Hermione didn't love Ron.
And that was fine, because neither did he love her, though he loved things about her, or so he told Harry. Harry was patient, sitting on the bed with one leg propped up and glasses askew, the bedsheets tangled about him. He would listen, with his head listing slightly to the side, as Ron talked about Hermione and got redder and redder in the face trying to say all that needed to be said.
Hermione was never patient; she always had somewhere to be or something to be doing. She very carefully and directly fit Ron into her schedule, and for that allotted hour every now and then focused her entire being upon pleasure – but so tight was her focus that, for Ron, all the joy went out of lovemaking, and so in that fashion it became sex, and in the same fashion it became fucking.
But he still loved things about Hermione. He loved the barely discernable freckles on her breasts, and he loved the way she would kick her feet up around him and dig her heels into his lower back, and he loved that while they had sex he could shout as loudly and bitterly as he liked – "Fuck you, fuck you," because of the magicked sound-sponge that absorbed every little creak of the couch and gasp, as well as louder sounds.
He loved when they went into Hogsmeade and how Hermione would sit sharp-eyed at their table, looking around with an encompassing intelligence, as if she saw through everyone, and meanwhile her stockinged knee insinuated itself between Ron's legs and she would smile nastily as he would gasp and choke on his butterbeer. He loved her girl-friends that would flock to the table, and he loved the way that they would stare as Hermione curled a finger in his hair or breathed into his ear. He loved how hard it made him. His climax was always spectacular after a night in Hogsmeade.
He loved the white stains on her impeccable Hogwarts robes, and he loved the tight lines of frustration in her face as she would scrub at them five, six, seven times, with all manner of solvents, and then labor over them with a wand and finally come to him shaking a finger and telling him it was all his fault, his seed had been spilt during an act of love, and no magic in the world was going to take away that stubborn stain and she couldn't use Clorox on black robes and she didn't have any Stain-away with her and she would have to owl her parents for it. Henceforth, she informed him, he would need to separate his emotions from their sex, because never were the twain fated to meet.
Ron loved her never-ending politeness, even after she had told him thousands of times that she didn't love him, only fucked him, she would still fall on her knees and plead with him for sex. Or perhaps it wasn't politeness, or even concern, but simply need, but that was what Ron lived for – for the vague memory of her half-naked, hands wrapped around his calves, hair in her eyes, begging, "Please, please, please." She never called him pet names, or even Ron, but he loved that too, he loved the informality and the fact that the noun was implied and all that bullshit that you never learned properly in primary school. "Faster," and "Yes," and "Harder," were all you needed; no sense in wasting time in names, except when she was coming and then she said things like "Lord…" and he loved that, too, her involuntary Muggle exclamations and gutter-talk and blasphemies, all uttered under the press of his body.
He loved the small patches of imperfection that he found when she was naked. None existed in her mind, that flawless space with white corridors that stretched on forever, but here on her body – a mole, the freckles, a scar. He never bothered to ask where each scar came from, because Hermione would rebuke him for being sentimental, but instead imagined things from her childhood – perhaps she'd fallen on some Muggle toy, or been chased down by the neighborhood dog.
He loved when she accosted him in the ten minutes between classes in the greenhouse after Herbology, and the way she would kneel in the soft black earth and finish him off quickly, and three minutes later she would stand as if they had been having a normal conversation and scrub at the dirt on her knees, while Ron, who had been braced against a table, tried to recover his breath and inhaled great lungfuls of oxygen-rich air, staring dizzily at the brightly colored flora and trying to gather himself.
He loved when he would sneak into the girls' bathroom before they saw each other and he caught her powdering her nose or applying a bit of lipstick, and he loved how she would completely forget her makeup five minutes later when Ron was licking and rubbing it off and wincing at the chalky taste, sneaking a hand underneath her shirt in the empty Charms classroom.
He loved that she never seemed to pay attention to any other boy save himself; how she would sit completely unfazed next to him at Quidditch matches while bronzed and muscled players sailed by, and how she would page through a textbook and maybe brush her thumb over his lap, not looking him in the eye. He loved, too, how she would come to the showers after practice, completely disregarding the locker room full of stark naked boys, intelligent Ravenclaws and bulging Gryffindors, the ones with big penises and the ones who strutted especially for her, and even the famous Harry Potter and his slightly crooked, uncircumcised cock, and how she would waltz past them with her small nose high in the air to collapse against him minutes later in the shower, shaking with the force of her lust for him – him – him.
He loved that even despite that, she remained unimpressed with him, toying with him sometimes for a half-hour or more, seeing how long he could hold out, and laughing when he at last came, thinking he had done well, and she would glance at her watch and give a derisive snort and make some comment about how he needed to be 'trained' better, because he certainly didn't know how to control himself. And then she would clamber on top of him and true to fashion he would come early, with her violent rocking motions, and he would slow to a halt as he spilled himself inside her and she would pull herself off with a "Hmph, what good are you?" and he could only whimper, still spasmodically vibrating from double climax, sputtering and almost nauseous.
Harry sat still while Ron told him all of this, and finally, when his red-haired companion had run out of words, he ventured, "But you don't love Hermione?"
"No."
Ron didn't love Hermione.
And that was fine, because she didn't love him either. Hermione confided in no one, but she lie on her bed with her quill between her teeth and wrote furiously a list of reasons she fucked Ron.
She loved his absolute lack of sense of self; his surreality, the way he did not seem to exist to himself at many times, and the mechanical way that he followed Harry around. She loved the way he would snap out of this mode during sex, and his eyes would almost water with the reality of being alive while she fucked him into the plush couch in the common room. She loved that he actually thought she didn't know he screamed "Fuck you, fuck you," when he came, and she loved that he said it, and she loved his lack of control in saying it. She loved that he was always the first to get drunk for the others to laugh at, she loved his ridiculous looks and she loved that he had every bit of him attuned to her, so much that he had talked to Harry for – she checked her watch – three hours just about how much, and how deeply, he was becoming absorbed into her, like sugar into warm water.
Most of all Hermione loved the way he wouldn't notice when she wrapped her thin fingers around his throat and throttled him, leaving mottled, shadowy marks like delicate inky designs under his neck, where his pulse beat rapidly as she leaned down to kiss him and whispered, knowing he could not hear,
"I hate you."