"What is this?" I thrust the paper in front of her eyes as she sits at the kitchen table, reading a layout for her magazine and eating a bowl of cereal.

She doesn't look at it.

"You said you wanted a list," she shrugs.

"Why is it so long?" I narrow my eyes at her.

"Have you read it?"

"That doesn't answer my question."

"Read it."

"Number one: We're friends. So?"

"So, there are some lines you don't cross."

"Maybe it isn't a line, maybe it's just a starting point."

She doesn't answer.

"Number two: you think of me as a sister. I can definitely assure you that's not true."

"Great."

"Oh, it is."

She shakes her head.

"Three: I'm not your type. What's my type, Hermione?"

"Ask Holly. Or Melissa. Parvati. Or one of the other ladies on our street."

"Three A. There's subpoints? Subpoints?? Three A: I'm not blonde and cute. Again, I can argue that. Okay, maybe not the blonde part."

"I'm not your type of 'hot'. Bushy hair, freckles, the works."

"What the hell does that have to do with anything?" I stare at her.

"It matters, Harry. It shouldn't, but it does."

"Not to me."

"Wait until your screaming fans hear. You can hit ground bottom with one tiny slip-up."

"You know I don't care about that."

"We'll see. Finish the list."

I run my finger down the page to number four.

"You're not my type. Why not?" I demand.

She shrugs, "You just aren't."

"Well, what's your type? You don't like the way I look?"

She closes her eyes. "You're just not my type."

"You can change your mind."

She sighs and gets up from the table to put her bowl in the sink. As she runs water into the dish, I come up behind her and continue reading the list aloud.

"You are a shameless flirt. We've been over this one, Hermione. You know it doesn't mean anything."

"Good to know. You've flirted with me. Quite a bit, as I recall."

"That's different!" I protest. "And you flirted back to me!"

"Okay."

"It is."

She shakes her head and folds the layout and drops it in the trash.

"Five. You only want me because everyone else thinks that we should be together. Are you serious?"

"It's my list, Harry."

"Six. If that's not the reason, then you only want me because you can't have me. Oh, really?"

She sighs and shakes her head yet again.

"I have to get going. I'm supposed to meet with my junior editors."

"Wait, I want to finish this."

"Fine, finish."

"You're a slob, you can't cook and you are a total chicken when it comes to trying anything new?! Scared to try new things?? Are you serious."

"You've stuck with Quidditch your whole life. You never even tried anything else. Not even your auror dreams."

Harry's jaw dropped. I felt a bit guilty for practically calling the bravest man on earth a lazy coward, but he seemed to still be in shock that I made an actual list.

"All reasons why you're not my type." I continued.

"Thanks for clarifying."

"Harry, you wanted to know. So now you do."

"But you're wrong."

She shakes her head. "I don't think so."

"I bet I can prove every single one of these points wrong."

"Whatever."

"Don't give me the brush off here, Hermione. I'm serious. I want to prove to you that you're wrong about me."

"Harry, I didn't make this list for you to get all worked up over it. You said it was just a question and then you wanted to know why. So I told you. Let it go."

I shake my head. "You really don't know me, do you?"

She sighs. "I do, Harry. That's the point. We're friends. That's all."

"What if I want more?"

"To prove a point? I don't think so."

"No, not to prove a point. Well, yeah. To prove a point. But to prove that point so that you'll look at me differently."

"Why, Harry?"

This time it's my turn to walk away.

* * *

Now I'm upset with myself for making that list. I thought he'd read it in a rational manner, come to the conclusion all the points are quite valid and let it go. Unfortunately, now he sees it as some kind of a challenge, a quest and a holy grail and he won't let it go.

It's ridiculous. It's like when a five year old tells their mother that the only food they want to eat is cotton candy and then even as they have bits of the pink and blue stuff throughout the day and get sick of it, they don't want to own up to a stomach ache, because they're trying to prove a point.

And what's this about him not thinking of me as a sister? I need to stop walking around the house in short shorts and tank tops.

I'm not a trophy to be won, I'm not a competition, I'm not up for auction or sale. He doesn't even want me, not really.

It's not good enough.

* * *

The meeting is busy and eventful and steers my mind in a new direction. David, my assistant, is booking me on some signings and wants to clear the schedule so that it doesn't interfere with promotion time. I'm a little apprehensive about all the exposure, but it comes along with the territory and I've accepted it.

Just as I'm about to head out for lunch, the fireplace in the common office snaps and Harry's head pops up.

"Hey."

"Hi, what's up?" I say cautiously.

"Where do you keep the mop? The one for the floor."

"There's another kind?" He doesn't answer. "In the storage closet, in the hallway, next to the bucket. Why do you never act like a wizard and use a cleaning spell?"

"I used Floo, didn't I? Okay, thanks. I have to go in for an interview, but I'll be home for dinner, maybe late."

"Sure."

He disappears and I figure he's probably spilled something in the kitchen. He's done it a couple of times before, despite my constant pleas to put any open containers away from the edge of the counters.

His birthday is coming up in a month. I need to get him something and I'm at a total loss. It's not like he needs anything, well, except a maid. There's an idea.

I head on over to the book store for a couple of hours and it's an easy, fun session. I'm not sure how much we got done, but I hate working in a stressful environment, so I don't mind fooling around sometimes. Then I snap back into my perfectionist mode and we get down to business anyway.

Since I'm done early, I maneuver my way through a gigantic supermarket and load up on all the groceries we're out of. Three aisles of pet food, 57 different yogurt flavours, 45 kinds of toilet paper, a pyramid of the shiniest Red Delicious apples gleaming with wax and people starving in Africa. It's hard not to think about, especially when you finally come into some money. When you're lower middle class, it's a matter of paying off your student loans before fixating on the third world. Now, I feel like that rich man looking at the camel get through the eye of the needle.

To cement the fact I'm now a shameless consumer, I can barely carry all the bags. I bought him 4 kinds of disgusting, sugary cereal, because I know he loves it and I feel a little bit bad about calling him a slob and a chicken, even if both those things are pretty darn true. I got a cherry pie, again more for him than myself, and with that, obviously, I needed vanilla ice cream, so that in the end, I bought a whole lot of nothing.

I have to make three apparitions trips from the store to the front door in order to unload all this stuff. Usually, he's good about bringing the groceries in, but he's out now, so I don't even bother ringing the bell. I get the door unlocked and stumble into the hallway. Hmmm, pine fresh.

The bags quickly make it onto the ceramic floor and then I'm transporting them into the kitchen. I turn around to search through the purchases when I notice the floor is particularly shiny. I stand up and take the rest of the kitchen in.

The counters are spotless. There is no clutter. The sink is as shiny and silver as the day they installed it. The tiled backsplash is clean of every tiny speck. The stove is sparkling. No dishes in the sink, none in the dishwasher either. The kitchen rags are hanging neatly, clean and ironed.

I forget about the ice cream and walk through the rest of the house.

I've never, ever seen a place this clean. Not even my mother's house the day before Christmas. The bathroom is stunning, and for the first time, I appreciate what a beautiful room it is when you can actually see the floor and the glass doors of the shower stall have been properly washed.

I'm not really sure I've walked into the right house, but my room is still there. I peek into his and it's also spotless.

I figure he must have hired a maid.

* * *

Damn that list.

My hands are burning from all the cleaners I used to get the house spotless before I left for my meeting. My wand is practically smoking at the tip from all the cleaning charms. I decide that I'll have to suck it up though. Strike "You're a slob" from the list.

I run over the list in my head again and again during my meeting so that most of what is discussed there goes over my head and I'm left feeling out of the loop as the suits debate some appearances that they want me to make.

Finally, I'm released and as I apparate back to the house, I wonder what Hermione's reaction was when she walked through the door. At any rate, I'm going to find out momentarily what she thinks.

"Hermione?" I call out as I open the door and glance around the living room.

"Deck," she calls and I follow her voice. She's sitting in a lounge chair, reading a book and looks up at me.

"How was your meeting?" she asks, nonchalantly.

Okay... she's not even going to mention it? She had to have noticed! I spent most of the day scrubbing. My damn spells didn't work right. I can conjure a bloody Class 3 Immobilization Jinx, but I can't do a simple scrubbing spell.

"Boring," I shrug.

"Yeah, well, you have to pay for the maid somehow."

"What maid?"

She snorts. "Oh, right. This place just cleaned itself?"

"I didn't hire anyone."

"Sure, you didn't." She winks at me and returns to her book.

I sigh, exasperated.

"I did it, Hermione."

"Whatever you say."

"Look at these hands!" I thrust them forward for her inspection.

"They look fine" she comments, not really looking.

"They feel like sandpaper," I tell her. "Feel."

I brush my hand across her cheek and she flinches.

"Okay, you've made your point."

Her skin is so, so soft.

I flatten my palm against her cheek and leave it there for a moment until she pulls away.

"So that's one."

"One what?" she sighs, even though she knows full well.

"One of your reasons why we're not together. That I was a slob. Except I just proved that it's not valid."

"You cleaned the house once, Harry. To make a point. That hardly proves that you're not a slob."

"But it proves that I don't have to be."

"Harry, if you prove every point on that list wrong, it still doesn't change things with us."

"That's crazy, Hermione. If I prove that you're wrong about me and the way that you feel about me, how does that not change things?"

She looks up at the sky.

"It doesn't change that we wouldn't work together."

"Why not?"

"It doesn't" she repeats stubbornly.

"Why are you afraid to let me try?"

"I'm not."

"I think you are. If you're so sure that nothing will change, what's the harm in letting me prove you wrong?"

She gets to her feet.

"Why can't we just stay the way that we are Harry?"

"Everything changes," I say sagely.

She bites her lip and sighs deeply.

"What do you want from me?"

I take out the list from the back of my jeans and smooth it out.

"A better reason than this."

* * *


She thinks I can't cook so the next morning, I'm determined to strike that off the list as well. I get up far earlier than should be necessary and consult a pile of cookbooks, thinking that it shouldn't be that hard to make breakfast. No magic. Muggle-style, like when she was a little kid.

If you can read, you can cook. Right?

Wrong, as it turns out.

After a lot of muttering curses under my breath, a disaster in the once-spotless kitchen and enough wasted food to feed a small army, I turn around at the sound of Hermione's laughter coming from the doorway.

"Hey, out!" I tell her.

"I couldn't help it," she laughs. "The Smoke Ward went off!"

"It's not that bad," I grumble and survey the fruits of my labour. A stack of blackened toast, some runny eggs and limp bacon taunt me from the table.

"So much for the list," she calls over her shoulder as she heads back upstairs to take a shower.

"Give me half an hour!" I call after her and open the fridge to take out the rest of the eggs.

* * *


The eggs start to take on a recognizable form by the time I'm back downstairs. They're not as fluffy as they should be, but they're not runny or too dry either. He still hasn't conquered the bacon, which is fine, too greasy anyway for this early in the morning.

I grab a couple of forks and plates and he hands me two pieces of perfect toast. Golden brown, buttered slightly, the sort you see in cooking magazines. Beside him, I see a pile of burnt pieces of toast, so apparently he went through an entire loaf of it before he produced these two models. He's buttering one of the charred slices, which I find silly considering he'd spent all that time in the kitchen, so I hand him one of the ones he gave me.

"No, that one's for you."

"Why would you want to eat burnt toast?"

"I just want you to have the good ones. I only got two this morning, maybe tomorrow I'll have four."

"You're not doing this again, are you?"

"Yes." He says defiantly and bites into the blackened bread.

I sigh. "For how long?"

"As long as it takes for you to strike that nonsense off the list."

"Harry..." I start to speak, but then don't know how to articulate myself. When he sees I've got nothing to say, he goes on.

"What are you doing on Saturday?"

"I thought we were going to Melissa's barbecue."

"Damn. Okay."

I think I might have just been saved from the awkwardness of him asking me if I'd like to do something that day and then both of us pretending it's just your average weekend in our household.

I still need to take care of my hair and makeup and I excuse myself from the table. The instant I'm up, I hear him gathering up the dishes, one by one and depositing them in the sink. By the time I reach the top of the stairs, he's squirting liquid detergent on a dish rag and the water is running. I shake my head fondly at his habit of defeating dark wizards and armies bent on world domination, yet his inability to cast cleaning spells.

All my life I've tried to be an honest person, and I will admit this is flattering. It's nice. It's nice for somebody to be devoting surreal amounts of time to essentially trying to make you happy. It's nice that he's doing this for me and not poodle girl down the street. He took the easy way out with her, paid for a nice meal in a restaurant and let some kid wash their dishes for minimum wage. He didn't get up at the crack of dawn only to go through a carton of eggs and a loaf of toast.

My heart tells me maybe he's being serious. It tells me that only a crazy person would go to these lengths if they didn't mean it. But my head tells me he was on a date with another woman only a couple of days ago, and my head is asking me why he's doing this now.

I'm uncomfortable with it. I also don't want to ask him to stop.

* * *



The kitchen is clean when I make my way downstairs and he's organizing some papers on the coffee table. I figure they're notes and he's got a full day ahead.

I walk past him to gather my things for the day and he looks up, and really looks at me. At first, his gaze settles on my mouth and by now, I'm half afraid he'll get up. Afraid of Harry, the guy whom I've been with almost every day for almost a decade, the guy who's slept in my bed more than once and seen me cry and filled me in on the rumor mill. It's still the same guy, I try to tell myself, but I can't remember a time old Harry fixated on my lips.

"You look, uh, great." He manages after a minute.

"Thank you. I have an important meeting with the Prophet representatives."

He nods and gets up. I feel cornered. Speak up now or forever hold your peace.

"What?" It's lame, but it's the best I can come up with on short notice.

He chooses to invade my space, like he's done a hundred times a day every day, but now it's unnerving to have him tower over me.

"You're not my sister, Hermione."

I know that he'll try to prove that one to me later, but I know I can also strike it off the list right now. There's nothing brotherly about him this morning. He taps my arm slightly and tells me I'll be late.

There's a moment where I'm suffering from temporary insanity because I give very serious consideration to doing something I shouldn't. Then he unwittingly saves me by stepping back and allowing me a path to the front door. The rush of fresh air knocks some sense back into me.