Just a Stupid Old House

James made a face. She certainly knew how to make him feel very uneasy. He sincerely hoped that she was joking with him, but seeing how close his last slip was, he had a feeling that she had some truth to her statement.

"Right..." he said, drawing out the word. Yeah... he was screwed.

"Well, the lady at the Quidditch store said that they were going to give their Firebolt a professional clean in about forty minutes, if I wanted to see that, and I said that I would, so I'll probably head back there. What about you?"

Alli could hardly believe what James was saying. "You're honestly going to go back to the Quidditch store to watch them clean a broom?" she shook her head, believing that James liked Quidditch a little bit too much for his own good.

"I'll probably just go to Honeydukes and then go back up to the castle so that everyone can show me what they bought today," she said. She didn't particularly care to see what her friends had gotten but she knew they would nag her into looking anyway, so she might as well get it over with as soon as possible.

"Do you want to meet me somewhere later?" she asked, considering it had been a while since their last "date" in the castle.

James raised a hand, his index finger pointed. "Uh, bah, bah. Don't look like that! It's a professional clean. You don't get to see those everyday!" he exclaimed, grinning. He couldn't wait. Andy would be jealous, he was sure.

"Wanna get me some goods from Honeydukes?" he asked giving her one of his pretty please smiles, wondering if she would really get him something. Probably not. All he'd get was a 'Get some yourself, you lazy git!'

James nodded. "Sure. Where do you want to meet? There's a shady corridor on third floor, or we could also hide behind that gastly witch statue in the Entrance hall again. That worked a treat last time, as long as I keep my head stooped the whole time and my arms at bay." His voice was very dry and dripping with sarcasm and certainly didn't give any leeway about how he was feeling about meeting up in secret.

James' hung his head, ashamed of how he was speaking. "Sorry. How about the lake? Or at the cabin again?"

Alli shook her head at him. "No way! Go get your own!" she told him.

She couldn't quite figure out if she was more angry or more hurt because of what he had just said, but either way, she wasn't happy. She took a step away from him to put some distance between them as he tried to apologize.

"No, I've changed my mind. I don't want to meet up with you later," she said, crossing her arms as she looked at him. "You're being really unfair. We both agreed that it was easier for us to keep this secret and yet you end up practically biting my head off about it! It seems rather useless for me to meet you if you're going to hold it against me and be rude whenever we get to see each other."

James made a face, but as he expected her answer to be something along those lines, he smiled. His happy demeanor was short lived, however, by what Alli just said. Her taking a step back from him made him snap.

He swore quite vulgarly, his tone no longer dry, but scathing. "Unfair? Unfair? I'm not the one being unfair! You need to make up your bloody mind! And I'm not being rude either! You know how I feel about it and it doesn't get any easier, you know! You want to meet up with me or not, but either way, I'm not going to be happy about it! And we all know how you feel about wasting time on useless people. Why don't you do yourself a favour and not meet up with someone so useless."

He was breathing hard and knew that he was going to pay for his words; pay big time. He didn't seem to care though. He was forever thinking that he was the problem in this relationship. That she didn't want to be associated with him. Like he was the one to be ashamed of.

As unfazed as she was by James' vulgarity, she was doubly hurt by his next words. She couldn't believe that he had the nerve to try to argue with her about this when, in her mind, she was completely innocent in all of this.

"Don't you dare make me the bad guy! We both know that I haven't done anything wrong. I'm the one who is trying to go along with the plan that we had and you're the one who is trying to change everything," she said angrily. She was seriously contemplating leaving because, as angry as she was, she still really liked James and she didn't want to say anything too awful to him or give him the slap that Tom had talked about, not that it would stop her if he kept digging himself a hole.

James stared at her, disbelievingly. "Nothing wrong? Are you serious? You can't be completely innocent in all of this. You're the reason we're keeping this a secret. I don't give two Knuts about what my housemates think about us, but you do." James was fuming. She seriously thought that this was his fault.

"I can't believe this," he muttered, pacing back and forth, getting angrier by the second. "I can't keep doing this. All this sneaking around. People are starting to talk. My housemates. I haven't even told Andy about you yet, but even he is suspicious about what I'm doing. And I seriously thought that you, out of all people, would understand some of what I'm feeling, but instead, you're making me out to be entirely at fault." He threw his hands in the air.

Alli was becoming more and more furious by the second. She couldn't believe that James was trying to throw this all back on her. "Fine then, don't worry about it! Tell everyone what happened for all I care because I'm going to stop wasting my time on you if all you're going to do is get angry at me for trying to protect everything that I care about. I'm done."

She simply looked at him for a moment and took a breath. "Just leave," she told him simply. She was done talking.

Turning her back to him, she went back to the tree stump that she'd been sitting on before he got there and sat again, planning to skip Honeydukes and shopping with her friends and just stay there until she had to go back to the castle.

James narrowed his eyes, crossing his arms over his chest. His voice was soft as he said the following. "The only thing you seemed to care about was protecting how your housemates saw you. Don't pretend you cared otherwise." He was aware he was speaking in the past tense, even though he didn't want this relationship to be over.

"I was just sick of always being second place to your house, Allison." James did as she said then, and began to walk away.

Alli already felt miserable and hurt, but calling her 'Allison' just added insult to injury. If James thought he was always coming in second to her house, then there was nothing she could do to change that. He clearly didn't understand how afraid she was of losing all of her friends, not that it really mattered anymore since she was 99% sure that they had just broken up, so she was no longer keeping a secret from them.

She looked back, half hoping that he was still standing by the tree, but he wasn't; he was walking away, just like she'd told him to. She frowned and looked back at the Shrieking Shack, trying her best not to cry.