Lily and James spent the next few days making sure they were seen together in various public places, trying to give the impression that they were on friendly terms, and hoping to plant the thought in the minds of the student body that something was building between them.
One evening, about a week later, they took the plunge and sat next to each other in the Great Hall and had dinner together.
Initially, they received a few raised eyebrows, especially from their friends, but after the shock wore off and Lily and James made no other strange movements, people quickly lost interest in them and went back to their own business.
As soon as the gossipers had turned away, James turned toward Lily as she whispered, "If just sitting next to each other at dinner attracts so much interest, Merlin help us when the rumours really start to fly!"
James chuckled and decided, for appearances sake, to whisper his response in her ear. "We'll manage. Anyway that is nothing to the show we're going to have to put on in the common room later."
"Yeah, I know," Lily said, as though trying to mentally brace herself. Suddenly feeling a little nauseous, she decided she'd had enough to eat, and pushed her plate away. She stood up and vaguely excused herself. "See you there."
He watched her bemusedly as she made her abrupt departure, his eyes staying firmly on her as she left the hall.
After only a few moments James stood up as well, leaving his food half finished. He followed in her footsteps, and suddenly interest was piqued again; James Potter had just left in the middle of dinner and he'd left to follow Lily Evans.
---
James soon caught up with Lily and convinced her to take a stroll around the grounds. He hoped to both soothe her nerves and kill time before returning to the common room, knowing that by the time they returned most people would be back from dinner.
"Are you sure about this, James?" She finally spoke as they took a seat by the lake. "Because once we start, there's no going back."
"Am I sure I want some time off the 'marriage market'?" he quipped with a chuckle, looking towards her as she stared out over the rippling water. "Don't ask silly questions, Lils," he said, nudging her in a friendly way.
Lily rolled her eyes at his use of her pet name. "Seriously, James. Karen was years ago... perhaps your parents have changed? Have you ever really tried to talk to them about it?"
"Of course," he said, his voice suddenly rough. "We had a major fight about it after Karen, and several smaller ones since, but they say they need to be sure I'm getting serious about the right kind of girls."
"The right Right kind?" Lily questioned tightly.
"I already told you," he said, interpreting her emotions correctly, "they don't care about blood purity. By 'right girls' they mean 'nice girls', girls who don't sleep around, girls who aren't using sex as a weapon, using me for my money and family name … trying to ensnare me," he grumbled as he leaned back against a tree.
"Oh," she frowned, copying his movements.
"Yeah, like I can't make that judgment for myself!" he said, getting more irate the more he talked about it. "I know exactly what some girls want. I've never been that much of an idiot, but when I was younger - I just chose not to care that they were using sex to get what they wanted, as long as I was getting something in return."
Lily choked on a laugh. "Nice, James, real nice!"
He smiled ruefully. "I'm not particularly proud of it, but I can honestly say that those girls knew what they were doing too and that it was always mutual."
"Okay, enough!" Lily stopped him, covering her ears jokingly. "I think I've heard enough about you and your sexual escapades to last me forever!"
"Sorry," he said with a grin, not sounding remorseful in the least.
Lily chose to ignore him and went back to their original conversation. "Well don't forget the poor girl could only have been fourteen, at most, when she met your parents. If I'd been interrogated by grown adults at that age I might have run away too. Perhaps a girlfriend wouldn't be quite so intimidated when she's seventeen?"
James smiled. "True, but no, I don't think it's any easier now. If anything they've become even more aggressive. Now I'm old enough for there to be an actual chance of a relationship leading to marriage – they won't leave any stone unturned. Trust me."
"Okay, I believe you… I just wanted to make sure you'd really thought our plan through."
"Of course I have – Are you sure you want to do this Lily?" he asked, eyeing her searchingly. "What's with the change of attitude?"
Lily didn't reply, looking away from his probing gaze.
He rested a hand on the side of her face and turned her back towards him, lowering his head a little so he could catch her eye. "What happened to make you so nervous?"
"Oh," she sighed, "it's nothing. Just Catreena, a girl in my dorm." He nodded stiffly, indicating that he knew who Catreena was and didn't particularly like her.
"Well, she said that you're out of my league." She held up a hand to stem James's protests before they started. "And whilst normally I don't listen to any of her drivel, I can't help but wonder if that's what everyone is going to think when they see me with you – and if she's right then no one going to believe in us ---"
Lily stopped mid sentence as James burst in to laughter. "What are you laughing at?!" she cried heatedly.
"What—" he tried to say, choking on a laugh.
"Oh, I see. Even you find it funny," she noted sadly, after watching him chuckle a while longer.
"What, no!" he defended, surprised at the turn of events as his laughter died on his lips. "Oh Lily," he sighed, "what ever makes you think she's right? She wouldn't know class if it hit her in the face. I'm not out of your league," he said, bringing his hand back up to hold her face. "If anything, it's the other way around," he earnestly assured her.
"You have to say that because you want my help." she groused.
"Lily, what bloke wouldn't want to be with you? You're beautiful and intelligent and kind, you look innocent, but you have this really wicked side, and you definitely know more than you let on. It all mixes together to make you very appealing and very… sexy," he finished with a smile.
Lily looked at him through her eyelashes. "Really?"
"I already told you-- I don't lie."
---
"Everyone is staring at us!" Lily whispered in an unusually high voice when they finally entered the common room.
"Well, what did you expect?" he asked, looking at her strangely. "We're not normally seen together and suddenly we're being spotted with each other all the time? That's going to draw attention all on its own, then if you add the fact that we're not yelling at each other, we're the most interesting thing that's happened in weeks!"
Seeing her starting to look a little green, he stopped her half way across the room. "This is what we wanted, yeah?" he asked, rubbing small reassuring circles on her hand. "We want people to notice," he reminded her quietly.
"Yeah, we want to be noticed, that's right," she murmured, relaxing a little under his ministrations. "Sorry, I guess I'm just a little nervous about being under the spotlight. I'm not used to so much attention."
James decided now was not the time to mention that she attracted attention wherever she went, no matter what she was doing or who she was with.
Instead, he gently told her, "Better get used to it," before abruptly changing his tone. "We can't be too obvious tonight. We have to look like we're shy about it, like it's a little unexpected. But we also have to look comfortable enough to make it seem like perhaps we've been flirting for a while and it's all culminating."
"Is it even possible to look like all those things at the same time?" Lily nervously asked, trying to distract herself from the heat of so many eyes on her.
"Of course," he said confidently, as he led her over to a sofa in front of the fire. "Plus, if we can make it look like it's been building and now it's reached the point where we can't help it, it will be more believable. You're not the type of girl to just say yes to anyone, and I'm not the type of guy to ask just anyone. Despite the rumours, the girls in this school know how fussy I can be-- that's actually why they can all be so fucking bitchy," he ended, a bit angrily.
"Oh," Lily said, frowning as she rubbed his shoulder absently. He started to calm down and Lily shook her head and smiled. "How do you think of all this stuff?"
"It's what I do," he quipped. "Hanging out with the Marauders and pulling pranks does have its uses," he added mysteriously.
She just raised her eyebrows in question.
"Made me learn to plan for every eventuality," he shrugged, " and to look for every angle – it comes in useful in so many ways – it even helps my dueling," he added.
Lily laughed. "Who would have thought?! Okay, so how do we go about making this look natural, oh wise one?
"Umm, let's start by sitting next to each other as close as we can possible get," he said, indicating she should move closer as he discreetly moved towards her.
She complied and sat so close to him she could feel his warm body pressed all along the one side.
"Now, grab that potions book you were reading before dinner and place it between us so it looks like we're both trying to read it."
"Okay, but why does this help?" she questioned, doing as he asked.
"Because it would look forced if we just sat next to each other staring at the wall," he chuckled into her ear, making it appear to anyone who was watching that he was whispering something much more intimate.
Lily smiled, catching onto what he was doing, and added to the performance herself by leaning back into the cushions and resting her head on his arm where it had been lying across the back of the sofa behind her . She tilted her head further backwards so she could look into his eyes, which where sparkling with mirth and interest, wondering what she would do next.
"Is it working?" she whispered quietly, and he briefly allowed his eyes to leave hers to scan the room.
"Oh yeah," he replied as he smoothed a hand down her arm, a little shocked himself by just how many people were watching them, each with their own varying degree of subtlety.
"What is it?" she asked, reading the surprise on his face as she tilted her head to the side so that it rested in the crook of his neck.
"Nothing," he chuckled, not wanting her to freak out again. He grabbed a lock of her hair and ran it around his fingers, saying, "You know, you're good at this… perhaps a little too good."
She smiled. "Nah. It's not too hard being affectionate with you…so long as you're not acting like a prat." She grinned before reaching forward to pull something out of her bag, saving James the embarrassment of letting her see him blush.
Having found what she was looking for, she sat back and resumed her position. But this time, she pulled her legs underneath her, settling more fully against him, looking to all the world as if she were snuggling into him.
"Wha—what's that?" he asked, trying to ignore the new position he now found himself in, and the spectacular view he had down her shirt.
"It's the permission slip," she answered quietly.
"Right... right. The permission slip," he said, mentally shaking himself. "Do you know how to charm it to make it look like something else?"
"Umm… yeah, but we need something to copy, we need whatever we want it to look like," she said, frowning as she realised she didn't have anything of the sort. After all, there was no such thing as a dance class at Hogwarts.
She turned worried eyes on him and he smiled reassuringly. "Oh ye of little faith!" he grinned, before producing a slip of parchment from his pocket and passing it into her waiting hands.
"I told you," he said to her surprised look, "I'm a Marauder. I look from every angle."
Lily unfolded the parchment and was stunned and relieved to find a perfect replica of the standard Hogwarts permission slip-- only this one specified dance as the extracurricular activity.
"Wow, how—you know what? I don't think I want to know," she stopped herself. She performed the charm without further question.
They both watched as the official form for dueling morphed and rearranged of its own accord, eventually leaving them with one disguised dueling permission form and one useless form for an activity that didn't exist.
She sighed as it finally hit her that they were really going to go through with their plan.
"You didn't think I'd forget, did you?" James asked, when the forgery was finally put away in Lily's pocket and the copy burned by the tip of his wand.
"Forget?" she mimicked, confused.
"You thought I'd forgotten that I said I'd help you with the slip."
"No, of course not, but I have to admit I didn't expect you to already have a mock up of the slip. Where do you find the time?"
"I did it before breakfast this morning. It didn't take long. I – I may have done something like that," he indicated to the forgery, "before."
Lily smirked at him, but said nothing other than, "Thanks."
He shrugged. "I said I would help you."
"Yes, you did, and I said I'd help you," she said, turning her head into his shoulder, both of them being reminded of the position they had been seated in the whole time. "So, say something that will embarrass me," she told him quietly, "and hold my hand while you do it."
"You are definitely too good at this," he mused before complying and taking her hand gently in his, softly placing a kiss on her palm before pulling her hand over into his lap. He leaned down to her ear once again and told her about the time he'd walked in on Remus and one of her Ravenclaw friends in a compromising position.
She giggled, but did not blush, which surprised him and made him wonder just how innocent she really was. But that thought was for another time and he had a job to do, so he changed his approach and, instead of being crude, he simply whispered how beautiful he thought she was, causing her to blush magnificently.
He grinned in a self satisfied way and his smile grew wider when he saw the similar sparkle in her eyes.
She nodded her head exaggeratedly for the benefit of their audience and placed a lingering kiss on his cheek before getting up, walking to the stairwell and sending one more playful look at him over her shoulder, discreetely tapping her back pocket where the slip to send to her father rested.
James watched her, a silly smile on his face, until she was out of sight before turning his gaze back to the common room at large. Unlike before, he didn't just find some of the people in the room looking at him, he found everyone staring at him—some with confusion, some with small smiles, and some with obvious anger—but he ignored it all, too happy to care.
The rumour that they were dating would be all over the school tomorrow, and it would be confirmed as fact when he walked into breakfast with Lily on his arm.
Their plan was working.
---
AN
Well most of you seem to have an opinion on the whole cross dressing issue… the problem is you all said something different!
I'm still not sure if I've made the right decision but if I don't carry on down this route then I'd have to do a fair amount of editing and even whole chap deletions… so I think, instead of wasting the work I've already done and trying to write certain things from scratch, I'll stick with what I've got!
I hope that doesn't disappoint anyone
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