Archive of Our Own ^beta

I tap the eraser of my pencil against my notebook, sitting through our evening of auditions. I have notes on who I think will be best for Christine; an odd woman named Luna from just over the hill with an amazing voice will be perfect. There are a couple of people who can fit for Raoul.

Other parts will be easy to fill. Except for one—Phantom. I just haven’t heard the right voice yet, haven’t seen someone with the right presence.

Usually, I’m incredibly attentive at auditions. I am a professional, after all.

But tonight my mind is elsewhere.

Ginny and I have been having a wonderful time. I’ll never admit it, but maybe she’s been right—a break has been nice. I even went a few hours today without checking my phone to see if there were any calls from work begging me to come back early (there weren’t).

Mr. and Mrs. Weasley have been incredibly kind to me, as they always were when I came to visit growing up. It’s just Ginny and I staying at the Burrow, with various Weasley siblings and their children popping in and out for dinner all week. Everybody is thrilled to get to see Aunt Ginny.

I haven’t seen Ron since he drove us home to the Burrow in stony silence. He opened my door for me, put my bag in the boot, and didn’t look at me once. Crookshanks hissed at him from his carrier.

Just because I haven’t seen him, though, doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about him.

His shoulders must feel so different. I’m itching to get closer to his tattoo, the one twisting all the way up his arm. Do his kisses still taste like spearmint? Can he still bring me to my knees?

Unusually for me, I start to fill in the margins of my notebooks with small doodles—cat pawprints and Phantom masks.

When I left him, Ron didn’t have a beard. He does now.

What would it feel like if I kissed him? If his mouth dragged its way down my body, bringing me to the edge in the way that only he knows how?

I scold myself for even thinking of this. I am a grown woman. There have been others since Ron.

But there’s never been anyone like him. As much as I wish he wasn’t, he is who I compare everyone to. And nobody has met my standards, the standards set by him.

I freeze, mid-doodle. Someone’s just gotten on stage, and they’re singing.

Not just singing. Performing.

A perfect voice for Phantom.

I glance up.

Of fucking course.

It’s Ron bloody Weasley.

He finishes, and I start with a slow clap, just like what he did to me when we first saw one another in the theatre last week. Ron gives a self-satisfied smirk and a wink, and I ignore the involuntary shiver it sends down my spine.

Damn him. 

I’m too much of a professional to give the role to someone else, not when he’s perfectly suited to it. I’ll need him to do a reading with Luna, of course. The role isn’t Ron’s just yet.

But then he and Luna sing fabulously together, and a week later, my worst nightmare has come true. Ron has been cast as Phantom. Luna is Christine. And a man named Cedric Diggory—decent actor, pretty face—is Raoul. An orchestra has been put together to play the music, and they’re far better than I expected. We have a pre-recorded track, of course, but Mr. Weasley wanted his time to shine with his bassoon, and set out to recruit a small live orchestra to supplement the show. Luna’s father, Xenophilius Lovegood, is on the keyboard and Ron’s brother Percy plays the trumpet.

Rehearsals are fan-fucking-tastic, except for one small detail.

The director and the lead actor can’t stand one another.

“Phantom is not in love with Christine,” I chastise. “Phantom is obsessed with her. From the top, with different feelings this time.”

“Phantom doesn’t know the difference! I like this spin.”

“Bloody actors,” I mutter. “Ron, I’ve been selected as the director, which means I must give you direction. And you must follow it!”

“You can give direction and listen,” he retorts. But he’s not angry. In fact, he seems to be infuriatingly amused.

I’m going to throttle the bastard. Shouldn’t he hate me? I left him all those years ago. He should hate me and not be amused by me. If he hated me, I certainly wouldn’t be having all these confusing feelings about him.

“Why don’t we take five?” suggests Cedric, who’s playing Raoul.

“Why?” asks Luna. “Hermione’s going to be just as upset with her ex-lover then, too.”

“Luna!” I snap. “Who told you that?”

She shrugs, taking a sip of water from her sticker-covered reusable bottle. “I can just tell these things.”

Ron has the audacity to cover his mouth with his hand and laugh.

“Fine,” I say evenly. “We take five.”

I go outside to take some deep breaths. The sun is going down, and I’m thankful for the thick cable knit sweater Mrs. Weasley insisted I put on this morning. The streets are wet with rain, but it’s cleared up enough to treat us to a wonderful autumn sunset.

“So,” says the last voice I want to hear right now. “What’s really going on, Hermione?”

The way Ron says my name makes a tiny, involuntary whimper escape my throat. I quickly cough to cover it up, hoping he’s not noticed.

“What’s going on is that you can’t follow my instructions, Ronald.”

He stands with his hands in his pockets. A long sleeve shirt today, faded with Fleetwood Mac tour dates listed on the back. Jeans. Red hair that’s just a bit too long, that curls at the back of his neck, and a scruffy beard. Freckles everywhere, freckles I used to trace constellations between using my fingers and tongue.

I squint.

The top of that damn tattoo is visible at the base of his throat. They look like words, though I can’t make them out from here. And is that a thin silver chain around his neck?

“Something’s happened,” Ron observes, breaking my concentration. “You can tell me, if you want.”

I huff and cross my arms. “I’ve told Ginny.”

“I might have different advice than my sister.”

I bite my lip. Ron is good at giving advice, I can’t deny that. He was always good at getting me out of a thought spiral, reminding me that not everything has to be perfect. The world was always in perspective with him at my side.

“I left you, Ron. I walked out because I had to go places that you couldn’t follow.”

He exhales slowly, and nods. “I don’t actually fault you for that, Hermione.”

“You should hate me,” I argue.

“Why?”

“I left,” I begin.

“It would have happened eventually. We would have never worked back then. You were just the first to call it. I didn’t want to travel all over for your career but I didn’t want to hold you back, either.”

Though Ron and I have been in the same country for a few years at this point, this is the first moment in nearly a decade that I haven’t felt the depth of an entire ocean between us.

It scares me.

“I think it’s been five minutes,” I whisper.

Ron’s eyes drop to my lips for barely a second before he nods. “I think it has.”

When rehearsal continues, I do my best not to bite his head off. And for his part, I think he stops deliberately trying to antagonise me.

This doesn’t mean we get along, though. It just means that we can stand each other now.

The night ends with me asking for everyone to email their availability for the next two weeks so I can schedule rehearsals. One challenge of community theatre—this isn’t anybody’s job. My actors all have work schedules and children to juggle. Picking our rehearsal times is going to be a headache.

Not to mention, I’ll be sentencing myself to time in the presence of Ron Weasley. Who apparently doesn’t hate me, but who I can’t help but feel awkward around and ridiculously attracted to.

It all makes me prickly and short-tempered.

—

When I arrive home at the Burrow, it’s late. Mrs. Weasley has left me a plate of food for dinner and a large slice of chocolate cake. I eat quickly with Crookshanks purring in my lap, then take the cake upstairs with a bottle of wine I picked up on my way home.

I deserve drinking, dessert, and a long hot soak in a bubble bath. Rain patters against the windows.

I poke my head into Ginny’s room; she’s sound asleep. In Percy’s old room, where I’ve been sleeping, I undress and put on my robe. As quietly as I can, I creep upstairs to the attic.

At the top of the staircase, the door on the left leads to Ron’s old room. But the door on the right leads me to the biggest, deepest, most luxurious clawfoot bath I have ever had the joy of soaking in.

I start running a steaming hot bath, adding nearly half a bottle of bubbles. A book of matches and a few candles sets the perfect relaxing mood. Dragging over a tiny table, I set down the plate of chocolate cake, the bottle of wine, and my beloved paperback copy of Persuasion. My unruly curls get pulled up into a loose bun. Up here in the attic, the pitter patter of the rain is loudest. I shrug off my robe and slip in the bath before the autumnal chill can sink in.

The hot water is divine. Mrs. Weasley’s chocolate cake is heavenly. When I sit back and open my book and take a long sip of wine, I let out a contented little sigh.

This is amazing, actually.

Not that I’ll ever tell Ginny that she was right.

But doing something outside my usual bubble I think has made me more creative. Already, new ideas for Shakespeare’s historical plays are pouring into my mind. And the break has been nice, too. There’s nothing more perfect than a candlelit bubble bath with a bottle of wine and a favourite novel.

I sigh, more relaxed and happier than I’ve been in weeks. This whole scene is completely cosy and utterly perfect.

A door shuts loudly from downstairs. I shrug and turn the page. I hope Crookshanks isn’t up to any naughtiness.

Quiet steps on the staircase. Perhaps Ginny up for a midnight snack.

But the steps keep coming up, climbing higher and higher towards the attic. Maybe Ginny woke up, saw I’d arrived home from rehearsal, and fancied a conversation?

Crookshanks comes running in, tail high and meowing as if the house is on fire.

Or perhaps, just warning of the arrival of a particular firefighter.

I recognise Ron’s voice as he grumbles to himself while stomping up the steps. “—no regard for basic fire safety, good thing I saw it from the window—”

Crookshanks and I make eye contact as he sits on the sink. It’s as if I expect him to tell me what to do in this situation. Jump out of the bath and grab a towel?

No, there’s no time for that.

The door—which I didn’t even shut all the way, let alone lock—bursts open to reveal Ron in the same clothes as earlier.

“Oh,” he says casually, blinking. “Hey.”

Really? Hey? I reach for the bottle of wine and take a swig. His eyes track the movement, settling on the clump of bubbles now very conveniently hiding my nakedness from his sight. “You show up here, interrupting my bath, and all you can say is hey?”

Ron backs up to leave. “I thought Ginny was leaving candles unattended again. I saw the flickering from the window outside. I’ll leave.”

“Yes, Ron!” I hiss. “Get out!”

First he ruined my rehearsal, and then he confused me with his adult muscles and his secret tattoo and his beard, and now he’s interrupted my bath? I take aim and throw my book at his retreating back. It misses, hitting the wall instead before falling to the ground.

Ron pauses. “You’ll be wanting that back, won’t you?”

I say nothing, hoping that he can feel my glare.

“Still the same favourite book, I see. Maybe not much has changed.”

“Everything has changed, Ron,” I retort. “We are not the same teenagers who—”

Ron leans down to pick up the book and practically stalks over to the bath. Crookshanks abandons me, bounding down the stairs. “The same teenagers who what, Hermione?”

“Who—who fell in love!” I say defiantly. “Is that what you wanted me to say?”

Ron crouches down next to the clawfoot bath so that we’re eye level. He holds the novel out like a peace offering. I take it and set it on the table next to me. Ron heaves a sigh, running his hand over his face. “I don’t want you to say anything. I just want—I want—”

“Spit it out, Ron. I’d very much like to get back to my evening activity.”

He looks at me, and the pain in his eyes makes me regret snapping. “I just want to be friends again, Hermione. You were my best one.”

I look away from his gaze, then up at the ceiling to hold in the tears that suddenly threaten to spill over. “You were mine, too.”

“Then let’s start over. I think it’s good that we’re different people now. We’ve grown up.”

“Okay,” I say, biting my lip. I look over at his face. His eyes are so blue, and without thinking, I reach out a hand to touch one of the freckles on his cheek. It always was so easy with him. He made me feel so…myself. Like I could give him the world, because I was his world.

Ron’s eyes flutter closed, and I trace down to his beard, along his jaw. My eyes drop to the delicate silver chain on his neck. When I get to his chin, I pull my hand back into the bath and suddenly become very aware that save for a curtain of slowly disappearing bubbles, I am naked in front of my ex-boyfriend.

Ron lets out a long, slow breath before opening his eyes.

“Sorry. You had a bit of dirt on your nose.”

“Did I?”

“You did.” (He didn’t.)

“What have you been up to, Hermione?”

I shrug. “Directing plays at the Globe.”

“Tell me everything since New York.”

“Oh. Well, I graduated from NYU, and worked at an internship in the city for about a year following graduation. Then I moved to Paris and apprenticed with a director there for three years. After that, I was traveling a lot with a company based out of Buenos Aires. I transferred to Melbourne for two years, and then got the job here. I missed England, and being in one spot. It’s hard to make friends on the road, and I’m not really the best at it to begin with.”

“Wow,” Ron whistles. “That’s pretty incredible. I’ve just been here. I’m the assistant fire chief, and the folks on my team are some of my very best friends. That’s actually why I stopped by and saw the lights in the window in the first place. Someone down at the station dropped off a gift for Mum, so I left it down in the kitchen for her.”

“That’s sweet,” I say, trying and failing to not imagine Ron the Firefighter, wearing his helmet and a sweaty white t-shirt beneath a pair of suspenders and his uniform pants. Or Ron the Firefighter, rescuing cats from trees (rescuing my cat from a tree), or carrying children in his arms to safety as they escape a deadly house fire.

God, I need to get a grip.

“Why are you here, Hermione?” Ron’s question shifts my focus away from firefighter fantasies.

“Because I had a long day and fancied a bath.”

“No. Here. In Ottery St. Catchpole. Not working.”

I shrug, and the movement creates little waves that push the bubbles away from my body. I meet Ron’s eyes as they dart up to my face after briefly falling lower. “I’m on a forced break from work. And Ginny thinks I should quit.”

“What?”

“Oh, Ron,” I sigh, “I don’t need advice right now. She just thinks that the kind of art that I want to produce is very different from what the Globe is looking for, and that I’d be happier elsewhere.”

“Is she right?”

“No. The Globe is a very prestigious and competitive place to direct. I’ve been dreaming of it my entire life.”

“That’s not the answer to the question that I asked.”

I close my eyes and lean my head back against the lip of the bath. For just a little while, I wanted to escape. I didn’t want to be an adult with an entire life to control, I wanted someone else to tell me what to do, and now I have to think about things. “I don’t know,” I say quietly. “I don’t know if she’s right.”

The truth astounds me. I don’t know if Ginny’s right. I don’t know if I’m really happy there, or even getting to do what I want to do.

But how mad would I have to be to leave the Globe Theatre? I adore Shakespeare; there’s no better place to share his work than on that stage.

“That’s what this break is for, then? To decide if you want to keep working there?”

“I don’t know, Ron, and frankly, it’s none of your business!” I snap. He’s pushed me too far, and I’m still in the damn bath and I can’t stop thinking about touching him. He needs to leave before I do something ridiculous.

“Come off it, Hermione. It sounds as if this break is a good thing for you. Good luck thinking your decision over.”

“There is no decision to think over,” I fume, looking him dead in the eye. “I’m going back to London, and this was stupid! We could never be friends again, I should just return to my real life, and stop wondering about your—”

I stop, chest heaving, realising that I’ve been leaning out of the bath to tell Ron off, and our faces are now very close and my nipples are very nearly out of the water.

“What do you wonder about, Hermione?”

“Nevermind.”

Neither of us makes any motion to move apart. I look down at his neck, and see the words of the tattoo twisting beneath the necklace. Before I can decipher them, Ron’s finger touches the mole on my shoulder and the world turns so still I’m convinced it’s stopped spinning entirely. The only sounds are the raindrops on the windows and our nervous breaths.

“You still have this mole.”

I snort softly. “It’s a bloody mole, Ron, where the hell would it have gone? Think I could’ve left it in Paris?”

His finger moves very slowly, catching beads of water on my skin and stopping at the dip above my collarbone.

“Do you ever wish you could just let go?”

I bristle, having been told often by friends and romantic interests that I should just “let go.” It usually precedes them leaving. “I’m fine the way I am.”

“You’re perfect the way you are,” Ron reassures so naturally that I can’t help but believe him. “I was trying to ask if you ever get tired of being so goddamn in charge all the time.”

It’s almost like he’s inside my mind.

“I love directing.”

“But managing your career and its impressive upward trajectory? Putting on all these incredible plays, always creating something original for a story that’s been told over and over for five hundred years? Taking care of yourself, being on your own?”

“I’m fine on my own,” I say stubbornly.

Ron quirks a tiny smile, his finger starting to draw abstract patterns over my wet shoulder again. “So you are alone? You’re not seeing anyone?”

“Ron!” I gasp, and splash some water out of the bath at him. He sputters, but is laughing.

“I had to ask!”

“And what if I was?”

He turns serious, and tucks a curl behind my ear. The contact is electric. I feel him touching my face like this—tenderly, gently—the first time we ever kissed, on our first Christmas holiday together after I left for university, and on the night before I left him. Ron’s hand stays on my face, gently twisting the curl in his fingers. He murmurs, “Then I’d wish nothing but the best for you both. You’re still the person who was the best friend I’ve ever had. I do not have you anymore, but I have always had love for you.”

I close my eyes and hold his wrist in my hand, keeping his fingers tracing the skin of my ear, my cheek, my nose. “I’m scared,” I whisper into the gentle silence between us.

“Of what?”

“Making the wrong choices. What if my ideas for adaptations really are terrible? What if I’ve wasted my life to achieve highly in a job I hate?”

“Hermione, sweetheart,” Ron says, the endearment slipping out as if we were lovers only yesterday. He cups my face in his palms and tilts my head to look him in the eye. “You love the theatre. Just because you don’t know if you love working at this theatre doesn’t mean your career has been a waste. It’s normal for your career to take a different trajectory than what you planned when you were eighteen. And you have two entire months to think about it.”

I nod, and lean my forehead to touch Ron’s. His breath catches. Our mouths are so close, the air between us really no boundary at all. I lift a shaking hand to touch the tattoo, and I recognise the words.

“Sonnet 23?” I ask. He’s a firefighter and has a Shakespeare tattoo? This isn’t fair anymore.

When he nods yes, our noses brush.

“O, learn to read what silent love hath writ,” I whisper.

“To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit,” Ron finishes.

His hands fall from my face, along my throat, my shoulders, tracing a collarbone and then the curve of a breast. Our breath mingles, neither of us crossing the point of no return.

“Holy hell,” I say shakily.

When Ron speaks, his voice sounds shattered into a thousand pieces. “Tell me to stop.”

I say nothing. His hands keep wandering. The back of my neck, along my jaw.

“Tell me to leave again, sweetheart.”

“I’m so tired of being so goddamn in charge,” I breathe against his lips. It sounds like I’m begging.

“What are you asking me?”

“Whatever you want to do with me, just say it. Tonight, I’m yours to control.”

Ron protests. “I don’t think that’s quite how consent works—”

I want him so badly I can’t think of anything but the way he smells of freshly cut grass and a hint of something smoky and how he could touch me in that way only he can and if I don’t get a taste of him I’ll surely lose my mind. But I’m so tired of choices and control and I want it all to be his. I grew up alongside this man while he was still a boy and I know that he’d never hurt me.

“I trust you. Right now, my body belongs to you, and only to you. Please, darling?”

The sentence has barely died on my lips when Ron grabs me roughly by the back of the neck and closes that millimeter of distance between our mouths. I groan loudly at the feel of his tongue touching mine and he bites my bottom lip.

“Fuck,” he whispers into my skin. “Fucking hell.”

With both hands I grasp the front of his shirt and tug him closer, not ending this ferocious kiss. All the oxygen in the room has disappeared, and we are each other’s survival. His beard scratches roughly, contrasting with the softness of his tongue as he traces little bites and licks and kisses down my jaw to my neck. His hands grasp my hair, tugging it hard, and my body is pliant and entirely his.

The bubbles have almost entirely disappeared from the bath, and Ron is pulling me so close that I’ve gotten the front of his shirt completely wet, but I don’t care and it appears that neither does he.

He inhales deeply, then bites and sucks at my neck, and I’m afraid it’s going to leave a mark.

Scratch that.

I hope it leaves a mark.

“Ron, darling,” I gasp. “Closer. More. Please.”

Suddenly, Ron stills in my arms and pulls back. He stands, hands bracing behind him on the sink. I stand then, too, water dripping from my body. From here, I can see both Ron and my reflection in the mirror behind him.

His chest heaves as if he’s just run from a burning building, eyes wild and hair mussed. He stares hungrily at my body and it physically hurts to see him look without feeling his touch. Need consumes me; but his skin against mine will not put out this inferno. It will only stoke the flames higher, and paradoxically, if I do not beg him to burn me all the way to ash I think I will crumble.

“You still smell like lilac,” he accuses.

“You still make me fall apart when you call me sweetheart,” I retort, not sure why we’re suddenly fighting.

“Fuck. Fucking fuck.”

“Why did you stop?”

“Get out of the bath.”

I obey, and stand dripping on the bath mat. He’s so thoroughly undone at the sight of me I don’t for a moment think to feel self-conscious about my body. “Will you keep going?”

A muscle in Ron’s jaw tenses. He reaches towards me, and softly traces a knuckle along my cheekbone. “I have absolutely no self-control when it comes to you, sweetheart.”

I bite my lip and look up at him.

“I can’t be trusted when my hands are on your body.”

“Shut up and touch me, Ronald.”

He slides down to the ground, his back against the cabinet beneath the sink. Ron Weasley sits looking up at me, and I catch my breath when I look myself in the eye in the mirror. I look positively ravished.

“Do you see yourself?” he says hoarsely. “Do you see why I can’t be the one to touch you, why I can’t hold back?”

“I never asked you to hold back.”

Ron smiles and laughs a strangled laugh. “Oh, but I have to. You’re going to ruin me all over again.”

“Then leave,” I taunt. “I’m asking you to leave, just like you wanted me to earlier.”

“I’m going to let you do the leaving, actually, since you were so good at it last time.”

“Arsehole!”

“Sit on the edge of the bath and tell me if you can see yourself in the mirror still, sweetheart.”

My heart thuds loudly, rapidly, out of control. “Wh—What?”

“Did you or did you not say that your body was mine tonight? That I was the one in control?”

“Oh my god,” I choke out. I think this is perhaps the most erotic thing to have ever happened to me. “I believe I did.”

“Then sit.”

I do.

“Can you see yourself?”

In the mirror, I’m visible from the chest up. My breasts heave, with soapy bubbles still clinging to me in places. My shoulders, my neck, my face, my hair now half-falling out of the bun I tied it into at the start of the bath, damp curls spiraling at the back of my neck. “Yes. I can see myself.”

“Good.”

“Do you still want to leave?”

“Fuck, no.”

Ron grins. “That’s it, sweetheart. I love it when you don’t hold back, when I can make that pretty mouth swear. You’re doing so good for me.”

My eyes go wide and a flush creeps up my neck in the mirror. Nobody has ever spoken to me like this in my life.

I think I like it.

“Spread your legs.”

My thighs part, and I surrender full control of my body to his words and the way they make me feel. Ron stands, walks over to the bathroom door, and softly presses it shut. The lock clicks, closing the two of us in this room that feels increasingly small the more turned on I get.

“Oh,” I breathe.

Ron returns to his seat, looking up at me with such adoration that it hits me like a drug. It alters my very consciousness and erases inhibition.

“Tell me what to do, darling.”

“Touch yourself exactly how you wish I would.”

I drag my fingers down my chest, across my belly, arching into my own touch before circling my clit.

“Slower,” Ron says, voice low.

I whimper, but do as he says.

“Slower,” he says again.

“I can’t,” I gasp.

“You will,” he counters, and he’s right.

My fingertips move so slowly. I huff in frustration.

“Do you want more?” Ron asks.

“Yes,” I whine.

“Too bad. Stop.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“Oh, sweetheart. I already have.”

“Fuck!” I swear, now gripping the edge of the bath with both hands to keep myself from ignoring his command and touching myself anyways.

“You’re such a good girl for me, aren’t you, sweetheart? You love it when you get things right, and you love it even more when I tell you so.”

“Are you trying to kill me?”

“No,” Ron smiles. “Just reminding you that your body is mine to control.”

“It’s yours.” The words spill out of me without thinking. “I’m yours, all yours, just please, please, please, I need it so badly—”

“Drag one finger from your knee up your inner thigh.”

My breathing is laboured as I do as he says.

“Pinch your nipple.”

I cry out.

“See? This is why I needed you to do this for me. Because when you’re making these sounds, I can’t hold myself back from ruining you for anyone else.”

“Please.” I’m begging now, entirely without shame.

“You’re doing so well, sweetheart, just another moment.”

Ron drinks me in, and when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I can see why he’s so undone. Lips slightly parted as I pant, knuckles white as they grip the edge of the bath, thighs shaking slightly in need as I let him control me; control my body.

I am water to him, life-giving, thirst-quenching, but every sip of me he lets pass between his lips I can see gives him equal parts relief and agony. He needs me, and I can only make him burn hotter.

We lock eyes, and everything goes honest for a moment. An inhale, an exhale. Ron is my first love and I know his soul, but I find myself wanting to know who he has become. I never knew he was someone who could do this.

“Ron, darling,” my needy, broken voice asks.

“Okay,” he says with a nod, and the heat takes over. “Go ahead, sweetheart, do what you need to do.”

My fingers on my clit though I’m imagining they’re his; my wild, fiery eyes caught in the mirror, and Ron at my feet, giving me murmured instructions that strip all thoughts from my mind. 

There is only me, and what he tells me to do.

It feels glorious to relinquish control like this. My breaths come ragged and he’s telling me to slow down and speed up. Every time, I follow his command, and each time Ron praises me for it. I’m delirious. I am no longer made of thoughts, I am real and a body and I am here in this moment and am a collection of sensations.

The cool porcelain of the bath. The slick sounds of my fingertips, now teasing, barely circling my clit, just as he’s told me to. Scents of lilac and sex hang heavily in the air. And there’s my reflection, flushed and needy, and I can’t stop staring at what Ron has done to my body, at the way he’s made me just let go. It feels divine.

“I’m so close,” I whisper as my legs begin to shake.

“Not yet,” Ron tells me again. “You’ve stayed on the edge so perfectly sweetheart, exactly as I’ve commanded you to.”

“I have,” I whine, and I keep going, even though it’s taking so much of my focus not to come.

“You’re such a good girl for me. Outstanding. You can stop now.”

I cry out in frustration. When I look at Ron, I’m so close to bending over the bath and begging him to fuck me; the only thing that stops me is that he promised I would be his tonight. That I wouldn’t have to think or ask, that he would only deliver.

So far, he has.

“You’ve outdone yourself.” He stands. I look up at him. He runs his thumb along my bottom lip before dragging it down, exposing my teeth. Our eye contact is ruinous.

“Let me come,” I hear myself plead.

He smiles. “You deserve a reward like that, don’t you? But sweetheart, you’ve done such a perfect job following orders so far, you won’t fail me if I give you a final one, will you?”

“I don’t fail,” I retort. The need to please and the desire for praise is so great that it obliterates any other possible response from my mind.

“Good,” Ron smiles, and that word drives heat through every nerve ending on my body. “I didn’t think you did.”

“What is it?”

He leans down, putting a hand on either side of me on the edge of the bath, his mouth barely brushing my ear. “You’re not going to come until it’s against my tongue or around my cock or on my fingers, sweetheart. And I have to go home now, and I know you won’t finish what we started here tonight without me, because you’re such a good girl, and you do not fail to follow orders when I give them to you.”

My eyes flutter closed. “I’m going to kill you.”

“No, you won’t, Hermione. Because you’re perfect, and your body has been so impressively under my control this entire night.”

Ron Weasley walks to the door as I sit there, still burning on the edge of an orgasm, staring daggers.

“Outstanding,” he reminds with a wink.

And then he’s gone.

Unfortunately, he’s right: I can’t bring myself to disobey.

I ignore the part of me that insists there will be a next time. There shouldn’t be. He’s my ex. But holy hell, if that was what he did with his words…

I can’t wait to see what the rest of his mouth can do.