She rested her head against the glass of the window. Not much was visible through it, since it was still dark outside, and the storm that had been delivering snow to Colorado had only rain to offer here in Nebraska, it seemed. Or maybe it was a different storm. Who cared? Who cared about anything? Not her.

Cars sometimes passed below her, on the left side of the bus. She would watch the red taillights move further up the highway, gradually leaving the bus behind, then eventually they would be beyond her sight. Before long another one would come by, and the routine would begin all over again.

What's she doing right now? she would wonder every few minutes. Is she still asleep? Did she wake up yet? Will she hate me? Will she cry? No, she wouldn't cry. No chance, not her. Would she throw an angry fit, tearing up the room and all the gifts she'd been given the night before? Yeah, that was more likely. And God help the poor hotel staff member that tried to stop her.

She felt a tear come to her own eye and blinked it away; she'd done too much crying already these last three months. That had been how she'd gotten herself into this mess, she realized now. After ten months of building up a big strong set of defenses--designed to protect not just herself, but everyone else, too--she had been lulled into letting them down. Another hard body, with soft breasts and a soft spirit wrapped around her hard exterior... What was the expression? 'Fool me once, shame on you; fool my twice, shame on me?' Yeah, totally applicable here. She'd gone looking to replace what she'd had and then lost, and ended up hurting not only herself--again--but an amazing woman who'd never tried to be anything but completely loving to her. An amazing and fragile woman, who now would probably never trust another human being in her life, even if that life lasted another hundred years.

You've had a hell of a year for yourself, haven't you, Dawn? In a thirteen-month span you've gotten the love of your life killed, then had to stake the vampire that was wearing her body around, and now you've likely emotionally-destroyed the woman who took you in when she had no reason to, opened herself up to you like she never had to anyone else before--and you know that much is true, even if she never said so--and gave you the most valuable thing she owned: her heart. So congratulations! I'd say it's Miller Time, wouldn't you?

"Yeah. Miller Time," she muttered, still watching the cars go by outside, noticing that the eastern sky up ahead was beginning to turn a mix of light-blue and orange.

"Did you say somethin', miss?" the guy in the seat next to her asked.

"Huh?" She turned to look at him, not realizing 'til now that she'd actually said that last part out loud. "Oh, uh, no. Nothing." She was about to turn back to her previous activity of observing traffic patterns; it was just the right degree of mindlessness, and left most of her brain free to slowly eat away at itself like some kind of bitter, corrosive acid.

He stopped her before she could fall back into the fog, however. "Look... are you okay?" he asked. "I been sittin' here beside you for a long string of miles now, and if you don't mind me sayin' so, you're not looking so well."

I just ripped out the heart of the woman who told me she loved me--probably the only time she's ever said that to anyone in her life--and danced a merry jig on it. How am I supposed to look? Happy? Satisfied? Aloud, she said, "No, I'm fine."

"Uh-huh." If Spike had said that, it would've been dripping with skepticism. But with this guy, his voice was dry, delivered in a flat Oklahoma drawl, betraying none of his interior emotions. She knew that the skepticism was in there, though. "That's why you're on a bus to Omaha on Christmas mornin', lookin' like you just lost your best friend. Because you're just hunky-dory."

"Yep. That's why. So why are you here?"

He pushed his baseball cap up a little higher on his well-lined, deeply-tanned face and smiled. "Got a rig waiting for me in Des Moines," he explained. "I drive." Dawn wasn't overly-surprised; he looked like every casting director's image of what your stereotypical American truckdriver oughta look like: thick brown mustache, three-days'-growth of beard, deep-set eyes and an old beat-up hat with a mesh back and the name of some company she'd never heard of on the front. He might've been thirty, or sixty, or any age in between.

"Oh." What else was there to say?

"I'm Axel," he said, and extended his hand to her.

She shook it. "'Axl?' Like the singer?"

He laughed. "No, 'Axel' like my kid sister couldn't pronounce 'Alex' 'til she was five. I been Axel ever since."

She said it again: "Oh."

He looked at her a little more closely. "Pardon me for sayin' so, but you look a little young to be rememberin' GNR. Wouldn't they be before your time?"

Her eyes suddenly dropped down to her lap. "I had a friend who was a fan," she said, her voice barely a whisper. She thought of Faith, and the way the lyrics to 'Sweet Child O' Mine' and 'November Rain' could reduce her to a soggy, sentimental mush ball. Had anyone else ever known that about her, or seen her as a mush ball? Dawn would be the existence of Planet Earth against it.

And of course, she thought back to that night around one of their innumerable campfires when Kait had played a slow, acoustic, countrified version of 'Sweet Child;' it wasn't until her time with Faith that she'd learned who had originally recorded it. "I had a couple of friends who were fans," she amended.

He stared at her for a long span of seconds. "And would I be way off-base in guessin' that one of those friends is the reason you're settin' here beside me right now?" he asked finally.

"Way off? No. But you'd be wrong. It's not one--it's both."

When she didn't say anything else for nearly a minute, he raised his eyebrows and looked at her expectantly. "And?"

She shook her head and turned her face back toward the window. "You don't want to hear my story."

"Now if that were true, I wouldn't have bothered to strike up this conversation in the first place, would I? It don't always help to get it out, but it damn sure ain't never hurt, neither."

A smile without any humor, and she reluctantly returned her attention to him. "And you're gonna sit there through the hours it'd take?"

He glanced down at his watch. "We're stuck in this steel beast for another five. Go ahead and tell it. If I get bored, I'll stop you."

Though she still looked a little unsure--of him, of herself, and of the universe in general--she gave in with a half-hearted shrug. "Alright then; you asked for it. Well, I guess it started almost five years ago, when my sister caught me playing with one of her broadswords..." she began.

//\\

"...And so I bought a ticket for the first bus that would get me out of Colorado, and here I am," she finished almost two hours later. "Suddenly the leading candidate for the Most Thoughtless, Uncaring Bitch of the Year Award. Yay me. And you wanna know the worst part, as if all of that wasn't bad enough? The worst part is that I don't even know what the worst part is. Was it running out on her, or lying to her in the goodbye note, or ever even looking her up to begin with?"

"What'd you lie about?"

"That the time I spent with her was the greatest of my life. It was great, and it was so... easy. We never fought, or argued, or had any kind of problems between the two of us at all. But it wasn't the same as what it'd been with Kait. Nothing could be better than the time I had with her, even with all the fights and issues we had along the way. Faith was just... the best available alternative. God, that sounds awful, doesn't it? Like I was using her. But that's what it was." A pause. "Or at least, that's what it started out as."

Axel pursed his lips thoughtfully and stared at a point on the seatback in front of Dawn, absorbing all of this. "Did you lie about lovin' Faith?"

"I could never love anyone like I loved Kait."

"Pretty sure that ain't what I asked."

She didn't respond for a long time. When she eventually did, she was forced to admit that, "No, it wasn't a lie. I loved her--I love her. Sure, somewhere inside me there'd always been this attraction to her, but then when I finally got the chance to be with her, to have her see me as a beautiful woman and not just the dumb kid she used to know... it was so much better than I'd ever dreamed it could be. But it was also... scary."

"How's that?"

"I got more than I expected. A lot more. I think I went into it looking for good times, great sex, and most importantly, someone to talk to about Kait. Someone who'd lived in that world and would know what it was like. I wasn't planning on falling in love again. For God's sake, this was Faith! The girl who'd made 'get some, get gone' a household phrase. Girls like that don't have serious relationships, and I'd pretty much decided that I was in that category now, too. Casual sex, a few laughs, and a shoulder to spend a few minutes crying on; that was all we should've expected from each other."

"But instead, you fell in love."

She sighed and looked out the window again. The sun had been up for well over an hour, and she could see the endless acres of flat farmland passing by, stretching out all the way to the horizon. "Yep. Pretty dumb, huh? You'd think I'd've learned better by now. Whenever I've loved someone in my life, someone's gotten hurt, either them or me. But I guess I've always been selfish, and probably always will be."

"Then why'd you leave this time?" he asked.

"Huh?"

"If you were selfish, and loved her, you would've stayed. But you said the reason you left was you were worried you'd get her killed, which sounds pretty durn unselfish to me, sacrificin' your happiness for her life. So which is it: selfish or un?"

"I... I don't know," she admitted after thinking it over for a few seconds. "It's complicated."

"No, it's not. It's real simple," he said, turning his head to face her for the first time since they began talking, ages ago. "Why don't you just admit the real reason you left?"

Dawn stared back at him coolly, feeling the onset of anger lurking not too far around the corner. "Why don't you tell me, since you obviously have an opinion."

"Guilt," Axel said simply.

Her anger moved closer. "No, that's not it at all. I told you: I'd already let Kait down, and I wasn't going to do the same to--"

"Which one of us are you lyin' to here?" he asked in a quiet, reasonable voice that blunted some of her rising temper. "Whatever went wrong with Kait, whether it was your fault or not--and I think you know, deep-down, that it wasn't--now you're just usin' that as an excuse to hold onto somethin' that don't exist no more. It's okay to let yourself be happy again, to love someone new. Doesn't mean you forget the person that came before, or stop lovin' them. Just means that you're strong enough not to let your own life end when hers did, and brave enough to move back into the land of the living. You and Faith might be different than you and Kait, but sounds to me like you and Faith had somethin' durn-near great, too, and if you're gonna chuck that just 'cause she ain't Kait... wellnow, that's bein' selfish.

"So seems to me like you got three options," he decided. "One, wait around for another Kait to come into your life, which'll never happen, and be miserable and alone for the rest of your days; two, call this girl who isn't Kait that you do love, try to patch it up, and be eternally thankful you've found two relationships in your life that great; or three, take the last step and just go ahead and end your life right here, 'cause if you ain't gonna call Faith, then you're sayin' that you'd rather cling to the dead than live for the expectations of findin' somethin' new and good. That ain't livin'--it's just walkin' around, usin' up valuable oxygen."

Dawn shifted absently in her seat and looked a bit closer at this stranger. "Who are you?" she asked softly. "I don't think you're just a truckdriver."

He tipped his hat back a little on his head, scratched the side of his face with one dirty hand, and stared back at her. Though he seemed to be wearing no expression whatsoever, she thought she could sense an amused smile hiding in there somewhere. "Yeah, well, I also drive trucks. Now would you call the girl?"

"But... what I did to her. You don't understand what she's like, how hard it is for her to trust people. After what I did, I don't even know if she'd ever... What if she won't take me back?"

"What if she will?"

A fierce inner-conflict raged within Dawn--for perhaps as long as three whole seconds. When it was over, she jumped to her feet in the center of the bus and exclaimed, "I need a phone! Please, can somebody lend me their phone?"

Nothing. All around her, people were pointedly looking elsewhere.

"Please, you don't know how important this is! I won't talk too long, I promise! Please!" she begged, and the desperation filling her voice didn't need to be faked.

Still nothing. Though she remained standing for nearly two more minutes, staring around at everyone in that part of the bus, no phones were offered. Feeling more despondent than ever, she slumped back into her seat. "You don't carry a cell?" she asked Axel, already knowing that if he did he would've offered it to her, but grabbing at any slim hope she could think of.

"Sorry." He shook his head sadly. "My boss has been after me to get one for a coupla years now, but I heard usin' those things gives you brain cancer, and I've always said it'll be a cold day in hell that you catch me with one. But we'll be in Omaha in three hours, and there'll be lots of payphones there. I bet you'll still be able to get ahold of her then."

"Yeah," she agreed gloomily. "Hope so."

//\\

Ninety minutes later, the bus began slowing down, and within a few moments had stopped completely. Dawn didn't need to look at a watch to know that they weren't in Omaha; out the window was nothing but highway and a barren landscape covered in a fine layer of light-brown plains grass. A look across the aisle and out the windows on the right side showed a small parking lot, with an even smaller roadside diner sitting in the middle of it.

"Sorry, folks," the busdriver's voice said, sounding hollow and tinny in the cheap speakers mounted throughout the vehicle. "Got some engine trouble, so I'm afraid we're gonna be here for awhile."

Dawn was the only one on the whole bus that didn't groan. This was her chance to make her phone call, and way earlier than she'd expected! She bounded up from her seat and was one of the first passengers out the doors.

The diner's only payphone was along one side of the building, next to the soda machine. When she saw someone else heading that way, too, dignity went out the window and she sprinted for the phone, not knowing if maybe the other person just wanted a Pepsi or not, and unwilling to take any chances. She actually had the receiver in one hand and a fistful of quarters in the other before finally glancing up and noticing the paper taped over the coin slot:

"Shit!" she roared, and slammed the thing back into its cradle nearly hard enough to put it even further out of order. But she wasn't sunk yet--there was one more thing she could try.

//\\

"Can I please use your phone? It's really, really important, and the payphone outside doesn't work."

The woman behind the counter gazed across at Dawn with absolutely zero emotion in her gray, watery eyes. She looked like she'd been there since the days when the patrons had arrived by stagecoach and the only messenger service had been the Pony Express. "Don't talk too long," she instructed, and pulled a phone out from somewhere and placed it on the formica surface between them.

"No, I won't. I swear," Dawn assured her, and started to punch in the numbers that would connect her to the Denver Hyatt Regency.

She was only half-done when a craggy, wrinkled, leathery finger slammed down on one of the hooks and cut the connection. "That long-distance?" the waitress asked.

"Yeah, but it's--"

"Forget it." She grabbed the receiver from Dawn's hand, and before she really knew what had happened, the phone was gone from sight. "Ain't havin' no long-distance calls."

"Please, you don't know how important this is!" she implored. "I have to make this call, or it's gonna ruin--"

"I don't need your sob-story, girlie, 'cause I got three-dozen of my own. Now, you want something to eat or what?"

"I'll pay for it," she offered as a sudden burst of inspiration struck. "How much?" She pulled a large wad of bills out of her pocket, the two-thousand dollars she'd taken of the nearly eleven-thou she and Faith had had in the bank. She'd already begun counting out twenty-dollar bills when a strong, harsh hand clamped over her wrist. Dawn looked up in surprise to see that it belonged to the ancient waitress, who had a much stronger grip than one would suspect.

"I don't know where you got all that money, little miss, and I'm sure I don't want to. But I think you oughta leave now."

What was she talking--? Oh. Oh! "I didn't steal this!" she protested, loudly enough to cause the heads of nearly everyone in the place to turn and stare at her.

"So you say. Now I'm not going to ask you again--leave, or else I call the sheriff."

Was there fire coming out of her nostrils? No? Well, there was smoking curling up out of her ears, at least, right? Dawn couldn't remember the last time she'd been so mad, and her face felt like the skin temperature had just been ramped up to about three-hundred degrees. After giving the witch one last, glowering look that might've sent some people fleeing in terror, she turned and stalked out, slamming the door loudly behind her. What did she do now?

Losing Faith because the slayer refused to take her back, because she wouldn't trust her anymore... Dawn could've handled that. She'd screwed up on a monumental scale by leaving that morning, and she was willing to accept the awful consequences if that was what prevented them from reconciling. But if the two of them were ended because she couldn't make a damn phone call...!

She stomped back up onto the bus, dropped into her seat in a partly-furious/partly-despairing huff, and waited for the thing to get fixed.

//\\

Ten o'clock came and went. Then eleven. Then noon. One o'clock... two o'clock... three. With every minute that ticked by, Dawn got madder... and sadder. It wasn't going to happen. All this time passing... there was no way Faith was still going to be there when she eventually got to a working phone. Not a shot in hell.

At long last, just past four-thirty, the engine rumbled back to life, and the bus was back on the interstate soon after.

//\\

When they finally pulled into the large station in Omaha an hour after sunset, Dawn was the very first one standing at the doors, ready to depart. She'd already said goodbye to Axel, and thanked him for listening and for his help, and now she had to see if that advice would pay off, or if it was already too late.

//\\

He watched her racing to one of the unoccupied phones among the long, lighted bank of them lined up against one of the station's exterior walls, and followed after her, though with a far more placid gait.

After selecting one quite a distance away from her, he commenced plugging quarters into the slot, one after another after another--this particular call was really long-distance. The string of numbers he entered was three-times longer than the one Dawn was punching in at that very same moment.

It rang three times at the other end, and then was picked up.

"Okay, it's done," Axel said without waiting for a greeting. "We had some engine and phone trouble, so I don't know if it's too late or not, but she's makin' the call now. So, you wanted a wrench thrown in the holier-thans' gears, hopefully you got it; I did my best, anyway. Now, you got a new job for me?"

//\\