Chapter Eighteen

9 August 1961

"I cannot believe Muggles actually go out in these things," Minerva said as she looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door.

Alastor crossed the bedroom of the small beach house they had let and came up behind her to plant a wet kiss on her bare shoulder. "If you ask me, Muggles have the right idea," he said. "Why you witches insist on hiding your lovely assets under yards of cloth has always been beyond my reckoning." He slid his hands down to run them over the backs of her bare thighs.

"Maybe it's because we don't fancy ourselves as objects for you wizards to slabber over," sniffed Minerva, although she was smiling. She'd been doing that a lot more lately, Alastor thought with satisfaction. After a moment, Minerva stepped away from Alastor and gave her maillot a firm tug to pull it down farther over the tops of her legs.

He put his arms around her, pulling her close. "We don't have to go to the beach at all, if you don't like," he said. "I'd be perfectly happy to stay right here for the afternoon. I'm sure we could find something productive to do." He pushed the strap of her swimming costume off her shoulder and attacked her neck with his lips. She turned in his arms, saying, "The beach can wait, I think." Her hands found the waistband of his Muggle swimming trunks and slid under them to cup his arse.

"It's cheeky y'are, Minerva McGonagall," Alastor declared. She silenced him with a kiss that made his prick sit up and take notice. When they came up for air, he scooped her up in his arms and more or less tossed her on the bed.

"Neanderthal," she remarked, grinning.

"Ah, lass," he said, approaching her, "you know how it excites me when you talk about science." He fell on her and felt the slight whoosh of her wandless magic as she Banished their bathing costumes.

The bed was old and squeaked shrilly as they moved, and he made a mental note to make sure a simple Colloportus would prevent the sound from carrying into the other room. Malcolm would be joining them the following day, and Alastor didn't want Minerva to be concerned about her son hearing them make love. They only had another week together, and he didn't want anything to spoil what had so far been a perfect holiday.

Later, as they sat on the beach, Minerva under an enormous, wide-brimmed straw hat, Alastor with his nose coated in a thick white paste he had cribbed from a friend in the Muggle Liaison office, who said it was the latest thing in Muggle beach-wear, Alastor thought he had never seen Minerva so relaxed. After he had met Malcolm, and the world hadn't collapsed, she had been less skittish about letting people know about their relationship. They had even gone to dinner together at Amelia's London flat at the beginning of the summer to celebrate her appointment as Deputy Head of the Auror Training Department.

Alastor had consulted Amelia about looking into Gerald Macnair's disappearance. She was better connected than he was among the witches and wizards who dealt with international law, and he had asked her to ask around for ideas about how he might continue his inquiry in France. Amelia had come back with a very few suggestions, capped off with her own advice to tell Minerva what he was up to. She wouldn't take kindly to his nosing around in her old business without her knowledge, Amelia had said, and Alastor reckoned she was right.

Still, he thought he'd poke around a bit before talking with Minerva. He didn't want to upset her needlessly if nothing came of his inquiries

They returned to the house, and together they prepared a light dinner of fish bought at the local market with eggplant and fava beans, complemented with a jug of...plonk was the unvarnished word for it...from a bodega up the street.

After they had cleared away the dishes, they sat on the small patio overlooking the ocean to watch the sunset, and Alastor was as content as he had felt in ages. Minerva turned her face to him and said with a smile, "Sickle for your thoughts."

Decorated Auror though he was, if it hadn't been for the three glasses of bad wine he had recently consumed, he probably wouldn't have had the courage to speak what he did next. "I was just after thinkin' that I love you, Minerva McGonagall."

She said nothing for a few moments while he cursed himself and the bastard who had brewed the wine.

He barely heard her whisper over the sound of the surf and the guitar music that wafted over from the house next door.

"And I love you, Alastor Moody."

His heart leapt as he got clumsily to his feet. He went to her and knelt in front of her chair, taking her hands in his. He could think of nothing to say that wouldn't make him sound like a prat from a two-Knut romance novel, so he just sat there holding her hands.

He was a little disappointed, but not surprised, when she wouldn't look at him, but only stared out across the ocean. He knew that her soft declaration of love had taken a goodly part of her Gryffindor courage, and she had only had one glass of the nominal Malvasia Bianca to loosen her tongue.

He tugged on her hands to pull her to her feet, saying, "I'd say a kiss is in order, wouldn't you, Professor McGonagall?"

"So it would seem, Auror Moody," she answered. She brought her lips to meet his, and they stood softly kissing for a few moments until the sound of joyous shrieks and laughter startled them apart. A small group of teens was passing on the beach, and the boys appeared to be chasing the girls with long bits of seaweed, making them squeal with outraged delight. Moody had automatically reached for his wand, which was not in its usual place at his hip, but lay inside with his wizarding cloak on the coat hook in the small living and dining area.

"Children," said Minerva with a sigh. "They're everywhere."

Alastor gave a barking laugh to cover his pounding heart and said, "Shall we go inside, then?"

"Let's."

He followed her into the bedroom and grasped her by the waist from behind, moving one hand up to move the curtain of her hair out of the way so he could kiss the back of her neck. The other hand snaked around to her front to cup her breast and tease her hardening nipple between his calloused thumb and forefinger.

She hummed in satisfaction and moved her bottom against his growing erection, and with a practiced movement of her wrist, she Banished her peasant blouse and bra, baring herself to his busy fingers.

"Have I ever told you how much I appreciate your talent for wandless magic?" he murmured in her ear, licking the shell of it and flicking it across the inside surface for good measure.

"It isn't hard," she said, and he rejoined, "Oh, but it is, lass, it is . . ." grinding himself against her.

Suddenly, all their clothes were gone, and he found his cock pressing tantalisingly against the smooth, naked globes of her arse. He worked her legs apart with his knee and slipped his penis between them to rub against her increasingly damp folds, moving his hand from her neck down to dance his fingers against her clit, pleased to hear her breathing grow heavy and ragged as he played with her.

She cried out as she came, and he had to support her for a moment as her knees buckled. When she had regained the strength in her legs, he continued to move himself against her wetness, and before long, she was gasping again, moving her bottom insistently against him. It took all his willpower not to move the inch or so it would take to push his cock deep inside her, but he wanted her to be begging for it before he finally slid home.

Another minute, and he was in danger of spilling himself where he stood, so he backed away from her and moved her toward the bed. Dusk had taken hold, and he wanted to see her, so he quickly flicked on the lamp that sat on the rickety bedside table, congratulating himself briefly for remembering how to operate the Muggle contraption.

In the dim light, he could see her heavy-lidded eyes and the mottled pink announcing her recent orgasm on the pale skin of her chest, her breasts moving rapidly up and down with her respiration.

Gods! Her breasts! He'd always been a breast man, and he found Minerva's nothing less than enchanting. They were on the small side, but extremely sensitive, he'd found, and her nipples formed the most perfect coral peaks when he touched them. When he added his tongue, and even his teeth to his efforts, she rewarded him with a delightful repertoire of entrancing noises.

He worked her into a frenzy of arousal, his fingers and mouth playing over her beautiful breasts, licking, sucking, and pinching her lovely nipples while his achingly hard cock moved over her slick centre. Her hands were everywhere: carding through his hair, kneading his muscular shoulders, fluttering across his back, and finally, pulling impatiently on his arse to urge him to enter her at last. He grinned at her as he resisted; she wasn't begging yet, so he reached down and grasped her arms, bringing them up above her head, and held her wrists firmly to the mattress as he continued to tease her with his mouth and his penis.

It felt so good to move against her as he was doing that he didn't notice at first when her cries of pleasure turned to tense requests to stop.

"Alastor, please!"

"Not yet . . . not yet . . ." he moaned, his head buried in her neck, thinking she was finally beginning to beg him to put himself inside her.

"Let me up!" she shrieked in his ear, and he opened his eyes in shock. He looked into her face and saw apprehension and . . . something. Something not good.

He immediately released her and rolled off.

She sat up, and it frightened him not a little that she turned her back to him.

"I'm sorry . . ." she breathed heavily, her shoulders heaving slightly.

"No, Minerva, I'm sorry," he said, sitting up and putting a tentative hand on her arm. "I didn't mean to hurt you. Circe, I would never want..."

She looked at him then, and said, "No, you didn't hurt me. It's just that . . . I don't like to be held . . . that way."

"I'm sorry, love," he said.

He was immensely relieved when she gave him a wan smile, saying, "No, don't be. You didn't know. But now you do."

"Yes," he said, and waited for her to say more, but she didn't.

Instead, she pushed him down against the mattress and dove down, more aggressively than he had seen her do before, and took his wilted cock into her mouth. It was on the tip of his tongue to protest, to tell her she shouldn't, that he could wait until she was ready again, but he had a sudden insight that this was what she wanted and needed to do. She needed to have him in her control and...

Merlin! It felt so good! He stopped thinking for a while, and when it was over, she let him love her with his mouth, and then they lay in one another's arms for a time.

She slept, but he didn't.

The incident kept replaying in his mind the next day, despite his efforts to put it aside. Alastor Moody hadn't survived as an Auror for eighteen years by ignoring his intuition, though, so when Minerva left to retrieve Malcolm from his grandparents' home, he took a cup of tea out to the patio and rolled himself one of the cigarettes he liked but never smoked around Minerva. It was a taste he had picked up during his deployment to Muggle London during the waning years of the Grindelwald war. Minerva thought it a filthy habit, and he reckoned she was right, but he found it helped him settle his thoughts and think, which was what he intended to do for the two or so hours before his girl returned with her son.

My girl.

He knew Minerva would probably hex him for it, but it pleased him to think of her that way. It had been a long road...not hard, exactly, but filled with bumps and detours along the way...getting to the point at which he could comfortably call her his. And if she wasn't a girl, he nevertheless felt a sort of paternal protectiveness toward her. She was still an odd duck: seemingly brittle, and definitely fragile in some respects, but strong as any man Alastor had ever had the pleasure of knowing in others. She was cannier than anyone he'd met aside from Albus Dumbledore, and certainly far cannier than Alastor himself, although he wasn't falsely modest about his own keen intelligence. If she had been born a decade later, say, she would have made a hell of an Auror, but MLE had only this year started talking about admitting more witches to the Auror training programme, and only thanks to Amelia Bones, who was, to the best of Alastor's knowledge, the only woman ever to complete the arduous course to become a fully qualified Auror. (And they certainly got her off active duty as soon as they could manage it, he thought angrily. The curse she had taken to the eye had only damaged her close vision; Alastor knew other Aurors who worked in the field with far worse disabilities...missing digits, hands that shook, knees that didn't want to bend properly. By the time an Auror had been on the active duty rotation for a few years, he could usually count on being on a first-name basis with St Mungo's finest Healers. Alastor had been lucky so far, he reminded himself.)

Come to think on it, Alastor was glad Minerva wasn't an Auror. He liked all her parts exactly where they were, thank you very much. And they would have been competitors, she and Alastor, because that's the way things were in the Auror corps, and because it was in both their natures.

In any event, even had she been born a few years later than she was, there was still her background to hold her back. Despite his own very modest beginnings, Alastor Moody had seen a thing or two of pure-blood society...chasing would-be Knights of Walpurgis had been a quick and rough introduction...and he knew there was no way in Heaven or Hades that a girl like Minerva would have been permitted to pursue a real career, and certainly not one as "unsavoury" as law enforcement. The fact that she had managed to become a Transfiguration mistress was, he thought, a testament to her fortitude and will. He had often wondered how she managed it, and when he had found the marriage contract during his preliminary investigations into the disappearance of Gerald Macnair, he had whistled in appreciation. He sometimes wished he could have been a pixie on the wall when those negotiations had been happening.; he would have liked to see Minerva and her father put the thumbscrews to Kenneth Macnair, that piece of shite. How Minerva could have survived under the same roof as that bastard . . .

The memory of her agitation the previous night came flooding back. Alastor hadn't meant to frighten her...he hadn't even intended to truly restrain her...but he had thought she'd enjoy that kind of play. Merlin knew she had been enthusiastic enough about most of the other variations of lovemaking he'd introduced her to. As he thought about it, he came to the unwilling conclusion that somebody in Minerva's past had . . . harmed her. The idea made him slightly sick to his stomach, and he tossed the end of his cigarette forcefully to the patio tile and crushed it harshly under his foot.

He forced himself to think on it a bit longer. She had told Alastor that her husband had been less than adventurous in bed, and he wondered now if that had been the whole truth. Had Gerald Macnair abused her? Or had it been someone else? Kenneth Macnair?

Alastor wasn't about to ask Minerva about it...certainly not yet...but by god, he was going to try get some answers from somebody. Of that, he was certain.

/***/

Malcolm was just deciding which of his books to pack when Elgar came into his room.

"Master Malcolm, your mother is here," the elf said with a bow.

Malcolm tossed his copy of The Ten Greatest Quidditch Matches in History aside in favour of the first volume of Churchill's The Second World War, which he Shrank with his wand and stuffed into his rucksack.

"Thanks, Elgar. Can you tell her I'll be down in a minute?"

"Of course, Master Malcolm." He added as he left, "Best not keep her waiting, now, Master Malcolm."

"No, Elgar. I won't."

He tossed a few last-minute items into the rucksack and zipped it shut. When he went downstairs, his mum and grandmother were in the entrance hall talking quietly.

"Ah, all ready to go, Malcolm?" Mum asked, striding forward to give him a quick hug.

"Yes, Mum. Got everything right here," he answered, patting his rucksack. "Sorry you had to come all the way back here to get me."

"It's no bother," Mum answered. "Next year, you'll be able to Apparate yourself, and I won't have an excuse to put my arms around you anymore."

Malcolm rolled his eyes. "Oh, Mum . . ."

"Did you say goodbye to your grandfather?"

"Yes, Mum."

"And Elgar?"

"Yes, Mum."

To Gran, she said, "Thank you, Mother, for looking after him this past week."

Gran answered, "'Tis no trouble; he looks after himself now."

"Indeed," said Mum. "He's practically a grown man now. Just look at you, with your man's beard . . ."

"Oh, Mum," Malcolm said again, putting a self-conscious hand up to his chin. He'd been delighted when it had finally grown something a bit longer than the auburn fuzz he'd been sporting for the past year. Beards weren't particularly in vogue among younger witches and wizards, but Malcolm Macnair had stubbornly let his grow, to the gentle ribbing of his classmates. He already stood out among the boys in his form by virtue of his height, so he had just sort of decided to go with a look he thought of as iconoclastic. Hell, he thought, maybe he'd even eventually grow his beard as long as Dumbledore's. He knew lots of people thought the Headmaster was a barmpot, and that his excess of hair just advertised the fact, but Malcolm rather admired the way the old man didn't seem to care what others thought of him.

As his grandmother and mother walked ahead of him toward the door, he heard Gran say to Mum, "Are you sure this is quite proper, Minerva? It's one thing for you to . . . consort with a man...you're a grown witch, after all...but to bring Malcolm into it . . ."

Malcolm took a few loping steps to catch up with them and interjected, "It's fine, Gran. Alastor's a great chap. I like him, and it'll be nice to spend a week with him and Mum. Besides," he added cheekily, "I think they could use a chaperone."

He only grinned when both witches gave him identical stern looks, Mum saying, "Really, Malcolm!"

More than an hour later, he and his mother had finally completed the last leg of their Side-Along Apparition and appeared in the combination dining and sitting room of the cottage. When Malcolm opened his eyes after fighting the urge to vomit (his mum wasn't the smoothest Apparator known to wizardkind), he saw Moody slide his wand back into his cloak pocket.

Malcolm liked Moody, all right, but he had to admit that the Auror's tetchiness sometimes grated on him. Who was going to attack them here? There probably weren't even any wizards around for miles...maybe even none on the island at all. That's why Mum and Alastor had chosen it, after all.

"Malcolm!" said Moody, approaching him and clapping a hand on his arm. "It's good to see you."

"It's good to see you too, Alastor," Malcolm answered.

Mum took his rucksack from him and set it on the table next to the sofa.

"I'm sorry the accommodations are a bit tight, "she said. "We thought we could just Transfigure the settee into a bed, and there's a small loo over there," she said, pointing to a door across the room."

"It'll be fine, Mum," he said.

"That's the ticket," said Alastor. "We lads aren't above roughing it a bit, are we?"

"No, sir," said Malcolm.

"Well, I'm just going to go freshen up," said Mum. "And as long as you two are being all manly together, maybe you could clean the fish for lunch. It's still got its gills and scales attached."

Malcolm and Alastor looked at each other.

"Um . . ." said Alastor. "Actually, I'm not sure I know how to..."

"It's okay, Alastor," said Malcolm. "Elgar once showed me a spell to clean a fish. It's easy. I'll show you."

Alastor looked dubiously at the boy but said, "All right. Lead on, man."

They had lunch, and Malcolm's mum scolded Alastor for offering Malcolm one of the Spanish beers he had got in, saying, "That's about as far as this man-to-man bonding goes, Alastor. He's only sixteen."

"Aye, sorry Minerva," Alastor said with a surreptitious wink at Malcolm.

After lunch, the three changed into their Muggle bathing costumes and went out to the beach, and Malcolm was disappointed to find that there was no surf to speak of. The blue-green water just lapped gently at the sand, which was, admittedly, very soft and white. They walked down the beach a ways until they found a small shack that rented snorkelling gear. Alastor paid the three hundred pesetas, and Malcolm happily went to explore what was under the crystalline surface of the water while his mum and Alastor sat on the beach and did whatever it was they did.

Mum made them go in after two hours...she was afraid they were all getting too much sun...and after they changed into regular Muggle clothes, he and Mum walked down the street to the local market to select something for their dinner.

Malcolm was glad to get back to the house where they could use a few Cooling Charms; it had gotten very hot in the late afternoon. The three of them settled down on the patio to read, and later, while his mum wrote some letters...and wouldn't the Headmaster and Professor Bones be surprised to receive them through the Muggle post, she said...Alastor challenged Malcolm to a game of chess. Malcolm won the second game, and he saw his mother smile behind her book.

Dinner proved disappointing; the beef was tough, or maybe Mum just had overcooked it, and the lettuce for the salad was a little wilted, so Mum proposed they venture out in search of a decent pudding. They found it in a little restaurant near the centre of town and sat eating their greixoneras de brossat, Mum and Alastor having a bit of Madeira with theirs, until nearly ten-thirty.

When they got back to the cottage, Alastor said, "I'm going to turn in. Sitting around doing not much of anything all day is strangely exhausting. You coming, Minerva?"

There was an awkward moment when Malcolm saw his mum's face flush, and she mumbled something about "in a few minutes." To tell the truth, Malcolm felt a little strange at the idea that his mum would be joining Alastor in the double bed right in the next room, but he swallowed his discomfort and said, "Go on, Mum. I think I'll just Transfigure the settee and read a little more until I fall asleep."

"All right, if you're sure," she said, kissing him distractedly on the cheek.

When the bedroom door closed behind her, he tried very hard not to imagine her undressing in front of Alastor. When he heard soft murmurs coming from the bedroom, he couldn't help wondering with dread if they were going to . . .

No, no, no . . . not going to think about that. Not going to think about it. Going to think about . . . Quidditch.

He wished he'd brought the Quidditch book, after all. Looking around, he found a couple of Muggle coins sitting on the kitchen counter, and after a few bad attempts, managed to Transfigure them into a pair of waxy earplugs.

Better.

He went to the small loo, changed into his pyjamas, cleaned his teeth, and came back into the small room to Transfigure the settee into a cot. With a nervous glance at the bedroom door, he leant over and turned off the lamp as Alastor had shown him, pulled the blanket his mum had left out for him up over his shoulders, and tried to go to sleep.