Both were so wrapped up in their overwhelming emotions that they failed to notice the obviously recently-sexed man who had written down every word of their conversation. His curly hair mussed, his fingers nimbly recording the words in his Blackberry, the man appeared about to dance a gleeful jig at any moment.
He danced the jig very quickly, and went back to his note-taking.
“My darling, sweetling, LifeMate,” Jim murmured to Blair as they hid together behind the potted plant after Blair had completed the highland dance maneuver.
“Hey, glad to have you all chatty after the sex,” Blair said, “but pack it square while I figure out the mystery that is that raven-haired beauty currently getting the keys to the second-most ornate penthouse in this fine hotel.”
The two of them were so busy spying on Xander and the clerk that they completely missed the loud PING that announced the arrival of the express elevator, the one that went directly from the penthouse floor to the lobby. But every other person’s gaze in the lobby turned to watch as the doors ever so slowly slid open, about to reveal what would surely be someone who embodied the very principles of prOn, sex-on-a-stick, mind-melting hotness and soulful, tortured eyes to boot.
The people in the lobby had incredibly overactive imaginations.
Jim, of course, would have easily heard the PING of the elevator, but he had zoned on the conveniently placed strip of his Guide’s back, peeking out from under his rucked-up, rumpled, and equally well-sexed tee-shirt, which had not even been removed for round one, such was the need for Jim to taste his beloved. Or so he had said.
So beautiful, that creamy skin, with the barest hint of a Jim-finger-shaped bruise forming from where the Sentinel had claimed him, roughly, but no rougher than his Shaman could bear, of course. For it was simply not in the Blessed Protector to hurt his Teaching fellow/Partner-in-every-sense/Little Guppy.
Blair, noticing Jim deep in the thrall of a zone, quickly maneuvered to bring Jim out of it by crooning softly, and placing his hands on socially acceptable places along Jim’s body, and therefore missed the startled gasp of the sable-haired stripper.
Spike, for his part, drawing the narrative attention back to the focal point of this missive, froze in his place inside the elevator, but recovered in time to punch the ‘door open’ button when the elevator began to steal the sight of his precious, his one and only, his . . .
Rosebud.
No, his . . . his Xander.
Xander spun on his heel, quickly sprinting from the lobby, away from his heart’s true desire.
With a roar of long-pent-up emotion, Spike’s features shifted quickly and he took off quickly after the boy -- his boy!
Bumping into the Sentinel and Guide pair on his way past, Spike caught their attention.
“Well, fuck me sideways, Jim.”
“Okay!” Jim quickly interrupted, only to be forestalled by Blair’s hand gently placed on his arm.
“They weren’t Sentinel and guide after all! They were just a vampire and his once bitten, twice shy lover. After all those notes, not even a dissertation to come out of it!”
“Well, that’s good, Chief. At least now it can’t get leaked to the press, causing us to fight and you to denounce your life’s ambition, only to have Simon pull some strings and get you into the Academy.”
Jim and Blair broke out into wide grins before succumbing to hysterical laughter. “Yeah, right, Jim. As if that would happen! Now, let’s go work on figuring out your little vocabulary problem, man. I want you to find your dials, okay, man? Find your dials,” Blair’s voice dropped into Guide range.
“Got ‘em,” Jim said.
“Alright, Jim, focus on your Shakespearean Harlequin Novel Language dial, and wrench that bad boy all the way down to zero, man.”
With that, Jim regained his stoicism, and he and Blair went back to their suite, content to focus on the rest of the conference, and much fucking of the sideways persuasion.
Spike, once again drawing the action back from plot B, chased after Xander, through the hotel’s four-star kitchen, and out into the alley. Looking first one way, then another, Spike saw only dimly lit pavement, dumpsters, alcoves, and various other places for a human being to hide.
“Bloody hell!” he exclaimed, turning his broken-hearted, soulless, chipped self back to the door, heading back inside, certain that he’d never be able to survive losing his soulless-mate not once, but twice.
*****
“Nooooooooo . . . “ Xander shrieked suddenly as he saw his best friend and his dearest darling begin to turn away from him. He coughed in the middle of his exclamation, cleared his throat, and then continued weakly, “ooooooooooooo . . . ..”
Spike whirled around, a spray of garbage flying in his wake, his sharp features lit up like a Christmas tree by the light of the moon. He struck a sultry pose, quirked his scarred eyebrow, and clasped at his unbeating heart at the sight of his fuckworthy lover of yore.
“No, Spike,” Xander cried, clambering out of the dumpster that had been filled with richly-woven tapestries, plush divans, and a lone comfy chair. “No, please . . . I . . . “
They locked eyes, both moving forward propelled as if by forces of magnetic attraction . . . Spike reached for Xander, and in that single moment Xander felt all the sadness and incompleteness and enforced celibacy of that past year sloughed off of him like so much dead skin under the ministrations of a very competent aesthetician.
Xander’s lips parted, his head tilted back, his knees stooped so that Spike could more easily reach his lips and dominate him (hello! bottom here!) . . . but just as Spike’s lips brushed his he drew back with such force that he hit his head on the dumpster.
“Ow,” Xander complained, rubbing at the bump that his panicked withdrawal had occasioned. At Spike’s inquiring look, he held up his hand, wanting and yearning and needing to ward off the inevitable, but unable to stop the train-wreck of a question that was hurtling out of his mouth at a speed that wouldn’t break the sound barrier, but would nonetheless make a normal man very, very dizzy.
“Um. What the hell were you going to tell me that night, anyway?” Xander opened his liquid brown orbs wide wide wide -- wide enough to swallow the night that surrounded them both.
Then he blinked, because, you know, it’d be weird if he didn’t. Plus it would hurt. Dry eyes and all that.
Spike brought his hand up to caress the bump rising on Xander’s head, and as his fingers slowly sank into the silken threads, sense memory cast him back . . .
back through the past year . . .
back . . .
back . . .
back to a cold winter night years ago . . .
no, that was too far.
Back a year ago, to Xander’s warm body under his own, sweaty, voice hoarse from screaming his passion into Spike’s mouth, his wrists limp and his loafers lightened, his fashion sense improving as Spike prepared to take his virginity.
Spike’s memory was dampened by a sharp noise. “Oh, god, Jim!”
“Gee, that really is annoying when you’re not getting any, huh?” Xander wondered absently, casting a perturbed glance up toward the illuminated window where the silhouette of two beautiful men could be seen in various and sundry and sideways positions.
Xander nuzzled his head into Spike’s palm, but not the bruised part, because, ow. He hadn’t been knocked on the noggin like that since leaving Sunnydale. It wasn’t a habit he wanted to pick up again, but if it brought Spike back into his life, he’d beat himself silly on dumpsters for hours at a time. Or until he passed out. No problem.
“Where was I?” Spike asked.
“I’m not sure. You got a kind of glazed look. Were you maybe,” Xander shrugged, nibbling his bottom lip in an unconscious imitation of that night Spike had been remembering so well, “thinking back on that night? The one I just asked you about?”
“Yes. Yes, Xander, I wanted so badly to tell you. You see, I . . . It’s like this, see . . . I love . . . you.”
“That was what you were going to say that night?” Xander’s voice shook with emotion, and his body trembled with anticipation while his lip quivered (as it so often did). “That was what made me think that all of our steamy, hard and dirty yet meaningful lovemaking was all a game to you? What made me flee our mating bed and come to this godforsaken yet friendly city where I’ve become a renowned stripper as well as the most highly rated bartender in the *Zagat’s Portland Nightlife* guide?”
“Well, yeah,” Spike said uncomfortably. He hoped they could get through this talking part quickly, because right now he wanted nothing more than to clasp Xander to him and deftly undo his pants so that they could celebrate their reunion with some good old-fashioned manpire-boy nookie.
All of Xander’s long-harbored feelings of love, devotion, confusion, mild irritation, and general horniness rushed to the surface like many bats coming out of many hell dimensions in one fell swoop.
“You were scared, weren’t you Spike?” he asked softly as he advanced on his love, beginning to undo his buttoned shirt in a languid series of moves that he’d picked up during his many acclaimed strip performances.
“You worried what Buffy would say . . . what Willow would do . . . how Giles would look . . . But most of all, you thought that I’d reject you, didn’t you?” Xander watched Spike with love burning in his eyes as he did a shimmy and a bump before shrugging off his shirt.
“I . . . yes,” Spike admitted, despite thinking no such thing. He’d mostly just been cut off by Xander’s adorably abundant babbling, and had been surprised into silence by Xander’s hasty yet sexy departure from the basement. But he wasn’t about to admit all that, at least not while Xander had taken off his shirt to reveal his gleaming golden chest, glinting warmly in the alley that was the backdrop to their unexpected tryst.
“Spike, I . . . “ Xander cast his long lashes down shyly as he undid his pants with a practiced move and twisted his muscular body to its best advantage. “I love you too,” he admitted softly, letting his pants fall to the ground.
From high above them, again, came an “Oh, god, Jim!”
But Spike ignored the happily rutting couple, too intent on reducing his own state of dress to match that of his adorably denuded, insecure lover to bother with yelling at the noisy men.
“Oh, god, Spike!” Xander whispered. “Take me! Take me, now, make me yours! Mark me, claim me, fuck me!”
Before Xander could so much as nibble his lip and cast his eyes down shyly, Spike had gathered him in his arms, and rushed him at vampiric speed down the block, through the sumptuous lobby, into the well-appointed express elevator, up to the penthouse suite floor, past the entryway to his private quarters, and on to the decadently comfortable and tastefully appointed bed.
Xander lay panting on the bed where Spike had carefully tossed him. “I think my ears popped,” he observed.
“Vampiric speed can do that to a man, pet,” Spike assured him as he deftly flipped on the switch on the ingenuous gadget on the night table so that it could heat the lube.
“Oooh,” Xander exclaimed incoherently, as Spike drew the curtains around their king-and-a-half-sized bed of love then struck a saucy pose on the velvet coverlet before crawling up Xander with feline slinkiness.
“But that isn’t nearly so discombobulating,” Spike purred as he quickly handcuffed Xander to the bed’s headboard, “as the shockingly rapid recovery time for vampiric bits and pieces.”
“I would have been used to it by now,” Xander noted tearfully, “if only I hadn’t run away, afraid that you didn’t love me . . . and just maybe, a little afraid that you did.”
“Oh, Xander,” Spike said feelingly. Then he cleared his throat. “Um, we are going to fuck, aren’t we?”
Xander snorted. “Duh!”
“Well then,” Spike said, grabbing the lube and liberally coating his hands, cock, fingertips, and elbows just for good measure, “let’s get started!”
Five and a half hours later . . .
Xander’s hair spread out across the pillow like a fan made of the finest dark chocolate, scattered with highlights of raspberry-flavored truffle filling. Boneless and debauched, his golden body draped over the bed, Spike watched him sleep, running the thought through his head one more time in a confusion of pronouns.
This is why I stayed with women for so long, he thought. Too confusing, with all the hes and hises. But, oh, if only I had known!
He felt little Spike stir with renewed interest for the nineteenth time. To be fair, he chided his inner narrator, it is not little. It’s quite large, proportionately. And Xander will attest to that fact, as soon as he regains consciousness.
His inner narrator quickly agreed, and continued on, her gaze lingering in a most inappropriate manner. Spike’s enormous throbbing cock began to stir, but Spike quickly clamped down on his urges. He had been a bit concerned when the boy’s -- no, man, must remember he’s a man now, fully legal in all fifty states -- pleasureful screaming abruptly cut off and his toffee-colored eyes had rolled back in his head, his body going limp after shooting copious amount of the most delicious fluid Spike had ever tasted.
Reaching across the bed, Spike picked up the bright pink princess phone and dialed.
“Hello, room service? Please send up the Just Got Laid Platter. Yes, the brunet version. Chocolate, toffee, coffee, hazlenuts, cream, cinnamon, whiskey, caramel.”
*****
Xander awoke to the enticing smell of whiskey-soaked caramels being melted down over chocolate-covered toffee.
“Murble,” he said, his mouth already stuffed full of the enticing, sweet confection.
“Yeah, I liked that part too, pet,” Spike drawled, lifting his head from giving Xander a hickey on his inner thigh. “And we can do it again as soon as -- “
“Grembabble,” Xander interrupted.
“Oh, again?” Spike asked. “While you’re in the middle of eating the cavity-inducing feast of the overly sexed? You’re quite the stallion, aren’t you love?”
“Mleeblah,” Xander said with a leer. Then he swallowed and cleared his throat. “Okay. We could do that again,” he remarked as Spike nodded vigorously. “Or, we could do something even more physically intimate.”
Xander paused, his head cocked to the side as he thoughtfully considered the many exciting sexual possibilities he could now explore with his undead lover of the vampiric variety now that they had worked out all of the hurtful misunderstandings that had somehow caused a rift as wide as the grandest of canyons to open up between them.
“For some reason,” Spike said slowly, “I choose the ‘more’ option.”
“I know what you mean,” Xander agreed. “Something seems to be compelling us to continually up the ante in our fevered grappling. Like first, we had the one-fisted, two-cock inclusive masturbation session . . . “
“That is always a good way to start,” Spike said. “Followed of course by the mind-numbingly ecstatic rubbing of hardness against hardness, our erections grinding together in a frenzy of frottage.”
“Then,” Xander pointed out, “you went down on me, using tricks that no woman could possibly ever know, handling me more roughly than any woman ever would, sucking my warm seed into your throat ecstatically as no woman would ever think to do, because we all know that chicks refuse to swallow. And though I wanted to reciprocate, I was suddenly engulfed with the post-sex-sleepiness, so all I could bring myself to do was to jack you off shyly.”
“While you looked at me through your long dark lashes,” Spike said fondly. “I remember, pet.”
“Of course, the last part was the best,” Xander concluded. “In which you twisted my shockingly-sensitive nipples -- something that no one has ever done before because apparently only men think that other men’s nipples are sensitive -- before preparing me for your enormous cock so slowly and sensitively that I almost fell asleep again.”
“Leading to our loving but brutal coupling, done of course with you on your back.”
“What other way would we do it?” Xander asked in confusion.
“Oh, there is no other way for us,” Spike clarified. “Although the on-your-hands-and-knees position feels fantastic, our enduring and hot copulation must always be imbued with as much meaning as we can muster. Bloody hell,” he added as an after thought.
“Boy, am I glad to hear you say that,” Xander grinned. “All of it, but particularly the bloody hell part. Your diction was getting a little . . . “ He waved his hand around vaguely.
“Non-Big-Baddish?” Spike asked.
“Yes! Exactly. Although of course you can change your way of speaking at any time to something more cultured and mannered, because you can channel your educated past like that,” Xander explained with a snap of his fingers.
“ ‘S’easier to write me because of that. Any sod can come up with an explanation for making me sound terribly educated or as knock-down as they come,” Spike shrugged.
“Huh?” Xander asked.
“Nothing, pet, nothing,” Spike replied hastily. “Cor,” he added as a further reassurance to his lover.
Xander, drawing comfort from the randomly muttered Briticisms, snuggled further into his lover’s shoulder, wincing for a moment at the boniness there. He thought for a moment that it might be comfier for all involved if it was Spike who snuggled into his shoulder, but being the subbiest sub in all of subville, he couldn’t quite bring himself to reverse their positions.
Of course, if he was really the king bottom of bottomdom, he would want to protect his powerful Top with his very life. And that should mean he would wrap his barely/much larger frame around Spike, imparting his warmth to the room-temperature creature of the night.
Certainly, his status as living furnace had never been questioned. It was hard to maintain his cool, crisp appearance while wearing all those ugly, trendy, geeky, thrift-store, hand-me-down, threadbare, welfare-reject sweaters over the years, but he had managed. After all, Alexander Lavelle Harris, friend to the Slayer, Buffy Not-Short-For-Elizabeth Summers, and Willow ‘The inept-to-most-powerful Witch’ Rosenberg, with various and sundry others who came into and out of their lives as need dictated, was overlooked by everyone, even his own parents. Except when they were beating him, though he wasn’t ever sure if those were his memories, or simply convenient plot-devices picked up from various Made-for-TV movies he’d watched through his years putting off schoolwork while secretly yearning to apply his concealed knowledge. But they would never see him as anything other than--
“Pet? Xan-love?” Spike’s concerned-yet-annoyed tone of voice tried to break through Xander’s reverie, but Xander waved him off. Vaguely, as if through a muddy, cloudy puddle of vague, Xander thought he could make out Spike’s words. But it took too much of his limited concentration to pay attention, for Xander knew most people thought he had no patience for anything other than sci-fi trivia and comic books. It wasn’t true, but he had spent so long now living down to other people’s expectations of him, he had forgotten how to be true to himself.
Spike found himself, briefly afraid he’d gone wandering in an astral projection sort of way, growing more and more concerned with the listlessness of his new human-and-therefore-infinitely-fragile lover. When he literally saw the smoke begin to pour from Xander’s ears, and when he could literally hear the gears behind those expressive yet hooded eyes begin to grind, realization hit Spike like an overused simile.
“You’ve fallen into the pit of clunky and redundant exposition, Pet! Come back to me now! Xander! Come back!”
But Spike was helpless to do anything but watch as the brunet who’d come to mean more to him than his very own unlife sank deeper and deeper into needlessly mulling over his familiar and much-explored past.
Xander wandered through the mists of his mind, running and skipping, and generally acting like a six-year old. He paused at a window to toss a baseball through it to hear the satisfying crash!, and then stomped on a harmless group of ants with great glee. He threw a rock at a group of girls and screamed “Cooties, cooties!” at them before running and hiding behind a bush.
Suddenly he was pulled back to his older self. But was it the hyena!Xander, or the soldier!Xander, or an uncomfortable amalgamation of those two plus evil!wrong!vamp!Xander? Or, far worse, was it . . . AncientMariner!Xander???
//What, you missed the part in which Xander was possessed by the spirit of the Ancient Mariner from the Coleridge poem? Really? Too bad. That was, like, one of the best eps ever. ***Ever!***//
No, it was none of those. It was . . . denial!Xander!!!
//My parents never hurt me,// he insisted through the thought-demarcations of the double-backslashes as he rocked himself back and forth. //It was the Cosby family that had all that abuse. Oh, sure, they seemed happy, but if you just read between the lines . . . //
Xander was startled back to reality by Spike, who was tossing marshmallows at his head.
“Don’t go wandering on me, pet,” Spike shouted hoarsely as he broke apart a Hershey’s bar and prepared to arrange the ingredients for S’mores on the side table next to the automatic fireplace. “I can’t bear you pulling away from me,” he added, as he shoved a whole graham cracker into his mouth and sobbed around the crumbs flying past his lips.
“See, it’s my parents,” Xander said haltingly.
Spike held up his hand. “Say no more. I lived in that basement with you for eight years, and I know what happened. Despite Buffy and Red, and Giles, and Angel, and everyone in town pretending they didn’t notice the signs and the markings and the pain -- I always knew . . . always tried to protect you . . . always failed,” Spike finished sadly.
“About that,” Xander began. “What, um, did you . . . know?”
Spike blinked. “Well, how your parents made you sell Amway products, of course!”
“Right,” Xander exclaimed, taking a large breath. “Amway! I knew that it was something.”
“So I thought we could kill your parents the next time we’re in Sunnydale,” Spike remarked conversationally as he handed Xander an ooey-gooey marhsmallowy treat.
“That’d be swell, Spike,” Xander said with feeling. “ ‘Cause even though I normally wouldn’t hurt a soul and would, if given the suitable superpowers, actually pre-empt each and every one of Buffy’s heroic acts and one-up her by becoming either immortal, or able to throw fire from my fingertips, or able to fuck Angel in a single bound without him losing his soul and becoming Angelus . . . I’d really like it if we could off the people who gave birth to me because of a sneaking suspicion that they weren’t all that nice.”
“Of course, my darling Xander, my boy, my sweetling, my cute widdle human manchild,” Spike cooed.
They embraced once more before separating, smiling a little awkwardly at once another.
Spike coughed, and Xander hummed a little tune.
“Rimming!” Spike exclaimed suddenly.
“Oh, thank god,” Xander joined in. “I knew that there was something vaguely kinky that we hadn’t tried yet.”
And so they proceeded to tongue one another senseless.
*******The End . . . ??? *******
