There comes a time in every woman’s life, or so she decided on that fateful evening, when she reaches an impasse. A sort of metaphysical crossroads that diverge into a quasi-realistic yellow wood, leaving the woman to either follow the beaten path – say, life-long loneliness ending in the unofficial title of “the cat lady of Henderson, Nevada” – or take the road less traveled by and, yadda yadda, eventually make all the difference.
For Jacqui Franco, this impasse was realized over a ham-and-cheese-on-seven-grain, during her lunch break on a Tuesday.
“I’m stuck,” she declared proudly, and set down her sandwich.
David Hodges – quite nearly her best friend in the world, if you could overlook the fact that no man as surly or unlivable as he should ever be allowed to be the best friend of any other human being – arched an eyebrow. “The pattern for eating, in case you may have forgotten, is biting, chewing, and swallowing. I really hope you don’t need a demonstration.”
From either side of him, Archie and Greg snickered and tried not to meet her gaze.
And the avoidance of her gaze was with good reason, because Jacqui had gone from contemplative to creepily annoyed in zero-point-three seconds. “Not with that,” she retorted, as if Hodges hadn’t known that in the first place. “With, you know. It.”
“The crazy Stephen King clown?” Ronnie sent Bobby a beaming smile of triumphant approval and nudged him in the arm, one of those masculine “good one, man” gestures that needed no verbalization.
Jacqui rolled her eyes, as any woman was apt to do when she dined with men like these. Mia, the only sane member of the lab technician cabal, now chose to dine – and this was an exact, verbatim quote – “anywhere but near them,” which probably meant somewhere in Arizona; no one had found her secret dining area…yet.
“Not It,” she informed them dryly. “It. With, you know. Him.”
“Oh.” Hodges nodded like a man who just found Jesus. “You mean your creepy, stalker-quality crush on Grissom. Yeah, how’s that working out for you?”
Bobby snorted. Greg grinned and eyed Hodges in a way that could very well have been a mental high-five. Ronnie bit back a chuckle. Archie’s ears reddened from holding back a likely guffaw.
Jacqui planned to kill them all very painfully, someday.
“It’s not, in case your puny pea brain has forgotten.” She slouched back in her chair, all interest in her sandwich gone. “I’m just stuck.”
“Jacqui,” Bobby Dawson drawled, sighing out her name like some oath, “you’ve been stuck on Grissom for, what, four years? It’s not gonna magically disappear just ‘cause you’ve decided you’re ‘stuck.’ Maybe it’s time you moved on.” He paused, eyeing her carefully. “Ya know, I got this friend – ”
“Bobby,” she interrupted, turning her steely glare in his direction, “the last friend you tried to set me up with was a closet case. Before that, we had the guy missing four teeth, and before him, the oh-so-happily-married accountant. Do you really want to finish that statement?”
Greg snickered. She elbowed him in the side and earned a satisfying little squeak in response.
Bobby, however, frowned noticeably. “I swear, he’s got all his teeth.”
“I think we’re missing the point,” Ronnie interjected, a useful entrance into the conversation given that Jacqui kept eyeing Bobby, and then her plastic fork, and then Bobby again. “Jacqui’s stuck on this Grissom thing because she wants to do something about the Grissom thing.”
If ever Archie Johnson had looked completely flabbergasted, it was after Ronnie closed his mouth. “Do something?” he gaped, blinking. “Like… Asking him out?”
“No, burning him in effigy. It’s all the rage in Milan.” Hodges finished off his soda.
While Archie scowled and tried desperately to think up some sort of witty comeback – which, they all knew, was hard for a man whose main social interactions were with Captains Kirk and Picard – Greg frowned. “If you did that,” he thought aloud, “you’d be asking out your boss. You know that, right?”
Jacqui glanced at him, not sure she’d meant the conversation to take this particular sharp turn at “the future of her crush.” Maybe Mia would let her eat in her secret basement fort, next time around. “Yeah.”
“And you know that, last time anyone tried to ask him out, the lab blew up and could have killed me?”
The room, which had been teetering on the edge of “socially inept conversation” ever since she’d set down her sandwich, plummeted straight into the bottomless pit of “awkward silence.” Everyone turned and just looked at Greg, who tried his best to look mild-mannered and unassuming with a cookie hanging out of his mouth. The attempt was pitiful at best. “What?”
“You always know how to put a positive spin on things, don’t you?” Archie questioned.
“The silver lining, right there,” Ronnie added.
Greg wilted slightly in his seat, but it was Hodges – David Hodges, who was definitely on his way down the slippery slope from “best friend” to “arch nemesis,” as far as Jacqui was concerned – who smiled sardonically. “I think I may shed a tear of joy. The boy is learning.”
That was the final straw, and Jacqui communicated this as such by socking Hodges in the arm. Hard enough to make a dull sound and inspire him to curse creatively, which was an accomplishment. “Thank you for taking such light-hearted jabs at my pain,” she intoned. “I’ll remember this the next time your wife locks you out – ”
“That was accidental,” Ronnie defended.
“ – or your Yahoo! Personals match ends up being a trannie – ”
Archie shuddered violently at the memory.
“ – or your ex calls and you need someone to answer your phone and pretend it’s a wrong number – ”
“Which would have worked if you hadn’t struck up a conversation,” Hodges grumbled.
“ – or you can’t decide which shirt to wear on a big date – ”
Greg snorted. “Like your taste ended up being so much better.”
“ – or your boyfriend dumps you for a man with muscles.”
Bobby scowled. “That hasn’t happened,” he objected. “Have you been talkin’ to Nick? Did he say something?”
Hodges rolled his eyes at Bobby’s sudden concern – “‘Cause he said that he didn’t expect me to work out all the time!” – and sent a long-suffering glance in Jacqui’s direction. “Jacqui, if you want to ask him out, then ask him out,” he encouraged. “But if you’re not going to do anything, don’t expect us to be your bitching posts. We have lives of our own to worry about, thank you.”
“We do?” Archie questioned.
“Since when?” Greg chimed in.
Sighing, Jacqui picked up her neglected sandwich and glared at it, if only because she couldn’t glare in five directions at once. “I’ve become the straight man to a bunch of comedians,” she muttered irritably.
“Technically,” Ronnie mused, “you’re the straight woman.”
Jacqui scowled and threw her balled-up foil at him.
==
Discovering one’s existence as the straight woman to a bunch of oh-so-funny men, Jacqui decided as she paged though fingerprint after fingerprint on AFIS, would probably be less annoying were she not so firmly entrenched in her impasse. She liked all five of the guys – sure, they were obnoxious sometimes, but so was she – until she needed advice. Her friends, she had long-ago discovered, were exactly the best people to ask for advice from…if, of course, you wanted to know which season of Star Trek to watch, or what car to buy, or where to get the best “foam” surfing, or whatever.
None of these topics were really relevant to “how to get the guy,” but then again, she had to consider the source.
She was very nearly done mulling over the idea of investigating in a gaggle of giggly late-thirties single girlfriends and creating a Las Vegas version of Sex in the City when the door to the fingerprinting lab opened and in walked – of all people – Gil Grissom. Jacqui flicked her eyes right back to the computer screen and willed her AFIS database to explode in a glorious fireball and take her with it, just so she wouldn’t have to have a conversation with him right at that moment.
“Jacqui,” Grissom greeted.
Whirr, purred the happy, explosion-free computer.
“Hey, Grissom,” she replied, and glared at the traitorous machine in front of her.
Gil Grissom was not, as men went, any sort of Adonis or even Clark Gable. He was a modest sort of attractive, with graying features, sharp glasses, and a rare smile. When Jacqui thought about him (which was often), she imagined him as sort of a tragic, bug-loving Romeo, played by a slightly-younger Michael Douglas to her charming, quiet Juliet. Or, if she was really thinking about him (which was even more often), she liked to pretend that they were on some serial television show and would eventually get together in the end, because the main character – in this case, her – always got the minor character – Grissom – in the end.
Either emboldened or just normally enticed by her greeting (she liked to think the former), Grissom sidled up beside her at the counter, his arm brushing hers as he peered at the computer. “Did you run that print through AFIS?” he questioned, as though AFIS wasn’t currently running up on screen.
The computer still was refusing to blow up. This could not end well.
“Still going,” she informed him, in case he couldn’t figure that out. She did not turn to face him, or even allow her eyes to glance over at him, because the impulse to grab him and contaminate the evidence counter was growing with every passing second. Dammit, why had he come to check up on his case so soon after her frustrating lunch with the men? And why was it okay for guys to employ the bathroom to indecent, self-centered ends while women –
“Did you check work cards?”
She sent him one very brief, sideways glance. “Always check ‘em first when it’s a casino case,” she reminded him.
“Just checking.” He nodded his normal approval and started to step away. Jacqui turned to watch him leave.
The computer still didn’t blow up.
“Hey, Grissom. Hang on a second.”
Grissom turned around in a very Grissomly way – a languid motion, unhurried, as though time wouldn’t mind his taking liberties with it because, hey, he was Gilbert freakin’ Grissom – and cocked an eyebrow. “Yes?”
As soon as their eyes met, Jacqui realized one very important detail: she hadn’t thought through to the next step. In her mind, or so she told herself in that scant second when all communication halted and her heart was threatening to impale itself on a rib and thus save her some pain at a later date, she hadn’t expected Grissom to turn around. Or to actually care that she had something to say to him. Or to actually appear interested in her existence beyond what she could do with some powder, a scanner, and a magnifying glass.
But he had, and now, she was screwed. And only metaphorically, to boot.
She forced herself to smile coyly, and damn, she felt thirteen again. “I was talking to the – ”
Shit. Wrong way to start.
“Well, I was talking to some people – ” Saved! “ – and was thinking, maybe… I know it’s kind of crazy, but here’s the thing, I – ”
Her hands were just about to make their fifth gesture of absolute futility when the door opened again and Sara Sidle popped her head and shoulders in, looking all young and attractive in a tank-top. “Hey, Grissom,” she greeted, completely ignoring that Grissom was not alone, “Brass called. We got a break on the case, and he wants us up at P.D. right away.”
Grissom glanced over his shoulder at her and gave her a very earnest, very interested, very eager nod, a nod that tortured Jacqui right down to the very depths of her soul. Oh, she wanted to hurt that Sara Sidle, and she mentally willed an anvil to fall on her pretty little head as the door closed with a hydraulic hiss.
The object of her affection, however, seemed not to hold that same opinion. “Can we continue this later?” he asked her before the door and its jamb had even properly reacquainted themselves, and she honestly blinked at the question.
“Yeah, sure,” she agreed quickly, because agreeing quickly was the only way she’d keep herself from doing something she’d regret.
Grissom nodded and was out the door almost as quickly as Sara had been.
Jacqui watched him leave, simmering in a silent stew of emotion: disappointment, hatred, irritability, hatred, loathing, hatred, anger, hatred, passionate deploring, and hatred, to name a few. One word from Sara Sidle, and the world stopped. One word from she-with-the-layered hair, she-of-the-Earth-toned-tops, she-who-walks-on-gorgeous-legs-and-can-shop-at-Abercrombie-if-she-feels-like-it, and Grissom became not unlike Silly Putty. A smile from the gap-toothed wonder, and Jacqui Franco was nothing.
That was fine, Jacqui decided, and turned back to the computer and it’s rumblings through AFIS – which still, damn it all, had not exploded. She could deal with this. This was nothing more than a bump on the road to love. Or, if not love, appreciation and an eventual coming-to-grips with a long-time physical attraction. And that meant only one thing:
Sara Sidle was going down.
==
She related this story to four of the five boys over breakfast; Greg, called out on another “field trip” – their name, not his – had neglected their normal meal together to better his career. Those present in the ranks all pretended to nod sympathetically at her tale of woe, but she knew from the undercurrent of cute little smirks that, really, they weren’t that sympathetic at all.
Damnable men.
She set down her fork with a clatter when she finished her omelet (she always ate fastest while she was stewing) and shared with them a very determined look. “It’s me versus her,” she reiterated, in case they’d somehow overlooked that thematic element of her story. “And I don’t see why I can’t win. I mean, what’s she got that I don’t?”
Ronnie started choking on his eggs in lieu of an answer, and Archie aided his quick recovery by refilling his water from the pitcher. Bobby fiddled with his phone, employing the age old “Look, I have a text message from my attractive and interesting boyfriend!” excuse. So she turned to the one man who hadn’t found a way to avoid her question.
Hodges took a rather vengeful bite out of a piece of bacon. “What?”
“Well?”
He sighed. “Far be it for me to state the obvious,” he answered slowly, receiving genuinely sorry gazes from his brothers-in-arms, “but long legs, shiny hair, a slender build, and a chance at holding his attention for more than twenty-three seconds.”
Ronnie, who had recovered from his death-by-eggs, smacked Hodges in the shoulder. “David!”
“She asked!” he defended himself, picking up his bacon as though he could employ it as a weapon. “The first rule is that you speak when spoken to, lest your reproductive organs become only a faint memory.”
The other man rolled his eyes. “Don’t listen to him, Jacq,” he assured her, which was good given the fact that she’d slouched back in the booth and begun to consider drowning herself in her orange juice. “It’s like the Frost poem. ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I / I took the one less traveled by / and that has made all the difference.’”
“Breakfast and a show.” Archie grinned. “Who knew?”
Ronnie summarily ignored him. “The point is that Grissom wouldn’t choose a cookie-cutter girl over you once he knew he had the option.”
“A cookie-cutter Harvard graduate with legs that don’t – ” Everyone looked again at Archie, who suddenly appeared very, very guilty. “Mmm. Pancakes. Yummy.”
Jacqui sighed and rolled her eyes. “You guys really suck at cheering people up, you know that? I need female friends, or a dog, or something.”
Setting down his bacon-weapon, Hodges exhaled slowly. “You can look at it positively if you want,” he encouraged in a tone that was everything except encouraging. “You’re the less-used road.”
Beside him, Bobby blinked and set down his phone. “No good can come of that one, David,” he noted as Jacqui’s eyes narrowed to slits. She looked something like a fire-breathing dragon before it actually breathed the fire. “I’d start runnin’.”
“Retrospectively, Dawson, I concur.” Hodges looked as though he might start running, too, though he must have known that Canada would be his only possible solace, now.
Their breakfast took a rather dour and uninteresting turn after that, Archie contenting himself to chatter about Battlestar Galactica while everyone else in attendance contented themselves with tuning him out. Jacqui, armed only with the pulpy remnants of her orange juice, was stuck wondering what it would have been like had she buddied up to Catherine more often and maybe learned how to dress. Or, if not how to dress, how to act feminine. Or, if not how to act feminine, how to at least seduce a man, because if there was one thing that woman was good at –
“Your day for the check, Jacq,” Ronnie reminded her, and, curse his luck, he was right, too.
Jacqui paid the bill – “Steak and eggs, plus a side of sausage? Bobby, are you trying to single-handedly eat my salary?" – and the group broke up in the parking lot, each person wandering back to their own car. Once in her drivers’ seat, she watched them each roll out of the lot and away, and suddenly had a very negative feeling about every bit of their so-called advice.
Grissom was brilliant and attractive, sure, but he was also a man. Men did not pick Captain Janeway when they had Seven-of-Nine at their disposal. They did not chose a rusted-out Civic when there was a Mustang in the driveway, or try to surf an in-ground pool when they could have an all-expenses-paid trip to Australia. No, men were predictable creatures who always chose the hot over the mundane. That’s why the Sara Sidles of the world had rocks weighing down their left hands while the Jacqui Francos of the world had cats sleeping on their heads.
If she was going to win, Jacqui decided, she was going to have to employ a whole new game plan, and it was going to have to start in the one place she dreaded more than the two inches of space between her couch and the wall:
The mall.
==
“You didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?” Jacqui asked oh-so-innocently the next day at work, reaching up into the cabinet to grab her coffee mug. Behind her, Hodges was making a face somewhat reminiscent of a flounder, Greg was trying not to laugh, Bobby was laughing, and Nick Stokes – who the Hell had invited him to this party, anyway? – appeared to be very, very confused. Archie, who had asked the question, was now retrieving his daily sudoku puzzle from where he’d dropped it on the floor.
Nick – who, despite being entirely too hot to handle, Jacqui wasn’t sure she liked all that much – forced a little smile when she glanced at the group over her shoulder. “I’m, uhm, gonna go,” he decided, and took off for the door before anyone could stop him.
“Wise man,” Hodges commented, nodding sagely. “Bobby, I now approve of your he-wife.”
“He-wife?”
“Yes. He-wife. Please don’t tell me it needs defined.”
Archie, now armed with his puzzle and pencil, smirked. “Is having a he-wife anything like having a man-wh – ” Bobby sent him a glance that said “I will shoot you and make it look like an unfortunate ballistics accident,” and he dropped his eyes to the puzzle. “Oh, look. That’s where the nine goes.”
“Now that the average IQ of the conversation has risen a few hundred points,” Hodges commented, leaning against the table, “I have to wonder – what hooker did you kill for that outfit?”
Jacqui scowled and glanced down, adjusting her sparkly belt buckle as she surveyed herself. She’d double- and triple-checked with the clerk to make sure she’d found the latest in fashion, and had been double- and triple-assured that, yes, tight black pants, a glitter-coated belt, and a low-cut tank-top with some pseudo-cardigan over it would be just what she needed to insure her sexual prowess. Top it off with some big, faux-wood beads – “all the rage this season!” – and some chunky earrings – “look, they match perfectly!” – and, well, she looked sharp.
And she wanted to use that sharpness to stab the now-sniggering Greg.
“This is fashion, boys,” she informed them languidly, and turned back to the coffee machine. “Of course, those of us who buy our clothing at yard sales wouldn’t know that, now would we?”
When she turned around, Bobby was looking suspiciously at the blue-and-red plaid monstrosity masquerading as his shirt. “You said you liked this one,” he complained.
“Yeah. I have some dust rags that match it perfectly.” He sent her a look that bordered on offended while she took a long sip of the caffeinated delight, feeling the burn from lips to stomach. “I’m just trying a new technique.”
“A technique that will have every horn-dog this west of the Atlantic Ocean offering you a twenty for your ‘services,’” Hodges muttered darkly.
Greg elbowed him. “You look nice,” he informed her, though he was smirking somewhat sardonically as he decided this. She smiled sweetly back at him, figuring that half a compliment was better than no compliment whatsoever, and a backhanded appreciation of her womanly attributes was, well, still an appreciation. “So, what’s your game plan?”
She hiked up her tank-top just a smidgeon – had to leave something for the imagination, and all that – and took another swig of her coffee. “Five minutes from now,” she decided.
“Five minutes?” Archie sounded dubious from behind the newspaper. “Why five?”
“Because it’s bigger than one minute and less than six.” She shrugged and set down her coffee mug. “And because I have to do it before I go into my lab and find a day-shift backlog that will keep me in fingerprints for six months. Besides, I – ”
“I am so going to kill Nancy,” a voice interrupted, and everyone glanced at Ronnie as he entered the break room, tugging on his lab coat. “I swear, the woman lives to make me late, and the later the….” He trailed off, his strong words becoming a mutter becoming a low, slow whistle. “Uh. Hey. Jacqui.”
Jacqui grinned. Mission accomplished, for sure. “Hello, Ronald,” she greeted, lowering her voice-ever-slightly. Men liked voices low and foxy, right? “What’s this about Nancy?”
Ronnie, for all his usual grace under pressure, stood stark-still in the doorway of the break room, his coat hanging limply from one arm as he surveyed all he saw; that is, as he surveyed Jacqui from head to toe and back again. Finally, he swallowed and forced himself to smile. “Uh, nothing,” he replied, though – from the fire and brimstone in his tone just a moment ago – everyone knew it was definitely something. “You… Uhm.” He paused, and glanced at the other men. They, loyal subjects of Jacqui’s non-sexual man-harem, were appropriately silent and staring at the floor. Ronnie finally found his voice after a strangled non-sound. “Jacqui, can I just say something?”
“Sure.” She could see it now, Ronnie singing her praises and giving her just the right amount of ego-boosting so she could stick out her chest and waltz proudly into Grissom’s office.
“Okay.” He took a deep breath. “Jacqui, you know we love you. We love you as much as any five men of varying sexualities can love a woman and not want to sleep with her. But with that in mind, I think it’s time to ask: are you sure you haven’t gone off the deep end with this?”
Bobby snorted and covered his mouth with a hand. Archie broke the pencil between his fingers. Greg choked on a mouthful of coffee, and damned if David Hodges, the king of never smiling except sardonically, didn’t actually burst out into guffaws.
“That’s it!” she declared, and set down her coffee mug on the counter with an authoritative clunk. “You’re so convinced I’m off the ‘deep end’? Well, I’m going to go take care of this once and for all!”
Recovering the quickest, most likely due to his polite Southern upbringing, Bobby frowned. “Jacqui, listen, he didn’t – ”
Jacqui didn’t know what “he” did or didn’t mean because she was out the door before she could hear any more of Bobby’s commentary, and she strode down the hallway with all the pride of a wounded lioness. They didn’t believe that she could successfully ask Grissom out, did they? Well, fine. She would show them. She would show them, and their pretty he-wives, and she would make them all realize that she was hotter, smarter, better put-together, and totally superior to Sara Sidle in every way. It wasn’t hard to prove; Sidle couldn’t even make coffee. And probably didn’t have to wear a bra. Who wanted a girlfriend who didn’t need to wear a bra?
She threw open the door to Grissom’s office and entered in a clattering of high-heeled black boots that were totally “in” the day before.
“Grissom,” she declared, and her boss glanced up from the file he was flipping through, “I need to talk – ”
“Oh, hey, Jacqui.” Jacqui turned so quickly to face the voice behind the sample shelves that she nearly fell right on her ass. Poking through a bunch of unneatly-stacked forensic journals was none other than Sara Sidle, resplendent in a salmony-colored top and white khakis. Who wore white khakis? White khakis were so last… Actually, Jacqui had no idea what they were so last, but they were so last something.
She narrowed her eyes slightly as Sara appraised her, and narrowed them even further at the gap-toothed smile. “Cute sweater,” she commented before turning back to the journals. “You look nice.”
Nice.
Sara Sidle thought she looked nice.
Lovely.
“Jacqui?” Grissom asked, and she turned to glance at the now-attentive genius behind the desk. He had removed his glasses and was staring at her carefully, as though she was some culture in a Petri dish that needed proper analysis. Oh, she hated that look almost as much as she hated Sara Sidle, and that was quite a bit. “What was it that you needed?”
“I.” Great, reduced to the level of Petri dish culture, and without a word to defend herself. “I… Need time off next month.”
Smooth, Franco. Very smooth.
“Oh.” He frowned slightly, but then nodded. Not like he really had any other option, considering the fact that Sara was smirking into her damned journal and the door was wide open. “Well, just fill out the usual forms.”
“Thanks.” She turned around quickly and very nearly fell over in the damned high-heeled shoes. Who invented those things in the first place? What kind of evil masochist would do that to women? Surely had to be a man. There was no other way.
She closed Grissom’s office door rather hard behind her, blinds rattling on the glass as some sort of divine justice, and wondered as she clomped down the hallway if Greg had any sneakers she could borrow.
==
The average person, had he taken time to examine lab rat culture and the inherent relationships between technicians, would have assumed that, after five years of knowing one another, Jacqui Franco’s set of male companions would have learned how to identify a woman on the war path.
Greg grinned as he glanced up from a trace microscope. “Hey,” he greeted her as she slid the door shut. “How’d it go?”
Obviously, the average person would have been very, deeply wrong.
Jacqui sent him a look that could freeze lava at ten paces and flopped onto an empty stool with enough oompf to convince Hodges to glance up from the developer pans he was busily washing. It was a slow shift, with a few CSIs out in the field while the rest (including Greg, stupid Sara Sidle, and Grissom) milled around the lab and tried not to be annoying.
Or to be annoying, depending.
“Nice lab coat,” Hodges commented, nodding at her before turning back to his pans. “Very lab-tech chic.”
She rolled her eyes – she didn’t even have the energy to glare at him – and adjusted said lab coat, which quite successfully hid her tank top and “cute sweater” from any obnoxiously prying eyes. Mia, for all her creepy hygienic quirks, had taken one look at Jacqui sliding around in her heels and handed over her running shoes. (Along with a pair of Odor Eaters, but Jacqui tried not to read too much into that.) Now, comfortably reclined on a stool, Jacqui almost felt normal, except for the stupid heavy earrings and the knowledge that she’d be the laughing stock of the crime lab for the next few weeks. “It was the look I was going for,” she informed him dryly.
Greg frowned and hoisted himself up on the evidence counter. “That bad?”
“The real thing was there,” she lamented, spinning idly on the stool. Would Bobby mind if she drowned herself in the bullet tank? Maybe. “Hard to compare when she’s complimenting my taste in sweaters.”
Hodges sighed and shut off the water. “Jacqui, I am going to tell you something that I suggest you listen to. Now, I know it’s an innovative idea, but have you ever considered being yourself?”
She snorted and sent him a dubious look. “Oh, yeah. Right. Myself. With the swami hat and the fat pants and the cigarettes.” She dismissed the suggestion with a wave of her hand. “That’ll work just fine. You can stand up in the wedding.”
“Oh, c’mon,” Greg pressed, frowning at her. “We all like you. Besides, Grissom’s weird like that. He’d rather you be you than you try to be some version of Sara.”
“Some shorter, sluttier version of Sara,” Hodges amended.
“Hodges – ”
“No, I mean it,” he cut Greg off, and leaned back against the sink. “What is it that Emerson said, once? ‘Imitation can only rise as far as its model’? Something like that, anyway.” He shrugged, and then met Jacqui’s eyes with an expression she could only describe to herself as concerned. Truly, deeply, readily concerned. It was more than a little strange. “Point is, Sidle struck out. If you try to be Sidle, or like Sidle, or whatever, you’ll strike out, too. Only Jacqui Franco can rise above that level of eternal drudgery.”
For a moment, the room fell very quiet, and Jacqui could only stare up at Hodges with a strange, half-blank look on her face. Had he actually said that? Who was he and what had he done with the real David Hodges? Was this all an illusion?
On the counter, Greg smiled sweetly. “Hodges, did you just say something…encouraging?”
He glowered over at the tech-turned-CSI. “It was a slip-up. Won’t happen again.”
Jacqui chuckled – wow, she must have been particularly sad to actually chuckle – and spun around another time on the stool. “Maybe it’s a sign,” she decided after a moment. “I should just give up.”
“You? Get over your crush? Be still my heart.”
“No, give up on trying,” she replied sharply, and Hodges honestly looked disappointed. “If something happens, it happens. Otherwise, I’ll just keep pretending that – ”
The door opened, just then, and all of them turned to glance at Nick Stokes. “Hey, guys,” he greeted, and it took all of half a second to tell that he was purposely keeping his eyes as far from Jacqui as he could. “I’ve got some prints that need running. Jacqui, would you mind…?”
“Nope,” she replied, and rose to her feet. “I’ll be into the lab in a second.”
Nick still did not glance in her direction. “Okay. Cool.”
The door closed behind him, and she frowned at both her companions. “How the Hell am I supposed to run matches for him if he won’t even look at me?”
Hodges shrugged and turned back to the sink. “He’s gay, and you showed him breasts,” he responded conversationally. He flicked the water back on. “That’s enough to scar a gay man for life.”
On the counter, Greg grinned. “Explains why you’ve been acting so weird, today, then,” he countered, and Jacqui laughed aloud as she left the lab to the sounds of Greg deflecting the development pan Hodges whipped at him.
==
Jacqui opted out of breakfast, even if it was her chance to get back at Bobby and his seven-course meal, and returned home to her cats and quiet apartment with a renewed sense of hopelessness. She stripped off the stupid fashionable clothes, threw them in the back of her closet, donned her pajamas, and watched Lifetime movies over a half-galloon of triple-chocolate-chunk ice cream, because that was just the kind of woman she was.
The boys were relatively nice to her the next day when she showed up to the lab in her infamous “fat pants” and a messy quasi-braid, and she forced herself to pretend they weren’t just being nice because she was heartbroken. She wasn’t heartbroken, after all; she was just returning to her previous level of neurotic crushing. Of course, that didn’t mean she’d be attending the Grissom-Sidle wedding when she got the invitation, or that she wouldn’t burn it and her Sara Sidle voodoo doll the evening of their nuptials. She was a woman, not a saint.
“Jacqui,” Grissom greeted a bit after lunch, when she was secretly eating the last of her sour-cream and onion potato chips behind the safety of her computer monitor. She glanced up at him and wiped her mouth discreetly on her sleeve. “Nick said he gave the prints to you, yesterday.”
“Oh. Right. He did.” She reached into her pile of results , pulled out the file she’d mentally labeled “socially awkward interactions” but really labeled “Jenkins Case” and handed it off to her boss. “All the partials were smeared beyond recognition – we’re talking two or three points of comparison at most – but four of the dozen usable prints were in AFIS.”
He nodded and, once his eyes had drifted over what Jacqui estimated was the whole page, closed the file folder. “Thank you,” he replied. She waited for him to turn and walk out, but he didn’t, remaining instead on the other side of the counter and staring very, very earnestly at her. It was a little uncomfortable, and she wiped her fingers discreetly across her mouth again, just in case.
“Did you ever say just what you wanted, yesterday?” he finally asked, and Jacqui frowned. Of course she hadn’t really, but he didn’t know that. He couldn’t know that, could he? “You seemed to have…more to say.”
Oh, that did it. Her frown deepened. Did this really have to happen now? She couldn’t just brush it off, after all; the man was Gil Grissom. Gil Grissom could spot a brush off from across the state. But right now, with her messy hair, fat pants, and potato chip breath? Quick. She needed to think up a lie. A really good lie about something more significant than time off.
But what? What in the world should she come up with that would keep Gil Grissom from – oh God, here it came, he was opening his mouth and –
“Let’s have dinner, Jacqui.”
“Look, Grissom, I – ”
His words hit Jacqui like something out of a Warner Brothers’ cartoon, a jumble of syllables pushed off the roof and tumbling in slow-motion onto her head. She stopped mid-sentence, mouth wide open, and just stared at him. No, not stared; gaped. She gaped at Gil Grissom.
When she finally regained enough composure to form a coherent thought, she forced her mouth shut. “I… What?”
He smiled in that slight, enigmatic, I-am-amused-by-the-differences-in-our-intellect-in-a-inoffensive-way smile she knew so well. “Let’s have dinner,” he repeated indulgently. “Tomorrow night, that is.”
Damn. He really had said it. “Uh, sure,” she agreed, and hoped that her broad smile didn’t completely give her away. Grissom smiled back, though, and from the way he was looking at her – still earnest and amused, but in all the ways she’d always hoped he’d be – her smile did exactly that.
==
The boys were all late for their coffee break – not unusual, given that they were hard-working lab techs who loved their jobs a lot and the internet connections in their labs even more – and Jacqui finished off the last of her coffee before lobbing Greg’s pack of Blue Hawaiian at him. “Find a new hiding place,” she instructed, “and tell me: what’d you guys do?”
They froze, a collective unit of men with horrified expressions, and Greg nearly dropped his precious coffee bag onto the ratty break room carpeting. “You…know?” Archie questioned, swallowing hard.
She nodded, but was smiling nonetheless. “I – ”
“It was Greg,” Hodges cut in, and made a break for the coffee pot.
Greg’s scowled at his back. “You traitor!” he shot. “And in my defense, the fingerprinting powder was right there, and you were the one who said it was physically impossible.”
Jacqui blinked. Of all the replies she’d been expecting, that was not one of them. That hadn’t even made the top thousand, really. “I’m now afraid to go back into my lab,” she decided after a beat’s pause, “but that’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Oh.” Greg smiled serenely. “Okay, then.”
“Then what are you talking about?” Ronnie moved to take his turn at the coffee pot, the nightly dance of thirsty caffeine addicts who needed a hit of the good stuff.
She frowned. “You know,” she chided. “You don’t need to play games.”
“Jacqui, we don’t,” Bobby assured her. “Aside from Greg’s rear end and the fluorescent powders – ”
“Which, if you overlook the disturbing factor, is kind of visually pleasing,” Archie added with a shrug.
“ – we didn’t do anything.”
“Huh.” She watched him carefully – of all her friends, Bobby was generally the sanest and definitely the most honest – and then frowned. If they hadn’t… Then… “Really?”
“Really,” Hodges confirmed, “but it’s kind of hard to know for sure if you don’t tell us what you think we did.” He sent her a suspicious glance, cradling his coffee cup in his hands. “Care to share with the class?”
“Nope,” she chirped, and thank goodness her break was very nearly over by all technical definitions of the word, because she had the opportunity to exit gracefully and avoid the technician inquisition. (Some day, she’d have to thank Mr. Stokes for coming up with that one.) “I’ll see you guys later.”
“But – ” Ronnie started.
She tossed them a little wave over her shoulder. “Later, boys.”
The hallway was abandoned, and as Jacqui stood just outside of the room with five very confused men staring at her back, she couldn’t help but wonder: if a road really did diverge in a yellow wood, and no one was there to encourage the hiker which way to go, would he actually take the less traveled path by his own volition? It seemed unlikely. It seemed mind-boggling. It seemed damn near –
“Hey, Jacqui,” Sara Sidle greeted, and Jacqui nodded her hello as the two women passed in the hall.
– impossible, really. Without any subtle prodding from the other men in her life, how had Grissom ever come to realize that she –
Wait a minute.
Jacqui whirled around on her heel as the thought occurred to her and glanced back at Sara just in time to get a glimpse of the tall, willowy, beautiful young woman entering the layout room…while grinning.
