Chapter Text
In hindsight - although, importantly, he didn’t recognize it immediately - but in hindsight, he knew he had fallen in love with her the moment she made him lose track of time.
San Francisco was not really Gil Grissom’s kind of city, but then if he thought about it he wasn’t really sure what ‘his kind of city’ was; Las Vegas was where he lived and had no intention of leaving, and it was also the place where lived a few people he might consider important to him, personally or professionally, but Grissom would not say Las Vegas was ‘his kind of city’ or indeed necessarily even ‘home’. San Francisco had none of the recommendations of Las Vegas - meaning it contained nobody important to him, other than the questionable importance of the conference - so it was only a place, and as a place it was full of cars that were not fond of pedestrians, and had the wet and cold weather of London without any of London’s history or charm. The people he had met who lived in San Francisco were, if he were to characterize them as a whole - a habit he tried to avoid - very aware of their own sense of fashion, whereas Gil Grissom was definitively not. They were a tall, beautiful bunch of people, not so different from Grissom’s native turf of LA, but they talked faster, and were willing to pay more for their coffee.
Of course, Gil Grissom was a scientist, and, on his best days, he hoped, something of a pocket philosopher. He would not judge a whole city filled with a hundred years of history upon his narrow impression of the past day. It was a consistent exercise of Grissom’s life to avoid all unnecessary judgments. Nonetheless, he would be willing to acknowledge he entered his first day of the conference with low expectations of the people he would be meeting there.
He deemed himself fortunate to be presenting at 9am on the first day; the audience would be neither lean nor over-full, and the attendees would be fresh and interested. It also freed him up for the rest of the conference to enjoy other lectures or take in the city. His talk addressed the symbiotic historical and evolutionary relationship between Homo sapiens and the insect world, and would not provide much technical expertise, so Grissom was hopeful that those who chose to attend would be there on grounds of academic interest and not fulfilling some tedious continuing education unit. The conference board had begged him to present on the specifics of regression timelines with insects, but Grissom had politely and persistently refused, knowing that half his audience would be asleep and it was nothing he found interesting to discuss in detail with laypeople.
As Grissom opened his messenger bag and leafed through his papers, he considered that he had perhaps underdressed. He noted with some reserve that every man in the room so far - only a handful; it was 8:45am - was wearing a collared shirt and tie. Grissom was in a pale green polo. He felt a small sense of relief as a young woman came running - running! - into the room outfitted in an ill-fitting collegiate t-shirt, denim jeans and a ponytail.
He couldn’t have known it at the time, of course: the woman was Sara Sidle.
“Sorry,” she gasped, holding up a hand to pre-emptively deflect any questions, “I’m late.”
Grissom felt a brief, irrational bolt of alarm and so checked his watch. 8:46am. “The lecture begins at 9am, miss.”
The girl looked up at him. She was young; not younger than many new CSIs, not even younger than many at the conference, but she wore her youth in a way most people in the profession did not; she gave no impression of trying to seem older; her face was pale and open and glowed with sincerity as she replied, “I always arrive fifteen minutes early.”
Grissom had nothing to say to this. Inwardly, he reflected, Odd.
The lecture proceeded rather well, if he might say so himself; people seemed interested, scribbling notes and nodding gravely along, only one person leaving to use the restroom. The early-girl did not write any notes, but she stared at him fixedly, not smiling, as though she was memorizing every word he spoke, which was slightly unsettling when he caught her eye but, he hoped, a good sign of her interest in the material. At length he advised the small congregation that they should pair up for an exercise consisting of naming examples of ways in which insects have proved to be essential and beneficial to human life. Grissom had already noted that the room contained an odd number of students, and considered only for an instant having a group of three but instead looked down at early-girl and gave a slight tilt of his head to indicate she would be paired with him. It seemed less awkward to choose her considering they had already exchanged a few words, and, if he were being particularly honest, something about her manner had charmed him.
And she was very pretty.
She came up to his podium slowly, like she was approaching a priest for a sacrament, and Grissom tried to look friendly and non-threatening. “Alright,” she said, setting her bag down by his feet, “we both know you don’t need to list examples, and I could list fifteen off the top of my head, so do you mind if I use this time to ask you some questions?”
Perhaps he was looking a little too non-threatening. “There will be time for questions at the end of the talk,” he replied, glancing out over the many busy couples. He narrowed his eyes as he looked back at the girl. “Fifteen? Give me three examples.”
One of her eyebrows crept upward, as though to say, Is this really how you want to spend your valuable time? “Silkworms,” she replied instantly, “scarabs in ancient Egypt. And insects as agents of horror in modern cinema.”
Good answers. God, she was bright. “Dare I ask for the other twelve?”
Her lips pressed together. Her face was so pale she had no defense from the spots of color rising in her cheeks. “I may have exaggerated.”
She had not yet looked away from him since setting down her bag. There was an intensity to her regard that was making him feel a little unbalanced, and he inwardly thanked divine providence that he was not one to blush. “Three questions for three answers.”
“Do you think the common fear of insects is primarily cultural, or an evolutionary instinct to avoid venomous bites and stings? Do you think insects as a whole have benefited from human activities? And -” here she paused, her eyes finally, finally shifting away from his to stare up at the ceiling - “why do people kill each other?”
He wouldn’t say she was the most interesting person he’d ever met; she wasn’t. And anyways in that moment he didn’t have the time or desire to analyze the impression of this girl relative to the many, many other people he had encountered in his forty years of life. In that moment, he was busy noticing that his tongue was a little dry, and he needed a sip from his reusable water bottle. “All three of those questions merit more attention than I could give them right now. Why don’t we--?”
She cut him off. “What are you doing after this?”
Grissom bought himself a moment sipping his water. He could use this time to come up with an excuse for why he can’t see her outside of seminar. “Whatever you want to do.” He could use the time that way, but he didn’t want to.
She pressed her lips again, but the motion was futile; a smile bloomed across her face, and the spots of color were back in her cheeks. “Lunch?”
“It’s a date.” She returned to her seat.
Grissom cleared his throat to call attention from the other pairs. People raised their hands to volunteer their answers, and a lively discussion commenced; he was pleased that not all the answers were ones he’d heard more than three times before. There was even an ichthyologist in the middle row who offered very unique insights. The remainder of the talk went well.
Why do people kill each other?
Grissom thanked the class and smiled politely at the smattering of applause. Early-girl, who was now categorized in his mental registrar as lunch-girl, waited in her seat expectantly, staring at him, not bothering to stand and approach or offer any social nicety indicating that she was doing anything other than anticipating urgently his accompanying her to lunch.
Grissom trotted the three steps separating his speaking platform from the audience, letting the side of his mouth drag up in the smile he had been resisting these last three hours. “Where to?”
She didn’t respond right away; she was blinking up at him with a serious expression on her face. Grissom was aware on some deep, indefinable level that she was very attracted to him.
Generally, Grissom found the behavior of his fellow human beings perplexing at best and, more often, deliberately nonsensical; all the little codes and nuances they spent so much time participating in and deciphering seemed utterly superfluous to him, a man who preferred solitude when outside strict and predictable frameworks of professional relationships. He was not disabled in this regard - he could understand the subtleties of human social communication as needed for his work and other worthy pursuits - but he liked to think of his brain as differently prioritized. Comprehending all the multifarious motivations and implications of people’s interactions did not usually warrant its cost of neural synaptic energy.
In the case of lunch-girl, it seemed an exception had been made.
It wasn’t voluntary; Grissom had not picked her out in the preceding three hours and said, this girl, this one right here, I will commit to understanding on every level I can access her. In later reflections, he would observe that it was not so different from how he had come to study insects - he had not chosen them, per se, as the object of fascination; he had been, in that sense, a passive recipient; he had simply been fascinated.
And he was being fascinated again.
“There’s an Ike’s sandwiches just around the corner.” As she stooped to collect her bag, some of her hair came loose from her ponytail, falling in a loose curl on the graceful slope of her cheekbone. For some reason it made him notice very distinctly how large and dark her eyes were.
“Sandwiches sound great.” Neither Grissom nor lunch-girl moved. “What’s your name?”
She smiled again - and again, she pursed her lips to fight it - raising one hand to tap a finger to the square of sticky paper adhered to her blouse across her right breast.
Grissom followed the line of her finger - an hardwired social response to joint attention indicators - and read her name, written in sprawling all capital letters, SARA SIDLE, and made an effort not to notice the shape and size of the breast beneath it, though failing utterly on that second count. It was, of course, on some unconscious level, the reason he had omitted her name tag from his awareness; now that his subliminal ignorance was dispelled, he felt in a rush what he had not been feeling the past three hours: he was very attracted to her. “Sara.”
She nodded once, pertly. “Dr. Grissom.”
“No need for the title,” he replied politely, slinging his messenger bag over his shoulder. He noticed with a muted sense of horror that his fingers were faintly trembling, an indicator of excessive adrenaline response that was increasing the rate of muscular synapse in preparation for sudden physical exertion. In the case of fear, that exertion might be to run; in this case, he knew, it was something else entirely.
She walked alongside him in a long, almost loping stride, her fingers picking at the strap of her bag, her eyes scanning continuously through the crowd of conference goers as she directed him expertly towards the rear entrance of the center. The conference was being held at the San Francisco State University student center, and Grissom did not know the campus at all; Sara seemed to know it well.
“Where did you go to school?”
“Harvard,” she replied absently. Grissom appreciated this immediately - it was exceedingly rare, in his experience, to hear somebody pronounce their attendance at an ivy league without either barely constrained superiority or a sort of cringing awkwardness that seemed to say, I’m as sorry as you are to discover how inferior you are. But Sara - who was always fifteen minutes early, who asked too many questions, who wore her hair in a loose ponytail - stated it only as a matter of record.
“And grad school?”
“Berkeley.” Sara pushed open the double doors leading out to the courtyard, not giving him a chance to open it for her. “You’re a senior criminologist in Las Vegas.” She looked at him scrutinizingly. “And a nationally renowned entomologist.”
He tilted his head towards her, hiked an eyebrow. “Been doing your research.”
“I read your bio during the break in lecture. It was very praising.”
He laughed. “Well, what do you think? Do I live up to the hype?”
She stopped abruptly; as though connected by some invisible thread, he stopped nearly at the same moment. Her eyes scoured his face for a moment. The slow, unfurling grin she gave him made his cock twitch; he tensed his abdominal muscles, fighting it. “That remains to be seen.”
~*~
The lunch was - well - he couldn’t quite settle on the appropriate adjectives, either at the time or later, much later, when that day looped through his mind ceaselessly as one episode in a saga of Sara Sidle that kept him awake through the long hot hours of Las Vegas summer days. He might attempt to say that the lunch was good, of course, and it was good, very good, but good was so broad as to be almost useless; electric would be another word, but that seemed too dramatic, and he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t adding significance in hindsight. So suffice to say that he left the lunch determined to see Sara Sidle again.
He had planned, at the end point of parting, to ask her for her telephone number; he had been contemplating the question since somewhere between her ordering a sandwich and water with no ice and her informing him that she had left behind the world of physics because she realized that in spite of universe’s best efforts nothing could seem to dissuade her faith in humanity and sincere belief that wrongs could be righted and people could be helped. How to ask, though? And under what pretense? Was he asking in order to pursue her romantically? Not necessarily - or at least not precisely - he didn’t want to date her - he had no intention of forming some kind of lasting connection outside a professional relationship. On the other hand, his interest in her surpassed the professional, and he wanted to see her again, and he would probably want that ‘again’ to be a dinner and he would definitely want to pay.
He vacillated inwardly for the next hour of lunch, and it was only as they walked slowly back towards campus in the foggy mist of San Francisco in late March that he finally determined he would ask, and he would specify that he was asking in order to arrange a dinner to ‘further discuss her interest in entomological anthropology’. As he turned to her in order to do so, she said:
“I’d like to go on a date with you. Give me the number of your hotel?”
He stopped, processing this unexpected move, feeling rather like a chess player whose complex game strategy has been thrown by the opponent’s queen attacking his pawn. “Um. Sure.”
She looked at him, seeming uneasy. “Do you want to go on a date with me?”
Grissom felt unsure: what did she mean by date? What was he agreeing to? “I’d like to get dinner.”
She seemed satisfied. “Okay. Write the number on my arm - here’s a pen - and I’ll call you sometime tonight.”
He held the sharpie over her slender, milk-white arm, his eyes tracing the bluish veins that extended like beautiful, multi-colored spider webs up from her wrist, and realized he would need to hold her hand in order to stabilize her arm to write on it. He did so. Her skin was warm. He wrote the number and returned the pen to her. “I look forward to your call.”
She smiled, her expression saying, of course you do, and left without saying goodbye.
~*~
That night he found himself sitting on his hotel bed, legs crossed at the ankles, not reading. His journal was open and his glasses were on and, if one cared to observe, his eyes were moving occasionally over the glossy expanse of the page, but he was not reading.
Catherine had paged him and he’d called her and she said that Brass was having a cow because a body had been released before they’d had a chance to collect trace evidence. Grissom heard Lindsay wailing in the background and a sharp reprimand from Eddy. Catherine sighed and Grissom heard a door shut quietly. “How are you? How’s Cali?”
Cali - one of those terms native Californians disparage. Grissom shrugged and remembered she couldn’t see it. “It’s fine.”
“Meet any cute girls?”
He tapped his index finger against his thumb, now glad she couldn’t see him. “The lectures have been interesting. And my talk went well.”
“You’re done already? Why don’t you fly back?”
“I agreed to get dinner with a colleague.”
Catherine hummed, clearly unconvinced. “Well, don’t even think of abandoning us for all those ocean waves and hippies,” she warned.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said.
They said their goodbyes and Grissom leaned his head against the hard composite wood of the bedframe and thought. He had known Catherine for nearly ten years, before she was married, before she even knew Eddy. She was kind and good-looking and dreadfully clever, and she seemed to understand the world in a way he did not but never resented him for his ignorance. She respected him and looked out for him and, he was moderately confident, loved him.
He wondered why he never fell in love with women like Catherine.
It was a maudlin thought, and a bit navel-gazing, but meeting Sara Sidle had put him in that mood. Sara Sidle, who was young and little odd and probably as single-minded as he was; Sara Sidle, who seemed slightly impulsive and maybe a bit reckless. Sara Sidle, who made his fingers shake.
The phone rang. Grissom waited another five seconds before answering. “Grissom.”
“Hey,” she said, not giving her name, and he was beginning to memorize her unusual vocal cadence - where was she from, anyway? “How about tomorrow at 6pm? I’ll pick you up.”
She rattled it off like she was his supervisor assigning him a case. He found it very charming in spite of himself. “6pm is great. I agreed to meet for a drink here at the hotel with a UCSF professor at 9pm, so the timing is good.”
“Where do you want to eat? We could do the city, but Oakland is cool.”
“Wherever you want; I trust your expertise.”
“Mm,” she hummed, and the sound spread like fracture lines from his ear up over his scalp and pricklingly down the back of his neck. “I’m glad you trust me. I’ll take good care of you.”
There was something sultry in the way she said it, and Grissom realized he should not have taken the call in bed with his shirt off and his head propped on the bed frame, but it was too late; he was already hard. “I’m getting that sense,” he said, then wondered if that was an odd thing to say.
He could feel her smile glowing through the receiver. “Alright. See you tomorrow.” She hung up without saying goodbye.
Grissom picked up the psychology journal he’d left bookmarked on the bedside table, and opened it to an article he’d set aside for later about callous-unemotional traits in children and how they persisted into adulthood. It was fascinating stuff, really, or at least he supposed it was; he hadn’t read a word. His eyes moved unseeingly across the black ink.
His mind, meanwhile, somersaulted liquidly through many scenarios: on her knees in front of the podium, here on the bleached linens of his hotel bed, in her car tomorrow evening (he imagined, for some reason he could not begin to guess, that she drove a Mazda). His cock throbbed beneath his slacks and boxer briefs, a pleasant ache that made him tense the muscles of his legs without meaning to. It felt very wrong to masturbate to thoughts of Sara Sidle - though he wanted to very badly. And the more he wanted to, the more wrong it felt.
At moments like these Grissom deeply regretted being raised Catholic.
He pretended to read for a full fifteen more minutes before tossing the journal and unbuttoning his pants with jerky, angry movements, like he was being made to do something against his will. It was not as though it was an unusual behavior for him, or even that he didn’t usually fantasize; but the fantasies were typically more distant, of past lovers or women he had no intention of pursuing. Now, though, it felt too real, too possible, like he was imagining something that might actually come to pass, but shouldn’t. She was young and she was a professional colleague and he had nothing, really, to offer her.
He came faster and harder than he expected, ejaculating all over his hand and pants, not grabbing a tissue in time or even squeezing the head of his penis to keep from making a mess. He wiped himself up and ran the slacks under cold water in the bathroom sink to avoid a stain.
Grissom lay down on the bed, a little chilled in the dry air conditioned hotel room. His last thought before falling asleep was her question:
Why do people kill each other?
~*~
She drove furiously through the city, her palm perpetually hovering over the horn, her eyes moving with clinical precision through the jagged lines of cars: a predator searching out weakness in the herd. Grissom gripped the passenger door handle and felt a little nauseous, but it wasn’t that different from riding a rollercoaster except he didn’t know whether he would survive and he spent the whole time staring at a beautiful woman.
They arrived at a restaurant called the Fat Lady, over the bridge in Oakland. Grissom observed the scrawling graffiti and the empty shipping containers stacking up in yards. The gritty industrialism was a shocking change from San Francisco’s glossy disarray, but Grissom enjoyed it, maybe mostly because of her: she was talking as she drove, pointing out different places she’d done cases and all the fascinating ways people’s lives had ended throughout the area, sprinkling in personal anecdotes of things she’d seen and felt and thought.
She snaked into a parking spot a block from the restaurant and then swung towards the backseat to pull out a club. After securing her vehicle, she flashed a gap-toothed grin at him, leaping out of the car and halfway to the restaurant before he’d collected his wits enough to unbuckle his seatbelt.
She was the rollercoaster, and he didn’t want to get off.
The restaurant was smoky and dark and everything was made of smooth lacquered wood or faux velvet. At dinner he ordered a steak and a glass of wine - Vegas had left its imprint after all - and she ordered a plate of raw oysters, and he was amazed to find his own hand reaching over the table and stealing one, that slippery saltwater taste of the deep ocean coating his throat, Sara watching his tongue like she’d be tested on it later. She told him stories of physics and Harvard and her first time sky-diving, and he mentioned the time he’d tossed a dummy off a roof to simulate a fall in Minnesota and accidentally clipped the director of the crime lab as the man was sneaking out back for a smoke. She laughed, if laugh it be called; wild and cackling, the sound sizzling along his skin, up his forearms and over his biceps and curling into his ears like smoke.
Her favorite activity in the lab was analyzing trace materials; sometimes she kept photos of crime scenes she took for her personal collection; she had had sex once with a coronor’s assistant on a table in the morgue. He hated that he had to kill insects in order to analyze them; he loved to teach almost as much as he loved to work cases; a woman once called him asking for a date even though she was the prime suspect in an active murder investigation.
“What did you say?” Sara asked, her eyes wide, her cheeks glowing from her pint of Guinness.
“I said no,” he replied, flippant, not aware of himself tilting his head in the way Catherine always said made him look like a beagle waiting for a biscuit.
Sara pressed her lips as she smiled and looked at him in a way that made the back of his tongue ache. “You think you’re cute.”
He leaned back against his chair, feeling himself grinning, feeling himself dissolving a little at the edges, a painting with wet paint, “am I?”
She laughed again, her hair curling and tumbling around her shoulders. “Guess I’m just glad I’m not a murder suspect,” she said.
Grissom touched his fingers to his lips, leaned against his palm. “I don’t know if I could have said no to you.”
The words swelled in her eyes for a moment, but only a moment; then she was jerking upright like she’d been electrocuted. “Shit,” she said, “oh, shit - did you say you had something at nine?”
Grissom followed her eyes and swivelled around to see a dimly lit clock behind the bar. 9:39pm.
The fact of his lateness hit him with the speed and unbalancing shock of a rear end collision. In all his adult life, Grissom had been late only a handful of times, each one with a verifiable and unavoidable excuse; he could have written out every scenario by hand, right now on this restaurant napkin if need be. Punctuality for him was a religious observance, a vertebrae in the spinal column of his existence. It was not merely a matter of moral grandstanding; it was a fundamental aspect of how his neurology functioned. An awareness of time was ingrained in his consciousness in the same way that an awareness of his own location in material space was; it was an essential piece of his identity as a scholar and scientist and an investigator; he was as likely to forget the hour as he was to forget that he had feet.
The terror of this oversight washed over him, cold and shocking as the pacific ocean smashing into the cliff faces only a few miles away. It was like he had been drugged, and he knew of course the intoxicant in this case was sitting across from him, chewing nervously at her lip. It was not her fault - he knew that - he wasn’t a neanderthal. But it was unacceptable.
It was the first time Sara Sidle left him speechless.
“I…” he said, staring at the clock, struggling with the irrefutable evidence of it against the previously unquestioned theory of his knowing his own mind, “I…”
Sara sighed, giving him a look of deep understanding that felt very real. “You lost track of time.”
~*~
There was no point in his trying to get back to the professor; he did not even attempt it. Instead he used the bar phone to call the hotel and ask that they convey his sincerest apologies. It took some of the dizzying whirlwind out of the evening, but he found, as he returned to the table and Sara Sidle, that he did not want to say goodnight.
Reading his mind, Sara said, “let’s get out of here. Want to head back to mine? My roommate’s out for the night.”
The offer was clear, as those things went; Grissom knew immediately he should decline. He was not the type to have sex with a woman he’d only just met, and he was not the type to have sex with a colleague, and he suspected - though it was the first ever occurrence, so he couldn’t be sure - he was not the type to have sex with a woman who turned him inside out the way Sara had. “That sounds nice,” he said, “but it’s been a long day.”
He pulled out bills to pay for the dinner. She frowned at him, trying not to look hurt and failing. “Oh.”
He felt her sadness like she was a radio wave and he was an antenna. What was this woman doing to him? “I could stop by for a little while, I guess,” he amended.
Her apartment was small and cluttered but clean; he saw a poster of the atom tacked on the wall above the couch, and next to it a poster for Reservoir Dogs . Sara kicked off her shoes and peeled off her sweater upon entry, revealing the long arms and slender body he had imagined as he jerked himself off yesterday night.
“Want a drink?”
“Whatever you’re having.” Grissom picked his way cautiously to the couch but did not sit. The apartment was young, frighteningly young, frenetic and full. He felt like a rat dropped into a maze with a cocaine salt lick.
Sara came up behind him with two gin and tonics, and as he sipped his with both hands she smoothed her palms down his shoulders and then up his chest. His heart pulsed in his ribs with such force he thought he might have an arrythmia. He set his drink on the bookshelf.
Forcing himself to look at her, he felt very distinctly the moment when his composure failed him; she was gazing up, not with avid hunger, as he might have suspected, but an open, curious longing that made him feel delicious.
In the next half of a half of a second, his right hand was tangled in her hair, his left hand skating down her narrow waist, and he kissed her, her lips cold from the drink and slippery and the best thing he’d tasted in a month - a year - his whole life. She made a little sound of surprise and breathy enjoyment that shot straight to his cock, now straining against his pants. Her fingers curled at the hair on the back of his neck, scratching slightly at his scalp, another sensation that went rocketing through his nervous system, her other hand resting chastely on his shoulder.
They kissed a long time, and he wondered if maybe that was all they would do; she was making no move to proceed, and he wasn’t really sure he should, though his thumb was brushing the underside of her breast and he was 95% certain she wasn’t wearing a bra. He would be happy with the kissing. He was happy with the kissing.
She finally stepped forward, letting the long cool streak of her body align against his, her breasts pressing lightly to his chest, her thigh brushing maddeningly against his erection. He didn’t thrust, instead leaning back from the kiss to bite lightly at her jaw and say, “tell me what you want.”
The front door opened.
Grissom sprange back from Sara Sidle like he was a finger and she was a hot skillet. Turning to the door, he saw an asian woman about Sara’s age wearing an SFPD jacket and a smile. “Oops,” the woman said through her grin.
Sara flushed, grabbing Grissom’s hand and yanking him down the hall. “Thanks for the warning, Chelsea!” she called back irritably. She shoved him into a tiny bedroom and closed and locked the door. “I’m so sorry about that.”
Grissom instinctively acquainted himself with the space - no bedframe, just a mattress on the floor; one small window with three plants on the sill; a painting easel; two bookshelves packed with books. “I - I can’t have sex with you while your roommate is home,” he said desperately.
Sara only arched a brow. “Okay,” she said, deceptively calm. She stepped forward and trailed one hand from his collarbone to his belt buckle, the muscles of his abdomen seizing as she snaked her long fingers under his waistband. “That’s fine. Why don’t I just get you off with my mouth?”
Grissom felt brittle, like glass cooled too quickly; his arousal was a maelstrom inside of him, a hurricane, and then so was his fear, his sense of overwhelm. “I… we…”
She sighed sharply, pulling her hand back. “You’re right,” she said. “We should’ve gone to your hotel.” She pressed a light kiss to the edge of his mouth. “Why don’t we try again tomorrow?”
Grissom was leaving tomorrow. He told her so. Sara didn’t answer, only dropping her head against his shoulder.
Grissom wrapped his arms around her and fastened her against his body. She was cool and slight and felt wonderful against him. He cupped one hand on the back of her head, his thumb swiping against her mastoid bone, noticing she smelled like fingerprint powder and sweat and that musky scent of an aroused woman that was almost a taste. He pressed a kiss to her hair like she was somebody he loved.
“Next time I’m in town,” he found himself saying, “I want to see you, okay?”
She nodded into his collarbone. Leading him to the front entrance, she kissed him again, licking his teeth, and then closed the door without saying goodbye.
~*~
That night, after he got into the hotel room and locked the door and came into his fist - this time with a tissue at the ready - he let his mind reel dizzyingly over the events of the day. On the plane the next morning to Vegas, he kept thinking of the question she asked that he hadn’t been able to answer:
Why do people kill each other?
~*~