Buffy shivered under Spike’s blanket. They’d been at it for a while, and paused to take a break, and the sweat was cooling on her naked body. “You okay?” he asked.

    “Just a little cold,” she said. She snuggled in closer to him.

    He caressed her shoulder and breathed into her ear. “I wish I could warm you.”

    She pressed against him. “You are warm,” she said.

    He chuckled, and nibbled gently on her earlobe. “It’s all your heat.”

    “I know,” she said. “But you hold it for me.”

    “I love to hold it for you,” he breathed. “I can feel it all through me. Makes me feel alive.” He ran his lips along her cheek, up into her hairline. “The warmth of you, your life beside me, surrounding me. There’s only one other time I feel–”

    He stopped abruptly, and kissed her forehead. Buffy knew what he was swallowing. “When you kill?” she asked.

    “Been awhile,” he whispered back.

    He kissed her, gently, sensuously, and she fell into it for a while before she pulled back. “You miss it?” she asked, her voice heady.

    He looked at her oddly. “You don’t wanna hear me say that, pet.”

    “Yeah I do,” she breathed, and tickled his ear with her lips. “You could kill me,” she said. “You could feed off me. Do you want my blood?”

    Spike had frozen under her gentle assault. She pulled back and gazed at him, a strange smirk on her face. Realization replaced the shock in his eyes as he said, “You’re teasing me.”

    “Yes,” she said, with all the naughtiness of a school girl. “Tell me how you’d kill me.”

    His breath came a little ragged, and he almost laughed. “You are a little vixen, aren’t you.”

    “Tell me,” she whispered as she sensuously nuzzled his throat, “or I’ll go.”

    He hissed as a thousand erotic, blood-drenched thoughts assaulted him all at once. There was nothing stopping him from actually killing her, nothing at all... apart from himself. “It’s dangerous,” he confessed.

    She pulled her head away and looked at him with all seriousness. “How dangerous?”

    “Tempting a demon dangerous,” he said with a bit of a smirk.

    “All right. I see fangs,” she said, “you get them punched out.”

    “Deal,” he heard himself say. He felt like he was in the middle of a game of Russian Roulette, and Buffy was the one in front of the gun, but it was exhilarating nonetheless. Buffy had a bit of a death wish, he knew she did. So long as he let her play here, she might not dice so carelessly with her life outside. “Now?”

    “Yes,” she whispered.

    “Well, assuming we’re past the small-talk,” Spike said, “I take you somewhere quiet.”

    “Like here?” she breathed.

    He grinned. “Here’ll do,” he said. “I start... by running my lips up and down your skin.” Buffy’s breath came harder as he put deed to word, sliding along her throat and jaw. “I can do it hard, or gentle,” he said. Into her ear he whispered, “Do you want it to hurt?”

    Buffy hesitated, wondering how much he was playing. But she could feel his teeth against her earlobe, and there were no fangs. She trembled, and her breath came hard. “Yes,” she said, her voice hard.

    “Good girl,” he breathed. He nibbled on her ear and slid down to her throat. “I’m holding you,” he said, “tight enough you can’t get away.” He pulled away and looked at her, his face soft and surprisingly sweet. “Do you want to get away?”

    “God, no,” she whispered, almost against her will.

    He stared into her eyes. “My teeth are on your throat,” he said, fighting the urge to release his fangs,  “and I bite you hard, piercing that soft, hot flesh.” He yanked her body closer, driving himself inside her, unable to keep from biting her unless he claimed her in some other manner. He breathed a sigh of relief as the blood-lust focused into simple lust. “And it yields,” he said, “letting me inside you, inside your skin.”

    Buffy made a small sound of enjoyment and wrapped her leg around him, pulling him deeper inside. Her hot gasps heated his face. “Go on,” she said.

    “Then the blood flows,” he said, thrusting along with his words, “gushing into me, rolling over my tongue like the ocean, pulsing with the beat of your heart as you moan,” he twisted his hips to make her gasp, “with the pain.” She did moan for him then, her hot, wicked hands clenched onto his back. “I suck,” he said, “and I suck, drawing more and more of your life out of you, locked onto you, buried in you as you flow into me... your heat pouring down my throat... coursing through me... burning me....” He paused, fazed by the need to taste her, grunting as he forced himself to claim her only one way, while he made love to the words for the other. “Your... heat... flows through me,” he gasped, pushing harder and harder into her, afraid he’d come and lose control. More afraid than she was, clearly, as she stared at him with hunger as keen as his own. “Down through me,” he went on, “into my fingertips, flushing into my cheeks. I draw your life into me, become one with you.” He twisted inside her again. “One... with you....”

    She moaned then, gripping him tightly, and he knew he’d made her come. He gritted his teeth to stop himself from following suit. If he came now, he couldn’t possibly keep from killing her. He needed the unfulfilled promise to distract him from the scent of her blood. He managed to keep from coming, or drawing out his fangs, but he lost all control on what he intended to say next. The words started coming very fast, his jaw clenched. “I hold you so hard your flesh melts, and your ribs crack beneath my arms, and you can’t even scream. I tear at your throat, ripping out the flesh until the blood is a river I can’t even swallow, pouring down your skin, your breasts, drowning me in hot, fresh blood. I’m so hot, so alive with you. I twist you so hard your neck breaks, a symphony of cartilage and bone, squeezing your ragdoll form until all the blood gushes out of you like a sponge.” The demon had full control of his voice, now. “You’re broken, you’re mine, your life is mine, I am alive with you, you pour into me, every pulse – every – drop!” He came then, groaning with it until his throat ached, and she clenched him tightly, pulsing her muscles around him again and again, drawing it out as long as she could. It felt like dying from a maelstrom of pleasure and pain, probably the strongest, most overpowering, and least enjoyable orgasm of his life.

    A moment later, shaking, he shifted his hips to leave her and flopped onto his back. They were both panting, and Buffy’s eyes were like the night sky, infinite and unfathomable. “You are a sick bloody bitch!” he growled through his gasps.

    He gasped with his eyes closed, unable to stop shaking. “You okay?” she asked after a moment, as he kept trembling with spent desire and constrained blood-lust.

    “No,” he said honestly.

    “You gonna be okay?”

    “Eventually.”

    She paused. “Is it safe to kiss you?”

    “Yes,” he said, after a second’s consideration. She did, over and over again, and her kisses were gentle, soothing. Slowly they assuaged his blood-lust and eased his shaking. “You have no idea how dangerous that was,” he said when she stopped, and he could bring himself to open his eyes again.

    “I think I gathered by the end.” Was she bloody amused?

    “Oh, god,” he breathed. “What did I say?” He actually knew what he’d said – he remembered it clearly – but it was rhetorical. “I didn’t mean to go that far.”

    “I asked,” Buffy said, kissing his chest.

    “Did I scare you?”

    “Not really.”

    He laughed, almost hysterically. “I scared me. Bloody hell,” he breathed. “Excuse me,” he said then. He grabbed her and turned her, biting at her neck with a growl, then a grunt of relief, fangless, but with force, hard enough to bruise, but not to pierce. A long moment later he released her, leaving tortured white flesh to smooth flat as the blood his jaws had pinched off slowly returned. Deep tooth-marks graced her skin in a pair of beautiful semi-circles. He panted after, and looked down into her face. “You made my teeth ache.”

    She giggled. He wanted to hit her, she was so flippant about it. “Which one of us is supposed to be evil again?” he asked, and she laughed even harder. “Oh, love,” he said, caressing her cheek. “You’re a complete nutter.”

    “I like the hunger in your eyes,” she murmured. She opened her mouth and bit at his fingers.

    “You like tormenting me,” he said.

    “Mm-hm,” she said with a mischievous smirk.

    “I could always get you back, you know,” he growled. “Take you step by step how you’d finally slay me.”

    She shook her head with a little hum. “Not the same. It’s not a hunger.”

    He raised his eyebrow. “Isn’t it? So what is it, then, keeps you out night after night, stake in your hand, when you’d rather be watching the telly?”

    “It is a need, in a way,” she said. “But not a hunger. It’s like... a vampire is like a splinter in the world, digging into the skin, and I have to take it out. I end the pain of it.”

    He gazed at her. “Am I pain?” he asked, very softly.

    They both regretted him asking the moment he said it. The only answer she could give was the truth, in a whisper so soft only a vampire could have heard it. “Yes.”

    His expression didn’t change. He nodded, right. A moment later he rolled out of the bed, his face still completely expressionless, and went back up the ladder to his upper chamber. Buffy followed, wrapped in a sheet, concerned. She found him mixing himself a lamb’s blood cocktail, with a heavy dose of Jack Daniels.

    He wasn’t even angry. That was what frightened her.

    He said nothing to her, just took a swallow of his drink, then another, downing it. He started to mix another. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

    “No, you’re not,” he said. He looked up at her with eyes clear, face calm. “You like torturing me, I knew that.”

    “Not like that.”

    He looked up at the ceiling with a resigned look on his face. “I’d like torturing you,” he said with a sigh. He looked over at her, still flushed with orgasm, her eyes shadowed with pleasure, her nude body barely concealed beneath his sheet. “But I missed out a step down there,” he said.

    “What do you mean?”

    “After I’d splintered your bones and ground your flesh into jelly and made myself alive with every heated drop of your cold blood.” There was no heat in his voice, now. It was ice.

    She swallowed. “What was that?”

    “I walk into the sun,” he said calmly. “Because I’m not staying in a world without you in it. Not again.” He picked up his glass and took another swallow. “You know, you torture me because you know you can get away with it. ‘Cause you’re the only thing that makes this dead man feel alive. Even killing can’t do the things you do to me. I can’t draw out someone else’s life, and feel even half as alive as you make me feel.” He finished his glass and set it down gently. “So. It doesn’t matter what you do. Torture me. Kill me. Do what want with me. Say the most painful things you can. I can’t fight you anymore.”

    He looked so tired. Not angry, not even resigned, just tired of it all. Buffy took a step forward and reached for him, the sheet dropping away as she did it. She pulled him to her, her hands on his cool shoulders, and buried her head beneath his chin. “You make me alive,” she whispered. “You’re the only thing that does. Sometimes I need you just to keep breathing in and out.” She reached up and kissed him. “Pain is life,” she said. “I need your hunger for me. I need your fire. I need you....” she trailed off, unsure what she needed him for. It didn’t matter.

    “I love you,” he said, the words hurting and consoling her both, as they always did. He wrapped his arms around her, and she shivered in the damp crypt, gooseflesh rising. “You’re cold,” he said.

    “Warm me,” she said. “Please. Come down, and warm me up.”