A/N: Friends, what a fucking week. acting up, the US election, global pandemic—it's too much. (I do like that I wrote acting up as the first issue there. That wasn't intentional, but it made me laugh after I wrote it.) I will say, I laughed out loud at the panicked reviews I got basically the second my chapter didn't show up but notification emails were sent. The reviews you all have given me are amazing, and they're absolutely driving this forward. To see a handful of people immediately come to read this after getting a notification—well, that's a huge compliment. I reread through every review before I post the next chapter, and I always end up smiling like such an idiot. Thanks for bringing me that joy.
I also have to thank you all for the quality of these reviews. You all really push me to think about this story in a different way and to see perspectives that I often don't, because I'm so close to it all that I overlook things sometimes. I received a review once that commented on how when they asked questions, I typically answered them in the next chapter or two. All of this is written pretty far in advance, so 99% of what you've read I haven't edited to answer anything. You all are just that good that you see the things coming that I've tried to drop hints about. As a writer, there's no higher compliment than knowing you're all following that closely. (Except maybe the compliments about my outtakes, which were so sweet. The outtakes are just pure chaos, random scenes here or there that I pulled to go a different direction, or because I wanted to explore it more fully later/in the sequel. Much of it will get recycled in some fashion, so that's my advice to you today if you write: always save the scenes you plan to scrap!)
Alright, this was long. Sorry. A fair warning, although I feel like you all should expect this after making it through chapter one: there is smut for days coming up. Like, I've written the next 3 chapters, and it's in every one. I know it's not everyone's thing, and so it's just something to keep in mind. We waited a long time to get to this point, so that's basically where this is going, although there's obviously plot too lol. Just an FYI.
Happy Friday!
Chapter Twenty-Two
And then, just like that, break ended.
Euphemia didn't cry when they left, not exactly. Tears gathered in her eyes when she hugged Sirius, and James saw them collect even further when she took hugged him. He did his best to smile at her when she took his face in her hands, and something about the way she looked up at him—the broken line of her forehead, the downturn of her eyebrows, the quivering shape of her mouth—made her look her age as she normally didn't. She looked almost small despite her height, frail and thin, and it hit him with a suddenness that bordered on panic.
She was old.
He tried to imagine a world without his mum, where she no longer hugged him at every chance and scolded him over his language.
What kind of world would that even be?
Just as he tried to imagine it, he abruptly tried very hard not to imagine it.
A lump still burned in his throat nonetheless, especially as Fleamont shook his shoulder affectionately and told him not to raise too much hell.
"Sirius, on the other hand…I expect you'll do whatever you please." Fleamont winked. "I'm fine with that. Just don't let Jamie get too far out of line. He's Head Boy, after all, so he gets to have less fun."
Sirius grinned victoriously, clearly relishing the express permission for troublemaking. "Cheers, Flea. You're the dad I wish I had."
He'd thrown it out casually, almost like a joke, but James knew he very much meant it. Really, he assumed that all six of them could see as much.
His mum took leave of Hestia tenderly, and Lily with much more warmth than she'd shown her the first week of break, in those times James internally called Before Lily.
"Write me and let me know how Arithmancy is going," Euphemia told her, and from the way Lily smiled, James knew that she would. She had sworn early on in the break that she would work to win his mum over, and he'd never doubted that she could. She was a force of nature, after all.
Still, it fairly floored him to think that Lily Evans—Lily Evans—clearly planned to become pen pals with his mum.
Wild.
"And keep me updated on your progress at Potions, and about your scar potion in particular," Fleamont added. For a moment, it looked like neither he or Lily knew quite how to say goodbye. A handshake? A hug? Neither? Then Lily laughed, all pretty dimples, and the lump in James' throat only increased as she hugged his dad. Fleamont looked surprised, but not displeased in the least. Watching his dad pat Lily on the back, James noticed the wear and tear on his hands for the first time—the heavy lines, the bulging veins, the liver spots.
He was old.
It took ages for the lump in his throat to disappear entirely, long after they'd Disapparated and he'd left his parents behind.
"Completely snowed," Sirius said after they'd gotten a compartment on the Hogwarts Express. "Did you see your dad's face, mate? If you blow it with her, I think he might disown you and adopt her instead."
Lily laughed, but when James tried to imagine a scenario in which he went home and told his parents that he and Lily had called it off—
Well, Sirius clearly exaggerated, but he made a good point.
As the train filled, James realized he had no idea how he should act towards Lily.
He also had no idea how he would managed to keep his hands off her.
It felt good to have Remus and Peter back with them, and even Marlene too, oddly enough. Lily looked so pleased to see her that it made him smile, her joy bringing him joy. It helped that Marlene looked almost pleased to see him too, or as near to it as he'd ever seen. She looked at him no differently than she did his friends, save for perhaps Peter. She liked him, for some reason, and it showed.
Probably because he openly fancied her, and it padded her ego.
Oliver took to his new surroundings with astounding ease. After meeting Remus, Marlene and Peter for the first time, he made directly for Peter, and curled up on his lap in the blink of an eye, immediately shedding long gray and white hairs on his jumper. Peter didn't seem to mind. He stroked Oliver's head with a sort of fondness that James had never truly seen before, but the sight clearly made Lily even happier than seeing Marlene, her happiness stacked on top of happiness. She went to sit by him and engaged him in conversation about Oliver and Kneazles and magical creatures generally, and a single glance at the smile on Peter's face revealed his own happiness at that.
Had she left him to sit by anyone else, James might have felt put out. But watching her laugh with Peter, and Peter's obvious pleasure at her genuine desire to talk to him—well, that felt almost as good as having her by his side.
Almost.
He knew anyone who so much as glanced at him had to see the open way he admired her, but he couldn't help himself.
Besides, wasn't the world used to seeing him look at her in that way?
Marlene was, and she caught James' eye within the first hour of the train ride. She jerked her chin towards Lily, expression the picture-perfect definition of nonchalant, and asked, "When are you going to tell us you two are shagging?"
The compartment stilled.
Lily spoke first. She looked nonchalant in return, lifting a cool eyebrow in curiosity. Her hand never stopped stroking Oliver's side, as the cat purred in Peter's lap. "Mar?"
That was all it took.
James couldn't remember a time Marlene had ever looked more smug. Her dark eyes glittered, and the full shape of her mouth had stretched into a victorious, almost vicious smile. "I may have peeked into James and Sirius' rooms when we were over for James' birthday. In my defense, you all know who and how I am—Lily and Hestia especially. Someone should have thought to lock the places you didn't want me to go. It's your own fault, really."
Lily stared at her, her lips slightly parted, the only indicator of her disbelief.
"Imagine my surprise when I saw nothing of Hestia's in Sirius' room, but I did see some of yours things in James'," Marlene went on. "At least I'm assuming those were your toiletries and makeup bag and fancy blue sex knickers on the floor—which looked torn, although I didn't really investigate closely. I hope you fixed them, James, because I was with her when she got them, and they weren't exactly cheap."
James could remember wrenching those knickers off Lily the night before his birthday, another scrap of fabric that bared more than it covered. The lace had indeed ripped, and he could remember the satisfying feel and sound of the fabric tearing under his hands before he'd thrown them on the floor so he could get his fingers inside of her.
"She fixed them," he told Marlene after a beat, because she'd taken to watching him instead of Lily, her face triumphant. "I'm shit at mending charms."
Marlene began to cackle.
"You absolute crazy bitch—" Lily began, although she didn't truly sound mad, or even surprised, really. Exasperation colored her tone, and she went to run a hand through her hair even as Remus turned sharply to look at James.
His face echoed the triumph on Marlene's a little too closely for James' comfort. "I knew it," he said. "I knew it. All your Zen nonsense about things working themselves out—I told you that attitude couldn't have come from wanking—"
That sent Lily.
"What?" she asked, laughing, and the compartment devolved into laughter with her, joining Marlene in her continued glee. "Remus, what on earth—"
Remus didn't look even a bit embarrassed. James could only stare as Remus gestured emphatically towards him. "You clearly did this," he told Lily, and no one asked him to specify what he meant. "I knew you were shagging within the first ten minutes of his birthday, and I told him I knew. He was a madman two days before, and then suddenly he can't wipe that look off his face? Look at him. You did this. Clearly."
Later, Lily would confide in James that, looking rather shamefaced, Remus had eventually apologized to her for the things he said in that moment. She, on the other hand, never stopped finding it funny, and would swear as much to him.
"I kept waiting for you to tell me, Lil—and I can't believe you didn't tell me, Hessie—and fuck you, Sirius, honestly," Marlene said. She spoke not with irritation, but still with a smug, knowing smile, still pleased at her own cleverness. "I asked you both—Sirius, I fucking interrogated you—"
"You're not great at it," Sirius told her. He looked at her as James had glimpsed in his parents' den, as if undeniably impressed. Her tactics weren't dissimilar to something he might attempt, after all. "You went in our rooms? Marlene, that's—"
"Invasive?" Hestia suggested. She began to tick off other options on her fingers, and of the compartment's occupants, James thought only she looked annoyed, just a trace of it. "Over the top? Ridiculous? Off-putting? Concerning?"
James caught Lily's eye from across the compartment, and he felt his heart lurch into his mouth. He wished she sat closer, because he would have liked to touch her then, just a hand in her hair or on her leg, something for support and stability. The time had come, pushed to the forefront by Marlene's antics (invasive indeed, although like everyone else, he found that they didn't surprise him, or even bother him, really).
"So, we're together," he said bluntly, and the compartment stilled a little again. He felt Hestia's eyes on him more than anyone else's, her gaze so sharp that it almost physically hurt. "But that can't leave the compartment. We're not telling anyone else, and we're not going to act like it."
The remaining levity vanished.
"I'll go first with questions," Sirius offered, and his voice hit James like a bludger.
In all the time he and Lily had spent talking about the situation, turning it over and over in their thoughts and words late into the night, they had never discussed exactly what role they wanted Sirius to play.
Yet, against all odds, Sirius played the role exactly right.
"Why?" he asked simply, his hand on the back of Hestia's neck, and he looked like he lived and breathed curiosity, as if as flummoxed as Hestia or Remus or any of them.
Sirius knowing nothing meant that Hestia couldn't harass him with questions, and not having to worry about that eased an ounce of the tension of James' shoulders. Just an ounce.
The rest of the tension remained for a very clear reason.
What else hadn't they thought of, if something like that could slip by without notice?
Although they hadn't choreographed it, Lily took up the explanation without pause, and James hoped she saw the gratitude he felt when he heard her voice. He didn't trust himself not to bungle things spectacularly, but she—well, he'd always thought she could convince anyone anything if she tried hard enough.
"It's been suggested that our adjustment into the Auror Department will go more smoothly that way," she said, and her voice sounded every bit as smooth as their hopeful transition. Even though James knew she spoke falsely, he still nearly believed her. "There's a lot going on there—personally, professionally—that we can't really get into, because there's a lot we don't understand ourselves. But it was asked of us, and we've come to terms with it."
The rest, they had decided—Greg and all that—could wait until June. They would figure it out then.
Marlene stared at her, gobsmacked. "I'm sorry, what?"
Lily spread her hands apart, gesturing to nothing, yet somehow she managed to make the move look as if it spoke volumes to an explanation she didn't give.
How the fuck did she do that?
"I can't explain, Mar," she said. "I would if I could, and you know that. It's been suggested that we go into all this without attachment to each other, and so that's our plan for outward appearances. I know it's bizarre. Trust me, I know. We're asking you all not to say anything. It's like when I went to St. Mungo's—I know you all knew, and none of you ever told a soul. This is like that—more serious, honestly. We have jobs on the line here, and more than that too. We're trusting all of you to not say a word."
She had never referenced her trip to St. Mungo's in front of all of them before, not that James could remember. She hadn't yet changed into her school robes, still clad in a soft olive green dress with buttons down the front. She sat with her legs crossed, and he wanted her fingers go subconsciously towards her right calf, briefly stroking in a way she didn't seem to catch.
"So you can't tell anyone," Lily repeated with emphasis. Her eyes had locked on Marlene, and James didn't envy her for sitting on the other side of such a look. Lily's gaze had gone painfully intense. "Not Luke, not your mum—"
"Why are you addressing this to me?" Marlene demanded. "Why am I always the one getting the warnings, and not—"
"Who else do Hessie or this lot talk to? At least in depth?"
She made a good point.
Such a good point, in fact, that Marlene opened her mouth to argue back, but then closed it slowly, words either dying or just never materializing. "What's your plan with Alex, then?" she asked, and the tension in the compartment, already high, shifted slightly.
Only she didn't know about Lily and Morton.
Lily and Hestia had spoken about it at length over break. James had caught them at it mid-week, huddled together quietly in his parents' kitchen after baking together a second time, and Hestia had looked so guilty when she'd seen him that his curiosity had refused to let the moment go.
Absurdly, after they'd divulged the topic of conversation, he and Sirius had ended up sitting at the kitchen table with them, strategizing about how to disentangle Lily from an old lover and break the news to Marlene about a secret kept for over a year.
Absurd. Truly absurd.
It was absurd because it had felt almost normal, sitting there with the three of them, trying to work it all out. Perhaps the weight of the world—Greg, Mucliber, the wizarding war, the uncertain future—had put things into perspective, but James found that Morton simply no longer mattered in his mind. Lily had looked uncomfortable with it all at first, the emotion just evident in the tightness in the corners of her mouth, something he doubted Sirius or Hestia had seen. Eventually, it had looked like his relative ease had relaxed her, at least enough to tell him and Sirius what she and Hestia had decided.
"We'll give Mar three glasses of wine," Lily had explained, twisting her teacup in her hands. At her side, Hestia—the other part of the 'we' in question, no doubt—nodded firmly. "I'll tell her he and I had a thing, and I'd never told her because it happened before she would even smile at Luke because she didn't know what to do from fancying him so much, and I didn't want to muck that up. By the time they got together, telling her would have been weird—and it didn't last long past that anyway. If she gets too terribly pissy, I'll tell her that Alex and I actually plotted to get them together without either of them knowing. We promised to meet up with them in the library to work on a Potions essay, and then both didn't show. Luke finally made a move that night. That should at least let her see that something good came from it, and hopefully calm her some."
She had sounded so fond of the memory in the library, and Morton's first name had come so easily from her mouth, that James had felt a flash of his previous dislike hit his chest, hot and dark. Yet it had passed quickly, quicker than he could ever remember. Lily had given him that look he loved, her eyes soft and tender, and that had righted the moment with surprising ease.
"I don't want to make things difficult for you and Luke," Lily told Marlene. If she felt awkward at the public nature of the conversation in a compartment surrounded by their friends, she didn't look it. "You know that. I've been kind, I've kept the peace, I've done gentle directness, but I think—"
"Yeah," Marlene said simply when she broke off, her face uncharacteristically serious. Something passed between her and Lily that James could almost see, a wordless moment that said something he could recognize but couldn't catch. "Try not to wreck him, will you? He does actually like you. Be nicer than you are to most lads."
What the hell did that mean?
"Of course," Lily agreed. "He really is lovely. I do mean that. He's just…he's not for me."
"Yeah, because you have shit taste in men." The grin Marlene flashed James, brief and pretty, softened what could have been a swift blow. "So, when?"
Lily stood. "Now, I think. I might as well get it all sorted. I'll be back."
James could only stare open-mouthed after her as she slid out the compartment door and disappeared out of sight.
They hadn't planned that.
She hadn't said a word about it to him.
What in the ever-loving—
"So I guess we're mates now," Marlene said, jerking him from his shocked stare. She looked as she spoke: perfectly amiable, as if she'd never cursed or hexed or threatened him, and he'd never tormented her endlessly just for being Lily's friend. "But I'm still going to go in on you if you're a prat. Worse, if I'm honest. I don't tolerate shit from my mates. Ask Hessie."
"It's true." Hestia leaned around Sirius to look at Marlene, and again, James saw the intensity in her eyes even though she remained focused on Marlene. "You're helping me get the rest of it out of her tonight, right?" she asked unabashedly. She didn't seem to care that James overheard, or any of the rest of them. She looked singularly focused, and she suddenly reminded him of Sirius in that moment as she never had before—a dog with a bone, unable to let things go.
Marlene shocked the hell out of him, so much that he literally forgot how to breathe for a few seconds.
"No," she said after a beat, tipping her head to the left and then right in thought, her thick curls swinging lightly. "No, we'll let her be. What?" she asked when Hestia made a sharp noise of disbelief. "It doesn't sound like something we should push, Hessie. Let her tell us when she can. She'll just end up shutting us out if we don't respect that."
Yes, the parts of Lily that Marlene knew, she knew very well.
When the hell had she gotten reasonable?
Even though Marlene spoke with conviction, as if she'd set a plan into place, Hestia didn't look convinced. From the way she sat back in a slight slouch, James had the distinct feeling that she'd never been on the outside of Lily's life before, at least not to her knowledge.
She looked lost.
"You okay?" Remus' voice pulled James' thoughts from Hestia and into his own introspective consideration of his mood. Remus' brown eyes looked kind but worried, one of the most Remus expressions James could imagine. "Is this why the world is fucked?"
He could hardly deny it.
"Yeah." James took a deep breath. "Yeah, that's why. But we figured it out as much as we can. We're good. I'm happy. Really happy."
He meant every word.
Sirius snorted. "Would hope you'd be happy, mate. You should have seen them," he added to Remus and Peter. "You should have heard them. They didn't silence the room the first night, and I don't think I slept at all, because they didn't sleep at all. I was right, Remus. Level ten earthquake. They're fucking ridiculous."
It brought the right note of levity back into it all, and James grinned at him, which Sirius returned with a ghost of a wink. For once, Sirius taking the piss out of him over Lily actually helped, and James was suddenly almost grateful for all the practice Sirius had gotten in before that moment, because it lifted the mood and melted away the tension of the compartment immediately.
"Haven't you been waiting to tell the whole story?" he asked Sirius, who sat up straighter with an eager smile. "Go on, then. Marlene looks like she'll hex you if you don't."
She really did.
Sirius told the whole tale from start to finish—or at least what he could tell without admitting anything about what he'd overheard between James and his parents. He set himself up as the hero, a devoted friend set out to fix the problems between Lily and James that he couldn't even name. Still, he spoke with such innate charisma that that detail hardly mattered. It mattered more how he described almost wrestling with one of the Potters' owls to get the letter to Lily, the bird refusing to hold still so he could tie his letter to its leg, which ended in bloodied hands from deep peck marks. It mattered more how he said that he and Lily had "talked about their feelings" together. (James wondered if Frank's phrase would ever die; he didn't know it then, but it never would.) It mattered more how he claimed that he and Lily had become best friends, and how Marlene had scoffed loudly in response, clearly wound up as he had clearly intended. It mattered more how he described how he dashingly saved the day, convincing Lily to, as he put it, "look past James' flaws," which he had described in length, and "give him a shot" because she'd "turned him into a miserable mess."
It mattered most because his plan to get them together had worked.
"And now they're fucking ridiculous," Sirius finished with a flourish. "Remus, if you think the way he looks now is bad—just wait. Lucky that Lily can actually hold it together if she tries, all things considered. We're all used to seeing James look at her all soppy-like. All of Hogwarts is used to it. Lucky she's not the same, since this can't leave the compartment."
Yes, Sirius was his best friend. Without a doubt.
He'd sold it all perfectly.
Even Hestia smiled. "She's much happier," she told Marlene with a small, coy smile that lit up her face. "Wait. Ask her tonight. She'll tell you."
Stupid stairs to the girls' dormitory.
James had never wanted to don his invisibility cloak and listen in on a conversation so badly before—perhaps in all his life.
Lily stayed gone for the better part of an hour.
When she returned, he immediately saw that she'd plaited her hair, which told him everything he needed to know about the state of her nerves.
"It's fine," she told Marlene quickly. "I'll tell you everything later, but no hard feelings. He was perfectly polite about it all. Just the same, I think I've had my fill of Ravenclaws for a while. I'll let you and Hessie go to their compartment and I'll hang back here."
Hestia stared at her. Her expression spoke of nothing but betrayal.
Later, Lily would describe it all to James, because he would press and press and press her on it, keen for every last detail. She would treat it all with a deep patience that surprised him, more than she'd extended to him over similar pressing about Greg. Later still, he would wonder if that patience came from the fact that she had ended it with Morton, which meant that his questions and their conversations about him would presumably end. With Greg, they would have to continue, and that, he would decide, was what frayed her nerves.
She had told Morton that she'd done a lot of soul searching over break, and had decided that on top of her previous misgivings towards dating, trying to get into the Auror Department would leave her no time for someone else. (She could hardly tell him that Moody had all but guaranteed her a spot, after all.) "I'm worried I won't even have time for Hestia and Mar," she had told him, and that had made him laugh, apparently, because he knew Marlene well enough to know that that would never fly.
Still, she had driven home to Morton something beyond that, something she had tried to tell him more than once without putting the words as harshly as she did then, and she repeated the same information several times, each time a little more severely: even if she had the time and desire for a partner, she knew it wouldn't be him. And there was never a future chance for that to happen between them. Ever.
Hearing that were the only times he'd shown any sort of negative reaction, she would confide in James, and she'd look like she felt badly for it. Morton had flinched a little each time, by her recollection, although he hadn't said or done anything more.
And then, weirdly enough, they had reminisced.
He'd brought up a memory he had of them, asking her if she remembered the first time he kissed her. After that, they had sort of fallen into it all, recalling different bits and pieces of their time spent together. When James would press her, that hot, sick feeling in his stomach refusing to let the moment pass without knowing explicit details, she would tell him about it without argument, although reluctance would color both her face and her tone.
They had laughed over their set up of Marlene and Rooney in the library, and how they'd watched them together, hidden behind a bookshelf, to see if it worked. Marlene had looked almost petrified, a look James couldn't imagine on her, and the expression had stayed until Rooney had said something to her, a sentence or two too quiet for Lily and Morton to hear, and then pink pleasure had spread across the warm brown of her cheeks. With that, Lily and Morton had left, certain they'd completed their job.
It turned out that they had completed their job, and well.
They had talked about the incident Lily had once described to James, where Morton had gone to find her after Snape had called her a mudblood their fifth year. She had thanked him for it, something she would admit to James that she wasn't sure she had ever done, and Morton had looked baffled by the gratitude. He had told her she didn't need to thank him for being a decent person, which of course had made her feel like shit all over again.
They had even gotten to the root of it all and discussed how they had transitioned from just snogging in the spring term of their fifth year to their first time together in the fall of sixth year, although they didn't get into explicit details. Rather, they had spoken of what they had each thought and how it had felt, not physically, but mentally and emotionally. When James would ask her to tell him about it, she would balk only briefly before giving in. She would seem to accept what he already had: until that door closed completely, he would need to know everything he could about it all. She would extend more patience than usual for that, undoubtedly because she meant to shut that door forever after that conversation.
"What did you think afterwards?" Morton had asked her, and she didn't meet James' eyes in her retelling of it all.
"I was happy," she had told him. "I thought you were fit and kind and I wanted to do it again. I was glad that we were mates. But that was how it always felt for me. I fancied the hell out of you, but I always just thought of you as my friend."
"Would it have been different if I'd tried this sooner? Making what we were something more?" He hadn't meant to say the words, she would tell James, just based on the look on his face.
"We'll never know the answer to that, but I really don't think so," she'd said, and, weirdly, that had seemed to pacify him more than anything else.
She had told Morton that she meant to tell Marlene everything, and wanted to give him fair warning to also tell Rooney, if he wanted. Morton had almost laughed at that, she would tell James, as if he knew that she'd drawn the short end of the stick and knew just how difficult and potentially painful that moment would be with Marlene in comparison to what he faced with Rooney.
She had tried to part with kindness, although she had cringed at her own cliché words when she told him that he'd make a stellar boyfriend for someone else. He'd taken it well, by her estimation, and had even kissed her cheek before they'd parted ways. She'd absolutely meant what she said, James would tell immediately, because even recounting it all to him, she would look torn up about it all. When pressed, she would admit that life with a boyfriend like Morton would have been simple and easy, and a part of her wished she wanted that. She had described her relationship with Greg exactly the same—easy.
But she hadn't wanted that.
Like him, she'd had opportunities for easy and had never taken them.
She would have similar opportunities in the future—and so would he—but even though it would look at times like both of them might go for the easy option in such a complicated world, they never would. Not for long.
In the end, they would always prefer life difficult but together.
xxx
That night, the refrain James thought during break ran through his head again.
Once Lily came around, she really came around, because she went all in.
It shouldn't have surprised him. He'd never seen her do a single thing half-arsed, not in almost seven years of knowing her. She went fully into everything—whole-arsed, he would come to think of it—and he'd always admired that about her. She worked determinedly at everything she did—classes, being Head Girl, friendship, winning over his family, shagging, and, suddenly, them.
In the span of just over twelve hours, she helped him tell their friends about them; ended things with Morton; and then got Marlene tipsy and admitted the whole, hidden affair.
When Lily knocked at his dorm door just past eleven to tell him that, he gaped at her. Really, his friends did too. Peter even sat up from where he'd already settled into bed, eyes round and mouth open, and Sirius gave her a careful once-over, clearly fighting a grin.
"Looks like you survived it okay," he said to her. "No physical damage, at least—or at least that's visible. I'm sure James will have to check you out fully in order to make sure."
Of course, James wanted nothing more than to do just that.
He hadn't expected it at all, but it hardly surprised him when he found himself immediately wanting her, turned on by her willingness for honesty and openness when expressing herself came to her so difficultly.
"Come here," he requested, already in his bed as well, and she did. She crossed the carpeted floor to his four-poster bed and sat primly on the edge of the mattress, posture perfect and face impassive, all Head Girl.
Even though she smelled a bit like wine, he very much doubted that he'd manage to get into the uniform she still wore in order to check her over as Sirius had suggested. She looked like a totally different person than the woman who had dragged him into the shower at his parents' house that morning, impatient for his touch.
"She handled it remarkably well," she told him simply. "I framed it as not wanting to potentially ruin things with her and Luke before they even started, because she'd fancied him for ages, and I really didn't want to make things weird. She understood it in the end. Hestia had the room silenced and her wand in her hand under her pillow just in case, but we didn't even start to fight."
Sirius returned the smile she shot him at that. "Bet Hess loved playing referee."
"Honestly, I think you're right." Lily pushed a hand through her hair, tossing it to one side, and even though she sat just out of reach of James' arms, he thought he could still smell her perfume as she did so, and it sent further heat into the pit of his stomach.
She'd already conditioned him.
Or he'd conditioned himself.
Or both.
"So now you all know about me and James, and Morton knows it's done, and Marlene knows about Morton, and that's that," Lily summarized briskly.
Whole-arsed indeed.
She stood up and smoothed her skirt down. "It's earned me a reprieve from the Ravenclaw table in the Great Hall for a while, which is nice, although I think Hestia might murder me for abandoning her. Anyway, I'll let you all sleep. I just wanted to let you all know that we're all fine and in one piece and everything is good, unless Mar just acted it and plans to ambush me later. But I don't think she has that kind of sneakiness in her—although she did go into both of your rooms without telling anyone or letting on at all, so what do I know." She'd nodded at Sirius and James at that, and everything about her expression seemed to say, but what can you do? before she looked at James solely. "They'll sit with the Ravenclaws tomorrow at breakfast and I plan to sit with our sixth year girls. When they ask why, I'll tell them that it's because I'm single and plan to stay that way, which makes sitting with the Ravenclaws strange sometimes. They already asked me about it when Alex asked me out and I said no, so people know it happened and it won't surprise them to hear me use that excuse. I expect they'll ask me about you since people talk about us together, and I'll tell them that you're crazy about me and I'm mainly indifferent, but we're friends." She smiled. "They'll believe that. I'll beg them not to say anything to anyone, so they'll immediately start telling people and hopefully that'll combat any rumors that we're together. It will at least help."
When had she thought up all of that?
"I'd buy it," Peter told her, and he laughed when James chucked his pillow at him. "Sorry, mate. It's in the way you look at her. Everyone sees it. And she—well, she looks at Oliver with more affection."
Lily smiled. "He's a great cat."
"He is. I like him a lot."
"I'm unsurprised he went right to you. You really are good with animals, you know that?"
Normally, the warmth between Lily and Peter would have warmed James too. But in that moment, he wanted her to pay attention to nothing and no one but him.
"Lily—" he began, but she took one look at his face and laughed.
"No."
Apparently, he didn't even need to finish speaking for her to know that he very much wanted to take her somewhere where he could have her to himself. Their adjacent bathroom had started looking very appealing.
"No, I'm going to bed," she said. Still, she went and she kissed him, a hand rested lightly against his jaw and her hair falling all around his face like a perfumed curtain. "Take care of it yourself and tell me about it later," she murmured just inches from his face, and even though she'd spoken quietly, her words carried in the silent dorm.
James heard a strange choking noise somewhere near Peter's bed, and then a series of loud, hacking coughs.
He didn't blame him. He felt rather the same.
"Goodnight!" she called over her shoulder as she left, slipping from his grasp easily and flitting away in a way he admired when she didn't do it to him. "
"Fucking hell, Prongs," Remus said almost as soon as the door closed. The three words immediately sent James laughing, because they sounded so utterly unlike Remus and precisely like Lily. He knew would have liked to hear him say it. "Other than Christmas, I've never seen you two kiss, let alone for her to put it on you, and like that—" The whole mess of it all clearly left him speechless.
"Ridiculous, innit?" Sirius asked. Sirius had taken to laughing too, as had Peter, although Peter's face had turned and stayed a faint pink. Sirius, on the other hand, just looked entirely amused. "I told you—it's wild, Moony. I mean, we all knew she had that kind of thing in her, but for her to turn it Prongs' way? After everything? What are the odds? Prongs, I know I helped—made it a reality, really, you're welcome—but how did you manage the rest?"
With those words, Sirius unknowingly echoed the thoughts that ran through James' brain certainly daily, if not hourly.
He truly had no idea.
xxx
Life fell into a predictable, comfortable, truly wonderful routine.
It wasn't the exact routine that James wanted. Before Easter break—and particularly midway through the first week—he had dared hope that he would return to Hogwarts with Lily as his girlfriend. He'd thought more than once about what a joy, what a relief, that would be, to touch and kiss and hold her in public as much as he wanted—or as much as she'd allow, more likely.
Obviously, things hadn't gone that way.
Still, when he compared the times at Hogwarts Before Lily to those After Lily, even if he hadn't gotten everything he wanted, he had gotten so much more than he'd had before that he really couldn't complain.
In the weeks that followed, life played out nearly as it would have if he'd gotten to decide exactly how it went.
True to her word, Lily eschewed the Ravenclaw table for a good ten or eleven days. Hestia and Marlene only sat there a few times, and James had to assume that the decision to not sit there more came in large part due to Hestia's clear distaste for the entire thing without Lily there beside them. Although Lily would eventually capitulate and go back, James couldn't quite tell how much of her desire to stay away in those early days came from a desire to avoid Morton or to avoid Rooney. In Potions the first week back, Sirius laughingly pointed out the utterly perplexed way that Rooney regarded her, a total change from how they usually smiled and chatted as they brewed. Morton had clearly told him, and Rooney obviously didn't know what to make of her anymore, just as Peter hadn't when he had first found out. Yet unlike she had with Peter, Lily didn't seem interested in making Rooney treat her normally again.
"He'll get over it or he won't," she told James in private. "It doesn't bother me either way. Honestly, I'm not surprised that he's taking it weirder than Mar. She's known I'm not just entirely Head Girl, but he had no idea. I doubt he ever thought of me even remotely sexually, so to hear all that? I sort of feel bad for him."
"You know you can sit with me and Sirius, right?" he reiterated for what felt like the third or fourth time.
She smiled. "Yeah, I know. Thank you. I did offer that to Alex, that I'd cede claim on the table to him, but he wouldn't hear of it."
That didn't look like it surprised her, but it certainly surprised James for reasons he couldn't articulate until several days of thought.
Truly, he realized, he'd expected a bigger blow up.
Morton's angry words after Slughorn's Christmas party had never fully left James' mind. He doubted they ever would. After all, those overheard moments where Morton had accused Lily of fancying him were some of his favorite to date when he'd said them, turning him almost gleeful at the prospect of irritating Morton even a fraction of the way Morton irritated him. Based on that alone, James had expected some sort of a big to do over Lily rejecting him so totally, certain Morton would kick off.
He never did.
He acted perfectly politely in their first prefect meeting after break—towards Lily, at least. He didn't give James a second glance, although he never had. In Potions, too, he spoke to her with an uncanny ease, as if nothing had changed between them.
Absurdly, James came to a startling revelation, something stupidly obvious he'd never considered.
Morton was just nice.
He'd spent months disliking him so totally—and very aware that Morton disliked him in return—that he hadn't seen it, but knowing that he'd won and had nothing to worry about whatsoever left him appreciating Morton as he never could before. For the most part, apparently, Quidditch and girl rivalries aside, Morton was just utterly nice, and that kindness made him mask whatever he felt towards Lily in order to avoid upsetting her.
Because he did mask something, James saw. He glimpsed it on Morton's face during their Potions lessons the second week back. At one point, when Lily got up to go to the storeroom for something, James saw her shoot some bit of banter over her shoulder to Marlene that left Marlene laughing, and even had Rooney chuckling in a way that looked more familiar to their table. The way Morton looked after her, brow briefly furrowed, looked more than a little frustrated—and more than a little longing.
But by the time she returned, he'd rearranged his face into something utterly the opposite, an expression almost entirely detached. Although James did his best to focus on his own brewing, he couldn't help but watch for any further hint of that look, but saw nothing.
Clearly, then, Morton hadn't—or couldn't—shut things off quite as easily as she had, but had chosen not to pursue her further at her request.
James had to respect that.
At the same time, he wondered how much things might have differed if Lily had dropped that she didn't want him in large part because she wanted James.
With Slughorn's Christmas party in mind, he doubted Morton would have reacted nearly as reasonably then, tendency towards kindness or not.
Regardless, watching the scenario play out in a way that felt very final, the end to six months of upset and worry and obsession, James had to recognize that things there had gone so smoothly that he hardly could have planned it better himself.
Marlene's reaction played in large part to the ease of the rest of term.
Only a couple of months before, she and Lily had rowed worse than they ever had in their friendship just at Lily declining Morton's advances.
Unbelievably, Marlene reacted more positively to knowing that Lily had kept things with Morton secret for a year than she had her simple declination of a date.
"Well, it makes more sense now, doesn't it?" she asked James rhetorically when he cautiously asked her how she was after their first day back at classes. She knew right away that he meant to ask after how she felt after the previous night's revelation, and didn't mince words. "Alex is too fit for a girl to write him off without a good reason, and her reasoning didn't make sense. Knowing she gave it something a shot—over a year's worth of shots by shagging him, at least—makes me feel a little better. Obviously that means it wouldn't have worked, and that's better than just not knowing." She looked up at him from where she filed her nails in the common room, their conversation quietly spoken only to one another as he never would have expected to sit with her before break. "And it makes sense why he'd be so after her too. I mean, I bought that he liked her just from working at the same table in Potions and having her around with me and Luke—most blokes would. But to know she was shagging him on top of that? I can't think of a bloke who wouldn't want to lock her down. Can you blame him?"
No, he really couldn't.
"She's incredibly picky," Marlene added, holding out her hand to examine her nails from another angle. "I can't stress that enough. Incredibly fucking picky. Not only about who she shags—and she's way pickier there too than she would have to be, stupidly pickier—but especially about who she actually gives the time of day to like. I wish I could explain it to you so you'd get it—but you won't. You would have had to have seen her over the years. I get that. Just count your fucking blessings, appreciate her, and don't fuck it up."
She smiled at him before standing to go challenge Peter to chess, and he saw it again, that piece of her that Lily had always spoken of. Ride or die, Lily had called her, and he saw it.
Lily had once told him that Sirius would kill for him if he asked, and he didn't doubt it.
But Marlene? Marlene would kill for Lily without her even having to ask.
She still terrified him—really, truly terrified him—but the more he watched her make Lily laugh and the more she seemed willing to not just accept, but almost enjoy his presence—well, he understood her appeal.
And things with Lily?
Despite everything that he couldn't have with her, as April passed all too quickly, the things he did have were better than he expected. That shouldn't have surprised him. She had a way of doing that, of surpassing his expectations, to the point that he knew he probably shouldn't even have expectations when it came to her.
He missed her immediately the first morning of the first day of classes—truly, he had started missing her from the moment they had gotten on the Hogwarts Express to return, aware that they would have to alter their dynamic to fit their new surroundings. He missed sleeping next to her—shagging her, absolutely, but also just sleeping. He missed the openness with which she had bantered and joked and flirted with him at his parents' house, how she acted as if she had always wanted to touch him nearly as badly as he did her, and the sheer availability of her attentions.
If sharing her with his parents, Hestia, and Sirius had felt like a challenge, it was nothing compared to sharing her with Head Girl duties, NEWT preparation, general coursework, Hestia and Marlene together, her random friends in other houses—
He had no idea how she had time to breathe, let alone shoot a smile his way sometimes, but she managed more than that with astounding ease.
Of course, he also had those responsibilities, plus Quidditch, but, as Sirius had pointed out over break (and as he would continue to point out over the years), she just looked better than him at juggling all those things.
That was entirely an illusion, she promised him then and later, and one she'd worked hard to craft, but he would never truly believe her.
Still, despite all that, she found time for him, and he did her.
With Marlene as his friend (thinking of her in those terms would feel strange for months), getting Lily to himself in the evenings became much less of an issue—or as much to himself as they could manage in public. With Marlene more willing to relinquish territory next to her, Lily sat near him on the couch often, tucked under a blanket with a book on her lap. It took conscious effort not to reach to touch her as he had gotten used to doing over break, but the nearness helped considerably. He did his best to let her work and to work in turn, although she sometimes let him distract her. She would ask after Quidditch or his day, and she still managed to make him feel like the only person in the room, just as she always had at home. She laughed at his stories and told him her own, both those from their pasts as well as their present.
"The sixth year girls truly think I should give you a chance," she told him at the end of their second week back. Her smile went briefly, decidedly wicked in the manner that always made his stomach flip. "They're all so certain that you're absolutely smitten with me and can't understand why I won't even entertain the idea. Well, except for Violet Griffith, mind. She and I are perfectly cordial again, but she goes mysteriously deaf any time anyone talks about you. It's the strangest thing."
It absolutely wasn't the strangest thing, because she had already taken the piss out of him for shagging and then ditching Violet the year before, but he didn't mind it in that moment as he had when she'd teased him before. She looked so utterly amused by it all that he couldn't help but smile too.
And he owed her, he reckoned, since he had harassed her about Morton, and knew he would have to continue harass her about Greg—and not jokingly, either.
"What'd you tell them?" he asked, and she looked positively mischievous in a way that utterly suited her face.
"Oh, you know, the same thing I told you I planned to say our first night back. You're infatuated with me. I think you're alright, but I'm not interested in you like that."
"That doesn't sound far off the mark."
"Stop." She laughed as she said it, and she drew her knees up to her chest. She had a blanket over her lap as usual, fully obscuring her lower half, but he didn't have to see to know that her uniform skirt undoubtedly pooled around her hips underneath. His hand itched with the desire to reach underneath her blanket to double-check if he was right. "They don't understand how I can just be friends with you since you're so fit and funny and popular—yes, I know this is giving you a big head, so you don't have to make that face. I told them Sirius was those things too—maybe more so, honestly—and I wouldn't go near him either even if not for Hessie. That floored them, way past me refusing to give you a shot." Amusement danced in her eyes. "Do you still have a big head?"
He snorted. "Yes, because you don't actually think that."
"Which part? That he's better-looking and funnier than you, or that I wouldn't go near him? Why, do you hope I'd go for him?"
Sirius sat nearby, battling Peter at chess, and it surprised James not at all to hear him interject into their quiet, clearly private conversation. He doubted Sirius ever stopped eavesdropping. "Cheers, Lily, love," he said, not lifting his eyes from the chess board, but he grinned too. "If I'd known you'd talk me up to girls, I would have become your best friend a lot sooner."
Would hearing him call her 'love' ever become normal?
James didn't know it then, but it absolutely would.
"It's all comparative," she assured him, smiling. "You should hear the way I chat shit about both of you when I compare you to Remus and Peter. I go in."
"Can't blame you there. Always kind of figured we didn't measure up." He caught Peter's eye and returned his grin before he turned to look at Lily. "But, wait, are we writing each other off as options? Because, like I told James over break, I still kind of thought that maybe—"
Laughing, he ducked the book James threw at him, but only just barely.
But James didn't mind their banter, not really, because they continued to get along better than he ever could have hoped, even if he found himself at their combined expense more often than not. For all Sirius' jokes about best friendship, they did somehow fall naturally into a friendship immediately sincere and easy, just as James had with him in their first year. Time and again, James watched them play chess in the evenings and shit-talk each other the whole time, discuss muggle automobiles and motorbikes and all the things Sirius loved, gossip and titter after a long day of courses, and argue spiritedly over Quidditch. With every conversation, he would marvel at the effortlessness of their banter.
It made sense that his best friend and the woman he loved would have some similar characteristics that made him want to be around them.
Then again, when he watched Marlene turn the duo of Sirius and Lily into a trio some evenings, her own wit and banter matching theirs, he would see the similarities there too, and he wouldn't touch her with a ten-foot pole. She clearly lacked whatever quality Lily and Sirius both had innately that drew him to them, something he would never manage to fully identify or articulate.
Overall, he spent much of April watching their friends interact—their friends, because Hestia and Marlene had clearly become his friends as well, more so than they were before break. It felt ridiculously good to sit and chat with them about music and laugh off Marlene's attempts at Quidditch advice and encourage them to rag on Sirius with him, something even Hestia took part in, to Sirius' obvious delight.
Lily fit him, just suited him utterly in an indescribable way. With her, he often felt as he had when stretched out with her on the grass in his parents' yard when he had held her for the first time for a reason outside comfort. She had just fit into him unlike anything he'd experienced before. All aspects of her—her personality, her humor, her values, her body—fit with him as naturally as breathing.
Yeah, he'd fallen in deep.
And her friends fit too. They fit seamlessly with his with nearly the same sort of organic ease that Sirius and Lily had together. Most April evenings, as they all crammed coursework and extra studying long into the night, James thought it felt as though the seven of them had always done it all together—ate, studied, played, laughed, talked.
He couldn't have planned it better if he'd tried. It all just fit, and he felt too lucky by half.
As those April days that melted into one another, each filled with tasks and chaos that seemed endless, he thought constantly on that, on the fit of it all.
He thought it most intensely the few times he saw Lily look at him tenderly, just a flicker of the expression that she almost immediately wiped off her face.
He thought it when he watched her laugh as she teased him, her eyes wicked and flashing in a way that had scared him half a year before, but he had come to find incredibly irresistible.
He thought it when he turned her bashful at the oddest times, usually just with a casual compliment, and she looked vulnerable enough that he always wanted to hold her even more than usual.
They just fit.
And, of course, they really fit together physically.
Break had spoiled him.
He'd gotten used to having her at least twice a day, once in the morning and once at night, although they had usually stayed awake long enough into the night, chatting and laughing, that they went at it a second time. To go from that to catching her two or three times a week, if that, felt like torture.
"You're an addict who's had their supply cut off," Sirius told him matter-of-factly one evening after James had put the team through another particularly brutal Quidditch practice. Somehow, the ordeal hadn't worn James out in the least, even though everyone else had trudged to the locker room absolutely knackered. Sirius managed to make the whole thing sound entirely rational. "You need your fix, and I know you'll be a real wanker until you get it, because that's how you are now when you haven't shagged her for a few days. I have half a mind to tell her she needs to let you get in her more for the sake of my sanity—and for the sake of the team, now that I think about it. You're going to have a mutiny on your hands if you keep it up. She's fairly reasonable, isn't she? Fairly? And I know she cares about Quidditch. Yeah, I might have to talk to her."
James had taken it as a joke.
He should have known better.
"Apparently I've turned you into a real dickhead," Lily told him that night. She'd found him on his patrol and pulled him into a classroom to push him up against the closed door, her mouth on his before she so much as offered a greeting. She sounded breathless but amused, and he saw the latter on her face in the moonlight that filtered into the deserted room. "Sirius seems to think that I'm not doing my 'girlfriend duties' enough, as he charmingly put it."
Girlfriend.
The word made his head spin. They hadn't put a label on things between them, and truly wouldn't for months to come, simply because they couldn't. They were together, as they'd put it more than once, that same word that Lily had spoken the first night she'd crawled into his bed. That meant a lot of different things to him—monogamy, physical and emotional intimacy, a shared look to the future—but girlfriend—
That somehow meant something different entirely.
He wanted that. Badly.
He ran his hand through her hair, watching the soft waves thread through his fingers. At Christmas, just managing to touch her hair had felt like a miracle. Sometimes it still did, and it certainly did in that moment.
"Did you hex him?"
She smiled. "Yes. I had to for using that term, although at least he's original. I hadn't ever heard it put that way. I told him that sex is never someone's duty, and if he looked at it that way—well, how very sad for Hestia."
No matter how hard he tried, James couldn't picture the look that must have come over Sirius' face at that remark.
"It's not enough," he told her when she turned her attention to his neck, her mouth hot and insistent. "Having you just now. It's not enough. It's never enough. I want you like this all the time."
Her nails grazed the back of his neck, raising goosebumps on his arms. "You do know I wouldn't do this with you in the common room and the corridors and wherever else you're imagining even if we could, right?"
Of course he knew that. But that didn't mean he wouldn't have tried if he could.
That night, they shagged on a desk for the first time, just as he had initially see her with Morton.
He knew she recognized the mirroring of six months prior. She resisted just slightly when he moved her in the direction the front of the room, and he caught the look she gave him, something questioning and almost a little concerned, before she let him take her there.
It didn't matter that they were in a totally different classroom on the sixth floor and not the fourth. He felt like he had gone back in time.
As he lifted her up to sit on the desk so he could kiss her with greater ease, everything about those first few moments almost felt like taking a Time-Turner back to October, except Morton had vanished, and he had taken his place—more than taken his place. He had Lily far past anything Morton had ever had.
It felt like a fucking victory of the highest kind.
A second victory, one very nearly as sweet, came from Lily finally allowing his mouth between her legs.
"I know I got on you for reciprocity, but I don't want you to feel like you have to," she had told him more than once over break when he'd asked if he could try. "Like I said, it's worse to do it half-arsed than not at all."
The half-arsed assumptions had gotten very old very quickly, and she had laughed when he told her so. Later, he would wonder if she'd made them so often and with such conviction in order to goad him into giving his all with her, even though he would have done so regardless. He would accuse her of such, and she would laugh and laugh and never confirm or deny it.
"Fine," she said almost crossly after he'd pulled her to the edge of the desk and gotten on his knees to kiss the sensitive skin of her hips. He hovered just along the line of her knickers, her last article of clothing between them both. "But if you don't like it, just—"
"Tell me what to do."
It should have been embarrassing, he reflected later that night when he'd crawled into his four-poster bed, finally exhausted as Quidditch hadn't accomplished. In the bright light of his bathroom as his parents' house, he had struggled to even ask her if she wanted him to give it a go, the mere words somehow awkward even though he knew he shouldn't have felt that way. After all, she had just gotten out of the shower with him that day, his cock out of her mouth for less than half an hour. That should have pushed them past any uncomfortable feelings on his part, as it clearly had on hers.
She had discussed it all casually as she did her makeup, like she might muse over a Charms theory.
In return, his insides had boiled.
Yet it felt different in the dark, and even more different in that moment, when the surreal feeling that almost always accompanied shagging her came over him in even fuller force. It wasn't embarrassing at all to ask her for instructions, even though it showed the lack of experience that had made her scold him for never returning the favor to a girl. Instead, it felt natural, as easy as breathing, to tug her knickers down and kiss around the inside of her thigh and waited for her directions. She loved telling him what to do, after all, and he loved listening.
She surprised him, of course.
"Just try it," she told him, her fingers gentle in his hair. "Experiment. Figure it out. I'll tell you what I like as you go."
Glancing up at her, he could see the soft underside of her breasts and just a fraction of her face as she looked back at him, the rest obscured by her hair. He'd lost his glasses in the shuffle of removing their clothes, but that hardly mattered. He could see her well enough, and from an angle he'd never experienced. He wanted to capture it in his mind's eye to remember for the rest of time—and especially for the nights he couldn't see her.
"Try things," she repeated. "Don't worry about doing it right."
Rich, coming from the biggest perfectionist he knew.
After he ran his tongue over her for the first time, he knew then and there that her concerns were invalid.
It turned out he liked going down on her very, very much.
It didn't surprise him in the least. She made a quiet noise at the contact, that sound she made that was entirely her, and his cock throbbed just from hearing it. The more he experimented, the more he drew the sound out of her, a veritable symphony interspersed with a breathless affirmation as he did something right, or a request if he hadn't quite hit the mark. She gave a quiet, heated fuck when he eventually added his fingers, and her hand got more insistent in his hair, fingers twisting incessantly.
How in the hell could he dislike anything about that?
She liked slow movements, he discovered quickly, particularly responsive to his tongue circling her clit in the same way she liked with his hands. The quiet sounds in the back of her throat grew a little when he hit it just right, and they changed altogether when he switched his tempo. She said his name, a sharp, almost panicked, fuck, James when he pumped his fingers more aggressively, and he tapped his tongue against her clit in tandem. There was something achingly erotic in the tone of her voice, something that sounded close to pain, a note that he would later come to associate with her losing control, which did hurt her, in its way. That tone hardly abated the more he experimented, altering the movement of his tongue from stroking to sweeping to darting to almost fiercely aggressive. She responded to the last one the most, although he couldn't tell at first whether she loved or hated it. Her voice sounded sharp again, although she didn't say a word, just gave a brief, almost frantic noise. She twisted against him desperately, and he hesitated a moment, not sure if she meant to drive him closer or push him away. A heated tug at his hair told him everything he needed to know. Pulling at his hair again (something he unexpectedly found he liked even more than when she pulled the same move when they snogged), she spoke breathlessly but with conviction.
"Curl your fingers," she said, and the hand in his hair had started to hold his head there between her thighs, as if worried he might stop. "Curl your fingers and move your tongue really slow and I'll come."
How she knew herself well enough to explain what she wanted and predict the outcome with scary accuracy, he could only guess.
In that moment, it didn't matter, really. He admired the hell out of her for it.
He looked up to find her head tipped back, the smooth column of her throat almost glowing in the watery moonlight, as she lifted her hips seemingly against her will. Her lower lip went between her teeth, and she reached for his free hand, the one he had leveraged against the rim of the desk to hold onto something to keep him grounded, lost in the sight and sound and taste of her. She didn't have to look down to locate his hand, and she pried it from the desk with surprising ease so she could move it around to cup her arse. He did his best not to hold her there as tightly as he did the desk, but he could still feel his fingers digging into the smooth curve of her backside, and tried very hard to make them relax.
"I like it," she said, her tone shifted somehow from the way she had spoken his name and sworn and affirmed his motions. Those had sounded longing; her voice then came out almost as a direct command.
With those three words, he found he didn't even have to have any immediate prospect of getting inside her in order to lose himself.
Conscious thought fled. The movement of his tongue and fingers became less a deliberate decision and more an instinctual action. The primal part of his brain took over, and something hot and intense and almost blank pounded in his head as he curled his fingers and circled her clit slowly and dug his fingers into soft skin of her arse, chasing after her pleasure with the same intensity he knew he'd devote to his own the second she was done.
When her thighs tensed around his head and he felt that pressure move inside of her, clenching at his fingers, it felt and sounded and tasted like victory as he pushed her over the edge. The tautness in her body contracted, desperately tight, and then shattered, and she made a sound he recognized as unique to those moments of ultimate release, no louder than her usual sounds, but somehow more intense.
She broke the silence first, a true rarity.
"How do you want me?" she asked, and he found her looking down again. Her lips had gone wonderfully red from her teeth. "Tell me."
He didn't have the words, but he certainly had the ability to show her. He stood and gripped her hips as he thrust into her, and that primal part of his brain that still reigned recognized the extra warmth and slickness to her came from his mouth and the orgasm it had brought, and there was something so fucking hot about that—
She kissed him, arms around his neck to drag him close to her, and there was something so fucking hot about that, how she didn't hesitate and he knew she could taste herself on his tongue. He felt her contract when he groaned, just a flicker of pleasure he normally might have missed, but he couldn't miss then. Going down on her had left him almost unbearably sensitive, and he felt every time she fluttered around him, which coincided almost entirely to every sound he made or word he spoke.
That made him more vocal, of course, intent on seeing how much he could affect her.
He had fucking missed her, and he told her that every way he could think of, his voice thick and desperate as he spoke into her neck. He couldn't stop thinking about shagging her—every night before he went to sleep, every morning when he woke up, throughout the day if he saw her laugh and toss her hair or she smiled his way with particular pleasure or if her skirt slipped up a bit as she went to sit on the long bench in the Great Hall.
"I'm doing all that on purpose," she said against his ear, faint breaths forming the words. "Wait until you see how far I pull my skirt up tomorrow. Watch me."
That sent all of his plans to talk to her entirely out the window.
She knew it too, because he saw her own victory blazing on her face as she pulled away from him, somehow disentangling one of his hands from her hair with supreme ease, and leaned to stretch out on her back. He'd had her that way before from the side of his bed, but fuck if there wasn't something entirely different about seeing at her on the desk, her hair strewn all around her head, and completely bare from both clothes and also her practiced veneer, with pure arousal dominating her features instead of her usual impassive expression. She looked like she had the night of his birthday—like something pulled out of some of his more lewd fantasies.
After all, he'd thought about her exactly in that manner countless times since October—sprawled out on a desk, face flushed and body warm and tight inside and out, her expression every bit as horny and needy as he felt around her constantly.
How had she known?
She didn't come again, but she got him there with no issue. It took nothing more than her asking him to pull her legs up and put her ankles on his shoulders, something entirely new. The second he did so, his heart pounding in tandem with the ache in his cock, he knew he was done. Everything about the position—the visual, the way the angle had shifted how she felt inside, the sounds she made, even the sudden, surprisingly erotic feel of her smooth calf against the stubble of his face—had him undone within a minute.
Strangely (and he would never admit it to anyone ever), as his brain resumed working in the slow, scattered way it did after he came, his first thought was of Sirius.
Sirius might be an idiot sometimes, but he was right.
He'd absolutely needed his fix.
"I'm addicted to you," he said without preamble as soon as he'd caught his breath. She had dropped her legs, but he'd stayed inside her, and she didn't protest when he leaned down and rested his head against her chest. Her heart skittered underneath his ear, fast and wild, and she ran her fingers through his hair in the familiar, soothing way he'd missed.
"Sirius told me." Her voice hadn't lost its breathy quality, but he could hear a smile too. "He's apparently convinced that I have a 'magic snatch,' or that I'm dosing you with a love potion. Or both. He settled on both. You should have heard Mar laugh. He had her going."
That sounded entirely like Sirius.
Unsurprisingly, James couldn't summon the energy for irritation.
"I really did miss you." It felt safer for him to say when he couldn't look at her to see her reaction. He heard her breath hitch as he trailed his fingers down her side, but if she did so at his words or at his motion, he didn't know. "Not just this, although also this. Obviously. I miss…"
He didn't even know how to put all the things they had left behind at his parents' house. He couldn't take her hand or pull her close or wrap an arm around her or run his hand through her hair or kiss her for no fucking reason, as he had over break in the times After Lily.
Beyond that physical closeness, a certain intimacy had vanished too.
She often laughed and joked with his mates more readily than she did him, clearly determined not to pay him too much attention.
The soft cadence to her voice, a tone that had shifted when they'd gotten together, had disappeared.
Worst of all, the tender look on her face rarely materialized, just a flicker glimpsed here or there, come and gone in the blink of an eye. Of everything, he thought he might miss those expressions most of all.
"I did too," she said quietly, even though he couldn't articulate all of that just then. He hoped she had the same thoughts. "It's hard. I've never wanted someone like I do you. And, like you said—not just this, but the rest too."
He always found he loved her a little more openly in his mind after he came, probably because the defenses that stopped that feeling from coming to the forefront had dropped away, but the heady stroke to his ego that her words provided made him love her even a little more just then.
"That's as much as I'm going to fawn over you," she added in the next minute, breaking what she clearly saw as a moment too tender or caring. "Like I said—you picked the wrong girl if that's what you're after. Although—" She paused for a second, and her voice came out with a clear bit of reluctance. "This is just going to give you a big head. I know that already. But I've never been with someone who took getting me off as seriously as you do. I've never had a bloke truly not be into it and give it their best shot, although some more than others, but with you—I don't know. I really think if you had to pick, you'd rather I get off than you, and that's a first. No, don't you fucking dare look at me, I know you're just going to look smug—"
He laughed as her hands pushed his head sharply back down to her chest, refusing to let him up. Truthfully, she probably did him a favor. He didn't doubt he looked as smug and self-satisfied in that moment as Sirius often told him he looked for hours after shagging her, and he knew she wouldn't like to see that expression on his face.
"Can I compliment you now?" he asked, and his head rose and fell with the deep sigh she heaved.
"Absolutely not."
"Will you ever let me?"
"Absolutely not. Not that what I say matters. You do it anyway."
"Yeah, well." He didn't exactly have an excuse for that. He trailed his fingers back up her side, and his smile widened as she squirmed. "It's good for you."
In return, he thought everything about her was good for him.
xxx
Two days later, a tawny owl delivered matching envelopes to Lily and James at breakfast.
"Oh, it has to be," Lily breathed from beside him as she slid open the creamy vellum. He had no idea what she meant, but the contents of the letter apparently proved her right.
It was a wedding invitation.
Together with their families, Alice Louise Prewett and Frank Augustus Longbottom request your presence on the day of their wedding, on Saturday, July 22, 1978 thick, immaculate calligraphy read at the top.
"Holy shit, Frank's actually going to lock her down," Sirius said, reading over James' shoulder. "Didn't know he could truly manage it."
"Alice still has a couple months to bolt," Peter reasoned, chuckling. "Can you believe it, though? Two years out and they're already getting hitched? It's madness."
Yet with a sideways glance at Lily, who smiled softly at the invitation in her hands, her expression far away and her skirt hitched up almost indecently and clearly purposefully high, James thought it made perfect sense.