Mid-February, 2007 – Two Days Later
Usually, Friday nights at the library were quiet and uneventful, peaceful even as the bulk of Hogwarts' students tended to gravitate towards more exciting adventures than homework and card cataloguing at the start of their weekend—usually something involving sharing secrets, risqué dares, and drinking bootleg alcoholic beverages (sometimes, all three at the same time).
Tonight would not be one of those nights.
Hermione had come to Madam Pince's territory to research the history and organization of the Australian Ministry, determined to reclaim her chosen career path there, since she'd decided to move down under this summer.
The excuse also gave her time to research magical pregnancies, and analyze how they differed from Muggle pregnancies.
Skimming the table of contents of Alwina Appleby's What to Expect When Expecting a Little Witch or Wizard, she opened it to chapter 11, "How Your Baby Is Growing: 15 Weeks." There, in the middle of the page, was an artist's coloured rendition of a peachy-pink foetus, eyes sealed shut, small hands balled into fists, positioned right-side up and leaning forward at an angle. A long umbilical cord stretched from its belly to attach to the uterine wall, providing it the nutrients it needed until it was fully developed and could sustain itself without the mother's help.
Hermione stroked a finger over the tiny skull and traced the slope of its nose. Is this how her baby looked, too? How strange it was to think that a miniature person was forming inside her.
The text on the page beneath the picture explained that her child was approximately four inches long now, that its taste buds were beginning to develop, and that it could probably sense light as well.
As she read on, she grew excited: this was the first week she'd be able to tell the sex of the child!
Shutting the book, she put it in her satchel, flip-flopping on the idea of going to see Poppy soon to ask for a gender check. Did she want to know, or keep it a surprise, though?
Lost for a moment in the thoughts of how she'd feel about first a boy, then a girl, she didn't hear Draco approach until he was already leaning against a nearby bookshelf and staring down at her. He had his hands shoved into the pockets of his expensive, woolen trousers, his long fringe flopping into his eyes, and he'd adopted a casual air that made it seem he'd just dropped in to bring a little 'sexy' to the room.
Git or not, the man definitely knew how to strike a pose, she'd give him that.
"It's official then: you're divorced."
He sounded careful and casual, as if he were asking out of politeness, rather than personal curiosity.
Well, two could play at that game…
Hermione shrugged, and began collecting her small pile of books, slipping them one at a time inside her dragon hide briefcase, careful not to let Draco see the text she'd been reading when he'd walked up.
"Obviously, since I'm going with my maiden name now."
She hadn't expected to be disturbed in her favourite sanctuary tonight, much less engage in a confrontation with Draco there—especially one he'd initiated without an apology. She needed to regroup, emotionally fortify…take a bloody Calming Draught for her nerves before she got another nosebleed from the stress.
Seriously, pregnancy hormones were the worst.
Pushing her chair out, she grabbed her attaché and headed out of the library without another word, her heart pounding madly in her chest as she hurried through the hallways and up stairs.
She wasn't running away, she wasn't. This was refusing to have a conversation on his terms. He owed her an apology, damn it all, and until he was man enough to offer one up, she didn't want to speak to him!
At least, that's what she'd convinced herself by the time she'd hit her floor and headed down the hall towards her room. By then, she'd worked herself up into a righteous fury, her emotions once more pinging from one extreme to the other faster than she could blink an eye.
Draco, who had been trailing after her (again), caught her arm and effectively stopped her when she'd reached the door to her private chambers.
"We're not together!"
Feeling her edges fraying, Hermione barked a short, slightly hysterical-sounding laugh. "Yes, I'm well aware. Tell me something I, and the rest of the bloody castle, don't know, Malfoy."
He tsked. "No, I mean Merryweather and me. We're not together," he clarified with a guilty expression. "We…we never have been. I never really dated her."
The world seemed to tilt a bit.
Hermione's lungs emptied in one great whoosh, as if she'd been nailed right in the solar plexus with a Blasting spell. "Explain," she hissed, feeling a muscle beneath her eye begin to twitch.
Draco sighed, looking quite deflated in that moment. "It was all a ruse we concocted. I wanted to make you jealous, to realise what you'd tossed aside."
She was pretty sure her eyes bugged, then, as she couldn't believe was she was hearing.
That disbelief must have been evident in her expression, because Draco reacted to it. "What did you expect, Granger? I'm Slytherin. This is how my kind get our point across. We punish others by hitting where it hurts. And I'm apparently also an arsehole who sees the worst in all things, and a petty, immature fucker where love's concerned." He pulled his hand away and sullenly shoved it back into his pocket. "I fuck good things up. That's what I do."
"And what was Helen's excuse?" she asked, grinding her back teeth into dust.
"Merryweather wanted to make someone else just as jealous, someone she fancies. He's been dragging his heels on committing to her, so she wanted to make it clear that she had other options. We weren't really dating at all."
Hermione growled, feeling her ears begin to ring from her mounting blood pressure. "You're standing here telling me that you two made it all up?!"
Draco wasn't exactly the wisest man on the planet, but he was certainly no village idiot, either. He felt and heard her anger, recognised the danger, and took a cautious step backwards so he was out of arm's reach. "Before you take my head off, in my defence, after everything I saw through the earrings, I was furious with you," he quickly stated. "I'd thought… Hell, you know what I thought, Granger. I'd thought you were playing me for a fool. I'd wanted to‒"
He paused, seemed to carefully consider his words then.
"That day in the dungeon corridor, when you finally admitted to feeling something deeper for me...it was a fucking revelation," he admitted. "Years of being blacklisted, outcast, seen as only the shite ex-Death Eater, persona non grata, it all seemed to just...not matter anymore." He glanced at her with a half-shuttered gaze. "Because I had you on my side."
"Kissing up to me is not winning you any points," she reminded him in a hard tone. "And it's as far from an apology as you can get."
"I'm not kiss‒" He stalled again, sighed, and ran a hand through his fringe, pushing it back out of his face. "I was angry at you. So bloody angry I nearly drank myself into the grave every night over break."
"That's on you, because you didn't trust me!" she hurled back at him, feeling suddenly attacked, as if this whole conversation had turned on its head when she wasn't looking, and now needed to defend herself. "Don't you dare try to make me feel guilty for something that was innocent on my side." She pointed a menacing finger at him. "And don't you deflect from the fact that you were spying on me in the first place, you miserable rodent!"
He held his hands out again in a pacifying gesture. "I'm not doing either thing, I swear! I was just explaining where my head was then. Here was this...perfect woman...and she'd accepted me, despite everything between us and my past, and then it all just crashed and burned. I was caught flat-footed. I wasn't thinking rationally, Granger. My eyes were telling me I'd been tricked, and I was blinded by jealousy and bitterness. I was resentful of how life kept fucking me hard. I admit I...I didn't handle it well."
She huffed, dropping her hand. "Understatement of the year."
"I've never been in love before," he admitted a bit heatedly. "It's not as if such a thing comes with a manual. I could only go on what I knew and on what I was trained to be."
That floored her. Draco Malfoy had never loved a woman before her?
Hermione glanced at him skeptically. "You've never had a girlfriend before me?"
He rolled his eyes. "You make me sound like a twonk, Granger. Of course I've had a girlfriend. You recall Pansy Parkinson, don't you?" He sighed. "After the war, though, I couldn't get a witch to look twice at me."
"But you've had enough sex to know what to do to melt the knickers off a girl!" she accused, crossing her arms and staring him down. "Don't bother denying it."
He shrugged, and took up a position against the opposite side of the door jamb, facing her, casually leaning against the stone. "There's plenty of destructive things to find in the Muggle world to keep one busy, including uninhibited sexual excess." His lids shuttered with growing arousal and that sexy smirk that had always sent her heart into palpitations crawled up the side of his cheek. "You certainly seemed to enjoy the benefits from those experiences."
Ignoring the way her cheeks heated at his innuendo, Hermione refused to be derailed. She was angry at him for deceiving her—not just once, but twice. "So, you're saying all those women were good enough to...to..."
Have sex with? Engage in intercourse? Ride stallion? How did one say such a thing without sounding totally crass?
"Fuck?" he supplied, his smirk widening and his eyes twinkling with mischief.
"Yes, that," she reluctantly agreed with an aggravated sigh at his antics, "but not to love?"
"I never invested in any of them for more than a one-off," he admitted, "but we were all adults, Granger. It was sex for fun. No promises were made, nor required by anyone." His amusement dropped away in an instant, and suddenly, he was all business again. "Not until you."
"That's because I don't do casual. And anyway, I didn't ask for you to pursue me," she reminded him.
He stared at her for a long minute, his gaze softening in a way she'd only ever seen from him in the afterglow of sex. "No, you didn't. But...I couldn't seem to help myself," he finally confessed.
Hermione found it difficult to look at him after such a raw admission, feeling oddly vulnerable in the face of it, and so she dropped her gaze to the floor. "Honestly, I don't care how many women you've been with. What matters is that you lied to me, Draco—again. You misled me on purpose just to cut at me." Her mood, swinging wildly between outrage and misery, gave rise to a tide of hateful tears. Angrily, she brushed them back from her eyes. "Thinking of you with Helen, like that... It was like someone had stabbed me over and over again," she choked, pressing her trembling hands to her heart. "Every day, I wanted to die."
He shuddered and bowed his head. "That's exactly how I felt seeing you with Weasley."
Of everything he could have said, that was the thing that finally made her cry.
"I never intended to make you feel like that," she sobbed, her chest heaving from the pain, "and I'm sorry that you did, but you know it wasn't intentional." She shook so hard from all the pent-up emotion burbling forth that she had to reach out and hold onto her door for support. "What you did, though, that was cruel, Draco. You hurt me just because you could. You broke me on purpose!"
"Granger...I..."
With an agonized expression on his face, he reached for her and pulled her into his arms. For her part, she went to him without complaint, tired of the fighting, desperate to hold him, too.
Holding her close to his heart, his tears mingled with hers as he bent his head in shame. "God, I'm so sorry, Hermione! I was a bitter, spiteful shit, and I hurt you, and I'm sorry. Sorry I doubted you. Sorry I misled you about the earrings and about Helen. Sorry I haven't learned how to be a person worthy of your love. Sorry I always fuck things up by being so petty. And you're right when you say I'm selfish and a little broken, and that I don't deserve you. I know I don't, especially after everything that's happened between us. I know it now more than I ever have before." He pressed his face into her throat, clearly fearful that his words wouldn't be enough to convince her. "But I want to. Merlin, I want to be that man for you!"
They stood there for a long time, her weeping into his soft, silken shirt, clinging to it even as a part of her wanted so badly to shove him away and cut him dead. For his part, Draco simply held her, his despair as awkward and as painful as hers, making him tremble.
It all suddenly felt like too much weight to carry. It was exhausting, being this wounded all the time. And she had a baby to think about now. How were her bouts of melancholy and sorrow affecting her unborn child?
"I'm afraid to trust you again," she admitted around a shuddering sob. "I put my heart into your hands once, Draco. Despite everything between us in the past, all the bad things you ever did and said to me, I still trusted you with my heart, and you did what I never thought you could: you tore it in half."
He swallowed hard. "I still love you, Granger. I love you more than I've ever loved anything in my life. And I know I've fucked it up between us, I know it's asking for the moon, but would you be willing to give me another chance? Please."
And in that word, she heard echoed every plea she'd ever offered up to him:
Please bring me...back to you.
Please stop tormenting me...with this pain when we're apart.
Please keep reminding me that I'm not an ugly, unwanted...lover.
Please don't hurt me with this...because you could.
Please take all this hurt from me...I can't take it anymore.
Please care for me...as I do for you.
Please don't let this all be a game to you...because it's never been a game to me.
Please remind me of who I once was...when we were together.
Please fall for me, so I won't be alone in this feeling.
Her heart turned over in her chest, and it took several tries before she could find her voice at last. "We rushed this," she whispered with some hesitance, afraid of offering her hand again, but finding she was willing to try anyway. She was Gryffindor, after all, and being brave wasn't just about standing up for social justice, or jumping in front of hexes, or even facing off against the likes of Voldemort. It was also about crawling to one's feet after life knocked you back, about standing up for one's self when necessary...and about putting your heart on the line when it felt right to do so, even knowing it could be obliterated. "We were hardly friends before. Neither of us fully trusted the other. That's what caused this mess. So, if you want to start over, we begin there."
He leaned back, looked her in the eye, and nodded in understanding. "Trust isn't something you demand. It's something you earn," he said, slowly reaching out to run his fingertips over her cheek. "I can do that. For you, absolutely."
Draco's gentle touch ignited a riot of feelings. Hermione shook from the magnificent and terrifying weight of them, and was forced to step back from him, seeking out the opposite edge of the door once more to keep her knees from giving out.
Her lover let he go without a word, but it was clear from the way he watched her, and as he straightened his shoulders and wiped the tears from his cheeks that it wasn't to be a permanent withdrawal. The determination in his granite-hard eyes made it clear that he was going to fight for her.
"I'll earn your trust back," he vowed. "I can learn how to be your friend."
Taking a single step back to put a little more distance between them eased the tension a bit, and Draco suddenly seemed much more assured and self-confident, as he'd been at the start of their affair. It was because he had a goal now, she knew, and like all Slytherins, he was ambitious enough to set other things aside to achieve it.
"You'll want more, though," she pointed out, needing to establish right up front that, to her, the foundation of the relationship was the more important goal this time around. "You said it yourself: you're greedy, selfish. You'll want things to immediately go back to the way they were."
They both knew it was true. The sex between them had been, in a word, amazing.
And addicting.
Amazingly addicting.
She'd never thought sex could be like that, honestly. It would be hard for her, too, to not want to immediately pick back up where they'd left off.
He shrugged and slowly began backing away. "I won't deny that the idea of taking you to my bed again isn't something I don't want to repeat over and over, Granger. I like the little sounds you make when I'm inside you. They're unforgettable." With a tremulous smile, he turned on his heel and began to walk off. He walked like a man who'd found a ray of hope in an otherwise cloudy day. Over his shoulder, he threw out a last thought, "Some things are equally as important as sex, though."
When he was down the hall and out of sight, Hermione returned to her room and shut the door. Then, she leaned against it, resting a red-hot cheek against the cool surface with a relieved sigh.
This wasn't caving, she told herself, as she climbed under the sheets later and waved the candlelight out with her wand. She'd done enough of that with Ron to know how it felt. This was starting over. Friendship first, if only for the sake of the child they were bringing into the world together. Anything else after that...well, she'd see.
She closed her eyes, rubbing a hand over her belly to calm the sudden roiling within it, caressing over the rounded curves...
Soon. She'd tell him about the pregnancy soon—
Her eyes snapped open and she stared up at the ceiling, the need for sleep fading proportionately to her mounting anxiety.
—Just as soon as she figured out how to do so.
TO BE CONTINUED...
AUTHOR'S NOTES:
To be completely frank, I'd written most of this chapter before I ever wrote chapter 6, so the info. about Draco and Helena that appears here, about them not actually being a couple and it all being a ruse...planned out far in advance. Foreshadowing, killing off characters, & leading readers astray = most fun a writer has, honestly (and in that order, too).
Please don't hex me to death! :) Besides, I have mentioned before that authors are sadists, didn't I?
Hopefully, you'll leave a review anyway. I'd love to hear from you!
XOXO,
- RZZMG