Chapter 11
Ron made it through most of the next day managing to combat the urge to dial Hermione's number. Being busy with further investigation of the smuggling case certainly helped. But no matter how absorbing the case was, Hermione was never far from his thoughts, and the piece of paper bearing her telephone number was burning a hole in his pocket. His brothers had always told him that if a girl gave him her telephone number, timing was of paramount importance. "Do not — I repeat — do NOT call her the next day," Charlie once said during one of the boys' sleepovers in the treehouse behind The Burrow years and years earlier. "Give it at least a day if not more."
"But hang on," Ron had said, rubbing the nape of his neck. "If she gives you her number, then she wants you to ring her up, yeah?"
"Precisely," said Fred.
"So you wouldn't be bothering her by calling, would you?"
"That's not the point," Fred answered. "Of course she wants you to ring her up. And of course, you want to ring her up. But you don't want her to know that."
Seeing the confused grimace on Ron's face, George cackled, "Don't be a prat, Ronniekins. You don't want to show all your cards too soon. Gotta keep 'em guessing."
"Look," Charlie said, "the last thing you want to do is let a bird know how interested you are. If you do, then she gets the upper hand. And if that happens, you're at her mercy."
"And then there's the opposite problem," George continued. "If you come on too strong, then you might scare her off."
This and every other mind-boggling conversation Ron had ever had with his older brothers about romance echoed through his head all day. Keep 'em guessing. Don't show your cards too soon. Get the upper hand. Don't come on too strong. He'd never really given much thought to his brothers' advice before because, frankly, he'd never met a girl he cared enough about for such tactics to matter. In the past, if a bird was interested, Ron let her take the lead and played along until things ran their natural course — usually a few dates, a snogging session or two and, if all went reasonably well, a shag, but eventually he would lose interest. He envied the special connection that couples like Harry and Ginny and Bill and Fleur had, but he was starting to wonder if that sort of relationship just wasn't in his future. Every girl he met seemed interested in him, his money and his fame more or less as a trophy. He was a celebrity who could get a girl to the front of the line at clubs and impress her friends by picking up the tab. They didn't seem terribly interested in talking about their backgrounds, their beliefs, their world, or even the ideals that had made him a so-called "war hero" in the first place. He didn't necessarily mind, but he was beginning to despair that he could ever find anyone who didn't see him as anything more than the guy in the photo spread from last month's Witch Weekly.
These were the thoughts swirling in his head as the hour grew later — it was well past 7 p.m., and he was the only Auror still plowing through paperwork in the office. Keep 'em guessing. Don't show your cards too soon. In frustration, he pulled the little slip of paper from his pocket and read Hermione's number again, running his finger over her neat and slanted script. Dammit, he wanted to ring her. Why shouldn't he ring her? His brothers' advice didn't apply to a girl like Hermione, did it. And besides, where had crap advice like that gotten him so far? Nowhere good, really.
He stomped through the darkened office and into a glassed-in booth that contained a desk outfitted with an array of the muggle-style telephones that Aurors sometimes used for surveillance purposes. With his annoyance with himself and his brothers crowding his thoughts, he didn't have time to be nervous until he actually picked up the receiver and stopped to try to remember precisely how to use the bloody thing. He'd learned during Auror training not to shout into it, but it had been a while since he'd done more than that. Taking a deep breath, he pressed the buttons that spelled out Hermione's number and hoped for the best.
Hermione, as it happened, was at home that evening grading papers. She'd meant to get this particular task done during her lunch hour, but she was so distracted by thoughts of her whirlwind weekend that she found concentrating difficult. By 7 o'clock, she was nearly finished with her work and was looking forward to watching a bit of telly and then turning in early. There was one thing she was quite certain of: No matter how much she wished otherwise, she would most definitely not be hearing from Ron this evening. Blokes never called the first night after receiving a girl's number. That, she thought with a smirk, seemed to be some sort of iron-clad rule with them.
Just past 7, the telephone rang and Hermione set aside her work on the dining room table and strode to the kitchen, mentally bracing herself for another potential run-in with her mother, who would no doubt be curious to know how her Sunday night outing went with "those people."
Trying her best to sound pleasant despite her annoyance, Hermione picked up the phone and sat atop the kitchen counter.
"Hello?" she said with a roll of the eyes.
"Erm, hello there, Hermione. It's Ron."
She was so startled that she was propelled off the counter almost as if she'd sat on a hot stove. "Oh!" she said breathlessly, then kicked herself for sounding like such an airhead. "I mean hi. I mean, it's nice to hear from you."
"Thanks, well, yeah. Hope I didn't ring you up at a bad time."
"Not at all," Hermione said, taking a breath to try to steady the wobble in her voice. "I was just grading some papers — just finishing up, actually. My kids took a big test last week and it's taken a long time to slog through them all."
"Oh yeah? What was the test on?"
"Oh, I just finished teaching them all about The Blitz during World War II and how children were so often sent away from metropolitan areas like London to live in the countryside to escape the bombing," Hermione said, warming to her subject. "The students really got into it — so many of them have relatives who were alive at that time. I've just been so impressed with the essays they've written about it, and their reflections on war in general. It's taken me longer than it normally would to grade this round of tests, but that's just because I've enjoyed reading them so much."
"That's tremendous. I think kids really do get it more than we think sometimes," Ron said. "Harry and I spoke at Hogwarts a few years back about the wizarding war, and I remember we were worried going in about how to present it to them — you know, whether or not to downplay the violence, which could be so senseless and horrible at times. And it turned out, we maybe didn't need to fret about it quite so much. One kid raised his hand and said, 'Yes, so many terrible things happened and war is awful, of course, but it was all for a cause and we're better off for it.' And that's really stuck with me ever since."
"So true," Hermione said thoughtfully as she leaned against the kitchen counter and then scooted herself back up to sit atop it again. "You'd like to think violence wouldn't be necessary to achieve those positive ends, but sometimes people aren't offered many good alternatives."
Ron sank onto the office chair next to the phone and put his feet up on the desk. "That's one thing I always admired about Harry during the war. He proved that sometimes there really are alternatives to violence. His first move in any fight was to disarm his opponent with a spell called Expelliarmus. He didn't really think about it, mind, it was just instinct — so much so that it sort of became his signature move. He just naturally looked to try to disarming someone before he'd do anything more drastic than that."
Ron became so lost in the conversation, trading stories and ideas, that it wasn't until the Ministry's cleaning squad arrived in the Auror office that he realized an entire hour had gone by. "Blimey," he said, "it's well past 8 o'clock, isn't it? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to eat up so much of your evening."
"Not at all," said Hermione, a tad disappointed that perhaps the phone call might be coming to an end. "I don't get to talk about my students very often, and your work sounds absolutely fascinating."
Ron smiled into the phone, wishing he could Apparate himself over there and kiss her senseless. He'd managed to break his brothers' don't-ring-her-up-on-the-first-day rule; he reckoned showing up on her doorstep would be pushing his luck a bit too far. "I have to be honest: My work really is interesting. I couldn't do it otherwise. I'm afraid I don't have the stick-to-it-iveness that you do."
Hermione couldn't help but laugh at this. "So says the pureblood who helped his best friend defeat Voldemort," she said.
"What does my blood status have to do with it?" Ron asked, a bit astonished.
"Everything!" Hermione replied hotly. "I may be a newcomer to your world, but from what little I've heard and read, it seems clear that purebloods could easily have sat out the war. You didn't, though. You did what was right, even though it was the hard choice."
She caught herself then, realizing that she'd essentially been arguing with him, which hardly seemed polite under the circumstances. She was relieved, however, to hear his laughter through the line.
"All right, you win," Ron said. "I'm bloody amazing."
"Oh dear," Hermione said with a wry grin, "I seem to have created a monster."
Just then the cleaning lady knocked on the door to the glassed-in booth where Ron had been sitting for above an hour, and she looked fairly annoyed.
"I'm getting the bum's rush from the office now, I'm afraid," Ron said with a jaunty tone that belied his disappointment. "If I don't get out of here soon, the cleaning crew will hex me."
"That will never do, will it," Hermione said. "You wouldn't look very good wearing gills or covered in warts."
"No indeed," Ron said. Waving the cleaning lady away, he dropped his feet from the desk while twirling the phone cord nervously in his fingers: "So, erm, the real reason I called was to see if maybe you might be free this weekend — Saturday afternoon, to be precise."
"I suppose I shouldn't admit this but, as it happens, I am free this Saturday," she said. She realized that her Mum had talked about wanting to go shopping together that day, but she quickly told herself she'd have to let her Mum down easy.
"Good," Ron said. "I have something in mind, but I'd rather keep it a bit of a secret until then."
"Well, that's intriguing. Are you going to at least give me a hint?"
"Nope."
"Oh, come on. You've at least got to tell me how I ought to dress. Formal? Semi-formal? Casual?"
"Casual will do," Ron answered, "but that's all I'm saying."
"You're mean," she said teasingly. "You're a very mean person."
"So I've been told."
"Be that as it may, I suppose I will entertain your invitation and plan to be properly and casually dressed," she said in mock officiousness. "What time should I expect you?"
"How does noon sound?"
"Perfect," she said.
"Good."
There was a long pause as both of them smiled into the telephone. Neither wanted to end the conversation, but it seemed they'd reached that inevitable point where one of them would have to be the first to hang up.
"Until Saturday, then," Hermione said.
"Until Saturday," Ron answered. "Have an excellent week."
"You, too."
Saturday couldn't come soon enough for either of them, and Ron cursed himself over and over as the week wore on for not thinking to ask her to get together with him on, say, Wednesday or Thursday. But he figured Saturday was a better day for a date at such an early stage and forced himself to live with his decision.
No matter how much he wanted to do so, he fought back the urge to call her every night that week. No matter how bone-headed he'd decided his brothers' advice was, even he had to admit that there was a limit to how much he could say or do at this point without coming on too strong. So he busied himself with the smuggling case, which was taking some unexpected turns and was proving to be more wide-reaching than either he or his supervisor, Brocklehurst, had thought, and he counted the hours until Saturday noon.
Hermione was fortunate that early May was always an especially busy time at Sevenoaks School, as her students were working on final projects and preparing for end-of-term exams. So she had plenty to keep her mind occupied throughout the week, though she too wished that she could somehow make the time go faster. At moments like these, she thought ruefully, it would have been nice to have a real, true best girlfriend — someone who knew the great secret of her magical abilities — but alas, she didn't, and therefore she had no one to pour her heart out to and share her excitement over this new and remarkable man in her life. Ginny entered her thoughts, bringing on a soft pang to Hermione's chest. She had a hunch that Ginny would have been such a friend if circumstances had been different. Could she be such a friend in the future? It was too early to count on it, but Hermione allowed herself to hope.
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Holly.
