Chapter 18: The reward
The silence had been a cage.
For seven days, Harry had moved through Hogwarts like a man under a vow of penance. Every conversation was a minefield. Seamus made a joke about the Veela performers at the last World Cup—Harry chewed his tongue until he tasted blood. Ron complained about Lavender’s clinginess, a perfect opening for a crude observation—Harry stared fixedly at his porridge and said nothing. The words piled up behind his teeth, a constant, buzzing pressure.
He thought of nothing else but Sunday. The anticipation was a live wire in his gut, coiling tighter with each passing hour. It fueled him, this dirty secret. It made the silence bearable. More than bearable—it was a countdown.
Now, it was time.
The third-floor girls’ bathroom was colder than he remembered. The drip from the middle sink was slower, more deliberate. Plink. Plink. Like a heartbeat. He’d arrived early, his own pulse racing in his throat. He’d already undone the front of his trousers, a practical concession to the inevitable. The thick, aching hardness straining against his boxers was a truth he couldn’t ignore. Hermione hadn’t stipulated. She’d been brilliantly, devastatingly specific about his silence, but she’d said nothing about this. He’d clung to that loophole like a lifeline.
He leaned against the same cracked sink, the chill of the porcelain seeping through his shirt. Every rustle of a mouse in the walls, every distant echo of a portrait’s snore, snapped his head toward the door.
Then, it opened.
Hermione stepped inside, and the air changed. She was alone. She wore a simple, long-sleeved grey jumper and plain black skirt, her hair pulled back in a severe ponytail. She looked like she was going to the library. Not here. Not for this.
She closed the door behind her with a soft, definitive click. The sound echoed.
For a long moment, they just looked at each other. Her face was pale, her expression unreadable. It was the same look she got before a particularly difficult exam.
“You’re here,” she said. Her voice was flat.
“I’m here.” His own sounded ragged.
“And you didn’t… speak? For a week.”
“Not a word. Ask anyone.”
“I did.” A flicker of something—surprise, respect—in her eyes. “Ron said you’ve been weirdly quiet. He thought you were ill.”
“I am ill,” Harry breathed, taking a step forward. The space between them hummed. “You’re the cure.”
She didn’t blush. She simply watched him, her analytical mind assessing the situation, the variables. Her gaze dropped briefly to his open fly, to the obvious bulge beneath. She didn’t react. She just noted it.
“This is a transaction,” she stated, her voice gaining a little strength. “A behavioral correction. Do you understand that?”
“I understand.”
“It’s one time. To remove the novelty. To end the fixation.”
“Right.”
She took a deep breath, her shoulders rising and falling. Her fingers went to the hem of her thick jumper. They trembled, just once, before she clenched them into fists and then released them.
“Okay,” she said, more to herself than to him.
Slowly, she pulled the jumper up. An inch of stomach was revealed, pale and smooth in the dim light. Then another inch. Harry’s breath caught in his chest. The fabric passed over the gentle swell of her ribs, then higher. She tugged it over her head, her arms rising, and for a second she was blinded by it, vulnerable.
Then the jumper was off, crumpled in her hand. She stood before him in a simple, white cotton bra. It was plain, functional. Not lace, not silk. It was the most erotic thing he had ever seen.
It curved over her, encapsulating the perfect, modest fullness he had spent years imagining. The fabric was taut. He could see the faint shadow of her nipples, the gentle slope where the swell began. They were, as he’d known they would be, incredibly, heartbreakingly perky.
“Merlin,” he whispered, the word torn from him.
Hermione stood stiffly, her arms at her sides, the jumper dangling from one hand. She was staring at a point on the wall past his shoulder. Her chest rose and fell quickly.
“Is that it?” she asked, her voice tight.
“No.” The word was a rasp. “You said show me. Properly.”
She flinched. For a second, he thought she’d bolt. She’d call him a pig, grab her jumper, and run. He’d have failed.
But she didn’t. Hermione Granger always saw a bargain through.
Her free hand came up behind her back. He heard the faint snick of a clasp releasing. The tension in the bra’s fabric loosened. She closed her eyes, took another shaking breath, and with a swift, decisive motion, she brought her arms forward, slipping the straps down and letting the bra fall away.
It dropped to the floor, a whisper of cotton on stone.
Harry’s knees went weak.
They were… they were exactly and nothing like he’d imagined. Pale, creamy skin glowing in the half-light. Perfectly rounded, not large, but full and unbearably soft-looking. The nipples were a pale, dusty pink, tight from the cold or the tension or both. They were high on her chest, defiantly uplifted. The sight was innocent and indecent all at once. The contrast between her clinical detachment and the breathtaking physical reality of her was utterly disorienting.
He couldn’t help himself. His hand moved, slipping inside his boxers, wrapping around his aching cock. He gasped at the contact.
Hermione’s eyes flew open at the sound. They widened, dropping to his hand, then snapping back to his face. Her composure fractured. Shock. Then a dawning, horrified fascination. Her lips parted.
“You’re…” she started, but the sentence died.
“You didn’t say I couldn’t,” he managed, his fist beginning to move slowly, his eyes locked on her bare chest. “You just said I could look. I’m looking.”
A strange sound escaped her—not a protest, not a word. She didn’t cover herself. She just stood there, frozen, watching him watch her. Her own breathing had become shallow, quick. A faint pink flush was spreading from her neck up to her cheeks.
He stroked himself, his pace increasing, driven by the visual feast before him. The smooth skin. The tight peaks. The way they moved slightly with her rapid breaths. This was Hermione. Clever, bossy, infuriating Hermione. And she was bare for him.
“They’re perfect,” he choked out, his thumb sliding over the head of his cock. “God, Hermione. You’ve been hiding these? All this time?”
She swallowed hard. Her gaze was still glued to the motion of his hand, visible through the open fly. Her own hands twitched at her sides.
“This… wasn’t part of the…”
“It is now,” he grunted. The pleasure was coiling, urgent. The sight of her, exposed and flustered, was a thousand times more potent than any fantasy. “Just keep looking at me. Please.”
To his shock, she did. Her brow was furrowed, as if she was trying to solve an impossible equation. Him, jerking off furiously in a bathroom. Her, topless, allowing it. The logic had collapsed, leaving only raw, pulsing reality.
He was close. The tension of the week, the brutal discipline, the unbearable anticipation—it all crested at once.
“Hermione,” he gasped, a warning, a plea.
Her eyes flew back up to his. In them, he saw no anger. No disgust. Just a deep, bewildered curiosity, and something else—a flicker of a power she hadn’t known she possessed.
That was it. With a choked cry, his back arching against the cold sink, he came, thick stripes painting the chipped tiles at his feet. His legs trembled. The world dissolved into white-hot release.
Silence descended, broken only by his ragged gasps and the relentless plink of the sink.
He slowly opened his eyes.
Hermione was still there. Still bare. She was looking at the mess on the floor, then back at him. Her face was unreadable again, a mask slipped back into place. But her cheeks were flushed, and her breasts rose and fell with unsteady breaths.
Without a word, she bent down, picking up her bra. She turned her back to him, swiftly putting it back on, then her jumper. When she turned around, she was Hermione again. The librarian. The prefect. Except her eyes were too bright.
“The week starts over now,” she said, her voice surprisingly steady. “The same terms. Permanently this time.”
He just nodded, tucking himself away, fumbling with his buttons. He felt spent, hollow, glorious.
She walked to the door, then paused, her hand on the handle. She didn’t look back.
“They were just breasts, Harry,” she said, but the statement sounded like a question, a fragile thing she was testing.
Then she was gone.
Harry slid down the wall until he was sitting on the cold floor, the damp seeping into his robes. He stared at the opposite wall, at the graffiti-scratched stone.
Just breasts.
He knew, with a certainty that shook him, that he would never stop thinking about them. The silence had been broken, but the obsession had just been forged into something new, something deeper and far more dangerous.
The cage was gone. He was in freefall.