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“Daddy!” cries Rose as she toddles as fast as she can on her little three-year-old legs. Crookshanks meows loudly behind her.
“Rosie!” replies Ron with equal enthusiasm, scooping his daughter up as he drops his briefcase to the ground and closes the front door behind him. He pauses to give Crookshanks a scratch. “What are you still doing awake?”
As if in direct response, Hugo’s screeches come from up the staircase.
“Mummy’s busy,” Rose explains, wrapping her chubby arms around Ron’s neck and resting her head of wispy red curls on his shoulder.
“Let’s go see if we can help her, shall we?” he says, kissing her head, still damp from a bath. Impressive, he thinks. He had to pop into the joke shop for a few hours tonight. With two-on-one, kids in the lead, bath time easily falls by the wayside.
But then again, his wife always has been an overachiever.
Ron walks up the stairs to the second floor, Crookshanks purring as he winds around his legs. Straight ahead is the door to a small toilet; on the right is Rose’s room. The left is the nursery, where Hugo wails.
Ron pokes his head into the nursery. He and Crookshanks part ways in an unspoken agreement to hide their truce.
“Thank Merlin you’re home,” says Hermione immediately. “Your son needs you.”
“ My son?” asks Ron, raising his voice to be heard over the din.
“He’s yours right now,” insists Hermione. “Rose, let’s go read a bedtime story, shall we?”
At this, Rose perks up and Ron sets her down. He takes Hugo from Hermione, who gives him a relieved look and follows their excited daughter out the door.
“What seems to be the problem, mister?” Ron asks the angry seven month old in his arms. He pulls his wand from his back pocket, casting large, colorful bubbles around the nursery. He hums a soothing tune, something he can’t remember the words to, but recalls from his own childhood at the Burrow.
Hugo eventually quiets, eyes open in wonder at the bubbles as they float around the room.
Ron smiles contentedly. For much of his life, he’s been average. Between his best mate being the Chosen One and his wife being the brightest witch of their age, it’s hard not to feel inadequate sometimes. But when it comes to Rosie and Hugo, he knows without a shred of insecurity that he’s the very best at being their dad.
• • • •
Kids finally asleep, Ron collapses with Hermione on the sofa downstairs. She wears a faded pair of jeans and one of his Chudley Cannons t-shirts beneath a thin lilac cardigan. He still manages to get butterflies every time he sees Hermione wear his clothes, even after all this time.
“How was the product launch?” Hermione asks, absentmindedly reaching down to stroke Crookshanks as he walks by.
“Good,” Ron replies. “George was really grateful I was able to make it. Thanks for taking the kids tonight.”
“Of course. You had to be there to see everything you’ve been working so hard on.”
Tonight was a special event at Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes, the launch of a new line of toys Ron’s been developing for the last year and a half. They’re chess sets—some with pieces that give advice, some that swear loudly when captured, others that are unbeatable.
“How was work today?” Ron asks.
They decided to have Ron at home full time for the first year after Hugo’s birth. Hermione’s easing into her return at the Muggle Relations Office a few days a week. She missed regular adult conversation and the thrill of work ( what , precisely, was so thrilling about her employment, Ron would never understand).
“Had a terrible case come in; I think we’ll have to prosecute. Your dad’s involved, so I chatted with him. He asked if we’d be round to the Sunday roast. I said yes.”
“Right, George was mentioning that. Oh, by the way—picked up your glasses today.”
Hermione groans, throwing her arm over her face.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want glasses,” she whines.
“Your favorite part of the day is reading books to Rosie.”
“And?”
“Hermione, I know you have them all memorised and can’t actually read a damn word on those pages.”
Hermione gasps, and sits up to smack him on the shoulder. “Ron!”
The movement shakes a curl loose from her bun, and it rests at the nape of her neck, momentarily distracting him. He refocuses. “What’s the problem with having glasses, anyhow? Harry’s got them.”
“Harry doesn’t have reading glasses.”
“The difference being?”
Hermione lets out an almost hysterical laugh, loud enough to make Ron wince and hope she hasn’t awakened Hugo. “I’m getting old, Ron! I turn thirty soon, I nearly always have baby sick on me, I wear cardigans all the time—“
“You’ve always worn cardigans. And you know that nothing actually changes when you turn thirty, right?”
“Not helping!” she groans. “Some days I just… I just feel like somebody’s mother! And I know I am, and I chose this, and it’s amazing but sometimes I feel like that’s where my identity ends and I forget that I’m me and I’m not just a mum and now that I need reading glasses, I don’t even know who I am anymore!”
With that, Hermione bursts into tears.
Ron knows from extensive trial and lots of error that the best course of action when his wife gets overwhelmed is to pull her into his lap and rub her back until she’s finished crying. “You’re Hermione Granger,” he murmurs, pressing his lips to her temple. “You’re the brightest witch of our age. And because I love you, I’ll help you memorise all of Rosie’s new books so you never ever have to wear your reading glasses.”
Hermione lets out a watery laugh against his chest. “That’s ridiculous.”
He kisses the top of her head, then tilts her chin up so her gaze meets his. “It is. But you know that I would move heaven and earth if you asked, so teaching you children’s stories is easy in comparison.”
“Fine. I’ll at least try them on.”
“They’re on the kitchen table,” he says, giving her bum a playful squeeze as she moves off his lap.
• • • •
Five minutes later, they’re still in the kitchen. Hermione holds the frames as if they’re one of Hugo’s nappies.
“What if I look like Madam Pince?”
Ron hastily suppresses a laugh when he sees the sincerity on her face. “You’re far too short to be Madam Pince. Your hair needs to be greyer. And you’ll have to somehow start smelling of mothballs and learn to hate children.”
“How have I become some cardigan-wearing, glasses-wearing mum? I just want to be me again.”
“Once again,” Ron reminds, “you’ve always worn cardigans.”
Hermione scoffs, then hastily starts unbuttoning the jumper.
Ron steps into her space, putting his hands over hers and slowly taking over the process of unbuttoning. He hears Hermione’s breath catch. “What—what are you doing?”
“For the record, I think you look beautiful in lilac,” Ron murmurs, “and I’ve always loved your cardigans. But if you think you’d be better off wearing fewer clothes right now, who am I to argue?”
Hermione bites her lip, looking up at him as she blushes pink. Ron uses a heroic amount of self-restraint to not throw his wife over his shoulder, onto their bed, and make love to her right now. He loves that even though they’ve known each other for more of their lives than they haven’t, he still makes her cheeks blush and her heart stutter.
And then Ron realises what this is about.
Hermione isn’t angry about the reading glasses. This happened with Rose, too—it took her a while to come back to herself after the birth of their firstborn. And the glasses are making her feel less like herself.
She needs to know that she can still bring him to his knees. He wants her to know it, too.
“Just try them on. You don’t have to wear them all the time,” Ron coaxes, tucking a stray hair behind her ear.
Hermione bites her lip and nods. “Okay.”
As she slides the frames up the bridge of her nose, Ron’s heartbeat quickens. They’re black and rectangular, and the effect isn’t unlike that of a librarian—just not the Madam Pince kind of librarian. Her curls halo around her face, and that damn cardigan with his Chudley Cannons shirt—
The glass lamp in the kitchen pops. Hermione cries out, and Crookshanks streaks under the kitchen table in surprise. Ron grabs for his wand. “Sorry! Sorry! That was me!”
Now it’s Ron’s turn to blush.
He hasn’t let his emotions get out of control to the point of performing accidental magic in years, probably since the day he proposed to Hermione.
“Reparo,” he mutters, and instantly the light comes back on, glass shards gone. After a moment of thought, he waves his wand again. “Accio mirror.”
Ron hands Hermione the small mirror. He means for her to see what he sees.
“I look ridiculous in these new reading glasses!” Hermione cries.
“No,” Ron assures. He pulls the tie from her hair, shaking her curls loose. Seeing Hermione in her glasses has just awakened something in him, and he needs to see it through.
Hermione crosses her arms impatiently and raises an eyebrow as Ron adjusts the spectacles on her face.
“Perfect. Now say, ‘Your book will be due in one week .’”
A look of surprise passes over Hermione’s face. Then it changes. Her brown eyes darken, and she bites her bottom lip.
Ron tries valiantly to keep his hands to himself.
“Your book will be due in one week, Mr. Weasley.” Hermione leans closer, lips brushing his ear. “And if it’s late, there will be punishment. Is that clear?”
“Crystal,” he breathes.
No way in hell will he be returning this imaginary book on time.
He reaches out, a hand at the back of Hermione’s neck, the other reaching under her cardigan and beneath her— his —shirt, palm coming to rest over her rib cage. It makes him dizzy when he realises she isn’t wearing a bra. Slowly, he dips his head. Their noses brush. But she pulls away before his lips meet hers.
Ron groans in frustration. “Oh, no, Mr. Weasley,” she says huskily. “Not until you return your library book.”
Maybe the fact that he fell in love with Hermione Jean Granger over mountains of parchment and beneath stacks of books as she did his homework for him should have tipped him off, but Ron only now realises that perhaps he’s been secretly harbouring naughty librarian fantasies.
He swallows. And tries to force enough blood back into his brain to form an answer.
“Right. It’s…it’s this way.” He reaches out and their fingers interlock. He guides them into the small room off the kitchen that Hermione uses as her library and occasional home office.
She clicks the door shut behind them. He waves his wand, igniting flames in the candles spread around the room. The walls are a deep, royal blue, with dark wooden bookshelves—alphabetized, of course.
“I hope you haven’t damaged library property,” Hermione purrs. “Because there would be consequences.”
Ron was never good in school, but he knows the right answer. “The book is ruined.”
“Maybe I can…fix it.”
“Ruined beyond repair,” he clarifies. “Accidentally spilled firewhisky all over it.”
“Ron!” Hermione hisses, momentarily breaking character. “I still can’t believe you did that to my entire Lockhart collection.”
“He was a git,” Ron defends breathily, hands on Hermione’s hips and eyes never leaving her perfect lips, walking her backwards until she bumps the dark polished wood of the desk. “And I’ll do anything to make it up to you right now.”
Hermione looks up at him. The cardigan slips off one shoulder. The glasses perch at the end of her nose. “Anything?”
He drops to his knees before her. Partially because they’re too weak for him to keep standing; partially to more effectively beg. He can’t think straight when his wife is standing in front of him, looking like this. “Absolutely anything.”
“It was good of you to be honest about damaging the book.”
“Mmhmm,” Ron replies absentmindedly, fingers already at the button of her jeans, dragging the zipper down.
“But you will have to be punished.”
Ron tugs the trousers down over her hips and moans softly at the sight of her thighs. Soft, with light-coloured stretch marks. He can’t help but press an open-mouth kiss to one, and then the other.
Hermione lets out a little sigh. “I’ll let you choose how you’d like to earn your library privileges back.”
“Like this,” Ron says, pulling her jeans off the rest of the way and throwing them over his shoulder.
Hermione reaches down, taking him by the chin, forcing his lust-filled gaze upwards. “Can you be more specific, Mr. Weasley?”
“Let me taste you,” he begs. “Let me touch you.”
He sees Hermione’s chest moving as she inhales and exhales, knows exactly what he’s doing to her, needs her to be as dizzy with desire as he is. “Yes,” she whispers, “please.”
“Undress,” he orders.
Hermione discards the cardigan, then removes the glasses as she starts to pull off his threadbare orange Chudley Cannons t-shirt.
“Wait,” says Ron. “Take off the shirt, then put the cardigan and the glasses back on.”
Hermione smirks, then does as he asks. He sits back, admiring the effect.
She’s seated on the desk, books and parchment piled up behind her. Her curls tumble loose and messy down her back. Her eyes are wicked behind the glasses and her lips are swollen. The flickering glow of the candles highlights every glorious curve and dip of her body, breasts bare before him. The unbuttoned cardigan refuses to stay up on one shoulder, making Hermione look as if she’s already been ravished. As if she’s unraveling at the mere idea of what he’s going to do next.
Hermione leans back on her hands, arching as she does so. Her thighs fall open.
“Your punishment, darling,” Hermione reminds impatiently.
Ron wastes no more time. He can’t go another moment without her skin against his.
Grasping her by the hips, he roughly pulls her to the edge of the desk and hooks one of her knees over his shoulder. Ron presses a gentle kiss to her centre, over her knickers, then pulls the fabric aside. “You’re incredible,” he groans against the wet heat of her skin.
Hermione buries her hands in his hair. It’s been more than ten years, and Ron knows exactly what makes Hermione come undone. He licks a long, slow stripe against her before kissing and sucking and holding her hips tightly against him. She lets out a deep moan as he sinks a finger inside her.
“Hush,” he reminds. “Don’t wake the children.”
“No talking in the library,” she pants. “Be quiet.”
“Make me,” he retorts.
She tightens her fists in his hair and presses his mouth against her. He can’t complain, really. This is a far better use of his tongue than talking.
“Oh,” Hermione sighs, “oh, Merlin.”
Ron knows her body, feels the orgasm begin to ripple through his wife, and grasps her hips tightly, pulling her to him. Her thighs clench around his head and she shamelessly grinds against his face. “Ron!” she gasps, and the needy way she says his name sends a ferocious surge of desire down his spine. He only pulls away when she’s finished shaking, when she collapses on her back against the desk.
Ron’s mouth hangs open at the sight before him. His wife, in a stupor that he put her in, her breasts heaving against the open cardigan, now slouched down around her elbows, the reading glasses crooked.
He’s going to think about this image for days— years —to come.
“You,” he says, leaning over the desk and pressing the lines of his body against hers, “drive me insane.” He punctuates each word with a kiss. “With your cardigans and your reading glasses. Every fucking moment is the start of a brand-new forever with you.”
Hermione looks up at him with such naked emotion that his heart stutters. “I love you,” she whispers, before capturing his lips in a tender kiss.
Her fingers slowly move from his shoulders to the hem of his shirt. Ron breaks the kiss, pulling his shirt over his head. Hermione rids herself of her knickers. Ron pulls off his trousers and pants and they stand there a moment, bare in front of one another, both breathless at the sight.
Hermione stands up. The lilac cardigan falls to the ground, forgotten. A hand on Ron’s chest, she spins them so that now he’s the one lying back on the desk. She crawls over him, knees bracketing his hips. Ron gets lost in her warm brown eyes, her dark skin, the perfect curls springing out in every direction around her face. His finger traces her jaw.
“Darling,” Hermione says breathlessly, eyes fluttering closed. She leans her cheek into his palm.
“I know, my love.”
“Touch me,” she begs.
This isn’t a game of naughty librarian any longer. This is the raw meeting of souls, the kind of moment that teaches you love is made, not found.
Ron sucks in a sharp breath when she lowers herself onto him. He trails a finger along the side of her throat as she starts to move, hips rolling in little circles that threaten to bring him to the precipice of delirium. He traces her collarbone and gently pinches a nipple between his thumb and forefinger, rolling it until she groans and clenches around him.
“Fuck,” Ron gasps. “You still ruin me. Even after all these years and all this time.”
Hermione cries out, leaning forward and he holds her hips, thrusting into her. She bites his shoulder and he groans.
She knows exactly what he likes, too.
“I’m so close, darling,” she whimpers into his ear.
“Good,” he answers gruffly, hand on the back of her skull, pressing her body as tightly against him as he can, knowing that he can never have enough of her skin on his. “Come for me.”
She writhes against him, teeth on his neck, hoarse moans of pleasure in his ear, and he can’t hold back any longer, not when his wife—his life —is this perfect.
They fall over the edge together, blunt nails scraping over skin and teeth nipping at earlobes and torsos arching.
They lay there, breathing still ragged. Ron feels her heart flutter against his. Sweat cools on his skin. He inhales the warm citrus-scent of her hair, and draws his fingers lazily down her back, wandering over each vertebrae of her spine.
“You must think I’m ridiculous,” Hermione says sleepily against his chest. “Losing my mind over a pair of reading glasses.”
“I think we’ve just established that I’m the one who loses their mind over a pair of reading glasses, my love.”
His wife laughs, and knowing that he’s the one who drew it out of her makes it so much sweeter. “I love you for that.”
• • • •
Later that night, tucked into bed, Hermione folds herself around Ron. He sighs contentedly as she spoons him, warm breath fanning out between his shoulder blades. Crickets chirp and frogs sing in the night air blowing softly through their open window.
“I wonder how we got here,” she says softly, tracing the constellations of freckles on his back. “How we got this far. Through the war. Through our own indecision. Through Rose’s terrible twos.”
“I don’t really need to wonder at all,” replies Ron honestly. “I will always find you, will always fall in love with you, no matter what.”
Hermione presses a kiss to the back of his neck and he shivers. Then she turns away, reaching for her nightstand. Ron rolls over in time to see her wave her wand before she tucks her chin into his shoulder. A small ring of yellow butterflies circles their heads.
“What’re those for?”
“I should be over all the butterflies by now. But then you go and say things like that.”
“It’s the truth,” Ron replies simply. “And I’ll remind you of it as many times as you need me to.”
The butterflies eventually fly out the window into the summer night, leaving Ron to drift off to sleep with a smile on his face and his hand clasped in Hermione’s.