Title: What You Want
By: Evan Nicholas
Characters: Gil Grissom, Greg Sanders, Nick Stokes
Rating:FRAO
Warnings: None
Summary: Nick is torn. Gil's not helping.

He's made mistakes before. That sinking, horrible, stomach-clenching feeling of doom that comes from fucking up is not a new one to Nick Stokes. But familiar doesn't mean comfortable, and even though he knows he should be going home, he's driving out into the desert.

He hates Las Vegas.

He loves his life, loves his friends and his makeshift family and his job and everything he has here, but Sin City itself - it drives him crazy. It's too easy to lose perspective, to blink and find you've done something stupid. To discover that it's too late to undo it.

And too, too easy to blame it on Vegas.

***

His phone rings twice while he's watching the heat rise off the desert. He lets it go both times, but checks his messages immediately. He can't help himself, knows he's in a hole and has a pretty good idea of how deep it is - but he needs to check anyway, just in case.

The first is from Greg.

"Hey - you left pretty quick there, I just wanted to - I don't know, check that you're okay? I'm sorry that I kissed you - well, no I'm not really, I'm kind of nuts about you and I probably shouldn't be saying this to your voice mail but hey, that's life. Call me. Let me buy you breakfast."

The second is from Gil.

"Wherever you are, you'd better be having fun. Can you pick up some lettuce on the way home? I feel a Caesar salad coming on. Oh, and chicken, I guess. Or fish? You decide."

He listens to them, one after the other and saves them both, though he isn't sure why. For a bizarre moment he's struck with the idea that the biggest problem in Western society is that people don't say goodbye anymore.

Then he thinks, Goodbye is the root of all your looming problems, Stokes, so don't go there. Not on your own, not voluntarily - not when you're about to be shown the way.

***

The one thing - the only thing, in fact - that they agreed on from the start was honesty. Discretion followed shortly thereafter, but the basic premise behind their ill-advised tryst (and it had been a tryst, at least until they fell in love, hard) was honesty.

"I did something stupid," he announces, standing in the kitchen with a bag of groceries in one hand and his keys in the other.

Gil is sitting at the kitchen table doing a crossword puzzle. "Oh?" he asks without really looking up. "Let me guess - iceberg instead of Romaine."

"No."

He loves it when Gil wears his glasses, can't explain why but it feels like home. He wishes he wasn't wearing them now - they make this that much harder. So hard to disappoint those eyes peering up at him over the rims.

"Sounds serious."

"It is." He leaves the groceries on the counter next to the sink, sits across from him and rubs his face. "I kissed Greg Sanders," he confesses, hiding behind the safety of his hands.

There's a silence from the other side of the table, and he wants to look but knows he won't, because he's a coward.

"Oh?" Gil finally says, and he says it in the casually neutral voice that Nick recognizes from work. He usually encounters it aimed at a suspect.

"I don't know what to say except sorry, and I know that's not enough."

"Tell me - Nick, please put your hands down."

He does, feels sheepish for hiding, tries to smile bravely and finds he can't. Wishes he could read Gil's expression.

"Tell me what happened."

He takes a deep breath, props his elbows on the edge of the table, tries to think of where to start. "I ran into him in town," he says, picking a spot that he thinks is probably the wrong one, but close enough for government work. "We grabbed lunch together, started talking, went for a walk. Then he kissed me, out of nowhere, and..." He shrugs helplessly. "I kissed him back."

"I see."

That silence comes back for a moment, then Gil takes his glasses off and sits them on the folded newsprint next to his pencil. Each action is measured, precise: an economy of motion. Nick loves that about him, how he's pared his immediate universe down to that which is essential, and lives it with serenity. His throat closes again. All that poetry that he's about to lose.

"Are you attracted to him?" Gil asks, steepling his hands and regarding Nick thoughtfully.

"What?" he asks. "No."

"Then why did you kiss him back?"

"I just- okay." He takes a deep breath. "Okay, he's attractive. All right? But... he's not you, Gil. I just - wasn't thinking. I don't know how it happened."

"So what do you want to do?"

He sighs. "Fix this?" he asks weakly. "I know, it's a stupid mess and it's my fault. But I'll find some way to let him down gently."

There's humour of a kind in Gil's eyes, and he feels the weight of the world lifted from his shoulders. Gil smiling indulgently is by far the best outcome he could have possibly imagined. "That sounds tricky," he says.

"I'm smart," he defends with wounded dignity. "I'll find a way."

"I'm sure you will."

He reaches across the table and takes Gil's hand in his own, turns it over and traces the lines in the palm. "God, I love you, Gil..."

The hand closes gently around his fingers, squeezes. "I love you too."