Title: Practiced at the Art
Author: amazonqueenkate
Claim: Jacqui Franco
Fandom: CSI: Vegas
Theme: (Set 2; #29, what I want)
Rating: G
Summary: Jacqui's problem has nothing to do with not knowing what she wants.
Author's Notes: Another fic that has David in it. I swear, he won't be in all of them, but I enjoy the dynamic between the two of them. Sorry.

 "The thing about you," David Hodges says over beers one weekend, "is that you don't know what you want."

Jacqui thinks it's preposterous, but doesn't tell him so. Aside from the two of them at a table and Bobby chatting up two very attractive young men at the bar proper, the little dive they like to call their own is relatively empty, and – like the tree falling in the forest – there's no one to hear her scoff. Across the table, David quirks an eyebrow and takes another pull from his beer, relatively unconcerned with her huffy arm-crossing and face-making. Jacqui is used to this. Jacqui is used to David.

Jacqui has been used to David from the very first day they met, when she finally moved back to nights after three long years relegated to days. She hated the day shift, getting up with the birds and the sun, and celebrated her first night back by snaking several mugs of Greg's high-class coffee.

A man finished off the pot just as she walked in for her third hit. He glanced at her, even-eyed and unimpressed, and she frowned back at him. "You took my coffee," she stated; he had to be relatively new, because even on days, she'd kept track of her friends from the night shift.

He rolled his eyes. "Didn't have your name on it."

"Semantics. Give me my damn coffee." She set her mug on the counter. "I want it."

"You can't always get what you want."

Right then and right there, in the break room on a Wednesday night, Jacqui narrowed her eyes and he narrowed his right back, a glaring contest across three feet of never-before-met separation. When he finally did blink, he did so with a smirk. "We'll split it," he decided, and grabbed her mug.

A single droplet traced down the side of the ceramic as he poured his beverage into her glass, and she wiped it away with her thumb. "Jacqui Franco," she introduced without offering a hand.

"Hodges," he stated plainly. He sipped his coffee. "Trace."

"Prints," she admitted, and she felt his smile even if his lips didn't move.

Now, sitting in the bar on their one day a week off, fifteen miles from work and a million miles from where they'd been that night, Jacqui reaches for her drink.

"I know what I want," she argues. "I'm just not good at getting it."