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Author's Chapter Notes:
I'm glad that young William found a little love with you all. :) Here's part two.
William didn’t bother to tape his hands up the way he’d been taught before he started pummeling the punching bag his father had hung in the basement. Knowing that he was home alone, he ranted freely.

“Such a bloody idiot. Couldn’t just ask the stupid girl to the stupid dance. No. No. ‘Course not. Arghh. Accents are cool now? Since bloody when? That’s what I want to know. Just go over and knock on the door and say go to the fucking dance with me. Girls are supposed to like that confident shit. They don’t like pussy boys that can’t even ask a girl to a dance. It’s not even like I want to go to the dance. Everybody knows that school dances are lame. I don’t even like dancing. Just wanted to…fuck! Why Angel? What does she even see in him? He’s a bloody simpleton…is what he is. He’s a senior and he’s still taking Algebra.” He screamed. Sweat dripped from his hair and down his back. His breath came in shallow pants. Two of his knuckles were bleeding.

He still felt like punching Liam O’Brian’s smug face. He imagined Buffy smiling at the taller boy and blushing while she asked him to go to the dance. He’d say yes, William had no illusions about that, Liam may be an idiot but he’d know what a good thing Buffy was when she fell into his lap. The thought of Buffy on the other boy’s lap led to another twenty minutes of solid strikes. Typing his paper for American History with two bloodied hands was going to suck, but he didn’t care. Sometimes he was just angry.

He looked up at the mirror in the bathroom after washing his hands and scowled. He wondered if a guy could look less like him than Liam did. Liam was exactly the type of guy that girls liked. Liam was tall, dark and handsome. William wasn’t. The tag on William’s t-shirt said small. He’d tried working out but he just didn’t bulk up…at all. Still, there were a lot of guys at school who weren’t very big and still had girlfriends and the only girl William was interested in was tiny. He was plenty taller than her, wasn’t he? The longer he looked at his face the more problems he saw: his eyelashes were too girly, his chin wasn’t big enough, his cheeks were almost concave and his dark blond hair was curly. Cool guys never had curly hair.

He’d showered and iced his hands before his parents came home from work. At dinner he answered their questions about school and reported that he had received the expected A on his last Physics exam. He was tempted to lie and say that he’d only gotten a B just to see what would happen. It wasn’t that he thought they’d punish him; his parents had never hit him or sent him to bed without dinner or any other dramatic and traumatic thing that he knew a million other kids had to deal with. In September he’d gotten an A- on a Latin paper and his mother had just looked confused and asked him what happened. He wanted to tell her that there were hundreds of parents in the world who would be totally happy to have a son that got an A- in Latin, that it would make their day, to see an A- on their son’s Latin paper. He wanted to tell her that an A- was the highest grade anyone had gotten from Mr. Lampksy in two years. He wanted to tear up the paper and yell, just to hear the sound. Instead, he told her that he thought he might be coming down with a cold and that he’d make up for it on his next test.

After dinner, he worked on schoolwork for three hours before he stalked over to his window and stared at Buffy’s bedroom. Her curtains were closed, as usual. He wasn’t spying on her. He just liked to see if her light was on. He just liked to know that she was in her room too, that they had that in common. He stared at the yellow glow of her window for several minutes before groaning.

It was a lame excuse. It was the only one he had. He snatched a book from his bookshelf and walked determinedly downstairs and towards the front door.

His mother’s eyes widened as he started to open the door. “William, where are you going?”

“I forgot to give Buffy this book. She needs it for her history paper.”

Anne Pratt frowned. “It’s after nine o’clock. Don’t you think it can wait until tomorrow?”

He shook his head. “She told me that she really needs to work on it tonight and I should have brought it over before. It won’t take long.”

She shrugged. “I guess there’s no harm if…William, you’re not even wearing a jacket.”

He was already halfway across the street.

She shook her head and went back to reading.

William stood on the Summers’ front porch shivering in his white t-shirt for five minutes before knocking. When he did, Buffy’s mother answered. He’d liked Joyce when he’d first met her. She smiled a lot and always offered him a snack. It had gotten a lot more difficult to talk to her lately though. Every time he saw her, he had to fight off the urge to apologize for having wet dreams about her daughter.

“William! What are you doing out without a jacket?” She stepped back. “Quick. Come in.”

Mothers. He rubbed his free hand up and down his bare arm to warm up. “Hi, Joyce. I just…umm…I have a book for Buffy...for her history paper. She really needs it.”

Joyce nodded. “Okay. She’s in her room. You can take it up.”

Result! A choir of Angels sang in his head. Of course, almost immediately he realized the irony. Even Buffy’s mother didn’t consider him datable. He couldn’t imagine Joyce sending Liam O’Brian up to her daughter’s bedroom.

Buffy’s bedroom door was open a crack, so he watched her for a second before knocking on the doorframe. She was listening to some happy pop music and painting her toenails with a bright pink nail polish. He licked his lips and swallowed hard. She had very pretty little feet. He’d never considered them before. He would from now on.

She jumped slightly at his knock, smiled for a second and then frowned. William figured that for a second she had forgotten his idiotic behavior, but that she remembered now.

“What are you doing here?”

He held up the book he’d brought. “You’re doing your paper on Lincoln, right? This book has a lot of information about The Gettysburg Address.” He walked into her room and handed her the book.

Buffy looked at it skeptically. “Right. The paper is due on Friday. I couldn’t possibly read this whole book and write the paper by then, so…”

He just stared at her for a moment. “Use the index to find the most relevant sections and read those.”

“Oh.” She shrugged and placed the book on her bed. “Thanks.”

William stared at it. His book was on her bed. It was sitting on her bed with her. She was already wearing pajamas, silly blue ones with big puffy clouds. He wondered if she would bother to move the book before she crawled under the covers and went to sleep.

“What happened to your hand?”

William glanced at his red knuckles and shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Oh.” She looked at him curiously for a moment. “So did you…I mean is that all?”

“Have you asked him yet?”

Her eyes widened. “What? No. I’m going to do it at school. Tomorrow.”

He turned and looked around her bedroom. He hadn’t been in her room in months. It didn’t look any different. “Oh. That makes sense.”

“So, I guess no one’s asked you yet…to the dance.”

He frowned. “Why would you say that?” He hated that she didn’t think any girl could ever be interested in him.

“Because you didn’t even know that girls are supposed to do the asking.”

She might have had a point there, but it didn’t make him feel any better. “No.”

“I’ll bet Willow will ask you if you want to go. She doesn’t have anyone she wants to go with. Do you want me to ask her to?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to go to the dance with Willow.” She looked like she was going to argue and he didn’t want to, so he shook his head. “I should get home. I still have some work to finish.” His head tilted to the side as he studied her for a moment. “I like your pajamas.” He turned and walked away.

It was dumb thing to say. That’s what he thought while he hurried back across the street. Being in her bedroom was too distracting. He couldn’t stand there next to all of her things, smelling her perfume and thinking about the likelihood that she wasn’t wearing a bra under her pajama top and also think of good things to say.

When he got home he announced that he was going to take a shower before turning in. His mother laughed.

“You just took a shower this afternoon.”

“Oh. Right. I forgot.” He walked up to his bedroom and flopped on the bed. What did she check to see if his towel was wet when she came home? His mother was like the bloody shower police, there was no lock on his bedroom door and he was painfully hard. Life sucked.


Chapter End Notes:
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