EVERYBODY LOVES A BAD BOY

By Mala
malisita@yahoo.com

RATING/CLASSIFICATION: 'R' for language and talk of sexual situations.
GRISHAM/VERA, angst.
SUMMARY: If you do a shot every time the "f-word" appears here, you'll be pretty hammered by the end. Grisham angsts about being the perpetual back door man.
NOTES: Thanks to Eliza for the transcript! Yay!
DISCLAIMER: Fireworks, etc...

The Queen: "Some girls like nice guys."
Grisham: "Well, not to sleep with."
--"End of Days."

~~~~~

He's not the kind of guy that nice girls want to marry. He's the kind they want to fuck. To fuck. Not make love to. Hard and fast and nasty in some cheap boudoir as they coo over his stripes and the flash of his sword and pretend sympathy over all his faded scars.

Sometimes they keep coming back.

And he curls up against them for a few hours and inhales their perfume and listens to them giggle as he whispers their name mid-stroke.

He used to think they giggled because he was good. Or because he was sexy. Or because it was so deliciously forbidden. Now, he knows better. He knows they giggle because he dares to say the name. He dares to call them in the dark what he will never be allowed to call them in the daylight if he meets them on the street.

What they would never allow him to call them.

Most of the time, they go back to their husbands after one night. No return engagements. Vera Hidalgo was the first to stay longer than a week. The only. But she still goes back when the sun comes up...back to her respectable and honorable Gaspar.

And she giggles the most.

Vera. Vera. Vera.

He'll never be able to take her arm and stroll through the Colonel's garden. He'll never be able to kiss her before he helps her up to her buggy and hands her the reins. He'll never be able to sit beside her as they drive out to their hacienda.

She'll never want him to.

But she'll sleep with him.

She'll fuck him.

Up. Down. Sideways. Upside down. On satin, on dirt. In dark, in daylight. With no one around or with Montoya in the next room.

She's young and energetic and doesn't care about anything more than her husband's money. Not even discovery. And especially not him.

He is a capitan now...and once he was a soldier...but he remembers when he was just a kid. He remembers what it was like to be that young. That energetic. That shallow. To have never held death in his hands...never had something to run from.

When he was a kid, he "made love." His first time...with a whore in the back room of a bordello while somebody mockingly played a love song on the piano...at least that was real. No lies. No laughs. And she'd touched his arm, as he stared down at the dark circles beneath her heavily-painted eyes, and thanked him for being so gentle.

He doesn't think anyone had thanked him for being "gentle" since then.

Because all he's done since then is fuck. And get fucked.

Just what bad boys do.

And he is so very good at what he does.

At being bad. At dancing to His High Holiness Montoya's tune. At failing to catch the Queen of Swords. At failing to escape the past.

He's not the kind of guy that nice girls want to marry.

But, just once, he'd like to think that he is.

He'd like to think of himself making Colonel. Of living some place like Santa Helena as an honest-to-God citizen and not a hired goon. Of having some beautiful senorita as his wife and coming home to a couple of babies who look just like her...with dark eyes and dark hair and charming little smiles. He'd like to think of his wife turning to him and putting her soft hand on his arm...and thanking him for being so gentle. And he'd say her name. There. And outside. In town. On the street. In church. Letting in ring from the rooftops. He'd shout it.

Tessa. Tessa. Tessa.

"Fuck!" he whispers, rolling over, burying his face in the soft, deceptive, hollow between Vera's shoulder blades. "No!" God, no.

Maria Teresa Alvarado is his ideal. The pinnacle of foolish dreams. He knows that. The ultimate nice girl. The kind that won't give him the time of day OR the time of night. She's not like the others. She's a lady.

And he's not the kind of guy that ladies even look at.

He never will be.

-END--

May 27, 2001