~*~
He really had quite the talent for gettin’ himself into serious messes.
He knew damn good and well that the whole friend thing was a complete crock. He was dense, but he sure as hell wasn’t stupid.
Spike gritted his teeth as Buffy’s ass came into contact with his lap. Wait, no—he was stupid, too.
“Hi!” she chirped, stealing a fry from his plate. “How ya doin’?”
He frowned at her. “’ey! My food, my seat...” My dick, too, dammit!
“Mine now,” she said, those cherry-red lips spread in a grin.
He very nearly groaned. God, do I wish.
“Hey, everybody,” Anya said, sitting down. “Spike, for God’s sake, would you stop looking like you’re about to orgasm in the school cafeteria?”
Wonderful. Trust Anya to give everyone an intimate update on how he was doin’ down in the dangly bits department. “’m not,” he snapped, acutely aware of the amused girl on his lap.
“Right.” Anya bit into her pizza, rolling her eyes. “Somebody’s kidding themselves.”
“Hey! We are not!” Buffy protested.
“I didn’t say anything about you.”
Willow and Oz sat down to a silent table a few minutes later. “Buffy?” Willow said innocently. “Why is your face so red? And...um...aren’t there enough chairs?” She looked around. The cafeteria was full of empty chairs.
Spike winced when Buffy practically leapt off his lap. “You’ve got a bony ass, pet,” he informed her, pretending to grimace because of it—though actually, he was grimacing because her wriggling had an effect that was rather hard to hide.
“Really?” Xander poked his head around the table, frowning at Buffy’s rear end. “Because I thought it was kind of—“
“Hey. Eyes off, whelp,” Spike growled. Why the bastards in this school thought they had any right to look at his girl was completely beyond him.
“Right, gotcha. No looking.” Xander went back to eating his lunch, occasionally stealing glances at Buffy. “Although, ya know—“
“Xander! So don’t want speculations on the state of my ass right now!”
“Damn, is getting burned your specialty or what?” Faith said, laughing. Xander’s face turned magenta.
“What? I didn’t know Buffy was Spike’s property, or whatever,” Xander whined.
Anya patted his hand. “Shut up, sweetie,” she advised, glaring at him.
“Right.” Xander busied himself with his lunch again.
They continued to chatter about trivial things. Generally Spike was right in the thick of it, trading barbs and laughin’ with the others, but today he didn’t feel inclined to say anything. Instead he concentrated on eating, stealing glances at the girl sitting next to him whenever he thought she wasn’t looking—which, much to his chagrin, was pretty much all the time.
She was his friend, right? That meant they ought to pay at least some attention to each other. Only problem was, he knew damn good and well that friends weren’t supposed to cuddle, or talk to each other nonstop while cuddling, or engage in flagrant make-out displays that would make Snyder have a sodding coronary in the middle of the lunchroom. And he wanted to do all those things, though preferably not all at once.
Bugger.
“So,” he said abruptly, taking advantage of a lull in conversation to get his mind off the girl next to him who wasn’t his, so matter what he might wish, “’m mum’s on a new vendetta. Says she wants me to join a club, or some rubbish like that.”
“You could join the cosmetology club,” Anya said absently. She was engrossed in the back of Xander’s hand, a rather uninteresting place, to Spike’s way of thinking—but then, he could spend hours staring at Buffy’s ankle, so he really wasn’t one to judge.
Buffy giggled. “Yeah, you and Lorne would have a blast.”
He was effectively brought back to the real world. “Hey,” he protested. “’m not gay!”
“So? You can still enjoy making ugly people less of an impediment to society.”
“Hate to break it to you, Ayn, but unless Spike’s planning on joining the Gay Guys Society, he’s not gonna join the cosmetology club,” Xander said cheerfully.
“I kinda agree with Xander,” Willow said. “Although you know, you probably know lots about cosmetology, what with the hair and the nails and—oh, look, ketchup!” She clumsily tried to change the subject after Spike started giving her a death glare.
“’m not gonna be a sodding cosmetologist!” Spike said, loudly enough that several people from the next table over turned around and stared at him.
“I never said you were,” Anya said mildly. “I just said you should join the club.”
He could hear Buffy gigging, but since he was banging his head against the table, it was rather muffled. “Sodding bints,” he muttered, thoroughly disgruntled.
*
Okay. The day was going well. In a no-kisses, God when the hell was Spike gonna look at her???!!!! kind of way.
Damn it.
She had no idea where her brain had been that morning. Maybe Spike was right and the bleach really had fried her brain, because agreeing to the whole friends thing? Yeah, not the smartest thing she’d ever done.
Now it was almost the end of the day. She was listening to her Calculus teacher talk and wondering just exactly how more bored she could get, while also half-dozing off and thinking of how bad she had wanted to tousle Spike’s hair today at lunch. Which meant that she was obsessed, and the bad part was that she really didn’t regret it. No, the only thing she did regret was the fact that she couldn’t, because she was his friend, and friends didn’t do stuff like that.
Damn.
“And so, when you take the blah-diddy-blah of the blahblahblahblahblah...”
Okay. So Mr. Kennedy wasn’t really saying that many blahs. Actually, he wasn’t saying any. It just sounded like that since all she could think about was a tiny little word that she was starting to think was absolutely no fun...especially since the person that the tiny word was attached to was currently sitting four seats away, diagonally to the right. And she could see his hair. The same hair she really wanted to tousle.
Beeeeeeeoooooooop. Buffy leapt from her seat. She’d never been gladder to hear the annoying electronic beep of her school’s “bell” than she was at that moment. Now, if she could just get out of the classroom before Spike managed to—
“Hey, luv, need a ride home?”
Not for the first time that day, Buffy grimaced inwardly and thought, damn. “Um, well, I think I can walk...”
He arched a brow at her shoes.
She sighed impatiently. “Okay, I can’t walk. Are you taking everybody else home?”
“No. Just you.” He tilted his head in that way she’d always found sexy, even back in the tenth grade, keeping his eyes on hers.
Gulp.
She hadn’t even known she could make that noise. “O—okay, then. Guess I’ll get home fast.”
She didn’t know what was wrong with her comment, honestly she didn’t, but his face closed up and his jaw got all stiff, the way it had when she accidentally on purpose posted that poem he’d written about the foreign exchange student, Ciley, all over the Internet. He looked the way he had outside his car this morning.
Wonderful—she’d managed to hurt him again. And this time, she hadn’t the slightest idea what she’d done! “Okay. What did I do?”
Well, it couldn’t hurt to ask, right?
“What the bloody hell d’you mean, what’d you do?”
“I mean,” Buffy said, “That you’re cussing and you have mad-face, which means you’re mad at me. So what did I do?”
He sighed. “Nothin’, pet. Just in a bad mood.”
They even sounded like they were dating. This was so beyond stupid. “Um, okay. I hope it gets better.”
His expression turned sarcastic. “Right. ‘m sure it will.” He turned and began to walk out of the classroom. “Hurry up, we gotta go,” he tossed over his shoulder.
She let out an exasperated sigh. OK, even if she were to go out with him—which she wasn’t planning on doing!—she would have the world’s toughest job, because he was soo moody. “Spike, would it kill you to just tell me what’s wrong?”
“Possibly.”
She rolled her eyes. Even she knew that was a rhetorical question—as in, you weren’t supposed to answer it. “Well, tell me anyway.”
He left the classroom, Buffy hot on his heels, mostly because she wanted a ride, of course. “No.”
She let out and annoyed sound. “Would you stop being so stubborn? I just wanna know what’s wrong!”
“No, you don’t,” he argued, getting out his keys as they neared the school exit. “You just wanna get home fast, remember?”
Spike was all hurt because she wanted to get home fast? But...”I’ll probably end up meeting with everybody at the Bronze, so I have to get home so I can do my homework,” she pointed out. She was making an honest effort to improve her grades. Funny how if you actually read the homework, class got so much easier.
“Right. Because spending time with me is the last thing you’d wanna do.”
“No, because spending time with you...alone...isn’t a friend-thing,” she forced herself to say.
He sent her a look that could only be described as disgusted, but didn’t say anything.
They went to his car and got in, both doing their best to uphold the strange silence. Buffy had to stop herself from saying something every few minutes—she was just so used to saying whatever she was thinking about to him. To not be able to say anything was just weird.
They drove to her house in silence, just as they had Friday night, except this time she was just a little more nervous on account of how they’d already kissed once and she really wanted it to happen again, except it couldn’t because she’d told him she just wanted to be friends. And somehow, she didn’t think he’d go for friends with benefits, or whatever.
When he stopped the car, neither of them moved. She didn’t know why he stayed still; she just didn’t want to leave and be alone in her house, even if he was mad at her.
After a few minutes she decided she’d say something. One of them had to, or she’d go insane. The only problem was, she wasn’t sure what she’d say.
So when she did talk, it wasn’t what she’d planned on saying. “This really isn’t gonna work.”
“What—what the soddin’ hell are you talking about?” Spike snapped.
Okay. Apparently he was really, really mad. She could deal with that. “The whole friends thing? Not working.”
“What’re you talkin’ ‘bout? Of course it’s working!”
She just looked at him. Apparently he got the message because he caved and said, “Well, a’right, maybe it’s not working, but that’s no reason to give up, is it?”
Was it just her, or did he sound a little desperate? Well, desperate was good. She could deal with that.
Although it would be nice to know how she planned on dealing with it before the words popped out of her mouth.
“No,” she responded cheerfully, “But it’s reason to do this .” She leaned forward, ignoring the seatbelt that dug into her waist, and kissed him.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
A/N: So, did the whole shutting down the site/charging money thing freak anybody else out? Sooo glad Pari decided not to do it, cuz I don’t have a credit card. If I did, I’d pay five dollars a stinking month to use this site—but I don’t so I’m really glad she decided to not charge anyone =D And thanks soo much for the reviews, they made me really, really happy—you guys are the most amazingly awesome people ever!