Turning Point Ch 3
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Lily/James
Length: 4,244 words (chaptered)
Summary: Their beginning is less romance and more...clandestine. "It started a month ago with, as you may have guessed, an argument... She shuddered like I was her fix, and how twisted is it that that made my heart burst with happiness?" Smut!
The situation: A few weeks before Christmas hols, Seventh Year. By this time, Lily and I had had sex twice, and I had become so confused by her that it spread to my life at large, resulting in embarrassing scenes such as A) reciting the recipe for the Draught of Living Death in response, apparently, to Flitwick’s request that I stop snoring in class, and B) getting caught by Lily for staring at Lily, which seemed to make Lily mad, which made me ask Lily’s friend Marlene to Hogsmeade, so that Lily wouldn’t think I had been staring at her, which made a) Marlene slap me and b) Lily storm off.
Does she get to be jealous when she won’t even return my owls? …Yes, alright, I owled her. That’s how cowardly I am.
Lily,
I know things have been…unusual, but I think we need to talk. As soon as possible. And probably we should keep at least five, or maybe ten, feet of distance between us at all times to prevent things from happening again. I think we can both agree that that would be a bad idea. Please, just tell me a time and a place and I’ll be there, approximately five to ten feet away from you. Although, maybe five feet is better so that there will be no shouting, which can often lead to other people overhearing conversations, which would also be bad.
James
I had wanted to write Love, James, but that was stupid. Then I tried Sincerely, James and wanted to cringe. Same for Regards and Cheers. Almost went with, Until then, but decided at the last minute it sounded desperate.
But does she respond? No. No way can somebody throw a bloke a bone and explain her insane behavior, because then James Potter’s life would be just WAY TOO BLEEDING EASY! Scheduled a Quidditch practice for the Friday before the Hogsmeade trip, and everyone whined so much that I had no choice but to keep them an hour late.
I skipped rounds that night because she had the same shift and I was worried we might accidentally cross paths in that gray area on the third floor that nobody knows whose job it is to patrol, and if I was on patrol I would probably have purposefully lingered there hoping to see her because I’m a glutton for punishment. So I avoided the problem entirely.
But at eleven o’clock I had a sudden and inexplicable hankering for treacle tart and Butterbeer. Only one place for that in the castle: the kitchens.
I didn’t grab my cloak because, after all, I am the Head Boy, and I was supposed to be on rounds, and I slowly ambled down the changing steps of Hogwarts to the still life portrait to tickle the pear. The elves were more than gracious, and I left completely satisfied. I walked slowly up to the tower, just to see if any students were out of bed past curfew, but ran across no one. Absolutely no one at all.
I crawled into my bed and shut the hangings, totally, one hundred percent satisfied and ready for Hogsmeade.
Why did everything in this shite Gryffindor Tower have to be so bloody red?
We slept in. We woke slowly, eventually wandering into the Common Room where we got up to our usual charming boyish antics (Sirius said he was prettier than I was, so I had to tackle him, of course, which led to Peter being Peter and Remus being Remus, separating us with that bloody effective charm of his (after he took two bets on the outcome-I saw it, I’m positive!)). We ambled down to the Great Hall to enjoy breakfast, most of the third years and up having already bolted down their meals to find their way into the village, so the tables were sparsely populated. Just the younger students and other jaded uppers who didn’t quite care so much anymore.
Guess who was among their ranks?
Did you guess Lily? I bet you guessed Lily. And you know what? You’d be right! Because if someone unusual or interesting or really, anything happens in my life that is at all worthy of mention, you could pretty much be guaran-damn-teed it’s about Lily Evans.
Sometimes I hate her. I’m not even kidding. I know it sounds like I’m kidding, but I’m not. Do you know what it feels like to have your identity ripped from you as a teenager and taken up by someone else? Someone who doesn’t even care? Someone who hates you? I never even had a chance. I was whipped from the time…well, I’m not sure when it happened. She was always special, you know? Always something about the Evans girl. And one day, maybe third year, it wasn’t just something. It was love. Drop down on your knees and weep, thank Merlin you’re alive, even the tiniest mites on a Hippogriff are beautiful because they exist in the world where she is, which makes everything beautiful love. Which, of course, eventually became, drop down on your knees and weep, beg Merlin he’ll spare you the torment of eternal rejection and pain of the most wonderful girl, the only girl, not giving the time of day I’m sure if she just knew the real me she wouldn’t feel this way oh Merlin what do I do how do I make it stop love.
I don’t know who James Potter would be if there were no Lily Evans in the equation. That’s fucked up beyond belief, in case you weren’t aware.
My jaw started to ache and I realized that it was clenched. Hard. And probably had been since we entered the Great Hall five minutes ago. I made an effort to relax it, because I was pretty sure I clenched my jaw all the time, and it was starting to make weird clicking noises when I ate, and it ached at random times, so I should probably relax and stop with the clenching.
But a minute later, as I went to shovel bacon in my mouth, I had to pry my bottom teeth from the top row, where they had been hell-bent on battling to the death. My will power seemed utterly useless in helping fix any problems in my life.
Now, I didn’t exactly have what you might call a “plan of action” at this point, but I guess by default I was ignoring Evans, turnabout being fair play and all that, you know. So there I was, ignoring Evans because I didn’t know what else to do. My mates were all sort of eyeing each other every minute or so, but didn’t say anything. My recent reticence on the Evans topic was very unlike me, especially after such a big development as losing my virginity (Merlin, I cringe every time I think that word; makes me feel like girl in pigtails) with Evans. But after their initial teasing and commiseration, they had decided to give me space, I suppose.
Plus, I imagine they were a bit relieved to not hear me whingeing about her for once. Berks.
So, I was fully entrenched, ready for the long haul of out-ignoring Lily. I had bacon, three best mates, and a day of Hogsmeade ahead of me. I was good to go.
As I was unhinging my jaws to stuff some more French toast in the munching cave, Lily stood up and, after waving goodbye to her friends, walked right past me and out of the Great Hall.
“Go on without me,” I shot at Sirius, Remus, and Peter (they groaned, the berks) as I bolted off the bench and after Lily. Well, what did you expect? I said I had bacon as willpower food. Everyone knows bacon is notoriously horrible for willpower. You need bananas and shit for that.
She was practically running up the steps by the time I burst through the doors, as if she had known I would follow. I tired very hard to ignore how magnificent her calves looked hopping up all the steps. So smooth and shapely…
“Lily! Bloody stop, would you?”
“Leave me alone, Potter!”
“I’m not leaving! We can have this conversation shouting across a flight of steps or you could slow down and we could have it in private!” I was closing on her anyway; I was as fit as I had ever been in my life as a result of grueling practices as a result of excess stress needing an outlet as a result of Lily ignoring me as a result of accidentally corking Lily, so running up steps wasn’t exactly exhausting.
Do you see why I always cock everything up? My brain does not think things in a way that makes any sense. It makes these great big circle-chains of questionable logic so that by the end I can’t tell how I got there, which, if I could, I would be able to say, “Look! Right here! Premise 3 is clearly untrue and therefore the resultant conclusions are unsound!” Instead, I say, “Sounds about right to me!” and do idiotic things like charm a dozen roses emerald green for her eyes and ignore the fact that they actually look like sort of like slime-covered roses and give them to her anyway.
Incidentally, it also makes my thoughts very long and complicated run-on sentences.
So at the top of the second flight of stairs, I caught her right wrist with my left arm. I swear I hardly pulled her at all, so I was stunned when she, without missing a beat, used the movement to spin around and slap me across the face. It hurt, but I’ve hard worse, so I resisted the urge to reach a hand up and gingerly touch it. It wouldn’t help, anyway.
Her hand was covering her open mouth then, and her eyes looked surprisingly wet. Like at any minute she was going to…
Bollocks.
“Lily, don’t cry… It’s okay, it didn’t even hurt much! No no no sorry, I mean, it did hurt! You’ve got a hell of an arm for a girl, I just meant that it’ll be fine and I deserve it anyway, so don’t cry. Please, please don’t cry!” I was stricken. I’ll admit it; James Potter does not know how to comfort crying women. Sirius does, because it’s apparently a great ploy to get a bird. But I don’t. Especially not Lily. Everything you try to say just seems to make it worse. So I decided to hug her. That was standard protocol, right? Hug away the tears?
She was at the landing but I was a step below her, so when I cautiously wrapped my arms around her waist, bringing her closer, her head fell on my shoulder.
I tried not to think it, I swear I did. I devoted a lot of energy to not thinking it, because I knew that if I thought it, I would be at least twenty per cent less manly, and that was not acceptable. But w by now we all know what my will power is worth, and I thought it. A perfect fit. The way her head tucked into my shoulders when I was just a few inches shorter.
Still a little shocked she hadn’t slapped me again, I hesitantly brought one hand up to stroke her back, reassuring-like. She cried harder into my shirt. Shit!
“Lily? I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m not sure what I did, well, this time, at least, but I’m sorry.” She pushed off me, almost making me lose my balance on the stairs. Her eyes were wide, lashes made darker and clumped together by tears, which still tracked down her face. Don’t ask me to tell you how she felt or what she was thinking, because I’m positive that any guess I made would be whole Quidditch pitches away from the truth. But I did know what I was thinking, and I said it.
“You’re beautiful.” Her face seemed to crumple, and then we were kissing. It was wet, and big, and different from the other times. I thought about pushing her away, preventing this travesty from repeating itself (preventing the sucker punch to my gut when she walked away again), but those eyes. Big and vulnerable? Scared? Angry? Hurt? Confused? Then…like everything was collapsing, falling apart.
Which, if I had had even half my wits at the time, which I never seem to around Evans, I might have realized what that expression could have meant. Because everything is collapsing. The wizarding world is falling apart, going to war, and though I have plans for after Hogwarts (plans to fight it, to change it), she’s the one who has the most cause to crumple and cry in stairwells about it.
But I didn’t have even half of my wits at the time, and I’m bloody self-centered and caught up in wondering if it’s about me or if it’s maybe just her time of the month (it’s not, as I was about to discover). Then her tongue brushed mine and brain function was a thing of the past. I curved my hands around her face, cupping her jaw and brushing her soft cheeks with my thumbs, savoring this kiss like I hadn’t the others, pretending the feeling behind it was love for me.
I brought one hand down to the small of her back to lead her to an empty classroom a little ways down the hall, my thumb coming away, wet from her tears.
My poor, poor Lily. What had I done to her? My chest tightened and I felt the need to show her beautiful, how precious she was and how she should never let anything or anyone in this world bring her down.
I backed us slowly toward the classroom, our feet getting tangled until finally I just hoisted her up by the waist and she wrapped her legs around me, mouth immediately coming back to mine.
How no one walked by in that time is a mystery to me. Even on a Hogsmeade day, you could rarely walk through this part of the castle without a few students or professors trickling past. But I guess the universe wanted to keep its showing of the Evans/Potter Twisted Fest private for a while, so we weren’t discovered.
Inside the room there were counters like from our first time. I carefully set her down and, after one or two tries (she didn’t seem to want to be parted from my lips, which normally would be a nice compliment, but it seemed sort of desperate, like it was linked to those emotions I couldn’t read on her face earlier), laid her down on the table. I leaned down and kept kissing her, slipping my hand under her skirt and inside her knickers so I could gently massage the bundle of nerves there (I didn’t know much about female anatomy, but every guy who ever aspires to be good in bed knows about that).
She gasped in that breathy way only beautiful girls seem able to do and I knew what I wanted to do. I spent a while like that, caressing her, unbuttoning her shirt (I should have gotten an award for doing that without looking and with only one hand; I could have done it with magic, but I didn’t want her to think I had memorized a bunch of kinky spells that I used on tons of girls or anything. Plus, touching her was worth it), and skimming my hand over the skin of her abdomen, clavicle, neck, wherever I could reach.
Eventually, I pulled away and looked at her. I could see her shallow, rapid breathing in every swell of her chest. The most entrancing sight I had ever beheld, and I’ve traveled half the world with my parents on holidays, seen some of the most beautiful scenery the world has to offer.
I kissed my way down her neck, between her cleavage (it was hard not to take a detour there), and down her stomach, slowly unbuttoning her jeans and sliding them off her legs as I blazed a gentle trail of kisses.
The thought of going down on a girl was terrifying-what if I was bad at it? What if it tasted strange? What if it was just a scary, scary place down there once you got up close?-but it was this strange compulsion to please her. I know now, and probably knew it then, too, that she wouldn’t realize what I was trying to do, but it made perfect sense that pleasing her, and not myself, in this way would show her how beautiful and magnificent she was. And okay, now I’m repeating myself, but I never said I was a poet. I know few beautiful words, and I can’t stop myself from thinking them about Lily, who deserves every one.
So I swallowed my fear and brushed the tip of my nose along the inside of her thigh, making her shiver. I kept skimming my nose, lips, eyelashes, fingers past the sensitive skin of her legs, until I worked up the courage to slowly peel the top of her panties down (they weren’t exactly risqué, just some white cotton edged in lace, but Lily made everything sexy). Her hands flew from where they had been lolling off the edge of the desk and clamped on my hands. Her head came up and she looked a little panicked and embarrassed.
“Trust me,” I whispered, hoping that for once she could read my true intentions. I may have cheated and brushed my hands up her thigh again. Her eyes fluttered closed the way they do when something feels good, and after a moment she slowly laid her head back down and unclenched her hands from around mine. She didn’t seem to know what to do with them, though, so I picked them up and kissed each palm, before wrapping the fingers around the edges of the desk. Hopefully she’d need to grip something soon, but for now they sat loosely there. I scooted her further down and put her legs over my shoulder as I kneeled down.
I’d be lying if I said I haven’t, erm, you know…relieved some tension to the memory of Lily arching and breathing hoarsely, hands tangled in my hair as she came, my tongue inside her. Though I daydreamed about her going down on me (duh), I spent more time waiting to do it to her again. Maybe to start off eating her out, then, right when she’s on the edge, I could stop and roll her over and take her dogg-
I’m not sure I can ever think that without Padfoot jumping into my brain, which is so not what I want to fantasize about.
I fantasized about a lot of things, but mostly I remember the after. When her hands finally untangled from my hair and her body was resting pliant, recovering, on the table. I felt pretty damn good right about then, but embarrassment crept in. I wanted to kiss her, but was that weird? And how long would it take before she threw her clothes back on and stormed out?
My nervous thoughts were broken by Lily’s, “Ow.” I stood up, wincing at the stiffness in my knees, from where I had been sitting, rocked back on my heels, since she had finished. I couldn’t think how I could have hurt her, but I worried anyway. As I was standing, she summoned her underwear to herself (lazy witch, I thought fondly) and slipped them on. She stayed laid on the table though.
“What is it?”
“Cramp,” she said with a huff of air that could almost have been a laugh.
“Where?”
“Leg,” she said. “Guess it was tense for a little too long,” she said. And she was almost smiling. I laughed. I wanted to take this moment of her not running away and profess my love, but instead I was laughing.
I really hate myself sometimes.
“Don’t laugh,” she said. “It’s your fault!”
“I’m sorry. If it was that bad, I’ll-“
“Oh, shut up,” she said, and it was definitely a smile. A weird one, but a smile. She was rotating her leg around, trying to work the cramp out, as she closed her shirt, not buttoning it.
“Do you want…?” I trailed off, gesturing to her leg. I was no stranger to cramps, and thought I’d only ever massaged one out of my own leg after Quidditch practice, I figured I could probably help her out. She raised an eyebrow like, what now you’re a trainer, too?
I raised one back. She snorted.
Challenge accepted.
I grabbed her left knee to stop her rotating. I touched the muscle at the top of her thigh, where I would assume she was cramping. I looked at her; she nodded. I started working the muscle the way I would if it were my leg, but gentler, because her skin didn’t seem like it could hardly take any friction at all. Which got me to thinking about what would reduce friction. Which got me to thinking about some body oil. Which got my mind going places that did not help my painfully obvious erection go anywhere.
She sighed and I felt the muscle relax. I kept rubbing light circles with my thumb, though, desperate to prolong this, to feel like an ordinary couple cuddling after sex.
I saw the blush appear on her cheeks, could practically see when the flight urge kicked in. I leaned against the edge of the table and didn’t stop gently rubbing. I wished I could massage away her fear, anger, embarrassment, hatred, whatever it is that kept us apart.
“Are you okay?” I asked, quiet as a mouse in my fear that the slightest disturbance would cause her to bolt like a frightened deer. Which would actually be okay, because, as you know, I’m a stag. I wondered what Lily’s patronus was, then refocused.
She sat up and looked away from me. My hand fell away from her leg and to my side. Would it sound too dramatic to say that my heart broke?
But she answered. “I’m fine.” It wasn’t the most reassuring response in terms of content, but the fact that she had said anything at all allayed the worst of my concerns.
“Do you… do you want to talk about it?” She did that huffing laugh again.
“I know how boys hate emotional drama.”
“When I said ‘do you want to talk about it’, it was code for ‘please Merlin tell me about it,’” I said. I was serious, but I’m a funny guy, so it came out all funny-like and she actually sort of laughed.
“No offense, but you’re sort of the last person I want to talk to about it.” Yeah. Good thing she said ‘no offense’, otherwise that would have really hurt.
“Maybe that means I’m the person you should be talking to about it.” She looked at me, straight in my eyes, and it happens so rarely that it still feels like a tractor beam holding me in place when we lock eyes. I can barely blink.
“Maybe,” she said. I opened my mouth in a fit of Gryffindor courage to start the conversation we need to have, but she looked away and cut me off, “Look, I should get going. Birds day in the village.” And suddenly I had about as much courage as a Hufflepuff (sorry, Puffsters) and I swallow my words and sadness. I backed up a step, then two.
“Yeah,” I said, voice sounding like the morning after a full moon. Rough, dry, and painful. I cleared my throat and hoped she didn’t notice. A minute later, she was dressed and we were both hovering by the door.
“Bye,” she said. A small surge of the Gryffindor spirit was back and after I opened the door, I pecked her on the cheek and said, “Bye,” before fleeing. I took a passage to the village instead of walking the path because I wanted to be alone.
The guys wanted to know where I’d been, and I told them the truth-that I’d wanted to talk to Evans about The Incident-and a lie-that it had gone horribly.
Remus gave me a small, sad sort of encouraging smile, Sirius patted me on the back in the painful manly way, and Peter just sort of nodded. Then I bought my weight in Honeydukes and Zonko’s products and we wreaked general mayhem in the village.
I didn’t see Lily, but it was a good day.
I fantasize about doing a lot of things with Lily, but mostly I remember the after when she smiled.
Pairing: Lily/James
Length: 4,244 words (chaptered)
Summary: Their beginning is less romance and more...clandestine. "It started a month ago with, as you may have guessed, an argument... She shuddered like I was her fix, and how twisted is it that that made my heart burst with happiness?" Smut!
The situation: A few weeks before Christmas hols, Seventh Year. By this time, Lily and I had had sex twice, and I had become so confused by her that it spread to my life at large, resulting in embarrassing scenes such as A) reciting the recipe for the Draught of Living Death in response, apparently, to Flitwick’s request that I stop snoring in class, and B) getting caught by Lily for staring at Lily, which seemed to make Lily mad, which made me ask Lily’s friend Marlene to Hogsmeade, so that Lily wouldn’t think I had been staring at her, which made a) Marlene slap me and b) Lily storm off.
Does she get to be jealous when she won’t even return my owls? …Yes, alright, I owled her. That’s how cowardly I am.
Lily,
I know things have been…unusual, but I think we need to talk. As soon as possible. And probably we should keep at least five, or maybe ten, feet of distance between us at all times to prevent things from happening again. I think we can both agree that that would be a bad idea. Please, just tell me a time and a place and I’ll be there, approximately five to ten feet away from you. Although, maybe five feet is better so that there will be no shouting, which can often lead to other people overhearing conversations, which would also be bad.
James
I had wanted to write Love, James, but that was stupid. Then I tried Sincerely, James and wanted to cringe. Same for Regards and Cheers. Almost went with, Until then, but decided at the last minute it sounded desperate.
But does she respond? No. No way can somebody throw a bloke a bone and explain her insane behavior, because then James Potter’s life would be just WAY TOO BLEEDING EASY! Scheduled a Quidditch practice for the Friday before the Hogsmeade trip, and everyone whined so much that I had no choice but to keep them an hour late.
I skipped rounds that night because she had the same shift and I was worried we might accidentally cross paths in that gray area on the third floor that nobody knows whose job it is to patrol, and if I was on patrol I would probably have purposefully lingered there hoping to see her because I’m a glutton for punishment. So I avoided the problem entirely.
But at eleven o’clock I had a sudden and inexplicable hankering for treacle tart and Butterbeer. Only one place for that in the castle: the kitchens.
I didn’t grab my cloak because, after all, I am the Head Boy, and I was supposed to be on rounds, and I slowly ambled down the changing steps of Hogwarts to the still life portrait to tickle the pear. The elves were more than gracious, and I left completely satisfied. I walked slowly up to the tower, just to see if any students were out of bed past curfew, but ran across no one. Absolutely no one at all.
I crawled into my bed and shut the hangings, totally, one hundred percent satisfied and ready for Hogsmeade.
Why did everything in this shite Gryffindor Tower have to be so bloody red?
We slept in. We woke slowly, eventually wandering into the Common Room where we got up to our usual charming boyish antics (Sirius said he was prettier than I was, so I had to tackle him, of course, which led to Peter being Peter and Remus being Remus, separating us with that bloody effective charm of his (after he took two bets on the outcome-I saw it, I’m positive!)). We ambled down to the Great Hall to enjoy breakfast, most of the third years and up having already bolted down their meals to find their way into the village, so the tables were sparsely populated. Just the younger students and other jaded uppers who didn’t quite care so much anymore.
Guess who was among their ranks?
Did you guess Lily? I bet you guessed Lily. And you know what? You’d be right! Because if someone unusual or interesting or really, anything happens in my life that is at all worthy of mention, you could pretty much be guaran-damn-teed it’s about Lily Evans.
Sometimes I hate her. I’m not even kidding. I know it sounds like I’m kidding, but I’m not. Do you know what it feels like to have your identity ripped from you as a teenager and taken up by someone else? Someone who doesn’t even care? Someone who hates you? I never even had a chance. I was whipped from the time…well, I’m not sure when it happened. She was always special, you know? Always something about the Evans girl. And one day, maybe third year, it wasn’t just something. It was love. Drop down on your knees and weep, thank Merlin you’re alive, even the tiniest mites on a Hippogriff are beautiful because they exist in the world where she is, which makes everything beautiful love. Which, of course, eventually became, drop down on your knees and weep, beg Merlin he’ll spare you the torment of eternal rejection and pain of the most wonderful girl, the only girl, not giving the time of day I’m sure if she just knew the real me she wouldn’t feel this way oh Merlin what do I do how do I make it stop love.
I don’t know who James Potter would be if there were no Lily Evans in the equation. That’s fucked up beyond belief, in case you weren’t aware.
My jaw started to ache and I realized that it was clenched. Hard. And probably had been since we entered the Great Hall five minutes ago. I made an effort to relax it, because I was pretty sure I clenched my jaw all the time, and it was starting to make weird clicking noises when I ate, and it ached at random times, so I should probably relax and stop with the clenching.
But a minute later, as I went to shovel bacon in my mouth, I had to pry my bottom teeth from the top row, where they had been hell-bent on battling to the death. My will power seemed utterly useless in helping fix any problems in my life.
Now, I didn’t exactly have what you might call a “plan of action” at this point, but I guess by default I was ignoring Evans, turnabout being fair play and all that, you know. So there I was, ignoring Evans because I didn’t know what else to do. My mates were all sort of eyeing each other every minute or so, but didn’t say anything. My recent reticence on the Evans topic was very unlike me, especially after such a big development as losing my virginity (Merlin, I cringe every time I think that word; makes me feel like girl in pigtails) with Evans. But after their initial teasing and commiseration, they had decided to give me space, I suppose.
Plus, I imagine they were a bit relieved to not hear me whingeing about her for once. Berks.
So, I was fully entrenched, ready for the long haul of out-ignoring Lily. I had bacon, three best mates, and a day of Hogsmeade ahead of me. I was good to go.
As I was unhinging my jaws to stuff some more French toast in the munching cave, Lily stood up and, after waving goodbye to her friends, walked right past me and out of the Great Hall.
“Go on without me,” I shot at Sirius, Remus, and Peter (they groaned, the berks) as I bolted off the bench and after Lily. Well, what did you expect? I said I had bacon as willpower food. Everyone knows bacon is notoriously horrible for willpower. You need bananas and shit for that.
She was practically running up the steps by the time I burst through the doors, as if she had known I would follow. I tired very hard to ignore how magnificent her calves looked hopping up all the steps. So smooth and shapely…
“Lily! Bloody stop, would you?”
“Leave me alone, Potter!”
“I’m not leaving! We can have this conversation shouting across a flight of steps or you could slow down and we could have it in private!” I was closing on her anyway; I was as fit as I had ever been in my life as a result of grueling practices as a result of excess stress needing an outlet as a result of Lily ignoring me as a result of accidentally corking Lily, so running up steps wasn’t exactly exhausting.
Do you see why I always cock everything up? My brain does not think things in a way that makes any sense. It makes these great big circle-chains of questionable logic so that by the end I can’t tell how I got there, which, if I could, I would be able to say, “Look! Right here! Premise 3 is clearly untrue and therefore the resultant conclusions are unsound!” Instead, I say, “Sounds about right to me!” and do idiotic things like charm a dozen roses emerald green for her eyes and ignore the fact that they actually look like sort of like slime-covered roses and give them to her anyway.
Incidentally, it also makes my thoughts very long and complicated run-on sentences.
So at the top of the second flight of stairs, I caught her right wrist with my left arm. I swear I hardly pulled her at all, so I was stunned when she, without missing a beat, used the movement to spin around and slap me across the face. It hurt, but I’ve hard worse, so I resisted the urge to reach a hand up and gingerly touch it. It wouldn’t help, anyway.
Her hand was covering her open mouth then, and her eyes looked surprisingly wet. Like at any minute she was going to…
Bollocks.
“Lily, don’t cry… It’s okay, it didn’t even hurt much! No no no sorry, I mean, it did hurt! You’ve got a hell of an arm for a girl, I just meant that it’ll be fine and I deserve it anyway, so don’t cry. Please, please don’t cry!” I was stricken. I’ll admit it; James Potter does not know how to comfort crying women. Sirius does, because it’s apparently a great ploy to get a bird. But I don’t. Especially not Lily. Everything you try to say just seems to make it worse. So I decided to hug her. That was standard protocol, right? Hug away the tears?
She was at the landing but I was a step below her, so when I cautiously wrapped my arms around her waist, bringing her closer, her head fell on my shoulder.
I tried not to think it, I swear I did. I devoted a lot of energy to not thinking it, because I knew that if I thought it, I would be at least twenty per cent less manly, and that was not acceptable. But w by now we all know what my will power is worth, and I thought it. A perfect fit. The way her head tucked into my shoulders when I was just a few inches shorter.
Still a little shocked she hadn’t slapped me again, I hesitantly brought one hand up to stroke her back, reassuring-like. She cried harder into my shirt. Shit!
“Lily? I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m not sure what I did, well, this time, at least, but I’m sorry.” She pushed off me, almost making me lose my balance on the stairs. Her eyes were wide, lashes made darker and clumped together by tears, which still tracked down her face. Don’t ask me to tell you how she felt or what she was thinking, because I’m positive that any guess I made would be whole Quidditch pitches away from the truth. But I did know what I was thinking, and I said it.
“You’re beautiful.” Her face seemed to crumple, and then we were kissing. It was wet, and big, and different from the other times. I thought about pushing her away, preventing this travesty from repeating itself (preventing the sucker punch to my gut when she walked away again), but those eyes. Big and vulnerable? Scared? Angry? Hurt? Confused? Then…like everything was collapsing, falling apart.
Which, if I had had even half my wits at the time, which I never seem to around Evans, I might have realized what that expression could have meant. Because everything is collapsing. The wizarding world is falling apart, going to war, and though I have plans for after Hogwarts (plans to fight it, to change it), she’s the one who has the most cause to crumple and cry in stairwells about it.
But I didn’t have even half of my wits at the time, and I’m bloody self-centered and caught up in wondering if it’s about me or if it’s maybe just her time of the month (it’s not, as I was about to discover). Then her tongue brushed mine and brain function was a thing of the past. I curved my hands around her face, cupping her jaw and brushing her soft cheeks with my thumbs, savoring this kiss like I hadn’t the others, pretending the feeling behind it was love for me.
I brought one hand down to the small of her back to lead her to an empty classroom a little ways down the hall, my thumb coming away, wet from her tears.
My poor, poor Lily. What had I done to her? My chest tightened and I felt the need to show her beautiful, how precious she was and how she should never let anything or anyone in this world bring her down.
I backed us slowly toward the classroom, our feet getting tangled until finally I just hoisted her up by the waist and she wrapped her legs around me, mouth immediately coming back to mine.
How no one walked by in that time is a mystery to me. Even on a Hogsmeade day, you could rarely walk through this part of the castle without a few students or professors trickling past. But I guess the universe wanted to keep its showing of the Evans/Potter Twisted Fest private for a while, so we weren’t discovered.
Inside the room there were counters like from our first time. I carefully set her down and, after one or two tries (she didn’t seem to want to be parted from my lips, which normally would be a nice compliment, but it seemed sort of desperate, like it was linked to those emotions I couldn’t read on her face earlier), laid her down on the table. I leaned down and kept kissing her, slipping my hand under her skirt and inside her knickers so I could gently massage the bundle of nerves there (I didn’t know much about female anatomy, but every guy who ever aspires to be good in bed knows about that).
She gasped in that breathy way only beautiful girls seem able to do and I knew what I wanted to do. I spent a while like that, caressing her, unbuttoning her shirt (I should have gotten an award for doing that without looking and with only one hand; I could have done it with magic, but I didn’t want her to think I had memorized a bunch of kinky spells that I used on tons of girls or anything. Plus, touching her was worth it), and skimming my hand over the skin of her abdomen, clavicle, neck, wherever I could reach.
Eventually, I pulled away and looked at her. I could see her shallow, rapid breathing in every swell of her chest. The most entrancing sight I had ever beheld, and I’ve traveled half the world with my parents on holidays, seen some of the most beautiful scenery the world has to offer.
I kissed my way down her neck, between her cleavage (it was hard not to take a detour there), and down her stomach, slowly unbuttoning her jeans and sliding them off her legs as I blazed a gentle trail of kisses.
The thought of going down on a girl was terrifying-what if I was bad at it? What if it tasted strange? What if it was just a scary, scary place down there once you got up close?-but it was this strange compulsion to please her. I know now, and probably knew it then, too, that she wouldn’t realize what I was trying to do, but it made perfect sense that pleasing her, and not myself, in this way would show her how beautiful and magnificent she was. And okay, now I’m repeating myself, but I never said I was a poet. I know few beautiful words, and I can’t stop myself from thinking them about Lily, who deserves every one.
So I swallowed my fear and brushed the tip of my nose along the inside of her thigh, making her shiver. I kept skimming my nose, lips, eyelashes, fingers past the sensitive skin of her legs, until I worked up the courage to slowly peel the top of her panties down (they weren’t exactly risqué, just some white cotton edged in lace, but Lily made everything sexy). Her hands flew from where they had been lolling off the edge of the desk and clamped on my hands. Her head came up and she looked a little panicked and embarrassed.
“Trust me,” I whispered, hoping that for once she could read my true intentions. I may have cheated and brushed my hands up her thigh again. Her eyes fluttered closed the way they do when something feels good, and after a moment she slowly laid her head back down and unclenched her hands from around mine. She didn’t seem to know what to do with them, though, so I picked them up and kissed each palm, before wrapping the fingers around the edges of the desk. Hopefully she’d need to grip something soon, but for now they sat loosely there. I scooted her further down and put her legs over my shoulder as I kneeled down.
I’d be lying if I said I haven’t, erm, you know…relieved some tension to the memory of Lily arching and breathing hoarsely, hands tangled in my hair as she came, my tongue inside her. Though I daydreamed about her going down on me (duh), I spent more time waiting to do it to her again. Maybe to start off eating her out, then, right when she’s on the edge, I could stop and roll her over and take her dogg-
I’m not sure I can ever think that without Padfoot jumping into my brain, which is so not what I want to fantasize about.
I fantasized about a lot of things, but mostly I remember the after. When her hands finally untangled from my hair and her body was resting pliant, recovering, on the table. I felt pretty damn good right about then, but embarrassment crept in. I wanted to kiss her, but was that weird? And how long would it take before she threw her clothes back on and stormed out?
My nervous thoughts were broken by Lily’s, “Ow.” I stood up, wincing at the stiffness in my knees, from where I had been sitting, rocked back on my heels, since she had finished. I couldn’t think how I could have hurt her, but I worried anyway. As I was standing, she summoned her underwear to herself (lazy witch, I thought fondly) and slipped them on. She stayed laid on the table though.
“What is it?”
“Cramp,” she said with a huff of air that could almost have been a laugh.
“Where?”
“Leg,” she said. “Guess it was tense for a little too long,” she said. And she was almost smiling. I laughed. I wanted to take this moment of her not running away and profess my love, but instead I was laughing.
I really hate myself sometimes.
“Don’t laugh,” she said. “It’s your fault!”
“I’m sorry. If it was that bad, I’ll-“
“Oh, shut up,” she said, and it was definitely a smile. A weird one, but a smile. She was rotating her leg around, trying to work the cramp out, as she closed her shirt, not buttoning it.
“Do you want…?” I trailed off, gesturing to her leg. I was no stranger to cramps, and thought I’d only ever massaged one out of my own leg after Quidditch practice, I figured I could probably help her out. She raised an eyebrow like, what now you’re a trainer, too?
I raised one back. She snorted.
Challenge accepted.
I grabbed her left knee to stop her rotating. I touched the muscle at the top of her thigh, where I would assume she was cramping. I looked at her; she nodded. I started working the muscle the way I would if it were my leg, but gentler, because her skin didn’t seem like it could hardly take any friction at all. Which got me to thinking about what would reduce friction. Which got me to thinking about some body oil. Which got my mind going places that did not help my painfully obvious erection go anywhere.
She sighed and I felt the muscle relax. I kept rubbing light circles with my thumb, though, desperate to prolong this, to feel like an ordinary couple cuddling after sex.
I saw the blush appear on her cheeks, could practically see when the flight urge kicked in. I leaned against the edge of the table and didn’t stop gently rubbing. I wished I could massage away her fear, anger, embarrassment, hatred, whatever it is that kept us apart.
“Are you okay?” I asked, quiet as a mouse in my fear that the slightest disturbance would cause her to bolt like a frightened deer. Which would actually be okay, because, as you know, I’m a stag. I wondered what Lily’s patronus was, then refocused.
She sat up and looked away from me. My hand fell away from her leg and to my side. Would it sound too dramatic to say that my heart broke?
But she answered. “I’m fine.” It wasn’t the most reassuring response in terms of content, but the fact that she had said anything at all allayed the worst of my concerns.
“Do you… do you want to talk about it?” She did that huffing laugh again.
“I know how boys hate emotional drama.”
“When I said ‘do you want to talk about it’, it was code for ‘please Merlin tell me about it,’” I said. I was serious, but I’m a funny guy, so it came out all funny-like and she actually sort of laughed.
“No offense, but you’re sort of the last person I want to talk to about it.” Yeah. Good thing she said ‘no offense’, otherwise that would have really hurt.
“Maybe that means I’m the person you should be talking to about it.” She looked at me, straight in my eyes, and it happens so rarely that it still feels like a tractor beam holding me in place when we lock eyes. I can barely blink.
“Maybe,” she said. I opened my mouth in a fit of Gryffindor courage to start the conversation we need to have, but she looked away and cut me off, “Look, I should get going. Birds day in the village.” And suddenly I had about as much courage as a Hufflepuff (sorry, Puffsters) and I swallow my words and sadness. I backed up a step, then two.
“Yeah,” I said, voice sounding like the morning after a full moon. Rough, dry, and painful. I cleared my throat and hoped she didn’t notice. A minute later, she was dressed and we were both hovering by the door.
“Bye,” she said. A small surge of the Gryffindor spirit was back and after I opened the door, I pecked her on the cheek and said, “Bye,” before fleeing. I took a passage to the village instead of walking the path because I wanted to be alone.
The guys wanted to know where I’d been, and I told them the truth-that I’d wanted to talk to Evans about The Incident-and a lie-that it had gone horribly.
Remus gave me a small, sad sort of encouraging smile, Sirius patted me on the back in the painful manly way, and Peter just sort of nodded. Then I bought my weight in Honeydukes and Zonko’s products and we wreaked general mayhem in the village.
I didn’t see Lily, but it was a good day.
I fantasize about doing a lot of things with Lily, but mostly I remember the after when she smiled.