"You infuriate me."
His voice was low, and soft, and intense in my ear. His breath warm on my neck. My eyes fixed upon his hand, which lay next to my open books on the desk as he leaned over me to whisper in my ear. There were only one or two others in the library at the time, the hour was late, but my senses seemed to sharpen to the point that I was convinced his whisper must be heard by all those in the room.
"Get away from me, Malfoy," I hissed, still staring at his pale-skinned hand. "I told you before to stay away."
I heard him give a quiet, derisive snort as he stood away from me. He circled the desk to sit down opposite me. His pale face glowed like a waxwork in the light from the reading lamp which hung between us, his eyes glittering in shadow. He leaned back casually in the chair, his forearms on the desk before him, and he smirked unpleasantly at me.
"Granger. Hard working, self-reliant...uptight. That about sums you up."
I stared back at him in loathing. He liked to do this. He liked to come to me when I was alone, when my friends weren't around to trade insults with him. He knew I wouldn't resort to pulling my wand on him because he knew I didn't think he was worth it. And that seemed to fascinate him.
"So eager to please the teachers, to...prove yourself. Prove that you're as good as any witch, pure blood, half blood or..."
"Malfoy, don't bother."
I began to gather up my books, shoving them into my bag. I stood up and turned to go with no intention of saying another word to him, but as I walked towards the library doors I was aware of him walking a few paces behind me. In the corridor, I turned to face him again. His face, always so conceited, was a picture of calm as he levelly matched my gaze. I said nothing. He said nothing. I lost my patience.
"Why do you bother, Malfoy? If I'm so disgusting to you, so infuriating, a swotty Mudblood who gets on your nerves, why do you torture yourself? Because I can promise you now, if you stay away from me, I'll happily return the favour."
He carried on staring at me, saying nothing, just staring, his cold grey eyes revealing nothing. I turned on my heel and walked away from him, aware of his eyes on my retreating back the whole length of the corridor.
Malfoy unsettled me. He was an unsettling character at the best of times, but recently his treatment towards me, along with his increasingly erratic behaviour in the progress of the school year had began to play on my mind. The interplay between him and the two boys had always been the same; a predictable mutual dislike and mistrust, which had graduated from everyday male bravado, to a real hatred. Harry especially was wont to despise Malfoy, and with good reason. In fact, we all had reason to hate him, with last years disgusting toadying to that beast of a woman, Umbridge.
But this year seemed different. Malfoy was, if anything, playing down his role as top Slytherin. He seemed content to loll in the wings as his cronies threw their weight around. He seemed gaunt, and quiet. He seemed, sometimes, to be removed from his surroundings.
I didn't make a habit of noticing the changing ways of Draco Malfoy. But it seemed that recently I had no choice, since he decided to bestow his unwelcome presence on me at intervals. Always when I was alone, always when I was without the boys. Always the same. And I kept these whispered comments and quiet visits to myself. I didn't know what I could tell the boys; I knew they would be angry at any unwanted attention Malfoy gave me. But how could I explain this to them? He wasn't throwing hexes at me, or even calling me a Mudblood as such. He seemed to be trying to raise a reaction from me that I had never given him, not since hitting him in the face what seemed like a century ago. And on realising that calling me a Mudblood would not be enough to get a fight from me these days, he had seemed to change tack, listing traits of my personality, calmly pointing out things about me which I knew were most likely true. Always quietly, always calmly. On some level, I was ashamed that I was allowing him to do this. Perhaps that's why I never told them.
A week after he came to me in the library, he found me again, this time as I trudged over the grounds on my way back from the greenhouses. I shouldn't have been there really in the first place, but I went there sometimes. It was a quiet place, and id been going there secretly from time to time since Id started at Hogwarts; the reason being that my mum kept a glasshouse at home, and sometimes when I felt homesick at first, I would sit in the soft warmth, and I would feel better. The plants may have been different, but the atmosphere was the same. As the years at school went by, I kept up the habit, felling I had found my own private retreat.
Malfoy saw me moving between the greenhouses towards the castle, picking my way slowly through the dusk. He fell into step beside me, and for the first minute or two said nothing.
"Granger"
The eventual greeting. I replied:
"Yes, hello Malfoy. What do you want?"
"Nothing very much. Why are you out alone at this hour?"
I said nothing. He continued.
"You're very unfriendly towards me, Granger."
I kept my silence.
"All this talk of inter-house friendship. How important it is during these dangerous times. What do you think of it all Granger?"
We walked on. The ground was soft from the recent rain, and it was hard going. I was short of breath, and I could hear that Malfoy was too. I remained silent.
"Because you don't seem to be very receptive to me talking to you, in fact-"
I stopped and turned towards him. In the fading light his hair shone silvery, his skin white, dark hollows beneath his eyes.
"What do you want? Just tell me. "
He smirked a little bit I think. Then he shrugged.
"You interest me. You always have, in a way. So prim, so fucking prepared at all times..."
He stepped towards me, his voice lower now, and he leaned towards my ear slightly.
"...And always so sure of yourself. Little or no regard for those who should, by rights, be ranked higher than you in blood status. No code or education in purity to live by. You don't care..."
He began to circle me slowly, passing behind me to speak softly in my other ear.
"...You don't care, because why should you? Brought up with Muggles. No one to tell you, to set you straight...It's oddly freeing for you. You are...in some ways..."
He stopped before me again, and this time, he looked me straight in the eye. His own glittered darkly.
"...Lucky. You're fucking lucky, Granger."
I stared back at him, at a loss for what to say. His face showed something, some repressed emotion. His eyes were alive with rage, with something close to fear. There was hatred there. There was loss. And there was something else, something darker and stranger...
He turned from me, and he slowly began to make his way back to the castle. I stood watching, until I couldn't see him in the falling night.
I have never been a naive person. Not even when I was very small. Fact and knowledge have always been my fascination, and so there are very few things I don't know about.
Before that night outside the greenhouses, I had been aware that the attention Malfoy was paying me could be read as, well, motivated by some sort of desire on his part. It was a logical explanation and one I had to consider. It wasn't as though I hadn't experienced such a thing before; Victor's quiet but determined pursuit of me a couple of years before has shown me. And then there was Ron...we liked to torture one another, it seems.
But I hadn't taken the possibility of Malfoy being motivated to act this way towards me because of, for want of a better word, romantic purposes, seriously.
And I was right, in a way. Because that look in his eye could not be called romantic. When he looked at me that night, it was with hunger. It was a desire for something he shouldn't, and couldn't have.
I began to replay all of the times it had happened; all the whispers, all the times he had leaned over me, spoke in my ear, placed an uninvited hand on my desk. He never touched, but he always came close.
And, to my horror, I began to wait. I waited for him to come to me again. Because now I was the one who was fascinated; appalled, of course, but deeply, irretrievably fascinated.
I started watching him in class. Where once he was cocky, he now sat quietly, head down, tracing invisibly patterns in the warped wood of the desks. Sometimes, it was as though he snapped back to the present, as though he'd been very, very far away; his head would snap up, his eyes would refocus. He would look startled then.
Sometimes I saw him stalking the corridor, radiating rage silently. He would walk straight past me as though I were part of the masonry. He would be alone at those times, no cronies flanking him, just rage and misery.
And then sometimes he would pass, and he would catch my eye. A split second and it was enough to raise a flush to my cheeks. I would look away instantly, try to rejoin the conversation of the boys, forcing myself to ignore it. Ignore the feeling he provoked.
It felt as though a storm was approaching, visible on the horizon, drawing closer.
It was Sunday. I decided to go to the greenhouses. Things had been hard lately. I had needed to escape, to be alone.
He was already there when I went in through the side door.
"Come and sit down, Granger"
He spoke to me without turning to look at me, as though he'd been expecting me. The feeling of the storm began to close in on me. I found myself moving, walking towards him, sitting opposite him on an upturned crate. His face, whiter than ever against the black of his cloak, was gaunt; his eyes were ringed with shadows. His tall, angular frame seemed tense, as though he were holding himself in, restricting his movements. I sat and stared at him, because I couldn't think what else to do, and he returned my stare.
"Granger... "
His voice was a whisper. I became horribly aware of myself, of his eyes seeing me all of a sudden. Self-consciousness flooded me. He leaned towards me as I sat frozen. His knees were millimetres away from mine.
"Granger, I've done some terrible things...things I shouldn't have done..."
His voice was low, and it shook as though he was afraid of the words he was saying to me. He held my gaze as he spoke.
"But I never thought I would care...mudbloods...muggle-lovers...I didn't think I would think twice about seeing them scream..."
He was leaning closer and closer to me, his face drawing ever nearer to my own.
"They make you watch...All sorts of things, things you probably couldn't even fucking imagine..."
His mouth was so close to mine. His breath was warm on my cheek. I closed my eyes. His voice had dropped to a whisper, so quiet.
"All in the name of cleansing the blood of wizards, washing out the filth...and here I am...with you..."
My eyes snapped open. The look had returned to his face, the hunger I had seen there before. I leapt to my feet, and so did he, gripping my arms at my sides and stopping me from running. He held me there as his mouth went to my ear, his voice rasping.
"I've seen you Granger, I've seen you fucking looking at me! Don't pretend you haven't felt it too! At first, it was just me, just me being fucking twisted, lusting after a mudblood for fucks sake. But now, I know you feel it..."
He crushed his lips to mine. His hands slid up from my arms and into my hair, holding the sides of my face firm. For moment I tried to push him. I tried to fight him. But only for a moment.
After that, I just couldn't stop it. I let him do what he wanted.
I locked the door of the prefects' bathroom and turned on the shower. As thick clouds of steam started filling up the room I leant against the dresser against the wall and stared into my reflection in the mirror. My face was white, my hair was wild. My lips were redder than I'd ever seen them, still glowing angrily from Malfoy's rough treatment of them. I began to remove my shirt, now minus two buttons, and surveyed the bruises on my upper arm with detached interest. My pale, somewhat scrawny figure looked unchanged, only these small marks betrayed the change in me. I reached for a tub of dittany essence and dabbed it on my flesh, almost in slow motion, as I finally looked into my own eyes. Before the steam completely obscured them in the mirror, I caught a glimpse of what could only be described as awakening in them.
Potions was one of the classes we shared. In general, the Slytherins sat in a huddle to the back and side of the room. The boys and I also liked to sit to the rear of the room, though generally as far away from the Slytherins as we could. Today, Ron and I were two of the last to leave the class, deep in conversation and unaware of those around us. Until that Slytherin moron Parkinson's voice rose above the general scuffle of the room.
"Look at the state of Granger. It's no wonder really though; if I were in her situation, I'd be a nervous mess as well."
I froze. She noticed.
"Yeah, that's right, you Mudblood bitch. You know times running out for your sort! Why aren't you in hiding yet then? Give the rest of us a break from your face!"
I stayed completely still as Ron spun round to face the huddle of Slytherins behind us.
"You can shut your face you evil pug-nosed bitch!"
"Oh look!" came the gleeful screech from Pansy, "Grangers blood-traitor boyfriends defending her honour! Well you're no better, Weasly!" A murmur of approval went up from the group.
"Yeah, your whole family's going to go down eventually. And do you know who'll they go for first? Your slutty little sister, that's who. The one that Potters so fond of."
I reached out to grab Ron's arm, painfully aware that he was about to attempt to take on at least five Slytherins alone.
"Don't Ron! It's what they want, just ignore them..." My desperate whisper seemed to go unnoticed. Pansy continued to screech behind us.
"Oh God, aren't they just the worst?! Hey, Draco! If you had to choose, if it was life or death, who would you go for? The Mudblood Granger, or that blood-traitor slapper Weasly? If you had to choose!"
I felt a slow clammy coldness creep over me. This was just the sort of thing Parkinson was known for. She was an expert at humiliating people in public; I had witnessed it and been a victim of it many times before. She often posed questions like this, often to Malfoy. It was generally accepted throughout the school that Malfoy and Pansy were an on-off item, despite discrepancies on both their parts over the years.
But at that moment in time, I would rather she asked any other question, and I rather she asked it to any other person; no matter how foul or insulting the statement. Just not a question about me. Not to Malfoy.
Until now I hadn't heard Malfoy's voice amongst the rabble. The others quietened down, until there was silence. I heard a chair scrape back, and then slow footsteps pacing behind me. I felt Ron quiver with rage beside me. Malfoy's voice came.
"That's an easy one, Pan. I'd go for Granger."
An outburst of horrid screeching laughter from the girls and groans of dismay from the boys.
"Of course," He carried on, his deep drawling voice carrying through the room."Ginny Weasly is better looking, I suppose. But really, she's worse than a Mudblood. She should know better. And she continues to betray her wizarding purity by hanging around with freaks, just like the rest of her worthless family. And then there's the issue of her being already messed with by Potter."
A chorus of hard laughter. His steps were closer behind me now, and when he spoke again, his voice was lower.
"Now, Granger here. She may be scum, but she almost can't help it. She's a bit like a freak of nature herself. But that's just the way it is. Yes..." He had stopped pacing and was standing just behind me now. "Id always choose Granger."
"You fucking bastard, you shut up about her and my family..."
I had already pulled my bag onto my shoulder and started walking towards the door, eyes straight ahead, not even turning to pull Ron away. And I knew, as I listened to the Slytherins deafening laughter and Ron's bellowed curses, that amongst it all Malfoy would still be standing there watching me. I was so afraid that if I turned around and looked into his face, I would see the hunger there again. And if I did, I knew I wouldn't be able to look away. So I kept walking.
For several weeks I managed to avoid any contact with Malfoy or his friends. In the classes we shared I insured I sat well away from them, and they generally left me alone; the snide glances and sniggers were so familiar after all the years that they seemed the norm. But now, whenever I saw him, my body went rigid, my heart rate increasing dramatically, a sweat forming on my brow. It was fear I think. I was terrified that someone would look at me and know, know what had happened.
He hadn't seeked me out again, I was convinced that that one Sunday in the greenhouse was our first and last encounter; a bizarre event, a one off never to be repeated. An accident.
But I still couldn't shake the experience from my mind, it seemed to live and breathe there, every second of the encounter still as fresh and eye-wateringly bright as though it had just happened. And I couldn't deny the truth to myself. I had never felt the way I did that day before. I hated the idea that it had been him, Malfoy, someone who my friends and I detested, that had inspired this in me.
On the three occasions that Victor had undressed me, I had been frightened and self conscious. He had been so much older than me, and I had been too young really to know what I was doing. The edge of risk that we both experienced had added some excitement, as we both knew the trouble that could follow if it was discovered that an experienced, 18 year old, internationally known Quidditch player was messing around with a little 14 year old girl. In hindsight it was a strange, slightly uncomfortable situation to be in. But at the time I was convinced of how sensible and mature I was, of course.
But this thing I had experienced with Malfoy was beyond that, so beyond it I couldn't even seem to vocalise it to myself. It was huge, and intoxicating, and violent. I was loathed to even admit to myself that I had enjoyed it; no, enjoyed wasn't the word. I had revelled in it.
And how strange that it had happened, how unexpected.
I struggled with myself. I knew I had to put it from my mind, lock it away and move on, forget about the Sunday, and the greenhouses. It was never going to happen again. The bright pictures in my mind would not fade, but I kept them quiet. It had to be put to rest.