The Stars on the Staircase

Bonus Chapter 3 - Spinner's Beginnings

Author's Note: Severus waits anxiously for his little nymph to return from an excursion with her friends. This is a Severus POV bonus Chapter that would be right before 'Summers with Severus'

Hanging halfway out of the back door of the kitchen I once more chide myself for being such a worrying mother hen. The owl she had sent me when she arrived home had stirred a complex mix of emotions in me I was still trying to sort out. She had informed me that she was going to go on some kind of excursion, seemingly outdoors in nature, with her friends for a week, and come to my place for our planned summer together at its conclusion.

I was glad to hear she was going to spend time with her friends. I did not want her to come running to me and neglect her relationships. Merlin knew I would be back at Hogwarts and unavailable to her soon enough. I had begun to worry I had made a mistake in inviting her to stay for so long. It might be too intimate, and lead only to difficulties when the fall semester began again. It would have been better to have sporadic visits, try to get used to not seeing each other as often.

As soon as I had arrived at my home I knew I had underestimated how much I would miss her. In my mind I thought of our Friday nights as our singular weekly visit but that was laughably untrue. She had been under my nose every day at the school. In my class, offering secret smiles and shiny eyes, at her house table, day dreaming out loud to me as I passed by.

Her imminent arrival seemed at once not soon enough, I craved her laugh terribly, and also too soon, the house seemed shabbier with the lens of future fresh eyes on it.

In truth I had neglected the house, it was nothing to me except a place to lay my head for two months. A house without a human in it for most of the year decays a little faster than one with living beings in it. I took the opportunity to clean it with new eyes, and repair what was easily done with magic. Still it had an unoccupied smell, like the dust on surfaces over the years had seeped into the bones of the house.

I paced around the kitchen once more, looking at the clock over the door to the sitting room. It was the appointed time, only just. I was behaving unlike I ever had before, the heart gripping worrying was not like me. I had given her a memory of the space in the backyard so she knew where to pop up. There I had grown some careful shrubbery to hide comings and goings from neighbouring yards. It remained empty seven minutes after the time we had arranged.

She was new to apparating. Not that I doubted her abilities. She was very clever but it did not stop me from worrying that something had gone awry. Either with this apparition or the one before to get where she was going with her friends. Trying to put my worrying about her apparition from my mind I resumed my worries about what her coming to stay here meant about our relationship.

It seems I am damned either way to worry over her. Am I really this kind of man? Even though she had aged by magic I felt sometimes still that I was a lecherous old bastard. Whenever I imagined the beautiful little thing flitting around the house I could not overcome the idea that I was thinking exclusively with my cock.

I had grown used to her being in my quarters at school more often than she ought towards the end of the year. I couldn't help but think of all the positions I had guiltily enjoyed watching her in. Laid out on my sofa, curled in my reading chair like a little egg, even reading on my rug by the fire with her homework and being unaware that my eyes had strayed from my marking to examine how she kicked off her shoes and how with her feet up in the air while she lay on her stomach, they wiggled to the rhythm of the words she read.

I looked at my furniture and felt greedy to have memories of her all over these as well. The sick feeling of what I truly am washed over me once more. Her teacher. Her teacher, luring her to spend the summer locked away with him here. Not because this connection needed to be explored but because if I was being honest I burned for her. I wanted her in every way and every time she breathed one of those broken breaths of pleasure, gasps ragged at my touch I was helpless in wanting more of her.