Guilty

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Guilty

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He always tells her that he loves her.

He says these three words while he runs his weather-worn hands through her long brown hair, and kisses her supple lips. She sighs into his mouth gently, and runs her hands over his taught back and pushes herself up onto her toes, because he is almost a foot taller than she is. She presses her body against his, fiercely, as if she has something to prove to him, and he presses back, just as intense.

Nymphadora feels three different ways about Remus. The first way is the way she feels when he makes love to her and he calls out her name just before he finishes, and he takes her hand in his own and closes his eyes. This is when she is in love with Remus Lupin. Nymphadora never really had many friends as a child, and her parents were never as close as she wanted. Having boyfriends and girlfriends was never high on her priority list and the few times that she did have a significant other the relationship was always about sex and nothing more. Love was never something Nymphadora had time for, and, for a while, that suited her just fine. But then she had met the charming ex-professor Remus Lupin, Remus Lupin with the sly wink in his eye that makes her blush ten shades of scarlet, and Remus with the long hair she loves to tangle her fingers in.

The second feeling comes when she sees Remus drinking too many glasses of brandy in the evening and his eyes become shifty. He does it every so often, every month or so, and she always feels the same pity that she felt the first time he made love to her, the night after Sirius had died. She still remembers that night clearly. She was wearing a black dress, and her arms were shaking. She had been close with Sirius, and it had hurt to know that he had died because of the foolishness of a fifteen-year-old. Her eyes were tired, as she cried very little in life and to cry for a whole day was quite a task. Remus had seen her there, seen her sorrow, and taken her from her lonely grave amongst the other mourning Order members, and brought her back to his home. There he had kissed her, pushing the girl back against the wall and ripping the black dress from her body, taking her right there in the room, in an act of defiance against his pain and depression. It had started there, Nymphadora and Remus had, and she supposed that someday it would end there as well.

The final feeling is the deepest and most compelling of all. It is the one that he elicits when he does not know that she is watching him, the one she gets when he falls asleep after a long night of working with the Order. The feeling starts in her heart, and travels throughout her petite frame with her blood, cleansing her of all her fears and doubts about taking Remus Lupin as her husband. He becomes an obsession to her, and in those moments nothing matters. His flaws become perfections that she never quite understood before. The fact that her husband took on the form of a wolf becomes one of the most wonderful things she knows about him. This obsession with him became the reason that she went to the doctor that day two years ago, knowing full well why she was ill in the morning and why she told the doctor to make it impossible to have morning illness ever again. Remus always asks about it, asks why they can't quite get a child, but she never tells. She just looks at him with her eyes, and convinces him that reproduction is a silly, fickle thing, and that it is all her fault because she was never able to have a child, and for that she apologizes.

Tonight she feels the worst emotion of all, a violent mixture of the three feelings combined into one horrid feeling called guilt. For no reason should she feel guilty, but for some reason, she always does. Remus came home that sundown smelling of hard liquor and heavy cigarettes. His eyes were unfocused and clouded with red streaks. He looked as if he has been crying for many hours on end. She crawled up to him and kissed him lightly on the lips, murmuring his name over and over. Suddenly he gripped her arms, and pinned her against the wall, tongue forcing her mouth wide and knee sliding her legs open.

"Please," he begs hoarsely now as he trails down between her breasts. Nymphadora holds his head against her and he whispers into her stomach that can never again know a child, knowing full well what he wants, but reluctant to give it. "Please Nymphadora; I need it so much...please..."

She wants to kiss him again, wants to hold him, wants to scream at him, wants to cry, because in those words he makes her feel wanted and unwanted all at once. She has done everything in her power to make him love her, but his heart still lingers on Him, and there is nothing she can do. Nymphadora Tonks is nothing if not capable, but in his arms she becomes helpless, something she has never been, and never will be anywhere else.

Slowly she closes her eyes, feeling the tears slip out onto the wooden floor as Remus picks her tiny body up from the living room floor and carried her upstairs to the bedroom they have shared now for five years as husband and wife. She pulls her arms tight around his strong neck, and wrinkles her nose in pain.

When Remus opens the bedroom door, he fingers her now crisp black locks, and runs his hands over her tense chest, now free of the womanly breasts he knows so well. Her black eyes flash as his eyes close, and Nymphadora leans in for a kiss, her masculine hand running the length of his back as Remus begins to cry gently.

"Sirius..." he whispers huskily, his mouth crushing against hers desperately, desire intense in his voice. He clambers on top of Nymphadora's body and presses down. "Oh Sirius..."

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He always tells her that he loves her after she makes love to him as Sirius. She always notices that Remus is more passionate when he makes love to her when she is Sirius, and that he comes longer and harder. He cries when he does, and she catches him in Sirius' arms, kissing his lips, and holding his shaking body next to hers.

"I love you," she whispers back every single time, and she means it.