Strange Glue
By Jillian
(Disclaimer: This is my first Harry Potter fanfiction and while I was brave enough to try, I did shuffle the characters into an alternate universe this time around. A dark little experiment, this is an Harry/Draco ficlet from Harry's POV. Wrote this as a gift for my friend Rissah. The lyrics are from Catatonia's song "Strange Glue." Enjoy.)
***
It was strange glue that held us together
While we both came apart at the seams
***
I met Draco Malfoy late one evening in the campus library. Apparently, he had been using the facility as it was intended. Papers with heavily scrawled notations spreading out to each far corner of the study table. An opened satchel of papers and texts in one chair, a pile of books in the seat next to him (the top one sitting open and book marked), the wooden chair across from his kicked back as if he'd balanced his feet there until the studying warranted him sitting upright to stretch his arms over the assortment of knowledge and orchestrate it into his brain.
To be honest, I knew Draco Malfoy well already. More exactly, I was caught that night by the almost lunatic gleam in his eyes. Perhaps they were only reflecting the neon lights that buzzed like disturbed mosquitoes through the otherwise silent bog of the library basement. Or it might have been the way his hair had lost it's precision, several strands falling forward like antennae. Each extension of his body deliberately intent on the task before him.
I understood deliberation and intention. I'd only been made captain of the soccer team that year. A junior at the state college who happened to have more trophies with his name engraved in them than any other student at the institution besides my own father. I was Harry Potter. The only peoples as recognizable as myself would be either the red-headed Weasley clan which was working to graduate one offspring after another through the ivy doors or the infamous blond who sat in front of me. The person who had somehow managed to become president representative for our entire class even though the sight of him gave a bad taste in the back of everyone's mouth including some of the staff.
But if you had asked me in that moment what about Draco Malfoy might have been so disagreeable, I'm not quite sure I'd have been able to remember. Because in a passed moment of our first meeting, I thought I had seen him vulnerable.
Nevertheless.
Perhaps I was acting from jealous curiosity.
Perhaps I was the truly vulnerable one that evening.
Because, without knowing one genuinely true thing about the person behind those steeled grey eyes, I yet again became obsessed with wonder. He silently met my eyes long before I realized that he was looking.
"What do you want, Potter?" He asked, wearied by the irritation of any meaningless disturbance. When I didn't answer immediately, his eyelids drooped suspiciously even as his chin lifted, "I'm busy."
"Busy with what?" I asked, curiously tilting my head to one side. The fringe of my hair causing a shadow over my glasses, but I restrained from brushing the obstruction aside.
"Ignoring you, in a moment," Then Draco spun the pencil between his thumb and forefinger, catching it, and scrawling something deep into the paper. Instantaneously distracted.
Ignoring me.
Maybe that's what drew me toward him. Like some base metal always being pulled toward the stationary metallic core.
"What if I wanted to ravish you across this table?" It came out a bit more demanding than I had intended, so when his gaze followed his lifted eyebrow to where I stood over him, he was already smirking.
"I must be bored," Draco clipped the words just as he grabbed my school scarf and dragged me down to his level.
Pretty typical encounter. Typical results.
With all of my bravado about ravishing him, it was how he made me feel that kept bringing me back into what I saw as a game of passions. Time and again, I was the one with his back against the table, scattering papers with algebraic equations and chemical symbols onto the floor with my flaying arms, ripping them with my boots. He bit into my lip as he got his hand into my pants.
Soon all I heard was the ringing in my ears, my racing breath, and the ever- present buzz of his name in the back of my throat.
"Now let me study." He wiped his hand on my jean-clad thigh. A strange light in his eyes as his eyelids lowered lazily, watching as I tried to refocus my vision once more. My mouth was a bit dry and I forced my jaw closed. The table, I realized was quite unforgiving and hard.
He started to pick up the notepaper from where it'd fallen. Never seeing that I'd bitten my own lower lip until it bled, frustrated by his indifference.
***
She said your place or mine
While we've still got the time
And I played along with her schemes
***
Ron wanted me to join the fraternity, but I never did. But for all intents and purposes, I was a brother and I shared Ron's room when he wasn't attempting to entertain. No one ever remembered that I didn't officially belong.
"Where's Ron?" I asked the girl who was leaning in the dark hallway leading back to the bedrooms in the house, one arm twisted up against the wall her head against it. She laughed oddly, which I attributed to the smoking stick of . . . something . . . in her other hand.
"You smell good," She glanced from my unruly hair down my jacket, jeans and boots. The way she sniffled just then, I knew she wasn't smelling anything but the sick sweetness of her drug. She grinned at me unexpectedly, her teeth white and almost pretty in the shadows of the hallway, her black hair tied back except where a few coils fell around her face like some Olympian goddess.
"Yeah, shut up, Blaise," I made a move to go around her.
"Ron's not here." She catches my arm as I move around her.
"Fine." My voice snapped, but I stop rather than pulling her forward with me.
"He's with *her*, you see."
It took me a while, but I understood. Ron might have thought himself a player, but he loyally kept himself for his one girl. Despite the reputations of his older brothers, Ron was haplessly monogamous.
"Don't wait for him then, Blaise."
Her lips curled in disgust even as my comment struck home in the few areas of her consciousness that were still functioning, "You don't look so satisfied yourself . . . Potter." The way she let my last name slide from her tongue thick with a familiar, mocking accent.
"Don't call me that." I stepped into her space, intending to intimidate her. Instead, she curled into herself and giggled sharply.
"Potter. Potter. Potter." She looked up at me from under dark lashes, so different from the silver-blond I had left behind.
"He's the only one who gets to call me that."
Even though I mumbled and the bass music from the main room was vibrating the walls, Blaise heard every word and her eyes widened. I never confessed to anyone. But, then again, neither had she. And we both hated that we couldn't confide our vulnerable desires to those for whom they were intended.
"Potter," Her voice still twisted in such a way to tease. Her fingers gripping a loop of my jeans and she tugged suggestively, "We'll never get what we really want, so . . ."
"No," Then more insisting, I repeated, "No." I turned and went back out the way I came. Until I was halfway from the front door to the street curb. My breath came out in certain clouds of white visible in the streetlamp light. My jacket too light for the decreasing temperatures.
But my thoughts strayed. Remembering how warm I had been for a moment. In the library. When I, Harry Potter, got what I wanted. What I thought I wanted.
"I must be bored."
Staring ahead, I knew that he was still in the library. Reading over papers that I had crumpled and torn. Otherwise as if nothing had happened.
"Now let me study."
What I wanted was for him to want me.
***
And I don't have the right to be with you tonight
So please leave me alone with no savior
I will sleep safe and sound with nobody around me
***
The first time we met had actually been near the end of our sophomore year.
It only made sense that we would meet and recognize each other eventually, but it had been some event that the dean had felt was important for the star pupils of each class to attend. I had been trying to work another finger between my throat and the horrid bowtie I was wearing when I heard Hermione's voice coming from behind me.
"Well, I suppose you have yet to meet Harry then as well."
I turned and saw her first. Hermione's thick brown hair braided back into something that appeared to me like a crown. She was wearing something shimmering of purple that fell from the thin straps over her shoulders and cascaded to her ankles like a waterfall.
"You look beautiful," I said even as I turned to see her companion.
"Why thank you, Potter," His lips had twitched to one corner in what I took as being humor. His grey eyes almost seemed purple like Hermione's dress that evening. I wondered several times that evening why he never adopted my first name.
"Thank you, Harry," Hermione had been amused, but took the compliment for herself as it was intended. "I don't think you've officially met Draco Malfoy. Draco was elected class president for next year."
"Seems like it'll be a bore really, but my father is happy." He had tilted his head forward to study the ground as he mentioned his father. One hand lifting to run his knuckles over his ear and across his smoothed back hair.
"Harry! Hermione!" Then Ron appeared, broad Weasley grin stretching over his freckles and making his eyes sparkle.
"How'd you get invited to this?" I teased, tapping my best friend's shoulder lightly, then ran my fingers along the edge of his suit jacket.
"You look . . . nice . . . Hermione," Ron had tried meeting her eyes, found it easier to study his shoes, looked at me desperately for some rescuing he must have felt he needed after such a comment, and then he saw Draco. A rush of Weasley fury darkened his skin in a rush of red to match his hair. Then he managed to clip out choked syllables, "Malfoy."
"If it isn't Virginia's youngest older brother," The way Draco Malfoy's words dripped leisurely made a normal sentence last an eternity.
"Virginia?" I asked dumbly.
"Ginny." Ron bristled, his fingers curling into fists and his suit jacket folding upward awkwardly as my best friend stiffened his shoulders.
"We parted on good terms if I remember correctly," Draco impressed me with the way he could talk so leisurely and almost kindly while maintaining an aristocratic aloofness to his features. The arrogant set to his cheeks and brow putting the insult into his otherwise harmless words.
Hermione glanced between them, clearly as in the dark as I was, "Let's go see Percy." Hermione suggested, letting her fingers run down Ron's near arm in an uncertain but comforting gesture. Ron managed to uproot his locked knees and went with her. I could almost see his hair standing on end in the back as if attracted to the electricity of furious lightning.
"How many Weasleys can fit into this school at one time?"
After the rhetorical question, Draco had turned back to me amiably enough. "So what is it that you do that makes you so important, Potter?"
I, on the other hand, didn't feel like I could let him free from such an insult on the Weasleys that easily.
It took me a moment to register his question to me and as I gawked at him while processing the ludicrously of not knowing who I was, Draco Malfoy's eyes began to sparkle with something akin to glee.
"A bit too much to process up there at once, Potter?"
The way he kept saying my name like that began to resonate in my ears like a mantra.
I must have taken too long to react, since I spent the rest of the evening following him with my eyes. Plotting what I might have said then, what I might have said next, what I might say if he were to talk to me again. Instead, I munched on tasteless appetizers and listened to Ron vacillate from the latest soccer statistics to various flaws characteristic to all Malfoys.
Each reference reminding me of Draco Malfoy's smirk, set under an otherwise mirthful gaze.
***
When faced with my demons
I clothe them and feed them
And I smile, yes I smile
As they're taking me over
***
Ron would never mention what Ginny's connection to Draco Malfoy might have involved. In fact, I couldn't get Ron to acknowledge any conversation about Draco beyond an unsightly sneer and venomous cursing upon the Malfoy household.
So, I decided to take the opportunity to inquire at the source of the conflict.
Why didn't I simply ask Ginny? Because I was looking for an excuse. I was looking for some reason to approach the blond aristocrat I'd only met in passing before in order to redeem myself. To demonstrate that I could hold my own in a conversation of wit. To win his hardly won respect.
"What did you do with Ginny?" At best, my voice was not shrill.
I had never seen Draco in a situation of relative confidentiality. So when I saw him reading and lounged in a chair of one of the campus study rooms, I had pulled open the door and walked in. With immeasurable patience, he slowly looked up and without any indication of surprise said quietly, "I didn't *do* anything to Virginia."
"There must have been something to upset Ron so much." I shook my head, still standing with my back to the door.
Draco leaned forward in his seat and closing the book he had in his hands, rested his forearms against the table and said simply, "If you asked Viriginia, she would tell you that I accompanied her to a social outing at her request. Nothing more came from it." He then relaxed back into his chair, as if having just finished giving official testimony at his trial. "Why are you so interested in the youngest Weasley, Potter?"
I refused to let him interrogate me, "Why *aren't* you interested in Ginny?"
"She's a nice enough girl," Draco shrugged, "Less disagreeable than the other carrot-top siblings I've met."
"Did you only go out the once?"
"Is that important?"
"Yes." By that point, I was arguing simply to disagree. Hoping something would break the pristine resolve of the collected individual sitting in front of me. Then he stood.
I had never watched Draco so intently as in the last few weeks since I met him officially at the dean's party. Intimately, I knew the roll his shoulders would make as he stood. How he set his chin back stiffly for a moment when walking, to relax it a step later. Absorbed, I almost started at how close he was when he spoke next.
"Potter, the girl asked me to go with her. As a gentleman, I could not refuse." His eyes narrowed, but holding some intensity that offset his curled lip. "But I declined to grant her any other favors, and after receiving my explanation she was content. Would an explanation make you content . . . "
I half expected him to call me by my name as his words trailed off without becoming a certain question. I nodded, once. Stiff from the neck down, it was the only movement I could make because he had captured me so completely. I bit my tongue with frustration.
"It's because: I. Don't. Like. Girls."
And in some strange relief, I felt the tension slip from my limbs.
"So, don't fear. Your 'Ginny' is no more soiled than I found her," Draco turned, but not before I caught his shoulder.
My hand firmly catching the fabric of his shirt. An odd purple-silver that I stared at as I felt a different reaction in my hammering heart, "I wanted to make sure." I wetted my lips, "Wanted to make sure that what I heard . . . was true."
"Why, Potter," His voice sly, "Don't expect that I need someone to defend my honor. I've found honor is more appearance than actuality . . . I can take care of that myself . . ."
"You talk too much," I had seen the gleam in his eye, or it might have just been the reflection of my eyeglasses. Regardless, I decided to shut him up and take his breath into my mouth and lungs.
But all the while, he was stealing mine.
***
And if I cannot sleep
For the secrets I keep
It's the price I'm willing to meet
Oh the end of the night
Never comes too quickly for me
***
"You'll catch cold, moron."
My gaze dropped from the stars that night and somehow Draco had brought his car to idle at the street curb. His car window rolled down, and one arm leaned against the edge the other draped over the steering wheel. Even so, he wasn't looking at me. His profile still ahead on the street.
He must have just been going home from the library right then.
I could feel Blaise's eyes burning holes in my back. If she was there or not, I suddenly felt the temptation of her offer. To take her. She wanted me.
Wanted.
As I stood, starting to really feel the cold, Draco waited.
Waited.
I could never say that we had the healthiest relationship. My shameless quest for attention. And his . . . his built in protection, distance.
But for choosing?
I regarded his profile. Alone. Moonlight and shadows in that car. Distant, but not demanding. Waiting.
"Draco?"
"Yes . . ." His voice low. My surname dropped.
I wondered then how many times he said 'Harry' in his own thoughts.
"I. Don't. Like. Girls."
"You talk to much. Get in the car."
By Jillian
(Disclaimer: This is my first Harry Potter fanfiction and while I was brave enough to try, I did shuffle the characters into an alternate universe this time around. A dark little experiment, this is an Harry/Draco ficlet from Harry's POV. Wrote this as a gift for my friend Rissah. The lyrics are from Catatonia's song "Strange Glue." Enjoy.)
***
It was strange glue that held us together
While we both came apart at the seams
***
I met Draco Malfoy late one evening in the campus library. Apparently, he had been using the facility as it was intended. Papers with heavily scrawled notations spreading out to each far corner of the study table. An opened satchel of papers and texts in one chair, a pile of books in the seat next to him (the top one sitting open and book marked), the wooden chair across from his kicked back as if he'd balanced his feet there until the studying warranted him sitting upright to stretch his arms over the assortment of knowledge and orchestrate it into his brain.
To be honest, I knew Draco Malfoy well already. More exactly, I was caught that night by the almost lunatic gleam in his eyes. Perhaps they were only reflecting the neon lights that buzzed like disturbed mosquitoes through the otherwise silent bog of the library basement. Or it might have been the way his hair had lost it's precision, several strands falling forward like antennae. Each extension of his body deliberately intent on the task before him.
I understood deliberation and intention. I'd only been made captain of the soccer team that year. A junior at the state college who happened to have more trophies with his name engraved in them than any other student at the institution besides my own father. I was Harry Potter. The only peoples as recognizable as myself would be either the red-headed Weasley clan which was working to graduate one offspring after another through the ivy doors or the infamous blond who sat in front of me. The person who had somehow managed to become president representative for our entire class even though the sight of him gave a bad taste in the back of everyone's mouth including some of the staff.
But if you had asked me in that moment what about Draco Malfoy might have been so disagreeable, I'm not quite sure I'd have been able to remember. Because in a passed moment of our first meeting, I thought I had seen him vulnerable.
Nevertheless.
Perhaps I was acting from jealous curiosity.
Perhaps I was the truly vulnerable one that evening.
Because, without knowing one genuinely true thing about the person behind those steeled grey eyes, I yet again became obsessed with wonder. He silently met my eyes long before I realized that he was looking.
"What do you want, Potter?" He asked, wearied by the irritation of any meaningless disturbance. When I didn't answer immediately, his eyelids drooped suspiciously even as his chin lifted, "I'm busy."
"Busy with what?" I asked, curiously tilting my head to one side. The fringe of my hair causing a shadow over my glasses, but I restrained from brushing the obstruction aside.
"Ignoring you, in a moment," Then Draco spun the pencil between his thumb and forefinger, catching it, and scrawling something deep into the paper. Instantaneously distracted.
Ignoring me.
Maybe that's what drew me toward him. Like some base metal always being pulled toward the stationary metallic core.
"What if I wanted to ravish you across this table?" It came out a bit more demanding than I had intended, so when his gaze followed his lifted eyebrow to where I stood over him, he was already smirking.
"I must be bored," Draco clipped the words just as he grabbed my school scarf and dragged me down to his level.
Pretty typical encounter. Typical results.
With all of my bravado about ravishing him, it was how he made me feel that kept bringing me back into what I saw as a game of passions. Time and again, I was the one with his back against the table, scattering papers with algebraic equations and chemical symbols onto the floor with my flaying arms, ripping them with my boots. He bit into my lip as he got his hand into my pants.
Soon all I heard was the ringing in my ears, my racing breath, and the ever- present buzz of his name in the back of my throat.
"Now let me study." He wiped his hand on my jean-clad thigh. A strange light in his eyes as his eyelids lowered lazily, watching as I tried to refocus my vision once more. My mouth was a bit dry and I forced my jaw closed. The table, I realized was quite unforgiving and hard.
He started to pick up the notepaper from where it'd fallen. Never seeing that I'd bitten my own lower lip until it bled, frustrated by his indifference.
***
She said your place or mine
While we've still got the time
And I played along with her schemes
***
Ron wanted me to join the fraternity, but I never did. But for all intents and purposes, I was a brother and I shared Ron's room when he wasn't attempting to entertain. No one ever remembered that I didn't officially belong.
"Where's Ron?" I asked the girl who was leaning in the dark hallway leading back to the bedrooms in the house, one arm twisted up against the wall her head against it. She laughed oddly, which I attributed to the smoking stick of . . . something . . . in her other hand.
"You smell good," She glanced from my unruly hair down my jacket, jeans and boots. The way she sniffled just then, I knew she wasn't smelling anything but the sick sweetness of her drug. She grinned at me unexpectedly, her teeth white and almost pretty in the shadows of the hallway, her black hair tied back except where a few coils fell around her face like some Olympian goddess.
"Yeah, shut up, Blaise," I made a move to go around her.
"Ron's not here." She catches my arm as I move around her.
"Fine." My voice snapped, but I stop rather than pulling her forward with me.
"He's with *her*, you see."
It took me a while, but I understood. Ron might have thought himself a player, but he loyally kept himself for his one girl. Despite the reputations of his older brothers, Ron was haplessly monogamous.
"Don't wait for him then, Blaise."
Her lips curled in disgust even as my comment struck home in the few areas of her consciousness that were still functioning, "You don't look so satisfied yourself . . . Potter." The way she let my last name slide from her tongue thick with a familiar, mocking accent.
"Don't call me that." I stepped into her space, intending to intimidate her. Instead, she curled into herself and giggled sharply.
"Potter. Potter. Potter." She looked up at me from under dark lashes, so different from the silver-blond I had left behind.
"He's the only one who gets to call me that."
Even though I mumbled and the bass music from the main room was vibrating the walls, Blaise heard every word and her eyes widened. I never confessed to anyone. But, then again, neither had she. And we both hated that we couldn't confide our vulnerable desires to those for whom they were intended.
"Potter," Her voice still twisted in such a way to tease. Her fingers gripping a loop of my jeans and she tugged suggestively, "We'll never get what we really want, so . . ."
"No," Then more insisting, I repeated, "No." I turned and went back out the way I came. Until I was halfway from the front door to the street curb. My breath came out in certain clouds of white visible in the streetlamp light. My jacket too light for the decreasing temperatures.
But my thoughts strayed. Remembering how warm I had been for a moment. In the library. When I, Harry Potter, got what I wanted. What I thought I wanted.
"I must be bored."
Staring ahead, I knew that he was still in the library. Reading over papers that I had crumpled and torn. Otherwise as if nothing had happened.
"Now let me study."
What I wanted was for him to want me.
***
And I don't have the right to be with you tonight
So please leave me alone with no savior
I will sleep safe and sound with nobody around me
***
The first time we met had actually been near the end of our sophomore year.
It only made sense that we would meet and recognize each other eventually, but it had been some event that the dean had felt was important for the star pupils of each class to attend. I had been trying to work another finger between my throat and the horrid bowtie I was wearing when I heard Hermione's voice coming from behind me.
"Well, I suppose you have yet to meet Harry then as well."
I turned and saw her first. Hermione's thick brown hair braided back into something that appeared to me like a crown. She was wearing something shimmering of purple that fell from the thin straps over her shoulders and cascaded to her ankles like a waterfall.
"You look beautiful," I said even as I turned to see her companion.
"Why thank you, Potter," His lips had twitched to one corner in what I took as being humor. His grey eyes almost seemed purple like Hermione's dress that evening. I wondered several times that evening why he never adopted my first name.
"Thank you, Harry," Hermione had been amused, but took the compliment for herself as it was intended. "I don't think you've officially met Draco Malfoy. Draco was elected class president for next year."
"Seems like it'll be a bore really, but my father is happy." He had tilted his head forward to study the ground as he mentioned his father. One hand lifting to run his knuckles over his ear and across his smoothed back hair.
"Harry! Hermione!" Then Ron appeared, broad Weasley grin stretching over his freckles and making his eyes sparkle.
"How'd you get invited to this?" I teased, tapping my best friend's shoulder lightly, then ran my fingers along the edge of his suit jacket.
"You look . . . nice . . . Hermione," Ron had tried meeting her eyes, found it easier to study his shoes, looked at me desperately for some rescuing he must have felt he needed after such a comment, and then he saw Draco. A rush of Weasley fury darkened his skin in a rush of red to match his hair. Then he managed to clip out choked syllables, "Malfoy."
"If it isn't Virginia's youngest older brother," The way Draco Malfoy's words dripped leisurely made a normal sentence last an eternity.
"Virginia?" I asked dumbly.
"Ginny." Ron bristled, his fingers curling into fists and his suit jacket folding upward awkwardly as my best friend stiffened his shoulders.
"We parted on good terms if I remember correctly," Draco impressed me with the way he could talk so leisurely and almost kindly while maintaining an aristocratic aloofness to his features. The arrogant set to his cheeks and brow putting the insult into his otherwise harmless words.
Hermione glanced between them, clearly as in the dark as I was, "Let's go see Percy." Hermione suggested, letting her fingers run down Ron's near arm in an uncertain but comforting gesture. Ron managed to uproot his locked knees and went with her. I could almost see his hair standing on end in the back as if attracted to the electricity of furious lightning.
"How many Weasleys can fit into this school at one time?"
After the rhetorical question, Draco had turned back to me amiably enough. "So what is it that you do that makes you so important, Potter?"
I, on the other hand, didn't feel like I could let him free from such an insult on the Weasleys that easily.
It took me a moment to register his question to me and as I gawked at him while processing the ludicrously of not knowing who I was, Draco Malfoy's eyes began to sparkle with something akin to glee.
"A bit too much to process up there at once, Potter?"
The way he kept saying my name like that began to resonate in my ears like a mantra.
I must have taken too long to react, since I spent the rest of the evening following him with my eyes. Plotting what I might have said then, what I might have said next, what I might say if he were to talk to me again. Instead, I munched on tasteless appetizers and listened to Ron vacillate from the latest soccer statistics to various flaws characteristic to all Malfoys.
Each reference reminding me of Draco Malfoy's smirk, set under an otherwise mirthful gaze.
***
When faced with my demons
I clothe them and feed them
And I smile, yes I smile
As they're taking me over
***
Ron would never mention what Ginny's connection to Draco Malfoy might have involved. In fact, I couldn't get Ron to acknowledge any conversation about Draco beyond an unsightly sneer and venomous cursing upon the Malfoy household.
So, I decided to take the opportunity to inquire at the source of the conflict.
Why didn't I simply ask Ginny? Because I was looking for an excuse. I was looking for some reason to approach the blond aristocrat I'd only met in passing before in order to redeem myself. To demonstrate that I could hold my own in a conversation of wit. To win his hardly won respect.
"What did you do with Ginny?" At best, my voice was not shrill.
I had never seen Draco in a situation of relative confidentiality. So when I saw him reading and lounged in a chair of one of the campus study rooms, I had pulled open the door and walked in. With immeasurable patience, he slowly looked up and without any indication of surprise said quietly, "I didn't *do* anything to Virginia."
"There must have been something to upset Ron so much." I shook my head, still standing with my back to the door.
Draco leaned forward in his seat and closing the book he had in his hands, rested his forearms against the table and said simply, "If you asked Viriginia, she would tell you that I accompanied her to a social outing at her request. Nothing more came from it." He then relaxed back into his chair, as if having just finished giving official testimony at his trial. "Why are you so interested in the youngest Weasley, Potter?"
I refused to let him interrogate me, "Why *aren't* you interested in Ginny?"
"She's a nice enough girl," Draco shrugged, "Less disagreeable than the other carrot-top siblings I've met."
"Did you only go out the once?"
"Is that important?"
"Yes." By that point, I was arguing simply to disagree. Hoping something would break the pristine resolve of the collected individual sitting in front of me. Then he stood.
I had never watched Draco so intently as in the last few weeks since I met him officially at the dean's party. Intimately, I knew the roll his shoulders would make as he stood. How he set his chin back stiffly for a moment when walking, to relax it a step later. Absorbed, I almost started at how close he was when he spoke next.
"Potter, the girl asked me to go with her. As a gentleman, I could not refuse." His eyes narrowed, but holding some intensity that offset his curled lip. "But I declined to grant her any other favors, and after receiving my explanation she was content. Would an explanation make you content . . . "
I half expected him to call me by my name as his words trailed off without becoming a certain question. I nodded, once. Stiff from the neck down, it was the only movement I could make because he had captured me so completely. I bit my tongue with frustration.
"It's because: I. Don't. Like. Girls."
And in some strange relief, I felt the tension slip from my limbs.
"So, don't fear. Your 'Ginny' is no more soiled than I found her," Draco turned, but not before I caught his shoulder.
My hand firmly catching the fabric of his shirt. An odd purple-silver that I stared at as I felt a different reaction in my hammering heart, "I wanted to make sure." I wetted my lips, "Wanted to make sure that what I heard . . . was true."
"Why, Potter," His voice sly, "Don't expect that I need someone to defend my honor. I've found honor is more appearance than actuality . . . I can take care of that myself . . ."
"You talk too much," I had seen the gleam in his eye, or it might have just been the reflection of my eyeglasses. Regardless, I decided to shut him up and take his breath into my mouth and lungs.
But all the while, he was stealing mine.
***
And if I cannot sleep
For the secrets I keep
It's the price I'm willing to meet
Oh the end of the night
Never comes too quickly for me
***
"You'll catch cold, moron."
My gaze dropped from the stars that night and somehow Draco had brought his car to idle at the street curb. His car window rolled down, and one arm leaned against the edge the other draped over the steering wheel. Even so, he wasn't looking at me. His profile still ahead on the street.
He must have just been going home from the library right then.
I could feel Blaise's eyes burning holes in my back. If she was there or not, I suddenly felt the temptation of her offer. To take her. She wanted me.
Wanted.
As I stood, starting to really feel the cold, Draco waited.
Waited.
I could never say that we had the healthiest relationship. My shameless quest for attention. And his . . . his built in protection, distance.
But for choosing?
I regarded his profile. Alone. Moonlight and shadows in that car. Distant, but not demanding. Waiting.
"Draco?"
"Yes . . ." His voice low. My surname dropped.
I wondered then how many times he said 'Harry' in his own thoughts.
"I. Don't. Like. Girls."
"You talk to much. Get in the car."