A few replies before I get to the final chapter, which is posted below; and thank you all for your really overwhelmingly lovely response to this story....
ISABIG, hi! Thanks for reading this; it’s always great to see your name and smilies.
Greatluna, thanks so much. I would think that this would be a bit of a letdown after the Netherlands, though. What a great place to have to go for work. I was in Amsterdam once and loved it…I embarrassed myself in front of my girlfriend’s parents by kind of sort of literally drooling over these banana crepes we had in this little café near the Anne Frank house….Ah. Thank you for reminding me of that.
RalSt31, you know, I wasn’t sure if people would really buy Dawn wanting to go away, or Willow and Tara wanting to let her, but you’re right; the Hellmouth has been this shadow over all of them, and I wanted to see what would happen if they all just…left. As for Tara addressing what her brother/ father put her through, yes I agree she needs to do that. I only hint at that, but I imagine it happening soon. Thank you for your feedback.
Frau rosenclay, I’ll have to check out Garden of Eden now; I’m not surprised to learn that it’s a sad story; it seems like happy girl-girl stories are few and far between, doesn’t it? And thanks for reading.
MadeinNZ, Nicky, thank you. People around here are awfully insightful lately, aren’t they? I’m noticing it all over the board. But saying you get immersed in this is a huge compliment, and it means a lot to me, so thank you for that.
Lipkandy, my feeling is that the caregiver-caretaker situation, as short as it was, had a long-lasting effect on both Willow and Tara, and I see it playing a part in the forget spell situation: both in Willow doing it and in Tara feeling betrayed by it. They just had too much practice at one being helpless and the other taking charge.
I am so sorry about your allergy! Have you tried spelt flour? I have some friends who swear by it. But bread smut…I love it! And the next chapter has some real bread smut.
Tiyodragon, Linda, yay! You like Dawn! My job is done! Seriously, I never liked her myself on tv, but writing her changed my mind entirely. No whiney, all finey. Or something like that. You have me laughing with “doughy-hack.” It just fits. As for walking through the door and being immediately affected by the scent of bread…well, you are a mind reader. Next chapter. Thanks for reading.
BoredNow99. Emma, um, yes, the soap. Certain people seem not to let me forget the soap. What can I say, it seemed like a good idea at the time? But the end result was really mushy, you know. Anyway, thanks for reading this chapter, and I’m so glad you liked it! Oh, and as far as I’m concerned, you can make several more bread puns.
Title: Bread. Part III: August and Epilogue.
Author: Tulipp.
E-mail:
tulipp30@yahoo.comFeedback: Yes, please, especially if it’s constructive.
Spoilers: Through BTVS season 5, “The Gift.”
Disclaimer: All characters and an occasional bit of dialogue are borrowed from Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. No copyright infringement intended.
Summary: Willow, Tara, and Dawn struggle to come to terms with the events of season 5, Buffy’s death, and an uncertain future. (Third of three parts.)
Acknowledgments: Thanks again to Ruby, Ruth, darkmagicwillow, and J. You were all essential to this story in different ways; that's all there is to it.
Part III: August.
Oh my swan, my drudge, my dear wooly rose,
Even a notary would notarize our bed
As you knead me and I rise like bread.
—Anne Sexton, “Song for a Lady”
She wasn’t dreaming.
Still, Tara paused outside the back door to the Summers house and glanced at the blue-hot August sky above. Through the kitchen window, she could see Willow, red-ponytailed and aproned, moving from sink to stove. She was talking to herself, it looked like, although Tara couldn’t hear her. And she was…she was making bread. Could Willow even make bread?
She had to be dreaming.
Tara glanced up, shielding her eyes with one hand to look for a gray bird that wasn’t there. The air was still, the sky quiet. And her other hand held a canvas bag of groceries.
She shook her head; it wasn’t a dream. But the sun glinted off the glass panes of the back door, and as she reached for the doorknob, Tara caught sight of her pale, bare arm and glanced up sharply, half-expecting to see Joyce’s face reflected back to her. It was just her, though, hot and damp and ready to be home.
Tara turned the doorknob, the moist scent of yeast overwhelming her as she stepped into the kitchen. It had been years since she’d been inside a scent like that; it slipped around her like an embrace. If she’d closed her eyes, she could almost have been walking into her mother’s kitchen. But she kept her eyes open; instead of the round brown table, she saw the butcher block island. And instead of her mother, she saw Willow.
As she watched, bemused, Willow threw down a sludgy gray lump and sagged forward onto the counter, dropping her head into her hands. “Stupid dough,” she muttered.
“What’s all this?” Tara glanced around at the flour-covered counters and bowl-filled sink. Torn yeast packets littered the floor, and a stack of open cookbooks teetered dangerously on the edge of the butcher block island; the top page was wet. Next to a pair of empty loaf pans sitting empty on the stove, the salt shaker had fallen over. And it looked as if Willow had simply upended the utensil drawer onto a cutting board: Tara saw several sets of measuring scoops and a pile of wooden spoons and…three?…rolling pins. As for Willow…..
Willow stood up quickly, narrowly missing the edge of the cabinet above her. She wiped hastily at the sweat on her forehead and—Tara peered at her suspiciously—at her eyes. “Hi!” Willow said too brightly, crossing and then uncrossing her arms before finally clasping her hands.
“What’s all what?” She seemed to notice the mess for the first time, glancing around the kitchen guiltily. She bit her lip and crossed her arms again. “Nothing.”
“It looks kind of like something,” Tara observed innocently.
“Well, see, it’s nothing,” Willow ran her hands through her damp hair. “It was supposed to be a something, but it turned out to be a nothing, so don’t make something out of it, or I’ll…I just…” She stopped suddenly, sighing heavily, and then she lifted her chin and looked directly at Tara. “I wanted to make something for you; I wanted to make bread for you.”
Somehow, it was the last thing Tara had expected. Her arms went weak, and she lowered her bag to the floor. “For me?” she managed to say, shaking her head slightly. “You did this for me?”
“Well, I tried,” Willow sulked, pushing at the hair around her face. “But it’s not working right. I thought it would be easy, like making cookies, but it’s not at all. Your mom did this every day? I don’t see how; it takes forever, and it’s a mess. I’m a mess, just look at me!”
There was anxiety in Willow’s voice, but Tara couldn’t stop her slow smile. She knew she shouldn’t smile; she could see that Willow was upset, but she couldn’t help it. Willow was a mess. Most of her short hair had escaped the sloppy ponytail, and her tank top clung to her skin in patches; her short skirt was streaked with flour. And she was breathing hard, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth. She looked…perfect.
“I am,” Tara said simply.
“No!” Willow shook her head; her eyes traveled the room, looking everywhere but at Tara, who just waited. Finally, sighing, Willow shrugged and dropped her arms to her sides.
“Look at me, Tara,” she said, her voice climbing. “This is me. This is what you get now. I can’t save people—not without Buffy—and you’ve seen how my spells go all wonky. I mean, okay, yes I did a little damage to Glory, but I had to swallow half a magic shop to do it, and the aftertaste wasn’t exactly minty fresh, not that I would want it to be, and….” She waved her arms around at the kitchen. “And look at this place…I can’t even make a loaf of bread without destroying the whole kitchen.” She leaned back against the counter, looking defeated. Still, Tara waited.
“I just...I really miss her, you know?" Tara nodded, listening.
"And it's like I don’t know who to be now. I mean, I was Buffy’s sidekick for five years, and now…I’m just some girl now. That’s all I ever used to be before I met Buffy. I was a geek, Tara, a computer nerd. You always thought I was powerful, but I was just some girl until Buffy came along. And now she’s gone, and…you never even met that girl.” Twisting her hands, Willow looked at the floor.
“Hey, hey,” Tara said softly, crossing the room; she stopped inches away and reached to tuck Willow’s hair back behind her ears. “Buffy never looked at you and saw sidekick; she only saw her friend, her best friend. And as for me, well, the day I met you…remember? At the Wicca group? I wasn’t looking for a super mega witch, and I wasn’t looking for some kind of, I don’t know”—she cast about for something appropriately ridiculous—“slayer in training. I was just looking for a girl. For you.”
Willow’s face softened at that, and she raised her eyes to Tara’s. “Well, you found me,” she said. “Happy?”
“Yeah,” Tara said solemnly. “Yeah, I am.” She caught Willow’s chin between her fingers. “For a long time before I met you, I was just… cold? And when I talked to you the first time, the very first time, I thought ‘that girl can warm me.’ And you did. You do. You’re my fire, Will, my own private oven….only softer.”
The corners of Willow’s mouth turned up slightly, and she made a little dismissive noise. “Well, your oven kind of stinks at baking.”
Tara brushed some flour off Willow’s cheek and let her hand linger a moment before lowering it to fiddle with the strap of Willow’s tank top. “My oven is wonderful,” Tara corrected her.
She didn’t know how else to say it. Willow could always find a sentence to argue back with, as if she had a formula in her head that could add two positives together and still come up with a negative. Words weren’t always an answer. And the scent of the dough—even the slightly off-color aroma of the gray lump that Willow had managed to produce—was beginning to work its way inside her like a memory. She wanted it now, fresh bread. She wanted to make it with Willow.
“I’ll show you,” Tara murmured, leaning forward to touch her lips lightly to Willow’s forehead, to her left cheek, to the corner of her mouth. When she finally pulled back, her lips full of heat, Willow was smiling again, her eyes soft and longing.
“Show me,” Willow said. “I want you to.”
Tara’s stomach rumbled slightly; for a moment she couldn’t remember if she’d eaten that morning. Or was it that deep down, she sensed that the separate parts of her life were blending? The soft wheat color of her mother’s hair, the salty tears of living with Donnie and her father, the way her heart rose around Willow, the way Willow looked at her with hunger. They were the necessary ingredients. They were all part of her now.
Willow bent down to pick up an unopened yeast packet from the floor, and she handed it to Tara as if it were a gift. Reaching out, Tara accepted it, and she felt Willow’s fingers warm against her own.
* * * * *
It took time, making the dough.
Willow watched as Tara set the sponge, as she mixed the yeast with salt, water, and flour until she had a ball of dough the size of a cantaloupe. She panicked a little when Tara stepped back and nodded at her expectantly, but she thought she could at least try.
She tried to pat the dough into shape, but the movement didn’t come naturally, and after a minute, she felt Tara come up behind her, reaching around to cover Willow’s hands with her own.
“Like this,” Tara said; Willow relaxed and let Tara move her fingers, let Tara show her how to knead. Together, they turned and formed and punched and shaped, and Willow stopped trying so hard to turn the dough into something that looked like bread and just watched her hands moving with Tara’s.
Together, they lifted the smooth oval of dough into a bowl, and Tara draped a tea towel over top. Willow was going to turn around then, but Tara’s hand pressed hers onto the counter again, her warm, slick fingers tracing patterns on the backs of Willow’s hands.
Willow became aware of Tara pressing lightly against her back, of the softness of Tara against the sharp angles of her shoulder blades. She watched as Tara’s fingers played over her knuckles, drawing outlines in the flour on the backs of her hands, flicking under to tease at the undersides of her wrists.
Tara was kneading her.
Willow shivered at the touch, and a slow smolder lit deep inside her as the fingers moved up, leaving traces of flour on her arms. She could feel Tara’s breath hot on her neck, the ends of Tara’s hair brushing against her bare shoulders. She could feel the cool edge of the counter press against the bare skin of her stomach, below the hem of her tank top.
Willow turned around so she could reach, so she could slide her fingers inside Tara’s shirt and up to her shoulder blades, and then she was kneading, too. She closed her eyes and felt only the stretch and pull, the shapes her fingers made on the skin of Tara’s back. The give of the flesh as she pressed into it. The same thing happening to her own back, to her arms, to her breasts.
At first, she was aware of everything, every detail in the hot, humid kitchen: The ends of her damp ponytail clinging to her neck. The bare skin of her thighs against the hem of her short skirt and the satiny strap of Tara’s bra smooth over her thumb. A sharp ray of sunlight glinting off the flour tin and the quiet whir of the fan on the counter and Tara’s hand sliding up her waist to curve over her breast and the yeasty scent of the dough rising in the bowl behind her.
She tried to fire up her brain, to plan ahead, to remember the recipes that had always worked in the past: who to be with Tara and how to touch her; where to put her hands; when to place her mouth and when to lift it again; what to do next.
But then Tara kissed her, a swirl of tongue against her ear and on her throat and up, up to her lips, damp and wanting. And the kiss melted everything else away: layer after layer of memory and forgetting until there was just the two of them: her and her. Inside the movement of lips on lips. Inside the warm slick of a tongue. Inside the hot oven of a mouth. Inside them.
They kneaded one another.
“The bread,” she remembered to say later, gasping the words around the corners of Tara’s lips, but Tara’s hands were everywhere, insistent and ravening and tugging gently at her tank top and not so gently at her skirt.
“It needs more time,” Tara murmured from deep down in her throat.
Leaning into Tara’s neck, Willow inhaled the salty tang of light sweat, and she tasted the buttery skin of Tara’s fingers when they passed over her lips, and she felt the light dusting of flour on Tara’s arms when she turned them both around so that Tara’s back was to the counter.
Greedily, hungrily, she pushed Tara’s long skirt up her thighs and, reaching underneath, pulled down the fabric her fingers found there; Tara stepped out of the circle of yellow and kicked it aside, and then Willow helped her raise herself onto the counter.
Tara closed her eyes, leaning back onto the flats of her palms, and Willow sank down, flickering her lips along the length of Tara’s thigh and pressing gently against the insides of knees so she could reach, and then it was all feeding and soft fluttering, time passing as she shaped Tara’s skin with her tongue; as she tasted.
When she pulled back to catch her breath, she saw only the whites of Tara’s knuckles where her hands gripped the edges of the counter, and she heard only the sound of Tara’s wanting in the air above her, and she felt only the smooth shapes of Tara’s heels touching her back.
She wanted only one more thing: to touch Tara, to feel her inside, smooth as butter but warmer, more liquid. But a flash of that night by the tower, months ago now, stopped her—an image of her hand getting ready to pierce Tara’s scalp, and her fingers hesitated.
“What do you want to do?” Tara asked her, lifting her fingers from the counter to trace the hollow of Willow’s throat. The touch was so loving, so tender, that Willow couldn’t speak for a moment.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she whispered finally; her mind was all flame and few words. “I just want….”
“You’ve never hurt me, Will,” Tara said, her voice low and moist. “You only thought you did.” Tara’s hand traveled up and cupped her face, and she leaned into it, feeling the humid warmth of Tara’s palm on her cheek. She could almost believe it; all that was left was the touching.
Willow held her breath for a moment as she leaned down to kiss Tara’s knee, and then she trailed her hand up Tara’s leg again and closed her eyes.
It wasn’t the first time they had touched each other that summer; it wasn’t the first time they had pressed up against each other’s naked skin, quiet and shaking. But it was the first time in months that Willow had been this brave.
This time, her fingers weren’t scraping Tara but smoothing her. And the memories her fingers found weren’t sharp shards of nightmares from Tara’s childhood but soft, fluid dreams they had shared before: a dark night tinged rosy-pink, a petal against her thumb, a word pressed into the small of her own back with fingers like fairy-lights. That’s how it always was with them; she remembered it now. All of it.
When Willow felt Tara’s thighs go taut around her, when she felt one hand grip her hair, when she heard her own name curling from Tara’s mouth, she bent her head again, pressing her tongue hard against that warm place to memorize the flavor.
And Tara rose.
This is how we do it, Willow thought, dropping her head onto Tara’s thigh and opening her eyes so she could see the quiet trembling up close. It wasn’t a resurrection. It wasn’t a forgetting. It wasn’t even magic, at least not the kind you did with spells. It was just what it was: homemade. From scratch, every time, until you could see and taste and smell the thing you had made with your own hands. Until you could touch it.
* * * * *
“You can use all the metaphors you want,” Tara laughed into Willow’s ear later, lifting the damp red hair from her neck. “It’s still sex on the kitchen counter and…um… floor.” Willow giggled into her shoulder and leaned back, settling across Tara’s lap. “I think maybe we should get dressed.” But she shifted so that the cabinet handle didn’t dig into her back quite so much, and she moved her hands down to Willow’s shoulders.
“Why?” Willow complained lazily, letting her head fall back. “No one’s here but us. Giles isn’t due back until tomorrow, and Xander and Anya have physical therapy until six, so…we could…”
“Yeah, but you know Anya,” Tara said, smiling. “She might want to show us her ring again, and you’ve seen how she manages those wheels. Xander might try to get her to finish her session, but he can’t keep up with her when she drives that thing.”
“He’s never been able to keep up with her,” Willow said drily, raising an eyebrow. “Besides, Anya’s never needed to stand up to get moving.”
“Willow!” Tara pretended to be shocked, but it was true. And Anya had been remarkably matter-of-fact about her injury. After a thousand years of walking around on high heels, she’d said, she was perfectly content to look at things from a different perspective for awhile, and she was already talking about a roller derby costume for Halloween. As for Xander, well, he had been building ramps all over Sunnydale since they’d returned from their honeymoon.
“Willow!” Tara squeaked in a different way as Willow’s hand moved downward. But the ringing phone startled them both, and before Willow’s hand could go much further, Tara pushed it away playfully and reached for her blouse.
“Tara!” Dawn’s voice squealed into her ear when she snatched the phone out of its cradle on the third ring. “What are you guys doing?”
“Dawn, sweetie,” Tara winked at Willow and bit her lip. “Um, nothing. Just, you know, hanging out in the kitchen. The usual.” She watched Willow blush as she tugged her skirt back down and looked around for her tank top.
“I miss you guys so much, but Dad and Monty are taking me fishing next weekend, and I met this girl who lives down the street—Elizabeth—and guess what?” Dawn’s voice dropped to a whisper. “She has tarot cards. She said she’d teach me how to use them and everything.”
Tara smiled. “Just be careful, Dawn, okay? Take it slow.”
“Don’t worry,” Dawn said, and Tara thought how good it was to hear that lift in her voice. “I saw her mom’s room the other day, and she had some of the same stuff you and Willow have…you know, books and candles and…stuff. She’s super nice, Elizabeth’s mom, I mean.”
Dawn went quiet for a moment, and Tara could hear wistfulness coming across the phone line in waves and then a click as Willow picked up the extension.
“Hey, Dawnie, we miss you,” Willow’s voice said in her ear.
“Willow, my dad’s been telling me what Buffy was like when she was just little. She had this doll she carried around all the time. Can you just imagine Buffy with a doll?”
“Yeah,” Willow said softly. “Yeah, actually I can.” Tara walked with the kitchen phone to the hallway, until she could see Willow holding the other phone in the living room, twisting the cord in one hand. She caught Willow’s eye and held it for a moment.
“I can’t wait to see you guys,” Dawn said after a brief pause. “ It’s so cool that you’re going to be living like an hour away. We can see each other all the time. When are you leaving again?”
“Well, we told Giles we’d help him get the house ready for the real estate agent to show,” Willow said, her voice perking up again the way it did when she had a list to work with. “But we’re packing today; I think we’ll probably leave on Saturday. We just have so much to do, and you know, my parents want us to have dinner with them before we go. They’re so relieved I finally decided to transfer.”
“Me, too,” Dawn said excitedly. “Maybe Elizabeth’s mom can show you this cool spell she can do. First, you have to have a frog, so….” Willow dropped the phone onto the sofa abruptly and stepped back. Tara just smiled and leaned against the wall to listen to Dawn talk about magic.
A few hours later, packing up candles and jewelry in the bedroom, Tara’s hand knocked against a ceramic bowl and spilled the contents over the top of Joyce’s dresser. The scent of lavender reached her nose as she swept the dried herbs and flowers into her palm, and she saw one sprig that she didn’t recognize. She held it up to the light, squinting at the tiny brown latticework of the branch.
“Hey, what’s this?” she asked as she felt Willow’s arms slip around her from behind. Willow’s chin rested on her shoulder, and for a moment, they looked at the dried flower silently.
“Oh, nothing special.” Willow’s lips brushed Tara’s neck before she pulled away, plucking the flower out of her grasp. “Just…something I thought I might need some day.”
Tara watched, curious, as Willow turned the flower over in her fingers speculatively and, without warning, crumbled the flower in her fingers and dropped it into the trash bag on the floor, brushing her hands on her skirt.
“Not anymore, huh?” Tara had the sense that something important had just happened, but they had a lot of packing to do, and whatever that dried flower had been, it was only dust now. Nothing of importance, just one more thing to leave behind. She thought about all the Willows she knew—shy and sweet Willow; supportive Willow; self-doubting Willow; smart Willow; sexy Willow; even the almost sinister Willow of dark magicks and revenge that she had glimpsed through Glory. She loved them all; she did. They were all her Willow.
The Willow who turned to her now was smiling and inches away, her green eyes wide open and unguarded, and Tara thought that she loved that Willow best.
“No,” Willow’s voice was calm. “Not anymore.”
Tara could smell the bread baking downstairs, and she knew she had to remember to go take it out of the oven in a few minutes. She had to remember to take one of the loaves over to Xander and Anya later; she had to remember to pick up Giles at the airport the next morning; she had to remember to call the agent in Massachusetts and make sure that the electricity had been turned on in the tiny apartment they had rented. And she had to remember to ask Willow about every little thing that had ever happened to her in her entire life and to tell her the same in return.
But then, as if she had forgotten that only hours before they had been half-dressed and sweat-chilled, kitchen tiles pressing into their thighs, Willow kissed her. And after a moment…Willow kissing her was the only thing she could remember.
Epilogue: September.
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone;
it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time,
made new.
—Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven
On a hot September day, Tara sat beside Willow in the front seat of the car and saw, in the rearview mirror, the dashes of yellow highway line blurring and fading into the road behind them.
Tara laughed inwardly at herself as she shredded the last loaf of the bread she and Willow had made, tossing the crumbs out the open window. Perhaps she was only being superstitious: the gray bird circling the house this morning as they packed up the car had not been Buffy’s spirit watching over them; it was just a bird. But being reminded of the bird in her dream, being reminded of Buffy, she felt a flutter of sorrow. Buffy had sacrificed herself to save them all; she had flown into the portal and given the rest of them wings.
And here she was, flying down the highway toward a place that was new and exciting and just theirs. She was sad for Buffy but grateful…so grateful. And she was leaving a trail of crumbs on the road out of the Hellmouth; it was the only thanks she could think of. She saw Willow’s quick, questioning glance, and she smiled sheepishly; she couldn’t explain. Some things she could never explain.
She and Willow had a car full of stuff, an address in Massachusetts, and each other: that was all. Maybe it was selfish, Tara thought, to leave the nightmare behind. To leave that particular fight behind for another Slayer and her friends to face. Or maybe—closing her eyes, she felt the hot September wind in her hair—maybe their ordinary life, the life of two girls together, was hard enough without vampires and monsters and demons. Maybe it was brave.
“I feel like an explorer,” she said suddenly. “Like Captain Cook, only without the part where I get eaten by the lesbian natives.” She blushed when she realized what she’d said, and then, winking shyly at Willow, she added, “No, actually, I think I’ll take that part, too.”
It wasn’t that funny. It wasn’t even a joke. But Willow reached over to touch her arm and laughed, and in that quiet moment, something unspoken rose soft and warm between them: a quiet heat. A whole conversation without words. A future without tragedy. A life of daily things like school and love and bread.
Tara smiled, and catching Willow’s hand in hers, she studied the shape their laced fingers made.
And Willow drove.
The End.
"And I'm eating this banana. Lunchtime be damned!" -- Willow in "Doppelgangland
Edited by: Tulipp at: 1/16/03 12:17:33 pm