I was in my potions workroom finishing up a sleep potion for Elizabeth Bones in the village when the door blew open.

"Not now," I told Tristan Potter as he trudged in.

"Iz -"

"It can wait. Give me ten minutes." I gestured toward the door that led to my sitting room. "Go."

He let out a snort, kicked off his snow covered boots, and slumped toward the thick wooden door.

When I followed him a few minutes later, he was lounging on the floor, his back to the warmth of the wooden wall. My workroom had to be kept cool so the potions didn't congeal, but there was a spell laid evenly throughout the walls surrounding my living space that kept it pleasantly warm during even the coldest winter months.

Tristan had already stripped off his outerwear and was lounging in front of the fireplace; his deep red coat and scarf were both draped over a stand nearby fireplace, and his hat and clothes were spread out on the floor.

"Hello, darling," he said as I locked the door behind me.

I didn't bother to hold back my giggle, and he grinned as soon as my lips turned upward. He liked it when I laughed at him; in fact, he often phrased things specifically to induce it. It was one of the many things I liked about him. When I made to sit down next to him, sweeping my skirt out, he grabbed my waist and pulled me into his lap before I hit the floor.

"Tristan!"

He kissed my neck. "I missed you."

"You saw me yesterday."

"But yesterday was so long ago. Are you ready to make an honest man of me yet? That would make things so much easier."

I twisted around to study him. Tristan Potter was very handsome, even if his nose and cheeks were still a little red from the cold and his dark hair was flattened from his thick woolen hat. His high cheekbones made his face light up whenever he smiled, which was often; his hazel eyes often twinkled from an untold joke; and his touch could be intoxicating.

Absurd though he undoubtedly was, I really was very fond of him.

"Not quite yet," I told him, nuzzling up against his very warm and comforting body. After minimal internal conflict, I had come down on the side of not caring about the impropriety. "My mother invited me by for tea tomorrow. Would you like to come with me?"

"Only if you'll make an honest man of me," he said again. Before I could pull back to glare at him, his arms circled around me. "Oh, stop it. Yes, of course. You know that. Did you tell her you were going to invite me?"

I hesitated. "I didn't not tell her," I said finally. He let out a chuckle. "Well, it won't surprise her."

He considered that. "No, likely not. Do you think she'll ever forgive me for my imprudent failure to observe even the most basic standards of respectability?"

"Probably before she forgives me for lying about it."

My mother had spent months trying to convince me to meet Tristan Potter after he'd moved to Godric's Hollow. In fairness, everyone else in the village was mad about him, too, but since I've never really been the sort of person to swoon over good-looking rich men with egos the size of Hogwarts, I'd avoided him on principle.

And then he'd cornered me while I was buying potions supplies and made me laugh. I do have a soft spot for men who can make me laugh. I don't meet many of them.

One thing had led to another, and then my mother had walked in on him lounging on the floor of my sitting room far too late in the evening for a proper social visit. It had taken quite a lot to convince her that the impropriety was indicative of youthful foolhardiness rather than a secret pregnancy. She still hadn't quite forgiven me for lying about not knowing him, and her previous high opinion of him had been left severely dented.

I steered the conversation onto less uncomfortable subjects. Tristan followed my lead.

When we next looked up at the clock, we had a very unwelcome surprise. "Is it that late already?" he asked no one in particular. "What time did your mother tell you to come by at?"

"Late morning. I should probably go to sleep."

"I should probably let you."

I didn't move, and neither did he. His grip around me tightened a little, and when I swiveled around to look at him, he leaned down to kiss me.

I liked kissing Tristan Potter.

When we pulled apart, he rested his forehead on mine. "You should go to sleep," he said.

"Yes." I took a deep breath. "Are you - are you staying?"

I'm still not quite sure how Tristan came to spend quite so much time alone with me in my sitting room until all hours of the night. I'm even less sure how he came to spend some of those nights in my bed. I remember it being my idea, of course; I'm just not sure how I'd gotten to the point where I had such an improper idea in the first place.

"If you'd like me to," he said.

There was a part of me that was very aware that this ritual was a little ridiculous - he never said no when I asked, and if I asked, it was obviously because I wanted him to. I suppose the vestiges of propriety made us both feel better, even if it always ended at the same very improper place.

I shifted my weight to one hand to push myself to my feet. He kissed my head before I could rise. "Would you like me to?" he asked.

I could feel the color start to flood my cheeks as I nodded. It was becoming harder to sleep when he wasn't here with me, which I should have taken as a sure sign that I was in well, well over my head.

But Tristan Potter had been robbing me of my good sense since he'd first made me laugh in McKinnon's potions shop.

"I'm going to - to change. You should…" I trailed off. We'd first done this more than three months before, but I still felt a little strange speaking about it.

He grabbed his bag off the floor and headed to the washroom.

I didn't let him keep his pyjamas here - that somehow made it feel more real, and besides, the best explanation I'd possibly be able to give if someone saw them was that at least they indicated that he didn't sleep in my bed naked. I didn't think that that defense would get me very far, especially if the person who saw it was my mother. People usually didn't wander into my bedroom, but one could never be too careful.

I grabbed the pyjama shirt and trousers I wore when he was here out of my top drawer - the knee-length sleeping gown I usually preferred had a tendency to edge up my legs as I slept, which seemed like it should probably be avoided in mixed company.

When we were cuddled against each other in my bed, covered by the knitted blanket and matching quilt my grandmother had given me as a gift for finishing Hogwarts and moving into my own house, I couldn't stop a giggle from slipping out. "Why do we keep doing this?"

He pressed his lips against the back of my neck. "Because you keep asking, and I'm absolutely helpless to resist you." I could hear the smile in his voice.

"That's not a very good answer."

He pulled my messy braid aside and started to kiss my neck in earnest. "Clearly it's good enough, since you keep asking me to stay. Did you know that people keep asking me whether Isolda Winters has frozen me solid yet? They say you're an ice queen."

"Do you agree with them?" I teased, rolling over to stare at his silhouette in the darkness.

Rather than going back to my neck, he pressed his lips against mine. I felt his hand slip beneath my shirt to rest on the small of my back. When I gasped - I still hadn't quite gotten used to the feel of his bare skin - he brushed his tongue against mine. I wound my arms around his neck and deepened his kiss.

"No, I find you to be exceedingly warm," he said when we'd finally pulled back from each other. His lips brushed against my forehead. "Though I can't say I'm sorry that no one else seems to see that quite like I do."

"I hope no one else ever does. My reputation would be in tatters."

"I'll take it to my grave," he breathed. "Kiss me again."

In my defense, neither of us was taking off our clothes, which had to count for something. Probably not much - inviting a man I wasn't even engaged to into my bed wasn't the wisest choice I had ever made in the first place, let alone repeatedly made for months - but something.

I shuffled closer to him as we kissed. He pulled his hand around to rest on my hip. "Wait," he said. "I - ah - you might not want to get too close right now." I felt my face start to get warm. "Sorry. I can't help it."

He sounded embarrassed. The vestiges of my good sense told me to listen to him, and that ignoring him was going to start us down a path we weren't going to be able to backtrack from later.

I ignored them.

"I don't mind," I said. "If - if you don't."

He didn't move his hand. "Sorry," he said again. "Are you sure you don't mind?"

The real answer was that there were many things I wasn't sure of where he was involved, but I didn't tell him that. Instead, I said, "I want to find out."

After another moment of hesitation, his hand returned to my back, and I tentatively moved my body against his. The bulge between his legs pressed against me, and when I didn't object, he pressed his lips to mine again.

"Is that all right?" he asked, resting his forehead against mine.

I nodded. "I - is it for you?"

"Yes." His voice sounded a little strained, and I could feel his heart starting to race beneath my hand.

His hand pushed me a little closer to him, and I heard a noise escape me that I didn't even know I could make. Heat flooded my face.

"Don't worry," he said softly.

Our lips met again, and most of the embarassment floated away. Feeling him pressed up against me felt good in a way that I hadn't realized it would, and there was a tingling coming from where we were touching that was starting to overwhelm my other senses. I closed my eyes and distantly heard him say my name.

Then it exploded, and I felt vibrations unlike any sensation I'd ever experienced before course through my body.

When I came back to myself, I realized that my hand was still clenched around his shirt. "I love you," I whispered as we started moving together again.

His touch was still gentle, but I could feel a growing sense of urgency coming from him, and I was surprised at how gratifying I found it.

It wasn't as though I didn't recognize where our relationship was going before that, of course. I'd known that if he was regularly sleeping in my bed, we weren't going to stop with kisses or my sitting in his lap. I knew that we were probably going to continue to do increasingly improper things unless I stopped inviting him to stay overnight.

And I knew that I wasn't going to stop inviting him.

We hadn't done very well at keeping our sometimes-sleeping arrangements a secret, either. My potions partner, Beatrice, had gotten to the workshop unusually early one morning and come across Tristan in his pyjamas. I didn't think she'd told anyone, but several of the village gossips had recently noticed that there were nights where the lights in his house never turned on.

And, of course, my mother had been suspicious about how far we were overstepping the limits of propriety since she'd discovered our relationship in the first place.

She seemed neither surprised nor particularly pleased to see Tristan with me the following morning. Her greeting was nearly as frosty as the air outside, and she almost immediately pulled me into the kitchen to "help her" with tea. "There's gossip all over the village," she said as she gathered a pile of biscuits on a plate. I wasn't sure how to respond, and eventually decided on a vague shrug. "It's about you and Mr. Potter."

"Mm." I put the teacups down on the tray and reached out to grab the plate. I wanted to escape the conversation as quickly as possible, and I was hoping she wouldn't want to have it in front of him.

"Isolda, there's a rumor that he never went home three nights ago."

"How would anyone even know that?" I asked. When her eyes narrowed, I quickly shut my mouth. My mother had always viewed logical answers as proof that I'd thought something out and was therefore probably lying about it.

She was often correct.

"Do you know anything about that?" she pressed.

I picked up the tray. "How would I know about it?"

I left the room before she'd formulated an answer.

Unfortunately, her irritation at Tristan's "imprudent failure to observe even the most basic standards of respectability" was even deeper than I'd realized; by the time I'd set the tray down and looked back at her, she had fixed him with a stare. "Have you been intimate with my daughter?" she asked.

My entire body suddenly felt uncomfortably warm. I wasn't entirely shocked that she would try to probe him for some information - he was a bad liar, which she'd exploited in the past - but I hadn't been expecting her to ask him that.

To my surprise, his face stayed neutral; it seemed like he had been expecting it. "I don't think that's any of your business," he said pleasantly.

No matter how pleasant his tone was, though, the words themselves were a sharp rebuke of her admittedly very rude question, and it took her a moment to process how to respond. "Isolda is my daughter -" she started to say, but Tristan cut her off.

"Then you should ask her. I don't like being used as her veritaserum."

My mother had often accused me of being willful, but there was no universe in which I would ever have considered talking to her like that. I supposed that that was where being a rich handsome young man came in.

She was so taken aback that she dropped the subject entirely. I wasn't entirely sure whether he'd done further damage to her impression of him or taken a step toward redeeming himself by sticking up for me - knowing my mother, it could really have been either. Regardless, she didn't bring it up again, and she and Tristan were perfectly cordial for the rest of the visit.

"I can't believe you said that to my mother," I said after we'd gotten back to my cottage. Our snow boots were sitting in a puddle of ice cold water in my workroom, and our outerwear was strewn in front of the crackling fire he'd just set in my fireplace. My braid was now hanging over my shoulder rather than pinned up on the top of my head, and the heat washing over me was just starting to warm my bones back up.

He was sitting with his back to the wall, head resting against it. He grinned without opening his eyes. "As I said to her: I don't like being used like your veritaserum." I settled next to him. "Anyway," he added, "I don't know how to answer that question even if I wanted to."

I shifted uncomfortably. "She meant -"

He saved me from having to spell it out. "I know what she meant, but…" He opened his eyes and looked at me. "I know last night wasn't that, but it wasn't nothing, either." I was a little disconcerted to find that I couldn't read his expression, and after a minute or two of silence, he sighed. "And she's not wrong, you know," he said reluctantly. "About us, I mean."

I felt a jolt in my stomach. "How so?"

He rubbed his face with his hand. "She's objecting to the idea of you sharing a bed and having sex with a man you're not married to." There was a tinge of red in his cheeks, and I could feel my face starting to burn. "Those are both reasonable objections, and they're not coming out of nowhere."

"I'm sorry," I said after a minute. "About last night. I shouldn't have -"

"No," he interjected quickly. "No, that's not what I'm saying. I…" He swallowed hard. "I liked it. But… Iz, in the most respectful way possible, why don't you want to marry me?"

I stared at him. After a moment, I said, "You haven't asked me. I assumed if you were serious, you would."

"Are you joking?" he asked incredulously. "I got a ring months ago and I've brought it up at least half a dozen times since then, and each time, you've just deflected it. Of course I'm serious. I wouldn't joke about something like that if I didn't mean it. You know me better than that."

I stared at him. "You have a ring?"

"That's not the point." He studied my face for a minute. "Did you want me to ask you?"

I stared at him, not quite sure what to say. Silence was clearly not what he was looking for; as it began to stretch out and become actively uncomfortable, he pushed himself up and grabbed his coat and hat.

My heart was hammering in my ears. As he vanished into my workroom, my mind started to work again, and I realized that he was genuinely hurt. I struggled to my feet and rushed after him. He was yanking open the door, snowboots still unlaced, when I reached the doorway. "Trist -" He started to turn, and I realized that he was about to apparate. "Tristan, wait."

There was a loud crack, and then he was gone.

I knew I'd be able to find him later, and I suspected that we'd be able to patch things up.

Still. The empty space he'd been standing in still felt frightening and demoralizing, especially since I wasn't really sure why I kept changing the subject when he brought it up. I really did adore him; Beatrice and my friend Cicily had both pointed out on multiple occasions that just saying his name brought an unconscious smile to my lips, and there was nowhere I felt more comfortable and safe than in his arms.

Marriage would also effectively address everything I'd come to hate about our relationship - the lip service to propriety, the lies, the nights that he wasn't in my bed…

But marriage had never seemed to make anyone else happy. My friend Cicily had married six months prior, and now far too much of her life revolved around making her husband comfortable. It wasn't that he was a brute - we'd grown up together, and knew that he wasn't. It was just what was expected. From what I could tell, Cicily's life had been turned upside down, and his had barely changed at all.

And she wasn't the only one. I'd seen women I knew had never been eager to have children end up occupied by two of them within a few years of marriage. It wasn't that they'd changed - I knew, because they'd come to me begging for a potion to prevent a third. It was just what was expected.

I'd even seen it in my own family. My mother would swear to her grave that my father had been taken from her far too early and that she missed him every day. I believed that she did, but I'd also seen her become more outspoken and engaged in the world around her after my father's death.

I had no reason to believe that I would be the excception to that. Once you were formally attached to a man, people stopped treating you as a person, and 'love' seemed to have more strings attached.

Through that lens, I supposed my avoidance shouldn't have puzzled me at all.

After a minute or two of waiting for him to reappear, I pushed the door closed, slid down the cold wooden wall across from one of the potions stations, and buried my face in my knees. I'd been crying long enough to look like a wreck - puffy eyes, hiccups, runny nose and all - when I heard a soft knock on my door. I didn't answer, and after a moment, the handle turned.

"Isolda?" he asked softly through the crack. "Can I come in?"

"Yes," I sniffed.

He slid inside and closed the door behind him. "Sorry," he said. "I was already apparating when you called out, and I had to walk back - I didn't trust myself to apparate again without splinching myself." He stopped in front of me and knelt down. His eyes were also red and puffy, which was gratifying. "Isolda, I'm very serious," he said without preamble. "If you're just… not ready, that's fine, and if you just don't want it with me…" He swallowed hard. "Then I can respect that, too. But I'm serious. I want to marry you. I got that ring before I even started spending the night here."

"That was months ago."

"Like I said."

"You've only ever made jokes."

"You've always brushed them off. I was afraid that if I said anything more without any encouragement from you, you'd think twice about having me in your life at all." He sighed and straightened up. "It's cold out here," he said. "Let's go inside." I was gratified when he kicked off his snow boots again before following me - it seemed like a decent sign that he was at least intending to stay.

I settled into the corner closest to the fireplace while he closed and locked the workshop door behind us. After he'd droppd his coat and hat back in front of the fireplace, he hovered in front of me, clearly not sure to sit. I was about to suggest he sit next to me when he dropped down to settle in across from me.

"Is this okay?" he asked, his voice hesitant. I nodded, and he put his hand out without touching mine. His fingers were still red from the cold.

He hadn't been this tenative around touching me and using my nickname since the very early days of our relationship. I drew my knees up to bury my face in them; he'd become a huge part of my life over the past year, and friction with him hurt even more than I'd expected it to.

After a moment, he said, in a very strained tone, "Isolda, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do right now. It feels like there's something about me that's making you uncomfortable, and I don't want to touch you and make it worse… but at this point, I don't really know how to make you feel better without hugging you."

I reached out blindly without picking my head up. When fingers found his sleeve, I pulled on it; after a moment, he shifted over to sit next to me. After another moment of hesitation, I felt his arm settle over my shoulders.

"Is this okay?" he asked. I nodded, still in tears, and his grip tightened a little. "Isolda -" I stiffened a little, and he sighed. "Iz, please talk to me. I don't understand what's going on - I just know that I'm hurt and that you're upset."

I focused on the one part of what he'd said that didn't require me to articulate anything. "Why are you hurt?"

He sighed. "Because I love you and want to be with you, and I feel like you don't like me enough to marry me."

His voice wavered as he spoke, and his words hit me like a dagger in the stomach. If I'd needed confirmation that the issue truly wasn't not liking him enough, I would have had my answer there.

Before I could reply, he added, "And I feel guilty that I may have destroyed your reputation too much for you to find someone you do." His eyes were still puffy and red.

"It's not about not loving you," I told him after a moment. "Or not liking you enough. But all the women I know who have gotten married have been less happy for it."

"And you don't want that." I shook my head. "Did they know their husbands first, though?" he pressed. "When you don't -"

He stopped talking when I sighed. "Tristan, I don't think that this is about that. Men never lose much when they marry. It can be different for women. Marriage takes away our freedom to make us more secure." He opened his mouth to protest and then shut it again, looking distinctly off kilter. "If you married me, would you want me to keep making potions?"

"I hadn't thought about it," he said after a minute. "But I'd let you do whatever you wanted."

"I don't want you to let me do anything."

He winced at the sharpness in my voice. "I didn't mean it what way."

"Didn't you?"

To his credit, he took a moment to think about it. "I didn't intend to mean it that way," he said. "I don't want you to stop being yourself."

I caught his gaze and held it. "If people mocked you about your wife working, would it bother you?" He hesitated, and I added, "You have an ego. I bet it would."

He looked away from me. "Not because of that," he said. "I would never want anyone to think that I can't take care of my own family."

"I don't want to be taken care of," I told him. "That's why people call me an ice queen."

As we talked, it became clear to me that there were things he hadn't considered at at all - including the idea that I might not want to leave my cottage to live somewhere else just then or that I actively didn't like the idea of servants. That didn't inspire confidence, and my heart was starting to sink when his response to my pointed question about what his parents would think of his marrying a potioneer without an overflowing Gringotts vault surprised me.

"I don't care," he said flatly. "I don't think they do, either - my mother asked me last week why I hadn't proposed to you yet - but even if they did, they would have to get over it." My skepticism must have been apparent on my face, because he added, "Iz, I don't want to trap you. If we disagreed about something, we'd talk about it, and I'd never sit there and listen to people attack you for who you are."

An enormous knot in my chest loosened. "You promise?"

"I promise."

Suddenly, I could feel my heartbeat pulsing through my body. It was deafening, and the twinge in my stomach made me feel like I was genuinely in danger of throwing up from sheer nerves. "Ask me again."

He froze. He was so motionless he could have been a statue. He didn't say anything for a long moment, during which my nerves fell to pieces. Then he took a deep, shaky breath in. "Will you marry me?"

His hands were shaking, which made me feel oddly better.

"Yes." My voice was too soft, and I cleared my throat. "Yes," I said again.

He let out a sigh of relief and leaned down to kiss me. "I love you," he said after we'd pulled apart. "I - do you mind if I go ask your mother for her permission now? So I can at least pretend I'm doing it properly?"

The truth was that I would have preferred to have him stay with me, but he was clearly anxious to go through the motions, so I told him to go ahead.

She would probably be gratified, at any rate.

It took longer than I'd expected for him to get back, though, and when he finally walked in two and a half hours later, I'd just started to worry that my mother had told him no. The smile on his face assuaged that particular fear, but I still asked him what had held him up with a fair amount of trepidation.

"She said yes. That's all the matters."

I snapped my book shut and put it aside. "Tristan."

He stripped his coat off again and plopped down in front of my chair. After a moment, I reached out to start running my fingers through his snow-speckled hair - he'd been too excited to remember his hat - and he let his head fall back to rest against my knee. "She insisted that I answer her question from this morning." My hand stilled, and he quickly added, "I told her not in the way she meant, but probably more than she'd like."

I felt my face get hot as I started twining his hair through my fingers again. "Does she know you've slept here?" I sighed when he said yes. "I'm surprised she's not already here to lecture me."

"She was expecting worse, I think. Her first question was whether you were pregnant."

That didn't surprise me, at least. "You would think I didn't make potions for a living." He laughed, slipped his hand under my skirt, and began to tickle the back of my calf through my tights. "Tristan!"

"I'm your fiance, it's not improper anymore," he said through my giggles.

"Yes, it is," I mentioned to gasp. He sighed and slid his hand down to run his thumb along my ankle. When I'd regained my ability to breath, I added, "We've never been proper, though."

He took my hand and pulled on it. "Come down here," he said. I slid off the chair and into his arms, and he kissed me. "You're sure?" he asked when we pulled apart.

"If you're sure about what we talked about."

"I promise."

"Then yes," I said. "I'm sure. I do love you, Tristan." His hold on me tightened a lot, and I saw a smile spread across his face that I wasn't sure he was even aware of. "I miss you when you aren't here. I just don't want to lose myself."

"I don't want to lose you, either." He kissed me again. "Can I stay again tonight?"

"I'd like that," I said. "I'm your fiancee, it's not improper anymore."

He smiled widened. "Yes, it is. We've never been proper, though." He nudged me. "Let's eat something and then go to bed."

I glanced at the clock. It was just past eight. "It's still early," I pointed out.

He kissed me again. "I know," he said softly. I felt one of hands at the small of my back, and a very pleasant shiver ran up my spine. The memory of the sensations I'd felt the previous night, which had been driven out of my mind amidst all my emotional turmoil, came rushing back to the fore.

Suddenly, going to bed early made all the sense in the world.

A/N: This has been heavily edited from the original version and totally reworked - I hope you liked it! (If you're interested in how they got here, you might enjoy The Thing with Feathers or The Netted Sunbeam.)

Reviews and faves are always appreciated, and thank you so much for reading!

- Branwen