Draco/Hermione (touch-starved)
There were certainly more conventional ways to be touched, but Draco liked the professional distance that his arrangement with Hermione afforded him. Intimacy was a tricky thing for someone unfamiliar with the nuances of it and he’d gone rather too long in life without having picked it up that trying to handle it now felt clumsy, like a teacup on the wrong saucer.
So he went to see Hermione every three weeks and had his needs met.
She had an easy way about her, happy to take control once she’d established how he liked things on his very first visit. And once the formalities of each subsequent appointment were met — did he want it longer this time? A cleaner edging or something more rough and natural? — she got right to work without needing further instruction nor conversation.
He liked that most about her — the way she understood him with only a few words and then let the silence fill between them, a pleasant buffer that let his mind slip away in that blissful little way he so needed while she carded her hands through his hair, warming him to his soul.
She was meticulous with him, precise in a way he’d grown to appreciate. She helped him be his very best, externally as was her focus, but inside, too. He could always tell when he’d gone too long without it, his nerves fraying with almost no stimulus and his moods sinking lower and lower until he was snapping at his coworkers and brooding in his armchair by the fireplace.
But when Hermione touched him — when she got her hands and her tools on him — he let it all slip away. It aggravated him that his psyche demanded touch from another person with such regularity. He’d tried to replicate her actions in the privacy of his shower, but it wasn’t even close to the same. His body knew it was him, and so ignored it.
It was frustrating as all hell, to need someone else. But the careful scratch of her nails against his scalp never failed to send a cascade of satisfied shivers all through his body, zipping through him and resetting his nerves. Had he been a little less shy about it all, he was sure they’d elicit low groans from him, too.
The way she measured his length; the way she pressed his head down, fingers warm but sure on his neck; the grounding weight of her hands on his shoulders, collecting all his tension and then dispelling it with just a few idle brushes — all of it was just so...satisfyingly…good.
He’d come more frequently if he could manage it but despite the example set by his father, he was only a man and it took time to grow enough for it to be plausible to return to her. There was probably a potion he could take to speed things up because the truth of it was, he was often quite needy for it in between those three weeks.
Because touch-starved or not, it was just a fact of life: Hermione Granger gave the absolute best haircut.