Forbidden Fruit
In trying to get away from a claustrophobic marriage, Hermione finds more than just solace with a man she previously thought she hated ...
It started when the cold, damp leaves of an especially wet autumn lay, over-ripe and unyielding, on the rapidly hardening ground of summer's end.
It shouldn't have started at all.
But it did.
Just like that.
After all those years of being the hateful, acerbic teacher – the professor with the spiteful, wounding tongue and intolerant attitude - the secretive triple spy became a 'war hero' (who very nearly lost his life at the fangs of a giant snake), when his true colours were finally revealed along with his betrayal of the Dark Lord.
That same man that I once thought I despised, detested even, suddenly became, not only my friend, but my exquisite lover also.
In trying to escape the confines of a suffocating marriage to my childhood sweetheart, and long-entwined friend (a union that should never have been, and, with hindsight, only happened because everyone assumed it would), I found myself in my former Potion master's arms. Having found each other by chance, and having sought a comfort neither knew the other could provide, our lives collided and took on a new and unexpected twist.
And, on that same chilly autumnal night; when the wind whispered through the trees, in the softly spoken secret language of nature, and the cloak of darkness wrapped itself around our dreams, he kissed my newly-formed tears away – every one of them – and led me down a new kind of path.
It had simply never been like that with Ron.
There had never been the fire, the passionate intensity – matched only by the heat in the former spy's dangerously dark-flashing eyes. No one had ever made me feel the way he did.
And, hearing him shout 'Hermione' in that sublimely seductive voice of his, at the height of our passion, was my final undoing. It left me with little choice but to answer with a shuddering, echoing, cry of his own name.
'Severus' sounded so good on my own tongue – like it had been resting on its tip for a lifetime – waiting to be shouted from the highest rooftops.
But that declaration to the world at large would have to wait. For now, it was our own precious, gloriously decadent secret; definitely not one for sharing.
Though, whatever the outcome, there was no going back, for either of us. Once tasted, love's forbidden fruit is – rightly or wrongly – almost always the sweetest.