In the end, I ran.
I ran and I kept running, "through three counties", I later joked. Then I realized no one was coming after me, so I came back. I don't really know why. Well, for Buffy, obviously, but I can't kid, at that point I was the last thing on her mind. She did ask how I was, though. Maybe if Xander hadn't been there...but, no, she could only think about Angel--excuuuse me, "Angelus" (stupid pretentious name)--and if I crossed her mind at all, it was only because he brought me back into it.
After all, that's why he sent them at us, Drusilla and her little band of vampires. Even though that Caribbean girl got killed and Willow ended up in a coma and Xander got a broken arm and Giles got kidnapped, I knew they were after me. Because Angel...us (whatever!) was upset that I had what he didn't--Buffy. Except that I never really had her. With us, it was just sex.
In the end, she ran. When the world didn't end, I knew she had won, and I waited at the hospital and then followed Giles and Willow back to the school, waiting for the moment she'd show up and tell me that she'd done it for me, that she really did feel something, that what we had wasn't just a series of mistakes or an attempt to try something new or a way to forget him. Waited for her to act like the Buffy I thought she was, when I wasn't cursing her for making me feel all stupid or getting sick from watching her brood over Mr. Vampy and his going evil. Waited for absolutely nothing to happen.
Eventually we found out. I went to her house (I told Xander that Willow needed him to stay with her, because Oz couldn't do it all himself) and I talked to her mom and she showed me the note. It wasn't actually addressed to her mother and, as I looked at it, I could almost make myself believe she had really written it for me.
"I'm sorry," the note said, "but I have to do this. I have to get away. I can't stay here any longer--there's nothing for me here." And that was it, she didn't even sign it. No "love, Buffy", no "Buffy". No Buffy at all.
It was stupid, I know, for me to expect that she would have come to me, let me kiss her again, let me wrap her in my arms and hold on, like I did before. There was "nothing" for her here, and that's what I was to Buffy. Nothing.
I shouldn't have been surprised. We never said "I love you", we never talked about coming out. Heck, most of the time we didn't even like each other. Okay, so sometimes I told myself that being with someone even though you don't like them, that's actually proof that you love them (did I mention that I was dating Xander? That's almost my Buffy story in miniature, me and Xander). But I was just kidding myself. Buffy didn't love me, ever.
In the end, it was just sex.