"So tell me again how you got banned from an ice cream store," Hermione requested with a raised eyebrow.

Harry sighed. "I asked Severus to come get ice cream with me after yesterday's meeting," he began, stirring his cup of coffee.

"Don't think you can breeze past that, Harry," the psychologist warned. "You have some serious explaining to do. For example, how did you go from begging me to separate you two as partners to going out on dates and buying each other ice cream cones?"

Harry snorted. "We didn't even make it to the cash register, Mione," he corrected with a hint of disappointment. Their cookie dough ice cream had looked so good. (Good Lord, was he drooling?)

"So you two are dating?"

That caused Harry to choke. Thankfully, he was able to keep his beverage in his mouth this time and not all over his friend's face. (Though she would have deserved it for a question like that.) "No! Where did you get that idea?"

"I gave you three things to deny. One was that you two used to dislike each other. The third was that you bought him dessert. The second, which you failed to deny, was that you two were out on a date," she explained calmly.

Harry didn't share her same demeanor. "Oh no you don't, Hermione. You know I hate these mind games," he complained. He always ended up spilling one too many secrets whenever she whipped out her psychology tricks, and there were some parts of his life that just weren't meant for full disclosure. As it was, he already been lassoed into this early morning "meeting" (her lingo for "It's past time we had a talk about what's been going on lately").

Hermione leaned back and crossed her arms. For a while, nobody talked. To be honest, Harry still thought she was trying to get inside his brain, read his thoughts. However, when his friend still didn't say anything, he tried to distract himself by looking at the artwork on the walls. Hermione had gathered quite a collection over the years, but Harry never saw the point of abstract art. It was just a bunch of lines and shapes. What was the big deal?

"Fine. If you don't want to talk about that yet, we can move on," she said.

Harry rolled his eyes. "Thanks… Anyway, there's not much to tell. I wanted to prove to Severus how amazing cookie dough ice cream is, so we walked over to Fortescue's. It was so late that most of the customers were gone, which I thought was a good thing… So I already knew what I wanted, right? But Severus claimed that he'd never heard of half of the flavors, and I refused to let him buy vanilla. I asked the guy behind the counter if we could have samples. You know how they give out those little spoons to let you test out a flavor before you buy anything?" Hermione nodded. "Yeah, so we did that for one flavor, but Severus said the caramel tasted awful. So we tried another flavor, but Severus said that the mint tasted like a bottle of toothpaste. So we tried another flavor, but Severus said the sprinkles were breaking off parts of his teeth. So we tried another and another and another. Can you believe that that picky bastard didn't like a single one of them? Unsurprisingly, the guy behind the counter – who so happened to be the fucking owner – wasn't happy. A line had started to form while we were choosing, and Severus still hadn't picked a flavor. I just ended up asking for two cones of the cookie dough ice cream to make things go faster. And just as the guy was measuring how much they cost, the fucking paparazzi find us and storm the place. I don't even know where the hell they came from. Of course, they couldn't walk into the place like normal human beings. No, they knocked little kids over, spilled napkin canisters all over the place, and were flashing lights in everyone's faces. Before I could even say anything, this buff kid in an apron comes out from the back and shoves us out onto the street with his boss yelling at us to never come back again."

Which was a real travesty. Nobody could make cookie dough they way they did. But what's done is done.

"And how did Severus take all of this?" Hermione asked.

"I don't know. I thought he would get frustrated by all the pictures, so I tried explaining to him that this rarely happens, I'm normally pretty good at dodging them. But then he only mumbled about how Forte's would get more attention once the pictures were released, which 'was an injustice because their customer service is dreadful and their product is even worse.'"

Hermione tried to hide a smile behind her mug. "He took things in stride, then?"

"Yeah…I guess so."

"So he wasn't mad about all of the online articles?"

Luna had sent him links to them at midnight. To this day, Harry didn't understand why people were interested in him. Yeah, his parents could be called socialites, and people admired them for all of their community service, fundraisers, and outreach programs. But that was Lily Evans and James Potter. Harry was just the CFO of a regional bank. He was only in his twenties and hadn't really done anything to make his name well-known, yet his face had wound up on the front page of more than a few locally renowned blogs and one or two more prominent celebrity blogs. It was absurd. All he'd done was visited an ice cream shop, and they were making it out to seem like it was some kind of big deal.

"Not really. They cropped him out of most of the shots, anyway."

This was, of course, after Severus gave them a…warning…about what would happen if he saw his face anywhere on the World Wide Web. Harry had to admit that there was something satisfying in knowing that the paparazzi weren't as fearless as they pretended to be.

"That's good. He seems like a private person." Harry nodded in agreement. There were some people that loved living in the limelight, but Severus was not one of them. "And I'm happy to hear that the two of you are getting along now. He really is a nice guy."

The girl was looking at him (im)patiently, and he knew that she was expecting him to start revealing all of his secrets. That's the look she always gave him when it was time for A Talk. It was unfortunate for her that Harry had recently enrolled in a class called Changing The Subject and was getting top marks.

"Yeah, I thought it would be good to actually know one of my business partners, even if I didn't know we were business partners until after he'd already joined the team," he said, waiting for Hermione to blush guiltily. "So what are our profits looking like this month?"

The mind behind STA brightened up and pulled out an accordion file filled with a bunch of papers. (Did you see that A+ topic change right there?)

Xxx

After making his excuses, Harry had left Hermione's apartment, hopped into his black Audi A8, and driven to his next meeting at Starbucks. That is where he met Neville, who waved him over to the tiny table he had already secured.

"Sorry I'm late," he apologized in a rush, dropping his briefcase and getting settled in his chair. "I hope you haven't been waiting long."

The tiny white plate littered with crumbs suggested his new-found friend probably had arrived a bit before Harry.

"I only got here a few minutes ago, but I've been keeping an eye out just in case," Neville informed him.

Harry frowned in confusion. (Did Neville suspect Dudley was going to be stopping by?) "Keeping an eye out for whom?" he asked cautiously, his hand reaching down for his case in preparation for a quick escape.

"For relentless men with flashing cameras," he replied, laughing as he watched Harry's reaction.

Feeling played, Harry glared. "Oh, ha ha, Neville. You're a regular comedian."

"And you're a regular celebrity. You even managed to get on the first page of the local newspaper. You should be proud," the man joked.

Harry rolled his eyes. "This town must be more desperate than I ever imagined if a man going to get ice cream is groundbreaking news."

"A man with your kind of money is."

The banker shrugged. He never felt entirely comfortable discussing his income with his friends. It reminded him of life insurances and other depressing topics. Besides, he hadn't asked Neville to come over to talk about how much money he was making. They had bigger issues to discuss.

"So how are things at work?" he asked before realizing he'd forgotten a tiny detail. "Where do you work again? I'm sorry. I can't remember."

The other man didn't seem that bothered. "I'm a trained botanist, but I'm working now as a normal scientist with a drug company called Pepperup. I doubt you've heard of it."

"They're in competition with Advil, right?"

Neville looked surprised. "Yeah, that's them."

"That's really cool! So have you gotten the chance to ask the mystery girl from Pepperup out on a date?"

The scientist shook his head. "I found out she already has a boyfriend…"

"Wonderful!" He saw a blonde walk in through the door and motioned for her to join them.

"Wonderful?"

"Yes, wonderful. Now, do you remember me saying I had a friend I wanted you to meet?"

Neville watched the young woman walk their way and was still clearly confused. "Yes…"

"Neville, I'd like to introduce you to one of my close friends and business associates, Luna Lovegood. Luna, good morning! This is Neville from my STA meetings," Harry said. "Now I'm sure you two are probably asking yourselves why I invited you out to coffee. Part of it was because I think the two of you will really hit it off."

It was as if someone had shot an invisible paintball at Neville's cheeks, which had exploded into two blotches of red. Whoops. Maybe Harry was getting a little ahead of himself. Time to backpedal.

"As friends," he hastily added, glad when his friend seemed to calm down. "Luna's the only person I know who smells like sunlight, which I think will really complement your own scent."

The look of confusion returned to Neville's face. "What?"

Luna patted Harry on the shoulder. "One of Harry's favorite pastimes is to study people's scents. He believes it is a good indicator of people's personalities," she explained without an ounce of ridicule. Unlike some of Harry's other friends, Luna didn't poke holes in Harry's scent science; she gladly supported it.

"And you smell like sunlight?" Luna nodded. "I'm not sure if I ever knew that sunlight had a smell…"

Realizing that they were getting slightly off topic, Harry jumped in. "We can talk about that later," he proposed. "The main reason you both are here today is because I've only told Luna parts of my plan and wanted to go over everything with the two of you present. Does that sound good?"

"That's fine with me," Luna answered, smiling softly as Neville scrambled to grab a third chair for her. She sat down. "Thank you."

Neville blushed again. "No problem," he told her before turning to Harry. "Does this mean that you have you thought of a way to make Dudley and his followers like you?"

"Not exactly," he admitted. "I was hoping the two of you could come up with some suggestions."

xxx

"Well, aren't you Mr. Popular?" the overweight man teased when he spotted the two of them walking in.

Harry wanted to sigh. He'd had such a nice time having coffee and scones with Neville and Luna that it almost seemed cruel to have his happy mood snatched away by this man. Just another thing Dudley had stolen. And, even worse, it was like his fellow board member had been waiting for their arrival. Checking his watch, Harry noted that he and Luna were only two minutes late. As punishment, they now had to face Dudley, who was leaning against Luna's workstation all too casually.

"What's that?" Harry asked, watching as Luna slid into her chair from the opposite side of the desk as Dudley. The other man had yet to say a word to the secretary.

"Don't act modest now, Harry. You're all over the internet," Dudley claimed, showing off his understanding of the word "hyperbole." "I bet you've been getting calls from ladies all day."

It was a marvel how that desperate man's mind worked. How did a few pictures in a handful of newspapers and blogs mean that women would suddenly have interest in him? In his imagination, Harry flipped the man off with two fingers. But, in reality, Harry just laughed.

"You know me," he replied, not 100% sure that that was even a proper response. (How did he even talk to these people before?)

Apparently, the reply hadn't been terribly socially awkward because Dudley laughed along. "Next time the guys go out to dinner, you're definitely coming with us," he stated with a smile, unconcerned that he'd just let slip the fact that there had been other dinners Harry hadn't been invited to. Dinners where they, no doubt, gloated over how many townspeople they were screwing over as they lined their pockets with "bonuses."

"Count me in," Harry said, swallowing back vomit. There were literally a million things he'd rather be doing than eating anywhere near Dudley, but he knew this was what he'd have to do if he wanted his foot in the door.

"Of course! Just make sure you bring some b-" He looked at Luna for the first time and frowned. Meanwhile, Luna was clicking away at her keyboard like she hadn't heard a thing. "Babes."

"Right." He smiled in a way that he hoped would signal the end of the awkward conversation.

"Great. I'll see you in the meeting room in five, then." He waved (Dudley never once waved at him before) and turned the corner, blessedly leaving Luna and Harry alone.

"Jesus," Harry moaned once Dudley was long gone. "I'm not sure how much longer I can keep up this act."

Finally, Luna took her hands off the keyboard. "If it makes you feel any better, it seems like you're getting closer to the group," the blonde kindly offered.

"Maybe."

"You are."

Harry ran a hand through his hair. "I don't know, Luna. Dudley and his cronies are finally talking – and inviting me – me to meetings, so I guess that's some sign of progress. They get dinner everyday after work, don't they?"

Luna nodded. "Everyday exactly at 5:00."

The man snorted. For all that Dudley had claimed to have a booked solid schedule, it was nice to know that he got off on work on time. Heaven forbid he spent a late night at the office instead of blowing the bank's money on sushi and steak!

"I guess I'll wait until I start getting invited out more before I start doing anything."

His secretary gave him a pitying look, knowing as well as he did that his "undercover" mission would end up lasting two or three more weeks at the least. But this is what he had signed up for, so he couldn't exactly complain. "If there's anything I can do for you, Harry."

He smiled gratefully as he opened the door to his office. "I know we were just at Starbucks – and this is probably like my fourth of the day – but would you mind bringing me another c –"

"Already on it."

A/N: Harry has a caffeine problem...