Ooh, Sexy Cardie!
Hermione stopped in her tracks as she rounded the corner of the aisle on her way to her favorite secluded studying table. She had just been thinking she'd finally gotten through a day without Cormac's desperate bids for her attention. She'd clearly come to that conclusion much too soon.
Cormac looked up at the sound of movement, and a smile came to his face. The smile was slow, smoldering, sexy. Or he thought so, anyway. Hermione sighed, wondering why she couldn't just skive off studying like normal witches and wizards did. No, she had to be responsible. Well, this was what responsibility got her.
He had clearly been waiting for her. That was bad enough. But as she hesitantly approached the front of the table, and he sat up straight from his position perched on the desktop, it was clear that he was wearing a long, fluffy knitted cardigan. And nothing else, she quickly noted with alarm.
"Cormac! What are you doing here?" she hissed at him, careful not to raise her voice loud enough to catch the attention of Madam Pince or any of the other students who might be in the library. She looked around furtively hoping no one else had seen him. The last thing she needed was to be caught in a scandal with a mostly-naked Cormac.
The smile stayed in place, and if anything he stretched himself a little taller. His long, bare legs were dangling off the edge of the table. Hermione only noticed this from her peripheral vision because she was determinedly trying to look only into his face, and ignore any dangly bits, limbs or otherwise, that were in her line of sight.
"I heard you like men in cardies." His voice was low and suggestive, not even bothering to cover up the innuendo. She wanted to look away from his dark eyes, but that would mean straying into territory that was better left unviewed. She didn't want to encourage it. Him, encourage him.
He'd clearly overheard the conversation she'd had earlier that day with Ginny. Ginny had said she was particularly enamored of a man wearing spectacles. And Hermione had admitted that many times her attention could be caught by the sight of a good-looking man in a cardie.
As it happened, this was not one of those times. Actually, she was trying not to gag. And she was hoping this one scene didn't ruin forever her pleasure in looking at a man in a cardie.
"Cormac!" Her barely whispered pronunciation of his name was supposed to be a chastisement, but he only beamed as if she'd said it with affection. "You're practically naked!"
"I know. I've been sitting here, wearing just a cardie," and the way he said it made it sound like a dirty fetish, rather than a perfectly respectable preference, "waiting for you." He lifted his brow, clearly expecting some kind of reaction from her.
"Oh, Merlin!" Hermione squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the beginning of a headache coming on. She did not need this. She had eight inches on transfiguration due in the morning (well, it was technically only six inches, but she was generous in considering it eight, and wasn't that always the case?), and even though she'd written it already, she had only revised once. And expelling a naked Cormac from her favorite study table was not on her list of things to do. Of course, letting a naked Cormac continue to sit on her favorite study table was also definitely not on her list of things to do.
Her eyes snapped open. "Cormac!"
Her voice held a hint of steel, and she noted with repulsion that Cormac positively quivered as he answered, "Yes, my lady?"
Oh, hell no. She absolutely did not need this.
"Get the hell off of my table. Put your damned trousers back on. Button up your cardie. And walk out of here." She brandished her wand at him. "I know a half dozen jinxes that will make your crown jewels not worthy of the lowest ranking monarch. And if you do not leave my study table to me by the time I count to ten, I will use them all on you."
He smirked at her, but the smirk faded a bit as she started to count.
"One…two…better get a move on, McLaggen. I've never tested all of these spells together. Three…"
He hopped off of the table, and slinked his way over to the other side, where he slowly, deliberately, bent over to retrieve his pants. The cardie was not long enough to cover the length of his pale arse and Hermione recoiled in distaste. "Five, seven, eight, McLaggen!"
He turned, having finished buttoning his trousers, but he'd left the cardie open so the expanse of his hairless chest was still on display.
Hermione frowned. "Niiine. I'm really not joking."
He just laughed, and blew her a kiss as he walked off in his bare feet. Before he disappeared around the corner, he turned and said in parting, "Next time, Granger, I'm leaving the cardie off, too!"
"Next time, McLaggen, I'm counting to ten by tens!" she whisper-shouted at him. He might have been too far away by then to hear her.
She expelled a frustrated breath, trying to calm herself from the unexpected confrontation with a nearly-naked man.
She walked to her usual seat, very near where Cormac had been sitting, and pulled out her chair, placing her books on the corner of the desk.
She paused for a moment before unpacking her supplies, trying to remove the image from her mind of him sitting there waiting for her.
She did have a thing for cardies. And actually, he did have a nice arse, she very privately admitted to herself.
Her vision sharpened and her gaze was drawn to the damp spots drying on the table that were in the perfect shape of two squished buttocks.
"Argh!" she huffed in frustration, all potentially charitable thoughts completely forgotten.
She Scourgified the table five times before finally settling on the side furthest from her usual spot and finally revising her essay. But her heart wasn't in it. Instead of revising a second time, she pulled out a new sheet of parchment and wrote at the top, "A List of Places a Naked Cormac Wouldn't Dare Go." With a little trepidation she added, "Probably" to the title.
-o-o-o-o-
A/N: I don't know how exactly I ended up writing this. I had this line from Notting Hill stuck in my head, where a woman says, "Ooh, sexy cardie." And I was like, "Are there sexy cardies?" I was curious because of a Neville/Luna one-shot I'm writing. And so I Googled "men's sexy cardigan." And this picture showed up of a guy wearing nothing but a cardigan. And THEN someone said she could see Random-Model-Guy-In-A-Cardie as Cormac McLaggen. And then...I don't know. Here we are. If you're interested in seeing the picture, Google it yourself. Or you could join Inspirational Universe on Facebook, which is a group with lots of pictures for inspiration or for making aesthetics and banners and all that.
And as long as I'm recommending things, don't forget to look me up on Hawthorn & Vine under the same penname, where I've just finished a 5-chapter Dramione. It's posted on H&V because it's rated MA.