Cold Comfort
Set after 'Entropy' (Buffy Season 6)
Chapter Six
Spike hammers out of Sunnydale. Bat out of the Hellmouth.
He's elated - high on the little chew of hate he got from Buffy's brutal, killingly-timed show of pique.
'Now leaving Sunnydale. Come back soon!' shoots by. He leaves this one intact.
He's got away. It's over. These three humiliating years- all the endless, pointless indecision; all the back and forth, all the nit-picking, all the thankless, wearing struggle of living with humans - he's swept them away: they're dust behind him, rising in clouds.
All but Anya.
She sits beside him, the spoils of war, a kidnapped Scooby princess, squinting at 'Vogue' in the dim light. He glances sideways at her. Cool as a cuke. Did she hear him right, when he said 'leave town'? Could she possibly have thought he was offering her a lift to the hairdresser?
But she's brought a case, it's on the back seat.
'Bloody hell,' he'd said when she'd held it out to him to put in the car. 'Where's the kitchen sink?'
'Don't be silly,' she'd said, brightly. 'These are all necessary items.' Her hands fumbled as she passed it over, and a red-feathered mule had fallen out of a half-zipped pocket. He was watching her, saw her face slacken, and wonders for a moment if this is going to be a worse mistake than he has so far suspected.
But she'd stuffed the mule back in, given him a ravishing wide-eyed smile and climbed into the front seat, fluffing up her hair while he rammed the bag in the back.
He slides another glance at her, touching up her red lipstick in the mirror. She's left everything she cares about behind her, dropped every person she's ever loved or liked without saying goodbye; hasn't forgotten her curlers.
What had he thought he was helping himself to when he'd stolen Anya? Why had he done it: pressed her, cajoled her, breathed his menacing charm down her silkily blue-veined neck? The car swerves. No sexual intercourse, he reminds himself.
She'd been lying when she'd said that. She knows there's going to be sexual intercourse.
Her careful, hard-won knowledge of the world has collapsed and left her in bewilderment. There's always been Xander, since she first found herself here, held fast in a single bewildering dimension. She should have known something was wrong. How could she have known?
She hasn't lived; she had no maps for how things were supposed to go; certainly has none for how they're supposed to go from here. She's afraid, and the only thing she's found that can safely, just for a moment, stave off the throttling panic is sexual intercourse. With Spike.
Sex with Xander had been like taking a bath in liquid pleasure. Warm and naked and delicious; stimulating, heart-racing, making you gasp, making you crave more and more.
Sex with Spike was like taking an overdose. Terrifying.
Making the decision to utterly give up control. Feeling your nerves sting, and hearing a roaring sound as you bend your lips to take your chance. Not knowing where you'll wake up, or if.
There hadn't been any acquisitive numbering of orgasms with Spike. That night in the magic shop she couldn't have remembered the word 'orgasm'; could barely remember the word 'mmm'.
That's what she wants. Black out.
She doesn't know what made her bluff. Doesn't want it to seem like her plan, is that it? She wants to be taken by surprise. She wants to be absolved; she wants to be seduced.
Is she learning hypocrisy - that human habit she'd struggled so hard to acquire? And failed, to endless silent choruses of raised eyebrows, rolled eyes; weak, tolerant smiles.
It's too dark to read the articles in her magazine but she can still see the pictures. Richness, possessions, glossy Hollywood lives. Xander. Xander. Xander.
Spike doesn't mind that much, about Anya's no-getting-cosy clause. Whatever he'd been hoping for, it hadn't been one long dirty weekend.
That wasn't why he'd sought her out, why he'd begged. Why he'd lied to her - because he'd known when they'd left: Xander still loves her. Knows she wouldn't be here if she knew it too.
Not that he'd say no, not for a second. Spike's blood may run cold, but it runs red. And he finds Anya rakishly attractive. He likes her brightness and her brashness, and her style, her forties chic. She reminds him of the American girls he ate in London, during the war. Garish, modish, talking a little too loud, always half-conscious that they didn't sound quite right. They'd tasted amazing. Warm, red, vitamin-pepped blood, he remembers it pouring fatteningly down his throat; iron-rich nectar after the watery, rationed blood of the English.
'I think we passed it already,' says Anya, staring at the map. 'What's the name again? St. Helga's what? What did that sign say, back when we passed the gas station?'
She's looking at the page so hard her eyes begin to cross.
'Saint. Hilda's. Lake,' Spike says in a tone that suggests he's going over old ground. 'We're not going to see it before dawn. This isn't Concorde we're in; it's the grandpa of all Volvos. And with you navigating we're bloody lucky if we don't end up in the sea.'
Anya's not listening. She swivels the page around and her face clears.
'Oh. This is the right way up,' she says, pleased.
Spike gives the horizon a look that nearly cracks the windscreen and mutters something indistinct, but that definitely contains the word 'maps' and the word 'bints'.
Anya glares at him.
'This would be a lot easier, you know, if there wasn't gravy over two of the major junctions,' she says huffily.
Spike says nothing, but keeps watching the road. For some reason he's anxious not to draw her attention to the statistical unlikelihood of any stains on a vampire's road-map being gravy.
They sleep the night at a motel. Spike's not keen but Anya says she feels carsick. He's sure she's lying, but he's too much of a gentleman to call her on it, and too used to female perversity to risk her being sick on purpose in his new car. Besides, their situation is unsure, and slightly delicate. They don't know why they're here exactly, either of them - or why they're together. Safer not to rock the boat.
He wakes up and she's there, standing by the bed, swirled in a sheet.
He sits up in bed.
'Anya?'
She comes to him, awkwardly, her hands clutching the sheet. She sits down beside him, on the edge of the bed. Her amber-shadow eyes are empty. She needs him to fill the blanks, he sees.
He reaches up to her tangled hair, strokes her. She leans, lets him kiss her - soft, restorative, un-vampirish kissing, that goes on and on.
Then he can feel her pulse beat harder, feel her replying, kissing him deeply. Her arms come up, brushing the tensed muscles in his back, they close round his neck. The sheet's fallen away; his hand's drawing insistently, urgently, up and down her smooth side. She holds his cheek, there are nail-prints, her brittle day-face splinters with desire for the oblivion of Spike.
He rakes his hands over her - her hair, her back, her leg that's moving restlessly to surround him - pulling her closer. She breathes out sharply against his kiss - he's distracting her, she wants it over, she wants the dark. She's clutching at him, all over him, there's fear, they can hardly tell whose, she's pulling him onto her, into her; she wants the end, she wants it never to end.
After, he stays, reaches down for wet, cool, greedy kisses. They've been wordless, but now he says 'darling', just once, with his eyes shut.
She lets him do what Buffy never would, lie with his arms round her, caressing; and he does, fondly and foolishly, feverishly, until they fall asleep.
But still he wakes burning in the night. Burning for the hard words Anya doesn't say? For blows? For slender muscles that crush him to craven submission, for a toothless bite that brings his dead heart to his mouth?
For the schoolgirl curve of a cheek he's traced more times in the glittering dark space of his mind than with trembling fingers. For Buffy, as he does every night. For his little goldilocks, his creature of the dark.
