cadhla. Tara/Anya.When good girls fantasized, they did it at night, alone, behind locked doors.
You knew you were a good girl when your thoughts made you blush at the mirror, drop your eyes. When your skirts swished, hiding your embarrassed legs the way your hair hid your face. When your lover teased you into public stammering with a wink that recalled the previous night, nakedness and private jokes and naughty confessions.
But Tara wasn't a good girl anymore. Two years had made her over, her lover's mouth turning her more deeply than the Hellmouth into something new, unmooring her, filling her body with an almost wicked witchlight. The opposite of good wasn't bad, though. The opposite of good was sex--or so Tara came to believe for a while--and sex was always natural, like life. Love. She'd been sexed up and loved, and she'd felt wide and happy enough to scour the goodness from her wardrobe like drab, inherited church dresses and run naked. If not with the wolves.
Now though, she was alone and angry and trying to be strong. And she'd realized too late that other people--Willow type people--didn't necessarily strip off the good girl to reveal the naked, sexy, natural witch underneath. For some people, the opposite of good was bad, just like they'd taught Tara in Sunday school, and bad was something you put on. It was dress-up. It was about temptation and too much knowledge and a darker power. Nature wasn't enough. They wanted what was unnatural.
Nothing was just about sex or love anymore. There were far more difficult problems for Tara to twist and brood on, late at night, alone with her thoughts. *Alone.* Except she got bored. She really did. Got angry, and burned herself out, until she was left oddly tired of Willow and herself and of course the Hellmouth, which had turned out to be a far more insidious power than Tara had anticipated; a powerful lover, wooing her own true love away.
So Tara fantasized in broad daylight now, for distraction. Sitting across from Anya in a café, she stared at the ex-demon from under her lashes, concealing her boredom and her faint distaste for the other woman, one she'd never been entirely able to get off her tongue, even though it wasn't nice, and wasn't even fair, really. Anya wasn't so awful. It's just that...well, she really was.
And she sure could talk. You could drink a whole mocha grande while she talked.
Boredom and dislike didn't prevent sex thoughts. If they did, there'd be a lot fewer babies and dirty bookstores in the world. Thinking sexy thoughts was a kind of effortful compensation in its way, an attempt to overcome her feelings for Anya. Like what if Anya, sitting here and planning her wedding, was in fact just as bored as Tara, and secretly didn't want to get married at all? A closet lesbian, just itching for some hot girl-on-girl action?
Girl-on-girl action, thought Tara. Shyeesh.
"--and I told them that the bridesmaids' dresses don't strictly need to be in the larval form, but I guess *that's* all moot now, since *some* people who shall remain *Buffy*," eye roll, "are too good for other people's traditions. You're listening, right?"
Tara nodded in zombielike stupefaction. "Burlap. Blood larva. Bridesmaids."
Satisfied, Anya flipped the page of her bridal magazine and inspected another dress, nattering on. Honeymoons. Petit fours. Skewers.
It's not that she wasn't pretty. Tara liked her hair--it seemed to change day to day lately, and right now it curled, blonded and cut like wood shavings. In a thousand years, Anya had seen a lot. Glossy exterior, jade heart; bright eyes, tired soul. Her aura was drenched in dark red. If Tara reached over, stroked her knee, would she jump? No. She'd merely look up in confusion, smile, ask, "Why are you touching me?" Maybe Tara could convince her that American brides and bridesmaids had a special relationship, not discussed in nice magazines.
A pinched frown and then, gamely: "Okay." And Anya would follow chattering and biddable to Tara's new place, let herself be undressed down to her lacy, girlish undergarments. She'd stand in high heels and lingerie, lipsticked like a pin-up girl, on Tara's worn carpet. Tara wouldn't need to be gentle. She could play with her, a bridal doll. Hairpins falling, straps slipping--a wobble on heels, backwards, bedwards. She'd probably do anything, probably gasp. Not in shock, only in pleasure. Self-absorbed, talking of bridal gowns as Tara licked her breasts. Unclasped her bra. Fingered the nested womanliness through her satin panties.
Where Tara was from, women like Anya aged fast. Married young, had babies, wore down. Some got a second wind in their forties. Divorced, they opened dress shops, permed their hair again, worked out and bar-hopped.
But Anya was older than that. It would be hard to forget, if Tara were kissing her way around Anya's body, her long hair falling forward, tips dragging in that blood-red aura. Demons could get souls and get better, though. Was Anya's aura lighter at the edges these days? Pinker, like a scab healing? It made you wonder. If demons could be...
"--glad you're going to come to the wedding. It wouldn't be the same without you. It wouldn't be *bad*, but it would be different. Because of your absence. I mean--"
That mouth chafed free of color as you kissed it, let your own breasts drag across her open breath.
Tara's nipples hardened and she shifted in her chair, hunching to hide as she'd been raised to do. Folding her arms in front of her. Because men would tease. No one needed to see that, Tara.
A warm, genuine smile from Anya startled one back from Tara, and she clothed her naked thoughts in haste.
Weird, sexy thoughts in broad daylight. Sexy, but discomforting. And maybe unnatural.
There was sadness, the smell of coffee, Anya's voice, and sunlight on the sidewalk.
And oh, you must read the one written for me, Stray Cat Is Crying by
moonlettuce. Spike! Xander! Angst! Other stories, including some S/X ones that I'm now going to go read, can be found at
marguerite_26's LJ. Why am I up at 4:30, you ask? Eh. Don't.