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i don't know why i like you (but i do) - (e): chapter 5 of 5
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This time when James wakes up, there’s no Snape banging on the door, just early morning sun streaming through his window and topless Lily Evans curled against him, all smooth skin and shared body heat.
i don’t know why i like you (but i do) - (e): chapter 6 of 6
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‘I mean, you know what I really think.’ There’s a glint in James’s eye that he reserves exclusively for winding her up. They’re towards the end of the episode now, having spent a good hour on a more scholarly debate of the historical veracity of the Trojan War.
She groans, careful not to over-modulate the microphone. ‘Don’t do it,’ she threatens with seeming sincerity, even though she’s known he would bring this up from the moment they chose this topic.
i don’t know why i like you (but i do) - (e): chapter 5 of 5
coming on the 19th of december
This time when James wakes up, there’s no Snape banging on the door, just early morning sun streaming through his window and topless Lily Evans curled against him, all smooth skin and shared body heat.
i don’t know why i like you (but i do) - (e): chapter four of five
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Here’s the thing—Lily’s never been in love, not properly.
In every relationship she’s ever had—let alone the catastrophe of her friendship with Sev—she’s known that her partner felt more for her than she did for him, each heart held in her hands like a fragile baby bird. She knows they all thought she liked the power, saw any lack of feeling for them as evidence of a more generalised apathy. Would they have been reassured to know how she spent whole nights lying awake, trying to think of the kindest ways to say no to them, trying to get off to the thought of them, trying to talk herself into love? Probably not, Lily knows she plays a much better femme fatale than ingénue, plus no one wants to hear about how much you tried to want them.
All of this is to say that being in love with James, even with no real hope of reciprocation, is the best fucking thing that’s ever happened to her.
A continued gift for @isahorcrux
There are a two Jameses that I crush on so bad that I constantly reread the fics. One is James in Covet by @bcdaily and @ghostofbambifanfiction. Another is James in Love is complicated by @theesteemedladydebourgh. Now I have to add your James in I don’t know why I like you. And possibly also James in your other fics. Like IM OBSESSED and I LOVE crushing on fictional men especially such well written and I can barely deal with it tbh. Like another ask said, take your time writing. You have given us such an amazing James and such an amazing Lily in all your fics so I’m well fed for YEARS, possibly forever.
Oh wow, thank you so much, that’s so kind!! Both of those Jameses are absolutely worth crushing on, so I’m honoured to have mine considered among such company!
Not to overfeed you, but I did write a James snippet that Sarah herself called swoony, so here you go xxx
i don’t know why i like you (but i do) - (e): chapter two of four
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To be fair to him, the first thing Lily notices about James Potter is that he’s fucking fit. Like a baby duckling imprinting on its mother, her body will never quite forget the way it first felt at seeing his beautiful face on top of his big, dumb body.
A continued gift for @isahorcrux
i don’t know why i like you (but i do) - (e)
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‘You are so exactly the person I thought you were, James Potter.’ That’s his girl, still so condescending even when she’s put down.
‘Yeah,’ he says, not looking back, ‘I guess I am.’
Lily and James read History together at Balliol College at Oxford. Unfortunately, they just can’t seem to read each other for shit.
A gift for @isahorcrux for the CT Gift Exchange. Enjoy, my love!
I literally remade a tumblr account to look at your tumblr (and am bashfully still on anon / worried about privacy on the internet these days)—but I just finished IDKWILY and it was life-changing. I'm sure you receive these messages all the time but I am not as good a writer as you are and can't find the words to properly convey just how much your story meant to me. I have been in the Jily fandom for over fifteen years, and this story actually rocked my world in a way that I haven't felt since I was fifteen reading on ff.net under the covers. You have a true gift for writing, for knowing people, for writing (somehow deeply moving) sex scenes that are still unbelievably hot? I just want to lavish you with all the praise and have you still know it's not enough to convey the depths of my emotion. PLEASE never stop writing. (/are you a professional writer??? you could be)
do you know of the old tumblr user "elucipher" who disappeared sometime around 2015/2016? IDKWILY reminds me of her meta fiction and her long text posts about british academia and you are so brilliant and anyway I am overcome. you are amazing. please take these words to heart. sit with them and marinate in them and let them fill you up whenever (hopefully never) you are feeling down. I want to end this on an "i love you"—it just feels right but obviously I don't know you but i DO love your writing. ANYWAY!
AHHHH!!! You have killed me, I am SLAIN!! But what a way to go, man oh man.
Thank you just endlessly for this, I know exactly that fifteen-year-old under the covers captivation and it is just the greatest pleasure to know I evoked it in someone. Thank you especially for your compliment on the sex scenes, because god knows they can be tricky as hell. I feel like my raison d'etre as a fic writer is to write sex scenes that both serve and are served by the narrative.
I'm not actually a writer by trade, and in fact I used to really hate writing because it felt so lonely and was so tied up with my academic anxiety. Fandom has been the biggest gift for me by countering that loneliness and making me fall in love with writing. It's something that gives me so much joy and a sense of achievement, and also, especially in writing IDKWILY, a real therapeutic effect by putting some of my experiences to paper. My goal in the next few years is to write something with a kind of autobiography/lit fic hybrid, and I would never have had the confidence to set that goal without readers like you, so thank you again and again.
As for how I go into fandom, I had kind of dipped in and out of jily, but 'dived' in properly in 2021 during one of the lockdowns (typical!). I think the first fic I read that really locked me in was 'oops i did it again'. Then I read 'the life and times', 'the last enemy', and 'come together' in unhealthily rapid succession, and I think my characterisations of James and Lily definitely emerged from that primordial soup, combined with my own visions of the Dream Girl and Dream Boy that they are. I think 'Come Together' is just so good that I've kind of imprinted on @thequibblah like a baby duckling, and the way her stories make me feel is for sure the benchmark against which I measure my own.
I think the column metaphor from IDKWILY is definitely my best attempt at expressing the appeal of Jily's dynamic, combined with Lily's speech to James over the phone after they fight. I love the fact that they match each other in wits and competence and (in my humble opinion) service toppery in all aspects of their lives. I also adore that James is fundamentally to me a boy who was publicly humiliated by a girl, and instead of resenting her, took on the feedback. I think the best versions of Jily have Lily grow and change as well, and that capacity and willingness is something that is both swoony and aspirational.
My point is this: Please come and chat in my inbox absolutely anytime, words cannot express how deeply you are welcome xxxxxxxx
