CIGAR
Author: Queen Nightingale
Rating: M
Pairing: JPLE
"She's as beautiful as a cigar after a steak dinner."
- Charles Bukowski
Her hair wrapped around her neck as if it was trying to hang her by her vocal chords. It was that red colour that you couldn't name, couldn't ever put your finger on – persimmon, cherry, scarlet – dripping down her spine as if somebody poured paint onto her head, shimmering and twisting and magnificent.
When she let you touch her inner thigh after the Quidditch Match, electricity burned through your tendons as if she held a lighter under every sinew in your body.
You – you were plain Jane James, stumbling to and from class with your glasses sliding down your nose, punched in between the shoulders of Sirius and Remus, your pants hanging at your ankles and your parchment sliding out of your bag. You wobbled up and down the hallways as if you were an asteroid struggling through the orbit of larger planets; a young fifteen year old boy intoxicated with the taste of strawberry hair and eyes the size of the moon.
You sat behind her in Charms and dreamed of taking these words out of your lungs and plastering them to her closed eyelids, watching the adjectives crumble down her face, falling past her heaving chest and onto the ground. Sweet nothings – you could never understand the saying, never understood how your male counterparts could chase skirts and thighs and ankles when there, in front of you, was a girl who could have given Messalina a run for her money.
One night you pressed your hands over her eyelashes and led her to an abandoned classroom by the kitchens, shutting the door silently.
You pressed your chapped lips to her earlobe.
She opened her green eyes and looked up at you, arching her faint eyebrow as if waiting for you to smash planets onto her high cheekbones.
"What are you doing, Potter?"
You press the fingers of her right hand onto the wrist of her left arm.
"Do you feel that echo under your skin?"
She shuts her eyes again, breathing hard, and you watch them flicker, like dimly lit candles igniting underneath her paper-thin skin.
"This, this right now," you feel yourself whisper, "This movement in your bones. This is art."
