Created for Hermione's Haven Bingo 2020 Fest! This is for my O5 square which was the prompt: Remus Lupin.

No beta, just Grammarly. If you love this (or hate it) please let me know about in a review! I made a collage for each of these, find it on my Tumblr at crochetawayhpff, and search HHBingo2020.

Many thanks to the readers who have followed this series! Especially those who took the time to leave a review. I really appreciate your words and they make me want to write more. I hope you've enjoyed these works!

Pairing: Hermione Granger/Remus Lupin

Warnings: This fic has a twinge of a hint of cheating. No actual cheating goes on, not really even an emotional affair, or perhaps a one-sided emotional affair. So if that is a trigger for you, please proceed with caution.

Summary: Hermione Granger and Remus Lupin have an understanding. It takes someone coming in to shake things up before Hermione realizes that she wants more from their understanding.

Rating: T

The Understanding

Professors Hermione Granger and Remus Lupin had a fairly solid understanding. Each Friday, after finishing teaching their last class for the day at Hogwarts University, they retreated to one of their flats for takeaway and sex. The takeaway was usually mediocre, but the sex was good. Very good. Mindblowing even. So good, that this arrangement lasted them for well over two years. On occasion, they would spend the weekend together, grading papers, sometimes taking in a film or art show, but more often, their relationship revolved around their Friday nights.

Love was not spoken of, nor was exclusivity, although they were exclusive to one another. Hermione was so busy working on gaining her tenure, that she didn't have time to do the traditional route of dating. Nor the new normal that was app dating. She shuddered just to think of getting on something like Tindr and having to swipe left on every student that cropped up. Where thirty-somethings even on Tindr? She had no idea. All of her friends were settled and married, so nobody she knew socially did any sort of app dating. Just another reason her understanding with Remus was so perfect. No need for app dating when amazing sex came to hers every week.

Hermione liked their understanding very much. She wasn't really one for marriage and babies and all the other things that most of the women her age were into. She was into her career and hopefully making tenure this year. And if she worked especially hard perhaps deputy department chair within the next two years. Her ultimate goal was department chair once Slughorn finally retired. He rightfully should have retired years ago, but he seemed to be one of those types who just hung on to a job until they died. She hoped that wasn't going to be her fate, but for now, climbing the ladder of her career suited her just fine.

It helped that she and Remus were in entirely different fields. She was a chemist and he a veterinarian. They didn't have to compete, but both of them were in science which meant there were no philosophical discussions like those professors in the humanities loved to have.

Slughorn stopped by her office between classes on Thursday to make an announcement. One that Hermione would come to regret entirely, but at the time she only greeted with a modicum of interest.

"Professor Granger!" Slughorn's voice was loud enough that he never used the PA system in even the largest of lecture halls. "Very exciting news to share. Very exciting, indeed!"

"Oh?" she smiled at him slightly as he made his way into her office and leaned against her visitor's chair, rubbing his hands together.

"Yes! We have a visiting professor coming next semester! From Oxford, no less. Very posh. From one of the oldest families in England, you know." He beamed down at her, sweating already although the day wasn't that warm.

"Really?" One only needed to make the smallest of attempts to keep a conversation with Slughorn going. He was such a windbag that a bit of nodding in the right place was often enough to keep him talking for half an hour or more.

"Indeed! Professor Draco Malfoy! Went to Oxford, then did his graduate work at MIT in the states. Bounced around some of the Ivies there, Yale, Harvard, Princeton before returning to the mother country, and taking a permanent post at Oxford."

"How accomplished." She nodded at him to continue. At least this way, she'd have all the gossip on the visiting professor at once and wouldn't have to wait on the often inaccurate university rumor mill.

"Very accomplished, Professor Granger, very accomplished. And he's coming here!" Slughorn was practically rubbing his hands together in glee.

"What does he plan to do while he's here? Teach a seminar?" That's usually what visiting professors did, although sometimes they filled in for faculty who were on a sabbatical. And then there was always the research partnership.

"Yes, he'll be teaching a seminar on water quality of the local lochs in regards to agricultural run-off. Right up your alley, eh? Perhaps you'd like to lend him a hand? Show him around the lab?" Slughorn wiggled his eyebrows at her and Hermione did her best not to shudder. "I believe he is about your age."

She offered him a tight smile. "I'd be happy to show him around if that's what he'd like."

"Excellent! Well, he'll be here in two weeks' time. We'll have tea, the three of us." Slughorn straightened and headed out of her office. "I have a good feeling about this Granger!" he said over his shoulder as he sauntered off down the corridor.

Hermione lifted her eyebrow as she watched him go. She had no feelings about this except tedium that she had another thing piled on her plate for the next semester. She sighed, at least it would look good for her tenureship.

What Slughorn had failed to tell Hermione about Draco Malfoy was that he was fucking gorgeous. Seriously the best-looking man she had ever seen in real life. He had platinum blond hair that he wore short, a pointed, aristocratic-looking face and the most arresting blue eyes she had ever seen. When he smiled, he looked downright boyish. Merlin, she didn't believe in lust at first sight, but Professor Malfoy might be changing her mind there.

She nodded her way through tea with Slughorn as he and Malfoy did most of the speaking. When Slughorn deemed they were finished, he winked at Hermione as he suggested she show Malfoy the water-quality labs.

The idea that Malfoy was here studying some of the same things she also studied had turned her head a bit. Her expertise wasn't quite the same but was tangentially related, she was interested in the process of snowmelt as it filtered through the peat bogs into the lochs. The Scottish watershed was fascinating and one-of-a-kind in the world.

Knowing she needed to make conversation or things would get awkward she started nattering on about the lab and all of the technology and facilities they had at their disposal.

"I guess this is all pretty small beans compared to some of the labs you have been in," she joked, finally turning to look at him. He was peering down at her with a face that looked entirely interested in her and not the lab at all.

"Maybe, but they didn't all come with such interesting faculty members." He winked when he smiled and Hermione wasn't feeling even a bit faint. Or so she told herself. Having all that good-looking charm turned on her was perhaps more than she could take. She felt her face heat and looked down at her feet, trying to think of what else to say.

Draco Malfoy made her awkward in ways she hadn't experienced since she was a teenager and while she hated it, some part of her really liked it as well.

It wasn't long until Draco had monopolized almost all of her free time. Their days in the lab turned into late nights, often ordering takeaway as they analyzed the data from the samples his seminar students had collected and discussed their findings.

Draco was insanely bright, more intelligent than most of her colleagues. One of the reasons she had chosen academia as her path, to begin with, was because she wanted to surround herself with some of the smartest people in the world. She felt like she had finally found that in Draco. Frankly, if she were being completely honest with herself, he had turned her head quite a bit.

She had even taken to blowing off her Friday nights with Remus and began answering his texts later and later, sometimes days after he had sent them as she found herself completely wrapped up in Draco. There was a small part of her that felt guilty about it, but it wasn't like she and Draco were sleeping with each other. So she wasn't being disloyal to Remus. And there was no talk of exclusion or love, so it wasn't like she was cheating.

Almost halfway through the semester, Remus knocked on her office door. It was the middle of the day and she was between lectures and for once, in her office grading assignments instead of in the lab with Draco.

"Hermione," Remus said in his quiet way. He offered her a small smile, with a slightly confused look on his face.

Her heart lurched in her chest at the sight of him. He looked like he wasn't sleeping well and she thought he had dropped a stone, at least.

"Remus," she smiled at him, but it felt fake and brittle. She knew she wasn't doing anything wrong, so why was there a lump in her throat that felt like a mixture of guilt and grief. "Come in."

He shook his head. "I just wanted to see that you were well. It's been a while…"

She swallowed past the lump, unsure of why she was feeling this way as her eyes pricked with unshed tears. "I am well. I'm sorry I've been so busy lately. There's been a visiting professor that Slughorn has basically assigned me to." She laughed and it sounded so fake that she found herself wincing.

"Right, I heard about him. Malfoy from Oxford, right?" Remus sounded pained.

Why was this so hard? She'd never had a conversation with Remus that was so difficult before. It only added to her own confusion about her feelings.

"That's right." She nodded.

Remus looked her over for a long moment, not saying anything. Then he nodded and left the doorway of her office. Hermione resisted every urge she had of chasing him down the hall and making him talk to her. Their understanding was casual, wasn't it? Why did it feel like her heart was breaking then?

It was near the end of the semester when the strange pull she felt to Draco finally broke completely. They were in the lab with the final dataset and working on drawing conclusions to his study.

"So the water quality is fine," he said reading through the data one final time.

"What? No! It's not fine," Hermione said. "Look, do you see these? They are too big. Too much of these elements are in the water. And these," she flipped the pages to find the next chart to show him, "these are too little."

"But not outside what's considered normal," Draco insisted. "Even you agree with that."

"Normal by what standards? Water quality wasn't something that was even looked at until after the industrial revolution. We have no idea if what we considered normal in the early twentieth century is truly normal. We can make some assumptions based on other, less developed parts of the watershed, but—"

"If they are within what the government says is normal, then they are fine," Draco said cutting her off sharply. "The goal of the study, Professor Granger was to prove that high-density agriculture was not affecting the water quality. And here, we've proven that."

Hermione flinched at his cold tone and took a step back, looking at him with new eyes. She had thought that Draco was a scientist but he was talking like a policy wonk.

"The only reason high-density agriculture hasn't skewed these numbers further than they are is because of the loch watershed management plan," Hermione explained slowly. "We can't definitively say that agriculture isn't a concern because we are actively attempting to keep agriculture runoff from reaching the lochs entirely."

"From where I'm standing, it looks as if the loch watershed management plan isn't doing anything. The numbers are in the normal range." He looked down at her, suddenly a haughty blueblood type that she hadn't seen before, even though Slughorn had told her.

"I'm not signing off on that if that's what you plan to put in your study," Hermione replied. "Without the management plan, the lochs would be horrifically polluted."

"Fine, no need to add your name to the paper then," he said, turning his back on her and deleting her name from the top of the page on his laptop.

She squeaked when he was finished, shocked. This was just not the behavior of an academic.

"I-I have to go," she muttered under her breath and fled the lab.

Draco left the university a few days later and Hermione felt numb to everything. How had he managed to fool her so terribly? Was she that inexperienced with men? Now that she had a few days of Googling him, she was appalled that she hadn't done it first thing. Draco Malfoy wasn't the premier chemist she had assumed he was. No, he was a policy wonk at Oxford. His undergrad work was in chemistry, but all of his graduate work was in political science. He knew enough of the science to run a study, but he'd forgotten—or willfully ignored—everything about letting the data speak for itself and coming to sound scientific conclusions.

Friday night rolled around and it was then that Hermione realized that all semester long she had felt so off-kilter because she missed Remus. Now that she was thinking about it, she was bowled over with the feeling. She couldn't sit around her office any longer and grabbed her things before dashing out of the building.

A quick stop to the chippie around the corner from Remus's flat, and then she was knocking on his door.

"Hermione?" he looked confused as he pulled the door open to see her standing there.

"I brought dinner," she offered, holding up the grease-splattered bag.

He furrowed his brow at her and reluctantly let her into his flat.

"I owe you an apology," Hermione said.

"If you're only here because Malfoy is gone," Remus said at the same time.

Her heart hitched in her chest at his words. "I've used you in the most horrible way, haven't I?" She wiped the tear that had trailed down her cheek.

Remus's lips tightened and he swayed toward her for a moment, but seemingly kept himself in check.

"I'm sorry," Hermione said. "I got my head turned by someone that it turns out I didn't even know."

Remus stayed silent, which only made Hermione cry harder. "I've mucked it all up. I'll understand if you want to be done with me. God knows I'd want to be done with me by now."

"What happened?" Remus finally asked as he took the takeout bag from Hermione and began setting the food out. The whole story came spilling out, ending when she realized that he wasn't an academic at all, at least not the kind of academic she desperately wanted him to be.

"So you never…" he trailed off reddening, looking down at the empty takeout containers.

"God no! Thank goodness too, I think I'd be so embarrassed now if we had... I'd have to quit my job entirely." She began cleaning up so she wouldn't have to look at him.

Remus let a small chuckle loose at her dramatics and she felt a minute lightening in her chest.

"I'll understand if you don't want what we had," Hermione said reaching her hand across the table to his. "But I have to confess, I have found myself quite in love with you, Remus." The tears were back in her eyes, but she blinked them away as she gazed at the man across from her. How could she have ever been turned by Malfoy's looks when she had this steady presence in her life?

His hazel eyes snapped to hers and he inhaled sharply at her words. A flash of hope and longing crossed his face so briefly that Hermione wasn't sure she saw it at all. It felt like her heart had stopped as she waited for him to say something.

"I…" he trailed off, looking down at the table between them for a moment and Hermione's heart felt like it was breaking all over again. He was going to turn her away. She could feel it in her bones and braced herself for the verbal blow to come.

"I find myself feeling the same," Remus said quietly into the table.

"Really?" Hermione asked breathlessly, squeezing Remus's hand in her own.

"Yes," he whispered, finally looking up at her again. The look on his face took her breath away and she stood quickly, leaning over Remus's small table to press her lips to his.

That was the catalyst.

Remus shoved the table out of the way and yanked her to him, pulling her onto his lap as his lips devoured hers. Draco Malfoy might have been pretty to look at, but he had nothing on the raw intensity and passion that Remus had. For the first time in weeks, months, really, Hermione felt truly happy again.

~Fin~