Over the entire Christmas break, his black Bugatti parks outside her shitty split level every goddamn morning at 6:45 sharp. A nightmare.

Thank God mom keeps the fucking blinds drawn.

Or maybe. Perhaps, Hermione should let mister future Ivy League take one look at her squalid shitcave of a life.

Then maybe he'd stop copying keys to his dead dad's giant house and wrapping them in various Christmas packages addressed to her with embossed cards, "To my Hermione" or, "My dearest Hermione," or "Please, Hermione." She doesn't want to think about how he knows she's thrown each one away.

She pushes a dusty slat down and peers out at him, parked on the curb in the rain, his lithe frame lounging in the front seat like a prince draped over his throne. Reading something. He knows she'll be leaving in half hour for her shift at Taco Bell.

Letting the blinds slip from her fingers, she straightens up, stretching her back.

The glimpse of her silhouette reflected above her dresser sends a pang of shock through her.

Drapey clothes and white lies have grown less reliable in her attempts at denial.

Her manager knows. The apron isn't hiding anything anymore. She let Hermione work the mercifully chest-high drive thru, in case somebody from school comes in with the munchies or a hangover. Pretty soon, everyone else will know too.

In the mirror, a shadow-eyed girl in a lace bralette stares back hollowly.

She might feel sunken, but her skin is as luminous as winter rain on the blacktop, her round belly like a pale dewdrop welling up out of her small frame.

Curious, she trace her new curvature, watching herself.

Her fingertips skim her swollen womb, the dewy skin stretched tight around a whole universe. It's tender to the touch, sensitive.

Her pelvis feels heavy, like a ripe apple hanging low from a branch.

Like he's still deep inside her cunt, his body over her, his breaths rough like a lashed-down beast, his thick cock battering the door to her womb.

Let me in, let me in.

He was golden with sunlight on that summer evening.

Clever and coy, as psychopaths are, while he waited for her to finish his Bugatti, the last car wash of the evening on a solo shift. But that night, Tom Riddle was more than flirtatious.

He was radiant.

She worked slowly in her cut-off shorts and her bikini top, smiling under her lashes as he spoke.

Then, she was in his car at the drive in, their kisses soft and open-mouthed in the flickering light of the big screen. He was slow, like the humid night.

They didn't even fuck until morning, when a muted pink dawn fell over the pile of down comforters he spread at the end of the dock.

The water was still as a windowpane and they watched a bird fly across it, the tips of its wings marking small ripples. Crickets sang from the rushes and sedges hemming the shore.

"I need you," he whispered, as if he couldn't breathe.

As if his chest was split open and the beat of his heart pulsed out of him like water.

As if he wasn't a fractured, shattered young man.

But Hermoine Granger wanted to believe in golden things, and she rolled onto her back.

She unbuttoned his shirt and raked her fingers down the sun-kissed planks of him.

She took him deep between her legs and felt him pierce her heart.

He planted a need in her as he seeded her womb: he infected her with a hunger for him, an insatiable void for his desperate whispers and fevered kisses as he thrust his body into hers.

Even as she watches him slowly fill her belly, she wants more of him.

But you know what? Fuck him.

She slips her fingers into her panties and strokes the damp bead of her clit.

A smirk flits across her mouth.

Let him sit in his car in the fucking thunderstorm outside.

She's going to sprawl back on her bed and wriggle out of her panties, plunging her fingers into the warm depths of her pussy.

Her wet petals squelch under her touch. Glossy spend strings from her hand, gushing hot down her wrist.

In the mirror, a wild-haired, round and rutted little slut fucks herself as she pleases, thank you very much. Tom Riddle might have planted himself inside her but she sure as hell doesn't need him to get off.

She watches a flush creep up her neck, her full breasts ripple with the quick strokes coiling pressure in her pelvis. Her mouth draws open as her cunt grips and gulps.

A high moan fills her room and she comes unspiraled with a blinding wave of white light.

Panting, she lays back.

Her arm flops over her head and her hair fans out behind her on the comforter.

Damn.

Sweat glistens on her skin, electric pinpricks hovering across its surface.

She thinks about the last weekend of the last week, as they watched the season pull up its own stakes. The sun-soaked days faded away and so did that feeling.

Like the first sharp, cool day of fall, reality hit her.

Actually, it was the first day of their senior year.

He walked into school with his arm draped over Daphne Greengrass' shoulder.

And now her lonely body was ripening one small mistake. One slip of her better judgement.

She could have erased it. It wouldn't have been wrong.

But Hermione Granger couldn't let go of anyone, she held on, she held on.

She clings to the tender swell and she knows she's weaving her flesh with a monster.

But she can't let go.

The glowing red numbers beside her bed scold her, and she gets up, throwing on her uniform.

She pockets her keys and stuffs her arms into her father's old overcoat.

With one more glance at the predatory car parked out front, she creeps out the back door and runs across the yard with the lapels of the coat pulled over her head. Dodging raindrops.

Precariously, she tries throwing a leg over the chain link fence.

"Shit," she mutters, gripping the damp metal.

One toe slots into the links as high as she dares, and she sucks in a deep breath.

And vaults.

"Fuck!"

She lands on her back in a puddle, air wrenched from her lungs. Her breath plumes from her lips in quick bursts.

A car door opens.

"Jesus fucking… HERMIONE!"

The sound of quick splashes from across the street urge her up onto her feet.

She won't let him have this.

Not after everything.

Wobble-legged, she stands. Still gasping.

He's big, this close, bigger than she remembered.

Enveloping.

He grabs her shoulders.

"Hermione, good God, are you hurt?"

He's shaking.

His hands are everywhere.

Pushing back her hair, palming away the dirty water from her face, drawing her toward the warmth of his body.

"Is the...?" His words stumble, heart caught in his throat. "Is—?"

The heat of his touch finds her waist.

Her voice splits the back alley,

"Don't touch me!"

She jerks back.

"Don't you," she pants, "...fucking touch me!"

He puts his hands up in surrender and steps backward.

The rain spirals through his wavy hair like tears, framing the pain in his eyes.

"Let me…" he begins, like something raw in him is cracking. "Please, Hermione."

The world hisses the static of rainfall around them.

Water tracks down his cheeks and clings to the edge of his clenched jaw.

Oh, she could drink from the firm angle of that face; the sleek, maleness of it.

He is power laid low, for her.

But Hermione Granger tilts up her chin, her eyeblack streaking cold down her cheeks.

"I need to go," she says.

And she leaves.