Dream Sequence III – Restless Night
part two

Willow kissed Spike as if it were the last thing she might ever do, and she had to imprint the taste of his lips on her own so that she could hold onto the memory throughout eternity. Her hands caressed down the cool skin of his body, over the taut muscles of his shoulders, his back, his buttocks, as if absorbing the texture of his skin into her palms. She wrapped her legs around his waist once more, as if no matter how close she was to him, it wasn't close enough. And her hips met the rhythm set by his as if she weren't a being separate from him, but one half of a dual-natured creature.

As if she were the other half of himself.

Something deep within Spike recognized this, and at least for this night, the beast was vanquished. In the middle of kissing Willow, Spike realized he was using bruising force, and appalled, he forced himself to gentle his touch. Willow moaned against his mouth, and with a shock he realized it was a moan of frustration. Her nails scraped down his spine, and he thrilled to the realization that the human girl in his arms could meet his passion with a hunger as voracious and all consuming as that any vampire could claim.

Spike forgot gentleness, he forgot the demands of the beast, he forgot he was in love with a madwoman, and that he was even more profoundly in love with a woman whose heart was inalterable given elsewhere. The girl in his arms was wine and fire and sweet forgetfulness and, at the moment, all he craved. Spike gave Willow the force she hungered for, driving into her as unrestrainedly as if she were no less immortal than he, his mouth crushing down on hers with brutal thoroughness, his body driving hers into the softness of the mattress beneath them. And she met him with her exquisite, fragile, human passion, giving him a satisfaction he had not dared expect or hope for.

Willow knew the instant things changed. She could almost taste the difference in his mouth, could almost feel the difference in him through the pores of her skin. And then he tried to gentle his kiss, his touch, but her passion was too intense to accept gentleness, and she told him without words that she needed more than gentleness from him. And he complied.

Spike was fire and wind and passion within her, a storm, a tempest, a force of nature that would, she understood, break her, if she resisted it. But she had no desire to resist him at all. She yielded before the storm, fed the fire, bowed with the wind, and gave herself utterly and unreservedly to the tempest and the passion. If the force of nature consumed her, she consumed it as well, because no matter how forcefully Spike thrust into her, no matter how avidly he kissed her, caressed her, took her, Willow met him, accepted him, reveled in his touch. And when she felt him reach his most intense pleasure, when his rhythm became frenzied and uncontrolled and she felt the first spurt of his cold seed deep inside her womb, Willow felt her own completion begin. She surged against him, her silken sheath tightening around him, giving him the final satisfaction he craved. She pulsed around him in helpless ecstasy, and as he drew out the pleasure for her, forcing himself to keep stroking inside her until her trembling flesh quieted, his own rapture became complete. Sated, but still sheathed inside her, Spike collapsed over her soft, warm and yielding body. Willow's legs slipped from around his waist, but she tightened her arms around his neck, drawing his mouth back to hers for a less frenzied, almost gentle kiss.

They lay entwined and unmoving for long moments. Willow's heart and breathing slowly returned to normal. They said nothing, what had passed between them too intense for words just yet. In the quiet, Willow heard the soft, sure tread of her father's footsteps on the stairs. She lay relaxed in Spike's arms as the footsteps reached the second floor, and proceeded past the closed, darkened door of her bedroom and down the hall to the master bedroom. Willow heard the soft click of the door being opened, and a moment later another click as it shut behind her father for the night.

It amazed her that the passion which had been so furious, so shattering, so all-encompassing, could have proceeded in such absolute quiet that her mother's sleep was undisturbed and her father had continued reading, unaware, in the room below. But so it had been. And if it weren't for the sweet soreness between her thighs, the relished weight pressing down upon her, the cool flesh caressing her own, she might have thought it an illusion. Willow was profoundly grateful it was not. She sighed contentedly, and pressed a light kiss on Spike's lips.

The warm girl in his arms stirred slightly, kissing him with a touch as gossamer as a butterfly's wing. Spike found his passions stirred once more, if more gently. He felt himself swell inside her, but was just a little unnerved by his own earlier violence. So he pulled her tighter in his embrace and rolled them so that he was beneath her, and she could control matters this time. Then he pulled the covers over her so that she would stay warm, creating a kind of tent for their lovemaking. Willow smiled down at him, the street lamp outside her window giving enough illumination for him to see it. He smiled back.

Willow liked the new position, and was quick to take advantage of the freedom it offered. She leant forward, brushing her breasts against Spike's chest, kissing his neck and shoulders, then lifting her head slightly, and taking one of his male nipples between her teeth. She delivered a slight nip, delighting in the pleased growl she drew from her lover. She nipped again. Spike buried his hands in her titian hair, holding her close. Willow laved her tongue against the bit of flesh she was tormenting, and Spike thought he would go out of his mind. His staff was achingly hard within her, but she wasn't doing anything yet about that. He lifted his hips, driving into her. With a growl as feral as his own, she warned him off, and bit again. Hard. Startled, Spike went still, a grin spreading across his face.

Pleased by his acquiescence, Willow gentled her caress, then licked her way up his chest to his neck, kissing what would have been pulse-points in a living man, then spreading slow, savoring kisses along his jaw, up to his ear, where her tongue swirled into the crevices, drawing a moan from him. That pleased her even more. Willow continued to torment his ear for a few more minutes, and when he began to growl low in his throat once more, she moved her attentions to his mouth, kissing him slowly, deeply, pouring herself into the kiss as if there were nothing more important in the world than finding out how good his mouth tasted against her own.

And all the while she was exquisitely aware of his hardened manhood sheathed inside her own body, filling her, stretching her...but utterly still because she had demanded that of him and he was, for the moment, obedient to her demands. The power was intoxicating. One of the most deadly creatures in the world --Willow had absolutely no illusions about exactly what it was with which she lay abed-- was hers to command, and if that command was not absolute, well, there were some illusions it was safe to indulge in.

The groans against her mouth became a little more desperate, and taking pity on him at last, Willow finished the kiss, and sat up. She let her hands trail along his shoulders, and down his arms, to his hands. Taking them in her own, she set his hands on her breasts, pressing down on them. And then she did what he longed for her to do, rising up on her knees, slowly, slowly, so that his manhood was gradually freed of its tender prison, until only the very tip of him remained inside. And then she plunged back down on him, taking him as deeply as she could, forcing another growl from him, as his hands tightened around her breasts. Willow sighed softly, and rose up on her knees again, twisting her hips to add another dimension to his pleasure, and her own.

Spike was being made nearly mindless with longing. Willow's intoxicating little body moved on his with voluptuous slowness, and torturous skill. She was in no hurry to reach her goal, and how could she be, considering how violently and thoroughly their passions had been slaked within the past hour? The miracle was that she was willing to make love to him at all, considering how brutal his passion had been the first two times.

She was the most fragile lover he had ever had, slight and young and human. How was it she was also the one who could rise to his most arduous demands, in a way that only Dru or Buffy had ever managed before? Dru's needs were as vampiric as his own, while Buffy was the Slayer, and more than human, if less than immortal. But Willow was no more or less than a teenaged girl, one new to passion, one to whom he himself had introduced the pleasures of the flesh only a few weeks before. By what miracle did she meet him so flawlessly, so completely?

I love you. Memory gave him the words she had uttered just after he had taken her virginity. He had dismissed them, even though he had secretly delighted in them. He just couldn't believe that he remotely deserved to hear them, or that they were the result of anything more than a surfeit of rapture.

But what if they weren't?

Spike was almost afraid to examine that idea too closely, was surprised at how unbelievably sweet the thought was. But just as he was beginning to realize that he might have to give some serious thought to exactly what Willow felt for him, she moved her hips in another erotic roll that brought his attention firmly back to more immediate matters.

Spike growled again, realizing that if she kept up the exquisite sensations she was giving him he wasn't going to be able to stay quiet. She seemed to realize it as well, because she leant forward again, stopping his mouth with a kiss, all the while keeping up the sensuous rocking of her hips, tightening and releasing her honeyed core on his eager cock. Spike opened his mouth beneath hers, thrusting into her mouth with his tongue in time to the pace she herself had set with their bodies. Willow sighed into his mouth, breathing into him, and though he himself no longer needed breath, he took in hers like an offering.

Willow's demon lover reached between their bodies, finding the tiny pearl of flesh that ruled her desire. Willow sighed into his mouth again, as he began to stroke her tenderly, and suddenly the easy, languorous pace she had set wasn't nearly satisfying enough. Willow increased her pace and added another twist to her already rolling hips. Her pelvis slammed down on his, driving his shaft more deeply into her, his balls slapping against her vulnerable core. She began whimpering, her tongue battling with his as she writhed on him in sensual abandon.

He could feel the trembling of her inner flesh and knew that her crisis was approaching. Spike ruthlessly built her pleasure, increasing the pressure of his stroking fingers, driving his hips upward to impale her more forcefully on his rampant manhood. His own desires kept pace with hers, until finally, he felt her explode around him, her muscles clamping him, her tongue delving into his mouth, her cries muffled by his devouring kisses.

Willow shattered around her demon lover, her orgasm the most intense ever, rapture crashing over her in white-hot waves that drove her into a frenzy, making her ride him more voraciously yet, until she felt him shatter in turn and spill inside her, and even that wasn't enough for her this time.

Not until the last intense spasm had crested and died away, not until he had gone still beneath her, his kisses gentling, did she allow herself to still in turn, slumping over his body, her mouth still clinging to his.

Pulling the covers more closely around her sweat-slick body, Spike turned with her in his arms again. She nestled beside him, breaking the kiss, snuggling her head into his shoulder. He dropped a kiss on her brow, and held her close, as, with a sigh, she drifted into sated slumber.

Light from the street lamps outside seeped in through the blinds on her window, sending strips of light across the bed. Spike contemplated them as he cradled the warm, sleeping girl in his arms. His thoughts returned to their earlier musings. Could he possibly be that lucky? Could Willow really love him? Or had her impassioned words been, as he had suspected, merely an excess of lovemaking?

And why, now, weeks after they had first been uttered, were her words returning to his mind?

But he knew. He had almost killed his beautiful Willow tonight. He had almost drained every sweet drop of blood from her fragile body and sent her soul into oblivion, replacing it with a demon born of his own blood. Appalled as he was by what he had nearly done, he knew that what had stopped him hadn't been his own control.

It had been Willow's utter acceptance of whatever he chose to do.

And was there anything but pure, boundless, selfless love that could account for that? Shaken, Spike tightened his embrace around the sleeping girl. With a murmur, Willow stirred in his arms. He dropped another, soothing kiss on her brow, but she turned her head, seeking his mouth with her own.

Cold, sweet lips on hers, and the warmth and familiarity of her own bed. If this wasn't heaven, it was so close, that she might prefer it to whatever paradise she could hope to find. Willow opened her eyes, breaking the kiss, smiling into the tender, somewhat rueful eyes of her demon lover.

"Hello," she whispered.

"Hello, little girl," he whispered back. Her smile grew. It was amazing how Spike had taken a nickname she loathed and turned it into her very favorite endearment. When anyone else used the term, she felt lessened, awkward, inadequate.

But being Spike's little girl meant being cherished, treasured, valued. It was just one of the many things about being a vampire's lover that defied logic and turned the world on its ear. Although tonight the world might have turned a bit too far. Sighing, Willow realized that she was going to have to deal with whatever had put Spike in his near-lethal mood. She needed to know if she was going to be in danger again, any time soon.

"I think you'd better tell me," she said softly.

"Tell you...?" Spike began warily.

"Why you wanted to kill me tonight," she said simply.

"Oh, God," Spike groaned, tightening his embrace. She could feel him trembling, and while it was nice to know that he would have regretted killing her, it didn't change the fact that he had very nearly chosen to do so.

"It's okay," she said. Spike stared at her, incredulous.

"How the hell can it be okay?" he growled. "Bad enough I almost made you a demon, tonight. You can't really be all right with that."

"Well, but you didn't," she pointed out logically.

"Do you have a clue how close a call it was?" he said harshly.

Willow cupped his face with her hands, holding him steady so he could not escape the regard of her warm brown eyes. She gazed into his own, and saw something in their night-black depths that she found infinitely reassuring.

"Oh, yes," she told him. "I know how close it was. I knew as soon as I saw your face tonight that you wanted more from me than my body."

"Then why the hell did you let me take you?" he demanded bitterly.

"Because I love you," she said simply, not letting him turn away from her, but holding his gaze unflinchingly with her own, "and because I can't imagine any place I'd rather die than in your arms."

He had no words for her. He was stunned by the depth of her love, which, expressed, struck him even more profoundly than it had when he had merely suspected it.

"Are you sure?" he finally asked her, when he could speak again. The inadequacy of his response struck him almost as soon as the words left his mouth. She smiled a bit ruefully.

"Yes. I am."

"That was a damned stupid thing for me to ask," he sighed and kissed her. It was a kiss as tender as he could make it. Her declaration deserved so much more than mere tenderness. But he didn't have more to offer her.

And she understood that as well.

"It's all right Spike," she said when the kiss ended. "You don't have to say it back. I know you're not in love with me. But I need you to know that I am in love with you."

"Do you have any idea," he groaned, "how little I deserve you?"

"Since when does that have anything to do with it?" she teased. "But you have to tell me, Spike. I need to know what's going on. Why you were...like that... tonight?"

"Why I was like a ravening beast who couldn't decide whether to eat you or rape you, you mean?" he asked savagely.

"Harsh, much?" Willow said. "Even when you were being, well, forceful, you weren't ravening. And certainly not raping. Nothing happened that I wasn't more than willing to have happen. But you were dangerous and I need to know why."

He couldn't deny the truth of her words. For her own protection, he should tell her what was going on. But how could he explain, without also explaining about Buffy? Without breaking her heart a little bit more than his inability to return her love had already broken it? Well, he'd have to give it a try.

"It goes back to what happened in L.A.," he began. Spike proceeded to give Willow a carefully edited version of the summer's events: Buffy's despair; their truce, with his promise not to kill; Xander finding them; their rescue of Angel.

"Well, okay," Willow said. "That's what happened. But you haven't told me why. I mean, why you didn't kill Buffy when she asked you to. When you'd been trying to kill her for months."

Spike shook his head, he should have known that Willow was too smart, too perceptive to overlook the fine points.

"All right," he said after a moment. "I'll tell you what I told her. It's pretty simple, really, but if you haven't been there, you might not understand."

"Haven't been...?" Willow questioned.

"If you haven't been so lost, so despairing, that you don't care what happens to you. If you haven't been so paralyzed with grief and regret that simply moving, getting out of bed, leaving your room, is too much to contemplate."

"It was that bad?" Willow said softly. Spike laughed without humor.

"When Buffy went up against Acathla, I was all she had. You and her watcher were pretty much out of it, and none of the rest of you were quite in the same league as Angel and his boys. Joyce gave Buffy that ultimatum she didn't mean, but Buffy believed. And then she went to do battle with the demon who had killed her lover, and ended up being forced to send not him, but her lover, into the eternal torments of Hell.

"Meanwhile I got away with an unconscious Drusilla, taking her out of town, like I promised. And when she woke up, knowing Angel was gone and I was partly to blame, she couldn't get away from me fast enough. I'd made a bargain with my mortal enemy to keep Drusilla with me...and that very bargain made her leave.

"When I found Buffy, it was like, she was the one being in all the world who understood...because it was pretty much the same for her. We had both loved too damned hard and too damned deep, and it had cost us both too damned much." He fell silent for a moment, remembering.

"That's why you fell in love with her, isn't it?" Spike went very, very still, and Willow wondered if maybe she had overstepped some boundary she hadn't realized was there.

"How the hell did you figure out I love her?" he demanded quietly.

"Remember the spell I cast?" she said. "The one that revealed true love? It was a little more successful than I let on."

"Ah."

"But that's why you've kept up the truce, isn't it? Even though you're not living with her, and you really could go back to what you were, you know that she'd have to come after you, try to stop you from killing.

"And it isn't that you're afraid to face her, is it? It's that you know how much it would hurt her to kill you. Because you couldn't bear to kill her, now, could you? Now that you love her?" Spike stared at her, but she was looking at him expectantly, and he knew he had to answer.

"No, pet. I couldn't bear that at all." Willow's perception was frighteningly on target. He hadn't realized he'd revealed so much of himself. It didn't surprise him that she put the rest of the pieces neatly into place.

"But you really weren't meant to live on a diet of animal blood from the butcher shop, were you?" she said softly. "Angel can do it, because he's got his human soul, and a lot of remorse. And I guess you can keep Drusilla happy with it, because her demon is so crazed, it probably doesn't know the difference. But you're a demon, and your sane, and it must be so hard for you to give up what you desperately crave." She shook her head in amazement. "No wonder you nearly killed me tonight. You must be going out of your mind." She said it so calmly, as if she accepted the danger she surely recognized was only temporarily averted.

"Yes. I am." he told her frankly. She caught her lower lip between her teeth, worrying it.

"Will it help if you drink from me?" she asked. An image of her lying in his arms, embracing him while he sank his fangs into her unresisting body, an imagined taste of salt copper, wine-sweet on his tongue. Spike nearly vamped out and made the image real.

"Willow!" he choked. "God. Don't!"

"Then it won't help?" she pushed.

"I...Lord, don't you understand?" he asked with suppressed violence. "Wasn't what you've already been through tonight enough? Do you want to tempt me that much further?"

"Well, actually, the point was to try to minimize the temptation," she explained. "If you need to drink from a living human, and if you could be satisfied with, um, less than you normally take...?" Her look was tender, concerned. He felt the violence brought on by her tempting words seep away.

"I don't know," he said simply. "You don't understand what it's like, sweet. When the hunger is on you, it's not just a thirst for blood, although the only thing you can think about is how blood looks, and how blood smells, and how blood tastes. When the hunger comes, it's a hunger for death, as well. Because that is the nature of the beast that lives within us, the demons that we are. Predators and killers, darling. I don't want you to have any illusions."

"I don't," she assured him. "But I don't want you to have any, either. Why did you come here tonight, Spike?"

"I came here," he said slowly, wondering where she was going with this line of questioning, "because if I hadn't, I'd have killed."

She nodded. "That's what I thought. Death isn't the only thing that will sate you when you, well, when you're like that. Hungry. Death and sex...there close, aren't they? For you, I mean. So you came here to keep the hunger in check."

"Yeah. But it nearly wasn't enough."

"Then maybe you need to come here more often," she said lightly, smiling a little. He raised his scared brow sardonically.

"Nightly, sweet? Because that’s what it would take."

"Nightly," she murmured. "Nightly would be nice," she added wistfully. "But not practical, for either of us. And, well, there’s still something I don’t understand."

"What’s that, then?"

"Sunnydale is full of a lot of wrong guys, Spike. I mean really wrong guys. Guys who don’t need a demon inside them to make them evil. Guys who chose evil of their own free will. Buffy has to fight them, from time to time, too."

"You mean like the guy I saved you from in the cemetery," he sighed.

"Yeah. Exactly like that. Even Buffy couldn’t complain about you making a meal of him. So. You need to kill. On occasion. And there are a lot of people in this town who kill for a lot less reason than the need to stay alive. If you have to kill, why not do it in a way that might save someone else?"

He chuckled mirthlessly. "Yeah, why not? Do the Anne Rice thing, only killing the killers, becoming some mystic avenging angel --fallen variety, of course--and saving the Hellmouth for another day."

"You don’t think it’s a good idea." It wasn’t a question.

"I think it’s worth a try," he said. "But I’m not sure it’s a permanent solution." He couldn’t explain to her the differences in blood, or in kills. He couldn’t tell her that draining the human refuse who deserved killing was simply not as satisfying as taking the innocents. Because he was a demon, and while he fed on blood, he fed on other things as well, usually carried in the blood. And chief amongst those was the corruption of innocence. Still, even the vilest human prey was infinitely preferable to butcher shop leavings.

And maybe, if she was still willing, and he was glutted enough not to go into frenzy, he could savor the taste of innocence, as well.

"Okay, it’s not a permanent solution," Willow agreed. "But even a temporary one buys us some time…until we can figure things out. Because I really want to figure things out, Spike. And this seems like a good start."

"Yeah, little girl," he said slowly, pulling her closer, and turning so that she was beneath him once more. "I think you are on to something." Spike bent to her willing lips, and proceeded to assuage, once more, the hunger they shared.

To Be Completed in Millenium Dreams

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