Chapter Text
Theo sets up a meeting with Flint for nine o’clock that night.
Draco leaves him alone after several hours of strategising and rehearsing to work on a decoy potion and get his shit together ready to disappear. Theo’s always been stoic, never giving much away no matter what’s been going on, but Draco can tell he’s spooked. He gave the potion to Draco before he left, promised there were no others.
Draco doesn’t believe him for a second.
He gets back to his flat and his first instinct is to send her an owl, to apparate to the Auror Office and find her. He stifles it. The place is… the same, he supposes, none of the furniture changed, the dreary doormat with the same stains they’ve had the month he’s been here. Somehow it feels a whole lot emptier than it did this morning.
He sends Zabini an owl instead. If he went to Nott Manor this morning, Draco needs to know how much he knows, how much danger he’s in.
He sits down at the wobbly little table, the chair groaning underneath him. He doesn’t know what to do with himself now, all long-term strategy out the window, hours before he needs to be anywhere.
Hermione would know what to do.
For tonight, at least, he has a vague plan, more than he’s had in the past for extraction missions.
Get Camilla Nott out. Destroy the potion. Hide Theo. Stay alive.
It might blow his cover, he knows that. Tonks will find out, he’ll never be able to rejoin the Auror Office, and Flint will undoubtedly make it his life’s work to hunt him and Nott down. His best bet, if that happens, is to hide with Theo and Mrs. Nott, somewhere in Europe or North America, beyond the reaches of Flint’s little empire.
He’ll never see Hermione again. At least, not until Tonks manages to take down Flint, which might be years, maybe never without someone on the inside.
The Floo sounds just after lunch. Stupidly, he thinks it could be her, turns his head around lightning fast only to find Zabini instead, brushing the powder and soot off himself.
“What’s all this about, then?” Blaise asks, standing up tall.
“You tell me, Zabini. Why did you send Theo here?”
Blaise shrugs, nonchalant. “Good excuse to get him out of the house, wasn’t it?.” He raises an eyebrow. “Why do you look like that?”
“Like what?”
“All… moody. Tense. She did come back here, didn’t she?”
Draco stares at him. He’s not talking to Zabini about Hermione, wants everyone in this life as far away from her as possible. “Did Theo say anything to you? About why he’s been at home?”
Blaise’s jaw flexes, and he shrugs again just a hair too slowly. “Theo didn’t say much of anything. He was half asleep.”
Draco thinks he’s full of shit, but he’s not sure who he’s protecting. It could be Flint; Zabini could be some sort of handler, keeping an eye on Theo. Equally, if Blaise is still the person he knew from school, it could be Theo. He always watched over him, even then, kicked his arse out of bed in the morning and stopped him from spiralling too far after Hogwarts.
“Right,” says Draco.
“You’re not going to tell me what this is all about, then?”
“No.”
“Sure. I’ll go ask Theo, then,” says Blaise, tipping his head towards the fireplace.
“Keep out of it,” says Draco, in what he hopes is a warning.
Blaise narrows his eyes, waits for a moment. “Did your new friend have a good night? What was it, Anna?”
Draco bristles, standing before he can even realise why. “Have you ever considered minding your own fucking business, Blaise?”
“Haven’t, actually, and doubt I’ll start now. If you’re going to be a twat I’m leaving.”
“Leave, then. Don’t visit Theo.”
Blaise looks perilously close to giving him the finger, but instead he shakes out his cloak and grabs some Floo powder, steps into it with a huff.
Draco sits down again, runs through scenarios for this evening in his head. It’s difficult when he can picture her here, on his bed, in his shower. He closes his eyes to block out his flat and then all he sees is her, the curl of her hair and the flush on her skin.
The Floo sounds again, an hour later, and he doesn’t turn. As expected, it’s bloody Blaise.
“Listen, Malfoy. Tell me, don’t tell me, whatever—”
“I’m not telling you.”
“—but I’m Theo’s friend, all right? Whatever you think, I just—I worry about him.”
“Fine. Worry away. He’ll be alright anyway.”
“I’m not an idiot. I know something’s going on.” He hesitates. “He’s disconnected his Floo.”
“It’s sorted, Zabini. Alright?”
Blaise looks at him, hard and angry. “Fine. But if you get him killed, Draco, I swear—”
“Yeah, yeah. I know.”
“You really won’t tell me?”
“Go and have a drink, or six. I’ll tell you tomorrow.” Blaise rubs his hand over his mouth before turning back to the fire, leaving in a spin of green.
Draco takes out a piece of parchment, smaller than his little finger. He writes, miniscule, and doesn’t sign his name.
Job at 7:30. Come before if you can.
It’s six thirty when he hears the Floo again. He sent the note at six, told himself she wouldn’t come.
“Blaise, for the last fucking time. I’m not going to tell you.”
“Tell me what?” she asks.
He turns so fast he almost cracks his neck.
“Hermione.” He stands. She’s in her Auror uniform, hair contained in her usual braid, the high scarlet collar of her cloak buttoned up all the way. She looks… uncertain. Knackered, too, dark purple shadows under her eyes from a full day of work after a sleepless night.
But she’s here.
He should be sensible. Say his goodbyes to her, or whatever, and spend his time preparing for the meeting with Flint.
“I, uh, got your owl.” She looks down at her boots, almost embarrassed. She clasps her hands together in front of her. The tip of her nose is very, very red.
He’s staring at her, he knows. He feels utterly incapable of acting rationally.
She’s looking at him now like maybe he’s been hexed. “Malfoy? Did you—Are you alright?”
He’s not alright. He’s not fucking alright. He wants to ask her about her day and fuck her into the mattress, maybe both at the same time. He needs to get his head in the fucking game, needs to run through the plan again and sort out what he’s going to take, get his fucking affairs in order for when it inevitably all goes wrong.
He didn’t expect her to actually come.
He takes a step forward, and she gravitates towards him, looking up at him with wide eyes and lips slightly parted, small and perfectly formed. She looked at him like this after she got hit with that bloody curse in her first year, thrown back against the wall and breathless, her quick wandwork the only thing that kept her alive. It had been a very near miss. She’d looked at him like that again seven months ago, the night of the incident.
They reach each other, and he can’t help but take her jaw in his hands, can’t help but tilt her chin up towards him.
He kisses her now because he didn’t then, light, just a graze of his lips against hers.
Her eyes flutter closed, long, long lashes, a smudge of ink at her temple under one of her curls. He can picture her at her desk, the one next to his, head bowed over parchment.
Did she think of him, today?
She pulls back, amused now that she knows he’s alright, hands moving to his shirt. She undoes the top button, business-like, like she does it every day. He looks down at her hands, an eyebrow quirking up at her in question. When he invited her, he wasn’t sure if she’d want to—Well. He kind of thought she’d be the talking type, if he’s honest. But the thought had definitely crossed his mind.
“Hey, you invited me, Malfoy,” she says, bold all of a sudden. “Did you miss me?” He brings his hands to her hips as she moves down his buttons, tries to feel the warmth of her through the starched wool of her trousers. He missed her like he’d miss a bloody organ.
“Yeah,” he says, not remotely able to lie. “Did you win?”
She snorts, indelicate as ever. “Obviously not. Dennis did, can you believe it?” His shirt is all the way unbuttoned now, billowing open. She hooks her fingers in his belt loops, a frown pulling down the corners of her mouth as she thinks about it. “Tonks said our cohort was the worst she’s seen in years. I didn’t even have a knut. And I was five minutes late.” He’s never known Granger to be late a day in her life. Tonks would have been close to sending out a search party, he can imagine, the way her hair goes pale when she worries.
“Shame. Must have been a hard night for you, traipsing around London looking for potions with no luck.”
She grins at him, soft and secret, reaching her hands around his torso to untuck his shirt. She’s certainly not wasting any fucking time. “Terrible. Met some real scoundrels, too.” She tilts her head up again. “So are you—You said you had to go out? At seven thirty?”
He stiffens.
“Yeah. A meeting. Nothing serious.” Liar, Liar. “Do you want a drink? Tea?”
“Are you seriously offering me tea, Malfoy?” She laughs, easy and light, and he brings his hands to the fastening of her Auror’s cloak on her left shoulder, undoes the large gold button there. It doubles as an alert if she presses it a certain way, all of them linked to their section leaders’ badge, which, in Granger’s case, is Tonks. He really doesn’t want Tonks showing up now.
“If you want.”
Part of him wants her to wear it, though, while they—
It’s a good look, is all. The uniform really suits her.
Her hands move to the button of his trousers, and any thought of tea goes out the window as she unbuttons him, trousers going loose around his waist.
She kisses him, now, one hand going to the back of his neck, the other palming at his rapidly hardening cock, single-minded in her determination. He deepens the kiss, opens his mouth against hers until she follows. He gets his fingers in her braid, the way he’s always wanted to, the soft hair warm against her scalp and cold at the bottom. He pulls the tie out, drags his hands through until she’s completely undone, her hair falling in untamed curls around her shoulders.
“Ginny knows,” she says, pulling off her cloak and letting it crumple on the floor, leaving her in her standard-issue shielded shirt, collar open, mass-produced by Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes. The love bites on her neck are still there, plum-coloured against her skin, in violent contrast with the starched white and the leather of her wand holster. “She says we’re idiots.” She’s smiling as she says it, like she doesn’t totally disagree.
“Bit rich, coming from the Trainee who’s shagging Potter.”
Hermione raises an eyebrow. “You think this—” she gestures between them, “—is a smart thing to do?”
“Possibly the smartest thing I’ve ever done.” And fuck, he’s really going for it, then. Honesty.
She fiddles with his pocket, runs her finger under the line of his waistband, smiling. Salazar, he’s missed being her partner. “Yeah, yeah. It was our brains that led us here. Can you take your trousers off now?”
Draco doesn’t need telling twice, kicking off his trousers until he’s standing there in his boxers.
She looks him up and down, gaze lingering on the open flap of his shirt. “You should just walk around like this, Malfoy. It suits you.”
“You’d never get anything done, Granger.”
She shrugs. “I think I’d get… something done.” She takes a step closer, until the crisp fabric of her shirt brushes against his chest, her breath on his neck.
He almost laughs at how cheesy that fucking line is, like she’s some teenage boy trying to get in his pants.
And then she slides down him, slow and smooth. He watches her, this intense, focused look on her face, eye-level with the bulge in his boxers. She puts her hands on the back of his thighs, runs her nails over him, kissing along the skin above the line of elastic, gentle. She pauses under his navel, looks up at him, and bites. Just a brush of the teeth, but enough to remind him exactly who she is.
He is, uh, definitely hard, now.
Draco keeps his hands fisted at his side. Hermione loops her fingers around his boxers, pulls them over him and down, tapping his ankle to get him to move so she can take them off fully. They haven’t even made it a metre from where she came out of the fireplace, Floo dust still on the floor.
She rests on her heels to look at him, and then looks up and gives him a grin so dirty that he can’t believe it’s on Hermione Granger’s face.
“I missed you, too, Draco.”
She leans forward and takes him into her mouth, hands on his arse, nothing gentle or slow or composed about her now. His whole body jerks as she swallows around him, her mouth hot and wet and eager, sloppy with her teeth in a way that shouldn’t do it for him but definitely does.
He holds the sides of his shirt open, ostensibly to look at her. His hands really need something to do, the way her tongue slides over him, this relentless movement back and forwards. She looks up at him, searching, and brings her hands to his. She prises them off the hem of his shirt. For a second he thinks she’ll come off, come up.
He wants his hands on her like some physical need.
She brings his hands to the crown of her head, cradling her skull like—
“Hermione, you don’t—” She looks up at him again, those big brown eyes, and raises her eyebrows. It’s a very specific kind of Granger look, a dare and a want all in one. She drags one hand to her jaw, and he feels it relax around him, the other hand miming pushing her forwards. “Fuck.”
She hums at that, this tilt of her head that somehow manages to be bossy even as she’s trying convince him to fuck her mouth. He feels the vibrations all throughout his spine, the visual of her in her fucking uniform and the feel of her mouth and the heavy weight of her skull in his hand, the way she got here within half an hour of his owl, the fact that she’s actually telling him to—
He’s not going to last long like this.
He does it, though, holds her head gently, like that makes it better, one hand on her open jaw and the other tangled in her hair. It feels like he’s totally spinning out of control. He moves slowly, this cautious slide back in her mouth, once, twice. He doesn’t want to hurt her, is the thing, doesn’t want to scare her. That she fucking trusts him at all is still a miracle and a mystery.
Her hands come back to grip his thighs, short nails dragging against him, pulling him closer.
She looks up at him and swallows a few times, this rhythmic clenching of her throat that makes him feel unhinged. He makes the most insane noise, all sense of decorum lost, and he’s not sure if he imagines the corners of her mouth going up in a smile, because suddenly she’s sucking, tight all the way around, her cheeks hollowing against him and the barest scrape of her teeth.
His hips jerk, too fast, right to the back of her throat, ring of muscle going so tight around him that it feels like apparating, his vision going dark for a second.
“Hermione, fuck, fuck. You can’t—”
He pulls out, going for gentle again, his cock leaking wildly and her spit pooling at the corners of her mouth. She swallows, once, and he can’t help but watch the motion of her neck as she does, another thing he’ll never be able to be normal about.
“Draco—”
He pulls her up in one ungraceful movement until she’s standing in front of him. She looks… pleased, ridiculously so. She’s competitive, he knows that, and he feels like somehow sex with her might always be some kind of weird one-upmanship, how much they can mutually make each other lose it.
It’s far too easy, with her.
She pulls him into a kiss, mouth still sloppy and wet, the drag of her trousers against his cock (Merlin and Morgana, her fucking uniform really shouldn’t do it for him like this, he’s seen her wear it every day for the past two years. It really, really does it for him.)
“You could have,” she says, like it’s nothing, looking at his ear and running her hand along the underside of his collar, fingers flat against his collar bone. “You know, properly. That’s what I wanted. If that’s what you—I mean, if you wanted.” She thumbs the point of his lapel, chews on her lip. Draco feels like he might be going in to shock.
“Fucking hell, Granger, you’re diabolical.”
She smiles at that, lifts her eyes to his and reaches around his neck, the smooth white of her shirt warmest in the crease of her elbows against him. She arches her back a little, presses her whole body to him through her clothes, his cock straining.
“I have my moments,” she whispers, breath hot against his cheek.
He kisses her neck then, unbuttoning her as he goes, the trail of marks across her collarbone revealed as he pushes the fabric from her skin, round and dark and his. The holster around her shoulders keeps her shirt pressed half-on, everything he ever imagined. She whines, high-pitched and needy, when he reaches her bra, his hand brushing over her nipple through the cup.
“Please, Draco, just take it off, I need—” She closes her eyes and rests her head against his shoulder, practically rubbing up against him for some friction. She’s so responsive, all worked up with nowhere to go, and he wants to get her off, wants to make her wait, wants it all sorts of ways.
He moves her to lean against the table, one leg between hers, the bed three steps too far for how much he needs her. He pushes the cup of her bra up without taking it off, this sudden feeling like it might be urgent. She groans and arches, pushing herself forwards at him, her hips pulsing against his thigh with a twitch like maybe she can’t help it.
“I’ve got you,” he says, brushing the back of his hand against her nipple, taut under his fingers. The shifting of her hips against his leg gets needier, no subtlety about it at all. “Patience, Granger.”
She groans, half-way between irritated impatience and turned-on. “I’ve been thinking about you all day,” she says, voice coming out breathier than usual, and his hands go to the button of her trousers, pop them open.
“Oh? What am I doing? When you’re thinking about me?” he asks, because he can’t help himself. If he can get her to ask, to beg, even—fuck.
She huffs out a breath like some moody teenager, like she can’t believe he’s asking. “This.”
“Just this?” His hands pause at the waist of her trousers, smiling into her hair. Her hips haven’t stopped moving even once, this continuous shifting as she tries to find friction. She whines.
“Fucking hell, Malfoy, can you please just take my trousers off?” He laughs then, at how shirty she sounds, and tugs at her trousers, getting his hands on her thighs as soon as they’re down, boots kicked off, all the smooth skin of her legs bare and wanting. She’s wet through the fabric of her underwear, and when he cups her, light, blunt pressure all over, she keens, pushing against him.
“Thought about you… touching me,” she says, voice quiet against his shoulder, and that idea—her at her desk, or out on assignment, in a fucking meeting, thinking about him—eclipses everything else, the only thing he ever wants to think about again.
He glides his hand back along the line of her to where she’s wettest, and pulls his thumb back over the fabric, forward over her clit. She moans, teeth resting against his shoulder now like she wants to bite, chases his hand with her hips.
“I thought about you, too,” he says, and she likes that, nodding her head against him and tilting her hips, trapping his thumb where she wants him. Her breath is hot on his shoulder, hip warm on the underside of his cock.
She leans back and the whole table tilts ominously, the shitty three-legged construction clearly not made for sitting on. There’s a creak, a crack, and suddenly she’s practically grappling him, this first-year hand-to-hand move that absolutely shouldn’t get him on the ground but does, whatever survival response he has shoved so far back around her.
The long line of her body lands on top of him, the wetness of her underwear pressed against his stomach, the floor cold and hard under his arse. She looks triumphant, all those sparring lessons paying off. Competitive one-upmanship indeed.
He rolls so he’s on top of her and she shrieks, laughing, gets one hand on his shoulder and wiggles to wrap a leg around him, more horseplay than anything else, the cold heel of her foot pressing into his lower back. Her hair is spread around her head, practically glowing in the smouldering green light of the Floo fire. “Good instincts, Granger,” he says in his Trainer voice, not seriously, like she’s just followed some particularly obvious lead. Hermione flushes anyway, bites her lip and twitches her hips.
So that’s good to know.
He pulls her red cloak over by the hem, tucks it under her shoulders. She grins up at him, and he thinks possibly she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. The scarlet has always suited her, brings out the red of her lips, the flush of pink across her tan cheeks. He kisses along her neck, the delicate tendon where her throat meets her collarbone, and reaches under her to unhook the strap of her bra. She pulls it off, her shirt and the holster too, leaving the fabric pooled underneath her on the floor.
He thinks he’ll never get used to her.
“You’re something else, Hermione.” He kisses just where her breast starts to swell on her chest, her nipple, the crease underneath her breast.
“Yeah?” she says, her hands coming to his head, her leg relaxing around him, foot skimming down to the ground so he can move down. He kisses the line of her ribcage, the hollow next to her belly button, brushes his nose against her skin. She smells like sweat and washing powder and the barest hint of his soap, the smell of her arousal drawing him closer, moth to a flame.
“Perfect,” he says, planting a kiss on the elastic of her underwear, watching the jump of her muscles underneath. If it all goes to shit tonight, at least he’s had this. She hums, less jumpy than last time, eager. It’s a good look on her.
He gets where he wants to be, between her legs, one of her heels on his back. She’s still wearing her underwear, something new she must have had spare in her locker, green with flowers, a little bow at the front.
She looks good in green.
He licks along the damp mark of the fabric once, hard, and she must be pretty fucking worked up because her hips come up so fast she almost takes his head clean off.
“Sorry,” she gasps, giving him a quick, nervous laugh.
He smirks and kisses her inner thighs, dragging her underwear down. If she’s that sensitive through the fabric, he wants to hear her without it, wants to watch her writhe and beg underneath him.
Good to know he still has the remnants of Slytherin ambition somewhere inside.
She’s bare in front of him now as he presses her apart with his thumbs, wet and swollen like maybe she really has been thinking about him all day.
“Thought about this, too. You.” And at that he stops teasing her, finally. He touches her clit lightly with his tongue and then gives her a long, slow lick from where she’s wettest, flat, hard pressure over her clit.
She hisses, back rounding to give him better access, hands twitching between his hair and shoulders and her own legs, never resting for a second.
“Fuck, Malfoy, why are you so good at this?”
He grins at that, licks her again just the same way, shifts his head to get the angle right. She seems to like firm, Hermione, consistent and steady and hard, every muscle in her body pushing towards him, and he thinks it will happen so much faster this time, the way he knows her better, how ready she was. He pushes two fingers in, met with a groan, and she’s so wet they slide almost without resistance.
Her breath starts hitching as he crooks them and she moans, loud enough that they’d hear it on the street below without the privacy wards. He keeps at her, not letting her escape for a minute, this persistent hard lick and the drag of his fingers through her entrance.
“Please, Draco, fuck.” Her hands come to his head properly, now, twisting his hair around her fingers. She’s close, he can feel it, this clench around his fingers, her thighs opening wide, wide, her knees practically flat against the ground to get him closer. The muscles in her stomach go taut, her head lifting up to watch him.
“Good,” he says into her, not stopping for a moment. Her fingers go tight in his hair and her whole body tenses underneath him, like she can’t decide if she wants to get him closer or keep him away. “You’re so good,” he says, and when that gets him a strangled gasp, he goes for it. “Good girl.”
The noise she makes as she comes is something he would classify as a scream. So there’s that.
He keeps his mouth on her, rides her through it until she’s limp and sweaty against the floorboards. She opens her fingers at him, gives him half a kick up his side until he moves up over her. She presses her eyes into his shoulder, hiding her face, muscles him down until he’s practically squashing her against the floor. She gets like this every time, he’s learning, this insatiable need for contact everywhere.
“Hey,” he says, brushing off a tendril of hair stuck to her forehead.
She nods against him and then brings her face up to look, her eyes gone all heavy and hooded. Her hair is the most divine tangled mess he could imagine, worse even than the time they chased an escaped Quintaped across the moors of Scotland.
“Hey, you,” she says, tilting her chin up to kiss him, the wetness of her still on his face. She wrinkles her nose at it, like maybe she hasn’t done that before, (and he’s thought about it, of course he has, what she got up to with—If he’s the best she’s ever had,) drops her head back onto her scarlet cloak with a dull thud. The redness of her cheeks stands out even more next to it, the tip of her nose and edges of her lips blurry and pink.
He stares at her, looks and looks and looks while he still can. Her eyes flutter, once, and she smiles at him, soft and contented. It feels new, a smile he’s never seen on her before.
“Hermione—” he starts, not sure where he’s going with it. He can’t tell her about Theo, about the potion. She’s too brave for her own good, Granger, would find some way to get involved, would risk her career and her life if she thought it was the right thing to do, all this over-eager optimism that he’s never understood, a lifetime of near-misses and Potter’s dumb luck.
Draco won’t let it get far enough to need luck.
But the thought haunts him, that this might be it. That he’ll fuck it up with Flint, or worse: that it will go well, that he’ll become enmeshed in Flint’s organisation like he’s supposed to. The deeper he goes, the stupider it is for him to get in contact, for her to come here, especially in her Auror uniform like this. The criminal Draco Malfoy definitely can’t see Hermione Granger of an evening, can’t do anything remotely close to what he wants, what she deserves, taking her out to dinner, being seen on her arm.
“Mm?” she asks, one eye opening to peer at him suspiciously. She’s like a bloody bloodhound, sometimes, the way she can sense something’s off with him if he’s not perfectly composed. When Narcissa—Well. She’s good at reading him.
He changes direction, quirking a brow. “So you had fun, last night?”
She lets him get away with it, too, just rolls her eyes good-naturedly and snorts. “You got me, Malfoy. Was it that obvious?”
“Pretty obvious, yeah.” He grins, leans down to run his teeth against her ear, a shiver running down her in response. His cock twitches on her hip, so hard it actually hurts. She looks down and rubs up against him, just gently, and he ruts forward, oversensitive and aching for her.
She smirks, this competitive glint in her eye that he’s pretty sure she learnt from Ginny, muscles shifting in a way that means she’s going to try and roll them again.
He gathers her wrists in his, stretches them up so she can’t get the leverage she’d need, holds light enough for her to escape, and she huffs. “Don’t telegraph, Granger,” he says, like they’re sparring.
“Don’t tempt me then, Malfoy.” She rolls her hips against him, all these dirty tricks coming out that he’d never expect from her in a million years. The stretch of her has shifted everything up, high and tight, and he leaves her hands there, squeezes her wrists for a second to get her to stay before moving them to balance himself. The image of her, laid out on the floor for him, watching him—
Her legs butterfly out again, the crease of her hip opening to shift him to the right place, bossy and demanding even with no hands, arching her back. She’s slick all between her thighs, so wet he can hardly think, and he moves, lines them up so the head of his cock is sliding through her folds, gliding across her clit. Her head rolls back, the line of her throat on his nose, and he feels the vibrations when she moans at the feel of him.
He slides in slow, painfully slow, a sucker for punishment even now, a profane groan ripped from his throat at the feel of her. She rolls her hips again, pulling him in closer, furnace-hot and wanting, so wet there’s practically no friction. He pauses at the bottom, still not used to her, barely able to process the events of the last twenty-four hours.
She shifts, getting her feet on the ground for leverage to push up against him and grind, this slow pulse of the muscles in her arse and hips that might actually drive him to madness.
“Hermione—” he starts again, so bloody stupid, no idea what there is to say, or how to say it.
She brings a hand down to his ear, puts her thumb on his earlobe and squeezes, gentle. “I know, Draco,” she says, soft, and there’s no way she can possibly know, but the way she says it makes him feel like maybe she does, even if he doesn’t know what he wants to say himself, yet. Being inside her feels like the surface layer of him has been all scrubbed off, like she can see all the raw, animal parts of him.
He starts moving, every thrust met by her fucking him from underneath, the hard line of muscle in her leg rigid under soft flesh against his hips, the bite of the floorboards on his knees. She starts out rougher than him, this relentless drive that never stops, and he moves to match her, presses her hips down and forward with every thrust until she’s holding herself in place with her heels, her nails scraping against his ribs to keep him pressed close.
“Draco, I can’t—Fuck, it’s so—Please.” Her face squeezes up, a wrinkle on the side of her nose that he’s never noticed before, sweat on her throat, pooling in the hollow between her collarbones. He moves his arms closer to her, shifts to his elbows so his forearms are under her shoulders, holding her in place as she loses her grip. Her hips rising like she can’t help it, chasing more friction, more pressure, more something.
His own orgasm is building fast, relentless in the base of his spine.
“Fuck, Hermione, you’re so good, so good.” He pants into her neck. He needs another bloody hand. “I can’t—Touch yourself.”
She does, hand flattened between them to rub at her clit, and she makes this noise that almost sounds pained. He licks the salt on her flushed throat, barely conscious or in control of his own impulses, everything wet and messy between them.
“Please,” she cries, her voice ragged.
He tries to stop it, tries desperately to hold on until she comes, but she starts clenching around him, tight and involuntary, and he feels it ripple across his skin, pleasure and pain and sensation. His hips jerk, sloppy, and apparently that’s what she needed, pinned beneath him with the press of her hand on her clit, and then she’s vice-tight around him, a rhythmic flutter that wrings him out from head to toe as he pulses inside her.
After what honestly feels like a full minute, he flops—there’s no other word for it, it’s indelicate—down onto her. She lets out these little huffs of disparate laughter, her whole stomach contracting underneath him with it.
He doesn’t have two thoughts to rub together.
“Fuck, Malfoy.”
And—Yeah. He’s never had particularly bad sex, first few fumbling attempts not included, but he sort of feels like they might be uniquely good at this.
He gets a finger through one of the curls at the nape of her neck, his forearms still wedged under her shoulders. He coils it around until his finger comes to her scalp, brushes against the pale skin there.
Everything between them is sticky and rapidly cooling, her eyes fluttering closed. She looks fucking exhausted, bad sleep the night before and a full day of work. All he wants is to pick her up and tuck her in his sheets, let her sleep for ten hours and give her breakfast. He’d place a bet that she’s bad at relaxing outside of work, all that highly-strung energy pin-point focused on the Auror Office.
She doesn’t talk about plans for the weekends anymore, not since her and the Weasel broke up.
And now he has to leave. He told Theo he’d meet him at seven thirty, and they’re rapidly reaching that time. He literally feels like there’s not a single bone left in his body, every joint gone loose. He can feel her relaxing underneath him, this rhythmic deep breathing that’s not quite sleep but is definitely close.
“Granger—” He feels like a total arsehole.
“I know.” Her eyes flutter open, a big deep breath like she’s steeling herself. “Night owl criminal activities to get up to.” She pats his arse cheek like he’s a bloody Hippogriff about to fly. He slides out of her, the slip of them both making an indecent noise that seems very loud in the now-quiet flat.
He kneels up and she pats around until she finds her wand in her holster, hands skimming dangerously close to the gold call button on the front of her cloak, an inch from calling Tonks directly to his bloody flat. She’s a sight, certainly, debauched and sweaty on his fucking floor, legs still open.
He’s never going to be able to come back from this.
She cleans them both, pulls her bra on, reaches for her trousers. She won’t look at him. She’s staring intently at the scars on his chest, the faded white lines that had once bled him out in a bathroom.
“This has to be the last time, doesn’t it?” she asks. “Until it’s done.” She doesn’t look sad even, just resigned, this hardness that she gets sometimes since the war.
“I—I don’t know.” He hates how uncertain he sounds. “Probably.”
“This thing, tonight. Is it—Will it be dangerous?” She’s looking somewhere over his shoulder, now, in the direction of his fridge. Her face is so carefully blank that he wants to get his hands on it, cup her jaw or press his thumb between her eyebrows, feel the smoothness there, hold her until she smiles or frowns or something.
Draco doesn’t say anything. He can’t bring himself to lie.
The silence feels heavy.
“Draco, I’m not—” She meets his eyes, and it’s like being hit by a curse, the intensity of her focus on him all at once. “I understand the job.” And he knows, the way she says it, just how much of herself she’s given to being an Auror. They’ve always been alike like that. It was the only thing that made those first few months bearable, back when it felt like she hated him for being her Trainer, for being an Auror at all.
“I know.”
“Just—Don’t get yourself killed. Alright?” She looks at him seriously, like it’s something he can promise.
“Just because you asked, Granger.”