By the Way Prologue

By the Way

By: Provocative Envy

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Author’s Note: I’m back! How lovely. This new piece of mine is in Hermione’s point of view, actually, and starts off right in the middle of the most sensuous, most meaningful moment of her young life. This is a Draco/Hermione love story, of course, but starts off as Hermione/Ron. This won’t be quite so angst-ridden, but be purely the result of my foray into existentialism: rather than devising all sorts of horrible thing to happen to these characters, they will simply be living everyday life. There’s beauty and romance and drama in that, too, it turns out. So on with this, the prologue: I’ll be writing more tomorrow, with actual dialogue and whatnot. This is just the beginning.

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PROLOGUE

I was falling, falling, falling: quickly and slowly and gloriously. Tumbling, twisting, turning my way through an entirely different kind of pressure: this wasn’t atmospheric, not even a little bit, but it was pressing in on me from all sides like some kind of achingly soft, achingly eternal body bag. I was shutting my eyes against the rush of reality, rather than air, that I knew must be rushing towards my unprotected face, that I knew must be aiming for my unprotected heart. I didn’t want to hit the ground, didn’t want this magnificently hectic, perfectly unbalanced and unplanned descent to end.

“Hermione,” he whispered wonderingly, his lips fluttering so, so close to mine, close enough to touch, close enough to radiate heat like a furnace. His hands were trembling at my waist, his splayed fingers clutching gently, his jagged, dirty fingernails digging into my skin.

I reached up tentatively, hoping against hope that this time would be different, that this time he wouldn’t flinch, wouldn’t run away, wouldn’t snap his eyebrows together and regard me with suspicion: hoping that this time, when I brushed that infernal lock of brilliant, fiery hair out of his eyes, he would let me, that this time he would gaze at me with something that might have been called love, that this time he would press closer.

“I’ve wanted this for--” he broke off, his front teeth catching his bottom lip, which was nothing so much as satin against my own, the friction the sweetest embodiment of physics I’d ever known.

“So long,” I finished softly, pulling backwards a fraction of an inch, just in time to watch his eyelids fall, just in time for him to close off the remaining distance and capture my mouth, my heart, my everything: he tasted better than my dreams, better than my fantasies, that was all I could think, all I could bother thinking when I was wrapped in his homemade sweater, wrapped in his arms with a fire crackling merrily behind us, with a sprig of mistletoe dangling dangerously off the chandelier above us.

My head was pounding, blood coursing through my veins with alarming velocity, almost as fast as my racing pulse, almost as fast as the speed with which I’d tripped into this proverbial rabbit hole of stupefaction; I couldn’t remember unbuttoning my nightgown, couldn’t remember flinging his paisley pajama bottoms across the closest armchair; I couldn’t remember stopping to fumble our way to his empty dormitory, to his even emptier four-poster; I couldn’t remember his desperate hesitation in snapping the curtains closed, couldn’t remember his groans of satisfaction when I’d shifted my hips against his; I couldn’t remember the way our legs had tangled together somehow, couldn’t remember the way his callused thumbs had rubbed circles against my inner thighs; I couldn’t remember my breathless pleading, my sweaty anticipation, my silent scream of euphoria when he’d touched me, finally; I couldn’t remember anything, anything at all, nothing except the feel of his mattress, feathery and deep and such a marvelous cushion for our shameless irresponsibility, such a marvelous cloud that alleviated my fear, mitigated my regrets.

I couldn’t remember anything but the finale, an explosion of chaos and fireworks and internal combustion and a million other things, fragments of pleasure, of desire, that had come together for just the tiniest split second, the briefest flash of time, only to burst apart and shower me with the remnants of their sensationalism; I couldn’t remember anything but that last, blissful moment of supreme relaxation, of weightlessness and exhaustion and astonishment, yes, astonishment that I hadn’t discovered this state of abject elation before then, that I hadn’t been conscious enough to savor it, that I hadn’t had the presence of mind to transcribe everything I was feeling, to bottle it up inside and look at it whenever I felt lonely or sad or tired.

But then I rolled over, my head landing on his chest, and all I could do was personify the most boring of all anticlimaxes: I slept, so peacefully and so soundly that I didn’t even dream.

I rather thought they’d all come true, anyway.

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