Prague with Precipitation by Dodyskin

August 2002

A cellar bar. Tourists mix with locals. It’s a good place for a meeting. Any combination of people will look usual here. Noise and smoke, music low enough for conversation but loud enough for privacy. A sign hangs above the long line of bottles and optics. It says, and I shit you not:

Double Trouble. International Bar.

The barman, who obviously won the bet to serve this single man in expensive shabbiness, leans forward. “Co si date?”

“Dám si ...”

Then, through the noise and the smoke, there’s a louder sound. A quarrel breaking into something more serious and Wesley sighs, and walks in a way to make the crowds fall to the side, and he’s straightening and tightening his arms and he looks down at the man and says, “Smím prosit?”

And the man’s eyes look swirled with fear and confusion but then fleck yellow and become familiar with rage.

“Prominte,” he says, and the hesitant roll is all Wesley needs.

“Get up and get outside. There’s no place for you here. Unless, of course, you really do want to dance.”

“Who are you, Van Helsing?”

“Indeed no. I’m much scarier than him, but I do know what you are and I make it my business to introduce you to what you should be.”

The man chuckles with a bitter glee. “Bully for you. Wish I did. So, you going to buy me a drink or what?”

***

Woah, this place looks like… Europe. And it does, it looks like Europe in every film she’s ever seen. Cobbles and winding passageways and spires and a babble that’s so far removed from English or Spanish it sounds like a rasping sandpaper is being drawn over the usual rhubarb-rhubarb-rhubarb. She thinks she ought to go to the Josefov, for a minute, til she remembers that this is not a sightseeing trip. Not a vacation. Not a vacation but cause for a drink surely.

***

It takes just a minute to step against the stone curve of the bar. And they push themselves together and they’re so close and it’s so angry that they seem to be one person fighting with themself. Through the thin t-shirt fabric the vampire’s body seems colder than Angels ever did, but it’s colder here so it makes sense, but Wesley notices anyway. Wesley slides one hand firm against an undead back and braces the other against the cellar wall and says in harsh undertones, “this isn’t real,” and doesn’t understand why the other man laughs and kisses him harder but goes with it and as he’s flipped round and slammed against the wall his eyes spring open and, “Willow?”

He waits for the crinkled forehead and wide eyes but they don’t come. Willow simply stares for a moment and sighs. “Spike. Wesley. Now there’s a pairing.”

Wesley sags and then stiffens. “Spike?”

She seems infinitely old and a haggard bitterness hangs about her.

“Nice use of the tortured-hero look there.”

***

They hug their secrets close but Willow notices the scar and Wesley notices the word sorry and Spike notices the heat rising from both of them but no-one says anything. They don’t want to know. So they sit and talk of everything and anything and nothing at all and no-one mentions the fact that they were-are all evil, by circumstance if nothing else.

“Cold shower and dry ice.”

“Really?”

“Yup, no such thing as waterproof mascara.”

“Huh, never knew that.”

“Well, there it is.”

They sit at a table close against the wall and drink slowly. They measure out the time in wine. Hour glasses, until the night turns into early morning and cigarettes and brown spirits are the only way to keep avoiding it.

“Study.”

“On business. Recruiting”

“Passing through, was going to take the slow boat but I stopped off in Almeira and it’s not so far now with the trains.”

“You’re going back then?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Not yet.”

That’s all that they need, so they move as one and walk up the stairs out of the bar into the Old Town streets. The air is sweet and wet with old velvet history laid sodden and hanging heavy. Or it could be five in the morning and about to rain, whichever.

***

It seems obvious to go to Wesley’s pension. Though Spike leads the way, he is following Wesley’s trail. Negotiating the streets becomes a negotiation as Wesley offers a word of direction here and there and when they arrive Willow says it first.

“Here we are then. Up the stairs to Bedfordshire.”

Stilted conversation abruptly turns to fluent dialogue. A sign language of touching, gestures. They are all selfish, and speak to each other with grunts of want, need, more. Willow crushes herself against Spike and his hardness is a blessed relief because anything soft would break her.

Wesley just watches, until he catches himself doing it and moves between the two of them with cold determination. He stands there, flanked by innocence and experience but he mistakes which one is which and guides Willow’s hand to her shirt. She breaks free and looks up at Wesley defiantly. Still staring him straight she unbuttons, everything, while her hands busy themselves with zips and belts and the unfamiliar contraptions of a fighting man. Unfamiliar indeed, and Wesley grips her hands tightly as she reaches for his jacket, the tension saying, stop, you don’t know, but Spike does and he jerks into a smooth action of disarming, gently.

So they move slowly now, as if to say, we want this, we know what we are doing, but permissions are not spoken, as if to speak would break the spell.

Spike breaks the spell with dirty words, muttered by rote, asking without questions. What do you want me to do to you? What do you need me to do for you? What do you want? Do you want me? Do you want this? Or this? Or this? Each sentence joins a motion, a grab and clenched hands. A wave of words rolling with practiced fingers over Wesley’s torso, which tenses and relaxes and then Wesley pushes the hands off himself and onto the woman and steps back and commands.

***

The humiliation of it all is so exciting and the fact that it shouldn’t be excites her even more. Bad girl, bad girl, she whispers as she leans back on the bed and displays herself. Wanton movements: she mimics the confidence of a whore and it’s laughable really and so wrong on her body. Little girl plays dress up naked and a thousand alarm bells ring muffled by I don’t care and I want to and I can. She can: the stolen power of it makes her tingle and buck and slick up hot from the inside out.

Spike moves over her, licks a long line up the inside of her thigh and she shivers for a second until she remembers what she is, today. Willow reaches out her leg and hooks Spike in closer, pressing his head to her wetness insistently, want, need, more. He circles her with his tongue and she begins to understand the difference between making love and fucking. There is no love here, just a starving desperation and it’s not pleasant but it is vivid. The luridity disconnects her, for a moment, and the liberation is extraordinary. Shudders run up her body and heat builds to fire running through her. She reaches her arms out to grip the bedstead and lassoes Spike with her legs pulling him upwards, urging him inwards. His, his what? His cock, his dick, his manhood? The clichés turn somersaults and she begins to understand the need for them. There are only clichés to describe this uncommon feeling of rhythm and pressure.

A moan escapes from Wesley and he steps from the shadows and tries to pull Spike away but Spike only twists a dirty leer and overpowers him. Batting him down. Spike rolls Willow over and over until she’s straddling him and riding in the manner of a hundred cartoons drawn on schooldesks and bathroom walls. Holding her lightly, Spike looks Wesley up and down.

“Come and have a go, if you think you’re hard enough.”

As his leer breaks into challenge, Wesley stiffens in all the right places. Wesley runs his hands down Willow's back, caresses turning to clawing in the small of her spine. Cat-rolls of Spike’s neck echo cat-rolls of her back and the two men lift her, one pushing her down onto his cock and the other pushing in to her pussy. Then there is no more work for Willow as she is rocked between them, rise and fall, so she concentrates on the cadence of the two men moaning and matches her mouth to the sounds.

Still talking, seems hell got even mouthier, Spike chants, “Dirty girl, dirty girl, dirty girl,” until a storm crashes out roaring outside and drowns out the animal grunts and the chanted words and all there is is friction and rain drumming.

***

The next day, Prague is flooded. The metaphor does not escape them. Willow leaves first, then Spike, after showing Wesley his sexy dance.