Gil looked over at Catherine. “It could’ve been a hiker who got lost. It’s interesting to me how you always expect the worst.”
She met his eyes. “You see, that way, I’m never disappointed. And then, sometimes I’m nicely surprised. So, can we call it a crime scene?”
Her eagerness never surprised him. “A potential crime scene. Did you know there are 206 bones in the human body?”
Her voice was snippy, showing her impatience with him. He wanted nothing more to kiss her to silence her. “Yes, professor, I too took osteology.”
“Well,” he widened his eyes in exasperation, “205 more bones and we have a complete skeleton.” He continued after a quick breath: “If we find the rest then we can determine whether or not it was a murder.”
Her lips pouted a little. He really wanted to kiss her. “Well, I feel it in every one of my 206 bones that this was a murder.”
He rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything. It wasn’t until they stopped working to take a break to gaze up at the stars that their conversation started again. The stars were beautiful. Not as beautiful as the woman standing next to him, but still easy to gaze on. “So,” she spoke first, after they made small talk about the case. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
He nodded. “How amazing the universe is. Everything made from the same carbon, stars to trees, trucks to human bones.”
She frowned. “Mmm, no. I was thinking that we have about 100 bone fragments. We could ID this body before the end of the shift.” She paused. “Stars and trucks?”
Gil looked down at her. “Yes. Stars and trucks. You’ve never thought about that stuff?”
She shrugged. “Not really.” Her head turned so she could meet his gaze. “Should we head back to the office now?” He smiled at her, thinking about her strong work ethic, and shook his head slightly. She asked another question: “Why are you staring at me like that?” When he didn’t reply, only taking another step towards her, she continued to press for information. “Gil Grissom, you’re freaking me out. Quit staring, unless you tell me what’s grabbed your attention!”
He laughed softly and pressed his lips to hers. She jumped at the contact, crying out and patting his chest with her hand: “Did you have that shot or not?”
He glanced around; she had been very loud. Luckily, the cadets had gone back to the lab, taking the bone fragments with them. “Yes, Cath, I’m up to date on all my shots. Now,” he grinned. “Kiss me.”
She squirmed out of his arms, laughing. “You have bone fragment lips!!” He chased her, laughing with her, as she ran towards his Tahoe. When he finally caught her, pinned against the car, she wiggled around, trying to keep her lips from his. “Crusty bone fragment lips!”
Still trying to kiss her, but to no avail, Gil realized he was going to have to do something else to get her to kiss him. He kept her pinned in place with one hand, and used the other by slipping it under her jacket. The moment his hand made contact with her stomach, and then her ribcage, and then her breasts, she stopped moving. He planted a deep kiss on her open mouth. “Finally,” he sighed, when he came back up for air. “I’ve got your attention.”
“We can’t do this here!” She looked around. “We should get back to work... won’t they realize that we’re late?”
He shrugged. His desires for her hadn’t been sated; they had intensified. “I’m the boss. I wanted to go for coffee.”
She smiled up at him, her hands already on his coat, pulling the zipper down. “Alright. Coffee it is,” she kissed the underside of his chin. “We’ll just explain to everyone that we had to grind the coffee beans ourselves, first, before we could brew the stuff.”
He nodded. “Sounds believable.”
“Yeah,” she snorted, reaching underneath his sweater, connecting with the bare flesh of his stomach. Unprepared for the contact, he sucked in air in surprise. She lifted the material up, bending herself down a little, to start kissing his torso. He groaned, struggling for control. He didn’t know how she did it, but she was always able to assault his body and receive maximum results.
He reached with his hands, pulling her up to meet him. “Cath, we can’t do this in the great outdoors.”
It looked as though someone splashed a glass of water on her face. Something had shocked her, but he didn’t know what it was. She recovered quickly. “Yeah, you’re right. We should get in the back,” she already had her hand on the door handle. “It’s gonna be cramped,” she murmured as she climbed in, flashing him a smile. “But, I’m game.”
“Good,” he said while tugging her jacket off. The scarf got tossed into the front seat. He didn’t take her shirt off, but he did manage to unclasp her bra; she took his sweater off, but only partially removed his pants. He panted for air, the vehicle heating up really quickly. “We need to get your pants off.”
She had been sitting in his lap, but she slid off of his legs and nodded. “You’re right.” She pushed her back up against the other door in the back, and bent over to pull her shoes off. She tugged at the zipper fly and the button, and then looked at Gil. He saw the passion in her eyes, and briefly wondered if it was just lust, before clearing the thought from his mind. “Want to pull?”
He understood, grabbing the cuffs of her pants. She slid out of them, and then crawled back to him. She kissed him again, one arm wrapping around his neck, the other sliding down between them. “So soon?”
“Coffee doesn’t take that long to grind, silly,” she grinned down at him, her eyes dark and cheeks pink and lips swollen. When she eased herself onto him, taking him inside of her at the slowest speed he could have ever imagined, he groaned and tried to help her out by thrusting upwards. Catherine, however, was being difficult; she lifted herself up also when he did that. He groaned in a complaint of sorts. “But, it’s not a quick process, either.”
“You...” he uttered. “Are impossible...”
“I know,” she winked, before pressing her lips back against his. He noticed how little room there was in the back seat of his SUV; her back often ended up pressed against the back of the driver’s seat, or her head ended up brushing against the ceiling.
She buried her face into his shoulder, keeping her arms firmly wrapped around him. “I’m sooo close,” she shivered, pulling at him for even more contact.
He managed to chuckle, slipping his hand between them. At first touch, he felt her shudder; at second touch, he heard her moan, low and lusty. By the time he made it to the third touch, he felt her teeth in his shoulder, her nails in his back and neck.
“God, Cath!”
Needless to say, it pushed him over the edge.
~*~
As they walked into the lab, Catherine saw Teri Miller, dragging her suitcase behind her. “Hi,” Gil called out to her. She smiled and quietly returned the gesture. “Where are you going?” Catherine heard the tone in his voice, and knew no matter how much she wished against it, Gil would always be attracted to another woman. This love seemed so much more romantic; it wasn’t the same as the lust they shared with their strong friendship. She could be the one, Catherine realized sadly.
“I’m leaving,” she answered simply.
“Town?”
She nodded, but added: “Don’t worry, I was able to isolate some of the tissue from the preserved vertebrae. Nick’s working on it now.”
She felt Gil shift his weight. He was agitated. Catherine’s eyes grew wide as she realized that he was probably going to want to kiss her good-bye or something. She had never asked how serious their relationship had been, or if they had one at all, but the attraction wasn’t hard to miss. Something was going to happen, and she didn’t want to be around.
“Well,” she excused herself. “I’m going to go check that out. Teri,” she flashed a smile to keep herself from falling apart. “You rule.”
“Thanks, Catherine.”
She made it to Gil’s office—the closest place she could hide in without being disturbed—just as the tears spilled out onto her cheeks.
“God, Catherine,” she started muttering to herself to fill the silence in the room. “Pull yourself together. It was only sex. We never put an exclusivity clause on the sex thing. It was for comfort, and fun, and that sort of thing.” She reached for a tissue off of his desk, wiping her face with it. “I’m so stupid for getting attached. I shouldn’t have held on.”
~*~
Catherine had been weird all evening, Gil noticed, as he reflected back on the date and the events prior to it. It was true, he had had a “nice time” with Teri, but it wasn’t amazing. He hadn’t felt the chemistry with her that he expected to feel; she was a beautiful and intelligent woman, but there was something missing.
He briefly wondered if it was because they were very similarly minded people, and if he needed someone that was very much his opposite to compliment him and form a strong bond with.
Those thoughts directed him to Catherine and her weirdness. He stopped by the Crime Lab on his way home from the scene he had been asked to survey. His office was a safe place to contemplate things.
He stepped inside the darkness, and shut the door behind him before turning the light on. His office had been touched. His chair was pulled back from his desk a bit, so he walked up to it to see if anything had been disturbed. There were little puddle marks on a page of paper.
“My intruder drools?” He asked the room around him, almost expecting an answer. He went to throw his coffee cup in the garbage, when he saw several crumpled tissues in the waste basket. He hadn’t used a tissue in a long time. Maybe once the other day, to wipe Catherine’s lipstick off of his face, but the garbages had been changed more recently than that.
He picked one of them up. It was damp. There was black smudges on the tissue; to him, it resembled ink, but it wasn’t until he saw an eyelash that he realized it was mascara.
Without a thought, he picked up his cellphone and dialed a familiar number.
“Hello?”
“It’s me.”
Her voice sounded heavy. “Hey, Gil. How was your date?”
“We had a nice time. She left early. I had to go look at some bugs.”
“Oh. Did you want anything?”
He didn’t know how to answer that. He wanted a lot: Catherine’s heart, he wanted his ring on her finger, he wanted to wake up everyday with her in his arms, he wanted to raise a family with her; simply put—he wanted to love her and he wanted her to love her in return. She sounded distant; he was afraid he would lose her.
“Just calling to see if you were alright.”
“Oh.”
“Cath?”
He thought he heard sniffing, but he wasn’t sure. “Yeah?”
“Did you want to go for a walk or something?”
“A walk?”
He picked up a couple files from his desk and tucked them into his briefcase. “Yeah, a walk. Maybe we could go to a park, stop and get some ice cream or something.”
“I’m tired,” she tried to decline.
Gil knew better. “Just walking, I promise.”
“Okay,” she gave in, as he expected. He could almost hear her smile, and knew that things would get better. “I could use a walk and some ice cream, anyway. Stop by when you’re done.”
The End!
