"What are you reading?"
Hermione Granger jolted as two white hands settled on the table beside her elbows, and warm breath tickled her shoulder.
Turning her head, she observed the arms that imprisoned her with the same absent-minded agility with which he was bending to examine the pages of the book.
The Skull and the Serpent flickered in the play of shadows and muscles when he bent his arms further, enveloping her in their warmth.
His shirt sleeves were rolled up, his skin fair, and cursed ink adorned it. She knew that if someone else entered the library, he would have closed the cuffs, erecting a barrier of fabric and detachment. However, in her presence, he no longer felt the need to cover up.
Veins of bluish blood ran over a scar on the soul, the part of him that, intimate and painful, illogically she loved more than any other—what for him meant living every day with what he had done, never knowing rest.
From that bone casket flowed the Serpent of Slytherin, the dead dream and the nocturnal sea of his past pride, a salty and bitter expanse whose horizon would never know the golden edge of dawn.
Blond hair brushed against her cheek with its scent, and she closed her eyes. The heart, against its will, skipped a beat.
"I want to understand if it's possible to remove the Dark Mark."
She heard her own voice, hoarse, on the verge of cracking like the iron cage of eyelashes that held back so many tears to fill a tomb.
She felt him tense, understanding that he had sensed the emotion surfacing and that, once again, he didn't know how to handle it.
"I understand," he said. "It's understandable that it bothers you."
He narrowed the dark golden lashes and she wondered whether it was truth or just infatuation that gave her the impression they were so long as to cast lace-like shadows on his slender cheekbones.
She leaned to the side, and with a sigh, succumbed to the temptation to rest her cheek against his left arm, risking that he might push her away.
The dark caress of the Mark should have scorched her skin, she thought; instead, it only burned on the surface of her heart.
He jolted. Against her face, she could feel the rough hardness of muscles tense like strings, so she closed her eyes and waited.
"It doesn't bother me," she said in a low voice. "I thought it was what you wanted."
Then Draco Malfoy leaned even closer to her; his body traced a curve that gently enveloped her. For the space of a moment, his arms came closer, wrapping her in the shadow of an embrace.
"You can't know what I really want."
Withdrawing softly, he brushed her arm as if by accident but it seemed to her like he lingered with his fingers a moment too long for a mere coincidence, and she felt as if every single letter of the word 'Mudblood' ignited with warmth under his touch.
"I'm going to Lupin's office for our lesson," his voice, once tense, had softened, and, a breath away from her ear, it was a warm caress. "Don't make me wait too long, Granger."