Okay, so I haven't written any fanfic for a while but I've been a geeky GSR girly for a long time and wish to share it with the world. When I saw that last scene in Way To Go...wow, good times for us. Anyway, R/R if you'd like and plan on many more chapters to come.

The day Grissom came home from his sabbatical, I was not thinking about him. In fact, it might have been the first time in hours, days, possibly even weeks that he wasn't at leastpart of my constant thought process. But I was just at the landfill and I smelled pretty damn bad.
It was much like the first time Hank asked me out...I was oozing pungent smells out of every pore. The last person I thought I'd see when I got back from the landfill was Grissom.

I saw him when I came around the corner. He was just standing there, as if he was waiting for me. Just the way he was looking at me when I rounded that corner made my knees turn to jelly. If someone pushed me, I would have fallen to the ground like a leaf. Thankfully, I managed to keep my composure.

It had been a long time since I last saw him. Before he left, he said he'd miss me. I watched him walk away and longed for him to turn around and say something else. I longed to run out of that locker room and grab him. But, while we did have a relationship, it wasn't like that. It was based on moments, moments much like the one we were about to experience in the hall. The relationship itself was purely based on passion, but neither one of us allowed ourselves any grand displays of emotion, at least not very often. And since we were at work, we both knew that we had to keep up appearances. This had obviously become a lot harder since we began our relationship. Sometimes I had no idea how to act around him. I just hoped the others didn't notice.

We didn't talk while he was gone on sabbatical. I wasn't sure if I expected him to at least call or send me an email, and I tried not to get my hopes up. But before my eyes closed and I drifted off to sleep each day, I would wonder why he didn't call or write. I wondered if he was thinking about me as much as I thought about him. When he was hard at work teaching his class, did he look in the audience and see someone that looked like me, and then start to wonder? Did he look at his cell phone and wonder what my voice would sound like if he called me right then and there?

Things got a little strange before he left. It started as soon as he announced he was going out of town for a little while. He didn't talk about it at all before he made this announcement, so I was a little surprised. One night, over dinner, I asked him about it.

"So, what made you decide to take this sabbatical?" I asked over a candelit dinner. We were at my house. I made my specialty veggie enchiladas, and he was very carefully picking them over.

He glanced at me and took a sip of red wine before he answered.

"I just need to think about things. I care...about you, and about the work, and the cases...but I just need some time to think. Please understand, Sara. That's all I want."

We managed to switch topics, but of course I couldn't get my mind off him leaving. Why did he have to leave what we had together? It was going well. It was a little rocky sometimes, but what we had was nice. It felt right.

But he did leave, and I had a whole month to ponder what was going on.

As much as I tried, I could not get Gil Grissom out of my head. In the beginning, when I first came to Las Vegas to help an old friend and mentor, I continued the child-like crush I had on him since the day I met him. It got out of hand. I realized that a long time ago, and I tried to move on with my life. There was the alcohol problem, but I got the help I needed and I kicked it. For a long time, all I did was go to work and process the case. I didn't think about Gil or anyone else. All I wanted to do was improve myself. And it worked. People started noticing that I was leaving personal stuff behind and not getting so involved in the cases that I made them a part of me. Of course, I still did that, I just hid it better. It was with the help of a therapist that I was getting my act together. However, I never talked about my relationship, or lack of relationship with my therapist. Only one time did she ask about him, and I just shook my head. Sensing she had touched a nerve, she let it go. I knew someday she'd ask again, but was grateful she hadn't yet.

Before he left, Grissom said he'd see me soon. I replied, "Yes, you will." Because even though I hadn't heard from him in nearly a month, I knew later, sometime in the next 24 hours, he would call me. After a long shower to cleanse myself of the smells my body was sending out into the universe, I would go to his townhouse, we would share a glass of wine. I'd tell him that I wasn't so happy about not hearing from him while he was gone. And he might or might not tell me why I didn't hear from him. This is how our relationship worked.

Most of the time I'd talk and he'd listen. It worked better that way. But now, after all we'd been through together, there weren't any secrets left between us. It took him a while to trust me completely, let me into the way his gorgeous mind worked. But when he did let me in, I knew I would be there forever.