Chapter 4
“I want my grandmother’s ring,” Buffy stated, entering Joyce and Spike’s bedroom where he had started cleaning out her things.
He sat on the bed, looking at some photo album when she entered and she winced when she realized what it could be: Their wedding album. The wedding she’d never attended.
He looked up, his eyes red. “Your grandmother’s ring?”
She nodded, shuffling her feet. “My mom promised it to me. It’s been passed down to all the women in the family and so…it’s mine, you see. So I’m taking that.”
“That’s all you want?” he questioned. “She has a lot of things you might want, Buffy.”
“For what? So I can remember?”
“What’s wrong with remembering?”
She nodded her head in his direction. “It’s not doing you any good is it?”
“Are you doing any better by not remembering?”
She said nothing, but stepped inside the room and went for her mother’s jewelry box. When she came across Joyce’s clip-on earrings, her fingers trembled. Those clip-on earrings were what Joyce allowed Buffy to wear before she got her ears pierced. And then she came across a little black bag stuffed in the corner. Opening it, Buffy found her baby teeth.
God, the tears wouldn’t stop. They just wouldn’t fucking stop. When would they stop?
“Buffy, luv, it’s all right.” And he was there again, guiding her to the bed, but she wanted to sink to the floor, clutching the bag in her hands as if it were a lifeline. They were her teeth, yes, but it was what the bag represented – Joyce’s love for her. Her father hadn’t done that; he never would have thought of it, Buffy was sure. But Joyce did. How many times had she played tooth fairy, Santa Claus and Easter Bunny? Too many times to count. And how had Buffy repaid her? By turning her back on her; by shunning her because she’d shunned her father – her pathetic excuse of a father.
“It’s not all right!” Buffy screamed, “It’s not all right and you know it. Don’t pretend you don’t know it. You hate me, Spike. I know you fucking hate me. You don’t want it to be all right for me. You don’t care, and I don’t want you to care!”
Spike stared down at her small form all curled in a ball on the floor, arms around her legs and sobbing.
“I do care,” he told her, voice rising above her cries, and kneeling down next to her.
“No, you don’t. But it’s okay. You don’t have to.”
“So—what? You’re going to wallow now?” he asked angrily.
“What do you want me to do, huh?” she asked; jumping up, fire in her green eyes. “You want me to say how sorry I am? How I regret that I lost all this time? How I never got to tell her that I loved her? I know all that already. I feel it already. I know that you hate me, Spike, and I don’t care that you do. You can take your joy in knowing that I hurt now, okay? Take your joy from it.”
“I don’t take joy in that, Buffy,” he told her softly. He shook his head and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“What are you fucking sorry for?” she demanded, completely outraged by the notion.
“For how it all happened…I didn’t realize–”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” she screamed at him and ran from the room.
He stared at the doorway, stunned. He thought an apology, and letting her know he did care, would help. But Buffy wanted him to hate her; she wanted him to hate her and berate her for she felt guilty now for not coming home, for leaving Joyce, and for being wrong about Hank. She held tremendous regret and resentment inside her and she wanted to wallow in it, wanted him to punish her, and wanted to punish herself.
Buffy was a masochist.
********
October 27, 2005
Spike thinks I’m fucked up. I could see it in his eyes. I can’t blame him. I am.
Where do I start to make things better? Do I say, “I’m sorry”? Would Spike take it? Would I mean it? If he did, would it be like saying I’m sorry to her too? Is it really all me? Or is it him too? Was I justified in all my anger and resentment all this time? He’s confused me…
It’s hard to be so angry at her now, still, and yet, I am. It’s eating at me…how do I let go of it?
Buffy avoided the task of cleaning out her mother’s things. Though, avoiding for her meant she’d stay out of the room for so long until curiosity got the better of her and then she’d walk by and step in, make a comment or two and watch Spike sort through things and she’d be off.
After the third day of doing this, Spike finally turned to her and said, “Will you stop walking by here like you’re ‘supervising’ me and just help me? I can tell you want to.”
That seemed to work, funnily enough. She jumped right in, not sure how him asking her in a roundabout way made all the difference, just that it did. Maybe because she felt she didn’t have the right to without admittance from him. Him. Who was him? Her mother’s husband. Widower, now. But there was more to him than that even if that’s what he’d been all this time. Just the guy that married his mother and made her father incapable of getting back in her good graces. He had become the epitome of so much to her and looking at him now, at his lithe, and yet muscular body, his bleached blond hair that looked as though he hadn’t washed it in a few days, his blue eyes that appeared dead – he didn’t look like much. He didn’t look like the monster she made him out to be.
“You really loved her, then?” she asked, holding her mother’s shawl in her hands.
Spike looked up at her, a framed picture in his hand. “Of course I did.”
“What was it?”
“What do you mean?”
“What was it about her that you loved the most?”
Spike smiled fondly. “Her heart.”
“Was she happy?”
“I think she was.”
That seemed to satisfy her curiosity for the moment and she continued to sort through the various articles on the bed. Damn, the woman had a lot of crap.
“What about you?” Spike said, breaking the silence.
“What about me?”
“Have you been happy?”
“You mean have I been happy not talking with my mother all this time?” Buffy couldn’t help but snap. Okay, so it was a sensitive subject for her and she felt a bit defensive about it. That couldn’t be held against her, right?
“No,” he shook his head, “I just mean have you been happy at all? You can take that question any way you want, but that’s not how it was intended.”
”If it wasn’t how you intended then I have to take it how you intended, don’t I? Not the way I would read it.”
“You’re being confrontational,” he said, pointing at her.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
He sighed heavily as if talking to her was exhausting and too much. It probably was. She was exhausted being her; she could only imagine what it was like for him.
“How about this question, free of entrapments of double meanings – how long do you plan on staying here?”
She quirked a brow, “How is that free of entrapments and double meanings? Do you want me to leave?”
“I …I will have your check for you soon.”
“So you do want me to leave.”
“Do you want to leave?”
She stared down at her hands for so long everything blurred. “I have nowhere to go,” she said finally when she could no longer see.
“What do you mean?” he sounded aghast.
“I mean I used last months rent to pay for a ticket out here. So, I’m most likely kicked out of my apartment and since I wasn’t able to get back, I most likely don’t have a job now either.”
“Do you want to go back?”
“Well, I don’t mind Boston…”
“That wasn’t an answer, Buffy.”
“I don’t want to go back. I have nothing there.”
“Not even…?”
“I have nothing there,” she repeated quietly.
“Then you can stay for as long as you need to.”
That kindness was not what she expected and she didn’t know how to handle it. She looked up at him, blinking the blurriness away and stared.
“You can say thank you,” he prompted.
“Thank you.”