So Much Together You'd Think We Were One

A/N - Okay, so, now that you're all salivating, here is the promised smut! I hope that it's so steamy it fogs your computer screen! Thank you all for being patient so that I could get this just right. Also, again, thank you all for the amazing reviews. The numbers have been staggering as well as the fantastic support.

It can now be reliably reported that this fic will be complete in eleven chapters. As amused as I am to say that this fic ends with Chapter Eleven (yay for tasteless bankruptcy jokes), I'm going to be very sad to see it go. In any case, I just thought I'd let you all know that this little ditty will be complete in the not-too-distant future. I hope you're enjoying the ride because Severus and Hermione sure will in this chapter. *points to drastic jump to an NC-17 rating* Mwuahahahaha.

Love and snuggles,

~~ ** Lady Tuesday ** ~~

Chapter Nine – So Much Together, You’d Think We Were One

The keys in Hermione’s hands rattled loudly as her fingers fumbled from cold and nerves. She dropped the ring twice as she tried to insert a key in the lock only to realize that it was the wrong one. He was standing so near. Too near. She felt the heat of his body all around her as if it were a palpable force, and the rhythmic puffs of his breath ruffled the top most curls at the back of her head.

“Steady,” he murmured near her ear.

She jumped at the sound, so close to her skin, and couldn’t help the way her pulse began to race as his long hand slid down her forearm to curl over hers. He took hold of the ring of keys and unlocked the door as he wrapped around her.

“The charms,” he muttered, rousing her from the moment of pleasant torpor as she absorbed his presence. “Release the charms on the door.”

She mumbled a few words, and the telltale fizzle of her wards coming down admitted them into the house. The minute he pushed open the front door, she stumbled across the threshold, suddenly compelled to move away from him. He followed her wordlessly as if nothing was amiss. Perhaps he didn’t realize anything was. Unable to explain her sudden anxiety, Hermione crossed from the hall into the sitting room swiftly, strode across the room, and gripped the mantelpiece so tightly that the knuckles of both hands whitened with the strain. She stared hard at the scatter of framed photos from various stages of her life, listening to the slow echo of his boots as he crossed from the front hall into the sitting room. He seemed to be taking in the surroundings, untroubled by the dim lighting. She heard him stop near the faded wingback under the long, goose-necked lamp, her favorite reading spot. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to look at him.

“Despite our actions just now,” he said softly, but it made her jump anyway, “my offer to abandon this plan still stands.”

He didn’t move any closer.

“No,” Hermione made herself say. “No, I want to. I do. I just—” She couldn’t force the right words from her mouth, but he seemed content to wait. “It’s just strange, you know? Now that it’s all so real, it’s a bit much to swallow.”

“Well, you can ease your mind on that point. I haven’t asked you to swallow anything just yet.”

Hearing the smirk in his voice, Hermione laughed, but it was a weak sound, and she still couldn’t bring herself to face him. She stiffened as she heard him approach her, her body leaping with excitement as she felt the warmth of him at her back.

His voice, when it came, was soft in volume, but silky with promise. “I know it’s overwhelming,” he murmured soothingly against her temple. Somehow he managed to be so close and yet not touch her. “It is for me as well. You are the last person I would have suspected to make such a connection with. But the fact is that it exists, and it is far more than just the agreement regarding a child now. Meeting in person has obviously only confirmed that. But I will reiterate my point: if it is my identity that bothers you—”

“I don’t want to quit,” she insisted firmly.

“—but you’d still like to stay the course,” he said as calmly as if she hadn’t spoken, “there are … measures that could be taken to ease your anxiety.”

“What do you mean, ‘measures’?” she asked, perplexed.

“There are ways to disguise things,” he said quietly. “To change the face, the voice …”

The offer of a spell or potion to change his appearance hung in the air, and though he seemed completely willing, Hermione could hear the telltale contradiction in his voice. A hardness crept into the deep, rich baritone, and sadness, too. Perhaps even disappointment. Her heart wrenched. Somewhere inside, Hermione’s instinct and her heart told her brain to shut up.

“I don’t want you to change yourself,” she said. “It’s not that it’s you. I mean, you, the man. It’s just … bizarre. Almost farcical. Thinking of being seduced by Professor Snape.” She gave an unsteady laugh. “I’m sure there are plenty of Slytherin girls who would have come up with some strange fantasy on that level, but … I don’t know, it’s just a very quick and dizzying shift of perception. It’s not that I’m not attracted to you, because I am. Good Lord, I’m—”

“Do you want me?”

His voice was suddenly gruff near her ear. The sensation of the usually smooth tones being worked over with sandpaper, roughness from arousal and impatience, sent lightning through her blood.

“Very much,” she managed.

She felt him angle his chin to move away the curls at her neck, and Hermione drew in breath sharply as his lips touched against the tender column of her neck. His long, slender fingers moved to her throat, unclasping her cloak and pushing it off her shoulders, all the while keeping in constant contact with her singing skin. The heavy item dropped to the floor, unnoticed, as he caught her earlobe in his teeth just for a moment.

“Then forget Professor Snape,” he said. “Forget Miss Granger. Think only of Joy and Tobias.”

His fingers traced her exposed collarbone momentarily before they skimmed over her shoulders and down her arms.

“Think of Hermione and Severus.”

He dipped into the hollow of her elbows for far too short a time before moving down to stretch his arms out over hers, his big hands covering her fingers that were still cool from the journey outside. He braced his feet on either side of hers and wrapped his much larger frame around her, giving her the sensation of being utterly and deliciously trapped.

“And think of how much those two people are going to enjoy themselves trying to make a baby. We are the sort of people to be completely thorough, after all.”

Hermione started to laugh again, but the sound quickly morphed into a hum of pleasure as Severus drew her hands up from the mantle and brought them over her head, arching backwards until they laced around his neck, surrendering the sensitive underside of her arms to his touch. She expected his fingers to be cold; after all, he was tall and long-limbed, and that usually lent itself to poor circulation, even if one hadn’t spent nearly forty years living in a dungeon. But the hands that caressed her so smoothly, so sure of themselves, were warm and lithe. Hermione shivered with pleasure as he moved from her forearms to the underside of her upper arms, brushing against her armpits just long enough to get her to giggle and squirm with pleasure. Her nipples hardened to aching points, a result of his attentions and the stark contrast between his searing body heat and the coolness of the room around them. A loud gasp left her when one hand moved from her arm to let his fingertips dance a circle around the peaked rise of her nipple, the other hand flattening against her ribcage to press her back against his body.

“God, Severus,” she exclaimed hoarsely. “Oh, God, please don’t stop.”

He pulled at the delicate bud of her nipple through the light fabric of her robes, chuckling into her ear. “Madam,” he said with a low rumble of laughter that tingled against her back, “there aren’t enough Galleons in the world to convince me to stop now.”

She nearly wept with pleasure, closing her fists around the tail of hair at the back of his head and pulling unconsciously. The hand at her stomach clenched a hold on her robes, sliding the silky material against her skin as his left hand slid underneath the triangle of green to cup and squeeze her left breast. A wordless exclamation left her, and Hermione arched her back unconsciously, crushing her chest harder against the maddeningly patient movements of his hand. Severus groaned loudly, barely able to stand the feeling of her firm, round bottom pressing against his aching erection. She murmured an impassioned cry of encouragement as he kneaded her breast, undulating against the hardened length of him.

“Tell me what you feel,” he said, his voice a cross between a plea and a command.

“Fevered,” she gabbled hurriedly. “Desperate.”

“Desperate for what?” he asked. He tipped his head down and nipped at her bare shoulder.

“You!” She felt nearly mad with wanting now, her blood hot, her body screaming. “Oh, you.”

He smirked, unable to resist the amusement in reducing the most talkative woman he knew to one or two word answers. “Where do you want me?”

She grabbed his hand on her stomach and pushed it lower until his fingers chafed her robes against the thrumming spot at the center of her legs. “Here,” she said. “I want you here. And everywhere.”

Severus pushed his fingers tighter against her body and feeling her quaver with need. “It aches here?”

“Yes,” she moaned.

“You feel empty?”

She could only nod as he swirled his fingers against her body and pressed his stiff erection closer against her backside. Severus grasped handfuls of her robes and tugged upwards until the material pooled over his forearm and he felt the warm, smooth skin of her thigh. Heedless of her pleas and insistent attempts to tug his hand to where it could do her some good, he used just the tip of his index finger to draw aimless circles across her inner thigh.

“So you want me to fill that space? Fill you? Thrust inside you until our bodies are so tight against each other that it feels as if we are one person?”

Hermione’s head spun so quickly and so thoroughly that she wavered under the force of the sensation. When she’d regained some sense of equilibrium, she whirled around inside the cage of his arms, letting him thread his hand back into the folds of her skirt.

“Yes, yes!” she said as the movement of his fingers traversed the damp cotton covering the apex of her thighs. “For God’s sake, Severus, stop teasing me and just take me!”

Finding herself unaccountably electrified by the new debauched dimension to the familiar smirk painting its way across his sharp features, Hermione tugged at both of his shoulders and demanded, “Kiss me.”

He took her at her word. Severus descended immediately to crush his lips to hers, his tongue sliding into the wet satin of her mouth and inflaming her desire as he explored there. She pulled at him again, desperate to bring them closer – she seemed to believe they could not get close enough unless they occupied the same body – and grappled with every ounce of self-control she had not to just insist that he strip himself bare and take her right there on the rag rug covering her sitting room floor. But she needed to make this respectable. If they might only have one chance together, she needed to draw out the pleasure as much as she could manage; she needed to give herself something to live on for the rest of her days. He swallowed her groan of anticipation as his fingers pushed aside the troublesome cotton knickers; he only manage to stroke against her heated flesh for a moment or two before she tore her lips from his and pushed her small hands against the hard planes of his chest.

She wriggled against the maddening touch between her legs, but forced herself to speak. “Faster,” she said. When he increased the speed of his writhing fingers, she shook her head and gulped out words. “No, no-oh! No, I mean, if you’re going to do that we’re going to have to move towards the bedroom much faster.”

He chuckled and allowed her to tear at the neckline of his robes, accidentally popping off just as many buttons as she was freeing from their holes. Severus withdrew his fingers from her body only because the walk from the sitting room and up the staircase towards her bed would be much more awkward if he didn’t. A silky smirk on his face, he leaned over and let his lips brush her ear.

“I’ll race you to the bedroom,” he whispered.

A mischievous grin lit her face. “I’ll win,” she chortled. “You don’t know where it is.”

With a throaty laugh, she spun gracefully and bolted from the room as quickly as a leggy colt. He took off after her, a little wobbly with excitement. An easy chuckle, so foreign to him, left his throat as she dashed up the stairs, throwing a challenging glance back at him from half-way up the case. In her haste and carelessness, Hermione’s shoe stamped down on the hem of her robes, hooking it on the stairs; with a clumsy jerk of surprise, she spun backwards to face him and slipped, bumping her bum on the stair. As the slick material skidded along, she slid down a few steps, knocking into him before he had a chance to readjust his position. Severus tumbled forward, sprawling across Hermione and jarring his knees as he fell. Her body pinned underneath his weight, he quickly brought a hand to Hermione’s face, trying to assess her for damage.

“Are you all right?” he asked hurriedly. “Did you hit your head? Are you hurt?”

Her eyes danced as she laughed and clapped a hand across her forehead. “Only my arse,” she said merrily as she cupped his chin. “Which is what I feel like right about now. You?”

“My knees,” he said, a wry smile on his lips. “But that’s unsurprising for an old man taking a fall.”

“You’re not old,” she said, suddenly serious. Her cinnamon eyes smoldered as they scanned his face.

“Admit it: I’m absolutely ancient,” he said roughly, shaken by the sudden scorch of her gaze. A hoarse exhalation left him as Severus felt one small hand thread between their bodies and close around his erection, her grasp unfulfilling due to the layers of clothing between them.

“All evidence to the contrary, Professor,” she muttered, her voice low and throaty.

Hermione palmed his erection and stroked him a few times, feeling her energy surge as his body twitched above her. She took his lips again and bullied them into a searching kiss which caused him to use one of the hands he’d been using as a prop on the stairs to thread back under her robes and knickers, fondling the slick, heated skin at the meeting of her thighs. Overcome with sensation, Hermione moaned into his mouth, rocking her hips against his fingers. Propriety be damned, she couldn’t wait any longer. Determined, Hermione worked both her hands in between their bodies and began pressing them to the front of his robes, wordlessly reciting a charm to release the fastenings. When her hands hit his bare skin, he wrenched his lips away from hers, though he didn’t stop his touch between her legs. He seemed incapable of resisting.

“What are you doing?” he asked. His normally smooth voice had turned to gravel.

“I want you,” she said simply. “Here. Right now. I can’t wait any longer. Take me now.”

Surprisingly, he smiled. “This is hardly a proper venue for lovemaking, Hermione.”

Her face twisted with impatience. “Oh, to hell with lovemaking. I’m going to burst if you don’t fuck me this instant! We can do it the nice way next time.”

His face had dropped slack with surprise at her use of vulgarity but quickly returned to the lecherous grin. “Next time?” he asked, allowing her hands to push aside his robes and stroke his turgid penis. “What a felicitous surprise. I wasn’t aware there was going to be a next time.”

“At this point, I’d like to ‘next-time’ you until you aren’t able to walk,” she quipped. “Now for God’s sake—”

Severus quickly braced himself on a lower stair and, with one quick slide of his hands, spread her thighs, positioning the head of his erection in the warm, slick cradle of her flesh.

“Bugger!” Hermione exclaimed before she realized it.

“Quite,” Severus responded with a grin.

Before she had time to answer his statement, Severus thrust into her waiting body. A long, low moan left Hermione, and she clutched at his shoulders, urging him on. Bracing a hand on the stair above her head, Severus drew back until he nearly left her body completely, causing her to whimper before he plunged back into her body in a long, slow slide. As Severus’s hips set an increasingly quick rhythm, Hermione felt overtaken by the demands of her body. She arched up against him, the wiry scratch of his pubic hair setting the thrumming center of her body tingling as he thrust against her, creating a wonderfully hedonistic counterpoint to the satiny feel of her robes sliding across her heated skin. Severus pushed aside her neckline and took one of Hermione’s stiff nipples into his mouth, causing her to groan and clench her inner muscles around his impossibly hard penis.

“Merlin,” he muttered against her skin. “Fuck … sweet, so sweet … so tight …”

His hips jerked against her erratically, and Hermione felt herself losing control as he did. His thrusts became uneven and heavy, pounding her into the hard stairs beneath, but she didn’t give a fig. All that mattered was the feel of being surrounded by him, inside and out, and that glorious winding, twisting tension building in her belly. She brought up one leg and laced it into his robes, curling her calf around his hip to press her heel into the low curve of his bum. With a light pressure against the clenching muscles in his arse, she pushed him deeper into her body and angled her hips upwards. On those last few thrusts, he struck that place deep within her body that drew strangled moans from her. Undone, Hermione cried out as her climax seized her and wrung sensation from every nerve ending. Feeling her inner muscles clamp around him, Severus called out her name on a hoarse groan as he lost himself within her.

When the paroxysms of his body slowed to a halt, Severus dropped down above her, his knees and forearms braced on the stairs at her shoulders and just below her hips. Still joined together, they both sat quietly as their breathing slowed. Eventually, through the quiet broken only by the rustle of their collective inhalations and exhalations, Hermione started to giggle. Severus looked down into her pinkening face and raised one heavy, dark brow. This gesture only seemed to incite more hilarity, causing her to burst into full-voiced guffawing.

“What in the world could possibly be so funny at such a moment?”

Hermione could only get a grip on her laughter long enough to choke out a single phrase. “I just shagged Professor Snape.”

Following this pronouncement, she dissolved into helpless howls of laughter. Severus, however, scowled down at her.

“Miss Granger,” he said, adopting his most disapproving, teacherly tone of voice, “I find this mirth regarding our sexual congress highly offensive, especially considering the indelicate position we are still occupying. I insist you cease at once.”

Hermione laughed again, cupping his face with both hands and pressing her lips to his in an affectionate and amused kiss. She felt his lips turn up in a smile against hers, and when she opened her mouth and slid her tongue against his bottom lip, she felt his body stir inside hers. Kissing him deeply for a few moments and feeling the excitement that he awoke in her, she was sorry to break away from him again.

“I’m sorry,” she said, grinning into his slightly bemused expression. “I just can’t help but find it funny that after all this time, after all that’s happened, I end up being frantically shagged by my meanest professor on the stairs of my house as if we’re both randy teenagers.”

Severus smirked but did not respond, merely sat back and allowed her to scramble up from the stairs. As soon as she stood, her face pinched, and she rubbed at her lower back. It seemed to take ages for Severus to be able to force his knees to support him upright after all that business on the staircase. He winced and groaned as pain shot through his joints, feeling the strain of supporting him in such an ungainly position. Severus heard the merriment in Hermione’s voice as she called over her shoulder.

“I’d offer you a pain potion,” she said, “but they dull all your senses, and I have every intention of following through on my promise of next-timing you until you’re unable to move.”

“That mightn’t take all that much right now,” he said exasperatedly, massaging his sore knees.

When she turned around, Hermione’s heart stumbled over itself for a moment. Gazing down at him as he straightened up, she couldn’t resist a smile. “Well, there’s a pretty picture,” she said, chuckling.

Perhaps not a pretty one, but one she was likely to remember for a good long time: her former Professor, in all his imposing and stoic glory, stood on her stair with his trademark black robes gaping from neck to toes, giving her a wide slash of his pale skin. Her gaze traveled from the open collar from which his long, slim neck rose; down across his chest, dotted liberally with dark hair that had just begun to streak with steel gray; and over the fleece of ebony hair that trailed from just below his navel to the pale skin surrounding the base of his shaft. Wanting to take in the sight fully, she pushed her eyes past his groin to his powerful legs, down to where his feet were still clad in the heavy-looking dragon hide boots she’d seen him wear every day since she was eleven. Under her assessing and obviously pleased gaze, Severus’s chest began to rise and fall with deeper breaths and his erection twitched with new life.

“Merlin,” Hermione said with a grin. “I wish I still talked to some of those girls from Hogwarts. Wouldn’t they be interested to hear the details of what I’m seeing right now? Come to think of it, perhaps I’ll draft a letter. My owl could use the exercise.”

“You wouldn’t,” Severus hissed, his eyes narrowing.

Something in the way he swayed a bit, betraying the bunching of his muscles, told Hermione’s instincts just what he was going to do. She shrieked in equals parts of alarm and amusement, managing to turn and gather her robes before fleeing from Severus as he roared a sort of battle cry and took off after her. The bellow turned to laughter as he chased her into the bedroom, slamming the door behind them decisively.

Hermione woke in the blanket obscurity of the midnight hours, her body cramped and oddly weighty. For a moment, panic gripped Hermione, as she seemed paralyzed along the right side of her body. Then slowly, slowly, she came to the realization of her situation: she was, in fact, covered by another body. It had been so very long since she’d experienced waking entangled with another person that she’d forgotten how strange the sensation could be when disoriented from sleep. Severus Snape’s long, lean body draped across her, his thickly-muscled leg twined over one of her legs and underneath the other, one slender arm heavy on her abdomen, and his dark head pillowed on her breast. Straining her neck upwards to assess the room without waking him, she took in the sight of a maelstrom of clothing pieces strewn about her floor, his undershorts hanging – inexplicably – from the knob of her closet door. Even stranger, his wand lay quiescent, sticking out of the pocket of his robes which he’d discarded on the back of her vanity chair. Somehow, she’d imagined that even in an intimate situation such as this, he’d have kept it closer at hand. She couldn’t decide whether this leniency was due to a relaxation of his guard or a display of trust in her. She smiled, hoping it was the latter.

They hadn’t really had a chance to discuss the possible future of their relationship over the course of the evening that had followed their break-neck coupling on the stairs. In fact, they really hadn’t discussed much of anything. The two successive shags they’d had following the bout on the stairs really hadn’t been any less feverish. They had heaved at each other’s clothes and fallen into bed with voices full of equal parts of laughter and moaning. Hermione had found that her former professor was not just passionate in his convictions or biases; on the third encounter, when he’d entered her from behind, she’d had to brace her arms against the headboard just to keep from travelling across the bed, so forceful were his thrusts.

A large part of Hermione was still decidedly flabbergasted about the revelations of the evening. In the quiet moments she spent in the dark, she contemplated the complete absurdity of the fact that her letters had led her to someone no more than five minutes from her front door who had been in her life in one way or another since she was eleven. The idea that the man behind those lovely letters was the same man who’d once made her cry with a four word sentence still struck her as almost impossible to comprehend, but Hermione firmly resolved that the past was just that and that he seemed more and more to be the man of her future. He certainly proved to be an enthusiastic and generous lover, reveling in and plying her body in a way no one ever had. Ron had never been a bad lover, really; he’d been warm and sweet, surprisingly gentle. But he had never quite been able to pluck her nerves like harp strings in the six years of their marriage. Severus had done so within the first six minutes. And on and off over the course of nearly three hours. They’d stopped having at each other long enough to ransack her pantry just after midnight, and had another lovely little tryst before collapsing into sleep around two o’clock. She hadn’t the foggiest idea what time it was now, but the last few hours had certainly been well spent. When Hermione had mockingly complained that they were going to ruin their chances of conception by doing it too much, Severus had merely smirked and insisted that they needed to “make sure it takes.” Though her thighs ached from the contact, the memory of the delights he followed that remark with brought a smug grin to her face and a delicious tingle to her belly. Unfortunately, that tingle quickly developed into something much more basic.

A low whimpering sound left him when she disentangled herself to relieve her vengeful bladder. As she slid from the bed, she felt his hand close around her wrist, which caused her to mutter a swear word. She hadn’t wanted to wake him. But when she looked over to his face, she realized that he must have done so reflexively, as his eyes were still closed and all his other muscles lay slack, indicating slumber. A little quirk to the edges of her lips, she bent down and kissed his fingers, which released their hold on her wrist. Something in her chest warmed and twisted at the simple, unconscious gesture.

Her trip to the loo was as fast as she could make it, not just because she wished to get back to bed but because the tile floor was absolutely frigid on her bare feet, and the fact that she wore not a stitch of clothing didn’t help matters. The instant she stretched out under the sheets again, she found herself reeled in against Severus’s body. Much to her surprise, he once again took a submissive position in slumber, curling his long body around hers and nuzzling his protuberant nose against her breast and the warm hollow of her throat. With a smile, Hermione wrapped one arm beneath his head, cradling it in the pocket of her shoulder, and used her left hand to gently push back the descending strands of ebony hair that slipped across his face. A shiver slipped through his body before he settled into deeper sleep, his heavy, regular breathing puffing into the valley between her breasts. Murmuring a warming charm on the duvet, Hermione yawned and slid into the dark recesses of sleep.

Wakefulness battered against Hermione’s mind as sensation slowly caressed her skin. She didn’t want to wake up, but life seemed determined not to allow her to laze in obliviousness. Awash in moody grey pre-dawn, the features of Hermione’s bedroom were much more distinct to her tired eyes than the last time she opened them. Ebony filaments tickled against her arm; eventually, she registered the soft touch of lips on the pulse point at her wrist. She turned her head and looked down to where the dark head was bent over her arm, the soft lips travelling up to stop at her elbow. She couldn’t bring herself to move, languishing in the gentle, pleasant sensation.

“Severus?” Hermione asked, her voice broken and raspy from sleepiness. “What are you doing?”

He didn’t speak, simply continued up the winding path of her arm to the wing of her collarbone. When he paused there, her breath skipped in and out of her on a hiccup as the plush tip of his tongue darted out to trace the contour of her shoulder. Severus flattened his mouth against the column of her throat, sucking and gently nibbling; she found that she could move after all, lacing her arms around his broad shoulders as he covered her body with his own. His kisses became more urgent, seeking more as he crossed to the other side of her throat and skimmed down her body to suckle at her breast.

“Severus,” she said, “you can’t possibly still be gagging for it. We’ve shagged more tonight than either of us has done in at least five years. What are you doing?”

Again, he said nothing. Hermione tried to pursue it further, but found herself lost in the silky-smooth warmth of his mouth as it slid down her stomach, stopping to dart his tongue into the hollow of her navel before slicking a wet path to the triangle of curls low on her body. Her hips levered off the bed, and she clasped eager fingers in the thin strands of his hair as she felt the flat of his tongue slide a long, slow caress across the outer folds at the top of her thighs. A low moan left her as her fingers dug into his scalp.

Her response spurred him to more acute action. She felt the brush of his arms under her legs, and the long, slender fingers curled across the tops of her thighs, spreading her wide open to his gaze. A rumble of pleasure from his deep voice set the bed springs humming just before his tongue dipped back into the center of her sex. Hermione clutched at him, unable to stop a keen of delight from leaving her lips, and she rocked against him, his tongue unbearably, deliciously rough against the aching peak of her pleasure. Her panting voice seemed to scour her throat, but she didn’t bother to contain it; her cries electrified him. With every vocalization, his tongue worked harder against her, followed by a plunge of two of his fingers into her body and a brush of just the tip of his nose, cold from the air, against the skin of her belly.

Severus groaned as her climax shot through her and she bucked against his face. It took Hermione a long moment to clear through the daze of her orgasm. When she did, she realized that Severus was panting against her inner thigh as if he’d run a mile at top speed, and the noise that had left him was not one of pleasure or sexual anticipation, but something dreadfully close to pain.

“Severus?” she queried, her voice nearly breaking from sorrow and fear.

He looked up at her only briefly, but in the moment between when he caught her eyes with his dark-eyed gaze and when he hid his face against her thigh again, something intense and almost agonized shot from him, straight to her heart. She gasped with the sudden shock of emotion. Cupping her hands around his face, she drew him up so that his body covered hers with its warmth and she could gaze into the bottomless black of his eyes.

“What’s the matter?”

He tried to bury his face in the cloud of curls beside her face, but she fought him, forcing him to keep his gaze steady on hers. For a long moment, she thought he might dissolve into tears.

“I … I… can’t,” he said brokenly.

“Can’t what?”

He clenched his eyes shut, his whole face screwing up with the effort, before he opened them again to gaze at her.

“I’m not sure I can go on like this anymore,” he said.

She didn’t speak, couldn’t speak, as she stroked her thumbs against his high, prominent cheekbones.

“I’ve been alone for so much of my life. At first because I didn’t want to need people, then because Lily …” He broke a moment, regrouped. “Because she couldn’t find it in her to really see me. I couldn’t bear to be without her, but she couldn’t stand who I had become, so she just threw me out with the day’s dust bin leavings. After that, I … I had to be alone. I couldn’t risk getting too close. And after a while, I didn’t want to let anyone in. It was a hassle, it was too dangerous, it was too … intimate. I cultivated seventeen years of segregation and convinced myself that it was best.”

Hermione tried to pull him in close to her in an embrace, but he resisted. Severus turned his face from her, staring blankly into the space beyond her bed, but she clung to him, wordlessly pleading for him to unburden himself. She laid a few kisses against his shoulders and his chest, but it was the one long kiss that she pressed against his neck, acknowledging and tenderly covering the jagged scars from the bite that nearly killed him, that had him lower himself down to touch her again, laying his forehead against hers. He cleared his throat a few times. Suddenly, she felt him move against her, pushing her thighs open with his knees. As the blunt head of Severus’s erection skimmed between her thighs, she lifted her hips, guiding him into her depths. When he buried himself to the hilt inside her, one of his hands came up and stroked at her face.

“I wanted to die, thirteen years ago,” he said gruffly. “I lay on that cold, dusty floor and prayed that I would bleed out. After everything I’d done, everything I’d been, I wanted to have my last moments blinded with pain and then be given an abrupt shove into blackness.” He was silent for a long moment. “You were the one who sent for the Healers, weren’t you?”

Hermione jumped a bit in surprise. She’d never had any intention of him knowing that she’d sent the frantic Floo message to St. Mungo’s in the early minutes of the celebration following Voldemort’s downfall. Horrified to realize that no one had thought of him before then, Hermione had nearly been sick with shame as she knelt on the hearthstones of the Gryffindor common room and sobbed out a distress call. In that moment so many years ago, she had known that even if it was idiotic to think he might be alive, she—they owed it to him to at least try. Pinned by the force of his gaze, she nodded.

“You saved my life. Granted, Euterpe did her fair share,” he grinned weakly at Hermione’s watery laughter, “but it was you, really. You brought me back to life. Then and now.” His smile faltered. “Don’t cry.”

She was struck by his last whispered statement. Hermione hadn’t realized that tears had started to trickle down the sides of her face until he reached up to brush them away. He laughed a little, his voice sounding almost as if it were rusty.

“I never thought I’d care if the Insufferable Know-It-All cried, but I don’t think I could stand your tears just now,” said Severus. After a long breath, Severus laid his face cheek-to-cheek with Hermione’s and began to roll his hips slowly, moving in gentle thrusts within her body.

“For thirteen years, I’ve been content to just sink back into my old life. I didn’t let anything change. I didn’t make anything change. I’d only been half living until I got your letters. And now…. Now ….”

Unable to stand the anxiety of waiting for him to search for the correct words, Hermione clutched at the back of his head and drew him in for a kiss. His tongue searched her mouth, not in the reckless fervor of their previous encounters, but gingerly, as if he thought too harsh a movement might shatter her. Or, she thought, as if she might vanish beneath him.

He tore his lips away. “I can’t be that man anymore, Hermione. I can’t. He was cold and cruel, and he lived for no one but himself and a woman who never really loved him.”

As the words tumbled from him, his body thrummed with something he could barely stand to feel. He couldn’t have named it if he tried; he only knew that it came from her somehow, and he never wanted to be without it again. Severus thrust deeper into her body, faster, faster. Hermione was kissing his mouth, his cheeks, his throat. She wrapped her legs around his hips and pulled him closer. Pulled him in until he felt as if he could melt inside of her.

“You are everything good and bright inside me,” he said raggedly. He shook his head, as if the right words had gotten stuck somewhere between his brain and his mouth. “You’re breath. You’re life—”

“I love you, too, Severus,” Hermione exclaimed breathily. “I love you, too.”

Severus’s momentum broke. His chest hitched and a short burst of sound, almost a sob, left him. He buried his face in her curls, and for one horrifying instant, Hermione thought she’d misread what he’d been trying to say. And then she felt the wetness against her ear. Felt the undeniable warm trickle of what could only be tears. His hips moved against hers again, and after a few erratic thrusts, Severus exploded with warmth and sensation and light, spilling himself within her. Giving himself only a moment to steady his breathing, he made to roll away from Hermione, but her small hands clamped a vice grip on his shoulders.

“Don’t!” she cried. “Don’t go!”

Severus nuzzled his nose against her ear, hushing her in soothing tones. “Just let me take care of you,” he whispered.

Without really separating their bodies, he worked a hand in between them to flatten along her stomach. His fingers searched in the slick folds just above where they were still joined and stroked at her until his kisses were swallowing her strangled cries of pleasure. When her peak hit, Hermione felt as if she had jumped into an ocean as warm as bathwater, one long, rolling wave of pleasure. And of Severus.