Hey Kittens - Here's the promised update. Late, but better late today than waiting until tomorrow.
Rating - PG 13
No health warnings in effect.
Angst level is at a 4-5
Low to moderate Squick level.
I think that just about covers it. Have fun.
******
She pushed herself, feeling the muscles in her thighs burn as she ran up the steps to the second floor. Her breath caught in her throat as the toe of her left sneaker caught the hem of her right pants legs; stumbling, she caught herself with her hands. She scrambled up the last few steps to her floor.
That had been silly. It wasn’t as if she was Buffy and needed to be in great shape. She was just a Scooby, and all things considered, a fairly sedate one. Panting, she fumbled with her key and the lock until she finally got the door open. She darted inside, pushing the door shut behind her, pleased that Buffy had not yet arrived. Or … her eyes found her clock … maybe she was eating dinner. Willow dropped her pack and nudged it under her desk with her foot. She tossed her jacket on the bed, stripped hurriedly down to her panties, and pulled on her robe. She scooped up the dirty clothes and deposited them into her laundry bag. After hesitating for just a moment, she squirmed out of her undies as well and gingerly picked them up. They were still stiff and … disturbing. Her nose wrinkled involuntarily. That had never happened with Oz, but then she’d never been soaking wet for a good portion of any afternoon that she’d spent with him either.
Just being with Tara made her wet. For that matter, just thinking about Tara made her wet. She grinned and licked her lips, remembering the picnic’s fingers and the food. It had been a lot of fun even if it had resulted in stiff underwear. She bet Tara’s were stiff too; smiling, she dug a small hole in among her dirty clothes and buried the panties. Saturday for that.
She laid out fresh clothes on the bed and tucked a fresh bra and panties into the pocket of her robe. As she reached for her toiletries bag, she heard the door open and turned to see Buffy enter, fresh from her own shower.
“Hey, Buff.”
“Will! Good, I was worried that you had gone to dinner without me.” The Slayer closed and locked the door behind her. “Sorry I’m so late, but I ran over to Giles’ after classes and the whole nothingness that is info on Adam took way longer than it should have.”
With a fond smile Willow watched her best friend bounce around her part of the room. “It’s okay, I’m uh, sort of not much with the ready myself.” She waved a hand at her berobed body.”
“Oh.” Buffy paused. “But we’re still on, right? You, me, Tara, mochas?”
“Uh-huh. Tara will be over soon as she sh … can.” She bit her tongue and hastily turned away. She felt Buffy stop bouncing – damn – and grabbed her zippered bag, towel and washcloth.
“You guys are really into the magic.”
Willow risked a sideways glance at the Slayer, whose back was turned as she located and donned a bra. “Well, yeah, witches here, it’s sort of what we do.”
“She seems like a nice girl.” Buffy turned around and faced her. “I’m glad you found one another. I mean there’s not a whole lot you can really do with the other witch that you know.” She nodded at Amy, who was running in her exercise wheel.
“No, not much,” Willow agreed as she edged toward the door.
“I mean, besides feed her and clean up her cage and stuff,” her best friend blithered cheerfully on. “So, do you think the two of you can un-do that spell?”
“Maybe.” She turned for the door and escape but suddenly semi-naked Buffy was beside her.
“Will, what happened to your neck? It looks like something bit you. Twice.” The Slayer lifted her hand and Willow found herself backing away.
“Nothing. Nothing bit me.” Willow scrambled mentally for some even semi-plausible lie or explanation for the pair of bruises. She watched as Buffy’s hand drifted to the bite Angel had left on her own neck. Now there was an unconventional relationship.
“What then?”
Willow keyed on the slightly abstracted look on her friend’s face. “Um, that spell, the one I did with Tara yesterday, well, it involved this collar-thingie that had to rest here …” she gestured toward her neck and shoulders, “… and see, it was kind of heavy, hence the bruising.”
“Did you just use the word collar in a sentence involving people?” Buffy grinned, amused.
“No, no collar. Just a collar-thingie.” She felt her face heat.
Her friend’s grin faded as other implications sank in, “On your neck? What kind of spell was it, ’cause that sooo doesn’t sound good? And why you and not Tara?”
Willow gestured frantically, trying to wave away Buffy’s concern. “Oh, oh, it wasn’t anything like you’re thinking. It was just an energy channeling spell.” Which it had been – Tara’s lips on her neck had channeled quite a lot of energy. “And, me, ’cause, well, Tara’s really knowledgeable, so it just seemed natural that she’d direct and I’d be the source.”
“Well, I guess that explains ‘less than perky Will’, too. You must be tired. No wonder you slept over last night.” Buffy nodded her head in satisfaction. “But be careful, ’kay?”
“No prob. We’re big with the careful.” She smiled reassuringly at her best friend. “And you know, I’d better go get cleaned up. Otherwise we’ll miss dinner and have to subsist on just mochas and brownies … which actually sounds pretty good, now that I think about it.”
“Geez, you and chocolate … I would have thought you’d gotten over that after getting sick on it at Halloween.”
Willow rested her hand on the door knob and inclined her head at the poster on the back of the door. “Oh, I don’t think I’m the only one with a chocolate problem.”
Buffy snickered and waved her hand. “Go.”
Willow pulled the door closed and started down the hall. Collar thingie. Good lord. That was as bad as Riley’s paintball story – she shook her head and grinned – but Buffy had bought it. Maybe she wasn’t so bad at poker after all. Of course, the additional distraction of chocolate hadn’t hurt any.
Chocolate. And Tara. God, she had a one-track mind. She fanned herself with her hand as she entered the bathroom. Maybe she should make it a cold shower.
*****
Tara walked rapidly towards Stevenson Hall, throwing in an occasional skip or two, not caring what the students around her thought or whether they even noticed. It was just past dusk and she was out alone (contrary to the advice in the handbook), but she was hurrying and the walks were still fairly crowded with students. Not that a crowd was necessarily safe – that she knew from Willow’s stories about the Bronze – but being in a crowd was safer than being alone. After all, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t walked by herself at this time in the evening before she’d met Willow.
She was also certain that Willow wouldn’t have left her if she didn’t think it was safe to walk from her dorm to Stevenson at this hour by herself. And she was armed, although she didn’t really think Buffy’s gifts were going to be much use to her. Throw the water – but she had really bad aim. Stick the stake in the vampire’s heart – well, that was sort of gross, and she didn’t think she had enough upper arm strength anyway. Wave the cross about – that she thought she could manage. But why exactly did that work against something as ancient as vampires? Why not a Star of David, or an Egyptian ankh? Both were older than a Christian cross. She shrugged and shelved that anomaly alongside other matters of faith that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but worked anyhow.
That done, the image of her lover again sprang immediately to the fore, and she found herself smiling broadly. She was looking forward to this evening, even if Willow wasn’t especially. Poor Willow.
Willow – poor conflicted Willow – was adorable. She knew she shouldn’t feel that way, but she did. Her Willow couldn’t be anything but adorable even amid this afternoon’s tears. Her sweetie had already had a hard day; she had endured a lot of frustration, both physical and emotional. Of course, she’d been instrumental in the first with their picnic. That, at least, she’d had the power to fix. And the ‘fixing’ had been fun. The other Willow had inflicted on herself – and would continue to do so, she thought. It was just as well that there wasn’t a spell that could instantaneously make Willow at ease, because she’d be tempted to use it even though it went against all of her mama’s teaching. Adorable as conflicted Willow was, she really did hate to see her suffer.
So, given that they were going to spend the evening with her sweetie’s biggest source of conflict, she rather suspected that it would not be all sunshine and roses. She liked Buffy so far – which was good, because she really wanted to like Buffy, and the rest of Willow’s friends, too. It just took her a lot of time to open up to new people. And although she didn’t want to tell Willow, the way Faith as Buffy had treated her had sort of set things back. Dinner on Tuesday had gone a long way to erasing Faith’s cruelty, but she still had the mental image of Buffy saying those things, of Buffy mocking her. That was going to take some time to get over. Plus she probably was PMS-y – it felt that way – so she was going to be fighting both her natural reticence around strangers and her pre-period silence.
Willow had come so close today, admitting things to herself, admitting things to her, even if she still was oceans away from declaring them publicly. And especially to Buffy – which was another reason she was hesitant to put Buffy automatically in the ‘her-friend-too’ category. If Willow was so hesitant and doubtful, even after 3 years of being best friends, then perhaps Buffy wasn’t really that good a friend. She’d already experienced that with Megan’s friends, although that had been less over the fact that Megan liked girls than over the choice of Tara as a girlfriend.
Right now she felt more certain of Jo than she did Buffy. Her next door neighbor had been perfectly clear since Monday afternoon. She was cool with it. Even the guys seemed cool with it, although that could simply be guy-stuff – which she also knew about from previous experience.
Guy stuff. Oz. That had been … interesting, in a scary way. They’d only known each other a few days when Willow had first told her about her ex-boyfriend. She smiled again remembering her delight in hearing the ‘ex’ before boyfriend – that little prefix had given her soooo much hope. Then Willow had told her that Oz was a werewolf and the little flame that ‘ex’ had lit grew larger. She enjoyed the irony that her little flame had been fueled by knowing that Willow had already had one unconventional relationship. Werewolf-girl was certainly more unconventional than girl-girl. But maybe love on the Hellmouth was bound to be weird. She shook her head, quietly amazed. She loved a woman who had loved a boy who was a werewolf, a woman whose best friend was the mythic Vampire Slayer, a woman who was on speaking terms with an ex-demon and a vampire, a woman who was a powerful witch in her own right. Viewed in that light, the fact that her oldest friend was a somewhat obnoxious but apparently normal boy was the really weird part.
She bit her lip, a slight pause in her stride. Willow was right, of course. She was far more freaked by the boy bit than the werewolf bit. The werewolf gave her hope for the future, just like Willow’s tolerance of Spike and Anya did. The boy-bit made her anxious. Girl vs. boy. That was threatening, and painful – she hadn’t loved Megan with half the intensity she loved Willow but it had still hurt when Megan had replaced her with a boy.
Which one did Willow really think was better? Boy. Girl. After today, after talking, she thought she knew; Willow had been pretty explicit. Girl. Her. Tara. That covered the physical stuff. She smiled, quietly amused that Willow had not ever hesitated in their physical relationship. Not after their first kiss, anyway; she treasured her memory of Willow’s reaction to that: “So soft … can I have another?” The kissing and snuggling had been … wonderful. Willow’s curiosity and her own eagerness had led to more touching, and then still more – until making love had been inevitable. It would have happened even without Faith’s appearance and the need to do the Nether Realms spell.
That spell. That beautiful spell had fully opened them up to one another. That spell had pulled Willow from a fairly scientific physical curiosity about a girl-girl relationship into a more emotional realm. Not that either one of them was into the purely casual; neither of them worked that way. But the spell had shown Willow that another person – another girl – loved her, had shown her that Willow’s feelings for her were more than just fondness.
And today ….
She hadn’t been really, truly happy since her mama died. Meeting Willow, falling in love with Willow – those had been good things. But before today, she’d been hopeful, not happy. Her love wasn’t quite there yet, but she was getting there.
She grinned to herself and counted her strides over the cement walk, adjusting them so that her feet didn’t land on any of the cracks. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back – she’d always avoided the cracks as a child. Mama would have liked Willow. She smiled at the thought, and at the realization that for the first time since her mother’s death, grief was no longer the overriding emotion she felt when she thought of her mama.
She skipped up the steps to Stevenson’s main door.
Happy again.
*****
Willow hung her robe on the nearby peg and stuck her foot in the spray to test the temperature. She angled the shower head so that the water wouldn’t hit her in the face and turned so that it struck her between the shoulders. She let it pound there for a few moments, pleased that the water pressure was adequate to the task. No way should she be this tense. Not after doing what they’d been doing all afternoon. She should be all relaxed and glow-y. Well, she had the glow, but there was also a growing ball of tension between her shoulders.
Yep, she was PMSing big time – mood swing central. What had it been, two or three minutes since she’d been grinning with Buffy? And now she was in full worry mode again.
She liked knowing secrets, but she hated keeping them. And really wasn’t very good at it, either. She always seemed to tell – not in a vindictive way, more in an ‘oops’ way. But this secret was hers – hers to tell or hers to keep. She would have thought ownership would make her more at ease, but it seemed that the reverse was true. She was getting really, really tense.
She shifted under the spray, letting the water massage her back. Tara could probably give her a great massage; she had the hand strength to manage it. Not as much as Buffy, but then she didn’t want bruises, did she?
She wanted Tara.
Plain and simple.
It had gone past physical wanting. Lust, desire, and hunger were pale shadows of what she was feeling, and they were fairly easily satisfied. This wanting was more than simply that of her body for Tara. This was deeper. Far deeper.
She pressed the palm of her hand to her forehead and rubbed at the frown that was clenching the muscles there. Oz. It had hurt so much when he sent for his things. Sometimes she could still feel the jagged edges of that pain, like a potato chip had gotten stuck in her throat.
Yet everything she’d said to Tara this afternoon was true. Oz had never made her go nova. When she’d told Tara that, she’d meant it just as a physical description of how good making love with her felt, but it really was becoming true in everything. With Oz, she’d been happy. She’d had a boyfriend, a cool boyfriend who was as smart as she was and who played in a band. It had been Oz and Willow, the Earth and the moon.
But when she was with Tara, it wasn’t just revolving around the other like she had done with Oz. With Tara, she felt a pull that was tremendously strong. She wasn’t stupid; she recognized that part of that was the magic. She’d known that the night they’d joined hands and slammed the soda machine against the laundry room door. But it was more than the magic that coursed through them. It was as if some part of them recognized in the other a missing piece, as if without the other, each was incomplete.
She and Tara were not a planet and its moon, locked in an endless unchanging dance, one always less than the other. With Tara it was as if every single move was choreographed to be performed simultaneously – which was scary in and of itself, since the only time she had rhythm at all was when she was drunk. No, they were a pair of suns, both powerful, but so closely joined that they not only mirrored each other but were completely dependent on one another.
That was an image she liked.
She turned around and lifted her face into the spray, scrubbing any possible residual stickiness away. She soaped her body and rinsed. Moving more quickly, she shampooed her hair, in a hurry now to get back to her room and wait for her celestial partner to arrive.
*****
Tara clutched her bag nervously as the door swung open and revealed Buffy instead of her lover.
“Hey Tara, come on in.” The Slayer stepped back out of the way.
“H-Hi Buffy.” She ducked her head and slunched through the doorway.
Buffy closed the door. “Willow’s still in the shower. My fault, I’m afraid,” Buffy admitted, crossing the room and flopping across her bed. “I was worried about that spell you did.”
Tara eased herself down on the edge of Willow’s bed. “S-Spell?”
“Uh-huh.”
She glanced quickly at the Slayer and found that her lover’s best friend was giving her a curiously pointed look. Oh gods, what had Willow said? “Wh-Which one?”
“The one the two of you did yesterday, with the collar that left bruises on Will’s neck,” Buffy explained. “Of course, Will didn’t exactly say collar, she said ‘collar-thingie’.”
“Ohhhh. That.” The hickies. Buffy had noticed. “It w-was safe.”
“Y’know, I was afraid that you were going to say it was fun, and that whole image just sends me to a very scary visual place. Not that ‘Willow, collar, and safe’ is much better. That gives me images, too.”
The door opened, admitting a damp Willow in a robe, and Tara felt a wave of relief wash through her.
“Oh, Tare – hi.”
“H-Hi.” She saw her lover’s eyes narrow at her stutter and flick over at Buffy. “Buffy w-was just asking me about the spell.”
Willow glance slid away from both of them, then came back to Tara. “She was curious about the energy channeling spell we did yesterday.” Her lover’s gaze turned to the Slayer. “Buffy, I said it was safe.” She was whining just a little.
“I know you did, Will. But I worry. I think it’s in the job description or something.” Buffy stood up and snagged a small bottle of make-up from her dresser. “C’mere. I know you don’t ever use much, but this is my special brand. Guaranteed by Slayers everywhere to cover up bruises. Don’t want any strangers jumping to the wrong conclusion about my best friend.”
Tara watched Willow submit meekly to Buffy’s application of makeup. “It’s not M-Maybelline?”
“Nope.” Willow shook her head.
“Uh-uh.” Buffy stepped back and gave Willow’s neck a critical eye. “There, good as new.” She settled back down on her bed. “It’s British, actually. Giles suggested it. Sometimes I’m absolutely amazed by the weird things he knows.”
“And the r-rest of the time?” Tara asked as Willow’s robe landed on the bed beside her. She forced herself to keep her eyes on Buffy’s face.
“Oh, the rest of the time Buffy’s bored,” Willow chimed in, and sat beside her clad only in her bra and panties to tug on a pair of socks.
“Very bored,” Buffy agreed.
Tara could smell Willow’s fresh, clean scent as she leaned behind her to snag the pair of jeans and sweater lying on the bed. A fresh wave of desire made her shiver. Noticeably.
“Are you all right?” Willow asked, laying a hand gently on her arm.
“Fine.” She nodded. “All g-good. Just a little tired.”
“I thought so.” Willow’s eyes twinkled as she stood up to fasten her jeans. She pulled the sweater over her head, slipped into a pair of clogs, and grabbed her jacket. “Okay. Ready now.”
“Good, ’cause I’m starving,” Buffy announced as she headed for the door.
“I am sooo going to get you for that,” Tara said sotto voce as Willow slipped past her.
“I know,” Willow acknowledged with a grin.
“Huh?” Buffy queried as they joined her in the hall.
“I said I know – I’m hungry, too,” Willow explained with a smile.
“Me, too,” Tara offered shyly.
Buffy pulled the door closed. “So why are we dawdling here then?”
Willow angled her way between them and linked hands with both her and Buffy. “Food now?”
“Oh, yes,” Tara said with a smile.
Thank you!
Mmmm... nice visuals, BTW. 
even my vanilla mind couldn’t resist. Hehe, sorry… 
) and find out you’re from WV. How ‘bout them ‘eers? I’m from a little place named Grafton (near Morgantown). Glad you like my story.
… My favorite S6 episode is probably DoubleMeat Palace for all the wrong reasons. The wig-lady’s twin is one of my customers at the bookstore, except she wears a knit cap (even in the Philly heat) not a wig. It’s all I can do not to run laughing into the backroom. Thanks again for reading.
)
Woo and Hoo!!! I so can't wait. Thanks, Mel. 
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