something delicious about the way you hurt,
face cascading into itself
and only i still remember the normal.
when every breath stolen from me
funnels into your fuel,
i need you the same way
oxygen needs fire;
or was it the other way around?
you splitting my cells was
the last time my ribcage felt right,
and i will make every hair stand straight
just to feel you
on my skin
again.
tell me you know my voice too;
finger to mirror like i am
the jaw you’re running away from
and the fault line you’ve already become.
even better,
whisper it into my lips,
every eternal memory bending your brow
so i can inhale the smoke of pain
and crush it between our chests.
wait for me
the way i waste for you,
begging for the slice of suspended judgment
and crawling through my skin
to see myself in your eyes:
like knife through butter
like i am at the beginning
of all the dominoes
crashing into you
like you are holding the matches
and i am breathless for the verdict.
~
Draco enjoyed the bruise of being somewhere beautiful alone.
Well, “enjoyed” is the wrong word. There was no joy to it, or even contentment. It felt more like ripping off a plaster before a cut entirely healed and letting the air burn it – the sting more grounding than letting the wound bridge itself back together. Sitting on a shelf of rock above the turbulent shore, Draco liked that no one knew where he was, that the roiling waves matched and sometimes even drowned the calamitous chatter inside his head, and that one shift in his seat was all that stood between breathing and breaking.
A couple weeks ago, his mother– after an admirable few years attempting to cushion the impact of his various moods and tempers– had simply run out of ideas and decided to try a remedy last popularized about 200 years ago: a trip to the sea, so the air could heal Draco’s delicate humors.
It was a mistake from the second Draco’s toes touched sand. His mother, regrettably still elitist, had chosen a beach well reviewed by several wizarding publications for its tempered weather, silky sand, and lovely, boundary-respecting birds. The problem was that the United Kingdom was an insufferably small island with only so many tolerable beaches, and that day all three-thousand-and-odd wizards in Britain had woken up, welcomed the full day of unmitigated sun, and decided to all spend it in the same 400 square meters where Draco was now brought to suffer.
Draco felt itchy as he walked past families seated on their blankets, giggling amongst each other until they noticed the shadow he cast and glanced up – eyes crawling up his black robes then widening when they stopped at his face. Sometimes it would end in a glower, or a sneer. Sometimes, inexplicably worse, they would simply exhort a short and rueful laugh before turning their back. No one spoke to him, of course, but that made the circumstances worse. It imbued the air with tension, like everyone on the sand had strung up an arrow aimed directly at Draco, and they were all waiting for someone to shoot the first one.
Draco tolerated it all for about twenty minutes before he abandoned his mother and walked briskly away, squinting into the sun as he followed the shore until the crowds diluted and the flecks of sand began to enlarge into coarse pebbles that poked through the soles of his shoes. Here, the wind was rougher with his hair, the sea roared as it shattered itself on the rocks, and when Draco turned around, he could not even pinpoint the last place he had seen a person.
Looking up, he saw a cliff of worn rock balancing itself about ten meters above the pebbled shore. It looked so much like a seat that he wondered if someone had been here previously and transfigured it. However, a second survey around the place convinced him that he was alone, which was both relieving but also a bit irritating in that even his own mother hadn’t cared to follow after him. Draco reasoned that if he was going to be bitter about that, he might as well sit down.
It was a simple climb to the top, crawling between large boulders that cascaded down the cliffside. When Draco finally dangled his legs over the shelf, a punch of wind directly to the face rendered him breathless for a moment. After it relented, and salt air replaced the vacuum in his lungs, Draco found that he was mindlessly peaceful in a way he rarely felt. Like the shore was reflecting back every bit of animosity he felt, in a taciturn equilibrium.
Draco returned several times after that, with no particular schedule or order to it. Whenever he felt particularly airless while languishing in the manor, he would apparate directly onto the cliffside and let the sea breeze beat the pattern of breathing back into him. His mother didn’t seem to mind when he returned several hours later with disheveled hair and red cheeks. If anything, he suspected she felt a reprieve at his temporary absence.
Draco was having such a time now, swinging his feet idly in the air and watching sun beams bounce and then slip among the churning waves. Whenever his meditation was interrupted by the sudden compulsion of a memory that twisted his stomach, he turned his mouth directly into the indifferent wind.
When there was movement below him on the shore, he at first assumed that it was a glare of the sun, or a stray wave. However, when the movement consolidated itself into a mass of color, Draco’s eyes flew to it and with great distaste found that a person was walking into his landscape. He examined their profile as it advanced closer, hair blown nearly horizontal by the wind, and when the breeze paused and the hair settled into a voluminous waterfall, Draco gasped, then cried out indignantly.
Hermione Granger on his beach. Hermione Granger transfiguring a handkerchief into a blanket and sitting down on his beach, like there weren’t a million other places in the world where she would be welcomed. He watched, so irritated he could scratch himself out of his own skin, as she folded her knees to her chest, placed her chin on top, and after a brief, pregnant pause immediately burst into tears.
It was exactly how he remembered it. The instant sobs. When Granger was upset, the whole castle would vibrate, and her face would tighten like a dam, and then any little thing could set her off. Usually Weasley. Sometimes simply a concerned look from an unfortunate bystander. She always cried angrily, never sadly, quivering with rage as if she was about to suck all surrounding matter into her vengeful orbit.
As Draco’s annoyance curled behind his sternum, there was relief in how familiar it felt. Like slipping on a well-loved coat. It was something he didn’t have to question, like a law of physics. Granger slips into hysterics, he slips into his taunting; the universe balances as they chase each other in an endless circle of cause and effect and cause. He almost forgot it had been over three years since they were last in the same space, eyes avoiding each other as he was led from the courtroom. Even longer than that, since they had last spoken to each other.
Knowing that made Draco crave igniting the match again, to prove this was something he could still trust. The laws of Granger, so to speak. He had always thought her predictable, her emotions shouting across the lines of her face, and he needed her to still be, now. He needed to be reassured that there were still tenets of his world that could not be upturned.
He picked his way down the boulders, hands in pockets, until he stopped a few meters behind Granger. Gazing at her back as she obliviously wiped at her cheeks, Draco felt the most control he had all year.
He cleared his throat. “I was here first.”
Granger’s spine stiffened straight, then he heard a wet swallow before she shuffled around, still sitting as she squinted up. Even though he was expecting it, he nearly startled as he stared back into dark eyes illuminated by defiance, tears clinging like dew drops to her eyelashes. It was a concentration of more emotion than he had probably felt in the last month.
She glared directly in his eyes without examining the rest of him, almost as if she was expecting him to be here.
“What do you want?” she snapped. Draco looked away from her eyes and down at his hands.
“I want you…” Draco paused, leisurely scraping under one fingernail with another, “...to get off my beach.”
She snorted an angry huff, which thrilled Draco because he recognized this too. This was easy in a way that nearly nothing was anymore. She was still pulling from the same handful of sounds he knew her to make, as reliable as the sun.
“I wasn’t aware that Malfoys owned any uninhabited shores. Surely if you did, this place would be a lot tackier. Some merchandising stands, perhaps. Dead wildlife on display. You know.”
Draco merely grinned malignantly. “And what’s your big idea? Resort of swots? Seaside haven for the most insufferable whimpering freaks of every class to congregate and condescend each other to death? Seems like a societal service. I’d fund it.”
“I don’t know about that ,” Granger said. “Seeing as how you would fit right in.”
Draco bit his lip to tamp down his smile. He only wished Granger would get up. She remained sitting, now frowning upwards at some point in the sky like he wasn’t even worth her attention. He wondered if he could still goad her into physical violence. He wasn’t masochistic enough to want a punch, but a shove, perhaps. Something that allowed him to look right into her endless eyes as they filled with fury and the specific indignant hurt that was unique only to him.
“Why are you crying anyway?” he sneered. “Weasel forget how to pronounce your name again?”
She rolled her eyes but remained looking just past him.
“Is it that life simply isn’t the same when you’re not receiving an Outstanding for fucking breathing?”
She merely sighed.
“Or is it that you just realized you wasted precious years of your life wiping the sniveling arses of two preening dunces who would rather bang each other than you?”
That made her face snap to his, a line immediately creasing between her brows. “When are you going to get it over with already and just call me a mudblood?”
Draco’s smirk immediately dropped as his heart rate jumped to careening speeds. He felt pounding in his head and sweat blooming on his back as he tried to shove away memories of that word , always cackled or shouted or screamed, before there was a sickening flash of light that made Draco’s eyes wince close. Memories of Granger’s screams permeated his brain and he struggled to breathe as he fought to forget the sounds.
I was just restarting our game , he thought. Does she not know that this was supposed to be a game?
He waited for her to continue, to call him an evil Death Eater or worse, but instead her face just began folding into itself as Granger began to withdraw out of reach. With her lowered eyelids, Draco could not tell if she was now sad or upset. Draco’s stomach sank. Since when does Granger give up?
He wiped his slick palms on his trousers and watched numbly as she turned away from him, carefully folded up her blanket, and apparated away without another utterance.
His gaze remained fixed on the ground before him as his breaths in his ears drowned out even the churning of the tumultuous sea.
~ ~ ~
The more Draco thought about it, the more indignant he became.
How dare Granger come to my spot and make me uncomfortable?
If Granger thought he was so irredeemable, she should have just said it. She should have made him listen to her final judgment of him instead of condemning him to stew in it alone.
Being in the manor only served to aggravate him and agitate memories he failed to bury. Draco lasted two days of this before he decided to return to his shoreside cliff, confident that in any case, he had totally and completely driven Granger from his life.
After he spun and opened his eyes, though, he was met with curls falling down a small back. Hermione Granger, colonizing not only his beach, but his exact seat on his particular cliff. It was so far above the ground where she had laid her blanket that he wondered how she even knew to climb up here, unless last time she had somehow seen him sitting there before he had seen her.
She remained silent and faced the sea, although surely she must have heard the slap of Draco’s shoes against the rock as he landed. He cleared his throat just in case.
When she did not acknowledge him, he offered, tentatively, “I think you’ve gotten lost.” He waited for even a sigh that did not come.
He advanced towards her, careful not to come closer than a few meters away.
“I usually sit up here,” he said. “And I think you wanted to build Resort of Swots down there.”
He could now see that over her shoulder her hands were resting on the pages of an opened journal, quill trapped between the fingers of her right hand as if she had been writing before he arrived. He watched her minutely rotate her body and her eyes twitch to his before they shied away to examine the ocean.
“If you want your seat back,” she replied, “you could always just push me off the cliff to my untimely death. No one would even know.”
Draco instantly prickled with irritation, rankled by what felt like accusation. “Why do you keep speaking to me like I’m– I’m–” Bigoted. Corrupt. Destructive. Murderous. Draco fell silent, afraid that speaking it out loud would be a confession.
“Aren’t you?” Granger asked coolly.
No , he thought. At least, not the murder part. Instead, he simply pressed his lips together.
Granger sighed and shuffled the pages of her journal. “Well, either leave or sit down, if you’re not going to murder me. You’re looming.”
Draco, feeling incredibly awkward and hardly in control of his limbs, sat cross-legged two meters away from Granger, joining her in her examination of today’s waves. Several times, he couldn’t help but glance at her face, desperate for clues on how to proceed, but she remained practically serene as she turned towards her journal and began writing again. Her cheeks were relaxed and her lips had a gentle tilt as the sunlight traced the slopes of her brown skin. Her hair floated softly around her, buoyed by a mild breeze, and every so often she chewed on her bottom lip until it was pink.
Draco found the scene entirely unfamiliar, which was disconcerting, and he wondered if that was what she usually looked like when he was not around.
A stroke of panic split Draco as Granger suddenly looked up and her eyes connected with his. He coughed and quickly shifted his gaze away, racking his brain for a distraction to offer.
“Or you could push me off,” he volunteered. “It would certainly make you feel better than however you were feeling a few days ago.”
Draco felt Granger’s continued stare.
“Really,” she stated.
He exhaled half a snort. “I could tell you were plotting to finish the job when slapping the shit out of me lit up your face more than getting your exams back.”
Silence. He couldn’t resist and glanced back. Granger was looking at her book again, quill stroking over the pages, although he thought the corner of her mouth was curved slightly upwards.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Granger seemed to wait for a punchline, and after a minute, when he said nothing more, she responded. “Well, currently I’m drafting an editorial for the Prophet about ceding stolen land back to centaurs.”
“Granger,” Draco exclaimed, affronted. “Don’t tell me you came here and stole my one meditative spot just so you can do some bloody homework .”
“Well, previously I was journaling and trying to reason out some of my emotions. But after you arrived I thought the ambiance wouldn’t support such sensitive activities.”
“You’re correct. I loathe emotions.”
To his surprise, Granger laughed– a single peal that bounced off the cliffside.
“I know,” she said.
“You’re not going to cry again, are you? Last time was bad enough. Although if you’re going to hang about Weasley, I suppose crying is expected to be a daily occurrence.”
She seemed to hesitate, then shook her head. “Haven’t seen him in weeks. We broke up.”
“Oh? What for?” Draco asked, although he hardly expected an answer.
Granger chewed on her lip, watching the waves. When Draco thought she had utterly forgotten he had even spoken, she opened her mouth.
“I guess there were just too many irreconcilable differences between us.” She thought for a moment, then smirked to herself. “For one, I didn’t feel like having a thousand children.”
Draco failed to contain a shocked laugh, taken aback by her nonchalance.
“You weren’t crying about him last time, were you?”
“No,” she sighed. “It was over something far stupider.”
“Hard to believe.”
She rolled her eyes and returned to her scribbling.
“You’re not going to tell me?” Draco asked after a few minutes.
“Hardly seems fair. I haven’t ever seen you cry, for starters.”
“Missed the boat on that one, I’m afraid. The show closed years ago.”
“So you come out here to what, brood and sulk?”
“No, I come out here specifically to siphon secrets out of Hermione Granger.”
Draco heard a disbelieving scoff of amusement, which unexpectedly made him feel triumphant. He watched her close her book, tuck her hair behind her ears – a Sisyphean endeavor against the breeze – and fold her knees to her chest, still staring down at the water.
“I was just trying to enjoy a holiday on the beach,” she relented. “Should’ve known better, because every time I’m in public I don’t get to be invisible, or normal. Everyone either wants to talk with me, or take a picture with me, or ask me questions about the worst part of my life. They still see me as the same person I was three years ago and are completely uninterested in anything that has happened since. It’s almost as if…there’s no point in me existing past that time, if that’s how everyone is going to remember me.”
A sarcastic retort rose on Draco’s tongue, but he swallowed it as he stared at the sky before him. The clouds had started to blush with the colors of dusk, and the growing dark allowed him some comfort as it masked his face. Hidden by shadow and surrounded by a scene of natural liminality, it seemed that whatever they said hardly counted as real. Draco was compelled to honesty.
“I completely understand,” he replied simply.
He fiddled with a loose thread on his trousers, then imitated Granger’s pose and rested his chin on his folded knees, watching the pink sun bury itself into the glistening waves. When he peeked at Granger many minutes later, she was already looking at him, brow furrowed curiously and eyes traveling across his forehead, between his eyes, and down his nose to the point of his chin.
He slowly turned his head back.
Neither he nor Granger said anything more. They both quietly watched the rest of the sunset, three meters apart.
~ ~ ~
The next time Draco returned to the shore, he fully expected Granger to be there, as integral to the landscape as the smell of brine or the sound of distant gulls. When the fog of apparition cleared and he found the cliff empty and the shoreside barren, he tried to convince himself that he did not feel put out.
He lowered himself to his usual spot, but the wind was particularly aggressive today. As it blew bits of sand into Draco’s mouth and traced goosebumps even on his covered arms, he made up his mind to leave. That is, until he heard a pop behind him and he released a breath he had been holding without his own notice.
As he turned around, Granger was smoothing down the skirt of an arctic blue dress, fabric light and nearly translucent as it whipped around her thighs in an imitation of the sea below. It hung from her shoulders by two thin straps, the light, delicate lines drawing a lovely contrast against her brown skin. The top half of her hair had been pinned back from her face, although gusts from the ocean were currently undoing that within seconds.
Draco swallowed dryly and looked away.
“Granger, did you think this was a date?” he jeered, commanding his eyes to roll upward. Then he immediately regretted it. Was that too far? He and Granger were not friends. Anything could agitate the fragile, taciturn truce they had somehow reached.
Luckily, Granger ignored him. She somehow produced her wand from a bag so minuscule Draco hadn’t even noticed it hanging from her wrist, then cast a shield against the wind that allowed Draco’s hair to gracelessly flop back down over his forehead. He forced his face to remain neutral as she drew closer and sat down next to him, folding her legs beneath her and self-consciously tugging down the hem of her dress.
“Harry and Ginny’s engagement party,” she explained.
“Oh, really? What was the ratio of gingers to civilians?”
“Not high enough,” she sighed. “Harry wanted to invite practically everybody we knew from school. I had to listen to Cormac McLaggen complain about his bloody fungal infection for twenty minutes as we waited in line for punch. Shouldn’t have smiled so much, as it encouraged him. And he’s invited to the wedding as well, of course.”
“Rude,” Draco said. “I would have thought I made more of an impression on Potter’s life than Cormac fucking McLaggen.”
“Not that it would have mattered.” Granger rolled her eyes. “Harry and Ginny disappeared to gods know where within the hour. I left after it was clear they weren’t coming back.”
She seemed to think for a moment, then opened the clasp of her bag again and began carefully wriggling out the neck of a wine bottle. “Want a drink? It’s on Harry.”
“Did you rob Potter blind while he was off shagging the girl weasel? What else is in there?”
Granger set the bottle aside, then pulled out two long-stemmed glasses that she placed between them. Next, she produced a corkscrew.
“Of course,” Draco noted. “Got a string quartet in there too?”
“Unfortunately, Harry blew the budget on inviting the entirety of the wizarding race.” Granger wrapped her fingers around the bottle and began pushing the corkscrew into the cork.
“Here, let me,” Draco offered. When Granger looked up at him, a curl of hair falling into suspicious, narrowed eyes, he inexplicably felt embarrassed.
“So I don’t have to watch you fumble with it,” he explained, ignoring the sweat that had sprung to his palms. After a beat, Granger handed him the bottle.
He uncorked it silently, watching the vapor curl from the wine. He leaned forward and poured a single splash into Granger’s glass, barely covering the bottom, before he filled his own glass halfway.
Draco laughed at Granger’s expression, eyes widened and jaw dropped in the beginnings of outrage, before he swapped the glasses and set the filled one in front of her, smirking.
They sipped while watching the waves pound the pebbles below. Draco ignored that her thigh, barely shrouded in a tantalizing tangle of blue, was centimeters from his own.
“I know I’m better company than the band of buffoons you generally keep,” he said after some time, “but was it that bad today that you had to get drunk immediately afterward?”
He was met with pensive silence. Draco hated that Granger was in the habit of taking a long pause every time he asked her a question, as if maybe she wouldn’t respond to him after all. He frowned at the horizon.
“Everyone mostly told stories from school,” she finally muttered, fidgeting with the hem of her dress. “It’s as if nothing’s changed.”
“And you want it to?”
She sighed. “Well, I don’t think we can pretend we’re all still the same people from before. That was a lifetime ago.”
She met Draco’s eyes and he tried not to notice as she bit her lip.
“...Right,” he said, uncomfortable as Granger once again examined him. She didn’t hide it at all, openly shifting her gaze around his face.
He traced the rim of his glass, then slid his fingers down and picked it up, clinking the tip against Granger’s glass. “Well, cheers to that. Otherwise I wouldn’t have the pleasure of years on, having you personally steal for me very mediocre wine.”
“Right,” she said. Granger swept back her hair and offered a shy smile that was so disarmingly genuine and free from guile, causing her eyes to wrinkle, that he instinctively smiled back, hardly in control over his lips.
The wind had picked up, or else Granger’s shields were beginning to weaken, as a sudden frosty gust from the sea blew so hard against them that Granger leaned into his shoulder. When the force dissipated, she remained there – cheek lightly touching the top of his arm.
Draco could feel that she was shivering, and looking down he saw goosebumps trailing up and down her bare arms. She had folded them across her chest in an attempt to shrink, which was a behavior completely foreign to Draco. Granger didn’t make herself smaller. Even at her most angry, her most pained, he had always known her to enlarge – hair pumped high with the forceful way she commanded life. He didn’t know what to do about the quivering woman hovering near him, barely brushing his shoulder like she was afraid to touch him at all. He frowned at how fragile she looked.
Slowly, he shifted the arm near Granger, which made her immediately sit up in mortification, and moved his arm behind her back. Hesitantly, he touched the tip of her far shoulder, lightly ran his fingers down her pimpled flesh, and finally gripped her arm and pulled her closer.
Granger was so stiff he thought he made a mistake, but a few seconds later she relaxed, resting her cheek back into him as her hair tickled his neck.
“I forgot my jacket at the party,” she said. “In my haste to avoid any further acquaintance with Cormac and his mushroom-ridden feet.”
Draco’s fingers twitched on her cold arm. “Well, don’t tell Potter you ditched his party to be with me.” Since she was just there , practically on top of him, he brushed his head against hers to whisper in her ear, “He might die of jealousy when he remembers I’m the one that got away.”
She laughed, although it seemed forced, and trembled harder beneath his fingers. Her breath warmed the side of his face. Her curls surrounded him with the faint fragrance of roses. He noticed a joyful spray of freckles sprinkling themselves across her cheek. It was one new discovery after another of land he thought he had already charted.
Thoughts muffled by a symphony of senses, and judgment blunted by cheap alcohol, he leaned incrementally forward and placed a soft, ghostly kiss below her ear.
He felt her inhale sharply, then exhale gradually, muscles relaxing beneath his hand. When she didn’t move further, he was encouraged and slowly slid his other hand across her stomach, soft and vulnerable beneath silky fabric, to wrap around her waist and draw her even closer. He coiled into her as he pressed a second kiss lower on her neck, longer and wetter as he tasted the salt on her skin. She sighed directly into his ear, and he felt entirely untethered from his body. His teeth had just begun to scrape her neck, the crest of a moan vibrating low in his throat, when she suddenly pulled back.
He looked up in alarm and found her narrowing her eyes at him and ravaging her lower lip with her teeth. Her nostrils flared as she struggled to regain her breathing, panting slightly.
“Don’t…be cruel,” she gritted out.
Draco’s lips were still tingling. “I’m…I’m not— what? ”
She shrugged herself free of his arms and slid further away. “It must be a big joke to you. Trying to seduce a mudblood.”
He flinched, thoughts shaken from him as he tried to keep up with the alternation in atmosphere.
She had scooted so far that she had escaped the limits of her shielding charm, and the wind was now gleefully scattering her curls.
“Or you think it’s some sort of sick prank,” she accused. “If you can get me, specifically, to want you.”
“No. ” Draco was so irritated he didn’t bother to withhold his anger as he spat it out. Did Granger think he was so morally decrepit that he was constantly plotting against her? Then a stab of hurt sunk his stomach. Or did she think that he was so soulless that he couldn’t even enjoy a kiss?
Granger turned her face away, vanishing their armistice as swiftly as it had begun. Draco had thought the delicate truce, with the talking and the wine and the looking, was itself the verdict that Granger had concluded about him. Instead, it was merely a period of suspended judgment before she slammed the door closed, deciding at last that she was too good to be touched by him.
As he glared at her, he surveyed the tightness of her jaw and cast about in his brain for the most hurtful judgment he could say about her. She shifted, looking down at her hands, which were back to fiddling with the edge of her dress. Her fingers were trembling as she lifted them to brush her hair behind her ears. It occurred to Draco that these were mannerisms of hers that he recognized, from long-gone years of watching her interact with Weasley. Insecurity.
Draco’s mouth turned sour. She thought he only existed to hurt her. And…wasn’t it true? Didn’t he use to love watching her face crack in fury, eyes ripping through a crowd of students to lock on him? When her vindictive palm finally connected with his face, hadn’t he felt like he won?
Well, that was before. When she used to meet his force to create equilibrium. Now, she wouldn’t even stand up to argue with him. As he watched her try to hide her shivers in the wind, line forming between her brows and eyes doggedly avoiding his, he saw how plainly she was not fighting back. He realized, sickened, that he could keep pushing her, and this time she would not even stop him from crumpling her entirely.
“Granger,” he said softly. She didn’t so much as twitch in response.
He practiced the words in his head, then mouthed them silently into the wind, over and over as he tried to awaken his voice.
“I’m…” He cleared his throat. “I’m sor-sorry.” He closed his eyes, blaming the stutter on the cold, even though the words felt bulky and unused in his mouth.
“I’m sorry for…everything I’ve done to you.” He took a deep breath. “And I’m sorry I didn’t do anything the night you were—”
“That’s quite enough,” Granger said sharply, making him freeze and putter out mid-word. Her arms were still folded and she did not look at him.
Get up, he prayed. Get up and pummel me. This time he would let her smear his blood down the cliffside, if it meant she would spring alive instead of further withdrawing, like he wasn’t worth even her passing attention.
Instead, Granger remained as still as if she were a fixture of the rock below her, the oceanic gusts whipping her hair so frantically that it obscured the expression on her face. As the minutes passed, Draco became terrified that she had already looked at him for the last time.
Wracked with anxiety, and shaking with the absence of her, Draco suddenly stood up to disapparate, desperate to leave before she could leave him.
~ ~ ~
In true allegiance to cowardly form, Draco practiced what he did best: hide.
He did not return to the cliff the next week or the week after that. The thought of having to bear Granger’s judgment was just as frightening as the thought of never seeing her again.
In fact, any thought of her at all was frightening. Draco felt confused, then worried, then resigned over how many times he replayed the memory of her flesh beneath his lips, followed by the wariness seeping into her mouth as she pulled away. The honey, and then the sting. The bite of forbidden apple before the great fall.
Draco tried to convince himself that whatever had passed between Granger and him was a rip in the universe before it was swiftly repaired. An improbable roll of dice that would not happen again. However, as time passed, Draco’s fingers only ached more with the loss of what they had once held.
Eventually, he became so miserable that he concluded visiting the shore again could not possibly alter his mood. In any case, he had waited long enough; he had to know. He had to return, one more time, to finally receive the answer to the question he was too afraid to ask.
When Draco popped back onto the cliff and found it abandoned, he told himself that was exactly what he expected, even though the sight made his ribs bend inward.
Well, he thought, as he walked to the cliff’s edge, that’s for the best. He lifted his eyes to the sea, preparing to bid it a final goodbye, but the glare of the unblinking sun reflected off the waves so strongly he had to avert his eyes down. And then, as easily as if a benevolent force was holding his chin and directing his head, his gaze immediately fell on a small, folded woman sitting below on the beach. Voluminous hair thoroughly caressed by the breeze, of course.
Draco’s pulse throbbed in his throat as he climbed and hiked his way down. With every step forward, he felt a stronger urge to bolt. He was clumsy with uncertainty as he crunched across the pebbles of the beach, announcing his arrival with the subtlety of a unicorn stampede.
When he was three meters away, Granger spoke without turning to glance at him.
“You came back.”
“As…did you.” Draco stopped and stood towering over a sitting Granger, feeling gangly and awkward and out of place.
“I thought you might not. It’s been nearly a month.” She finally looked over her shoulder, meeting his eyes briefly before glancing away sheepishly. “And I’ve been here quite a lot.”
“Oh? Waiting for me, are you?” Draco was too discombobulated to even manage a singular tone, at first starting with the air of a taunt and then ending with the breathlessness of a wish.
Granger rubbed her hands up and down the legs of her jeans as a contemplative silence fell.
“...Well,” she finally said. “It is your turn to bring the wine.”
This part of the game is easy, Draco thought. I know how to do this.
Draco cleared his throat. “Forgive me. I didn’t have anything suitable to meet your taste for mass produced, bottom barrel swill.”
“A shame. Now we have to talk sober.” Granger glanced up again, squinting as if he was the sun itself. “Do you want to sit down? You’re far too tall.”
Draco acquiesced and deliberately lowered himself to the ground, claiming a spot next to her but a measured distance away. “You’re right. The only thing I can see up there is the distress signal of your hair.”
“Original,” Granger mumbled.
They sat quietly watching the waves before them – calmer than usual today, but still thrashing upon the shore with roaring decisiveness.
After a tense few minutes during which Granger fidgeted and Draco wondered if he should just go drown himself, Granger sighed.
“What have you been doing?” she asked, hesitance diminishing her volume.
“Oh, the usual. A healthy daily routine of languishing in solitude, squandering my potential, and wallowing in regret about my future. Sometimes I even get spontaneous and switch up the order I do it.”
“Okay,” Granger said shortly, unamused. The conversation died there.
More agonizing minutes passed. With no preamble, Draco released a long-suffering sigh of his own, stretching it full with all the ennui of the past three years.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Granger. I’m unemployed, on account of the whole being a felon business, and I live with my mother, because no one else anywhere even wants to look at me. I go nowhere and see nobody, since I’ve fucked up possibly every personal relationship I’ve ever had.”
“Oh.” Granger rolled her eyes. “You should try feeling sorry for yourself even more, that should really help.”
“And you do what, Granger, wake up daily to the adoring cheers of thousands as the crowds part before your step and every mutter that falls out your mouth instantly becomes law?”
“If only,” she sighed. “I have to beg anyone with any modicum of power to listen to me. I’ve been trying to advocate for legislative reform these past few years, but I think my tolerance for it is drawing to an end. Nothing good ever passes and it takes a million years for the simplest of bills to even come under review. I’ve– well, I’ve considered that maybe I should go back for a mastery and…try to teach instead.” She aimlessly picked up a pebble and tossed it at the ocean. “You think that’s predictable of me. Going back to school.”
“Granger, I’m shocked senseless that you would even consider parting from Potter and the Weasel at all. I don’t think they have enough life skills between the two of them to even turn on a stove.”
“Malfoy, they’re not that bad and you know it.”
“Sure, they’re not that bad. They just hate my fucking guts.”
Granger turned her head to him and rested it on her bent knees, hugging her legs. “I think you overestimate how much everybody thinks about you.”
“Ouch.”
“I’m serious,” Granger said. “I think they would forgive a lot, if you apologized.”
“I’d rather swallow a niffler and have it dig out from inside me.”
“You apologized to me,” she said softly.
The invocation of that memory, so fraught with naked vulnerability and uncertainty, made Draco’s palms sweat. “That’s different. You’re…different.”
“You mean, from them? Or from before?”
“Before. Both. I don’t know.” Draco rubbed his palms on his trousers.
Granger began to say something, pressed her lips together, then opened her mouth again.
“Well, I think in order to evaluate the authenticity of such an apology, I need a… control to compare mine to. Since there were, erm, other circumstances leading up to the apology I got.” By the end, Granger’s cheeks blushed pink, which Draco was sure matched his own as he tried not to look at the soft skin of her neck.
He rubbed the back of his head and stared at the ocean before them instead. The waves closest to the shore were white with beaten foam, while the water just beyond the swelling waves loomed dark and formidable, stretching infinitely towards the horizon. Today, the sea seemed to intimidate all life away, void of any seagull overhead or teasing flash of a fish below. He wondered how cold the water must be, despite the presence of the sun. It looked very.
Draco shrugged. “Sure, I can go prostrate myself in front of Potter and the Weasel.” He stared dryly ahead as a corner of his lip quirked. “As soon as you can take a plunge into that ocean.”
There was perhaps half a minute of momentary peace before Granger abruptly stood up, brushing her jeans. “Okay.”
“Wait, what? ”
Granger caught his gaze and narrowed her eyes in challenge, a hint of a smile playing about her lips. “I’ve done worse.”
Draco’s eyes widened as he realized the irrevocable error of suggesting any sort of dare to a Gryffindor. “I didn’t really mean–”
He slammed his mouth shut when Granger grasped the edge of her jumper with trembling fingers, hesitated for half a second, then pulled it over her head.
“What are you doing?”
She started unbuttoning her jeans as a flush crept up Draco’s neck. “Well, I hardly think I can swim in my current attire.”
His gaze darted between the sea and her, nervous to look but unable to resist doing so. His pulse climbed as he took in long stretches of tanned limbs. She was wearing a simple black bra with a pair of dark blue knickers, the mismatch only serving to erotically highlight the spontaneity of the moment. Draco swallowed thickly.
Granger tossed her clothes in a neat pile on the ground, wand landing on top.
“You’re welcome to join, if you want.” She glanced at him, suddenly shy, then turned and began advancing towards the water.
Draco watched her approach the sea, convinced that he would call her bluff at any moment. When she stepped into a mischievous wave and did not stop, he panicked.
Stumbling inelegantly onto his feet, he kicked off his shoes and began unbuttoning his shirt, grateful that Granger’s back was to him. He certainly could not add accidentally inciting Granger’s unexpected and tragic drowning to his long list of sins. He shuffled out of his trousers, cringing as he revealed vast expanses of skin naive to the sun. Alone in only his boxers, Draco felt overexposed and vulnerable, like a snail spit out its shell – so soft that Granger could crush him with only her thumb.
He hurried towards the water and hissed when it first lapped at him, biting and foamy. He staggered several bold steps until the water was mid-calf. The coldness of the sea stole all feeling in his lower extremities, leaving him numb.
“Granger!” The water was up to her mid-thigh, her arms crossed over her chest as she picked her way deeper into the ocean.
“Granger, I think I can say this was a plunge successfully completed. I’ll go draft my apology straight away.”
Insufferable Gryffindor that she was, she merely continued. When she did not hear the splashing of his following behind her, she turned to question. Seeing him halted, and taking quite a beating from the waves crashing on his legs, she began to wade back.
“It’s worse when it’s more shallow. The waves are calmer out there.” She reached out and wrapped her fingers around his wrist, tugging him forward. “You’ll get used to the cold.”
Draco had no choice but to stumble along behind her or else fall face-first into saltwater. The rough rocks on the bottom cut into his feet, and he cursed Granger, himself, the sea, every dead wizard he could think of, and then a few alive ones for good measure.
She stopped when the water was deep enough that she appeared to be treading in it, although Draco, being a foot or so taller, could still reach the bottom with his feet.
“It’s not that bad,” she remarked, as if she were simply on holiday in the tropics and not in the middle of an isolated, merciless sea that rivaled the temperatures of the Arctic. She released his wrist and turned, having the audacity to smile at him.
“Strong work, Granger. You will have me dead of hypothermia yet. I hope you can at least return my beautiful body to my poor mother.”
Granger only smiled wider, with a mischievous tilt. Irritated at her good humor, Draco flicked some water at her, which she accepted with a laugh.
“I really am glad you came, Malfoy.” The playful expression on her face melted into earnestness, becoming almost apologetic. “I thought you wouldn’t.”
“Yes, well, someone has to corral that massive ego bef–” They were suddenly slammed by a roguish wave that had built behind them without their notice. With surprising violence, it sent a breathless shower across Draco’s face and knocked into Granger so roughly that she grabbed for his shoulders to anchor her.
She sputtered, her hair tragically plastered in thick tendrils across her face. Draco choked a laugh at the sight. In a bout of pity for her utter helplessness, he reached out and brushed the wet strands aside, helping free her face as she inhaled ragged gasps. When he swept the hair out of her eyes, he found himself gazing into a brown depth that was knowing and gentle in its richness. Distracted, his study of her traveled down the slope of a rounded nose and rested on full, plush lips, still parted and panting as she struggled to regain her breath. A hint of her top two teeth peeked out, just barely visible.
His gaze flicked back up to her eyes, which were now curious.
“What?” she asked, with a breathlessness that bordered on suggestive.
It was unclear who moved first. Perhaps it was Draco, who tilted his head, or Granger, who started to slide the hands on his shoulders upwards. Possibly, in a stroke of serendipitous cosmic balance, they both leaned forward at the same time. In an instant, Draco’s body lost all sensation except for the singular point where Granger’s top lip slipped between his own.
Their kiss was soft, ephemeral, and halting, as if both were afraid to startle the other into stopping. She tasted like salt and baptism; like the relief of finding a raft while stranded. Distantly, Draco felt her ankles settle on either side of his hips. Her hands now cradled the back of his neck, and she floated in the water still with some distance between them, like a sail hung to his mast. He allowed his hands to drop into the water and rest on her waist, further anchoring her.
When her lips parted further and his tongue touched hers, a throb of desire split his body in two. He pressed into her mouth and dragged her hips forward so that her torso was flush with his. She sighed in contentment as her hands slid further up to entangle in his hair. Mad with need, he chased her tongue recklessly, licking against it with desperation and opening his mouth wider to invite her in.
His hands, obscured underwater from the judgment of daylight, freely wandered. He shifted them from her hips to her back, holding her with two open palms that nearly covered the span of her. He followed her spine up to her neck, then traced the fragile wings of her scapula as they moved along with her grip in his hair. Sliding down her sides, his hands returned to her hips and brushed against the thin fabric of her knickers, which he followed backwards. With deliberate intention, he splayed each hand across an arse cheek and firmly squeezed, prompting a gasp into his mouth that shot a pang down into his groin.
He mindlessly explored her lips, teeth, and tongue with abandon, inhaling when she exhaled, swallowing every sound she sighed, clutching her like she was the one standing instead of him. Time seemed to expand indefinitely, until it snapped when he felt her muscles shift and her body infinitesimally pull back. He was so bereft that he grunted in disappointment and disapproval.
He opened his eyes as she leaned her forehead against his, their lips still a breath apart, peering into him with a face left open with honesty but hindered with lines of insecurity.
“Is this because you feel sorry for me?” she whispered.
“No.” He chased after her lips, but she drew back further.
“Is it because you think you have to do this, to repent or something?”
Staring into her eyes, he shook his head slowly.
“Then what is it?” she asked softly.
He studied the cartography of her face, landmarked by features he remembered so well and shaded with details he had only started to discover.
“Because I knew you,” he told her. “And now…I don’t.”
He thought of how little he understood of her life, both then and now, outside of the brief instances when they’d exchanged words. A bolt of unmistakable grief struck him as he realized that perhaps he had never really known her. Another way he had squandered all those reckless years.
“But I would like to,” he breathed, the words so quiet they barely fluttered from his lips.
Granger unwrapped her fingers from his hair and smoothed the stands down with such tender delicacy that he ached. When she was done, her hands settled on his shoulders.
“Draco.” His brows lifted as he watched her lips deliberately pronounce his first name. She hesitated, and the fingers on his shoulders twitched nervously.
“Are you going to hurt me?” she whispered.
Draco felt cavernously raw as he memorized her cheeks flushed pink with exertion; her front teeth nibbling haphazardly on her lower lip; her boundless eyes shining damp with questions. With every cell in his body, he needed this moment to not end. He needed her to not pull away. He needed whatever rip in the universe that had allowed them together in this moment to remain unrepaired, at least for a while longer. He felt seconds from shuddering apart, rent with anxiety that she was about to melt from his fingers, already craving the memory of this before it even ended.
“I think you could hurt me,” he answered truthfully.
Granger closed her eyes and nodded. With measured movement, she inclined her head and ghosted her lips over his, for just a moment, before she shifted and kissed his cheek, then his jaw, settling in his shoulder and wrapping her arms around his chest.
Returning her embrace, Draco thrummed with want . None of this was enough. He wanted to feel her skin without the shrouding slick of water on it. To hear her voice repeat his name like that, over and over, like he mattered. To remove every extraneous layer between them and to touch her unhurried and without the desperation that currently crawled beneath his skin.
He sighed, the yearning in him gaping wide. Trying to regain presence of mind, he rubbed Granger’s back and pressed his nose into her hair, inhaling both the brine of the sea and the grounding scent of roses. After a few tranquil moments, he realized she was shivering as the wind glanced coolly off their wet skin.
“We should head back,” he muttered. He felt her head as it nodded.
He shifted his hands to support her beneath her thighs and began walking towards the shore as she clung to him. As the water ebbed lower, he sheepishly realized he was not equipped to carry her without the buoyant assistance of water, so when the sea fell waist deep, he carefully slid Granger out of his arms so she could stand on her feet. They untangled, and he followed behind her with a hand on her lower back.
They separated at the beach to collect their discarded clothes. Draco picked up his wand, and in front of him Granger bent over to retrieve her jumper. His mouth dried as he watched trails of water run between the curves of her breasts and disappear into her bra.
He was caught immediately as Granger snatched her jumper and straightened, holding the fabric in front of her chest. A flush heated his chest and climbed up his throat. It deepened when Granger’s assessing eyes traveled down the lean planes of his torso, lingered on his boxers proudly showcasing a stiff outline, then revisited his face as a smirk pulled at her lip.
Draco cast a drying spell on Granger first, then himself. He dressed while rotated slightly away from her, the breeze from the ocean doing little to alleviate the warmth in his face and the static in his ears. He only realized she had said something when she cleared her throat and looked at him expectantly.
“Sorry, what?”
“I said, do you know how I could forgive you?”
“How?”
“If you take me to dinner right now. I’m famished.” Fully dressed, she straightened her clothes. “You’re paying, of course.”
“Granger, I’m insulted that you even felt you had to clarify.”
“Hermione,” she corrected, smiling at him with a radiance he certainly did not deserve but very much wanted.
“Hermione,” he repeated, crossing the beach to her like a moth to a flame. He gently cupped her face in his hands. She was still smiling, and when he leaned down, she rose to her toes to meet his lips halfway.
It felt like the unzipping of a new universe.
~ ~ ~
