Chapter 5: The Morning After
The grey dawn had hardened into a flat, accusing light. Harry woke to the precise, throbbing weight of his own skull. The Felix was gone. What remained was a chemical emptiness, a hollowed-out basin now filling rapidly with the cold sewage of reality.
He was in her bed. The sheets smelled of her—jasmine and sex and something else, something metallic and wild. Memories of the night reassembled themselves behind his eyes with horrific clarity: her mouth, her body moving above him, the sounds, the utter loss of control. Three times. He’d come three times, and each surrender felt like a brick mortared into a wall between himself and everything he’d known.
Gabrielle shifted beside him. Her back was to him, the line of her spine a perfect curve under the silk. He watched the slow rise and fall of her breathing, and a nausea that had nothing to do with hangover clawed at his throat. He needed to move. To flee. To scrub his skin raw.
As if sensing the seismic shift in him, she turned. Her eyes were awake instantly, startlingly blue and devoid of any morning haze. She looked at him, at the tension in his jaw, the sick cast to his face, and she understood everything.
“Don’t,” she said, her voice sleep-roughened. It wasn’t a plea. It was a command.
She closed the distance between them, her naked body pressing against his side. Her skin was furnace-hot. He flinched.
“Harry.” She propped herself on an elbow, her silver hair falling around her face. “The guilt is boring. It’s ordinary. You are not ordinary.” Her hand slid down his chest, over the flat plane of his stomach, and wrapped around his soft cock. He inhaled sharply. “See? Your body remembers what your mind is trying to forget.”
“I need to go,” he muttered, but the words lacked force. Her touch, even now, was a lit fuse.
“You need this,” she corrected. She leaned in, her lips brushing his ear. “I have a gift for you. Something purer than Felix.”
Before he could process it, she brought her fingers between her own legs. He heard the wet sound as she gathered her arousal. She brought her fingertips to his lips, glistening. “Taste me. My essence. It’s… amplifying. For a Veela, it’s the most intimate offering.”
He stared, revolted and hypnotized. The part of him that was still an Auror screamed that this was unknown magic, a probable violation. The part of him that was hollowed out and craving just… opened.
He tasted her.
It was musky, salty, complex. Then it wasn’t a taste at all. It was a sensation—a golden, honeyed heat that bloomed on his tongue and flooded down his throat, spreading through his veins like Cognac. It wasn’t the borrowed, false confidence of Felix. This was a profound, anchoring need. It whispered that this scent, this taste, this woman, was the only source of oxygen in the world. His guilt didn’t vanish; it was incinerated in the sudden, possessive fire.
A low groan rattled from his chest. His cock swelled to full, aching hardness in her hand.
“Yes,” she breathed, triumph glittering in her eyes. She swung a leg over his hips, positioning herself above him. She guided him to her entrance, already slick and ready. “Look at me.”
He did. His green eyes were wide, desperate, owned.
She sank down onto him with an excruciating, controlled slowness, letting him feel every silken millimeter of her inner walls stretching to accommodate him. When he was fully sheathed, she paused, a shudder running through her. “You belong here,” she stated, her voice tight with pleasure.
Then she began to move. Not the frenzied ride of the night before, but a deep, grinding rotation of her hips. She leaned forward, her breasts brushing his chest, and kissed him. He could taste himself on her, mixed with her own unique flavor, the feedback loop of the essence making his head swim. Her tongue plunged into his mouth, mimicking the rhythm of her hips below.
“You can never be truly happy with her,” she purred against his lips, her breath hot. “It will always be a ghost of a life. A compromise.” She clenched around him internally, a vicious, sweet squeeze that made him see stars. “But with me… you will always feel this good. You will always be this alive.”
Her words coiled around the need inside him, giving it a shape, a justification. He gripped her hips, his fingers digging into her flesh, and began to thrust upwards to meet her downward slides. The pace quickened. The bedframe knocked a dull rhythm against the wall. The room filled with the raw, wet sounds of their joining.
“Say it,” she demanded, her composure fracturing into sharp gasps. “Say you want this.”
“I want this,” he choked out, the truth of it terrorizing him even as he embraced it.
“What do you want?”
“You. Fuck, Gabrielle, I want you.”
It was all she needed. Her movements became erratic, frantic. She reached between them, rubbing her clit in fast, rough circles. “I’m going to come all over your cock,” she snarled, her Veela glamour flickering at the edges, a hint of fierce, otherworldly radiance breaking through. “And you’re going to fill me up. Again. Do it.”
The command, the sheer filthy urgency of her, broke him. His orgasm was a tidal wave, tearing through him with a violence that felt like oblivion. He cried out, a ragged, broken sound, as he pumped his release deep inside her. She followed instantly, her pussy clamping down on him in rhythmic, milking spasms, a long, shuddering wail ripped from her throat as she collapsed onto his sweat-slicked chest.
They lay there, tangled, breathing in shattered unison. The essence still thrummed in his blood, a binding agent. His mind was quiet. The panic was smothered under a deep, sated drowsiness.
His gaze drifted past her shoulder to the crystal clock on the mantel. It was past nine. He was due at the Ministry for a debriefing on the Lestrange retrieval in twenty minutes. Robards would be pacing. His team would be waiting.
Gabrielle felt his slight tension. She didn’t lift her head. “Stay,” she murmured into his skin.
“I have a meeting. It’s important.”
“This is important.” She shifted, still joined to him, and kissed his jaw. “Call in sick. Tell them you’re… contaminated by a residual curse. It’s not even a lie.”
He looked at the clock. He looked at her. The choice was no choice at all. The essence made the path luminous. He reached for his wand on the nightstand, summoned his charmed Auror memo parchment, and scribbled a single line with a thought: Potter. Unwell. Contamination. Out today.
He sent it flying. The link to his duty dissolved with a faint pop.
“Good,” Gabrielle whispered, a smile in her voice. She rose up, disengaging from him, and stood beside the bed, glorious and naked in the morning light. “Now, let’s get you cleaned up. I’m not done with you.”
She offered her hand. After a heartbeat, he took it.