a swish and a flick

Hermione’s cried every day and night since Ron abandoned them, but when she sits down at the kitchen table opposite him her eyes are dry and there’s a determined twist to her mouth.

“Harry.”

He places a hand over his parchment, covering the Quidditch play he was just scribbling. He doesn’t want her to know he wasn’t focused on their mission. She’ll be upset. But to be honest, he needs something to take his mind off the endless hunt: hunting, and being hunted. Packing up the tent every six days and moving somewhere new, sleeping with one eye open. Quidditch is the only thing that diverts him, even though he can’t play.

“Harry, I’ve decided I don’t want to die a virgin.”

“We’re not going to die,” he says firmly, although he doesn’t know that.

“I hope we don’t. But I want to make sure.”

“I will make sure. I won’t let either of us die, Hermione.”

“…That’s not what I meant.”

He watches her bottom lip disappear, worried by her front teeth. He has no idea what she’s talking about, and then in a rare moment of sparkling clarity, he understands.

“You— With me?”

“Yes.”

“Because I’m the only one here.”

Because Ron’s gone, and he’s what’s left over.

“No, because I trust you. You’re my best friend. And because you haven’t either, have you?”

He hasn’t. Ginny snogged him, a lot, but they never did anything else, beyond that one time she left him put a hand under her shirt. But her bra just felt like fabric, and he didn’t get what the big deal was. She’s with Dean, now. Unless she’s already dumped him and gotten back with Michael Corner. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t get updates in a tent in the middle of nowhere.

He shakes his head.

“So, will you?”

Harry blows out a breath, thinking this, at least, he can do. He doesn’t know where the remaining Horcruxes are, he doesn’t even know what they are, and he doesn’t know where Voldemort is hiding or how to get his other best friend back. But he can do this.

“Okay. Let’s do it.”

Her eyes widen. She must have thought he’d need more convincing. It’s not like he’d ever seriously thought about her like that; lately he hadn’t been thinking about sex at all.

But she’s his best friend. It makes sense. He’ll do anything for her.

When night falls they’re standing on either side of the bed in Hermione’s room, silent and shaking.

She slips off her jeans, underwear, and socks and peels off two knitted jumpers over her head. They’ve taken to layering to fight the bitter cold, since they can’t rely on warming charms while sharing one wand between them. She slips under the duvet wearing only a soft cotton t-shirt.

“Do we need… something?” he asks quietly, shucking off his jeans and jacket and joining her. He knows Hermione’s prepared for everything, but he can’t imagine she packed condoms to hunt for Horcruxes.

He folds his glasses and places them carefully on top of a haphazard pile of books on her bedside table.

“I did the charm,” she tells him. “And I haven’t had my cycle in months.”

If this is meant to reassure him, it doesn’t. Girls are always complaining about how annoying periods are, but not having them doesn’t seem healthy.

It’s then he notices how thin she looks without the extra layers. Her hair has lost its shine and her cheeks are pallid and hollow. She needs to eat more. He needs to make sure she eats more.

Harry reaches out beneath the covers. When his fingers touch her bare skin, she flinches.

“We don’t have to,” he says. “We can stop now. Or later. Any time you want, we can stop.”

Hermione smiles weakly. “Have you been reading a pamphlet?”

Actually, he has. Mr Weasley gave him and Ron Muggle pamphlets about puberty when they turned thirteen, much to their mutual embarrassment. Most of it was lost on him, being naive and undeveloped, but there had been an interesting section on girls and how to act around them. Plus, Ron had lent him Twelve Fail-Safe Ways to Charm Witches.

“I mean it. We shouldn’t do it if you’re not ready.”

“I want to,” she insists.

He won’t argue with her, but he knows that she only wants to for the sake of getting it over with, not because she’s overcome with passionate lust. She has that look on her face: all grit and determination, ready to face down whatever obstacle comes in her path. So he slides his hand along the crease of her hip, steadily moving between her thighs.

Hermione’s face contorts with panic.

He reaches for her hand instead. It’s cold to the touch.

“How about this,” he says. “I’ll kiss you, and you let me know if you like it. Okay?”

It’s a trick Bill told him about once, said it worked on half the Quidditch team.

She acquiesces. “Alright.”

Harry brings her hand to his lips and kisses her knuckles, watching her.

“Do you like it?”

“It’s fine,” she says.

It’s a start.

He places a kiss on her wrist, soft and open. She hums. Then he kisses up her arm like an Italian man in an old film, making her giggle.

“Do you like it?”

“Silly. But I don’t mind it.”

He raises her arm up and moves his nose towards her armpit, but she recoils and clamps her arm back to her side. “No thank you,” she says quickly.

Good. He thought she wouldn’t like it, and he wants her to be able to say no to him.

Lying on his side, he props himself up on one elbow and kisses her cheek.

“Like it?”

She smiles shyly. “I suppose.”

“You suppose,” he says, and ducks his head to mouth the side of her neck, sucking gently. “Do you like that?”

“Oh…” She exhales shakily. “Yes.”

Better.

He does the same to the other side and her hands come up to rest on his shoulders. He presses a feather-light kiss on her other cheek and then moves away further down the bed until he’s at her waist, and places an open-mouthed kiss on the smooth, unblemished skin there.

“Nice?”

“Yes,” she whispers. A clandestine sigh escapes her mouth when he nudges the fabric of her t-shirt away with his nose and kisses the swell of her breast.

“Hermione. Do you like it?”

Her eyes are closed. It takes her a while to answer.

“Yes.”

It’s dark and silent, but he can feel his heart beating like the shimmering wings of a Snitch in flight. The energy in the room has become something tense and electric; anticipation floods his veins like a potion. He can’t resist taking a peaked nipple into his mouth.

She gasps and he has to shift on the mattress so she can’t tell how it’s affecting him.

“Do you like that?” he asks, voice cracking in the middle. He knew she was a girl, but he never thought about her like this.

“Not sure… feels strange.”

He shifts further up the bed and sucks on her collarbone.

“Yes,” she says, before he’s even asked.

Her bare shoulder. Her throat. Her earlobe. Her jaw.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she chants, encircling her arms around his neck and craning up to meet his mouth.

They could be the only two people in the world right now. He doesn’t think about Voldemort or the mildew creeping up the walls of the tent or the way Ron abandoned them, just like that. He thinks about kissing her.

Kissing’s never felt like this before: fiery, urgent, desperate— new but comforting all the same. His hand finds her hip and her leg comes up to wrap around him. It pains him to break away, but there’s something else he wants to do.

He traces a path down her body, placing kisses along her sternum and brushing his lips over the swell of her breasts once more. When he settles between her legs she positively squeaks.

“You can’t kiss me there!” she whines, but Harry notices that it comes out like a question.

“Can’t I?

“It’ll taste bad.”

He’s no expert, but that doesn’t seem right. He looks up. Yes, she’s a little blurry without the aid of corrective lenses, but he can tell she’s worried.

“I don’t think so. Who told you that?”

While he’s waiting for an answer a bead of sweat trickles down the back of her thigh. He licks it away, tasting a sting of salt.

“You don’t mind?” she asks, answering his question with a question.

“I don’t mind.”

It’s more than that. Now that he’s here, he’s sort of dying to. It’s part curiosity and part challenge, but most of all he wants her to like it.

But he’s not quite sure what he’s looking at. His only frame of reference is the black and white lithograph they showed them in their singular hour of sex education: a diagram that appeared to have been made by a wizard who’d only ever seen between a woman’s legs from fifty feet away and through a frosted glass window. He can’t tell where he’s supposed to put… anything.

He gently shifts her legs, guiding her to cross her ankles behind his neck, then licks upwards blindly, searching for the spot that should make her writhe and her breath hitch. Soft hair tickles his nose.

Ah, there.

Through a haze of lust that’s stolen his brain away he struggles to remember another trick Bill told him about: drawing the letters of the alphabet with his tongue. He can’t recall whether it should be capitals or lower case and it’s requiring a lot more dexterity than he expected, so by the letter G he gives up and raises his head.

Hermione’s face is screwed up in concentration and she’s about to bite a hole through her lip.

He curses himself for not being better at this. But then again, intense concentration is how Hermione approaches everything.

She turns her head and mumbles something into the pillow. “Wingardium leviosa…”

“What?”

Her index finger traces a quick pattern in the air, and he realises: a swish and a flick.

He licks a slow stripe upwards and finishes with a quick flick. Her back arches immediately and her fingers clench in the sheets, then release. He does it again.

He soon finds a rhythm, tongue cramped be damned, and she’s whimpering and twitching and her toes are curling and just when he’s convinced she’s about to—

“Now,” she whines, reaching for his shoulder to drag him upwards. “I’m ready, I’m ready.”

Her fingers scrabble desperately at his waistband and he awkwardly shucks his boxers off past his ankles, panicking. His body is ready, but he’s not. He sinks down between her open, waiting legs, breathing far too loudly and pressing bluntly, because he really has no idea what he's doing. But he can’t stop: he won't stop, he won’t let her down, because he remembers the Boggarts in third year. The thing Hermione Granger is most afraid of is failure.

She makes a frustrated noise and takes over, guiding him. Her eyes go impossibly wide and she’s breathing oddly.

He’s scared to move. He doesn’t want to break her. His mouth has left a bruise of a mark on her neck.

She’s doing something, squeezing inside, around him, and he doesn’t know if she’s controlling it or if it’s unintentional, like sneezing or blinking.

He wants to kiss her, tries to remember what she likes — breast neck collarbone jaw — but he can’t touch those and stay balanced on shaky elbows at the same time, at least not well, it’s like patting your head and rubbing your stomach and each tiny shift of her hips threatens to end this all far too quickly.

“Okay?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says, close enough to brush the tip of his nose against hers. Her hair is tickling his ear.

It’s more than okay. Something primal howls in his chest and threatens to take over, but it only wants to hold her close and never let go.

“…Harry.”

“What?”

She digs her heels into the backs of his thighs.

“Move.”

The tone of her voice has a tinge of the bossy Hermione of old, the one who told him she’d rather die than be expelled and scolded Ron for having dirt on his nose at least once a week. The long-lost crossness is so familiar he feels the urge to giggle. He’s glad he’s doing this with her, not with anyone else. She would never abandon him.

He moves, clumsy and ungainly, but he must be doing something right because she pants against his neck and he’s wondering if he can hold back any longer when he discovers that the way girls do it is definitely not the way guys do it, that’s for sure.

Once again, he marvels at how ever since he was small, magical things have happened to him. Magic is filling the room, brightening the space, buzzing right through to the tips of his fingers and toes as she gasps and shudders against him.

He really can’t hold back any longer with her muscles clenching around him like that. He buries his face in her hair, trying not to make an embarrassing sound.

They lie side by side, catching their breath and not speaking. The pile of books on the bedside table are now in alphabetical order.

For some reason, he feels like he needs a good cry: there’s too much emotion and nowhere to put it. He falls asleep beside her before he can figure out what to say.

The next day Ron wrenches him out of a freezing lake.

He had planned to tell him about it, because they didn’t keep secrets from each other and because he wanted someone to talk to. A small, petty part of him wanted to brag that he had done it first.

But after seeing the shade that came out of that locket, he couldn’t.

He couldn’t risk Ron walking out on them again, so he didn’t tell him.

Hermione never mentioned it again.

It’s surreal to be heading back to school again, after everything.

Harry’s in the train toilet washing his face and hands because Nev’s pet cactus sneezed gob all over him. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a witch with bushy hair appear in the doorway.

Hermione is supposed to be on prefect duty patrolling the cars but she comes into the bathroom and locks the door, then pushes herself up onto the tiny marble counter beside the sink. The room is tiny, no bigger than a cupboard; but decorated with old-fashioned dark wood panelling and fancy gold fixtures. A wilted posy droops out of a wall-mounted vase. His hand is by her knee.

“Harry.” The tone of her voice spells out clearly to him that he’s in for a Talk, capital T, no escape. “Do you remember when it was just us?”

He nods slowly. Her question is vague, but he knows what she means. And he does remember. He thinks about it occasionally, late at night, when he’s alone. He tries to hold on to the ephemeral, unspoken memory of it to stave off the nightmares of corpse-like faces, hissing snakes and the crumbling stone walls of the first place he could call home. But the memory, too, feels like a dream.

It’s forgotten in the day, a footnote in their relationship. They’re friends — best friends — who’ve spent countless days and dinners together, shared each other’s company in long summer evenings and caught the train back to school together, just like always.

Three words spill from her mouth in an anxious rush.

“Was it alright?”

“Yes,” he says immediately. “Wasn’t it?”

It was more than alright. It was earth-shattering. It took apart everything he knew and put it back together, sharper and more complex.

She’d only asked him to help her out of fear and curiosity, not wild passion, but he doesn’t regret it. It wasn’t skilled or sophisticated, but he doesn’t regret that either. It was precious. It was just the two of them.

The thought occurs to him that she regrets it and is about to request a pact to Obliviate each other, but her expression unfurls in relief.

“Yes, yes, it was,” she nods quickly. “I— I wanted to see what it was like, and now I know… what it’s like. That I like it. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.”

He’s glad. He reaches past her to dry his hands on the hand towel and she bites her lip as their faces come near.

“It feels strange to be going back, doesn’t it? The castle won’t be the same as it was. Faces will be missing, there’ll be new ghosts. Everybody’s still grieving.”

She combs through her hair with her fingers and he watches her unconsciously start plaiting a tiny section of it. She only does that when she anxious.

“Yeah,” he says dumbly, wishing he could provide more comfort in his words.

“I thought you might want to… take your mind off things,” she says, wide-eyed and questioning.

Flying usually takes his mind off things. McGonagall created a new position for him this year: Quidditch and Flying coach. As an eighth year he’s too old to be Gryffindor team captain, but this way he can help train students from all the houses. He’s looking forward to being in the air again, soaring above the lake and the Scottish hills on his broom.

Hermione is still watching him nervously, eyes the colour of chocolate frogs. She’s waiting for something.

It dawns on him that they’re in a locked room together, alone. In private.

The realisation of what she wants hits him like a frying pan to the back of the head. He feels like the cat and mouse in Dudley’s old cartoons, seeing stars and tweeting birds.

“You want to do it again?” he asks, too loud and too surprised.

Her face closes and she clams up, as if she thinks he’s going to reject her or call her a slag or something.

Harry takes his glasses off and moves forward, inch by inch, resting a hand on the marble counter either side of her knees until their foreheads are pressed together. “Leviosa?” he whispers.

Her eyes flick to his. She sucks her lower lip into her mouth, not saying yes and not saying no.

Slowly, tentatively, he slides his hands from the counter to her thighs, slipping under her pleated skirt and finding the fabric of her knickers. Hermione lifts her hips obediently and he drags them down, all the way past her ankles and over her boots, stuffing them in his pocket. He sinks down between her legs, perching on the edge of the loo seat.

It’s not romantic, but he thanks the heavens above that since the space is so tiny, from this position he can give her what she wants.

Is this what she wants?

His hands reach around her hips to pull her closer and he leans in between her thighs, which spread wide for him. Gods, but he missed the smell of her. Do all girls smell like this, or is it just her? He doesn’t know.

He’s gripped with a sudden nervousness, a lump in his throat and unhelpfully sweaty palms. What if he’s forgotten how to do it, what if he’s not good enough?

But it’s simple. A swish and a flick.

At the first touch of his heated tongue against her she sinks her hands into his hair and moans shakily.

“Please,” she begs.

She wanted it. It’s like she needed it. She must have been thinking about it, imagining it, and the thought arouses him so intensely he’s glad his lower half is hidden from her. Her eyes are closed, anyway.

In minutes her thighs are clamping tightly on either side of his head and the heels of her boots are digging into his back. She’s gripping his hair almost painfully, and when he sneaks a glance he sees her cheeks are red and her jaw has fallen open. The train carriage rocks and rumbles as they turn a corner, and the vibrations are clearly doing something for her.

It’s a different type of thrill to fighting a dragon. It’s no threat and all pleasure, it’s liquid heat pooling in his abdomen and a rushing through his veins, and he wants it to go on forever, he doesn’t ever want it to stop, but—

She comes with a choked-off cry.

He can feel it: something in the air pulls and snaps; her body spasms; the lights flicker on and off; the marble gleams and the wilted flowers are in full bloom again.

He stands up, dizzy, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. She’s panting like she’s run a mile, but she reaches clumsily for his flies and breathes heatedly against his neck. He hadn’t expected this: her delicate fingers grasping him, stroking him, urgent but too light-fingered to be satisfying.

It’s embarrassing, but after one solid press against her heated palm he can feel the familiar sensation building in his toes. He reaches for a fluffy hand towel and spills onto it, which Hermione finds unaccountably funny.

He grins back stupidly, a bit embarrassed but thoroughly happy.

“What? I thought it would be rude to— you know, on you…”

He charms the towel clean, then has second thoughts and Vanishes it.

“You have dried Stinksap in your hair,” she tuts, still giggling, and reaches up to scratch it away with a fingernail. The affectionate gesture makes his tender heart squeeze. It reminds him of how she’s always mended the break in his glasses and cleaned ink off his cuffs. She fixes him.

He closes the short distance between them by kissing her on the mouth, close-lipped but sure. She’s still smiling when he pulls away.

“Thank you,” she says, blissed out and loose, pupils blown wide.

“Anytime,” he grins. He wonders how he never noticed how beautiful she is.

Her smile falters. “Really? Do you mean that?”

“Yeah,” he says, realising that he really does. “If you ever want to… take your mind off things.”

That’s what it is. It’s uncomplicated, like flying. He wouldn’t make that offer to anyone else, but they trust each other. They have each other’s backs.

“You didn’t tell anyone?” she asks.

He shakes his head. He wanted to tell Sirius, to be honest, but unless he broke into the Ministry again and whispered through the veil, he never could.

“I’ll think about it,” she says, and drops a squashy kiss on his cheek before telling him to get out, so she can clean up.

A cacophony of laughter and friendly ribbing greets him as he returns to the compartment where Ron, Neville, Dean and Seamus are playing card games and demolishing what looks like half the contents of the refreshments trolley. Harry sits down and opens a chocolate frog.

“Who’s on the card?” asks Seamus.

Harry turns it over. It’s Sacharissa Tugwood, born 1874, the first witch to use beauty potions. Seamus grins.

“Tugwood, does she? Thanks for the tip!”

The carriage explodes into raucous laughter and Neville goes bright red.

Ron nudges him. “Get it?”

Harry looks up. “Huh?”

He had been thinking about the taste of her, both her hands in his hair and the way she’d said please. That she liked it. That they might do it again.

“Tug wood?” Ron claps him on the shoulder and shakes his head. “Ah, poor innocent Harry. This kind of thing goes right over his head.”

Seamus sniggers and Dean smirks. Even Nev, who is innocence personified, titters.

They can think what they like. Little do they know.

Hermione is almost late to the Sorting ceremony because some biting books got loose in the baggage car and started eating through the hatboxes. The prefects had their work cut out for them fixing the damage.

“What, the Monster Book of Monsters?”

Ron tosses a jellybean into the air and catches it in his mouth, chewing noisily. They can’t start the feast until the new students are sorted and Violet Singh has been perched on the stool at the front of the Great Hall for the past eleven minutes.

“Boy, I’m glad we don’t have to deal with them anymore. I love Hagrid, but you’ve got to admit he’s a bit mental.”

Hagrid is sitting up at the staff table, looking older than Harry remembers. McGonagall’s black hair is shot through with silver. Snape’s portrait is hanging in the headmistress’s office. Lavender Brown isn’t at the feast — she’s still in hospital, recovering from a werewolf bite sustained at what everyone is now calling the Battle of Hogwarts.

The hatstall is finally sorted into Ravenclaw and the occupants of the Gryffindor table clap politely.

Ron leans over and speaks low in Harry’s ear. “Hey, got the Map? ‘Mione and I have got to take the new firsties up to the dormitory after, and I wanna avoid Peeves if we can.”

Harry reaches into his pocket.

His fingers find unexpected fabric. His face heats as he realises it’s Hermione’s knickers that he took off her on the train.

Hermione herself is sitting opposite them, looking composed and watching the Sorting interestedly. She’s got a notebook in front of her, ready to make notes when the headmistress makes her welcome speech.

“Later,” Harry mutters.

Is she sitting there with no knickers on? he wonders. Come to think of it, everyone in this hall is naked under their clothes, even the teachers. He begins to feel a little hysterical.

He passes Ron the Map after the feast and goes to bed early, since a lot of students seem prone to staring and pointing at the Boy Who Lived, Defeater of Voldemort, the Chosen One. He doesn’t want to be that person anymore. He’s Harry, just Harry.

He takes the pair of knickers out of his pocket. They’re dark green with orange Kneazles on them. Or cats, he supposes. They remind him of Crookshanks. That’s probably why she bought them in the first place.

Seamus and Dean tumble in to the bedroom noisily and the scrap of fabric in Harry’s hands suddenly feels like contraband. He’ll give them back, obviously, but he should keep them safe for now. He can’t hide them under his pillow, can he? That would be weird.

He stuffs Hermione’s knickers in his bookbag, praying he remembers to give them back before somebody else finds them.

Ginny arrives on the pitch for practice as one of his coaching sessions is finishing up. She draws him aside and lets him know that they’re not getting back together.

“Here’s how it always goes with you, it goes: fighting Voldemort; Ron and Hermione; Quidditch; fighting with Malfoy; and then me. I don’t want to be bottom of the list. I want to be someone’s number one.”

Voldemort’s dead, but he doesn’t deny the rest. She deserves to be someone’s number one, and he tells her that. She punches him lightly on the shoulder.

“But I won’t ever be yours, will I?”

He can’t deny that either. “Ginny… I’m sorry.”

She takes it well. Earlier he overheard two Hufflepuffs in the boy’s toilets talking about how she’s already moved on to Blaise Zabini.

“We’re better off as friends, anyway,” she says. “Mum’s practically adopted you. I’d rather not date one of my brothers.”

“Er—”

She mounts her broom and speeds off towards the goal hoops where her team-mates are waiting, wind whipping her copper hair around her face. She hangs upside-down and ties it in a ponytail in mid-air, the show-off.

A weight settles in Harry’s chest as he waves goodbye and returns to the castle. It’s over, but it’s for the best. He’s practically part of the family, like she said. Maybe that’s what he wanted from her all along.

Harry’s heading to the dormitory, on his way back from helping a lost firstie up to the Astronomy tower for a midnight lesson, when he runs into Hermione at the top of the stairs.

He’d found the first-year crouched in a corner clutching a telescope ten minutes after her lesson had started. The little girl had looked up at him with such tearful, fearful eyes that he’d been forcibly reminded of Dobby and had almost started crying himself.

“Harry! Am I glad to see you, I’ve had a hell of a day…”

She tells him how Crabbe’s ghost has been haunting the dungeons, shouting abuse at anyone in his path. He won’t accept that his death was his own fault. He blames his friends.

“Goyle’s been in tears, I’ve never seen him break down like that. Malfoy had the idea to ask Moaning Myrtle to help, but Crabbe called her a— no, I don’t even want to repeat it. How’s your day been?”

Same old, same old. Schoolwork is giving him a constant headache and people still stare at him in the corridors. It’s funny how easily he’s fallen into the same routine, when in under twelve months they’ll be leaving school for ever.

Hermione grabs his arm. “I’m just finishing up my prefect patrol for the night, do you want to join me?”

“Er… sure,” he says, since it’s on the way to the dormitory anyway. “What is it you actually do on these patrols?”

“Oh, you know, look behind tapestries, check no one’s hiding behind the suits of armour or in broom cupboards. The portraits usually let us know if there’s a serious disturbance.”

They meander across the seventh floor corridors, him with his hands stuffed in his pockets while Hermione lifts the corners of tapestries and peeks into alcoves. It seems there’s no students out of bed past curfew today.

At the end of the hall she opens the door of a cleaning closet. Harry peers inside. It’s full of rusted buckets and dusty push brooms.

“No one in there,” he says. “Empty.”

“Good,” she says, pointedly not shutting the door.

He waits dumbly for a few moments, vaguely registering that she’s trying to convey something with a meaningful look, only he doesn’t have a clue what it is.

Until he does.

She wants to. Again. Now.

As the weeks had passed he thought she’d changed her mind — that it was only a two-time thing. She’d given no indication that she’d been thinking about it; she hadn’t ever acted coy or flirtatious. Not like Romilda Vane, who was dating Tony Goldstein but still made sure to flutter her eyelashes at Harry whenever he passed her in the corridors.

The pit of his stomach drops all the way to his feet as he steps into the closet and Hermione crowds in behind him, shutting the door with a soft click.

“Lumos.”

A ball of light glows at the tip of his wand for only a second before it’s hastily extinguished.

“Nox,” she whispers. “The light will show under the crack in the door, that’s how we catch people out. You don’t need to see me, anyway.”

He wishes he could, though, if only for practical reasons. The space gives a new meaning to the word cramped: he moves his foot an inch to the left and knocks over a tower of clattering buckets.

“Shh!”

“Sorry,” he whispers back. “What, um… do you want—”

“Touch me,” she says desperately.

Those two simple words are almost ruinous. He sways on the spot and hears rustling: it sounds like her skirt falling to the floor.

He reaches out into the darkness, tentative, and finds the crisp fabric of her shirt. He traces down the row of buttons and discovers, when his fingertips meet soft hair, that she’s taken her knickers off too.

He swallows. “Here?”

She makes an impatient, inarticulate sound. “That is the general idea…”

Oh. The times before he used his mouth, not his hands, so this feels like a whole new world.

He strokes between her legs, running his fingertips lightly over her heated skin. His index finger slides easily into something slick, hot and deep, and he groans aloud without meaning to. Her muscles clench around his finger, pressing from all sides.

“More,” she says.

He obediently slides another digit inside and curls them. When he brushes his thumb against her clitoris she grips his shoulders painfully and stutters.

“I need— can you— are you ready?”

He’s been ready since she closed the cupboard door behind them. But their situation is presenting a challenge; she’s too low down and he’s not sure he’s physically strong enough to lift her this way.

“Uh, could you stand on a bucket or something?”

She snorts and conjures a sturdy crate, then steps onto it. It’s just the right height. She pulls their bodies flush together and kisses him.

He undoes his flies and carefully positions himself, kissing back hotly.

His eyes are becoming accustomed to the lack of light and he can just about make her out: she’s painted in shades of grey, her shirt is half-open and a bra strap has fallen off one shoulder.

He thrusts his hips and she whimpers in his ear.

“Feels good,” she says, head lolling to the side. “Yes, yes, please…”

He speeds up, moving faster and faster — and then too fast.

“Fuck,” she hisses, slipping down the wall as her knees shake. Hermione never swears.

“I’ve got you,” he promises, encouraging her to wrap her legs around his waist so he can hold her up. His fingers press dimples into the thick flesh of her thighs.

She’s gained weight since last year, back to her former self, and he feels a wash of relief and gratitude. In the tent she’d been so cold, so scared.

He does his best to multitask, thrusting in a delirious, intoxicating rhythm and tilting his head to suck the spot just beneath her ear. She smells of perfume and sweat, and he can’t get enough of it.

Her climax arrives without warning.

Tendrils of wild magic leak out of her, caressing him, sparking across his skin and raising goosebumps. It catches him unawares and half a minute later he’s shuddering, pulsing into her, his vision whiting out even though the space is pitch black.

Hermione grips the back of his neck and kisses him, as slow and sweet as treacle, lazily pushing her tongue deep into his mouth.

This is somehow both overwhelming and reassuring. A few hours ago, they were sitting in Transfiguration together, learning how to turn dandelions into andirons. What happened between them on a train had begun to feel like an exquisite dream.

Maybe he is dreaming. He’d like to go to bed right this minute, preferably right beside her.

She places one final kiss on his cheek and slips away into the darkness. The sound of rustling fabric and errant limbs poking into him indicate she’s putting her clothes back on, which reminds him.

“Oh, you forgot these, on the train.”

He fetches the green Kneazle knickers out of his bookbag and hands them to her.

“I didn’t forget them, you took them! Thanks a lot, I nearly ended up with splinters sitting on the bench in the Great Hall…”

“Sorry, sorry,” he laughs, “it was an accident.”

“It’s not funny!” she argues, but she’s laughing too.

She peers through the keyhole to check the coast is clear and they spill out of the cupboard in one happy, rumpled mess. As he shuts the door behind them Harry notices the dusty buckets and mops are now sparkling clean.

Harry returns to the dormitory around one o’clock in the morning, but Ron is so engrossed in writing a letter he doesn’t hear him come in. He’s scribbling away on a sheet of parchment, using a Martin Miggs annual balanced on his knees for stability.

Ron barely ever writes letters, but he seems to have done about four pages. It’s more than Harry’s ever received from him over the summer, and he knows for a fact Ron doesn’t write to Fred and George anymore after they sent him rabbit droppings disguised as chocolate raisins. He drops his bag on the floor and kicks his shoes off.

“Who are you writing to?”

Ron jumps, upsetting his ink pot. A flood of black seeps across the covers. He swears and spells the ink back into the jar, stuffing the letter he was writing in between the pages of the book.

“No one,” he says quickly. “Where’ve you been?”

Two can play at that game. “Nowhere,” Harry replies.

He changes into pyjamas and climbs into bed.

“Alright, look, it’s Lavender,” Ron admits after five minutes of silence, just when Nev’s snores are starting to lull Harry to sleep.

“Oh?”

“I offered to put her in touch with Bill over the summer, in case she needed someone to talk to. About, you know, the bite. But she wrote back to me, and I wrote back to her, and Bob’s your uncle. Hermione might be upset, but what can you do? I’m a free man.”

Ron settles against the pillow with his hands behind his head, elbows splayed wide.

Harry rolls over to face him. “Would she be upset?”

“You know what she’s like. She pretends she’s not interested, but she’s playing hard to get. But hey, I’ve got options. There are plenty of fish in the sea.”

Harry stares at the ceiling of his four-poster and chooses his words carefully.

“Ron… I don’t think Hermione’s playing anything.”

He considers this. “You reckon? Eh, maybe. She’d probably rather spend time with a book than with a boyfriend anyway. Frigid.”

Harry bristles at this pronouncement but tries not to let it show. She hadn’t seemed frigid half an hour ago, when she’d been sighing into his ear and begging him to touch her. Just because she doesn’t swap spit in the common room like Ron and Lavender used to…

A secretive, burning sensation starts up in his chest at the thought that she’d opened the broom cupboard door and let him in, let him inside her.

He almost can’t believe it. It’s the sort of reckless, teenagerly thing he should have been doing earlier: having sex in inadvisable places, not defeating a chimaera in a hedge maze.

The memory of her climax plays on a loop inside his mind, and even though he has to be up again in six hours his body is awake and thrumming, desperate to experience it all over again. He falls asleep wondering: will there be a next time?

On a cold day in October, Lavender Brown returns from hospital. Harry and Hermione watch from the clock tower as Lavender rushes through the entrance hall to hug Parvati, then Ron, who were both waiting for her.

The skin on one side of her face is twisted and gnarled like the trunk of the willow, stained an angry red, while her left eye is ghostly white.

Ron organised a welcome party for her in the common room that evening. It seems their letter writing over the summer rekindled something that was never there in the first place. He’s stroking her crimped hair and laughing.

“He’s been writing to her,” Harry says. Hermione looks over, surprised.

“Has he? But he barely ever writes.”

“Are you upset?”

What follows is a very uncomfortable silence. Harry resists the cartoonish urge to pull at his collar.

“I’m not upset that Ron’s been writing to her, but I am upset that you think I would be upset by it.”

This is almost too complicated for Harry to understand, but he thinks he gets the message: he has said something wrong and is now in the doghouse.

“I didn’t say I thought you would be, I only asked because Ron said you might be.”

“Talking about me behind my back, were you?”

The hole he’s digging for himself is getting bigger and bigger. “We were talking about Lavender.”

“I suppose Ron thinks that if Lav-lav and I aren’t the best of friends, we must have been fighting over him. It couldn’t possibly be because I have absolutely nothing in common with her.”

“So, you’re not upset,” Harry asks, just to check, although he’s pretty sure she is. Below them Ron is carrying Lavender’s trunk up the marble staircase.

“Anyone can write to anyone they like,” Hermione huffs. “You could write to Lavender if you wanted to. I’m not stopping you.”

“What would I write to Lavender about?”

“I don’t know, the price of fish!”

She storms off before he can retort that he wouldn’t need to write to Lavender anyway, since she’s back in the castle. But perhaps that’s not the point.

Later, during the welcome party, he writes a letter to Bill, asking for advice on what to do when a witch is pissed off with you and you don’t know what you’ve done wrong.

It’s Hermione’s birthday on the nineteenth. Harry’s never forgotten that she bought him his Broomstick Servicing Kit, which was so generous and thoughtful that it makes all his gift ideas look rubbish in comparison. She still likes knitting, so he had the idea that he could learn how to make her something. He feels guilty for never showing enough of an interest in what she likes.

Mrs Weasley suggested a hat. She lent him a book called Knitting Without Tears.

But in the end, there were tears, because the stupid loops kept falling off the stupid sticks and the wool got all twisted around his fingers and if it wasn’t a gift for Hermione he would have stabbed himself with the knitting needles already.

But he couldn’t give up, she deserved something good. She was worth making the effort for. Pity that she's the only person around who could help him, but he can’t ask because he’s doing it in secret to surprise her.

A firstie catches him about to throw a wobbly inside the Quidditch equipment shed.

“Are you alright, sir?”

The honorific shocks him out of his self-pity and he has to choke back a laugh. He recognises her: it’s the lost first-year he helped find her way to the Astronomy tower. She looks four feet tall and extremely worried. Even with him sitting cross-legged on the floor, she’s not much taller than him.

“Yeah, I’m fine. You can call me Harry, by the way. I don’t suppose you know how to knit, do you?”

“Yes, sir. My granny taught me.”

“Really? Can you help? What’s your name?”

“Elizabeth,” she answers, and comes closer to peer at the red chaos hanging off the needle. “What is that?”

“A hat.”

Her eyes widen. “Oh, I see,” she says politely.

“Do you know how to join it together?”

“Um… I do, but I think you should fix these bits first. You’ve dropped a few stitches. Do you see the ladder?”

He doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but he’s happy for her to take over. She takes a small metal rod with a hooked end out of her robe pocket and starts twisting it like a fork around spaghetti, pulling and pushing the loops of wool through one other. After a few minutes it looks loads better, but she tells him there’s still more to be done.

“What are you doing in here?” he asks. “Only authorised students are allowed in the equipment shed.”

Little Elizabeth suddenly clams up, which tickles him no end. Like he’s going to lecture anyone about breaking rules. He’s only asking because he’s interested.

Finally he worms it out of her that she was trying to steal a school broom to practice flying. She’s never flown before, because her parents said it was too dangerous and she doesn’t want to look a fool in front of the rest of her class.

“Hey, I do coaching sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You could come along.”

She doesn’t seem enthused. She says there’ll be too many people there.

“Okay, how about this: I’ll give you some one-on-one flying lessons, and in exchange you can help me sew this hat together. Does that sound fair?”

Elizabeth holds out her tiny little hand for him to shake.

Harry thinks he may have just made a new friend.

Ron and Lavender get together, but they don’t do more than snog. Harry knows this because girls talk.

Lavender talks to Parvati, and Parvati talks to Padma, and Padma told Hermione about it because she thought Hermione deserved to know the truth.

And then Hermione told him. She says she doesn’t care.

He doesn’t know if it’s true, but it helps that she had her hand down his trousers when she said it.

“Brooms are like horses: they can smell fear.”

Elizabeth is only an inch off the ground but her eyes are screwed shut and she’s emitting a steady wail.

“I don’t like horses either!” she cries.

“Okay, come down, come down.”

He hovers his hand gently above her shoulder in case she loses control of the broom. As soon as her feet touch the ground she rolls off and sinks to her knees, clutching clumps of grass as if it’s the only thing stopping her floating away and off into outer space.

“See, you’re steering with your ankles, but you’ll get more control if you steer with your knees.”

“You’re just saying words,” she grumbles.

When Harry had asked Headmistress McGonagall if it was alright to give a younger student some extra help, he didn’t think the help would involve so much arguing. Not only had McGonagall said yes, but she’d actually welled up. She’d called him a fine young man.

Snape’s supposedly sleeping portrait had audibly scoffed.

“Did your friend like the hat?” asks Elizabeth.

“Oh, yeah, she did. Thanks for your help.”

Elizabeth had taught him how to make a pompom to go on the top of it. They sat in the Quidditch shed together on the eighteenth of September winding yarn around circles of cardboard.

Hermione had been gratifyingly surprised by her gift. They’d been celebrating in the Three Broomsticks with a bunch of other Gryffindors and Ravenclaws, having drinks. She’d tried the hat on immediately and hugged him, saying it was a perfect fit, though he privately doubted it.

Ron had got her a bar of Honeydukes chocolate bigger than her head and the latest unauthorised biography of herself. Lavender and Parvati had clubbed together and bought her a necklace.

She slid her arm around his waist as they walked back up to the castle together and he wondered if she might want to get him alone, but she went off to firecall her parents and he didn’t see her again that night.

He wasn’t expecting anything. Whenever she asked him so far, it had always been so shockingly unexpected.

Harry claps his hands.

“Ready to get back on the horse? By which I mean broom?”

Elizabeth sighs but jumps to her feet, smoothing out her robes. She calls “up” and the broom wobbles reluctantly off the ground and into her palm.

“Remember, you’re the boss,” he says. “The broom only does what you tell it to. It’s all about confidence.”

“More mumbo jumbo,” says Elizabeth.

Hermione moans and writhes.

The alcove window seat in the trophy room is at the perfect height for him to push deep inside her, to hold their bodies flush as they rock together. He might be grazing his knees on the stone wall, but he doesn’t care: he’s consumed with the hot, coiling pleasure, the fruity scent of her shampoo, the sight of her cleavage bouncing.

He’s doing his best to carry her over the edge into release, while simultaneously wanting to prolong it forever.

The times they’re not alone together have begun to blur into insignificance. Hermione is all he cares about.

No, that’s not true: he does care about exams, and he’s pleased that the students he’s helping learn to fly are making progress, but when he listens to his peers gossip at the breakfast table about who fancies who and who’s fallen out, he feels an incontrovertible distance. He’s not any older than them, but he feels it. Maybe it’s the war.

Maybe it’s the sex.

She always comes with a reason, claiming a headache from arithmancy research or feeling wound up from supervising detentions, but she only has to crook her finger and he’ll go on his knees for her.

Each time it’s like a bludger to the stomach: the knowledge that she wants it. Unpredictable and devastating.

She moans again, but the timbre is all wrong. It turns out she’s got leg cramp.

“You need to eat a banana,” he suggests helpfully.

She laughs. Her stomach muscles constrict and flutter against his palm.

“No, that’s to prevent cramp! You can’t just eat a banana whenever you get cramp… Okay, stop, stop for a minute.”

He stops. She pants, in discomfort rather than ecstasy, until it eventually eases off.

“That wasn’t my sexiest moment,” she groans, self-conscious and flushed.

He cups her face and gazes into her chocolate frog eyes. Her wild hair is escaping her plait and her chest is heaving; her skirt is rucked up around her waist and her lips are slick from where he’s kissed them.

“Are you kidding?”

She tilts her head. “What do you mean, am I kidding?”

He shakes his head, confused. He likes her just the way she is, leg cramp and all.

Everyone else is in costume for Hallowe’en, but Harry is spiralling because it’s the day his parents died and he should be visiting their grave. He should have gone every year, only no one ever told him where they were. Why didn't they? Someone should have, anyone. His Aunt Petunia, Dumbledore, Sirius, Remus.

Parvati twirls by dressed as the bride of Frankenstein.

The dance floor is packed full of monsters, but Harry’s leaning against the wall with his hands in the pockets of his plain old black dress robes feeling sorry for himself.

But he's allowed to feel sorry for himself, he thinks gloomily. It is sorry that his parents aren’t alive.

He’s not alone, though, because Crabbe’s ghost is sulking in the corner next to him, sitting half-on and half-through a giant pumpkin with his chin in his hands.

Neville sidles up to him, drinking punch out of a skull cup.

“You alright there?”

Harry can’t muster up the energy to lie. He can feel himself scowling even though he doesn’t mean to.

Neville leans in conspiratorially. “By the way, everything okay with you and Hermione?”

This unnerves him. “Yeah, why?”

Did she say something? Is she cross with him? Is their secret no longer a secret?

“You don’t seem to talk anymore. I thought you might have argued.”

“We talk,” he says. They do, they talk all the time. Except, he realises, they’re usually alone when they do. They don’t have much to say to each other at the breakfast table or in the common room, because they’ve said everything already behind tapestries and under staircases, in closets and alcoves and on the sofa in the display in the Muggle Studies classroom.

He wonders if she thinks about sex when they’re not having it. In public she behaves totally normally; she seems to be able to switch it on and off.

Not him. He’s always thinking about her.

“I don’t mind being piggy-in-the-middle,” Neville tells him. “If you need a go-between, I’ll help. I’d hate for you two to fall out.”

Hermione appears from the crowd and rushes up to them, bubbly and giggling. She’s wearing a glittery black dress and cat ears.

“Harryyy! Guess what I’ve had? I’ve had too. Much. Punch!” she sings, punctuating each word with a gentle biff on his chest. She grabs onto his hands and tries to swing him around.

“Mmmm,” he agrees, refusing to be swung. Neville grins.

“Never mind,” he says, and shoves off back to the dance floor.

“Harry, where’s your costume? These are your dress robes. Boring!”

“I shouldn’t be here,” he mumbles.

She stands on tip-toes to hear him better, but wobbles on her shiny heels and falls into his arms. “Oops! And where should you be?”

“Godric’s Hollow.”

Hermione sobers, understanding immediately.

“Then let’s go,” she says simply.

She drags him over to McGonagall and asks to use her Floo, and ten minutes later they’re stepping out of the fireplace in The Seven Swans.

She takes off the cat ears before they enter the graveyard. Shame. He thought they looked cute. She puts on the knitted hat he made her instead.

His knees give out when they find the place where his parents are resting. It doesn’t get easier, even though he never really knew them.

“Laminae resurrexit,” says Hermione, and a string of red rose petals flutter out of her wand into the night air. “Whoops, that’s not the right spell. Sorry, I had a bit to drink.”

She keeps trying, producing a sunflower, a daisy chain, a fluffy cloud of gypsophila and a bunch of daffodils.

Finally a bright orange tiger lily emerges proudly from the tip of her wand. She conjures six more and places them on the grave, enchanting a ribbon to loop around the stems and tie them into a bouquet.

“I bet everyone gave my mum lilies,” Harry mumbles, feeling exhausted beyond measure. “’Cause of her name.”

He slides his arms around Hermione’s waist and hugs her, resting his head on her shoulder.

“These are lilies,” she says, pointing at the bouquet.

He frowns. The flowers Hermione conjured look just like the flowers his aunt used to keep in vases all throughout the house.

“What are those?”

He points to a bucket of fresh purple flowers recently placed beside the grave.

She tells him they’re petunias.

The Christmas holidays pass far too quickly, as always. Hermione just had to one-up him: she presented him with a pair of gloves she knitted herself, with warming charms spun into the yarn. How did she do it, how did she make all the separate fingers? There are no holes at all. Maybe he’ll ask her to teach him.

He won’t have time to learn, though, because he needs to be working out strategies to make Elizabeth believe in herself. She won’t have practiced flying over the holidays and he predicts she’ll have convinced herself she’s forgotten everything. He knows she can do it, it’s just nerves.

December melts into January and classes start again, but everyone is sluggish and dull, preferring to spend time doing nothing with friends rather than apply themselves to studying.

Ron comes back from hanging out with Lavender one night looking like he just won the Quidditch World Cup. He sits on the edge of his bed, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, until Harry asks him what’s the matter.

“Mate… mate.”

Harry recognises that look from the mirror. He thinks he has an idea what happened.

“You and Lavender do it, then?”

Ron turns his wide-eyed gaze to Harry.

“She…” He mimes something, clumsily shaking his fist by the side of his cheek. “With her mouth.”

Harry snorts. “That’s good,” he grins, wondering if he should offer his congratulations.

“You’ve never…?” Ron asks.

He shrugs. If he said yes Ron would assume it had been from Ginny, which isn’t true, and would burst his bubble unnecessarily. He lets him think he hasn’t.

“It was like… it was… I can’t explain it. Good. Really good. You’ll find out what it’s like someday,” he chuckles, with such smugness Harry almost tells him.

He does know what it’s like. Searingly hot, and so slippery he almost lost his mind.

But Hermione said it made her jaw ache, and soppy as it sounds, he prefers doing other things. Things where he can touch her, and smell her, and feel her breath on his ear, hear the sounds she makes when she comes. Having that done to him felt great, sure, but there’s too much distance for his liking.

Five minutes later Ron comes and sits on the edge of Harry’s bed, speaking around a toothbrush.

“Hey, what about you and Romilda Vane?”

Harry sits up. “What about me and Romilda Vane?”

“She fancies you, doesn’t she? I bet she’d do it to you if you asked.”

“I’m not— I don’t even know Romilda.”

And he doesn’t want to know Romilda. She’s only interested in Harry because he’s famous, and she’s tried to drug him more than once. Even if he was desperate, which he isn’t, he could do better than that.

“But you could get to know her,” Ron points out.

“No thanks.”

A blob of toothpaste drips down Ron’s lip as he stares, bewildered. He must think Harry’s a real prude.

The common room is alive with banging and smoke. The fifth-years are celebrating the end of their mock OWL exams by setting off Weasley’s Wizard Whizzbangs, which squeal and multiply whenever they come into contact with a hard surface. There are plates of green jelly everywhere and Harry keeps getting his Charms homework sticky.

Ron usually sits with Lavender, but lately they’ve argued, so he’s by the fire with Harry and Hermione. She must be telling Parvati and Padma her version of things, because Ron keeps looking over at them, eyeing her gesticulations and straining his neck in an effort to overhear.

He’s jiggling his leg and Harry can tell it’s driving Hermione spare. At half eight she slams her enormous runes dictionary shut and scrapes a hand through her curls.

“I think I might… go to the library,” she mutters, but finishes this statement by catching Harry’s eye meaningfully.

“Have fun,” Ron says sarcastically, pulling a face behind her back as she climbs through the portrait hole. He unwraps chocolate sickles and stuffs them in his mouth, four at once.

“Uh, me too,” says Harry, pushing himself off the sofa and following her.

He catches up with her at the top of the marble staircase. She tells him she’s not really heading to the library, since it’s closed for the night.

“Then where are you going?

“I don’t know. I don’t suppose you want to…”

“…Take my mind off things?” he finishes. “If you do.”

He could take it or leave it tonight. If it’s there, he’ll always take it, but only if she wants to. He’s helping her out, after all. They're just friends.

They walk back to Gryffindor but don’t go in. Girls can access the boy’s dormitories in Hogwarts, but people might notice. They turn round again and walk back along the seventh floor corridor.

Hermione’s always the one to initiate things, and as a result she’s been the one responsible for the admin. He hasn’t appreciated before how difficult it is to find a place to be alone and undisturbed in the castle.

“Prefects' bathroom?” he suggests.

“Not in the bath, though.”

“Why not?”

“If you do it in water you can get all sorts of infections,” she explains. “Well, I can, I don’t know about your bits. Sadly it’s not as sexy as it sounds.”

“Oh.”

He almost suggests the Shrieking Shack, but then remembers who died there. They’ve walked up and down the same stretch of corridor three times when an unassuming wooden door appears in the wall out of nowhere.

“The Room of Requirement,” she gasps, turning the door handle and peeking inside. “It’s back! Oh, um… did I wish for that, or did you?”

He follows her in to a cosy, candle-lit room containing a large bed made up in white cotton sheets. On each side there’s a bedside table with space for a few books, and a soft rug on the floor to keep their feet warm. A curtained window looks out onto the lake.

“Both of us, I think.”

She flops on top of the covers, fully clothed. Usually they’re already in the throes of it by now, in an urgent race to release tension and get on with the day, grabbing a moment where they won’t be missed. But there’s a delicate silence, uncertainty hanging in the air.

Harry slips off his shoes and lies beside her, mentally thanking the Room for producing pillows that are just right. Hermione interlaces her fingers over her abdomen.

“Er, what do you wanna do? I’ll do whatever you want,” he says truthfully. “We could go to sleep if you’d rather. Only… you have to give me a clue.”

She frowns. “I can’t just tell you what to do.”

“Sure you can. I like when you tell me what to do.”

Hermione telling him what to do has saved his life in the past, but she looks doubtful.

“I’ll go, if you like. I need to work on my special revealio charms anyway.”

“Specialis revelio, it’s Latin. Honestly, I can’t believe you don’t speak— why are you laughing at me?”

“See, you’re good at telling me off,” he says. He knew the incantation.

Hermione’s face creases with anxiety.

“I don’t want to tell you off! I don’t like bossing people about, even if I happen to be very good at it.”

“No, no, I meant…” He grabs her hand and squeezes apologetically. “I meant you can tell me anything.”

She squeezes back. She’s silent for a while, thinking. Probably overthinking.

“I liked what you did the first time,” she says quietly.

He’s not sure which part. That they were lying down, or…?

“Kiss me,” she says, shy and courageous. “Everywhere.”

Oh. He’s already holding her hand, so he raises it to his lips and brushes his mouth across her knuckles.

She’s wearing far too many clothes, so he kneels at the foot of the bed and pulls on the laces of her boots, slipping them off her feet and placing them carefully at the side of the bed. He helps her roll off her tights, slowly, careful not to rip them, and once they’re removed he kisses the naked arch of her foot.

From there it’s only natural to kiss her ankle, her calf, and up her inner thigh, sucking and lingering. She squirms, chewing on her lip and making muted sounds. When he arrives at her sex, she speaks.

“Up here,” she demands.

Her mouth meets his in a delicious, eager press and she tugs at his shirt, using a wordless spell to undo all the buttons at once. She pulls it off his shoulders and skims her hands across his chest.

Gradually he undresses her, too. She wants to leave her vest on but allows him to slide a hand beneath it to cup her breast.

Her skin is hot beneath his hand, and soft, and distantly he realises it’s more than just sex. It’s comfort, and trust, and it’s vulnerable.

They take their time.

It’s better than flying, better than winning. He thinks he’ll never get used to this.

Seamus drops a pile of slippery jazz mags he filched from a dodgy stall in Camden market onto his trunk and invites his dorm-mates to feast upon them. They swarm to the bootleg pornography like wasps at a picnic.

Ron flicks open to the centre-fold where a woman in pink kitten heels and nothing else is showing off everything God gave her.

“Whoa.”

“Right?” asks Seamus, flashing his white teeth.

“Wowzer,” says Dean, after a low whistle. His eyes fix on a photograph of a petite Asian woman with her legs wrapped around her own head.

“Check this one out,” Seamus insists, thrusting a crinkled magazine into Neville’s hands and instructing him to turn the pages until a blonde woman with large breasts and vacant eyes is staring unseeingly back at them. “What do you think?”

“Um. Yeah. Big tits,” says Neville, then looks to the other boys for confirmation.

Harry peers over his shoulder. “They look fake,” he remarks.

“So?” says Seamus. “She’s smokin’.”

“Boobs or bum, everyone?” Dean asks. “If you had to pick.”

The results come in quick: two for boobs, two for bum. Harry’s is the deciding vote, but he can’t answer.

He can’t dissect women into parts like that. It’s not from the moral goodness of his heart, it’s just when he thinks about Hermione, he can’t separate it all: her voice, her smile, her stomach, her thighs. He can’t pick one thing. He needs all of it.

Seamus nudges him and leers. “Hey, lads, it’s what's inside that counts, am I right? Tight, you know what I’m saying?”

Ron comes down with a coughing fit and Neville looks frantically to Harry for guidance. Dean’s disappeared into his four-poster with one of the magazines and shut the curtains.

“How many girls have you actually been with, Seamus?” Harry asks, feeling fed up. The expression he’s met with is predictably shifty.

“Loads. They go to another school, you wouldn't know them.”

“Sure.”

“Really?” Ron asks genuinely. “Where? Beauxbatons? Camelot College?”

“All sorts of places,” says Seamus unconvincingly.

Harry rolls his eyes and climbs into bed, casting a silencing spell to shut out all the noise.

Whoever is responsible for the Valentine’s Day decorations at Hogwarts this year has regrettably followed in the footsteps of Gilderoy Lockhart.

It’s not quite as bad – no dwarves in cupid wings, and minimal pink balloons. It’s the students who are going too far. A third year boy got down on bended knee at the breakfast table and publicly declared his undying love for one of his classmates with a red rose between his teeth.

The singing cards are so shrill Harry thinks his ears might bleed. Lavender won’t stop opening hers. There are flowers everywhere, too. Along each of the house tables are glass bowls filled with fresh pink roses.

It's not that he minds flowers, or the colour pink. What he minds is the uneasy feeling that he should have done something. Add to that the knowledge that witches up and down the country are probably trying to send him illegal love potions. He gets his post screened now, by a private service for celebrities. He wouldn’t trust the ministry, even if Shacklebolt is Minister for Magic now.

He doesn’t think of Hermione as a flowery person. She’s a no-nonsense person, and since she can conjure any flower she likes, she’d probably tell him buying her a bouquet was a waste of time and money.

But it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it? She’d appreciate that he thought of her, even if she didn’t want a gift. But a Valentine’s Day gift is presumptuous when they haven’t made any sort of promise to each other. It’s more of an arrangement. It’s not romantic, it’s just…

Look, even Malfoy’s received flowers. Or a plant, at any rate: it’s got a tall stem and spiky purple petals. He stops craning his neck round at the Slytherin table to ask Neville, who’s sitting opposite him.

“Hey, what’s Malfoy holding?”

Neville looks at Harry like he’s crazy. “How should I know?”

“Oh, sorry, I… thought you were the plant guy.”

He shuts up, feeling wrong-footed. Is Nev not into herbology anymore? What else has changed since Harry spent his seventh year on the run? He still has that cactus, the Mimbulus Mimbletonia. Maybe he just doesn’t know that specific plant, and Harry’s embarrassed him by asking.

“Dragon’s Mouth orchid,” says Hermione, stirring honey into porridge. “I saw an illustration of one in Wizarding Wildflowers of North Carolina.”

“Thanks,” says Harry, forgetting why he cared in the first place.

A chorus of beating feathers signals the arrival of the post owls. A pretty barn owl drops a newspaper into Hermione’s hands and flutters down onto the breakfast table to mooch around. It nibbles a candy heart from a bowl and then spits it back out.

“How about that,” she says, showing Harry the front page. It’s a special edition of the Prophet featuring celebrity engagements. He squints at the black and white picture of an embracing couple and realises the man is Viktor Krum, only he’s grown his hair out. The accompanying text tells him the woman is Krum’s Scandinavian fiancée.

“Mmm,” he says neutrally, not sure how he’s meant to take this news. Ron catches Harry’s eye, looking as though he fears the hysterical wrath of a woman scorned.

But she doesn’t seem scorned. She turns the page and inspects a photograph of Clea Bextor and Emily Culpepper from the Harpies putting their hands together in the shape of a heart.

“So, uh, you’re not disappointed?” Ron ventures. Harry silently thanks him for taking the bullet.

Hermione fixes Ron with a contemptuous look strong enough to stun a doxy.

“Do you really think I’ve been pining over a wizard I had three dances with, five years ago?”

“I would be,” says Lavender. “I still miss Boris. What a hunk.”

Boris, Harry remembers, was a tall boy from Beauxbatons with flaxen hair, large hands and an indecipherable French accent.

She and Parvati sigh wistfully, and the tips of Ron’s ears burn red.

He doesn’t get to talk to her alone until after dinner.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” he says, as they stride through a hallway whose walls are plastered with cuddling couples.

Hermione looks at him sharply, about ready to bite his head off. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. I didn’t get you anything,” he says, feeling like a total cad.

She rolls her eyes – rolls her whole head in fact – exasperatedly. “That’s fine, I didn’t expect you to.”

Oh. Because they’re not together, or because she views him as a thoughtless, bumbling incompetent?

He steers her into an alcove behind a suit of armour. Mrs Norris stalks past wearing a pink ribbon.

“Do you want anything?” he asks.

“No. Not today… Alright, a hug, maybe.”

He opens his arms and she buries her face in the fabric of jumper, inhaling and exhaling deeply. She tells him she’s exhausted. Female troubles.

“I’ll carry this for you, if you want,” he offers, gently tugging at the strap of her bookbag.

She sighs. “I don’t think it’s very feminist of me to have you carry my bag.”

“Er. I won’t tell if you don’t.”

She gives in and hands it to him. “Thanks.”

“Dormitory or library?”

“Bed,” she says, yawning. “As soon as possible…”

The door to the Room of Requirement is solid and waiting for them on their way up to Gryffindor tower. They stop to look at it.

“Want to sleep here?”

She hesitates. “With you?”

“If you like.”

He wouldn’t mind sleeping somewhere else for a change, without anybody snoring or leaving the window open or crashing in from “studying” with Ginny at four in the morning.

“But just sleep,” she affirms.

“Yeah. I won’t stay if you don’t want me to.”

“I want you to,” she says, and pulls him inside.

There’s another door on the inside now, leading to a bijou ensuite bathroom. Hermione disappears into it and a minute later he can hear the sounds of her brushing her teeth.

It’s not yet nine, but the sun sets early this time of year, and looking out the window he can see the lights are on in Hagrid’s hut. Moonlight casts silver dashes across the rippling surface of the lake. He watches as the giant squid thrashes a tentacle, trying to grab hold of one of the rowboats and pull it underwater.

Hermione comes back wearing pyjama bottoms and a fair isle jumper, then burrows so deep under the covers that all he can see is her hair.

Harry’s not ready to sleep, so he pens a letter by candlelight. A while ago she’d told him that anyone can write to anyone they like. So he writes a letter to Sirius, even though he can’t send it.

They’ve spent the past three nights in the Room together, because even if his dormmates notice his bed is empty they’ll never suspect who he’s with. He doesn’t mind if they do, but they won’t, because they’re all woefully unobservant. Whenever he’s been missed he’s told people he was in the Owlery.

They’re not having sex. Hermione’s sitting up in bed making notes in a book of French poetry. She has menstrual cramps and every minute or so she scrunches up her face and then exhales very carefully.

He wishes he could help, but he's useless. He wants to tuck her in and feed her egg and soldiers.

She pulls at the strap of her bra beneath her shirt for the fifth time and winces.

“Take it off,” he says.

She throws a horrible scowl his way.

“I’m not trying to cop a feel, I swear,” he says, raising his palms in surrender. “Only, you look uncomfortable.”

“I am uncomfortable.”

“So why don’t you take it off?”

She mumbles crossly, and the gist of it is that her boobs aren’t the right shape.

“Not the right shape for what?” he asks, astounded.

“They’re not round enough.”

He’s at a complete loss. Not round enough to sleep? Or is there some new sex thing he doesn’t know about? Come to think of it, she always leaves her vest on, or her bra. He’d put it down to the castle being so chilly, or the urgency, but he realises he’s never seen them in the light. She doesn’t want him to see.

“Who’s telling you these things about your body?”

“You don’t understand,” she growls. She claps her book shut and rolls away from him.

Maybe he does understand, sort of. He used to be a lot skinnier and weedier, and he hates people staring at his scar. Fred and George tried to persuade him he was lean, but he’d overheard Mrs Weasley using the term malnourished.

He isn’t a perfect male specimen, but there's no point feeling bad about it.

“Do you think Eloise should put a bag over her face, to cover her acne scars?” he says, trying to make a point.

“Of course not!” she cries, rolling back over so she can thump him through the duvet.

“See, she has nothing to hide. She shouldn’t feel bad, and neither should you.”

“I can’t help how I feel. They’re not perfect like Ginny’s.”

He props his head up on his elbow and rests his other hand on the curve of her hip.

“I haven’t actually seen Ginny’s,” he tells her. “I’ve seen Romilda’s, though. She flashed me once during a match.”

He doesn’t mention Seamus’ pornography, because he won’t be accused of objectifying women when he didn’t buy the damn magazines. He didn’t like the pictures anyway.

“Slag,” Hermione mutters under her breath. “Get a good look, did you?”

“Uh, not really. I was two hundred feet in the air and I was looking for the Snitch.”

She rolls her eyes at him, amused and exasperated.

Perfect, she’d said. He doesn’t even know what she means by that. His bits definitely aren’t perfect. But they’re good enough, he hopes. They work, and she hasn’t complained so far.

“Have you ever seen another guy’s… thing?” he asks.

“Mmm. Yes.”

“Krum’s?”

“No! Do you know I got a letter last week from a columnist at Witch Weekly asking me how far we’d gone? That’s what they call journalism. It’s none of their business. Besides, he really only watched me study. I think he was shy.”

“Whose did you see, though?”

She tells him she walked in on George once in the shower at the Burrow, in the holidays. She was in fifth-year, so he works out that George must have been seventeen.

“How did you know it was George?”

“Well, it can’t have been Fred, because he was really embarrassed. Also, I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard some very vivid descriptions from Lavender. She could be making it up, I suppose. Do you happen to know if it bends to the left?”

“Um, his left or her left?”

She thinks about it. “Hers.”

Harry grimaces at what’s in his mind’s eye. “Yeah, she has seen it. And he said she’d— well, it’s not my business.”

“Good for him, if what I’ve heard is true.”

Hermione pulls at her bra strap again and Harry puts his hand over hers, stilling her movements and slipping the elastic off her shoulder.

“I want you to be comfortable. I promise I’m not judging how you look. There’s no breast exam you need to get top marks in.”

“Actually, a breast exam is what it’s called when you check for lumps.”

“Do you want me to check for lumps?” he jokes.

She glowers at him, all fire and brimstone. That’s a no, then.

But she sits up to unhook the fiddly clasp at the back and performs an adroit manoeuvre that ends with her pulling the bra out of her sleeve, without even taking her pyjama top off. It’s like a magic trick.

“Happy now?” she demands.

“If you are,” he says seriously, and lays down to sleep.

In the springtime Hermione grows cautiously experimental. The room stays open for them, so they make use of it.

Ron hasn’t noticed. Harry feels the distance stretching between them like the ravine beneath the covered bridge, traversable only with careful footsteps, but he knows he can’t blame him. It’s his own fault for keeping it a secret. But what could he say? It’s not like him and Hermione are together. He doesn’t know what they are.

In more melancholy moments he admits to himself that he still resents Ron for abandoning them. He said all was forgiven as soon as he returned, but it wasn’t.

Hermione’s kneeling astride him, warm hands on either side of his ribcage. It still feels new to do this in the light, even if it’s only candlelight. It’s turned her smooth skin golden.

“I don’t… should I be moving up and down, or back and forth?”

“Whatever you like.” He doesn’t care, he could stay like this for hours. He slides his palms over the curve of her arse. It’s temptingly grabbable.

“Hmm…”

“Avifors,” he suggests. It’s a Transfiguration spell that took his year group weeks to master, since the wand movement is extremely complex, unlike a swish and a flick.

She frowns in concentration before realising he’s teasing. It’s a funny sight: her looking amused and unamused at the same time. She crosses her arms over her bare breasts, sadly covering them up.

“Just for that, I’m not moving at all.”

But she is moving, because his laughing is dislodging her: she wobbles and clenches around him and he hisses though his teeth.

“Sorry, are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m— yeah.” Of course he’s alright, but now he has to think of Kreacher’s horrible face to distract himself or this’ll be over before it’s begun.

“Does it hurt?”

“Hermione, it doesn’t hurt.”

“But you’d tell me if it does?”

“I don’t think anything you do will hurt me.”

She takes this as challenge and slides her palm over his nipple, then twists it. He doesn’t react.

“No?”

“They’re not as sensitive as yours,” he says, leaning up on his elbows to capture one of hers in his mouth, flicking his tongue. Her mouth falls open and she bucks her hips instinctively.

“Do that again,” she breathes.

Afterwards, when the sweat is cooling and it’s vaguely coming back to Harry that life exists outside of this room, she finds his hand under the blanket and squeezes. He hadn’t noticed how close to sleep he was; the sensation drags him back to a fuzzy state of consciousness, but only for a brief moment. His eyelids are too heavy all of a sudden.

“Harry?”

“Mm?”

“…Never mind.”

Did she want to tell him something?

Tomorrow, he thinks hazily, he’ll tell her to… to tell him… whatever it is.

She snuggles warmly into his chest, fitting against him like she’s always belonged there.

Harry’s trying to supervise a game of Hot Potato with the second-years in his Thursday flying session, but the girls are more interested in inventing new song lyrics than catching the Quaffle. Whenever he blows his whistle they fall out of formation, giggling, pleased that they made him cross. It’s getting really annoying.

“In a circle, you lot! Oi, are you listening? Enid, put your wand away or I’ll—”

He cuts off abruptly at the sight of two eighth years on the ground below them, a blond and a brunette walking together along the gravel path from the greenhouses to the fountain courtyard.

It’s Hermione and Draco Malfoy. She passes Malfoy a scroll. When they reach the archway he ducks his head to speak in her ear, covering his mouth behind his hand so no one can read his lips.

Harry and Malfoy had, by unspoken agreement, reached a truce this year, which translated into leaving each other alone at all times. But he senses that is soon to be over. Is this what Hermione had wanted to tell him?

Harry’s so busy watching the pair of them that he misses Enid Nightshade shooting a jinx at Mildred Hubble, who falls off her broom and down towards the sand beneath the goal hoops. He steers his Firebolt into a sharp dive and catches her. The silly girls cackle and whoop in delight.

Harry feels an uncontrollable sting of jealousy when he finds Hermione and Neville in the library with their heads together. Nev absconds, looking guilty, and Harry drops into the seat he’d vacated.

“He was giving me some valerian tea,” she says. He believes her, but she shows him the packet as proof anyway.

He folds his arms on the desk and uses them as a pillow, feeling awkward. He wonders how she managed to bring it up, the first time.

‘Can we have sex, please?’ is too blunt. ‘Come to bed with me, because I’ll die if I can’t be close to you’ is too honest. He can’t say either of those; he’s English.

“Are you busy?” he mumbles.

She tries to stick a quill behind her ear and finds there’s one already there.

“I’ve got about a million and one things to do,” she says, arranging her papers.

“Oh.”

“But I don’t really fancy doing any of them,” she admits. “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” he says.

She carries on working, scribbling away at an essay. A while later she taps her wand to the parchment to spell the ink dry and then rolls it into a scroll. He’s still resting his head on his arms, so she leans downs to murmur in his ear.

“I’m finished now. Did you need something?”

Need. It’s a good word. When does ‘want’ become ‘need’?

He raises his head and drops it down again on her shoulder.

“Ah. Want to take your mind off things?” she whispers, quiet as a sparrow.

He does. He’s never asked before; she always comes to him. But seeing as the only thing on his mind is her, it probably won’t help.

They go to the Room together.

It’s slow, but powerful and rhythmic like an ocean tide. He feels washed away, out to sea, lonely now he’s conscious that she might prefer someone else. He didn’t know sex could feel this complicated.

He doesn’t want to let go of her, after. She squirms in his arms, but she’s only trying to reach up kiss his temple. She presses her lips against the lightning scar and tells him to go to sleep.

“I don’t see why you need to hang around with him so much.”

He stabs a roast potato with gusto. The chatter in the Great Hall is typical for dinnertime, but it’s grating.

“We’re not hanging around,” Hermione says mockingly. “We’re working on a project together. What’s wrong with that?

“He might get the wrong idea.”

“That I care about my Arithmancy marks?”

“He’s up to—”

“He’s not up to something,” she says shortly. Neville twists around on the bench seat to look worriedly at the Slytherin table, as if Malfoy’s going to come and steal his Remembrall.

“He’s using you for your brains, then.”

“We’re fairly evenly matched academically, so I don’t think he is.”

Malfoy’s noticed Neville’s staring and is narrowing his eyes at the Gryffindor table suspiciously.

“Okay, fine.” Harry throws down his fork onto a napkin and leans forward, speaking low and quietly. “I think he fancies you.”

Hermione looks unimpressed. It’s probably not a conversation they should be having in public, but he doesn’t care.

“That’s allowed,” Parvati interrupts. Quite rudely, Harry thinks.

“Why wouldn’t he?” says Ginny, joining in while also painting her fingernails midnight blue. “You’re hot, smart, and you helped save the world. You could do better, though.”

“Any man would be lucky to have you, Hermione,” Lavender adds graciously. Ron is a ginger nodding dog beside her.

Ginny agrees. “Don’t be jealous, Harry, it’s pathetic.”

“Jealous!?” he chokes.

He is jealous: agonisingly, savagely jealous, but Ginny shouldn’t know that. He looks furtively at Hermione but she’s got her nose in a book: Arithmantical Equations for the Equivocally Argumentative.

“Yes, don’t be jealous of Hermione. Just ‘cause no one fancies you anymore, it doesn’t mean no one’s allowed to fancy her!”

“Yeah, Harry, you’re old news,” says Seamus, who’s finding this conversation hilarious.

Throughout the rest of dinner, Harry stews, and Hermione does a great impression of someone who isn’t noticing.

He’s going to tell Malfoy to stay away from her.

The map tells him Malfoy is in one of the greenhouses, so he storms through the castle at dusk, bracing for a fight.

He finds Neville there, too, under the wisteria trellis in Greenhouse Three. Nev’s pushing Malfoy against the shelving.

Harry almost bursts through the door to separate them but then realises that Neville’s kissing Malfoy. A pot of tarragon falls off the shelf and rolls across the ground, trailing dark earth.

They’re snogging, actually. Properly snogging. Harry turns tail and heads back to the tower, shocked speechless.

When he slips into the Room of Requirement Hermione doesn’t acknowledge him. She’s reading haughtily in bed, in a way that involves vicious page flipping. He squeezes her foot through the duvet.

“Okay, you were right, I was wrong. Let’s take that as a given in future.”

“About what?” she enquires icily.

“Malfoy.”

“I told you so,” she says emphatically, and shuts her book without a bookmark, which makes it evident that she was only pretending to read. “Malfoy would never be interested in me.”

Yeah, well. He knows that now.

When he thinks about it, Malfoy’s always been delicate. And sort of pretty, rather than handsome. Harry doesn’t want to stereotype, but there’s something prissy about the way Malfoy talks. Or maybe he’s just posh.

He had no idea about Neville.

“He told me about it in the library the other day,” Hermione explains. “I promised not to tell anyone, but trust you to be snooping around.”

“Sorry,” he murmurs, crawling on top of her over the covers and kissing her. He meant to be chaste but he ends up sinking into it, going the whole nine yards: brushing her hair behind her ear and sucking on her lower lip. He wonders, and not for the first time, what he’s gotten himself into.

Hermione pulls back and clears her throat. “What would you have done if Draco had fancied me?”

“I dunno. Something stupid, probably.”

“Why?”

He shrugs. Because no one else should touch her. Because he wants to be hers.

“Because it’s Malfoy,” he says.

She exhales with a tinge of disappointment. “Some things never change.”

“Weird,” Ron pronounces.

He’s sitting between Harry and Hermione at the stone circle with his arms around both their shoulders, like old times.

Far below them, Neville is shin-deep in the lake sorting kelp from gillyweed. Malfoy is sitting against a tree on the bank, talking to him and practising the Patronus charm. He can only get a silvery wisp, but Harry notices it’s getting stronger.

“It’s not weird,” Hermione scolds. “Don’t be narrow-minded.”

“Hey, I don’t mean cause they’re blokes! You know I don’t mind about Charlie. I didn’t mind Sergei either, except when he pinched my bum.”

Charlie’s Romanian boyfriend had pinched a lot of bums during Christmas at the Burrow that year. Percy wrote a cease-and-desist letter.

“It’s weird cause it’s them,” Ron continues, and Harry privately agrees. “It doesn’t make any sense. Malfoy was such a twat to him.”

“He was nasty to all of us. Maybe that’s his way of flirting.”

“No, no way.”

Ron mimes vomiting with such intensity Harry worries he’s really gonna hurl. He’s got to agree, that sounds crazy. But then again, Hermione is always right.

“We weren’t here last year; things changed,” she says. “Neville told me Draco was passing information from the other side.”

“What?” Harry sits up. “He didn’t mention that during his trial!”

“Yes, well, who would have believed him?”

“Blimey. I guess a lot can change in a year,” Ron sighs, leaning back against the stone and stretching his freakishly long legs out onto the grass. “I can’t believe Neville’s got a boyfriend. You know he went to the Yule Ball with my sister?”

A lot can change in a day, Harry thinks.

“They haven’t put a label on it yet,” Hermione tells him. “Don’t go around saying the word boyfriend.”

“Pfft, not boyfriends, my arse. It’s plain as day. I’ll put a label on it for them.”

It’s ironic, really, since Ron doesn’t seem to have spotted what’s going on right under his nose.

Hermione receives a wedding invite with a plus one. Her Muggle aunt is coming back from Australia because she wants to have her second wedding as far away as possible from her first husband.

She calls to Ron from the sofa as he steps through the portrait hole and crosses the common room.

“Want to go with me?” she asks, waving the invitation. “Free food, and there’s a—”

“You had me at free food,” he says, grabbing the card and reading it. “And a free bar!”

“Well, if you’d let me finish…”

Hermione and Ron’s friendship has greatly improved since he’s settled with Lavender. Harry thinks Ron needs to spend time around people who aren’t excelling him. Bill and Percy were both Head Boy, Charlie was Quidditch captain, and even though the twins failed all their exams and dropped out of school they became successful with the joke shop. Plus Hermione’s a genius.

Harry hasn’t done anything extraordinary since killing Voldemort, but that’s still enough to overshadow him.

“If I tell the guests you’re my boyfriend, that might stop my nosy relatives interfering in my love life,” she says.

The bottom of Harry’s stomach drops out. He looks up from chapter five of Training Techniques for Fearful Flyers, not believing what he’s hearing.

“Sounds like fun,” says Ron. “Can I wear a disguise? Breaking into the ministry that time was bloody stressful, but I kind of miss the adrenaline.”

They’ve both gone mental.

“Won’t Lavender mind?” Harry points out. He prays this’ll be the sticking point: she’ll never let him go, let alone be Hermione’s fake date. To a wedding, of all things.

But Lavender agrees, saying it sounds like a laugh.

He blurts it out, in bed, without meaning to.

“Why not me?”

Her legs are wrapped around his waist, her arms twined around his neck. Her cheeks are flushed and her collarbone is glistening with sweat. It’s beautiful and overstimulating.

“Ah! Harry— what?”

“You asked Ron—” He thrusts, and she gasps. “—To the wedding.”

“I thought you hated stuff like that,” she says, confused, aroused, panting with effort. “You can be my fake boyfriend if you want.”

He does hate stuff like that. Formal clothes, meeting strangers, stupid small talk… He doesn’t even want to go.

He’s been braced on his elbows above her but he collapses, pressing her into the mattress and his face into the pillow beside her head, hiding. She holds him, her fingers dancing an uncertain rhythm across the back of his neck.

“So… I’m good enough to be your fake boyfriend, but not your real boyfriend.”

He feels himself growing soft, and shifts on the bed so their sticky bodies are side by side, shame blossoming in his chest. They have a routine now, curiously adult and domestic, and he's ruining it all by wanting too much. He's possessive and jealous and insignificant. She's just taking her mind off things.

She keeps her hand on the back of his neck, looking at him with wide eyes, pupils blown twice their size.

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“…Asking.”

She looks stunned and sits up, pulling a blanket up to her chest. “If you wanted to be my date to the wedding, I thought you would have asked. I didn’t think… do you like me that way?”

“What way?”

They’re alone, but she whispers anyway, anxious and quick. “Do you want me to be your girlfriend?”

“What do you want?” he asks, like a coward. He closes his eyes.

When he opens them again, tears are rolling down her cheeks, falling like summer rain.

“I want you to tell me what you want,” she says wetly, fiercely. She sounds hurt, and it makes his heart ache.

“I’m not good at this,” he complains, feeling raw and pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes to hold back tears. “I…”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know how! Hermione, I— I don’t know how to tell you how much I love you. I don’t know how. I know we were just… trying it out at first, because we thought we were gonna die, and then we were, like, taking our minds off things, but somewhere along the way it became something else. For me.”

She sniffles and smiles a wobbly smile at him. “That’s a pretty good summary of the situation.”

He conjures a handkerchief for her. It comes out green with orange Kneazles.

“I worry about how much I love you, Harry. You’ve gotten me into all sorts of trouble.”

These words are enough to make his heart flip over. He didn’t realise how much he needed to hear them.

He buries her face in his neck, so close he can’t breathe, but still wishing he could be even closer. His thumb skims the underside of her breast, and she lifts her hand to cradle the back of his head.

“I almost told you, a few times,” she tells him. “Thing is, you tend to fall asleep very quickly. I wanted more, I thought maybe there was already more between us. I didn't know how you felt. I hoped...”

“I love you,” he says again. It’s freeing.

“I love you too. Do you want other people to know?”

“Er. Yeah. Ron might go ballistic.”

“Mm. Ginny’s going to kill me for not telling her.”

He really wants to tell Elizabeth, too.

“We’ll sort it out,” Hermione promises. “Together.”

Harry never thought he’d be playing Malfoy at chess in the Gryffindor common room on a Sunday evening. Neville’s flitting around anxiously, as if he thinks they might start duelling.

“Checkmate,” he says.

Malfoy frowns and moves Harry’s chess piece back to where it was. “You’re shit at chess, Potter. The bishop can’t move forwards.”

“Oh. Yeah. I’m better at Exploding Snap.”

The eighth years have taken over: him, Malfoy and Neville, Seamus and Dean, Lavender and Parvati, and Ginny and Luna too, taking up all the good chairs. The lower years are all in bed.

Between them they’ve had four bottles of Ogden’s raspberry liqueur and Harry’s feeling brilliantly tipsy. When Hermione appears through the portrait hole he stands up out of his chair and trips over, like an idiot.

“Well, he left at her the altar,” she announces in greeting, wearing a baby blue dress with delicate straps and a long, flowing skirt. Ron appears behind her, carrying their bags.

Seamus and Dean roar at this scandalous news. “What? Seriously? So your aunt didn’t get married?”

“No, she did. She married the best man.”

While the room is noisy with shocked yells and drunken laughter, Hermione sits on Harry’s lap and kisses him full on the mouth.

He supposes that’s one way to tell people. When he pulls back Ron is staring at them, gobsmacked. He points a finger.

“How long’s this been going on?”

Draco pinches Neville on the arm. “You owe me a galleon.”

“Uh, a while,” Harry says to Ron, sliding his arms around the silk at Hermione’s waist.

She moves his bishop diagonally.

“Checkmate,” she tells Malfoy, and sticks her tongue out.

“How long’s a while?”

“Here, Ron,” calls Dean. “Pass us those bottles, will you?”

Distractedly, Ron casts Wingardium Leviosa with a swish and a flick. Harry’s face burns red as Hermione laughs in his ear, reminding him of the very first time, that helpful trick.

She produces a slice of wedding cake she saved for him wrapped in a napkin and tells him all about the ceremony, dipping a finger in the chocolate buttercream and sucking it clean.

Ron glances over at them at intervals throughout the night, trying to work out when it started. Things might be tense between them for a while. He’ll want to know why Harry didn’t tell him.

They’ll talk about it. But it’s a conversation for another day.

“Alright, show me what you’ve got.”

It’s their final coaching session before the end of the year. He’s charmed golden rings around the pitch – and some red ones that’ll shrink when she approaches – and told Elizabeth to fly through them.

He clicks the stopwatch and watches her soar through every single one.

Hermione, watching from the stands, gets up and applauds.

“I did it!” Elizabeth screams. She lands on the ground, alights her broom and spins around with her hands in the air, whooping.

Harry hugs her. “See, I knew you could.”

“You kept saying, but I didn’t believe you. Wow!”

“Wait till your Mum and Dad see what you can do.”

Floorboards creak close by as Hermione descends from the stands. Elizabeth motions for Harry to bend down so she can whisper in his ear.

“Did you tell your friend ‘I love you’ yet?”

He pushes his glasses up his nose and grins. “Er, yes, I did, actually.”

“And did she say ‘I love you’ back?”

“Yes.” Every day.

Elizabeth beams triumphantly. “See, I knew she would.”

End.

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