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He is the sentimental type, she knows. Has known for years now, in the sort of way that happens when someone exists as the physical embodiment of unavoidable. It’s both endearing and frustrating.
She thinks about it all the time, all the time, which is not altogether surprising anymore, so much as it is exasperating. By default, she's thinking about him all the time.
So, she’s thinking about him, and when she’s not thinking about his eyes (hypnotising), she’s thinking about his hands (brilliant), and when she’s not thinking about those, she’s thinking about how entirely sentimental he is.
The trip was (obviously) his suggestion, “One last night together!” he had declared, as if they were diving head first off a cliff the next morning, and not just graduating. Although, she supposes, he thinks of most of his life like that. As if it’s all going to end tomorrow, as if the whole thing is balancing on the world’s thinnest tightrope waiting to fall over and he’s the only one who can keep it up. She admires him for it sometimes. Envies it, even.
It’s all a little hopeless, of course, but she still smiles every time he looks over at her even as he’s falling into what he’s saying. He gestures widely and openly, toppling over into his stories like he is the teller and the character all at once; both the inventor and the actor. Lily knows she’s philosophising him, but she can’t help it. Thinking about him always comes to her in absolutes, he’s very rarely any of the maybes in her head, or the almosts.
Rarely, and only when it comes to the two of them, does he exist in those spaces.
She turns back around to face the water. She can feel him end his tale, can sense Sirius laughing and rolling his eyes all at once. Can picture the self-satisfied grin on James’s face as he watches his friend laugh. Lily doesn’t sit close enough to hear the words, but she’s just close enough to feel it all. The rest of them had gone into town to get some more food, or maybe drinks, or maybe something else altogether but she had decided to stay only because she wants to sit there forever and knows she cannot.
“Where’s Sirius then?” She asks, when he’s beside her, doing her very best to appear calm and collected instead of looking directly at him, which would immediately reveal all her worst secrets to him. It’s almost irrelevant that he likely already knows them all.
He, in a completely precedented manner, has no such reservations.
(Though, he has much, much more experience being in love with her as she exists right beside him. She always forgets that this kind of admiration takes practice.)
He sits close, his right arm touching her left, his feet right beside hers in the nearly clear water. When she asks him about Sirius, he turns his head right to hers and grins (God, she thinks rather dramatically, this is how I die). She catches it only briefly from the corner of her eye; it’s the kind of smile she’s seen before and still makes her heart race like she’s some heroine in a novel on her bedside table.
“He went off,” James gestures with his other arm, the one not touching hers.
Lily raises her eyebrows. “Off… Where?”
She can feel the raise of his shoulders, a shrug. “Off.”
“Alright.” She shrugs back. Then asks, “You didn’t go with him?”
There’s a pause. “I wanted to come here.”
Silence. She doesn’t reply, and she wonders how thick the line is between not being able to reply and not wanting to say something that will send it all up in flames.
The sun is almost setting, taking its time as if it’s getting ready for something. She feels like she’s in the moments found in between frames, the incalculable milliseconds that are found right before the click. The sky is that colour of almost-orange, almost-pink, and she knows that if she looks over to her left James will look statuesque in an almost-dizzying way. Usually, and for most of this trip, it was bearable, but something about their aloneness has her feeling unsteady. Maybe she is on the tightrope. Maybe he’s holding her up. He smells like ocean salt and something familiar.
She’s aware he’s not wearing a shirt. (Distantly, she’s aware she’s not wearing one either, but his offence is of a higher magnitude). An inhale, she wants to get away from him, and exhale, there is nowhere else she could imagine wanting to be more.
She settles for something in between. “You up for a swim?” Her hair isn’t dry yet from the last time she was in the water.
She doesn’t bother waiting for him to reply before getting in.
The water is cooler than it was before, a slight change in the temperature that feels welcome against her skin. She’s feeling much warmer than she was. He creates a splash when he comes in, and emerges with his hair pulled back, and water dripping from his shoulders. Possibly, she didn’t think through as much as she should’ve, but it’s too late to back out now.
“So,” he says, “How are you?”
She almost rolls her eyes. “Fantastic. You?”
“Never been better, Evans.”
He’s a terrible liar, but she doesn’t have the words to call him out for it.
Her feet are moving around lazily as the water comes right to her neck. They’re just an arm’s length away from each other, not daring to go any closer or any farther apart.
“What’re you thinking about?” he asks as if he doesn’t know.
Still, she’s a good pretender, and says, “Everything?” Lily wonders what his reply would’ve been if she had said “YouYouYouYouYou. Just you. ”
He nods thoughtfully. “That’s quite a lot of things.”
“You know me,” she says, clearing her throat.
He’s marginally closer, she can feel it before she can see it. As if he’s some sort of sun, she still can’t look him in the face.
“I do,” he replies, his voice low.
Another step closer and the water ripples around them. She wonders if he can hear the pounding of her heart. The sun is finally setting around them (Is this what it was waiting for? Them? What a bizarre thought, as if the universe was in suspension for a James and a Lily.) Looking at him now, he looks less statuesque, less hard stone, and more liquid gold. All the chiselled sharpness and hollow spaces are still there but they’re softened by the way the light shines on him. If only he was a little less, maybe she could bear it.
She’s such a lost cause.
Before he can come closer and disrupt her entire solar system, she ducks her head under the water. He follows, unfortunately, and then they’re both staring at each other through the blue. His hair looks like usual now; electrified like it exists in a dimension entirely separate from his head. She fights the urge to float closer and put her hands through it like it’s hers to touch. Like he is hers to touch. The rest of him is the same story; resisting from afar feels like fighting something intrinsic she isn’t supposed to fight.
The worst part, though, is the way he’s looking at her. Looking in a way that feels like an entity on its own. Like he can’t stop, like she’s something precious to him. Lily can recognize the look in his eyes, but she’s not sure she can endure it.
They’re staring at each for so long that she almost forgets breathing is vital. Up they go, almost simultaneously. Now they’re closer, and she’s unsure about what it is she’s trying to avoid. Him? What he means to her?
He picks up right back where they stopped. “I do know you.”
Closer. “I’m sure.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I do,” she pauses to whisper, “But, I’m not sure I should.”
If she takes another step forward she would be crashing into him. It feels like she has been crashing into him since they met.
They’re still not touching, he’s just blinking at her, head tilted like he’s trying to figure out something about her. Maybe he figures it out because he takes a step forward and then his hand is touching hers under the water. Just his fingertips, just barely, just enough to make her breathless all over again. He glances down, and she takes the moment to keep looking at him instead.
This time she stops resisting the urge to touch him. Water, by its nature, eventually erodes whatever fort stands in front of it, and Lily Evans is nothing but the crumbling walls of a child’s sandcastle.
Tentatively, she places her hand on the side of his face, palm resting on his jaw, fingertips landing on his cheek. He’s warm to her touch, though that is the tendency of sunlight. There is a roughness she doesn’t expect on his face, hair growing in from the long day.
She’s aware she’s on a precipice; the world below is new and unfathomable and James is part of it in a way that she cannot untwine from herself.
James looks back up at her, there’s a chanting in her head, some perilous combination of kiss me, kiss me, kiss me and this is it, this is it, this is it. He’s here, he’s right here, and he’s so close, and she's—
Crashing, crashing, crashing, and never landing. There was a precipice, and now there’s him. His lips touch hers, and suddenly the sun setting just for them feels far more probable than it did just moments ago. Of course, the world was waiting on them, waiting for them. It makes sense.
She feels his hands move to the small of her back, and hers can’t help but move to his hair, slowly at first, then with more certainty when she feels his smile against her lips. She wonders how a kiss can feel both novel and familiar, like walking into a new place and realising this is what home will be from now on. They pull apart, and she’s on her tippy toes, but she doesn’t want to pull away.
Later she’ll wonder how long they stood there like that; foreheads together, chests rising and lowering at the same time.
“Hi,” Lily murmurs, biting her lip, unable to come up with something more coherent.
She feels his grin. “Hi.”
They pull away slightly, and she is entirely tortured by the sight of him looking like some ravished godling. His thumb is moving in circles where it rests on her back, and she can’t figure out which of two sensations, the sight or the touch, is more detrimental to her well-being.
It seems neither is capable of saying more, and she knows they should talk and they should get this out in the open when the world seems so vast and beautiful, but there is something else in her body, in the marrow of her bones, that feels settled. Steady, certain. There he is again, existing in her absolutes.
They will talk, eventually, and she will feel all her fears open and close like a heartbeat, and he will be there like a constant. Not something to endure, but something to bask in, something to hold.