Let’s Get Lost

Chapter 3

She walked back into Manhattan, across the Williamsburg Bridge, and up First Avenue. When she passed the UN, the sun was setting, casting long golden beams down the side-streets. When she reached the Upper East Side, it was the early blue hour of the night, and she was tired, hot, her shirt stuck to her back, the shopping bag handle digging into her palm. No one she passed seemed to see her. Maybe I’m already inivisible. She liked the idea.

Spike, in his full regalia of black leather duster and big boots, was sitting on the steps of Mr Vaux’s house. His cigarette glowed, and his eyes did too. The museum was closed, and on this one side-street, there were no other pedestrians.

“An’ here she is, with all her gimcracks in a paper bag.”

“Did you sleep?” she said.

He took a drag of the cigarette, and blew the smoke out in one long stream. “You’re a lucky girl, Slayer. To be in possession of a light conscience. Never done nothin’ you can’t be forgiven for.”

“You are so wrong.”

“Wrong about most things, but not that.” He laughed softly. “Used to have such a guilty conscience once-upon-a-time. But now I know was nothin’ but innocent fancy brought on by too much religion.”

She climbed the steps, sat beside him.

“Any religion is too much. Have a smoke?”

“No. So you didn’t sleep because your conscience is heavy. Like it shouldn’t be.”

“Not sayin’ it shouldn’t be. You think I’m takin’ all this pretty coolly, don’t you, Miss Anne?”

“I don’t know.” I don’t know you. Though … I know a bit more than I used to.

“You missed my fireworks show. After Dru … let herself immolate, I … I ran mad. For weeks, an’ hundreds of miles. Made everythin’ worse before it got better, ‘cept of course that it isn’t better. Just … quieter.”

“Quiet desperation.”

“Exactly.”

“I’ve been learning about that myself,” she said.

Spike flicked his cigarette end out to the gutter, and rose. “Come inside. Reese has your supper for you, an’ if it dries out he’ll be cross.”

“He won’t care. He’s paid too much to care about that, right? I want pizza. Can we get a pizza?” Buffy pulled her pocket inside out. “This is the only money I have left, so you’ll have to buy.”

He gave her a look–a soft, strange look. “Oh, Miss Anne. When you start to trust a fellow ….”

“I don’t,” she said, avoiding his gaze. “I’m just hungry. And I don’t care.”

“You’d better not care about anchovies either.”

“I’m not afraid of the anchovy.”

“All right then. Come inside.”

***

In the small back sitting room on the second floor, a television was tuned to an old black and white movie that she’d never seen before and Spike claimed to have seen a dozen times. In the final bit, when the shooting was done and the chips had fallen, the heroine’s eyes brimmed, and her lip trembled; the hero looked at her with an expression of passionate renunciation, but couldn’t leave her without first taking her in his arms. Buffy stared, transfixed, until the screen faded to black, then hit mute on the remote.

Nothing remained of the pizza but a few gnawed crusts, and Spike, sitting on the floor in front of the deep sofa she was curled up on, had finished four bottles of Heinecken to her almost-one-and-a-half, which made his eyes sleepy when he tipped his head all the way back against her knees, and his cool mouth taste pleasantly earthy when she leaned forward to taste it.

Her hair fell down around his face. Spike’s fingers combed through it as he kissed her. Trippy, warm-bellied, floating, she gnawed at his lower lip, then drew away.

“You’re upside down.”

He turned to kneel before her, and slipped an arm around her waist. “This better?”

She showed him her tongue. “You think you’re good-looking, don’t you?”

“I know it.”

“You aren’t.”

“Like this better, pet?” The game face came on with a soft sound like a slow-motion crunching of cartilage.

“I’m not afraid of vampires.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“I don’t care.”

“You keep saying that. You keep saying you don’t care, or that it doesn’t matter.”

“Well … duh.”

He looked at her close-to, leaning against her knees.

“What?” Buffy demanded, when he’d let the silence lengthen.

“Just wonder at you, Miss Anne.”

“I’m only here at all because it doesn’t matter. You want me to be here, don’t you? You think I’m going to sleep with you, and that’s all you care about.”

“Do I? Is it?”

“I will. I don’t care.”

He dropped his gaze then; his hand caressed her kneecap, and when she parted her legs, his fingers traveled up her thigh. “You don’t care if you do,” he said, lightly mocking. “It’s all the same to you, whether big vampire man makes you come ’til you scream.”

His words excited her despite herself. She could smell her response, her dried sweat and the aroma of her pussy.

“Because,” she said, “it’s not going to have any effect on your soul.”

“What effect’ll it have on yours?” He raised his eyes to hers again. The game-face was gone, and his gaze was very soft and blue in the shifting TV light.

She frowned. What was he talking about? Why was he talking at all? Grabbing his head, she yanked him in, pressed her mouth again to his. Spike chuckled, and kissed her hard, his other arm tightening around her body as his hand teased at the sensitive skin high up on her thighs.

“Always wanted to fuck a slayer. Always knew I’d get around to it sooner or later.”

She gasped. “You talk too much. Kiss.”

“When I first saw you in the Bronze, I thought, ‘maybe that one. Maybe I’ll have her’. Tasty piece you are.”

She gave his hair a sharp tug. “Shut. UP.”

“You like it. Gets. You. Hot.” At that moment he discovered that she wasn’t wearing any panties. He grinned.

She squirmed against his gently invading fingers, and let her legs drop open wider. “I’m not a slayer anymore.”

“That’s not how it works. You’re the slayer ’til some lucky vampire does for you an’ all.”

She caught his wrist, and squeezed it until the cocky grin faded, and became a grimace.

And then they were just staring at each other.

“You want to kill me.”

“I did. I don’t now.”

“You don’t.”

“Now I want to see your face when I fuck you. Want to see how you look when you come for me.”

She searched his expression. She didn’t exactly disbelieve that he’d stopped wanting to destroy her, but she couldn’t quite understand why. What was a soul, that it could turn purpose on and off like that? It seemed too easy. Plenty of murder happened every day among the souled. Her mind coasted, far far above the sensation that even now rippled through her, as he flexed his hand once more against her sex.

Spike cocked his head. “What about it? Does that matter? Do you care?”

She blushed, and pushed him away. Rose to her feet. “Stop it.” The words came out on a whisper.

For a moment she just stood there, while the room spun around her and she wished she’d never tasted the beer. She’d never been drunk before.

With the deliberation of a gourmet over a fine piece of cheese or fruit, Spike took in the aroma on his fingers, and one by one, ran them into his mouth. “There was a moment, the split-second before I did for each of my two slayers … when each one stopped caring. I saw it, in their faces, in their eyes. It was when they let me in. It was when they were ready. An’ I was ready too, an’ I snatched their lives.”

She wished she’d drunk more, because if she’d drunk more she could go and be sick. But she was nowhere near that. Just high. High and skimming along above herself like a bird.

“You were a murderer.”

“I was a great vampire. One of the greatest ever. Slayer of slayers. An’ now … I’m not. Now I’m nothing.”

” ‘I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us–don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know.'” Buffy hiccuped. “I memorized that for school. Emily Dickinson. Except it’s the opposite. You’re not nobody anymore. You have to be a person. That’s your curse.”

“An’ you have to be the slayer, that’s yours.”

“I’ve quit.”

“You can’t bloody quit.” He tugged on her skirt; she sat down again abruptly, and held her head.

“Why’d you run away, Miss Anne?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why’d you leave home? A nice home, it was.”

“I … I had to.”

“Had to leave your dear Mum? Because of that Angelus?”

“Don’t talk about my mother!”

“She must be so lonely without you.”

“You don’t know! You don’t understand!”

“So tell me.”

“Why should I? You’re not my friend.”

“Ditched your friends, haven’t you? Might as well talk to an enemy, then.”

His questions were tiresome, and confusing. Why should he want to remind her of her mother? Particularly now. Buffy gripped his belt buckle, undid it and started on his fly. His jeans bulged over his erection; why would he want to talk when he was hard? Stupid vampire. She slid down onto her side, a less dizzy place to be amongst the sofa’s soft cushions, a place where she could more easily confront the part of him that most interested her at the moment.

She was far from jaded yet about cocks, especially erect ones. Especially erect ones that belonged to very experienced, very talented, quite old vampires whose motives were unclear and whose conversation was maddening. Buffy put her tongue out and licked the slick tip. Spike sighed, and edged closer. She opened her mouth to take in the head. The skin was as soft as her own inner arm, the knob plump and sort of friendly on her tongue. She sucked on it softly, and Spike made another sound, more like a low groan, and his hand was back in her hair.

“That’s lovely, pet. Do that.”

Wrapping a hand around the shaft, licking all around the head, in and out, she wondered if he knew she’d never done this before. At school she’d always been the girl who didn’t, and with Angel … it was another thing there hadn’t seemingly been time for. She was curious, and it felt good, felt good between her own legs when the round head of his prick rubbed against the roof of her mouth.

“Use your teeth a bit. Won’t hurt me,” Spike encouraged. “Ah–ah–sweet. Good.”

It was kind of amazing, she thought, how she could do this, and he’d say that. Sort of like playing a musical instrument–one you didn’t know how to play, so you couldn’t really control what came out, but it was fun to find out.

“Could go at it harder,” Spike said. “Use your hand.”

She saw that he was tugging on his ballsac in rhythm with her own movements, and she could feel him building, hastening. Her own nipples were hard, and the base of her tongue felt ticklish in a good way. She closed her eyes, thinking of how it would feel, how it would taste, when he came. Spike was grunting now, not in a loud gross way, but just enough so she could tell that she was doing it right, that he was getting there. Then he seized up, she felt his flesh convulse in her mouth, and the thick sour-tasting stuff was there. She held it on her tongue for a moment, contemplating it, and swallowed.

First time. She wondered if it all tasted like that, or if vampire spunk was different.

She let him go, fell back against the deep cushions, letting one bent knee drop away from the arch of the other. The cottony feeling of the beer suffused her excitement, so her whole body felt warm and sensitive. Spike’s hand was already back on her thigh. “Got you all wet, that did.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” he repeated, leaning in to look. “What a hot twitchy little snatch it is.”

“Lick me.”

“Gonna eat you up.”

With his face buried in her, she arched and mewed, stretching her arms up, doubling them under her head, pushing up at him with her hips. He devoured her with slow deep kisses, long languid sweeps of his tongue, and fingers that made gentle yet possessive inroads into her pussy, into her ass. She was simmering, but he was, apparently, in no hurry, and kept her from falling into a rhythm, making her feel instead only the swollen juiciness of her own flesh. She threaded fingers into his hair, pushed him in closer. He hummed into her so everything vibrated, and laughed when she tried to fuck his mouth. Her other wandering hand found his open flies; his cock was hard again already, wet at the tip; it jerked when she gripped it.

“Am I good?”

He answered by nodding into her, and then his fingers stroking inside her found a place that made her start up and shudder. She cried out, and he laughed. He was stroking her clit now with hard regular licks that made her frantic; she thrashed up into his face; he held her down with one hand. And then everything went rushing and shaking, an avalanche off a height, into a huge crash–she heard herself gulping air and groaning. She was crying, her hips heaving, long shuddering sobs.

They went on and on, aftershocks of terrible pleasure washing through her. Spike climbed her body, and then he was stroking her hair and kissing her with his slick mouth, and his cock was there against her convulsing folds; she tugged him and he was inside. “Fuck,” she whispered, sobbing. “Fuck me.” She gripped him tight, clutching his shirt, yanking it up to connect with his skin.

“Right here, Slayer. Right here. Fuck you long as you need.”

“I hate you.”

“I know. I know.”

“Stay with me.”

“Right here.”

He covered her, slow and heavy, languid and powerful, like a big kingly leopard. She squeezed her eyes shut and imagined him that way, a sleek animal covering her. Memories of the other time, the first time, Angel’s bed, Angel’s body, wanted to intrude, but this wasn’t that, there was no love here so it was all right. It didn’t matter what she did or said. She could just get what she needed.

She needed this fucking, this covering, this sinuous male body in her arms, so much.

“We are nothing to each other.”

“S’all right, Slayer. Take it as read.” She opened her eyes and saw him just above her, entirely focused on her, an interested half-smile on his lips, eyes foggy. “Pair of nobodies we are, right now.”

***

When she’d come three times, and he’d spent himself in her and collapsed, his face buried in her neck, Buffy tensed. This was the always-terrible moment, which she’d already well learned to dread. She counted backwards from twenty, thinking that then she’d push him off.

“Can relax. Not goin’ to turn mean.”

“You have to stop doing that.”

“Can’t help knowin’ what you’re thinking. You have to stop bein’ so transparent. Got too many tells, Slayer. Got to learn finesse if you expect to survive long.”

“I told you, I’m out of that.”

“Right, right. Anyway, just want to have a bit of a cuddle. You shift a bit, an’ you can rest your head on my arm.”

She wondered, as she let him arrange her in a more comfortable pose, whether she was getting a glimpse into what he’d been like with Drusilla. She’d never really thought about vampires–vampires who weren’t Angel, who was so much more than a vampire–as boyfriends. Vampires were bloodsucking killing machines, and that was all she’d really ever thought about them. Socially they were nowhere.

“Who said we were going to cuddle?”

“You did. Said you meant to comfort me.”

“I said, during a momentary lapse in sanity, that I’d keep you company. It’s not remotely the same thing.” Even as she complained, she was scooching in beside him, one leg caught between his two, her cheek on his chest. His skin had a welcome tinge of coolness after their exertions.

“Company, comfort. Promised you’d give me a reason not to top myself. Now admit it, Slayer, I’m a good lay. I’m teachin’ you right, for which you’ll thank me later.”

“You need to talk less. A lot less.”

“Yeah. Could maybe get a bit of kip now. If you’ll stay put. Will you stay put?”

She realized with an uneasy twinge in the belly that he was asking her to hold him while he slept. Which, again, was a boyfriendy-girlfriendy thing that was … assuming.

Assuming too much.

Anyway, she needed to pee now, and she was all sticky, and … thirsty. There was definitely unignorable thirst.

“Lemme up.”

He looked disappointed–but she only just glanced at him–and said nothing, as she trundled across him and found her feet, like a baby foal standing up for the first time. There was still residual dizziness, and residual excitement, her clit twitching as she shifted around, pulling her clothes straight.

Up a flight of stairs, she succumbed to the temptation of the big tub, and ran a bath.

As she was climbing into it, a knock sounded on the door.

His voice sounded through the closed door. “Thought you were comin’ back.”

“Go away, Spike.”

“Don’t call this company. I give you my horizontal all, an’ you get up after an’ run off.”

“I’m still here.” She hesitated, a foot in and one foot out of the tub. I’m not your girl, it’s not my job to comfort you. She didn’t want to have to say it.

“Let me in.”

“No!“

“Won’t splash. C’mon, it’ll be nice.”

“Newsflash, Spike. You’re not nice. So why would I want to take a bath with you?”

“Got dirty with me, so stands to reason.”

She hadn’t locked the door, but he made no attempt to open it. She could just feel him standing there on the other side, abject.

“I thought you wanted to sleep.”

“You know I can’t sleep, Slayer.”

Something in this, in his tone, the restraint of his pleading, nicked her.

“All right, come on.” She sank into the water as he opened the door.

“Don’t like bein’ alone,” he muttered, as he stepped into the other end of the bath. The tub was so long and large that they were able to share it without needing to touch. Buffy sank down so even her chin was in the water.

“Needn’t frown at me like that.”

“You’re pathetic. What are you doing?” She waved an arm, then plunged it back into the warmth. “I mean, here.”

“Was … tryin’ to figure that out. An’ then came across you, and made a new plan. Could very well ask you the same, anyway. What are you doing here? You know you can’t quit your life.”

“I already did.”

“An’ do what?”

“I’m fine on my own. I can manage.”

He laughed then, and after a moment, threw his head back and laughed more, so that the water rippled. He prodded her with his foot. “Never was a one like you, I don’t think. We’re both up the fuckin’ no thoroughfare, aren’t we? You won’t go be the slayer, an’ I can’t kill you. Pathetic indeed.”

“You could learn to meditate or something.”

“Or something.” He sank all the way down until the water bifurcated his face, and prodded at her with his foot.

“I don’t know why you care. I’d think you’d like it, one less slayer.”

“Care because you made me care.”

Buffy lobbed a sponge at his face. “Don’t try to tell me you’re in love with me!”

Spike surfaced then, staring. “Meant that I got this soul shoved in me on your account. That’s all.”

Buffy didn’t know where to look. ” … oh.”

“God, Slayer. Think a bit much of yourself, don’t you?”

The temperature plummeted. Buffy shivered. She couldn’t believe she’d let things go so far–that she was taking a bath with William the Bloody, and that for even a split second she might’ve thought– Only she didn’t think–she’d never–never ever–

Grabbing up a cake of soap, she threw it point blank at his head, clambered out of the tub, and ran.

***

Even in the heart of the park, she couldn’t find complete darkness, or total solitude. Even this late at night, there were strollers, and roaming groups of teens who should’ve been home in bed but who steered clear when they saw her coming. She heard people having sex in the bushes, and, though she didn’t want to be, stayed on alert for that tingle at the base of her neck that said vampire.

She didn’t feel it though, not until she’d been sitting for a few minutes at the edge of the Meer, letting herself be hypnotized by the shimmer of the water, and the rhythmic pulsing of her own misery. The trees all around her were completely still in the close breezeless night.

He came up on her from behind, but she didn’t move.

“Shouldn’t have said it. I’m sorry.”

“Fuck off.” She winced. Since when do I talk like that? Immediately the answer came, Since everything stopped mattering.

Except the not mattering seemed less easy than it had a little while ago. I hate everything, she thought. But she was coming to hate even that.

Spike leaned on the back of the bench, beside her shoulder.

“Come now, Slayer. That’s not you.”

“You don’t know me!”

“Know you a bit now, an’ I’m sorry to make you cry.”

“I wouldn’t cry over you.”

“Don’t be angry with me. At any rate, not for stupid remark like that.”

“We’re not supposed to be doing this. Apologizing. Talking. Any of it.”

“You said I’m a person now. An’ you’re too good a girl to leave a fellow just hanging when he’s all souled up an’ alone.”

“I’m not good.”

“Who says so?”

She sprang up and rounded on him. “Don’t try to be nice to me! What is that? That’s not how you are!”

“You don’t know how I am. Let me be a little nice to you, Slayer. Everythin’ hurts a bit less when I’m–“

“When you’re getting laid?”

“When I’m not just all on my own.”

She swallowed around the knot in her throat. But when he offered her his arm, she put her hand through it, and walked beside him.

***

A few blocks south of the meer, they came across a pitched battle between two armed gangs of teens.

With fangs.

When she’d finished with them, Buffy was barefoot, bloody, bruised, exhausted. Off in the distance, a siren dopplered, and a car alarm sounded, like a faint reverberation of what she’d just been put through. Resting her hands on her knees, she gulped air. Her heart was racketing, and with every eye-blink she saw all over again each of the half-dozen moments in which she’d just almost lost her life.

She felt alone.

“Spike?” She limped around the area of the battle, a rocky grassy area fringed with low twisted trees. Found part of her shirt clinging to a branch, and a big man’s sneaker caught between stones. “Spike?“

The next hour was a blur she could only sort out in retrospect. Increasingly frantic hunting for some sign of him. Wonder that he’d might’ve left her–might’ve even set her up to be killed by the gang–interspersed with conviction that that couldn’t be right. That he’d fought with her–that he’d been dusted. Which was so hard to imagine–she’d come to think of him as indestructable.

Then, attracted by a faint moist groan, finding him in a dark by-way, pinned to the ground by a stout wooden stave driven through his chest and well into the soil. He muttered feverishly as she circled him, that she could just finish him off now, or leave him there for the sun to take. She freed him slowly, wary lest in shifting the spear she’d dust him. Spike cried out when she pulled it free. He could barely speak, and yet he kept babbling the whole time as she supported him, sometimes dragging, sometimes half-carrying, his legs barely working, the long blocks back to the house.

When she got him in, Spike collapsed on the foyer floor. The hole in his chest was still bleeding; his face was the color of chalk, the eyes sunken and shut. He was silent now, and didn’t answer when she said his name.

Buffy hastened down to the kitchen, looking in the refrigerator for the dark bottle she’d seen there before. But it wasn’t there. She checked the freezer. Shouted for Reese. Nothing.

Returning to him, her knees trembling as she took the stairs three at a time, Buffy’s mind was flooded with thoughts of Angel. All her love, so large and pulsing and desperate, hadn’t been enough to save him. All summer she’d fought a looming sense of shame at having let herself fall so far, become so engrossed. Because it just made things go wrong, made her go weak. Made everything she had to do so much harder.

Love just made a mess. Love unleashed Angelus.

Spike too was a mess, because of love.

Standing over him again, she wavered. She’d hauled him back here–no question in her mind of leaving him in the park–but now.

Now she hesitated.

Her strongest urge was to run. Leave him to Reese–who would have to turn up soon, right?–escape New York City, leave leave leave and never look back. Go to Florida, maybe, where she could get another job, avoid the coming winter, disappear. Remember never to let herself feel too much.

Spike coughed. Blood spattered his drawn lips. “Buffy–“

“Be quiet.”

Where the hell was Reese? She called out for him again, her voice echoing in the marble entryway, up the staircase, against the closed doors of the many rooms. But the house was empty.

“Buffy, please. Just … send me off.”

“What?”

“Finish me.”

Standing over him, it struck her for the first time how small he was. With the force of his personality quenched, he was just a compact young man in a big coat.

Bleeding out from a chest wound.

What would happen to his soul now, if he died? What would her responsibility be?

“Please.”

His voice, querulous, pleading, threw her into a perverse rage. “Shut up.” She wasn’t going to take this, him giving up. She wasn’t going to be the dispatcher for another soul sent to hell. She couldn’t stand any more death.

In the parlor she grabbed up one of the heavy crystal tumblers from the drinks cart, smashed it against the stone mantle, and cut herself on a shard. Back in the foyer, she thrust her bleeding wrist against Spike’s mouth.

“I’m not letting you go. Drink me.”

His eyes opened, frowned, and were fixed on hers, the blue gone a dark intense grey.

“Quick before I change my mind.”

The next thing she knew, she was on her back, his fangs in her throat, his weight on her chest. She’d never been bitten like this before. It hurt, it hurt at the point where his teeth were sunk in; it hurt at her wrist–not the cut one–that he was squeezing and pinning against the hard floor, and it hurt through her sinews, like her whole essence was being wicked hard up into her neck, out into his sucking, swallowing mouth. She heard her own heart thubbing hard, and a low dirty slurping that sounded like the end.

For a long moment she just let it happen.

It felt like what ought to happen.

Then she thought of Angel again. Angel asking her what she had left.

I don’t know, I don’t know. Even as she flailed at the memory, she was pushing, surging up. Shoving at Spike, but he was already letting go, pushing her off as she pushed him. They rolled in opposite directions. He pulled himself upright on the marble commode. She heard him breathing–why?–deep and labored, as she scrambled to her feet, a hand clapped to her bleeding neck. The room reeled.

He caught her before she toppled.

She wanted to punch him, to tell him off–she’d offered her wrist, and he’d gone for her throat–! But she felt too sick. Could only put up token resistence when he swung her up. Couldn’t tell the ceiling from the floor from the walls.

“Not a pet dog to be fed from your hand,” he was saying, his tone argumentative even as he bore her quickly but gently up the stairs. “But I’ll see you all right now.”

He cleaned her wounds, ran her a fresh bath and handed her into it. Woozy, she felt curiously like a child, and Spike like her mother, taking care of her, firm and maybe a little annoyed with her, but always kind and easy. The place where he’d bitten her throbbed; she tried to take it in, what he’d done, how she’d almost surrendered. If she hadn’t struggled, would he have let her go? If he hadn’t let her go, would she have managed to throw him off?

“Did it happen?”

“Losin’ your mind, are you, slayer? Everythin’ happened.”

“No … when you bit me? Did it happen?”

He eyed her, narrow and suspicious. Then his brows rose. “Did I lose my soul?” A smile, sardonic, amused, but tender too, formed on his lips. “No, pet.”

She subsided into the pink-tinged water, half-asleep, blinking slowly, thinking slowly. Spike went away. When he came back, he had a bottle of water and a plate of cold chicken.

“Lemme see you eat this.” He was still disheveled, streaked with grime and blood. The hole in his chest was a moist scab now, visible through the torn, blackened shirt–she saw it move, like a bubble, when he inhaled to speak. He knelt beside the tub.

“So how did I taste?”

“Wasn’t exactly gourmandisin’ just now.”

“How did I taste?”

He sat back on his heels. “All smooth an’ silky an’ full of power. Lovely.” His eyes lit. “You’re lovely, slayer.”

His praise embarrassed her. Still angry, but also relieved, that he was still with her, she nibbled at a chicken leg. He watched her eat, urging her with gestures to take more.

She took the plate from his hand, set it on the floor.

“You’re filthy. Come in here with me.”

***

Later he stood patiently, clean and dripping, as she bandaged his chest. “Be all gone by tomorrow.”

“So will this.” She touched her throat. She’d forgotten to be shy with him. They were both nude, leaning against the wide marble sink. She looked down at their paired bodies–his skin milky, only the head of the penis tinged with pink, hers more various, tanned on the legs, her belly pale. They were both bruised everywhere. Her feet were covered in cuts and blisters.

His hand still at her neck, he caressed the line of her jaw with his thumb. She swallowed, forcing herself to stand still, and raised her eyes to his.

He touched it too, his fingers covering hers. “I the first?”

“No.” She made a face. “Besides, this wasn’t some rite of passage. I didn’t want to be bitten. I wasn’t looking forward to it.”

“But you permitted it.”

Did I? She still wasn’t sure she had. Was he assuming a polite fiction? “We’re not going to talk about it.”

“No? Was against all your nature, an’ teaching. To help me. I call it generous.”

“It’s only that I didn’t want to be all alone.”

“Ah. Well … fair enough.” He went on caressing her jaw, a touch so light she barely felt it, except that it ran all through her. Made her warm and shivery at the same time.

“You fought like ten valkyries back there. Magnificent. That’s what you are.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“I don’t want you telling me my business.”

“Miss Anne, I am the business.”

“Just don’t. All right? Don’t spoil this.”

“This?”

She shook her head. She didn’t know–couldn’t say–what this was. A moment. A moment she was hyper-aware of, that she wanted to remain in. She brought a quivering hand up to thread into his hair. Gently tugged his face down to hers. He parted his lips when she kissed him, met her tongue with his. She shivered as she tasted his mouth. Back and forth, without pressure.

“I like how you kiss me.”

“You do all right yourself,” he said.

She wanted then to question him, to make him tell her all about herself. What am I like, to fuck, to bite, to hold, to fight with and talk to? He must know her now–must know her as she wasn’t sure she knew herself. Must know all kinds of things–what it was to be soulless, and souled, dead and alive and in-between, loved and abandoned, contented and miserable. She longed to bury herself in his arms and hear him tell her her story.

He kissed her some more. “Think you’re asleep on your feet, slayer. Better go to bed.”

“You come too. I think you’ll sleep now.”

His lips twitched in a pensive smile. “Do you?”

“You have to.”

He let go of her slowly. “You go on. I’ll join you in a minute.” He shrugged into one of the robes hanging on the back of the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Just to have a word with Reese. He’s come in. You go on, Slayer. Be back in a minute.”

Head swimming, throat throbbing beneath the bandage, muscles singing with fatigue, she sank gratefully into Mr Vaux’s big bed. Their argument, the hours in the park, the battle, were receding now. The bite starting to feel not like an invasion but something they’d been through together, and survived.

***

When she woke, Buffy was alone. She could tell from the state of the bed that he’d never joined her.

Disarranging the layers of heavy drapes, she looked down into the sunny street. A few people walked on the opposite side towards the museum; a UPS man worked at the back of his truck. She blinked. The days, the nights, were losing meaning. She wasn’t sure what the date was, what day of the week–only that it couldn’t be Sunday, because there was no UPS on a Sunday.

Slowly she peeled the bandage off her neck. The skin was nearly healed; the scabs rolled off under her probing fingers. Beneath that were bumps that might or might not become scars. The Master hadn’t left one, not on her flesh, but he hadn’t gone as deep or held on as long as Spike.

Spike’s motives weren’t those of the Master. Which didn’t mean they were better, just … not the same.

Staring out at the still, dusty sidewalk trees, feeling her neck, she experienced it again, his pounce, being knocked back flat, and then the bite. The pressure, suction, pain, force of it. Not at all as it was with the Master. Different sensations, different duration, different kind of terror.

Before she went to bed, she’d begun to feel like it was almost a good thing, a bond. After the bite, things between them were changed.

Now she wondered if that wasn’t the definition of thrall.

She faced herself in the dresser mirror. Am I in thrall? How would I even know?Buffy asked herself the question, and looked into her own eyes, waiting to feel some resonance within her that would tell her what had happened to her, what she was turning into. Maybe because I’d rather stay here in this closed house with a vampire than run away like a normal girl would? But I felt this way before, too.

She remembered then the things she’d wanted to ask him about, except that she’d been too tired, after fighting and biting and bath, to go on to anything else.

Remembered that in going at last to bed, she’d wanted him to be there with her. That she’d thought, before she fell asleep herself, that maybe now Spike would sleep too, and with that came a sense of anticipatory satisfaction. She had healed him with her blood, they’d attended to each other’s wounds, and she would influence his rest.

Had she started to think that he was hers?

Forgotten why she was here? She was here because he was more or less holding her prisoner, and she was supposed to be relieving him of his soul, or at least going through the motions of doing that apparently impossible thing, until she could figure out what else to do, or he got tired of trying and flitted off.

Anyway, where was he?

Staring at the smooth sheets where he hadn’t been, she prodded her own feelings as she’d just prodded her neck. Had to make sure she hadn’t gone really soft, gone native, fallen down the rabbit hole. Forgotten he was still a killer. She wasn’t supposed to like him. She was staying on here for many reasons, but liking Spike was absolutely not one of them.

Now she was wide awake again, lucid and fresh, she could recall that.

No one, anyhow, could like Spike. It really wasn’t even a question.

Though … he had a good body, and knew what to do with it. She’d liked the things he’d done to her yesterday … was it only yesterday? I could’ve been out of it for days. She wanted more of that. Wanted to learn. Like he’d said, going to bed with him was no risk. She wasn’t going to catch anything, and he wasn’t … he wasn’t going to change.

Slipping on a robe, she went out into the hall. The other rooms were empty. She went down one flight, and was drawn by the low chuckle of the TV.

Sprawled on the sofa, a nearly empty bottle of Jim Beam in his slack hand, Spike stared at the old movie flickering on the screen. His face was slick with tears; he barely blinked, and even when she stirred in the doorway, he seemed unaware of her presence.

She went up to him, tapped his arm. “What happened?”

Without taking his eyes from it, he raised the bottle to his mouth, swallowed the dregs, and let it fall among the cushions.

“Spike, what happened?”

“S’almost over now. No point tellin’ you. Ought to see it someday though, s’a good ‘un.”

“Not the movie! To you. You were supposed to ….” She stopped. Her words played back in her ears, like an echo over the phone, and she blushed. What, now I’m complaining because my mortal enemy didn’t come to bed? She realized she was again touching her neck. “Did you do something to me?”

“You ought to know.” He sniffled, and wiped at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Christ. Be a good girl, an’ fetch us a fresh bottle.”

“I asked you what you did to me!”

“Need to be drunker. Go on, there’ll be more in the pantry.”

“You’re blotto already. What did you do to me?”

Spike shook his head. “Not blotto. Can’t get there.”

“Will you listen!”

“Hear you all right. I fucking bit you, yeah? As you obviously recall.” He rose, faster than she’d have thought possible, given how drunk he looked–and smelled–and reached for her throat. Raising defensive fists, she started back, hitting the doorjamb. But he didn’t squeeze her neck. Just touched it, tipping her head up. “You heal fast. Could bite you every night an’ you’d be right as rain in the morning.” His thumb caressed the mark he’d left, sending a shudder through her. “Wouldn’t that be something? Slayer elixir on tap.” He coughed out a laugh. “I’d be king of the bloody vampires.” He dropped his hand, and his eyes. “Wish I could.”

She knew then that whatever was going on with her, it wasn’t due to any hocus-pocus of his. She shoved him. Spike tripped, tipped over the arm of the sofa and sprawled on his back. His robe opened over his chest. At some point he’d discarded the bandage she’d carefully fixed there, and done something to tear at the wound; it was raw, angry, the edges blood-flecked.

He’d had quite a session, after she’d gone to bed.

She wrinkled her nose. “What did you do to yourself?”

“S’called mortifyin’ the flesh. Not that I know much about that–that’s a Catholic thing. Old Angelus could’ve told you all about it. Though the flesh he liked to mortify was never his own.”

“We’re not talking about Angel. Why did you tear this wound open?”

He squinted at her. “You almost liked it, last night. Could feel you, startin’ to start to let go. That’s how it begins.”

She traced the line of her neck with a finger, realized she was doing it, stopped. “I didn’t like it. I pushed you off.”

“Not too quick.”

“So why did you let me go?”

“Need you alive, don’t I? And ….”

“And?”

He shook his head. “Need you alive, gonna get myself out of this mess.”

She gestured again at his chest. “Why did you–“

Spike caught her wrist, gave it a jerk. “Because feels better here–” he pointed at his temple, “–when I hurt here.”

“So what, this is how you make up for biting me?”

“What do you care?”

“I … ” She didn’t want to say she felt responsible. That wasn’t exactly true. He confused her. He could cloud her mind. “I offered to let you drink me.”

Spike’s grin was bright and bitter. “Gettin’ soft on me. Ah, I know what you like, Miss Anne. Sufferin’ bad boys get you hot. James Dean with fangs. Like danger in your fuck, like to feel a little bit afraid. Stands to reason. What’s to be afraid of in a regular bloke? You can kill a man with your pinky. Takes some of the fun out of the mystery dance.”

“It’s not true. Stop analyzing me!”

“We fell about over you, Dru an’ me. Little slayer girl all misty for Angel. You had no idea, did you? No idea what he’d done. Oh, if you’d only ever seen him in his glory. Would’ve pulled your own lips off ‘fore you’d have let him kiss you.” He rolled off onto the floor, his shoulders shaking, except now she wasn’t sure if it was mirth or tears. “Oh oh oh–the lot of us, we laughed ourselves sick over The Ballad of Angel an’ Miss Anne. S’all in the timing, see? Why you were all ga-ga over him … an’ why you’ll never care for me, though I’m bunged up exact same way, an‘ a better lover.” He crawled to the TV, hit the off button, and sat up to face her, his back against the screen. “Not that I care two pins for you. Not really.”

“Angel was good.”

“Angel was good,” he mimicked. “What, in bed? Ahhh … when it comes to him, you’re all wet.” He chuckled. “Both senses of the word.”

Here was what she’d run from Sunnydale to escape confronting. The reminder that she’d been able to love Angel and just not really think about his past. Even after he’d told her, she hadn’t so much come to terms with it as just turned her back on what she’d learned. Stuck with the immediate evidence–how he was right then and there. The reminder that even after he’d killed Jenny and who knew how many more, she’d still yearned to have him back–still thought it might be possible. Thought it would be all right if he could just get his soul back.

That was why she’d left. Why she couldn’t be the slayer anymore.

She was all mixed up.

Full of wrong thoughts, wrong desires. Her mind shied from them, on waves of shame.

“He was inactive for almost a century. He was helping us. You can’t tell me that doesn’t mean–“

“What does it mean? Think you know him better than I do? Wasn’t exactly a choir boy all century, I can tell you that. Ran into him a time or three when he had blood on his breath. Was this one time, on a submarine–“

“A submarine.”

“Don’t you make that face at me. Was a German sub, in ’43. Long story, but there was your good good Angel, an’ he turned a little sailor boy. Didn’t see him weepin’ over it, either.”

“Why do I get the feeling there’s more to the story than you’re telling me?”

Spike shrugged. “There’s stories plenty I could tell. Angel wasn’t good, so much as tortured an’ harried an’ haunted. Wanted to hunt an’ feed just as much as ever, only couldn’t stand the mental torment when he fell off the wagon. Just like I am now.” He thumped his chest, where the wound gaped, and winced. “Just like me. An’ I know how foul I am, so he was worse.”

“God, Spike, you’re too much.” She sank onto the sofa. “You shouldn’t do this. I mean, what’s the point?”

“What’s the point, she asks? Christ almighty.”

“You said you’d come to bed. You need to sleep. Nothing’s going to make any sense to you while you’re strung out.”

“Don’t pretend to care.”

“I … I’m not pretending.”

“If you’re not pretending, find me another bottle.”

“You don’t need more liquor. I’ll get you some blood.”

He gave her a hard stare. “Here’s what, Slayer. You can go.”

“Huh?”

“Go. Won’t come after you. You’re not the solution to my problem. I release you. Go home.”

She got up. His gaze gripped her like a fist.

She imagined herself leaving. Going out into the sunny street, walking to the subway. It probably wasn’t too late to reclaim her futon in Brooklyn, and she’d be able to find another job, or maybe even get the Gristedes job back, if she apologized for not showing up. She could work until she had enough money for a bus ticket south, and leave the city before the weather turned cold. Was there someplace she could go that had no vampires? None at all? Where she could really start to forget about being the slayer. Were there vampires at Disneyland?

“That’s it,” Spike muttered. “Go on, get out.”

She knocked him out with a single kick.

***

Spike out cold was an easy-to-deal-with Spike. It was no problem to drag him up to the third floor. Clean and bind his wound again, and get him into bed.

When she descended to the kitchen, Buffy found Reese there, playing solitaire on the big wooden table. “The, uh, TV room could maybe use some tidying up.”

“Yes, miss. Allow me to prepare your breakfast first.” He swept the cards away, and made no objection when she sat down instead of retreating. “Three eggs, or four?”

“Four?”

“I think miss must be a hearty eater.”

“Two eggs are enough. But if there’s bacon–“

Buffy watched him cook. All his movements were controlled and precise. He spilled nothing. “Does Mr Vaux return soon?”

“That’s doubtful, miss.”

“But you hear from him?”

“When he has any instructions, of course.”

“How long have you known Spike?”

“Would you like a slice of melon?”

“Maybe later. How long have you known Spike, Mr Reese?”

“The coffee is nearly ready.”

Buffy sat back in her chair and sighed. “What’s Mr Vaux’s first name?”

He brought the coffee to the table in a silver pot, and set out a large painted china cup and saucer. “Do you take milk, miss? Sugar?”

“No, this is fine. I’ve learned to like it black. How did you learn to like working for the undead?”

Reese turned then from the stove, the spatula in his hand. “Miss, it is my goal in service to give all possible satisfaction, but I do not think I am required to answer such questions of Mr Vaux’s guests, or indeed of any but my own conscience.”

“Then you have a conscience.”

“I will leave you to enjoy your meal, while I attend to the other matter you mentioned.”

Buffy stuck her tongue out at his retreating back, and as the door swung behind him, murmured, “Hey, I don’t know what happened to my conscience either.”

This time when she looked, there were two large bottles of not-beet-soup in the refrigerator. She wondered, as she poured some out and heated it up, if it was human. Then if Mr Vaux got all his blood this way, neatly bottled. Maybe he never killed people. Though that still left a question about where this came from. Were there people who regularly sold their blood to vampires? She looked around in the vast pantry for a thermos. The place was kitted out with enough china and silver, arranged on shelves all the way up to the ceiling, to serve dinner to a cotillion. At last she found what she needed, poured the blood in, and started back upstairs. Maybe there was a syndicate of secret blood farms run for wealthy vamps like Vaux. Giles would know how to look into this. But she wasn’t going to be asking him, because she’d burned that bridge. She’d burned the whole river.

Maybe Spike knew. Spike seemed to know a lot of things. And to be quite willing to tell them to her.

But not yet. He was still out when she came into the room. But not, she realized as she went closer, unconscious. Now he was asleep. His head twitched on the pillow; she could see the movement of his eyes under the closed lids, and puffs of breath, not quite words, escaped his lips every few moments. Watching him, she could practically see the nightmare coalesced above his head.

Was Angel’s sleep like that? She’d only seen him asleep that once–the night he’d awakened out of his soul. He’d had a quiet sleep then, apparently deep and limpid.

Happy.

Spike lurched suddenly, emitting a croak, and then he was awake. “Fucking hell.” He curled forward, cradling his head, and only gradually noticed where he was, and that she was there.

“What happened?”

“I pressed your reset button. Here, drink this.” She poured out some hot blood into the thermos cup, and held it out to him, breathing through her mouth so the aroma wouldn’t reach her.

Spike squinted suspiciously. “What’re you playing at? Now it comes back to me … I told you you could go.”

“Maybe I’ll go when I’m ready.”

He took the cup. Sniffed at it.

“I didn’t do anything to it. Drink it.”

He drank, and poked at his chest, feeling along the edges of the tape.

“Don’t you pull that off until it’s healed.”

“Oh ho. Playin’ at doll hospital, were you?”

“Don’t be stupid. You think it was fun, dragging you around while you were limp?”

“I’m better when I’m hard, yeah.”

He flashed her the eye, but she could see that he wasn’t feeling it; he looked tired and small; demoralized.

“I didn’t feel like going yet.” She sat on the side of the bed, offered him more blood. “What do you dream?”

He sighed, staring past her. “Don’t ask me that. Oughtn’t to have a bit of it in your head.”

“Like I don’t have horrors in my head already.”

“Not these.”

“Is it always the same dream?”

“No. Got all sorts.”

She crawled up onto the bed, arranged herself beside him. “Go back to sleep. I’ll stay with you.”

Spike gave her a hard look. “What’re you on about now?”

“Don’t talk it to death. I’m keeping you company. Lie down.”

She realized she was holding her breath. She was nearly as bemused as he was, at this fit of care-taking.

It was what she would’ve done for Angel, if he was here. But he never would be. And she had no where else to go, no one else to spend this reckless burst of nurturance on, but Spike. Who, as he’d maintained before, was surely as entitled–or unentitled–to consideration, on account of his soul, as Angel was. She couldn’t pick that apart, and she didn’t want to. She just wanted to follow her impulses.

Little by little, Spike laid back. Turned to face her. He still smelled liquorish. His eyes were ringed in dark circles.

“What an odd girl you are.”

“Don’t talk. Sleep.” Clumsily, she snugged in closer. Spike slipped an arm around her, and all at once she was blinking back tears. She didn’t want him to see, but it was too late; he touched her face with his finger tips.

“Poor lonely little slayer.”

“I–I’m not. Ssssh.”

“You are. Two lonely misfits, we are.”

“This–this–this–isn’t about you!” She couldn’t stop herself anymore from crying. It was as if his just saying the word lonely ripped all her defenses down, made her miss everything she’d given up, everyone she’d lost.

“I know, pet. We never will cry over one another. But it’s all right–won’t tell on you. No one’ll ever know you were kind to William The Bloody.”

She didn’t stop him when he pulled her in close, and kissed her wet eyes.

***

“Please,” she said, as Spike’s lips touched her wet cheeks, and headed for her mouth, “please go to sleep.”

He stopped, and looked at her. They were so close together, their legs tangled, his arm circling her, and her hands were nestled in the small space between their bodies. In this position it was so easy to forget everything except her own unhappiness and the animal comfort of being held. If he kissed her mouth she knew her control would slip altogether.

“I want you to sleep.”

“All right, odd girl,” Spike whispered. “You close your eyes, an’ I’ll close mine.”

“And no bad dreams,” she said. “I’m here, and I say no bad dreams.”

Spike chuckled, and wriggled her in a little closer. His cheek rested against her hair. His body wasn’t a big bulwark like Angel’s, but it was solid.

“You’re all warm. That’s not bad.”

“Sssh. Do what I say.”

She didn’t go to sleep herself, so she knew when it happened for him, when the last air sighed out of his lungs, the last tension subsided from his limbs. The encircling arm went heavy, he felt settled.

And there, with her head tucked under his chin, she lay, thinking about Drusilla.

Or not Drusilla so much as Spike with Drusilla.

Remembering, in particular, that night in the stupid goth club, when Spike had dropped everything he was doing, made everything stop, because she’d had a stake at Drusilla’s breast.

No hesitation, no doubt, no two ways about it.

And later on, he’d risked his own life, coming to her to make their pact. Again, to save Drusilla. Even though he already knew she wasn’t faithful to him.

What made a man be that way?

Her father wasn’t loyal, not to her mother, not to her. Teenage boys, by definition, weren’t. And she couldn’t know what Angel would’ve been like, if he wasn’t taken away from her, but nowadays it felt sort of inevitable that she wasn’t supposed to have been able to keep anyone she wanted that hard.

But Spike, without a soul, loved like a romantic hero.

Which didn’t make him, or even his love, a good. It did though, as she thought about it, make him seem a little more … human. She thought of vampires as barely more than animals–okay, animals who could talk, and drive–but finding out that they could remain consistently interested in a lover for more than a hundred years–and mourn her so extravagantly–was one of those details that just forced you to recall they weren’t all that simple.

Simple. That was Angel’s word.

Every time Angel came into her mind, she ached. A real, palpable ache, a stone weighing on her chest.

Beside her, Spike rippled suddenly, and groaned.

Buffy put a hand up and laid it against his face. He quieted at once, though he was obviously in a deep sleep; not shifting or reacting or to her touch.

Lonely. That was what those stupid kids Ford was mixed up with called the vampires. The lonely ones.

Spike hadn’t seemed lonely then. With Drusilla and those minions, who’d obeyed his every order. And later, the word she’d have used to describe him would’ve been: angry. Vindictive. Scheming. Not lonely.

She’d never admitted to being lonely before. Lonely was for losers, and she’d always known, in her school world, who the losers were. They weren’t her or anyone remotely like her.

Even when she got called to be the slayer, and her parents split up and they had to move, she’d never have described herself as lonely. Lonely was pathetic. Spike was pathetic. She wasn’t.

She didn’t like it now. Didn’t like Spike pointing out how much they were in the same boat. Didn’t like that they’d come to a point where he was kissing her eyelids and she was begging him not to lest she get so lost in her grief she’d never ever ever stop crying.

He groaned again, shoving her with his arm, rolling away. She heard him murmur some words she couldn’t discern.

Buffy wriggled up close behind him. Put her lips near his ear.

“Spike,” she whispered, “you hush. Rest. Dream about … dream about when you were a little boy, and it was a sunny day and you were playing outside and there was absolutely nothing wrong, nothing to worry about.”

He sighed. For a moment she was certain he was awake, about to make some cutting remark about her dream suggestion, but no; he trembled, and relaxed again into motionless silence.

She tried to imagine Spike as a little boy. What popped into her head were those colorful urchins from the Oliver! movie she’d seen once on TV, all rags and dirty red cheeks. The bad guy in that movie, a murderer and a thief and probably a pimp too though that wasn’t so clear … she struggled to recall the character’s name. Sikes. Bill Sikes. Huh. That was kind of like Spike. William. Was that the sort of man he was when he got turned? A London street thug. Made sense. What else could he have been, to become the leering leather punk she’d met in Sunnydale?

Yet something about that didn’t satisfy her.

Anyhow, real life wasn’t a movie. Especially not a singing movie.

Another groan broke from him. His body arched, an arm shot up. He shouted, but again she couldn’t make out the words.

“Spike. Hey!”

He dealt her a rolling blow, that brought him on top of her. She pushed him off, shook him. “Okay, quit! Wake up!”

Eyes opening with a start, he could see how surprised he was to find her there, a surprise he quickly erased. “Told you, slayer. Me an’ sleep had a parting of the ways.”

“You got some, anyway.”

“What you been doing?”

“Watching you.”

Spike blinked; his expression resolved slowly into a wicked grin. “Like what you saw?”

“Oh yeah, it’s loads of fun to watch some bleached bozo snort and twitch.”

The grin went mild, curious; he propped his head up on his hand to regard her. “That really how I look to you?”

“How … how do I look to you?”

His eyes narrowed. The teasing smile was gone. “You’re asking me what exactly?”

“What was I like? To … you know ….”

“To be into?”

” … yeah. Am I–?”

Spike leaned in closer, looking at her with that all-seeing gaze she’d already come to … not to like, not to crave, no, nothing like that, but ….

“You didn’t buy it, did you?”

“Buy … what?”

“What Angelus told you? That you were a bit of trash he was toying with?”

Gooseflesh rose on her arms. “I–I don’t–“

“Know what he did to you, what he said to you. How he tricked you into believin’ he’d only ever despised you. But think. You fucked his bloody soul out of him. All right, don’t make that face. Not fucked. You loved it out. That’s power, an’ not the dark kind, either. And with an’ without his soul, yeah, you were all he ever thought about. His universe.” Spike took hold of her chin, made her face him. “Slayer, don’t you know there isn’t a man sees you doesn’t know you’re the finest thing there is? I knew it when I first laid eyes on you–never was a one like you, an’ I wanted like blazes to take you on. Take you down. And Angel–he’d never loved a single blessed thing in all his unlife an’ probably his life besides–and one look at you laid his heart open like a knife through butter.”

She hadn’t thought of it like this. She’d never thought at all, amid her storm of emotion about Angel, from the first to the last, about why he loved her, what he loved about her, what specific effect she had on him. He’d so moved her, every day, every minute, that that was all she could focus on.

And now Spike was telling her … things difficult to hear. Flattering things her mind instinctively rejected, because they were too large, too over-the-top, to take in, to own.

She squirmed back. “I’ve gotta ask myself–what do you know? I mean, you were stuck on Drusilla for all that time. I don’t think you’re a terrific judge on the question of lovability.”

Spike winced. Buffy wasn’t sure she’d seen it–the lamps were low–but it sure looked like it. He was quiet for a long moment, and passed a hand across his face. “My princess. Yeah. Big reason I want quit of this soul–bein’ all conscience-ridden, interferes with my mournin’ for her. My memories. Curdles me all up inside, knowin’ I was devoted, all that time, to … look, she was my sire! An’ our thing was mutual–she did her best. Couldn’t help it that Angelus had already broken her. Was my pleasure, my honor, to see to her. We saw each other all right, Dru an’ me.”

His eyes, when she could glimpse them–they were cast down–were black now, and there was such woe in his voice she was almost sorry she’d brought it up.

She almost pitied him, for his loss, and his inability to simply mourn. It was almost terrible to her, that anyone should suffer so much that they couldn’t even mourn without guilt and reservations.

“Thought we were talking about you,” Spike said. “Can’t believe you’re in any doubt about what a special little girl you are.”

“Special, yeah. I’m the slayer.”

“Seen plenty of slayers, but none of ’em come close to you. You … you do things to a fellow.”

“What?”

“Bring out the most in a man, whatever that most is. Do you really not know?”

“Don’t … don’t pretend you have feelings for me.”

“Got feelings for you. Always have. No, I’m not in love with you, slayer. There’s plenty of feelin’s, aside from that.”

“I … I know.” She thought, I don’t know. I don’t know anything. “You wanted to kill me. You were going to get a big charge out of killing me.”

“I was. But told you I don’t want that now.” The smile was back, soft now. “You want to know what a sweet little lay you are? Could show you.”

Why did he have this effect on her, so stark and immediate–the suggestive gaze, the murmured words–immediately her skin was hot, her clit throbbed, and there was no hiding it.

In the back of her mind, when she’d refused to leave hours ago, was this. Anticipating this. That he’d touch her again. Make her feel–so crazy and frantic and high–

“First time I saw you, got a hard-on for you. Got one now.” He took her hand and brought it to his groin. And while a little voice in the back of her head gave the predictable response: Oh, gross!, when her hand closed around it, she was excited, and a little awed, to feel the effect she had on him.

She felt it, and drew her hand back. “Hey. Do you think I’m just completely teen-girl stupid? I’ve been to the movies, Spike. I’ve read some books. I know when my mind’s being messed with.”

“It’s not me manipulating you, love. It’s Angelus who’s still movin’ you round the board from the great beyond.”

“What?“

“Last time I saw you in Sunnydale, Angelus had you on your knees. I was sure you were a goner. Yet here you are, an’ he seems to be done. Which means you were mighty. You won. An’ yet you’re acting like the vanquished.”

“Stop it. I don’t want to hear this.”

“You listen. Angelus wanted to make you suffer, an’ make everyone who loves you suffer. He wanted to triumph over you. To murder your spirit. Long as you’re on the run, hiding from your friends, hiding from your calling, he’s done it. Even though you killed him, you’re givin’ Angelus just what he wanted.”

Oh God. Every fibre of her fought against what Spike was saying, even as the truth of it suffused her, a hot flush that rose up from her belly, rushed through her like the most fearsome news, tearing her up.

But still Spike had it wrong. Because he didn’t know everything that happened in that courtyard.

” … it … it wasn’t Ang–“

“Tellin’ you, I should bloody know. Was captive audience to him bragging on for weeks ’bout all his plans for you.”

“Spike. It wasn’t Angelus I killed.”

When she said it, his eyes blazed up, like he wanted to fight her. He seized her shoulders. She jerked free. “Don’t you get it? Why you have a soul? Willow’s spell worked! It worked … on all of you.”

“All of us. On Angel.” Awe made Spike look for a moment like a choir boy. Then the effect was spoiled. “So you did for him anyway?” His sharp laugh was like a bark. “Yeah, I like it! Good on you, slayer! Didn’t think you had it in you! An’ all the more reason you shouldn’t–“

“No! He came back. He came back, and we were together again, and it was–it was … ” The whole scene rushed back on her, the room spun, a wave of nausea kicked her in the belly.

Spike took hold of her again. “Just spit it out.”

It emerged, not like spit, but like bile, thick and black and bitter. “He was so glad to see me, and he couldn’t remember what was happening … but he’d opened the portal. Only his blood would close it. Only his life. So I had to send Angel–Angel— into hell.” She got the words out, each one falling from her lips, the edge of a cliff crumbling away, so that when she was done she was plummeting, through the dark, through the cold, into a vast bottomless pit. She’d cried before, but not like this. Not without a speck of light.

Not in a vacuum without air.

When she came back to herself, aching all over, her head was in Spike’s lap, and he was stroking her hair, slow and rhythmic, along with her shuddering sobs.

“Sssh, sssh. Brave girl. Nothin’ braver than that. You’re the bravest there is.”

“I’m dead. I’m dead. I’m dead.”

“You just think that, but it’s not so. Sad, yeah, but you’ll round the bend soon. You’ll go home. Still got your home waiting for you.”

“No.” She squeezed her eyes shut, because she couldn’t look up into his blue eyes, so full of compassion and interest. He was her enemy. She couldn’t be looked at like that by her enemy. Her heart was a knot. “My mother said that if I walked out, I could never come back. I had to walk out–I had to go fight. But now I’m nowhere. I’ll always be nowhere.” Another gust came over her, shaking her to her core. Spike’s palm was cool on the back of her neck.

“I know nowhere, Miss Anne, know it like the back of my hand, an’ you’re not there. You’ll never be. You’ll be all right.”

“Let me stay with you. I don’t love you or even like you–so nothing matters here. I need to rest.”

“Makes you tired, gettin’ your heart busted.”

“You know.”

“Slayer, I do.”

~~~

Buffy’s foot traveled reflexively up and down the smooth bedpost, toes curling and flexing. With her head thrown back over the edge, and the sheet twisted over her eyes, all she could see was a suffusion of whiteness that let her pretend she was everyplace and noplace, while somewhere far far away Spike was doing things to her pussy and her clit and her ass that made her flush and jerk and keen.

First he’d made her come fast, with just his clever fingers worming between her thighs. Next he’d made her come hard, with his swarming tongue. Then, holding her wriggling legs open, he’d brought her off soft, again and again and again, and now he was teasing her with nothing but breath and glancing touches on her slick sodden flesh, making her arch and moan, while he told her in a low lascivious voice how hard his prick was and how many times and how many ways he would fuck her, in a little while, and how she would like it.

Before all that, he’d kissed her breasts, and her belly, her armpits and the insides of her elbows, her legs and feet and the palms of her hands, in ways that made her writhe and flail. He’d already told her she was beautiful, told her about her eyes and her eyelashes and the curve of her nose and the pillow of her lips and the line of her neck and her pretty tits. That her cunny–a word she’d never heard before–was lovely and smelled all luscious and tasted better. She stayed hidden behind the veil of sheet all the while, because as long as she couldn’t see him, she could feel what he was doing, hear what he was telling her, without having to remember who he was. What he was. And being here with him was turning her into.

She’d never known she could respond this way, lose herself so completely, to someone she didn’t love. Who didn’t love her.

An enemy.

Angel had never given her this. Hadn’t touched and tasted and praised every inch of her, hadn’t told her about her intimate self. He’d always been so quiet, and when she was kissing him she hadn’t felt anything was missing. Some time in the future, the infinite future, they would get around to everything together. Their love would be endless and huge and contain everything.

But it never happened, and now she was being taken on this tour of herself with quite a different guide.

After an infinity of light licks and kisses, Spike’s tongue sworled with luxuriant thoroughness around the pucker of her anus. She cried out, dragging at the bedclothes. He pushed in, wet and feeling impossibly thick. An hour ago she’d have refused this, but he’d broken through her last bit of physical reserve, and as he began with maddening languour to fuck her ass with his tongue, she wondered only how she’d lived for seventeen years without this sensation, without his fingers creeping into her pussy, brushing maddeningly across her clit. The noises she was making, without volition or control, came back on her ears like the strange cries of tropical birds.

This time when she came, the convulsion arose from a gelid depth she’d never known before, and rippled on for a long long time.

The sheet was lifted away. Spike was at her side now, head propped on one bent arm. His mouth and face and hair were smeary. He smiled at her like a sleepy tiger. His body was lax, relaxed, but his cock was hard, the tip just touching her collapsed thigh. He seemed to be in no rush. She didn’t want to meet his eyes.

Spike had had everything from her. Seen her naked. Touched her, fucked her, bitten her. Had her secrets, her confession.

And now he’d coaxed forth her most elemental self.

She’d shared so little with Angel, compared to all that.

“You’re an astonishment, Slayer. You’re a discernin’ demon’s dream. All this–your power, your splendor–was wasted on the big poof.”

She was too tired to move. After the emotional storm, and this long jag, she was played out and drowsy. If he fanged out and grabbed her, she thought, she’d just melt like cotton-candy.

“Why do you keep trying to build me up?”

“Appreciate you. You’re not like the other slayers. You’re more.” He shifted a little closer, so the eye of his cock painted a liquid dab on her leg. “Suspected it when I first saw you, but now I know.“

She wished he’d be quiet now. She wanted to drop off to sleep, or possibly cease to exist altogether. A numbness was starting to flow up from her extremities. “You talk too much. You assume too much. You don’t know all about me.”

“I’m old an’ I’m canny, an’ I do.”

“Don’t spoil this.”

He cocked his head. “Best you ever had, yeah? Well, you’ve barely had any, ’til me. An’ you’ll never have it this good again. Better than you ever even dreamed of, right?”

She didn’t answer. It was true. What he’d just done to her went way beyond what the sex articles in Glamour and her own imagination had ever led her to expect. It made her feel like she was running up a big debt on her mom’s credit card. Like sooner or later–sooner–she was going to be in trouble. Would have to work and work to pay it back.

“When the time comes,” Spike murmured, “I’ll be glad I had you. When the time comes, we’ll remember we had this, and it’ll feel sweet.”

“What are you talking about? What time?”

He molded a hand around her breast, weighing it gently, caressing the nipple with his thumb. It was a gesture full of familiarity and easy affection, and it made her uneasy. She dragged her own hand up from the heavy depths to push his away.

“When things’re different.” His tongue appeared between his lips. “You know things’ll be different some time.”

“Still a’wishin’ and a-hopin’, Spike? It’s not going to happen. You’re stuck with it. But hey, you’ve got a lucrative career path ahead of you as a call-boy.”

His hand was on her nose and mouth, cutting off her air, quicker than she could see him move. “You cunt, don’t talk that way–don’t you pretend you don’t know what’s goin’ on here. What’s between us, what this is about!”

She tore free, the adrenaline rush surging life into her punch. Spike tumbled off the bed. When he reappeared, wearing a lopsided smile, his lip was bleeding. He licked up the blood with the point of his tongue. “Ah ah, slayer, watch out, or I’ll start to be really fond of you.”

“You shit!”

All at once he was frowning again. “Don’t do this for every bird I bed. This … is special. Ought to have the proper respect for it.”

“You’re crazy.” Even as she said it, Buffy thought she understood him. Understood, but rejected, because what he was implying–that this meant something, that they were somehow moving towards something together, some kind of alchemy, that neither of them would’ve even thought about on their own–well, she couldn’t go there. N. O. No. Spike was nothing to her, and vice versa.

He crawled back onto the bed. His cock was so hard now that the tip touched his belly. She had to drag her eyes away. “C’mon. Not done with you yet.”

He wasn’t the only one who could move fast. She grabbed a dangling shackle and clapped it on his left wrist, then sprang away, scrabbled for the key in the drawer, and stood back triumphantly.

Spike’s eyes flashed yellow. “You want to play it like this, should’ve just said so.”

“I’m going out for a while. When I come back, you’d better be waiting for me just like that.”

“And when’ll that be?”

“I don’t know. It depends–” she picked up his discarded jeans, turning out the pockets, “–on what I find here–” Spike had plenty of money. She didn’t want to think, as she appropriated it, about where it came from. “–and what’s going on outside.”

“Slayer–don’t you leave me like this!”

“Don’t make me come back over there, Spike, or I’ll just lock up your other hand and you won’t even be able to scratch.”

She was a little surprised, when she left the house after a quick shower, to find it was broad day. Her mood soared when the sun touched her bare arms and face, and brought with it a heady sense of freedom. She was footloose in the big city, absolutely unfettered. Money in her pocket, time on her hands.

The light was bright and intense, but the air was less humid, and as she walked to the corner, Buffy noticed puddles here and there–it had rained.

In the coffee shop on Madison Avenue she took the table in the corner and ordered an enormous breakfast. Coffee and food would substitute for sleep–they often had before. At the next table, a mother and her sub-teen daughter were arguing in fierce whispers about a purchase the mother had refused to make at a nearby boutique. Beside them, a fat man paged through the New York Post while eating a sandwich.

The whole place was steeped in normal and regular. Out here, in the light-drenched restaurant that smelled of fries and charbroil and coffee, it was easy to imagine that she was not the same girl who’d just chained a fiercely aroused vampire to a bed and walked out on him.

Out here, she wasn’t the same girl, the lapsed slayer, who’d submitted to that vampire, whose slick spendings he’d licked up like pudding off the sides of a bowl.

Out here, she was an unsupervised seventeen-year-old with an afternoon ahead of her and some money in her pocket.

Full of eggs and bacon and toast, she walked up to 86th Street. Bought a new pair of sneakers. Listened to some CDs in Tower Records. Drank an Orange Julius.

A half hour after she wandered again into the park, Buffy was playing shortstop in a pick-up softball game with a bunch of twenty-something guys. It started as a joke, but after her first at-bat, they wouldn’t let her leave. She told them her name was Cordelia.

She played for hours, all through the golden hours of late afternoon and early evening, and while she did, Spike was gone from the forefront of her thoughts. She went along with some of them at dusk out of the park on the west side. No one carded her at the bar, so she had a couple glasses of beer with her burger platter, and when the check finally came, they told her to put away her money; the home-run queen didn’t pay. At parting, she had three napkins with phone numbers on them in her pocket, but she dropped these into a trash can in the park as she made her way slowly back to the east side.

Reese opened the door to her. “Welcome back, miss.”

“Spike’s probably pretty hungry. I think I should take some blood up with me.”

Reese had a way of looking always politely just over her head. “I brought some up an hour ago. Is there anything else, miss?”

She supposed he’d seen stranger things, serving in this house, so she just said no thank you and started up the stairs.

***

“Where’ve you been all this time?”

He was right where she’d left him. A tall glass with lees of blood sat on the bedstand; Reese had indeed come in and served him and left him there.

“Out playing.” She went to the dresser, began to comb her hair.

“Wasn’t funny, leavin’ me like this so long.”

“I lost track of the time.”

“For ten hours? I’m not your slave.”

“Reese was here. He brought you blood. Why didn’t you get him to free you?”

“That’s not his role. Could’ve gotten free myself, for the matter of it. Not the point.”

“The point?” Taking the key from her pocket, she went to him, reached for the shackle. Spike caught her arm with his free hand. Looked into her eyes, in a way she couldn’t take. For the first time, uncertainty uncurled in her belly.

“Slayer. Stayed put because you told me to.”

Uncertainty lit the fuse of shame.

“An’ because I want you to trust me.”

Okay, shame or not, this was to laugh! “Trust you? Earth to Spike–why would I ever trust you? You’re a vampire who always wanted to kill me.”

“Never kept it a secret, did I? Never lied to you ’bout any of my intentions. Never been anythin’ but straight with you right up to this moment. It’s you, Slayer, who dissembles, an’ backtracks, an’ conveniently forgets her own promises.”

Her throat closed up tight. Her voice sounded in her own ears like the squeak of a kitten. “You only want to get over on me.”

He was looking at her again in that way that made her feel she was naked and transparent to boot.

“Playin’ Miss Victim doesn’t become you. What do you think I’m gonna do to you in here, Slayer? We both know you’re stronger than I am. You could kill me with your bare hands if you needed to. An’ there’s no pleasure or return for me forcin’ you.”

The fuse ran out, shame exploding into anger. “You … you keep saying you know all about me! You act all superior, you keep telling me what I’m supposed to be doing, like you’re Mr Wise and All-Knowing, when you–you– Let’s be real, Spike, you’re a filthy killer who just got his soul back a month ago and all you’ve wanted ever since was to get rid of it!”

“Well, just bein’ honest about that, too. Told you I wouldn’t hurt you even so.”

“It doesn’t feel honest, when you sweet talk me. When you pry and pry until I tell you– tell you–“

“Never said I had your best interests at heart. Not your friend. But you needed to spill it, Slayer, you know you did. An’ then I made you feel good, better than you ever have in all your little girlie life, an’ what do you do?” He rattled the chain. “The other day you told me I was a person, but you still don’t treat me like one.”

Her own convictions about the soul were plenty coherent when applied to Angel, her love–who was and was supposed to be the only ever one-time-is-all ensouled vampire. But with Spike … why did she have to be responsible for him?

It was something thrust on her, when she wasn’t ready or willing–like being called as a slayer in the first place. She didn’t want to have to own any of that anymore.

Still avoiding his gaze, she went to unlock the shackle, but again he stayed her hand. “You want to punish me for what I am?” His tone was different now. Small. Raw.

“I … I’m not the Vampire Punisher.”

“This is how to do it. Lock me up somewhere and leave me alone. That’s what’ll do me in. Loneliness. Can’t abide it. Never could.”

“Then why do you stay here alone? Why don’t you go hang out with your Mr Vaux? I’ve got to think he’s got a posse.”

“They don’t know me anymore. No one knows me, or can know me … only you.”

“I don’t! You’re not making sense.”

“You know me best, Miss Anne, of anyone. If you don’t think that’s a punishment, think again. But we’ve got plenty in common now, you an’ me.”

His pleading shouldn’t affect her. She didn’t want it to. “Spike. Let me unlock this.”

“Wait. What do you really want–in your heart of hearts? Want to take out all your anger at Angelus on me? Beat me down ’til I bleed out? He’s all gone but I’m here, next best thing. Full of sin an’ choked up with a soul makes me writhe over every one. Put that other shackle on me, an’ I’ll be at your mercy. Go on. Do it. You recall how pretty I bruise up. Leastways I won’t be alone.”

Her first instinct was to tell him to stop being pathetic, but that gave way at once. “I don’t want to beat you. That isn’t … that isn’t what I do.”

“What do you do, Miss Anne? What else, I mean, than what you’ve shown me already?”

She fitted the key into the lock, but Spike jerked his arm away.

“Hey!” This time, when she looked into his face, she saw what had eluded her, or what he’d been hiding, since she’d come in. The franticness he’d desperately controlled. For the first time she was aware of the past ten hours as he must’ve experienced them. Not just bored and annoyed, not just playing an irritating waiting game.

He’d waited for her, first in anticipation, and then … when she hadn’t come back, and hadn’t come back ….

“Why won’t you let me take this off?”

“You’ve cut yourself off from everythin’ else. If you can’t be a little good to me, hidden up in here, what hope do you have anymore?”

Oh God. She imagined herself, dissolving into tears. Imagined herself fleeing, never coming back. Calling up the Council in London, turning herself in.

But she knew she had to face the music here. He was right at least about that much–she wasn’t being honest with herself. And she had to deal with that, and with him. He was inextricably entwined with it all.

Deal with him somehow. Somehow that was different than what she’d been doing so far.

“I’m sorry.” She reached again for the shackle. He let her take it. Her hand brushed the skin of his forearm, and Spike shivered. She could feel now how very close he was to breaking down. The realization scared her, and awed her, and secondarily filled her with a compassion she’d have liked to deny, but couldn’t.

They did have that much, anyway, in common.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, and pulled the metal cuff away. “I … I get confused around you. I get angry, and … uncertain.”

Spike rubbed his wrist; she saw the lines incised in the skin, where the cuff bit in. “We’re havin’ a confusing time.”

He rose slowly, stretched. He had, she noticed, no physical modesty, didn’t hold himself or move any differently because he was naked.

“It … it doesn’t seem just, that you … that you should have to suffer for what you did when you had no conscience. I don’t always get it. It’s not … simple.”

“Want to get outside. Need some air. Need to move.”

“Right. So … you should do that.”

He turned back to her, took her chin in his hand. She saw, when she met his eyes, that he’d moved back from the edge, regained his equalibrium. “Don’t pout anymore, Miss Anne, I’m not one to hold a grudge. Know you won’t be so unkind again. You’re not that sort.”

“”Spike–” Why did he have to let this go so easily? It would be easier if he tried to take it out of her.

“Would rather see you cheerful, yeah? As much as you can be.”

“Cheerful. Oh yeah.”

“Could happen, if you let it. Let’s see if we can find somewhere to go that’ll amuse you. I’ll just have a wash, an’ we’ll be off.”

***

Spike’s ‘having a wash’ lasted a very long time. When Buffy overcame her hesitation and went to check on him, he was crouched in a corner of the large glass-enclosed shower, his face to the wall.

He didn’t react to her presence, even when she shut off the water. In the sudden silence she heard his sobbing breaths.

Buffy took a towel from the rack, held it out to him.

No move. He was curled up small, head low. His spine made a row of graduated pebbles under the white white skin.

More hesitation, but she pushed it aside, stepped into the stall, draped the towel around him.

“Please get up.” Her own voice surprised her–she spoke low, soft, like even regular volume would shatter him to pieces.

After a long moment, she put her hands on him. Tugged gently on his shoulders. “Spike, please. We were going out, remember? You’ll feel better outdoors.”

It took a few tries to raise him; she was leary of being too forceful. Ashamed of how forceful she’d already been. Her own belly had gone light and tetchy, like she’d just vomited and might again.

“C’mon, dry off and put your clothes on.”

He let her draw him clumsily out of the stall, then pulled away from her touch. She expected him to let loose some rain of invective, or self-pity, but he only said, “All right. Can manage this.”

She stood by in a state of bobbing dread she associated with dentist office waiting rooms. She’d almost stopped questioning why she felt this way over anything to do with him. She couldn’t get rid of it; her mind kept playing back to her the moment she’d picked up her hairbrush and said she was out playing. The act, the words, the studied nonchalance, steeped her again in shame. Some bit of her conscience that she associated with her mother stung and stung at her, for being mean and thoughtless. I take it back. she thought, over and over. But she couldn’t say it out loud.

She expected him to reproach her, or to ignite into some further deranged display of grief, but Spike said nothing at all as he dressed, laying a shirt over his teeshirt, and fixed his hair–a process she watched with blinking incredulity. The edges of his eyelids were still pink from the crying jag, when he shrugged into the leather duster and gestured to her that he was ready. She followed him down the stairs and out into the night street, wondering if she ought to lead the way, ought to suggest some destination. But he seemed to know where he was heading.

They ended up, half an hour later, in a small crummy bar on First Avenue in Spanish Harlem, side by side in a dark booth, where Spike knocked back a double JD and a glass of beer within a minute, and she was sure the barman and the other patrons, bleary middle-aged men who’d stared at her with hungry resentment as they’d come inside, took her for a street-walker.

She was served with beer and not carded.

The jukebox played merengue, and the TV over the bar was tuned to an infomercial about some kitchen gadget.

She was certain this wasn’t what Spike had had in mind when he’d suggested they find something to amuse her, but there was no way now that she was going to bring that up. He hadn’t known what kind of horror storm was waiting for him in the shower stall.

When Spike had downed three beers and three shots of JD, she said, “Are you okay?”

“You really think it’s not fair that I suffer for what I’ve done?”

She wasn’t ready for this question, this return, after such fraught speechlessness, to her earlier offering, and answered what came to her first, without thinking: “I don’t know. It’s too complicated. Who am I to say?”

“You’re the slayer. All this is in your hands.”

“Not souls. Souls aren’t … my department. But it doesn’t feel fair.”

“Wrong question. Should ask yourself, did he choose?”

“Choose? I know you didn’t choose to get your soul back.”

“Did he choose to be a vampire.” Spike swallowed more beer.

This was, indeed, a question she’d never asked herself. She didn’t think much about vampires, just like she didn’t think much about rats and roaches. She’d never actually seen anyone turned. The closest she’d come–Xander’s friend Jesse, and that girl on parent-teacher night–it had happened elsewhere, out of her control. She knew the mechanics of how vampires were made, because her first watcher had taught her, but that was all.

At the point of death, with their last breath, the victim had to swallow some of the vampire’s blood, in order to rise again.

That didn’t seem like an exactly voluntary act. It was difficult to imagine what one could consent to, or refuse, in the moment of dying. “You sought it out? You asked Drusilla to turn you?”

“No. Had no idea who she was or what she was up to. But there’s a moment … never turned any myself, but I’ve seen it plenty, watchin’ Dru, an’ Angelus, an’ Darla. When the prey chooses.” The whole time they’d been walking, and since they’d sat down, he’d stared straight ahead, never turned to her. He regarded his beer glass as if he was talking to it.

“You’re saying you chose. Did you even know what was happening?”

Spike squeezed his eyes shut, pinched the bridge of his nose. Like the question was a stunner, something he couldn’t bear to face.

“Did you even know what a vampire was?” she asked. “Before you saw Dru?”

“No. Could feel my heart goin’ all crazy in my chest, an’ I couldn’t catch my breath. I was so afraid, an’ felt like she had all of life in her, an’ nothing but her kiss would save me.”

Trying to picture what he was saying, to sort it out, overwhelmed her. She had no context. Where, how? Spike swallowed the rest of his beer, gestured at the barman, who immediately brought another, having already been well-tipped. When he was gone, Spike held the base of the glass like a safety-line.

“Have you ever seen anyone who didn’t take it?” How, she wondered, could one be expected, as life was rushing away, to actively refuse any liquid dropped between one’s lips? Never before had it occurred to her, with all the instinctive disdain she felt for vampires, to hold responsible the people they’d once been. Sure, you could be stupid and put yourself in danger, but once you were bitten, once you were dying ….

“When I rose, that was the first time I was ever really alive.” He looked at her then, his eyes half-lidded, dark-circled. “First time I ever felt happy. Free.”

“You want me to blame you, is that it? For how you were killed?” Her own heart was racing. The air conditioning was too cold, or else there was something else in the air here that made the gooseflesh race up and down her arms, her neck. Spike watched her, silent, expressionless.

“Spike, everyone tries to stay alive. You … you were being murdered, and you couldn’t help–“

“How sweet you are.” He leaned back, and put an arm around her. Buffy tensed up, then, as his fingertips brushed against her cheek, the tension released. She shifted closer to him. His other hand, on the table, touched hers. “Deep down, still innocent, an’ sweet.”

She wasn’t sure if she made the first move, or he did, but all at once they were kissing, her fingers digging into his leather sleeve, her tongue in his mouth. Beneath the table, she went liquid. The next thing she knew they were in a tiny bathroom, she was bare-assed on the edge of the sink, her dress hiked up, Spike’s hands holding her knees wide, and he was inside her. She heard her own sobbing frantic cries, felt the cold metal of the tap against the small of her back, his leather crunching beneath her grasping hands, but all of it was secondary to the needy congested wet immediacy of fucking. She shook in helpless waves, the back of her head striking the mirror, her breath sawing. Biting the leather collar, biting at his neck, blindly seeking for his mouth, his tongue. She sucked his tongue, and Spike took her harder, filled her up, and she wanted to tell him that she was sorry she’d hurt him, sorry he hurt, and that she hurt too, unbearably, but this was helping helping helping, she needed it, she needed him. But there was no speech, she could only return his rhythm to him with deep reverberant thrusts that made them both gasp and swear.

She never could remember how they got out of the bathroom, or the bar; she recalled a short cab ride in which her mouth was glued to his, his hand up her skirt, and she was glad she couldn’t see the driver watching her in the rearview mirror. In the house they stumbled into the front parlor, dropping clothes as they went, and she took him astride, at a gallop, on the hard upholstered settee by the fireplace. This time she couldn’t take her eyes from his face, needed to see him watching her, her reflection in the wide black of his blown pupils. His slick thumb rode tight against her clit; pleas and pleases and moans fell from her as she writhed up and down on him. But it was when he caught the base of her skull in his hand and pulled her in close, breathing against her lips and then kissing her, kissing her slowly even though she was fucking him fast, that everything shimmered into chaos, and she was lost.