Silent Confusion
Part of the Deconstruction Project

By Amber & Cappuccino Girl

Rating: PG-13 for adult themes and language.
Disclaimer: Not ours. Wish they were.

Notes: A series of vignettes, a passing of time, which attempt to make up a story. Additional notes can be found at the end.




It was unusually warm for April. His windows were wide open at five fifty pm to reveal the picturesque view over the central courtyard of the faculty of criminology and forensic science. Someone might have chosen this exact place for a painting.

He was about to pack up for the day when there was a knock on his door, and it opened a little.

"Excuse me. You said I should…"

His chair was in need of oil, he realized as he turned around to face the person standing in the doorway. She was leaning to the right due to the weight of her bag.

"The books," he said with a slight smile.

The young woman seemed insecure. She looked at her shoes instead of scanning the bookshelf for the relevant titles and in her he saw himself fifteen years ago.

"I assume you have the titles," he half asked, half stated.

She pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from the back pocket of her jeans. "Mass Spectral and Gc Data. Regulatory Toxicology."

"If you have the authors, they're all in alphabetical order."

"Chengelis," she whispered.

"Top shelf, I believe."

She pulled her bag from her shoulders and dropped it on the floor. After having stepped over the chord of her professor's printer, she tilted her head to the side and slowly ran her index finger along the spines of the books. She tapped the back of the toxicology one when she had located it, and tugged it out, tucked it under her arm.

He tried to appear busy. The screensaver on his computer had frozen and gone blue and he didn't intend to work anymore that day. Closing his files, he proceeded to pack his briefcase while his pupil shoved two hardback books into her bag and struggled with the zipper.

Eventually, she blinked and looked up. "Thank you."

"If you ever have trouble finding the books again, just knock on my door. I have most of them here. I'm usually here on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays." He's not quite sure why he said this. It was written on a sign outside: 'Office hours'. He said it anyway.

When she was gone, he noticed that she'd left a fountain pen and floral scented air.


~* *~


The night after her graduation and they were both in the same bar. She looked through the employment section of trade magazines, the pages slowly blurring as she reached the bottom of her third glass of vodka.

"Shouldn't you be out celebrating with friends?" he asked.

"Work doesn't stop now. I have college loans to pay and I guess I was so caught up in studying that I didn't take the time to find a job and now…" She flipped the pages hastily.

"A position has opened at the county coroner's office. He's a close friend of mine." Her former professor pulled out a piece of paper and scrawled something on the back before handing it to her. "This is my home address and my telephone number. I'll talk with the coroner and put a good word in for you and if you ever need anything, call me. I'd hate to lose touch." He smiled, touched Sara's hand for a moment before getting up to leave.

Three weeks later she had a job offer.


~* *~


It was a beautiful night, one of those crystal clear full moon nights. It only made everything worse.

She parked her car in one of the narrow spaces. The building in front of her, identical to the ones on either side with their simple white siding and unnatural carpeted porches, made her wish she had not come to him, but she had nowhere else to go. She checked the paper in her hand with his scrawled address. If she had doubted his handwriting, she did not doubt the appearance of his supposed residence, the lack of furniture and plants. Her finger rested a moment too long on the doorbell, and she listened as the noise reverberated inside.

He opened the door slowly and took in the figure before him. Sara Sidle, damp hair curling around her ears, silver cross on a small chain against her black windbreaker, blue satin falling over brown leather sandals. His eyes returned to her face with its red eyes that refused to meet his own.

“Come on.” He pulled her gently inside. “What happened?” he asked, a soft tone barely camouflaging rising rage.

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Did he hit you?”

“No,” she insisted, flinching at the anger in his voice.

“No?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet tonight, you mean?” He stalked away from her, down a back hall.

“Why do you even care?” she called after him.

“I don’t know. It shouldn’t have to be a question.”

She sighed. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have,” he agreed, rejoining her in the living room with a robe sashed around his waist. “This wasn’t why I gave you my address.”

She laughed with much more deprecation than humor. “I know why you gave me your address.”

“I didn’t mean--” he began, except that he had.

“It’s okay,” she said, realizing that it was. She would not have kept the paper if she had not at least been considering his unvoiced offer.

He attempted to blink away the surreal feeling. “Do you want something to drink?” he offered at a loss.

“Yeah.” She settled herself on his couch, sandals on the floor and her legs under her. “A towel would be good, too.”


~* *~


He wrote her a postcard and mailed it from the airport because he didn't know how to say goodbye. He said how sorry he was that he was leaving, but that he had to move to Las Vegas and that it was only a short flight away. It was pathetic and he knew it, but he couldn't think of an alternative and swore that he would call her once he had unpacked his belongings. The card remained unread in her mail box for two weeks. Aaron had thrown her down the stairs that day.


She didn't hear from Grissom until he phoned her three years later in a crisis, and she packed her bags while Aaron was away on business and took a four PM flight to Nevada.


~* *~


“Grissom?”

She buzzed him up and returned to her pacing. Her hands shook as she opened the freezer door. An almost empty carton of Ben and Jerry’s fell to the floor as she searched for the emergency pack of cigarettes that she kept in the back of the freezer in an air-tight bag.

He knocked on the door at the same moment that she came to the conclusion that the cigarettes were not there. She wondered if she had ever put them there, or if she was that far gone now.

Grissom looked almost disturbed when she opened the door, and she followed his eyes to her hand. She saw that somewhere between the freezer and the door she picked up her gun. She assured them both that the safety was on and sat the gun on the counter.

She gestured toward the living room, but he was waiting for her to say something, anything. She didn't.

“What is this?” he finally asked. His concern was paternal and it upset her more than she would have liked.

“Nothing.” She did not want Grissom to see her dirty sock-clad feet or the freezer door hanging open. She really did not want him there at all. “I’m fine.”

He shook his head. “People who are fine do not open the door with a gun in their hands.”

“After what happened, it’s not so paranoid,” she defended herself weakly, though she was every bit as alarmed as he was.

“You weren’t answering the door with your gun last week,” he stated pointedly.

He had not been concerned with her emotional state last week, either. She would have said as much, but simpler escapes existed than arguing. “I’m fine,” she assured him, making an effort to soften her expression. Her lips found his tentatively; for then, at least, it was easier this way. She left her arms around his neck and an air of secrecy around everything else.


~* *~


He drove her home frequently, and the kisses at the door before leaving soon turned into him keeping a spare suit in her closet. They were too tired to speak, so they kissed and fucked, her thinking of the pretty yet short-tempered boys she had left behind in California. She missed the rain and the smog. She missed the hills.

She remembered sitting on her mom's porch when she was little, just after her parents had separated. She'd held her teddy bear in her arms, the stuffing peeking out of his ears due to too much love. Her mother had reached over, first touched the bear and then her daughter's waist and hoisted her onto her lap. "Grown-up relationships just drift sometimes, Sara," she had said, wiping her daughter's nose and stroking her hair. But Sara had never seen the drifting. One day her father had packed up his bags and left. Now she knows he was having an affair, but when she was young, she had truly believed that adults drifted quietly, secretly. Maybe some adults never reached the stage where they could drift, because there was nothing to drift from.


~* *~


He ran his hand through her dark hair, little tangles on the white pillows. She was naked beneath the sheets. She no longer faced him when she slept. She didn't play hard to get during sex. He possessed her, and she never fought. So when he came and she faked her third orgasm in a week, she pulled away from him, turned around in bed and stared at the glowing figures of the alarm clock until she fell asleep. He listened to her breathe.

He tried to tell himself that it was the cases which caused her to be like this, that it was the man who killed his wife, that it was the undercover work, and the constant processing of death. He knew women could react this way because he learned it in a college psychology class some thirty-one years ago. If he would have taken a further class he might have learned how to approach someone about an issue as complex as this, but he chose to take a medical biology one instead and as a result he didn't know how to ask her why she slept with her back to him and why she snuck out of bed every morning and scalded herself in the shower.

He would try to ensure that she worked on property crime cases that week and he'd turn the shower to a cooler temperature once she'd left the bathroom in the morning. He would empty her lighter.

He kissed her between her shoulder blades.


~* *~


It has been one of those scorching days where the air conditioning on maximum seems useless because one step out of the front door is enough to send a person into a coma, and Sara always has to leave.

The remains of smoked cigarettes and glasses of Absolut and Jack Daniels litter the balcony table of Grissom's apartment. It's hardly stylish by any definition of the term, but the bright lights of the city contrast nicely with the chipped glass and smoldering ashtrays.

"What are you doing?" Sara asks. She's wearing an threadbare pair of 501s, and her old ASPCA tee-shirt. She keeps pulling the shirt down with the back of her hands. Her feet bang against iron legs of the table.

Grissom shakes out the remaining five Marlboros from their packet and tosses them off the balcony. "You shouldn't smoke like this."

"I've read the warnings." And she has and he is all warning signs and relentless criticism and insecurity.

They both stare at the remains of their evening. Dirty plates and lipstick on her glass.

"Why don't we ever--"

"I should go and--" They both speak at the same time and they stop speaking together and sit in silence while the traffic hums by three stories bellow.

Eventually, she sighs. "This is a joke."

He remains silent.

"We're a fucking joke, Grissom. You with your 'don't smoke, Sara' and 'this isn't a seminar, Sara' and 'I don't have time for your constant emotional outbursts, Sara.' I don't think I've had a two-sided conversation with you for months."

"I'm sorry," he murmurs. He hates that she's right, that there hasn't been, has never been anything else to say.

She stands up and walks over to the balcony railing, and while she's looking down at the passing traffic, the lights go out. She's sure the lights shouldn't go out in sparkling Las Vegas.

"Sara get away from there," he orders.

"Scared I might fall?"

"Don't you dare joke with me now."

"Don't you fucking order me around."

"We have no electricity. The entire city is blacked out."

"How do you know that? You're not the one peering over the balcony."

"Get back from there." He pulls her towards him, his voice harsh, his touch cautious.

She wriggles away. "You don't trust me, do you?"

"I don't think anyone would trust you in your present state. Would you mind finding a flashlight or some candles so we could actually see what is going on as opposed to trying to make out black silhouettes?"

"Get your own damn candles."

Grissom leans against the wall. "Why do you want to fight?"

She stops and moves to what she thinks must be closer to him and when she can touch his shirt sleeve she says, "What would we do if we didn't?"

"Would you like to take a break?" He says this because he's heard it said before and it seems suitable.

Sara moves away from him, lets go of his clothes and stretches her arms out in front of her to guide her inside and through the living room.

"Where did I put my bag?" she asks.

He stands in the doorway, back to the city. "On the couch."

As he takes a few more steps into the room, he can hear her rummaging around for her car keys in her coat pocket.

"You can't go now." He pauses, suddenly aware that he needs to give her a reason why. "You won't see a thing in the stairwell."

"That's the least of my problems right now."

"Let me help you with that."

"It's fine." And suddenly her voice is soft and he can hear the choked back tears.

He touches her shoulder. "I'm sorry."

"You always say that," she whispers. "You always say that because you don't know what else to say to me."

"You're right."

"Now you never say that, but we are these two people who remain together because we've never learned how to break up."

"You could wait until the lights come back on."

"No I couldn't, because I'm always waiting for the next event to occur because, who knows, that event might make us into this perfect couple but it never does, and I end up chain-smoking Marlboros in the middle of the day while you write up agendas for some conference." Her keys rattle in her hand. "Goodbye."

She kisses his forehead. He kisses her mouth. They don't hug.

"I'll see you in the office tomorrow." And the front door clicks shut behind her.

She lights a cigarette, grasps tightly onto the banister rail and gingerly placing one foot in front of the other, she makes her way down the stairs.



~* the end *~

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Authors' notes: During many pleasant hours spent on AIM, this story slowly came together, bits and pieces, to span the length of a relationship. It's not pretty and we never tried to make it that.

we live for feedback. please send it to cappuccinogirlie@hotmail.com & minttown1@yahoo.com

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