Chapter Twenty Nine

"Hermione, it's time to wake up."

Hermione buried her head in her pillow, unwilling to let sleep go quite yet.

"I swear you are trying to kill me." Her pillow groaned.

Which was a very odd thing for a pillow to do.

Reluctantly she pulled herself towards consciousness. For a moment she wasn't sure she had opened her eyes and then she was worried she had gone blind as she blinked in the total darkness.

"The Auror's are gone" Draco told her "And while I'm thrilled you seem to have made yourself comfortable, my legs are killing me."

Clearly she had fallen asleep at some point. Hermione sat up disoriented and reached out to feel her surroundings which resulted in her accidentally smacking Malfoy upside the head.

"Can you stop flailing about and give me a minute to get the door open?" Sighing, Draco grabbed her hands to stop her delivering him any more bodily harm. He muttered a spell and the door behind them slowly creaked open.

The tavern was still and quiet but after the total darkness of their hiding spot even the dim light that spilled in from the street lamps seemed bright as day.

Hermione disentangled herself from him and scrambled out as quickly as she was able.

"How long were we in there?" She asked, stretching.

"Couple hours" Draco busied himself with putting the panel back in place. When he stood up Hermione clapped a hand to her mouth in an attempt to smother a laugh. Normally so pristine and put together he was thoroughly covered in a thick layer of brick dust.

He raised an eyebrow.

"Sorry" she giggled. "You look ridiculous."

"I highly doubt that, I have never looked ridiculous a day in my life, Granger." He told her seriously.

"You look like a Weasley." She couldn't stop her laughter at his horrified expression.

He shook himself, sending a cloud of dust everywhere. "Right. I'm taking you home and then I am going to scrub every spec of that bloody dust off me. I can't believe you compared me to a Weasley, I may never feel clean ever again."

"You really don't need to do that, I'm perfectly capable of apparating and walking up to my flat all on my own." she insisted.

"I really wasn't asking you Granger, I was telling you. You fell asleep while we were in the middle of evading Aurors. You're dead on your feet. If you tried to apparate you'd probably just get yourself spliced." He said dryly "come on"

Hermione was too tired to argue with him. Smothering a yawn, she followed him out onto the street. She took his offered hand when they reached an apparition point and laced her fingers through his. She tried not to focus on the feeling of his long slender fingers wrapping around hers.

They appeared at the end of the alley behind her flat.

"Um, thank you" she told him when he looked down at her "I mean for sharing your hiding spot and for making sure I didn't pass out." Her cheeks felt like they were on fire.

He smirked. "Conspiring with Death Eaters, entangling yourself with an illicit potions operation and now running from Aurors?" He tutted. "We might just make a Slytherin out of you yet."

She had always thought of his eyes as being steel grey. Flat, with the same harness and coldness as metal. But then she didn't suppose she had spent a lot of time looking into his before, because now she realised they weren't dull or even grey. They were the swirling blue of the ocean a moment before a tempest unleashed its furry. The colour of the fog swirling through the heather of the moors on an early summer morning.

"It's late, goodnight Granger." He didn't step away from her but the low cool tone of his voice put an ocean of distance between them.

Hermione's flush deepened to the point she was fairly certain even in the dim light of the alley way she looked like an over ripe tomato. She let his hand go and hurried to the door, throwing a hurried 'goodnight' over her shoulder.

Hermione envied Ginny as she lay awake staring at her ceiling. Her friend was able to feel things and accept them as they were but Hermione couldn't help but dissected and analysed everything she felt so she could understand them.

"Feelings aren't logical" Ginny had laughed when Hermione had been trying to puzzle out things with Ron at Hogwarts. "They aren't always rational and reasonable, just let yourself feel what you feel and the rest will come later, don't overthink things"

Yet here she lay, overthinking, turning her feelings over and over again trying to understand as she watched the darkness of her ceiling give way to the soft brushes of dawn.

There was no use denying she enjoyed Draco's company, even if it felt like a betrayal of herself and her friends to admit. He was intelligent and was a good conversation, if you could get past all the backhanded comments or thinly veiled insults.

Not to say that he wasn't an utter prat most of the time. And he was still a rich, annoying, stuck up jerk the rest of the time.

Yet as she got to know him, she saw qualities in him she admired. His loyalty to his family and friends. His protectiveness and his willingness to sacrifice himself for the good of the people he cared about.

It was also unavoidable that she had to admit that he was, physically, rather attractive.

She had always known that he was objectively attractive but it had been more of a detached observation than a feeling.

Like when she went to France with her parents and saw the art museums, she could look at a beautiful painting and know it was amazing but not have it invoke any true emotion. She had seen Malfoy and acknowledged he was handsome without being attracted to him. Apparently, that had changed.

But did she truly like Malfoy or was it just that she was lonely? Had it been so long since she had truly felt any of these feelings that she was now magnifying them and making them into more than they were?

Maybe it was time for her to take Ginny's offer of another blind date, maybe she just needed someone else to take her mind off her connection to Malfoy, to distract her from this passing fancy.

Besides, Malfoy clearly didn't feel the same about her. While he had been kind and attentive to her when they were trapped in the bar she felt fairly certain he hadn't been aroused by their close proximity. And when they said goodnight he had been every inch the gentleman but the crisp, cool way he had said goodnight had harboured no warmth or hint at his feelings having changed by their ordeal in the closet.

No. Hermione was fairly certain that this fleeting attraction was wholly and irrevocably one sided. Malfoy may no longer find her blood status distasteful or repulsive but that didn't mean he found her appealing and he certainly hadn't given her the smallest reason to think he did.

Hermione groaned into her pillow. Why did it have to be him? All three of the Slytherins were uncommonly handsome, there was a reason for their reputation at school, and Blaise certainly had taken her breath away with his grace and beauty. Why couldn't it be him? He was far away and fairly safe to take a passing fancy to. Why did it have to be Malfoy?

If Hermione had looked out her window and down into the dark alley below once she had fled to her apartment, she would have seen Draco standing where she left him staring at his hand that had moments ago held hers.

He could still feel the ghost of her there, warm and soft, fitting perfectly against his palm. He flexed his hand, whether to banish the feeling of her skin against his or to try to imprint the feeling on his palm he wasn't sure.

He stood there for several long minutes until at last he glanced up at her dark window before stuffing his hands into his jacket pockets and disappearing into the shadows.