CONTENT WARNING: This story is rated a NC-17 for sexual content and language. If you are under 18, or are uncomfortable with this type of material, please return to my Fanfiction Index.
-- "'C' is for 'Cordy', covered in clay..."
Cordelia Chase steeled herself and dipped her hand down into the bucket of cool, gooshy clay. She drew out a dripping handful of it, made yet another face, then slapped it on her bare thigh. She stared down at the clinging glob for a moment, then smooshed the blob flat and spread it out, down her leg to the knee, under and behind to the pit of her knee.
"The things," she muttered to herself as she scooped up another handful of the muck, "I do for my -- euww -- Art." She pulled back the side of her bikini panties to work the clay up her hip. "Bleah. Can't they make this stuff in coral pink at least? Or copper? I could at least squint and pretend it's a nice tan?" She slopped up more of the gunk and smeared it across her rib cage, shivering as the clay sucked up her body heat. Chunks of it spattered the drop cloth at her feet. She gritted her teeth and stepped into it, gushing it between her toes.
A knock sounded at the door to her apartment.
"Oh of course," Cordelia growled at the offending person behind that knock, although he was a room away and behind a well-constructed security door. "You couldn't have come ten minutes ago. "A broken alarm clock has better timing than you."
"Dennis!" she yelled into the living room, where the television was blaring. "Stop watching 'Casper' cartoons and go answer the door."
She scooped up another lump of guck and slobbered it over one shoulder, listening to the clunk of the door that announced her visitor's arrival. "Three o'clock, Wesley!" she yelled. "I know it isn't three o'clock yet because Dennis always switches to the 'Love Connection' at three. Don't just stand there in the living room like you've lost your capacity to make snarky remarks. I'm preparing for a role, all right? Be useful for a change and do my back."
After a moment, fingers settled on her shoulders, smearing the clay tentatively about.
Cordelia blew out a breath of impatience. "This isn't remedial finger painting, Wesley. Just get it on there." She grabbed his hand and turned around. The realization that her visitor wasn't Wesley hit her a split second before they came face to face. The hand was wider, more calloused than Wes's, not to mention that Wesley didn't wear a ring.
"Oh!" Cordelia said in surprise, looking into his eyes. "Hi, Giles. Gee, look at me, I'm a mess." She looked down at her semi-mudcaked, bikini-clad body, torn between conflicting impulses. "Okay, here's the deal, Giles. I've been cast as Eliza Doolittle in 'Pygmalion'-- not the one where I'd sing, but the artsy no-singing one -- and I'm getting into the role now. It's called method acting. So if you're going to barge in without warning, you're just going to have to deal with the mess. Okay?" She looked at him challengingly.
"Hello, Cordelia," Giles said. "I apologize for intruding. Should I --?"
"No, you shouldn't, because you've intruded now and running away isn't going to change that, and besides I need a second pair of hands and Phantom Dennis is no good with clay."
She turned and lifted her ponytail. "All over me, Giles."
After a moment, he bent to scoop up some of the wet clay and began to smear it over her shoulders. "Pardon me for asking," he said as he worked. "But I don't recall a mud wrestling scene in 'Pygmalion'."
"God, Giles, I would have that you'd know the legend behind the play. Especially that one. You can move below my bra strap, you know."
His hands stilled, then he stooped to get some more clay. "I do know the legend of Pygmalion, and I'm familiar with the play as well, and nowhere does George Bernard Shaw get this literal with it. Ignoring for the moment that the original Pygmalion sculpted his statue from ivory. And what do you mean, especially that legend?"
"Tell that to my director," Cordelia grumbled. "He's a real bitch, if men were allowed to be bitches. Not that I'm arguing his artistic brilliance, since he cast me in the role, which he says I was born to play. But there's these big chunks of time where I'm supposed to be a statue, so I've got the get in a statuey frame of mind. Thus the clay. Under the bra strap too, Giles."
He cleared his throat nervously. "Surely it's not necessary -- What kind of clay is this, Cordelia?"
She turned to face him. "They had a special on quick drying cement at the hardware store." He looked aghast. "Come on, how dumb do you think I am? Don't answer that if you can't be nice, Tact Guy."
Giles shut his mouth.
"It's theatrical mud." She turned around and lifted her hair again. "I know this girl who's a professional mud wrestler. She recommended it. Says it does wonders for her pores -- we'll see about that -- and it's also a great --" she darted a look back at him, "-- lubricant."
Giles dropped the clay bucket.
"Watch it!" She righted the plastic pail before the muck could spill out. "You know how much this disgusting stuff cost me?"
"P-perhaps you could get Wesley or Angel to -- to --"
Cordelia studied him, then grinned. "No. That wouldn't work. Neither of them are here right now, and you are. Stop being such a wuss. It's just clay. What are you staring at?"
Giles blinked. "Uhm, you look just like a -- like a --"
She cocked her head. "Say it, big guy."
"-- a caramel apple," he finished.
Cordelia glared at him.
"It -- it's the color of the mud. And with your hair top knotted like that, it looks like a stem," he back-pedalled furiously. "And . . ."
"And?" she insisted. "Are you saying I'm round, Giles?"
His eyes dropped to her breasts, then shot to the ceiling. "No, sorry, it is an absurd analogy. Do you think Angel would be in the office if I . . ."
"No." Cordelia bent to get a dripping handful of clay. "He's going to be in bed right now. Wake him up and get one cranky vamp. And you don't want to see his bedroom hair. Uh, not that I do. Not often! And only in the course of duty. You know he isn't a morning person." She scowled. "You diverted me. What else about me reminds you of a caramel apple?"
"Sweet?" Giles tried.
She rolled her eyes. "Try again. You won't know a moment's peace until you tell."
He sighed. "That is true. I was thinking that you look delicious. Is that a sufficiently horrible enough prospect to get you off this track?"
"Delicious?" Cordelia studied her own clay-caked body. "That'll do," she said with a sudden dazzling smile. Giles looked staggered. She turned her back to him again with a vampish strut. "Get back to work, Rupert. Every sixteenth of an inch of me."
"Oh lord," she heard him mutter, and she grinned again. But his fingers were less hesitant now, and that was fine. He had a good, solid touch, kneading the clay into her flesh with an almost professional familiarity. She found herself relaxing, flowing under his touch, pondered the possibilities of getting him to give her a full massage. That led her brain into other tactile fantasies, fueled by the sensation of his hands working the calves of her leg.
She looked back and down at him. He was kneeling, like a supplicant, his head bent over as he concentrated on getting an even spread of clay all over her leg. His hands traced all the subtle curves of her muscle, tracing the lines of the ligaments, brushed through the fine hollows, dips and curves of her ankles. Cordy felt a visceral thrill of what it must be like to be cut and molded from actual clay, shaped up by magical life-giving hands into something to be admired, cherished, protected, and worshipped. She dropped one hand to his head, so lightly that he didn't sense it.
A sudden wicked playfulness seized her then, and she ducked to dip up some clay, and let it fall into his tousled hair.
Giles looked up at her indignantly. He reached up to brush the stuff from his hair, but only succeeded in smearing it further in. "Is that my punishment for intruding?" He tried to stand, but Cordy pushed him down.
"No. It's your reward," she said, and dribbled some more clay down the back of his neck. "You know that my nickname to the loser crowd at Sunnydale High -- which was by the way just about everyone there -- was Queen C?"
Giles had pulled a handkerchief from his coat pocket and was using it to try to get the clay out of his hair. "Dear, dear," he said. "I wonder how you came by it?"
She rapped him hard with the side of her leg, and he glared up at her. "Forget that," she said imperiously. "Do the other leg."
"Perhaps plaster of paris would suit the occasion more?" he suggested, still working unsuccessfully at the muck in his hair. "White marble being the material of choice for the classical tyrants of old."
Cordelia scooped up some more clay. Giles scooted away from her. "I've got a good throwing arm," she said. "Come back here. It's for your own good."
"My good?" he echoed.
"You're sitting there feeling like a dirty old man. Well, we'll get you good and dirty and you'll stop feeling that way," she insisted.
Giles considered that. "I must admit, it makes a horrid kind of sense."
"There you go. Now come here and take your mud like a man." She tossed the muck from one hand to the other.
He watched her for a moment, then shrugged his black leather jacket off and set it well to one side.
"The shirt too," Cordelia insisted. "That's a nice shirt. Cerulean blue looks good on you. Who's been doing your shopping lately? You never had anything that nice, and Buffy and Willow for sure don't have that kind of taste."
"It was a gift," he admitted as he unbuttoned the shirt. Cordelia lifted an eyebrow at him. The fusty old librarian wasn't putting up any kind of resistance to her imposed striptease. Must be the pragmatic aspect of it, she decided, and wondered, with a sly grin, how far she could get him to go with it.
"Should I be worried?" Giles asked her.
She eyed him luxuriously, from his tousled head to bared chest to jeans. "Oh yeah," she said. "Come here and finish what you started. I'm getting cold."
He submerged his hands in the clay and came up with a generous dripping mess of it, which he then slathered over Cordy's right thigh, his fingers deftly molding it down her leg. She couldn't stop herself: her flesh goose-pimpled in the wake of his touch and she shivered. Giles paused to look up at her, his fingers barely touching her at either side of her knee.
Cordelia looked up at the ceiling. "Oh god," she announced to it. Giles began to stand up, but she put an imperious hand on his head. "Leave and get the whole bucket of mud on your head."
He looked up at her again, then smiled. Cordelia had never seen such a smile before, least of all on him. All wicked and shy and knowing and unconsciously sensuous. She swallowed. That smile went beyond games. Or could, it said. Up to her to take it any way she wanted.
"To hell with it," Cordelia said out loud.
"What?" Giles said, frozen in the act of caressing her leg.
She kneeled, so that she was nose to nose with him. "It's been one of those years. You know the kind? You wouldn't give it back, but damned if you don't need to stop thinking about everything so much."
He stared at her. "I --" he began, then Cordelia shut him up with a jaw-bending kiss.
Giles gave a little-boy whimper, then with a palpable tremor of something falling away, he pulled Cordelia, squishy clay and all, against him and returned the kiss.
Who could've guessed he could kiss like that? Mistress of the Kiss Cordelia half-swooned, and Giles took advantage of her moment of wobbled knees to pull her legs about him. She threw her arms around him and toppled him backwards.
"Ow!" Giles protested, as his head hit her hardwood floor (waxed cedar), rather harder than she'd intended.
"Sorry!" Cordelia said. "Don't be concussed, okay? We're just getting started here, and that would suck, since I'm going to need a hot shower later to get this gunk off."
"Cordy, I'll endeavor to hang onto consciousness for your libido's sake," he said, rubbing at the back of his head.
"Okay, sarcasm, that's good. Though I think maybe you could be sarcastic in a coma." She pushed herself off of him so she could look into his eyes. "You've got a fleck of brown in there. Is that normal? Have your eyes always been this green?"
He stared up at her in mock annoyance. "No. They only turn green when I'm being straddled by a clay-covered, half- clad Eliza Doolitle impersonator."
She slapped him hard on the chest. "And you're only getting snarkier with age." She looked down at the warm, solid flesh beneath her hands. "When did you get so buff?"
Giles reached up to take her wrists, but to Cordelia's surprise, instead of disengaging her, he slid his hands up her arms to the bend of her arm just inside the elbow, resting the calloused warmth of his fingers upon her hammering pulse there.
Their arms fit together nicely, like matching puzzle pieces. Cordy eased herself down to test the overall fit. She pressed full against him then, leisurely explored the contours of his mouth inside and out, matching the curvatures of tongue, hands mapping out those odd areas of his body that she'd never had the opportunity to explore before, making sure to get him well-smeared with clay.
She shifted her torso up just enough to get her hands between them, unfasten his jeans and shove them, along with his boxers, down his way-too-long-for-her-patience legs. His arousal pressed hotly beneath her body, distracting her from goal of stripping him. She reached under to take him in hand, take measure of the satisfying length and pulse of his desire for her. Suddenly impatient for him, she tore at his remaining clothes.
She became aware, as she worked, that he was following her every move, his hands spanning her ribs, and that he was sucking slowly, very thoroughly, on her bared right breast. Somehow he'd divested her of her bikini bra without her noticing. "Sneaky," she panted, and arced her head back to thrust her breasts at him for further attention. Giles obliged her by shifting his attentions to her left breast, while continuing to trace, massage, paint, and explore the right with one hand.
He didn't do things, even in the realm of caresses, by halves. By the time his hand had drifted from her breast down to her torso, Cordelia was shuddering with the unreleased sensual overload and certain that he now knew every contour, pore and dip of that breast as well as she did herself.
His mouth left her breast, and he dragged her down by her pony-tail so that her ear was next to his mouth. His hot breath raised the hairs on the back of her neck and sent shivers down her body.
"Pygmalion..." Giles murmured to her, his words tickling, "created his ideal of the perfect woman out of clay." He released her hair and gently threaded his fingers, sticky with clay, through the stands. Cordelia, torn between indignation and mesmerization, stayed where he had dragged her, bared chest pressed to his bared chest, chin over his shoulder.
His hands roamed over her body, painting the clay, using it almost as an extension of himself, of his desire for her. Cordelia squirmed to fix the contours of his arousal hard beneath her, and Giles moaned, a barely audible sound of such longing that it shook her out of her impulse to tease him and thereby regain mastery over this encounter.
"She came alive under his hands," Giles continued, his hands moving to her bikini bottom and slipping under the fabric, roaming, exploring, creating. "Burned into existence by the very act of loving him. Imagine coming into being, loving and desiring. The painful intensity of those first feelings --"
"God, yes," Cordelia replied, tears slipping down her face, making tracks in the mud. "He's a wizard, a genius sculptor. His touch defines her, doesn't it?"
Gis caresses stilled. "But as a creature of a now separate spirit, a new life, she's a free agent. Her destiny, her body, is now her own. Perhaps he doesn't have the moral courage to recognize this, he's so blinded by the beauty which he created, but which he doesn't own --"
Cordelia sat up. "That's so profound," she said with a sniffle. Then she shook him hard. "And it's a crock. It's just a play, Giles. Is this how you always get every time you get frisky with someone? 'Cause I've got to say, it explains why you're still single."
He glared up at her with a mixture of hurt and indignation. "I'm suddenly feeling mocked. I was trying to get into the role with you."
"Yes, okay, thank you Robert DeNiro. And I'm thinking: Actor wannabe much?" She shoved him down as he struggled to get up. "Look, I'll give you the name of my agent, if you like, but you're not going to get me all hot and bothered and then run out on me." She pushed her ass back against his arousal and grinned devilishly at him. "And you wouldn't be doing yourself any favors either."
He moaned and thrust up against her. Catching her breath, Cordelia rose to her knees, pulled him to her, and then impaled herself on him without prelude. They shouted out together; Giles smiled sheepishly up at her and Cordy grinned back as his silent acknowledgment that he wasn't normally this vocal a lover. She dug her nails into his chest just hard enough to leave marks and then bent in to scrape her teeth on his chin, lips, nose while her hands moved to his hips to pull them hard into her.
"Who's possessing who now, Mr. Smartypants?" she demanded, and gripped him hard with her inner muscles.
Giles bucked underneath her, another moan tearing through his throat. He reached around her to grab her hips, to complete their carnal circle, and grinned back up at her. "Who's possessing whom," he corrected her, and did something with the hard side of his thumb and her pubic bone that sent a wave of arrows of sensation straight through her groin to the pit of her belly.
Cordelia came hard with a surprised scream. But even as she felt herself coming down from a seemingly endless but all-too-short spiral of sexual overload, she gave her hips an emphatic twist and felt a hot rush inside as he toppled over the edge too. She slumped forward onto his chest, her eyes closed and a smug smile on her face as she basked in the pulse of heat of out-of-control maleness -- and more specifically Gilesness -- shooting up into her.
"Oh lord," Giles murmured dazedly underneath her at the end.
A drop sheet suddenly billowed up from the floor and dropped down on top of them. Cordelia blinked at him in the sudden sheet-colored dimness, then started to giggle. "Sorry, Phantom Dennis," she yelled out.
Giles blushed. "I forgot about the audience," he admitted. "Do you think that he's -- uh -- jealous?"
"Who knows, and no he's my roommate and roommates deal. I'll rent a Gary Cooper movie for him -- that'll cheer him up." Cordelia lay her head down on Giles' shoulder again and relished, for a moment, the sensation of being warm, filled, and contained in a soft white universe with a man who was, face it girl, a pretty good catch in anyone's book. Anyone with a modicum of sophisticated taste anyway. She pondered the irony of her leaving Sunnydale before she'd grown up enough to develop the taste to appreciate him properly, and nibbled upon him again.
"Ow," Giles protested sleepily. "That hurt."
"Good," she said. "You'll remember me better."
His arm slid up around her to cradle her to his chest. "Cordelia, I could never forget you."
Cordelia snuggled. "Don't think this means we're a couple or anything," she said. "I mean, I like you Giles, but --"
"You don't intend to become Pygmalion's dream girl," Giles said, his voice light but sad. "You have a life of your own here. And mine is in Sunnydale."
She relaxed. He did understand. Which, damn it, was another reason for regret. "Don't get me wrong..." she finally managed, after a long, warm silence.
"Yes?" he prompted when she didn't complete the sentence.
"You and Buffy. Maybe you're her Pygmalion, or maybe she's yours. If she ever decides what she wants from you, and if what she wants isn't what you want -- well...."
His fingers stilled in her hair.
"I recognize potential, is all," Cordelia said, and rose up on her elbows to kiss him. "And I know the value of keeping my options open. Okay? You understand?"
He kissed her back, gently this time. "I believe so. Thank you." He cocked his head. "Somebody is knocking at the door."
"Damn!" She started to get up, then grinned and eased herself up off of him. "That'll be Wesley, with his great timing as usual." She stood, dragging the drop sheet up with her to wrap around herself, pausing to survey the naked and clay-smeared Giles on the ground at her feet. "Mmmm, Watcher al stucco. I might have to get me one of my own." Another knock at the door sounded, and her expression changed. "Only not Wesley. Euww."
Giles grabbed at his clothes and started pulling them hurriedly on. "I thought you said Wesley was improving?"
"He was -- is. If he'd just let me do his clothes shopping for him. But he can be so annoying. Big brother much?"
Giles paused in the act of buttoning up his shirt to kiss her. "Remember those options, cherie."
Startled by the very un-Gilesean endearment, Cordelia broke out in one of her rare, dazzling, no-holds-barred smiles. "You, Mister, are way too casual about the competition."
"And you, my lady, are a clay-caked, tousled Grecian goddess."
She tilted her head and smiled at him. "Thanks for stating the obvious, Mr. Watcherman." She pulled her drop cloth around her and swept off majestically to answer the door.
The look on Wesley's face when she opened the door in all her earthy splendor was almost, although not quite, rivalled by the look that replaced it when Giles slipped past with a tousled, sheepish and roguish "HelloWesleynicetoseeyouhopetoseeyouagainsoon" before disappearing down the hallway.
Cordelia put on her best Eliza Doolittle smile for Wesley. "'Ello, Wes, wot's up then? We've been talking about you, we 'ave," she said.
For once, Wesley was speechless.