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“I-I don’t know what I’d ever do without Ron,” Hermione murmured into the hands tented over her nose and mouth. “I feel like I’m crazy to be thinking like this. He’s a great man, a great father to the kids. I...the way I see it, our marriage doesn’t have the same passion anymore, and it hasn’t for a while.”
Hermione Granger tilted her head toward the ceiling of Neville’s office, her brown eyes rolling backward as they glistened with unshed tears. Their parent-teacher conference to discuss Rose Weasley’s performance in Herbology had devolved into whatever this was. Neville Longbottom had greeted his old friend with the simple courtesy of a so, how are you doing? – a question Hermione heard too rarely, based on her breakdown before him. A long, rattling breath was followed by a I’m awfully sorry, Neville. I mean, Professor. I really should get back on topic.
“There’s no need to apologize, Hermione. Really. And please, it’s just Neville and...I can’t pretend to make things all better but I’d hope I can give you some form of comfort. It’s the least I can do after you saved my arse in Potions and Charms...everything but Herbology, way back then.”
The corner of Hermione’s lip twitched upward in a faltering, lopsided smile that graded into another sob.
“I feel like I haven’t been able to say this to anybody because it’s just wrong, you know? We’ve been together since Hogwarts and I know I’m lucky that I haven’t had to date around not being able to make anything last.”
A painful stab of recognition hit Neville, more reminiscent of cold dread than the catharsis that usually followed such realizations on his own state of affairs. For years, Neville had been grateful that he wasn’t alone, that someone as clumsy and lacking in social graces as Neville Longbottom had managed to pair up and start the semblance of a standard adult life. And he’d married well, according to his grandmother and friends. Hannah Abbott was a kindhearted, simple woman who opened her hand to all who sought her comfort or affection.
Their relationship dated back to his final year at Hogwarts, when the heady mix of hormones and the impending prospect of death made him crave a woman’s love. Neville had first asked Hannah for a date after Luna Lovegood – his first real object of affection – declared her engagement to Rolf Scamander. She’d responded with her dimpled smile and an okay, that sounds good to me. Their bond deepened through shared trauma and the stress of leading a revolution together, and Neville continued seeing her in large part because she never rejected him. Not like Luna, not like Ginny or the other girls he asked for dates. Then came their daughter – Amy Longbottom – followed by a son – Frank Longbottom. Augusta had lavished her affection on both grandchildren, spoiling them rotten to the point where their parents struggled to recalibrate them once they returned from their visits. His interest in Hannah as anything other than a friend and partner had long faded, and what remained of their marriage was a husk bound by inertia, social pressure and the necessities of parenting.
“You’re not crazy. You’re the last fucking person on the planet who I would ever think was being crazy.”
I know you’re not crazy because I feel the same way, he finished. If someone as grounded and sensible as Hermione shared his feelings, Neville couldn’t be unhinged for harboring regrets about his own relationship. The urge to speak his own feelings sat on the tip of his tongue, but he held back because speaking his dissatisfaction aloud would tempt him into acting on them. When Neville acted on his less constructive emotions, the results were often disastrous, and he couldn’t afford to throw his children’s future into disarray over something so petty. Rather than turn their conversation into a commiseration, Neville swiped the tissue box from behind his chair, and placed it in front of his friend.
Hermione blotted her eyes and blew her nose into a crisp white sheet, then disposed the used tissue in Neville’s wastebin.
“Anyhow, we were here to talk about Rose, weren’t we?”
“We were. That’s true, but that can wait. I’d like to make sure you’re okay first, before you worry about your daughter’s marks in my course.”
Though their conference had been scheduled well in advance of Hermione’s expressed doubts, Neville slid Rose’s student files beneath a stack of unimportant reports on his desk. Whatever deficiencies Rose demonstrated in his course, Hermione’s current predicament took precedence in his mind. His heart swelled when he watched Hermione, a woman he knew as a headstrong girl full of confidence and ideas, wither into a grieving mess. He leaned forward on his forearms, waiting for Hermione to meet his eyes again and either accept his invitation to comfort or attempt to yank their conversation back on course. If she tried, Neville knew he could scarcely bear to slide back into his role as Professor Longbottom at least until he had reassurance of her recovery.
“Thanks,” Hermione whispered. The tips of her fingers swiped at the corners of her eyes before she brought her hands back to rest on the edge of his desk. “I appreciate you being good about all this.”
“No worries.”
Some impulse drove Neville to reach his hand across the expanse of his desk to touch the backs of Hermione’s fingers. Hermione stared back with wide eyes and a slackened jaw, a gasp tensing her core. Despite her initial shock, she accepted the gesture, and relaxed her hand into his warmth after a moment. Neville’s thumb wormed into her palm and ran across her skin. The sparks that ran up his skin hadn’t made themselves known for years, at the very least. Those were the sparks of connection with another human being that confirmed their touch wasn’t just a function of incidental contact or obligation. The joining of their hands was more intimate than all the fucking he did with Hannah – and for all the breakdown in their sense of closeness, they still had sex at least once a week.
Staring into her lap, Hermione balled her hand into a fist, then retracted it. She, too, must have perceived something more than friendship in his touch. Neville’s heart fluttered, happiness bubbling in his chest at Hermione’s presence next to him. The unfamiliar lightness that came with sharing her company wasn’t one he felt around his wife, to no fault of hers. When they spoke about their days, or anything but the children, their sentences trailed off into half-words and digressions to hide their lack of synergy. Neville struggled to fill the space of his conversations with Hannah with something anything that could spark more than a few sentence-long exchanges. Even momentary gaps in the flow of words between them didn’t mellow into the comfortable silence he’d been able to share with Luna – or that he shared with Hermione now.
“You’ve come all this way for me, so I reckon we could at least go for a lunch or a picnic. Or something of that sort. Up to you, though.”
“I suppose there’s always Hogsmeade, but I don’t like the idea of feeling like a student again. We could take a walk about the grounds, though. I’d like that.”
Neville swept an outstretched hand toward the door, giving Hermione a mock curtsy that crippled her in a fit of giggles. He trailed after her into the greenhouses full of germinating magical plants – still curled toward the earth in that way new plants had, but soon to be in bloom. Though autumn turned the leaves outside the greenhouses to crimson and gold, Neville felt the tentative warmth of spring. Neville circled through the sprawling open spaces of Hogwarts alongside Hermione more times than they could count, relishing the freedom that came with no longer alone in his marital loneliness.
While he and Hermione walked their meandering, circuitous path, so too did Neville’s wedding band circle round and round his finger. Several times, he felt its weight drop on his ring finger, slipping past his knuckles with an ease that tempted him to let it fall off altogether. Yet Neville caught the ring before it could drop, the weighty piece of metal tethered to him not only by marriage vows, but by family. Children, the home they shared, the possessions they had in common. By inertia – that rule of naturewhich kept things in place that already were, and made a different life so much harder to imagine.
Neville Longbottom knew inertia was a powerful bind to break. Once he’d declared his vows of eternal loyalty and love for Hannah, breaking his vows would be difficult. Yet she failed to stir the same flash of excitement incited by a simple conversation with Hermione Weasley – or Granger, as she’d always be to him. He retired to bed the night after his reunion with the cold metal of his wedding ring weighing on his finger, alone because Hannah’s duties as proprietor and chief bartender at the Leaky Cauldron kept her up late. The chill from the night air seeped through his skin and into his heart, a discomfort brought on by more than the drop of temperatures. He shuffled into the center of the bed to make the emptiness less perceptible to his sprawled limbs. The clock on Neville’s nightstand read midnight, meaning he had two more hours until the Leaky Cauldron made its last call for drinks, and Hannah could come home.
In his sleepless state, Neville twisted his wedding ring around the fourth finger on his left hand to salve his nervous excitement, or lull himself into sleep with the monotonous motion. Every twist of the ring around his finger came with the welling of another thought – I don’t want to do this anymore, I sure don’t feel lucky to be here, we’re hardly a family. The ring rolled over his first knuckle, then it slipped over another knuckle. A few more twists of the ring between the index finger and thumb of his right hand slipped it off his finger altogether. The ring dropped into Neville’s hand before falling onto his pillow. Rather than slip it back on, he set it on his nightstand – gently, and without anger or spite.
The barely audible click of metal on polished wood snapped Neville to attention with newfound clarity. For the first time that day, his head – beset by the competing demands of head and heart – finally stopped spinning round and round.