One Match Away - Chapter 3: About to Expire
By Miss EmYei G
Rating: M (18+)
🔗 Previous: Chapter 2 - Silver Among the Vines
🔗 Next: Chapter 4 – Harry and Ginny in Sydney - New Life, New Roots
Chapter 3: About to Expire
Ginny always said the cure for a bad week was rosé and cheese.
Hermione took the wine. Left the dairy to the braver souls.
After a week of playing corporate chess, side-eyeing gym selfies, and dodging dating profiles featuring dead fish, she deserved this.
Deserved a couch.
Deserved this soft pink wine dripping down her throat like it could rinse out the ache.
"So?" Ginny asked, casual as sin, swirling her glass. "Still swimming in the Sea of Limp Wands?"
Hermione almost choked on her grapes.
"There was... one," she admitted.
One weird, familiar, heart-thudding ghost in the machine.
S.M.
Vineyard.
Dog.
The kind of eyes you remember even when you spend a decade trying not to.
Ginny crowed over the profile like it was a new TV show.
"He could have my passwords and my plants," she declared, unabashed.
Hermione smiled, but her chest tightened.
Because she knew.
Knew without knowing.
That sometimes the past didn’t knock.
It just slipped into your feed, swiped right, and dared you to open the door.
twenty minutes to detonation
Work dragged her back into calls and tasks.
But under the deadlines, under the polite nodding, was him.
Or maybe not him.
She didn't know which was worse.
Ginny had called it fate.
Hermione called it reckless curiosity.
Twenty minutes left on the match timer.
Her finger hovered.
The screen pulsed like a heartbeat she didn't want to claim.
sunset confessions & old ghosts
Across the world, Draco was doing the same stupid dance.
Wine bleeding into his blood.
Heat sticking to his half-open shirt.
And Theo—good old Theo—snickering over the rim of his beer.
"You matched with Granger?"
"You matched with Granger?"
Draco didn't laugh.
Didn't smile.
He knew those eyes.
Knew what it meant to be pulled back into gravity he thought he'd outflown.
Sixteen minutes left.
A lifetime or a second, depending on who you were asking.
Hermione zipped her laptop closed.
Checked the clock.
Fifteen minutes.
Fourteen.
Thirteen.
Fear tasted metallic on her tongue.
The fear that if it was him, she would come undone in ways no therapy could ever stitch back together.
And if it wasn't him... well. Disappointment was an old friend too.
She didn't let herself think.
Just typed:
Two letters.
One word.
A beginning.
Or maybe—maybe—something else.
She stared at the screen like it might catch fire.
Somewhere, miles of vines away, someone else's phone buzzed.
And the world, just slightly, tilted.
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