Reality Check - Chapter 10

He took a car and drove to the coast, keeping his mind utterly blank until he reached the ocean. It was easier to think there, away from the pressure.

It was easier to give into the realisation that his personal motive for saving Angel—hurting him as badly as he’d once been hurt—was as substantial as the sea foam that now lapped at his feet. He didn’t want to do to Angel what Angel had done to him. On the contrary, he wanted to have with Angel what had always been so tantalisingly close, hidden under the easier relationship of hatred and discord.

He shoved his hands deep into his pockets and hunched his shoulders then, on impulse, ripped them out, shed his clothes, and walked out into the cold surf.

The ocean was no more real than the water he’d been playing in all afternoon—inside Angel’s head, where things shouldn’t be real at all.

It buffeted him, froze him, took him back to a time when things were simpler, and as he lay on its cold surface, staring up at the sky, his perspective returned. He was no longer a needy childe in thrall to Angelus’s broken promises. He had saved the world. He was a man, and he could make his own decisions.

When he emerged, he was calm and decided.

He made his way back to Wolfram and Hart, to the bedroom, to the bed and, for the first time, willingly attached himself to Angel’s psyche.

He emerged from the bathroom, naked, only a few moments after he left. Carried on the same purpose that had formed on the swelling waves, he slid into Angel’s welcoming bed and Angel’s welcoming heat.

Angel, half-asleep, grunted happily and draped heavy limbs possessively over him. ‘You smell like the ocean.’

Spike smiled into the dark. ‘Sex, Angel. I smell of my need for you.’

Angel chuckled and slid down, licking and tasting as he went.

Spike kept his hands flat to the mattress until Angel came to one source of the salty aroma, and then he put them onto the dark hair and guided him on. He kept them there as Angel made a new reality: theirs. In the dark, with the centre of all his passion and pleasure deep in Angel’s throat, Spike felt his certainties drain away at Angel’s powerful sucking: who he was, where he was, the very definition of reality. There was only this: Angel, a bed, and being pleasured in a way he had not imagined possible despite a century of anticipation.

When he released down Angel’s throat, he cried out. The sound began as nothing more than a man reaching orgasm, but when it escaped his body, it sounded more like a cry of terror. Angel’s fingers entwined in his, and as the dark vampire drank, the powerful grip anchored Spike. Wherever they were and whatever they were doing, Angel’s grip seemed to be saying they were doing it there, and they were doing it together.

Drained, lost, found, Spike fell instantly asleep on the aftershocks of his orgasm, tiny tremors of pleasure still rippling through his body and carried into his dreams.

Dreams within dreams seemed to favour him, for he woke to bright sun on his face, an awareness of intense, bone-warming heat, the feel of strong, tight limbs entwined with his, and the knowledge that he was in love for the first time in his life.

He lay absolutely still so as not to disturb even the dust motes that drifted in the rays of sunlight.  He saw for the first time just how much difference a soul made to his capacity to love. It made him utterly vulnerable, connected somehow to every other person. There was no self, no arrogant concern about his needs. There was nothing of him left; there was just them, and he had never felt so content.

All of these feeling lasted for the time it took Angel to wake, scratch, grunt and go back to sleep, but by then, back to his old self and just as indestructible and selfish as ever he was, Spike knew that what he was feeling was real. There was nothing soulful or mystical about it. He had a vast capacity to love, and it all now centred on the sleeping man lying next to him.

If their positions were reversed and Angel were trying to get him to swap realities on the basis of this feeling, he’d have taken the plunge without a single doubt. He’d follow Angel to hell and back if that was what Angel wanted.

He draped his thigh over Angel’s hard backside and laid his face on the broad, warm shoulder. ‘Mornin’.’

Angel grunted again, but then slid his hand around to hold Spike’s thigh, an occasional stroke of his thumb proving he wasn’t quite as insensible to Spike’s presence as his loose-limbed sprawl indicated.

It was the sort of morning that Spike had rarely ever enjoyed, having been so mismatched with previous lovers: loving them when they were mad and unable to love him back; not loving or respecting them and consequently wanting to spend as little time as possible in bed with them once the sex was done; loving them when they hated themselves and had no love to give him back. Dru, Harmony, Buffy. Not exactly an impressive record for a hundred years of opportunity. 

This, however, was something entirely new.

He pushed to the back of his mind that it wasn’t real, that it would all have to end soon. It was real enough for Angel; why couldn’t it be real for him?

Suddenly, a seductively dangerous thought wormed into his mind. He tried to push it into the mass of other things he wasn’t thinking about, but it resisted, and slid back, looming large in his consciousness.

Something had to be done. He could not let this thought take root, grow, begin to blossom. Moving away from this enticing body would do it.  So, he just had to move. Away. From the sleek warmth. From the smell of sex.  From Angel.

Just before he put some considerable thought into which muscle would be best to move first, Angel, although apparently still asleep, took Spike’s hand and suggested it lie somewhere new.

Spike closed his eyes to the inevitability that he would not move away. It was too late to stop, too late, for the thoughts were blossoming like large exotic flowers of temptation in his mind.  Too late, for he was touching Angel’s frighteningly hard cock. Too late, for his hand was being moulded around it, encouraged with a few first tugs.

He was a quick study.

As the flowers turned to crimson, dripping pollen of enticement, he fondled his first cock.

Angel rolled onto his back, his eyes still closed in early morning lassitude but his shaft, surprising as an exclamation mark, purple and needy on his belly.

It wasn’t hard to know what to do, even if he didn’t already do it to his (which he did): it was a shape that demanded to be fisted. The knob, like a tiny pugilist’s fist, was cocky, arrogant, and tight with the need to jab and thrust. The shaft felt incredibly hot to his perpetually cool hands, and impossibly hard, more bone than flesh, but alive in a way bone could never be: flushed, veined and pulsing with blood.

Before he could play with the foreskin, which drove him insane with lust when he popped the head in and out, in and out, Angel put a hand to the back of his neck.

An oral sensualist, Spike found nirvana when the knotty, skinned fist slid between his lips. It was salty and raw, soft and hot, and sloppily wet. He caught the foreskin in his lips and withdrew, pulling it tight, then plunged back on, allowing his cheeks to bulge, not so lacking in self-awareness that he didn’t know how erotic this would look in his angular face and under his sharply delineated cheekbones.

Angel’s fingers entangled in his hair, and for the first time, Angel admitted he was awake. He pulled on the longish strands and whispered, ‘Yeah,’ in a voice that made Spike’s face flush, only adding to the eroticism of the moment.  He allowed his lips to travel further down the impossibly thick shaft, panicked, then pulled off swiftly.

Suddenly, Angel rose to his knees. Spike lowered to take the vertical shaft in his mouth again, annoyed that he’d allowed a very human fear of gagging to ruin their pleasure, but Angel grabbed his shoulders and very determinedly turned him around.

Back to Angel, confused, Spike began to protest, until Angel transferred his hands to Spike’s head and eased it back, then back some more, until his neck stretched taut. Angel smiled down at him, his eyes dilated, then fed his cock into the now long, tight, straight throat.

Two Adam’s apples, one his own, one the little boxer jabbing wildly as if to escape his confinement… Angel’s hands holding his head, rubbing around in his hair… whispered, erotic accompaniment to the deep throating… a conviction that no one had ever done this for Angel before… balls crushing his nose… no need to breathe but the desire to drag the musky scent deep into his lungs. Completely wanton, Spike allowed himself to be face-fucked as if he wasn’t there, totally safe in the knowledge that Angel was actually very aware whose face he was plunging his cock into and enjoying that thought very much indeed.

When the end came, when it was all shudder and strain and the noise of a man coming with wild cries of pleasure, Spike felt as if he were back in the ocean, swallowing greedy throatfuls of the salty water.

As Angel’s come filled his belly, it watered the crimson blooms of Spike’s temptation.

It was so simple he wasn’t quite sure why he was even attempting to repress the thought.

He could stay here, too.

Continue to chapter 11