In one day, she graduated from high school, prevented the apocalypse, and lost her virginity. It was a long day.

They had survived, as Oz had pointed out. They had survived, and more: they had vanquished. And now, his arm around her shoulders, they were walking home, they were hugging Buffy and seeing her inside, they were hugging Xander (and the tension had disappeared, replaced by simple relief that they were all alive in a dimension they recognized), and then they were walking quietly, hand in hand, in a direction that could lead to Willow's house.

"Where are we going?" Willow asked after a moment.

"Not sure. I was following you."

"Oh. Well, my mom's not home. It's safe. We can drink hot chocolate and congratulate ourselves over the fact that college cannot possibly be any weirder than high school."

Oz kissed the top of her head. "Famous last words."

"Maybe," Willow admitted. "I mean, it is Sunnydale. But really: when we're bonding with our roommates on the first day, is anyone else going to be able to say that a big ugly green thing ascended-or tried to-at their graduation?"

"If they can, we've got to talk."

A pause. "So when are your parents coming back from Brad's graduation?" Willow asked.

"Probably tonight, late. They wanted to take me out to dinner on graduation day, but I assured them brunch tomorrow would be satisfactory."

"You're so lucky you had a built-in excuse like your brother graduating. I really had to work to convince my mom to be elsewhere."

"And she's still elsewhere?"

"Yeah. She's on Catalina Island at some kind of retreat." Willow smiled the shy smile Oz had loved from the first day they'd met. "I paid for her to go, and guilt-tripped her until she agreed. I promised her much videotape and 35-millimeter film."

"You think they got a video of all that?"

"Yeah, it's called 'The Green Thing that Ate Graduation.'"

"'How the Mayor Got His Groove Back.'"

"'And on the Third Day, the Mayor Ascended.'"

"'And on the Third Day, the Mayor Ate the Principal.'"

"'Evil Dead Part 68: Sunnydale High School Graduation.'"

"'Silly Mayor, Ascensions are for Christian Deities.'"

Willow giggled and unlocked the door to her house. Inside was quiet and smelled faintly of lavender. It looked the same as it had when she'd left that morning, which relieved her in a strange sort of way: the mayor might have turned green (and eaten the principal), the school might have burned down, people might have died, but her cereal bowl was still sitting in the sink, a lone Cheerio caught on the rim, and the couch was still red. She closed the door behind herself and Oz and let herself collapse into him. He smelled of incense and Ivory soap and she needed to breathe in a few liters of that before she could really believe that she was safe again.

"So, how about the hot chocolate?" Willow said into Oz's chest after a few minutes.

"Excellent."

She would have made it with Swiss Miss and marshmallow creme, but Oz took his hot chocolate seriously, and she sat happily at the pine table while he heated milk and powdered cocoa and made it the way it was supposed to be made. Oz probably would have actually used a foodstuff made out of mallow if he could have, but the pantry contained only the usual jet-puffed kind. Willow ate her marshmallows almost immediately, but Oz let his sit and melt into the liquid. She would never, Willow thought, have that kind of patience.

"So," he said, "what are your plans for the rest of the week?"

"I hadn't really gotten beyond 'kill the ugly green slime monster.' What about you?"

"Dev and I have some practice dates, and maybe a gig down in Studio City."

"You made plans for after graduation?"

Oz reached up and tucked an errant strand of auburn behind Willow's ear. "If I made plans I couldn't break, then I couldn't let the world end."

"Oh. I was focusing more on the not letting the world end part. So I'm not really sure what I'm doing this week. Maybe I'll watch some soap operas. That would be nice and non-apocalyptic."

Willow enjoyed Oz's company for many reasons, but the first thing that had drawn her to him was calm: he radiated it, and it seemed to settle over almost everyone he encountered. Silence was not a threat in Oz's world, and Willow had learned that he didn't expect her to talk just to fill it. And so she sat quietly with him at the table, slowly drinking hot chocolate, watching Oz's body relax as the afternoon passed.

Their hot chocolate finished, Willow felt exhaustion settling in, but she was still too wired to sleep. But reading sounded nice. "Did you want to do anything this afternoon?" she asked Oz.

"Hadn't planned on anything."

"Maybe we could just, you know, read for a while? Like we could read and I could fall asleep on you and we could pretend that we're waking up to a day with no big green monsters trying to keep us from going to college?"

"I'd like that."

Maybe she'd been preparing subconsciously: two days before, she'd finished the last of the books she'd been reading, and she hadn't begun another. She had to stand in front of the bookcase for a few minutes before she could find something without a hint of apocalypse, and she finally settled on Weetzie Bat, because in Weetzie's California the sun meant happiness and not just the time when the vampires don't come out. Oz withdrew an issue of Guitar Player-why was there always one under her bed?-and started reading about an upcoming movie about Led Zeppelin.

It didn't take her long to fall asleep.

***

She slept for longer than she'd intended, waking mid-afternoon. She could have slept longer, but she was chilly: her mom, apparently, had cranked up the air conditioner before leaving. Oz was still asleep, his wiry arms around her, his chest against her back. Moving would wake him up, but she really was cold. As gently as she could, Willow tried to loosen herself to pull up the cotton blanket from the end of the bed.

One green eye blinked open. "Where you going?"

"Nowhere. I'm just cold." She spread the blanket over both of them and was immediately warmer. Oz settled his arms around her again and she heard him sniff sleepily at the back of her neck, the wolf part reminding itself that this was his mate and she belonged there and it was safe to sleep now.

But she didn't fall back asleep, not completely. Warm under the blanket and within the circle of Oz, she dozed on and off, but didn't fully sleep. She listened to the sounds of her house, the boards that creaked (they hadn't been the same since the last earthquake), the pipes that squeaked.

After some length of time, she felt Oz wake up, felt the miniscule tightenings of muscle that meant he'd lost the relaxation of sleep. He kissed the nape of her neck, right where her hair was cut. "Hey."

"Hey yourself. You're awake."

"Sort of."

"Did you sleep well?"

"Better than I have in a long time. You?"

"Yeah. Also better than I have in a long time. I think lack of impending apocalypse will definitely improve my sleep patterns."

A soft laugh from Oz and another kiss, gentle, on her neck, and then several along the lines of muscle that connected shoulder to neck, gentle nips with teeth and then the softness of lips and tongue. Willow shivered.

"Feel like getting up?" Oz asked. A few more kisses, up the side of her throat, behind her ear, and then suction on her earlobe. Her eyes fluttered closed and her toes curled.

"Um. No. Not so much. You?"

"Not so much," Oz agreed.

He moved his arms and she turned over and his body was solid on top of hers. This was not especially new: they had spent hours which probably totaled to days or even weeks kissing, and she knew what his body felt like. There had even been one weekend back in March when they'd taken his van out to the beach and she'd talked him into smoking up with her (she knew he did it with his bandmates, and she wasn't sure why it was such a big secret around her), and they'd taken off their clothes and touched and nibbled. They had only gone back home the next morning once Willow decided that she really, really had to shower.

And now this, both of them under her old blanket, Oz's hands cupping her face. He still tasted like sleep, and he was warm from it. She slid her hands underneath his shirt (in deference to the occasion, he'd worn a button-down, though it looked suspiciously big on him, as though he'd stolen it from Xander) and traced the sinewy muscles of his back. She twined her legs with his and felt him sigh at the contact, and she turned them over so that she was on top. A few strands of hair fell down and played around the edges of Oz's face, and he brushed them with his finger tips. "Hi," he said. He was smiling.

"Hi," Willow said.

She leaned down and kissed him again. His callused hands were gentle on her skin, tracing their way up each arm, down her sides, and then under her own shirt. It was a tank-top, dressy enough to meet her mother's scrutiny (it had beads on it), and stretchy enough for the fight afterwards. It was not hard to shrug out of, and Oz seemed surprised, as though he'd been exploring more for exploration's sake than with intent. The shirtlessness, too, was not new, but nor was it particularly common, especially in the middle of the day with the bedroom door unlocked.

This time Oz turned them over, and it was with intent: he kissed her face, and with one hand he traced concentric circles, going inward, around the cups of her bra. He mouthed her nipples through the cloth, then pushed it down and licked the sensitive skin of the each areola, and she moaned in earnest. He moved his mouth down her torso, weaving from rib to rib and then circling her navel with his tongue. Then back to her breasts, with a mouth and fingers that seemed very happy to see them. He sat her up a little bit. "OK to take off your bra?"

Willow herself wasn't great at undoing the clasp from behind, and she had more experience than Oz did, so she did it herself, and dropped the red bra (which had been purchased for the occasion: Buffy might fight in a strapless but Willow sure wouldn't) to the side of the bed. "Sit up," she told Oz. He did, and she undid the first button of the shirt (and tried to ignore the fact that she was probably unbuttoning Xander's shirt), fumbling at the new angle.

"I can do it," Oz offered.

She shook her head. "No. It's kind of something I always wanted to do."

"How so?"

"The first time I had sex with somebody, I always wanted to unbutton his shirt-you know, undress him. It's just, well, kind of sexy."

Oz caught her fingers at the second button. "Are we having sex?"

She had managed the last line without a blush, but this tripped her up. "Um, not if you don't want to. But I kind of do. Actually, I don't kind of do. I really do. We're of legal age and we're high school graduates and we survived the apocalypse and I think that sex could also be on the menu. What do you think?"

"If it's not on the menu," Oz said, "I bet the kitchen takes requests." He kissed her again and she giggled. But then his face slid back into seriousness. "I don't have any condoms." Of course he could talk about this directly; Willow wondered if she would ever be able to. "I, well, I didn't plan-"

She cut him off. "I know." She freed her hands and reached back to the bedside table. She opened the drawer and took out a box. "I did."

It was, Willow thought, the closest she'd get to seeing Oz with a dropped jaw. "What- when-"

"I guess I lied about the whole no-plans-after-the-apocalypse thing. I mean, not that I had a scenario laid out or anything. I just... I decided that if I were going to live to grow up, I wanted to do it all the way: go to college, do my taxes, have sex with you."

"When did you decide this?"

"Two weeks ago in the family planning aisle at Rite Aid."

Oz took the box from her, set it on the table, and closed the drawer. "Then my vote is yes. Although I hope I'm more enjoyable than doing your taxes."

Willow laughed. "Obviously I'd rather do you than a 1040 form. Oh, that didn't come out really like I intended it to. Um. But I guess it's not inaccurate. Anyway, it's like balancing pleasures and responsibilities."

"We saved the world. I think that counts as a responsibility."

"Right. So now it's time for the pleasure. May I recommence with the shirt-unbuttoning now?"

Oz took her hands and put them back where they'd been. "Please."

One by one, the buttons were loosed, and Willow pushed the shirt back over Oz's shoulders. She sat and looked at him for a moment, at the sparse bronze hair that covered his chest, at the compact but defined abdominal muscles, at the pink circles around his tiny nipples. She reached for him and he for her and she breathed against him. He was so, so warm.

More kisses, and Oz rolled to the side and addressed himself to the issue of opening Willow's jeans. Inside, his hand was gentle, and she wriggled to allow him better access. His fingers knew where to find her and she gasped. Oz hooked his thumbs in the waistband of the denim. "Can I?"

"Yes please."

Willow toed off her socks and Oz maneuvered the jeans down her legs until she kicked them off, and then she was disconcertingly naked except for a pair of small cotton underwear with a cat's head embroidered in pink on the front. She and Oz been naked before, yes, but never sober, in broad daylight, and with definite plans of what was happening next. Oz looked at the design and smiled. "Visual pun?"

"Uh-huh. I feel very, very naked. Bizarrely naked. All-my-clothes-off naked."

"Do you want to stop?"

"No. I think I just want to get used to it for a while."

Oz pulled himself to a sitting position against the bed's white headboard, and pulled Willow with him into his arms. "Get used to it for as long as you need to. Do you want the blanket?"

"No. I'm not cold. And you're warm."

"My blood's flowing."

He was hard, she realized, under his jeans: if she leaned back, she could feel him searching for her. She leaned back and wiggled a little bit and heard him sigh. "Do you remember that time we went to the beach in March?" she asked.

"Not something easily forgotten."

"Did you enjoy it?"

"Much." One of his hands was on her hip, the other drawing random hieroglyphics on her stomach. She took the unoccupied hand and put it on her breast. It needed to be doing something. She wouldn't have wanted it to get bored.

"What do you remember about it?" she asked.

"A lot of things. Thinking of anything in particular?"

"I remember buying fruit at that farmstand on the way and then eating it on the beach. And then the brownies we had for dessert."

The rumble of a laugh from Oz's chest. "The special Devon brownies."

"You tasted like berries and chocolate. And marijuana."

A warm, slow kiss on her neck. "You tasted indescribable. Essence of Willow." The hand on her breast started to mimic the pattern of the hand on her belly. The stomach hand moved lower. "Can I?"

By way of answer, Willow guided his fingers below the cotton. He found her again and she moaned, letting him rub and explore gently, whisper that he loved her and she was beautiful and he wanted her in so many ways which he proceeded to describe and she pictured herself on top, straddling his hips, his cock buried deep inside her and that was when she came, crying out, her head against his collarbone.

She let her heart slow down before she said anything. "That was nice. I, um, I liked it."

Soft teeth on her ear. "Good."

Willow let the last ebbs of pleasure wash from her body, and then she turned around. In lieu of speaking to Oz, she pushed him down so that his head was on the pillow. She bent down and they rubbed noses and she smiled. She kissed his mouth once, then moved it to his ear (and she knew how sensitive his ears were, how his toes would curl if she did nothing but blow a gentle stream of air in the right direction). He was still wearing his jeans, as well as a worn brown leather belt she'd seen before. Boxers peeked out from underneath the denim; they were a soft maroon plaid. She sat up and fumbled with the buckle on his belt. He reached down to help, but she shook her head. "No. This is kind of another always-wanted-to-do-first-time-I-had-sex thing."

"You had some definite plans for this, did you?"

"Not plans in the planny sense. Just more- ideas. On the to-do list when the day came around."

Willow's fingers figured out the buckle and then started on the button fly of Oz's jeans. One of those things, she decided, that looked a lot sexier than it was in practice; in practice, she was finding, it was slow and not a little clumsy to unbutton from the outside. And Oz was not helping, stroking her arms with light fingers, circling her nipples which made her hands shake even more.

And then Oz's jeans were open and her hand was inside. There he was, warm and hard, and he closed his eyes and took a deep breath when she touched him. She stroked him and he turned his head to one side and his hands were suddenly less busy on her skin.

But there was not, she realized, full range of motion. Access was limited and she would need to unlimit it if she were going to do what she wanted to do. She hooked her fingers in the waistband of jeans and underwear and pulled down, and Oz lifted his hips and then he was naked.

He was beautiful naked; she'd seen it before, but in bad light and under the influence. His body hair was reddish-blond, gleaming gold in the late afternoon light. There was enough of it on his chest for her to be able to ruffle it in her fingers, but underneath she could still see the milky-white skin. Just because she could, she leaned down and bit gently at a spot near one of his small pink nipples, then sucked gently. It would leave a mark, she knew, an indication that she had been there, written on Oz's skin. Further down, the hair grew sparser and formed a fine line that led to Oz's now-hard penis and impossibly pale testes. A treasure trail, Buffy had once called that particular kind of line, and she and Willow had giggled for a while over the implications.

But the trail was a good reminder. Willow circled her tongue around Oz's nipples, surprised at how sensitive they were; biologically she knew why men had them, but she didn't remember that they had this serendipitous sensitivity. She kept going, leaving gentle bites down and around Oz's torso, hearing his sighs and feeling his hands in her hair, and then it was in front of her. This she hadn't done, but damn it, she'd read enough and she'd certainly heard Cordelia Chase talking in the bathroom more than once. If brainless Cordelia could do this, then smart Willow Rosenberg who'd gotten into MIT and never did anything without proper research could go down on someone and do it well and even enjoy it.

She licked the tip of it. It was salty and a little wet. She licked it again, and Oz rewarded her with a moan. She kept going. It was strange and ungainly and it definitely felt obscene, but fingers on Oz's balls made him sigh, and even just a little bit of suction made him whimper in a way she'd never heard before. When she put her hands on Oz's thighs, she could feel him straining. Yeah, she'd keep going.

And she did. There was a rhythm to it, a method-she knew about method. She was just sinking into the rhythm, and so was Oz, when there was a hand on her forehead, gently pushing her back. She stopped and looked up with concern. "Not good? Stop? Do something different?" Maybe her research had failed her; maybe this just worked for Cordelia because she was tall and pretty and anything she did was automatically good.

"No. God, no. So good. Very good. Incredibly good." It must have been, Willow decided, if it got this many words out of Oz. "But if you didn't stop, we wouldn't get to the main course. I didn't want to fill up on the appetizers."

Willow giggled and arranged herself on top of Oz, legs dangling over his hips, chin on hands on his collarbone. "So you liked that?"

Oz kissed her by way of answer, and Cordelia must have been lying about some of the things she'd said, because Oz obviously had no issue with kissing her after she'd gone down on him. Maybe Cordelia just had bad breath.

"So," Willow said after a moment, "what was that about the main course?"

"You ready to order?"

Willow grinned; she couldn't help it. "I ordered a long time ago. I've just been nibbling off the la carte menu until the waiter comes back."

Oz grinned back. "But do you think it's proper to serve such a fine dish covered up like that?"

They turned over, and this time she lifted her hips, and now she was naked, and it felt less weird that she thought it would. Oz was naked, too, and he reached forward and took a small shiny packet from the box. He tore it open and handed it to Willow. "Would you?"

"I... I'm not sure... I missed the health class where we had to put them on bananas."

"I think you just unroll it. I was at that health class."

"Did you have to put one on a banana?"

"Yeah, but the banana was kind of misshapen."

Willow broke into giggles. But Oz was right, and it rolled on perfectly, and Willow lay back and looked up at Oz and felt rather like a ritual sacrifice, open, laid out, ready for the taking. Oz lay down and propped himself on his elbows. "You sure about this?"

Some things were meant to be sacrificed; you couldn't go on, couldn't change, without giving up something first. Willow knew this as well as she knew her own name. She had been prepared, long ago, to be sacrificed. She put her hands on either side of Oz's face. "I'll stake you if you don't do it. Is that sure enough?"

He was at her entrance and he pushed and it hurt a little bit. She readjusted herself, moved a little lower. She pushed herself up and Oz thrust himself down and there was a moment of pain-not too much, but enough for a gasp and an "ow"-and then he was inside. "That OK? You want me out?"

"Um, yeah. Just for a second."

He did. She reached down and felt herself and she was wet and her finger came back with mostly her own juices but also with a smear of blood, just enough to let her know that something had happened and it was important. She kissed him. "OK now," she said.

Inside her again, and this time without the pain. This time just the fullness and Oz's sigh and her legs around his hips. A jolt of surprise from parts that hadn't been touched before and they were moving in that rhythm she'd discovered. He kissed her nose and her eyelids and her lips and his tongue was insistent and she moaned into his mouth.

There was violence in this, or maybe not so much violence as a loss of control. His hands under her ass and suddenly the angle was more direct and she cried out and so did he. And then the rhythm stopped and his cry was hoarse and she could feel the pressure inside her when he came.

He was boneless, his heart thumping against hers. But they'd both had health class, and he knew to get out and up and throw the condom away. But instead of lying back down next to her, his fingers probed where she was tender but still vibrating, waiting, electric. And then oh he was doing something against the rules, it must have been against the rules because it felt too soft and too precise and too good and now she was whimpering. They'd done this before and why didn't she remember how good it felt, how incredible his tongue was and she would have ripped the sheets apart if she could have, her hands clawing into the mattress. She was almost there and then he slowed down and he picked up speed again and slowed down again and she was a gasping wreck; she would have begged him if she could have put the words together.

Two fingers inside her, then three, moving in and out slowly, his tongue fast and that was when she came, falling apart, calling his name. He shimmied up and curled himself around her and she held on and let her heart slow down. She almost asked if the taste of blood had been a problem, but then remembered that she was dating a werewolf and decided she didn't want to know.

"How are you?" he asked.

"Oh. Good. Lots of goodness. Goodness all over the place. You?"

"Lots of goodness."

His hand lazy up and down her spine, just stroking, reminding her that he was there. Later they'd get up and get dressed and try to look respectable when her mother came home. But not now. Now they'd lie here and maybe they'd sleep and Willow would think that this, the pleasure of lying naked in someone's arms, with his heart playing backbeat under her ear and his smell imprinted all over her and the knowledge, certain, that he loved her-it was worth all the horrors she'd seen.