Title: Stutters
Fandom: CSI
Pairing: Grissom/Sara
Rating: Teen
Summary: Pure unadulterated fluff. Sara's POV.
Disclaimer: Pleeeease give me them, I promise I'll take good care of them...
I never really knew exactly what it was that changed his mind. All I know is that something suddenly shifted fundamentally in our relationship. For years I had been, for the lack of a better word, the pursuer. Then, well, life happened, and we were somehow drifting further and further apart. Until one day I woke up and realised that not only was the distance between us starting to decrease again, but I was also being actively pursued. It took a bit of time to get my head around that one, I can tell you. But once I did? It was an amazingly wondrous feeling. Oh, he had hurt me in the past, and I wasn’t so naïve as to assume he never would again, but somehow I just knew that, if I let him, he would spend the rest of his days making it up to me.
Deciding to let him? That was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made…
On the surface, our first date wasn’t exactly the stuff dreams are made of. When he picked me up, all of the ease we had rediscovered over the previous months was gone. We barely exchanged a single word on the whole drive to the restaurant, each of us stealing nervous glances at the other. It wasn’t until we had been seated that we managed to stumble over the mutual compliments of appearance that most people would have exchanged when I first opened my front door. The easy conversation that we fell into during friendly breakfasts had abandoned us, and we found ourselves blurting inane comments about the weather, and going off on nonsensical ramblings about nothing in particular. Just as we were finishing our starters, salvation came in the form of a call from the lab. Yeah, yeah, maybe that doesn’t sound like a good thing, but it really, really was. When his beeper first went off, he was all apologetic, but I could see from the look in his eyes that he felt the same thing I did - relief - especially when my own beeper went off about a minute later. As much as we had both wanted this date to happen, a return to the familiar world of processing a scene together was just what we needed to snap us out of this awkwardness.
After quickly taking care of the check, we headed back to my place so I could pick up my car and throw on some jeans before I joined him at the scene. As he drew up outside my building, he looked across as if to start apologising again. I cut him off with a brief kiss before he could even start, and reminded him just who he was talking to. I don’t max out on my overtime nearly every month by not being a workaholic. Just as I was opening my door to get out, he said my name. When I turned back to face him he he leaned over and pressed a slightly longer kiss to my lips. The tender grin on his face when he pulled back sent a flutter to my heart which stuck with me the rest of the night, even through processing a grisly scene.
So really, it was kind of a great date after all. And the best part about it was that it got a lot of that nervous stuff out of the way nice and early, freeing us up to really enjoy our subsequent ones.
Oh, we’ve had our awkward moments since, not the least of which was him asking me to move in, but they’ve always been so worth it in the end. It’s actually become a bit of a running joke between us. If one of us is stuttering (him) or overtalking (me), then the other knows there’s something memorable on the horizon.
Which brings me to now. He’s been stuttering non-stop since we sat down to dinner, so whatever it is he’s trying to say, I know it’s going to be really special…