Submerged
Harry looked up at Draco’s face, all dewy and soft despite the hardness of his voice. He eyed his lips, the way they curled inward like rose petals afraid to bloom. The air was magnetic. Sound could not puncture the living bubble whose walls encapsulated them, parting the world around their breathless moment. Harry’s spinal column acquainted itself with the tiled bathroom floor, hardly rippling the surface of his narcotic trance. An unspoken drop of water glistened out of a sink’s faucet on Harry’s left, universes away. Time was still.
“Did ya hear me, Potter? Are you listening?” Draco hounded with performative volume, his harsh tone seeming to come from a different mouth, the one beneath his nose dissonantly soft. The door’s slamming echo had almost lulled completely—still, the sound of Crabbe and Goyle’s deserting footsteps oozed beneath it. Draco pushed his knee deeper into Harry’s chest, blanketing a layer of warmth over Harry’s ribcage, quilting him with a weight only a mood away from pain. The movement forced a grunt out of Harry, and the sound of his own voice echoed off the ceramic walls and beamed a tremor through their moment.
“I…heard you, Draco,” Harry choked out, slowly reentering the scene. Threshold of indignity finally met, he twisted his leg around Draco’s and deployed the sputtering fumes of his dying stamina to topple their pose and assume Draco’s mounted station. Abruptly leveled with the ground, Draco’s eyes widened up at Harry, whose half-smile hardly tried to contain itself. Draco’s unblinking eyes and parted lips granted Harry a buzz of satisfaction—clearly his platinum haired peer hadn’t expected to be bested, but here they were.
“Draco,” Harry whispered, leaning closer to Draco’s face to exhale a piece of advice. “Give up.”
Draco inhaled sharply, sending a sibilant wave up to the room’s high ceilings and back down to Harry’s ears. For a moment, Draco’s face hardened, his eyes approaching a venomous squint, his jaw crawling forward.
“Not so soon, Potter.” He sneered. In a single breath he fisted the collar of Harry’s wrinkled white shirt and pulled it towards his own, their chests’ colliding with a muted thud, Harry’s face an eyelash away from Draco’s.
All at once, the two boys’ lips found one another. Draco moaned—a tiny, broken thing, and if Harry had been anywhere else but the seam of Draco’s lips, he would’ve heard agony. Even here, within this pulsing dance of tongues and spit, there was pain. Pain in the silent promises made in Draco’s gazes at Harry, their words stifled by the vindictive glares of Crabbe and Goyle beside him, stolen by the grapevine, spreading whispers about Draco’s chronic bachelorhood. Pain in the kind of pleasure whose name is used as a weapon. In the way Draco’s lips were soft and supple, tasting faintly of butterbeer, in the way they were just as intoxicating. Harry leaned further into Draco’s skin, leaving the pain behind him; Draco was now getting sloppy, hungrily mouthing at the skin around Harry’s lips. The two boys inhaled each other’s analgesic, filled with a maddening sweetness, drunk on the other’s breath.
Still, though, the heat of two bodies colliding can only blaze for so long. Eventually, the flame dies in the vacuum—so much space, but no room to breathe. Draco had pulled away, head turning to the side, freezing the entropy a little more with each deepening breath. The heat of Harry’s voracious gaze gradually cooled, allowing Draco to face him again. He caught Harry’s eyes in a failed escape, an apology trying to sneak out of Draco’s arrhythmic blinks. He lifted himself to a leaning position, folding inward, gaze landing on Harry’s hand, still lingering on his chest.
“Get the fuck off me, Potter,” Draco tried to sneer, though it wilted softly out of his mouth. He pushes Harry off of him, smothering to darkness the last bit of glow Harry had been holding on to, the embers now a hunk of charred wood.
Draco staggered up from the floor, cheeks a canvas of red. What the fuck have I done? He repeats the question in his mind, over and over again until the words mean nothing. Until he feels nothing.
With a final glance at Harry, who was still on the floor, Draco hastened towards the door, clutching something he’d fished from his pocket during his ascent. From the frigid bathroom tiles, Harry stared at Draco’s diminishing outline, noticing a shiver convulse through his body only by the way it shook the visual of Draco departing. He saw Draco’s hand wrapped around something, and before he opened the door, a folded piece of paper escaped Draco’s fingers, fluttering past a few tiles and landing at the midpoint between Harry and the shutting door.
He leaned there for an indeterminable amount of time, entranced by the doors sluggish in-swing, having no thoughts worth promoting to action. The heavy oak door clicked into its frame, haunting the room with a meek echo. As he acquainted himself with silence, Harry noticed a platinum hair clinging to his vest, woven in between the threads.