Work Text:
The florist shop next to you is ruining your business.
I mean, who wants to go to a bar right next to a flower shop? That’s right, no one. And that’s what you tell the girl who runs the shop, point blank.
She smirks and tells you to suck it up, which is infuriating and hot because she is a red head like Briana was, and she has eyes like some kind of green outer space that you can’t stop looking at but whatever. The business. Right.
But the flowers she sells are really pretty and you’ve even seen Sirius stop and look at them a couple of times. And once you saw Moony actually buy some, but he said if you told he would tell Sirius exactly whose fault it was that he got salmonella that time when you were eighteen so you keep quiet because you do not need that to come out.
Okay, so it’s not like they actually have that much trouble in finding business, I mean, four attractive twenty-one year old blokes who own a bar together? And one of them owns a motorcycle? They could probably run the garbage store and still have regulars.
Plus green-outer-space-eyes comes and sits with you while you clean the bar after the guys inevitably flake out on you every night, so that’s nice. And, yeah. You might give her all if the drinks she orders on the house but, it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t. It’s weird to see someone so short drink so much vodka. You tell her this and she tells you to “fuck off, trash king”
She keeps taking your cigarettes but you find it funny as fuck to see a girl who owns a flower shop chain smoking outside next to the Violets, so you let it slide. Plus she always lends you her lighter because you are always leaving your back at the apartment, so the whole friendship isn’t totally one sided.
And it is a friendship, because she groans at your terrible puns and insults you about your obsession with black skinny jeans, which isn’t an obsession by the way, it’s a lifestyle, you tell her. She laughs so hard she knocks over a roses display that you then spend forty-five minutes helping her clean up. You ask her why she sells every other flower except lilies and she says, “Because my store is called Lilies. And I'm called Lily. It’s ironic, walking into a store called Lilies and asking a girl named Lily if she has any lilies. And I get to say no, I don’t”
“That is the worst joke I’ve ever heard” you inform her.
“Every joke you tell is the worst joke I've ever heard.” She confesses.
Sirius loses his motorcycle one day and he’s almost crying when she rides up, takes off the helmet and says. “Stop blubbering Black, I was only gone for two seconds”. You cannot fathom why this comment makes you laugh so much, but it does. Her hair is twisted in a messy bun and you stare at the elastic, marvelling at how it has managed to tame fire.
You steal her books and she steals your stationary. You help her paint the walls in her shop bright red one on a whim one weekend and you end up covered in paint, laughing so hard your sides hurt as she makes ‘paint angels’ with the mess on the floor. Once you get drunk and end up on the bar, singing ‘My Heart Will Go On’ into an empty gin bottle. She pushes you off and you break your wrist and she sits beside you as your cast sets, calling the snappy receptionist a fuckwit while attempting to make an origami swan out of gauze.
For your birthday she gets you a shirt that says ‘TRASH KING’ in caps across the chest. Peter loses his shit when you open it and you grin proudly, wearing it for a solid week before Remus drags you upstairs to “wash the god damn thing already, the smell is putting off the customers”.
When there is a fire in the book shop a couple of doors down you run to her door and knock loudly, shouting her name Lily Lily Lily through the walls. She emerges, bleary eyed, in cat pyjamas and follows you to the street, where she stands with you and the guys as you watch a building burn down. You decide that you like the fire on her head better than the one in front of you.
The next day the door of the bar is lined with flowers, a thick ark of yellows, reds and purples snake around the frame. You stop Sirius from tearing it down. The day after that you wake up at two a.m and line her door in empty beer bottles. She knocks on your door a few hours later, holding two of the empty bottles. You open the door. “Wanna drink?” she asks. “Yes” you reply.
You stick glow in the dark stars on her ceiling night and you sit in the flowers and look at them for a whole night, while she rants about her fucking sexist boss from her last job and you tell her about how you think you had a breath mint addiction in college. When you wake up on the floor you see that she is wearing your TRASH KING shirt and you are sporting her white and purple stripped sweater.
And yeah, maybe the flower shop next door is affecting your business a little, but you think you can let it slide for cat pyjamas and green space eyes.
(And the making out on the bar after hours, well, that’s just a bonus)