Chapter 25
She tasted just as he remembered. The first glide of his tongue up the slick crevice of her pussy had his eyes rolling back and his fingers digging into her thighs.
“You’re so good, Spike,” Buffy said, breathing heavily, opening her legs wider for him.
Heaven, this was heaven, he was sure of it.
He could bury his face in the spongy flesh of her mound and hum a tune an hour long. He could close his eyes, deny himself the pleasure of seeing how shiny and wet she was, touch her only once, and still be overwhelmed.
“Oh, Spike,” she said, her voice high-pitched and her fingers digging into his scalp. He’d added a finger and she’d been waiting too long.
“You need more?” he asked, teasing her opening in slow circles with the tip of his index finger. He watched a trail of goose bumps trickle up her arm.
She nodded, biting her lower lip. “I need you real bad.”
As he rammed his finger inside her without warning, she yelped and moaned his name.
“I bet you do, you dirty little girl.”
“What?” Buffy asked, suddenly sitting next to him on a park bench where they’d been the whole time, and not spread naked before him.
Spike blinked rapidly, coming out of his daydream. He had to find a way to stop thinking about sex with Buffy, especially when she was sitting right next to him.
“I said…” He swallowed, rubbed his sweaty palms on his jean-clad knees. Spike wasn’t very good at saving his own ass when he was caught off guard. “Uh…I said…what did I say?”
She smiled slyly. “I said that I love people-watching and then you said, ‘I bet you do, you dirty little girl.’”
He should go ahead and dig a hole, and then jump into it. Right now.
He laughed awkwardly, playing it off as if he meant it. “Yeah. Pervert.”
She seemed to buy it. “I am not a pervert! There is nothing pervy about people-watching.”
“Says the man with the binoculars and the girl tied up in his basement.”
She rolled her eyes and took a sip of her milkshake. They stopped for lunch hours ago and she still wasn’t finished with that damn drink.
“It’s nice. You just…y’know. People watch. You learn about them. It’s interesting. You never do that?”
“Sure, I guess,” he said, scanning the people walking around the park. It was a gorgeous day, naturally. Los Angeles had a knack for those. “Easier for girls to do it, I’d wager. You see someone like me sitting in a park bench all by his lonesome, watching people, doesn’t look so good.”
He wondered if she realized she was leaning against him or not.
“Well, you’re with me now, so…enjoy it.”
Buffy turned her focus away from him, smiling to herself at something or someone she’d seen. She seemed to glow in the sunlight, though her form was dappled with shadows from the tall trees along the walkway. Not even they could snuff out her light. He wanted to say a million things right then. The moment was perfect—would have been perfect, he reminded himself, if he were allowed to go any further than this.
She must have sensed his eyes on her, because she looked up at him, her cheeks reddening and a tiny smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “What?” she said softly, as if she’d forgotten how much he loved her.
“No one person in the world, let alone in some stupid park, would ever be more interesting than you.”
Her breath hitched, as if caught around the start of a retort. She hadn’t expected him to say that. The tenderness that blossomed on her face then was so beautiful that he wished he could kiss her. Her chest rose and fell with a heavy sigh, though she still smiled, and then she shook her head, looking out at the park again.
“You’re on thin ice, buddy,” she said, her teeth shining.
He smiled, too, braving the opportunity to put an arm around her shoulders. She didn’t push him away. “I am, am I?”
“Uh-huh.” She took a sip of her drink, grinning around the straw. “You’re gonna make me break my rules and kiss you.”
“That would be a travesty.” She shivered when his fingers slid up the back of her neck into her hair.
“I think about you all the time,” she blurted out, though the volume of her voice was barely audible above the noisy chatter and chirping of birds in the park.
His hand stilled on its course through her blonde locks, and before he could ask her to repeat herself, she said, “That day…in the studio…”
Her eyes were closed, and she breathed a quiet little moan when he continued to play with her hair. He repeated an internal mantra to himself not to think about sex with Buffy.
“You’re torturing me.” Spike inhaled slowly, placing both of his hands in his lap and trying to put space between them. He felt her hand on his knee and he quickly looked at her to gauge her expression. He couldn’t read this one, though.
“I could say the same thing,” she said. “A hot guy playing with my hair in the middle of a park on a gorgeous day just so happens to be my weakness.”
“I can think of a few others,” he said, putting his arm back around her and feeling that urge in his trousers swell up again. Hormones could really be bastards when you let them run wild.
“Did you have a good birthday?”
“So you’re changing the subject.”
“Yes.”
“Because any minute now, you’re going to climb on top of me like some sex-starved cave girl and knock some sense into my lips?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I knew it.” He smiled. “But what if I want you to?”
“We can’t always get what we want, Spike.”
“Tch, yeah…” he said, grumbling even more complaints beneath his breath. Her hand was on his thigh again. “You know, for someone hell bent on keeping things platonic, you’re awfully footloose and fancy free with that hand of yours.”
Buffy had been touching him all day, and often. A hand on his leg, a squeeze of his arm, and once, when they were strolling around the park, she stopped him so she could get a stray eyelash that fell on his cheek. When she pinched it between two fingers and blew a kiss so that it floated away, he could have sworn she wanted him right then. It was driving him nuts, all this touching. It certainly explained his sexual fantasies that bombarded the few lulls in their conversations.
“Ok, how old are you? Eighty? Footloose and fancy free?”
“I live with Rupert, what do you expect? And don’t try and insult your way out of this.”
“I’m not! I just can’t let something like that slide.” Fuck, how could she not know how much he loved her when she smirked at him like that? “And anyway? You’re the one avoiding my question.”
Did he have a good birthday? She should know better than to ask him that.
She came to his apartment that morning, bright and early, and dragged him out of his bed. It took him a few moments to realize he wasn’t dreaming, that Buffy was actually tugging him to the bathroom and barking orders for him to hurry up and get in the shower so she could start her birthday festivities. He was too touched to tell her that she would never wake him up like that again unless she wanted to die young and pretty.
But Buffy’s excitement was contagious, and the genuine want to do something just for him shone in her eyes. It wasn’t anything especially grand, the day they had. There were no lavish gifts, no crazy surprises. He wasn’t quite sure what he expected her to do for him, but she couldn’t have done anything more perfect. She’d given him an entire day with her, eating up the hours with conversations he’d never in a million years dream to share with another person. Talking hadn’t been a difficult task for the two of them before, but it was different now. He no longer hesitated if she asked him something personal, and neither did she. Something had changed between them.
They had lunch at a hole-in-the-wall diner, the kind of place he imagined she went to with her friends. He could picture her dressed in one of her dance outfits, face red from practice, mouth smiling from a joke, and surrounded by a gaggle of girls who wanted to be just like her.
After she poured almost an entire milkshake into a Styrofoam cup to take with her, Henry drove them to the beach.
“You’ll learn the hard way if you don’t take your boots off,” she’d said, already prepared with flip flops that she’d slipped off and tucked into her purse.
Her obsession with getting him barefoot was new, but he wouldn’t argue. Not when he had a chance to walk along the shore with Buffy at his side. She was turning him into a sap. A sap with rolled up black jeans on. Thankfully, she didn’t make fun of his white ankles, and he was able to enjoy the feel of the wet sand squishing between his toes as they made a path along the waves.
“I know I started dance for the wrong reasons,” she’d said out of nowhere as the two of them looked out at the ocean, “but I think I still want to go to the audition tomorrow.”
He offered her a smile, though the ocean had all of her attention.
“I think you should. Doesn’t matter why you started, what matters is why you still love doing it. And you’re too good to quit now.”
Buffy didn’t say anything else about it, and neither did he. But she did tell him how much she loved searching for sand dollars, so they spent the next hour scanning the ground for flashes of white, chasing one another, and trying to get each other to fall in the water. Neither won, as they both shared an equal level of competitiveness that was almost frustrating. He’d never seen Buffy laugh so much, never seen her eyes dancing quite like this.
Buffy finally noticed how red his cheeks were getting from being out in the sun all day. He expected her to scold him for not putting on the sunscreen she brought specifically for him; but instead, she told him how cute he was. Spike was suddenly glad for the sunburn.
The thought had been nagging him all day, but the more time he spent with Buffy like this, the more he understood how badly he needed her. In all his youth, with all the people he thought had loved and cared for him before, no one had ever just let him be. He felt more like himself with Buffy than he did with anyone else. What Spike felt for her was more than sexual, though being a nineteen-year-old boy made that an impossible thing to ignore. However, if she thought that what he felt for her was just passing fancy, that he could get over her easily if she decided to move on, she was sorely mistaken. A day like this only solidified what he’d always known in his heart, and he tried to accept it for what it was, to let it be just a wonderful day. It was a hard pill to swallow when your throat was clogged with professions of love.
Now they were here, on a park bench in the shade, and the sun was beginning to set. The day would soon come to an end, and tomorrow would bring another day of questions and waiting. The spell would be broken and they’d be right back where they started. He could see that if he continued to give her the space she wanted, she’d never let him in. The very thought that he might not be with her because he did what she asked broke his heart. He was done holding on, done waiting on the sidelines when he had a perfectly good reason to be in the game.
“I think today was the best birthday I’ve ever had,” he said, and he meant it.
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He turned a little to face her, and tucked her hair behind one ear. “But you know what would make it perfect?”
“What’s that?” She swallowed, and he figured she knew where he was going with this.
“If you gave me a kiss. Just one.”
“Spike, I—”
“Don’t you say you can’t.”
She sighed.
“I’m in love with you, Buffy.” He tried to convey everything in that statement, and whatever fell to the wayside he picked up with his hands and brushed it along her cheeks. She would look at him when he told her this. She’d heard it before, but he didn’t know if she really heard him.
Buffy curled her fingers around his wrists, but she didn’t pull away. “W-what if tomorrow—”
“I don’t sodding care about tomorrow.” He had her undivided attention, her eyes wide and scared. Not of him, but of what he knew she was feeling. “I may be impulsive. I may act irrationally now and then. But one thing you can always count on, Buffy, is how I feel about you. That won’t ever change. I know it.”
“How do you know?”
He smiled. And then, when she never expected it, he kissed her. He breathed her in, pulled her close, and kissed her. She tasted just as he remembered. When his tongue teased the part in her lips, she moaned softly, and he knew that he’d put an end to her confusion. She was pressed against him now, her body arching into his, her breath hot and sweet when she finally let go. What he remembered most about the way Buffy kissed was how passionate she was. But this kiss held something else, something more.
She placed her hands on his cheeks and kissed his lips, his chin, slid her tongue against his and breathed his name. The tenderness in her touch and the way she made his every nerve tingle had him feeling dizzy.
“No…no more waiting,” he said, panting as she kissed his neck. He felt her smile against it, and then her gorgeous face was in his view.
She shook her head. “No more waiting.”
He exhaled a little laugh of relief, and took one of her hands in his. “Do you mean it?”
“Yes,” she said, kissing him again to drive it home. She only meant to peck him and say something else, but Spike cupped the back of her head and pulled her back down for another, longer kiss, moaning against her lips. She was glossy-eyed and breathless when he pulled away. “I’ve been an idiot, huh?”
“No,” he said, settling her against his side and wrapping his arms around her. “You’ve been a pain in the ass, that’s what you’ve been.”
She laughed, playfully slapping him on the chest. “Don’t have to be so honest all the time.”
He knew she smiled when she laid her head on his shoulder, and the happy sigh she emitted when he played with her hair once more had him smiling, too. Spike welcomed the silence that fell over them as they both watched the sunset, and his mind didn’t need to wander. Nothing he could dream up would have been better anyway.