She's supposed to go back to school on Monday. Cordelia will go, nothing can keep her away. She'll hold her head high and inch by inch, minute by minute, she'll make sure that everyone forgets that she ever even looked in Xander Harris's direction.
She will make sure no one ever mentions him again.
Amy and that creep Michael might be able to do something for her. Memory potion, big poof of blue smoke and some chanting and no more thoughts of that geek. That, however, would involve talking to them. It would also require going back to the entire magical realm that Buffy brought with her. Where monsters crawl the earth and little redheaded wenches have the power to steal your boyfriend. Where it somehow started to make sense to have that *loser* as a boyfriend in the first place.
She will go back. She just doesn't want to.
She wants to lay back on her clean sheets and look at the curtains covering the window. Pull her daisy-covered quilt up around her neck and not have to do *anything*.
It would help if she could stop crying. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror this morning and it was horrible. Shapeless, puffy face, watery eyes like a Nyquil commercial, nose like Rudolph's. Maybe there's a spa that makes house calls.
It would *really* help if Xander would stop calling.
Gentle knock, more a tap than anything: Mom at the door. She knows better than to open it all the way without an invitation, but Cordy turns her face away anyway.
"Baby doll?"
"No, Mom."
"Someone to see you?" Her mom is too nice to her; Cordy figured that out when she was about eight, and it makes her throat hurt every time she realizes it all over again. Good for scamming cash and the Visa, but bad for her mom. She doesn't ever want to talk to someone like that, so softly, every sentence a question curling up like smoke at the end.
Her mouth tastes like aspirin when it sits on her tongue too long. Bitter, like wet dust. Cordy swallows. "That's nice. Tell them to go away."
"Won't take too much of your time." Another soft voice, hoarse and a little lower than her mom's. "Pinky swear."
Cordy relaxes her grip on the quilt and touches her hair. "Oz?"
"It's that nice Daniel boy?" her mom says and opens the door wider. "You remember him?"
Cordy pulls herself up carefully, fists balled against the mattress, but as cautious as she is, her stomach still screams in protest. Dark, sharp ache from her breasts to her hips. The bandages pull one way, the stitches the other, and she's going to chew through her lower lip by the time she's healed.
She ought to care what she looks like, and maybe she kind of does, but it's *Oz*. She doubts he'd notice one way or the other. So she tucks her hair behind her ears and scrubs a tissue over her face just in case, and says, "Come on in." Tilts her head against the pillow and closes her eyes. "If you want to."
When she open her eyes, a walking bunch of daffodils is halfway across her room. It pauses, and Oz's face peeks around one side. "Oh, good. Wasn't sure if you liked yellow."
He's looking at her quilt and the wallpaper and Cordy nods. "Favorite color, actually."
Her voice is rough and she's really going to have to do something about all this phlegm. She sounds like the bums in LA with emphysema and liver damage and god knows what else.
Oz hovers where he stopped, moving the flowers from hand to hand. "Never saw you wear it. Yellow."
"Sit down, okay?" She pats the bed and reminds herself that no one has to know she let Oz into her house, let alone onto her bed. Except maybe Devon; that might twist him up rather beautifully. "I can't wear yellow. Makes me look sallow."
Oz nods and places the flowers across his lap like a baby getting burped. His fingers pluck at and stroke the stalks. "I'm a winter, myself. So I get that."
He looks like hell. Paler than ever, like he's been dusted with chalk, and while Oz was never very impressive at hair styling, the uneven spikes and matted patches are the worst she's seen on him since Tucker Wells whaled on him in elementary school and rubbed his face into the mud puddle behind the swings. Bags under his eyes the color of lilacs and bruises. His t-shirt is inside out and she's sure it's not one of his grungey fashion statements.
Cordelia reaches over, ignoring the pain across her stomach, and touches the petals of one flower. Damp and soft, almost like skin. "You look like hell," she says.
Oz nods again. "Feel worse. You?"
Cordy touches his shoulder, the fabric of his shirt thinner than the petals under her fingers. She should be brave and careless, like she will be come Monday. She could use the practice. "Shitty. Definitely shitty."
Oz turns, clutching the flowers, and she notices for the first time that he wrapped the stalks in a damp paper towel to keep them fresh. His knuckles are white, he's gripping so hard, whiter than the towel itself.
"You were really brave," he says. Shivers when her hand slides down his bare arm and she's always thought of him as twiggy. But beneath her palm, she feels cords of muscle, close-wrapped to the bone, and skin so soft most girls would kill for it.
"Yeah, you said that." Cordy swallows again and she doesn't want to remember, but she can't help it.
It was so dark down there, lying there on her back, looking up, all this red washing over her vision, blood and haze and pain. The spike in her gut throbbed, shifted, like it was alive. Pain, she found out then, is dark, dark red and hot. It moves randomly around like candle flames, thin, bright, intense. And Oz was there, lying on his stomach, his head hanging through the hole in the stairs. Little scrap of pale face like paper against the night and he was talking to her. Trying to keep her awake until the ambulance came.
All she wanted to do was sleep, slip under the dark and go away. Oz wouldn't let her.
"You remember?" Oz leans over, sets the flowers on the floor like he's in church or a graveyard -- *reverently*, Cordy thinks; she did very well on the verbal SAT, thanks -- and toes off his shoes. His socks are mismatched; one white tube sock, the other a dark blue argyle with a hole in the toe. Pulls up his legs and folds them underneath him. "Seemed pretty out of it."
Cordy closes her fingers around Oz's tiny wrist and squeezes. "I remember. Also told me I'm beautiful. So I took it all with a grain of salt."
Maybe it's the music thing, but Oz is like Devon, the way he can half-slink, half-pour himself through empty space. She got stoned with Devon once and talked too much and told him how pretty he was when he sang because it was like he didn't have any bones.
Cordelia's done much more that she regrets than she ever plans to let on.
This, though, as Oz slides up her bed and lies down on his side next to her, she doesn't plan on regretting. He rests his cheek on her shoulder and closes his eyes.
His lashes look like dried blood against his cheeks.
"You are beautiful," he says. "Don't be stupid."
Cordy tilts her head against his and pokes his bony little shoulder. "Whatever."
"Not coming onto you," Oz says. Looks up at her and she never noticed how *green* his eyes are. Crushed velvet, worthy of something tight and pseudo-Goth. When his lips curve slightly at the corners, he blinks like that tiny movement hurts him.
She knows the feeling.
She also knows that coming onto her is probably the farthest thing from his mind right now.
"Like you'd get anywhere near me, Osbourne."
Oz slides his arm across her chest, chastely, right over her collarbone and bites down gently on her earlobe. "Doing pretty well so far, Chase."
"I'm not at full capacity," she says. It feels like she's admitting something and she tries to look away. But Oz is *right* there and his eyes are too green, shadowed by those bags, for her to succeed.
Oz smiles a little more widely and curves his hand around her neck. Runs his fingers through the tangles in her hair and nods. "Don't worry about it."
His touch in her hair is almost enough to make Cordy cry again.
She doesn't know what she's thinking, who she is, what the hell she's going to do come Monday, because Oz, wolfy slacker extraordinaire, is being nice to her. And she's letting him. He's combing her hair like her mom used to when she shot up in fourth grade and got those growing pains that shrieked through her calves and kept her awake at night. Only headrubs could get her relaxed enough to sleep again.
Oz's fingers might have magic in them. The good kind of magic, which is funny, considering he's a *wolf*, but then again -- Animals know how to take care of each other. Like puppies will nip and bark at each other and roll around, but then they'll curl up together and nap and keep an eye on each other.
She's getting sleepy.
She's scared to sleep, though, because she can't stop dreaming about Xander and the spike and the harsh, mean smell of the hospital and Xander and the way his mouth fit against hers like no one else's ever had and how he'd whisper in her ear while he kissed her neck and his hands did that *thing* around her waist, half-kneading, half-pulling and the way he'd talk so fast while she drove him home, like he almost believed that each time was the last time she'd ever talk to him, and he had to fit in just as many words as possible before they got there and the door closed, and she let him believe that because she was in charge even when they both knew neither one of them was.
Oz is touching her like she's his guitar. Lovingly and innocently and Cordy sighs.
"S'okay," he says against her shoulder, so that she feels the vibrations of it more than she actually hears it. "Things'll get better."
She snorts and there are a thousand and one retorts to that. She just can't find the words for any of them.
"Somehow," he adds and his lashes brush her neck like miniature versions of his fingers on the other side.
"Yeah," Cordy says and unwinds, slips down until they're sharing the pillow, Oz curled around her, and she's tugging the daisy quilt up over both of them. "Hell or high water, right?"
When she closes her eyes, she sees yellow. Like Crayolas, like lemonade, like hazy summer afternoons. Daisies and daffodils and sunlight.
Oz is warm and still against her and she borrows some of his mellow. She knows he won't mind.