"I slept in your bed," Willow confessed pointlessly to the group frozen at the Hyperion's doors, from her seat across the open foyer.
Those behind Angel stood as frozen as did their leader. Only Cordelia shifted her weight, and the coin-covered bikini outfit she wore jangled softly off-key. Angel looked at Willow for a lengthy moment. His brow lowered with the intensity of his stare and she felt like he was able to see things about her, within her, that she would rather not have shared. But his gaze, as always when he chose to focus the full force of it on her, was mezmerizing and she was unable to look away or to even blink back the still-coming tears.
She didn't know what to do next. Blurt out the awful truth and exit? She should have had a plan.
"Gunn. Office." Angel said, not removing his eye-contact from Willow, his tone as always mono, and at first she was not sure she was invited. Perhaps, after all, there were some things he needed to straighten out with the tall Black man following him over to the hotel's front desk area. Perhaps, but Angel paused half-way across the center of the marble floor and bid her to join them with only the inclination of his head. She complied without thinking, and momentarily found herself installed in a seat in the office with the same desk covered in papers that she had ransacked unsuccessfully for clues to where this man had been.
This man, Angel, this vampire whose return she had anticipated, anxiously believing it imminent from the moment she arrived. This man whose whereabouts had been of such great consequence to her that she had stooped to searching his personal effects--his business files, his mirror-less medicine cabinet upstairs. This man whose always (how could she have forgotten?) un-nerving appearance had, in the flicker of an eye, made her reverse and re-examine all such urges she had felt toward him, every second's thought, every wish to be in his company, to have him return. This terrifyingly dark, brooding 200-year-old creature who carried so much sorrow, so much capacity for evil, and whose eyes alone had only moments ago burned through her with a fire not unlike the one she felt inside, fueling the tears still spilling from her eyes.
Go to LA and break the news to Angel, Willow. Do it in person, Willow. He deserves that much doesn't he, Willow? What had she been thinking?
Before Gunn pulled the gate down over the opening at the front desk-area and turned this office into a private, windowless room, she saw Cordelia walk forward, making her intent of joining them obvious. Angel turned from where he had been standing frozen in what Willow assumed was thought just beyond the office's doorway, and put his hand out to stop her.
"Just. Gunn." Willow heard him say, and she saw the same look pass over Cordelia's face that she had the time the other girl had walked in on her and Xander kissing.
Angel entered the now closed-off space, and Gunn leaned into the wall behind the desk next to him. They both focused their eyes on her. And stared.
Her throat went dry. She no longer seemed to have the ability to speak, she had gone aphasic, and if her knees had been settled against each other she was pretty sure they would have been knocking.
Time passed. And passed.
A loaf of wheat bread, partially eaten, and an opened jar of peanut butter sitting in his line of sight finally distracted Angel, and he seemed to come back to himself, back to the room they occupied, the present air that two of them breathed.
"This is Charles Gunn," he introduced the man next to him. "Gunn, this is Willow--" he stalled out.
"Rosenberg," she prompted him, and with that recovered her voice if not her presence of mind. "Willow Rosenberg. Pleased to meet you."
"Yeah," said Gunn, not impolitely. "What's up?"
"Dead," said Willow, like an unexpected hiccup, choking over her friend's name. "Buffy's dead," and she noticed that Angel's intent, but seemingly-impassive expression did not change.
In contrast, Gunn immediately sprang away from the wall as though it had burned him, and spun around, turning to Angel, his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "Look, Angel, this here's personal, and I'd just as soon wait outside with the others."
Without replying to him, without altering that same intense, unreadable expression, Angel announced, "Gunn is here to share what you have to say with the others."
Gunn slumped back into the wall, obviously knowing that he had lost. He would stay.
Everything Angel spoke came out in a tone so even, so steady, that Willow found she didn't know how to take it. And something in its evenness upset her. Her brows came together in a frown, though her mouth held to its linear shape. This expression always made her look suspicious.
"How," Angel stated more than asked.
At first every word Willow said, each sentence that she used to relate the last year or so of their lives in Sunnydale made it harder to breathe, made her feel even more like hot pokers were being jammed into her chest, her back. She stumbled over the simplest words, struggled with remembering the clearest facts. But by the time she had talked her way into placing Buffy on Glory's scaffolding, began to relate what had occurred up there second-hand via Dawn's own fragmented account, by the time she could see the end of the story--the final few steps down the hallway to the door that would mark her completion of this task she had volunteered herself for, she was so caught up in the mechanics of relating her tale that the hot pokers had gone and her lungs filled themselves easily and unconsciously, and the words were there offering themselves for her use.
And all the while Angel sat behind the desk, entirely still, as he listened to her. Since he did not breathe his chest neither rose nor fell, his nostrils did not flare. He asked no questions, evinced no shock.
Where, Willow thought to herself, were the red-hot pokers stabbing into him?
His expression remained deadpan, poker-faced she might have said if he had given her reason to believe he was hiding anything from her. Twice he may have blinked, no more.
.
...to be continued...
.
Disclaimer: Willow and company belong to someone else.
Other Neftzer-iffic fiction can be found here, or in its entirety at my own site, The OutBack Fiction Shack. Thanks.