Disclaimer: Oh yeah, bet you didn't know J.K.R. was an American teenager. Right, if I owned anything but a laptop and a library card I could afford a better disclaimer.
Book Ends
Ronald Weasley was not the most confident person in the world. He had always been bullocks at anything even came remotely close to sappy, emotional stuff, or anything that put him in the spotlight at all. In class he sort of pretended that he wasn't quite as smart as he really was just so people wouldn't expect anything of him. Well, that and it gave him an excuse to ask for Hermione's help. His Hermione. He loved watching her work. It gave him the perfect opportunity to study all of the little details about her; how she raised one eyebrow and pursed her lips whenever he misspelled a words or misquoted some well-known fact. Sometimes he even did it on purpose, just to watch her eyes light up when she spotted some small error. She looked like she was Julius Caesar or Napoleon or something, drunk with the conquest.
She had all these little quirks that he had noticed over the past few years. She shook her foot when she was reading something that she found especially fascinating, but what intrigued him most about Hermione was the delicate way she did things when she thought no one was looking. She abandoned her aggressive, ambitious manner for something else. He couldn't place it, but sometimes she reminded Ron of a fairy, not the real ones, but the ones Muggles told stories about, the way her rebellious curls fell out of the sloppy bun she wore at night. He supressed the urge to reach over and brush them out of her eyes. She was always so strong, a firecracker. He loved to get her all riled up, but it was so refreshing to see this side of her. It was gentle, and innocent. It drew him to her, and made his hands shake and his breath grow ragged. But tonight, all of that was going to have to be pushed aside. Ron might not be too sure of himself, but there was one thing he was completely sure of. He couldn't go one more day wondering what it would feel like to be more. For years he had watched her blossom from a mousey little girl to a beautiful young woman. And, if there was one thing Ron had realized in his years at school it was that he couldn't do anything without her, and he swore to himself that he would never let any other bloke brush those curls away, he finally knew what he had been missing all this time. She was his match, his perfect woman. Nothing else made a fire burn in his chest and sent shivers down his spine like she did, and he was determined now to make sure that terrifying, wonderful sensation never left him. So, tonight, he would do whatever he needed to do, but one thing was certain, before midnight, Hermione Granger would be his.