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THE PARTY ENDED AS MESSILY AS it had began, and Aisling hadn't seen much more of James after he had cheekily asked her to go with him to Hogsmeade again. She hadn't gotten the chance truly, Cece's first experience with alcohol had gone down like a lead balloon, resulting in a crying, vomiting witch. Aisling had taken it upon herself to sober up enough to be a caregiver of sorts, carting the girl back to their shared dorm room, holding back her hair while she vomited and even taking off her make up.
"Just leave it," Cece whined from her position seated on the closed toilet lid, as her friend meticulously wiped at her face to remove all traces of make up.
"No," Aisling refused, unable to stop herself from laughing at the state the girl had gotten herself into. "You'll regret it in the morning when you wake up all spotty because you didn't clean your face."
"Why didn't she show up?" Cece asked, opening her wide brown eyes to look up tearfully at the blonde. Aisling's heart ached at the sight. It wasn't the first time she had asked the question over the previous half hour, but the other times had been in the midst of regurgitating up the contents of her stomach.
"I don't know, sweetheart," Aisling answered honestly, her tone soft as she gently lifted the girl up from the toilet lid and helped her stumble from the bathroom toward her bed.
Lily Evans, despite assuring the two she would make an appearance, did in fact not show up. And although Cece would admit she still had a great time regardless when she was sober and clear of mind the next day, one of the things she had been looking forward to the most was seeing the redhead.
"Even Potter and his gang showed up." Cece huffed with exhaustion as she practically fell onto her bedsheets, not bothering to lift her duvet to crawl underneath and settling on top of it instead. Her closed eyes shot open as a thought came to her drunken mind at the mention of his name. "Was he flirting with you Ais or did I imagine that?"
Aisling sighed as she crawled into her own bed, her hair scraped back from her face in a loose braid. She had been hoping to avoid explaining the James conundrum to her friend, expecting him to move on sooner rather than later and she didn't exactly want to dive into the topic in their current state of inebriation.
"Yeah, he's probably just taking the piss though," she admitted, chewing on her lower lip in thought and running her hand over her forehead. A hangover headache was already settling over her skull like a crushing blanket, a grim sign of the suffering that was waiting for her in the morning.
When Cece didn't answer, Aisling cast a glance back to her friend and found to her relief that she had already fallen asleep. The interrogation would be put back another day, then.
Despite the sickly feeling that rose within her from the alcohol consumption, Aisling couldn't find sleep right away, no matter how hard she chased for it. Her mind was distracted by an earlier conversation with a certain glasses-wearing Gryffindor and what it implicated.
