Chapter Three:

"You'd be the death of me, Slayer, if I wasn't there already," Spike rasped, rolling off her and stretching over the side of bed. Buffy knew he was reaching for the cigarettes and lighter he had secreted in his duster pocket, but decided not to replay her well-worn second-hand smoke speech. Considering that last performance, he deserved the nicotine fix. Hell, she might even ask him for a puff or two.

Thirsty, she reached for the water glass on the nightstand, swallowing down half its contents in one greedy gulp. After several hours of non-stop unlawful carnal knowledge, she was quaky and dehydrated and light-headed, like she'd just run a marathon in heavy gravity, and there was soreness and stickiness in places that had no business being that way. She wouldn't have the strength to patrol at this rate, which would make two nights this week she'd missed because of her extra-curricular activities with the former Big Bad. It's a plot, a plot I tell you, she thought giddily. First workable scheme Spike ever came up with. Screw the Slayer to the point of paralysis at every available opportunity, leaving her too tired and sore to fulfill her appointed duties. Cue hostile Sunnydale takeover by its more demonic elements, bloodshed, apocalypses, yadda yadda yadda.

She had to admit, as a Master Plan it had a certain style. Buffy pictured Spike pitching the plan--complete with lewd stick-figure diagrams--to a mixed bag of monsters, like that motley crew he played kitten poker with, and barely smothered a giggle.

I shouldn't be feeling this way, she thought, setting down the glass. Beneath her exhaustion and soreness was something very different, a trembly, vibrant, strawberry jello-ey sensation of well-being practically oozing out her pores. Which was all wrong, given the things she'd done and the creature she'd just done them with. Now was the time for the cold pricklies of shameful guilt, not the warm fuzzies of post-coital loopiness. It has to be all the endorphins, she reasoned quickly. I must have hit my target heart rate about a dozen times in the last three hours. Just a chemical reaction, nothing to get concerned about.

Refreshed and rationalized, she turned back to the vampire, who was now stretched out on his back, smoking and staring at the ceiling. Lying there with his gilt hair all ruffled, dressed only in sheets and wearing an uncharacteristically pensive expression, he looked strangely young. "It's never been like this," Spike said softly. It was amazing how his tone could change at times, from Sid Vicious to Dylan Thomas in the time it took him to light a cigarette. "Being with a vamp's quite a different thing from being with a human, and you're quite a human, at that."

"What's the difference?" Buffy asked, intrigued. How humans compared with demons sexually was a subject Angel would never discuss, probably out of guilt over Angelus's three-month campaign to utterly destroy her self-esteem. But she'd always been curious--probably also because of said campaign.

"It's not as immediate, somehow. Part of it's the cold--no body heat, y'know. And it's cleaner. . . not that that's necessarily a good thing," he added hastily before she could do more than raise an eyebrow at him. "'Cuz that means no sweat, no pheromones, no juice to it, so to speak. Of course, vamps have most humans beat hollow for sheer strength and endurance," he paused and blew another puff of smoke at the ceiling. "Plus, no bloody inconvenient moral inhibitions getting in the way. Demons don't stick at much." He paused and leered fondly at her. "But then again, neither do you. All the heat of a human, with the strength and cunning of a vampire--that's powerful mojo, sweetheart. No wonder you have me by the short hairs."

Buffy frowned at him, not sure how to respond. Being told by a 120-year-old creature of evil with countless macabre entries in his little black book that she rated numero uno was seriously disturbing. But after Angel's and Parker's brush-offs and Riley's infidelity, oddly flattering, as well.

Spike was watching her closely, smoking and smirking and apparently enjoying her confusion so much he decided to add a little more. "Must have been tough for you before now, though," he said with studied casualness.

"What do you mean?" she said, trying to find a tone of voice a comfortable distance between nonchalant and defensive.

"Oh, come on, Summers. By my count, you've been with two human men now, and two vampires. Are you telling me it was anything the same?" Exhaling, he regarded her challengingly through a haze of cigarette smoke.

"Well, it was different. . ." she trailed off, silently cursing herself for letting curiosity lure her into a round of True Confessions with Spike, of all people. There was no way this was going to end well.

"Yeah, the difference between a tricycle and a Harley. That git Parker clearly wasn't worth your time, so we won't go into that. But can you honestly say there was ever one heavy petting session with Captain America where you could really let go? One moment when you didn't have to worry about snapping his neck or breaking his back in the heat of passion? Or maybe just taking him so hard, so fast, his heart couldn't take it? There've been times you've had me hanging on by my fingernails--I know for a fact G.I. Joe didn't stand a chance unless you were going half-speed with him. Couldn't have been much fun for you, love."

Buffy's frowned deepened, as the memories came back to her in spite of her best efforts to keep them at bay.

Riley's handsome, boyish face flushed and sweaty, looking up at her with the same wonder and apprehension he'd shown when she kicked him across the training room. "That was amazing, but I think you tore something important," he says that first time, and she can tell he's only half-joking. Smiling down at him reassuringly, squashing the vague fear and nebulous anger--she'd tried to be so very, very careful, and still she'd hurt him. Wondering if there will ever be a time when she won't have to hold back, to worry about breaking a lover in some irreparable way, to fear that her apparently overwhelming needs will cost him his soul or his manhood. Leaning down and kissing him so he won't see what she's thinking, loving the warm, human feel of his lips and his large, kind hands, but knowing deep down that it will never be enough.

Buffy cleared the traitorous thoughts from her head. Riley had loved her--he'd been noble and giving and real--and he'd tried to make it work. It hadn't been his fault that she had pushed him away, that the very humanity she prized in him had also marked him as too vulnerable for her to love wholeheartedly. She still missed him, missed the companionship and the support and the utter normalcy of having a boyfriend she could walk around in daylight with. Spike had no right commenting on what he couldn't understand. "Riley was a good man," she said pointedly. "There was more to our relationship than just sex."

Spike's eyes narrowed slightly, but the superior smirk stayed firmly in place. "Yeah, unlike this. I get it. You want to play it like he was this great lost love, fine. But the fact remains that when it comes to having it off an ordinary human just can't cut it for a vamp--or a slayer. Not unless you get your jollies by ripping them to pieces, which was never really my bag. Or yours, I suspect."

"So you've been with humans before?" Buffy replied, realizing that this was the perfect opportunity to turn the conversational spotlight back on him. Plus, she had to admit to a certain curiosity. Spike jeered and argued and flirted and even occasionally advised, but he rarely reminisced. Much of his known history was an unsolvable tangle of rumor and myth he'd carefully crafted for more than a century to enhance his reputation as a master vampire. But the only time he'd chosen to tell her about his past, the truth had been far stranger than any of his fictions.

Spike was momentarily silent. Oh fine, trust him to turn all broody just as things are getting good, Buffy thought, irritated. She was about to prod him again verbally when he finally spoke. "Just once," he said in a strange, flat voice.

"And?"

"And what?" he said, sounding suddenly flustered. Interesting.

Buffy pressed onward. "What was it like?"

"Not what I thought it would be. Didn't care to repeat the experience." Taking a final drag on his cigarette, he reached over her and threw it into her water glass. Buffy saw the gesture for the attempt at distraction that it was, and ignored it.

"Why not?" She could feel the disquiet coming off him in waves. Normally Spike came in two flavors: unbearably cocky or utterly defeated. To see him uneasy was a rare thing. There was no way she was letting this go now.

"I just didn't. It was a cheap thrill that didn't work out. Let's leave it at that."

"Bullshit, Spike. In a hundred and twenty years of unlife you've wanted one other human woman for something besides a snack. That's no cheap thrill. Who was she?" Buffy said, snapping into full interrogation mode. Her spidey sense was tingling, the electric feeling of anticipation that told her there was something serious going down. She'd never ignored it without being sorry later.

Silence again. Spike was sitting up now, usually restless hands clenched on his knees, eyes darting around the room like he was planning escape routes.

"Who. Was. She?" Buffy said, real menace creeping into her voice. The last time she'd used this particular tone with him he'd been chained up in a bathtub.

Spike sighed and regarded her with a trapped, guilty expression. Though there was almost no physical resemblance between the two, in that instant he reminded her of Riley, caught with his veins open in an abandoned tenement. She could see all the muscles in his face and arms tensing, like he was steeling himself for a sudden, savage attack. When he finally spoke, his voice was very quiet.

"Cecily," he said simply.

Buffy stared at him, the name crashing through the still recesses of her mind like a boulder thrown into a pond. Cecily. The one woman he'd loved as a human man, whose rejection had sent him straight into a century of carnage and destruction. Buffy had never really thought about what Cecily's fate might have been after William transformed into Spike. The one time they'd discussed his past, he'd made it sound like he was too wrapped up in his new identity and his new fixation on Drusilla to retain emotional ties to anyone living. It had never occurred to her to ask what might have happened to William's love for Cecily, filtered through Spike's rage and vindictiveness. She felt an icy, nauseous feeling stirring in the pit of her stomach that was nothing like her usual numbness. "What happened to her, after, Spike?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Spike's rueful expression intensified. "You know what happened." There was regret in his eyes, but Buffy suspected it wasn't for Cecily. She knew she must look like she'd just been punched in the stomach by someone who knew how. The sick feeling was increasing, a rancid emotional cocktail made of equal parts anger, fear, and something that felt uncomfortably close to hurt. I know what he is, she thought queasily. I've been reminding myself of it for the past week. This should come as no shock or surprise.

So why did it suddenly feel like she couldn't breathe?

"You couldn't make her love you, so you killed her," she said in a low, choked voice. "Was it fun, Spike? Did it make up for all the times she'd hurt you?" In her mind's eye, she saw Drusilla in chains, Spike pressing a stake to her unbeating heart, ready to destroy the being he'd adored for decades. Oh God. "We both know most humans are no good in the sack, but I bet hearing her scream and beg was quite the turn on. And at least you got a decent meal out of it." And you were practically ringing the dinner bell yourself not three hours ago. Oh, God God God. She put her hands to her temples, knowing it was a weak gesture but not able to help herself.

Some of what she was thinking must have been showing on her face, because Spike was suddenly right there, gripping her shoulders with terrific urgency. "Buffy, don't go jumping to wrong conclusions. Things are different. I'm different."

"What's different about you?" she shot back. "You have no soul, you have no conscience. You're dead to everything except your own selfish needs. The only thing keeping you in line is that chip." Which doesn't even work on me anymore, she thought but didn't say. After this latest bombshell she couldn't even begin to face yesterday's emotional missile.

"Bollocks," he said, tightening his grip. "Do you really think I can't kill? That there aren't dozens of fledgling vamps out there just begging for a Lord and Master to tell them what to do, who'd bring me all the fresh meat I wanted? If that dozy bint Harmony can form a gang in no time flat, what do you think I could do if I set my mind to it? I love you. That's what keeps me in line."

I love you. The words were so easy for him. He'd said them to her over and over again the other night, as they made each other bruise and bleed, as he worshiped her with fang and claw. That couldn't be a kind of love. She couldn't need that kind of love. She wrenched away from him, retreating to the far side of the bed. "You don't know what love is, Spike," she said, barely keeping the quaver out of her voice. "You can't love, you need a soul to love."

Spike followed her, swiftly closing the distance between them. "That would make it easier for you, wouldn't it? But it's not that simple. Dru was telling the truth that night in the crypt--vampires can love, but our love isn't like that of humans, Slayer." He brushed the tangled hair away from her cheek, cupping her flushed face in his chill hand with gentle deliberation. She closed her eyes, as always less ready to face his tenderness than his cruelty. "It's dark and strange and hungry, as we are. When it happens to us we're obsessed with it, drowned by it, servants to it." He hesitated, then went on. "That's why Angelus couldn't bear the thought of it."

Buffy's eyes flew open in sheer surprise. The blond vampire had enough issues about his former mentor to fill a moderately large newsstand. He never mentioned him unless he absolutely had to, unless he thought it vitally important. Spike smiled slightly at her obvious astonishment, but then his face grew serious again. When he spoke his voice was tight, like he was forcing the words out. "Angelus wanted you dead because his love for you consumed him. He'd been imprisoned for a hundred years and couldn't stand being a slave to anyone, especially the Slayer. Loving you would have been like loving his own destruction."

At his words, Buffy felt something crucial shatter deep inside. Spike had answered a question she'd been asking forever, but the truth held little solace, for so many reasons. Her vision begin to blur, and she called upon every ounce of control she possessed to keep from breaking down in front of him. But he knew, he always knew. With excruciating tenderness, Spike pulled her close to him, but whether it was for her comfort or his own she wasn't sure. "After Dru ripped me to shreds, I didn't want to be another woman's lapdog ever again," he said in that same strained voice. "When I couldn't stay away from Sunnydale, I told myself I wanted to kill you, rather than admit I just wanted you. That's the dark side of our devotion. To kill, to possess, to be possessed, they're all so very close for us. As a slayer, you know what that's like."

Buffy pulled back, glaring at him, stung out of her anguish by his insinuation. "I'm not a murderer, Spike. You've slaughtered thousands of innocents without a speck of remorse, so don't compare my feelings to yours."

Spike glared back, azure eyes glittering dangerously. "You've killed thousands too, love, and reveled in every grisly minute of it. I've hunted with you, I've seen it. There's nothing you love better than the kill. That glow you get when you dust a vamp or gut a demon is the same one you have when you come. So don't pretend you don't know what I'm getting at."

Buffy jerked away from him, breaking his grip with a quick, brutal movement that knocked him back against the headboard. She'd been so very, very wrong to invite this being in, to let his distorted, fun-house mirror reflections influence her perceptions for one moment. "Get out of here, Spike," she said, voice as chilly as when she'd left him lying in an alleyway covered in twenties. Wrapping a sheet around herself, she backed away from the bed like it was covered in tarantulas.

Completely oblivious to his own nudity, he stalked over to her, not touching her but again invading her space, refusing to let her get away. "That's your answer to all of this, isn't it? Run away, or shove me away, but it won't work. You can't keep the truth out by running any more than you can keep me out with garlic." He glanced at the windows and bedframe, and Buffy felt herself blush, shame diluting some of her ire. Then he was looking at her again, eyes boring into her own. "Face it, pet. You're a predator same as me. Maybe your motivations are higher than mine have been, but you're still nearer to me than you've ever been to your family or your Watcher or your little band of Slayerettes."

He leaned in closer, close enough to kiss, and even in the midst of her anger, Buffy could feel the connection between them, twisting and sparking like frayed wire. "They're afraid to see what really drives you, to look into the darkness and find you at home there. They don't want to know what really moves you." His voice had taken on a slow, hypnotic quality, which twined around her fevered brain like a kudzu vine. His eyes were ageless, fathomless, and if she let herself she could fall into them, drowning in wells of blue. She felt like Mowgli in the wilderness, trapped by a seductive serpent who wouldn't be satisfied until he'd swallowed her whole.

And in that dizzy instant how she wanted it, wanted him, the familiar lethargy washing over her and drowning her anger in a tide of desire as thick and sweet as molasses. With aching slowness, he was caressing the smooth skin just under her collarbone, tantalizing around the upper edge of the swaddled sheet, and she could almost feel the cells in her skin straining towards his touch. His busy mouth was exploring the salty hollow of her throat, tasting the racing pulse there with his tongue, but still he went on speaking.

"It's lonely, isn't it?" he murmured, grasping the top of the sheet and beginning to draw it down. "Always hiding, always pretending, never finding anyone who loves you for your shadows as well as your light." His speech was smoothing out, losing its staccato edge, taking on the same plush accents as Giles's dulcet tones. "But I'm not afraid to see all of you, Slayer." The sheet was around her waist, around her knees, now puddling uselessly on the floor. "Even now, when we both know you're not the same." With nothing between them now, she could feel his uncannily smooth skin gliding deliciously against hers, his cool erection pressing into her abdomen, his hands tattooing her all over with his ceaseless touch. The room was spinning, spinning, and he was the only fixed point within it. "I want you still, even when you're hard and cold and cut like a blade, and the others run away, terrified of their own handiwork." Buffy clutched at him, feeling the inexorable hardness of his shoulders, the strength of the arms that had both struck her and soothed her at the darkest moments of her life. He felt like safety and damnation all at once.

Spike's voice whispered on, his words entrapping her as much as his hands. "I know what it is to feel divorced from the world, to need something powerful, something profound, something beyond the weak and selfish love of human beings." He was kissing her neck, savoring the thin skin there, achingly near to her now-glowing scar. "I hear what your heart cries out for, Slayer," he growled softly, and she felt rather than saw his face change and his mouth harden. Needle-sharp fangs were pressing into the pearly crescent that marked her as another's, ready to obliterate it with his own claiming wound. He was offering it to her, everything she'd been craving, and making it fatally easy to accept. She didn't have to move or speak or even think--all she had to do was stand still.

Sooner or later, you're gonna want it. And the second that happens, you know I'll be there. I'll slip in. Have myself a real, good day. Suddenly, Spike's chilling promise came echoing back to her, as clearly as if he were whispering it in her ear. Buffy felt her lassitude break, submerged by a fury so intense she was literally seeing red, angry glints dancing in front of her eyes and working her into a fever-pitch of rage. How dare he. . .how could he. . .I knew it. . . too incensed to think coherently, she relied on pure reflex, pulling back from him in a fluid burst of movement too fast for the human eye to see. With a single, powerful blow she sent him flying across the room. He landed on the floor by the bed, the force of her strike shocking him out of game face.

Before he could gather his strength, she leapt on top of him, straddling him in a position very like the one they'd been in not long before. Spike opened his mouth to make what was probably a witty comment to that effect, but was stopped cold by the ten-inch, razor-sharp stake that had appeared in her hand as if by magic. With deadly deliberation, she pressed it into the waxen skin just over his heart, one of the only parts of his torso not already marked by the welts and bruises of her violent pleasure. A single, black-red drop of blood welled to the surface, the exact color of the spots still dancing before her eyes.

"A broadsword's not the only weapon I keep in my bed, Spike," she hissed.

"You'd do it, wouldn't you?" he said slowly. "You'd rather kill me than face the truth about yourself. About us."

"You're already dead, remember?" she spat back at him, pressing the stake in another few millimeters. She knew that she was dancing on the knife edge of his doom, but those deadly red sparks wouldn't let her stop. Buffy could feel all of her most primal slayer instincts bubbling to the surface, telling her to take, to kill, to drive her weapon home and end the monster stretched out before her. She could imagine it clear as day, the finely drawn features dissolving into dust and ash, that mocking, beguiling, infuriating voice silenced forever, this entire emotional quagmire drained with one easy blow. Her fingers gripped the stake harder, tensing to make that small, fatal push, when at that moment she looked into his haunted eyes and stopped, frozen, at what she saw there.

She had seen it before, in an abandoned mansion, as she stood in front of a crackling abyss opening upon unimaginable apocalyptic terrors. It was a mixture of love and pain and confusion but also acceptance, as if he'd always known this was the way things between them must end. It was the same look Angel had worn when she skewered him and sent him straight to hell, and seeing it echoed in Spike's face nearly undid her.

Loving you would have been like loving his own destruction.

To kill, to possess, to be possessed, they're all so very close for us.

Buffy felt her vibrant anger darken into a keening emptiness, as the red spots faded into clear nothingness. Slowly, carefully, she withdrew the stake from him and tossed it away. Climbing off him, she pulled her knees to her chest and leaned against the foot of the bed. At that moment, she wanted nothing more than to fall back into her grave and pull the sheltering soil over her head.

"Go," she said tiredly. She couldn't bear to look at him.

"Buffy. . ." She couldn't listen to him, either. Not now.

"GO!" She nearly screamed, then stopped and gathered the last threadbare strings of her control together. "Spike," she continued in an awful, bloodless voice. "If you have ever had even the slightest real feeling for me, you will leave, now." She buried her face in her hands. "Please."

Spike must have dressed and exited with supernatural stealth, because all Buffy could hear in the next few moments was the mournful buzzing of the cicadas outside. When she looked up again, the only sign that he had ever been there was the lingering smell of cigarette smoke.

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