She still had it. Her grace, strength, the way she could anticipate an opponent's moves, cross his signals, screw him up. And she had more—heightened speed, agility—and, Spike thought, a new sort of wicked will to not just slay, but play.


The vampires they attacked weren't expecting to be disturbed. She could've popped them fast, almost without their knowing, but that wasn't what she wanted. She wanted a melee, and she forced it—together they forced it—a chase, an ambush, a rout—and a massacre. Though he helped in the round-up, the cornering, Spike let her do the slaying. With each vamp that exploded off her stake, her grin widened, her eyes blazed up full of manic glee.


All through it, she kept her human face—they both did.


"They didn't know what we are," Buffy said, when they'd brought the population of the blind alley that was the scene of their last stand, down to two. Her smile was fang-sharp, and included him in her sudden merriment like a friend.


"They didn't know a bloody thing," he agreed.


"I wish there were more. I could go for hours. Why didn't I think of this?"


"You had other things on your mind."


"Whereas you—" She stepped up to him, taking the two lapels of his duster in her hands, to snug him in close, "—you have thought about nothing but what I needed, all this time. Spike—I want you to know I get that."


Her mouth touched his before he could pull away, though he meant to. Meant to detach her keen little fingers from his leather, and tell her that was fine but they'd better get back. Only her lips were so soft, and beckoning—not warm, not fragrant with her breath, but so sweet still on his—that he could do nothing at all.


"Aren't you going to brush me off?" Her whisper, like her lips, was gentle and coaxing and opposite in every way to everything she'd been for the last ten days and more.


"I will, in a bit."


"After one more," she murmured, going up again on tiptoe to press it on him, another kiss that was not like any of the kisses she'd ever given him, not angry, possessive, combative, competitive, contemptuous.


Just a kiss: a little friendly, encouraging. Grateful, even? She tugged on his coat, but not the way she used to do when she was simultaneously pressing him into service and shutting him up. This tugging asked only to be gathered in, and when he put his arms around her, Buffy sighed and dropped her forehead against his chest. "Maybe I'm no good for you anymore, like this. I'm cool to the touch, I don't have—I don't have what you used to like."


"I love you just the same." It was more than he'd said if he'd time to consider. It was just the unalloyed truth, and he'd never been good at keeping that to himself.


"But you're sorry for me."


"Buffy—"


"I know you are. I've seen how you feel pity for us when we're hard up. Not just me. Dawn. Tara. Anya, Giles ... you've had your little moments of being kind to all my people. My ... former ... people. I never could figure out why. But it's what you're like, just as much as you're like mayhem and violence, and .... You must've been that way when you were a man."


He'd have blushed if he was capable of it. "Dunno. Was a foolish fellow, that's all."


"A lonely fellow?" Before he could answer, she walked over her own question. "We should go back to the room now, it'll be light soon." She pulled back, letting go of him except for one finger hooked into his buttonhole, as if she couldn't quite bear to be entirely unmoored. "Tell me something, Spike."


"What's that?"


"When we get into the room. Will you come into my bed, and let me hold you and kiss you some more? Tell me now, because if the answer is no, I won't touch you again. We'll just go back, and drink our blood, and brush our teeth, and get into our beds, and go to sleep."


"Will we?"


Her greeny eyes seemed to reflect the stars. "For now, yes. If you say."


"Though you were goin' to set off an' leave me."


"No. Not actually."


"I was just with that other girl."


"It doesn't matter. Take a shower."


"What are you offerin' me, Buffy?"


She tugged a little on his buttonhole, as if she had to think this through before she spoke. "As much as I've got. Will that be okay?"







She took his arm as they walked back through the quiet pre-dawn streets, quiet and decorous as a Victorian couple. He didn't say anything, and neither did she, but he could feel her contentment, how that good slay had cooled her off and warmed her up, both.


She kissed him again at the bathroom door, and then sketched a funny little wave goodbye as he closed it between them. In the shower, Spike scrubbed at himself, and fretted—why should he let her do this to him again? What had really changed?


He'd regret it. Worse, so would she.


And he'd gone with that dratted girl, and wished now he hadn't, though maybe it was that as much as anything else that night that had turned the slayer so suddenly sweet. She'd let hers alone—hadn't bit him, hadn't even touched him, probably.


He didn't like to think that meant anything, but maybe she thought so.


When he came out of the bathroom, wearing a towel, holding his clothes, she was sitting up in the middle of her bed. The lamp was on, a teeshirt draped over the shade to make the light dim and pink, but the TV was off, and she was nude, her hair hanging loose around her shoulders and breasts.


"Put that stuff down." She held her arms out.


He dropped the clothes on the other bed, and then stood there in the damp towel, seized with stupid uncertainty.


She came to him. "You think I'm playing a trick on you."


"No."


"Poor Spike. I'm so mean to you." She came a little nearer, but not touching. He could smell her though, the scent of her shampoo, her skin, her budding arousal. It wasn't like he remembered, all volcanic heat, but it was still her, still stirring. He'd gotten his end off a couple hours ago but it might as well have been days for all it mattered.


She looked down at their feet and then up into his face. "I'm mean to myself, too, though. I'm a regular tatar."


He was going to answer, with something witless no doubt, but she darted up to claim his mouth again, her hands seizing on the towel at the same time, using it to draw him along as she backed up towards her bed. She let herself tumble, pulling him down on top of her.


"I want to be nice to you, to make up for it. I mean, as much as I can make up for it."


"Buffy, you don't—"


"No, I'm not teasing. This isn't a set-up. Spike, I need to be nice to you. Please just let me."


"Right." He assumed that what she was really after was another serving of the usual, but this time with a bit of sugar on top. To be attended to, pleasured, comforted, and forgiven the taunts she was so lightly admitting to. And he would do it, because now he was right up against her, he was all out of No.


But he was wrong. When he tried to lay her back, prepatory to giving her the sort of seeing-to she'd demanded those nights she'd blown into his crypt like a gale, Buffy wasn't having it.


"Uh-uh," she whispered. "You. Spike. You. Let me. Okay?" She rolled him over, gently pressed his wrists back against the pillow. "Lie still. I'm going to give you some kisses. You like kisses, don't you? On your mouth, and other places."


Her lack of hurry gave him difficulties—he was used to getting things done with her fast—even on those nights when she'd stayed with him for hours, she'd always been all about quantity—hasty, frantic, nearly manic.


It was as if he hadn't been touched in weeks, or months—her patient leisurely kisses tensed him up, sending his mind racing ahead, past the climax, the one-minute afterglow she might permit, straight on to the next brutal thing she'd say that would erase this and make him feel like a fool for submitting to her.


Once, twice, again, she put his hands back, pressed him down. "Relax. I'm not going to cheat you."


"You always cheat me. Was what you were born to do."


She got up on one elbow and regarded him, blinking. "I don't mean to now."


"You don't even think of me as a person. You don't believe in what I feel about you."


"That's not true. That's ... " Her lip fluttered, and her eyes went swimmy. The sight of it gave him a certain nasty satisfaction. He pulled her back to him, and now she made no resistance when he rolled her underneath, trapping her head in his two hands, her body opened beneath his. Tears were streaming from her eyes now, though she made no sound. He kissed them, and her wet open mouth, and she clung to him, kissing back, her hips already twisting.


When he let her mouth go, she gasped. "Please don't give up on me. I need you."


"You need this?" He let her feel his erection prodding her belly.


"I need you. My friend."


"Your friend."


"Yes. Please. Just let me show you—"


"Know what you've got to show." What did it mean, anything he got her to say when she was in this state of arousal?


"You don't. You don't, because I've never given it to you before. Let me. Let me now."


He crushed her pleading out in another kiss. She opened wide, rippling under him, grappling him with her hands. He took what he'd always wanted from her mouth, imposing on her a slow thorough exploration, and she let him. Bit by bit the tension went out of her, ratcheting down instead of up, until a few minutes later they were almost still, except for caressing tongues, and her hands making long soothing sweeps up his back. She waited on his pleasure, advancing nothing, letting him take his time, all the time he'd ever wanted. Once in a while she rocked a little, reminding them both that his hard cock rode against her wet curly mons, open between her wide-spread thighs.


He almost lost himself in it, but not quite far enough that it didn't occur to him that he could get a bit of revenge on her for past humiliations, if he got up now and went back to his own bed. Left her to stew, to find out what it felt like to be rejected. Once admitted, the idea bloomed into a lush temptation. Didn't she deserve that? To be treated like the bitch she was?


But then she brought a hand up to his face, touching her fingers to his cheekbone, tracing the scar along his brow. He drew back a little, to see the expression that went with this touch. Buffy's eyes were once more awash in tears. She nodded to him—he didn't really know what the nod meant, but it broke his anger.


He kissed her tears again, and as he did, she began to sob, and drew him in tighter. He put a hand down between their bodies, and she made an assent, crying out as he pushed inside her, flowing up to meet him.


They rocked together, slowly, sometimes almost stopping, for a long time, amidst the ongoing conversation of kisses, sighs, sobs. She resisted her climax, as if that would somehow show the new leaf she'd turned. He brought her there, once, again, with his hand, with a gentle dominance that she seemed to want; her surrender coming with little wails, like contrition. Then she coaxed him to his own, whispering his name as he climbed. Afterwards he expected her to tense, resisting her old urge to separate, to spring up right away and negate it all. But she stayed put, half melted beneath him, her pussy giving off the occasional belated ripplet around his cock, returning his sated kisses until all sensation was lost in fog.







Sleep gave way to Buffy talking.


"—can't tell them. It'll make trouble. You have to promise. Oh God. Don't cry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry about everything. I ... I'll try to call again in a few days. But you can't tell—"


Spike pulled the phone receiver from her hand. "What in hell you doin', Slayer?" He didn't have to ask who she was on with. He could hear Dawn's anxious squeak perfectly well. It was all he could do not to commandeer the conversation himself. But he threw the phone back onto its cradle. "You out of your mind?"


She was so white, her lips paler than her face. "I had a dream about her, she was so sad and so angry at me because I just disappeared. I just had to tell her, you know, that I'm not .... That I didn't just abandon her."


"So you called the bloody house."


"I knew she'd be alone. She gets in from school around four, and no one else comes in until just before six. I told her not to tell the others—"


"Oh, that'll be all right then. An' no one'll notice that she's hidin' anything either."


Buffy missed the irony entirely, thick as it was. "They barely notice her at all. She said ... she said she's been alone a lot. Because they're supposedly all working on figuring out what happened to me, but .... She said she's been sitting in your crypt every night, waiting for you to come back, and—" Buffy's hands flexed on the sheet, and suddenly tore through it, and the blanket. Fanging out, she attacked the bedding, flaying it until the air was filled with flying fibers. Her violence crackled the air, and Spike braced to be next—the beating he'd been expecting all along might well come now, and he supposed he might as well get it over with. He'd earned a crippler, after the morning they'd had. It was too much sweetness to go unpaid-for.


But the blows didn't come. Buffy spat out a piece of bedspread, the wrinklies melting back into that too-pale strained face. Springing up, she grabbed her bag, started stuffing their few clothes into it.


"Slayer—"


"I can't just leave her there alone. I have to go back."


"Are you out of your mind?"


She stopped, and the look she gave him was more naked than any he'd seen since this began.


"Spike. Please take me home."