The house stood alone. It was surrounded by woods, and there had been a stone fence around it at one point. The fence had fallen to ruin long ago, though; there was just a sort of orderly stacking of stones and mortar in a wide semi-circle around the house. The house itself was Victorian, mostly a dull gray-beige, a copper roof that had gone green, and a red-brown door with a shiny brass knocker.
Severus didn't want to be anywhere near the house. The door was the color of dried blood, and the yard was full of dead plants. The grass was overlong and dead. There were bushes on either side of the three steps up to the front porch, but they'd died and were only pokey bits of twigs. It was appalling.
He'd found her through Minerva. The headmistress kept up with her favorite cubs, and Hermione Granger had been her most prized student in generations.
"What is it you want?" Granger asked. He looked up and realized she was standing on the porch, her front door open behind her. Her arms were crossed over her chest, eyes narrowed. He hadn't noticed her open the door. "Minerva told me you'd bullied my address out of her. What do you want?"
He didn't know how to answer her question. Mostly, he was curious. She'd worked for him for a year now—Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday—and everything he knew about her came from other sources. He'd known her as a child, when she was his student, but the rest was from the Prophet or gossip he picked up from Pomona or Poppy when he sat down to tea with them every few weeks.
For example, he'd expected her to live in a small flat in the city. According to the Prophet, the smattering of interviews she gave every now and again, she was about town quite a bit. And she was young, hadn't made any notable career moves (those he would've heard about from the Hogwarts grapevine). The house was not small, and despite the state of the yard the magic on and around the place suggested it was well-kept.
Granger stood at the top of her steps. Her hair was as unruly as it had ever been, working to escape the mess of a bun she had it in. She wore a white button-up with the sleeves rolled up, and blue jeans. Muggle clothes. She had an apron on over the clothes, not a sturdy apron like he gave the assistants in his shop, but a thick linen thing for baking; it was dark green and covered in flour. Her boots were scuffed dragonhide. She had her wand in the pocket of her apron.
"Master Snape," she said, slowly like she'd said his name a few times and he'd missed it. "Why are you here?"
Why was he here? What was it that had made him bully Minerva into giving up the Gryffindor know-it-all's address on a Saturday evening? What had made him think about the address all night, made him look it up on a map Sunday morning so that he could Apparate there?
It was the wards, he realized. She had distraction and aversion built into the protections around her home.
"Because you left." There was more to it than that; of course there was. He couldn't remember half of it with the wards telling him to bugger off, though. It reminded him that this was the woman who had kept Undesirable Number One hidden and safe(ish) for months when she was just eighteen.
"It was the end of my shift."
"Your shift had nothing to do with it."
Granger froze. She took a breath. She went back in the house.
She left the door open.
The wards pressed on him the closer he got to the door. He'd left the fire burning in the grate. He'd had the Wolfsbane simmering on the stovetop, too; no sense going in to the shop to brew it when he could have the weekend to himself so long as he bent his own Rules of Proper Brewing. And he needed to owl his solicitor. His cat needed to be fed.
Only it was summer, so he hadn't lit a fire in weeks. And it was the wrong phase of the moon for Wolfsbane (and he would never brew it in his kitchen). He probably did need to owl his solicitor, but not on a Sunday. And he didn't have a cat.
She was good, dammit.
He stepped across her threshold, and the nagging urge to leave abruptly vanished.
She had gone to the kitchen, leaving him to defeat or succumb to her wards in privacy. She was kneading bread, a towel thrown over one shoulder. She'd worked for him for three years, and it had only been last week when he'd learned things about her from her not some outside source. She baked her own bread every Sunday afternoon. She had a glass of wine every Friday night while she read the Weekly Potioneer.
He'd asked her what she was doing on the weekend.
Severus approached the witch, wary since she had her back to him. She wasn't the sort to put her back to a door, but maybe she was just that secure in her own home.
There was a mark on the side of her neck, at the curve where neck met shoulder. The way the collar of her shirt gaped with the movement of her arms, the way it was pressed flat under the straps of her apron, showed it off clear as day. A love bite, dark and fresh, two days old.
Two days, fifteen hours, twenty minutes. Give-or-take.
"You left. You didn't let me say anything."
"What was there to say?"
His mind went blank. She still wasn't looking at him. All he could do was stand behind her and stare at the mark he'd left on her neck not so very long ago. He'd gone home, had a drink, decided to forget about it. He'd woken on Friday and had the least productive day at work in the history of his shop, so distracted thinking about how they'd been standing just there when she'd let him kiss her. Saturday had been for finding out where she lived. And now it was Sunday.
"Will you look at me," he said, then realized it had come out harshly. "Please."
She turned, probably because she'd never heard him say please. She wasn't wearing any makeup, but she didn't usually. He wondered what she'd had for breakfast and if he'd be able to taste it if he kissed her, or if she'd taste like the minty Muggle toothpaste she used. She'd tasted like the lemonade she'd been drinking in the afternoon on Thursday. (Had it really only been Thursday?)
"What? What is it, Master Snape?"
"Why do you keep calling me that?"
"Because you're my boss! What else should I call you?"
He blinked. She'd always called him Severus, for the past two years at least. Probably longer. He hadn't actually noticed when she'd started. He'd always called her Granger because she'd been his student, and now she worked for him. Three days a week, doing inventory and keeping his accounts, ordering what he needed. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. The best days of the week.
Granger tossed her head—a habitual gesture, usually to put her hair over her shoulder, but now it was up and nothing happened—and turned back to the bread dough. She began kneading, ignoring him.
Slowly, because he still couldn't think of what he'd like to say, because he couldn't explain why it bothered him that she stopped calling him by his first name when he never actually gave her permission to do so, he walked up behind her. He touched her elbow, then the top of her forearm. He stepped behind her fully, close enough to feel the heat of her back against his front without actually touching, and put his other hand on her other arm. Her hands had stopped working the bread.
"Please," he said. Quietly. Because his mouth was so close to her ear. She was utterly still. "Hermione, please look at me."
She turned, just her head, and very slowly. Her eyes were inches from his. Brown, flecks of hazel, flecks of muddy green. Enchanting.
"Tell me you don't want me to, and I will stop. Tell me no, and it never happened." Because better that it never happened and she was still his friend.
She laughed, closed her eyes. It was a bitter laugh.
"Of course it happened."
"Hermione…"
She shivered. Or he hoped it was a shiver, not a shudder.
"I'm in love with you, did you know that?" she asked, opening her eyes and looking up at him again. Now he was the one to be absolutely still.
"No," he said. "No I didn't know that."
"I didn't either." She smirked. "Not until Thursday."
A/N: Quick little one-shot for a Thursday night!