FIC: What Boys Like (Buffy/Kendra, PG-13)
TITLE: What Boys Like
RATING: PG-13
FANDOMS: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
PAIRING: Buffy/Kendra, background Buffy/Angel
SUMMARY: Maybe it happens like this.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Takes place during alterna-season two post-“Innocence”. Written for femslash_minis Round 88 for snogged, who wanted Buffy and Kendra with a misinterpretation of the Slayer’s handbook, vampires, and belly button piercings, with no non-con or character death.
Maybe it happens like this. After you bring a rocket launcher to the Sunnydale Mall, your Watcher digs up his old copy of the Slayer’s handbook and locks himself in his office with the book and a pot of coffee, a surefire sign that things are amiss, since it’s not even decaf, let alone tea, his British stereotype drink of choice. The night ends with Giles on a long-distance call to Sam Zabuto on the library telephone, which you are pretty sure Principal Snyder will notice when the phone bill comes around, but nobody asks you.
Nobody asks you if you want a roommate for the next indefinite time period, either, but that happens, anyway.
When she arrives, she’s still wearing your shirt.
***
The deep red liquid welled up over Kendra’s fingernails. The tip was to push the brush back kind of flat, Buffy had discovered, so that you didn’t get nail polish all over the cuticle.
Kendra fanned out one hand, examining her shining, crimson-colored manicure.
“Boys like this?” she asked.
Buffy shrugged, averting her eyes under pretense of recapping the bottle of nail polish. “Who cares what boys like?”
“I am sorry about your vampire,” Kendra said.
Buffy felt tears welling up-salty, hot, like they were coming from the seas of hell-but she swallowed and swallowed and finally they went down. “Yeah. Me, too.”
***
Maybe it happens like this. You are in some tropical paradise-blue waters, blue skies, sandy beaches. You have a drink with an umbrella and the sun warms your skin.
Caribbean beats confuse your heart; you feel the drums beneath your breastbone, boom boom, boom boom. You walk bare-footed onto the dance floor. Bodies crush against you, jostle you into place. The rhythm worms its way into your blood, and your body begins to move.
Out of the crowd, a girl-an impossible beauty, full lips, a cascade of curls, what one of her mother’s romance novels would call “bedroom eyes”-sashays your way. Her every movement is the music, and she takes your hand, and you dance. Only maybe “dancing” isn’t the term, because this is some How Stella Got Her Groove Back stuff going on. How Buffy got her groove back.
You are feeling the groove.
When Buffy woke, Caribbean beats confusing her heart, Kendra was the first thing she saw.
***
Maybe it happens like this. You are sequestered in the library, chained to a desk. Supposedly researching, actually catching up on this month’s glamour gossip. You even convince Kendra to pick through an Elle.
“You probably miss Mr. Zabuto, huh?” Buffy said, lazily perusing a Cosmo.
Kendra shrugged. “I go where there are vampires.”
“Have stake, will travel?”
Kendra’s brow furrowed. Buffy shook her head. “Never mind.”
Suddenly, Kendra’s brow rose; her mouth pinched.
“Boys like this?” Kendra demanded, holding up the magazine.
Buffy squinted at the page Kendra indicated. It showed a recent pop princess, her belly bared, midriff sparkling with a large navel ring. Buffy’s nose wrinkled.
“First, ew, tres trashy. Secondly, who cares what boys like?”
Kendra’s mouth crimped at the corner. “We should be researching,” she said.
Buffy sighed, and tossed her magazine aside. “Yeah. Yeah, why don’t we?”
***
Maybe it happens like this. You are walking through a graveyard at night, dew-licked grass grabbing at your ankles, and the two of your footsteps synch up-like soldiers marching, like dance steps, like heartbeats. And when the vampires come, the interplay is silent; it’s like you know everything she is going to do before she does it, and she knows what you will do; you are two arms of the same body. You are dancing, ash covered in the dew-licked night, Caribbean beats confusing your hearts.
***
Maybe it happens like this. Kendra, who shouldn’t even be here, who is an anomaly, a fluke, a glitch
(a treasure, a jewel, a gift)
raises her arms and you find yourself lifting off her shirt. She pulls down her hair and her curls fall over her bare shoulders and it’s the most beautiful thing, maybe, that you’ve ever seen-like she is older than her years, not like Angel, not like Angel at all, the opposite of Angel so gold-brown and curvy and heaving with life, but like you could sew your secrets into her warm, living skin and she could keep them for you. Clothing is lost. Though lost implies that something is missed; better to say that bodies are found. You fit together, hands small, hips wide, breasts soft. Everything is so soft, supple, giving. Everything gives; nothing takes. There is no taking. Everything is soft rhythms and skin sliding against skin, lips on lips, lips on skin. And from somewhere, you hear yourself saying, “Boys like this”-though you have only been with one boy, one time, though boys are the furthest thing from your mind.
And Kendra’s eyebrow inched up, and the corner of her mouth quirked. Her eyes sparkled. “Who cares what boys like?”