You Can Sleep While I Drive 
by Hth


I drive through for a large cup of coffee, even though it's a risk. I'm gambling 
on the habitual blindness of Angelenos, just assuming that this boy won't bother 
to look in the back seat of my car and notice the man there, naked and shackled. 

He doesn't. Hello, L.A. 

The coffee washes the taste of blood out of my mouth. Bittersweet. Part of me 
thinks - what's done is done. It's too late to take it back, so...enjoy it, 
right? Smear it with my tongue all over the inside of my lip, the roof of my 
mouth, the back of my teeth. 

Part of me thinks that if I'm not very, very careful right now, I'm going to 
lose it completely, pull this car to the side of the road, climb over the seat, 
and.... 

And what, boyo? Chew open the artery inside his thigh while he's passed out 
cold? Exsanguinate him? Rape his dead body? Are you listening to yourself? 

No. I'm listening to the demon. 

And it's all McDonald's fault. 

Not the coffee, although the fast-food restaurant that sold me this mud has to 
be karmically responsible for a lot of people's bad days, if this is typical 
fare for them. I'm thinking of *Lindsey* McDonald, the man chained up in the 
back seat of my car. 

Lindsey McDonald, with his mind games and his full lips and his long eyelashes 
that set off eyes that might as well be bottomless and his bloody, and I do mean 
bloody in every sense of the word, kinks. He brings out something in 
me...something that's no more completely the demon than it is completely me. 

It's more than a game. It was never a game. 

Maybe it was a thrill, at first. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, seeing him on his 
knees for me, begging me with those beautiful eyes to use him long and hard.... 
There was a sexual thrill, and a thrill of power, too. He *owes* me. And that 
was how I took it out of him, for a while. Raping his mouth, making him grovel a 
little more and a little longer each time. 

But I was lying to myself when I said I was just collecting a debt. I would 
never have...have touched him at all, never spent myself inside him when I could 
have been home where I belong, just for some alpha-dog...game. 

Or maybe - and this is the hardest part, the part that I'm trying to wash out of 
my mouth as I drive - maybe I wasn't lying to myself. Maybe he owes me this much 
and more, for what he did to me. 

And what did he ever do to me? 

Made me like him. Made me want to trust him. Put out the bait for me that I've 
never been able to resist: partnership. I *worked* with him. I fought for him. I 
relied on him to hold up his half of the plan, and he did, and that always, 
always, always sticks that hook right into me. Buffy. Doyle. Cordy. Wes. I'm 
just done for once I go that far with somebody, all the way to working *with* 
them instead of for them. 

So he woke that need inside me. And he turned it backwards on itself, made it a 
lie. For a six-figure salary and a full benefits package, Lindsey, you *bastard.* 
You whore. You...nothing. 

Nothing. You should be nothing to me. I've killed three of your kind in a 
minute's time before. 

I'm not proud of that. I'm not boasting. It's just the truth. You're alive 
because of me. Because I haven't put you out of both our misery yet. 

And make no mistake, Lin: it would be a mercy. You think your life is hard now? 
It gets worse, the longer you serve in the armies of hell, and worse yet when 
they cut you loose. If I killed you tonight, there might still be something left 
to save. 

I look back over my shoulder; L.A.'s lights are getting further away, though to 
get far enough away to lose them completely, I'd have to be out here on the road 
much too late into the night. Too late to get home by morning. 

Home. I wonder how late Wesley will stay up waiting for me. I can see him at the 
kitchen table, frowning at his book, drinking his tea. His blue robe, his 
glasses, his gnawing fears that he thinks I don't know about, printed so clearly 
in the creases between his eyes. 

Fear of death, fear of pain, fear of failure, fear of fear, fear of me, fear of 
love. Goddamit, Wesley. How am I supposed to save the world if I can't save you? 

The highway darkness is patchy. L.A. behind me, electric wires hung between 
lamp-posts along the road. All those headlights, too many to count. I remember 
when people *slept* at night. Now it seems like everyone has somewhere to go, 
constantly. Life just doesn't have to let up now, not for darkness, not for 
anything. No rest for the wicked. 

With one notable exception. 

I check him in the rear-view mirror; still unconscious. The discoloration across 
his neck and collarbone could easily be nothing but shadows, except that I know 
better. 

Old blood, tacky now. Soon it'll be dry, and the taste of a thin crust of dried 
blood - I know it more intimately than I like to think about. It's sort of an 
acquired taste, and it leaves a gritty feeling in your mouth, a little stale, 
bitter in a way that you grow used to. 

Of course, if I sucked it off his skin now, the taste of that dry blood would be 
competing in the back of my mouth with the real thing, the genuine article. 
Fresh, living blood, salty and sharp and hellishly hot. The difference between 
drinking blood from someone's throat and drinking it from a glass isn't really 
the taste. It's the way that live blood, pushed by the frantic beating of 
somebody's heart, seems to *leap* into your mouth. Like it wants to be in you. 
Like it belongs to you. 

Like that person, that person gasping in your arms, *belongs* to you. 
Power trip. Sadistic thrill of domination and acquisition. You should try it 
sometime, Lin. You'd love it. Of course, the bones and the skin of your face 
wouldn't rearrange to intimidate and to take. There wouldn't be that feeling of 
predestination, that sudden, perfect knowledge that taking this is more than 
something you do. It's something you are. 

Something I am. No matter what I *do,* no matter how scrupulously decent and 
honorable and upstanding I am, how unfailingly I adhere to the letter of the 
soul's law, I'm not a human. Everything, my whole body, makes it easy, too 
damned easy, to own someone to death. 

Like him, for example. 

The thrill of sex. The thrill of power. The thrill of Lindsey submitting to me 
in a dozen different ways. On his knees. Cuffed to the bed. Sprawled out, 
waiting for me. Begging to suck my cock. Wanting me with a relentless fire that 
makes a damned strange bedfellow with that ever-present look in his eyes, that 
watchfulness, that brooding, analytical...lawyerness. 

How long did I think it would be before I wanted more? Wanted it all? Did I 
really think I could take him without *taking* him? Making him more than my 
enemy, toy, whore, or erstwhile lover. Making him my victim. 

That's what made me who I was. I've thought about it a lot - I guess it's what 
they're all talking about when they say I'm "brooding" - and that was the 
difference between Angelus - between *me* and most other vampires. They kill and 
feed with some measure of amusement; it's something to pass the time, when the 
demon mind inside you is already terribly old and frighteningly bored. But I did 
it to abuse, to subjugate, to prove that I had ultimate strength at the expense 
of their ultimate weakness. 

I always had something to prove. Until I lost it all, the hate and the power and 
the fear. I had nothing then, and I lived like it, too. With nothing to prove, 
nothing to call my own. 

Famine to feast. All these things I lay claim to now: my soul, my city, my 
redemption, my pathetically botched attempts at romance, my mission, my business 
cards, my past. Mine, mine, mine, mine. 

Just couldn't resist taking one thing more. One little taste. One human life to 
own, to take, to consume. Greed - *his* favorite sin. And mine. 

There's an access road I drive down some nights, for the privacy. It seems like 
no one ever uses it but me, not at this hour, and you can go two miles or more 
between signs of life. 

Almost three, between one particular house and the next nearest anything at all, 
a little nothing filling station. I pull the Galaxy off to the side of the road 
midway between them, and I get out, leaving the headlights on. 

He's so light, so much lighter than he looks, even as dead weight. It's like 
he's hollow already, and I wonder, knowing how attached Lindsey is to his past, 
how much he has to prove, how he gets away with carrying so little inside him. I 
lift him out of the car, and he groans. 

My plan, such as it was, ran a little something like this: hoist him up, drop 
him by the roadside, wake him up, throw his clothes on top of him, tell him to 
walk for help and if he's smart he'll never come near me again. 

But it goes wrong right off the bat. I'm not hoisting; I'm picking him up, and 
he looks sick and exhausted, the wounds on his neck forbiddingly dark against 
ghastly-pale skin, and his eyelashes are fluttering desperately as he fights 
himself back toward consciousness. 

Damn. Damn, if he's thirty years old I'd be surprised. He's no older than I was 
when I was turned, and I was no better than a child. But he's no child; he's a 
creature of the modern age, implacably hungry, so restless and ambitious that he 
never lets up, not for darkness, not for anything. He needs, he wants, he's 
desperate to prove himself, to own something under his own power. No wonder he 
moves so ably among the demons; he's nothing but a toothless vampire, just a 
soulless, hopeless, driven thing who will always, always fail to change. 
Why does that make me tense and sad and guilty all at once? I'm holding him 
close, just like the vampire carries the swooning victim/bride across the misty 
moor in some absurd Hammer film, and his head keeps lifting and dropping back, 
until finally he manages to open his eyes to slits. I'm still not sure he can 
see me. 

"You bit me," he finally says, hoarse and amazed. 

"Dammit, Lin. You think you can live like you do and never get bitten?" I want 
to yell, to tell him to stay the hell away from me like I planned to. Why does 
it sound like I'm appealing to him? 

"No, I just...never thought you'd do it." His voice is fading in and out, his 
eyes unfocused. He's still not entirely with me. 

It runs through me like a shock. Soulless, hopeless....analytical lawyerness...owes 
me...this much and more, for what he did to me...not entirely with me.... He's never 
been entirely *with* me, has he? Not for all his submission and his begging and his 
inexplicable cravings for me. He's a slave to so many things - his greed, his pride, 
his senior goddamn partners. 

I hate that. I hate it that he...isn't...mine. 

"Never thought...you'd condescend to it.... Wanted you to for so long...." 

"You idiot," and I can't hide the tenderness in my voice now, can't put it back 
in the dark, hidden box where it belongs. "What did you think it was going to be 
like? Erotic? *Romantic?* It's just...blood. It's just having your blood stolen 
to feed one more God-damned demon." 

His arms twitch, like he tried to move his hands, and then forgot about them 
when the movement was stopped by the short chain of those handcuffs. "You and 
your sacred morals. Got under your skin after all, didn't I? Angel Almighty...." 

The silence gets to me, but he's too far gone to be worth answering. He's not 
listening to me; his eyes are open, but rolled back, sightless. I can't leave 
him out here like this. He's in no shape to walk anywhere. Not that it would 
kill him to sleep this off by the side of the road, but.... 

Oh, Christ. Goddamit. 

I drape him across the trunk of the car and unlock the handcuffs. The blood 
caked onto his skin isn't even tempting anymore; his blood has settled sourly in 
my stomach, and the last thing I am right now is hungry, so I just lick my thumb 
and wipe his neck clean as best I can. I pull him up with one arm slung over my 
shoulders, and he's just conscious enough to help me out a little bit as I take 
off my coat and get him into it instead. It's that cold part of the night; even 
in Southern California, March can get a little brisk around two in the morning. 
He's on his feet but swaying, stumbling into me, and I have to put an arm up, a 
hand on his back to keep him steady. And suddenly we're standing there, leaning 
together in an embrace that has as much to do with mental stability as physical, 
and his fingers are in the hollow where the base of my skull joins my spine, and 
he's kissing my shoulder through my thin sweater. 

The silence is almost unbearable, and eventually I get enough control over my 
brain to realize that I *can* speak, if I feel like it. "Lin," I say, and it 
fades off, stupidly. I try it again, trying to ignore the way my arm sneaks more 
and more securely around his waist. "Lindsey. We can't keep doing this forever." 

That's it. That's my grand declaration. If he were on his game, healthy and 
alert and keenly critical as usual, he'd understand it. Understand that I 
wouldn't need him out of my life if he weren't...under my skin. I punctuate it 
with a little kiss in that messy, boyish brown-gold hair, slippery like silk and 
wax. I've carded my fingers through that hair so often, let it slide across the 
backs of my hands. Maybe that should have been a clue for me. 

"So tired. Angel, I haven't slept in days. I keep thinking...I feel like I'm 
being watched, everywhere...I'm losing my mind." 

I coax him back into the car and buckle him in - front seat, this time. 
I've made this drive back to Los Angeles before, many times. I drive it this 
time without really seeing the road, and Lindsey sleeps all the way, curled up 
small inside my voluminous coat, the top of his head resting lightly against my 
arm.