Buffy the Shemale Vampire Slayer Part 3

"Fine. Promise not to tell?"

He didn't look fine, she thought. He looked sick. "Sure."

"Buffy, no one can know. Not Willow, not Giles, not Anya, not-"

"No one's going to know," Buffy assured him. "What someone does in the privacy of his own home is totally his business." Buffy was watching her friend closely as she spoke to him, and now she frowned. "Xander? Is that a tear I see? Are you crying?"

He wiped the teardrop away. "I'm sorry," he said, his voice breaking. He sobbed, the tears coming fast and furiously. His frame shook, and a keening, wailing sound seemed to emanate from the depths of his being.

Buffy crossed the room, holding him. Although he was naked, she hardly noticed, and neither of them cared. Xander was too frightened and ashamed to care, and Buffy was too concerned. She held him the way that a mother might hold a frightened child, cooing soothingly to him. "It's all right, Xander," she whispered. "It's all right."

"It's been so hard living a lie all these years," he confessed between the sobs that wracked his body. "I've wanted to tell you, tell Willow, tell Giles, tell the others. I wanted to tell everyone so many times."

"It's all right," Buffy repeated softly.

"No one can ever know," Buffy. "I'm so ashamed."

"There's no need to be ashamed," Buffy assured him. "We are who we are, Xander."

He continued to weep; she continued to hold him.

"Willow's gay," Buffy reminded him, "but that doesn't make us love her any the less."

That was true, Xander thought, but their knowing that Willow was a lesbian had changed their relationships as friends. Although he and Buffy loved Willow just as much as they ever had before she'd announced her lesbianism, their friendship was different now in some ways, and it always would be, just as his friendship with Buffy had been irrevocably changed by her discovery of his bisexuality.