It Feels Like Home
Pairing: Hermione/Cormac
Word Count: 502
Written For:
- February Event: (lyric) "And I feel your warmth, and it feels like home." - Depeche Mode, (object) Lingerie
- Gringotts Prompt Bank/Secret Diary: (location) Stairwell, (word) Invitation, (word) Desire, (plot/action) Sneaking out of bedroom and leaving sleeping partner there, (word) Publicity
- Gringotts Prompt Bank/Poems Porn: "Falling for him wasn't falling at all. IT was walking into a house and suddenly knowing you're home."
- Word Prompt Express: house
Falling in love with Cormac wasn't falling at all. It came at the most unexpected time; it was like walking into a house and suddenly knowing she was home.
She felt no love for him when she knew him at Hogwarts. Back then, he just irritated and disgusted her with his smarmy ways and silver tongue. Her mind was full of a hundred other things back then, the centre of which was Ron, who was nothing but a beacon of confusion for her.
Hermione thought that she would never put a thought to Cormac again, after the war. She married Ron quickly in the winter, while they were still young and stupidly in love. The years passed, filled with hopeless adoration for one another which slowly progressed into irritation. Hermione and Ron still joined Harry Potter at the forefront of any publicity, and it was a major source of stress for their relationship. It wasn't long before Hermione was waiting until Ron had fallen asleep in their marital bed, and then she would sneak out.
She was always hidden under a nifty disguise that a few hair-colouring charms and some facial rectification provided. Going out reminded Hermione of all the things she had missed out on while she was young. She never got a chance to live or experience the things that most young twenty-something women would.
No love passed from her heart to his when she met Cormac in a downtown London club. In her drunken state, all she felt was risky desire. Before long, she was making out with Cormac in the stairwell of his apartment building, accepting his invitation to join him upstairs.
The emotions were electric between them, but there still wasn't love. It was lust; pure arousal, found in the little movements. Hermione's hand between his legs, his fingers gently peeling away her plain white lingerie.
It was slowly that Hermione started to feel an attraction to Cormac, as their secret meet-up sessions multiplied. She spoke to him, and his words resonated with her. He wasn't just a smarmy shadow of his teenage self, but a man with a long past of loneliness and a desire to meet the woman of his dreams. They would hold each other all through the night, pressing warm kisses upon every inch of flesh they could reach, crying through the pain of not truly being able to have one another. "I feel your warmth," Cormac would whisper to her heatedly, his fingers entwined in her bushy hair. "It feels like home."
Love didn't come to her until she was laying on her back in St. Mungo's Hospital, screaming out in agony as she pushed out her first child. It was Ron who stood beside her, clinging to her hand, and that only made the pain worse. In the bright white lights of the hospital, she saw Cormac's face, and his face was reflected on Rose.
Hermione knew then just whom she truly loved—but it could never be.