Chapter 5
Party

"And then she almost kissed him, Dory. Right there in the Leaky Cauldron!"

Lily rolled her eyes "Almost being the key word."

Mary looked up from thumbing through the hangers in Lily's closet, a wicked smile on her face. "Tonight, then?"

Heat pricked her neck at the thought. It had been a few days since their outing to Diagon Alley, and she'd been replaying those moments with James in her mind repeatedly ever since. She'd wanted him to make a move, and she supposed with the whole licking-her-hand thing and sitting-in-his-lap situation she had sort of gotten her wish, but that near-kiss haunted her. So much so that now, faced with the impending reality of seeing him again, she almost felt like it hadn't really happened; like it was just some figment of her imagination, stretched and distorted by her incessant day-dreaming of those lips so close to hers, and those shoulders she'd felt, and that smile that made her simply melt into a puddle—

A wadded up blouse hit her square in the chest, and Dorcas's laughter peeled through the room from where she sat cross-legged on the floor, doing her make-up in the floor-length mirror.

"I'd say that's a yes, Mare."

Lily shook out the blouse Mary had chucked at her, a bronze-colored satiny peplum top with thick shoulder straps and a low v-neck in the front. "I think this one's a little much, Mare."

"Nonsense," Mary called back, now rifling through Lily's dresser drawers.

Lily stepped behind Dorcas and held up the blouse to her chest, surveying herself in mirror. "I thought you said this was a casual party."

"It is," Mary answered, "just a few blokes and us, I expect."

"Kingsley better be there," Dorcas muttered.

"He was in Diagon Alley the other day," Lily told her.

"Looking fresh as hell, I expect."

Lily tossed the blouse aside and picked up her now-hot curling iron. "Objectively, yes."

"Alright," Mary announced, stepping up beside Lily. "Shorts"—she held up a pair of faded denim, then tossed them next to the discarded blouse when Lily nodded her agreement—"bra"—she lifted the arm dangling a black satin construct with just a hint of push-up, ignoring the beginning of Lily's protest—"and knickers"—she dangled what looked like a scrap of black lace. Lily just gaped at her.

Dorcas cackled from her spot on the carpet. "James is going to lose his fucking mind."

Lily focused on her next curl, cursing the flush rising around her neck. "Who says he's even going to see them?"

Mary arched a brow. "Best be prepared, Lil. Sirius and I hooked up the first time we snogged."

Fresh anxiety unfurled in her stomach; of course she'd thought about something more happening with James, but not in a way where she expected those thoughts to actually come true.

"Would you?" Dorcas asked, her deep brown eyes fixed on Lily's through the mirror. "Hook up with him?"

Lily shrugged. "I—I don't know."

"Yes, you would," Mary sighed, crossing her arms. "You didn't see how you looked in his lap, Lil."

"How did I look?" It was a poor attempt a nonchalance, and Mary and Dorcas both knew it.

Mary rolled her eyes. "Gee, I don't know, maybe like you wanted to shag each other right then and there?"

Lily flushed again and figured she might as well just stay a permanent shade of red. "Well," she deflected, fluffing out her hair, "I don't know how you two expect any of that to happen, snogging or otherwise, when we're at a party with our friends."

Dorcas grinned mischievously. "Oh, I can think of some ideas."

Mary waggled her eyebrows. "Maybe a certain… game?"

Lily picked up the blouse and shorts, turning toward Mary. "Fine. If I wear these, you two have to start it, and you have to pair us together. Deal?"

"Obviously!" Mary grinned, then turned to flick her wand toward Lily's record player. "Now get changed already so we can see how this looks."

Lily dutifully changed into the outfit Mary had selected and then layered some of her favorite dainty necklaces to fall over her chest. Dorcas slung an arm around her shoulders and proclaimed, "We're getting kissed tonight, Lil, you mark my words."

Just then, a knock sounded at the door. Lily turned and called, "Come in!"

The door cracked, and Petunia poked her head around. Lily sensed Dorcas stiffen beside her, and Mary froze mid-eye liner.

"Oh, hey, Tuney."

Her sister sniffed. "I heard noise."

"We're just getting ready for a party," Lily told her. "Want to come in?"

Petunia's eyes darted around the room, no doubt taking in the record player changing records by itself, the discarded clothes folding themselves, and the make-up floating in mid-air next to Mary.

"No," Petunia said coldly. "I have better things to do."

Lily chewed her lip. "Right, well. We'll be going soon. We're almost ready."

Petunia looked her up and down, her lips pursed. "You look desperate."

And with that, she snapped the door shut.

Lily turned and slumped on her bed with a sigh, barely hearing the eruptions of fury from Mary and Dorcas. Somehow, her sister always knew how to hit her where it hurt the most.


Lily had been to her fair share of summer parties, but never one at James's house. She fidgeted with her blouse nervously, adjusting the strap and smoothing down the peplum front. Back in her bedroom, she'd been infused with her friends' confidence, entertaining daydreams about getting James alone. Now, though, walking up the tree-lined drive toward the massive brick estate, Lily felt stupidly self-conscious. Why had showing a little more cleavage than usual seemed like a good idea? What the hell had she been thinking? A vision of Petunia's judgmental face flashed before her mind. Would James think she looked like a tart?

She walked past the spot where he'd parked the motorbike and resolutely stayed seated, and she mentally kicked herself. She was being an idiot, letting her catty sister get inside her head when Petunia didn't know the first thing about who Lily really was or how to be a real friend. Lily had found her own friends, girls who had her back against every blood slur, throughout every boy saga, and who knew her, knew this world, better than Petunia ever would. It was sad yet comforting all at once, but at least she knew that Mary and Dorcas were truly looking out for her. And as she followed Mary around the side of the house, toward the back patio where Mary said they had a fire pit, she reminded herself how she'd felt before Petunia came in. Sexy. Fierce. And ready to snog one James Potter.

Her stomach fluttered as she saw him, leaning against the side of a patio chair as he talked to Remus amidst a small crowd of people.

Sirius noticed them first, calling out, "Oho, and the party has arrived!"

Mary walked up to him and curled into his side, stealing his drink to take a sip.

"Hey, Lily!" She turned and saw Remus waving at her, and she grinned at him as she walked over and threw her arms around him in a friendly hug.

"Reme! How's your summer been?"

"Good, you?"

Something about his eyes were just a little too knowing. She looked between him and James, and then ran a hand through her hair as she said, "Good for me too. Er, you heard from Marly?"

Remus nodded. "Yeah, they're onto Crete now. "

Lily sighed. "Why didn't we all go summer with your girlfriend again?"

Remus chuckled, lifting his bottle of mead to his mouth. "Because she has five brothers."

Lily snorted. "Yeah, I don't envy that part."

James spoke for the first time. "Want something to drink?"

"Yeah. Um, I'll do a mead."

He nodded and set his own glass on the table next to him before he plucked a bottle from the depths of the charmed ice bucket and then lifted up the bottom of his shirt to dry it off. Lily's throat closed, her skin suddenly feeling very hot after the flash of abdominals and peek of waistband she'd just seen.

Remus cleared his throat softly, and Lily's eyes snapped over to him, finding him watching her with an amused expression that he tried to hide by taking another swig of his drink.

James had flicked off the cap of the bottle and was holding it out to her. Lily took it, her fingers brushing his in the hand-off, and she thought James's eyes darkened as he stared at her.

Or maybe that was just a shadow. From the flames. In the fire pit.

She was losing her mind.

Lily raised her bottle to her lips, the mead refreshing and sweet on her tongue, and she swore it went straight into her bloodstream because she was suddenly slightly dizzy, like her blood was zinging around in her body too fast for its own good.

Or maybe that was just James. Staring at her. Like a predator.

"Fucking hell, Sirius was right," Remus muttered.

"What?" Lily squeaked.

He looked pointedly from her to James and then back to her as he said, "You two. I mean, Merlin, do we just need to shove you two in the broom shed, or what?"


A few hours, several rounds of goblets, a handful of meads, and an incessant amount of flirting later, that's exactly what their friends did.

"Your turn," Dorcas murmured in her ear, grinning maniacally as she pushed Lily toward the broom shed.

Mary brandished the door, ordering, "In!"

James stood aside, gesturing for Lily to go first, and she crossed the threshold, not daring to look back at her friends for fear that the anxious glee brewing in her chest would show through on her face. The muggy air of the shed hit her like a wall, and she sucked in a breath as she looked over her shoulder to see James following her inside.

"Seven minutes," Sirius barked, and Lily just caught the devilish wink Sirius sent James before the shed door shut and sealed, its edges shimmering with a faint blue glow.

James rumpled his hair absently, biting his lip. The broom shed on the Potters' grounds wasn't big, per se, but James was about as far away from her as he could be. Lily's stomach gave a little lurch; they'd been increasingly touchy and flirty all night, and Lily would have bet all the galleons she had that he'd been thinking about their near-kiss just as often as she was, and yet now he had her alone, in a broom shed, of all places, and he wasn't coming anywhere remotely near her.

"Er," he started, stuffing his hands in his pockets, "sorry about them—"

"You don't have to apologize—"

"—they're pretty hell-bent on, um, us—"

"—they're my friends too, you know—"

"—but I don't want you feel like you, you know, have to—"

"James." There it was again, that delicious name on her tongue. He fell silent instantly, staring at her across the shed, illuminated in an eerie blue glow from the light of the spell around the door. "I knew the girls would start the game."

His throat bobbed. "You—you did?"

Lily nodded slowly. "And I told them to put me with you."

James stared at her, like he was momentarily frozen.

Lily shifted on her foot. "I—I didn't know how else to get you alone—"

In a stride so quick she barely saw it happen, James was suddenly standing right in front of her, a smile tugging the corner of his mouth. "What'd you want me alone for, Evans?"

Lily fought her own smile as she peered up at him in the dark. "Well, the last time I saw you, we were rudely interrupted while you were trying to make a move."

"Giving me a do-over, eh?"

"Seemed like the chivalrous thing to do."

That earned her a grin, the flash of his teeth starkly white in the dark.

"Such a bloody Gryffindor," he muttered, though she heard the affection in his voice.

"And you aren't?"

He gave a brief, humorless chuckle and said quietly, "I've liked you for years, Lily. So it's taking all the Gryffindor I've got to kiss you right now."

Something about that admission knocked the air from her lungs, and she fleetingly thought he might not have said it if it weren't for the whisky in his blood. For years. Really, she'd known; between the way he'd acted around her and the incessant teasing from their friends, there was no way she couldn't have. But he'd never actually told her before, and the way he'd kept a friendly distance from her in the spring had left her thinking that maybe he didn't like her that way anymore. Relief filled her to the brim, and she vaguely thought she'd never been happier to be wrong in her life.

Lily rested her hands on his chest and then tilted her head up and slightly to the right. She wondered if he could hear her heart pounding like mad, but mercifully her voice sounded far more controlled than how she felt. "Better make it count, then."

He inched closer to her and rested his hands lightly on her waist just as his nose brushed against hers, his touch sending currents of butterflies zinging around inside her body. The anticipation was torture. This was precisely where they had left off days ago, only now they were completely alone with minutes of guaranteed uninterrupted time, her heart was beating a wild rhythm as her brain quickly started turning to mush, his breath was hot and his lips were so close and he smelled like pine and smoke and whisky, and she suddenly just ached for him, a foreign feeling she'd never had before but that she felt stir in the depths of her being and spread through her bones—

And then his lips pressed softly against hers and time stopped for a moment. Her brain rushed to catch up, to process that this was happening, that James had actually kissed her, and though the kiss was chaste, small little zips of electricity seemed to shoot through her veins—

Their kiss broke, and James tilted his head, kissed her again, a little more firmly this time. Lily slid her hands up over his shoulders, felt his fingers curl against her waist, and when this kiss gently ended, she immediately tilted her head back the way she'd started, sensing James doing the same, and her lips found his a third time, the beginning of familiarity stirring within her at the feel of his mouth covering hers. But something about this kiss was different. Charged. Like something in James had broken open, his initial tentativeness giving way to the confidence that carried him through life. And it swallowed her whole.

Merlin, James Potter could kiss. His mouth was now open and hot on hers, his tongue swiping her lip before his teeth ghosted the same place with their sharp edges. Lily couldn't help the sigh that spilled from her throat as she pulled him in closer, hands snaking up his neck and into the back of that inky black hair, its softness a pleasant surprise as it slid through her fingers. A low growl sounded from James's throat as his hands tightened at her waist and his fingers slipped just under the hem of her blouse, setting her skin on fire.

He pulled back a fraction, breathed a soft, "Lily—"

It was like a trigger; she pulled his head back to hers, pushing up on her tiptoes to get to his mouth faster, seeking out his tongue with her own, needing more of his taste, his heat—

James slowly backed her into the wall, his legs slotting between hers, and Lily gasped into his mouth as she felt the press of his thigh between her legs, that foreign ache she'd started to feel before surging back, pulsing around where his leg pressed between hers and sending waves of desire up through her limbs. And then James's body encased hers more fully, his whole front flush with hers, and Lily felt a hard prod at her hip.

If she hadn't been breathless before, she certainly was now. Obviously she knew James was turned on by her; she'd seen him randy the day they rode the motorbike, and she'd felt him randy when they'd hugged that same day. But feeling him now, in a dark broom shed, mid-make-out, surely past the seven-minute marker but with no sign of their friends interrupting them, was something else entirely.

Lily had touched a boy before, had tugged and stroked until he spilled over her hand, but the thought of doing that to James made her dizzy and anxious like she'd never known was possible.

She kissed him with renewed fervor, raking her hands back through his hair as she let her mouth get lost in a blissfully natural rhythm of licks and sucks and tongue and teeth. It was like the more he gave her, the more she craved, and when his hands eventually slid up her sides and over her breasts, her first thought was simply more, and she arched into him, pushing her chest further into his grasp.

James groaned against her mouth and rolled his hips into her, driving that hard bulge into her stomach. Her body reacted on instinct, her legs squeezing around his, her hands clutching hair, neck, shoulders, and soon the rhythm of their hips matched the cadence of their mouths, and James's hands were everywhere, around her back, over her front, under her blouse, and that aching pressure Lily had never felt before was taking root somewhere deep within her as she squirmed against James's leg.

A soft whimper escaped her then, and James rested his forehead against hers, breathing hard. "Shit, Lily," he whispered.

"Yeah," she agreed breathlessly. "Back at you."

His eyes searched hers, glittering orbs in the dark. "I think our seven minutes are up."

Through the determined evenness in his voice, she heard the question, hanging silently in the charged air between them. He was giving her an opening. An out.

She didn't want it.

"Well, if it's all the same to you, Potter"—she reached up on her tiptoes, nuzzled around his nose. "I'm not done snogging you yet."

A grin split his face, filled his voice. "I've always liked it when you get bossy."

Lily couldn't help her own smile. "Is that right? I'll have to remember that the next time I catch you fools causing trouble."

James chuckled as he squeezed her waist. "Why do you think I always let you catch me?"

Her breath caught at that, realization dawning as she thought back through all the times she'd caught (or rather, thought she'd caught) James—only ever James—in the middle of creating some sort of mayhem. How had she missed that? Deep down, she knew the answer. Because she liked it. There was really no denying it. She liked catching him, liked seeing him on her patrol, liked the thrill that filled her when she heard his voice, saw his figure in a corridor, tried to keep coherent in the face of that easy grin and teasing, "Aw, Evans," that always preceded his plea for mercy.

"You bloody wanker." She tried to bite back her smile, shake her head, but James ducked to her neck, dotting kisses on her jaw as he muttered, "Literally."

"What?"

She felt his smile on her skin as he moved his mouth along the column of her neck.

"Can't tell you—how many times—I got off—after seeing you—on your patrol."

Lily sucked in a breath, the force of that confession combined with the hot trail of his lips making her stomach drop.

It was all also apparently addling her brain, because Lily suddenly found her hand had dropped to his hip and her mouth was whispering into his ear, "How about I get you off this time?"

James froze. Lily panicked. Damn her betraying mouth. How many forward things had she now said to him in the past week? Too many. How many times had he reciprocated and made a move? Not enough. And now she'd really stuck her foot in it, she'd pushed the envelope too far, she'd—how many idioms until she melted into a puddle of embarrassment?

His whisper sounded strained. "Are you for real?"

Relief flooded her. She almost wanted to laugh. Instead she inched her hand under his shirt and nestled her thumb under his waistband of his briefs, feeling him tense at her touch. "Yeah."

He cleared his throat. "You—want to?"

Lily did laugh at that. "You think I'd offer if I didn't?"

"I—I just didn't—I mean—"

But James never got to finish that sentence, because just then a gigantic clap of thunder shook the ground, and Lily noticed for the first time that rain was pounding against the side of the shed right as the shed door flew open, washing them in a blast of cold air and spray of water.

Sirius stood in the entryway, soaked to the bone, and shouted, "Storm's rolling in—c'mon!"

James was already moving, pulling her by the hand, and he looked back down at her as he reached the doorway, that cheeky grin back on his face even though his hair was being blown sideways and rain was splattering his glasses. "Ready to run for it, Evans?"

Adrenaline coursed through her body, and while she would have normally met a situation like this with dread, she couldn't look at his face and not feel a sense of childish excitement about it all.

"Race you both," she shouted, and she took off into the gale, laughing despite being instantly drenched as she slid through the slick grass with Sirius and James running with her on either side.