Delilah sat cross-legged on her bed with the remaining contents of George’s package in front of her, picking them up one by one. The problem was that most of the items required two-party consent: the potion and the photographs were the only thing she could really bomb him with. Evidently there wasn’t much market for coercive seduction tools. Not a legal one, at least. She considered writing to George to ask for one of his standard-issue love potions to try again to sneak something to him, but having shown her hand with the Finch-Fletchley mess, she was sure he’d be wise to the effects of the potion even if by some miracle she found another opportunity to spike something he was about to drink, and lightning was hardly likely to strike twice in that regard – not that it had even worked the first time anyway.
She felt sick when she thought about Finch-Fletchley. The previous evening, as she’d left the Great Hall after dinner, she’d found him standing formally outside the door, waiting for her. He’d approached cautiously, slowly, as though she were a horse who might bolt if he made any sudden moves.
‘Delilah du Lac?’ he said.
‘Yes?’ she said in confusion, not recognising him.
‘I’m Justin,’ he said, holding out a formal hand. ‘Justin Finch-Fletchley.’
‘Ah,’ she said in comprehension, giving a guilty smile as she shook his hand. Without the allergic inflammation to his eyes and nostrils – not to mention the chemically-induced violent lust – she saw that he had a polite, benign sort of face, with clear hazel eyes, a rather large roman nose and a juvenile smattering of freckles on his cheeks. Her guilt was nothing to his though.
‘I just wanted to apologise – really sincerely apologise – for what happened yesterday,’ he said, turning a glowing shade of pink. ‘I don’t remember it and they wouldn’t really tell me what happened, but I tracked down Ginny Weasley and got it out of her. She told me what I did and I just, I really can’t believe…’ His face crumpled into an expression of utter anguish.
‘It’s OK, honestly. You were poisoned, I know it wasn’t you.’
‘I really and truly would never do anything like that, I don’t want you to think there’s even a fraction of me which would ever, ever…’
‘Of course not,’ she cut him off, ‘I know, and I really don’t blame you at all.’
‘I can’t understand what happened,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’ve taken that tonic dozens of times and I’ve never reacted badly to it before, Professor Sprout is convinced she must have done something wrong, but I just don’t know.’
Delilah’s stomach squeezed again as she imagined Professor Sprout in her greenhouse, agonising over the remainder of the batch, checking and re-checking her ingredients, wracked with worry that she was responsible for Delilah’s near miss.
‘I guess it’s a mystery,’ she mumbled, and, after allowing Justin to shake her hand again and press a final apology on her, they went in opposite directions, and she wondered which of them was left feeling worse.
It had been ridiculously unlucky, she thought grumpily as she gathered everything back into its envelope, heaved herself off the bed and threw it back into her trunk, that the hayfever tonic hadn’t been for Snape. She’d been so close, and she was sure Snape wouldn’t have been half as affected by it as Justin.
She stuffed her books into her schoolbag and made her way towards the Charms corridor, thinking desolately that she’d have to give up soon. The idea was inconceivable though – how could she just put the whole thing from her mind, go back to the drudgery of castle life, orbiting him every day and doing nothing about it? What would she do with herself? How would she occupy her thoughts?
It occurred to her that this time the previous year, her thoughts had been occupied exclusively with Terry. Now she barely noticed him any more, in spite of seeing him every day. Maybe she could find someone else to fixate on, and Snape would become just as irrelevant to her as Terry was. It was a slightly depressing thought. Was she really this feeble-minded? Did she really need to be pursuing someone in order to be satisfied? Couldn’t she just lose herself in her studies, or take up a hobby, devote herself to something more worthwhile? Wasn’t this all really just a colossal waste of energy? She tried to imagine Connie, single-minded, brilliant, utterly self-assured, panting after a series of males even in the face of outright rejection. It was like trying to imagine Dumbledore incoherently drunk.
Her path took her to the third floor, past the empty Defence against the Dark Arts classroom. She glanced at the timetable pinned to the noticeboard beside the door as she passed and then, after walking on a few paces, froze and retraced her steps. She stood in the doorway staring hard at the desk in front of the blackboard, and a mad flash of inspiration seized her. Before she even knew what she was doing she had darted into the classroom, slamming the door closed behind her, and slithered under the handsome carved wooden desk, crawling into the far right corner and pulling her knees to her chest to take up as little space as possible, her heart hammering so violently she could feel it against her thighs.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ she muttered frantically to herself. As soon as she was there she began to panic. It seemed next to impossible that this could end in anything but disaster.
The students would be coming in any second, this was madness, madness… but before she had time to reconsider she heard the door crash open and footsteps coming into the room.
‘…for the thousandth time, won’t work unless you know exactly what to ask,’ a girl’s voice was saying. ‘Can’t you just drop this obsession and focus on the more important matter at hand…’
Her voice was drowned out by the sound of a handful more students coming in. Snape still wasn’t there, and she wildly contemplated just crawling out, ducking her head and making a run for it in spite of the assembled students, but before she could do so, an unmistakeable silence fell.
‘Turn to page ninety-six.’
Professor Snape had arrived.
The desk was deep and entirely enclosed on three sides, meaning she could avoid detection as long as Snape didn’t push his legs out at an angle into the corner she was curled up in. She squeezed her legs tighter to her body.
‘…going to be discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the various concealment charms which we’ve learned about over the past few weeks…’
She could hear the sound of chalk scraping; he was obviously teaching from the blackboard. Was there a chance he’d stay standing for the next hour?
‘…anyone give me the main drawback of the Disillusionment Charm?’
An indistinct murmur came from the classroom and several people laughed.
‘Thank you Mr Finnigan,’ Snape’s voice rang out, much more distinct for coming to her from the open side of the desk. ‘The Disillusionment Charm should be far from “effing impossible” for a sixth-year wizard who has applied himself to his studies, but you are correct in the sense that incompetent execution can render partial results, most commonly manifesting in incomplete concealment against light-coloured surfaces…’
She could see the bottom few inches of his robes and his shoes pacing back and forth in front of the blackboard.
‘…anyone give me another form of magical concealment not yet covered?’
Her muscles had begun to seize up. She pressed her back carefully against the side of the desk and slightly loosened her grip on her legs. She prayed that the desk was too heavy to be moved by her body weight.
‘…Mr Weasley, but unless you intend to demonstrate a hitherto unsuspected genius for Transfiguration and transform yourself or another into a Demiguise in order to weave its hair into a garment, an Invisibility Cloak cannot be considered a teachable method of concealment…’
He paced back and forth and she swung between terror, wild excitement, and a mad impulse to laugh. She found herself wondering what he was wearing underneath his robes. She tried to remember if she’d caught any glimpse on that night, but all she could picture was a swirl of black fabric being wrenched aside by tremblingly impatient hands, and then his cock springing free…
She swallowed hard.
‘…rolls of parchment detailing each of the methods of magical concealment discussed today, plus any others you may wish to proffer from your own research, focusing specifically on their advantages and drawbacks. You may begin now. There will be no need for talking; if you have any questions please approach my desk.’
There was a rustling of papers and the ripping sound of a few Velcro satchel flaps. The legs of the chair in front of her scraped the floor as it was pulled back, and the light under the desk diminished as Snape threw himself heavily into the chair, leaning his weight back, his long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle, shoving themselves into the space under the desk.
Delilah squeezed herself up as small as she could. She heard a shuffling overhead as he rummaged through a sheaf of parchments; otherwise, only the scratching of quills and the odd sigh disturbed the silence.
She hardly dared to breathe. She stared at the elegant folds of black material that draped the air, the form of his legs outlined under them, the tidy black shoes, barely four inches from her own feet. What on earth would he do if he moved his legs and brushed against her? Would he yell, drag her out, publicly expose her? Would he ignore her until the end of the lesson? Would he press his legs against her? Maybe even spread them, inviting her between them…?
The idea went through her like a shot of Firewhiskey, and every single inch of her body clenched with excitement.
Fuck it. I’m here now.
Slowly, very carefully, she pulled her wand from the pocket of her robes and brandished it with the tiniest flick, so that a whorl of pale blue smoke unfurled from its tip. She bit her lip and held her breath as it drifted under the desk towards his legs… He was engrossed in reading: would he see the wisp of vapour emerging from near his knees?
For a moment it looked like the smoke was going to dissipate before it caught his attention. Delilah held herself as still and taut as a cat watching a squirrel as the blue smoke hit the open air and spread out, surely too faint now to be seen, but she watched on, her wand quivering in her hand…
He shifted his weight, and she felt rather than saw him pause. At waist-height he ran his hand through the air as though trying to catch a handful of the smoke, and Delilah dropped silently forwards onto her hands and knees as she saw him bend to peer under the desk. His body twisted and his face dipped into view before his alert black eyes caught hers and widened in surprise, and she pressed a finger to her lips, staring back up at him.
They stayed where they were, eyes locked together for a few seconds, then Delilah retreated back into the shadowy underside of the desk and sat back on her haunches, while Snape, clearly choosing not to rush into any decisive course of action, sat slowly back up in his seat. Delilah breathed steadily and silently through a clamped jaw for several moments, gazing at his legs, and then extended a surprisingly steady hand, closing it gently around his calf just below the knee.
He gave a tiny jerk, and she felt the cartilage at the back of his knee tense under her index finger as his muscle flexed. When he didn’t kick her away she gently ran her hand up and over his knee, tracing a path between his thighs with her fingertips, her palm pressing into the muscular top of his leg. She progressed slowly up his thigh, pressing her fingertips into his skin more and more firmly as the gap between his legs narrowed, until the side of her finger met a wall of hard, warm flesh where his thighs met. She stopped for a moment and then gave his leg a prompting squeeze, and he shifted in his chair and parted his legs slightly.
This minuscule gesture of encouragement was so thrilling, so totally affirming that she actually closed her eyes in the dark, paralysed for a second by the judder of pure arousal that seized her – and then she set upon him with the force of all the past few weeks’ built-up frustration behind her. She slipped her hand under his robes and thrust her whole arm up under them until her fingers again met his thigh, warmer still with just his trousers separating her fingers from his skin, and she plunged her fingers into the newly-created space between them, kneading at him with insistent pressure, climbing higher and higher up his leg until she met with the hot, throbbing bulk of his cock, bursting at the seams of his crotch.
She pressed her hand hard against him for a moment, feeling him pulse beneath her touch, and then fumbled for the button of his fly. He shifted himself fractionally forward in his chair and leaned back, pushing his hips forward to facilitate her, and, after a few seconds’ effort, she unzipped his trousers and slipped her hand inside them.
She realised with a start that she had never actually touched his naked flesh before – or, in fact, any man’s. His skin was incredibly soft under her fingertips but lined with raised veins, and as stiff as stone but pounding as though it would burst open. She stroked her fingers experimentally along its constricted length, breathing shallowly, until he shifted impatiently so she, understanding, gently slid it out of his trousers where it bucked free and stood directly upright. With her other hand she pulled his robes open and crawled on her knees until she was between his legs, forcing his knees further apart, and ducked her head under his robes. She took him carefully in her hands and touched her wet tongue delicately to the tip of his cock.
She knew immediately that she’d done the right thing, as he squeezed his thighs around her neck as though to hold her there, and she began to run her tongue up and down his length, tracing the thick vein that ran like a tree-root along the underside, and as she reached the pulsing tip she felt a fresh convulsion, and a drip of salty-sweet liquid tanged on her tongue.
He’s coming, she thought with crazed pleasure, I’m going to make him come; she focused all of her attention on that bulging tip, running her tongue over and over it as more drops pooled there and slid off into her mouth where they mingled with her saliva, and she ran one hand up and down the inside of his thigh at the same time, the other growing numb with supporting her weight on the floor…
‘Professor?’
She froze.
His voice rumbled through his body as he answered. ‘Yes?’
‘I have a question about human Transfiguration.’
‘Approach.’
There was the sound of a chair scraping and footsteps, and in the few seconds of distraction that this afforded, Snape thrust his left hand under the desk and grasped her by the head, digging his fingers into her hair and squeezing so that his fingernails scraped deliciously along her scalp. He ran his hand over her head so that he was grasping her by the back of the skull, and, in one swift movement, pulled her in close so that the whole length of his cock filled her mouth, the bulbous end pressing against her palate. The gasp she gave was stifled by the size of him, and she very nearly pulled away in surprise and panic at her suddenly restricted airways, but the feeling of his hand in her hair was more compelling at that moment than her need to breathe, and she sank into his lap, pressing the tip of his hardened dick into the back of her throat.
‘…on a genetic level, if for instance you were to die or fall unconscious whilst in a Transfigured state?’
‘For a start, I would caution you to steer clear of Muggle terminology such as “genetic” in your N.E.W.T. paper, which although occasionally useful, almost always results in the student becoming sidetracked from the spirit of the question…’
As he spoke, he tightened his grip on her skull and imperceptibly pushed her away by a small distance, then pulled her back towards him, then pushed her away again. Getting the idea, Delilah started to move her own head back and forth so that the surface of her tongue slid against him and his satiny nub rubbed against the roof of her mouth. She could feel the swell of his salty cleft pulsating against her flesh.
‘…but essentially the answer is no: Transfiguration can create a lasting and convincing change to appearance, but, unlike Polyjuice potion, doesn’t penetrate further than the surface…’
How could he concentrate on what he was saying with his cock in her mouth, so rock hard it felt like he would explode any second? She could hear a telltale ragged note in his voice, which she recognised from some of their earlier encounters with the Dermorestorative Poultice.
‘I don’t really understand how that works. You say Polyjuice potion creates a more complete transformation, but it’s still essentially just a mask isn’t it? The potion drinker is still just under the surface, and they don’t take on anything more than the physical characteristics of the…’
A wicked impulse flashed through her mind and, without any interruption to the rocking movement of her head, she fumbled with the buttons of her robes. They only unbuttoned down to the bottom of her sternum, so she pointed the tip of her wand haphazardly at the fabric so that they split silently down to her navel and slipped off her shoulders.
‘…but still a productive point of comparison in terms of longevity. Don’t forget to take into account the skill required in achieving a human Transfiguration to rival the detail that Polyjuice potion can provide if the caster is actually trying to pass themselves off as…’
She pulled her bra off her shoulders and released the clasp with a nimble twitch behind her back so that it fell to the floor and, naked from the waist up, ran her hand over Snape’s at the nape of her neck to signal for him to release his grip on her head. When his fingers loosened she took hold of his wrist and guided it to her breasts, which he grasped in a desperate squeeze so exciting that she shoved her free hand between her own thighs, almost hyperventilating at the thought of him touching her there. She writhed her body against his legs, ran her tongue again along the length of his cock, ran the flats of her hands along the insides of his thighs, covered his hand in her own to rub his palm against her nipple, growing insane with desire, maddened at the sight of him still upright and stiff as lead right in front of her. Being half naked and so close to his cock was so furiously arousing that it was nothing more than an inarticulate plea for release which made her close her left hand around his cock and sit up taller to press her breasts against him, cushioning his throbbing length between them, but she knew at once she had hit home as his legs jerked with a violent tremor and his voice cracked and faltered mid-flow above her.
‘-urge you to look up the… the case of… the Wizengamot ruling of nineteen… I forget the year… I shall find it for you by next week. You may go.’
‘Um, OK. Thanks Professor,’ the girl’s voice said, sounding confused at the abrupt dismissal.
‘You may all go,’ Snape thundered. ‘Class dismissed; complete the assignment by next week. Leave.’
A short silence followed in which Delilah could almost hear the students looking at each other in surprise at this unprecedented event, and then a scurry of activity as they scrambled to leave before he changed his mind, but she couldn’t think of anything except what would happen next, and before the last footsteps had even left the room his hands were again gripping her head, sunk into her hair. As soon as the door fell closed behind the last student, he pushed his chair backwards and flopped back against it, thrusting his hips forwards and pulling his robes right up to his waist so that she had unfettered access to him. She sat fully upright and took him again in her mouth, both of his hands closed around her head, guiding her back and forth. She glanced up through her disarranged hair to see him apparently immobilised with pleasure, his lips parted, his half-closed eyes watching through his bottom lashes at her lips and tongue moving up and down his rigid shaft.
She caught his gaze and shook her head free of his grasp so that she could slide more fully between his legs, raising herself up so that her breasts were again nudging at him. She looked challengingly into his eyes and guided his hands to her breasts, then let her head fall back in pleasure at his touch, but barely a moment later he gave a kind of growl and grasped her under the arms, yanking her to a half-standing position so that his chair clattered loudly to the flagstones and, her body clutched to him, turned to the fireplace before she’d even caught her balance, leaving a disarray of jumbled parchments strewn on the desk. He produced a handful of Floo powder apparently from thin air and dragged her into the flames with such reckless haste that his robes were singed at the hem, and seconds later they crashed out into the hearth of his office.
Snape grappled madly at his own robes whilst Delilah’s, already ripped in half, slid easily off her hips, leaving her in her knickers; she kicked off her shoes and then wrapped herself around Snape’s naked torso as it emerged from under his robes. He looked strangely vulnerable appearing from under the swathes of fabric, his hair ruffled, his marble pallor slightly flushed, and, as he shook his inside out robes off his wrists, a fresh surge ran through her at the sight of his slim, white body, exposed to her for the first time. She pressed herself close up against him and his hands closed roughly around her waist, falling on her with his mouth, biting her shoulder, running one hand up her spine, the other feeling for her breast, his cock pressing insistently against her leg, his unzipped trousers still only halfway down his thighs as the two of them kneeled upright on the flagstones.
He suddenly fell on her and lowered her to the floor, the freezing stone on her back contrasting with the blistering heat of his skin on hers as he shimmied her knickers down her hips. Seeing her lying naked before him, spread out in the sunlight that struggled through the small window, he seemed briefly overwhelmed, his eyes darting all over her as if unsure where to start, and then he came unstuck with a convulsive gasp, like he’d just bitten into fresh peppercorn, pinned her down by the shoulder with one hand and shoved the other between her thighs, stroking at the soft folds of her skin until he parted her lips and slid his fingers inside her, finding her astonishingly hot and wet, and gave an unbridled yelp of pleasure. His hands shaking violently, he withdrew his fingers, still leaning bent-backed over her, and plunged himself, now as taut and magenta as an overripe plum, deep inside her.
Delilah had been delirious with pleasure, writhing under the sensation of his flesh on hers, almost choking on the exclamations of joy that were bubbling up through her at his touch, his longed-for, final touch, and so was caught once again off-guard by his abrupt ingress, but this time, hot and wet and wide open and expectant, she felt a twinge of pain so mild that it mingled almost satisfyingly with the pleasure that was flooding her body, and after a few thrusts from him, accompanied with his savagely exciting moans of ecstasy, the pain melted and gave way to the sensation of him sliding in and out of her, the friction building to a pleasure so indescribably intense that she grappled blindly for him, wriggling up to clutch at his shoulders, her eyes clamped shut and her cheeks scarlet, her hair in a savage tangle from his clawing at her scalp, and positively screamed into his damp, downy chest with an extravagance that caused Severus to explode into her with dynamite force.
