Chapter Ten

oOo

Gods, your mouth, your wonderful, wicked, horrible mouth. It isn't beautiful or perfect and you ruin it when you suck your lip, but even then, hidden talents lie within. There is nothing in this world that I desire so much as to have your mouth on mine, or on my neck, my chest, my skin, my cock. You hurt me with it, score my skin with your teeth and I love it.

A purple bruise the size of a bludger on my left thigh throbs every time I touch it, and I can't stop myself. I sit in class and listen to the drone of professors I cannot stand and finger it through my robes. There are angry red marks in the centre of it where your teeth sunk into my flesh and sucked it while I whimpered, while I moaned, while I screamed and your fingers wrapped round me and I died. Your kiss revived me, and I have the memory of it written on my skin.

Last night I stared at myself in the mirror for an hour after you left me, looking at the evidence that this is real, that you were there, that you want me still. Every place you touch leaves a mark on me, and only I can see it. The glamour hides it from prying eyes to keep our secret, but I can see it still, feel every scratch and bruise and bite when I move.

All I have to do is touch myself where you touched me and I know that you want me, need me, crave me the way I crave you. The pain reminds me.

oOo

I'm in love with you. I'm in love with you and I haven't told a soul, not even you. But then, who would I tell? Blaise is out of the question, obviously, and certainly not any of the other Slytherins. They don't even know we're together. No one does, really. No one but Blaise, who watches me like a hawk, sees the bruises on my body he knows he never left. Not even your friends know, so I can't tell them now, can I?

But I am, in love with you, I mean. I know I never say it, and neither do you, but I feel it. I feel it burning through my veins and skittering across my skin like a curse. I want you and I need you and I can't quite breathe when my eyes meet yours. It seems to me that I am so obvious that the whole world must know the second they look at me, but they don't. No one knows but me.

I want to climb up onto the table in the middle of the Great Hall and shout. I want to cover your forehead with tattoos of my name for everyone to see. I want to make love to you in my bed, not rut around in the grass or on some dusty floor. I want you to be mine, as I am most embarrassingly yours.

But I can't. I can't have any of that because of some unspoken rule between us, some pact of secrecy to keep us safe enough to give the little of ourselves we do to a person we can never trust. You don't love me back, and I don't trust you not to break me the way I broke you. You don't trust me because I didn't first, didn't trust you enough to tell the truth, didn't trust you enough to let you know how I feel, didn't trust you enough to let you touch me.

And so we are safe, we two who meet in the dead of night to kiss and caress and suck and bite and grind and lick and touch and moan and die in each others' arms. So safe in the dark we can even open our eyes while we grope and never see the fear reflected in them. I am free to love you as long as nobody ever knows but me, and you are free to take from me what you want.

oOo

You are so ravenous for affection that you are never full. Nothing I could ever do could fill your need, the bottomless pit of your desire to be loved not for part of yourself, but for all of you. My kisses rained on you like a typhoon would never drown you; you would simply soak them up like land parched with drought. That I love you is not enough, never enough and I could flood the Earth with it and you would still want the moon.

What is it that you want from me, need for me to give you to know the truth of it, that I love you and I always will? You say you like things the way they are, and in the same breath lament that I leave you too soon, that I do not come to you enough, that the nights we are together can never make up for the days we are apart. You do not say that you love me, but your words are all designed to manipulate me into saying it to you.

I am a Slytherin, and a Malfoy, and I have never had even a fraction of your arrogance nor your insecurities. For that matter, I have never had even a glimmer of the power you so blithely, casually display, and your inability to even notice that you do infuriates me. Don't you know that I am just like everyone else? Don't you know I have worshipped you from the day we met? Can't you feel it in my touch, see it in my eyes, hear it in my moans, my pleas for more of you? Do you know me so little that you do not know I love you?