~Sandcastles, Sunburn And Smiles~

I first noticed him, I mean really noticed him, during a holiday with James and his parents. The air on that little beach was hot, so hot that it shimmered and glinted like a waterfall where it met the softly rounded dunes. After a swim and plenty of horseplay involving frantic dodging and much ducking of other people's heads under the saltwater, we bought two ice lollies apiece -- licking the rapidly melting drips from our fingers and not even caring when we got a tongueful of sand as well as fruit juice -- and some little plastic buckets and spades from a beachside vendor. Fifteen is far too old to be building sandcastles, of course, but even people much older than us were taking every opportunity to prolong their childhoods as the threat of war loomed above our heads.

We soon gave up using the castle-shaped buckets as moulds. They were too small. We wanted to do something spectacular, and ended up building a vast model of Hogwarts. All three of us helped to form the basic shape of the castle, pouring bucket after bucket of mushy sand into a heap and shaping it with our hands and the flats of our spades. James began constructing Quidditch posts from our six discarded ice lolly sticks (with a little help from his mum's Enlarging charm, because they weren't big enough as they were), and I laughed with childish glee as I filled the Slytherin dungeons with rubbish and a dead crab before building the walls of the south wing up around it.

I sat back on my heels and brushed my sand-caked hands off on my denim cut-offs. None of us were wearing shirts, and I couldn't help looking at the shocking contrast Remus' newly-tanned skin made with his white scars.

I watched him for a while. He was building the astronomy tower with the serious, precise attention he paid to all his work. Deft fingers smoothed the wet sand, catching the chunks that crumbled away and patting them back gently, patiently building the cylinder shape up higher than James or I could ever have managed to do in our eagerness. Grains clung soggily to Remus' skin and collected underneath his nails as he used the tip of his little finger to dig in a little vertical groove as a window.

All of a sudden and with no warning at all, I realised he was more than Remus Lupin, more than one of the best friends anyone could ever have. The revelation was almost physical in its intensity and for a second my stomach lurched as if I were falling.

He hadn't changed one bit, and yet everything had changed.

He was smiling. I'd seen him smile before, of course, and laugh and cry, and once I'd seen such a fit of helpless giggles overcome him that he'd started to hyperventilate, but he'd never looked like this before. His lips curved back softly, displaying a hint of white, slightly sharp teeth, his cheeks were flushed with the first tan-pink tinge of mild sunburn, his hair clung damply to his cheeks and stuck up in crazy spikes where he'd run his sand-and-salt-encrusted hand through it without thinking, and his eyelashes were still wet, clumping together a little bit to create two dark stars around the honey-toned eyes that suddenly seemed to contain my universe.

It was a look of such heartbreaking, breath-stealing beauty that the waves came in to gaze at him, then hurried back from the shore to fetch their friends. Devils prayed, angels wept, the world stopped turning. My heart didn't just skip a beat -- it halted entirely. All those clichés, and then some.

I had my first surprise encounter with love that Thursday afternoon, as my best friends and I played like innocent children under the careful watch of cotton-wool clouds rolling languidly through the azure sky.

And although I've had many, many more, the one that turned that sun-kissed August day to perfection is the one I remember most clearly, for it was really the beginning of my life.

~END~