Merry Christmas!

Okay, you guys, so I don't know how much I'll be around until the 26th, so I'll post an excerpt as an early Christmas present now. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah (even though that was at the beginning of Dec.), and, just generally, Happy Holidays!

Love,
Jules

P.S. the beginning of the excerpt is a repeat of the end of the last chapter... not a remarkably similar conversation =)

“I have a plan.” James looked at the both of them. “Do you trust me?”

Alice slowly nodded, and he looked to Lily. She hesitated for a moment, and then nodded as well. “I trust you. What’s the plan?”

“Fantastic.” With that, he threw off the cloak and stuffed it into his hat, along with Sirius’s pocketknife and his own wand. “Excuse me...” Then, he opened the door, stepped into the corridor, directly in front of the Ministry wizards, and raised his hands as though in surrender. “Alright—you’ve got us.”

(Approximately Ten Hours Earlier)

“So this is where Her Majesty summers...”

“We’ve been drinking!”

“It’s just... it’s been a really... emotional day...”

“I’m sorry... I just... I can’t...”

They hadn’t kissed.

They hadn’t kissed.

“I’m a girl who will try anything once—I suppose that should apply to an actual relationship, too...”

Voices and images flooded James’s head, making the walk up towards Lily Evans’s front door seem to last much longer than it actually did. When, at last, he had ascended the front steps, James hesitated before he rang the bell.

It would be fine. Really.

Carlotta was... great. And excellent. And marvelously straight-forward, by comparison.

           

This wasn’t going to be weird. Really—he wouldn’t let it be weird. He had a girlfriend now, and he could be over Evans, who obviously had no romantic feelings for him. She was a girl—a lovely, insane, completely fantastic girl, but, all the same, just a human being. And, from an evolutionary standpoint, human kind was built to handle rejection. It wasn’t going to be weird. He was completely over Lily Evans.

He rang the doorbell.

A short eternity later, Lily opened the door. She wore a blue bathrobe and a giant yellow t-shirt that covered the essentials and not much else. Her eyes grew wide at the sight of James, and she moved to close up the bathrobe.

“Nice shirt,” said James almost automatically.

“Nice hat,” she retorted, without missing a beat.

And that’s when he knew it.

Namely, that this was going to be a lot trickier than he'd thought.

Damn it.