Please forgive the gratuitousness of the second half of this chapter. I felt Angel and Buffy's Big Night Out, and Buffy's cryptic romantic plans, deserved a bit of catharsis. But then, don't we all? For a precedent on the kimono and the food, please see the Buffy episode "Enemies" from season 3.
A Feast For the Eyes
Deanna figured she'd give the lovers a bit of time. Whatever it was that they were going to do tonight, she was pretty sure she didn't want to watch. Did vampires have regular sex anyway, or would there have to be some kind of exchange of plasma in order for Angel to "achieve happiness?" Or was it the Slayer who was deviant, needing to pummel her lover about the head and neck in order to feel dominant? In any case, Deanna Everweather was a lot of things, but a voyeur was not one of them. She figured she'd spend the night doing some research and try to figure out what Lindsey and the wacky gang at Wolfram & Hart were up to. Spying on Angel and Buffy could wait until the sun came up and they were finished doing... well, each other.
Lucy Lira, on the other hand, was not quite so tactful. Not only was she an excellent aura reader, but she was also a highly skilled psychic. She could, if she concentrated, channel the emotions and hear the thoughts of anyone she had touched. Sometimes she didn't have to concentrate; if the feeling or thought was intense enough, it would come to her of its own volition. She loved the power of invading people's private thoughts, and the deliciousness of knowing what they were thinking and feeling, even when their faces betrayed nothing. Wolfram & Hart had been her best clients through the years, hiring her not only to read auras, but also to accidentally bump into someone, touch them somehow, and then predict their movements. She'd paid for her condo in Brentwood working for them when they were trying to procure highly unscrupulous attorneys from other firms and bring them into their dark fold.
The last time she'd gotten a call from Wolfram & Hart, it was a few months ago. Lindsey McDonald had attempted to hire her just after his first encounter with the vampire Angel. Angel had thrown Russell Winters out the 38th story conference room window at Russell Winters Enterprises, demolishing a perfectly good source of obscenely inflated income for the firm, and for Lindsey in particular. Naturally, the firm wanted to know what was up with this guy, and whether he could be used to their advantage.
Lucy had followed him to the Santa Monica Pier where he valiantly took out a nest full of Tanafirroh demons and saved a smart-looking man from a terrible, slow death. She had asked for the time, and then touched his hand in thanks. It should have worked, as it had on dozens of men and women before. Except that vampires' minds cannot be penetrated. It's like the mirror – the thoughts are there, but they create no reflection. Angel, or any vampire for that matter, couldn't be read the way a human could. But what she did notice was his aura: the eggplant-colored ring around his neck that denoted guilt, and around his entire body, the reddish hue of a human soul. She knew enough about vampires to find this odd, so she reported back to Lindsey immediately, and he had thanked her. They'd shaken hands, touched skin. And now, she could read Lindsey.
He was thinking of her right now. His emotions and intentions were coming to her loud and clear, such was the magnitude of his fear. She laughed to herself. He was going to call her again to spy on Angel, but what good could it do? Everyone at the firm already knew he had a soul, and that was the extent of her psychic expertise on those of the bloodsucking persuasion.
Still, she liked to get a jump on things. Her years of trying to touch people for the sake of readings had made her good at skulking about, and her aforementioned lack of tact made it very easy for her to spy on people without scruple, usually just their minds. Occasionally, their persons. Put the two together, and she could lurk behind the bushes with the best of them. She used the local business directory to locate Angel's office, and with it his apartment, and set out with her collection of lock-picking bobby pins and some infrared binoculars, just in case..
For unlike Deanna Everweather, Lucy Lira was a voyeur. Voyeurism was her bread and butter, and the juicier the revelation, the better, the more entertaining for her. She was looking forward to finding out how a vampire with a soul might live, might eat without feeding on humans, what he might watch on television, who he might choose to spend his time with. She was looking forward to selling this information to Wolfram & Hart, some good old-fashioned cloak-and-dagger reconnaissance, that would perhaps make up for her inability to read the vampire's mind, and maybe buy her a new Mercedes. But as she used a hairpin to unlatch the front office door of Angel Investigations and crept through the dark to the door at the top of the stairs, she had doubts. How could she be sure that he'd be home, and not out saving the universe?
But she needn't have worried. She could hear his voice as soon as the second door was silently unlocked and opened, and a second voice as well. A female.
She crept down the top two steps, listening harder for something more specific, a word, a sentence, some piece of information she could use. But all she could hear was moaning. So she crept down a bit more, so that she could just see into the sitting room. She nearly lost her balance and fell when she saw.
Angel was nude, half-sitting, half-lying on the sofa. A blonde girl dressed in a kimono was licking chocolate mousse off his stomach, drawing closer and closer to the place where his legs meet each other. Judging by the upright, nearly purple state of things, Angel was very pleased about it. She worked her tongue slowly over his abdomen, and then over his admirable erection, and the moans that escaped increasingly louder from Angel's lips would have indicated to the untrained eye that he was being most eggregiously tortured.
Lucy was quite surprised to find that she disapproved of her own inappropriate prying into the sexual lives of vampires. Even for her, this act of voyeurism was way off the rails. She should walk away – this was clearly an extremely private moment between two souls (she was reasonably sure that the girl was human, as she had a soul, and appeared to have a body temperature, heightened though it may have been at this juncture), and there was little to be gained for reconnaissance here.
But she just couldn't tear herself away, and the perverse delight got the better of her. So, Lucy watched the blonde finish her dessert, accompanied by a beautiful, musical groan of release from Angel, then slowly tease her vampire lover back up to full-mast by opening, but not stripping away, the delicate silken Japanese costume. She allowed him to drink in great gulps the sight of her bare, and equally silken skin, and used the soft fabric of her garment to brush lightly against the most swollen parts of him and compound his desire.
Eventually, she slid gracefully to the floor and guided Angel's hands and mouth to the places where she needed them most. Then after Angel brought the girl to writhing fits of supplication involving what looked like baked apples in some sort of syrup, and the kimono was all but ruined, the two of them came unhinged. They tried, panting, to stumble to the bedroom, God knows why, but they only made it as far as the kitchen. And so, with succulent desserts spilled everywhere throughout the front of the apartment and the kimono ripped to shreds, he took her on the kitchen floor, under the exposed light bulb, with Grecian athleticism and marathon endurance. A human being, a man, would have died from exhaustion, and frankly, Lucy could not understand how the blonde girl survived it.
By the time Lucy heard him groan his last and loudest, she had figured out that Angel and the girl had been re-enacting a film called Le Banquet d'Amélia. It was a piece that had been released the year before about an RAF pilot and a French prostitute whose shtick, as it were, was to play the part of a Geisha who specialized in food-related sex play. It was all there: the kimono, the mousse, the syrupy dessert with baked fruit. Even the swinging light bulb hanging from the kitchen ceiling smacked of their cinematic re-enactment.
Only the sounds of Angel and the girl beginning to clean up the kitchen, putting on clothes, chatting lightheartedly about what had just transpired, brought her out of her stupor. It was as though she'd been in a trance, watching the action from afar, as though she were having one of her psychic experiences, only in living color. She looked at her watch. She had been crouched on the stairs for three hours, and it was nearly dawn. Slowly, she gathered her senses, stood up and crept back up the stairs.
Except she could hear someone in the office above, someone much less stealthy than herself. Though she knew it was coming, she gave a start and a little jump when the door opened at the top of the stairs, and she found another pair of eyes staring back at her.