SOME KIND OF DISASTER ─ oliver wood

[ 031 ] maybe i'm a threat

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
maybe i'm a threat

SOMETIMES, Oliver says while he's plucking at the bandages around her hand, we have to let ourselves want things, even if they're out of reach. You spend your whole life denying yourself greater things, things you want so bad it scares you, and you miss out because all you can think about is what could be taken from you—but if you don't even try, it'll be taken from you anyway. You can't be afraid.

Between pointing out his team's chances against Slytherin in the upcoming match and pressing his mouth against hers, Sawyer doesn't know which thing he's talking about. They're lying in their backs now, collapsed on the dew-springy grass, their skin still flushed hot from their run, just half an inch apart, all-too-aware of the body warmth radiating off his arm. It feels like the summers when she'd float around in the pool, face-up to the sky, until the minutes meant nothing and the passage of time was marked by the colours of the clouds and all she could hear was the water lapping against her ears. Now she hears her heartbeat. She's never been more aware of it.

"I had a dream," he says now, eyes filled with the marble sky, the sweat drying on their skin in the morning sun, "that we weren't allowed to talk for a whole day, and so everyone had to use hand gestures to communicate, but I didn't understand anything and I didn't know how to make gestures to tell you about the hamster I had when I was a kid that I saw eating its own babies."

They do this now. Oliver trading dreams for the press of her knuckles against his palm, Sawyer collecting them. For a moment Sawyer feels a tension pulling at her hairline, like that prickling tell when you're about to get a sunburn. "I was in your dream."

"Yeah," Oliver says, laughing softly. "It was stupid. I didn't even have a hamster when I was a kid."

"You had a terrapin," Sawyer says, before she can even think, memories from their childhood rattling in her brain like wishbones in an altar box. "You called it Wilda, after Wilda Griffiths, the Chaser from Puddlemere United. Wyatt almost dropped it twice."

"You remember." His head jerks and he's looking at her now. He sounds surprised.

"I don't forget," Sawyer says, ripping out a handful of grass and rolling it between her hands until her palms are stained green, and now she knows how Oliver must've felt in his dream, all those words in his head but no way to say them, no way to know how.

It gets quiet for a little bit. A wind picks up, cutting across the pitch, rustling the grass, and Sawyer lifts her hand up, lets it sweep away the blades of grass plastered to her palm.

There was so much from their childhood she never forgot. Every time his mother would lift him up so he could ring their doorbell when he was six, every time Wyatt would pretend Sawyer didn't exist like he'd found a replacement in his friend who liked the same things as he did, every time they'd shut the door and leave her to play by herself with her broken Barbie dolls and safety scissors. And the way Oliver's eyes would pass over hers like she wasn't there each time she tried to join him and Wyatt in their boy-games, fumbling the controls with her girl-hands. Eight years old marked a different time, when she'd grown out of her little girl-crush on him, and he'd started barging into her room without ceremony, demanding her to play backyard Quidditch with them. She'd complied, begrudgingly, until he kept criticising her for terrible form and she'd pushed him over out of rage before running back into the house to hide in her room.

But she also remembered times that were a little less cruel. Like when he'd say hi to her, all soft and shy, like he didn't know what to do with his hands. Or that point in time when Oliver carried around sweets in his pockets, and when their families had dinners together, and he'd quietly place a neat line of green gummy bears next to her plate because she'd told him she liked the green ones best.