A Paradigm of Uncertainty cookie by Lori Summers
This is an interstitial scene from Chapter 8 of PoU, the oft-requested "missing scene" in which Harry and Hermione make love for the first time. I escaped the description of it by a fadeout in the original, but I decided to take a stab at a more detailed account. And it is quite detailed! Almost as long as one of my chapters, I'm amazed at my own verbosity. I hope it satisfies the smut-lover in you.
Rated NC-17 for strong sexual content!
Harry kicked the door to the Cloister shut behind him, unsteady on his feet after carrying her up the stairs from the living gallery. He put her down and they fell back against the closed door, the need to keep their balance running a distant second to the sudden but all-consuming need to kiss each other as hard as they could without leaving a bruise. Could this be happening? One moment shouting at each other, one best friend to another, each terrified of losing the other, then the next moment falling into a passionate embrace? Did such things happen outside the movies? Apparently they did.
She drew back and looked up at him. They were both breathing hard and her heart was racing. He was holding her face between his hands, staring down into her eyes with an intense expression. "Are you..." he began.
Hermione put her hand over his mouth. "No. No talking." She didn't want to talk about it. If they talked about it they might talk themselves out of it, and she didn't want that. She didn't know what was happening and she could tell by his expression that neither did he, but she did know that at this moment she wanted him more desperately than she'd ever wanted a man in her life. A little voice of reason in her mind warned her that this would ruin their friendship, and that was scary. Her friendship with him was so essential to her existence that she didn't know what she'd do without it...and yet, that same voice was wondering if there might be something even greater beyond the friendship. It whispered that this was what they were meant for, this was what they were meant to be to each other. Not friends. Not only friends. Something else.
Harry nodded. "No talking," he repeated quietly. He clenched his hands in her hair and sealed his mouth over hers. For a few long moments they stood there against the door of the Cloister, their kisses fueled with a passion that bordered on violence. She clutched her arms around his shoulders, his waist, his back and felt him doing the same to her. She was pressed against him from knee to chest and soon enough she could feel a reaction from him. My God, she thought. That's his penis. It was an odd thought to have, but she couldn't help it. What was odd about it was that she'd never thought of him as having one, though of course academically she knew he must, being of the male gender. She just wasn't accustomed to thinking of her good buddy Harry as a sexual being. She suspected that after this she might have trouble thinking of him as anything else. A little thrill of feminine power ran up her spine...I'm giving Harry an erection. Who would have ever thought?
They stumbled across the floor, unwilling to let go of one another for one second even to facilitate walking. They fell together onto his bed in a tangle, laughing into each other's mouths. Hermione felt buoyant, and so turned on she was practically on another planet. She wound her legs through his as their mouths opened against each other. His hands were everywhere except where she wanted them. When he finally got up the nerve to touch her breast she gasped a little and arched her back, pressing more firmly into his hand. Encouraged, he raised his other hand to her chest and cupped both breasts through her shirt, squeezing and circling his thumbs over her erect nipples. She grabbed the hem of his turtleneck and pulled up on it. He drew away slightly so she could yank it off over his head. She ran greedy hands over the smooth skin of his chest, scratching her nails through the dark hair sprinkled between his pectorals, which felt firm and tight under her touch.
She kissed her way down his neck and onto his chest, flicking her tongue over one of his flat male nipples, smiling at the shudders that ran through him as she did this. His hands slipped beneath her shirt; they felt hot against her skin. His fingers shook as he unbuttoned her blouse and eased it off her shoulders, popping the rear closure of her bra with surprising ease. She tossed blouse and bra to the floor and slipped back into his arms, her already potent arousal increasing at the feeling of her breasts pressed against his bare chest.
He slid down on the bed, wrapped his arms around her hips and took one of her nipples in his mouth, gently suckling it as he kneaded her other breast. Hermione twined her fingers through his hair and held him tight to her, throwing her head back and gasping with pleasure. His other hand was cupping her buttocks through her skirt, then it slipped underneath the wool and slid upwards along her thigh. His breath felt warm against the skin of her chest. He looked up at her for a moment; when they locked eyes Hermione felt something inside her heart shift. She reached down and gently plucked his glasses from his nose and set them on the bedside table. He crawled up the bed and settled over her, propping himself on his elbows so he could look down into her face.
Hermione ran her hands up over his shoulders. Harry raised a hand to her face, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. "You're so beautiful," he murmured.
Hermione smiled up at him. "Interesting that you should suddenly think so," she said, joking.
He remained serious. "I've always thought so."
She sighed. "Remember...no talking." He leaned down and kissed her, slipping his hands under her hips to hold her closer to him. They rolled over twice, grabbing at each other's remaining clothing. Hermione unzipped his jeans and pushed them down his hips. She slipped her hand inside the waistband of his boxer shorts and touched him for the first time. His breath rattled in his throat as she gripped him, finally knowing the only part of him which had escaped her experience. He was surprisingly long, though not too thick...and hard as a rock. He raised his hips and kicked his jeans the rest of the way off, his boxer shorts going with them.
Hermione felt his fingers unzip her skirt and shove it down her legs, his thumbs hooking through the elastic of her knickers to slide them off as well. She settled back against him, wondering how it shouldn't feel odd to be naked in his arms. His skin was so smooth and pale, like marble, and he was more muscular than she remembered. In some part of her mind, her image of Harry persisted as a little boy...skinny, insecure, short. But as she was now experiencing up close, he wasn't that little boy anymore. He was a man, with a man's body. Broad shouldered, slim hipped, and oh my God what a butt.
It seemed as if he was having similar thoughts as he ran his hands over the swell of her hips, the curve of her waist, and the fullness of her breasts. She wasn't the little girl he'd once known, either. She stared into his eyes, mesmerized, as their hands roamed over each other's bodies. She raised her hand and touched her fingertips to his face. He looked down at her, the intensity of his gaze making her stomach do flip-flops. She brushed his hair back, her fingers tracing the line of his eyebrows, his cheekbones, his jaw. She hesitated, then traced over his scar with one fingernail. It started just below his hairline, a little to the right of center, and arched down his forehead, a single twist giving it that famous lightning-bolt shape. It disappeared into his right eyebrow, a narrow discolored line that had been his badge of honor and his mark of infamy all his life. She pulled his head down and traced its line again but with her lips instead of her finger. She felt him sigh and relax further into her embrace. He turned his head and kissed her palm, then the inside of her wrist. Their eyes met and that sudden surge of heat passed between them again, as it had earlier in the living gallery. She pulled him down to her and he crushed his lips onto hers, his touch scorching her. Their mouths opened to each other and she felt the smoothness of his teeth as their tongues met. He tasted like coffee and lime cheek-puncher sours, and like Harry...sweet, but intense.
One of his hands slid down her stomach, her abdominal muscles jumping and fluttering at the contact. Her legs parted as he slipped his hand between them, his fingers moving confidently as they caressed her most sensitive places. She gasped against his lips as ripples of pleasure coursed through her. Someone had taught him well, a part of her mind whispered. Who had it been? Ginny? Ronin? Somehow she couldn't imagine either of them tutoring him to touch a woman this expertly. Perhaps it was just that it was her he was touching. He knew her so well in every other way, it didn't seem odd that he should know how best to touch her...just as her own hand seemed to know exactly how he would like her to touch him, as she was now demonstrating. She felt no reserve, no embarrassment, no hesitation to boldly place her hands on his body, as she had felt with other men. Her inhibitions seemed to have left her en masse. All she wanted was to do everything and anything to him and with him. His pleasure was her pleasure, her passion was his.
She muffled a cry against his shoulder. He had one finger inside her now and was stroking her with such gentle force that she knew she would soon orgasm. She felt it building in her chest and her loins, but she didn't want it yet. She pushed him away and over onto his back, letting her breasts sway before his face as she sat up. He looked up at her, burying his face in her chest and drawing first one nipple then the other into his mouth.
Hermione slid down the bed and felt him suck in a deep breath as she bent and wrapped her mouth around his penis. He was probably surprised she'd done so on her own initiation, which was indeed a first for her, but with him everything was different. This wasn't like sex with Rufus, or Abel, or Gerald. This wasn't something they wanted and that she was okay with. She had instigated sex with her previous lovers plenty of times, but she had never felt this openness, this freedom to express the intense sexual desire she was feeling...nor had she ever felt towards any of them anything approaching the desire she now felt towards Harry. She had never in her life initiated oral sex, she had always been asked or begged or goaded into doing it. Harry had not asked for it. He didn't have to, just as she knew she wouldn't have to ask him for anything that would pleasure her. Giving pleasure had never felt so important a part of receiving it. She wanted him in every way she could get him, she wanted to experience everything with him.
He growled deep in his chest when she slid her hands under his hips; he undulated against her face in unconscious movement. She waited to feel that hand on the back of her head, holding her in place, but it didn't come. She glanced up at him. His head was thrown back, his arms flung to either side of his body and his hands clutched in the sheets. He was completely vulnerable, and she had him in her thrall. She smiled a little and went back to work, determined to drive him as wild as she felt.
Soon enough he pulled away and sat up, not letting himself climax as she hadn't. He lifted her into his arms and kissed her passionately, his breathing ragged and his pulse racing under her hand on his chest. "Oh God," he kept whispering, over and over, as he caught his breath. She held him tight to her as he kissed down her throat, onto her chest, down her stomach. All at once he slid off the bed to his knees and drew her hips to the edge in one quick, decisive motion. She stared at the stars up through the glass ceiling of the Cloister, watching not him but the heavens as she felt him put his hands on her inner thighs and spread them wide. She sucked in a great screaming gasp as his tongue touched her and then began to move in tantalizing circles and swirls around her hypersensitized flesh. Her hands rose to clutch in her own hair, the pleasure shooting out in great manic bolts through her whole body. Her hips rolled, the muscles in her thighs spasmed and clenched as Harry held her legs wide apart, stroking her skin possessively as he used his mouth on her in ways she would never have thought him capable. Once again some part of her mind that still had rational thought wondered who on Earth had taught him how to do this. This, she definitely couldn't see Ginny patiently explaining.
He reached up and enveloped her breasts in his long-fingered hands, her nipples rock-hard and pointing at the ceiling as he ran his thumbs over them, rolling them between his fingers. Before she could stop him the orgasm burst through her body. She cried out with the sheer force of it, her entire body breaking out in gooseflesh. Before it had subsided he was beside her again, cradling her entire length in his arms, wrapping himself around and through her, their limbs intertwined. She looked down at them, flesh against flesh, and she couldn't tell where her skin ended and his began.
She grabbed his face in her hands and kissed him again before she had even come down all the way. She was panting and shaking and she felt like she was visiting places no human had ever seen. He planted kisses all over her face, his lips leaving searing footprints of warmth behind on her skin. They faced each other on the bed, tightly laced together on their sides. She felt his hardness against her leg, nudging closer.
She raised her knee and hooked it around his hip, the anticipation settling into the pit of her stomach. They both paused and their eyes met in the dimness. He reached up and stroked her cheek. Their unspoken communication was as clear as telepathy. Are you sure? Yes. There's no turning back after this. I know. I know. I want you. I need you. Please. I'm ready. I'm sure. So am I.
They put their arms around each other. Hermione was lost in his eyes as he stared back at her. Without breaking the eye contact, they slowly leaned forward until their lips met, soft and filled with emotions both familiar and new. In one smooth motion, Harry slid inside her. The kiss broke and Hermione buried her face in his shoulder, holding him tight to her chest, his arms around her back and his face pressed to the side of her neck.
For a long time they just lay there, holding each other tightly, not moving, his long length fully seated inside her. She let the alien thought drift through her mind: Harry is inside me. She tried it more clinically. Harry's penis is inside my vagina. I am having sex with Harry. Harry. My best friend Harry. The idea still felt alien, even if the act itself felt like something she'd been destined to do for her entire life. After a few moments Hermione found herself crying quiet tears, and the wetness she felt on her shoulder let her know he was doing the same. Harry. My best friend Harry. Harry, who I thought I loved as a friend. Harry, who I think I might love as a man. She cupped the back of his head. "Say my name," she whispered without stopping to examine why she was asking. He seemed to understand.
"Hermione," he breathed. He drew back and wiped the wetness from her cheek with his thumb, bending to kiss the tracks on her face even while his own teardrops fell on her skin. For herself, she could say that her tears had many meanings. The sheer joy of feeling him inside her, filling her and stretching her deliciously. The sadness of a friendship lost forever. The anxiety of the future. The great swelling of something new inside her heart, something felt for him, something that might overwhelm her and make all that came before seem like pale shadows of feelings. "Hermione," he repeated, a whisper so low he almost mouthed it, reverently, like an offering. It came to her then. The satisfaction of completion. That he who knew her best, in every other way a person can be known by another, should now be the one to know her in this way, this most intimate way. It almost made her sob out loud with its beauty. The beauty of a circle, begun in childhood and traced slowly over the paper of years, complete and neverending. Making love with him was completing something she hadn't known was unfinished; their physical union was only the last brick in the long road they'd built of their emotional and spiritual union, which had been powerful enough to drive away all interlopers until there was only them, as perhaps there had always been...only herself, and her Harry.
He kissed her then, a deep and yearning kiss that went on and on until she felt she had spent her whole life kissing him, and would be glad to spend the rest of it doing the same. "It's you, Hermione," he whispered against her face. Able to hold back no longer, they began to move against each other in the motion of the ages. "It's you," he said again. It seemed to be all he could say, for he repeated it as he eased on top of her.
Any thoughts of spiritual completion and emotional meaning left her then, driven away by the power of raw sexual desire. "Harry," she moaned, drawing her knees up and hooking her ankles behind his thighs. He settled between her legs, his hips against her groin.
"It's always been you," he whispered, and then they spoke no more.
He supported himself on his elbows so he could kiss her again. She kissed back, holding tight to him as he began to move against her. Gently at first, arching his back, sliding within her, the friction warming her all over. Hermione matched his movements to keep him deeply inside her. "Oh God," she murmured, the pleasure flowing over her body like warm water, bubbling around her breasts and her fingertips and swirling in her hair.
He pressed his forehead to hers and she could feel his breath on her face as he began to take long strokes within her, withdrawing a little further with each stroke and returning a little more forcefully. They both began to gasp as their arousal mounted. He sagged against her chest, his weight pressing down on her, and dropped his head into the crook of her shoulder as the motion of his hips sped up. Hermione ran her hands down his back and gripped his buttocks, her legs spreading wider of their own volition.
Rationality left her mind completely as the undeniable fever of passionate sex overtook both of them. Harry was groaning quietly as he thrust into her, his mouth moving over her neck and shoulders and pausing at her lips every few seconds to kiss her. Hermione didn't think she had ever been kissed so much during the act of sex, her previous lovers had been too occupied with the task at hand. Seized by impulses and helpless not to obey them, Hermione pressed her knees against his sides and pushed on his shoulders. He got the message and rolled over, holding her to him so they rolled together. The bed was large and they had been lying at a cockeyed angle, somehow they ended up at the head of the bed with her on top and Harry sitting with his back propped against the headboard.
Hermione settled into his lap, straddling his hips. Harry had his hands on her waist but they didn't stay there; he was touching her all over, her back, her stomach, her legs, her breasts. His hands were amazing, warm and soft and strong with those much-admired long, elegant fingers that had always looked good casting charms or catching the Snitch...pity it had taken her this long to appreciate their other uses. They seemed to be casting charms still, but on her skin. He ran them up her back to her neck where one cupped her head and the other stroked down her throat as he pulled her face down to his. She held him around the shoulders as they kissed; he reached up and freed her hair from the ponytail it was still in, it fell around her to envelop both their faces.
She threw her head back as her hips began to move back and forth in his lap, slowly at first and then faster. His arms around her kept her tight against him; his hair brushed against her chin and face as he kissed her breasts and the high plane of her chest. She rocked her hips hard against him, her breath racing in and out of her throat with rasping little gasps. She clenched her hands in his hair and kissed him savagely, helpless to control her own intensity as her arousal mounted steadily higher and higher.
She gasped into his mouth as he drew her hard against him and rose up on his knees, the sudden motion driving him even deeper within her, and laid her down on her back again. She twined her legs around his waist and threw her head back, her back arching on its own as he pulled her hips into his lap and re-entered her. He leaned over her and kissed her as he repeated the motion, moving within her now at a maddeningly slow pace that he kept up, relentless, until she thought she might literally go mad. "Oh God, Harry," she finally gasped. Her heart was pounding so she could feel it in her temples, in her wrists, in her groin. "I can't...can't stand it..."
Their eyes met in the dimness of the Cloister and there it was again, that flash of heat that swept through her whole body. He paused, one hand rising to slide around the back of her neck. "Hermione," he breathed. "I can't believe it." It seemed, objectively, an odd thing to say, but at the moment and in the situation it was entirely logical and made, to her, perfect sense. She grabbed his face and pulled it down to hers, crushing her lips to his and sliding her tongue into his mouth with unabashed lust...for whatever else she might be feeling towards him, a topic she was sure she'd be pondering for some days and weeks to come, at the moment it was her lust for him that was ruling her. She felt no dissonance or discomfort over this, as she had in the past with other men, as if lust were something shameful or illegitimate. She'd spent most of her life feeling kinship and affection and fondness for Harry. Perhaps some lust was long overdue.
As it was, all bets were off between them, all restraint was lost, all self-control left them. Their passions had taken over, they boiled together as their bodies thrashed against each other on the wide bed. Hermione wondered for a moment who on earth kept screaming before realizing it was herself. She tossed her head from side to side, letting loose any cries that rose from her chest, not caring if she sounded ridiculous or if she woke everyone from here to Stratford. She marveled at Harry. Could this be her pleasant, even-tempered and sometimes shy best friend who was making mad, violent love to her? Who was this man, this wild lover who bucked and plunged and growled and seemed to be losing himself in her, as she was in him?
She felt him tensing and knew he was close. She held him tighter, their bodies moving as one, the rhythm of his thrusts matching hers. Hermione gasped as her body suddenly leapt past any level of pleasure she'd ever known and reached a new plateau. Her eyes went unfocused and her mind seemed to come loose of its moorings, every muscle jumping and fluttering in sensory overload. His cheek rested against hers as he slid his arms underneath her in a tight embrace. All at once he drew back and stared into her eyes as his jaw clenched and his brow furrowed with the effort.
When she came it hit her like...well, she was always hard pressed, later, to come up with an accurate analogy. A nuclear weapon? A fireworks display? A lightning burst? Such cliches all, and yet all seemed mere approximations of the sensation. Her whole body clenched, the sensations emanating from where they were joined together overwhelming her cognitive functions for the moment. She screamed helplessly as it overtook her, the waves of pleasure coursing over her body and washing everything else away, everything but the look in his eyes as he watched her climax. A few seconds later he followed, a cry tearing from his throat as he thrust one last time hard against her, every muscle tensed; she held his face between her hands, still riding it out herself, and looked into his eyes as she felt his warmth flood her. He moaned as he spent himself inside her, his gaze never leaving hers.
Hermione felt two lone tears leak from the corners of her eyes and trickle down her temples. She'd had sex before, with five different men, but this was different. She had never really understood the human preoccupation with the sexual act, nor the extent of people's enthusiasm for it. Sex had been pleasant for her, and it had given her pleasure, but this...suddenly it all made sense. This was how it ought to be. Never in her life had she felt as intimately connected with someone else, and the heretofore unsuspected level of ecstasy she had just shared with him was only a small part of it. The absolute freedom, the lack of inhibitions, the acceptance and encouragment of desire...these things were new to her. And it had all been with Harry, the person she was closest to in the world. She already knew that no matter how long she lived or what lay in store for them, she would always look back on this as one of the most precious moments of her life. The future stretched out before her now uncertain. Always she had seen Harry there, but only as her friend. Now, she didn't know what he would be to her. She saw herself poised on a fulcrum, one of those rare moments when she knew her life had just changed forever, its old shape shattered into a thousand pieces, its new shape as yet unclear to her.
Harry kissed her then, with the gentle passion of afterglow. She felt that pang of emptiness as he slipped from within her, but it was all right. He drew her with him as he rolled over onto his side. They lay there in a tight embrace, both of them breathing hard. She touched his face, feeling the dampness of sweat in the hollows of his temples, and they smiled at each other, no words necessary between them...at least, not quite yet.
Wordlessly, they rose and Harry drew back the rumpled covers. They climbed into the soft bed together and he held out his arms to her. Hermione snuggled against his chest, secure in his warm embrace and the contented feelings emanating from him. She kissed him again, quietly, feeling drowsiness beginning to overtake her. She settled her head in the hollow of his shoulder, his arm around her back and his hand resting on her hip. His cheek lay against the top of her head and a sense of peace stole over her as she felt him relaxing.
She wondered, briefly, if she ought to tell him. Is now the right time? she thought. Should I say it now? It's easy. Just three little words. I love you, Harry. But...it wasn't the right time. It was too soon. And, if she was going for total personal honesty, she needed some time to sort through her feelings before she declared herself to him. She wasn't certain, at this moment, how she felt about Harry. All she was certain of was that it wasn't how she'd always believed it to be. Just friends. That, at least, was not true. Not anymore. But was she in love with him? The idea was so appealing that she hoped it were true. But now, just after their first sexual experience with each other, was not the most objective time to decide such things. It would keep. But even then, she knew that it would not keep for long.
She had not time to finish another thought before she was asleep, her body tucked next to his, where it seemed to fit best. She slid into vague dreams, the heady and intimate dreams she'd had since her youth...except now, the nameless lover who inspired her sleeping encounters had a face, a face she knew as well as her own. The face of the man that she loved, a fact that her sleeping mind could embrace even while her waking thoughts hesitated. And so she dreamed on, some part of her mind aware even in sleep that she dreamed, as perhaps she always had, of him.
