Prompt : remember
Word count : 422.
"Now, Hermione," her mother had said as they sat around the kitchen table together one morning, back when she was eleven, and had never met a wizard or risked her life. "Remember that nice boys, ones who make good boyfriends, will only kiss you if you want to be kissed."
Well, she certainly hadn't even been thinking about kissing while she was busy doing her Prefect rounds during Sixth Year, and unsurprisingly she'd been rather shocked when a blond Slytherin ferret had appeared out of nowhere and pinned her to the wall. But she'd also got over that rather quickly.
"Nice boys will always have you home before your curfew."
The day that she had snuck out of 12 Grimmauld Place to see him, he should have had her back by dinner time; that way, she could have claimed to have been in the library the entire time. But he took her to the beach, and it was so nice to pretend that they weren't in the midst of the battle to decide the fate of the wizarding world that they stayed on the promenade, eating fish and chips (well, Hermione eating fish and chips - Draco thought them too greasy) until long after night had fallen. When she got back, they had mounted a search party.
"Nice boys will always call you back."
Even the twins had noticed Hermione's unusual behaviour in the week before the siege on Voldemort's headquarters. Only Ginny knew that the older girl spent every spare moment she had gazing out of their bedroom window, looking for the owl which would bring her one of the encoded, hastily scrawled replies which she collected in a shoebox under her bed. A reply which would tell her that he was safe, but a reply which was taking much too long to arrive.
"And, once you've been dating for a little while, nice boys will always take you home to meet their parents."
Hermione had already met Lucius the summer before her Second Year, and was in absolutely no hurry to do it again. Aside from the inevitable slurs on her lineage, there was also the minor problem that, should Voldemort somehow discover that one of his Death Eaters was secretly courting the muggleborn friend of Harry Potter who had caused him so much trouble, Draco would no doubt have only seconds to live.
By Matilda Granger's standards, Draco Malfoy would most definitely not have qualified as a nice boy.
But then again, maybe Hermione didn't want a nice boy.
A/N : Pop on over to The Butterbeer Club forum, if you haven't already :D