Disclaimer: 'Angel' and all associated bits belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy and WB and Fox. And, oddly, I'm not bitter about that, because the things they do with them are just so damned interesting. So interesting, in fact, that I wanted to play too. I didn't make any money, though, and I didn't do any permanent damage to anyone, and really, that's what counts, isn't it?

Sex disclaimer: M/M stuff. Get into it or get over it.

Notes:
Somewhere around the twentieth time through Liz Phair's "Flower," the oddest things start occurring to me. So thanks to her for the title, and associated weirdness.
 
 

Cordelia asked him once if he had a leather fetish. He likes to think the question was only brought on by her memory of the soft wool winter suits he wore while they dated. When she buried her face in his chest for hours at a time, thinking, he supposes, that he smelled like money.

A different Cordy now. One who can be bribed. He declared the office closed for a few daylight hours and took her up to the hills, taught her to handle his motorcycle. Her price for leaving the subject alone. She's strong enough; under the fragile girl-clothes, those arms are iron-hard. New muscles she's acquired in her work with Angel. He told Faith once that slaying was the best exercise. One of their few moments of connection.

His left arm still throbs faintly when he thinks about Faith. He wonders how much he gave away to her while she was carving parts of him away. Whether she could sense him imagining big hands locked around his jaw in place of her talons. Whether he cried Angel's name while he bled. He doesn't think so. She wouldn't have said something. Then or later. Later, while Angel nursed her and he curled up cold and bruised in his bed at home and cried.

He wishes he'd stripped naked for Angel that next morning, when Angel took her breakfast and cuddled her like a broken child. He should have demanded that Angel acknowledge what she'd done to him. The shredded skin. The broken ribs flowering out blue and purple across his chest. The cracked collarbone that he didn't identify for almost a week, when he finally cried out in pain once too often and Cordelia drove him to the hospital. The shallow cuts on his belly. The sickening ringing in his ears that made him constantly and sent him running for the bathroom more than once.

He can imagine Angel's hands on him, curious like an animal with no sense of pain. The vampire senses identifying both the places where he was bleeding intermittently and those where blood was pooling just under his skin. Cold fingers tracing out the pain on his flesh.

Teeth running down his chest while Angel licks the blood off. Cold lips on him, following the bruising down the central line of his body. Licking below his navel, where the worst bruises disappear into the waist of his trousers. Licking into his navel for the body-warm flecks of blood that his three showers that first night still missed.

Angel possesses him. More than he likes to admit. He was a wretched and pathetic thing when he cajoled an invitation to stay out of Angel and Cordelia, but he thinks he's maybe been useful since then. He offers expert administration, in which he gets to exercise all the anal-retentive traits that his Watcher training drummed into him. He was not unhelpful in a dozen very close encounters with higher demons. Two nights when Angel accepted his body heat and curled around him on the couch in his apartment, while Wesley carded that thick, dark hair with his fingers. He smelled his fingers afterward, but like all vampires, Angel leaves no trace. He doesn't smell like anything at all.

Just those few minutes on the second night when Angel's curl brought his face up to Wesley's hip. And rested there, chin against the almost unpadded bone of his pelvis. Angel snuffled there, instinctively seeking the big veins that ran up from Wesley's legs. Moving slowly in towards his groin, leading inexorably to the external iliac vein and his cock hardening just below it.

He still isn't sure whether Angel kissed him before he pulled away and sat up. He remembers warmth, but that isn't possible. Even if he could have felt it through his trousers, Angel doesn't have any body heat to offer.

Sometimes, he gets the impression that Cordelia wants to check him for tooth marks in the morning. She watches him fiercely, looking for whatever secretly clever girls look for when they look at soft-spoken Englishmen. She could, he supposes, just be watching his ass while he bends down to buckle his motorcycle boots, but it's unlikely. Whatever else may be true, he's fairly sure she got her fill and more of looking at his ass while they were dating.

He's not entirely sure that she's forgiven him for that. If she said he seduced her, he's not entirely sure he could deny it. She was beautiful and brittle and radiated sophistication, but she was a child, really. All the innocence of suburbia was locked inside her shell. He could have done anything to her.

The chrome of his motorcycle clamped between her thighs was beautiful that day. These days, he's grateful for how strong she is.
 

 
 
    

jane
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