Spike was used to vivid dreams, all technicolor and stereo sound, and usually full of sex or bloodshed. Oftentimes sex and bloodshed, as agreeable a pairing as candlelight and poetry readings. But they were never like this, with him standing demurely in the lobby of a building, the room gleaming white and sterile, all polished floors and brass fixtures. If it hadn't been for the deco-style elevator in front of him, he would have thought that he was back underground in the Initiative facility. Nightmare, that.
He zeroed in on his hands, and realized with a start that the slender fingers and clean, rounded nails, devoid of chipped black polish were hers. The sound of elevator arriving captured his attention, and he lifted his head just as the door opened with a bright, cheerful ding. And there, waiting inside, the husband from the photo hidden in Charlie's apartment. Jesse. Oh, Spike knew how this dream ended, and he looked bleakly down towards his stomach, expecting to find himself impaled with the knife that Charlie had talked about. But there was nothing there except for a flat, feminine abdomen and a chunky-knit blue sweater.
"Come on. What are you waiting for?" Jesse waved impatiently as Spike looked up again.
Not knowing what else to do other than obey, he walked onto to elevator, roughly brushing up against the shoulders of a man in a tweed suit who was rushing to get on at the same time. Jesse smiled warmly at Spike as the man in the suit jammed his finger into the button for the 17th floor and the elevator door slid shut. As the dial on the floor level indicator began to rotate towards the higher numbers, Spike realized that a piece of yarn from the end of his… her sleeve was stuck in the door and the sweater was rapidly unravelling.
He tried pinching the yarn between his thumb and forefinger, but the thread kept shooting right through, burning the pads of his fingers. It whipped in circles around his, no, her arm, and then around her torso, disappearing through the slit in the door. By the time the lift stopped at floor 17, there was only a tiny band left around one wrist.
"This is your stop," the suited man said to Spike, as the door dinged open again. The air seemed to whistle by tunelessly as he stared into a room of vast, white nothingness. Dread crept up through his stomach, and Spike opened his mouth to tell the man, "ladies first," but found he had no voice. And he supposed since he seemed to be inhabiting Charlie's body, the insult wouldn't have packed as much punch anyway.
"No! Can't we just go to the top? This is going to hurt too much," Jesse begged Tweed, grabbing miserably at the man's arm.
"It's not time yet. Almost. But until then..." With a flourish, Tweedy handed Spike, or Charlie, a piece of floppy, orange cheese that left his thumbprint embedded in the surface when he handed it off.
"Don't spoil your appetite," Jesse whispered in Spike's ear. The boy's words sounded strangled and anxious, and to Spike's absolute stupefaction were punctuated by a firm kiss to his lips.
Before Spike could react to the rather presumptuous act of endearment, Tweedy cheese-man gave Spike-Charlie a not very gentle shove out of the elevator, and they were falling.
Spike awoke with a jolt, the sickening feeling of inertia still plummeting through him as he tried to wrap his brain around the fact that he was quite stationary on his bed.
With a glance to his side, he realized that Charlie was also awake, sitting up with the sheets wrapped tightly around her knuckles, trying to control the slight trembles that had taken up residence in her limbs. The mattress dipped as he pulled himself into a sitting position, and she turned her head towards him, her eyes dark with apprehension.
"You alright? What's wrong, luv?" Shaking off his own jitters, he pushed her still-damp hair off of her face, draping it over her tense shoulders so he could run his thumb in soothing lines down her neck.
"Nothing, I'm okay. Just a dream."
"Must be somethin' in the air." Spike kissed her temple and gently tugged her back down to the bed, pulling her back firmly against his chest. "Wasn't that elevator one again, was it? Think you rehashed it well enough that I just dreamed the most unwelcome sequel."
"What?" Startled, she rolled over onto her side to face him.
"Weird dream, light on the humor, heavy on the cheese," he reiterated. "Wardrobe, featurin' shoddily made sweaters. Think your hubby made an appearance too, and kissed me on the mouth, the floozy."
Charlie stared at him in shocked silence for a moment. "That was my dream. I just had that dream. How...?"
He stared back at her with equal surprise. "Tweedy git handin' out free Kraft samples?"
"No sprinkle of tinkerbell dust before getting off at floor 17?"
"Bloody hell."
"Is this like a vampire… sire… side effect?" Her forehead creased with worry and Spike almost wanted to lie to her and say that it was, just to ease her mind. But he thought better of it, wanted to keep his deceit to a minimum, save all the wrongdoing for bigger issues.
He shook his head. "Never shared a dream with Dru. Don't think she ever experienced it with Angel either, and believe me, she was above the board with me about everythin' they shared. 'Specially when I didn't want to hear it."
"Maybe it was… bad milk. You had hot chocolate at Buffy's, right?" Charlie scratched at her lip and frowned at a tiny hole in the pillowcase. "I put milk in my coffee, so maybe it was spoiled, and it's just some weird dairy occurrence that only happens when two vampires sleep right next to eachother and-"
"-Kitten," Spike interrupted, catching her chin in his hand and forcing her to look at him, "it wasn't the soddin' half-and-half. Don't know what it was, but it was deep. I was in your head, seein' what you were seein', feelin' the same tinglies that you were feelin'."
"You didn't have… I mean… what other kinds of dreams have you had lately?"
Spike gazed at her from beneath his lashes, "They've had a rather recurrin' theme of yourself and yours truly."
She looked thoughtful for a minute, her lips eventually tugging ruefully upward. "So I guess this means we both know what happens when you put us in a room with chocolate sauce and popsicles, huh?"
He ran through his mental rolodex of recent dreams involving her, reasonably sure that he would've remembered one involving either ingredient. Given the sultry look on her face, it was clearly one she wasn't going to be forgetting anytime soon. "Can't say I remember, but maybe you could remind me, pet," he suggested with a widening smirk, tongue curling behind his teeth.
Her smile flatlined. "Oh… um, it was like a cooking dream. We were putting- I mean we were preparing dessert. Totally boring."
"Right. And my name's Phoebe Buffay."
"You know, the blond hair, the past life of crime… I should've known," she countered, blowing out an exhausted breath. "I guess we're not mind-melding every time we sleep, but maybe we should see if Giles or any of the gang have heard about something like this happening."
"The crack team occasionally gets it right, but they know sod all about vampire nitty-gritties. Not sure I can make heads or tails of it either, but the last dream you had was fairly literal, so mayhap the dreams are somewhat prophetic."
"So this time, I'm gonna get shoved out of an elevator? Prophetic dreams suck. I don't want to know all the bad shit that's going to happen to me!"
"You'd rather be surprised by it?"
"Almost," she said petulantly. "Who wants to spend the next, I dunno, ten years, waiting to get pushed out of an elevator?"
"Could just avoid knitwear and take the stairs from here on out," he suggested.
"That's actually a brilliant point. But it still doesn't help to explain why you're having the dreams too."
"We'll think on it when you're not knackered, luv. Get some rest," he murmured, running a comforting hand up her arm. Pacified by his gesture, Charlie snuggled back into his chest and he mindlessly combed his fingers through her hair. He'd missed moments like this. Never had many with Dru, with her taste for pain and torture, but he'd been given a reprieve when she'd been sick and he'd enjoyed the gentleness. And now he had an armful of it.
A loud knock sounded at the crypt door upstairs, and Spike sighed in frustration as Charlie pulled away from the relaxed curve of his body, hopped out of bed and began rummaging around for her jeans.
"Sun hasn't even gone down yet," he groaned after a cursory glance at the silver alarm clock that he might have borrowed from the Hyperion. "Tell me you ordered delivery and whoever's knockin' is clutchin' a box o' wings, and is prepared to shove off after you hand him a few quid."
Her voice was muffled as she slipped a faded raglan t-shirt over her head. "Close. It's probably Willow and Tara."
"And that's just like delivery, is it?"
"I bet they brought herbs, which if you're really desperate, you could... uh, chew on the ones we don't need. And they probably won't be here for very long." As she tied her hair up into a dark waterfall of a ponytail, she glanced over to the bed that Spike hadn't budged from, the thin cotton sheet laying on top of him not doing much for concealment. "You should really think about putting on some pants. Also, a shirt would be of the good."
"Why's that? 'Fraid I'll scare off the sapphic witches with my man parts?" he asked wryly as she began climbing up the ladder.
"Doubtful. I just won't be able to concentrate if you're half-naked and leering at me from the other side of the room." She flashed a smile back down at him before disappearing through the opening.
"So I've been thinking a lot about what happened at the theater, when you tried to do a spell and then… zilch with the whammy. Would you be up for an experiment? Purely scientific," Willow was saying.
The scene laid out before him was bloody bizarre. If Spike had been asked a month ago if any of the white hats would ever have a social hour in his sodding bedroom, Dracula would have heard the echos of his laughter from Bran Castle or whatever molding pile of rocks the bugger was living under these days. But for some completely backwards reason, perhaps Spike's hatred of being alone, the sight filled him with contentment.
The three girls had made themselves comfy, sitting cross legged on the piles of oriental rugs laid out randomly on the downstairs crypt floor, and to his surprise, there wasn't a textbook or sparkly chunk of crystal to be seen. He'd also made himself comfortable, his jean-clad legs stretched out on the rumpled white bedlinens, and his shirt-covered back leaning up against the headboard. The leather bound collection of Poe's short stories resting in his hand was purely for appearances. There was no way he wasn't going to be keeping an eye whatever undertaking the witches planned on carrying out.
"Yeah, sure, experiment away. What'd you have in mind?" Charlie seemed eager to start, squirming in place as Willow began her explanation.
"Okay, so… magic ability can be taught, but it's mostly in the blood, right? Well, Spike drained yours after the Bleakgrave-cabin fiasco, so the only other blood in your system is the non-magicy demon blood you've been ingesting."
"You know, I hadn't thought of it that way, but it makes sense." Charlie glanced at Spike, but he was too busy mentally kicking himself for not thinking of the theory first to respond to her visual inquiry. He was also wary of whatever mojo-filled solution the witch was planning to propose.
In moments of crisis, Spike rarely gave Red's talents a second thought, but the non-essential magic situations she became involved with often had a way of going horrifically sideways. But as much as he disliked the idea of the witch going all Dr. Marie Curie-Frankenstein on the minor issue of evaporated magic, he didn't think Charlie would tolerate constantly sitting on the sidelines whenever there was a physical altercation.
The selfish part of him didn't want her getting her magic back at all. He thrived on being needed, loved playing the part of the defender, but with the chip in his head to keep him from injuring anything human, he knew it was an unreasonable desire.
Willow reached out and put her hands on Charlie's knee, refocusing the girl's attention. "So don't freak out, but I wanna see what happens if you drink some of my blood."
And there it was. Christ. Thank everything unholy that it had nothing to do with a My-Will-Be-Done spell, and Spike gave the witch credit for offering herself up as the sacrificial lamb. It didn't exactly ease his mind, however. As any vampire worth their dust knew, blood was nothing to be trifled with, and Red's was thick with potent magic. But at least she hadn't suggested they go rustle up a Thricewise as a first course.
There was a long pause before Charlie opened her mouth again. "You're joking, right?"
"Not joking."
The witch who'd been quiet until that point cringed at the intensity in her girlfriend's tone. Obviously Red and Glinda hadn't gone over all the details of the experiment before arriving at the crypt. "Sweetie, are y-you sure? You're not the only one. You know, with magic in their blood..."
Willow sent Tara a reassuring smile. "Totally sure. All of the sure."
Charlie ran her hands through her hair, pressing her fingers against her scalp as she gave the redhead a skeptical look. "Willow… don't take this the wrong way, I like you a lot but this just feels all sorts of ethically wrong, and I wasn't planning on getting staked by Buffy anytime soon. Also, me and human blood, probably not on mixable terms. There's like a pheromone or something that makes you smell all sorts of untasty."
"I can't do much about the taste, but I already ran it by Buffy. I wouldn't say she was throwing ticker tape and confetti about it, but she gets it. I just can't imagine waking up one day and being without magic."
"To be honest, I was never great at it," Charlie said with a dismissive swish of her fingers, "so it feels more like I'm missing a pair of scissors or a useful power tool than something essential to who I am. Not that I wouldn't mind having it back. You ever try to wrap a birthday present without a pair of scissors handy?"
Tara tucked her dirty blonde hair out of her face as she eyed Charlie with genuine interest. "What kinds of things could you do?"
"Really basic spells. The non-ingredient kind. There's an all-purpose unlock spell that I learned. I could also move things, you know, push or pull them, make them float. Good for shoving annoyingly perseverant vampires away from the portals you need to get through," Charlie said, throwing Spike a provocative smirk, which he took as an open invitation for verbal warfare. "And I can make things change color."
Spike shut his book and tossed it off to the side of the mattress, edging a little closer to where the girls were sitting, "Very useful, bein' able to adjust the hues of whatever you'd like. Bet you got into some fun terrorizin' the posh bints at your local Clip N' Curl. But didn't you say there were four, pet?"
"What?"
"A whole quartet of mumbo-jumbo. Said you knew four when you were shootin' off a whole lotta nothin' at the theater. Just counted a trio."
"The last one's kinda stupid," Charlie said nonchalantly, shrugging it off as her cheeks tinged with embarrassment.
Willow and Tara looked at her expectantly, and Spike added his anticipatory stare to the building peer pressure.
Relenting with a sigh, Charlie dropped her hands into her lap. "It was like… an undo spell of sorts. Separating elements. It's hard to explain."
"What did you use it for?" Tara asked.
"I tried to use it on a bunch of things, but it only worked a few times. Namely, on scrambled eggs."
"You scrambled eggs? Hey, if everyone could mojo up a freshly cooked breakfast, there'd be no need for cereal or pop tarts." Willow's lips suddenly twisted into a downward pout, as she pictured a world without sugary instant breakfast options. "Actually, that'd be kinda terrible."
"No, I de-scrambled the eggs. Made them runny again."
Spike snorted amusedly from the bed, wisely choosing not to say anything when three sets of eyes all glared at him at once.
"Well… I'm sure that a spell like that could be useful," Willow said kindly, "Like, what if you made scrambled eggs, but you were also making pancakes and ran out of eggs by the time you started making the batter? You could say, sorry, scrambled eggs, today's not your day. Emergency extraction for pancakes."
"Yeah, but the egg texture was all funky after. As in non-edible. I also accidently used it on my math homework once in high school. Resulted in a blank sheet of paper and a pile of graphite dust, so it's not ranking high on my list of favorite spells."
"So you're sayin' it's stuck at the very bottom of that towerin' list of... four," Spike drawled.
"There's a few other things that are about to get stuck at the bottom of a list if you keep talking down that road," Charlie threatened. Spike took the hint and said no more on the subject, though he was fairly convinced that her warning was made in jest.
"Okay, enough with the dilly-daddling! We're doing this? Let's do this!" Willow held her left arm out towards the brunette vampire.
Charlie wrapped her fingers around the witch's wrist and elbow, staring dubiously at the pale stretch of skin marked with translucent blue veins, and Spike leaned forward to get a better view. "Even thinking about doing this makes me really nauseous."
"M-Maybe pretend you're drinking something else?" Tara offered. "When I was five, I used to pretend that peas were were tiny p-planets and I was an angry space goddess devouring the unpious ones," she began to blush self-consciously as Willow and Charlie grinned at her, "and I'm just not even going to finish that story because what worked for five year old me probably won't work for vampire you."
"What if I just chased each sip with fruit juice?" Charlie eyed the newly reacquired downstairs liquor stash as though she'd find a bottle of Tropicana sitting among the collection of 40 proof.
Spike let out a puff of frustration from his elevated turf. "Oh, for god's sake, will you just bite her already? Watchin' a group of three-toed sloths play a game of cricket would take less time than watchin' this play out. You're not gonna feel less sick 'bout it an hour from now, so quit draggin' your feet and bein' a priss, pet."
All three girls regarded him with wide eyes at his irritated outburst, and Charlie rose to her feet and wisped by him, amiably patting him on the head as she passed. "Careful, Spike. You sound like a jealous, jealous vampire."
"Bloody well right, I do," he said, catching her hand and tracing his finger up the faint tattoos on her arm, heedless of the audience in front of him. Before she could pull away, he released her hand with a brush of his lips. "Haven't had a drop of fresh human in well over a year, and here it is bein' offered up to you on a silver platter, and you don't even want it. Well, give it here, I say, wouldn't want it goin' to waste."
"Are you jonesing for a headache that bad?" Charlie knelt down at the foot of the bed and grabbed the medical kit that was stowed underneath on the floor. She snapped the clasps open and pulled out a length of gauze and a few strips of tape.
"I think he just gets grouchy when he's hungry," Willow hypothesized, looking everywhere but at the overly generous amount of bandage Charlie was cutting.
"Well, there's blood in the fridge," the brunette vampire reminded him, pointing towards the upstairs as if he'd forgotten the location of where all the appliances were, and her shirt shifted enough to that he could see all the way down to her navel. "Help yourself."
His eyes burned into her, and he honestly couldn't decide if he was more hungry or horny as she stood up again. "Think I will help myself," he said, his voice dipping into a husky purr.
"Behave yourself." Though she said it sternly, Charlie's eyes were bright and she discretely mouthed the words "later" as she was facing Spike, turning around and feigning innocence and restraint in front of the two Scoobies in the room.
"Trollop," he muttered under his breath.
She sat back down next to Willow and gently took the girl's forearm, staring at it the same way a human would look at a piece of uncooked liver on their dinner plate. "Welp, here goes nothing." With one last groan of discontent, she let her fangs descend and tentatively bit into Willow's wrist.
His mind working overtime to keep his vampiric reactions in check, Spike compelled himself to stay in human form, scathingly envious of the hot meal and naturally very turned on by the sight of the vamp-girl on wincing-girl action. It was less than a minute before Charlie pulled her fangs out, sputtering and covering her mouth.
"Lookin' a little green around the gills, luv," Spike commented, though he could see there was another change in his progeny as well, small as it was. A tiny vibration seemed to thrum under her skin, too weak to be a pulse but too apparent to be a figment of his imagination.
"Do you need… some water?" Willow asked, "One of those cute, foldable air sickness bags?" As Charlie shook her head, her hand still clasped tightly over her lips, Tara wrapped a tight bandage around the two spots of blood that were welling up on Willow's skin, sealing the tape on the dressing with lingering touch.
The word "voilto" erupted from Charlie's lips as she suddenly thrust out her arm, and Spike was rendered speechless as he watched a bottle of his favorite whiskey go careening past his head and into Charlie's outstretched hand. She unscrewed the cap and took a few sips, sighing with relief once she'd washed all the blood down with the golden liquid. "I guess you really are what you eat," she muttered, offering the bottle to both the girls, who vigorously declined.
"Well that worked…" the redhead chirped, shifting closer to her girlfriend and beaming excitedly at Charlie.
"Nothing personal, Willow, but you're not my favorite flavor. The magic on the other hand… might be worth the trip to Peptoville."
"Try something else! You know, for… science," the witch urged. Spike wondered if he should have voiced caution before Charlie drank the proverbial punch. She'd probably never contained so much magic before, and it seemed a little too much like handing the keys to a shiny new Boeing 747 to the kid who played X-Plane a few times on the library computer. At any rate, she seemed to be handling her new dose of power well enough, not spontaneously combusting or going all glow-bug again, so he let his concern dissipate for the time being.
"Hmmm." Charlie looked about the room, doubtless for an object to enchant, and Spike's muscles twitched in readiness to leap up and defend his book selection or what was left of his booze if she had any thoughts of testing her powers on them. Coming to a decision, she finally traipsed back over to the bed and laid her fingertips on the sheets. "Muttatio," she whispered.
The fabric turned to a deep wine color in the spots she touched, spreading outward as though she'd spilled a bottle of Pinot Noir on the bed. Spike went catapulting off the sheets before any of his person made contact with the spreading magic, unwilling to start a new fashion trend in either skin or apparel color. He'd dealt with enough mockery over one decade of his life, being called William the Bloody, he certainly didn't need a new catastrophe to bring the insulting moniker back to life.
Once the bedding became one solid color plane of red, Spike reached a cautious hand out to examine the it. "Always thought the crypt could use a woman's touch. Never meant it literally, but I suppose it's too late to argue the toss. Good thing I like it."
"I'm glad you like it too. It wasn't exactly the color I was going for, but close enough. Thanks, Willow. This is pretty great."
Willow and Tara crept in behind them. "Best thing to do now is see how long it takes to use the magic up," Willow said, admiring Charlie's handiwork.
"Wait… you want me to use all of it? I don't want to waste it…"
"It'd be good to know what kind of a half-life it has," Willow explained. "I don't think you'll be able to regenerate it. So just keep track of what kind and how many spells you do, and in the meantime I'll see if I can come up with a more palatable source of magic juice.
"Anya might know someone," Tara suggested, an idea which Spike instantly disliked. Demon Girl probably did know a bloody Thricewise.
"Good point. We'll talk to her." Willow let out a deep breath and dusted her hands off on her pants. " Alrighty, well, you know what to do, and we have a date with a slayer and her commando."
Charlie eyed the red-headed witch with surprise. "I thought you guys were hitting up the Bleakgrave compound tonight?"
"Yeah, that was tough-guy speak for hitting up the Bleakgrave compound tonight. We're just putting a cloaking spell on Buffy and Riley and then heading over to the Magic Box, so once we get the owl-thingimajig it'll be wham, bam, thank you ma'am. In- in a fast, completely non-sexual way."
"Sounds like you guys have it all worked out," Charlie said.
"I hope so. We'll reconvene tomorrow and go over some battle strategies. I think it'd be good if you both were there if it's not too, you know, sunny. Ten in the morning if you can make it, assuming everything goes to plan."
Charlie raised an imploring eyebrow in Spike's direction and he rolled his eyes in reluctant agreement, annoyed at how much of a pushover he was becoming. "Fine. But there better be some nosh at this soccer huddle. Not gonna listen to the Slayer drivel on about teamwork with an empty stomach." An amused look passed between the girls, which he chose to ignore.
Once the witches had finally departed, Charlie selected a variety of knick knacks lying around the room, and sat back down where she'd been sitting before. Determination settled over her face as she stretched and flexed her hands, and set to work.
Spike had every intention to read, even had the book open in his lap with his finger in the crease, but he couldn't for the unlife of him stop his eyes from flicking over to where Charlie was honing her magic after every single sodding sentence.
The sight was enthralling, similar to watching a good fight or sparring match, albeit with no violence, more subtlety, and on a much smaller scale. Her hand movements were graceful and became more precise with each attempt she made, pushing and pulling a pair of candles across the floor. After a short while, she was able to stack them on top of each other with only a hand gesture and a whispered sound.
A deck of cards that had been lying around from a week-old game of solitaire he'd played fell victim to her exercises next. It took her a few attempts, but she soon got the hang of suspending the cards in the air, making them dance in shapes and patterns, becoming bolder as she grew more comfortable with the magic.
Miniature cityscapes began to form, and then mythical animals, the cards shuffling themselves between each transition. Spike let out an unintentional gasp of appreciation when a dragon with wings made out of face cards began circling above her head. They dropped in a cascade of fluttering paper as her concentration broke, flustered at the notion that she was being observed as she practiced.
"Sorry, luv. Didn't mean to- it's just, you're bloody good at that."
"I'm not. Or at least I wasn't all that good before. It feels strange, this amount of power, like I'm wearing shoes that are the wrong size or something. I'm trying to get the hang of it, but feeling a teency bit self conscious about the re-learning it part."
"Should be catchin' up on my readin' anyhow. Fortunato isn't gonna wall himself up."
Turning himself away from where she was sitting, he forced himself to read, only occasionally glancing up to admire the shadows her cards were making on the wall in front of him. He had made it through several more stories and two thirds of the way though The Tell-Tale Heart when he felt something tickling his chest, and he looked down to find the buttons on his shirt pulling open on their own accord. His head shot up, and he turned to find Charlie leaning casually against the wall, smiling like the cat who got the canary.
"What are you playing at, Charlie Girl?" His voice was low and gravelly, and he marvelled at her ability to turn him on as quickly as if he were a light switch.
"Oh, you know, just doing some... " she bit her lip as she popped another one of his buttons open, "homework."
Spike wasn't even sure where he put his book down as he watched the desire roll off her in soft, tantalizing waves. "Want me to teach you a lesson, luv?" he asked, cocking his head ever so slightly to the side, in query. "You're already teacher's pet so you'll get an easy A."
"And what class do you teach, Mr. Spike? Physical Education? Women's Studies?"
"Anatomy," he replied with a devilish grin, sliding off the bed and stalking towards her.
"And what's your teaching style?" She didn't try to dodge him when he captured her waist between his hands.
"Prefer the Montessori approach," he said, smoothing his palms below the back pockets on her jeans, "Hands-on. Learn by doin'." In one lightning-fast move, he had her seated on top of the rickety dresser, uncaring of how many things went clattering to the floor as he pushed apart her knees and stepped between her thighs.
He moved himself in slow, torturous thrusts against the denim barrier that separated them, tasted the tangy, fiery decadence of blood and whiskey in her mouth, nipped at her earlobe as she gripped his shoulders and rubbed back against him with equal pressure.
"Tell me how much you want this, baby," he growled hotly in her ear, "Tell me how much you want me to fill your quim, make you come all over me. Tell me you want me to drink you up like a sweet, thick cordial."
"Want you. God, I want you." Though she was practically screaming it in every line of her frame, he wanted to hear more. He wanted to claim every bit of her, even the words that came out of her mouth.
"Not enough, pet. Gonna make you beg for it. What do you want, Charlie?"
Her lips parted and she looked as though she'd been drugged with lust, eyes wild and demanding more of his touch. He leaned in close and nibbled at her tempting bottom lip, chuckling as she moaned desperately into his mouth.
"Say it," he whispered, a command despite the volume of his voice.
"I want you so deep inside me that I don't-"
A loud rapping sound emanated from the upstairs. They both froze. When another muffled noise sounded from upstairs, Spike let out a torrent of curses under his breath.
"Expectin' someone?" he asked.
She frowned and looked up towards the opening in the ceiling. "No."
Whether it be a demon or a spotted, infantile Bambi lurking around the entrance to his crypt, it was about to get the thrashing of its life. "Don't you move an inch," he warned her. "Be back in a tic."
Still muttering expletives, he crawled up the ladder with the frustrating revelation that erections and ladder rungs were the worst possible combination, and crossed the floor of his living area. He jerked open the door with more force than even Buffy gave it, and peered out at the retreating figure in the darkness. "Oh, for god's sake," he groaned. "What the bleedin' hell are you doin' here?
A/N: So this was a long one... I was going to split it, but then I thought... nahhh. I've been sick all week (the kind where I should be changing my marital status to "In a committed relationship with Kleenex") and I had a few days off to write. Thanks so much for all the favs this past week, and to RFK22 and kcheslock for their kind reviews! xoxo