Faith shook her head disbelievingly. "Here. Tonight."
"Yes, here tonight!" Buffy scowled at her roommate. "It's just one night. And I thought that you would be okay with it, since you've been all about blowing me off lately." Maybe she was being a bit harsh, but she was fed up with Faith's ongoing sulk about her having other friends. And if Faith wasn't going to spend time with her even after they'd talked about it, then she wasn't going to keep sparing Faith's feelings by keeping the rest of her life out of their room.
Besides, Faith had been even worse than usual lately. Not only was she avoiding Buffy when they were with the watchers, but now she even avoided their room at night, disappearing for hours and not returning until Buffy was getting ready for bed, dazed and…well, off somehow. Buffy had been concerned at first, but she had had enough. She sighed, turning her back to Faith and testing the weight of her dresser. At least Willow still seemed to like her fine. And Tara was also pretty nice, even if she was quiet and Buffy had only really invited her to the impromptu sleepover because she'd been there when Buffy had asked Willow. She sort of thought of Tara and Willow as a package deal, anyway.
"What are you doing?" Faith was idly twirling a plastic stake on her pointer finger as she watched Buffy struggle with the dresser.
"Making room for another mattress. I think that one can fit between our beds, and maybe another at the foot…" The dresser tilted precariously in her direction, and suddenly, there was an extra set of hands supporting it, pushing it back in place as Faith took over.
"Forget it, B. You can share my bed, and Willow and Tara can take yours," she said, shrugging nonchalantly. But there was a flush on her face and a pout just below the surface, and Buffy knew that she wasn't thrilled with the arrangement.
Faith wasn't as bad as the rest of the dorm, though, and the slayer hallway erupted when Cordelia heard that two watchers were coming to spend the night. "Absolutelynot," she announced, tossing her hair. "It's bad enough that we have to put up with you spending all your time inpublic with them, but we're not having any watchers hanging out on our side of the dorm!" There was a clamor of agreement from the other slayers in the hall, even Molly, who Buffy had always thought was all right.
Luckily, Buffy had a get-out-of-jail-free card when it came to Cordy. "Please. Like you don't drape yourself all over the guys?" she pointed out, raising an eyebrow warningly in reminder of the information she had.
But it wasn't effective this time, and Eve stepped forward, crossing her arms and meeting Buffy's gaze challengingly. "We date the guys because there are no slayer ones. Even Ken wouldn't touch the watcher girls, right?"
Kennedy frowned. "Actually, I-"
Cordy cut her off smoothly. "This is our territory, and we won't have watchers thinking that they can come in whenever they want and have pajama parties with Buffy!"
"Yeah!" The other slayers nodded vigorously like the good little drones they were, and Buffy heaved a sigh. Of course they were going to turn this into a big deal. No, she couldn't even enjoy some time with her friends without everyone taking offense at it… She thought longingly of the watchers, who never gave her dirty looks when she spent time with them. But no, she amended mentally. They might not have been as against slayers spending time with watchers, but they certainly gave her dirty looks, like she was beneath them, and last week Nancy Doyle had even asked her how it felt to know that she'd spend the next five years on useless training to do nothing but die painfully. Watchers weren't pleasant as a whole, either, but watching helplessly as the slayers rounded on her with accusations, Buffy couldn't help but wonder if it might have been easier to have just been a watcher. And how sad is it that my dormmates alone can make me want to forsake my sacred calling?
"Excuse me! Girls!" From behind the crowd of slayers, Buffy could hear Mr. Wyndham-Pryce's voice, calling for their attention with little success.
She glimpsed Miss Calendar beside him, putting two fingers in her mouth and letting out a magically-enhanced whistle so high-pitched that even the loudest slayers fell silent. "What's going on here?" she demanded.
Cordelia turned to sneer haughtily at their den mother. "Buffy wants to bring watchers to the dorm tonight."
"Watchers?" Mr. Wyndham-Pryce asked disbelievingly.
"Girls?" Miss Calendar added.
"Uh, duh?"
"That's fine," Miss Calendar said, quirking an eyebrow as she looked at Buffy with something akin to respect. "There are no rules against girls sleeping over in their friends' rooms, as long as you don't get too rowdy."
"Miss Calendar, are you sure that's a good idea?" Mr. Wyndham-Pryce looked alarmed at the thought of it. "Watchers and slayers fraternizing like that?"
Miss Calendar shrugged. "Makes no difference to me, and it isn't against school policy."
"But-" He fell silent at the look on Miss Calendar's face, and leaned back against the wall beside her, giving the crowd of girls a fisheyed glare until they reluctantly filed off, and Buffy slipped back into her room. Faith had somehow escaped the other slayers before the confrontation, and she was missing again. Of course.
Outside the room, Miss Calendar and Mr. Wyndham-Pryce were still speaking quietly. "It's not appropriate," Mr. Wyndham-Pryce was saying in low, anxious tones. "Watchers and slayers are meant to be separate. How else can we ensure that the watchers can send their slayers to fight death each night? Or that they won't be cowed by a strong-minded slayer?"
"I don't think you're really one to admonish about inappropriate relationships," Miss Calendar said archly. "Not from what I've heard."
"Cheap shot, Jenny." And Mr. Wyndham-Pryce sounded suddenly weary.
And it must have been, because Miss Calendar's voice softened. "Leave them to their friendships, okay? In more ways than one, this particular slayer seems to be the exception to the rule. And from what I remember from when you were a student, you were also close to some of the slayers."
"And if I'd been Beatriz's watcher?" Mr. Wydham-Pryce murmured. "I don't know if I'd have sent her out when she was so young and inexperienced. I would have let my emotions get in the way." He exhaled slowly, and Buffy tiptoed closer to the door to hear better. "I would have made a terrible-" He stopped abruptly, and then he was saying brightly, "Ah! Miss Rosenberg, Miss Maclay! You must be Buffy's guests for tonight!"
Willow came into the room moments later, followed by Tara and looking vaguely bemused. "Why are the dorm supervisors guarding your door?"
Buffy rolled her eyes. "Cordy's on the warpath. Don't ask. You two okay with sharing a bed?"
Tara's eyes widened, but she nodded vigorously and flushed. Willow shrugged. "Sure. Where's Faith?"
"She'll be back eventually." Hopefully.
She was, somewhere around the third hour of cookies and giggles, and she managed a mumbled greeting before she climbed into her bed and fell immediately asleep.
"I-Is she okay?" Tara asked, eyeing her worriedly.
Buffy nodded, feeling a sudden surge of defensiveness on behalf of her roommate at Willow's suddenly curious gaze. "She's fine. She just…had a thing…tonight."
"Oh, a thing," Willow teased, grinning. Her eyes widened. "Wait, like a thing thing?"
Buffy frowned. "What kind of thing thing?"
"You know, a thing." Willow raised her eyebrows significantly.
"Oh! No! I mean, I don't know." Buffy clambered off of Faith's bed to join Willow and Tara on her own, worried about waking Faith so she could hear them talking about her sex life. If that was what they were talking about. Buffy wasn't quite sure. "She isn't…it doesn't matter," she said finally. And it didn't, not now. Regardless of how secretive Faith was being, even if Buffy had known what she was up to, that was no business of Willow's.
Willow's cheeks were red, but her eyes were sparkling with mischief. "So…have you?"
"Me?" Buffy shook her head, eyes wide. "Oh, no. I mean, what do you mean?" She thought back to a few nights experimenting with herself and flushed.
"Come on, you must have gotten some nice smoochies, at least!" Willow prodded.
Buffy laughed self-consciously. "Yeah, well, I don't date much. I've kissed a few guys, but nothing more than that." Her first kiss had been with a watcher a year older named Pike, and they'd even dated for a week or two before Faith had scared him off. "How about you? You're the one with a boyfriend!"
"Oz is a gentleman," Willow confided, grinning. "So there's been some under-the-shirt touching but not more than that. Just nice smoochies!"
"And you don't want more than that? You guys have been together forever!" Buffy settled in between Willow and a crimson Tara, who was determinedly staring in the direction of the floor as she listened. "I mean, if I were crazy about a guy, I'd want to-" She paused, the memories of what she'd seen between Cordy and Jesse in the library bubbling up again. "Go further, you know?"
Willow made a face. "I don't know. Sometimes, I still feel like this is all so new, and I think that I don't even want to go any further-" Buffy felt Tara straighten beside her. "But then I think about how great Oz is, and I can't imagine not…you know…ing with him." Tara slumped again, and Buffy gave her a curious look.
"You're so lucky you found someone so great," Buffy said wistfully. "It seems like Oz is the only decent guy in the whole grade."
"Well, there's Xander," Willow pointed out. "He always liked you, and as long as he isn't off chasing demons in the woods with Jesse and Oz-" She pouted, annoyed- "He's okay."
"Yeah, he's a good guy." But she'd never really been attracted to him, and she got the sense that at this point, he thought of her as more of a friend than a potential girlfriend. "How about you, Tara?"
Tara shrugged. "I-I'm not r-really dating."
"Oh." There was an awkward silence, which Buffy broke eventually, saying brightly, "So, Professor Rayne, Giles and Gunn. Marry, do, shove off a cliff?"
They all agreed that they'd marry Giles and do Gunn, that they'd marry Jonathan and do Parker, and Willow was trying to convince them to shove Forrest Gates off the cliff instead of Graham Miller when the hand she had wedged between Buffy's mattress and the wall closed on a thick sheaf of papers. "What's this?" she asked, tugging at it.
"Don't-" But it was already too late, and Willow was gazing down at Miss Chalmer's thesis with horrified befuddlement.
"But this is a library book!" she exclaimed, holding it up.
Buffy shrugged self-consciously. "They'll never notice that it's gone. And Miss Chalmers can just reprint it if they need another copy."
"That's not the point!" Willow flipped through it, her eyes skimming from page to page as she scanned the thesis. "You can't just…" She took a deep breath. "Okay. I'm not going to be rules-girl. You're my friend, and if you want to steal books from the library, then I will support you and help cover up the evidence."
Buffy grinned. "You're the best, Will." She smoothed down the pages and tucked the thesis into her night table drawer.
Tara gave her a searching look, but Willow just forced a grin and added, "And now I have a new one. Marry, do, kill; William the Bloody, Angelus, and Darla?"
Buffy grabbed a pillow and bopped her on the head, leading to a pillow fight of epic proportions that ended only when a stray pillow hit a sleeping Faith squarely in the face. Even Tara had gotten into it, and when Willow finally begged off to sleep, Buffy and Tara were both too revved up to join her in slumber.
"Thanks for inviting me," Tara said shyly as they slid to the floor against Faith's bed. "This was nice."
"Yeah, it was." She smiled at the quiet girl, who'd been surprisingly fun once she'd relaxed. "So…" She struggled for something to talk about, but Tara beat her to the punch.
"You still haven't answered what you'd do with William the Bloody," she reminded her, a twinkle of amusement in her eye.
Buffy smiled enigmatically. Spike wasn't a topic she liked to discuss with anyone. Regardless of the fact that all their battles were in a public stadium, they still felt privatesomehow, special to her, and talking about that to anyone else almost cheapened it.
On the other hand, there was something she wanted to talk about. And Tara seemed the sort who could keep a secret. "Can I ask you something?" she blurted out.
"Sure."
"I just…a few weeks ago, I saw Gunn zap Spike. Hard. And he wasn't even doing anything. We were messing around, that's all." She sighed. "And I know that it's stupid, and he's a soulless, evil vampire, but it just seemed wrong to me. Spike…he's kind of like my trainer now, and as far as I know, he hasn't killed anyone in over a decade. Is it wrong for me to think that he doesn't deserve it?" Her eyes were welling up with tears as she remembered Spike on the ground, made pathetic by pain that seemed so incongruous on a vampire as strong as he. The memory still hurt, and even Gunn's expression had hurt, the amount of hatred he'd suddenly had for Spike unnerving her completely.
A warm hand moved to clasp her own. "No," Tara said simply. "It's not."
There was a long silence before Tara spoke again. "I used to think that I was a demon," she said quietly. "It took a long time for me to figure out otherwise. It was an old family myth used to keep the women in check, and I was terrified. I thought I wasn't worthy of being a watcher, of being treated like a human." Intense, earnest eyes turned to meet hers. "But I was, even if I had been a demon, Giles explained to me. There are lots of harmless demons, demons who can do good or who just mind their own business."
"Giles is in love with a demon," Buffy murmured. It felt odd to verbalize it when an unspoken taboo had been placed on discussing all things Anya and demony, but not on this strange night when Tara felt like the one person she could talk to.
"I know. He told me." Tara squeezed her hand. "What happens to the demons- the vampires- here isn't right, regardless of the fact that it's necessary. And I guess that Gunn has his reasons, but I'd never condone hurting a helpless captive. There's nothing wrong with that bothering you. It just makes you human."
"Thank you." Instinctually, she moved closer to Tara, borrowing into her side, and the two girls were silent, lost in their individual contemplations.
Willow must have been dreaming, since the last thing she remembered was getting into Buffy's bed, and now she was in Ethan's lab with Tara, doing magic. And they were both naked, but it seemed perfectly natural in the dream, just another aspect to the magic. Weird.
"Ready?" Tara was saying, and Willow nodded, closing her eyes and joining hands with her friend. "We call upon the goddess," Tara began, and Willow joined in. "We call upon Astarte to work our will."
The chant went on for quite some time, and Willow was suddenly aware that she'd moved closer to Tara and was sliding her hands from Tara's palms down her wrists and arms and toward her body. Tara was still speaking, but Willow had fallen silent, her focus solely on Tara.
The magic rose within them and they both began to rise through the air, so Willow caught hold of Tara around the waist and hoisted herself up to reach the taller girl, attacking her lips with sudden gusto. Tara wrapped her arms around Willow, pulling her closer, letting their mouths mold together as the magic brought them higher, reaching closer and closer to their peaks…Willow's attentions moved lower to latch onto a dusky pink nipple on rounded, full breasts that made her quiver with desire, kissing and licking and tugging at one while her hand moved to the other to do the same, and Tara arched and cried out in ecstasy as she came, her legs wrapping around Willow's and leaving a warm gush of fluid somewhere near her navel as they shook together.
Then Tara swooped down upon her, pulling her upwards and reaching toward her sex, and she'd no sooner put a hand on it when Willow came as well, nearly crying at the intensity of it all, and her eyes popped open as she gasped for air.
She was back in Buffy's bedroom, three sets of slow breaths reassuring her that no one else was awake. There was an uncomfortable stickiness staining her underwear, her legs were tangled in Tara's, and- Oh, god. Tara's shirt had ridden up during the night, and Willow's cheek was resting against a breast as soft as the one she'd dreamt of.This can't be happening. But the sheer absurdity of the situation escaped her with the proximity of Tara's body, and she could only stare for a few moments, a tiny voice in her head wondering if it could really feel like that.
No. No, this did not happen, and I am not staying here any longer. She pulled away from Tara, shaking, and slipped out of the bed, padding back to her room in the next hall as quickly as she could in only her socks and wondering,What's wrong with me?