I am abjectly sorry for taking so long with this update. I know that some of you are ready to lynch me. I can only say in my pitiful defense that I lost interest for a while. However, in celebration of a new year and a new resolution, i will try to be better with updates. Thanks SOOO much to all the reviewers, of which, there were many. THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH

I glanced out my rearview mirror again. The fifth time in two minutes.

It was his fault, just like always. Malfoy was so tense, my shoulders were aching.

We had been on the road for about three hours now, and it was nearing 11 o'clock and we still have not had a single glimpse of Lestrange. I didn't know if this was a sneaky maneuver of Lestrange, in order to lull us into false complacency, or if he just no longer felt like giving chase. But whatever it was, Malfoy obviously believed that Lestrange had some sort of sneak attack planned, considering the waves of careful watchfulness that were positively emanating from him.

"Relax, Malfoy." I finally snapped when I could no longer ignore the nerves skittering along my spine. "You're driving me mad."

"I'll relax when you relax." came the cool reply.

"I can't." I ground out.

"And why not?"

"Because.. Because.. Ohhh!"

"Very articulate you are, Granger."

I shot him a glare and was disgruntled to see him staring straight ahead with his too damn watchful eyes.

I painfully swallowed all the acid that wanted to come spewing out of my throat at him and turned to watch the road again. I figured it wasn't his fault if I had suffered brain damage somehow and thought him attractive. He couldn't help looking the way he did so it was unfair of me to be in a bad temper because of it. It was also unfair to still be angry at him for questioning me so closely about you-know-who. It was natural for him to be curious. And well, if he was tense, he had to reason to right?

Whatever.

He was prat boy and would forever remain so. No excuse could ever take care of that.

I pursed my lips together and kept my eyes on the road. I would ignore his presence. I would.

"Granger."

"What?" I snapped. Dammit, I had gone thirty seconds and he just had to ruin it.

"We need to take a break."

"What?"

"A restroom break." he said urgently.

Finally, there was something to smile about.

"What, Malfoy, do you need to pee?" I asked gleefully.

"I do NOT need to pee. I need to use the restroom." he said haughtily.

"Same thing."

"Pee is an incredibly vulgar word. Something only a mud blood would use, I'm sure."

I glanced at him sharply. "What was that?"

"I called you a--" Malfoy cut himself off, belatedly remembering that I was the one who controlled whether or not he would be able to pee.

"That's what I thought." I murmured smugly, turning back to the road. I began to sing quietly about a little stream bubbling its way down south.

I could literally hear Malfoy grind his teeth together. The sound was music to my ears.

"Granger.."

"All right, all right. Keep an eye our for signs that say Rest Stop or something then."

"I hate you, Granger, just to let you know." he said in a too pleasant voice.

I chuckled. "Ditto."

"Ditto?"

I waved a hand negligently. "It means something like, me too."

"I know what it means."

"Then why did you say, 'Ditto?' in your prat boy tone?" I retorted.

I saw out of the corner of my eye that one of his blonde eyebrows was arched in a very arrogant manner.

"It was merely me repeating a word you used, in an incredulous tone." he said.

"And why was your tone incredulous?"

Malfoy shifted in his seat and was silent. For a second I thought he wasn't going to answer me but then he spoke in a somewhat puzzled voice.

"The Granger I knew at Hogwarts was too prim and prissy to ever use words such as pee or ditto."

"The Granger you knew was a dead bore." I muttered darkly.

He shifted again and this time I turned to look at him.

Malfoy smirked. "She still is."

I couldn't keep the corner of my mouth from twitching with amusement.

"Ouch."

"That's right."

"And what about you Malfoy? Have you changed any?"

"Oh sure." he replied nonchalantly. "Lots."

"Like how?"

"I'm not a git anymore."

I snorted.

"I'm not."

I turned and gave him my most skeptical stare. "Riight.. Like I'm not a muggleborn."

"Well I'm not a git to most people. You just bring out the worst in me, Granger, what can I say?"

I turned back to the road. "You can try saying 'I'm a nasty git and will always be one no matter what others say in order to kiss my butt.' "

I heard a strangled noise emit from him but when I looked he had already schooled his features into a mask of neutrality.

We drove in silence for a few more minutes.

"I've gotten more handsome and overall sexy." he murmured finally.

My eyes bugged and I couldn't help thinking in my own errant head that I agreed. Merlin, the horror. I wanted to bash my head against the steering wheel and put myself into a coma. Unfortunately my sense of self-preservation was stronger than my desire for suicide.

I, of course, had nothing to say back to him so instead I remained stonily silent.

We drove in peace and quiet for another half hour, during which I only looked in the rearview mirror 10 times. Malfoy was infinitely more relaxed, most likely because of our squabbling, but his tense alertness was still getting at me. Not just that, but I hated the feeling of being lured into false complacency which is what I was sure Lestrange was doing. I hated being fooled in the best of circumstances, and having a mad, ex-death eater on my tail, or more correctly, on my ex-but-still-sort-of-enemy's tail, would never qualify as a 'best circumstance'. My passenger shifted in his seat and I couldn't resist.

I took a peek at Malfoy from the corner of my eyes and saw the customary haughty look he had worn so often during our years at Hogwarts. I wondered if he ever tired of having such a pinched expression and decided that since he so often acted like a prat, it must not take him a lot of effort to look like one too. Unfortunately, my infinitely amusing musings were interrupted by, who else, Malfoy.

"You agree don't you?"

I searched my mind to figure out what it was I was supposedly agreeing to, but I came up blank. I opted not to answer him since it would be so like Malfoy to trick me into answering in a way that would amuse him.

My silence must have alerted him to the fact that I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was we had been talking about because he chuckled.

"You so completely agree."

I stoically looked straight ahead and pretended that Malfoy didn't exist. It didn't work since I could practically feel his presence on me like a blanket.

"Granger, you think I'm sexy."

I almost slammed on the brakes. How did he know? I mean, oh, gross! That is an utterly disgusting idea! Sadly, my brutally honest side refused to let me lie to myself told me that I rather did think he had become.. Attractive. In a repulsively fascinating way, of course.

"And what makes you think that?" I managed in an only a little bit of a choked voice.

"That's how I said I changed, and you were silent."

"And?"

I glanced at Malfoy in time to witness his slight smirk.

"I took your silence for agreement. You didn't protest earlier."

"I find you.. Stupid." That lame sentence was the best I could come up with. I mentally berated myself and told my hormones to get some control.

"No, Granger, you find me sexy."

"Look, Malfoy," I paused and struggled to find the right words, "I know that you're feeling.. Frustrated, understandable since you've probably never been celibate for this long, but I find it wholly unreasonable for you to hit on me just to give your hormones the satisfaction." Plus it was driving MY hormones through the wall, I thought.

Malfoy actually chuckled. "I was hardly hitting on you, Granger. I'm not that desperate. Yet."

Okay, that stung. I knew that I wasn't the most beautiful woman in the world, and I was working on it, or I was planning on working on it in the very near future as soon as I got Malfoy off of my hands, but he didn't need to throw it in my face. I was doing him a favor, for Merlin's sake.

"Well, isn't that good then? I doubt your ego could stand the rejections it'd inevitably get if you ever deigned to stoop so low as to hit on me." I retorted bitingly.

"Granger, if I ever decided to make advances on you, you'd hardly be able to stand your knees will be quivering so hard, much less push me away." said Malfoy in an alarmingly leering voice.

"Oh honestly, this is the real world, not la la land where you're king of the world. You're hardly irresistible."

I was too busy thinking about how easily he COULD become irresistible that I didn't see the slight haze in the air that I would normally identify as a rebounding spell. Within a second of realizing it was there, I slammed into it with no time to use the brakes on the car. The Porsche ran into the spell with a jarring crash that I felt all the way through to my bones as the car immediately began to rebound off of the spell. However, because it was a muggle contraption, it had no stability, and just as soon as it rebounded, it flipped and rolled.

I felt the glass scratch my skin even as I felt other pieces of it penetrate and sink into my flesh. The pain was enormous and already a black cloud was descending on my mind, ready to take away the extreme hurt of being in a car as it rolled and broke all around me in a shower of glass. My last conscious thought was that I hoped Malfoy was okay, and right after that, I thought that it was ridiculous for me to care for his well-being when I didn't even like him.

It seemed as if I were struggling up through layers of suffocating black velvet. Too many times I almost gave into the urge to stop fighting and sink back into the comforting abyss of unconsciousness, but for some reason I continued to struggle. Eventually, after what felt like hours, I broke the surface and gasped for breath. That was when the pain slammed into me like an iron fist. I immediately stifled the urge to groan, a reflex left over from the years of war, as I quickly allowed my mind to remember the most recent events. An argument with Malfoy over, of all things, his attractiveness, then the quick realization of a shimmering rebound spell, the crash, then the following unconsciousness. I took an inventory of the pain. I had numerous scratches, both shallow and deep, from the glass, and it felt as if my left wrist was broken. Luckily that was not my wand hand, so I could still function. Unfortunately, I could not feel my wand poking me reassuringly in my magically extended right pocket.

I mentally sighed. If Lestrange had been intelligent enough to erect a rebounding spell, then it stands to reason that he was intelligent enough to take away my wand. Hopefully it hadn't occurred to him to break it, but I couldn't know. Lestrange's reputed madness would have swung him in either direction of breaking or not breaking a fellow wizard's wand. There were, of course, strange repercussions for one who broke someone else's wand, consequences that are either dealt by the wand itself or some higher power, however, the knowledge alone might not have been enough to stay Lestrange's hand if he was truly as mad as he was reputed to be.

I closed my eyes for a second and tried to think of a way out of this mess. Unfortunately, my brain still felt as if it were in shock because I couldn't think of a single thing. Years ago when I had been getting into messes with Har- with HIM and Ron, I used to be the one to think of ways to get out the binds we inevitably were stuck in. But now, when it might have mattered most, I couldn't think of a single plan. The panic I was just barely holding back was clawing at my mind at the thought that there was no way out.

As I was struggling to control my breathing and rein in the panic, I heard shuffling in the dark to my left. I quickly turned my head that way but could not make out anything but shadows and darkness. Unable to tell if Lestrange was in the room, I dared not call out for Malfoy, however, I did my own shuffling.

A few seconds later, I heard a cracked whisper.

"Hermione?"

Automatically, I replied, "Don't call me that."

"Merlin! This is not the time to be a bitch over something like that." came Malfoy's furious whisper.

Contrite, I whispered, "I'm sorry. It was just-"

"Yeah, I know."

A few seconds passed in silence.

"So do you have-"

"So do you have a-"

We both stopped, then quietly I whispered, "No, I can't think of anything."

So much time passed that I thought Malfoy hadn't heard me. I was just about to repeat myself when his defeated whisper came just as quietly.

"Me niether."

The panic came again, making it hard for me to breathe. I didn't want to die, and Merlin help me, I didn't want Malfoy to die either.

A few minutes passed in tomblike silence. Then so quietly, I almost didn't hear him, Malfoy whispered, "I'm.. sorry, Granger."

I chuckled softly and tried to ignore the hollow sound of it.

"Hey, we're not dead yet."

His silence said it all.

"So.. What's it like being the biggest womanizer in all of Great Britain?" I asked. I was desperate for conversation, for distraction, or else I feared I might have done the most horrible thing of all. Cry. There was so much that I had realized about myself and so much I wanted to change. I wanted to have the chance to do it. To really live. And now, I probably wouldn't be able to, all because I picked up a hitch hiker. And most puzzling of all, I didn't regret a moment of it. The bickering, the arguing, the unexpected and highly unwanted attraction, none of it.

Malfoy was silent and I was pretty sure that he thought I was cracked.

But then he answered in a cynically amused voice.

"It's.. pleasurable."

"Yes, I'm sure." I answered in a wry voice.

"I'd tell you about it, but I'd hate to destroy your precious illusions of the female sex." he told me with a leer in his voice.

"Try me."

"Well, I haven't really added it all up, so I can't be sure, but I think I've slept with maybe about 100 witches. Maybe more." he paused then added thoughtfully, "It's so easy to talk women into bed if you're rich. Looks aren't even a requisite, just a bonus."

Prude that I was, had only ever had one sexual partner, He Who Lied. Malfoy made me feel like a shriveled up virgin.

"What, only 100?" I teased in a blasé way that I didn't feel at all.

"Oh shut up, Granger. I know you're feeling all horrified at my promiscuity right now."

"Not at all." I paused then told a whopping lie. "Why, I've had just as many, if not more, sexual partners."

"Really?" Malfoy's one word conveyed a cauldron full of skepticism.

"That's right."

"I don't believe you." he answered simply.

"Well, it's true." I said defensively.

"You've probably only had one sexual partner, and that would be Potter." Malfoy snickered as if he had just said something amusing.

"Why are you laughing at the thought of.. him and I in bed?" I demanded.

"Because I can't decide who would be the colder fish."

"Excuse me?"

"Come on, Granger. You expect me to believe you and Potter aren't cold fishes? I bet Potter tried to get you to save your virginity for until after the wedding." said Malfoy.

That wasn't entirely true and I didn't hesitate in saying so. Malfoy's reply was a snort.

"I'll have you know that he and I have a LOT of fun in bed. I can twist like a pretzel and well he.. He's very good!"

"Twist like a pretzel?"

I was blushing furiously, but Malfoy couldn't see that. Thank Merlin.

"That's right."

"And Potters.. Very good?"

"Of course." I muttered.

Malfoy was silent for about 30 seconds before he burst out laughing. The man was practically guffawing.

I chose to stay righteously silent. It wasn't all lies. Most of it.. Well some of it was true. I couldn't exactly twist like a pretzel, but I was somewhat flexible, even if I had never employed any of that flexibility in bed. And Harry was.. Well he was satisfying. Most of the time. We didn't have burning passion in bed, but we were satisfied. At least I had been. I suppose now, that Harry had been since he had to seek out Ginny. But that thought hurt more than my physical pains so I refused to think about it further.

"Shut up." I muttered fiercely.

"I'm.. I'm.. Sorry." he gasped. "That was just.. Very Good! HAHAHA."

"I hope you choke on you're laughter."

Malfoy laughed, I mean, guffawed, for a few more seconds before finally quieting down.

"If you hadn't remembered, we're being held by Lestrange, who may or may not be certifiably insane, not deaf, and he COULD have heard you, you stupid..ass." I said coldly.

"Sorry, Granger, but that whopping pack of lies you just told were too funny."

I sniffed.

"Granger, you couldn't possibly have believed I would have bought any of it." Malfoy said in a disbelieving voice.

"It's all true, so I don't see why not." I growled.

"Oh please."

"Well then tell me, Oh Wise One, why do you think it's not true? Even though it is." I said sarcastically.

"Because Potter doesn't have a passionate bone in his body." Malfoy answered flatly. "His whole life revolved around defeating Voldemort, and when it was done, well what did he have left? Was Potter supposed to go on and live a normal life? Voldemort was his passion. He had nothing left to live with."

I tried to ignore the ring of truth in Malfoy's words but I couldn't. I had noticed the change in HIM after the war. HE had seemed lost and without drive, but after a few months, it had seemed as if he had picked up his life again. And well, if there had been moments, they had been all too easy to ignore. I paused. Had it been me? Had I driven him to Ginny because I hadn't been enough to help him pick up his life? I stopped that disturbing line of thought. I needed to find myself and my footing before I thought too deeply on that.

"…And plus, you.. Well you.." Malfoy trailed off.

"No, don't stop." I snapped. "I can't wait to hear about how passionless, how much of a cold fish that I am. Please Malfoy, don't stop talking."

He was silent for a few seconds.

"Oh, you've got passion, Granger." he finally said in a curiously dead tone.

I said nothing. In fact, I froze. I, Hermione Sophia Granger, passionate? The idea was too alien, too strange, but somehow, I could almost believe it. Almost. But not quite. But then again, I didn't really know myself.

"It's just Potter wasn't and isn't the one who can see or let it loose. He could never."

"Oh and I suppose you think youcan?" The brash words were out of my mouth before I realized just how inviting they were.

Well, that took forever. Sorry its short, but writing on after that seemed like it would be anticlimactic. Sorry for taking forever with this chapter.