Coping skills
James never thought he’d find it, the love he had been dying to experience as a little boy. The love he had read about in his romance books in middle school. Everyone had thought him to be a big sap when he used to tell them how he envisioned the love of his life to be.
All he had ever longed for was that easy going domesticity. Someone who made him tea, and liked his nick-name giving skills, even though they pretended not to. Someone who he could learn from, but also cuddle up in bed after a long day of errands.
It was true that James loved deeply, some might say he wore his heart on his sleeve. After all it was his mum, that had first told him to be careful with it. That not everyone might appreciate the richness of his love.
So when the first person he had been in a relationship with told James that he was ´to much´ and that they ´couldn’t put up with it anymore´ , James had thought he would be better off not dating in high school.
That whole ordeal had happened when James had been 16. Seeing as he was now 17 and hadn’t had an actual relationship since then, you might think James wasn’t all that popular. Well, you’d be wrong.
He had been sleeping around a lot recently, trying to cope with the fact that maybe he ´just wasn’t a good boyfriend´. Thats the conclusion he came to in the end. And anyway the girls he slept with he never saw more than once. And since thats all they were (casual hookups), it prevented him from actually falling in love and burdening the other person.
His hookups were usually pretty happy they’d get a ´chance to woo James potter´ but James had made a mental note that at the end of the night, it would always end in them asking James ´this one-time thing will stay between us, right?´. Honestly James was already pretty accustomed to it, he usually only hooked up with people when he was either sad or felt that something was off. Like the voice in his head telling him ´you’ll never be enough James´ was getting to loud.
It had worked for a while, at least enough to get his mind off of that nagging voice in the back of his head. Now he had to focus on more important matters, like helping a soaking wet regulus that had stumbled into his house, and was now wrapped up in a blanket with Sirius hugging him tightly.