Shadow Though it Be: An Excursus – Chapter 15
"Where are you parked?" Elisabeth asked Xander as they strode down the sidewalk.
"Just around the corner there," Xander replied, gesturing.
Behind them, the door of the Magic Box jerked open and Anya's voice called out: "Hey!"
They stopped and looked back at her.
"He's my boyfriend, remember," Anya told Elisabeth loudly, leaning out the door and not closing any of the distance between them.
"Of course," Elisabeth reassured her, as Xander groaned, "An!"
"Just so you remember," Anya said firmly. She made as if to retreat back into the shop, but added, "But you can have Giles. I'm okay with you having Giles," with the air of a child offering her playmate the use of a toy she clearly thought was second-rate.
"An!" Xander said again, now blushing hard.
"Okay," Anya said, "bye!" She popped back inside and shut the door.
Xander groaned again and turned back toward his car. "I'm really sorry about that," he muttered to Elisabeth as she jumped to fall back into step with him.
"That's okay," Elisabeth said, pretending that her own blush did not exist. "Anya's cool."
Xander glanced at her, and Elisabeth had a sense of his feathers going down in relief. "I keep forgetting that you know her," he said.
Elisabeth decided this was a point worth nailing home: "I don't," she told him. "I just know what she's like. There's a difference."
"Yeah," Xander said, thinking, "I guess you're right….This is it." He pointed to his car parked by the sidewalk. Elisabeth waited while he unlocked the door on her side and opened it for her, then got in and unlocked his side for him. "Buckle up," he told her automatically as he got in and settled himself behind the wheel.
"Done," she said.
Xander's car smelled of peppermint and hot vinyl; the sun had warmed the seats and the dash. Elisabeth wriggled out of her jacket and laid it over her knees.
"Listen," Xander said, as he pulled out of his parking space and began to negotiate the Sunnydale streets, "about Buffy…don't—don't worry too much about what happened back there. It's complicated…there's a lot going on, and—well—"
"It's okay," Elisabeth said, for the second time. "I know what Buffy's like, too. I'm not the kind of person she'd readily get along with. Add to that what you just said, and—"
"Well, she's kind of in hyper protection mode right now. I'd just—just kinda be careful."
"I will."
Elisabeth was, in fact, beginning to feel a small upwelling of worry, coming uppermost of a whole host of new feelings. See, this is what happens when you decide not to be a shadow, she told her new improved self. Now, if she could just keep Xander from saying anything about Giles….
To her relief, Xander didn't seem anxious to discuss Giles with her. Instead, he contented himself with asking: "How much did he give you?"
"Fifty," she told him.
"Hey, you could do some damage with that."
"Thinking about it," Elisabeth said with a smile. "He didn't say I had to bring back any change."
"He also said you can get whatever you like," Xander recalled. "This is your big opportunity. I mean, you've been eating his cooking all week, and now it's your chance to decide the meal."
"Poor man," Elisabeth said, and Xander laughed.
"Yeah, there was this one time where Giles and I were cooped up in his apartment researching, and he made me cook when I complained one time too many. He'll tell you we had to call the fire department—" Xander looked over at her— "but don't believe him. We did not have to call the fire department, we just had to throw out his stupid toaster oven and make popcorn."
Elisabeth chuckled. "Well, he hasn't really cooked very much this week. We've mostly been living on takeout."
Xander gave her a brief smile and returned his attention to the road.
By the time they reached the grocery store, however, Elisabeth had caught Xander studying her surreptitiously as he drove, his expression unreadable. Elisabeth was pretty sure that his glances weren't hostile, but she had an idea that Xander was putting together a thought-puzzle of his own, one that may not form an altogether positive picture of her.
Once through the door, Xander asked her, "Cart or basket?"
"Aah, better make it a cart."
Xander wrangled a cart out of the bunch and wheeled it to her. "Here," he said. "I guess you probably want to push."
She smiled at him: her first spontaneous smile since her hour of grief. "No—you push," she said.
He grinned back and began to drive the cart through the lobby. Xander Harris was a man of simple pleasures.
"Now, I don't know this place at all, so help me," she said to him, skipping a little to catch up to the side of the cart.
"Okay, what do you need?"
Elisabeth thought. "We should get a staple or two, so, milk and eggs…."
"Okay, dairy's over that way." Xander pointed, ignoring the woman in a business suit who glared at him as she maneuvered her cart awkwardly around them.
"And where's the deli?"
"Next to the dairy."
"Excellent."
Elisabeth found that she did not have to wait for Xander to catch up to her as she strode down one aisle and across the back to find the dairy section, as he was quite nimble with the cart. Counting pennies in her head, Elisabeth chose a carton of milk and a box of eggs, then headed over to the deli.
"So," Xander said as she stood finger to lips, examining the contents of the deli case, "I'm curious. What are you going to feed Giles?"
"I'm kinda thinking an antipasto indoor picnic sorta thing," Elisabeth said, without taking her finger from her lips. "With salami and various cheeses, and olives and stuff."
"Huh," Xander said.
She ordered a quantity of sliced salami from the deli attendant, then tossed it into the cart and moved on toward the specialty cheese case. From this, she selected a wedge of Brie, a small wedge of Gloucester, and a bit of Stilton. "Do you like this?" Xander asked her cautiously.
"Of course I do," she said. "Well…I'm okay with Stilton but I probably won't eat very much of it. Giles'll probably turn his nose up at it," she added, studying the label, "if he notices this 'English Stilton' is made in Wisconsin."
"I promise I won't tell him," Xander said, with his hand over his heart. "And anyway, if he doesn't want it he can always palm it off on Anya."
Elisabeth chuckled to herself as she counted up the prices in her head. "Okay," she said finally, "we have enough left to get some olives and crackers. And tea. Don't let me forget the tea."
"Tea," Xander repeated firmly.
It was as Elisabeth was choosing a box of English cheese biscuits that Xander finally said: "Can I ask you something?"
Elisabeth looked up apprehensively, but Xander's expression was too hopeful to be the prelude to a catastrophic question. Then again…. "Yes?"
"I mean,…about the show."
"Yes?" Elisabeth compared the prices of two boxes of biscuits, glancing up at him occasionally, waiting for his answer.
"Is it…is it cool?"
Elisabeth's lungs suddenly felt much less constricted. "Oh, way. Completely cool. I watched it whenever I could, before I—started traveling so much. I mean, before I got here—I was doing the see-America thing."
"You didn't wind up in a ladies' strip bar in Oxnard, did you?" Xander asked her anxiously.
"Haven't been to Oxnard yet," Elisabeth said. "Note to self: avoid Oxnard." She pantomimed writing on a small notepad as she tossed her choice of cheese biscuits into the cart. Xander laughed.
"So, the show's cool," he said casually, as she led the way toward the beverage aisle.
"Yeah," Elisabeth said. "It's certainly a one-of-a-kind show; I mean, the critics really don't know what to do with it—but it's got a huge cult following, though that took a while to build up, I mean, because the movie sucked so bad."
Xander ran two steps and jumped onto the cart, to ride it a few strides ahead of her. "Cool. I mean, your dimension sounds pretty crazy, but at least it has one good TV show." He grinned at her.
They turned the corner into the beverage aisle, and Elisabeth stopped in front of the tea selection to deliberate. "Yeah, it's been pretty successful…though I don't think as many people have migrated to Angel as may have been hoped—"
Xander halted. "Angel has a show?" he yelped loudly.
She looked at him, startled. "Umm…yeah."
But he wasn't even looking at her anymore; instead, he had turned to the aisle at large and was appealing to the old lady buying Ovaltine for backup. "I don't believe this! Angel has a show! What is the matter with these people? His own show! That is just all kinds of wrong—"
Elisabeth turned back to her tea decision, to hide her smile.
Xander was still fuming by the time she had chosen two small packets of tea and turned to add them to the cart. "Look at it this way, Xander," she said, dropping in the Earl Grey and the China Black, "all the people you don't like are on Angel, instead of on the original show with you: Wesley—Faith—Cordelia—"
"Oh—dear—God," Xander said, making an anguished face.
Elisabeth could no longer hide her smile.
But Xander recovered quickly from this reversal of fortune, and as they were waiting in the checkout line, he said to her, "Can we send Spike to Angel's show too?"
Elisabeth laughed. "If you can make him go."
Xander sighed. "I doubt we could. Damn."
Elisabeth sighed too, thinking of her recent introduction to Spike and hoping her bad-tempered taunting didn't come back to bite her.
Xander's mind seemed to be similarly occupied. "So," he said, "was Spike Giles's source? I mean, if he was, we might want to look elsewhere…."
"Yeah," Elisabeth said, drawing out the carton of milk and thumping it onto the conveyor belt. "But he had others too, apparently, so it's not just his word we have to rely on. Not that the other—um, sources—are any more reliable, but, you know…."
"Yeah….So did you see Spike?"
"Yes," Elisabeth growled, before greeting the cashier and pulling the fifty out of her pocket.
Xander watched the side of her face for a minute or two, but she didn't turn to look at him. "I guess it didn't go well…?"
"He kept insinuating that I was jailbait for Giles," Elisabeth said with a scowl, holding out her hand for the change. "I ask you. Do I look fifteen?"
"No," Xander said quickly. "No, not at all. I mean, you look—very—" his face took on the treading-quicksand look— "not jailbaity. At all."
"I mean, really," Elisabeth said, hoisting the grocery bags and stalking toward the exit, "asking me what grade I'm in, for God's sake." She snorted loudly. "It's perfectly ridiculous, a) to assume anything about Giles and me at all, and b) to further assume I'm some kind of young bimbo. So I can pass for an undergraduate. That doesn't mean I'm a kid, for God's sake….Oh, who am I kidding," she said suddenly, her shoulders slumping with the combined weight of the grocery bags and the world. "I'm never going to look like an adult. Spike's right, damn his hide."
"Yeah, well," Xander muttered as they reached the car, "I can sympathize."
Elisabeth stopped and gave him a commiserating look. "If it helps at all, you know," she told him as he opened her door for her, "you at least have some growing room. I, on the other hand…." She set the grocery bags on the back seat and slumped into her seat in front.
When Xander got into the car and started the engine, she said glumly, "Hello, my name is Elisabeth, and I'm a dignity addict."
Xander started laughing. "Hi, Elisabeth." He gave another little giggle and said, "My name is Xander, and I'm a dignity addict too."
Elisabeth was provoked to another smile. "Hi, Xander."
They rode in an amicable near-silence to Giles's place.
Xander parked in front of Giles's apartment house and turned to her: "Would you like help getting the stuff in?"
"Yeah, thanks," Elisabeth said.
They each took a grocery bag and went up the walk and into the court, where Elisabeth dug out the key Giles had given her. Once inside, Elisabeth went straight into the kitchen with her purchases, while Xander excused himself and, leaving his bag on the counter, went to visit the bathroom.
By the time he came back, Elisabeth had put away the milk and was filling a pan of water to heat on the stove. "What's that for?" he asked her.
"For the eggs," Elisabeth said. "I'm hard-boiling them."
"Oh."
She glanced sharply at him, suddenly worried. "Does he like hard-boiled eggs?"
"Who, Giles? Listen: he pretends to be all finicky and English, but the man'll eat anything. I've seen him. And anyway, I'm pretty sure he grew up on hard-boiled eggs. Don't they have special little cups for breakfast eggs over there?"
"What, in England?" Elisabeth gave him a sideways smile. "Well, I've never been there, but I have seen it in stories."
"I swear it's like a foreign country over there," Xander said, hiding a small grin.
Elisabeth chuckled as she carefully dropped three eggs into the water.
"Can I do anything to help?" he asked, after a moment.
"You have time?" Elisabeth raised her eyebrows at him, her hopes rising.
"Yeah, sure. What do you need done?"
Elisabeth put her finger to her lips. "Well, there's nothing to do with the eggs until the water boils…I know. You can help put the salami on the—platter…platter…where did I see him put…?"
"I think it lives here," Xander said, opening one of the cabinets.
"Ah! Yes, thank you. Here, let me show you what to do. Take these salami cuts…roll them up one by one like this…and lay them next to each other on this end of the platter. The rest of the stuff will go on the other end." She dusted her hands and stepped back to reach for the tea towel hanging on the oven door handle. "There. That shouldn't result in a call to the fire department."
"You don't know me," Xander snorted, but he was smiling as he bent to take over the salami-rolling task.
Elisabeth meanwhile got out a cutting board and the cheeses and began to slice them. She studied the inside of Giles's refrigerator and discovered a hunk of dill Havarti which passed the olfactory test, so she got it out as well.
She was arranging the cheese slices on their own plate, quite happily adjusting each piece for maximum tessellatory effect, when Xander said: "Your water's boiling."
"Oh!" She went over and checked the eggs, reduced the heat, and glanced up at the clock to time them.
Meanwhile Xander had stopped rolling salami to check out her handiwork. He gave a little laugh. "Cool cheese art," he said.
She snorted. "Thanks. How's the salami coming along?"
"Pretty good. I'm making a pyramid now."
"Cool." Xander's work, she observed, was actually quite neat and pleasant to look at despite his self-deprecation.
"Now for the olives," she said, reaching into the grocery bag for the tub of kalamata olives. She drained the brine into a bowl and put the olives into another bowl, then returned the brine to its original container. Xander watched with interest.
"Why'd you do that?" he said.
"In case there are any left over," Elisabeth explained, sucking the brine delicately off her fingers. She returned her attention to the eggs, which were done; she fished them out with a colander ladle and put them in a bowl of cold water she had waiting. "I'm not so big on eggs myself," she said, searching through Giles's implement drawer for an egg slicer, "but I reckon Giles can eat them with a salad if there's any left over. Oh! which reminds me." She went to the fridge and plucked a few leaves of romaine lettuce from the bunch Giles was keeping in the crisper; then came back and gently shifted Xander's pyramid of salami rolls so that she could rearrange them on top of the lettuce leaf.
"Wow," Xander said as she evened the rows of salami, "you're really making with the presentation here."
Elisabeth shrugged as she set the bowl of olives in the center of the platter. "I want to do something nice, you know?" she said. "I mean, Giles has been really good, letting me camp out on his couch all week and buying me meals and suffering various and sundry griefs. Best I can do, really, is to treat him with his own money." She didn't quite look at Xander as she said this, which was just as well; a hint of mild skepticism had crept into his thought-puzzling expression.
"Giles is a good guy," was all Xander said; "Yes," Elisabeth answered, "he is," as she busily dumped the egg water into the sink.
Xander helped Elisabeth slice the eggs and arrange them on the platter with the olives and salami. "And now," Elisabeth muttered, dropping a cloth napkin over the platter and another over the cheese plate, "for the pièce de resistance. I believe he's got a wine rack around here somewhere—ah!" She opened a lower cabinet and squatted to examine the bottles one by one. "Merlot—not an easily replaceable vintage, and possibly he's saving it for a special occasion—no—a Riesling—ah, that would be lovely—but maybe we'd better go red—yes—cabernet—and a shiraz—hmmm…shiraz it is." She rose with the bottle of shiraz, rearranging the tea towel she'd thrown over her shoulder to wipe the dust off the label. "I'll wait a little bit to open it, though…."
"Is this a date?" Xander asked her.
Elisabeth almost dropped the shiraz to disaster. Trembling, she set it on the counter and turned her head to stare at him wide-eyed. "Does it look like a date?" she asked, her voice quivering.
His dark eyes regarded hers steadily. "Well, I'm not asking what it's supposed to look like. I'm asking if that's what it is."
She put up a nervous hand to resettle her glasses on her nose. It was a moment before she could answer him: "Honestly? I don't know."
"I know it's not my business," he said gently, "but I think you're running out of time to figure that out."
Elisabeth raised her eyes and drew a breath; turned to take the tea towel off her shoulder and wipe more dust from the bottle of wine. "You mean, I need to have it figured out before he comes home?"
"Yeah…I think you oughta be clear. I mean, not because of Giles…." Xander sighed deeply. "You know why Buffy's on such a rampage, don't you?"
Elisabeth's shoulders went down, and she stopped wiping the bottle. "Yes. Yes, I do." She turned her head again, hands braced on the counter, to look Xander in the eye.
"I'm okay with it," Xander said, putting up his palms gently. "I even think it's kinda cute—in a TMI sorta way. But…I don't think Buffy's likely to see it that way. There's—this way she is about Giles…."
"He's her Prime Mover," Elisabeth said softly to the bar window. "The thing that makes the world go round in a regular clockwork fashion. I know."
"Yeah," Xander said, drawing a long breath.
Elisabeth stood, hands braced, thinking. There didn't seem any way to explain herself without either stating the obvious or sounding whiny; and in any case Xander appeared not to need any explanation from her, because he said after a long moment:
"Look, I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying—count the cost, you know?"
She straightened and threw the tea towel back over her shoulder. "Yeah," she said, meeting Xander's eye again. "I've been counting the cost all day. As for how it adds up…I'll let you know."
Xander gave her a wry smile.
"Well," he said after a moment, "speaking of TMI…."
"You have to go."
"I have a girlfriend too," he said, looking at her cautiously, as if afraid of offending her. He relaxed when she smiled. "And she'll be wondering where the hell I am."
"That she will," Elisabeth said with a chuckle. "You'd best get a move on."
"Yeah."
"Thanks for helping me cook."
"No problem. I mean, hey," Xander said, stopping to lift his hands in a shrug on his way to the front door, "I have something to brag about now. No 911 calls—and I even have an idea for a date." He pointed his finger at her like a gun and gave her a wink, making her laugh.
"See ya," he said as he went out the door.
"Bye, Xander," she called, just before he pulled it to behind him.
When he was gone she turned to put her back against the kitchen doorway and let out a hefty sigh.
*
Chapter 16