Sidney McGannigan (another firefly fragment)

Not sure where this came from...it wasn't exactly what I was meaning to write. Sorry if it doesn't fit.
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It was that blush.
See, it pays to have a little fling with the nurses, nothing new there. You never know when you might need them to slip you the keys, after all. And there’s nothing like motivated health care to get a man back on his feet.
But that intern on Ariel, she was different.
Pretty and young, straight out of some backwater planet outside of Beaumonde. Accent thick enough to sink your teeth into.
And she blushed.
Something sweet in that.
Girl like that could sew up a gash the size of a spaceport and not blink an eye, but she blushes when a man touches her hand. This man anyway.
Company I keep these days, not a lot of women blush, no matter where you touch them.
I didn’t know she’d gotten to me so much. Not at first. All I thought was it was good she liked me, because she wouldn’t run my face through the scanner the way they sometimes do, to find out if the Alliance gunning for me.
Keep a low profile, that’s how I work. A man’s got to step real light when he walks so close to the core.
But when that wang ba den said what he said, I didn’t think about keeping a low profile. I didn’t remember about who might or might not be looking for a one-eyed sharpshooter, and I sure as ruttin’ hell didn’t remember she was just a pretty way to waste some time.
I didn’t think much. I just stood up, limped over, and shut him up. Silently and violently, as my old man used to put it.
That I got cut up doing it didn’t mean a damn thing. Two weeks earlier I’d had two shattered knee-caps and a snapped femur, and it hurt like hell to walk.
I don’t fight for those odds. Not close quarters and not for free.
So she was bad news, that intern.
The Alliance bulletin that came out late that night – showing up conveniently on her wall-screen, which she left logged-on, trusting bao bei that she was – just clinched it.
One thing you learn as a merc is when to cut your losses. I was on the next shuttle out, putting as much air space as I could between me and that blush.
Say what you may about shooting for the highest bidder – precious little but that makes any kind of sense, by my thinking. When you run into something you’d fight for without a second thought, without sight of a brass penny, you’d best run the other way again, because you just bought yourself a whole world of trouble.
I learned that the hard way.