Greetings, my dear readers! I'm terribly sorry for the delay in posting this chapter. I was going through a massive writer's block - my intention was to include something Christmas-related, but I'm afraid that didn't work with the story plan I have in mind. So Christmas will have to wait, at least in this story!

Oh and there are some mature themes in this chapter but nothing too explicit (hopefully!). Happy reading!

WILFULLY: CHAPTER 8

Draco Malfoy had always had a love-hate relationship with night time.

When he was little, he hated having to go to bed when he could have spent all those hours playing. When he was at Hogwarts, staying up late along with his dorm mates, playing wizards chess or cracking jokes was the highlight of the day for him. When he received the Dark Mark, he hated the night time; the pressure of figuring out a way to kill Dumbledore made it impossible to sleep and staying awake was no walk in the park either. When the Dark Lord resided in the Manor as their esteemed 'guest', Draco craved for the night, for a time to shut his eyes and to escape from the horrors and the screams that echoed in his precious home. And after the war, well, the prospect of nightmares made him dread the time when he would have to go to bed.

Sometimes it felt as if things we better. Other times, not so much. But then again, the same could be said about his days too... Sweet Salazar, his life was a complicated thing.

xx

He was standing on the edge of a cliff that almost touched the sky. What he was about to do was utterly reckless, but he could not wait to do it. There was a good chance that he would die as a result of this, but he had never felt more alive.

He slipped his hand into his pocket until he felt the tip of his wand and a small brush, which he knew was his shrunken Nimbus Prime. He had his tools, and all he had to do was to use those tools to achieve what he wanted. And what he wanted was utterly bizarre. Not to mention, totally awesome.

His body trembled with anticipation as he took a deep breath – and jumped.

His stomach churned as gravity tugged at him and the ground that was far, far down below started inching towards him. He would have shouted, but the wind had knocked the breath out of his lungs. Even as he floated, he felt a heavy, tangible weight press down on his chest and something soft caress his face –

Draco jerked awake and blinked rapidly until the image of the tall cliff and the bright blue sky disappeared, only to be replaced with a curtain of red locks and a very familiar freckled face. "Wha–?"

"It's just me," Ginevra – for it was Ginevra – murmured as she placed her hands on his shoulders and pushed him back onto the pillows. It occurred to him then that she was sitting on top of him.

Perhaps this was a bizarre dream as well, but to be sure, he reached out and placed his hands on her waist, noting that her form was very real beneath his touch. Not a dream, then. "Do you often break into other people's bedrooms and sit on them while they are sleeping?" he asked.

"Only the people I date," she replied as she buried her face in the crook of his neck. She placed a hot, open-mouthed kiss on his skin, the softness of her lips a pleasant contrast to her ferocious teeth. When her attentions continued to remain fixed on that single spot, he realised that she was giving him a love bite.

"Merlin, I'm dating a psychopath!"

"You'll get used to it." She raised her head to look him in the eye. "And I did not break into your room. Yugo let me in."

"I see," Draco said as he glanced at the clock. It was just after midnight. "And may I ask why you are here?" Not that she was not welcome, but he felt it was a reasonable question to ask, taking into account the fact that he had been at her place for that damned dinner with her parents only a few hours ago.

"I wanted to thank you for behaving somewhat decently at the dinner today. Honestly, I was prepared to be stood up once again–"

"I'm a man of my word, Ginevra," he told her, but then felt obligated to add a condition that applied to all Slytherins, most of all him. "When it suits me."

"It's funny you mention that," she mumbled as she slowly started to move down his body. "Since you've stuck to your side of the bargain, I think it would only be right if I fulfilled mine as well."

Draco frowned. What bargain? He couldn't recall anything that she had promised him... until she pulled his pajama pants down to his knees and placed a soft kiss on his thigh.

Oh.

That.

Right.

This was to be his prize – though she had flippantly called it 'price' when he had first suggested it – if he ensured that his meeting with her family did not end in disaster. Which, miraculously, it hadn't.

He opened his mouth to tell her that the 'blowjob clause' had only been a joke and he did not really expect her to comply; he would never ask her to do such a thing unless she was willing. But from the looks of it, Ginevra was willing – she had come all the way here in the middle of the night for this, after all – and her lips were curved into a smile that he found to be immensely seductive. Only an idiot would try to put a stop to what the lady intended to do, so he very wisely shut his mouth.

Her fingertips were cool as she ran them up and down his inner thighs for what felt like years, and he fidgeted impatiently, wondering if her goal was to tease him to death. By Merlin's blood, he would haunt her forever if that was the case. But then her lips were upon him and all ability to formulate coherent thought escaped him.

It was as if she had taken him to the highest cliff in the world and thrown him off it, just like his dream, except this time he didn't have a shrunken broom in his pocket that could potentially break his fall. So, he flew and fell at the same time, engulfed in the heat of her mouth and the strokes of her tongue, until he crashed into the sea below, drowning in the waves of an ecstasy so pure that he could not help the raw sound that escaped his throat.

"Well, Mr. Malfoy." It was Ginevra's voice that snapped him back to his senses, and he realized that he had been staring dazedly at the ceiling. "Should I take that moan as a compliment?" she asked as she crawled back up until her face was level with his.

If there was ever anything that was going to make him blush, it was this. Fortunately for him, he was already flushed because of the pleasant ordeal he had just gone through, making it nigh on impossible for her to note the change. "You may if you want to," he said in a tone that he hoped was filled with gratitude but also preserved some of his dignity. Hopefully. "It… It'd been a while since I've experienced this."

"How long?" She raised an eyebrow.

He pulled his pajama bottoms back up. "I expect you will be expecting the favour to be returned?"

"You're trying to change the topic."

"How is making an offer of performing oral sex an attempt to change the topic away from oral sex?" Draco demanded. Damn him and his post-orgasm brain, blabbing off about his past in the daze. Now, Ginevra's curiosity was peaked. There would be no distracting her. He wondered if she expected him to give her the date when he had last received a blowjob; he could not, for the life of him, remember when that had been. Which was just sad. "I don't know," he answered. "With my last girlfriend, perhaps."

She nodded slowly. "Who was she?"

Draco was not caught off guard, but the question did give him pause. Barring a few disagreements, this unexpected relationship with Ginevra had miraculously been going stable and he had known that this topic would pop up sooner or later. The problem was that he was uncertain how to respond. His past romantic entanglements were no secret – though he doubted many people knew of them; nobody was interested in his life anymore – but he had never really spoken about himself to anyone but Blaise, who not only was his best mate but was also wise enough to keep his remarks brief and his curiosity even more so.

Something must have shown on his face because Ginevra quickly said, "You don't have to tell me. I didn't mean to pry–"

"No." He shook his head lightly. He was not blind to the efforts she always made to ensure his comfort in their relationship. Not once had she asked him to not be himself when meeting her family or reprimanded him for any arrogance he had exhibited towards her parents; though he did believe that she was in dark about the 'real talk' he and Mr. Weasley had had during her brief absence and wanted to keep it that way. If anyone had deserved answers from him – at least about this – it was her. "Solenne De la Croix. I met her through Lukas last year." The only time he had found his unbearably haughty first cousin once removed to be somewhat useful. "We dated for a few months."

"Right," Ginevra said. Her eyes were shining with something akin to gratitude, as if she was glad that he had shared a part of his past with her. Salazar's blood, he'd had no idea that something so simple would mean so much to her.

"To be honest," Draco went on. "I have been so busy with my work in the last few years that I haven't had much time to date." The Malfoy Corporation had all but collapsed following his father's incarceration. No one wanted to do business with the people who had been one of Voldemort's strongest supporters. It had taken a lot of hard work to re-establish the company and make it strong and stable once again. In those circumstances, dating had been the last thing on his mind… And then there was the Dark Mark that was burnt onto his arm, the sight of which was enough to scare most women away. "Just some one-night stands."

"Man-whore," she teased.

"There were no monetary transactions involved in those encounters, so technically, your label is incorrect."

"Technically, you're a git." She sat up, cross-legged, and folded her arms across her chest. "And an inhospitable one at that. I just gave you a bloody orgasm and you haven't even offered me a drink."

"Well…" he began with a suggestive smirk.

She must have anticipated how utterly coarse his next words were going to be, for her cheeks turned crimson. "Say it and I'll hex you, Malfoy," she warned.

Draco sat up with a laugh and summoned them a bottle of chardonnay and a pair of wineglasses. "You can be such a prude at times, Weasley," he stated as he poured them both a drink.

Ginevra looked at him incredulously, as if the idea of anyone calling her a prude was unimaginable. And clearly, unacceptable. "I just gave you a–"

"Yes, yes." He rolled his eyes. "How long are you going to hold this blowjob over my head?"

"For as long as it suits me." It was curious how sometimes she would say or do things that made him think that she would have done remarkably well in Slytherin. No wonder he was fond of her. "To be honest," she began after a few moments. "I'm surprised you didn't end up married to pug-nosed Parkinson."

"Pansy?" Draco asked, startled. He hadn't thought of Pansy Parkinson in a while, and with good reason.

Ginevra nodded. "Weren't the two of you a thing since the Yule Ball?"

"We were." He remembered all those evenings he and Pansy had spent snuggling on one of the secluded armchairs in the Slytherin common room, or the few times the two of them had snuck to the prefect's bathroom for a romantic bath. "But I ended things with her during my sixth year because… I had more important tasks to do." He had tried holding on to both his regular school life and the Dark Lord's mission, but it had become clear within a couple of months that the latter would have to take precedence over everything else. So, he had broken up with Pansy, distanced himself from his friends, given up on his formal education, made excuses to get out of his Quidditch obligations and spent his time as a recluse, trying to figure out a way to kill Dumbledore. "Though we did try again after the war."

Pansy had shown up at the Manor one afternoon, a couple of months after his trial. They had taken a turn about the gardens like they used to when they were children. She had bitched about one of her American cousins – Patricia, was it? – spilling red wine on her best white dress and he had pretended that they were back at Hogwarts, where his biggest worry had been the favouritism Potter received at the hands of the teachers and not the nightmares that awaited him every time he lay down to sleep. It had felt natural at the time to rekindle their relationship; the attraction that they had felt towards each other had never really evaporated, after all.

"What happened?" Ginevra asked as she refilled their glasses.

"It didn't last," Draco replied simply. "It couldn't have lasted."

The war and the time spent in Azkaban had still haunted him at that point – to be honest, it still did in some ways – and he had been on probation at the time, only allowed to go to certain places and use limited types of magic, stuck with cooperating with the Aurors whenever they decided to look into his affairs, which was at least one or twice a week. Dealing with all that and facing the constant scorn of the entire wizarding community had left him in no shape to be somebody's boyfriend. He had somehow survived the war, but the world – his world, the one that he had grew up in – had crumbled down and all the beliefs he had had before were put to question. He had needed time to not only mend his broken self but also to make sense of the person he had become.

"After the war, I found myself desiring loneliness, space," he told her. "But Pansy wouldn't go. She thought that she could help me, and maybe she could, but I wasn't willing to find out. Not at that time."

He remembered their final fight vividly. They had been having brunch at Pansy's townhouse in London when the conversation had turned sour. The things he had said that day… Merlin, they were utterly unforgivable; sometimes he could not quite believe that he had been capable of even uttering such words. He had broken Pansy's heart, and when she had asked him to leave and never come back, he had done exactly that.

Ginevra reached out and took his hand in hers. She did not speak, but comforted him with her silence as she waited for him to continue his story.

Which he did. Merlin knew why. "By the time I felt ready for a relationship, she was already engaged." Zabini had suggested that he try and stop the wedding, but Draco had refused. He would never stoop so low as to steal a man's bride. Besides, bizarre shit like that only happened in badly-written romance novels. "She lives in America with her husband, who is the head of some department at MACUSA."

"Did you love her?" Ginevra's voice was soft, but the question was blunt.

Draco refilled their glasses, noting that they had already gone through nearly two-thirds of the bottle. Judging by the slightly buzzed feeling, he would wager that he had played a big part in that. It was no cause for concern; he was not a lightweight, years of drinking with Blaise had ensured that. The room fell silent, save for the ticking of the clock, and his mind wandered far away, perusing through memories of his ex.

"I suppose I did," he answered after a while. "But I don't anymore."

A small smile touched Ginevra's lips and she squeezed his hand lightly, clearly indicating that she had appreciated his honesty. She did not ask any further questions, which was fortunate; he had had his fill of sharing for the day, possibly the year. However, when she did speak, it was to say the most unexpected thing. "I am sorry I called her pug-nosed."

Draco bit his lip to keep himself from laughing. He doubted Pansy would give the slightest damn about being called that; she hadn't when the Gryffindors had done so back at Hogwarts. "Please," he scoffed. "Do not presume that you can offend us Slytherins with your insults. Your harshest words are mere blossoms compared to what we can come up with."

"I believe you," she muttered. "You Slytherins did have no class–"

"Says the girl who compared her crush to a 'freshly pickled toad' in her love poem," He sneered, reminding her of the ridiculous poem she had written on Valentine's Day for Scarhead back at Hogwarts. It had proven to be quite a hit in the Slytherin Common Room, so much so that Montague had charmed all the alarm clocks to sing it every morning. Draco had tried feeding his clock to the Giant Squid on day six. "By the way," he went on, thoroughly enjoying the sight of her cheeks turning as red as her hair. "When am I going to get a poem of my own?"

"I can give you one right now," she retorted, clearly irritated at his successful attempts to get her flustered. "'Draco Malfoy is an ugly armadillo. Later tonight, I'm going to smother him with a pillow.'"

This time he did laugh. As rude as her poetry was – he was certain he would balance the scales with his trademarked insults in the near future – it was quite impressive that she had been able to come up with a couplet on the spot; he wouldn't be able to do so even if his life depended on it.

"Since we are sharing," he began with forced casualness, wondering how much would he be able to get out of her. "When were you going to tell me?"

She looked at him, an eyebrow raised in question. "Tell you what?"

"That Potter is still in love with you."

All traces of amusement left Ginevra's face in an instant. "Harry is not in love with me," she said, her voice lacking in conviction as she slipped off the bed and walked over to the window.

"He is," he said. "You'd have to be blind to not notice it."

It was obvious that she was uncomfortable with the direction their conversation had taken, but he had no intention of taking back his words. He moved to stand beside her and waited.

The night outside was still but beautiful. A blanket of fog had descended from the hills and settled over the fells surrounding the Manor, hiding a large part of the woods behind white mist.

"I cannot remember a time when I wasn't in love with Harry Potter." Ginevra's soft voice almost startled him. "It sounds silly, I know, an infatuation conjured up by an eleven-year-old girl, and maybe it was that at the time…" A small smile touched her lips, but there was something sad about it. "But after what happened during my first year at Hogwarts, I knew I loved him."

The Chamber of Secrets.

Draco wasn't quite sure what had happened – the events that had taken place at Hogwarts that year had never quite come into light; his father had told him that Dumbledore had insisted that Tom Riddle, who had turned out to be the heir of Slytherin, had opened the chamber and terrorized the students using some dark magic – but he did know that Ginevra was the girl who had been somehow abducted and taken into the chamber. And Saint Potter had saved the day. Big surprise there.

"Harry never saw me as anything but Ron's little sister. He was much more interested in Cho Chang, so I tried to move on. I dated Michael Corner and Dean Thomas for a bit, but it didn't feel… real." She glanced sideways at him, as if to see if he had anything to say. He didn't, so she went on. "Harry and I got together in my fifth year – your sixth – and I think my world snapped into place. Everything was perfect, but then he had to go and… finish the mission Dumbledore had given him. So, we broke up."

He noted that she had purposefully remained vague about Potter's mission, which was nothing new. After the war ended, the Ministry officials and the press had been eager to know the trials and tribulations the Golden Trio had faced during the time Voldemort had been in power. Potter had told them that they had been on a mission for Dumbledore, the details of which were highly confidential and would strictly remain between a handful of people – but Potter must have told Ginevra, and she was loyally keeping his secret.

"It wasn't a break up, though. Not really," Ginevra went on as she reached out and drew a jagged line on the window glass. "We both knew that if we somehow survived the war, we'd be together for the rest of our days. And we were together for a while. We were so madly in love, and I was the happiest I'd ever been."

It occurred to Draco that the line she had drawn on his window looked remarkably like Potter's lightning scar, and he hated it. Reaching out, he wiped it away. "But it didn't last. Why?"

His question seemed to snap her out of whatever memory lane she was tumbling down. "Harry spent his entire adolescence fighting for the wizarding community. I don't think he knows how to stop. After Voldemort, he saw it as his duty to go after the Death Eaters who had escaped, so he became an Auror."

Draco resisted the urge to sneer; he, after all, knew all about Potter and his goddamned hero complex. No matter how much Scarhead acted all humble, no one would ever be able to convince him that he did not enjoy all the attention. That git.

It was almost as if Ginevra knew what he was thinking. "You've only ever seen Harry as an adversary, Draco. You don't understand how much he is willing to sacrifice for the sake of others. He carries the weight of the world on his shoulders; it's just that I didn't want to carry it with him," she said, turning to face him. "I lost friends in that war, I lost my brother. The possibility that one day someone would show up and tell me that Harry was killed during one of his Auror missions was unbearable. And I couldn't share my fears with him. How could I ask him to give up the very same courage and nobility that were the reasons I'd fallen in love with him in the first place?" she asked. "I grew frustrated, so did he. We started fighting over the pettiest things. Days would go by where we wouldn't even look at each other, let alone talk. It was suffocating."

"So you decided to end it," he stated.

Ginevra nodded. "It was one of the toughest times of my life, and though it was difficult for both of us, we decided to remain friends afterwards." Considering that Scarhead was practically a part of the Weasley clan; it would have been nigh on impossible for the two of them to steer clear of each other. "I chose to focus on my career. I didn't consider any other man in a romantic light… until I ran into a certain blond prat at some posh party in Paris and ended up trapped between him and a bookshelf."

Draco couldn't help but grin at that. "Can you imagine what would have happened if we had just quarrelled and went our separate ways that night?" he asked.

"Well, I'd have been deprived of this gorgeous tushy, for one!" She joked as she grabbed his buttock and squeezed it lightly.

With a roll of his eyes, he pulled her against him so he could claim her lips with his. He let the contact linger for a few moments longer than necessary and looked into her eyes when they parted. "Do you still love him?" he asked. The thought was irking him like a pebble stuck in a boot, and he had to get it out of the way.

Ginevra hesitated; it was subtle, barely a slight shift of her posture, but it filled him with an odd alarm. "A part of me will always love Harry–"

Sweet Salazar. The last thing he wanted was to be a third wheel to the great Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley love saga. "I am not interested in competing with Potter, Ginevra," he said coolly. "And I am not going to serve as your boyfriend until you realise that he is your one true love and run off to him."

She turned her head to meet his gaze. "I'm going to say this only once, Draco: there is no competition between you and him," she said. "If I wanted to be with Harry, I'd be with him. But I'm not. I'm with you because I choose to be with you. I want you. Trust me."

And he did. Ginevra Weasley was not someone who used people, of that he was entirely sure. "I trust you," he murmured, the words terrifying him to his very core.

"Draco," she said softly as she reached up and took his face in her hands. She kissed him gently, and his heart elated at the touch. "Will you take me to bed?"

Merlin. What was she doing to him? "Of course, I will."

Their lips met once again, their clothes came off bit by bit and they fell onto the bed. It started off slow and soft, an attempt to get as close to each other as was humanly possible, and as Draco looked down at the beautiful woman laying beneath him, he realized how important she had become to him. It had been too long since he had trusted, let alone cared for someone other than his immediate family. And now, this Weasley girl had weaseled her way into his life.

He wanted to show her that, to somehow let her know how glad he was that she had chosen him above Potter.

A sudden wave of possessiveness came over him, filling his insides with an animalistic desire to claim her, to almost devour her, and his movements grew rougher and rougher until the entire bed was shuddering beneath them and her moans turned into whimpers. The thought that perhaps he was hurting her broke through the haze of lust, but he quickly dismissed it once he noticed how she met his every movement and how her face was a portrait of ecstasy that he too was feeling in his heart.

This time when he fell off the cliff and dived into a sea of pleasure, she was right there by his side. And Draco reckoned that if the world had somehow ended abruptly in that one moment, he would have died a happy man.

xx

Draco Malfoy had always had a love-hate relationship with the night time. This one had been surprisingly good; he had had a heart-to-heart and a mind-blowing shag with his lovely girlfriend.

But it didn't last.

For the second time that night, Draco found himself jerking awake. It wasn't because of Ginevra this time – she lay curled up against his side, fast asleep. Nor was it due to a nightmare. In fact, he had woken up to a nightmare far, far worse.

His Dark Mark was burning.

Da-da-dum! I really wanted Draco and Ginny to spend some time understanding each other better before I threw them into the outer world once again. Please leave a review and let me know what you thought of this chapter.

Until next time!