Charlie Weasley, Paper Husband

Chapter 3

Charlie flicked his glasses off his face and onto the tabletop. "I've done it, Hermione," he said. "I've hit my limit. I can't read another word until after Christmas."

From her armchair, she tutted as if to scold him. "Pace yourself, Weasley. Shake it off."

He did just that, leaning backward in his wooden chair, growling into the stretch of his spine.

Hermione glanced up from the book she was reading in time to catch a glimpse of his bare flank as his uplifted arms pulled his shirt out of place. Like a reflex, she hid her face behind her book again. It was an old habit she had adopted thanks to Ronald, this quickly looking away whenever too much of any of his brothers' skin was showing.

It started the summer they'd all gone to the quidditch world cup. The lot of them had come back to the Burrow dirty and worried and hot. Everyone was terribly in need of something to cleanse the bad feeling of seeing the Dark Mark in the sky the night before. Bill and Charlie understood this. They exchanged a knowing look, nodded in unison, stripped off their shirts, and tossed their younger brothers and Harry into the pond before leaping in to swim themselves.

Without any violence, Ginny coaxed Hermione to change and get into the water too. The nine of them spent the rest of the afternoon in the pond while Arthur explained what had happened to Molly, and held her as she wept over it. It was up to Bill and Charlie to nag their siblings about sunscreen spells. As they did, they raved with exaggerated jealousy at how nicely Harry and Hermione's tans were coming along.

Overstated as it was, Hermione was still very pleased with the compliment, smiling to herself and examining the colour of her arm in the sunshine. That was, until Ron pulled himself out of the water like a vengeful kraken and sprawled beside her on the grassy shore. They hadn't been anywhere near dating at the time but he was still red-faced and blustering about what he called Hermione's "ogle-fest" of his grown-up older brothers.

"What's got into you?" he'd fumed at her. "I've never seen you look at anyone the way you've been eyeing up Bill and Charlie today. You're even worse now than you were with Lockhart two years ago. It's indecent."

Instead of arguing that maybe Ron should take it as a compliment that the men whose looks she admired best were the people who looked most like him in all the world, she hissed at him to shut up. "It is perfectly normal, healthy even, for a girl my age to have an appreciation for the male physique," she'd said, cringing inwardly at how much she sounded like an article from one of the magazines in the waiting room at her parents' surgery.

"Male physique, is it?" Ron squawked before she covered his mouth with her damp, gritty palm. He lowered his voice as he tugged her hand away. "Yeah? It's about males, is it? Then how is it I've never seen you look at Harry that way? Or me?"

At this she'd scoffed so loud it was a shout that sent Harry flinching and diving underwater. "You? Ronald Weasley, I would hardly expect you to notice if I was ever boggled enough to look at you."

And with that she had stormed back to the house.

It was all very regrettable, especially when Ron threw her "healthy" comment back at her as justification for when she caught him leering at Fleur Delacour at school a few weeks later.

But Ron had nothing to say about who she looked at anymore. And Charlie was legally her husband, for stars' sake. She snapped her book closed and looked back at him, fully prepared to stare straight at whatever part of his torso he might have exposed. But Charlie had already stood up from his chair, his clothing neatly in place, all his lean, freckled skin modestly covered.

He was, however, coming her way, grinning. Even without his specs on he was giving her that same slightly dizzy feeling as when he'd walked toward her in the Portkey Terminal.