TEACHER'S PET ━ 𝓡. Lupin

2. Lies & dragons

—IF THERE WAS ONE thing Natalia Zabini was good at, that was lying.

No, for real, she was extremely good at it, even if no one would have ever thought that.

After all, when her best friend Delilah tried to pull some sort of stupid prank on her boyfriend, Jonah, Natalia couldn't help but laugh while she tried to go along with it.

Therefore Natalia, in people's eyes, wouldn't even have been able to tell stupid white lies, not because she didn't want to, simply because she wasn't able to do it.

However, reality was quite different.
Natalia surely lacked in credibility when she had to lie for some trivial joke, but she was instead the most skilled liar when lying was needed for wider purposes.

If at one point she had to lie to save her own life, well, she would have easily gotten by.

The young ravenclaw's performance highly improved when she was under pressure or when she found herself in a dangerous situation.

That day, however, as much as she wanted to, she couldn't manage to lie.

"You know, I can tell that something's wrong"

The Gryffindor boy facing her was trying in every possible way to meet her gaze, but Natalia just wouldn't allow it, instead she kept her eyes fixated on her books.

In their whole friend group, Jonah was probably the person that knew her best.
They didn't meet each other when they were so little that they couldn't even remember it, like her and Delilah did, nor they shared the common ravenclaw house problems, like her and Kenneth did. Either way, Jonah -Jj, as Natalia liked to call him- was the first person she would have gone to if she ever found herself in trouble.

Not because Jonah was that good of a listener, nor because he was extremely skilled in giving her advice, but because, no matter what happened, he was always going to show genuine concern towards her.

Natalia and Jj were very different, but also extremely similar in a way: they loved equally, with the same ardor, with the same eagerness that was sometimes harmful for them.
Therefore, Jonah would always take great care of her and, most importantly, she would take care of him in the same way.

Jj casually tied his curly, mid length hair in a messy ponytail, while observing the girl in front of him, until she eventually decided to look up at him.

His big greenish eyes finally met Natalia's, whose expression, unfazed up until that moment, ultimately turned into a small smile.

"Are you having some sort of problems with Charlie?"

Charlie.

And like that, Natalia felt like the worst person on the planet.

Because initially, when Jonah was repeatedly asking her, there wasn't really something wrong with her, she was just in a bad mood, and she was also already far too stressed for it to be only the first month back in school.

But now that Jj had mentioned Charlie, something was definitely wrong.

Charlie Weasley was basically Natalia's boyfriend, or at least that's what everyone thought. The truth was, they had never labeled their relationship. To put it briefly, when they happened to spend time together, they were more than happy.

Charlie was at least three years older than Natalia. While he attended Hogwarts, the ravenclaw girl had only ever allowed herself to watch him from afar, obviously she had always had a bit of a soft spot for him, but while he was still in school she had decided to never act on it, she couldn't have handled rejection from him.