Chapter Text
So know ye this: no aspect of your cooking skill will bring you greater or more lasting pleasure
than the ability to prepare the drink that stimulates wit and digestion.
Coffee splices all loose ends, greets the cheese gladly, and spreads a mantle of aromatic warmth.
Esquire's Handbook for Hosts: A Time-honored Guide to the Perfect Party
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I.
The hall was deserted and sunny. The light came in through long horizontal windows, placed high along the lateral walls that, like the rest of the interior, were cream-colored. The auditorium was formed by long wooden desks and divided in two by the stairway which ran down, almost reaching the little platform which hosted the place for lecturers – a table that he, Dr. Gil Grissom, would occupy in an hour or so.
As he started to climb down, his sight inevitably fell on the girl sitting in the first row, in the closest seat to the stairs. The only one present in the hall besides him, she sat intent on reading a book she held on her legs, overlapped and laying against the edge of the desk. Her long and sleek hair was tidily gathered in a ponytail.
He climbed down the stairs with a peaceful stride, not making any noise unintentionally, and even when he arrived at the girl’s back, nothing in her posture seemed to indicate that she was aware of the presence of anyone in addition to her in the hall.
“If I’m not mistaken, you’re a bit early.”
The voice of the man didn’t resound in the hall and the girl didn’t seem to be alarmed in hearing its sound, which, although quiet, came out of silence suddenly. He deduced that she had heard him arrive because she didn’t even raise her gaze when she answered him, just moving it to her watch.
“If you’re here for the lecture, you’re early too,” she said with a bland voice, going back to her reading right after.
“Yeah, actually I’m here for the lecture,” the man replied, wearing an amused smirk and stretching his neck in the – failed – attempt to see what the girl was reading.
“Good. Then choose a seat and wait.”
She had not spoken rudely but, rather, like a person who preferred not to be disturbed. He took the hint and she received all his comprehension.
“I think I’ll choose the central table then,” he said unperturbed, heading for the platform.
That kind of reply aroused the girl’s curiosity, so much so that she finally raised her head from the book.
Seeing the man for the first time since he entered the hall, she found his features strangely familiar. She flipped through the papers related to the lecture and when she raised her gaze again on the man, she saw the same blue eyes and short, curly hair of the face printed on the paper she was holding, right next to Lecturer: Gil Grissom . She stared at him, not knowing what to do to remedy her poor showing.
Dr. Grissom, instead, seemed to not have given much importance to that event. He had sat at his desk and was studying what probably were the notes of the lecture he was going to give in an hour. The girl scanned him, the casualness with which he reacted to her cheek drew on him a charm in her eyes. So she armed herself with courage and stood up, approaching the table.
“I apologize,” she said once she was in front of him. He raised his eyes from his papers and looked at her above the glasses he had put on for reading. “I didn’t know it was you, Dr. Grissom.”
“I gathered.”
The man spoke without severity or conceit, but just with a good dose of self-confidence.
“I had heard you arriving…and…since your lecture doesn’t start for more than an hour I thought you were one of those guys who join conferences lacking interest for…” she faltered a moment, “for why people join conferences,” she concluded a bit awkwardly.
Dr. Grissom looked perplexed. “Are there people who join conferences for…chatting up?” he asked, surprised.
“Oh, sure!” the girl promptly replied. “I’m not an expert,” she hurried to make clear, “but I’ve heard a lot of stories about that. Told by reliable people, I assure you.”
The man seemed to take a moment to reflect on the reason why a person would choose a scientific conference as a field for conquests.
“I would offer you a coffee to further apologize,” she went on, “but it’s so disgusting that I would probably make my situation worse.”
He seemed to be awakened to a thought.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“Work. San Francisco crime lab,” the girl replied proudly.
“You’re rather young,” he said, taking a moment to study her.
He received a glib answer. “Harvard scholarship. Graduate school at the University of California and work-study position at the San Francisco Coroner’s Office. I attend lectures to keep up with the developments of the sector.”
Dr. Grissom was more struck by the fact that she gave the entirety of her schooling history than by the makeup of that history. He decided to not offer any comment about that. He, instead, expressed the thought that this strange situation had brought to his mind.
“You see,” he started with an educational tone, “with this care of yours, you coming here to apologize, you put in place the main theme of my lecture of today.”
The girl seemed pleasantly struck by that and when he didn’t elaborate she prodded further, “And…that is?”
“First opinions are crucial, but if the evidence changes, so must the theory.”
The girl pondered over that for a moment.
“We don’t have to rely on first impressions,” she paraphrased.
“Exactly,” Dr. Grissom confirmed with an appreciative nod of his head. “On impulse, you acted following your first opinion, but when you found out that physical evidence didn’t support your thought, you changed your behavior,” he clarified.
The young girl seemed floored by how, despite not knowing her, Dr. Grissom had analyzed the course of her mind under a scientific guise. Most of all, she seemed surprised by how quickly he’d been able to assess the situation.
“Yes, I suppose I did something like that…” she commented, kind of awed but fascinated at the same time.
Her gaze meandered on his desk for some moment.
“I better leave you to your readings,” she finally said, taking her leave.
Dr. Grissom felt himself track her movements and the girl had just sat down when he addressed her again.
“That thing about the coffee…” he started. The girl stared at him, waiting for him to continue his thought. “You know that thanks to those reliable people, too?”
“No,” she was quick to contradict him. “That's the fruit of personal experience,” she explained with a quirk of a brow.
Dr. Grissom smiled in turn and he went back to his work.
“However,” the girl continued out of nowhere, “if you want one, you can go to Bright’s, just outside the building, about fifty feet to the right. The coffee is good there.”
Dr. Grissom didn’t raise his head, but pointed out, “I was under the impression that you wanted to offer me the coffee.”
The girl felt tremendously embarrassed, sensing to have just put her foot in it again, and hastened to reply.
“Oh…yeah, sure, I’m sorry, I didn’t –
“Don’t get nervous, I was kidding,” he stopped her, raising his head with a smirk.
The girl watched him, perplexed, while he stood up and headed for the exit.
“Fifty feet to the right, you said?” he asked her, stopping at her side at the bottom of the stairway.
“Yeah,” the brunette automatically replied, still watching him with a wary air.
Dr. Grissom started to climb up the stairs, but after a few steps he stopped again.
“You want one?” he asked.
The answer he received sounded uncertain.
“Oh, no. No, thank you,”
“Are you sure?”
The girl wavered at the force of the attention of a man who was becoming more and more interesting by the minute.
“Well, if you really decided to go, maybe I could take advantage of it…”
“Good,” the lecturer replied in appreciation. “Any preference?”
“Excuse me?”
“Sugar, milk…?”
“Oh, yes. Sugar, no milk. Thank you.”
“Good.”
Dr. Grissom resumed climbing the steps and the girl, after a moment spent observing him leaving with a peaceful stride, realized that something was missing.
“Wait,” she called him. She caught him at the top of the stairway. “The money for my coffee.”
She handed over the bills, but he rejected them.
“You gave me the idea for the beginning of my speech today. I would offer you the coffee if you allow me to.”
The girl asked herself if that man had just come out of the knights' era.
“I accept, thank you,” she said then.
“Will you watch my things here for me?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I trust you.”
“You should,” the girl said with a touch of pride and a swing of her ponytail.
Dr. Grissom left and she went back to her seat. Her mind, though, was somewhere else already.
Since the moment Dr. Grissom came back with the coffees, both of them kept studying their papers, now and then throwing each other curious glances.
The conference started on time and indeed the lecturer used the account of a misunderstanding that referenced the first approach between him and the girl as an introduction to the main theme of the lecture, which revolved around a double murder in a garage.
*
The lecture finished two hours later. The hall was full and the rush to leave meant that the girl could talk again to Dr. Grissom only once they got out of the building.
“You were right about the theme of your lecture,” she pointed out, reaching him into the crowd.
“Why should I have lied?” he replied, more surprised by her insinuation than by her presence itself.
“It was an interesting lecture, however,” she went on and he thanked her. “I’m wondering whether all this involves anthropology.”
“That’s an interesting question,” he sincerely congratulated, “but I’m afraid that the answer would take time that I don’t have at the moment.”
“You’re just going back to Las Vegas?”
“I am.”
“Do you need a ride to the airport?”
Her proposition caught Dr. Grissom by surprise, but he elegantly declined.
She insisted. “I was planning to head over that way…If you want…”
Dr. Grissom kept walking, but his stride slowed down as he pondered on the answer. Then he stopped, searching the face of that unknown girl with whom he felt to have an affinity already.
He finally accepted. “If you really decided to go, maybe I could take advantage of it…” he added, proposing to her the words that the girl had told him a few hours earlier.
She beamed in response, but very quickly the features of her face turned more composed as she said they should go back the way they'd just come to reach her car. Dr. Grissom followed her with a strange sense of adventure: he wasn’t in the habit of accepting rides from his students, but there was something in this girl that intrigued and amused him.
*
They climbed into the car and when she turned on the engine, the integrated music player automatically turned on. Tom Yorke’s voice resumed from the point where he had stopped when the girl had turned the engine off:
You’re so fucking special
I wish I was special
But I’m a cr-
The girl reached the volume control knob just an instant after Radiohead’s guitars exploded in the refrain, deafening them, and she turned the volume down.
“Do you…uh, listen to music, Dr. Grissom?” she asked him, with pretend ease.
“I do. But usually not of this kind.” His answer denoted a subtle sarcasm.
“Oh? What kind?”
“Classical kind of music,” he specified.
The girl had just come out of the parking lot and before leaving she turned the music off with an unobtrusive movement of her hand.
“We were talking about anthropology, right…?” she said, turning the car in the direction of the airport.
Throughout the drive, they talked about anthropology, and the girl proved herself involved and attentive, asking Dr. Grissom various clarifying questions. He didn’t refrain from answering and revealed himself blooming with explanations and elaborations.
*
“Here we are,” the girl announced, turning off the engine when they arrived in front of the entrance of the airport.
“Thank you.”
“Never mind, I was meaning to come this way anyway, I told you.”
The answer drew the entomologist’s interest.
“That’s curious,” he pointed out. “When we got out of the building that hosted the lecture, you were going in the opposite direction, if I remember rightly…”
The girl paused, in the face of Dr. Grissom’s blue eyes staring at her cleverly, and she turned her gaze somewhere else.
“Yeah, well…I didn’t say that I was coming , but that I was meaning to come around here,” she observed, turning her look on him. “It seems that making the wrong first opinion happens to you too, Dr. Grissom,” she specified with a smart aleck air on her face.
He smiled at her cunning.
“Maybe you’re right, miss…” His sentence remained lacking since he didn’t know her name.
“Sidle.”
He quirked an eyebrow at the omission of her first name but allowed her the air of mystery she was cultivating. “Well, it was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Sidle,” he said. He gave his hand to her as a farewell.
“Have a nice trip back home, Dr. Grissom,” she answered, shaking his hand.
“And you, continue on the good path that you’ve embarked upon,” was what he left her with, as he climbed out of the car.
Miss Sidle waited for Dr. Grissom to cross the airport’s sliding doors and then left, driven by a mix of elation and disappointment.
She could not hide from herself that she already felt seduced by Dr. Grissom. It was not just those blue placid and serious eyes that drew her, but maybe what had surprised her the most, and thus fully enamored her, was the casualness with which he seemed to take everything. It was as if the soul of a bad guy took hold of the body of a man from the old days: behind an apparent kindness and politeness, she had the impression that nothing could really touch or shake his soul too much.
Miss Sidle considered herself a pretty determined girl, a tough girl in a manner of speaking: because of her job she had already seen enough dead bodies and disgusting things, she carried her points even the hard way when necessary and she took pride in the fact that most of her male coworkers viewed her as an equal. But her colleagues would have mocked her if they knew how she was feeling inside at that moment: an awkward little girl blushing for nothing, that was the way she was feeling.
She had heard around that, despite the weight of his name in the field of entomology and the reputation of his intellect, Dr. Grissom’s lessons tended to be long and boring. She truly didn’t understand the reasons for those rumors: she’d not only found the lesson interesting but would have kept listening to his voice and followed his argumentations for much longer, maybe during a dinner…An embarrassment of which she had lost memory of, or that she had never felt, though, took over and she had failed to utter a word that was not related to science.