“Impressive, Harry,” Tonks complimented, after he blocked all but one of her last string of attacks.

Harry wiped the sweat off his forehead and bent over grabbing his knees, trying to get some air back into his lungs.

“Your endurance is pretty good,” she said, tossing him a bottle of water. “All those years of Quidditch have come in handy.”

Harry took a long drink from it before saying, “you should tell Hermione that. She’ll be glad to know I haven’t been wasting my time.”

“Speaking of Hermione, I’ve heard some pretty interesting rumours circulating lately,” the Auror said, watching him closely.

Harry shrugged and put his water bottle down on one of the empty desks in the classroom.

“I take it you don’t want to talk about your girl problems?”

“No.”

“Fair enough,” said Tonks. “It’s not as if I was very forthcoming last year about my feelings for Remus. Even now, he still goes on that he’s too old for me, and I just say Sirius would be proud of him for taking advantage of a much younger woman,” she finished with a grin.

Harry smiled as well, because that definitely sounded like something his godfather would say. It was still difficult to think of Sirius sometimes, but it was getting better.

“Ready to attack me this time?” She asked him.

Harry nodded and raised his wand, glad not for the first time Tonks had offered to give him extra lessons. It gave him a way to vent his frustrations, even more so now since everyone in school thought he and Ron were fighting over Hermione thanks to Seamus. But even though they all gossiped about it, no one seemed the least bit surprised by it.

That didn’t make it any easier for Harry to look Hermione in the face, not that she was talking to him any more than was necessary since the rumours started flying. He should have just kept his mouth shut like he’d been doing since fourth year and everything would have been fine.

What he really needed to do was get over his jealousy and his own personal feelings for Hermione, otherwise it was going to cost him not only his best friends but the two people who meant more to him than anything else in the world.

Tonks kept him at it for another hour. He spent most of that time trying to break through her shields, something he still wasn’t able to do even after more than a week of training with her. Tonks wasn’t discouraged by this. In fact, she hadn’t been expecting him to break through her defenses, at least not until they had been training together for a few months. She had joked their first lesson saying what kind of Auror would she be if she allowed someone who hadn’t yet completed school to get the best of her?

But it wasn’t all for naught. Tonks was impressed with his defensive skills and reflexes, so she worked on making them better by removing the holes in his fighting stance and getting him to try different approaches.

Just like all their other training sessions, he came out of his Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom feeling sweaty and completely drained. It was too close to curfew otherwise he would have used the Prefect bathroom, which he could still use because of his Quidditch captaincy – not that being out passed curfew had stopped him before.