Covet Thy Neighbour

by Ghost-of-Bee

There are lots of ways to introduce oneself to a new neighbour, but breaking into their flat, perhaps, is a road less travelled.

4. Between a Knock and a Hard Place

Chapter 4: Between a Knock and a Hard Place

Lily wakes up the next morning earlier than planned, following a night of restless, unsettled sleep—which is to say, hardly any sleep at all.

It appears that she hasn't been watching where she walks, because she has tripped headlong into an infatuation with her neighbour and is suffering the accompanying symptoms of such an ailment, including but not limited to: random, seemingly unprompted smiling, a renewed interest in looking her best every day, and large chunks of time spent gazing at her ceiling at night, deep in thought, over-analysing every look, word and inadvertent touch that passes between them.

Last night, for example—when they semi-snuggled on her IKEA couch, when their mates teased them, when he touched her face, and hugged her—has given her quite a lot to unpack, and re-pack, and unpack again, all for the sake of examining said night from a million different perspectives. Her quick and lively brain has no desire to rest on the subject, so when her eyes snap open to greet the day, she finds herself with over an hour to spare before her alarm is scheduled to go off.

Also, she can hear Sirius singing in the next flat over.

In truth, he's not singing in any real sense of the word. It's more like the petrified yowling—"She was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb in the shape of an L on her forehead"—of a dog in intense pain.

He is...not a good singer.

He probably takes a sick pleasure in that fact. Probably plays up to it. He's probably a lot better than he lets on.

James is likely burrowed beneath his covers on the other side of the wall that separates their bedrooms—twisting in his dark blue duvet and obnoxiously clashing lime sheets—right at that moment, pressing a pillow over his head to muffle the sound of this torturous caterwauling and willing his mate to drown in the shower, rather than get out of bed and tell him to shut up, because they've been playing this game for far too long, and Sirius has succeeded in draining all of the fight out of him.

It's just a theory, but she feels she knows enough about them both to assume that it's true.

Poor, sweet darling.

There are so many other, better things he could be doing in that bed than suffering his mate's terrible singing. His huge, warm, comfortable bed, ideally built to splay across, arms akimbo and spread-legged, like a happy, slumbering starfish.

Or share.

She'll have to put a stop to this unacceptable behaviour of Sirius Black's, she decides, as she pulls herself out of her own bed and slides her feet into her waiting slippers. Sirius is still owed his punishment for lying to her, they all deserves to sleep uninterrupted, and Lily will not have it said that she doesn't know how to seek vengeance when her honour has been impugned, or when her morning is interrupted by the musical equivalent of drinking noxious chemicals.

Thoughts of revenge take her through a brisk shower, into the kitchen and halfway towards a boiled kettle before Mary comes shuffling into the room, bleary, unkempt, and all the prettier for it.

"Did he sleep over, then?" her friend asks immediately, without so much as a perfunctory "hello" or "good morning" to preface her question. She looks around the kitchen as if she's expecting to see James leap childishly out of the pantry with an accompanying, dastardly yelp. "Did you make the beast with two backs? Where is he now?"

"Not here, which should answer all of your questions, surely?"

"Not necessarily. It's not like it'd be hard for him to sneak back home, is it?"

"You'd have noticed, you dragon. Don't pretend you weren't listening out last night."

"God, you're boring. I would have shagged him the minute I got him into my room, if I were you."

A loud clicking sound from the kettle indicates that it has boiled, and Lily slides towards it with her mug in hand, teabag already placed inside. She's not going to be as fresh as she hoped for Kingsley's photoshoot, but he'll be good about it, and has a makeup artist friend coming along who will cunningly conceal any dark shadows, brush some colour into her wan, freckled cheeks, and frost her tired eyes with industrial-strength glitter.

She'll appear well-rested, even if she isn't.

In the meantime, she can't stand coffee, so tea will see her through the morning's activities.

"Shagging him as soon as I got him into my room would have been a little awkward," she reminds Mary, as the first splash of scalding water hits the bottom of her mug, "on account of how the cat came with us, and you and Sirius were in here, waiting for us to order pizza."

Mary points toward the television in the living area. "I have surround sound and every streaming service known to man. We would have been fine by ourselves for five minutes."

"Bold of you to suggest that we'd be done within five minutes."

"Optimistic of you to think you'd need more," Mary retorts. "What happened between the two of you in there, anyway? You were looking at each other all goggle-eyed and sappy when I walked in."

Lily still has plenty of time to kill before Kingsley arrives to pick her up in his Audi, so over her tea and a slice of jam-smeared toast, she runs through her conversation with James from the night before, including the strange coincidence of his having seen her play before he ever met her, the many wonderful things he said about her performance, and how she feels so comfortable around him, like they've already known each other for years, and how rare that is, and how cool it is that he feels the same way.

If she can't keep the smile from her face in the recounting, that's neither here nor there.

Unfortunately, Mary is the one listening to this story, and as is characteristic of her, she pours cold water over the whole thing as soon as Lily is done.

"What a creep," is friend's cold appraisal, her nose screwing up in distaste.

She's not sure if Mary believes she's commiserating with her, or if she simply doesn't care if Lily is slightly hurt by her assessment, but either way, she's not happy about it.

"He's not a creep," she counters, trying to sound casual, but the immediacy with which she responds rather negates any airs she may be putting on.

Besides, Mary knows her well enough to know what behaviour is normal and what isn't, and she most certainly used last night's movie-watching session to monitor them both closely.

"You just said he acted like a creep."

"No," Lily refutes, having never said anything of the sort, "you've just inferred that he was a creep because of what I said."

"Because what you said was creepy!"

"How?"

"Are you honestly telling me that you weren't freaked out when he admitted to having remembered you from a play you did months ago, taken note of your name, looked you up on the internet and found a bunch of stuff you did on telly?" says Mary, as if it's a denunciation, as if she's a member of the prosecution reading a list of his offences at the Crown Court. "All of this at the same time, mind, that he starts offering you lifts to work?"

"I'm not such a princess that I'm going to let him give me lifts to work all the time, and if I ever do, it'll keep me off my bike—"

"And I'm thrilled about that because your bike's a piece of shit, but come on, no bloke does that unless they want something, so already he's got one major stalking point in his—"

"God, Mary," says Lily, not liking this conversation, or where it's going, or her friend's tactlessness in continuing to push a point—she does have a point, but Lily is stubbornly disinclined to admit that—that she knows will only upset her. "It's not like I'm famous and he's rooting through my rubbish bins. If that were the case, I'd understand why you'd want me to be careful."

"You should already be careful when it comes to men—"

"And I am, okay?" she retorts. "I promise, I'm not stupid, and yes, certain aspects of the whole thing might seem a little dodgy if you don't have all the information, but that's not how it is. Even if he does fancy me, it's just a coincidence that he saw me in the play before we met. I still would have moved in here. I still would have stumbled into his flat. The sequence of events doesn't automatically make him a creep."

"It doesn't not make him a creep, either."

"Honestly, you're only saying this because you don't know him very well."

"Neither do you, babe. Not well enough, anyway," says Mary. "And look, maybe it'll be fine. Maybe it is just that he fancies you, and stares at you like a boob because the actress he's got a thing for moved into his building and he doesn't know how to handle it—"

"Good. I hope that's true."

"—and if he can act like a normal human being instead of going all Max Cady—"

"Which he does."

"Does he?"

"This is why his cat can't stand you, you know."

"Oh, that's me well and truly scolded," Mary says, her voice teasing, amused. "A low blow indeed."

"I'm just being honest. Why should he like you if you don't like James?"

"I never said I didn't like him," Mary immediately counters. "I said that he was a creep. A weirdo. A boob. I happen to enjoy creeps and weirdos and boobs, as long as they're not also psychopaths."

"That's true," Lily agrees, thinking of Eddie, who has been to the flat to excavate Mary, so to speak, twice more since his and Lily's untimely morning meeting in the hall, and persists in calling her Laurel. He swears, according to Mary, that the unfortunate state of his pants was merely the result of a cruel prank at the hands of his housemate, who hid all of his underwear, but his kissing technique has not yet improved.

Lily has never seen James in his pants, nor has she kissed him, but she's going to assume the best until she's proven wrong—which she won't be—and even if she is, pigs will fly before he falls anywhere close to the barrel-scraping depths of Nigel-Farage-Is-Just-Misunderstood-Todd. What right does Mary have to lambaste him for his failings when she willingly slept with that dumpster fire of a man for years? What right does she have to judge anyone when she's casually seeing a bloke who snogs like a pneumatic drill?

"I just want you to be careful, is all," Mary presses on. "You barely know the guy, but the two of you are already snuggling on the sofa and driving to work together like besties. That's a lot of trust to put in someone, right off the bat."

"Mary, the night I met him I was plastered," Lily pointedly reminds her.

"And?"

"And, it would have been easiest thing in the world for him to take advantage of me in that state. I probably would have let him do it, but he didn't. He tried to get me dressed and send me home."

"Well, yeah, fair enough, that was decent of him. Just be careful, is all I'm saying."

"I will," Lily agrees, but rolls her eyes like a teenager and flounces off to park herself at one end of the kitchen island, her mug gripped tight between her hands. "Can I enjoy my tea in peace now?"

"Go ahead, just don't say I never warned you," says Mary, with a shrug.

It shouldn't annoy her that her friend has suggested such a thing about James, but it does; a deep-set, restless kind of annoyance, like an itch in the sole of her foot, buried too deep beneath the skin to fully be relieved. Mary has a habit of sticking by her first impressions with a doggedness that would be admirable, were it not so troublesome on occasion, for she'd rather remain wilfully ignorant to a truth than admit that she was wrong about a person, even if her beliefs have been completely disproved beyond all argument. She'd hated Lily's first serious boyfriend—Robbie was, by all accounts, a perfectly lovely chap who Lily only dumped because their chemistry felt off—on sight, and persisted in announcing her intent to run him over with a bus one day.

Lily should, perhaps, dislike this side of Mary, but she can't, because she's been cut from the exact same cloth—stubborn, staunch, and loath to admit that she's made a mistake—and knows it all too well. She couldn't be told with Sev, not by Mary, nor Kingsley, nor by six or seven others, even though she knew in her heart of hearts that something was seriously wrong.

Mary can have her triumph over Severus, and all the smug satisfaction of knowing she was right, for all she cares. Lily has owned to her mistakes, and Sev made sure she was punished for her failure to act with any speed. That's done. Finished. If she never sees him again, it'll be too soon.

But James is...not Sev.

She doesn't know him terribly well, not yet, but he's not Sev. She's sure of that, feels it in her gut, in her bones, that this one—this one—is one of the good eggs. Goodness seems to emanate from him, in fact. He's considerate, and generous, and utterly adorable when he's had a few too many.

She knows that she's a little bit nuts for having such faith in him. She knows that she sounds utterly asinine in her defence of this man she hasn't known for long, and that the intelligent, reasonable, standardized procedure for an acquaintance such as theirs is an aloof cordiality—she lives in an apartment building in Crouch End, not a charming row of country cottages in rural Kent, where it would make sense to cozy up to her neighbours—at best, or at least at first.

But she can't do that. She can't not cozy up. She likes him far too much, likes the sound of his voice, likes the way that he smiles at her—has she mentioned that he smiled at her a lot last night? That he looked at her often, and didn't mind her flirting, and seemed a little put-out by her crush on Colin Firth?

She wants to keep this one, these feelings, this person.

She wants the freedom to enjoy the butterflies in her tummy without an ever-lurking feeling of unease. She wants to revel in thrills of excitement when they pass each other in the hall without wondering if she's blinded to some awful, glaring problem. She doesn't want Mary to be right about James, not if Mary will insist upon offering an assessment that isn't positive and glowing, but now she's gone and called him a creep, planted her seed of doubt in the way only a best friend can, waiting for a beanstalk to flourish, and it's much too soon, and it has pissed her off. Lily is a little too infatuated, yes, but she's only been that way for all of ten minutes, and it'd be nice if she could just be left alone to enjoy it before she starts to panic, and make up reasons to see him, and stare obsessively at her phone until her eyes start to blur, wondering why the text she sent was marked as read two hours ago, but he hasn't bothered to reply.

Which reminds her, she'll need to wangle his number somehow.

Not for any particular reason. Just to have it. It's useful to have contact details for one's neighbours, in case of an emergency. Say she was cat-sitting Algernon (she may or may not be considering adding cat food to this morning's online shop, just in case) and he accidentally ate some grapes. They can cause kidney failure in cats. James would need to be informed.

That's a terrible example. She would never bring that brilliant, estimable, beautiful creature into an environment with such readily available hazards.

She wants his number for emergencies. Nothing sexy. Feline kidney-failure. That's all.

Mary simply doesn't understand.

She can't understand. She's never hugged him—been hugged by him—she doesn't know how it feels to be snatched up the way she was, pulled flush against his body, a length of lean, hard muscle that was no less warm and inviting for all of that, wrapped up tight in a pair of strong arms that had committed to hold her and went for it, her head full of the scent of him, and the feel of him, and I'd been waiting to earn this, as if hugging her was a privilege, not an ordinary thing. Mary can't have ever had a hug like that.

Nobody has hugs like that.

I'd been waiting to earn this. She's thought of that constantly since the minute he left her flat, having physically bundled Algernon out the door because the cat was so reluctant to leave her side. Why was he waiting? What possible merit could a moment in her arms hold over the innumerable potential hugs he could share with innumerable potential people? She knows that he likes her—or what he knows of her, as a person—enough to want to drive her to work, watch movies on her couch, banter with her, befriend her, but even then...she's sure she's never been hugged with such enthusiasm before.

It ended weirdly.

She left that part out when she recounted the story to Mary.

That was...strange. Confusing. He'd been holding her tightly one minute, slotted nicely against her like a jigsaw puzzle piece—no need to let go, nope, she was perfectly happy to stay there, for longer by far than any hug between mates had any right to last, so long, in fact that it was starting to feel distinctly romantic—and moving stiffly away the next, lifting his arms from around her body as if he feared she might infect him, patting her back like she was one of the kids he coaches, and he was trying to show approval without stepping over a line that might raise eyebrows.

She had almost asked what he was doing, and why, and if he could grab her again, but figured that he was just embarrassed, being as tipsy as he was, and perhaps more inclined to sentimental cuddles with relative strangers than he would be in his right mind. Lily has made many a lifelong friend whilst drunk and queueing for the ladies' room, only to forget the other girl's name as soon as she tasted fresh air. He must be an affectionate drunk, ground suddenly to a halt by the glimmerings of sobriety.

That, of all the explanations she has thought of, is the most realistic, if not the most comforting.

Off he had gone, one stiff-limbed, awkward man, taking with him his shame, his cat, and piece of her soft and vulnerable heart that's much too large to go unnoticed by its owner.

She knows it's foolish. She knows she's feeling far too much, too fast. She knows she'd roll her eyes at one of her friends, if they were falling victim to this trap. Mary would. Mary will. Mary does.

But still.

Mary can't possibly understand.

Mary never hugged him.

---

It takes three weeks for the knocking to start.

She's trying to talk to her sister on the phone when it does.

Lily is listening to her chill-out Spotify playlist—"My Girl," by the Temptations is the current track on rotation—while she works out her budget for the coming month on an Excel spreadsheet, a pretty soundtrack to undercut a mundane, often depressing activity, when Petunia calls, prompting an immediate pause and answer.

Fortunately, her budget is a little less woeful than usual—thanks in part to Kingsley, who insisted upon reimbursing her for helping out with the academy's advertising, and a two-episode spot she's booked as a murder victim on yet another crime series, this time with the added bonus of meeting Claire Foy, who is playing the lead detective—so she's a little bit flush at the moment, and the prospect of a call from the Empress of Darkness strikes less dread into Lily's heart than it normally would.

Besides which, the introduction of a certain person—and all the slap, bang and fanfare he came with, not to mention his ornery cat—to Lily's life recently has seen her smiling to herself more often than she did in the days pre-new apartment, pre-drunken mishap, pre-James.

Lily feels as if she's slowly, slowly, lifting herself out of the pit that swallowed her.

She's got a way to go yet, and mostly she feels as if she's peeping over the edge rather than establishing any kind of toehold to haul herself to freedom, but she no longer feels so corralled.

Petunia will be bitterly disappointed to hear it.

Lily's elder sister is one of those people who likes to say they're nervous when they aren't, Mrs. Bennett without any eye-rolling ridiculousness to smooth her jagged edges, the kind of person who—motivated solely by her love of spinning drama out of the littlest things—sends a plethora of frantic messages if she doesn't receive an immediate response to a simple query, her overactive imagination formulating five soap opera scenarios per minute, most of which involve Lily "going down a dark path" of drink and drugs like "other actresses do," many of which will slingshot from her speeding fingers and land in her sister's inbox within a matter of seconds.

A speedy typist, her sister. Petunia was a secretary when she met her husband-to-be—his secretary, as it happened, and as nauseatingly Mad Men-esque as that sounds—though she will be shortly surrendering her career to set up home in a detached house in Surrey that is as devoid of character as it is expensive.

Petunia has no real reason to give up work, but claims that it's "the done thing," or should be.

Oddly, she would likely be very proud to learn that Lily has set her heart on the wealthy heir apparent to an international luxury haircare dynasty and would convince herself that her younger sister has finally learned to adopt her mercenary view of the world. She's marrying rich and thinks Lily should too, though not as rich as her, so perhaps she wouldn't be all that proud, all things considered.

As if Lily gives a shit about money, beyond what she needs to earn to feed and house herself.

As if she had any choice in the matter of who she set her heart on, and when, and under what circumstances. The bleak reality of the thing is that her heart set itself on course without consulting her in advance, and all she can do is follow the trail of breadcrumbs she finds along the way.

In any case, not answering the phone to her sister is not an immediate option. Petunia does not take well to having her calls ignored, and it's not worth having her poor old mum get in touch to ask why, in a tired, weary tone, her eldest daughter has once again called to complain that Lily is being a neglectful sibling.

The Temptations are brought to an ungainly halt with her apologies, because they deserve much better than to be paused for Petunia, and Lily answers her call.

"Hi, Tuney!" she says cheerily, raising the phone to her ear.

"I'm having a nervous breakdown," says Petunia at once, tacking an affected sniff to the end of the sentence, as if the implied breakdown isn't serious enough to grab Lily's attention. "Eight weeks to the wedding and Dotty breaks her leg—breaks her leg—windsurfing in the Maldives, if you can believe it! What was she even doing in the Maldives? And windsurfing, of all things, when my email specifically stated that all members of my wedding party were to avoid putting themselves in situations that could monopolize their ability to attend! She's going to be wearing a cast now! I can't have her walking down the aisle next to Roger from Vernon's office, she's going to look so common and awkward—"

Behind Lily's head, and from the other side of the wall, there comes a firm, yet insistent, knock.

It's probably James, accidentally banging his elbow whilst performing complicated karate moves on his bed (she knows he does it, try as he might to deny such a thing).

"—anyway, I told her she was out. Of the wedding, I mean. She can still come, Vernon and I paid for a place setting for her and a plus one, but since you'll need to take over you can bring a guest, and she can come alone and take your spot—"

Another knock, louder this time, sounds from James Potter's bedroom.

"Sorry, Tuney," says Lily, and looks over her shoulder at the wall as if it might furnish her with answers. "What was that?"

There is a pause on the end of the line. Then an indignant huff.

"Are you even listening to me, Lily?" Petunia wails. "I have an emergency on my hands, and I need you to fill in for Dotty or I'll be down a bridesmaid—I can't ask Pauline, she's ballooned like the Michelin Man since she had that ugly baby—but if you're not even paying attention—"

"Yes, of course—" The knocking is growing more insistent, two at a time, three, tap tap tap—what the hell is going on over there? "Petunia, I'm sorry, I've got—"

Petunia lets out another exaggerated sniff. "Is somebody knocking on your door?"

Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap.

Know your opportunities, Evans.

Also, she's starting to worry that James is sick, dying, or being brutally attacked on the other side of that wall. Maybe Sirius has also learned ineffective karate and has launched into a counter-strike.

"Yes," Lily lies, but firmly, so that she will seem entirely sincere in her blatant dishonesty. "Sorry, sorry—forgot I was expecting the landlord around now."

"You haven't missed your rent, have you?" said Petunia eagerly, distracted from her own woes, as always, by the prospect that Lily might be going through a shittier time than she was.

"No." Tap tap tap. If James is actually being murdered while she attempts to ward off her nosy sister, it will make for the strangest slice of irony that Lily has ever been forced to swallow. "No, it's a...repairs thing. I've got to go, Tuney. I'll ring you later."

"No, wait!" Petunia practically shrieks. "What about my wed—"

Lily ends the call, cutting her off midstream and almost certainly earning her ire later, but the persistent knocking on the other side of the wall is a more pressing worry than Petunia's wedding panic and general willingness to shunt her closest friends and relatives to the side, should they commit the heinous crime of accidentally injuring themselves.

Not to mention that she only seems to merit a position in her only sister's wedding party when she's the last possible resort.

She closes her laptop lid, pulls James's number—which he offered up of his own volition, negating any need for underhanded schemes—up on her phone and dials it immediately, lest her sister ring her back and complicate matters by tying up the line.

He picks up on the second ring.

"Hello," he says, his now familiar voice reverberating down the line with the slightest echo, vaguely discernible through the wall that separates his bed from her bed, and him from her, and causes Lily no end of undue frustration on her most sleepless of nights.

"Are you okay?" she asks at once.

She sounds more concerned than she'd like to, perhaps, but she can't be blamed for that. His knocking was incessant, so Lily is perfectly within her rights to assume that he was choking to death, or suffering a massive heart attack, or simply unable to shift an irate Algernon off his face.

"I am most certainly," James firmly intones, "not okay."

"What—"

"Here I was, lying innocently in bed, enjoying the sounds of the Temptations crooning to me, and someone—someone—cuts them off—cuts the Temptations off, Lily! At the very best part of the song!" His outrage is rampant and dramatic and so very typically him. "So, the real question is—are you okay? Because I can think of no other reason for this type of tragic action except, maybe, impending death."

"I don't—I thought you were—" she begins, then starts to laugh. "My sister called me, you absolute bellend. Wedding emergency. I paused the song to take her call."

"If we're weighing out emergencies, I'm just not sure that 'wedding' tops 'musical genius,'" James replies. Then pauses. "Unless the groom is dead. Or the priest. Or...I don't know. I did give a pass for impending death, so I feel like I should be generous on that front."

"I thought you were bloody dying! I wound up bloody hanging up on her because you had me so worried."

"You were worried about me?" He sounds delighted to hear this. "I was only trying to be expedient. What use is having a shared wall if you can't communicate through it?"

"A little warning would be greatly appreciated, next time I fail you as an impromptu DJ," she says wryly. "My sister is very sensitive and lacking in any semblance of a sense of humour, and she's not going to be happy that I hung up on her for no reason."

"Explain about the Temptations," James suggests. "She's got a wedding coming up. 'My Girl' is required wedding music. You could call it matrimonial research and earn yourself points."

"You don't know my sister if you think she'd play that at her wedding, it's a string quartet or nothing." She leans back against her headboard, drawing her knees up to her chest. "My wedding, on the other hand, will feature lots of retro classics, as is only appropriate for a woman of excellent taste such as myself."

"Getting married, are you? Who's the lucky sod? And don't," he cuts in, "say Colin Firth."

"Couldn't possibly tell you," she replies, "as I left my crystal ball in the other room. Plus, nobody's asked me yet—well, one person asked me, but that was a long time ago."

"A long-ago marriage proposal?" There's a vague rustling on the other end of the line, as if he too is nestling down on his bed to chat with her. "Do tell."

The rustling reminds her that she's been sucked into long phone conversations with him before, despite a close physical proximity which practically eliminates any real need to talk on the phone at all, and the clock is ticking on seven, and she'd been contemplating making herself dinner before her sister called and set her evening off course.

They're proper friends now, her and James.

They're board game-playing, cat custody-sharing, 80s playlist-curating friends, who take drives together, talk nonsense together, and share ridiculous, you-had-to-be-there private jokes that prompt Sirius to tease them about their inevitable marriage. When she's fed up and tired after work, she plops on his couch with ice cream and whatever cheap, vaguely saccharine cocktail mix she can wrangle from the off licence down the road, he pays for a takeaway, and they watch box-sets together until one, or both, of them starts to grow drowsy. James was utterly appalled to learn that she had never seen Parks and Rec, so they're currently in the middle of a binge-watch, halfway through season 3.

Now, James is appalled only by Lily's humongous crush on Ben Wyatt, though he has admitted to finding this easier to understand than her libidinous longing for Colin Firth.

"It's a long story," she says, running a hand over her hungry stomach, "best shared over food, of which I am in desperate need. Do you fancy going out for some dinner? You helped me get my crazy sister off the phone, which means of course that I owe you, so it's my treat if you're free."

"Oh." There's more rustling. "Dinner? Yeah. Yes. I can do dinner. Where'd you have in mind?"

"Depends on what you want. Anything you're particularly craving? I just need to throw some clothes on and I'm good to go whenever."

Lily is fully dressed—not that James has any way of knowing this—but she'll need to change her shirt to leave, and the devilish voice inside her ear that so often likes to make itself known in his presence may have compelled her to embellish a little.

"Ah. Hm. Craving. That's…" He hesitates. Maybe thinking. Maybe not. "Well...there's that Greek place on Tottenham Lane. Has Mary taken you there yet? Or we can always eat our body weights in McDonald's fries. That rarely ever goes wrong."

"I've never tried Greek food," she says thoughtfully, "but I've always wanted to, if you fancy popping that particular cherry."

There's a slight cough on the other end of the line, then a firm, quick tapping sounds from above her head—rap, rap, rap.

"That's a 'yes, with delight' knock," he tells her. "Much different from the"—THUMP, THUMP—" 'kindly but no thank you' knock. See?"

"What occasion would merit a 'kindly but no thank you' knock?"

"If you had said Domino's, for instance," James replies. "Or if Sirius ever, in any circumstance, offers to cook for you—though, actually, there's no need to be kindly about that. It's very simply a run-screaming-in-the-opposite-direction scenario."

"Domino's," says Lily coldly, "is a bastardization of all that is good about pizza, and I like you far too much to ever ask you to eat there. I like myself too much to eat there."

A few more playful and vaguely melodic knocks sound from beside her head.

"That," James says, "is my 'Lily Evans, you are as clever and right as you are lovely' knock."

She beams like a smitten idiot, thankful that he can't see her blushing face, and returns the knocks with a few of her own, gently rapping the wall beside her ear with her knuckles. "Flattered as I am, I should call a halt to these proceedings now, or we'll never end up eating."

He laughs warmly. "Fair enough. Meet you downstairs in...ten? And in the meantime—" He pauses, and Lily knows him and his humour well enough now to have the inkling that he's setting himself up for something, as much by the dramatic pause as by the fact that she can practically hear the smile in his voice. Three more brisk knocks sound. "Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me."

Cheesy git. They listen to that song in the car.

"I'll take a broom downstairs with me," she solemnly promises. "Bye."

Lily hangs up the phone, clambers up from her bed and yanks open her wardrobe door as if she's found the entrance to Narnia and must set off on an adventure at once.

Such an occasion requires more than a meagre change of shirt.

Eight minutes later, she's managed to zip herself into a green summer dress that brings out the colour of her eyes just so, touch up her makeup and flit downstairs, congratulating herself on her speed, a giddy jumble of nerves jittering in her stomach. She settles into one of the lobby chairs with a toss of her hair and every effort to appear cool and poised, as if the prospect of going out for dinner with James Potter hasn't thrown her heart into a tremendous tailspin.

If the swiftness with which she got herself ready left her in any doubt as to how good she looks, those fears are tidily done away with when one of the Prewett twins—Fabian, she has learned, from numerous elevator trips—saunters into the lobby from outside and makes a beeline for her at once.

"Irish!" he cries in greeting, having come up with this asinine nickname one day after questioning her about her family and learning that her mum is an immigrant from Dublin. "If I'd known I was keeping you waiting, I would have come back sooner!"

In a calculated, roundabout way, he puts his feelers out, dancing around asking her if she'd be interested in spending the evening in his company, casually enquiring as to whether or not she's free tonight—which she clearly isn't, otherwise she wouldn't be waiting around in the lobby with her favourite earrings on—clearly hoping to weave her into a web of disappointing sexual gratification, which is extremely bothersome, but just about confirms that she must look fantastic.

Fabian is still talking when James strolls out of the elevator and catches sight of them both.

He stops in his tracks. Frowns.

"Hey," she says, and waves at him, but remains firmly in her seat. Salvation, thank goodness. "You took twelve minutes, you know."

"Considering at least eight of those minutes were taken up attempting to keep Algernon from following me out the door, I'm going to blame you." James's slow smile forms brightly enough, but his eyes still flicker with some question between her and Fabian. "Haven't the faintest how he always knows when I'm going to meet you. Have you secretly been knocking with him all this time?"

Lily's eyes widen slightly, tellingly, as she catches his gaze, and mercifully, a mutual understanding seems to land neatly between them. Yes, this happening. Yes, I am aghast. Yes, I would indeed appreciate a rescue.

"How could you?" she says, feigning offence, and takes to her feet, her lips pursing into a would-be adorable pout. "You know you're the only person with whom I would knock. I thought I'd been very clear on that."

Fabian takes a step back from her armchair, his arms rising to fold across his chest, regarding James warily. "You two know each other?"

"We keep shared custody of a cat," James replies instantly. "Very serious business. He's a very special creature."

"James and I met after a drunken night out. I took my clothes off in his flat, he let me climb into his bed, and now here we are," says Lily brightly. "Cat parents. You know how it goes."

"Good to see you though, mate," James says affably. He simultaneously gives Fabian's shoulder a friendly pat while placing his other hand lightly on the small of Lily's back. "We're off to get food. Say hullo to your brother for me."

She can see the defeat in Fabian's face.

He has absolutely jumped to the wrong conclusion, which is absolutely fine, because that's absolutely where Lily wanted his mind to go.

"Do not let go of me until we can't see him anymore," she mutters to James under her breath, as he steers her away from Fabian and toward the revolving door at the front of the building. "Do you know how many girls he brings back here and abandons in the lobby?"

"The only thing you should run faster away from than Sirius and any kind of cooking ambition," James mutters back, "is a Prewett twin with amorous intentions." He gives her an amused side glance as he motions for her to enter the revolving door before him. "But if you ever see their sister Molly hanging around the lobby, do not, under any circumstances, leave. I have never seen a woman so eviscerate a pair of poor sods with one well-put rant in my life. It is thrilling to watch her go."

"Clearly, you never saw me as head girl at school," Lily replies, stopping just short of the door to throw him smile. "It takes a certain kind of talent to intimidate a bunch of idiotic teenage boys in a tartan skirt and a pair of knee-high socks, but I managed to pull it off admirably."

Whoever this Molly person is—not that Lily cares what James thinks of other women who may or may not have a gift for stripping men of their bones with a couple of well-placed words, but if she did care—she can make like Miss Perfect Pants Rosalind and exit this conversation.

Lily is not jealous of a woman she doesn't even know.

Not much.

"I think you can intimidate anyone you'd like in just about anything," James says. "I met you when you were only donning a Little Mermaid bra and beer goggles, and you kept me in line." He motions for her to precede him out the door again. "A woman of many talents, Lily Evans is."

That, Lily reasons, is more than acceptable as compliments go, and likely not one he could level at Molly, who admittedly sounds like a pretty cool person.

They flagrantly abuse Fabian's efforts in the car, an activity that James delights in so much, Lily is starting to feel tremendously grateful to the friendlier Prewett twin for stopping by the lobby by the time they pull up at the restaurant. Hestia Vesta is situated quite close to their apartment building, which is fortunate for Lily, because her empty stomach is practically growling by the time they step inside and take in their surroundings.

The space is very prettily decorated, with chalk-white walls of scrubbed stone, electric blue fairy lights and cheerful ceramic tiles on the floor, but Lily barely has a moment to take it all in before the hostess—a plump, middle-aged woman with the boldest red lip she's ever seen a person attempt—springs out from behind her podium and throws her arms around James's middle.

"You!" she bellows, attracting the attention of many diners, once she has allowed him to escape her death grip. James is easily a foot taller than she is, but that doesn't prevent her from catching his face between her hands and landing a bright red lipstick print on each cheek.

"Me," James agrees.

"How long has it been since you've come to see me, boy?" The woman flings her arms around him once again. Squeezes like she's trying to make his head burst. "Too bloody long, I would think! I've got half a mind to slap your skinny arse from here to Belgravia, and Sirius's, too."

"Hullo, Aunty Chara," James greets dryly, but gives the top of the woman's dark hair a bit of cuddle with his cheek before releasing her. "Not that I didn't pop in here for lunch just last week."

"That was at least a fortnight ago, don't tell fibs or your tongue will fall out," Chara scolds, then fixes Lily with a gaze of immense curiosity. "Who do we have here?"

"I'm Lily," she says, with a slight wave. "I'm a friend. Of James's, I mean. We're friends."

She recognises the sly, amused look in Chara's dark eyes for exactly what it is, understanding in that instant that she's poised on the verge of becoming the focus of much speculation and gossip. There is no hardier vulture than an overly-interested aunt.

Chara raises an inquisitive eyebrow at James. "A friend, she claims, but I've never seen a friend of yours who fills out a sundress quite as well as this one."

"That's only because you've never seen most of my mates in sundresses. I think Sirius is remotely offended." He looks properly silly with embarrassment but sticks his hands in his pockets and makes a decent attempt at getting a sighing, pointed air about him. "Be kind, Chara. Lily is my neighbour. Honestly. And she's never had Greek food! I am doing you both a service here."

"I think it's perfectly kind to tell a beautiful girl how well she carries off a dress," Chara retorts, fixing Lily with a smile, "which is exceptionally, I might add. Far better than Sirius ever could." She jerks her head towards James. "Did he tell you how nice you look in that dress?"

"No," says Lily sadly, playing along now, if only because it's funny to see James devolve further into hopelessness and despair, "he did not, and I put it on especially for the occasion. Can you believe?"

"Don't encourage this. You will rue the day," James mutters to her. But then, quicker, chastised, "You know you look lovely."

"He always assumes I know how lovely I look," she tells Chara, in a conspiratorial, just-between-us-girls kind of tone, "because it saves him the hassle of telling me himself."

Chara responds with a sad shake of her head.

"Lazy," she declares. "Wait until his poor mother hears about this."

James's eyes go wide. "Aunty, no. Mum doesn't need to hear a thing about this—"

"You know, I've never met his mum," says Lily. "I'd love to, though. Do you see her often? Does she come in here?"

Chara's eyes nearly pop out of her head. "You haven't met his mother?"

Lily shakes her head.

"Well." The smaller woman plants her hands on her hips. "Imagine a spoiled little prince not telling his own mother, who suffered through thirty-six hours of agonizing labour to bring him into the world because of that oversized head of his—"

"Thirty-six?" James interrupts. "You know, that number gets suspiciously higher and higher—"

"I can't believe you wouldn't want your mum to know that you've met a nice girl, finally," Chara concludes, waving a hand towards Lily. "I'd want to show her off, if I were you. Those eyes and that pretty face, and I bet you're clever to boot, aren't you?"

"My brains are far more impressive than my looks," says Lily solemnly.

"Well, there you go," Chara says, as if that settles matters. "And such lovely red hair—James has always had a thing for redheads, you know, even when he was a boy watching cartoons—"

"Oh, God." James suddenly snatches up her hand, and Lily feels him tug firmly. "All right. That's enough. Lovely to see you, Aunty. We'll take the table in back. Cheers. Love you. Bye."

He leads Lily away from his aunt and towards the back of the restaurant at such a speed that she almost stumbles when she realises what he's doing, but she allows herself to be steered through the tables, because he's clearly quite flustered, and she may have taken the joke too far.

"You know that grabbing my hand and asking for a table in the back isn't going to do much to convince your aunt that we're not a couple, right?" she reminds him, once they've stopped at a small, round table that's as far away from a waving, tittering Chara as possible.

"Trust me, the hasty escape was infinitely more preferable to the looming stroll down prepubescent wet dreams lane," James grumbles. "Chara's not even my real aunt—she's my mum's best friend, but she's known me since right after the alleged thirty-six hours and has positively no filter. I've made a terrible misstep here, but have recovered accordingly." He declares this with confident bluster, pulling out the chair for her to sit, though his blooming red cheeks tell a different tale. "The food is worth the busybody company, I promise."

"I don't mind the busybody company," says Lily cheerfully, and parks her bottom in the chair he has so graciously offered. "She obviously loves you, and more importantly, thinks I'm fabulous. What's not to like about that?"

"Oh, yes, it's lovely," James replies dryly, and takes his own seat, "until she shows up with mum in tow at your flat tomorrow for tea. And the next day. And the next day. And suddenly you've been adopted, and you don't even know how." He gives her a beleaguered look. "I've already got Algernon hanging around you like you've got perpetual pockets full of catnip. The Potter family accostings have got to stop somewhere."

"If you feel that strongly about keeping me away from your family, I'll abandon my three-point plan to marry you and assume full ownership of your bed," she says, picking up the menu, her eyes scanning over the specials at the front, "which is a shame, because I'm pretty sure my mattress is now actively working to hurt me."

"Haven't you already gotten one long-ago proposal? Greedy of you to be three-pointing another, even in the name of a better mattress."

"I'll get right on buying a new one after I treat you to dinner, you spoiled little prince."

He pulls a face at her teasing, then taps briskly at the menu. "Peruse if you'd like, but she's only going to come over here, ask if you've got any allergies, and then make you whatever she feels like."

"Fine by me, saves me the effort of picking through a bunch of delicious-sounding options."

A waiter approaches the table to pour them both some water and take their drink orders, and the lull in conversation gives Lily a chance to look at James, really take him in—her eyes raking greedily over his whirlwind of soft, coal-black hair, his smooth, brown skin, his perfect, irresistible mouth—and finds herself struck, for the millionth time in a matter of weeks, by how keenly her body responds and reacts and wants when in his presence. He's tall and flushed and vaguely mutinous, sitting across from her at a candlelit table, and she finds herself smiling softly at him despite the tell-tale, pinkish hue she knows is blossoming freely along her chest and throat.

"Hi," she says, when the waiter leaves, an unbidden word that leaves her lips without her knowledge or consent.

His lips quirk up. "Hi." He fiddles absently with the silverware on the table. "Sorry about my mad family."

"Don't apologise—my family are all very repressed, and I'm entirely unsuited to it. I'd much rather have a couple of interfering aunts."

"You haven't got any devious dames hidden in the Evans family tree? With a wedding coming up, they're bound to jump out of the woodwork."

"They're never in the woodwork," she says, tapping the table with her fingernails, "but they're not nearly as complimentary as your non-aunt, and quite alarmed by my lack of an engagement ring at my advanced age of twenty-four. Petunia's the good girl, see, not letting her ambitions stretch beyond snagging herself a husband."

"Husbands are all well and good, but you're on the telly." He says this with a generous heap of starry-eyed reverence. "How does that not amount to some level of lustre and awe? Besides, haven't they seen you on stage? That should sort that, surely?"

"My parents have," she says slowly, "and my nan, and Petunia's been to at least one play, but mostly they don't really get it, I think. My mum had really high hopes that I'd go to uni and make a huge success of myself, and my dad is definitely entrenched in the 1930s way of thinking, waiting for me to find a man and give him grandkids, so I've been a bit of a disappointment to them both."

James's face pinches in some semblance of disapproval. "That's...rubbish. It only took one play for me to see you were made to be up there, and I'm hardly an expert. Maybe I ought to stick Mum and Chara on you for a few days. They'll fluff you up incessantly—at first merely with endless gratitude that you've taken me on, but they'll recognise a kindred spirit quickly enough. Then there's no escaping their smothering charm."

"Kindred spirit?" She cocks an eyebrow at him. "Are you saying that I'm a smothering kind of person? Because I'm definitely prepared to refute that and remind you that Chara only thinks I've 'taken you on' because of this redhead fetish you never told me about."

"Well, now that's a flagrant lie," James objects. "I told you I was a fellow ginger enthusiast on the very night we met. Not," he's quick to add, "that that ought to make any redhead in a twelve-kilometre radius easy fodder for my family, but this is why you're kindred with them—you enjoy torturing me mercilessly far too much."

"Not every redhead, only the ones you take to your aunt's restaurant with you," she points out. "I can't say I blame them that much—we are kind of on a date, only not, because, well—context, I suppose."

The fork he's still playing with makes an abrupt clattering sound as he drops it to the table, then skittishly picks it up again. "A neighbourly date," he says. "Context is important—though I suppose in keeping with that, they likely should never learn we met while you were half-naked in my bathroom. Then my bed."

"What's this about your bed?" said Chara, appearing behind James with a notepad and pen in hand.

"Er." James's eyes flicker to his aunt, then to Lily, then to his aunt again. "Bed...bugs. They're awful. Really terrible. I'm starving. Lily, are you starving?"

"Yes," Lily smartly agrees. "Ravenous."

"Oh, I'm sure," says Chara lightly. She drops a hand to James's shoulder. "You'll have your usual?"

"Yes, please," James says, and hands over his menu. "I've told Lily she's best left at your whims. Best food comes out that way."

"I'll tell you what, how about I put together a little taster for you both? Bit of everything? That way your girlfriend can decide what she likes—that's something you'll need to do, dear, if you're planning on sticking with this one," she adds to Lily, smiling down upon her with an angelic benevolence. "His mum is Greek too, you see, and we're quite big on family events."

"She's not my—" James stops, sighs. Doesn't say why do I bother? but embodies it all the same. "Yes, bit of everything. Wonderful. Thanks."

"Good boy, compliance is key," says Chara fondly. "Anything else you'd like?"

Lily and James both shake their heads no, and Chara stalks off, laughing to herself, no doubt overjoyed at the myriad possibilities of embarrassment James opened up before her when he made the mistake of leading Lily through the front door of her establishment.

Now that she mentioned it, though…

"So, not to continue with the evening's humiliation, but why don't you have a girlfriend?" Lily asks him, laying one palm flat on the table, her head cocked inquisitively to one side. "I've wanted to ask for a while, because it seems a bit ludicrous to me that nobody's snapped you up."

"Perhaps I'm difficult to snap up," James hedges, shoulders lifting briefly. "Or...dunno. Time. Circumstance. Cat. Why haven't you? Floating in the same boat, aren't we?"

"There are two very good reasons why I don't have a boyfriend," she says flatly. "First, because most of the men I meet are garbage, and second, the only two blokes I've really liked in the last few years were threatened by my former housemate until they ghosted me, something I didn't find out until I bumped into one of them in a pub recently and he told me the whole bloody story."

James finally quits toying with the fork, leaving it sideways on the table as he frowns, deep lines settling between his eyebrows.

"This...is the same one who was obsessed with you?" he says, sounding unsure, as if this is something he's been debating bringing up for quite some time. "That you mentioned that night we got pizza?"

She nods, her mouth tugging to the side, a shudder of something unpleasant running down her spine at the memory. It's a keen, lucid feeling, and sadly unlikely to fade into a faint memory for many months to come.

Severus decimated Lily's trust in him, and in herself, to some extent.

But she can tell James the truth. He's nothing like Sev. Couldn't be more different.

"Yup," she says, after a moment has passed. "That was Severus. Tricky sort of person. I confronted him after Joshua—that's my more recent ex—told me what he'd been saying to strong-arm him into dumping me, which was namely a lot of empty threats, but he'd made calls to his company to lodge false complaints against him, and he has a few dodgy mates, dangerous people—as in, people I refused to even let in the flat because of the stuff they were involved in, and they'd given Josh a bit of hassle—anyway." She takes a breath in, holds it, releases it in a rush. "He got...upset, when I told him I knew what he'd been up to, and more upset when I told him that I didn't feel, well, the way he felt about me. Said some things. Threw a plate—"

"He what?"

"Not at me, but in...my general direction, I suppose." She frowns down at the table. "Maybe...yeah, no, I'm not sure. I hope it wasn't aimed at me, I guess, but it was enough to send me packing, in any case. I'd been making excuses for him for years, but there was nothing else to do but leave after that, so I moved in with Mary, all a big rush. He's still got a lot of my things in the flat and I've got no idea how I'm supposed to get them back."

"Fucking hell." James lets a sharp huff out of his nose, lips pinched tightly at the corners. He opens his mouth to say something, then closes it, the words never forming.

"Yeah," says Lily simply. "That's everyone's reaction."

He hesitates for a moment, then drops his hand over hers on the table, giving it a firm, warm cover.

"I'm sorry," he says, leaning his head in towards her, earnest and yet still looking a bit incensed. "That's...what a fucking wanker. Now I'm doubly glad to have you next door. Thank god you got out of there."

A pleasant, tingling heat surges up in her chest, blooms across her face.

He's so sweet, and thoughtful, and his concern isn't in any way feigned, and she likes him so much.

She wants to flip her hand beneath his so their palms touch, twine their fingers together. She refrains because she's sure that's pushing it too far, that it makes her feelings too clear, because James might want her like she wants him, or he might be really, really committed to giving their friendship his very best effort, and it's much too dangerous to act on the former conclusion.

Lily can't take such a risk when she's still so bloody uncertain, and besides, this isn't the right time, the right mood, or the right conversation.

"I should have done it years ago, honestly," she says instead, and keeps her hand steady, tucked safe and tight beneath his larger, warmer one. "Everyone told me he was bad news, I just didn't want to believe it because we'd been friends since we were children, and he had such a horrible upbringing, but I wouldn't accept that as an excuse for mistreatment from anybody else, so he shouldn't get a pass. Doesn't get a pass, now," she adds, with a firm nod to cement her own point. "Plus, it was nice to know that I was ghosted twice in a row because of him, not because I'm inherently undateable. Josh even texted to ask me out again, couple of weeks ago, if you can believe that."

"Oh?" James's fingers slowly slip off hers. "So, you may not be in my single boat for long, then?"

"What, get back together with a coward who never thought to tell me that my best mate was literally a psychopath, and didn't think enough of our relationship to spend so much as a minute fighting for it?" She scoffs, loudly, and resists every voice in her head that's yelling at her to take his hand back, lace her fingers through his—can't James see that she wants him, not her worthless ex-boyfriend?—instead drumming her fingers on the table. "Not bloody likely. I told him where to go quickly enough."

James lets out a short laugh, his shoulders easing some with the sound. "Good for you. I didn't fancy going down in this single ship alone, anyway."

Their waiter comes along and delivers their drinks to the table while Lily considers the possibilities behind this statement, what she can make of it, what fun she can have that safely toes the line between friendship and...every other thing she wants from him.

Everything. She wants everything from him. His mind. His body. His affection. His time.

But Lily's not about to upset the perfect balance they've achieved over the past few weeks. She's still embodying the role of Cool, Sexy Neighbour Girl, and that girl wouldn't be so foolish as to play her messy, emotion-leaden cards so early in the game.

She picks up the straw that came with her drink, rips the top from its paper sheath, and dunks it into her cocktail.

"Careful with that kind of talk," she warns him, raising her piña colada to her lips. "My stomach is tragically empty, which means I'm two mouthfuls away from getting squiffy and suggesting a marriage pact. You know, in case we both find ourselves alone when we hit our thirties? I hear they're all the rage in movies."

"Who needs two mouthfuls?" James thrusts out his hand, quirking an eyebrow at her. "What shall it be, then? Thirty-some years of age and nothing to show for it but one tremendous cat, and we hitch ourselves together for life?"

Eager, aren't you, she wants to say, and then, why are you eager?

She takes a sip of her drink and sets it down, eyeing his outstretched hand with a trepidation that is entirely put-on, and entirely designed to buy her suddenly-pounding heart enough time to calm itself down.

"That depends," she says. "Are there any kids guaranteed with this deal? I'd like to have at least one, and we could probably make a cute baby."

"My hair, your eyes? It'd be a crime to waste those kinds of genetics." He wiggles his fingers in enticement. "Though you'll likely have to make sworn promises to Algernon that he'll always come first in your affections. Put those acting chops to work."

"Algernon won't expect me to pay deference to him over our child, because the child will be part me, which means your cat will pay deference to the child," she promptly reminds him, "and I'm not shaking on it without a half-decent proposal, so hop-to or I'll go home and make a pact with Sirius."

"You wouldn't hitch yourself to Sirius if it was a choice between him and the Grim Reaper," James accuses, but his hand does drop momentarily down to the table as he begins to scope out the area for some kind of proposal inspiration. "Let's see, let's see—ah." He looks up at her, flashes a cheeky smirk, then plucks her discarded straw wrapper from where it sits scrunched in the middle of the table.

With quick, deft fingers, he twists the wrapper around until it's tied into a neat, finger-sized circle, then polishes it off by tying the spare ends into a quaint little bow.

He clears his throat, holds out his hand again, palm up this time. His fingers wiggle in invitation once more.

"If you'd please," he says.

She's definitely blushing, and he's definitely noticed—against the shining white backdrop, and beneath the twinkling lights, her lily-white skin has nowhere else to hide—but she places her hand in his, drawing herself up in her seat. "Do continue."

His fingers curl securely over hers.

"Lily Evans," he says grandly, foolishly, "light of my heart, love of my life, keeper of my cat...we may have only known each other for…" He stops, squints. Quickly gives up the maths. "...some short time, but by the harrowing age of thirty, we shall surely know all there is to know and then some. It's a tremendously old age, after all." He sits up straighter, leans in closer, hazel eyes shining with jovial amusement amid the feigned solemnity. "Will you do me the very serious honour of binding yourself to me for all eternity, mothering our near illegally attractive children, putting up with whatever knocking or DJing life may require...in approximately six years or so?"

She lifts her other hand—the one that isn't resting comfortably in his, waiting patiently for a makeshift paper ring to grace its finger, happy to be held and fussed over until further notice—and places it over her heart.

"All these weeks, living next door, listening to your mad housemate murder his way through a repertoire of dodgy pop songs, and all the romantic drives home from my crappy job while I try not to fall asleep in your car," she sighs dramatically, "and I thought you'd never ask. You've made me the happiest woman in Crouch End, James Potter—absolutely, yes, I will marry you. In about six years or so."

James grins—a big, silly, lip-quirked, white-toothed grin—and tugs her hand forward, bussing a huge, smacking kiss across the back of her knuckles. It's too quick a brush—he's already pulling away, holding her fingers more daintily within his grasp as he shimmies the paper ring onto her finger. It's a bit too big, but that doesn't seem to matter to him.

"You have made me the happiest of men," he says. "In about six years or so."

"Six years," she agrees, drawing her hand back to admire his work. "Hardly any time at all, really."

"Do we order champagne?" James asks, head tilted in question. "Or are cocktails enough for delayed engagement pacts?"

"Since I offered to pay for dinner, cocktails are absolutely enough," she says, with a laugh. "Though I would say this ring is probably enough to wrangle us a free dessert."

"Do not," James says emphatically, "let my aunt see that. Unless you want every family member I have or have ever thought to have descending upon this restaurant in less than twenty minutes. You cannot even joke about it. Don't you know how much Greeks like weddings?"

"Are you saying," says Lily dramatically, leaning forward across the table, "that you're ashamed of me? Too ashamed to introduce your future wife to every member of your family, plus a bunch of other people who aren't your family but who make you call them 'aunt' and bother you about your romantic prospects?"

"I am saying," James replies, "that as your husband, six years in the future, it is my job—nay, my privilege—to protect you from outside forces set to cause you harm. Harm like headaches. And a severe lack of privacy. And people, everywhere, when all you really wanted of this evening was to get a quick meal." He nods his head sagely. "A secret engagement is better for everyone involved, I assure you."

"If you insist, I guess I can get on board with a secret engagement, they're sexier anyway," she agrees, and pulls the paper ring off her finger, setting it down next to her water glass. "Best keep your aunt from seeing that—though I do intend to cherish it forever, so don't let me forget it when we leave."

"I'd be tragically insulted if you did." James takes a sip of his water. "Terrible start to a secret engagement, that."

"What engagement?" says Chara, bounding suddenly into view.

Much to her delight, Lily learns, following a long, shamefaced, and stuttered explanation of their little game, many delicious platefuls of flavourful Greek food, and an endless barrage of teasing from James's gleeful, not-quite-aunt, that she was absolutely, categorically correct.

They do get a free dessert.

---

James is just finishing polishing up the draft agenda for the programme's next board meeting when the insistent clatter of knocks interrupts his morning productiveness.

"Oi! Door!" he hollers, spotting a stray typo in the memo's last line and absently wondering with each brisk backspace what Sirius is having delivered this early in the morning.

It's barely gone nine, but as community feuding successfully becomes community funding, no further information or acknowledging response is provided. Whatever it is (whoever it is?), the git has likely not heard its rapped arrival from his current location holed up in his bedroom—where some bass-heavy cacophony is already vibrating the walls—nor James's shouts from the living room attempting to alert him to the same. Affirming this, the knocking soon goes again.

Thumpthumpthump.

James sighs, pushing his laptop aside and slowly rising to his feet, the vague exasperation cut only by a slice of rueful amusement as it becomes increasingly apparent how his body has instinctively reacted to the innocuous knocking: heart jumping in his chest, limbs tensing in gleeful anticipation, dopey smile spreading across his face. And all this, regardless of the fact that the curt, commonplace sound of knuckles rapping on surface has clearly come from the flat's front door, not the wall in James's bedroom.

There is often quite a bit of knocking coming from James's bedroom nowadays.

It's their thing, see, the knocking.

They have things now, he and Lily.

The dopey grin spreads wider.

James lets his lips do as they will, ambling toward Sirius's bedroom with a lighter spring in his step. Life has grown far simpler since he'd given up trying to play dictator to these inevitable reactions, the varying quirks of adoration, the telling little absurdities that seem to rule his days and make him feel simultaneously like laughing and groaning. He's laid down his sword, waved his white flag, quit driving himself mad over what any of it means, or should mean, or positively can't mean. Oh, he still has his Dictates and his neighbourly blockades, certainly, but they are mere safety nets in his newly secured structure of friendship and fancying. And wouldn't you know it—with the deafening questions dialed down to mute, it's shocking what dignified sanity a bloke can reclaim. At the very least, there is no longer a sense of grappling panic, of lingering potential calamity, attached to his every word to her, his every enamoured swoon.

(There are, admittedly, still quite a few enamoured swoons.)

It's all grown cooler, calmer, easier.

It's all...Lily.

Lily. Her name in his head still does silly things to his stomach, but that's grown more familiar, more manageable, over the weeks too. Because it has been weeks now—weeks, of getting to know her, of her getting to know him, of the careful but heady progression from Lily Evans—untouchable homebreaker, masterful murder victim, fanciful fantasy—to Lily Evans—charming neighbour, steadfast mate, promised wife (six years in the future).

Lily, who enjoys the colour yellow, but not mustard or smelly cheeses; who lavishly praises his tastes in music and board games, but who eyed him with the sort of censure typically reserved for puppy punters when he admitted he sometimes reads the end of a book first; who finally seems to have reached the point where she doesn't need to flush and stammer half-hearted objections every time he texts her in the morning to inquire if she needs a ride to work, who now instead shows up in the lobby with a travel mug of the strong tea he prefers and sometimes a breakfast pastry she's happy to split before climbing into his car and chattering happily the whole way to Angel. (Take that, Deathtrap.)

Lily, who he no longer needs to stalk in common areas or ambush with calculated Nods, who instead spends casual evenings cuddling his cat, and making fun of terrible television with him, and displaying her wildly competitive streak as they battle Sirius and Mary for Third Floor Charades Dominance. (James and Lily are, of course, the long-reigning champions, a nearly unstoppable pair...save for that one time he could not possibly have been expected to get The Silence of the Lambs from the "spot on" Hannibal Lecter impression she'd thought she'd been giving, but which really only looked like she'd eaten bad sushi. This has naturally not stopped her from bringing up what she perceives to be his greatest failure at every vaguely relevant moment.)

Lily, who shares a bedroom wall with him, and who seems to enjoy his playful taps on their communal partition to say good morning, or good night, or a million other things.

A few days ago, he'd listened for nearly twenty minutes as she ran through some kind of monologue, her crisp, emotive voice reverberating through the thin wall. She had it memorized quickly enough, but seemed to be working through how to project the climactic line—a sorrowful, anguished "how could you?" versus an angered, enticed "how could you!" or a stronger, stiffer "How. Could. You."

If James ever needed more evidence that Lily Evans was a theatrical revelation, this would have been enough. Hearing her labour over her craft was utterly fascinating, but it very quickly became apparent that the last option was the way to go. When she got back round to that version, he rapped insistently on the wall. That one, that one, that one!

Moments later, his phone pinged with a text.

That one? she'd written.

James grinned, sending back a dozen thumbs-up emojis and—lingering over it for a second—one heart-eyes.

She ran through a few more variations on the chosen stronger, stiffer version, and James liked the second, where her build-up to it was quicker, more insistent. He knocked enthusiastically at that one.

Another ping: Angling to be added to the Olivier thank you list?

yes, James wrote. just b4 queen and country

Bold move, usurping the queen.

some mutiny every now and then is good for her

Will keep that in mind. Then: Thank you, and a kissing face emoji.

James had stared slavishly at that kissing face for longer than it had taken her to perfect the speech.

Right. So he's still a bit of a lovestruck ponce—what of it? At least now he's simultaneously a bit of a cherished mate, and that's what counts. That's what he'd wanted. That's what will separate fate from folly. And he's going about it exactly as he'd set to: slow, and neighbourly, and has he mentioned slow? And if sometimes—

Well.

If sometimes—maybe—perhaps—he thinks that he is not the only one counting down the seconds until they can see each other again, rapt for any wisp, any passing glance, any vague note of familiar laughter hanging in the air or filtering in through a thin wall…

It's a strong maybe.

He doesn't know for sure.

He's got spotty evidence at best.

A few looks here. A particularly flirty comment there. The way she always, no matter what, seems to find a way to touch him, light and casual as that touch may be.

She'd jokingly agreed to get engaged to him, and still occasionally flitted around with the paper ring on her finger, grinning and teasing.

But it's a lot of little somethings that may amount to nothing. She's coy and fun and a laugh. Maybe that's all this is for her. He doesn't know. And even if he did know, that doesn't mean they need to rush to the finish line here. They can both enjoy the scenic route. Much safer, the scenic route. Who doesn't fancy one of those every now and again?

And in the meantime, James will simply get giddy every time Sirius has breakfast delivered, and spend increasingly longer periods of time each evening perusing the Asos website.

(Which, despite her protests, has proven Lily is indeed a bit of a swimsuit model—albeit one for a company that seems to think they need to saturate her coloring to blinding paleness and airbrush her fine bones into strange prominence in order to sell product. But the pictures do capture her smile and playful humour, which James will admit to gawking at freely for...some lengths of time.)

Shaking his head ruefully, James pushes aside thoughts of swimsuits and smiles and gives his own brisk knock on his mate's bedroom door. The music continues to pulse, but James reckons he may have gotten some muffled answer, so he carefully prods the door open.

"Oi." He pops a tentative head into the room, naturally wary of what he may find inside. "Door."

"Woosit?" is Sirius's distracted reply, though when James tucks his head fully inside, he's relieved to see that Sirius is not thrashing around the room playing air guitar in the nude, nor experimenting with Coke and Mentos again, because "why does it do that?"

Instead, he's lying on his bed, semi-respectably dressed, fully engrossed in his phone.

"Dunno." James kicks aside the haphazard heap of laundry blocking the door, then swings the portal open wider. He has to near shout to be heard over the blast of AC/DC. "Whatever you ordered."

"Didn't order anything."

"Whoever you invited over?"

"Nope."

"Then who is it?"

Sirius stares sardonically over the top of the phone. "Dunno, mate. Shall I use my magic powers to figure it out?"

James rolls his eyes, keen to flip back an equally dry rejoinder, but it quickly becomes apparent that Sirius has already tuned out of this conversation. His eyes are back at his phone, fingers arched over the display, lips curled in satisfaction.

When his face suddenly alights with obvious pleasure and his fingers begin jabbing feverishly at the screen, James regards the scene with growing suspicion.

"What are you doing?" he asks.

Sirius barely flinches. His eyes remain fixated on the screen, fingers flying over the keys. "Nothing."

Right. And James is a purple woolly mammoth.

"Fucking hell." He takes another step into the room. "Aren't you on probation? Customer service Tweeting only?"

"'We're sorry to hear the product didn't meet your satisfaction, please contact our service line'?" Sirius scoffs with untempered derision. "Please. That's intern shit. Besides, that probation is arbitrary at best. Your dad thought my Twitter war with Farage was hilarious. 'We fix hair, not broken souls' was some of my best work."

"The Sleekeazy Board of Directors felt otherwise," James puts in dryly, and wonders which of the stodgy old codgers will be pulling their hair out over Sirius's antics this time—if it could be kept to only a single member. Sirius had once taken on Viagra, and the male half of the board had burst into blustering hysterics (the females, as James recalled, had cackled appreciatively). "Who is it this time? If you're getting stroppy with KitKat again, even Dad is not going to defend you. You know how much he likes those."

"KitKat." Sirius harrumphs with superior haughter. "Please. They're low-hangings."

"You're going to get fired," James warns, though the familiar threat is undoubtedly falling on deaf ears. They have this conversation at least once every fortnight, and will likely continue to do so for as long as Sirius still believes Social Media Manager is synonymous with Sleekeazy Twitter Troll. "Even blatant nepotism will only save your arse so many times—"

Thumpthumpthump.

"Get the door," Sirius drolls, fingers—lord help them all—moving swiftly again. "Waitrose and I will settle this like men."

"If you get us banned from Waitrose, I will disown you," James declares, but knows better than to stand around and argue about it now. Sirius will Twitter row with whoever he wants to Twitter row with, and people will screenshot and meme it just enough to keep him in a job, even though he regularly incites spats between public figures, household brands, and snippy housewives alike, making a mockery of the good Sleekeazy name.

All in a day's work.

James sighs, turning out of the doorway and wiping his hands of the whole mess. He'll ring Dad later and let him handle it. Sirius sometimes listens to Fleamont. Every fifth or sixth attempt, anyway.

"Coming, coming," James grumbles, as the knocking goes again. Whoever's on the other side, they're a dedicated sort. If it's just some git selling pots and pans door to door, James will give them a stern talking to, that's for sure.

"Fucking hell. Keep your pants on!" He reaches the flat door, grabs the handle, swings it open—

—and just nearly misses being thumped in the head by Lily, whose hand is already lifted to give the wood another firm pound.

Lily, who is...who is...

"Hi," she says urgently, breathlessly. "I need you."

I need you. James looks at her—then does not look at her. Looks anywhere, frankly, but at her. The ceiling. The floor. The vague bit of air just over her shoulder. He cannot, in the most explicit of terms, keep his eyes directly on her person for long, because there are times when he can gaze at her, and there are times when he cannot gaze at her, and moments in which she is standing in the threshold of his flat doorway, soft skin shining, hair dripping wet, white shirt damp, clearly not wearing a bra, saying things like I need you, are firmly in the latter half of that conundrum.

James breathes through his nose. Or tries to. He really, really does.

"Good morning," is what he somehow manages.

She glances quickly from side to side, taking in both ends of the corridor, apparently unaware of his present state. "Can I come in and explain?" she asks. "If anyone comes out and sees me like this, they're going to think I'm returning from a really regrettable night."

Wonderful. Now James is thinking of nine hundred thousand regrettable things he could do with her.

(Approximately eight hundred and forty thousand of those have some relevance to the pinched tips of her nipples he can very clearly see in her clinging wet shirt, but that is neither here nor there.)

He clears his throat, prays for strength, and pushes the door farther open in welcome. "A regrettable jaunt through an early morning rainstorm?"

"Oh, god, you don't even know the half of it. I'm in the shower just now, right?" She nudges past him with a big expulsion of breath—there is a definite brush of her against him that could have easily been avoided if she'd only stepped to one side—and tucks a lock of very wet hair behind her ear. "Just me and my sponge, innocently attempting to bathe, trying to live my life, and then there's this spluttery sound, and the water's freezing cold all of a sudden, and then it's just...gushing." She throws her hands out wide to indicate the carnage. "Everywhere. You know the pipe that connects the shower head to the wall?"

"I think it's called a shower arm," James says, because he and maintenance requests are very tight friends, and he needs the comfort of his very tight friends in trying times like these.

"Well, whatever it is, pipe, or arm, or whatever, it's broken, because there's no water coming from the shower head, it's all coming out of the bit where it meets the wall, and I haven't even managed to wash my hair," Lily explains, and sighs as if she's in tremendous anguish. "Would you mind terribly if I used yours now, and maybe for the next couple of days? Mary's sending an email to the housing company to ask for an emergency repair but she says they always take forever to respond to anything."

James wants to huff in offense—he does not take forever. He takes a respectable few days, as to keep the tenants on their toes—but since several things preclude her from being aware of this, he musters past that to focus on the actual request.

Lily.

In his shower.

Where she will bathe.

In his shower.

For several days.

Can't she ask for something a tad easier? Like world peace? Or the moon?

"Asking permission this time, are you?" he jibes, because that is what he does when he's on the brink of blindingly uncomfortable physiological and emotional tension. "Because you've had a pretty solid record of just strolling on in, you know."

"Oi!" she lightly admonishes, and takes a lazy swipe at him, the back of her hand colliding gently with his shoulder. "I know you think that happens all the time, but all but one of those were your wildest dreams, mate. No cheek while I'm wet and cold. That needs to be a rule."

James will second that rule quite firmly, because a cold Lily is a...particularly perky Lily. As mentioned. Not that he is looking. Because he is not. Also as mentioned.

"My cheek is quite hard to regulate," he says, lifting his hands in feigned helplessness. "But I suppose in compromise I will let you use my shower—if you don't mind the overwhelming stench of Sirius's body wash. You may prefer the wall spigot shower after a few minutes in that."

"I saw Eddie naked in my bathroom yesterday," says Lily flatly. "He's got hair on his back. Hair. On his back. Frankly, I don't care if Sirius drinks Drakkar Noir at this point."

"Dirty pants and back hair? How hasn't Eddie been kicked to the curb yet?" James hesitates a moment, then places a guiding hand on the dip of Lily's lower back, nudging her toward the bathroom. Defaming Eddie has become a favorite pastime around this corner of the third floor, as Mary's bedroom buddy seems as unavoidable as he is unbearable these days. There is familiar comfort in Eddie mockery. "Is that what this is, then? Cry plumbing disaster because you want to escape Eddie and his fur? I bet your shower is fine."

"It just figures that the first bloke I see naked in nearly two years doesn't even look good with his top off," she says grumpily, allowing him to steer her where she needs to go. "Now, on top of that, you accuse me of lying. Ta."

"Lying for self-preservation," James clarifies, and bites his tongue before he finds himself offering to begin stripping down to quell her naked man drought in a more satisfying manner. Likely, a slow striptease does not qualify as a slow relationship move. "That's a plenty good reason to prevaricate. I'd tell tales of faulty shower arms and sputtering water rushes, too."

"You and your big words, Potter," she sighs. "Oh-so-impressive, you are, but were I ever so traumatised by Eddie's hairy body that I needed to see your beautiful face to recover from the fright, I wouldn't break my favourite part of the flat to do it."

He won't read into the fact that she's just suggested his face—his beautiful face—is some kind of balm to the perils of a housemate's grimy guest. Their footsteps pad across the hallway rug. He doesn't know why he's followed her toward the bathroom. Soon enough she's going to realise it too, and undoubtedly rib him mercilessly about it. "No need to shower me with your compliments, Evans. I've already said you can wash the Eddie away."

"That's another rule I need to start enforcing—no puns before 11 a.m.," she says, stopping by the bathroom door, then eyes him rather strangely. "Is there any reason why you're coming with me? Do you think I'll need you to show me how to use it, or are you just hoping that I'll invite you in with me?"

He probably shouldn't answer that.

"You've had some harrowing times in this bathroom," he defends instead. "I'm here for moral support. You should be very grateful, I think."

"Actually, I met you in this bathroom, so...maybe the only good thing that's happened to me in months?" she reminds him, and James's heart misses a beat. "But whatever you need to tell yourself to pretend you're not a perve."

James is good at pretending. He's gotten so bloody good at pretending a million different things, and only half of those have perverted intents. She will not fluster any of those out of him, no matter that meeting her in this bathroom had been...equally the best of things for him. Maybe the best thing, period. He doesn't know yet. He's still figuring it out. And she can't rush him into sorting it out sooner with her damp clothes and her witty jokes and her you're the only good thing to happen to me in months.

If his pulse would just quit humming in giddy delight, they'd be just fine.

"I'm not the one pretending to have a broken shower to shed my clothes in the other person's bathroom," he shoots back. Two can play this game. "So who's the real perve here?"

"Well, you've definitely been staring at my boobs this whole time, so...still you."

Bugger.

"Not the whole time," he mutters, but they're in the doorway of the bathroom now, so there's really nowhere else for him to go unless he is indeed angling for an invitation inside...which is not something he should be doing. Yet. Probably. He needs to change the subject. "Are you certain it's the arm of the shower that's gone wrong? If anything really is wrong, that is. I still have very little evidence one way or the other."

"No, it's not the arm, it's the Achilles tendon," she says, her tone dry.

He lifts an eyebrow. "Now who's being cheeky? And here I was about to offer to take a look."

"Why? Because I called you out for looking at these"—she points to her chest—"so now you've decided to feign an interest in my plumbing to distract me?"

"Not to put a wrench in your plans to seduce me with your wet shirts and dirty talk," James retorts, smiling at her exasperated huff, "but I thought I'd be helpful and not merely a palate cleanser to erase your sordid images of naked Eddie. I know a thing or two about plumbing."

Which is actually true—he knows that the pipe thing connecting the head to the wall is called a shower arm. And he knows how to call a plumber when things like the shower arm break.

One, two.

Truthful to the finest point, James Potter is.

If she was of a mind to further explore her perfectly correct suspicions regarding the preferred direction of his gaze, this tidbit is sufficiently diverting enough to make her drop the subject. There is a delicate lift of her eyebrows, the beginnings of a sentence that never makes it out of her mouth, and a sigh. "I don't—no, you've already done me too many kindnesses."

"Think of it as a universal kindness," James presses, ignoring the railing questions in his head. (What are you doing? You know fuck all about plumbing. One, two! What is happening here?) "I'm just trying to kick you out of my bathroom so Sirius can have this requisite seven hours to do his hair. Plus, we've got shared walls and pipes. If yours has gone wonky, it could back up into ours."

Does plumbing work like that?

The fact that James doesn't know is probably very telling about why he should not be offering his plumbing services.

Quit while you're ahead, arsehole.

But instead he finds himself crossing his arms smugly over his chest, as if he's served her an unbeatable argument.

"You spend longer doing your hair than Sirius," she quietly counters, looking up at him in a soft, fond, distracting kind of way. "And there's a thing called reciprocity, you know. It's already unfair that you drive me to work so often and you won't even let me give you petrol money. There has to be something I can do for you."

"You are doing something. You're being my friend even though I pun before 11 a.m. and occasionally accidentally ogle your chest." He tilts his head in question. "Do you always keep this kind of ledger in your head?"

"Only when I'm the one underperforming," she admits, but the grey cloud over her head seems to pass, and she smiles at him. "You are an honest-to-goodness Prince Charming and I don't deserve you, but I'm really glad that we're mates."

Mates.

They're mates.

Even as James knows this—hears her say it, right there, softly and happily and directly—he melts into a puddle inside. Mate or otherwise, he always melts to a puddle when she says things like that. She's too kind, too bright, too easily pleased by him, even as she takes any kind of shit he attempts to serve her and whips it back at him with a laugh. He wants to be worthy of it. Wants to earn the smiles she gives him, the faith she always seems to hand over after a bit of good-hearted nudging. Wants her to be able to come into his flat with her faulty showers and her wet t-shirts, and to be able to swoop right in and fix things for her.

Maybe he can fix it.

If not the undefined state of their relationship, at the very least her shower.

He's not horrible with maintenance. And tinkering with plumbing is nothing compared to surviving Dicates, right?

James reckons he's okay pretending that's the case.

"Don't start heaping on the platitudes just now," he still has sense enough to warn her. "I haven't managed to fairytale fix anything yet. I'll just grab some tools"—which he does, funnily enough, have in the flat, since Mum had presented him with a box filled with shiny new ones when he'd first purchased the building, though it was very clear from Euphemia's vague cackling as she passed it over to him that she'd love to see the day her son attempted to wield any one of the many fangled instruments therein—"and we'll see what can be done, yeah?"

"Even if I wanted to stop you, I don't think that I could," she admits, with a laugh. "You go and...do whatever you need to do. I have a long-standing date with your shower to get to."

James nods, focusing on broken showers, not Lily-filled showers. For the betterment of them all.

She takes a step toward him, away from the bathroom. Then another. Then another.

James stumbles back. "Er. Shower's that way?"

She gives him a look. "I said I'd tolerate Sirius's stench body wash, not that I was willing to lather myself in it. I have to fetch my things. And someone needs to let you into the flat. Unless—I mean, you really don't need to look at it. We can just wait for the building—"

"No, no. It's fine!" He waves a gallant hand. "Lead the way. Lemme just—grab a few things—"

He needs that toolbox.

And his phone. He really needs his phone.

Leaving Lily lingering in the hallway, he speeds into his bedroom, finding his phone charging on the bedside table. He shoves that in his back pocket, then plops quick, musing hands on his hips. The toolbox is a bit more of a locational challenge, but he's almost certain it's in the back of his closet. Algernon, curled up in his usual furry heap atop the bed, blinks a bored look at James that clearly says, You useless cur. The fact that the cat wants to be so far removed from this situation that he didn't even immediately dart out of the room at the sound of Lily's voice to attack her for cuddles is likely an ominous indicator. But useless cur or otherwise, a cry of victory would not be entirely out of place as James does indeed spot a flash of the deep green toolbox peeking out from beneath a hefty pile of football equipment in his closet. He grabs it by the plastic handle and yanks it out of the dark depths. There's brisk metallic clattering as it's moved, which bodes well for a toolbox. Or so every DIY television show James has ever watched would have him believe.

Algernon lets out a purring scoff, but James ignores it.

"All right. Got it. Let's take a look," James announces, ambling out of his room with false bravado, toolbox swinging at his side.

Lily eyes him—and it—for a moment, before her lips quirk slightly.

"Nice toolbox," she says.

"Thank you." James gives it another metallic shake. "On to it, then?"

She nods, spinning on her heel and making toward the flat door, James following dutifully along behind her.

"Mary's left to meet with Eddie somewhere," she explains as they exit his flat and move into the corridor. The three-step gap between their flat doors is traversed briskly, and she jimmies her keys into her flat locks, twisting until the door pops open. "Morning reprieve."

"Let's just hope Eddie hasn't left any hairy gifts behind," James says, entering after her. This flat has become nearly as familiar to him as his own in the past few weeks. Someone must have tidied up recently—likely Lily. Mary's generally more keen on making the messes than sweeping up after them—because the rooms have a fresh look. They pass by the open living room door on their way to the bathroom, and James spots the book he lent Lily stacked neatly atop the side table besides a pile of recipes ripped out from various magazines. He'll have to attempt to wrangle an invitation when Lily finally decides to try her hand at one of them.

Hot steam and condensation still hangs in the bathroom as the two of them enter, and Lily lets out a hefty sigh as they approach the shower.

"My poor darling," she says, and strokes the tiled walls with much the same beloved affection she gives Algernon. Her fingers skitter back down to her side before she reaches out again, this time to grab a few bottles tucked into the neat little baskets she and Mary have set up to hold their shower things. James smells coconut.

Hugging them in the crook of her arm, she takes a step back and throws the water on with a quick yank of the knob. Immediately, there's an ugly sputtering sound and water begins to shoot and leak out of the pieces affixing the shower arm to the wall. They both jump back.

"See?" She turns the water off again. "And you called me a liar."

"Profuse apologies," James mutters, but his stomach has sunk somewhere in the vicinity of his toes. He doesn't know what he'd been expecting—to come in here and see the shower magically repaired? To be able to give the pipe a cursory twist with one of his foreign tools and, voila, Plumber James saves the day?

He hopes his furrowed brow looks more competently contemplative than blisteringly baffled.

Whichever he manages, Lily still looks dubious. "It's a lost cause, isn't it?"

"No, no. Not just yet," James blatantly lies. "I'll see what I can do."

Lily drops her hand onto his shoulder, gives it a sweeping rub. "Thank you," she says, and smiles at him again, spreading warmth all through his insides. "Need anything else?"

A vague sense of how plumbing works? Your deep love and affection regardless? But to her, James only says, "Nope. Enjoy your shower." He hands her his keys to get back into his flat.

She takes them, and with one last lingering pat to his shoulder, exits the bathroom.

Leaving James alone.

To fix her shower.

Which he has no bloody idea how to do.

The second he hears the flat door close behind her, he's grappling for his phone. He's clumsy with it, bobbling momentarily, but manages to catch it before it crashes to the bathroom floor in a likely prophetic smashing. He pulls up his contact list and scrolls quickly through until he gets to the M's.

He finds the contact he wants, jabs the button to start a call, and brings the phone to his ear just as it clicks through.

One ring. Two.

Answer. Answer, answer, answer—

The line goes silent for a moment. No ringing. No greeting. Then—thank bloody god—a dull, plaintive voice fills the other side.

"Hello."

"Myrtle!" James nearly cheers. "Hi there. It's James Potter."

A sulking little sigh sounds on the other end of the line. "I know that. Your name comes up."

Right. Makes sense. "Listen." James keeps his voice as light and friendly as possible. "I've got a bit of a plumbing problem over at the building that I was hoping—"

A loud, anguished huff.

James pauses. "Myrtle? All right?"

"No one ever calls just to say hello," the woman complains, the clear whinging mope in her tone. "It's always 'my shower's doing this' or 'my toilet's spewing that.'"

"Well." James clears his throat. "You are a plumber, Myrtle."

A wail of insulted anguish unleashes. "That is completely unfair! Positively unconscionable! No one ever understands me! I'll have you know that I am so much more—"

James winces, pulling the phone from his ear and sighing as Myrtle's moaning kicks it up a notch. Honestly, if she wasn't such a wiz with pipes and toilets, James would not put up with her and her near constant griping. But Myrtle was a plumbing genius, magicked them fixed like she lived in them, and was cheap to boot, not to mention that her...unique personality made it so she was often free on short notice. So he kept her on his vendor list, enduring her...peculiarities.

He lets her wail out her protests and condemnations until she settles herself back into her usual pout.

"You are completely correct, Myrtle," he placates into the silence. "So ungrateful. But look—I'm going to send you a quick video of this leak we have here. Maybe you can...give a few troubleshooting tips? Then come in next week to make sure I haven't made a muck of it? You're so good with these things. And I know you're likely dead busy. Just a quick few instructions. Please?"

She makes a faint preening noise, clearly enjoying his begging.

"I suppose," she finally relents.

James lets out a quick breath of relief. "Good. Wonderful. You're such a star, Myrtle. I'll just text it in a sec…"

He steps back from the shower, flipping the water back on and taking a quick video of the sputtering disaster. If anything, it seems to have gotten worse. Or maybe that's just James's panic talking. Either way, he forwards it to Myrtle through text, and waits a few seconds as she views it.

"Hm." Another sulky sigh. "It's a leak."

James rolls his eyes. Even he knew that. "Reckon I can patch it up until you can come take a better look?"

More glooming. More haughty sniffs.

"It doesn't look like it's leaking inside the wall," she reluctantly concedes. "You'd have to remove the back piece to see. Maybe—maybe—you can fix it. The pipe may just need teflon tape. Or you might need to be rid the piece altogether. There should still be some spare shower arm pipe in the maintenance closet. Replace it—"

"Replace it?" James repeats in mild alarm. "How do I do that?"

Myrtle bristles at the interruption. "With tools."

James wants to give a sulky sigh of his own. "Yes, thanks. I sorted that bit."

There's a long pause on the other side of the line.

Too long a pause.

Uh-oh.

"Well, then I suppose you can 'sort' out the rest of it too, can't you?" Myrtle snaps, the annoyed huff now morphed into a full-on stroppy rail. Shit. Alert, alert! Myrtle Meltdown. "Ungrateful men. Ungrateful everyone. I am dead busy, you know. I have so many important things to do, and you've just rang me up to complain and pester and steal money—"

"It's not that at all!" James cuts in again, desperate to backpedal. "Really, Myrtle. I'm so appreciative. You're so brilliant. If you could just tell me—"

"Go look it up on YouTube, Mr. Fix-It!" Myrtle yells shrilly, and then there's silence.

Distinct silence.

James pulls the phone from his ear to see the final call time blinking on the screen.

She's hung up on him.

Right. James sighs. So much for that.

Though…

He pauses.

Well...there are worse ideas, surely?

He can't—or could he? Sirius once taught himself how to play the opening instrumental of "Toxic" on a recorder from YouTube. Fixing showers and Britney Spears can't be that far off, can they?

The ended call disappears and James pulls up his YouTube app—where all of his most recently viewed videos happen to be six years worth of dance performance clips from the Shacklebolt Academy, but he bypasses those quickly for the search bar.

Considering it for second, he slowly types in how to fix a leaking shower.

He presses enter.

It takes moments. Literal moments. Pages and pages and pages of videos pop up.

James grins.

Would you look at that! An instant plethora of knowledge right at his fingertips!

Good ol', YouTube.

For the first time all morning, James feels bolstered again. It's a treasure trove of plumbing tips and tricks. Finding an applicable video takes a bit of effort—James immediately regrets whatever whim of haughter had inspired Leonard to install such posh showers, because the simplistic hardware most of these YouTube fixers are working with look utterly foreign to the one James is facing now, with its luxe rain shower head and its ornate piping. He's learned enough from Myrtle and from the first few videos he watches snippets of to know that he has to take off the shower head and decorative back piece anchoring the arm to the wall first, and that seems easy enough. Even he knows how to use a screwdriver. He locates one in the tool box, and pliers that he's told will help him remove the head from the arm.

So. The head first.

He can do this.

Verna, the former-accountant-turned-DIY-expert, just made it look easy as can be.

James is just as competent as Verna, surely?

He digs out a washcloth from beneath the sink and drapes it over the piece connecting the shower head to the arm. PlumbingHelp4U557 told him that the washcloth is an important barrier between the pliers and the bolt so that you don't scratch up your hardware, and James definitely doesn't want to do that. Thank you kindly, PlumbingHelp4U557.

He opens the pliers, catching the cloth-covered bolt in its clutches. Righty tighty, lefty loosey. He's got this. No problem.

James grunts, and give the pliers a yank.

In just under a minute, James has the shower head off.

Ha! Take that, Myrtle! Look at him—Mr. Fix-It, indeed! Sir Fix-It, even! Surely he deserves to be dubbed with a scepter of some sort after this?

Buzzing on his recent knighthood, James eyes the shower arm and back piece thoughtfully.

You know—Verna had mentioned that sometimes it was just a matter of tightening or loosening the right thing. And that other bloke—Home_Improvement_for_Dummies—he'd mentioned that, too. It was certainly a possibility. James experimentally puts the rag and pliers to the bolt connecting the shower arm to the wall piece. He gives a decisive twist.

...was that loose?

It had definitely moved. He knows that.

So it's tightened now? Was that all this was?

If the fix is honestly as simple as that, James will cheer. He will loudly and actively celebrate.

Humming thoughtfully, James decides there's only one way to find out.

He steps a bit to the side and reaches out to turn on the water.

It takes a second—there's the faint, tinny sound of the pipes going, but no water leaks from the wall piece yet.

Slowly, a beginning bit of water slips out of the shower arm pipe, where the head would be.

Eureka!

James whips a victorious fist into the air. "Sir Fix-It does it ag—gahhh!"

Water.

Water everywhere.

"Fuck!" he shouts, the exclamation quickly drowned out by the continued burst of frigid, sputtery water that explodes from the shower pipe, from the wall, from bloody everywhere, and straight onto his person, drowning him. James stumbles back, hand flying up, a frenzied litany of "fuck, fuck, fuck," expelling as he frantically moves to yank the water off again. Almost as quickly as it had come, the water stops, leaving James floundering, gasping, and dripping.

Well. It wasn't the loose bolt.

He lets out a choked huff, plucking his specs off his drenched face and attempting to wipe their sodden lenses with the few stripes of fabric at the bottom of his t-shirt that seemed to have been spared from the water attack—if there is any part of him that has been spared.

Unsurprisingly, it is tremendously unhelpful. The water spreads more than it absorbs, leaving swipes of dotted water and condensation across the glass lenses. James mutters under his breath, grasping the hem of his shirt entirely and lifting it up in a vague attempt to dry his face. He pats and curses. Curses YouTube. Curses himself. Curses showers and Myrtle and all knights of every kind.

A smattering of footsteps sounds from the hallway as James reseats his glasses, and then Lily appears in the bathroom door.

She's...back?

Fucking hell, how long had he been searching through bloody videos?

"Is everything okay? I just heard—" she begins, sounding concerned, then stops short, evidently able to assess the situation without need for explanations. He is very wet, after all. "Oh."

She's freshly bathed, with soft waves forming in the folds of her damp, dark red hair, bringing with her the scent of coconut that he's come to associate with her presence, garbed in one of the many colourful, floaty summer dresses she owns that skim her thighs and oft induce...thoughts he shouldn't be having.

He's suddenly very grateful for his recent cold shower.

James considers pulling the shirt farther over his face, burrowing there for a few hours, or days, or years, but instead decides the only way out of this is blatant, false bravado.

"No worries," he tells her, patting some more. "Pesky pipe got a bit fresh. All handled."

"Oh," she repeats, her eyes on his stomach, sounding rather detached from the present. "Is it fixed now?"

"Not...quite yet," James answers, though the words come out slow as he squints through his water-splotched glasses, wondering if his vision is really that impaired, if he's imagining things, or if she's actually...

No.

She can't be.

She's not...

He shifts slightly, watching her eyes dart immediately up, then down again, then up once more. There's a telling pink colour pooling in her neck, then creeping upward.

Fucking hell.

She is.

Lily Evans is standing mere steps from him, ogling his person!

In that moment, James makes a very quick, very rash decision.

"Reckon this is officially useless now," he says, and yanks the wet shirt entirely over his head. The damp material weighs heavily in his hand, and he chucks it casually into the sink. "I'll toss it in the laundry later. You're not in a rush, are you?" He motions, with bare arm, to the shower pipe. "This may take a bit."

"No," she says immediately, looking at the sink now. "No work today. I was going to go for a walk and—actually, I can wash that for you because I was going to do my laundry. And make breakfast. Would you like breakfast? I've put on some coffee for you, and I thought I'd use Mary's waffle iron while she's out." She gestures behind her back. "Did I mention she went to meet Eddie? It's just you and me here."

"You mentioned. Waffles sound brilliant," James says, but having made learning Lily Evans a focal point of his daily life for the past few weeks, he immediately notices how she's shifting in the doorway with each successive offer, eyes darting just about everywhere, and maybe most telling...the red continuing to pool up her neck and into her cheeks. "Long as you don't mind a bit of shirtlessness with your morning meal?"

She moves to the sink, picks up his sodden shirt, wrings it out with deft twists from her slender fingers.

"Yeah, I think I can handle that, actually," she says as she works. "I wouldn't exactly call it a trial."

"Just what a bloke likes to hear." He's physically unable to keep the small, pleased smile from spreading over his lips. He nods down to the tool box open on the floor. "Mind grabbing that smaller wrench for me?"

James does not need the smaller wrench. Or—well, maybe he does. He doesn't know. Verna and Home_Improvement_for_Dummies haven't quite helped him that much yet. But he does know that he can do better than "not exactly a trial," and cultivating an excuse to have her come closer, generously offering a better gander is...the kind and neighbourly thing to do.

Look, James knows he's not horrible to gaze at. His mother spent far too much time throughout his childhood congratulating herself on creating such an attractive spawn, so she's obviously to blame for his blatant vanity. He has amazing hair. Very good angles to his body. His metabolism is a thing of wonders. As such, he has never had to grapple with those kinds of insecurities, just the ones in which he is occasionally a bumbling idiot.

So if he's reaching up right now for no logical reason whatsoever, feigning some kind of desperate need to inspect the shower pipe, causing his quaint but defined muscles to strain, and his stomach—honed from years of sport—to ripple as much as it can ripple…

Well, he is only human.

And no one is forcing her to look.

Out of the corner of his eye, James peeks to see if she's still looking.

She's still looking.

She's looking as if she's torn between exiting the room and picking up the smaller wrench and throwing it at his head.

James stifles a smile.

It takes her a moment of silence, but she drops the sodden shirt back into the sink, pushes her hair away from her face and steps into the centre of the room, circling the toolbox, needlessly, until her back is facing him, and he can't possibly see her expression, even reflected in the bathroom mirror.

"Which one?" she says, pointing to the floor. "The one with the red handle?"

"That's the one," James says, hoping she doesn't spot the retail stickers still tellingly attached to half the box's wares. "Can you pass it over?"

Lily makes a noncommittal noise in the back of her throat, and bends to pick up the wrench.

Bends.

She doesn't scoot down, or hunker to her knees, or elegantly curtsey herself closer to the ground—she bends, as if she's trying to touch her toes, and her thigh-skimming dress becomes less thigh-skimming and more...bum-skimming. Tiny, silky, lacy pink knickers-skimming. She does seem to love lacy underwear, and that's something a bloke shouldn't know about his neighbour. Or his mate. Or anywhere in between or surrounding there. He already knows, quite frankly, far more about Lily Evans's undergarments than is allowable by his tenuous sanity, and she and her bending are cruel and unusual punishment.

He nearly gulps.

Just when he thinks he has the upperhand. Honestly.

She snaps back upright and twirls gracefully on one foot, flipping her long hair over her shoulder.

"Is this what you wanted?" she asks, handing the requested and entirely unnecessary tool out for him to take, with a smile that might be triumphant, or might be entirely innocent.

Touche, James thinks, as impressed as he is daunted. He musters out, "Yes, thanks," with something that he hopes she thinks is a cough, but which is actually more of a choke. He does not know why he is so surprised that he has somehow lost the control here, but he will not give up so easily. "Actually, would you mind lending a hand for a tic? I need to hold the water off here, but if you could twist off that bolt just under the pipe? Super helpful."

James never turned off the water. He has no idea how to, though he's pretty confident it has nothing to do with him holding anything "off here." He is also almost certain that the bolt he's just told her to remove does nothing, but even if it explodes the entire building, it may be worth it just to force Lily Evans and her haughty bends closer to his "not quite a trial" body.

Her eyes flit to the bolt in question, then back to his face, with one suspicious eyebrow raised in question.

"Does this scenario end in me getting wet?"

James matches her eyebrow quirk. "Would I do that to you?"

A brilliant, rosy flush steals across her face, but she sighs as if deeply inconvenienced by all that has transpired, and steps into the shower, skirting not-so-carefully around him—more brushing of her against him—her hands raised as if in surrender.

"Fine, I'll take the risk," she says, with a dainty lift of her chin, "but if I go down, you're coming with me."

"That's generally the plan when I get women in the shower with me," James says, and even she blinks, startled, at the flagrantly sexual quip, so he quickly follows it up with, "Just twist it off to the left."

She stares up at him for a moment, her eyes wide and her lips slightly parted in surprise, but it passes, and she turns around, brushes her perfect, pink lace-clad backside against the front of his jeans, and reaches for the bolt above her head.

"I know which way to unscrew a bolt, James," she says coolly, as if she hasn't just— "This one?"

Her dress really is very short. Too short. So short, in fact, that lifting her arms into the air yields near enough the same result as bending over, only she's much closer to him now than she was then.

He shuffles back a step, then forward a step, wavering momentarily in this plan. But she's so close now and he can smell the coconut right beneath his nose and it acts like a tether, towing his body toward hers. The space between them lessens to nearly nothing, and her hair brushes faintly at his skin. He speaks quietly at her ear. "Yes. That's it. Good."

She makes a sound—a small, soft, delectable sound—in the back of her throat, and he can feel her shiver, then she twists hard at the bolt and it comes away in one clean swipe.

"Got it."

James knows he should move away. She's done as he's asked, played along with his game, and he's already used up all his luck with the fact that nothing imploded as she deftly twisted off the bolt. The only thing left to implode is him—them—and he...he can't. He can't, but his feet won't move. They refuse. This—this—is what he's been worried was here all along, been worried he'd get sucked into and give into too quickly, and now he's been proven correct. Too much heat. Too much draw. This is what comes of messing around with the fire. Now he's trapped in the flame. The warmth of her body surrounds him and it's a drug. It's like that time when they hugged, except now there's less space and more skin and he's determined—determined—not to fuck it all up like he had that. He can't do that to her. To him. He doesn't know where this goes, but everything in him screams it's not away.

So he remains where he is, their bodies pressed together, reaching around her to slowly take the small, red wrench and place it onto the sink counter before saying, "See, I knew you wouldn't get wet."

"As far as you can tell," she says softly, and rotates back around to face him, her lips curved into a knowing smile. "Hey, you."

"Hi," he says, but it comes out on tight breath—on a tight everything. "I can't be blamed for that."

"I blame you completely," she retorts, as quietly as if to keep him close to her, lest he fail to hear. "I was just fine out there—" She nods to the bathroom floor. "—until you needed a hand."

"You have very good hands," he defends, matching her whispered tone with his. The space between them is so paltry, so utterly miniscule, that his own fingers faintly brush down the length of her as he reaches down to grasp one of the hands in question, lifting it up to present to her, like evidence. He plays idly with her fingers. "Blame back on you."

She doesn't pull her hand from his grasp. Rather, she drops the bolt she's holding in the other—it clatters noisily between their feet, but neither of them follow its progress—and trails the tips of her fingers along his exposed stomach, travelling up and up and up, stopping only when they reach the centre of his chest.

"No, you took your shirt off. You started it."

"You said it wasn't a trial."

"It wasn't." Her fingers trace a tingling path along his skin as they move higher, lightly grazing his bare shoulder, then toying lazily with the hairs at the nape of his neck. "It's not. You look really good, with no shirt on."

The words come out with breath feathering his heatened skin, which is when James realises that it is not just their bodies close, hands touching, but that his head has lowered too, that he's leaning toward her, that the hand at his nape is not so much toying any longer as it is tugging—lightly, but decisively—and he can't conceive of a time when he would not follow where she leads, much less now, this, here—

"MARY!"

What the—

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

"MAAA-RRRRYYY!"

Lily jumps, flinching at the sudden bellows, the fingers on the back of James's neck clenching in surprise. James jolts too, but he's in this too deep now, his body bouncing forward rather than back. He can't get his hands to release her. Doesn't want to release her. No, no, no.

Lily's breath catches. "What the—"

"Lily," James says, because he's not sure what else to say. What can he say, to keep hold of this? He just wants to keep hold on it. Her. Just for a little bit longer.

Her eyes find his again.

He loves her eyes. Anyone would. The spark of wit, of fire, always pooling in the green. Or darkening, like now, with heat and questions.

Everything in him burns. His fingers tighten on her, steady her. Something.

He leans closer again.

"MAAA-RRRRYYYYYYY! I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE! MAAAAAAAAA-RRRRY!"

Fucking Eddie.

Fucking, fucking, useless, worthless, dirty-panted, hairy-backed, woefully-wailing, awfully-timed, fucking Eddie.

It's gone. James knows it immediately, and he knows Lily does too. Whatever this was. Whatever...bloody fucking madness this just was. His fingers loosen their death grip on her skin. Hers fall down from his neck, fluttering to her sides in time with a breathy little sigh. They don't immediately step away from each other, but they may as well be on separate ice patches floating steadily apart in a frigid ocean. James swallows hard, listening to Eddie's continued door pounding and endless yelling in the background.

"Fucking Eddie," he says aloud, and hopes he sounds more aggravated than flagrantly bitter.

Lily makes a soft humming sound of agreement. She waves a hand toward the door—the same hand that had been cupping his nape and tugging him forward seconds ago.

"I'd better—" she says, and motions again.

"Right." James's whole body is reeling and...hard. So fucking hard, it's embarrassing. "Doesn't seem he's going to give up anytime soon."

"Yeah. I mean, no," she says, looking up at him curiously, "but—what exactly were we just—"

"Fucking hell, he's loud," James interrupts, because there is nothing good that can come from what exactly were we just, because he doesn't know what they were just—or, he does, but it's all hot steam and bodies writhing against shower walls and guttural sounds, and he's angry about that and his body is angry at him for being angry, and stupid fucking Eddie, and all of it.

With key timing, Eddie's shouts grow even more raucous. "MAAAA-RRRRRRYYYYYYY!"

Lily lets out a huff of frustration—likely at Eddie, but perhaps at James too. Her lips sink down, her head turns away, and she gingerly steps out of the shower.

Away from him.

James sucks in a short breath, trying to settle down his rioting body, his very frayed nerves. He gives himself a few bracing seconds before he forces himself out of the shower too. Lily is already halfway towards the flat door.

She flings it open without ceremony.

"Eddie," he hears her say. "What the fuck?"

"Where's Mary?" says Eddie, barrelling past her, a look of abject outrage stretched across his face. "I know she came back here!"

"She's not here," Lily replies, looking completely nonplussed. "What are you doing?"

"We had a fight, and she stormed off, so I came back here to find her," says Eddie shortly, spinning on his toes, as if to see the hall from every conceivable angle, like Mary could be hiding behind the ficus plant in the corner near Lily's bedroom door. His eyes fall on James lingering in the open bathroom doorway. "What's he doing here half-naked?

"Hullo, Ethan," James greets irritably. "Good to see you again."

Eddie blinks at him. "What?"

"Nothing," says Lily, her face practically crimson as she darts to the bathroom door to stand between them. "The shower broke. James was just fixing it. Saves us a call to the landlord. He got a bit wet and had to take his shirt off, is all. And Mary's not here, so you should probably leave."

"I'm staying right here," Eddie hotly begins. "I'm not letting her get away with what she said over breakfast. You can't even imagine—"

Eddie continues to rail, but James quits listening nearly before it begins, his entirely body going abruptly cold and rigid.

Saves us a call to the landlord.

Landlord.

Shit, fuck, landlord.

Lily is trying to reason with Eddie, being far kinder about the situation than James had been prepared to be, but he can't even bring himself to back her up in trying to coddle the fuming Eddie back out the door because Lily and Mary were going to call the landlord, and James is the landlord, and somehow in the midst of all the heated madness of the past fifteen minutes, he'd utterly forgotten that giantly significant detail.

Slow.

He was meant to be going slow.

Since when is waltzing three breaths away from shagging her in a shower going bloody slow?

James wants to wail louder than Eddie. Louder than Myrtle. Louder than both of them, put together, in miserable symphony.

He's a idiot. A complete and utter idiot. He knew this was going to happen. From the second he'd met her, he'd known the sparks between them were dangerous. That's why he'd resolved to go slow, why he'd held strong to his Dictates even in the face of the realisation that there were no two women more uniquely different than Sasha and Lily. That what was between them...hell, couldn't be more different. Lasting a few useless weeks rather than a few useless hours did not make him any kind of saint or success. They still had infinite things to learn about each other. Had only barely scratched the surface.

She didn't even bloody know that calling the landlord meant calling him, for fuck's sake.

James stifles a long groan.

He can't believe he did this. It's so completely unfair to both of them. But she…

She'd been there in the shower with him. She hadn't rebuffed his nonsense. Hadn't turned him away and told him to leave off her person. It had been her hands on him, same as his hands were on her. Her body shifting closer. Her breath fanning his skin. Her head tilting up as his had dropped down.

She would have...they would have…

But what does that even mean? That she'd merely be delighted to shag him? Or that she...would want something more?

She'd called him her mate, there in his bathroom, just this morning. It came from her mouth, that.

James thinks he may actually wither in devastation if she's just in it for the sex. He'd honest to God rather be only her friend forever than reduce what's between them to just shagging. They're better than that. Their click deserves better than that.

But he can't even broach any of this with her until he figures out what it all means, until he can be completely clear and honest with her about everything, and he...he's just not sure if they're ready for that yet.

This is all still too new, too fresh and undefined. They've made quick progress, sure, but nothing—absolutely nothing—about he and Lily Evans is casual or small or unimportant, and he's not going to make decisions about them without the sort of consideration that deserves. Look what happened when he didn't stop to think.

Madness.

Regret.

Questionable decisions in showers.

He can fix this. He can roll it all back, regain his footing. Likely, it was just a heated laugh for her, anyway. James isn't ugly. They have clear chemistry. She hasn't seen anyone other than fucking useless Eddie naked in two years. James does not in any way mind being the body to break that sorry streak, but not if it's only a single-time viewing. Not if she won't be able to interact with him the same after. Not if it cost him their friendship.

Lily shoots James an apologetic look over her shoulder as she nudges Eddie into the kitchen, resignedly offering to brew the blighter a cup of tea as they wait for Mary to arrive.

James sighs, and retreats back into the bathroom.

Bloody Sir Fix-It has work to do yet.

---

"Was your breakfast okay?" Lily asks.

"Yeah," says James, dully. "Good. It's good."

His fork is playing absently in the leftover swirls of sticky syrup on his plate, as it has been since he took his last bite, and his gaze keeps shooting down to it, like it's some kind of burgeoning masterpiece. Or like he can't quite manage to meet her eyes now that they're alone.

Has he met her eyes at all since Eddie turned up at the flat? Lily's sure she would have noticed if he'd bothered to look her way even once. There was a lull while he finished fixing the shower, sure, and Mary's return to the flat caused yet another dramatic scene in the hallway while she and Eddie hashed things out—from what Lily can glean, one was upset by the other's views on Outlander, so words were exchanged, then Eddie took offence when Mary affectionately called him a turd—but the flat has been clear of such distractions for a good thirty minutes, and James has had ample opportunity to engage with her since then.

Eddie and Mary have set their differences aside and snogged it out on the balcony. All those hoping to bathe in Lily's newly-repaired shower will be safe from sudden shocks of spluttery cold water. James's shirt was run through the tumble-dryer and is now safely back on his person. Lily even had the time to make bacon, eggs, and waffles-from-scratch for the four of them, plus a cellophane-wrapped offering for Sirius.

All of this, they've managed to accomplish, but James Potter can't expel more than a single syllable from his determinedly downturned mouth at a time.

The worst part about it is how stupid it makes her feel.

Call her crazy, which Mary might, but Lily had been looking upon that moment in her shower as a positive change in the wind. Not that she hadn't been outraged by Eddie's interruption—especially since he called her Laurel again—but more than that, she'd been happy, and incandescently so, because the object of her affections, a sweet, silly, achingly handsome man who slipped a straw-wrapper ring on her finger and seemed far too happy about it, had been close, so close, to kissing her, and holding her, and having her, finally.

And Lily must be a stupid, naive twit, must have missed something stark and glaring, because she'd made the mistake of believing that he'd be as happy as she was, that the pull she felt between them hadn't been the work of her imagination, that as soon as Eddie and Mary made themselves scarce, they'd be right back to it, and that the next time he took her to the restaurant of an overly-interested aunt, the woman would be right in assuming that Lily was his girlfriend.

What she's faced with, instead, is the stiff, sullen silence of a man who drowns in his own regret.

Flattering, that.

She couldn't care less if he enjoyed his breakfast. She's just angry enough that she'd hope he chokes on his food if she didn't care for him so bloody much. Casual queries as to how he liked his waffles don't belong with the line of questioning she truly wants to take. It's not the thing of the hour, not a cloak of invisibility for the huge, fluorescent pink elephant in the room. It's not a fix. It's not anything that matters.

But James won't look at her, and the atmosphere between them was—is—thick enough to drive the rest of the household into a hurried retreat. Even now, a reconciled Eddie and Mary are probably eavesdropping on their non-conversation from her bedroom. They obviously know that something untoward is going on—James is as unsubtle in his silence as he is when he's at his most talkative.

"Well, you certainly ate a lot," she says, though she hardly knows why she's bothering.

He makes a vague, empty hum of agreement. "Hungry, I guess." Then—would you look at that—blesses her with an entire sentence. "Ought to barter with Mary for her waffle iron."

"She'd swap it for Algernon in the blink of an eye."

"Algernon's a poor choice for a hostage swap. He'd only scratch her to pieces and then flounce off into your room, and I'll be sued for breach of contract."

Scrape and slide, goes the fork, like nails on a chalkboard.

Lily drops her own fork onto her half-eaten meal.

"That's true, Algernon does love me," she points out. "I'm glad you liked them, though. I'll have to remember to make them when you next bring Sirius over."

"Right." A tight, useless little word. "Next time."

"For Sirius," she says pointedly.

He coughs. "So."

"So," she echoes.

So.

What an aimless, insipid, infuriating talk they're having.

He's not going to bring up what he did.

Funny, that. Funny that he doesn't feel the need to mention that he'd been perfectly poised to slam her into a shower wall and shag her until neither of them could breathe, but he didn't, and now he looks as if he wishes he never tried.

Of course, there are other obstacles in the way, namely that he'd have to glance up from his plate to engage with her on any meaningful level, but he's so deeply fascinated by the syrupy remains of his breakfast that Lily thinks she could potentially be justified in flicking him with the wet end of a tea-towel and telling him to look at her, for the love of Christ, she is a person who deserves his attention and respect, not Medusa in her lair.

Must be tough, being him.

Fuck it all, she's going to have to do it.

She has to, or they'll spend the rest of their lives bumping into walls in the corridors because they're each so determined to avoid the other's eye.

"Not to bring this scintillating conversation down, or anything," she begins, and steels herself up, and takes a breath, and rips the bandage away from her wound with the force of a thunderclap, "but what the fuck was happening in my shower before Eddie got here?"

His body freezes—a fraught-filled pause on the syrup Warhol-ing, a flinch of his face that seems to lock up immediately afterwards.

"Oh," he says. "That. Yeah."

After that, nothing.

From her best friend's bedroom, she hears a distant, throaty laugh. How bloody typical that everything's rosy in Mary and Eddie's garden after they callously ruined Lily's morning with their pointless, childish arguments.

"You have a fully functional voice-box, as I recall," she reminds him.

He coughs again, waves the hand that's not preoccupied with silverware, but looks no less uncomfortable for the casual motion. "We don't have to—I mean, obviously it was just…"

Lily waits for the rest, but realises that he has trailed off, though his hazel eyes have flickered upward to look at her, properly, finally, as if he expects her to fill in the missing words.

"Just what?" she says coldly, because he doesn't get to escape this. He doesn't get to worm his way out of an uncomfortable conversation with the barest, most insignificant response, not when she's the one who threw herself at the mercy of whatever humiliation lurks on the horizon. "You needed a place to park your boner and my arse was the best place for it?"

He flinches again, looking rightfully called out. That'll show him. She knows how a man's body functions. Did he think she couldn't tell? She's had to force lids onto lunch boxes that were packing significantly less.

"Options for placement seemed very limited at the time," he eventually mutters.

Or jokes.

Is he joking?

If he's fucking joking...

"So, what, any woman would have done in a pinch, and I just happened to be there?"

"What? No! That's not—" He makes an offended noise of protest. "Look, I'm a stupid arse, slave to biology. We were...you're you, and we were in a shower, and my body's not so good with finer details. Pretty girl in a tight space, and that's what happens. No need to make a thing of it."

The immediacy with which Lily finds herself acutely, stunningly hurt by this astounds her.

James is talking as if there's nothing for them to discuss besides the fundamentals of biology, because Lily is a woman and he is a man, and it was merely a primal, animalistic urge that pushed them to breaking point in her shower, as if that's all there is to it.

As if Lily hasn't spent the past several weeks feeling like her heart is going to burst when she passes his front door in the mornings.

As if she's nothing special at all, just a pretty girl in a tight space.

That's...not what she thought they were.

She feels as if she's been shoved unceremoniously overboard, cast out into murky seas and bewildered to find herself treading water without a direction. It seems that Mary was correct to advise caution, that Lily didn't know James as well as her starlit, sugarspun, candyfloss cloud of a crush led her to assume, and that all this time she's been travelling down the wrong path, hoping rather than knowing that they were set to arrive at the same destination.

She had thought—but she's an awfully foolish woman—that there was something in the way he looked at her, in the things he said that made her silly little heart flutter, and in any given snapshot of time they spent together when James was being himself, just himself, and she'd stupidly thought that himself was exactly who she needed in her life, who she wanted and liked and trusted, who she could even see herself...

Loving. Maybe. Some day.

But if she's just a pretty girl in a tight space that he'd briefly considered fucking...

"No need to make a thing of it?" she repeats. "Not make a—we were seconds away from—make a thing of it? Really? That's your position on this?"

"We flirt all the time," he says. "Harmless. This just...got carried away—"

"It's not—" she begins. Stops. This isn't harmless, because I'm hurt, I'm really fucking hurt, she wants to retort, but she can't bring herself to say something like that, ten immensely simple, completely impossible words. Starts over. "I'd like an explanation." Better. "I'd like to know what exactly you thought you were doing in there, before Eddie turned up and put a stop to it."

"What we were doing," he corrects pointedly. "We. There were two of us in there, as I recall."

"You stripped off your shirt and asked me to climb in there with you."

"Only after you stood there in the doorway eyeing me up like I was a Sunday special!"

"So I can't enjoy looking at you without getting rubbed up against in my own shower?" she retorts. "You look at me like that all the time, but I don't strip my clothes off and try to get you into bed every time you do."

She'd never be clothed otherwise, she does not add.

"I wasn't trying—"

"Oh, excuse my semantics," Lily cuts in, anticipating the lie before it leaves his mouth, disdain dripping from her every word. "You were trying to get me up against the shower wall, not into bed, how could I have make such a mistake? That obviously changes everythi—"

"There is a tremendous amount of me in these claims," he interrupts hotly, face flushing with more than just discomfort now—there's clear indignation brewing too. "Not as if you were shoving me and my erstwhile erections away, is it? What's your excuse?"

"Don't turn this back on me. I'm not the one sitting here pretending nothing happened and acting like you're making a big deal for no reason. You know I'm attracted to you, you knew what would happen if you tried to initiate something, so you did, and I went along with it—"

"'Went along with it'?" He repeats the words on a disbelieving scoff. "Lovely. Flattering."

"Oh, right, because it would have been more flattering if I'd turned you down?"

"Better rejection than just going along!" He's quite caught up with the phrase, deriding it again while a frustrated hand runs through his hair. The same hair she'd sifted through her fingers as his head lowered down to hers little more than an hour ago. "What are we doing?" he asks, like he's only just realised this has gone off the rails somewhere. "I don't want to fight with you. We clearly have a dodgy track record with shirtlessness and bathrooms. Can't we just leave it at that?"

"I was drunk and not in my right mind when I met you. You were stone cold sober at ten in the morning, so don't even pretend that this is exactly the same."

"I'm only trying to defuse this! It doesn't mean...if you want me to apologise, I will. I've clearly been an idiot here. Is that what you want?"

"No, I don't want—" He's not getting it. Or he doesn't want to. "You nearly...we nearly kissed, and I don't think it would have stopped there, and that seems...not like nothing, and I can't just leave that like it's—I just want to know what's happening right now."

"I don't know!" he finally cries, huffing it out on a winded breath, then wincing at the confession. "I don't know what we were—look, what I do know? Whatever happened in there, none of it was smart. Not a bit of it. We both ought to do better than to merely 'go along' with anything, and I think you can agree with that. So what are we fighting about?"

"We're not fighting," says Lily at once, reflexively, untruthfully.

He's not making any sense. None of this is making any sense.

"Aren't we?"

"No, we're not, I just—it's like you're so fucking ashamed of a normal human impulse all of a sudden, of what you did or—or of me, which is bullshit because I wanted it, too, you didn't force me into anything, and obviously it wasn't supposed to happen but it did, and now you're acting like I've got the plague and that's not fair, that's not—"

"Ashamed of me," James puts in earnestly, leaning further over the table, closer to her. "Not you. Never you. You're right. I started it and I don't know...it isn't what I…" He trails off, losing the words yet again, though now he looks properly frustrated at himself rather than at her. He runs a tired hand down his face. "Look, I'm sorry if I made you uncomfortable or confused. You're...you're not a plague. You're as far from a plague as possible. I didn't mean to fuck this up. I am trying not to fuck this up by pushing all the erstwhile erections and shower walls aside, easy as it would be to hop in there and...but that's not the point. You're my friend, Lily. My good friend. This? Us? It's...the best part of my day, usually. And I'd never want any stupid randy moment in a shower to ruin that. That's what I was trying to say. That's what I meant."

Oh.

Oh.

She's his friend.

His good friend.

The best part of his day.

He just doesn't want… or does, maybe, but in a purely physical sense, not…

"So," she says, staring at her plate, feeling weirdly detached from what's happening in the kitchen because an invisible assailant has just appeared from nowhere and punched her hard in the chest, "what you're saying is that you find me attractive enough to occasionally want to...to fuck me in a shower—"

"Quit saying it like that—"

"—but I'm too good a friend, so you'd ultimately rather not?"

"What I'm saying," James clarifies slowly, speaking the words gingerly, precariously, like he's navigating a minefield, "is that one not-even-existent kiss already has me fumbling this like an arse as we row over waffles, so fuck knows what the rest of—"

"You're deflecting," she says loudly, cutting him off, not caring if it's rude. "Just answer the question."

"I was getting there, if you'd only—"

"You tried to fuck me in my shower." A second interruption rears its angry head. He should be able to tell by now that not here for evasive bullshit. He should know her well enough to know that it won't fly. "Don't pretend you didn't. Don't pretend it was some sort of mistake or that you didn't know what you were doing. It was very clear that you wanted sex, and if it wasn't because you wanted me specifically, it was because you would have had whatever was on offer, and it—"

"Of course it's about you specifically!" he yelps, redness pooling through his face. "Do you honestly think I'd have done that with anyone? You know that I—" He stops. Huffs. Gives her a look, like she's being difficult. "You know I'm attracted to you. We've always been attracted, and that's just part of us, and I'm not going to be sorry about not wanting that to ruin everything else here—"

"So I was right, before? You're attracted to me, but you'd rather just be friends?"

"Yes," he says, a blunt, small, ugly word. "Or—I want to be your friend. I always want to be your friend, before anything. And I think mixing in the other is just...poised for a mess. Clearly," he says, and waves a hand around them.

"And you're being honest about that?" she presses on. "Totally honest? Because I swear on my life, James, if you're lying to me now I will kick you out of my flat and never speak to you again."

He looks properly grim and solemn at the threat. It only takes a second for him to give the quick and firm nod.

"Yes," he says again. "I'm being honest."

"Then why didn't you just say that in the beginning?" she sighs, and slides off her stool, feet hitting the floor with a dull thud, her shoulders dropping. "Why couldn't you explain that instead of...whatever that shit was? It made me feel like I was meat or something."

"That's the opposite of what I was trying to do. I thought brushing it aside would make it—I don't know. Less like meat. Smaller, somehow. Clearly I made a right hash of that." He stands slowly, still eyeing her carefully. "You're important. This is important to me. That's what I ought have said from the start."

Lily doesn't understand what's missing for him, what infinitesimal something isn't there that means he cares about her, but not for her. Why he'd shag her in a shower or talk with her on her couch until the wee hours of the morning, but has no desire to combine the two. She's not a stupid woman, ill-advised as some of her decisions have been today. She can step aside and look at what they have with a reasonable amount of objectivity, and conclude that even the most casual of observers wouldn't question their chemistry, their closeness, the fluidity with which they bounce off one another, so quickly, so soon, so easy.

She knows that she could make him so happy, if only he would let her.

Why won't he let her?

And how pathetic is she that's losing her mind over this?

"Yes, you should have, instead of making a pig's ear of things. You know you're better with words than that," she reminds him. "What do we do now?"

"Well, to start, quit giving Mary and Arsehole Eddie in there soap-worthy entertainment," James replies wryly.

"No, I mean, what do we do to make sure this never happens again?"

"Remain clothed at all times?" His lips quirk slightly, testing the joke. "Never let me speak again?"

Her eyebrows travel towards her hairline.

He gets it. Immediately. Tucks the corners of his mouth in and has the good sense to look ashamed.

"I'm serious about this," says Lily, and keeps her voice even—but there's a hard undertone to her words that she needs to drive into the forefront of his consciousness. "I'm at an incredibly tenuous point in my life—you know I am—and I need things to be stable, which means I'm not going to let myself get messed around. We need to be set on this."

"I never meant to mess with you," he insists. "But you're right. That's...fair. And it's not looking as if we can just ignore it, is it?"

"I don't know, I've never been in a situation where I've wanted sex from someone who wanted the same from me, but we collectively decided to hold off. I'm pretty sure most people in that situation just wind up doing it—this is brand new territory for me."

At the word sex, his eyes flicker clearly, quickly, down to rake over her body, then return to her eyes, then down again, as if he can't resist.

"Right," he says. "New territory for me too."

Lily almost laughs out loud.

The audacity of him.

He would. Still.

Of course he would.

He absolutely would, because the truth is out in the open now—or a half-truth, on her part—and as long as it is, then fucking her in a shower is always going to be an option. They can return to this awkward, painful, regrettable moment a thousand more times.

That excites her as much as it concerns her, and it shouldn't.

She needs to recover some agency here, take charge of the situation, and draw a clear, unbroken line that neither of them can cross. She and James have been flitting through an acquaintance without a single rule or boundary to stay them, and their happy little bubble has imploded as a result.

If she had any sense at all, she'd put an end to this friendship—cut her losses, cut him out, cut the head off this monster before her feelings spiral further out of control—to protect her own interests, because in her heart she knows that "just friends" isn't a feasible long-term plan. Just isn't a word for them, for what they are and how they are and what she feels when they're together. Just implies uncertainty—almosts and maybes and not-quite-theres—and she and James are better than that. They're both full-blooded, passionate, no-holds-barred kind of people, everything or nothing and all that goes with it, and Lily doesn't know if she can apply that kind of ethos to "just friends" and come out the other end unscathed.

She can't sit through this another thousand times. She can't even do it once.

Mary would say that she should end this, now, before it breaks her heart, but she can't.

She can't.

So what that leaves her with is…

That.

And that...probably isn't a good idea, in the long term.

It's a plainly bad idea, actually. Terrible. Ill-judged. Bound to bite her soundly on the ass.

She's going to do it anyway.

"Right," she says smartly, and points to the stool behind James's back. "Sit down, please."

"Sit down?" he asks in confusion, but does so immediately, falling back onto the stool like a skittishly obedient pet.

She's not sure what, ultimately, is informing her decision here, if it's lust, or sheer practicality, or an ill-founded need for some kind of retribution, but James will let her do it either way.

He wants her to.

He wants her.

Just...not in the way she wants him.

Lily drains the last of her water from the glass beside her untouched plate and sets it back down. Then, with a sigh of resignation, she circles the kitchen island, keeping one hand pressed flat against the cold, granite surface like she's playing a game of tag.

She's directly in front of him now, nudging his knee to one side with her own, moving closer, planting herself firmly between his legs, her hands moving to smooth down a crease in his shirt, still warm from its brief sojourn in her tumble-dryer. Now it's him looking up at her, the usual glaring difference between their heights done neatly away with. Lily's not trapped between him and a shower wall, waiting for him take action. She's the one in control, like he obviously wants her to be—it saves him the trouble of making a hard, potentially friendship-ruining decision—and she doesn't know if she should appreciate or hate him for that.

"Buckle up, then," she softly instructs, and moves her hands to cup either side of his face.

His chin jerks in her grasp, surprised, but still somehow quickly softening into her touch. Behind his glasses, his eyes rove her face in question.

"What are you doing?" he asks, and his voice is low, almost reverential.

"Getting this out of the way," she says.

She kisses him.

It's not the kiss she thought she'd have this morning, the one that was cruelly snatched from her by angry fists pounding on a door, not a fast, feverish rush of blood to her head and heat through her veins while she's pressed up against a slick shower wall. It's soft—insistent and soft, if the two can ever coexist—a slow, lingering press of her mouth to his, a deceptively innocent thing, a pretty, rosy flower with a million hidden thorns, because she wants him to burn as much as she's just burned herself.

She had been right, so right, his lips are perfect.

Soft and full and perfect, and made to be fused with hers, the idiot. Stupid, noble, beautiful idiot, denying her this for the sake of friendship, letting nonsense words fly from a mouth that would be much better served in kissing her soundly, now, and tomorrow, and every bloody day thereafter.

He moans when she slides her tongue along his bottom lip, a low longing sound that rumbles in the base of his throat, and Lily knows exactly what it means—I like this, I like this, I like this—and moves his mouth against hers, suddenly awake and returning the pressure, hungry for a taste of her now, and it's a small, sly triumph he affords her.

She's shown him, now, that this is what he could have had. This is what he's passed on.

Got you, she thinks, and pulls away fast.

"One," she says, and holds up a finger. "You get one." One kiss. A fleeting thing. Fairly chaste. Somehow the most erotic thing she's ever done in her life. She desperately wants to kiss him again, but she sounds as if she believes her own lie. "That was it."

"One," he repeats dumbly. "Helpful."

"Let's hope so."

He doesn't say a thing, but sways back slightly in the stool, looking like a faint puff of air might topple him to the floor.

"It seemed like the practical thing to do," Lily explains. Her heart is pounding, her head swimming like it was on the night they met, a heady intoxication flooding every winding spool of her brain. "We had an itch and now we've scratched it, and now it's done and that's that. Finished."

"Finished," he repeats again, a sudden parrot. His lips twitch, side to side, like she's left something lingering there. "I feel much better now."

He doesn't sound like he feels better.

Good. She's glad. Better to be in hell together than languishing there on her own.

"That's great," she tells him. "Good. We're on the same—tea. I really fancy some tea." She spins away from him, moving to the little corner cupboard that houses Mary's unnaturally large assortment of flavoured teas. "And look, I know I interrupted your morning and I'd hate to keep you from the rest of your day if you've got something planned, but thank you so much for fixing the shower."

"Got something...wait," he says.

Lily glances over her shoulder just in time to see him totter rather inelegantly off the stool. "Wait?"

"That's—that's it?" he continues, looking slightly punch drunk. "All the 'what is this' and 'what do we do now' and you just...and now you're all sorted? And kicking me out?"

"Of course not, I just don't want to keep you from your day," she says reasonably, and selects a box of teabags at random from the cupboard before she turns around to face him properly. "Also, I mean, maybe it'd be good if we had a little distance from each other for a couple of days?"

"Right," he says tightly, a sudden tick in his jaw seeming to flutter to life at the suggestion. His expression shutters. "If that's what you want."

"No, it's not—it's not that I want to not see you." He looks entirely lost, and Lily feels like the bad guy suddenly. "It's like, I think we're a bit combustible now because we were curious about… you know, and now I've kissed you and that was lovely, but it's like trying to limit yourself to one chocolate when you've got a whole box of them, yeah? So we should probably take a couple of days until we...don't want chocolate."

"So it's...strategic separation, not"—he shrugs, scratches at his neck—"not because you're still cross, or because something's gone all wrong here now?"

"Yes. Strategic. Exactly that. You always know what I mean."

What Lily means is that she's a hair's breadth and one poor decision away from throwing herself at him and letting him have her on her kitchen floor—and he would have her, it's as plain as day, and she's certain he's relying on her to leave his self-control untested—but she doesn't want to do that if he's only looking for a friend, if he doesn't want exactly what she wants from him.

She just needs some time to catch her breath.

He can't begrudge her that. He shouldn't.

Knowing what she means or not, James still doesn't look like he wholly believes her, shoulders tensing at whatever seems to be left unsaid here—so much left unsaid, by both of them.

He exhales a weighted breath. "Will you be alright, getting to work? Chocolate is all well and good, but if the choice is between fraught discomfort and you being mowed down because of that stupid bike—well, that's no choice at all. For me," he says.

God, but it makes her melt that he cares about her.

"I'll be fine," she assures him lightly, "honestly, I'm talking about a couple of days, not weeks, and I'm taking a train to Manchester tomorrow to film that Claire Foy thing so I won't be anywhere near my bike. You won't even notice I'm gone, I promise."

He chokes out a humourless snort. "Well, that's simply not true, and you know it."

"I'll have Mary knock on my wall at night to remind you that I exist while I'm off being murdered. Again," she adds, with a wan laugh. "So, y'know, don't worry about anything—I'd just appreciate the space for a few days. Get my head screwed back on properly."

"As if you could just sub in Mary to understand all our knock nuances," he mutters. "Better off sending smoke signals from Manchester. They'd have about the same effect." His head tilts slightly. "Though I suppose smoke signals still count as contact. Best not, then."

He's being so dramatic and pessimistic and sad about all of this, assuming that 'space' is equivalent to an insurmountable, deathly silent void, and she's half-expecting an over-the-top gesture later, an "I'm sorry for seducing you in your bathroom, the most sacred of all private spaces," tapped out in morse code on his bedroom wall, because pushing the boat out is kind of his thing.

She lifts her favourite mug—the one with cat ears that she normally lets him use—from the mug tree and pops an apple-scented tea bag inside.

"Whatever you think I'm asking for now, take it down about five notches, and that's actually what I want," she says as she flicks on the kettle. "I'll text you."

"Or you can knock," he suggests, still watching her with a languishing sort of worry that proves he's likely only kicked his imagination down a paltry half notch—if even that—despite her advice. He takes one reluctant step toward the flat door, then another, feet dragging. "I'll be around."

"And I won't, because I'll be away, so this'll feel totally normal, don't fret."

"This is not normal at all," he objects, with more reluctant steps. "I meant when you return. You know, knock hullo, a little 'I reckon I can tolerate seeing your face again' rap."

"James," she says, a sigh with some weight to it, some resignation, the barest hint of not now, please. She knows what reassurance he needs, but she doesn't have the energy to give it, nor should she need to. Once he extracts himself from the immediacy of his own feelings, he'll see that she's the truly injured party, and he'll understand why she needs this. "It's fine, okay? Cross my heart. Go home and relax and I'll talk to you soon."

It's too direct a request for him to continue lingering without merging into outright defiance, though it's not without several moments of lips opening and closing on unspoken comments and even a vague lift of his hand in entreaty that he finally reaches the kitchen doorway. His trainers scuff at the wooden flooring. His fingers curl over the side of the doorframe, a deathgrip clutch. His handsome face still looks terribly bleak and forlorn.

"I'm sorry," is what he finally settles on, though he's likely not apologising for any of the things Lily would prefer. "Give Claire a run for her money, yeah?"

"I'll die like a pro," she promises, and waves him gently out the door. "See you."

The deathgrip on the doorframe loosens. One hand lifts in a weak little wave. His eyes remain pinned on her face as if he's trying to download it into his memory, as if he'll never see it again.

"See you," he echoes, and is now officially in the hallway. "Travel safe."

When Lily hears the telltale click of her front door, signalling his exit from her home, and her life, if only for a couple of days, she drops into the stool he vacated and props her elbows up on the table—violating every rule of etiquette her parents ever taught her—to cup her face in her hands and sleep, probably, upright and all, because she's all of a sudden exhausted, thinking it over seems like the enemy, and moving from this spot is too great an effort to attempt.

She stays like that for a few minutes, she thinks—not upset or angry or anything, really, just very, very tired, ruminating on nothing but how much she likes the quiet—until a gentle rapping on the frame of the kitchen door sends her spine snapping straight, assuming he's come back, or that he didn't leave at all.

It's only Mary, though, clearly fresh from eavesdropping. She's got that look on her face, a pretty, blue-eyed marriage of genuine sympathy and smug vindication. Another day, another hunch, another bloody victory. Someone ought to gift her with a medal.

Mostly, though, there's sympathy.

Mary is very nice, and loves Lily very much, and deserves better than Eddie, that living tragedy.

"Has he left yet?" she says gently, and tiptoes across the kitchen floor as if Lily is keeping a sleeping baby in the dishwasher and she doesn't want to wake it up.

Lily shrugs, reaches for the freshly-boiled kettle, and hesitates. She doesn't even want tea. Why did she decide to make a cup? "Is not-quite-noon too early to open a bottle of wine?"

"I knew it. That wanker," Mary intones, her voice low and rough like an east London gangster. She comes to a stop behind Lily and rubs a soothing circle into her back. "I knew he'd go and pull some stunt like this—"

"Mary, please don't—"

"I said it, didn't I? Said it weeks ago. If they seem too good to be true, they probably are—"

"I really don't want to talk about this—"

"No, look, darling, I know you think I'm going to say that I told you so, and I'm not saying that—definitely not saying that, but all I want is what's best for you, yeah? There's a reason why I wanted you to be careful with that guy, and I think that now—"

Lily lets her head drop to the table.