"What is this?" The scorn in her voice and the way she held up her arm, encased in the loose knit sleeve, implied she was questioning the nature and size of the sweater, not asking what a sweater was.

Newt looked up from where he was dicing carrots for their soup and felt his heart smile, which manifested itself in the slightest of uncontrollable smirks. Tina stood in the doorway, wearing a pair of his slacks and one of his jumpers--his favourite yellow-and-black Hufflepuff jumper, to be exact. They'd found themselves in the middle of a downpour halfway to his apartment, where he was only going to fetch his suitcase and a few other things before they got drenched and Tina started sneezing. ("You've got to come in now," he'd said then. "And I won't let you leave until you're dry and have got a bowl of warm soup in your stomach.")

"You're really not this much larger than me, are you?" Tina demanded, desperately trying to make the sweater behave like a decent cooperative blouse. Newt only pursed his lips, enjoying watching her struggle too much to answer. Finally she sighed and gave up with one last flop of the sleeves that went an inch past her fingertips. "How am I supposed to use my hands?"

Newt wiped his hands on his apron and crossed the kitchen to her. He cuffed her sleeves up without a word and then raised his eyebrows. "Or, you can have built-in oven gloves," he added somberly.

"Mitts," Tina corrected, yanking her sleeves away from him. "Gloves have fingers." She glanced up at him in the way she always did which began reprimandingly and ended admiringly, and he shoved his hands in his pockets and stepped back to look her over.

"Yellow looks nice on you," he remarked with such a sudden bluntness that something twisted the wrong way in Tina's chest, which evidenced in her face in confusion and tenderness. She felt she ought to say something, thank you, most likely, but Newt went on. "You'd think it wouldn't, you know. But it, it," he paused to catch his breath and thoughts. "It pairs nicely with your dark hair, and brings out your eyes--"

Tina bit her tongue with her back teeth, unsure what to say, when a hissing noise startled both of them and Newt whirled about to find the soup boiling over. "Oh, hush," he said to the restless water, and Tina sighed and smiled as he went back to work.

A/N: yes I know there's drying charms but in Deathly Hallows they change out of wet clothes into new ones so whatever