Home of Greg Sanders Slash Fiction
Chapter Seven
Greg stays in bed until Gil leaves, and then until Nick leaves, and then he gets up and moves through the house.
Days off are always strange. He feels dislocated, like the world has moved on and left him behind; and being alone in someone else's house isn't helping matters much. His last day off Nick had had free, too, and they'd spent the day playing video games and making out. And the one before that he'd had a seminar to go to, and the one before that both Gil and Nick had been free, and they'd...
He stops in the kitchen and hugs Gil's robe tighter around him. What had they done? They'd ended up in bed, eventually, but... oh, that's right. Nick had made some offhand remark about recharging his solar cells and Gil had made a day of it, for all of them: they'd driven out to the desert, lain naked in the sun and eaten fruit until Greg had been sure he was going to explode. And then they'd driven back into the city and picked up dinner and they'd ended up in a sticky pile on the living room floor. Greg had had rug burns for almost three days.
He leans against the kitchen counter, and looks at the table against the wall. He hadn't seen the conversation this morning - this evening, by external reckoning, but it's still morning as far as he's concerned - but he can guess who was where.
It's not that he was by nature an eavesdropper, it's just...
He sighs. He's never felt like this before, this amazing balance between love and lust and excitement and warmth. He doesn't want to let it go, he's ready to do whatever it takes to hang on to it, but - but but but.
But it's only been a couple of months and he's already screwed it up, hasn't he? And not in the way he was sure he would - he hasn't said or done the wrong thing this time - not yet, anyway. No, this time it's the opposite. This time it's because he's been so afraid of disappointing them - okay, of disappointing Gil - that he's done something to them.
He's not even sure why he's so terrified of Gil, really; he just can't lose that bottomless-pit feeling when it's just the two of them. Gil is so... so perfect, maybe. He and Nick are so perfect together, so exactly what Greg has always wanted out of life, that - well, that there really isn't a reason to have a Greg kicking around, is there? And maybe that's what it is, that he's so busy waiting for the other shoe to drop - so sure that it's going to happen, even when he can construct an intellectual argument to the contrary - that he can't really forget about it long enough to get laid. Sure, when Nick is there he can, but that's different. Nick is - well, Nick is not Gil, and that's something right there.
But he knows he has to get over it, and get over it fast, because Gil is so sure that the only way to make this right is to break them up. To protect him.
He laughs at that, a sad laugh but it's a laugh anyway and the thought is absurd; as if he - Greg Hojem Sanders - needs protection. From the likes of Gil Grissom and Nick Stokes, the two most amazing, most gentle and loving people he's ever met.
The two safest people.
Hell, they probably need protection from him. The things they don't know about him...
So that's where he'll start. Even if it scares the shit out of him.
The message from Robin just says, "How about the day after tomorrow?"
It's a punch in the head for Jim, who spent the better part of the night sulking and fuming and avoiding going to the lab at all costs. He actually traded cases with O'Reilly so he could work with Catherine instead of - instead of any of them.
But this message from Robin, the feathery little laugh she left along with her words, reminds him that he still has to decide what to do about the Nigel Crane thing. He really doesn't want to sit with Nick and talk about it, but even more than that he doesn't want to sit down with Gil and talk about it.
So Nick it is.
He looks at his watch: almost five-thirty. Odds are they're back at the ranch playing their science games, he thinks, and sighs. Might as well bite the proverbial bullet.
The first person he sees - of course - when he walks through the front doors is Gil. Gil, walking along with Sara on one side and a nervous-looking uniform on the other, carrying a jar of something creepy crawly.
They almost make it past each other without having to say hello, but Sara looks up and smiles.
"Long time no see, Brass," she says brightly.
He gives her his best fake smile, and finds himself eye-to-eye with the last person he wants to see.
"Morning," Gil says tightly.
"Still night by my clock," he says, turns his vapid smile up another notch and pushes past them.
He can hear Sara saying something behind him, something along the lines of, What's eating him? And he can hear Gil telling her, It's probably nothing, keep your mind on the case.
Still... he glances over his shoulder once, to find that Gil is likewise looking back at him.
After a moment, they look away.
He needs to find some way to put this in a box, he thinks as he makes his way through the maze of glass walls. He needs to trick himself into not being bothered by this, so he can look the guy (his best friend, some cruel part of him pipes up) in the face and work with him. He really, really needs to be able to see them - any one of them - and not think of what goes on in that townhouse of ill repute.
Catherine is in the break room when he sticks his head in. She looks up, swallows the mouthful of coffee she's got, and says, "Find the guy yet?"
It takes him a moment to remember that he's still on the clock, that he's been running a slick dealer down for her; that there's more to this night than the mess in his head.
"No," he says, "sorry. I've got a couple uniforms sniffing after him, though."
She sighs, peers down into her cup again. "Oh well," she says with the practiced patience of a seasoned professional. "He'll turn up eventually."
"We'll find him before long, Cath," he says, "there's only so many places a rat like him can hide."
"I'll drink to that," she says.
He watches her for a moment. "Hey, you seen Nick?" he asks as lightly as he can.
She shakes her head. "No," she says, "sorry. Isn't he working O'Reilly's case tonight?"
"Yeah, this is... something personal." He shrugs.
She narrows her eyes at him. "Jim," she says, picking her way carefully, "I know you don't like the Nick-Greg thing, but..."
He holds out a hand to stop her. "It's not that," he says, although right now he wishes his problems were that simple. "I just... need to talk to him."
"Check trace?" she suggests. "I heard Warrick had some paint transfer or something..."
"Thanks," he says, smiles at her, and pulls his head back into the hallway.
"Be nice!" Catherine calls after him.
Ha.
He stands in the hallway for a few seconds, watching Warrick scrape delicately at a chunk of highway guardrail and Nick tape-lift from what he can only guess is a swatch of car upholstery. Warrick is saying something and Nick is chuckling, and there's an easy camaraderie there that makes Jim hesitate.
He thinks, This is going to ruin the guy's night. And he's halfway to making up another excuse, putting it off another day like he has twice before now, but then Warrick looks up and grins at him.
"Hey," he says with his usual easy friendship.
He swallows. "Hey," he says, keeping his eyes locked on Warrick's because that's a lot easier than looking at Nick.
"What brings you around?" Warrick asks. "You've been like a ghost all night."
"I'm Cath's street urchin tonight," he says.
Warrick grins again. "I hear you," he says.
He swallows again, forces his eyes to Nick, and thinks, Yeah, I deserve that look he's giving me. "Hey, uh, Nick - got a minute?"
He can see the muscles in Nick's jaw clench. "I'm kinda busy right now," he says in an even voice. "Can it wait?"
Can it? He sighs. "Not really," he says. "It'll only take a few minutes."
Warrick claps him on the shoulder. "Go on, man," he says, "I've got this."
For a minute, Jim thinks Nick is going to argue with him, but instead he sets the fabric and tape-lift tabs down, and pulls his jacket from the back of a chair.
"Fine," he says, "a couple of minutes."
He makes himself smile. "Great," he says. "Let's go somewhere we can talk."
He knows Warrick is watching them shrewdly as they walk away, but he can't let himself worry about that just now. Now he's got bigger fish to fry, such as Nick who is so tense with suppressed anger that he can feel it from here.
Nick pushes open the door to an empty lab, backs himself against the worktable and faces him with his arms crossed. "Okay," he says, "spill."
Jim may not be the genius that Gil is, but he's got a trick or two under his belt when it comes to reading people. Nick wants him to bring it up, he thinks; he wants him to start in on him so he can let loose with the little speech he's been rehearsing all night.
"Look, Nick," he says, because he's too old and too tired for this. "This isn't about - your domestic arrangement, okay? So stop trying to kill me with your eyes."
The look of murder doesn't fade any, but Nick allows him a tight nod.
"It's - ah hell, Nick. Nigel Crane is up on appeal."
It's a long time before the hard look starts to crack, before the reality of Jim's words penetrate the aura of unpleasantry that Nick is projecting. Jim waits him out, knows there are going to be questions and accusations and demands, and while he might not have all of the answers, he's the one who's going to have to fill in the blanks for the kid.
And he is just a kid, Jim thinks, watching the walls come down. He's just a kid who shouldn't have to deal with this messed-up shit, he should have a job that takes him out in the sun once in a while and lets him enjoy himself a little. Jim is even willing to admit that Nick and Greg - just the two of them - were a kind of cute couple. Nick deserves more than this, more than psycho stalkers and sexual harassment from his boss.
"Wh-" Nick blinks, shakes his head. "How? What? When?"
"It comes up before the judge next week," Jim says. "It's some paperwork fuckup, the DA's office says it's not going to stick, you don't need to worry about it. You just need to know about it."
Nick gives him a strangled look. "Not worry about it?" he echoes. "Jesus, Brass - the guy pushed me out a window, he stalked me, he killed Jane Galloway - don't tell me not to worry about it. I know it was a couple years ago, but fuck, man. I still have nightmares."
Jim watches him progress from anger through tension and into panic, wishes he had something useful to say here. "Robin says it's going to blow up a storm and then disappear." He tries a parental smile, the kind that never worked a damn on Ellie. "You know she's always right."
He isn't really listening to him. He's retreating into his own private hell, and Jim knows that it's not his fault but it feels like maybe it is - like if he hadn't said something, then none of this shit would be happening.
And that's kind of true, isn't it? If Crane's lawyer wasn't a shark, if there hadn't been a paperwork fuckup, if if if - then Jim wouldn't have been knocking at Gil's door in the first place, wouldn't have been privy to something he really didn't need to know, and everyone would still be blissfully ignorant.
Yeah, he thinks, let's blame Nigel for this one. Let's pin everything on him, and ignore the rest of it. He feels a little blossom of anger, and he likes it.
"Nick," he says, dropping a hand on his shoulder, "he's not gonna get within three miles of you. I promise."
Nick startles back to the moment, and wriggles away from Jim's touch like it's electric. "Don't," he sneers, "just - don't."
It stings when Nick turns from him and leaves, but he takes that curl of pain and thinks, Nigel's fault. He grits his teeth. Just keep Nigel in sight, Jim, he tells himself, and everything will make sense later.
"So?"
He looks up. Catherine is leaning against the door of what used to be his office. He's sitting at his old desk, which is her desk, now. "Sorry," he says, getting to his feet. "Just feeling nostalgic."
"Hey, don't get up on my account," she says with an easy smile. "What's the deal, Jim?"
He shakes his head. "Don't ask," he says.
"Nick's throwing up in the locker room," she tells him. "What did you do?"
He's not really surprised. "Nothing," he says.
"Jim."
He shakes his head. "It's old business," he says.
"Can't be that old," she tells him, and gives him her not-buying-so-try-again look. He thinks this is probably what Lindsay feels like when she's been caught out.
"It's - a Nigel Crane thing."
She raises her eyebrows. "That can't be good," she says carefully. "What is it?"
"Paperwork fuckup and he's got a good lawyer."
It isn't often he's treated to the spectacle of Catherine ready to hit someone, so he enjoys it while he can.
"What - he's not getting out, is he?"
"DA says no," Jim tells her, and scrubs his hands down his face. "Look, just... keep an eye on him for me, okay? I can't - I mean, I don't think he'd want me-"
She smiles at him without humour. "I will," she promises.
"Good."
They sort of stare each other down for a bit, then Catherine shakes her head and pushes herself away from the door frame, and Jim looks down at the paperwork - at her paperwork. Thinks how simple his life used to be, in a sad kind of way, and eases his way around the edge of the desk.
Catherine touches his shoulder as he squeezes past. "It's not your fault," she tells him.
"I know," he says, and the hard smile he gives her is at least partly genuine. Because it's Crane's fault. All of it.
He takes a lungful of air once he's outside again, breathes in the baking heat of the desert air, and then pulls his phone out of his pocket. He wonders whether to call her now, or wait until he's in a better mood - but then again, nothing is going to put him in a better mood for the immediately forseeable future, so he'll take what he can get. And who knows: maybe she'll laugh that little laugh of hers, and god knows that would make a difference right about now.
Robin picks up after the seventh ring, sounds tired. "Hello?"
Belatedly, he looks down at his watch. Five-thirty. Shit. "Sorry," he says, "I, uh - I didn't know what time it was."
He can hear her moving around, maybe struggling to sit up in bed. "'s okay," she mumbles, and he's absolutely certain that she's rubbing her eyes. "It's, uh, not that - oh fuck. It is pretty early."
"Early?" he says. "I was going to say late."
She groans. "I don't know how you do it," she says. "Work these hours and still show up in court when I need you... hang on, let me turn on a light."
The phone lands on something soft, something sort of swishy - high thread count sheet, he guesses - and he listens to her bare feet walk across a hardwood floor. He closes his eyes, finds himself unprepared for the wave of nostalgia that washes over him. He doesn't have a lot of good memories of being married - he has a few, and they're cherished, but in his mind they're far between - but somehow this is one of them: middle of the night wakeups with Ellie when she was just a kid, and the slow movements of his half-awake wife as she navigated through their room in the dark...
"I'm back," Robin says, startling him.
"Hey," he says, because now that he's got her awake for no reason whatsoever, he realises he has nothing to say. "I, uh, got your message."
"Yeah?" She's definitely awake now, and the ghost of his ex-wife is chased away by the tone of Robin's voice.
"Day after tomorrow sounds great," he says.
She laughs, and it is that little laugh that he likes. He feels something like a smile start to grow on his face, on his tired face that hasn't smiled enough today. "Don't you mean tomorrow?" she says.
It takes him a moment to decipher that, and then he remembers that his day starts when hers ends, so yeah - tomorrow. "Sorry," he says, feels a sad little laugh push at his chest. "Been one of those nights, you know?"
"Yeah?" she says. "You want to tell me about it?"
"Not much to tell," he hears himself say, and another little ghost of his ex-wife comes back, her accusations about his secret life. "I just talked to Nicky - Nick Stokes, I mean. You know, the-"
"-Jane Galloway case," she says. "That must have been hard."
"Yeah, well - I didn't make it any easier, you know?"
A little pause. "You want to tell me about that?"
He wants to make a joke about lawyers not letting anything slide, but - it's just because he doesn't want to talk about this, he'd rather push it out of the way and never talk about it again. But.... "It's something personal," he says. "Between Nick and me. It's - never mind."
"Oh come on," she says teasingly, so lightly it almost hurts because now she does kind of sound like Marie did, back when they were young. He pushes the thought aside. "That sounds too juicy to just throw out there. What happened?"
"It's nothing."
"Come on, Jim - it's five-thirty in the morning, every part of me wants to be asleep right except the part that's talking to you - you've got to tell me what's going on. I'm a sucker for gossip..."
Oh ho, he thinks, then you're going to love this... But he can't do that, can he? Gil may be way out of line here, but he doesn't need it spread across the department, he doesn't need his job and his intellectual life taken away from him.
He sighs. "He's uh, dating someone," he says, skirting the issue. "It's - awkward."
"The lab guy?" Robin asks. "I heard about that."
He raises his eyebrows. "You heard about that?" he asks. "When - how'd it get down to the courthouse?"
"Oh, you know," she says, "one person tells another tells another and then he's dropping some paperwork off with my clerk, and..." She half-laughs again. "You know how it is."
"Sure," he says. "Same old, same old."
"So that's awkward?" Robin asks him, her voice still pitched lightly but he can tell that it's a test of some kind. "Nick dating a guy?"
Jim lets his eyes close. "He, uh - used to date a friend of mine. It's-"
"-awkward," she finishes for him. "Got it."
And he thinks, maybe she does. As much of it as he can tell, anyway. "So," he says, "you, uh, you wanna do dinner or something? Maybe drinks, or..."
"...or?" she asks, and laughs again.
Uhhh - he hadn't counted on having to come up with something on such short notice.
"All right," she says, letting him off the hook. "What time does your shift start?"
"Midnight," he tells her, "give or take."
"Dinner sounds great, then," she says. "I should have my end wrapped up by, say, seven?"
He swallows. "Seven sounds just about right," he says. "You like Italian?"
"Love Italian."
There's a moment, and it stretches just past casual into - into kind of flirtatious.
"Okay," he says, because he has to say something now or he's bound to say something stupid. "I'll make reservations at this place I know."
"Can't wait," she says.
He grins despite himself. "Go back to sleep," he tells her, "I'd hate that you started your day on a bad note because of me."
"This is hardly a bad note," she says, but she's swallowing a yawn, Jim can tell.
"Sweet dreams," he says, and before he thinks of anything else stupid to say, he adds, "I'll call you later."
"Mmm," she says, and that's a kind of nice sound for five-thirty in the morning. "Later," she says, and hangs up.
Jim stands holding his phone in his hand for a few minutes, wondering what he's getting himself into and if he's too old to suddenly start dating. For an instant he wants to go inside and ask Gil what he thinks, and then he remembers that he doesn't want to talk to Gil right now. Maybe not for a long time.
Crane's fault, he thinks bitterly, and lopes towards his car.