Hi, guys! This is the first fic I’ve ever written, so reviews would be very, very, very much appreciated and loved! =)
Oh, and of course, I own nothing; everything is JKR’s.
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“Lily, you’ve got a stain on your shirt.”
She reluctantly tears her gaze from the quartet in the corner and her eyes slide down to the lingering ring of pasta sauce near the edge of her otherwise immaculately white shirt.
Lily, usually-meticulous Lily, always-pristinely-dressed Lily wastes hardly a moment on that tainted circle of dim red and I feel something die with her indifferent wave.
“It’s nothing; I’ll have it washed and it’ll be gone. I must have accidentally dropped some sauce on myself at dinner while I was reading my book,” she says and seamlessly redirects her gaze back to the four boys playing Gobstones across the room.
She is wrong. That stain is not a result of Lily’s compulsive reading-while-eating habit. She had dropped that one strand of spaghetti on herself as she gazed furiously upon the same lanky tousled-haired boy she is narrowing her eyes at now, when he had charmed a bowl of mashed potatoes to float over to the Slytherin table and upend itself over the head of an unsuspecting first year. Lily’s flashing emerald eyes had traveled with the bowl on its journey across the room, had sparked and ignited with quick fury as realization dawned on her. She had held her fork in one hand, her fingers tightening as they curled around the utensil as it stood poised in the air; her other hand lingered loosely, unnoticed on the book she held open in her lap.
Everything about her had seemed so static, so frozen.
But I had known better.
I had known what was coming then. How could I not have? And so I had quietly pulled the lone spaghetti string off of Lily’s shirt and tugged her clenched hand away from its place on the open book and into my own. “Lily, let it go. Leave it. He only meant it as a joke.”
Her eyes had not left his laughing face and when she spoke, it was in a restrained voice, her teeth clenched and her tone hard. “I can’t just let it go, Bertram. He “ is “ Head “ Boy “ and he should know better!”
And with her sharp retort, she had pulled her hand from my loose grip and made her way towards him, her red curls bouncing as she had pulled him up by the scruff of his collar and proceeded to admonish him in front of all those dining at the time.
His eyes seemed to dance merrily as she scolded him. Hers were more animated than they had been all evening.
She had slipped back into the seat next to me ten minutes later and had shot me an apologetic smile. “Sorry, Bertram. You know I had to do it.”
And so I did.
Kissing my cheek swiftly, Lily had resumed her dinner and pulled the book back into her lap. But she was fooling no one; her eyes had ceased to flit across the page as they normally do when she is reading, and a glazed expression had replaced the cold fury that had so transformed her features minutes ago.
That night, even after all of the dishes of food and all of the used plates have vanished, the solitary thread of spaghetti laid untouched on the table.
--
One week later sees us in the Common Room working on our Transfiguration homework together. It has been a week, an entire week, and I still cannot help but think about the crimson red of the stain. I am thus struck by the irony of the situation as I note that Lily is wearing this particular shirt today.
“The stain hasn’t gone,” I remark, making sure to keep my voice indifferent as I speak.
Lily raises her eyes from her parchment, confusion etched in her features until she looks down at the faint outline of the same red ring that has captivated my attention for a week.
“Oh! Oh dear, it hasn’t gone away in the wash, has it? And this was my favorite shirt, too…”
But Lily’s voice lacks the earnestness, the wistfulness that would usually accompany a statement such as this one, and as a particularly loud peal of laughter from the four boys reaches her ears, she ceases to pay the stain any attention at all.
Her eyes immediately stray to them and narrow dangerously, suspiciously, as if she is waiting for something to go horribly amiss as they take up a raucous game of Exploding Snap.
I know I shouldn’t defend them, know that every time I do, I am making myself a little more insignificant and him a little more perfect, and yet I can’t help it.
“They’re not doing anything wrong, Lily.”
“I know. But they may. They will.” Her certainty is jarring and I find myself wanting to rectify it at my own expense.
Lily’s piercing gaze attracts Sirius’s attention and he turns to look at her, a knowing smile now growing on his face as he notes her expression. “Oy, Evans, Aubrey! Come over here and play some Exploding Snap for a while!”
Lily laughs “ a sardonic, falsely mirthless laugh meant to protect her precarious façade “ and retorts, “Sorry, Black, but I’m afraid we’ve got better things to do today than to injure ourselves with you lot! I am Bertram’s and Bertram’s alone today.” Flashing a brilliantly artificial smile at Sirius, she turns back to me with a more genuine one which I struggle to return.
She is wrong. She is wrong in so many ways, so many ways, in every way imaginable.
I am with Lily; she is my girlfriend, I am her boyfriend “ but she will never be my Lily.
She’ll always be his and even she knows it as she entwines her hand with mine.