Home of Greg Sanders Slash Fiction
Chapter Four
Jim stops to pick up some whiskey - he prefers his own cheap brand to the quality merchandise Gil keeps on hand, feels less guilty about drinking more than he should when it doesn't cost forty bucks a pop - and parks on the street in front of Gil's townhouse.
He peers up through the windshield at the windows. Curtains are drawn but there's a familiar blue flicker peeking through so he must be awake. Gil keeps strange hours at best, he remembers - when he's on a tear he'll be up for forty-eight hours straight, fifty-four, whatever it takes to get the job done; and then he'll sleep away the bags under his eyes and reappear a couple days later looking like a spring chicken.
Well, a spring chicken who's pushing fifty.
He pulls the keys from the ignition and slips the bottle under his arm, and there's a good feeling in his stomach as he walks up the drive. He hasn't had a drink with Gil in a long time, not since that dinner party they had for Greg's birthday (why that ended up chez Grissom he's not sure) and that wasn't even just Jim and Gil shootin' the shit. That was Jim and Gil and Al and Cath and Nick and Greg - not really the same.
He stoops to pick up the morning paper where it landed in a huge potted geranium just under the doorbell, tucks it in with the whiskey, and leans on the doorbell.
They both run out of tears, inevitably, but Gil won't let Greg get up and die of shame in the basement. He holds onto him, keeps him on the couch with him, pulls them into a sitting position and holds him tight to his chest.
"You don't have to do this," Greg mutters against his collarbone.
"I do." Gil is still speaking softly, still softening the edges of his consonants and lilting his voice into something almost hypnotic. Greg wonders if he's actually mesmerized himself, succumbed to his own brand of unconscious suggestion.
"You don't. It's not like-" He stops himself.
Gil kisses the top of his head. "Not like what?"
Greg sighs. "It's not like this is the first time I've fucked up," he says.
"Greg-"
"I mean, okay, I've never fucked up with two people at the same time, but..." He manages a shrug in the cage of arms that Gil has around him. "I'm sure it won't be the last."
"You haven't fucked up, Greg," Gil says again, patiently, a song he's been singing for what feels like an hour and which he knows he's going to go on singing for a long time (his fault, he thinks, he should have been more careful with Greg from his first appearance at the lab), "and you're not about to. I won't let you."
Jesus, Gil, Greg wants to say, but he's actually biting down on the inside of his lips so his mouth doesn't move and let his inner thoughts escape.
Gil rearranges him so that they're looking at each other and he puts as much love as he can into his smile. "Greg," he says, "I love you and I'll do whatever it takes to make you believe that. Anything."
Greg holds his eyes for about three seconds then looks away, leans his head against his shoulder again and tries to think of something to say. What he wants to say is that Gil is blowing this out of proportion, that it's his problem and his alone and he doesn't want to suddenly make it Gil's problem, too. But he can imagine what Gil would have to say to that, so he keeps it to himself.
The doorbell rings then, once, and then again, longer.
"That has to be Nick," Gil says, kissing the side of Greg's face and releasing him. "Probably lost his keys, again." He stands up as the doorbell rings again, looks down at Greg where he's sprawled on the couch. "We're not done with this," he says, reading the expression that Greg is wearing. "Not by a long shot."
Greg sighs, buries his head in a cushion.
Gil touches his shoulder once more gently and walks through to the entrance. He turns on a couple lights as he goes, kicks Greg's shoes out the way against the wall as he passes them, catches a glimpse of himself in the hall mirror and almost laughs. Been a long time since he's looked that splotchy and pathetic. He pulls the door open and-
Jim and Gil look at each other for a long moment.
"And I thought I needed a drink," Jim says dryly, looking at the state of Gil's face. "So can I come in?"
"Jim." Gil blinks at him, his imagination spinning out of control. He lets it go for a moment, then reins it in and thinks, what's the worst that could happen? He clears his throat. The worst that could happen is that Jim will see Greg and know exactly what's going on.
He tries not to think about that. "Sure," he says, and steps sideways to let the other man in. He wonders if there's some kind of loud noise he can make that'll send Greg into hiding upstairs without making Jim think he's on drugs.
Jim wanders exhaustedly down the hall and into the living room, casting his eyes professionally around him as he goes. Gil holds his breath and follows a second behind, hoping that he doesn't notice the extra pair of shoes - battered red sneakers that have Greg Sanders written all over them - or the extra wallet on the hall table or the thousand other tells that someone else is here, someone young and spunky and more fragile than he looks.
He swallows that train of thought, because if Jim is here to suss him out, the last thing he needs to do is start thinking of how much damage he's wrought on Greg over the years, because that'll set off the sprinklers again and while Jim might be aware that he's been crying, Jim really doesn't need to see him cry in the flesh.
"So how you holding up?" Jim asks as he steps into the living room.
Gil takes a quick look around, is relieved to see that Greg has disappeared. Maybe he heard Jim's voice and panicked, he thinks, maybe he's hiding in a closet in the bedroom trying not to make a single sound.
Except there are still two empty bowls from dinner sitting on the coffee table, and Greg wouldn't have left so obvious a clue if he'd been covering his tracks.
Hm.
"Gil?"
Jim is looking at him, cautiously, like a man about to walk out over questionable ice.
"I'm okay," Gil says absently, starts picking things up randomly. A magazine, a sweater. He hopes it looks like a casual cleanup, and he hopes that Jim's not paying too much attention to what he's actually grabbing.
"You don't look okay," Jim counters. He's standing with his back to the tv, watching Gil move around the room.
"I am," Gil assures him, and feels ridiculous as he picks up both bowls right under Jim's nose. "Really." He tries to smile at him, finds it's not as easy as he thinks it should be, and walks into the kitchen with the incriminating evidence.
Jim follows him, watches dispassionately as he stacks the dishes in the sink and leaves the magazine and the sweater on the counter next to the toaster.
"I know you said you were okay with this Greg-Nick thing," Jim says at length, choosing his words carefully, and Gil thinks he can actually hear the man's discomfort shaping the vowels.
"I am."
"...but I don't believe a word of it."
Gil sighs, standing at the sink where Jim can't see his face. Why does nobody believe him these days? he wonders. First Greg, now Jim... He fixes what he hopes is a settled expression on his face and turns around.
"Jim," he says as kindly as he can, "I appreciate that you're here. I do. I know that none of - none of what happened with me and Nick makes a lot of sense to you. And I know that you don't really like to think about it too closely - but I'm okay."
"You've been crying your eyes out, Gil," Jim says. He's resting against the door frame, as far from Gil as he can be without leaving the kitchen.
Gil studies the tense set of his shoulders, the line of his jaw, and realises how difficult it is for him to be here, doing this. He gets a warm feeling from the fact that he is here, doing this, fighting a bone-deep instinct to stay away from it.
And then he gets a cold feeling, hot on the tails of the first, because he's going to have to lie his way through this.
"If I needed help, Jim," he says, "I would ask for it."
Jim shakes his head, a tiny jerking motion. "That's bull, Gil. You know it and I know it."
"It's - complicated."
"So what isn't?"
Gil is halfway to answering that when he hears water start to run upstairs, and without thinking he turns back to the sink and turns the tap on. He knows the sounds of his own house, but he hopes to hell that Jim doesn't.
"Look, Gil," Jim continues, oblivious to the errant noises, "we both see this shit every day. You got dumped for someone younger, and it burns."
Gil grabs the bottle of soap and lets a generous dollop fall into the rising water from the tap. He just has to keep up the water noises until Greg stops making a racket in the washroom, he thinks. Then he'll need to find some other distracting noise.
"I'm not going to do anything rash, Jim," Gil says, "and I'm not going to hurt myself. I'm fine."
"Then what's going on here?"
An insane urge to tell him the truth, to tell him that Greg is upstairs blissfully unaware that the other voice he hears downstairs isn't Nick's at all, bubbles up in the back of his throat and it takes him a second or two to muzzle it.
"I'm just having a bad night," he says. "We all have bad nights."
"Yeah," Jim says, "but time was that you'd come knocking on my door when it got this bad."
"I know you're not comfortable with my lifestyle, Jim." He washes both bowls, listens for the sounds of the upstairs pipes, and wishes he had something else he could wash. Like a stack of plates and the cutlery to go with.
"So?" Jim says. "We're friends, Gil. Aren't we?"
"Of course we are. Dammit, Jim - you're one the best friends that I have. It's just - I don't really like talking about this, okay?"
He can hear Jim chuckle half-heartedly. "You and me both," he says. "Look, you got any glasses over there?"
Gil glances over his shoulder and sees Jim holding out his bottle again. "Sure," he says, and reaches a soapy hand out to the rack of dishtowels.
He's decided that Greg must be taking a shower, and there's no way he can keep making watery noises that long. So he pulls the plug on the sink and dries his hands and uses the sound of the sink draining to cover the sounds of Greg while he reaches over and flicks on the radio.
Which is tuned to the local country station.
Oops.
He turns back to see Jim shaking his head. "That's pretty sad, Gil," he says.
"What?" Not that he wants to know, but he can't help himself.
"He left, what - a couple months ago? Three? And you still haven't reset your radio."
And what is he supposed to say to that?
He takes two glasses from the cupboard and follows Jim into the living room. "Let me put some real music on," he says, and pulls the top CD off the stack by the sound system: Leonard Cohen. Not what he would have chosen under the circumstances - nothing says 'I'm miserable and suicidal' like listening to Leonard Cohen alone, he thinks - but it's better than the Nick-flavoured drone coming from the kitchen.
"Haven't heard that in a while," Jim says, taking the glasses from Gil and setting them down on the coffee table. He unscrews the cap while Gil ducks back into the kitchen and kills the radio, and is pouring two generous shots when he comes back in.
"It worked its way into the rotation," Gil says absently and takes the glass that Jim hands him.
Jim gives him a less-than-credulous look.
Gil shrugs. Greg had actually ferreted it out a couple weeks ago and wouldn't let it get far from the disc turner. He stifles a smile and looks over at the tv. It's still on, the movie still playing itself out, but Greg muted it ages ago and now it's just subtitles and awkward camera angles.
"What the hell is that?" Jim asks, following his eyes. The evil doppelganger of the main character has been split in two down the middle, and the two halves are having an argument.
"I'm not entirely sure," Gil admits, and turns it off. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
Jim is shaking his head. "Gil, next time you need to space out in front a movie, let me know and I'll lend you 'Die Hard'."
Gil grins and takes a tentative sip at the drink in his hand. "I'll bear that in mind."
Nick is stuck in traffic when his irritation really starts to get to him. He's irritated at Sara, for still thinking she has a shot with Grissom, he's irritated at her for drinking too much and for making it their problem, he's irritated at Warrick for, well, being Warrick.
Mostly he's irritated at himself.
He knows that Gil is not going to cave in with Sara. He knows it to his core, with every cell in his body. Gil is faithful to him - well, him and Greg, but that's a totally different thing because before there was Gil and Greg, there was Nick and Greg. And just because the right pronouns don't exist for this thing doesn't mean it's not for real.
So he knows that Sara is barking up the wrong tree. Knows it, but it still stings.
Gil has infinite patience for Nick when he gets wound up, gives him the space he needs but peppers it with unforseen kisses when he least expects them. Greg is learning, too, to heed the careful parameters of tact when Sara enters into the equation. Greg is good to bitch at when he needs to, because he nods seriously and chips in his own two cents worth and it feels good to not be the only one in a snit.
He turns at the corner with the huge acacia, smiles like he always does at the memory of the lecture Gil improvised once about some random beetle and how it needed an acacia to reproduce successfully and how that tree was probably the most important tree in a ten block radius, and he turns into the driveway.
He gets out and looks around. Greg's car is parked across the street where he usually parks it, because the driveway is small and itty-bitty cars can usually get away with parking violations that SUVs can't. Nick feels good about that, that they're both home and he can tell them how much he loves them and is glad to have them in his life.
It's a trick he learned from Gil, these random declarations of joy. Gil is the king of out-of-the-blue sticky notes inside the fridge, for candles suddenly appearing at dinner, for the perfect song played at the perfect moment. A thousand and one ways to let him - to let them - know how important they are to him.
He pulls his keys out of his pocket and opens the front door. He takes a deep breath - he can smell the Indian spices Gil was cooking with earlier - and he smiles at the music, which he's starting to get tired of but which he'll listen to anyway if it makes Greg happy.
There are voices coming from the living room, talking at a low register under the music and he shakes his head. Greg likes that CD because it has slow sex written all over it, or so he claims - he can only hope that he's going to catch a glimpse of something really inappropriate when he comes around the corner and into the living room.
Maybe they're necking on the couch. Or maybe they're curled up together enjoying the post-coital bliss, Gil humouring Greg's unending need to babble when he gets relaxed. It's kind of funny, he thinks, how Greg babbles when he's nervous and when he's at his most relaxed, but how there's a universe of inexplicable difference between the two, how one is exasperating and the other is adorable.
"I'm home," he calls out as he walks down the hallway. "Hope you didn't miss me too much..."
The tableau in the living room is one that Nick is not going to forget for a long time.
Gil is sitting facing the archway, a glass of something strong in one hand and the most pained, awkward and miserable look on his face that Nick has ever seen him wear.
And Jim Brass, glass in one hand and bottle in the other, is sprawled on the couch with a matching look of disbelief.
Nick freezes with one foot in front of the other, halfway into the living room and the glib follow-up to his entrance line dying on his lips.
"Hi, Nick," Gil says after about three seconds of the most resounding silence in recorded history. He clears his throat and tries to sound remotely comfortable with the state of the universe.
"Hi," Nick says back, because clearly he has to say something. His eyes gravitate towards Jim of their own accord, and he swallows. That is not a good look he's getting, he thinks. He's vaguely surprised he doesn't have two smoking holes burned through his forehead. "Um."
Jim whips his head from Nick to Gil and says, "What the hell is going on?"
The good news, Nick figures, still frozen to the spot, is that Jim isn't yelling. He isn't shouting, isn't even on the edge of shouting. It's his quiet voice, the one that says 'I'm missing something obvious and you're going to explain it to me'.
Yeah Gil, Nick thinks. Explain it to him.
And then he thinks, I know I saw Greg's shoes in the hallway.
And then he thinks he hears someone moving upstairs, and he knows his eyes get huge and he manages to make eye contact with Gil, who almost-winces, and Nick clears his throat and mumbles, "Berightback," and bolts for the stairs.
After Nick flees the room, the ambient tension drops by about a micronewton and Jim is able to focus his considerable intimidation techniques on Gil without distraction.
"You want to fill me in?" he asks.
Gil closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. "Not really," he says, sounding exhausted, "no."
Jim interprets this liberally as a yes. "I thought you and Nick were finished," he says.
Gil shrugs, his eyes still pressed shut.
"Moreover," Jim continues, "I thought Nick and Greg were an item."
Gil shrugs again.
Jim drains his glass and sets in on the coffee table. "Look," he says, "I know I saw two dishes on this table when I came in. I assumed you were sliding into bachelor slobdom but I can see that you're not."
He waits for Gil to say something. After a few seconds of silence, Jim stands up. "I don't really want to know the details of this, do I?" he asks.
Gil sighs, peels his hand from his face and stands up gracelessly. "Probably not," he admits.
"Well that's too bad," Jim says, "because I'm starting to get a pretty clear picture. Where is Greg, anyway? Is he around here somewhere?"
Gil's face is a study in conflicted neutrality.
"Jesus," Jim says, shaking his head. "Forget I asked. How long has this been going on?"
"Jim-"
He holds up his hand to stop Gil in mid-plea. "Don't," he says. "Look. I can deal with you being gay, Gil. Believe it or not, I can deal with that. But this? You've got a harem, Gil."
"I don't have a harem," Gil protests.
"Fine," Jim says, "whatever the word is for a retinue of young men who live with you. I guess I'm not 'up' on that funky Roman nomenclature."
"Jim-"
"Is there anyone else I should know about? Is Warrick hiding in a closet upstairs? Hodges sprawled naked somewhere I don't want to know about?"
"Jesus Jim," Gil snaps, suddenly out of his miserable head-in-sand mode and starting to get angry. "Get a grip on yourself. What business is it of yours, anyway?"
"What business?" Jim asks with a harsh laugh. "None, I guess. I thought we were friends."
"We are friends, dammit," Gil says. He takes a deep breath. "Jim. It doesn't matter."
"The hell it-"
"How can it possibly matter who I'm sharing a bed with?"
Gil asks it so reasonably that for a moment Jim can't remember the answer, can't remember why it's so wrong. Only for a moment, then it's back in perfect clarity. "There are limits, Gil," he explains coolly. "Even for the great Gil Grissom, there are limits."
"I know there are limits," Gil says.
Jim starts walking towards the door and Gil dogs after him.
"I know there are limits," he says again, "but anything between consenting adults is still on this side of those limits."
"Keep telling yourself that, Gil," Jim says. He reaches the door and hauls it open, steps out into the rising heat of morning.
"What is the matter with this?" Gil demands, and follows him out into the sun, down the walk and out to the curb. "Just tell me that much."
Jim stops when he reaches his car, turns around and squares off with Gil in plain sight of his neighbours. "Have you completely lost your mind?" he hisses.
"Quite possibly," Gil says, toe-to-toe with him, hands on hips. "But I'm happy."
Jim rolls his eyes. "Oh, you're happy," he says. "Good to know. So what?"
"For the first time in my life, Jim," Gil says, his voice starting to seethe with something dangerous now, "for the first time in my life I have everything I want. Don't expect me to wash my hands of it because it makes you uncomfortable."
Jim shakes his head. "Have you listened to yourself lately?" he asks. "For the first time in my life, everything I want, don't expect me - what about them, huh? What about those two kids - and they are kids, Gil, you know that as well as I do-"
"They aren't kids," Gil snaps, "and for what it's worth, they're happy too."
"Again with the happy," Jim says and turns back to his car. "You know what this is? This is stupid and it's dangerous and you should know that. It's weird."
Gil stands on the grass shoulder of the road, watches Jim walk around the hood to the driver's side door. "I've always been weird," he says.
"And them?" Jim jerks his thumb up at the house.
"No one's twisting their arms," Gil says.
"You're their boss, Gil."
That stops him up, but only for a moment, because that's always been true and he's already reconciled the politics at work with his life at home. "I know that," he says. "I'm careful. We're all careful."
Jim slams his car door open and it bounces against the rubber stop. "Grow up, Gil," he instructs. "This may have been cool in college but it's not now. You're pushing fifty and they're just kids and it's sick."
The word slaps Gil across the face. "Sick?" he echoes.
"Sick," Jim spits at him, "as in not normal as in unhealthy as in-"
Gil takes a step back from the car, sets a grim look on his face. "I got it the first time, Jim," he says softly.
Jim mutters something under his breath and hauls himself into his car, slams the door and peels away from the curb.
Gil watches him go, then turns and walks back into the house.