Disclaimer: I don't own Angel. Please don't sue me.

Author's Note: Thanks to YOUPIN, a.a.k.88, speaker4thsilent, justawritier, -J, and wesleyssilverphoenix for the kind reviews. As I've said before, I'm having serious issues with my memory (the kind in my head, not in my computer), so it's been slow-going getting this stuff churned out since I keep having to go back and reread what's been written previously.

WARNING: This chapter's a little more sexually mature in content than the previous ones, but nothing too wild.

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Gunn: "Maybe this isn't our night."

Gwen: "Then we make it our night." –from "Players"

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The water beat down on the top of his head. Carefully, he scrubbed at the old blood dried on his abdomen. A man wasn't supposed to be wearing this much of it on the outside and still be alive. It just didn't happen. The water lifted the brown stuff, turning it pink and sent it running in rivulets down his dark body. It mixed around his feet before swirling down the bathtub's drain. It had to be caked on two inches thick in some places. The thought of it sent a little shiver down his spine. He'd been dead. For more than forty-eight hours, he'd been dead as a doornail, lying on the lobby floor waiting for a certain thief to jet herself in from the Orient to revive him.

Blood gone, he got his first good look at his stomach and found it surprisingly scar-free. Illyria had done a damn good job of closing up the wounds left by the senator and her minion vamps. He leaned down, his eyes half-crossing, as he inspected along his hip. Gunn sighed a breath of relief as he found the narrow cobweb of scars on the underside of his hipbone. That'd come from being pitched through a chain link fence by a vamp back in the day before he'd met Angel. If that'd been missing, he wasn't sure if he'd be so sure that this was his body. Weird, he knew, but stranger things had happened to him. "Guess it's still me," he muttered, picking the wash rag back up and continuing the scrubbing.

The hotel's ancient water heater gave out after about an hour. By that point, the bathroom was full of steam, making him feel light-headed. He quickly rinsed off the last of the soap and watched it disappear in runny white bubbles down the drain. No pink. Thank God.

Shoving the shower curtain aside, he stepped out of the tub and started toweling off. The water pooled around his feet on the bare tile, warm and clammy with steam beneath his toes. Every little sensation seemed so much sharper, so much more real since he'd come to downstairs. The soft, stiff fibers of the new bath towel on his skin, his toe where he'd stubbed it trying to get up the stairs to his old room—everything. He'd never felt this alive before. Major contrast to the cloud of numbness he'd spent about the past year stumbling around in.

"One of those big, juicy bacon burgers from Ramone's," he said to his steamed over reflection in the mirror on the front of the medicine cabinet. "Gonna get me one of those and then I'm gonna go see if there're any vamps lurking around. Haven't been on a real hunt in, what? A year? Damn, boy, I'm gonna be rusty as hell." He smiled, and the reflection in the mirror smiled back. For the recently dead, he wasn't looking half bad…and he felt like he could take on the entire world.

Wrapping the towel around his hips, he opened the door leading into his old room. Cordy was back to her old tricks, snitching a credit card (though, apparently, it was English's since Angel's had all been Wolfram & Hart accounts and were now frozen) and buying clothes, including some for him. Girl didn't have bad taste, though there was one white paisley shirt that he was a little uncertain about…

Gwen was in his room, he realized immediately, seated on the edge of the bed, one ankle propped on her opposing knee, acting like she owned the place. The red leather jacket she'd been wearing downstairs—the one with all the zippers—was lying next to her, leaving her all in skin-hugging black: jeans, tank top with those little noodly-looking straps, and, of course, her gloves. Her eyes were roaming over him, making his neck do the prickling thing again. His eyes made their own little inspection, noting the band of white skin where her shirt had drifted up a bit from the waistband of her jeans. His attention fell on a velvet box the size of his hand resting next to her thigh on the bed.

He took the three steps from the door of the bathroom to the bed and picked the box up. It looked like something you'd get at the jeweler's. "This LISA?" he asked. She nodded. Getting it open with only one hand (the other holding up his towel) wasn't easy, but he managed despite the heavy hinge. Inside, resting on a little pillow of matching black velvet, was a small silver microchip about the size of PS2 memory card. "I thought you'd be wearing this," he said, looking from it to her.

Gwen smiled and took it back away from him. "I like to save it for special occasions. It's just a prototype, after all. Besides…sometimes I like being sparky. Comes in handy from time to time." The look she gave him was one hundred-proof tease.

He chuckled, snapping the box shut with an audible clap. "Yeah, it does." Gunn looked down at his chest. There were two overlapping hand-shaped burns right over his heart. Not the first time he'd sported her marks. At least this time, she wasn't the one who'd put him in the situation where they were required. "I guess I owe you."

"Big time," she agreed. She scooted back on the bed, folding her legs up in front of her, and patted the spot she'd just abandoned. "I was in Taiwan, you know, when I suddenly got the urge to snag a plane out here. Couldn't explain it—just woke up one morning and felt like I had to come to this place. Guess your goddess put some kind of magical compulsion on me."

Goddess—she meant Illyria. Gunn hadn't seen her, though Angel assured him that she was in the hotel, somewhere. Hadn't been feeling too social since she'd resurrected them, apparently.

He shook his head, shaking off that train of thought. "So, yeah, I owe you big time. Maybe I'd better start carrying a card in my wallet says to call you if my heart ever stops or my soul gets separated from the rest of me." He sat down on the edge of the bed, making the old, squishy mattress bounce under his weight. "So, what can I do to make up for all the trouble I caused you?"

Gwen tucked a curl behind her ear. "It really wasn't that much trouble—just one hell of a plane trip." She turned LISA's box over and over in her hands.

"Oh, come on, there's got to be something," he prodded. "I know a place that makes one hell of a hamburger or if you wanted to see something more entertaining then an in-flight movie, there's a vampire movie that's supposed to be out by now that I wanted to see—it's got Kate Beckinsale…"

With one serpentine movement, she was in his lap, careful of her bare upper arms and shoulders, as she placed her gloved hands on either side of his face, then began to gently move them down his shoulders. She traced a finger along a small puckered scar next to his collar bone. "Piece of vampire stake," she said, favoring him with a roguish smile. Her hand snaked down his side to his hip, right above the towel where the flesh was pinkish and bumpy from a badly healed burn. "Burn marks—from your trip to Encino."

"You remembered."

"I'm a thief, Charles; it's my job to remember the details." Her breath whispered across his face—smelled like spearmint gum. Gunn was suddenly very aware of just how close she was and just how little he was wearing. She shifted her weight forward onto her knees, still straddling him, her breasts safe behind the shirt brushing against his chest. One gloved hand reached back behind her, gently tugging the bottom of his towel up his legs. "And if I'm remembering right, then you've got a big old scar…"

Gunn's hand shot out, catching her elbow. "Gwen, I'm not sure…"

"Denzel, you've gotten exactly thirty seconds to chip me or I'm going to kiss you, LISA or no," she informed him, her voice throaty. Her blue-green eyes were darker than he remembered them.

He rolled her off his lap and onto her back on the bed, her long legs hanging off. The towel slipped dangerously, and he saw her eyes travel down to it. "Demanding, aren't you?"

Pushing with her feet, she shoved herself up onto the bed and rolled, stretching. Lean muscles moved beneath the thin black cloth of her clothes. She reminded him, not for the first time, of a tigress. Gunn retrieved the LISA box from where it had fallen to the floor and opened it. The chip felt so small, so fragile in between his large fingers. Hard to imagine such an itty-bitty thing could contain her electric powers.

Pinching the cloth of her shirt beneath his fingers, he lifted it up just enough to expose the creamy flesh of her lower back. Careful not to touch her skin with his fingertips, he set the thin device right above her spine, copper prongs down. For a moment, one of the little electrodes flashed, and then silvery tentacles crawled out of the sides of the chip and burrowed into the skin on either side. He watched the tentacles move beneath the surface in geometric patterns until another electrode flashed, and they settled in.

"Did it work?" she asked, looking back over her shoulder at him. For the first time since he came out of the bathroom, he heard something other than cocky playfulness in her voice. If he wasn't mistaken, she sounded a little bit…nervous.

Tentatively, he touched his fingertips to her back…and let out the breath he hadn't realize he'd been holding. "Yeah," he assured her, "No shock." His hand ran up her back, under the flimsy tank top. She shivered in response. Gently, he planted a kiss on her spine, right above LISA.

As he raised his head, she rolled back over so she was looking up at him. Reaching up with her black-gloved hands, she drew his face down again, this time to hers, and their lips met, delicately.

"Gunn," she said, pulling away, "I'm not going to break."

He laughed. "Yeah, well, just-dead, cut me some slack." His lips were still tingling from that small kiss.

She laughed as well, mirth in her eyes. "All right, I'll take it slow, just for you," Gwen promised. She reached down and yanked his towel away.

"Slow my ass," he had time to mutter before she pulled him down on top of her.