"The Magic Box is due to open again tomorrow," Anya mentioned, trying to keep her voice as light as possible. "I thought maybe we should go in today and check on everything."

She watched as Giles calmly finished filling their new teapot with water before he came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist, the high stool where she was sitting allowing him to rest his cheek alongside hers without discomfort. "Whatever you wish."

"There could be dust," the blonde added.

"I would imagine that after being closed for two weeks there will be." Giles' equanimity seemed unchanged, though Anya thought he might not be convinced that five minutes with a duster was reason enough to interrupt their last day of freedom.

"We could have unopened mail." Anya shivered as the former watcher loosened his grip, the loss of his comforting presence at her back making her feel an emotional chill rather than a physical one.

Giles took hold of the edges of the stool and twisted it around until Anya found herself looking into his clear blue grey eyes. "No doubt there will be creditors who would be mildly distressed if they were forced to wait an extra day for their cheques." He reached out and brushed fingers calloused by years of holding weapons and pens over her cheek.

Unthinkingly Anya leaned into his touch, like a pampered feline.

"And yet neither of those things really necessitates that we should sacrifice our last day of freedom," Giles said in the same soothing tone that he used when he was reading to her. "If anything, my being here should mean that I can tackle any backlog of cleaning or paperwork tomorrow, whilst you concentrate on the normal day to day running of the shop... or vice versa, so I can't help but think that you have some other reason for wishing to visit the shop today..."

Anya chewed at the inside of her lip as she wondered how to say what she really wanted. It used to be easy. With Xander she had never been reticent when it came to—

"And I don't care."

Cool lips pressed gently against her forehead as Anya absorbed the importance of those four little words.

Giles continued to reassure her in that gentle voice that he seemed to share only with her. "All that matters is that it's important to you that we go."

With Xander she wouldn't have hesitated. With Xander she'd always felt as if he had expected her to want sex all the time. The more often they had had sex, the more adventurous they had been, the more she had catered to his fantasies...

"I don't need half a dozen imaginary reasons. You don't have to make up excuses." As the watcher continued, the sincerity in his words was obvious. "Relationships do not fall into place overnight and I don't expect you to instantly be able to talk to me about anything and everything. I don't expect you to explain everything but I don't want you to feel like you have to lie to me... ever."

The more desirable she should have been as a girlfriend... and the more Xander should have loved her or so she had naively believed, not on a concious level perhaps, but with hindsight, she realised that that was the way things had been.

Giles hadn't shown any disappointment when she decided to leave behind the rubber nurse's outfit, or the slave maiden set or any of the other things that Xander had bought for her at Sindy's Sex Store and in a way that was what made it difficult to ask that Giles have sex with her to order.

When Giles looked at her, she knew that he didn't see a naughty schoolgirl or Catwoman. She suspected that it wouldn't matter what she wore. There were times when she and Giles kissed... and they had kissed a lot over the last two or three days... he would get this look as if he thought he were the luckiest man on the planet. Anya was a little surprised to find that she found that look to be far more of a turn on than any of Xander's games. Giles didn't look at her and see a collection of pleasingly shaped body parts... or at least he didn't only see pleasingly shaped body parts. He seemed to see her heart, whatever it was that made her Anya. When they made love, she was at least as likely to find him looking into her eyes as staring at her breasts, and she had good breasts. Not that Giles was a prude. God, but he had been right about the handcuffs.

And it wasn't that Xander had been sexually inadequate. He had become quite proficient... if you didn't include the first few attempts, which had been over rather too quickly to be truly satisfying. Her sexual relationship with Xander hadn't only been about physical gratification. There had been tenderness there as well, but mostly it had been about the pleasure that can be derived from two physically compatible bodies. With Giles it was different... Giles made her feel as if there were orgasms which could touch her soul as profoundly as her body...

"Anya?"

With a start she realised that she had been silent too long and she turned her head slightly so her lips brushed his palm, letting him know that everything was okay. "When you say that you don't want me to lie to you, does that mean you don't want me to tell those silly lies that are meant to be tactful? You know like where someone comes in and spends half an hour looking at everything in the shop, picking it up and putting it back just an inch or two out of place so you know you'll have to straighten it all up again after they leave, but you're supposed to say that you hope they have a nice day instead of telling them if they want to look at things they're not going to buy, then they should go to a museum instead of making extra work for shop assistants."

"I don't want you to lie to me. I think my ego is capable of dealing with the unadulterated Anya." There was a glimmer of subdued laughter in his teasing smile. "The customers... and the others might require a white lie or two from time to time."

Anya tilted back her head until her eyes met Giles', choosing to allow him to read every nuance of expression that played over her face. "I won't lie to you, Giles," she promised. She took a calming breath. "...But I want to explain, or no I don't want to really but I think you should know... why I changed my mind. I don't need to go there today."

She took a deep swallow from her glass of orange juice before she tugged at Giles' shirt, drawing him closer and slipping her arms around his waist as she went on. "The apartment, this part of town, it's all new. It's all part of my new start. The Magic Box is somewhere we used to be together, somewhere that I thought there might be memories of him. I thought maybe if we made some new memories... the sort of memories you don't want to be interrupted by a customer when you're in the middle of making them, even if they have been waiting two weeks for the shop to re-open and have lots and lots of money that they want to spend—"

"Then the old memories would go away?" Giles asked.

"Maybe..." Anya ducked her head for a moment before she defiantly forced it back up. "But then I figured it out. That's all they are. They're just memories, ghosts, and they don't have any power over me. They can't make me sad 'cause I don't want to go back to the past. I just want my future... with you."