Hermione’s heartbeat lives on the surface of her skin now: buzzing, prickling, pumping. Each inhale warms her chest. Her bones melting.
And Draco Malfoy’s head has tilted, leaned against her thigh as his own heavy breathing washes over parts of her she’d had almost no intention of ever letting him near again.
Her limbs are slack and she can’t seem to muster the energy required to move them, to preserve a modesty she can’t pretend to have anymore.
Pretend.
It had been nice. She fell into it easily because there’s something so intoxicating—more so than the liquor, she thinks, though the liquor probably played its own part—about the way it feels to not be so alone anymore.
Whatever this is, she and Draco are in it together, and that solidarity pulls her in like a siren at sea.
She looks at Malfoy again with less fascination now, and he seems to notice her stare because he turns and his grey eyes lock with hers. Pureblood. Muggle-born. Somehow, she feels like he knows it instantly, that he can see it in her face, that in a world built upon lineage hierarchies that span centuries with a society woven of sociopolitical connections, that she does not belong.
She lifts her chin and refuses to drop her eyes or look away. Whoever this Malfoy may be, he isn’t going to make her feel small.
One second. Two. Three. Four. He doesn’t break eye contact and neither will she.
