Chapter Ten
“What on earth are you doing?”
Spike jerked, pulled his hands from Buffy’s breasts and thrust them in his jeans pockets. Buffy spun around, coming face to face with a tall woman, whose lips were curled into a sneer.
“And you?” His mother glared at Buffy. “What sort of girl are you that would let a boy do that in public?”
“It’s not public, it’s in our garden,” Spike muttered, dipping his head.
“Oh, my God! She’s a prostitute!”
“I am not a pr—”
“I know how much you used to chase after the girls, don’t think I don’t. A different one every night. So you thought you’d buy one for the afternoon. Did you have one last night too? Is that why you were so drunk this morning?”
“Hey! Buffy stepped between the two. “Where do you get off, calling me a prostitute?”
Dru’s cold blue eyes settled on the low cut blouse, “Well, you dress like one.”
“Christ! Mum!” Spike backed up, wishing he could run away. “Buffy, look—”
“Don’t try to make me shut up, Spike.” She pointed at Drusilla. “There is nothing wrong with the way I dress.”
“Hmm, not if trailer-trash is the look you’re going for.” As Drusilla glanced at her son, her expression filled with concern. “My poor son can’t see you for what you are, but I certainly can.”
Buffy realised then, exactly what was going on. His mother liked him being so reliant on her, and would do her best to keep him right where she wanted him.
“Trailer-tr—” Words failed her. She glanced over to Spike who was standing with his head down. “Spike?”
He shook his head. “She’s my mother…”
Buffy glared at Dru who had puffed up at Spike's apparent defence of her.
“Then I pity you.” She regretted the words as soon as they were spoken as Spike stiffened, his chin rising defiantly.
“I don’t need your bloody pity. Huh, I knew that was why you came.”
“I think it’s time you left the property,” Dru said, with a self-satisfied smirk.
“Spike, I didn’t mean I pitied you because you’re blind.” She touched his arm, but he shrugged it off. “I meant…” She hesitated. Would it really help her cause to say she pitied him a mother like that?
“I know quite well what you meant, and I will not be insulted in my own home,” Dru said.
“But it’s okay for you to insult me?” Buffy just couldn’t help blurting it out.
“William?”
Buffy glanced over her shoulder looking for someone else before she realised his mother was talking to Spike.
“Uh…I think it’d be best if you left now, Buffy,” he mumbled,
“But…”
“You heard him.” Dru’s face flushed with triumph.
“Spike?” Buffy again put her hand on his arm, but their earlier connection was lost.
He kept his head down. “Please…”
God, she wanted to shake him and punch his mother in her smug face, but having taken a deep calming breath, Buffy did neither.
“Oz has my number.”
As she strode away, she heard Drusilla begin to harass Spike about his friendship with Oz. She glanced over her shoulder, willing him to say something, but he just appeared to slump and if he said anything, it was too quiet for her to hear.
“Come on, Spike. Stick up for Oz, if not for me.”
She tossed her head, causing her hair to bounce from side to side, and grabbed the car’s door handle.
“Damn it.”
Jabbing the keys in the ignition as if she were trying to kill it rather than turn it, she slammed the door shut and sped off down the drive, throwing gravel up in her wake. Rupert rushed out to the front steps.
“Buffy?”
With a frown, he scanned the garden for Spike. If he’d upset the poor girl when she’d come to apologise and was quite obviously smitten, he’d give him a piece of his mind. Rupert spotted Spike and Drusilla and sighed. He should have known. His wife’s behaviour around Spike since the accident had been both smothering and domineering. He’d thought that Spike was finally beginning to get back the spark losing his sight had extinguished. Mother and son had never had an easy relationship, and he couldn’t blame Spike for staying in England without visiting for so long.
“Drusilla! Darla is on the telephone for you. Something about a charity auction?” Giles’s voice carried across the lawn.
Dru immediately hurried towards the house. By the time she discovered his lie, he would have been able to speak with her son.
Rupert watched Spike carefully as he walked to him. He looked lost. His cane was on the bench several feet to his right and his body language gave away the fact that he was completely disorientated.
“You come to say your piece too?” Spike said recognising Rupert's heavy tread, he'd been hoping for a snarky tone, but it ended up closer to a choked up croak.
“Well, yes I am.”
“Don’t bother! I was stupid to think I could be with her anyway. Mum’s right. I’m better off at home.”
“Has the world stopped turning?” said Rupert, amused.
“What?”
“You’ve just said your mother was right. Something must have happened. I didn’t think I’d ever see the day that you’d say that.”
Spike drew himself up. “It’s because I can’t bloody see, that I’m saying it!”
“Grow up, Spike!”
“What? Gr…? I’m fucking blind, Rupert. What’s growing up got to do with it?”
“You’re blind. I know. It’s terrible. I can’t begin to understand what you are going through, but enough is enough! This self-pity has got to stop. Right now.”
Spike’s face crumpled and he turned away from his stepfather. “I try…”
“Oh, I know, son. I know.”
Rupert’s arms wrapped round Spike’s shoulders, and he leaned briefly into the grasp before pulling free, reminded of how Rupert had always been the one to comfort him if he got homesick during his summer visits.
“What did she say?” Rupert asked.
“She accused Buffy of being a prostitute. Then said how I’d shagged half of England before I came here, and—”
Rupert burst out laughing.
“Hey! Buffy’s no trollop. It’s not funny.”
“It’s because she is so obviously not a lady of ill repute that I find it so amusing. She couldn’t look more wholesome if she tried. Whatever gave Dru that idea?”
Spike couldn’t help but smile. “Uh…well…I sort of had my hands on her tits, but it wasn’t like…I mean, she grabbed my hands and…”
He gave up.
“You want to keep hold of that girl, Spike. She might just be a match for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that she’s like you. She knows what she wants and she sets out to get it.”
Spike shook his head. “I’m not that person anymore, Rupert.”
“I think you could be…with someone like her beside you, perhaps?”
“Well, that’s it then, isn’t it? She won’t want anything to do with me after today.”
Giving Spike a nudge, Rupert said, “Then perhaps the time has come for you to chase after her? Are you going to come back to the house?”
Before Spike could reply, Dru appeared at the front of the house. “Rupert! Are you going senile? The phone was in place when I got to it, and Darla said she’d never called when I rang her!”
“Why do you do it, Rupert?” Spike said.
“Do what?”
“Stay with her?”
“Simple. I love her. I know she has her faults.” Spike snorted. “But at the end of the day, she needs to be looked after, and I need to be the one to do it. Are you coming inside?”
“Uh…I think I’ll stay out here for a bit. Can you pass me my cane, and point me in the direction of the hollow?”
Rupert did both, and as he went to meet his wife, Spike wandered back to where his iPod had bit the dust.
*~*~*~*
Buffy drove around town until her anger died down, leaving just the bitter taste of regret. She shouldn’t have spoken that way about his mother, but he shouldn’t have let the woman say those things either. She shook her head as she recalled telling Willow that Spike was her soulmate. The guy would be taking out an injunction against her at this rate.
No Buffys allowed within a hundred yards.
She decided to go play gooseberry to Willow and Oz, needing to talk to someone about yet another disastrous meeting. As she pulled up outside Oz’s building, she noticed Willow’s face peering out of the window. How did the redhead always know when she arrived?
“Witch,” Buffy muttered, as she locked up the car and jogged up the stairs to the apartment.
Willow opened the door and beckoned Buffy inside, holding a finger to her lips to indicate that her friend should be quiet. Seeing that Oz was talking to someone on his cell, Buffy nodded with understanding and made her way to one of the mismatched armchairs.
“Hey! She just walked in. Why don’t you say hello?”
Oz thrust his cell phone into her hand and stepped back looking at her expectantly.
“Who is it?”
“Put the phone to your ear and find out.”
Frowning, Buffy did just that, and her eyes grew wide as she heard the voice on the other end.
“Oz? Oz? Don’t! I can’t bloody talk to her…not after…”
“Spike!” Buffy threw the phone back to Oz, who caught it deftly and threw it straight back.
“Talk to him! You’re both as bad as each other. Maybe talking on the phone will be safer.”
Grinning, Oz guided Willow into the bedroom, to give Buffy some privacy.
She stared at the handset, then with a sigh, sat down and put the phone to her ear.
“Hello?”
“Uh… Hi.”
“Um…”
“So…”
“God, I thought being wasted at the Bronze was embarrassing, but this…”
“Yeah. Awkward, huh?”
“And then some.”
“Look, Buffy…I’m really sorry about earlier…about my mum—”
“It’s not your mom that got me angry…well, not just her. It’s just—”
“I should have said something to her about speaking to you like that. I did later, but I shouldn’t have let her say it.”
“No you shouldn’t.”
“But if you look at it from her point of view—”
“What?” Buffy sat up ramrod straight.
“No…I didn’t mean it like that…it’s just…well, I was pawing at you.”
“Yeah, I guess you were.”
They both chuckled.
“I liked it,” Spike said, quickly.
“Me too.”
“We shou—”
“Please don’t say ‘do it again sometime’.”
Spike laughed out loud. “I wasn’t…though I wouldn’t say no if the opportunity arose.”
“So, what were you going to say?” Buffy’s was voice flirty and light.
“I was going to say…uh…no…you’re going to think it’s daft.”
“Come on, Spike. After what I’ve been doing lately, I think it’s only fair that you do something silly too.”
“Well, I was going to say…would you…do you think that maybe we could talk on the phone for a bit…you know…so we can get to know each other? Could email too…my computer…uh…I can send emails, yeah?”
Buffy suddenly knew what he was getting at by not suggesting they meet up, but communicate like that. On the phone, it was the same whether he was blind or not. Same with email. You couldn’t see the person you were emailing.
“I’d like that.”
She chuckled at the sigh of relief she heard.
“Great. Um…but you’re at Oz’s so I reckon I’d better let you go now, but can I have your number? Or email address?”
“The email one is easy, it’s just buffy dot summers at k-mail dot com.”
“Okay…I’ll email you my number.”
“Great.”
“Um…you don’t mind doing this? I know it’s pretty lame—”
“It’s fine, Spike. It’ll be fun. Just…”
“Just what?” She could hear the tension in his voice.
“Just don’t let it be too long before we get to ‘do it again sometime’, deal?”
Laughing, Spike said, “Deal.”
“Cool. Email me then, Spike. Email me good!”
She hung up before he stopped laughing.
“It’s okay, guys, you can come out now.”
Willow and Oz came back hand in hand with their faces flushed.
“And that is my cue to go home.”
“You don’t have to,” said Willow.
“I know…but I want to.” Buffy walked up to Oz and gave him a hug. “Thanks for that.”
In typical Oz fashion, he just shrugged.
“And thanks, Will.”
After a hug with her best friend, Buffy left the apartment, swearing she heard the bedsprings squeak as soon as she closed the door.
*~*~*~*
Spike thumbed the keypad lock on his cell and put it on the bedside table. His heart was pounding fit to burst. She’d agreed. He never thought she’d go for it.
“Christ, I’m going to morph into Tom Hanks!” He smiled as he thought of Meg Ryan in that schmoopy film You’ve Got Mail.
So used to where everything was in his room, it would have been difficult for one who didn’t know to actually realise Spike was blind. He walked over to the desk where his computer sat, a state of the art laptop with all the gadgets it needed to make Spike able to use it with ease. He preferred to use the keypad rather than the speech recognition, as he tended to talk too fast for the software to get it right first time. Luckily, he’d learned to touch-type at university and so hadn’t found it too difficult to adjust. Mistakes could easily be corrected.
Feeing more than a bit daft, he began to type. His first draft baldly gave the number of his cell. The second draft wasn’t much better. By the sixth attempt, it wasn’t too bad, and the seventh got sent before he could change his mind. Determined not to sit waiting for a reply after taking well over hour to send the bloody thing, Spike got out his guitar and began to strum the opening chords of his favourite Dingoes song.
By the time the woman’s voice announced the arrival of an email he jumped six inches in the air. He put the guitar down and pressed the keys needed to open the email.
It was from Buffy. He smiled and mentally replaced the synthesised voice with hers. He replied and the conversation continued. They were awkward at first, the questions and answers a little stilted, but once they began to relax, they both realised that this was the perfect way to put their past misunderstandings behind them.
Later, as Spike showered and used his new knowledge of the smell of her perfume, the firm roundness of her breasts, and the softness of her lips, to bring himself to completion, he knew that ‘sometime’ wasn’t going to be too far in the future.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Betad by seapealsh and dawnofme. Banner by dawnofme
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