01/15/2012

A/N: Hey guys! Me again! So I was watching CSIBarbie's (so blame/thank her for this newest post) fanvids which led me to watch every Cara fanvid on YouTube, which got me inspired to write this little thing! This first chapter alternates POV a couple of times, but the next chapter will be in third person. This chap just sets the stage for the next bit. Its not going to be super long, but I hope it will provide some amusement.

Summary? Sara and Catherine cross signals. We'll see what happens.

GO!

Cath's POV

It started out innocently enough. Sara and I had been on a case together. And she was in a pretty good mood- unusually good for Sara. Smiling. Laughing. We were having fun. The scene happened to be at an old hangout of mine, and the bartender-cum-owner recognized me. Called me 'Red,' like he used to. I didn't correct him because, well, it was nice to know I wasn't so old that this place had changed that much. And it was nice to know I still looked enough like my younger self to be recognized. Sara had been in the back processing and I hadn't even known she'd heard him until a few hours later.

We were in the break room sucking down some caffeine and talking over the evidence. She was still in a great mood, but I wasn't about to ask why and wreck it, so I just enjoyed it while I could. Nick and Gil were in the room too, pretty much doing the same thing. We were looking at a couple files and decided to follow up on a lead. I told Sara to 'hop to it' and she joke saluted me. "Yes, ma'am!"

And that's when it happened. The first time it happened. She slapped the file shut and I turned back toward the coffee machine. Suddenly I felt the firm smack of a file folder hitting me. Directly on my ass. I think I jumped about a foot in the air, not to mention dripped a few drops of coffee down my front. What the fuck?

"Catch ya later, Red." It was definitely Sara's voice. And when I turned around, mouth gaping and eyes bugging out of my head, it was definitely Sara's ass sauntering out of the room. Uh…hold the phone…Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Gil looking over his glasses and between me and the door. Nick's jaw was on the floor. Had that just happened? The events of the next few weeks proved that oh, yes it definitely had. And it was just the beginning.

Sara's POV

I don't know what I was thinking when I did it. I guess I wasn't thinking and that's pretty much the point. The day had just been going so great. I'd won the lottery. Not kidding. My brother sends me scratch tickets every year on my birthday which had been the week before. I'd finally gotten around to scratching them that morning and, so dead serious, I won twelve hundred bucks! That's my rent and then some! Awesome thing #1.

Awesome thing #2? My ex came around and picked up some stuff she'd left at my place. Now normally, this would not be awesome, but in this instance, it really was. Cassie is a great girl, and we didn't work out more or less entirely because of me. I'm the absentee girlfriend. I'm never around, I'm always at work, and when I'm not at work, I'm always way too tired to do anything but eat and sleep. Maybe watch a movie. So she wasn't really my girlfriend as much as she was the cute chick who came by to water my house plants and feed my cat when I was too busy. With the occasional roll in the hay. In any case, she'd left a sweatshirt and some sneakers and stuff around and she came by to get them. And I apologized again for being utterly crap at relationships. And because she's so fantastic, she just sort of waved me off and told me that I was a great person and I deserved happiness and someday soon, I was going to find it.

Maybe it was because I was already in a good mood; I was well slept and fed and oh yeah, I'd won the lottery! Not to mention just closed a very hard case. So I was feeling pretty good when she said that and for some reason, I sort of believed her. She wasn't the one for me, but maybe there was someone out there who was. She kissed me sweetly and left and I headed into work in a really killer mood. Even getting paired with Catherine for the night could not bring me down. In fact, we were getting along great. Until the thing. The thing that I did. Things were going so well and, I don't know, smacking her ass with the file folder really didn't seem all that weird in the moment.

Of course, by the time I'd turned the corner, I realized what a horribly stupid move it had been and was completely mortified. Six years. We'd worked together for six years and nothing like that had ever happened before. That was just not what we did. Crap. She was going to be so pissed off. Not only had I just undermined her authority as my superior, I had just sexually harassed her in the workplace. In front of Grissom. Shit. Shit, crap, damn! My mind raced as I tried to get through the rest of shift without seeming like a complete lunatic. And without seeing Catherine. She was going to kill me. I spent the next several hours hiding in an abandoned lab working on the case and waiting for her to track me down and end my life in some very unpleasant way.

She never came.

Cath's POV

The way I saw it, I had two options. The first was that I could freak and call Sara out on the ass smacking incident. But I knew how well that would go over. Sara would immediately go defensive and freeze up and become a Grade A bitch that would make cases impossible for weeks to come. And as fun as that sounded, it wasn't really the road I wanted to go down with her. Most of the time, I really actually kind of liked Sara. We were very different people with different experiences and methods in our work, but overall, Sara was a decent sort of person. She was smart, resourceful, kind of darkly funny, and sometimes she could be very sweet and thoughtful. Of course, sometimes she could be a total ass. And apparently, sometimes she just up and decided to grab, okay smack, other people's asses. But, for the most part, she was alright. We got along, usually, and I wasn't going to throw another wrench in the relationship we had spent the last six years building.

So that left me with option two. Ignore it. Don't call her on it. After all, if she were one of my friends from outside work (not that there were many still hanging on at this point) or my sister, I wouldn't bat an eye. Friends have that kind of friendly interaction all the time. Huh. Maybe Sara was just starting to think of me as more of a friend. After all, if she felt comfortable enough to just up and smack my ass with a folder and not think it was completely weird, then maybe this was just a natural progression of our friendship. That could be good. It would be nice to have a gal pal around the office. Not competing for cases or Gil's good graces, just…being friends.

I thought back to when I'd first met Sara. True, I was a bit…unwelcoming, but she was investigating Warrick and Holly had just died, was I supposed to throw a 'Welcome to the Team' potluck? No. So I didn't. But I remember making those prank phone calls with her and catching Holly's killer, and I remember thinking that, okay yeah, she was a hardass, but at least she wasn't some simpering girly or some conniving slut. And after Warrick was cleared and she decided to stay, I remember thinking that she had just been doing her job and maybe now that things were okay, maybe we could be friends. Good friends.

Six years later, though, it had just never happened. Sara was prickly and hard to get close to. And I tend not to waste time with people who don't immediately seem like they are willing to put the same amount of time and energy into making a friendship work as I am. But now…friends. With Sara. Hmm.

If one of the boys had had the balls to do what Sara had done, I would have had to say something. Because not saying something, in their pervy little brains, is more or less like saying you wanted them to do it again. And things could get weird or out of hand. But Sara was a woman. She wasn't about to turn it into something it wasn't. More likely, not saying anything would send the message that I felt comfortable joking around with her and being playful. Well…that was pretty much the message I wanted to send so…great. That was settled. Friends with Sara. It would be interesting, to say the least.

Sara's POV

So I waited for Catherine to go Ice Queen over the folder smacking incident, but she didn't. I avoided her all shift and then had minimal interactions with her for two days and she never blew up at me. Odd…

It was almost like she hadn't noticed. Like she didn't even care. Weird. The whole thing started to take up way too much space in my brain. Why wasn't she mad? Why wouldn't she care? Because I knew Catherine well enough to know that if she was even slightly bothered by it, she would flip a shit. But nothing. She was not afraid to speak her mind. She would have no problem calling me out in front of the entire lab. If it had bothered her. But apparently…it hadn't. That really bugged me. I just could not understand. What was going on here?

For two days, I could not let it go. It was the only thing on my mind except work. I would wake up in the evenings (after reliving THAT day over and over again in my dreams) and just stare at my ceiling, trying to figure it out. Thinking of Catherine while in my bed was not a new thing. For the first couple of years I lived in Vegas, she was a main character in more than one fantasy. And even when I had convinced myself I was in love with Grissom, she was never that far from my thoughts. In fact, it was only in this last year or two that I had successfully washed either of my supervisors from my head and my heart. It was a waste of time. On both fronts. I was only succeeding in making myself completely miserable.

But now, with recent events taken into account, thoughts of an impure nature just sort of…slipped in. And it was two days after the 'incident', while I was…taking care of the situation, that an idea suddenly occurred to me. The idea in itself was good enough to bring me to climax pretty rapidly. Which gave me time to stare up at the ceiling and think.

Could Catherine…like me? Was that possible?

Most of my head was screaming 'no!' But something was niggling at me. If Catherine had been at all bothered by what I had done, she would not have hesitated to chew me out. Everything I did bothered Catherine. I was pretty sure it would piss her off that we shared oxygen if she had to think about it too closely. But she wasn't upset about the ass-folder thing. It followed that there was a possibility that she was the opposite of upset about it. That, maybe, she didn't mind a bit. That it was a welcome change. Logically, it would also follow that she didn't mind that it was me that did it. So Catherine didn't mind that Sara Sidle smacked her ass in front of the boss? Well, yeah, that was strange. But…could be good. It could be a good thing. Maybe, seeing as she didn't mind the first time, she wouldn't mind if I did it again. Or something similar. It occurred to me that the conversation we had been having that whole shift could be construed as flirting if you were paying attention. So she probably just thought I was flirting and then didn't say anything. Because she liked it. Hmm.

Well, Catherine had the night off tonight. But come tomorrow shift? I was taking this theory out for a test drive.

End Side A.

So? What do you think? What's going to happen next! Do you want the second part? Review, my pretties, review! And I'll see what I can do!