Chapter 11
This was the kind of thing you watched on television or read about in magazines but never experienced yourself, he mused, unless by luck of the draw you found yourself in a sleepy backwater village where the dogs still had no leash law and the most popular road-surfacing material appeared to be topsoil. The sun safely below the horizon, Spike joined the other residents and guests of the odd little motor court as they dragged out lawn chairs and ice chests, hosed the bird shit off the picnic table, and saturated the charcoal briquettes with too much lighter fluid in preparation for "Eating Outdoors."
It had been ages since he'd felt this mellow. Elbows resting on the cedar table, a sweating-cold bottle of Dos Equis in his hand, he watched through lazy, half-closed eyes as the tribe (so he had come to call them) milled around the yard and in and out of the house. The slayer kid and her parents, Kay of the flying toothpicks, some doc from the emergency room who'd caught 'Loma's fancy. Nice lot, all of them.
He lit a cigarette contentedly and turned to look at Fred, seated beside him. The weeks here had been good for her. Innocence and joie de vivre were returning to her countenance, and the cerulean hue of her body continued to fade until only a few traces were left in her fingernails and along the edges of her forehead. Now she nursed her beer and stifled a tipsy laugh as Thu, with the oblivion typical of girls her age in the throes of a snit, expounded to an ever-patient Dilip, "...on the phone with my aunt from Cambodia, and when I hung up Shelley and Hayley were standing behind me with these big smirks and Shelley's all, 'What the hell kind of language was that?' and I said, 'It's Khmer, but I can translate into Twat so that you can understand.' God, she's such a bitch!"
Spike chuckled and flicked some ashes into the grass. "Havin' a good time?"
Fred smiled and nodded almost blissfully. A stray breeze caught some wisps of her hair and wafted them into a soft brown nimbus, and her face was pretty and flushed. Spike's thoughts began to drift.
Sort of girl you'd want to take to a hayloft. Air all warm from the sun, skin all warm...sink down into the hay with her where the little sunlight fingers can't reach you and drown yourself in her sweetne-
"THU! WATCH YOUR MOUTH! DO YOU THINK WE'RE RAISING YOU IN A SEWER?"
Fred rested her cheek against her hand and reaching up, slid her fingers through his hair. "'M glad you're lettin' the bleach grow out," she said languidly. "Looks nice. There's some curls at the back, too."
Someone turned on a CD player, and the rockabilly voice of Johnny Rivers twanged out into the night:
Long-Distance Information give me Memphis, Tennessee
Help me find the party that tried to get in touch with me
She could not leave a number but I know who placed the call
When she drew her hand back he almost caught her wrist to stop her; her fingers had felt maddeningly good on his scalp.
'Cause my uncle took a message and he wrote it on the wall.
Help me Information get in touch with my Marie...
Paloma took a seat opposite them and picked up a jar of green jalapeno pepper slices floating in liquid. "Oh, good, there's some left." She and Fred had been consuming the raw peppers enthusiastically all evening; the mere scent of them made Spike's eyes water.
"How the buggary bollocks can you two stand those things?" he shuddered.
"They're good. Clears your sinuses. Cleans your palate." Paloma popped one into her mouth.
"Yeah, well, I'm not tongue-kissin' either one of you."
"You big titty-baby. Jalapenos are a staple of Tex-Mex cuisine. Tastes so good it'll make you slap yer mama." Fred fished a slice out and waved it playfully in front of Spike's nose. "Just one bite. Come on, Skeeter."
Paloma burst into peals of raucous laughter. Her features shifted into their demon configurations, turning her own nose into two ovoid openings flat on the surface of her face. Spike stared at Fred with a mixture of shock and amusement.
"Did you just call me a mosquito?"
Fred began giggling uncontrollably. Spike turned to Paloma and snapped in mock irritation, "'N what're YOU laughin' at, Sheep-Sucker?"
Paloma cheerfully clacked her piranha teeth like windup chattery dentures and gave him the finger.
"Stoat," he replied.
"Sharpei."
"Jack-o'-lantern."
Paloma doubled over in another paroxysm of mirth and the mouthful of Coors she had been about to swallow shot out through her nostrils and sprayed her plate instead.
"GROSS!" Thu shrieked.
Fred smiled blearily. "I wanna stay here forever."
That's the third time now.
It was long past the hour that Fred was normally sound asleep, and this trotting back and forth to the bathroom was beginning to worry him. She'd been able to sleep through the night with fewer and fewer lights on - they were now down to the TV set, volume turned on low, and the bulb over the lavoratory. He'd offered once to take another cabin, thinking she might want some privacy. Her response had been an immediate "NO!", spoken almost in panic, followed by, "Unless you want to, I mean; of course it'd be understandable that you'd want your own place, you're used to having one, right? So either way's okay by me," while her eyes had begged him, Don't.
"No, 'course I don't mind sharing. Can't think of a nicer flatmate, and I get lonesome when I'm all by myself." He hadn't intended that last to come out; hadn't even consciously thought it 'til now, but it was true. He'd always liked people, craved company. Five years of existing between two worlds but being accepted by neither had pushed that longing to the farthest back corner of his mind, something he no longer expected or at times even thought he deserved, but still it was there.
The toilet flushed; the bathroom door opened and she was briefly silhouetted in its light: a slim figure clothed modestly in two-piece long-legged cotton pajamas. Then she was tiptoeing across the room and climbing back into her bed.
"Fred? You okay?"
"Yeah, sorry; I didn't mean to wake you up. Beer always makes me pee a lot."
She pulled the covers up to her chest and considered that statement. "I suppose there's ways I could have put that even more crudely."
Spike grinned at the ceiling. "Still feeling a bit soused, are we?"
"A little."
"'S okay; you're cute when you're drunk."
She giggled. "I guess that's better than hearing 'You're cute when I'm drunk'...You know, once when I was nine a friend and I snuck a beer out of a cooler in the back of her daddy's camper and tried to drink it. It'd been sitting in the sun all day and gotten skunky, and was the nastiest thing we'd ever tasted. I think we took about two swallows each and got sick at our stomachs."
"I used to steal into the butler's pantry to sample my mum's claret. Made me sick, too. 'N then they'd dose me with cod liver oil."
That produced another spasm of giggles. "At least...at least you didn't have drivers' licenses you borrowed from people who didn't look anything like you to try to get into clubs. There was this one called 'Tracey's'...it had the best live bands. Everyone wanted to go there."
"Scoobies used to hang out in a place like that," Spike said, almost to himself.
"Scoobies?"
"Buffy and her friends - Cordelia, Willow."
Fred couldn't help but laugh. "Is that what they called themselves?" When he failed to answer she added quietly, "You miss her a lot, don't you?"
"...Yes."
"Have you ever reconsidered about telling her you're alive?"
"Thought about it once or twice. Wouldn't be much point, though. She never loved me, I don't think...just a bit of affection, maybe, towards the end." There was no resentment in his voice; only sadness and resignation. "I made life too complicated for her. I was supposed to be her enemy. She didn't want anyone to know that we were..." What had they been? "Lovers" wasn't right, because the love had always been one-sided. "Intimate"?
"I tried to be what she wanted, did what she asked, and I screwed it up royally."
"And that's when you decided to get back your soul?"
"Yeah. Wasn't even sure that's what I was after at first. Just knew something had to change, 'n there was a fella in Africa knew how to do it. Had a good reputation for gettin' the job done, y'know."
They'd swapped insanity stories before, keeping each other company in her laboratory while she'd tried to figure out how to get his body back. She wasn't sure that he'd told her everything, but it'd been a relief to have someone to commiserate with.
"Once you'd - you know, pulled yourself together - did it make a difference?"
"Some. She said she didn't hate me anymore. And we stopped hitting each other."
Get a grip, Fred reminded herself, This is a slayer and a vampire he's talking about. Fist-fighting each other is a part of their physical and psychological makeup; it's normal to them. What a sad way to live, though. And Andrew said that Spike was helping them fight evil even before he got the soul. Why Willow didn't tell us about him is beyond me. Did they really think so little of him?
Suddenly she began to feel an irrational, growing anger
I WISH TO DO MORE VIOLENCE
(My god, she thought, startled, Where did that come from?) at this Buffy who seemed to rule all men's hearts but value none of them. I'm probably not being fair, she scolded herself.
"Maybe she didn't know how."
Spike turned his head and looked at her quizzically, and she continued: "To love, I mean. Not just you; anyone. Since she was fifteen years old she's been forced to be a killing machine. That's got to have taken a toll on her. And then she lost her mother, and she's still awfully young...maybe she loved you as much as she was able."
They were both quiet then, digesting that. And suddenly he was tired of trying to decipher the enigma that was Buffy. In this room she seemed to have no place, to be merely a large part of an exhausting, self-defeating mess that was now over.
"How'd you get to be so wise, Pet?" he asked the young woman in the bed beside his. He received no reply; her eyes had closed and she was softly snoring.
Author's Note: The lyrics "Long-Distance Information", etc., are from the song Memphis by Johnny Rivers, 1964.