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Cormac fucking loves summer.
He loves how the days stretch themselves out, endlessly long and shimmering with heat, how the sun beats down and burns freckles into his skin; he loves how blue the sky is and how slow time seems to pass, loves the sweltering buzz of the water bugs and the coolly refreshing glide of aloe-slick palms, the sand and the rocks and the brittle brown pine needles that coat the bottoms of his feet; he loves the slightly bitter tang of ice-cold beer on his tongue and the bright white layer of zinc oxide smeared across his nose, the freedom of forgetting and the weightlessness of floating, and he loves the bonfires, the ghost stories, the charred sugar and the melted chocolate and the curling tendrils of smoke and the girls—he really loves the girls.
But summer has an expiration date.
It's fundamentally impermanent.
And then there's Hermione Granger.
"Dibs," Cormac says, squinting across the shallow part of the lake to where the new counselor is diligently inspecting inflatable canoes with Malfoy and Wood.
Flint looks up from his iPod speakers and barks out a laugh. "Like fuck."
"Just because your type is boring and terrible and obsessed with—"
"Like fuck," Flint hisses, more vehemently, expression turning mutinous. "I don't—who even told you—whatever. We're not talking about me."
Cormac snorts and drains the rest of his Bud Lite. "Well, we're not talking about me, either."
"You're right," Flint agrees. "We're talking about how hard you're gonna strike out with the mathlete over there."
Cormac tilts his head to the side. "You think she's a mathlete?"
Flint reaches for another beer, popping the tab with one hand and flipping his hat backwards with the other. "Her shirt's tucked in. That's, like—rulebook shit."
Cormac hums thoughtfully. "Still hot," he decides.
Flint shrugs. "Still gonna strike out."
"Nah," Cormac says, clapping Flint's shoulder as he moves to stand up. "I've got this."
He does not, in fact, have this.
"Hey," Cormac calls out, offering the new counselor his most charming smile. "I'm Cormac."
"Hi, Cormac," she says carefully. HERMIONE, her regulation white name-tag sticker reads. "What do you want?"
He crosses his arms over his chest, flexing his biceps, and gestures to the canoe paddles stacked haphazardly at her feet. "Just thought I'd offer to help you out with the, uh, the—canoeing. Stuff. Since you're new here, and all."
She blinks, looking confused, and then straightens her spine. "Are you—are you serious?"
Cormac's smile twitches wider. "Like a heart attack, babe."
She grimaces. "No."
"What's that?"
"No," she repeats, unnecessarily loud. "I don't need your help."
"Oh." He frowns. "But—really?"
She rolls her eyes and goes back to the pile of air pressure gauges she's been organizing. Or counting. Or something. Cormac doesn't actually know.
"Really," she states flatly. "You smell like beer."
He pauses. "Well, yeah."
She presses her lips together. "You're a counselor."
"Technically, camp hasn't started yet, so I'm not—"
"It's not even noon," she continues, talking over him, scribbling in the margins of the color-coded spreadsheet she keeps checking. "And there's no way you're twenty-one. God. You're an authority figure."
Cormac scratches at the back of his neck. "I mean. It's summer."
"And?"
"It's summer," he says again, plaintive and a little helpless.
"I don't see what that has to do with—"
"Hey! Granger! I found the—the thing! The life raft thing!" One of the Weasleys—Cormac can't tell any of them apart, it's really fucking weird—is shouting from the doorway of the boathouse. "Hurry up!"
Hermione huffs, tucking her clipboard under her arm, and flicks an irritated glance at Cormac's bare torso. He's not used to girls looking at him like this. Like he's an idiot. An unattractive idiot. It's kind of alarming.
"So, like—you'll be right back?" he blurts out.
She wrinkles her nose, skirting around him to make her way to the far end of the dock. "Not if you're here."
His mouth falls open.
On Monday, the campers arrive.
Five thirteen year-old boys descend on Cormac's cabin, duffel bags full of contraband—shaving cream and AXE body spray and multi-packs of Twizzlers, mostly—and it's kind of a shitshow for a few hours while they awkwardly share their names and wrestle for prime bunk space and exchange horrified, accusing glares when Cormac gets to the part of his introduction speech about jerking off in the communal showers because—
"No matter how quiet you think you're being, I can guarantee it isn't quiet enough," Cormac says sagely. "Questions?"
The boys shove at each other, throwing elbows and punches as they mutter furiously under their breath, before the tiniest one, Dennis Creevey, raises a shaking hand and asks, "Do you have a girlfriend?"
Cormac grins.
He snags lifeguard duty for that whole first week.
"Are you even certified?" Hermione demands when she sees him sitting in the second deck chair. She's wearing a bright red one-piece and a pair of white denim cut-offs, a gleaming silver whistle around her neck and a hilariously oversized first-aid kit in her arms.
"Like, for lifeguarding?" Cormac asks.
"Like, for anything," she retorts, producing a bottle of SPF 150 from the depths of her bag. He tells himself he's not going to watch her put it on, but that's probably a lie.
"Dunno," he says innocently, spreading his legs and slouching farther down in his seat, "why don't you test me?"
"Test you on what? Keg stands?"
"Babe, you don't have to get me drunk to—"
"Do not finish that sentence," she interjects, reaching up to tie her hair into a surprisingly messy bun.
Cormac winks. "Not in front of the kids, I get it."
She sighs. "I really don't think you do."
"Anyway," he goes on, undeterred, "of course I'm certified for—stuff. Like CPR. I'm certified for that."
She turns—very, very slowly—to look at him. "CPR," she echoes, something like disbelief coloring her voice. "Is that what you wanted me to test you on?"
He smirks. "You know it."
Hermione clenches and unclenches her jaw, a dollop of sunscreen streaking the length of her right arm, and he can't help but notice that her skin is already a deep, dark bronze in the late morning light. Smooth. Silky.
"Look," she snaps, "I don't—I’m not here to hook up, okay?"
Cormac considers that for a second. "So, like...you want me to take you to dinner first?"
Her eyes narrow. "I want you to leave me alone."
"Oh," he says, kind of nonplussed. "Okay. But—just to be, like, clear or whatever—you're not playing hard to get?"
In hindsight, he doesn't know why he's so shocked when she pushes him into the lake.
On Saturday, Cormac gets back from his morning run just as the sun is beginning to rise.
There's a hush blanketing the camp's surrounding forest, the sky bleeding pink and blue and orange where it's peeking through the trees, and a pleasantly lukewarm breeze is blowing through the common area in front of the cabins. He's dripping with sweat, throat dry and chest heaving, his t-shirt sticking to his skin—he has to peel it up and off his lower abdomen to wipe at his face, and that's when he hears it.
A twig snaps.
A twig snaps, and then there's a faint choking sound, and then—
"Hermione?" Cormac calls out, lowering his shirt. "Is that you?"
Hermione reluctantly emerges from the path that leads up to the administration building. She's in threadbare cut-offs and an oversized gray tank top with some kind of faded coat of arms printed on the front. She's fucking blushing.
"Um," she says, fumbling with something in her hands. "Yeah, it's—me. Hi. Hello. Good—morning?"
Cormac bites down on the inside of his cheek to hide his smile. "Uh, yeah," he says, rubbing the back of his neck. "Good morning. What are you even doing up?"
She licks her lips, studiously avoiding his gaze. "Announcements. I, um, volunteered. To do them. What about you?"
He raises his eyebrows.
"Right," she says hastily, gesturing to his Nikes. "Of course. You're—running. That's obvious."
"My body is a temple," he agrees solemnly.
She wrinkles her nose. "You ate nothing but chili cheese fries yesterday."
Cormac rolls his shoulders back. "I mean, I'd for sure do that again, to be—wait, what is—" He cuts himself off, leaning forward to snatch what he now suspects is a CD case out of the cradle of her hands. "Is this—"
"Oh, my god, don't—"
"FARM ANIMAL SOUND EFFECTS," he reads, starting to grin. "You bought—is this for the—"
Hermione's face, already flushed a hot, mesmerizing pink, is practically glowing. "I can't find the—the chicken!" she says. "I think I lost him, or let him out, or—or something, and I read the rulebook three times, okay, I know that upholding, um, upholding certain traditions is exceptionally important for the camp experience, so I—"
Cormac bursts out laughing.
Hermione presses her lips together and makes a move, jerky and furious, to stomp back up to the administration building.
"No, no, babe, it's not—there's no chicken," he explains, grabbing her elbow to stop her from leaving. "There's never been a chicken. It's a—joke, kind of? An initiation thing?"
She stares up at him, a thick chunk of hair escaping her ponytail, and he's standing close enough that he can see her eyes are a clear tawny brown, softer than he might've expected, framed with long lashes and currently cloudy with uncertainty. He's reminded, abruptly, of the airport gift shop paperweight is dad had brought him from Arizona once, a big desert scorpion encased in a pool of thousand year-old amber. It had drowned. Or suffocated. Or something. Cormac had thought it was fucking morbid at the time, but maybe it hadn't been. Maybe he just hadn't understood.
"Rooster," Hermione finally murmurs, a begrudging note of amusement creeping into her voice. "It's a rooster, not a chicken."
They play the CD.
The piercing crow of a rooster crackles through the speakers posted above the cluster of cabins on the far side of camp, and Hermione starts laughing halfway through the first track, quietly, helplessly, lips quivering and nose scrunched up—but then she's dropping her forehead onto Cormac's shoulder, hair tickling his chin, and he's sweaty and he's gross and he desperately needs to stretch and shower and shave, but—
But it's kind of nice, just sitting there.
A few days later, he figures out that Hermione might actually secretly be the camp's worst counselor.
"No, Astoria—don't—you can't—why did you dye your hair?" Hermione's tone is somehow both exasperated and frantic. "Where did you even get—no, no, please don't cry—"
"Yo," Cormac interrupts, slinging an arm around Hermione's shoulders and peering down at—Astoria, apparently. Astoria's eyes are red and puffy, her cheeks tearstained, and her hair is an unnaturally brassy shade of orange. "What's up?"
Astoria sneers at him, which is honestly kind of impressive. "What do you think is up?"
"Bleach," Cormac answers promptly. "Bleach is definitely what's up. Where'd you get it, sweetpea?"
Astoria's lower lip wobbles. "I—my sister—Daphne—she said—an hour—"
"Oh, man," Cormac groans. "An hour? No wonder you look like the world's saddest carrot."
That startles a giggle out of Astoria, and Cormac can feel Hermione's gaze boring into the side of his head. He tamps down on the urge to fidget. He isn't the one who made a twelve year-old girl cry. He has nothing to be defensive about.
"So," he goes on, keeping his voice light, "we've got good news and bad news. What do you want first?"
Astoria hesitates. The bands of her braces are neon turquoise. "The bad news?"
Cormac nods approvingly. "So, the bad news is that Hermione's gonna have to write you up for the bleach. I know, I know, buzzkill—but the good news is that we can totally fix this. You won't have to hide in your bunk forever! High five!"
Astoria giggles again, slapping his outstretched palm. "Okay," she sniffles. "How do we fix it?"
"Well," Cormac says, squeezing Hermione's shoulder and flashing her a quick grin. She looks—baffled. And flustered. And overwhelmed. And adorable. And—"We're gonna need to run to the store."
The drive into town is pretty fucking awkward.
"So," Cormac starts, drumming his fingers against the steering wheel of one of the camp pick-up trucks. "You suck at this, huh?"
Hermione scowls as she fiddles with the scrolling wheel on the bottom of an air conditioning vent. "Why do you know so much about hair?"
He raises his eyebrows at the deflection. "My mom's a hairdresser. Before I was old enough for, like, after school stuff, I pretty much lived at the salon where she works."
Hermione pauses. "Oh."
"What?"
Her expression turns pinched and slightly sour. "That's—not what I was expecting you to say."
He cracks his knuckles. "Yeah? What were you expecting?"
"Just." She flaps her hand. "That you learned it from—girlfriends. Girls. Hook-ups. Whatever you—call them."
"Whatever I call them," Cormac repeats, wishing, belatedly, that he'd remembered to bring his aviators. The glare of the afternoon sun bouncing off the windshield is fucking brutal. "I mean—I call them...by their names? What the fuck?"
Hermione puffs her cheeks out and exhales, noisy and impatient. "That's not what I—never mind. It doesn't matter."
He clears his throat. "I don't...there haven't been that many."
"Excuse me?"
"Girls," he clarifies, haltingly. "There haven't been that many. And—even if there have been, it's not. It's not a big deal."
Hermione doesn't respond for a while, and all he can hear is fuzzy radio static and the gravelly thud of the truck's tires lurching over potholes in the road. His heartbeat's a little loud, too. Pounding in his ears like a fucking waterfall.
"You're good at this," Hermione eventually says. Her posture is stiff. "The campers—they like you."
Cormac taps the brake pedal to maneuver around a fallen tree branch. He kind of feels like they're having two completely different conversations. Like maybe he said the wrong thing, or maybe she did, or maybe they both just—missed the point. It's not a particularly comfortable thought.
"Yeah, well," he says, forcing himself to relax, to curl his tongue around his teeth, to smirk like he really means it, "I'm good at lots of things, babe. You should let me show you."
She sighs, sounding as beleaguered as she does relieved, and that's it. The weird, vaguely unsettling tension between them evaporates.
Cormac idly wonders where it went.
It takes four days, three phone calls to his mom, two boxes of ashy blonde dye, and one more packet of bleach powder to get Astoria's hair back to something that almost resembles normal.
"Thank you thank you thankyou!" she exclaims afterwards, beaming up at Cormac like he'd single-handedly rescued a litter of kittens from, like, a house fire. Her smile visibly dims when she turns to Hermione. "Thanks to..you, too. I guess."
Hermione emits a wounded squeak of outrage.
Cormac snaps a leftover latex glove against the back of her thigh to distract her.
Two weeks later, their days off coincide.
"C'mon," he whines, sprawled out on her too-narrow bed as she sits cross-legged on the floor, meticulously organizing a pile of glitter dusted construction paper nametags. "Let's go do something."
She looks over at him. "We are doing something."
"No, we're not."
"Yes, we are."
He huffs. "I'm bored."
"Okay," she says simply, shuffling through the glue sticks in her lap. "That's nice."
Cormac purses his lips, heaving himself up onto his elbows so he can see her better. She has tan lines on her shoulders from the straps of her bathing suit and a faint smattering of freckles on the bridge of her nose and dark, sun-dappled streaks of auburn in her hair; she looks like summer, the gentle slope of her spine and the narrow curve of her waist, and he aches—bright and fierce and so, so sweet—with how badly he wants to touch. Taste. Memorize.
Summer always ends, though.
He knows that.
He does.
"C'mon," he says, more seriously. She meets his eyes. He doesn't blink. "Let's go do something."
She swallows, hands frozen on a roll of masking tape, and he holds his breath as he waits for time to speed up, to unstick itself from the roof of his mouth and the pit of his stomach and the empty space between his tonsils, and then she's licking her lips and tucking an errant strand of hair behind her ear and whispering—
"Okay."
The next couple of days are almost a blur.
He takes her to the unmarked little dive bar off the old highway that never cards and smells like stale beer and French fry grease, buys her her first shot of tequila and steals quarters out of her wallet for the jukebox—and she knows all the words to "1969" and she uses honest-to-god math to beat him at pool and her teeth are a little bit too big for her mouth when she smiles, really smiles, and Cormac has to pelt her with a dusty peanut shell to avoid blurting out some truly embarrassing shit—
She teaches him how to properly stack canoes, and he teaches her how to whistle with just her thumb and forefinger. She learns not to bring up his dad and he learns not to ask her about what she's majoring in.
She tells him about ten years' worth of ballet classes, the control and the discipline and how dangerous it was, to have limits and not be willing to accept them—and he tells her about hockey and football and water polo and how he couldn't ever pick one, how he liked winning, liked scoring, liked the adrenaline and the focus but not the details.
She's ticklish.
He isn't.
She's brilliant.
He isn't.
She's fascinating.
He's--
Fascinated.
The Friday before Fourth of July is a movie night.
"This is bullshit," Flint mutters, glowering at an enormous beanbag on the opposite side of the lodge. Wood's sitting there with Pansy Parkinson, looking politely pained. "This is such fucking—"
"What's what?" Hermione asks, dropping into the vacant seat next to Cormac. She's wearing thin cotton pajama shorts and a stretchy red tank top.
"Nothing," Flint says darkly. "Nothing's what."
Hermione furrows her brow. "Okay, well—"
"He's just pissed we're watching Transformers again," Cormac says, faking a yawn so he can drape his arm along the back of the couch. Hermione's hair is slightly damp where it's brushing his wrist. "Isn't that right, buddy?"
Flint's nostrils flare. Wood is now pouting at the instruction manual for the projector, Blu-Ray remote clutched between his teeth, while Parkinson plasters herself to his side and shoots increasingly obvious glares at one of the Weasley boys. Cormac still can't tell any of them apart.
"I swear to god," Flint hisses, "I'm going to—"
"Oh, look, the movie's starting!" Hermione interjects cheerfully, flashing Cormac a small, conspiratorial grin.
Cormac looks down at her, categorically unable to stop himself from staring, and then nudges her leg with his knee. "Hey," he murmurs. The lone overhead light that Wood left on flickers, just the once. "You want to get out of here?"
On-screen, the opening credits begin to roll.
She bites her lip.
When they get outside, the moon is high and round and a patchy silver-white in the sky. The air is still warm, a lazy kind of heat that seeps slow and easy into his bones, and the surface of the lake is a sharp, pristine navy where it reflects back a twinkling tangle of stars.
"I, um," Hermione says, gingerly sitting down at the end of the boat dock. "I wanted to talk to you about something."
Cormac joins her, tugging at his board shorts and sneaking a glance at her bare thighs. "Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah," she replies wryly, a muscle working in her jaw. She looks nervous. "I just—wanted to ask. And it's—fine, it's more than fine, even, if you don't—anymore—"
He laughs a little. "Wait, what?"
"You haven't tried to—do anything. With me. Not since we met."
Cormac's mouth goes dry. "You, uh, you were pretty clear about...not wanting me to. Do anything. Try anything. With you."
She makes an impatient sound in the back of her throat. "That was before."
He prods at a scab on his lower lip the tip of his tongue. "Before what?"
"Before you started treating me like a person instead of a—a conquest."
"Conquest," he repeats, and he doesn't quite manage to conceal how fucking fond he suddenly feels. "That's what you thought was going on?"
She frowns. "Isn't it?"
"Maybe," he admits, because he's a lot of things, not all of them as awesome as she probably deserves, but he's not a liar. "But—it's like—that was before."
She knits her fingers together and swings her legs, toes just barely skimming the water. "Before what?"
He hesitates.
But then he shifts, slightly, moves closer, leans forward to study her face—her features—and she's always so much softer than he expects her to be, so much more vulnerable, and it registers, finally, that maybe she isn't, usually. Maybe it's just for him.
"I wanted to kiss you the first time I saw you," he says, because he did.
Her smile trembles. "Yeah, I—I got that."
"I still want to kiss you," he says, because he does.
"I—oh."
He slides his hand around to cup the nape of her neck, and then quietly confesses, "But why I want to kiss you—I think—I think that's different."
He feels her go still, feels her breath stall and stutter, feels how her nose grazes his cheek and her lips part, catch, drag against the corner of his mouth—
She tilts her chin up.
He ducks his head down.
They meet halfway.
Summer's going to end.
Cormac knows that.
But he's thinking about autumn now, about changing leaves and hot apple cider and competitive pumpkin carving and the ugliest couples costumes he can possibly find—
He's pretty flexible.
He's got a lot to look forward to.