At some point during their liaison, she begins to crave him.
Not simply his body, which she can – and does – actually appreciate, though she will never admit it in the light of day. Not even the way he can make her feel loved, if she were to open herself up enough to allow it, to accept the entirety of him, which she of course never does. Nor will she.
She begins to crave how he can hurt her.
The feel of plaster dust sticking onto her sweating face, filling her lungs with every desperate, gasping breath. Cold hands reaching frenziedly for any exposed bit of flesh, running down her arms and across her exposed abdomen. Clawing fingernails chipping and peeling against fabric she is unable to tear. Fingers grasping at his neck as he pushes his cock into her and for just a fraction of an instant, the universe surrounding them rips apart, freezes, and desperately scrambles to reestablish itself.
It’s just easier. Easier to open herself up to pain than to love. She had jumped, once, and left a world that had provided her with love, and had returned to a world that surrounded her with nothing but pain. And so it’s just easier. She resurrected, and lives still-dead, and finds an odd sort of comfort within the arms of the only person – thing – in her life who knows the same.
He had told her, once, that she needed a monster in her man. It kills her to think that maybe he’d been right. She’d stayed with Angel after his foray into the land of murderous, soulless vampires, despite having seen first-hand what kind of destruction he could wreak. Parker had been the mortal form of Angel, using a woman to fulfill a primal biological drive before denying everything else about her; she had unwillingly allowed him to define her as nothing, as simply sex, with no discernable identity. Degrading, the way he forced her into a preconceived notion of “woman.” And Riley had done the same, but he had loved her while doing it.
His cold, cracked lips blazing a trail from her lips down her neck, the brief pressure of his tongue pushing at her collarbone before his blunt teeth seize the flesh at her shoulder, pulling away from her body before being released in a wet, warm, sharp pang that spreads throughout her body as he manages to tear her shirt off of her, slamming her against the large oak tree, the harsh bark rending pinpoint scratches across her bare back.
After years of emotional pain, the physical pain he provides becomes a welcome release. And that she craves it from him – can feel relief from the knowledge that once again she sports bruises as a testament to the validity of their liaisons – completely shakes her foundations.
The night he has her in the alley behind the Doublemeat Palace, she bleeds for him. His desperation, her frantic flailing, and he smashes her body against the brick wall, pinning her in place with his own lanky form. The sheer force of him causes her head to bash against the brick, but it is her bruised and bleeding knuckles that draw his attention as his eyes flash amber and he quickly sucks them into his mouth, his heated gaze challenging her to order him to stop. Instead she impales herself onto his ready cock and lays her forehead on his shoulder, biting her lower lip to keep from crying out.
It isn’t her. But she quickly incorporates it, accepts it, craves it. Spike is a drug, and despite knowing just how unhealthy he can be, no matter how much she tries to escape her addiction, she refuses to give him up. The sex is her fix, and the resulting bruises on her body and aches in her muscles are her high. It is the most euphoric sensation she has ever encountered on earth, and despite her protests, a part of her deep down intends to keep it with her as long as she can – it’s quite possible that the entirety of the magnitude that is Spike will destroy her sooner or later, but even armed with that knowledge she cannot help but crave her next dose.
She will not let him bite her. Despite the blood he sucked from her knuckles – and the rare times she bleeds long enough for him to notice – she never allows him to bite her, and he never asks. In compensation, his teeth gnaw and gnash at any bit of flesh she’ll allow him, and those are the best for her; those are the marks that remain in the morning.
It doesn’t matter that she showers as soon as she can after each time they’re together; hot water cannot fully erase the knowledge – and feeling – of what they’ve done, and it is fairly early on in their trysts that she quits fighting the realization that she doesn’t want to forget. That she revels in the twinging of her aching flesh whenever her questing fingers press into a newly-acquired bruise. The shudder that courses through her body whenever she runs a loofah over her sore and tender breasts, covered with fresh indentations of blunt, human teeth. And of course the appalling rapture that jolts through her system after she washes his dry semen – certainly mixed with her own come – from the inside of her thigh, only to find that she can still feel it there despite its physical absence; a foreign yet perversely welcome presence.
Each aching muscle, each flourishing bruise, each time she wipes come from between her thighs – they all remind her that she is in fact alive. That despite her all-too-brief stint in Heaven, Willow hadn’t erred in her calculations and pulled Buffy through the earth to awaken in Hell.
It’s hard, this world she’s been returned to, and it hurts, but she does what she can, replacing the gaping void within her with a hurt that she can control, one that can’t be taken away from her against her will. The sarcophagus below her back is cold and hard and the stone rasps against her back, against mostly-healed scars from their last tryst. Even his cock grasped between her fingers is hard and unrelenting, and when she claws at his back and gasps his name, he thrusts inside her without testing to see if her body is ready. And as he keeps his thrusts in tempo with his mantra of “I love you I love you I love you” she allows the words to fall from his lips, never insisting he hold them back, because it hurts her all the more.
But she bruises, and she aches, and all she wants is more, and she knows she’s back among the living, forcing herself into a facsimile thereof.
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A/N: Written for the lj-community 20_hot_prompts, a response to a prompt for “rough.”
Chapter XII of Chirality is going slowly, but surely, and I hope to have it up by the end of the week. I’m sorry for the delay!
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