South Beach Sizzle

Summary: AU. Road trip! Hermione Granger has her last summer before college all mapped out. She's checking out of NYC and checking into the sizzling hot "SoBe" scene with her best friend, Ron.

When their day jobs get to be a drag, they spice things up by entering a local band contest. And spicy it is. Turns out that the hottie Hermione keeps running into is also her bands toughest competition! Harry might seem like the perfect guy, but as things heat up Hermione starts to wonder if she can trusty her biggest rival with her heart?

This story is H/Hr and it is my first ever fan fiction.

Disclaimer: I don't own the plot or the characters they belong to J.K. Rowling (who I'm currently angry with because of HBP) and Suzanne Weyn and Diana Gonzalez. If I were JK Rowling HBP would have turned out differently. Now to start the story.

"Ew! This is disgusting!" Hermione Granger shouted over the deafening sound of the wind. She pulled off her black, rectangular framed glasses and wiped away the squashed bugs with the end of her white shirt. She'd been pelted with little insect pests ever since they'd driven out on to the open expanse of the 17.6-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. "Put the top up! Please!" she requested.

The driver of the classic, silver BMW convertible- a slim, handsome guy with lively blue eyes and short, bright red that was tipped in blue- smiled, but shook his head. "I don't know how."

"Then raise the windows, at least," she suggested. "You have to do it. My window button doesn't work. I think that you have the child lock on or something."

"Okay." He pounded on the electronic buttons at his side.

Bzzt. The window to her right went up.

And then down again.

Bzzt. The window on her left went up…

…then down again…then up.

"Ron what are you doing?" she asked.

"I can't dive and adjust the windows at the same time," he explained, speaking loudly over the sea breezes blasting them from the Atlantic Ocean. "I can't multitask. I'm an evolutionary throw back to a simpler time."

Hermione laughed and shook her head. "Maybe you're just a lunatic," she teased.

Ron lurched into the next lane, causing Hermione to grab the side of her seat. She decided to say no more and let him pay attention to driving. Since they'd left New York City at dawn that morning, Hermione had come to startling- and somewhat horrible- realization.

Ron was a horrendous driver.

Totally berserk! He was the Ozzie Osborne of automobiles.

She'd thought- just assumed- that she knew everything about Ron. But she hadn't known this.

Watching him grin with pleasure as he clutched the steering wheel made her smile. This was so typical of him. Naturally he would take a job driving a sporty classic car to Florida even though he clearly had absolutely no idea what eh was doing.

He'd found the help-wanted ad in The Village Voice. A man in New York had sold a BMW convertible on eBay to a woman in Florida. He needed a driver to deliver the car to her. He'd pay for gas and for Ron's meals and would also pay him three hundred dollars for his so called driving.

Ron always got them mixed up in things like this. She remembered, for example, the time that he'd volunteered them to run the frog-hop races at their community center's Kid's Day and they'd spent hours running after fugitive frogs.

But that was okay with her, really.

Ron's offbeat, but always upbeat, optimism was one of the best things about him. He believed- no matter how disastrous things appeared at the moment- that things would always work out fine in the end. And, when they were together Hermione felt the same way.

So what if he was such a complete freak of a menace on the road? She figured that you had to take the good with the bad when it came to people.

The good with the bad…

Hermione slipped a pen and a small silver notebook from the large canvas bag she'd stowed under the front seat. The good with the bad, she wrote. She liked the way the phrase it sounded and wanted to remember it for her next poem. It might even make a good title.

Looking up, she saw a red sports car dart dangerously close in front of them. Way too close! "Look out!" she cried.

Ron swerved into the other lane. A terrible, crunching sound came out of the engine.

"What was that?" Hermione shouted, alarmed.

"Not to worry," Ron assured her. "I just threw it into the wrong gear." He shrugged and smiled sheepishly at her.

"Oh, is that all?" Hermione said leaning back into her seat. "Ron have you ever driven this kind of car before?"

"Do you mean a standard clutch?"

"Yeah."

"Once."

"Once?" she said warily.

"But it was for a whole hour," he added, as if it were equivalent to a PhD in driving a manual-shift car. "I may be a little inexperienced, but at least I know how to drive."

"Really?" she said, but he didn't seem to notice the sarcasm. Actually, she knew what he was getting at. Mass transportation had been so easily available in the city that there was no real reason to learn to drive. That's why she had never gotten her driver license.

Reaching over her head, Hermione gathered as much of her blowing hair as she could grab. With quick twists of her wrists, she bundle that thick unruly strands into the black elastic that she'd worn around her wrist. Stray pieces instantly escaped and danced around her forehead.

Ron turned on the radio, and buzzing static blasted at them. They'd lost the signal of the rock station that they'd been listening to in New York. Ron fiddled with buttons until he found a station that came in clear, nearly crashing the car in the process.

Hermione once again clutched the side of her seat and stared, wide-eyed, at Ron. Just then the station he had tuned in crackled to like and blasted "The Remedy," by Jason Mraz.

Ron cranked the song to full volume.

Hermione's mood lifted with the music. It was the start of summer. They'd somehow managed to graduate- high school was behind them, finally! And they were together on this road trip to Florida. What could be better?

She put her glasses back on and knelt up on the seat, her arms stretched wide, and started singing along. Ron sang, too, belting out the lyrics as he drove. "I wont worry my life away!"

That night Hermione and Ron sat on the roof of the car and finished ice-cream cones. They'd stopped at a rest area off interstate 95, at the edge of a city called Florence, in South Carolina.

Ron suddenly grabbed her arm. "Okay, coming out of the door right now," he said, dropping his voice. "Yours or mine?"

Trying not be obvious, Hermione skirted her eyes over toward the front door of the restaurant. A real hottie had just come out. Broad shoulders and cut abs were easy to see beneath his tight T-shirt. Form-fitting jeans promised a great walking-away view. "Mine," Hermione said.

"Dream on," Ron disagreed. "Look at those abs. That guy spends a lot of time at the gym.

"Check the hair, though," Hermione countered. "No gay man would wear a mullet anymore."

Ron shook his head. "I don't know…. I've seen some mullet-headed gay guys."

"Not in this life time," Hermione argued.

A Dodge Ram pickup drove into the parking lot. Its driver was a cowboy type in a Stetson hat. He stopped, and the object of their attention climbed in. Ron pounded Hermione's shoulder excitedly. "Busted! I so win!"

"You do not!" Hermione disagreed. "That could have been his brother or his friend."

"Or his boyfriend," Ron added.

"Maybe," she allowed her interest in the subject began to fade "Who wants a guy who wears a mullet, anyway?"

"Well this is the South," he allowed.

The South might as well have been a foreign country to her. New York, New York, was the only place she'd ever lived. "It's so far away from Manhattan, isn't it?" she said, already felling a little homesick. "Where would we be right now if we were home?"

"Probably drinking too many caffe lattes at Rick's New Rican," he suggested. Rick's New Rican Coffeehouse was their favorite hangout.

Open-mike nights, Rick let Hermione perform the poetry she wrote, even though she was younger than the other poets. "Your stuff is good," he'd told her. "When your good age is just a number."

On her last night in the city, Rick had given her a pep talk. "Are you nervous a bout going to school in Miami?" he had asked her.

"A little," Hermione had admitted to him. "At first the University of Miami seemed too far away from home. But then I got the creative writing scholarship and it became so affordable, I couldn't really turn it down."

"They gave you a stash of cash, huh?"

"I don't know if I could go to college if they hadn't," she replied.

"Well, good luck, kiddo," Rick had said to her. "You might meet kids at this university who have fancier cars or nicer clothes, but remember: You have talent. You're a damn good poet. You have something in here"- he thumped his chest lightly- "that no one can ever take away from you. You have passion for life, and it show in you writing."

"Thanks, " she'd told him, wrapping him in a quick hug. In a few words, Rick had helped her deal with an anxiety that she hadn't even admitted herself until that moment: How would she fit in at the University of Miami?

There on the Lower East Side of Manhattan she was in a crowd of other kids who were mostly like herself. They came from different ethnicities, but very few of them had a lot of money. If they did, they'd go to a private school. So, although she lived in a small apartment with her mother, living off of the unreliable and usually insufficient money her mother made as an aspiring actress, Hermione didn't think about her lack of money on most days. All the families around her struggled and that's just how things were.

Now, though, she was going into a whole different world, where she wouldn't be with other people who were so much like herself. Would they look down on her because she might not have all the things they did? She tried not to care. After all, it was a trivial superficial thing. But sometimes she felt herself freeze up inside, overcome with anxiety.

Ron's voice broke through Hermione's thoughts, bringing her back. "Did your mom freak this morning when you left?"

Hermione shook her head and scooped a drip of chocolate off the end of her cone with her tongue. "No, I think she was relived that I'm not going to Canada with her." Hermione's mom had just landed a big commercial acting job that was being shot in Canada. It was an important job for her since she hadn't worked in two months. "She knows I'd be bored up there, and she'll be busy shooting the commercial."

"She's making that foot spray commercial right?" Ron said.

"Funk-Off foot spray," Hermione confirmed.

Ron snorted with laughter. "I love the name of that stuff."

Hermione laughed too. "I know. She actually has to say, 'Spray foot fungus away with Funk-Off!'" That reminded Hermione that she had brought a can of the stuff along to show Ron. Wiping her chocolate covered hands on the back of her jeans, she reached in to her brown bag and pulled out the can. "Ta-da!"

"That is so sick!" Ron cried. "I have to have this! Every time someone cuts me off on the road, I'm going to shoot a blast of Funk-Off at them!"

Hermione tilted her head back up at the dark night sky and laughed. What a sight that would be.

Ron hopped back in to the car. "Come on. We have to go find a hotel. I can't drive anymore."

Hermione sent up a silent cheer.

They drove a short way and came to a shabby but affordable-looking place called Fred's Hideaway. The heavyset man at the front desk asked them if they wanted one room or two. "One I guess," Ron said looking apprehensively at Hermione to check if that was okay.

"Sure. One room," she agreed with a shrug. Neither had a lot of money. The less they needed to spend, the better.

The man leered at Hermione with a knowing grin. She glared back at him. As he handed Ron the room key, he winked. "Have fun," he said.

Ron reached down to his over night suitcase and pulled out the can of Funk-Off. He sprayed it around the room.

"Hey! What that?" the man shouted.

"It's Funk-Off!" Ron replied with a goofy, bright smile. "I thought that you could use some."

"Get out of here with that stuff!" he yelled turning three shades of red.

They hurried, snickering quietly, out of the office. "I can't believe that you did that!" Hermione managed to say when they were outside and able to burst in to laughter.

"I had to do something," Ron replied. "I hope the rest of this place isn't as dirty as his mind."

Their room was small and smelt of mildew, but it had two double beds. Hermione threw her self on to the nearest one. "Wow, I'm beat. What time do you want to get up tomorrow?"

Ron had already gone into the bathroom. He'd left the door open, and she could hear little blasts of an aerosol can being squirted. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"If there was ever a place that needed Funk-Off, this is it," he said as he squirted. "I think we've arrived at fungus headquarters."

She reached over to the small digital clock on the nightstand between the two beds. Arching a brow as she flicked off a questionable looking bug, she called out to Ron what time do you want to get up tomorrow?"

"Five?" he suggested.

She groaned.

He stepped out of the bathroom, a toothbrush in his mouth. "I was hoping to get to Miami tomorrow," he explained through a mouthful of toothpaste.

"So soon?" she asked. She didn't want to spend an eternity driving with Ron, the Menace of the Highway- that was for sure. But she hadn't expected to get to Miami the next day. She wasn't really ready for that yet.

A small nervous knot clenched in Hermione's stomach. Even though the University of Miami wouldn't start until the end of summer, she'd convinced her mother to let her stay with her father, who lived in nearby Coconut Grove. That way she could learn her way around the Miami area before she started classes. And, with Ron there, it was more fun than being alone in Alberta, Canada.

Her dad had been pretty much out of her life since her parents divorced when she was five. She'd e-mailed him and asked if she could stay with him. He didn't answer for two days but when he did it was to the point: "Sure the more the merrier! Come on down!"

Maybe this would be a good chance to get to know her father. On the other hand, it might be a complete disaster. She really didn't know what life with him would be like, and it made her nervous.

She'd find out… tomorrow.

Well that was chapter 1 tell me what you thought. Flamers will be laughed at unless it is constructive criticism.