Disclaimer: All of Harry Potter belongs to J.K. Rowling. This is purely for fun, not profit.

Author's Note: As promised, this chapter has NOTHING to do with the previous piece featuring Voldemort and Hermione. CheetahLiv requested a Hermione-Snape one-shot, and I am replacing the Marriage Law fic with this one. There is a sequel in the works for To Choose a World, so that will now be published separately from this collections. This is a quick one-shot that popped into my head. Please note that while the story is not graphic, it does contain adultery. Enjoy your read!

Stay

The night was warm as she slipped out the back door onto the small patio, breathing deeply the dense air that heralded another summer storm.

In the flat over Diagon Alley, the city air was oppressive. Here, laden with the herbs growing just beyond the edges of her bare toes and the flowers loading branches that tumbled over the garden walls, the breeze-less night was soothing and rich, like bathing in chocolate pudding.

The sound of footsteps behind her, the deep baritone that did not belong to her husband. "I missed you."

Long, lean arms wrapped around her and she inhaled again, and now the garden's abundant scent carried his note as well, musky and light, a blend of the man and the potions he had brewed all his life.

"Stay," he murmured in her ear.

It was always the same entreaty, now as old as the relationship they had shared two blissful months at a time over the past five years.

"I wish I could," she whispered, and the clench of profound longing she hadn't been able to shed since the day he had walked back into her life squeezed just a little tighter.

He did not reply, pressing his lips to the top of her head. He never argued with her. It was he, after, all, who had provided the icily logical refusal in those first, hectic days of their affair.

"I'll send an owl to the lawyer in the morning," she was pacing, nude, as his black eyes followed her from the bed. "We can have divorce papers ready in a few weeks—"

"No."

She whirled, surprise quickly ceding to anger as she stared at him. "'No'? What do you mean, 'no?' If you think I can just blithely continue in my marriage when I can't…when all I can think of…when you and I…"

He rose from the blankets unsmiling, wrapped his fingers around her upper arms and kissed her firmly. "No. You, with your colour-coded diagrams and intensive study schedules, you, with your obsessively organized research and breathtakingly logical mind…what will happen, if you suddenly want a divorce?"

She gazed into the face that had so quickly become the dearest sight in her world and forced herself to think. A divorce…Ron would want to know why. Hugo and Rose would be devastated, even if they never learned the reasons…and this new, precious, fragile love would be trampled by the press, judged by a world that had always demanded a right to her private life.

More important than the papers were her friends. Her family. Harry and Ginny, the Weasley's, her parents, all of their friends…none would understand. Perhaps none should. Until he had returned to Britain, she had never looked twice at another man, never imagined another at her side, and now, explaining that to anyone…more than scrutiny and criticism, she would be ostracized, cast out. It would tear her family in half, and she would spend the rest of her life looking in on her children and those dearest to her from the outside. There were expectations she had to fulfill, a cage she had crafted that she had to live within, no matter how stifling the box.

"All right," she breathed a long exhale, "no." Her brown eyes sought his for confirmation. "But I'm not giving you up."

Now he smiled, barely, but the warmth touched his eyes and filled her to her toes. "I never asked you to do that."

There was only one other time they had discussed her marriage – later that first summer, as he had prepared to return to the school.

"I will not see you until next June," he told her solemnly as she rose from the couch past midnight, frantically packing to ensure she would be home in time to wake her daughter and see her onto the train. It was Rose's first year.

"What?" she asked, straightening to frown at him.

"We should not see each other during the year when I am at Hogwarts. The conditions of my employment – and Minerva's nosiness – would make secrecy impossible."

She could only gape at him for a minute, struggling to fathom what ten months without him would be like, when she heard her own voice saying calmly, "I agree. You can hardly frequently leave Hogwarts for London, and there is no real reason for me to be in Hogsmeade unless I make a point of visiting Rose."

"In which case I am certain your husband and son would join you for the family outing." He said it without bitterness or mockery.

He pulled her down onto his lap, pressing his lips to her neck as he murmured, "But I will very much look forward to sleeping with you next summer."

That first year apart, she had half-hoped that the insanity of their insistent desires would fade – she was more than thirty now, the days of feeling like a teenager, giddy with passion, should have been long behind her. In the first weeks of his absence, she had missed him fiercely, and then it had indeed seemed to wane with the dying seasons. That hope had turned to ash with his first message at the end of June, the arrival of his thestral Patronus sending her heart into her mouth like any schoolgirl.

In the years since she had consented to wait though long months apart for their short, stolen summers together, enduring the blistering emotions by keeping them firmly in check, his mercilessly rigid control their saving grace. She never spoke of him, nor he of her. They never saw one another publically – going so far so to warn each other when daily tasks might run the risk of a face-to-face meeting. She could count on one hand the number of times she had seen him in daylight in the last five years.

But every year, on a warm night like this when it was easy to fantasize about a potions lab in the basement, about ham and eggs on a sunlit table, about two black, curly heads running around instead of the red-heads now attending Hogwarts, he would say it.

"Stay."

And she had yet to stop wishing that the answer could be yes.