Chapter 19: The Reward
The second week of silence was different.
It wasn’t a cage of anticipation. It was a foundation. Every withheld joke, every bitten-back comment about some Hufflepuff’s low-cut top in the Great Hall, was a brick he laid, building towards something. The memory of Hermione, bare and bewildered, was the mortar. It held him together. It made him powerful in his restraint.
He watched her. Constantly. In Charms, he saw the way her shoulders tensed when Ron whispered something to Lavender three rows ahead. In the library, he noted the precise, agitated flick of her wrist as she turned a page. She never looked at him. Not directly. But he felt a charge in the space between them, a live wire only they knew was there.
Sunday came again. The castle slept under a blanket of damp fog.
Harry entered the bathroom first. He didn’t bother with the pretense of waiting this time. His fly was already open, his hand already resting on the hard, impatient length of himself. The air was sharp with the smell of limescale and pine soap.
The door opened. Hermione entered, followed closely by Ginny.
Harry’s heart stuttered, then slammed against his ribs.
Ginny’s expression was a storm. Her bright eyes were narrowed, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. She wore a simple Quidditch jersey and jeans. She looked ready for a fight, not a show.
Hermione, in contrast, wore an expression of cool administration. She was the project manager. “He held his end,” she said to Ginny, her voice quiet but firm in the echoing space.
“This is mental,” Ginny spat, not taking her eyes off Harry. “Absolutely barking.”
“You agreed,” Hermione countered.
“I said I’d hear you out! I didn’t say I’d stand here while he…” Ginny’s gaze flicked down to his open trousers and her words died in a sputter of outrage. “Merlin, Harry. Have you no decency?”
“None,” he answered honestly, his voice rough. His eyes were pinned on Hermione. “What’s this?”
“An expansion of the parameters,” Hermione said, clasping her hands in front of her. She was giving a lecture. “The initial intervention lacked… comparative data. The novelty couldn’t be fully assessed with a sample size of one.”
Ginny stared at her. “Are you hearing yourself?”
Hermione ignored her. “You wanted to see. To compare. This eliminates that curiosity. Permanently.”
Harry’s mind reeled. He looked at Ginny—fiery, fierce Ginny who he’d snogged, who’d hexed him once for being a pig. Then back at Hermione, the archivist of his obsession, now curating the collection. A hot, ugly thrill shot through him. “You’re both going to?”
“Yes,” Hermione said.
“No!” Ginny snapped.
“You owe me,” Hermione said, turning to her friend, and her voice finally lost its clinical edge. It was low, personal. “For covering for you with Slughorn. For the entire bottle of Firewhisky. For never telling Ron about you and Dean in the broom cupboard.”
Ginny’s face flushed a deep, blotchy red. Her defiance wavered, crumbling under the weight of Hermione’s calm, collected blackmail. She swore viciously under her breath.
“Fine,” she growled. “But this is it. One time. And you,” she jabbed a finger at Harry, “you don’t get to speak. Ever again. To either of us.”
“He won’t,” Hermione said, answering for him. “Now.”
There was a terrible, suspended silence. The drip of the sink was a metronome.
Hermione went first. Same routine. The pragmatic removal of the jumper, the plain bra, the swift unhooking. Her breasts were revealed, the same perfect, pale curves, the peaks tight in the cold air. She stood stiffly, looking at the wall, but her chest rose and fell rapidly.
Then Ginny. With a sound of pure frustration, she yanked the Quidditch jersey over her head in one violent motion. No bra. She was bare underneath.
Harry’s breath left him in a rush.
They were different. So different. Ginny’s were smaller, as Hermione had said, but they were fierce. High, rounded, with deep pink nipples that looked perpetually alert. They suited her—untamed, immediate. Next to Hermione’s soft, creamy perfection, they were a declaration.
“Fucking hell,” Harry whispered, his hand tightening around himself.
“I said don’t speak!” Ginny barked, but she didn’t cover up. She stood her ground, chin raised, her anger making her skin flush down to her chest.
“Just look, Harry,” Hermione instructed, her eyes still averted. “That’s the agreement.”
He looked. He drank them in. The two of them, standing side by side in the grimy bathroom light. Hermione, trying to be a clinical statue, failing as her nipples hardened visibly. Ginny, a live wire of fury and something else—a perverse pride in her own body, a challenge in her pose.
He began to move his hand, slowly at first, then with building urgency. The slide of his flesh was loud in the quiet.
“You’re disgusting,” Ginny muttered, but her eyes were locked on the motion of his fist.
“He is,” Hermione agreed, her voice thin. “But it’s contained. It’s here. Not in the common room. Not in class.”
“So we’re his personal bloody Wizard’s Wireless pornographic broadcast, are we?” Ginny shot back.
“It’s a controlled environment.”
“You’re both fucking perfect,” Harry groaned, unable to stop himself. His hips jerked. “Look at them. God. Hermione… so perfect and proper. And Ginny… fuck, Ginny, yours are so… angry. Like you.”
“Shut up!” they said in unison, but neither moved.
He let his eyes travel back and forth, a frantic comparison. The soft weight of Hermione’s, the pert defiance of Ginny’s. The pale pink against the dark. The knowledge that he had reduced this—the two most important witches in his life, one a friend, one an almost-something—to this. It was awful. It was the most potent thing he’d ever felt.
“Which ones do you like better, Potter?” Ginny taunted, her voice dripping with venom. “The know-it-all’s or the Quidditch slut’s?”
“Ginny!” Hermione gasped, finally looking at her, horrified.
“They’re both… fuck,” Harry panted, his rhythm becoming erratic, desperate. “I can’t… Hermione’s are like… I want to touch them so bad. Just to see if they’re as soft as they look. And Ginny’s… I want to make you even angrier. See if they get harder.”
“You revolting pig,” Ginny breathed, but her own breathing hitched.
He was hurtling towards the edge. The visual was too much, the taboo too thick. His free hand gripped the sink edge, his knuckles white.
“He’s close,” Hermione observed, and her clinical tone was utterly shattered now. It was just a shaky whisper.
“Good,” Ginny snarled. “Let him spill his pathetic mess on the floor and be done with it.”
Her words, the sheer contempt in them, pushed him over. With a strangled cry that was part triumph, part surrender, he came, shuddering violently against the sink. This time, he kept his eyes wide open, fixed on the two bare chests, imprinting the image onto the backs of his eyelids forever.
The aftermath was a hollow, ringing quiet.
He slumped, spent.
Hermione moved first, grabbing her jumper and pulling it on with frantic haste, not bothering with the bra. Ginny yanked her jersey back down, the fabric scraping over her skin.
“The terms continue,” Hermione said, her voice regaining a sliver of its former steadiness. She was talking to the floor. “Indefinitely. For both of us. One word, Harry, and this ends. Forever.”
Ginny just stared at him, her expression unreadable. The anger was still there, but beneath it, something contemplative and dark. She gave a sharp, disgusted shake of her head and turned for the door.
Hermione followed, but at the threshold, she paused. She looked back at him, not at his face, but at the mess on the tiles. A tiny, almost imperceptible shiver ran through her.
Then they were gone.
Harry leaned his forehead against the cold porcelain. The smell of sex and cleaning potions filled his nostrils. His mind was a scrambled whirl of pale skin and pink peaks, of clinical words and furious tears.
He had compared. He had catalogued. The curiosity was not eliminated. It was multiplied, deepened, twisted into a new, hungrier shape.
The silence was no longer a foundation. It was a weapon he was now holding for two. And he had never felt more powerless, or more alive.