AN: Are you loving me yet?!

Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns them. I'm just being evil.

Dedicated to:

Chapter 13: The Proverbial "Morning After"

When I wake up in the morning and you're wearing my clothes...

- "Answer the Phone", Sugar Ray

Stretch. Ooh. *click, click, click*

She could feel the aches ease slowly out of her spine. So soft. So warm. She rolled over contentedly in the soft bed. She could hear the world around her waking up... the gentle whirring of the electric fan blowing it's cool breeze against her bare skin, a slight scritch-scratching sound that must be the blinds at the window...

Wait.

Her bed wasn't this soft. She didn't have an electric fan in her room. She didn't have blinds either. She used Cooling and Darkening Charms.

Wait.

Bare... skin?

Hermione sat bolt upright, the memories of last night rushing back into her head.

Draco sat at the foot of the bed she had been lying in, calmly watching her over a small easel... on which - if Hermione just turned her head slightly to the side - was drawn a portrait of her fast asleep... and nude.

"Have a good sleep?" Draco languidly reached out and added a few strokes onto the portrait.

Hermione immediately wrapped herself in the bedsheets, and bright red with fury and embarrassment, turned to Draco and asked the question that she already knew the answer to.

"What happened last night?"

Draco smirked. He had obviously been waiting for that.

"Oh, don't you remember? That would be such a waste..."

Hermione gripped the bedsheets and called back the memories...

Blood. Bubbles. Swimming Pool. A kiss.

More kisses.

More and more and more and more... until she was gasping for breath and clutching at him.

More and more and more... and she was still pleading for more. And more and more and more...

He swept her off her feet... somehow...they managed to end up in his room.

In his bed.

Hermione glanced at Draco, sitting behind his easel, with nothing more than a sheet draped casually around his waist. She watched his lips form a slight smirk, and remembered how those very same lips...

pressed against hers.

traveled down her neck.

lingered on the hollow at her collarbone.

left a trail of burning kisses down her body...

He was lazily twirling a charcoal pencil between his fingers, and as Hermione dazedly admired his hands, she thought of the way they...

rested on her waist.

slid down her legs.

traced patterns on her back and body and face and lips...

How they touched her so perfectly.

More and more memories of exactly what happened last night were filling Hermione's unclouded brain, and she just couldn't stop them from coming, no matter how hard she tried.

How he somehow managed to slip her out of the damp bathing suit.

How they tumbled into bed, locked in an embrace.

How the first initial contact of skin against skin shocked her so much.

... and how good it felt at the same time.

How he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her into a crushing embrace.

How his eyes had darkened to the shade of jet black...

... or was it just the moonlight pouring through the blinds at the window?

His skin against hers, slick and soft and smooth at the same time.

Their harsh breathing in the room, mixing with the whir of the electric fan.

The way Draco looked in the dark, his eyes half-closed, hair tousled, and his lips bruised and pink from their kissing.

How he knew what part of her to kiss to make her melt. What part of her to touch to make her gasp. How he knew every single secret a woman's body had to hide.

Her body.

Hermione clutched at the bedsheets, horrified at what she had just done. Draco watched as her tears began to stain the pillowcase she held on her lap.

"And once again, the Magnificent Draco Malfoy has brought another woman to tears with his excellent love-making... but you know, they usually cry during the act itself... not the morning after." he remarked, but there was no sarcasm, no insinuation... just his way of whistling in the dark.

Hermione kept on crying, eyes screwed shut against her anger at herself... at her lack of integrity... of loyalty.

"Why are you crying?" She felt the bed give way, and she knew Draco was kneeling beside her. She felt his hand on her bare shoulder, and she yanked away, unable to bear his touch.

After what happened last night...

"You weren't saving yourself for Saint Potter, were you?"

She shook her head hysterically, hot tears slipping down her flushed cheeks.

"I figured that out." Draco sounded thoughtful. "Then... why cry? It was only one night."

Hermione was so shocked at his casual approach to the topic that she stopped crying. "But..." she choked. "It was one night... with... you."

And to her surprise,

shock,

indignation,

pain...

Draco laughed.

"Hermione! If you're still all high-and-mighty about your Paladin status..." A slight mocking tone entered his voice.

"Oh... of course you can't sleep around with us... commoners, right? How could I have forgotten?" he slapped his forehead in a gesture so utterly un-Draco.

Hermione's eyes narrowed. "You don't get it, do you?" she whispered dangerously.

"I may not have been saving myself for Harry, but he was the only man I have ever slept with, and we were planning to get married anyway!"

She had risen off the bed now, and was standing above Draco, clutching the bedsheet around her in a gesture both naïve and defiant.

"Don't you know what that makes me now?!"

Draco looked contemplative. "A whore?"

Her eyes filled up with tears again. "Exactly."

Silence.

"Hermione..."

Silence.

"I never meant for it to be that way."

Silence.

"I lost control of myself back there."

Silence.

"When you kissed me. Just like that."

Hermione looked at him with puffy red eyes. Draco was sitting on the bed, avoiding her gaze.

"I'm sorry."

"Oh... Draco."

She fell onto the bed, and wrapping her arms around him, buried her face in his neck. Draco closed his eyes and put his arms around her, knowing that he was the only source of comfort she could find, even though it was he who caused her anguish in the first place.

And Hermione's sobs and the hum of the fan were the only sounds in that room as a new day begun.