This meeting had started off interestingly. The snack table now had a plate of chocolate chip cookies behind a sign that had "baked" written in all caps and underlined several times. The plate of sugar cookies with colorful, "not rock"(all caps and underlined) sprinkles from last week was gone. But that was okay because these new cookies were soft and wonderful. He was currently on his fourth cookie.
"Where should we go tonight?" Harry asked.
"Aren't we presumptuous," Severus said dryly.
Harry winked. "We've been doing this for weeks now. Admit it, you can't get enough of me." He leered.
"You're mistaken, Mr. Potter. The only reason why I suffer through your presence after these meetings is because your dear friend, Ms. Hermione Granger, has asked me to babysit you. Apparently, she cannot trust you to comport yourself in a reasonable fashion in public and feels you require…supervision. Quite frankly, after spending time with you, I share her same concerns. I shudder to think about kind of things happen when you're left to your own devices."
"I've been nothing but a gentleman," Harry argued. "It's you who can't behave yourself!"
"I beg your pardon," the bar owner sputtered.
"You talk during movies. You complain about the food – loudly, might I add. You snap at the servers. And you even tried to give our waiter negative tips. Negative!"
"You don't tip someone who doesn't know how to do their job," Severus stated stubbornly. "If Jim or John or Jacob or whatever his name was had bothered to take my order, maybe I'd have been inclined to be more lenient. As it was, I felt like he owed me money for wasting my time."
"Joshua was distracted." Severus harrumphed. "It was probably his first day of work."
"Well, it certainly wasn't his first time asking for a guy's number," he mumbled.
Harry had to give the older man that point. They'd met Joshua two weeks ago. How should Harry put it? Hmm…Joshua had been brazen in a way only a teenager could be. After seating them at the booth, he gave his full attention to Harry and Harry only. At first, the banker thought it was because Harry seemed like the easier customer to address, but it quickly became clear that Joshua wasn't the nervous type when he slid Harry a napkin with a phone number scrawled across it. Then he'd asked for Harry's order (with a wiggle of his eyebrows) and walked off before Severus could say a word. It was so rude that Harry had to assume that Joshua must have been too busy "flirting" to worry about anything else.
"That may be true," Harry conceded. "But what's the big deal? It's not like I called him."
Severus sniffed. "You didn't?" he asked, attempting to sound blasé about the whole matter.
Harry frowned. He had made a point of keeping a distance from the coy waiter because the last thing he wanted was to lead the teenager on. "Why would I?"
"He's young. I presume he's in shape. He's interested in you. What more do you want?"
The cupid-demon-mutant aliens were going crazy. This was the perfect opening to make a move, but Harry didn't want to be brash about it. They'd been dancing around their "relationship" for a long time now. (What category did they fall under? Enemies? Friends? Frenemies? Two guys that just like to hang out with each other? *cough* Future lovers? *cough*) However, Harry didn't want to push the man into something he wasn't ready for. Still, he thought it was important to at least show that Harry was ready for whatever if and when Severus was.
"I was actually waiting to see if someone else was interested in me." Despite his nerves, he made a point of making eye contact.
"One isn't enough, Potter?"
"It would be if he was The Guy."
"And who, pray tell, is this 'Guy'?"
Harry groaned. "Shouldn't you know?"
"I try to stay out of your love affairs," he replied curtly.
(Did Harry ever say that Severus was a difficult man?) "Not for long, I hope." Oh, jeez. That one was pretty corny. He should probably shut up now.
"What are you trying to say, Potter? You keep trying to circumvent whatever it is you truly want to say while the rest of us are trying to figure out how an infant brain thinks and decipher the meaning behind your senseless questions."
"I'm trying to tell you something important, Severus, but you aren't making this exactly easy for me," he hissed, his frustration evident in his voice. Jesus! Were confessions always this hard?
"What is it, Potter? Spit it out already! I don't know how things work for the rest of the world, but I, for one, am not dying to hear your every word. If you've got nothing to say, just say it. If, as I suspect, you truly don't have anything to say, just admit it, so we may spare ourselves from further wasted minutes of agony. I've got better things to be doing right now."
Harry frowned. "We're only ten minutes into Round One. What other things do you have to do?"
"Is that any concern of yours?"
Biting his tongue, Harry tried his best to remember the original purpose of this conversation. Oh yeah. He wanted to tell the cruel man that he liked him. Oh, God. What was he thinking?
Harry laughed at himself, earning him a peculiar look from Severus. "Listen, why don't we start over?" Harry suggested.
"Go on," the bar owner said, clearly reluctant.
He decided to start at the very beginning. "Did I ever tell you how good you smell?" Harry asked.
Severus groaned. "Let me tell you now that this is not how you want to start over."
Harry ignored him. "I was fascinated by your scent. I've never smelled anything so…enticing before in my life. Did you know I spent a whole weekend trying to find your cologne at the mall? I kept thinking about the smell even after our first meeting, and I couldn't get it out of mine. I searched for hours, Severus. Hours. And I couldn't find it. But that didn't stop me from thinking about how you smelled. Soon, it wasn't just how you smelled. It became about your sweaters. Your bar. Your sarcasm. Your wit. I…I just kept thinking about you. About our conversations. Our teasing. Our time together. And I realized that thirty minutes a week just wasn't enough. I wanted to talk with you more – go see movies, share ice cream, eat out at a restaurant. I don't know how to explain – how to say this…" Ugh. He sighed.
"What do you want, Potter?"
"Call me Harry?"
Severus sighed, too. "What do you want, Harry?"
Harry scratched the back of his neck. (Here goes.) "Will you go out with me?"
"Were we not already in the process of finding a place to go to earlier in this conversation, Mr. P- Harry?"
The older man looked tired, and Harry was, too. "No, I mean, will you go out with me? As in, will you date me?"
Severus frowned. "I suppose dating you wouldn't be entirely intolerable."
He hated to sound cliché. He really did. But he didn't think there was a better way to describe the feeling in his chest aside from the pain you feel when a bullet passes straight through your heart. In fact, the sensations were so similar that Harry checked his shirt for any signs of blood.
"Don't look so dejected, Harry," Severus admonished carelessly. "You would think you'd be happy."
Through the pain, Harry tried to explain himself. "I don't want you to feel obliged to go out with me, Severus. If you don't like me, just say so." (And, really, where was his Purple Heart? Severus was – figuratively speaking – trying to kill him, and Harry was still trying to hold in there. He deserved some kind of medal.)
"You foolish boy," Severus mumbled, but the insult just bounced off the banker. "I know you're brain hasn't fully developed, but surely you should be able to comprehend this."
"Nope. I don't really comprehend anything that's happening right now." He knew that he was in pain. He knew that much. He didn't know that alcohol would make him feel better, but he imagined this hypothesis wasn't too far off from the truth. Other than that, he didn't feel sure about anything else.
"I don't like movies." Severus paused. If he was waiting for Harry to respond, he was out of luck. The older man growled. "Harry, I don't like ice cream. I hate sweets. Harry? Are you listening?"
Oh, how he wished he wasn't. "Yes, you hate all of our not-dates. Duly noted, thanks. I think I'm going to get some more cookies and a bottle or two of that non-alcoholic beer crap if you don't mind." Perhaps the manufacturers made a mistake and actually leaked some booze into the bottle. Unfortunately, before he could even make a move to the snack table, a firm hand on his shoulder stopped his progress. "What?"
"Harry, why do you think I agreed to go out with you if I didn't like those things? Come on. Put your thinking cap on."
"How am I supposed to know? To make me look stupid?" He just wanted his beer.
"No, you idiot! Because I don't dislike you nearly as much as I had imagined," he spat. "Though the reason why is beyond me. A man of my intellect certainly deserves someone with a higher IQ."
"I don't understand. You don't hate me. Yay!" Beer. Why wouldn't Severus let him go so that he could get his goddamn beer?
"Ask me again," Severus demanded. Harry gave him a look of confusion. "Earlier. You asked me a question. Ask it again."
What was the point of all this? Did Severus get some kind of pleasure out of all of this? Fine. Whatever. Harry didn't care anymore.
"Will you go out with me?" he mumbled.
Severus rolled his eyes. "Yes."
Suddenly, he went from suffering from a shot to the heart to trying to recover from an asthma attach. He was wheezing. Wheezing.
"Get ahold of yourself, Harry!"
"Does this mean you actually like me?"
Severus rolled his eyes. "That's what I already said."
That was not what he said, but Harry wasn't going to start a fight about it. There were more important things at hand right now. "We're dating," he said, though it came out more as a question than a confident statement.
"Is 'synonym' your word of the week, Harry? Yes, we're dating. We're going out. Don't make a spectacle about it."
"We're dating," Harry repeated quietly.
"Are you in such a state of shock that your vocabulary is limited to those words alone? Because, if so, I'd like to cancel our dinner date." Harry's eyes gleamed at the final word. "For heaven's sake, Harry! You act as if this is the first time you've ever asked someone out."
Harry just smiled. "We're dating."
Severus shook his head. "You're broken. Simply broken."
"Hey, everyone!" Harry shouted.
"Don't you dare," Severus threatened with a scary look in his plane.
Ok, change of plans. "After this session, I'm buying everyone a round at Three Broomsticks!"
The crowd cheered. Hermione and Severus glared.
A/N: Sorry it's so short! I'll try to post another (longer) chapter in the next few days.
As always, I'd love to hear what you think! :)