Flirting in Code
By Doyle

Kennedy blamed Willow. Dating rules said that even if it was a good break-up and you’d stayed friends and whatever, you had to blame your ex for everything, and wasn’t her Watcher always saying Kennedy needed to learn about following rules? She said that all the time, right between “there’s no ‘I’ in Slayer” and “ancient mystical samurai swords are not toys, Kennedy. No, not even if Santa left it for you.”

Willow had turned her onto geek chicks, so it was Willow’s fault that she was here a year later, watching Dawn catalogue books and wondering how bad - how good? - a response she’d get if she just threw her onto the library table and licked the nearest accessible piece of skin.

Okay, it was partly Dawn’s fault for wearing jeans that tight when she knew she was going to be stretching to reach the books on the high shelves. And for turning down a summer in Italy to help Giles rebuild the Council’s library – volunteering for three months counting books? That was the nerdiest thing Kennedy had ever heard, and it made her die a little of lust and frustration.

Dawn made jokes in and about languages nobody had spoken for ten bajillion years. Dawn glowed when she found a book in the stacks that nobody had known existed any more. Dawn had gone to Italy as Buffy’s nobody kid sister and come back gorgeous and vibrant and totally resistant to all Kennedy’s best flirting.

It was part of the universe’s great plan to drive her crazy.

“Well, maybe she’s straight,” said Vi, not even looking up from her movie magazine as Kennedy vented about dumb geek girls who didn’t notice come-ons. “You can’t get everything you want, Kenn.”

She considered that. “Y’know, I’ve heard that, but I’ve never really understood it.”

Vi rolled her eyes and told her to get laid, please; or, if she was going to keep hanging out in the library, at least read something. “If anybody’s mind could do with expanding…” she said, and Kennedy hit her with a pillow and hid her three favourite hats.

The reading advice was good, though. With a book open in front of her she had a reason to be in the library beyond “it’s raining outside” (which it wasn’t, and wasn’t England supposed to be nothing but rain?) and “I like watching you” (which was true, but looking back would’ve sounded more romantic without the ‘great ass’ part, with its accompanying thumbs up).

“You’re reading?” Dawn asked the first time her new masterplan went into action. “You’re reading something that doesn’t have a gun on the cover?”

“Some of us are into expanding our minds,” Kennedy said, haughtily turning to the first page.

The book was boring and nobody got murdered, but Dawn opened up after that. She talked while she worked; about Italy, which she’d loved, Italian boys, which she hadn’t, about stuff that had happened to her in Sunnydale and the classes she was planning on taking in college that fall.

Kennedy listened to it all, drinking in the way her eyes looked when she was talking reading lists and seminars, loving how she gestured with her hands when she got too excited describing the extra tutoring in demon languages she was getting from Giles.

“I still say she’s straight.” Vi had appointed herself official rainer on parades.

“No way. Look, she gave me this. She said it was really good and I’d love it.” Kennedy triumphantly tossed the book onto her roommate’s bed.

“So?”

“It’s about lesbians.”

“So clearly a come-on,” Vi teased, reading the back cover. “Anyway, isn’t this set, like, a hundred years ago? So there’s no sex or anything.”

Kennedy grabbed it back and read aloud. “ ‘Soon her breaths became moans, then cries; soon my own voice joined hers, for the dildo that serviced her also pleasured me…’ ”

“Uncle!” She pulled her hat over her eyes. “Okay, I give in, she’s into you. Just don’t screw her in my bed, please?”

“Jeez, one time…”

That throwing Dawn onto the table and ravishing her thing was looking more doable, but the next day Giles happened to come by while she was browsing a book on chaos magic and Kennedy was barred from the library. Totally unfair, she protested. It wasn’t like she was going to try any of the spells. Well, only the sex ones. And Dawn was going to be a Watcher some day, that counted as adult supervision.

Some days, watching Dawn and pretending to read, and really reading and still watching Dawn, it had felt like time had stopped, and the two of them were going to be there forever, stuck between seconds. It should have been boring. She couldn’t believe how much she missed it.

She ran the five miles to the village and back. She sparred with Vi. She had a cold shower. She read the book Dawn had loaned her. She had a colder shower. She thought about the smell of leather bindings and old paper, and the books she hadn’t finished.

It was a hopeless case. She’d gone native. She’d spent too long lusting after geeks, and now she was becoming one. She’d never recover.

When she walked into her bedroom and found Dawn sitting on her bed, she quickly decided that recovery was for losers.

“Hey,” Dawn said.

“Hey.” She let her towel slip a strategic half-inch. Dawn’s wide eyes followed it down. “Oh, did you want your book back? I’m not done with it.”

“That’s okay,” Dawn croaked.

“You must have read it a lot. It kept falling open at the same pages.”

“It’s a great book.”

“Yeah, the part where the girl’s dressed as a rent boy and the rich woman takes her home… oops.” The towel puddled on the floor. As signals went, this was blatant, even for Kennedy, but she figured that desperate times called for it.

Dawn was pretty when she blushed. And when she’d stopped blushing, she moved fast, in several senses.

“Wait,” she said as they hit the bed, and Kennedy reined in a wail of frustration.

“It’s okay.” She stroked her face, her hair, kissed away the drops of water that had fallen onto her bare shoulders. “I know you’ve never done this, and we’re going fast, it’s okay to want to stop…”

An eyeroll stopped her dead. “Please, what do you think I was doing at that school with a thousand gorgeous Italian girls?”

Kennedy was speechless. She couldn’t remember that ever happening to her before. With heroic effort, she managed. “So – wait – why?”

“Isn’t this Vi’s bed?”

She grinned very, very widely, and licked Dawn’s neck because it made her squirm and because she could. “Vi just has to learn,” she said serenely. “You can’t get everything you want.”