"All Wrong"
A Crossing Jordan Fanfiction
Written by Kate "SuperKate" Butler

I've always been attracted to the wrong kind of men.

It started in the sixth grade, when the school bully, a tall eighth-grader with spiky blond hair, decided that he liked me and convinced me to kiss him under the bleachers during a football game. The principal caught us and called my mother, and she scolded me the entire way home.

"Men will only ever break your heart, Lillian," she informed me as the yellow-white headlights of other cars rushed past. "They'll love you and leave you, like your father did to me. You have to build up an immunity to them. If you let them get to you, it's all over."

The school bully and I kissed under the bleachers when there wasn't a football game the next weekend, and no one noticed.

I've dated every kind of man that's been all wrong for me. In tenth grade, I fell in with the pseudo-punk, pseudo-goth, loud-music-and-dark-clothes crowd and dated their unofficial ringleader. He fancied himself a vampire, as cliché as it may sound. He wore dark eye make-up and left bite marks on my neck.

I dumped him when I realized that I wasn't the only girl in the group with those same marks.

Twelfth grade had me in with the potheads. Marijuana, free love, blacklight posters and Jerry Garcia were our gospel. And my boyfriend then, well, he was cool. All the right kinds of cool, with the shaggy hair and calluses on his fingers from playing guitar. He wanted to go to Yale and major in philosophy, and he probably could have done it if he cared. We got corresponding tattoos – a sun on the left side of my chest, a moon on his right – and dreamt big of marriage and life out on the road.

Three weeks after I stopped smoking grass, he wasn't so cool.

My college boyfriend redefined "preppy." We're talking dress shirts, khakis, highlighted hair, fancy watches, and a rope necklace. Three years older, and the big man on campus, he wanted to go to Harvard Law after his undergraduate program ended and work for one of the big New York law firms. I rode around in his convertible, wearing heels and pressed pants, and damned if I didn't feel ready to be a lawyer's dutiful wife in a ten-bedroom suburban mansion.

But I met his parents and realized that, if they disapproved of my hair and tattoo and family background, they disapproved of me, too.

After college, I met the quintessential geek. You know the type – socially awkward, uncertain, his hands in his pockets and eyes studying the ground. He'd graduated from a state school with an engineering degree and hoped to do work with computer technology. He said he liked my non-traditional attitude, encouraged my second tattoo, tagged along with me to concerts and parties and treated me like a queen.

I always claim that I left him the first time he hit me, but that's a lie. I didn't leave after the second time, either. I left after the fifth, and only because the doctor at the hospital who treated the hairline fracture in my wrist threatened to call in a domestic violence officer. There is something to be said for intervention.

So I left. I left home and everything in it, buying a Greyhound ticket for the first place that sounded truly tempting (Boston, Massachusetts, since it was fall and I'd always wanted to see New England in the fall) and found a dingy apartment in the slummiest section of the city. I dated around – crack heads, petty thieves, men cheating on their wives, creeps, degenerates, idiots – and worked day jobs for minimum wage. Every morning, I woke up early to read the classifieds and prayed for a better job to pop up.

I took a position at a temp agency. They placed me at a morgue. Boston's only morgue, I discovered later, a beautiful, blue-and-white series of offices, clean and warm, and filled with the dead. The dead and the living mingled together, and I sat at my desk and admitted our "clients," wading through forms and paperwork as I became one of the many trying to sort out the measurements of a life.

He was all wrong for me from the first day. I realized it immediately. Gruff, strict, determined, he puttered around the morgue and barked out orders and didn't ever seem to mind who he offended or hurt. My coworkers whispered rumors about him – he'd been recently divorced, he had issues with his father, he favored the pretty, dark-haired medical examiner with the self-righteousness complex – but I rarely noticed. I found his eyes on me as I bounced around with my clipboard (covered with stickers from my previous lives, a reminder of who I was and wasn't all at the same time) and smiled at him as best I could.

All wrong. Nothing about him fit. A divorced, grumpy, well-meaning man who enjoys being strict and yet still has a heart of gold. I listened as he calmed down his justice-seeking employees. I watched as he lectured his daughter on her visits to his office. I felt the compassion in his every motion when he patted me on the back, smelled his cologne as he passed in the hallway, greedily devoured the homemade cookies he brought in for a birthday without ever tasting them.

A good man, to be sure, just all wrong.

The first time we kissed, there was electricity, overtaking my entire body. The first time his fingers traced down my back, I gasped and shook. The first time he called me "Lily" instead of his polite "Miss Lebowski," my heart thudded in my chest. The first time I called him "Garret" instead of "Doctor Macy," he shared a secret, small smile with me.

I wear peasant-style blouses and flowing skirts, and he wears dress shirts with the sleeves rolled up. He's commented on my tattoos more than once. I've commented on his inability to let go of the past.

And I know it won't last. Nothing ever does, and it's all wrong.

But, then again, I've always been attracted to the wrong kind of men, and it seems a bit late to change that particular habit now.

Fin.

Standard Disclaimer: Crossing Jordan and all related characters belong to NBC and Tailwind Productions. I am simply borrowing them with no intent to, you know, make money. Friends, perhaps, but not money.

Author's Notes: I really don't like Lily all that much, but when a Lily/Garret fic presents itself to me, I have to write it. She really is attracted to the wrong types of men. I mean, she's had her sordid past and we all know it, so there's no reason to act like it's not there. I just, you know, created it more fully.

February 28, 2005
1:25 p.m.