Six Days and Seven Nights

NIGHT 2

“You’re hurting your eyes,” Snape, I mean Severus, told me when it came time for bed last night. I had been bent over a book about Inferi and had been bringing the pages closer and closer to my face. I took the hint and went upstairs, but not without noticing that he was still squinting over his potions journal. He was giving me a chance to slip into bed on my own again.

When he came upstairs, I realized that he did not look at me this time. In fact, he decidedly avoided looking at me when he slipped under the covers. I wondered if he would again pretend as if I wasn’t sharing his bed, and I wondered how we would ever break the curse if things didn’t move along.

I needn’t have worried about that. This time he lay on his back for only a moment while he steeled himself for what he was about to do next. Then he propped himself on his elbow and stared down at me with that penetrating Severus Snape stare.

I think I liked it better when he wasn’t looking at me.

He bent over me and kissed me on the lips. My Gryffindor biases had gotten the better of me: I’d half expected a rotten taste—his teeth aren’t so good after all. Instead, he tasted like toothpaste—not the fresh, minty sort but the special licorice kind. It was sharp but crisp and suited him well.

He kissed me firmly but with his lips closed. I noticed his eyes were still open. He was studying how I reacted. I did my best not to show any hesitation. I remembered back to the days when Viktor and I would kiss by the lake. This was something I knew how to do. Wanting to prove to him that I was not completely ignorant in the ways of coupling, I flicked my tongue against his lips.

He faltered just a moment. I think he was startled to find me reacting so assuredly. Part of me swelled with the thought that I could surprise him with my knowledge of snogging.

He parted his mouth and let his tongue slide slowly over the length of my top lip. It was a far more sensual opening move than I had expected, and I opened wider to catch my breath. He repeated this move by running his tongue along the ridge of my teeth, and I wondered what he thought about my childhood buckteeth now. Not wanting to give him time to recall his former acerbic witticisms, I let my own tongue slip into his mouth and play at the base of his taught muscle.

Despite the intimate contact of our lips, I realized that little else of our bodies was touching. He had one hand placed on my shoulder for balance, but it had not moved since he had first bent over me. I wondered over his restraint. Viktor had always moved in for the grope. Physical being that he was, his hands had always been roaming. They had always been sliding under my shirt or down my neckline or up my skirt. I still remember those rough Quidditch-player hands and how there was little he hadn’t tried to claim with them. I had assumed it was the usual way of the male species. Even Cormac had tried to cop a quick feel under the mistletoe until I had threatened to hex him.

But Severus’s hands did not move an inch. Strange though it seems as I write this now, it was almost maddening how little contact the rest of our bodies had as our kisses became deeper and deeper. Finally, instinct brought my own hands, which had been lying limply at my sides, to his shoulders to brace both of us against the surprising ferocity of our snogging.

I had never imagined Severus Snape to be a good kisser. If I had imagined him as a sexual being—something I had previously spent a concerted effort not doing—I had imagined him wanting to get straight to the point. Foreplay seemed too intimate for him and might have risked betraying some kind of emotion. (Not that there was emotion now. These were not the impassioned kisses that made it into romantic movies, but there was nevertheless electricity behind them—electricity and skill and careful instinct.) Now that I thought about it, a kissing Snape made perfect sense. This was, after all, the man who reveled in the subtle art of potion making, who could spend hours waiting for his brew to simmer. Why wouldn’t he have patience in the art of sex? Why wouldn’t he carefully tend to each step in the process until his partner was completely turned on? I could even imagine him enjoying himself, relishing the power he wielded in manipulating the chemistry between him and his partner.

This thought made me falter as I realized that I was the one being manipulated. Severus sensed this hesitation and pulled away. He lay back down on his side of the bed.

“Is that…?” I began, wondering just how long we had been lying there kissing.

“That’s it for now,” he answered firmly. “Go to sleep.”

I did not argue, though I realized with surprise that a part of me—a newly-awakened part of my mid-regions—a wanted to. ‘Yes,’ I thought sensibly. ‘It’s best that we stopped when we did. He’s right that we shouldn’t rush into this. There’s no sense in doing something we’ll regret. Like he said, you only get this choice once, Hermione.’ So I curled up with my back toward him and tried to sleep.

* * *

I woke up some time later with hot breath at my neck. It startled me to realize that someone was bending over me in my sleep. It startled me even more to realize that that someone was Severus Snape.

Then I remembered how I had come to end up in my former professor’s bed. My heart slowed, just for an instant, before I then recognized the new level of insistence in Severus’s advances. He was nipping my neck with increasing passion, and it frightened me a little to see how aroused he had become without my participation. I wanted to take a step back and start again with simple mouth-to-mouth kissing…

But, oh, the way he sucked at my collarbone. There was no going back now, I decided, and when he worked his way around to the other side of my neck I leaned forward and let my lips do some exploring of their own. I caught his earlobe in my mouth.

“Careful,” he growled in a satisfyingly hot-and-bothered way, “or things will move faster than you had planned.”

I heeded his warning and kissed my way down his neck but made a mental note of that special place at his ear. Occasionally I would teasingly return to it, just to remind him that I knew that it was there.

During one of these nibbling forays, he drew away and steadied himself by capturing my mouth with his own. These kisses were far less heady than those off-terrain ones had been, but I was still eager to show him that I could hold my own. We sucked hungrily until we both had to gasp for breath. When he came up for air, I looked up at him, still scarcely believing that this was the man who had just taken my breath away. A bit of his course black hair had slipped from its ponytail. I reached up to push it out of his eyes and to study his face better, but he quickly shied away, opting instead to explore the v-neck of my nightgown.

Though his mouth explored to the hem of the gown and his tongue even slipped under the fabric covering my cleavage, I noticed that his hands still did not roam. He seemed determined to keep this a chaste affair, impassioned lip-work aside. I was partially excited to learn that a man and woman could do so much—we had been kissing most of the night—while actually doing so little, but another part of me was still anticipating the time when he would allow his hands to wander like his lips did.

I waited for more once his kisses started falling over the places covered by my nightgown. He dropped small kisses down the middle of my chest, his face getting lost in my breasts until he reappeared to set a deeper, hungrier kiss in the middle of my stomach. I leaned my head back in pleasure as he caught the fabric between his teeth and dampened my underlying skin with his warm and humid breath. Then he looked up at me with those immensely dark eyes, measuring the levels of my conflicting anxiety and desire. He disentangled himself from me and lay back down, this time for the rest of the night.

* * *

AN: Thanks for reading!