Chapter 17
I may have been the tini-winciest bit worried when Potter insisted we had to talk. His rumpled clothes and unshaven scruff had him looking broodier than normal. He got that way when he was on one of do-gooder missions and I hated the dual feelings it sparked in me to see him like that. Concern, of course, for my own neck because who knew what he thought I was up to. And, well, unbecoming things.
He caught me midday, before I could scurry off and evade him. Not that I’d been hiding. Just like he wasn’t hiding when he escorted me into an empty training room instead of his office, casting a colloportus at the door for good measure.
You’d think, what with him being brave and all, he wouldn’t have to psych himself up for whatever it was he’d dragged me in here to say. Instead he paced past me three full times, his workworn hands tangling in his disheveled hair, casting me beseeching glances like I was the one who called this rendezvous. He finally settled on the instructor’s desk. A big slab of a thing, high enough he could prop against it like a bar stool. His long legs stretched out to me, strained taunt with a tension that ran from his head to his toes. His hands clung to the siding, gripping it for dear life. Green eyes blazed at me. Finally steady. Intimidatingly resolute.
He’d done something. Something he was ashamed of. He’d dragged me in here to apologize.
Now, I was in no position to turn down an apology, but I also never was in the position to stare down a contrite Potter eager to make amends. I could see too many ways how lording his guilt over him could go terribly wrong, but why throw away the chance? He did look good laid out like that, not quite beneath me but still stretched out to gaze upon. I could think of too many ways staring at him could go terribly wrong, but it’s not like I’d ever get a less awkward chance to look my fill.
He shifted under my unpardoning stare, a blush peeking out from beneath his collar. Oh, he was on edge. What had he done?
He’s outed me, you see. He’d gone around to all my little friends and asked them about me. Asked them about my gay behaviors. Which men I hit on. When I’d started seducing Ajax. It felt very much not the point to snap about how I wasn’t seducing Ajax. And, while I knew better, I got caught in the trap anyway and had to put up with Potter assuring me he believed me now, because he’d talked to Ajax, and Trix, and Stephanie, and Iris, and mother fucking Weasley about it. He’d found out none of them even knew I was gay.
Honestly, he was the worst fucking auror in the world.
Again, I got caught in a trap Potter didn’t even know he was setting for me and slopped out my declaration that I was not gay.
I saw the minute widening of Potter’s eyes, the slacking in his lips, the subtle etches of surprise across his face. Much like me he was caught in a trap he had the chance to evade but maybe he didn’t want to. What he wanted, or, perhaps, what he was compelled to do, was point out I had kissed him.
What of it? I kiss all sorts of people.
That was not a good defense, not that I should need a defense, because Potter had just conducted an investigation in my so-called love life and he knew I wasn’t kissing anyone. Still, I could practically see the cogs turning in Potter’s head as his mind focused in on all things Draco Malfoy. His scrutiny itched over my skin, looking for Salavazar knows what. Secret queer markings that revealed inclinations as easily as the other Mark I’d once accepted.
I swiftly changed my answer to say I’ve kisses girls, too, and by Potter’s logic that means I’m straight.
Bisexual, Potter negotiates, because in his mind this is very much a negotiation. Or maybe just my identity is another puzzle he has to be the one to solve. He didn’t look contrite, anymore. The tension running through him wasn’t holding him in check, it was preparing him to spring. Possibly at me, as if taking hold of me would help him prove exactly what I was. He’d been apologizing, damnit. He had done something truly despicable. When the fuck had we moved away from that?
Where I should have started was to tell him off for making assumptions and being disrespectful towards me. Where I went instead was, the kiss didn’t fucking mean anything and Potter was a creep for not letting it go.
Snapping at Potter had never made him go away. I used to like that about him. It had been reassuring that I could make him focus on me so completely with only my vitriol. I still liked the feel of his eyes on me. Even here, when he sought to flay me open and expose what I kept hidden deepest. His jaw was set in that way I liked. Frustration making him stern. Emotion making him vulnerable.
Why did I kiss him? He asked it out loud to my face like it was something to discuss.
Hadn’t he dragged me in here to apologize? Yeah, no thanks. Apology not accepted. Time to go.
Potter sprung from the desk with all his coiled energy to reach me before I could leave. He put a hand on my arm. I expected it tight and demanding like Weasley had been the time he grabbed me. It wasn’t. It was gentle, a soft entreaty. I’d have fought against him if it were anything more, but found myself pausing just because he asked.
Did I mean it, when I said the kiss meant nothing?
Oh, Potter. The things he could do to me with just his gaze. The way I’d yearned for it to stare at me with just half the longing I’d share in return. The way I could feel his eyes on me now. No different than how he watched me in school. How he studied me for his job. How he scrutinized my well being because he needed to save everyone and I was in dreadful need of saving. I’d given in just the one time to the hope his attention ever meant more than it had and now he wouldn’t let it go.
But I’d been wrong, like I was always wrong. He’d leapt away from me. He’d said sorry even when I was the one who overstepped. Hadn’t he dragged me in here to say sorry? The apology and my magnanimous acceptance of it got lost in all the traps we kept stepping in.
The lie that all things Potter meant nothing to me was ready on my tongue when Potter stepped closer, filling my space with the hard line of his body and the heat radiating off it. His hand stayed gentle on my arm. A second tentatively lifted two fingers with half a mind to stroke them over the lips that once kissed him. There was nothing tentative in the hard stare he pinned me with when he asked again.
Did I mean it?
My breath caught in my throat. The smallest gasp escaped my lips. My mouth hung parted open, trapped between silence and truth. I didn’t recognize this trap. I’d never seen Potter spring one quite like it, with soft caresses and those deep green wells in his eyes. It was the traps you didn’t understand that would most likely kill you. My gaze flickered from his eyes to his soft, parted lips.
Desperately, I lashed out. You’re the biggest idiot I ever met, Potter.
He huffed, somewhere on the edge of amusement and certainty. Oh shut up, Malfoy.
Then, as if he didn’t trust me to listen, he shut me up himself. He leaned in, tilting his head to slot his lips perfectly against mine. His mouth left open just enough to tease me with soft, warm heat. It was a trap. The most alluring trap. And I gave myself entirely to it, to hell with the consequences.
I couldn’t tell you which of us flickered out the first tongue, teasing and begging all at once. Maybe it was me. Potter couldn’t be as needy as me. One hand was fisted in my hair, gripping this shy of pain, unyielding as he guided me into deeper, open-mouthed kisses that at least one of us moaned into. It was definitely me that plastered my body up against his. I positively tingled when skin met skin. Potter definitely was not as needy as me. Those sounds had to be mine. His hands dropped to my waist to slot me against him the way he liked, driven on by my enthusiasm.
I couldn’t claim his growl. That was his and his alone. Like his strength, strong enough to reach down to my thighs and lift me, leaving me squealing as he swung my body so he could drop me on that desk and splay my legs open so he could step between them. I couldn’t claim I alone was affected. Not when his hard on was right there, grinding against mine.
Merlin wept. I might have come then and there like a shame faced teenager, so little control did I have. I was positively shaking with sensation.
It was a jarring thud that stopped me. Or maybe the jarring sensation of Potter pulling away when he heard the sound. Someone’s attempt to break through Potter’s lock.
I had a front row seat to Potter’s expression as the lust-fueled haze lifted and he realized where he was and what he was doing there. Rapid blinks were a marker of his clearing head. Kiss bruised lips a marker of what he now regretted.
It was so cold, so very cold, when he stepped away from me. In my room, he had tried to say sorry. It looked like the words were at the tip of his tongue again.
I’ll admit, I didn’t catch what he actually said in its entirety. His words were rushed to get out before whoever it was broke through the door. Something about me being in a vulnerable state and him taking advantage. Something about responsibility. Something said from two meters away with the knowledge he wouldn’t be coming back.
“Am I unlovable?” Rattled around in my head, even though I don’t need to ask Potter to very much know the answer.
The door unlocked for me when I marched out, shoving between students waiting for a class, all the while Potter was still talking. Sorry, he said. Always sorry.
My skin was marked by nothing but faint memories of what it had felt like to be wanted. I wanted to claw at it. Make the sensations real, make them last so no one could say they never happened. I was brainstorming how I could make that happen when Trix found me.
One look. They only needed one look at my face.
They dragged me to the library to study on a thin pretext that Ajax would need me. They sat me between Ajax and another second year, Parker, who had the same upcoming exam. The group never, not once, brought up the interrogation Potter had subjected them all to.
Ajax would nudge me, though, when my mind started drifting. When I reviewed which cubbies in the shower room were left unlocked and which of those would most likely hold a razor. The nudge tingled, an unexpected pressure along my skin. A grounding in this moment before Ajax asked something he already knew the answer to just to give me a reason to talk.
Surrounded by these people, who I suppose were my friends, I didn’t let myself cry.