Roman Holiday

Chapter Nineteen

“Will-o’-the-wisp,” Hermione panted, threw herself past the startled Fat Lady and through the portrait hole, and pounded up the stairs to the girls’ dormitory, all the way to her room.

Thank God, no roommates - yet another prefect perk, and worth the hours of studying all on its own. She kicked off her shoes, threw her robe into a corner, flopped down on the bed, and yanked the curtains shut. Just for good measure, she pulled her down comforter over her and jammed a pillow over her head.

Christ, she was in a mess.

Why, oh, why, couldn’t she be a normal girl for once? She’d spent four years in a dormitory room with Parvati Patil and Lavender Brown - why couldn’t she have picked up on some of their refreshing, middle-of-the-road Maybelline femininity?

Lavender had been dating Seamus Finnegan since the Yule Ball two years ago. Parvati had given up on Harry, a few months into their fifth year, and settled happily for Dean Thomas instead. Hermione, of course, hadn’t dated anybody except for Krum - and most of the Hogwarts student body considered his interest in her to be the oddest kind of aberration.

That afternoon in the Roman salon with Giulia and Micaela, looking in the mirror with the old ladies twittering behind her and that classic little Hepburn face gazing piquantly back at her, the face that she couldn’t believe was hers, she’d thought she was finally coming into her own. Thought that this year might be different, that somewhere among the Hogwarts boys there’d be someone who would take a closer look and like what he saw.

Her hopes had been modest. An invitation to Hogsmeade. A snuggle underneath a stadium blanket, up in the Quidditch stands. Some inexpert but enthusiastic necking in the Astronomy Tower.

Instead, she had this … this situation on her hands. Secret valentines from her onetime arch-nemesis. And an electric attraction, as undeniable as it was unwise, for the forbidding Potions professor.

Hermione hugged her pillow tighter. What was she going to do?

Two grade-A romantic tangles - three, if she believed what Draco had said about Ron liking her, too - and not a safe, steady Dean Thomas among them.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Of the three, Ron was the closest to take-him-home-to-Mum material. But dating Ron was out of the question. She’d corrected his Transfiguration homework too often to consider him as a potential boyfriend. Not to mention that it would screw with their Three Musketeers dynamic.

And, God help her, she just couldn’t imagine him naked.

Dating Draco was nearly as bad. It wasn’t easy to admit, but Hermione was more relieved than not that he wasn’t shouting his love to the rooftops. Part of that was the aforementioned buddy thing - she really, really couldn’t imagine breaking the news to Harry and Ron, not after they’d all hated each other for so long. Part of it was his own family’s obvious distaste for Muggle-borns, and her suspicion that he wasn’t so much rebelling against that bigotry wholesale, as making a hormone-based exception in her particular case.

And part of it was just, well … it seemed a bit premature.

How well did she really know him, anyway?

Well enough to have sex with him, apparently, she told herself tartly. Well enough to run around the castle at all hours of the night, practically under Filch’s nose, and snog in deserted classrooms. Well enough to share her favorite study carroll in the library … which she wouldn’t have done for just any pretty face.

In many ways, if you overlooked the traditional Gryffindor/Slytherin rivalries, they were a good match. Draco was smart. He was ambitious. He had good ideas. He made her think, and he made her laugh, and he listened to her, really listened, when she talked.

He liked her. A lot. She could tell - it was there in the way he touched her, the way his lips trailed over her throat, the half-poetic, half-incoherent words he gasped into her hair under the Invisibility Cloak. And he’d given up a lot to be with her … whether or not Lucius Malfoy cared to broadcast that his only son had defied him for a Muggle-born witch, whether or not the other Slytherins knew, Hermione had a feeling Draco had seen Malfoy Manor for the last time in a long time.

So in a way, she kind of owed him. Which was an awkward position to be in.

He was sexy, he was inventive, and kissing him made her feel as if she’d just uncapped a butterbeer after being out in the cold. There was no artifice between them, during their snogging sessions - they were both exploring foreign territory - and as often as it got tense and breathless, it was giggly and teasing and affectionate, too.

It’d be pretty easy to fall for him, all things considered. But she wasn’t quite sure she’d … fallen … yet.

Or maybe it was just that Snape was distracting her.

Snape. Damn him.

She’d known that sooner or later she was going to have to think about Snape; everything else, at the moment, was only an evasion of the inevitable.

He gave her the screaming meemies … every short hair on her body stood at attention under those lazy, knowing dark eyes. And when he touched her - well. Wow. There weren’t words for it.

No sweet teenage sincerity. Not Krum’s respectful gentleness, or Draco’s appealing mix of sharp curiosity and awe. Just a blistering tropical blaze that made her brain black out and her body turn to porridge.

She knew it was a bad idea. Even if he weren’t her teacher. Even if he weren’t twenty years older than she. Even if she could manage to talk to him for ten minutes without ending up against a wall or over his knee.

The chemistry was too powerful, too scary. When the two of them mixed, they melted cauldrons.

And he knew it, too. She buried her head farther in her pillow and groaned. He’d been trying to warn her off at every turn … probably that nastiness he affected was his idea of a defensive measure, meant to keep her at a distance.

But she couldn’t seem to stop herself from pushing his buttons, now that she knew there was more to the story, now that she’d seen the dark electricity that pulsed beneath the surface. It was like that Nicolas Cage line in “Moonstruck,” her mum’s favorite movie.

“You run to the wolf in me,” Nic had snarled at Cher. “That don’t make you no lamb.”

Cue the fake snow and the violins. Hermione rolled over and sighed heavily.

That jaw-clenched, skin-vibrating rage. That tidal wave of animalian sensation. The heady, gut-roiling knowledge that they were teetering on the precipice - that he was fighting with his baser instincts, and that she’d already given over to hers.

Dear God. Who’d have ever thought that she’d have a slick in her panties for bad boys?

It was going to be an interesting year.

**

Crookshanks had arrived a week ago, along with her luggage and a care package from her parents - apparently Dumbledore had come to the rescue and sent them an owl with a plausible reason why Hermione had come straight to school. Draco had gotten his things, too - and his eagle owl was right on schedule with its twice-weekly infusions of sweets and spending money, Hermione noticed. If this seemed odd to him, he didn’t let on.

“Keeping up appearances,” he’d said when she brought it up one evening, and shrugged. “The Ministry’s bound to have leaked the story a little … easiest way to make people forget is to maintain a routine. He can’t seem to be angry with me now; it’d just feed the rumors.”

And, as his right hand had at that moment found its way through her robes and was moving in increasingly satisfactory patterns over her naked breast, she’d let it go at that.

To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there was a time to ask questions. And there was also a time to just shut up and feel the moment.

Now, she decided that eating in her room tonight was vastly preferable to taking her dinner in the Great Hall … Draco and she never spoke at meals anyway, and she’d just as soon wait to see Snape until … well, until it was absolutely necessary. She ignited one of her little bluebell fires in the middle of the stone floor, dug out a packet of microwave popcorn (her mum didn’t seem to realize, even after five years of Hermione’s reminders, that Hogwarts didn’t run on electricity), and levitated the packet six inches above the fire with a flick of her wand.

“Finite Incantatem,” she said as the popping began to slow, and heaved herself off the bed to dump the popcorn into a bowl.

One more uninterrupted evening, and she’d have the rest of the Palestrina notes translated and ready for Snape to review. For a moment or so following their little … um … episode this afternoon, she’d seriously thought about calling off the extra-credit project. But she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction - and besides, if this potion really did what Palestrina claimed, she wanted to see it happen.

She’d send it by owl, early tomorrow morning. Make it into a correspondence course.

**

She was interrupted, an hour or so into her work, by a furtive knock at her door. By the time she’d gotten off the bed to answer it, it had already opened - apparently by itself - paused as if to admit a fairly lean human body - then abruptly shut again and locked itself.

A moment later, Draco appeared from under the Invisibility Cloak and grinned at her. She gaped back at him.

“What the hell are you doing in here?”

“Keep your voice down, will you?” He shoved a stack of her notes unceremoniously off the bed and plopped down next to her. “Followed one of the Gryffindor prefects up here,” he said. “Right through the portrait hole. Nice password, by the way.”

Hermione picked up her wand before he could squash it, eyed him narrowly for a moment, and set a ward on the door before she turned back to him. “So, what? This is a social call?”

“Something like that. You weren’t at dinner.”

“Wasn’t really hungry. Had work to do.” She yelped as he tackled her around the waist and bore her back to the bed. “Hey!”

His face was already buried in her neck. “I’m tired of sneaking around the castle,” he murmured, nipping at the soft skin behind her ear. “Tired of kissing you standing up. The train’ll be here tomorrow, and you’ll be off with Potter and Weasley the minute they get here. I wanted you all to myself for one more night.”

Her robes were still in the corner where she’d thrown them, and she was wearing only a pair of shorts and a much-worn, much-laundered T-shirt with “Kiss the Cook” emblazoned on the front - she’d stolen it from her dad. Before she knew what he was about, he’d stripped it off over her head and had transferred his mouth from her neck to her breasts. He smelled faintly lemony, as if he’d just showered.

The bed was soft, the door was locked, and Draco had obviously learned a lot about female anatomy since the last time they’d been horizontal. What the hell, Hermione thought, and yanked the curtains closed.

**

Much, much later. They were spooning in the center of the big bed, the comforter bunched around their waists. Hermione’s fingers were tangled idly in his silky spill of palomino hair.

“You need a haircut,” she murmured, and he half-twisted so he could eye her lazily over his shoulder.

“You offering?”

She laughed. “That’s a thought. A dangerous one.”

“I like it long.” He yawned. “Don’t you?”

“I wouldn’t take that much off,” she said, and gathered it all together. “Just a half inch or so … Draco?”

“Mm.” He tried to turn around to face her, but she pressed his shoulder with one hand to keep him as he was. “What is it?”

“You’ve got a funny little mark on your neck,” she said. “At the very nape. Like a birthmark or something.”

He shrugged. “Dunno. Never heard anything about a Malfoy birthmark.”

Her fingers combed his hair to either side, and she pushed one of the curtains back to take a closer look. “Odd,” she breathed. “I’ve seen this before, somewhere - I’m sure of it.”

His hand came back to feel his nape. “I don’t feel anything.”

“That’s the weird thing.” She traced it with her index finger. “It’s not raised at all - not really like a birthmark, come to think of it, as much as a … tattoo?”

“Huh.” He turned in her arms. “Never heard anything about a Malfoy tattoo, either … and you’d think it’s something your mother would tell you. What’s it look like?”

Her eyes were troubled as they met his. “Like a little knife,” she said. “It’s shaped exactly like a little black knife.”

**

TBC