Spike had been standing in front of their door for over ten minutes trying to get someone to answer it, but nobody came. His fear and panic was slowly replaced with a red-hot fury. They had left his girl all alone after they had promised to watch over her and now she was gone.
Gone. And he was fucking wasting his time waiting for a response that would never come while he could have been half way out of the city by now.
Slamming his fist against the wall, he let the anger consume him. He needed it, the adrenaline and push to do what he would need to do once he found her. To cripple the son of a bitch and make sure he would never be physically able to touch her again.
With a roar he jumped down from the landing, his feet hitting the third step from the bottom before bounding across the lawn towards his bike. His fist was scrapped, bruised, and bloody from using the wall as a punching bag and he winced slightly as his hand curled around the grip.
He jumped up and his foot crashed down onto the kick start, the bike coming to life in a wail of metal and gears. Revving up the motor, the sound bounced between the buildings making it seem larger than life.
Putting the motorcycle in gear, he backed it out of the parking stall and swung around to face the exit.
Suddenly, the oncoming lights of a truck blinded him and he held up his hand to shield his eyes.
“Spike?”
Spike squinted against the light to see Xander leaning out of the truck window. “Xander, where the hell have you been?”
Xander shut his headlights off. “I just took the girls out for ice cream.”
Girls. Anya and Buffy. He felt his heart stop and drop to his feet. Fuck, she had been with them the whole time and here he was thinking something horrible had happened to her.
Kicking down his kickstand, he shut the bike off and dismounted it in one swift move. He stomped over to the truck and opened the passenger side door to find Anya and Buffy looking at him as if he were the one-handed hookman come to murder them.
“Get out of the truck, Buffy,” he said in the calmest voice he could muster.
“What’s wrong, Spike?” She asked him, not moving a muscle.
“Get out of the truck!” Spike couldn’t contain his anger as he reached across the seat to grab a hold of her arm.
“Hey, calm down,” Anya told him. “Let me move first before you yank her out of here like a caveman.”
Letting Anya slide out of the truck, he once again took hold of her arm and pulled her out. For a minute all he could do was stand there staring at her, his hands grasping her shoulders tightly.
“Spike, what did I-”
Quickly, he brought her into a strong embrace with his arms banding around her small frame. “I could kill you right now,” he whispered against her hair. “Could bloody murder you for what you just put me through.”
“What did I do?” She mumbled, her mouth pressed against the hardness of his chest.
He held her out at arm’s length and gave her an incredulous glare. “What did you do?! Fuck, Buffy, what was I supposed t’ think when I come home t’ find you gone? No note, no soddin’ phone call, and those two gone as well?”
“Oh,” she replied lamely. “Sorry, I guess I didn’t think about that.”
That shouldn’t have caused his heart to ache, but it did. She hadn’t given him one thought when she’d gone out with Anya and Xander and he was the git who almost died of a heart attack when he found her missing. God, he felt like a fucking fool!
“I see. So you didn’t care that I would come home t’ find you missing? It just didn’t matter,” he told her. The relief he had felt moments earlier was now leaking out of him and being replaced with a strong feeling of betrayal.
Her arms folded over her chest as she spoke in a defensive tone. “No, that’s not it. You told me you wouldn’t be home until one and I knew I would be back before then so I didn’t think to leave a note.”
The admission took the sting out of his pain, but didn’t take it away completely. Her explanation made sense and he knew he was being unreasonably angry with her. Of course, nobody had ever accused him of being rational especially when his emotions came into play.
“It still doesn’t make it right, Buffy. You scared the shit out o’ me. I thought…” he trailed off for a second, his hand running through his hair. “I thought he had gotten you.”
She felt like the biggest jerk who ever walked the planet.
How could she have been so thoughtless? With her father looming over them at every turn, Spike was bound to jump to that conclusion when he found her missing from the apartment.
“Oh, god, I’m so sorry, Spike,” Buffy said, her hand reaching out to him.
He backed away from her reach. “Well, you bloody well should be.”
Dropping her arm to her side, she took the couple steps towards him and grabbed onto his shirt so he couldn’t get away. “I was stupid and I totally didn’t think you would be home. I’m really sorry. I swear it won’t happen again. Please don’t be mad at me, Spike, please.”
Staring up at him, she could see the wheels turning in his head and the internal argument he was having with himself.
“You’re gonna be the death of me, luv,” he whispered hoarsely.
They stood like that for what seemed like a million years before Xander honked his horn and slapped them back into the real world.
“Is everything okay, now? Because as much as I’d like to stay out here and watch as the Buffy and Spike soap opera unfolds, some of us have to get up early and go to work,” Xander told them.
“Xander! Don’t be such an ass,” Anya scolded.
“We’re fine. Just go on home,” Spike said, his gaze never leaving Buffy’s.
“Don’t need to tell me twice.” Xander threw the truck into gear and drove off to park.
Anya was still standing there watching with rapt attention and Spike turned to glare at her. “Is there somethin’ you need, An’?”
“Oh, well, no. I was just making sure there wasn’t going to be a throw down. I love watching people fight and I didn’t want to miss anything good,” she replied.
Spike rolled his eyes and let out an exasperated sigh. “Well, I think we’re done for now, so why don’t you toddle off like a good little eavesdropper.”
“Do they have memberships to that club?”
“What club?” Spike asked, his tone growing more and more annoyed.
“You know, Assholes Anonymous? I think you and Xander should join,” Anya retorted before sauntering off towards her husband.
Spike looked down at Buffy. “I think she’s got a little too much sass for her own good sometimes.”
Giggling, Buffy said, “Yeah, but its fun to watch.”
After moving the bike back into its spot under the carport and Buffy followed Spike up to the apartment.
“Are you still mad at me?” Buffy asked, sitting down on the couch.
Spike was moving around in the kitchen and he emerged with a bottle of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “I’m not mad, luv, just bothered by the fact that you didn’t seem t’ have any concern for my feelings.”
“I do too! I just wasn’t thinking. I never wanted to make you worry like that,” she told him, watching as he took a seat in the recliner adjacent to the couch.
“Hmm.” He took a big swig out of his beer and set it down on the table. “I think we need t’ get something straight then.”
“I promise I won’t ever leave again without you, but I thought it was okay to hang out with Xander and Anya so I didn’t think you would mind.”
Spike shook his head and took a drag of his cigarette. “I’m not tellin’ you that you’re not allowed to go out without me, pet. And you know I don’t have a problem with Xander and Anya takin’ you out.”
“Then what?” She honestly didn’t understand why he was so upset with her now. At first, it made sense, but after he told her that her leaving the apartment wasn’t the issue she was at a complete loss.
He wasn’t looking at her, rather he was studying the burning end of his cigarette when he said, “You’re all I’ve got.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. Not only was it vague as far as their conversation went, but she was taken aback by the raw sincerity in his voice.
“You’re all I’ve got, too,” she finally replied.
Instantly, his gaze was on her. “That’s why we’ve got t’ stick together then and you leavin’ me out of the loop when you went with Xander and Anya doesn’t exactly inspire my confidence in us. I’m not your father, Buffy, and I’m not going t’ tell you what you can and can’t do, but in the bloody future you might want t’ remember that we’re in this together.”
Spike watched as a tear rolled down her cheek and suddenly he felt like the asshole that Anya had accused him of being.
“Don’t cry, pet. I didn’t mean t’ sound so-”
“No. No, you’re right,” she said as she wiped the tear away. “It was thoughtless and I made you worry when all I had to do was leave you a dumb note.”
He stood up and walked over to her, sitting next to her on the couch and wrapping his arm around her shoulders. “Buffy, you do understand what I meant, right?”
She nodded. “We’re each other’s family.”
Well, that was close, but not quite what he had meant. He supposed that in a way they were each other’s family, however, his feelings for her went beyond familial ties. She wasn’t his cousin, not in his mind.
Truth was, he couldn’t yet name what their relationship was, but it sure as hell wasn’t something that would be defined by their family tree.
“You know I don’t think of you like that,” he said, almost stumbling over the words in fear of her reaction.
By the expression on her face, he could tell that she didn’t understand what he was saying. If he spelled it out though, there would be no turning back though. He wouldn’t be able to take it back later if things didn’t work out or if she decided that she didn’t want him that way. It would hang there for an eternity once it was vocalized.
“You’re not my cousin. I can’t look at you like that, Buffy, never could,” he tried to explain without actually coming out and saying how much he wanted her.
“Oh, well, I don’t look at you like that either. We’re…friends, right?”
A million things were running through his mind. Normally, he had no trouble just speaking what ever was on his mind, but with Buffy he knew there had to be some caution taken. It was easy to forget how young she was sometimes and even easier to forget that she had yet to experience what went on between men and women.
“We’ll never be friends, luv,” he replied. There, he had finally said it. The other day with her let’s-be-friends speech, he had wanted to tell her then what he thought about it, but he hadn’t been ready to accept what he was feeling for her. And now he couldn’t deny it.
“Then what are we, Spike?”
He took her small, delicate hands in his and turned her so that she was facing him. “We’re together, sweets.”
When she didn’t say anything, he added, “You do want to be together, don’t you?”
“I-I don’t know what that means.”
She wasn’t going to make this easy on him, was she?
“It means that you an’ I are with each other.”
Her eyebrows rose. “You mean, like boyfriend-girlfriend?”
He winced at the terms she used. There hadn’t been a time in his life when he’d had a ‘girlfriend’ and now that it was staring him down in the face, he was a little terrified. Calling someone your girlfriend meant that you were in a committed, exclusive relationship, in his mind. And while that’s what he wanted, the part of him that was a die-hard bachelor was trying to climb out of his skin and slap some sense in him.
No, he wasn’t going to chicken out of this. There wasn’t an alternative.
“Yeah, pet. Boyfriend-girlfriend.”
“Oh…”
A/N: I didn’t have any of you fooled, did I? Darn it! Well, at least I can say my reviewers are smarties. Muchas gracias on all of the great reviews for the last chapter and I’m sorry I kind of left you all hanging for so long. I try and update daily (either this one or Personal Attention) but I lagged off a little this week.
Thanks for sticking with me. All reviews are appreciated so if you feel inclined to do so, I will be more than happy to accept.