Chapter Seven

AN: This is a PSA reminding you to please heed the warnings! It's not too late to turn back. Please proceed with caution, etc.

Dropping the children off at King's Cross was worse than it had been in September. Hermione drove them herself, in the family's mostly unmodified Volkswagen, as Ron's school children returned to school before Hogwarts resumed, so he could not accompany them to the station. Unfortunately, this only intensified her feeling that she was saying goodbye to the children for good, that her traitorous feelings had already fractured the family beyond repair.

She hugged them both fiercely and then stepped back, placing a hand on each of their shoulders. "You know I love you both more than anything," she said. "No matter what."

"Mum, we didn't fail anything. You got our marks already," Rose said.

"This isn't about marks. It's just... I just love you. That's all."

"Mum, you're being weird," Hugo said, shrugging her hand away.

She grinned at them in a watery sort of way. "Maybe I am. I'm just your weird old mum."

Rose gave her an odd look, but caught sight of a few of her friends and began to gather her things.

"You'll write me when you get settled back in?" Hermione asked.

"Yeah, of course," Hugo said.

"And if you have trouble with Arithmancy?"

He shrugged.

"All right, then. Be good. Don't use magic in the corridors. Be kind to Mr Filch."

"Mum! We're going to miss the train!"

"Go on, then. I love you."

She watched the train as it slowly chugged to life, bearing her children out of the station and away from her. It was as if she could feel the bonds that held her to her life stretching thinner and thinner, until the train was gone, and she returned to the car.

***

She told herself a great number of untruths as she drove toward Athene University. She told herself that it wouldn't be fair to judge Professor Potage's class without taking the course in its entirety. She told herself that she could always drop the course if her expectations weren't being met. She told herself that keeping her mind busy was important, especially with the children away.

When those stories remained unconvincing, she told herself that she was simply checking to see if the course had filled up. She could turn the car around right now and drive it back to her own house, Floo to work, and be done with this whole ridiculous mess. She told herself that if there was a line at the registrar's office, she would do just that.

In the line, she told herself that what she was doing would be worse than foolish, except that Snape would never sign up for the course himself, so disaster would be averted, and she would know for certain that he did not care for her, which he did not. She told herself that this would be a kind of closure, that being in Potage's classroom without him would be the sign that she needed that the feelings she held were completely one-sided, and then she would be able to put this down and move on.

And besides, she told herself, even if he were there, it didn't mean she had to continue to take the course. She could still drop it. She could still walk away.

She signed up for the spring term, and spent the drive home imagining what she was going to tell Ronald.

***

He had been, actually, rather unconcerned.

"Didn't you hate that course?" he asked, looking up from the coffee table, where he had spread Helen Jacoby's maths homework.

"I did," she said. "But we never got to the bit on setting Stirring and Stringing Charms, and I really wanted to learn those."

"Mmmm," Ron said, already turning back to his marking.

"And I'm still interested in the Preserving Charms, and I would like to brew the Universal Antidote."

"Well, and you'd miss your new best mate," Ron said. This was delivered utterly without suspicion or malice, which broke Hermione's heart a little.

"Actually, I don't think Severus is signing up for the second part," she said. "He never said so, anyway."

"That's too bad," Ron said. "I know you enjoyed his company. He must be an acquired taste." He made a face, but it was meant in good humor, she knew.

"Yes, well," she said and drifted vaguely upstairs. I am the worst sort of person, she thought. Everything about me is despicable. I will drop that class tomorrow.

***

She saw him before she'd even fully entered the classroom...sitting at their usual workstation, his long hair hanging in two slick curtains, obscuring his eyes. She felt as if she'd stopped breathing, as if oxygen deprivation were making all the colors of the world stand out in sharp relief. He was here.

She walked toward the table, unable to take her eyes off his familiar, longed-for face. If he was here... if he was here, despite everything, then he must...

He was seated nearly in the center of the lab table, to prevent, she presumed, anyone from taking her place. The gesture seemed to restart her breathing, her heart, and she was able to speak.

"May I?"

He looked up at her sharply, dark eyes blazing with what looked like wonder and fear, mixed. He gestured to the seat next to him, not bothering to move back to his own side of the table.

She slid into the proffered chair, feeling, with an almost otherworldly clarity, the slide of her thigh against his. She did not pull away.

It raised the hair on her arms, on the back of her neck, to be so close to him, as if each hair were reaching toward him to close that final gap. She felt lightheaded with proximity, and she shifted slightly, just to feel the tingling sensation of her leg pressed against him. He neither flinched away nor looked at her. She could feel a kind of desperate heat radiating off him.

She did not hear a word Potage said in greeting or introduction, so absorbed was she in the dance their hands were doing on the table's surface. Snape withdrew a piece of parchment from his satchel and offered it to her. His fingers lingered on the page as he slid it toward her, nearly daring her to brush those fingers with her own, which she did, feeling a jolt of electricity to her heart that she hadn't felt since she was a teenager. Likewise, she offered him a quill, and he pulled it slowly from her fingertips.

His left hand rested idly at the side of his parchment, and Hermione had never been so grateful to be left handed as she laid her right hand beside it. There was a gap of less than two inches between them; anything might have closed it...a gasp, a sneeze...and it seemed that some energy was actually arcing and crackling between their flesh. She moved her hand infinitesimally toward his.

Snape leaned down once more to fetch his ink...his hand never leaving the table...but his shifting stance brought his left foot into contact with her right one. Her body answered with a throbbing in her core so deep and needy that it frightened her a little. From his shoe?

She had never experienced wanting like this...actual physical desire brought on by the body of another person. Oh, she'd felt excitement before, chemistry, but that was something more manufactured, worked up to, a heightened state of nerves and firing synapses. What she felt at the moment was something more primal, animal...the desire to feel skin on skin, the desire to fuck this man.

She glanced up at him. His face was unusually pale, save for spots of hectic pink burning at his ears and cheeks, at his hairline. He stiffened as he seemed to feel her eyes on him, and he turned to her slowly, slowly, so slowly.

She half-expected an admonishment to pay attention, but none came. Instead, he simply gazed back at her until she felt the blood rushing to her own scalp, but she did not look away. He studied her, his eyes lingering on her lips, her throat. Hermione felt as if her eyes were widening, her pupils dilating to take more of him in, more of his startled, greedy eyes, his burning skin, his slightly parted lips.

She swallowed. Audibly, she was sure. In a moment of heart-stoppingly foolish bravery, she slid her hand across the miniature chasm until it pressed against the side of his. At this, he broke their gaze and returned his eyes to his parchment. However, whatever tentative new link had sprung up between them could not be broken. Hermione felt they breathed in unison for the next fifty minutes.

She was startled when Potage stopped speaking and silence descended over the classroom. It was like waking from a hot afternoon nap, rising slowly through layers of dreams toward a filmy sort of consciousness, a smouldering world. The class was over.

She looked to Severus, who slowly removed his hand from where it had pressed against hers...cold...and gathered their untouched parchment. She stuffed the quills back into her bag and rose, feeling that momentary chill again as it raced down the side of her body. Merlin, it was as if she had been sitting inside him.

The classroom emptied before them, and slowly, she walked out, feeling his footsteps behind her, afraid with every step that he would suddenly Apparate away, leaving her here, and equally afraid with every step that he would not.

She knew, then, that if he asked, she would go with him, that all her stories and her promises to herself had been so much mental pretense. There are some forces, some magics, too powerful to be denied.

As it turned out, he didn't ask. There wasn't any need.

***

The lightest of touches to her shoulder brought her around to face him, and there they were, so close...kissing distance, her brain insisted. He slipped an arm around her waist, pulling her to him firmly, hip to hip, her startled hands just beginning to reach for him when he spun them away.

They landed, Hermione breathless with shock and want, in the middle of a dark, cluttered sitting room. Her first fleeting impression was of dust and a great number of books. Her next impression was of the taste of Snape's mouth, spearmint and heat, and a tsunami of renewed desire. She tugged frantically at his outer robes, eyes closed, blindly feeling for the clasp that would let her closer to his body.

She found it, and heard the heavy material slip to the floor, felt his hands working her own cloak's clasp.

"Are you certain?" his low voice growled in her ear, barely more than a breath.

"Bit late to be asking now," she said, resuming her attack on his clothing.

His skin tasted of sweat and the oils of plants...green life...and his hair was in her mouth. She ground against his leg shamelessly, feeling the gusset of her trousers pulling tight and maddening against her clit, but wishing it were his skin, the coarse black hairs of his thigh against her sensitive flesh.

She longed to engulf him, to take him somehow entirely into herself.

He stood beside the sofa and began quickly to undress, his fingers making short work of the buttons and closings hers had fumbled with. She watched him with undisguised hunger. His chest, mottled pink with heat, dusted with fine black hairs; his ribs, his slim waist, melting into a nest of darkest hair; his cock, ropy and thick...

"Fuck me," she whispered.

His eyes widened. "I'm sorry?"

"Fuck me, Severus. Please."

"I have every intention of doing so," he said. "But first you must stop gawking at me and remove your clothing."

She laughed then, because it was him, Severus, here with her, and this would change nothing, she suddenly felt. He would always be himself, and she would always be herself, and that was just as she liked it.

She toed off her shoes, shoved her trousers to the floor, and lifted her shirt over her head. Her body, she knew, was not that of a schoolgirl anymore. Two children and fifteen years of desk work had changed it irreparably, but he did not take his eyes off her as she undressed, and the burning look in them kept her self-consciousness at bay.

Gently, he nudged her down on to the cracked leather sofa, where her skin stuck and pulled with sweat. She reached up for him, tugged him down slowly, and he settled over her.

"I am afraid this time will be brief," he said gruffly, but she neither needed nor wanted any further foreplay. An hour and a half in Professor Potage's classroom had been more than enough. She gasped as he brought his pelvis to hers, absorbing the new and pleasurable sensation of his cock resting in the cradle of her thighs.

"We could try to draw it out," he whispered.

She shook her head violently in the negative and began to try to squirm upward against the leather, to bring the head of him into position.

"Come on, come on, come on," she whispered under her breath, barely aware that she was doing so.

"Like this?" he breathed, sinking deeply into her. His eyes closed tight, and his mouth fell open, his head rocking back to expose his throat.

"Yes," she hissed, arching up hard to meet him, drawing her knees up. "Yes."

Their coupling was frantic. Severus leaned his forehead against her shoulder, planted his hands on either side of her and pistoned his hips, driving them both at an incredible pace, right from the start. Hermione's hands scrabbled for purchase on his back, his hips, trying to bring him in harder. Deeper. They were both sucking in huge, panting breaths.

It ended quickly, though neither of them moved from their position on the couch. Hermione was pleased when he did not withdraw from her, but reached down and pulled his wand from his trousers and cast an Expanding Charm upon the sofa. He pulled her with him as he rolled backward, until they lay facing one another, her thigh hiked up over his, his softening cock still buried inside her.

She gave an experimental little push and felt the wet crush of their bodies pressing together.

"Not yet," he whispered. "Soon."

She smiled a private smile. It seemed now that their most immediate need had been taken care of, she was able to breath properly again, to truly see the man who lay beside her, one arm folded beneath his head, the other slung over her waist.

She ran a slow hand down his side from smooth shoulder to coarse thigh, memorizing the outcroppings and soft hollows of him. He leaned forward and touched his lips to hers.

She did not think of Ronald, of how different it was, how strange to be kissed by someone else at long last. Instead, she simply thrilled to discover that kissing could be so revelatory, so urgent, that the movement of his tongue against her lips could send her heart into overdrive. Had it ever felt like this?

She ran her hands through the heavy hanks of his hair, dragging her fingertips lightly over his scalp and holding his mouth to hers. His shudder burned and multiplied in her belly.

Finally, the kiss broke, and she stretched until she could lick the whorl of his ear, take his earlobe gently between her teeth.

"You are the first thing I think of in the morning," she said quietly into it, her voice husky with harsh breathing, "and the last before I go to bed. I have wanted you for so long."

He writhed beside her, and she felt him going hard again, the very tip of him barely sheathed inside her.

"Say it again," he panted.

"Say what again?"

"Say how much you want me."

"I want you," she said but she could feel that it had lost some of its elemental power, so she tried again. "Severus, I want you with my whole body. I want your words in my ears and your cock in my cunt."

He growled, low in his throat, and began to slide slowly, wetly, inside her. He rolled them over until he rose above her again; his eyes locked with hers, and he did not break his heavy gaze as he thrust. It was, she thought, the most intimate, exposing moment of her life, to be looked at that way while he penetrated her. There was no room for thinking, as they looked at each other, only the two of them, caught in this ouroboros of desire. She felt her body yielding, not to him, but to them, to whatever it was that had grown up accidentally between them, choking out everything else, until she had no choice but to give herself up to it completely. The feeling rose up inside her, inexorable and frightening, so sure of itself in its raw power...so good...

"Please, please, please don't stop," she whimpered.

He stared back into her eyes and picked up the pace slightly.

Her head wanted to thrash against the arm of the couch, but his gaze fixed her in place. She could not twist or squirm away from the sensation that was threatening to overpower her; it simply built, feeding off his eyes and his cock, his skin pressed against her, the taste of her own sweat as it gathered on her upper lip.

"Please," she whispered, and then it crashed over her, and she was shuddering against him, her body throbbing and clutching him...

And still he moved inside her, slick in their accumulated wetness, pressing now, even more urgently against her clit and oh, God...

She came again, and it seemed to break something inside her, for tears rose to her eyes unbidden, and she felt them spill over onto her burning cheeks. He rode out his own climax, and still panting, gathered her into his arms. He did not say anything, did not ask her if she was all right. She could not have named the reason for her tears...joy or sadness...even if he had. He simply wound his hands up in her hair and held her against his chest, and she laid her face against his skin and breathed deeply of the scent of him as she had imagined doing so many nights in the past.

***

"Is there any chance that you could stay the night?" he asked her finally.

She peeled her face away from his chest, where it had stuck with sweat and tears. Normally, this might have embarrassed her, but just then she was loose-limbed, cleaned out, and filled with a kind of calm acceptance of her body.

"Yes, I think...Let me just write a quick note. You don't have an identifiable owl, do you?"

"Just a standard tawny."

She nodded. "Good."

Amazingly, she felt more awful about what she was currently doing than about anything she had done all evening. Somehow, it felt hurtful...to Severus, to herself, to Ronald...to suddenly bring this level of artifice to the situation, which heretofore had seemed to be comprised all of people acting genuinely. Poorly, perhaps, faithlessly, but still genuinely.

She rose from the couch with regret and located her bag.

Dear Ronald, she wrote.

I have been called back to the office from class, and it's the Department of Mysteries, so of course I couldn't tell you when I'd be back even if I knew. You know how these go. I'll be home when I can. Please don't forget to feed Fort.

Hermione

She looked up to find Snape standing behind her, reading the note over her shoulder. He nodded and whistled for his owl. When it had been dispatched, he motioned for her to follow him, and led her up a staircase that materialized from behind a bookshelf. She smiled a rueful little smile. There was something very Severus about that.

It struck her then, that he'd made a grander gesture tonight even than he had in showing up to her family Christmas party. That had been public, yes, but he could have left whenever he wished and returned to his privacy. Here, now, he'd brought her to his home. Of all the places they could have gone, he'd let her inside the one that he kept so separate from the world. It wasn't that he couldn't still bar her from it if he wished, but that... well, she knew now, didn't she? She'd seen it, seen the inside of him. She reached forward and took his hand.

His bed was a very large four-poster, uncurtained and spread with a white coverlet. He led her to it, and they both climbed in wordlessly. She felt, suddenly, bonelessly tired, spent. She had no energy for reflection or self-recrimination, which seemed to be what the situation called for. So she took the comfort of his bed, his body, and slept.