Title: "Could I Be Your Girl"

Fandom: Angel

Pairing: Angel [David Boreanaz]/Doyle [Glenn Quinn]

Author: MonaR. (aka Mona Ramsey, aka Mona)

Series: "Alternative Beginnings"

Webpage: the bare skeleton of one is at: http://www.geocities.com/monaram

Rating: NC-17.

Warnings: Explicit slash (m/m) content. And, because it bugs so many people, songfic warnings. :)

Archive: Sure.

Notes: I don't use betas. :( Any mistakes are solely my fault and the fault of my *#^&@ spellcheck. ** is used for emphasis, // for thought. Any weird characters should be hunted down and killed.

Feedback: Yes if you're moved to write me by the story, no if you think that *unless* you write me, I won't write any more stories. Anyone with even a glancing knowledge of my posting history (this *is* my 400-and-something-th story) knows that isn't true. Feedback is gratefully accepted and responded to whenever possible. Flames are buried in the backyard, along with a few skeletons.

Spoilers: Sorta, for "City Of".

Summary: Angel discovers a cure for unresolved pain.

{I honestly can't believe I'm using this title. I just can't help myself. I need a keeper. I heard Jann Arden doing this song, and I was hooked. I'm so bad. Demon songfic. I shall burn in an eternal fiery hell. . . Better go buy a fan. :)}

It didn't help to pretend that it didn't. It used to; it used to be that pretending and ignoring made most things better. There was a certain code of suffering that was only allowed to those who lived and didn't have years of personal darkness to atone for. For the rest of the world of demons Angel inhabited, pain was irrelevant; it was his burden alone to suffer the guilt and shame, and all of the other self-inflicted punishments that were so familiar as to be oddly comforting. Real pain was a luxury that had no place in his life. It had to be *earned*.

So he called it other things, and tried to pretend it wasn't what it was.

Cordelia was gone, finally, after spending most of the day trying to - as she put it - "make the office livable, and not another Hellmouth on Earth". Whatever that meant. He and Doyle had shifted furniture and dusted and killed cockroaches - well, Doyle took care of the cockroaches, and helped Cordelia decide where the furniture should go, while Angel himself did most of the heavy lifting. It didn't look bad. It might actually work as an office - as soon as they replaced the shades, and had the name painted on the door. Might attract a better class of demon.

He shrugged out of his sweater, pulling it up over his head and flinging it down on the bed, and winced at a tiny heretofore-unnoticed twinge from his shoulder. There was a small, nearly-healed cut there that he hadn't even felt, and the dried blood over it pulled free when his shirt came off, opening up the wound again. A few bright red beads of blood welled free of his broken skin, and he licked his lips, reflexively.

"You're bleeding."

He forced himself not to visibly react, although he jumped inwardly. It was going to take some time to get used to Doyle's stealth. "I'll live."

"Well, that goes without saying, doesn't it?" Suddenly, Doyle was beside him, tracing a finger over the closing wound. He brought the tiny drop to his lips, and sucked the finger inside, cleaning it thoroughly with his tongue.

Angel licked his lips again, swallowing hard.

"Nah," Doyle said, shaking his head. "It doesn't appeal. I don't get what you see in it, myself."

"Would you like to?"

Doyle's eyes narrowed, and he grinned. "Half-demon, all vampire? No, thanks. I've got enough problems."

"Really," Angel said, in a dismissive tone. /And what can you know about problems?/

"Really," Doyle answered, a trace of anger in his voice, and a look in his eyes that told Angel he'd heard that unvoiced question. "You don't hold the corner on atonement, you know. We're all looking for absolution."

"Not me." Angel shook his head. "I don't believe in it."

"The hell you don't," Doyle said, sarcastically. "If you didn't, you'd have gone into the Light yourself, years ago."

"Maybe I'm a masochist," Angel said, quietly.

"Oh, there's no doubt about that," Doyle agreed, cheerfully. "You're just a bundle of contradictions, aren't you? A vampire killer with a soul, who's been to hell and still believes in absolution."

"Is that the short list of my 'potential'?"

"Don't ask me. I didn't *ask* for this, you know. You don't *choose* your repentance. It chooses you." A sudden smile cracked Doyle's face. "If I had a choice, don't you think I'd be giving sponge-baths to wayward Miss America contestants, instead of being stuck in this modified Batcave with you?"

Angel chuckled, humourlessly. "Do all of your fantasies come from Penthouse letters?"

"Only the better ones." Doyle reached out to swipe his still-wet finger over the residue of blood on Angel's arm, but found his wrist caught in a crushing grip. "What the fuck?"

"Don't."

"Why?" Doyle's head cocked to one side, and his eyes narrowed. "Temptation too strong for you?"

A moment dragged over hot coals, and Doyle wouldn't back down from Angel's gaze, not realizing that everyone did. "Yes," Angel said, finally.

After that, there was only a second - one where Doyle smiled and *knew*, the same one where Angel thought of flight - and then the crushing grip transferred from one pair of hands to another.

His eyes were still open.

That was the only thing that Angel could think - /my eyes are still open/ - and he was watching, as if he *could* watch himself being kissed by Doyle. Whether it was dissociation or astral projection or maybe just a re-play of a fleeting and recently quashed fantasy, it didn't really matter. And it hadn't been Doyle starring in that fantasy; he was too new. It hadn't really been anyone or any *one*, just a body and a mouth and skin that smelled like something almost human and convenient and willing - hopefully willing, /please be willing/ - orifices to be buried inside. No face. Faces meant eyes, eyes meant souls - souls were dangerous. He'd done that already, with *her*.

It wasn't good.

Doyle's teeth bit into his bottom lip, hard enough to draw his attention, and Angel knew he'd been caught thinking.

"Here," Doyle said, just that, invitation and command and explanation, and moved Angel's hands, placed them under the edges of his hideous shirt that burned the eyes and felt surprisingly like silk, even though it wasn't. The feel of it was fascinating, and the warmth; everything was fascinating.

Doyle was still giving him biting kisses, nips really, and dragging him across the floor to the bed. Angel felt stupid, slow and sluggish and numb, like his limbs were all wrapped up in gauze and tape, useless. He stumbled and Doyle fell back across the bed - or was pushed - and *laughed* as he hit the mattress and bounced just slightly up. Angel stood there, stripped to the waist with his arms crossed, unaccustomed to anything but grace and ease in his own body, if nowhere else, and Doyle laughed and looked at him with a gaze like sunlight, white-hot and burning his flesh. Angel wouldn't have been surprised if he'd spontaneously burst into flames, just from that gaze.

Doyle kicked off his shoes, stretched out one foot and traced his toes over the incipient bulge in Angel's loose-fitting black pants. He wasn't laughing anymore, not out loud, although his eyes looked vastly amused.

Aroused, but amused.

Angel fell.

The wound had closed, but when Doyle licked his tongue over it, again and again, Angel swore he could feel his skin tearing open again, soft wet nubby pressure cleaving deep into his bones. Doyle felt heavier than he looked, on top of Angel, all pale skin and dark hair and wiry muscle, and the fact that he efficiently removed every stitch of clothing from both of them made Angel think that this seduction might not be as spontaneous and opportunistic as it was meant to feel, but his words were washed away with every lick of that tongue on his skin.

He was hot and getting hotter until he realized that he wasn't breathing. And then he remembered that he was already dead, and not breathing wasn't going to kill him. By that time, Doyle was straddling him and his tongue had moved away from the non-wound on his shoulder and onto his right nipple, and all of Angel's words were coming out in a non-language far different from the one he was thinking them in.

Doyle looked at him. "Angel?"

Coherence was necessary. He was a *vampire*, dammit. He did this to other people, not the other way around. "Yeah?"

"Shut up."

He opened his mouth again, intent on a retort that would re-assert, and Doyle took the opening for what it *really* was - an invitation. It wasn't until Angel was sucking that tongue deep into his mouth that he realized it was true.

Doyle's hands were caught in his hair, and were pulling his entire body up like an invisible puppet-string was attached to the top of his head. When he was sitting upright, with his arms around and against Doyle's back, sharp fingertips clawing into the flesh, his mouth sucking hard at the long column of a pale neck, Doyle's thighs gripping tightly to his own, Angel finally realized what this was.

It was something like pain, but not quite. Something other people were allowed. Something he had been denied by others for so long he finally learned how to deny it to himself.

This was need.

Atonement.

Repentance.

Absolution.

There were reddening welts and teeth-scrapings everywhere along the length of Doyle's terribly pale body when Angel looked up at him from his unique vantage point. Doyle's head was thrown back and he was gasping for air, or maybe just trying to say something, but Angel smiled when he realized he'd finally found the perfect way to make the Irish demon definitively shut up - or, rather, smiled as well as he could, around the heat and thickness that filled his mouth.

The taste of him was a revelation - the first offering a spark of flavour that had flooded Angel's mouth with saliva and want at the same time. There was something to be said for both self-control and self-denial: it made the need, when it returned, all the more hard, and fast, and strong. It would have taken something superhuman to fly in the face of that need and turn it away, and Angel wasn't human at all. Never before had he been so glad of that.

He dragged his teeth, more gently here than anywhere else, over the weighty column of flesh, and marvelled anew at the tremors that wracked Doyle's body. It wasn't fear; Angel had always been able to smell the pungent scent of fear more strongly than anything else. No, Doyle wasn't worried at all, even though the course of blood through his veins was so powerful that Angel could *hear* it, and there was a pulsing, throbbing artery so close that it seemed to mock him, clearly visible through the translucent skin of Doyle's thigh. But it wasn't what he needed.

The blood didn't call to him - or even if it did, it was drowned out by the keening siren's song the *rest* of Doyle's body sounded. Skin and flesh and sweat - the scent intoxicating in its complexity, arousal and need and wonder and taunt - all of these things were suddenly absolutely new, unknown but not unknowable.

It would take so little for him to *know*.

Green eyes stared up directly into his own, for a moment, and then closed. Angel didn't even think that Doyle had been looking at him, really; more like just looking. He gasped again, and Angel shifted his body, pressing it further forward, almost desperate to hear that gasp repeated again.

The muscles in Doyle's jaw flexed, his entire body tense, and once again Angel was staring at a fully exposed neck that seemed determined to defy him. Or maybe just test him. That was the other, the demon side; Doyle controlled his better than almost anyone Angel had ever seen. Maybe that was part of the reason that he seemed so haunted underneath his cool human exterior.

Angel turned his head to brush his cheek and lips against Doyle's ankle, wanting to touch him. It was strange to think of it in those terms, but it was true; they were already joined together in so many places, grasping onto one another, burned and buried together, and still Angel had to reach out to really *touch* him. He stopped moving just to see if Doyle's eyes would open, wanting them to, wanting to know if he was so far gone that he would beg for it.

When they did open, the words were suddenly there in the room between them. Angel's smile disappeared when he saw the look Doyle was giving him - when he knew with absolute certainty that Doyle *would* beg - and he moved swiftly, shifting limbs and crawling over Doyle's body to his mouth, to silence those words before they could be heard. Angel pressed himself inside every opening, and wondered what it would take for him to finally realize that even the *want* of something was sometimes too much to bear.

Doyle slept curled around himself, knees drawn up against his chest, arms wrapped defensively tight around them, his entire body deceptively small under the sheet. His hair was damp and half-matted against his head, half sticking out in all directions, and his eyelashes made dark smudges across his pale cheekbones. Angel watched him for a long time before he realized that Doyle slept as though he expected to wake up alone. He wondered who had taught him that; it wasn't a lesson that could be learned in one night.

Just life in general, maybe.

Angel stood up out of the bed, glad that Doyle didn't awaken at the rush of breeze made by the falling sheet. He stretched and felt all of his muscles pop, and scratched his chest and his belly, feeling warmed through and immensely pleased with himself, like a lazy, sated cat, but not sleepy. He wanted to crawl back into bed and sleep glued against his lover, but knew that he wouldn't, and so settled for a nocturnal prowl, nude, around his territory.

The offices seemed less dusty at night, all black and navy and dark gray shadows. Everything was locked tight, and dawn was an hour or more away, still. There was something new in the building's air, something that spoke of others, instead of just himself. Cordy was there, yes, with her vibrant humanity, but there was also Doyle.

Doyle was a different scent and a different presence entirely, straddling the line as he did between so many things - between Angel and the Powers That be, between demon and human, between want and need. It wasn't fair, it was too much for one person. There was something about him that suggested transience - maybe it was the way that he moved, appearing and disappearing without notice. Angel wondered how long he would be allowed him.

However long it was, it wouldn't be enough. It was never enough.

It wasn't until he swung the office door closed behind him that he realized that his shoulder didn't hurt anymore.

He didn't even remember that he was still naked when he leaned against the wall near the bed; the surface was cool but he'd been too long away from the bed, so it didn't even register. He didn't realize it until Doyle looked up at him from where he sat on the bed and then looked away again, too fast. There was a flicker of hurt in those eyes - not as if he'd been wronged, but as if the sight of Angel was somehow physically painful to him - and then it disappeared, and he finished buttoning his shirt.

"You're going?"

"Yeah, well," Doyle said, lightly, "I figured - "

"Wrong."

"What?" Doyle raised his eyes, locked them on to Angel's, and didn't lower them.

"You figured wrong," Angel said, matter-of-factly. "Surely it must have happened *once* before in your life?"

Doyle started, and grinned, just a little. "Not that I can remember."

Angel smiled. "Well, there's always a first time for everything, isn't there?"

"So I've been told."

"Good."

Doyle's grin faded. "This wasn't part of it, you know."

Angel couldn't fathom what he meant. "What?"

"*This*." Doyle gestured to the rumpled bed, almost embarrassed. "It wasn't part of the plan of me coming here. The Powers That Be and all, I mean."

"I didn't think it was."

"Oh. Good. I just didn't want you to think - "

"I didn't. I don't." Angel nodded at him, still fumbling with the last button on his shirt. "Shouldn't you take those off?"

Doyle swallowed hard, the way Angel had earlier, at the sight of his own blood. "I - "

"They might get wrinkled," Angel continued, as if he had said nothing. He hadn't moved a muscle, was still leaning against the wall, nonchalant in his nakedness. "Or messy," he added, seeing that the clothes were already wrinkled.

The chin raised a little, self-possession and cockiness returned in equal degrees. "Is that so?"

Angel nodded. "Yes," he said, and then moved, crossing the distance between them with two long strides and coming to rest on his knees, in front of Doyle. "Stay," he said.

"D'you think that's a good idea?"

"No," Angel said, shaking his head. "I'm pretty sure it's a terrible idea." He fingered open the first button on Doyle's shirt. "Stay," he said, again.

"I should - "

"Stay." Another button opened.

"It'll be - "

"Stay." Angel sat back on his heels and looked up at Doyle, expectantly.

He would wonder, for a long time, if it was that gesture, the removal of his hands, or the plaintive note in his voice that made Doyle realize that he was begging. Whatever it was, for the first time in a very long time, neither one of them woke up alone.

The End

MonaR.