Chapter Thirty-Four

Sunnydale was small enough to walk from one side of town to the other and back and still have the balance of the evening to kill if you weren't killed first. It was nice, though Oz knew that he really wasn't supposed to think that. He had grown up in a place where everywhere that you would want to go was too far away. Within walking distance were a tiny strip mall, two gas stations, a Burger King, and a lot of houses and churches, but no cemeteries. Sunnydale had seventeen.

He chose St. Louis for his werewolf den. It was the farthest from home, closest to campus, and it was his favorite cemetery. In a space that was roughly oval, there was an angel perched on a column, one cool marble hand outstretched, fingers curled lightly. Tonight she was holding waxy white flowers with dark green foliage. On a night like tonight with the moon nearly full, soft radiant light fell on her face. Her gaze was trained on the grave she was poised over.

He wasn't sure why he liked her so much, but before he had any need to find another place to lock himself up during the full moon, he would find himself here to look at her, serene, solemn, but not without joy, and rarely without a flower loosely clasped in her outstretched hand like an offering.

The crypt was in the center of the cemetery, built into the ground, with weeds growing up between the stone stairs. It was the same crypt where they had incarcerated Harmony, and after he left the angel and started walking toward the crypt, he realized that no one had bothered to clean it out.

Reluctant to go in alone, at night, even armed with a stake, he headed home, more or less retracing his steps from Buffy's house. He lived closest to her. Xander was closer to the center of town and Giles. Willow was farthest away, but nearer to the burnt-out high school.

He came in through the front door, and walked through the darkened house, half-expecting his mother to be in bed, but she was out on the enclosed porch behind the kitchen. He made a bowl of cereal and went out to join her. She looked tired when she smiled at him.

He had a memory of her not long after they moved into the house on Mamoroneck Drive. It was the first day of school and he was in the second grade. The elementary school was across a four-lane street. There was supposed to be a crossing guard out there, but for some reason the guard wasn't there when they reached the corner, and the traffic was heavy.

There was just time to walk him to the corner before she had to go to work, and barely that, and he had felt her trying not to walk too fast the whole way to the corner. Now that they were there, with no one to stop the traffic, and time passing, there was no clear way to cross the street. But she smiled, like it was expected, to reassure him, and he thought that she looked tired. Like now.

It worked out, though. A bus, pulling into the school driveway had stopped on the diagonal of the intersection and opened its door to activate the lights and stop sign on the bus. The traffic stopped, and he crossed the street.

"Devon called," she told him, moving over to make room for him on the cushioned wicker sofa. "He's found a house to rent near campus and wants to know if you want to look at it or if he should just go ahead and rent it," she tilted her head to one side. "I told him as far as the money went it was in the right price range."

"I'll call him in the morning."

She waited for a moment. "No news?"

He gave a spare shake of his head. "It's late. Don't you have to work tomorrow?"

"I keep thinking about them. The Rosenbergs. They don't know, and . . . it makes me angry. At them," she clarified. "In the first few months, after—" she glanced over at him, feeling suddenly that she had started to tell him something that he didn't need to know on top of everything else.

A film of milk clung to his lower lip and the smell of milk and sugary cereal reached her.

When she stopped, he looked over at her, wondering which 'after' she was thinking of. He didn't really remember the before of his life when his father was still a part of it. His earliest memories were divided between spending the night, which sometimes stretched into a weekend or a week at his grandparents, and an apartment that felt like someone else's home to him. He preferred staying with his grandparents. Probably because they let him do anything he wanted to, like make tents of sheets thumbtacked to walls. The memory of that made him smile. He knew that his mother's relationship with her parents was difficult. Distance had improved it, but it had something to do with the fact that they were no longer necessary.

His aunt Christie had explained it to him before they moved, when his mother and grandparents were fighting over the prospect of their moving to California. It was something she wryly described as boundary issues. His grandparents needed to feel needed. His mother needed to not feel like a failure for needing them. She probably had not meant to imply that needing people was a bad thing. None of them had. It was just the way it worked out.

There was something that she needed to say. That was the hardest thing of all. Needing help to pay the rent or the car payment could be frightening and humiliating, but needing to say things and always having to gauge the appropriateness of those boundaries because they had been broken was harder.

Aunt Christie had explained that too. "We know too much about our parents' lives. Things that we should never have been told, and your mother is scared of doing that to you. She's scared of making you the bearer of her burdens."

They sat like that for a while. He finished his cereal, but he stayed on the sofa, holding the bowl with the milk warming, feeling the smell of it crawling over nerve endings in an increasingly unpleasant way.

"It's so fragile," she said at last. "You think that you can go through life without ever being touched by bad things. By stories that you read in the newspaper or see on television, by incomprehensible things. And then something happens and you see that it was always like that. The distance from the door to your car. The space of nighttime, when you should be sleeping, is full of hazards that have nothing to do with you. It isn't because of something you did or didn't do. It makes me angry that they don't know that, and it makes me angrier that I might have to tell them and shatter that."

He understood what Christie meant now. How there were things that you could be told by your parents that made you the bearer of their burdens. Not things about your parents, but things about yourself.

"I'm sorry," he said.

She smiled at that, thinking that he meant that he was sorry that she might have to tell the Rosenbergs that Willow was missing or worse. "Don't be. What you are doing is so much more. It scares me to think of what you are dealing with, but I'm so proud of you."

He got a surprisingly good night's sleep and started the next day without calling Giles or Buffy, instead retrieving the van and picking up Devon. They went to see the house that Devon had found for them to rent a few blocks off campus. He dropped Devon off at his house and went back to the cemetery to clean out his cell. It smelled strongly of vampire, and specifically of Harmony. The weirdness of being able to identify the scent as Harmony's made him wonder about how much stronger his sensory perceptions were becoming.

In the beginning, he was almost completely unaware of the changes in him. They were violent and frightening physiological effects that were incomplete, fragmented memories. Sharp demarcations between his humanity and the wolf. He was becoming increasingly aware of the enhancement of his senses. Blocking that out was the only real exercise that he engaged in. There were times, in clubs, when it threatened his equilibrium, and the only thing that seemed to help was to concentrate on one thing. Playing his music. Finding something to focus on.

Willow.

She had no idea. He wouldn't tell her. She thought that he had forgiven her for Xander, and he had, but the need to forgive her was complicated by needing her. The sweater she sometimes slept in was in his bedroom, and the scent of her it carried soothed him. When he felt overwhelmed by the sensory input that swamped him, he concentrated on her, he sought her, and the ferocity of that focus on her could make the whirlwind subside.

It was too much for anyone to bear, to be a totem. The angel in the cemetery was marble. It would never feel the weight of his stare or know itself to be in some way connected to his hold on himself. It would never feel responsible for him. It would never worry about upsetting him. Willow would, which is why he couldn't tell her.

He would not make her the bearer of his burdens.



It was almost eleven in the evening when Spike called. Near the end of the longest day of Rupert Giles' life. Having averted at least three arguments between Xander and Angel, they had settled down after dinner to play Castle Risk on a board that he had had since he was in training with the Watchers' Council at their facility on the Isle of Muck. He had once participated in a seventeen-hour game of Risk that ended deadlocked when the brilliant and unpredictable Madeline Chisholm had played the Franco-Austrian block Giles had formed against the Russo-Turk block that their classmate John Grant had formed by weaksiding her defenses against the rival power when she was threatened. She refused offers of alliance on each side, and all but dared them to attack each other.

She died two years later in Tibet, on an assignment; a terrible loss. At the time he thought that the WC had lost a woman who was destined to be the best Watcher, the most obvious choice to guide a Slayer, of their generation. Now he was less than certain of that. It wasn't, in his experience, his job to be brilliant and unpredictable. It was his job to make sure that his Slayer was.

Risk was an interesting game. It was, in some ways, quite revealing. Xander drew England, a small territory, but to Giles' mind the best defensive position on the board. By agreement, since they were short players, the player drawing England also got Turkey and the player drawing Germany was awarded Austria. Xander was prepared to complain until Buffy drew Germany, and then he subsided. Giles had Russia and Angel had France.

Xander kept playing Alliance cards against Buffy in an obvious attempt to diffuse any alliance he suspected that she had already struck with Angel. The cut and thrust of alliances and secret pacts that made Risk so entertaining was paralleled in an all-too-real way in the relationships that existed between them. He was withholding information from his Slayer. So was Angel. Xander didn't trust Angel or Buffy, where Angel was concerned, but he implicitly trusted Giles and left himself open to attack from the north in Turkey.

He didn't whine about it. He didn't suspect that he was being set up, or that Buffy was—not that that was part of Giles' game strategy, just his awareness that what he was doing was likely to be thought of unforgivable. He very, very badly needed to be drunk.

Every time the phone rang, everyone jumped. It was Oz or Joyce checking in, and then Joyce calling again because a message had been left by Shelia Rosenberg while Joyce was at work wondering if they had heard from Willow. To his surprise, Buffy and Xander finally allowed for the possibility that Willow's parents would have to be told some version of the truth.

Giles didn't entirely understand the Rosenbergs. Their somewhat hands-off approach to childrearing seemed odd and inevitable to him. He suspected that the Rosenbergs were luckier than they would ever know in their daughter. The first time he had met them was at the hospital after Willow had been injured in Drusilla's raid on the high school. They were not involved parents, but they were not uncaring either. They had come straight from a golf course in Arizona. Without changing clothes or packing their bags and from the airport, they had come directly to the hospital. That implied a degree of earnest parental concern.

He expected them to have questions that would be difficult to answer, but they barely acknowledged him. If they had noticed his very obvious injuries they gave no sign of it. They weren't interested in how Willow had been injured, and they swallowed the police report whole. It was the doctors and nurses who bore their intense attention. They wanted to know the extent of her injuries and the details of the care plan that had been developed. He was reminded of Willow as he observed. Her ability to shut out distractions and apply herself to problems in a highly-focused way had provenance in her parents' reactions.

He was a pseudo parent. He had been drawn into the odd world of teenagers where friends were relied upon to supply what completed a family. Over the previous summer he spent a great deal of time with Joyce Summers, who did need to understand what had happened and how she had failed to see it happening in front of her. He liked to think that he could have been a parent like Joyce, but he understood that he probably had more in common with Shelia and Ira.

Giles, Joyce, and Marilyn Osbourne had already conferred about this. The truth was simply too difficult and confusing. They had agreed that they would offer to send Xander or Oz to San Jose to check in on Willow, mirroring Oz's call to Joyce that had alerted them to the fact that Willow was missing. If she wasn't back in a day or two, they would have to tell Shelia and Ira that Willow was missing and that they needed to return home.

It was less cruel than to tell them that their daughter was in the hands of a psychopath.

Xander and Buffy left briefly to go by the Rosenbergs' house to pick up mail and then to pick up Oz and dinner from a diner across from the hospital. While they were gone he had an opportunity to get started on a much-needed drinking binge.

"Is it possible that he knows that we have it and that he is playing us?"

It was clear from his expression that Angel had not considered this a possibility. "Because he hasn't called since . . ." he tried to remember the last time Spike had called and realized that it had been a while. "since he talked to Buffy."

Giles nodded. "I've thought that leaving Harmony was a mistake. We could end up dealing with two vampires seeking the same thing."

Angel was prepared to dismiss Harmony as a threat. She was the sort of fledgling that you could size up in an instant and know that they'd never survive. The two older vampires that she had recognized were another matter. "If it doesn't help Spike, I consider it a bonus at this point," Angel said.

Giles finished his drink and poured another one before stepping away from the bottle and sinking into his favorite chair. He gestured to the bottle in a help yourself gesture, but Angel shook his head and sat back in the couch. "We give up the fake Gem of Amara, and we kill him. It's simple."

"He will want to test it before he surrenders Willow," Giles pointed out.

Angel shrugged. "Xander will get to indulge his fantasy of staking me."

"Or I will," Giles muttered to his drink. His attention shifted to Angel, but he wasn't surprised. In fact, he looked like he felt it was deserved.

"Oh, don't be a bloody martyr," Giles growled at him.

He shrugged. "Sorry."

"She'll never forgive us, which is all very well and good for you, but I'm her Watcher. We have . . . trust. And she lives in a world where there is so very little to trust." Giles made a face. "Bloody brilliant. Two fingers of scotch and I'm mawkish."

"At the risk of being accused of being a martyr again, I've already thought about that," Angel leaned forward, lowering his voice. "There is no reason that she needs to know that you knew. I took the ring from Devon when he was leaving. We were testing the torque. I was the only one who knew that it could have been anything else. I never told you. You never knew. Giles . . . she didn't need me to be here for this. She doesn't need me. But, she needs you. And if it goes bad, she will need you even more."

"I know you think we should tell her, and I know why. She may even agree with us. The best chance that everyone has to survive is to try to outsmart Spike. Spike doesn't trust me. He doesn't know you. Xander and Oz aren't even on his radar. If Buffy believes it is the Gem of Amara, Spike will believe it. I don't care what he promised Willow, he will not be able to resist attacking Buffy. That's why Buffy can't know. She has to believe it. He has to look in her eyes and know that she knows that he is coming for her next."

Giles stared at him for a moment. It was no more and no less risky than actually giving Spike the Gem of Amara. This was not about choosing between Buffy and Willow. He tossed back the rest of the drink. "Agreed."

"We will bring her home," Angel said. For a moment he considered telling Giles what he suspected was going on with Spike. He hadn't called because he was otherwise occupied. It wasn't a strategy. It was distraction.




Spike put off calling. He knew it was bound to change things between them tonight. She'd get guilt-stricken and tense and remember that she mostly hated him even if she had some absurd idea that she didn't hate him. He fed her the rest of the pastry and ordered food from room service. They ate out on the little balcony with the crappy view, blocked by the hotel parking garage.

When she started to look like she knew that she was not supposed to be enjoying it, he pulled her down into his lap and nuzzled her throat. "Softening me up for your next escape attempt, pet?"

She looked startled.

He shook his head, willing her to play along. "You aren't fooling me for a second," he warned.

She sucked in a shallow, startled breath and held it for a second before she let her head rest against his. She looked at him, eyes steady and a little uncertain, but grateful for the pretense.

He put it off for a bit longer. They had pay per view and an Internet connection. Against his better judgment he let Willow log on to the latter. She sat cross-legged on bed that was still made up, with the keyboard in front of her, chewing on her lower lip as she made adjustments to the angle of the keyboard and struggled with the sluggishness of the keyboard. He watched her navigate her way into her email account. Computers had never really interested him, but she had looked startled and so genuinely excited about being able to get on the Internet that he had found himself annoyingly aware of how charmed he was by her enthusiasm.

She didn’t have any new mail from Buffy or Oz, which was a little surprising. She had managed to get online before and they didn’t give her any credit for that. Willow opened the neglected emails from her parents instead, aware that Spike was reading them too. For dinner he had ordered the appetizer sampler and a steak and baked potato and a bottle of white Zinfandel. The meal came with extra salad dressing. She was almost unpleasantly full and slightly woozy from two glasses of wine.

She read through her parents’ notes to her, not really all that surprised that they attributed her lack of response to AOL. Computers were her acknowledged area of expertise and she was scornful of AOL with its Internet for beginners approach to organizing content, clumsy email filters, and aggressive expansion at the cost of reliability.

When she got to the last note she used the remote control to navigate to the reply button, opening a new window. For a moment her hands hovered over the keyboard while she wondered what to say to them. All of their notes came through at once and she was glad that they were enjoying their trip? Everything was going okay for her, but she missed her friends? Eventually they were going to figure out that she had lost her summer internship. The thought made her stomach knot.

When she hit the reply button Spike wondered what she was up to, and stared at the screen as she composed, with a lot of revision, a fairly bland summary of what she had been up to for the last few weeks. From what he had gleaned from the notes she had read her parents were in Europe. Based on the note she was writing, it wasn’t hard to figure out that they knew nothing about her extracurricular demon fighting activities with Buffy. There wasn’t anything in the note to object to, and it would satisfy any concern that her parents might develop over her silence.

She re-read it before picking up the remote to direct the cursor to the send button, suddenly feeling tired, and too full, and hot with shame. Everything wasn’t okay and she could never explain how she had gotten to this point. If her parents had found her in a hotel with a man, half-undressed, the conclusions they would draw—that she had lost her mind, that she was acting out, or abusing their trust in her good sense, would have been unfair, but, at least in part, accurate.

They would see Spike and think, what? That she was infatuated? Fascinated? That he was a big make-up for being a geeky high school loser person? In a way he was all of those things. After he had called room service, he had pulled on his discarded jeans and the blue shirt he wore over the ubiquitous t-shirt, leaving it unbuttoned. He hadn’t bothered to restore order to his disordered hair. He was watching her, a bit covertly, at least in that he wasn’t letting whatever he was thinking show on his face.

It was an ability she resented almost as much as the inevitable comparison to Oz.

At some point she was going to have to deal with the fact that for reasons that were probably very bad, she was attracted to him. She had an Internet connection and she was a search engine away from articles on Stockholm syndrome, though she instinctively rejected psychosis. It felt too much like an excuse. He had qualities that she responded to. Under her dress she could feel her skin prickling with awareness of him, and she knew what would follow. Sitting Indian style with the pleated skirt of the half-unzipped dress belled around her she was aware of herself in a way that was unnervingly acute.

She had wanted Xander to love her. She had wanted Oz to be her boyfriend. She just wanted Spike. Enough that she could wonder what he would do if she slipped her hand under her skirt and ran her fingers over the parts of her that he was more familiar with than she was. She didn't need to do that; she could simply enjoy the idea of him smiling crookedly if she did. Spike didn't insist that she prove that she wanted him before he let himself want her. He didn't notice her because someone else had. There were probably a half dozen creepy reasons why he did want her, but they were his reasons and he didn't seem to expect her to adopt them as a guide to who she was supposed to be with him.

He saw her expression change. While she was typing she looked intent on her confabulatory exercise. It made him feel slightly uneasy to realize how good she was at lying. He had grown accustomed to thinking otherwise. This summer would be a summer layered in lies that she told her parents, her friends, her boyfriend, and most of all, herself. In a way that he didn't want to examine he recognized it. There were versions of reality that were adapted by need. There were lies that you told until they felt true, until you were as perceived as deceiving.

Willows fingers tightened around the edges of the keyboard. She saw herself bashing Georgia over the head with it and almost felt nostalgic about the burst of violence. Hitting people or people-shaped things was easy in principle. It was a bit more complicated when you could feel the shock of impact running up your arms through a blunt object or hear the wet sound of a soft tissue injury. Gross and awful, really, though she hadn't been thinking that when she hit Georgia the second time. It had been about expediency. It had been like breaking the glass door at the gas station in San Francisco. She didn't know how Buffy kept it all in perspective.

Except she did. Buffy didn't get confused about evil and Angel had helped her with that when he lost his soul and became someone entirely different.

Bashing Spike over the head probably wasn't a great plan. He wasn't preoccupied the way Georgia was. On the balcony, settled in his lap, forced to relax in his grip because he had shifted his hips and propped on foot up on her abandoned chair, using gravity to create a cradle of his body, not looking at him, but out into the uninteresting view of a multilevel parking garage where fat and lazy pigeons circled and settled on the ledges, outlined by the orange light that illuminated the floors of the garage, she was aware of his awareness of her. His fingers moved through her hair, over her neck, skipping under and then over the dress that covered her shoulder. His index finger rested in the crook of her elbow.

She looked up and for a moment their eyes met and held in mutual recognition of the quiet tension that was building while they were lost in their own thoughts. She thought he would say something when he moved, but he was just bringing another cigarette to his lips, and then pausing. She knew he was going to kiss her, and under the dress her skin prickled, starting somewhere around her shins, almost painfully. She could feel the razor-sharpened stubble poking through her skin. Without prompting, she tilted her head enough to be kissed and let her eyes shut as he turned his head to reach her lips.

The first time he had kissed her it had been a distraction from what Georgia was doing. Deliberate and calculating, she realized now with a heavy feeling in her chest. They had probably talked about it before. His lips were hard, pinching her upper lip before relaxing against hers, like he wanted to kiss her urgently, and then appeased by the contact, simply wanted to kiss her. His hand cupped her elbow and then moved down her forearm with enough pressure that she awkwardly touched him, trying to keep her hand outside his open shirt, gripping the collar as his tongue touched hers.

His hand stroked the underside of her arm while his tongue slid against hers in a slow kiss that grew softer and wetter and less urgent, and then gracefully terminated with the withdraw of his tongue, passing over her lower lip lingeringly before his lips caught it, tugging lightly before separating with a sound like a sigh. She thought he would kiss her again, and when he didn't, she opened her eyes.

The corner of his lip turned up in a half smile and he moved to let her up before going back to the business of lighting the cigarette that he still had in his hand.

Even now, his expression was deliberately unreadable. There was just enough wariness in the way he was almost avoiding her gaze to suggest that he didn’t really want her to know what he was thinking.

The sliding glass door to the balcony was open and the sheers under the drapes with their heavy backing were pulled out to curl around the open doorway, which suggested that the smoke was getting sucked out in that direction as well. Willow logged out of her email account and was returned to the mail menu. She made herself get up to go into the bathroom. Her stomach felt crampy from too much food and she was too warm. She considered taking another shower. She was probably the cleanest kidnap victim ever. Washing the smell of cigarette smoke and sweat and sex off her skin, covering it with the cloying perfume of soap.

The wine had left a sour taste in her mouth. She brushed her teeth instead, flossed, and then brushed again before washing her face. In one part of her mind she recognized her pre-bedtime rituals. Turning the hot water down, she rinsed the washcloth out and slid the dress down her shoulders to wipe her neck and shoulders, unfastening the pearl necklace when it got in her way. For a moment she examined the clasp, thinking that she had probably been wearing it wrong. The clasp was a tongue and groove mechanism hidden by a silver flower with rhinestones on the petals and faceted black glass or crystal in the center. It looked fussy and old lady-ish to her, like something someone's grandmother would wear.

But most of her kidnapping wardrobe had been selected by vampires that were older than her parents or her grandparents, so that sort of made sense. She dropped the necklace on the countertop and rinsed the washcloth out again before swiping it over her chest in an effort to reduce the overly warm feeling that she had, half-expecting the bathroom door to swing open. She leaned forward to examine the small scabs on her left breast and stomach, trying to decide what they looked like. The bite mark on her neck was pretty unmistakable, and it was going to take buckets of mineral oil and massage to reduce the scar that was bound to form. The other bite marks were more delicate-looking.

She had an unnerving sense of the control that was implied by them that made her drop the washcloth and step back from the mirror. At the time, while he was biting her, she hadn't thought about much more than the fact that it hurt and that she was bleeding and that it was rude. That seemed a little silly, but there it was. It was her blood and it was supposed to be inside her body, and there he was, nibbling on her like she was a candy bar. Since then she hadn't felt much more than relieved and angry on the occasions when he seemed to be thinking about biting her again and refrained.

She pulled the dress back up to cover herself and turned the tap off before leaving the bathroom. Spike was out on the balcony, finishing his cigarette.

When he came back in he asked her if she wanted to pick out a movie to watch, and then he frowned. "What's wrong?"

"I had too much to eat," she said, wanting not to look at him, but feeling compelled to anyway. The same negative pressure that was tugging the sheers out the sliding glass door was pulling the shirt he had put on and not buttoned away from his ribs. Flat, dark nipples contrasted sharply with his skin. She was unnerved by how much she wanted to slip her arms under his shirt and rest her forehead against his chest.

Stockholm syndrome. Research sexual attraction of kidnappee for kidnapper. She tried to take a mental inventory to determine if she felt like she had lost her mind. She didn't feel like she had been driven crazy by anxiety or boredom, and psychosis was sounding better to her with every passing minute. It sounded depressingly like an excuse. She and Buffy had read the Watchers' Diaries about Angelus and his stalking of Drusilla. He driven her mad by utterly and completely destroying her life. It was a consequence of a deliberate campaign and she felt a sharp stab of shame at seeking an easy way out.

He tilted his head to one side. "No," he said. "It's something else. You look like you've seen a ghost, pet."

She went to sit in one of the two chairs at the table that served as both desk and table. Spike had angled the chair to the television. It was the same chair that she had been handcuffed to when she woke up, so sometime while she was sleeping he had dragged the chair here to watch television. In her mind's eye it was alarmingly easy to picture, right down to the slouch.

"I'm having a regularly scheduled freak-out," she told him tightly. "Is that okay?"

His lips pursed. "Don't be snippy."

"It goes with slutty, and it's alliterative."

He smiled at that. "Want to fight?" he asked, like it was nothing more than an alternative to movie watching or kissing or sex.

It probably was from his point of view, she decided, and since he excelled at combat, verbal and otherwise, and was likely to win, she didn't feel like indulging him.

"No, thank you," she said, distracted by the idea of movie watching and kissing that didn't necessarily lead to sex. When she ran her tongue over her lower lip she could feel him there, grasping her lower lip between his.

He walked over to her, squatting down in front of her, his hands grasping the supports of the armrest, effectively trapping her in the chair. "Rather sulk?" He made it sound like a poor choice.

"If you are bored, watch television," she suggested, ready to give fighting its due because it was a lot less confusing. "I'm not an entertainment." She hugged herself to keep from planting a foot against his chest and shoving him away from her.

He studied her defensive posture for a long moment, eyes narrowing thoughtfully. He was pretty sure that he knew what this was about, and she was picking a fight, which wasn't so smart, but probably inevitable. "There's a set of handcuffs somewhere around here. We can put them on you and pretend that what happens next is all about me making you do something and nothing at all about you liking it."

She surprised him. There was a blush creeping into her cheeks, but no embarrassment, or head-ducking confusion. She looked him in the eye. "Oooh, baby," she deadpanned.

"That's not it? I thought you were having a moment because you like shagging me."

She pressed the heel of her hand into her stomach. That should have been exactly it, she realized as the crampy feeling in her stomach intensified.

She waited for him to follow it up with a leer or some other overture that was intended to remind her of her place, but he just tilted his head a little to the side looking like he was trying to figure something out. She touched his face experimentally, catching surprise that flashed in his eyes before his eyelids swept down. Under her fingertips his cheek was slightly raspy, but not unpleasantly so, and his skin was slightly warmer than usual, but he had just come back in from the balcony and it was a warm night.

"You are very stupidly attractive," she told him, sounding solemn, and feeling foolish.

She felt the muscles in his cheek move as his lips twisted into a familiar smirk. The expression was allowed to develop before his eyelids lifted, slowly. It was all so deliberate and calculated, and she felt a wave of . . . something that felt like affection rise, because he was so unaware that he was doing these things—or it seemed that way to her. He was just being Spike.

She leaned forward, sliding her fingers into his disordered hair, kissing his forehead. "I wish I didn't notice," she told him, stroking the back of his head. If she wasn't crazy, then there had to be some other explanation for the appeal of him. Touching him like this was a kind of experiment.

His eyes drifted shut as he absorbed the sensation of her fingers ruffling and smoothing his hair. She kissed his forehead and the bridge of his nose. He turned his head the slightest bit to find her cheek, zeroing in on the warmth that she shed, nipping at the apple of her cheek while she laid her other hand on his throat. It was, he realized as he felt the tip of her finger feather over his earlobe, the first time she touched him spontaneously, without him insisting on it, or because she was holding onto him while he was touching her in ways that made her feel like she needed to hold on to something.

His hands tightened on the arms of the chair as he waited to see what she would do with it, assuming that her inner Scooby didn't wake up and spoil it for him. She kissed the side of his nose. Inwardly, he rolled his eyes in exasperation, turning his head back toward her lips to give her a hint.

She paused at the corner of his mouth. "This doesn't mean that I l-love you," she stumbled over the word, sounding awkward and looking slightly horrified that she even used the word. "It just means that I like you more than I should."

He had started to turn his head to chase her lips, tired of waiting for her to kiss him, when what she said reached him and he hesitated. When she was solemn and uncertain, she sounded like a little girl, her voice thickening silkily, but for once she had foregone her slightly silly, babyish vocabulary, as if she recognized that she couldn't hide behind it. There was a gaping pit opening up right in front of him. The sensible thing to do would be to ignore it, to catch her lower lip between his, take the initiative away from her, and lead her down the infinitely safer path of sex and emotional ambiguity. He backed off to look at her instead. She wasn't crying or on the verge of hysterics, which was good. She looked like she shared his reluctance to examine what liking him more than she should meant.

Willow looked at him warily, not sure what to expect. He had been quiet after her pronouncement, and he was looking at her now with an expression and that was hard to read. His lips were pursed in thought. With his hair mused, it made him look younger and less sure of himself. It was the last thing she wanted to see in him. It made her realize how ruined he was. If he wasn't a vampire and evil and selfish and deadly, then he might have been so much more. There were little glimpses of it. He was smart. Much more so than they had ever given him credit for being, and he had a quick, quirky sense of humor, and he could be likable when he wasn't being scary, and sometimes when he was being scary, and you could see the sheer joy of it in him and it almost hurt to think what it might be like to be included in that feeling.

Without the scariness. She drew in a quick, startled breath, feeling the hair on the back of her neck prickle as her mind stumbled over the idea that this was part of what she was attracted to. Not the scariness, but the way he enjoyed it. The way he enjoyed what he was. It wasn't the idea that she liked having sex with him that was scary. She had sorted that out a while ago, with his helpful commentary on nerve endings and hormones as the supplemental text. It was the idea that she liked him that was wrong, not just in a handful of qualities that she saw glimpses of and to some extent admired, but in a way that could see something likeable in his worst qualities.

He likes to kill people, she reminded herself.

Angel hated being a vampire. Angelus just hated with a coldly clinical passion for destruction. His was a personality, even in duality, that was informed by resentment. For Spike, hate was like the coat, something he wore lightly that he cast off as it suited him, something that disguised him. What remained the same was the engagement. Right now it was directed at her, and it there was something in it that answered a need she didn’t want to know that she had.

If Oz loved her the way it seemed that Spike could . . . would she have ever thought about Xander again? Would she have ever closed her eyes and imagined Oz doing things to her that Spike did?

His gaze flicked to her, and his eyes narrowed slightly. Her heart thudded dully in her chest. She half-expected him to say something awful, though she wasn't quite sure what would be hard to hear.

Belatedly realizing that her hands were keeping him in front of her, she started to withdraw them, and he made an almost imperceptible sound that she registered as a protest. He heard it too, and his expression turned rueful, a half smile twisting his lips.

"You must think I'm dumb," she said, wondering why he was holding back on the observation. It really wasn't like him.

"No," he gave a spare shake of his head. Actually, he was kind of amazed that she had figured it out in a way that made sense. He didn't love her, though he liked her enough to wonder about it in an uneasy sort of way, and was relieved that there was an alternative explanation. It was the lack of disloyalty to Drusilla that had puzzled him, and if he liked her, if he was fond of her after a fashion, amused and entertained, and drawn to her, then she didn't encroach on what he felt about Dru in any way. It was as simple as that. He liked her. He had seen things in her that he was moved to appreciate.

And it wasn't casual. He thought that she recognized that too. For a long puzzled moment he tried to find a common point of reference. He had lived for a century and more. He had to have known someone that shared some quality with her that he would recognize. He liked Georgia, but she didn't inspire inconvenient loyalties or a peculiar sense of responsibility. That complicated things a bit, and he could see that she was aware of it too. He had no vocabulary for what she was to him, just a growing awareness that it was more than he expected and that it wasn't a bad feeling.

He tilted his head toward the television. "Movie?" he asked, willing to let it drop if she was.

She nodded, feeling relieved when he released the arms of the chair and stood, pivoting away from her to look for the remote control to the television. For a few seconds her field of vision was restricted to his abdomen, and the movement of muscles under skin, casually draped by his open shirt above the waistband of his jeans. It wasn't mind bending to grasp the attraction. He was attractive. The idea that she liked him wasn't really new either. After Angelus, she had regarded Spike with a certain degree of sympathy. Unlike Angelus or Drusilla, he hadn't killed any of her friends—unless you counted Shelia, and Willow wasn't sure that she did, or even that Spike killed her, though it seemed certain that he was involved when she tried to kill Buffy on Parent Teacher night.

She didn't count Ford either, because he went looking for a vampire to help him and offered to betray Buffy in exchange for joining the soulless undead. There were times when she thought that Xander oversimplified because he was . . . determined to put himself on the simple side of everything, but to Xander there was no difference between the vampire that killed Jesse, the vampire that Jesse became, and any other vampire. But he had staked Jesse, and he had to believe that there was no difference.

The fact that Spike killed people at all was bad—but he hadn't hurt her. Not really, not in any way that he would have grasped. In an evil, amoral, relentless sort of way, he was actually nice to her most of the time. The thought made her frown at the realization that she had startlingly low standards.

She still liked the idea that she was going crazy better.

He had logged her off the Internet and was in the pay per view menu, scrolling through the options. She didn't want to watch a movie.

‘Call them,’ the voice in his head nagged. The mood that he had been reluctant to spoil with reality was gone. "See anything that you want to watch?" he asked instead, putting it off.

Willow stood up. He was right there in front of her. When he put the shirt on the collar, limp from wear, had gotten caught against his neck. She was surprised that he hadn't noticed it before now. Maybe it had gotten tucked down against his neck when they were on the balcony. Had she done that when he was kissing her? He was particular about his clothes. His t-shirts were always tucked in, smoothed down from the ribs before he finished zipping and buttoning his jeans and fastening his belt. She reached up to straighten it, keeping her eyes level with his neck as she slipped her fingers in against his neck to free the shirt point and turn it down on the outside of the collar.

He watched her out of the corner of his eye, wondering what she would do next, relatively sure that if he said anything it would be wrong. She didn't look like she had any idea what she was doing. Once she had the shirt collar sorted, her fingers rested on him for a moment and then she withdrew her hand and stepped around him to the space between the two beds.

Hotel beds were not designed for comfort, at least not for sitting up in bed and watching movies. Spike appropriated the pillows from both beds. There was an awkward moment when he caught her arm, at the elbow, standing behind her while he slipped the loose dress over her shoulders, letting the weight of the fabric carry it down to her waist where it caught. She closed her eyes, feeling her head spin a little as he kissed her neck, certain that he was looking over her shoulder, down her chest, observing the impact of his lips and tongue on her throat.

Kill me now, she thought, lips compressed to keep the words from escaping just in case he decided to take it literally.

For a moment it was hard to breathe. The weight that settled on her chest was crushing her. His hands rested on her waist for a moment and he did something completely unexpected. He rubbed her slightly-distended, overly-full stomach. It made her open her eyes and turn her head to look at him, but he ducked his head and kissed her shoulder, pushing the dress over her hips to fall at her feet.

"Get in bed," he said, nudging her toward the bed. After she moved away from the inside edge to the side of the bed near the wall, he pulled the sheet and blanket up around her, tucking them around her. It wasn’t uncomfortable. She rearranged the pillows to tuck one between her shoulder and cheek and settled in to watch the movie she had selected as he moved around the room, turning out most of the lights, smoking a cigarette near the open sliding door to the balcony. He stepped out to retrieve the bottle of wine.

In the flickering light from the television, she watched him undress while she wished that she could pretend that she wasn’t and then wondered why she should. He watched her. When he was doing things to her with his mouth and fingers, when he was inside her and she opened her eyes for a moment that was one thing she could count on. He would be watching her. Colored light washed over his shoulders as he took the shirt off, outlining his hip as it was exposed.

She half expected him to call her on it, to wait to catch her, and then to revel in her discomfort at being caught, but he walked past the television and she could hear him locking the door to the hallway. The bed gave as he got in, behind her, outside the blanket he had tucked around her. He worked his arm under the pillows, under her neck while the other settled over her, his hand splayed over her stomach. She waited for his hand to drift lower, to press against her intimately.

Waited, feeling him behind her as his weight shifted and settled. Wanted it so badly that the words formed in her mouth and stuck there as she realized that he wasn't doing anything more than making it easier for her to rest against him.

It wasn’t uncomfortable. Oz didn’t like to snuggle like this and they were too much the same height to fit together comfortably. He was high enough in the bed to be able to see the television without having to lift his head to see over hers. She bent her legs at the knee and he folded into her adjustment neatly. With a pang, she remembered before Oz, when she used to imagine being like this with Xander, snuggled up watching movies together and she would hug herself, imagining that it was him, and the weight that squeezed her chest came back with a vengeance.

Spike misinterpreted it, feeling her tense and hearing the slight change in her breathing, he rubbed her stomach soothingly until she untangled the arm under his and caught his wrist, her fingers wrapping around it, holding it until he stilled. She no longer knew what she wanted, except that she did know. She just couldn’t bring herself to say it. She carried his hand to her mouth, pressing his palm against her lips until he shifted his wrist and lightly covered her mouth in a tiny moment of recognition that was acknowledged with nothing more than his hand, covering her mouth in a parody of coercion as he shifted behind her, pulling her more firmly against his body.

She thought he would do something more, say something in her ear, but he just held her, watching the movie and for some reason she felt comforted. No one ever hugged her hard enough or long enough. His hand wasn’t pressing against her lips so much as holding her face.

There was a simple reason for all of this, Willow thought, and made herself repeat it in her head while he touched her, feeling his thumb make a circuit that started with her eyebrow and swept down over her cheek before starting again. She didn’t know what it was, but there had to be a reason and once she understood it she would know how to deal with it. She liked him, but it could be that she was crazy, and that was okay for now.