Maybe it was teenaged rebellion, at first. Maybe it was the way he took the bitter, sarcastic words right out of her mouth. Maybe it was the lure of the darkness, although how he could ever be called dark she didn't know.
Maybe she mostly wanted to believe it was rebellion. That was what she told herself, anyway. She told herself a lot of things. It was rebellion, she was just doing it to get a rise out of her brothers, she was dating him for the first-class vacations and the lavish gifts.
She didn't know what he told himself. Maybe he focused on the sex. A tumble in the hay with a servant girl had long been a privilege of the aristocracy, after all. Maybe he told himself he was just using her to keep him out of trouble, in the same way his father had used the Imperious curse.
She practiced the excuses every night, just in case one of her family found out. George, you're being ridiculous. Don't you know how much money he has? and Bill, his family has the most amazing connections, I've found out so many useful things.
When they were together, she never remembered those reasons, though.
When they were together, there were other reasons. There was the rueful way he smiled, there was the torchlight glinting off his hair and making it look almost silver, there was the way he was fascinated by her freckles. When they talked about the war, she was shocked to find that she could hardly argue with him. She was speechless when she realized that for all her righteous indignation over Sirius, she'd never realized that Draco's father hadn't had a trial either.
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The first time they met in an abandoned classroom, it was coincidence. The second time, the third time, and the fourth time he told himself it was just chance. They both liked to walk the cold and empty hallways, was all. Soon he found that he was wandering the halls more and more, and often haunting the second-floor Transfiguration corridor on the right-hand side.
But really, it was nothing.
It was nothing that they would sit and talk for hours, nothing that they studied together even though they were in different years and had no reason to, nothing that the first time he kissed her his palms were sweaty and his heart beating at Quidditch speed.
It was nothing that she smiled at him in the halls and it made him smile back, even though he felt like his face was broken and couldn't do that anymore. It was nothing that he worked for hours transfiguring broken desks and rickety chairs into a Sultan's palace for her birthday, and it was nothing when she pressed him into the lavish Persian carpets and kissed him until he couldn't breathe.
The relief he felt when Potter defeated the Dark Lord in his seventh year, like they'd all known he would, that was nothing too, even though it was relief and not crushing defeat or regret or dismay.
When he stepped off the train for the last time, and she kissed him there on the platform in front of everyone, with tears running down her face, and then walked away from him through the barrier, that was nothing.
Nothing. She was nothing to him.
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In later years, she would tell herself that she just liked blondes, that seekers were her type. She told herself she wore that bracelet he gave her because it was pretty. And when she saw him in that Moroccan restaurant, with the pillows all over the floor, she cried because the food was too spicy.