We Made Love

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For years, we made love.

With our minds, with our hearts, with our bodies- we made love.

The day she left me was a day like any other day. A day just like any of the thousands we had spent together. For fifteen years, we were inseparable, except for those daylight hours when she worked. She had finished college and taken a job working as a social worker. God, how I loved watching her get dressed in the mornings. Her tailored suits were always cut to be sexy and her blouses were always left partially unbuttoned, revealing just enough to make you want to see more. She was a woman in every sense of the word and I would sometimes have to take her before she could get out the door.

That morning we showered together. Showers were a sacred place for us because we first made love in a shower. I soaped her hair and massaged her back and she clung to me as our passion drove us over the edge and into an abyss that I could only find in her arms. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched her at her bureau. She looped her hair in a twist, secured it with a set of combs I had given her for Christmas and then she turned and rolled her chair toward me. "Spike, I love you," she whispered, staring at me for a long time.

Looking back, I wonder if maybe she didn’t know what the day would bring. She looked sad when she said it; almost like she wanted to cry and I had only smiled at her and stroked her face. "I know you do, baby. I love you."

She kissed me then. I tell myself that it wasn’t her lips trembling against mine, but I think it was. I think she knew. She hugged me, dragging her fingers through my hair and whispered, "I’ll miss you."

Now, she always said that to me. Every single day that she left me to go to her job, she would tell me that she would miss me. Normally, she would say, ‘I’ll miss you. When I get home, I’ll show you how much.’ But, on this day, she simply told me that she would miss me. I followed her to the front door, just like I always did and just like always, she kissed me again. Then, she looked past me, looked at our spacious living room, the fireplace where we had warmed ourselves as we made love, the painting of us over the mantle and she sighed and told me, "We did good for ourselves, you know? It was worth it. Every single step we took and every single time it hurt, it was worth it."

It was worth it. Even know, even when I have to force myself to remember her laugh or find myself crying when I see something that reminds me of her, it was worth it. She was worth it. All the hurt in the world, all the pain in my heart, doesn’t override the joy of her that is still there.

She was thirty-three when she left me. The years had been kind to her. Sometimes I think she didn’t age at all. We would joke about me taking her out when she was ninety and we’d laugh and laugh about how we’d look. I didn’t care. I just wanted to have her for that long. I think we joked so easily because we knew the chances of someone living that long in that day and age was almost impossible. Especially a still active Slayer.

We talked about me turning her one day and having Willow curse her soul, but after what I had witnessed in hell, I couldn’t condemn her soul there for even the briefest moment. I would simply shake my head and tell her that one lifetime with her was enough.

It wasn’t enough.

Fifteen years wasn’t enough time and it wasn’t a lifetime.

At five o’clock that afternoon, I ordered a delivery from her favorite Chinese restaurant. She would be home at six and I intended to have it all laid out. I was going to seduce her, not that I would have needed to, but because it was a game we played. She would see the trouble I had gone to and get a knowing twinkle in her eye. Most of the time, the dinner was forgotten and she would pull me to the bed or in the floor or on the sofa and we would make love for hours.

That day was going to be no exception, but it was.

The food arrived and I set it all out. I used her favorite set of dishes and then watched the clock. I can’t remember clearly if I saw it on the news or if it was Giles who told me first. I remember bits and pieces. I remember seeing the office building where she worked on the news and the words ‘fatal gun shooting’ at the bottom. I remember hearing a car screech to a halt in front of our house, and I remember seeing Giles’ face when he shoved open the door and I just knew.

We sat beside the telephone and soon the house was full packed with her friends … our friends and loved ones. The police weren’t releasing the names of the victims and I couldn’t go out until the sun set. Willow, Xander, Joyce, none of them would let me out of their sight. I sat on the couch, alternating between watching the clock, watching the news, and watching the phone. At seven-thirty, just when I was ready to get on my motorcycle and go look for her myself, two officers came to the door.

"Is this where Buffy Summers lived?" One asked, as soon as Willow had opened the door.

I wanted to scream at them that she lives here, not lived. She’s alive and she will be home, she’s just tied up somewhere. She lives here, she loves here and she has to come back here. I heard Willow tell them that it’s her house and they stepped inside. I think I started screaming when they removed their hats and said they were sorry. Somehow the floor tilted, the room spun and all I could do was scream her name, hoping she was just outside and would hear me and come running.

See, Buffy was the Slayer. Slayers are supposed to die because of a demon and she had died because of a gun and a human being. Joyce and I had to go identify her body. We went down into a cool room and a man in a lab coat pulled her out of a cooler. There was a sheet over her, but I didn’t have to see her to know it was her. For years, I had laid beside her, watching her sleep under a sheet. I knew her curves, the thin lines of her body. I just knew.

He pulled the sheet back and Joyce began to sob. Giles was outside the room and he rushed in and helped her out. I could only stand and stare down at her, my sleeping Slayer. I asked the doctor to leave us alone and he nodded. The door closed beside him, drowning out Joyce’s wails and I leaned low to her ear. "Where did they hurt you, baby?"

I lifted the sheet and pulled it down, studying her body. There were two bullet wounds. One in her abdomen and one at her heart. I’d like to tell myself that the one in the heart happened first and that she didn’t have to feel the second one. I pulled the cover back up and put my hand over hers, letting myself stare down at her. Later, I would realize that she looked like Lizzy, completely at peace and happy, but right then, all I could think about was the fact that she wouldn’t be having dinner with me and she wouldn’t fall asleep in our bed. I would never feel her arms around me or feel the power she possessed.

She wasn’t mine anymore.

I’ve killed a million people, you know. I’ve tortured a million people, but nothing could have prepared me for my own torture and that’s what it was. I howled in rage and lifted her body in my arms. I clung to her, begging her, pleading with her to wake up. I went to the floor, with her against my chest, ignoring how stiff her body was already becoming and I prayed to anyone who could listen. Imagine that, a vampire praying. Maybe it was more like pleading. Pleading for a miracle.

But she left me and I had to leave with Willow, who found me and convinced me to let her go.

I watched her funeral from inside a limo with tinted windows. I chose her casket, a beautiful white one with roses on all the corners. The inside was pink and the night before she was buried; I put pink flowers in her hair. She wore a plain white dress and no shoes on her feet and her hair flowed long, curling around her shoulders and fanning out on the satin pillow.

Angel came. He came and he stood beside me and stared down at her with me. Somehow, his hand found mine and he squeezed it. I guess he could tell that I needed to be touched by someone who I had a connection with. He was the only one other than her that had that connection. He sat with me in the limo and neither of us talked. An all boy choir sang two songs, then a cage was opened, and thirty-three doves, one for every year of her life, were released.

The void that Buffy left in my life has been huge. I always knew that I would say good-bye to her one day, I just never dreamed that it would happen so soon. I remember when we celebrated the new ‘millennium’ together. She was getting ready to go off with Giles to Europe for a few weeks and I told her how I would miss her. I never knew the meaning of ‘I miss you’ until now. Five hundred years later, I still feel her everywhere.

She was called a hero. All the papers ran articles on her, describing how she had fought the armed man and, even after she was shot in the chest, had taken the gun away and threw it to one of the guards. Then she laid down and died. Buffy died at noon and I didn’t find out until that night. You would think I would have felt her passing away somehow. Maybe she passed away that morning. Maybe she passed away when she told me she would miss me. Maybe she accepted it and passed away before the bullet ever hit her.

I still have those old newspaper clippings. I have them sealed in plastic bags and I will pull them out when I’ve had enough to drink. ‘Gunshots rang out on Thursday in the Parson’s and Wade Social Services Offices. A lone gunman, fifty-three year old Marc Levitz opened fire in the atrium, attempting to kill his estranged wife, Wanda Levitz. Caught in the crossfire was Elizabeth ‘Buffy’ Ann Summers, who successfully intervened. Onlookers said Miss Summers fought the man, even though she had been shot twice and took him down. Miss Summers was pronounced dead on the scene. At her candle light vigil, the Mayor of the city presented her mother with a posthumous Medal of Bravery and Key to the City in her daughter’s name. A plaque with Miss Summers photo and the key will hang in the office building.’

The plaque had a picture that I took of her, looking happy and natural with our dog Scotty. Her cheeks were rosy and flushed and she was laughing at the fact that I couldn’t work the camera. After they tore that building down, forty years later, I broke in and stole the plaque. It was probably wrong of me, but I had to have it. It says that she’s a hero in gold letters. Funny how they realized it after she died. She was always wondering if she would ever be known for her achievements. I just wish she had been here to get that key and stuff. She would have blushed and cried. I can almost see her modest reaction, like she didn’t deserve it. That was my Slayer, my friend. My lover.

We made love. That’s rare and that’s sacred. I’ve lived almost seven hundred years, but I have yet to find anything that compares to those fifteen that she gave me. Time is a rabid bitch. It plows into you and steals your yesterdays and pushes you into a tomorrow that you could never be prepared for.

I stayed in Sunnydale until the last of her friends had died. Xander hung on longer than any of the others and at the end, he seemed to take comfort in the fact that it was me there with him and no one else. I journeyed to where Angel was and we drank too much, shared too many stories, cried and laughed and slept. We traveled out of America and overseas, two figures that kept to the shadows. Time was good to our bodies, but not our minds. We became veritable recluses, only wanting the company of one another.

She was a part of us. Sometimes we would mention her out of the blue and more often than not, it would lead to one or both of us sharing new memories. I think we both made up things. He only had her for three years, but he had a lifetime of memories. I would lie and say we had gone to Hawaii and he would top me by telling me that he had taken her to France. Maybe in our minds it was real because we dreamed it.

We went back to Sunnydale and saw her headstone several times over the years. It said: Buffy Summers, Beloved Friend, Devoted Lover, and Courageous Spirit … May she find herself on the other side of the rainbow and never have to fight again.

I sometimes wonder if I will see her again. I wonder if some miracle can happen that will lead us back together. We fought insurmountable odds to find one another and I like to tell myself that this can’t be it, that she will be my reward for becoming more than just a demon. Or maybe she was my reward.

Either way, she was mine.

The love we made will live forever because love can’t die.

And what we made was love.

 

finis

 

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