Chapter 26: Game of Hearts
Hermione tried to ignore the smile plastered over Remus's face. It wasn't easy. He looked positively elated, though so far as she could tell there was no reason for it. They were bundled against the freezing wind, walking together to Hogsmeade with Sirius and Tildy beside them; James had already run on ahead to find Lily.
She had been trying to keep things friendly with Remus, but that was about as easy as ignoring his grin. Tildy was continuously making remarks about them, about Hermione's preference for sandy hair over red, about how few – make that no – letters Ron Weasleby sent her from Johannesburg. Sirius was no better, sending sly winks her way and pushing her toward Remus whenever she entered the common room. Then there was Remus himself. A gentleman in every sense of the word, he never made any advances or suggestions; he smiled and spoke politely, talked to her like a friend, and it was driving her mad.
No matter how much she told herself not to, she found herself thinking about him. She tried, really tried, to put Ron's face into her brain instead, but Remus just walked up and pushed the boy out of the way like the proverbial ninety-eight-pound weakling.
"So, are you two going to wander off to Madam Puddifoots to start snogging?" Tildy asked with a wiggle of her eyebrows. Sirius snorted, the first indication that he was actually paying his companions any attention.
"No, thank you," Hermione bristled. "Harry lent me money to visit the bookshop."
"Why does he have all the coins?" Sirius inquired. "Seems odd."
She muttered her standard reply about her things getting lost on their journey from South Africa. For how often she had said it, she ought to have been able to make it sound convincing, but she failed. The boys shared a meaningful glance as she ducked her head.
"Sirius," Tildy said, grabbing his arm tightly, "I want to go over there!" She didn't wait for his acceptance, just pulled him along behind her.
"I'll catch you two later," Sirius shrugged and let the girl decide their direction.
"Tildy is so odd," Hermione frowned. "So like her…"
"Like who?" Remus questioned, his voice airy as if he was not particularly interested, but she could tell by the intensity of his glance that he was extremely keen to know.
"No one. Never mind," replied the girl crisply. "I need to look at the bookshop." She started marching off in the direction of Tomes and Scrolls, not realising that her knowledge of which direction to go added another item onto Remus's list of curiosities about the Grangers. She just cared about reaching the store.
The selection at Tomes and Scrolls was not the best, certainly not as diverse as Flourish and Blotts, but it would have to do. She and Harry needed as many sources as they could get their hands on if they had any hope of finding the spell that had sent them here. Actually, given that it was Malfoy that had gotten them into this mess, she was starting to think the best source to search for his hex might be down Knockturn Alley. Getting Professor Dumbledore's permission to go there was highly unlikely, however. It took her a month of careful argument – complete with a graph of their probability of success without more materials – to win permission to visit Hogsmeade, he was so against putting them in reach of Death Eaters.
She opened the shop door and sighed as the warmth washed over her. Remus was close behind her. "So what are you after?"
"A book," she said hastily, too flustered by his proximity to be polite.
"I did gather that much on my own," he commented with a raised eyebrow.
She took a deep breath to calm her nerves, "Remus, please stop following me." His smile showed that he knew she didn't mean it. Why couldn't she mean it? It would make things so much easier if she did.
"What?" he said innocently. "I need a book, too."
"Which one?" she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest.
"I'll know it when I see it," he replied lightly and walked past her, brushing his hand against hers as he did. Her heart beat faster at that brief contact, her skin tingled, and he smirked. He knew what he did to her. He knew and he did it on purpose.
'It's the full moon,' she reminded herself, trying to keep a cool head. 'It's the full moon. He's not himself. It's the werewolf. Remus would never play with you.'
"I'm going over here," she said, her voice shaky. She walked quickly toward the back where the most advanced level spell books were kept.
"So what are you looking for?" he asked.
"I don't know yet," she replied, head tilted sideways to read the titles. Nothing looked particularly helpful. "They might not even have anything… Can you get me that book off the high shelf?"
He retrieved it easily. "Aren't you glad I came? How else would you have gotten it?"
"With my wand," she replied.
"So I'm not even useful for getting things off the tall shelves?" He pouted – actually pouted – and it was so adorable she had to smile. She had never seen him so playful as an adult. Thinking back to his lessons third year, the energy and fun of them, it was clear to her that he still possessed that playfulness; it just manifested itself in a different manner.
"No," she giggled, "but I'm sure you have other uses."
"Oh, I do."
It wasn't the depth or huskiness his voice had suddenly taken on but the promise held in it that made her turn and look at him. His eyes had darkened and his mouth was turned up in a smile that was different, predatory, wolfish. Standing at a respectful distance, fully clothes in at least four layers of wool and cotton, he put ideas into her head, all of which involved the pair of them naked, sweating and screaming each other's name.
"I need some air," she squeaked and ran past him out into the freezing wind.
If cold showers worked anything like cold air, they did not work at all. The frigid wind only made her realise just how hot her skin was. Thinking of her hot skin made her think of his. Thinking of his skin made her think of his body… pressed against hers… naked.
"Oh, bad," she moaned.
"What's so bad about it?"
She didn't have to turn to know it was Remus, that his face was back to normal, his eyes their normal innocent blue, untainted by thoughts. He was himself again.
"I've told you," she said, desperate for him to finally listen and believe her. "I like someone else."
"You like me, too," he replied quietly. "What's wrong with liking two people?"
'Quite a lot when one of them is you,' she thought and nearly said it, but knew that would have hurt him immeasurably.
"I can't like two people," she insisted. "I can only like one. And the one I like is Ron."
"Liar," he said, smirking. "You like me far more than you like him. You never write to him."
"I do, too," she lied. "You just haven't seen me do it."
"You never talk about him," he countered.
"Because nobody wants to hear it," she scowled. "I think about him all the time."
He just kept smirking.
"You are impossible," she glared at him. "Just stop it. Stop your smirking and your suggestions and your brushing up against me. I don't care what you think or what Tildy says."
The smirk didn't move.
"Stop that!" she stamped her foot.
Still he smirked.
She huffed and spun around, marching away from him toward nothing in particular. She grew tired and cold from plodding across the village. For all the distance her efforts managed to put between them, she might as well have stayed with Remus in the warm bookshop. He walked beside her, easily keeping up with her great, stomping strides, smirk firmly on his face and for good reason; he knew, as any casual observer would, that he had quite the effect on her. Her feet took her past the pub and down a narrow, curving side street that ended abruptly with a crumbling wall. Just past it, after a thicket of snow-heavy trees, was a derelict little cottage known to be the most haunted in Britain. The Shrieking Shack.
The boy's smirk finally fell as he looked at that house. His jaw clenched as if he were in physical pain. His hands fisted as his sides. His eyes glazed over, as he thought of the coming transformation or memories of all those that had already passed. It hurt to watch him fighting his other half even before the moon came out.
Unsure if it was the right thing to do, but knowing she needed to pull him out of his mind, Hermione reached out and touched his face. Her hands were cold as she gently turned his head. He should have jumped at the contact, at the shock of her freezing skin on his flushed cheek, but he turned his eyes with her movement and looked down into hers.
'Perhaps not the best plan,' she thought as the ripple of fear and desire ran through her.
His eyes were hard again, shaded by his drawn brow. The boy looked so much more like the man she knew, though Lupin would never have looked at her that way, the way that made her knees buckle and heart beat erratically; the way that made her spine tingle and her stomach tighten, that made her blood flow everywhere but to her brain.
That's where she was now – flushed, stuttering, tingling and weak-kneed – standing alone with him in a clearing with nothing to distract her from him, or him from her.
She wanted to run. She wanted to turn, to flee, to hide. She wanted to kiss him.
Remus wanted to kiss her, and he did. He leaned in and captured her mouth as she stood there staring at him, opening and closing her lips as if she were desperately trying to force words to come out. So far as kisses went, it was practically nothing. No tongues or teeth or anything that made kisses so fantastic, but it was still a kiss. It was contact of a decidedly more-than-friends nature. It was the first step on a pleasurable road that would end somewhere very, very wrong.
Realising too late what she had let him do, Hermione tensed.
Lupin came into her brain, grown and stern and highly disappointed. He shook his head sadly, slowly as he folded his arms across his chest, looking down at her as he leaned on his desk in the Defence Against the Dark Arts room. He frowned, 'You're the cleverest witch of your age, Hermione, and you couldn't see that coming? I was chasing after you for months. What did you think would happen if you were alone with me?' A spike of fear impaled itself in her chest at the thought of all the things that she had changed. Would Lupin still be her teacher? Would he hate her? Would he fail her on purpose for being so weak-willed? Would he never join the Order? Would Sirius never find his friend? So many things that she might have damaged with this one moment.
Remus, the boy, broke away from her. Considering what he had just done, he ought to have been smirking again, but his face was slack with shock. She should have slapped him at that precise moment. Slapped him hard across the face, kicked him or assaulted him as any girl who had been kissed unwillingly would do, but she couldn't. For one thing, she had wanted him to kiss her. For another, he already looked as if she had wounded him.
"I'm sorry," he said, the words dragged from his throat sounding like a razor across his skin. "I shouldn't have."
"No," she agreed, though it was a lie, "you shouldn't have."
Focusing every ounce of resolve she possessed, she walked away and left him standing in the clearing. The second she was out of sight, she slumped against the nearest wall for support. Her heart was still racing despite her efforts to slow it down.
"Bad," she groaned. "Why did I let that happen?"
This wasn't some test grade that would be forgotten after a few years. Nor was it a silly ball game that students would crow about until the next great player came along. This was important. She was playing not with a Quaffle but with a real, human heart. Remus liked her, and she could not like him back however much she wanted to. She knew him, spent time with him, lived with him. There was no way that she could escape the effects of her foolishness if she let things go any further.
There had to be a way around this… if only she could see it.