Chapter 11: The Test
The fallout from the library was a cold, pervasive thing. For two days, Hermione moved through the castle like a ghost, pale and silent. She ate at the far end of the Gryffindor table. She didn’t meet their eyes in class. The grey t-shirt was gone, replaced by an even larger, shapeless maroon jumper that seemed to swallow her whole. It made Harry ache with a twisted longing. He missed the suggestion. The memory of what was hidden was now a constant, pulsing image behind his eyes.
Ron was no better. He was jumpy, snapping at Lavender over trivial things, his gaze constantly sweeping the common room for a bushy-haired silhouette. He’d tried to apologize, a mumbled mess of words outside the girls’ dormitory that Hermione had walked right past. The failure made him sullen.
Harry carried the guilt like a stone in his gut. He’d broken their trust. But beneath the guilt, coiled hot and insistent, was the image. Her bare breasts, the pale curves, the desperate look in her eyes. It replayed when he tried to sleep, when he showered, when there was a quiet moment. His hand had moved to himself more than once in the dark, the fantasy vivid, detailed, a secret ritual of shame and thrilling possession.
He had to fix it. Or at least try.
He found his chance on a damp Thursday afternoon. Ron was off with Lavender somewhere, a “walk by the lake” he’d announced with forced cheer. Harry saw Hermione slip out of the common room alone, her book bag slung over her shoulder. The library. Always the library.
He gave her a five-minute head start, then followed.
She was in a different alcove this time, smaller, darker, a fortress of solitude. She didn’t look up as he approached, but her shoulders tensed. The lines of her body under the bulky maroon wool were stiff, defensive.
“Hermione.”
She kept writing, her quill scratching violently on the parchment.
“Can we talk? Please?”
“I have nothing to say to you, Harry.” Her voice was thin, frayed.
He sat down anyway, the old chair creaking. He could smell the faint, familiar scent of her—parchment, ink, and something floral underneath. It sent a jolt through him. He leaned forward, his voice dropping. “I was a complete bastard. Telling Ron. It was the worst thing I could have done.”
A tremor ran through her hand. A blot of ink spread on her essay. She carefully set the quill down.
“Why did you?” She finally looked at him. Her brown eyes were huge, wounded. “Was it a joke? Something to bond over? ‘Look what she showed me, the silly, desperate girl’?”
“No. God, no.” He ran a hand through his hair, tugging at it. “It just… came out. He knew something was wrong with me. I was… I am… obsessed with it.” The admission was brutally honest. He saw her flinch, but he pressed on. “I think about it all the time. I can’t stop. And he’s my best friend. I told him because I’m screwed up about it, not to make fun of you.”
She stared at him, her lips parted slightly. He could see the rapid flutter of her pulse at the base of her throat. The neck of her jumper was loose. He imagined following that line down, beneath the wool, finding the warm skin he’d already seen.
“You’re obsessed,” she repeated, dully.
“Yeah.” He looked away, heat crawling up his neck. “But that’s my problem. Not yours. And I made it Ron’s problem. And now you’re… hiding in a tent.” He gestured vaguely at her jumper.
A faint, bitter smile touched her mouth. “It’s just a jumper.”
“It’s a fortress,” he said. “And I’m sorry I made you feel you needed one.”
Silence settled between them, less hostile now, thick with unspoken things. He watched her chest rise and fall under the maroon fabric. He wondered if she was braless beneath it. The thought was a lightning strike. His jeans felt suddenly tight.
“He can’t look at me,” she whispered, her gaze dropping to her ink-stained hands. “Ron. It’s like I’m a painting he’s trying to see through. He’s looking for what’s underneath. It’s horrible.”
“He’s obsessed too,” Harry said quietly. The words felt like a betrayal, but they were the truth, his peace offering. “He always has been, I think. He just buried it. Now he can’t.”
She looked up, a fragile hope in her eyes. “Really?”
“Really.” Harry took a deep breath. This was the apology, the real one. It was cruel, but it was the only currency he had. “He talks about Lavender. A lot. But he’s… distracted. He told me something last night. In the dorm.”
Hermione leaned forward, instinctively. The movement pulled the neck of her jumper forward. Harry’s eyes dipped. He saw the shadowed hollow between her collarbones, the very top swell of her breasts, the soft inner curve where they began. He forced his gaze back to her face. It was a struggle.
“What?” she breathed.
“He said… he and Lavender are probably going to do it soon. This weekend maybe. He’s nervous. Excited. You know how he gets.” Harry watched the hope die in her eyes, replaced by a slow, dawning devastation. It was like watching ice form over a pond. “He’s planning it.”
She sat back as if shoved. All the color drained from her face. Her hands came up, not to cover her face, but to cross over her chest, gripping her own arms. It was a gesture of profound protection, holding herself together. The bulky jumper compressed under her grip, and for a moment, the fabric tightened, outlining the full, rounded shape of her breasts pushed together by her arms. The sight was a punch to Harry’s gut—a tragic, beautiful silhouette of her grief and her body.
“Oh,” she said. It was a small, broken sound.
“I’m telling you because I’m sorry,” Harry said, his voice rough. “And because you shouldn’t… you shouldn’t wear a different shirt for him. Or not wear one. It won’t change his mind right now. He’s on a different track.”
Tears welled in her eyes, but they didn’t fall. They just shimmered, making her look glassy and unreal. She was looking through him, seeing a future where Ron was with Lavender in a way he would never be with her.
“He’s really going to,” she said, not a question.
“Yeah.”
She nodded, once, a sharp, mechanical movement. Then she began gathering her things again, her movements precise, robotic. The vulnerability was sealing over, replaced by a brittle shell.
“Hermione…”
“Thank you for telling me, Harry,” she said, her voice frighteningly calm. “That was… informative. Now I know.”
She stood, slinging her bag over her shoulder. She looked down at him, her expression unreadable. “You’re both obsessed. With different things. Or maybe the same thing, just… attached to different people.”
She walked away, her footsteps measured and quiet.
Harry stayed in the alcove, alone with the dust and the dying light. His apology was complete. It had been a knife, and he had twisted it. He had hurt her to cure his own guilt, and in doing so, he had fed his own obsession. The image of her hugging herself, the shape of her breasts molded by her own arms, was now fused with the earlier one. The naked truth and the clothed pain. Both were his.
He sat there until the library lamps flickered on, his body tight with a restless, unsatisfied hunger. He had told her the truth about Ron. But he had not told her the whole truth about himself. That his apology was also a claim. That in sharing the devastating news, he had marked her pain as his own spectacle. That even now, as he pictured her crying alone in some deserted corridor, his mind strayed to how those tears might track down her neck, towards the hidden curves he couldn’t stop imagining.
He finally stood, adjusting the uncomfortable tightness in his trousers. The castle felt vast and hollow. Somewhere, Ron was planning his weekend with Lavender. Somewhere, Hermione was shattering. And he, Harry Potter, was left in the middle, hard and guilty, a prisoner of wanting what he had already been shown and could never truly have.