Spike: Love Him or Hate Him
Despite his resentment, he still has hope. Hope that Buffy can look past the vampire and love the man, just as she did with Angel, her first love.
BUFFY: (calmer) I have feelings for you. I do. But it's not love. I could never trust you enough for it to be love. SPIKE: (laughing) Trust is for old marrieds, Buffy. (Buffy rolling her eyes) Great love is wild ... and passionate and dangerous. It burns and consumes.
The love Spike describes is a mirror of the love he had with Dru - and is his only reference since Dru was Spike's first real love (I view Cecily as more of a painful crush). As though to prove it to her, Spike begins the foreplay that has been typical of the two in the past - violent, painful, lustful. And yet this time around Buffy doesn't want a part of it, and it turns into an attempted rape before Spike realizes he's gone too far.
But as soon as he snaps back to reality and attempts to apologize, she bitterly says, "Ask me again why I could never love you." A horrified Spike leaves Buffy's house and goes back to his crypt. In a conversation he has with his demon friend Clem, he says, "We were never together. Not really. She'd never lower herself that far." - showing that Cecily began the cycle of self-doubt in William that lives on in Spike. Cecily and Buffy both have told William/Spike that he's not worthy, that he's beneath them.
So at the end of Season Six he decides to "give [Buffy] what she deserves." And he gets his soul back. And now begins Season Seven, and already the Spike apologists are out proclaiming Spike's ultimate redemption based on the season's second episode "Beneath You". The final scene is a powerful one, in which an insane Spike finally tells Buffy that he has a soul. In the premiere episode "Lessons", Buffy finds a nearly incoherent Spike in the basement of the new Sunnydale High School. She has no idea that he has a soul, and that the remembrances of all the evil he has done is being played out like a movie in his mind (as it did for Angel in "Amends" (S3)).
But Spike admits his latest acquisition, which horrifies Buffy. What does this mean? she surely asked herself. Buffy has to remember that she and her friends easily forgave
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