Author: Pete Milan
"Get back here, you little--" Buffy chased a small, furry blur up the stairs of the house she shared with Willow, Tara and Xander. Her quarry, the kitten temporarily known as Miss Kitty Fantastico, had just done something unspeakable to a shirt Buffy had left lying unattended.
Buffy reached the second floor and saw the kitten slip through Xander's door, which was slightly ajar.
"A-ha!" She charged inside. "It's the sink for you!"
She stopped. The kitten was perched on Xander's chest, who was lying on his bed. It sniffed around his mouth curiously.
"Lose something?" he asked.
"Just a silk blouse that cost me six hours of pouring coffee, that's all," she said, gently but firmly scooping the kitten off her friend. She glared at it. "Get this straight, you. I don't know if you noticed, but there's a lot of monsters wandering around his town. I could fake your death with frightening ease."
"Okay, Buffy? Here's what she just heard. 'Mwah wah wah, mwah wah wah wah.'" Xander did his best adult-speaking-to-Charlie-Brown impression.
She deposited the kitten outside and took a look around the room.
"Huh," she said. "I just realized, I haven't seen what you've done with the place."
What he had done with the place was fill nearly every square inch with stuff designed to fill an entire basement. She could barely see the rain falling outside his window for all the toys and knicknacks lined up along the sill. A few longboxes of comics were piled against one wall, looking precarious.
"Boys are frightening," she concluded.
"Yeah, yeah," Xander muttered. "I've seen your room. It looks just like this."
"Hmmm." She looked at his stereo, which had piles of CDs on top of it. She looked at the titles. "How do you shake your groove thing with this stuff, anyway? I mean, it's all..."
"Guy music?"
"Blink 182, Green Day, Rollins Band, Mighty Mighty Bosstones..."
"You'd be surprised. Sometimes I dance to 'The Impression That I Get.' The 'knock on wood' line always gets a big response."
"There is so much about that image I don't want in my head."
"Sometimes I do the Bosstones dance."
"I beg you to stop." She stopped at a female name. "Best of Patsy Cline, Trisha Yearwood, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Mary Chapin Carpenter..."
"My country music stack," Xander said, sitting up. "I was just about to indulge."
"Ah, the music of pain," Buffy said. "I remember."
"Sorry about that."
"Don't be." She hit Play; a sad melody started up. "So why were you about to indulge?"
"Three guesses and the first two don't count," Xander replied. "Since when do Wiccans have day camps anyway?"
"It's just a weekend."
"It's a vacation. It's a road test of their relationship. Going away together anywhere, even if it's to a Holiday Inn in Reseda, means taking a larger step." He tried to erase the image of Willow and Tara in a hotel room bed from his mind and failed for the four hundredth time that afternoon.
"It could be worse," Buffy replied, sitting on the end of the bed. "I mean, you're just pining away after a woman you're convinced can't be yours, while your at-the-moment official girlfriend is incommunicado on Cape Cod. It's not like your significant other is stranded in Iowa for the summer and hasn't called you in three days."
Xander looked at her, a little concerned.
"Have you tried calling him?"
"What, just pick up the phone and call him? Admit that I want to talk to him more than he apparently wants to talk to me? Surrender control? Hell no. He's not going to make me mope."
"Which is why you're in here with me on a rainy day listening to my Music of Pain Mix."
"There's a whole mix?"
"Most of it starring the esteemed Ms. Carpenter, or Chapin Carpenter, or whatever the hell her name is. If country is the music of pain, then she's the Queen of pain." Xander shrugged. "What can I say? There's something about a babe singing about a lost love that gets to me."
Buffy lay down next to him and listened.
"So this is the music of pain," she said.
"Yep."
"So...what? I just lay here and listen to it?"
"Well, it's not just that," Xander said. "You've gotta try and apply the lyrics to your own situation. That way, it feels like she's singing just to you, and then you feel better."
"Uh huh." She turned on her side to face him. "You don't think he'd cheat on me, do you?"
"Riley?"
"Yeah."
"Riley Finn?"
"He's a man. He's capable of it."
"That's quite the Anya impression. Buffy, come on. That guy wouldn't cheat on you at gunpoint. He's too...I dunno. He's too good of a guy for that."
Buffy looked skeptical.
"So you don't think that he has the same urges as other guys? You don't think he's capable of throwing some farmgirl down on a haystack and having his sweaty way with her?"
"No. I think he was rocketed to Earth from the doomed planet Krypton."
That got a grin out of her.
"You're right," she said. "You're right. I'm stupid to worry."
"You're not stupid. I should know. We can smell our own."
"Xander--"
"Ssshhh. Just listen to the music for a bit."
They lay in silence for a couple of minutes, listening to Patsy Cline croon out the blues.
"It's not working," Buffy finally said. "I don't feel comforted."
"Might just be a guy thing."
"I guess." She sat up. "I need to do something. Anything. I can't just sit in here and be depressed."
"Yes, becoming as pathetic as I am would be terrible."
"It really would," she replied with a wicked smirk.
"I love you too, Buff."
She was about to retort when the phone rang.
"That's Riley!" she said brightly. "I know it!" She ran out into the hall and picked up the extension. "Hello? Hi there, sweetie. You wanna tell me where the hell you've been?"
Xander smiled and closed his eyes. His favorite song of the mix was coming up.
***********
There's a place in my head where it's always October.
We are always seventeen. We have less scars than we do now. It's complicated, of course; it always is. But in another way, it's not.
I close my eyes, and I'm there, right when the music starts, a soft piano tinkling out of the dark beyond her windows. Baby, where's that place where time stands still?
I remember like a lover can
I forget it like a leaver will
I'm trying to tie my bowtie as she changes out of her dress behind a screen, and here I can almost feel her, feel the silk moving over her skin as she tugs the dress over her head and wriggles into a new one.
It's no place you can get to by yourself
Gotta love someone and they love you
Time will stop for nothing else
And then she comes out from behind the screen and I see her.
No, I mean I see her. She's wearing this simple little black thing, I've probably seen the same outfit on dozens of girls, and...oh my God. She's beautiful.
Willow's beautiful.
When did that happen?
You know when you see a movie and there's a big plot twist at the end, and then you have to go see the movie again and you see it all in a totally new light? That's what happened to me that night. It's like when you're about to die, your entire life passes before your eyes...I looked back and it became so blindingly obvious.
She was always beautiful, you idiot.
She loved you.
Memory plays tricks on us
The more we cling, the less we trust
And the less we trust, the more we hurt
And as time goes on, it just gets worse
She looks at me, and as I look back I can see it on her face...she's digging the tux. Maybe that's why I wore it as a Halloween costume; trying to recapture the magic.
But you can't recapture magic, can you?
We stammer out some words, and a look of panic crosses her face, and the next thing I know, we're dancing.
So baby, where's that place where time stood still?
Is it under glass inside a frame?
Was it over when you had your fill?
And as we're dancing, I find myself thinking of the first time I told her I loved her. The first time I admitted it to myself. The first step I took towards our complete destruction.
"I love you."
I could tell her that, you know. I could. It's true. I could just pick up the phone and call her and say that, and then we'd all have to deal with it.
But I won't. Instead, I'll just dance here in my head, dance with her and hold on to as much of her as I can...
And then we're kissing.
Here we are with nothing but
This emptiness inside of us
Your smile, a fitting final gesture
Wish I could have loved you better
When that line comes up, I suddenly remember it all, all the hurtful things I said and she said and the way it got all screwed up and I want to...I want it to be better and I don't know how.
But that doesn't last too long, because she's kissing me, and how can that be bad? How can that possibly be bad, if I love her and she loves me, how can that be bad? How can it be wrong? How can it end up driving us apart and into the arms of other people?
How did that happen?
Sometimes I feel like if I can just figure out where we screwed everything up, maybe, just maybe...
How did that happen?
Baby, where's that place where time stands still?
I remember like a lover can
I forget it like a leaver will
I hold onto that kiss for as long as I can.
Slow motion. Instant replays.
To this day, that remains the finest moment of my life.
It's the first time that you held my hand
It's the smell and the taste and the fear and the thrill
It's everything I understand
And all the things I never will
I always stop before the kiss ends. I back away, leave the memory alone, because I don't want to see what happens next, the denials and the dismissals and the hunger in her eyes and my body. I just want to be lost in that kiss.
There's a place in my head where it's always October, and I'm kissing Willow, and all is right with the world.
But then I have to go back to reality.
*********
"Xander?"
He opened his watery eyes to see Buffy standing at the door to his room.
"Yeah?" he asked.
"It's Willow," she said, offering the phone. "Said she wanted to talk to you."
"Really? I thought it was Riley--"
"It was. Call waiting. It's okay. I can always call him back." She smiled and handed him the phone. "Good luck."
Xander took a deep breath and raised the phone to his ear.
"Hello?"
"Hey, Xander! What's up?"
"Hey!" he said casually. "How's witch school?"
"It's great! We're just taking a little break before dinner, and Tara's napping, so I thought I'd give you guys a call." She paused. "I sent you a postcard."
"I'm thinkin' you might beat it back here, Will."
"Probably," she agreed. "So what have you been doing all day?"
"Nothing; just watching Buffy torment the kitten."
"What?! Oh, she'll be getting quite the tongue-lashing when I get her back on this phone!"
"I ever tell you you're a total mom, Will?"
"Watch it, you."
Xander smiled as he gazed out into the rain.
"I miss you," he said, the words slipping past his lips before he could stop them.
"Well, I miss you too," Willow replied. "But that's why I called."
"Good," Xander said softly. "So! Back to witch school. So d'you know anything about turning people into toads yet, because this guy cut me off in traffic last night..."