Chapter Ten

The fog had come in. Spike could smell its thick presence seeping in though the wall cracks as he writhed. He could smell the damp sinking over the raw rich fragrance of her body - her unwashed hair and skin, the animal musk of her cleft, parted and filled with his cock. The dew settled on her warmth, bringing shivers and bumps to her bare arms and breasts as he pressed his smooth chest to her, his arms low around her hips, hitching her up, giving her a tilt to better drive himself in. She winced and moaned, growing wetter around the intrusive length of him, though she was surely sore by now. Nothing to help that - lust was a battle they fought just as fiercely as the scarce creatures that went bump in the night. They'd have long scared them off by now, the creatures, if the children who'd left behind the blankets and candles they'd appropriated on the disheveled floor of the abandoned séance room had better luck tonight. The faded spell markings glowed along the walls above their bare twinning bodies, the forgotten language dulling in the guttering candlelight.

They'd lain here for hours - rolling, fucking, moaning, claiming each other in turn with bites and bruises and primal shouts. He'd sniffed her, licked her, sucked her from neck to knee, his face returning to her folds, collecting their mingled fluids, priming her for another go. Limb and muscle were worked to the edge of exhaustion, and yet they still strove to connect, to keep the hard burn smoldering, flaring up again and again like matchsticks drawn across a rough surface. She sobbed his name, her small nails digging into the raked flesh of his back. He pressed his panting mouth to her, nipping her chin, a fist twisting in her hair as if to find a hand-hold to claw his way in even deeper, lose himself more heavily in her heat. They'd find it soon, that perfect release, locked together in a hot thick rush surfacing from what should be, after these long wild hours, a well-drilled field.

"Spike, lover… do it…get it in there, right up in there…oh, God…"

Her mouth closed over his and she kissed him hungrily, like a plea for water or blood—as if his demon were bound and bred to feed her sucking mouths with dead seed. His cock stroked into her, metering out that rhythmic pain-mixed pleasure she delighted in so much. Lost here in this fortress, they could push their desire to the brink of agony and revel in it. Her thighs tightened around him and her cunt clamped down as she dragged herself once more toward the brink.

"Need you…want you so fucking much…do it, do it, make me come…oh, please…" her words thinned into a sweet wail. She was close, straining, thrusting her hips to meet his, his balls sloppy with her juice, needing more, just a little bit more. He slid his hand over her hip to feel the hot meat of their joined bodies, tender tissues swollen by over-indulgence as much as need. She'd heal fast, fortunately. And him, well, after a hot shower and a half gallon of cold blood down his aching throat and he'd sleep like the dead for days. He gathered the slickness off her low gorging lips and spread it to her hot little bunghole. After their initial fuck he'd given it a rest, a chance to acclimate to the shock of being filled and stretched. She'd be sore here, too, but something needed to be done soon to get her off or his cock was going to shatter to dust. He'd had her everywhere tonight: Against the iron bars, chained together until the wall had given way to let him tumble out. Then he took her with her ass in the bowl of the cracked and teetering basin he'd flung through the wall - her ankles locked behind his head, her pretty wet qwim a warm hollow in the darkness. They'd changed floors for better air—building a bed of the blankets, lighting more candles and just letting one fuck roll into another with a shift of limbs and interludes of pleased kisses and raptured sighs. And that still hadn't been enough. For her.

"Jesus! Oh, God…yes…fuck!" Two fingers in the bum without much prelude sent her right to the coda—though she'd deny it later, how she couldn't possibly love a dirty little lowdown probe so goddamned much. She jerked and trembled around him and went boneless in his arms, melting along with her bliss into the tattered wool beneath them. He collapsed on her, his dick still in her, reasonably hard, but he was too shagged out to mount the effort to finish it. They lay in silence until she caught her breath and rolled him off her to take mercy on his last stand and bring him off in her mouth.

Spike let the last of himself ooze from his prick and down her throat with a surrendering groan. She licked at his rubbery flesh, smiling like it'd been a feast rather than a meek trickle. "Bloody hell, girl, I'm tapped."

She grinned and stretched out next to him, hips just brushing, as they watched the green light of her jewel throw the shadows of their depleted forms against the far wall. "I didn't think there was a bottom to your cask."

"Neither did I," he said, lungs aching for a cigarette, or twelve. Fuck, their clothes were abandoned a few floors down still. No way he could manage to sit up right now, let alone stand and trudge around looking for a scrunched pack of Reds. Better just to pass out starkers and hope the State Park Service was too bloody cheap to hire a morning watch. "I guess there's a first time for everything. I hope you're pleased - couldn't manage another horn for you, if you dangled your jack and danny in my face."

She smiled and sat up, a wicked dare in her eyes. God, please no. She knelt and pressed her breasts to his chest, shimming up him. She clamped her thighs over his arms and splayed her lips for him - her rosy red nub was a shimmering ruby in the candlelight. "Your mouth still works," she said and he knew that victory smoke was a long cry off.

They took the bus back. She rode beside him, her eyes closed, nestled in his arms and wrapped up in his long coat. He stroked her tangled hair and kissed her smudged cheek. He loved holding her, more than anything - close, where he could sense all the lovely stories her body, blood and breath had to tell. She was naked under the dusty leather and smelled of deep satisfaction. He'd carry her home now, right up to the door of the shower - get the water hot and soap all the dirt and spunk from her perfect radiant skin, then rinse her clean and towel her up for a long sleep together in their bed.

He was happier now than he could ever remember being in his whole long sorry existence. It was true what he'd told the surfers - he had no idea how he'd managed it—to earn this rare treasure, to hold her close and cherish her. Even the driver could sense this as his tired eyes glanced once more into the rearview to see her pretty head resting against the vacancy of her spectral lover. He wouldn't ask. He'd probably seen stranger oddities of a night.

Spike felt Buffy had earned him, too, in some ways—taking the chance and courage to come back to him over the years to rebuild the fallen foundations of their former affair. Even so, he knew tonight wasn't just about pleasing his demon. She needed the rush and crash for herself, a place to come undone, to be free and true to her nature. It wouldn't last; he knew it. Her efforts to exhume her slayer past were beginning to fray at the edges. His soul knew it, too, thrumming with a pulsing wariness under his resurgent joy. Great love may burn, but it also consumes—they'd both learned that—until there was nothing left. What she needed was something more, more than him. And he had an idea how he might go about giving that to her.

Buffy came home the following night just as he was stepping out of the shower. Two large dusty trash bags sat in the middle of the living room floor.

"What's this," she asked, toeing a plastic mound. "And where have you been all night?"

He took a scrub at his hair, then wrapped the towel around his waist. "They're for you."

"Garbage? Thanks."

"It's not rubbish, just some of it was buried under it for a while. Took bloody forever to dig it all up."

She untied the red cinch on one of the sacks and peered in. She raised her head and stared at him. "It's money."

"Yeah, a lot of it. More than I thought." He plopped down on the couch and began picking the dirt out from under his nails.

"You'd buried it all? Spike, they had invented the banking system back in the 1880s, hadn't they?"

"Do I look like a fellow who keeps banker's hours?"

"You didn't...uh..."

"Nick it? No...I earned it, in a manner of speaking."

"You don't work."

He chuckled. "If you think I've gone back to mugging people in the street, I'll go take my loot and drop it down a manhole for some lucky sewer dweller to find. I saved the bloody lot of it—been at it for a few years; it piled up. It's yours now; I don't want it."

She reached a hand in to lift up a crumbly wad. It smelled a little funny and she put it back and wiped her hand. "Spike, I can't even begin to understand this unless you're honest with me."

"Honest?"

"How did you get it? When you lived in Sunnydale you barely had two shirts on your back...and a beta player."

"A man can get up in the world, you know."

"Spike..."

He sighed. "Fine. It's Giles. He thinks keeping my pockets lined will prevent the good English watchdog effort from any untoward embarrassments."

"He sent you this much?"

"No, I've held a job or two, and had some...financial opportunities come my way."

"Gambling money? Is that what this is?"

"Hey, it's legal. Thank white-guilt Indian casino votes for that!"

She sighed and sat down next to the offering. "I can't take this."

"Why not?"

"Because...I don't know. It's not fair."

"Take it, Buffy. Buy yourself a nice chipper shop like you wanted. Make bloody tea sandwiches for the working class. You'll be good at it. I know it."

She looked wistful. "Being a slayer was the only thing I was ever really good at."

"Yeah, well killing people was the only thing I was ever really good at. Look where it got me."

She looked seriously at him. "Do you think we can do this, Spike?"

"It's what you came here for, wasn't it? Originally?"

"It was, yeah."

"Then I think, Buffy, that's why this is going to work. I have to believe that."

"So do I."

"Then take the sodding money, all right?"

She grinned at the bag and gave it a pat. "Think this stuff is washable? I'd hate to walk into the bank smelling like a grave robber."

"I'll put laundry detergent on the grocery list."

Five days later they were standing in the dark narrow kitchen of an old soup shop in the north Mission. The flooring was cracked and the walls smelled of good ol' San Franciscan mold.

"So this is what thirty grand gets you nowadays, eh?" he said, easily finding and flipping the light switch over her searching hands. The remaining fluorescents hummed and struggled to life. Little black shapes skittered under the tarnished steel grill and make table. "Charming. You could almost eat off the floor, or at least the rats do."

Buffy gleamed with pride and threw herself into his arms, kissing him. "Oh, sweetie, it's perfect!" she said, hugging his waist and tugging him into the seating area. There was room beyond the counter for a half dozen tables and twice as many chairs—a little hole-in-the-wall lunch stop on the way to the South of Market business district. "I want to put a big palm there, right by the door. And here, over the counter, I want one of those hand-drawn chalk menus with the light pine framing. The tiles need replaced and the oven's a lost cause, but the rest…I never thought…" her eyes sparkled with excitement. "A little bleach and elbow grease and it'll be beautiful! It is beautiful! You're beautiful!" He caught her up as she leapt on him again for another chorus of kisses. He grinned under her tender enthusiasm, held her small body to his where her heart beat swiftly.

"It's yours, love. For real this time. Something of your own." Something that will make you stay—with me.

She looked into his eyes. "It's something for us both," she said and he smiled.

That there was some work to be done on the place was an understatement. But Buffy knew her trade and was soon on her cell to old contacts in the biz she'd known, she said, from before when she worked down south: suppliers, bakers, plumbers... The rest was up to them. Instead of trudging through the gullies and drains with swords and crossbows they now spent their nights wielding mops and paint rollers from dusk till dawn and sometimes beyond, rolling the shades down in the front room to keep the sun out.

She was light-hearted and sweet, pausing often in their work to plaster him with warm kisses and caresses—sometimes degrading into a hot hard fuck on the make table. One day she surprised him with a plain brown package.

"What's this?" he asked, putting down the spackle knife and taking the long heavy box from her, pulling on the twine bow.

She looked amused. "Something every handyman needs." Inside was a loaded leather tool belt and a rubber mallet sledgehammer. He was vaguely horrified, but hid it well under a bemused smile. She bounced. "Come on, try it on!"

He obliged her, sliding the leather belt around his dusty jeans and looping it tight. It looked like a Home Depot hula skirt.

"Ooh! Very manly," she praised, turning him about.

"If you put me in this thing to say it makes my bum look like Xander's, I'll know what the sledgehammer's for."

She giggled. "The sledge is for the rear storage room. We're expanding it." She grinned, handing him the implement and pushing his tooled hips toward the back. "And we both know you're especially talented at taking down walls."

After the wall came down, they took a night off to celebrate their one-month anniversary. One month from her move-in date, that is. It seemed to Spike like a year had gone by, but time was more variable to him, less simple to divide and measure. It made him dizzy sometimes to reach back through the years to their first true year of acquaintance and remember the vampire who used to rule the Sunnydale underground with a crazed paramour and a hell-bent grandsire set on bringing down the human world he was now preparing to feed. This was a stranger life than he had ever known, Spike thought, as they walked along the pier where they had shared their first uneasy date in San Francisco together. Buffy was tucked at his side, cheerful and full of baked clams.

She was chatty tonight, excited about the shop, her plans for it. He was quiet - an odd feeling niggling at the back of his mind - a sense of unreality he took for his inability to accept good fortune when it turned right up and smacked him in the melon. Unforgiven - his soul still whispered. And yet he clearly was. She held his hand in hers, let passers-by see they were beloved, though the mainstay of their days were private and spent in the exclusive company of one another. This was so different from the Buffy who once was surrounded by people whom she loved and needed. Now there was just him. He should feel grateful for their absence - somehow though, her isolation made him sad.

"You know I've been meaning to ask you," he said as they walked along the wood planks over the shifting waters. "Why didn't you ring-up Harris to come rescue the shop from all the cockroaches and paisley wallpaper? He'd have done a fair better job in half the time."

She shrugged. "I don't know. I guess I wanted to do this all myself and with you, silent partner."

"Does he know?" he asked. "Do any of them know you're here?"

"Of course they do. The big empty apartment would have been a dead giveaway by now."

"But they don't know why you're here."

She turned her head toward the water. "They do. They understand."

He stepped ahead of her and stopped them both. "You're lying to me," he said. "Why?"

"I'm not…lying, completely."

"You needn't lie to me, not about this. I don't care if they know or not. All I care about is that I'm in love with you and by some undeserved miracle, you're here, with me. I rather like having you all to myself. I just thought it was odd they never rang."

She looked contrite and crossed her arms, leaning back into the rail. "I told them I was traveling, overseas, for a few months. I think they bought it. I just wanted…some time. I wanted to see if I, if we, could make this work."

He considered that. "And Dawn?"

"She knows. Everything. I gave her your address and she has my cell. Funny thing is, she always was a cheerleader for your team."

"Aside from when she promised to set me alight if I ever hurt you again. I won't. I couldn't. She knows that, right?"

"She does. She trusts you, more than the rest ever could. I can't say I blame them. I was never able to explain you very well to them, and when I did, it was over. I don't want to lie to you, but I need you to understand this isn't easy for me."

"I know that. That's why I don't ask you for anything. I love you so much…it's everything to me just to be near you, to see you, to talk to you, to kiss you, to make you smile, to make you moan…hmm, I guess I do want everything. I can't help it. It's what you do to me by just…being. There isn't anything I wouldn't give you, to make you happy. You have my heart. I'd give you my soul, too, if I could. Truth is I never cared for it much; it's a bloody nuisance most times, except when I'm holding you, and then it's wonderful."

She touched his face. "I believe you," she said as she moved into his arms. He held her, kissed her head as they watched the night ferry pass under the bridge. "How does that soul feel now?" she asked.

"Much better," he said against her hair. "Better still if you stay. Will you stay with me, Buffy?"

She hugged him tighter. "Of course, silly. I'd planned on it."

"Good, because this time around you'd have to stake me before I could ever let you go."