The One in the Cave
A donation story, out of order. S/X (NC-17, 2500+ words) for herself_nyc. I have accomplished something despite my sore throat yay. *blinks blearily* I actually must thank dsudis for prompting this--I don't think I can say why or how without being spoilery for something, but once the idea hit me I was able to write it fairly quickly. I'm always happy when that happens.
Feel free to point out any errors--please!
The One in the Cave
"I say we just have sex right off the bat and get it over with," Xander said. "The longer we wait, the worse it's going to be."
Spike favored him with a look you give a dog when you're deciding where to kick it. "Don't know why you're worried." He raised his brows in mock wonder and curled his lips. "You think they're going to pick you, doughboy?" The vampire couldn't have said any more clearly, *I'm the pretty one.*
"I'll have you know I'm demon-nip. It's like being the cheese in a worldful of mice." The cheese stands alone, it occurred to him, but he wasn't about to give Spike ideas.
"Good point." Spike gave him a fresh study. "Beasties go for you." He stepped closer and leaned in elaborately for a long sniff of Xander's neck. "Why is that?"
"Get off!" Xander withdrew on pure instinct, body folding and flapping at unlikely angles in avoidance.
"A minute ago you wanted sex." Spike shook his head in a wounded attitude, as if Xander had just broken their five-year engagement. "Fickle boy."
"That was my survival instinct talking." Feeling a bit sick, Xander waited to see if it would yap again. "Stupid survival instinct," he muttered.
"They probably wouldn't kill you, you know." Spike was too, too informative. "Just bugger you senseless, maybe chew off a few bits and pieces."
"I need all my bits and pieces. Toes are important to balance. And fingers are needed for Anya, and maybe someday for the piano." This was so not good. In hindsight the evening had gone wrong somewhere around seven a.m. when the alarm went off and he'd decided to get out of bed. It was like dominos. You could always trace things back to that first wrong decision.
"Don't forget the buggering. Nothing to sneeze at. Bryneuc demons are hung like--"
Xander waited for him to complete the sentence, but Spike paused with a frown as if he couldn't decide or maybe remember. After a moment he held his hands apart, allowing a disturbing length of space to stretch between them.
They both stared in silence at the invisible demon penis he'd measured out. Spike himself was starting to look paler than before.
"All right," the vampire said abruptly. "Sex then."
"Whoa." Xander held up his hands as Spike shrugged off his duster. At the inquiring look he got he faltered and asked lamely, "Can't we do this from opposite sides of the room?"
"Don't I wish." The way Spike's gaze raked over him wasn't flattering. He'd seen that look of disgust mixed with resignation before--during a fifth-grade Sadie Hawkins dance, from Erin Gundlach, as the chaperone herded her in his direction; during gym in the eyes of his classmates, when the coach assigned him to a randomly unlucky team; on Cordelia's face as she all too honestly assessed his penis for the first time and he realized they were never going to have sex.
Shoulders deflating, he sighed and pulled off his shirt. There was a blanket in the corner of the cave chamber, something heavy and striped and Mexican and filthy beyond even a nineteen-year-old guy's ability to contemplate. He knelt and pulled it square and began to smooth it out. After a minute he became aware of a pointed silence behind him. When he looked around, Spike was contemplating his boots and fiddling with his pockets.
"This is bollocks," he spat, snaking his head around to look at the cave entrance, the carriage of his body strengthened with renewed venom. Before Xander could agree, he threw himself at the bars, vamped and roared, and proceeded to kick them over and over in a pointless way until something in him gave out and he slumped against them with a groan.
"Okay, that's enough!" It seemed safe to yell at him now that he was done having his tantrum. "You're just begging them to throw peanuts at you."
Spike twisted off a glare of confusion at him. The disgust was back too, but Xander ignored it.
"Look, I don't want this either, but you heard what Giles said. They won't actually recognize we're males unless we--" He made a whirligig hand gesture. "And if they don't recognize we're *males*--" His gestures were broader and more energetic this time, tinged with irrepressible panic.
"Ye Olde Librarian was reading from a sodding book, Harris. He didn't say, 'Oh, by the way, if you see the giant warrior pigs, fall to the ground and shag like minks.'"
"I took Subtext 101. I know what 'sharing the masculine essence' means, especially when Giles says it in that nervous high-pitched voice."
"Maybe we can just show them the goods," Spike mused, fingering the top button of his jeans and thrusting his hips out a little.
"You try that." A malicious fatalism was settling in as he foresaw this day ending with the two of them on their knees, porked by giant demon boars. "They'll probably just think it's an extra finger."
"Oi! I don't think so." Perversely, this seemed to have been the right thing to say to get Spike away from the bars, because he was stalking over in a huff, wearing his pride on his sleeve. He grabbed Xander's hand and wrapped it around what was so very not-a-finger.
"That's not a finger," he agreed, echoing the squeak of his brain.
Spike looked smug, and then--after a few moments--uncomfortable. There was one of those interludes you get when neither party is sure how to proceed.
"This is foreplay for you, isn't it," Xander said, trying not to fondle the denim.
"Well." Spike shifted, apparently embarrassed. "It's been a while."
"Guys?" He'd always wondered about vampires. The subtext of Giles's many books on the subject said: sluts.
Shrugging one shoulder, Spike admitted, "Victims."
"You vamps." Xander shook his head. "Always playing with your food."
Spike cocked his head and ran a half inch of tongue along his lower lip. He looked sly and his voice lowered. "You're doing a pretty good job of that yourself."
"Just so we're clear: I'd never screw you if the alternative wasn't giant pigs."
"Ditto," Spike said, but he sounded unconvincing, and somehow their faces were only a few inches apart, and a lot of husky breathing was happening between them, the warmer half of it Xander's. It bothered him that Spike looked so interested, with his heavy eyelids and parted lips. Vampire slut man.
On the other hand, this was starting to become more flattering.
"I've never done this." He half-cleared his throat. "Done guys. Done this *with* guys. I've done *this*."
"Shut up." Spike paused. "No, wait. Open up." He kissed Xander, who jerked away.
"I know for a fact this can be done without kissing," he said, unnerved by the touch of dead lips, or guy lips, or both, never mind the details, just two too many lips.
"Not much of a romantic, are you?" Little crinkles cornered Spike's eyelids when he smiled--when he *really* smiled and not fake-smiled. This was not one of those thin plastic smiles that didn't rise above the lips, and why was that. Apparently he amused Spike when he was terrified and erect and his heart was rabbiting away in his chest.
"High school kills that--if junior high doesn't get you first. Of course, my high school killed a lot of things, and people. And so did you--kill people. In my high school, even. So, romantic, no. Not about you."
That might have hurt Spike's feelings. It was hard to tell, but something in his face closed up. "Just thought--your first time with a guy and all--" And then it wasn't just the shutters banging closed, but the light going out behind them. "Never mind." He drew back a step and made a show of unbuttoning his shirt, yanking it from his belt, pulling it off and then his tee. Xander watched the strip show and didn't get any less nervous.
"You just going to stand there?"
Right. Sex was a cooperative endeavor. Xander sat on the blanket and took off his shoes and then his jeans. His eyes felt stretched wide. He was afraid if he blinked Spike might make his move, catching him unaware, and he wanted to be ready for this.
When Spike shucked his jeans off Xander expected to see a lot of naked British vampire underneath, but he was wearing boxer-briefs, black ones.
"You have so many layers," Xander said absently.
"You think?" Spike tilted his head and gave him a funny look, then folded to his knees like taffy dropping off a spoon and stretched himself out toward Xander in a cat walk, his hands bringing him closer across the blanket. Xander tensed. "You going to unpeel me like an onion?"
"Um." He had no answer to that one. Yes. No. Maybe.
He'd been propped on one arm, hoping for nonchalance, but when Spike pushed at his shoulder, he lay back against the blanket and let Spike climb aboard. He wasn't so much aboard though as above, a bridge of muscle suspended above the watery puddle of nerves Xander's body had become.
"So," Spike said. "No kissing, right?" He seemed to be trying to figure out the rules, and maybe it was the moments like this that fooled victims into thinking vamps were people, but Xander felt himself relax a notch. In some ways Spike was just as much a loser as he was.
"Well." Xander struggled for a way to renegotiate without coming off as the effeminate one in this scenario. "If you go by the four-base theory of nookie, kissing *is* base one."
"Right." That sounded uncertain, but then Spike went for it again. This time Xander let him.
Mid-kiss there was a distant roaring sound that Xander first mistook for the sound of blood rushing earward from his heart, but when they broke off he realized it was actual roaring. They both looked toward the cave entrance.
"I think the party's getting started," he said, and suddenly he was right *there* in the performance anxiety zone, remembering that just fifty yards away there were dozens of hairy upright oinkers with three-foot tusks in oiled leather drinking beer, and he was here, about to have sex with a vampire. The lesser of two evil penises.
"Yeahhhh." For a moment Spike seemed genuinely concerned, then the expression wiped itself from his face and he kissed Xander again.
Trapped by circumstance and trying to forget his girlfriend's philosophy of vengeance, Xander kissed back. He liked kissing. Kissing was soothing and you didn't have to think about much. And Spike kissed well, like he'd been doing nothing else for a hundred and fifty years but reading books on the subject and practicing and earning degrees in it.
A few minutes became a few more and they were still just kissing but it didn't feel like they weren't making progress. Xander felt as if this was the first real conversation he'd had with Spike and every moment that passed he understood more and more. Spike was telling him things, his thoughts; secret thoughts, quiet thoughts, soft thoughts, thoughts that were broken and tangled and difficult to get across, and serious; and Xander talked back and could feel words spilling out the way they did when he was excited, jumbling and tripping back over themselves, and the conversation slipped into that groove where you're both talking over each other, finishing each other's sentences, nodding, yes, yes, because you're both on the same wavelength, and you need to get out this next thought, and another, and get to the end of it, because when you do, the other person will laugh, nodding in recognition, and you'll laugh in relief, being heard. Xander was being heard.
One of his hands slid into Spike's hair and the other gripped the back of a thigh, right against the curve of his ass, and they were moving against each other with gasps, talking with their bodies. Spike's hands moved on him, sliding around his skin more urgently, and then he worked one hand between their hips and pressed their cocks together right through the material of their briefs.
Xander arched and wrenched his head back and came with a cry that ricocheted off the cave walls. Spike dragged his hand away and propped himself up and began shoving in a frantic way against Xander's hips.
"Fuck yes," Xander said, and arched some more, desperately riding out the pleasure. He felt Spike shudder, and the blunted punch of his cock eased gradually to a stop.
Afterwards Spike found a cigarette and Xander watched him light it with a trembling hand. A few puffs later he looked more recovered, and then he turned his head and said seriously, "We should probably do that again."
"Just to make sure they know we're men," Xander agreed. "Manly...manly men." He stared at Spike's abs and reached out to trace his fingers along them.
Spike pitched the cigarette off somewhere and rolled his way and they met in another kiss. This time, despite the supposed limitations of the male body after orgasm, they were even more energetic in their grappling, and managed to get their shorts off. And then Spike shocked the hell out of him by sucking him off, for as long as Xander could hold off from coming. He showed enthusiasm, which Xander appreciated. He even groaned, and when it was over, Xander realized that the other man had come too, from friction against the blanket.
"Wow," he said, hardly able to catch his breath enough to put sound into the word.
Face smashed against the soft part of Xander's stomach, Spike just made a fuzzy noise. They lay that way for a while until Xander realized he was stroking Spike's head. There was a problem to all this but he couldn't remember what it was. Something about pigs or girlfriends.
The third time (Xander: "I'm not sure we've shared the masculine essence yet." -- Spike: "Yeah, better do it proper this time.") they argued about who'd be on top.
"Go ahead," Spike said, lying face-down on the blanket. "Bombs away."
"Wait. Why do you want to be on the bottom? It's better on the bottom, isn't it? Or, no--hold on--you're trying to trick me. You want me to think it's better on the bottom so you can be on top."
Spike rolled his eyes and shifted to give Xander an annoyed look. "Trust me. You don't want to bottom. Not like this." His voice was kinder than expected. "You want your first time to be all soft candlelight and wine. Try it at home with your girl; she'll know what to do."
"Okay, *that's* scary. And what are you saying--it's too painful? Are you saying I'm not man enough to bottom?"
A roar from further down the cave system reached them, distracting them both. The roar was joined by a chorus of voices that cohered rockily into a beer-hall song.
"Look," Spike said, dragging his attention back to the matter at hand. "You're very butch, all right? Now will you bugger me? We haven't got all bloody night."
"Don't think I don't know you're being condescending." But he knee-walked his way over and ran a hand down Spike's back. The truth was, he'd circled back to being nervous. He knew very little about the mechanics of this act; in fact he'd worked very hard his whole life to avoid thinking about this act at all.
"Should I--" Before he could ask whatever would have come out of his mouth, Spike got up on his knees.
"Just take it slow," he said. "Use your fingers first. Get them wet."
There'd be diagrams next, Xander thought. He rebelled against the commands and the flat, instructive tone of Spike's voice. "Can't I just--" Instead of finishing he leaned down and licked a stripe along the inner curve of a cheek.
"Uh, yeah." Spike sounded dazed. "Why don't I just let you figure it out."
Xander did, and somewhere in the middle of it while Spike was moaning and jerking he felt his suspicions confirmed: it was better to be on the bottom. The bastard *had* tricked him.
He was inclined to be forgiving though, at least until he woke up and sat up and saw the cell door open. Buffy and Giles and Willow stood there gazing in at him, as if they'd just spotted something horrible through a plate-glass window and stopped to gawk. He looked down at his lap and saw Spike's arm flung across his thighs. He looked up again, raised a hand to forestall any questions.
"Okay, I know how this looks. But I can explain."
Spike shifted upright, stared past Xander with an irritable squint. "Cavalry's a little late this time, isn't it?" All at once he seemed to wake up and take matters in. "Right. This is--" He stopped, mouth empty of words. "You know what, I'll just. Get dressed."
That was about the time Xander realized things were going to be very uncomfortable for a while and that Spike was going to be no help whatsoever. Because duh, he was an evil, evil vampire. And bad things always happened the morning after when you slept with a vampire.
Though, he thought speculatively, watching Spike pull on his jeans, maybe that was only true the first time.
Feel free to point out any errors--please!
The One in the Cave
"I say we just have sex right off the bat and get it over with," Xander said. "The longer we wait, the worse it's going to be."
Spike favored him with a look you give a dog when you're deciding where to kick it. "Don't know why you're worried." He raised his brows in mock wonder and curled his lips. "You think they're going to pick you, doughboy?" The vampire couldn't have said any more clearly, *I'm the pretty one.*
"I'll have you know I'm demon-nip. It's like being the cheese in a worldful of mice." The cheese stands alone, it occurred to him, but he wasn't about to give Spike ideas.
"Good point." Spike gave him a fresh study. "Beasties go for you." He stepped closer and leaned in elaborately for a long sniff of Xander's neck. "Why is that?"
"Get off!" Xander withdrew on pure instinct, body folding and flapping at unlikely angles in avoidance.
"A minute ago you wanted sex." Spike shook his head in a wounded attitude, as if Xander had just broken their five-year engagement. "Fickle boy."
"That was my survival instinct talking." Feeling a bit sick, Xander waited to see if it would yap again. "Stupid survival instinct," he muttered.
"They probably wouldn't kill you, you know." Spike was too, too informative. "Just bugger you senseless, maybe chew off a few bits and pieces."
"I need all my bits and pieces. Toes are important to balance. And fingers are needed for Anya, and maybe someday for the piano." This was so not good. In hindsight the evening had gone wrong somewhere around seven a.m. when the alarm went off and he'd decided to get out of bed. It was like dominos. You could always trace things back to that first wrong decision.
"Don't forget the buggering. Nothing to sneeze at. Bryneuc demons are hung like--"
Xander waited for him to complete the sentence, but Spike paused with a frown as if he couldn't decide or maybe remember. After a moment he held his hands apart, allowing a disturbing length of space to stretch between them.
They both stared in silence at the invisible demon penis he'd measured out. Spike himself was starting to look paler than before.
"All right," the vampire said abruptly. "Sex then."
"Whoa." Xander held up his hands as Spike shrugged off his duster. At the inquiring look he got he faltered and asked lamely, "Can't we do this from opposite sides of the room?"
"Don't I wish." The way Spike's gaze raked over him wasn't flattering. He'd seen that look of disgust mixed with resignation before--during a fifth-grade Sadie Hawkins dance, from Erin Gundlach, as the chaperone herded her in his direction; during gym in the eyes of his classmates, when the coach assigned him to a randomly unlucky team; on Cordelia's face as she all too honestly assessed his penis for the first time and he realized they were never going to have sex.
Shoulders deflating, he sighed and pulled off his shirt. There was a blanket in the corner of the cave chamber, something heavy and striped and Mexican and filthy beyond even a nineteen-year-old guy's ability to contemplate. He knelt and pulled it square and began to smooth it out. After a minute he became aware of a pointed silence behind him. When he looked around, Spike was contemplating his boots and fiddling with his pockets.
"This is bollocks," he spat, snaking his head around to look at the cave entrance, the carriage of his body strengthened with renewed venom. Before Xander could agree, he threw himself at the bars, vamped and roared, and proceeded to kick them over and over in a pointless way until something in him gave out and he slumped against them with a groan.
"Okay, that's enough!" It seemed safe to yell at him now that he was done having his tantrum. "You're just begging them to throw peanuts at you."
Spike twisted off a glare of confusion at him. The disgust was back too, but Xander ignored it.
"Look, I don't want this either, but you heard what Giles said. They won't actually recognize we're males unless we--" He made a whirligig hand gesture. "And if they don't recognize we're *males*--" His gestures were broader and more energetic this time, tinged with irrepressible panic.
"Ye Olde Librarian was reading from a sodding book, Harris. He didn't say, 'Oh, by the way, if you see the giant warrior pigs, fall to the ground and shag like minks.'"
"I took Subtext 101. I know what 'sharing the masculine essence' means, especially when Giles says it in that nervous high-pitched voice."
"Maybe we can just show them the goods," Spike mused, fingering the top button of his jeans and thrusting his hips out a little.
"You try that." A malicious fatalism was settling in as he foresaw this day ending with the two of them on their knees, porked by giant demon boars. "They'll probably just think it's an extra finger."
"Oi! I don't think so." Perversely, this seemed to have been the right thing to say to get Spike away from the bars, because he was stalking over in a huff, wearing his pride on his sleeve. He grabbed Xander's hand and wrapped it around what was so very not-a-finger.
"That's not a finger," he agreed, echoing the squeak of his brain.
Spike looked smug, and then--after a few moments--uncomfortable. There was one of those interludes you get when neither party is sure how to proceed.
"This is foreplay for you, isn't it," Xander said, trying not to fondle the denim.
"Well." Spike shifted, apparently embarrassed. "It's been a while."
"Guys?" He'd always wondered about vampires. The subtext of Giles's many books on the subject said: sluts.
Shrugging one shoulder, Spike admitted, "Victims."
"You vamps." Xander shook his head. "Always playing with your food."
Spike cocked his head and ran a half inch of tongue along his lower lip. He looked sly and his voice lowered. "You're doing a pretty good job of that yourself."
"Just so we're clear: I'd never screw you if the alternative wasn't giant pigs."
"Ditto," Spike said, but he sounded unconvincing, and somehow their faces were only a few inches apart, and a lot of husky breathing was happening between them, the warmer half of it Xander's. It bothered him that Spike looked so interested, with his heavy eyelids and parted lips. Vampire slut man.
On the other hand, this was starting to become more flattering.
"I've never done this." He half-cleared his throat. "Done guys. Done this *with* guys. I've done *this*."
"Shut up." Spike paused. "No, wait. Open up." He kissed Xander, who jerked away.
"I know for a fact this can be done without kissing," he said, unnerved by the touch of dead lips, or guy lips, or both, never mind the details, just two too many lips.
"Not much of a romantic, are you?" Little crinkles cornered Spike's eyelids when he smiled--when he *really* smiled and not fake-smiled. This was not one of those thin plastic smiles that didn't rise above the lips, and why was that. Apparently he amused Spike when he was terrified and erect and his heart was rabbiting away in his chest.
"High school kills that--if junior high doesn't get you first. Of course, my high school killed a lot of things, and people. And so did you--kill people. In my high school, even. So, romantic, no. Not about you."
That might have hurt Spike's feelings. It was hard to tell, but something in his face closed up. "Just thought--your first time with a guy and all--" And then it wasn't just the shutters banging closed, but the light going out behind them. "Never mind." He drew back a step and made a show of unbuttoning his shirt, yanking it from his belt, pulling it off and then his tee. Xander watched the strip show and didn't get any less nervous.
"You just going to stand there?"
Right. Sex was a cooperative endeavor. Xander sat on the blanket and took off his shoes and then his jeans. His eyes felt stretched wide. He was afraid if he blinked Spike might make his move, catching him unaware, and he wanted to be ready for this.
When Spike shucked his jeans off Xander expected to see a lot of naked British vampire underneath, but he was wearing boxer-briefs, black ones.
"You have so many layers," Xander said absently.
"You think?" Spike tilted his head and gave him a funny look, then folded to his knees like taffy dropping off a spoon and stretched himself out toward Xander in a cat walk, his hands bringing him closer across the blanket. Xander tensed. "You going to unpeel me like an onion?"
"Um." He had no answer to that one. Yes. No. Maybe.
He'd been propped on one arm, hoping for nonchalance, but when Spike pushed at his shoulder, he lay back against the blanket and let Spike climb aboard. He wasn't so much aboard though as above, a bridge of muscle suspended above the watery puddle of nerves Xander's body had become.
"So," Spike said. "No kissing, right?" He seemed to be trying to figure out the rules, and maybe it was the moments like this that fooled victims into thinking vamps were people, but Xander felt himself relax a notch. In some ways Spike was just as much a loser as he was.
"Well." Xander struggled for a way to renegotiate without coming off as the effeminate one in this scenario. "If you go by the four-base theory of nookie, kissing *is* base one."
"Right." That sounded uncertain, but then Spike went for it again. This time Xander let him.
Mid-kiss there was a distant roaring sound that Xander first mistook for the sound of blood rushing earward from his heart, but when they broke off he realized it was actual roaring. They both looked toward the cave entrance.
"I think the party's getting started," he said, and suddenly he was right *there* in the performance anxiety zone, remembering that just fifty yards away there were dozens of hairy upright oinkers with three-foot tusks in oiled leather drinking beer, and he was here, about to have sex with a vampire. The lesser of two evil penises.
"Yeahhhh." For a moment Spike seemed genuinely concerned, then the expression wiped itself from his face and he kissed Xander again.
Trapped by circumstance and trying to forget his girlfriend's philosophy of vengeance, Xander kissed back. He liked kissing. Kissing was soothing and you didn't have to think about much. And Spike kissed well, like he'd been doing nothing else for a hundred and fifty years but reading books on the subject and practicing and earning degrees in it.
A few minutes became a few more and they were still just kissing but it didn't feel like they weren't making progress. Xander felt as if this was the first real conversation he'd had with Spike and every moment that passed he understood more and more. Spike was telling him things, his thoughts; secret thoughts, quiet thoughts, soft thoughts, thoughts that were broken and tangled and difficult to get across, and serious; and Xander talked back and could feel words spilling out the way they did when he was excited, jumbling and tripping back over themselves, and the conversation slipped into that groove where you're both talking over each other, finishing each other's sentences, nodding, yes, yes, because you're both on the same wavelength, and you need to get out this next thought, and another, and get to the end of it, because when you do, the other person will laugh, nodding in recognition, and you'll laugh in relief, being heard. Xander was being heard.
One of his hands slid into Spike's hair and the other gripped the back of a thigh, right against the curve of his ass, and they were moving against each other with gasps, talking with their bodies. Spike's hands moved on him, sliding around his skin more urgently, and then he worked one hand between their hips and pressed their cocks together right through the material of their briefs.
Xander arched and wrenched his head back and came with a cry that ricocheted off the cave walls. Spike dragged his hand away and propped himself up and began shoving in a frantic way against Xander's hips.
"Fuck yes," Xander said, and arched some more, desperately riding out the pleasure. He felt Spike shudder, and the blunted punch of his cock eased gradually to a stop.
Afterwards Spike found a cigarette and Xander watched him light it with a trembling hand. A few puffs later he looked more recovered, and then he turned his head and said seriously, "We should probably do that again."
"Just to make sure they know we're men," Xander agreed. "Manly...manly men." He stared at Spike's abs and reached out to trace his fingers along them.
Spike pitched the cigarette off somewhere and rolled his way and they met in another kiss. This time, despite the supposed limitations of the male body after orgasm, they were even more energetic in their grappling, and managed to get their shorts off. And then Spike shocked the hell out of him by sucking him off, for as long as Xander could hold off from coming. He showed enthusiasm, which Xander appreciated. He even groaned, and when it was over, Xander realized that the other man had come too, from friction against the blanket.
"Wow," he said, hardly able to catch his breath enough to put sound into the word.
Face smashed against the soft part of Xander's stomach, Spike just made a fuzzy noise. They lay that way for a while until Xander realized he was stroking Spike's head. There was a problem to all this but he couldn't remember what it was. Something about pigs or girlfriends.
The third time (Xander: "I'm not sure we've shared the masculine essence yet." -- Spike: "Yeah, better do it proper this time.") they argued about who'd be on top.
"Go ahead," Spike said, lying face-down on the blanket. "Bombs away."
"Wait. Why do you want to be on the bottom? It's better on the bottom, isn't it? Or, no--hold on--you're trying to trick me. You want me to think it's better on the bottom so you can be on top."
Spike rolled his eyes and shifted to give Xander an annoyed look. "Trust me. You don't want to bottom. Not like this." His voice was kinder than expected. "You want your first time to be all soft candlelight and wine. Try it at home with your girl; she'll know what to do."
"Okay, *that's* scary. And what are you saying--it's too painful? Are you saying I'm not man enough to bottom?"
A roar from further down the cave system reached them, distracting them both. The roar was joined by a chorus of voices that cohered rockily into a beer-hall song.
"Look," Spike said, dragging his attention back to the matter at hand. "You're very butch, all right? Now will you bugger me? We haven't got all bloody night."
"Don't think I don't know you're being condescending." But he knee-walked his way over and ran a hand down Spike's back. The truth was, he'd circled back to being nervous. He knew very little about the mechanics of this act; in fact he'd worked very hard his whole life to avoid thinking about this act at all.
"Should I--" Before he could ask whatever would have come out of his mouth, Spike got up on his knees.
"Just take it slow," he said. "Use your fingers first. Get them wet."
There'd be diagrams next, Xander thought. He rebelled against the commands and the flat, instructive tone of Spike's voice. "Can't I just--" Instead of finishing he leaned down and licked a stripe along the inner curve of a cheek.
"Uh, yeah." Spike sounded dazed. "Why don't I just let you figure it out."
Xander did, and somewhere in the middle of it while Spike was moaning and jerking he felt his suspicions confirmed: it was better to be on the bottom. The bastard *had* tricked him.
He was inclined to be forgiving though, at least until he woke up and sat up and saw the cell door open. Buffy and Giles and Willow stood there gazing in at him, as if they'd just spotted something horrible through a plate-glass window and stopped to gawk. He looked down at his lap and saw Spike's arm flung across his thighs. He looked up again, raised a hand to forestall any questions.
"Okay, I know how this looks. But I can explain."
Spike shifted upright, stared past Xander with an irritable squint. "Cavalry's a little late this time, isn't it?" All at once he seemed to wake up and take matters in. "Right. This is--" He stopped, mouth empty of words. "You know what, I'll just. Get dressed."
That was about the time Xander realized things were going to be very uncomfortable for a while and that Spike was going to be no help whatsoever. Because duh, he was an evil, evil vampire. And bad things always happened the morning after when you slept with a vampire.
Though, he thought speculatively, watching Spike pull on his jeans, maybe that was only true the first time.