Disclaimer: Not mine; all things HP belong to JKR, WB and Scholastic, etc.
Author's Note: This first part was first posted at the fanfict00bs LJ community.
UST to be followed by some angst and then fluff and smut.
Happy 2006, everyone!! I hope you all have a very Harmonious year!
Part 1 of 3. Enjoy!
An Affair of the Heart
Part 1: Lust-and Something More
Harry blamed the bathrobe.
That had been the start of this whole thing.
It had been an accident of timing-or something.
Hermione usually left for work before he woke up in the morning, choosing to go to work early, being a morning person, while he was very definitely not. That morning, though, he had woken up early and had wandered into the kitchen to get some water and been on his way back to his room when the door to the bathroom had opened and he'd seen Hermione.
He had stopped for one long, endless second as his eyes took in the sight of Hermione.
She was obviously just out of her shower, in a bathrobe that was partially gaping open, allowing his stunned gaze a glimpse of the beginning of her cleavage. She had a towel wrapped around her hair as she was drying it. But what really drew his attention were the droplets of water he could see on her throat and upper chest, drawing his gaze inexorably down to the cleavage he could just see hinted at. His mouth had gone dry and his thoughts had skidded to a halt and all he could think, somewhat inanely, was that he had never in his life wanted to be a bathrobe before that moment. To be a bathrobe-to be wrapped around Hermione's body, drying the moisture from her body-he stopped his thoughts.
He came to his senses when he met her surprised gaze and turned tail and retreated swiftly back to his room.
Great Merlin, what had just happened? It was ridiculous-he shouldn't be turned on by the sight of Hermione in a bathrobe! He shouldn't be turned on by Hermione at all, for that matter-but beyond that, a bathrobe?! If it was going to happen, shouldn't it be when she was even wearing something more-- sexy? But no, a common, simple bathrobe, not even the most revealing thing he'd ever seen Hermione wear with how loosely it hung around her body-but there was something in the fact that he knew perfectly well that she wasn't wearing anything underneath the bathrobe... All it would have taken was one tug on the belt and-and--
If anyone had asked him a minute before if he'd ever thought about what Hermione's body would look like without her clothes, he'd probably have sworn that he didn't think of Hermione that way. She was just his best friend.
Apparently, he'd have been lying given that he was having absolutely no difficulty now imagining what she would look like underneath that bloody bathrobe…
His hand dropped automatically to the straining hardness in his boxers as he pictured what he'd never really seen but what his imagination was easily picturing in glorious detail…
It was over in the space of a few minutes as he bit his lip hard enough to draw blood to prevent his groan from escaping as he spilled himself into his own hand.
Oh God…
He was suddenly disgusted with himself. What had he just done? Wanking off to the mental image of his best friend?
Oh God, oh God, oh God…
It had started that day.
He'd made a resolution that it must have been a fluke, a mistake, a very stupid mistake at that-and it wasn't going to happen again.
That resolution had been broken within the week-hell, within three bloody days of making it.
They'd been having dinner, he and Ron and Hermione, in the kitchen of their flat and she'd been laughing at something Ron had said, an imitation of something his coach with the Chudley Cannons had said at the last practice, and then her tongue had come out as she'd delicately licked her lip to clean some lingering drops of sauce. And then she'd reached for her glass and taken a sip of water and in his crazed state of mind, just the touch of her hand on her glass looked like a caress.
He had never in his life known before that eating and drinking could be such sensuous acts-especially when he knew she was being completely natural and not even trying to attract.
Then again, as was becoming clearer and clearer to him by the day, Hermione didn't need to try to attract him. He was attracted like a bloody moth to the proverbial bloody flame-to everything she did, because of everything she did.
So he stared at her mouth and her hands-and then he'd escaped to the bathroom and he'd pictured her mouth and her hands on various parts of his body and-well, that had been the end of his resolution.
It hadn't changed-although he was discovering that his imagination was an incredibly active one in finding any and all of Hermione's most mundane actions to be arousing.
He couldn't decide sometimes if the whole moving-in-together idea, after the final defeat of Voldemort, was either brilliant or the world's most refined torture-or both.
It had made sense at the time. Ron and Hermione were his best friends, had spent nearly every waking moment with him in the past few years; who else would he move in with now that he no longer had to go back to the Dursleys? And at first it had been wonderful.
There had been some tangles, some minor arguments (that were simply part of Ron and Hermione's usual interaction) and the usual snarls that happened in the course of any people living together for the first time-but overall, it had been wonderful.
He had loved it. Loved having a real home. Loved having Ron and Hermione around when they could just be best friends and have fun in the first few months after the last battle without having to worry about Death Eaters or anything else. Then they'd all gone back and started work, Ron as the Keeper of the Chudley Cannons, Hermione as a Healer at St. Mungo's and he as one of the Aurors-the only Auror in history ever to become one without having to undergo any of the usual Auror training.
But now, it was getting to be torture.
Being around Hermione so much, seeing Hermione so much in all the thousands of every-day situations of ordinary intimacy-being able to smell her shampoo and her soap after she used the bathroom. Her scent lingering in the living room-and even in her absence, the entire flat suddenly seemed full of her presence now. He didn't know why it had never bothered him or occurred to him before but suddenly everything reminded him of her. He could see the pictures she'd chosen in the living room, her books in the bookshelves, a sweater of hers which she'd left thrown over the couch, her orange juice in the fridge.
He was obsessed with his best friend. There was something wrong with him.
And it wasn't even that he was wanking off to mental images of his best friend on a regular basis now. That was practically the most normal thing about this new obsession. He was young and healthy and Hermione was a pretty young woman-no wonder he was attracted to her. (Never mind that he'd known her for 7 years now and had never felt this sort of attraction before…)
No, this went beyond that. What was troubling wasn't his lust; it was how everything reminded him of her, how he thought of her nearly constantly. Because that was what told him that this wasn't just lust. He didn't just want his best friend. This was more than lust. He didn't know what to call it, wasn't sure it was love, but whatever it was, this was more than lust.
And she only thought of him as her best friend. He was just Harry to her.
And he was going crazy.
He'd been going crazy for nearly two months ago now.
Harry waited with Ron in the living room, idly talking, trying very hard not to think of the fact that he knew Hermione was getting dressed for the Weasleys' Christmas dinner just a few meters away in her bedroom.
And then her bedroom door opened and he saw her.
He stopped breathing.
She looked-she looked-amazing, incredible. She was wearing a new dress-and he knew it was new because he'd never seen her wearing it before; there was no way he could have seen her in this and not remembered it, despite his usual inattention to clothing. It was a forest green, the color her concession to Christmas, he guessed, and he could swear that her very dress was in some sort of conspiracy to make him even more mental than he already was, with the way it seemed to lovingly outline every curve of her body in a way that he hardly ever saw given the sensible, comfortable clothing she usually wore. She had pulled back most of her hair but left the rest of it to fall in its usual curls past her bare shoulders. The neckline was relatively modest but it left her shoulders mostly bare and he swallowed hard.
"You look great, Hermione!" Ron exclaimed admiringly and she smiled at him.
"Thanks. You don't look bad either."
Harry said nothing-he seemed to have lost all power of speech right along with all power of coherent thought and all power to breathe but he somehow had the presence of mind to grab her cloak off the hook and help her into it in a rare gesture that made Hermione raise her brows slightly even as she smiled.
"You look--" he swallowed and avoided looking at the hint of cleavage revealed by the neckline of her dress, as he finished lamely, "you look- nice." And then wanted to kick himself for saying something so inane.
His fingers brushed her shoulders as he put her cloak on and he could swear that she shivered slightly, just as he did. He felt the impact of that lightest of touches all over his body.
She turned to look at him and he forgot to breathe again, his gaze lowering from her eyes to fix irresistibly on her lips.
And for that crazed moment, he forgot that she had never indicated thinking of him as anything other than her best friend and in another moment, who knew what might have happened…
But then Ron said cheerfully-seemingly oblivious to the sudden tension in the flat-"All ready? Come on, let's go. Mum'll be waiting."
Harry couldn't decide whether he wanted to hug Ron or strangle him.
To be continued…