It wasn't as if Hermione didn't know the boys were there. The curls covering her neck were Medusa-ing in a vaguely impossible way - surely the novels saying 'the hairs at the back of her neck stood on end' didn't mean it literally? Absent-mindedly she scratched a note on the parchment by her hand - /staring plus neck equals question mark, cross-reference with bodice hyphen heaving/ - and turned a thumbed corner of the book she was reading, cringing at the violation of library property.
Somewhere in the space behind her, where words coalesced in bound leather tomes and fragile paper, two boys were talking. One was Lee Jordan, his voice skittering over itself so his words came out in the wrong order, and he was constantly back-tracking in the face of offended girls and angry boys, or beneath the purse-lipped glare of McGonagall. She could just make out his words, and they were pausing regularly enough that Hermione guessed he was conversing with someone.
"So. You've got a thing for Hermione Granger?"
Viktor.
A smile pulled at her lips, though she hid it from her brain with her hair. She knew already of course - she did consistently have some of the highest marks in her classes, and Viktor was not the subtlest of teenage boys - but when Lee said it out loud, it became a not-secret. Instead of being a rumour, it metamorphosed into a fact! Solid and gunmetal grey and oh, how Hermione loved facts!
"I am...she is...the library..."
A confirmation! Her hand skittered the quill once more over the parchment - /facts comma perhaps a little too (underlined) excited by question mark/ - and she smiled a small smile over the question.
"Well. You do know she's fourteen, right?"
The smile dropped, leaden. She was sure that age wasn't important - look at Juliet! Most famous romantic heroine of all time and she was /twelve/! Did these - her brain skittered to call such uneducated heathens 'people' - have no idea about classical literature or-
"I am thinking that age is not important when it comes to love."
/Skritch skritch/ as she chewed her lower lip, primarily in consternation, but also in the hope of biting away the hideous grin that was threatening to consume her face whole. What ravenous things expressions were! And 'Hermione Krum' wasn't really such an awful name, when one considered it from every angle, was it? Five syllables, the stop of the surname underscoring the elaborate vowel arrangement of her forename. Never mind that Viktor couldn't pronounce it... Then Lee Jordan, again, more muffled this time.
"Love ... concerned about the law ... few love spells in the Restricted Section."
Then his words were obliterated as Hermione leaned her chair on two illegal legs to hear better.
"... famous and all."/
Damn her feeble hearing! There was probably a spell to help in just these situations, so why couldn't she think of it? Tapping her fingernail against her teeth, Hermione thought furiously at herself, as she often did, reprimanding herself for being so lax in her studying. Really, she had been mad to think she could scrape by on only three hours a day. What if she failed the end of term exams? A decline in academic standing meant a less impressive CV, which equaled her missing out by a hair's breadth on that teaching post in Salem and instead having to flip burgers for a living, thus making it increasingly less likely to meet the eccentric millionaire of her dreams over champagne and escargots, leaving her with only her cats for company until she died and was eaten by the very felines she once doted on!
In short, doom!
A few deep inhalations later, Hermione managed to get her pulse under control and she shook her head to clear the horrendous vision of herself and burgers and cats, realising that, once again, she had missed a chunk of Lee and Viktor's conversation.
/Note colon letting one's mind run away with itself is not conducive to eavesdropping full-stop/
"... If it makes you feel better, I'm liking you because you're sexy in Quidditch robes, not just because you play it. Well, g'bye. It was nice meeting you, then, Krum."
Blinking did not quite cover Hermione's utter shock at that sentence. Nor, apparently, did it cover Viktor's and, as the silence stretched on, she wondered whether the Bulgarian boy had understood. She wondered whether she had understood, truth to be told. Since when did Lee... "Swing that way" and, oh dear, there's that imagination thing everyone keeps talking about. Rather, and wasn't long hair such a wonderful thing when it could successfully cover the sigh of blood rushing to one's cheeks? It tickled her face like teasing fingertips - or so she imagined.
"Viktor."
And then Hermione found herself mouthing the question along with Lee though her version of it was softer, wistfully curious:
"What?"
Did it count as voyeurism if she was only listening? The quill moved once again and she winced as if the sound was louder than elephants or embarrassment. Louder than her heart, that she knew couldn't be beating that tattoo inside her chest; it was physically impossible.
/I must be dea-/ was obliterated in a light-headed snicker of ink.
"Please to call me Viktor."
"Well then, please to call me Lee."
Unleashing her new-found imagination, Hermione pictured the stuttering awkwardness of Viktor's pose and heavy-browed nervousness next to Lee's heel-rocking confidence and her lips curved at the image. In the everyday world Viktor was silence, and Lee was speech - here they shared a poignant pause, and she was the only witness. She was already gathering her books and notes when Viktor next spoke:
"I don't suppose...I don't suppose I could entice you to have some pumpkin juice with me?"
When the arrangements had been made, Lee slotted his book back onto the shelf before following Krum out of the library under Madame Pince's beady glare. Hermione was nowhere to be seen.