A Week of Time, a csi fanfic

A Week of Time
by Camilla Sandman

Author's Note: Beware the multi-couples of doom. Catherine/Grissom, Grissom/Sara, Catherine/Warrick, Nick/Sofia, Robbins/Mrs. Robbins and others alluded to. Much thanks to Chicklit for beta.

Monday, the past

Catherine Willows fucks Gil Grissom late one Monday on his couch, and it's a mistake.

He is fumbling and she is mad, tasting death on his lips and tears on her own. Bastard Eddie and the slut she considered a friend grunting in her head, Grissom grunting against her skin. She knows it's a mistake from the moment she stumbles in his door, but she's tried not to make mistakes for so long she's itching to now, like a drug denied her. She wants this, her night of unfaithfulness against Eddie's many affairs, and Grissom is there, her friend, her available skin.

They haven't even undressed, and she feels her hitched up skirt rub against her stomach, the air chilly and his skin warm against her thighs. He pushes against her, she sinks into him and he's not Eddie and doesn't know her body and in the end, she pushes him down to do it the way she wants. Hard, fast, driven. She's always gone for what she wanted. Las Vegas. Men's attention. Eddie. Marriage. A better career than skin on display. Never look back, always eyes on the road ahead. It's the only way she knows not to crash.

Grissom just looks at her, hair dark and eyes darker, slightly withdrawn in the face of her passion, and that's always been him, and always been her. She doesn't know if he loves her, but she thinks not. He wants her, she knows, feels it in his gaze. She had a life once in making men want to fuck her and she knows all the signs. Perhaps it's become a habit. She doesn't sleep around, but she feels strength knowing she can.

Her mother taught her that.

"Cath," he gasps, and his head falls back, and he looks utterly silly and downright beautiful at once, and she knows he'll never be hers. He likes her, yes, enough to show her glances of his world. Puzzles, crosswords, words, the frames of the lab that are also his life. The experiment will end, and he'll have his answers. She already feels hers.

The next day, she goes back to Eddie and Lindsey. She always does. Mistakes don't last.

Tuesday, not so distant future

Gil Grissom finally comes to sleep with Sara Sidle one Tuesday morning, just before she leaves Las Vegas.

She doesn't intend to sleep with him as she lets him in, seeing a maelstrom of emotions in the calm of his posture. He's not taking the news of her leaving well at all, she considers.

"Ecklie told you, I see," she says calmly.

"Sara..."

"No, Grissom," she says firmly, and tries to push him out of the way. He seems to fill up her apartment, looming over everything and her too. He's come to stop her, but she won't be stopped. Not this time.

He presses a kiss against her neck, burning and possessive and demanding and Grissom and it galls her that her breath catches in her throat and that her skin finds it pleasurable.

"This is not going to make it okay," she says, but even as she says it, she knows she's going to sleep with him. Because though it is too late, she has also wanted him for so many years it's become a habit. Just this once, she wants to know what it is she's not had, what she can't have. What she'll walk away from.

"I know," he whispers, his tongue dancing along the edges of her ear. "I know."

He doesn't know, he can't know, but his fingers have pushed her top slightly up and run across her skin and she stops caring. She presses her body against his, cloth making noise against cloth. She doesn't want noises, and neither does he, tearing at her clothes as she does at his. Skin against skin then, and silence.

They've never been great at words, she thinks. But Grissom is speaking another language - fingers brushing against her and making her buck, mouth warm against her breast, eyes dark as she clings to him. She knows what he's saying. It's still not going to make it okay.

He sighs when he sinks into her, and even then she can feel the restraint in him. Even now he's not letting go, holding back, holding back until she digs her nails into his back, and it's pain and pleasure and Sara and Grissom and everything, everything's a mess and he catches her lips with his as she wants to scream.

Sara Sidle finally gets one thing she's always wanted, and she still leaves.

Wednesday, now

Nick Stokes should never have slept with Sofia Curtis.

He knows it every time there is an awkward silence between them, every time he seems her back across the lab and remembers her back arched against his palms. He knows it when he sees her lips open and remembers her lips around his flesh, when he hears her speak and remembers her moans, when she looks at Grissom and he remembers her glazed look as her body tenses.

She does want him after a fashion, and he wants her after a fashion, but passions are fleeting and the work stays. The dead stay.

And still, he keeps sleeping with her, keeps fucking away graves and traps and dead howling from his mind, her body convenient at hand. Maybe she does the same, he doesn't know. He never asks if she'd rather he was someone else, and she never asks the same. He's not even sure what the answer is. He just knows she's warm where the memories of a grave underground are not, and there when everyone else is not.

Sometimes, fucking is really about how fucked up you are, he thinks.

He should never have slept with Sofia, yet he doesn't stop.

Thursday, still to come

Warrick Brown seduces Catherine Willows, and it's nothing like her fantasy.

Fantasies don't have sharp metal joints digging into her back, or the smell of disinfectants on his skin, or her nose bumping clumsily into his as she tries to kiss him again, or fumbling with clothes that seems to want to cling on. He tastes of peanut butter from lunch, and she's never cared for the taste. He doesn't sweep her off her feet with romantic words or assurances that she's beautiful, he just lifts her up and lets her straddle him. He's hard taking possession of her body, the force of him half slamming her against the wall and even as it's everything she wants, she wants more too.

"Warrick," she mutters, biting down on his upper lip, her hair framing his face. He looks almost angry, and she knows why. Angry because his marriage fell through. Angry because he fucked up on the case. Angry because attraction doesn't go away by will. She knows. She's tried. And still, here they are.

When he shudders against her, she clings to his skin, watching the pale against the dark, but the differences are hardly noticeable in the dark of the room. He is like her, she thinks, for all the ways he's not.

"Cath," he whispers, breath ragged and raspy and they stay like that for a long time, her arms around his neck and his forehead against hers, not letting go.

It's nothing like her fantasy, but it will do for a start.

Friday, anytime

Albert Robbins makes loves to his wife every Friday.

Sometimes, it's late, and sometimes it's early, depending on when he works, but he never forgoes it and never forgets. It's a ritual, like the Valentine's Day muffin, the morning kiss, the Saturday shopping trip. He knows her body, knows she likes to be kissed at the base of her neck, knows she closes her eyes to his kisses and opens them to his whispers, knows she likes her back against his chest as he moves inside her, knows the pitch of her moans when she's really brought to an orgasm and knows the pitch of her moans when she's not quite, but doesn't want him to think she's dissatisfied.

He knows she knows him too, knows he likes her fingers circling a nipple, knows he likes her on top and his fingers feeling her rhythm, knows he never closes his eyes, knows when she curls her fingers in his beard he feels old and when she curls her fingers in the hairs on his chest he feels like twenty again, just like the first time she did it.

She doesn't mind his leg, and he doesn't mind the little extra weight around her hips. At least not except where the darkest of fantasies dwell, but he is old enough to know fantasies are just the mind's way of never settling when the heart already has.

Albert makes loves to his wife every Friday, and it isn't always perfect, but it's always real.

Saturday, best forgotten

Sara doesn't like the way her father touches her mother.

It isn't like they touch on her favourite TV show, but her mother has always told her that's just TV and not real and she shouldn't believe it. What is real are bruises and hard grabs and pushing and cries from behind the bedroom door. So she believes in that.

Sometimes, her father will kiss her mother very softly, and it always seems to Sara that makes her mother saddest of all. She doesn't understand why. Sara would like a gentle kiss, and to be held like a precious thing and to have fingers comb through her hair in silence. She likes silence.

The silence never lasts, and her mother always cries when her father bends her over the kitchen table and grunts.

Sara doesn't like the way her father touches her mother, and she's beginning to hate how he touches her, too.

Sunday, an end

Sara Sidle fucks Gil Grissom at a Sunday wedding, and it's not quite a mistake.

It's a bright warm day in Las Vegas, and he is warm and hard underneath her, darkly silent while the world is not. She can hear faint voices and thinks distantly that if they're caught here, Warrick and Catherine's wedding will be memorable in more than one way. He seems to think the same, for his lips are curved in a smile and he pushes up to kiss her softly even as his thrusts are hard and demanding. She holds back a little still, enjoying the power in his desperation to please her.

He's a little afraid of it still, she knows, and so is she. She still needs it.

When she finally lets go, she sees herself mirrored in his eyes, and she wonders why he can never speak what his eyes tell her. Maybe he doesn't have the words.

Maybe she can teach him.

"You okay?" he asks, helping her to put her clothes right again, watching her carefully. "You had a long flight."

"I was tired, but I'm certainly awake now," she teases and he smiles, framing her head in his hands and kissing her gently. It is that, more than the impromptu and unexpected sex, that tells her he has never quite let her go. She knows she has never quite either.

Maybe it isn't healthy and maybe it isn't right, but life has always been fucked up, and somehow she still lives. Somehow they all live on. She knows sleeping with him again isn't a solution to anything, and maybe it still won't be enough to make her stay with him. Maybe it will be, because time has passed, and he is different. She is different.

She still loves a gentle kiss, she thinks.

Sara Sidle kisses Gil Grissom at a Sunday wedding, and it's not quite an end.

FIN