She turns up when he's patrolling, ambling down the Charms corridor and trying not to think about how hungry he is. He only had one helping of pudding with his dinner—a truly foolish move, very unlike him, and now he's paying the price.
So it's understandable that he's caught off guard, mind on sugary things, when she pops up in front of him like a beautiful, flame-haired apparition.
"There you are," she smiles, and he isn't quite sure how to respond. He tries for a smile back as she adds, "I asked Sirius where you were, and he said something about not being your keeper. Have you two had a tiff?"
"Um, no," he replies, glancing behind him at the empty, silent corridor. An awkward pause. "Did you need something?"
Her smile flickers briefly, like a candle guttering in the breeze, but it returns to all its glory before he can think much of it. "No," she says, "I just…wanted to see you."
He's not sure why, but this is it—the straw that breaks the camel's back.
(He remembers vividly her using that strange muggle idiom before: they'd been sitting together in the library, talking about the odd build-up of behaviour coming out of Ravenclaw tower's prefects that term. Apparently, Barry Warriner—or 'Baz the Waz', as Sirius liked to call him—snapping and screaming blue murder at some innocent first years was the straw in question, and he had gifted her with a baffled expression in reply.
After she'd explained what it meant, she moved on to telling him, "you know, camels are famously associated with Ancient Egypt but didn't actually arrive in the country until the Ptelomic era."
There wasn't much Lily Evans enjoyed more than educating him, he'd found.
"Oh," he'd said, bewildered but a bit distracted by the way her eyes had widened with delight, and how her hands had waved demonstratively in his direction, "okay?"
That had sent her on a diatribe about the way that some purebloods were seriously lacking in a wider education, by not going to muggle primary schools and doing posters about the Nile and its impact on an ancient civilisation.
Or something. Again, he'd been caught by the tilt of her lips, the fire in her eyes.)
Why it's the last straw, anyway, he doesn't know, but it is. Because how she can be looking for him—be pleased to see him—when she'd asked for space, he doesn't know. He'd like it to make sense, all of it, instead of being this constant, confusing tangle of ups and downs and a tug of feelings in his heart and his gut, like all the terror of his first ride on a broom with none of the fun parts.
"What is it that you want, Evans?" he demands, and her face drops, bright green eyes widening in surprise that he is desperate to kiss away—a true test of his resolve. He has never spoken to her like this before, but he can't stop it, now it has started to flow. He can't hold it in any longer.
She hesitates, fidgeting with the sleeve of her jumper. "Oh, I just—if this is a bad time—"
He gestures wildly around them. "Clearly it's not a bad time," he says, trying—failing—to keep the volume of his voice under control. "I'm doing piss all here, obviously, but—"
She bristles, shifting from foot to foot. "James, you don't need to get arsey with me, I was just—"
"Just what?" he asks. "Because you said you wanted space, and I was respectful, I understood—"
She is blushing now, a full-force flush that seems to flourish from her cheeks down to her chest. "I know—"
(Two weeks ago; the Head's Office. Her, reaching for a bit of fluff caught on his jumper. Him, swallowing hard at even that most innocuous of touches. Then, her hand had lingered, and slid to rest over his heart. Can she feel it? he'd wondered. The way it's thumping hard enough to come crashing through my chest? And then, the tilt of her chin, her eyes finding his—her, not him, closing the distance between them. The soft press of her lips to his; the sensation, somewhere deep inside him, that this was what his whole life had been leading up to.
Gasping for breath, then, and her cheeks flushed delicate rose in the firelight: that was when he saw the hesitance, knew what she'd say before she even said it. Knowing didn't take away the sting, of course.
I'm sorrys, at first. Stares in return, wondering how it was possible to be sorry for what they had just shared.
But he'd nodded, because what else was there to do?
"I just need some space," she'd murmured. "Is that…okay? Just to…I don't want to rush anything and ruin our friendship."
With the memory still fresh in his mind of how it felt to kiss her, of her hand at his neck, he wasn't sure he gave a flying fuck about their friendship. But he was technically a mature, decent person who didn't have to think with just his raging desire for her, and so he'd given her hand a squeeze and promised to give her all the time she needed.)
"And now I'm trying to give you space and you won't bloody let me!" His hand takes root in his hair, that old standby, as if he's trying to yank it straight out of his head, such is the force of his frustration. "So, I repeat: what do you want from me, Evans?"
He does not enjoy the look on her face. He does not enjoy that he is the one who put it there. He does not enjoy any of this, even a little bit. But how can she know about the Third Intermediate Period of Ancient Egypt, whatever the fuck that is, and not know that she is actually torturing him? Physically, emotionally, torturing him?
(It's possible that he is overreacting, but is it any wonder when he's been—gently, deliciously—pushed to breaking point? Because apparently, according to the unreliable witness that is his best friend Sirius, he's Obsessed with a capital O, as in, Oh sweet Merlin, Prongs, if you don't stop bleating about the way she looks at you over the breakfast table and bloody well do something about it, I will forcibly defenestrate you.
James didn't always take a threat from Sirius, well, seriously, but something about his tone in that moment made him just a touch nervous.)
Bleating might be the right word for it. He's found it next to impossible to stop cycling through all the interactions he's shared with Lily leading up to this point, and it helps him to think out loud, something he thinks his mates should be used to by now, and maybe be a bit more generous about, all things considered.
But then the surprise is gone from her face, and she's rolling her eyes in a way that has always been far more of a turn-on than it should be—he has a very specific erotic hit-list, and almost all of it is linked to her being irritated by him.
(The rest of the list is and always has been, still, Lily-centred, but smaller, softer things, like the way she tucks her hair behind her ears when she's trying to focus, or the delight that lights up her face when she realises it's chocolate pavlova for pudding, or how she'd looked dancing at the last post-Quidditch party, or—
Etcetera. As Sirius said: obsessed.)
"For Christ's sake," she mutters, and then pushes forward, into his space, her hand finding its rightful position on his chest, again, and he barely has time to glance down at it—a moment of oh, what's happening here, then?—before she presses herself even closer and kisses him.
It's a much fiercer kiss than their first, frustrations and things unsaid mixed in with the natural state of attraction and need. He has only just got to grips with what is happening to him—got to grips with her hip, her waist—when he realises one of her hands is raking through the hair at the nape of his neck, and his mind short-circuits all over again.
Lips swollen, a few minutes or hours or days later (time has lost all meaning), she pulls back to fix him with what is surely too harsh a glare, considering what they'd just been doing only seconds before. "I've been trying to tell you, James," she says, voice laced with annoyance. "But you keep giving me too much space."
He pauses; tries, very hard, to take this all in. "I'm not sure how I was supposed to know that," he offers, eventually.
"So you're saying it's my fault that we could have been kissing again, oh, twelve days ago?" She raises an eyebrow, and he's suddenly aware that her hand is still in his hair, her body still close against his.
"Of course not," he replies, because he has some common sense, no matter what Moony says. "It's definitely mine—twelve days?"
"Twelve days," she repeats, and smiles sweetly. "Think of what we could have done in that time."
(Hindsight, a wonderful thing, and infinitely sharper than his actual sight. Even in the future, when he can kiss her and hold her and touch her whenever he might like to, he will look back on those twelve days and think, what a waste.)
"Well," he says, with a growing smile of his own, "I suppose we should get to making up for lost time, don't you?"
She doesn't say anything in reply—doesn't need to, because her kiss is answer enough.