Neville/Pansy (love confession)
It’s not that she’s scared, she’s just stubborn.
And anyway, even if she is scared, it’s perfectly natural.
It’s her heart, for Salazar’s sake. She needs it to live, unblemished and unbroken.
The trouble is, she’s beginning to realize she needs him to live, too.
“You say it first,” she says, an inappropriate response to his softly-spoken query.
He huffs a laugh, eyes deeply affectionate as he looks down at her from where he’s still lying half over her.
“You need to hear it?” His voice is low, the warmth of it second only to the heat of his body, naked but for the sheet draped over them both.
They’ve only just finished making it and yet she finds the word hard to admit. She needs to hear him say it first, even though she’s fairly certain…well, she hopes…
Even so, a girl likes to be sure.
“Yes.”
His nose skims the line of her jaw, breath dusting over her throat, and she shivers. “Will you say it back?”
“Do you need to hear it?” she parrots, and feels his smile against her skin.
“No,” he whispers, just below her ear. “I already know you love me.”
Her heart throbs at the acknowledgement of how close to the surface it lives, beating in her fingertips that card through his hair and in her throat where his lips dip to press, and between her legs where he’s only just left her, the lingering pleasure still acute.
“So tell me,” she whispers.
He draws back so that he’s right over her again, nose to nose, and pushes her hair off her face with gentle fingers where it'd been mussed from his fervor in tearing open his heart for her, again and again and again.
“I love you,” he promises.
And though he claims he doesn’t need to hear it back, she suddenly needs to say it. Because she never has. Because she wants to.
“I love you, too,” she says.
The confession doesn’t make her weak like she’s always feared, as if her vital organ is now bared, ready to be cut into. Instead, she feels unbearably safe when he presses the words between their lips.
Part of her heart lives outside her body – it’s confirmed now, stated – and though it’s terrifying, she trusts him with it.
He will protect it. And she will always protect his.