He would nearly crash into Emmeline. It couldn’t have been Audrey or Caiden or even some random person he had never met. Oh no, that would have been too easy. Of course it’d be the girl he hadn’t really been able to get out of his head for the past two and a half years, the one who he still couldn’t act properly around. It really shouldn’t have been that difficult to be around her; he had never had any sort of issue dealing with girls or people in general, and he had always been good at being charming with minimal effort. But of course, none of that held true around the one girl who really actually mattered to him. He did like though he liked to think that he had gotten better at it though; two and a half years really gave him a lot of practice at not stuttering and blushing and generally making a complete arse out of himself.
“Oh, Em. Hello! Happy Saturday, yeah.” He smiled at her, pleased as always to see her. But her sudden appearance still caught him off guard. It wasn’t totally unexpected, running into her at Hogsmeade weekend, but was suddenly self conscious of the fact that he was alone. Would she assume that he wasn’t cool enough to have made plans, that all of his friends had better things to do than to hang out with him? No, that was just ridiculous. Em wouldn’t jump to those conclusions anyway, especially when she was aware of the fact that most of his friends were off on dates- wait, what did that say about him that he wasn’t on a date? Would she think that there was something horribly wrong with him that somehow repelled girls, never mind the fact that plenty of girls had liked him, that he had unintentionally caused a few girls to develop crushes, it wasn’t that hard. Did that make him seem like Sebastien, would she associate him with his brother oh Merlin that would be bad he’d never have a chance if she thought-
Oh fuck it.
He could be calm, rational, a normal boy talking to a normal girl, nothing difficult there. “Oh, nowhere exciting- just need to pick up a few things. You know, some quills, a few books, a new bag…” He trailed off, scolding himself for sounding so boring. School supplies? Really? He couldn’t at least pretend to be doing something more interesting on one of their few weekends at Hogsmeade? He was good at lying; one would think that he would have taken advantage of that skill at that moment to make himself look less dull and uninteresting, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Of course.
“You’re welcome to join me if you really want to, though you may have more fun with someone else,” he added, giving a sheepish, self-effacing laugh. He understood that they were friends- at he was thankful that they were that, at least, even if it did make things unnecessarily difficult sometimes- but surely she would enjoy herself more with one of her housemates.