"I don’t get it," Willow once said to him. "What do the two of you even have in common? Do you ever just sit around and talk? Or is it just about the making out in closets and parked cars?"

"Of course we talk!" Xander said, and mostly it was true, because he and Cordy, they talked. They bitched about teachers, moaned about homework. Cordy told him more than he ever wanted to know about Harmony and Aura, and up-and-coming fashions. Xander said things like, Buffy this, and Willow that, and interspersed it all with the occasional, Demon!  Only then, after those sorts of pleasantries were out of the way, did they usually start making out.

What they didn’t have, though—what Xander hadn’t even known they’d needed—was silence. If Willow had asked him that, "Do you guys ever just sit around and be silent together?" he probably would have still said, yes, of course. But that, at least, wouldn’t have been true.

Not until today.

It happened like this: He and Cordy, they were leaving the library after school, after his research and her cheerleading practice, and Harmony came up to them and said, "You aren’t really going to take him home to meet your parents, are you? I was just joking about that earlier. I didn’t think you’d actually take me seriously."

Cordy, to her credit, didn’t freeze. She said, "Ha, ha, very funny," but her smile was tight enough and thin enough that Xander knew it was really a ‘fuck you.’

Harmony knew it, too, because she smiled even more widely than before and said, "Oh, Xander, didn’t you know? Cordy told her parents about you last night. Her mother was trying to set her up with Ty Covington—you know, of Covington Park, Covington Raceway, Covington Street fame?—because apparently he broke up with Missy Perry, and apparently he remembered Cordy from a pool party they were all at last summer, and—"

"Enough, Harmony," Cordelia said. Then, "Come on, Xander. We have places to be."

Xander, very smartly, did not say, "We do?" Instead, he nodded and said, with a hopefully definitive nod, "Uh, yeah. We do."

It wasn’t until they were in Cordelia’s car and she was backing out of her parking space that he spoke again. "You, uh, told your parents about me? Like, told them who I was and everything? I didn’t suddenly become a multi-millionaire or the star of the football team, did I?" The hard twist that she gave the steering wheel was as effective a way of shutting him up as her actually saying the words, so he took the hint and said, "Sorry."

And then there was the silence. It wasn’t a comfortable silence, not by a long shot. Cordy was staring hard at the road as she drove, her knuckles white with the force with which she was holding onto the wheel, and her lips were pressed together, the heels of her shoes tapping along to the beat of the music coming through the speakers.

This was when Xander realized that he didn’t do so well with silence, because the longer they didn’t talk, the more twitchy he became. Finally, he couldn’t take it any longer. "Maybe I should be saying ‘thank you’. For not dumping me for Ty Covington."

"I didn’t do it for you," Cordy said. "Ty is a—Last summer, he— I—"

And now she was biting at her bottom lip, smearing her lipstick, and Xander knew that there was a whole lot more to this than Ty. Out of the corner of his eye he saw green, saw that they were passing by one of Sunnydale’s parks—thankfully not Covington Park, that would have just been too much—and he said, "Turn in here, okay? Park somewhere for a few minutes."

Cordelia looked at him as if he was crazy, but she did as he asked. Turned sharply, drove a few hundred feet, and then pulled into the nearest parking spot. "Okay, what," she said after she’d turned the key in the ignition. "What are we doing here?

"You’re going to calm down," Xander said. "You’re going to take a few deep breaths, and if you want to tell me what’s really going on, you can do that, too. Or we can just sit here."

"I don’t need—" she started, but he reached out and placed a finger on her lips. "Breathe," he said. She looked at him, stared at him, and amazingly enough, did as he asked. She relaxed a little bit, leaning her head against the headrest, but somehow Xander knew that wasn’t what she needed.

He wasn’t quite sure what she needed, actually, given that she’d told her parents about him which he’d never in a million years expected her to do, but he wanted to be closer to her, so he unbuckled his seatbelt and scooted as close to the center of the car as he could. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her towards him. She resisted for a moment, but then her head came down on his shoulder, her hair brushing his neck.

This was something new and different, Xander thought, because while the earlier silence had made him twitchy, he was actually sort of liking this one. It was far more comfortable, like how he imagined silences were supposed to be between boyfriends and girlfriends. They just sat there, with her staring out the window in front of them, and him rubbing her arm up and down, up and down, for several minutes, maybe five, maybe ten. Heck, it might have even been twenty. Whatever it was, though, it was good.

Finally, Cordy said, "I wouldn’t date Ty Covington even if I wasn’t dating you. Last summer at the pool party, I overheard him talking to one of his friends about his now ex, and okay, I mean, yes, she is a bitch, but so am I, and how could I expect that he wouldn’t start saying those same sorts of things about me? I have to have some standards, you know."

"And you told your mother this?"

Cordy nodded against his shoulder. "I told her that, but she wouldn’t let it go. So in a fit of honesty, I said that I was already seeing someone who treated me well, and that I was happy, and no, that he might not have the money or the connections, but I’m 17. I told her that I was old enough to make my own decisions, and to hell with Ty Covington."

"To hell with him," Xander echoed, which made Cordy giggle. She also sat up and undid her own seatbelt and turned to face him.

"I don’t want you thinking that I’m making some sort of grand commitment here," she continued, "because if Brad Pitt shows up here, wanting me, you are so gone."

"I can live with being thrown over for Brad Pitt," Xander said, even though Cordy had kept right on talking.

"But for now, I’m happy. And as I told Harmony, I’m going to date whomever the hell I want to date." Then Cordelia truly seemed to notice where they were—deserted park, car—and said, "You do realize we’ve been in this car for almost half an hour now, and you haven’t kissed me once?" Her grin was no longer tight, but rather loose and wide. "What’s a girl gotta do to get that situation rectified?"

"Nothing," Xander said, and then he kissed her, and as her lips moved against his, he thought she might be saying ‘thank you.’