"I mean," Buffy went on, "I only came to see you—"

"To tell me face to face not to see you face to face," Angel finished for her. He nodded, and began to walk again.

She walked too, looking up at him. She was smiling a little, a tiny, suppressed smile, the one that was always determined to shed a little light on all his dark places, even when she was in darkness too. "There's a fly in that logic ointment, somewhere," she said, her voice gently teasing.

He looked down at her, and found himself almost smiling back. "There always is, in your logic," he said, his voice a little too warm. He should have known. He'd learned about that smile long ago. Acknowledging it meant he was going to smile too, and then he was going to say something affectionate, and then they were going to end up having another heart-breaking sewer talk. That would make this the second in one trip.

"My logic?" Buffy squeaked, feigning offense. "You're the one who said . . . oh. I gotcha. I'm the one who said it, aren't I?" Suppressed-tiny-smile again, bigger this time.

Angel looked away. "Yes."

"It's no fun," she said. "Me being predictable."

"You aren't," he said, an immediately slammed his teeth together. Why did she have to make it so easy to love her?

"That's good," she said, satisfied, nodding. They kept walking, Buffy scudding her shoes. She put her hands in her pockets. She'd changed once again into the he-remembered-ripping-it-off-her outfit. He liked anything that Buffy wore—especially when it was red—but he was a very sense-oriented being, and not just because he was a vampire. He noticed the way clothes looked on people, the way they draped, the way the colors fit or didn't fit. Most of all, he was tactile, he noticed the way fabric felt, and it was important to him, in an unconscious area of his brain. And there were so many sense-memories tied into what she was wearing now that it was driving all those senses crazy.

He hadn't known before that he worked that way, that just what she wore could do this to him. He'd known red turned him on, and that he liked it when her legs showed, and liked it even more when her neck was covered—because that part was private; that part was personal; that part was his—but he hadn't known that memory could be imbued in fabrics like this, that he would look at her and remember . . .

I'll never forget . . .

Maybe it was hereditary. In his genes. His father had been silk merchant—He didn't know. He didn't think about his father and he didn't consciously dwell on what people wore. But with Buffy, unused corners of his brain put her in different colors for different moods, different fabrics for different times. If she had worn that sexy tan little camisole she'd worn in the rain that day—their first time—their only time, he reminded himself—if she'd worn that again—

He would have raped her.

Angel wished there was a physical way to manifest the pain of that thought. He desperately wanted to want to throw up. Instead all he could do was swallow a mad laugh, and repress the imagined images flooding him of him raping her after all.

"So," Buffy said again into the darkness. "Was I good?"

A sound, very much like the whine of a wounded animal, almost escaped him, but Angel jerked himself into the present and swallowed it.

"Angel?" she asked. "You okay?"

"Yeah," he answered flatly. "Do you get the feeling that something's following us?"

Buffy kept walking, but the rest of her went still, listening. "No," she said, after several moments. "Should I?"

"I don't know," Angel said. "We should keep our eyes open."

It wasn't as if he had never considered raping her before. His wildness after his return from Hell—especially after he'd remembered how to speak again and had said Buffy's name—had owed something to what it felt like to lose his soul and fear of what had happened. He hadn't done it—but it didn't mean he hadn't wanted to.

He liked rape. He liked innocent young girls best, but women did the trick too, and boys, and men. Animals, not so much, but corpses could be fun if there was an innocent relation nearby to watch the gruesome violation of the dead body of someone she had loved. Yes, he liked it well enough, but rape was—well, blasé. It was coarse, rather vulgar; taken by itself, there wasn't anything artistic about it, nothing unpredictable, nothing that really sang creativity.

What he had done to souls like Drusilla were far more pleasing. It was only toward the end, only a few weeks before he'd turned her, that he'd raped her. For all intents and purposes, he'd been inside her months before he'd ever touched her. The rape itself—or rapes, he guessed—had only been one long, sweet climax to a year-long foreplay. When he finally took her, he'd had her so twisted he'd convinced her he was alternately Lucifer, Gabriel, Jesus, Joseph, and the Holy Ghost violating her, and it had been so much fun to let her think sometimes that she was the Virgin Mother Mary, even while he took her. He'd twisted her enough so that she almost believed it—at the same time believing she was the Devil's bride and child.

That was what he had wanted to do with Buffy—except for the Christian part, because that wasn't the way to get inside her. The way to get inside her was through the man she loved—and fuck, but Angel had learned that, hadn't he? She'd been a virgin, but she'd had muscles he'd never even—

Wearily, Angel pushed the thoughts away. No, it wasn't as if he had never considered raping Buffy, but just thinking about it brought a darkness roaring within him, and rest of him revolting, because the tiny, scared little voice at the root of him told him that the reason he could have wanted it when he hadn't had a soul was because that darkness was already within his human soul, even before he was turned. He was just a man—one man, who wanted to see the woman he loved more than anything face down, legs spread, hating him while he violated her until she bled and then again until she could bleed no more.

"Did I do a good job explaining why it wasn't so good for you to come to my—to Sunnydale?" Buffy asked, startling Angel so much he almost flinched. This, he guessed, was what she had been asking when she'd asked whether she had been good. Her voice dropped a little, chagrined. "The way you told Cordelia—about how this wasn't about who's town was who's . . ." She glanced up at him and shrugged, her nose scrunching. "You sounded a little ticked. Since the general plan was to strut into your office and tell you to stay out of my town I wondered whether I . . . did that."

"Sort of," Angel said.

"I didn't mean to peeve you," she said softly.

"You didn't," Angel replied, peering down at her. "You were . . . very mature. Wise."

"I was wise?" Buffy seemed to perk up a little. "Really? What did I say?"

It pleased him that he could be walking beside her thinking about what it would be like to rape her and she could just walk there, trusting him completely, golden-haired and beautiful and—and cute. That was one of the things he liked about Buffy; she was just—cute. There was no other word for it. They could banter and tease and so much of the time, when he was with her, he could forget that he secretly wanted to do terrible things to her. "You said it, wise one," Angel said, smirking down at her. "Shouldn't you know?"

"Oh come on," she said, giggling. "This isn't fair. You know stuff I did that I don't know about."

He knew plenty of stuff she'd done that she didn't know about, Angel realized suddenly. She'd licked ice cream off of him and watched the sun set with him and come panting his name about six or seven times. Angel swallowed thickly and looked away. "You said when I was near you you felt it. And it threw you."

"Oh." Her voice was small, and the laughter was gone.

Angel looked around the dark sewer, memories of the day and dark desires he didn't want to face boiling to the surface. "Perfect reason for me to stay away," he informed her, voice low.

Another good reason to stay away was that a tiny part of him that was still running over scenarios of how he might have raped her, of all those missed chances, of how he would make sure to do it if he ever got free again. Angel had never told her that a large part of the reason he had left was because when she was near him, the curse that held his soul in place would be threatened whether she was willing or not.

Add to that the fact that if he could get away, be someone without her—though he hadn't been anyone, until he'd first seen her—maybe he could discover enough of himself to learn how to live in peace with himself. No matter how much older or more experienced he was, when Buffy was near him, he leaned on her. He expected things to be alright, because she was there. He didn't bother with introspection, with looking inside himself, with building himself up, because his better half was there. He lived for her, when he was with her. One day, though, that could crack him just as easily as perfect happiness had, and Buffy would learn that she had only fallen in love with half a man, that he was nothing without her, had been nothing. He'd needed the time, the space, to fight his inner demons—and yes, there was more than just the big one—on his own, and leaving Buffy had a lot to do with that.

Why then was he doomed to repeat the day she had come into his life again to tell him to stay out of her life? Why then did he have to remember how much he loved her every time he looked at her? Why did he have to remember, when no one else did? And why did he have to be the one to push her away, every time?

When would it be over?

When they got back, Buffy called Giles. She claimed that if there was anything "apocalypsey" going on, she should stick around, but otherwise, she planned to spend the rest of the day and night with her dad.

Giles was of no more help today than he had been on the previous iteration of today. He did remark that it was very possible the repeating day could have nothing to do with the Powers folding time at all, but he could not fathom anything else with enough power or motives who could be doing it. He was intrigued by the idea that Angel's memories could have been created, but he remained uncertain on that front, too. He said he would look into it and call Angel tomorrow. Which wouldn't really help, because Angel had been deficient in the tomorrow department recently.

Angel had Giles tell him which volumes he was going to check through, so that if Angel repeated the day again, the latter could tell the former what Giles had already researched. At least then Giles could continue reading from where he left off, instead of going over the same books over and over again.

Meanwhile, the Angel Investigation crew tried to do some more research on their own, but they didn't scare up much. Angel planned to read on into morning, wondering what would happen when the next day started. Of course, he didn't think that sleep deprivation would be enough to keep time from turning back, but it was worth a shot. Before she and Doyle left for their date (to which Cordelia had finally consented, it seemed), Cordelia suggested Angel change something by his bed so he would know first thing in the morning whether tomorrow had come or not.

"Buffy and Willow were in my bed last night," Angel had said. "They weren't this morning. It was easy enough to tell."

"Hold up there, man," Doyle said. "You're telling me you had a Slayer and—"

"Angel!" Cordelia exclaimed sharply. "What about your curse?"

Angel rolled his eyes. "I wasn't in bed with them."

"But you had two girls in bed with each other," Doyle confirmed. "Was Velma gay?" he asked, turning to Cordelia. "'Cause I don't remember Velma—"

"Willow is not gay," Cordelia announced, aggravated. And then, because of the quirk on Angel's lips when she said it, she whirled on the vampire with an incredulous expression. "Is she?"

"I wouldn't be surprised," Angel replied. He waved a hand non-committally and turned away. "I'll lay my shirt on the chair beside my bed. If it's not there in the morning, I'll know it's still today."

"Got that, Cordy?" Doyle had asked, chuckling. "No shirt stealing."

"I don't get it," Cordelia replied, nose wrinkling. "Why would Willow be gay?"

"Good night," Angel had said, turning the lights off on the couple and walking down the stairs.

"I mean, she can't go around kissing my boyfriend and then turn out to be gay. Not that Xander was every my . . . Gay? My loser not-boyfriend got stolen by a not-guy-liking lesbian? Is she really gay? What does that say about me?"

To Be Continued . . .
Disclaimer: Lines stolen from AtS 1.8 "I Will Remember You."