Chapter 4
She walked along the edge of the abyss, feeling her way by
touch and sensation, testing for edges and rocks, bumps, and fissures. She crouched down experimentally in the water to test her
ability to hold her breath, but something slithered past her in the water, and
she suddenly gulped in a mouthful of…air. She erupted from the water in shock, then looked down at it.
Her own legs looked distorted to her eyes, changed by the sea around them, but
when she ducked under again, she looked at herself, and she was normal. And she
could breathe; she didn’t understand how, but she could. The water itself was utterly comfortable; molded around her
body, supported her, swirled around her with her movements. It was so much less
work to move forward underwater than on the ground. She was interrupted in her thoughts by the realization that
he was solidly asleep, and naked. This had been right in front of her eyes, so to speak, the
entire time, but there was a time delay between her brain and her eyes. She slowly lifted her head and looked at him, starting at
that angelic face and working her way down. She’d never before realized that an
Adam’s apple could be interesting to look at, but it was a reminder that she
didn’t have one, and that seemed to sum up the realization that seemed more like
a revelation. “Oh. My. God. He’s…a guy! And he’s naked! Right here!
“ But it seemed to her she’d never before so much as devoted a
thought to the fact that Spike was of the masculine persuasion; he’d always
seemed like his own irritating demographic group, impossible to characterize as
anything but Spike, possessing his own characteristics, irritating though they
were, but impossible to find duplicated anywhere else. He had absolutely no body fat anywhere, and even while
asleep, his body was lithe and supple looking. He looked almost frail naked, and
that was something surprising to her, because in her nightmares he’d almost
loomed monstrously tall. She traced a finger down its length and was startled at how
soft the skin was. Softer than his lips, she thought. Gently, she circled the head with one cautious fingertip, and
it twitched, just a bit. She caressed the slit, then encircled the whole
circumference with her hand. Spike sighed in his sleep. She glanced at his face, startled,
but he was still asleep, probably worn out, she thought. She ran her finger up
and down the groove along the bottom, and Spike sighed again. Now he was getting hard, and she could see it, feel it, and
she didn’t know what she was doing, what she was going to do. She couldn’t leave
him like this, he’d know and…..She was getting excited. He was utterly asleep, she thought, what if he didn’t wake up
at all? She wasn’t aware what she was thinking, except there was a rushing sound
in her ears, and before she was aware of it, she had swung her legs over his,
poised over his erection. No eye contact, she thought. No confusing thoughts. No Spike,
his mask falling away before her, till she was confronted with someone else,
someone she didn’t know, even while she wondered if he, too, was seeing
something she didn’t want to reveal. She positioned herself on him, and slowly slid down his
length, holding her breath. She looked at his face, seeing him again as he had looked the
last time, his face twisting with pleasure, changing, someone she wasn’t used to
seeing….She thought of him like that, and she went faster. And his eyes snapped open. They stared at each other, Buffy
trapped and horrified at getting caught, Spike slowly registering the heat
around him, the movement. She was on him, riding him, and he suddenly understood the
dream of a warm sea that had engulfed him. Understood it, but didn’t. He tried to sit up, but that changed his angle in her body,
and it sent a bolt through him. Buffy stared down at him, her expression stricken,
guilty-looking, and he couldn’t figure out why. Oh, he’d been dreaming of
seething waters, but it was nothing compared to her. He spread his legs and bent them, and she braced her hands on
his knees as he leaned in to kiss her, their tongues ebbing and flowing with the
movements of their bodies, teasing sounds out of throats and bodies. “I’m sorry.” She whispered. Spike threw his head back and bit his lip, trying not to make
a sound, but he couldn’t stop from panting. “Why? Because you made me hard? Because you wanted me inside
you?” He had only one hand free, supporting his weight with his
other arm braced behind himself, but he made the most of it, stroking her
clitoris with one finger, then tracing her nipple with a wet fingertip. She stared into his face, wondering who it was she was with.
His hands, his tongue did things to her that could only have been perfected
through experience, but his face, his expression, was almost absurdly innocent,
utterly without guile or pretense, pleasure stripping all the defenses he wore
during the day. Looking at him as he closed his eyes, she saw someone she hadn’t
expected and didn’t know….but wanted to.
Once she was
underwater, it seemed as if it was almost daylight; light illuminated the
depths, and she could see her own hair swirling around her.
She swam along the edge
of the precipice, wondering if this dream would turn into a nightmare. But there
was only one way to find out. She braced her feet on the edge of the shallow
shelf, and launched herself over the edge….
The water was warm, and the light
gentle, almost like sunset light, and strange little sparkles swirled around
her. No more Disney movies for a while, she thought, even in her dream, and then
she snapped awake.
The water had been warm, but she was cold, curled up
around Spike, with her skirt as a blanket, and his coat as a mattress…..and him
as a pillow. She laid still for a moment, assessing where she was. It was
actually pretty warm; this was Southern California, and cool was eighty degrees.
She wondered if she could get up and quietly leave. Would he notice? Could
she sneak away, pretend it hadn’t happened?
And now….She touched
his throat, flushing slightly at the spot on his collarbone where she’d bitten
him.
She traced her hand past his bellybutton, and
hesitated. His penis lay relaxed between his legs, and she wondered if she dared
do to him, what he had done to her. She wondered for a moment what he would
taste like, what his face would look like if she did.
She stroked him a
few more times, and now he was completely hard, and she found that she herself
was suddenly, abruptly, aroused.
And then letting it go. She wasn’t as ready as
she thought she was; something was wrong, it just didn’t feel like it had. It
was devoid of anything, even when she tentatively rose and fell on top of him a
couple of times. It was pleasant, and that was all.
He opened his mouth and shut it, trying to believe
his eyes and senses, trying to separate the dreams from the reality.
“Why?’ He asked, but she
discovered the skin on his thighs, able for the first time to do what he usually
did; stroke the long muscles of the thigh, caress the sensitive muscles of the
inner thigh.
Buffy blinked at him, utterly beyond speech. She couldn’t have managed
coherent speech anyway. The angle, the position, was new, and she could see
every thing. Every thing. She could see him entering her, and even as she turned
fiercely red, she couldn’t have said whether it was shock or…She didn’t even
have a word for it.
He watched her face, watched her breathing in rhythm to
his movements, watched her arch and roll. She pushed herself forward to kiss
him, grasping the back of his neck with one oddly cool hand, gasping against his
lips, her tongue echoing the movements of their bodies, surging and flowing,
receding and returning.
Oh, God, she wanted to. She wanted
to know where the gentleness came from, how he kissed like that. Who was this
person inside her, inside him? She didn’t feel exposed to him any longer, she
felt as if she’d been connected to him at the skin, at the soul, at the heart,
and she didn’t even know who he was any more. Now she understood why it was so
vivid, all of it, where it had never been before, because she’d never felt like
that about anyone else before.
She pulled herself forward, getting her weight on her
knees, but that brought every sensitive spot on her body against some hard
muscle on his so that she abruptly without any warning at all, froze, as her
body contracted with orgasm. The surges of it brought her against him further,
and it didn’t end. It was like a pulse, endless, cyclical, and she thought it
was too much for her; she thought it would kill her.
He turned her over, burying himself in her in flesh made
sensitive by pleasure. She hadn’t even recuperated; she grabbed at him as he
moved slowly against her, his face straining over her, burying his face between
her breasts, her heart pounding against his face. He stiffened over her,
quietly, shuddering, and she tried to pull him closer, wanting him closer still,
closer than inside her, closer than it was possible to get.
”Not
possible”, she thought.
He pulled out of her gingerly, and she saw again
the stranger’s face. Was this who he really was, was this the person who loved
her? Who did he see? How could he be so sure of whom he loved, when she didn’t
know herself?
Chapter 5
It was Spike who couldn’t sleep, who couldn’t relax, who couldn’t let go. He was
conscious of the rising temperature, the humidity, the breeze that sprang though
the gaps in plaster and glass. It was going to end. He could feel it coming,
hear it, taste it, and only scant hours kept it away. The hairs rose on his
arms, on the back of his neck, and there was nothing he could do to hold it
back. He turned over on his side and tried to engrave her on
his memory; every gasp, every sigh, every sound, and every sensation. He knew
there would be nothing else; he’d been too lucky as it was, and he had to make
sure that every iota was remembered. She curled up next to him, and he was
reluctant even to touch her, as if reality would sully what had happened. He ran it through his mind, stroking her hair with one airy
finger as he did so. The first kiss, the contact, the shock, the frenzy. He
wanted to separate the moments, the flow, the feeling. He couldn’t; he couldn’t
remember the exact moment she’d come down on him because his eyes had been too
full of her, as she buckled over him, every fiber of her body plucking chords
in his, every cell in her body exploding around him, and how was he supposed to
be sensible? He knew what had been happening with her through all those weeks
after she’d returned; seen her waste down to a pale thin creature who almost
looked more like a vampire than he did, even while he tried to remember how
simple it had been not to give a damn, or---to not give a damn, vehemently. He’d
lost track of all the times he’d seen her on the back porch, not even crying,
which he’d seen her do more than a few times when her mum was ill, but sitting
there silent, while her supposed friends bickered about, no doubt, her
ingratitude inside her own house. Just don’t think about it, he thought, but he checked
the dim light, and knew it was just the debris between him and the rays that
could kill him. Oh, he hadn’t expected this, this shocking turn, not in a
million years. He’d thought just to be around her, seeing her day after day,
would be enough, but now…! He’d measured her as any enemy takes stock of their
opponent, to defeat them, but he’d never expected the things he’d seen this
night. She was so tightly wound, so controlled, should he have expected her to
be so…..? She was a creature from some history, more of a vampire than he was,
the way she attacked him, made him feel dead and alive at the same time. As a
disinterested observer, he’d seen no sign of it with Angel, but he was biased;
‘passion’ and ‘Angel’ were just not two words he could put together in a
sentence and feel good about. Then there’d been the wanker, a doe-eyed creature
he’d summed up as being too embarrassing even for lunch, the vampire equivalent
of incredibly tacky food. Instead of a White Castle, Parker had been the
whitest of White Boys, so greasy he’d slide right through. Pity he hadn’t at
least done away with the little bastard, though. And then…ah, yes, then. He flopped over on his back to
think of Riley, the one he personally most regretted the chip for, the one who’d
hurt Buffy even worse than Angel, because he was such a good guy. Bastard
thought he ought to get a better deal because he was one of the good
guys, even when he was doing the one thing guaranteed to hurt Buffy like
nothing else. He wondered if he could make a case like that for himself. He was
bad, no doubt, but trying to be good, why, he wasn’t sure. Still, it was harder
for him to be good, so shouldn’t there be some kind of brownie points for him
for trying? And shouldn’t it be worse when Captain Cardboard did something
wrong, because he was such a good guy? At the very least, he had further
to jump. Had to be lot of time to think on the way down. Same thing for me, he thought. Lots of time to think
about what I’m doing, except I’m not jumping off a cliff and landing on some
poor Slayer on the way down. I’m climbing, and it’s all asses and elbows. Lots
of time to think. Lots of sweat, lots of…he couldn’t think straight, he was so
tired. Lots of….stuff. He studied the girl next to him. Lots of time to think,
but as long as it was her he had to think about, he didn’t mind. He wondered what would happen, not in the morning, which
he figured was going to be bad, but he also knew he had a chance to kiss her out
of it. He shook his head at the amazing figure of Riley Finn, a man who got a
chance with Buffy, and tossed it aside, not because she was too much to handle,
but because he didn’t even try hard enough. Spike knew one thing with absolute clarity. Now he was
going to try. He didn’t know how much of a chance he had of succeeding, but he
knew he was going to keep making the effort. He wasn’t going to slink back to
his crypt to write poetry, although his fingers itched suddenly with the desire
to find a rhyme for ‘contusion’—no, he was going to dream about this. And then he was going to wake up, to find her not
knocking and then yelling at him, no doubt. Better sooner rather than later,
he thought. Get the yelling over with, get on with it. Yelling he could handle.
It was the silence that worried him, silence meaning she was so locked up in her
chest, she couldn’t get it out, till it came out like a volcanic eruption. “Ablution,” he thought suddenly, and went to sleep
with happy thoughts of bad poetry and loud fights making his lips curve into a
contented smile.
THE END