You guys have been both patient and kind, so I suppose I owe you an explanation for the break. I was on vacation for a week, and then spent the last week working my butt off for my dad, who has just opened his own photography business on top of his full-time job. I have been editing senior pics out of the wazoo, so I apologize. I didn't plan on making you wait this long, and I'll try to keep it from happening again.

Disclaimer- sigh…. I wish I owned Sirius. But I don't. Nor do I own Harry. But, oh, if I did…. (acquires distant look of wistfulness and slowly morphs into an evil cackle) mwhahahahaha!

"You did WHAT?" Sirius asked, eyes nearly falling out of his head in shock.

"I know," James said miserably, sinking onto his bed in the dorm room with remorse. "It was stupid. I'm pathetic. I should've known better. Tell me something I haven't already thought of."

Harry leaned forward, looking more amused with the situation than James thought he had any right to be. "So you just leaned in and kissed her? No warning, nothing?" He asked. The corners of his mouth were pulled down but his eyes turned up in a smile.

Eyes just like Lily's, James noted. They weren't just the same color—they were shaped the same way, so that when Harry smiled the corners of his eyes crinkled slightly.

Maybe he was just seeing Lily in everything he looked at, though. She drove him crazy enough to make it possible.

"Yeah, I wasn't thinking. Stupid mistake on my part," James said, putting his head back in his hands. Though he knew that what he'd done was stupid, he couldn't bring himself to regret that three-second kiss. He'd kissed a lot of girls, and many of them very experienced, good kissers.

That was the best kiss he'd ever had in his life, and thus, the best mistake he'd ever made.

Lily, meanwhile, was having similar thoughts of the kiss. While James hadn't given her a whole lot of warning with what his intentions were, she knew he had given her more than enough time to pull back. She hadn't. She had leaned forward, thrown herself into the kiss, far more than she had with any other guy before. Was this what the other girls had felt, when they had been kissing him too? The tingling of the lips and cheeks, the jelly-legs effect he seemed to have on her every time he was close, intensified by a million?

It had to be some type of magic, Lily thought, that made James Potter so attractive to the entire female race. And she was more furious with herself than she could even be with him because she was letting that magic work on her.

"I heard he kissed you." Lily jumped about a foot in the air when Harry's voice broke her train of thought through the clamor of people starting to enter the Great Hall for lunch.

"Without even so much as a 'how about a date'!" Lily agreed, her face heating up in humiliation. "Well, if he thinks he can do to me what he does with all those other girls, he's got another thing coming!" She huffed indignantly.

Harry smirked. "You didn't hex him." Lily stiffened, knowing that she had been found out.

"So?"

"So if you were really that furious with him over kissing you, you wouldn't have hesitated to do your worst. So it must not have been that terrible."

She hated that Harry sounded so smug. She hated that her face heated up even more, and that her fair skin would show the blush that lit her cheeks easily. She hated that when she remembered that kiss, her stomach became tied up in knots.

Mostly, she hated that Harry was right. He was more right than he knew.

What she wouldn't give for a sympathetic girlfriend's ear right now, someone who could listen to her without being jealous of her kissing James Potter. Sighing, Lily decided that Harry would just have to do.

"He makes my palms sweat and my head spin and my stomach turn and fingers tingle, but he knows it, and that's a huge problem," she revealed, embarrassed.

"No he doesn't."

"Don't be ridiculous, Harry, of course he does!" She argued, furious. "He knows he does it to every girl he comes across—that's why he does it! He thinks he can just waltz up to any girl he pleases and kiss her and get away with it!"

"Yeah, to any other girl. But right now he's up there in the dorm moping and even Sirius can't seem to cheer him up," Harry said gently, staring at her. She suddenly realized why some people became so incredibly uncomfortable when she stared at them for a long period of time. Intense green eyes probing you like that did tend to make anyone feel uncomfortable.

"I hate that he makes me feel like this. He does it to every girl out there." She said, aware that she sounded a bit like a sulky little kid and unable to do anything about it. Harry studied her face calmly, clearly trying to carefully construct what he was about to say next. That was the way in which Lily was reminded of how different Harry and James really were every time she was with the two of them. Harry thought everything over very carefully, his words well-selected to say exactly what he meant. It as much more like her. James acted without thinking at all, and tended to just blurt out whatever was on his mind at the time.

"Well, he might have that effect on a lot of girls, Lily, but I know for a fact that you're the only girl who has that effect on him. And for what it's worth, I really think that's saying something."

Lily stared at Harry, trying to sense any sort of lie or dishonesty about him. He seemed entirely sure of what he was saying, so positive that he was right that it should have irked her. Instead, it just served as a source of comfort.

"Really?" She asked him, her voice smaller than she'd meant it to be.

"Really." Harry reassured her, his manner positive.

That night, when James and she silently walked the halls once more on duty, she asked him, nonchalantly as possible, "So are you going to ask me out or not?"

James had been asking himself the same question all day, as well as the majority of the night. Blinking, opened his mouth to try and ask about how she had glared at him earlier from across the Great Hall, how she had obviously gone out of her way to avoid him previously in the one class they shared that day, how her face had turned bright red in anger when she had caught his eye earlier.

Then he realized she didn't sound all that irritated with him. In fact, though he thought it could have just been his imagination, he almost thought Lily sounded hopeful.

James decided he'd never understand girls. But even to James, a hint like that was hard to miss. "Lily Evans, would you please accompany me to Hogsmeade this upcoming weekend?"

And for the first time, Lily said yes.