#siriusblack

Personality Nº5

The kitchen was the only room in the flat not packed wall to wall, which was the single reason I’d dragged him into it.

“You don’t get to sulk,” I said.

“I’m not sulking.” Sirius hitched himself up onto the counter, long legs swinging, drink loose in one hand. “Sulking’s beneath me.”

“You’ve got your jaw doing the thing.”

“My jaw isn’t doing anything.”

“It’s doing the thing where you’ve decided you’re right and the rest of us can drown.”

He smiled at that, the slow one, the one I’d watched work on every girl in the next room for six years now. “Maybe you’re just sensitive tonight.”

“Maybe you spent forty minutes with Emmeline Vance hanging off your arm.”

“She wasn’t hanging off—”

“And the one in green before that.”

“I don’t even know her—”

“Don’t.” I held a hand up. My face had gone hot and I hated that he could see it. “It’s fine. It’s so fine. Go on, then.”

He tilted his head. “Go on where?”

“Go talk to your other girls, Sirius. Don’t let me keep you.”

I turned before he could answer, because if I stayed one more second I was going to do something stupid like cry into someone’s leftover punch, and shoved back out into the noise.

My phone went off in my pocket about four steps in.

I nearly ignored it. Then I saw the name lit up on the screen, and I stopped dead in the middle of the hall with people pushing past me on both sides.

I turned around.

He was still on the counter. Phone pressed to his ear. Watching me.

I answered. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Well.” His voice came through tinny and warm at the same time, mouth not quite moving in time with the words across the room. “Personality number four just gave me a direct order, didn’t she. Told me to go talk to my other girls.”

“…Sirius.”

“And I’d never dream of disobeying her. Bossy little thing, number four. Terrifying, really.” A pause. “So here I am. Calling my other girls.”

It took me a second. Then it landed.

“You’re ringing me.”

“Ringing round personality number five, actually.” He looked entirely too pleased with himself. “You’ve got, what, five? Six? Hoping one of them’s a bit more reasonable than four. She’s got it in her head I’ve been off with strangers all night. Won’t be talked round.”

“You’re unbelievable.”

“That’s not a very number-five thing to say.”

“Sirius.”

“Yes?”

I should have hung up. I should have walked off. Instead I was already moving back towards him, phone still warm against my cheek, and he watched me come the whole way with that look that had stopped being a joke somewhere around step two.

I stopped in front of him. He was at eye level for once, sat up there. Neither of us hung up.

“There aren’t any other girls,” he said, quieter now, not into the phone, just to me. “Just you and your personalities. All five or six of them. That’s the lot I want.”

“You don’t even know how many there are.”

“Working through them one call at a time.”

I lowered the phone. His thumb found the screen and ended the call without looking down at it.

“Number five,” he said. “Reckon she’d let me kiss her?”

“Try it and find out.”

He did. One hand slid into my hair, the other curled round the back of my neck and pulled me in between his knees, and he kissed me like he wanted to prove there was no one else.

I got a fist in the front of his shirt and kissed him back, and somewhere behind us James wolf-whistled and neither of us bothered about it.

When he pulled back his forehead dropped against mine. He was grinning. I could feel it.

“Five’s lovely,” he said. “Bit easier than four.”

“Four’s still standing right here.”