Chapter 4: A Taunt in the Trees
The memory of the bathroom was a ghost that lived in his skin. It followed him into classrooms, where the scent of lavender from a passing student would make his hands shake. It haunted the Quidditch pitch, the steam rising from the wet grass after a rain mimicking that perfumed haze. For a week, Harry moved through Hogwarts like a man in a waking dream, the real world overlaid with the persistent, crystalline vision of Cho emerging from the water.
He avoided the Prefects’ Bathroom. He avoided the corridor. He tried, desperately, to avoid her.
Which was why he found himself skirting the edges of the Forbidden Forest at dusk, completing a detour on a pointless errand for Hagrid. The air was cool and damp, smelling of pine needles and decaying leaves. The towering trees cast long, grasping shadows, and a thin mist began to coil around their roots. He wanted the silence, the emptiness. He needed a place where his own thoughts could scream without an audience.
He didn’t hear her approach.
“Hiding, Potter?”
Her voice came from his left, near a thicket of thorny, black brambles. He started, his hand flying to his wand pocket.
Cho leaned against the thick trunk of an ancient oak, wrapped in a heavy, woolen cloak the color of the gathering gloom. Her face was pale in the fading light, her expression unreadable.
“I’m not hiding,” he said, the lie brittle.
“You are. From me.” She pushed off the tree and took a few steps toward him. The forest floor was soft, silencing her footsteps. “We need to talk about Cedric.”
The name was a slap. It cleared the sensual fog from his mind, replacing it with the older, sharper pain. “What about him?”
“You see him when you look at me, don’t you?” she asked, her voice dropping. It wasn’t accusatory. It was matter-of-fact, weary. “You see the dead boyfriend. The perfect martyr. The one you couldn’t save.”
“Cho, don’t.”
“Why not? It’s the truth. It’s the only reason you look at me like that. Like you’re starving and I’m a feast you’re not allowed to touch. It’s guilt, Harry. It’s all just guilt.”
He shook his head, but no words came. She was too close to a truth he couldn’t articulate.
She moved closer, until he could see the faint smudges under her eyes, the tightness at the corners of her mouth. The kind, gentle Cho was there, but she was etched with something harder, something that had been tempered in a private fire. Her fingers came up, not to touch his face, but to his chest. She laid her palm flat against the old fabric of his jersey, right over his pounding heart.
“You still dream about them, don’t you?” she whispered. Her voice was so low it seemed to come from the mist itself. “My tits? That’s what you call them in your head, isn’t it? Not ‘breasts.’ Something cruder. More honest.”
His breath hitched. He was paralyzed.
A strange, bitter smile touched her lips. “The noble Harry Potter, haunted by a pair of tits.” Her other hand went to the clasp of her cloak. With a soft snick, it came undone.
She didn’t throw it open. She simply let the heavy fabric fall partway, peeling it back slowly, revealing the space between the folds. She wasn’t wearing a shirt underneath. Just the cloak, open now to her waist.
The last of the dusky light caught her skin, painting her in silver and blue shadow. Her breasts were bare, exactly as he remembered yet utterly new in this dark, wild setting. They were high and perfectly shaped, each one a gentle, palely luminous curve in the twilight. They were indeed small, but so exquisitely formed, with a pert, defiant lift that made his mouth water. The nipples were drawn tight from the cold forest air, dark and pebbled, begging for warmth.
They swayed, just slightly, as she let out a low, mocking laugh that held no real humor.
“See?” she breathed, her eyes locked on his, watching him unravel. “I know you. I know the look. I know what it does to you.” Her fingers, still on his chest, trailed down slowly, over his sternum, toward his belt. “I can feel your heart trying to batter its way out of your ribs. I know your cock is already hard. You want nothing more than to come all over my perky little tits, don’t you? To mark them. To claim the thing you think Cedric had.”
Every word was a violation and a liberation. She was speaking the filth in his head, giving it air, making it real. The shame was a fire in his gut, but it was fanned by a hunger so raw it stripped him bare. He was hard, painfully so, trapped in his trousers. She could see it. She knew.
“Stop,” he choked out, but it was a plea, not a command.
“Why?” Her gaze was relentless. “It’s the truth. You’re drowning in it. In me. In him.” For a fleeting second, the hardness in her eyes cracked, revealing a abyss of hurt so deep it stole his breath. “You think I don’t have dreams? You think I don’t wake up wanting to feel something, anything, besides that hole he left behind?”
She stepped back, pulling her cloak closed in one swift, decisive motion. The vision was gone, replaced by a woolen barrier. The sudden absence was a physical ache.
“This isn’t about Cedric,” Harry said, the words raw. “Not just about him.”
“I know,” she said softly, all the mockery gone, leaving only a profound exhaustion. “That’s the tragedy, Harry. For both of us.”
She fastened the clasp, her movements sharp and final. “The memory in the bathroom was a gift. This,” she gestured to the space between them, the charged air still vibrating, “was a lesson. You’re not haunted by a ghost. You’re haunted by a feeling. And you’ll use anything—even me—to try and feel something else.”
She turned to leave, then paused, a silhouette against the darkening trees. “The next time you stare at some girl in the Great Hall, wondering what’s under her robes… remember this. Remember that you know. And that knowing doesn’t help. It just leaves you emptier.”
She vanished into the mist between the trees, leaving him alone with the rising dark, his body thrumming with unmet need, his mind echoing with her words. The memory of her bare skin glowed in his mind, more potent than any Patronus. But it was now inextricably twisted with the sharp, clean pain of her honesty. She had given him what he wanted and in doing so, had shown him the hollow man who craved it.
He stood there until full night fell, the forest sounds closing in around him. The hunger hadn’t left. It had just been named. And it was a far more terrifying companion than any ghost.