When Julia sat back from the piano Jamie was quick to take her place, leaning right over her to be sure he could reach the far end of the keyboard, where he began to massage out a little uptempo melody with his right hand. He gave himself four measures for nothing and then started in on playing a competing melody with the left. He was fond of playing rags, for as much as he enjoyed playing through a piece, a rag presented a challenge that even the most complex concert piece didn't provide. It was, he imagined, more like juggling than performing. It was hard, and the look of concentration on his face was proof. His playing was imperfect, which he didn't mind. Playing rags was more like a game to him than a serious endeavor, and every time he botched a note or he confused his counts and his hands briefly fell into unison he just produced a floundering little wordless exclamation and tried to fix it. He had a million pieces in his arsenal, and he could have gone for any one of them, but for whatever reason he was compelled to immediately reach for the one thing he was likely to mess up. He was never good at upstaging people. If a spotlight was ever shining on him he'd probably choose that moment to accidentally tip his chair over until he fell out into the darkness again. It was all on the subconscious level, but it was a definite trend – Jamie just didn't like to show off, at least in the traditional sense.

When she started speaking again, he transitioned back to a melody he could play without the necessity of a backbreaking level of concentration, keeping it uptempo now that he was in that mode. He listened as he played, doing more listening than playing and, once she'd posed her question, more thinking. “Plenty of girls are interesting. I fancy birds more like you, you know, cause you're different and that. Purebloods, I mean. You know, witchy birds. Though I might fancy a girl from my sort of background, too.” Essentially, all girls were fair game. All he'd done was narrow the search down to girls who went to Hogwarts, which was likely already an unspoken parameter. 

There was no romantic epiphany blossoming on Jamie's own face when Julia suggested Harmony. He knew who she was, seeing as she was in their year, and he found the type-A beater chick a tad intimidating for his liking. She was a whole lot that he wasn't and he had trouble finding that appealing. He didn't outright say no, but his eyes did – with no ambiguity. Also, he was in disagreement about the name Harmony fitting into a song in any productive way. It already sounded campy and he hadn't even written it yet. There was a pun about dissonance and heartbreak in there somewhere, he knew. Once he was stooping to puns then he was stooping too low. 

There were two other names being fired at him next, and he really had to think about whether or not he knew who she was talking about. He thought he had an idea, but the features of those particular girls were unclear in his mind and he really had to push to fill in the details with his imagination. He abruptly finished off the piece he was playing with a canned ending and  then removed his fingers from the keys, turning to watch Julia as she flipped through the sheet music. “I thought a girl I already know might be a sound place to start, unless you introduced me. We are talking about dating, aren't we? It's hard to think about dating some bird who I couldn't pick out in a lineup,” he explained as he kept his eyes on the music. He counted them in and took up his part, following Julia as she played the melody. “All me mates are beautiful. That's how I pick them,” he explained over the music, which grew fairly repetitive after a short while. 

“And about yourself?” Jamie asked after a time, wanting to, once again, get some of the pressure off of him – picking up a rag instead of a sonata, if you will. “I reckon we could both use some heartbreak. You can preach effort to me all day but you'll stay a hypocrite until I hear what you've done to land a lad for yourself,” he teased. 


a simple rule that every good man knows by heart: its smarter to be lucky than its lucky to be smart