The Price of a Kiss

All for the price of a kiss. Tara never asked her for anything, and she never mentioned the night that she admitted that she was attracted to Willow. It was like it never happened. Willow felt bad about it. It wasn't like she hadn't wanted to kiss or be kissed.

"I don't know why I keep coming back," Willow said.

She sounded genuinely confused about that. Spike smiled crookedly and leaned over, brushing his lips over hers once, twice, waiting for her lips to part. A small rush of warm breath danced over his upper lip. He answered it by letting the tip of is tongue slip under her lip to tease the delicate tissue inside.

Her lips were a little puffy from sucking his cock and kissing. He could never get enough of kissing her. She was wearing her hair a little different courtesy of a perm that added a bit of curl to it. At the moment it was a little damp around her face and neck. Her eyes stayed closed while they kissed.

He was lying on his side, enjoying the warmth that radiated from her body. She was nothing like Drusilla or Harmony. They were lush and womanly. Long legs, curving bodies, full breasts. Willow was slender and angular. He ran his hand over her shoulder and one breast. The softened nipple sprang instantly to life, making her shiver as it tightened into a hard bud.

She made a sound of protest when he stopped kissing her and her eyes opened with the reluctance that was expected. His hand had drifted down to play with the silky curls between her legs, tugging on them lightly. He wanted to shave her. She balked at that. He teased her with it. "Think about your panties against your bare cunt. All that softness brushing against you, teasing your clit, making you so fucking wet. Driving me crazy to taste you while you walk around in one of your ugly skirts."

He fed her ideas until she was too caught up in what they suggested to refuse him.

"You like fucking me," he pointed out. It was why she kept coming back.

After she sucked him off he had pulled her up into his lap in the other room, pushing her ugly skirt out of his way and frigging her clit until she was soaking wet and moaning. He had pushed her off his lap and told her to take off the shirt and her bulky sweater and then her bra. When she was down to a pair of brightly colored socks he had beckoned for her to come back to him and guided her back to his lap, straddling him. She rode him. Being on top was still a bit of a struggle for her. She tired too quickly and was distracted by trying to keep a rhythm that was pleasing for him, never quite grasping that he could tell what pleased her and generally preferred it.

Except that first time, but he had a point to make then. This was different. They were different together. He didn’t always think of them as being together. She wasn't clingy like Harmony was. She doesn't want her friends to know about what she did with him anymore than he wanted them to know. He thought of them as being together when he was kissing her. When her eyes were closed and she was breathing into his mouth. When he watched her while she was unaware of it.

Eventually he took over, moving her under him on the couch and fucking her slow and hard until she was bucking up, her legs gripping him as she tried to grind herself against him to a shuddering orgasm that he felt milking his cock in delicious spasms while he kissed her mouth and played with her tits and waited for her to come back down a bit before he fucked her to an orgasm that triggered his own.

"Not really," she said, frowning. "I don't like myself for it."

He shook his head at that. "You really are kind of stupid," he told her with a small smile. "I like you for it."

"For being stupid?"

"No," he sighed. "For fucking me, you daft cow."

He felt her stiffen up. Was it the first part or the last part? Was it the daft part or the cow part? He felt like he was sifting a century, gender, and a wide gap in culture through an unreliable sieve. Bloody hell. It was probably all of the above. It was probably morals and annoying notions about right and wrong that meant fuck all to him and in relative terms had not overcome her reservations in any significant way. What did it matter why she kept coming back? She was here. He was here.

"Don't turn it into a drama, Willow," he kept his voice even. "I wouldn't put up with it from Harmony, and I'll cut you a little slack for not being nearly as annoying, and having hormones and moral issues that I can't begin to comprehend, but don't push it."

"Push what?" she asked, looking puzzled and a bit offended.

"I don't love you. I like you. Mostly I like shagging you. You don't love me. You might wish that you did because then you'd have a better reason to be fucking me, but you don't. You just like fucking me."

She pushed his hand off of her. "Not so much at the moment," she muttered, moving away from him, possibly looking for her clothes.

"Mostly on the floor in the other room," he told her. "Your clothes," he clarified, rising to look for his own.

Her mood was subdued as she located her clothing and dressed. She wasn't scrambling back into her clothes in an excess of modesty the way she had the first few times they met like this. He was dressed and lighting a cigarette while she was putting on her shoes and finding her purse to run a brush through her hair. He watched her for a second, frowning to himself. There really wasn't any reason for her to leave, and he had probably been too harsh. Or insensitive. Or something that bordered on unacceptable.

It used to be easier to hurt her feelings. He didn't precisely wince inside when he thought back on some of the things that he had said to her, but he stopped saying them. And he cleaned out a portion of this hated house for her. He never made her come to his crypt. They met at the Crawford Street mansion. He never touched her in public, never even dropped the slightest hint of any interest in her around her friends.

Had he hurt her feelings? Was it just becoming harder to tell?

"I got the hot water heater working," he said into the silence that had fallen. "Thought it might be nice," he refused to say 'for you' though it was probably heard that way. Cold water didn't bother him anymore than cold weather did. He preferred warm, but it wasn’t the same. Cold was uncomfortable for her in a far more extreme way. Painful. She was biting her lip, chewing on a piece of dry skin.

The unspoken 'for you' fell on deaf ears. She was thinking and he felt something uneasy stir. "I'll drive you home," he said.

She looked up at him then and nodded, dropping her brush into her purse and closing it. "Thanks," she stood up and looked around the room. "I haven't left anything here, have I?"

It struck him as an odd question. "I don't think so."

"I didn't think so either," she walked to the door, and out it, into the night, while he shrugged into his coat and patted himself down for his keys.

Being dumped in her significant relationships left Willow with a new and depressing appreciation of how hard it was to be the one ending the relationship. Not that she had a relationship with Spike. They just had sex. It wasn't a big deal.

At the small bridge of the creek he caught up with her, and snagged her hand in passing. It was an almost playful gesture that made her smile a little. He had a whole world view that was fairly incomprehensible, but evenly applied.

He drove her to the parking lot behind the Science building on campus. It was abandoned at this time of night so no one was likely to notice her getting out of his car.

"You have a stake?" he asked when she reached for the door.

"Yep," she said.

"Holy water?" he pressed.

She patted her purse. "I'm packing," she joked. "It's only a couple of blocks to my dorm, on the campus with the super secret demon hunter commandos patrolling and a Slayer."

"Ah-ah," he wagged his finger at her, "Don't get too comfortable," he scolded, turning toward her. "Maybe I should walk you in. I can stick to the shadows."

She started to ask him why, and realized that tonight was different, and that he knew it. When she went home by herself after being with him she always thought that it was the last time and that she would never be back. Then she thought about how awkward it would be and how eventually the awkwardness would become noticeable and this would be one more not so good thing that she couldn't take back. As long as she kept seeing him, there was no awkwardness, and no one noticed that there was anything to notice between them.

"You know that I'm not coming back, don't you?" she said, finding it easier than she expected.

"I think I get the whole thing about rebound relationships, or non-relationships. I'm not dead. I didn't die when Oz left. Life goes on. I'll probably fall in love again. I'll probably have sex with someone I'll never fall in love with, again," she tilted her head to look at him. His fingers were hooked around the bottom of the steering wheel and he was looking at her. He must have known that she thought about this. They were a now and nothing more proposition and that meant that there was always to be an ending.

"And that's okay. Well . . . it's not okay, but I'm okay and I think I've reached the point where if I kept doing this with you I won't be okay anymore."

She sounded so calm. So rational and reasonable that he couldn't help but smile. "There's not a bloody thing wrong with you, Red," he told her.

"Nothing I can't make right," she agreed, relieved that he was being nice about it. "I'll see you around, then?"

He eyed her thoughtfully. He gave it a week. A weeklong spasm of conscience before she missed kissing. "Yeah," he said, nodding.

She got out of the car, smoothing her skirt down and flipping her heavy purse over her shoulder before she walked away from the car and toward the building without looking back. He gave it a week, and he wouldn't rub it in when she came back. They would just pick up where they left off. That was as much together as he had to offer.

She had settled before. He was settling for her. It didn't occur to him then that she would chose to live in someone else's moment.




From the balcony he watched her. Blissed out. Floating a foot above the ground with her cheek resting on Tara's shoulder and Tara's face buried in her neck. He needed a drink, a smoke, and a long, nasty fight. He needed to bloody well look away.

There was a soft look in her eyes that had never been there for him. She had been soft in the ways that he wanted. Soft and warm and so sweet with her eyes half closed while he fucked her. He watched her lift her head, smiling. Her lips brushed Tara's cheek and then drifted down to her lips. Their eyes met and then drifted shut as they kissed, softly, sweetly.

He did close his eyes then. He couldn't stand to watch them anymore. She never came back. She was cautiously friendly with him around the others, and when he had punched Tara in the face, when she realized what it proved and what it meant for Tara, the look Willow turned on him, full of gratitude so blatant, so full of meaning, it nearly gave him back what he had never really had with her. The realization was incomplete, because it was as fleeting as the emotion that he thought he saw flicker like the last flare of a match before it was extinguished. One look; all she had was that one look, full of surprise, and gratitude, and a hint of something else that was gone too fast. Then she was turning to Tara and he was left to explain the point of the nose punching and let Buffy take over from there.

He wanted her for the moment. He wanted her for revenge. He wanted her, but never so much that he didn't stop, even for a second, thinking that wanting her had something to do with wanting more. He never gave any thought to what it meant until she was giving every thing he wanted to someone else in a soft look that had never been there for him.

He never knew what she wanted, but he thought that he was seeing it now as she floated a foot off the floor.