I seem to be posting one chapter for every load of laundry I do. If I could keep up this pace, on both the fic and dirty clothes fronts, not only would I have this story done by midnight, I’d finish half my other WIPs. That’s not going to happen, but Buffy and Spike are about to find some more trouble at Ashiana Industries.
“Who left this here?” demanded Melandra.
Buffy looked over the cubicle wall and saw that her boss was standing in front of a pile of hardware that seemed intended to build yet more cubicles. She noticed it earlier when she came back from a meeting.
“Some guy from Facilities,” said Rita. “He dumped them a couple of hours ago. I don’t know where he went. Stephanie was complaining that he’s never where he’s supposed to be.”
“I thought they fired that guy last week,” said Harry, who had approached at the sound of a possible opportunity to volunteer for something.
Rita shrugged. “There’s a new one now. They always have at least one guy like that working in Facilities. I think it’s an OSHA rule.” She smiled looked down as if thinking of something pleasant. “This one has very nice blue eyes.”
Melandra was not inclined to be intimidated, even by the threat of mindless government regulations. “Get Stephanie to tell him to clean up this mess.”
Rita had turned back to her monitor with a set to her shoulders that said running this kind of errand was not in her job description. “She says she can’t make him follow orders. And she thinks he’s cursing her out half the time, but she can’t be sure because she doesn’t understand half of what he says.”
“Why, is he foreign?” demanded Melandra.
“Oh, yes.” Rita smiled again. “He’s English. The accent’s quite nice, really.”
Well, thought Buffy as Harry volunteered to call Stephanie and pass on Melandra’s message, at least Spike is settling in as well as can be expected. Too well, as far as Rita is concerned.
A few minutes later, Buffy saw Spike wandering down the far hallway, a toolbox dangling from his left hand. She slid out of her chair, and dodged past Rita’s empty desk and Melandra’s open office door. Her eyes widened as she heard laughter from behind Stan’s door, but she kept going until she had tracked Spike through two heavy double doors and into a loading dock.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
He was seated on a pile of boxes that sagged under his weight. “Having a fag and otherwise loafing, of course. Should be obvious.”
Buffy regarded the boxes. “I think you’re crushing whatever’s in there.”
“Yeah.” He leaned back and took a drag on his cigarette.
“And my boss is pissed off because you dumped a load of junk just outside her office.”
“Yeah.” He was watching a truck pull away from the open door of the dock, exposing a swathe of blue sky.
Since this conversation was going nowhere, Buffy looked around the loading dock. There were cages full of equipment, which she assumed was kept locked up to keep someone from stealing it, but the contents seemed to consist mostly of broken furniture. Newly delivered boxes of probably expensive and fragile equipment were lying around, free for thieves to take and vampires to lounge on. Some kind of machine made of lots of red metal with a big gate in front of it lurked by the door. The floors were dusty and stained cement, and the air was so full of truck exhaust, Spike’s cigarette didn’t even qualify as a minor annoyance.
He tossed away the butt-end. “Actually, Slayer, I came in here because I smelled someone. Couldn’t find him, though, because that great semi blasted the place full of diesel. Soon as it clears, I’ll see if I can tell what he was up to.”
“You’re turning into a regular Joe Hardy.”
“Since Nancy Drew is falling down on the job, I had to. Or did you find out anything this morning?”
Buffy drew herself up to her full 62 inches. “I was in a meeting all morning.”
He slipped off the boxes, grinning with such a superior expression she wanted to hit him. “I, on the other hand, have been detecting.” He stepped towards her. “Do I get a reward?”
She stepped away, and found her back against the side of the red machine. “Not until you tell me what you found out. And you may want to avoid telling me what you broke, destroyed, or stole in the process.”
He tried to look insulted. “I only nicked things I found under copier hoods. Everyone seems to walk away from those things without taking their originals back. I’ve been checking machines all over the building.” He opened the lid of a toolbox lying on the floor and took out some papers.
“You found all that in copy machines?”
“Well, I might have picked up an item or two that people dropped in the trash instead of shredding it. And a few things off the edges of desks.” As he flipped through the pages, he gave up on his faux air of apology and a native pride in his thievery was echoed in his voice. “Quite a haul. Lots of porn. Some medical claim forms—do you know Susan down the next aisle from you has a yeast infection?”
“Ick, no.” But Buffy reached out for the papers.
He held them away, maneuvering her against the side of the machine as he held the documents just out of reach. “Rita’s buying some naughty underwear. She left the lingerie catalog when she Xeroxed the order from. I thought at first that was another porn haul.” He contemplated it for a few seconds until Buffy tore it from his grasp. He went on. “Your good friend Eric is also filing a medical form. Seems he has an even more embarrassing problem than Susan.”
“Eww. What does this have to do with anything, Spike?”
He flipped to the final document. “And your charming boss left some copies of financial reports.”
She put out her hand. “Let me see.” She snatched at more papers and grimaced. “Eww again. I didn’t mean Eric’s doctor’s note! Gross!”
Spike was smirking. He leaned a hand against the metal spine of the machine and his face was next to hers. “I saw him trying to chat you up. Gives a different perspective on him, doesn’t it?”
“He never had a chance with me, you lunatic.” She stared at the paper in horror. “Fortunately.”
“I saw you laughing at his jokes. But next time he tries to give you a jolly, just remember that paper.” His hips moved closer. “And remember this.”
Buffy put her hands on his chest and prepared to push him away. “Spike, put aside your insane vampire jealousy, stop trying to wig me out, and show me that financial report.”
“I’ll show you anything you want, Slayer.” But the hand holding the papers was behind her head now, which made it awkward to reach back and grab them away. Besides, he was managing to use his fingers to send little shivers down her spine without ever dropping the papers. And somehow the hands she had on his chest weren’t doing much in the way of shoving. They were doing a lot more in the way of inching up to his shoulders.
A moment later, their lips and tongues were busy not-arguing too. Their embrace tightened and she was pushed back against the metal thing behind her. The entire machine shuddered, giving a thud that sent vibrations coursing through her body.
“What is that thing?” she asked, pulling away a half-inch.
“Cardboard crusher.” His hips thrust against hers again, and there was another thud. “It takes a messy pile of old boxes and turns them into neat cubes for recycling. Your pretty little bum is pressed against the start button.” Thud. “Makes for an interesting sensation, doesn’t it?”
Thud. That one set every nerve tingling, and Buffy had to admit he was right. A small part of her brain was also insisting that making out in an open loading dock with incriminating papers literally in hand was probably not the best way to be spending her second day on the job. Dawn would be very disappointed if her sister got fired before collecting at least one full paycheck, and it would be very hard to explain the reasons for the latest employment interruptus. But Spike’s lips and teeth were tugging at Buffy’s nerve endings as surely as the thuds from the cardboard crusher, and his hips were starting to set up an interesting rhythm that promised consummations that had nothing to do with minimum wage.
One of Spike’s hands slid up under her skirt, his fingers taking a few minutes to play with the softness of her thigh before moving on to even more sensitive spots. Buffy, in spite of her earlier hesitation, found her own hand inching southward. A fly button snapped, a zipper slid a few inches, and she felt the hard column of his cock in her hand.
As her fingers grasped him, Spike began thrusting against her hand, pushing her back time and again, his own hand and lips as busy as ever. The rhythm pulsed through her, and she took a moment to wonder if the designer of the cardboard crusher realized that his invention could double as a full body vibrator.
Spike moaned and pushed against her harder than ever. He was building up to a howl, and she was getting close too. Buffy gasped and was astonished to hear how loud she screamed. Then she was shocked to realize she wasn’t screaming at all. The machine was. It was shrieking at fire alarm levels, loud enough to warn half the huge building that something was afoot on the loading dock.
“What’s wrong with it?” she demanded, reluctantly pulling away from Spike and straightening her clothes, her eyes on the door to cubicle-land. Someone was bound to burst in on them any second, and her sense of embarrassment was starting to overwhelm her frustration at the thudus interruptus.
“It’s jammed.” Spike was doing up his zipper and looking more worried than she would have expected. “And I think I know who’s jamming it!”
“Who?” Buffy stopped in the act of buttoning her blouse. “What do you mean who? Not what?”
“You sound like Abbott. Or Costello. And it doesn’t smell like a what.” Spike stepped to the front of the machine and yanked on the grid covering it. It squealed open, and several cardboard boxes slid out, along with the other contents of its maw.
“Hey, is there a problem here?” Harry trotted into the loading dock, several coworkers at his heels. “Do you need any help with the crusher? Because I volunteered to work out here once when—” He stopped, staring.
The people behind him also stared, and some of them began screaming.
Buffy looked at the thing that had fallen out of the crusher. “That’s Eric’s name tag on the top.”
Spike nodded grim agreement.
“What happened to him?” asked Harry.
Buffy shook her head in disbelief. “He’s been cubed.”
In Chapter Six, a load of jeans hits my dryer and Spike encounters Melandra
Originally posted at http://seasonal-spuffy.livejournal.com/27164.html
