Roses in December
Chapter 6
Grissom's cell phone rings loudly before he has a chance to respond. I hang my head as he speaks into the phone, knowing he's leaving. But he surprises me.
"I've got to take a look at a body in the desert," he says. "There's bugs involved, and I'm on call to consult on those cases. Do you want to come with me?"
"To look at bugs?"
He nods. "That, and to talk. It'll take an hour or more to get there, so I'll have time to explain things to you. You. deserve to know what happened, Sara."
For a brief moment I don't want to know. I want to keep cocooning myself in the guest room comforter, reading science books and waiting for Grissom to come home to me. But it's not my home, not really. I've got an apartment somewhere across town, with spoiled milk in the refrigerator and framed photos of strangers on the shelves. I can't keep living like this, and I know it.
"Okay."
I throw on jeans and a hooded sweatshirt with deep pockets to fit my cell phone and a paperback book. Grissom changes, too, then directs me to the door with his hand on the small of my back.
It's my second car ride since the accident, but for some reason I'm nervous this time. As Grissom pulls onto the highway I'm gripping the edges of my seat.
"So." he begins finally, staring straight ahead. "I guess I started suspecting something was up about a month and a half ago. You were acting. I don't know. Odd."
Sweat trickles from my hairline down the side of my cheek as traffic grows heavier. A car swerves to cut in front of us, and I flinch involuntarily. "Odd how?"
He purses his lips. "Standoffish, I guess. You'd smile at me, but within a couple of seconds it'd be replaced by a look of. resignation."
"Kind of ironic, seeing as how I was about to resign." I fight to keep my breathing under control as an eighteen-wheeler pulls up to our right side, the roar of its engine deafening my right ear. I stare at it, the polished chrome gleaming in the morning light, stickers on the driver's door proclaiming staunch support for Bush/Cheney 2000 and the NRA.
"I didn't know what to think of it," he admits. "I wondered if you were feeling vulnerable because you'd told me about your parents. I thought maybe you needed space."
The truck driver wants to get in our lane, I can tell. I bite down hard on my lower lip, tasting blood, and wonder how much I bled after the accident. A pint? A quart? The trucker tries driving faster, but the car in front of him doesn't pick up speed. I watch him as he inches closer to us, my heart beating in my chest like a trapped bird. Frustrated, he honks his horn loudly, and tears spring to my eyes. "Please, Grissom, please let this guy over."
Grissom glances at me and does a double-take. "Jesus, Sara." He slows down to let the truck pass, then pulls off the highway at the next exit. "Honey, are you all right?" he asks, driving toward a rest stop.
My breaths come easier. "Yeah."
"God, I'm such an idiot," he says sharply, self-loathing evident in his voice. Putting the car in park, he gets out. Confused, I remove my seatbelt and get out too, intending to follow him. But he's coming around to my side, and suddenly I'm enveloped in his strong arms. "I'm sorry," he whispers into my hair. His grip on me is so tight that I can't even move my arms to hug him back.
"It's okay." But it's not, and he knows it. He squeezes me tighter, smelling of soap and salt and lemons. I know that scent, and I blink, seeing us standing by the front door of my apartment, watching through a veil of tears as Grissom leans in to hug me. Then, as now, I'm sobbing into his neck.
Do I love him? The old Sara hovers, half-inside me, whispers that there's no one but Grissom to make my palms sweat and heart ache. But I'm resisting the urge to merge with her completely, to take on her memories as my own. She bared her soul to me in that diary, in swirls of inky anguish, but I'm not yet her. I didn't sit with Grissom by a hockey rink, or huddle with him under blankets to stare at a dead pig. No, in this life we sit on his couch eating takeout and watching the Discovery Channel, having long debates on scientific theories. I can't relax into his embrace, because I'm wondering why this feels familiar. I wait for another memory to come, but it flutters maddeningly around my head until I pull back with impatience.
"We should probably get back on the road," I mumble.
Grissom squints at the highway in the distance. "Hang on a second, okay?" Taking out his cell phone, he punches in a few numbers. "It's Grissom. Do you have time to help me with that DB they just found in the desert? Great. We'll be along shortly."
I wait till he hangs up. "Who was that?"
"Sofia. She's leaving right now, so she'll make it there before us to start processing. We'll take the back roads. Less traffic, and no trucks."
We get in the car and pull onto an empty stretch of road. Grissom drives five miles under the speed limit and peeks at me to make sure I'm not having another panic attack.
"So. I was acting oddly," I prompt him. "When did you figure out that I was leaving?"
"You called me on your way back from San Francisco." His voice is soft and low, but his hands are clenching the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles are white. "It was around two in the afternoon, and I was sleeping. When I answered the phone, you said 'I've been offered a job in San Francisco.' No hello, no small talk." He swallows. "I woke up pretty fast when you said that."
"I bet." It's strange, realizing that I hurt him, that I probably did it on purpose.
"I started telling you that the lab in Vegas was superior to the San Francisco lab, and that you were taking a step backward professionally."
I throw my head back and laugh. "Oh, bad move."
"What?"
"You gave me an opening to tell you that I'd been taking steps backward personally since I got to Vegas, and that my career was going nowhere here. Am I right?"
The corners of his lips twitch. "Yeah. You lit into me pretty good."
"Atta girl." I roll my eyes, realizing I just praised myself.
"Then you said that, uh." Grissom's squirming, and a part of me enjoys it. "You were tired of playing my games. You were going to go back to San Francisco and start your life over. I didn't know what to do, what to say to fix things. So I said that I was sorry, that I was attracted to you too but that I couldn't be in a relationship with you. Then I asked if there was any way that I could change your mind about leaving."
He's faltering, his eyes growing moist. I want to take his hand and squeeze it tight, but when I start to reach for it he shakes his head quickly.
"You said that I could help you get over me," he says with difficulty. "You told me you were on I-15, near Sloan, and that you were going to drive straight to my place and knock on the door. And that when I answered you would kiss me, and take me into the bedroom, and get it over with, so that you could know what it felt like and be able to move on."
My cheeks are burning. As he recounts what I said, I unconsciously mouth the words behind my closed lips. I want to deny it, to explain that I would never have made such a proposition. But the words he speaks are heavy on my tongue, and the taste of them is familiar.
"How did you respond?" I ask after a minute.
"I was speechless," he admits. "I couldn't believe that you would put aside your pride like that, offer me a one-night stand because I wouldn't allow you anything more. I'd." he trails off, his eyes bright.
"What?"
"I'd never felt so ashamed in my entire life."
I suddenly realize that he prefers telling me the story this way, so that he can look at the road and not into my eyes. I'm reminded of a quote about hearts and sleeves and looking in someone's eyes. but it's gone before I can think of the wording, or the source.
He continues. "I thought about what I'd been doing to you all those years when I thought you just had a schoolgirl crush on me. I listened to you breathe into the phone, waiting for my response, and when I didn't speak you said, 'Either I come over now or I take the job in California. It's your call, babe.' And so I made my choice. I told you I couldn't sleep with you. Then you started to cry."
God, I must have been devastated. There I was, offering Grissom sex with no strings attached, and he still turned me down. I must have been out of my mind with embarrassment and misery.
Enough to drive into the path of an oncoming truck? I can't help but wonder. Would it have destroyed me to the point where I would try to take my own life? It doesn't sound like the Sara I know, but the timing seems too coincidental.
I work up the courage to ask him. "Was that when the accident happened?"
"No," he says quickly, and I'm flooded with relief. "That was when I decided to start being a man and admit the truth. I told you that the reason I couldn't sleep with you was the same reason I couldn't kiss you. Because if I got one taste, there was no way I could go back to what we were before. I'd never be able to let you go."
"What's so bad about that?" I ask, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice.
"Nothing," he says simply. "That's exactly the point. Nothing's bad about it. I listened to the sound of you sobbing into the phone, and I wondered what the hell I'd been doing with my life. Was my career, my reputation, was it really that important? Was it worth giving up a chance at spending the rest of my life with you? Was it worth making us both miserable and lonely and bitter?"
"No," I whisper, and he nods in agreement.
"Which is what I told you. At first you thought it was a trick, and you started screaming at me." He chuckles. "So I said the only thing I knew could make you shut the hell up."
"Which was?"
"I told you I loved you." He's not even talking about me really, but I'm beaming, and the question of whether I love him seems foolishly outdated. "I told you to drive straight to my house and never leave, not ever." He smiles wistfully at the memory. "Eventually I convinced you that I was serious, and a whole new round of tears started, from both of us. We admitted to each other how we felt, and even though it was through a phone line it felt so intimate."
A haunted look falls over his face. "We were discussing how to make it work in the office when there was this horrible screeching noise. You screamed my name, I heard the crunch of metal, and you were gone. I called for you over and over, then came to my senses and dialed 911. Luckily you'd told me where you were driving. The paramedics had to cut you out of the car, they told me later. When I got to the hospital, the doctors didn't think you were going to make it." He's weeping freely, without shame. "I thought we were going to lose our chance, before we'd even started anything. And then you woke up."
"And I wasn't me."
"You were," he says unconvincingly. "But it was confusing for me. I still loved you, and at the core you were still you. Just without all the past. After a while it wasn't so bad. We didn't have the baggage between us, just the connection. There were times that I wondered if it were better that way."
"That's why you didn't want me reading the diary," I realize.
"I was afraid of what you'd written in there. You were so angry when you called me, and it's not like you could have written an entry about our last phone call. I didn't want you to think that you'd given up on me completely, that we were over."
The prickly beginnings of a headache make me close my eyes. "You're never going to get me back, are you?"
He sighs. "You've had memories come back to you, Sara. You're getting better."
"Right," I say dubiously. "Yesterday I asked you what the things on a keyboard are called. Yeah, I'm so much better."
"We all have moments like that," he argues. "Last Wednesday I spent five minutes trying to remember which continent Australia is on."
This earns him a small giggle. The headache is growing, though, and I don't dare open my eyes. "Do you have any aspirin?"
I hear him rooting around in his kit, and he presses pills and a water bottle into my hand. The rest of the ride goes by in silence, as I press my fingers to my temples and wait for the pain to subside.
The car pulls to a stop at last, and I open my eyes. Following Grissom out of the car, I spot the young blonde leaning over a dead body. She sees us too, and I can tell by her face that she didn't expect me there.
"Looks like multiple stab wounds," she says to Grissom, ignoring me. "I've found at least four kinds of insects on the body."
It's a man with dark hair and a blood-stained shirt. I squint and tilt my head. He looks like my father did, lying on the floor in the living room, blood pooling on the new carpet. I remember how sticky the blood was, how it coated everything. My shoes, the walls, Mom's hands.
I'm vomiting suddenly, and Sofia shrieks. "You're compromising the scene!"
"Shut up, Sofia," Grissom growls, throwing an arm around me and ushering me back near the cars. I vomit again, my hands on my knees, and he holds back my hair until I'm done. "I'm sorry, Sara," he says gently. "I shouldn't have let you see the body without preparing you. They can be gruesome."
My headache is back, piercing my skull. Reminds me of that time in college when I drank too much and ended up passed out under the statue of John Harvard. "I need to leave," I tell him desperately, and his eyes are warm with compassion.
"Sofia!" he yells. "I need you to take Sara back to my house."
She marches over, looking irritated. "I'm not done processing the scene."
"I'll finish. Sara's sick, she needs a ride home. Take the back roads."
"Is she going to throw up again?" She's staring at me with unconcealed distaste, and I remember Catherine's face that time that she had to pick through a gallon of vomit. Jesus, my head.
"I won't throw up." Grissom tossing dummies, Grissom taping my wrists together, Grissom pinning me against a wall. The pain is blinding, and I need to get out of there. "Please, I'd really appreciate a ride."
Her expression softens. "Of course, Sara. I'm sorry you don't feel well." She packs her kit and several evidence bags into the trunk, then opens the door for me.
"I'll be home as soon as I can, and we'll talk about this," Grissom whispers in my ear. I shudder in pain, my mind's eye watching him grimacing in his office, telling me he doesn't know what to do about this.
Without a backward glance, I climb into Sofia's car, and we pull away from the crime scene. "Sorry if I was rude back there," she says awkwardly. "I tend to get. immersed in my work, and I don't transition well. It wasn't personal."
"Don't worry about it." Greg crushed under a heavy mannequin, Nicky breaking down in the locker room after a rough case. Nicky? I fight the bile rising in my throat, knowing it will ruin the temporary truce we've established. Got to get home, must get home.
"Do you want me to stop and get you something to drink? Some cold water?"
I shake my head, squeezing my lips shut in agony as she pulls onto a busy road. Grissom, paling upon learning that I was dating Hank. "Please, just drive."
"Okay. If we stay on this road we should be at Grissom's in about an hour or so."
"Not Grissom's." I grit my teeth, watching him spin around, younger and beardless. His betrayed gaze burns into the backs of my eyelids. "I want to go home. Take me home."