“Please, just—”
“No!” she said.
And then she kissed him. She kissed him with such hunger and passion that if he kept his eyes shut he could almost forget that she didn’t love him. He could almost make himself believe that the fingers that were so desperately digging into his skin were there for him, for his pleasure, and not because she knew that every time she touched him he would do anything to keep her from stopping.
But her exquisite torture made his eyelids flutter open and there she was again: his Buffy, his Slayer, his girl, with her too-wide eyes that held nothing but fear and self-loathing.
And once he’d seen them, he couldn’t pretend anymore.
Her mouth tasted like ashes.
“Love,” he breathed into her kisses, his voice thick and deep with lust, “stop. This isn’t right.”
Then she was eating at his lips like she was starving, sucking on his tongue to rob him of his powers of speech.
He tried to say ‘no’. Wanted to. Meant to. But he’d momentarily forgotten how to draw breath.
He closed his eyes again when her hot mouth trailed along his jaw and down to his neck. He forgot who he was – forgot everything, except how she was playing his body like a virtuoso so his skin sang with each brutal caress.
But that voice in his head kept saying, This isn’t right. Mustn’t! Can’t. Won’t.
So he brought his hands to her head to pull her away – to redirect her lips and tongue and breath and teeth to anywhere but where they were. But his fingers became lost in the soft silkiness of her hair, and he found himself pulling her closer instead of pushing her away.
He needed to stop this, to stop her.
But she knew his body. Knew how to break him, make him so weak with need he couldn’t think, couldn’t act, couldn’t do anything but lose himself in her.
All Buffy wanted was to forget, to forget heaven and her responsibilities and how hard everything was. She wanted to be lost in sensation. But she couldn’t. She was too broken to lose herself.
So she was losing him instead. Throwing him away with both hands.
And he knew it. He knew exactly what she was doing, and he knew it was going to destroy them both.
But he was drowning. He couldn’t fight this, couldn’t fight her. Before he even realised it, he was moaning his acceptance, whispering the filthy crudities she would accept to stop himself from speaking the truths she couldn’t bear to hear.
Maybe once he could have resisted – before he’d become so fatally addicted, before he knew how her skin tasted, or the sound she made in the back of her throat just before an orgasm took her. Before she was burned so deeply into his senses that she never really left him anymore, for all her running away.
Maybe.
But he doubted it.
Despite himself, his left hand was curling into her hair while his right slipped under her shirt and her bra to take possession of her breast, his thumbnail scraping oh-so-gently over her nipple.
She moaned.
He knew her body, too.
“Please,” he begged, breathing deep and drugging himself with her scent. “Please.” He was no longer sure what he was begging for, only that he was desperate for something only she could give him.
She licked along the length of his neck.
Thinking became so hard and his head fall back as the first whole-body shiver ran through him. “Buffy—”
Then she slammed him against the wall, rattling his teeth and knocking him speechless, breathless.
She bit down on his throat almost hard enough to draw blood and he stopped pretending he was capable of resisting.
But he remembered what he was begging for.
Please just let me love you.