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Author's Chapter Notes:
I hate busy weeks. So much. This one was one those, but here's a chapter for you anyway! :)

Previously: Buffy can never catch a break and got her period, but Spike volunteered to brave the drug store. Is there a deeper truce brewing? Read on and find out. Dun-dun-dun.

Beta'd by the ever amazing All4Spike!
Chapter 11

His hands were shaking so much he could hardly open the lid on the Thermos. He was starved for it, as awful as he knew it would taste, the tip of his tongue running over the sharp edges of his fangs.

Emma was huffing and puffing somewhere behind him, wrestling off her boots. “Daddy, I need help!”

“Just a sec, love,” he said, aware he couldn’t face her with his demon out to play.

“Hurry!”

“Told you to wait,” he growled out, the wave of bloodlust welling up in the pit of his stomach as he unscrewed the lid and drank deep. Even the pig swill tasted like ambrosia, and yet… something inside him remained restless, a thirst he couldn’t quench even as he drained it all.

His fingers flexed around the counter hard enough to feel it creak.

It’d hit the spot, just not all of them.

When he finished putting the rest into the freezer and his head cleared up, it occurred to him that he might have snapped at Emma, even though he’d never really meant to.

She sat there with her hands resting on a boot that was half off, following him with that too serious gaze that made him feel as if she was trying to wriggle inside his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said, instantly angry, because he wasn’t supposed to care about her feelings at all, but did so anyway. No wonder Angelus made me his laughing stock. What kind of vamp cares for a snack?

“It’s okay,” she said and he wondered when the roles had flipped and she’d become the adult one. “Are you mad at me?”

He wanted to yell, pick her up and shake her, tell her to stop looking at him as if she trusted him with her life. “No. No, I’m not mad. Everything’s fine.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll help you, yeah? Just hang on a tic while I give your… mum… stuff.”

He didn’t deserve Emma’s earnest trust and soft-spoken I love you’s, didn’t deserve Buffy’s thank you as he put the stuff on the bathroom floor without coming inside. He didn’t deserve it, but a part of him didn’t care, was starved for it like a hungry animal.

*******

It was wigging her out how strangely quiet Spike was. See, she should be cheering and dancing around because he’d shut up, but something had shifted the moment he’d decided to risk getting crispy just to help her out. Maybe even before.

She didn’t want to get in too deep, to pick it all apart and find out the when and the how, to pinpoint all those familiar dynamics that no longer felt as familiar. She just had to get him to say something, anything, to lock up all those thoughts that were better left unsaid.

“Thanks. Again. With the helping out stuff. You didn’t have to.” Her hand hovered over his shoulder where he was sprawled in the armchair with a book in his lap. She told herself not to be stupid and made contact. Emma was there anyway. Got to keep touching, keep the pretenses up.

She’s not even watching you right now.

Shut up.

“Don’t mention it.” He tilted his head back to look up at her, his voice strained and testy. “I mean it.”

“Okay, Grumpy.”

She was about to leave when he caught her forearm and tugged, pressed his lips to her wrist. His eyes were tracking the pages of the book as if he wasn’t even aware of his lips, soft and ticklish on her vulnerable skin. She tried not to think about how his fingertips felt like live wire pressed into her inner arm.

This isn’t right. This feels like cheating. What would Riley think? And Willow and Xander and Giles?

Then why wasn’t she pushing him away?

“You smell good.”

“Uhh… thanks?”

He bit down on her wrist with blunt teeth and sucked at the skin over her pulse, and that that sound she’d just made was definitely not a moan. She was just… voicing her disapproval. Without actual words.

“Sure,” he said, as casual as you please. But it wouldn’t be Spike if he didn’t turn it into some kind of challenge and the smirk he gave her as he let go of her arm made her want to press him into the couch and punish him. In a non-sexual, non-naked way, because that would be the very definition of wrong. Yes.

“I’m getting you for that later.”

“Can’t wait.” He turned back to the damn book and added, “Now let me read, woman. You’re ruining my concentration.”

“God, you’re boring.”

The blatant dismissal of her jibe and his refusal to give in to the banter was enough to make her develop an eye tic. If he wanted to be buried in some musty old book, then fine. His loss. She was the Slayer, the Chosen One. She was perfectly self-reliant. She didn’t need him to entertain her.

*******

If he wasn’t too lazy to move, he’d have toppled off the bed when the earthquake started.

Wait. Not an earthquake. Just a five-year-old jumping up and down to wake him from his nap. And landing on his back. He grunted into the book on top of which he’d fallen asleep.

“Bloody hell.” What was it with women in this cabin not letting him get a wink in?

“Can we watch The Grinch?” Emma shoved a DVD into his hands and fluttered her eyelashes the second he got to his feet and put the book into the night stand. “Please?”

“How did you even get up here? Isn’t it unsafe for little girls to go around climbing ladders?”

“Mommy said I could. And I’d never fall! I’m the best climber in the world.” She started jumping up and down on the mattress. “Can we go watch it right now?”

He wiped his hand down his face and sighed. “Sure, I’ll pop it in for you.”

“But you have to watch with me. I’ll feel lonely if you don’t.” She plopped down on her bum, turning serious before he could as much as blink.

It was the pitiful little pout. Had to be. God damn it. “All right.” He could go get the book if he got too bored, get a few more chapters in, safe in the knowledge that books were to the Slayer what holy water was to him and she wouldn’t want to peek. She hadn’t earlier.

Emma squealed and jumped on his back, limbs wrapped around him tightly as he climbed down the ladder. Buffy was already seated on the living room sofa with a blanket around her, mouthing at him, You too, huh?

Before he could make himself comfy in the armchair, Emma hopped into it, grinning at them. Well then. He put the film in, hit play and sat next to Buffy. He felt Emma’s eyes on them, so he put his arm on the back of the sofa, playing with Buffy’s hair.

“Mommy looks cold, Daddy. You should cuddle her.” She smiled at them from behind her teddy bear and Spike knew now that the kid wasn’t actually their child. She was the spawn of Satan.

He reclined in the corner of the sofa and pulled Buffy into his arms. She huffed at being manhandled, her back ramrod straight against his chest.

“Relax,” he whispered into her ear as Emma huddled into a blanket and resumed watching the telly. He had to tell himself the same thing, because the last time they’d been this close he’d been snogged to within an inch of his unlife. Christ, he was really hard up for a good shag if he was considering turning her head to the side to find out if a repeat would be just as good.

*******

Relax, he says. She would, if his penis wasn’t up against her lower back. Well, not up, per se, but still. It was right there, separated from her by a few flimsy layers of clothing, Spike’s underpants excluded. She’d more likely catch him cleaning the windows with a pair of boxers than see them on him. He was shameless and indecent, and looked inhumanly good naked.

She needed a lobotomy. Not only to forget the way moonlight washed over his V-line or dipped into the hollow between his collarbones, but also because his proximity was making her… squirm. Too close for comfort didn’t even begin to describe it.

Maybe it’s not close enough.

And when the hell did the dirty voice in her head start to sound like Spike? Or look like him, as he beckoned her with a lip bite and bedroom eyes? She really hoped he couldn’t read minds. She was ashamed enough for the two of them, and she clearly needed to get laid. Not by Spike. Anyone else but Spike. Preferably someone Riley-shaped.

Yup.

If you can read minds, say ‘chicken’.

Spike just shifted and tucked the blanket around her sides. He was the Grinch here. The movie should have been about him.

About twenty minutes into the movie, Spike let his arm slip from the back of the sofa. It took her a couple minutes to actually realise his arm was holding her in a loose embrace, his hand splayed lazily over her abdomen. But that wasn’t even the wiggiest part. The wiggiest part was that she’d laid her hand over his, fingernails slowly scratching down the back of it as though it was a habit she’d grown into years ago.

And it was easy to make excuses and tell herself that it was for Emma’s benefit and that all they did was play a part, but the fact was... it felt nice. And that’s what made her the Worst Girlfriend of the Year, because she’d never really liked to cuddle with Riley for too long. He was too warm and too big and too needy, with arms that wanted to hold her prisoner instead of holding her close.

She wondered now, if it was a slayer thing or a Buffy thing that made her so screwed up that she couldn’t stand to be held by someone alive, that she preferred the way Spike’s hand ducked beneath the blanket and the hem of her top, and made itself at home on the fevered skin of her belly when her muscles seized with a cramp.

“You all right?” he whispered against her temple and all she could do was nod, torn between feeling like a traitor and a traitor who wasn’t willing to stop.

“I’m just… I’ll be back in a minute.” Getting off the couch was a lot like struggling to climb from beneath a mountain of warm blankets. Not because Spike wouldn’t let go. It was more of an I-feel-more-comfy-than-I-should kind of an issue and the second she realised it, she couldn’t get up fast enough.

Life would be a lot easier if she could just lock herself in the bathroom until the problem went away, lock him out of her head. And wasn’t it ironic how she could flirt with death every day and not be afraid, yet her knees would start to shake if she so much as thought of sorting through her own feelings.

It was just this world that was messing it all up in her head, the skewed perception, the constant touching without causing pain. They’d been forced into this. The second they got back to Sunnydale, everything would return to their usual brand of normal. She would no longer have to think of the way his hair curled after he took a shower; the way he could touch her so gently; the way he kissed. She could forget everything as if it had never happened.

Can you?

*******

“Can I sleep on the bed then or will you try to kick me off again?” He’d watched her closely ever since she’d come back from the bathroom, back to being stiff like a corpse in his arms. She’d relaxed in the end, of course, let her guard down when she thought he wasn’t looking anymore. She had no idea that he had an insight now, all those little nuances and reactions she shared with her other self, all laid out in the pages of the book.

“Her heart was like an exposed nerve she tried to barricade with walls inches thick. I’d still see it though, in that moment when she was in my arms, lost in all the things I could do to her. I’d see but couldn’t touch, because she was the only one who could let me in and being out of control terrified her more than anything else.”

“I won’t. Not on purpose anyway,” she said, fingers playing with the hem of her top as she faced him from the opposite side of the bed. He remembered the first time they’d stood there, that moment when they’d realised all they had was each other. How much could change in five days, and yet so much had stayed the same. He wasn’t in love with her and she wasn’t in love with him, but there was a tension snapping beneath the surface, the cabin fever heating them up from the inside.

“I’m holding you to that.”

“Okay. Sheesh. Good night.”

“’Night, Slayer.”

Lying down next to her was bloody awkward, a lot like the time they’d touched in the bathroom under the guise of practice. She was so close to the edge of the bed he expected her to tumble off any moment. He’d laugh if she did. Still evil, after all. Had to get his jollies somehow. Jollies that didn’t include stripping her naked and seeking a heart-shaped birth mark on her hip, finding out if she’d turn pliant and needy under his hands, giving as well as she took.

He should never have opened the blasted book. It had put all kinds of nasty ideas into his brain. He’d fallen asleep soon after, plagued by too intimate moments he’d never lived through, her tongue smoothing over his skin, lips sucking bruises into his throat and the inside of his elbow, that sensitive spot he’d never known before that he liked to have kissed. Her breast was a warm weight in his palm as she whimpered into his jaw, sinking down on him inch by a torturous inch.

It turned hard and fast soon, her torso stretched and head thrown back, his fingers leaving bruises on her hips. It wasn’t half-scribbled poems written at sunset or four-word confessions whispered into flesh. It was passion that rebounded and multiplied with every slip and slide, every time she’d dig her nails into his chest when he’d talk dirty.

He sat up then, wanting to feel her entire body quiver in his arms. Only she was turning hazy like a morning fog and instead of racing to the finish line he found himself hovering somewhere between the last flashes of the dream and a sober moment of wakefulness.

He blinked, knew he’d be sweating if he could. There were limbs wrapped around him still, an arm carelessly thrown over his waist and flannel-clad legs tangled with his. He’d never have pegged her to be a cuddler, but he supposed she wasn’t the only guilty one, seeing as his hand was on her lower back, bordering on slipping lower to get a nice little handful. It was likely a good thing he’d compromised and put boxers on before going to bed.

When she stirred he wondered if he’d tipped her off somehow, poked her Slayer radar into awareness. Her eyes were open now and it was too late for him to start faking sleep.

They stared at each other in the darkness, neither quite knowing what to do next. He knew she’d recoil soon and maybe he was selfish but he didn’t want to let go of her yet. It was… nice.

“Don’t make a big deal, yeah?” he whispered, saw her swallow hard. “Doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s natural, isn’t it? To want to hold someone.”

“Just… here,” she said after a pause. “The rules are different here, aren’t they?”

He could read it in her eyes. They were silently pleading with him to agree and say it won’t change us, it’s not really real when it’s not our world. And it wasn’t. The minute they got back all this would be but a distant dream.

“It’s just comfort. Nothing more.”

“I don’t love you,” she said, not pulling away.

“I don’t love you either.”

“Okay.” She closed her eyes. “Okay. But… I do care. Maybe. A little bit.”

“Maybe I do too,” he admitted, safe in the knowledge neither of them would remember their confessions in the morning. And if they did, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

TBC





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