NOTE: Steph's challenge was for me to write a piece of Cordy and Spike smut set in my Cordyverse.
As always, my conscience demands that I point out that the exchange of bodily fluid during any type of sexual activity carries with it an insanely high risk of transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, including, but not limited to HIV/AIDS. Practice safer sex.
*****
Active Listening
Don Bentley
Cordelia threw down her three shots of bourbon in quick succession, and chased them with a long pull on her beer. Three shots, a quick beer, then nurse a succession of drinks for the rest of the night, that was the plan.
Well, that wasn't the whole truth, was it?
No, no it wasn't. The plan tonight, like any number of nights before this, was to lose herself somewhere, anywhere, just for a night, just for an hour. Either in the bourbon that she hated, or another of the one-night stands she despised herself for having.
"Jesus Christ, Chase. Someone vivisect your kitten?"
Uninvited he took the seat opposite her.
"Fuck off, Spike."
"Tssk, tssk, such language, never knew you knew those kinds of words, being a princess and all," he took a drink of his beer, ignoring her irritation at his presence.
"You don't know anything about me, Spike, so let's not start now, 'kay?" she finished off her beer and stabbed the empty glass into the air between them. "The only reason you're sitting there is 'cause everyone else is out of town for the weekend and you've promised Tara that you wouldn't drink alone."
"Oi, leave the Doc out of it, Chase. You want me to leave, fine," he drained his glass and rose. "I'll leave, and you can get back to drinking yourself into a stupor."
"Good, get lost."
"I will."
*****
"Cheers," she toasted him with the shot glass and downed it in the same smooth motion, before managing to grab the waiter before she could leave, waving a finger at the empty glasses littering the table. "'Nother round. On me."
He countermanded the order with a shake of his head to the waitress that went unnoticed by Cordelia.
"So, where was I? Oh, yeah. So, my first two detectives couldn't transfer back into uniform fast enough, and shit, Spike, Harmony was scarier than this clown was, for chrissake's. The third goes on phys... pysiac... mental health leave after taking down a little Gurndach demon at the hospital. So, my first eva... evaluation's next week and I'm not going to have a squad to be eva-evaluated for. No squad, no job," she focused unevenly on his face and leaned forward. "How you been?"
*****
"For fuck sake's Chase, try an 'elp me 'ere," he pleaded as he wrestled with her apartment keys and her mostly limp and entirely uncooperative body.
"Hmmmm?"
"Bloody 'hell. At least invite me in."
"What? Oh, okie-dokie, Spike."
Oh great. NOW she decides to wake up. Even semi-consciousness would have been a big help back in the cab.
"Come on in, Spike, come on in. My casa is your castle," with a grand sweep of her arm that forced him to duck, she presented her home.
It was a small apartment, sparsely furnished, though her young son's things strewn about gave it a homey air.
"Nice. Come on, let's get you to bed."
"Wait!" she shouted at him.
"What!" he shouted back.
"I've got some beer in the fridge," she lurched out of his grip and made for the small kitchenette. "Want one?"
"No," retrieving her and steering her down the short hallway, he pushed her into the second of the two bedrooms. Unless she was a fan of Albert Einstein, the first bedroom was her son's room; a poster of Einstein sticking his tongue out had pride of place over the bed. A small collection of soccer memorabilia littered the room, including, he was dismayed to see, an Arsenal poster.
Her own small bedroom was dominated by a large queen sized bed onto which he tried to position Cordelia.
Put her to bed then leave was pretty much the only plan he had at the moment. That's why the few moments took him completely by surprise. That they succeeded in derailing his plan had more to do with his own state of inebriation than with any finesse on Cordelia's part.
"Spike?"
"Chase?"
"Fuck me," she said. It took him a moment to realize that grammatically it was an imperative rather than an exclamation.
To emphasis her point she twisted about and grabbed his crotch.
He was harder than rhyming 'orange'.
Okay, him standing there in her bedroom with a hard-on wasn't very gentlemanly, he knew that. Certainly the Doc wasn't going to approve, but hell he'd been holding Cordelia right tight since they left the bar, her being legless and all, and the way she squirmed and fell about, well, that pretty much meant he needed a solid grip on her. For her own good, he thought of it, so she wouldn't fall down and hurt herself. And that meant, you know, sudden movement on her part, and better grips, and inadvertent touching, and so on and so forth.
In any event, should he have to explain any of this to the Doc that was pretty much what he planned on telling her. He'd plead the good Samaritan defence. Probably wouldn't work, the Doc wasn't as nearly as naive as she looked, but what the hell, it was really the only defence he had.
Alright, alright! He'd plead no contest.
"Hey, always wondered," she said, her voice surprisingly clear, though that clue would escape his attention entirely.
"Wondered what?" he coughed out as she started to massaged his cock through his pants.
"No blood pressure, heart beat or anything, right?"
Cordelia had his belt undone by this point, and was working on his fly.
"Yeah, so?"
She chuckled, then hiccuped, then chuckled some more as she succeeded in drawing his cock out into the open. "So where does the hard-on come from?"
"It's just there, never thought to ask why."
"Men," sighed Cordelia as she squatted in front of him.
*****
For the first little while neither of them said anything as they writhed together in the dark.
Then.
"Come on, Spike. Move your ass, I want to feel something, damn it."
Cordelia had him pinned beneath her as she straddled him, writhing up and down on her knees, her hands clawing at his side, pulling at him in time to her thrusts.
"Come on, you bastard. Make me feel something! Here, you like my tits? Play with them, and make me feel it, damn it."
Grabbing his hands she held them to her breasts, roughly kneading them with his fingers under hers. Releasing his hands, she continued to squeeze her own breasts, pinching her nipples, raising small half moon shaped welts as she dug her short nails into her own flesh.
One hand shot down to her thighs and started squeezing the flesh there. She started pulling at her labia, twisting them tight. Savagely she pinched her clitoris between clenched finger nails.
Taken aback by her frenzied actions he lay beneath her, still, watching her warily.
"That the best you can do? Come on, fuck me, goddamn it. Fuck me like you hate me, you bastard! Be a man, for God's sake, and make me feel something. FUCK ME!"
When he didn't respond, but rather looked up at her with shock and disbelief, she slapped him hard across the face.
"MAKE ME FEEL SOMETHING!" she wailed. "I want to feel something."
With a silent roar almost as if they had been accompanied by a great peal of thunder, a cascade of images flashed across his mind's eye. Chase with black eyes, with cuts and scrapes. Favouring tender ribs, sore muscles, twisted shoulders and dislocated wrists. Chase sporting bruises, bruises they could all see, and others that only he knew were there. For you can smell bruises when you're a vampire. The blood's there just below the surface, and ever so close.
But, but Chase?
He's heard the stories from LA, heard them and believed them. And she's a cop now, for chrissake, a cop who hunts demons. There's no fucking way she's a victim.
Was she?
Sure, she'd get hurt in fights and scrapes, and the excuses-
But they were just excuses weren't they. Everything made sense and her friends all accepted everything without seeing the injuries for what they were.
Wounds.
And they were the next best thing to being self-inflicted.
Finally, frustrated at his inaction in the face of her abuse, she fell off of him, turning her back to him as she pulled herself into a tight ball. Even in the pale light of the street lights outside he could see the faint marks, the almost invisible bruises and welts on her arms and her shoulders, her back and her buttocks and her legs. And out of the dank recesses of his mind came a damnable succession of hideous memories he had long been trying to deny and to bury, memories that he was only now starting to accept and work through, memories that identified the marks, one by one, for what they were.
Fingers squeezing her wrists, gripping her arms and thighs and neck. Restraining her, posing her.
A knee into the small of her back. A brutal and effective way to put her down and subdue her, pacify her.
A thin whip, or an electrical cord, anything number of things really, worked across her back and down over her ass and thighs. To hurt her. To torment her.
To punish her.
He looked at her for a moment, then rose and dressed in silence.
She just laid there, staring at the wall. Not making a sound.
Why? His question died unasked.
He wouldn't understand her reasons even if she'd tell him. Not really. He couldn't. He wasn't a single mother raising a young son without a father. He wasn't still hunting vampires and demons in a home town he'd swore he'd never return to. He wasn't fighting a losing battle with a city hall and police bureaucracy that still tried to pretend that monsters didn't live under their beds. They had no common ground.
Except-
The picture frame was laying face down on the dresser. Aside from a silver hairbrush it was the only personal touch on the dresser, in the room, and that's probably why it attracted his attention in the first place.
It was their common ground. He knew it without touching it, without looking at the picture on the other side.
William gathered up the displaced comforter from the floor and gently laid it over her. Kneeling beside her side of the bed he brushed some errant strands of hair from her face.
"Chase-" he stopped then tried again. "Cordelia?"
"Go away, Spike."
"William."
"Go away."
He held his right hand up in the space between them.
"I, uh, I would put my hand out into the sun light. I'd watch it blister and smoke and turn black. It hurt like hell, but I couldn't... I couldn't feel it, not really, not here," he touched his heart. "I didn't feel anything for months after she died. Not the burns, the crosses, the holy water, nothing. I had nothing left to feel."
This drew a look, a sad fleeting expression of recognition, of understanding. She said nothing though.
"So, finally, I turned to Harris. Knew I could count on him. I- I taunted him. I provoked him with lies, terrible lies about Buffy, about Anya, and Willow, and.... And you. It worked, I was going to have my wish, I was going to finally feel something, 'cause he was going to beat me to death. No doubt there, he was finally going to stake me.
"And I was looking forward to it. I was on my knees waiting for the stake, 'cause I'd have to feel that, wouldn't I?"
"Why... why didn't he?" she asked in a tentative whisper.
"The Doc. She stopped him. Had to lay him out flat to do it," he smiled a wan smile. "I'd done a good job pissing him off.
"She'd been worried, you see. Worried about me," another smile, warmer this time. "'Cause she saw all this stuff that the others 'adn't. Saw it, and figured I might want to... to talk to someone about it."
For the first time that night her eyes met his.
"Does it really help?" she whispered.
"Yeah, it takes a while, but it helps. She's a good listener, the Doc is."
She shook her head and reached out from under the comforter to take his hand in hers.
"What about you?"
"Yeah," he settled back against the wall, making himself comfortable. "I can listen."
*****
Postscript
Early Monday morning and the last desk had already been cleared off. That was Montague's. His paperwork for extended leave was sitting on her desk, awaiting her endorsement and signature.
Might as well, she thought. The squad might be finished, but the paperwork still needed to be reviewed and minuted, signed and forwarded. Filed and forgotten.
It was so still in the squad room that she was startled by the shrill ring of the phone beside her.
"Special Operations."
"Gunn, it's Graham," Sergeant Helios Graham was the front desk officer.
"Yeah."
"You sound cheerful."
"What do you want, Graham?"
"Okay, be that way. You've got someone here who wants to join the squad. Shall I send him up?"
"Tell him to come back at the end of his shift," by then the squad would be officially stood down and she wouldn't be wasting anyone's time.
"Not a cop, a civie. Name of, ahh, Walthorpe, William Walthorpe. You want me to send him up or what?"
(end)