One Hundred And One Ways To Brew Lust

Chapter Four

***

Hermione went through the next morning’s classes in something of a daze. She couldn’t wait to get to the library. Certain that something strange was going on, she needed to get to the bottom of this. Now.

Madam Pince hardly looked up from her desk as Hermione scuttled past her, and headed straight to the section on Love Potions. She had a niggling feeling that something magical was going on.

“Love potions, love potions, …” she muttered to herself as she examined the spines of the old musty tomes in aisle five.

“Potente Passion Potions… Love’s Lavishe Liqueurs… One Hundred And One Ways To Brew Lust.” Hermione stopped on this last one.

She certainly wasn’t in love with Snape. What a disgusting idea! No. Lust. That was it. Someone had slipped her a lust potion. Maybe that was Snape’s secret punishment! And all the other things, cleaning the Bog clo closet, the meter stick, those were just bluffs!

But, how had Snape given her the potion? She scanned through the pages of One Hundred And One Ways To Brew Lust, and she seemed fairly certain that they all involved a potion of some kind.

“The port wine,” she thought to herself miserably. “It must have been the port”.

But hadn’t Snape been drinking that very same port too? Now Hermione wished she’d paid closer attention to her surroundings that first evening. Tore ore she thought about it, the less likely it seemed that Snape had poisoned her. Of all the forms of punishment, this definitely didn’t fit his style.

She left the library, clutching the book, perplexed and none the wiser. On the bright side of things, today was the one day of the week that she didn’t have Potions.

Later, she joined Harry and Ron down at Hagrid’s place for afternoon tea. Thankfully, she didn’t have to answer too many questions about her whereabouts over the lunch break, since she soon found that her teeth were cemented together by one of Hagrid’s notorious cakes.

***

Hermione approached Professor Snape’s chambers with something akin to dread. She knocked on his door as the clock struck seven. She waited a few minutes, and knocked again. After three attempts, she decided to wait outside his door. She had brought her homework with her, and settling down to wait, she began her Ancient Runes assignment. After finishing that, she moved on to Arithmancy, and then her Potions essay. So absorbed in her work was she, that she didn’t realise how quickly time had passed. It was only when the clock struck eleven that she rose stiffly from the floor. She knocked one last time, tentatively, on Snape’s door. Nothing.

Not wanting to be accused of skipping detention, she scribbled a hasty note to him. “Professor Snape, I came to your chambers for detention at seven sharp, and waited until eleven this evening. I’m going back to Gryffindor Tower to make it to bed before midnight curfew. Hermione Granger”. She slipped it under his door and left. On her way back, she caught sight of him making his way down the corridor. Not wanting to confront him now, she hid in an empty classroom. Snape inched by her, looking furtively behind him, and creeping stealthily down the corridor.

“I wonder what he’s been up to?” she asked herself.

It never occurred to her that he had been dreading this evening’s detention as much as she had.

***

Snape made it back to his chambers without meeting anyone. He shut the door wrelirelief, and noticed the note on the floor. He recognised Granger’s handwriting and absentmindedly ran his fingers over the words addressed to him. Spending all night in his office helping Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle wasn’t exactly his idea of a good time, but it was infinitely better that dealing with Hermione Granger.

Granger. What a defiant little know-it-all she was. With her watchful, sparkling eyes and thick, bushy, luxurious hair… Her soft, creamy thighs and her firm bottom barely covered by those black lacy panties of hers….

“Great heavens!” Snape thoughthimshimself. How could he be thinking such thoughts about a student! Least of all annoying little Miss Granger. And then, realisation dawned on him.

“I’ve been the victim of a Lust Potion, that must be it.” Little wench had probably done it to him as a joke. She was one of the few students who’d actually managed the Love Potion last week. But he certainly wasn’t in love with her. He hadn’t taught them to make Lust Potion, but he felt certain she could manage it, if she’d pulled off the Love Potion so flawlessly. Any textbook would teach you that you simply had to leave out the dove feather powder to turn a Love Potion into a Lust Potion.

With a furious growl, Snape readiedselfself for bed that night determined to find out exactly who had spiked his drink with a Lust Potion, and why. For the more he thought of it in a rational manner, the less he believed that Granger would do such a thing. She loathed and despised him, didn’t she?

Snape fell into a dreamless sleep thanks to a White Night Draught he had concocted. The last thing he needed was another dream like last night’s. The previous night, he’d woken up with a cold sweat and painful erection after dreaming of caressing Granger for what seemed like hours. He’d touched her midriff, her soft thighs, the underside of her breasts… Then he’d rolled her nipples between his thumbs and index fingers until she’d swooned from the pleasure of it. He’d leaned down to taste them and had practically come in his bed as he had awoken in the early hours of morning. The dream had been so vivid. He’d been deeply troubled by it and had decided early in the day that he would avoid Miss Granger at all costs that evening.

***

That night, Hermione slept deeply, and was very thankful that she didn’t dream once of Professor Snape.

***

The next day was Saturday, and Hermione spent the morning with Ron and Harry, sitting under the tree by the lake. It was a glorious late autumn day, unusually hot for that time of year. Between homework essays, they skipped stones on the surface of the lake until Ron accidentally hit the Giant Squid, who responded by shaking an angry tentacle at them. Feeling very guilty, Ron chucked a piece of sponge cake into the lake for him as a peace offering. The tentacle grabbed the cake lazily and slowly sank back into the lake.

Hermione spent the afternoon sitting in the stands with Lavender and Parvati, cheering Ron and Harry on for Quidditch practice while trying to out-shout Malfoy and his despicable gang of Slyths, ws, who had come to try to disrupt the Gryffindor practice period.

***

All told, she’d had a wonderful day with her friends and was happily munching on a slice of pumpkin pie when Harry looked at the clock in the Great Hall. He had noticed teachers leaving the High Table, and poked Hermione.

“You’d better hurry, Hermione. Don’t you have detention with Snape at seven?” he asked.

“Oh God! You’re right, I’d completely forgotten.” She gathered her schoolbooks, and rushed off to Snape’s chambers, hoping that he wouldn’t show up so she could sithis his floor and do her homework like last night.

But when she arrived, she saw the light under Snape’s door and her heart sank. Gathering her courage, she rapped on his door with more confidence than she felt.

He appeared at the door and something struck Hermione at that point. His hair, usually greasy and limp, had been washed and seemed to hang more gracefully around his face. Dressed no his his sombre teaching robes but in a maroon jumper and woollen grey trousers, he looked…Handsome? Well, perhaps not, but certainly not as loathsome as usual. In fact, with his long, aquiline nose, his dark eyes and strong chin, he was rather attractive to her eyes.

“Just great!” she thought to herself. “Now I’m thinking like some heroine in one of those awful romance novels my sister likes to read. What are they called? Pierrot Novels... No! Harlequin Novels.”

Hermione was so engrossed in her reflections that she didn’t realise Snape was looking rather exasperated. It occurred to her that he must have just asked her a question.

“S-sorry?” she stammered.

“I said, what do you think you’re doing here?” he asked, growing more impatient by the minute.

What was she thinking, showing up on his doorstep on a Saturday night, dressed in a skimpy dress? A rather fetching, lime green, silky looking number with flimsy little Muggle straps. He noticed that she must have been sitting in the sun because a few freckles were cropping up on her nose and shoulders, and her skin had turned a shade darker than usual. One of the straps on her dress fell off her shoulder as she fidgeted nervously, and he could see the tan line. Her eyes were sparkling in the dim candlelight emanating from his front room.

“I… I thought you’d given me detention for the rest of the week?” she said.

“The week, Miss Granger, ends on Friday. Even someone from the Muggle world knows that, surely!” The minute it was out of his mouth, Snape wished he could have retracted it.

She took his reproach like a slap to the face. “So, he’s wearing his Slytherin colours tonight,” she thought angrily. “He obviously loathes me as a Muggle-born.”

How stupid she was to have thought he might be capable of any sort of kindness. He must have been possessed the other night when he’d actually tried to soothe her pain.

Snape watched as her nostrils flared in anger. An apology was on the tip of his tongue, but it died thereshe she turned swiftly and rushed away from his door.

“Miss Granger,” he called with more composure than he felt. “I did not give you leave to depart. Come back here immediately!”

Hermione felt her heart sink. She’d probably just lost Gryffindor ten more points for “insubordination”. She raised her chin defiantly and walked back to Snape’s door. Silence, she decided, was her best option. So she waited patiently for him to instruct her.

“Come in, please, and shut the door on your way in,” he said.

It took a moment for the penny to drop, and then she rushed in after him, closing the door and leaning on it for support. For she had just spotted his desk, with the meter stick leaning against it, and his bottle of Offley’s Reserve on it. A half-empty glass stood next to his pile of Potions essays. And music, something she never would have associated with him, emerged from an old Muggle radio.

Lost in the contradiction of it, she asked him, “If loatloathe Muggle-borns so much, why are you listening to one of their radios?”

He looked perplexed at that. “Miss Granger, whatever gave you the idea that I loathe Muggles?”

But Hermione wasn’t really listening. Sections of “Hogwarts: A History” were coming back to her as she asked again, “Come to think of it, how come that radio works at all? I thought all electronic devices stopped working once you entered the grounds at Hogwarts?”

“I see you’ve learned the history of this place rather better than you’ve learned to control that sharp tongue of yours,” he answered.

There was no reply to that. Not if she didn’t want another spanking with the meter stick. And then a wicked thought occurred to her. She’d provoke him, just to see how far he’d go before he snapped.

“Well, my tongue might not be so sharp if yours weren’t so poisonous,” she ventured.

And then she waited. He was turning three shades of red, but strangely, he didn’t utter a word for a good thirty seconds. It was obviously taking all his willpower not to rebuke her.

But then, with more honesty than she knew how to deal with, he asked her with as calm a voice as he could muster, “Miss Granger, why do you insist on provoking me?”

And now he was moving closer to her. Closing in on her as she felt her cheeks grow hot. The room began to sway a bit.

“Hmmm? Answer me that! Do you want me to punish you?”

He was only a foot away from her. Snape couldn’t believe she was acting this way. As he got closer to her, he could feel heat coming off her in waves. it it suddenly struck him. She had been given the Lust Potion too! It must be. Why else would an intelligent woman like her be practically begging for a confrontation?

Despite his better judgement, he got even closer. He must have been standing five inches from her. His whisper was just audible. “Do you want me to punish you?” he asked her.