A/N: Hey guys! SOOOO SORRY IT'S BEEN SOO LONG but in our defense we were on spring break and i was out of the country and couldn't really write over there. since i had no computer. anyway. remember all that long time ago when if you reviewed we'd put you as an OC in our story? well, that starts to happen in this chapter! it continues in the next one, but sorry you had to wait so long for that...our bad. Anyway, now our beloved OTP is back together again! YAY! I'll let you get on with reading so you can rejoice in the beautifulness that is Jily. Okay baiz.

Lily and I walk down to breakfast together the next morning, and what should be a ten minute-trip takes triple that amount. It may or may not have to do with the fact that we stop in a secluded area or empty classroom or secret passageway to snog every opportunity we get. God, I've never been this head-over-heels for a girl before. Sure, I did a lot of snogging with some, but I've never been this...content before. Content without having sex, content seeing them smile, content with just the brush of our fingers together as we walk down the hallway. Not even holding hands. Just the occasional light touch. Neither of us want anybody to catch us. That would be awkward, at best.

Just to not be suspicious, Lily and I sit a few seats away with our respectable groups of friends, but I can't help shooting a quick glance over at her every few seconds. Sirius, Remus, and Peter all seem to notice my good mood and pester me about it, but whenever they do I just shrug and change the subject.

"Hey, James," I hear a female voice say behind me, and for a second I hope it's Lily. But it's much too...sultry and flirty-definitely not the tone she'd take with me now in public. I spin around and see Amanda there, and all I can think is just shit.

I completely forgot about her. Call me crazy, but I totally had other things on my mind.

"Um, hey. I was actually just about to look for you," I lie. "There's something I need to talk to you about."

"Great," she says, looking much too pleased at that. "Shall we go somewhere more private?" Ugh. Not that I'm sure why, but just the thought of being somewhere "private" with Amanda makes me want to puke.

"Yeah," I stammer. "Private sounds...not...bad..." So awkward. I look at my friends-all of them looking at me with partially confused, partially incredulous facial expressions-before grabbing my bag and following Amanda out of the Great Hall. Just as I reach the door I turn back to look at Lily, who's watching me. I give her a facial expression that I hope she reads as "God, please help me," and I figure she does, given the small chuckle I see that follows it. I turn back around and walk out, stopping with Amanda by a tapestry a ways down the corridor.

I stop in front of her and she grabs my shirt, pulling me down to kiss her. Before our lips make contact, however, I lightly push her away and start to speak. "Amanda, I really am sorry, but I don't know how to put this less than simply. I just don't really...like you. I'm sorry to have led you on, but I'm not feeling anything."

She looks extremely confused, and while I do feel bad for doing this to her, I know it's either her or Lily. And gee, what a hard decision that is.

"But...I thought what we had was...special..." she stammers, and I can see her eyes start to get watery. Oh shit, please don't start crying. I'm not very good when it comes to crying girls at all.

"Hey, calm down, now. It...it was special. But that's the thing. For me, it just...isn't anymore," I lie. Special? Hell no. Maybe it was a while ago, but it definitely lost its "specialness" this past year. But what was I supposed to say?

"Well," she says, giving me a very half-hearted smile. "Thanks for telling me now instead of later. And it wasn't if I could tell that you didn't really like me." Wait, what? That catches me by surprise.

"What do you mean by that?" I ask.

"James, I've known this whole time that you never really liked me. Not as much as someone else. And I get that. I'm not saying I'm fine with it, but...I get it. Bye, James. Maybe I'll see you around." She turns and strolls away, walking down the hall at a casual but quick pace.

Well. That went much better than expected.

Right after that interesting exchange, I just decide to walk back to the Heads common room, where I can expect to see Lily soon. Seriously, that thing is amazing. Only the two of us can get in it and we already have a great excuse to be in there. So basically, it's the perfect place to just snog all we want.

Sure enough, a few minutes after I sit down on the couch she walks in, pausing by the door. "So, uh..." she says. "So what did Amanda want?"

I grin. "To the point, much?" She scowls at me and comes to my seat. I want to her to crawl under my arm, to that one place she seems to fit perfectly, as if we were made to fit together. But she chooses to sit on the direct other side of the couch, kicking up her feet and putting them in my lap.

"Sorry for being curious about what other girls wanted with my boyfriend," she mumbles, and my heart skips a beat when she calls me her boyfriend, but I'm snapped out of my temporary state of wonder when she says, "That is what we are now? Boyfriend and girlfriend again?" I smile.

"Lily, love, I couldn't think of anything I would want more. Except maybe for you to actually get over here," I say, motioning for her to come closer to me. She grins widely and obliges, cuddling up next to me. And that's just another example of why I'm so content with this relationship as supposed to past ones: I actually enjoy cuddling. I crave it. What a girl this girl has turned me into. Wait, what?

I look down at her and say, "Just so you know, Amanda wasn't exactly looking for conversation, if you know what I mean. But I didn't let her lips get anywhere near six inches of mine, I promise. I also carefully mentioned that I wasn't interested in continuing our...well, you can't exactly call it a relationship, can you..."

"So you dumped her?" Lily clarifies.

"Erm...to put it bluntly, yeah. I guess I did dump her."

"Okay. I guess I can live with that." I grin down at her as she steals my glasses off my face, making everything incredibly foggy and hard to see. Everything except her beautiful face right in front of mine, the hard lines when it's all a blur. Both literally and figuratively.

"Would you have preferred if I not had dumped her?"

"No, I'm fine with the dumping of Amanda. It would definitely had made things in this relationship a little awkward."

"Well you know what I think?"

"What?"

"We're talking too much."

"And how do you suspect we change that?"

"I think you know what I'm thinking."

"Really? Because I think you're going to need to show me what you were thinking."

"Oh trust me, I can definitely do that."

And after that, we stop talking for quite some time.

It's all I can do not to stare at Lily during our classes-in my defense, the ponytail she has her hair in just shows of her bare neck. A place that I would very much like to be kissing right now. But no. Instead I'm stuck staring at it slightly creepily while she talks to Melisa Habibovic, her Transfiguration partner. Don't get me wrong, I've never had anything against the laidback and pretty Hufflepuff girl, but right now I hate her.

How come she gets to talk to Lily? She's not even her boyfriend! I know I'm being unreasonable, but this whole secrecy thing is kind of slowly killing me. What I would give to just hold her hand in public...

But I know I just can't risk that. Letting anyone know of our relationship would make it somehow get back to my dad, I just know it. And my dad would be pissed if he knew I was back with Lily. That sounds so ridiculous to me. Why should my dad have such hold over my relationship? Unfortunately, he doesn't just have hold over my relationship. He could possibly have hold over Lily's future career. That's just a risk I'm not going to take.

Him finding out, I mean. So long as there's no chance of that happening, no one in hell could stand in the way of me being with Lily again.

We have a prefect's meeting that night, so Lily and I head to our office early to prepare what we're going to say. Well, we start off by doing that, but somehow we start having a passionate debate about whether there's something going on between McGonagall and Dumbledore. By the time the first prefects walk in, the two of us are laughing so hard, Emily Canteony and Kiki Cunningham just give us really weird looks, obviously baffled by the way we're acting around each other.

In fact, I feel a little bad for the prefects, seeing as the whole relationship between me and Lily must have been really confusing for them. First, we were slightly bitter towards each other. Then, we ignored each other completely. After that, we slowly started warming up to one another, and now here we are, laughing and talking like old mates. It really must be extremely confusing.

The rest of the meeting goes without a glitch, although Kiki does manage to somehow knock over a potted plant in the middle of my speech about tallying house points. Kiki's great, but she's a total clutz. It's kind of funny in an awkward way.

After that, we go on rounds together, continuing our game of Truth as if that whole oh-yeah-now-we're-together thing never happened. Well, it would have been like that, except for all the kissing...

We walk along a moonlit corridor, one side of the wall flanked with high windows and the other covered in portraits of famous witches and wizards, snoozing in their frames. Lily stops as she comes to an alcove looking out over the lake, and I stroll over to stand beside her, alternating my gaze between the view out the window and her gorgeous face.

"Do you ever kind of stop and think...about how being here is going to end soon?" she says quietly, not ripping her gaze from the window. "Soon we'll graduate from Hogwarts and be out in the real world. Fighting our own battles by ourselves. Living on our own. We won't have school to feed us, or house us, or let us try again when we mess up. It'll be just us against the world. Alone."

My hand slowly travels to my hair-a habit I have for whenever I'm nervous. And right now, I am nervous. Because then I say: "Well...it doesn't have to be like that. You don't have to fight your battles by yourself. You don't have to live on your own. And you definitely don't to take on the world all by yourself. I mean, unless you wouldn't want..." I trail off, focusing my gaze on the ground in front of my feet.

"What do you mean? Unless I wouldn't want what?" Lily asks, now looking at me.

"Well, you see...I always planned on getting my own place after I graduate. Like a flat in London, or something. And I mean, unless you would rather live on your own, or something, maybe you could, like...maybeyoucouldlivewithme," I finish rather quickly, so much so that I don't even know if she understood me.

She doesn't reply for the longest time, but after what feels like decades of silence, she says, "Are you asking me to live with you?"

"Well, I mean...erm, it could...I...I guess...yeah. Yeah, that's basically what I'm asking." I finally bring my eyes to meet hers, and they have a certain fire to them. One I've definitely seen before, no doubt, but this one is...different.

"Do you really mean that?"

"Er...yeah! Yeah, of course I do!"

"You want me to move in with you? In your own place?"

"Why? Would you want to?" I ask quickly, suddenly afraid that she'd find the idea of living with me so ridiculously insane she'd never consider it. "I mean, I know we're both so young, and don't know what we're doing, but I do know that I love-"

"James," she says suddenly with a soft chuckle, and I instantly shut up. "I get where you're coming from. And I...I do want to move in with you. But I don't know if that's what I'm going to want in the future, or if it's truly the right choice. So for now...I'm going to have to think about it. I hope you'll understand."

"Of course I understand, Lily! I...It was ridiculous of me to ask, I know, but everything is so uncertain right now. And you're just...certain. A thing I'm certain about."

"It wasn't ridiculous, James. Just...just early."

"Just early." She nods with a soft smile.

"All I know about me and you is the right now," she says. "And I'd prefer if we keep it that way." I smile back at her.

"I can live with the right now," I reply, starting to continue on down the corridor.

"Oh, can you?" she asks playfully. I nod enthusiastically.

"Definitely. Especially if the right now involves snogging." She laughs and playfully shrugs me, but I catch her hand and say, "Actually, I'm being serious." All she does is wink and run down the corridor with a giggle, leaving me to grin, shake my head, and chase down after her.

Chasing down Lily Evans seems to be a common habit in my life. But now I know that catching her seems to be one also.

A/N: Awwww cute stuff yeeeah. Next chapter will be up in two to three days (lolz our updating schedule is so irregular). But until then, keep in mind that we respond to all reviews, so go ahead and click that little button down there...you know you want to...LOVE YOU GUYS 3 XOXO Maddy