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Lover, lover, lover, let's pretend we were born as innocents
Cast into the world with apple eyes
...We understand we can't be understood
-Smashing Pumpkins
She twists and unfurls with you like smoke and peeling orange rind and the broken, cataclysmic metaphors fed to you by the pseudo-poetry in your head. You hold her in both hands and breathe shallow glass shards. Her teeth are clenched, locked behind the orange red of her bright, bright mouth and her wild, undulating hair.
"Let go of me, Potter!"
You sigh—so dramatic, so misused—and release the neon-wired wrist you'd been holding. She's gone in a flash of orgasmic hair and grass-blade ankles; you hear her tell some friend—brown hair, blue eyes, big, bobbing breasts—that it was just "fucktard Potter".
It's after Potions and you'd wanted to talk to her.
It's hot and she's fucking breathtaking and it isn't your fault your fumbling teenage romanticism gets the better of you sometimes.
But you have a desperate streak meters wide and romance tumbles in your boiling blood and these day to day skirmishes are your hopeless, heady version of fucking Lily Evans.
You like to sit behind her in Potions and fancy no one understands you.
(Because everyone knows no one ever had trouble getting the girl.)
It's easier that way, to be the floppy-haired prototype, the boy brooding over the masterpiece concatenation of glittering atoms known as Evans—just Evans, because Lily is too bright and regal for your Potter mouth.
It's easier to be the only, the first—a prototype rather an archetype. It depresses you to think that there were other yous—other boys with glasses and sharp canines and vulnerable, vulnerable eyes.
But there was never another her. You know that, know it because newness throbs in every nucleus of every atom of her hard white body.
She turns around. Sees you staring.
"What?"
You give her the singsong smile that's only skin deep, playful and arrogant and meaningless. The smile of an innocent first, of a princeling.
"I'm hopelessly in love with you, Evans."
"Fuck off, Potter."
But no—no, her bored expletives are a grasping teenage boy's come ons, and you throw out another casual reveal, hurriedly lewd.
"I wanna bang you into next Tuesday, Evans."
The words fuck you are written in the pale orange freckles of her cheeks; she's not impressed, and she doesn't blush.
"That's cute."
Nothing—she doesn't care—she knows you're spouting off words in a made up language to fill the space between and around you. Your wildest, kinkiest fantasy explodes out of your mouth like an awkward pick up line.
"I want to marry you someday, Evans."
She sighs. Turns, and you're left staring at the blue-rimmed shadows of her shoulderblades.
"You'll get over it."
You roll a shoulder up and down and pretend you already have.
You have a conviction that the two of you could be art.
You are only a face and a name, but her hair swings and pulls around the burning white of her throat as she runs and you want to be entangled in her glory.
She allows you to kiss her because she's tired of you.
Shes smart—too smart, too damn smart—and she's seen that you get a thrill out of her grenade-launched profanity and wild, redhead anger…so she's started dealing with you with a languid, cigarette-smoke boredom, telling you in raised reddish eyebrows to go procreate with the Giant Squid.
Which finally culminates in her tiring of your pointless game of 'darts in the dark', of the haphazard tossing of tired jabs, and saying wearily:
"Just kiss me already, Potter. Get it over with."
You blink, all crooked glasses and innocence.
"What?"
"Do it. Stop dicking around with me and kiss me."
It's a sad excuse for the breathless story you have in your head—in which Adam and Eve, nee Lily and James, live in naked solitude in a private Eden—but it's all you have and you go for it, determined to convince her of the raw, aching perfection you two would have together.
Your lips bump into hers. You gape. Her eyes are slightly, impatiently open, and she waits.
Fuck it all, you are not in Gryffindor for nothing.
Your hands grab at chunks of her hair and slide onto her cool pale neck and you gasp and groan and work impatiently at her motionless mouth
Which is suddenly no longer motionless because she starts—shivers—shivers—like the lust-sweat beading on your own neck as you kiss the girl who makes you an artist.
Evans chafes her mouth against yours and your muscles clench at your raw, pitiful skeleton in savage glee at the way her own hands are moving up your arm—thumping,
Groping onto your back
And you can't breathe, don't want to, what the hell would you do with oxygen unless it's sucked directly from her heaving scarlet lungs and you're never uncurling your fingers from her red hair and her white neck and wild, bewildering soul.
She pulls away. Looks at you with envy green eyes, considering.
You breathe your heart out for her, pulling your own soul out of your lungs as, high on lips and endorphins and an erection, you try to convince her.
"Lily, Lily, we could be so much—we're like the fucking—what's it called—the Mona Lisa…and it's insane, but I'm telling you, we're like—we're like—we're like creation."
Her eyebrows go up, almost laughing at you, but at the same time she's breathless like you are and the eyes are wide, wide, wide.
"What?"
She doesn't get it, doesn't get it, but she has to, has to see what the two of you could be…
"I dunno," you finish, lamely, your courage lost in the space of her slightly open mouth. "I—I dunno…I just…we just…I feel like we could transcend, you know?"
"James," she begins, her voice a motherly don't tell stories. But you stop her, bleeding out the foolish truth from your helpless, hapless lips.
"I'm not joking, I swear…we could…it's art, or something…"
But she's a doubting Thomas to your garbled Gospel and she walks off, bewildered, saying that she's going to be late.
She leaves you, and the transcendentalism vanishes, leaving you once more a skin-deep serial dater in throbbing, adolescent love.
Later, in the Common Room, Sirius regards your pensive, boy-genius brow with suspicion.
"Who died?"
"Bugger off. I'm thinking."
Sirius doesn't bugger; he slides onto the couch beside you, sympathetic yet slightly mocking.
"Oh, yes? What of, Potter boy? Red hair and a freckled rack?"
"No."
"Yes."
"Go away."
Your best mate sighs—looks at you—bored with the whole scenario. He's seen your 'futile artist' moods many times before.
"Look, if you're going to wank on about it…talk to her or something. Your pensiveness is boring."
Deep in your role now, you shrug—so damn misunderstood—and mumble that it's not that simple before going tritely to bed.
You find her crying the next day, hunched in defensively on herself: blurry, bright mouth, salty cheeks, pink, wet eyes. You stop, because shit you don't know what to do with crying girls and awkwardness bangs against your bones.
"Uh…hey."
Her chin dips down, hiding her weakness, and you want to hold tight, tight at something because Lily, Lily, Lily, please don't close off…
"Evans," you mumble, back to stiff surnames. "Evans, what's wrong?"
"Sod off, Potter," she says, fierce and damp and so lovely your lungs tighten hopelessly, because she can't, can't be for you.
"Evans, c'mon, what happened?" Then, recalling black hair and pointed, needle smiles, you say, with heartening disgust:
"It's him, isn't it? You two had a row?"
She doesn't answer and her hair falls, startling and titian, into her pale, streaked face. You're crouched beside her now, and your fumbling hand lands lightly on her hair, an astronaut on a new planet.
"I hate him," she says, shoving the words out between her sharp, locked teeth. "I hate…I hate him. I hate what he's doing!" Her voice rises, up and sharp and shattering, orgasmic and glassy. You put a heavy, hesitant arm around her and brace yourself for the ride.
"I don't even know…he acts like…I just hate him! Him and those fucking pigs of friends he's got…act like I'm fucking nobody…and he's…he's acting like them and I..I thought he'd be different…I thought people were different…"
There's a pause as your hand goes up and down her back and her wild, loose hair, filling the space and the time and the emptiness in her wide, wide eyes. You wish you knew what to do, what to say…you wish you had something stellar and lovely, something warm, fuck, something right…
But all you have are awkward hands and a weak, weak wanting to make it stop.
"You can't change him," you say, cape-clad Captain Obvious.
"I know," she says. "But I…I just hoped…"
A sob rips its way up her throat, out from her heaving, shuddering abdomen. You say nothing and rub her back and wish you had Sirius's talent with girls.
Finally, she speaks. Sniffs. Wipes her wet, black-smeared eyes.
"Is…do you think everything's going to be so… so disappointing?"
You pull her in, uncouth and inelegant, her head on your shoulder as your mouth disregards your brain and says the first words that creep into it from your throat.
"No. I don't."
And then, because she's such a damn you don't even know and always wants proof, you continue:
"I don't think life's all disappointment. Some things are real, Evans. Maybe life doesn't have symbolism and all that shit but…but it has something. Evans, I…I always thought that kissing you would be really fucking crazy and…and literary, you know?"
"And?"
Not seeing the connection. Skeptical, salty. You grit your teeth and ignore the ominous chill crawling up your trachea.
"And…and the point is, it was, Evans. You see? I had this crazy high expectation and it followed through. Lily," bold now, lion bold, seizing onto her lovely, lovely name, "part of the reason we all get out of bed in the morning is because sometimes what glitters is gold. Because some things are really just insane."
Your mouth brushes the top of her head, its glimmering, graded part. You feel wild and heedless and odd and elated: with her, you seem to transcend.
"Because sometimes Life imitates Art."