That Fourth Word
" 'Mione, want to go see a quidditch game with me?" Ron excitedly held two battered tickets directly in front of his girlfriend's nose.
"Oh, uh, maybe not this time," Hermione graciously deferred, an uneasy look on her face as she focused her attention on her feet. "You know I'm not a big fan of quidditch, and there's this really good book on Ancient Runes that I've been wanting to finish…" she trailed off as she hesitatingly glanced up into the boy's hopeful eyes.
Ron sighed and, in spite of her response, broke into a smile. "That's alright. We can always just see each other another time." With a quick good-bye kiss he left her apartment, whistling. He had been with Hermione for two years, but somehow, in the last few months something had changed. There was no longer the feeling that they had to constantly be together. It used to be that if they failed to vocalize their love for each other or show their love in other obvious displays of affection that something felt wrong.
But now there wasn't that anxious aspect to their relationship. It was just…comfortable. Natural. They could spend time apart, and every moment only made Ron love her more and more. He knew that she was starting to feel the same way as him, because in the past few months she had been spending fewer evenings with him. There was nothing wrong with it, just the fact that some evenings Ron felt like playing quidditch and Hermione felt like reading and he felt confident that the fact that they could accept these differences only made their relationship stronger.
Another content grin broke across his face. It almost felt like he was born again. He had told her countless times that he loved her, but suddenly he realized that now he loved her in an entirely new, wonderful way.
Seized by a romantic impulse he quickly knocked on her apartment's door again. She swung open the door again, a dull expression on her face. "Hermione, I need to tell you something."
"I've just been thinking the same thing, Ron," she said, but he only noticed the words, and not the torn, sad look on her hesitating face.
When Ron said his next words they managed to perfectly clash with Hermione saying her next sentence, and this only made Ron smile wider because he thought that he'd heard her say those wonderful three words and because he couldn't help but think that him and Hermione had become so close that their minds now even worked at exactly the same pace.
"You first," Ron grinned like a boy awaiting Christmas morning, because even though he'd heard her say those three words countless times, he wanted to hear them again.
Hermione finally tore her gaze away from her shoes. "I don't love you."
The grin slid off of his face until it looked like he had never grinned before in his entire life.
He was right. She had said those three words.
There was just that despicable fourth word in the middle.
…
A/N: The goal of this one-shot was to show how two people can interpret the same relationship with completely opposite results. Did that come across well?
Disclaimer: I don't own Ron, Hermione, etc.
