There will come a time when you will need to tell someone about your first kiss. Need to because this is the person you intend to give your last kiss too. For her, though, it is too hard.
Hermione's first kiss was with Krum and it was quick and messy- he most certainly knew what he was doing and she most certainly didn't. She thinks of it as what happens when you kiss because you must. After all, at the end of the night there is a kiss and you go home floating on clouds of gold.
But for her and Viktor, the kiss was without pleasure. Or so she thought for weeks- he must have found it strange and wet, too. It had been cold and uncomfortable with hands in awkward places and lips that were more trying to map than to caress.
She'd thought, for a long time that this was what all first kisses were. Then she had kissed Ron.
Hard and solid against a wall in the train. Her body swaying so she didn't fall down, his hands everywhere, all the time. The feel of his breath against her neck as he got her bra off in one smooth move. They should have gotten caught, but they hadn't. Not for hours it had seemed, they'd been together forever by the time they'd been together for two weeks. Everything with him felt so right. So perfect.
They'd been married when they were eighteen because, well, what else was left to do? They were no children by then. She'd vowed to love, honor and obey, sometimes she thought, too soon. But it had been good, a little house near the Burrow, twin nieces from Harry to spoil by the time she turned twenty-one. Her husband who loved her more than life itself.
Did she love him?
No.
Some days, she woke with it ringing in her head like a bell. She did not love him. Did not, did not, did not. There was no great moment when they stopped loving one another, no affair, and no monumental disagreement. It just came silently, creeping up on them. They went about their business as usual, they were faithful and loving, even in private. But if you had known them in those first precious years and saw them now only ten years later, you knew that they were not the same. It was a difference that one could nearly touch.
She still loved his family though, loved that warmth of theirs. The fact of their chaos that she had never really understood or wanted to understand, only to be absorbed into. She still loved Harry in that same, constant way they had. He was all but her brother, and he always had been. But the base of that life, her love for Ron, had fallen out.
Harry knew because she needed to tell someone, and he was her best friend. She didn't think he understood though, he and Ginny's relationship had been forged in something different – candy -floss and kisses and it's core and pure steel around that. She and Ron were different stuff all together, spice and vinegar, core of gold. Good intentions that could hardly be said to count at this point. Besides, gold may be pretty and rare but it's bent, broken and melted so easily, she has never considered how easily it may be mended. Re-forged of different stuff altogether, too.
But, she's never wanted something mended more than something new. And there's always been something new. The latest advancement, a new toy, a new book, spell, husband, lover, whatever it is it's better and she will have it. Ron version two, she thinks, new and improved, fewer freckles, more smirks, blond, this time. If you couldn't tell yet, she's having an affair.
She's known him about as long as she's known Ron, but in entirely different ways- and he has the scars to show them. Scar on his cheek from when her ring grazed it when they were thirteen, scar on his chest from when her best friend tried to kill him, scar on his arm from when he tried to cut off a tattoo, scars on his back from her nails, too. She traces their story on his body like she used to find constellations in Ron's freckles.
"And this one?" she'll ask, placing a finger on a white mark anywhere, but for clarity's sake, let's say that round one just below his navel.
"Knife," he would say, if it were that scar, "nothing much, really. Hurt like a bitch though. I must have been seventeen, eighteen and, obviously, drunk. More of a fencing accident than anything else, actually."
At this point, she might giggle and say, "but you don't fence." Then he'd sigh, and roll her over.
They don't see each other much clothed.
His name, by the way, if you haven't figured it out yet, is Draco Malfoy. He's twenty-eight, pale, tall and deliciously evasive. They've been sleeping together for five years now, half her marriage. If she were ever to have a child, it would probably be his. He's married too, but she's been dead nearly ten years now. Her name was Veronica and he didn't really like her so much as he liked Pansy, but as he told her when she asked him to explain the jagged red scar on his knee, things with Pansy just didn't work out. Besides, he doesn't like Pansy half so much as he likes Hermione. And even if Pansy and Veronica had been around to tell all their horror stories in a non-stop row, which would take a few days, at the least, Hermione probably wouldn't be dissuaded from whatever this is.
She doesn't love him, either, though.
She just loves that he makes her feel as if, somewhere, in the past almost-thirty years, she has accomplished something, anything at all. He, in himself, isn't much of an accomplishment. He's cynical, self-centered and he can be suicidal when it occurs convenient to him. But, on the bright side, he, unlike nearly everyone else she knows, has never killed anyone. Not for all his scars, all his dead wives and parents, not for all that makes him a little bit of a risk has he ever killed anyone. Punched, incapacitated, wounded, tortured, certainly. But in the war he went far, far away like some big terrible coward and did not kill anyone.
Somehow, she feels, this is because of her. Don't ask her to explain it, she probably can't. No one's ever written down why a person is bonded to their lover. How, however, covers rather a number of volumes, if you're inclined to find it out.
First kisses, we were talking about first kisses. You'd probably forgotten. Well, her first kiss with Draco was her third first kiss. They were twenty-three, drunk out of their brains, tired and lonely- and she wasn't pregnant again. Which, all things considered, wasn't such a bad thing. It has never occurred to her that if she and Ron had had a child, it might have stopped what happened to their marriage from happening. It has occurred to Draco, though, millions upon millions of times, he can see her, sweet red-haired babe in arms, a quick flash of all the should-have-could-have-would-have been futures that were laid out before them that night.
He has never dreamed of their child quite the way she has. He has dreamed of her children, which he is almost certain will come. No matter how many heavens they have in expensive hotels in beautiful cities, he is an interlude to her real life. He may paint her with chocolate in places no one else has ever been, he may have put his lips in all the places he can name but he is not the One.
If anyone's the One, it's Ron. The wrong One, the first One. Well, really, the second one. She forgets Fred, well, not really forgets, you don't forget your first. Ron only knows there was someone- has no clue it was his own brother (we don't count him as a first kiss, because they didn't kiss, she doesn't think) in the Hospital wing when they were in Fifth year. And it was just because she could, because they both wanted too. Because he was scared to grow up and she was just as scared that she wouldn't. He had snuck in one night- to see Ron, he'd said. She still thinks that might have been a lie. But that's beside the point.