“I don’t know,” Alicia muttered, and shrugged for the umpteenth time. “Nothing, I suppose, though it might be sending the wrong signals.” Or what was it her mum had said? It didn’t matter either. Alicia knew she wasn’t easy, though she had to admit that she did enjoy the looks she got from dressing the way she did. She’d be a liar if she tried to deny it, and just like she wasn’t easy, she wasn’t a liar either. And suddenly the apple in her hand was very, very interesting.
“No!” Alicia’s head shot up when Oliver asked if anybody had called her easy. Uneasily her eyes flickered down to Oliver’s hand. The way it was clutched and his voice when he had spoken reminded her all too much of whenever Flint’s name was brought. “No, no one’s called me easy,” she soothed, though her eyebrows twitched when she was trying to find a way to explain what she had meant by it. “Uhm... It’s more like... I don’t know. They want to know why I won’t... you know... and then they get, I don’t know, jealous of you guys, and if they think that I... do that with you, then they must think I’m easy, right?” Merlin’s pants, but why was it so awkward to explain this? The last thing she wanted was for Oliver to get in trouble because of something she had said, though it still gave her an odd sense of satisfaction to know that he cared enough to get angry about this. Then again, there was also something familiar about this. This wasn’t the first time she had tried to soothe him, though the other times it had had to with Quidditch and the odds being against them.
That made her relax. Maybe there really was something familiar to all this non-date thing, like Oliver still being Oliver and her still soothing to calm when he managed to work himself up over some things. Even in the uneasy look on his face as he tossed her his robe did she manage to find that hint of familiarity that made her relax. Or maybe it was the robe, his warmth slowly seeping into her when she wrapped it around her and sent him a grateful smile. “Right, you’re not romantic at all,” she teased him gently, then chuckled, her smile widening a bit. “Alright, I admit it, freezing my bum off at a picnic in February without heating Charms does lack a little in the romance department.” But without those shortages, those small things wouldn’t have come off the way he obviously hadn’t intended them to.
With the warmth came some of the ease that there normally was when she was with him, and even his backhanded compliment didn’t turn her into the blithering ditz she had been earlier. Instead it made her smile in acceptance. “I’m not unpleasant to look at,” she repeated, though knew that she’d be pushing it if she returned it, let him know that he was as good-looking as the whispers in the girls’ dormitories all over the school claimed him to be.
“Alright,” she said, deciding to at least attempt giving him a break as she put the apple down and reached for the Prophet, flipping it open on the special on the Quiberon Quafflepunchers. “So if not pink, then what colour should they be? They’ve been pink since... always. Besides, since when do you care more about the robes than on the play? Just look at their stats! They keep on winning the French league.”