Her lips needed to stop tingling. Really. It was getting annoying.
Annoying along with the looks that Spike kept shooting her. He was supposed to be talking, dammit. Which, okay, he was doing. He was talking. But he was looking at her. And her lips, being lame and uncooperative, were making with the tinglies and aching for his.
It was not fair that he could kiss like that. Not fair in the slightest.
“Allow me to…interject…” Giles said. His glasses were in a perpetual polishing session in the hem of his dress-shirt. Perhaps he hoped that Spike would disappear if he couldn’t see him clearly. “You’re…you’re serious?”
Well, that was certainly profound. Her shoulders slumped and she breathed a relieved sigh that Willow had skipped out while she had discussed things with her vampire in the spare classroom. The redhead’s affinity for after-school activities had drawn her away, thankfully leaving them with only one pair of disbelieving eyes. One pair of eyes was proving to be difficult enough.
And Spike wasn’t making things any easier. Asshole.
“Serious?” repeated the vampire in question, arching a brow in a way that made her tingle for all the wrong reasons. “As a bleeding heart attack, mate.”
“You really wish to…”
Spike’s brows perked. “Save the world? Yeah.”
“Oh.”
“I could write it down for you if that’d help clear out any ambiguity.” He huffed and shook his head, his eyes meeting hers again. An electric shock shot down her spine. “He always like this?”
Buffy forced a dry smile to her still-tingling lips. It was hard to make with the talking when all she wanted to do was suck his face until he forgot his name. “He’s just not used to bad guys waving white flags.”
He grinned, and it was too sexy for words. “I’m not one for rules, love.”
The look on his face spoke for that and then some. No, Spike was many things and none of them had anything to do with abiding the rules. The rules definitely said—underlined, italicized, the full-nine-yards—that fraternization between vampires and slayers was strictly forbidden.
It didn’t matter if the vampire in question was the sexiest creature on two legs. It didn’t matter if he made her feel female after so many weeks of being hollow inside. Perhaps her reaction to him was a side-effect of being lonely. And perhaps his reaction to her was a side-effect of being abandoned. Buffy didn’t harbor any delusions that things between her former boyfriend and Spike’s insane lover were chaste. The way the two acted together—the way Angelus spoke when she saw him—she knew that they were making it, and often.
That would certainly explain Spike’s reaction to her. He’d been deserted just as sure as she had. He was starved for touch as well.
In the end, it likely had little to do with her. She was just the owner of the lips his enjoyed kissing in the absence of Drusilla.
“D-do you know what they’re plotting?” Giles asked, glasses still in full-polish mode. “If the end of the world is Angel’s intention—”
“Not Angel,” Spike corrected, his eyes narrowing. “The git’s name is Angelus.”
Giles frowned. “I…I beg your pardon?”
There was a long, quiet moment. The vampire shrugged. “S’pose it doesn’t matter in the end, right?” he replied. “The wanker has the same face. Same walk. Same talk. Jus’ minus one soul, yeh? Jus’ got his confidence back.” He broke off then, laughing without humor. “Angelus is the prat that got a soul shoved up his righteous arse a good century ago. The beast that your slayer awakened by partin’ her dimpled knees.”
Buffy’s innards flushed with cold, a well-aimed barb striking her chest. She found herself swallowed in confusion; she didn’t know whether to be angry or hurt.
Thankfully, Giles took care of her dilemma for her. In a blink, he’d paraded across the library floor and popped Spike in the eye. The move was so thoroughly uncharacteristic on part of her Watcher that Buffy could do little more than stand numbly to the side, watching in disbelief as Spike sailed ineloquently to the ground.
“You filthy little wanker!” Giles spat. “How dare you speak to her that way?”
Spike recovered quickly enough, rolling to his feet, his eyes flashing. “Speak what way? The truth, maybe? It’s what brought Angelus back, innit? It’s why that prat’s fucking Dru sideways while I’m here in the sodding belly of the sodding beat, chattin’ up the Slayer an’ her mates like we’re old chums. You think I want to be here? You think I want to be…” He paused, his gaze flickering to hers. And perhaps it was her imagination, but she thought she saw some of the fire die.
No, check that. It had to be her imagination. Just as the shaking of her legs and the ache in her heart.
“You’re the one who came to me,” she said softly, rubbing her arms. “Remember?”
“Pet—”
“You came here. No one forced you. No one held a stake to your heart.” Her brows perked and she surged with a forced sense of confidence. “You came to me for help.”
Spike nodded somberly. “That’s right.”
“And then…” And then he’d kissed her and taken her to the stars. “And then—”
“Look—”
“I’m just saying, if you don’t wanna be here, then there’s the door.”
“I don’t wanna be here,” he retorted. “No more than you want me here. Can’t say I fancy keepin’ company with a lot that would just as soon see me dust as anything else. An’ you’d trade me over for a kiss from your boy in a blink, so don’t bloody look at me like I’ve squashed your dainty feelings, Slayer. You want Angel back, I want Dru. Simple as all that.”
Buffy froze, rubbing her arms again. A short twenty-four hours ago, and she would have agreed with him. She would have given anything to see her boyfriend’s face. To feel his hands on her skin and his whispers in her hair. To hear him tell her that everything would be all right—that the dark was over and he was with her now.
But a day had passed. The night had come, and the sun had risen.
Spike had walked into the library. Spike had come to her. Spike had done what no vampire would ever do.
“Angel’s a killer,” she said softly.
“Yeah,” Spike agreed, arching that perfect brow again. “An’ he was before, too.”
She knew that. She’d known that the second that he’d flashed his fangs in her bedroom after they’d shared their first kiss. She’d known when they tentatively started dating, just as she’d known it the night she’d foolishly agreed to share his bed. He’d taken her virginity as a killer, and he’d awoken as one as well.
Only now he’d killed people that she knew. The deaths were no longer a part of the past. They were no longer faceless names in a history book. They were people like Jenny Calendar. People like her classmates. Girls and boys and teachers. He was eating away at her reality now; the book had come to life. The names had become faces. The faces were people she knew. People she had once seen every day. People that she’d cared for.
A long sigh whispered through her lips. “He’s a killer,” she reiterated, stronger now. “And I…look, you say they’re going to end the world?”
Spike shrugged lazily, though there was something in his eyes that hadn’t been there a minute ago. “They’re planning on it,” he replied flippantly. “Angelus has gotten some bloody large aspirations. Seems bein’ shoved inside a soul tends to make one lose his marbles.”
“Imagine that,” Giles said dryly.
“He’s plotting something on the world-ending stage. I’d stake my smokes on it.”
“Yes,” the Watcher replied. “And your word’s as good as grit.”
Spike shot him a narrow glance. “Did you miss the ‘stake my smokes’ part?”
“You insolent little—”
Buffy grumbled and held up a hand, quickly putting herself between her Watcher and the insolent vampire in question. One thing was certain; they weren’t getting anywhere like this. And despite Spike’s rather abrasive manner of getting his point across, he had the added benefit of being right.
Angel—or Angelus—was crazy enough to end the world. Spike wouldn’t be here if he didn’t think so.
He wasn’t here for her after all.
Better this way, she told herself, swallowing hard. Vampires and slayers? Very nonmixy. I could write the book on how nonmixy they are.
“Giles,” she said softly. “If…if Angel’s planning something, we need to be ready. And we’re going to need all the help we can get.” She turned to Spike slowly, braving herself to meet his eyes. His too-blue eyes and the devastating way he could see into her without even trying. No one had ever looked at her like that. “All the help we can get.”
“We don’t need him. For God’s sake, Buffy, for all we know, he’s been sent to throw you off.”
Spike frowned at that. “I am not a sodding lackey.”
“Like we can believe one blessed word you say!”
“If you knew anything about Angelus, you’d know he doesn’t send anyone to do what he couldn’t do himself.”
“Angel likes to torture psychologically. How can we know that gaining Buffy’s trust isn’t a part of—”
Spike sputtered at that, wide-eyed. “Buffy’s trust?” he repeated. “Does the Slayer look like she trusts me? She doesn’t trust me any further than she could…” He paused. “Well, okay, so she could toss me quite a ways, but you get my meaning. An’ I say since the girl’s the one with the super-powers, she’s the one you oughta listen to.”
He met her eyes again, and another electric shock raced down her spine.
It was nothing. They had nothing. A few kisses didn’t mean loyalty.
He wanted Dru back. And until then, she was his substitute.
The idea left her cold for reasons she couldn’t explain, and try as she might, she couldn’t shake the feeling aside.
She wanted Spike to want her.
God, how screwed up was that?