He looked away from the window and the lure of his own thoughtful expression at the sound of a chair being pulled out from the opposite side of the table. Teri had gone- called away to an urgen matter in the field...and now Gil Grissom was ill-prepared to hide his suprise at the unexpected arrival of the lithe figure seated in the recently abandoned seat.

"Hey there, stranger." Nonchalant, Catherine Willows was the personification of chic beauty and grace. Sporting a black silk evening gown, spaghetti straps gently hugging her freckled shoulders, she shrugged off a transparent opal shoulder wrap and gently fluffed her strawberry locks with elegantly manicured fingernails. Grissom found himself fastinated by her metamorphasis from exhausted working mother to elite social icon, porcelean skin and vibrant blue eyes hiding every trace of the busy shift she'd only recently have left behind. "What's the special tonight?"

"What are you doing here, Catherine?" He posed the question patiently, fingers wrapped around the cool exterior of a glass on the tabletop to his right, frothy amber beer filling the vessel a quarter of the way up.

"Oh, I'm sorry- would you two rather be alone? Or are you saving this seat for the Calamari?" The comment yielded no sarcasm, but was accompanied by a jesting smile, and a barely discernable wink. "Did I come at a bad time, Grissom?"

"No." Rather than discourage her presence, Grissom waved to the nearest waiter, who promptly deposited a glass of sparkling champange at Catherine's right elbow. She lifted the delicate, thin-stemmed glass and examined the dancing bubbles silently, eyes taking in the vision of the man in front of her, distorted by the moving liquid. "Thank you."

"For what? Grissom- I was just on my way to the Opera." A peculiar glance pasted onto the boyish features made her sigh, and she amended the sentence quickly. "I'm just kidding...Sara mentioned you might be here, and I thought that I'd stop by..."

The suggestion that she'd known Teri would leave flew through Grissom's mind, but he dismissed it, not desiring to know the answer. She beat him to it.

"Teri gave me a call, a few minutes ago...asked if I could get her a plane ticket to Reno. She told me that she had to leave, Grissom..."

"Wait a minute." Grissom held up his hand, the opposite member still absently clutching the glass. "Catherine- that was barely an hour ago."

"And you've been sitting here ever since, lost in your own world. I know you, Gil- you're not going to go home and sit in front of your television set with a jar of chocolate grasshoppers, wondering why it didn't work out. For that matter, I'm not even sure if you own a television set. But the point is," She paused, sipping from the champange, mocha-shaded lips moistened by the beverage, and glistening in the elegant overhead candlelight. "That you needed company, and I'm here."

He nodded, thoughtfully. The idea that he and Teri were ever to be anything other than colleagues...when the urge had come over him to ask her to dinner...only to watch her leave.... He had been overcome with the realization that perhaps that would be how his colleagues would forever look at him. How every woman, every person in his life would be forced to regard him. The man who would never enjoy a meal in life, with the woman he loved...because he couldn't leave work behind for even a second. He loved the puzzles, loved the pursuit of the evidence...but when looking at the evidence in front of him at that very moment, Grissom knew why it was that Catherine Willows had come to be with him that very evening.

"Thank you, Catherine." He reached for her hand, wrapping large, callused fingers around her slender, delicate digits. "I appreciate that."

And the calamari never joined them.

THE END