Theo waited until she came back up the stairs. She'd managed to leave before he got up and she'd managed to stretch her day out to an absurd length. He cast yet another tempus charm and tried not to scowl. He was fairly sure the Ministry of Magic didn't expect their employees to stay until after seven. He'd shooed Draco away at five, when he'd expected her to return, and gone from nervous to annoyed to impatient to nervous again.
When she fumbled with the door he could feel himself start to sweat. This was such a Gryffindor thing to do he could barely stand it, but he had a feeling that dealing with her was going to sometimes take a willingness to be bold.
Bravery wasn't really his forte.
The door opened and the witch stepped inside, turned to shut it, and made sure the latch took. When she turned back to face the flat, clearly intending to flee into the guest room before either he or Draco could waylay her, he caught her face in his hands and pressed his mouth to hers.
She froze and he could feel himself wither inside. She'd melted into Draco. He'd watched her melt into the other man just the night before. Her body had curved to every line of his. She'd gasped at Draco's touch and lost herself. Now she just stood stiff and unmoving and Theo cursed himself and cursed his idea and cursed adolescent crushes that never quite went away, not even after wars and pestilence and famine.
Not, to be fair, that he'd ever had to deal with either pestilence or famine.
This was possibly the most humiliating moment he could recall in his entire, misbegotten life.
Then she dropped her bag and reached a hand up to slide it along his shoulder. She pressed herself up onto her toes and all he could think was that she was so much softer than Draco. He skin was smooth and her body was curved and rounded and squishy (a part of him brain kicked in and suggested he never, ever tell her she was squishy) and she was as unlike Draco as any person could be. Her other hand cupped behind his neck and he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her more aggressively against himself and she did the thing he'd watched her do the night before and she just fit him. He groaned and she opened her mouth and the kiss became frantic and heated and then his mouth was on the line of her jaw and her throat and he could feel her pulse start to race and he thought it was so weird to not have an erection pressing against him as an obvious sign his partner was interested. How was a man supposed to read her?
"Theo?" she said, the question breaking his focus and he let her go with some reluctance and stepped back.
"You're late," he said. "I was getting worried."
"What was…?" She trailed off and he smiled in a way he hoped covered how nervous he'd been, how nervous he still was, and ran a hand through his hair.
"I thought… you were upset last night," he began. She opened her mouth to speak and he signed and put a hand over her mouth. "This is hard enough without you playing twenty questions," he said. "I just… it seemed like it would be easier… like you would believe me, if I just showed you it didn't matter instead of trying to tell you."
She closed her eyes and squinched up her face before looking at him again. "I spent the whole day worried I'd somehow - "
"I spent all of sixth year staring at you," he said.
Hermione took a deep breath. "Where's Draco?" she asked.
"I told him to clear out until I'd convinced you it wasn't a problem," Theo said. He reached out and took one of the curls he'd watched dance around her face for so long without permission to touch into his hand. He ran a thumb along the spiral, then tucked the lock behind her ear. "Is it not a problem?"
Her jaw seemed to tremble but she finally shrugged with that Gryffindor devil-may-care nonchalance he'd never mastered and said, "If you say so."
. . . . . . . . . .
Twenty questions, however, was inevitable. He may have held her off long enough to get out his quick explanation, but over a pot of tea she peppered him with questions. Theo supposed you couldn't really ask Hermione Granger to not be inquisitive after you stopped her at the door with a kiss and then admitted you'd stared at her for a whole year. By the time Draco came back, his shoulders tensed against an explosion or loss, Theo was brewing a second pot and he'd confessed how he'd watched but also heard her admission she'd done the same.
"You were just… it was just a crush," she said, her face red, but he'd felt something untangle inside of him that he'd never even known had been knotted up. "You were so smart and quiet and I knew you despised me but - "
"I didn't," he said. "I was supposed to, and I meant to, but then you came up to me in the library that day and - "
"You were just so obviously miserable," Hermione said. "And I remembered what it felt like when Skeeter went after me."
Theo nodded. The way Skeeter had painted her as a teenage harlot, after the innocent and precious Harry Potter, had made him laugh at the time. He remembered the way Draco had fed that reporter stories and thought himself so clever until the children of Death Eaters had been a bigger story than who Harry Potter dated. Or hadn't dated. Anyone with eyes could have seen she and Potter had never been more than friends. Weasley, however. Theo had hated Ron Weasley for a while with the petty, petulant hatred of a child who not only didn't get a treat he wanted, but had to see another boy throw it away.
He felt a wholly unadult urge to gloat. He wanted to take the woman out, an arm slung around her shoulders with casual possessiveness no other man would miss. He wanted to smile at Ron Weasley as he fetched Hermione napkins in Flortescue's and teased her just loudly enough to be heard.
Assuming Flortescue's would serve him, of course. He doubted they'd let Draco in the door.
As Theo poured the second pot of tea and Draco came in their door with those braced shoulders he met the man's eyes and Draco looked from Theo, tea pot in hand, to Hermione, who'd crossed the room and was looking at the titles of their many books. Tension slid out of him at the sight and Theo pulled down a third cup.
"How was work?" Draco asked.
Hermione shrugged and didn't turn around. "House elf issues. Some fool woman who thought her husband was lured away by a siren. The usual."
"A siren?" Draco took the cup Theo handed him and sat down. "Was he?"
Hermione snorted. "It's never a siren," she said, her eyes still on the books. "It's never a siren. It's never a veela. It's never anything but a girl from the local pub or Quidditch club."
"Are you sure?" Draco asked.
She turned at that. "Unless Tiffany, with her teased hair and a jumper way too tight, has a magical allure totally lost on me, I'm thinking her breasts did the trick without any need for veela ancestry."
"Breasts are squishy," Theo said. He immediately wanted to take the words back because Hermione looked shocked and a little outraged and too late he remembered he'd told himself to never mention that to her even if it had been one of his main thoughts when they'd been pressed into him.
"What?''
"Just… I can see why your Tiffany might have been appealing," Theo said. He cast a desperate look at Draco for help but Draco didn't rise to the bait and left him there. "That's all."
Hermione hurumphed and turned back to look at the books until he handed her the cup of tea, fingers brushing over her palm in what he hoped she'd take as an apology. She scowled a little, but accepted the cup. "Girls are tricky," Theo said.
"Squishy," Hermione muttered.
He ran a hand along the arm that wasn't at all soft. She might be wrapped in layers of curves but he'd not want to be between that wand arm and someone she thought was an enemy. "Mean," he said. He tugged her toward the couch and she let him and then the three of them were seated, Draco and Hermione on the couch and Theo is a chair facing them, all with cups in hands, and Theo had no idea what to say next.
Hermione went back to questions. "How does this work?" she asked.
"Well," Draco began, "you insert part A into slot B and repeat until done."
She hit him. She hit him hard and Theo had to put a hand over his mouth to keep from laughing as Draco rubbed at his arm and glared at her. "You deserved that," Theo said. "Don't look to me for sympathy."
Draco transferred his glare to Theo.
"I meant… how does this work," Hermione said. She waved the hand not holding tea between herself and Theo, then herself and Draco, and finally between the pair of them. "Just dealing with R… with one person was tricky enough some days. What is this?"
Theo slouched a bit at that. "I don't know," he said. He thought about how long he'd been with Draco. That was the connection that had sustained them both through times that had been more than dark. Hermione had been a crush. She'd been a fantasy. She'd never been real and now in the span of less than a week he'd met her again, invited her home, and kissed her. "I don't know," he said again.
Draco slid over until he was seated closer to her. "Do we have to have an answer?" he asked. "Just… could we let this be easy? Not try to plan or plot it out?"
"Plans do tend to go awry," Hermione said.
Theo contemplated the war, and how much had to be behind that seemingly simple sentence. "Maybe we can figure it out as we go?" he said. "We could go on dates."
"Dates?" Hermione sounded doubtful.
"Like for ice cream," Theo said. "I hold out your chair, Draco fetches napkins, that sort of thing." He hoped he wasn't being too transparent.
Hermione's face suggested the idea of that filled her with trepidation. "Or we could not," he muttered. Maybe not too transparent but not something she wanted to do.
"No," she said, though she sounded nervous. "Dates are good."
Draco managed to slide even closer to her. "So," he asked, "do you kiss on a first date."
She raised her hand as if she were going to smack him again, then lowered it and smiled at him a bit impishly. This she clearly felt more comfortable with than the idea of going on a date with the both of them at once. Theo didn't blame her. They'd be stared at, and she had to be wondering what their intentions were: quick shag, romance, three kids and a manor house.
"You'll have to take me on a date to find out," she said to Draco.
"What's still open?" he asked. His glance at the door was exaggerated enough to make her laugh and the delighted smirk that earned her made Theo's stomach flutter in a way that Draco's happiness always did. It had been so rare, that happiness, for such a long time. He didn't know if he'd ever be able to take it for granted, didn't know if he'd ever stop bracing against the screams in the darkness that sometimes followed even good days.
"Maybe we could just practice," Hermione was suggesting as he refocused his attention on her. "I'd hate the first date thing to be even more uncomfortable than it's already likely to be."
Draco ran a hand over her knee. "That would be unfortunate," he agreed. He lowered his mouth to hers and, setting his tea down, slipped his other hand behind her head and Theo watched as she slid on their couch until she was lying under him, her own tea discarded to the floor where someone was sure to knock it over before the night was done. He moved to join them but stood, not sure how. He decided to just sit on the floor, near their heads.
Hermione and Draco both turned to face him at the same time. He leaned to kiss her but the result was less romantic than he hoped and instead he knocked his forehead into Draco's.
"Shite," Draco said.
Hermione reached a hand over to rub at Theo's forehead. "I'm sorry," she said.
"Don't be sorry." Theo pulled her hand down and kissed her palm.
"It's a bit like being fourteen again and not knowing anything," Hermione said. She sounded rather put out by that.
Theo laughed. "Do I open my mouth?" he asked, mimicking his childhood self. "What if he puts his tongue in there. Gross."
"And if I don't, do I seem like I'm too uptight?" Hermione said in response.
"You were," Draco said.
Theo and Hermione both looked at him.
"What?" he asked. "You know she was uptight at fourteen. You saw her at school."
Theo glanced at Hermione whose smile had become strained again. "You do get used to his tendency to say exactly the wrong thing," he said.
"Do you promise?" she asked.
"I do," Theo said. He scooted closer to her, knocked the tea cup over, and swore. "Shite."
