Come November
I don't wanna live in limbo, baby
I don't wanna come home to an empty bed
.
He finds it unfair that he can only have her one day a year.
Although he tries, he can never quite feel guilty for cheating. It doesn't feel like cheating, not with Hermione, because they have been friends for so long and she knows him so deeply. It doesn't feel wrong.
And so, once a year, on the anniversary of their moment, they are together. They are together so deeply, so completely, that he wishes this day was every day, and he wishes twenty-four hours would never end.
In a way, he supposes in his guiltier moments, the moments in which he tries to justify himself, Ron has brought this upon himself. He left, that night, and left a broken woman and his best friend behind. It is his fault.
He has no justification for his own behavior, in truth, and in the moments he thinks about this he swears to himself that he won't see her this year, he will let it pass like every other day and pretend to be satisfied.
And then the day comes, and he can't say no to her, not when she comes to him and looks at him like he is everything—and once a year, he is everything.
After seven years, he aches to be everything.
They lay together, his fingers tangled in her hair, and he thinks that if the world was like this forever, he would be the happiest man alive.
"Hermione," he says, and it breaks his heart, "I can't do this anymore."
She leans over, her chin poised elegantly and his chest, and strokes his lower jaw. "I can't, either."
But then she lowers her lips to his chest, and everything starts all over again; his heart races, and he can't do this—
"Hermione, please."
She stops, looks at him with questioning eyes.
"I want you. I want you for more than a few hours once a year. I want you all day of every day, every hour, every minute. I lo—"
"Stop."
He obliges, and she sighs deeply.
"I want you, too," and the sorrow in her voice breaks his heart.
"You make it sound like that isn't enough."
"It's not," she says. "Ron, Ginny, our families, Harry—we can't leave them."
"I know." But because he does know, his heart breaks even further. "Then this is it? One day, one moment a year that we have to ourselves? And then what?"
"And then we go back to our lives, back to what we should be."
"That isn't me, Hermione. This is me."
"And this is me." Slowly, she brings her lips up to meet his, and they kiss, and it feels like goodbye. "And I love you."
"And I love you." But he can hear in his own voice that he's inadequate.
They lay there, his arm around her, for a long while, and she finally moves.
"Hugo will be missing his mum," she mutters, and the excuse falls flat. They both know it.
She gets up, dresses, and then comes back over to him, pulls him up, and kisses him with everything, and for that moment, she is everything.
"Goodbye," she says, and then she isn't.
He lays there alone, wondering what has happened, what will happen. And then he rolls over and sees the imprint her body has left in the bed, the imprint her heart has left on his. And he knows, he feels, that this is her home. Their home. And she'll be home, come November.