Orpheus,

tilting through shade,

in the Sun’s back alley, spies

the Prize; all five feet and ten pints,

strides she, a wing’s beat

(in still marshes, legs like long sighs)

and the stung air of fried French

Solanum?

And such depths

in the angels’ Pimpleia

are both known and wanted

and wanton, and cheap

( free, the naiads swear on torn knickers)

at any price the stars might name, she turns

her white chee—OH BOLLOCKS

~*~*~

“Uh, hello?” she crooned. “I can see you!”

“Eh?”

The Slayer flung the rubbish sack high – a proper goal, straight in the dumpster. “You. I can see you. With my eyes.”

“Oh. Right.”

Spike smoothed his hair, and shoved his hands in his pockets, and scrubbed his bootheels on the black grime. The loading dock behind the Doublemeat Palace was a beastie’s heaven of ripe scents. He pictured almighty rat kingdoms beyond each sheet of rotted iron and stained brick, a sea of gray, boneless bodies squirming for a closer look at this tragic sport of theirs.

“So, what’s cookin’, love?” he asked. “I mean, besides the Jumbo Value Meal?”

“Go away.”

“Just got here.”

“Yeah, well, that’s life in the fast lane for ya.”

It was mind-boggling. Even now: clad in that shapeless nylon nightmare and that ludicrous Bessie the Bleeding Cow cap, even slathered in failure and rendered fat. Even now the little minge could lance him like a sodding boil. She stood glaring at him for a few heartbeats, that glassy go hither look in her eye, and then returned to her stygian labors. All those sacks of murdered meat and milkshakes…

Thick as two short planks, he thought, watching the goddess slog through the muck. The image was stark lunacy: the waste of all-of-that that on all-of-this.

“Need some help?” he heard himself say.

Poofter! Bloody Pillow Biter!

“No. Not unless you wanna help me snake out my grease traps…”

And, of course, her body stiffened under the candy-stripe number, the Slayer decoding her own reckless rhyme. She heaved a familiar sigh, and William the Bloody Idiot braced his head for a good kicking.

“Look, don’t be stupid,” he said. “This is not you.”

“Weird. Says me on the paychecks.”

“It’s beneath you, love.” Another sack flew into the dumpster, this one on a high arc with some ‘oomph’ behind it. “Have a look at yourself! This really what you want to do with your life?”

“Wow! Guidance counselor with a body count. O, teach me how to live a fulfilling life, Mister Dead Guy.”

Another sack of slime splattered onto the pile. She wouldn’t even spare him a glance. Even the trash merited more consideration. This, he realized, was the part when he was supposed to slink off back to his lair, tail tucked and bollocks duly snipped.

He prowled closer instead, the gears slowly spinning. Spied the lid of a garbage can.

“Gonna to get you killed,” he said. “This type of work. It deadens the wits. Turns the reflexes to jelly.”

Once the rubbish bin was in reach, his hand flashed out. It snatched the lid and whipped it like a discus. The makeshift frisbee sailed the distance quicker than his own brain, so he still had an impish grin plastered on his face when it connected with a cartoony bong on the Vampire Slayer’s forehead.

There came an unnerving silence. Her eyes found him now, of course. Drilled bloody lasers through him, in fact, and burned flaming holes.

“Now, hang on,” he said. “Honestly, dint mean to… ”

She was fox-quick, faster still than Spike’s wayward disc, her cow helm bobbing like a lunatic’s frowzy mane. He knew better than to resist, by now. So, as her violent little form came rumbling through the darkness, he just closed his eyes and thought of England.

Waited for it.

Waited.

Waited some more.

Her breath was piping out hot, close enough for him to feel it on his neck. He could taste that electric bangle-jangle of her nerves, and all that racing blood shot through with adrenaline, and that church bell gonging away in her breast.

Still nothing.

Having been fooled before, he gently cracked open an eye.

She had her fists balled up tight, like arrows strung and drawn. But her eyes weren’t in the game. Tears hammered the lashes, nostrils pink and flaring. A smudge of grime painted one of her flushed cheeks.

It was wrong, wrong. When he glanced down, even her shoes were wrong: hideous, blocky, mannish, built for crawling. The girl’s shame, always spun out on the ether, was suddenly a solid thing, and huge.  And blaring like a siren.

He felt like he might go bugshaggers standing there, so he grabbed her by the hips. When they kissed, it was the way she always seemed to do it, that End of the World Snog, her fingers clawing his hair like they might tear it all out with their murderous strength.

He ran his hands under the horrific blouse, over warm tits, down every iron knot of her spine. The tongue in his mouth felt so alive that he had to strangle a large portion of his brain to remind himself not to bite it.

When the fingers in his hair began to loosen, he almost shouted his panic. His legs and arms shouted instead, driving the girl against the wall. Her arms wriggled and twisted, elbows quarrelling with hands. She was trying to speak but her mouth wouldn’t obey.

That smart, smart mouth...

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t you bloody dare.”

He might have been a mugger for the ghastly look she shot him; the eyes bugging out, teeth set and white and shining through the dark like vesper candles. They stood there for what felt like a long time, one breathing and one pretending to.

There were only a few lamps in the alley, but what they revealed was like his dreams of London; all the nasty, squalid bits of it, the fisheries and the wharfs and the roominghouses, and all the back alleys where aromas of food and death mixed so well that one realized they were the one and the same, that the difference was a trick of grammar.

But it was balmy in London, most of the time. Here, it was all California swelter, and while his cursed body absorbed it like a serpent’s, hers was peppered with delicious sweat.

“No,” she whispered. “Not here. It’s… dirty…”

He tugged her belt loose. One hand plunged down the front of her knickers, handling one thigh and then the other. He felt the same volt go through him as the first time, as every bloody time. As strong as she was, the legs down there were as soft as pillows.

She grabbed for his waistband instinctively, but by then he had her in his grip. His thumb found her little button and circled it. Pressed it with long and short strokes.

She began to breathe soft agreements in his ear. The little sounds she made were starting to become familiar to him, but not commonplace. Never that. These were like electric shocks in the madhouse, the warden gradually burning some blueprint into his heart.

And, he started to breathe too…

Ponce! Bloody Rent Boy!

He grabbed her sodding throat.

“Yeah. ‘Bout time to get real dirty, love.”

Green eyes bulged at him. Bessie the Bloomin’ Cow Hat had a gander, too, with her cheap rouge and that black lipstick, like she tongued arseholes between milkings.

He waited for Buffy’s eyes to narrow, to glaze over. This bit was familiar too.

She was off the clock, now. It was time to play.

“Oooh, big talker,” the Slayer snarled.

Her little hand slid up the front of his jeans. It wrenched the belt and button loose. He could feel that peculiar ache of hers pouring through her fingertips when she gripped his cock, the thing inside her that whispered, “This is mine, this is mine now.” The sensation almost broke him…

OH, IS THAT SO, MARY?!

THAT SO, YOU LIMP, FLUTTERING BATTY BOY?

“No,” he said. “You can’t have that.”

She kept stroking and tugging, like she didn’t hear. He grabbed her wrist hard, fingers biting hard into bone.

“Gotta ask nice, first,” he said. “You know how to ask nice, don’t you love? With that smart mouth a’yours?”

She didn’t blink.

She just sank to her knees.

(and wanton, and cheap...)

The angle he had on her was a miracle of old cinema; the paltry street light pinning her shape against a sea of muck, her angelic gaze pasted on a damp spotty canvas. Black bits of ash and granulated smog stuck to her cheeks and chin, mapping out little tantalizing constellations of decay.

She kept her watery gaze locked to his as she swallowed him, inch by inch, working hard but trying to look like she wasn’t, trying not to gag on his cock. Working hard at making it look easy.

“That’s it.” He snatched Ol’ Bessie off her head and tossed it, grabbed a fistful of yellow hair, that sodding boy-cut she got just to spite him. “There’s a good little cow.”

She did it right. Swirled her tongue in a circle, good and slow, bobbing and bobbing, her tiny fist wrapped round the base to stop from choking on the rest.

And part of him didn’t want that. Part of him wanted her to gag and choke on it. And even as he tried to silence that part, he felt himself rocking his hips forward, making his cock dig a little deeper and a little deeper and a little deeper.

When he felt a bit of mild resistance, his fist hardened to stone in her hair, enough to stiffen her spine. A muffled complaint escaped her, and a snorting, half-strangled breath. But these things only spurred him on, made his body dance, the gentle thrusts graduating into the steady beat of a war drum.

When her grip finally crumbled and the hand fell away, he went full bore at her. Then he was just shagging her face – fucking that smart, smart mouth of hers in the alley where she hauled trash.

(And such depths...)

She worried her brow and opened her throat. Dined on him like he was made of sodding chocolate.

“Mmm,” she said. “Mmmmmmm…”

Her eyes. They were blasting out pure black hate and something else, but the hate was all he could use right now. So he sank the fangs of his own eyes deep into them, drinking down her hate and shame and the other thing (no, no, not that) and blaring it back at ten thousand times the volume. He fucked and fucked and fucked her beautiful face, soothed by the slippery music of her lips as his cock battered the warm, pink walls of her throat.

The unexploded bomb was ticking down to zero. He almost let it blow, too, but the squalid little night was singing to him, now, and, for all he knew, this could be the last night on Earth.

So, after one last thrust, he slowly guided her off him by the reins of her hair.

When the head reemerged, the girl was gasping like a rutting sow. Her tongue dashed out and licked the tip. A romantic farewell kiss.

(the Prize; all five feet and ten pints...)

“That wasn’t askin’ nice,” he chided. “That was nasty.”

Fingers still knotted along her scalp, he took the doggy for a little walk. She yelped and cursed and pretended to differ, one hand snatching at his fingers, the other groping along the greasy asphalt.

Across the way, a squat gray recycling bin sung out to him. It seemed just the right height.

“We’ll work on table manners some other time,” he said. “Right now, we got some rubbish needs takin’ out...”