CW: dubious consent and underage sex (in the past, so they don't involve dramione). Also, a lot of sex (in the present!).

Canonically speaking, Hermione is a year older than everyone else, but we ignored this detail because, well, what is canon anyway.

Bed (night)

10th of December, 2006. Somewhere in the Dolomites.

Draco tasted of burnt, dark smoke. The lingering flavour of nicotine rested on his tongue and blended into his scent, enthralling Hermione's senses as she let him kiss her.

Quietly.

Delicately.

His hand moved over her jaw, cupping her face, long fingers resting on her neck. Hermione curled her hand over his, the peaks of his knuckles sharp against her palm. A chill ran down her spine, and the blood rushing through her veins pumped so quickly that everything else became muffled, around her and inside of her.

She stood without breaking the kiss when he pulled her towards him, the noise of the chair scraping on the hardwood floor echoing in the kitchen. Silently, she went to sit on his lap, her legs on either side of his long ones, hair tickling their faces as she angled her head down and kept kissing him. Their lips parted only to breathe, for the briefest of seconds.

His arms wrapped around her torso, finding the frame of her body under her oversize, heavy jumper. Hermione cupped his cheeks, his stubble scratchy under her fingertips as she caressed his face. Draco tilted his head backwards and her hands sank into his hair, fingers raking through his short locks while he kept kissing her, kissing her, kissing her, like he was following the captivating rhythm of a perfect lullaby. Slow, calm, unhurried. Nothing rushed him, nothing fretted him, and he searched her mouth and her body taking his sweet, sweet time.

There was no room for worries of any kind in her mind, and Hermione derived a distinct feeling of bliss from that. Every time she let her senses take control of her feelings, every time she gave her restless brain a break, every time she managed to flee her heavy, complex, and intrusive thoughts, dipping into pure and uncomplicated nothingness, she wished it could last forever.

When she registered the way Malfoy was holding her—close to him, hand on her spine, the other one in her hair, her lip between his teeth—a soft moan curled at the bottom of her throat; something that begged for more.

She grew hungrier. Her hands became frantic, pacing the planes of Malfoy's chest over his cashmere pullover, before heading towards the hem. She was already clutching the fabric when he stopped her, murmuring against her lips, "Easy, now, Granger."

Hermione frowned. The calm lake inside of her swirled dangerously towards confusion, something akin to panic emerging from the depths of it. "Do you… am I…?"

"No, it's okay." His palms rested soothingly on her hips. "I mean, if it's okay for you."

"It's okay for me," Hermione replied breathlessly, reaching for Draco's lips, mesmerised by the way they had turned a glistening pink.

Their noses brushed together, and her hands slid again between their bodies. He pulled back once more.

"Malfoy, what—"

"On the kitchen chair?" Hermione blinked at him, wide-eyed as his mouth curled into a smirk. "I mean, I get it," he gestured towards his body, prompting her to roll her eyes, "but I could, um… use with a little more comfort."

"Cry me a river, idiot manchild." She stood up though, quickly spinning on her heels and striding toward the bedroom as the need to cocoon herself back inside Draco's frame started to spread somewhere between her stomach and lungs.

She never broke their connection—couldn't fathom doing it now. His hand was in hers. Smooth. Trimmed nails. Sharp bones. Warm.

"Oh, we're already discussing nicknames?" he joked, following her as she crossed the threshold of what she thought was her sacred space. They were going to desecrate it, now; or perhaps it had never been pure in the first place. "I have a few in store for you—"

"We," Hermione cut him off, facing him, "are not doing anything." Her hands went back to his jumper, keenly. "You and I, on the other hand…"

Malfoy sealed her lips with another kiss, chuckling at her satisfied sigh. Maybe it was something in the way he did it, or maybe it was simply the silky feel of it that made it unnecessary for her to consciously decide to clear her mind. Draco pressed softly, sucked tenderly, and the thousand thoughts flying around Hermione's mind faded away. The only thing she could make sense of was a litany of yes, yes, yes, more.

"Do you want me to take it off?" he murmured in her mouth while Hermione crawled backwards on the bed towards the headboard, still tugging at his pullover, still kissing him like it was the only instinct she had to respond to.

"Yes, please, if you don't mind." Draco smiled as he slipped out of it, and his lips were already back on hers when the garment landed carelessly on the floor. Hazily, in a remote corner of her mind, she must have thought she could have kept kissing him for ages.

Hermione's hands went to his skin almost by magnetic attraction—slowly, not all at once: nail, fingertip, palm—and she began tracing the defined lines of his body. Eyes shut, the tactile experience was the only way for her to commit him to memory. The mental image she'd had of him started to change, to reshape itself to better fit the truth.

Malfoy was skinny, but not bony: lean. Where she expected him to be a gaunt sort of angular, he was instead muscular, if a bit wiry. Hermione's curious fingers moved all over him, down his back and up his chest, down the sharp cuts of his hip bones and up the taut hills of his shoulders. He never flinched nor tensed, not even when she found herself tracing diagonal lines that didn't match the regular anatomy of a male body—jagged and ridged like barbed wire, slightly embossed.

Draco grabbed her chin to angle her head and started leaving kisses on her neck. That's when Hermione opened her eyes and saw it: crooked, pink lines crossed his torso two or three times, resembling a frazzled Z, or S.

Something tried to tug at her conscience—sirens blaring in the distance about Sixth year, and Harry, and Sectumsempra—but Draco shifted slightly, his hand sliding under her jumper, and her eyes closed again.

She let herself fall back into her blissful haze as he whispered in her ear, "Do you want to keep this on?"

She mumbled something, shaking her head, and then took it off quickly. "Weird question." Her hands rushed back to him. His palms, too, were on her skin in a matter of seconds, and she let out a content sigh.

"I wouldn't know your preferences."

Beat.

"Weird preferences." He spread a hand over her side, his thumb resting under her breast and stroking back and forth languidly; the other fingers matched the curved bones of her ribcage.

An odd kind of feeling, to know that her own hand curled on herself like that, too, sometimes. Even odder to realise that the way she would try to mimic the sensation was nothing compared to the real thing.

And, oh, how she'd missed the real thing.

She glanced up at him: he was looking at her, taking her in, measuring her with his hand.

"You don't have to be shy."

"I'm not being shy, Granger." He caressed her, then leaned down until his forehead met hers for the first time, like two strangers sharing pleasantries in a bar. "I'm just not in a rush." His hand moved, cupping the soft flesh of her breast. "Are you?"

Hermione kissed him, drawing him closer and crushing the small space that separated them. There were still notes of red wine on his tongue: she could pinpoint the exact shade of it to an almost analytical extent.

She found her way to his shoulder blades and held onto them as Draco's fingers tweaked her nipple.

"You look in a rush." His voice was low and alluring, and Hermione pushed more against him, losing a battle against gravity she wasn't aware of fighting.

"Are you complaining?"

"No." His hand covered her whole breast. His fingers dig into her, squeezing, holding. "But I personally don't have much else to do, so…"

"I'm sure there's some movie you could be watching right now." Her voice came out hushed, breathless when Draco brushed her nipple.

"Maybe. But I don't really feel like it. And if you could just relax for a second…" His arm curled around her. Hermione leaned back on the pillows and his lips—his magnificently soft lips—finally wrapped around her nipple.

The deliberate languidness of his actions, the way he was taking his time, everything was making Hermione go insane with want and need. Her hand tangled in his hair as Malfoy shifted between her legs, making room for himself while fondling the shape of her body. Her breath hitched when he bit the bottom of her breast gently, and her eyes opened when he soothed the spot with a kiss immediately after.

To a clear mind, the scene before her would have been absurd, ridiculous even. Weirdly enough, though, it elicited a strong sense of déjà-vu in Hermione, which made her wary all at once.

Draco noticed it right away.

"Are you alright?" he asked, pushing himself off of her, worry shadowing his face. "Do you want to stop? It's fine if—"

"No. No, it's okay, I'm fine," Hermione replied quickly, her hand still on his neck, firm in its hold to prevent him from pulling away. "I'm fine," she repeated, comfortingly for him, steadily for herself, and pushed him down again. "You can keep going."

Draco eyed her with a frown between his eyebrows. "Granger, we're adults, we can deal with…"

"I said it's fine." It was fine. "It's fine." It was just a fleeting memory. "I mean it." Another push, this time a bit more demanding: "Keep going." She moved her hips, already aching from the absence of his touch. "Please."

She could see he wasn't completely convinced, but then the chilly point of his nose was brushing against her breast, and Hermione sighed as she felt her core clenching. She relaxed back on the pillows, her mind focusing only on Malfoy's hands toying with the elastic band of her pants.

He looked at her through his lashes, lips a breath away from her wet nipple, her skin reddened where the short and thick hair of his beard had scratched. "Yeah?"

"Mh-hm." Her hand slid from his neck to his cheek, thumb dragging alongside the cutting angle of his bone and reaching the haughty curve of his nose. Draco turned his head to leave a kiss on her palm while his clever hands disappeared under the fabric around her hips, before pushing it down past her ankles and tossing it on the floor.

When he stroked the inside of her thighs, Hermione felt something cold against her skin that pulled her back to reality, making her tense up.

The rings.

The other night.

The rings.

Plural.

"Fuck," she mumbled, covering her blushing face with both hands and closing her legs just enough for Draco to lift himself from her body. "No, Malfoy, wait—" She stopped him before he could pull away completely, and a strident feeling of relief took hold of her when his palms went to hold her hips tentatively.

His eyes were full of questions when he looked at her.

"I'm—I'm just a bit in my head," she apologised, sheepishly. "That's all."

Draco frowned, confused. "Do you mean like… you don't want to be fully present…?"

"No, it's not that. It's…" she trailed off, giving up on her attempt at an explanation with a groan. Honestly, she wasn't even sure she could explain it herself. Something about having a little bit of a ring kink, mixed with the fact that one was a Malfoy signet while the other one was a wedding band, sprinkled with the lingering embarrassment of having thought about the former during her alone time, loaded with the new knowledge of the heartbreaking story behind the latter. A lethal combination, really.

"Granger, seriously, we can end this amicably…" Malfoy was inexplicably chill about the entire affair.

"No, shut up, it's just…" She covered his hand with hers, afraid he was going to lift it again, and this time the cold sensation made her shiver. With what, it was unclear. Want? Shame? No one could say.

Draco followed her eyes, and when he realised what was making her so agitated, his eyebrows raised in surprise.

He freed his hand from her grip. "It's about these?"

Hermione forced herself to look at the hand hovering in front of her, feeling a blush of humiliation spreading on her face. She tried to hide it, but failed miserably.

"Um… I… It's… um…" Maybe they should have just stopped.

"Oh. You want me to take them off?"

It was the obvious deduction, of course, that she was uneasy because of everything the rings meant. Instead, what arose in Hermione's chest was… annoyance. She did not want him to take them off; but at the same time, why was he that willing to do so?

"Don't be absurd. Why would you—"

"I mean, I understand why it feels weird for you. And I don't mind," he explained, calmly slipping them off.

There had to be something wrong about her wanting to ask him to forget about his wedding ring for a short while. Simply had to be. And with the rest, too. I would actually kind of love the idea of coming into deep contact with your family ring, is that sick and twisted?Probably. And there might have been something wrong, or maybe just weird and strange (alarming?) about him deciding to slip them off his finger that easily.

"You can keep them on, they're just cold," she started, helplessly looking as Malfoy placed them on the bedside table. "Why would I even ask you to take your wedding ring off, that's insane—and why would you take it off, that's…"

"It's just a ring, Granger, it's not that big of a deal."

Hermione squeezed her eyes shut. Where was he, headspace-wise, when it came to his feelings for Astoria? How was it possible for him to slip his wedding ring off his finger so effortlessly, after everything? They should have had that conversation in the kitchen earlier. Why didn't they? How was it possible for him to be laying in bed with her now, after everything he had told her just minutes before?

How was it not a big deal? It should have been a huge deal. Where did this new and frankly baffling version of Draco Malfoy, who wanted her, Hermione Granger, to be a hundred percent comfortable while hooking up, come from? And why was she overthinking this?

"Maybe we should… shouldn't… I don't know…" The voices in her head were growing louder by the second, impossible to ignore. She started retreating in a fetal position, legs pulling back towards her chest without even realising it.

"Hey, Granger, wait," Malfoy said, hands on her raised knees. "What is it?"

"I don't know." Try as she might, she couldn't find the words to describe the spiral of thoughts that was getting the best of her. She didn't even know how to name them herself.

"Okay," Draco said after a moment. "That's fine, I'll just…"

"Wait." Somehow, she couldn't bear the idea of him letting go of her. Maybe the only thing she needed was for him to hold her until she couldn't remember her own name. "Wait," she repeated, a whisper in the quiet of the night, "don't go."

Hermione grabbed his arm and pulled him towards her.

She slipped under the covers and Draco followed her easily, if a bit tentatively. She didn't look at him: there could have been anything in his usually cold gaze, and she didn't want to gamble her chances. Was it selfish of her to want him exclusively on her terms? Egotistical, to willingly ignore how he was feeling about all this?

Hermione squeezed herself against his warmth, and her eyes flickered shut. Her head moved up and down following the calm rhythm of his breathing, and his heartbeat boomed inside her skull. Draco's arms were around her shoulders, holding her close.

Her hand went to his chest, tracing it mindlessly. "Sorry," she mumbled before she could think better of it. Her fingers brushed one of his scars, crossing it like a bridge.

"What's there to apologise for?"

"I don't know." She shrank even more into his embrace. "I felt weird, all of a sudden." Déjà-vu. Her voice grew smaller, almost paralysed by the weight of the sudden rush of memories. "Did I upset you?"

"What?" He turned, searching her eyes. "No. Why would you even ask that?"

Because…

The first boy Hermione had walked into a dimly lit bedroom with was Marcus Brown. It was fun, and exciting, and she had felt nervous all over, not knowing what to do. Marcus had sat her on his bed, black curls falling on his eyes, inexperienced hands palming her juvenile curves.

"You're pretty," he'd told her, making her giggle.

"You think?" she'd asked, not really believing him, and casting her eyes away when she noticed him staring at the swelling on her chest.

"Yeah," he'd replied, "and my parents say you're crazy smart, too. That's why you don't go to school with us." His accent was thick, so different from the one Hermione had grown used to at Hogwarts.

At fifteen years old, Marcus' fingers, too, smelled like cigarettes.

When he'd kissed her, it felt new. And a bit weird. Her stomach had plummeted, and for the first time since her kiss with Viktor, she'd felt her brain stop—which was so nice.

Those days, it was impossible for her not feel haunted by a thousand different things: the image of Cedric's lifeless body on the ground, Harry's pale and terrified face as he held on to it, devastated and powerless, the emptiness in his eyes as he told her and Ron about Voldemort's resurrection. The uncertainty of tomorrow had been growing unbearable, and her fourteen-year-old mind was not equipped to handle it in the slightest. That's why finding shelter in the emptiness that Marcus' kiss brought with it had been the next best thing.

When he'd started to make his way towards her legs, though, her hand had shot up to stop him.

"What are you doing?"

"Just relax a bit," he'd said, tugging his hand free.

"Hold on," she'd insisted, and he'd frowned.

"What? Hermione, what do you think we're doing?"

"I don't know." He had looked disappointed then, pulling away from her. Hermione had panicked. "Wait, no, sorry," she'd said, grabbing his hand and placing it hastily under her shirt, right over her cotton bra. "Keep going. It's okay."

Marcus had palmed her small breasts, kissing her, and when he glanced at her, Hermione had thought his expression looked completely fake. Still, she'd mimicked it, afraid he would move away again.

His hand had traced the path to her legs, and this time Hermione forced herself to stay still. But when his fingers had slid under her leggings and touched the hem of her knickers, she'd whispered, "Can you not go under that?"

Marcus had looked up, confused. Maybe he hadn't been sure of what exactly they were doing, either. "Hermione, I don't…"

"It's okay," she'd said then, kissing him in the hopes to comfort him. "Just…"

She knew that would be a major breaking point. There would have been a before-Hermione and an after-Hermione, and the only thing standing between her innocence and everything else was the cotton barrier of her underwear. She already felt like she had lost most of it the moment she'd walked through the castle doors for the first time, given everything that had happened since. There was this one thing left. Did she really want to let it go?

"Just do it… over it." Do what, she hadn't even known. "Can you?"

Marcus had sighed, but Hermione had reached over to kiss his neck, making small sounds like the ones actors used to do in films, and he'd relented. His fingers had moved over her underwear, up and down applying some pressure, and she'd found herself canting her hips against his hand. Marcus' lips found their way to her chest and bit on her nipples; the bruises he'd left healed only after a week. Hermione would look at her reflection for long minutes the following days, tracing the purple-ish shapes with her fingers, digging her nails where the teeth marks were. She would carefully check that her mother wasn't in the bathroom every time she had to take a shower.

"Can you do me?" Marcus had asked after a while, breathing heavily in her mouth.

"How?" She'd been scared, but also determined to go through with it.

"You know…" he'd mumbled, retreating his hand from between her legs to open his trousers, "with your hands."

No, she hadn't known. But she couldn't tell him that. He'd stood to slide his jeans down his legs, and Hermione had buried her face in the pillow, suddenly terrified.

"Hermione?" he'd called, but there was no worry in his voice. Slight annoyance, rather.

"Sorry," she'd apologised again, eyes still squeezed shut, "it's just that I…"

"It's okay if you've never done it, you know." Irritation.

"Yeah, but I never…" Was she supposed to feel like… that? Shouldn't she be—was happier the right term? "Is it okay if I don't look?"

Silence. There, I blew it, she'd thought.

"What do you mean you don't look?"

"I just… I never… I'll do it, it's okay," she'd put a hand out, "just don't let me see it."

The noise of cotton fabric pulled down. "It's not gonna bite you."

"I know. I just don't know how to… can I just…" She'd waved her hand around. "You do it."

A moment later, her fingers were curled around him. She'd shivered, but then followed Marcus' instructions. After a while and after he had repeated "It's just flesh" more than once, Hermione had peeked from the corner of her eyes.

And just like that, the fragile glass of her innocence had broken irrevocably.

Hermione hadn't stopped meeting with Marcus that summer, nor had she stopped when she'd come home, those handful of times over the following couple of years. She had actually come to crave the moments she was alone with him: there was something rapturous in being able to escape her mind and enter her body that easily. It would make her euphoric to hold his face between her legs, firmer and firmer until she'd come shaking around him.

The only thing Hermione had never let him do was the one thing Marcus was constantly asking for.

One day, she'd thought she'd made up her mind and was ready for it; she'd told him, and he had suddenly become jumpy, sloppy, greedy. That day, his hands had moved roughly over her, lacking both the patience she'd taught him and the awkward hesitation of the first times: Marcus had just wanted to get to it, before she could change her mind.

But Hermione did, or maybe she'd never made it up in the first place, and when she closed her legs, silently urging him to stop, she'd had to look away to hide her tearful eyes.

"Are you crying on me?" He had looked at her like she was a lunatic.

"Sorry," she'd whispered for the umpteenth time. "I don't know why…" He'd thrown his hands up, falling on the bed cross and grumbling.

"Way to kill the fucking mood." She'd glanced at him after a minute, mortified, feeling guilty for everything and nothing at the same time, but decided to swallow it all down and touch him, peppering kisses over his chest, hand reaching down to stroke him.

"Sorry," she'd repeated, "I felt weird, all of a sudden. You know how I am… Even if we don't do that today, we can do something else, right?"

That flustered, almost angry look that Hermione remembered clearly on Marcus' face was nowhere to be found on Draco's.

Her heart clenched.

Did I upset you?

Why would you even ask that?

"I don't know," she replied, back in the present. "I'm sorry I told you to stop." A moment later, she let out a small yelp when Malfoy made her sit up abruptly, before looking at her square in the eyes with a serious expression.

"What are you on about, Granger?"

"I don't know," she repeated, closing herself in her arms. "S—"

"Stop apologising."

A beat. "Okay." Another one. Why did her own mind betray her like that? It wasn't like it was the first time she had sex after Marcus. Could she have a single moment of peace? "I didn't really want you to take your ring off."

Malfoy made a sound. "Okay."

"Ring. Singular," she added, mumbling, as if it was just an afterthought. He scoffed, and she found herself hating him with a passion.

"O-kay."

"But I don't want to ask you to… you know."

He slowly started caressing her calf. "Granger, I promise you it's just a ring." His lips curved in a small smirk. "And if you have a particular preference for the other one…"

"Shut up," she chuckled, smacking him lightly as he reached over to the bedside table to take his family ring and put it back in its rightful place. Well, maybe not exactly, Hermione noticed, since she was almost positive he used to wear it on the other hand…

The light in the room reflected eerily on the metal surface, fascinating Hermione with the chiaroscuro around the capital letter. She took his hand in hers, tracing it, exploring it, feeling the stark contrast between the warmth of his skin and the coldness of the band.

"Do you still want…?" she asked, not averting her eyes from Draco's long fingers, her index following the lines on his palm. She could see his veins through the pale skin of his wrist.

"If it's okay with you," he whispered back, already curling his arm around her.

Possessively?

Protectively.

Hermione placed his hand on her cheek, dragging the cold ring across her features and down her neck, slowly, following an invisible path towards her warm core.

Collarbone.

Sternum.

Belly.

"Fuck." She exhaled when their hands reached her underwear and Draco pressed his finger on it. He kissed her, and Hermione searched around his mouth hungrily, avidly.

When he moved the knickers aside to dip his fingertips into her folds, Malfoy chuckled at the whining sounds she made. The cold ring brushed against her clitoris, and Hermione mumbled something incomprehensible, shifting under him to better angle herself against his hand.

"Is it the ring itself or is it more the history behind it?"

She groaned against his lips. Yes, there might have been something poetic about fucking herself on a bloody Malfoy heirloom, but that wasn't the point. "If you must know, it's the hand with the ring."

Malfoy flicked his index back and forth. "And is it more the hand or the ring?"

Her hips twitched and buckled. "Combination of both." Two fingers sank deeply into her, the ring coming to meet the sleek edge of her entrance. "Fuck. Finally."

"That's a word full of anticipation."

If only he knew what happened the last time some fingers were nearby.

"Can you…" He curled his fingers, making her grunt. "Just… get it over with?"

"Get it over with? Salazar's sake, Grang—oh, sorry, does that disrupt the mood?" he grinned when Hermione grimaced.

"It kind of does, yeah."

He laughed, a short, happy sound that echoed in her mind. "Well, then, Merlin's sake—you really need to relax a bit. Let me handle this." He pulled his fingers from her but pressed her body against his. His hands curled around her waist, palms sliding up towards her breasts and making her feel oh-so-easily held, as if she was something fragile and delicate that needed unique attention. Hermione abandoned herself to it, relaxing back on the pillows, opening her legs to accommodate his torso first and then his shoulders.

When he kissed her, she didn't close her eyes: she wanted to remember the perfect image of Draco Malfoy's flushed face between her thighs.

She swore when his tongue traced her lips, gasped when it swirled around her clit, once, twice, and more, before he sucked. Her fingers clung to his hair, keeping him firmly against her, and Malfoy slipped his ringed finger inside of her again, claiming space, breaking the warmth. He pumped it lazily in and out, his mouth lapping up her juices.

Her panting grew shorter and louder the more time he dedicated her, coherent thoughts slipped away the softer his lips worshipped her cunt.

A chill ran through her body when he spread her open with his thumbs, and her back arched when he murmured quietly, reverently, "Such a tight little pussy." She pushed against him, canting her hips against his face without a trace of embarrassment. "You want it too much, Granger," he grinned, his mouth shimmering with a mix of saliva and her wetness. Hermione wanted to kiss it away.

"No shit," she managed desperately, breathlessly, trying to find the best angle for herself.

"Greedy." Again, the signet on her clit, rubbing the engraved top in small circles over it. Coated in her juices, it almost didn't feel cold anymore.

She squeezed her eyes in concert with her cunt. "Arsehole."

"What a great idea."

Hermione didn't have time to wonder why he stopped his ministrations, because in the blink of an eye Malfoy brought her legs over his shoulders, making room for his tongue to keep playing with her glistening hole and for his fingers to reach the other one. The sudden, unfamiliar, but not unwelcome feeling was so strong that she briefly felt her brain snap out of her ears.

Her vision blanked out when Malfoy's thumb traced the ridged surface, and her legs spasmed when it pressed lightly. She could sense her whole body squeezing and releasing around him. When an all-encompassing fullness overwhelmed her, Hermione knew she was dangling right over the edge of the precipice, her empty spaces claimed by him.

"M-Malfoy—fuck, I—oh…"

She whined when he pulled his tongue back with a smacking sound, and then his hands, too. It took her a while to realise he was making work of his trousers.

She pushed on her elbows and helped him with trembling hands. He wriggled out of his clothes, kicking them on the floor, before Hermione hastily pulled down the elastic band of his boxers, setting him free.

The first thing she thought was that, well, the rumours were true.

The second thing (even though she would gladly die before admitting it out loud) was that, anatomically speaking, she didn't know if there was enough room.

She blinked.

"Don't," she warned him before Malfoy could utter a single word. He was curving his lips in a seemingly innocent way, but it wasn't hard to read his expression. "Don't," she repeated more softly, urging him to lie down with a push to his shoulder. He complied, and she climbed on top of him, legs on either side of his body.

"Not saying anything," he smiled cheekily, his back resting against the propped up pillows.

She slid back until her wet and pulsing centre met his hard groin. Leaning down, her lips brushed his ear, bosom almost touching his mouth.

"Alright?"

"Are you sure, Granger? We can flip…"

"Piss off, who do you think you are?" she retorted, rubbing herself on his length. A beautiful sound left his throat, somewhere between moaning and grunting. "Yeah?"

Malfoy nodded this time, pulling up until he could fold himself around her. His hands went to hold her hips, his lips pressing on her sweaty skin. For the briefest moment, Hermione felt an aching divide between the dull throbbing of her core, where she so desperately wanted him, and the glorious bliss of feeling his body, hands, and mouth all over her.

She lined herself and let him sink deeply into her.

Her eyes squeezed shut, breath laboured as she felt the stretch to accommodate him, almost to the limit.

"Does it hurt?" he asked, gently rubbing her hips, moving her hair away from her face. Hermione took deep breaths, embracing the feeling.

"A bit, yeah. But it's okay, I just need…"

"Yeah, no rush. Take all the time you need." He leaned back, taking her hand to kiss it—thumb, index, middle finger; ring finger, pinky, palm; knuckles, back, wrist—and Hermione exhaled shakily.

She gave a tentative squeeze, and Malfoy groaned. His head fell back when she jerked her hips and leaned down over him.

Every time she welcomed his length, the burn came anew, and yet each time Hermione felt the desperate need for it. Her pace quickened as she balanced herself with her hands on Malfoy's scarred chest, and his arms went around her to hold her close when her breath became shorter.

"That's it, Granger. Make yourself come." He said it with his lips pink, his hair ruffled, his eyes glazed and voice hoarse, and Hermione gripped his shoulders, sweaty skin against sweaty skin, nails digging into muscles, hand palming soft flesh. She kissed him deeply, fiercely, carelessly.

Draco kissed her mouth, kissed her cheek, kissed her jaw. A trail of kisses down her neck, the slope of her shoulder and collarbone, until he attached himself to her breasts, arms tight around her back—possessively, protectively—hot all over except for that singular point of coldness on his hand.

When she came fluttering around him, gasping for air and scratching his back, Draco followed suit with a long groan. He kept holding her, even as his arms shook, even when they fell back on the sheets, boneless and exhausted. Hermione didn't move her head from its position on his chest, rising and falling with the rhythm of his evening breath.

After a while—seconds? Months? Minutes? Years?—she felt him stroking her hair, fingers running through her curls.

"Don't fall asleep like this," he said quietly.

"Sorry…" She pulled herself up, heavily. The coldness of the night was harsh on her damp body.

"Why do you keep apologising?"

"Habit." He made a face, and she ignored it. "Merlin, we made a mess," she complained once she slipped off him, sore all over. "I need to… oh, right." She sighed when Malfoy cleaned the sheets with a quick movement of his hand. "Wandless, even? That's pretentious."

He grinned. "That's more like it."

She went to the bathroom, where she quickly cleaned herself and put her pyjamas on almost mechanically. In a similar manner, after leaving the room to Malfoy, she curled under the bed covers in a tight ball, alone, feeling sleep claiming her.

It was with the last shreds of consciousness that she saw Draco standing outside, peeping in the bedroom, about to close the door for her.

"Malfoy," she called, a faint string of sound in the lonely room. "Come here."

The silence that followed was so long that she thought he didn't hear her.

"Yeah?"

Hermione moved the duvet aside, a silent plea for him to join her. "Come here," she repeated. "Stay." With me.

If he looked questioning, confused, or even wary, she was too spent to tell.

And maybe that was the reason why his arms felt so welcoming, why his embrace felt so comfortable—or maybe she was somehow seeing clearly through the haze of sleep, but what she did know was that Draco laid down next to her, and she fell asleep curled against him, the soft tune of his heartbeat echoing in her ear.