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“If we could tell a film, then why make a film?” —Jafar Panahi
“I love you,” Lily says, quietly. The night holds the words for a moment, then releases them. She hasn’t yet looked at him. “I’m in love with you, and I’m tired of pretending I’m not.”
Everything splinters after that.
I. THE SUN
1982
From Star magazine, March 16th, 1982:
Guess Who: It’s the Splits for Sci-Fi Superstar!
We already knew this space cowboy and his formidable alien priestess have the kind of smouldering chemistry you can’t fake. Now he’s officially on the outs with his model wife — and, rumour has it, shacking up with his co-star… — just shy of their two-year anniversary.
From Star magazine, May 18th, 1982:
This Week’s Yeses and No’s
No: Model Lily Evans may have been on the cover of this month’s Vogue UK, but the post-divorce binge isn’t treating her well. Lay off the ice cream sundaes, Lil!
From Star magazine, July 5th, 1982:
Guess Who: These Co-Stars Are Out-of-This-World Cute!
What can we say? Sometimes true love takes the bumpier flight pathway. We wish the happy new couple all the very best!
***
In point of fact it probably started a long time before August 3rd, 1982, but that’s the day Lily will always remember as the beginning. Before August 3rd, it was vague suggestion and smoke-like desire, never spoken aloud. That night: from nothing to something.
Mary instructed her, sometime back in July, to throw a party. “Head off the bad press,” she suggested. “Give them something good to talk about.”
They were speaking through the telephone, but Lily still arched an eyebrow. “Sorry, I should throw a party in order to…divert attention from my very public divorce?”
The headlines practically wrote themselves; every gossip rag in the country would discuss how gauche it was to celebrate one’s divorce. As if she ought to be seen mourning the death of this marriage, as if it were her fault it had ended, anyway.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” said Mary cheerily, “you can’t be seen enjoying it too much.”
“Of course, how silly of me.”
“But you bought the Brighton house. It’s yours. And you’ve wanted to throw a housewarming anyway.”
“A housewarming dinner,” Lily corrected. “Just a handful of friends and, like, my mum.”
“And me.”
“And you, obviously. You’re in the handful of friends.”
Mary said awww, as was appropriate. “I think it would be good for you, setting aside the question of the press and all. Have some fun, forget the shithead you married.”
“All right, look—”
“What? We all know he’s a shithead. It’s literally public information.”
Lily let out a breath. “I don’t want to mess up the house when I’ve barely lived in it.”
“You know that’s a stupid excuse, Lily. Come on, throw a proper summer party, like you used to do out of that shit flat of yours—”
She was laughing at that point. “So, my flat’s shit, my ex-husband’s shit, is there anything else in my life you want to rubbish?”
“Both of those things are out of your life now,” Mary pointed out. “Everything else is shiny and brilliant.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“You’re most welcome, doll.”
There was a pause. “But it’s also about the press, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes,” Mary said. “It’s about the press, and the film.”
Yes, the film. Lily couldn’t argue there.
And to think, being cajoled into hosting a party by her agent has put her here, now, in the once-expansive sitting room of the brand-new Brighton beach house. Once-expansive, because it’s so jam-packed with bodies now that it’s starting to look small — an intimidating thought, since Lily has committed to spending the rest of summer here, and she doesn’t want to consider how empty it’ll be without all the guests.
At least there will be Dorcas, her best friend from university, who’s currently singing along to “Don’t You Want Me?” louder than the stereo itself, pressed close to an actor Lily thinks she recognises from a daytime soap. By the dazed look on his face, he certainly wants her.
Lily has held religiously to Mary’s recommendation: all she’s had to drink tonight is one margarita. The hired bartender mixed a strong one, but that was almost an hour ago. She’s clear-headed. And she likes it that way. If she’s in full control of her mind, she can’t look around the house and recall all the things about it she’d wanted to share with her ex-husband.
One thing she’s definitely too sober for is gasping dramatically when the song changes to “Copacabana.” It instantly makes her feel nineteen again — nineteen and utterly un-famous and without guile.
“Big fan of this number?” says a voice behind her.
Lily assumes it’s the bartender — she’s sitting with her back to the bar, elbows resting against the countertop. Without turning around, she says, “Oh, yes, shamelessly.”
“I think I saw Barry around here somewhere.”
Her mouth falls open. “You think you— Barry Manilow’s at my party?” She whirls about at that, needing more information at once, and the man who’d spoken is laughing to himself, and he’s decidedly not the bartender.
“Long time,” James Potter says once he’s finished laughing, holding out his hand.
“You remember me,” says Lily, her guard lowered enough by “Copacabana” that she can’t stop herself from blurting this out.
He gives her a puzzled look. “I mean — I was making a joke. It’s only been a few months.”
She still hasn’t shaken his hand. Flushing, Lily does so, rushing through the motion so as not to hold on for too long.
Being surrounded by attractive people for the past few years has mostly desensitised her to handsomeness, and being married made noticing it a low priority. But she notes his handsomeness now, his stomach-lurching good looks only enhanced by the clean lines of his white button-down, his impossibly-tousled inky hair. He’s on the barstool next to her, their knees centimetres apart. Impressive of her to not have noticed when he sat down.
She knew he was in Brighton, everyone knows that, for some sort of charity gala thing. But that doesn’t explain why he’s chosen to spend the evening here, at a party with a handful of famous people but a good deal more young, sun-bronzed Brighton residents curious about Lily’s personal drama.
“That’s— Yes. It’s been a few months. Sorry.” She laughs awkwardly. “The craziness of the party’s getting to me, I suppose.”
The chemistry read they had together was back in April, the two of them in a cramped King’s Road flat owned — allegedly, though it didn’t look very lived-in, or liveable-in at all — by the casting director. Lily wouldn’t have gone inside, looking at the setup, if not for the fact that she’d auditioned for Trelawney, the director, already.
Mary had warned her again and again about the woman’s eccentricity — which she’d seen firsthand. “She’s making a really intense, arty film. And people need to take you seriously.”
This, because Lily has thus far only had modelling jobs, and Mary was insistent that her first film role not be all about showing off her legs. “Though, your legs are lovely,” as her agent always tells her.
So: Sybill Trelawney, a recluse and an eccentric, looking to cast for her first project in five years, apparently backed by mysterious Hollywood money. Lily didn’t ask where exactly it came from, obviously. Trelawney, a Brit, wanted Brits in her film. That was all that mattered.
Trelawney herself is a woo-woo sort, prone to gazing off into the middle distance and speaking in strange, cryptic riddles. Lily was surprised to get the call for the chemistry read, given how unsure she’d been if anything she’d done in the audition was to the woman’s liking at all. They’d not offered her the part outright (though Mary assured her this callback was a very good sign) and so Lily arrived at the chemistry read only cautiously excited. And then her stomach bottomed out when she saw James.
He is famous, see — that’s not to say she isn’t, people will recognise her at the shops now, but that’s partly because of all the divorce stuff. He’s been acting since he was a child.
Which she knows because they were at school together, and he was gone all the time to film things. Eventually he’d just left entirely. These thoughts were at the forefront of Lily’s mind as she approached him in that tiny, filthy flat.
And then he said, “James Potter. Nice to meet you.”
So, well, he clearly doesn’t remember her.
Lily drags herself out of the layered memories back to this moment at the Brighton house, and scans him up and down discreetly. She got the part in the Trelawney film sometime in June, and is in fact flying to Rome for principal photography in September. But she and Mary are supposed to keep that news a secret. She hasn’t even told Dorcas — everyone in her life thinks it’s a magazine cover shoot.
The press for this project is very, very controlled. Lily and Mary have lived in fear that they’ll finally snap and cut her loose because of the divorce and its fallout all summer. She can’t imply anything now, not when Trelawney hasn’t even told her who her co-star will be.
“It was a good read,” she offers.
“It was,” James says smoothly, revealing nothing. “I liked it.”
Really, it’s the exact same thing she said to him first, but Lily can feel her blush deepen. God, no wonder people think she’s some kind of ingénue. Here she is, red in the face because a movie star gave her the most basic of compliments.
He’s looking at her, and she wonders what he can make out from her reaction. She darts her gaze away, rubbing the back of her neck.
This is the pause in which he might leave, if he wants to. But instead he says, seriously, “So… Barry Manilow.”
“I hope you weren’t joking about that. I could never forgive anyone who jokes about Barry Manilow,” Lily says.
He grins. It’s not at all like his on-screen grin, not even like the way he smiled at her during their audition (which, fine, she’s thought about, so sue her). It’s wide and boyish, less celebrity-charm and more something effortless, something utterly unaffected. Even if he weren’t famous, everyone in the room would stop to look at him grin like that.
James jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “D’you want to go find him? He may turn out to be just a Barry lookalike, I’m afraid, but we can lampoon him for it if so.”
“Lampoon him!” She laughs. “Strong words.”
He quirks one eyebrow. “I thought you took Manilow seriously, Evans. Have you been leading me on all this time?”
She laughs again, though this time her body is on high alert. Mary has warned her so often that the words ring in her ears: no flirtations at this party, Lily Evans, if the magazines get even a whiff of it they’ll pounce. She waved her off at the time, because she couldn’t really picture a so-called flirtation interesting enough to reciprocate. But no one warned her that James bloody Potter would be in her house, and sitting so close by, and that he’d be flirting with her and that she’d like it.
People might notice if they left the room together. But surely it isn’t so obvious that she enjoys his company, sitting here at the bar? Nothing innocuous happens right under the bartender’s nose. It’s her house. If she wants to take someone to a private spot, it would be the easiest thing in the world.
“No,” says Lily, mind made up, “but I don’t want to go find Barry Manilow.”
“You don’t?”
There’s an expectant pause. She flatters herself and imagines he’s holding his breath, and finds that she’s doing hers instead. As if even she doesn’t know what she’s going to say next.
“No, I think it’s quite comfortable here. Barry can wait.” She smiles at him. “Fancy another drink?”
And then — this is entirely coincidence — she swivels her stool just a little, and their knees bump together.
His eyes are wide behind his specs. “Sure. What do you recommend?”
Lily catches the bartender’s attention. “Well — I had a great margarita earlier…”
***
Lily met her now-ex-husband when she was just shy of twenty. He was twenty-eight and famous. Really, capital-F Famous. From the moment they began dating, people they passed by on the street or in restaurants or at parties always gave her the same puzzled sort of look, like, what’s he doing with you, anyway?
From the outset, he dismissed her concerns about being a nobody. “Think of it this way,” he told her, “you can only go up from here.”
So she did think of it that way, and as if through sheer exertion of will, things did go up. She went from adverts to proper photoshoots to covers in a dizzyingly short amount of time, a pace that stunned the agent she fired and lifted the eyebrows of the new agent she hired, one who understood when she explained that this was a means to an end.
“We’ll get you there,” Mary Macdonald promised, her ironclad certainty reassuring Lily rather more than her husband’s. Which might’ve been a sign of things to come, in retrospect.
It was almost gratifying, after two years of being called a two-bit model, an empty, pretty face, a hanger-on, a social climber, a gold-digger, by people who knew nothing about her, to find out that he had been cheating — quite regularly, with his young co-star — on her.
(Of course it took a while for that petty satisfaction to really sink in. The first few months had been horrible. There had been no begging to be taken back, no very sincere apologies, even. Hard to imagine that this was a man she’d thought solid and dependable.
Her mother told her once, placatingly, “Well, celebrities are all quite different, you know,” as if he’d been a different species of creature entirely.
And the satisfaction was rather undercut by the fact that the press — and everyone who’d ever watched a film of his — took his side. Thus, the cards fall, or whatever.)
Some days Lily thinks she was silly to ever believe she’d have done anything for him and he for her, that they loved one another the way people do in novels and films. Some days she resigns herself to never feeling anything like it again — so golden, and warm, and loved.
To claim that she fell in love again on August 3rd might be stretching things. But Lily tastes possibility, light and sweet as summer fruit on her tongue, for the first time in a long time on that night.
She loses it, too, many times over. Wait — we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
***
“I have something to confess to you,” James says, halfway through the margarita she’s induced him to try.
Lily tilts her head to one side, considering him with narrowed eyes. The ends of her hair trail over the sticky countertop, but she pays this no mind. All her energy is invested in trying to imagine what James Potter could possibly have to confess to her.
Maybe he remembers her from school after all. It shouldn’t mean anything, his memory of her, and she tries to actually take in this fact, that his opinion of her doesn’t matter.
Does she just want to make a lasting impression on everyone who’s ever known her? Does she want people she crosses on the way to the shops to turn and stare? Well, yes, a little. (Petunia calls it her narcissism and Mary calls it her model mentality, and neither feels very flattering.) But none of this should extend to James Potter, who is not a casting director or a photographer or anyone who’s evaluating her face and body.
There is the small fact of him being a very attractive man, she supposes. To consider that angle, however, would be to admit that she is interested herself. And that’s a problem. She isn’t interested, because Mary told her not to be, and also he doesn’t remember her from school, so why would she want him to be interested anyway, and — and —
James looks not at all like her ex. He’s lankier and younger, obviously, and his hair is darker, and his skin is browner, and this was the standard of comparison by which she judged all men after him, even more so after they separated. Only, she can’t quite recall the exact tilt of her ex’s smile just now, nor the timbre of his voice.
It’s the margarita. Obviously.
“What’s the confession?” says Lily, resting her chin in one hand.
“I didn’t actually see Barry Manilow here. I just wanted to strike up a conversation.”
There is really no trace of guilt in his expression. Laughing a little, she wonders if he might be incapable of it — if he is so shameless that he’s gone entirely the other way and projects innocence. His smile grows as she laughs, which rather confirms her instinct.
“And you thought,” she says, “that would work best?”
He shrugs one shoulder, taking a sip of his drink. “It did work, didn’t it?”
She makes a face. “Hook, line, sinker. But now I’ll find someone to tell me better lies, thanks.”
James pouts. Lily makes no move to leave her seat. She feels sharply alive, like she’s on a ride at an amusement park, the wind whistling through her ears, her whole body braced for the drop. And he’s hardly said anything to her.
That makes her wary, even if the better part of her is trying to ignore any hints of caution. Her natural immunity against charming people — charming men in particular — has woefully dwindled in recent times. Gone is the Lily Evans of her schoolgirl days, who could make a boy wither away by a carefully-placed unimpressed stare. She struggles now to reconstruct her armour, to ready every clever riposte she has in her just in case it comes time to do battle.
“You haven’t gone,” says James at present, almost nonchalantly.
Almost.
“No, I haven’t,” she says, as if she herself has only just realised it.
“Funny thing, that.” His smile is ever-present, but it’s dimmed a little. Less like he’s beaming at the whole room, and more like he’s aiming at a target.
Lily swallows, and reminds herself that all of this is wishful thinking. She’s lonely. That’s all. She has a big new house she meant to share with someone she loved, and now she has it all to herself.
“Are you liking Brighton?” James says, interrupting her drain-circling.
“Hmm?” She looks back up at him. “Oh, yeah, loads. I spent the one holiday of my childhood here, though of course it’s changed since then, and I didn’t summer anywhere near this neighbourhood.”
She laughs, conscious that she’s perhaps admitted too much. But he’s also the first guest to actually ask this question — it’s not really the chitchat sort of party — so maybe the words were pent up inside her, and she had no hope of holding them in.
“The one holiday?” he repeats.
That is so like a rich person, Lily almost responds. Jesus, the margaritas must be stronger than she realised. She coughs, nudging her drink just out of reach.
“Yeah, we never had much, growing up.” (Her least favourite euphemism, but the circles she runs in now have her repeating it over and over, much to her chagrin.) “So, just the one proper seaside holiday for me.”
“And now you’re living a seaside holiday, is it?” The teasing lilt to his voice is gone; he seems to mean this question in earnest.
“So the listing for this house promised,” Lily says lightly.
His smile is there and gone again. “No one’s as sneaky as an estate agent, eh?”
“No one. Well, maybe an actor.”
James feigns offence. “You tell one white lie…”
She mock-glares, then picks up her glass. (So much for her resolve.) “But, yes, Brighton’s really nice. I’m not actually shifting here permanently, I’m still sharing a flat in London with my friend…” Lily trails off, momentarily searching the crowd for Dorcas. There she is, in one piece, now dancing with a gorgeous model Lily once did a shoot with.
“Oh, I see,” James says.
He doesn’t comment on the sharing bit, perhaps having learned a lesson from his earlier question. For better or for worse, that is not an arrangement made for her finances’ sake. She lived with her ex in London, obviously, and hasn’t yet been able to bring herself to find a real place again. Some idiot part of her, she supposes, thinks that will be the final nail in the coffin, not seeing her ex and his new girlfriend plastered all over magazines every damn day.
Her throat has tightened. Lily clears it and says, “Do you want to get some air for a second?”
His brows rise, but there’s no hint of the suggestive in his expression. “Sure. Lead the way.”
The back patio is occupied by others who’ve had the same idea (and, judging by how close some of them are standing, rather more ideas). So she heads into one of the downstairs guest rooms, where the party’s spilled over into a split-off separate ecosystem. Lily scans the bare walls, the simple furnishing. She moved everything she needed to upstairs in advance of everyone arriving, which has only made her more aware of how much space she’ll have soon.
Through the guest room, and she unlatches the French windows that lead onto the small, secluded balcony. She peers at the back patio to their right, squinting in the darkness to make sure no one is doing anything particularly concerning. Certainly some drugs are in circulation, but nothing is too out of hand…yet.
James lets out a quiet whistle, making her start. She almost forgot he followed her. He grips the balcony railing and leans out over it, staring at the pristine beach and the waves beyond.
“That,” he says, “is a fucking view. Your estate agent wasn’t kidding.”
Lily laughs. It’s maybe easier now to appreciate the stunning beauty of this house through someone else — though it was immediately apparent to her when she first scoped it out.
“Try waking up to it,” she says.
“I want to,” he says at once. “Seriously, I’ll buy it off you right now.”
She laughs once more. “Sorry, not selling. I’ve already had to beat my sister off with a stick to stop her from trying to borrow it.”
James sighs theatrically. “I’ll look into the rest of this development, then. We can be neighbours, and you can be sick of me in a month.”
“I’ll be fleeing to London as often as I can,” she says seriously. “They’ll think no one lives here.”
“Mm, you’ll start to plot my death.”
“Posing hypotheticals to my mates over drinks — how would you off a movie star and get away with it? Oh, no reason, just curious.”
He laughs, an expansive sound that fills the air around them. Lily feels the sharp thrill of success, like she’s had a standing ovation.
“Really, though,” he says, his smile fading slightly, “I’m sorry. It must not be easy moving to this house. What with all the…” He trails off, peeling his gaze from the moonlit waves to rest squarely on her.
She bobs her head in some vague acknowledgment, wishing badly that she could bring herself to look away.
“People can be pricks.” Breezy and light, Evans. Well done.
James continues to stare at her. “Yeah. They really can,” he says.
Lily gives him a faint smile. It’s likely less reassuring than her words. But she at last turns to face the water instead, elbows against the railing. A light breeze stirs her hair, sets goosebumps along her skin. She shivers.
“I’d offer you my jacket,” says James, “but I have none, and also, it’s August.”
She gives him a disbelieving look. “Are you trying to be chivalrous while also poking fun at me?”
“I’ve got two hands.”
“Two hands you’re using to not help me in the slightest.”
He arches one eyebrow. “You want me to help keep you warm? Is that what you’re implying?” He could very easily have made this question a flirtation in and of itself, but he asks like it’s a joke. Like she couldn’t possibly be implying that, because it would never happen.
“No,” she says, quickly, petulantly. “Just — you’re not helping me in general.”
James grins at her, sensing that she’s on the back foot. “Then let’s do it over again.” He turns to face her, and the space between them feels cramped to nonexistence. Lily’s breath catches in her throat.
He says, with feeling, “Lily, take my jacket, it’ll protect you from this Arctic evening—”
She groans. “Fuck off, oh my God—”
“—your every moment of discomfort tears me apart—” With a flourish, he mimes removing a jacket and draping it over her shoulders.
“You’re a terrible actor,” she says, shrugging off the nonexistent jacket. “Charlie Chaplin’s rolling over in his grave. While weeping.”
“Really?” His grin only widens. He lowers his head, so they’re almost eye to eye. “Then why did you like it so much?” he whispers.
Lily pulls her bottom lip between her teeth, which is not a move, but he is immediately distracted by the gesture. A spark of surprise begins in her chest. He’s not just being solicitous; he’s really flirting with her.
But he also said he was sorry about the house. He is the closest anyone has come tonight to mentioning the big, scary D-word. What does that mean for this moment, each of them staring at the other’s mouths and making no secret of it?
Long minutes too late, Lily plucks up her sword and shield, remembers to be on her guard. She steps back, noisily and obviously as she can manage. “Uh,” she says.
James kneels, inexplicably. She almost leaps out of his reach, but all he does is pretend to pick something up off the floor and dust it off.
“My poor jacket,” he tells her.
She rolls her eyes. “Be still, my beating heart.”
He smiles, but it’s not the meaning-laden smile he had on just moments ago, inches away from her. It’s friendly. There they are, her wit and her bravado, arrived just in time to stop her from making a mistake.
Because it would be a mistake. She shouldn’t jump into bed with someone, especially not someone who will flit off into the horizon tomorrow morning as she turns his every word over in her head. She is so freshly stitched together that the slightest snag will pull her apart.
“I should go back inside,” she says, jerking a thumb over her shoulder as if it’s unclear which way inside is. “My friend and I are supposed try to talk the DJ into playing the entire Grease soundtrack at some point.”
James looks at her very seriously. “Not Grease 2 as well? Because I’ve just seen it, and it was—”
“Shit,” Lily finishes. “No chance.”
His relief is comically exaggerated. “Almost thought you were one of them, Evans.”
“One of…?”
“The legions of the damned,” he clarifies. “The Grease 2 fans, they of poor taste.”
“I’m offended you’d even consider it.”
His grin is crooked. “I’m too busy being relieved to beg forgiveness.”
This is where she ought to leave. Instead she says, “Would you have been very disappointed? If I were a fan of Grease 2?”
He nods at once. “Oh, yes. I was terrified I’d lost you.”
She chokes out a laugh, squeezes her eyes shut. “Bye.” And then she’s gone through the French windows before either of them can say anything else.
That’s the last time she thinks she’ll ever see James Potter.
***
Of course, if getting a divorce at twenty-two hasn’t already squashed her belief in fate, that word might come to mind when she arrives in Rome and meets her co-star.
“Oh,” James says, with a lopsided smile, “you.”
Sybill Trelawney, bracelets jangling, gestures between the two of them. “That’s right, you knew each other in school, didn’t you?”
Lily gapes at her, as does he.
“How did you—” Lily starts weakly.
Trelawney squints at her from behind her thick bifocals. “I have my ways, dear,” she says gravely.
Maybe Mary spilled the beans, Lily thinks darkly. Not that she cares, really, but she hoped for it to come up a little more innocuously in front of James himself. It’s likely news to him. He probably feels very awkward now.
But then— “I didn’t expect you to know,” James says to Trelawney, which throws Lily for a loop yet again. “I didn’t think anyone else knew.”
Excuse me? Lily wants to say. You didn’t think I knew? Never mind that she’s made no reference to their time together in school either, and for all intents and purposes she, too, has acted as if she didn’t know him. She is outraged at the idea that he’s gone all these months thinking she didn’t recognise him.
She holds that outrage close even now, with the crisp autumn daylight spent almost entirely in front of the camera, alongside him. It helps, ironically, that Trelawney insists on shooting chronologically for authenticity’s sake. (James grumbles about this a bit, saying it’s all acting anyway, and he can manage authentic if they go back to front. Lily doesn’t have an axe to grind, given that she’s never filmed anything before.)
But since their characters are still feeling each other out, still in the early stages of the romance that anchors the film, she can milk her real reticence around him for all it’s worth.
“Good,” Trelawney has a habit of saying, her hands a-flutter. “Good, Sabine, let him convince you.”
She has to hold back a snort. James gives a good-natured eye-roll.
His character, Freddy, a student layabout sort who’s moved to Rome, sets his sights on Lily’s character, Sabine, soon after his arrival. They knew each other as children. Though the film will not include any childhood scenes, the suggestion of some idyllic English village hangs behind their interactions.
Anyway, it’s a bit of a problem that Freddy is attracted to Sabine, and she to him, since she’s unhappily engaged. She might consider breaking it off but the fiancé is rich, and she’s the eldest of a bunch of impoverished siblings. Freddy’s got no money to speak of. So they’re busy dancing around each other for the first third of the film.
If the rest of the cast and crew notice she’s standoffish around James even off-camera, they don’t say anything. Not to her, at least.
Take, for instance, the typical evening activity after filming wraps for the day. Trelawney and some of the crew are staying in the villa where most of the shooting happens, but the bulk of the cast is arranged in crumbling apartments some streets away. They’ve become anthropologists specialising in the alcoholic offerings between the villa and the flats, and they sit now in their favourite bar, a crumbling joint with rickety chairs and tables and an ill-tempered old man for an owner.
Lily has decided she likes Italian bars best of all — drinks are the same everywhere you go, but the food, good God. (James makes a crack about how he’ll look unrecognisable at the end of filming if they go on like this every day. As if, she thinks, with a resentful glare. She’s seen him running around the neighbourhood each bloody morning.)
Now they’re discussing film projects they’ve been soundly rejected for. Lily has little to contribute to this conversation — anything she could say feels like a boast. Oh, yeah, I got the first role I auditioned for. But she listens, nursing her gin and tonic. Collects little grudges against James, who looks golden and unreal in the fading sunlight.
“—a musical, once, but they sent me out of the room the moment I began dancing,” he’s saying, smiling. “That was the first thing I asked Sybill when I got the call — there’s no dancing in this, is there?”
Leo, who plays one of Sabine’s brothers, roars with laughter.
But Lily can’t help leaning forward at this, a frown on her face. “That’s definitely not true.”
James — and everyone else — turns to her. “What’s not true?”
“That you’re a bad dancer. You’re probably a great dancer. Don’t lie about it.” The words are a touch more aggressive than she intended; she doesn’t quite know where this is coming from. Leo and some of the other men hoot their approval.
James’s smile turns crooked. “Sorry, my moral compass is just a bit askew.” He pinches together thumb and forefinger to show how much. The others laugh again.
“It’s not about morals.” Lily rolls her eyes. There’s a part of her going don’t say it, don’t say it, but she’s mulishly committed to going on. The next words out of her mouth are, “Self-deprecation is so unattractive.”
That sends her trio of onscreen brothers into fits. Only James is still looking at her, lips still curled upwards. He has this horrible, searching way of gazing at people, which she supposes makes him a charismatic actor, but she hates it with a fiery passion. On more than one occasion she’s caught him doing it to her and said, crossly, what? He always replies, nothing, sorry, and looks away, ostensibly penitent but still smiling. Like he’s won something by getting her to ask.
Of course, that only serves to get her more worked up. Lily has to bite back a comment like you flirt like a prepubescent boy, because she doesn’t actually know that he’s flirting, or worse, you flirted much better at my party, because — well, that one’s self-explanatory.
“Oh, no,” James murmurs now, dropping the smile, “I hadn’t realised. I’ll do my best to be attractive for you.”
Murder is generally frowned upon, Lily knows, but surely there are exceptions for one’s infuriating co-star? Surely a judge would let her go lightly?
“Please do,” she says, voice clipped. “At least you’re nice to look at.”
He’s back to smiling, which is how she knows she’s lost a point. “Oh?”
“Shut up,” Lily says hotly. “You know you are, shut up before you spoil it.”
“Sorry,” he says — he seems to like apologising to her, or just seeing how many little things he can get away with — and mimes zipping his lips shut.
She can’t help it. Her poker face breaks, and she laughs.
***
On the day Freddy and Sabine are supposed to kiss, James all but corners her outside her trailer.
“Are you feeling okay?” he says.
She could ask him the same thing himself — he’s more restless than usual, shifting from one foot to the other. “Feeling okay about what?”
“The, you know, the scene today. Do you feel prepared?”
Drily, she says, “I’ve only had six months of knowing Sabine has to kiss her lover eventually, so. I think I’ve wrapped my head around the concept.”
He gives her a look. “You know that’s not what I mean.”
No, of course not, but she’s also had nearly two weeks to get accustomed to the fact that she has to kiss James, specifically. That was the bigger hiccup.
(Trelawney is amazingly neurotic about it. “You knew each other as children, just as Freddy and Sabine did, but I hope you know Freddy and Sabine did not kiss as children,” she told them once over breakfast, so matter-of-factly that the actress playing Sabine’s younger sister chokes on her cut fruit. Then she gave them a searching, discomfiting stare.
“Noted,” Lily said into the silence that followed, because James was too busy stammering to answer.
She thought then — as she thinks now — that it might be for the best that they didn’t kiss at the party. Maybe Trelawney would be able to tell. The woman’s found out stranger things.)
“I know that’s not what you mean,” she says, patting a stray curl back into place, “but really, you don’t have to worry about me. Are you feeling okay?”
He nods at once. “Great,” he says with gusto.
Lily says, smiling, “Whoa, there, on the enthusiasm.”
He gives her an agonised look before realising she’s joking. An unfamiliar feeling, this: him, radiating nervous energy, her, loose and relaxed. He’s supposed to be the acting veteran.
She loops her arm through his. It’s hard to get awkward about physical contact after having been on set all this time together, and she wouldn’t hesitate to grab Leo or any of the other actors like this. But then she remembers that this is James.
It’s too late to pull away without making it worse, though. So she tries to deflect by keeping her tone light and breezy. “It’ll be fine. I’m told I’m an okay kisser, even.”
He ducks his head and laughs, a quick expulsion of warm breath against the bare skin of her shoulder. “Yeah, somehow, that wasn’t the primary concern.”
“I’ve heard you’re an okay kisser,” she offers, looking up at him.
His eyes narrow. Freddy doesn’t wear spectacles, and most of the time between takes James wanders around with his off, always looking a little lost because of it. “Heard from who?”
“You don’t think I read Tiger Beat?”
He rolls his eyes. “Come off it, Lily. Really?”
“What?”
“Are you joking?”
She laughs. “You’re really worked up about this.”
“Who doesn’t want to know what people say about them?” he shoots back.
She pulls her arm out of his, too quickly for him to reach after her. “If you ask me, this is all for authenticity. Freddy absolutely wonders if Sabine knows he’s an okay kisser.”
“Freddy’s a great kisser,” James says, following.
“We’ll see, I guess.”
His hand closes around her upper arm, just above the elbow. Lily turns around. “What?”
But he simply looks at her without speaking. She waits for a long moment. Then, “Never mind.”
She shrugs, cool as you please, though she wants to stay wrapped in the sudden electricity, here. “See you on set, tiger.”
He chokes on his laughter.
The scene itself takes place in the villa’s back garden. There’s a canvas screen type thing that is, in fact, a crucial prop; they’re arguing about its placement for ages before they start filming. Does it catch the light right? Will it have the desired effect? Will the actors’ silhouettes be visible through it? Finally Trelawney says they will have to experience the scene before deciding. That, Lily judges, means they’ll need loads of takes before the director’s happy.
The camera rolls. Lily slides into Sabine, mid-argument with Freddy. She leads the way into the garden, back to him, not even speaking directly to him — it’s his job to listen, why should she face him? She doesn’t look back, but she can imagine how he follows: slouching slightly, hands crossed over his half-unbuttoned shirt. This infuriates her further.
Sabine, honestly, Freddy says, would you stop shouting?
I’m not shouting, she shouts.
If she doesn’t put physical distance between them, something will happen. She can’t say what. Just — something. So Sabine keeps moving, futile though it is given that Freddy’s taller than her and can keep up with little effort.
Sabine— Freddy catches up in two easy strides, pulls her behind the screen.
She looks at him for the first time in what feels like ages. He’s bent towards her like a bough weighed down by snow; his hand is on her arm. Though he drops it as if scalded, he doesn’t move away.
She flicks her gaze towards the screen, which separates them from the house — flimsily, of course. Their silhouettes are clear behind it. But she can almost pretend they are utterly unobserved — no, not just that no one is watching them, but that no one can watch them. They’re here, but not here at all.
She takes one of his hands in both of hers. He takes hold of her waist. Given how they are standing, a kiss seems inevitable, but they move closer only haltingly. Feeling out every moment of this. At any moment one of them might spook. But then their mouths meet.
For all his flirting, Freddy’s kiss is shy, hopeful; Sabine loves that, the taste of hope. She squeezes his fingers tightly between her own, but the kiss stays soft.
He breaks away, starts to speak, and then decides against it. He turns and leaves the garden in a hurry. She watches him go for a moment, then ducks her head to stare at the grass instead.
Trelawney calls cut!
“Again?” James can be heard saying. Lily stays there, behind the screen, trying to settle her racing heart.
“No,” Trelawney tells him, “that’s the one.”
“That’s the—? But we only—”
“That’s the take.”
With that uncharacteristically brief assessment, Trelawney directs them to wrap up for the day.
Lily takes that as her cue to come back out. While behind the screen she forgot that the garden wasn’t empty — that dozens of crew members watched that scene play out. It was a clever choice, that screen. Even the audience will feel like they’re intruding on something.
The thought is terrifying as much as it’s thrilling. It’s the first time Lily’s remembered that people will be seeing this in cinemas. She shivers, though the evening is far from chilly, and escapes the circle of crew members dismantling equipment to find James.
“All right?” she calls to him.
“Just fine. You?”
“Good.”
Then she laughs. Normal people in their normal jobs don’t have to kiss people and then shake it off.
“What?” James hasn’t taken offence. He’s almost smiling, as if in anticipation of her explanation.
Lily just shakes her head. “Never mind. Drinks?” she says, addressing the larger group around them. Enthusiasm is muted; she rolls her eyes and amends that to, “Drinks on me, we’re celebrating Sabine falling in love.”
That gets a round of cheers. Lily returns to the trailer, shedding Sabine’s dress and exchanging it for her own, a simple linen number. The makeup girl Maria gives her face a thorough scrubbing. She emerges, raw and pink as the setting sun, to find that a handful of cast members have waited for her to walk over.
James falls into step beside her. “That was the moment Sabine fell in love?” he says, and it takes a moment for her to recall what she said earlier.
“It was.”
“Really?”
“You seem surprised.”
“I thought it might have been sooner. The scene by the river, maybe.”
Lily smiles. “Was Freddy looking at her and thinking, this is the moment she’s falling in love with me?”
James huffs. “Not Freddy. Me.”
“Oh.” She takes a few steps to consider her answer. “No, I think… She’d thought about it earlier, but that was when she decided to do it.”
“Decided!” He smiles. “I thought love was something that happened against your will.”
Lily thinks about her ex-husband. “It would be much too easy like that.”
“And it was only a kiss that did it?” He shakes his head, chuckles to himself.
She elects not to respond to that. Let him think what he wants, even if most of her rises in outrage at the implication: only a kiss! Only!
Someone has brought a boombox with them, carried straight into the bar. The proprietor has a furious conversation in Italian with Leo before conceding with an exasperated gesture. Out of respect for him, maybe, Leo doesn’t put on anything loud or disruptive. Instead, Doris Day wafts through the bar as James pours the wine.
“Red or white?” he asks Lily.
“You always ask me — you know it’s red.”
His smile is lopsided. “I’m only giving you the chance to change your mind.”
She feels quite drunk before she’s even had a sip. The relief of having got through the scene, probably — she felt this way on the first day of filming, exhilarated and exhausted and acutely aware that she was alone here in Italy while James Potter noisily befriended the whole cast. That vague irritation is so far gone from her mind now.
Lily drinks deep. Tomorrow is light on Sabine scenes. She might even have a lie-in.
Or at least she might be able to take advantage of her solitude, go for a walk around the city. Maybe she’ll properly consider the low fizz in her stomach, the odd magnetism that has her following James around the bar with her eyes. Doris trills through the boombox, perhaps— perhaps— perhaps.
Time passes, and all of Sabine’s siblings have their arms around one another, crooning along to “Que Será, Será.” Lily knows she’s had a reasonable number of glasses — two, maybe three — but she can’t remember how much, exactly, which makes her think it’s time to head back to her flat.
“I’ll walk you,” says James.
She tries to wave him off. “It’s literally around the corner, James.”
“It’s late!”
“It’s half past ten.”
“Late,” he says again.
“Oh, all right,” she says, and tucks her hand into his elbow.
Her feet are aching, though she’s been sitting since they left the set. This makes the progress to the flat rather slow. James threatens to carry her up the stairs in the building, and she threatens to strangle him if he so much as tries. A fine drizzle begins, but neither of them is much troubled by the dampness.
At last, they stop in front of her building. Lily unsteadily separates from him and avoids his gaze. She has the strangest sinking feeling, like if she leaves him now she’ll never see him again. That, at last, does make her glance up to look at him.
She’s aware of the rise and fall of his shoulders, in time with her own, and the part of his lips. But she’s not looking anywhere but his eyes, the rich hazel glimmer of them. She is quite helpless.
“You’re not— Are you drunk?” Lily says.
His brow furrows, but he answers, “No.”
She exhales, long and slow. “Then I think… It would be better to just get it out of our systems, yeah?”
When he nods, he seems relieved. “Upstairs?”
They don’t hold hands or anything. They walk normally up the two flights to her door, in no particular hurry. James waits for her to wriggle her key around in the lock, even allows her time to swear colourfully and kick the door open. She heads through and he closes the door behind them.
She’s half-turning to reach for him after that, and he’s already leaning towards her. The steps are muddled, but the result is almost graceful: his hands spread around her waist, she rises to the tips of her toes, and their mouths meet. He tastes like rain, and wine, and his fingers dig into her sides. Lily has avoided the word desperate all this time, but that’s a good word for this. For her, now.
He steers her towards the first available piece of seating, the settee in the tiny sitting room space. She tilts his head upwards, deepens the kiss, settles over him. James reaches under her dress — she squeals at the first cold press of his hands, but she likes this, his palms flat against her back. Gradually they peel off their clothing.
His hands are warm by then, and she savours his assured touches, his murmured devotions. Then he pauses to root through the pockets of his trousers and produces a condom.
Lily is bloody delighted. “Cocky, aren’t you?”
He looks more embarrassed than she’s ever seen him. “No, it’s— No, Patrick keeps putting them in everyone’s pockets, it’s a stupid joke—”
“You don’t need to lie, James.”
“I’m not, Christ! Would you stop— Here, open this.”
She’s still grinning as she rips the packet open, gestures for him to come closer. Slides it on. His lashes flutter; a quiet sigh escapes him. This is turning out rather more tender than she expected, but she doesn’t want to change that, not really. It’s nice.
He kisses her, and as if he’s been saving his best for this moment, it’s possibly a perfect kiss: patient but not teasing, deft but not showy, slow but not torturous.
“You’re — an okay kisser,” she tells him, left breathless.
His laugh thrums through her.
Afterwards she wonders about the semantics of this. Fucking one’s co-star seems de rigueur in the industry. But realistically they have not fucked, not unless the definition’s changed since last she checked. A one-and-done would feel separate from the rest of the world, safely so. Now she can still smell the earthy impression of rain on his skin, can still hear plucked strings and Doris Day. Lily realises, rather clinically, that she would like to do it again.
Really, really. She’d really, really like to do it again.
As if he can read her mind, James begins to sit up and get dressed. She watches in silence; when he’s finished, he curls one hand around her calf.
His smile is slanted, ironic. “Never again, then.”
She smiles back, though she’s sure she doesn’t look so poised. At least they’ve come to this realisation together.
***
They don’t talk about it the next day, or the day after. He still teases her at drinks in the evening; their scenes are not awkward. In fact, Lily thinks, they might be better at acting alongside each other now. As if the missing piece of their collegial relationship was a hookup.
Leo plays Duran Duran on the boombox one evening, much to the bar owner’s chagrin. (They have to appease him afterwards with Adriano Celentano.) James coaxes Lily out of her chair for a dance, which they turn slow and melodramatic until they’re both singing along more than they’re actually moving. He has a horrible memory for lyrics, as it happens; she laughs herself to tears when he sings, without pretence, lick you down into your well.
And maybe she feels some distant flutter at his proximity. So what? He’s a handsome guy. When he danced “Hungry Like the Wolf” with Ariana, who plays Sabine’s sister, the girl blushed the whole way through.
“Told you he was lying,” Lily says once she collapses into her seat. “He can dance.”
“Must you hold all my throwaway remarks against me?” says James sorrowfully.
“Yes. I’ve started to keep a ledger.”
All in all, she can’t think of a better result for having slept with her co-star. It doesn’t look like there will be lasting consequences. What she felt in the immediate aftermath — the sudden, insistent urge to do it again — can probably be chalked up to hormones, or her dry spell, or her persistent, pathetic loneliness after the divorce.
So, she doesn’t think it odd to call him into her trailer one afternoon to do up the zipper of her dress. It’s frustratingly fiddly, and she usually gets the makeup girl Maria to do it, but the crew must be having some impromptu meeting because they’re none of them in sight.
“Hold still,” James says, pushing up his glasses as he bends to inspect the zipper.
“Sorry, God, it’s really the worst bloody—”
“No, see, it’s getting stuck here.” He traces a finger over the band below her breasts, where the dress cinches in. “The stitching, I suppose. Do you think you can take it off, zip it up, and then put it on again?”
She grimaces. “I don’t know, it’s quite tight at the bodice.”
“D’you want to try?”
“Might as well.”
He starts to step away.
“Do you mind staying? In case I need help getting it back on, or something,” Lily says.
“Oh, sure.”
He turns his back on her. For a moment she just looks at him instead of taking the dress off, at the faint lines of his shoulder blades through his T-shirt, the way his hair sticks up in the back.
Then she snaps out of it and drags up the hem of her dress. “Here, hold this,” she tells him, and he must think it’s safe to look, because he turns back to face her.
“You—” James takes her in, makes a choking noise, and whirls around once more, snatching the dress from her.
Lily almost asks what? before remembering she is somewhat rather topless.
“Sabine’s French,” she says, stupidly.
“I don’t know a lot of French women.” He sounds strangled even though he’s no longer looking.
“It’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” she feels compelled to point out.
“Yes, well.” He busies himself searching the dress for the zipper.
She wasn’t embarrassed before, not really, but she is now. What was she thinking, that it might be harmless or even funny to tease someone she happened to have slept with once? Never mind that he’s a flirt, never mind that he’s spotted with some new beautiful woman every other day. Lily presses her lips together, feeling the hot lick of shame.
“Sorry,” she says, “I— When you’ve modelled for a while nudity is…not that unusual, but I realise it is to you, and, er, I’ll just put something—”
But then, the dress flutters to the floor and his gaze lands squarely on her again. James kisses her into silence, earning a small noise of surprise from her. He’s laughably polite about it, his hands cupping her face even as she’s all but naked, even though she can only assume that what prompted the kissing was her all-but-naked state.
“Sorry,” he says now, pulling away, “sorry, that was—”
She shakes her head to silence him. “Good.”
She tugs him close for another kiss; he starts to smile.
“The — dress.”
“It can wait.”
He pushes her against the makeup counter; she braces her hands against it, scattering brushes and half-closed compacts, and hopes Maria won’t kill her if something ends up on the floor. It occurs to Lily that this is properly bold, doing whatever they’re doing right here in the trailer. Not that there would be terrible consequences for the film, not really, but everyone would know… And the press might find out too, that’s the real issue…
“Wait,” she says, inching backwards to suck in a much-needed breath, “wait, we can’t—”
James at once lets go of her. “We don’t have to do anything.”
“No, I mean.” She coughs, sure that her cheeks are pink. “If we…were to actually go for it—”
And then he starts to laugh.
She breaks off her train of thought to frown and say, “What?”
He passes a hand over his eyes, but it does nothing to suppress his laughter. “You’re in just your knickers, bold as you please, but you can’t say the word sex to me?”
“Oh, sod off,” Lily mumbles. “Fine, I’ll say sex, if we were to actually have sex right now—”
“Don’t shout it to prove a point—”
“—the trailer might—” now she’s laughing too “—shake, and give up the game—”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” he says, and he has to bury his face in her shoulder, because mirth has well and truly taken hold of both of them.
Lily bites her bottom lip, hard, and tries to compose herself. “So, you know, anything up to but not including—”
“It’s for the best. Patrick forgot to slip me a condom today anyway,” James says.
Her resolve crumbles; she whacks him in the chest. “Stop it, my God—”
“Ouch, all right, stopping—” His snickering subsides, and he slides a hand down her stomach, beneath the lace edge of her knickers. “Okay?”
She lets out a breath mid-laugh, and nods. Tosses her hair over one shoulder, hears him swear quietly. Reaches under his waistband. She thinks about how she likes a bloke who can laugh.
Lily stifles her smile. Look at her, mentally sizing him up for the marriage market. The point of this is not to think, not to discuss, not to worry about where things might lead. At least, not in the long term. She knows where things will lead now, and they do, whispers turned to moans turned to eyes squeezed shut, release.
“Well,” James says, once he’s caught his breath afterwards, “so, that’s not happening—”
“Not happening again,” she agrees.
“Yeah, that’s it. Last and final— Yeah.” He lets go of her hip. “Let me find us some tissue— Bloody hell, Evans, don’t. Don’t you dare.”
This, because she’s lifted her hand to her mouth.
“What?” she says innocently.
He lets out a helpless gasp of a laugh. “I’m laughing, but that’s only because I can’t think of any other response to this. Other than—”
She sucks on a fingertip, grinning. “Other than what?”
His hand, fixed to her hip again. His gaze is heated, intent, his lips slightly parted.
Hoarsely, he says, “Other than breaking our rule and fucking you again.”
Lily’s smile turns warm, honey-sweet. She wants to say I wish you would, but that’s not the game they’re playing. She doesn’t quite know what it is, but she knows what it isn’t.
James releases her again, looking away. “But we’ve agreed not to do that, so…we’re not doing that.”
“No,” she says, nodding. “We’re not.”
There’s a knock at the trailer door, Maria’s voice: “Lily? Are you dressed?”
Fuck, James mouths, his eyes wide.
Lily flaps at him to stay quiet, calls, “N-No, not yet, this zipper is fucking ridiculous—”
“You want my help?”
“No, James is here, it’s fine!”
“Why would you say I’m here?” he whispers, horrified.
“How would I explain it otherwise, when I let her in to do my makeup and you’re lounging in the back?” she hisses back.
She wipes her hands down, thrusts the box of tissues at him, and seizes her dress. The zipper is too stuck for her to do it up even now; she swears.
“Hold on—“ James reaches around her, yanks the zipper back and all the way up. Lily yelps, alarmed, but it somehow doesn’t rip. “There,” he says briskly. “Put it on.”
It is wrong, definitely wrong, on ethical, moral, certainly religious grounds, to feel a little flustered at the way he does up a zipper. Lily puts the thought out of her mind and wriggles into the dress. It’s a fiasco right away, and to divert from how embarrassed she is — how she must be flailing, with it stuck around her shoulders — she takes to cursing under her breath.
“Jesus, relax. Like you’ve never put on a dress before,” he says. She sees him approach — the neck of the dress is lodged just below her nose — with hands held out, like he’s judging how to wrangle a wild animal.
“You’ve never put on a dress before,” she says resentfully.
“I have, actually. Haven’t you seen Screwed?”
She has — it’s his big hit, and only a couple of years old, but she’s not about to admit it. “Sorry, did you think I’ve got your entire filmography memorised?”
“No, but I look great in a dress. I thought that would be particularly memorable.”
He tugs the hem of her dress out from under the bodice, fingers running down her spine in a way that seems inefficient. Unnecessary. But necessary, certainly, to her.
Lily pulls the dress into place at last. “I wouldn’t say you’re particularly memorable.”
“Yeah?” James stands very near. “Sure?”
Her breath comes quick. “Mm, positive.”
“Good, then you won’t be pining after me. Since we’re not doing this again.”
She gives him a sharp smile. “I know.”
Maria knocks again. “Lily, your hair and makeup!”
“Sorry!” she calls. To James, she says, “Get the door, would you?”
***
Before she was rather unrepentant, but having Maria enter the trailer right afterwards makes her flush with guilt. Lily starts to worry about things like the state of his clothing, or whether the air in the trailer somehow smells of sex, or whether it’s plain to the girl as she powders Lily’s cheeks what, exactly, she nearly walked in on. In short Lily is starting to think like someone carrying on an affair.
Which she is obviously not. She is unattached and so is James, she’s pretty sure — magazines spend inches upon inches speculating about his single status. But it leaves a sour taste in her mouth nevertheless.
Maybe this is what her ex-husband did, when he’d cheated on her. Brought his co-star — twenty-one and willowy, her sarcastic quips the stuff of science fiction legend — into his trailer and warned her that they had to go slowly, lest they draw attention to themselves.
Now she might make herself sick.
When they return to set she is furtive, paranoid, feeling like stalked prey. If anyone can tell it would be Trelawney, a close observer of their body language around each other from behind her massive bifocals. Their next scene goes poorly — it’s four, five takes before the director finally concedes, her mouth a moue of dissatisfaction.
She pulls the two of them aside. “What—“ her bracelets jangle with the force of her animated speech “—is happening?”
Lily avoids James’s gaze. “Sorry. I’ve been — off all afternoon, I think it’s the heat.”
Bless him, he says, “You did look a little woozy earlier.”
Trelawney shakes her head. “It is not the heat, my dears. It is both of you.” (Lily freezes.) “Just yesterday you were brilliant in the villa with Antony—” Sabine’s fiancé “—so restrained, so tense…” She visibly has to rein herself in. “Now you’re simply wooden. Stiff.” A disdainful sniff, like she can’t think of a worse thing for them to be.
And she’s probably right. Lily feels ungainly, like she’s been dropped into someone else’s body. It is just like her ex-husband to get in her head, even without trying, even from miles away.
“Sorry,” she says again, wishing she could make herself smaller.
“Can we move up the Freddy and Richard scene?” James says. “Lily can take a breather.”
Trelawney doesn’t look pleased at the idea of rearranging her plan. With pursed lips she turns to James.
“And you don’t need a breather?” Her sceptical emphasis on the last word makes it sound like he’s has suggested Lily skip away on holiday, or perhaps do a bump off the villa’s dining table to ease her nerves.
But he weathers Trelawney’s stare and shakes his head. “I’m all right.”
He looks all right. The uncertainty of the scene prior has washed away, leaving the composed, in-control James she knows. Their awkwardness was probably heightened in the moment, each of them playing off the other’s skittishness. Though, Lily’s not sure she could jump into her next scene without him right away — that’s a testament to his composure.
A trickle of admiration makes its way through the opaque wall of her mortification. She’s glad to be doing this with him.
“Very well,” Trelawney says with a theatrical sigh. She drifts away back to the rest of the crew. “Leo! Your scene!”
James lingers. “Okay?” he says quietly.
“Fine,” Lily breathes. “Fine. Thanks for covering—”
“Yeah, ’course. If you want to talk about it later…” He raises his brows meaningfully. His eyes are ever so slightly unfocused — no specs — but she still feels fixed in place by his gaze.
“Yeah, maybe,” she says, unconvincing even to her own ears.
***
She escapes the set quickly that day, for once in no mood to unwind with the others. All she wants is her flat, and to sleep and forget her embarrassment. Perhaps she’ll wake up tomorrow and find that it is today, and all this was a quick flash of a bad dream.
There’s a voice in her head she can’t silence. Unprofessional, it whispers. You don’t belong here. Go back to your magazines. It doesn’t quite sound like Petunia, who’d sniff and say maybe you’ll get a real job and a proper husband this time. It doesn’t sound like her former friend Severus, who disdained both her modelling and her acting ambitions alike as beneath her.
It just sounds like herself. And Lily can’t escape that.
She latches the door behind her. Evidently she forgot to open all the curtains this morning, because even the sly hand of dusk hasn’t found its way into her rooms. Lily kicks off her jeans at the door, and by the time she’s in the shadowed bedroom she’s undressed and pulling on nightclothes.
The unglamorous nighttime routine almost makes her think she’s back at uni, sharing a peeling, crumbling flat with Dorcas and constraining her dreams to the night. Time dulls novelty and she’s grown used to the big Brighton house. But somehow solitude strips all that away, makes her just Lily with nowhere to go.
Her teeth are clean and her face slick with product when she hears a knock at the door. She sighs and takes the time to swipe her cheeks dry.
Lily opens the door but leaves the chain on. It’ll come across as surly, no doubt, but she won’t be talked into wine tonight.
“I’m going to bed,” she announces, and is both surprised and not to see that her visitor is James.
“Can I come in?” he says.
“I’m actually going to bed. Now.”
“I just want to talk about today, for five minutes.”
“I don’t,” says Lily, petulant.
He has a hand braced against the door. Maybe he worries she’ll shut it in his face.
“Well, tough,” James says. “You’ve got to. At least let me understand what happened so we don’t screw up the whole film.”
Lily shivers; that we is some consolation, but only some. She swallows. Then she slides the chain free and lets him in.
The flat felt so empty just minutes ago. The only thing she expected to see around a corner was a shadow. But the mere addition of one person makes it different — or maybe it’s the specific person, and he makes every room his.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Yeah.” She sucks in a breath. They are neither of them sitting. They’ve not moved past the narrow hallway. “It’s— I lost my nerve. That’s all. I was thinking too much and I lost it.”
James is frowning. “Can you tell me what you were thinking about?”
This exhale comes out as a panicked flutter. “No—”
“It’s fine,” he says quickly, “it’s fine. I’m not asking as your friend. I’m asking as your co-star.”
Friend, she wonders? When did they become that?
But, then again, of course they’re friends. Of course they are. She tries to take hold of the reassurance, as she walks this tightrope.
“It’s stupid.”
“I don’t think it is.”
“You don’t even know what it is.”
“Lily.”
“It’s— You’re not seeing someone, are you?” The question is high, tremulous, unpractised. His eyes go wide. Lily says, “I mean, not because— I’ll explain. Just, please, answer the question.”
She’s misread his reaction, she realises. He isn’t put-off or confused. He’s…angry.
“Why would I be seeing someone while sleeping with you?” James says, his voice tight with outrage.
She wants to laugh. Wants to tell him it’s less rare than he’s making it seem. “Well, are you?”
“No! Christ, of course not!”
As incredulous as he is, she can feel her shoulders loosening. “Okay,” she says quietly. Somewhere in this feeling is relief, she knows, but she can’t reach it yet.
James seems to deflate along with her. “Was that what it was?” he says, not so offended anymore. “That’s what made you slip up?”
“I didn’t— I don’t—” Lily huffs out another sigh.
She feels as though she needs to say it: I don’t want to be my ex-husband. But if she does the pinprick in the backs of her eyes will turn to tears. And she doesn’t want to cry in front of him, not now.
So she settles on, “I don’t like being made a fool.”
“I don’t want to make a fool out of you,” he says, voice low.
Lily nods just once.
“I don’t really — date,” says James presently, making her look up. Now he’s a cornered animal in open space; he won’t meet her gaze.
“You don’t?” she says, surprised.
It’s true that tabloids are always concerned about who he’s with and they claim it’s a different girl every week. But after getting to know him, it’s hard not to think of him going steady. He seems like he would like that.
He shakes his head. “It’s funny — I know how to fake it onscreen, but I can’t seem to get it right in reality.”
“It’s not like an exam,” she murmurs. “You can do everything right and still end up wrong.”
His brow creases; he laughs quietly. “Yeah. I s’pose. But I’m not like you.”
“Like — me?”
“You’re brave,” James says, simple as that. “For holding onto someone when you found them, and even more so for letting go when you needed to.”
She’s flushed, but she doesn’t feel her embarrassment beyond the physical evidence of it. “It’s less heroic than you’re making it out to be.”
His eyes are the only bright thing in the dim hall. “Maybe. Still, I couldn’t do it.”
“You’re the most self-assured person I know,” Lily says, frowning.
James smiles. “I’m an actor.”
But not that much of an actor, she wants to say. I remember you from school, and you were still you then, not blurred with characters you’ve taken on. In fact it’s impossible to think he’s flimsy as a film character. If anything, Lily thinks, he leaves each of his roles with a piece of him.
He sucks in a breath. Apparently while she was absorbed in her own internal monologue about him, he was deep in thought too, and has decided he has more to say. “Thing is, my parents are disgustingly in love.”
She cocks her head, lifts her eyebrows so he knows she’s listening. Interrupting him risks bursting this bubble.
He runs a hand through his hair. “They met when Mum was acting in a film Dad was producing, and it was—” He snaps his fingers. “Easy as that. I suppose I’m waiting for something that feels that obvious.”
She withholds her immediate response, which is something along the lines of cheers, you’ll be waiting forever. Is that her inner cynic talking, though? Does she only want to believe real love is difficult because her first go at it seemed so easy — until it wasn’t?
At last, she chooses a more generous answer. “I hope you find it.”
He nods, the gesture barely perceptible.
She chews on one corner of her lip, watching him. “And…thanks. For coming by to talk me down.”
He ducks his head in sheepish acceptance. “Anytime.” A pause. “I really don’t want to flub this, you know. I like working with you.”
Lily is struck by the funny urge to say you do? She’s gathered as much, but it still feels lovely to hear. She smiles, basking in the full force of the sentiment. “Yeah. I like working with you too.”
James’s hand grazes her hip; he brushes past her towards the door. She catches him by the wrist before he can undo the latch. Her kiss is warm, tentative, an exhale shuddering through him.
“I thought we weren’t doing this again,” he says against her lips. But he’s smiling.
***
Forty-five days, and they’ve completed reshoots, and they have a film. Well, it’s not finished yet, which Lily hadn’t wanted to ask anyone about outright but allowed James to explain to her one night. (Nice of him to do so without smugness, she thought at the time; there was no artifice, no embarrassment, since it was only the two of them.) They will all go their separate ways and the editors will get to work with back at the studios in London.
After the dinner party celebrating the wrap, though, they have a different film to watch. One of the cameramen has endless B-roll and plenty of tape of them flubbing their lines, and has made a short movie of it. It’s strung up to a projector now in the villa’s big main room, and everyone refills their glasses and their dessert helpings before settling in to watch.
Lily is cross-legged by Ariana, her onscreen sister, and it so happens that the very first scene features the two of them.
“Oh, God,” Ariana moans, “I didn’t know anyone was watching us!”
They are in the garden of the villa, with Lily miming drawing a circle on the screen they’d used in the kiss scene.
“—like this, yeah?” film-Lily says. “Geography teachers draw perfect circles. It’s flawless. They’ve had so much practice.”
The onscreen Ariana is shaking her head. “Why would a geography teacher be drawing circles?”
Lily gapes at her. “The earth, Ariana. The—”
“No, I don’t think so…”
The Ariana sitting here in the room says, loudly, over the cast’s laughter, “Leo plied us with wine right before, if you blame anyone blame him—”
“Me!” Leo protests from where he sits on the sofa. “Me, can you believe it?”
This he directs at the person beside him, James, who is grinning into his beer bottle.
“Can we watch the film?” shouts Andrea, who plays Sabine’s fiancé.
“Sorry, Andrea,” Leo says, affecting a pout.
They groan and laugh their way through some dozen minutes of ridiculousness. Then, nestled between footage of Leo tripping theatrically outside the villa — which, over the course of filming, happened six separate times and sent Trelawney into a panic each time — is a shot from the final day of filming. Lily’s grin eases; she knows what this is.
From outside the frame Trelawney calls cut! James whoops — his arms were already around Lily for the final pose, and now he picks her up and whirls her around in the air. Then it’s back to another clip of Leo yelling and falling.
She feels a weight on her shoulder: James’s hand.
“Want a refill?” he says, pointing at her empty wineglass.
“I’ll come with you,” she says, and follows him back to the kitchen.
She has to fight back her smile as she goes — if anyone were to notice, they’d tease her endlessly. It feels like touching an electrical socket might, this giddiness that squeezes the breath from her and makes her skin tingle.
She’s going to be in a movie. A real, serious one that will be dissected by critics and sent to festivals. Against all odds — her ex, her snobby sister, her perfectly ordinary life before she’d been persuaded to model — she’s done it. Lily Evans from Cokeworth is going to be Lily Evans, an actress.
“There’s nothing like it, is there?” James says, interrupting her thoughts.
She quickly smooths away that manic grin, though it’s liable to burst free again. But he doesn’t look like he’s going to laugh at her for being so obviously excited, so uncool.
The kitchen is silent, expectant. He has one hand on the corkscrew, another on the bottle, and his gaze on her. No, he’s not teasing. His smile is small, pressed into a quieter shape than usual — she realises he is trying to suppress the same thrill.
Sheepishly, Lily says, “I feel caught.”
He laughs, working at the cork. “I was definitely worse for my first one, don’t worry.”
“Yeah, and you were also about…five years old.”
There’s that grin. “Six, actually.”
“Oh, my mistake. I’m so sorry. I’ll resign from your fan club immediately.”
“As you should,” he says, affecting seriousness, “the conditions for entry are quite strict. You’ve got to have your basic trivia sorted.”
Shaking her head, she comes closer, glass held out. He doesn’t fill it right away, just looks at her. His eyes are so bright.
“We made something,” he says, softly.
There, he has voiced the thought she’s had since that last day of filming, since he spun her around and the world seemed forever changed once her feet landed on solid ground again. She’s made something — and she’s done it in collaboration with people, of course, it’s not about who owns how much of this. But she’s made something, and (heart tripping, breath catching) she’s done it with him.
“Is it always like this?” Lily whispers.
He opens his mouth, hesitates. After what seems like forever, he says, “Some milestones you’ll remember for a long time.”
She will remember this, she knows: her first. Whether or not he will is secondary, immaterial. He’s had others. This one is hers to hold. Some of that possessiveness turns physical, hungry, before she can even register it; she reaches for him, pulls him down to her.
He hoists her onto the kitchen counter and her head bumps up against the cabinets, but there are no muffled giggles, no whispered jokes this time. This time, he pushes her dress around her hips and she makes short work of his belt, and hooks her ankles together behind him as he produces a condom. It’s quiet and quick. He laces his fingers through hers and presses her palm to his mouth to muffle his groan. She is hazy with the feeling of him even after he pulls away: we made something.
He trails a hand over her bare thigh, fingers running all the way down to her shin as he puts distance between them. She flips the skirt of her dress back into place. She watches him pour her wine.
They walk back to the sitting room and it’s like no one even noticed they were gone. Lily bites back a smile at the rest of the cast and crew arranged in front of their blooper reel. She’ll remember them too.
James brushes his knuckles against the back of her hand. “Hey — you know I’m flying out tomorrow morning, yeah?” The warm amber of his eyes is muted, slightly — uncertainty, perhaps, or wariness?
“Yeah, I know,” she says slowly.
He continues to look at her meaningfully. Oh, she realises, of course. This is where they shake hands and call it a job well done, and don’t talk about it ever again. He must be used to this. And, yes, it brings her a twinge of regret, but what’s a girl to do? She knows full well that he isn’t going to sweep her off her feet. She doesn’t believe in such things. Not anymore, at least.
“I’ll see you around,” says Lily, with a smile she hopes is professionally friendly.
It seems to work, because James’s expression shifts once more. He steps back and smiles. “Yeah, hopefully.”
II. THE STARS
Life returns to normal after Italy.
Lily books more photoshoots, appears in more magazines. She can hardly walk up and down the street outside her flat in London without being gawked at. They’ve stopped writing about her divorce, at least, but she doesn’t like the prying eyes. She stays in Brighton more and more often.
The premiere for In An Absent Dream approaches, a date looming on the calendar that sends her and Dorcas into tailspins whenever they think too much about it.
“My best friend,” Dorcas has grown fond of saying, “the movie star.”
At first Lily laughed and told her she’s not really a star yet. But self-deprecation has become harder, and now when she considers the impending nature of her big break she feels like a bottle of champagne upon being shaken too hard. And if she does burst, who knows what will be left behind?
Mary, bless her, keeps a cool head. She’s running around liaising with the film’s studio, demanding that Lily’s ex be left off the premiere guest list — “I told them I didn’t care if he’d bring good press,” she recounts triumphantly — and introducing her to all the bigwigs. Trelawney being what she is, the producers had only briefly met with the cast, and only a select few studio representatives had been present on set. Now, Lily dines with the lot of them, and under strict instruction from Mary, charms their pants off.
“Do you want to take a date to the premiere?” Mary says on one of their regular telephone calls.
Lily sits on the back patio in her Brighton house, fiddling with the dial on the radio. “Oh… Do they want me to, or something?”
Such things are not unheard of. Though she can’t imagine Trelawney demanding it, the producers might well have suggested it…and given her divorce…
“Not as such, I don’t think. Are you opposed?”
She frowns at the receiver in her hand. Mary is terrifyingly skilled at lobbing her questions right back at her. Sometimes she wonders if her manager is also angling to be her agony aunt.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Lily says, truthfully. “Is it not bad form to parade around with a different man when you’ve been in a romantic drama?”
Mary hums in appreciation. “Now you’re thinking, Lil. I can ask them to set you up with Potter, so you’ll be seen around the city with him in the weeks leading up to—”
“No!” she squeaks. “No, ohmygoodness, don’t. God, how embarrassing!”
In her panic she gives little thought to her choice of words. There is deadly silence for a long moment.
“Why would it be embarrassing, Lily?” Mary says evenly.
“Because…” She squeezes her eyes shut, despairing. Fuck it. And the whole story spills out of her — how he flirted with her at the housewarming party, and she turned him down, only to spend weeks filming with him in Rome.
Mary scoffs. “Don’t blame that on me! I meant no flirting with people you shouldn’t be flirting with, not James Potter!”
Lily pauses. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He’s a hot commodity, obviously. You know the real money’s in America, and he’s had work there for years now. Seeing him would not be a poorly-considered rebound after your shitbag ex, Lily! It’d be a masterstroke—”
“Well, you can stop mentally planning our wedding,” she cuts in drily.
“Wedding? Er, no, I’m envisioning the film franchises you’ll jumpstart.”
She laughs. “In any case, I did reject him, and not just because I was worried about how it would look. I’m not ready, Mary. Not after how things went with…”
A gust of a sigh, almost forceful enough to stir her hair through the telephone. “Oh, all right. But just because you’ve said no once doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind. His people will see the benefit in it too. The red carpet date offer is open.”
“Open to you. Not to him!”
“We’d never know unless we ask…”
“That’s not the end of the story, actually.”
“Oh?” Mary says. Lily can picture her curled up by the phone in her flat, eyes wide with interest, her plump cat sprawled across her lap. “Well, don’t hold back, darling.”
“In Rome, we—” She stops, let out a self-conscious laugh. “God, I feel like such a kid.”
“You fucked James Potter,” says Mary, with remarkable composure. “There, I’ve said it for you, now we can proceed.”
“Thank you,” says Lily wryly. “But, erm, not just once.”
Mary whistles. “Not just once? Christ. How many times? No, wait, don’t answer that, I feel like a lech for asking. What’s he like in bed?”
She laughed, loudly enough to startle away a pair of seagulls wobbling their way up the sand. Only Mary would follow I feel like a lech with what’s he like in bed. “Well…”
Mary drew in a gasp. “Thank fuck, there’s way too many actors who only look like they’d be good lays—”
“Mary!”
“—I’m telling you honestly, Lily! Anytime you date an actor, you run his name by me beforehand and I’ll tell you if he’s worth it in the sack.”
Lily groaned, laughing into her hands. “Can you tell me beforehand if he’ll turn out a horrible cheater?”
“I’m afraid not,” says Mary, darkly, “but if he does, I’ll cut off his dick for you.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Too much?”
“Yeah, a bit!”
“Anyway, you’ve given me this riveting information, Lily, but no actual reason as to why I shouldn’t ring his agent through the producers and see if we can get a few dates going. The way I see it, you’ve already done some essential vetting.”
She shifted in her chair, crossed and uncrossed her legs. “I think if there’s one thing my romantic life proves, it’s that vetting by sex is not very thorough.”
“If it’s thoroughness you’re worried about,” Mary says seriously, “all the more reason to find Potter again and give him a few more goes.”
“Mary!”
“What?”
“No vetting,” she says, her voice firm. “Of any kind. It was a fling, and it’s over, and it didn’t end awkwardly. I don’t want to make things worse by trying to rope him into something.” She thinks of him saying, I don’t date, and how uncomfortable he looked when he did so.
Mary snorts. “It’s a studio date, not a marriage.”
Her stomach drops at the word. She can’t entirely hide the coldness from her voice when she says, “That’s my final decision.”
Mary gets the idea, finally. “All right. You let me know if you want another beau to take to the premiere, yeah?”
Lily twists the radio dial again so she won’t have to answer right away. She doesn’t want a studio date. She doesn’t want to see anyone, not like that, not yet. She wonders, the beginnings of a good cry starting in her throat, if she ever will again.
Her thumb slips on the dial and the radio blares —music and passion were always the fashion at the— She starts.
“Lily?” Mary prompts. “You still there?”
“Yeah.” Lily switches off the radio, and “Copacabana” with it. “I’ll, er, I’ll give the date a miss. Maybe for the next film.”
“That’s my girl.”
***
1983
In An Absent Dream premieres in London in March of the next year. Lily’s been busy in the intervening months, not with filming but with previews for a clever little stage play, a dark comedy about two sisters. (Her own sister calls it disturbing.) The show is bound for the stage just after Dream releases, which is fortuitous; she knows it will continue to do well and perhaps even make it to the West End, even though Mary tells her she can expect to have to leave soon for another film.
All through the day of the premiere Lily is beset with nerves. She has the weekend off from the play and the studio sends over a host of people to turn her into someone fit to walk the red carpet. The buzz should keep her distracted, but it gives her far too much time to think. She wishes she could speak to someone about these jitters, but she’s not exactly bursting at the seams with actor friends.
Lily wrestles with this impulse, then picks up the telephone. Call me anytime, he told her, and gave her his card.
A few rings. Then, a bored-sounding assistant: “Horace Slughorn’s office, how can I help you?”
“Oh,” says Lily, though she shouldn’t have been surprised. “Er, is Mr. Slughorn available? I’m—”
“If you want to pass on your headshot, you can drop it off during business hours,” the assistant drones. “Otherwise, miss, I don’t think I—”
In a flash of irritation, she says, “I’m not trying to get an audition. I’m Lily Evans, and I want to speak to Mr. Slughorn.”
“Ah, Christ,” says the assistant. “I’m so sorry, Miss Evans, terribly— I’ll fetch him for you. Just one moment. So sorry.”
Lily relaxes, feeling a bit sorry for snapping herself. It’s a few moments until Slughorn comes to the phone; she tries to get comfortable in her favourite armchair, but the curlers in her hair are making it not so straightforward.
“Lily, my girl!” Slughorn booms through the receiver just as she’s given up on comfort entirely. “Woman of the hour, what can I do for you?”
Of all the executives and producers she’s wined and dined with, Slughorn seems to have taken a shine to her in a sort of avuncular way. Mary scented blood when Lily mentioned this to her: “Keep him as a friend,” she instructed, “he’s got the bigwigs’ ears, Lil.”
But she isn’t really phoning him because she wants to network. He was nice to her. He is nice to her.
“Oh, it’s silly,” Lily says, balking a little now that she’s in the moment. “Just…could we discuss something mundane and businessy? To take my mind off things?”
“Ahhh,” says Slughorn knowingly. “Pre-show jitters, is it? Not to worry, my dear, you’ll be pleased to know that business never stops.” He laughs at his own joke. “Now, Mary’s been keeping your offers at bay while you’re still on the small stage, but we do want to start talking through them. I can have the scripts sent to you tomorrow. But here, let me look through them and give you the basic idea—” She hears the rustle of papers. “Right. A historical drama, but they want you to be some throwaway concubine, and I don’t mean Mary Boleyn… I wouldn’t recommend this, my dear.”
“Okay,” Lily says, nonplussed at the Mary Boleyn remark but already beginning to relax. “What else?”
“Brief appearance as the main character’s sister on a BBC comedy programme. This one I’d put forward, certainly, but it won’t be the most time-consuming of things, we can’t say yes to just this.”
“Okay…” She has a feeling he’s working his way up to something, and starts to brace herself for what it might be.
“And…this is exciting, a big sci-fi franchise, they’re looking for a villainess. Tragically in love with the hero, jealous of the heroine, that sort of thing.” Slughorn can’t hide his eagerness. This is the real offer.
But it pulls all the enthusiasm out of her. “I know which franchise,” she says dully. “I can’t do it, Mr. Slughorn.”
“Please, call me Horace, my dear — and pardon me, but why not?”
It shouldn’t be that difficult to understand, should it? “Well, it’s my ex-husband. And his new girlfriend. I don’t think it would be a good working environment for me.”
There’s silence on the other end as Slughorn seems to struggle to process this.
“It’s not as though you need to be there all through filming, Lily. Shoot your scenes, do your part, enjoy sunny Los Angeles, and then—” He snaps his fingers. “My God, you’ll be in the year’s biggest movie!”
Her sigh is ragged, patience worn dry. “I can’t do it, Mr.— Horace.”
His disappointment is palpable, but he says, “Oh, all right. I’ll have someone ring Mary…but the BBC show, how does that sound?”
“Send me the script,” she says, her smile a brief, hopeful curve that no one else can see.
***
The premiere isn’t the flashiest thing in the world. She knows for a fact that her ex’s premieres are far more extravagant — understandable, considering everything from budget to star power to the rabid fans that flock to the cinema every time a film of his releases — even though schedules were such that she’d only accompanied him to one of them. It’s probably only as important as it is because of Trelawney’s mysterious absence from filmmaking. But it’s still a spectacular feeling, smiling for the cameras and thinking they are here for you.
Bizarre. Unthinkable. But, oh, what a swell of adrenaline — the part of her that is hungry to be seen positively preens.
She does brace herself, arm looped in with Dorcas’s, for the sight of James. She’s not quite sure why, but Lily is prepared to see him with a girl, even though she has no reason to suspect he’s seeing anyone.
Well, she has no reason to suspect he isn’t, either.
But when he does he arrive, he, like her, is accompanied by a friend. She recognises Sirius Black, because he’s as much of a tabloid darling as James is — or, really, darling isn’t the right word. What’s the opposite of that?
In any case, apparently James’s team thinks the wholesome quality to their brothers-in-arms friendship outweighs Sirius’s reputation as the disgraced son of a conservative arsehole of an earl, because the two are rarely seen apart. Lily waves at James across the carpet — feels Dorcas’s quiet attention — and gets a glittering, curious smile from Sirius as a reward.
“I hope we’re not seated in the front row,” Dorcas says as they file into the theatre. “I don’t want us to break our necks looking at your beautiful face, Lil.”
Lily laughs. “So demanding. You’d think this wasn’t our first premiere.”
Dorcas grins back. “Well, I’ll be demanding on your behalf, so no one can call you a diva.”
They take the seats marked for them, not in the front row. (James is two rows behind; Lily knows this from a casual glance.) Her onscreen fiancé Andrea is a few spots down from them, and Lily dutifully introduces Dorcas to him. When their polite conversation is cut off by the lights dimming, Dorcas whispers to her, “The models were bad enough. Now your friends are handsome Italians?”
Lily just grins and looks up at the brightening screen.
One thing is a relief: a film is not like a photoshoot. The first time Lily saw herself on a magazine cover, the thrill of it was undercut by the precise, vivid memory of how she’d felt when the photo had been taken. She has an eerie ability to recollect the mundane discomforts of a shoot, like the shoes that cut into her feet or the glare of the sun in her eyes as she endeavoured not to squint.
Not so with this. She can convince herself that Sabine is someone who happens to resemble her — and really, thanks to makeup and costuming, Sabine isn’t styled to look like her at all. This is a story, and even if she sees herself in one of its protagonists she isn’t searching it for errors.
Maybe the naïve reaction to that is to believe she was always made to be an actress, not a model. Lily knows it’s silly — no one is made to be anything — but she holds onto the childish impulse in that dark room.
She pays special attention, though, to her favourite scenes. Sabine’s first appearance, at a rowdy family supper that is so warm and homey she can practically smell the fresh-baked bread they’d used as a prop. The first time Freddy and Sabine acknowledge their pasts to each other. And, of course, the kiss; she’s braced for it, almost shaking from excitement and nerves, from the very first time Freddy and Sabine speak.
There is the argument, and there is the golden halo of the evening sun in the garden, the screen blending in with the verdant shrubs around it until Freddy and Sabine approach it. Lily spares a moment to admire that tracking shot, the way it slows to a halt when the characters do. They move behind the screen.
“Oh, my God, are they—” Dorcas says, her voice hushed.
It seems as though the whole room holds its breath as they kiss behind that screen. Lily sees James’s hand in hers, though she wouldn’t have known to look for it if she hadn’t acted it herself. Then, Freddy pulls away.
The moment might’ve come across as abrupt, but the camera lingers sweetly on Freddy’s face as he strides out of the garden. This is no guilty, hurried retreat, which was how Lily’d assumed it would appear.
Instead James milks every ounce of his natural earnestness for all it’s worth. Freddy is lit with wonder, giddy and flushed and quite appallingly in love. He lifts a hand to his mouth as he goes, not to wipe at it but just…to touch, as if to memorise through every sensation what he’s just experienced.
The film goes on, but, if she’s being perfectly honest, Lily stays there. Replays that lovely little smile, his thumb upon his lower lip, again and again.
That is what makes James Potter good at his job. Instinct. Sincerity. There is no doubt to the viewer that he absolutely believes what he’s doing.
When the credits roll and the lights come back on, Dorcas is dabbing tears from her cheeks. She’s not alone, a glance around the theatre reveals. For her part, Lily is dry-eyed, but she feels like cloth left out in the summer sun — hot and papery and carrying the whiff of smoke, something not burned in earnest but having had just a taste of it. There will be a short Q&A session with the press now, but she can’t think how she’ll be able to string together a coherent sentence.
Lily has just finished hugging Dorcas and listening to her best friend’s heaps of praise, and now she tries to get her tongue under control. She’s being ridiculous. She’s being—
A hand at her shoulder. A breathless voice says, “Hey.”
She whirls around. “Oh, hi—”
James pulls her in for a hug. “You were brilliant,” he says in her ear, then steps back. “But you already knew that.”
Lily laughs, trying to regain her balance in his absence. “Well, I won’t stop you from saying it.” Shyly, she adds, “You were brilliant too. I mean, really, spectacular—” If she doesn’t stop now she’ll go on forever. She seizes Dorcas’s arm. “Meet my friend!”
Everyone is introduced to everyone else. Sirius Black arches a curious brow at her as he shakes her hand. Lily thinks it’s time that she and James went to prepare for the panel — they’ll have to be mic’d or something, won’t they? — and is about to say so, but he cuts her off.
“Could I have a word?”
She nods. Dorcas gives her a look that she interprets to mean you are leaving me, here, with the infamous Sirius Black? But she seems excited, not daunted, at the prospect. So Lily follows James down the row of emptying seats, making for the aisle at the far side of the theatre.
“Hey,” he says, when they’ve stopped at a somewhat secluded area.
You brought me all this way to say hello? she almost says. “Hi,” is what she actually says.
His mouth tilts into a half-smile. “You know something funny?”
No, she almost says. “What’s that?”
“Last year in Rome, when I left the villa and flew back home, I suppose I knew we’d have to see each other again—”
Now Lily manages to get her dig in, a well-placed elbow to the ribs. “Oh, you sound thrilled about it.”
He rolls his eyes. “Let me finish. I knew we’d both be at this premiere, but I felt as though you’d just…vanish. And I’d never see you again.”
She manages a blustery laugh. “That’s a touch ridiculous, no?”
“Oh, it’s quite ridiculous,” he says with a nod. “You know I enjoy giving you ammunition.”
Are her cheeks red? They must be. She feels like she’s had a dizzying number of shots in a too-short period of time.
The universe is playing some kind of joke on her, she thinks, because surely a thought that she’s had — on the night they first kissed, no less — didn’t organically occur to him too? Surely he can’t read minds? Lily lifts a hand to the back of her head, almost expecting to find the mark of a scalpel.
“Was that what you wanted to tell me?” Gathering her composure, she adds, “You could’ve said it in front of Dorcas, you know.”
James arches a brow. “Could I have?”
“Sure, why not?”
His brow stays quirked, a question he won’t ask and an answer she won’t give. They’re probably thinking the same thing, anyway.
“What I actually wanted to tell you,” James says, “is that Talkalot over in America are having me do two films in the next year — something about scheduling on set being easier if we shoot concurrently.”
“Okay,” Lily says slowly.
Is he trying to hammer home the fact that they are not dating? She knows, obviously. And even if she hadn’t, the radio silence between Rome and now would’ve given it away.
“Okay,” he says, equally slowly. “And…they want me to offer you the female leads.”
She blinks. “The— They, they’re offering me a part?”
“Parts.” He’s doing a bad job of suppressing his smile. “Plural.”
Lily gapes at him for a solid minute before remembering what Mary would say. What Mary is probably telepathically trying to tell her to say right this moment.
“I’ll, um, I’ll want to read the scripts first. And— Mary will have to take a look at the contract—”
He rolls his eyes. “Well, obviously. I’m not going to rope you into two films blind. Who do you take me for, Trelawney?”
She laughs. He looks immensely pleased that she’s laughed.
“So, you’ll think about it?” James says.
Lily bites down on her grin. Thinks about Slughorn’s offers earlier today, the doomed love triangle with her fucking ex. She knows she doesn’t have to think.
“Ask them to send over the materials.”
He is not nearly so concerned with withholding his delight. James grins, squeezing her bare shoulder. “See you in L.A., Evans.”
“We haven’t even left yet,” she points out.
He smiles, gestures towards the table they’ve set up for the presser. “Just making sure.”
She leads the way, and pays no mind to his hand against the small of her back.
***
From The Times arts section, March 28th, 1983:
FILM: Trelawney returns with atmospheric, moving romance
Impossible not to root for these young star-crossed lovers
From Star magazine, April 5th, 1983:
Star Watch
Lily Says Yes? Speculation Abounds After Intimate Moment at Movie Premiere
From Star magazine, April 19th, 1983:
Star Watch
It’s Love All for James Potter and Tennis Pro Emmeline Vance in Miami
From OK magazine, May 1983:
“He Asked and I Said Yes”: Lily Evans on a Talkalot Double Feature
From Star magazine, June 7th, 1983:
10 Couples We Can’t Believe Happened
…impossible to think he was with Evans (then not yet an actress) just a year ago — he looks so much cosier and happier alongside new girlfriend Amelia Bones!
***
It’s the first time she’s flown across the Atlantic and it feels thrilling just as much as it’s terrifying. Lily rolls her one little suitcase out of the airport, scanning the faces before her to try and gauge which one belongs to the driver the studio sent to pick her up.
As it happens, this is a very simple task. The driver has a cluster of teenage girls around him, and is signing autographs. Lily sucks in a big breath of hot Los Angeles air and waits for James to notice her.
When he does he’s halfway through a smile; it widens as he waves at her. He makes some apology to the fans, gives them all hugs, and lopes towards Lily, sliding a pair of sunnies smoothly up his nose. He is sickeningly good-looking.
“Evans!” He pulls her into an embrace. “Flight treat you all right?”
She nods into his shoulder. “Good, thanks — what are you doing here?”
“I’m here to fetch you, obviously.”
Lily pulls back. “Oh, that’s a relief. My first guess was that you like to hang around LAX in your spare time.”
“That too. Two birds with one stone, you know.”
She rolls her eyes. “I mean, you don’t have anything better to do?”
“Not at all.”
He releases her and reaches for her suitcase; a brief, polite argument ensues, and finally he allows her to pull her own luggage after him. James stops at a bright red convertible in the car park. Lily eyes it with suspicion. He gestures for her to put her suitcase in the back, which leaves no doubt as to whether or not this is the car they’ll be taking. She lifts it up and over, dropping her purse into the passenger’s seat.
“That’s my seat, actually,” he says, nudging down his sunnies as if to confirm the location of the steering wheel.
Lily flushes. Said steering wheel is indeed in front of the seat she’s just tried to occupy. “Oh. Right. The other side of the… I forgot.”
“Understandable.” He moves her purse over to the real passenger’s seat and slides in.
Warily, she follows suit. “You can drive here, can’t you?”
“Much to the consternation of the L.A. police,” says James gravely.
“Funny.”
He puts the key into the ignition, rolling his eyes. “This is a studio car. You think they’d let me come to pick you up and drive us off a cliff? We signed a contract.”
“This is a studio car?” She tries to compare the London studio’s dingy old automobiles to this; it makes her feel too sorry to even contemplate.
James grins. “Well — it’s the nicest of them. I’ve sort of made it my own.”
“I should pretend to be surprised.”
The radio hums to life, a familiar guitar-strum. They pull out of the parking lot and are soon on the highway, wind whipping the knot out of her hair. It’s the height of summer; Lily remembered to apply suncream in the airport loo before stepping out, but she still feels at risk of burning. The sun is never like this in England, so close, so relentless in its welcome, whispering along the tops of her shoulders and the bridge of her nose.
James is cheerfully singing along to the Who as if he’s never had a lick of trouble in his life. He gets through a chorus before realising she’s looking at him; his smile turns sheepish. “I can turn down the volume if you like. Sorry. You must be tired.”
In truth she isn’t. She was on the plane, especially towards the end of the gruellingly long flight, but stepping out into the Californian air has reminded her what lies ahead. A big, splashy comedy, with bloody Talkalot Studios, and then a witty, sharp heist film. And both of them with James — another few weeks of learning from him and learning about him. The excitement hasn’t hit yet but she is…happy.
“I’m not tired,” she assures him. “Please, carry on with the singing.”
“You wound me, Evans.”
“That was completely sincere!”
She pops open the glovebox, though, in search of more cassettes. Surely there is something she can sing along to as well. What she finds inside makes her laugh, hard and startled.
“What?” James says.
Within is My Generation by the Who, The Who Sell Out by the Who, Tommy by the Who, Who’s Next by the Who, Quadrophenia by the Who, It’s Hard by the Who (this is an empty case, since the cassette’s in the stereo), and Voulez-Vous by ABBA.
“James,” Lily says seriously, “have the Americans been warned that the next British Invasion is right here in your glovebox?”
That makes him laugh, head thrown back and sunglasses slipping. His right hand remains on the wheel, so she’s not concerned about them crashing into the next car, but the lack of concern might also have something to do with that big, expansive laugh of his.
Before she left, somewhere in the midst of trying to pack for the cross-Atlantic trip, Lily had a panic-filled phone conversation with Mary. “What if we just — I don’t know, start it up again?”
“Excuse me?” Mary’s voice was cool. “Why are you discussing your sex life like it’s something that happens to you?”
“No, it’s not that it happens against my will.” Lily raked a hand through her fringe, trying to find the correct words to describe her and James. “It makes sense for it to have been a fixed arrangement. If it goes on, I don’t know if I—” Won’t get attached, she meant, and didn’t want to say aloud. “It’ll be confusing. For both of us.”
“Then just don’t sleep with him,” Mary suggested drily. “Besides, he’s been spending loads of time with that tennis player lately. Vance, whatever her name is. If you need an excuse, Lily, there it is.”
She swallowed. She knew already about Emmeline Vance. The very day after the In An Absent Dream premiere, the gossip rags had run a story about James proposing to Lily at the screening — the absurdity — based on a photo someone had taken of their private conversation. He wasn’t on one knee, she’d pointed out when Mary had sent her the magazine clipping.
But they did look very happy. Incandescently so.
A week or so later he’d been seen with Emmeline in the States. Lily’d done an interview and laughed the proposal rumour off as charmingly as she could manage. Oh, that? Of course not — he was asking me to be in Mischief, that’s all! So the rumour was successfully quashed.
Just don’t sleep with him, Lily recalls now, her hair whipping over her shoulders. Surely they won’t just tumble into bed together. That first time was very deliberate. In fact, each time was deliberate, save for that last night in the kitchen.
“Can I swap that out?” she says, pointing at the car’s radio.
“I should warn you that I know the words to every tape that’s in there,” says James. “The singing won’t stop.”
“Oh, I don’t mind.” She ejects It’s Hard and replaces it with Voulez-Vous, flipped to the B-side. “I’m quite interested in finding out how badly you’ll butcher ‘Does Your Mother Know.’”
If only it weren’t so easy to make him laugh. Then she wouldn’t have to constantly watch him do it and wonder what she’s playing at, and how badly she’s fooling herself. Lily summons up an image of Emmeline Vance, who is tall and lithe and pretty, and a terrifically accomplished athlete. She has a model’s cool, the kind that eager-to-please Lily has never been able to adopt.
Then she wonders what she’s doing, comparing the two of them anyway.
“So, how’s Emmeline?” she says, ostensibly to distract herself from wondering about Emmeline.
It might not be the most effective tactic.
Might.
A small furrow appears between James’s brows; he stops singing. “Emmeline?”
“Vance,” Lily says, feeling more foolish by the moment.
Maybe he’s on to the next girl. Maybe she’s given away that she’s been paying attention, even though it’s not that kind of attention — she reads magazines to see what they’re saying about her, she can’t help if she picks up information about him along the way—
“Oh. Good, I think. She’s in London. Wimbledon soon, and all that.”
She nods. He has such a practised way of shuttering up his expression, the actor’s version of a makeup artist wiping someone’s face clean.
“Do you think you’ll go?” she says.
“Go — to Wimbledon?” James says slowly.
This time Lily doesn’t prompt him with an overly obvious explanation. He’s the one making things stilted.
“Probably not,” he says at last. “We’re not — like that.”
“Not yet reached the professional support stage of the relationship?” Lily says drily.
It would be wise to stop prodding. But if she avoids the subject entirely, it still sends the same message, doesn’t it?
Besides, she wants them to be friends. Or at least to settle into something like their working relationship from Rome, outside of the sex. They’re filming Mischief and It’s Hardly Love simultaneously, but the overall process will take the time of one and a half movies. And she’s here at a big studio on his invite. She knows how much of this rides on her coming across as easy to work with. Mary’s been going on and on about it — “I’ll be there at the end of the month, you just have to hang on until then” — in between heavy-handed hints about studio dates.
James says, “You know I don’t really…do that.”
She shrugs. “Just making conversation.” Not a lie, she thinks, not a lie.
“What about you?”
“Hmm?”
He takes one hand off the steering wheel, leans back in his seat. “What about you, are you seeing anyone?”
Lily coughs. Evidently she can dish it out but not take it. “Ah. No.”
Now he looks at her properly, a bemused smile playing at his lips. “Why do you sound so embarrassed?”
“I’m not embarrassed,” she squeaks, then clears her throat. “I’m not. I just — wasn’t expecting the question.”
She turns quickly to the road ahead. In her peripheral vision she can see that he still isn’t facing forward.
“Would you keep your eyes on the road, please?” Lily says crisply.
To her chagrin, his smile only broadens. “Don’t worry, I don’t intend on dying in a pileup on the freeway in bloody L.A.”
She rolls her eyes, crosses her arms over her chest.
“Oh, fine,” says James, pointedly putting both hands on the wheel and hunching forward. “Better?”
“Yes. You now look like you’re enjoying this as much as I am.”
“Please, Evans. We’re both having the time of our damn lives, and you know it.” He’s back to his relaxed position of earlier.
Lily arches a brow and does not feel a thrill in her stomach. “Are we?”
He glances at her, grinning that crooked grin of his. “Well, we’re in it together, aren’t we?”
***
The Talkalot studios are to Slughorn’s Make It Magic what Goliath is to David. A trio of perky American assistants assure her she will have the lay of the land in a day or two, but Lily can’t imagine navigating the sprawl of buildings with any confidence, even by the end of her contract. Her schedule is stuffed to the gills — meetings with stylists and trainers and studio honchos, and afterwards, press engagements and places to be seen at. Ironically, things will mellow out by the time Mary gets here, but it might be worth phoning her fiery manager to make sure.
She keeps afloat for the first week. On Friday, the producers of their upcoming films are meeting with her and James for the first time. Well, they know James, he’s worked with them before. But they’re meeting Lily for the first time. So obviously she’s shitting bricks.
Helpfully, whoever organised this welcome-to-LA schedule has put in end of week bar hop for the same day. Should anything go horribly wrong, she has that to look forward to.
But it turns out that she has very little to worry about. James is there, first of all, relaxed in the chair next to her in Graham Talkalot’s office. Tilden Toots, the film’s director, is there too, restlessly prowling the space in front of a floor-to-ceiling window through which the Hollywood hills curve around the city. And Graham’s sister Lucinda, who wrote It’s Hardly Love, sits behind the desk while the man himself stands.
“And you’re finding everything okay?” Graham asks her. Lily nods, feeling as though he’s already asked her that question, but honestly the whole meeting has been such a blur she can’t be sure.
“She’s very adaptable,” says James. “Smartest person in our school.”
She whips her head up to look at him, brows raised. It’s not often that he makes reference to their shared history, at least not that she knows of.
“You left when we were fourteen,” she says.
He’s unfazed. “And you were already the smartest person in school, so…your point is?”
Lily can feel the others watching this exchange closely, and leans back in her chair. Be tractable. “Well…thanks.”
Graham says, “Yeah, we’d love to lean into that. Do a couple of interviews about your reunion, what it’s like working with someone you went to high school with. How’s that sound?”
“I’m game,” James says.
Well, if he’s game she sure as fuck is too. “Sounds wonderful.”
Graham beams. “We’re not gonna unearth any sordid secrets, are we?”
Lily says, drily, “My sordid secrets are already in Star magazine.”
At that they all laugh, even quiet Lucinda. Or — they all laugh except James, who’s watching her with an unfathomable expression.
“Well, Lily, you heard it a bunch on the phone, but I’m going to say it again,” Graham drawls. “We’re selling you as a pair here. We want people to show up for a movie that has Potter and Evans on the poster — even here in the States. Y’know? Like Fairbanks and Pickford. Bogie and Bacall. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Potter and Evans.”
Lily shifts in her seat. She’s not sure if she’s actually uneasy, or if it’s because James has stiffened beside her.
“Those people were actually in love,” she feels compelled to say. “In real life.”
Graham and Lucinda exchange perplexed looks, like they don’t understand why she would bring up such a thing. But the difference matters, she thinks. Of course it does.
She resists the urge to glance at James. Doesn’t it?
“Look, hon,” Graham says, soothingly (Lily tries not to prickle), “that’s besides the point. Anyway, by the time this is all over, you’ll have to be a little in love with each other.”
Tilden laughs; Lucinda nods approvingly. Lily considers the fact that this woman has already written a love story they’ll star in — even if It’s Hardly Love is as roundabout a romance as the title suggests — and wonders what she sees when she looks at them. The characters? People who could convincingly slide into the characters? Puppets?
“Sure,” says James, and pushes himself out of the chair. “Are we finished? Lily’s got the welcome wagon waiting to take her bar-hopping.”
“Oh, the famous Talkalot bar tour,” Tilden says, bemused. “Just don’t wear your voice out entirely, okay? We aren’t making silent movies here.”
He flashes them a parting grin, sailing out of the office.
“Let us know if you need anything,” Lucinda says, sliding Lily a card. “We’re used to some weird demands from British imports, thanks to this one here.” She gives James a fond eye-roll.
“Who, me?” he says innocently.
“What did you demand?” asks Lily. “That sports car?”
“Only to replace the one I totalled. Reasonable of me, I should think.”
She laughs. “I hope this bar tour is walkable from here.”
“Oh, actually, I’m not coming,” James says, casting the easy rhythm of their back-and-forth aside. “I’ve got to, er—”
Graham affects a haughty English accent. “Ring the old ball and chain, eh?”
James looks embarrassed. “Oh, fuck off. That’s not what it’s like, and London is eight hours ahead.”
“Uh huh. Totally.”
The tips of James’s ears have gone red. “Bye, Luce.” He flips Graham the bird on his way out.
Lily says a proper goodbye and follows him, nervousness hot and prickly on her tongue. She hopes they will not address this conversation, and worries that they will have to. Then she feels bad, for the way James so attentively heard her out in Rome.
Then again, that was more directly connected to her on-set performance. This is his personal life, and she has no right to interfere.
“You’re really not coming bar-hopping?” she says, catching to up him.
He has his hands in his pockets, gaze lowered. He looks up at her, briefly. “Yeah, no. One too many studio bar-hops in my past.”
Lily nods. She sometimes forgets that James has a history outside of their shared one. While she was taking any ads she could get, he was touring the Sunset Strip.
She smiles reassurance at him. “Well, I’ll do a shot for you.”
That coaxes a smile out of him in return. “Oh, please. A B-52 on me. Two, even.”
“Two it is.”
“Try a cocktail with a funny name, too.”
“Sorry, how drunk do you want me to get? Tilden said not to wear my voice out.”
James pays her no mind. “A Slippery Nipple, perhaps.”
She stops to wheeze a laugh. “A— What?”
“—a Blue Hawaiian Frozen, maybe— What, was Slippery Nipple too shocking for you?” he says, grinning.
Lily is still laughing. “Who names these things?”
In a smooth American drawl James says, “You’re in El Ay, baby. Get used to it.”
She mimes gagging. “Never do that again!”
“I’ll be doing it for two whole films with you, so please practise your poker face.”
“Oh, God.” That reminds her that her accent coaching begins next week. She supposes she has to sound intelligible to an American audience.
“Surely it’s not that bad,” James says.
She huffs instead of spitefully telling him he never does anything that bad. “I’ll have those B-52s, then.”
He gives her a two-fingered salute. “See you on Monday.”
“Monday,” she echoes.
***
The three studio assistants — Becca, Hildy, and Margo — have assembled a shocking number of people at the very start of the bar hop. Lily can only imagine how this thing will grow as they carry on. They’re not all Talkalot Studios employees, she gathers. Some are starlets in the making, small-time actors, assistants at other production companies or even record labels. Some are writers. Most are definitely only there for the alcohol.
“Bar number one!” Margo hollers, her hands cupped around her mouth. “We leave in twenty minutes, so keep up or get left behind!”
Christ, Lily thinks, and follows them into the bar.
The pair of sound engineers in front of her cut straight for the bartender, making it easy to follow. One of them spots her and beckons her forward. The bartender arranges three B-52s — clean, striking layers intact — in front of them.
“Happy Saturday,” one of them says, lifting his shot.
“It’s Friday,” says Lily.
He swallows his drink with an “Ah, fuck.”
At bar number three, Lily wishes Dorcas were here — not because she’s not having fun, but because she knows her best friend would love this. She’s exceeded James’s recommendation and tossed back a third B-52. Maybe she’ll ask for a weird cocktail at the next bar. Becca takes her by the hand and spins her around the dance floor.
At bar number five, she has a shot of something electric-blue. At bar number six, it’s orange, a slammer. Bar seven has a sound system at the back, and a drunken patron is singing into a microphone.
“KARAOKE!” Becca drops Lily at once and races towards the singing.
There is a list of cocktails on the blackboard behind the bar, but Lily’s vision is slightly too blurry to make out what it says. The girl in front of her, giggling, orders a Slow Comfortable Screw Between the Sheets, but surely Lily’s misheard that. El Ay, indeed. She plays it safe and gets an amaretto sour.
She’s sipping on her drink and moving in the general direction of the singing as the familiar synths of “Like A Virgin” pulse through the bar. Suddenly she’s right by the stage-like thing.
“Oh, I love this song,” she remarks offhandedly to the person beside her.
It turns out to be Hildy from the studio — her eyes go bright. “Ohmygod, you should sing it!”
“What?!” Lily squeaks.
Hildy pushes her. The guy whose song she’s currently upstaging throws her a mic. Fuck, fuck, fuck, but she just manages to catch it in time for you make me feel, yeah you make me feel — shiny and new—
This singing in a bar thing sounded mental at first, but Lily takes to it right away. She shimmies her shoulders, and the guy — tall and sandy-haired — laughs so hard he doubles over. This is a performance now. Lily is going to hit every note of it — including each coy falsetto hey!
She and the guy shout the last chorus together — when you hold me, and you love me — and Lily jumps up and down with gusto — can’t you hear my heartbeat — for the very first time? — and the song ends, and a few strangers clap.
Breathless, she follows her duet partner into the crowd.
“Who are you!” she squeals when he turns around, red in the face. He sticks out his hand to greet her, but she bypasses it for a sweaty hug.
“Ouch, okay,” he says, laughing.
Lily gasps, releasing him. “You’re English?”
“Welsh,” he corrects, his smile sideways.
“Again I ask, who are you?!”
The answer comes from behind her.
“Drunk Remus.” James shoulders his way around dancers, a peevish look on his face.
“You’re here,” Lily notes, then thinks go on, state the obvious. Then she looks back at Mr. Drunk Remus. “Is his first name Drunk, or is that some kind of honorific prefix?”
“His first name is Remus,” says James, “but he might as well be a different person when drunk.”
“I can introduce myself,” says Remus, a warning finger pointed at James. “And anyway, I already know who you are,” he adds to Lily.
“You do?”
Remus puts a hand over his heart. “Rome is for lovers, Freddy,” he intones in the worst imitation of Sabine she’ll ever hear in her life, surely, “just not for you and I.”
Lily snorts a spectacularly loud laugh. “You’ve seen the film!”
“Of course I have.” His gaze is full of affection as it slides over to James. “I’ve got to keep up with all his stuff.”
“He’s drunk,” says James again.
“So you’ve already said,” Lily says.
“No, he’s really very reticent when sober. He’ll be so embarrassed tomorrow. It’s his horrible tolerance for alcohol.”
“He just sang Madonna with me.” She glances over at Remus, who is wearing a serene smile and looks quite unbothered. “And we’re talking about him right in front of him.”
“I know he sang Madonna with you,” says James.
She winces. “Ah. You heard that.”
“Saw it, actually.”
Lily squeezes her eyes shut, laughing. “It— Look, I—”
“You were absolutely shameless about it two minutes ago,” he says, smiling, “what about me makes it suddenly mortifying?”
“Oh, forget it.”
Remus cuts in to say, “Well, since you’re here now, I’m off to—”
“Switch to water?” James suggests.
“Dance.”
“Switch to water while you dance.”
“All right,” says Remus, exasperated. “Nice meeting you, Lily.” And then, with a sly twinkle in his eyes, he says, “I’ve heard so much about you.”
She’s about to say what? and haul him back for a full explanation, but he’s gone into the crowd in an instant. So she peers at James instead. “What was that?”
“He’s drunk,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Don’t listen to a word out of him.”
“Fine,” she says, huffing, “don’t tell me anything, then. But since you’ve decided to come after all, let me buy you a drink.”
“Oh, you don’t—”
Lily teeters close to him so he’ll hear her over the person shriek-singing Blondie. “You literally got me into two films, Potter, and you brought me to bloody California.”
Solemnly, he says, “I wouldn’t say that I got you into them. Your work speaks for itself.”
“Oh, whatever. You’re wrong about something else, by the way.”
“Do tell,” he says, leaning close.
“I do remember you from school. And I did before Trelawney mentioned it, in Rome.”
He clears his throat. “Oh, really?”
“Why on earth did you pretend not to know me, at the chemistry read?”
James groans. “God, don’t bloody remind me. I don’t know what I was thinking — I panicked, because I didn’t expect to see you, and then I didn’t want to start things off on the wrong foot. What if you didn’t remember me, and I made things awkward before we did a single read-through?”
Lily blinks. This is actually a more logical explanation than she expected to get. “Well, I remember you. You were barely there, but I remember your very untidy hair, and the time Summerby tried to tell you off for not combing it—”
“It just doesn’t lie flat!” he protests. “Ask anyone who’s ever made me up for a film!”
“Well, I know that now. There was a significant population of our form that suspected you were doing it to look cool.”
James raises a brow. “Oh, yeah? Did you think so?”
“No,” she says, nonchalant, “I didn’t think you looked cool.”
“Ouch.”
She shrugs, trying to think past the alcohol to put the sentiment to words. “I mean, you looked — like a person. Not like a movie star.”
“Ah,” he says.
At first he mulls this over in silence and she wonders if she’s misstepped. But then he laughs quietly, and she wants to kiss his dimple…only Mary floats into view in her mind’s eye. Her sex life is not something that happens to her.
“So you have to let me buy you a Fluffy Duck, anyway,” she says, hurriedly circumventing the past few minutes.
“They don’t feel the same way about Fluffy Ducks here,” James says.
She wraps a hand around his forearm, allows him to steer them to the bar. “Don’t they? Well, you’ll have to read me what’s on the menu, then.”
“Me?” He points at his specs.
“Hmm. We’re fucked.”
The bartender’s occupied, so they stop a ways off. She doesn’t let go of him as she squints at the board. His head tilts towards hers; he’s frowning at it too.
“Any luck?” Lily whispers.
“Can’t see a damn thing.”
“Just make up an innuendo. Half the cocktails are sex-related. You know, on the beach, in the sheets, what have you.”
He laughs, and she swells with pleasure. “Is that what you’ve learned today?”
She scoffs at his teasing tone. “You laugh, but I’ll go up to this bloke right now and say, ‘I’ll have a Slow Comfortable Screw on the Countertop,’ and he won’t even blink.”
James laughs even harder, a hand pressed to his ribs. “Sorry?”
“Didn’t you hear me?” With an exasperated sigh, she turns to say, right in his ear, “A slow, comfortable screw—” And then her brain catches up to what’s happening, and she stutters to a stop, wide-eyed.
James tips his head even nearer, hazel eyes so close. “No, go on,” he says, half-smiling.
Her face grows hot. “Erm.”
“You ordering, or what?” the bartender calls.
“Yeah,” says James at once. “She’s having…a Slow Comfortable Screw — any particulars on the where and the how of the slow comfortable screw, Evans?”
“Fuck off, oh my God—”
The bartender is unamused. “I’ve got a line here, man.”
“Should I go on?” says James, grinning like a fucking cat.
Lily has her face in her hands at this point. “Oh, do,” she says between her fingers.
He slaps a few bills on the bar, apparently pacifying the bartender. “Two Slow Comfortable Screws Against the Wall with a Bang, let’s say.”
At last she snaps out of her embarrassment. “Excuse me, I’m paying for these drinks!” she cries, fumbling through the purse slung over her shoulder.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” the bartender mutters.
“No, don’t bother. It’s a welcome gift,” says James, unruffled.
“You picked me up at the airport!”
“Yeah, that was a pickup, not a—”
“—shut up, James—”
The bartender sets their drinks down with a pointed clink. “Pay and move along.”
Lily snatches James’s money off the bar and replaces it with her own. He puts up his hands so she can’t give it back to him. She shoves the bills into his pocket instead.
Then she plucks their drinks off the counter, smiling at the bartender. “Here’s your slow hard fuck,” she tells James with a playful glare.
“Slow comfortable screw,” he says.
“Whatever, Potter.” She takes a sip, then hums approvingly.
James is watching closely. “Good, isn’t it?”
“It actually is. I never took you for such an expert on slow comfortable screws.”
His grin spreads wide. “Didn’t you?”
Lily’s mouth falls open. “You— Wow.” That’s the first time either of them have mentioned Rome. “I don’t even know what to say to that.”
“No need, I already know how you feel about it,” he says.
“Jesus Christ.”
This is how friends would discuss the fact that they’ve slept together, Lily thinks. She has no experience in the matter, but she thinks that’s how it goes. Except she has to take a big gulp of her drink to ignore the fact that she’s so fucking attracted to him, now, with his cocky smile and his dimple and the words slow comfortable screw in his warm, amused voice. Against a wall, Lily can’t help but think, with a bang.
She shuts her eyes, presses a hand to her forehead. She needs to get a fucking grip.
“You all right?” he says.
She opens her eyes to his concern and wants to shut them all over again.
“This is my last drink of the night, I reckon,” she mumbles.
“Okay,” he says, brow furrowing. “I can take you home, if you want.”
She recalls how he’d walked her back that first time in Rome in the drizzle. My career, Lily thinks desperately, the most sobering two words in the English language; my career can’t be derailed by this man, no matter how nice his smile. She’s had her share of charming smiles already.
“That’s fine,” she says, “I’ll find a cab.”
“Lily—” he starts, then breaks off at her expression. “Okay, yeah. Sure. If that’s what you’d prefer.”
She nods. There’s really no going back from a conversation like that, so they drink their Slow Comfortable Screws in silence, and then he leaves her at the entrance.
***
The next morning, Lily is so bloody grateful for Saturdays. She sits in her kitchen with sunglasses on, uncapping her fourth bottle of water by nine o’clock. The phone rings and she shouts at it to shut up before answering.
“’Lo?”
“Morning, Miss Evans,” says the — unfamiliar — voice on the other end. “It’s Norm from Talkalot.”
“Oh,” says Lily, “hi, Norm.” That seems nicer than who?
“We’re printing off Mischief and sending you a final copy. Can we have that to you this morning?”
“Can I come pick it up?” Lily croaks.
Norm pauses, apparently baffled. “You — why?”
God, she really must sound awful.
“Just, I need to leave the house and feel like a human being. Sorry — you didn’t ask about the particulars, Norm.”
“No, uh. That’s fine. You can pick them up, yeah.” Someone’s saying something to him. “Just a second, Miss Evans.” The rattle of the receiver, and more muffled conversation. And then—
“Hi, Lily?” This voice is crisp, polite, not American. “It’s Remus Lupin. You really don’t have to come in. You’re going to have even fewer days off once we get into the thick of it.”
She laughs, a little awkwardly. “Sounds like you really don’t want to see me.”
He coughs. “That is — not true at all.”
Very reticent, James said. Maybe he wasn’t exaggerating.
“I promise I won’t tell anyone you know all the words to ‘Like A Virgin,’” says Lily.
He makes a choking sound that might possibly be a laugh. “Oh, God.”
“Really, I’m a woman of my word. I didn’t know you work at the studio, by the way, is that how James knows you?”
Remus coughs again. “I, er, wrote Mischief along with Tilden, actually.”
Lily sits up so straight she hits her head on a cabinet. “Motherfucker,” she gasps, eyes watering.
“I wouldn’t describe him as such, no… Maybe a scoundrel at worst?”
“Oh, all right,” she says, rubbing at where it smarts, “you’ve got jokes, is it? Mr. Touched for the Very First Time?”
He groans. “Will I ever live that down?”
“If I can live down not recognising the writer of the bloody film I’m working on, yeah. I’m so sorry, I feel like an idiot!”
“I keep a low profile,” says Remus, and Lily has to bite back another “Like A Virgin” crack.
“Well, I’m coming in to get my copy of the script, so I can apologise to you in person.”
“Oh, please—” He sounds alarmed.
She laughs — then winces at the throbbing it induces in her skull. “Not just on your account, don’t worry.”
He still looks a bit pained when she arrives with a box of pastries, but the various employees supervising the script-printing are thrilled. Lily is now on bottled water number five. While she drinks, she lets Remus tell her how he and James met, while working on Screwed back in ’81. (She marvels at how young they were then and pokes fun at him for his penchant for one-word titles.) Remus has since been reluctantly roped into a friendship with James and Sirius Black. (He says reluctant, but his smile grows as he mentions it.)
“Sirius Black scares me,” Lily confesses, biting into a pastry. God, they’re so much sweeter here, it’s fizzing straight into her veins.
Remus laughs. “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.”
“Well, no, not because of— He seems very, ah— I don’t think he’d like me.” Where the fuck did that come from, she wonders? Why did she go and say it?
But Remus doesn’t poke fun at her for it. His expression is considering. Then he says, “No, I think he’d like you.”
She takes another bite of pastry to save herself from responding. And as they round a corner towards the car park, where the car Norm sent for her idles, who should walk up to the doors but James himself.
All three of them pause.
“What’re you doing here on Saturday?” says Remus.
James pushes his sunnies to rest on his forehead. “Er, I…needed to have a word with Graham, but actually, Lily, could I speak with you quickly?”
“Oh,” she says, “sure.”
Remus’s brows are steadily rising, but he nods. “Thanks for the pastries, Lily.”
“No problem.”
He troops back to the doors, leaving the two of them alone.
“Everything okay?” Lily asks, bouncing on the balls of her feet with a lightness she does not feel.
“Oh, yeah. Fine. Just— I’m sorry,” he says hurriedly, “for last night.”
For a brief, panicked moment, she wonders if something happened that she forgot. But no, that can’t be right… “What about last night?”
He sighs, looks over her head. “All that stuff about the — slow comfortable screws—”
Oh, that. “You really don’t have to apologise, it’s fine—”
“No, it’s not,” he says, more urgently. “I don’t want you to think I — constantly fling come-ons at my female co-stars, or that I gloat about what happened between us, or— And all while everyone thinks I’m seeing Emmeline? That’s dickhead behaviour and I don’t— I’m really not like that.”
He meets her gaze, so earnest and beseeching. Lily forgets that he is waiting for a response and just looks back.
“It’s fine,” she says hurriedly, after too much time has passed. “I didn’t think any of those things about you, honestly.”
James rocks back on his heels, nodding. “Okay. And, to be clear, I’m not dating her. Emmeline, that is. But it’s not really…my information to share, in regards to all that, so…”
Lily nods. “You don’t have to explain any of this to me, James.”
“I don’t think you realise I really, really like working with you,” he says, one corner of his mouth twitching upwards.
She smiles at that. His compliments seem to unravel any tension in their interactions, which is probably a mark of her easily-appeased vanity. “We’ve done one film together.”
He shrugs. “I’m told I’m a very decisive person.”
“Doesn’t mean you come to the right conclusions.”
“Oh, no,” he says seriously. “I’m always right. The only one more right than me is my mother.”
Lily laughs. When at last she allows her relief to settle, his smile is relaxed too.
“That was a better apology than my ex-husband’s,” she jokes, lifting a hand to shield her eyes from the sun.
She’s ready for him to laugh in return. But instead, his eyes flash and his jaw clenches.
“Just for the record,” he says, his voice dropping to a low murmur, “fuck that guy, yeah?”
She’s so surprised she can’t do anything but make another joke. “Won’t be doing that again, actually.”
But James is utterly serious; he shakes his head. “Really, Lily. What a fucking moron he is.”
Her mouth is dry. It takes several tries at clearing her throat for her to speak again. “Yeah, I know. Erm. Thanks.”
He gives her an odd sort of look. “Don’t thank me.”
She shrugs helplessly, like what else am I supposed to do? “So, I should get back to memorising this.” Flaps the bag that contains a freshly-bound copy of Mischief at him.
“Right. Yeah.” James puts his sunglasses back on, slides his hands into his pockets. “Monday, then.”
“Monday,” she echoes. Looks over her shoulder to watch him go.
***
From Rolling Stone magazine, September 1983:
James Potter and Lily Evans Go Way, Way Back
…it’s plain to see how Potter and Evans have established such a natural rapport on the screen: it's how comfortable they are around each other in real life. I begin to feel like an intruder on their conversation, less an interviewer than an eavesdropper…
From Elle US, November 1983:
Breakfast in America with Lily Evans
From Star magazine, December 20th, 1983:
Star Watch
Lush Lily and Plastered Potter Toast to Christmas in London
From Vogue UK, February 1984:
COVER: James Potter and Lily Evans Are Managing ‘Mischief’ Well
From Entertainment Weekly, April 1984:
Saturn Today, Infinity and Beyond Tomorrow: Amelia Bones’s Rising Star
…the actress picked up her first Saturn Award last month on her third nomination, and while she’s grateful for the gruelling schedule of her beloved science fiction trilogy, Amelia’s got her sights set on new horizons…
From the Official UK Albums Chart, week ending April 20th, 1984:
#1 — It’s Hardly Love: Music from the Motion Picture — Celestina Warbeck, Various Artists
From The Times arts section, April 27th, 1984:
FILM: ‘Mischief’ is Raunchy, Laugh-out-loud Fun
…it may not be the film you want to see with your parents this weekend, but it’s definitely the film you want to see. Evans is plucky, Potter is dynamic, and their chemistry…is the reason you’re leaving your family at home.
From Star magazine, May 15th, 1984:
This Week’s Yeses and No’s
Yes: We can’t stop thinking about Lily Evans in ‘Mischief.’ If our boyfriends are watching the film again and again behind our backs, can we even blame them?
From The Times arts section, June 22nd, 1984:
FILM: Never A Dull Moment in this Diamond-Heist Comedy
…it’s a good thing for Talkalot Studios’ risky double-header plan that we’re not tired of Potter and Evans at all. ‘It’s Hardly Love’ outshines even its springtime predecessor, with its brisk runtime and clever musical numbers (penned by screenwriter Lucinda Talkalot to music by Celestina Warbeck).
From Star magazine, July 10th, 1984:
Guess Who: It’s a Baby on the Way for Our Favourite Extraterrestrial Lovebirds!
It’s been two years since this ruggedly handsome leading man professed his love for his gorgeous co-star. Their trilogy may be done with, but there’s a new chapter in store for the priestess and the cowboy…
From Vogue UK, August 1984:
Brighton’s Brightest is Back
…”I love L.A., I’ve had such a wonderful time there, but England will always be home,” confesses Evans in the bright, airy sitting room of her Brighton beach house. She returns to the West End next month for what promises to be a stunning starring role in Olympe Maxime’s sumptuous adaptation of ‘The Bloody Chamber.’ Stage veteran Rufus Scrimgeour will play the Bluebeard to Evans’s Daphne DuMaurier-esque innocent young wife. Evans is full of praise for Scrimgeour and the mentor role he’s already taking on in her still-budding theatre career…
And what of frequent collaborator James Potter, with whom Evans has had two smash hits this year — the racy romantic comedy ‘Mischief’ and the heist-musical ‘It’s Hardly Love’? Evans smiles at the question.
“We’re good friends, obviously, and working with him is always its own kind of magic. But James has other commitments, and we have our separate goals. Although,” she adds laughingly, “I would induce him to join a West End show if I could.”
From Star magazine, September 4th, 1984:
Star Watch
Winner Doesn’t Quite Take It All: Vance Nabs Grand Slam, Loses Boyfriend
…any hopes our dear readers have of tall, athletic Potter-Vance children have been dashed following the recent US Open. The pair have always been coy about their relationship, insisting they are ‘just friends.’ But while Vance dominated her American opponent on the court to win in straight sets, Potter was seen out and about in L.A. with new-wave group Heartfood’s frontwoman Marlene McKinnon.
Tough luck, Emmeline! At least she has a pretty consolation prize…
From People magazine, November 1984:
Gilderoy Lockhart Studs English Canon with New Stars
His Wildean remake will film next year and release the year afterwards, but the director remains mum on his leads
From The Times arts section, December 20th, 1984:
THEATRE: Emotional scene as ‘The Bloody Chamber’ original cast puts on final West End show
From Star magazine, December 24th, 1984:
Single or Not?
James Potter: “Single,” he assured Entertainment Weekly last month while wrapping filming on a Talkalot action-adventure film. We’d believe him if he didn’t look so good beside co-star Greta Catchlove…
III. THE MOON
1985
From Star magazine, January 8th, 1985:
Not Lonely, Just Alone!
Lily Evans may be single as ever since the split with her ex-husband, but she looks happy to start the new year as she greets fans on Brighton Beach…
From People magazine, February 1985:
Emmeline Vance on Coming Out and What It Cost Her
“I’ve stopped listening to what people say about me,” says the year’s transcendent women’s tennis champ
***
After L.A., London is a strange place to live.
Or maybe that’s backwards — L.A. was a strange place to live, and in returning to London she’s discovering how much her notion of normal has changed. London is a place, but Los Angeles is a dream, a story breathed into life by the sun-bronzed hopefuls who crowd its streets. But even dreams can feel stifling sometimes.
She skips Brighton in the spring, preferring to stay in the London flat she’s finally bucked up and purchased. There’s plenty to catch up on — they are filming for The Importance of Being Earnest, and between frazzled three-day trips into the countryside — fucking Bunburying indeed, she thinks morosely — Lily keeps up with Dorcas and visits her mother.
Dorcas has a new girlfriend, a sweet, bookish girl called Hestia, and it takes some time for Lily to adjust to the change. That’s not to say that Hes is in any sense unlikeable. But for so long it was just Lily-and-Dorcas that any sort of hitch in the thing is difficult to contemplate.
One evening she lets this slip to her friend. To her credit, Dorcas gives her a sympathetic smile.
“Lil, what d’you think it was like for me when you got married? Or even before, when you started jetting off here and there for cover shoots?” She leans across the table, squeezing Lily’s hands in her own. “Things are going to keep changing, you know. But we’ll still have each other.”
She is certain on set that even a hint of suggestion in her interactions with James will make their history evident to everyone. Of course, she can’t avoid him outright, nor does she try to. They’re playing love interests. She’s been with him for table reads —
“This entire film I’m going to be channelling Sirius,” he said, and she said, “Great, now Cecily would rather not fall in love with Algy, thanks,” and he said, dismayed, “What’s wrong with Sirius?”
— and rehearsals —
“Say ‘Bunburying’ one goddamn time without laughing, I fucking dare you, rich of you all to tell me off—”
— and what feels like every waking moment. They are co-conspirators, annoyingly close friends, giggling about the pompous director, Lockhart, and falling silent beneath veteran actress Minerva McGonagall’s sharp gaze.
But there’s something else. Something she can’t bring herself to think about. Something that chokes her up with want when he sits too near, and she has to reach for a joke to fit between them.
On the rare off-day in London, Lily abandons her usual routine to rifle through the offerings at a Notting Hill bookshop. Maybe if she has something to read on set she won’t feel like a perv staring at James all day. Maybe if she gets laid she won’t feel like a perv either.
The prospect is still vaguely unappealing. She slept with a bloke or two in Los Angeles, and they were attractive enough, and the sex was fine enough, good, even — but all that couldn’t shake this feeling. There’s no reason to suppose an English guy can somehow do the trick.
Lily taps the edge of a beautifully bound volume of Gaudy Night. She ought to persuade someone to adapt it…for the stage, perhaps, she can already imagine the glittering Oxonian sets…
“Lily?”
The book thuds to the ground, upside-down. She swears and scrambles to pick it up, backing away as she does from the source of the voice.
“I didn’t know you work here,” she says, and then realises too late that this can be taken as encouragement when it is, in fact, not that.
Severus Snape is staring at her through narrowed eyes, as if she has somehow done him wrong by appearing unknowingly in his place of work, or by existing at all. Lily gathers up her indignation in advance.
“Yes, I work here,” Severus says. “Back in England, are you?”
She resists the urge to say something snippy, like possibly, yes, and it’s been in fucking Vogue so don’t pretend you’re too highbrow to have accidentally glanced at it in a Tesco. “Yeah. Well, have a nice life.”
Alarm makes him blanch. “Wait — Lily—”
Breezily she says, “Sorry, I’m ever so busy — loads of press, you know, places to be seen—”
This sort of thing always pissed him off, which riled her up in turn. He would say things like you really think you’re like all those other models, with no brains to speak of, just taking their clothes off for— What, do you want me to lie to you, that’s how these people are! And you’re not one of them! But if she hoped she would irritate him too much to start an argument in this bookshop, Lily is about to proven wrong.
Now Severus flushes angrily. “Oh, of course. Surprised you can even look at a bookshelf without going cross-eyed.”
She laughs, outraged despite her best intentions. “Yeah, okay. Sorry, am I the one who studied English, or was that you?”
His eyes are glittering with a cold cruelty she remembers well. She remembers being surprised to find herself the target of his venom, when really it was only a matter of time.
“Sorry, am I the one who has a degree, or is that you?” he snaps.
“Sorry, am I the one who’s in big-budget films, or is that you?” says Lily, struggling to regain her composure.
His mouth curls into a sneer. “Oh, that’s all you. Running around with James bleeding Potter of all people, getting photographed drunk by paparazzi—”
She searches through her mental inventory of magazine stories, and an incredulous smile spreads across her face. “Oh, do you read Star? I’d have thought that was beneath you.” Lily clicks her tongue. “Are you really still on about that bizarre schoolboy grudge against James?”
“Shut up,” Severus says, like an instinctive flinch, and then, even worse, he looks guilty for having said it.
Lily rolls her eyes, letting her smile fall away. “Spare me, all right? I don’t owe you any explanations about what I do or who I do it with, and we’re not friends, so piss off.”
She replaces Gaudy Night on its shelf, a little forlornly. It’s really a very pretty edition. She’ll need to ask another bookshop about it.
He calls out from behind her, as she makes her way to the door, “Yeah, that’s typical for you, isn’t it? Fall for the first moron who looks twice just because he’s handsome and rich, and now you’re going to go and do it again. Well, don’t cry when you’re on divorce number two—”
She doesn’t think, doesn’t pause — she whirls around, so enraged that even Severus cuts himself off, eyes wide. For a split second Lily contemplates hitting him across the face. It would be so fucking satisfying.
But the small, sensible part of her that speaks with Mary’s voice reminds her what the headlines would say.
“Eat shit, Snape,” Lily says through clenched teeth, and then she’s out the door.
***
From Star magazine, February 19th, 1985:
Star Watch
Worst V-Day Ever: Not the Greatest of Dates for Evan Rosier and Lily Evans
…we said their names were way too similar! A source close to the pair claims they were set up by head honchos at Make It Magic Films, to no avail. Witnesses say Lily stormed out of dinner, leaving the Greatest of Days actor fuming at their table. Studio matchmakers flop again…
From The Times arts section, March 3rd, 1985:
THEATRE: ‘Les Mis,’ ‘Love’s Labour’s’ Lead Olivier Noms
…Most Promising Newcomer of the Year in Theatre…
Lily Evans as Girl in The Bloody Chamber — Phoenix…
From GQ, July 1985:
COVER: Dandifying James Potter
From The Times arts section, October 27th, 1985:
THEATRE: ‘Red Roses,’ ‘Me and My Girl’ Take Home Biggest Honours at Olivier Awards
…Most Promising Newcomer of the Year in Theatre
Winner: Lily Evans as Girl in The Bloody Chamber — Phoenix
***
1986
The Talkalot premieres were big, of course. They tried to get James and Lily to show up at both the London screening and the Los Angeles one, which was ridiculous in the middle of The Bloody Chamber, so obviously that didn’t happen.
But Earnest is a Lockhart film, and Slughorn forewarned her to expect…more.
“Jesus, I’m going to be seeing camera flashes through the week,” Petunia mutters, twitching the skirt of her dress into place.
Their mother gives a patient sigh. “Darling, please. Lily didn’t have to bring us, she could’ve taken one of her friends…”
Lily bites back a yeah, exactly, and trains a beatific smile at the cameras instead. “You could go right through the red carpet, avoid all the paps. Mary’s waiting at the door. She’ll show you to your seat.”
But Petunia draws herself upright, outrage turning her cheeks pink. “I’m not going to run through a red carpet like bloody Cinderella.”
“Then don’t complain,” Lily says, with as much faux-sweetness as she can muster.
She swivels around to find someone, anyone, to introduce her sister to. If Mary can’t take Petunia off her hands, maybe Emma Vanity will…and if anyone would be impervious to Petunia’s rudeness, it’d be Emma…
Or Minerva, Lily thinks, tickled at the idea. But she doesn’t want to take the risk that Minerva McGonagall will lose respect for her just for being related to Petunia.
As it happens, this is when James arrives.
Petunia’s gaze sharpens with interest. “Are you going to introduce us to James Potter?”
Lily has to roll her eyes at the way she says it, like there’s an extra level of capitalisation to James’s name. Trust Petunia to sniff out the most high-profile actor at this event and demand a meeting.
“Is he anything like…you know. Your ex?” her sister continues.
Their mother gasps. “Petunia!”
“It’s fine,” Lily says absently, “it’s not like speaking about him summons him, that I know of. Though, you could argue he has some relation to the dev—”
At the same time, Petunia says, “Oh, I don’t mean romantically. Lily never dated James, did you?”
Her breath catches in her throat at the question — though it’s not much of a question at all. And Petunia’s right. Lily shouldn’t have any reaction to this other than the vague feeling that the assertion is an insult.
Instead she feels nauseous. And James has spotted them, and he’s coming their way.
Her mother is giggling self-consciously; she doesn’t seem to have heard Petunia’s latest crack.“Goodness, he’s handsome in real life too.”
But Petunia is looking right at Lily, her painted lips twisted into a moue of pity. Her sister reads her silence like a fucking book.
“Oh,” Petunia sighs. “Oh, well, if that’s how it is between you, why didn’t you say so?”
She stiffens. “I really do not have the patience right now to—”
Her mother and her sister glide right past her.
James is saying, “Gosh, Mrs. Evans, is that you? I thought, nah, Lily only has one sister—”
Lily stays in place, and catches herself searching for whoever’s accompanying him. She only spots Sirius striding up the carpet, his brows sky-high.
Petunia’s right.
“Oh, don’t the both of you need to walk side by side?” Her mother none too gently ushers her towards James.
“Not as such,” Lily begins.
“Well, how will the cameras get nice pictures of the stars? No, no, you go on—”
James slips one arm around her, the sleeve of his jacket warm against her bare back. She regrets her sartorial choices, even though she knows—
“You look beautiful,” James murmurs into her hair.
“I know,” she says without thinking.
He laughs.
(Later her mother will cut out a photo of this moment from OK magazine, and Lily will look at it every time she’s in her kitchen.
Until she won’t anymore.)
“You know, Lily,” Petunia says, “I much prefer these sorts of premieres to the plays you do. Much less of a hassle, and though I can’t say you have the most logical taste in films—” (Lily suppresses a snort; Petunia watched Mischief with her hand over her mouth) “—you certainly have bizarre taste in shows—”
“Really? Lily?” James is glancing between her sister and her, brows lifted. There’s a deceptive politeness to his expression, and though it’s one that she’s never seen before, she can’t help but feel like something’s going to happen. “She’s got brilliant taste.”
Petunia’s eyes narrow ever so slightly. It’s suddenly very funny, the most famous person Petunia’s ever met picking an argument with her over her own sister. Lily has to smother a laugh and turn it into a cough, and she’s pretty sure that doesn’t fool anyone.
“I don’t know if you saw the first show she did,” Petunia begins airily.
“You and Me, the sisters who survive that serial killer?” James says, not missing a beat. “Yep.”
Lily frowns, taken aback. “Wait, what? You never said you’d seen You and Me—”
“Really?” He tilts his head to one side in thought. “I thought I’d mentioned it. I didn’t see you in it, unfortunately. Your understudy was in the night I went.”
She’s currently doing the best acting of her life — a perfect imitation of a goldfish, mouth opening and closing stupidly.
“Why… If you’d said, I would’ve…warned you or something…”
The matter-of-fact manner he’s had for the entire length of this conversation gives way a little, his pleasant smile dimming. “I think part of me thought it might be nice to surprise you.”
“I hate surprises,” she says immediately. “Don’t do that again.”
“What, go to your shows, or not tell you?”
Lily isn’t sure when they left Petunia and the girls’ mother behind. But suddenly it’s just them in their little section of the carpet, and the deceptive solitude is making her shiver. Don’t cry when you’re on divorce number two, she remembers suddenly, and her palms grow clammy.
James wouldn’t, though. He wouldn’t lead her on to that extent. It is perfectly clear now, for instance, that they’re friends, and that the period of their life when they slept together is over.
But she can’t lie to him. She physically can’t bring herself to lie to him, and why should that be the case? It would be so fucking easy, in any other situation, to smooth the fib over with a wry smile. Shot, chaser.
“Don’t — not tell me,” Lily says, quietly. “Don’t do that.”
The easy expression he has on flickers; he swallows visibly. “Well, I’ve got a few more confessions to make, then,” James says, the words absent of any teasing.
His voice sounds scraped raw; she looks at the toes of her heels, just visible beneath the hem of her skirt, so that she won’t have to meet his eye. But all that serves is to send her imagination into overdrive, wondering what his expression must be.
He says, “I saw The Bloody Chamber, with you actually in it.”
Every muscle in her body is screaming at her to say, hold this thought, please, until we are inside the theatre, and not surrounded by photographers. She recalls the In An Absent Dream premiere, and bloody Star gleefully wondering if James proposed.
Don’t cry when you’re on divorce number two.
She doesn’t pull him towards the doors. She says, “And…what did you think?”
Something between an exhale and a laugh escapes him. “I didn’t think.”
She waits for him to elaborate, for one moment, then two, then three. He leans close, his breath warm against her ear, lips brushing her skin as he inhales. Now, he’ll say something, and the sparks skidding along the surface of her skin will be set to rest.
Then James draws back, brow furrowed. He makes no sound. For a moment Lily wonders if she did something to dissuade him, or if someone else called out to him — but she realises that it’s far simpler than that. He has nothing more to say.
He takes her hand, and they move towards the theatre.
***
From The Times arts section, March 14th, 1986:
FILM: ‘Earnest’s dialogues may miss the mark, but its acting is top-notch
…a touch overwrought, as Lockhart films tend to be, Wilde’s play is nevertheless buoyed by the sharp comedic timing of its cast.
From Entertainment Weekly, April 1986:
The Importance of Being Honest?
…though the period film has nabbed three BAFTAs (Supporting Actress for McGonagall, Costume Design, and Adapted Screenplay) rumours have swirled about in-fighting among the cast — in regards to name placements on marketing materials.
Lily Evans dismisses these stories out of hand. “We’re all friends. What happened was a studio decision, certainly not a result of any one actor throwing their name around, and it didn’t jeopardise any professional relationships.” Onscreen love interest James Potter concurs. “If Lily’s a diva, then so am I, right?”
From The Times arts section, April 11th, 1986:
The Hunt is Over: BBC Finds Lizzy and Darcy for First-Ever On-Film ‘Pride and Prejudice’
Fresh off the Lockhart period film ‘The Importance of Being Earnest,’ Lily Evans and James Potter are headed further back in time to the Regency, joined by Amos Diggory (‘Much Ado,’ ‘All’s Well’ at the Globe) and Amelia Bones (the Great Galaxies trilogy) as Mr. Bingley and Jane Bennet respectively, with Sir Albus Dumbledore appearing as Mr. Bennet.
***
She has her feet propped up on the bench beside her. The skirts of their dresses will be long enough that their footwear needn’t be period-appropriate. But she has to practice in these strange heels to break them in, so that she is the right height (she has no clue why that matters this much) at the Netherfield ball. Or she did know and nodded along eagerly upon hearing it at first. And now she repents.
Across the room, Amelia is drinking big mouthfuls of water. The younger Bennet girls are deep in discussion. James twirls around Mrs. Bennet, and they both laugh.
Each time they start a new project together, it takes a while to find a new rhythm. With In An Absent Dream she was irritated by him for about a third of filming, just because she wanted to be. In Los Angeles there was all this realignment — new place, new crew, a setup that made her feel like she had so much growing up to do.
For Earnest, she’d seen him a fair bit in the intervening months, what with the press for the Talkalot films. But the memory of their first day of rehearsal is vivid and embarrassing — the summer sun was gold and bright around him, and she saw him and thought, oh, my God, he’s fit.
That’s not to say she hadn’t realised before. Obviously she knew — continues to know — he’s good-looking. But it caught her off-guard then, somehow. He waved at her. Her thoughts wandered in not-so-innocent directions.
Nothing happened. Nothing’s happened between them since Rome. They are coworkers and friends. But Lily has kept a careful watch on those lustful feelings since Pride and Prejudice rehearsals have started up. No one here has Minerva McGonagall’s eagle eye, but she has no desire to read that she’s mooning over James in the tabloids. Her memory of the Earnest red carpet looms large.
He’s caught her looking; he lifts his brows. She smiles.
Okay? he mouths. She gives him a thumbs up.
After the day’s dancing has come to an end, he sidles up to her as they file into the gravel drive. Choreography is still rattling around Lily’s head. She looks up when he touches her elbow.
“How’re your feet?” he says.
“I’ll live,” she says, with a rueful smile.
“The easier for Darcy to sweep Lizzy off them, I suppose.”
Lily rolls her eyes. They’re still doing table reads. No one’s sweeping anyone anywhere just yet. But he could, she realises, as she studies the soft curve of his mouth, the faint hollow of his dimple.
“What’re you staring at?” James says.
“Trying to picture how you’ll look with Regency sideburns.”
He grimaces, running a hand through his hair. The men have all been instructed not to get any trims, so it’s at its most disheveled now, even worse than it was for Earnest.
“Is that what that expression of yours means?” he says. “That you’re trying to fix my face into ugliness?”
What expression, she wonders? Aloud she says, “I’m not going to tell you how handsome you are, if that’s what you’re looking for. Twat.”
He only grins.
“James! Lily!” Amos is waving at them from his car. “Need a drop?”
“God, yes,” James says. “Lily’s half-fainting.”
Lily has to bite back a laugh at Amos’s alarmed expression. “Don’t tease him,” she whispers as they change course for the car.
“Who else should I tease, then?” James murmurs, his lips close to her ear.
The dull thump of her heart quickens. He knows, some part of her thinks in fluttering panic, to which the sensible side of her replies, knows what?
Something she doesn’t know yet herself, apparently.
Lily rolls her eyes when he opens the car door for her. Once inside, she lets James and Amos do the talking, staring out of the window instead.
They aren’t far out of London, at one of the smaller countryside studios, but pointed suggestion from the Beeb has compelled them to stay at the studio accommodation. Personally Lily is more comfortable with this than driving to and from her flat in the city — she’d hardly get enough rest, so it would serve little purpose. Besides, she’s shot in unfamiliar locations more often than home.
Luckily, it hasn’t been weird between her and James at the house — a big, rambling thing, the sort of genteel country estate she’s imagined into stories as a child — thus far. But when she slides out of the car again and walks up the front steps, she can feel his eyes on her. Who else should I tease?
They eat supper intermingled with some of the crew. No one is much interested in conversation, and Lily sits by one of the makeup girls. The same silence from the car seems to have followed her. After the meal she says her goodbyes and makes for the staircase, stretching her arms above her head. The choreographer is adamant they don’t pull any muscles, but no matter how many cool-down exercises they’re led through, Lily can still feel the knots in her back.
“All right, Evans?” James calls from the bottom of the stairs, as if they’re back in school and hurrying from one classroom to the next.
She glances down the banister at him. “Fine, yeah.”
He motions to his own shoulders. “Tense?”
Her limbs feel liquid, out of her control. Maybe he has found someone else to tease, she thinks, despairing privately.
“A little,” she shrugs.
He catches up to her on the steps.
“Are you going to offer to help?” Lily says drily, hoping to head off whatever joke is forthcoming.
But James tilts his head back in surprise. “Do you — want me to?”
She can’t make out any humour in his expression. “Want you to help, or want you to offer?”
His hazel eyes are just as wary as she feels. “Don’t they mean the same thing?”
She shakes her head. One is a joke and the other is a promise, and it confuses her to think he doesn’t know that.
“I can.” He lifts a hesitant hand to the back of her neck. “Help, if you want.”
Lily expels a slow breath. She doesn’t dare look anywhere but at his eyes. They lower, briefly. She thinks he might be looking at her mouth.
Someone slams a door shut, above them. James doesn’t even flinch. His hand is still a cautious weight upon her neck.
The moment stretches on. It’s not like it was during In An Absent Dream, when it was a means to an end to begin with. She doesn’t want him to go.
She remembers what he said to her at their first premiere — that, irrationally, he’d expected not to see her after they’d finished filming. Thinks back to that rainy evening in Rome. If she bids him goodnight she’ll see him in the morning for rehearsal, but she’s transfixed by the sudden conviction that she won’t. Like he’ll vanish in the night, a dream she’ll wake grasping for.
“I don’t know what exactly you’re offering now,” Lily says.
His thumb runs under the neck of her shirt, over her bare skin. “Whatever you need. But — I know what I want.” James stops there, mouth slightly parted, like he could go on but is just barely holding back.
“Your room?” she says.
The staircase is never this empty. It seems impossible that they should have gone uninterrupted for so long, which makes her certain that with each successive second they are more likely to be seen. But Lily lets the tension in her limbs subside when he kisses her, the barest brush of his lips on hers.
He steps back, throat bobbing as he swallows. “My room.”
Lily stops by her bedroom only long enough to change. Then she’s at his door, knocking as quietly as she can manage. It opens so immediately that she feels certain he was waiting.
“Oh, good,” he says, apparently feigning casualness, “come in.”
She stifles a laugh, squeezing around him. “Sorry, are you an actor by profession?”
James rolls his eyes, shutting the door and locking it. “Leave me alone.”
That makes her smile. “I don’t think you want me to,” she says, moving a step closer.
He plays at exasperation for a moment more. Then he lifts her face up to his.
The kiss is steady, slow enough to make her blush. He works her top up, runs his fingers over her back. Slides his hand without hesitation down her shorts. She shivers, though his touch is warm. His caresses are laden with intent, like he knows exactly what he wants to do next, and Lily realises with a thrill that he’s thought about this.
Desire tightens in her belly. How long, she wonders? Today? Just now, waiting for her to arrive at his door? Or is it an older imagining than this film, this set?
She pauses to shed her top, and James takes the time to remove his. She marvels at the breadth of his shoulders, at the lines and muscles she hasn’t seen like this in years. He’s filled out. She wants to map the new feeling beneath her fingers, re-learn the topography of him.
He takes a step towards her and spreads his hands over her waist. Lily bends like a river reed into his touch, sighing his name into his mouth. She stumbles back onto the bed, sitting with a thump and moving further, and he follows like he can’t be left behind for a second.
James asks to take off her shorts. She acquiesces, leaning back on her elbows to watch him do it. She is surprised, somehow, when he kisses the apex of her thighs, wringing a gasp from her.
“Is this all right?” he says, looking up at her. His eyes are dark.
She nods, eager, hungry.
He ducks his head again and she grasps him by the shoulders, biting back the first few moans valiantly before at last giving in. And he brings her to the edge, knocks her right into the empty air; her hips rise then fall, her fingers threading into his hair so she has something to hold onto.
When her sounds have subsided into ragged breathing, he sits back and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Lily exhales a hot rush of air. She can’t look away from him.
“Do you have a condom?” she whispers.
“Yeah,” he whispers back. He leans across her to reach the nightstand, and she absentmindedly presses her hands to his stomach. Her fingers sink into his shuddering inhale.
He hands her the condom. She hands the empty wrapper back to him. Then she rolls it over him and runs her hand along his length. He whispers her name, and she briefly forgets everything else.
James has got rid of the wrapper, God knows where or how, and he lifts her hips to pull her closer. She lets her spine curve, hooking her legs around him, pushing herself up like an offering. But he is the one on his knees. His eyes flutter shut, penitent, his lips pressing tight then parting as he slides into her.
The rest is almost too hard and fast to be satisfying; almost. Lily grips his arms, gasping, as they move, so tightly that she can feel the shape of his shifting muscles. That is, until he’s rubbing his thumb against her again, and then she has to dig her fingers into the sheets instead, bunching the cloth into her fists.
“That’s it, baby,” he says, which is new — he’s only ever called her by her name in bed. It is so breathless as to seem involuntary. She pushes against him harder, desperate to see what else he might say.
When they both finish, she thinks they might be in separate worlds entirely, as if they’ve come close only to spin out after colliding. He falls onto his back beside her. They catch their breath in silence.
Then James kisses her shoulder, sliding a hand over her hip. This too is unexpected. It is not doing wonders for Lily’s breathing. But she turns to look at him, and tips his chin upwards so she can kiss him back properly. His hand creeps lower.
She pulls away. “Do you have another condom?” she says, and only after she bites her lip does she realise she’s fighting a smile.
James laughs quietly. “Yeah.”
These kisses are unhurried; she loses all sense of time. Lily thinks, all of a sudden and without prompting, a slow comfortable screw between the sheets, and has to stop kissing him to laugh into the back of her hand.
“What?” he says, the corners of his mouth quirking upwards.
“Nothing,” she says, scrabbling without looking for the condoms in the nightstand drawer.
Later she’ll notice that neither of them bothered to pretend they won’t be doing this again.
This time she straddles him, shakes her hair behind her shoulders, makes a big show out of running one hand up her stomach and over one breast. He pinches her thigh gently, says, “You minx,” almost as warmly as baby.
She goes slow. He’s smiling all the while, that gorgeous dimple stark against his cheek. It makes every yes — hissed quietly between his teeth — so much sweeter.
***
“I’m going to look forward to the two of us being properly typecast,” says James one evening.
Lily laughs. They’re rehearsing more dancing and riding over the next few days, so today has been a lighter load to prepare. They should both be asleep, really. Instead they are here, in the corridor outside their rooms, standing by the open window. She doesn’t think she’ll be able to sleep for ages. There’s a crackling feeling under her skin, like fire or lightning, something waiting to be doused or stoked.
“It’s true,” she says, putting her chin in her hand and looking at him out of the corner of her eye. “I think if we’re going to be typecast in Austen, it might be…Northanger Abbey?”
He shakes his head with a rueful smile. “I’m not familiar.”
She gasps. “We’ll have to fix that. But — you really aren’t much of a Darcy.”
“No,” he says thoughtfully, “but I suppose you weren’t much of a Sabine, and I wasn’t Algy…”
“By rights you ought to have been Jack in Earnest, I think.”
He pulls a face. “What, the sort of idiot who would invent a roguish brother without thinking things through, and still get himself in all kinds of trouble?”
What she meant was that Algernon Moncrieff is a cad and a dandy, and James is more upright than that. But Lily only smiles sweetly. “Yes, exactly.”
He scoffs. “You were never a Cecily either.”
“So we’ve come to the conclusion that we could’ve sidestepped the credit order debacle if we’d only been cast as the leads?” Lily says.
James groans. “The stupidest shit we’ve ever had to put up with, my God — even Gid and Emma were embarrassed about it.”
“I might’ve kicked up a fuss,” she allows, “if I were Emma. We really weren’t the leads.”
She can still remember feeling grateful to have play rehearsals to throw herself into. The studio worked itself into knots over whose names should appear first on promotional material — since Gideon Prewett and Emma Vanity had unmistakably been the stars, but Lily and James were…the stars.
“Bloody Lockhart.” James sighs. “Let’s have them do it over, hey? Better director, better script. You be Gwendolen, I’ll be Jack. But we’ll need to have Minnie back for Lady Bracknell.”
“Oh, absolutely.”
“That would never work,” says a voice behind them.
They both jump guiltily, though they haven’t been caught doing anything wrong. Amelia Bones is halfway down the corridor. Lily can feel the way James inches closer to her, the way he always does around Amelia. As if he worries the other girl is going to take a run at her, even though she’s been nothing but professional.
Amelia doesn’t flinch from their twin gazes. “Sorry, I couldn’t help but hear. But they’d never cast you as Jack and Gwendolen in Earnest. People like to watch you fall in love.”
Lily straightens, rolling her neck so she won’t have to answer. James says, “Ah.”
Amelia seems not to have noticed the effect of her words because she adds, thoughtfully, “You’d be good for Shakespeare.”
“Macbeth,” says Lily, the same time as James says “Much Ado.” He squawks at her, horrified, and Amelia laughs.
“What d’you mean, Macbeth? I thought we miss being typecast!” he protests.
We, Lily registers, her smile warm, satisfied. “I’d make an exception here, we’d be an excellent pair of Macbeths. On the stage, I reckon. No cameras, loads of fake blood.”
“Ha bloody ha.”
“Quite literally, yeah.”
“I’d watch it,” Amelia says, flashing Lily a genuine smile. “See you in the morning.”
Once Amelia’s footsteps have faded, she turns back to James. “Sure you’re not interested?” she teases.
He pushes up his specs, frowning. “You’d make a better Beatrice than you would Lady Macbeth.”
She shrugs, maybe so. “It’d be fun with you. Sexy, even.”
James laughs. “Murdering a king is sexy?”
“Being haunted by it afterwards is sexy,” she corrects.
“Sometimes I forget you read English at uni.”
“Well, I didn’t finish the degree, so there’s no need to sound that way about it.”
His smile has softened, the sun slipping towards the horizon. “Come to bed, Lily.”
The night is hers. She goes with him.
***
They are filming in increments, so as to imitate the actual passage of time in Pride and Prejudice over the course of the summer. The schedule expands and contracts week to week in early June, so that there is suddenly a spate of days when only the Bennets and Mr. Collins are in front of cameras.
It’s not like Earnest, when she thought of James so much that her teeth ached, shamefully often, inappropriately timed, one blustery-warm summer night resulting in a hand slipped into her shorts. It could be that that period of time was merely a tunnel to pass through, and now she was saner, better-adjusted, and happier.
It could be that the reason she’s not thinking herself into feverish imaginings is that she’s living them. Lily brushes aside this temporary intrusion of logic.
One of these Bennet days, a man accompanies Amelia Bones to the lovely country house that stands in for Longbourn.
She knows him like the faint impression of a place she used to live. Deciding Amelia won’t take issue with her absence, Lily makes herself scarce while everyone else is introduced to her ex-husband.
They play this game for the better part of the morning, until they very nearly physically collide as she comes out of a scene. Lily spares a moment for sour annoyance. Anyone else wouldn’t be allowed to watch them film.
“Lily,” he says, smiling, and then, voice lowered jokingly, “are you running away from me?”
Her own smile is too wide to be sincere. “No. Why, should I be?”
He laughs a beat too late. “Okay. Yeah, fine, if you want to be that way about it.”
She sighs, deflating. “I don’t want to be any way about it, actually. I’d like to do my job.”
He lets out a soft huh. “Right, you’re so focused on your job here — and not on screwing Potter, yeah?”
Lily is genuinely, properly startled at this. She hopes it comes across as shock, not guilt. Because really, the idea that she has any guilt to feel around this man is…
“I think you should go,” she says coolly.
He puts up his hands in surrender. “I’m only saying — bit hypocritical, isn’t it, how you went at me only to do the same thing yourself?”
She blinks. “How would it— Sorry, did you forget that you were actually married to me?” She checks her hands dramatically, then holds them up: no ring. “Yeah, so, get off my set.”
His mouth falls open; his frown becomes a scowl. “Exc—”
“It’s my set,” Lily says evenly, “it’s my goddamn show. Get out.”
***
From Star magazine, June 30th, 1986
Ten Celebs Who (Maybe?!) Sleep Around On Set
…it just might be that the reason James Potter hardly ever settles down is that he’s busy picking up his co-stars. Wouldn’t you, if you had your pick of these gorgeous ladies? (From L to R: Doris Purkiss, Genevieve Spinnet, Lily Evans, Greta Catchlove, Emma Vanity)
***
Mary phones her about the list in Star, which is Lily’s least favourite type of telephone call.
“Obviously, his people are all over it. I mean, Doris is married,” she says, her eye-roll audible through the receiver. “And apparently he feels particularly strongly about this. So we can sit back while they threaten Star, unless you want me to toss some threats around too?”
“No,” Lily groans.
“Fine. I know you don’t like this, Lil — maybe you ought to cancel your subscriptions to all those mags, yeah? You don’t need to follow them the same way as before.”
She considers that. Mary’s probably right. Why does she waste her time flipping through all the stupid shite people say about her, anyway?
“Yeah, all right. Although it’s possible Star will start sending me issues for free.”
Mary snorts. “Maybe we should threaten them. Libel, et cetera.”
It’s not actually libel, Lily almost says. Not the part that concerns her, at least. But she manages to swallow the words at the last moment.
“—James definitely didn’t sleep with Emma, though, did he? Christ—”
“He definitely didn’t,” she blurts out, then wonders where, exactly, she found this degree of confidence, and how much it had cost her.
“Oh?” Mary says.
“He doesn’t…actually see as many people as it seems like he does. I think he’s used to having to keep up appearances, and he doesn’t really think about it while he does it. It’s a habit.”
And only once she’s spoken it aloud does she realise it might be true. How straightforward could it be to shake behaviours you’ve absorbed since you walked onto your first movie set at six years old?
Lily is so busy frowning at the wall ahead of her that she doesn’t realise Mary’s talking to her.
“—anyway, I desperately want to start talking about something else, so if you’ve got the bandwidth, Slughorn’s sending over more scripts—”
She shakes herself back to attention, and says mmhmm in all the right places.
***
She doesn’t have to ask him about it. James volunteers, right away, “It’s not true,” when she sees him next. She is taking a smoke break away from set. He appears to have come here looking for her.
He says, “They just phoned me about it. Fucking Star.”
“Fucking Star,” Lily agrees peaceably. It all seems like a fly she can absentmindedly swat at, made more inconsequential by his reaction to it. “Hey — you know I didn’t think it was true, right?”
He runs a hand through his hair, turning it into even more of a bird’s nest than it already is. “Well, I’d hoped you wouldn’t.”
Lily drops her cigarette and squashes it beneath her heel. “I don’t think you’re that terrible a person, no.”
His smile is a little fainter than usual. “Oh? High praise, that.”
“Considering that for a very long time, I thought men were out to get me personally, especially the ones I was attracted to,” she says, “I think so, yes.”
James says, “Ah, so you are attracted to me.”
“Were you unsure?”
“Can’t a bloke have a bit of an ego boost from time to time?”
She lifts one sardonic brow. “And what is it we’re doing, shagging in secret, if not that?”
He grins and presses a kiss to her mouth. They’re alone, but still, his confidence is quite breathtaking. Then again, many things about him are.
When he pulls back, he says, still grinning, “You taste disgusting. Please quit smoking.”
Lily tells him to fuck off. He kisses her again before he goes.
***
The house is so quiet come nightfall. It amplifies the sound of someone late to bed, perhaps Mabel putting out her last smoke; it tells them when Amos works his window shut and tucks in early. Lily can imagine the rustle of bird-feathers in the tree outside the window, the soft movements of foxes in the undergrowth. She can picture their lamp-like eyes and how the grass curls and bends beneath their dark paws. She’s inside his room, but she thinks of night sounds and hushed woodlands when his fingers rasp over the bare skin of her waist.
She exhales so slowly it becomes a shudder on the way out. His mouth trails over her shoulder, meandering, deliberate. He kisses the curve of her breast, somewhere safe where no one will see tomorrow. Lily has to admire his knack for finding those spots. He has never seen the bottom-most layer of her costumes, but he seems to know exactly where its edges run, beneath her stays and her dresses.
Her hand is pressed between his legs as he kisses. She pulls his waistband away from his skin, slides her hand beneath it. “Condom,” she says, which feels like the first thing she’s said in an age.
James murmurs assent. He shifts out from beneath her, reaching for the nightstand, and Lily takes the opportunity to slide off her pyjamas and knickers. But when she looks up again, he’s frowning at the nightstand.
“Fuck,” he says, “we’re out.”
“We’re — out?” It seems suddenly despicably funny, that they’ve been at it with enough rigour and regularity to have exhausted his condoms. She has to fight off a laugh. “God. Well—”
He leans back on his hands, as if to keep a safe distance between them. “Do you have any?”
“…No.”
Lily feels her face grow hot. Has she been terribly blasé about this? But she’s hardly going to be sleeping with anyone else here, so why wouldn’t she rely on James’s seemingly endless supply? Is it very reckless of her not to care? She can’t seem to think beyond this moment, beyond this room.
He doesn’t seem to think anything of her answer. He sighs. “I meant to buy some more. We can, erm…”
“I take the contraceptive pill,” she mumbles. “So it’s not— I mean, it’s — if you’re not bothered by that, and I don’t really do this with other people— I, we, oh my God, I’m not even speaking English anymore—”
James laughs and tugs at her hand, folds it into his. “I can take care of myself, and you—”
Before she can embarrass herself into staying silent, she says, “But I want you to. I want you.”
His gaze darkens. The press of his fingers is sharper, just momentarily. “Lily, I’m serious.”
She frowns, thrown by this line of reasoning. “Well, I’m serious too.”
Now his hand is upon her thigh. She watches it, because if she looks at him directly her chest starts to ache.
“You have me,” he says quietly.
Lily glances up, disbelieving. The smooth, sweet shape of her desire has a brittle crystalline edge. This is the cruelest lie of all. But worse still is how desperately she wants to believe it. She wants him to be hers, even though she knows people do not belong to other people.
She watches him, his mouth swollen from its time spent against her skin, his pose relaxed but his muscles held taut. The easy, instinctive reactions they have to each other in front of a camera are slowed-down, hesitant, when they’re alone. They’re always waiting to see what the other will do next, anticipating some future cue. Lily sucks in a breath to give him his.
“Fuck me and prove it,” she says, catching his chin between forefinger and thumb.
His exhale runs through her hand. She pushes her thumb into his bottom lip. He kisses it.
Lily skates her hand around his cheek and presses her mouth to his, crawling into his lap. “Is that a yes?” she says, barely able to inch away long enough to get the words out.
James pulls back too, his eyes glimmering with something that makes her lean closer again. “I thought you were telling me, not asking.”
Her ribs are tight with wanting him. Every breath she takes is too shallow. She lets the silence run on while she wrestles with her own tongue.
“It was a challenge, not a command,” says Lily, and waits for him to react.
His smile is slow, a secret shared but savoured. Her heart kicks into high gear.
“I do so enjoy your challenges,” James says, fitting his mouth to hers once more.
Together they slide off his trousers. When Lily starts to lie down and pull him on top of her, he splays a hand against her spine and holds her in place.
“You’re already where I want you,” he whispers.
Her mouth feels slack. His eyes crinkle at the corners. He’s enjoying how flustered she is, and she’s too busy being flustered to berate him for it.
Whatever control she’s had in this moment is slipping out of her reach. The realisation isn’t worrying, though; Lily watches it go, unconcerned, and concentrates on what will happen next.
“Which is — where?”
“Near enough to feel you properly,” James says, matter-of-fact, then curves a hand beneath her bum. “Up.”
She rises onto her knees, her fingers curling into his hair. He kisses her stomach. She swallows, hard. Some precipice hangs before her, she thinks. He may push her. She may jump.
He kisses her again, the heat of his tongue slick against her skin. Lily closes her eyes and allows the first helpless noise to escape her, and his fingers dip into her centre.
Her knees start to hurt from the pressure but she can’t bring herself to care. When her legs begin to tremble, he raises his free hand to stroke the backs of her thighs. She wants to tell him this doesn’t make her feel any more stable. But the only sounds her mouth can make are moans.
Now James is kissing her hip, the touch of his fingers so damn assured it’s almost infuriating. He doesn’t have much to prove, she knows, because the question of whether or not she has him feels suddenly very secondary to its inverse. And Lily knows that answer, irrevocably, unforgettably, like a puzzle piece clicking into place.
“Stop,” she tells him, eyes half-closed, “I’m so close, I — want to finish with you inside.”
His groan gusts against her stomach. His fingers still, but he doesn’t move.
“James,” she whispers, insistent.
“Okay,” he says, “C’mere.”
His arms wind around her, pulling her back on top of him, and faint thrill skitters up her spine at the look on his face. He kisses her on the mouth, and she holds that expression in her mind, hers and hers alone. Her breath comes quick and hard. Here is the precipice; she teeters and she loves the feeling of it.
James bids her to rise again. This time they are pressed close enough that the brief friction along her front makes her gasp. Near enough to feel, she thinks, and if she didn’t want him this badly already she would now.
He wears a sweetly determined expression as he lines himself up with her. She lowers herself slowly, squeezes her eyes shut at the sensation. They are both pretending to be less affected by this than they are, she can tell. His jaw is tight with something withheld; she bites her bottom lip. Lily sits back, lets her spine arch the way she wants. Now he can’t swallow a small sound of approval.
She looks at him then. He hasn’t yet taken off his specs, which he usually does by this point. She hopes he won’t try to, because she’ll tell him not to do it and will have to come up with a reason why.
Really, she’s not even sure she knows why. Maybe it’s because he looks most like himself with them on. Maybe she just wants him to see her.
James draws her close, bends his head so his breath stirs the loose strands of hair sticking to her shoulders. He sets every quiet thing to movement: the still lines of her body, her tool for all these years; her cautious sentinel of a heart.
He mutters some vague curse, shifting underneath her, and then Lily senses her own cue, rising a little so that he can push into her once more. This dance takes coordination she’s not sure she can muster, half-choked with desire as she is. But he grips her by the hips, holds her in place — she gulps a much-needed mouthful of air — and then she’s no longer thinking about what she can or cannot do.
Instead she thinks about wanting him, which is made much easier when she’s in the thick of it. She doesn’t think she’ll stop — with wanting him, that is. Now she’s admitted it to herself. It’s possible that there’s more there, in that admission, so close she can taste it in the back of her mouth.
Lily pushes his hair back from his hot forehead and kisses him. His hands squeeze her, hard. She feels helplessly remade, like a stone that’s suddenly found itself in the shape of a sculpture. She gasps his name, and he kisses her for it.
“You feel so good, like this,” James says breathlessly. “God— You feel—” He kisses her again instead of finishing his sentence, and she thinks she understands.
He doesn’t stop kissing her, not even when she clenches around him and moans so loudly she’s half sure someone will come knocking. Lily rocks forward, still unsteady from orgasm, and their hips collide hard; James teases her lips apart. Again, this raw, split-open feeling, and she will confront it only in the morning.
His thrusts quicken, then slow, one hand at her waist and the other in her hair; his hot release fills her. His tongue traces her bottom lip, his teeth colliding with hers. She waits for the haze to fade and kisses him back.
They part and sink back onto the pillows. Slowly the sounds of the night grow audible once more. She thinks he might be the owl and the bright-eyed fox; he might be the whisper of the wind to the trees. Lily wants to hear him.
“All right?” James says. The tip of his thumb flirts with her pinky.
She nods. She knows what she’s about to say, can feel it building up within her, and she knows she can’t stop it either. He has her, sure and firm, and he can either let her go or admit it.
Lily wants him to choose the latter, very badly. Either way it will be a relief to put it out there, an acknowledged, known thing. God, she needs to have it out.
“Lily?” he prompts.
A short exhale. “I love you,” she says.
She can hear his quick intake of breath.
“I’m in love with you,” she goes on, “and I’m tired of pretending I’m not.”
The quiet that follows speaks for itself. Lily forces herself not to look at him.
“What do you want me to say?” James whispers.
Her body is stiff, not her own. Not that, for a start. “It wasn’t a question,” she says instead. “I was telling you.”
Then she sits up. They must’ve knocked their clothes off the bed, since she can see no evidence of hers. Lily stands and goes around to the other side, starts to put on her knickers. She’s pulling her hair through the neck of her top by the time he speaks again.
“You know…” He stops, tries once more. “You knew, when this started. How it would be.”
“Yeah,” Lily said tonelessly. She doesn’t need to be reminded that she broke the rules. “Went and fell in love with you anyway.”
She likes the spiteful sound of it, enjoys flicking it his way like something that will sting him. Lime juice on her fingers, aimed at his eyes. She likes being able to say it, again and again, when he’ll refuse to.
He’s half sitting up now, but not in a way that suggests he’ll stop her from leaving. She hates his tousled hair and the brace of his arm against the mattress. Hates seeing it give way beneath him like she did, like she still wants to.
This is how it always ends.
He must notice she’s about to cry, because he says in an agonised voice, “Lily,” a moment before she registers how glassy her vision is. She wants to tell him these are tears of anger, but in truth she won’t be angry for weeks. First she will be so bloody sad.
Lily scans the floor and finds her flip flops on the way to the door. She touches the cool metal of the doorknob.
“I fucking love you,” she says, without turning around. He might not even hear it. She’s basically professing her love for the door.
But she hopes he‘s heard. She hopes he sees the shadow of her leaving behind closed eyelids for days — I fucking love you. She’ll love him resentfully until she doesn’t anymore.
Lily lets the door swing shut behind her.
***
In the early morning she could almost believe it was a dream, except that she wakes up and remembers immediately that she loves him.
Well, big deal, she tells herself. You loved a man who married you and then cheated on you repeatedly. She’s survived worse. Today, Lizzy goes to Netherfield in dreary weather to tend to an ill Jane. So, Lily has work to do.
She’s costumed and made up while she pops sliced fruit into her mouth, careful to bypass the faint balm they’ve pressed onto her lips. She has to keep dabbing at her chin with a tissue, though, which is probably spoiling the job. Whatever — it’s misty enough that no one will be looking that closely at her. Are there any closeups in this scene? She can’t remember. But surely there are, or one of the doubles would be doing it—
“There are brambles on the path,” one of the producers says. He’s come up jogging from the grassy meadow beyond, where they’ll shoot; he’s panting, and it sounds to Lily like he really wanted to intersperse that sentence with a lot more swears. “Give us five minutes while we clear.”
She nods. The makeup girl repaints her lips and Lily resists the urge to lick the traces of pear juice from them. Soon she’s left alone, waiting for them to fetch her. Or she is for the space of two heartbeats.
He says, “Here, you’ll catch a cold.”
“I don’t need a jacket,” she says, privately congratulating herself on sounding so calm.
James is in the same sweats and shirt as he was last night. Lily’s heart bobs somewhere around her throat.
“Sure you want to freeze to death?” he says. She only rolls her eyes. He sighs and holds out a tartan shawl. “I was sent to give you this. Please, just take it.”
She eyes him, unconvinced, but takes the shawl and draws it around her shoulders. Sent, her arse. He isn’t in these scenes. He doesn’t need to be here at all.
“I’m sorry about last night,” he says, perhaps sensing her dwindling patience.
She keeps her gaze trained on the fog-blurred landscape before her. “Okay.”
“I don’t want to fuck this up.”
She scowls, feeling the acid rise to her tongue. “Oh, yeah? The part where we screw?”
James looks haggard, she realises, like he hasn’t slept. She’s never seen him look tired before. As if I care.
“I meant,” he says, “the part where we make movies together.”
Lily swallows. She considers a myriad of caustic responses, but truthfully she doesn’t want to fuck it up either. She just wishes that both things could be true — that she could love him and make art with him, and it wouldn’t feel like cutting something out of herself.
But this very conversation is making it clear that she needs a break. They both do. And they’ll get one, as filming pauses to wait for the weather to turn again next week, but what she needs is longer and more permanent. She can’t stay within his gravitational pull, not like this.
All she can think about is that this wasn’t easy enough to him. This doesn’t live up to some unattainable ideal he’s been holding onto, and she feels just like she did on the Earnest red carpet, rooted to the spot and waiting for him to say something.
But — something only she wants to hear. Something he can’t say.
She has to cut herself loose.
“Yeah, sorry,” she says, and she almost manages to sound apologetic, “but I think this’ll be the last one.”
He draws in a sharp breath. She turns back to the meadow, shrouded in mist. Somewhere in the distance she can hear the crew shouting.
Quietly, he says, “It was good, though, wasn’t it?”
“You don’t get to say that,” she says, quietly, furiously. “You don’t get to say — that I have you, and that we were good, when you’re the one who decided it had to go like this.”
“I don’t—” he starts, then stops. “Yeah. Sorry. You’re right.”
She wants to angrily point out, also, that it’s not actually over, their filmmaking. They have weeks of Pride and Prejudice left, weeks over the course of which Lizzy has to fall in love with Darcy. They are due to have arguments and issue half-hopeful confessions, and they still need to kiss.
But maybe he’s right. Something else is finished. Something won’t ever be the same again.
“It was really good,” Lily says, “since you want to know so badly.”
She hitches up the skirt of her dress and walks away. That, she knows, is the last time she’ll see James Potter. Or the last time he’ll see her.
***
From Vogue UK, September 1987:
COVER: Gladness and Gratitude
On the eve of the ‘Pride and Prejudice’ miniseries’s debut, Lily Evans is humbled to appear on the silver screen
…”Elizabeth Bennet is a childhood hero of mine, and I hope this gorgeous new production can introduce her spirit and her strength to a new generation of young girls.”…
…“There was absolutely no tension [with Amelia Bones],” Evans says; Bones, who plays Jane Bennet in the series, is now married to Evans’s ex-husband; they have a son together. “So many years have gone by since all that — and we know better than to let the acrimony and the nasty stories affect the job we’re doing.”…
Considering the experience of filming this story with someone she’s worked with so closely before, Evans says, “I always feel supported on set with James, and I respect him a great deal as a coworker.”
From The Times arts section, October 20th, 1987:
‘Pride and Prejudice’: One word — spectacular
It’s hard not to see this as an adaptation that will live on in viewers’ hearts and minds for years to come. The production is modern and unlike any previous version; the faithfulness to Austen’s beloved source material is admirable; the charming focus on women and domestic life entirely in the spirit of the novel. Unsurprisingly, Evans is commanding in the lead role, effervescent and youthful in a manner that will certainly turn BAFTA voters’ heads. But the surprise of the series comes from Potter, whose typical dynamism and charm is startlingly repressed into stiff, proud Darcy — it shouldn’t work, and it somehow does.
This is the sort of programme that will make a boor pick up Austen, and make a cynic believe in love.
IV. THE SKY
From The Times arts section, April 20th, 1988:
Connery, Bancroft Win Big at BAFTAs
‘Pride and Prejudice’ nabs Best TV Actress
From Star magazine, April 26th, 1988:
Lizzy in a Tizzy
Lily Evans was all smiles at the BAFTAs last week, accepting the Best Television Actress award for her portrayal of Elizabeth Bennet in the BBC’s new ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ The actress wowed on the red carpet in a stunning Christian Lacroix gown, complete with the designer’s trademark pouf.
But sources say she specifically asked to be photographed with her award solo rather than alongside co-star James Potter. Could there be trouble in paradise for these old pals?
From Vogue UK, May 1988
COVER: Lily Evans is Everyone’s Lady
…”I’m still trying to find my footing, despite any appearance to the contrary,” the 28-year-old says with a self-deprecating smile. “I’m looking for projects that really, truly excite me.”
From The Times arts section, May 6th, 1988:
FILM: ‘Yesterday’s Lady’ Disappoints
The film’s saving grace is flashes of brilliance from Evans, but the script bogs down the characters and gives the actors no room to breathe.
***
“No more of this,” Mary declares, the summer after Yesterday’s Lady.
“Of what?” says Lily.
They’re sprawled on the roof of the Brighton house, slathered in suntan lotion, for the most informal of meetings. At least, Lily thinks it’s a meeting. Possibly Mary would define it as an intervention.
“Bullshit,” says Mary crisply. “Enough mindlessly flipping through what Slughorn sends you. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, you’re not even thirty yet. So I have been putting feelers out for real, sharp projects—”
Lily sits up. “I didn’t ask you to—”
Mary’s dark eyes narrow. “You asked fucking Vogue, Lily, so I’m going to take that as my cue. As I was saying, I’ve got a bite. Gaspard Shingleton is basically the West End wunderkind right now, and he wants you in his next play.”
She sighs, lying down once more. “He wants me to audition?”
“No, he wants you to have the role, because he liked you so much in The Bloody Chamber. You’re welcome.”
Lily glares at the sun. “That’s your job, getting me parts.”
“And I do it so well, and you’re so grateful for me.”
Her shoulders drop. “Thank you.”
“Anytime, babe.”
Sweat pearls along her hairline, trickles down her throat. She thinks she could just melt away, sitting here.
“What’s it about?” says Lily eventually, giving up on pretending her interest hasn’t been piqued. Mary is no Slughorn; if she calls something real and sharp, it has jagged fucking edges.
Mary takes too long to answer. Dread percolates in Lily’s stomach, alongside the faintest taste of curiosity.
Or maybe that’s just masochism.
***
From Star magazine, September 27th, 1988:
Yesterday’s Lady Says Goodbye to Love?
Lily Evans has lived up to the title of her recent box-office flop lately — we hope we don’t sound too Mrs. Bennetish, but when, oh when, will we see our Lizzy in the arms of someone new?
From Star magazine, November 15th, 1988:
Guess Who: No More L.A., Baby!
He’s got nothing left to prove, so this English heartthrob is taking a break from Hollywood and spending time in his Mayfair childhood home. We sure are thrilled — why should California girls have all the fun?
***
The play is called Love Ends. It is a sparse, moving three acts about a dissolving marriage and an unfaithful husband.
Well, Lily supposes it’s about other things too, but she lets herself prod at that knowledge like wiggling a loose tooth with her tongue. Will it hurt, when she actually speaks the lines aloud to someone, and sees him respond to her? Who will it be?
Thankfully, her brain saves her the indignity of imagining her co-star as her actual ex-husband. Instead when she tries to visualise the scene-blocking in her head, she sees a faceless figure and is twice as unnerved.
It doesn’t help that the auditions are going…poorly. Gaspard is the sort of prodigy that grows up to either be a Trelawney or a Lockhart — someone so utterly in their own heads that they become either incomprehensible or a narcissistic sociopath. He is pickier with the male lead than he was with Lily’s casting, or so it seems to her, anyway.
“Don’t you have someone in mind, like you did with me?” Lily cajoles.
Gaspard sighs. “No. I could see you as Maia, but when I imagine Alex all I see is—”
“A faceless guy?” she says, wondering if this is all in fact a group hallucination.
He frowns. “No. I see Napoleon Bonaparte, actually.”
Soundlessly, Lily mouths what?
“You realise why this is a problem.”
It’s odd, having to reassure the writer instead of being reassured. At least the show’s director, a kind-faced, perceptive woman named Pomona Sprout, takes on half the reassurance herself. But Lily and Pomona both know that any number of finalised secondary cast members won’t make up for the fact that the male lead simply doesn’t exist. A play this high-profile is going to have press, and previews, and attention; it’s not as easy as picking someone out of a lineup and tossing the script at them.
“If you have any recommendations,” Pomona tells her, “let me know.”
She doesn’t, anyway. Her past onstage co-stars are too old to play Alex, and anyone else she can think of with West End experience — Albus, Minerva — is not the type of person to call upon in this situation. No one is immediately, obviously right to walk this careful tightrope with her night after night, and if it’s not obvious it’s not worth pursuing.
She’s followed this line of thinking on her way to a trendy café she has begun to frequent, and when she realises who she sounds like she jerks to a halt on the pavement.
A man shouts at her, but Lily ignores him. She shakes it off; she pushes open the door.
She backs out quickly.
The bell above the door chimes again as she hurries down the street; maybe she can blend into the crowd quickly enough, if she just—
“Evans? Are you actually fleeing from me?”
—can get away from Sirius bloody Black.
“Long time,” he says, when she stops again with a sigh and turns around to face him.
His gaze is cool, assessing. She doesn’t think he’s ever looked at her like that before, not that she has paid any particular attention to James or his mates since Pride and Prejudice. She’s stopped getting the magazines.
“Yeah,” she says. She wants her coffee. She wants her bloody coffee.
“Do you want to give in and get a coffee, then, since I’ve already seen you?” Sirius says.
Lily follows him into the shop.
Once they’ve sat down, drinks in hand, Sirius says mildly, “Is it true you were afraid I wouldn’t like you?”
She remembers how Remus had groaned and pleaded for her not to mention the Madonna karaoke evening. Grimly, she says, “I was, and remind me afterwards to tell you something about Remus Lupin.”
He snorts. “Only if I can tell you something about James.”
She goes still.
“James Potter,” he elaborates.
“Thanks, but I wasn’t confused on that point.”
“You might have realised this, being one half of the pair of you,” says Sirius, ignoring her, “but maybe you’re as dense as he is, I dunno. You like working together. A lot. Somehow you’ve convinced one another that you’re not going to do it ever again, but if I could recommend that you just give it a chance…”
“What, we might rediscover the magic?” she says tonelessly.
“Wouldn’t have picked a phrase like that, but yeah.”
“That’s not going to happen. I appreciate the advice, though.”
His expression doesn’t so much as flicker. “He can be an idiot sometimes, so whatever he did—”
“Who says it’s something he did?” Lily shoots back just for the sake of having an argument to pick.
Sirius is unruffled. “Are you on his side, or your own?”
There’s the thing, right? In Rome they were on the same bloody side. Maybe the shift was in L.A. — the wide-open world, all the talk of him and Emmeline, and the emotional pressure of two fucking films—
Did she love him in California too? When did she start to, come to think of it? When she told him, during Pride and Prejudice, she didn’t stop to consider it. There was just the hold of the moment, the feeling, the knowledge.
Now Sirius sighs. “I didn’t want to use this as leverage, but, anyway, you owe him.”
She straightens so quickly she almost upends her coffee. “Pardon?”
“You owe him,” Sirius repeats calmly.
“I don’t,” Lily says, fury whittling her voice into something steely and unrecognisable. “I owe him exactly fuck-all, so—”
“I don’t know if he told you,” Sirius says, cool as you please over her rising volume, “but he actually asked Talkalot for you, back in ’83.”
Whatever protests she has lodged in her throat stay stuck there. “Excuse me?”
“He told them to watch In An Absent Dream, made their lives hell until they went and did it, and that was why they chose you.” He shrugs, like this explains everything. “So you owe him.”
“I owe him—”
“A chance.”
And then — the gall of this man! — Sirius begins to collect his things to leave. Lily almost wants to haul him back into his chair so she can storm out first.
“So, he sent you to plead his case, did he?” she says, burrowing deeper into her chair with all the petulance she can muster.
Sirius levels an amused stare at her. “He can hardly say your name, sweetheart. He’s not sending anyone to plead anything.”
She doesn’t respond to that. He doesn’t seem to require one, nor a goodbye, and he leaves without ceremony.
If Lily speaks to Pomona, it’ll only be because they are bloody desperate.
***
1989
He gets the part.
Of course he does. It occurred to Lily for about half a second, dropping into the stool placed onstage for her, that she could sabotage this audition with little consequence, and then not have to worry about acting with him. But if James lost, she wanted him to lose fairly; the damage it would do to her pride otherwise was unconscionable.
Then they ran through the scene, and she remembered she never did have to worry about acting with him. One look at Gaspard afterwards, and she knew.
Over weeks and weeks the play begins to coalesce. She sees her name on the draft posters alongside James’s, set against pretty painted porcelain.
“Idyllic domesticity can shatter,” Pomona says approvingly.
James gives her a look like, please translate? She laughs, rather against her will.
Every day, his character cheats on hers. Lily reminds herself that she isn’t Maia, every morning and every night. Every evening she thinks he might say something to her as they filter out of the theatre, exhausted and sore-limbed, but he doesn’t.
Until he does, in the few feet between the theatre doors and the cars that await each of them.
“Why’d you give them my name?” James says.
“Sorry?” But she can hardly feign ignorance forever. Some part of her expected this question all along.
“You recommended me to Pomona, after you said we’d never work together again. Why?”
She has to admire his pluck, really. For someone who allegedly couldn’t even speak her name to third parties last year, he doesn’t seem so rattled to share the stage with her again. And he sure as fuck isn’t rattled while asking her this.
“Why did you suggest me to Talkalot?” she says, studying the wintry London sky instead of looking at him.
He shifts from foot to foot, his arm almost brushing hers. “I knew we’d be brilliant together — funny and quick and sexy, and that was what they wanted.”
Lily nods. “Then you have your answer.”
Love Ends isn’t funny or quick or sexy. He can supply his own adjectives, she thinks.
“Is it as easy to you as it is for me?” she says, reaching for her car door.
He doesn’t ask her to clarify any aspect of that question. James only glances upward, momentarily, before saying, “It’s almost too easy.”
The first drops of icy rain whisper through the air.
***
Acting is always ritual. Sometimes it feels like a spell she’s cast over herself, something strengthened by repetition like prayer. For her very first callback, Lily whispered the lines she’s been given to herself over and over again on the drive there. As if shrouding herself in the character.
But that is really all there is to it, isn’t it? Words and belief.
It’s never more pronounced than on the stage. Rehearsal doesn’t do the feeling justice. Lily comes away from opening night so drained she thinks she might collapse backstage. She feels as though she’s given too much of herself to the audience, and now there’s nothing left to hold her upright.
It takes until the eighth show for it to properly sweep her away, though. Opening week was a rousing success, and the weekend performances are bound to be full house. Before the lights dim it fuels her, standing in the wings and hearing the swarm-like chatter. Knowing they will all fall silent soon, for her.
After the show she shuts herself in the dressing room and cries.
Lily’s almost surprised by it. It’s built up over the past week, obviously, but she’s been in rehearsal for months and months before and she knew what this play would be like. Because, face in her hands, she realises it’s not really the audience or the exertion that’s making her weep in front of her mirror. They are factors, but they are not the chief cause.
It’s all right, she thinks, the practical side of her detached from her sobbing other half. I can get this out of me, and I’ll be better afterwards.
But perhaps her practical side ought to have been looking in the mirror instead, because she mustn’t have closed the door firmly enough. It nudges open and she hears his quick intake of breath; she doesn’t have time to dry her cheeks.
“You,” James says, and then stops.
Lily straightens in her chair, shaking her head and scrubbing at her face with the backs of her hands. “I’m just tired,” she says feebly.
“You’re going to rub your cheeks raw.”
He crosses the room and fishes out a clean hand towel from the pile, then pours water onto it. Lily watches all this, observes the steady drip through his fingers upon the hardwood floor as he wrings the towel out. He hands it to her, then steps back to a safe distance away.
She swallows and dabs at her face gingerly. Her skin does feel raw. But all of her does.
“Great show tonight,” he says quietly.
She nods instead of thanking him. It was a great show. The heat practically shimmered in the air between them.
Then he says, “Do you need a hug?”
Qualifiers aside — there are always qualifiers now, with him — the answer is yes. Lily pushes out of her chair and wraps her arms around him, burying her face into his shirt. It’s softer than the towel. His hand comes up to stroke her hair, and with each touch her shoulders slowly loosen.
After a long while she inches backwards to look at him; his eyes dip to her mouth, quickly and guiltily. But she doesn’t miss it, of course. She’s kissed him many times since Pride and Prejudice, and she knows his tells, acting or not.
“I can’t do this again,” she whispers. “Not the show— I mean I can’t do this, us again.”
She knows he feels the weight of that us the same way she does. Fairbanks and Pickford, Bogie and Bacall, Potter and Evans — us, us, us, and the still-living dream it holds.
James shuts his eyes. “I— Believe me, the absolute last fucking thing I wanted was to hurt you.”
Lily forces herself to breathe in deeply, past the ache. His hands have tightened on her back. “I know.”
“And—” now he opens his eyes, scans her face ”—I was so terrified, because I don’t know how to do any of this. Not properly. And I like you so much more than anyone else I’ve ever done a film with.”
She laughs quietly. “That hasn’t been enough for maybe five years, James.”
His jaw is set so tight it must hurt. She lifts a hand to it, strokes her thumb along its hard line. When a tremor runs through him, she feels it everywhere.
“I can understand if you hate me for it,” he mumbles.
Her smile is fractured. She wants to say, James, I’m holding your face in my hand in a quiet room. Do you really think I hate you? It would be easier to hate him, just like it would’ve been easier all those years ago to pretend she never loved her ex in the first place. But she can tell he has more to say, so she bites this back.
“I don’t know a way to do this that doesn’t involve pretence,” he whispers. “I don’t want to look back three, or five, or ten years from now and worry that I’ve — not been honest with you.”
She wants to tell him he is so painfully honest, so open-handed and optimistic, that the idea he has of himself is so far from the truth. She wants to remind him that he came to her flat seven years ago the first time she’d fucked up on set. That in Brighton he said, it must be not easy for you. That she remembers every piece of it, that he’s stuck fast in her, that the distance and time since Pride and Prejudice has done fuck-all.
“I just,” James says, then stops to close his eyes briefly. “I don’t want to pretend with you. I want things to be real and I want to make certain that they are, and I want to mean it when I say I love you.”
Lily’s breath hitches. When, she thinks. When. Only, maybe he didn’t mean it like that; maybe the wording is incidental.
She says, softly, “It’s all pretending. But I suppose when you’re in love you just…don’t mind them catching you slip up.”
A faint, desperate laugh escapes him. “I’m not ready. I’m sorry, but I’m— And you don’t deserve to have to wait, Lily.”
She nods mutely. All she can hear is Mary’s voice in her head: you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, you’re not even thirty, and she is struck by the urge to assure him she will wait. Trying to get over him is a futile exercise.
But she holds her tongue. It seems like the close, urgent grip of that quiet bedroom two years ago has released her at last, and all she wants is not to feel so wrung-out anymore.
“I don’t want to hurt you more than I already have,” James says at last, his voice hardly above a whisper.
She half-smiles, and catches sight of its sad reflection in her mirror. “Then go where you need to, James. Maybe I’ll meet you there, someday.”
***
From The Times arts section, March 31st, 1989:
THEATRE: ‘Love Ends’ is moving, complex, and brilliant
…for years we’ve watched Lily Evans and James Potter fall in love — as students, as criminals, as classic English characters. Now we watch them fall out of it, and it’s no less electrifying.
From Star magazine, December 18th, 1989:
A Decade of Missed Connections
Our readers have spoken! Here are ten celeb couples we’re still waiting on to get together… Maybe a new decade will induce a new leaf?
…#4 James Potter and Lily Evans. This duo have spent the 80s acting almost exclusively alongside each other, and yet haven’t been seen on so much as a date. What gives, Lizzy and Darcy? Our only hope stems from the fact that they aren’t seeing anyone else…and they keep coming back to wow us on the screen and the stage.
From the desk of Rosmerta Cowan, December 27th, 1989:
Flowers for JP. “Thank you for a cathartic nine months. Couldn’t have done it with anyone else.” (From Lily Evans)
From the desk of Mary Macdonald, December 27th, 1989:
Champagne for LE. “Honoured that you thought of me for ‘Love Ends.’ Thank you for the trust.” (From James Potter)
From The Times arts section, January 2nd, 1990:
Historical Drama Casts Wide Net in Search for Queen Bess
…that ‘Roses White and Red’ — based on the Man Booker-shortlisted novel of the same name by Cuthbert Binns — will actually cast an unknown seems unlikely. Here are the high-profile English actresses who have openly expressed interest in the role…
From the concierge at the Savoy London, January 5th, 1990:
Message for Sirius Black, room #117: “It’s James. Headed back to L.A. I feel like I made a mistake somewhere. Ring me back, urgent.”
From the desk of Hildy Harris, Talkalot Studios, January 6th, 1990:
JP to call RL on arrival
From Entertainment Weekly, February 1990:
It’s the Screen, Not the Stage for Potter
London’s darling is back in L.A., and Hollywood loves it
From The Times arts section, March 2nd, 1990:
THEATRE: ‘Love Ends’ Leads Acting Noms
From People magazine, April 1990:
“I’m Not Waiting Around for Anything”: The Life and Lavish Home of James Potter
We take People readers on an exclusive tour of the actor’s West Hollywood home
From Star magazine, August 14th, 1990:
Star Watch
Would you drive down to Brighton from London in this heat? No? How about for Lily Evans’s summer party?
From OK magazine, September 1990:
Evans Calls It Quits…For Now
After a quick turn from West End show ‘Love Ends’ to ‘The Pale Horse,’ Lily Evans is taking a sabbatical from the stage — but it’s far from permanent. “I want to be really picky about what comes next,” she says.
From The Times arts section, October 24th, 1990:
THEATRE: Oliviers for Evans, Potter
From the desk of Rosmerta Cowan, October 26th, 1990:
Champagne for JP. “Huge congrats from the ‘Love Ends’ team! Wish you had been able to celebrate with us in person.” (Signed Gaspard Shingleton, Pomona Sprout, Lily Evans)
***
From the desk of Mary Macdonald, January 30th, 1991:
Deliver to L. Evans. Thanks, Shauna! MM
1. Moët et Chandon, your pick
2. Card from me (in top drawer of desk)
3. Card from studio (same)
4. Bouquet from studio (should be with Gerry at front desk)
Forward gifts we receive from recognisable names, no weirdos, please.
From the bin of Shauna Jones, assistant to Mary Macdonald, January 31st, 1991:
To-do, 30/1
1. MM birthday presents to Lily
2. Studio flowers to Lily
3. Forward JP flowers
From the desk of Rosmerta Cowan, February 1st, 1991:
Message for JP: “Thanks for the flowers. Hope to see you in Brighton this Aug. Also hope you’re well.” (From Lily Evans, by telephone)
From Rolling Stone magazine, March 1991:
“Age is F*cking Wisdom”: James Potter Looks Back At ‘Screwed’ 10 Years Later
From the desk of Rosmerta Cowan, March 27th, 1991:
Message for JP: “Happy birthday. Have a B-52 on me.” (From Lily Evans)
Note from Rosmerta: Please give her your direct house line.
From the desk of Mary Macdonald, March 29th, 1991:
Message for LE: “It was a great B-52, thanks. Will try to make Brighton work.” (From James Potter)
From Vogue UK, May 1991:
Roses and Lilies: First Look at Sumptuous Sets for Tudor Period Piece
From the desk of Shauna Jones, assistant to Mary Macdonald, August 1st, 1991:
RSVPs for LE Brighton: No (who the hell says no? In advance??)
James Potter (via phone, 31/7)
From Rolling Stone magazine, September 1991:
Brighton Rock
An exclusive look at Lily Evans’s raucous summer party — and the unlikely hostess herself
From Star magazine, October 29th, 1991:
10 Potter Ex-Girlfriends and Who They’re Dating Now
***
1992
From Entertainment Weekly, March 1992:
James Potter is Always Chasing
“Life’s good,” confesses the actor, who will turn 32 this month, “but it can always be better, can’t it?”
…if he feels unfulfilled — though Potter will not commit to that word — then it is because he can pinpoint the last time he was really creatively satisfied. “Easy,” he says when asked, “Love Ends,” referring to the limited-run 1989 Gaspard Shingleton West End play Potter starred in with frequent collaborator Lily Evans. “I’d never acted on the stage before, and I was damn near terrified. And of course, anyone would be intimidated alongside someone as poised and talented as Lily — no matter how long we’ve known each other.”
From Vanity Fair UK, August 1992:
COVER: Pretty Please, Lily’s on Top
…now, after her star turn as a sharp-tongued, difficult Queen Elizabeth in the macabre, witty period film ‘Roses White and Red,’ Evans has her sights set higher than telly BAFTAs — though she won’t admit it in so many words.
“Does anyone really expect to win an award?” Evans says, smiling. Beyond the ‘Pride and Prejudice’ Best Actress nod, she has a growing collection of Olivier Awards in her trophy cabinet, but the Academy has yet to come calling. Certainly, critics like her odds this season…
Stiff Tudor garb notwithstanding, Evans doesn’t think ‘Roses’ has been her hardest project to date. “It was challenging, certainly, but I believed in it from the start. That’s something I’m still learning — that when I take a risk my gut doesn’t agree with, I won’t be able to give it my all. Every project I’ve loved wholeheartedly has felt, to some degree, effortless. Like I couldn’t stop myself from being in it if I tried, or I’d hate myself if I turned it down.”
Evans has no shortage of ambitions, and rattles off a laundry list of names she’d love to work with in future. None are repeats; I ask if she anticipates any reunions with former co-stars, such as Rufus Scrimgeour on the stage in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and ‘The Pale Horse.’
Evans laughs. “Poor Rufus, he’s tired of being my husband in dark and gloomy shows. We’ll need to find something sweet to be in together.”
And what of James Potter, who’s been alongside her in just about every medium there is? Evans doesn’t mince words: “Oh, I could make films with James until the day I die. I don’t think there’d ever be a dull moment in a life like that.”
***
The party is in full swing, and Lily is on her third drink of the night. It feels like her fifth or sixth, somehow, but the caterers assure her they are not being heavy-handed with the alcohol, so she can only chalk it up to poor tolerance. She circles the crowded living room, dances with Dorcas, and somehow wanders into conversation with Sirius Black. They spend a good amount of time discussing politics, of all things, before talk moves — unlikely as the transition is — to James.
“He wanted me to say sorry for missing this,” says Sirius. “And also, happy birthday.”
She frowns. “It’s not my birthday.”
James knows that, of course. Their schedules haven’t lined up since Love Ends and he’s missed the past few summer parties and birthdays alike. But he sends flowers and a note.
Sirius frowns too. “It’s not? Then why are we all here?”
“For fun?” she says slowly.
“I suppose,” he says, looking unconvinced. “Well, he’s in Malta, sadly, filming a spy thriller. And it’s not James Bond, in case you were wondering.”
Lily arches a brow. He taps the side of his nose and winks before slipping away, so she has no clue at all whether or not to take him at face value.
She goes back to the kitchen, meaning to get herself another drink, but maybe that’s not such a good idea at present. Maybe she ought to have a glass of water instead. Then she can get the instant film camera she bought for tonight and take loads of silly photos of Dorcas, yes…
She’s busy pouring the water, pleased with her plan, when she hears the muffled but unmistakable sound of her telephone ringing.
It takes her a moment to remember that she stashed it in the pantry earlier, though in hindsight it was silly to hide the phone and not any number of valuables. Gone are the days when she bothered moving her furniture for the party. But really, who’s going to try and ring their chum from her kitchen?
Lily follows the cord into the pantry and picks up, balancing the receiver between shoulder and ear so she can hold her glass of water in two hands. “Hello?”
“Lily,” says James, sounding surprised.
It is her house, though. What’s he doing sounding so startled? “James!” she says, determined to outdo him in shock. “What’re you doing phoning me? I didn’t even know you had this number.”
His laugh is sheepish. “Actually, I called the studio first and made them scrounge it up for me.”
“Well, I’m flattered. What’s the occasion?”
He ignores the question to ask, “How’s the party?”
“Going swimmingly. You know, Amelia brought him?”
“Really?” James sounds less curious and more concerned. She waves a hand to dismiss his worry, then remembers he can’t see her.
“Oh, yes. But it’s fine. He wasn’t badly behaved and it actually didn’t bother me to see him here. It really is my house alone.”
“Of course it is. It’s been ten bloody years.”
“It’s true, I guess, that love ends.” There’s a moment’s pause. “So?” she prods. “What made you call?”
“Just a feeling.”
She fancies she can hear the hint of a smile in his voice, and an answering warmth fills her. “A premonition? My house isn’t going to burn down, is it?”
Bemused, he says, “Not that kind of feeling.”
She sips at her water. “Surely nothing’s wrong in Malta?”
“Oh, I’m actually not in Malta.”
Lily rolls her eyes. “Right, sorry, you’re not in Malta, like you’re not doing a James Bond film.”
James laughs. “Sirius needs to stop implying that to everyone—”
“But is he lying?”
“—and I’m really not in Malta.”
She slides down the wall to the ground, leaning back against the shelving. “Where are you, then?”
“In a phone box down the road from your house, actually.”
Lily sloshes her water down her top. “You— In Brighton? But— You’re mid-shooting, aren’t you?”
“A bit,” says James, his grin audible.
“So why the hell are you here!”
“Well, someone got the latest issue of Vanity Fair UK last week,” he begins.
She coughs at that, rubbing at her damp chest. “I’m not actually naked on that cover, by the way. It just looks like I am. I’m in fact fully clothed. The jewellery popped better against my skin than any of the outfits we had to choose from, and the camera angle did the rest.”
“Sure, Lily.” He’s definitely laughing at her. “That’s not actually what had me fly across Europe.”
“Right, no, of course. Sorry, carry on.”
“I read the interview too. It was a nice profile.”
She smiles, briefly placated. “Thanks.”
“You, er, said you wanted to make movies with me until you died.”
“Oh, God.” Lily laughs, palm to her forehead. But she finds herself not embarrassed, somehow; there’s a strange new feeling in this conversation, one she can’t remember from Love Ends, and it makes her comfortable. Something where there was nothing, or the pronounced absence of something else. “I did say that, didn’t I? In retrospect, maybe a bit much to admit in national press—”
“No, I’ve been trying to say it to the press for years,” James says. “My publicist is running out of favours to call in. Eventually I’ll see it in print, don’t you worry.”
“You should come into the party and let it slip. There’s bound to be some tosser here who’ll go running to the paps.”
His easy manner stutters for a second. Slowly, he says, “Right. The party.” As if trying out the words.
“Were you going to come all this way and not even enter the house?” Lily says, incredulous. God, but she’s missed him, and as soon as the thought takes shape in her mind she speaks it: “I’ve missed you.” A sigh curls around the words. “I hate when work keeps me from friends.”
There’s an odd moment of hesitation, and she wonders if the line has been disconnected. Then he says, “Yeah. Me too. Are you sure you’re having a good time?”
“Mm, positive. Why?”
“You answered as soon as I called. How did you hear the phone ring?”
Lily shifts so her back isn’t digging into a jar of something or other. “I was in the kitchen. Perfect timing, like it was meant to be.”
She hears his little exhale. Another pause. “Are you drunk?”
“Maybe,” she says, coyly. “So, you should really come inside, because I think I might fall asleep in my own pantry, and no one will find me. Then I’ll wake up with my neck totally fucked.”
James laughs again but it’s quiet this time, like something private. “Yeah, okay.”
***
The morning heat wakes her up. Her sheets are tangled around her waist, her dress shucked off and dangling from the bedpost. She’s alone, and oddly well-rested.
Lily yawns, stretches. Really, it’s rare that she wakes feeling so good, and even more surprising that it should be the day after a party. Retiring early — somewhat unintentional though it was — was a good choice. She vaguely remembers James leading her to her bedroom. Not the most auspicious beginning to his night, but hopefully he enjoyed the rest of it.
Before the heat gets even worse, she judges, she can try and sneak in a swim. Lily sheds her underwear for a bright-red bikini and opens her bedroom door. (It was locked from the inside, a touch that she figures has to have been James’s.) She moves through the hall and down the stairs with a small smile on her face.
There are no stragglers strewn across the sitting room furniture like there have been in years past. Thank fuck. Whoever was the last to leave did a good job shooing out everyone else. Lily hopes it was one of her mates so she can properly thank them later.
She pulls her hair back from her face and, absent anything to tie it with, holds it there with one hand while she works the refrigerator open. Jugs of drinks line the top shelf, and aluminium-foiled leftovers follow. Lily pulls out one jug and sniffs — mint, and hints of lime, but no trace of alcohol.
“God bless the virgin mojito,” she says and pours herself a glass. Now onto the back patio, where she will wake herself up with the drink — it’s already pearling with condensation — and then cross the sand to the water.
Lily gives up on her hair to open the sliding door, and in the moment it takes her to notice it’s unlatched, she also spots the glass on the side table outside, and the forearm balanced against it. She sighs. Great; she’s had to chase people out of her house before, but she’d prefer not to do it in a fucking bikini.
She pushes the door open and grimaces at the warm air. The cold glass held to her neck, she opens her mouth.
He turns around. Her mouth snaps shut. She watches, unable to speak, as James scans her with wide eyes, from the drop of water trailing slowly between her breasts to her bikini to her bare legs.
He blurts out, “I didn’t sleep in your bed. Just in case you…were wondering.”
Lily frowns. He looks terrifically embarrassed.
“I wouldn’t have assumed,” she says, perplexed. “I hope you took a guest room.”
James scrubs a hand over his face, one corner of his mouth pulling upward. “Your sofa’s quite comfortable.”
She forgets both her surprise and her mortification at once. “No, you fucking didn’t.”
“It wasn’t intentional!” He spreads his arms wide, helpless. “I just helped Dorcas get everyone out at two or three in the morning, and sat down for a moment, and— Look, I can fall asleep anywhere.”
She knows. She’s seen him on breaks in Los Angeles with a hat over his face, breathing even; in Lincolnshire, absentmindedly kissing her goodnight and nodding off moments afterwards. But still—
“I wish you would’ve used one of the half-dozen beds I have. I’d have offered, if I thought you’d be staying.”
“Do you want me to go?” James says.
Lily blinks at him. They seem to have occupied opposite corners of the patio: her, by the house, leaning against the railing, him, pushing out of his chair, his back to the sea. Now it feels like a boxing ring.
The air is suddenly charged. They’re not talking about beds and sofas, but she doesn’t know why or how that came to be.
“Don’t you have to go? Back to Malta?” she says.
He lets out a breath, looks at the floor. “Yeah. I’m due on set tomorrow at the crack of dawn, actually.”
She frowns, more taken aback by the moment. “Then why…did you come all the way, just for this party? It happens every year. And you spent about half of it outside.”
James rakes a hand through his hair. Says to himself, “God, this is stupid.” He turns away, then seems to think better of it and paces back to where he was before.
His agitation is contagious. Lily says, with more force than she intended, “What is going on?”
“I really do want to make films with you for the rest of my life,” he says, which is no explanation at all, and he sounds so deeply defensive saying it too.
She opens her mouth to respond but he doesn’t slow. In fact his voice gathers fervour and urgency both.
“But I read the interview where you said it, and I realised I don’t just want to work with you forever. I want to be with you. All I could think was— Jesus fuck, she’s at the house where I first started to fall for her, probably looking stunning, and I’m in bloody Malta, and I haven’t told her — God, it’s insanity to think I could love anyone else.”
He stops, meets her gaze. His jaw is clenched; she wants to smooth out the tension of it.
And then he says, “I am — so — stupid, Lily. I love you. I love you, and I always did, I was just too thick to see it — or I didn’t know there was a word for something that felt so big.”
Lily sucks in a breath, and so does he.
“You had no reason to wait for me,” continues James in an undertone. “I shouldn’t feel angry that you’ve moved on, I have no right to—”
She has been focused, this whole time, on gripping her glass as tightly as she can. If she doesn’t, she’ll drop it, and if she drops it she won’t be able to hear him out, and this moment will shatter surely as the glass itself.
But she says, “Moved on?” before he can continue his tirade.
“You — said friends. Last night.” It seems to pain him to repeat the evidence. “You said you miss your friends.”
Lily lets out a choked noise of disbelief. “That’s all?”
His brows knit together, but she won’t even stop long enough for him to formulate a misunderstanding.
She strides towards him. “That’s — it? God, of course you’re my friend, James! That’s not unconnected to my having been in love with you all these bloody years!”
“What?” He’s still frowning. “You said love ends.”
“Not this one,” she retorts.
“So,” he says slowly, “you didn’t actually…”
“Fall out of love with you?” She shakes her head. In goes a steadying breath. Out come the words. “It’s never been like this with anyone else — and I don’t think it will be. Of course I still love you.”
“Oh,” James says, “ah. Well, now I feel…”
She sets her glass down on the table. Her irritation hasn’t yet flooded out of her, but she knows the feeling that comes to replace it will bowl her over with its force.
“You’re ridiculous, you know that?” Lily says. “You could’ve told me on the bloody phone yesterday, and I’d have come to the phone box and snogged you senseless, and brought you back to the house, and—”
He’s starting to smile. “You were very drunk.”
“So?” She crosses her arms over her chest. “I think you owe me eight or nine hours’ worth of kisses, James.”
“That’s a serious debt.” He reaches out haltingly, slides a hand around her waist. “Is that why you’ve come out in a bikini now? More available real estate to kiss, as it were?”
She debates the merits of continuing this conversation or letting it fade away in favour of more enjoyable activities. Rising up on her toes, she winds her arms around his neck. “It’s all yours, if you want it.”
His other hand, against her back. His dimple makes an appearance. “God, yeah. I want—” James bends his head (she holds her breath) and kisses the space beneath her ear. “You,” he breathes right there.
“Me?” she repeats, smiling at last.
“Yeah. You. Fucking hell, you.”
He presses his mouth to hers, and then she can taste that last you, sweet and sincere, and his lips part, and then she can taste the heat of him. His arms tighten around her; he lifts her up and backs her into the wooden railing. She wraps her legs around him. God, she’s missed him, the weight of him, the pressure of his hands, how his kisses change shape when he smiles.
His fingers toy with the edge of her bikini bottom, skirting around her thigh to nudge at the fabric between her legs. Lily’s head falls back against the wooden post behind her.
“Be honest,” she whispers, “was it the interview or the cover that brought you here?”
James grins, sucks on her bottom lip. “I may have downplayed the cover as a factor.” He traces a finger over the cloth again.
Oh, God, she thinks. “Took it somewhere private, did you?” she pants.
The look he gives her is half a plea, half a protest. “Absolutely not.”
“But…you thought about it?”
“A lot,” he admits begrudgingly, and she adds a point to her tally, “but I tend to think about you a lot.” He kisses where her pulse trips frantically in her throat, glances up at her from under his lashes. “You really weren’t naked?”
Lily’s grin is broad, giddy. “You really aren’t James Bond?”
He laughs against her skin, and it turns into a groan. “I have to be back in fucking Malta tonight,” he says, and for the first time in what feels like forever the delight is wrung out of his voice.
“That’s a problem,” she says, her ribs tightening in agreement. “And what, L.A. next month?”
“Fuck me,” says James, eyes shut tight against the prospect.
“And I won’t be on the cover of Vanity Fair all the time,” Lily muses, tangling her hands in his hair. “We can’t have you forgetting me.”
This laugh is big and incredulous; his eyes fly open. “As if, Lily. As bloody if.”
Her cheeks hurt, but she can’t drop this grin. Airily she says, “Everyone in the world’s seen that photo. I suppose I’ll need to send you off with your own private stash.”
His mouth parts, pretty as a painting. “Please don’t joke,” he says hoarsely. “Please— And what about when you’re kissing some loser on stage, and he actually has the gall to think anyone in the audience is there to see him?”
She shakes her head thoughtfully. “I can’t see myself swayed by any such loser. What about when some small-town coed with big dreams sidles up to you on the Strip and asks to buy you a Slow Comfortable Screw?”
“I get my slow screws elsewhere,” he assures her, teeth grazing her collarbone.
Lily takes his face between her hands, drops the act for a second. “Our schedules really won’t line up well. If we’re going to do this, we—”
He’s already nodding. “I’ll make the time. For you, anything.”
“So will I,” she says, a sudden warmth blooming in her cheeks.
She’s in love, and he loves her back. This is the sentiment on the tip of her tongue when he kisses her again. She almost says as much to him, but he beats her to speaking.
“Can I fuck you, Lily?” James asks, so demurely that she wants to laugh.
“Ideally, not on the back patio,” she says, clamping down on the giggles threatening to spill out of her. “Upstairs, yes.” She presses her mouth to the corner of his. “Now.”
He carries her up the staircase and into her bedroom, not bothering to close the door, sits at the edge of the bed — moves back against the headboard, stripping off his clothes and tossing them to the floor — she follows, straddling his hips. She has condoms very optimistically upon her nightstand, and for once she’s not embarrassed by it. She gropes for one and snags her boxy little Polaroid camera on the way. This she presses into a nonplussed James’s hands.
“Oh,” he says faintly, “you really weren’t joking.”
“I meant to take photos of the party, but—” Lily shrugs.
He half sits up and kisses her until she’s breathless, until she lets go of the condom and drops it who knows where and moans into his mouth.
“I am not,” he says, pausing to kiss her hard again, “going to forget you, Lily.”
“I know.” She has to blink forcefully to clear her vision, sure that she has some reasoning to give even as all conception of logic scatters from her head. “But I want you to keep me with you.” His eyes are such dark pools. She swallows, grasps for something lighter. “Think of it as an anniversary gift. Ten years to the occasion you first pretended to see Barry Manilow in my house.”
Fervently, James says, “Next year I’ll bring Barry here myself, I swear to God.”
Lily tips her head back and laughs. It hits her all over again, that she loves him.
She reaches for the tie holding her top in place and tugs it loose. He’s watching her, one hand reaching for her at once, the other with his forefinger curved into the camera’s shutter-release.
“There’s a full roll of film in here,” he says, low enough that she spreads her legs wider, sits deeper without thinking about it. “Could be a lot of photos.”
Again she says, “I know.” She leans closer, her hair pooling onto his shoulder. “Maybe I shouldn’t just hand them off to you. Maybe I should post them to Malta, give you something to look forward to.”
“No chance,” James says, voice rough with desire. “If you’re going to make me wait, you’ll come see me and put the photos in my fucking hands.”
She feels a shiver run through her and smiles, flicking open the button on his shorts. “So, you know I’m going to see you again.”
His gaze softens. He pushes up his specs, still balanced on his elbows to look at her. “I know I’m not letting you go.”
***
From Star magazine, August 6th, 1992:
It’s Definitely Love for James and Lily
Talk about a couple that’s had us hoodwinked for years! Potter was seen in Brighton for Evans’s annual summer bash despite being in the middle of filming a secret project in Malta — and the reason he’d come so far soon became abundantly clear to Brighton residents. The pair were seen getting handsy outside of Evans’s beach house the day after the party, looking as comfortable around each other as if they’d been together for years. Of course, we’ve always suspected there was something there…