She’s outside the house, arms full of bags full of groceries, looking straight at him, and it’s a mean glare.
“What?” he asks, sitting on the hood of his car—Sirius and him, drinking pink milkshakes. Sirius slurps his, obnoxiously.
“You need to stop,” she says.
“Stop what?” he asks, knowing that he’s beginning to yammer, repeat everything she says. She talks smart, anyway, it wouldn’t be a bad idea.
“That.” She tries to shift the bags to point at the car stereo, manages for a second, almost loses the contents of the cooler bag, milk and yogurt and ice cream.
“What, this?” He’s pretty sure he’s said the word ‘what’ in every interaction he’s ever had with her. Sirius has given up on them both, uninterested, lying against the windscreen, sunglasses up and sweating.
“It’s too loud,” she says, shifting a bag to her hip, she’s starting to strain under the load and hates the way he’s looking at her, like, even though they’re arguing a slight, a slight argument, he is ready to rush out and grab the bags if she drops them, mouth open, he’s about to offer and she will refuse if he does. She has to make this quick.
“What’s wrong with Drake?” he asks. Sirius snorts.
She rolls her eyes. “Drake, Post Malone, Ellie Goulding. It’s not good music. Anyway, I don’t care, but it’s too loud. If you’re going to play shit music you should turn it down. Also,” she’s blabbering, has to get it out, he’s started smiling at her like he knows something she doesn’t, like he’s winning, they’re standing out the front of their respective houses and her ice cream is melting and she’s trying to tell him off and he’s enjoying it, “why are you out here, anyway? Can’t you play the music inside the house?”
“First off all,” he starts, hands in pockets, stoops a little to make his point to her, still smiling, “you seem to paying special attention to the music I listen to—“
“How can I not, it’s so loud—“
“—and secondly, you’re the one out here arguing with me in the heat, when you should be going inside to play some Nina Simone or Florence and the Robot or whatever obnoxious music you listen to—”
“It’s Florence and the Machine,” she snaps.
He grins at her, ravenous, full-blown killer-watt bulb, and says, “Gotcha.”
She pauses for a second, mouth open, about to drop the shopping, floored, he’s so irksome, and then says, “Look,” and loses her grip completely on the shopping, the bags almost go down, but he surges forward, grabs half-her and half-the-bags and keeps her up, manages to keep the shopping up. They were supposed to be arguing.
She fumbles, mumbles. “Thanks.” She says it quietly, so perhaps she didn’t say it at all, but she can’t not say it.
“You’re OK, Evans,” he tells her.
She balances the shopping in her arms, goes straight for the door, pauses on the threshold. “Turn it down!” she yells to him, in the street.
She can still hear him laughing when she closes the door, pauses, frantic, against the wall in her dark hallway, breathing hard. Damn him, she thinks. Damn him to hell.