AN: Thank you for the reviews and love! I read them all and appreciate you so much.
London, England
1939
Hermione keeps her hair tied back now. It sort of helps the bigness, but it doesn't do much for the frizz. She celebrates her twelfth birthday alone. Tom sends her letters all year, but not as many as he did before.
And then it's summer at last.
Tom tells her stories about Hogwarts, as he always does. He makes her go bright red when he tells her about dirty things he's done with the girls there. He calls the other boys virgins and snickers when Mrs. Cole reprimands them for waking up stiff and soiling their sheets. He's much taller. Somehow, he's even handsomer. He watches her like a hawk.
At the museum, Hermione moves away from an entrancing painting filled with cubes and bright, distinct colors. She opens her latest book. It's Henry V and filled with tea stains and scribbles where the last person who read it didn't appreciate the integrity of a well-kept book. She smooths the crease of a bent page with her pinky finger, frowning.
"Don't move," Tom says suddenly, startling her. Her head snaps up, doing precisely the opposite of what he's asked. Tom is staring at her in a strange way that she can't quite put her finger on, as if she is both familiar and foreign to him. He chews his eraser thoughtfully. The bridge of his delicate nose wrinkles around the bone and he suddenly looks the same boy she found in the library of Wool's Orphanage for a second... except taller. He says, "Stay right there for a moment."
"Why?" Hermione asks, propping her hand on one hip. Her wrist is growing tired from holding the book.
"Just stay still," he presses. When she scowls, he adds with a soft smile that makes her breath stutter: "Please, Hermione."
Hermione knows that look in his eyes. It is at once capturing and captured by its' subject, like a siren of legend who seduces sailors with sweet, deadly song and is seduced by the call of their blood in return. Tom's fingers twitch toward his pencil case eagerly. At the moment, she is the blood and he is the siren, or perhaps it is the other way around. She can never be sure. She sighs and casts a glance around them at the section they stand in. It's empty, save for a woman carting a baby stroller and her husband, and the Picasso painting beside them. "...Alright," she says at last. "But not for too long, my legs are tired from walking all day." Tom grins in triumph.
While Tom sits on a bench and draws her in a hectic throe of inspiration, Hermione stares at a distant Greek sculpture until the face blurs into a smear of white. The limbs look so graceful. How could they be made of marble when they looked so soft and supple? She closes her eyes, trying not to give into the prickling sensation of her foot falling asleep. She doesn't move a muscle until Tom clears his throat.
"Finished?"
He nods.
"Can I look?" Hermione asks, moving to stand beside him. Her foot screams with pain in protest. She grunts, limping into the seat beside him. Tom is shaking his head and covering the drawing with his hands.
"No." He flips the sketchbook closed and rakes his fingernails over the cover, chipping at the cardboard and his initials, T.M.R., stenciled into it. "Not yet," he mutters. "Maybe later.'"
Hermione blinks in surprise. "Didn't you finish it?"
"Not exactly." He shifts restlessly. "I couldn't get your eyes right."
"Really?" Tom has never failed to draw anything before. Ever.
"Let's go," he says abruptly, standing up. He didn't answer her question. "I think I'm done with observation drawing for the day. And I'm bored of this place anyway."
"Already?"
Tom grins and takes her hand in his, tugging until she stumbles to her feet. He slips his arm around her lanky waist and sneaks his fingers into the pocket of her grey smock, as if he's going to pilfer her pennies. Not that Hermione has any pennies. "Don't look so surprised," he says, steering them toward the exit. "One would think you hardly know me at all."
She scoffs. "I know you, Tom. Better than you know you."
He looks at her, no longer smiling. "Are you certain of that?" he says quietly.
Before she can answer him they are on the crowded streets of East London. The heavy air is damp with the promise of rain and the smell of cooking fish. Hermione's stomach growls so loudly that Tom laughs and asks if she would like him to jump in River Thames to fetch her the fisherman's catch. She thumps him on the head, forgetting about his question and the queer look in his dark eyes a moment before.
At the cove, the sun is so hot it bakes the sand into a blistering sheet of heat underfoot. Hermione cools her feet in the shallow end of the pool, drying off from her swim in the sun. She lines seashells in a row on her towel while Tom shows off his breaststrokes for the girls running by. He doesn't like them - they're too small-minded and ugly for a Hogwarts boy, according to Tom - but he does like their attention. The girls take off giggling and screeching when he catches them looking. Hermione rolls her eyes, grumbling under her breath when a 13-year old redhead trips over a rock trying to get a peek at Tom Riddle shirtless.
But Tom tires of this game soon. He walks patiently toward Hermione, throwing himself on the burning sand as if it is a throw blanket. The water in his hair splatters her book. "Hey, watch it!" she snaps.
"You're the only girl I know who comes to the beach to read," he says, smirking. He looks as skinny as a rod, but his skin is smooth and pale like milk under the sun. Tom Riddle does not have a single pimple or blemish like the other children do. Hermione starts to touch the sensitive pimple on her chin and stops, remembering what Mrs. Cole told her about a woman's hygiene.
Hermione remembers kind, loving fingers weaving through her hair when she was little. She doesn't know why the memory comes to her just then. Mum's face is only a blurred smudge now, like a chalk drawing on the sidewalk washed away by rain. The details have gone soft and muddled in her head, confusing her.
She looks down at Tom's wet black hair and his closed eyes. He snores lightly. His eyelashes curl and brush the tops of his carved cheekbones. He could be made of porcelain.
She touches his hair slowly, experimentally, and he doesn't move. Feeling bold, Hermione pulls her fingers through the soaked strands. They leave streaks behind, like stiff strips of black acrylic paint. Tom's eyes flutter open and watch her. He reminds her of a cat, still and strange... and impossible to read. Tom is the one thing in the world that Hermione cannot make sense of, even after all these years. She could have the Rosetta Stone and still never be able to translate his expressions into English. Sometimes, she wonders if Tom came from a different world. But her theory was rejected when Mrs. Cole told Hermione that she saw Tom Riddle's mother give birth to him in the orphanage.
"Is this ok?" Hermione asks. She is whispering without knowing why.
Tom's eyes are intent on her fingers where they've paused in the air an inch over his nose. He pulls them back down to his head, applying pressure to her knuckles until they curl around him again. "Yes. It feels... nice." He closes his eyes, his breaths slowing into sleep again when she continues to comb his hair with her fingers. The sun warms their skin and turns hers gilded until she is dark as bronze. Tom stays white as snow... as usual.
Hermione sees one of the older girls run by in the distance and stops her exercise, watching and realizing with shock that the older girl isn't much older than her at all. It's Amy Benson. Amy Benson with…with breasts.
What the devil?
She blinks and looks down at her flat chest, wondering when Amy developed this new asset and why she hasn't yet. She's still as flat as an ironing board for God's sake. Her hand twitches into a fist without permission and Tom stirs, opening his eyes to frown at her. "Hey. What did you stop for?" he asks.
"I... was distracted. Sorry." She shakes herself and puts her fingers in his hair again. Soothing him the way her mother used to soothe her. His muscles relax, but Tom watches her warily now, his black eyes narrowed in suspicion. "I just got distracted," she repeats.
"Hmmm." Tom's eyes look catlike, the way they slip and slide under his flickering eyelids. He is fighting the pull of her caresses, but he sighs in the end. "That feels like heaven," he slurs. Hermione looks at his lips, pink and arched slightly. He looks like the marble sculpture from the museum. Stay still, she wants to say. Don't move for a moment. Her lips burn from the heat of the sun... and something more.
She shakes herself, pulling her hand away. "My hand is tired," she says. Tom looks at her and shrugs, leaping to his feet to dive in the pool again. Hermione reads the copy of Peter Pan that she brought with them. Her eyes flick up every other page to watch Tom's chest drip with water. He catches her staring and raises his dark eyebrows expectantly. "What?" he demands. She turns red. "Something in my eye," she says loudly. She rubs at her face. "Got it." Tom looks at her strangely, but he says nothing.
When they have to go back, it is nighttime. Hermione stands up on the rickety bus to see the billions of twinkling stars outside their window, peering out of the glass and squinting up at the blue-black sky. "Be careful," Tom says irritably. But Hermione isn't careful. She stays there and Tom rests one hand casually on her waist, steadying her even though she says she's just fine. He's worried that they'll ride over a bump and she might fall on top of him. His hand is the only thing keeping her from falling. It is also making her fall.
London, England
1947 – present
Cormac McLaggen asks Hermione out to dinner.
She tells him no.
Hermione hates herself for doing it. She hates him more. He's ruined her life.
She sits down in her little cupboard of a room in the Dursleys' flat, on the twin-size bed. Her feet are exhausted from running around in the high-heels that Madame Pomfrey makes all the employees wear. The high-heels that get her extra smiles and wolf whistles when she crosses the street.
She presses the heels of her palms into her tired eyes, wondering what it would be like to date Cormac. She tries to imagine it, to imagine him in a nice blue suit and in a restaurant, smiling at her as she sits down in the booth across from him. The candles are romantic. He's gotten her flowers. He wants to hold her hand, but the night's only just begun so he doesn't try to just yet…
Bam.
Her fantasy is rudely interrupted.
Because instead of Cormac McLaggen, she sees him. She sees Tom holding her hand for all to see, twirling his fingers through hers, kissing the tips and sucking them into his warm-wet mouth and blowing on them so she shivers. He watches her reactions with dark eyes that laugh at her. That laugh at her weakness for him. That take delight in their toying. That pull her in like fish hooks reeling in a victim for the kill…
I'm not anyone's toy. Hermione yanks herself out of the daydream, viciously, although her body would like very much to do otherwise. She's not going there. Not ever again.
It's far too dangerous.
And it will get her nowhere.
She makes a grab for her painful shoes, swipes up her library card, and leaves before the haunting memories can catch up with her. Before her heart can dare to miss what it lost so long ago.
London, England
1939
"Tom, let go! I don't want to go in-"
"Stop being difficult," Tom says coldly. He gives her a rough shove on the back and Hermione buckles, falling into the boiler room that seems much smaller now and banging her shoulder on the cement wall. She barely fits. It's screaming hot. "I'll come back for you in a few hours."
"Tom, don't," she gasps. "I'll just hide in my room or something-"
"No."
"Please, Tom," she says desperately. "It's so hot. Don't make me stay here."
Tom doesn't bat an eye at the crack in her voice. "Stop that. You're staying here and that's the end of it." He adds, "Don't try to call for help either. You'll get us both in trouble-"
"Please. I hate the dark." She is choking on the heat in the air. "Don't leave…"
Hermione lets loose a sob when the door slams shut.
It's suffocating inside. Muggy. Wet. She sweats through her smock and stays standing, crammed against the locked door and praying silently as her legs begin to cramp. She can barely breathe. After the first thirty minutes, she tries to break loose. She rams her body up against the metal door, again and again, harder and harder, until she feels dizzy and can't draw one single breath. She pounds her fists against it and screams and screams – but no one is on this floor during orientation. No one can hear her through the cement walls.
Finally, the door opens. Hermione falls onto the floor outside. She busts her lip on the tiles.
"Hermione," Tom says, surprised. Like he didn't know she was in there at all. "Are you al-?"
"Get away from me!" Hermione slaps away his hands when he reaches for her. She pushes the sweaty hair out of her face, panting. "I hate you, Tom Riddle."
Tom looks at her. His dark eyes are wide and blinking rapidly, as if trying to clear away dust. "Hermione?"
She runs. The corridors blur through her tears and her feet leap over the black-and-white tiled floors, knocking over some boy's bucket of soapy water. "Hey!" he shouts after her, shaking his wet fist. "Get back here, you lout!" When she finally reaches her room, Hermione throws the door closed so hard that the walls tremble. She curls up on the cot, shaking all over, and she screeches into her pillow. Mrs. Cole will come any minute to beat her with a wooden spoon for misbehaving.
She locked the door behind her and someone knocks on it politely.
"Go away," she shouts through the pillow, but whoever it is doesn't listen. She scowls. He never listens.
The sound of a hairpin tinkering in the lock is followed by the door opening and closing. Slowly, footsteps make their way to her side. Hermione doesn't move her face from the pillow. She hopes it is Mrs. Cole who has come to beat her and not the alternative option. Next to her head, the bed dips slightly as someone sits. She smells sweat and soap. When Tom Riddle tries to touch her shoulder, she recoils as if shocked by an electric current. She feels him stiffen beside her. Quickly pulling his hand away, Tom doesn't say a word as she feeds angry tears to her pillow.
"What are you doing here?" she says finally, in a flat voice. Tom looks at her for a while. He is expressionless. "Well?" she barks.
"Do you really hate me?" he asks. His voice is quiet. Can he really be so calm after what he did to her?
"Yes." She frowns. "...No. I dunno." She wipes her eyes, raw and stinging, on her sleeve. Tom looks at her as if she someone new. Someone to be scared of. "I don't like it when you do things like that to me."
"Things like what?"
"Like locking me up," she mutters. "Like not letting me have any friends."
"But you don't need any other-"
"No, Tom." She meets his eyes, black as pits and swimming with an emotion she has no name for. "I do. You aren't a good friend. You hurt me."
"No."
"Tom, you can't-"
"No," he says and the quiet is gone. His voice scrapes in her ears like a knife. "I said no, Hermione. You can't have anyone else. I won't let you." He puts his face in hers and it is horrible and twisted with rage. She can barely see the beauty in Tom Riddle at that moment. It is drowning in the nightmare of his damning eyes. "If you leave me, I'll hurt your friends. I don't care who they are or what you say. I'll hurt them. I swear I will."
Hermione stares at him, saying nothing.
"Don't cry. I don't like it when you cry."
"Why?" she whispers.
"Because it makes me feel... like I did something wrong."
"Not that," Hermione says angrily, drying her face in vain on her sleeve. Her sleeve is soaked through already and doesn't help any. She throws her arm back down with a huff. "Why would you hurt my friends? What's... what's wrong with you?"
Tom stills. He is watching her face intently. She has no idea what he is looking for, not until he pulls his thumb over her cheek slowly to capture the tear on his thumb. He stares at it as if he's never seen it before. Tom Riddle never cried as a baby. Mrs. Cole said that. Hermione had never thought how strange that was until now. She shudders when he licks his thumb curiously. "Nothing is wrong with me," he says, but he's wrong. Something is very wrong with Tom Riddle.
Something is wrong with Hermione Granger for being his friend.
"You.. you told me that I don't know you, Tom. You're right." She takes a deep breath and dares to look him in the eyes. They are still beautiful under his dark lashes, but they put a chill in her, like a sharp draft from an open window."I don't understand you," she says.
Tom stares at her and he seems to decide something within himself. Finally, he says, "I don't like many people. Anyone really. Even you, sometimes. But I consider you... mine."
Mine.
Hermione's mouth opens in surprise. "What?"
"I said that I consider you mine," he repeats. "That's why I, er, hide you." Tom looks lost for words for a second, as if he is the one who has just been told that his friend considers him a toy or pet. He picks up the limp blanket and uses it to dab at her sticky, blank face, until she is dry again. The gesture feels sweet... and wrong. "I don't want you to hate me." Tom looks at her out of the corner of his eye, bunching the soggy blanket into his fists. He stands up when she doesn't answer. "But if you do... I understand." He walks toward the door, back stiff.
"I don't." The words are out of Hermione's mouth before she can stop them. Tom pauses, but he doesn't turn around. Not yet. "Tom, I... I think I fancy you." Oh God. Why did she say that? Her face is burning like the sand at the cove. She tries to recover. "I-I mean I th-think that-" She doesn't finish. Tom cuts off the rest of her words by pulling her into his arms so hard that her bones squeak. His lips are on her forehead, curved in a perfect smile. They are even softer than she imagined.
London, England
1940
That summer, Tom returns with his hands.
Hermione is reading Oliver Twist in the makeshift library when she feels them. Cool fingers move aside her incorrigible hair. They dance on her neck, playing up and down it like she's a slide. She shivers and doesn't have to look to know who is here. The tempo of breathing behind her ear is ingrained in her memory. The scent of cigarettes and paint mixed with sweat is on the air. These little qualities are third-degree burns seared into her senses. They scar.
She grins at the air.
He's back.
"Did you miss me, Granger?" Tom Riddle whispers into her ear. With a shriek, Hermione jumps out of the chair and throws her arms around his neck, laughing in glee. He smiles into her hair.
"Yes. Horribly, you twat." She is so nervous. Can he tell? He must be able to tell by the way her face has turned into a tomato. She feels her pulse hammering against her jugular, as if she just ran to the Big Ben and back.
"Good," he says, smirking. "I missed you too, you know."
Hermione bites her lip and looks away from him, toying with the cover of her book. She found that hard to believe.
"Scoot over, will you?" Tom says briskly, shoving her toward the chair.
Hermione bookmarks her page before she sits down. Tom is very tall. She would've thought that he would stop growing already, but every summer that Tom Riddle returns to Wool's Orphanage he only becomes... farther away from Hermione. His eyes are still dark and lovely as a summer night, but they dance with a newborn wickedness that Hermione has only seen in glimpses before now. Or perhaps she is reading into him too much. Tom was not a book, he was a boy. And if he was a book, he would be a very long, complicated one. Like a poem by Homer or a sonnet by Shakespeare. While she is thinking, Tom suddenly startles her by yanking her into his lap. She stiffens as he twines his arms around her stomach and leans back against the chair, getting comfortable. She is painfully aware of how taut her back is, like a thread waiting to snap, and Tom seems to catch on, too.
"What's with you?" he asks, pinching her side lightly. It doesn't hurt, but she flinches. His voice softens. "Hermione."
"It's nothing," she says. Too quickly. The silence is stony. Tom waits until she twists around to face him.
"I did miss you," he says, reading her mind. It must be written all over her face, how uncertain she is about his feelings for her. Hermione hates that. "Don't you want to know how my year at Hogwarts was?" he asks.
"I suppose."
His eyes turn shrewd at the polite interest in her voice. "Perhaps later then," he says, suddenly cold. "It appears that you're quite busy with your... books."
Hermione looks away and bends down to retrieve said book. She takes a deep breath.
"Tom."
"Hm?"
"Do I…" She pauses. "Do I look any different to you?" She faces him fully.
Tom glances at her face, pursing his lips. Then he looks at the window at a bird flying by. "Er. Should you?"
Hermione is silent. After a moment, Tom looks back and winks at her. "Oh, don't be such a girl," he says tauntingly. "Of course you do. Your hair is a wee bit smaller."
"Smaller?"
"You know, it's less... large."
"Excuse me?"
"I like it." He laughs at the rage darkening her face, as if it delights him. Hermione growls. "I like that, too," he adds, winking.
"Didn't you get my letters?" she asks, crossing her arms over her chest.
"I did." Tom waits for her to fill the silence, but she doesn't. She traces the book spine of Oliver Twist absently, pretending it is a cat. Mrs. Cole won't let them have cats. They have fleas and disease and they shed everywhere, or so the old matron says. "They were interesting," he goes on. "Very... detailed."
"You barely wrote anything in return," she says accusingly. "Do you know how long it took me to write those letters? Oh, never mind. It isn't as though you care. You're quite preoccupied with your other life." She sounds ridiculous. Hermione can hear herself talking, sounding more and more foolish with every word that flees her mouth, but she is helpless to stop it. The months of boredom and annoyance and loneliness have coalesced into a nasty crescendo. She breathes harder and faster in the tiny, dusty library. The walls seem to be closing in on her, but they never close in on Tom. No, Tom can get away from here, and you can't, can you?
"I read every letter," Tom says, frowning. "I have a lot of work to do at school. It's hard for me to find time to reply and besides, there wouldn't be enough paper for me to tell you all the foolish things people do at Hogwarts. The girls..." Hermione turns rigid and he clears his throat, straightening under her. "No, it isn't like that. They're all dolts. Nothing like you, of course."
Against her will, Hermione starts to smile. A little. "Whatever do you mean?" she says coyly.
"That you're brilliant. The smartest girl I know. The smartest girl of her age."
"Oh, shut it. You don't have to be such a ham," she mutters, blushing. "But... thank you."
The crook of Tom's long neck looks rather inviting. Hermione nestles her face there and breathes in the scent of his warm skin until he sighs. She can smell the cigarette that he must have smoked outside before he came in, out of Mrs. Cole's sight. Tom tells her everything about Hogwarts. About how popular and beloved he is. He tells her of the schoolboy pranks of his friends and the plots of his enemies. She knows the names of his professors, who are besotted with him. One of them, Professor Slughorn, wants to feature Tom in an upcoming art show in London.
Hermione laughs and frowns and disapproves and snorts through it all. Tom bathes in her attention. He looks to her for reactions and kisses her cheek when she smiles. She doesn't really know why he kisses her. When she told him that she fancied him last summer, he had never said it back. He never mentioned any feelings for her in his letters either. She had quietly tucked that part of her away, but Tom was tugging it gently back into the surface of her thoughts every time that he touched her.
She tries not to react when his mouth lingers on the edge of her lip. He's teasing her, that's all, she tells herself. He doesn't mean anything by it.
But after they return from the chapel on Sunday, Tom sneaks them out of the line streaming back into the orphanage and takes them to the empty courtyard. Daffodils have grown in patches in the dust leftover from the aftershocks of bombs in the city. He plucks a flower suddenly, holding it toward her. Hermione turns red and takes it, confused and flattered. Mostly, she is confused. No boy except for Tom Riddle has ever shown her much attention before (not the good kind of attention) and this seems... different. Tom Riddle walks very closely to her through the courtyard, only stopping when they are standing in the shadows of the building. There are no windows around them, Hermione realizes suddenly. No one is around to watch.
She is a bit excited by that.
"What are we doing back here?" Hermione whispers, peeling the petals off her flower one by one. The white petals float to the ground slowly, like tears.
Tom stretches his arms over his head. His shirt strains against the muscles in his chest, defined and not too large. What does he look like under it now? A year has gone by since they last swam at the cove. "Oh, nothing. I only wanted to see something."
"What's that?" she asks, turning her head back and forth. She sees nothing but rocks and an old, abandoned seesaw that Mrs. Cole had never had fixed.
"I meant what I said before, Hermione," Tom says, staring at the grey sky above them. It looks as though it is going to rain again. "You're not like the other girls. At Wool's or Hogwarts. Or anywhere." Hermione stares at his profile, sharp and handsome as cut crystal. His beauty is painful to look at. She feels plain standing beside him in her too-small smock and battered shoes. "I tell some of the girls at school that I care about them, but I don't really," he admits. "It's for sport."
"That's horrible of you."
"I know, but I can't very well help it. They aren't even interesting." Tom turns toward her, making her shiver when his breath tickles her neck. "I think... I care about you, Hermione."
Hermione rolls her eyes. As if her heart isn't pounding in her chest. "How do I know you're not lying? You're quite good at that apparently."
"See? That's why I like you so much. You aren't a simpering fool like... Well, never mind that." He smiles at her sweetly and Hermione knows that he is about to do something she won't like. "I want to show you something."
Hermione thinks of the other times that Tom Riddle has 'showed' her a surprise and turns cold from the bowels of her stomach. The time she tried to swim at the cove flashes through her mind and she stumbles back, but Tom is there to catch her against the building. Bricks bite into her back, but he shifts his hands to cushion her shoulders. She stares up at his face, feeling dizzy and disconnected from her own body when Tom comes too close to her. Their chest move up and down against each other. She is breathing too fast, but Tom is calm and even. His lips test her button nose, smiling when she frowns.
"What on earth are you doing, Tom?" she demands, trying to push him off. He doesn't move. He's become stronger, too.
"You'll see. Don't you trust me?" Hermione stares at him suspiciously. He kisses the corner of her upper lip, nibbling it, and suddenly, Hermione knows exactly what he is trying to do. Her heart staggers and then picks up triple-time. He must feel it throbbing against his chest. "I just want to kiss you for a while," he whispers.
"Wh-why?" she stammers. She has imagined this before, Tom Riddle kissing her, but never in a million years did she think it would actually happen.
"Stop talking, Hermione."
Hermione hates it when he says that, but before she can remind him Tom is bending bends down toward her. His mouth is on hers before she can blink. It's not such a big deal, but it is. His lips are as soft as she remembered them. They feel like velvet, but firmer.
He has kissed a lot of other girls.
Tom's mouth pulls and pushes hers up and down like a yo-yo. He puts one hand at the back of her neck and the other on the brick wall behind her. She still has the chest of a nine-year old even though she's thirteen and Amy Benson looks loads more woman than she does – but Tom's not kissing Amy, she reminds herself. He's kissing her. And she likes it.
When Tom's wet tongue pushes at her teeth, she opens her mouth, and she gasps when his tongue sweeps inside it. He's hungry. He doesn't kiss her like she's seen him kiss other girls when they're out on daily trips to the park and he sneaks away, far from Mrs. Cole's watchful eye and behind the apple tree with some blue-eyed blonde. He kisses her hard. He kisses her like the demon he really is.
That's why he's kissing me, Hermione thinks, afraid and breathless and excited all at once. Because no one else can see him like this, in his real form. Because I'm his, so he can hurt me without getting in trouble. So he can kiss someone the way he really wants to kiss someone.
And Tom wants to kiss someone so that it hurts.
He bites her tongue until she cries out, but then he strokes it with his so she feels good as new. He crushes her to him. He traps her in his artist hands. He sweetly scrapes his nails under her blouse over her back and kisses her until she can't breathe. He peppers fast, anxious kisses down her throat and pulls down her sleeve so he can suck on her shoulder and leave red blotches there. He gravitates back to her lips like magic is pulling him there. Her mind whirls. Tom is carnivorous.
And when he's finally finished and pulls back, he doesn't say a word. He only lopes off, back to the orphanage with his hands in his pockets. Like nothing just happened.
Hermione watches him go, mystified.
She touches her tingling mouth and frowns.
"Come on, Hermione," calls Tom. The water breaks around his lean chest like blue glass when he moves. "Don't be such a baby."
"I'm not a baby!" She scowls and glares at him, but she has to look away because the sun is right behind him and burns her eyes. She regards the deep end of their secret pool nervously. She's wearing the new bathing suit Tom bought her with money he earned from his art show. It has two lace flowers on the right shoulder and green stripes. He had her try on lots of other ones in the store and model them in the dressing room, but ended up picking this one. "I just… I just can't swim."
"I'll hold you up," he says.
Hermione bites her lip. "Well…"
He smirks, triumphant, and pads away, kicking his long legs and streaming through the glassy cerulean over to her. He comes up, sparkling with water droplets and looking like someone from the cover of a fashion magazine. Hermione carefully treads toward him. The water feels colder out here.
"Don't let me go, ok," she says warningly.
Tom grins.
Taking her in his arms, he kicks them into the center of the pool and keeps them afloat where Hermione has never ventured before. The deepness scares her. She wants to go back, but doesn't say it. She doesn't want to look weak.
"Don't worry, baby," Tom murmurs, seeing right through her. Like she's made of tissue paper. He always makes her feel like that. "I've got you."
She nods. But she's still nervous.
"Here, hold your nose," he instructs and she does, squeezing her eyes shut when he dunks them. They come back up with a grand splash and she laughs, breathlessly. She's surprised by how fun it is. Tom grins at her and counts to three, dunking them again. By the seventh time they rise and dunk, she's laughing so hard her ribs hurt.
"Enough, enough!" she declares through her giggles. Tom raises a brow.
"Enough?" He feigns an innocent look and lets her slip in his arms a little, dropping her an inch. She yelps. "Enough of what? Swimming?"
"Tom." Her smile falters. "What are you-?"
He lets go.
A shriek rips itself free of Hermione's throat a mere second before she sinks through the water like a stone, choking on the dark water and into a pool that is much deeper than she originally thought. She tries to grab onto Tom's trunks, but they slip right by her.
And she's sinking.
She's drowning.
Her heart beats frantically and she kicks and thrashes for what feels like hours but is only minutes. The water offers nothing for her to take hold of except slimy seaweed. Bubbles surge out of her mouth when she screams. Black dots float around the endless water. Muddy sand crawls between her toes and something scaly flits over her foot.
Something's down here. Hermione's eyes widen when a shape surges toward her in the blackness. Her ears pop and her lungs sear hotter than fire from lack of oxygen, when she's so desperate her body automatically sucks in a breath only to fill her lungs up with burning seawater. She slowly goes limp. A blob with five short seaweedy limbs reaches out to her and pulls her up, up, up – up back to air.
She sputters in the daylight, coughing. Tom is laughing beside her.
"What? Did you think I'd actually let you drown?" he snickers. Hermione gasps and clings to him, holding his neck tight and refusing to let go when he tugs at her. What she'd thought to be some sort of seaweed urchin are actually his hands. "Come on, Hermione, let-"
"No!" she shouts.
Tom stops tugging and lets her hold onto him, chuckling. He likes the way she clutches him. Like she'll die without him. Like she's got no one else. "It was just a joke," he says.
"Get me out, Tom." She's shaking like a leaf. Her frizzy curls are practically a hazard. "Please, just get me o-out-" Her voice cracks and trembles. Tom relents.
"Alright, alright," he says, taking pity on her and petting her hair. "Hold onto me though, alright?"
She nods frantically, gripping him so hard her nails dig marks into his pale flesh. Tom winces and pulls her firmly against him. She squeezes her eyes shut so she doesn't have to look at the black water.
When they're finally back on land, Hermione races as far away from the threatening pool as she can. When Tom sits down on the beach towel beside her, she buries her face in his chest and hides there, shivering. He rubs her back. He speaks in soothing tones. He dries her off with his towel, wiping down her goosebump-ridden legs and arms. He wrings out her hair and sits them down in the sun. He kisses her neck. He kisses her mouth while she stares at the cheery blue pool, whiter than a sheet and silent as the grave.
It's perfect.
On the bus ride back, Tom watches the tight-knit buildings in the city fly by through the windows. Hermione sleeps on his shoulder, mouth parted and snoring softly. He wants to draw the city. He wants to paint the way Hermione's bottom lip juts out more than her top one, and how the skin between her eyebrows bunches, when she has a bad dream. He wants to go back to Hogwarts. He wants to put everything he sees on paper.
He looks away from the windows and catches the new kid, Dennis Bishop, staring at them with blatant disgust on his face. He arches a brow and Dennis looks away quickly, scowling. Tom makes a note to leave the younger boy...a special picture...before summer ends.
He's distracted when Hermione stirs in her sleep, murmuring a dream or two. There's a strand of hair caught under her nose and he pulls it away carefully. They go over a speed bump, jolting the whole bus, and her eyes snap open. She blinks up at him, and smiles. He finds that he likes being the first thing she wakes up to, the only thing she smiles at. He does not like to share her affections.
Because he's afraid that if he does, he'll lose her forever. And Tom is determined to never lose again.