"Dancing In The Rain"
Author: Samantha
Email: sammer77@aol.com
She picked herself up off the ground and shook the dust from her ponytail, sighing heavily. That had been the only vamp she had seen all night and she had taken longer than necessary to kill him just to pass the time. The slow nights were the toughest ones because there was nothing to occupy her mind other than the events of the day.
And that day’s events were not worth reminiscing about.
Sliding the stake back up into her sleeve, she shrugged and looked at her watch. It was pretty late and she should be heading back to Stevenson Hall, but she couldn’t bring herself to go that direction. Will would just want to know what was bothering her and she wasn’t in the mood to talk about it. She wanted to just forget it, but she couldn’t seem to do that either.
It just kept eating at her thoughts.
Giving up the fight, she finally just let the memories flow, her conscious mind becoming flooded with words and sounds and vivid pictures for the thousandth time that evening.
Impossible. That’s what he’d called her. He had said she was difficult to figure out and that he wasn’t sure he had the energy to try.
She had responded by telling him that if it was simple he wanted, he should go out and get one of those inflatable girlfriends. Of course, she said, he would need energy to blow her up and she wouldn’t want him to strain himself.
Yes, she had actually said that.
And after hearing her own words play around in her head for the hundredth time, she realized just how stupid they sounded. Inflatable girlfriend? Oh yeah, that was a good response.
She could engage in witty wordplay and banter with vampires, but she couldn’t have a decent argument with her own boyfriend.
All the papers had been graded and the reports had been completed and filed away neatly. There was nothing left to do but wander the sleeping campus in search of…of what? Something to take his frustrations out on, he guessed.
Graham and Forrest had kicked him out of the house almost an hour before, telling him that if he didn’t leave immediately, they *would* have to kill him. So after deciding not to pull rank on his best friends, he walked out the front door of Lowell House and into the humid night.
The entire day had been filled with activity embarked upon in an attempt to keep the ghosts of the morning at bay. Because his morning had, frankly, sucked ass.
She was so damned impossible sometimes. Hell, most of the time. And he had told her as much that morning on the phone. He didn’t have the energy to try to figure her out. At least that’s what he’d told her.
It wasn’t true, of course. Trying to figure her out was one of his favorite hobbies. But she had just made him so mad that he had blurted it out in the heat of the moment.
Her response had surprised him a little. And the more he thought about it, the more humorous it became.
She told him to get an inflatable girlfriend if all he was looking for was simple. That was, of course, if he had the energy to blow her up.
He shook his head and smiled ever-so-slightly at the sound of her words over the phone. She had hung up right after she said them and he remembered doing the same a few seconds later.
The whole thing had been stupid. So stupid, in fact, that he couldn’t even remember what had started the argument in the first place.
She certainly regretted her choice of wardrobe. The black sweater clung to her skin and she plucked the front of it to create a little circulation. She hated the humidity. Not only did it make her clothes stick to her, but the vamp dust too. Not to mention the adverse effects it was currently having on her hair. It had taken her almost an hour to curl her hair that morning. All for nothing.
The only reason she had curled it in the first place was because the boyfriend-who-shall-remain-nameless liked her hair curled. Then the big blowup occurred and he had never even seen it anyway.
She shouldn’t have bothered.
Looking up into the sky, she hoped to see stars. What she saw instead were the makings of a rainstorm.
Great. Patrolling in the rain. That was just the icing on the cake of her day.
It was going to rain; he knew it the second he had stepped out the door. He could smell it in the air—a little skill he had picked up when he was a kid.
But he didn’t care. A little rain never hurt anyone. Besides, it certainly would help make it cooler. The heavy, humid air made it hard to breathe.
He hadn’t seen her all day, hadn’t talked to her since that disastrous conversation on the phone that morning. And he felt like his day was incomplete, like he was missing something. He was—her.
But he certainly wasn’t going to tell her that.
That would be like acknowledging defeat, like surrendering. Hell would freeze over before he would surrender.
Of course, in Sunnydale, anything was possible.
Feeling the first, plump drops of rain fall on his head, he put his hands in his pockets and braced himself for the impending downpour.
Frowning, she cursed herself for having worn her suede boots. Now they would be completely ruined and she had already spent the "emergency" money her mom had given her to buy the boots in the first place.
When she looked up, she was eye-to-eye with a solid gray mass. A solid gray mass that remarkably resembled her heretofore nameless boyfriend whom she was supposed to be mad at.
But as her eyes moved up the wide expanse of chest—a chest to which the rain soaked gray t-shirt clung—she was finding it increasingly difficult to remember what she was supposed to be mad about.
"Hi," he muttered, pushing his hands deeper into his pockets.
She looked up into his face and gave him a closed-lipped smile. "Uh, hi."
"It’s raining," he said, then mentally kicked himself for saying something so utterly obvious.
"Yeah. It is," she replied softly, digging the toe of her now ruined boot into the wet turf.
They stood in awkward silence as the rain fell, each one avoiding eye contact and debating whether or not to speak first. Finally, after a long moment, they opened their mouths to speak.
At the same time.
"About this morning…" they both said.
Nervous laughter from both sides. "You go ahead," he said softly, nodding in her direction.
Shifting her weight uneasily, she swallowed and searched for the right words. She didn’t know where to start and she just looked him in the eye and said, "Dance with me."
His eyes widened at her words and he just stared blankly at her for a moment. When she didn’t repeat what she said, he asked, "Here? Right now?"
"Why not?" she said, smiling, ignoring the rain falling down her face.
He could never resist her smile. And he had never seen her look more beautiful as she did at that moment, standing in the rain, looking up at him.
A grin spread slowly across his face and he reached out to take her in his arms, reveling in the feel of her cheek against his chest. He closed his eyes, covered her hand with his, and rocked slowly, following her movements.
Silence passed between them. Then he leaned down and pressed his lips to her ear, whispering, "You’re a much better dancer than Cindy."
She stopped dancing and pushed away from him, looking up into his face, her eyes narrowing slightly at the sound of another woman’s name. "Who’s Cindy?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.
His grin grew wider as his eyes sparkled through the rain. "My new girlfriend. You know, the inflatable one." Then he winked at her and laughed.
Smirking at him, she punched him playfully in the stomach and said, "Very funny. You’re gonna pay for that one."
"Can’t wait," he replied, pulling her back against him and closing his eyes again.
There wasn’t any music; they didn’t need any. And there weren’t any words. Their only accompaniment was the sound of the rain.
The End