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New York City

“Ms. Summers, welcome back to the Gramercy Park Hotel. Your suite is ready.”

“Thank you.” The clerk is new and so young it looks like he’s playing dress up in his smart uniform, but my status as a frequent guest and lavish tipper precedes me.

“If you and your son require …”

I bite back a smile. Spike wraps his arms around my waist and pulls me close.

The clerk stammers an apology. Guess no one clued him in.

“No worries, mate,” Spike replies to the flustered boy, pulling me in for a kiss that borders on the obscene.

“The only thing we need,” I say to the dumbfounded clerk as I break for air, “is for you to hold all of our calls.”

***

Cougar.

Boytoy. Arm candy. Gold diggah.

Ssssslut!

If I actually were shacked up with some sweet young-enough-to-be-my-son thing would the whispers bother me?

No, I don’t think so.

The girl I was going to be? She’d have freaked.

Or maybe I’m not giving her enough credit. Live five decades, travel the world and your whole perspective changes. It’s easy to ride that high horse when your world is small and your choices are limited.

And then sometimes, one tiny thing happens and everything changes. In a funny way, I owe it to Willow and her gig at Caritas. Otherwise, I’d never have slipped past the velvet rope and found myself in Spike’s orbit.

Then there was Owen. I can almost thank Owen for being such an ass. I was on the verge, then, of giving up and thinking I could live in the workaday world without Spike.

Of course, if Hugo had lived, I’d have never dared. Hugo would be a man by now. I might even be a grandmother. There are places in New York that remind me of my days of baby lust and anxiety, of longing and suffering. But mostly that’s a chapter that’s closed, a maybe that wasn’t meant to be.

We stayed almost six weeks in New York that time. By the end of our visit, the pale little clerk with the soft hands was checking out my legs when I walked through the lobby.

Maybe 52 is the new 21.

***

The night sky peeked in through the French doors, slanting across the floor boards of our bedroom, the room in the London home we'd shared for more years than I'd bothered to count.

Buffy sprawls on the bed, naked and satiated, as I gaze at the moon. Been doin’ things like that lately. Poncey, romantic, moon-gazing things.

“You’re so good to me.”

I turn, slowly, and take her in. She’s long since given up the blonde in favor of her natural brunette, and lately she’s stopped fighting the streaks of grey.

“You take care of me proper, too, luv.”

She stretched, and I let my eyes roam over her body. The effects of aging have come, but to my surprise, it hasn’t cooled my ardor. Want her just as much as when she was a little slip of a girl, all bones and blonde-dyed hair.

Buffy mewled.

“Heat wave, pet?”

She nods and fans herself with her hand.

This is something I can help with.

I cross the room, covering and cooling her heated skin with my own. “Better?”

“Um …”

“Take that as a yes.”

She’s visibly older than me now. Has been for a while.

I think about it, about turning her, about keeping her by my side forevermore. I’d be lyin’ if I said the thought didn’t appeal. Even now, the change would restore some measure of her lost youth. We’d still be May-December, yeah. But it turns out I get hot for a younger older woman just as easily as I did for the girl who fascinated me so many years ago.

And Buffy? Buffy never asks.

Beneath me, she’s relaxing into my touch and growing fevered for another reason.

She arches into me, teasing and impatient.

“Thought my embrace was s’posed to cool you down?” I ask.

“That never lasts, Spike,” she says with a saucy smile.

And even though her phrase – never lasts – echoes in my brain, I oblige.

***

He never says he loves me.

We’ve been together half of my life. I’ve known him much longer. And he’s never said love. “Need you,” sure. “Want you,” all the time. But I don’t know if he loves me.

Or maybe I don’t know if he knows that he loves me.

Willow asked me, the last time we visited LA, if he still killed. And I had to tell her the truth. I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure.

I didn’t mention that one time. That was self-defense.

I think.

I’m not a little girl anymore. Even Willow has stopped seeing my as some innocent corrupted by a villain. Instead, the very few who are in the know treat me as more of a lion tamer. They’re not crazy about my pet’s appetites, but they trust me to keep him in line.

All I know is that he’s never come to me blood-stained again, like he did that night in London.

Secretly, I almost wish he would.

***

It happened in Oranjestaad.

Got lost down a dark alley a little too close to sun-up. We barely made it back to the hotel. My girl’s not as young as she once was, and yet I won’t insult her by tossing those brittle bones over my shoulder and sprinting. So even as I felt the night fade to a shattering blue dawn, I calmly lent her my arm, and let her scurry in her slow, seventy-something way, back to shelter.

The next day, while Buffy slept, I asked the concierge to send up a canvas and paints.

I’d sold Minus Zero to Harris, and hadn’t had a proper job in better than twenty years. When she woke up and asked me what I was doing, I told her it was yet another reinvention.

She told me she’d much rather I work my artistry in bed, and I agreed.

***

Harris is an old man now, bent and bald.

“Xander, I’m so sorry,” Buffy says, hugging him. Their bones creak in a mutual acknowledgement of old age.

“Harris,” I nod. “She was a good woman. She’ll be missed.”

Tears glisten in his eyes, and I’m relieved when one of their kids comes up and takes dear old dad by the elbow.

I help Buffy into one of the pews, and we sit in church to bid farewell to a friend.

***

We’re at the first class check-in at Heathrow, bound for New York.

“Will your grandmother require a wheelchair?”

It was funny to be mistaken for his mother, but now that I’m Granny, it’s not the laugh that it used to be.

Spike fixes the gate attendant with a steely glare. “My wife will be fine, thank you.”

“I – I’m – I’m sor-sorry sir.”

“Spike,” I reprimand, and he dials it down. We’re not legally wedded – though I suppose the same false identity that lets him clear customs would suffice to tie the knot. He’s never offered, and I’ve never asked. Calling me his wife is just his way of staking a claim to a world that doesn’t know what to make of the weak old lady and the hot young guy.

Since air travel took steroids back in the 2020s, it’s almost possible to commute from London to New York. We’re headed there on business. My business. Spike hasn’t shown his paintings, even though I tell him he should.

He tells me there’s time. All the time in the world.

I suspect he’s saving his new craft for when I’m gone.

***

Photography Online

Buffy Summers dies at 88

She was once called the eyes of a generation. Summers picked up a camera in her 20s, and mounted her first independent show not long after. With a body of work spanning the commercial to the avant-garde, few photographers have worked in so many styles. Her campaigns for Jeep and Borghese were both runaway international successes.

In later years, her images became starkly erotic. While she rarely photographed individual faces, Summers had a way of capturing a crowd that evoked the energy and tension in a gathering. Her shots of scenes from the Parisian nightclub Banc during the rash of killings in the 2020s have been celebrated as some of the most startling and revelatory of our time.

Protests greeted her first major museum exhibition, at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. The resulting press led to one of the most successful exhibitions by a modern artist, a phenomenon reminiscent of the Robert Mapelthorpe showings in the late 20th century.

Her personal life was no less controversial. Briefly married to the poet Owen Thurman, she is thought to be the inspiration for much of his melancholy work. Following their divorce, she became known for her liaisons with much younger men and her reclusive ways. In fact, she was rarely seen during daylight hours, so much so that New York galleries only scheduled her showings in the heart of winter.

While Summers lived most of her life in London, she is a native Californian. A memorial service will take place in her hometown of Sunnydale next week.

***

I laid her to rest in Sunnydale. First time I’ve been here. She’d been back a time or two, I guess. Mostly she wanted to be buried next to her mum, and who was I to begrudge her?

For those last two years, she was in and out of the hospital. Killed me to know I could put her out of her misery. She forbade it. Wanted to go out of this life, she’d whispered, just like she’d been born into it – by fate, by the dictates of a cruel and capricious God.

By the time she breathed her last, I’d made my peace. Even told her – finally told her – I loved her. My only regret is that she might not have understood, not with the medicine and the machines and the stark white of the hospital walls.

I sigh. That chapter of my life is closed. Buffy is gone, and with her, I think all of the good in me might be gone, too.

It’s dark now, past midnight, and I’m prowling the streets of Sunnydale, wondering what the denizens do for a good time. There’s a coffee shop on the main drag, with some older, sincere type strumming a guitar.

I amble in and take a table.

Before long, there’s a pretty blonde glancing my way. I can see her doing the mental math – am I over 30? She doesn’t think so, and so she co-eds her way over to me.

“Hi,” she says. “Mind if I join you?”

I smile hungrily. "Please do."




Author's Note: And so ... that's it, folks. That's all she wrote. I never intended to write anything more than the original four chapters of Meet the Pratts, a story I thought was so wierd it would get me drummed out of the fandom. The reviews and encouragement have been amazing, and I can't thank everyone enough for taking this trip with me. I'm only sorry it has to end. :)