InsaneJournal

THE PROPER SLAYER (pt 24 of ?)


Previously

It was better this time, waking out of sleep to receive him, warm and languid, rocking. He smelled like cigarette smoke and tasted of beer, but she didn't mind that. It made him feel manly. "You get everything done?"

"We're all set."

He smiled into her eyes, laying kisses on her face, all around her mouth.

"Set how?"

"For our new life. For me to take care of you." He lowered his mouth to her breasts, kissed each one with worshipful thoroughness.

She wrapped her legs around him, and swiveled.

A little later he said, "You're different."

"Different? Since when?" She thought he meant in the last day, since he'd left her here waiting for him.

"Where'd you learn to move that way? Make love that way?"

"What way? What was wrong with it?"

"Nothing, I guess. You've been to bed with someone else."

"No." She wasn't quite sure why she was lying altogether, when really all she needed to do was lie about Spike. But the mere thought of Spike right here, when she was spread out beneath Angel, made her flush all over with shame, and ... something else, some feeling she was not going to examine. Spike was finished, she'd left Spike. Dirty filthy Spike. She wasn't going to think about him.

She mustn't permit herself to think about him.

"You had another man."

"I've been reading the sex tips in Cosmo."

"You're telling me you haven't been with anyone else?"

From his tone, she was halfway sure she could say yes, yes she'd had another boyfriend, some high school classmate and of course they'd done it, who these days expected a seventeen year old girl not to fuck? Instead she shook her head with vehemence.

"No one else."

"You didn't think you'd ever see me again."

"I loved you. I mean—I love you. Hey—I thought you said we shouldn't do this before our wedding night. That it was better to be apart?"

"Forgot. Missed you too much while I was out." He kissed her. "It'll be a couple days, anyway. Since you set store by having a pretty dress."

"I can't afford one. I just wanted to, you know, fantasize about it."

"I'll get you the dress. You don't have to worry."

"How? You don't have any money either."

"I've got enough for us."

"The trust, right, I forgot."

Angel raised his head a little. "Trust?"

"You know. The Aurelian trust. They didn't change your PIN number when you came back human, did they?"

"How do you know about that?"

"I ... I looked it up, in Giles' library."

"You were reading up on the Aurelian line?"

"Yes. What, do you think I'm stupid? Illiterate?" She almost believed it now, that she'd cracked the books. How dare he act surprised that she would do that?

"Of course not." He put a hand out and caressed her face. "And I'll always have plenty to take care of you, Buffy. You never have to doubt that."

At the border crossing, Angel showed a North Dakota driver's license that raised no eyebrows. Buffy wondered how he'd acquired it, but she was too anxious about her own I.D. passing muster—it was a fake one she'd gotten in New York City last summer, where one of her co-workers hooked her up—to have much time to ponder. She'd thought of hers as a way to get into bars—it said she was twenty-one—and had never anticipated using it to cross a national line. But as she held her breath, the man in the uniform handed it back to Angel with his own, and waved them through. "Welcome home."

They took two days getting to Las Vegas, listening to oldies and country music on the radio. Angel got stopped once for speeding, but charmed the officer into letting them go with a warning. They talked little, and Buffy was content with that, content to watch the miles elapse with the music. There didn't seem to be anything to talk about—the past was a book they both wanted to keep shut, and the future ... what was there to say about it? They were going to get married and then they were just going to live it.

She'd been logy and slow-headed all through the long desert drive. But Las Vegas woke her up. The lights amazed her—she'd seen them in movies, but the reality—sitting in the stop-and-start traffic on the strip in the early evening, dazzled her. Crowds on foot surged in and out of every frantically flashing building. The presence of demons pinged her everywhere, so it was all she could do not to jump out of the car right there and give chase.

"I feel like a can of soda that's been shaken up!"

Angel smiled. "Thought you'd like it."

They passed the casinos and hotels, and turned in at the fancy new mall. "You go on into Saks and find that dress you want. I'll get us a room and come back for you." He pressed a wad of bills into her hand. When he'd pulled away and she looked at them, Buffy saw they were hundreds—twenty of them, crisp and new. She boggled, then stuffed them away into her front jeans pocket.

The saleswoman in the bridal department looked a little askance at her, in her cheap clothes, her ponytail, her solitude. The other women there looking at gowns all seemed to be groomed to the nines, manicured, made-up, everyone wearing heels, everyone with at least one accomplice, mothers, sisters, friends, to ooh and ah and squeal.

Buffy said, "I'm getting married tonight, I'm ready to buy a dress now. Cash." She thought. "Shoes too. Everything."

This declaration seemed to focus the clerk; five minutes later she was buttoning her into the first of a succession of full frothy white confections straight out of her schoolgirl fantasies. She pulled the band from her hair so it hung over her shoulders, and swirled this way and that in the three-way mirror. Mrs O'Connor. Introducing Mrs O'Connor. That would be her name, come midnight.

A voice startled her out of her happy reverie. "Sweetheart, look at these!" She flung open the dressing room door, Mom? Mom! halfway out of her lips, before she realized the woman wasn't speaking to her. She sounded like Joyce, but she was short and squat and dark haired, bustling into another room with veils over her arm. Not for her at all.

Buffy sank onto the little pouf in the corner. The big Scarlett O'Hara skirts rustled and crinkled as she dropped. She'd always assumed her mother would be there, beaming and approving and beautiful in a light blue silk, at her wedding. She'd be delighted and she would dance once with Angel. She'd also imagined that her father would come to the wedding too—leaving his secretary behind in L.A.—and that Mom would dance with him as well, and they'd talk, and when she got back from her honeymoon it would be to the news that they were going to get married again, and they'd be a complete family once more. All forgiven.

She thought of calling her. Maybe she could persuade her mother to come here, to be her witness. Wouldn't she be so happy to be reunited, that she'd agree to everything?

No. She wouldn't. She'd mess it all up. Insist that Buffy was still just seventeen, refuse her consent. Try to drag her back home.

She'd have to wait, to tell Mom after it was done. After it had been done for a while, too late to undo. Next year, when she was eighteen.

Until then, she'd have to go on going it alone.

"How are we doing in here?" The salesclerk poked her head in, and Buffy sprang up. "Do you like this? Or do you want to try the cream tulle again?"

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