Lily’s heart was in her throat as she made her way through the labyrinth of corridors, trying to get to the transfiguration classroom. She had never missed one of her and James’s study sessions.
It had started when Professor McGonagall had walked into the common room while Lily and James were having one of their legendary arguments that kept the whole common from focusing in fourth year. James had sent a tripping jinx at Snape after Snape had tried to send a nasty hex at Remus after breakfast.
“You don’t have to be such a bully!” Lily yelled, the whole common room looking on to the redhead. “You’re so selfish and you think about yourself!”
James, for his part, looked only a little peeved. He knew he was justified to an extent. Severus did try to send a bat bogey hex at Remus, who was still recovering from a full moon, after breakfast. Of course Evans wasn’t there to see that. And if protecting Remus met getting on the receiving end of one of her rages, so be it.
“Maybe your precious Severus isn’t quite as innocent as you think he is,” James said, cutting Lily off.
Lily’s face turned the color of a tomato. She grabbed her wand and was about to send a hex the likes of which James had never seen before, but there was a flash of light and Lily’s wand went flying through the air.
It was caught by Professor McGonagall, her lips pinched in a furious scowl and her nostrils flaring.
“Miss Evans and Mr. Potter!” she said. “My office. Now.”
Lily’s turned red, less of anger and now embarrassment. She still felt rage boiling in her stomach as she followed behind McGonagall but in front of James. He was used to this by now. Professor McGonagall leading him to her office was a bi-weekly occurrence. He had nothing to fear unless Minnie felt the need to write a letter to his mum.
Other students snickered at them as they passed and Lily felt close to tears by the time they made it to her office. The professor moved two chairs in front of her desk with a wave of her wand and then stood behind her desk, hands on her hips, as she waited for the two of them to sit.
“Words cannot describe how disappointed I am in you, Miss Evans,” McGonagall said, after they sat, Lily’s toes barely grazing the stone floor. “You yell at James for hexing people, but you were about to do the same, were you not?”
Lily shrunk in her seat as she nodded once.
“And you, Mr. Potter,” McGonagall said. “I don’t know what you did, but I can’t imagine it was good. I’m disappointed in you as well.”
James averted his eyes to the floor.
“I hope you two realize that whether you like it or not, you’re stuck here together until you graduate,” McGonagall said. “I think you two need to learn how to cooperate with each other.”
Lily didn’t like the sound of this, her eyes widening in fear. What could McGonagall make them do? Be partners in every class? Tie their hands together? How would they use the restroom?
Professor McGonagall sat at her desk and pulled some pieces of parchment out from her desk and laid them neatly in front of her. The Scottish woman then took a second to inspect the papers as the nervous energy rose in the kids. James’s knee started bouncing up and down and Lily’s hand shot out to stop it.
“Mr. Potter, it seems that your Potions seems to be toeing the line between Acceptable and Poor,” Professor McGonagall said. “That’s very odd for a Potter.”
James let out a squawk of embarrassment, his hand going up and tugging on his hair. He didn’t want Evans, who now had a small smirk on her lips, to know.
“And Miss Evans, based on your last essay on the use of object Transfiguration, it seems that you aren’t fairing much better in my class.”
Lily’s smirk quickly fell. She crossed her arms tightly across her chest.
“You two are going to meet here every Tuesday to help each other with Potions and Transfiguration.”
The study sessions had been running for four years, just the two of them in Professor McGonagall’s classroom for two hours. The days changed over the years, but those two hours had become moments of truce between the two, even after the OWLs incident.
It was now becoming something more. Just the thought of James’s name made Lily’s stomach tie in knots.
She wished she could say it was just lust, but while James wasn’t everyone’s type, he most certainly was Lily’s. Messy black curls that begged to have her fingers run through it, a dimple in his left cheek, brown eyes that looked golden in the light behind flattering specs. He was still lanky, with long limbs, but he was lean and had muscle definition that Lily had to look away from when she saw him after Quidditch practice.
But it wasn’t just lust, no. It was the way he laughed, so open and carefree. It was how much he just cared for his friends, often hugging Sirius, Remus, and Peter tightly, not caring what anyone else thought. It was the way he could just sit with someone and have them laugh in an instant, even making Professor McGonagall crack a smile with his witty words.
God, it was fucking torture.
But what made Lily feel like she wanted vomit as she made her way to the study session was the words of Emmaline Vance.
It had been after dinner, in their bedroom. Em, Marlene, Dorcas, Alice, and Mary were winding down for the day while Lily was grabbing things for her study session.
Mary sighed. “Peter was a good snog,” she said, responding to Marlene's declaration that boys did not know how to kiss.
“Frank knows what he’s doing as well,” Alice said, a shy smile on her face. The other girls let out a noise, still teasing Alice for her romance with last year’s headboy.
“James has to be the best in our year,” Emmaline said, smiling. “And I’ve kissed a good percentage of them.”
Dorcas and Alice gasped, while Lily froze.
“When did you and James snog?” Marlene asked, throwing her robes at Emmaline, outrage that this was the first time they were hearing about this.
Emmaline shrugged. “It was last year at Hogsmeade, I think? When we went out on that date?”
“That one date?” Dorcas asked. “You came back and said there was no spark!”
“Well, yeah,” Emmaline, flipping her dark hair over her shoulder. “We snogged for a good hour but we decided there wasn’t much else there.”
“Have you snogged since then?” Alice asked.
“No, unfortunately,” Emmaline said with a frown. “I dream about his tongue though.”
The rest of the girls let out noises of disgust but Lily was still frozen, something that felt a little too much like jealousy coursing through her veins.
It was stupid, Lily knew. She had no claim to James whatsoever, especially not a year ago. She remembers not feeling jealous when he had asked Emmaline out. But now, she wanted to find the nearest closet and cry, which also made her angry that she cared that much about James.
She was composed as she stepped into the room, McGonagall had the candles still on for them in the otherwise dim room in the fading daylight. Luckily, James wasn’t there so she had a few minutes to compose herself.
She waved her hand and had two of the desks turn and face each other, a habit from when this had started as a punishment. She claimed hers, the left one, and set about getting her things out. She really needed help with the animal transformation essay that was due at the end of the week.
Just as she started to review a passage from her textbook and the jealousy momentarily forgotten, the door flung open, startling her so bad that she almost broke her quill.
“Sorry!” James said moving through the room like a hurricane. “Bloody fucking Tabolt thinks he’s too above drills and then he launched a bludger through the stands again—”
The words faded to hums when Lily realized that he was shirtless. A defined brown stomach, hair sprinkled along his chest but more so the further you looked down.
“—so then I jumped into the shower because I didn’t think you’d appreciate me smelling like a hog pen,” James said, throwing Lily back into reality as he grabbed a plain white shirt and started putting it on. “I also realized how late it was and took off running as soon as I had trousers on. Anyway, sorry for being late.”
She didn’t know what to say. All she could picture was James, half naked, running through the grounds and castles to get to her. She needed a very cold shower.
He dropped his broom and cursed, but left it on the floor as he grabbed the things he needed from his bag.
“So, animal transfigurations are really about force, rather than precise movement like charms or potions,” he said, walking over to her. He sat all his things down at the desk directly in front of her and she got a whiff of his soap that was definitely not helping things.
“Like with a patronus, there has to be a lot of intent both mentally and physically,” he said, pushing up his glasses before he dropped down into the seat.
He opened his textbook with a thump and started thumbing through the pages.
“So, on page 455, you can see where this is highlighted,” he said. “So when you become an animagus, you have to do all those silly little rituals because you need to have this kind of intent. Like when you hold the leaf on your tongue for a month, not only are you showing your dedication to the process, you're teaching your magic resilience is a physical way. Whereas like charms, it's mostly about mental resilience.”
He licked his lips before taking a deep breath and his golden eyes glanced up at her.
“Are you okay?” he asked, scrunching his nose a bit. “Normally, you’d be like ‘that sounds fake’ or something like that by now.”
Her mouth felt particularly dry as she spoke. “Yeah.”
His eyes narrowed and he leaned back in his chair.
“Nope,” he said. “You have your distressed face on.”
Her eyebrows skyrocketed. “Distressed face?”
“Your eyes go wide and stay that way,” he said. “I’ve seen it every time we’ve had a test.”
Lily tried to tell her traitorous heart that just because he knows something like that about her, doesn’t mean it meant anything, but it hummed happily in her chest.
“Not in any sort of distress,” she said, looking back down at her book.
“Hmm,” James hummed, making Lily snap her head up.
“I’m not.”
“Sure.”
She sighed and rolled her eyes.
“If you were, though… you’d tell me right?” he asked. “Like it isn’t Snape or Mulciber or anything right?”
“No, it’s not,” she said softly.
“You’d let me know if it was?” he asked.
Lily lifted her head back up and their eyes met again. He searched for an answer in her eyes, concern only growing in his.
God, he cared about her, she thought as her heart swelled. And God, she cared about him, too. So much.
“I’d let you know,” she said, watching as relief flooded his eyes.
And then he licked his lips again.
It was too much for Lily. She felt like at any second she was going to combust into flames.
“God!” she exclaimed as she stood up and grabbed a fistfull of James’s shirt and pulled him a kiss as she leaned over the desks.
She gave it her all against his surprised lips, kissing him like this was going to be the only time ever.
And then he started kissing back and Lily found she couldn’t even be mad at Emmaline because holy shit she was right. She never realized that just a kiss to feel like her whole body was electrified and that she might actually die if he pulled away.
Which he did, a wet noise between their lips as he pulled away. Lily stared at him, a bit nervous at the expression on his face as her fingers released the shirt she had grasped in a fist.
James stood up and in a swift motion, he walked around the desk, his large hands wrapping around Lily’s waist as he turned her and pulled her to him, her chair falling to the floor with a clatter as he bent down and pressed his lips to hers.
The height difference was a bit awkward as Lily stretched up to her tiptoes as James’s tongue entered her mouth and started doing wondrous things as Lily threw her arms around his neck.
James’s hands left her waist and dipped down to the back of her thighs and for a moment Lily thought that it was going to go that way but he instead just lifted her up and deposited her on the desk, so Lily didn’t have to be on her toes.
She didn’t care about how she was sitting on her open textbook or how James’s glasses dig into her face. All she could care about is the way his tongue maneuvered around her mouth and the burning want of wanting his hands on her.
She tangled one hand into his hair as the other went down on the desk to balance herself as he untucked her shirt and his calloused hands dragged across her stomach and teasing the edge of her bra.
James’s lips left hers and started kissing down her jaw and then to her neck until he found a stop that made a noise escape from Lily’s lips. She started lowering down, taking James with her. She was ready to have the feeling of his body against hers, especially if kept sucking on her neck like that.
Lily was almost completely against the desk when they heard a door slam so loud, they felt the vibrations.
They sprung apart like they had been stung and looked to see Professor McGonagall standing in the doorway to her room.
“Well, this isn’t quite what I imagined when I made the punishment,” Professor McGonagall said, her voice stern but her lips tilted up. “I think it’s time you two stop studying in private here.”
They just stared, frozen, Lily propped up on her elbows and James hand in front of the crouch of his pants.
“I’ll give you two minutes to grab your things and then you two can find a different area,” McGonagall said. “I heard the library is a popular area for study sessions like these.”
She turned and walked back out of the room. James turned his gaze towards Lily. It was quiet for a beat before they started laughing.
“Oh my god,” she said. “Did that just happen?”
“This kissing? Or Minnie?” he asked.
“Both.”
“The kiss, very fortunately yes. Minnie? Unfortunately yes,” James said.
He held out a hand and helped her off the desk. Once her feet were on the ground, she tugged James closer to her. Their smiles matched as they were once again in each other’s space.
“This wasn’t how our first kiss was supposed to go,” James whispered, a smile still on his lips.
“Oh?” Lily asked
“It supposed to be a snowy afternoon in Hogsmeade after an amazing date and-”
“Thought about this often?” she asked with a laugh.
“Only like, every day since fourth year.”
She laughed. “If it’s been that long, then how did you not know it was going to happen with me grabbing your shirt and pulling you in to shut you up?”
He laughed as he bent down and pressed a chaste kiss to her lips, that quickly turned into something more.
“Oh, for Godric’s sake!” Professor McGonagall exclaimed as she walked back into her room.