Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful
Will you still love me when I got nothing but my aching soul
-Lana Del Rey
She sits wrapped in red paint hair and blue paint thoughts, her chin on her white, bony knees.
There's something that tastes like wonder that's been rolling under her tongue, and her lungs ache from all her heavy breathing.
She is tired from (of) being in love.
You approach her, all black hair and battered glasses and long, sweat-tipped nose.
"Lily."
She doesn't look.
"Um."
"Lily, Lily, whacha thinking about?"
Her hair is loose and hanging about her face; you can't see her face as she says:
"Youth."
Shit. This isn't a good sign. Youth goes with beauty and thunder and awe, with a mind romping like the mind of God. Youth goes with brevity and endings; you want a relationship of breathless eternity.
She thinks of youth with pensive crayon brows, huddled in on herself.
"We think we're invincible now," she says, after a moment. "We think we're so damn beautiful. So special. Beautiful and young and golden."
"Of course we're beautiful and young and golden," you say, leaning in, pushing aside the thick gush of hair between you. "We're almost seventeen. Can't you just enjoy being young?"
"Beautiful and damned," she continues, like she hasn't heard you or maybe you haven't said anything besides empty space. "But one day we'll just be damned."
"Lily, stop," you say, because her philosophic, tender moroseness frightens you. "You're being...gruesome."
But that isn't the right word and she knows it, knows the doom in her voice, the vast endless future, is creeping up on you now.
"You know I'm right."
You know. You ignore it.
"Lily, shut up. You're being mental."
"I'm being realistic."
"You're borrowing trouble."
Abruptly it comes to you, and your voice bypasses your lungs and comes right out of your soul as you say, fiercely now:
"Lily…Lily, let's do something insane."
Her head turns, and the jagged silhouette of her cheek against the cold diamond night shatters.
"Like what?"
You lean in, your breath wild and hard and loose as her fluttering hair.
"Let's get married."
Later, when she's had time, she makes her objections.
"That's fucking mental."
"It's fucking brilliant, actually."
"What would be the point? It wouldn't be legal. No one's going to recognize it."
"Hell with them. We don't need it, Evans. We're young and golden and we're going to enjoy it. And we don't need them."
Her voice is glassy and wondering now. Vulnerable.
"Why?"
You lean in and kiss away her hordes of unasked questions.
"Because you have orange hair and whirring thoughts and I have old glasses and wild plans. Because we're in love."
She stands barefoot and fucking freezing her ass off in your garage. Her hair is down and long and wild in the cold, burning against her skin. Her dress is a soiled satin nightgown and it clashes white on white with her skin on which freckles fall like snowflakes. You wear a black tee shirt and old jeans and a red, red parka because fuck, it's cold in here.
"Dearly beloved," you say, sonorous and pompous because she looks blue-lipped and glum and dammit, she needs to laugh.
It's her wedding, after all.
It works; she laughs. A little giggle which bounces around her smooth white teeth and finally bobs about the air like a shiny red balloon.
"Potter, you're so stupid."
"We are gathered here todayyyy…"
"Skip it, it's ice ass cold in here." But she smiles now and her thin, bare shoulders look less pitiful.
"Alright, then. Lily Evans, I bloody love you like all hell. Won't shag another, don't want another. I want you in bed and out of it. Your turn."
She looks up, clutching withered, old daisies from your grandmother's wedding
(Fake plastic daisies with dull, flaccid leaves and yellow-white petals like dirty teeth)
and her eyes are wide and serious even as her mouth is loose and smiling. You hear strains of rusty organ music and actually feel like you're getting married, wed to this girl with Crayola coloring and a fierce, aching soul.
"James Potter, I bloody love you, in bed and out. Always."
You lean in and kiss her. Her mouth is orange and pink like sherbet and her hands are cold cold cold against your prickling neck.
In the gunmetal chill of your dank garage, you make out with and become married to Lily Evans.
Afterwards, you carry her upstairs and she puts on an old leather jacket "for the honeymoon", as she wryly remarks. You dump her onto a sagging sofa in your room and your hot, awkward hands find her shivering skin beneath the shuddering thinness of the dress.
The dress comes off but before that the jacket does ("Shit it's cold") and you see her left in her bridal bareness, all in her honeymoon lingerie: old white bra and tattered pink boyshorts with faded yellow hearts. You kiss her shuddering concave stomach and try to articulate the poetry rattling around in your ribcage.
"Lily Lily Lily…Lily, I love love love…"
Her hands are slick in your wild, wild hair and her breaths are stuck to the sides of her throat and the curve of your mouth and you pull into her and she gasps a sharp hot gasp and her teeth clench like her hands on your bobbing back and
"Lily Lily…Lily, sorry…sorry sorry sorry…"
When it's over you collapse onto the ground beside her, sprawled and naked and proud and grinning.
Because you fucked Lily Evans.
But your mouth melts downward at the stricken look on her face; her breathing is sharp still.
"You okay?"
Her chin jabs at the air, quick and unsteady. Her eyes close and she swallows (shadows bobbing drunken on her white hot throat) and takes a deep breath. Swallows again. Looks at you with a slow, shaking smile.
"We're married," she says, after a moment. You nod and feel like you've been caught in a hurricane.
"Yeah."
"It's for forever," she tells you, setting your glasses onto the bridge of your damp nose.
"For when we're not young and invincible. For when all we have are aching souls."
"Just your soul aches? You got off lucky, I'd say."
"I'm serious."
You know she is; she's Lily your Lily, and seriousness is part of her act.
You kiss her hair, heavy in her face, and her chin and the freckles spattered like sweat on her sky high cheekbones.
You are both young, golden young, and with swelling breaths you stare with heady arrogance into eternity.
"Okay, Evans. For when all we have are aching souls."
Note: The phrase "romp like the mind of God" belongs to the tragic beauty of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I just retyped it.