"The used books shop," she answers, because evidently Hermione Granger picked herself a home somewhere where comforting scents could flood her private abode at every time of the day.
Which brings her to point number two, said with some trepidation, and a little smile at the corner of her lips. "There's a café across the street, they make pancakes and excellent poached eggs, for wizarding London."
There's a non-invitational invite. They should have breakfast - whether it is because they're going to just meet there on a weekend day, or because they're going to have a few more rounds and exhaust each other into sleep, and tomorrow their heads will beg for caffeine, they should have breakfast.
It's a solid ground to build all this on.
"And they open early, even on Saturday. So, I guess what I have in mind is to go there tomorrow together."
A beat. Both of them tentative, weighing this decision, feeling out their changed dynamic.
“I’d like that,” Draco says. Then, a confession for a confession: “I don’t often go to the cafes or restaurants, even around here.”
An old paranoia gone rancid: skirting away from the public eye, long sleeves always covering that faded tattoo on his left forearm, the exceedingly visible mark of his shame. Random passersby probably wouldn’t actually notice; people didn’t pay half so much attention to Draco Malfoy as he thought they did, but he still felt uneasy in his skin, watched, judged. And he was a shit cook, so he tended to order in, or go to expensive restaurants with private rooms, catering to pureblood society. He has the money for it, even after his father’s assets were frozen during the war crime tribunals.
Long story short, he doesn’t know the local cafe.
“Can’t promise I won’t steal the duvet,” he was selfish with it, an only child and perpetual bachelor syndrome, “but you can stay over if you like. It’ll mean less coordination in the morning.”
"I'd like that," she says, mimicking his own hopeful, tentative answer from before with not even a trace of mockery. It's a gentle ribbing, because she can't help herself, because Malfoy brings this out in her, and isn't it better to be friendly rivals over a good cause than enemies in a war?
She knows why he doesn't go out to restaurants, she gets it; the eyes follow even her around; in the three years after the war, they'd been relentless; the year directly after, when the crime tribunals were still ongoing, they'd been merciless. There were many people out there who would have loved to rake her over hot coals (literally) because she committed the offense of testifying in a few cases (Draco's, namely) . The idea of the whole world having an opinion about what Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger possibly get up to in their free time fills her with the same sort of dread as Skeeter slutshaming a fourteen-year-old.
She won't drag him to one to be mean, but she will show him that she's not ashamed of him in this way. Whatever else some people might think, and they'll draw their wrong conclusions regardless of how discreet they are, Hermione's rather pleased they have come to this.
"I'll enlarge it if you piss me off," she says airily, dismissing his concerns about the duvet. She rolls properly onto her side now, somewhat recovered, and props her head up. "Are you a cuddler, Draco? Or should we share the bed like we're currently debating, internally, if we're going to regret this?"
Draco is normally so aloof and buttoned-up, tied into highstrung knots and stiff and intractable; but post-coital he’s managing to relax, those edges thawing. She’s fun. She’s funny. It’s frustrating how long it took for him to realise, or for either of them to lower their knives long enough to see it in each other.
“We should lie a full meter apart and stare haunted at the ceiling and obsess too long over our life choices, probably.”
Was he a cuddler? They rarely stayed over long enough for him to find out. He shifts his position, makes himself comfortable against those pillows and where he can look to the side at Hermione, and answer her teasing question properly.
“I don’t actually know. Which means I might be. I disavow myself of any personal responsibility if I do cuddle you in my sleep; it’s literally unconscious.”
They're having breakfast, she's sleeping over. They had a round of absolutely fantastic sex, she wants to raid his bookshelves before she goes for any loaner at all, and she snogged him in a cupboard full of cleaning supplies. What, if not the clothes they very much are not wearing, is there left for them to be awkward about?
She is going to introduce him to Hermione Granger: Rule Breaker the fast way. Immersive therapy.
She slips closer, and slips one knee between his, letting her leg drape over his calf, tugging herself a little closer. Close enough to remember they're still decidedly naked, and post-sex warm.
"I am. I cuddle in my sleep," she interrupts, a little smile at the corner of her lips. "And I cuddle when I'm awake, too, so." She wraps her hand around his waist, pressing her palm to the top of his buttock just to be, well, cheeky. "You're going to have to deal with that, since you've asked me to stay the night. No takebacks, I'm afraid."
It isn’t how he pictured this evening going, when he’d first sighed and shrugged on his jacket for the work function — or how he ever thought this particular turn of events might come about between him and Hermione. How might it have gone? An ill-advised mistake on too much wine, maybe: she’d fuck him after the party and then leave and they’d never speak of it again, besides it being more tense when they ran into each other in the Ministry hallways.
But here’s the miracle of it: it’s not awkward. The night keeps inching on and on and it keeps being not-awkward, just as Hermione coils around him and Draco smirks and tangles his feet with hers. This version is better. His thumb runs along the edge of her arm where he can reach her, absentmindedly following the line of her warmed skin.
“No takebacks,” he repeats. “Which is funny, that. I actually pictured you dropping me back in the gutter as soon as you were done with me.”
Oh gods, good. He isn't just lying there, valiantly enduring her proximity and touches. She doesn't realise she's been nervous about that part until he touches her, the simplest graze along her arm sufficing to make her relax the tension in her shoulders.
"I'm not," she murmurs, and runs her fingertips up a sensual line along his spine. "Done with you. I'm not really the one and done type, and I don't sleep with people I despise. I'd think that, you know, after enduring a whole war and all, we're owed more than just hateful fucks."
She leans back enough to catch his eyes, taking in the dishevelled state of him. Post orgasm Draco Malfoy is quite a sight.
"I'll say it clearly now that we're not distracted by... you know." Sex. "I've wanted to do this for a while."
Where his touch smoothed out that quiet coil of tension in her, her words do the same for him. Had he genuinely thought she still hated him? Maybe. Possibly. There was just so much fucking baggage: being on opposite sides of a war, her torture at his aunt’s hands, captured in his own Merlin-damned family basement, a knife at her throat.
It’s a lot. It’s complicated. Draco often wonders how things would’ve played out differently if the war hadn’t happened.
Then again, he’d likely never have wound up working at the Ministry with her otherwise, so.
His fingers curl along her forearm, the same scarred skin he’s already kissed. Hermione’s confession unwinds something further in him and he exhales. “I said something along those lines, didn’t I?” he says, contemplative, genuinely trying to remember. His mouth had been running away with him while she was riding him hard and fast, the truth spilling loose in a flood, and it’s hard to recall the specifics of what he’d blurted out. But now that they’re both clear-headed again, and she’s said it back—
“Good. Because, well, same.” There’s a beat, a calculation of timelines and remembering that interminable period when she’d been with Weasley, and Draco finds himself wondering when he’d finally graduated out of despicable. How long it had taken for her hatred to cool, or at least metastasise into another kind of heat. “Wait, how long is a while?”
There's no easy answer to that, if she's meant to be honest. How long has she been attracted to Malfoy?
It was around the time she graduated from Hogwarts, following an eighth year there feeling alone for the first time in her Hogwarts years, with both Ron and Harry having taken the traineeship into the Aurors instead of returning with her for N.E.W.T.s. With all the baggage between them, they'd been mostly just quietly cordial that year, her and Malfoy. A nod of acknowledgement when he'd swept up an O in Advanced Potions, a tiny smirk when she'd taken the only O McGonagall had handed out in Transfiguration right under his nose.
There had been one moment, in the middle of all that, when she'd looked up from her book in the library and saw him cast in soft candle light and had realised that when Harry wasn't around to bring out the git in him, Malfoy was tolerable and...pretty?
But the real mess had started when they began working together, towards the end of her relationship with Ron. Draco Malfoy and all his well cut suits, his good manners, his intellect. Draco Malfoy and the insidious way he had of sneaking into her fantasies.
The answer is: a while.
She'll lie and say: "I don't know, months?" Because she'd only really started thinking of fucking him a few months back, when she'd come to the conclusion that they'd both be very good at it. "You know you're handsome, Draco," she points out, and breaks the awkward pause by surging up and kissing him again. "Don't fish." For compliments. Do purebloods even get that saying?
She kisses him again, dissolving any illusions that she wouldn't want him again after one go. His lips are so perfect, and kissing feels so damm nice.
Draco’s a doted-upon only child, of course he fishes for compliments. But he’s grinning against Hermione’s lips as she rolls closer and kisses him again, and he just manages to say “I knew i—” before she’s stopped his mouth and derailed him. He falls back into it easily.
It’s not as frenetic as that first, break-down-the-doors kiss in the closet; they’re not knocking over cleaning supplies and elbowing each other into the wall. In their comfortable sprawl in the afterglow, it’s more languorous and comfortable, but soon enough, the heat starts to build again. And that fire’s easy enough to stoke: her leg still thrown over his, his hand drifting up and palming one of her breasts as they deepen the kiss with that slide of tongue.
It's not a hardship to get a little carried away, given all that. She manages to kiss his smug smile into submission by dint of kissing it over and over until he's focusing more on responding than on being smug.
And then the night goes on. Whatever wine they had at the work party has ceased to make her dizzy, so if she gets breathless or dizzy at all, it's his doing.
Him and that mouth of his.
The night stretches in a haze of discovery, curiosity, and lust. By the time she falls asleep, she's tangled both in his sheets and in his arms.
Sunrise waked her, slipping through the window, and finds her playing big spoon to Draco Malfoy, of all things. She buries her face against the nape of his neck, but it doesn't make sleep return. An invasive thought hits her, going back to last night: the books.
So ten minutes later, she's crept out of the bedroom to the living area, bare naked and crouched by one tower of books, browsing titles one by one.
The astonishing thing, in the end, is how well he sleeps.
He’d expected to toss and turn all night, unaccustomed to the lingering presence of someone else in his bed, and extra-unaccustomed to it being her; but exhausted from their late night and time exploring each others’ bodies and fucking each other into oblivion, Draco’s out like a light. He sleeps through Hermione waking up and wriggling against him, and then— almost sleeps through her tiptoeing out of his room.
He notices the shift on the mattress, the weight going away, and he peels an eye open after she’s gone, squinting at the bedroom doorway. Waits, a little paranoid, for the click of the front door and the sound of her sneaking out after all.
It doesn’t come.
So, curious, Draco rolls out of bed a few minutes later. And true to form, he does stop first to scoop up all their discarded clothes from the floor, and half-fold them into quick little stacks on his dresser. He’s a little neurotic, this one. He tugs his black briefs back on, walks out into the apartment proper—
And is greeted by that lovely sight. Hermione Granger, naked, looking through his collection of books.
She’ll have found an eclectic mix, the texts loosely thematically grouped together in the stacks. Some Quidditch theory and a biography of Dangerous Dai Llewellyn; textbooks on potions and alchemy; a field guide to local herbs; a book on memory charms, standard issue for rookie Obliviators.
Draco crosses the creaking floor and joins her, dropping to his heels beside her; he leans over to kiss Hermione’s bare shoulder, which also gives him a good view of what she’s currently picked out from the tower. “Does it pass muster?” he asks, bemused.
She will find it very amusing that he's folded her clothes as well, when the time comes, but Hermione is hyperfocused on the tomes before her for now. She should have more awareness of the sounds and movement happening behind her, but there's a little tome on brewing potions from scratch that she absolutely has to take up from the pile.
It's in the centre of a stack, and she doesn't want to knock the rest of the books down and gods, Malfoy needs a bookshelf. Move in properly. Don't be so dramatic.
With some wandless magic and carefulness, the pries the desired book from its place, and is skimming through it - delighted to find that there's a historical aspect to the book too - when touch of lips against her bare skin comes, and she jumps a little.
She turns her head to find him, astonishingly, wearing clothes, and becomes aware that she isn't and - not really shy about it, to be honest. He did ask a question.
"Yes - very. The collection is ecclectic and interesting, Malfoy, but you need a bloody shelf - and a sorting system."
It really isn’t a plausible excuse. He’s been at the Ministry for the better part of a year now. And he still hasn’t fully settled into the flat, in all that time.
There’s a contemplative pause, Draco chewing over that realisation. Why hasn’t he gotten proper bookshelves? The sofa and the bed both look like something out of an interior design magazine: pristine but soulless. And does he actually want to peel back those layers and burden Hermione with whatever thoughts are ping-ponging around his skull?
But, somehow, he realises he hates the idea far less than he thought. Because who the fuck else can he talk to? He hasn’t really hung out with Goyle since Crabbe died; they’re always too-aware of that missing third in their group, and it hadn’t felt right, and they’d never been equals as friends anyhow, and so they’d gone their separate ways after graduation. Nott and Zabini were capable of keeping up with him, but they’d always been closer to each other than to Draco.
He’s still a terrifically lonely boy.
“I think,” he says slowly, discovering this about himself even as he broaches the theory and says it aloud, “I’ve been holding off in case the whole Ministry thing falls apart. If I can’t cut it and I’m sacked and have to go back to Wiltshire in shambles. I don’t want to, obviously. But I think I’m— waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Lucius kept treating it as such. Thinking the whole honest job thing was a lark; expecting his son to give up any day now, and to go back to the safety of the idle rich and the family fortune.
If he can make her come so hard her knees still feel wobbly ten hours later, he can bother her with emotional stuff - and it isn't a bother. She asked. She doesn't judge him, there is no expression of distaste or criticism.
She watches him as he explains and elaborates, and then finally nods.
"I had an extensible tent and three weeks' worth of food shoved inside my purse for two whole years after the war," she admits, "and every time I argued with my managers I kept thinking this is it, they'll tell me that just because I'm Potter's best friend doesn't mean I'm instantly qualified for anything, and I should just go back to the muggle world."
She never fit, as much as she wanted to (desperately), in the pureblood wizarding world. It has changed since, somewhat, but still.
They're lonely people both, perhaps. She tilts her head and considers his living room, then turns to face him, her legs still tucked under her.
Once upon a time, the prospect of baring his throat to Hermione Granger like this would have rankled; would have made him feel ill-at-ease in his own skin, like he’d handed her a knife ready to stab him with. But instead, he drops that confession in her lap and she reciprocates with one of her own, and he doesn’t hate how this feels.
Because she gets it. Of course she gets it.
At her suggestion, though, he cocks his head with absolute blank-faced nonrecognition. “Eye Key what? Is that a cocktail bar or something?”
It really was truly absurd how much the purebloods could get away with not knowing, in their insular little world. You would think that, even with living between the cracks of the Muggle world, they would’ve picked up enough bits and pieces to get by, and yet. It took real, concerted effort over sheer centuries’ worth of bigoted ancestors to leave Draco looking quite so lost at the reference.
She has this moment of clarity, imagining Draco Malfoy wandering through a muggle furniture store looking absolutely shocked by everything, and almost wants to laugh. Definitely wants to make it happen, as well.
"It's a store where you can get furniture, Draco. It is, however, muggle and you'd need to exchange some money into pounds if you're going to buy anything there, but it's being advertised as very handy for young people starting fresh in their own place."
She offers him a grin, and then unhelpfully adds: "Most of my stuff is from there. I'll show you when you - " And at this, she stops, for a moment feeling very exposed. Vulnerable, which she doesn't make a habit of feeling, but which feels fitting considering that she's sitting on his living room floor naked and wearing his shirt. She was going to invite him over to her place.
She was going to invite him over to her place, so they can do this again. So they can give this a try, whatever it is. Whatever it stands to be.
"If you wanted to come over, that is," she adds, in a murmur.
It’s careful, this thing — whatever this thing is — because there are so many bricks in this teetering tumbledown tower, which feels at risk of collapsing any moment if they push on it just the wrong way. The fact that she’d bled into the flagstones in the basement of his family manor. The way he had been awful to her, and she had thus been awful in retaliation. That volleying push-and-pull of their dynamic throughout school. His complicated relationship with her best friend. His family. Hers.
But Draco Malfoy wants very little to do with his family anymore, his mother aside.
So he looks at Hermione, and he sees that dip in the road which she just tripped over; quite similar to the one he’d suffered the evening before, with that sudden pique of anxiety hammering in his throat when he’d asked about disclosure forms. So this time it’s Draco’s turn to reach out, a hand absentmindedly brushing some of her hair out of her face and behind her ear (it has gotten really voluminous and out-of-hand in its morning tangles, it’s a wonder he didn’t suffocate in the night).
“I’m not done with you,” Draco says, echoing her earlier words. “So if you’d like to show off your flat and rub it in just how much better-appointed it is than mine, then by all means.”
Wry and arch, his voice dripping with what she’s learning is his usual fond yet slightly sarcastic humour, but it’s a way of papering over that brief blip, that temporary stutter in her voice.
It camouflages the momentary stumble just right, and opens the door for an opportunity to be smug right back at him which she really appreciates him giving her. There's something wildly beautiful about this moment alone.
She's sitting on the floor of his living room, nearly naked except for his shirt, with him still crouching (very athletic of him) by her side. There are faint marks of her kisses and her nails against his skin, and she knows that her hair must be a mess from all that she was writhing last night. They've not showered since before the party that brought this whole thing on, and there's a hole in the pit of her stomach that could be identified as hunger-for-breakfast.
But in observing this moment, and in Draco brushing her hair behind her ear, it's a different kind of hunger that awakens, sudden and undeniable. She doesn't give him much warning, and doesn't ask first if it'll be welcomed. Instead, she sets the book down gently and reaches up to brush his hair behind his ear too, curling her hand over the back of his neck and tugging him towards her.
"I liked the sound of that," she says, before kissing him.
Very athletic indeed. He was a genuinely good Quidditch player for a time, good at bracing himself against that broom for long hours. So his thighs aren’t half-bad, is the thing,
except that Draco finally wobbles when she pulls him closer and kisses him, losing his balance and that careful equilibrium, and he half-topples to the floorboards with her. But he kisses Hermione back, unhesitating; doesn’t give a shit that it’s morning and they haven’t brushed their teeth and it’s not picture-perfect. It had always been a little messy from the start, her mouth tasting like wine and shoved in a closet and accidentally knocking over cleaning supplies.
When he has to surface for air, he catches himself and readjusts so he’s sitting next to Hermione on the floor instead. It’s just nice to sit here. Unpretentious. There is a sofa on the other side of the room — oh, look, his coat’s still lying there from last night — but it seems horrifically far away, when he could stay here and kiss her again instead, his fingers curling into the fabric of his own shirt.
After a moment, a contented sigh, and: “You said something about breakfast across the street?”
She ends up laughing against his lips at that half-topple, and is tempted for a moment to push him down on the floor and sit in his lap again, but what if the books will mind? Better not traumatised his poor books, before they've had a chance to sit on bookshelves.
Then the first kiss becomes a second, and he's close and he looks soft and content, and she's got a flutter in her belly that's not from nerves.
"They serve breakfast until pretty late," she murmurs back, nudging her nose to his nose, and letting that suggestion hang between them. They don't have to rush to breakfast, if they'd rather do something else first. (Each other.) "So...yeah..."
Hermione dangles that invitation right in front of him, and Draco finds himself doing some mental gymnastics and calculations and wondering exactly how uncomfortable would it be to fuck on a hardwood floor without any padding, and is there a chance they’ll both get splinters, or should they get up and move to the sofa—
“Y’know, I haven’t actually broken in this room yet,” he muses aloud.
Is that dreadful and sleazy to point out? Maybe. Or not. Maybe it’s just refreshingly honest; there’s a cheeky half-grin on his face, just visible out of the corner of her vision, as close to his face as she is. And there’s a decision teetering in the moment, before he reaches out for her again, she lets herself tip into him, and then they’re just a tangle of limbs on the floor after all.
“Ah fuck,” he laughs as she lands more on him than not, and the floor is hard which is not quite as easy as the porno mags always made it seem, but: there’s still Hermione over him, and both of them failing to bite back laughter, and Draco dragging his shirt off her, his mouth against the bared skin of her shoulder, her hand already reaching between them. It’s quick work to get their few scraps of clothing off again, eager to get their hands on each other once more even in the bright light of day.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I forgot where I made her live but I'm 99% I'm right with this guess
Which brings her to point number two, said with some trepidation, and a little smile at the corner of her lips. "There's a café across the street, they make pancakes and excellent poached eggs, for wizarding London."
There's a non-invitational invite. They should have breakfast - whether it is because they're going to just meet there on a weekend day, or because they're going to have a few more rounds and exhaust each other into sleep, and tomorrow their heads will beg for caffeine, they should have breakfast.
It's a solid ground to build all this on.
"And they open early, even on Saturday. So, I guess what I have in mind is to go there tomorrow together."
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“I’d like that,” Draco says. Then, a confession for a confession: “I don’t often go to the cafes or restaurants, even around here.”
An old paranoia gone rancid: skirting away from the public eye, long sleeves always covering that faded tattoo on his left forearm, the exceedingly visible mark of his shame. Random passersby probably wouldn’t actually notice; people didn’t pay half so much attention to Draco Malfoy as he thought they did, but he still felt uneasy in his skin, watched, judged. And he was a shit cook, so he tended to order in, or go to expensive restaurants with private rooms, catering to pureblood society. He has the money for it, even after his father’s assets were frozen during the war crime tribunals.
Long story short, he doesn’t know the local cafe.
“Can’t promise I won’t steal the duvet,” he was selfish with it, an only child and perpetual bachelor syndrome, “but you can stay over if you like. It’ll mean less coordination in the morning.”
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She knows why he doesn't go out to restaurants, she gets it; the eyes follow even her around; in the three years after the war, they'd been relentless; the year directly after, when the crime tribunals were still ongoing, they'd been merciless. There were many people out there who would have loved to rake her over hot coals (literally) because she committed the offense of testifying in a few cases (Draco's, namely) . The idea of the whole world having an opinion about what Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger possibly get up to in their free time fills her with the same sort of dread as Skeeter slutshaming a fourteen-year-old.
She won't drag him to one to be mean, but she will show him that she's not ashamed of him in this way. Whatever else some people might think, and they'll draw their wrong conclusions regardless of how discreet they are, Hermione's rather pleased they have come to this.
"I'll enlarge it if you piss me off," she says airily, dismissing his concerns about the duvet. She rolls properly onto her side now, somewhat recovered, and props her head up. "Are you a cuddler, Draco? Or should we share the bed like we're currently debating, internally, if we're going to regret this?"
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Draco is normally so aloof and buttoned-up, tied into highstrung knots and stiff and intractable; but post-coital he’s managing to relax, those edges thawing. She’s fun. She’s funny. It’s frustrating how long it took for him to realise, or for either of them to lower their knives long enough to see it in each other.
“We should lie a full meter apart and stare haunted at the ceiling and obsess too long over our life choices, probably.”
Was he a cuddler? They rarely stayed over long enough for him to find out. He shifts his position, makes himself comfortable against those pillows and where he can look to the side at Hermione, and answer her teasing question properly.
“I don’t actually know. Which means I might be. I disavow myself of any personal responsibility if I do cuddle you in my sleep; it’s literally unconscious.”
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She is going to introduce him to Hermione Granger: Rule Breaker the fast way. Immersive therapy.
She slips closer, and slips one knee between his, letting her leg drape over his calf, tugging herself a little closer. Close enough to remember they're still decidedly naked, and post-sex warm.
"I am. I cuddle in my sleep," she interrupts, a little smile at the corner of her lips. "And I cuddle when I'm awake, too, so." She wraps her hand around his waist, pressing her palm to the top of his buttock just to be, well, cheeky. "You're going to have to deal with that, since you've asked me to stay the night. No takebacks, I'm afraid."
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But here’s the miracle of it: it’s not awkward. The night keeps inching on and on and it keeps being not-awkward, just as Hermione coils around him and Draco smirks and tangles his feet with hers. This version is better. His thumb runs along the edge of her arm where he can reach her, absentmindedly following the line of her warmed skin.
“No takebacks,” he repeats. “Which is funny, that. I actually pictured you dropping me back in the gutter as soon as you were done with me.”
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"I'm not," she murmurs, and runs her fingertips up a sensual line along his spine. "Done with you. I'm not really the one and done type, and I don't sleep with people I despise. I'd think that, you know, after enduring a whole war and all, we're owed more than just hateful fucks."
She leans back enough to catch his eyes, taking in the dishevelled state of him. Post orgasm Draco Malfoy is quite a sight.
"I'll say it clearly now that we're not distracted by... you know." Sex. "I've wanted to do this for a while."
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Where his touch smoothed out that quiet coil of tension in her, her words do the same for him. Had he genuinely thought she still hated him? Maybe. Possibly. There was just so much fucking baggage: being on opposite sides of a war, her torture at his aunt’s hands, captured in his own Merlin-damned family basement, a knife at her throat.
It’s a lot. It’s complicated. Draco often wonders how things would’ve played out differently if the war hadn’t happened.
Then again, he’d likely never have wound up working at the Ministry with her otherwise, so.
His fingers curl along her forearm, the same scarred skin he’s already kissed. Hermione’s confession unwinds something further in him and he exhales. “I said something along those lines, didn’t I?” he says, contemplative, genuinely trying to remember. His mouth had been running away with him while she was riding him hard and fast, the truth spilling loose in a flood, and it’s hard to recall the specifics of what he’d blurted out. But now that they’re both clear-headed again, and she’s said it back—
“Good. Because, well, same.” There’s a beat, a calculation of timelines and remembering that interminable period when she’d been with Weasley, and Draco finds himself wondering when he’d finally graduated out of despicable. How long it had taken for her hatred to cool, or at least metastasise into another kind of heat. “Wait, how long is a while?”
no subject
It was around the time she graduated from Hogwarts, following an eighth year there feeling alone for the first time in her Hogwarts years, with both Ron and Harry having taken the traineeship into the Aurors instead of returning with her for N.E.W.T.s. With all the baggage between them, they'd been mostly just quietly cordial that year, her and Malfoy. A nod of acknowledgement when he'd swept up an O in Advanced Potions, a tiny smirk when she'd taken the only O McGonagall had handed out in Transfiguration right under his nose.
There had been one moment, in the middle of all that, when she'd looked up from her book in the library and saw him cast in soft candle light and had realised that when Harry wasn't around to bring out the git in him, Malfoy was tolerable and...pretty?
But the real mess had started when they began working together, towards the end of her relationship with Ron. Draco Malfoy and all his well cut suits, his good manners, his intellect. Draco Malfoy and the insidious way he had of sneaking into her fantasies.
The answer is: a while.
She'll lie and say: "I don't know, months?" Because she'd only really started thinking of fucking him a few months back, when she'd come to the conclusion that they'd both be very good at it. "You know you're handsome, Draco," she points out, and breaks the awkward pause by surging up and kissing him again. "Don't fish." For compliments. Do purebloods even get that saying?
She kisses him again, dissolving any illusions that she wouldn't want him again after one go. His lips are so perfect, and kissing feels so damm nice.
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It’s not as frenetic as that first, break-down-the-doors kiss in the closet; they’re not knocking over cleaning supplies and elbowing each other into the wall. In their comfortable sprawl in the afterglow, it’s more languorous and comfortable, but soon enough, the heat starts to build again. And that fire’s easy enough to stoke: her leg still thrown over his, his hand drifting up and palming one of her breasts as they deepen the kiss with that slide of tongue.
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And then the night goes on. Whatever wine they had at the work party has ceased to make her dizzy, so if she gets breathless or dizzy at all, it's his doing.
Him and that mouth of his.
The night stretches in a haze of discovery, curiosity, and lust. By the time she falls asleep, she's tangled both in his sheets and in his arms.
Sunrise waked her, slipping through the window, and finds her playing big spoon to Draco Malfoy, of all things. She buries her face against the nape of his neck, but it doesn't make sleep return. An invasive thought hits her, going back to last night: the books.
So ten minutes later, she's crept out of the bedroom to the living area, bare naked and crouched by one tower of books, browsing titles one by one.
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He’d expected to toss and turn all night, unaccustomed to the lingering presence of someone else in his bed, and extra-unaccustomed to it being her; but exhausted from their late night and time exploring each others’ bodies and fucking each other into oblivion, Draco’s out like a light. He sleeps through Hermione waking up and wriggling against him, and then— almost sleeps through her tiptoeing out of his room.
He notices the shift on the mattress, the weight going away, and he peels an eye open after she’s gone, squinting at the bedroom doorway. Waits, a little paranoid, for the click of the front door and the sound of her sneaking out after all.
It doesn’t come.
So, curious, Draco rolls out of bed a few minutes later. And true to form, he does stop first to scoop up all their discarded clothes from the floor, and half-fold them into quick little stacks on his dresser. He’s a little neurotic, this one. He tugs his black briefs back on, walks out into the apartment proper—
And is greeted by that lovely sight. Hermione Granger, naked, looking through his collection of books.
She’ll have found an eclectic mix, the texts loosely thematically grouped together in the stacks. Some Quidditch theory and a biography of Dangerous Dai Llewellyn; textbooks on potions and alchemy; a field guide to local herbs; a book on memory charms, standard issue for rookie Obliviators.
Draco crosses the creaking floor and joins her, dropping to his heels beside her; he leans over to kiss Hermione’s bare shoulder, which also gives him a good view of what she’s currently picked out from the tower. “Does it pass muster?” he asks, bemused.
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It's in the centre of a stack, and she doesn't want to knock the rest of the books down and gods, Malfoy needs a bookshelf. Move in properly. Don't be so dramatic.
With some wandless magic and carefulness, the pries the desired book from its place, and is skimming through it - delighted to find that there's a historical aspect to the book too - when touch of lips against her bare skin comes, and she jumps a little.
She turns her head to find him, astonishingly, wearing clothes, and becomes aware that she isn't and - not really shy about it, to be honest. He did ask a question.
"Yes - very. The collection is ecclectic and interesting, Malfoy, but you need a bloody shelf - and a sorting system."
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It really isn’t a plausible excuse. He’s been at the Ministry for the better part of a year now. And he still hasn’t fully settled into the flat, in all that time.
There’s a contemplative pause, Draco chewing over that realisation. Why hasn’t he gotten proper bookshelves? The sofa and the bed both look like something out of an interior design magazine: pristine but soulless. And does he actually want to peel back those layers and burden Hermione with whatever thoughts are ping-ponging around his skull?
But, somehow, he realises he hates the idea far less than he thought. Because who the fuck else can he talk to? He hasn’t really hung out with Goyle since Crabbe died; they’re always too-aware of that missing third in their group, and it hadn’t felt right, and they’d never been equals as friends anyhow, and so they’d gone their separate ways after graduation. Nott and Zabini were capable of keeping up with him, but they’d always been closer to each other than to Draco.
He’s still a terrifically lonely boy.
“I think,” he says slowly, discovering this about himself even as he broaches the theory and says it aloud, “I’ve been holding off in case the whole Ministry thing falls apart. If I can’t cut it and I’m sacked and have to go back to Wiltshire in shambles. I don’t want to, obviously. But I think I’m— waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Lucius kept treating it as such. Thinking the whole honest job thing was a lark; expecting his son to give up any day now, and to go back to the safety of the idle rich and the family fortune.
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She watches him as he explains and elaborates, and then finally nods.
"I had an extensible tent and three weeks' worth of food shoved inside my purse for two whole years after the war," she admits, "and every time I argued with my managers I kept thinking this is it, they'll tell me that just because I'm Potter's best friend doesn't mean I'm instantly qualified for anything, and I should just go back to the muggle world."
She never fit, as much as she wanted to (desperately), in the pureblood wizarding world. It has changed since, somewhat, but still.
They're lonely people both, perhaps. She tilts her head and considers his living room, then turns to face him, her legs still tucked under her.
"Have you ever heard of IKEA? We should go."
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Because she gets it. Of course she gets it.
At her suggestion, though, he cocks his head with absolute blank-faced nonrecognition. “Eye Key what? Is that a cocktail bar or something?”
It really was truly absurd how much the purebloods could get away with not knowing, in their insular little world. You would think that, even with living between the cracks of the Muggle world, they would’ve picked up enough bits and pieces to get by, and yet. It took real, concerted effort over sheer centuries’ worth of bigoted ancestors to leave Draco looking quite so lost at the reference.
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"It's a store where you can get furniture, Draco. It is, however, muggle and you'd need to exchange some money into pounds if you're going to buy anything there, but it's being advertised as very handy for young people starting fresh in their own place."
She offers him a grin, and then unhelpfully adds: "Most of my stuff is from there. I'll show you when you - " And at this, she stops, for a moment feeling very exposed. Vulnerable, which she doesn't make a habit of feeling, but which feels fitting considering that she's sitting on his living room floor naked and wearing his shirt. She was going to invite him over to her place.
She was going to invite him over to her place, so they can do this again. So they can give this a try, whatever it is. Whatever it stands to be.
"If you wanted to come over, that is," she adds, in a murmur.
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But Draco Malfoy wants very little to do with his family anymore, his mother aside.
So he looks at Hermione, and he sees that dip in the road which she just tripped over; quite similar to the one he’d suffered the evening before, with that sudden pique of anxiety hammering in his throat when he’d asked about disclosure forms. So this time it’s Draco’s turn to reach out, a hand absentmindedly brushing some of her hair out of her face and behind her ear (it has gotten really voluminous and out-of-hand in its morning tangles, it’s a wonder he didn’t suffocate in the night).
“I’m not done with you,” Draco says, echoing her earlier words. “So if you’d like to show off your flat and rub it in just how much better-appointed it is than mine, then by all means.”
Wry and arch, his voice dripping with what she’s learning is his usual fond yet slightly sarcastic humour, but it’s a way of papering over that brief blip, that temporary stutter in her voice.
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She's sitting on the floor of his living room, nearly naked except for his shirt, with him still crouching (very athletic of him) by her side. There are faint marks of her kisses and her nails against his skin, and she knows that her hair must be a mess from all that she was writhing last night. They've not showered since before the party that brought this whole thing on, and there's a hole in the pit of her stomach that could be identified as hunger-for-breakfast.
But in observing this moment, and in Draco brushing her hair behind her ear, it's a different kind of hunger that awakens, sudden and undeniable. She doesn't give him much warning, and doesn't ask first if it'll be welcomed. Instead, she sets the book down gently and reaches up to brush his hair behind his ear too, curling her hand over the back of his neck and tugging him towards her.
"I liked the sound of that," she says, before kissing him.
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except that Draco finally wobbles when she pulls him closer and kisses him, losing his balance and that careful equilibrium, and he half-topples to the floorboards with her. But he kisses Hermione back, unhesitating; doesn’t give a shit that it’s morning and they haven’t brushed their teeth and it’s not picture-perfect. It had always been a little messy from the start, her mouth tasting like wine and shoved in a closet and accidentally knocking over cleaning supplies.
When he has to surface for air, he catches himself and readjusts so he’s sitting next to Hermione on the floor instead. It’s just nice to sit here. Unpretentious. There is a sofa on the other side of the room — oh, look, his coat’s still lying there from last night — but it seems horrifically far away, when he could stay here and kiss her again instead, his fingers curling into the fabric of his own shirt.
After a moment, a contented sigh, and: “You said something about breakfast across the street?”
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Then the first kiss becomes a second, and he's close and he looks soft and content, and she's got a flutter in her belly that's not from nerves.
"They serve breakfast until pretty late," she murmurs back, nudging her nose to his nose, and letting that suggestion hang between them. They don't have to rush to breakfast, if they'd rather do something else first. (Each other.) "So...yeah..."
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“Y’know, I haven’t actually broken in this room yet,” he muses aloud.
Is that dreadful and sleazy to point out? Maybe. Or not. Maybe it’s just refreshingly honest; there’s a cheeky half-grin on his face, just visible out of the corner of her vision, as close to his face as she is. And there’s a decision teetering in the moment, before he reaches out for her again, she lets herself tip into him, and then they’re just a tangle of limbs on the floor after all.
“Ah fuck,” he laughs as she lands more on him than not, and the floor is hard which is not quite as easy as the porno mags always made it seem, but: there’s still Hermione over him, and both of them failing to bite back laughter, and Draco dragging his shirt off her, his mouth against the bared skin of her shoulder, her hand already reaching between them. It’s quick work to get their few scraps of clothing off again, eager to get their hands on each other once more even in the bright light of day.
She’s right; breakfast can wait.