Fleeting

Rating: It will be NC-17 by the time I’ve finished
Disclaimer: Do I *really* have to do this *every*time?
Authors Note: This started out as a challenge that Amberina set me. I was hoping for a one-part fic. Unfortunately, she’s evil. Also! this fic jumps between the time line of the story. flickers back and forth through time. hopefully, you can figure out the basic timeline for yourself. if anyone has any problems, just let me know.
Dedication: Amberina. You bitch. [smirks]


Part I - So Hard To Love You

“Do you have any idea what it’s like, being in love with some one like you Faith?” my voice was sad as I spoke those few word her her, her eyes locked onto mine for a single instant, before flickering away to look at the carpet down and to the right of me.

I could see her fingers, slowly working themselves, fidgeting against each other, while her brow furrowed in concentration. I guessed she was trying to think about how it would be.

To love your best friend. To know that your best friend knows. To w her her strut around as if it was nothing. To fuck whoever she felt like it, and spend hours telling me about them the next day.

I suppose the last part was probably my fault. I told her to just forget it, to act like it hadn’t happened. But despite a part of my brain forgetting it, the rest was still playing catch up, at an amazingly slow rate.

At the speed it was going, I doubted I’d ever forget.

“I know what it’s like..” she sighed heavily, leaning her elbows down on her knees and covering her face with her hands. She sat; doubled over for long minutes, leaving me thinking she wasn’t going to answer me. “I know what it’s like to want someone so much you feel like you can’t breathe.”

“What did you do?” she laughed mirthlessly as she sat up again, leaning her head back against the chair she was sitting in, her eyes focused on some unseeable point on the ceiling of our living room.

“I haven’t done a god damn thing.” She looked at me then. Burning balls of almost pure black, searing into mine. And I felt myself falling. Taking a header into those eyes, and feeling the pull, the lure they always had on me, become all that stronger.

I shook my head out, dragging my eyelids closed and hoping she hadn’t noticed how much of a profound effect her looking at me like that really had on me.

“They don’t know?” I brought my hand up, rubbing my closed eyes with my finger tips, hoping to elevate the pain of knowing where she’d just been, with god knows who. When all I could really want is for her to come home with me after clubbing. If only to just have a cup of coco before falling into our respective beds and drifting off into sleep.

At least that way I’d know she was safe. That she was home for another night at least.

“No, probably not.” I could almost hear the shrug in her voice; see that humorless smile flutter across her lips. The far away look that her eyes always gained when she was thinking about something she thought she could never have. “Cause I haven’t told them. I’ve had thportportunity to tell them.”

I opened my eyes, slouching down further in my chair and propping my head against the back of it, getting myself comfortable.

“Really?”

“Yeah. But.. how do you tell your best friend, you’re in love with them?” My entire world froze. Like someone had just found the remote and accidentally pressed the pause button.

“What? I’m sorry I just meant… *what*?!” the force with which my voice tumbled out of my mouth shocked me slightly. But I had suddenly found myself through the looking glass and into a world of permanent acid trips. She couldn’t have just said, what I thought she said. Right?

She shook her head and sighed slightly, lookbackback up at me, and then away again. Her hands hanging limply between her legs as she swallowed deeply.

“Buffy. I’m in love with you. I have been for the longest time.” Her voice sounded resounded. Like she’d set herself up for the inevitable fall of rejection. But why, when she knew that I had loved her for the longest time?

“Then why the hell didn’t you say something?” I found the anger in my voice slightly surprising. But hell, I shouldn’t have done really. She’d know for the better part of a year how I felt about hehe’dhe’d had the chance to tell me how she felt for just as long. Dammit, I had a *right* to be angry. “Fucking hell Faith. You’ve really put me through thekingking ringer.”

I slammed my head back against the chair I was in and slammed my eyes shut. Shit. I always swore when I got angry. I hated that my mask slipped, if even for just a second.

I suddenly felt the backs of her warm fingers, trailing a soft line of fire down my cheek. Forcing me to open my eyes, to look at her as she knelt on the carpet before me.

“I’m sorry.” She swallowed deeply, her eyes following her fingertips as they carried on their path, down the side of my neck and over my collarbone. The very contact causing shudders of pure passion and longing skuttering through out my entire being. “I was scared. Even when I knew how you felt.”

I could understand that. She wore a mask too. One of strength. One of confidence. And only I was the one to see the scared and confused girl beneath the thick hide of the woman the world got to see. I was the one to hold her when she woke up crying in the night. I was there whenever she started hyperventilating, when the panic attacks grabbed her. Her head reeling from the past she had worked so hard to forget.

“What changed?” I was silently pleased that my voice came out almost steady. Her digits making it hard for my breathing to remain normal, as they wove an intricate web of heat around my body.

“I saw the way you looked at me when I came in tonight.” She eyes flickered up to mine for a brief moment, a ghost of a smile on her lips, before they lowered again to her hand. “That look of utter fear, and then complete relief when I walked through the door. That it was me, and not some police person coming to tell you that I wouldn’t be coming home.”

I grabbed her hand, stilling her fingers on my flesh, and squeezing slightly, causing her to look up into my eyes again.

“I’m always cared that tomorrow might be the last day I ever see you.” I smiled weakly at her, finding my fingers slowly interlinking with hers. Holding the back of her hand against my bare color bone, and the seam of my top. “Because I’m so in love with you, I don’t think I could survive if I knew you weren’t gonna be there the next morning.”

She smiled at me softly, her thumb running back and forth gently over mine, her skin grazing the skin on my color bone as it glided gently, soothing the ache that had come upon me with thinking thoughts of her not being there.

“I..” her eyes slowly drifted from mine, trailing a soft path over my face, and coming to rest on my lips, slightly parted and waiting with bated breathe for the chance to steal the kiss I’d been wanting to have for as long as I can remember. “I desperately want to kiss you right now.”

Her breath whispered softly across my face, causing a shiver of pleasure to worm it’s way down my spine, at the husky and endlessly sexy levels her voice had dropped into. Whispering her need to kiss me across the airwaves to me.

“I’ve been wanting that for years.” I whispered back as I pushed my fingers into her hair and gently pulled her towards me. Her lips landed on mine and neither of us moved for fear of suddenly waking up and finding out this wasn’t real.

But the dawning of reality came over and and I gently lead the way in our first kiss. Brushing the tip of my tongue over her bottom lip so lightly, I wondered for only a moment if she’d felt it, before her lips opened up to me and responded.

It wasn’t aoraborable day. The sun wasn’t crystal clear, the weather wasn’t notable. The club was monotonic, the music lethargic, the clothes having been worn countless times before. It wasn’t a national holiday, nothing happened to make that day stand out in my mind.

But for that one moment, the clocks stopped ticking, the wind died, and the world stop turning. I will remember that single moment for the rest of eternity, simply because it was just her, and only me.

I will remember that instant, because in that moment, she was mine.


Continued Next in: Woven Heat