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The Sequel to
Reasons For Living
Headfirst
11 Still Life
Spike leapt off the bed. Riley remained still for a long moment. His eyes, peering out through the stretched cotton of his shirt and into the darkness of the room, made out what he could. Spike was gone, at least, from the room, and Riley slowly pulled his shirt back down, not noticing that there was now a soggy hole revealing the middle of his chest. His breath came in ragged gasps and he tried to calm himself down, holding his fingers to the pulse in his neck, counting. He sighed as the pace of his counting – the pace of his heart – slowed.
“…tired of living like a blind man…”
The music still blared, but over it, or somewhere inside it, a scream rose. The scream was sustained. It ran as long as there was a trace of air in the lungs it came from, lungs that didn’t need to breathe. Riley sighed again as he pulled his hand down from his neck, coming to rest, folded with his other hand, over the hardness in his pants which was quickly becoming less than turgid. The scream finally ended, or paused, Riley thought, then resumed accompanied by the crash
of what could only have been Riley’s television and then the music seemed to explode and dropped away completely. The screaming continued.
“…”
Riley continued to sit on the bed, his hands folded, and all he could think of was – two years to tenure, just two more years. If I can just live through this, I can get to that. I won’t have to… just two more years. Dissertation is dead and gone, tenure is all that’s left, and… what’s… that? A radio, somewhere else, parking lot, maybe or the trailer across the
way…
“…I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain…”
The vampire’s profile emerged from the edge of the doorframe of Riley’s room. Spike stared forward, into the wall, into nothingness, coming no further into the room. Riley cocked his head slightly and caught just a little bit more of the edge of Spike, but what he saw, what he could see there, was the hardness that still jutted out in front of Spike, and Riley wondered what exactly it was for, and who, and if it was for her, and if he would have it in his mouth again. One of his
hands went to his chest, and he found the hole that Spike had breached on his way into Riley’s mouth. He tugged at the edges of the hole, jagged, the kind of tear that only teeth could really make, but without any specific kinds of tooth marks. He pulled on it harder, suddenly the hole in the shirt was, and it was only, what it was. Somehow, symbolic, he began to knead the hole into a large shape, while Spike stood in the door, hard, staring, and Riley got the shirt as big as it needed to be, and Riley stopped. His hand left the hole and returned to his neck and the counting, the speed of which slowly increased again until he was breathing almost as hard as he had been,
before.
“…I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never…”
Spike’s head never turned. Riley hadn’t know that this vampire – this rageaholic, this drunk, this coward and calculating and impatient vampire – could be so still. Riley blinked, and in the space of a blink, not even a brief moment of shut eye, not even eyes closed, just a blink, Spike’s eyes set on him from nearly beyond the doorframe, from nearly through the wall. His counting stopped.
“How bloody broken are you, Riley?”
167. That was how many times he counted his heart beat in the minute following the question. 167 throbs of a heart that didn’t know it had the will to live. 167 beats that were prayers to keep on beating. 167 treatises on psychology and its effects on the central nervous and cardiovascular systems. 167 pulses of an emergency guidance system teetering perilously close to the edge of…
“Do you hear me? Do you know what I… What I’ve done to you? To myself?”
Spike’s feet shifted, and it pushed his hips forward, into plain sight, but he didn’t seem to notice. Riley’s eyes betrayed the moment, locked there, lingered just too long for either of their comforts and by the time Riley batted his eyes away Spike had flipped on the light switch and was standing over Riley on the bed, glaring down as if his hunger and his sobriety were going to crack him in two if he didn’t feed one or the other of them. Spike’s hardness was inches above his head and Riley’s expression was still. He laughed.
“You’ve made a cuckold of me…” Riley waited. “Is that what you want to hear?”
Spike growled. He didn’t move, he was looking down, past himself to Riley’s upturned face which no longer looked hungry, even if his heartbeat sounded it.
“I don’t know what you’ve done to yourself, Spike. I don’t even know you. I never did. What do I know? I will never stop loving her. And you can’t stop. So, you’re here, taking some kind of solace…”
“Solace, what do you know from bloody solace?” Spike’s voice rose, cut off the former soldier who retaliated.
“What do you know from what you’ve fucking done to me? What the fuck do you care? What makes you think this is any more important than any other fucking one night stand I’ve ever had?” Riley said.
Spike laughed, long and loud and stepped back and away from Riley. Spike sat on the edge of the bed, at Riley’s feet, facing away from him. He would have been vaguely impressed if the prematurely middle aged professor wasn’t stupid enough to believe that nothing had happened in the din he hadn’t heard through. Spike knew too much to be impressed now and his laughter continued. It slowly abated and Riley slipped his hand through the hole of his shirt, rubbed his chest and pulled his hand out.
“What?” He asked.
Facing the wall. “I’ll be staked for this. Sure enough, when – they, he, she, all of the bloody Delilahs – realize what I’ve done. I dunno how I ended up in your bed after all. It’s, god, it’s so funny.”
Riley couldn’t understand just then, and he didn’t try, but the talking continued.
“Cut off the bloody hair and all the strength goes away, and she cut off the hair. Shaved away, took the last thing that was mine. Lost dignity decades ago, lost breathing years before that. I mean, sure, yeah, I’ve still got fags to smoke and pints to drink, but… I…” Spike turned to Riley. “I don’t know what to say. Bloody brilliant.”
It was the moment, the one that, had happened, but hadn’t happened before. It was the moment where a hole in the shirt became fully symbolic, a hole over a heart, pumping and Riley crabwalked down the bed until his legs were on either side of Spike and his arms slid under Spike’s arms around wrapped around the vampire who sat there limp, still turned as if to talk to a Riley that was still across the bed from him, and just then, nothing that had happened mattered and there was comfort seeping into the vampire and back into the human for delivering it and Riley looked up, met Spike’s eyes and Spike started to turn his head more, and their lips started to touch, less than a kiss and the phone rang and Riley’s head immediately jerked toward it. It rang again. Riley looked back at Spike. It rang again.
“Spike? No one calls me,” Riley said over the ring.
“I know that.”
“Why would someone be calling me?”
It rang again.
“I don’t know.”
It rang again.
“How could someone get this number?”
“…”
“Spike? Spike. No one calls me.”
“…”
The ringing stopped.
“So, then, you’ve done what while I was, what? Sucking you off? You’ve called someone? Pissed off an ex-girlfriend? Maybe they actually bothered to use that wacky star-sixty-nine business. This is so…”
Riley’s pulse was pumping faster, but he held fast onto Spike, didn’t let go, didn’t withdraw. Riley just hung on for one more long slow minute, Spike faced forward, Riley tattooed across Spike’s back, before he pulled away, a tattoo shredded from skin, scar damage visible only in the eyes.
Spike cried.
“No one answered, Buffy,” Anya said. “What was that?”
Buffy’s eyes were glazed extra thick, the pall over her features the greatest yet of all the sad expressions on her face since she returned suddenly sans Xander. She grabbed the phone from Anya’s hands without a word and disappeared up the stairs and into her room.
She dialed nine of ten numbers and hung on the last one, waited as long as she could, then punched it in. She sat through the rings on the other end in silence and dreaded the moment she knew was—
“Angel Investigations. We help the…”
“Screw the helpless. I need to take care of some shit. Where’s Angel?”
“Buffy?” Cordelia’s voice was bright, if concerned, through the faint static of the landline. “What’s going on? Not another apocalypse.”
“Did you know that your ex-boyfriend is called Alexander the Great in the demon world? You’d think they’d add a ‘the second’ onto that title as it’s already taken, but they don’t. Nope, some of them apparently think your ex-boyfriend actually is the Alexander the Great. What d’you think of that?” Buffy
took a breath, “Sorry, Cord, where’s Angel?”
“Malibu, there’s, a thing, with some traditionalist Catholics. You know Mel Gibson? That whole thing? Yeah, apparently his church is actually built on satanic ground. Did you know there was satanic ground?”
Buffy grinned. “No, I didn’t, but that’s interesting. So, wait, Mel Gibson is evil?”
“Apparently so. Rumor has it that ‘Man Without a Face’? Yeah, not so much make up as, say, ‘Braveheart’ was.”
“You mean he’s actually all burn-y looking? God, he didn’t even come with good looking not fx-makeup face. Like, wait.” Buffy frowned again. “Really, Cordelia, that was a nice distraction, I don’t know if you knew that I needed it, but thanks for doing it, but…”
“You said something about Xander, right?”
"Right, your ex-boyfriend.”
Cordelia tensed and Buffy heard her start to crack knuckles, “Why do you keep saying it like that? ‘Right, your ex-boyfriend,’ like you’re all jealous, or bitter or something. It’s not like you to express romantic resentment toward my castoffs. Not counting Mr. Salty Goodness, who won’t be back, um, for a while, at least not until he’s pulled a ‘Lethal
Weapon’ on the faux Aussie.”
Buffy sighed, wanting to laugh again at the routine slayage banter, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so.
“When he gets back, don’t let him leave. I’m coming there. I need to talk to him. I need, to… tell you later, god, I have to go.”
She hung up without another word and imagined Cordy standing behind the counter of the Hyperion with the phone stuck to her ear and her mouth drooping to her ample bosom.
She packed a bag, opened her window, tossed the bag out and jumped down to the ground below. She smiled at the trick, not having done it since high school, then frowned because she suddenly felt it was the only way she could go. That feeling, that fear of discovery, that she had fought tooth and nail to get rid of washed over her and as she strode away, a hundred
pounds of supplies and clothes in the bag over her shoulder and her pace faster than any man twice her size would hope to manage with such a load, she heard her phone ring again and knew who it was and knew that no way in hell would she go back and talk to him.
She turned on the timer in her heart and mind that counted down the hours until Los Angeles and the moment of basking she would have before the world started spiraling and as she climbed on the bus, she cried.
He got out of the shower, wrapped a towel around himself, went to the phone. He picked it up, dialed, let it ring. He waited, each ring hollowing out a space in his mind, burrowing. He thought it would ring forever. He was surprised by the booming, trembling voice that answered the phone.
“Spike. What are you doing? What is the…”
“Anya.”
“Oh. My god. You’re not Spike,” Anya said.
“What’s your point?” He said.
“I just thought. Do you know what’s going on?”
“I’m just waiting.”
“Well, get off your ass. Spike’s, I guess, in Iowa.”
“What’s he doing in Iowa, Anya?” He said.
She was quiet for a moment and he missed the ringing. The silence was louder, and the stillness was ossifying.
“He’s there. He’s with, I mean, we heard. He called and there was moaning and. He was doing something to, with, Riley.”
He gritted his teeth and his fists clenched. He wasn’t surprised really.
“Buffy’s… upset. I think she’ll, do something.”
“That’s cool.”
“Are you kidding? Spike’s shacked up with her ex-orgasm friend and you think it’s cool?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“You’re so far gone, Harris, there’s not even words.” She hung up.
He pulled the towel from around his waist and stood naked in the dark in front of the hotel room’s mirror. Where he should have been was just an uninterrupted view of the bed.
He swung around, bent over and grabbed the bed, tossing it aside like so much paper, like so much nothing at all, and he cried.
tbc
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