Summary: Blaise never really did appreciate girls. Blaise/Astoria
Blaise Zabini was a Neapolitan ice-cream; a whole mixture of different adjectives. Exotic, different, but it just depended whether you liked the change in flavour.
He was arrogant. Selfish, even, and stubborn. He didn't get on with many people, and thought himself at a much higher level than the majority of his peers and schoolfriends. A heavy air of prejudice and discrimination hung over him - he despised muggles, muggle-borns, blood-traitors, half-bloods and breeds. When Sanguini arrived at Slughorns Christmas party in the sixth year, Blaise was disgusted. Honestly. Mixing the likes of vampires with wizards. Half human, half animal. The thought of muggles and Mudbloods living in our houses, walking our streets, made him physically irratated. It wasn't really anything more than typical Slytherin attitudes to anything, except for the fact that Blaise couldn't help but hold a grudge against the Dark Lord. Maybe it had something to do with his mother, and her many husbands. They had all had links to Voldemort in some way. Being vain, highly respectful of his looks and actions, he was also minutely envious of anyone who seemed to be better or more talented than he.
Take Draco Malfoy, for example.
High-headed, porcelean skinned, sly-smiled, my future husband Malfoy, with his irresistable charm and knack for attracting girls.
Not that Blaise wanted the knack for attracting girls, of course. If girls flocked to him like they flocked to Malfoy, he'd end up marrying someone like Pansy Parkinson.
But it still earned Malfoy the rays of disrespect that Blaise seemed to radiate to the majority of Hogwarts. But there were some people who didn't have to be subject to Blaise's burning blaze of bitterness. His mother was a prime example, with her murderous good looks. She had been through seven marraiges, to which each of them had been killed or died. Suspicious, as the Zabini family would instantly be provided with fortune, which meant they would end up very well off indeed, but only Blaise and his mother would know the answers as to why all seven had ended in such a peculiar way.
There were others, though. Despite admitting that "Astoria Greengrass was about as useful as a plastic frying pan", he did hold a small (and it was very, very small) amount of respect for me. I never knew why. He never told me. He just said he did.
And that was the only reason.
"Honestly," he repeated, as he kissed my earlobe behind the curtain in the Slytherin common room. He was in the seventh year, the wrath of Death Eaters were taking over our school and he hated it. "Don't date Malfoy."
I didn't say anything, just stood there, my hands on his waist as he continued to decorate my neck and ears with his tongue. I was two years younger, and I wasn't really dating anyone. Malfoy had only recently expressed his new found feelings. How Daphne Greengrass' baby sister was the new Hot Topic.
The same Hot Topic that Blaise Zabini had been entertaining himself with since my second year at Hogwarts. I vaguely remembered his mouth on mine behind the heavily decorated screens at the end of the Yule Ball. His hand sliding up my skirt to settle on my upper thigh during dinner one time, when he had sat next to me (huffing and puffing like it was such an embarrassment to be sat next to a woman). I'd coughed in shock so abruptly I'd almost spat pumpkin juice all over the table. Lingering touches when he passed or handed me something, secret kisses in deserted corridors. I thought the excitement of having an older, more mature, looked-up-to boyfriend would fade eventually. This was Blaise Zabini; even in his fourth year he was well known for being reluctant to have girlfriends, so I was convinced he was just experimenting.
But it continued. And infuriatingly, it still stayed a secret. Blaise had been so ugly-voiced about girls in the past, especially girls that were considered plain, like myself, that it would lower his social status menacingly if we were to go public. And he couldn't have that. Even the jealousy he had against pretty-boy Malfoy, looking at me across the common room, his white-blond hair practically glittering in the lantern light as he smirked at me with looks that effectively screamed "come-hither", didn't change Blaise's views.
No matter where I got with Blaise, it always fell back to this. He was Marmite, hot Mexican chillis on an equally hot day. Maybe I was better with Malfoy.
Well, I'd never really liked Neapolitan ice cream anyway.