It starts quietly. In the glancing graze of skin, the eyes caught in a stare, the breath that hitches where it used to slide past, unnoticed. She finds herself seeking him out, looking for him and hoping to find him, looking back.
He always is.
It's a late night, heads bent over a recalcitrant prefect rota, when it blossoms. His hand brushes hers, not with purpose, and she turns to look at him, to see the line of tension in his neck, the shadows that move across his face in the cool light of the nearby lamp. She doesn't think about it (and maybe that's where it all goes wrong, where the wrongness begins, because she knows it started somewhere and she knows it's probably her that watered that seed), just reaches out, tilts his chin towards her. He looks broken from thought, surprise etched into his brow, and when she kisses him - at last, they both think, with very different points of reference - it feels like everything else, the room and the castle and the world around them, blurs under a fine mist, unimportant, superfluous.
Afterwards, as he steadies his breath and stares at her like she has given him light in a darkened void, she asks him not to tell anyone, and pretends not to notice that light dim, just slightly, even as he nods his assent.
She's not sure why but the secrecy seems important. How would it look, the two Heads, shacked up together? And besides, it's a gentle thing, a casual thing. To share it would be to lend it a greater importance. They wouldn't be able to get around that.
This gentle thing, this casual thing, it sometimes occupies her thoughts more than it should. Now that she knows what his hands on her back feel like, now that she knows how soft his hair is, now that she knows how her eyes roll back in her head when he moves his mouth between her legs - it becomes all-consuming. She can be sitting in Transfiguration, diligently taking notes, when she'll catch sight of him shifting in his chair, or scratching his leg, and be lost, all of a sudden, truly lost until she can pull him into a broom cupboard, or an abandoned classroom, and wrap her legs around his waist, feel his pulse flutter at every kiss, every touch.
She thinks he feels similarly. Distracted. Drunk on the taste of her.
Soon, they spend more time together than apart. Around Quidditch and Head duties and tutoring, they find time to steal away, to bracket themselves against a cold stone wall or a rickety desk or the floor of the prefects' bathroom. It never occurs to her that what she sees, the changes between them, he might not see too. That he might not be feeling as she does, that shift from casual to, just, not.
She relies on his old feelings for her. Clings to them, not knowing that they are crumbling sandstone beneath her fingertips.
It's February, then, when the wrongness reaches full bloom. When she's in the girls' loo on the fourth floor, washing her hands and mentally preparing herself for double Arithmancy, and Rachel Hart is chatting to her about the upcoming Hogsmeade weekend. She's not really listening, just nodding politely, but then –
"And who's going to say no to James Potter?" Rachel pats on some lip balm, pausing to nod at her reflection in the mirror. "So I said yes! Can you believe it?"
She can't. She didn't think they really knew each other. Rachel is a friendly, pretty Hufflepuff, the sort of girl who flew under the radar. James lives his life smack bang in the middle of the radar.
Later, as he slips his hand under her shirt in the dimly lit Heads office, she finds her voice. "You asked out Rachel Hart?"
He pauses, lifts his head from the curve of her neck. She knows her voice sounds different - heavier, a weakness there she wants to hide but can't. "Yeah. To Hogsmeade," he replies, and steps back.
She knows this is the breaking point. She could backtrack, put his hand back on her bra, bring his lips back to the spot on her neck where she never knew heaven could live. She could smile, and shrug, and carry on.
But she doesn't. "Why?"
He looks confused. His hand finds its way into his hair, an old habit he won't ever be able to shift. "Well…she's pretty. And her friend told me she likes me…"
She blinks up at him, her cheeks flushing nothing to do with the warmth of the nearby fire. She feels an idiot. She feels a fool. She feels cracked open, raw, and left to someone who can only peer at her in confusion, like a specimen in a jar. "Oh…"
His frown deepens. "Look, Evans," he starts, and her heart sinks further. "I thought this was casual. I thought it didn't matter."
She drops her gaze then; straightens her shirt, then her spine. Swallows down the rush of tears. "It mattered to me," she says.
He doesn't expect that. She's not sure she does, either. In the silence they just stare at each other, and Lily thinks about the damage that can be done, so quietly, so insidiously, not noticing until it's all shattered at your feet.
She leaves, and he lets her, and she can't think of a better by-line for this thing they had together.
