The Art of Taking Chances || Severus Snape x Reader ||

Chapter 11: Starting Over

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"It just...happened." 

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In the two weeks to follow, you were all that Severus could think about. You were his first thought when he woke up in the morning, and his very last thought when he went to bed. It even seemed that you were making your way into his dreams. He couldn't stop thinking about that night. That wonderful, lustful night just played on repeat in the back of his head. He couldn't stop thinking about how his hands felt on you, and how natural and how intoxicating it was. He was almost craving you. He was addicted to the feeling of you.

But he wasn't exactly open to feeding that fire.

He was practically avoiding you at this point. He refused to speak to you at dinner in The Great Hall, he didn't speak to you in the halls, he didn't acknowledge you at staff meetings. He had intentionally only visited your shared office during the hours that he knew you wouldn't be there.  

It was a huge blow to your confidence, but it wasn't exactly like you were trying to make an attempt to reach out to him. You were beginning to think that he was regretting what had happened. You sure as hell didn't regret a damn thing, no matter how much you didn't understand it.

If you thought the tension between you and Severus was bad before, now it was 100 times worse. He couldn't even look at you without his cheeks going beet red and his palms going sweaty. You weren't much better than he was. You tried your hardest to avoid looking at him, but if your gazes did happen to meet, you were just as flustered as he was. 

What you and Severus had done was complicated, just as the two of you had expected (yet ignored) it to be. It was a lot to think about, and it was even more to try to understand. You just couldn't wrap your head around WHY the two of you had given in to one another like that. The conversation leading up to it had started with innocent intentions. You and Severus both merely wanted to know what all the back and forth was about. 

For now, you had settled on the idea that the environment was just right. Maybe the room was just right and the circumstances were a little too perfectly fitting. You were currently settled on the idea that the two of you were just taken advantage of by a sincere, touching moment.

But you'd be a fool to actually think that was true.

The real reason had already begun to swim around in the back of your head, and in Severus' head too. Although, you were the one who had actually taken the time to try to sift through it.  You couldn't deny it to yourself any longer that you felt something towards him, while you didn't know what it was yet, there was something there. You knew the feeling was mutual, based on everything you had heard him think about you.

What scared you most about it was that the feelings you were harboring were similar to the ones you had felt with the only other person you had ever loved. Except this time, they were relentlessly endless, and about one hundred times stronger. 

You couldn't even imagine telling any of your old friends about this. How could you tell anyone about this? In all honesty, you had been tempted to write and owl a letter to Remus Lupin, even though you and Severus wanted things on the down low. While you hadn't seen Remus in several years, the two of you sometimes wrote letters back and forth to catch up. Remus had always been very intelligent and he always gave efficient advice. The more you thought about it, though, telling one of your best friends that you had sex with the person he used to bully seemed rather abrupt. Although, you always had a soft spot for Remus for never being as harsh on Severus as Sirius, James, and Peter were. 

You decided that you'd want to tell him in person next time you saw him.

No one had seemed to notice the odd distance between you and Severus. Everyone seemed to think that your avoidance of one another was due to your previously open hate for one another, and not because you had shared a far more than intimate moment together. As far as everybody else knew, things were business as usual. No one had noticed the bubbling cauldron that was your relationship that was wasn't far from bubbling over.