Dealbreaker

Harry caught her as she was coming downstairs one morning. He tried to block her path, but she determinedly pushed past him.

“Hermione—”

“I can’t talk, I have a meeting with the florist.”

“But I—”

She drew her wand and sealed his lips with a Silencing Charm.

“I can’t hear you,” she said.

He could have cancelled the spell nonverbally, but he just looked at her crossly. She ignored him and slammed the door behind her.

“Harry’s not happy with you,” said Ginny, once she got back.

“Mm.”

“He wouldn’t tell me what you fought about.”

“Mm.”

“So, what did you fight about?”

“Nothing. Everything’s fine.”

“Okay, cool,” said Ginny, opening a bag of sweets. “Wedding planning going alright? I know Mum can be a nightmare.”

“It’s going great,” said Hermione, forcing herself to smile. She had read that smiling in humans may have evolved from the behaviour of apes, for whom baring one’s teeth was a fear response. It sounded plausible.

“Only a few more days!”

“Then it’ll all be over,” Hermione said aloud to herself.

Harry and Ron came into the room. Harry sat down beside Ginny, pointedly not saying anything, while Ron settled beside Hermione on the sofa. Hermione summoned all her strength and forced herself to kiss him.

*

Hermione gazed sadly into the mirror of her dressing table, wondering if the guests would be able to see how puffy her face was under the veil. She had already cried three times that morning, which everyone had said was totally normal.

Harry popped his head through the door.

“Don’t,” she said tightly, but he ignored her and came and kneeled by her skirt. 

He took her hand and pressed something small and cold into her palm. It was an enamel brooch shaped like a sleeping cat.

“Your ‘something blue’,” he told her.

She could feel her face crumpling, but tried to smile. It didn’t quite work.

“I want you to be happy,” he said softly. “That’s all I want. So, if this wedding is what you want, then I’m happy for you.”

He looked at her for a moment. Harry struggled to be physically affectionate—a lasting scar from his upbringing—but she could tell he wanted to.

He stood up, then bent down and pressed a clumsy kiss on the side of her temple.

“I’ll see you out there,” he said.

*

She stood outside the arched double doors of the quaint little Devon church Molly had picked out for them. It was where she had got married, and where her mother had got married, and her mother before that. Music was playing from inside.

She could see her dad coming up from the graveyard in a smart suit and tie, shielding his eyes from the bright sun. He must have been fetching something from the car. He was about to give her away.

She wished Pansy was there to talk to, to give her advice, to listen. She closed her eyes.

“Ready, sweetheart?” said Mr Granger beside her.

She wished it was Pansy standing at the altar. She could see her there, in her mind’s eye, in a little black dress. A pint-sized princess, sharp and observant, patient and kind, trying hard to be a better person.

*

Hermione ran. She ran through the graveyard, down the twisting lane, between parked cars and past postboxes. Her feet kept her moving without conscious input from her mind, until she stopped for breath and realised she had no idea where she was. She apparated to the first place she thought of and kept on running.

Dog-walkers taking a gentle stroll in the Forest of Dean that day might have seen a woman in a tangerine wedding dress sprinting through the trees, but Hermione didn’t see anyone. She kept on running until she collided with something hard and fell back onto the carpet of leaves, losing her veil among the ferns.

Her obstacle, a tall man in a suit and tie with a pink rose pinned to his lapel, held out an arm to help her up.

“Ron?”

The groom did a double-take. “Hermione?”

“How did you know I was here?” they both said simultaneously.

“I didn’t,” they both said again. “I—”

“Hang on, hang on,” said Ron. “Let me go first, alright? Hermione, I’m so sorry for leaving you at the altar. Please don’t kill me.”

“I thought I left you at the altar,” she said, bewildered.

They looked at each other for a moment, stunned, and then burst into laughter.

They walked further into the forest and sat down by a stream, where the air was cooler.

“Harry didn’t think we were happy,” said Ron. “We weren’t, were we?”

Hermione lifted her chin and looked into his earnest blue eyes. Feeling like she was committing a terrible sin, she shook her head.

“That’s what he kept saying, that he wanted you to be happy. And I want you to be happy too! I was trying, but I… I don’t think I’m the right guy for you,” he finished.

There is no right guy for me, thought Hermione. There’s something wrong with me.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She had been trying, too. She had tried so hard.

He put his arm around her and knocked their heads together.

“What about the honeymoon?” he asked. “‘Cause no offence, but I didn’t really want to go to Ibiza.”

“Nor did I. It was Ginny’s idea.”

“Let her and Harry go on it, then. They didn’t get a honeymoon, did they?”

“Fine by me. Oh, God, I bet everyone’s frantic by now…”

“It’ll be alright,” he said. “Friends?”

He held out his hand, looking hopeful.

She could do that, she thought. She could never be more than that; not with him, not with any man, but she could do that.

“Friends,” she agreed, and shook it.

*

Ginny had left Ibiza a day early to compete in a match against Wimbourne, so Harry was alone when Hermione came to greet him at the Portkey check. He was very tanned and surprised to see her. They took two seats outside a dinky airport café and drank overpriced coffees.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You must be really angry with me.”

“Hermione…” Harry scrubbed his hair and sighed. “I’m not angry, I’m just sad because… you’ve always been there for me. But you won’t let me be there for you.”

“I’m a lesbian,” she blurted.

Harry put down his cup.

“Okay, wow, um. Yeah. I thought so. Recently, I mean. What changed?”

“Nothing. I didn’t change, I’ve always been like this. I feel so stupid, because looking back I always knew, I just… didn’t think I was allowed.”

“You thought I wouldn’t be okay with it? Because that really makes me sad.”

“No, not you, ” she said, reaching out and touching his sleeve. He put a hand over hers, listening intently. “Not anyone specifically. Except, um, Ron, but. It’s more that I didn’t think the world would allow it. I was trying to do what you’re supposed to do: find a man, get married, have kids and live happily ever after.”

“You’re really good at doing what you’re supposed to do,” Harry nodded thoughtfully. “If you take an exam, you never get less than a hundred percent. But in life, there is no exam.”

He was right. It was a great disappointment, post-school, to discover there would be no more exams. Without grades, Hermione had ceased to know if she was doing the right thing.

“I’m not sporty,” she said, feeling a self-conscious need to explain herself in case anyone accused her of being an imposter. “I don’t have short hair, and I don’t wear leather or anything.”

Harry laughed. “I don’t think you have to do any of that. Hooch does all those things, and she’s not a lesbian. You can just be yourself.”

Thinking about it, Hermione wasn’t totally sure that Madam Hooch wasn’t a lesbian, but she didn’t correct him. She was also thinking about cutting her hair short. It was time for a change.

“What happened after I left?” she asked sheepishly.

“Well, I don’t know exactly when you left, but we were all already in the church when Ron started spouting some rubbish excuse about needing to find a four-leaf clover to put in his shoe for luck and ran out the priest’s door, then me and Ginny went out the front to see if you were still getting ready, but we found your dad, and he told us you’d legged it. Gin thought you might both have gone to Gretna Green, but I figured you’d run away. I was relieved, to be honest.”

“I should have listened to you. You were right. I just wasn’t ready to hear it.”

“Ron told me how you ran into each other. But he didn’t say… I’m guessing you haven’t told him what you just told me?”

“Not yet.”

She would, one day. She had no idea how to, but she would.

“Anyway, we had the reception without you in the end. It was pretty good. Padma got off with Charlie. Muriel got blind drunk, as usual… And at midnight we all spent half an hour looking for Luna’s shoes, till eventually she told us she’d come barefoot.”

“Were my mum and dad upset?”

She hadn’t spoken to them yet. Her mobile phone showed seventeen missed calls, so she had decided to put it on silent and let the battery run out.

“Er. Confused, I think. Your mum thought it was an accident. Said you had a habit of teleporting at random times?”

“Mmm. She means apparating. What about Molly?”

“Furious,” he said, grimacing. “At Ron, not you. We all saw him leave, so she assumed you’d found out that he’d abandoned you and were, um, crying your eyes out, or something.”

She’d done enough of that leading up to the wedding. Being left at the altar had made her the happiest she’d ever been.

“So everyone thinks I'm a jilted bride?”

“Would you rather they know the truth?”

“No! Please don’t tell anyone. The people who matter will find out eventually. And the people who don’t matter… Well, it doesn’t matter what they think.”

“What now, then?” Harry asked.

Hermione considered how intimidating it would be to talk to a woman she found attractive now there was the possibility of getting rejected. It didn’t bear thinking about.

“I’ll die alone with my nine cats, I suppose.”

“Nah,” Harry shook his head. “You’ll meet someone.”

*

Hermione rang the doorbell with some trepidation. It was girl’s night.

She’d never really had female friends. At least, not the way women did in films or on television. Lavender and Parvati had treated her like a temporary visitor from another planet, and she wondered how much she and Ginny would get along if the latter wasn’t Harry’s wife and Ron’s brother. She saw Padma at work, but they rarely had time to talk about personal things.

Pansy opened the door and her eyes lit up like she’d been handed a baby crup. She led Hermione into the living room, where Millicent was lifting a medicine ball above her head and Daphne was working her way through a box of chocolate fingers.

“Ooh, is that Mrs Weasley? Let’s see the ring, then!”

Hermione held up her bare hand.

“Still Miss Granger, I’m afraid,” she said. “We decided not to get married in the end.”

She thought telling people would make her feel embarrassed, but in reality saying it out loud was an immense relief.

Millicent dropped the medicine ball, making them all jump.

“No way! Why?”

Pansy stared. She fell onto the sofa, speechless.

“It just wasn’t right,” Hermione said simply.

Except for Harry, no one knew exactly why she didn’t marry Ron. She’d tried explaining it to Ginny, but she kept insisting Hermione just hadn’t met the right man yet.

She had never felt the way you were supposed to about any man, not even a fictional one, so she didn’t see the point in waiting another twenty years for her vagina to change its mind when she knew exactly how she felt about women.

“You can do better,” Millicent said confidently. “We’ll introduce you to someone; Daphne knows loads of men. And I mean loads.”

“Rebound,” said Daphne, snapping her fingers and pointing. “A rebound will solve everything.”

Hermione also worried that going out with Ron meant that people would assume she liked men and women. It would be rude to say that she had never been attracted to him in the slightest and was only going along with the pretence of a relationship because she thought she had to, so there was no easy way to explain it.

“No thanks,” she said, climbing onto the sofa beside Pansy.

“You changed your mind?” Pansy asked quietly. Without thinking, she laid a hand on Hermione’s back. Hermione smiled.

“All thanks to you,” she said.

end of part one.