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RIPTIDE
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Amidst a stretch of pure white sand on the Gulf of Mexico, far removed from the towering condominiums, surf shops, church camps, and tattoo parlors that clamored to the East, was a carefully arranged line of reclining beach chairs – and on one of those chairs, under a wide, cobalt blue umbrella, rested a woman with wind-tousled, golden brown curls, honey-colored eyes, and a strange purple scar, which wound its way between her breasts and stretched its numerous tendrils up across her chest bone.
“Yggdrasil,” her best friend’s lover called it.
She enjoyed that. She liked thinking of it as a tree, as opposed to a travail – as a source of life, rather than the wound that had almost ended it.
The sea was smooth as stone that day, barely undulating, better to display the shockingly transparent water, disturbed only by the reflection of the sun – the bands of mint green, aqua, and cerulean blue now blending in impeccable visual harmony. A nervous little sandpiper marched past her, sticking its beak into the wet sand every three seconds or so, as a family splashed in the distant water off to her right. If the children had looked up and seen her then – simply a pretty woman relaxing in a fire engine red, polka-dot bikini – they might never have guessed that she was an assiduous, painfully responsible government worker on unpaid leave, or the author of a bestselling autobiography.
Or a witch.
It was the book she was running from, though. That was the reason she had come here, to this beach on the Florida panhandle – to hide at the edge of the earth, on another continent, where the people spoke her language but, by her reckoning, just barely.
Although the book had filled her pockets, it also meant that everyone lately was wanting to either ask for an autograph or to scream their lungs out at her.
People had been relatively supportive about the idea of Hermione speaking her truth, of course, until they saw the shape that truth had taken. Perhaps they only liked it as a concept, and not an actuality; perhaps they had expected Truth Lite.
But Hermione Granger, in all things, was thorough.
Her memoir – covering her experiences throughout her tenure at Hogwarts and, most of all, the war against Voldemort – sold like hotcakes. It caused a frenzy of excitement throughout wizarding England and beyond, resulting in a series of interviews and a book tour which caused her to take a leave of absence from her Ministry job (a leave that was still ongoing, during which she had been surprised to discover that she did not miss the work at all). She netted a relatively huge chunk of galleons from the writing endeavor, which she had appreciated and, truthfully, rather needed, but in return it had alienated her from those closest to her. Ron, for instance, had been apoplectic with rage, having disagreed with his portrayal in her memories, and Molly and Ginny closed ranks around him, perceiving that Hermione had betrayed them all. Harry – although acknowledging that what she had written was accurate – seemed to think it gauche of her to have shared it with the world (and Draco, understandably, had sided with his partner). The instructors at Hogwarts that Hermione still knew, and loved, were upset with her, objecting that the memoir did not paint the school’s safety record in the best light, and most of the other women at her job seemed to regard her differently, perhaps due to jealousy from the attention, or perhaps because they, like Harry, thought what she had done to be tacky – that she should have kept the standard British “stiff upper lip” and taken all of those anecdotes with her to her grave. Hermione felt that she had lived it all and deserved to tell it, and still, even now, did not think in her heart of hearts that she had done anything wrong; however, the fact was that she had stumbled into a greater degree of fame, which she had not quite been prepared for, and also stumbled out of friendships which she had held more dear than any amount of coin.
The only one of her compatriots, in fact, that had staunchly stood by her was Pansy.
If someone had ever told Hermione five years previously that she and Pansy Parkinson would become best friends, Hermione would have referred them to the mental ward at St. Mungo’s. Nevertheless, the two had developed a rapport – first begrudging, then, gradually, enthusiastic – during their time working in the same department at the Ministry, and Pansy was now the woman who knew Hermione best. She had been the one, in fact, who had noticed Hermione’s stress levels and suggested this vacation.
“Listen, pet,” she had exhorted, placing her hand over Hermione’s when the two of them were out at Bathilda’s Bakery, decompressing over afternoon tea. “You need to get the fuck out of here. Just GO. Get out of England. Better yet, get out of Europe, even. Somewhere you won’t bloody run into anyone that you know.”
Pansy could be hard; unforgiving; judgmental. But, when she attached herself to someone – precisely as she had to her ex-con boyfriend, Thorfinn Rowle – Pansy was the most loyal person Hermione had ever met. And, also, she was usually right.
“…where should I go?” Hermione had asked, in a timid voice. “Big cities? Mountains? Deserts? Forests? Lakes? I think your proposal is sound. I just don’t know where to – ”
“BEACH!!!!” Pansy effused, cutting her off with a wicked grin. “It’s May now, and, frankly, it’s been way too long since you got laid. Time for you to have a hot girl summer, love.”
Hermione was not sure if this would, indeed, result in her getting laid, but, the more she thought about it, the more the ocean sounded ideal. Thus, after she left the bakery that day, she had performed copious research (as she was wont to do), looking for beaches outside of Europe that were not too crowded – and which, crucially, had excellent water quality. She was not one of those beachgoers who remained on the sand and, if at all possible, wanted to find water warm and clear enough for swimming.
She had thought briefly of Australia, but knowing that her parents were still there, their memories irretrievable, made the thought too painful to entertain for long.
She had thought of places like Fiji, Tahiti, or the Maldives, but – despite her improved financial situation – she still balked when she examined the price tags.
Eventually, she had stumbled upon this particular area of Florida that the internet had disparagingly termed “the Redneck Riviera,” the forty-mile stretch of beaches between Panama City and Seaside (where, apparently, some successful muggle movie had once been filmed). It had seemed perfect; it featured the gorgeous, warm water she had been looking for, a reasonable cost, and no previous associations for her (or even the vaguest chance of seeing anyone she knew). And, as she stretched her hands over and behind her head, lazily watching, through her sunglasses, one of the children assembling a sand castle, she congratulated herself on her decision.
Hermione had checked in to her quaint three-story motel – the Panhandle Pearl – the afternoon before. It was nothing fancy (a bit dated, mayhap, but in a way that added to its charm), but her room was serviceable and clean as a whistle, with a balcony that opened right out on to a view of the Gulf. She had arranged to rent a beach chair and an umbrella for the week from the associate who worked the front desk – a friendly spitfire of a girl with two long, orange braids and and one hell of a Southern accent – and had even bought a manta ray-shaped kite from the gift shop, trying that morning, for the first time in a long time, to fly one without the assistance of magic, enjoying the tug of the breeze on her hand, the flutter of the tail ribbons against the bright blue sky.
Now, she just had put down her book – fiction, to further cement her escape, and a Southeastern author to hopefully help her get a hang of the dialect (Trampoline by Robert Gipe) – and was taking a sip of her ice water. Her wand was hidden under her grip, nestled between the pink koozie and the plastic part of the tall, cheap thermos. She had no anticipation of needing it, but, although five years had passed since the fall of Voldemort, she never went anywhere without it, even sleeping with it under her pillow. Old habits died hard, and she suspected this one would never die at all.
But, as she sighed in contentment and gazed out at the flat, liquid horizon, she reminded herself that the worst of her trials in the past – and that even her current problems were thirty-six hundred miles away. She breathed in the scent of the salt spray and silently thanked Pansy yet again for encouraging her to leave.
However, as much as Hermione already loved it here, she was still a pale English rose, and she noted that the sun’s changing position meant that the umbrella was no longer covering her. She had been warned that, even with the advent of sunscreen, she could still burn, so she ambled out of her chair and attempted to adjust the shade.
And this was where the Eternally Competent Hermione Granger started to fail.
The umbrella was massive; it seemed to Hermione that a medieval knight could easily have utilized it as a lance. She pulled it out of the ground, trying to find a more advantageous place to re-stake it, only to wobble as the breeze caught it and buffeted both her and the equipment into the sand, her red-rimmed plastic sunglasses knocked off of her face into a crab hole. She clambered to her knees, awash with embarrassment, trying desperately to hold on to the base so that the entire apparatus would not go tumbling into the waves, when she heard a rich, hearty male laugh.
“Ne boysya, my lady – allow me to rescue you.”
With amazing speed, a man had appeared, his back to her, and gripped the wayward umbrella, striding over and shoving it into the sand with one concentrated stab.
Hermione could not even get up from her knees yet, because, even before she had seen his face, she knew he was the kind of man who made her want to stay there.
Bloody fucking wrackspurts.
Every ounce of intellectual and physical power she had was going towards the herculean effort of trying to process that he was, in fact, a real human being.
Merlin, if you answer prayers, please let this man be my ticket to hot girl summer.
If one of Michaelangelo’s statues had come to life, gotten a tan, and stepped into a pair of navy blue swim trunks, it might have looked almost as good as the specimen before her. Thoroughly entranced, she stared at the way the lean muscles in his back, arms, and calves shifted while he worked the umbrella; he had, among many other facets, the most perfect, touch-worthy shoulder blades that she had ever observed.
“These can be a little…unwieldy,” he said, rocking the wooden stave back and forth.
The lilt of his speech was decidedly Slavic –
(That has ever been my undoing, Hermione reflected, remembering Viktor and several brief, delicious foreign catastrophes in the decade since then.)
– and his brown hair was cut short in the back, but still had enough length on the top to be enticingly messy, coming down to his ears with streaks of highlights from the sun.
She finally managed to stand and slink towards him, leaning down to pick up her water thermos and struggling to think of a way to thank him that did not betray how this demigod was rendering her brain matter into neanderthal mush.
You, make shade for woman; me, thank – yes? You, take woman? Now? Please?
“I…really don’t know how to express my gratitude, kind sir,” she stammered. “You have saved me from both sunburn and shame.”
He chuckled, his face still turned downwards as he finished.
“That’s an accent I haven’t heard since…”
And then he stood to his full height, his head lazily turning, his gaze meeting hers for what should have been the first time.
But it was not.
And, in an instant, they both damned well knew it.
It wasn’t the fascinating pattern of scars on his chest that stole Hermione’s breath – nor was it the mottled, angry tissue on his inner forearm where, she would learn later, he had performed a painful spell to remove his dark mark. It wasn’t the coffee-colored, neatly trimmed beard, soliciting the touch of her fingertips, or the slight trail of body hair that traveled past his belly button down under his waistline, along with the soft shadows cast by his obliques, like road signs pointing to a rough ride ahead.
What stopped her respiration was his eyes.
Underneath two dark brows – now risen in unconcealed shock – they stared out at her, magnificent and accusatory. They were blue, but unlike any she had ever seen. Not arctic, like Thorfinn’s, nor forget-me-not, like Ron’s. They were the blue of the deepest abyss – of the farthest stretch of ocean that, if she had dared to turn her head, she could have seen. A blue of mystery, and of longing, and of latent peril.
She had seen those eyes before, glaring through the holes of a death eater mask right before she was struck down; searching her out in a cafe, as curses flew and dishes shattered around them; peering upward, motionless, somehow almost pleading as he was obliviated; glowering from the pages of the Daily Prophet, daring the reader to judge.
They were the eyes of Antonin Dolohov.
He wasn’t even supposed to be alive. Yet, there he stood, in all his deadly glory.
And, within seconds, his hand was wrapped around her throat.
He had closed the small gap between them and grabbed her with such alacrity that, if not for the training that she still maintained, she would not have registered the movements at all. His words rushed out like a violent squall, but even as he growled his menacing litany, she could feel the slight tremble in his fingers.
“Granger, I am not – ever – going back to Azkaban, ponimayesh? Nobody from the motel can even see us here, due to the umbrella. I can kill you sooner than you could even blink, apparate your body out to Shell Island right fucking now, and feed your chunks of flesh to the hammerheads. No one would ever know.”
Hermione was filled to the brim with conflicting emotions – confusion, wrath, anxiety, and, although it was wholly illogical, still-present attraction – but no man would ever catch her slipping. Not even one as legendary as this.
“Fine then,” she rasped, his fingers leaving her enough air to still speak. “Try to cast the killing curse. But you’d be facedown in the sand before you even said ‘avada.’”
And then she poked her wand – which she had been aiming at his stomach for the duration of the exchange – into one of his damnably appealing abdominal muscles.
She registered a twitch of his right eyebrow as he realized her advantage.
“Although,” she taunted (foolishly, in retrospect – but she was already losing control, even then), “I don’t think that spell can be cast without a wand, regardless.”
He relaxed his grip slightly, just slightly, his eyes flitting down, strangely, to her lips. He slowly caressed the pad of his thumb back and forth at the front of her neck, right over her trachea, his other fingernails still digging into the skin below her hair. She kept her wand rigidly in place, but something about the movement gave her a chill – an immediate physical response that wasn’t because he had just promised to turn her into chum.
“I don’t need a wand,” he rumbled. “I know a million ways to break a woman.”
And it was then she realized that she wasn’t just sex-starved and socially awkward. Something, despite his ostensible animosity, was happening between them, something warm and euphoric that bloomed on the skin between her breasts and spread outward through each of her limbs and appendages, something that harried her breaths, that rendered her eyelids heavy – something that spurred her to reply to him like a lunatic.
“Is that a promise?”
Oh, cuntwollops.
Before she could muster sufficient embarrassment, his head reared a couple of inches backward in surprise, his grasp still on her throat. He seemed decidedly unsteady.
“STOP that, ved’mochka,” he commanded. “Whatever you are…doing to me.”
She saw now, as he released a ragged, overwrought breath, and as she felt his fingertips on the back of her neck press in more deeply, almost in a parody of a massage, that whatever was happening to her was happening to him, as well.
“I’m not bloody doing anything,” she insisted, through gritted teeth. “YOU stop it. Is this…some kind of…homebrewed imperio, enacted through touch?” she theorized.
The warmth in her chest was even more potent now. She was having an extremely difficult time holding, in her short term memory, the fact that he had just expressed a willingness to kill her. Instead she could only seem to process the dominating presence of his long hand, the way the breeze tossed his touchable hair and wafted his scent towards her – lime, and bay rum, and a bit of Tropicana sunscreen.
“Cyka blyat,” he whispered, his eyes trailing down her collarbone to her –
He was about to say more, she would have reckoned, but right at that moment, the two of them could hear the voices of the family Hermione had been watching earlier.
“Momma what are they doin’? How come he’s got his hand round her neck?”
“Hey, can I call the cops this time? Last time in the trailer park you let Jaidyn do it.”
“BAD BOYS BAD BOYS, WHATCHA GONNA DO, WHATCHA GONNA DO WHEN THEY COME FOR YOU, BAD BOYS BAD BOYS – ”
Hermione and Antonin – each keeping their hand and their wand on each other, respectively – snapped their heads towards the children. They saw the plump mother, in her wide-brimmed sun hat and knockoff Vera Bradley paisley print one-piece, and all three of her sons fixing them with a dumbfounded stare, clearly thinking they had stumbled upon a domestic dispute. Antonin, in now obvious panic that Hermione would later find hilarious, looked between the boys and his captive twice, his eyes darting back and forth like blue ping-pong balls as he made his rapid calculation – trying frantically to think of what he could do to convince these muggles that he had not just been threatening to chop this woman into conveniently bite-sized pieces.
And, so – in a moment of nonsensical hysteria – he kissed her.
At the impact of his lips on hers – unexpectedly soft, at first, the enticing warmth of his mouth and the taste of freshly-squeezed oranges – she could, at a distance, hear the response of the muggles before, scandalized, they moved along with their day.
“Oh!” breathed the woman.
“Ewwww.”
“Grody.”
“He’s gonna get so many cooties from that.”
“Let’s leave them alone, boys,” the mother counseled. “That’s between them and the Lord.”
Hermione was not surprised that she wanted to shepherd her sons away, because what was occurring between her and Antonin was rapidly becoming not just a kiss.
Heedless of their earlier hostilities, his grip and her wand had somehow dropped at the same time, right as he had failed to stopper a deep, intoxicating moan against her lips, intensifying the embrace while their palms sought each other’s skin and hair, taking egregious liberties, one of his hands roughly seeking her lower thigh to wrap her leg around him. The strange, nirvanic magic was even stronger now, pulsing outward from her chest, and, although Hermione had never been high, she imagined that this is what it might have felt like – this complete and joyful decimation of logic in favor of bliss.
“Chert voz’mi,” she heard him whisper, as she scratched her nails down his chest, in between the increasingly manic adorations of his mouth. “Chto ty…so mnoy sdelala?”
Somewhere far away, Hermione knew she had to stop this, that he was a murderer – almost her murderer – that this made no sense, that some horrifying sorcery was afoot. But that voice was drowned out by the music of his panting, demanding breaths, the harmony of their tongues moving together, the symphony of how his need throbbed up against her core, separated only by swim trunks and a red polka dot bikini bottom (DAMN these clothes!), when – without even realizing it – she had pushed him down into the beach chair and clambered on top of him, still kissing him all the while.
“Stop…kissing me, you…bastard,” she whined, raking her fingers through his deliciously soft locks, nipping his bottom lip and relishing the way his hand gripped her hip.
“YOU stop…kissing…ME, damnit,” he growled, his other hand grasping some of her own tresses as he tried to reclaim dominance. “Pizdets, why…can’t I…fucking…quit?”
He moaned again as, incensed by her little bites, he pressed his mouth against hers full throttle, and even amidst the heady elation of whatever arachnid magic had both of them secured in its web, at the sound of him losing all control, she distinctly felt something deep inside her flip – as if she was airborne, suddenly unsure of where she was about to land, all orientation obliterated, like an overconfident jump from the diving board that stretched out into just enough seconds to crystallize a sense of regret.
“You’re…the one…who…came looking for…ME,” he grumbled, tilting his head in a dozen different angles to kiss her this way, that way, and yet another way, eliciting a high-pitched exhalation from her that, under normal circumstances, she would have been mortified to have emitted. “I…wasn’t bothering…anybody…”
“Mmmmhhhmmm,” she whined as she tasted him, placing her hands on the sides of his face, finally running her fingers through his beard as he pulled tighter on her curls. “I…wasn’t looking for YOU…you’re…supposed to be…dead,” she corrected, both titillated and frightened by the arcane power running through her veins, the tiny, thrilling jolt that came with every one of his touches. “I’m…bloody well on leave. I’m just on…vacation. I…came here…to get AWAY from anyone I knew…”
“Well you – Khristos Pantocrator – did a…terrible job of it,” he rasped, overwhelmed mid-sentence when his fingers, seemingly of their own volition, had traveled underneath the side of her bikini bottom, contacting the delicate, unexposed flesh at her hip.
“Cancel…the spell…you idiot…” she hissed, rubbing his shoulders and nipping him again.
“It’s NOT a spell,” he whispered, nuzzling his prominent nose against hers as he, for the first time in several minutes, found the strength to keep his lips away from hers for more than five seconds at a time. “It’s the fucking scar – the curse I cast on you, what, seven years ago now?” he asked, still panting, gently touching her upper chest. “Look.”
When his index finger made contact with the old wound, before she had even looked down, her eyelids fluttered and she let loose a feral, chittering call, digging her nails into his shoulder blades, glad that no one was behind them at this point.
“God help me,” she heard him rasp. “Look at it now – the scar. I can’t prevent myself from kissing you for much longer.”
She saw that the normally aubergine tree, Thorfinn’s little Yggdrasil, was aflame, actually glowing, illuminated in undulating shades of mauve, magenta, and mulberry.
She glanced back up at him in unconcealed awe, his face turning redder as he pressed down the entire palm over the topmost branches above her breasts.
And then she was on fire. Everywhere.
“SWEET MERLIN I fucking hate you,” she snapped, savoring, despite her words, the way his breath hitched as she began to grind on top of his desire, thick to the point of insanity.
“FUCK!!!” he barked, his arms having gone from a slight tremble to a frenetic quake as he threw back his head, arched his back, and bit his bottom lip, his hands sliding up her waist. “Ya mogu libo trakhnut' tebya, libo umeret’, ved’mochka…”
“Who told you that you could have the audacity to kiss me?” she accused, her lips nevertheless rushing forward to meet the stubble at his neck, laving open-mouthed, almost worshipful devotions all around his prominent Adam’s apple.
“UUUUNNGGGHH,” he groaned, his eyes closed in unbidden ecstasy, his hands sneaking underneath the bikini tie around her back as he bucked up into her. “Who told you to grow up and get so goddamned beautiful!?”
Her head popped up to regard him as he froze, his eyes almost comically wide.
“…I said that out loud just now, didn’t I?”
Somewhere, in some filing cabinet now locked by supernatural lust, she knew everything that he had been, everything that he had done and tried to do, even to her.
And seeing a man so menacing look this vanquished only drove her to kiss him more.
Which she did.
“Mmmmmhhhgggrrrr,” he moaned, pressing her close to him – and, before she even knew it, he had flipped them around like the pieces of bread on a grilled cheese sandwich, her back pushed into the cushion of the beach chair as he, now licking and biting a line down her neck to her collarbone, shifted in promising patterns on top of her.
“Circe Almighty,” she breathed, knowing that they should really go somewhere, that someone would likely walk past – that they should, in all reality, stop this madness – but the affect of the enchantment was too potent for her body to comply with reason. All she could do was run her hands down the flexing muscles of his back, wondering if this was how it would feel underneath her palms when he was fully ravaging her.
“I kissed you,” the death eater attempted to explain, between the laving of his tongue and the scraping of his teeth, both of which were heightening her frenzy to a worrying degree, “because…I didn’t…want that nosy hillbilly to…call the police on me for…assaulting you – ”
“So you…assaulted me…MORE?” she scoffed, her own back arching now.
For the second time, she heard him laugh – a low, throaty chuckle that would have made her wet even without any magic that had lain dormant within her for a decade.
“Like you don’t love it.”
How dare he. How dare he be so RIGHT.
He had raised his head to smile at her now in arrogant triumph, while his hands grasped her own, pushing them into the royal blue cushion above her head.
He has dimples, she realized. Of COURSE he has dimples.
She knew then, and for the rest of their lives together, that the devastation his smirk was capable of could properly be classified as atomic.
But, even in the throes of the indomitable alchemy his curse had worked upon them both, the bossy little Gryffindor bitch within her would not be so easily cowed.
“I would NEVER love a kiss from a man who tried to kill me,” she spat, squinting in scorn.
His smile only widened, showing off his rows of perfect white teeth.
Gripping her wrists more tightly, he leaned down, his face only inches from hers.
“I WASN’T trying to kill you, Miss Granger. Our orders that night, at the Department of Mysteries,” he said, nuzzling her once again, the affection of the gesture at odds with his tone, “were specifically NOT to kill any of the students.”
And then he moved his lips to her ear, kissing the lobe before a gravelly whisper.
“If I’d have wanted you dead…you’d be dead.”
Her heart flailed like a trapped stoat against a steel cage, ready to sell its pelt dearly.
And then, like the brutal, ruthless monster that he was, Antonin rutted his swollen length against her clit through the fabric as he growled, his breath hot on her ear.
“But there are infinitely more delightful ways to destroy you, ved’mochka.”
That should not have made her groan. That should not have made her writhe against his restraints, tangle her legs with his own, pepper his shoulder with destitute kisses.
But the compulsion she was under put her past the boundaries of sanity.
(Yes, it’s the compulsion, she told herself. It’s not my fault. I can’t bloody help it…)
A litany of agitated little grunts issued from his throat as he released her palms, his hand cradling the back of her head and his mouth latching on to the side of her neck, sucking enough to leave a mark, because apparently one from him was not enough (and, in this moment, she was exactly fucked-up enough to want that).
“FUCK, Antonin…” she breathed into his ear – large, and somehow adorable.
It was the first time she had spoken his name, and she could feel his response to it. She wondered why she hadn’t said “Dolohov,” “inveterate cad,” or simply “arsehole,” but his eyes glared down at hers in provocative exhilaration at the sound of it.
“Again,” he commanded, rocking against her once more for emphasis.
She shook her head, her lips pursed, obstinate even when drunk on this power – even when all she wanted was for him to evanesco their clothing, apparate them to a creaky motel bed, and make her forget that there had ever even been a wizarding war.
But as his fingernails caressed her scalp, his other hand trailing down her side, his tone was not what she would have expected; it was plaintive, even imploring.
“It’s been…years for me. Since I’ve heard it. Pozhaluysta.”
She had not stopped shaking her head, somehow afraid of the intimacy he was coaxing out of her, of making a deliberate choice to name him, to acknowledge him, to know him, when everything before could have been blamed on the spell.
But then he chuckled again, and she should have known she was doomed.
When he ran his tongue up the entire length of the scar, her midsection raised off of the chair as if she was possessed, and she caterwauled so loudly that, later, she thought surely the Blue Angel pilots flying overhead might even have heard it.
“ANTONIN!!!”
“FUCK yes,” he effused, cupping her jaw roughly, leaning down to capture her lips once more. “I can’t wait to make you scream that all night – ”
“BOOOOSSSSS!!!”
Like the chiming of midnight bells turning Cinderella’s coach back into a pumpkin, the noise of the shouting, heavily-accented voice seemed to snap both of them out of their salacious haze. In a flash, the death eater was off of her, standing two feet away from the chair, blinking rapidly like a possum stumbling in front of a car.
“Boss, the damn toilet’s busted in room 304 again!!! I don’t know what kind of magic you work but you always manage to fix it and it’s about to flood the other floors…”
Both of them were still panting, wholeheartedly befuddled, as Antonin stared down at his own hands, at Hermione’s scar, and then up towards the sound of the yelling.
“…gavno.”
He shook his head as he stared at her in horror, utterly at a loss.
“Boss, seriously, are you even hearing me? There’s water EVERYWHERE – ”
“I’LL BE RIGHT THERE, PYXIE!!!” he bellowed, grasping his own hair in frustration.
He uttered a growl of annoyance blended with anxiety.
"Izvinite. I mean…I’m sorry. So fucking sorry, for all of it. FUCK!!!”
And, at that, Antonin Dolohov simply turned and ran up the sand dune towards the hotel, leaving her, still laid out like an uneaten banquet on the beach chair, feeling addled, disappointed, and aching at the sudden removal of his touch.