Show, Don't Tell by Jane Davitt

“So, you got me watching over you tonight. Anything I should know about? Never baby sat a wolf before.”

Oz watches Faith smile, lips black cherry ripe, eyes hungry and restless. He can feel the change prickle under his skin, scab picking time, painful but satisfying.

“Not really. Just don’t get too close. And if I get out...”

“What?” Faith’s glance drifts to the rifle, loaded with tranquiliser darts, and Oz nods approval before turning away.

Something deep inside is telling him that this one would kill him if she had to. Well, so would Giles, but he’d be sorry about it. And so would Buffy, but only in the last resort and so ... Oz’s thoughts get tangled for a moment, trying to picture Willow killing him. Can’t do it. Funny; knowing Faith wouldn’t work hard finding alternatives to snapping his neck doesn’t make him hate her; makes him feel safer in fact. If she’s what stands between him and a life taken by the wolf, he wants her to be a good defender.

“Oz?”

Her hands on his bare arm and he shivers. The others know not to touch him this close to the time. Xander did it once. Once. And the next full moon, he rubbed the arm Oz hadn’t bitten hadn’t, until the skin was raw and ragged, his eyes skittering from cage to Oz, swallowing non existent spit from a fear-dried mouth until Oz wanted to scream and hit him and he really didn’t feel able to blame the change for that reaction.

Faith doesn’t flinch, but she lets her hand drop and steps back carefully.

He lets the door clang shut and shakes it to make sure it’s locked, then steps back and waits. Faith comes close, wraps slender, strong fingers around the metal and fucking attacks it, just hammers and yanks and wears herself out. Then she smiles, breathing harder than she should have been, and steps back.

“Nighty-night,” she says and turns to her chair, her can of soda, her comic, as Oz starts to strip.

But she’s watching. Oz gets an earring stuck as he pulls off his shirt and for a long moment his eyes are blindfolded as he curses and fiddles and deals with it. But a t shirt isn’t opaque when it’s tissue thin from wear and he can see her head turn, eyes wandering over his chest and down, lips pursed and fuck she looks at him like he’s meat and his cock hardens as he yanks his shirt off, taking the earring with it, a minor ouch but his ear’s bleeding now and he can smell it. Sends him wild but there’s enough of him left to channel it and his cock’s pointing the way.

His hands go to his belt and she’s reading again now, flipping pages like a speed reader or an illiterate, and the blanket on the door’s hiding him but it isn’t because he’s pulled it down and he’s waiting for her to notice.

And she does. Yards away but he can hear her pulse quicken, catch the sound she makes as she watches him peel out of his jeans. He’s not stripping for her, not trying to turn her on. He stumbles getting a sock off, shoves his ass back as his boxers come down, does it all just exactly how he would have done if he’d been alone. No flex of muscle, no sucking in of a gut he didn’t have anyway, no presentation at all. Just letting her see without sneaking. Letting her watch. Call it payment for her time. A bonus for being able to kill him.

And she does look. At his face mostly, after that one glance down. It’s a refinement he wouldn’t have thought her capable of and it gets him so hard he seriously thinks about jerking off but that’s more than he wants to give her.

And when he starts to change and it’s then that she comes over to watch, a bare inch out of reach, and her eyes cold and appraising, blasé and distant, he’s glad he didn’t.

Faith’s a cold bitch. Something to remember.

And a night spent watching her finger fuck her way to heaven, lips sneering at the animal watching as she splits her legs wide, doesn’t do much to change his mind.

And Oz wonders who told her he didn’t remember anything and then realises no one did.

.End