**Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore. Faithful friends who are dear to us, gather near to us once more. Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow. So hang a shining star upon the highest bough and have yourself a merry little Christmas now.** Merry (super) early Christmas. I don't know why but I am waaaay tooo excited about the short number of weeks between me and christmas decorations and snow (what little we get in Tennessee, anyway). This feeling has nothing to do with the chapter, but I wanted you all to know.

enjoy.

There had never really come a time in her life that Lily had questioned who she was and where she was in life. She hadn't ever even thought it necessary. Why would you question something you were so confident in? Maybe that was the issue, now. That Lily was no longer confident in who she was and she wasn't really sure where she was in life. She had this near perfect life, living in a calm neighborhood, working at a stress-free job. She knew she was ignoring everything that she had learned throughout her schooling at Hogwarts, but she didn't feel like it was necessary for her to be so involved with magic anymore. There were so many other people that were as qualified if not more qualified than she was to do anything in the magic world.

She felt completely secure in the fact that her life was exactly how she wanted it to be, but as she thought about that for a moment, was it really? She wanted to be a wife and a mother, and as much as she joked about being unorganized, she was successful at patterns and lists. She could follow a checklist from the moment she placed her feet on her hardwood in the morning to the moment she crawled between her sheets at night. And she was happy doing it. But she wanted someone to crawl into bed with and someone to share coffee with first thing in the morning. So maybe she was missing a few things from her life, but she was successful. That was important to her.

She was independent. She didn't need a man to fix her plumbing, kill bugs, look for intruders at night, take her out to eat, splurge on her, or surprise her with flowers. She could buy her own damn flowers. She scanned her street and unclenched her fist. She hadn't realized that she had gotten angry, but there was a small feminist inside of her head that jumped to her emotional rescue when she felt lonely and it triggered anger in her every time.

Lonely. A word she had never quite associated with herself. She had always had friends, she had dated a few boys here and there and she had definitely had her fair share of one night stands. And yet, she was lonely. Maybe she should take her work friend, Loyal, up on her offer to go out for drinks sometime. She was curled up on her porch swing with a now empty cup of coffee clutched in her fingers. She loved sitting on her porch in the morning, it always made her day feel like it had truly begun. She was trying to pretend like she wasn't looking for the one recent addition to the morning chaos.

Right as she was about to give up and go inside, she saw him. James came jogging around the corner to her right. He was shirtless today. His rhythm was consistent as his feet hit the pavement. He always looked up at her, and smiled widely, and then jogged right up to his front door, where he then proceeded to stretch and do push-ups and sit-ups to cool down. She would always pretend to look at the sky while admiring his physique from her peripheral vision.

This morning, however, he glanced behind him as he crossed to their side of the street and jogged up to her. He didn't say anything, just stretched and panted lightly. When he stepped back and dropped to the ground to do a few push-ups, she leaned forward and wondered aloud. "What are you doing?" Confusion laced her words.

He finished his set and stood back up, approaching her again. Still panting lightly, he answered her question between breaths. "I figured I would give your eye muscles a rest. Trying to focus on such details," he gestured to himself. "Out of the corner of your eye day after day must be exhausting." His smirk made her blush terribly. When he had finished his cool down he walked right up to where she was staring into her empty coffee cup. He looked down into it and jumped excitedly internally. "How long has that been empty?"

The Lily she used to know and love would have told him only a few minutes and pretended that he was completely wrong in his claims about where her eyes tended to drift, but she didn't feel like she really knew who she was anymore. So she decided to reinvent herself, be spontaneous. Forget her lists. "About half an hour." The words, while they simply confirmed his suspicions, meant so much more to the two of them than anyone else could possibly know.

He smiled down at her lightly, and instead of making a quip that she truly expected, he nodded his head. "Good morning, Lovely." He turned and without another word, left her alone on her porch again in the cool of morning. When she heard his door shut and she leaned forward to confirm he was inside, she stood up and did the same thing. She wandered around her empty home for a few minutes before fully making up her mind.

She picked up her phone and found the number she was looking for almost immediately. After a few rings, the woman on the other line cheerfully greeted her friend. "Hey Loyal, why don't we go out tonight?" said Lily. She was tired of feeling lost in her life, she was tired of the same old thing every day. She had thought she was content in her life before the marauders had made an appearance again and it was true. But she didn't want to be just content anymore, she wanted to thrive. She wanted to laugh obnoxiously and be spontaneous, be slightly careless, and she wanted her magic back. Lily hadn't realized how much she missed using magic until Petunia had showed up the other day and forced her to solve a problem.

Loyal responded excitedly. After they had picked a time and a place, both women hung up. Lily looked around her house and decided that she didn't want to be alone anymore. To hell with what she thought she knew about James from school. It was obvious that he had changed and the way she always knew she felt about him deep down hadn't. She grabbed her keys, and after she thought twice about it, her wand, and headed over to his house. It had been about fifteen minutes since he left her on her porch, so she figured he was probably finished showering. She was going to walk over there calmly and explain the emotional turmoil she was feeling inside. She was going to tell him that she felt more for him that a friend normally would. A lot more.

She walked out her door and turned to lock it but then decided that maybe it was better to leave it unlocked so that she could use it as an excuse to leave if she had been wrong about all the signals she believed he had been sending since they met about seven years prior. Then again, that was what the Lily she knew would do; what did the Lily she was becoming want to do? She fought a smile as she slid her key into the door handle and locked her home. She smoothed down wrinkles in her shirt as she walked over to his stoop. She stood at his door, picking off nonexistent fuzz from her clothing in the name of procrastination. Taking a few deep breaths, she smiled to herself, she could do this. Lily reached her hand up, rested her pointer finger on the doorbell and applied a little pressure.

The moment she heard it ring out from inside, she panicked. What the hell was she doing? What was she going to say? "Hey James, sorry I played with your feelings all throughout our schooling... I'm ready to be an adult now." No. "I can easily resist you fully clothed but when you jog by my house with no shirt on, I can't help but think naughty thoughts." No, she couldn't say that... "James, I've finally decided to be honest with myself. I know what I want in life and it's you, it's us. I want what I've been fighting against since I met you at the age of eleven."

She took a deep breath and decided that maybe starting with coffee would be a helpful lead in to what she wanted to communicate. She heard movement on the other side of the door and pivoted her body to the right a little and pretended to be surveying his garden so that he wouldn't see her face right when he opened the door. She was afraid she would look too nervous. The door creaked and she looked up expectantly. "Hey James, I was wondering if..." Before her stood their beautiful blonde neighbor. "Oh! I was expecting James... Because he lives here... And you don't." Lily gave the young woman a once over and realized that she was barely clothed. "Heather, right?" It was as the petite girl nodded excitedly that Lily recognized her as one of the neighbors right behind her and James' houses, the very same neighbor that Lily had been jealous of, only a few days prior.

"James is about to be out of the shower, I'll tell him you're here?" The young woman offered, gesturing behind her and opening the door up wider for Lily to step in.

Who was she to just invite someone in to James' house? "Oh, no thank you. In fact, don't even bother telling him I was here. I was just wondering if he had met you, but he obviously has!" Why that was what came out of her mouth, she wasn't sure. Both women had been there when James had met the girl. Now Lily wasn't the one in his house, the one with his attention and she looked like a fool to her only competition. Or, apparently, there wasn't much competition left. James had made his choice. Lily forced a laugh out of her body to hide her discomfort and turned to walk down his steps when she heard something that twisted her gut.

"Oh, he most definitely has," the woman behind her whispered smugly. Lily was shocked to say the least. Hadn't James been in need of a rescue the other day? She hesitated in walking up her front steps when a thought occurred to her. Maybe Lily had seen him interacting with Heather and justified her actions in her own head by fabricating discomfort on James' part. It was very clear that she had either misread their relationship early on or it had rapidly changed in the last seventy-two hours.

Lily made it to her front door, embarrassment still tinting her cheeks, and reached to turn her door handle. When she found it locked, as she had chosen to leave it, she burst into tears. Who was she? Apparently she was the same girl she had always been. The one who ran with all of her might from James Potter and then in an instant decided to hesitate and glance behind her; but it was always too late. She set her keys down on her kitchen counter and pulled her wand out of the waistband of her jeans. She twirled it through her fingers a few times before making up her mind. She stormed up the stairs, busted open her bedroom door, reached blindly under her bed and grabbed the box she had placed there no more than two days ago. When it was in her grasp, she pulled it out and ripped it open.

She hesitated momentarily when she saw her formal robes and moving pictures from her time at Hogwarts, but after mentally shaking herself, she threw her wand in and closed the box again. She was going to just slide it back under her bed, but it just didn't seem final enough. She walked over to her closet and chucked it up onto the shelf at the top. She wasn't sure where or how it landed and she felt quite settled about it. Wiping the tears from her eyes, she settled herself against the wall and slid down to sit on the carpet. Why did she think anything had changed? It hadn't. She got a few butterflies and made a brash decision which had ended badly. This, this was why she stuck to routines. She wouldn't make the same mistake again.

Hope you liked it... Tell me or don't, either way I'll feel special because CHRISTMAS IS SO FUCKING CLOSE TO ME RIGHT NOW! ... Childish moment over. My adult game is so weak in the face of all holidays. I melt like butter in the warm sunshine. Or a microwave... that happens faster.

So! Update in my life, for any and all who care (I need to come up with a clever name for my personal updates. Like... Giving Graces. No, that's fucking stupid. Grace's Great! ... But what if I'm super shitty, I don't want to lie. And that kind of sound like I'm patting myself on the back... We'll revisit this at a later date.) :I got a new job that I adore. It gives me the availability to do homework or write, so hopefully I won't be quite so distant. I'm still baeless (#foreveralone)... I bought new sheets for my bed. They're brown. :) I literally have nothing to tell you.

I just keep letting you all down in every capacity. Fack me. Yes, fack.. Not fuck. I may be single, but I'm not thirsty. (*lies*)