𝐚 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐬
eight | chapter list
Finding out you’re a princess isn’t half as intimidating as suddenly acquiring a full-time bodyguard. Especially when that bodyguard is disarmingly handsome, charming, and can’t seem to stop flirting with you.
bodyguard!james, fem!reader, implied chubby!reader, shy!reader, princess diaries au, star-crossed lovers/ forbidden romance, slowburn, background wolfstar
˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗
The Genovian flag is sweet. Where Italy’s flag is made up of three vertical stripes that are green, white and red, Genovia replaces the red with a light blue. It strikes you, laying in bed, a History of Genovia held over your face by your one good hand, that you wouldn’t have been able to recall before. If you were on a game show and the questions were about the country of which you are the sole heir to the crown and throne, you’d lose.
In the light, early, early morning, it’s hard to get your eyes to focus on the words. You stumble through another paragraph on how the flag came to be developed, but let the book flop onto your chest when the words blur into a sludgy sepia blur.
Your bedroom is still around you. Nothing moves. No alarm clock or lamplight, no TV. The curtains are drawn, and no dust motes come to move in the straggle of light lining the window sill.
You struggle into a sitting position, your back sorely protesting the move, having slept too long, too early in the night. You can hear people up and moving already in your flat past the bedroom door. It’s weird. A few weeks ago, you spent the majority of your days alone. You aren’t sure you’ve ever spoken out loud while at home before. This was a lonely place. This is a lonely place, one little bedroom full of art you don’t use half as often as you pictured, a kitchen with an empty fridge, a damp bathroom and a living room full of creaky furniture where only you would ever sit.
But it’s your place. Your life, in one room, where everything was familiar. It was yours, and you knew what was happening. Nobody ever tried to hurt you here.
You don’t get to stay.
You take the sketchbook off of your bedside table, remembering belatedly that you can’t write. Not really. Can’t draw. You shove it back, where it slams into a lamp and sends the shade skittering across the wall.
You feel heat in your eyes. Tears that aren’t big enough to fall, wetness lining your lashes and shimmering. You wipe them away.
This room will be small forever. It won’t ever get bigger. It’ll stay beige and full, but you don’t have to stay here. Maybe you want to.
You push your quilt back with your feet and stay scrunched up, waiting for the energy to get up. It doesn’t come, so you rush, on your feet and over to the curtains for a paranoid glance outside. There’s a familiar black Jeep outside, a shining, foreign beacon compared to the other more worn neighbours surrounding it.
You turn back to your room. Thinking of what to do. How many boxes would you need to pack everything away? Sirius says you can keep your flat, but as much as you might wanna pretend things aren’t changing, they are, you’re better off now.
Another weary tear wells in your left eye. Just the one. You scrub it away with the back of your hand, letting out a wet breath.
You’re not thinking as you open the door to your room. It feels achy, to know you have to leave home. You aren’t on kilter. Every step is like a shake in your hip, clumsy, the blood roaring in your ears until it’s eery quiet again. The fridge is humming in the kitchen. The clock is ticking on the wall. Sirius is snoring rolled up in a throw blanket on the sofa, but James is drinking from a steaming mug standing by the living room window, a phone in hand.
He puts it in his pocket and turns to you. His eyes flare gently, then his brow wrinkles. His nice mouth, usually set so plainly in a calm smile, goes rigid. “Hey,” he says quietly, blended into the white noise. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
You frown back at him, not understanding.
“You’re crying.”
You don’t really hear him. In about five steps, you’ve closed the distance between him and you, pressing your face without care into his chest. You wrap your arms around him. You’re worried he’ll move away.
James hugs you with an arm, the other careful behind your head, “Oh, hey,” he murmurs, “hey, hey, you’re okay. I have you. You’re alright.”
You can feel your eyes under your eyelids, pressed to his chest, his creased sleep shirt. He smells like boy, not that you have a ton of experience with what that is. It’s not sweat but not not sweat, either, deodorant that’s mixed with it, which you know from yourself. The rest is too new to know. He smells nice. You breathe him in and let your hackles fall, better when James rubs the tension from your back with steady up and downs of his hand.
“What’s wrong, honey?” he says, something sweet in the pet name, like condescension without the cruelty, like pity without shame. He sounds sorry he can’t fix it before it crops up, whatever it might be. “Say?” “
You grab him tighter. He doesn’t try to pull away.
“Is it your hand? Those boxer’s fractures, they hurt bad for the first few days, I know, but your painkillers will’ve worn off in the night. Is that why you’re up so early?”
“I think I have to leave.”
He hums quietly. “The flat?”
“Not safe here.”
“No, hey.”
James makes another hum as he eases you back from him, placating, a promise you can put your head back where it was hiding. “Hey,” he says again, his eyes light despite the force of his frown, “you’re safe where I am. I will keep you safe. You can stay exactly where you are if that’s where you want to be.”
“The car outside…”
“What car?”
“The jeep. It’s out of place. I’m–” You shrug ineffectually. “This isn’t my place.”
James shakes his head in confusion, though he says, “You’re okay,” with a hand spreading out at the small of your back.
He doesn’t offer more words or placations. In fact, you get what you want —James brings both arms around you with that mug still in hand held an inch apart, but the arms are holding you so tight it borders on uncomfortable. It never gets there. You put your face in his shoulder, breathing, waiting for the panic and your pattering heartbeats to settle. It doesn’t stop. It keeps going, twisting, no matter how dedicated James is to keeping you flush to his front. He lets his cheek rest on your forehead with a sigh, his face skewed into the contact, waiting you out. Everything is too much until the details fade away, your eyes shutting, your mouth warming the fabric beneath it one heavy breath at a time.
“I can’t draw,” you confess.
“You can’t draw,” he repeats.
“My hand…”
“I know about your hand,” he says gently. “Is that what’s upset you?”
You aren’t sure.
You mumble unintelligible and inaudible nonsense into his shirt and imagine it was skin instead, so awfully starved for touch that this hug is the longest of it you’ve had in years. It draws strange, nice thoughts to the surface pretty quickly. How James’ hand would feel if it slipped under your shirt, the skin of a knuckle. He touched you helping you put it on last night. He’d been very careful not to do it again. The memory sends an involuntary shiver through you, which only serves to worsen James’ worry.
He waves into your shoulders. “It’s okay. It won’t be long. Six weeks and you’ll be completely fine.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” you confess to yourself.
“Nothing is wrong with you,” James tells you easily. Simple as the sky is blue. “Don’t say that.”
You peel away from him eventually, less yourself than when you’d started. He nods to the armchair and presses his mug into your hand, cool but not cold, bending over you with an assessing eye as he says, “It’s only tea.”
—
For breakfast, Marlene makes toast.
“I’m tired,” she says.
Having food cooked for you is a privilege James refuses to ignore, accepting four slices of toast to spread pear jam over. He takes your plate to you where you’re scrunched up in the armchair and kneels, spreading pear jam over half of yours, too, in case you want it. He pops three ibuprofen out of a blister packet and hands them to you wordlessly. By the time Sirius has roused from the sofa, no doubt drawn to the smell of golden bread, your eyes have dulled but your trembling has paused. James struggles with his relief, not sure what to make of you, or do, or say, but sure he deserves this. He failed you again. He can’t stop. He doesn’t deserve his post if he can’t get a handle on the things that are happening to you.
Well. No more covert rendezvous to cinemas or supermarkets. His protection is clearly not enough. From now on, you’ll have James and an additional two men keeping your person, more on standby. He has these assets to use and he hasn’t been using them, because he is a proud, stupid boy. Forgiving himself for this will be impossible without rectifying changes. You might not like those changes, but James can contend with anger after the bruises on you have faded.
Your hand is an angry shade today. He can see the bruise where your splint leaves your pointer and middle fingers free. It really will heal quickly.
“Here,” he says, not minding the piece of toast you have held in a mildly disinterested hand as he takes your wrist, “hold your hand here,” he says, moving your hand to your collarbone, “just above your heart.”
“Why?” you ask through toast.
“It helps with inflammation. The ibuprofen, as well.”
Okay, you mouth.
“Then I thought we’d go online and find you something.”
You pause your chewing. “Um, what sort of something?” you ask shyly, like you’re the stupid one.
“Anything you want. A book, a movie, maybe what you want for dinner tonight. Let’s look, shall we?” he asks, employing a tender tone that crops up whenever you’re hurting.
“Sure,” you say, going back to your toast. You like the pear jam, eating your two half-slices before picking at the buttered ones slowly.
James swaps your plate for his. You’re so out of things that you don’t protest, just eat. James denies himself the pleasure of wiping a crumb from your cheek, gathering himself off of his annoyed knees to get you a glass of orange juice. You drink it in quick pulls. He brings you a glass of water to finish after, and you manage about half.
Things mill slowly through time. Dorcas pops in and asks if she’s doing the clean up alone, and James, sitting straight-backed and nervous on the arm of your chair, gives her a grateful nod. It isn’t self loathing to assume that Dorcas will do a better job of things on her own.
She takes over. James notes an absence of relief as he opens your laptop and turns it on. It’s not like he lied about the online shopping, but it’s not a coincidence when an email from the royal therapist flashes along the bottom of the screen.
You hum. James looks down at you steadily, waiting for a response.
You click the browser icon and wait for things to warm up.
“Will you email her back?” he asks, a request rather than a question.
“She wants to call me.”
“Do you want to speak to her?” Especially after yesterday. And this morning. All your tears and lethargy.
“Not really. She’s kind, but I don’t… like talking about everything. It doesn’t make me feel better.”
“What makes you feel better?”
You let out a breath neither of you are expecting, hurrying to move the cursor on the screen but stopping when you can’t think of what to type. The silence stretches like taffy, too cold, waiting to snap. “Nothing,” you say.
“Nothing?” he repeats, feeling like he’s been kicked in the solar plexus.
“Having company has been nice.”
“What else?”
“The food. Eating well.”
“What’s the most urgent thing, right now? What hurts the most?”
You hesitate. James isn’t sure you’re going to answer him, though he has his fears locked and loaded; you’re scared and you don’t want to tell him. But you rest your hands on the keyboard, looking up at him with guilt written into every line of your face.
“I know exactly what I’m supposed to do, and I don’t want to do it.”
“What’s that?”
You chew your lip. Your eyes dart over to Sirius, still sleeping on the sofa. James doesn’t like getting rough with Sirius, but fuck, he’d like to slap him upside the head for the things he’s told you. James knows what you’re supposed to do, what you will do, but knowing what you’re gonna have to do is the scariest part. Admitting that everything is different now and changing yourself accordingly is a stinging transformation. You would’ve done it without the guilt, yet the weight of the Baron’s eventuality weighs over your head.
“I can’t– I can’t finish school,” you say. “I have three months left and now my hands out of commission for half of that, and I’m already behind because of how much time we spent in Genovia, and I don’t like my degree, but I didn’t want to be the girl who drops out. I’m always the girl who– can’t do anything. Things that are easy for other people have always been hard for me.” You look back at the laptop. “And… Why am I pretending I have the– the courage to do what I want? I don’t want to be–” You tip your head forward. Your hand comes up slowly, where you hide your eyes in your fingers and palm, trembling again. “I couldn’t afford the bus fare a few weeks ago, how awful is that?”
He senses an overwroughtness brewing in you he’s probably not equipped for, but James will always try.
“I’m sorry,” he says, measuring each word as he says it, hoping it’s the right one, the correct tone, “about everything. I’m sorry about your dad, and how hard these last few weeks have been for you, but you’ve been brave the entire time. You’ve done things many people wouldn’t be willing to do, even now– even right here, you’re thinking about the future and the things you’ll have to do, and you’re thinking about everybody else, too. It’s a brave thing, to be born into this. It’s another thing entirely to do it because you’re being asked to. You are not a coward.”
He wasn’t expecting empty words from himself, but he’s still startled at how accurate he finds his own assessment. He’s been thinking about you in terms of himself more often than not —how he’s protecting you and how he isn’t, how he can be a friend to you, and occasionally how there are threads of you he’d like to keep close and private— without considering the way it must ache to be thinking about it in your own head. At least James carries the burden of looking after you. He has an active role. But you have to worry and wonder if you’re doing what needs to be done, if you’re allowed, if this new life is permanent, it’s vastly overwhelming, because it’s more than being a princess. It’s entering a guaranteed line of succession.
James can see that that’s what this has been. This awful morning, your unconscious tears as you’d come for the first person you could. You are overwhelmed by everything, and he’s lucky you didn’t break worse than this weeks ago.
“You are a good princess,” he says, laughing quietly when you scoff at him. “You’re going to be amazing. You just have to give yourself the chance, first.”
“I don’t want to be a Queen,” you murmur, as though worried the admission will face a roaring laugh. “That’s what this is, right? There’s no– I’m the only one in the Genovian line of succession from our family, so when–”
“Her Majesty won’t abdicate,” James says, still gentle. “Do you understand what that means? She’ll die before she gives you the throne. Not– not that you wouldn’t be good at it. But… it sounds so urgent, doesn’t it, when we tell you about things at home, but it’s not–” James scrubs his mouth. “Nobody expected Prince Phillipe to die like that. Alright? They thought he’d have more time, that he’d– that he’d produce an heir. I honestly believe that they were going to leave you alone.”
Something like indignation flares across your features, which is… interesting. You should be indignant! This is your birth right, and they weren’t going to give you the chance. They were going to leave you here all alone. All alone. The last Renaldi.
James swallows. “And that was their mistake. The Queen’s mistake, the entire monarchy, they underestimated the person that you are and what you’re capable of becoming, but I see it. Sirius, Remus, all of us here, looking after you, we see it.” You look after them. You give up your bed for them. Doesn’t James replay the scene of it that very first night when you’d offered him tea and biscuits and your one lovely pillow? “You can be anything you want. Genovia needs someone with your heart–”
“You don’t know if I’m even that good,” you say.
James meets your eyes and holds them. Looks right into the core of you. “You are good,” he says. “I know good, Princess.”
For the first time since you met, the title doesn’t make you flinch.
“You’re flirting with me,” you say quietly.
A joke. If only you knew how close to the line he’s been walking.
“I’m securing my future,” he says, to your delight, your laughter easing that screwed up ball of nerves he’d been tightening in his chest. “You don’t have to be everything at once,” he adds. “You’re doing fine as you are. But I have to make some changes for us, if this is going to work.”
You settle back into your chair. You seem to have released a similar ball of your own tension. A smile teases the corners of your mouth.
“Okay,” you say, clicking on the search bar of your browser. James watches you type one-handed. The best place to get dinner in London?
The results are ridiculous. You backspace dinner and swap it out for pizza.
“Pizza hut buffet?” you read.
James wants more than anything to hug you with one arm a drop a friendly kiss into your hair. He settles for a nudge. “No, definitely not.”
—
A week passes without much fuss. Remus recovers from one of the worst migraines he’s ever had between beds and under people’s arms, your lessons paused. He helps you write an email to send to your college-uni-classes and promises that someway, somehow, he’ll get you the credits for the first module transferred over. What he means to say is that he can play your Princess card should he need to, though Dorcas wonders at him about getting your education records expunged from any public record. She wants you off the grid completely, and James, for lack of a better phrase, is letting her run rabid.
Sirius plays keepaway. Remus isn’t sure where he is half the days, which isn’t enjoyable nor optimal, but Remus stays at the flat most of the time with you pretending not to hear your murmured conversations with James. They concern him. You’ve gone shaky and half-done, not wanting to leave the flat for the gym, no longer interested in spending a bit of your pocket money. Remus knows what it’s like to have money after long years without, knows how it burns a hole in your pocket wanting to be spent, and how there’s a part of you that doesn’t wanna part with it anyways.
He also thinks that perhaps the reality of your situation has caught up with you. You were photographed with the royals, you’ve taken hits for being who you are —there aren’t any take backs coming. You aren’t going to wake up to a big white banner stretched from hand to hand that says, You fell for it!
It takes half a day for James and the boys to pack your flat into boxes. Remus isn’t sure when you decided you were done, but he gets to the flat with a paperback of children’s traditional Genovian fairytales tucked under his arm and finds you sitting on your bedroom floor surrounded by your things, unmoving. You glance around at it as though it’s a shifty dog, waiting to see if it’ll nuzzle under your hand or bite.
“You okay?”
You shrug. “No,” you say.
He admires your honesty. Remus squeezes down into a gap between books and paints.
“I was sitting there when they called me,” you say.
“Here?”
“Right there.”
“You didn’t believe it.”
“Not really. I don’t know? As spam calls go, it was convincing.”
“What’s going on?” he asks, gesturing to your unboxed room.
“I thought I’d do it myself in case… you know, like, in case there was dirty socks under the bed or something, but I don’t really want to do this.”
“You don’t want to move?” he tests.
“Remus, I don’t think I really care anymore. I don’t see why I need a new home, this one’s fine, but I know it’s not gonna work.”
“No, it’s not.”
“But what I really mean is that I don’t want to do this,” you say, spreading a hand flat over the floor. “I don’t care what anyone sees. I– this is my life, and it’s always been my life, so now seeing it spread out and knowing that this is all it is?”
“All it was,” Remus says. “It can be anything you want.”
“James said the same thing, but it’s not true.”
Remus sighs over loud for your benefit. There’s a stack of sketchbooks in front of him, rugged and dirtied by pencil on their corners. “Can I?” he asks, taking one with care off of the top.
“Sure.”
He opens it to the first page. It’s a pear tree. Remus recognises the angle, looking down from the scholar’s wing into the expansive gardens of Beauville House. You’ve started in graphite but added yellows and oranges to the leaves. Blended into the gray, it looks dark, and expressive. Remus knows you love to draw, it’s one of the first things he’d learned about you, but he finds himself unfairly surprised by how good it is. He flicks to the next page, an unfinished window. The next is a rough, almost black shadow underneath a heavy door. You’ve written a few lines in pencil beneath that Remus ignores out of simple courtesy. The next page is full of handwriting, as is the next.
“Had a lot on my mind,” you murmur.
Remus flips to the next page. It’s a half realised portrait of Sirius. The line of his nose is perfect, and the quick scratch of his eyelashes capture his smile without need for perfect realism. “You’re really good at this,” he murmurs, thumbing under Sirius arm fondly. “It’s him.”
“Oh, thank you. He was moving. He–”
“Doesn’t stay still? Only when he’s sleeping.” Remus clears his throat. “It doesn’t matter. It’s obviously him.”
You reach forward to slip a finger between the pages. You turn over three or four at a time, opening to a page where you’ve drawn three boys sitting together. James grows down at something in his lap hidden by a crossed leg, Remus beside him leaning into his arm, Sirius turned sideways to talk to both of them. The sketch is gray and blue in the shadows. Remus pauses as he looks it over, first to analyse the details of himself, wondering how he looks in your eyes, then in delight.
“I didn’t see you doing this one,” Remus says.
“You’re not supposed to know. That way, when they go badly, nobody’s offended.”
“They don’t seem to go badly for you,” he says.
You flip to the next page, find James with his head thrown back in a quick laugh where his shoulders are wrong-sized and you’ve drawn a tiny frowny face where a signature might be. Remus huffs a laugh at it.
“He moved too fast, too,” you say.
Remus turns the page for more but finds it empty thereafter. He closes it gently, putting it back on your pile of books, says, “They are good, though. They’re brilliant. I can’t imagine how you learned to do it by yourself,” as he stands up.
He offers you his hand.
“Someone else can do the packing,” he says. “James will. He won’t mind. Might get Sirius to stretch his legs.”
You take Remus’ hand and climb to your feet. He lets his palm slide up your arm to squeeze at the crook of your elbow, proud of you and not sure how to tell you without your immediate cringing.
“You’re doing well,” he says finally.
You escape his sincerity into the living room, where James is deconstructing the coffee table you’d admitted to liking too much to part with. The new flat, chosen by James, and then agreed upon without reluctance by you (though you’d been too sad to go see it in person) has its own coffee table. James promised you could swap them, but you’d been resigned, and told him you’d break it back into its pieces. Remus thinks it’ll probably stay undone in storage, no use for two, but it’s what you want and James has promised you that you can keep everything. It’s nice that he’s taking it apart for you.
James lights up when he sees you. Remus watches it with his mouth held firmly shut. His eyebrows lift from frowny eyes as he pauses. Remus wonders if he realises how fully his attention falls to you.
“What’s up?” he asks.
“I don’t wanna do it.”
“Okay, don’t,” he says easily. “I’ll do it, after. Do you want to sit down?”
You’re uncomfortable being handled with kid gloves, shifting your weight from one foot onto the other. “I want to go out.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Will you take me?”
“Sure, angel,” he says, his voice descending into a softness Remus has heard before. When Sirius feels like everyone’s mad at him, waiting to flit into anger or quiet depression, or when Remus is sick of everything. When Monty got sick and James had to look after both of his parents for the first time. “Right now?”
“I– whenever.”
“I’ll finish this and then we’ll go?”
“Okay.” You hesitate more. God, Remus doesn’t know what to do with you. He hates seeing you unsure of yourself. You don’t have to feel like this, like you’re an imposition, because if you were it wouldn’t matter. “James?”
“What, angel?”
You sit down on the edge of the armchair, perching there as you look into your lap. “I wanted to say thank you for this,” you say, hard to hear from over the din of the kitchen, “you’ve done all the hard work. I’m really grateful.”
“We talked about this.”
“I know.”
James rests a folded arm across your knee and his chin on the back of his hand. You fluster a little, tiniest of tiny smiles on your lips.
“Do you want to know a secret?”
“What?” you ask quietly.
“I’d do this for you anyways. ‘Cos we’re friends now, right?”
“Right,” you say, looking altogether too pleased for such a small kindness.
You better know what you’re doing, Remus thinks at James, hard enough to make his eye twitch.
Like he can feel it, James turns around to see Remus standing there. He doesn’t move his arm.
“Remus, darling, where’s our other half?” he asks.
Remus rolls his eyes. “Why should I know?”
“Only that you’ve known where he was since he was twelve. They have a soul bond,” he tells you conspiratorially.
“Sirius Black can do whatever he likes wherever he’d like to be.”
“Have you had a tiff?” you ask, peering around James with owlish eyes.
“No, of course not, he's just doing whatever it is he thinks he should be out doing. The car’s gone. Maybe he’s gone to get his hair permed.” You make a questioning hum. James shakes his head, not really. If Remus weren’t dedicated to the bit of wanting Sirius dead at the moment, he’d find it cute. “I don’t really care.”
“You’re breaking my heart, baby.”
Remus groans as Sirius makes his way out of the kitchen. James is smiling evilly, no doubt aware of Sirius’ presence the whole time.
“I was out,” Sirius allows, “but I came back in time to hear your slander, Moons.”
Remus slouches as Sirius lets himself into his space, wrapping an arm behind Remus shoulder, lithe and lean, smelling of everything Remus has ever come to love. There are things that will serve to remind him of their lives together forever, stuff he wouldn’t share. The smell of Sirius’ hair in the morning after a night of light sweating in a pillow too small for both their heads. The feel of a familiar hand tracing lines up and down his back, like he’s doing at current, the sudden zigzag he pulls up to make Remus shiver.
“Thought you liked me.”
“Thought wrong then, didn’t you?”
This is where Remus will want things he can’t have.
Sirius holds his eye. He probably knows what Remus is thinking. How couldn’t he, after so long in each other's skin? Remus makes a face, as if to say, do something about it or stop. Sirius ruffles Remus’ hair until it’s fuzzed with static, fingers brushing down his cheek as he pulls apart.
—
The new flat is huge. So big that you know that James knows you never would’ve said yes to it if you’d been in the mood to look at it. Not because you aren’t coming to terms with the money —it’s a change, not exactly a hardship— but how are you ever going to manage this place? Sirius gets you a maid after three days of your overwhelmed picking-up, which you hate more than anything. You don’t want to be someone who has a maid. You can clean up after yourself.
James catches you using too much bleach in the bathroom and drags you away from it. You’re not stupid, but this is you coping with things you can’t handle in a stupid way.
You’re expecting him to say, “Get dressed,” to force you to take a walk in your new neighbourhood, try this celebrity spotting everyone’s been excited about doing, but he pushes you showfully by your shoulders into a new leather sofa, throwing a blanket over your legs, and disappears out of the living room toward the kitchen. A minute later he returns, carrying a Tupperware full of Marlene’s raspberry and pear turnovers, and a small bottle of juice.
“Telly?” he asks, nodding at the remote as he sits down beside you. The blanket stops you from making any skin on skin contact, but James doesn’t leave a millimetre of space between you. He is startlingly warm.
He swaps your remote for the juice and Tupperware, filling your lap with it as he turns on the TV and clicks a sticking volume button until the automatic previews of the different channels begin.
James clicks onto a channel, then a movie. He lets it start, tipping his face to the side to meet your eyes.
His smile is so… odd. Soft, warm, but something held back as his gaze dips down to your mouth.
You rub your lips and chin, not sure what it is he sees.
“Alright?” James asks.
You could be. “Yeah,” you say, turning your sights on the TV. James’ gaze lingers on your cheek for a moment, before he turns too. Watching the movie, you don’t have to be anywhere but this room, or anything but yourself. James has fixed it for you again.
