She's all scarlet and lace, white ribbons in red hair. She's all silk skin and soft eyes, small smiles and strange smirks. He likes to watch her laughing, her head tilted back and her eyes squeezed shut. He likes the way her eyes crinkle in her happiness, and the flush across her cheeks. Her mouth. The soft pink flesh over small, sharp teeth.
Given to hero worship, she has found a new god. He knows it's wrong to take advantage of a schoolgirl crush. Just sixteen, God bless her, and she comes creeping to him at night. It starts out easy, an excuse like a nightmare, like a sound on the glass. How helpless, how sweet, who could refuse? He opens arms like spreading legs or gaping jaws, and she crawls across the covers and into his embrace.
From there it's just a pantomime. She pretends to be asleep; he pretends not to care. Moonlit and uneasy, he lets his fingers brush back her hair, allowing only small movements, only regulated caresses. She snuggles closer in her feigned sleep; murmuring in what they pretend is her extreme somnolence. They've always been good at play-acting. This is a duet worth watching.
He lets his eyes wander over her. Long, dark lashes, splayed over pale cheeks. Pretends not to see the hint of green that tells him she's still watching. Her legs are long, strong and fast when she runs in the day. Lightly tanned skin, still showing those sweet freckles. Her hair is mussed, falling carelessly into her face like a veil of blood. It smells like watermelon from her shampoo, sharply acidic and sweet. Thick and cool around his fingers, so that he wonders what it would taste like. If he just leaned in now, took a mouthful of her hair, let his tongue swipe over her skin and take away pieces of her, dissolving in his mouth like so much cotton candy…
She stirs now, always at this point, as if she senses his thoughts. He holds her tighter and she quiets again, her little sigh restoring the calm of his brain. He can't even think, these times, of why he's here. Harry is safely tucked in bed in his room upstairs, Ron full fathom five in a cot near the window. And all is quiet in the room across the hall from the boys, where moonlight must drown itself in the curls of Hermione's hair, must spill traitorously over the empty and cooling bed that the girl in his arms has fled.
It feels funny, to be free again. He feels giddy sometimes, and maybe that's what this is. Maybe that giddiness, that surge of sweet and sacrosanct joy, is the reason that he finds himself in this position, night after night.
It never goes farther, but isn't this enough? Isn't this incriminating enough? There's no pretending this is innocent, despite their contrived sleep and their feints. Anyone can see in an instant; the facts of this pattern lay out for a month of heated summer. He never even tried to say no.
He likes to watch her in the sunlight, burned clean of all their impurity. Her hair catches light like flame, fire red and autumn leaves. The length of her legs and the stretch of her smile, all burned into his eyes like so much ultraviolet.
What he likes most about her, what he wishes he could keep the most,
is just this artificial moment.
