Chapter 11 – Not Guilty, Not Guilty at All



The following evening, after another long day at the gallery – hello, tons of time to think – Buffy reached a decision. Or maybe she had an epiphany. A revelation?


Well, whatever it was, it was relatively simple to explain: She refused to feel guilty.


Not for cold-heartedly dumping her boyfriend yesterday over the phone after waking him up. Yeah, breaking up was supposedly hard to do, but Riley had made it surprisingly easy with his steadfast refusal to hear her.


Not for outright lying about her nocturnal activities to two of her friends last night, with the gleeful participation of her mortal enemy. Half-naked, former mortal enemy at that.


And certainly not for lusting after said former mortal enemy, half-naked or not.


No, there was no guilt to be had here. None at all.


Why? Because she was done with guilt.


Spike was hot, funny, just bad enough to be good, just good enough to be bad – whatever that meant – exciting, gorgeous, dangerous, willing, and, most importantly, there. Why should she feel bad for wanting to spend as much time with him as possible? All the rest of her friends were paired off with a significant other that was actually in town and that they cared for. She wanted that too, damn it, and if nakedness and lusty goodness happened while spending time with the vampire she suddenly wanted it with, well who was she to turn her back on it?


She wouldn’t. And she would go one step further and ensure that it actually happened. Tonight, preferably.


Her talk with Anya the other night had, with hindsight and blinders off and all that jazz, revealed that she had been unhappy with Riley. Not because he wasn’t perfectly nice, and not because he hadn’t been an attentive, loving boyfriend.


It was because there was no heat. No passion. No I-wanna-tear-your-clothes-off-and-ravish-you-right-frickin’-NOW-ness to be had in all their relationship.


Hand-delivered orgasms, however, were aplenty. Bountiful, even. Guilt over being stronger and a better fighter was also in abundance.


And that she could do without.


Spike reveled in her strength and agility – had he not sought her out to spar with? And she was willing to bet that over a century on the planet had taught him a thing or two about pleasing a woman.


Which was why she was prowling through town looking for him, dressed in nothing but a flippy, flirty skirt and a halter top, sans bra. He hair was loose around her shoulders; she knew it was a look men liked and even though it was still hot as hell outside and a bun would be a smarter idea, she couldn’t resist putting all chances on her side for a little seduction action.


She was antsy, unfulfilled, and itching for a little ‘rough and tumble,’ as Spike would put it. And if she had anything to say about it, the outcome would leave both her and the vampire quite satisfied…


She would not take no for an answer. Spike wouldn’t know what had hit him.


And if she felt just a twinge of discomfort at the idea of pursuing someone not even twenty-four hours after breaking up with her steady boyfriend, well she would allow herself to feel a tiny amount of guilt.


But not for long.



--*--*--



An agonizing hour of searching later, she was still wandering Sunnydale’s quiet streets and getting frustrated with it. Usually, she couldn’t set foot outside her house or dorm without stumbling over Spike. Now, when she actually wanted to run into him, he was nowhere to be found!


Was that irony, she wondered? Or just another annoyance she could add to Spike’s lengthy résumé?


“Buffy!”


“Anya, hi!” Anya was resting against a lamppost in front of Sunnydale’s Other Gym, in full workout regalia, and looked unusually worn out. “Should I bother to ask what you’re doing here?”


Anya was also panting softly. She took a swig of water from the plastic bottle she was holding. “I just got out of a boot camp class at the gym, which I,” she paused for a few pants, “low-impacted my way through like you would not believe.”


“Tough class?” Buffy sympathized.


“Human bodies are not made for such exertion! I swear, if that instructor had uttered the words ‘eight more’ followed by ‘again’ one more time, I would’ve summoned D’Hoffryn in a split second to,” Anya paused yet again for a few more pants, “wreak some serious vengeance on the girl.”


“If it can be any consolation, it does get easier after a couple of classes,” Buffy reassured her.


Anya wiped her arm across her brow and pushed off the lamppost to come stand next to Buffy. “Easy for you to say, she of the innate physical fitness and coordination. If I didn’t value the intensity and frequency of my orgasms so much, I’d give this up all together.”


Trust Anya to, once again, bring everything back to sex.


“And why weren’t you there tonight?” Anya continued. “I thought aerobics could be something fun we could do together. And I just know that with Riley away and all, you need stuff to do.” She paused, thoughtfully. “Unless you’ve already found something else to do?”


Buffy decided to ignore that last question. No way was she rising to the bait Anya was dangling in front of her. She obviously hadn’t fallen for last night’s ‘the demon stole our clothes’ subterfuge. “Um, I kinda broke up with Riley last night. Or at least I think I did.”


“You broke up with Riley!” Anya exclaimed. Loudly.


“Hey, keep it down,” Buffy admonished her.


“Who broke up with who now?” a very familiar voice asked from behind her.


She turned around to face Spike. Now he shows up? After she’d spent the better part of an hour scouring the streets and cemeteries for him, he shows up while she’s gabbing with Anya – loud-mouthed, brazen, speaks-her-mind Anya – and talking about her very recent breakup. Not good.


Or, she realized, very, very good. It all depended on how you wanted to look at it…


“Go away, Spike! Buffy and I are sharing some quality girl time!” Anya made little shooing motions with her hands.


“Oi, ’s a free sidewalk, ain’t it?” Spike retorted.


Time to get things back on track before the convo veered too far away from her latest predicament. “I’m pretty sure I broke up with Riley last night,” she admitted, looking up at Spike through her lashes.


“Pretty sure? Wha’ in blazes does that mean?”


“Yes, Buffy, please explain,” Anya chimed in.


Buffy spotted a bench near the entrance to the gym and made her way over to sit, trusting that both Anya and Spike would follow her.


“When I got home last night, there was a message from Riley on our machine. He wanted me to call him back, so I did, we talked, about nothing really, and it just hit me: our relationship wasn’t going anywhere.”


Ok, not technically the truth, but ‘I broke up with Riley in order to have dirty naked fun’ was not something she’d admit in the presence of said dirty naked fun and she-of-no-discretion.


“Oh, Buffy, I could have told you that,” Anya admonished.


“Me too,” Spike concurred.


“Ok, what do you know?” she asked Spike. Without waiting for a reply, she continued, “Let’s just say that a conversation I had with Anya the other night may have opened my eyes to the fact that he’s been gone for about a week now and I don’t miss him. At all. Which, correct me if I’m wrong, is so not a good sign that all is right in Buffy’s relationship land.”


“You broke up with Riley because of something I said?” Anya asked, pleased.


“Partly, yeah,” Buffy admitted.


“Wha’s the other part?” Spike inquired.


“That is none of your business, Mister!” she exclaimed. And then something occurred to her. “Hey, and not that I want to be all bitchy Buffy here, but why am I sharing this with you two when I haven’t even told Willow and Xander yet?”


“Because I’m your friend too, Buffy,” Anya replied with a hurt look on her face. “Or at least I thought I was.”


“You are! It’s just that…” she trailed off, unsure of where she wanted to go with her explanation.


“Just that you’re closer to Willow and Xander and wanted to tell them first,” Anya finished for her. “I get it. Well then, I’ll just get out of your way. Wouldn’t want you to spill any more late breaking news to me by accident!”


Anya spun around and stomped off, short ponytail bouncing.


“Anya, wait!” Buffy started after her, but Spike grabbed her hand to halt her.


“Let her go.”


“What? No! I hurt her feelings, I should go apologize,” she explained, tugging on her had to get him to release her before giving it up as a lost cause. They were too evenly matched for her to overpower him and get him to let go. And, truth be told, she kind of liked the feeling of his cold hand in hers.


“Let her go,” Spike repeated. “I know enough about you birds to know that when you leave in a huff, you wan’ to be left alone for a bit.”


He let go of her hand then and reached in his pockets to extract a pack of cigarettes and his lighter. She watched him, fascinated, as he lit the cigarette and took a long drag. God, it was just too sexy that he was left-handed. It made everything he did look slightly off, but in an interesting way. She remembered back during their engagement, when they’d been snuggled in Giles’ armchair and he’d been scribbling away in a notebook. She’d loved the way he’d been holding the pen, the way it made her focus on his hand and fingers. She recalled how she’d drifted into a daydream then, of those fingers stroking and those hands kneading–


“So, what’re you doin’ tonight, pet? Found any demons that need killin’?” Spike inquired, effectively bringing her back down to earth.


“Actually, I was looking for you,” she admitted, falling into step at his right as he started walking away from their spot in front of the gym.


“Really? ’m surprised, thought you’d be due for a spell of avoidance after last night,” he smirked down at her.


“Good point. So I’ll see you around, then?” Buffy teased and made to turn around and leave him. Of course, it was also perhaps just a ploy to get him to grab her hand again.


Spike did not disappoint. He halted her escape once again by twining his fingers through hers. “No need for that, luv. We’re both adults here.” He smirked. “Some of us more than others.”


“Hey,” she protested, using her free hand to smack him on the shoulder. “I’m nineteen, therefore an adult. And I find it very adult of me that I’m walking with you in a civilized manner instead of being all avoido-girl because of what happened last night.”


“Yeah, about that…” Spike trailed off, sounding unsure, which was so unlike him that Buffy immediately dropped his hand and prepared herself for the inevitable rejection she was sure coming.


“Yeah, I know,” she started to say, before Spike interrupted her.


“Was a bloody revelation, it was.”


“Huh?” Buffy stopped in her tracks, shocked. She’d expected a brush off, maybe a little cruelty. Certainly not to hear her former – yes, still former – enemy admit that it hadn’t been a gigantic mistake.


“What do you mean, ‘huh’? You were there! It was bloody fantastic.” He whirled around to face her and grabbed her gently by the shoulders. “Wanna do it again?”


Oh god, the way he was looking at her! Blue eyes searching hers, hope etched across his features. Her gaze focused on his mouth, those lips. It was what she wanted, wasn’t it? What she’d set out for tonight, what she’d dressed for, shaved her legs in anticipation of? And it would be so easy to just lean up and press her lips to his and see where it went, how far it would go.


A part of her, not the girl, but the Slayer, was shocked at how fast her opinion of Spike had changed in less than a week. He’d gone from a disgusting, evil thing to a desirable partner, an equal, someone she could honestly see herself being with. Someone she’d broken up with her boyfriend – or at least attempted to – for. And now that the fateful, symbolic ‘last chance to back down’ moment had arrived, she was faced with one last decision that would change everything: to kiss Spike again and embrace something new and dangerous and exciting, or to back away and… well, she wasn’t sure what, but odds were it wouldn’t be as fun as option number one.


Which made leaping into the unknown easier.


So she whispered a soft “yeah,” barely loud enough for even Spike’s sensitive ears to hear and leaned in and up in an open invitation for him to make a move.


Thankfully, he wasn’t a man that needed directions. He slid his hands up from her shoulders to cup her face. “Yeah?” he asked softly. “You really wanna do it again, luv? No going back this time. No stopping.”


“No going back,” she murmured in reassurance, closed her eyes, and waited.


And waited.


Just as she was about to open her eyes to see what the hold up was, she felt his lips brush hers in a feather-light caress. Despite the hot night, she shivered. And then he did it again, and again, teasing her lips with soft, barely-there brushes, changing the angle on every kiss.


It was gentle, surprisingly, and it felt so good. Who knew? William the Bloody had a tender side.


Buffy Summers did, too. However, she also had a penchant for something a little harder, a little more demanding. Months of sweet Riley kisses had made her crave... more.


“More,” she therefore whispered when Spike’s lips left hers to plant a trail of moist kisses across her cheek to her ear. He bit down gently on her earlobe, and she shivered a bit harder.


“You want more?” he murmured in, guh, that voice and her knees all but gave out from the sensations it stirred between her legs.


She moaned in reply and nodded. Tilting her head to give him better access to the erogenous zone that was the place where her neck met her shoulder, she darted her tongue out to trace the shell of his ear and whisper a breathless “please.”


His hands had slid down from her face to her shoulders. Which wasn’t where she wanted them, but she could wait. Spike was proving to be less of the want-take-have vampire than she thought he would be, which was fine with her. Much as she had decided that pursuing something with him this summer was of the good, and that her patience for gentle and hesitant touches was of the not, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to jump straight into the harshness she was expecting from the likes of him.


“Buffy!” he gasped against her neck, cooling her skin with that oh-so-convenient chill of his. “Gonna make you feel so good, luv.”


“Promises, promis–”


She interrupted herself with an “eep” when Spike simultaneous bit down on her erogenous zone with blunt teeth and cupped her breasts with hands that had moved way too fast for her to keep track of.


The fact that they were standing in the middle of the sidewalk did nothing to temper the throaty moan she issued at the feelings his fingers incited as they plucked at her nipples, naked as they were through the thin cotton of her halter. There was therefore no way she could have stopped her hands from gripping his hips and jerking them into hers with a force that would have bruised her former.


“Buffy!” he gasped again as he trailed his hands down to grip her hips to anchor himself as he began rubbing his hard length against her centre. “Bloody hell but you’re warm.”


“It’s,” gasp, “like, super,” moan, “hot outside,” gasp, “Spik–”


A blood-curling, familiar scream cut her off then, killing her ardor as effectively as a bucket of cold water.


Blue eyes met hazel, awareness and recognition merging to form panic and excitement.


“Anya!” they both shouted before breaking their heated embrace and instinctively turning toward the direction from which the scream had come.


“I knew I should have gone after her!” Buffy exclaimed before grabbing Spike’s hand and pulling him along as she started to run.




TBC...