A/N: I literally accomplished nothing in this chapter that I intended to accomplish before I started writing it. Major stuff happens! Just not any of the stuff I had wanted at this point. Also, like in the previous chapter, there's going to be some stuff that happens here where you'll need to read Darkly to find out the characters' motivations.

xx

Chapter Eighteen: Stuff I'm Not Allowed to Do

"Remind me again why we're doing this essay tonight when it's not due 'til Wednesday?" groans Emmeline.

"Well…" says Sirius, choosing his words carefully. "Remus isn't feeling great tonight—he was thinking about checking himself into the Hospital Wing overnight—so I'll probably want to spend most of tomorrow keeping him company in the Hospital Wing, or hanging out with just him and the boys after he gets released, if he does get released. Technically, we should have done it over the weekend like McKinnon and Abbott did, but—"

"Too late for that," says Em with a grin.

It's nine o'clock at night on a Monday, and they're in the library with their Muggle Studies textbooks spread out in front of them. Getting this essay done over the weekend was definitely not happening—Sirius and James had found another passage to Hogsmeade the previous weekend, and he and Em promptly spend all of this weekend sneaking down there and scoping out the shops—so here they are, stuck in the library, trying to describe the exact function of some contraption called a toaster. Frankly, Sirius doesn't really care how toasters—or anything else he's learned about in this class, really, with the possible exception of TVs and telephones—operate. He'd signed up for Muggle Studies because he'd wanted to keep teaching himself to do better—to learn his shortcomings and overcome them—but all they really learn about in this class is how Muggles use something called "technology" to get by without magic. It's kind of cool, he guesses—Muggles are certainly inventive—but it's not what he'd been hoping for when he'd picked out his electives at the end of second year.

Still, he's got an essay to write, and there's no way he ever wants his parents to find out that he flunks any subject, let alone Muggle Studies. So he's with Emmeline, poring over the diagram in her textbook and scrawling out paragraphs three words at a time.

They're sitting side by side at the table, close enough together that it's making Sirius a little nervous. Ever since they went skinny dipping in the lake, his eyes keep flicking down to her hips, trying to track the movement of the curves that he hadn't noticed until two months ago—the way he robes (sometimes) hug or (usually) hide them. Right now, her left hip is only a few centimeters away from Sirius's right one, and he feels like he's going to lose his bloody mind just thinking about it.

Just then, she fidgets in her seat, and her knee brushes against Sirius's. He looks at her out the corner of his eye. Her own eyes are fixed in place on her textbook; at first, he thinks it's because she's still looking at the toaster diagram, but then enough time passes that he realizes she's just—not reading. She's zoned out and probably nervous, judging by the way the leg touching his leg is shaking.

And he hadn't been planning on doing anything about his giant crush on Emmeline yet. He really hadn't. Her fourteenth birthday is still more than a week away, and he'd wanted to wait until at least after that before attempting anything—if he attempted anything at all. Sirius still isn't convinced that he wants a girlfriend: he's young, and he's got plenty of time, and he gets a little anxious thinking about how much harder his life would get if he took the way he feels when James and Peter and Moony aren't in the room and compounded it with somebody he's dating.

But Sirius only has so much self-control, and something in him just—snaps. Em hasn't given much indication that she might be interested in him up until now, and that's been a part of why he hasn't done anything, too. However, she did kind of check him out that night on the lake—and now, she's been staring at the same place in her textbook for the last minute, and she touched his leg, and she's shaking.

So he sort of—moves his foot so that it's right up against Em's. He's openly looking at her now, but she keeps her eyes down and doesn't react. He takes another chance—nudges his foot around to the other side of Emmeline's so that their legs are hooked together.

Sirius doesn't know if she actually thinks she's pulling off the appearance of not caring or if she's just not brave enough to look up—but he doesn't think he can stand another second of the tension. Gingerly, he raises his right hand and rests it on her shoulder.

"Emmeline?"

Finally, she tears her eyes away from the textbook and meets his gaze. They sit there staring at each other for a moment. He notices that he's breathing hard—almost panting.

And he shuts his eyes and kisses her.

He doesn't really know what to do with his mouth, and obviously neither does she, because at first they just sit there with their lips touching motionlessly. He tries to think about what the actors in Mary's soap operas did on the television when they kissed each other—it had looked like they kind of moved their jaws up and down so that they could close their lips around each others'?

So he tries that. Right now, their top and bottom lips are exactly touching each other's, but when he drops his jaw a little, Emmeline's lower lip slips in between both of Sirius's—and oh. He closes his mouth again, sort of puckering both his lips around Em's bottom one—pulls back and opens his eyes.

He doesn't think Em has closed her eyes at all in the time it took him to kiss her. Now, she's breathing as heavily as he is, her chest rising and falling. He's got no idea what to say to her, and he starts to panic a little about whether he's just made a terrible mistake—but then she leans in again and presses their mouths back together.

This time, her lips are moving really fast—so fast that Sirius can hardly keep pace with her. He doesn't really know what he's doing—like, at all—but he tries to do the opening-and-closing thing and to mostly keep one of her lips in between both of his while he's doing it. After a minute of this, he summons all his courage and moves the hand that's still lying limply in his lap up to her cheek. He barely touches her, the pads of his fingers just skimming her skin, but Em shivers and moans a little in the back of her throat.

That's what jars him out of the moment, and he abruptly pulls away and looks frantically from her left eye to her right. As she looks back at him, her jaw is still hanging open.

"Sirius?"

"I… um…"

He extracts his leg from around hers and drops the hand touching her shoulder, but the fingers of his other hand are still brushing her cheek. Her skin feels hot, and that's when Sirius notices that she's blushing.

"We should…"

She ducks her head, breaking contact with his fingertips, and his hand hovers stupidly in the air for a second before he pulls it into his lap. "We, uh—we have an essay to finish," she says, sounding more like she's talking to herself than like she's talking to him. "We're going to be here all night if we don't kick ourselves in the arses and focus."

"Focus. Right. Toasters. Quirrell."

Em is blushing furiously now, but she manages to crack a weak smile before she runs her hands down her face, shakes her head, and turns back to their textbooks. He follows her lead.

An hour later, his essay is only half written, and he's bullshitted most of it because he still hasn't got much of a clue how toasters are supposed to work. If he'd thought that kissing Em would break the tension, he was wrong. If anything, he feels way more wound up now than he did before he—before they did this thing to each other.

It felt good, unbelievably good, to kiss her. He'd spent a lot of time trying to imagine what it might feel like, and the real thing doesn't compare at all to his imagination. He didn't realize it was going to be so—wet. Or fast. Even when they were just sitting there not moving, he felt like time was passing faster than he could keep up with it. And it was weird to explore his sense of touch in the dark: he's so used to his world being visual that it was very strange to entertain an experience that was all about mapping out the way something feels, especially with his lips instead of with his hands.

He's sure that he was terrible at it, and he can only attempt to envision what it's going to feel like when he actually figures out what he's doing. But is there going to be a next time for him to try again? After all, for the whole hour since they kissed, they've just been sitting here in silence—it's not like they've tried to do it again or, god forbid, like they've talked about what it meant or what they want moving forward.

When the library closes, he mumbles something about going to see if Moony checked himself into the Hospital Wing like he'd thought he might, and Emmeline mumbles a goodbye before they sprint off in opposite directions. He doesn't go to the Hospital Wing, of course: Moony won't be there; he'll be in the Shrieking Shack by now. But Sirius doesn't think he can stand to go up to the dormitory and be around Peter or James right now, so he shoves his hands in his pockets and leaves the castle to go for a walk alone.

True, he hadn't known what to expect, but the part that he really didn't see coming is—how freaked out he's feeling right now. He'd known he would probably feel a lot of things when he had his first kiss, but he'd thought they were all going to be good things. And it's not like he feels all bad—he liked it, really liked it—but he also feels sort of… guilty. Really, really guilty.

He's being ridiculous, he tells himself: there's absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying a bit of kissing. Everybody does it sooner or later, and he is fourteen and a half—he's the age where this kind of thing starts becoming normal.

So why does he feel like he's done something wrong—something immoral?

It makes sense, he supposes, when he thinks about it. His dad hasn't actually given him the mechanics-of-sex talk yet (though Sirius has pieced together some of how it works on his own), but the one thing his mum and dad have imparted to Sirius repeatedly is that he's absolutely not allowed to date or have sex with anybody until he begins his official betrothal to the pureblooded girl of their choice. He's got to keep the bloodline toujours pur, and that means not risking muddying it with any accidental pregnancies or inadvertent feelings that might get in the way of his engagement.

Of course, Sirius decided at the beginning of his second year—when Raleigh Greengrass, the girl to whom his parents had promised him, came to Hogwarts and promptly got herself Sorted into Slytherin—that he was going to completely ignore his parents' decision to marry him off to her. He may not have a relationship with Andy anymore, but a big thing he learned from her is that he can love whom he wants to love and leave the Black family if he so chooses. He's just waiting to drop that bomb on his parents until he's in a position to leave Grimmauld Place for good.

But just because Sirius intends to break his betrothal doesn't mean that Mum and Dad's lessons about waiting until his arranged marriage to have any kind of sexual or romantic relationship haven't, apparently, affected him. It's not even just that he kissed somebody he's not allowed to kiss: it's that he kissed anybody at all—as if hearing for so long that he can't have a relationship yet has somehow twisted itself in his brain into the idea that he can't ever have any relationship.

He can still taste Em, and he keeps licking his lips. Every time he does, it gives him a rush that feels both good and bad.

Lord, he's crazy about her.

When he finally gets up to the dormitory, James and Peter can obviously tell that he's acting off—Peter keeps looking at him oddly, and James outright asks him what his problem is somewhere around two in the morning. "I'm just worried about Moony," he says, which isn't entirely a lie. James seems to accept this, though Sirius isn't sure that Peter does.

He doesn't tell them about the kiss—he doesn't think he's ready to tell anyone about the kiss—and concealing it makes him feel like he's untouchable, not in a good way. Since when does he keep secrets about something this big from his best mates? On the other hand, how is he supposed to talk about what happened when everything he's feeling about it is contradictory?

The guilt gets worse, a lot worse, when he next sees Moony in the Hospital Wing in the morning. Sunrise is at frigging five in the morning now that it's almost summer, which means that James sets his WWN alarm for six and they all troop downstairs by quarter after. The hangings on Moony's cot are open—he's not too banged up, then—and when he spots Sirius, he cracks a tired smile and actually raises one of his arms to the side in invitation.

Crawling into Moony's bed, tucking his head under Moony's chin, letting Moony's arms wrap lightly around him before Moony falls back asleep—Sirius thinks he might be sick. It was one thing lying to James and Peter, but for some reason, his guilt is magnified tenfold now that he's lying to Moony, too. Maybe it's something about the intimacy of sharing a bed while simultaneously withholding such personal information. Maybe it's not—maybe it's something else—but Sirius doesn't know what else it could be.

He shakes his head to clear it and nestles into Moony's chest. His friend needs him, and if Sirius deserves him, he ought to pull his head out of his arse and focus on Moony instead of himself and his own problems.

After a quick breakfast, his first class of the day is Transfiguration, where he always partners Em. He's nervous as all hell walking up to the desk where she's waiting for him—what if things are weird now, and they don't know what to say to each other? Has he ruined everything? But Emmeline just grins at him like everything's normal and asks when he'll have time around classes and seeing Moony to finish Quirrell's essay. Marlene struggled with it, too, she says, but when Em asked, Alice said she's got a pretty solid understanding of toasters and can explain it to them sometime tonight.

Sirius can't stop hearing the sound of Emmeline moaning on a loop in his head. He's going to go insane. He knows it.

The only other one of his friends whom he knows has ever kissed anybody is Mary, but he doesn't know if Mary would understand. She's from a Muggle household, so her parents wouldn't have lectured her every week growing up on the dangers of tainting her bloodline. Then again, as far as Sirius has been able to gather, Muggles do have a lot of the same hangups about sex as wizards do, even if those hangups are for slightly different reasons.

So he gets Mary alone after dinner and asks her, "Do you ever, um… does dating Gudgeon and doing stuff with him ever make you feel guilty?"

She raises her eyebrows. "Guilty? Why would making plans with my boyfriend make me feel guilty?"

"That's not the kind of stuff I meant," Sirius mumbles.

"Oh, like—like kissing and stuff? Why? Did you kiss somebody? Do you feel guilty about it?"

"No," he says a little too quickly. "Nothing happened. I've just been thinking more lately about—relationships in general, I guess."

"What, do you have a crush on someone? Who?" says Mary keenly.

He wouldn't tell Mary even if he weren't already hiding it from the Marauders—the whole school would probably know within a day—but he doesn't want to hurt her feelings. "It's not that. It's, um… well, actually, it's been the last couple months with you and Gudgeon being together," he improvises. "You're the first one of our friends to start dating, so I guess I'm just—thinking about the possibility of it for the first time."

"And you feel guilty when you think about having a girlfriend?"

"Purebloods are kind of insane when it comes to relationships," he says. He doesn't necessarily feel up to getting into the whole story about Greengrass and his parents, but she'll need at least some context to understand what he's going on about. "It's sort of—all over wizarding culture because of it. It spills over to the half-bloods and Muggle-borns, too. You haven't noticed it, being here?"

She considers this for a second. "I've noticed that everybody seems really anxious when they talk about sex, but my… um… my parents are religious, so it didn't seem like anything out of the ordinary to me. Being anxious about sex is normal for me."

"You and Gudgeon aren't having any, are you?"

Mary actually shudders at this. "What? No way. Not ever."

"Not ever?"

She blushes. "Well, not anytime soon, at least. It's just—so far away that I don't even think about it yet. It's not like we're getting married soon—we're fourteen."

"You don't think about it? If I had a girlfriend—I might not jump right into sleeping with her, but I wouldn't be able to stop myself from thinking about it."

Mary is looking more embarrassed by the second. "I just—yeah, I think about it, but I don't think about it like it's—like—a viable possibility. There's stuff I'm allowed to do, and there's stuff I'm not allowed to do—or I feel like I'm not, anyway."

"Yeah, I get that. I—feel like I'll never be allowed, you know? Even if that's not what I was taught—even if I grew up hearing it would be okay someday—it's like it's so ingrained in me that it's never going to feel like someday is here, no matter how old I am or—whatever."

"Yeah," she agrees.

He's hoping she'll elaborate—it feels kind of good to get some of this out of his system, even if he can't or won't talk about how it relates to Emmeline—but Mary just looks at her feet and keeps walking in silence.