This Time, Last Time (A Harry Potter Universe Fanfiction)

29.

If you say go, I would stop everything.

My heart would play the role now,

And act like it's never been broke.

Though, my soul,

Lately I really need to know,

How long, how long can we be touch and go?

-"Touch and Go," Ed Sheeran

August 2018

James walked up and down the steps to Elise's front porch three times. It was like the beginning of the summer all over again. He didn't have a plan, didn't know where to begin, didn't even know what to tell her when she inevitably asked why he was there. Every bit of calm that Raigan had instilled in him had been sucked away the moment he landed on the beach and heard the first powerful wash of the waves, tumbling over one another, racing to the shore. She had told him to be nice. It was the only thing he could remember because she had told him so so often.

James stood at the bottom of the steps again now, stuck. He looked at the chipping blue paint on the siding and at the faded cushions on the porch swing and at the sand that had wedged itself in fine lines along all the window edges. He caught a glimpse of Elise through the small kitchen window and thought she might have seen him too so he forced himself to walk up the two steps again, and this time, he knocked on the door.

James heard footsteps approaching the door. They sounded angry, but he might have been reading too much into things. Elise pulled the door open and looked at him hard. "What?" she asked. And that cleared that up. She had definitely known he was outside.

James took a step back, stuck his thumbs in his pockets, and opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Elise just stood there with one hand on the door, ready to close it again. Her cheeks were flushed, but otherwise her face looked very pale.

"Can I come in for a minute?" James asked. It was the first thing that came to mind.

"I didn't invite you over," said Elise.

"You told me before I didn't need to ask," James retorted. Now that she was here and in front of him, his nerves had gone away and in their place, the frustration he'd felt earlier had crept back in. So before Elise could respond again, James slipped past her into the house. She shut the door behind her back and looked at him, her expression a combination of shock and agitation.

James wrung his hands out just for something to do. "Look," he said. No grand plan had formed in the time it had taken him to get inside, so he resorted to making it up as he went. "We've been fighting a lot lately, and I don't want to fight with you. I thought we could just... talk or something and figure out what happened, because..." James hesitated, but only for a second. "I don't really think I did anything wrong and I don't get why you're mad at me."

"I'd really rather not talk about this right now," said Elise cooly.

"No," James argued. "We're going to talk about it right now, because you wouldn't talk about it yesterday and you wouldn't talk about it today and-"

"We were at work, James," she snapped.

"Yeah, and we were at work when we made out on the beach too." James didn't mean to raise his voice, but he couldn't help it.

Elise looked flustered, like he had just shouted out this fact to a crowd of people she respected and not to her otherwise empty house and maybe Cat, if he was even here. "That was different," she said. "We weren't in the office."