Sometimes, Sansa wondered if there were something magical about Sandor, some mystical force that bypassed her entire lifetime of experiences and thoughts and feelings and preferences and all rational thought to send a message directly to her lizard brain that said, forget everything you thought you wanted in a man.
There was no other way she could think of to describe how she'd left her family in the North to join her fiancé, the golden Joffrey Baratheon, in King's Landing… then taken one look at his unusually large, horribly scarred bodyguard and disregarded almost everything else. Something inside her had exploded into full, quivering life the first time she'd heard that rasping rumble of a voice of his.
She was sure it had quite a lot to do with Sandor's body. In her measured opinion, it was the stuff of dreams. Not a maiden's dreams, no; those were of delicately modeled cheekbones and golden curls and nonthreatening androgyny. Those pristine dreams had melted like dew beneath the noontime sun after being initiated to womanhood by some tragically bad sex with Joffrey.
She wondered how she'd been so incredibly wrong about the Lannister scion. Wealthy and handsome, he'd seemed so good on paper. In reality, however…
A few days after Sansa's lackluster devirginization, she crept down to the kitchen to see if she could find something to put in her mouth that wouldn't make her feel sad and kind of gross. She was hopeful of chocolate, but would settle for something spicy.
Sandor was in the kitchen, cooking chicken molé like a damned pro chef, his huge hands deft as they chopped a bushel of poblanos and measured out tablespoons of cocoa. Sansa suspected the prospect of chocolate AND spice got all weirdly conflated in her head, associating their delectable selves with Sandor. Or maybe it was the contrast between 'tall, superbly-built hyper-masculine dude with loads of manly stubble doing something requiring delicacy' that got her.
Because at that moment she was nearly bowled over by a wave of desire, and choked on her tongue.
Predictably, he didn't rush over to her with exclamations of alarm; he didn't even ask her if she needed help. He just watched her with his usual "you're so stupid" expression as she gasped and hacked her way toward clear bronchial tubes once more.
"I'm fine, thanks!" Sansa wheezed with passive-aggressive cheerfulness, when she was able to speak again.
He continued to ignore her, but she was positive one corner of his mouth— the unscarred side, which looked unfairly soft and pink and supple— curled in amusement. Needing no further encouragement, she hopped up to sit on the counter right by where he was preparing the molé.
"You know your own business," he began in that bass rumble that made at least three parts of her body perk up in attention, "but you just sat your ass down on where I chopped the peppers, and that skirt's kind of short. So unless you want capsaicin burns on your cooch, you might like to take it elsewhere."
Sansa gaped at him. "Cooch?" she screeched, even as she scrambled down from the counter, trying to surreptitiously glance over her shoulder to see if the back of her skirt were besmirched by chili pepper innards.
He shrugged a massive shoulder and used the hatchet-sized cleaver to scoop up poblano slices and deposit them in an iron cauldron that would have been more at home over an open fire in a witch's lair.
"It was the least offensive name I could think of for it."
"Cooch was?" Dear god, where had the man grown up, if that were the mildest euphemism for a woman's… area… he could come up with? "How about 'private parts'? 'Lady bits'?"
She wracked her brains to remember the terms she'd overheard her schoolmates giggling about, back home in Winterfell, but everything that came to mind was either merely revolting ('hot pocket') or utterly nauseating ("bearded clam"). Still, she mentally groped for something— anything— better than cooch.
"…vajayjay?" she finished lamely.
His mouth curled again, and this time his eyebrow lifted. "Do you really see me saying that?"
Sansa slumped. "Well, no," she admitted. "But maybe—"
"Listen," Sandor interrupted, "here's the complete list of names I'm aware of for it. Cooch, cunt, gash, quim, and pussy. If you want to get technical—"
"By all means, please let us get technical," Sansa muttered, sullen.
"—then vagina and vulva. Other than that, I got nothing."
"My brothers are fond of the term punane," she countered, "and that's not too awful."
Sandor looked thoughtful. "No," he allowed, "that's not too awful." Then he leered at her. "And what do you call it, princess?"
"The women in my family always refer to it as a muffin," she replied loftily. "And before you make fun of that, you should know that my mother got it from an Aerosmith song, and Aerosmith is cool, so there."
He didn't reply, just kept dumping ingredients into the cauldron. Sansa didn't like the idea that he was ignoring her.
"Quim isn't too bad," she allowed, feeling bold.
"I've always enjoyed it," he said agreeably.
"I meant the word, not the… part itself."
"I've always enjoyed both."
She averted her gaze to stare out the window, feeling a blush creep up her throat. "I wouldn't know," she said faintly.
"You ain't seen nothing 'til you're down on a muffin, then you're sure to be a-changing ways," he sang under his breath in a pleasing baritone, his attention on shredding cooked chicken. Then he shot her a grin from under his surprisingly thick eyelashes, and suddenly Sansa was a lot more aware of her muffin, because it gave a good hard throb at the sight. "Don't knock it until you've tried it."
"I feel pretty comfortable knocking it, actually, because I'll never be trying it."
Sandor tsked softly. "Never took you to be close-minded." He dumped the chicken in the cauldron, then gave its contents a stir and clapped a lid the size of a manhole cover on it with a loud clang that made Sansa jump.
"I'm not close-minded," she retorted hotly. "I'm just really sure I'll never… go in that direction, since I'm—"
"You're what?" He washed his hands, then rubbed them dry with a dishtowel. Sansa had only known him a few days, and already she'd had way too many inappropriate thoughts about those hands, and how they and their long, strong fingers might feel on her.
And in her.
Oh, god.
"Since I'm really attracted to men," she finished, a little breathless. It was probably intensely stupid for her to take it this far, but some wild hare wouldn't let her take the easy road. "The more masculine, the better."
He tossed the dishtowel in the direction of the sink and leaned his hip against the counter, crossing his arms (tanned, brawny, dusted with dark hair) across his chest (as yet unseen, but likely to be more of the same).
"That right?" His voice was a subterranean rumble. "And you're stuck with Joffrey? Talk about barking up the wrong tree."
"Mistakes were made," Sansa agreed glumly. She crossed her own arms and stared down at them, wondering how she could extract herself out of this particular pickle. When the silence stretched a bit too long, she glanced up to find him eying her arms, or rather, what they were crossed over, with singular interest.
Her first impulse was to huff and drop her arms, but she'd come this far already; what was one more sin? So she just stood there, letting him stare his fill at her plumped-up cleavage. When he finally lifted his gaze to hers, and saw her watching him in full knowledge of what he'd been up to, he looked a bit sheepish at first, but then shot her an impish little grin that had her heart flipping end-over-end.
Holy shit. Maybe it was for the best, that Sandor had been so terribly scarred, because she didn't think the female populace of Westeros could withstand a Sandor that was built like a god, mischievously flirty, and aesthetically flawless. If both sides of his face had been somewhat handsome, instead of one half somewhat handsome and the other destroyed, there'd have been riots in the streets.
"I have to get out of here," she muttered, looking around somewhat wildly, as if just freed from a prison cell and uncertain how to make a break for it.
"Oookay." Sandor shot her a wary glance. It was clear he thought her mood swings quite mad. He was probably right. Sansa felt her grasp on sanity slipping with each day spent in King's Landing.
"I'm going to need some of that spicy chocolate chicken glop, when it's done," she informed him. "It's urgent."
"You're lucky I'm here to fulfill your… pressing Mexican food needs," was his caustic reply, "since in no way did I make it for you. Need anything else? How're you fixed for socks and underwear? I can pick you up some at KingMart."
Sansa paused in her hasty exit, holding onto the door frame to keep from launching herself across the kitchen at him. How was he sexier the more sarcastic he got? She felt a burning desire to make him as aware of her as she was of him.
So she gave him a slow, queenly nod. "I'd appreciate that, actually. The socks should preferably be thigh-highs, and for the panties…" she turned to leave, but glanced back over her shoulder. "I only wear lace. Pastel lace."
She had a split second to acknowledge the stupefaction on his face before she scurried away, hand over her mouth to keep from giggling like a maniac. Once safely in her suite of rooms, she locked the door, changed into a nightgown and fell into bed to contemplate her imminent mental breakdown.
I have to end it with Joffrey, she thought, but how? She didn't want to make things awkward with her father and his friendship with Robert Baratheon, but neither could she resign herself to the rest of her life with someone who treated her like poop, and for whom she felt zero tender emotions or physical attraction.
Sandor might be sex on two (long, muscled) legs, but he was more a symptom than a cause of her unrest in this situation. If she'd been truly happy with the prospect of marrying Joffrey, she'd never have looked twice (and thrice, and then a few dozen more times after that) at his bodyguard.
Sansa sighed. Tomorrow, she'd break her engagement to Joffrey. The prospect made her feel light and hopeful in a way she hadn't for weeks. The only damper was how, when she left, she wouldn't be able to ogle Sandor any more.
There are strong hairy alpha males up North, she told herself sternly. The place is riddled with them, in fact. I'll just find one who's sarcastic and funny and cooks like a master chef, and then everything will be great.
She fell asleep without having convinced herself of that in the least.
Breaking up with Joffrey worked better in theory than in practice. To break up with him, Sansa first had to be in the same room with him, and she didn't know how Sandor, Meryn, and Boros could stand it. Thus a week had passed since that fateful night in the kitchen with Sandor and this agonizing brunch with him, Joffrey, and the other two lackeys.
Now that she'd spent a goodly amount of time with Sandor and experienced first-hand what a man secure in his masculinity and devoid of any major personality disorders was like, Joffrey's lunacy was thrown all the more into relief. Sansa wondered which personality disorder Joffrey didn't have, because he seemed by turns narcissistic, histrionic, antisocial, paranoid, bipolar, avoidant, and borderline.
"Obsessive-compulsive!" Sansa announced, apropos of nothing, halfway through brunch. She'd spent the entire meal pondering the issue and decided that, if anything, Joffrey was the very opposite of OCD: instead of adhering to rigid habits, the challenge was keeping him from veering erratically from one wildly inappropriate behavior to another.
Conversation around the table ceased abruptly at her pronouncement, and she looked up to where she was torturing her eggs Benedict, instead of eating it, to find everyone had fallen silent, instead just staring at her with varying degrees of confusion on their faces. She noted that Sandor, rather than looking confused, had that little smirk gracing his lips again, like he'd just been waiting for her to do something weird and was amused when it finally came to pass.
Every day of the last week, she'd noticed something new about him. And every new thing she noticed just made it more difficult to reconcile herself to her doomed match with Joffrey. How could she spend the rest of her life with a petulant whiner who sucked in bed when, as if to throw Joffrey's deficits into higher relief, Sandor was there to show her how a real man could be?
How could she bear Joffrey's Axe body spray addiction when Sandor smelled like pine sap and black pepper? How could she endure Joffrey's nasal, shrill prating when Sandor's velvet-rippling-over-marble tones sent shivers up her spine on the regular? How could she ignore the bony jut of Joffrey's skinny body heaving over hers when there was 200+ pounds of prime beef to roll against in a sweaty tangle of sheets?
She found herself fantasizing about Sandor at odd moments, and then not-so-odd moments; the single time Joffrey had been able to bring her to orgasm, she'd been imagining herself with Sandor instead. It had been his lips on hers, his hips between her thighs, his cock moving inside her. She'd come like a meteor cataclysmically ending all life on Earth.
Afterward, Joffrey had complimented her on no longer being a frigid ice queen. He'd even given her his own brand of encouragement, saying that with a little practice, maybe she wouldn't be so terrible in bed.
She sighed at the memory, and made herself focus on the matter at hand.
"Sorry," she said to the other occupants of the table, not sounding sorry at all. She opened her mouth to make some sort of excuse for her strange lapse, but then just shrugged and went back to mauling the eggs Benedict. She didn't owe Joffrey excuses or anything else.
He was grinning at her over his wine glass in a way that presaged the petty cruelty he liked to visit upon her with increasingly regular frequency.
"Won't the voices in your head let you follow the conversation, Sansa?" he drawled.
Before her decision to end her engagement to him, she'd have hastened to apologize convincingly and try to be bright and charming and amusing to smooth over her lapse. But thwarted passion for his grumpy bodyguard and a heightening need to escape from Joffrey's stultifying presence seemed to have had a reckless effect on her.
"It's just that they're so much more interesting than you are," Sansa therefore replied.
Quiet descended as Sansa's gaze flicked over each one of them in turn.
Meryn stopped chewing to gape at her in amazement.
Boros' fork stopped, suspended in mid-air, as he paused in shoveling Western omelet into his piehole.
Joffrey's face purpled as confusion, indignation, and anger warred for dominance in the hollow melon atop his neck.
Sandor looked amused, his lips twitching as he fought to keep from laughing.
The fork clattered from Boros' numb fingers. Sansa shrugged.
"Sorry," she said, not sounding sorry at all, and smeared Hollandaise sauce around the edge of her plate with an artistic flourish. "I'm not very hungry. Guess I'll go… read a magazine. Or something."
She rose and scampered away, leaving three-fourths of the men to sit in silence like a set of stunned haddocks. The last one-quarter of them just watched her go. She could feel Sandor's speculative glance on her skin like a tangible caress.
Safe in her room once more, she curled up on the chaise longue by the window and lost herself in daydreams of escape.