Hermione used both arms to brace herself against Severus's chest, pushing herself away. "No?" she demanded, her eyes glittering in her anger and incomprehension. "No? You're saying no to me?"

Severus grasped her wrists as she made to turn away, not tightly, but with all the strength of one used to pounding items to the finest powder with mortar and pestle. "I am, dear one."

"Dear one?" she sneered, pretending nonchalance since escape seemed impossible. "Hmmph!"

"Yes. Dear one. Do you promise to stay and listen, if I let you go?"

"I don't have a lot of choice, do I?"

---

"You always have a choice," Severus said, loosening his grip and turning his back as he made his way to the kitchen window. He opened it several inches before he fumbled in a drawer.

"I'm listening," Hermione pointed out, wincing at the petulance in her tone.

There was a grinding click, and Hermione stared at the tense lines of his shoulders as seconds later Severus blew a plume of smoke through the open window. "What do you want from this relationship, Hermione?" he asked her in the calm tone she knew to be as lethal as an old-fashioned bear trap.

---

"Well, since sex seems to be beyond your capabilities, it would be nice if you could at least look at me when you're talking to me." She knew the antagonistic tone was a mistake, but she had pinned three months of hopes and frustrations on this meeting only for him to deprive her of the release she craved. "And I suppose it's a bit late to say I'd have preferred a non-smoker."

He turned to lean indolently against the kitchen sink, a cigarette in his right hand, his eyes flat and blank, as unreadable as the back of his head.

---

"I see." He flicked ash into a small glass dish that must have been in the drawer with the cigarettes. He raised the cigarette to his mouth and inhaled deeply, never lifting his gaze from her as the silence grew until it thrummed with tension. He held the smoke in his lungs for an impressive length of time before it began to trickle from his nose, like the breath of a dozing dragon.

Hermione's nerves screamed as he went through the endless flick, inhale, hold and exhale routine again.

"And that is all you want from me?" Severus finally asked.

---

Before Hermione could yell back at him, whether to tell him she wasn't sure she wanted anything at all or whether to tell him she wanted everything, he continued.

"Shall I tell you what I want, dear one?" he crooned, stubbing out the cigarette though it was only half-smoked. "Should I?" he asked as he glided back toward her. "Or will you run scurrying back to Molly?" He closed the gap between them until it was only six inches, until she could smell tobacco on his breath and on his finger when he used it to tilt her head up.

---

Hermione snapped and almost instantly the tip of her wand was pressed to Severus's neck. "Stop playing with me, Severus. I don't like being manipulated."

Anger flared in his eyes and was hidden just as quickly. "Nor do I," he warned, "and that is precisely why my answer was no. I am not a plaything, Hermione. If you wish no more than the means to fulfil your sexual desires as and when it pleases you, that relief can be purchased at the nearest branch of Ann Summers. That is not on offer here. I have far higher expectations than that."

---

"Well, so do I!" Hermione retaliated.

"Then you should learn patience, woman," Severus chided as if she were an infant. "Haven't you learned people value far more highly that which has to be earned rather than that which is thrown at their feet?"

"Merlin's balls, Severus!" Hermione dropped her wand and grabbed handfuls of silk. "You're not some wilting virgin and neither am I."

"I never said you were. Virginity or the lack of it has little to do with our situation. I'm trying to tell you you're better than that."

"I'm better, or you are?" She drew him close.

---

Severus allowed her to pull his head down to hers. He kissed her willingly, putting all he hoped for and all the tenderness he felt into the caress.

"Hermione..." he sighed as her hands eased his shirt loose from his jeans. "Please."

"Severus, don't think so much." She slid her hands under the soft fabric covering his back. "I love you, and I want to express that love. Does it have to be more complicated than that?"

"Hermione, if you'd wanted simple, you'd have been married to Master Weasley, not taking your chances with a broken-down spy twice your age."

---

"Ron's not simple! He can be a git, but he's not simple," Hermione retaliated instinctively, pulling away before she realised that had been exactly what Severus had wanted. She gave a huff of indignation and threw herself down on one end of Severus's sofa. "Alright, tell me what you want. Just sit down and do it without all the melodrama."

The Severus who perched beside her seemed like a different man to the one she knew: the supercilious teacher, the caring confidant, the oft-times scathing mentor and collaborator. All his natural grace was absent, leaving him all angles and awkwardness.

---

"I want," he said with his eyes fixed on his hands, "to make you happy, and if you hear me out and you still feel we should... If you want sex, then I..."

"Severus," Hermione whispered, but he lifted a hand and she stopped instantly.

"Let me finish. You have shared many of my memories during your Occlumency training, enough I would assume for you to guess that until now there was only one woman for whom I had strong feelings. What you cannot know is that it ended badly without my ever telling her my feelings went beyond friendship."

---

"There have been women. Some paid, some courting darkness or danger, but all... tainted in their own way." He turned his head to one side, her side, without lifting it. "You are young. When... the war is over, there will be many men who will court you, men who are in a position to offer you marriage and a family, if that is what you want." He stilled her incipient protests with the faintest narrowing of his eyes. "I can only offer you here and now, but just once I would like to do things as they should be done."

---

"I want to take you out for dinner and steal a goodnight kiss when I drop you off at your door. I want to buy you roses, even if you have to leave them here. I want to share my work with you and see you grow more beautiful and more confident with every skill you master. And I worry, especially if we are to be limited to those minutes you are able to snatch here and there, that if we fall too easily into my bed, then we will eventually lose the habit of talking and sharing other things."