DISCLAIMER: You know the drill - I'm not JKR. Mondo bummer. Cover art by anxiouspineapples.

Just a little something I've been playing around with between ARE chapters. More smut, just 'cause, slightly different narrative style, also just 'cause. Hope you enjoy this little foray.

Love & Milky Ways & whatever else you like… –K.

Why Don't You Make Me?

Just like them old stars
I see that you've come so far
To be right where you are
– Jason Mraz –

They were fighting again.

(Actually, they were always fighting, so the "again" is a little pointless, a little obvious, a little bit of a given, a little goes-without-saying. "Again" also implies that at some point they stopped fighting, and maybe they did. Nobody really remembered those lapses of peace and quiet, though, because they were always so much louder than they were quiet.)

Lily threw a shoe at him and James ducked.

(He'd learned to take her projectile shoes – rather, his shoes, because they were in his dormitory and his shoes were readily available – anyway, he'd learned to take it seriously. The first time it happened, his left trainer hit his right eye and blackened it, and Lily wasn't even sorry. It had been three months since the first time and James still wasn't sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, he'd had a wicked black eye for a week; on the other, Lily had pushed him up against the wall right afterwards and sucked on his neck and tugged down the zipper on his trousers, and… well… so perhaps she'd been a little bit sorry, after all.)

"Are you mad?" James demanded, catching the second shoe instead of ducking it.

(He couldn't help being cocky like that sometimes. Lily hated it when he caught her makeshift weapons and questioned her mental stability, so it was sure to rile her up but James didn't care because he wanted her riled up. For more reasons than one, James thought, but he couldn't help that, either; she was just so goddamn pretty, with her heat-colored hair and her candy-coated lips, and those eyes that flamed like Floo powder fire and he was reeling, reeling into them. And her skirt was just so goddamn short, it wasn't fair.)

"You're such a prat!" Lily shouted, and she threw a pillow at him.

(She hated resorting to pillows. They were too soft, not likely to cause the damage he most thoroughly deserved. But she had to throw something at him, because they were getting to that point in their perpetual argument where James starting giving her The Look, and his hazel eyes were brighter than usual and they were most decidedly not concentrated on her face. Rather, they were traveling slowly up and down her body and that tingle in her spine was following their progress but she didn't have time for this, for Merlin's sake.)

"I am not!" James argued, and he threw the pillow back.

(Pillows were okay to throw at her. He couldn't hurt her with a pillow, and it wasn't fair that her skirt was so short and she was the only one who got to throw things.)

"Yes, you are!" Lily caught the pillow at its corners and whipped James over the head with it.

(This was most satisfying, she thought, boxing him repeatedly upside the head. He was too busy trying to take cover under his hands that his eyes had quit devouring her, so now she was less distracted and less tempted to drop the pillow and push James onto his bed and climb on top of him and… and…)

"I'm not!" James repeated, and he caught the pillow and tossed it aside.

(He jabbed her in the collarbone because he couldn't very well jab her in the chest, since he wouldn't so much jab as he would, well, fondle, and Lily was clearly not in the mood for fondling just yet. "Just yet" being the operative term, of course, since James fully intended to put her in the mood because she was so goddamn pretty with her bright eyes and her short skirt and he was tired of fighting.)

"You are." Lily shoved his prodding hand away.

(She didn't like how close he was now that she didn't have a pillow or a shoe to beat him with. She didn't like that he was looking at her like that again – The Look – and touching her, because his gaze made her knees knock together and his fingertips wreaked havoc on her heartbeat. He knew it, too; Lily could tell by the little smirk playing at the corners of his very alluring lips and dancing in his very bright eyes. She hated when he knew it.)

"Do you even know what we're fighting about anymore?" James wanted to know.

(He'd certainly forgotten it, somewhere around the time his eyes had skimmed their way up and down her pale, pale thighs, and his mouth watered as he imagined trailing his fingers up and down the same path.)

"Because you're a prat." Lily jabbed him in the chest.

(She was always quick with a reason, no matter how broad or somehow irrelevant, but she always made the mistake of touching him right when she was congratulating herself on how very clever she was. She supposed she was not as clever as she'd like to think in these instances, but she'd never tell him that.)

"That's not a reason, Evans," James drawled, and he caught her hand in his. He ran his callused fingers over her unblemished ones. He watched her pupils dilate slightly, dousing the green flame in a drop of black paint, and he brought her fingertips to his lips and spoke against them. "That's a simple fact."

(It was sort of like letting her win, James knew, and it was a self-inflicted blow to his pride but his pride could go straight to hell. He wanted her, and he wanted her now.)

"That's charming, Potter, but it's not going to work this time." Lily tried and failed to tug her hand from his grip.

(She was used to his tricks and she always fell for them, but not before putting up a good fight. Her heart could beat as wildly as it liked against her ribcage, but she always refused to budge right up until her heart made its daring escape.)

"It works every time."

(James's lips were moving across her palm, fluttering like butterfly wings and setting little fires over Lily's skin and shooting off tiny fireworks in the deep dark corners of her body. She wanted him, she wanted him now, but she wasn't ready to give in yet but that hardly mattered because she could feel herself giving in – loosening, unraveling, melting…)

"See, that's what I'm talking about," she tried to continue the argument that they'd both lost track of. "You're a huge ridiculous incorrigible impossible unbelievable infuriating –"

"Shut up."

(James murmured and ran his tongue over the line of Lily's palm. Her eyes blazed again, black, black, black, because her pupils were betraying her. She should have known to never trust her bloody traitorous pupils; they caused nothing but trouble and brought her nothing but mad insane improbable pleasure.)

"Make me."

(Lily knew it was a childish response, but it was the thing that was on the tip of her very dry tongue. Her whole body was turning her in now – from her pupils to the pulse points at her throat and her wrists, to her eager and thundering heart and her trembling knees to the bare toes that were curling into the plush maroon carpet right next to James's bed.)

James did as she asked. He dropped her hand and grabbed her face and his mouth was devouring hers, lips pushing and teeth biting and tongue plundering. He swallowed her small surprised gasp and she swallowed his moan as she pushed him back onto the mattress. Her body pressed into his and he felt that short skirt hitch a little more up every time she moved, and Merlin, did she move…

(He loved it when they fought because this is where it led to.)

Lily popped every last button on James's shirt and ran her hands up and down his heated chest, lingering over the heartbeat that was so erratic and desperate to get to her. It was impossible to avoid wanting him and needing him and loving him, he was so charming and sweet and funny, and he was handsome with his stupid untidy hair, his crooked glasses and lopsided smile, and the way he looked at her – God, did she love the way he looked at her.

(She loved it when they fought because they always, always ended up touching.)

James caught her hips and rolled them over so he was on top. He shrugged off his shirt and tossed it aside and his lips assaulted the skin of her neck, bruising it with the intensity of his open-mouthed kisses that were pouring out love and want and need. She was so perfect, he thought for the millionth billionth more like trillionth time. He was always thinking about how perfect she was, ever since he was fourteen and had some sort of clumsy sweaty clammy in-the-midst-of-adolescence shaky grasp of what it meant for someone to be perfect enough to steal your heart and keep it for good.

(He'd loved her and he'd waited, wanted, pined, and all that time – the rejections, the jealousy, the sleepless nights, everything that filled those useless gaps of time that had been spent without Lily Evans – it was all worth it when she'd started looking at him the way he was always looking at her.)

Lily wound her arms around his neck and tangled her fingers in his stupid untidy hair. She loved messing up his hair, the way he was always doing and the way she'd wanted to every time she was shouting or hexing or turning him down. She'd wanted to leap into his arms and snog him senseless breathless, she'd wanted to say yes, but he'd always been so cocky and she couldn't give him the satisfaction until he quit being a complete tosser and she quit giving a damn about losing the upper hand.

(She didn't feel like she'd lost anything at all.)

James tugged her skirt down over her hips, skimming it past her thighs and her knees and past her ankles, over her feet. He kissed his way back up her legs – those pale, long, skinny things that would wrap around his waist and cling and tense and rock and release.

(It didn't matter how much he loved those short short skirts, because it was always so much better when the blasted things were off and out of his way.)

Lily yanked at the zipper of his trousers and slipped the catch at the top.

(She felt the same way about his trousers that he felt about her skirts – better off than on.)

His heart was pounding fiercely and his stomach exploded in butterflies. It didn't matter how long they'd been together, how long she'd loved him – she was always going to make him feel like this, nervous speechless breathless helpless hopeless tongue-tied weak-kneed completely at a loss because he'd somehow won so spectacularly immaculately unbelievably.

(How in this crazy unprecedented fantastic mad terrible awful world had Lily Evans fallen in love with him?)

Her heart matched his in beat and tempo and her nerves were on fire, dancing, blazing trails of love and all those other wonderful things through the length of her body. It made her scalp prickle and her toes tingle right at the tips. He always made her feel so wanted loved adored, like she mattered and it was all because she mattered to him and he was the most spectacular wonderful unprecedented accident that she'd ever had the insane ridiculous fortune to collide with.

(How in this mad full-of-surprises marvelous insane awful terrible world had James Potter fallen in love with her?)

James left kisses shadowing over the slope of Lily's shoulders and he whispered love into her skin. Lily grazed her fingernails over the broad expanse of James's shoulders and she murmured love back into his ear.

(How in the bloody hell had either of them gotten so lucky, to chase and pine and realize and reciprocate and never, ever give up?)

When he moved his way inside of her, the whispers and murmurs shifted into sighs and moans, but it was all love just the same. It was all want and need and give and take, all have and keep and hold, all physical pressure and release and fulfillment, and it was all giddy love and the same I-can't-believe-I've-got-you-here-with-me that had been humming happily in both their heads ever since this crazy mad wonderful thing had started.

(They loved it when they fought because it meant they were fighting with each other.)

Their lips caught and clung and kissed.

(They loved it when they fought because it always, always led to touching.)

Love passed between their lips and ignited their fingertips. Their hearts skidded and accelerated and raced in time to each other's beats. Their mouths parted, a breath away, and they looked at each other the way they were always looking at each other; they smiled and there were two sharp intakes of breath, and then they laughed quietly, a little, and they were kissing again.

(They loved it when they fought because this is where it led to.)