It Only Hurts When I Breathe

Chapter 5

Everything returned to normal by Monday morning, or nearly so. Grace and Remus pretended that their kiss had never happened, and Lily and James were rowing again. The only odd thing was Sirius. After the ball he had been acting very peculiar. He had become distant to both Grace and Remus, and neither knew why. Although Remus knew that Sirius had been interested in Grace before the ball, he thought it had been nothing serious, merely that Grace was one of the few girls left at Hogwarts that Sirius hadn't dated yet and he wanted to claim her for a bit before graduation. Sirius treated Remus like he wasn't there and was down right brutal to Grace, slipping in snide comments about she and Marcus Drummond every so often, even though he was seeing James' ball date Raine. Grace was furious that he would treat her so badly for whatever she had done to him. She'd spent hours in History of Magic trying to figure out what she had done, but nothing she had done to him would warrant such treatment, well, at least not recently. It was two weeks after the ball and Sirius was still treating her with contempt. After about two days she had given up trying to reason with him, and started looking through him like he was one of the resident ghosts. The rest of the Gryffindors buckled down, for both Sirius and Grace were known for being extremely competitive. Even against such a formidable opponent, Grace knew she would win this battle, after all, she was a Prewitt and their family was legendary for being hard headed and stubborn.

She was finishing breakfast Saturday morning and preparing to go to the Library with Lily and Antonia to research for their Transfiguration essays. She said goodbye to the rest of the Gryffindors, purposely overlooking Sirius, and threw her bag over her shoulder. As she did, Sirius grabbed her arm. The other Gryffindors looked away to give them a small amount of privacy.

"What do you want?" she said brusquely and jerked herself out of his grasp.

"Meet me on the Quiddich pitch. Please," he said in a low voice. "I need to talk to

you."

"Fine." She dropped her heavy satchel on the floor by Carrie and stormed out into the Entrance Hall with Sirius close behind. Grace walked quickly, trying to stay ahead of him, but his longer legs soon caught up with her and he snatched her arms up at the elbows and turned her to face him.

"Look," He said, but she had turned and began walking again. "I acted like a jerk."

She turned quickly and shouted in his face. Merlin, is that the understatement of the century! You thought Marcus has porridge for brains; at least he has something in his

head!"

Sirius groaned and threw up his hands. "Look. I'm sorry, all right. I acted like a bloody git. I just..." he trailed off.

"You just what? For heavens sake, spit it out Sirius!"

His cheeks flushed and he looked down, thrusting his hands into his pockets. "I just didn't want to lose you," he said quietly. By this time they were standing in the center of the pitch, and the wind was blowing quite hard.

Grace pushed her hair away from her face. "You what?" she said, a bit quieter.

"Lose me? What in heavens sake are you talking about?"

Sirius sighed, "When I saw you with Remus, I thought I was going to lose you."

Grace stood in stunned silence. "Where did you get that idea from?"

He ran his hands through his thick black hair, "Lily said that you went with Remus to get my attention, but when I asked you to go with me you decided not to because you didn't

like me anymore. I got jealous because I wanted to ask you to the ball but Mooney beat me to it. Then I saw you together, and you looked so happy, I thought you'd never get the chance to go out with you."

Lily and her excuses, Grace thought, That's what's got him so bothered. "She said I didn't like you anymore?"

"Yeah, she said that you'd liked me since last year, but you were afraid to go out with me."

"Lily told you that?"

"Yeah."

On second thought, I'm going to kill her, Grace thought. She is going to get it when I

get back up there...

"Grace," Sirius began. She looked up at him questioningly. Suddenly, she noticed how handsome he looked with the wind tousling his hair, and how tan he had become from practicing Quiddich shirtless.

"Will you, er..." he paused, becoming even more flustered and turning a brilliant shade of magenta.

She shook those thoughts out of her head and smirked evilly. "Sirius Black, the great womanizer. The Don Juan of Hogwarts, is speechless? This is rich. Oh, do go on, darling, I want to hear this."

He grew even more flustered. "Fine," he said angrily. "I just wanted to know if you would go out with me?"

Grace was a bit stunned. She hadn't been expecting that, but she recovered quickly. "Sure, why not," she said. She wasn't stupid enough to turn down the best looking boy to pass through Hogwarts in a decade, even though he was a bit of a prat. Then she pushed her raging hormones aside. "On one condition."

Sirius grew pale. Was she turning him down? He'd never been turned down before. "What?" he rasped, as his throat had suddenly gone dry.

"No other girls on the side, we're exclusive. Oh, and don't crowd my personal space, I hate it when you blokes do that. I'm not just one of your other brainless, senseless pieces of arm candy, so don't treat me like one. And I'll think of more additions to my rules as they come up."

"And Marcus Drummond put up with all this?" Sirius said with disbelief. All of the other girls had considered it a privilege to be seen on his arm, they had never demanded anything but a few visits to the Astronomy Tower. Grace was actually telling him what to do!

She paused, and considered his question thoughtfully. "Yes, I believe he did." She turned and started off the Pitch. "By following those few and simple directions, I was happy, which made him happy."

Sirius exhaled deeply and a bit of his old self returned. "So... you want to go snog in an empty classroom?"

She punched him hard in the stomach. "What kind of girl do you take me for? A scarlet woman?" He laughed and snaked his arm around her waist, kissing her on the cheek as they made their way up to the castle. "You're incorrigible," she moaned. "Is this what I'm going to have to put up with, you climbing all over me?"

Sirius pulled her closer and nipped softly at her neck. "You'd better believe it."