Lily perched on a stool along the windows of the café, watching the crowds flow past; going about their shopping, getting a late lunch, rushing in and out of the government building situated catty-corner to where she sat. She was on her third coffee of the day, not really a surprise, if the last few weeks were anything to go by. Late nights and early mornings, trying to finish her coursework before spring break rolled around next week. The less work she had to do then, the happier she would be. She was trying to stay motivated, but it was difficult to start an assignment in February, knowing she could theoretically not think about it until the middle of March.

The idea of doing any sort of work when she could be sleeping in late over break was even less appetizing than her distaste for doing assignments now. Mind made up, she downed the rest of her coffee and returned from staring out the windows to the task at hand. Technically, the task at hand was her break between an admittedly shoddily written chemistry lab report and some (surprise) chemistry practice problems. She squinted at the half-naked man on her computer screen, adding a few hash marks to her paper. This drawing was really starting to get on her nerves. Something about the abdominals just wasn't turning out right, no matter what she tried.

Lily was coming up on her one-hour time limit, at which point she would declare the drawing done, never look at it again, and hope she could sell it for a few pounds to someone who didn't care that the abs were a little uneven. She had nailed the face, and that was what people would care about, right?

She was very strict about her one-hour time limit for a reason. In most of her drawings there was something that would not turn out up to her standards, despite continued trying. She had learned that it was better to quit when she was as far ahead as she could get, there was no point in fruitless persistence. The alarm at the end of an hour ensured she wouldn't snap any pencils or crumple up a half-decent sketch in her frustration. Neither of those things would make her feel any better.

And the drawing could not be counted as a failure if it wasn't perfect when she only spent sixty minutes on it. That was not enough time to polish everything off. That was the main thing.

She let out a frustrated sigh, looking around the coffee shop as she did so. She made eye contact with a bloke in the corner with horrifically messy black hair for the third time since she had sat down, a few hours ago now. He gave her a crooked smile and pushed his glasses up his nose. Lily had noticed that they tended to slip down. A lot. Not that she was spending a lot of time looking at him mind, just that she was easily distracted when a drawing was not going as well as she would like.

She gave him an appreciative once-over, noting his empty cup in hand – he was still trying to get the last few drops out, doing something weird and oddly attractive with his tongue in the process – as well as his purple button-up. He'd missed a button, which detracted from the formal, faultless way it was tucked into his trousers, held in place by a dark belt. His feet were propped on the chair across the table he was at, and they were knocking against each other in an irregular rhythm.

He had looked away quickly when they first made eye contact, but now he looked back up from his phone and smiled when he noticed Lily was looking at him. Lily smiled back at him hesitantly.

Lily looked back down at her drawing, she did not need this guy thinking she was staring at him. She bit the end of her pencil, considering whether or not she should try to erase and redraw a significant portion of her drawing. Eventually, she settled for adding a few more marks, foregoing blending entirely. A rougher look fit this particular portrait, which had a remarkable number of harsh angles for a study of the human body.

She leaned forward and zoomed in on the waistband of the man's jeans, comparing with her own rendition. She figured it looked about right, right enough to satisfy someone and, more importantly, right enough to help pay for her ridiculous coffee consumption habits. She zoomed back out on the picture, leaning back as far as she could on the stool without tumbling over backwards, and cracked her knuckles. Good enough, and good riddance to this particular drawing.

"I was wondering what was taking up your attention so thoroughly, but I guess I understand now."

Lily yelped. The pencil fell out of her mouth, making a dark mark on the corner of her drawing. She threw her body over the paper and tried to slam her laptop closed, succeeding only to bruise her knuckles which had returned to rest on the keyboard.

She realized doing that wasn't helping her situation – the guy had still seen both the drawing and her screen and trying to hide it only made the situation look worse.

Lily sat back up and closed her eyes as she let out a long exhale, trying to keep her cheeks from turning bright red. Flaming cheeks also would have given this guy the wrong idea. Not that it was possible to give him the right idea at this point. He surely had already jumped to conclusions. She slowly turned around on her stool and arched her eyebrow at the messy-haired boy standing in front of her.

Great. This was mortifying. The guy she had made eye contact with (and partially planned a stupid coffee-shop-based relationship with) would be the one to comment on this. Usually when she drew pictures like this in public people were tactful enough to just judge her from afar.

And when had he stood up and walked over here anyway? She had sort of been sneaking glances at him every few seconds. She must have been much more distracted by this stupid drawing than she thought.

One of his hands had jumped to rake through his hair when she looked at him. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans, pulling them down slightly so Lily got a glimpse of an inch of his waist. Obviously, his shirt was not as impeccably tucked as she had initially assumed. He was smiling sheepishly at her, hunched over a little bit at the shoulders. Despite that and the height of her stool, he still towered over her. The only thing this situation gave her was a good look up his nostrils. Unfortunately, it did not make anything twitch in her stomach.

"Uhh…" Lily began. Excellent Evans, off to a great start of making this situation any less weird. The first thought she had had, other than slamming her hand shut in the laptop, was to sprint out of the coffee shop, paying for her croissant be damned. This attempt of explaining things away, was going about as well as her running away plan would have.

"I didn't take you for a Sirius Black fan," he gestured to the table. He took a step forward to peer over her shoulder, invading her space in the process. "I feel obligated to tell you he doesn't look that handsome in real life."

"Uhh…" Lily tried again. She shook her head. Obviously a fourth cup of coffee would have done her some good. Her brain was somehow both full of cobwebs and firing all the synapses at once. Her difficulty talking had nothing to do with the fact that this guy did not understand personal space at all. If she leaned forward even an inch, she would press her face into his chest. Focus on the nostrils, Lily. "I'm not," she defended, probably sounding a little too offended, based on the way the guys' eyebrows shot up into the hair hanging over his forehead.

"I mean he's fit; I'll give you that. But I'm not a fan. His fans will pay generously, for even a butchered drawing. I would sooner burn that." Lily closed her sketchbook on the offending drawing, it was something to do with her hands and something to keep her eyes off of him.

He laughed at that. "I'm sure Sirius would appreciate that sentiment." What the hell did that mean? The comment sounded a little too personal to be casual.

What did she know though? She was dumb enough to draw a portrait like this in a coffee shop, causing this conversation to happen. If she had been doing her coursework like a normal person, they wouldn't be discussing the sexiness of another man right now. They could have just exchanged numbers like normal people and participated in pleasant, if slightly agonizing, small talk.

The boy pulled a stool up to her table and sat down, right next to her, evidently not giving her the room to further hide what she had been doing. She studied him for a minute, trying to place the sudden boldness he was displaying after several hours of exchanging glances. Something about his face seemed vaguely familiar, but she couldn't quite place it. Maybe she'd seen him around campus at some point? He seemed about the right age.

"Look, I draw people to help fund my coffee shop addiction. See?" She slid the sketchbook a few inches to her left. He eagerly picked it up, flipping casually through her drawings from the past week or two, nodding as he went. His eyebrows drew together at one drawing, scrunching up his forehead. "I'll admit these are pretty good. Why no girls in here though, hmm?" He raised an eyebrow and smirked at her.

Oh my God. He thought she just spent her time drawing guys she was thirsting over. She should have just run away. That plan was looking better by the minute. She managed to swallow a lump in her throat. "I just really hate drawing hair."

"That's a likely story." He handed the sketchbook back to her, and Lily clutched it until her knuckles turned white. "The hair is consistently one of the best parts. You have a knack for it."

"Duh, I do that first before I get tired of staring at the same picture for an hour."

"An hour?" he asked. "I thought drawings took up days." He leaned on his elbow, and he shrunk enough to look Lily directly in the eye.

"You'd be right, I just tend to run out of patience really quickly. It's not like time has that much effect. The picture of Sirius took maybe fifty minutes, but this one," she flipped through the book to find the right drawing, "took two and a half hours and really, it's not all that much better."

"Can I take it you just think Remus Lupin is more attractive than Sirius?"

"Who?" Lily asked, perplexed.

He pointed at the drawing currently lying out in front of her. This was starting to seem weird to Lily. This man had a weird amount of knowledge about Sirius Black. And he accused her of being obsessed with the model. The audacity.

Lily shrugged. She hadn't known who she had been drawing. He had been standing next to Sirius in one of the pictures she found during her initial research for her Sirius drawing, and he had seemed like a challenge to draw, not being her typical type to work with. "The scars were interesting to work with."

"Well, you nailed the worried, the-apocalypse-is-coming-soon look in his eye," he said, nodding his approval.

"Thanks, I think?"

"So, what do I need to do to get on your to-be-drawn list?" He was fiddling with the sugar packets scattered on the table next to her laptop she hadn't bothered to use. She liked her coffee bitter but would always take a few sugar packets anyway to use later, on top of some baked good or another.

"Telling me your name would be a start," Lily said, still trying to place where she knew him from. The more time she spent looking at him, the surer she became that she had seen him before. She was usually shit at recognizing people, so to recognize someone she didn't know, well, that was the opposite from her typical problem.

"James." He picked up her empty coffee cup. "I'll be right back, Evans."

She sat, stunned for a minute, trying to figure out how he could have possibly known her name. She was pretty sure no one had been stalking her recently. She stared, racking her brain, at the drawing still open to the table, a drawing of one Remus Lupin apparently. Her eye caught her signature in the bottom corner. L. Evans. At least that explained one thing about this James character. He had several things yet to explain. His astute knowledge of all things Sirius Black would be a good start. Boys didn't typically pay attention to male models, right?

James returned and handed her a refill of coffee, palming his own, strangely pink concoction. "What's the next step, since I jumped ahead to buttering you up?"

Lily felt the corner of her mouth quirk up, unable to help herself. The boy knew what he was doing. "I mean, if you have any high-quality pictures of yourself, I guess just send them to me. More than one, preferably from different angles, just in case I absolutely murder you nose or something."

James nodded, handing her a pen, and holding out his hand. Lily had never written her number on someone's hand as a request before, that was usually the result of no other options. She currently had plenty of paper. She gave in, pleased with the way the pen glided on his skin. That was hard to come by. A lot of pens didn't work on skin very well.

"I expect you to take this, by the way, and pay me for it."

James nodded.

Lily noticed she was still holding his hand and promptly dropped it, looking for something to say. "Twenty bucks if I give up after an hour, more if I actually manage to put any effort into it."

"Fair enough. How much for the drawings of Sirius and Remus?" he asked.

After Lily got through a triad chant of "What the fuck," she managed to answer. "You bought me coffee, so forty for Lupin and you can take Black for free. I want him out of my damn sight." She carefully ripped the two drawings out of her book, paying more attention to the safety of Remus's portrait than Sirius's, while James dug through his wallet. He handed her two crisp twenty-pound notes.

Lily stuck around to finish the coffee he had bought her, absentmindedly checking her bank account and email for something to do, procrastinating chemistry as always. Not that she really thought she would be able to focus on something even vaguely complicated with James sitting right next to her. It was better to not even attempt the chemistry.

James jumped up suddenly, from where he had been scrolling idly through his phone. From the glimpses she caught he was going through his camera roll, trying to find a suitable picture to send to her.

"I've got to run, but do I have to pay you for my drawing in cash? Or would dinner work?"

Lily recovered her wit remarkably quickly. The fourth coffee and the extra foot of space between them was really working miracles. "Is this a 'coming onto me' thing or a 'you think my McDonald's order is much less than twenty pounds' thing?"

James winked and grabbed her hand to shake it rather violently before running out of the shop. He waved at her through the window on his way past. Lily waved after him, stunned by the encounter now that it was over. She had managed to make a lot of coffee money, scored a date (probably), and met an incredibly interesting (weird?) good-looking guy in the span of an hour at most. And Lily was very familiar with how long an hour was.

Lily left shortly after him. Maybe she would feel more inspired to do her chemistry homework in her apartment. Every thirty seconds her thoughts would flicker to James, even though he had long since left.

She was halfway home, two blocks left in her trek, when her phone buzzed in her jacket pocket. She pulled it out, curious, to see several images from an unknown number. She stopped in her tracks when she saw the bottom one, a picture of James between Sirius Black and Remus Lupin, all three of them laughing their heads off. No wonder he looked familiar. He had probably been in some of the pictures she had seen when looking up Sirius. Lily had to admit she was relieved he wasn't just hopelessly obsessed with Sirius Black. That may have been a red flag if she was going to consider a date with him.

What were the chances of James seeing her drawing that exact portrait though? This was an insane coincidence.

The next few pictures were slightly blurry, but at least he had mastered the various angles part of the assignment. Lily's mouth dropped open when she scrolled up. She looked behind her, back to where the coffee shop was, hidden behind taller buildings, half expecting James to be standing there, gleefully watching what she was sure was an astounded expression.

The last picture was a concerningly high-quality photo of a mostly naked and very sweaty James. He was standing on a track, staring off into the distance, one hand in his hair, running shorts riding low on his hips, not doing much to leave anything to the imagination. He had one set of abs that Lily would not be messing up.

Cheeky bastard. This dinner had better be nice because she was not going to mess up this drawing.