Sixth Secret

She tells him that she loves him by accident.

She has been brooding it over in the recesses of her heart. She means it, of course, but she did not mean to tell him. At least just yet, she reminds herself. For now, it was meant to be something to reassure herself with.

It slips out one day when he brings her hot cocoa with five marshmallows, just the way he knows she likes it, so hot it burns her tongue, as he bends down to place a kiss on her cheek, right above the scratches she received when she tripped over a tree root and went sprawling when last on assignment. She can't stop the words; they feel right. He tenses, and his eyes become impossibly dilated, as they only do when he is inside her in the heartbeats before he starts moving. He doesn't say anything, just walks backwards out of the room, his eyes never leaving her face.

But when she slips into his room that night, after losing an internal battle in which the rational part of her mind implored her to go home and the irrational part insisted that she was only staying to finish the first three hundred pages of Hogwarts: A History, which Hermione left on the table for Ron to "finally read, you great prat," he is still awake. He pushes the sheets aside for her to slide under them just as he does every night.

Their lovemaking is harsher that night, fierce and wild and tinged with a hint of desperation that gnaws at her heart, even as she knows that it's now his place to address the question. But as he comes, he merely whispers her name.

He will not tell her he loves her for another three months.