Chapter 17
"I know Dawn. I'll come home when I can, but right now I have to stay here in LA." Buffy said to the phone.
"Buffy, I don't think he's going to come back. If you guys haven't found a way to." Dawn started.
"He's coming back!" Buffy snapped. "Don't ever think that Angel and I are going to give up on our son. We're gonna get him back."
"Can I come back up since Holtz is gone?"
"Later Dawn. Things have.gotten weird."
"So? They always get weird Buffy. I miss you, we all miss you."
"I know Dawn. I promise Angel and I will come back."
"We.we put Conner's stuff in storage yesterday."
"You what?"
"Well, we thought since he. that it would be the best thing for everyone. We didn't want to, but we thought it would be better."
Buffy was silent. She had wanted to be the one to take Conner's stuff down.
"Buffy?"
"I'm still here."
"Are you mad?"
"No. Not at you, or Willow, or Tara. You did the right thing. I've cried too much. You guys just helped me out. Thank you."
"Buffy, can I come up and visit you this weekend?"
"I can't let you Dawn. You have summer school and I want you studying with Willow."
"Please?"
"No."
"Buffy, I know he's gone and he might come back someday, but it really is time to move on and get a life. You have Angel and you have all these friends who care about you and they are all worried about you. I have to go. I'm going over to Lizze's house. I love you Buffy."
"Love you too Dawn. Bye."
Buffy hung up the phone. She was sitting is Wesley's old office as the others were upstairs fixing Angel's apartment. Dawn's words echoed in Buffy's head. ".he's gone and he might come back someday, but it really is time to move on and get a life. You have Angel and all these friends who care about you and they are all worried about you." She knew Dawn was right, but something in her just wouldn't let her leave LA. Something in her just knew that Conner was coming back to her and Angel.
There was a knock on the door and Lorne walked in.
"Hey there Blondie."
"Hey Lorne."
"Why aren't you upstairs with your hubby and friends?"
"I was talking to my sister."
"Oh. Can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"Why did you send her back to Sunnydale?"
"It was getting way to.heavy for her around here for her. I didn't want her hurt," Buffy looked down. "or worse."
"I know that it hurts. Although I can't really imagine what exactly it is you and Angel are going through, but I can see it in your eyes."
"I miss him Lorne."
Lorne walked over to where she was sitting and knelt down. "I know you do. I hate to see you like this. When I first met you, I saw this beautiful, vibrant woman that was full of life and love. Then I found out your story. You know, the whole 'died twice, lost love, your mother died, you were brought back from heaven story? And so you know what? Despite it all, you were that beautiful, vibrant woman. I couldn't believe it. Now I know that woman is in there somewhere, and I also know that she's going to come back."
Buffy cracked a little smile and looked down as if she were ashamed that she had just smiled.
"Hey! Don't do that. Bring that smile back."
"It feels like I'm betraying him when I smile."
"You're not. If Conner could talk and if he were here right now, he'd say, 'Mom, bring that sparkling smile back. You're too gorgeous to hide it.' You know how I know?"
"How?"
"Because, he's there, in that smile. That's what I saw in that smile. He's there too." Lorne pointed to her heart. "You and Angel made that precious little ball of cuteness. So if you look at it this way: Conner isn't really gone. He's still here, and he'll always be here." Lorne got up and walked to the door, but before he walked out, he turned back and looked at her. "Just remember that and you can make it through anything." Then he walked out.
Buffy smiled a little and got up. She went out to thank Lorne, but he was gone, the front door was swinging closed. Without another thought, she headed upstairs to help out Angel and her friends.
Angel ran his hand over a crack in the wall of his apartment.
"Angel. You and I have fought side by side on more than one occasion, fellow warriors, shoulder to shoulder. By now my council must surely hold weight. So I beseech you to heed my words." Gru said.
"Okay." Angel answered.
"Pomegranate Mist is the wrong color for this room."
Angel sighed then turned to face Gru. "What?"
"We were just thinking, well, actually I was thinking and Gru agreed, that well, since you have to repaint the room anyway, maybe you'd like a change, you know, for a change." Fred said.
"Gru agreed?" Angel asked.
"Don't mock. He actually has good color sense." Cordy spoke up.
Gru held up sample color cards. "Summer splendor is a hue more worthy of a champion. Or," He turned to another card, "or perhaps this unique one called purpla."
"Purple. Yet you have no problems pronouncing pomegranate." Angel said.
"It was my mother's name."
"What are the odds?" Gunn walked buy carrying a crisped piece of furniture. "Hey, hang on. Where, where are you going with that?"
"I'm tossing it." Gunn answered.
"It's an antique."
"It's a charcoaled briquette."
"We're not throwing it out. And the wall color, it stays, too. Look guys, I appreciate everybody's help. I just want everything back to the way it was or close to it."
"Not gonna be, you know. Unless we pay for real dishonest to goodness over priced contractors those cracks are always gonna be there." Cordy said.
"Let them."
"Sure! Maybe we can even start dumping our trash up here."
Angel saw a snow globe with a bunny inside in one of the buckets and picked it up.
"The old 'gives the place character' philosophy. Guess that served you pretty well, living in rotted out mansions and." Cordy trailed off as she saw Angel staring at the snow floating down inside the globe.
"I don't know why I bought this for him. A whim, I guess. Thought he'd like to look at it. Snow." He lowered the globe. "It does never snow in southern California."
"It did once." Buffy said coming into the room.
"I remember."
"You should, that was a fun night."
"Yeah, it sure was." Buffy smiled at him. "What's up, you're.happy?"
"Yeah. I'm happy because my husband is here, in the bedroom, and we haven't."
Buffy trailed off as she saw that everyone was watching them and they broke apart from the position they had been in.
"Hey, you know, we shouldn't be wasting time fixing up my place when we got work to do." Angel said quickly.
"What work?" Gunn asked.
"Our jobs, the business." He and Buffy started for the door. "We're neglecting our cases."
"Um, Angel? We don't have any cases." Buffy and Angel stopped and turned, Angel still holding the globe. "We haven't had a call in over a week." Fred said.
"Really? Well, uh, somebody ought to be downstairs in case a walk-in should, walk in. Because uh." He opened the door and he and Buffy started to leave, "we get those sometimes."
"Never on Sundays." Cordy said under her breath.
Angel shut the door and he and Buffy headed down to the stair well. As soon as they got to the door that led to the hallway with the main staircase, he turned to Buffy and looked at her.
"Are you ok?" he asked.
"Yes, I'm fine."
"How's, um, Dawn?" Angel asked a little breathy as Buffy ran her hand up his shirt.
"She's just fine." Buffy whispered into his neck.
"That's good. Are you sure you're fine? Not, you know," Angel cleared his throat, "possessed?"
"Nope." Buffy kissed his neck. She knew how much he couldn't resist her when she did that. "I'm Buffy."
Angel started to melt. He was ready to slam Buffy down on the floor and take her right there, but he had practice in this sort of torture and he gently grabbed her shoulders and pushed her back as tenderly as he could. She whimpered a little bit, and then looked up at him.
"Buffy, what is going on with you?"
"Lorne and I talked. He said that I should try to bring back the 'beautiful, vibrant woman' back out in the open. You can do that for me."
"Yeah, I know I can, but Lorne didn't make you go from sad, almost depressed Buffy to happy, ready-to-pin-her-husband Buffy. Something else hit a nerve with you. Sit down." Angel led her into one of the rooms and sat her on the bed, sitting himself in a chair that faced her. He didn't want to sit on the bed with her, because then he wouldn't resist her. "Talk to me."
"Dawn said I need to get a life." Buffy said.
"That's not it."
"She said that I have friends that love me and are worried about me?"
"Not even."
"Lorne said that Conner was always with us and that he'll never leave."
"Now we're getting to the problem. Go on."
"He said he saw it when I smiled. He saw the same smile that he saw on Conner, on me."
"Lorne is a smart guy. I've always seen it. There's more to this though isn't there?"
Buffy dropped everything and sagged a little. She looked up into Angel's eyes and he could see the pain there. "Dawn, Willow, and Tara took down Conner's room and put it all in storage."
"Oh." Angel said, face dropping at the news.
"They figured that it would be best for us. That it would only cause more pain for us if we came back and saw it."
Angel and Buffy were quiet. Both trying to process the news.
The door to the Hyperion opened and a man in his middle ages walked in.
"Hello? Angel Investigations?"
He looked around the deserted lobby, seeing that he is standing just inside a pentagram. He backed out of it and walked around it to the reception counter.
"Hey! Anybody here? Hey! Hello?!"
He didn't see the clear, ghost-shrimp-like creature skitter across the counter.
"Look, unless you want me to take my business elsewhere. Fine. Probably couldn't find my dog anyway."
As he turned to go, the ghost-shrimp suddenly jumped up and clamped onto his face, then forced its way into his mouth, slithering down his throat.
Angel started to say something, but his ears "perked" up and he stood up.
"What, what is it?" Buffy asked.
"Someone's in the lobby." Angel said as he started out the door.
Buffy followed him and they hurried down the stairs.
"Yes! Hi. I hope that you weren't ah. Can I help you?" Angel asked.
The man turned around to face Angel. "What was that?"
"I was just saying if, if you're looking for Angel Investigations. I'm, I'm he. Him. Angel. And you are?"
The guy looked a bit dazed. "I uh, I need."
"Don't be embarrassed. Whatever your problems are, I'm here to listen. And, you know, help, of course."
"We have to go."
He turned and started to walk out.
"Huh? What?"
The guy walked around the pentagram and towards the exit.
"Is something wrong? Oh, the pentagram. Don't worry about that. That's, that's an old case. It's done. I'm here to totally give you my," The door closed behind the man, "full attention."
Angel and Buffy stood and stared at the closed doors.
Cordy walked down the stairs.
"Hey, when did we get the statues for the lobby? Oh, it's just you two."
"Can we do something about the stain? It just scared off a client. At least I think he was a client. The guy barely said two words before he ran out of here."
"Well, you know, some people can be pretty closed mouthed. We've never really talked about everything that happened while I was away."
Angel and Buffy walked away from her. "You know the gist of it." Buffy replied.
Cordy followed. "Yeah. Sure. I've got loads of gist. But what I don't got is the specifics. Specifically about that little five pointed doodad decorating our lobby and the voodoo that you dood, did over it."
"Cordy!" Angel said.
"I know you guys don't wanna talk about it, but you don't mess with dark magicks and expect to walk away from it like it doesn't matter."
Angel set the snow globe down on Wes' old desk. "It doesn't matter. It was a waste of time."
"Still. I should probably know what kind of spell it was. You know there is almost always some cosmic price to using primordial powers. There could be repercussions. And you know the one person who could help us with that isn't around anymore."
Angel stopped fiddling with the files on the desk and looked at her, then started to walk out of the office.
"Not going there. I'm just saying. You can run away, avoid talking about this, but you know as well as I do that stuff we do in the past usually comes back to bite us in our respective 'assi' and what you did."
"Okay. So maybe we weren't thinking too clearly. I mean, I was drunk for a while. Drunk on my own son's blood, slipped into my food by the good folks at Wolfram and Hart. And Buffy was a little upset that she had finally had her dreams come true only to be squashed by someone from MY past that came and took her son away. And our heads were a little clouded with rage over a trusted friend stealing our child from us." He threw up his hands and dropped down to sit on the stairs next to Buffy. "Damn it, Cordelia, you got me talking about this."
Angel buried his face in his hands. Buffy wrapped her arms around his waist and laid her head on his slumped shoulder. "Probably just needed to vent." Buffy whispered.
Cordy went to sit beside Angel as he raised his head from his hands, Buffy still holding to his waist.
"Why didn't you call me?" Cordy asked.
"We didn't want to mess up your vacation. We just thought one of us should be happy." Angel sighed.
"But I could have helped. I could have done something."
"There is nothing you could have."
"How do you know? What makes you so sure? I've got a hotline to the freaking Powers, buster. I could've gotten a vision, or, or something to warn us. Oh, plus, I've got demon in me now." She jumped up and faced Buffy and Angel. "So, maybe, maybe there is some untapped power that could have help find Connor before, you know, before." Cordy stopped with a sigh.
"You needed to vent?" Buffy asked.
"I, I should have been here for you guys!"
"You, you were. I mean, you are. You're always." He stood up shifting Buffy to his hand as she stood too. "Look, look, I'm just, we're just trying to move on like everyone's telling us to. We're just trying to not be so into our problems. Just focus on something else for a while. You know?"
Cordy said after a beat, "Sure. Yeah. I, I get that. But next time you call me."
Buffy and Angel nodded slightly then walked past her. "Right." Angel stopped and turned back. "Oh, there is something you can do for me. Find me a case to work on. Please."
"Hey, I know something you could work on!"
"What?"
"You two trying to have a little fun together."
Buffy and Angel smiled and went into the kitchen.
"I know Dawn. I'll come home when I can, but right now I have to stay here in LA." Buffy said to the phone.
"Buffy, I don't think he's going to come back. If you guys haven't found a way to." Dawn started.
"He's coming back!" Buffy snapped. "Don't ever think that Angel and I are going to give up on our son. We're gonna get him back."
"Can I come back up since Holtz is gone?"
"Later Dawn. Things have.gotten weird."
"So? They always get weird Buffy. I miss you, we all miss you."
"I know Dawn. I promise Angel and I will come back."
"We.we put Conner's stuff in storage yesterday."
"You what?"
"Well, we thought since he. that it would be the best thing for everyone. We didn't want to, but we thought it would be better."
Buffy was silent. She had wanted to be the one to take Conner's stuff down.
"Buffy?"
"I'm still here."
"Are you mad?"
"No. Not at you, or Willow, or Tara. You did the right thing. I've cried too much. You guys just helped me out. Thank you."
"Buffy, can I come up and visit you this weekend?"
"I can't let you Dawn. You have summer school and I want you studying with Willow."
"Please?"
"No."
"Buffy, I know he's gone and he might come back someday, but it really is time to move on and get a life. You have Angel and you have all these friends who care about you and they are all worried about you. I have to go. I'm going over to Lizze's house. I love you Buffy."
"Love you too Dawn. Bye."
Buffy hung up the phone. She was sitting is Wesley's old office as the others were upstairs fixing Angel's apartment. Dawn's words echoed in Buffy's head. ".he's gone and he might come back someday, but it really is time to move on and get a life. You have Angel and all these friends who care about you and they are all worried about you." She knew Dawn was right, but something in her just wouldn't let her leave LA. Something in her just knew that Conner was coming back to her and Angel.
There was a knock on the door and Lorne walked in.
"Hey there Blondie."
"Hey Lorne."
"Why aren't you upstairs with your hubby and friends?"
"I was talking to my sister."
"Oh. Can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"Why did you send her back to Sunnydale?"
"It was getting way to.heavy for her around here for her. I didn't want her hurt," Buffy looked down. "or worse."
"I know that it hurts. Although I can't really imagine what exactly it is you and Angel are going through, but I can see it in your eyes."
"I miss him Lorne."
Lorne walked over to where she was sitting and knelt down. "I know you do. I hate to see you like this. When I first met you, I saw this beautiful, vibrant woman that was full of life and love. Then I found out your story. You know, the whole 'died twice, lost love, your mother died, you were brought back from heaven story? And so you know what? Despite it all, you were that beautiful, vibrant woman. I couldn't believe it. Now I know that woman is in there somewhere, and I also know that she's going to come back."
Buffy cracked a little smile and looked down as if she were ashamed that she had just smiled.
"Hey! Don't do that. Bring that smile back."
"It feels like I'm betraying him when I smile."
"You're not. If Conner could talk and if he were here right now, he'd say, 'Mom, bring that sparkling smile back. You're too gorgeous to hide it.' You know how I know?"
"How?"
"Because, he's there, in that smile. That's what I saw in that smile. He's there too." Lorne pointed to her heart. "You and Angel made that precious little ball of cuteness. So if you look at it this way: Conner isn't really gone. He's still here, and he'll always be here." Lorne got up and walked to the door, but before he walked out, he turned back and looked at her. "Just remember that and you can make it through anything." Then he walked out.
Buffy smiled a little and got up. She went out to thank Lorne, but he was gone, the front door was swinging closed. Without another thought, she headed upstairs to help out Angel and her friends.
Angel ran his hand over a crack in the wall of his apartment.
"Angel. You and I have fought side by side on more than one occasion, fellow warriors, shoulder to shoulder. By now my council must surely hold weight. So I beseech you to heed my words." Gru said.
"Okay." Angel answered.
"Pomegranate Mist is the wrong color for this room."
Angel sighed then turned to face Gru. "What?"
"We were just thinking, well, actually I was thinking and Gru agreed, that well, since you have to repaint the room anyway, maybe you'd like a change, you know, for a change." Fred said.
"Gru agreed?" Angel asked.
"Don't mock. He actually has good color sense." Cordy spoke up.
Gru held up sample color cards. "Summer splendor is a hue more worthy of a champion. Or," He turned to another card, "or perhaps this unique one called purpla."
"Purple. Yet you have no problems pronouncing pomegranate." Angel said.
"It was my mother's name."
"What are the odds?" Gunn walked buy carrying a crisped piece of furniture. "Hey, hang on. Where, where are you going with that?"
"I'm tossing it." Gunn answered.
"It's an antique."
"It's a charcoaled briquette."
"We're not throwing it out. And the wall color, it stays, too. Look guys, I appreciate everybody's help. I just want everything back to the way it was or close to it."
"Not gonna be, you know. Unless we pay for real dishonest to goodness over priced contractors those cracks are always gonna be there." Cordy said.
"Let them."
"Sure! Maybe we can even start dumping our trash up here."
Angel saw a snow globe with a bunny inside in one of the buckets and picked it up.
"The old 'gives the place character' philosophy. Guess that served you pretty well, living in rotted out mansions and." Cordy trailed off as she saw Angel staring at the snow floating down inside the globe.
"I don't know why I bought this for him. A whim, I guess. Thought he'd like to look at it. Snow." He lowered the globe. "It does never snow in southern California."
"It did once." Buffy said coming into the room.
"I remember."
"You should, that was a fun night."
"Yeah, it sure was." Buffy smiled at him. "What's up, you're.happy?"
"Yeah. I'm happy because my husband is here, in the bedroom, and we haven't."
Buffy trailed off as she saw that everyone was watching them and they broke apart from the position they had been in.
"Hey, you know, we shouldn't be wasting time fixing up my place when we got work to do." Angel said quickly.
"What work?" Gunn asked.
"Our jobs, the business." He and Buffy started for the door. "We're neglecting our cases."
"Um, Angel? We don't have any cases." Buffy and Angel stopped and turned, Angel still holding the globe. "We haven't had a call in over a week." Fred said.
"Really? Well, uh, somebody ought to be downstairs in case a walk-in should, walk in. Because uh." He opened the door and he and Buffy started to leave, "we get those sometimes."
"Never on Sundays." Cordy said under her breath.
Angel shut the door and he and Buffy headed down to the stair well. As soon as they got to the door that led to the hallway with the main staircase, he turned to Buffy and looked at her.
"Are you ok?" he asked.
"Yes, I'm fine."
"How's, um, Dawn?" Angel asked a little breathy as Buffy ran her hand up his shirt.
"She's just fine." Buffy whispered into his neck.
"That's good. Are you sure you're fine? Not, you know," Angel cleared his throat, "possessed?"
"Nope." Buffy kissed his neck. She knew how much he couldn't resist her when she did that. "I'm Buffy."
Angel started to melt. He was ready to slam Buffy down on the floor and take her right there, but he had practice in this sort of torture and he gently grabbed her shoulders and pushed her back as tenderly as he could. She whimpered a little bit, and then looked up at him.
"Buffy, what is going on with you?"
"Lorne and I talked. He said that I should try to bring back the 'beautiful, vibrant woman' back out in the open. You can do that for me."
"Yeah, I know I can, but Lorne didn't make you go from sad, almost depressed Buffy to happy, ready-to-pin-her-husband Buffy. Something else hit a nerve with you. Sit down." Angel led her into one of the rooms and sat her on the bed, sitting himself in a chair that faced her. He didn't want to sit on the bed with her, because then he wouldn't resist her. "Talk to me."
"Dawn said I need to get a life." Buffy said.
"That's not it."
"She said that I have friends that love me and are worried about me?"
"Not even."
"Lorne said that Conner was always with us and that he'll never leave."
"Now we're getting to the problem. Go on."
"He said he saw it when I smiled. He saw the same smile that he saw on Conner, on me."
"Lorne is a smart guy. I've always seen it. There's more to this though isn't there?"
Buffy dropped everything and sagged a little. She looked up into Angel's eyes and he could see the pain there. "Dawn, Willow, and Tara took down Conner's room and put it all in storage."
"Oh." Angel said, face dropping at the news.
"They figured that it would be best for us. That it would only cause more pain for us if we came back and saw it."
Angel and Buffy were quiet. Both trying to process the news.
The door to the Hyperion opened and a man in his middle ages walked in.
"Hello? Angel Investigations?"
He looked around the deserted lobby, seeing that he is standing just inside a pentagram. He backed out of it and walked around it to the reception counter.
"Hey! Anybody here? Hey! Hello?!"
He didn't see the clear, ghost-shrimp-like creature skitter across the counter.
"Look, unless you want me to take my business elsewhere. Fine. Probably couldn't find my dog anyway."
As he turned to go, the ghost-shrimp suddenly jumped up and clamped onto his face, then forced its way into his mouth, slithering down his throat.
Angel started to say something, but his ears "perked" up and he stood up.
"What, what is it?" Buffy asked.
"Someone's in the lobby." Angel said as he started out the door.
Buffy followed him and they hurried down the stairs.
"Yes! Hi. I hope that you weren't ah. Can I help you?" Angel asked.
The man turned around to face Angel. "What was that?"
"I was just saying if, if you're looking for Angel Investigations. I'm, I'm he. Him. Angel. And you are?"
The guy looked a bit dazed. "I uh, I need."
"Don't be embarrassed. Whatever your problems are, I'm here to listen. And, you know, help, of course."
"We have to go."
He turned and started to walk out.
"Huh? What?"
The guy walked around the pentagram and towards the exit.
"Is something wrong? Oh, the pentagram. Don't worry about that. That's, that's an old case. It's done. I'm here to totally give you my," The door closed behind the man, "full attention."
Angel and Buffy stood and stared at the closed doors.
Cordy walked down the stairs.
"Hey, when did we get the statues for the lobby? Oh, it's just you two."
"Can we do something about the stain? It just scared off a client. At least I think he was a client. The guy barely said two words before he ran out of here."
"Well, you know, some people can be pretty closed mouthed. We've never really talked about everything that happened while I was away."
Angel and Buffy walked away from her. "You know the gist of it." Buffy replied.
Cordy followed. "Yeah. Sure. I've got loads of gist. But what I don't got is the specifics. Specifically about that little five pointed doodad decorating our lobby and the voodoo that you dood, did over it."
"Cordy!" Angel said.
"I know you guys don't wanna talk about it, but you don't mess with dark magicks and expect to walk away from it like it doesn't matter."
Angel set the snow globe down on Wes' old desk. "It doesn't matter. It was a waste of time."
"Still. I should probably know what kind of spell it was. You know there is almost always some cosmic price to using primordial powers. There could be repercussions. And you know the one person who could help us with that isn't around anymore."
Angel stopped fiddling with the files on the desk and looked at her, then started to walk out of the office.
"Not going there. I'm just saying. You can run away, avoid talking about this, but you know as well as I do that stuff we do in the past usually comes back to bite us in our respective 'assi' and what you did."
"Okay. So maybe we weren't thinking too clearly. I mean, I was drunk for a while. Drunk on my own son's blood, slipped into my food by the good folks at Wolfram and Hart. And Buffy was a little upset that she had finally had her dreams come true only to be squashed by someone from MY past that came and took her son away. And our heads were a little clouded with rage over a trusted friend stealing our child from us." He threw up his hands and dropped down to sit on the stairs next to Buffy. "Damn it, Cordelia, you got me talking about this."
Angel buried his face in his hands. Buffy wrapped her arms around his waist and laid her head on his slumped shoulder. "Probably just needed to vent." Buffy whispered.
Cordy went to sit beside Angel as he raised his head from his hands, Buffy still holding to his waist.
"Why didn't you call me?" Cordy asked.
"We didn't want to mess up your vacation. We just thought one of us should be happy." Angel sighed.
"But I could have helped. I could have done something."
"There is nothing you could have."
"How do you know? What makes you so sure? I've got a hotline to the freaking Powers, buster. I could've gotten a vision, or, or something to warn us. Oh, plus, I've got demon in me now." She jumped up and faced Buffy and Angel. "So, maybe, maybe there is some untapped power that could have help find Connor before, you know, before." Cordy stopped with a sigh.
"You needed to vent?" Buffy asked.
"I, I should have been here for you guys!"
"You, you were. I mean, you are. You're always." He stood up shifting Buffy to his hand as she stood too. "Look, look, I'm just, we're just trying to move on like everyone's telling us to. We're just trying to not be so into our problems. Just focus on something else for a while. You know?"
Cordy said after a beat, "Sure. Yeah. I, I get that. But next time you call me."
Buffy and Angel nodded slightly then walked past her. "Right." Angel stopped and turned back. "Oh, there is something you can do for me. Find me a case to work on. Please."
"Hey, I know something you could work on!"
"What?"
"You two trying to have a little fun together."
Buffy and Angel smiled and went into the kitchen.