Eighteen Again

by scriibble

After Hogwarts, things fell apart for Lily Evans and James Potter. Three years later, when she shows up in his life to work for the Order, James finds himself pushed back towards her in a situation that's not only dangerous for his life, but also his heart. [First Wizarding War; Second Chances AU]

11. Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven

Week Four:

The weekend passed without incident.

Yet again, James pondered etiquette.

"Seriously, nothing happened," he told the other Marauders Friday morning. When he'd returned to their flat carrying the prior day's clothes, all three of them had stared before firing a volley of questions. "We had a fucking disastrous night in Knockturn Alley. I stayed over, but we didn't do anything."

"You wouldn't say if you had," Peter said, and James wondered if he spoke the truth.

"We'd still know. He wouldn't be able to wipe that stupid, smug look off his face if he'd shagged her. You remember that look, don't you, Wormtail? It's very obvious. We'll know it when we see it." Sirius stretched lazily, but his eyes glittered with the promise of a good battle. "Now, what's this on Knockturn Alley?"

Recounting the story left all three of them in such a state of shocked silence that James thought the whole evening almost worth it. Almost.

Yet, after all that, how was he supposed to treat Lily?

Merlin, things were easier when he dated conventionally. He knew how to do that. It was easy.

But, fuck, he'd always loved the tangled mess that was Lily Evans. She herself wasn't necessarily a mess, but she turned him into one. Beyond that, they became a mess together, a mess of longing and desire and deep connections and laughter and frustration and stubbornness. He'd grown to crave it years before, and he worked very hard to tamper that craving down as it began again in full force.

He just wished he knew how soon he was supposed to see her again after spending the night in her bed, and waking up with his face in her hair and his arm around her waist and his cock pressed against her arse, just as she'd predicted.

How soon was too soon?

Could he pop over the next day, Saturday, and ask her to actually go get that drink with him?

Could he go by Sunday and see if she wanted to go swim in the ponds at Hampstead Heath like they had on many summer days years before?

Could he go over Monday and challenge her to a game of chess in his dad's study or see if she wanted help in his mum's greenhouses?

He passed Saturday and Sunday with those thoughts continually churning in his mind, but Dumbledore solved things for Monday, because he sent a patronus and asked James to meet him at the Hogs Head that evening.

"I've asked Lily as well," the phoenix had said before dissolving into a soft, sparkling mist, and James hated, hated, that the news made his stomach flip with anticipation.

As he suspected, he found Lily masquerading as Diana when he reached the Hog's Head. She and Dumbledore sat tucked back into a private room where Aberforth led James after he'd entered the pub.

Also as he'd suspected, she looked fucking great, and her smile alone left him grinning like an idiot. Eighteen-year-old James had just about died every time Lily Evans had smiled at him, because once she'd started to tolerate him, he'd worked unendingly to try to coax as many smiles out of her as possible. Even just seated in a spindly, old chair and holding a glass of dark amber mead in a room that smelled strongly of goats, a smile from her somehow made the world feel brighter.

"I find it best to make my presence known in Hogsmeade from time to time," Dumbledore explained after greeting James warmly. He waited for James to find a chair to pull next to Lily before he continued. "I've discovered that the more frequently I'm seen here, the less Voldemort and his Death Eaters attack the village." That information spoke volumes about Dumbledore's power and importance, but he used the same tone he might have employed when describing a new pair of socks. His voice only got truly sharp and keen when he instructed, "Now, tell me about last week."

Working together, playing off one another to describe their personal thoughts and perspectives, Lily and James walked Dumbledore through their talk with Borgin and the entire impromptu, chaotic mess of the drink at The White Wyvern. Dumbledore didn't stop them once, not to ask questions or prompt something further, but sat with his hands clasped in his lap, never once touching his goblet in front of him. He only spoke up after the tale had concluded with James' clearly-dismayed recollection of his invitation to Fudge's stupid garden party.

"I do think you're right, James," he said after a sip of his drink. His eyes looked piercingly blue. "They'll approach you about Voldemort sooner or later. In truth, that would serve us well." He set his goblet back down. "But it would require more than I'm willing to ask of you, because of what they would want from you if you were to join their ranks."

For a second, James could only stare. "Is that what you want me to do?"

"I can't ask you to do that."

"But it would help." He didn't have to phrase it as a question. Dumbledore's face said it all.

"It would." Dumbledore sat back in his chair, one of his usual squashy, purple armchairs that he'd clearly conjured, which stuck out like a sore thumb in the musty room. "We have eyes in their camp, at least to an extent, but one can never be too careful. It's hard to say what's true and what's false from their reports, because I can't trust them completely, but I trust you completely."

Despite it all, Dumbledore's praise warmed James' chest just as it would have if he were eighteen again and back at Hogwarts.

"But I can't ask that of you," Dumbledore said again. "It would mean asking you to commit acts you would find reprehensible. You're not like them. It would damage your soul."

James found his hand under the table and on Lily's leg without any recollection of putting it there. He'd reached for her on instinct, seeking the sort of grounding comfort that she'd offered him at The White Wyvern, that same comfort she'd offered him at the last auction, like she'd offered him even at the Rosiers', back before things had improved between them to the point that he could reach for her without reprimand. Indeed, she didn't reprimand him. Rather, she slipped a hand under the table to settle over his, and she left it there, her fingers soft and warm.

"I'll think on that," James said after a long, tense silence. "On all of it. If they approach me about Voldemort sometime soon…" He mulled the possibilities over in his head for a second, trying to think rather than focus on the way that Lily's thumb stroked his knuckles gently. "I'll express a little interest, I guess, if anyone says anything. Enough to make them think I might want in, but not so much that they'd rush to get me there. Does that sound okay?"

"It does. I trust that you'll know how to manage it perfectly."

James only wished he had as much faith in his abilities as Dumbledore apparently did.

"In the meantime," Dumbledore went on, "I think it might be a good idea for the two of you to start practicing Occlumency and Legilimency together, rather than working at it separately."

James mouth dropped open silently. Lily's thumb froze, caught between the knuckles of his pinky and ring fingers. When he turned to stare at her, he found her already looking back.

"Have you—" he began, but she didn't let him finish. She didn't need to let him finish.

"Dumbledore said I should work at it when he set me up working with Rue," she said, and that sent another little jolt of surprise up his spine. In her talk of Madam Rue, she'd never once mentioned that Dumbledore had made the connection between the two of them. "He thought it wise, since I'd end up going around Knockturn for her. And you—"

He didn't need to let her finish either. "Dumbledore suggested it about a year ago, when the idea of all of this with the Wizengamot was still just an idea. It's fucking hard, isn't it?"

Only later would he realize that he'd said 'fuck' in front of Dumbledore, just like Lily once had and Sirius had expressed such awe over. In the moment, staring at her face, he hadn't noticed at all. Dumbledore might as well have not been there at all. He couldn't think of anything except for her.

"Oh, I hate it," she said vehemently. "I can't remember the last time I've read so many books to try to work out the theory of something that I still don't understand. I mean, very basic Occlumency has worked for interacting with people around Knockturn—and the Slytherins last week—because it's helped me clear my mind and compartmentalize enough to make it all more tolerable, but—"

James wondered if he stared at her like he felt, because he felt like she was a bloody miracle. "I hadn't even thought of using it like that."

He didn't doubt that they could have gone on forever if Dumbledore hadn't stopped them.

"I'm glad you're both amenable to the idea," he said, tone all simplicity, but something about the look in his eyes left James convinced that he hid a smile beneath his long mustache. "I'd like to test you both again soon, so do work at it. Now, tell me, what else is there?"

Really, James couldn't think of anything else, mind still buzzing loudly at the revelation that someone—no, not just someone, that Lily Evans—could finally understand his struggles. His mates had tried, of course, especially Remus, who found the whole thing fascinating, but they couldn't really get it.

Later, thinking back on all Dumbledore had done—setting Lily up with Madam Rue, encouraging her to learn Occlumency and Legilimency, approaching her for the Order more than once, asking James to learn Occlumency and Legilimency, placing the Wizengamot mission before him—he had to marvel at the coincidence of it all.

Of course, with Dumbledore, he doubted there ever were coincidences. No, Dumbledore planned, and better and more intricately and more successfully than anyone else James had ever met. It wouldn't have surprised him a bit if he found out that Dumbledore had set all of it into action years earlier, aware that Lily's knowledge of Knockturn Alley and its inhabitants and James' ability to enter the pureblood sect would come together to work as it had.

Truly, if he had planned it that way, James really wouldn't have minded.

Lily ran Dumbledore through the list of people she'd healed over the prior week. It was somehow both short and long, the number of people not many, but her explanation of their injuries—what curses or hexes had caused them, what she had done to remedy them, her thoughts on avoiding similar future catastrophes—took a while, especially with Dumbledore's follow-up questions. He looked as interested in the healing process as Lily did, and he morphed into encouraging professor mode before James' eyes. Lily flourished under such attention, not at all to James' surprise. Such a swot.

"And your brewing?" Dumbledore asked before he left, already having stood and vanished his armchair. "I'll come by later this week to see, but how has it gone?"

"All four cauldrons are still in play," she said, her words careful. "I'm less sure about one than the others, and I may have to bin that one entirely, but I'm trying to salvage it. I can be at the house every day this week except Tuesday and Thursday mornings into the early afternoon, so just let me know when you'd like me to be there. I'll work everything else around that."

Well, that cleared up James having to ask after her schedule, and thank Merlin for that.

After Dumbledore left, Lily and James remained seated, his hand still on her knee and her hand still atop his.

"Go to dinner with me," he said before she could speak, and a slow smile curled across her face before she began to laugh.

"Do you just make demands of women now?" she asked. "'Go get a drink with me,' 'Go to dinner with me'—who the fuck is letting you get away with this?"

"Hopefully you." He kissed her before she could hurl back some piece of taunting banter, as she very clearly planned to do based on the look on her face, and it felt natural to kiss her, like the most normal of things. "Go to dinner with me," he repeated, not bothering to remove the hand he'd buried in her hair. "I owe you for the drink you bought me. We're even partners, aren't we?"

She'd said that same thing to him over and over while they'd dated, 'we're even partners' the constant refrain she had employed when insisting that he let her pay for things. She'd said it first on their second date, which they'd had in Hogsmeade after he'd already asked her to be his girlfriend and she'd already agreed. "We're even partners," she had said, her face an open map of stubbornness and challenge and all the things he'd admired about her for years. "You don't have to pay because you're the man. That's shit."

"What if I want to pay?" he had asked, and she'd smiled at that before she'd kissed him, a kiss he'd fallen into easily, because he'd tried to never stop kissing her once they'd started.

"That's tough shit, because so do I," she'd said after she had kissed him soundly enough that he'd briefly forgotten what they even spoke about. Without another word, she had paid, and once he realized what she had done, he'd nearly laughed himself sick.

"I just never thought I'd get to the point where I'd be lucky enough that Lily Evans would use snogging me as a method of distraction," he had told her afterwards, once he'd hustled her away to pick up kissing her somewhere more private. She had rolled her eyes in return, the motion all fondness as he never would have thought he'd be lucky enough to see either, but he'd meant it entirely. "Please keep doing it. Please."

She'd laughed, but he'd meant that too. Fortunately, even though she'd laughed, she'd followed through with his request. In very little time, they would both get there and employ the distractionary technique on each other, something he'd never even dreamed possible, and, fuck, he had loved it. Yet eventually it had come back to bite them both, because when things started growing more and more tense between them, snogging and all that came after it became far easier than dealing with their issues.

From the way she smiled at his use of the saying, James doubted she'd remembered quite as much of the memory as he had. She looked like she'd only focused on the good parts, and not how they'd ended up falling apart. Just from her smile, he joined her almost immediately in that happiness. She'd always managed to make him feel that way, her joy becoming his too, as no woman before or after her ever had.

"Are you really that bored?" she asked. "I can't imagine that you have nothing better to do than go to dinner with me."

"I really, seriously don't," he said, and something about his face or tone must have convinced her, because, after a moment, she agreed.

To James, that evening in Hogsmeade felt like he'd fallen into a date out of the past—and if it was a date out of the past, he annoyingly—so, so annoyingly—found that he didn't want to go back to the present.

Her altered appearance had come to hardly matter. Despite it all, he'd come to see 'Diana' as her, Lily Evans, both from the physical parts of her he still recognized, but increasingly because of her mannerisms, things he'd seen her do over and over and over again that made her her.

She pulled her hair all to one side when he made her feel particularly bashful, a move that never ceased to leave him grinning.

She squeezed his hand every time she laughed, something she did often after he'd reached to hold her hand as they left the Hogs Head. Unlike in Diagon Alley, she hadn't asked after him taking her hand.

She drew the corner of her lip between her teeth when she felt uncertain, a look that flickered across her face whenever she thought she'd said the wrong thing or revealed too much or potentially upset him. It looked entirely different than when she bit her lower lip to hold back a laugh or smile, because the latter made him want to snog her senseless, while the prior left him with the desire to hold and comfort her.

Sitting across from her at The Babbling Brook, one of the village's quieter restaurants, he watched her do all of those things, even down to squeezing his hand when she laughed. She reached across the table to do it, just the smallest of squeezes when he'd told her some pointless story about the lads that had sent her laughing, and he'd held her hand there after that. Although she looked a little surprised, delicate eyebrows lifting for a second, she'd left her hand folded in his without comment.

Really, all things considered, holding her hand at a dimly-lit restaurant should have been awkward. Even just a couple of weeks before, he didn't doubt that it would have been awkward, although it never would have happened, because she never would have agreed to accompany him to dinner in the first place. Yet somehow that potential for awkwardness had fractured and then broken completely, no doubt aided by their need to act as a couple, combined with their continued physical affection both by necessity and by choice, and the two nights he'd passed in her bed. Pulling glass from her back had certainly shifted things as well, he knew, as had her healing him that first night had changed things, at least for him. It all came back to that first night for him, to the warm compassion in her face and voice, her determination to make him smile or laugh where she could, and her understanding and empathy. He didn't doubt that he would have wanted to sequester her in bed for several weeks even if he'd just found her at the house without all that, but he knew that the way she'd treated him as she'd healed him that first night had only pushed things further for him—and past the physical and into something much deeper and much more dangerous.

They spoke of all manner of things over dinner, voices kept purposefully low in a way that James knew made them look more like lovers craving intimacy than anything else. Sometimes it did feel that way, like when they reminisced about days past. They never spoke on anything too difficult or uncomfortable, as if the last two months of their relationship had simply never happened. Instead, every memory that followed the beginning, 'Do you remember…' was one of happiness or laughter or even tenderness, the latter present especially when discussing their parents.

At one point, she spoke quietly about her work in his mum's greenhouses. As she'd spent all that time up to her elbows in dirt as she'd once hated, she told him, she'd tried to remember everything his mum had ever taught her about Herbology. She had found that she remembered more than she'd expected, which had left her feeling like she could tend Euphemis's plants in the way she would have wanted. Watching the softness in her eyes and the gentle smile on her mouth, James' throat grew unexpectedly tight, but not in the way it usually did when he thought of his mum and dad. No, it felt different in a way he couldn't entirely put to words, but he also didn't try too terribly hard. She was too bloody distracting to allow him to get too lost in his own thoughts.

Other times, she felt more like a co-conspirator than lover, especially when they discussed Occlumency and Legilimency and the bomb Dumbledore had just dropped on them that he'd had them both study such obscure branches of magic.

"Fabian and Gideon's gran dabbles in both," she told him while they lingered over a dessert he truly didn't care about eating, but had ordered just to keep her for a little while longer. "She's an extraordinary woman. She learned so she could help their granddad, who worked as an Unspeakable. She'd fallen out of practice once he'd retired decades ago, but she's helped me a lot. Who do you practice with?"

"Remus. He can't exactly do Legilimency properly—he can't get into my mind enough to work through thoughts or memories—but he can break through enough for a peek if I'm not shielding myself properly." He tried hard to suppress a grin. "He stopped helping me for a while, though, because he saw more than he wanted."

She tipped her head, hair sliding across one cheek, which she hooked behind her ear. "Meaning?"

"Meaning he fell into a memory of me and you shagging and refused to try it again with me for nearly a month."

He might have found the admission embarrassing if it hadn't made Lily laugh so hard that a pretty, pink blush worked its way up her cheeks. Just as eighteen-year-old James Potter had always greatly valued her smiles, he'd also loved every single laugh she gave him. How did she make him still feel that way?

"Remus has seen me naked?" she asked, hand still over her mouth, and he'd never thought about it in those terms, but saw her point.

"Yeah, I guess he has."

"How the hell did he look at me after that? When did this happen?"

He wracked his brain. Time had ceased mattering as much after his parents had died. Each day without them had at first blended into one, a long, meandering nightmare of epic proportions that lasted months. Afterwards, time felt as if it slowed down or sped up on a whim, some days lasting ten times as long, some weeks speeding by in the blink of an eye. It had made dating events very difficult.

"Five months ago?" It was before he'd started seeing Esther, but not by much. In part, Remus unearthing that memory of Lily had pushed James to give dating another go after a series of boring, uneventful, or downright bad first dates. He had thought about her often, especially after joining the Order, but had never really considered just how often she infiltrated his mind. Knowing that her memory sat near enough to the front of his brain that Remus, with his total lack of Legilimency skills, could access it? That meant he had needed to distract himself with someone else, and quickly.

Even though he'd liked Esther, it hadn't worked, of course. Not fully.

"I wouldn't have thought him capable of keeping something like that from me," she said, voice entirely fond. "Not that I think he tells me everything, but I'd have thought he'd act so weird around me that I would have figured something out. Oh, I'm going to get after him for this." She paused, biting her lower lip, that look he loved. "Do I want to know what the memory was?"

He thought about Lily on her back underneath him, her thighs on either side of his hips as he fucked her from the side of her bed at her old flat with Mary and Dorcas, his eyes flickering between her face, flushed and tipped back with pleasure, and where he thrust inside her. Even just the memory left his stomach coiling with thick heat.

"No." Remus had only seen it all for about three seconds, after all, but that had been enough. She passed a hand over her face, as if caught somewhere between amusement and embarrassment, and he offered, "But I'm happy to recreate it, if you're curious."

Her eyes sparkled in a very promising way in response—or at least he hoped they did, and he wasn't just projecting wishful thinking.

"I'd say that you can buy me a drink if you're uncomfortable that I paid for dinner, but I really don't care if I ever go for a drink again," he told her when they left the restaurant. "I really should stop taking you anywhere public, honestly."

"Is this your way of asking me to go to Fudge's party with you?" she asked. "By telling me you don't want to be seen with me? It's a strange tactic, even for you."

"I just don't want anyone to see you. At all. Period."

"Territorial."

"I never denied that." Really, anything of the sort would have been a lie, and not one he could easily maintain.

The night air was warm and lightly fragrant, smelling of grass and smoke from various chimneys and perhaps a hint of the promise of rain. It reminded James entirely of summer nights passed with the window of his or her bedroom thrown open for the chance of a breeze while they lay wrapped up in each other in bed. Between Quidditch training and his inability to keep his hands off of her, he'd passed the summer after seventh year flat-out exhausted, but more seriously, stupidly happier than he'd ever been—or had been since.

"I wouldn't say no if you asked me to come have a drink with you at home," he added, and he let the offer hang for a moment. "It would really get around you getting mad at me for acting like a territorial prat when we're in public, if you think about it."

She smiled, her face pretty in the moonlight. "You truly are bored, aren't you?"

"I don't need to be bored to want to spend time with you, love," he said, but something about the way she looked at him made it clear that she disagreed. "What?"

She sidestepped his vague question with a more pointed one of her own. "Are you asking this so you can try to talk your way back upstairs with me?"

"No." He hadn't known he'd meant it until he'd said it, but he found that he did entirely. "No, I'm going to wait on you to ask me to stay."

She bit her lower lip. "And if I don't? Ever?"

"You will." It didn't matter that she'd always hated his arrogance, or that he had no evidence to back up his claim. He felt it as strongly then as he had outside the disastrous auction they'd attended: they were going to shag. He just knew it. "Now, are you bored enough to invite me home with you? Not to bed, but just to home?"

As it turned out, she was.

He still grinned victoriously after following her into his parents' house, a smile that only widened when she took removed the charms from her appearance and looked like her again. But he had only a minute or so of relishing his win, before they stepped into the den and Dorcas' presence ruined it all.

"Well, this is a bit of a strange sight," she said, sitting up from where she'd stretched out prone on the settee. Her face had an odd quality to it, one James couldn't place, and something he instinctually knew had nothing to do with seeing him with Lily. "I'm sure you have a perfectly reasonable explanation for why you're together."

"We had to meet Dumbledore at the Hogs Head," Lily said. James could only see her face from profile, but he still caught the growing worry in her brow. "Dory, are you—"

The odd quality in Dorcas' face was that she'd been crying, James realized belatedly, and he felt a hot flash of embarrassment—not for himself, but for Dorcas. He very much doubted that she would have wanted him to notice a single thing amiss with her.

"I invited the lads over," Dorcas said matter-of-factly, stopping Lily short. James could only assume that she meant Gideon, Fabian, and Benjy. "I thought we might get sloshed. It's been a while."

Lily didn't hesitate. "Sure." She did, however, hesitate then, but only for a second. "Are you staying tonight?" she asked, and James recognized the question as a loaded one.

"Maybe. I haven't decided." Dorcas leveled James with a stare that looked far too knowing for his liking. "James, you'll stay and cheer me up, won't you?"

When she put it that way, how could he say no?

'The lads' were indeed Gideon, Fabian, and Benjy, not at all to James' surprise.

But to his surprise? 'The lads' apparently also included Remus, and he and James could only stare at each other after Remus came into the den, appearing five or ten minutes after Gideon and Fabian's very loud arrival. Remus apparently hadn't expected to see James any more than James had expected to see him.

"Sirius said he'd bring you whatever you want to drink if he can come over," Remus told Dorcas, his expression all amusement. James could almost imagine Sirius' incredulous tone and voice at Remus receiving an invitation that had clearly left him behind, and Remus' grin at that incredulity. "He wanted to know the 'price of admission,' as he put it."

"Firewhiskey," Dorcas said instantly. "I'd like two bottles, and I'd like him to make me laugh. That's the price of admission. Send him a patronus and tell him, and make sure you clarify that Pete is welcome to just bring himself."

Yeah, that would only increase Sirius' indignance.

That indignance had transformed into a grin by the time Sirius arrived, Peter at his side. Neither looked surprised to see James, which told him that Remus' patronus had included that little tidbit of information too. Sirius handed two bottles of Firewhiskey to Dorcas. "As requested," he said. "You know, if you're angling to get me to buy you a drink, Meadowes, there are easier ways to go about it."

That prompted a smile from Dorcas. "Fuck off."

"Nah. Shove over, will you?" He didn't wait for Dorcas to answer before settling onto the settee beside her. "I've promised you a laugh, haven't I? Now, who do you want to hear me take the piss out of? You have my undivided attention."

James knew they were just mates, as they always had been, but he doubted that many women wouldn't have preened a little under Sirius' undivided attention. Hell, women James had dated had gotten flustered when it came to Sirius, and Sirius hadn't even tried with them.

When he'd first started dating Lily, he'd waited to see her fall into that as well, because he'd known even at Hogwarts that Sirius just had That Way with women, proper noun. It wouldn't have surprised him to see her bite her lip and glance at Sirius through her eyelashes, all things she'd taken to doing with James, flirtatious moves that seemed more subconscious than thought-out. She'd started them late the fall of seventh year, and it had sent his head whirling, certain he misread every last indicator that she could possibly like him even a little bit. "You're a fucking liar," she'd said, laughing, when he'd later sworn up and down that he really hadn't known she'd started liking him, at least not for sure. "Christ, Potter, how thick are you?" she had asked, although with more warmth than any other time she'd asked it before, and he'd loved hearing it.

So once she and her friends started hanging around him and his friends more, becoming friends with each other—real friends, not just housemates—he'd watched and waited to see her react to Sirius as Dorcas and Mary and really all other women did when he focused his attention their way.

She and Sirius fell into a friendship easily, one based on mutual banter and the shared need to take the piss out of James whenever possible, but he never saw her look at Sirius in any manner aside from friendly. Really, she looked at Remus with more warmth, but that was all platonic affection and nothing more. Eventually, still disbelieving, James had come to realize that Sirius had no significant impact on her.

"He's very good-looking," she had said when he'd asked, and she hadn't even teased him a little for the awkward way he'd phrased the whole do-you-fancy-my-best-mate question. "But he still has so much growing up to do that I've never really found him attractive. Now, you—" There she had gone teasing. "You managed to grow up just enough this year, although there were some days I questioned if you weren't still a child. Honestly, there are still a lot of those days. You're lucky I like you enough the rest of the time—and you're lucky that, when you're not acting like a total idiot, you're ridiculously fit."

He'd immediately set to trying to control just a fraction of his impulsive, Marauder idiocy in order to keep her looking at him as she had just then, that way that women so often looked at Sirius. Women had looked at James that way too, of course—scores of them—but it had never mattered before, not like it had mattered with her. He hadn't known it then—how could he?—but it wouldn't matter much after her either.

As Sirius set to trying to make Dorcas laugh, James realized that he minded the group aspect far less than he had the last two times they'd all gotten together. He didn't doubt that that reasoning came from a couple of different sources.

It helped, naturally, that Gideon and Fabian seemed so intent on cheering up Dorcas that they paid far less attention to Lily than James was used to seeing. Really, a lot of the way they treated Dorcas reminded him of how they treated Lily, all flirtatious banter and jokes, which had him questioning if they had simply sought to cheer Lily up the entire time he'd seen them with her. He'd already decided that that was at least part of it, but their interactions with her clearly weren't entirely a goodwill effort. Fabian had basically told him as much weeks before in the kitchen, when he'd said, "If she gave me the go-ahead, I'd be in there."

Yet most of James' newfound tolerance for the whole thing came from Lily herself. He certainly didn't like watching Fabian drape an arm around her shoulders to mutter something against her ear that made her swat him while smiling, but it bothered him significantly less. He felt confident enough about her that he didn't feel the immediate need to hex something—or someone—which was an improvement by far. It also undoubtedly helped that he couldn't hear what they spoke of, because the din had grown by that point, aided by alcohol and nerves taut from war and the fact that, at the end of the day, they were still kids.

"Fancy seeing you here," Remus said after James' second drink. He pulled up an armchair alongside where James sat in Fleamont's recliner, his eyes crinkling with mirth. "I had no idea you and Dorcas were such good mates."

"I had no idea you and Dorcas were such good mates," James shot back, but without ire. If Remus wanted to take the piss out of him a little, as it certainly looked like he did, he could. He was in too good of a mood to really care.

"I think she considers me a sort of calm in the chaos," Remus said, nodding towards the group, and James thought he had a point. Everyone else chatting so animatedly—Gideon so much so that he nearly upset his drink—made Remus look even more like the soothing soul he was. "If I had to guess, I'd say you ended up here for a different reason than I did. Are you planning on coming home tonight?"

"Not if she asks me to stay." James didn't bother specifying Lily's name. He didn't have to, and even though the voices and laughter of his friends drowned his own words out significantly, he didn't want her to hear her name from his lips either.

"Do you think she will?"

Unwillingly, James glanced to where Lily sat on the floor, leaning up against Dorcas' legs. She looked far more integrated into the group than she had the last two times they'd gathered together, but he knew that that came in large part due to her wanting to lift Dorcas' spirits. She'd joined Sirius in that quest, and whatever the two of them volleyed back and forth had all three of them laughing, although Dorcas laughed the hardest, nearly to tears. James didn't even have to hear their voices—impossible over Gideon, Fabian, Benjy, and Peter's increasingly loud, friendly disagreement about Quidditch anyway—for their words to make him smile.

"I think I had a better shot before everyone else got here," he told Remus, tearing his eyes away from Lily's exposed throat as she tipped her head back to laugh. "Now I'm not so sure. We came back here for a drink after we went to dinner, and I—"

Remus interrupted him. "So you went on a date." It wasn't a question.

But it should have been a question, because James simply didn't know the answer. "Maybe?" he said, more question than Remus' statement. "I don't know. I didn't put it that way when I asked her to go with me." He paused for a second before correcting himself. "When I told her to go with me. She seems to think I've gotten demanding with women."

"Weren't you always demanding with her?" Remus asked, and James hated that he sort of had a point. Once Lily had given him an ounce of attention, he'd demanded more and more of it, intoxicated by her eyes on him and the smiles she sent his way and the soft, pretty laughter she gave to his jokes. "If it wasn't a date, what was it?"

"I have no fucking idea."

There it was, really.

James thought about telling Remus about his conversation with her the week before, where she'd asked him if he could just shag her, nothing else, and he'd told her that he could. He'd rehashed that conversation over and over in his mind ever since, uncertain if he'd said the right thing or made a serious mishap or something in between. More than once, he'd considered Apparating to his parents' house and telling her he couldn't just shag her. They'd been too much to each other, as she'd said, and no matter how badly he wanted her, he didn't think he could see her leave if he had her again. Other times, he had thought about going over and just fucking grabbing her, because the thought of her mouth and the smell of her skin and the sound of his name from her lips overwhelmed his memory until he could hardly stand it.

He could tell none of that to Remus, he decided in a second. Sirius? He could tell Sirius. Sirius would understand and not judge him and love him no matter what. Remus?

Well, Remus might understand and not judge him and love him no matter what too, but James didn't want to disappoint him, plain and simple. He wasn't sure if admitting that he'd told Lily he could just shag her would disappoint Remus, but given the continued warmth that existed between the two of them that seemed to only have grown since Hogwarts, James rather thought it might.

"She and I talked about Occlumency and Legilimency today," he told Remus instead. "Did you know she's working at it too?"

Somehow, Remus didn't, and he looked astounded. James relished the look, a feeling that came not at all to his surprise. It felt selfishly good to know that he had news of Lily that Remus didn't, like he'd managed to win himself back into her confidence just a little, and he realized abruptly exactly how much he loved that.

"I told her about how you've helped me practice," James added before Remus could respond. "And how you've broken into my memories a few times."

A curious question sat on Remus' face, clearly something about what she thought of Occlumency and Legilimency proper, not James' words, but it slid off when the statement hit him. "Prongs," he said slowly, "Did you tell her—" He stopped himself short, a mortified red creeping up his neck. "You fucking didn't."

It probably made James a bad mate, the level to which he enjoyed Remus' embarrassment, but he couldn't help it. He did his best to stifle his laughter into his glass. "Of course I told her. She pointed out that that means you've seen her naked, and she couldn't figure out how you didn't get weird around her after that."

Remus' reaction was immediate. "You're a git. Why would you—"

"Because it was fun. You should have seen her laugh. You know I always liked making her laugh, Moony."

For a long moment, Remus just stared at James.

In the next, as James began laughing at the sheer dismay on Remus' face, Remus also laughed, the sound both quiet and begrudging.

"You're a git," Remus repeated, but he didn't sound mad. "I can't believe you'd—no, I can believe you'd tell her that, because you're right. You'd throw the lot of us under the bus to make her laugh."

"Not seriously under the bus, not enough to kill you—but to maim you, yeah."

"Cheers, Prongs." Remus paused. "Did you tell her exactly what I saw?" he asked, blush creeping further. He sounded as if he didn't really want to know.

James grinned. "No, but I offered to recreate it with her."

Remus nearly shoved him out of the recliner at that.

Even if the sudden party had disrupted James' plans entirely, he still enjoyed, rather than resented, the entire thing. It felt rather good to talk to Benjy about the latest single from the wizarding band The Dung Beetles, or discuss dueling techniques with Gideon and Fabian, or watch Remus and Lily begin a private chat that left Remus positively glowing red and Lily pink with laughter. He knew that he needed to talk to Gideon and Fabian about the Wizengamot, and when he told them as much they agreed, but a mutual, unspoken later hung in the sentence, one solidified by Fabian pouring them each a shot of Firewhiskey.

"To our burgeoning political careers," he said, grin mischievous and eyes laughing, and James could only chuckle, because he looked like the exact opposite of a professional politician.

Then again, wasn't he the exact opposite of a politician as well?

But as good as it all felt, what felt best of all was waiting a mere sixty seconds after Lily had disappeared out of the room to discreetly follow her. When he caught her in the kitchen, opening a bottle of wine at the counter, she didn't even look surprised to see him.

She looked even less surprised when he crossed the room and kissed her.

He could swear that she tasted like all of the things he wanted to do to her, and all the ideas he'd had when she'd agreed to let him accompany her home. Just because he hadn't intended to talk his way into her bed didn't mean that he hadn't had plans for her, and he didn't even have to express those plans to know that she most likely agreed to them. She slid her hands immediately underneath his shirt the second he grabbed her, and she caressed him everywhere, her nails on his back and her fingers stroking his chest and her touch light as she skimmed along his waistline. He caught the smile on her face when he inhaled sharply at the latter, his mouth just briefly removed from hers. She looked decidedly wicked, again that vision of sex incarnate, and the memory of what Remus had unearthed in his brain still sat in the very front of James' mind, enough so that he could almost feel her underneath him in bed.

"I want them to leave," he told her as he ran his fingers across the soft blue fabric of her dress that stretched over her bust. He could feel her nipples harden under his touch. "I want them to leave, because I had plans for you, love."

"I had plans too," she said, and she didn't even have to specify what she meant for that to ratchet his desire up further. "I really did. I—fucking hell, will you touch me? Please?"

Her request came out of left field, voice suddenly almost panicky with need, the sort of tone that went directly to his cock and ego at the same time. Fuck, he loved nothing more than when she made it clear that she needed him, always beyond pleased and smug and aroused by how he had something she desperately wanted—needed—something only he could give her. That had been years before, of course. He knew, logically, that other blokes had given her that same thing by then, but she made it sound in that moment like she'd die without his touch, just like she always had. It sounded like she'd waited years for him to satisfy her, like—

He was losing his head a little. The Firewhiskey hadn't helped.

His hand dropped to the hem of her dress, seconds away from pushing it up, but—

"How much have you had to drink?" he asked, the question tumbling out unprompted. "I never felt bad for it when you got this way after a few drinks when we were together, but now—"

'This way,' of course, referred to the pleading, desperate way she looked at him. Hell, having her get 'that way' had been one of his favorite things about attending parties with her. She hit an amorous peak around three drinks, something he very much noted but very much did his best not to exploit, although he'd kept an eye on her every time she got around that number. He always had, ever since the first time they'd drank together once they'd become a couple, a post-Quidditch party seventh year a couple months after he'd first (giddily) started calling her his girlfriend. They'd only just started undressing each other at that point, and she'd taken him away to his dorm at the height of the party and blown his fucking mind when she'd asked if she could try going down on him for the first time. Drinking just often flipped something in her, something that seemed unique to him, because he'd watched her drink at parties before their relationship, and had never seen her drag a bloke off to bed. (Thank fucking Merlin for that, because he would have thrown a fit if he had.) That had gone straight to his cock and ego too.

"I mean, you're right. Before you, I would have just spent a long while in the bath," she'd told him when he'd teased her over how she'd only ever acted that way with him. "I managed okay on my own. I'd gotten really, really good at getting myself off way before you came along." She'd sounded supremely casual, as if her admission shouldn't knock him flat on his fucking arse, but of course it had. He'd all but begged her for a recreation of that bath scene immediately, and she'd given it to him.

It had lived up to his expectations and then some.

"I get that, and you're wonderful for thinking about those things, and I really do appreciate it," she told him, voice quick and eyes looking up at him, pleading and absolutely unreal. "Honestly. But this was going to happen whether I had a few glasses of wine or not. I planned on it, James, and I was already ready before we even went to dinner. If no one else had showed up when we got here, I would have let you have exactly one drink before I would have reminded you that you told me that I didn't have to be frustrated. I didn't plan to shag you, but I absolutely planned to ask you to get me off. I might have begged a little if you'd wanted. If you don't believe me, you should look at my knickers."

The rush of words stunned him a little, each sentence absorbing into his brain slowly only after he pondered over the last. Finally, when he got to the end of what she'd said, he had to reach a hand out to steady himself on the counter. "Why?" he asked, his voice tight.

Her hands had stilled at his sides. "I wore them for you because I planned this," she said, and the quiet, throaty quality to her voice broke his fucking brain.

He heard her inhale sharply when he stepped back enough to lift the hem of her dress, the motion all deep impatience, and then he heard himself swear. Firewhiskey and a lust thicker than he'd ever known clouded his brain and sent him almost outside his body, as if he watched himself look at her. He watched himself take in the sight of her tiny, black knickers—his favorite color on her—more string and lace than fabric that didn't cover a fucking thing. He felt himself realize, somewhere in the back of his overworked mind, that he hadn't actually seen her knickers or looked at her while he touched her since they'd started fooling around again. He'd always really, really loved watching his fingers or his cock slide in and out of her, the desire deep and primal and inexplicable, and he had no fucking idea why he hadn't tried it again sooner.

Beyond that, he had no fucking idea how it hadn't really dawned on him that she no longer carefully trimmed the delicate patch of hair between her legs, but had removed it completely. He'd had his fingers in her more than onceand hadn't noticed that, not until he pushed her knickers aside to really look at her. How hadn't he noticed that?

"Since when—" he'd started to demand, the question of her grooming habits somehow incredibly important, but he lost his thoughts entirely when he went to touch her. The move felt like it came not from his own volition, and what he found left him literally dizzy. "Holy fucking shit," he breathed, lifting his eyes from where his fingers traced a path just over her, never slipping inside. "Holy fucking shit, you're soaked, love."

"I told you, since before dinner," she said, and her hands went to clutch his back, her body tense and taut with desire that glowed in her face. "Baby—"

"You were wet for me at dinner?" he asked, and he heard the wonder in his voice. She bit her lip in that way he always loved, but he loved it even more because she clearly did it not to hide a laugh or a smile, but to hold back a sound of pleasure. "You sat there, so pretty and proper, all the time just soaking your knickers?"

"Yes." The single word sounded pained, but he couldn't recall a more beautiful sound. "Will you—"

"What were you thinking about?"

She'd started to look cross, an expression that reminded him wonderfully of all the frustrated, angry looks she'd shot him when he'd annoyed her endlessly because he'd fancied the pants off of her at Hogwarts, but the irritation disappeared in a second the moment he slid his thumb over her clit. The expression broke, once again pleading, a scintillating stroke to his ego. "I thought about how I wished you would touch me under the table," she said, cheeks flushed but gaze never leaving his. "I thought about how hot that would be, not just because I wanted to get off, but mostly because I wanted to watch your face while you did it. I could just imagine how you'd look at me, like you're looking at me now, like you'll stop at nothing to make me come and like getting me off would make you prouder than anything else on earth. That's what turns me on, baby, the thought of how—"

His brain broke further.

"Fuck," he said, the word coming out unbidden. "Oh, fuck." He thrust his fingers inside her, and she made a soft, strangled sound in the back of her throat, a noise that sent a fresh shot of heat into his stomach, only furthering the throbbing in his cock. Even though he'd expected it, finding her wet and waiting for him still knocked him off-kilter a little, and he found his hips moving against her in tandem with the movement of his fingers. "I want you upstairs," he told her, voice unexpectedly harsh, but he fucking ached from wanting her, and the ache came from somewhere deeper than his cock, that ever-present, clawing hunger almost ravenous from want of her. "I want you upstairs on your back. I want to know what you feel like on my tongue now that you're bare down there. I want to fucking live between your thighs. I want to hear you say my name over and over—holy shit, love, I want to fuck you so badly."

"I want that too."

Her words sent any pieces of James' brain that remained functioning into a furious explosion.

"Yeah?" He felt like he could hardly breathe, but at the same time heard the heavy breaths that he exhaled into her neck as he licked and sucked and bit every inch of her beautiful skin that he could find. "Tell me."

He hadn't believed her, not really. Although she'd sounded desperately sincere, he'd written off the four words that had snapped his mind as nothing more than heated talk, something said to try to get him harder, if that were even possible.

"I mean it," she said, as if she understood his disbelief. She buried her hands in his hair and brought him to look at her. Her eyes looked wide and glossy and absolutely wild, and her mouth held a determined shape. "Take me upstairs," she said, staring up at him. She licked her lips. "Take me upstairs and take off my dress and take my knickers off with your teeth, like you said you wanted weeks ago. Take me to my room, throw me on my bed, and do whatever you want with me. Whatever you want. Take me upstairs."

She'd devolved into pleading by the end, that begging she had promised.

It was quite possibly the hottest thing he'd ever experienced in his life.

He wanted to take her upstairs. It would have been easy just to take her hand and pull her from the kitchen and up the two flights of stairs to her room, everyone else be damned. He could almost feel himself jerking her dress up over her head, see her hair fall mussed around her face as he tossed the garment aside, hear her desperate call of his name when he knelt to drag her horrible, wonderful, flimsy knickers off with his teeth.

For some reason, his stupid, traitorous body followed his decision before his stupid, traitorous brain could even articulate the thought.

Instead of dragging her away, he stood still.

"When you're sober," he said, and she looked positively broken over his refusal. "Say all that to me when you're sober and I'll do it. I want to do it. But—not when you're drinking. I don't care if it's a few glasses of wine. If you regretted it tomorrow—" He wasn't sure quite how to put it. Finally, he settled on, "If you regretted it, even though at this point I'd give up food and water to fuck you—it wouldn't be worth it."

He hated, hated what that implied.

With any other woman—any other woman—he wouldn't have felt that way as strongly as he did just then.

She meant to offer counterpoints, to throw back that line to him. Her expression said as much, torn somewhere between disappointed—almost crestfallen, really—and longing. Her face turned into a look of only the latter when he curled his fingers inside her, and she gave a short, faint cry. "Christ," she said, one hand dropping to clutch his shoulder. She looked like she held him as an anchor for support. "James—oh, fuck, James, please."

Watching her beg was somehow simultaneously the best and worst thing he could imagine.

"Tomorrow," he said, and he'd actually began to sweat a little from the heat of it all. "Ask me tomorrow when you're sober and I'll fuck you until your legs give out. I swear, love. I just can't have you regret it."

Why did that matter, really? She'd be gone in a few short weeks and he'd never see her again. She'd said as much, and remembering the words still made his heart lurch uncomfortably every time. If she meant to leave the wizarding world totally behind, why would it matter if she regretted him following her request and fucking her senseless? He wouldn't have to deal with the fallout of her regret.

Yet that hardly mattered. What mattered was avoiding that regret altogether, even though it physically hurt. Later, it would hardly surprise him at all that he'd put her feelings above his furious hunger for her, but in that moment it left him feeling only too vulnerable and exposed.

"I'll still make you come," he promised, stroking her clit in the way he knew she liked best. "I'll make you come as many times as you'll let me."

He had dropped his eyes by then, once again eager to watch his fingers inside her, which meant that her quiet, angry noise surprised him. When he looked at her face again, he saw frustration in the line of her mouth and the narrow slits of her eyes, an expression that even his most careful treatment of her clit couldn't drive off her face.

Before either of them could say another word, the door swung open.

He had himself away from her, and she had her dress righted, in a fraction of a second. His fingers felt like they radiated the heat inside her, and glistened by his side.

Sirius' curious eyes took in the sight of both of them, and then he gave a twist of a grin. "You don't have to act like nothing is going on," he said. "I know you're fooling around. Prongs told me."

James stared at him, mouth slightly open. The bloody traitor, telling her that without so much as a single prompting question.

"Did he?" Lily asked. Her cheeks still looked fetchingly flushed in the kitchen light, and James did his best not to stare at her. "Why am I not surprised?"

"Why am I not surprised that you're hiding in here to fuck around while we're all out there?" Sirius asked in return. "Feels a bit like I've gone back in time."

James knew that feeling too well.

"Did you need something?" His voice came out a little strange. He sounded as if he had forgotten how to speak, but when he thought about the way she'd made him feel when she'd pleaded with him, he knew that he nearly had forgotten how to form words.

Sirius laughed openly and loudly. "You look so furious, mate," he said, clearly relishing that fact like the brother he was. "Nah, I didn't need anything. I just wondered where you'd gotten off to. I really didn't expect to interrupt you two getting off." He looked more than a little pleased at his turn of phrase. "Find somewhere more private, will you? It's a big house. You can find a better place than the kitchen if you don't want someone to walk in. And hurry up if you don't want everyone to get suspicious."

The second Sirius left, James stepped towards Lily, the completion of his task the only thing in his mind, but she held up both hands to stop him.

"You can't," she said, and she looked like the words physically hurt her to say. "I'm not trying to be vindictive, I swear to god, but you can't. You don't want to shag. That's fine. Really. But I don't trust myself not to try to get you to fuck me if you keep going, because I want you that badly."

That shouldn't have been as hot as it was, but holy shit it was hot.

"Let me make you come," he said, and she nearly laughed, as if she'd expected him to say it. "Use me. I told you—"

"I want to use you. That's the problem. I just want to use more than your fingers."

That was ridiculously hot too.

"And if you make me come, I'm going to want to return the favor," she said. Her chest rose and fell a little more rapidly. "I want to return the favor already. I can't promise I wouldn't try to push you more if I did it, and—I don't want you to regret it either."

She sounded so fucking reasonable that he suddenly wondered if he could take her at her word and proceed like he wanted and take her upstairs. She hadn't had that much to drink, after all. He'd seen her down far more drinks and still speak and think coherently.

Still, even as those thoughts occurred to him, he knew that they offered justifications, not truth.

Why, why couldn't he just set his conscience aside and give her what she wanted?

"I won't regret a single fucking thing when you're sober," he told her fervently. "Ask me tomorrow. Ask me to fuck you tomorrow, Evans, and I'll make you forget your fucking name."

She bit her lower lip, brilliant eyes torn and somehow almost sad, an emotion that made no sense in the context of their interactions, at least not as far as he could see.

"We should get back," she said. "Although I'm going to need a minute. Where are you—"

"Let me make you come," he repeated, and it started to sound like less of a request. "You can beg me and try to convince me to fuck you all you want. I want that, love, and I really just want to watch you come. We don't need to do anything else."

"Are you not listening?" she asked, frustration creeping into her tone. "I'm going to want to get you back, and that—"

"And I'll tell you no. I can do that." He hoped he could do that he that. "Evans, do you want me to touch you, or would you rather do it yourself? Side note—if you'd rather do it yourself, can I watch?"

That coaxed a smile out of her. "You always did like watching me," she said softly, which hit his stomach with a hot swoop of desire. "Good lord, the things you used to say to me when you'd watch me—oh, I loved that."

How many times, how many glorious times, had he watched her touch herself, stretched out next to her in bed or pressing her up against a wall or on top of a desk or table or counter or some other flat surface they'd hurriedly found? How many times had he lost his head with the dark fury of his desire, unable to stop himself as the all-encompassing arousal and frustration had spilled out of him in prose? If he'd lavished her with praise during normal times, he really lavished praise on her then, unable to get over her beautiful face or her soft, incredible body or the clever work of her slender fingers. Within seconds, she'd always had him telling her all the filthy things he wanted to do to her, and each time, she'd very clearly loved it. More than that, she'd very clearly loved holding him off from doing those things until he could hardly stand it, and then she'd very clearly loved when he set to those things immediately at her okay.

"Let me," he said again, and his body actually ached from holding himself away from her. "Fuck, just—Lily—"

She interrupted him, a truly fortunate thing, because he'd hardly known where he meant to take his counterpoints and lines of reasoning, and she saved him from having to figure it out. "Okay," she said, and he had the sudden, wild thought that it looked like her body ached too, just based on the way that her shoulders slumped a little with her decision, like she'd given into something. "Okay. Please, please—"

He didn't need to hear anything else.

He heard the back of her knees hit the kitchen cupboards when he all but threw himself into her, and then she had her hands in his hair and her mouth desperately against his and her body melting into his touch. She broke their kiss for a brief moment when he thrust his fingers back inside her, but he pulled her back impatiently. He wanted to watch her face or the progress of his fingers, but he also wanted to hear and feel the way she whimpered into his mouth when he stroked her in a way she particularly liked. Those tiny sounds were somehow more arousing than the loudest of cries from other women, and he felt momentarily bad for having that thought even briefly flash across his brain, but he couldn't help it. It was all just better, better than anything he could have imagined, that feeling again like he was eighteen and it was all new and exciting and impossibly good, the way he'd always felt with her, from the first time he'd touched her to the last. She just did that to him, and it wasn't fair, and he—

He was losing his head again.

"Tell me you want me," he said, pulling back from her just enough to see her face. He lifted his free hand to trace her lower lip with his thumb, and she made the softest of moans when she couldn't pull her lip between her teeth to stifle the sound. "Beg me to fuck you. Try to convince me."

He knew even as he said it that he'd probably regret it all, but truthfully—

Truthfully, whatever she said to him would definitely get him through all the nights—and mornings and afternoons, really—where he jerked off thinking about her. He owed it to his poor cock to have some new inspiration, because he'd really started abusing the concept of self-abuse.

Alcohol hadn't robbed her of her pride. She looked momentarily affronted, and he could just imagine her line of reasoning. Why would I do that when you already said you won't? he could almost hear her saying, but he shattered that insult on her face with another curl of his fingers.

"I need you," she said, the words heavy with meaning, and that was really all it took for him to regret his instructions, even as he simultaneously wanted her to go on more than anything else in the world. "I've never needed you like this before. Take me upstairs and show me what Remus saw in your memory. I don't even care what it is, because I just want you. I want you however you want me."

He reached again for the counter to steady himself, a move he hadn't consciously made, but he discovered his hand clutching the edge so tightly that it hurt. "Tell me how you'd want it." His voice sounded as pained as his hand. "Fuck what I want—what do you want?"

She didn't hesitate. "I'd want to be on top, because I don't trust you to give me what I want right now," she said. "I'd want to take what I want, and I'd want to watch you lose your fucking mind when you'd watch me come again and again, because then I'd make you beg and not give you what you want to pay you back for this."

Well, he officially had a new favorite fantasy.

"You're my fucking dream, Evans." It came out more tenderly than he would have liked, but he couldn't stop himself.

"You're my nightmare," she shot back immediately. "You're my nightmare because I hate how badly I want all of you."

All of you.

In the moment, the words slipped in one ear and out the other. Only later would he sit and ponder them at length until he'd nearly driven himself mad.

Despite all his painful longing, he almost laughed at her sharpness, that immediate volley of banter that she somehow managed even when he had her almost breathless from desire. And despite it all, she smiled back a little, and it transformed her face from that look of sex incarnate and into something soft and pretty, the look of that woman who had smiled at him across the dinner table that night while he held her hand. Those two parts of her intersected and then melded in his mind, not for the first time in the prior few weeks, but certainly the most intensely. Looking down at her, admiring the gentle curve of her mouth even as her eyes stayed pleading and she all but rode his hand, he had only one thought.

She was everything.

He had no idea what he meant by it. All he knew was that the words flashed in his brain like a brightly-lit sign, dramatically illuminated and screaming. They felt as significant as the undeniable urge to get her off—and that was significant indeed, because he hadn't known he had room in his brain to think of anything else.

She threw any deeper inspection of the thought—not that he could have made one just then anyway—totally out of whack when she went on.

"Do you have any idea how hard I'd come for you if you were inside me right now?" she asked, and victory flashed across her face when he groaned involuntarily. He knew immediately that she meant to probe that weak spot, and he'd never wanted anything more or less. "Do you remember what it used to feel like when I'd come around your cock? I remember. I remember how good it felt, baby, and I remember the look you'd get on your face, like—like there was no better feeling in the world, except maybe when you'd come inside me or in my mouth or on me or—"

That did it.

He kissed her, unable to hear another fucking word, because he could see and feel and hear all of the things she described, and it was all so much, too much. It was everything he'd asked her to say to him and everything he couldn't handle any further, because he knew if she kept it up that she'd end up convincing him to break his word and take her upstairs sooner rather than later.

It all came back to him instinctually again, the way to get her to come quickly, and he didn't even have to think about it. Somehow, it just worked flawlessly—he decided to make her come and then he just fucking did, causing her fall apart within minutes. She pushed her face into his neck, even though he wanted to watch her, but he heard her speaking there, breathless and frantic, right before she fell over the edge.

"I can't—they'll hear me," she said, hands clutching desperately at his back, and fuck if he didn't love the idea of that, of everyone in the den hearing her cry out over the laughter and raised voices of their impromptu party. He wanted them to hear her and know that he'd made her sound that way, because a ridiculously heady shot of pride hit him when she said his name as she came around his fingers. "James—oh, James, fuck—fuck," she said, her voice broken and pleased and pained and heated all at once. He wanted the world to know that he could do that to her, just as he always had after the first time he'd made her come.

She actually shook a little as she recovered, just the faintest of tremors as she struggled to regain control over her breathing, and he gently pulled her face from his neck to look at her. She still looked frenzied and flushed, but her eyes were a little less wild, like he'd calmed something in her, and that combined with her shaking combined with the way he always felt when he made her come had him grinning like a foolish eighteen-year-old schoolboy.

"You're seriously so beautiful," he said, reaching to touch her cheek. She felt as warm as she looked. "It's not fair. You don't even have to do anything to turn me into a fucking mess."

"I still want you." She bit her lip and it somehow made the painful throbbing in his cock even worse, something he wouldn't have thought possible just before. "Fuck, James. Let me go, because I can't be around you right now, you're too—"

"In a minute. Let me kiss you first."

She heaved a heavy, long-suffering sigh and dragged a hand through her hair, and she looked so annoyed with him that she managed to make it seem like their roles were reversed, like he'd come and she hadn't. "You look so bloody smug right now, and I know it's because I want you more than you want me. Have your—"

"No, you finally want me at about the same level that I want you all the time." He kissed her, and he half-expected her to push him away, because she'd always claimed to hate his arrogance more than anything else. Instead, she pulled him closer, and she gave a soft, pleased hum against his mouth when he ran his hand up and down the side of her leg. "You'll never want me more than I want you. It's just not how we work."

"Just because I don't throw myself at you all the time—"

"Could you, though?"

She very nearly smiled, her fingers soft on the nape of his neck. "No. I told you, that's all we'd do. I know you're bored, but that doesn't mean—"

"I'm not bored. I just like you, Evans."

It slipped out before he even thought about saying it, another one of those things she just pulled out of him without even fucking trying. At the risk of redundancy, it really just wasn't fucking fair that she had that sort of power.

"Stop interrupting me," she said, and she did smile then despite the scolding in her tone, a smile that came reluctantly. She'd gone soft in his arms as her shaking subsided, soft and pliable and warm and perfect, and the combination of her relaxed muscles and her smile shifted his pounding, frantic desire into something a little gentler. He still worked his hips against her, unable to stop himself even if he'd tried—which he didn't, because why would he when it felt as ridiculously good as it did?—but slower than before. He'd decided the change in pace, but subconsciously, and it left him about as surprised as it probably did her. He swore quietly, a low, ringing, fuck, and it knocked the smile right off her face. Instead, that thick look of sheer need came back over her expression, and her fingers contracted in his hair, pulling gently in a familiar, incredible way. "God, I want you," she said—no, whimpered, really, and the sound of her voice left him clutching her backside under her dress, desperate to pull her somehow closer.

His hand closed entirely around soft, wonderful skin, because the fabric of her knickers apparently didn't extend to her arse, and he pushed his face into her neck, suddenly unable to even look at her. "Say that again," he said, somehow pushing the words past teeth gritted with pleasure and desire and frustration and a need that matched hers entirely. "Say it again, and then—I'm going to need to get away from you soon. You're killing me with these fucking knickers and your voice and the way you feel and how you smell and—fuck, all of it, Evans."

Her mouth pressed against his ear, hot and promising. "I want you," she breathed, and he heard the intent in her voice, something so open and real and honest that the mere words seemed to squeeze his cock. "I'd let you bend me over the counter and fuck me right now, baby. That's all I'm going to think about later, because I think about you all the time. I can't fucking stand it, James—even just the way you look at me makes me wet. It's constant and it's not fair and—"

He wrenched his face out of her neck in one sharp jerk, and grabbed her hand from the back of his hair without a second thought. "Shit. Fuck. Fuck." It all tumbled from his mouth mindlessly, heart pounding hard enough to burst, and he pressed her hand against the front of his trousers, where his cock strained so painfully that even just the light pressure of her palm felt like the world's greatest relief. "Jerk me off. Please, love. Please. I know I said—fuck, I know what I said, but—oh, holy shit, thank you."

He'd planned to try to justify himself, to clumsily apologize and walk through exactly why he broke his word about not wanting anything from her in return, but she didn't make him stumble through it. No, she went to work at his belt immediately, her fingers efficient and quick, and she had it undone in a flash. He waited for her to lick her hand, the thought of her tongue swirling across her palm enough to send his cock twitching, but she didn't. Instead, eyes locked on his face and her lips gently parted to make room for the heavy pace of her breath that matched his own, she reached between her own legs and pushed her knickers aside to run her fingers over herself. She used two at first, and he heard the almost inhuman noise he made when she slid them inside herself, the noise followed by another, louder, when she said his name quietly as she pushed them into herself again, eyes fluttering briefly closed. She slid the entirety of her palm over herself next, cupping herself gently, and he was a fraction of a second from just fucking doing it himself, shoving his hand into his pants and completing the two or three jerks it would take to get him to come, because he was already so close that he knew it would take absolutely nothing to get him there, especially when she looked and sounded like she did, and opened her eyes to stare at him while she did it.

The next moment, she removed her hand from herself and slipped it into his pants. She was wet from her own arousal, arousal he had caused, and that combined with the moisture that had already leaked from his cock allowed her hand to glide over him easily.

"Lily," he choked out as she stroked him with smooth, even, unbelievable caresses. "Oh, holy fuck, Evans. That feels—holy fuck, you're my fucking dream."

Hunger read in her eyes as she stared at him, her eyes so intense that it almost felt predatory. "I can't stand how fit you are," she said, and she gave a little, breathy moan in response to the moan he made as her hand twisted against the head of his cock in a truly astounding way. "I love watching you lose your head over me. I love watching you come. The way you look right now—Christ, baby—"

He was sweating. He was swearing. He was absolutely losing his head, and with such intensity that he felt eighteen again entirely, because her hand still had no business feeling as good as it did. "Do that again," he demanded, and it took every ounce of self-control he had to pull his hand away from her arse, worried he'd end up hurting her if he held her another second longer. He pressed both hands to the countertop on either side of her, trapping her body against his and clutching the heavy granite slab so tightly that it bit into his palms painfully, although he hardly noticed. "With your wrist—do that again and keep talking, because—I'm almost there. Fuck, you're incredible. I could come just from listening to you talk, Evans. Your voice—the way you sound—"

His head had fallen forward, forehead pressed against hers, and she tipped her chin up to kiss him. At first, she kept the pressure of her mouth gentle, but things flipped entirely when he groaned against her mouth as her teeth teased his lower lip lightly. Her tongue swept into his mouth in a flash, and the rhythm of her tongue against his matched the speed and pressure and warmth of her hand around his cock entirely. Suddenly, he could imagine the work of her hand as her mouth instead, and all of it together—her hand and her kiss and the closeness of her body and the way that she smelled so uniquely like her—combined to drag him so close to the brink that he felt briefly, undeniably outside of himself, his body nothing but a shell of buzzing electricity and longing and desire so deep that it ached in his bones.

"Come, Potter," she said against his mouth, the words almost swallowed in his frantic need to kiss her.

Potter.

He felt eighteen again—or sixteen or seventeen, maybe—back at Hogwarts, listening to her hurl his surname at him with vitriol at worse or indifference at best, and she knew what that did to him.

He opened eyes he hadn't recalled closing, and it hit him in the face all over again.

Lily Evans was telling him to come.

She looked like every filthy fantasy he'd ever had about her, all red, swollen lips and messy hair and breathless want, and just the sight of her, watching him, did things to his heart and his cock that surpassed the utter magic of her hand.

He wanted to tell her that. He wanted her to know how fucking unreal she looked and how mind-blowing her hand felt and how fucking lucky he knew he was, sitting on the receiving end of her gaze and offered the pleasure of her hand that felt so good that it still didn't make sense. He wanted her to know that whatever the hell she did to his cock that made breathing next to impossible had nothing on the way his chest twisted when she smiled a little, her own breath catching in anticipation as his cock started to pulse with real earnest. He wanted her to know that the intensity with which he was about to come had a lot to do with how physically good it all felt, but even more to do with her just being her, something he somehow hated and loved at the same time.

She got him to come in much the same manner he had her: it looked like she decided that she wanted him to finish, and so she just got him there on instinct. She just knew him, knew exactly what to say and do and how to look in order to get him there fast, and it took little more than the increased pressure of her strokes and her fingers lingering over the head of his cock, combined with several quiet, throaty noises of her own, for him to come into her hand. "Yes, Lily—yes, yes, yes," he panted as pressure built and the world slid out of focus and then relief broke over his body as she gave one final, incredible tug. "Fuck," he said, and loud enough that she removed her free hand from his hair to clamp over his mouth, something he hardly even noticed, just like he hardly even noticed the sheer volume with which he'd cried out. There simply wasn't enough space in his brain to recognize something like that, not when pleasure rocked through his body with such intensity that the entire world suddenly came together in a moment hot and strong and just right.

Thick fog clouded his brain, so heavy that it left him more than a little dizzy, and he had no idea how long he stood pressed against her, his hands still clutching the countertop, hers still pressed against his mouth and slowly stroking his cock as he twitched in her palm. Finally, he gathered enough strength to remove her hand from his mouth, and he kissed her. The sheer need for her had dissipated slightly, although it hardly seemed to have mattered that he'd just come so hard that his legs felt a little weak. He still wanted her, maybe even more than before, even if he couldn't do anything about it other than kiss her with all of the feeling that he couldn't express in words.

She gave a soft, happy hum against his mouth, something that seemed to travel up his spine and lifted goosebumps on his arms, which felt fairly fucking ridiculous. "Go away," she said in the next moment, while every bit of him still tingled, and he opened his eyes to find her almost smiling, even though her expression looked otherwise entirely torn. "I need to get away from you, you stupid, dangerous—"

Warmth for her filled his chest, warmth unlike anything he could remember in recent sexual encounters, save for—

Well, save for those he'd recently had with her, of course.

That should have panicked him. It still pricked his anxiety just a little, but warmth and sheer physical contentedness overcame any potential worry. "Could you come again?" he asked, and he found himself grinning, a grin he had no recollection of starting. He kissed her lips, something single and soft, and then ran his mouth up the length of her jaw to her ear, where he finally released the countertop so he could push her hair back. She shivered a little as he nuzzled her ear, which told him just about everything he needed to know. "I'll get you again, love. I want to get you again. All you have to do is ask."

Really, he shouldn't have phrased it like that. He probably should have just parted her thighs again and gone for it, because phrasing it that way—her asking for it—clearly piqued her pride a bit. She wasn't about to give him that, not when it might seem like that meant that he had somehow won something. Their constant struggle for power still ran too deeply for that.

"No," she said firmly, and she somehow got him away from her with her free hand and nothing more than a gentle press at his chest. A hint of a smile crossed her face at his noise of abject loss when she removed her hand from his pants, and she slipped away from him before he could recover enough from that loss to grab her again. "I'm going to go clean up," she said after she'd crossed the kitchen, but she hesitated for a moment, and her green eyes flashed in a particularly suggestive way when she glanced back at him.

He should have seen her power move coming, but he didn't.

Eyes locked on him, staring into his, she lifted her hand to her mouth and licked her palm clean of his cum intermingled with her fluids. The movement of her tongue was slow, exaggerated, as if she relished each second of intense eye contact and longed for every drop that had spilled out of him. Her fingers slipped into her lips last of all, the same fingers she'd had inside of herself, the same that had brushed the head of his cock again and again until he'd come, and he heard the deep suck that she gave, loud in the silent kitchen. He felt it too, deep down in the pit of his stomach, because it hadn't mattered that three years had passed. He couldn't forget the precise way her mouth had felt around his cock, not even if he tried—although he hadn't tried. He'd gotten off to those thoughts way too often over the years, although especially in recent weeks.

"Oh, fuck you." The words burst out of him, just as they had at the Rosiers' dinner party when she'd first called him 'baby,' backed by longing so intense that it bordered on hatred. "Evans, you know that I'm—"

—going to fuck your mouth, went unsaid, because her words stopped him short. Really, it was probably for the best. It didn't matter that he'd just come so hard that his legs had felt weak. He would have set to bartering with her immediately, intent on reaching some sort of agreement where she ended up on her knees, his conscience be damned. How much she'd had to drink no longer mattered quite as much, not when she looked at him like that, fingers still in her mouth.

She cut him off, drawing her fingers out of her mouth so that just the tips brushed against her lower lip, which curved in triumph. "See you back in the den, baby," she said, and with a flurry of her long hair and the soft swing of her dress, she turned on her heel and left the kitchen.

xxx

He was so very, very fucked.

He knew that even before he'd gathered the strength to right his trousers and do up his belt and count high enough that he'd gotten past the majority of his enraged desire.

He knew it even more when he finally returned to the den and found Lily already there, curled up on the floor next to where Fabian sat in an armchair. She had her head tipped back to talk to him, much as she'd sat near Dorcas' feet earlier in the night, and yet—

And yet there was something entirely different about seeing her sit like that near a bloke, especially when thoughts of her on her knees in front of him still swirled in his mind.

Fabian had her laughing—no, not just laughing, really laughing, although James couldn't hear about what over the din that had only seemed to increase in his absence. She'd laughed just as hard that night with Sirius and Remus—harder, maybe—something the logical part of his mind knew very well. Yet the illogical part of his mind focused on the stupid, pleased way that Fabian laughed with her, on the way she refused the second crystal tumbler he'd conjured and filled with Firewhiskey before finally relenting, on the way he looked like he'd won by convincing her to take it in her hand—the hand James had just come in, the hand he'd just watched her lick and suck like her life depended on it—and bring it to her lips.

"You good, Prongs?" Peter asked as he took his seat again in Fleamont's recliner. His face was flushed with drink and his eyes appeared a little unfocused, but he was still together enough to look at James with some amount of concern. "You look kind of…weird."

He felt weird, full stop. No, Weird, proper noun, something almost akin to drunkenness, but stronger still. It didn't even make sense, really, the way he felt. How many parties had he been at with Lily where they'd snuck away to snog or fool around or even shag? The number was too high to even count. It shouldn't have felt so strange to have done just that for the thousandth time.

Yet at the same time…

At how many of those parties had he then separated from her totally afterwards, unable to talk to her or touch her or hold her?

None, and—

And he wanted to hold her.

It came down to that. The warmth in his chest, warmth she'd brought about, had only disappeared when the sight of her laughing with Fabian had doused it like cold water on a fire. He'd always felt that warmth towards her when they'd so much as kissed, but he'd never had it put out so abruptly. Once upon a time, he had gotten to nurture that warmth by tucking her under his arm or holding her in his lap or just having her near in some way, shape, or form. Once upon a time, the idea of her going to sit with some other bloke—and to look up at his face in a way that James just knew had to put all sorts of ideas in Fabian's mind—would have been nothing more than a laughable idea. Once upon a time, he would have had her in his lap without question or a fuss. She would have gone there willingly, without a second thought, and he would have gotten to wrap an arm around her and rest the other hand on her legs and revel in her soft warmth and the scent of her perfume.

Fuck, he wanted that, and with such intensity that he couldn't even pretend that he didn't. He couldn't shove the desire from his mind, not when alcohol and the strength of his climax had left him feeling—

Well, had left him feeling.

"Just fine," he assured Peter, the biggest fucking lie he could imagine himself telling in that moment, and he knew Peter didn't believe him. He didn't have it in him to sound even halfway convincing, but Peter was too good of a mate to call him on it.

"Right." Peter's blue eyes flickered between James' face and where Lily sat. He looked at Lily just long enough to see her choke on her Firewhiskey at whatever Fabian had said, and when he looked back to James, everything in his expression read that he just fucking knew.

He was too good of a mate to call that either, fortunately.

"Benjy thinks the Wasps won't make it past the next League game," he said, and Benjy's kind, freckled face turned towards them at the sound of his name. "Go on, mate," he added to Benjy, grinning. "Explain your logic to James, because you sounded daft earlier."

Thank Merlin for Peter, and thank Merlin for Quidditch.

Still, Quidditch couldn't distract him entirely—a true rarity indeed. Part of his brain—a large part, if he were honest—remained firmly focused on Lily. He noted each of her actions, unable to help himself from noticing when she left Fabian's side to end up next to Remus, or when she finally kicked Sirius off the settee and settled in beside Dorcas. She remained there as night bled into morning, a blanket spread across both of them and her head ducked close to Dorcas', stands of their red and dark hair blending together, as they spoke in quiet undertones in the loud den.

He'd seen them sit similarly too many times to count, but not in recent days. In the few times he'd been around them in recent days, their interactions had lacked a certain intimacy that he hadn't noticed had disappeared from their friendship, not until he saw them acting as they once had at Hogwarts and in the year that followed their graduation. Suddenly, brain addled by drink and conflicting feelings or not, it became very clear: he wasn't the only one who Lily was holding at arm's length.

It was oddly nice to see them back together like that, nice enough that he almost didn't mind it when it became apparent that Dorcas would stay the night and end up taking up his spot (his spot) in Lily's bed. Seeing her smile with Dorcas, and giggle in the specific way he'd only ever seen her do with her girl friends, almost made him happy enough that the warmth in his chest returned just from seeing her happy.

Almost.

xxx

A/N: Happy surprise update! I decided to post this for no other reason than it was ready and I liked this chapter enough that I didn't want to sit on it until Friday—and because I'm eager for reactions to it, of course. That definitely prompted this impromptu update too.

So, happy Monday! Hopefully 7800 words of smut made a few people's days better.

As always, reviews are much loved and encouraged, and come hang out with me on Tumblr at scriibble-fics!