savoir-faire
"...we never talked much those days, not because there was nothing to
say but because there might be too much and if you once started you
would upset the beautiful and perilous equilibrium which we had
achieved."
- All The King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
It is their third day when Ron finally asks her. She is surprised it has taken this long. They sit in a café, at an indoor booth in the corner where the sunlight doesn't reach; he leans across the table and says, "Why are we here, Hermione?"
She sips her coffee, wishing it were tea, and tells him, "Because we need a vacation."
It rained the day of their final trip home, thick droplets pounding a steady roar on the metal roof. They sat alone in a compartment at the back, and the plump old witch with the food cart never came.
"I think we should go to France," said Hermione. Ron looked at her.
"I don't speak any French."
And so it was settled. They arrived at Platform 9 and 3/4, and Hermione kissed her mum and dad goodbye, and they went to France.
Ron looks as though he may begin to speak again, so she leans forward and kisses him.
"That's...well," he stammers, and she smiles. Ron is Ron is Ron, she thinks, and wonders if he thinks the same of her.
Probably not, she decides.
They spent their first night wandering through Paris, holding hands, tipsy and flushed and almost forgetting that they belonged in another world altogether. They sat on a bench, and Hermione pulled her legs up and curled her fingers into the bottom of Ron's coat and said, "I love you, Ron."
"I love you too, Hermione," he replied, and rolled his head back, flopping an arm across the back of the wooden bench. "And I love you, Harry," he added, an afterthought; it sounded like something that had never before occurred to him, and probably was.
She was quiet for a moment, then: "You're drunk, Ron," and guided him back to their hotel room with a steady hand.
"I wish I had gotten tea," she says, dragging her toe along the panelling of the wall. He does not respond. "But it wouldn't have seemed right."
He gives her a funny look, a Ron-look, one she hopes will slowly weather away with the frown that creases his forehead every time he hears this language not-his-own. "Sure. Right."
Hermione rolls her eyes, a Hermione-thing-to-do, that she also expects will be gone eventually. He may love her, but he doesn't understand her.
"Isn't there a magical community in Paris?" Ron had wondered on the second day, peering down a particularly shabby alley that she knew reminded him of London's grubby pubs nestled sweetly between shoe stores and antique shops.
"I don't know," Hermione lied.
He grabs her hand as they leave the café, and leans to whisper in her ear.
"You're trying so hard to convince me that you're hiding, Hermione."
She looks at him and realizes that this is not the Ron that is always Ron. This is the Ron who she never thought would exist, but who does now and who she sees might have known what they were doing here all along.
"But you won't find him here."
He lets go of her hand and she watches him walk away, until his head is a smidge of orange in the not-so-far distance. Her best friend walks away, and she thinks that maybe he does understand her, after all.