The thing he liked about Lilah, was that she was depraved enough to recognize that in the depths of his heart he was evil; but innocent enough to be surprised every time he didn't succumb. She had a way of staring at him when he resisted her evil plans, a kind of frank bafflement, as though at a tramp who was handing out Fry's Turkish Delight, or a tiger who had started knitting a sweater.
The other thing he liked was that she adored him. He wasn't sure if she was trying to hide it or not – she might be: she was clumsier than he at such manoeuvrings. The truth was her natural element; she enjoyed telling it.
Wesley had met with very little uncritical adoration in his life and looking around could see no reason to try to resist it in Lilah. Her incessant quips were the evidence of a tempered brutality that was always restless in her: she couldn't leave him alone, and he was not in a position to sneer at deriving cheap and lasting satisfaction from that.
It was something different, though, when he had her in his arms and she'd lay her head against his neck, stroke the side of his face, his brow and cheek and lip. She'd move her fingers and palms over him restlessly and speechlessly, as though it were they that were hungry to know he was there. Nearly always he'd manage to get a look at her face while she was doing this and then he'd get what he'd been waiting for. Her expression in repose gave him a stab of joy every time.
She'd be looking at him: grave and devouring and bereaved, like a starving lion cub. She made no effort to cover this bare tenderness when they were in bed together – why, he couldn't think, as surely it left her needlessly open to any of a range of easy meannesses that he could – if he wanted to - inflict. She was used to taking risks of all sorts, he supposed. Safety measures bored her.
He had to admit that he'd never been able to hurt her on purpose. She took obvious pleasure in his attempts to wound. The only time he'd pierced the skin, he thought, was that first time, when he hadn't even been trying. The dead tone, the evident truth of his I wasn't thinking about you when you were here, had rattled her insouciance as no deliberate cruelty could. She seemed, in fact, to confuse deliberate cruelty with demonstrative affection and to respond with a lover-like eagerness under a thin veneer of lawyerlike cool.
He'd let her seduce him that first time out of a truly barbaric impulse to destroy.
Losing his position on the Council had once been the worst and deepest wrench he could imagine. Hearing Angel's voice in something between a growl and a scream: You're a dead man, Pryce, had changed that. Well, in truth, the first time Angel had clapped him on the shoulder, everything had changed. The tide of his deep, low-flowing introverted passions had turned, and Angel was his Diana. To lose him had been more than Wesley had been able to bear and remain human. Had Billy, that Machiavellian dimension-hopper, been alive and watching, he couldn't have more charmed with Wesley's descent. He'd wanted to break and batter and humiliate Lilah beyond recognition. Was that still the key to her fascination for him? That he hadn't done it yet?
His guilt about their affair wasn't to do with how evil she was. His good-guy persona was only a sparkly cape, and at the bottom of his heart he didn't care. Didn't care who lived or died. Didn't care if Lilah killed people to get dinner reservations or thrills. The reason he enjoyed wanting to kill her was merely that she was lower in the food chain than him; more despised by the Gods. And the Gods for him weren't the powers at all, but two men and two girls, because they were the people who made him feel sanctioned and sane, who made the word 'family' a lullaby in his mind, rather than a vampire bat. Sometimes he thought it was he who hadn't a soul.
But despite all that was supernatural and murderous and depraved in the increasingly frequent meetings between him and Lilah, elements of the normal crept in to make him feel madder than ever. The way he'd feel himself fumbling around the words 'relationship' and girlfriend', as he had done with so many women before. (Two, to be frank. A conscientious Watcher has very little spare time.) They never went to the cinema together, or the laundrette, or argued about which soap to watch. He'd never given her a neck rub or brushed her hair or told her her outfit looked all right from behind. He had the feeling she'd have died rather than asked.
But things crept in. When had she begun to lay her cheek against his shoulder, afterwards? When had he begun to feel happy that her wiry died hair lay under his stroking hand? Only since he'd broken away from her had he realised that his heart had begun to thrive on her sledgehammer wit; only since he'd cut off her head with an axe did he begin to feel that he'd thrown away 'the dearest thing he owed as 'twere a careless trifle.'
Only in the long nights afterward did he hold his wallet to his heart, and not sleep, and think about the indispensable things you can buy for a dollar, and wish greedily and foolishly as a child that she might come back.