• CHAPTER V •

Comprehension

Several divergent claims could be made as to how long it took Harry Potter and Hermione Granger to finally have sex with each other. "Years!" some self-appointed pundits would boldly contend in view of the intimate yet equally negligible friendship that had served its sole function as a slightly protracted prelude to the act. But considering the couple's age at the time the deed was done, this would by its unavoidable implication at best paint a dubious scenario, and at worst an uncomfortable one. Without the plural then, bettors accordingly endowed would sensibly aim to amend their wager. A year, maybe? With a month or twelve on top? Somewhat less concerning a thought, perhaps, but truly a more plausible one?

Over one and a half but not quite two years ago, Hermione had for various reasons refrained from revealing to Harry what tumultuous feelings had surged through her when together, intermittently even hand in hand, they had struggled against time unrelenting and the world's harsh indifference to save both Sirius and Buckbeak from their gruesome fates. Not a word had she ever spoken to either him or anyone, excluding the reliably patient pages of her diary, about what their ride on the hippogriff's half-feathered and half-furred back had set into turbulent motion in her.

How throughout the following summer and beyond, those incredible moments of them soaring through the night sky—closer, it had so irrationally seemed to her, to the Moon above than to the Earth below—had replayed inside her mind over and over again, both in half-forgotten dreams of slumber as well as their more embarrassing waking brethren. How she couldn't forget the abject horror that had gripped her at finding herself higher even than the tallest of the castle towers, with her dearly preferred terra firma a mortal distance beneath their winged mount's swaying claws and paws. And how all of that cold fear had seemed to dissolve into some meaningless haze as she clung to him so fiercely, so desperately, realizing in a sudden rush of certitude that nothing could happen to her, because he wouldn't let it.

All of that had been safely locked away deep within her heart, where she herself could not quite yet discern its truest meaning.

At winter's snowy onset of that same year Harry had not found the lion's courage within himself to ask the only person with whom it would have meant something to accompany him to that dreaded Yule Ball, without a doubt the greatest peril he had ever had to face. Crestfallen, frankly all but consumed by burning jealousy, he had looked on impotently as she—so radiant, so singular—had been taken to the dance floor by Viktor Krum, that Quidditch talent extraordinaire (which was bad) and, in addition, insufferably decent human being (which was worse). And he had stood there feeling weak and petty and unworthy, and this wildly helpful self-conception had lasted him far beyond that revelatory Yuletide night.

Ron, at some point during the progressing festivities, had kindly remarked how Harry for once looked like he himself always felt. Ever observant and yet thoroughly oblivious, his best friend was. Like Harry himself, apparently. Observant yet oblivious. He had always seen her, but never understood. When months later he had found out that Hermione was still exchanging letters with the Bulgarian wunderkind, Harry had felt an acute and overwhelming urge to hurt someone. Possibly Viktor Krum. Maybe someone less fundamentally likable. Probably Malfoy.

And all of that had been safely locked away deep within his heart, where he had only slowly begun to realize that he was messing everything most properly up.

While without a doubt sexuality was ever the silent conductor of this pubescent orchestra, the physical reality of the act of sex itself, and all the endings and beginnings it entails, was, within both of these two troubled minds, still too distant a thing to reach, and as alluring as it was frightening. Sex, in those times, by that unceasing biological imperative, was an ever-present yet never fully grasped idea, a vaporous temptation like a phantom in the mist, excruciatingly desired yet prudently eschewed. It was, for the cautious heart wary of lasting scars and clinging yet to waning innocence, still too daunting a leap to take.

Well, all right then. How about half a year? Their reluctant parting at King's Cross and the summer apart that followed? Had Hermione not thought of Harry, and his repeatedly expressed offer (or wish?) for her to join him for a dip in the lake on some future sunny day, when she had overcome her own reservations and purchased that—by Hermione's well-established standards—slightly risqué swimsuit in a boutique in Marseilles? Of course she had. Et voilà, there they were: swimsuit on, swimsuit off, and bye-bye virginity. Coincidence? Well... yes and no, to be precise.

Consciously she had planned no such thing, of course. She hadn't bought it as her periwinkle intercourse assurance, per se. But there undeniably was a part of her, which she was very much aware of since it insisted on being well-nigh omnipresent, that wished and hoped and longed for Harry to notice her. To notice her in that way the shy and gentlemanly Viktor had, whose only crucial flaw in her eyes would always be that he was not, and had no way of being, Harry. Having herself no way of knowing that the poor chap with the lightning-shaped scar had, in fact, taken a whole lot of notice of her a long, long while back, she reckoned a swimsuit that invitingly revealed as much as coyly it kept hidden might help the endeavor along. Without dwelling too much on the rather troublesome question of where exactly that endeavor would lead in either failure or success.

And indeed, had it not been for the terrifyingly plausible vision of Harry, even upon seeing her standing in front of him naked as a mole-rat—and surely about as sexually appealing as one—asking her for help with his Charms homework without deigning her as much as a second glance, she would have donned her daredevil swimsuit all the way back in September, when just after her sixteenth birthday summer had formidably made its last stand and a dozen boys and girls from the usual three of the four houses had gone out together for one last sun-kissed day at the lake before autumn's inclement coronation. She hadn't outright refused to join them, of course. She had simply elected to stay in the dry at the shore, in her normal civilized attire, sitting in the shade of a tree with a Henry James novel in her lap. And then, just like any ordinary person, she had spent the entire time hating herself.

Why couldn't she be as casual and relaxed as everybody else always appeared to be? It's not like they collectively looked like supermodels in their swimwear. Susan Bones was going through a rather onerous pimple phase, and that didn't seem to hold her back in the slightest. Hannah Abbott was wearing braces which by the looks of it had been assembled by a bunch of loopy goblin tinkerers with a full-grown half-giant in mind, but owing to those two humongous distractions she was carrying with her at all times, at least none of the boys around her could ever have confirmed her braces' purported existence. Seamus Finnigan had always looked a bit like a walking caricature of himself, and he was just about the most easy-going person in the world, once making two Galleons and five Sickles on a single bet by doffing his swimming trunks and doing a cannonball right in the middle of a group of unsuspecting girls. Not only did he not think twice about it, but by all appearance not even once. The madman would most likely have done it for free, for crying out loud!

To Hermione Granger, people like Seamus Finnigan were an unsolvable mystery. Even Ron, who was so laid-back that he preferred to literally lie back whenever the opportunity presented itself, had his insecurities. Yet there they all were, swimming, diving, splashing and laughing together in their half-naked merriment. Barbarians, the lot of them.

And there she was, sitting, frowning and occasionally even reading a couple of lines in her book, looking on as Harry was surrounded by half a dozen giggly girls in skintight swimsuits, ostentatiously economical bikinis and flimsy wind-swept pareos. Ginny in particular seemed to be physically incapable of keeping her hands off of him for some idiotic reason, like she wouldn't manage to stay afloat without his support. Didn't the girl know how to swim? Why go swimming then?

Oh, sporty pretty Ginny with her I'm-just-one-of-the-lads thing or whatever exactly it is. You wanna be a princess or a tomboy? Make up your bloody mind and leave some cardboard-cutout identities for the rest of us, will you? Urgh...

What was she so afraid of, anyway? It's not like she was utterly hideous... right? Surely she had something going for her... ?! Her mother had emphasized how well that swimsuit accentuated her physique, and there was not a thing in the world more sober and impartial than a mother's judgment of her own children. Her father, on the other hand, had adamantly disapproved of the selected item, and in these particular matters that was always a good sign. Viktor! Viktor had highlighted the apparent perfection of her feet once, during the Yule Ball. That was something, right? Wasn't it? Granted, she had been somewhat perplexed at first, and admittedly thought Viktor a bit odd for a moment, but once she had done some research on the matter the following week, she had come to the slightly revised conclusion that boys, regardless of whether or not they had a check mark on this specific oddity, were just odd in general. At any rate, a compliment was a compliment. So now she had pretty feet, allegedly... and no idea what to do with that information.

Did Ginny have pretty feet, too? Hermione certainly wasn't any less curvaceous than her, though, was she? Neither of them, unlike Hannah Abbott, had breasts that would be putting a strain on their spines anytime soon, which had its obvious upside. But still. There was something… there. Possibly. Wouldn't really help her much if Harry had more of a predilection for the redhead's sleek athletic build, with hips made for running. Whereas Hermione's own hips were probably better suited for... reading. All things considered he probably did prefer the fiery broomstick-riding vixen. And who in their right mind wouldn't? Being able to zoom around on broomsticks side by side was probably an integral part of his personal conception of a deeply fulfilling relationship. They could zoom right into their honeymoon that way, leaving Hermione to her own devices and giving her ample time to read another good book or a thousand. Equally wonderful prospects for everyone.

And unobtrusively going mad at the lake shore like that, she failed quite fabulously to put into perspective how Harry, instead of spending all of his time in the water to bathe in fawning female attention, regularly came back to her and sat down by her side; talking to her without ever even mentioning her ostensible hydrophobia; making her laugh and loosen up a bit; never pushing or teasing her with even a hint of meanness; making her by virtue of his company feel less like an extraterrestrial visitor from the planet Nerd. The scantily clad girls around him at times caught his involuntary glances, but only Hermione under her tree, with golden streaks of sunlight in her hair, ever captivated his gaze.

Yet if things were missed on that last summer day, if opportunities passed them by uncaught, and if some great transformation eluded them, it did so not because of what Hermione was wearing or whether or not she decided to partake in the abounding fun and water-bound revelry of that bygone day, but simply because their reticent hearts were not yet ready to brave that specter of adulthood looming over the horizon of their youth.

And so much for their great and glorious summer sex opportunities.

Weeks, then? A few of them? Surely at least that much? Harry had certainly spent a considerable chunk of those weeks nearing the prior year's end thinking back to that day the two of them had met on Platform 9¾ on the first of September. Hermione had come running to him the moment she spotted him in the teeming crowd, flinging her arms around him and almost toppling him right over on impact. And then for the second time she had kissed him on the cheek, lingered for a moment and noticed how his facial hair had begun to sprout, before taking a step back with her face flushed and her eyes averted, tucking some loose strands of her hair behind her ear and also acknowledging Ron's presence while she was at it. Including the time she had planted that long and desperate kiss of relief on the crown of his head during the Triwizard Tournament, this had been the third time in total she had kissed him. Not that anyone was keeping count or anything like that. Could she possibly be trying, wittingly or not, to tell him something?

But of course! These facts, as they unambiguously presented themselves, only left him with one logical conclusion: she was secretly in love with Ron. Kissing Harry was a casual, unselfconscious gesture of friendly, perfectly platonic appreciation. The most apparent restraint she practiced in her greeting of Ron was one of tragic inhibition. Sure, the two had a striking tendency of bringing out the absolute worst in each other time and again, but that would probably just keep their life-long marriage fresh and entertaining. Harry was in some particularly ludicrous moments of his mind's nightly peregrinations quite certain that this was how it all worked. Ron was courting her by making eyes at almost every other girl in existence, including that statue of Rowena Ravenclaw. A most ingenious ruse. Not even Viktor Krum with his constant attention, gushing adoration and ever courteous deportment could possibly compete with that.

Ginny had joined the trio then. His nose was really coming into its own, she had said. What exactly had it been doing before, he had wondered. But all right then, he'd take it. He'd simply make sure that Hermione from now on would always have an unobstructed view of his nose, so that she too could marvel at the way it was coming into its own. Brilliant. He would beat both Viktor and Ron, and any other carelessly competing suitor that would dare stand in his way, with the sublimity of his nose. Figuratively, should that suffice; literally, should that prove necessary. What had Hermione seemed so miffed about all of a sudden, anyway, and why had Ginny kept touching his arm?

During their ride on the Hogwarts Express that day, Harry and Hermione had been unable to keep their eyes off of each other. Which in that way it is commonly understood means they willfully focused on everything but each other, while their vagrant eyes kept meeting fleetingly in flashes and in flickers over and over again throughout the familiar journey. Ron and Neville were also there. Until, when at some point the longing gazes of Harry and Hermione once locked could move no longer, they suddenly popped! right out of there. The Chosen One, brimming with virility, naturally flung himself at the voluptuous brunette the moment the air was clear, ravishing her in an hours-long excess of carnal lust and debauchery, a hot and sultry Dionysian fever dream that choo-chood its way through the British countryside. They were nearing their seventh masterfully synchronized climax when Harry woke up with his boxers stickily stained and a cold damp splotch of saliva on his pillow.

And thus the truly matchless Harry J. Potter, The Boy Who Lived A Perfectly Honorable Life, had stepped into the first proper school day of his fifth year feeling mightily decent and dignified. With his self-respect reaching new heights when before breakfast Hermione, all her ever-caring self, asked him after a single worried perusal of his face whether he had had a bad dream, he came to the conclusion that she could never possibly want him like that. He was too small, too pale, too bespectacled and too everything else that was unequivocally negative. Truth be told he basically looked like Dobby with a perennial bad hair day. He didn't deserve her in any case, lusting after her like some knockoff Nosferatu with a constant hard-on. If there was one thing he knew all women truly wanted, it was not to be wanted by any man. She'd be appalled at his lechery, and rightfully so. How utterly disrespectful. Shame on him! Shame!

Hermione, on an entirely unrelated note, had had a similar dream that night, although in her version Ron and Neville had from one moment to the next started snogging and then left the train hand in hand at its well-known stopover in Manchester, where they joined Arsenal Liverpool Incorporated, the town's world-renowned football club, and built a wonderful life together. Understandably inspired by these rousing events, Hermione had tossed her clothes out their compartment's window before proceeding to tell Harry to take her right there and then like the naughty little witch she was, which presented with so persuasive an argument he naturally set about doing at once.

So, even after all these enlightening elaborations the question surprisingly remains: how long did it take them? "Years!" some exceptionally obstinate folks would not cease to insist, invoking that timelessly fashionable sense of retrospective determinism. It was always meant to be, now that it is! From the very start they were clearly on this pelvic collision trajectory, as one can easily tell by looking at the way they presently keep colliding. It was only ever a question of when and where and for how long they'd do it! And in which position! And so on and so on. The usual fare.

Professor Trelawney, beginning from the exact moment she found out about it, had certainly always seen it coming. It might have been years or months in the making, it might have been weeks. It might have been forty-four hours and thirty-three minutes, if one were to start the stop watch at precisely the point in time when the two future lovers first set foot in the Room of Requirement on that fateful day, and then stop it again at the exact point in time when they... you know... became present lovers.

The question of how long it truly took them to have their first time together can thus not conclusively be answered. The closely related question of how long it took them to have their second time, however, can. And the only correct answer to that is: twelve minutes.

~•~

"So you've basically just used me."

With her index finger tapping against her puckered lips, Hermione sent her eyes upward for some proper rumination. "Mmmmh... yes."

Harry was aghast. "'Twas but a ploy to escape, all of it!"

She proceeded to purse her previously puckered lips and nodded affirmingly away. "Yep."

"A scheming she-devil you are!" He shook his head in grave disapproval. "A spawn of pure evil!"

Hermione gave a low-effort shrug. "'Tis true, I am. Both of my parents are dentists. You should've seen this coming, honestly."

"Were you not such a dainty little dish," Harry sternly declared as he ran his hands down the magnificent concavity of her back and along the upward slope of her buttocks, "I would have you at the stake forthwith!"

A fittingly devilish smirk formed on the young witch's face as she purred, "You can have me at that stake of yours anytime you want."

This time Harry gaped at her quite in earnest, involuntarily breaking their impromptu play. "I... I did not expect that."

With a giggle she kissed him on the chin, rather enraptured with these newfound effects she had not known—and had barely dared to dream—she could ever have on him.

"So it was all in vain?" a profoundly disappointed Harry asked. "Did we really have sex just now for nothing?"

Hermione exhaled a sigh burdened with the weight of the world. "I'm afraid so. 'Twas all for naught."

"I refuse to accept it!" he declared in defiance of the gods. "We mustn't give up, my dear! There has to be something we can do..."

"Well," his dainty she-devil allowed herself to muse aloud, drawing invisible circles on his chest with a finger with a yen to play, "I suppose we could... give it another shot? Perhaps the Room didn't quite get it the first time, you see..."

He nodded pensively. "That could conceivably be the case, yes. Yes, I believe we should try that. And then, if necessary, we could just keep trying and trying... re-lent-less-ly trying... until the Room finally does catch on. No matter how long it takes." He gave her rear-cheeks a proper squeeze, pressing her harder against his form. "Anything to get us out of here, really."

She smiled at him with eyes so darkly coruscant. "I'm glad we're of one mind on this matter."

"And one body, too," he said as her nose grazed his.

And as their lips reconvened with abandon she sighed into him, and that was pretty much all it took. Ten minutes of dozing and two of pillow talk, and their second time commenced. All in all minimally less of a hassle than the first, it must be said.

~•~

Sustenance, they agreed soon thereafter at both their tummies' repeated rumbling call, was what they dearly required before any further acts of fornication could responsibly be engaged in, the prospect of which—more so than the food itself—being what eventually managed to get them to rise from the disheveled sheets and crumpled pillows all around them despite their most evident reluctance.

Sitting cross-legged on the immense four-poster, Hermione with rapt attention was watching a delectably naked Harry rummaging through the shelves and drawers of the wardrobe. Having stepped into a pair of sweatpants that she thought she recognized as his own, his head was just plopping out of the neckline of a plain white T-shirt when he suddenly became aware of Hermione's aforementioned attention. Within an instant she took immense interest in the bed's crimson canopy and the window drapes and the lampshades, one hand in her unruly mane and her face all flushed with sinner's shame.

Harry smiled at that adorable sight of her. "Don't you think it's a little late for that?" he asked her with a pointed glance and nod at her chest, where clasped in one hand she kept a corner of the duvet in place to cover herself.

With puzzlement written plainly on her features she followed his eyes, by all appearance barely aware of what she was doing, let alone why. "I don't know," she mumbled with a shake of the head and a helpless shrug. "Post-coital nudity seems more embarrassing somehow than... the more purposive kinds of nudity that preceded it."

Harry's eyebrows didn't look very convinced.

"Okay, fine," Hermione relented to his cogent counterargument. "You're right. It's silly, I know." She hesitated for about three and a half seconds before releasing the duvet from her torso, from where it unceremoniously plopped down into her lap. Then she proceeded to use the newly unemployed hand to twiddle with her earlobe instead. "There. Casual nudity. No problem for me."

A couple of seconds later she froze. Not a sound or other sign of activity was coming out of Harry's direction, so she turned his way again: the uncultured lout was ogling her chest with eyes round as saucers and lips pressed tightly shut.

She rolled her eyes, almost as annoyed as she was flattered. "Harry..."

"Hahyum?" was all he managed at first, whatever exactly it was. "Yeah, uh... you'd better cover those fine baps o' yours back up again, lass, if food's what's on your mind. 'Cause there's no way I'm getting out of here with those two out in the open."

She threw a pillow at him, laughing. The Seeker of House Gryffindor caught it midair with understated aplomb, came to the bed with fluffy projectile in hand and setting it down in front of her chest leaned over her. Grinning, blushing, glowing she looked up at him. He kissed her.

"I'll whip us up something edible," said Harry in a muted voice, his face remaining close to hers. "You take your time, gorgeous."

"Harry, I'm not gor—"

"Shut up, gorgeous." He kissed her again, nipping that nonsense right in the bud. Somewhere between his lips she forgot to contradict him any further. "You know," he said as he leaned back ever so slightly with his head canted to one side, "you look a bit like Julia Roberts in that pizza movie right now, with your hair like that. Only prettier."

She scoffed rather emphatically. "Please! Now you're just being silly. I look more like the pizza in that pizza movie."

Harry laughed despite himself. "Funny," he said. "I'll give you that. But I really don't like it when you talk about yourself like that, because I know that some part of you genuinely believes it. Not that you literally look like pizza, I hope—although... pizza can actually look quite delicious—but... you know what I mean. It's sorta strange, too, since I really don't think the facts support your opinion on this matter."

"And I don't think your opinion qualifies as fact," she gave back somewhat peevishly, her face averted to the side.

"Fair enough," said he. "But maybe my opinion could at the very least qualify as relevant to you?" He gave her temple a nudge with the tip of his nose. "Like just a little?" Another nudge. "As in, 'Hey, that opinion right there? Of that bloke I'm all kinds of crazy about? I'm gonna go right ahead and acknowledge it. Who knows, the git might actually be on to something.'"

She pouted against that importunate upward curl of her lips. "What's gotten you so cocky all of a sudden, mister? I don't see what could possibly have given you the idea I'm any kind of crazy about you."

He grinned that boyish grin of his and made a rough sound at the back of his throat, half chuckle and half something else, the combination of which turned Hermione all gooey inside. "I've gathered some new data on the matter, you know," he imparted to her. "Two whole batches of it. I think it sufficiently corroborates my suspicion that the girl in question's almost as crazy about me as I'm about her."

She looked up at him at that, and her thoughts momentarily got all tangled up in his eyes. "That—well, that—'s not nearly large enough of a sample size to arrive at any such conclusion. You need to take your research more seriously than that, Mister Potter."

"Duly noted, Miss Granger." He planted a parting kiss on her forehead, and on his way out of the bedroom jovially warbled, "Don't take too long then, okay? Because I really can't wait to get started on that third batch of data."

Hermione's mouth lamely opened as if perchance to speak, but Harry was long gone before she even realized that the universe was still a thing. So she just sat there on the bed, looking at the mess of pillows, sheets and blankets she found herself surrounded by. Their telltale wrinkles, bends and angles were like some forbidden chronicle, writ in linen, silk and velvet, of heavenly pursuits and hellish delights. She tried to blink away her disbelief, then shook her head at the futility.

Whose life was this?

~•~

When Hermione stepped into the kitchen just over a quarter of an hour later, she found Harry busily skipping back and forth between table, stove and counter, carrying plates and pans, cups and cutlery, and seemingly never doing fewer than three things at once.

"Almost done," he happily announced with a swift glance in her general direction. Then he did a double-take and froze midstep. "Wow," he exhaled, his eyes fixed all on her and not at all on the sizzling frying pan in his hand, slanting more and more with every second...

"Your eggs," a blushing Hermione more or less pointed out as much.

"My what? OH!" He managed to flip the fried egg back into the pan just when it was on the cusp of scrambling straight out of there.

She came padding over to him with her eyes shyly cast floorward. "Just wanted to get into something that's easy to get out of, is all," was how she chose to explain being clad in naught but Harry's white button-up shirt. And a pair of fresh panties. Which, to clarify, were not Harry's. "Our regular clothes have made a well-nigh magical reappearance, by the way. Now that we don't really need them anymore, funnily enough. Here, let me handle your eggs."

He surrendered the pan to her without resistance, remained as if in a daze for a moment longer before snapping out of it and welcoming the opportunity to wrap both his arms around her from behind.

"Easy to get out of, you say?" he mumbled as he nuzzled her neck with his nose slipping underneath her collar. Or rather his collar on her.

"Sustenance, Harry," Hermione reminded him with a voice far more composed than the entire rest of her being felt just then, trying her best to focus on her highly demanding frying work. "We agreed?"

"Oh, I'm ravenous," he all but growled into her ear.

"Harryyy..." she whined. One more nudge from him and that shirt on her wouldn't be the only thing to come undone. "I'm begging you! We can't let all your wonderful kitchen efforts go to waste like that. Let's have our brunch first and then we'll... see about a nice little dessert à la 'Ermionée for you, okay?"

He gave a throaty chuckle, sounding ten years older than he actually was, then whispered in her ear, "Sounds luscious."

Hermione quietly uttered an agnostic's best approximation of a prayer as she felt Harry releasing her from his embrace, one hand of his lingering ever so lightly on her waist before—thankfully, regrettably—gliding off.

Brunch was great, though, and not merely as an adequate diversion from other things. They had bacon and sausages, golden toast and bread and butter, paprika and cucumber, eggs scrambled, fried and boiled (Harry confessed to having forgotten which kind she preferred; she couldn't actually name a favorite) and five different types of cheese, three of which were only smelled but never tasted, thank you very much. There were baked beans, too, and they were put on toast, and we shall forgive them for they were both so very British and they just couldn't help themselves.

"You know," Hermione at some point remarked, "if you keep this wandless culinary magic of yours up, I'm afraid I'll feel obliged to offer my thanks to the Dursleys eventually." She paused with a spoonful of berries and vanilla cream halfway to her mouth. "What a ghastly thought."

Harry laughed with a glass of orange juice raised to his lips. "Well, it's not like they actively taught me or anything. They just had me do it all the time."

She narrowed her eyes at that. "I bet those pillocks secretly love your cuisine."

"They sure kept it secret all right," he quipped.

Other than the food itself, the topics of their ongoing table talk were the Global Economic Goblin Wars of the 18th and early 19th century and their present day repercussions, the incommensurability of Merlin's third theorem and the second law of thermodynamics, and Margaret Thatcher. So nothing too overtly erotic.

"So," Harry began circumspectly enough about one hundred and forty-nine seconds after the last bite had been taken, "about that dessert you mentioned..."

Hermione delicately cleared her throat behind a raised hand, if only because at the mere utterance of those words she felt her heart jump up that very throat. "It's interesting, actually," she then laid out, "because, you see, the word dessert comes from the French verb desservir, which among various less pertinent things can mean something along the lines of... to clear the table."

Harry gave a slow nod. "Food for thought right there."

Gazes of emerald and chocolate locked across the cluttered table between them, there in the alcove underneath the little window. With one midair flick of his wrist Harry somehow swept all the remnants of their brunch off the tabletop without ever touching any of them. Glasses, plates and bread baskets, and a small decorative vase with presumably fresh daisies in them, were violently sent flying and then... floated onward to the kitchen isle? Where they safely came to rest without so much as a scratch or crack?

"Harry, how did you—" a thoroughly flabbergasted Hermione set out to voice her wide-eyed amazement, yet much to the amplification of her already formidable perplexity found herself being pulled up onto the table. And—gosh!—was she assisting in the effort? "But. What. Ha—Harry!" she managed to stammer in between all the kisses she suddenly found herself assailed by, and it should in the hapless girl's defense be recognized how desperately she tried to fight them off with kisses of her own.

"Just something that's sporadically been happening," he explained without much patience for such trifling matters, his gliding, gripping hands seemingly all over her at once, already slipping inside of the only other piece of clothing she was wearing underneath that appropriated shirt of his. "Didn't know if it would work quite like that. Couldn't care less, though."

"I don't—think—anything that breaks—in here—is permanently broken—anyway," Hermione astutely analyzed whenever she found the breath to relate her progress.

"Exactly," he agreed with his mouth running along her collarbone before eagerly following the cord of her neck on an upward trail, where underneath the skin he drunkenly thought he could feel her heart drumming madly, madly in the rhythm of his own.

"But Harry," Hermione insisted despite her entire body's hot-blooded betrayal of her attempted scientific pursuits. How would throwing her head back like that help with anything? "That's'n... incredible display of magic—"

"You're an incredible display of magic," he huskily opined with her earlobe between his teeth.

"Oh," on a whimper she exhaled. "O-okay then."

And thus dessert was had. In precisely the fashion the French language would approve of, no less.

~•~

After doing it three times within a matter of two hours, Harry and Hermione—just for a change of pace, perhaps—actually didn't do it for a little while. In fact, they spent the greater part of the afternoon doing the sum total of nothing, and scandalously enough these two sluggards savored every single minute of it. They were lying snugly on the couch together, and unlike their clothes—which had been discarded and forgotten somewhere in the kitchen—two steaming cups and a pot of tea were at all times within arm's reach. Hermione had already reheated the pot twice with a touch of her wand. Their entangled bodies were partially covered by a crochet blanket or two, mostly from the hips down. He was lying on his back with one arm around her and a heap of pillows as his backrest, she on her side with an arm and a leg on top of him and her face nestled into that nook between his shoulder and his head. Sometimes they talked in whiffs of whispers, sometimes they merely listened to the whispers of their tranquil hearts.

"Harry?" it at some point meekly came from Hermione. His eyes staying placidly shut, he acknowledged her question with a soft sound at the back of his throat, the vibration of which she could faintly perceive on the outside of his neck. She seemed hesitant, looked up at what from her position she could see of his relaxed face and then down the length of his smoothly heaving torso and her hand resting on top of it again, which remained an altogether wondrous sight to her. "Would you consider... reading something to me?"

He processed that rather unexpected input for a couple of seconds. "Like... an afternoon bedtime story?"

"No?" Hermione tried to mitigate the apparent silliness of her request with a wave of heat rising to her head. "It's just that—well, I've had this... daydream sort of fantasy for a while now, of us being together very much like this and... and you reading something to me."

A quiet chuckle shook his chest, and Hermione on top of it. "That is the most Hermione fantasy ever."

"Don't make fun of it!" she whinged no more than half in jest, her embarrassment getting the better of her. "I just find the sound of your voice very soothing and always imagined it would be ni—will you stop laughing at me already?!"

His continuous chuckle promptly turned into full-fledged laughter. "I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing—"

"Yes? I'm listening."

"Well, I would be laughing with you, if only you cared to join me."

"Uh-huh..."

He cleared his throat. Of laughter, mostly. "So, uhm... you were talking about how you like my voice?"

"Oh, I most certainly did like it," she replied coolly. "Up until just a moment ago, that is. I'm honestly over it at this point."

And there he went laughing again, the—

"Muppet," she mumbled under her breath.

He took her hand in his and pressed its palm to his lips. "You are the cutest thing, you know that?"

"I wasn't aware," she stated flatly.

"Well, you are," said Harry. "Which is why I'm going to read to you whatever you wish to hear. The phone book, the weekly horoscope, or even your favorite Rita Skeeter column..."

Hermione through flaring nostrils inhaled deeply, loudly—a bit like a dragon about to spew flames of righteous ire at her insolent mate...

"I'm sorry," he said with an honest and at best semi-effective effort to stifle yet another traitorous sound of amusement rolling up his chest. "I'm being facetious. Inordinately so. Let me make it up to you by reading something to you. Whatever you want. Name it and I shall read it."

"Well," she pointedly prefaced as she raised her head to look at him with a vindictive glower in her eyes and rather contradictory a smile on her lips. He mirrored the latter and therewith banished the former.

"I would actually love to hear you read the introduction of A Tale of Two Cities," she said as she snuggled herself back into her previous position, "but I'm not sure we're gonna find a copy in here anymore, seeing how our library was turned into wizarding Britain's literary pornography and sex education centre."

Harry ejected a single bark of laughter, and Hermione was okay with that. "That does limit the scope of our choices a mite. We got a wider range of clothes again, though. Maybe the same is true for the library? Hey, how come you haven't even checked yet?"

A brief but conspicuous pause. "I was... otherwise engaged."

This time they snickered in unison, in that invisible bubble of secrecy of theirs, away from the noise and the maddening meddling of the world.

"Why A Tale of Two Cities specifically, though?"

"Oh, we had this Granger family thing once, when my dad was trying to get my mum to read it," Hermione went forth to elucidate. "Which she had always refused to do on account of her grandfather being that die-hard Dickens snob. He had spent virtually her entire adolescence going on about how Dickens supposedly is the be-all and end-all of literature and mankind's collective wisdom and what have you, while in equally vocal a fashion disparaging her Austen and her Hardy and her Brontës at every turn. Without ever having read a single word of theirs, naturally.

"At any rate, papa claimed that no two people would read the introductory paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities the same way. With the same cadence and inflection, mood and implication. To prove his point he had each of us, alone and one after the other, read it out loud with a tape recorder running. As it turned out, he was kind of on to something. At least in our little circle not one reading quite resembled another. Eleven-year old me argued that the same would to some extent likely be true for any piece ofsufficiently artistic writing,and we later conducted some more experiments on that front as well, but that's neither here nor there. So credit where credit is due, my grumpy great-grandfather's rendition was by far the best. He had that ideal voice for it, too. With this natural timbre in it, all rough and raspy, rich with life and wear and stubborn resilience against it all. And far too many cigarettes, frankly.

"My mother told him the only way to get her to 'read' Dickens would be for him to read it to her, in its unabridged entirety. Much to our surprise he promptly agreed, and with my father's recorder at hand got to work." Harry felt a long exhalation of hers brushing over his skin. "He never got to finish it, so my mum did it for him. I confess to never having read the book myself to this day. I've only ever listened to those tapes. It happens in the middle of a sentence, that switch from one voice to the other. About two thirds through the book. Not because my great-grandfather died right in the middle of it, of course. He was just too tired to go on that day. And then there were no more days to come."

A weak sniffle came from Hermione, and Harry with his arm around her drew her closer to him and kissed the crown of her head. He heard her breath shakily leaving her chest through parted lips, and felt her hand's caress, like a wordless thank you, on his neck and jaw.

"Sorry," she whispered. "Didn't quite anticipate where I'd end up with this."

"It's okay," he said. "Your family sounds so much like... like your family."

She was conspicuously still all of a sudden. "In a bad way?"

Harry sighed. "No, silly. In the best way."

She hugged him more tightly for a second. "Okay. Sorry." He shook his head at her and all these unnecessary apologies. They drifted into a reflective quietude then, before eventually Hermione picked up that loose thread of her tale and with one last reemerging memory tied a neat little knot in it: "We found a copy of Jane Eyre on his bedside table."

She felt herself rise, float and softly fall again on the undulation of his chest as he breathed deeply in and out. And she could, far beyond that mere physicality of the sensation, feel that he was right there with her.

"You know," she mused with a touch of tiredness creeping into her voice, "I'm never quite sure what to think of our species as a whole, but I do appreciate a genuine human being's complexity. That constant struggle between nature and nurture. That code that drives us and the experiences that mould us. The multifarious causality connecting it all. The contradictions. The imperfection. The constant confusion. That brief flicker in that long darkness. How we strive and fail and strive again. The ways in which we ache and break. The tragic impermanence of all that we do and all that we are, and how desperately we toil and moil against the hunger of time even as it eats away at us. Our hopes and our fears, our vices and our virtues. The way we dream and believe. The way we love and desire, or hate and despise. The drums of passion in our hearts, making us march on and on, even straight to our own ruin. The truths that we trust in, the lies that we cling to. The questions we ask and the answers we seek—and the ones we shun, too. All of it, in each of us. Except for Dolores Umbridge. She's a twat."

Harry was taken by surprise so hard that his own snort of laughter made him cough. He had certainly never heard Hermione Granger use that word before...

"My great-grandfather was an obstinate, gruff and bitter old man," Hermione continued in the wake of her own little giggle, "all too easily mistaken for a certified O for Outstanding git. He wasn't easy to be around, harder to approach and all but impossible to truly reach in his later years. Dreadfully pigheaded, so rigid in his ways. And yet... there was still some dauntless little vestige of kindness in his bludgeoned, bruised and battered old heart. Buried deep inside, like some ancient treasure underneath the sands of time. He lost his two older brothers in that war that failed to end all wars. His best friend survived along with him, but committed suicide a few years later. His first love, his sweetheart that had waited for him to return from hell, eventually realized that the boy she had loved had in fact never come home, and left him for a more jolly fella. The woman who would later become his wife died in a car crash at age 49. He never remarried, and spent the last thirty-eight of his ninety-two years essentially alone. He outlived three of his four children, and hadn't been on speaking terms with the remaining one for a decade or more."

She waited to see where her thoughts would go, and he waited for her. "I think at times we hate excuses so much that we render ourselves blind to explanations, and potential understanding is lost. We still loved him as best we could, you know? In that 'Well, what else are we gonna do with him?' sort of way."

They shared a moment's quiet laughter.

"But that Jane Eyre on his bedside table? Nobody saw that coming, not even those few among his descendants that could still reasonably claim to know him best... or at all. It saddens me to think that somewhere along the way he... unlearned these things. How to share and to trust. He could only ever allow himself to let people in in secret. I don't think he told anyone that he loved them ever again after the death of his wife. Not even once. It was still there, somewhere within him. Forsaken yet not forgotten. But the house around it was too far collapsed to retrieve it, broken beyond repair. You could never hear it in his words, and only rarely catch a glimpse of it in his actions. When he thought that nobody was looking. Still, I hope he died with more love than bitterness in his heart. Thinking of that recording he did and that last book he ever read, I'm willing to believe he did."

She exhaled a woeful sigh, and for a while again silence reigned gently over them. Harry held her, caressed her, assured her. He did not find the words he searched for, but wrapped up in his arms Hermione found that she missed not a thing.

"Harry?"

"Yes?"

"What the hell was I talking about, and how did it suddenly get so gloomy on this cozy couch?"

She felt his soft chuckle more than she heard it.

"I was supposed to read something to you," he kindly reminded her.

"Right!"

"Here," he said, maneuvering himself out of their bodily entanglement and clambering over her, "let me just throw one of these blankets 'round my waist real quick and then I'll see if I can't find some decent literature between all the wanton Walpurgas in here. Wait, now that I mention it—"

"Don't even think about it."

"Aw, why not? We could read it together. You take the female parts, I the male parts..."

"How do you even know the parts?"

"Well, I thought that much at least could be safely assumed given the subject matter. Unless it's some kind of lesbian odyssey, of course." He smirked. "In which case you could be assured of my undivided attention while you do all the parts yourself."

She harrumphed her faux disapproval. "Why the loincloth, anyway?" she asked with a coinciding glance at his makeshift raiment. "Afraid you'll run into somebody in here who hasn't seen your privates yet?"

With a shrug he looked down at himself. "I don't know. Looking for Dickens with my dangly bits out in the open just wouldn't feel right."

Hermione laughed.

"Be back in a minute," he said, and with rather debonair a wink turned to make for the study.

He was, in fact, back in two minutes. "I've got good news and I've got bad news." She looked up at him expectantly, puzzled as she was at his annunciation. "The bad news is," and he procured a book from behind his back, "I found A Tale of Two Cities." She perked up one eyebrow at the alleged badness of the news. "Pity, I know. But the good news is," and with a little bit of showmanship he revealed a second book which he had hidden behind his back, "I still brought dear Walpurga with me! Just in case anyone should be in the mood for some serious literature."

Hermione didn't know what she should do: roll her eyes, shake her head or laugh out loud. So she did all three. "Come back here, you goofball," she told him, gesturing at the unacceptably vacant space on the couch. He wisely put Walpurga down on the coffee table—(For later, surely.)—and brought only good old Charles John Huffam with him as he reclaimed his spot right next to her. She held the blanket up and patiently waited for him to get his limbs sorted out. Then, the moment he seemed even remotely comfortable, she gave him a quick peck on the lips and hastily nestled back up to him so that everything was exactly the way it had been before.

"Ready," she declared. "You may begin."

With a noisy exhalation that was three quarters affectionate chuckle and a quarter and a half fatalistic sigh, Harry opened that famous book about two urbanized areas and flipped straight to the first page he thought appropriate to read out loud:

"A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens."

"Wooo!"

"Thank you, thank you."

He cleared his throat with a skillfully judged degree of affectation.

"BOOK THE FIRST!" he then bellowed in his best approximation of a bass-baritone, making Hermione wince quite violently. Dramatic pause, then quietly in an eight o' clock news sort of register: "Recalled to Life."

A chortle came from her. "Well, so far this is definitely the most exciting reading yet. Very, ah... avant-garde."

Harry ahemed apologetically. "I'll be a good boy now." He flipped to the next page and inhaled a steeling breath, which then, however, got stuck in his chest where nothing came of it.

After a few seconds of anticipation, Hermione thought it reasonable to inquire after him. "Harry? I'd feel a lot more involved here if you'd deign to read it out loud, you know?"

"Yeah," he exhaled. "I, uh... I think I'm having a major... minor... medium case of stage fright here."

"Stage fright?" she asked with a bemused chuckle.

"Well, seeing how that reading your great-grandfather and mother recorded means so much to you, understandably, and was by your own words so excellently done... I mean, how can I possibly compete with that? I don't even know the text. I might've read too much inconsequential nonsense in my cupboard-under-the-stairs days."

"But it's not a competition," said Hermione.

"No, I know, but—"

Hermione raised her head to look at him, supporting herself on one arm. "Harry," she said, "to me you alone are beyond all comparison. Well, realistically speaking, my parents are beyond comparison as well, since I'm not actively evaluating random strangers as possibly better qualified replacements for them either, but... I hope you know what I mean, and that I mean it truly. I'm not going to judge your reading performance on a point scale. I'd simply love to hear these familiar lines read in your familiar voice. Your natural voice, if you please. As much as I appreciate your... initial enthusiasm for the material."

He mustered a weak little smile with his eyes evading hers, and Hermione nibbled pensively on her lower lip as she kept her attentive gaze on him. She had most recently intensified her acquaintance with that nascent young man in him. Repeatedly. Avidly. But this was all the boy again from which the man would spring. The boy that had touched without intent, conquered without demand, and filled without effort all of the heart that she had, and more.

"Hey," she softly spoke, "remember what I told you about the piano? How it quiets my mind, calms my heart and banishes my demons? That how I put it? I almost told you about that one other thing that reliably does that for me, didn't I?" He nodded once. "Well, Harry James Potter... you are that other thing." Finally his eyes met hers, and she didn't let them go anywhere. "Always have been. More so even, I have since then discovered, than those black and white keys. Nothing else in the world can either stir or soothe me like a smile of yours meant for me, like the sound of your voice in my ear, like the touch of your skin on mine or the mere sight of pure serenity cast gently over that beautiful countenance of yours. Nothing."

It took Harry a moment to heed his straining eyes' mounting remonstrance and at their behest remember to blink. "I—" Well, that was a pitiful croak, Mister Potter. "I feel the same. About you."

There was the faintest hitch in her breath. "You do?"

He nodded, then labored to swallow and softly cleared his throat of the frog in there. No Chocolate Frog, sadly. "Guess we've taken the pressure out of it a little bit."

Her smile widened. "If you'd rather read Walpurga to me, I would be okay with that, too." She got a chuckle and a vague wave of the hand for that, although she did mean it in earnest and he knew it.

"No, no," he declined the offer with a smile of his own. "I'll do this properly. Besides, I'm quite eager by now to find out what all the fuss is about with these two cities. Which two cities, anyway? Just to get my bearings here."

"Paris and London."

"A-ha! Now I know exactly what's up."

She couldn't possibly resist any longer: she kissed him, and he was as glad to receive her as he was quick to respond in like manner.

"Chapter One," he read out loud when once again she had resumed her position at his side (and half on top of him), "The Period." He kept his voice as normal as he could, too, while suddenly wondering quite self-consciously what exactly his normal voice even was, especially while reading, which wasn't the same as talking at all. But much to everybody's great surprise and against all entirely justified panic, he met the challenge quite ably, and eventually even found some joy in the endeavor as the timeless power of Dickens's evocative prose drew him in. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," he set out, "it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..."

With her eyes closed and her mind filled only with the sound of his voice and the scent of his skin, the smile Hermione felt so insistently, so pleasantly tugging at the corners of her mouth was impossible to contain in its quiet elation. Harry, after a mere handful of pages, had already accumulated multiple questions which for now he refrained from asking so as to not unnecessarily disrupt the reading, and Hermione rolled her eyes at his audible amusement when a vexed coachman ejaculated whatever he was saying out into the world.

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon," Harry read a few minutes later when he had reached the novel's third chapter, sinking ever deeper into contemplation the further he progressed, "that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!"

Unconsciously he paused, caught indeed in reflection upon this wonderful fact, caught and troubled, and struggling momentarily to find the wonder in that fact. There was truth in those words, he could not deny. That Dickens fella probably knew a thing or two about human nature, he conceded. The sort of thing, that kind of truth, which lies perhaps outside the vast domain of science to fathom and explore. Truths we feel rather than think.

A secret to the heart nearest it...

That most wonderful fact unsettled him, though a certain wonder he could most certainly see in it. There is strength and solace to be found in the autonomy and independence of one's own individual self, but also isolation. He knew both these sides of it all too well. Was it not also true, he wondered, that one can only rightfully claim to love that which one intimately knows for what it truly is? But if one heart must by the very nature of reality forever remain to some extent a stranger to every other heart, what then is left of love to claim?

In some of its imaginings...

Over the course of the last few years Harry had increasingly felt as if Hermione could very much imagine every last one of his imaginings, which he now imagined was very much impossible. But what he felt for her he could not allow to be diminished in any way. Not even by facts, no matter how wonderful they were asserted to be. Perhaps it was a fact too, then, that love is contingent less on knowledge than on trust, built in actuality on uncertain ground, to be either hardened and refined, or eroded and torn asunder through the tests of time, and epitomized in that daring leap of faith one ultimately has to take in order to obtain it, and again and again to keep it; that faith that the other's heart is as willing and as honest as one's own, and that of that most familiar stranger's heart there is a truth profoundly known where true knowledge cannot be attained.

Harry looked down at that blanket-covered shape of Hermione then, nestled against him with her head on his shoulder, her long fingers lightly spread on his chest, her leg crossing his midsection. Her breathing had changed, he observed. She had become quieter as he progressed from page to page, and altogether still eventually. Her fingers remained in place and had done so for a while now, where before they had from time to time either scratched her nose or caressed his skin. The two previous nights had finally caught up with her, Harry surmised. She couldn't have slept much more than ten hours in both of them combined. Twelve at most. And he too, for whom those nights had been much the same, felt that weight of sleep neglected, and now demanding to be slept, coming over him just then. He was so deeply comfortable, so perfectly at peace...

And as he gave in to its soft beckoning and let his eyelids glide gently shut, he knew beyond all doubt that there was no greater truth in his life than Hermione herself, and that she was where all his faith belonged. Her heart was always nearest to his, no matter where it dwelled, and if there were secrets hidden yet within, some more meaningful than others, he would simply spend the rest of his life discovering as many of them as he humanly could, and as she would allow. And that, too, was a wonderful fact.

"I love this," he thought.

"I love you," he said.

With a second's delay Hermione opened her eyes. For a moment she did not move, did not breathe, did not dare do anything at all. Then, inadvertently, she gulped.

Harry's eyelids shot all the way back up again. He looked about, unsure of what exactly had just transpired. Had he been sleeping, had he been dreaming already? There came a stirring at his side.

Hermione moved. She propped herself up on her elbow and raised her head to look at him. Slowly, reluctantly his eyes came from one side to the other to meet hers.

"What?" she asked succinctly.

"What?" he echoed her idiotically.

She canted her head ever so slightly. "You... said something?"

"Did I?" he evaded. "I don't know. I just meant to say that I... I love this. Right here. Us. On this couch. With the... the blankets. And the pillows. And everything." He gestured vaguely at everything. "So maybe I said that."

She turned her head a bit more, scrutinizing him askance. "That's not what it sounded like to me."

"It didn't?" Harry feigned blissful ignorance, if most of it was at the moment even feigned. "Well, I think I might've thought one thing and then said another, but I don't see how that's important. What I meant is what I said, or what I meant to say is what I thought. Either way, I mean what I said. Or thought."

Hermione, rendered hesitant by her mind's persistent disbelief and her heart's highest hope, bit her bottom lip and deliberated with herself, her eyes never leaving his face. "Could you... maybe... clarify that for me? Just so that I can understand what exactly it is that you meant, regardless of what you actually said or thought."

"Right, yeah, sure," Harry purposefully set out with half a mind to trail off completely, then stumbled over all that magnificent purpose in his way. "What I meant is... is that... that..." He groaned with exasperation as he rubbed his eyes underneath his glasses. "Bloody hell, why am I being so stupid?" Hermione wasn't entirely sure whether she was supposed to offer an answer to that particular line of inquiry. He took a deep breath just then, so she discarded the thought in favor of silent expectancy. "What I should say," he said, "because it actually is what I mean to say, is that I love this right here, in all its simplicity, because I love you, in all your complexity."

A vellication most delicate flashed 'cross her features then, like a faint trembling of blades of grass in the most tenuous whisper of a wind: a ghost of a flutter on her eyelids, the hint of a twitch 'round her nostrils, and finally the most tentative curl of a smile on her lips.

She should have doubted him. By all rights she should have doubted him. The notion was absurd, the mere idea too sublime to manifest itself in earthly realms. There was simply no way that this deepest and dearest of all her heart's wishes could ever come true. No such preposterous good fortune should ever be hers to receive, and surely no gift of such splendor would ever be hers to deserve.

By all her persuasions' well-reasoned command she should have doubted him, but found it not in her ever-uncertain heart to do so, for him... oh, him she could not doubt.

If this be error and upon me prov'd,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

"Do you?" in a whisper it drifted off her lips as her eyes welled up. But she knew the answer. How clearly she knew it! She laughed, she sobbed and she sighed all at once as Harry's hand came up to cup and to steady the side of her face with his thumb's sweet caress along the arch of her cheekbone. "You do, don't you?"

"Of course I do, Mione," said Harry, and forehead to forehead their heads came to rest.

"You love me." She was weeping freely now.

"I would've thought the last couple of hours made that kinda abundantly clear," he humorously said to her. "Did you think we were just fooling around out of sheer boredom, or what?"

She had to giggle through her sobs, or perhaps the other way around. "No? I know you wouldn't—well, I certainly know that I wouldn't—but—but it's all happening so fast, and ever since we… since we started… I've barely had a moment's break to think. It's all such a blur, so surreal. Hearing you say those words, even if you already made me feel their meaning—well, frankly, that's also quite surreal. But at the same time it makes it all seem a bit more real-real, you know? Does that make any sense? No. No, it doesn't. Could you maybe say it again, though? Just to help me along here?"

Harry smiled, cupping her face with both his hands now. "I love you, Hermione. I truly, madly, somewhat alarmingly love you."

Hermione laughed with tears streaming down her cheeks. "I'm sorry," she sniffled. "I'm being greedy. But hearing you say that, and knowing somehow that you truly mean it... oh, I can't tell you what that means to me."

"Why the hell not?"

She laughed so clearly as her hand too found the side of his face. "I want to say it back," she told him with another quaver of a sob, "but it strikes me as tantamount to saying, 'By the way, gravity is a thing. Better watch out for that stuff.'"

"I'll definitely keep that in mind next time I'm up in the air," he quipped, nudging her nose with his.

She heaved a long and sniffle-shaken sigh. "I love you, Harry," she then said. "I love you, too. And much like gravity, it simply is."

With lips and thumb he kissed and wiped her tears away, then waited patiently, with his face an inch away from hers, for her eyes to come up in a flutter, shyly, and he caught them gently with his own. The seconds ticked ever on and on, and surely out there, distant and detached from them somehow, the world kept turning on in cycles unceasing, but in here there only were in two breasts two beating hearts ever nearest to each other, and in their most radiant of imaginings they truthfully were in perfect consonance.

And like the noble and dignified human beings they indubitably were, they did not surrender themselves to some primal prurience and attack each other like animals in heat the moment those pesky proclamations of love were out of the way. They kissed and they caressed, they reinforced with tenderness of touch what their voices had now in heartfelt tones at last made heard. They lay and they breathed together. They gave their exultant hearts time to take it all in, to expand around its sheer immensity, and to settle into this new reality of their lives inseparably entwined, so soothing in its familiarity, so thrilling in its novelty. As one their souls were afloat on the surf of time unheeded, dreaming yet awake.

Then, and only then, did they have sex. Again.

~Ω~

The Trivial Trivia Section

• That other vampire: While the word nosferatu finds usage in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) as an alleged "Eastern European" term for vampire, the visual comparison Harry draws in his somewhat skewed self-perception is more specifically a reference to the 1922 German silent film classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, and starring Max Schreck as Count Orlok.

Itself a thinly veiled adaptation of Stoker's novel, this milestone of cinema was almost successfully wiped from history by the Stoker estate, acting on behalf of the writer's widow Florence. Though misconduct on the side of the Nosferatu production cannot be denied—the adaptation was entirely unauthorized, and Bram Stoker uncredited—I nevertheless consider it a triumph that the film was preserved for posterity. Destroying art is not a part of the path of wisdom. Not even on the scenic route.

• That pizza movie: Yes, that one! No, not Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. No, not Moonstruck, either. And no, definitely not Spaceballs. The movie in question is Mystic Pizza, 1988 breakthrough film of Julia Roberts, and also little Matt Damon's debut on the big screen.

• That Shakespeare, finally: Took us a while this time. Sonnet 116.

• Those authors mentioned: Henry James, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and Charlotte's Jane Eyre (1847) specifically, Thomas Hardy, and—more extensively—Charles Dickens, with quotations from his 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities.