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The Hogwarts Express was in pristine condition; all its windows gleaming, its paint refreshed, its cushions fluffed, the velvet of the seats and curtains looking brand-new. The students in the seats looked just as prepared. School uniforms pressed and ready, cloaks clean and unwrinkled. Trunks levitated precisely into the overhead racks.
But the atmosphere was subdued. The war still showed through. Groups of friends had changed; some shattered, some closer-knit. Faces were familiar but bore new scars and shadows in their eyes, haunted by what they’d survived.
Some students simply weren’t there.
Hermione sat quietly in a car with Neville, idly flipping through a copy of the Daily Prophet. For Hermione, Hogwarts was now the only thing she had left that had ever made her feel at home. Her parents remained in Australia without their memories of her, and the atmosphere at the Burrow was still bleak and sorrowful following Fred’s death.
Harry and Ron had gone directly to junior Auror training rather than returning to Hogwarts for one more year. Some of the muggle-born had opted not to return, their families thoroughly spooked by the events of the war. Politics and ideology had driven some to leave Britain, some classmates finishing their schooling at Durmstrang or Beauxbatons.
The train shuddered, followed by the squeal of the brakes as they came to an abrupt stop. Hermione tossed the Prophet to the seat, peering out the window, while Neville stood to look out into the corridor.
“What’s the problem?” he asked, stepping out and speaking to someone closer to the front of the train.
Hermione remained in her seat. A few moments later, there was a clamoring in the back of the train, shouts and thumps fraying her nerves. She peeked into the corridor. Though she could hear the conflict, she could see nothing. Her pulse raced, the hair on the back of her neck rising. She closed her compartment and shut the blinds to shield herself from view. Just in case.
Wand clutched tightly in her hand, she sat on the edge of the bench, listening and waiting.
A minute passed, then another, and the sound died down. Quick footsteps signaled an approach. When her cabin door slid open, she expected Neville, and was so shocked to see Draco Malfoy instead she nearly hexed the hair off him before she realized he was bleeding.
She watched him drop, panting, onto the bench opposite her. “What happened to you?”
He gulped a breath, letting his head fall back against the wall. “Got jumped coming out of the toilet. Smith and Boot.”
Hermione frowned. “What made you come in here?”
“Blinds were closed. Thought it might be empty.”
“I closed them.” The words just tumbled out. “I heard the commotion and it made me nervous.”
He eyed her warily, though he didn’t lift his head. Blood trickled down the side of his head into his collar, and he seemed unwilling to address it. “You, nervous?”
“Yes, well.” She sighed. “I’ve seen quite enough of conflict, thank you.”
“Yeah, you have.” His face darkened, and he looked at her questioningly.
It made her feel odd. Though, sitting in a train car with Draco Malfoy was strange by itself. Perhaps he felt just as unmoored as she did. Hermione’s shoulders were tight, so she rolled them to relieve the tense feeling at the base of her neck. The cabin shook gently as the train began moving again, and she watched Malfoy glance out the blinds into the corridor.
“You’re bleeding,” she finally said. Had his eyes always been that light? She wasn’t sure she’d ever truly looked at them before. The colour was a moody grey, and it reminded her of the cloud-covered sky. As he scanned the passage, she eyed the bloody trail leading into his collar. “Aren’t you going to clean that up?”
He snorted. “I intend to let the Headmistress see exactly what happened when she denied me early admission.”
“You wanted to go early?”
“I wanted to avoid the bloody train,” he grumbled.
She couldn’t help her curiosity. “Why?”
A strange blend of horror and confusion crossed his face as words spilled from his lips. “Because getting thrown off the train on the way to school for being a Death Eater would have been one of the easiest ways for someone to get rid of me for good and write it off as a terrible accident.”
Before Hermione could respond, he turned his head sharply. Footsteps were approaching the cabin. He bolted, leaving the cabin door wide open in his wake.
He also left a decidedly masculine cloud of cologne. Or aftershave. Whatever it was, she liked it. That, too, felt absolutely bizarre. With a huff, she whipped her wand out and cleared the air.
Moments later, Neville returned. “There was a tree down on the tracks. Was that Malfoy?”
***
Hermione arrived to her first potions class early, getting situated at a table close to the windows. It wasn’t the same classroom potions had always been in before the war: that part of the castle was under repair, and Slughorn had taken over what used to be Firenze’s ground-level divination classroom. It had large windows that looked out over the grounds.
As the other students filtered into the room, she watched them take their seats. She couldn’t help but notice the loss of non-returning students. There weren’t enough eighth year students to merit their own class schedule, so they were joining the seventh years. They had all been told to partner with each other where partnering was necessary during the welcome feast. But so far, none of them had come through the door.
Potions was her first class without Neville, and her first class having to sort a partner out on her own. Wringing her hands, she tried to recall who would be in the course. It wasn’t required after sixth year for students not pursuing a Potions N.E.W.T., so she wasn’t sure who to expect.
“Hello, Ms. Granger,” Professor Slughorn approached her table. He gestured toward the windows with a genial smile. “I see you’re thinking ahead.”
“Good morning, Professor. I thought it would be beneficial during brewing sessions to be able to crack the window,” she said. As he began speaking excitedly about her prospects as an eighth year, the classroom filled. From the corner of her eye, she watched Theo Nott and Blaise Zabini walk in together, taking the table in the last row. Not far behind them was Terry Boot, but he took one look at her speaking to Slughorn and averted his eyes. Zacharias Smith joined him a minute later.
Padma and Parvati entered and sat together; they had been keeping to themselves since they arrived. Dean walked in, but sat at the empty table closest to the door. Since Slughorn was still bending her ear, she felt rude interrupting him to wave Dean over.
“Well, my dear, I should let you get situated,” Slughorn finally said.
Hermione sighed in relief as he toddled off to the front of the classroom. Turning to perhaps coax Dean to come sit with her, she found herself too late, as Hannah Abbott had just taken the seat beside him.
Which left her the only eighth year to partner with when Draco Malfoy slipped into the room.
He hesitated in the back, catching her eye as she peeked back at the door again. Biting her lower lip, she gave him a small shrug. It seemed to take him a while to make his choice, but eventually he dropped into the chair beside her.
“Malfoy,” she greeted him. She tried hard not to breathe too deeply. At this distance, his enticing scent was unavoidable. As he pulled his bag into his lap, she noticed just how long his fingers were. Slender and pale, with neatly trimmed nails.
He had very nice hands.
“Granger.” Pulling supplies from his bag, he glanced her way. “Good table.”
She swallowed, forcing her focus back to her own things. “I thought so.”
“I won’t have anything but top marks in this class,” he said.
She looked at him warily. “Is that why you sat here?”
“There was an empty chair,” he replied. A muscle twitched in his jaw as he shifted in his seat, eyes to the front, where Slughorn was writing a recipe on the board.
“Better you than Smith.” It wasn’t until he snorted that she realised she’d said it out loud.
“Cheers to that, Granger.”
***
“So,” Neville began, sitting down beside her at the Gryffindor table. He swiped a roll from the plate in the center and bit into it, speaking with his mouth full. “I heard Malfoy’s your potions partner.”
“You’re as bad as Ron,” she complained.
He swallowed his bite. “Nah.”
“Both of you stuff your faces and then start talking as if it’s normal.”
“What’s wrong with multitasking?”
Hermione sighed and rolled her eyes, earning a chuckle. “Yes, Malfoy is my potions partner.”
“And?”
“And what?” Hermione picked at her plate. Nothing on it appealed to her. She hadn’t had an appetite all summer, though at Molly Weasley’s insistence, she had still eaten. It meant that she had put on the weight she’d needed after the war, but now that she didn’t have her surrogate mother force-feeding her, she wasn’t eating as much. She hadn’t even bothered with breakfast.
Neville watched her poke at her food with her fork. “Because you’ve gotten along so famously over the years. I’m just wondering how that’s meant to work.”
“We’ll make it work. Neither of us wants poor marks.”
“Fair enough,” he shrugged, taking another bite of his roll. “How is Ron anyway?”
“I haven’t heard from him or Harry since they went to Auror training,” she said. “I’m going to send an owl after I finish eating.”
“Are you even eating?” he asked gently, glancing at her plate again. “‘Cause from where I’m sitting it looks like you’re just pushing that broccoli around.”
She held his gaze for a moment before spearing the broccoli and eating it. It was cold and unpleasant, and after she swallowed, she followed it with a bite of roast with mashed potato.
“Want to work on that numbing charm after you send your owl?” he offered.
She brightened. “Yes, please.”
***
The next time they had potions, Malfoy got there before she did, and had the window already cracked.
“We’re brewing today,” he said as she glanced at it. When she turned to face him he gestured to the board. “It’s got glutinous bulbroot and unfiltered bobotuber pus in it. It’s going to smell terrible.”
Hermione wrinkled her nose. “Good call, Malfoy.”
He sneered, sliding slightly in his seat.
Though the voice in the back of her head told her not to engage, the question nevertheless came tumbling out. “What?”
“Everyone calls me Malfoy,” he muttered petulantly. “Is there something wrong with Draco?”
“I… no,” she said, furrowing her brow. “It bothers you?”
“Yes,” he barked. He looked confused, as though he hadn’t realized he’d said it out loud.
More came from her unbidden. “It’s habit, but I’ll try and break it.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
“Anything to get that sour look off your face.”
He frowned. “What look?”
“Like you’ve been passed over for a position on the Quidditch team,” she said. Again she felt out of control, as though every half-formed thought was just falling out of her mouth to die gasping on the table. To make it worse, she just kept babbling, despite wanting nothing more than to stop. “It would be terribly strange to see the Slytherin team without you on it after all those years of watching you and Harry do your strange, aerial penis-measuring dance.”
Her face had to be red because Draco looked wildly uncomfortable.
For a long second everything was silent between them, then words rushed out of him. “I did get passed over for Quidditch. There’s a third-year that’s built like a seeker and I’ve gotten too tall, and they had enough chasers established since I’ve been off the team for two years. I’m pants at beating.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” she replied, mortified. “I didn’t mean to make light of it.”
“You didn’t know,” he spoke over her. “I don’t know why I’m even–”
“Everyone’s settled in?” Professor Slughorn spoke over the din of the room, silencing every conversation. “Good, good. Today we’ll be brewing doxy repellent, as a favour to the headmistress. It seems we’ve got an infestation on the third floor.”
***
“Something odd is happening to me.”
“What?” Neville looked up from his herbology notes.
Hermione dropped into the chair across from him. “Every time I have to talk to Malf–Draco, it’s like I lose all control of my tongue.”
He barked a laugh. “I didn’t know you were into that sort of thing.”
“Neville!” she shrieked, earning a few shushes from nearby tables. She dropped her voice. “I am not—that’s not—It’s just that I can’t seem to control what comes out of my mouth around him. I just start… talking.”
“That sounds like a problem.”
“It’s horrifying! What if I just keep… telling him things?”
“Oh no! Human conversation!” Neville placed his hands over his heart.
“Stop it, I’m being serious,” Hermione frowned at him, trying her best to be stern.
Neville snickered. “Does he do it too?”
“That he speaks to me at all points to yes,” she said, leaning back. “I’m not exactly someone I think he would willingly tell anything.”
“True,” Neville nodded. “Well, I haven’t ever heard of anything like that before.”
“What do I do?”
He quirked an eyebrow. “We’re in a library, ‘Mi. Do some research.”
She couldn’t help but smile. Not knowing where to start, she approached Madam Pince. The woman was aging, wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and the sides of her mouth, but she greeted Hermione with a familiar warmth.
“Hello, Miss Granger. How can I help you?”
“I’m not sure where to begin searching,” she said. “Have you ever heard of a phenomenon where someone would feel compelled to speak in the presence of someone else?”
“Like a compulsion?”
“Maybe? The effects of Veritaserum, but without the introduction of Veritaserum into the system.”
“Hm,” the librarian nodded slowly. “You may be thinking of an alethic bond. They’re common in ancient histories and mythology. Particularly in early Greek. You may want to begin there.”
Hermione thanked her and made a beeline for the library’s collection of mythology. The first few books she flipped through didn’t pan out, but she spotted an enormous leather-bound volume on an upper shelf. Levitating it down and casting a quick scourgify to clean the cobwebs and dust from it, she flipped to the index.
Dragging her slim finger down the column of topics, she stopped on Aletheia, noting that there were a number of sub-headers, beginning with alethic bonds. Precisely what she needed. The book was roughly the size of her torso, so she levitated it back to the table.
Neville blinked at the book when it landed in front of him. “Merlin, that’s huge.”
“Madam Pince told me to look up alethic bonds,” she explained. “I went through a few books before I found this one.” She opened the book back to the index. “Look here. There’s dozens of citations in this book for them. I should have an idea after reading through them.”
What she found in the book shocked her.
Eventually, Neville’s voice came to her as though she were underwater. “Hermione? Hermione…” Neville waved a hand in front of her face. “Hermione!”
On the page in front of her was a floral description of an alethic bond. It was a literary paean to truth and transparency, an evocative and moving paragraph about the simple purity of finding one with whom you can share every unvarnished thought and desire that you have.
Alethic bonds.
Known colloquially as soul bonds.
Neville waved his hand in front of her again. “Hello? Hermione?”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” she croaked.
“What?”
“It’s soulmates,” she said, swallowing. Her mouth felt impossibly dry.
Neville reared back. “What? You? Malfoy? I think you read it wrong, read it again.”
“I’ve read it a dozen times!”
“Well read it again!”
Hermione let out a despairing whine and crossed her arms over the book, dropping her face into them. Draco Malfoy, the surly boy who had taken his insecurities out on her best friends, who had called her slurs and made fun of her appearance, who had stood witness to her lowest moments during the war, was somehow her soulmate.
And somewhere along the way she’d already developed a fixation on him. She refused to call it a crush. To call it a crush would give it agency. It would become a living, breathing thing that consumed her every thought and movement, and she’d never sleep again.
She’d just keep it to herself. She’d swear Neville to secrecy, bury it deep, and try to forget. She’d pursue a life of knowledge and learn to be happy on her own. She didn’t need a soulmate. She didn’t need anyone to be fulfilled. She’d just find one of those muggle hypnotists to make her forget that she ever found enjoyment in things like kissing and heavy petting. Or that thing that Viktor Krum had done to her with his fingers that had made her bite her own fist to keep from making any noise and left her thighs shaking for fifteen minutes afterward.
She would not think about Draco Malfoy’s hands.
She would not.
“You can’t tell anyone,” she said, jerking her head up and pleading with her eyes. Neville stared back at her with his jaw slack. “I just won’t tell him. I’ll go to America and make a lifetime of helping protect the pukwudgie.”
“‘Mi,” he said carefully. “Do you intend to never speak to him again?”
With a wail, she dropped her head back into her arms.
***
Hermione skipped her next potions lesson. When Draco came looking for her to figure out why, she yelped and ran in the other direction.
***
The tunnel to the Shrieking Shack was intact, if dank and musty. Levitating a rock to push against the knot that paralyzed the swinging branches of the Whomping Willow, she trod carefully over roots into the darkness beneath. She cast cleansing spells as she passed, finally emerging in the shack on the other side.
It was in terrible condition. It had already been derelict in third year, but since then it had seen worse, housing Voldemort for a time and judging from the mess, some of his Death Eaters as well. There was a hole in one wall large enough for her to crawl through, and she could hear creatures that had moved in over time.
It took her a week to clear it out. Repairing the holes in the walls was simple enough, but Boggarts and Acromantulas had settled into the old building. Between the spells she needed to eradicate them and her own reaction to the effects of their protest, it was an exhausting few days. But eventually she prevailed. Then, she transfigured the debris and detritus that littered the floors into a desk, a pile of cushions, and a couch.
Here, she could do her studies without losing hours to distraction in the boisterous Gryffindor common room. More importantly, in the shack, Draco Malfoy would never find her.
“Where have you been disappearing to?” Neville asked her a few weeks later. “I barely see you unless you’re sitting next to me in a class.”
“Here and there.” Hermione shrugged.
“Not meeting Malfoy in dark alcoves, are you?”
For a split second, a vivid image of her doing just that flashed in her mind before she tamped it down with a vengeance. She shushed Neville violently, glancing around to ensure no one heard him. “I am not! Keep your voice down!”
“You’re avoiding him!”
“Of course I am! If I get anywhere near him I’ll just blurt it all out and Merlin only knows how he’ll react when I tell him I’m his soulmate,” Hermione whispered, leaning in close. “I don’t fancy being murdered by his family before I can sully the purity of his family line.”
Neville scoffed. “You’re too famous to murder.”
“No I’m not.”
“You are,” he insisted. “Besides, you can’t get murdered. I’d be really sad.”
She snorted. “You’d better be.”
He grinned mischievously. “Yeah, my marks in charms would suffer.”
***
“Granger!” Draco’s voice carried over the crowd in the corridor. “I see you over there, Granger, get your slippery little arse over here!”
“My arse is not slippery!” she shouted back, ignoring the juvenile snickering that came from a few of the students moving between them. “Leave me alone!”
“You can’t avoid me forever! I won’t have our potions marks be worse than MacMillan’s!”
Ernie’s offended “Oi!” was followed by more laughter from around them.
Hermione scowled. They did need to do the work, and most of what they had left for this term was the things they genuinely could not do alone. But she also didn’t want to be face-to-face with Draco Malfoy, knowing that their alethic bond would cause her to blurt everything out. What she knew would spill from her lips, he would take it poorly, and she would find herself offended that he didn’t want her, even though she wasn’t even sure she wanted him, and wasn’t that just aggravating?
It would all be easier if he wasn’t so bloody tall.
It was normal to notice how tall someone was. She was a head shorter than nearly every boy in her year, it was typical to have to look up. But Draco had been roughly Harry’s height before. Now he was closer to Ron’s height, which meant he’d had a spurt over the summer holiday.
It was probably a little less normal to dwell on it incessantly even as she spent all of her mental energy trying to avoid him.
And to have dreams about it, well, that was decidedly not something she had intended. But it was bound to happen when she had to engineer her entire day around making sure she wasn’t alone with the man. Completely normal.
“Granger! Stop moving!” His frustration carried along the corridor. His voice was alarmingly close now, and she ducked to the left, shoving past a few fourth-year Hufflepuffs to hide in the old Muggle Studies classroom.
Before she could lock the door, Draco pushed it open. She tried to push back against it to keep him out, but he was larger and stronger than her. When he shoved again she toppled backwards and landed on the floor, legs sprawled in front of her, arms flailing behind her to keep her from slamming her head into the ground.
It all resulted in her awkwardly looking up at Draco Malfoy completely flustered.
“Merlin’s balls, Granger, you look like you’re trying to seduce me.”
“Is it working?” she asked, and her face heated with embarrassment. “I mean—that’s not—”
“I mean, you don’t really have to try,” he said. “For fuck’s sake, get up before one of us says something stupid.”
“Or anything at all,” she muttered, getting up as gracefully as she could manage. “Why did you chase me down like a maniac?”
“Why are you avoiding me?”
“Because you’re my—” she bit her tongue, trying to stop herself. Wincing, she clamped her mouth shut, fighting not to say another word.
“What are you—Did you just bite yourself?”
Hermione nodded, squeezing her eyes shut with the effort of keeping her words in.
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want to say what I was going to say, please stop asking me questions!” she shrieked.
“Why don’t you want me asking you questions?” he asked, his lip curling up. Hermione whimpered. He was being infuriatingly inquisitive, in addition to relentlessly looming over her like some sort of leaning adonis.
“I don’t want to talk to you!”
“Why not?” He stepped closer to her, forcing her gaze upward. “What don’t you want me to know?”
She gulped, trying to fight the effects of their bond, but it was no use. “That we have an alethic bond, Draco. We’re bloody soulmates, okay?”
He stopped, blinked, and took a step back. Her heart dropped into her stomach and to her horror, Hermione found that no matter what she had told herself, there was no bracing for a soulmate’s denial. That single step away from her, that flinching rejection, was already too much to bear.
Before she burst into tears, she shoved her way past him. “I don’t need to hear you tell me you’d rather die, I can see it in your face.” She fought to keep her voice from wavering. “I won’t skip Potions again but please don’t speak to me if it’s not about the bloody brewing.”
“Granger—” his voice followed her out the door, but when it slammed behind her, he didn’t chase after her.
***
Potions class became excruciating.
Draco would use those flawless, slender fingers to hold potions ingredients and a knife, slicing so precisely that his specimens were picture-perfect. His fine blond hair would fall out of its pristine, swept-back position over the course of the brewing, dislodged by frustration and by heat.
If the cauldrons were on full blast, there was no alleviating the sweltering temperatures in the room, open windows or not. On those days he would roll his sleeves up and loosen his tie, and the warmth of his body would make that delicious, masculine smell of him rise beside her.
She refused to ask him questions. The inside of her cheeks were raw from biting them to keep from letting words out. Beside her, she could feel the tension rolling off him as he seemed to do the same. He seemed to be doing his best to actually respect her request not to speak with her.
Inexplicably, this enraged her.
The effort was so much that she would sweat through her blouse over the course of the lesson. Beside her, Draco fidgeted, which tested her every nerve. They became adept at wordless communication, using quills and fingers to point at the text, gesturing at one another to get things done.
They made perfect marks.
Every week she left Potions class, marched with an unbridled, pent-up frustration all the way to the Shrieking Shack, holding everything in until she was safe between its aging walls. Only then would she let the floodgates open and cry herself hoarse.
***
“This is absurd,” he snapped, halfway through thinly slicing a wriggling segment of wormvine. He threw the knife down and mashed down on the wormvine with his palm, ruining the specimen but ceasing its infernal twisting.
“Draco!” she yelped. “Now we have to start over! The timing—”
“Sod the timing.” He grabbed her wrist and pulled her out into the corridor. “I wouldn’t rather die and I think it’s preposterous that you decided you knew how I felt about all this—” He gestured between them. “—Before even letting me process what you’d just told me. An alethic bond! I’d not heard of such a thing until you said it!”
“But I’m—”
“No, I think you’ve tormented me enough, you don’t get to talk until I’m done,” he said, clamping his wormvine-smeared hand over her mouth.
It was pungent and vile, but if she opened her mouth to protest she’d only get its fumes in her mouth. So she tried not to breathe and hoped he wouldn’t monologue until she asphyxiated.
“I looked them up, you know. There’s actually quite a lot in the library about them. I should have known you’d figure it out, you always were an interminable swot.”
She wrenched his hand away from her face. “You mashed wormvine into my face!”
“Quite frankly Granger, it’s your fault I’ve spent weeks trying to muddle through when to discuss this with you, so you only have yourself to blame.”
“You’re infuriating.”
“You’re presumptuous.”
“You’re aggravating.”
“That means the same thing as infuriating.”
“No it doesn’t, infuriating implies rage whilst aggravating implies more of an annoyance—”
“Shut up, witch, I’m trying to tell you I wouldn’t rather die than be your soulmate, doesn’t that mean something to you?” He heaved a great sigh, as though telling her was the most burdensome chore he’d ever taken upon himself. “I know I’ve done nothing to deserve anything good, never mind a lifelong attachment to someone as good and noble as you—”
“I once set Snape on fire to keep him from interfering with a Quidditch game.”
“I’m trying to apologize to you, you relentless pixie,” he crossed his arms.
“You are?”
“Didn’t you notice?”
“You’re distractingly tall,” she said. Her eyes widened and her cheeks warmed, and despite herself she giggled. Giggled. She covered her mouth with one hand. “I hate this fountain of truth thing. It would be nice to keep some things to myself.”
“Agreed,” he said.
“What do you mean? You’re so put together.”
“Granger, I have spent weeks trying to figure out how to talk to you about this without immediately discussing the way your shirt buttons pull over your breasts.”
“Oh.”
“I’m always roughly one of your lovely hairs away from waxing poetic about the way you make my penis hard,” he blurted out, immediately closing his eyes with regret. “Please change the subject. I beg.”
She smirked. “You beg?”
“Salazar’s leaking teats,” he muttered, throwing his head back and sucking in a deep breath. “Please. The potion.”
“Oh, all right,” she said, taking pity on him. “But only because you said my hair was lovely.”
“Especially the way it is now,” he babbled, tugging on an errant curl. “When you twirl it up like this and pieces fall out around your face.”
Her cheeks warmed. “Okay, maybe I don’t hate the fountain of truth.”
“Now you’ve got me talking about it, I can’t stop,” he said, twirling the curl around one of those long, slim fingers of his. “It’s softer than I expected. I suppose I thought it would be coarse because you always look like you’ve recently been hit by lightning.”
“I do not.”
“You do. Sometimes there are even sparks,” he countered. “But those are the times that I have the hardest time.”
“Is that so?”
He stepped closer to her. Her heart hammered in her chest, and the scent of him enveloped her entirely. She blinked up at him, watching with a mixture of disbelief and eager anticipation, as he brought his face toward her. He stopped a mere breath from her, speaking softly. “I always want to kiss you then.”
“Kiss me now,” she replied, and when their lips met, she found she had nothing more to say.