FIRST IN A SERIES OF SEVEN: ENVY

Rating: T for some language

Disclaimer: Not mine. Sadly and depressingly.

Summary: Millie Harris was everything he could never, ever be. Not even if he tried.

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He hated her.

No questions to be asked, no second thoughts. He hated Millie Harris – little miss thing, queen bitch of David's world. In his eyes she could do no wrong.

She was perfect.

Perfect hair, long and dark and soft and sweet, clean and something worth running your fingers through. Perfect skin, warm and flawless, not a line out of place, not a scar or disfiguration to be seen no matter where you looked. Perfect body; she fit David like a glove, tucked against his side like she belonged there. Perfect smile. Perfect teeth. Perfect eyes. Perfect, perfect, perfect, per-fucking-fect!

Millie Harris was everything he could never, ever be. Not even if he tried.

His hair was coarse and filthy, filled with the dirt and grit of a hundred different places all across the world. His skin was marred, flawed, used and scarred, damaged deep from cuts he never expected to fully heal. He was short, but still too tall; he didn't fit beside David. His shoulders were too broad, his body too flat and solid – his hips and waist and chest didn't yield like Millie's. Didn't cushion or give under David's hands.

Millie was beautiful. He knew he wasn't ugly, but he was no striking looker. He was ordinary, average-Joe, maybe handsome if you caught him on a good day, but he wasn't beautiful.

Millie was patient – stupid as all hell in his opinion, but patient. He lost his temper a million times a day in a billion different ways for a trillion different reasons that sometimes he didn't even understand after the fact. He cussed and growled and fought and bit and clawed his way through every minute of every day.

Millie frowned and David tripped all over himself to turn it back into a smile. He frowned and David looked at him like he was five or got annoyed, hardly ever tried to butter up a situation with him like he did for Millie – not that he wanted David to play that kind of game with him. The fact of the matter was that he knew David wouldn't, even if he wanted him to.

Millie had been David's world since forever. He was pretty sure that if he wasn't a jumper, someone like David in ways no one else in the world the brunet had ever met was, David wouldn't even bother with him. If he hadn't followed the asshole to Rome like he had the two of them never would have even met. David was caught up with a woman in that bar, a Millie replacement, not him. David didn't even see him.

Millie was a girl. He was a boy. And of all the things that Millie was or had or did that was the one thing she could keep for herself and he wouldn't care. He didn't want to be a girl. He wouldn't know the first thing about being one even if he did. But he hated her for being one. Hated her because she was a girl and he wasn't and he would never be anything but a possible second best to David because of it. She won by default and he had always been a sore loser.

David loved her. Part of him didn't care that Millie Harris held the key to David Rice's heart. Part of him didn't want to be at he center of David's entire fucking universe. Part of him was glad that he wasn't. But another part of him, the part that bristled whenever he heard Millie's name or caught a whiff of that sugar and spice smell of her on David's clothes, the part that had been more then ok with setting off a bomb in her apartment while she was still trapped there wanted to tear her apart for being so God damn important and influential in David's life. That part of him, the dangerous part that hated every breath she took wanted David's heart for himself and no one else.

As much as he hated Millie Harris, as stupid and worthless as he thought she was, whenever he saw her and David together – when he heard the way he said her name or caught the look that crossed his face at the thought of her – more then he hated her, he wished he could be her.