presenting...the first Marauder Rhombus Collaborative Fic!!!

[belovedsnail]

christ, this took a long time. but here it is, the MR collaborative First Time fic. it's long, it's het, it's a little explicit. if it sounds like it was written by three people and thrown together around midnight, it was. hope you like it, anyway. (it takes place a few days after the first part of the epic, by the way.)

also, the three of us are a bit confused about how many people are actually reading these crazy AU fics, so consider this the MR Census. you don't have to leave us novel-length feedback (although we will love you forever if you do), we just want a head count. as per Jamie's ingenious suggestion, it's as easy as clicking a button! so please, by all means, do.


Poll
Poll

and now, without further ado...



[background noise and sheer blind luck]

They were supposed to be having a practice, but James said since they were going on tour in five days, they were good enough not to practice for a bit. That, and he hadn't moved from his armchair since Remus and Peter had arrived, which pointed to his being too hungover to sing. They'd all been sprawled out over and around the collection of debris that passed for James and Sirius's living room for about an hour, Remus was sitting sideways on the couch, leaning against the armrest and flipping through a copy of Silas Marner that James had leftover from high school English, which had been underneath one of the legs on the coffee table to keep it from wobbling. Sirius was sprawled on the floor, flipping through an old issue of Playboy that had fallen off the table when Remus removed the book. Peter was trying to make some kind of fruit drink in a chipped coffee mug from a tin of mix he'd found in a kitchen cupboard. All the spoons had been dirty, so he was shaking the mix in gingerly from the tin and stirring it with a butter knife, trying valiantly to ignore James and Sirius's conversation, which was a needlessly detailed rehashing of being in middle school and wanking off to centerfold girls that had been going on for nearly fifteen minutes.

"...No, no, forget that 'going blind' shit. Did you ever come so hard your ears would ring, and you'd think 'oh fuck, I'm going deaf!'" James laughed, leaning out to grab the magazine from Sirius, but stopped halfway and sunk slowly back into the chair. Peter dropped the knife on the floor, where it managed to hit the one section not covered in clothes and paper and make a metallic, clanking noise.

"But it was worse than that, it was like 'I'm going deaf and I'm going to have to tell my parents I went deaf from wanking!'" Sirius gave the airbrushed woman on the page a weird, wistful grin like she was an old friend. "Remember when we got our first one of these?"

James laughs a little more carefully this time, grins at Sirius without moving his head. "Yeah, we bought it from that kid in the school bathroom for...I don't know, a lot of money."

"Yeah, he was that kid who'd got left back a lot, and he was like, twenty."

"No he wasn't. There's no way he could have been twenty. We were in middle school."

"He seemed twenty."

"That's because we were twelve."

"Right. And I kept the magazine in my bag all day, and I was so scared that it was going to fall out and I'd get expelled or something, and we went back to your house, and looked through it really slowly and you leaned forward so far that your glasses fell off..."

"And you had your arm over your lap, like that was fooling anyone!"

"Fuck off, I was twelve. And you had the magazine in your lap."

James gropes blindly behind the chair cushions for something to throw at Sirius and settles for a ball of tinfoil. "I was twelve, too, you know. Wanker."

Sirius lets the tinfoil bounce off his shoulder, distracted gaze downcast to the centerfold girl once more. James glances her over. Brunette. She was fit, yeah, of course you'd have to be, but there wasn't anything about brown hair for him anymore.

The room lapses into a long silence, through which there was the sudden feeling that, hey, not everyone in this room seems comfortable with this topic. Remus seems focused entirely on the book- which was odd enough to see in the flat. The book, not the bassist of course. Peter had excused himself earlier to make what James and Sirius had hoped was gin and tonic. Unfortunately, both were quickly realizing neither gin nor tonic was purple, did not come in powder form, nor advertised "KOOL-AID," or, rather "COOL-ADE," the grocery store brand. With the conversation on the topic of pulling off, Peter seemed more prone to dropping things and generally looking awkward and startled at every other word. The uncomfortable silence that followed (broken only by Sirius turning a page) was enough of a sign to James that more embarrassing sex talk was in order.

"Enough about pulling off," James curls his legs under him on the armchair, leering wickedly to the three seated around him. "You know, ladies, it's just been brought to my attention that we haven't had a man-to-man talk about this sort of thing."

"How can we have a man-to-man talk if we're ladies?" Sirius asks absently from the floor, smoothing out a crease over a girl who was only just clothed in leather. It was scarcely even like being clothed, this one, more like being upholstered. "Moron." James wrestles with the cushions briefly, before unearthing a fork to toss at Sirius. Maybe that was where all the forks had gone? And here James thought someone was just taking them.

"Hey, Black Beauty." Sirius mutters something grudging like 'oh, that's clever' under his breath. "Belt up when I'm trying to talk, would you?" James let his scowl to his would-be best mate fall, glancing up at the two most eager to leave this conversation very far behind.

"When'd the lot of you bang your first girl?" Upon receiving no response- Sirius didn't bother saying anything just yet, because he knows that James knows, so what's the point? When no party responds, James continues, answering his own question.

"Eighth grade," He smirks over to the men- nah, boys -sitting around him. "Beat that, assmeisters."

It really didn't seem that young, didn't seem like he was just thirteen when it happened. It was probably because when you're thirteen you've just become a teenager and James might as well have been nineteen for how he dealt with the terminology 'teenager.'

"She had the biggest tits you blokes will ever see. Huge ones-really. In one of those black lacy bras." James snatches up a cigarette from Sirius' pack that rests in a heap by the lopsided table. "Oy, Blackscallion, light."

They hadn't really been that big. Her bra might not have even been lacy, for that matter. He hadn't gotten the best look at her chest, the room only had two lamps and one of them was broken on the floor. Not to mention he'd never really seen a girl's breasts close up before. His parents had taken him to a flowery concert once and apparently there had been a lot of nudists girls there, but James had been four so that memory was fairly nonexistent. All those factors made it hard to prove an accurate comparison.

It was at one of Sidney Caulfield's parties. Sidney was a weedy looking son of a friend of the family, a senior in high school when James was still in junior high. From what James had heard, Sidney threw the top of the range parties in Godric's Hollow, every cool kid was on his doorstep when Sidney's parents were out of town for the weekend. The cops were never called because Sidney's family, like the Potter's, were too high rise to be taken out by the law. They were from the same financial circumstances, Sidney and James, though Mr. and Mrs. Caulfield were quite a deal less dotty than Mr. and Mrs. Potter.

James, as a lowly eighth grader, hardly warranted an invitation to a Caulfield party, but Sidney was eventually forced into it by his parents. Even if they hadn't been very dotty, they thought a lot of James' parents and were sure James would grow up to be somewhat more normal. After being the only boy in his school to receive the invite, James had been asked to bring a friend, so naturally, he had an equally excited Sirius come along. Mortified at being humiliated for bringing a guy along ("What are you Potter, a sodding queer?" and then they laughed at him) he made a good show of losing Sirius five minutes or less into the party. It certainly made him look less queer, not having another boy tag along after him, stuck at his elbow. But it made James look more out of place, wandering from room to room and nursing a headache that built with his drink and the pounding of the music from Sidney's stereo.

It was like any other high school party, really. There was a large concentration of kids all gathered at a house without parental units. The music was very loud and people were drinking too much and slipping off for unmentionables. The only thing that separated Sidney's parties from any other teenage party was that it took place in a house with an eight figure property value. If it was even humanly possible, the worth of the house had filtered into the consciousnesses of the partygoers. So although the only thing that was different was the house (mansion?), the kids seemed to get it in their minds that they were at an adult party. But it didn't matter how many champagne glasses they'd drink from after they jimmied open the antique hutch, they were still drinking plain beer and there was still that boy who had been chugging it from a sterling silver fruit bowl.

James had caught a glimpse of them, a circle of clearly stoned kids in one of the sitting rooms. A girl stood in the center of the circle reciting poetry- everyone seemed to be taking this all so deep, James thought he was at a party? The kids seated around her looked too out of it to really understand what the girl was saying, though James hadn't understood much of it either. Everyone took sips from the same crystal-cut glasses that cast rainbows through their vintage red wine. It seemed to be the most posh circle of the party here, with Sidney, all under a haze of pot.

Even then, when James wasn't a lyricist, when he didn't know the real meaning of good rhymes to bad ones, he could still tell this girl was really crap at poetry. He seemed to be the only one who had really noticed, as he was the only one in the room who wasn't completely dazed. To cap off just how terrible the whole recital was, at the end of her poem, the girl concluded her rambling onslaught about her shattered heart by throwing her drink to the floor. It was hardwood, a fact James hadn't noticed until glass exploded over it. It was a very serious moment, the girl and group wracked with emotion.

He was the only person who laughed and Jesus, did everyone need to look at him at once like that? James coughed and quickly ducked out of the sitting room, just as he heard Sidney snap out of his beat reverie.

"FUCKING HELL THAT GLASS IS AN HEIRLOOM YOU FUCKING WHORE!"

James left his glasses (the type for eyes, really) at home, to make himself look as if he belonged, older, cooler. He ran into three different door frames that night. Including the one that led him to her, lying half covered by a sheet that had been pulled free from the mattress.

"Ron?" Her voice was so laced with alcohol James was sure he could smell it all the way from the door frame. Her expression was bleary, blonde hair like a lion's mane all over her face. Her eyeliner and lipstick went everywhere but her eyes and lips, though James could still tell she was a girl too pretty to talk to him sober.

"James, actually." He had answered shakily, feeling the bruise forming from the collision into the guest room door. It was a small, hazy sort of room, smelling strongly of beer and pot and something a thirteen year old could only place as sex, judging from the girl's state of undress. She still had her top, even if a shoulder and black bra strap were exposed. The sheet was awkwardly draped over her lower half and James could see legs that hadn't been rivaled until Marauder Rhombus was managed. The girl's skirt and underwear were at the foot of the bed and it was all he could do to keep his eyes focused on the girl's face. She was very pretty, but the sheet clung below her waist just right.

"Where's Ron?" Her face was creased into the sweetest looking pout. The kind so sweet that only someone who often looked sour could manage. James was having a hard time talking with the music blaring behind him, so he shut the door. He didn't know where Ron was, he wasn't really quite sure who Ron was, even. The girl looked around the room slowly, eyes remaining unfocused on much of anything, seemingly oblivious to James' eyes on her.

"Do you want me to go find him?" His voice cracked as if to remind him who he was. James felt the pit in his stomach deepen when she looked at him. It was too dark to tell the color of her eyes, everything looked orange under the light.

"No," Her responses were all very slow, same for her movements, but James found he hadn't minded that all too much. Her bare hips slid under the sheet that was white and tan and orange at the same time and more and more skin was visible from the waist down as she inched closer to the end of the bed. "What's your name anyway?" He supplied the name James once again. The girl shoved some blonde hair out of her face, pushing it back over her forehead and suggested James come sit with her. He had, movements as slow as hers even if he hadn't had as much to drink.

"Are you excited for graduation?" The last word proved tricky and she slurred it so badly it took her two repeats for James to answer properly.

"Uhm. I'm not graduating." She had laughed and the sheet moved farther off her hips and James was suddenly very aware of her body heat. He had a girlfriend once-the type you never saw outside of school-and had his hands under her shirt once, behind the stands during an assembly, but it had been June so he hadn't noticed the heat. It was much, much different with this girl and better somehow, even with his hands at his sides.

"Me neither," She mumbled, smudging some lipstick and she rubbed the back of a tiny hand over her face. "I mean-probably. I'm really crap at school. D'you want to tutor me?" James had weakly managed something like a Sirius bark of a laugh and shook his head, not sure what was funny in that refusal. Clearly also finding that humorous, she laughed too and her teeth were white even under the bad lighting.

The girl reached out and pressed a lock of James' flyaway hair between a finger and thumb. Her nails weren't painted, but filed so smooth and perfectly he could see the care that she put into the minor details of her appearance. Even if James could smell the alcohol so strongly then, her face less than an arm's reach away, it didn't bother him as much as he imagined it could. The blood in his body had all rushed downward and his senses remained concentrated there as well.

"Aren't we a couple of dopes, yeah?" She had the sweetest smile James had ever seen, even if it was half obscured by his head being in the way of the light. "You're really cute ..." And she stopped smiling, thinking on his name, since she clearly had some memory of it being given to her. He smiled shortly and had been about to say 'James' and tell her she was cute too, when the smudged lipstick was quickly transferred to his own lips.

He remembered the shoes he was wearing, since he had spent days preparing what he would wear for the party. They were black and lace up and he remembering the trouble he had kicking the off as he fell back down against the mattress, that smelt twice as strong of fluids than the rest of the room. The girl's perfume had been overwhelming enough to cancel out the rest of the scents that had haunted him until that point.

He'd been thankful that he'd chosen to wear pants that were one size too big, easy to get off. His button up shirt went up and over his head, and she lost a button from her sweater-but James hoped she didn't notice? He was having a difficult time noticing anything other then her hands on the elastic of his boxer waistband and her fingers were warm but she had on rings that were still cold and god. The sheets were easy to get tangled in.

He couldn't see most of it. There were sheets (that smelt used) in his way, and her hair and his fringe were in his eyes--which just stopped working without the right corrective lenses. It was all a blur of his own thoughts that got more and more hazy with the smell of the pot and the beer and the perfume. Am I doing this right? Fuck bras, this is so-goddamned-Oh.Thanks. What am I doing? How am I doing? Is that good? Am I any good? And that entire constant feeling of this is it. This is what he had spent every moment since puberty aching over, each time he looked through that fateful magazine. Every girl that he kissed, every dream that he had, everything led up to this mess and mash of limbs and it wasn't bad. It was great, of course. But just something over as soon as his clothes were off seemed oddly emptier than he thought the whole process of filling someone would be.

James left soon after they were through, because lying naked under a sheet and duvet and her long leg around his waist somehow reminded him that he was being picked up at midnight. He had to scramble for his clothes, the concert T-shirt he borrowed from Sirius-Shit, he would have to find Sirius, too-his jeans that were a size too big and one, two shoes. He squinted blindly through the dim room for a few minutes before realizing he hadn't brought his glasses with.

He didn't stop at the doorway, because he watched the girl from the foot of the bed instead. She was asleep or passed out, hair messier than ever. James was reminded of photos of dolls left dejected in the center of a messy playroom, dress up clothes scattered over a chair and bedside table. He made himself be late, fixing the sheets and comforter so it covered the girl well enough, stopping just short of fixing her mane of hair. He pulled a chair close to the door as he inched his way out, hoping the blocked entry might stop other guys from following in his path. James blamed that now on jealousy, wanting to be one of the few who had her. But at thirteen, it had been more of a gentler, protective nature that Mr. Potter had since lost with the ladies.

Sirius had been drunk, so, so drunk when James found him on the far couch in Sidney's drawing room. He was sitting beside a couple very engrossed in each other's mouths, but showing little sign of noticing either of them. James hauled Sirius up by his wrist and resisted the urge to thank the host for the party-The whole thing in general didn't seem as amazing as everyone said they were and hey, Sidney was a bastard anyhow. Sirius broke another one of the heirloom wine glasses as they walked through the lawn and mentioned, face buried in his friend's shoulder, that he smelt like a girl. James told him the full story the next morning, when they were both nursing headaches.

Mrs. Potter was sitting in the car across from the long driveway, lights low inside the car, dark glasses and a hat on and seated at a slouch. His mother had been the type who could pick you up from school, but pretend to be of no relation of yours if you asked her to. She could play the anonymous female driver of James Potter. A mom who wouldn't kiss you on school grounds if you instructed her to, all because she had been the type of mum to really remember what it was like to be young. So when James told her to 'pick them up, but don't draw any attention to yourself,' she had driven up Sidney's street incognito.

"I don't think I've been seen yet," She had said, brown eyes grinning behind her sunglasses. "Hurry-before we're caught!" James grumbled for her to shut up. It hadn't bothered her, since he was a teenager after all, but James wished now he had been nicer. She hadn't put the keys in ignition before assuring James that Sirius could spend the night. She understood Sirius wasn't going to sober up properly at home. The things she said about Mr. and Mrs. Black when she thought James wasn't listening.

James' throat felt strangely tight thinking of his mom and he mentally rushed through the part his with his father leaving the front lights on for his son.

Sirius crashed in the cot underneath the window in James' bedroom. James had his best mate over so often they never put the rollaway bed away, it barely did much rolling in its lifetime, really. Sirius had grumbled incoherently up the stairs and into the room and under the blankets, but fell silent when his head hit the pillow. James had gone to bed soon after, but not sleeping. He had spent the night staring up at his ceiling and thinking on the fact that less than an hour ago he had been having sex, something hard to imagine with Sirius snoring and his parents dancing to the "Que Sera Sera" record downstairs.

"Don't remember," James, said around his cigarette, as Sirius asked him what her name had been, anyway. He did though, Becky Baxter. She had graduated by the time James and Sirius entered Hogwarts High School. James skived off geography to thumb through the yearbook for the previous year, searching each face for one he wasn't sure he would recognize without make-up imperfections. Still haunted by the smell of her perfume and shampoo. He found her, page 14, Rebecca Baxter, nominated for homecoming court, cheerleader, most likely to become a movie star. She still had a pretty smile, the type of teeth you could still tell were the whitest of whites even through a grainy yearbook photo. The first in a list long enough to fill it's own yearbook.

James starts out of his reverie as Sirius is suddenly in front of him, making a grab for the cigarette that was burning out between his fingertips. With a brilliant Potter smirk, James brings the stub back to his lips and drags on it. Becky Baxter shouldn't matter, so he won't let her. James wasn't about to be pushed around by the older kids anyway. Sirius is lighting a cigarette of his own, and James prods a sneakered foot into his shoulder. "C'mon, you next."

Sirius exhales a stream of smoke, artfully, and rolls his eyes. "Look, you heard about this the day it happened, there's no point---"

"Ah, but they didn't!" James makes a sweeping gesture that seems to imply that 'they' includes not only Remus and Peter (who are both putting on spectacular shows of not paying any attention), but the rest of their apartment building. "Go on, Sirius, enlighten us."

Sirius knows he could keep arguing, but that he'd never get anywhere, so he leans back against the couch, takes another drag on his cigarette, and begins. "I was thirteen, too---"

"And hideously jealous of me, of course, just itching to run out and get lai---"

"Oy, James. You wanted me to tell the story, I'm telling it. Without your bloody commentary, if you don't mind."

James makes a show of not talking, and waves his hands for Sirius to continue. "I was thirteen, and I met her at the burger place in town..."

It'd been weeks since Sidney Caulfield's party, and James hadn't stopped strutting around yet. And what was worse was that the girls hadn't stopped swarming him yet, either. They'd been kind of a team before, it'd always been James and Sirius and two or more girls, holding court and ordering milkshakes at Molly's, which was the coolest place to be if you couldn't drive to the movies or the big hill where everyone parked their cars and made out (Sirius knew he'd get there as soon as he could get his hot little hands on wheels). The odd, hungover shakiness that James had been unflatteringly sporting when he told Sirius about the blonde girl who'd thought he was someone called Ron had dissolved immediately, and he was swaggering more than ever, something that seemed to attract girls who were actually his own age the way sharks were attracted to blood.

On this particular day, James was sitting and making bad jokes with three girls who were all doe-eyed at him and Sirius was brooding by himself near the jukebox. Up until the random twelfth grader had deflowered his best mate, Sirius recalled a time when being broody was more swooned over than tacky humor. He mourned the lack of non-loser music and tried to sip his milkshake in the coolest way possible. Apparently, it worked, because a girl sidled up to him, and after noting the fact that her hair was fluffed out almost wider than her shoulders, like a weird brown-and-clumsily-blonde-streaked cloud, the first thing he noticed was her shirt. Or her lack of one. She was wearing what Sirius later found out was a pair of cut-up black stockings, which bared her stomach and her shoulders, and was stretched tight enough that she might as well have not been wearing it at all. Her tits weren't really big, but it was the being able to just almost see them, really see them, that counted. Her eyelids were a sort of blue that made him squint, her eyelashes looked about six inches long and seemed to leave more smudges below her eyes every time she blinked, and her lips were a sticky red that made Sirius think of movies where people's blood splattered onto brick walls.

She leaned against the wall next to him, as adept at afffecting a loose-hipped, cool posture as he was. "Hey," she said, waiting until he turned to face her to continue. "I'm Rissa. Short for Clarissa, you know?"

He nodded, and swallowed a mouthful of milkshake, trying to look smooth. Something about taking to girls seemed oddly strange now that James had actually been with one, seen one without her clothes (not that this one was wearing much). It made what was once easy verbal contact strained, Sirius' mind firmly engaged now on what any talking with any girl was expected to lead up to.

"I'm Sirius." He somehow managed not to try and shake her hand.

"Good, because people tell me I've got an awful sense of humour."

In hindsight, Sirius knows he should have stopped talking to her then and there. But he didn't, because he could see her nipples through her stocking-shirt, and that meant more to him at thirteen than being around someone who was bright enough to understand the difference in intonation that indicated that Sirius was his name and not a character trait.

So he was patient. "No, that's my name. Not 'serious' like not funny, Sirius like the---there's a star called Sirius, I'm named after it."

She nodded, interest already waning, reached over and commandeered Sirius's straw, and took a sip of his milkshake, hollowed out her cheeks and looked at him with half-lidded eyes. Sirius obediently thought of blow jobs. "You're really cute," she said, hair rustling as she shook it away from her face, which worked for about half a second before it bounced back.

"So are you," Sirius replied, and took a pointedly slow sip, not that hollowing out his own cheeks would have made the girl-What was it? Rissa?- obediently think of anything in particular. Her lipstick tasted waxy on the straw. He gestured to an empty booth across the room. "Wanna go sit down?"

"Sure." She took his arm, and sat down next to him at the booth rather than across from him, thigh pressed against his, and leaned over for another sip of his milkshake, breast brushing against his arm. Sirius found himself constantly rushing his gaze across the burger joint, trying to make eye contact with James, who was sitting a few booths down. The other boy had ducked his head towards a pretty blonde girl, seemingly oblivious of Sirius's "look-over-here-you-can-see-this-one's-breasts!" signal with his eyes. Eventually he gave up when James ducked in close enough to stick his tongue down the blonde's throat.

They made pretty clumsy small talk, in which Sirius found out she was a year older and went to the high school a town over, had an older sister whose makeup she stole a lot, and was failing math. And science. And geography. Sirius, in exchange, told her that he liked hockey and had a stupid little brother who didn't have anything worth stealing, and carefully didn't mention that he and James both got really good grades without even trying. See, it wasn't really lying if she had asked and if she had asked, yes, he would have lied. He was really just looking below her neck for the most part of the conversation and she had a really annoying laugh, so Sirius didn't count lying to this one as a major sin against love.

She had to leave around five, and she kissed him on the cheek goodbye with her hand resting on his thigh and told him to meet her outside the drugstore on the corner tomorrow, if he could. He figured this meant they were going out, kind of. It was a vague terminology, 'going out' in junior high. There never was much of an 'out', moreso 'going', though it seemed so to Sirius that he needed to be 'going' a lot faster to catch up.

James didn't even ask about the lipstick smear on his cheek, so he didn't mention it. James didn't even notice him not mentioning it. There was something oddly satisfying about that little secret, even if it was staring his best friend clear in the face. Looking back on all that now, Sirius has the idea that James noticed and knew, but didn't care enough. His best mate had lost the ability to give much attention to anything else at age three.

He met her the next day and they walked to a deserted playground and made out standing under a slide and Sirius, in a fit of mortification, kept his hips braced so far from hers that he thought he might fall over. His effort was wasted when she took a step forward and ground her jean-clad thigh between his legs, and he ground back for a couple glorious moments before he had to use every ounce of restraint he could muster to pull back before he couldn't make himself pull back and things got messy.

She looked at him with her eyes half open and her leg still cocked forward, foot pointed almost delicately against the ground, and grinned smugly enough to remind him of James. She rolled her eyes for a second and unzipped his pants, and he remembers clinging to her hip with one hand and curling his other arm over his head to clutch at the cold metal edge of the slide as she jerked him off. It's a sense memory that still assaults him when he walks by playgrounds, mingled with the memory of pushing Regulus down the slide stairs at a young age. They weren't actually memories that mixed well, to tell you the truth.

She wiped her hand off on the inside of her jacket with her nose wrinkled up and asked him what time it was. He stuck out his hand, and she wrenched his arm around and squinted at his watch for a few moments, muttered "shit," told him to meet her tomorrow, and kissed him as an afterthought. He nodded and leaned up against the slide wishing he had some tissues, and eventually gave up and drifted home.

The next day was pretty much the same. The same walk to park in silence with forced and stunted conversation. Sirius was beginning to think that the approach to doing something people raved about night and day shouldn't feel like the walk to an execution chair. It was all the same that day except that she nudged him to sit on the stairs of the slide and blew him, and his initial thoughts that some little kid could come to the playground and see this (with their fucking parents even) and wasn't this sort of thing illegal and his panic every time he heard a car go by, the metal stairs digging into his back, and how quickly it faded. She pulled the same thing again, shaking hair that seemed more plastered that teased, shoving herself to her feet and brushing dirt off her fishnets and muttered something vague and non-threatening before she left. When he got into the shower that night, he saw the lipstick prints all over his cock and thought he was bleeding to death.

He'd met her on a Monday, and she'd been busy Thursday, so their third 'date' was a Friday when she met him at the corner and said, "C'mon, I wanna show you someplace really cool," and kept her hand in the pocket of his jeans as they walked through town and onto the dirt road that led through what was going to be a block of identical, ugly houses. She slid her hand up to hook a finger in his beltloop and pulled him around to the back of one them, the name of the insulation company blazoned all over it because the siding wasn't up yet.

"Check this out, the doors are locked, but the basement windows aren't in yet." She slid easily through one and he followed. Sirius wasn't naive enough to think that they were here to explore the construction site, but he wasn't quite expecting her to practically shove him down onto the dirt that would eventually be someone's rec-room floor and straddle him. She kissed him for awhile, hands resting on either side of his head, but it was obvious that she regarded this as a waste of time, and she stood up to pull off her boots and her stockings and her panties and he just stared up at her. She pivoted to plant one foot on either side of his hips, and looked surprised to see that his pants were still on, crouched down and yanked them and his boxers down over his thighs, dropped to her knees just short of the mark so that he was faced with the image of his cock against the background of her plaid skirt.

"Do you have a condom?" she said, and it took him a moment to reply.

"Yeah, in my wallet. Er, back right pocket," he added when he realized that his back pockets were somewhere around his knees and he couldn't reach them, and thought about standing in the filthy bathroom of a bar with James a few months ago. James's dad had been driving Sirius home on a rainy day, and had stopped into the bar on some kind of mysterious errand, James had dragged Sirius inside and straight to the condom machine in the bathroom, grinned, and asked Sirius if he had any change, because, you know, they should be prepared. They'd swaggered back out into the bar with condoms in their wallets, and somewhere in the back of Sirius's mind, he knew that this isn't exactly what he had in mind for his. He told the back of his mind to stop being such a sodding girl and pay attention to the one against his cock.

His wallet landed on his chest with a thud and she was tearing the condom wrapper open with her teeth and he leaned back for a moment and looked at the exposed beams and pipes that ran across the ceiling and she slid herself down onto him, all in one motion. He gasped and tilted his head upward towards her and she was watching him so intently with her smeary eyes that he let his head fall back onto the floor, shut his eyes, and curled his hands around the backs of her thighs. She brushed some hair off of his forehead, which felt oddly tender, but he was still reticent to open his eyes, so he pretended he could trust the feeling and let his mind go sex-blank as she braced her hands on his shoulders, the bones under her thumbs digging into his collarbone.

He kept his eyes shut as she rode him, pushing off from his shoulders so that he felt the majority of her weight transferring from his hips to his collarbones and back, and for a minute, that's all it was, her weight rocking back and forth and the warm dark friction and the nothingness of his closed eyes. He started moving his hips without even really noticing he was doing it, and thought that it was almost like dancing, that the rhythm she set was so practiced and even that there might as well be background music, and he pretended there was, moved against her the way he moves against his guitar, tight little circles of his hips that only kept their languid, rhythmic quality for a few minutes before he couldn't maintain it anymore, jammed his hips up hard and came, trying to arch off the ground but pinned down by her weight.

He floated around in a post-orgasmic haze, dimly realizing that she was putting on her underwear and her boots and shoving her stockings in her purse, and dusting off her knees.
"Hey," she said, and he sat up, draping an arm what he hoped was casually across his lap, feeling suddenly stupid. "That was cool, but I've gotta get home. Maybe I'll see you around, right?" She rubbed at an eye and smeared a streak of black all the way to her temple, and walked up the basement stairs. Sirius sat on the ground for a few minutes, stunned, before pulling his pants back on and trying to jump high enough to get out of the basement window before he realized why Clarissa went up the stairs, and unlocked the front door from the inside and slipped out. He didn't see her Saturday, Sunday, Monday or Tuesday. The later stretched on into an ever.

He walked back to Molly's, and caught James just as he was leaving, being kissed on the cheek by two different girls. He fell into step with James like nothing was different, like they hadn't been barely speaking for a week. James played along, and they walked in silence until he noticed the dirt all over Sirius's jacket. And his jeans. And his hair.

"What the fuck happened to you?"

Sirius shrugged, tried his best to look blasé, like this were the sort of announcement he made all the time. "Got laid."

Sirius still likes to think that James had a couple seconds of genuine surprise plastered across his face before he smirked and answered "What, by a farmer? You're fucking filthy."

"Oh, fuck you," Sirius snapped, using the vast assortment of words a teenage boy might. He shifted in his step, dirt still uncomfortably clinging to skin underneath his clothing. He could feel James' leer on him, could see without looking that the other boy had his lower lip between his teeth, peering over his glasses and under fringe. For a leer, he could manage it all to look very concerned and intrigued.

"Blackie. Who?" There could have been the classic argument, going back and forth until someone eventually caved and the matter was either dropped or reiterated upon. But, like Sirius knows now, he knew then and grudgingly replied.

"Rissa. Uh. Short for Clarissa. She goes to- What the fuck are you laughing about, Potter?" Sirius found that he actually he still hadn't forgiven James for laughing, for halting in his tracks and nearly choking.

"Oh hell, Rissa?" James failed at an attempt to snicker and talk at the same time, resulting in a snort that, had any other teenaged girls been around, would've sent the boy into fits of mortification. "Sirius, that one does everyone!" And as James was lost under another wave of laughter, Sirius wishes he had thought to say 'Well, you haven't' but he didn't think that all up until later that evening, lying in his room listening to haunting songs about heroin.

All of this, however, gets lost in translation as Sirius flicks his cigarette ash onto the floor and stretches out his legs. "So anyway, she fucked me in the basement of some house that wasn't finished yet, we snuck in the basement windows. The floor was still dirt, fucking messy as hell. She didn't even take her skirt off, it was like schoolgirl porn. But without all that innocent giggling shit, you know? She kind of shoved me around, it was hot."

James snorts. "Yeah, and then I told you that she was a fucking whore, and screwed everybody, and you got all pouty---"

Sirius doesn't even waste time glaring, but turns to Peter, his tone conversational. "So Peter, ever had sex? With an actual girl, I mean." If he doesn't look at James, he can be as smug as he wants.

Peter wipes his hands down the front of his jeans and swears softly as he sees the purple tracks his fingers leave behind. This grapeberryfruit drink mix was making a huge mess. Well. He was making a huge mess with the grapeberryfruit drink mix. But only because of James and Sirius. He'd made this stuff loads of times at home and had never once turned his pants into some sort of tribal ritual gone wrong. It had to be the conversation going on not eight feet away from him. The conversation that he had been simultaneously listening to and blocking out for the last twenty minutes. The conversation he'd dreaded being dragged into any second now.

He tries not to let his face cringe along with his mind. And he thinks for one fleeting moment of agreeing with what he knows they're thinking, of saying, no, he hadn't slept with anyone yet, yes, he was as innocent as his chubby cheeks implied. He knows that would be a lie though, knows that one late spring night in a hotel he couldn't find again if he had a map is barring him from muttering about his virginity under his breath and going back to his grape sludge. It would've gotten him teased a bit (all right, probably a lot), but at least he wouldn't have to be a part of all this.

He struggles to ignore the part of him that's implying that he doesn't want to talk because he knows his story isn't very good.

"Er, I, um, I lost it...that is, my, um, virginity." He breathes out the last word more than speaks it. Maybe they'd just let it lie.

Sirius raises his eyebrows. "When?"

Of course they wouldn't. He hesitates, "High school?"

"Is that a question, Pete?" James was chiming in now. Lovely.

"Um, no, it was high school. Er, late high school." The last month of my last semester of my last year of high school, actually. "She was a year younger, from a different school, we were at a, um, band competition."

Band competitions hadn't seemed pathetic at the time, but saying it just now, in front of James and Sirius, and even Remus who was still ostensibly reading his book, made him feel like he had a cartoonish bubble over his head that read 'nerd' or 'geek' or maybe even just 'loser.'

"Well, go on then, tell us. What happened?" Sirius leans forward, the elbow of his cigarette hand rested on his knee.

"There's nothing to tell...I, uh, didn't know her, and I haven't seen her since." He tries not to show how much this bothers him. Tries to make it seem like he didn't spend the entire bus ride home from the competition wondering what her last name was and if he had made a mistake that might actually matter in the grand scheme of his life.

"She came up to me at a party."

He'd taken off the band uniform jacket, which left him in his white t-shirt and black dress pants. Sitting in a corner, back to the wall, drumming softly on a dresser to the Buzzcocks' 'Orgasm Addict' as it played on a loop in his head, he hadn't expected anyone to notice him. That had been his plan actually, go to the party across the hotel with the brass section and the rest of the drum line for a little while, long enough to not get called a few names, and duck out in time to catch the second half of the movie on Channel 16.

A bottle of beer had been thrust at him as they'd walked through the door and he'd taken a few sips and tried not to make a face. It was now sitting next to him, serving as an occasional part of his make-shift drum kit. He'd drink it down when he needed it to make a different sound. She'd walked up to him and he'd barely even glanced at her, too busy trying to picture Johnny Rotten without his green hair and in half of a band uniform, in the corner of a hotel room while the school from across the pond's tuba player tried to tongue wrestle his own school's lead trombonist. Peter thought briefly that maybe the other school was trying to sabotage them-- render one of the soloists incapable of using her mouth by bruising it. But that girl didn't seem to mind the assault and the one standing in front of him didn't seem to mind Peter's obliviousness.

She sat down next to him and leaned against the wall. "What's that you're playing?"

Peter looked at her for the first time, and tried to decide if she would take offense if he told the truth. He remembered coming home with the album, leaving it on the counter, and hearing his mother shriek as she read the song listing. The girl was wearing a black cardigan, jeans, and black shoes that Peter was sure she had polished right before the party. He mentally shrugged -- couldn't tell much about a person from a non-descript outfit like that -- and decided to tell her. If she was horrified, she could always leave, he wanted to go back to his own room soon anyway. "Um, it's called..." He hesitated. This was a little more embarrassing than he'd thought it'd be. "It's called, er, 'Orgasm Addict."

The girl barely even blinked. "Oh yeah, the, um, Buzzcocks, right? My brother listens to them, I think."

He hadn't expected that, "Um, yeah."

He took a large swallow of his now-warm beer and struck it with the drumstick. It sounded wrong-- he'd drank too much.

"I'm Tammy." She was staring at Peter and obviously expecting him to offer his name back.

"I'm Peter, um, Pete."

"And you probably play clarinet, right?"

"No, dru--, oh, right," He glanced at the sticks in his hand and made himself laugh at her joke.

She was sort of leaning into him and Peter was struck with the thought that he might be being picked up. He wasn't sure. He'd never been picked up before. Never done much picking up of his own. There had been a girl a couple of years ago, his neighbor, and they had had what he had termed a 'recreational relationship.' He'd fallen into it, it was mutual, one minute they were watching some variety comedy show and the next, they were snogging as if the livelihood of the Queen and the nation depended on it. There'd been no 'picking up' involved and he was more inexperienced with girls than he felt any self-respecting 18-year-old should be. So for now, he wasn't sure if that's what this was. When she snaked her hand out to meet his own, removed the drumstick and twined their fingers together a few moments later, he felt he could safely call it such.

She nodded her head in the direction of the couple on the edge of the bed, "Listen, Brian's only got beer in here, but there's some cinnamon schnapps in my room." Peter mentally noted that the tuba player must be Brian.

He was seconds away from telling her that a cinnamon-flavored drink didn't sound like something he'd want when it occurred to him what she was implying. A part of his brain that he knew he had no control over spoke up and he was almost sickly pleased to note that even that part of him fumbled with words. "Oh, um, yeah...That, er, that sounds good..."

She stood up and tugged him with her by their joined hands.

As they walked, they passed by all the kids he couldn't see from his spot in the corner. The two boys he was rooming with were nowhere to be found though and Peter wondered if they'd been targeted by girls too.

By the time they'd started down the hallway, Tammy had started to rub circles on the back of his hand with her thumb and Peter was pretty sure his left eye was twitching in response. But by the time she was fitting the key into the lock of her room, he had convinced himself that she really did just want to share her cinnamon schnapps. Maybe he could convince her to turn on Channel 16 for that movie.

When the door swung open, the TV was already on, and either Tammy or her roommate had been watching an 'I Love Lucy' rerun recently. He sat on the edge of the bed nearest the door, silently cursing the school systems for not springing for rooms with couches or more innocuous furniture, and looked around for someone else in the room.

There was no one there.

He was alone. In a hotel room. With a girl. And she was handing him a hotel mug half-full of cheap alcohol. He looked back at the TV and downed his drink in two long gulps. It was terrible and he had to fight to not shudder. On the screen, Ricky was starting to rant at Lucy and it occurred to Peter that Tammy hadn't poured herself anything. When he turned to say something to her about it, she was looking at him intently and he coughed and asked her a question to cover up his surprise.

"So are you graduating this year?"

"No, I have one more year after this."

"Oh."

"You'll be graduating soon though?"

"Yeah, in a month actually, I think I'm going to go to the community college, for a little while anyway and--"

Her hand had found its way to his leg and when she started to lean her head in, he almost laughed. He thought about a vocabulary test from a few years ago-- surreal. That's what this was. Surreal. It wasn't something that should've been happening in real life. Not to him anyway. She kissed him then and he stopped thinking about English.

All of the sudden it didn't matter that he didn't know this girl-- he was about to get to know her a little better. It didn't matter that he hated the way his mouth tasted after the schnapps-- hers tasted just fine. It didn't matter that this sort of thing didn't happen to him-- it was happening now.

She opened her mouth under his and one of them scooted the other further up the bed before they gave up the pretense of trying to sit entirely.

His hands snapped back from the opposite directions they had been led in when there was a banging on the door and someone hollered out to Tammy.

She hollered back. "I'm FINE! I'll be fine!"

Footsteps and laughter echoed down the hallway through the door.

Before he could say anything, she'd kissed him again. She worked at the buckle and leather of his belt and when he hesitated to help or make a similar move, she pulled back and asked him about this being his first time. He wasn't sure why, but he denied it.

The memory goes cloudy there. He remembers the laugh track to 'I Love Lucy' punctuating the atmosphere at inopportune moments. He remembers the green of a pool table and doesn't know if it's the color of her underwear or her eyes or the bedspread or the condom wrapper. He remembers being suddenly lonely and not knowing how that was possible when he was so close to someone else. He remembers an abnormally large freckle in the center of her chest. He remembers picking up his pants from the floor and his shirt from the foot of the bed and sliding his feet into his shoes, stuffing his socks in his pockets instead of wasting time putting them back on. He remembers the way they left the room together and went different ways. He'd wandered through the lobby and the floors below his until he'd been from grateful to disgusted to happy to numb to confused to disbelieving and back again.

Mostly though, he remembers seeing her in the hallway the next day and the glance she'd barely given him.

He doesn't remember if he'd been relieved or disappointed.

"And?" Sirius's voice jolts him out of his thoughts.

"And what?" he manages.

"You were at a band...thing, she came up to you at a party. And then what?"

"We um. Went back to her room. Because we were at a hotel, and I guess her roommate was somewhere else?" He knows Sirius won't give up until he says it, so he does, trying not to squirm visibly. "And then we had sex, and that was it."

"Oh, c'mon, that's never it. It's all about details, right James?"

James nodded. "Yeah, Pete. What colour was her bra, that kind of thing?" He smirks, far too wickedly for someone who would probably fall over if he got out of his chair.

"I--I don't remember," Peter says, and it occurs to him about half a second later that he should have just made something up. Red, maybe, or black.

Sirius rolls his eyes. "Well, was it any good?"

Peter goes for James's casual tone. "It was fine."

"Yeah? Fine, huh?" Sirius leans forward even more, looking predatory. "How about for her? Did she kind of...murmur your name, rake her nails down your back? Did you make her scr---"

"Sirius, leave him alone." Remus hadn't even deigned to look up from Silas Marner to make this comment. James seemed shocked that he was still in the room.

"Well then," Sirius says, shifting his weight around to face Remus, folding his legs up under him, a parody of a child at storytime (Peter relaxes visibly and takes a sip of his oddly-coloured fruit drink). "how about you?

Remus glances up, finally, not even closing the book in his lap, and tries to look like he hasn't been listening, hasn't been remembering. Like it hasn't been running through his head the whole time more or less in sequence, his first girlfriend and the orange glow of her bedside lamp and her plastic bracelets leaving imprints on the backs of his shoulders.

His first girlfriend, much like the few he'd had since, had been the sort of girl who secretly felt misunderstood, but knew it was passé to say so. They were both fifteen and sat in the back of their English class, where she drummed the desk with her blue-black-or-purple nails and ate the sort of lollipops you get at the bank when you were little. She folded the wrappers into little origami cranes, and read novels if the teacher wasn't looking. She and Remus did that thing---the one where you look over at someone, and they're looking at you, and then you look back at your desk---for all of September, and then the teacher paired them off for a project about the Odyssey, and they started talking about having a tree in your bedroom, and whether she should be a siren for Halloween.

Remus daydreamed about her in a weird, adolescent way, in the beginning she was more the concept of a girl than anything having to do with the actualities of her. She was breasts and cute shoes and lipgloss stains on lollipop sticks, a weird, endearing laugh and jangly earrings and black eyeliner that Remus freaked out about watching her put on. (Jesus Christ, you're going to stab yourself in the eye, what are you doing?) He daydreamed about her, and when she started petting his hair and sitting with her legs draped over his lap and kissing him on the cheek if he said something really funny, it slid out of his thoughts and into reality, seamless. They'd been friends for months, and walked home from school holding hands for a week before he actually asked her to go out with him, and she flung her arms around his neck and mumbled of course into his collarbone, like she'd known all along.

She hated parties and liked to go to movies during the day for the matineé prices and didn't let him look at her poetry. She tied up his phoneline all the time and put eyeshadow on him once and sang under her breath if she thought he wasn't paying attention. She baked him weird, lopsided cookies and sometimes mailed him letters even though they saw each other all the time. She scrubbed at her eyes with the heels of her hands when she was tired, and smeared her eyeliner all over her face. She liked borrowing his coat and laughed for a good three minutes the first time he asked if he could touch her (whispered can i---d'you---is this okay? at her in the back row of the movie theatre with his hand inching inside her Felix the Cat t-shirt), and then nodded fiercely when he looked confused. She was the sort of girl you didn't end up writing songs about, because she didn't make you fucking miserable.

They'd been going out for about six months when she told him that her parents would be away for the night next Friday and did he want to come over, maybe. He said yes, of course, and they both knew what was really being agreed to and did a delicate kind of dance around it for a week, a little like they had before they'd ever talked, looking at each other sideways at odd moments, and quickly turning away.

Friday came, and after a lot of nervous laughter and cookies in her kitchen and a rum and coke, Remus found himself lying on her bed with her leg around his waist, his hands sliding up under the back of her shirt. She sat up to pull it over her head, and her bra was blue with a rosette in the middle and Remus realized he'd never seen her with her shirt off before, that everything until now had been over and under and around their clothes, fast and furtive by necessity, and that this was different, and before he really knew what to do with that, she tugged at the hem of his shirt, and he couldn't get her bra unhooked, so she did it for him and threw it dramatically backwards over her head with a grin, and it turned out to be very hard to get someone else's pants off and then, then it was just him in his plaid boxers and her in panties that helpfully reminded Remus it was Friday and had a little rocketship on, and the sudden realization of five feet of her skin against his.

And he stopped for a moment, hand resting on her side, warm skin and the curve of her ribs under his thumb, and leaned forward to kiss her. In the strange slowness of the moment, her tongue was sweet with chocolate and soda, and he felt her breathing under his hand, was hyperaware of her hooking her ankle around his calf and sliding a hand over his shoulderblades. She rolled onto her back, and nudged him along with her, and he was looking at her from above, knees squeezing snugly against her bare thighs, the lamp casting orange light on her hair and an almost golden shine on the tops of her pale shoulders, and she looked up at him with her mouth slightly open. He leaned forward to kiss a line down her neck, the birthmark on her shoulder, the muted lines of her collarbone, cupped the outer curves of her breasts as he licked at her nipples (the left, then the right), and she tangled her hands in his hair and tugged him up to kiss him, and that was the end of the slowness, the honey-coloured light and holding a reverent hand over her heartbeat.

From there, it blurs in his mind, the way things do when your heart was racing and your eyes were closed and the moments were smashed together in a tangle of legs and kisses made clumsy by hastiness, and her hands wriggling the waistband of his shorts lower on his hips until he took the hint and slid them off with one hand and a lot of kicking his legs around. Suddenly she was dropping her rocketship underwear off the edge of the bed and sheepishly scooting over to her bedside table and fishing in a drawer, handed him a condom and everything slowed again to a torturous crawl while he tried to open the wrapper with almost-shaking hands, and she looked pointedly up at the ceiling until, fairly certain he'd got it right, he cleared his throat, and asked her if she was sure about this. And she nodded, not quite so fiercely this time, and he began to wish that the bedside light was off, while he was kneeling there with one hand holding his cock steady and his eyes downcast and his cheeks probably flaring up near-fluorescent pink. He let his hair fall over his eyes as he leaned forward and slid into her as gently as he could manage, and when he tried to breathe in, his breath hitched like he'd been crying.

Finally he was looking down at her again, their hips flush and the lamp reflecting strange circles of light in her eyes, and said are you alright and she wrapped her arms around his neck and said yeah, fine, but slow, okay, and he nodded and hunched over a little to kiss the hollow between her collarbones and pulled his hips back, slowly, and tried not to make some kind of embarrassing noise. Slow, as it turned out, was more difficult than aniticipated, his thigh muscles were practically shaking with the effort and he had his eyes closed and his lower lip between his teeth when she poked him on the shoulder blade and said hey, and he looked down at her, almost startled. She tangled her hands up in his hair and shoved his fringe away from his face and smiled at him. look at you, you're beautiful, you look like a fucking rock star, she said, and you can. um. go faster, if you want.

He has no idea what his face must have looked like, but she grinned, released his hair, and wrapped her arms around his neck again, and whispered it's okay, really, go. So he blew his fringe away from his eyes with a shaky smile back at her, and started fucking her a little slower than his heart was beating, admired the way the shadowy arc of her eyelashes against her cheekbones seemed to blur as he moved, shifted his right hand to rest his thumb against her ribs and feel her breathe again. He teetered weirdly on the edge of coming for a drawn-out moment, and all of his thoughts about whether he was doing this right and that a piece of his hair was caught in his eye and it kind of hurt condensed down to a string of obscenities and affirmatives and he was too far away from the rest of his mind to feel ashamed to moan.

This is what he remembers, the details, the way James and Sirius want them, more or less. The oh god she was tight, my fucking ears rang kind of shit, and he could say it if he wanted to, laugh along, shut them up. But he won't. Partially because he remembers the kind of thing they're not talking about, how awkward used condoms and trying to shimmy back into your shorts while she goes to the loo are, the feeling that it went too fast, looking at yourself in the bathroom mirror when you got home and thinking that this was supposed to have changed something, and the weird terror of not even knowing if it had.

He looks at Sirius steadily (because this is the one thing he knows from his memories, that he's different, that there's nothing here now to make him look down through his eyelashes and give it all away.) and what he actually says is: "I was fifteen. She was my girlfriend. Her bra was blue."

Sirius smirked appreciatively, but he wasn't quite finished. "And what about your first time with a boy?"

If they'd been in a comic book, Remus's voice would have been dripping icicles. "Fuck off, Sirius." He shut the book with what would have been an impressive snap if it hadn't been a beat-up paperback, and tossed it onto the pile of pizza boxes on the coffee table, stood up and grabbed his jacket off of the back of the couch, and tossed the hair away from his face with a decisive motion Sirius had never seen before. The dark line of stitches on his forehead was visible. "Look," he said, looking up but not at any of them in particular, voice slightly less hostile. "Lovely as all of this is, if we're not practicing, I could be doing something else. Like calling people about subletting my flat." He steps over a pile of James's t-shirts, picks up his bass, and opens the door, turning and looking back at them for a moment as he steps out into the hall. "Call me if we're going to practice tomorrow."

He leaves, and the three of them are all tensed up, waiting for him to slam the door (he doesn't). There's a good minute and a half of weird silence before James raises his eyebrows and sets his face in an expression that hasn't passed for innocence since he was twelve years old. "Weeellll." James manages to make the word about five syllables long. "You really did a number on that one, didn't you?" He gives up his mask of innocence to grin at Sirius with one side of his mouth.

"Fuck you." Sirius's tone is almost conversational, but his face is strained, somewhere between confused and furious, and he stands up and walks to the kitchen with such concentrated calmness that it's clear he's seething. There's the sound of a glass being banged down on the counter. He's probably not making himself fruit punch.

"You're losing your touch!" James calls out for good measure, and a cupboard slams. He looks worried for a fraction of a second, but the expression's only fleeting, and he busies himself shaking another cigarette out of Sirius's pack and groping at the edge of the coffee table for a book of matches. He looks up, and seems startled that Peter (who's holding his drink in one hand and drumming on the leg of the coffee table with the other) is still there, and smiles his best shark-out-for-blood smile, somehow managing to give the impression that he's leaning forward conspiratorially without actually moving. "So Pete, ever fucked a boy?"

James and Sirius's glasses aren't heirlooms, but it takes forever to clean up the fruit punch.

_________________

Author's Notes are in a seperate post. eek.