SECTION 1 - LEAP OF FAITH

And it's a leap of faith
When you believe there's someone out there
It's a leap of faith
When you believe that
Someone cares, oh
And when I call out to you
Will you be right there
Right there

(Michelle Branch, Album Broken Bracelet)



Chapter 1.06
Monday, May 6th, 2002

"Dawn." The slayer yanked open drawers pulling out and sliding on some lacy white briefs. She pulled Spike's shirt off over her head, but before he had time to appreciate the view she threw it in his face.

"And she's off. What's the problem, love? I kinda thought being in your own bedroom might save you from the quick dress and run scenario."

"Get your clothes on, you stupid vamp. I might be leaving but you're coming with me. Dawn's lunch-break finishes in an hour and she can't leave school grounds. So if we want to make sure she's the first person we tell, you're going to have to drive into the school parking lot."

"Can't we just wait till she comes home and tell her then?"

"I'll be at work and you're seeing Anya before then. You think she's not going to ask you why you're grinning like the Cheshire cat?"

"Nah, Anya wouldn't read Lewis Carroll. Harris only just managed to stop her walking out of the Matrix, but point taken. Though I did hope you might just phone in sick for work and hand in your notice at the same time." Spike pulled his shirt over his head and headed for the bathroom to retrieve his boots and socks.

"If it was still Manny the manager I would, but Lorraine's always been decent. The least I can do is work my notice which I'll hand in tonight."

"That's my girl. Now tell me your bank details."

"You what?"

"If you're leaving work, then you're going to need money coming in from somewhere else. I'll get the lawyers to arrange a weekly allowance until we get married and then they can just transfer half the assets into your name. I would do it now, but if we wait till we're married then the transfer should be tax exempt or it would be in England."

"You're starting to sound like Anya."

"Hush, pet. Be nice. I was planning on asking her if she still had her wedding organiser with all the stuff about florists and dress shops and suit hire, but if you want to slog through the Yellow Pages and find all of them yourself."

Spike pushed his now fully attired wife-to-be out of the room.

She commented as they left, "Giles is going to think this is a practical joke, you know?"

"Yeah, right up until he gets the plane tickets to get his bum over here and give you away. Hmph, bet your vicar won't let me have Clem for best man. Guess I'm going to have to ask Angel."

"Pfft. And I'll have Dru and Harmony for bridesmaids. You said he'd probably beat you black and blue just for touching me and then you want to ask him to be best man."

"Hell, pet. If we're getting married he can't say I'm taking advantage of you. And he knows I wouldn't go as far as getting' married if it was just me trying to soften you up for the kill. As far as Angel goes, I've probably dramatically increased my chances of not getting' staked if he wins the fight, not that he will." He paused ready to open the front door.

"How are we doing this, pet? Are you sticking with me all the way, meeting me at the car or meeting me at the school?"

Buffy picked up the bag of things to be returned to The Magic Box and threw Spike a blanket she had found in the basement the previous day.

"Staying with you all the way."

"Sewers it is."

The black DeSoto pulled up in the school parking lot.

"It's not my fault you decided to wear heels. You were the one who said you would come through the sewers. I offered to meet you at the car."

"It's still your fault for having a stupid bloody sunlight allergy."

Spike smirked. "That's at least the second time today you've said bloody."

"Well, if it is, that's your bloody fault as well."

"Go fetch the Niblet and remember to keep your left hand in your pocket till you get back to the car."

"Yes, dear." Buffy stuck her left hand in her jeans pocket and stalked off in search of her little sister, wishing yet again that the Mayor had skipped her graduation. That way she'd know where she was going.

The two Summers women climbed into the old car.

"So what's the big emergency that brings you out the bedroom, then?" Dawn asked nonchalantly.

Buffy looked nervously at Spike who immediately frowned. "You told her already."

"Didn't."

"Did."

"Didn't."

"Did."

"Didn't"

"Definitely did, or Bit would have interrupted by now to find out what we were talking about. And you would have gone straight to the showing and the squealing and giggling and bouncing instead of looking guilty and people would have thought there was something different going on in this car from what there is."

Buffy pulled her hand from her pocket and held it out in front of Dawn. Spike lit up a cigarette.

"Oh my God. It's gorgeous, Buffy. That must have cost you a fortune, Spike."

Spike grunted. "Bet first time she saw it she went, "OhmyGod OhmyGod OhmyGod OhmyGod OhmyGod."" Spike did a better impersonation of Dawn's high pitched shrieking than any male past puberty and still in possession of his testicles should be able to do. "And I bet you did the bouncy, giggly thing that bloke's like to watch. except when it's like their little sister, so I would have just had to watch Buffy."

Both women blushed.

"I don't know why I bother. She could have come on her own. No better than a bleedin' chauffeur. Bloody church wedding."

"Spike, I'm really sorry. I just couldn't keep it in when I saw her. I had to tell her straight away."

Spike smirked back at her, his previous resentment apparently all for show. "If you'd made it back to the car without telling her, I'd have been disappointed at your lack of enthusiasm."

"What?" Buffy was confused by his about-face.

"This is your sister we're talking about. If you'd made it back to the car without telling her, it would have been a pretty sure-fire sign you were regretting saying yes. I might even have been tempted to call it off."

"You manipulative bastard," accused the slayer.

"Thought I might as well live up to what you were accusin' me of last week, pet."

"So," Dawn treated the pair to a smirk that ought to have earned Spike royalties. "Does this mean you'll be asking Xander to be best man."

"Anyone noticed hell freezin' over," Spike retorted. "Then, I think not. Maybe if Clem can't do it Rupert could do both, d'you think?"

"Can I help plan everything?" Dawn wheedled.

"Ask Buffy."

"Can I, please? I can help pick the bridesmaid dresses and everything."

"The ulterior motive is revealed," announced Buffy. "Yes, you can help as long as you get all your homework done first and keep your grades up, otherwise we might economise by getting you, Will and Tara to wear the radioactive dresses from Arashmahar."

The conversation was rudely terminated by the bell for the end of lunch-hour.

"Do me a favour, pet. Have a look in the glove box there. Behind the parkin' tickets and the log book, right at the back there should be a brown envelope with some money in."

Buffy found the rather scruffy item and before she could pass it over to him he astounded her by saying, "Get a couple of thousand out for me."

Lifting the flap of the envelope Buffy discovered a stack of brand new sequentially numbered hundred dollar bills. Counting off twenty of the bills she passed them to him, noting that there were probably five times that number remaining. Spike took the cash and stuffed it loose into his duster pocket.

"Why do you have thousands of dollars sitting in a car that's probably only worth a couple of hundred?"

"I like to have some cash around for emergencies. The car's more secure than the crypt and it's handier if I need a fast getaway. And how many times do I have to tell you that my baby is not some heap of junk? She's a classic.

You're probably goin' to need some of that once you start getting' stuff for the weddin'. Leave a couple of grand in the envelope and you keep the rest."

"You're saying, here you go have seven or eight thousand dollars?"

"Yeah, I mean as soon as you start orderin' stuff and bookin' places they're going to want money aren't they. I know what's there won't be enough for everything but I'll get more if you let me know when you're running out."

"You expect me to carry around thousands of dollar in cash. I don't even draw more than a hundred out of the ATM at a time."

"Bloody hell." Spike slung the steering wheel round to the left and pulled an illegal U-turn before pulling up in front of Buffy's bank.

"This is a "No parking" zone," Buffy pointed out.

"You better be quick, then."

His bride to be rolled her eyes and darted into the bank.

After ten minutes of chain-smoking, a quick glance in the rear view mirror showed an approaching traffic cop. Spike pulled out and began to drive round in circles. It was twenty minutes after that before he spotted Buffy half a block down from the bank, heading toward The Magic Box.

He pulled up next to her and waited for her to get in. He was unprepared for her onslaught when she did.

"You left."

"I didn't bloody leave. I've been driving in circles round that bank for the last God knows how long. Which part of quick didn't you understand?"

"It's not my fault. I got this girl, Amber, who used to be in my French class, and she saw the ring and well. And then when I said the money was from my fiancé to go towards paying for the wedding she said I should open a separate account because it would make it simpler to keep track of it all. And then the manager recognised me and wanted to talk about the reward and I had to count it all before I could fill in the deposit slip and I kept losing track."

"Sequential bills, pet. Take away the little number from the big number, add one and stick a couple of zeros on the end. Hardly rocket-science. What did they say about the reward, then?"

"Apparently they got back just over ninety-seven thousand, so it means just over three thousand two hundred each, which I could get very excited about except you seem to treat it like spare change."

The car pulled into a shady alley at the rear of The Magic Box.

"Sounds like you're getting all upset with me 'cause I'm not skint. Hey, I could've just not bothered telling you I had any money and let you go even deeper in debt trying to pay for a wedding you couldn't afford.

The money that was there is more than I would normally keep hanging around, but I started keepin' some extra after you started workin' in that dump, just in case you came to your senses and quit. The rest would normally last me a good six months but lately I've been getting through more booze than I normally do. And the only reason I just stuck two grand in my pocket is that I owe eighteen hundred of it to Anya for first and last on the flat she leased when she split up with Xander."

"Why do you owe money on Anya's lease? Were you paying her rent? That's a lot of rent. Willow only pays forty bucks a week."

"How the hell does your brain work, woman? Why would I have been paying demon-bint's rent? It's hardly like she can't look after her own money. I'm subletting from her. All-inclusive. She's not stuck with the lease on an empty apartment. I don't have to pass a credit check or set up direct debits to a non-existent bank account to cover bills and it already has cable, and she's taping Passions for me until I get moved in. Happy now?"

"Why didn't you tell me before?" the slayer pouted.

"'Cause I was planning on surprising you and the Bit and making dinner for you there after I got settled."

Spike got out of the car and tried the back door of the shop. It was locked.

"Pet, do you think you could go round the front and open this door for me, save me going through the sewers again?"

He turned to see that Buffy was still sitting in the passenger seat of the car. He opened her door leaning over the top of it to speak to her.

"Okay, love, what's up? Talk to me?"

"You. Everything. You're all grumpy. My whole life is disintegrating in front of me. Practically nothing's the same as it was yesterday morning, and even if some of it or all of it's good, it's just too much all at once and it's all revolving round you and now if I'm wrong I'm not just screwing up my love-life I'm screwing up everything."

Spike was torn between trying to comfort Buffy and his own pain at her belief she might be making a mistake. He moved around the car door to crouch next to her seat, taking one of her hands in his. "Love, I'm sorry. I didn't mean for you to get upset. I know it's a lot all at once. If you want. I don't know what to say."

An awkward silence settled on the pair, and Spike began to wonder if this was going to turn into the cruellest of 'morning after's he and the slayer had ever shared. Finally, he tried to pry into the workings of the slayer's brain.

"Okay, pet. Seems to me that the final straw was me telling you about the flat. So chances are there's something about that you don't like. Maybe you'd rather I stayed in the crypt?"

"Well, no. but, I mean it was kinda cool. I mean, it's not far from the house and it's right in the middle of my patrol routes and it was ours. Well, it was yours, but sometimes it felt like it was ours. It was. I felt safe there."

"Is that it? Buffy, I hate to tell you, but the place is trashed. Downstairs needs a lot of shoring up done before I'd let either you or Bit back in there. Then, we'd have to scrounge together some furniture that's good enough to use but not so good that it would get nicked. You vetoed pinching electricity and I don't think I could stand having a generator running all the time, between the noise and the fumes.

It isn't exactly an address you can give to social services if they start asking questions about your new boyfriend. It's definitely not an address I could have given to the cable-company or the electricity people. Living there just isn't a feasible option any more. Taking over Anya's apartment seemed to solve both our problems at once.

But that doesn't mean we can't fix the old place back up again a bit at a time. Keep the nasties from moving in. Call it our holiday home. It can still be our place."

He could see her mood improving and decided to push his luck, running his tongue over his upper teeth " . somewhere private for those mid-patrol shags."

"Spike, you're a pig."

"But you love me anyway, right?" His words were devoid of his normal confidence and she realised that she'd set him up and knocked him down so many times he just wasn't able to take her words this morning at face value. She mentally kicked herself for hurting him again.

Getting out of the car, she wrapped her arms around the neck of the vampire, who had moved to let her out. She looked up into his eyes as she spoke. "I love you and I want to marry you. It's just that you freaked me out with ten thousand different things at once. In my line of work surprises are generally a bad thing and today seems to have been full of them. No more surprises today. Okay?"

"I'll do my best. Does this mean you're ready to play nice with the capitalist demon?"

"We talkin' 'bout you or Anya?" Buffy joked looking up at him from beneath her lashes.

"Anya. But if you want I'll find somewhere a bit more discreet to park the car or we could get to either your place or the crypt in under ten minutes." He tightened his arms around her body pulling her closer against him.

"You really should have been called Randy."

"Can you blame me? It's been three and a half hours. We've been engaged for two of them and you were in such a rush to tell your sister we still haven't had a celebratory shag. Bloody disgusting, that."

"This from the man who said yesterday he didn't want me to get the idea it was all about sex, and was probably brought up in an age where pre-marital sex was a stoning offence."

"Hey, I think you're still confusing me with Anya. In my day our exploits would just make you a fallen woman."

"And what would they make you?"

"A lucky bastard?"

"Pig." Buffy walked off around the corner of the building.