She turned, her eyes wide, and, before she could reason herself out of it, had brushed her lips against his. He became still for a moment and then had his hands on either side of her face and was slowly and very thoroughly kissing her. She fumbled with the towel she had wrapped around herself, struggling to keep it pulled up as she softened more and more into this man's touch. When he drew away from her, when he took a finger and traced it along her cheekbone, across her lips, she yanked the towel back up and clutched it to herself.
"Let's get you dressed," he murmured. "Draco is surely done making breakfast by now."
Draco, she was startled to find out, really could cook. He had bacon, tomatoes, eggs, and toast all laid out for her when she finally made her way downstairs, tucked into clothes Blaise had picked out, swearing they were her favorites. Her fair angel looked up when she walked through the door and his eyes slipped from her hair to her bare feet and he grinned. "Blaise did your hair, didn't he?" he asked and she self-consciously raised her hand to the twist. "It looks good," he reassured her, leaning back against the counter looking, she thought, rather good himself. "You just never put your hair up on your own."
The two men exchanged one of those looks and she muttered, "You can both stop communicating via glances over my head."
"Sorry," Draco said, not sounding sorry at all, as he dished up far too much food. When she gave the plate a doubtful squint he said, with annoying cheer, "The homecare instructions were clear that you needed to eat. I'm just following orders."
"Why do I feel you only do that when it suits you anyway," she continued to eye the plate and its more than generous helping of breakfast and ignored the snicker coming from behind her.
"I always do what you ask," the man protested.
"So obviously false," she said as she settled on a stool at a counter and began to poke at the eggs with her fork. "I lost my memories, you know, not my ability to tell when someone's being disingenuous."
"You seem better," he noted as she ate one bite and widened her eyes in surprise at how good it was. "I told you I could cook," he added with, she thought, a rather annoying level of smugness in his tone.
"It's fine," she muttered, not wanting to gush because the git was smirking at her now and, damn, this was really good. He just grinned as he watched her eat – devour - the food he'd prepared. She swallowed and glanced back at Blaise, still lurking in the doorway. "Am I the only one eating?"
As the men did another one of those things where they exchanged glances – something she decided to ignore this time – and as Blaise began to fill his own plate she thought about what holes she cared most about in her personal history. The blond had his back to her and was piling dishes in the sink and starting a series of cleaning charms on them when she said, "Draco," and he turned – spun – around. "Tell me how we ended up here, you and me, together," she said.
Blaise sat down on another stool and, with a blatant smirk, said, "This should be good."
Draco poured himself some coffee from a pot and leaned back to look at the two of them at the counter and began his story.
"We knew each other in school, which I'm sure Blaise told you. Though 'knew each other' covers a great deal of 'I was a total arse to you and you repeatedly bested me in every possible way.' After the War, in which you were a hero and I was most decidedly not, we didn't see one another for years. I can't say I'd forgotten you existed; in a world where you're lauded as a golden girl despite your vigorous attempts to stay out of the papers that would have been impossible, but I didn't exactly socialize with you. And then Blaise dumped me for you."
She looked up from her breakfast at that.
"It's true," Blaise grinned at her. "I'd been dating the man, though very casually, so don't let him make it sound like I broke his heart or anything, and I ran into you at a bookstore and was smitten."
"My heart was definitely broken," Draco protested and Blaise rolled his eyes.
"You had a date within hours of my telling you we were done."
"It was Astoria!" the man protested. "That hardly counts."
"Uh huh," Blaise went back to eating.
"Anyway," Draco drawled, "I got dumped for the girl who'd always beaten me at everything and I was less than thrilled. And then the man started doing this insane courting ritual thing as if you'd grown up in a convent or something. I didn't know anyone who still actually insisted on a duenna for coffee dates and I thought he'd lost his mind, no one was worth all that trouble. When I caught him reading an etiquette book from eighty years ago and copying down lists of appropriate gifts I was sure of it.
"Then, while I was out with my mother, I ran into the both of you. This was after you two had finally stopped hauling that chaperone with you everywhere and he was looking at you like you were the most precious thing he'd ever found; it was enough to curdle milk, all that doe-eyed fawning."
Hermione flicked a glance at Blaise who shrugged over his eggs. "You're quite lovely and I'm really just very shallow so I tend to look at you a lot," he said while giving her a look that belied those words. She smiled back at him, feeling herself melt in this man's gaze again. This combination of barely knowing him, knowing she loved him, knowing he absolutely adored her? This combination was turning out to be ridiculously potent. Looking at the other man she spotted a similar look on his face, though his was combined with a little more worry. He still doesn't think I'm going to stay, she thought. She reached her hand out towards him, over the counter, and he moved forward and took it, kissing her fingertips. She pressed her hand to his cheek and mouthed, 'I love you,' at him and he closed his eyes and seemed to take a moment to collect himself.
"When we met that day, my mother was less than pleasant. You might have been a war heroine, but she couldn't believe Blaise was dallying with a woman she considered beneath him. She'd been acting like a bitch all day and I was tired of it and as she dripped out one snide little put down after another I snapped and told her, in front of both of you, that not only was I not in sympathy with her condemnation of Blaise, I envied him having captured the heart of such an ideal woman and if I thought I had the faintest hope of being accepted I'd start courting you – courting you both – myself.
"Now, she'd been unhappy enough I'd dated Blaise to begin with and that I'd consider returning to him with a Muggle-born – not the term she used, by the way – as a third partner was clearly the most horrifying thing she could imagine. And you, well, you'd clearly had it with her snippy prejudice and you announced, looking her straight in the eye, that you'd be delighted to consider my suit."
"Are you telling me I started to date you in order to spite your mother?"
"Pretty much." He grinned at her.
"The woman who argued with you about whether we could have bookshelves in our own living room?" The woman, she thought to herself, who let you be branded with that Mark.
"That's the one." Draco leaned back and laughed. "I honestly thought we'd gotten ourselves into an untenable situation because we were both just too ridiculously stubborn to back down until we actually went out the first time."
She watched a softer expression settle over his features as he recalled that date. The sardonic, mocking smile dropped away and she felt her heart pound as she watched him. Here was this person she inexplicably loved. "Blaise was there; he clearly had no intention of letting me woo you away from him. This was a three-person deal or nothing and his preference appeared to be 'nothing' though he seemed willing to at least consider the idea, or to humor you in your desire to spite my mother. He hovered. He was overwhelmingly attentive. He subtly cut me out all night. And yet, the more time I spent with you the more utterly charmed I became. You were funny and smart and had a biting sense of humor and I left that night without so much as a kiss from you – from either of you – and couldn't wait to go out with you again."
"I was a prick to you," Blaise acknowledged.
"You were much nicer than I would have been in your place."
"In that I didn't try to set you on fire or something? I suppose. I didn't really think anything would come of it, to be honest. Your prejudice was pretty well established and I never thought you'd do more than flirt with us both and then move on to someone else. I was just enjoying knowing how upset your mother was about the whole thing. She wasn't ever my biggest fan what with my being both male and not quite as Anglo-Saxon as she'd like; that she had to bite her tongue while you pursued a threesome with me and a muggle-born?" Blaise snorted and Hermione's already low opinion of Draco's mysterious, opinionated mother dropped another notch. "And," the man added, almost as an afterthought, "I had my own reasons for thinking it worth my while to get closer to Draco."
Draco snorted at that and Blaise gave him one of those irritated looks.
"So…" Hermione tried to keep them focused. "We went out, all three of us, Blaise was posturing, you were charmed and I was… charming?"
"Actually, you were kind of a bitch," Draco said with a shrug. "You needled me about the war time stuff, made snide comments about my ancestry and implied I was inbred, and you kept touching Blaise on the shoulder or knee to the point I suggested you just pee on him if you wanted to establish ownership so badly."
Hermione nearly choked on her tomato and Blaise was at her side instantly, fussing and glaring at Draco. "It's okay," she managed to get out. "I just wasn't expecting that. Please tell me I didn't pee on you."
Blaise snickered and Draco burst out laughing. "Oh, it is so tempting to tell you that you did," Draco said around his smirk. "But, no, you didn't. What you did was take the bitchiness down a bit and start to actually treat me like a person." He frowned. "Not many people do, you know. Either I'm fawned on because of the money or figuratively spit on because of the Death Eater history."
"Not always figuratively," Blaise added.
"And it was obvious you were, even aside from the crazy touching thing, utterly mad about Blaise and you were polite and pleasant to the waitress and you… you just charmed me. I don't know how else to put it. Both of you. I wanted… that. I wanted to be loved that way, to have someone lean on me the way you leaned on him at the end of the night when you'd had one glass of wine too many and you were tired but you utterly trusted him to take care of you. And I wanted that someone to be you. And," he hesitated, "and I missed Blaise. He jokes that he didn't break my heart, and he didn't, of course, but it hadn't been quite as casual as he implies either. I'd been on the verge of falling in love when he left and watching him look at you, I felt a kind of helpless, bitter longing that he'd never looked at me that way."
"Do now," Blaise said and Hermione nodded. That, certainly, was true. Even if most of the looks they exchanged seemed to be about their concern for her the way they loved each other was obvious.
"It seems too pat," she said into the pause. "Too perfect."
"Hah," Draco laughed. "When I said I'd been an arse to you at school, I was understating it. You had no reason to give me any chances at all and if you hadn't been pissed at my mother you wouldn't have. Every date was like an audition. You made me prove I wasn't like my parents, raked me over the proverbial coals for everything nasty I'd done in school – and you have a memory that's incredible…"
He stopped suddenly and flushed and she forced a tight smile to her face.
"I'm sorry," he said. "That was beyond tactless."
"Just… go on," she said.
"You made me explain my choices before and during the War. And you hated them, hated what I'd done. Some of it, sure, I'd been fairly heavily coerced into but still... I'd watched you be tortured, you know." She paled, egg-laden fork half way to her mouth; she hadn't expected that and she slowly lowered the fork down. "You couldn't bear to see the mark on my arm. You flinched like someone was about to hit you whenever you saw it. We'd been dating for months before I really understood how much bravado had been in that dare you'd thrown in my face, in my mother's face." He exhaled sharply and looked down. "You've always been so much braver than I am, so much braver than I even know how to be. And now you don't even want me to cover the Mark. I… I'd do anything for you, you know."
"Tell her about the incident with Dean," Blaise said, his voice quiet.
Draco smiled at that, a wan smile that seemed forlorn. Hermione looked anxiously at Blaise who nodded at her to reassure her.
"One day we were out, all three of us, and it had started to go really well. You'd started to unconsciously touch me; you'd take my hand, let me help you into a seat. You leaned on me one night and I'd sat there, frozen, looking at Blaise with utter panic in my eyes while he laughed at me. I knew I wanted you, wanted you both, knew you didn't hate me anymore, but there's such a gap, you know, between 'not hate' and 'love'. And then, this one night, one of your old friends confronted you, wanted to know what you were doing with me. Blaise had gone off to the loo and he came back to find me flinching under accusations of things I'd done during the war – all true – and you simmering more and more as this guy hissed his invective at me, and by extension you."
"You didn't see me," Blaise took up the story, "but at some point you'd had enough and you stood up and slapped the guy, then, as he stood there, his hand on his cheek, you just leveled him. For a good five minutes you let him have it, a harangue I wish I could repeat because it was beautiful. You accused him of dwelling in the past, of not using discernment to tell when a person had changed, of not caring whether someone had changed, of infantilizing you – how dare he assume you couldn't be trusted to choose your own companions. You'd started to question his own ethics when I cut you off."
"If there was a moment I knew I was helplessly yours that was it." Draco shrugged, "and that's also when I believed you had grown to care for me."
"And I kissed you that night," she whispered. "In front of everyone."
Both men turned sharply to look at her. "I turned from Dean and kissed you to let everyone know you were mine, that we were actually together. And you just sat there, terrified and shaking, and I whispered into your ear that you needed to kiss me back or I'd think you didn't like me and you did, finally, and when we broke apart someone muttered, 'get a room' and you were about to cry."
"You remember anything more?" Blaise watched her but she shook her head.
"It's like the cotton candy. I remember just the one thing, like short scene cut out of a movie, but nothing around it."
"I'll take it," Draco whispered.
. . . . . . . . . . .
A/N - Thank you, again, to everyone who has been reading and commenting on this. Now that I've managed to get the plot outlined I've changed the category from hurt/comfort to mystery because I think it fits better there.
I hope everyone continues to enjoy!