obviously, this isn't mine in the slightest. thanks JK for not clobbering me with your scary lawyers.
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Her love for him wasn't all that conventional, so the emotion at first was hard to pin down.
She didn't imagine his lips, or strong hands on her, or how soft his hair was (not too much anyways). She didn't go out of her way to impress him (although she rather hoped he was impressed with her already), or even see him. She didn't draw their names in hearts with arrows through them. She didn't show the classic symptoms, but she knew she loved him all the same and she tried to show it in all the little ways she knew.
Sure, coy smiles and cryptic little comments weren't the most outright declarations of love, but she was raised to be discreet. And patient too.
Sooner or later the poor man would see her signals for what they were, and not figments of his imagination (as Remus laughingly told her one time after a prefects meeting, while James was fidgeting with his papers and trying not to watch them). She had smiled then, because she took pride in being one of the few people who could put him off-kilter.
Her friends urged her to go after him and confess, and if he was lucky snog him for a good minute or two. But that wasn't her style and besides, out of the two it was James who was the Chaser, not she.