Chapter 11: Forced Proximity
The silence in the Land Rover on the drive to the cabin was a tangible, awkward thing. It smelled of wet dog and old vinyl, which was fitting, Harry thought. Hermione stared fixedly out the window at the relentless grey drizzle, her arms folded tightly. She’d re-braided her hair with vicious precision. Every strand was tamed. The woman from the lake, with her wild curls and ringing laughter, might as well have been a ghost.
He’d tried, once. “About the lake—”
“There’s nothing to discuss,” she’d cut in, her voice clinical. “It was a lapse in judgement. The heat. It won’t happen again.”
And that was that. For two days, she’d been a paragon of professional distance. Her diagnoses were accurate, her treatments efficient, her gaze never lingering a second longer than necessary on his. It was maddening.
The cabin, when the team’s beat-up vehicle finally lurched to a halt before it, looked less like a rustic retreat and more like a prison outpost. It was a squat, gloomy structure of dark stone and thicker timber, hunched against the wind that whipped across the moors. A single, small window, barred with iron, stared out like a suspicious eye.
“Home sweet home, eh Potter?” Oliver Wood clapped him on the back, grinning. “Team building. Coach’s orders. You and the healer get the cozy one. Rest of us are in the bunkhouse down the track.”
Harry’s stomach dropped. “What?”
Hermione whirled around, her composure cracking. “That’s highly inappropriate. There must be a mistake.”
“No mistake,” Wood said cheerfully, heaving Harry’s duffel bag onto the muddy ground. “Limited space. You two are the leads. Think of it as… conflict resolution.” He winked, a gesture so blatant it was offensive, before climbing back into the Land Rover. “See you at dawn for drills! Don’t stay up too late.”
The vehicle spat gravel and rumbled away, leaving them alone in the dripping silence.
“This is absurd,” Hermione hissed, stomping towards the heavy oak door. It groaned open on rusted hinges.
The inside was one room. A single room. A peat fire smoldered in a small grate, filling the space with a low, earthy hum and a faint, smoky tang. The floorboards were warped and groaned underfoot. There was one rough-hewn table, two chairs, and against the far wall, one bed. A narrow, wooden-framed thing with a thin mattress and a single woolen blanket.
Harry dropped his bag by the door. “Well.”
Hermione stood perfectly still in the center of the room, taking it in. Her shoulders were rigid. “I’ll take the floor.”
“Don’t be stupid. It’s stone and it’s freezing. You’ll seize up.” He ran a hand through his hair. “We can share. It’s just sleeping.”
She shot him a look that could have crystallized the peat smoke. “After what nearly happened? Absolutely not.”
“Nearly being the operative word,” he shot back, frustration bleeding into his voice. “Which, for the record, you ran from. Dramatically.”
“A moment of shared foolishness does not constitute an invitation!”
“It wasn’t foolish!” The words burst out of him, louder than he intended. The quiet of the cabin absorbed the echo. He saw her flinch. He took a step closer, the old floorboards creaking a protest. “You were laughing. You were right there. And then you weren’t. You built a wall again, brick by bloody brick, the second we got back. What is so terrifying about just admitting there’s something here?”
Her cheeks flushed. “I am not one of your groupies, Harry. I am not a conquest to be notched on your broomstick. That ‘something’ you feel is novelty. You’re not used to being told no. The second you got a ‘maybe,’ it became the only thing you wanted. Well, I am not a game you can win.”
Her words were arrows, each one hitting a mark he didn’t want to examine. It stung because it carried the sharp edge of truth. He defaulted to offense.
“You think that’s what this is? A game?” He laughed, a short, harsh sound. “You think I enjoy this? Trying to decipher your every look, getting whiplash from your hot-and-cold routine? At least with other women it’s simple. They smile, I smile, we have a nice time. No lectures. No psychological evaluations.”
“Then go find one of them!” she shouted, her voice cracking. “The world is full of women who’d fall into your bed without a second thought! Why are you so obsessed with breaking me?”
The question hung in the smoky air between them, raw and essential.
He had no answer. Or he had too many, all of them jumbled and embarrassing. Because you’re the only one who sees me and still looks annoyed. Because you’re real. Because you taste like lake water and defiance.
He didn’t say any of it. He just looked at her, breathing hard.
She broke the gaze first, turning to her neatly packed trunk. “I’m taking the floor. That’s final.”
They prepared for bed in a silence so thick it was suffocating. He changed into a pair of joggers and a t-shirt in the shadowed corner by the fire. She retreated behind a folding screen she’d conjured, emerging in long, sensible flannel pajamas covered in tiny, printed books. It was so utterly her he almost smiled, but the tension killed it.
True to her word, she transfigured a spare blanket into a thin pallet on the floor beside the hearth and lay down, her back to him.
The peat fire hummed. The wind moaned outside, searching for a way in. Harry lay on the narrow bed, staring at the blackened beams of the ceiling. Every sense was hyper-aware. The sound of her breathing. The faint rustle of her turning. The smell of woodsmoke and the subtle, clean scent of her shampoo cutting through it.
An hour passed. Then another. The cold in the cabin deepened, seeping up from the stone foundation. He heard it—the faint, unmistakable chattering of her teeth, quickly stifled.
“Granger.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re freezing. Your teeth are playing Quidditch.”
“It’s manageable.”
He sat up. “Get in the bed.”
“No.”
“Merlin, you’re stubborn! It’s a bed, not a marriage proposal!” He grabbed the extra pillow and shoved it vertically down the center of the mattress. “There. A wall. A very dignified, impenetrable wall. Now get over here before you get hypothermia and I have to explain to Wood why I let his lead healer die of pride.”
A long pause. He heard her sit up. In the dim, pulsing light of the fire, he saw her look from her thin pallet to the bed, weighing her misery against her principles. Principles lost.
She stood, gathered her blanket, and walked over. Without a word, she slipped under the covers on her side, her body rigidly aligned with the edge. She kept her back to the pillow wall, and to him.
He lay back down, staring at the ceiling again. The pillow barrier was pathetic. He could feel the heat of her body just inches away. He could hear every swallow, every shift of the blanket. The memory of her in the lake, pressed against him, flashed with brutal clarity.
“This is worse,” he muttered into the dark.
“What is?”
“This. Knowing you’re right there. It’s torture.”
He heard her breath catch. A soft, almost inaudible sound. She didn’t reply.
Long minutes crawled by. He was just beginning to think she’d fallen asleep when she spoke, her voice a whisper in the humming dark.
“It wasn’t because of you. Running away at the lake.”
He didn’t move. “Then why?”
“It was because of me.” She hesitated. “I don’t do things like that. I don’t lose control. It scared me.”
He turned his head on the pillow. All he could see was the dark outline of her braid against the woolen blanket. The wall between them felt insubstantial as mist.
“It scared me too,” he admitted, the words foreign on his tongue.
She didn’t answer. But slowly, incrementally, the rigid line of her shoulders softened. Her breathing evened out, deepened. Sleep finally took her.
Harry remained awake, listening to the two rhythms: the low, constant drone of the peat fire and the softer, vital sound of her breath. The cold room held them both, but in the narrow space between the pillow wall and her spine, the air was electric, alive with everything unspoken. Two weeks. It was going to be agony.
And he had never wanted anything more.