To Live is the Rarest Thing

Chapter 13

Tom threw his head back and laughed. “Oh, my darling, that is vicious, sicking your dead mother on poor Severus.”

Harry turned a little on the couch and held out his hand. “Give me the stone, I’ll summon her to catch her up and ask her if she wants to help us.”

But instead of summoning the stone, as Harry thought he would, Tom released a deep sigh and lowered his head, and instantly Harry knew he’d pushed things too far.

“Can we not do that right now?” Tom asked, voice barely audible.

“I’m sorry, babe.” Harry realized that they really should address a few elephants that were stationed around every room of their lives, and he knew just how to do it. “How about I let Izzy out for a wee and close up here, and you get undressed and wait for me in bed, face down.”

Tom raised his head and gave Harry a very dubious look before something must have dawned on him. Tom was many things, but stupid wasn’t one of them, and for a moment it looked like Tom might roll his eyes and dismiss Harry’s offer, but in the end he relented and slowly got up from the couch. “Very well. Your wish is my command.”

“Atta boy,” Harry said with a chuckle. While Izzy got to roam the yard for a few minutes, Harry sent their cups and glasses flying to the sink with a spell, banked the fire in the hearth and put out all the candles and turned off all the lights. While giving himself a bathroom break, Harry picked up a bottle of baby oil from the cabinet under the sink and then entered the bedroom where he found Tom exactly as he’d instructed him. Tom had his arms folded under his head and looked at Harry with hooded eyes.

Harry didn’t get naked, because what he was about to do had nothing to do with sex. This was an entirely different kind of intimacy.

You see, for all that Tom was a psychologist, and a psychiatrist, many times over, the man had a pathological inability to discuss his own mental issues. He’d gotten better at it over their many lives, no question there, but Tom was a perfectionist at heart and whenever he needed to address one of his own failures, the man clamped up tighter than a giant clam. Of course, for his own well-being it was imperative that he did talk about it, no matter how much he hesitated doing so. One thing that helped Tom to open up was to distract him with some type of physical stimulation, and it so happened that Harry was a licensed massage therapist, at least once upon a life.

“Just relax, babe.” Harry sat down on top of Tom’s bare ass, knees on either side of Tom’s waist. Pouring a generous amount of baby oil on his palm, Harry rubbed his hands together to warm it up and then set to work on Tom’s shoulders.

Harry took his time kneading the tight muscles he found there, working his way up to Tom’s neck and down his spine. For the first ten minutes Harry didn’t say a word, just helped Tom loosen up with sure, practised strokes of his hands.

Finally, Harry asked a quiet question. “That must have been hard, seeing all your victims today.”

Tom sighed, the kind that signalled he really, really did not want to talk about it but knew it was in his own best interest if he did so anyway. “Yes. It was tough.”

Harry hummed as he shifted a little so he could apply more pressure to a particularly stubborn knot right besides Tom’s shoulder blade. “I imagine the thing that bothers you the most is the fact that you made all the same mistakes again this life, that turned you into Voldemort.”