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Author's Chapter Notes:
Special thanks to Willow Trees for editing help and story advice. Thank you to everyone reading and commenting!
Buffy couldn't stop thinking about Spike as she drove home, his hands, his lips, his long legs. She felt like a teenager with a crush. The closer she got to the house, the tighter the guilt clutching her stomach became and she forced herself to stop flipping through the Tiger Beat in her brain.
Dawn was setting the dining room table when Buffy walked in; the house was redolent with the rich scent of spaghetti sauce.
Riley and Buffy had inherited their home from her mother, Joyce, after Joyce's death five years before. The house had two stories, so after Riley's injuries they’d had to put in a chair lift allowing him access to the master bedroom and bath. Riley’s best friend Xander was a carpenter who’d done the work for free. The lift represented another thank-you pie Buffy had yet to bake.
Joyce had populated the house with arts and crafts style furniture, Navaho rugs and stained glass. The walls were a neutral shade of beige, except in the dining room which was decorated with brown, leaf-patterned wallpaper. Buffy had hated the paper when her mother was alive, but after her death it became so intimately connected to her memories of Joyce that she couldn't take it down.
"Hey everybody," Buffy said.
Buffy walked through the living room to her daughter and gave Dawn a hug.
"Ick, you're sweaty," Dawn said, shrugging away from her mother’s embrace. Buffy had given herself a sponge bath in the sink, but she wondered if she smelled like Spike.
"I can shower," she said, defensively
Riley called from the kitchen.
"Can it wait, I just drained the pasta," Riley said.
"Sure. Is there anything you guys need me to do?" Buffy asked.
"Nope, just sit down," Dawn said.
Buffy took a seat and Riley glided into the room with a mound of long noodles in a bright, blue serving dish. Buffy recognized it as one her mom had made during her pottery phase. Dawn jockeyed past him into the kitchen. Riley placed the dish on the table and started doling out its contents onto their plates.
"How was Pilates?" he asked.
"Intense," she said with a smile. I am enormous, fucking whore, she thought.
Riley smiled at her and she felt her heart twist. Dawn walked in with her hands full.
"Look, I repurposed the gravy boat, pretty clever, huh?" Dawn asked as she set a gravy boat full of sauce on the table.
"You're like the MacGuyver of dinner," Riley said.
"Who's that?" Dawn asked.
"Old person reference," Riley said.
Dawn nearly sat down, then bounced back up onto her feet.
"Oooh, I forgot, Daddy made bread when we were at Gram's house," Dawn said. She skittered into the kitchen and came back with a basket piled high with sliced, homemade bread.
"I'm sorry I missed it, you know how I love to watch that sweet Finn forearm action," Buffy said, seductively. It was true, too, her husband had some delectable arms.
"At least some parts still do work," Riley said with a forced smile.
"Like your mouth," Buffy said, thinking of what Spike’s wonderful tongue had done to her; knowing what Riley could do if he'd only want to again.
Riley caught her meaning and blushed. Buffy couldn't believe she'd said that in front of Dawn. Luckily, the comment went over Dawn's head. Unfortunately, when things went over Dawn's head she often went to her default mode of self-righteous anger.
"You're so mean, dad doesn't talk too much, if anything you're the one who never stops talking," Dawn said.
"She's just teasing, Dawnie, give your mom a break," Riley said, unable to meet his wife's eyes. Riley shook out the fern-colored napkin Dawn had placed under his silverware and set it on his lap.
Buffy covered his hand with hers.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean it," she said.
She hadn't meant to let any of it happen, but it had, it was, and she didn't know if she could stop.
“Wow, I got mom to apologize. Mark your calendars folks!” Dawn said, triumphantly.
***
Spike unlocked the door to his bungalow and Sunshine jumped up on him as he walked through. He scratched the dog's head affectionately.
"Hey Sunshine, down you bloody poofter," he said.
He went into his brown and cream tiled kitchen, put the kettle on for tea. He took out a tin of dog food for Sunshine and a tin of soup for himself.
"The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights her stove, and lays out food in tins."
First Emily Dickinson and now T. S. Eliot. Buffy was calling to mind all the poetry sixteen years of teaching had made him forget. Spike knew what that meant, he'd done the same thing with Dru when they first met.
"When lovely woman stoops to folly and paces about her room again, alone, she smoothes her hair with automatic hand and puts a record on the gramophone."
He peeled the lid off Sunshine's dinner and pulled it out of the container with a fork, the food making a suctioning noise as he dished out the brown lumps. Spike placed Sunshine's rubber-bottomed green bowl on the ground and watched the hungry dog snuffle up his food.
He wasn't the young man carbuncular, was he? She'd enjoyed it, Spike knew it, he'd felt it. He hoped she didn't feel the way he did now, like an empty dog food can.
He put the soup back and rubbed his face with his hands, hands that still smelled of her.
Spike was angry at himself for wondering how she was feeling, how she was coping, what she would say to her enormous, war hero husband when she got home.
He'd learned that tidbit about G.I. Joe from one of Dawn's essays. It made him sick to remember how giddy he'd felt after reading the girl's simple, painful story. That's when he'd seen a glimmer of hope, a slim shot at Buffy to exploit and he'd monstrously, relentlessly pursued it, never believing he'd have her.
Spike had once fancied himself a novelist, but everything he'd written was shite, all the prose purple, all the main characters perfected versions of himself. Dawn was a more moving writer, and she was fourteen. If Dawn were writing this story, hell if he were writing this story, Spike knew he wouldn't be the hero. The hero was clear and Spike was in fact the villain of the piece.

Ah, but fuck all.

It was time to admit he was in love with Mrs. Buffy Anne Finn, irrevocably, unfortunately in love with her. He couldn't stop, moreover, he didn't want to stop.
There was no way this could end well, he thought.


Chapter End Notes:
The poem Spike starts hearing in his head is T. S. Eliot's the Wasteland. The young man carbuncular is a character in the poem, the quoted lines about the food put out in tins are from the same passage.
The rest of the story will reference "The Wasteland," again, because I'm still paying of student loans and symbolic imagery is super-hot. To me.
Also MacGuyver was a t.v. show from the 1980's starring Richard Dean Anderson about a guy who could get out of bad situations by building bombs out of tampons. It was not a good show, but I loved it when I was a kid.
Oh, and Tiger Beat is a magazine for teenage girls with pictures of non-threatening boys in them.



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