DISCLAIMER: It's all because of JKR. I'm a K, but I'm missing the requisite JR to be hailed for the majesty that is the Harry Potter series. Cover art by viria13.
Hello, all! I just wanted to let any of my followers who are reading this know that DON'T WORRY, I am still working on ARE. I just felt like writing/posting some honest-to-goodness Jily smut, and this particular scene is a bit premature for what's happening in ARE right now. There's a lot of the same characterization here, but that's because, you know, this is just how I imagine Lily and James to interact with each other; those things tend to stick, so some of this might ring rather familiar for those of you who have read ARE so far.
Okay, that's it, so here we go. –K.
It Happened in a Broom Cupboard
It was nine o'clock on a Thursday evening, and James Potter was not happy.
It was odd, because James Potter was – more often than not – very happy, bouncing-on-the-balls-of-his-feet, heart-as-light-as-air, skipping-down-the-corridors, whistling-as-he-walked, no-holding-back happy. So the fact that he wasn't happy was very odd indeed.
James wasn't sure if he liked it – no, in fact, he was quite sure he didn't – but he'd had a lot to be unhappy about lately (more than usual, anyway).
Some things were just minor annoyances. For one thing, being Head Boy sometimes made him feel like a great big prat, but who wouldn't feel that way? Two years ago he'd been hanging Snivellus upside-down, Vanishing his pants, laughing uproariously with Sirius, and now – suddenly – bam! – he was filling out disciplinary slips and telling people to be quiet in the library. Reasonably speaking, James knew that this shouldn't have bothered him; he still caused trouble and snuck around and outside the castle and had a laugh with his mates, but his unhappiness was such that he was determined to hang on to every little thing.
It wasn't all just little things, of course. It was January, which meant their exams – their N.E.W.T.s, the most important exams of their young lives – were looming ever nearer, the days and weeks ticking by so quickly that James wondered who the hell had been elected to manage time and why whoever-the-hell-it-was was such a sadistic prick.
And with the ever-looming nature of the exams, there was the ever-looming pressure of the war outside. He saw it every day – attacks on London, attacks on Muggles, attacks on Muggle-borns and whoever had the audacity to stand up for them, pureblood or half-blood or any-sort-of-blood. It didn't matter what sort of blood you had if it was traitorous in the eyes of the Death Eaters.
James paused his purposeful walk long enough to take a swift, violent kick at the plinth of a nearby knight. Protectors, knights, heroes… It had all begun to sound insanely romantic to him, and it was the sort of romance that only completely, utterly, totally mad idiots got themselves caught up in. Unfortunately enough for James, he was one of those completely, utterly, totally mad idiots who'd gotten himself caught up in it. So tack that on to the ever-growing list of reasons why he was so unhappy.
At the top of that list, though – before his self-esteem and the exams and the war and how big of an idiot everyone was – at the top of that list was his girlfriend. She was the reason he was fuming, the reason he'd been mulling over all those things that came after her on that list, the reason he was marching up and down the corridors at nine o'clock on a Thursday evening, because she was on rounds and he had to talk to her right now so she knew how incredibly unhappy he was with her.
He found her on the seventh floor in the middle of a corridor on the right-hand side, sitting on the floor and bouncing a green ball – a tennis ball, James thought she'd called it – across the corridor so it hit the opposite wall and bounced back to her. Sometimes Lily Evans was very bad at doing rounds.
Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. Catch.
James started down the corridor towards her, trying to remember his anger when it smacked him in the face how pretty she was. He had a tendency to deliberately forget that whenever he felt like being cross with her, but it only worked when he wasn't about to confront her.
Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. Catch. Bounce.
It was all hitting him repeatedly over the head now – the way the curtain of her crimson hair fell around her face, the way one thin finger tucked it behind one ear (and oh, the things he could do to the flesh behind that ear), her bright green eyes and the way they lit up when she laughed at him, the way her pupils dilated when they kissed, the pale peach of her skin that blushed whenever she caught him staring, the pale peach skin that he knew would be incredibly soft beneath his fingertips and increasingly hot beneath his lips…
Bounce. Bounce. Catch.
No. James shook his head. He was mad at her, furious because she could be even more incredibly stupid than he was sometimes, and she wasn't allowed to be stupid, that was his thing –
Bounce. Bounce. This time it was James who caught the ball as it bounced its happy way back to Lily. She smiled up at him, candy pink lips separated by pearly white teeth – pearly white teeth that knew how to bite, but James tried not to think about that because he was mad – her eyes lighting up the way he knew they would, and he almost caved. Almost.
"Evening, love," she said, and her voice washed over him like sweet sweet honey, drowning him in its intoxicating melody with just two words, three syllables.
But he was mad at her.
He bounced the ball. Bounce. Catch. Pocketed.
"I need to talk to you," he said, short and unsmiling.
"Okay." Totally unaware of the storm raging inside her boyfriend's head and his inner battle between yell-at-her-til-you're-hoarse and kiss-her-til-you're-senseless, Lily pushed herself up off the floor. She leaned back against the wall and blinked up at him, inviting him to continue talking even though she was really thinking about inviting him to do a lot more.
James took a deep breath and ruffled his hair. He stared at the corner of her left eyebrow because he'd found that was somehow the easiest way to keep himself from latching onto her mouth and clutching at her hips and pushing her up against the stone wall and –
"Right," James said, shaking himself of these thoughts (or so he told himself, but he'd never been the best shaker of those thoughts). "So. You."
Lily offered him a small, crooked, confused smile. "Me."
He scowled. "Don't be cute."
"I'm not being cute," Lily said, beginning to realize James's clipped tone and stiff posture and clenched fists. Well, well, well, she thought, somebody's testy.
"Yes, you are."
"No, I'm not. You're being cryptic. What's your problem?"
"You." James uncurled one fist long enough to point a finger at her. "You're my problem."
Lily snorted. "Oh, well, that's nice."
"You're doing it again!"
"Well, I wouldn't if you'd just tell me what your real problem is," Lily snapped, her own annoyance flaring now (James ignored the way a pink tinge crept up her neck – mad, mad, mad, he was mad, he couldn't think about pulling her into a broom cupboard right now). "I was just sitting here, you know, and then you come storming up the corridor in a right bad temper and start a row with me about something I'm not even aware of because you're being deliberately obtuse!"
"Not even aware of?" James repeated incredulously. "Don't be thick, Lily, you know what you did!"
Lily took three steps forward so she could jam her finger into James's chest, knocking him back half a step in his surprise and her anger.
"Don't you insult me, James Potter," she said, her voice low and dangerous and that pink tinge creeping up over her face now. "Don't accuse me of being thick just because you're too much of an arse to tell me why you're being such an arse."
"Well, you are thick!" James shouted. The corridor was deserted, he could shout if he wanted to and he wanted to. "If you hadn't noticed, we go to Hogwarts; news tends to travel pretty fast here. I don't know what you were thinking this afternoon, trying to take on Mulciber and Avery and Snape all at once –"
"Is that what this is about?" Lily resisted the urge to smack him repeatedly upside the head. That's what this was about, and she was the thick one? "Are you kidding me, James? Tell me you're kidding. And by the way, I didn't try, I did. It wasn't hard, you know Avery and Mulciber are right idiots, even bigger idiots than you're being right now –"
"It was three on one and you did it on purpose!"
"Of course I did it on purpose! They'd ganged up on Alice for no reason; she was absolutely pouring blood, hardly in a position to defend herself, so of course I pulled my wand on them on purpose!"
"It's all fine and good to be noble," James said (he was having trouble keeping it together as he thought of how everyone had described Alice's injuries and how they very well could have been Lily's injuries, too), "but it was three on one. You can't take those odds."
Lily had to fight the urge to laugh derisively. "Oh, don't you talk to me about being noble," she said. "That's rich, that is, James Potter telling someone else not to play the hero, telling someone else they 'can't take those odds,' you hypocrite."
"I –" James started to say, even though he didn't quite know where he was going with that, but it didn't matter anyway because Lily was still talking.
"And it was more like two on one; you know Snape never tries to hex me."
James thought he might tear his hair out. "Are you deliberately trying to rile me up now?"
Lily rolled her eyes. Not this old song and dance again… "Oh, excuse me," her voice managing that dry sarcasm she was so good at whenever they bickered about this, "I forgot about your insane and baseless jealousy –"
"Baseless?" James hardly thought so, not after all the time Lily used to spend with Snape, not after the way Snape always looked at her, it was enough to make him physically ill. "It's not baseless, Lily –"
"If you hadn't noticed, I'm dating you!"
"You weren't always dating me!"
"Oh, well, excuse me again for not always having been at your beck and call –"
"Merlin, Lily." James clutched at his hair again so it stood more erratically on-end than usual. "That's not what we're supposed to be arguing about!"
"You're the one who brought it up," Lily grumbled; although she had to agree with the one sensible point James had made so far, she still thought this whole thing was mad. And to think, before all this she'd been planning on grabbing him by the neck of his shirt and dragging him into the nearest broom cupboard. "So, what, you want to keep having a go at me because I defended my mate?"
"No, I want to keep having a go at you because you're not supposed to be that stupid."
"Ugh!" Lily shoved him. "I did the same thing you would've done, which, yeah, generally is a pretty stupid thing to do, but –"
"You don't have to shove me, you know –"
Lily took a deep breath and glared at him, her heart ramming furiously against her ribcage. She wasn't sure if it was because she was angry with him or because fighting with him was oddly… sort of… Well. But she was too angry with him to entertain those ideas; she had to distract herself somehow.
"You're right," she said, and her voice was so suddenly calm that James felt compelled to take a step away from her. She pulled her wand out of her sleeve and pointed it casually at his throat.
James swallowed, eyeing her wand warily; he'd been on the receiving end of one too many of her hexes to not take this seriously. Lily was immensely satisfied by the nervous glint in his eye and the way his Adam's apple did a panicked little up-and-down bob.
"What – er, what are you doing with that?"
"This?" Lily flourished her wand a little. "Oh, it's nothing. I'm just about to do to you what I did to the lot of them. You know, the three against my one who I cursed right into the hospital wing. Nothing to worry about, love, nothing at all…"
James had to smile a little at that, but it was a smile mostly born of nerves and maybe a little bit of… Well. Lily was very – well – whenever she started threatening him like this. James thought himself to be barking mad, of course, but he couldn't help the way his pulse skittered around in his throat and his wrists whenever Lily pulled her wand on him and got so cheeky about it. And of course he'd been shouting at her all this while, trying to get those voices in his head to shut up, the ones that hissed and whispered and egged him on about how his time with her would be much better spent in the close confines of a broom cupboard.
"I could think of a few other things you could do to me, actually," he said, and Lily saw his Adam's apple do another one of those up-and-down bobs, but that didn't stop James from offering her a mischievous grin.
"You're completely warped in the head if you think I'm even considering that now," Lily said, even though of course she was considering – more than considering it, really, because as irritated as she was with him, she could think of much better ways to work out that frustration.
"Come on, Evans," James said, his voice low, convincing, and he banked his trepidation of the end of her wand and took a step forward. "I think I've shouted myself out of it now."
Lily felt her heart ramming somewhere in the vicinity of her throat now. She'd never say it out loud but, Merlin, she loved when he called her by her surname. It reminded her of all those times they'd fought before, all those times he'd asked her out and she'd shot him down even though, really, most of the time even that arrogant little berk had made her heart skip and her knees weak and, all right, so she'd had a dream about him every now and then –
"Right, then." Lily caught James by the collar of his shirt like she'd wanted to do all along and dragged him toward the broom cupboard at the end of the corridor. She yanked the door open and shoved him inside and slammed the door behind them and pretended that she didn't find that self-satisfied little smirk of his unbearably attractive.
"Still mad at me, Evans?" James wanted to know. His hands were at her shoulders, rubbing them, tugging at the material of her blouse, pushing her gently and almost imperceptibly against one wall, kicking over a mop and a bucket but not really hearing the clatter they made as they hit the floor because the blood was pounding so loudly in both their heads.
He leaned down and worked his mouth over her neck, from the bottom to the top and dipping down to that spot behind her ear, the one he'd been so distracted by when he'd come by her in the corridor. Teeth nipped, tongue flicked, lips sucked.
"You're a right big prat, James Potter," Lily muttered, but her fingers were tangled in his hair and her back arched against him as his hands slid over her waist and across her ribcage and down her hips.
"Don't I know it," James murmured, his parted lips planting open-mouthed kisses along her jaw. "And you're a right compulsive little prig." His lips dropped down to her throat, working deliciously at her pulse point, behind which he could feel those insistent, delighted little nerves as they pounded against muscle and skin. He sighed, his breath tickling her flesh and raising goosebumps down her arms. "I was so worried about you, Lily, you have no idea."
"I can take care of myself." Lily's hands slid from his hair down to his belt loops, hooking her fingers through them and tugging him flush against her.
"I know, love." James's mouth was moving back up her throat. He nipped at her chin and hovered a breath away from her lips. "But I'm always going to worry about you and I'm always going to be a right big prat about it."
"Well, as long as you know."
And then she tugged at his shirt and his mouth was on hers – open and hot and still a little frustrated, all teeth and tongues, hands grabbing, fingers stroking, nails scratching. James pushed his body into hers and Lily was slammed more firmly against the wall, standing on her toes and winding her arms around his neck, blood pounding in both their heads and heat building between their legs.
"I'm still so mad at you," Lily said furiously against his lips.
"No, you're not." James pushed her skirt up.
"Furious." Lily ripped his shirt open, not caring about the buttons that popped off. "I'd even go so far as to say I'm beginning to hate you again."
"You don't." James massaged his hands over her thighs and moaned at the feel of her skin against his. "Tell me you love me."
"Not a chance." Lily bit his ear.
"Lily." James's hands were roaming over everywhere, his fingers tugging at that thin but troublesome material beneath her skirt until it slid down her legs and around her ankles and she kicked it away. "Tell me."
"No." Lily tugged the zipper of his trousers down.
At the touch of her provocative hands and the brush of her insistent fingers, James couldn't help himself and he thrust his hips into hers; Lily dipped those insistent fingers into the open zipper of his trousers and through the flap of his boxers and her skin was warm against his and his was hot against hers and her hands were stroking…
James groaned and bit her bottom lip. He ripped her shirt open, just as careless and unforgiving about her buttons as she'd been about his. His callused hands were rough against that smooth, pale peach skin and Lily felt her stomach explode in a thousand drug-charged butterflies when his thumbs grazed the underside of her bra and his tongue moved over the roof of her mouth before tangling with hers again, deepening the kiss and swallowing her moan.
"Lily…" Her name was a sigh – a hoarse, rough sigh that was breathed into her mouth. His lips tore away from hers and he growled in her ear, "Tell me you love me, you need me, you want me."
Lily whimpered as James's hands massaged the tops of her thighs, moving in small slow circles, moving ever closer to the heat that was emanating from between her legs. He slipped a finger inside of her, then two, matching the rhythm of his mouth and her hand – up, down, suck, caress, nip, twitch, suck, up, down…
"I love you," James told her, his mouth trailing over her face, her temples, her forehead. "I need you, I want you, right here, now, against the wall of this broom cupboard."
"Damn it, James." Lily moaned and took her hand from his trousers so she could properly grip his hair. His fingers were still working inside her, moving with such a persistent, steady pace and it was driving her up-the-wall mad and she couldn't concentrate, she was seeing stars and her whole body was being engulfed in flame.
James smirked as his mouth teased the corner of hers. His skin was heating up, his blood boiling, heart pounding, his senses heightened – she was so soft and warm and responsive, moving against him, those little moans sounding deep in her throat, and her skin smelled like vanilla and her hair smelled like honey and she tasted – oh, Merlin, she tasted like chocolate and peppermint and his taste buds were tingling and his nerves were shooting up and down, sending jolts of pleasure through his body. He slipped his fingers out of her and thrust his hips against hers and there were two sharp intakes of breath and Lily felt the electricity shoot up her spine and explode, raining down through her veins to tingle at the tips of her fingers and toes.
"I love you." Lily's voice was breathless, her eyes half-closed and her lips swollen. James gripped her just behind the knees and she wrapped her legs around his waist.
"I'm mad about you," she went on, fingers twisted in his messy hair. She trailed open-mouthed kisses over his neck. James thrust his hips again and he groaned and she whimpered as he entered and started moving inside of her. "I need you, I want you."
James's breathing was already ragged and shallow and on the verge of complete breathlessness as he moved inside of her, hands still clutching at her legs that tightened around his waist with every thrust, as Lily's lips moved over him and she whispered endearments in his ear, her breath hot against his flesh, her chest increasingly warm against his, and her could feel her heart pounding, matching his own beat – quick and erratic and take-your-foot-off-the-brakes kind of speed.
"James." His name fluttered over his ear and his body responded, pumping faster, and Lily moaned again – that intoxicating, irresistible sound – and her fingers wound more tightly in his hair and she crushed her mouth against his, pushing his lips apart with her tongue and kissing him deeply, so deeply and sweetly. James's body was shuddering and he was sure, so sure, that he was going to unravel at her touch. Lily moved against him, hips rocking – up, down, up, down – her thigh muscles clenching involuntarily as he went faster, harder, his short fingernails digging into the sensitive flesh at the back of her legs.
Lily couldn't take anymore; she was so tightly wound, like a spring that couldn't be coiled any further, and her body shuddered and she felt like she really was exploding, into a thousand million stars and James's name was an oath as it escaped her lips. James followed a moment later, his body draining completely, unraveling like he knew it would because it was Lily and she'd always been able to wind him up and then loosen those binds with a snap of her fingers. His heart clamored to escape his chest and Lily's name was a prayer as it escaped his lips.
James buried his head in Lily's shoulder, taking in her scent and her taste as he kissed her absently along the slope of her shoulder, trying to slow his breathing and get his heartbeat back in order. Lily's legs uncurled from around his waist and she dropped back down to her toes. She dipped her head and pressed her lips to the pulse point at the base of his throat.
"We should fight more often," she murmured, her lips brushing against his skin.
James laughed and ran his hands over her back. "Perhaps tomorrow I'll do something reckless and you can come storming down the corridor during my rounds, yeah?"
"Or I'll just overreact about something you haven't really done wrong," Lily said, rolling her eyes.
"I don't know what you're talking about, Evans."
"Mhmm." Lily started re-buttoning her shirt. "James, we're bad at rounds."
"Buttons too, apparently."
"Definitely buttons too."
Five minutes later, Lily and James stumbled out of the broom cupboard, buttons missing from their shirts, skin flushed, eyes bright and pupils dilated, James's glasses askew and a slight violet spot blooming near Lily's collarbone. James snapped the door back into place behind them and pulled out his wand.
"What are you doing?" Lily asked as she watched him move his wand in short little strokes across the wood, a bright gold light flaring with every motion before it sizzled out and smoked a little.
"Marking the occasion." James grinned.
Lily peeked over his shoulder and saw the words he'd etched into the inside of the doorframe: L.E. + J.P.
"How very Muggle of you," she said and kissed the back of his neck.
"I have my moments."
They started down the corridor then. James took Lily's hand and swung it up to his mouth, moving his parted lips over her wrist and she smelled like honey. Lily pressed her smile against his temple and intertwined her fingers with hers. The pounding in their heads from all the frustration-turned-lust had subsided, but the butterflies were still there – fluttering, nestling back into the pits of both their stomachs until the next time one of them happened to catch the other staring.
It was ten-thirty on a Thursday evening, and James Potter was happy. Very happy. Bouncing-on-the-balls-of-his-feet, heart-as-light-as-air, skipping-down-the-corridors, whistling-as-he-walked, no-holding-back happy. But he supposed that that was just the Lily Evans in his system.