I had so much fun the other night, those spells. Yeah, that was nice. I hope you don’t think that I just come over for the spells and everything. I mean, I really like just talking and hanging out with you and stuff. I know that. But you wanna do a spell. Yeah. But only because it’s really important. There’s this… No, you don’t have to explain. I don’t mind really.
I have no idea if you’re still accepting the drabble prompts but if you are, for the pairing of your choice: 1 - roommates au and 6 - “Do I love you? Yes. Do I like you? That’s still up for debate.”
Sorry for taking so long on this, and have some modern Jily, because I’ve been in that kinda mood thanks to Leah’s amazing regency fic.
“I went out for twenty minutes to get more tea bags,” Lily says in exasperation, leaning across the kitchen sink to open the window and let some of the smoke out before it sets the alarm off. “What did you do?”
Standing by the oven, trying to waft the smoke towards the window with a spatula in one hand and peering at the phone in his other hand, James gives a genuinely puzzled frown. “I don’t know! I was following the recipe! Look, it says to fry it on a high heat, and I’m fairly certain Mary Berry knows what she’s talking about.”
He’s waving the spatula about as he talks, and with his hair half-sticking up in disarray and his eyebrows drawn down in bewilderment he just looks adorable and it sent a jolt of annoyance through Lily because she doesn’t want to find her disaster of a roommate adorable right now, she just wants to be angry with him for nearly setting their flat on fire.
Stalking over to him, she snatches the phone from his hand and scrolls down the recipe – then glances over at the charred remains that still sitting in the probably now ruined frying pan and the used utensils scattered on the counter.
“James. How much oil did you use?”
“A tablespoon, just like it says.”
“It says a teaspoon.”
“What?”
“T-s-p means a teaspoon, you numpty. T-b-s-p means a tablespoon. And this –” She grabs the big plastic spoon he has clearly used for measuring and waves it front of his face. “- this is not a tablespoon, anyway. This is a serving spoon. For god’s sake, no wonder it caught fire.”
He doesn’t even have the grace to be embarrassed – just plucks the spoon from her hand and looks at it curiously before giving a nod and saying, “Well, that’s good to know.”
Lily lets out a sound of disgust, grabbing the frying pan and starting to scrape the contents into the food bin. As she does so she grumbles, “How on earth did you get to the age of twenty six without knowing what tablespoon is and being unable to cook anything more complicated than a pot noodle?”
Although he’s now behind her, she can feel his airy shrug.
“I’m a useless, privileged, privately-educated posh boy wanker who’s never had to do anything for himself. Didn’t we establish that pretty much the day you moved in?”
Her ears go warm. It wasn’t quite the day she moved in, but she called him after she asked if he had any fabric softener she could use since she’d forgotten to pick some up and was met with a blank look and the revelation that he had no idea because he didn’t actually do his own washing. His cleaning lady did.
In fairness, Lily was already frustrated with him that day because he’d used up both the hot water and the last of the milk and there wasn’t really any vehemence behind it. But clearly James has remembered.
Is he upset? His voice is light and cheerfully self-deprecating, so he doesn’t sound upset - but then again he rarely does. He’s very good at making it appear like nothing bothers him. So good that at first Lily believed nothing ever did bother him and that only grated even more on her nerves, made her want to pick at him. But slowly, over the months living together, she caught glimpses – of a flickering behind his eyes and a twitch in his jaw, a brief tensing in his shoulders and his fingers clench – and pieced them to together to realise she was only really seeing what he wanted her to see.
The thing is, what she said about James isn’t untrue. He is privileged, and he was privately educated because his family is obscenely wealthy and he’s breezed his way through life never having to worry about anything so a lot of basic skills have passed him by. Like cooking. And doing the washing.
It’s a pretty stark comparison to Lily’s own life; she went to the local state comprehensive, had a Saturday job for most of her teen years because although her parents aren’t poor poor they always had to be careful with expenses and couldn’t give her much in the way of pocket money. Lily was helping her mum with the cooking and cleaning from a young age, and frankly wouldn’t know what to do with herself if she started paying someone to do it for her.
But the thing is . . . what she said about James isn’t entirely true either.
Because he isn’t useless. Or a wanker – not at heart, although he can do good impression of one when he wants to. Lily’s seen how he cares for his friends, making sure they have enough for groceries and rent if they’re struggling; how much he does for his elderly parents, making daily calls and regular trips home to keep an eye on them; and for all he has a cleaning lady, Lily knows he pays her double what she gets from most of her other jobs, sends her gifts on every holiday and always asks how her kids are doing.
And despite the fact that they’ve been bickering since the day she moved in, James has extended that care to Lily as well. Often she’ll come home and find he’s picked up things he knows she likes during his grocery shop – her favourite kind of chocolate, a new jar of peanut butter, a packet of custard creams – and once after she made an off-hand comment about the stress eczema she sometimes got on her hands he had switched out all the soap in the flat for a hypoallergenic brand and made sure there was a bottle of hand lotion by each sink.
Then, as much as he sometimes drives her mad, he also always manages to make her smile when she’s had a bad day and has a way of just making everything more fun and enjoyable.
So really, in the scheme of things, she doesn’t mind if he sets a frying pan on fire every now and then or doesn’t know a serving spoon from a tablespoon.
But she’s not about to tell him that.
“Right,” she says, putting the frying pan into the sink and starting the hot water running. It’ll probably need to soak, for a while, but she can probably get a lot of the charring off before it sets. “Which is why as soon as I’m done with this, we’re having a lesson in spoon sizes and how much oil to put in a stir fry.”
James just grins, pushing himself up to sit on the counter and watches her. “I must be growing on you. A few weeks ago you would have hurled that pan at my head and told me what a waste of space I am.”
“Growing on me like fungus.”
He laughs, but then asks, “Seriously. First you sewed those buttons on my shirt, then you saved me from accidentally dyeing all my whites red with that stray sock, now this. What you made you decide to start helping me instead of leaving me to flounder?”
It’s a fair question. Previously she’s just let him make his own mistakes and then laughed and or gloated when he’s come to face to face with the consequences. But recently . . . recently she hasn’t. She’s not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s because she can see how hard he’s trying, taking her criticism on board and making an effort to improve, and she can’t bear the disappointment on his face when it doesn’t go well. Maybe it’s because it means a lot to her than he actually listens. More than she wants to admit.
“You just seem so pathetic. Not helping would feel kicking a puppy dog.” Absorbed in scrubbing the thin burnt layer from the pan, she keeps talking without really thinking about what she’s saying. “It’s just who I am. Mary says it’s my love language – wanting to help people. Apparently it’s because I’m a typical Aquarius.”
A shrug shows what she thinks of that.
But rather than laugh or make some sharp remark about astrology, James is silent for a moment just long enough to send set Lily’s spine prickling in anticipation and then he says, “You love me?”
Lily goes still.
“What?”
“. . . I think you just said you love me.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You said helping me is your love language,” James points out. “As in, it’s your way of telling me you love me. You love me.”
It’s not just her ears that are warm any more, it’s her entire face and she’s sure that her cheeks must been as red as her hair. It feels like the bottom of her stomach as dropped out as she hurriedly tries to back track.
“I just meant in a general sense. The same way I love Mary, or Alice.”
“You love me,” James just repeats, and when she glances over at him he’s wearing a broad, bright, delighted grin that makes her heart do a ridiculous flip in her chest. Which is extremely frustrating.
“Fine. But you really shouldn’t be smiling,” Lily tells him. “Do I love you? Yes. Do I like you? That’s still up for debate.”
If anything, he just grins wider.
“That’s fine. I can work with that. I’m very likeable, I’ll have you know. All my teachers said so on my school reports. Charming, some of them even said. And I can provide plenty of other references –”
“Sirius doesn’t count,” Lily quickly tells him.
“Remus, then.” He shrugs. “I always knew I could get you to like me, Evans. But I did think getting you to love me might be a challenge. Now that I know I’ve done that, the rest will come.”
His tone is light, but there’s a flicker of something serious in his eyes – like he really means it – that make it suddenly hard for Lily to breathe. For half a beat she thinks he’s going to lean forward to kiss her and she doesn’t think she’d mind if he did –
“Go and get a clean frying pan. And spoons. I’m almost done here,” she says, trying to snap herself out of it.
James obediently hops off the counter, one corner of his mouth still curled up into a smile. “Believe me, it won’t be long until you love me and like me.”
Lily rolls her eyes but doesn’t say anything.
Because the thing is, she’s fairly sure she already does.
