The bell rang shrilly, jolting Buffy from the deep slumber she had been enjoying during her teacher’s lecture.
“So I’ll see you all next week for a final review session,” Professor Walsh said, meeting Buffy’s eye and quirking an eyebrow before leaving the classroom.
“Man, that was an exciting class, huh?” Willow remarked dryly.
“Oh, yeah, well—”
“And the last twenty minutes was a revelation, just laid out everything we need to know for the final. I’d hate to have missed that!”
The redhead smirked at her blonde friend, who rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “Just tell me I didn’t snore.”
“Very discrete, minimal drool.” The two laughed for a minute, before the sly expression found itself on Willow’s face again. “So were you dreaming?”
Buffy suddenly looked at her friend warily. “Did I do something other than snore, Wills?” Her dream had been… intense, to say the least, and she blushed deeply at the thought of giving some outward sign as to what fantasy had been playing out in her head.
“No, but you had that little smile on your face that you had last night when talking about dearest Spike, so—”
“Who’s Spike?” The voice behind the two girls caused them to simultaneously groan and lock eyes.
“Do you want me to…?”
“No, I’ll be fine. Go on ahead.”
“I’ll be at the end of the hall,” Willow promised. With that, the redhead hurried off, not before shooting an ugly look behind her to the person currently staring at Buffy with an impatiently irritated expression.
“Riley. To what do I owe this extreme annoyance?”
“You moved on fast.” The jealousy was plain on his face, and it was all Buffy could do to keep herself from rolling her eyes.
“For your information, Spike is my new boss. And considering the fact that our relationship was pretty one-sided, ‘moving on’ wasn’t exactly difficult.”
Riley let out a harsh laugh. “How can you say that after all we’ve been through?” he asked incredulously. “Did you meet someone else? Is that what’s going on here? You don’t have to have them, Buffy, you can always have me if you need me!”
“I don’t need anyone!” Finally giving in to the urge, the blonde rolled her eyes. “Listen, Riley, the sooner you realize that you’re not in my life anymore—that you really weren’t in it before, anyway—the better it will be for the both of us.” Buffy turned and began to walk towards where Willow was standing with Tara, leaving Riley dumbstruck and not entirely sure of what had just happened. “Sorry about that,” she said, greeting Tara and heading out of the building.
“Did he say anything bad, Buffy?” Tara asked, giving a wary look back at the hulk of a man still standing stock-still in the middle of the hallway.
“Nothing really. Just accused me of getting naked with the first guy I met.”
“If only he knew just how close to the truth he was,” Willow mused in an exaggerated tone. She and Tara let out ill-concealed laughs while Buffy glared at them, her face highly reminiscent of a tomato. “Come on, Buff, you know you were thinking the same thing,” the redhead said soothingly, winning an embarrassed-yet-sincere smile from her friend as a result. “Oh! I almost forgot to ask you!” she said suddenly, as the three girls left the safety of the building and traversed along a sloping lawn to their dorm buildings. “Tonight’s Xander’s last night in town, whaddya say to Bronzing after you get off?”
“Meh,” Buffy said grumpily. “I would, but I work late tonight and I’ve got that stupid paper for finish up—and by finish, I mean start.”
“We can Bronze and do homework at the same time!” Willow reasoned.
The wheedling tone in her friend’s voice nearly convinced her to give in and live a little—even the most studious Willow rocked out every now and then—but the oppressive weight of the book in her arms won out. “Sorry, Wills, but I’ve really got to make it an early night.” She gave the couple an apologetic smile as they reached the door to Stevenson hall and bade them farewell, the two heading off to Tara’s room. As Buffy passed through the doorway, she was oblivious to the set of eyes that was watching her departing form.
~*~
It was many hours later when Buffy blearily arrived back at home, her feet sore and head pounding from the exhausting career of waitressing. “Not a career,” she said to herself, alarmed by her internal monologue’s referral to her job, “just a way to get money.” Of course, that thought led to the other way in which she was making money—not that her mind had been wandering there throughout the entire evening.
Willow, Tara, Xander, and Anya had decided to head out somewhere other than the Bronze that night, and Buffy found herself working a particularly boring evening. Without any kind of external stimulus other than the pounding music and sexually suggestive lyrics, the blonde found herself thinking about a particular British artist in entirely unprofessional positions.
She’d tried to eradicate the thoughts by mentally outlining her paper, but every Englishman mentioned turned into the steamy man dominating her mind and doing very naughty things to her with paintbrushes and some kind of oil.
“Blah!” Buffy groaned, pushing her blonde ringlets out of her sweaty face and hurriedly settling herself down at her desk. As she stared at the open book and nervously tapped her pencil to a notebook, she began to force herself to read the words on the page, determined to get her paper done that night.
It wasn’t working.
When Buffy realized she’d read the same line at least three times already without moving on to the next, she hazarded a glance at the lined paper she’d been absentmindedly doodling on—and her eyes widened in shock.
“Okay, Buffy, this is really getting out of hand,” she said exasperatedly, the crude sketch of semi-coital actions between herself and Spike—well-drawn, she noted offhand—crossing the not-so-fine line between innocent attraction to unhealthy lusting. But the image was enticing her, causing her to lean closer to the page to study her subconscious desires manifested, her mind already winding the simple picture into a detailed fantasy.
A sharp knock at the door elicited a jump from the embarrassed blonde, who automatically shoved the notebook into her desk drawer and stood up, stretching after being seated for so long and making her way to the door. A sharp knock sounded again, right as Buffy reached for the handle, and upon turning the knob was met with a very impatient Riley.
“Can I come in?”
“Anything you have to say to me you can say it through the doorway,” Buffy replied, his irate tone setting the mood for the encounter. The blonde leaned against the wooden frame and crossed her arms over her chest, raising an eyebrow expectantly.
Riley stood there with a slightly nervous look on his face, well aware the slight crowd the two were receiving per fact that he blocked the hallway with his bulky form. “I think it’d be best if we speak in private, Buffy,” he not-so-subtly inclined, his eyes darting away from the blonde’s face to glance in her dimly lit room.
“Well I think it best that you leave me the hell alone, Riley,” Buffy replied scathingly, “so if you’ve got something to say, you say it here or you keep your peace.”
Riley was clearly debating for a moment, his eyes on the ceiling and his hands nervously fidgeting, but when he came to his decision and turned his gaze back on Buffy’s, it was cold. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he started, with a rough tone, “but I came here to ask who the hell you were dancing with at the Bronze on Friday.”
“What?” It took a moment for her to remember the events of the previous week, but as soon as she touched on the memory she felt a realistic ache begin to grow deep inside her—god, how could one dance give her more pleasure than any sex she’d ever had?
The crowd was thickening, much to the chagrin of the blonde, but Riley didn’t care, shouting the words so that anyone in the vicinity of the room could get a good idea of what was happening. “Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about,” he said threateningly. “Forrest told me that you were practically having se—”
“What the hell is going on here?” a voice yelled out, sounding suspiciously like the R.A.; immediately, the crowd began to disperse, people filing into the nearest room regardless of whether it was theirs or not. Riley and Buffy stood their ground, now openly glaring at one another, and Willow soon appeared; as soon as she saw Riley, her mouth became a fine line and her jaw set in a resolved expression.
“Okay, what’s going on?” she asked, her normally quiet voice now clear and commanding. Seeing the expression on her friend’s face, Willow glared in the other’s direction. “You have one minute to finish this up before I go and get you kicked out of here.”
Clearly, Riley hadn’t expected such an attitude from Willow, and he was momentarily taken-aback. But once he realized that the redhead was being serious and precious seconds were being used, he softened his expression and looked back towards the blonde still standing in her doorway. “Buffy, I… I didn’t come here to fight,” he started, ignoring the well-placed scoff from the girl now next to the blonde. “I just wanted to make things right—and to tell you that you don’t have to resort to hook-ups just to get me back. I want to give us another chance!”
There was a moment of silence as the two girls looked at one another and simultaneously raised eyebrows. Riley was still smiling widely as Buffy, mouth hanging open incredulously, slammed the door in his face.
“Oh my god!” Buffy moaned, hiding her face in her hands and peeking between her fingers to see Willows face. “Don’t laugh, I think that was the most mortifying moment of my life.”
“Aren’t you glad I came along and cleared the crowd, though?” she asked, trying her best to salvage her friend’s pride and look at the best in the situation. “I should totally have brought the R.A. and said that Riley was trying to break in and steal your underwear, or something.”
“Creepy, much?” Buffy asked, her hands gradually moving out of her face and finding shelter in her hair. “And even more so that he was, like, checking up on me. And that he thought my sexy dancing was attention-seeking!”
“What, like you wouldn’t do a sexy dance with, say, Xander to make Spike jealous?”
“I wouldn’t resort to something like that past the age of sixteen,” she wryly replied, rolling her eyes. “Ugh, I bet he was stalking me all day to make sure I’d be here alone so he could talk to me. Did you know he used to rehearse conversations to have with me before we dated?”
“And again, I ask, why the dateage?”
Buffy sank onto her bed and bounced for a moment, contemplating the question. “I just think I was trying to get out of the Parkangel funk,” she mused. “I mean, they were both very… untouchable, I guess, what with Angel being the high school god, and Parker being every freshman girl’s dream college guy.”
Willow sympathetically nodded, sitting down next to Buffy and giving her a light hug. “And Riley was tangible?”
“Exactly,” Buffy answered, grimacing. “I thought what I wanted wasn’t what I needed, so I let myself think that being with someone different would make everything magically work out okay.” Letting out a sigh, the blonde turned her gaze back to the textbooks still stacked on her desk. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but can we change the subject to school? I’ve still got almost all of that paper to do.”
“Oh, I forgot!” Willow jumped off the bed gleefully and grabbed her purse, reaching inside to pull out a sheaf of papers. “Tara and looked around her dorm room, and she said you might be interested in these.”
Buffy accepted the handwritten papers from her friend and quickly scanned through the pages, her face brightening almost unbelievably quickly. “I love your girlfriend,” she sighed, hugging Willow and going to the desk to put Tara’s report to good use.
As she settled herself back onto the chair and pointedly refused to look towards the drawer containing the notebook of doom, her eye was drawn to the glowing green numbers on her alarm clock. It was past midnight, and with a sinking sensation Buffy realized what that meant.
Pushing the lyrics of “Tuesday’s Gone” from her mind, she bent over the desk and began to write.
~*~
VVVVVVM! VVVVVVM! VVVVVVM!
“I’m drowning in footwear!” Spike yelped as he was jerked out of his sleep ungracefully, the harsh sound unceremoniously ending the strange dream he’d been having—something that he would definitely not be analyzing any time soon. He was still shaking off the last holds of sleep as a beeping sound alerted him to what had awakened him.
The cell phone thrown carelessly on his bedside table was now simultaneously chirping and vibrating, traveling dangerously close to the edge—the bleached blond fumbled madly for it and, upon securing it safely in his hand, flipped it open and muttered, “’Lo?”
“Good morning, Daddy!”
A sudden headache reminded him just why his sleep had been so sound—although the pain may have just been a result of hearing Drusilla’s manipulative inflection, and not the copious amounts of alcohol he’d consumed earlier that evening. “It may be morning in London, pet, but in California, those of us who are sane here are sleeping.” Although the time difference might just have nothing to do with it, now that I think about it, Spike wryly thought, sitting up in bed and pushing the matted mess of his bedclothes aside.
His response was the sound of the brunette’s girlish giggles, strangely distorted through the connection of the phone. “Such a funny boy, my William,” she remarked, the endearing tone in her voice causing a flood of memories to crash throughout Spike’s mind.
For a moment, he almost let himself smile, cherish the strange combination of innocence and depravity that had been his salvation from mediocrity. But the remembrance of their recent conversation, in which her tone had lacked any semblance of adoration, prevailed, and it was with a cold voice that he demanded, “What do you want?”
“To see the sunshine, of course,” she remarked, seemingly oblivious to his harsh tone. “My Spike, do you know you’re covered with it?”
“Not at the moment, Dru, since it’s the middle of the bleedin’ night!”
“The sunshine’s never really gone,” she whispered, as if telling a secret, “but rain is sure to come—you always did find yourself without an umbrella.”
“Thanks for the weather report,” Spike replied, rolling his eyes. “But I think it best that we end this now—and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t take to calling me at all hours of the night.”
“But the clouds—”
“Good night, Dru!” At that, he flipped the phone closed, the silence in the room an almost tangible presence as he realized just what day it was.
Wednesday.
“Bloody hell.”