hermes and the hot jock problem
As Hermes watched Hattie turn to him with a shit-eating grin as they both stood in the stands, the football team below them shaking hands with the losing team with teeth bared, all he could think was, oh, no.
“Not a word,” he said, quick and futile.
Hattie’s grin widened. Between the grin and the wild hair and the awful band t-shirt, she had never looked more deserving of the half-affectionate “punk” Hermes’ father always called her when she came by his house.
“Not a word about what?” she said. “Not a word about how you’re predictable? Not a word about how a swotty bastard like yourself being into jocks is the most cliche thing? Not a word about how we should start a ‘I’ve Been Personally Victimized by a Weasley’s Muscles’ club?”
“I’m not into jocks,” Hermes said, like that was somehow the most important part. He tried to avoid looking down at the football team, and more importantly the two gingers. Well, the one ginger. Ginny Weasley was Hattie’s obsession, and he wasn’t interested in her for several reasons aside from that. The other one.
Hattie cocked an eyebrow. Hermes enjoyed her cocking an eyebrow at someone else, because she always had something to say to a fool, but he hated it when that eyebrow was directed at him. He was half-tempted to cover her face with a hand, but he wasn’t a ten year old idiot no matter how much he wanted to act like one.
“So Krum wasn’t a jock, then? Or Cormac?”
“Krum,” Hermes stressed, “had plenty of fascinating things to say about Bulgarian history, and went on to graduate from Cambridge, you might well remember. And we didn’t date, anyway.”
He’d been very disappointed by that as a teenager, of course, but now as a 2nd year student he understood that once one went to university any secondary student was basically now a child, and so that had probably been Krum’s view of him all those years ago. Better that Krum was a somewhat distant friend than a man he thought of as “the skeevy one” several years down the line.
“Mm, and he’s also an international sports legend.”
“Well, that isn’t why we got on, alright?” Hermes insisted. “So that doesn’t count.”
“Was Cormac secretly a genius when nobody was looking?” Hattie asked dryly. “‘Cause he certainly wasn’t a genius last I checked.”
“Cormac was a mistake,” Hermes said.
Hattie barked out a laugh. “God, I’m sure his mother said the same thing.”
Before Hermes could tell her off for that remark, he was distracted by more yelling from the field. For reasons he truly couldn’t divine, someone had lugged a giant water container over and it was being tipped over several players. Including Ron, Ginny’s sister.
The sight of water streaming down her head and soaking her clothes, her face still red from the game, was unfortunately appealing. She was quite tall. There was a lot of body for the water to travel down.
“Oh, no,” Hermes muttered.
Hattie laughed at him.