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We never touch.
We should, because we spend so much time together that it should be impossible it could be avoided all the time.
I thought so. But miraculously it is not.
He makes sure of it.
When we are preparing for the staff meetings, he slides at my side and keeps light conversation while I resist the urge to just brush at his hand on the table centimeters from mine.
When we are at the Great Hall, during meals, I try to always be near him and when I can’t think of anything else to say I ask for spices I don’t need just to see if his stiff posture eases a bit. It doesn’t.
When we join forces patrolling or spend an evening playing chess, his movements are so cautions and precise that I constantly find myself distracted.
We never touch.
However it doesn’t stop me from looking, from admiring, from... wanting.
I talk to him freely now, about my hopes, worries, theories and nothing at all. He listens in a way nobody else did to me before, like I am always saying something important and valuable.
I learn how to interpret his moods. He doesn’t speak much, but I can understand all of his silences - and some of his intentions behind his sarcastic remarks.
It shouldn’t matter so much that we never touch, I guess. Yet it does.
I know it means something, but I’m afraid to know and, because of it, I don’t ask. Or I didn’t ask before now; it is impossible to hold the question when just my raised hand in an expansive gesture makes him jump as if attacked.
“What’s wrong?”
I don’t have the courage - great Gryffindor am I, right? - to be specific, but he looks at me with a pained expression. I prepare myself for the worst and I don’t feel prepared at all.
“I fear that if I touch you, I’ll never be able to stop.”
I cannot believe my own ears, but I can believe his eyes.
“Then don’t stop”.
It is all that I’ve ever wanted.