Chapter Text
You still living in Leeds?
Fancy a drink?
James stares at his phone. Lily Evans, the Lily Evans. The beautiful capricious redhead for whom he had pined for pretty much for all of their years at Edinburgh University and a fair bit beyond. Lily, who he hadn’t seen in over a year and hadn’t spoken to in at least 6 months. Lily is in his DMs and apparently she is also in town.
Realising that he has been staring at the open message for at least five minutes he bites back a curse and hastily types his response.
Tonight?
Name the pub Evans ;)
What kind of drink is this? He wonders as he quickly showers off the sweat of his after-work run. A friendly catch up? A breaking of bad news? He has a feeling that her text hadn’t seemed particularly happy, but then she hadn’t seemed particularly anything. ‘Fancy a drink’ was about as neutral a statement as one could get. Was he just projecting, imagining that he could extrapolate a bad mood from those three short words? Maybe she is really happy and wants to meet up to share some good news.
Christ, maybe she’s engaged or something.
That thought is enough to put a sharp end to his musings and he jabs the button to turn the shower off. The sooner he gets to her, the sooner he’ll find out what is up and the less time his brain will have to torture him with horrible scenarios involving Lily and a fantasy fiance.
Another message is waiting for him when he returns to his bedroom.
The Boathouse. I’m already there x
Okay, so maybe he is onto something with the bad mood theory. Lily is already in the pub, presumably on her own, in a city she does not live in. This didn’t spell good things.
His suspicions are confirmed when upon arriving at the Boathouse, a short 15 minute walk from his city centre flat, he finds Lily curled on a bench in the corner of the outdoor seating. Hunched under the shade of an awning, she’s one of the few patrons not taking full advantage of the unseasonably warm spring sunshine. The table in front of her appears littered with the empty evidence of several cocktails.
“Hey Evans.”
She looks up at the sound of his voice, shifting over a little on the bench to allow him to squeeze in next to her. He drops into the space, trying to ignore the way her thigh presses against his on the small seat.
“Thank you for coming James”
Her voice is heavy and almost painfully strained.
He tries to ignore the thunk of his heart as it takes a deep dive into the pit of his stomach. Why did she sound so stiff? What bad news could this entail? Maybe he was right about the engagement? Had she figured out his feelings and had come to end their friendship in the name of her fiance's happiness? He glances down at where her hands were twisting together on the table but doesn’t spy a ring.
“It’s good to see you.” Still strained, she sounds like quite the opposite is true. He almost wants to run away.
“Likewise, it’s been a while since we caught up.” Christ, now he was doing it too. This was how he spoke to old coworkers whose names he didn’t remember, not one of his best bloody friends.
“You look beautiful.” He’s not sure where it comes from but he means it absolutely. She’s wearing a soft looking floral sundress and the upper part of her hair is pulled back and bound with a little green scarf. She looks incredible and a small part of him bitterly notes that their time apart clearly hasn’t exaggerated her beauty in his brain.
“I’m sorry, James.” She says in a sudden exhale. She skips right over his compliment and he tries not to let that hurt. “I wasn’t really sure what I was thinking when I texted. I know it’s been a while and…”
“You were probably thinking that you didn’t want to drink alone in a pub in a strange city.” She’s worried, he realises. He probably would be too if he turned up in her city and texted her out of the blue. “I don’t mind Evans, I’m glad you texted. It really has been too long.”
Her shoulders relax a little and she offers him a smile. A rather half-hearted smile, he realises, god knows he spent enough time studying her face to know. He once practically lived for the days when he could make her smile. He shifts and gestures to the empty glasses in front of them. “Speaking of drinking alone in a strange city, wanna tell me what's going on Evans?”
She pauses before she looks up at him, her hands playing with the paper umbrella from her latest drink and he is forcibly struck by the memory of all the times at uni that he had cajoled her into admitting her troubles. Never one for sharing her feelings, his Lily.
“Lily,” his voice is softer now. “You’re clearly not okay, I’m still your mate, tell me.”
“Think I got disowned today.”
Whatever he was expecting, that was not it. All thoughts of her imagined engagement flew out his head as he looked down at her distressed face and slightly trembling lip.
“Well not legally disowned. I doubt anybody in my family would be arsed with all that paperwork and they can’t change Mum's will anyway but functionally, effectively, pretty much… yeah.”
She trails off and he can’t help himself from putting an arm around her and pulling her even closer. She sniffles slightly, turning into his chest so that her head is tucked right below his chin and he inhales the familiar scent of her honey shampoo. The feeling has his heart stuttering and he prays that she can’t feel the sudden increase in his pulse from where she is tucked against his right side. Cursing himself that he’s thinking about her hair when she just broke news like that, he brings up his other hand to grasp hers where it’s laying on his thigh.
He holds her there as she calms down, her breath coming more evenly, until she no longer seems in danger of crying in the middle of a pub garden. When she pulls away to root through her bag for a tissue, he straightens and tries to calm his heart, a quest which completely fails when she reaches back over and re-takes his hand.
“What happened today?” he asks.
Lily snorts. Her frustration is clear now that her tears have been placed at bay.
“Well, I don’t know how much you remember about my family but Dad and I, we have very different ideas about what a young woman should be doing with her life.” James nods, he remembers everything Lily ever told him about her family. Her ‘traditional’ father and her hag sister. Had been there when she lost her mum. But now wasn’t the time to bring up old wounds so he stays silent as she continues.
“He was fine with me going off to uni, because that's just ‘what young women do these days’.” Her voice has changed, sarcastic and contemptuous. Clearly a quote from the man himself. “But after uni he expected me to come home and get married like Tuney did.” Lily lets out a noise of frustration, “He was actually shocked when he realised I came out of uni without a boyfriend at all, because like, why else would I go?”
Lily had dated very little throughout uni, preferring to spend her time with their friend group or doing something with one of her dozen societies she always seemed to be part of. ‘Although not for lack of offers’ thought James glumly.
“He just got worse and worse. Every phone call, every visit, was just a chance to guilt me for not coming back to Cokesworth. Not settling down and giving him some grandchildren. Because God forbid that I want to do something with my life other than marry the first man I meet and pop out some babies!”
James, who has thought many many times about what a baby of his and Lily’s might look like, feels a niggle of guilt.
Lily sighs and turns sideways on the bench, releasing his hand and bringing her feet up to hug one knee to her chest. James tries really hard not to glance at where the motion has allowed her wrap dress skirt to fall open and reveal a generous amount of inner thigh.
“It’s not even that I’m against that stuff really, I do want to be a Mum someday. I just want it to be on my terms, I want to do the things I want to do first. For fucks sake, I’m only 23, it’s not like the ticking of my biological clock is deafening.”
James snorts again and they fall into contemplative silence. He knows Lily, she had always had her head on straight, even when the rest of them were stupid freshers making terrible decisions. She wasn’t asking for his advice, she just wanted his ear and he was more than happy to give it. She would rant and maybe cry and then she would carry on, like she always had. Like they always had.
“I nearly changed my name once, you know? Before uni.” Her voice interrupts his contemplation of their history and he turns to her in surprise.
He couldn’t imagine it, Lily Evans not being Evans? He couldn’t think of any other name that would suit her half so well. No other collection of sounds that would capture the essence of that beautiful face and that laughter. Except maybe Lily Potter.
Jesus Christ okay, no wonder Sirius called him a sap. He reigns in his thoughts as she continues speaking.
“People just called us the Evans girls, me and Pet, and I used to love that but then she became so shit and Dad became so shit and I didn’t want to be an Evans anymore.” He reaches for her hand again but she only hugs her knee tighter and rushes on.
“Then I met you and you only called me Evans and I hated it at first and you were such a dick but then we became friends and… and you made me love my name because I love how it sounds when you say it.”
James freezes. I love my name because of how it sounds when you say it. Fuck. He couldn’t read into that, much as he wanted to. Lily had never said anything like that to him before. She was drunk, she was hurt, she had been crying on his shoulder not 15 minutes ago. Move on Potter, say something. Say anything.
“Have you eaten Lils?”
He winces as the old pet name comes out automatically but tries not to overthink it.
“No, we were supposed to have brunch before everything went spectacularly to shit so not since last night.”
James sighs, moving off the bench to grab a few menus from the nearby stand.
“Okay, let’s get some food in you. Drinking without eating is a rookie mistake, even freshers Lily wasn’t that dumb.”
She lets out a laugh at his teasing.
“Scuse me but I wasn’t the one who had to be carried home after they had all those Jagerbombs on an empty stomach and decided to take a ‘little nap’ in the Meadows.”
He grins back at her, “I wasn’t even a fresher then was I? Can’t even blame it on being young and dumb.”
Her smile softens and she looks at him almost fondly.
“Oh we were all young and dumb back then, I think we still are some days.”