Bliss
by Jaclyn // musicnotej@aol.com
11.19.03
Disclaimer: Whedon's!
Feedback: much appreciated.
A/N: Thanks to Becky for the beta :)
*
Lilah is late, and she is never late. Linwood's going to fillet her alive--
There is a raggedy man standing on the corner, dirty and hunched with cold. Yet he is smiling; it's a disquieting effect. He puts out his hand, grabs her arm.
"You should pray more," he tells her earnestly, apropos of nothing.
Lilah tries to wrench her arm away, gritting out words with a kind of harsh flippancy. "Nah. Praying doesn't do it for me."
"It isn't always about you, child."
"Listen, buster, God certainly doesn't need my prayers. So of course it's about me." He shrinks away from the hard, hard look she directs at him; and finally she can free her arm. "And I'm not your child."
*
Actually, she's nobody's child.
Her father is dead -- she does not mourn him -- and her mother is lost, wandering in the empty space of Alzheimer's.
But it doesn't matter, not really. There's no great difference between death and nearly a whole continent's worth of distance. Even if they'd been alive and/or aware, would the occasional postcard or hopelessly awful birthday gift really be such a vast improvement?
No.
*
"Can you cook, Lilah?" Wesley asks her one day instead of ripping her clothes off. It stumps her for a moment. She pulls the door closed behind her and sets her purse on the kitchen counter with distant precision, looking at Wesley blankly.
"Can I..." Lilah shakes her head. "What?"
"Do you know how to cook? I'm tired of takeout. Aren't you?"
Wesley's voice is matter-of-fact, but she cannot quite believe her ears. "You want me to cook you dinner. Like a little housewife, like a little--" Anger flares in her, and Lilah stutters to a stop.
"I tried to do it myself, believe me, but I nearly burned the building down." He rolls his eyes with a sharp edge of petulance. "For Pete's sake, Lilah, I'm not proposing -- or even suggesting any sort of domestic bliss -- I'm simply telling you that I'm hungry and cranky and that if you choose to be here, it's not going to pleasant. So if you know how to remedy the situation, it'll be for your benefit as well."
"What'll you give me in return?" she asks suspiciously.
"What do you want?"
The last thing her mother taught her was how to cook a rudimentary chicken dinner. Lilah came home from school the next day to find her crying on the couch, thinking herself kidnapped. Where am I? she'd sobbed. Don't hurt me.
"There's nothing I want that you could give me," Lilah tells him coldly; then grabs his wallet and leaves.
*
When she returns from the supermarket, she's in a marginally better mood. This is the problem with Wesley, lately, Lilah knows: the thought of him tends to dispel anger, turning a flash flood into mere ripples of water. Nothing but the pretense of disruption on a calm sea.
A little time to herself to steady her nerves, and she's good to go. It's part of the reason Lilah's lasted so long at Wolfram & Hart, to be honest. They're all damn good lawyers, every last employee, but in actuality that's not nearly enough.
Dumping the contents of a brown paper bag on the table, Lilah kicks off her shoes. Damn Pradas: gorgeous, but ridiculously uncomfortable. "Okay. You are now the proud owner of a couple of processed chicken parts, some frozen vegetables, and a bag of rice."
"Just tell me it's not fried rice in the style of greasy, Americanized Chinese, Japanese, Thai--"
"It's not. This is gonna be the plainest, most boring dinner you've ever tasted, and you're making it yourself." The ghost of a gleefully malicious smile rises up from the ashes of a bad mood that seems determined to linger.
"What?!" Wesley panics.
Lilah sighs, circling her earlier thoughts in her head like a mantra. Good to go, good to go. "Don't be such a baby. I made sure to buy stuff with easy-to-follow instructions."
"Lilah, I cannot cook a chicken. I don't care HOW easy you claim it is."
"Fine. I'll put the chicken in the oven, but dammit, Wes, heat up your own vegetables!"
He narrows his eyes. "What's wrong with you today?"
"Nothing's wrong with me. But I'm not your indentured servant and I'm not your girlfriend and I'm not your mother. So just--"
"Lilah!"
"WHAT?"
He is staring very hard at the set of her jaw, as if there are answers written in the flexing of muscle against bone. "What happened?" And in his own voice, Wesley is surprised to find something that sounds very much like genuine worry. It startles them both.
"Nothing!" Lilah protests, but Wesley's perception of her is strengthening, and he can see Lilah give up just a little. She sighs again, defeated. "Nothing much. Some weird homeless guy freaked me out a bit, that's all. Someone should rid the city of those things. They're even worse than cockroaches."
But she says it wearily, without her usual pizzazz. As overblown threats go, it barely registers on the scale.
"You want to talk about it?" Wesley offers awkwardly after a pause. They do not usually talk. Not like that.
But Lilah has never snapped at him that way, with real ire instead of glee. It makes her seem more real, somehow, like there's something behind the endless legs and polished, raking nails. Someone that maybe understands the way he hurts because she hurts that way too; someone who is maybe here out of loneliness, not just--
No. Lilah is not nearly that clichéd. She wouldn't let herself fall that far. By even thinking this, he is giving her too little credit, or too much.
"Wesley, I think you're confusing me with Fred," Lilah says acidly. Forget the damn ripple metaphor; she's done fooling herself. Maybe she can bottle her anger in the firm or in a courtroom, but that's not personal. It's not like this. "First you want me to make you dinner, and now you want to have a conversation. Did you forget I'm just your fucktoy?"
He visibly flinches. "Don't be crude, Lilah."
Yeah. This isn't some majestic water storm. This is just the cold reality of Lilah, furious.
She laughs loudly in disbelief, an eerie, billowing sound. "Don't be CRUDE?! What do you think this is, Wes? Fucking flowers and hearts drawn on the back on my business card?"
"I..." Wesley falters.
"That glasses stunt was particularly striking," Lilah rants, forcefully slamming the oven shut. Wesley jumps. "So don't you talk down to me about 'crude' when you're just a bundle of it all wrapped up in prissy Englishman."
"I didn't know you felt this way," Wesley murmurs, a little wide-eyed.
"I don't," Lilah says shortly. "Maybe you were right. I don't feel a thing."
She rips off his damn striped oven mitt, feeling ridiculous for even agreeing to go along with this mockery of domesticity, and stalks out of his apartment.
*
Wesley is following her.
"Fuck this," Lilah says very clearly into the chill air of midnight, though Wesley cannot hear her. She swerves into the next lane and makes a sudden and fairly stupid left turn, trying to lose him. But Wes is nothing if not dogged; though when the hell did he learn to ride a motorcycle with such skill anyway? Lilah has fully expected him to topple at least a dozen times.
Another sharp turn-- and Wesley is still behind her. Goddamn. This was not how she'd envisioned her Tuesday night. A quick fuck; some nasty, therapeutic jabs that Wesley would struggle valiantly to match; and then a nice bottle of champagne in her own [safe] luxurious bed to cap the evening. Early meeting tomorrow, and if she has to sit through it, Lilah would at least prefer to be without caffeinated ringing in her ears.
Or, she could be smothered by an airbag while chasing-- chasing away? Wesley, in which case she won't have to worry about the meeting after all. When, exactly, did she start putting her own safety in jeopardy over a man?
Her cell phone rings as she's cursing herself, but there are plenty curses left over for him too. What, now he's riding a motorcycle AND dialing her number? She grabs for her phone, furious. "Damn you, Wesley!" Lilah yells. "Who the hell do you think you are, Superman? You're going to get yourself killed!"
"Come on, Lilah," Wesley sighs. He sounds tired. Lilah catches herself sympathizing before quickly stamping the feeling out. Stubbornly, she remains silent. "Lilah, pull over. Come on."
"Screw you."
"Is that your solution to everything? Blur it all in sex until you're nothing but a body, an empty, meaningless body--"
"Hypocrite!" she snarls. "That's all I've ever been to you. We both went into this situation with the full expectation that it'd be meaningless fucking. So stop with your preaching and your damn pedestal of righteousness; I'm not impressed. You can't fall back on platitudes. I'm way past them."
Without realizing it, she's someone managed to circle back to his apartment. Defeat settles on her like a shroud, and with a heavy exhalation, Lilah slows to stop and tosses her cell phone to the side in a fit of self-disgust.
"Lilah?" Wesley's voice crackles tentatively out of the passenger seat.
"What?" she snaps, grabbing the phone angrily and jamming it to hear ear. Her movements are jerky with confusion. Lilah has never suffered from internal conflict like this before; she's always known exactly what she wants.
She has never wanted anything like this. It is dangerous and wrong and right.
"Um, you got very...quiet," the man who fucks her roughly on a regular basis says cautiously.
But why, why can't she just let him go?
"Just come home, Wesley," Lilah says shortly, yanking her keys from the ignition and getting out of the car. "I'll be cooking your fucking chicken and we can play a nice game of 'let's pretend this never happened.'"
"It happened," Wesley says, but he thinks she may have already hung up.
END