Awakened
Chapter 4 of
“The Evolution of Spike”
By Chani
Spike awoke with a start, slightly confused. He sat up, his head swimming. And pounding. Loud pounding. Getting up suddenly seemed like a stupid idea.
Settling back in the bed, he glanced around the room. He didn’t recognize it. At all.
The bed he was in was huge. Definitely a king-sized. With tons of pillows on it. He reached above his head, through a layer of pillows, and found that it was an iron bed. Solid. Not cheap.
Then again, the 60-inch big screen TV that sat against the wall facing the bed wasn’t cheap either. Wherever he was, it wasn’t a dump.
Bits of memories of the night before came back to him. Getting drunk in his crypt, going out to find more alcohol. Getting in a fight. Sleeping in a bar, getting up and drinking some more. Then he had passed out again. Ugh. That meant it had been two nights ago that he got drunk in the crypt. He remembered waking up in the bar with someone – the slayer? - saving his butt from being thrown in jail. Being in a car and ending up here. Feeding from the slayer.
Only it wasn’t the slayer. Or was it? He couldn’t smell her anywhere and this definitely wasn’t her place. But he was sure he remembered seeing her. Why would she take him to someone else’s house? He had been too wasted to actually remember anything but snippets. Which would explain why it felt like there were a thousand drums banging in his head. Hangover or not, he needed to find out where he was.
He got out of bed slowly, stretching to help him wake up. His jeans were hanging neatly over a chair across the room…but his shirt was nowhere in sight.
He walked out of the bedroom to the stairs and nearly got run over by a cat with a huge dog following closely behind it. He still wasn’t sure where he was, but the word ‘zoo’ came to mind.
Once downstairs, the massive amounts of noise coming from the back of the house led him to the kitchen. He already had a suspicion that his assumption that Buffy was his Florence Nightingale was a drunken delusion, but when he stepped inside the door to the kitchen, it was confirmed. This woman was definitely not the slayer.
His rescuer was opening and slamming cabinet doors in a fury, muttering under her breath. Watching her, he understood why, in his drunken stupor, he believed she was Buffy. At least from the back. Her hair, though a little bit shorter than the slayer’s, was almost the same honey color. Like his slayer, she was small-framed and short, though she was a bit curvier. But she didn’t have Buffy’s tan. In fact, she was almost as pale as him.
He halfway expected her to sense his presence, but she was too focused on what she was doing – which appeared to be searching for something. Finally, deciding the object in question must be on a higher shelf than she could reach, she climbed up on the counter. That wouldn’t have been a bad solution had she not been wearing socks, or maybe even if she hadn’t had to stand on her tiptoes to reach the top shelf. Spike, however, knew what the end result would be, but before he could say a word of warning, her socks slipped on the counter and she tumbled backwards with a high-pitched curse.
Thanks to his vampiric speed, he was there to catch her, and instead of hitting the floor with a painful thud, she found herself in his arms. The wide-eyed look of shock in her dark green eyes amused him immensely. And he couldn’t help but notice that she wasn’t making any effort to escape his grasp. He tilted his head and let his eyes roam her face. Cute. And flushed. If his scrutiny of her face was making her squirm, he wondered what would happen if his eyes moved lower.
She answered that question by hopping out of his arms, bumping into the counter. “You’re up!” she squeaked.
There was no way he could let that one go. He gave her a sexy look and smirked. “Yeah, now I am.” He paused long enough for her to cough and look back at him with an amused look. “But you really should be more careful, luv. You could’ve busted that pretty little head of yours open.” He almost expected her to respond with a nasty comment or punch him, but then he remembered: this wasn’t Buffy.
“Then I guess you screwed up,” she told him with an amused smile. “If you had let me fall, you could’ve had a nice breakfast. Now you just get a mug of nuked blood.” She reached to her right and picked up a mug, then shoved it at him, pointing at the kitchen table. “Sit.”
Bossy. But he didn’t move, which meant she couldn’t move either since he still had her blocked against the counter. “What about the thing you were trying to get from up there?” He pointed at the cabinet and looked back down at her, noticing that she was about an inch shorter than Buffy. The girl should’ve invested in a stepstool by now.
“I was looking for a tray. Don’t need it now that you’re…awake.” Her teasing smile made it clear she had chosen her words carefully. “Now if you’ll sit down, I’ll finish making your breakfast.”
He wasn’t sure what else she intended to make him for breakfast, but he sat down at the table anyway and watched her. The bits and pieces he remembered about the last two nights left him with a few questions.
And it seemed to him that this pint-sized Martha Stewart wannabe had some of the answers.