Author's Note: We're not sorry for coming for Domino's Pizza the way we have. They deserve it.
Chapter 1: Bibbity Bobbity Booze
She's heard it told that bad things come in threes, but most proverbs are garbage.
Bad things come in droves. They come in spades. Lily feels foolish for having believed, once, that her terrible luck had its own limitations in place, when the clear reality is that it's quite happy to smash headlong into every individual area of her life with a cruel disinterest in her emotional stability, like an angry bull running rampage through a feng shui exhibit.
Career? What career?
Friends and family? Laughable. Sev and Petunia have seen to that.
Money? She's been biking all over London on the rusting death contraption she salvaged from her parents' garden shed—scared out of her wits that she'll be flattened by a bus and learning to her detriment that nothing unites a road full of drivers like their utter disdain for cyclists—in an attempt to save on public transport. Her financial stability lingers almost permanently at a point between 'not so good' and a full-blown panic attack in the dead of night.
Health? Well, the cycling is keeping her in pretty good shape, so if she can find a way to afford three square meals a day and overcome the crippling sleeplessness that comes with the utter disintegration of one's entire life, she'll be doing alright.
The evidence is there, laid out before her like a tidy row of soldiers. Misfortune is her home now. That's where she resides.
She shouldn't have expected her love life to be any different.
She deletes her Tinder as she leaves the bar because that date was a fresh hell she does not intend to repeat again, and undertakes the twenty-minute walk—in heels—to another bar in Holloway, where a sympathetic Kingsley pours a generous helping of white rum directly down her throat without bothering to add the pineapple juice or coconut cream afterwards.
"He made the porn joke," she tells him, and pops an olive into her mouth. "Complete non-starter."
"Bastard," says Kingsley, with a noise of disgust for good measure, and orders a bottle of white. His treat.
Lily doesn't even like olives, but she's hungry and they're readily available, and people, apparently, don't do first dates in restaurants anymore. They meet in bars and shag like lithe, disciplined drones, determined that romance be time and cost-effective. All this she has learned over the past year; not that she's been doing any shagging. The men she's met have been less than optimal, and Sev—her supposed caring friend—was scaring off the ones she actually liked for far longer than it took her to notice.
The latest—Will, 27, business consultant, dog person, loves family, rock-climber, travel and adventure enthusiast—immediately recognized her 'from somewhere,' which happens often enough in the city, but, "I must have seen you in a porno," followed by various excitable hints at the wild night of sex he'd somehow convinced himself was coming, will never be an appropriate response to hearing what she does for a living.
'Actress' is not synonymous with 'sex worker,' though she repeatedly finds herself staggered by the amount of men who disagree.
If she can even call herself an actress now, that is. She hasn't booked a proper job in a couple of months, and is picking up more shifts than ever at the restaurant as a result.
There's an out, she knows, if she wants it. Dorcas often calls to remind her, and it takes all the self-control she possesses to ignore her agent's repeated pleas to model 'one more time.'
She feels sort of guilty about that. There are so many girls who want to break into modeling, while Lily seems to be sought out for jobs without much effort on her part, but she despises it with a passion she didn't think possible. She wanted to act so she could embody people, and problems, and say something about the human condition, because it means something to her and because it makes her feel joyful. Modeling feels like fraud, like selling an aspiration that she can't possibly achieve for herself. It's all smoke and mirrors, a deceitful wipe of her many imperfections, and she can't bear the idea that a girl, any girl, even one girl, might look at her picture and feel like she's lacking, because Lily is a mess who doesn't deserve the envy, and she's always hated liars.
She might look hot-as-hell in a bright blue midi, or a gold sequined one-piece with a split down to the navel, but not as good as those shiny, airbrushed photos make it seem.
Plus, Primark was her go-to place for cheap clothes, and now she can't shop there anymore, lest she be bombarded with herself, photoshopped to the nines and vaguely unfamiliar, from every conceivable angle.
She chooses the restaurant instead, has a nice, flexible job at an Italian place in Angel that lets her hang on to her principles, but she hates every minute, and will inevitably give in to Dorcas soon. Her wretched elder sister—poised on the brink of marriage to a chronically repulsive, yet comfortably moneyed man—is already operating at such a high level of smugness that Lily might actually smother her with a tablecloth swatch before she makes it down the aisle.
"My sister the waitress," Petunia had declared, at her bridal shower last weekend, prompted by Lily's appearance in the living room with tray of mini quiches in hand. "It's such a shame that you never made it to uni."
Petunia lives to apply a particular sort of wording to her thinly-disguised jabs, taking such pleasure in inferring that Lily couldn't get in to uni, when getting in was never the issue. She has heaps of brains. Heaps. She could have had her pick of the litter. It was her common sense that fled her when she decided—dewy-eyed, optimistic teenager that she was—to become an actress instead.
It was a bloody idiotic decision, in hindsight.
She stays out with Kingsley until much, much later than she'd like, and naughtily takes a taxi back to Crouch End—she supposes she can justify the expense when the alternative is being assaulted as she walks home in the dark—and the flat she's shared with Mary for approximately six hectic days.
She's had rather a lot to drink, but she really feels fine. Pretty damn good, in fact. Unusual, considering how much of her life could quite reasonably be described as codswallop.
Perhaps she may have come back home earlier and avoided the second bottle of chardonnay, had Mary not been entertaining a mysterious male visitor in a post-breakup dating spree, and had Lily felt comfortable enough in her new digs to physically inhabit the space without feeling like she was intruding on her friend's privacy. She only moved in because living in the flat she'd shared with Severus had become detrimental, to her sanity and safety both. It just so happened that the lease Mary shared with her cheating ex-boyfriend had come to an end, and so she insisted, with a most-convincing vehemence, that Lily take his place.
Mary's flat is a modern, two-bedroom, shiny-plated affair in a nice, secure complex, because Mary has a practical, well-paying job and a family of means, and while Lily's stuck on her lease with Sev for another two months, she hasn't got much choice but to let her friend cover some of her half of the rent, but she doesn't intend for it to stay that way. She's not a charity case. She's not a scrounger. She's given herself a month to find appropriate work, and if she fails—which she will, come on, she hasn't exactly been lucky lately—it's back to bikinis and perfume ads for her.
Lily has stepped off the lift on the third floor and is scrabbling fruitlessly in her handbag for keys when she sees that the door to her flat is ajar.
Strange, she thinks, and there's a mild, fuzzy sense of awareness in the back of her mind—Mary might at this moment be getting accosted by a murderer, or a burglar, or a door-to-door salesman, so it might be prudent to worry—but Mary texted her twenty minutes ago and seemed perfectly happy, and Lily also really needs to pee, which is the conundrum that chiefly occupies her thoughts, so she pushes her way inside.
All looks well in the dark, narrow, white-walled hallway. She can hear the sound of the television coming from behind the closed door of the living room.
This is fine, she thinks, and heads to the bathroom, almost tripping over a dark red rug that wasn't there this morning. This is all fine, like that little cartoon dog in the burning house. Mary is probably not being murdered. Mary is obviously watching television and buying new rugs for the flat, which she will place in strategic locations in order to trip her unsuspecting housemate. Lily is only a little bit squiffy. The bathroom also looks normal; bright-white and sparkling, completely devoid of blood-splattered tiles. There are no corpses in the bathtub, staring at the ceiling with blind, lifeless eyes. No floating turds in the porcelain loo. This is all entirely fine.
Once she's divested her bladder of its contents, whizzing it away with a loud and satisfying flush, the prospect of a shower seems irresistible, because she'd quite like to scrub the memory of that awful date away from her skin, but also because there are new towels—soft and fluffy and warm—hanging on the dryer rail. Mary's really treating her today.
She tosses her handbag on the floor, turns on the water, pulls her blouse over her head and is waging war on the uncooperative zipper of her jeans, feeling like a fool because she's just had a wee and had no reason to zip them back up again, when the bathroom door opens behind her back.
"Occupado, m'sorry, I just need a shower but don't let me ruin your sex, okay?" she says, and finally, finally, yanks down the zip. Ah, sweet release. She spins around, with a little bit of a wobble, to greet her friend, who has no doubt come to check on her. "I'll go to bed right aft—you're not Mary."
She's right. Her eyes are not deceiving her, though she does, strangely, feel as if her head is full of sticky treacle. Unless Mary has morphed into a tall, dark, bespectacled man, with lips so perfectly formed that it seems entirely unfair that kissing a stranger is frowned upon, Tarzan-like forearms and the wildest, blackest hair she's ever seen—an incredibly-bloody-sexy man, in short, and hopefully not a murderer, or Lily might actually weep for humanity as she's being brutally hacked to pieces—this person is absolutely not her housemate.
When the authorities come to interrogate James about this incident—which, he's already quite certain, they are bloody well guaranteed to do—he will be able to tell them honestly that, regardless of whatever sordid-seeming research they may uncover, he is nonetheless truly only a victim of implausibly remarkable circumstances here.
The familiarly gorgeous, thoroughly drunk, half-naked woman teetering about his bathroom—now his bedroom—had arrived there of her own accord.
And—as with most things in James's life—the trouble can all be traced back to Sirius.
"Twenty-seven minutes, thirty-six seconds," the blighter had gleefully been counting, watching his phone with the sort of vengeful concentration a cartoon villain might afford a dodgy timer ticking down the seconds until his clumsily compiled dynamite would blow up the old county bank.
Sirius is, in fact, just attempting to finagle his way into a free pizza. But his enthusiasm for the cause seems much the same.
"I am hungry," James reminds his mate irritably, and not for the first time in these intervening twenty-seven minutes. They're sprawled out on the living room sofa, watching that episode of Crime Scene with the actress James fancies for the nine-hundredth time. But not even her startled gasp as the murderer lurks and she begins to dodge fetchingly between alleys can assuage James's impending dread about this familiar tableau. It is brewing in time with his empty stomach. He's bloody starved. "It's eighteen quid. You piss out eighteen quid worth of Nespresso before lunch every day. Can't we keep some perspective?"
"There is no perspective when principle is at stake," Sirius insists, eyes still fixated on the clock. "I've caughtthem out this time. Thirty minutes or less, my arse. I respect the laws of the free market. This is the deal they've stuck."
"To be bullied and badgered by a madman with a cell phone stopwatch?" James kicks his socked feet up on the coffee table. "Best brush up on those economic terminologies, Adam Smith. Free market that is not."
Unsurprisingly, Sirius ignores this.
"I'm beginning a revolution," he declares instead. "One valiant fellow calling out injustice."
"Like Robespierre," James returns flatly, knowing full well the only likely injustice that will result from all this is Pronto Pies refusing to deliver to them anymore—just like Pizza Pazza and Firezza Pizzeria before them. Sirius has managed to scare off every take-away service with a delivery promise in a ten-kilometer radius. If this keeps up, soon they may be forced to do something utterly preposterous, like cook for themselves.
Or—James shudders—Domino's.
He does not want to think about a life reduced to Domino's.
However, two minutes later, when the flat buzzer blares in time with Sirius's mobile timer, and the git lets out a warrior's cry, James says a silent farewell to Pronto Pies and resigns himself to a lifetime of overpriced garbage slices and stale bread sticks.
Life is cruel sometimes.
"Got them! Got them—" Sirius hurdles the coffee table, knocking over a stack of unopened mail, and skittering out of the room.
"Keys!" James shouts, because he is most certainly not letting Sirius back into the flat if he doesn't have a fully intact pizza in tow, which has not occurred the past two times he went down to row with a pizza boy.
Instead, there's a cringing clack as the door rebounds against the frame, telling James that his mate opted out of keys in lieu of throwing on the dead bolt, and thus their flat door is likely swinging open for all to enjoy.
Ah, well. If they're robbed, Sirius is paying for it.
James settles back into the sofa and hits rewind. He's missed the actress stumbling upon the murderer, and that's his very favorite bit. She dies so well.
The faint creak of the front door opening comes far sooner than James would have expected. This is a record. Either the pizza boy had pegged Sirius for a belligerent pill mighty quickly, giving in preemptively, or the lunatic is trying some new kind of avoidance tactic. There really is no telling. James waits, but hears no subsequent exclamation of fury or victory to give hint about the outcome.
There is, however, also no smell of delicious pizza filtering through the flat.
James's stomach gurgles in anguish.
He mutes the telly.
"Mate?" The living room door is still closed, but the flat walls are paper thin. The fact that Sirius is ignoring him does not bode well.
Was that the toilet flushing?
And…the shower?
James lunges to his feet. If Sirius is drowning the pizza in some kind of riotous reaction to Pronto's refusal to honour his thirty-minute mutiny, James is going to murder him even more thoroughly than the bloke on Crime Scene had just done to his much fitter victim. With his nine hundred viewings, James has become a bit of an expert on murder now. And hangry doesn't even begin to describe him. They say crimes of passion are common.
He storms toward the bathroom.
"Wanker," he calls, voice carrying. He reaches the closed bathroom door, grabs the knob, and throws it open. "I want my—"
And that's when the trouble starts.
"You—" he says, looking even more surprised than she feels. "You. I—what?"
His reaction seems to suggest that Lily ought to explain the situation, the situation being that she—just a small-town girl, living in a lonely world—could be taking a midnight shower going anywhere right now were it not for this city boy's rude interruption.
What's ruder than rude is that he's acting shocked at all. What cheek, honestly. She would never barge into his flat, potentially murder his housemate—there's a distinct lack of blood on his person but there's more than one way to skin a cat, or murder a woman, Lily knows, because she's played a murder victim in a BBC procedural and her character was savagely garrotted—then demand an explanation for his presence.
"Is this a murder?" she asks him, quite impressed by his own calm in the face of possible death. He really doesn't look like the type, though she vaguely remembers reading that attractive men make better killers for their innate ability to win trust with their pretty faces—but she's far too tired to go into all of that now. "Are you doing a murder in my flat?"
"Doing a murder?" He repeats the words slowly, near incredulously. His eyes are wide behind his specs, but he can't seem to settle them in any one place. "You've invaded mine! The invader does the murder. You're...is this a trick? Has Sirius paid you? I…" He gives a desperate sounding huff of breath. "Please put your shirt back on. I don't know where I'm meant to look."
"What do you mean?" she starts, and looks down at her chest. Her blouse is gone, but luckily, she's wearing her very favourite purple bra with the fancy lace. Who took off her blouse? It must have been her. "What's wrong with it? It's my Little Mermaid bra."
Now his eyes are most definitely on the ceiling. "I've already been accused of being a murderer today. I'd rather not be maligned a pervert too."
"I asked you if you were a murderer, actually. There were no accusations. You're very oversensitive."
"Yes, well, high crimes do tend to kick up my sense of panic." His eyes flicker down for only a second, and he lets out a strangled noise. "And please notice you haven't put your shirt back on yet. I want that entered in the record. Whatever record there is."
"Hang on," she instructs him, and holds up a hand to silence him. She can't comprehend him at all. "Firstly, you're the one wandering around my flat, so I'm the one who should be panicking, and secondly, I don't—I can't shower with my shirt on."
"You're showering here?"
"Where else would I shower, Norman Bates? The motel?"
"Can we please not regress back to murderer? You're very fixated and I am apparently overly sensitive."
The inside of her head feels so thick, like the treacle of earlier has mated with quicksand, birthing some bastard-child sludge that is slowly squeezing the air from her brain. It's hot in this very-white room, even with her shirt off.
All she wants is a shower, but it seems she has to decipher this strange, handsome home-invader's nonsense first.
"If you're not a murderer…" she begins, regarding him with lowered brows, but then some lost knowledge from earlier clunks into place in her brain like a shifting gear, and she darts forward to grab his arm, teetering a little as she does, but she's sure it's completely unnoticeable. "Fuck me, are you Mary's date?"
Of the guys her friend has dated, Lily's never found a single one attractive, much as Mary might insist that Benjy or Florian or Eddie—she thinks this one is an Eddie—are irresistible sexpots, one and all. She likes unusual-looking blokes, with shaved heads or unkempt ginger beards, ears that stick out like kettle-spouts, or all three on occasion. If this guy is Mary's first foray into the world of genuine, undeniable handsomeness, it's an act of deliberate cruelty, because he looks like Lily had him custom-made in a Hot Man factory for her own pleasure.
"Date? Mary who?" He seems to be staring fixedly at where her fingers touch his arm. Then he shakes his head a bit. "Wait. Next door Mary?"
"Well, I dunno if I'd call her bedroom next door, as such," Lily muses, and drops her hand from his arm. "Caddy adjacent, maybe. But all the same, can you hop-to back in there, please, so I can bathe?" She points to her own chest, though she hardly needs to, because she's seen his eyes flick down there several times, and why shouldn't they? There's a reason why she's been asked to participate in so many swimsuit shoots. There's a reason why the advertising execs at Primark have made such ample use of her cleavage. "If she comes in right now, she's going to think that I'm trying to seduce you."
"Trying might denote some kind of failure, and at the risk of getting repetitive, I still can't manage to get you clothed. Or to speak much sense, for that matter." His long, tanned fingers stream tiredly down his face, as if she's the one being difficult. "Why would next door Mary..." But the words sputter to a sudden halt, and he seems to jerk in some realization. The hand drops down to his side. Abruptly, he leans closer, though they're already standing quite close. Too close? "You do know...Christ. Do you think we're in Mary's flat?"
"It's Mary's and mine, excuse me."
"No," he says. "It is not."
"Yes," she says, and points to the open door behind him, through which she can see part of the living room on the other side of the hall, faintly outlined in the glow of the television. "It is. That, right there, is my couch."
"It's an IKEA couch. It is literally everyone's couch."
"Everyone can't fit on one couch, you idiot. Are you drunk or something?"
"Am I—" He laughs, snorts, then catches himself. "You do realize that swimming look to things and the way they're likely teetering about isn't because we've entered a dream sequence, yeah?"
"If this was a dream sequence," she begins loftily, but is forced to pause for a moment, because if he is Mary's date… but mustering up a lie seems like complicated long division; not overly difficult if one were to try, but Lily can't really be bothered at this juncture. "We—you and I both know that you'd be a lot more naked right now, so don't start getting clever with me."
He's full-on gaping at her now, and this is ridiculous.
This is her flat, and all she wants is one bleeding shower, and she has done Shakespeare, for crying out loud. She deserves more respect than this.
"Where's Mary?" she says. "I need to disapprove of you to her face."
Hah. That'll show him. Stupid, sexy burglar. Murderer. Mary's date. Whatever he happens to be.
She'd really rather he wasn't her housemate's date—though the alternative reality is somewhat questionable, but he hasn't brought out a deadly weapon yet. The last thing she wants is to spend tomorrow morning gazing longingly at him over her cereal while he and Mary engage in an awkward, post-shag ritual of uncomfortable, self-conscious cheek kisses and unenthusiastic declarations of, "we should do this again," that neither of them will ever see through, at which point he'll dart out through the front door and Lily will have to admit to her friend that she's madly in love with him.
Or—alright, not love, but Lily would neverbring a specimen like that home with her, only to waste him with one night of regrettable passion. Unless he turned out to be a closeted UKIP supporter, or something. She's not that desperate for romance.
"Yes, by all means, let's find Mary. Next door. Where she lives." Then, beneath his breath he grumbles, "Tells me we ought to be naked, but I'm the one getting clever?"
Maybe, she thinks, cocking her head to the side—only to hastily right herself because damn, does that make her feel dizzy—this is some sort of prank, Mary's terrible idea of a fun puzzle to welcome Lily to the building, and the one clue to crack it all is the fact that he looks nothing like her best friend's usual type.
"You know what?" she says coolly.
"You want me to guess?" he replies.
"You and Mary think you're so funny, but you're not funny," she confidently concludes. "You are hazing me, and I'm feeling really disrespected right now."
With that undoubtedly cutting and fabulously witty comment, she draws herself up to her fullest height and tries to push past him, but she finds herself stumbling, her heel sliding against the tiled floor, so he's forced to catch her in his arms to keep her from colliding with his chest.
"You think this is—oof." He steadies her against him, his hands bobbling around as if he's not quite certain where they should go, what they should do. "Sorry—if you'll just—yes. Two feet. Look, you've got this all wrong. There is no hazing. And I know I've been trying to get your clothes back on, but you're going to crack an ankle attempting to storm about on those heels, so maybe just...?"
Her gaze floats to the door behind him. If she makes a run for it now, she can burst in on Mary in her bedroom, where she is no doubt shaking with suppressed laughter, and give her a piece of her mind.
"Fine, then," she agrees, and puts one hand on his shoulder to hold herself steady. She lifts one foot behind her back and pulls off her heel with her free hand, pulling him towards her for support, her chest pushed fully up against his, like the strangest hug she's ever experienced. "But I'm my own woman and I'm doing this because I want to, not because you told me."
He smells really good, like sandalwood, and man—pure, raw, flesh and blood man with man parts and really strong arms—and she hasn't had sex in such a long time, and feels vaguely resentful towards him for reminding her of that now, especially since some terribly cruel deity with a spite against Lily saw fit to let Mary see this one first.
She ignores it, and works off the other shoe.
"I must away," she tells him grandly, once both shoes are off and in her hands, and moves to the door, ignoring the look of deep confusion on his face. Her handbag and her blouse are still on the floor. "Farewell."
As soon as she's out in the hall, she takes her shot, sprinting to the bedroom like a deer—he calls out something behind her but it's far too late, he can't warn Mary now—throwing one of her shoes behind her like she's playing Mario Kart and her favorite silver stilettos are a slippery banana peel, and throws the door open with dramatic aplomb.
"Got you!" she cries in triumph… to an empty room.
Or, not empty, exactly—there's a massive ginger cat stretched out across the bed—but completely devoid of her best friend's possessions.
All of a sudden, the whole damn mess becomes quite clear.
Lily might, perhaps, in spite of earlier convictions, definitely be plastered.
That second bottle of wine was undoubtedly unwise, as were the cocktails that came after it.
And this isn't Mary's flat.
If she was feeling gracious, or sober, were her pride not grievously wounded, nor her better judgement missing in action (likely abandoned on that bathroom floor), she might admit to her wrongs and slink back home in embarrassment, rather than stick it out and argue for the sheer sake of arguing.
But Lily isn't any of those things.
It is somewhere around the time that James is watching her sprint—still half-clothed, cackling, like a red-haired sprite come to life—into his bedroom, and is only partially able to dodge the shoe—the shoe—she's flung back at him like a soldier tossing grenades behind enemy lines, that he fully comes to realise he has officially lost all control of this situation.
Not, he will freely admit, that he ever had much control to begin with. But reason argues that basic sobriety ought have been enough to tip the scales in his favour at least a smidge.
Ought have.
Funny things, ought haves.
He shuts off the still-flowing shower, grabs her silky wisp of a blouse from the bathroom floor, and kicks the shoe that nearly maimed him in the direction of his bedroom, still not entirely certain this isn't a dream, or a prank, or some kind of elaborate mental break. Each one of those things, James decides, is distinctly more probable than the actual reality he's found himself in now.
A woman has broken into his flat.
A woman has broken into his flat, and is vehemently claiming it is her flat.
Said woman, you see, is terribly smashed.
Said woman, also, does not seem to realise she is terribly smashed, nor is she particularly receptive to observations making note of that.
She is not, either, terribly receptive to clothing.
And finally—most spectacularly—said drunk, ornery, shirt-adverse woman is not exactly a stranger to James. She is, in fact, eerily familiar, though they have never once met in their lives. He has not told her this, and likely never will, as she already sort of thinks he's a murderer.
She's funny, his housebreaker.
Distractingly gorgeous too, even more so than he'd expected.
She's flirted with him nearly as much as she's insulted him, and his insides are twisted round because of it.
Also—has he mentioned her state of undress?
Moreover, it is very, very possible—if he's managed to sort out her nonsensical rambling correctly—that she has moved into the flat next door, in the vacancy left by Next Door Mary's dodgy boyfriend, Squawks-Like-A-Killed-Animal-When-He-Comes Todd.
And isn't that just the damnedest thing?
James is not quite sure what to do about any of this. Cataloguing it all as such is not particularly helpful, though it's nearly all he can do at the moment to remain upright and moving forward. He's desperately grappling to keep his life, his dignity, and, maybe, hopefully, even some semblance of decorum, as a woman he's for many weeks had dreams about lunges into his bedroom with a resounding, "Got you!"
The joke is on her, of course. She isn't in her flat. Mary's flat. Whosever. They are most certainly in James's flat—James's bedroom—and James wonders how long that will take her to register.
It likely doesn't matter. This one's cheeky, clever, and far too quick of the lip for someone who can't even manage to properly keep to her feet. She'll turn it all around on him, he's sure, as she's managed to do every little thing he's said and done since he first stumbled upon her in the bathroom. In a matter of moments, her housebreaking will be his fault, and she'll somehow have him apologising for it. Or laughing. Has he mentioned she's funny? And pretty?
A bloke can almost forget she's just attempted to kill him by shoe.
"Who throws shoes?" he laments as he reaches the doorway, sounding, he knows, terribly like his mother. Euphemia only deigns to scold her son on every third Thursday and the occasional religious holiday, but she nonetheless knows her way around a high dudgeon. "You could've taken an eye out!"
She's standing just inside his bedroom now—not Mum. The housebreaker. She! Her! In his bedroom—and though her back is to him, he can see from the tenseness of her shoulders, the sudden stiffness in her long limbs, that she's finally caught on that she may not be in the right here.
As predicted, that seems virtually irrelevant at this time.
"Well," she eventually declares, nonchalant as you like. "Clearly, she's redecorated the entire room in the past few hours."
James will not laugh. He blatantly refuses to laugh. He will not take enjoyment out of her breezy response, the patented obtuse cheek it has only taken something like ten minutes to get to know. It is far wiser to cling to indignation instead.
"That's what you're going with?" he asks, arms all akimbo, only a touch of humour escaping. "When conspiracy fails, mass redecoration?"
"I might as well. Though I must say, her sense of style has completely failed her. The only good addition is the cat."
She motions to Algernon, who is lounging atop James's bed, watching this scene play out with his usual aplomb, but James reckons there's a secret gleam in the cat's eye just for him that says, Well, I am interested to see how you bungle this now.
Algernon is a wit and a hoot. It is no wonder even an objectively intoxicated woman can immediately notice his brilliance. That is not rocket science, it's very nearly common sense. Her proper acknowledgment of this will not delight him.
(He is getting quite good at lying to himself.)
"If you think you can make this better with praise of my cat, you are only partially correct," James sniffs, matching her easy haughtiness with some prim hauteur of his own. "Invade my flat and now insult my decor? The whole lot came straight from the Pottery Barn catalogue, I'll have you know. Well—mostly. That bit there may have been picked up at a tag sale. But the seller said it was in prime condition. And it only collapsed the once."
She does not seem overly impressed by these explanations.
"Look, Eddie, or whatever your name is—"
"James." It has not occurred to him until now that she doesn't know his name. He knows hers. He thinks. Unless she's got a clone running around somewhere, proper Orphan Black stuff. "If we're going to be insulting each other so thoroughly, it may as well be by name."
"—if you and Mary aren't—wait." She pirouettes around to eye him with great interest. "Is your name really James?"
She sounds so surprised—with that intrigued sort of gleam her very green eyes are flicking his way—that James is momentarily nonplussed. "Er. Should it not be?"
"That," she says emphatically, and points towards his chest. She's teetering rather dangerously, for having taken off her skyscraping heels, has taken to standing on her tiptoes to compensate for the loss of height. He is quite prepared to have to lunge to steady her at any moment. "That is my all-time most favourite name in the world. Honestly, it is. You know the bloke with the giant peach? Loved him. Can I pet your cat?"
Bloody hell. She's got a smile on her, this one. Sunny and bright, and can she pet his cat. Even if James's very own mother had not spent more nights than not during his misbegotten youth reading and rereading James and the Giant Peach to him, James reckons he'd still be turned all to mush now. He doesn't know how to handle her being friendly. At least the drunk and prickly persona can be somewhat withstood. But when she looks at him like that—like he's just done the best, most darling thing, simply to please her—he is effectively putty in her hands.
As such, he probably should let her know now that Algernon has only ever met approximately three people on this entire green earth who he has deemed acceptable enough to cuddle with him, and one of those people is Remus, who Algernon spent most of uni alternatively perching along in study sessions with one minute, only to claw holes into every sock Remus ever owned or merely thought to own at the next.
James does not want to dim that sunny smile of hers. It's best she's warned straight off.
"I would offer blanket permission to those who respect Dahl's best heroes," he starts, taking a few steps closer, "but Algernon—the cat—he's rather got a mind of his—" Oh fucking hell. "Oh—well. There you go, anyway. Right. Watch—"
She's on his bed now.
She's on his bed now.
"Of course you have a mind of your own," she's cooing, snuggling Algernon—who is...what? Somehow instantly receptive to her charms, the little bugger—to her semi-exposed chest. "You're ginger. I'm ginger. You're clever, I'm clever." She treats James to a maddeningly smug smile. "You were saying?"
James can't recall what he was saying. He can't recall anything at all, because Algernon—Algernon—has cuddled up to her now—onto the silky skin James had only gotten brief touches of before, as she'd stumbled against him when attempting to storm out the bathroom. Warm. Soft. Strokes of velvet against his fingertips, which had skittered along everywhere, not sure what was allowable, what would get him smacked (it should all get him smacked. He's a proper letcher), but wanting above all else not to see her fall on her face or blemish her lovely person with her drunken clumsiness. The same person that wasn't protected at all by that purple bit of nothing she calls a bra (no matter which Disney princess inspired it), nor by the coyly unpopped button of her jeans (has he not yet mentioned the coyly unpopped button of her jeans?). James has seen maybe more times than he'd like what Algernon can do to skin that soft, that pliable, when he's been disturbed in his comfort bubble. Cat scratches are slight but brutal wounds when applied just so. (And Algernon, of course, knows how to apply them just so.)
That he's not lashing out now—that he has in fact even just purred contently—only makes sense in the universe where this woman had found herself in James's flat in the first place.
"I...you know, never mind. I've given up." Better men than him have lost harder battles than this. He scuttles toward the bed in defeat. "But look, here's your shirt again. Maybe we just...don't give a bloke ideas and toss it back on now, yeah?"
"Not now," she says, waving her blouse away, her attentions entirely captured by Algernon, who looks as if he's on the receiving end of the petting of his life. "You. Are. Just. Beautiful, aren't you? Such a fluffy little gent, yes you are! I love cats. Even cats with murderous owners. It's not your fault, you know? It's not your fault, you poor, darling thing."
Ah, so back to being a murderer now, is he? There's some relief in that. "Even murderous owners deserve some common decency from time to time," he tries, and thrusts the shirt back at her again. "I admit I'm feeling quite ganged up against at present. Can you just—no, not further in the bed. Out. Out the bed. In the shirt."
"What's your obsession with me putting my shirt on? Do I have horrible breasts or something?"
Oh, yes, he's definitely going to answer that one. "Fishing for compliments, are you?"
"If you didn't want me to ask, you shouldn't keep looking at them."
"If you didn't want me looking at them, you should have put your shirt on."
"Maybe, James, one might consider that my bra is living a very sad life not being looked at, when in actual fact I spent a lot of money on this bra and only I ever see it." She ceases her stroking of Algernon's fur to land her hands clumsily on her hips, pushing her shoulders back as if she's daring him to get an eyeful. "Maybe you're not doing my bra's self-confidence any good right now."
James is going to ignore the thrill that sets off in his stomach at the intriguing admission that he, in fact, is apparently one of the few viewers of this said sad bra. It does not look all that sad to him. In fact, with her chest puffed out like that, it looks...well. Never mind. She thinks he's a murderer. Or she's quite fine joking about it. Either way, she's drunk and blathering and no doubt means that as a proposition as much as she means anything she's saying right now—that is, not at all. He just really needs to get her clothes back on. "Well, I've already got my hands full attempting to keep your bra's owner on her feet, so—"
"Sick of being on my feet. Been walking all day in those bloody heels. Compassionate you are not."
"And is compassion what was at play when you nearly punctured me with those same bloody heels earlier?"
"You're a person, not a bicycle tyre," she wearily sighs, then wraps her arms around the cat and collapses backwards on the bed, her head connecting with his pillow. "I should know, I've got a bike—but this bed is super comfortable, you know. You should really try sleeping in it sometime."
He will never sleep in this bed again. The image of her there, cat cuddled close, red hair spread across his pillow, in the terribly lonely bra, will keep him up every night from now until kingdom come. "I generally make the attempt at least once a night," he somehow manages to get out. "Typically it's just me and Algernon, however, and if you're angling for an invitation, best leave that sort of decision making until tomorrow."
"I make attempts, too." Another tired sigh. "But it's hard to sleep when you're deeply miserable."
Deeply miserable? The term immediately catches him. More, even so, the little, resigned way she says it. James pauses in his attempts to foist her shirt on her, hesitates for a lingering moment. This is not the tale of the sad and lonely bra. For the first time all evening, James is actually a bit startled by her. Concerned by her. She's frowning, and there's this notch that settles just between her drawn brows that furrows into shallow grooves.
He does not want her to be deeply miserable.
He wonders why she's deeply miserable.
It isn't his place to ask. She doesn't know him, doesn't know what she's saying, either. Or, she does, likely, but she won't mean to have said it come morning. James doesn't want that. It's not fair to press. It's better he just makes the rest of this evening as un-deeply un-miserable as possible, for both of their sakes.
But he does really wish she wasn't deeply miserable.
"I suppose you want your bed back now?"
This time, it's his turn to let out the hefty sigh. "If we're going by my wants and preferences...hard to believe, but shirt before bed, please."
"Alright, Mum. Go on, then."
James admits to some delight to see the cheek is back. Though he is not quite sure what to do with the order. "Can't say I ever thought I'd be trying to re-robe a gorgeous girl in my bed, but that's what this evening has come to, has it? Alright. But you need to quit clutching Algernon if you want to make a proper go of this."
She laughs to herself, releases the cat from her arms and hoists herself up to a seated position, shifting so that her legs dangle off the edge of the bed.
"I think I love your cat, James," she admits, gazing up at him with wide-eyed innocence. "He gets me, you know?"
She's said love and James in the same sentence. Lord, now he's sounding drunk. "Must be the ginger thing."
"Gingers are beautiful."
"Well, from one ginger enthusiast to the next...please put your clothes on."
"Since you're being polite," she allows, and rises to her feet, but immediately groans and claps a hand to her forehead. "Okay, no." She sits back down. "Head's all swimmy. You need to do it."
"Need to…" He clears his throat. Fuck. Of course. Right. He can do this. It's fine. He lifts the shirt again. "Alright. Yes. Team effort. This hole is...the head...I think—"
"What are you—ow! That's my hair!"
James's hands dart back. "Shit! Sorry! Er...there. All sorted. Your hair is very silky. It slips right out. Just pop your arm through—oh." James blinks. Moves one sleeve this way, then that way. "Shit. Wait. I think it's gone backwards."
"You're gone backwards, for the love of—earring, earring! Careful!"
"Well, why must they dangle like that?" He swears beneath his breath, wrangling with the earring like Algernon used to battle with string back when he was a kitten, before he got much too cool for such plebeian pastimes. "Quit twisting. I've got this—or—hey, stop yanking it! I'm trying to help—"
Then he feels it—ten times worse for the surprise, surely, but blistering pain all the same, ricocheting up his leg from the place at which she'd just mutinously jabbed him in the shin with her foot. She's kicked him. She's actually kicked him! He lets out an impolite, strangled sound as he keels over in anguish...which leaves his face resting equally as impolite and strangled in what, he thinks, some may call her décolletage.
Fucking hell, she's going to boot him again, isn't she?
But instead he hears, quite collected, quite primly, her melodic voice going, "Oh, hello."
"Oh, hullo," comes the equally quaint response from behind them. And god, lord, Christ, James knows that voice.
And, annoyingly, also now notes the tempting smell of pizza filling the air, too.
Of course.
James lifts his head from her chest slowly.
This is going to take some fancy explaining.
"The pizza guy is here?" She snorts, loudly, and regards James's wincing and now thankfully upturned face with an arched brow. The fact that he's just landed face-first in her cleavage appears to be vastly amusing to her. "What kind of porno did you have planned?"
"The fact that you still seem to think I've planned any of this," he mutters, "is deeply baffling."
"I mean, I'd give you a whirl if pressed, but him, too?" She jerks her head towards Sirius. "Not really my thing. Or my type. No offence, pizza man."
"I'll keep on my pants, then," Sirius replies affably, giving a congenial wave, at near the same time James's head jerks round and he thinks, what the hell did she just say?
Maybe he did not, in fact, land embarrassingly and cushioning-y in the warmth of her tempting bosom. Maybe, in fact, she'd kicked him in the shin, he'd wailed like a child, and on his way down, he'd struck his head on the end of the bedside table, and now he's unconscious, passed out cold on his hard bedroom floor, dreaming this all up, because that is what would make the most sense here.
Or maybe she's just drunk, and brazen, and already senses that the easiest way to bring him to his knees (when he is not, you know, there already) is to tease him mercilessly.
She is not wrong.
Give him a whirl. Fucking hell.
"I'm looking for Mary," she says to Sirius. "Do you know Mary?"
Looking far too amused, Sirius cocks a thoughtful head. "Next door Mary?"
Ha. Best of luck. James had been through that gag already.
"Oh, next door Mary!" she happily exclaims, suddenly, inexplicably. "It all makes sense now! You know, I suspected that she lived next door, but he said otherwise—"
"I?" James is floored. Outraged. "I—?"
"Thanks for telling me, pizza guy." She hops to her feet with a steadiness which has, as of yet, eluded her completely on account of her utter inebriation, yet she seems perfectly able to pull it out of the bag for his housemate. The confounded blouse is appropriately positioned and smoothed down in a matter of seconds. "What toppings did you get?"
Sirius pops open the pizza box. "Sausage and pepperoni. All the phallic sort. And it was free."
"Ah, the over-compensator. Can I have a slice?"
James stumbles to his feet. This is all happening too quickly. When did she get so dexterous? When did this all become neighbourly? How is he the dunderhead, and Sirius—the smirking git—the newly-arrived saviour? For saying the same bloody thing James had fifteen minutes ago? Next door Mary! "Are you kidding?"
She rolls her eyes at him, then flashes a friendly smile at Sirius. "I'm Lily and this is James. Is he your housemate?"
"When I can't convince him to sleep outside with his fellow stray mongrels"—Sirius nods sadly—"unfortunately, yes."
"He doesn't seem to like me very much," she tells him sadly, which is so patently absurd, James nearly chokes out loud. She fishes a slice from the open pizza box, takes a generous bite, wipes her mouth with the side of her wrist and carries on talking, her voice thick from her mouthful of crust, cheese and processed pork products, yet still perfectly discernible. "But can you tell him from me that I think he's real cute? I've got to head off."
I think he's real cute.
She did not…
She did not—
She is drunk. She is drunk, drunk, drunk, drunk—REAL CUTE—drunk, drunk, drunk...
She blows a kiss to Algernon and begins to hum to herself as she sallies past Sirius, not even bothering to give James so much as a glance, though he notes she stops off in the loo to scoop her bag off the floor, shuck it over her shoulder, and continue whistling her way out of the flat. She only stumbles over the hallway rug and politely begs its pardon the once.
The front door clicks shut with a resounding snick. No one says anything—not James, not Sirius—for a solid fifteen seconds. James is not certain he's capable of words just yet. His mind is far too busy trying to remind himself that she was sloshed, and teasing, and probably won't have time to really notice how fit he is until they're in the stark light of sobering day, if she ever has a care to notice, which she very well may not, what with her occupied being so fit and funny and housebreaking and all that other to-do herself.
It's fine.
He's fine.
Right.
"So," Sirius finally says, dragging out the word with mocking pleasure, giving James a look that encompasses every rubbish, ribald thing the blighter might say, a clear buffet open to him, though the myriad options are obviously making it difficult to decide which particular taunting morsel to tuck into first. Instead, his eyes flick back to the now-closed front door. "That was the same…?"
James sighs. "Lily. Evans. Yes, I think."
"Fuck me," Sirius cackles, eyes alight with glee. "And she's…?"
"Moved in next door in place of Ten-Second-Pterodactyl Todd?" James nods grimly. "Apparently so."
"She thinks you don't like her," Sirius says next, and now the cackles are nearly raucous wails, and the half-opened pizza box is tipping to the side. "You. Not like her."
"She was also somewhat certain I was a murderer for a bit there," James confesses miserably. "With my luck, that's all she'll hazily recall from her drunken evening—some dodgy tosser with murderous intent who somehow ended up with his head caught against her tits, shoving phallic pizza toppings at her, and all because some wanker"—James glares—"couldn't bother to close the damn flat door!"
"You're welcome," Sirius says, pulling out a slice of pizza and taking a hefty bite.
It's a terribly sad state of affairs that James finds he's not even hungry anymore. His ravenousness has fled with his housebreaker, and she's likely taken a healthy slice of his sanity along too. The prospect is so despairing, so utterly predictable with his rubbish bin luck, that James effectively tunes out Sirius's persisting laughter.
This is likely why—for the second time that evening—he is caught unawares by the flying spiked heel, failing to clap eyes on the hurtling projectile before it's already been lobbed at his head and is halfway sailed to shanking him dead. It's only helpful self-preservation, pure automatic instinct, that sees James swatting it away at the last second, where it lands, clattering noisily, against the hardwood floor.
It's one of Lily's shoes. She must have forgotten it.
"Buck up, Prince Charming," Sirius says, leg still outstretched in the sort of follow-through required for kicking dangerous footwear at one's best mate's head. "Already done better than the last bloke, haven't you? He only managed to keep his Cinderella around till midnight. And here you are, all the way to"—he consults his phone—"half-past, before chasing her off. Well done."
"Bugger off," James grumbles, grabbing the shoe and winding it up behind his head as if to let it fly back whence it came. Sirius darts away from the doorway with another smug cackle, but James doesn't even bother attempting the toss. Instead, he settles the shoe back in his lap, eyeing it with suspicion, with resignation, with...something.
He'll have to get it back to her at some point, he's sure.
Tomorrow, likely. Or perhaps the next day.
Maybe she won't even remember him.
And that would be a relief...wouldn't it?
In the hallway, Sirius's off-key singing floats through the door. "Salagadoola, don't-know-the-words-a bibbity bobbity boo. Put them together and what have you got—"
"Bibbity bobbity...bugger," James mutters.