Chapter 8- Stop it!

Where does obsession begin? Is it with a smile or unimaginable laughter? With a touch, gentler than you expected, a hand warm where you would have thought it cold or with an unexpected act of kindness? Hermione didn't know but she did know that it was all kinds of wrong to lie in the bed of the man she had loved since she was a girl and fantasies about someone else.

Had she really just been imagining that? Had she really wanted to do that with him? Suddenly Hermione felt dirty. It had begun innocently enough, imagining what it might feel like to run her fingers through his fine blond hair. She hadn't been able to stop thinking about him since that day when they had left him alone. She longed to know if there was more to that kiss than desperation. She imaged kissing him again and the next thing she knew…well she really shouldn't go there again.

Hermione tossed and turned chastising herself for her faithlessness but her imaginings wouldn't go away. Frustrated she decided to get up and take a very cold shower to wash away her unclean thoughts. It didn't work!

Hermione stood under the showerhead closing her eyes, trying to relax, but his image: that smile, those storm grey eyes, seemed emblazoned on the inside of her eye lids. The more he avoided her the more she wanted to see him again, touch him again. She imagined the heat of him pressed against her again…

"Stop it!" She moaned out in frustration, "it will do no one any good," she tried to give herself a stiff talking to but she knew it wouldn't help. She had become obsessed with the fallen Slytherin Prince. Even though she knew he was an itch she could never scratch.

Returning to her room Hermione saw the light burning under Draco's door. Clearly he couldn't sleep either. For reasons she didn't want to fully acknowledge Hermione suddenly wanted to speak to the blond. She knew she hadn't apologised yet and she really, really needed to. Perhaps he just slept with the lights on? Merlin knows he wouldn't be the only one to fear the nightmares and night terrors that came with the dark, she considered. Fearing to wake him if he was indeed asleep she quietly tried the door.

He put aside the book he had been reading as he saw her enter his room.

"I couldn't sleep," she began, a shiver of cold suddenly running through her; "I thought we might talk?"

For a moment he neither moved nor spoke, clearly calculating his next action very carefully, it was with caution that he moved to pull back the covers at his side and patted the bed beside him.

"You're cold," was all he said.

Hermione moved towards him as if she had been placed under the imperious curse. Her body seemed to act of its own volition as she walked towards him and slipped into his bed.

Hermione knew this was all kinds of wrong but the only spell she was under was her own longing to feel his warmth again.

Pulling the covers up and gently tucking them around her he turned and said simply;

"You left me!" there was so much vulnerability in those three words that it cost Hermione nothing to apologise.

"I'm sorry," she began, "you must have been frantic, it all happened so quickly no one thought to tell you."

"No, I don't belong here and you shouldn't be with me."

"I know," she did know but at that moment the 'wrongness' of it seemed itself to be wrong. Hermione couldn't understand why but she felt no conflict, no sense of betrayal being with Draco, it just felt like it was fated.

Gently she placed her cheek against his shoulder, she felt him tense but it was only from surprise. He wrapped an arm round her pulling her closer to him, resting his chin on the top of her hair, breathing in that scent of Jasmine. There was no urgency to their embrace, it might have looked friendly to an outward observer but the hammering of both their hearts told them it was not merely friendship.

"Hermione," Draco began.

"Shh," she told him lifting her hand to stroke his silken hair, to calm and sooth him, "shh," she repeated, "I know, it will be alright." Hermione wasn't sure why she was reassuring him but innately she knew he needed that reassurance. Draco was alone, vulnerable and she wanted to save him.

Ron turned and reached for Hermione at his side. Only half conscious something in his psyche knew that she had gone. Quickly more alert he felt Hermione's side of the bed, it was cold-he imagined she couldn't sleep, expected that she had gone to read in the library but when he padded barefoot down the stairs to find her he found the library dark and deserted.

Panicked Ron began to search every ground floor room, then the garden. There was no sign of her. Reluctant to raise the alarm and wake the others for fear of looking a fool he padded back up the stairs to check the bathrooms. That was when he noticed it the sliver of light that shone around the door of Malfoy's room. Surely she was not talking to Malfoy? He considered, they had become rather close, perhaps she was. Casting a muffliato he crept towards Malfoy's door. Some baser, more jealous part of him needed to know what it was that Hermione could talk to Malfoy about. It was only moments before he regretted those baser instincts.

Through the gap in the door, that was slightly ajar, he could see Malfoy's pale head resting on what at first he took for a soft comforter but he quickly realised it was not. The soft 'fabric' in shades of caramel and chocolate that Malfoy's head rested upon was Hermione.

Ron felt suddenly and violently sick; his brain couldn't understand what he was seeing. He didn't rant or rave, he didn't demand an explanation he simply fled the scene as if, if he couldn't see it, he could pretend it wasn't real.

Hermione has betrayed me with Malfoy. This was the only thing Ron could think. He sat at the foot of the bed careless of the cold and his state of semi-nakedness and he wept hot, silent tears.

Author's note

okay so now there's going to be trouble-please review.