CHAPTER THREE
It is morning. Dawn creeps out of her room as the first light of the new day is filling the house. Buffy is not awake yet. There is no movement in the house, no sounds of dishes being rattled in the kitchen, no boards creaking under anyone else's steps except hers. She looks at the bathroom greedily. Yea, first shower of the day goes to Dawn.
She walks into the bathroom. And then immediately walks out.
Seconds later she is tugging her sister awake.
"Buffy! Spike's the in the bathtub! Spike's asleep in our bathtub!"
Buffy is slowly waking. "I know. I put him there last night."
"What?"
Buffy flips over on her back and yawns. "You were asleep last night or else I would have told you. I guess I should have warned you."
"Buffy, you are totally scaring me. What's going on?"
The events of the late night are like dreams to her now. And Dawn is demanding more of an explanation than Buffy can give right at the moment. Even she is not certain how it happened, or why it happened, but somewhere in the course of the evening she had pretty much invited Spike to live with her.
Buffy rubs her face and sits up, cross-legged, on the bed. She motions for her sister to sit next to her and pulls her close.
"Dawn, I can't watch you all the time. And if something ever happened to you, I don't know what I'd do. You're the only thing I have in the world. I was only thinking about you when I did this, OK?" She takes a breath and exhales deeply. "Spike is going to be living with us for a while. I don't know how long, but for now, we have a new roommate."
"You mean he's going to be here all the time?"
"Yeah," she says.
A sweet smile lights Dawn's pale face. "Cool!"
Buffy's tone turns cautious. "But don't tell anyone, OK? For now it's going to be our little secret. This is not something for show and tell."
"But what if people come over? What are we going to do then?"
Now there is worry in Buffy's face. "Hadn't thought about that."
A few minutes later Buffy and Spike are heading down the stairs to the basement.
"You're going to have to stay down here," she says. "And I mean stay down here, all right?"
"All the time?" he almost whines.
"Well, no. You can come out when Dawn and I are home. But if anyone comes around, you have to come down here. At the first Scooby sighting, you better make tracks. They can't know that you're staying with me. Right now, anyway. You'll be kind of like the sea captain in the Ghost and Mrs. Muir. You're here, but you're not really here."
"And the only other person who can see me is bloody Charles Nelson Riley. Lovely," he says.
She watches him as he's looking around at his surroundings. He's standing next to a box of Christmas ornaments and a jolly, plastic snowman with tinsel wrapped around its neck. Spike puts his hands on his hips and sizes up his new living quarters with a visible consternation.
"Right, then. I can adapt. This isn't so bad. Got just the right amount of gloom and fung shuay to keep a vamp happy."
"I'll bring a mattress or something down here."
"Oh, so generous. I don't think I've ever had something so nice as a mattress before," he says glibly. "And I'm going to need some blood."
"I'll stop by the butcher's shop today."
"And don't go that one down on Elm. Friggin' bastard sold me pig's blood with a hair in it."
She heads for the stairs, intent on searching for a mattress. But as she starts to leave, he catches her by the shoulder. She turns around and he places both hands on her shoulders. They were this close last night. He had figured out where the new parameters had been set. He could touch her now. Their lips almost met. She had been so taken with the thought of his sacrifice for her, she had almost allowed him to kiss her. He had dreamed of their first kiss for such a long time. He never imagined it would be taking place in her basement.
And it doesn't.
She quickly slips away from his grasp and bounds up the stairs.
God, he wants me, Buffy is thinking as she walks down the street.
She still remembers the feel of his lip touching her ear. It still feels inflamed from his touch. That searing, nearly torturous love he has for her became all too real the night before. Even when he told her that he loved her, it was almost as though she didn't believe it. She knows now. She knows because he touched her. And it didn't feel all that wrong. And that is what has been driving her nuts since one o'clock in the morning.
I can't let him in, I just can't…she repeats to herself.
But I already have! He's living in my house now!
Someone is calling her name from across the street. She turns her head in the direction of the hello's and sees Tara and Willow approaching.
"Buffy!" Willow says.
"Hey, Will," she says. It seems odd to see them. Sometimes it seems she has been away for a while, kidnapped from the earth, and has been plopped back into her life, having to get used to living in alien skin.
She receives their hugs awkwardly and Tara automatically holds her in a suspicious gaze. Tara has perceptions and intuition that scare her sometime. If she sees it in her face that Buffy is hiding something, it will all be over.
"Watcha doing out today?" Willow asks.
"Just getting some things I needed for the house," Buffy says. "I have to take care of everything now."
"From a butcher's shop?" Tara asks.
Buffy has been trying to hide the brown paper bag behind her, making it more obvious in doing so. "Oh, this? It's just…steak. Dawn and I are going to grill some steaks tonight. Ironic, isn't it? The slayer grillin' some steaks." She laughs nervously.
"How's Dawn doing?" Willow asks as her close by paramour continues to probe Buffy's secrets with her eyes.
"Dawn? Dawn's fine."
"Where is she?"
"She's home." Oh, God, why did I say that because now they're going to ask…
"Alone?"
"No. She's got a friend there. I just thought I'd give them some alone time. All that Backstreet Boys music was driving me nuts."
"You should have asked us to come over. We would have looked after her," Tara says.
"No, that's all right. She's fine. Really, she's fine. I'm going straight home right now."
"Well, could we go with you? I haven't seen Dawn since the funeral."
"No, she's got her friend with her. You know how teenagers are. They just want to be left alone. Burning their CD's. Watching TRL." Buffy is observing Willow's disbelief. "I'm just trying to give her some space."
Willow's mouth opens to a perfect "O" and she nods silently.
Tara is too pensive to speak. Buffy feels her stare seeping into her like liquid mercury.
"Well, hey, it's been good to see you. Wish I could stay and chat. But I can't. You understand, don't you?"
"Yeah, we understand," Willow says.
"Completely," Tara says. And the knowledge behind that answers fills Buffy with fear.
"Maybe we could come over one of these nights. You know, when you're not busy," Willow suggests.
"That would be great! Oh, that would be great! You know, once I get things together. Things are kind of a mess now."
"We could bring some movies over or something," Willow says.
"Oh, a movie night! Haven't had one of those in a long time." Buffy is trying to find an entrance for her good-bye, but it seems her friends are intent on keeping her there in their grasp for a while. "I really gotta run, you guys."
"OK. But say hello to Dawny for us, will you? Let her know we're thinking about her."
"I will. And she knows," Buffy says.
As she starts for home, her heart is racing. God, what was I thinking? She wishes that some force would re-establish the reasoning side of her brain, which has seemingly been switched off since her mother died. She knows there's no way in hell this new arrangement is going to work out. Even with Spike living in the basement, he's too close. Even when he was in his crypt he was too close. Hell, even before he arrived in Sunnydale he was too close. She has effectively elicited some sort of relationship with him now.
He's going to think he's got a chance with me now, she thinks. He's going to think I share his feelings, and I don't! I couldn't…
At this moment, sending Dawn to a convent somewhere doesn't seem like such a bad idea. She would miss her, but she would be safe. All she wants to do is keep her sister safe. Spike has to understand that. That is the only reason why she would have asked him to move in.
"That's the only reason," she affirms to herself.
When she enters her house that day, the TV is on again, but no one is watching. Dawn has left her cereal bowl on the floor and the Cheerios have swollen to the size of half dollars. She bends to pick it up and take it into the kitchen when she hears something.
There's a strange noise in the house.
She listens for a moment, setting the cereal bowl down on the table by the stairs. She hears the noise again, joined by a man's voice.
It's the sound of Dawn laughing.
Dawn is laughing, and it's as though the whole house has become a crystal vase and its quivering with music. The laughter cascades down the stairs in a waterfall and laps tentatively at Buffy's feet as she stands at the landing. Dawn is laughing. Dawn has found happiness again.
She follows the laughter into Dawn's room where she finds her sister sitting on the floor, with Spike lying on his side. He is holding a CD booklet in his hands and reciting lyrics as though he's giving a dramatic reading.
Oops, I did it again.
I played with your heart
Got lost in the game
Oh, baby, baby Opps!
You think I'm in love
That I'm sent from above
I'm not that innocent
He clutches the booklet to his chest. "Ah, poetry. Pure poetry. You know the fellow who first thought up that pairing of 'love' and 'above' would be so proud that it was included in this masterpiece."
"You don't like Britney?" Dawn asks.
"Oh, I'd give her a nibble, I suppose," he says, eying the CD cover wolfishly.
"You'd bite Britney?"
"Yeah. Why not?"
"Would you bite, like, anyone in *NSYNC?"
"Oh, I'd suck *NSYNC like their music sucks."
"What about the Backstreet Boys?"
"Mmmm….slurp, slurp, slurp."
"And then you could go on tour!" Dawn says.
He laughs. "It'd be a sell-out, I'm sure."
There is such giddiness in Dawn's voice, Buffy stands transfixed at the doorway. She leans on the doorframe, enchanted by the sound of her sister returning to life.
Spike looks up from the CD cover now and sees Buffy standing there. He gives her a slight smile.
"Hello, Buffy."
"Hi," she says. "What are you guys up to?"
"Dawn's giving me an education on the finer points of modern pop music. I'm finding that it sucks pretty much all the way down the line," he says.
Buffy smiles at him. This time there are no other thoughts to distract her countenance. She is too blissful to think of anything but how good it is to hear Dawn laughing again.
Buffy is finishing up her homework for tomorrow in the kitchen. She is surrounded by piles and piles of books. Her concentration is just gone and she can't read word one of any of them. She scoots back in her chair and rocks back and forth. A shadow passes by the door. She knows that Dawn is in bed. Her heart leaps---Mom? But she knows it couldn't be.
Spike pops his head in the doorway.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey," she returns wearily and she rubs the back of her head.
"You about finished?"
"Can't do anymore tonight," she says. "I'm all tapped out."
He nods. "You want some company?"
She considers this for a moment. She's not sure what kind of company she's going to be at this point. Her brain keeps misfiring in information overload. But eventually she hooks her foot under a nearby chair and pulls it out for him.
He sits cautiously and for a while they say nothing. Spike browses the books lying open on the table and Buffy continues to rock in her chair, slowly.
"Got a test or something tomorrow?"
"No," she says, "I'm just trying to catch up on some work from while I was gone. Willow gave me all her notes." She reaches for a stack of papers. "All carefully annotated, typed, and printed out on a desk jet."
He laughs a little. "A bit anal, isn't she?"
"You might say that." She buries her head in her hands for a minute and massages her temples. "I ran into her today. I think she may have guessed that something was up at casa Buffy."
"So Red suspects that you and old Spike may be setting up house together, eh?"
It kills her how he refers to himself in the third person all the time. But then again, she does the same thing.
She glares at him. "We're not setting up house together, Spike. This is not Three's Company. But I can see my friends getting all Mr. Roper on our little arrangement if we're not careful. They could be a problem." She shakes her head slowly. "I don't know. I'm still figuring things out here." She drops her head and says in a small voice that he can barely hear above the hum of the fridge. "But I do know that you've been great with Dawn."
Spike knows that this is the closest thing he'll ever get to a thank you and smiles.
"Little Bit is a good kid. Smart, charming, and quick as a fox. Not at all like her big sister."
She narrows her eyes at him.
"You're helping her a lot," she continues. "I mean, when I came in today and heard her laughing I had to remind myself what it was I was hearing. I can't remember the last time I heard her laugh. I can't remember the last time I laughed. Oh, wait. Yes I do. Had to be when that robot threw you out the window at the Spring Break party."
"Oh, yeah. That was a real laugh riot. Enjoyed that one myself. Nothing like a little humiliation in front of one hundred complete strangers."
She smiles at the memory and then tucks it away.
"Here lately, I haven't been of much use to anyone," she says.
"I don't know about that, pet---- " and he quickly corrects himself. "Slayer. You saved me from being extra work for the street cleaner the other night."
You saved me…She quickly shakes the thought out of her head before it can be vocalized.
"It's just like, all of a sudden, I've got this huge inbox in front of me. And everything inside is marked, 'Needs Attention Immediately.' I just…I just…some days it's just too much. I just feel like screaming, you know? Just yelling my head off. But I've always got to be the one in control. I've always got to have the cool and steady head about everything. I wake up every morning and everything is right out there, ready to get me. You'd think being the slayer, is would be the other way around."
"Not to worry, slayer," Spike says. "If the world ever becomes too much weight on your tiny, well-sculpted shoulders, you can always put your head right here," he says, pointing to his own shoulder.
She shakes her head as she glowers at him. "You're never going to stop trying are you?"
He smiles. "You know me too well."