Cordelia took a deep breath as she turned to face Angel who was standing rigidly beside her. "You ready?"
"Ah ... yeah, pretty much." He paused, straightening his anxious frame. "You?"
Cordelia shifted, uncomfortably tugging at the imagined crease on her shirt. "I ... Yeah I think so. I mean, ready as I'll ... never be."
Angel gave her hand a reassuring squeeze as he looked deeply, meaningfully into her eyes. "We don't have to do this now you know. I mean, if you don't feel up to it ..."
"We have to Angel. If I chicken out now I'll never ..." She paused as she took another breath. "I want to do this. I really do."
"Okay." Angel said quietly as he gazed at Cordelia, his expression of rising panic mirrored on her face.
This was proving more difficult than he had thought. Telling the others about him and Cordelia had seemed achievable the night before. But now ... standing in the hallway outside his room, hearing the faint voices of Wesley and Gunn echoing in the lobby below, his still heart nearly trembled with anxiety and pent-up pressure. How would they react? What would they say?
This was worse than going to hell. Well okay, maybe just a fractionally less painful.
What was the big deal anyway? Angel admonished himself. There would be some raised eyebrows on Wesley's part, Gunn would laugh or say something smart, Fred would stare with wide eyed wonder at them like she still stared at everything she saw in L.A ... No big deal.
No big deal. He repeated over and over to himself.
Yeah right.
"Okay." Cordelia said again, this time with more bravado. "Of course I can do this. I've done harder things than this ... Going back to school after the whole rebar Xander kissing Willow and everyone finding out thing, and the whole Mayor wanting to have us for lunch at graduation thing .. " Cordelia's voice trailed off, hesitation once again colouring her voice. "This will be a piece of cake. Well, maybe more than a piece ..."
Angel swallowed, his throat felt strangely parched. Big deal. He was a warrior for the Powers That Be dammit. He had averted apocalypses. He had survived Wolfram and Hart's psychotic scheme to break his sanity. He could handle this.
"Don't worry Cordy, I'll be right here." He gave her small hand another reassuring squeeze. "We'll be fine as long as we know we're in this together."
She nodded, as much to reassure herself as him. "Let's do it then."
"Let's do what?" Wesley's clinically English voice made both Angel and Cordelia nearly jump out of their collective skins in surprise. Startled by their twitchy reaction, Wesley observed the pair more closely. "What are you two doing up here so early?"
Cordelia could only stare, transfixed by Wesley's wide, inquiring eyes. For once in her life she was speechless. Utterly and totally without speech. It was an incredibly uncomfortable feeling.
"We ah ..." Angel's eyes flittered desperately between Cordelia's similarly panicked eyes and Wesley's curious expression. "We ... Cordelia wanted to do this, ah ... She wanted to show me this new outfit she just bought." He finished lamely.
Wesley's face morphed into one of slight incredulity. "Angel ... It's eight o'clock in the morning." He looked askance at Cordelia, noting her unusually peaked expression. "Besides, I know for a fact that Cordelia never gets up before nine if she can help it"
"I would for a really ... huge ... really big ... sale." Cordelia interjected desperately. "There was this huge sale thing on at ah ... this really new place in Santa Monica and ah ... Did I mention it was a really huge sale?"
The former Watcher looked from the vampire to the seer, an incredible yet strangely coherent possibility forming in his mind as three facts simultaneously struck him.
One, Cordelia and Angel were standing very, very close together.
Two, Angel had not been in his room when Wesley and Fred had arrived at the Hyperion earlier that morning.
Three, Angel was in the same clothes he had on when Wesley had bade him goodbye last night.
Ergo, Angel and Cordelia were trying to hide the fact that they had spent the entire night together.
Wesley smiled inwardly and silently congratulated himself. He was going to have so much fun with this.
"Where are the bags?" Wesley interrogated them, folding his arms stubbornly across his chest. He was curious to see how far he could push them.
"Huh?"
He sighed, seemingly exasperated by Cordelia's puzzlement. "Your shopping bags?" He paused. "It was a 'huge' sale and you didn't buy anything?"
"Oh ... that." Cordelia looked at Wesley blankly. "I ... I left them up in Angel's room. You know ... don't want to be cluttering up the office and all. Gotta have a clean work space."
Cordelia groaned inwardly. And the Oscar for the lamest acting of the year goes to ...
"So, where's Fred?" Angel cut off Wesley's interrogation of his seer as he observed her growing discomfort. Not that he was all that comfortable himself ... what had been a fairly doable task earlier this morning seemed completely undoable now.
"Oh, she went off to the University library to see if she could hunt up a specific tome I heard was housed there. Fascinating really, the amount of things one finds in L.A. It turns out that this tome, which was lost somewhere around the 15th to 16th centuries, may have been given over to an order of Spanish monks who later came over to the Americas around the time of ..." He let his voice trail off at their uncomprehending looks. "Ah, anyway, Fred's at the library."
Angel nodded, stomach still slightly squeamish. Wesley looked as if he had no intention of letting up from his train of questioning.
But he was surprised by Wesley's next move. "Anyway, I guess I'll be going back downstairs. Files to read, cases to research." He looked at them inquisitively. "You coming? Unless of course, you haven't finished ... whatever you were doing up here? ..."
"What?" Cordelia's anxiety accented voice almost made Angel jump out of his skin for the second time that morning. "I'm done. I mean, we weren't really doing ... Not anything we shouldn't be doing ... I'm coming down now." She looked back at Angel desperately as she followed Wesley down the stairs, who seemed to empathise with her growing panic. The longer they left it, the harder it would get.
Angel didn't know how they were going to tell the others.
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