Prestige

*

Buffy’s heels wobbled in the plush carpet as she entered wall-to-wall cliché.

“Eight thousand at Prada?” Angel raised an eyebrow above the seam of a credit card bill, but it was a question, not an accusation.

It was his end of the deal.

“Spring preview.”

“Ah.”

There’d been an agreement. The kind that, from what she understood, was signed in blood. He was courteous about keeping the details from her, but she was acquainted with the bullet points.

She’d been a part of it, after all. A term.

“Got something for you today, baby.” She settled her collection of shopping bags in the foyer of the Hyperion’s penthouse, then circled behind Angel’s desk. The stacks of paper made him appear painfully swamped, but Buffy knew they meant nothing. Everything was taken care of. All they had to do was each other.

“That so?” His head dropped back against her breasts.

Buffy’s elegant wrists garlanded his neck, and next she was undoing his tie. “Uh-huh,” She breathed against his ear. “Guess.”

“I don’t know.” Angel chuckled a dirty old man chuckle. Apt in that he was a dirty old man. In Sunnydale, they’d both tried to deny that reality. She’d been a little girl, and he’d been, well, rounding century three.

Really, California’s statutory rape laws wouldn’t have begun to cover it.

She felt as ageless now as she’d perceived him as being back then, though of course she knew how old she was. There was a gala every January. This last had been twenty-six. Three and a half since Sunnydale’d sunk. And two since she’d come to live here, with him.

Slipping the tie from the column of his neck, Buffy placed it playfully across his eyes. She half-expected him to groan about the silk wrinkling when she knotted it, but he only lifted his fingertips to his temple, adjusting the placement.

“I’ll give you some hints, then.”

Buffy tugged at the back of his chair, and he followed suit, pushing into the carpet with his feet until he’d revolved halfway, his back to the show of papers.

She unbuttoned his shirt casually, then zipped down his trousers, leaving the belt and button fastened. Her hand sought the opening in his briefs, and then she emerged with him, swollen, almost too much for her grasp.

She undressed: her knee-length pencil skirt, wide metal belt, cleavagey blouse. The shoes stayed on, stockings too, their thick, black hems hugging her middle thighs, where the skin still gleamed, even and warm.

He hadn’t told her. Even now, it was only a suspicion. She traced her own naked body in the full-length mirror daily.

Waited to age.

The very nice saleswomen at Agent Provacateur had said not a day over twenty-two. They were pitching lingerie, however, so their remarks remained unweighted in Buffy’s mind. They’d sold her the garters and panties and corset, said her beau would be thrilled. They’d used that word. Beau.

“He’s my husband, actually.”

They’d sured and of coursed and smiled and winked.

He signed in blood, she’d wanted to say. But she only nodded and autographed the credit card receipt.

Now she perched on his desk, the wooden edge marking a pink crease across her ass. Each seamless calf hung down his bare chest, her knees hinged on his shoulders. “Touch me, Angel. Go ahead.”

His palms were the temperature of the air in the room. He grazed an Achilles tendon with one thumb. Wet a finger in his mouth and pulled it behind a knee. When there was massage on each side, as matched as bookends, she fisted his hair. Her own naked gasp snuck up on her.

“Can you smell me, Angel? How juicy I am? Tell me.”

“Luscious, Buffy. Always so primed for me, so slick…ready…”

Raising one leg over his head, Buffy slid down into his lap, situating his alert cock against the crotch of her panties. Angel slumped down to accommodate the position, and when she leaned back against him, his mouth pressed into her shoulder blade. He outlined the structure with the tip of his tongue, cool and moist as a watercolor brush.

At the same time he was exploring around her ribcage with both hands: grasping her breasts, thumbing the clasped placket in front, darting fingertips beneath all sorts of fabric borders like textile spies.

The shape she’d been in when he’d tracked her down in Italy…she hadn’t even thought to hesitate, to ask. She’d looked for that animal desperation in his eyes, and saw instead a resigned determination that registered far fewer layers. She saw a plan. It was a good plan.

To his credit, he’d tried to explain the fine print. Not effectively, but he had. She’d shushed him, kissed his mouth with equal hesitance and willingness. They’d been standing in the rain, and her hair had hung around her in soggy, disheveled strands, and she’d pulled him in like oxygen. It was so very 1998.

So he’d stuck to the basics, even those being more than she wanted to have to absorb. No more slaying for either of them. The next incarnation of the Council of Watchers was up to their ears in newly-calleds, and she could retire in good faith now. They both could.

And money. Would be taken care of. In excess. Indefinitely. So, shopping. Facials. VIP everything. The Hyperion would be rebuilt, and the happy new couple would have penthouse dibs.

The sealer though, what dashed any and all hesitance from her Buffy-brain, was the soul overhaul. New. Improved. Permanent.

From there, she hadn’t asked a thing, just got swept up, removed. Finally, something she didn’t need to orchestrate, something she didn’t need to wage. Take care of me, she’d whimpered and I will, he’d assured.

It was informed enough consent for Wolfram and Hart. Inside twenty-four hours, they’d landed in LA. He’d excused himself from their bed in the middle of the night, gone barely long enough to use the bathroom. Once back from the three am errand, he unwrapped himself from his robe like hard candy, nodded, told her it was taken care of.

They’d made love for days.

“Let me see you, Buffy.” His face was light, impossibly childish, and she shook the shadow from hers.

“What are you willing to do for the view, Mister?” She teased, shifting his foreskin delicately back. The head, when it emerged, always seemed so fragile and precious and pink, dampening her thumb tip as she circled it.

“Lady’s choice.”

“In that case…” Buffy maneuvered herself around, hovering over his lap in a squat she was a little bit glad he couldn’t see. Gripping both of his shoulders to brace herself, Buffy pulled her body upright, legs V-ed, feet anchored to the chair by each of his outer thighs. She was pleased when Angel groaned, the margin between his face and the source of all her most delicious odors now agonizingly tiny.

“I won’t lie, Angel. This was very expensive lingerie. I’m fairly certain you should taste it. Make sure I got my money’s worth.”

Both his hands were immediately fierce on her ass. Buffy dug her sensible French manicure into the tensed muscles of his upper back as he licked her, the flimsy mesh between her billowed pussy lips and his insistent tongue doing for a fantastic friction that made her shudder and whine. He played for a little while, steadied her when she swooned, squeezed and scratched both grateful ass cheeks.

And when he got down to business, he got down to business, in true Angel fashion. In a blink he was mouthing her clit in a demanding, consistent rhythm, her panties still a welcome filter. From behind, he slicked a finger against her perineum, then nudged it against her asshole, a wordless question.

The answer, Yes, was spoken out loud.

When she came, she felt herself clench-release-clench around his plunging finger. “Keep going, Angel…with your tongue…don’t…don’t stop…not until…” Instructions he didn’t need. Hadn’t needed for a long time.

*

They stayed on for a long time, the expensive undergarments. She sucked him off in them, on her knees, feeling the flick of the switch on her ass grow more and more erratic, until he clutched it in with her hair and splattered the back of her tongue with his spendings.

She touched herself in them, splayed in his office chair, one fist crumpling each end of the good silk tie, sliding it back and forth between her pussy lips until it was sodden. This time she didn’t even consider the possibility that he’d object to the damaged fabric. Exhausted mesh pushed aside, she stimulated her clit in his plain sight, watching him watch her. She sucked on the tie where it had absorbed her juices.

Eventually the outfit came off, clasp by clasp, piece by piece. He shed the stockings from her tangled legs like a form of worship, and there, for an instant, was that animal desperation, the eyes that had shifted her heart toward him, back when it felt so empowering to have decided.

Their fuck was long and almost silent, her skin becoming so heated that he rivaled her temperature, picked up her sweat as he thrust from above. Neither of them came easily, and by time she did she was pounding her sharp little fists into his back, tears building in the corners of her eyes, muscles worked raw and ready, all of her ready, ready, ready.

Her release rose up over a horizon of pleas. She shook with it. She sobbed.

Angel pumped pensively after that, clearly finished but for the last. She looked at him and he didn’t look back. So she waited. They both waited.

It was only a couple of minutes, and then he dropped his forehead into a hot press at the crux of her shoulder, the tightness in his face translating to her flushed skin. “There. There.” He growled, slammed into her, drained.

*

The silence afterwards was long, too. They lay together, touching, but not liberally. She wanted to ask him. Wanted to know. She wanted to listen to his breathing, match her own up with it, like she had with her mom, with Dawn, and Riley.

But there was just her breath. Just her.

“Angel?”

“Mmm?”

“ How long will it go on?”

“Forever.”

“And…and if I don’t want—”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

*

It had been two years since she’d said the word heaven out loud.

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