One Cloud

Sunlight, shifting with the swaying canopy of leaves overhead cast flashes of white light on whiter skin. Hermione felt heat hover on and within her cheeks. The heat from the sunlight was less intense. She was staring. If she looked up she knew would see him watching her stare. Best not to look up, then, she told herself as she touched him in what could only be described as an excess of her curiosity and his permission. 

She had felt him, through layers of clothing, pressed up against her. The first time she hadn't been positive that was what she was feeling. She had also been embarrassed by how it distracted her. He had been kissing her neck, long, unexpectedly strong, competent fingers holding her hair off her neck. It tickled. His lips and tongue on her throat, kissing, licking her skin, biting softly.  

It made the hair on her legs prickle, she noted with a sense of amazement at the strange sensation below her knees. It made her feel a bit cross, really. If there was anything that shouldn't be connected with kissing it was stubble below the knee. That was when she felt him, pressing against her thigh, and she almost asked him what it was when the question stuck in her throat with the answer that came out of a flash of intuition accompanied by a strangely prideful pleasure. At that moment she didn't have a proper vocabulary for what she felt against her thigh or anything more than a mental picture that seemed more accurate than real based on diagrams and pictures in an anatomy book.  

The word 'penis' sounded like exactly the right name to give a body part in order to promote chastity.   

There was nothing chaste in the feeling it engendered, pressed against her thigh in a recognizable shape and density that made her realize that she had felt it before without recognizing what the shape signified. This realization was fraught with unease because it was connected to boys that she would rather not think of as being alien creatures that feel and act on feelings that she might inspire but did not want to experience in connection to them. It would change things irretrievably and things are changing too fast and too much.  

But she knew what it was and why it felt the way it did against her and she was deeply curious about what it felt like to him. There was something almost clinical about the way she ran her fingertips down his spine. His hips flexed and she felt that shape rub against her through her jeans and it was the first thing she did deliberately, for no other reason than to experience how she might affect him. Up until that moment she had simply reacted to him, the overwhelming novelty of what he did to her. 

She had felt it pressed against her abdomen, her hip, her bottom—while his hands moved over her with layers of clothing in the way. She remembered escalation in her awareness of his sullen stare, in a note folded down so small and hard that the edges made sharp contact with her palm when he slapped it into her hand with an insolent glare. The first time he had touched her in any way she had backed up so sharply that her head had smacked against the stone wall on the third landing of the little used staircase of the old south bailey tower. He had taken her hand and licked his own thumb to scrub at an ink stain on her index finger.  

Sometimes she thought he liked it that she was wary of him.  

She kissed him first, for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with him, and she felt guilty later because he looked so pleased. Because he looked at her like she was so pleasing to him. The next time she saw him was in the library, and she knew that he had been there, waiting for her, when he grabbed her hand and pulled her into a corner where she couldn’t be seen and he had kissed her with his hands on her waist, taking little breaks where he rested his forehead against hers, his hips brushing against her so lightly that it was some time before she realized that he must have been feeling the shifting of his own clothing against his flesh. 

She had the thought then, in the library, that this was a boy who had kissed and liked kissing enough to take his time about it and was surprisingly willing to spend his experience on her. It was easier to think of him in neutral terms. When she closed her eyes she allowed herself to imagine that he was a visiting student. He was a temporary license. The Draco Malfoy that she had known up until fifth year had disappeared over the summer. There had been a threat of nastiness at the beginning of the year when he ambushed Harry on the train, but after that he seemed disinterested in picking a fight. 

He had held her hand against that hard shape while he stared at her with her shirt open to the waist and her bra shoved up over her breasts inside the broom shed. She had been aware of how out of control things had grown between them when he said that no one would ever think to look for her there. It should have frightened her, but he only smiled at her like he was grateful that no one would seek her there and he cupped her cheek, rubbing his thumb over her cheekbone, laughing softly when she smiled back at him. 

Today, they were still mostly dressed. It was Saturday so they were out of their school uniforms. He was ridiculously overdressed for a casual Saturday afternoon. She wondered if he found being mostly dressed as comforting as she did. The idea of being completely naked in front of him was one that she had mulled over. It gave her the same prickly feeling that she had now when she was thinking about it while she pretended to read, but she felt a sense of near panic when it seemed more likely that he would want to see more of her than the most interesting bits.  

Like her tummy. Her mother thought she was going through a bit of an awkward, body conscious stage when she picked out a modest one piece bathing suit for the annual Granger summer holiday trip. She had been completely cured of the ill effects of the curse Dolohov had flung at her in the Department of Mysteries, but Madame Pomfrey had warned her that it would take weeks for the suppurating welt across her chest to fade away. She copped to modesty and kept covered up, and now her tummy was doughy white, and she preferred to keep it to herself, or at least keep it from being noticed by a boy who had, in the past, seemed to have a knack for cruel observations. 

He was wearing a black, long sleeved sweater. His coat was under them. His gray flannel trousers were open with the weight of his belt tugging them down past his hips. Even his casual clothes were tailored. Her fingertips explored the surface of his skin, hot and smooth, and amazingly silky.  

She had seen pictures and diagrams. She was trying to relate them to what she was looking at and touching. He was uncircumcised, she realized with an odd shock that seemed to sizzle in several places at once. She was suddenly very aware that she was wearing a skirt on Saturday, when she usually wore jeans. He could see and touch a lot more of her that way, and if it got to be too much, she could always push her skirt down and push him away. In her head it smacked equally of boldness and cowardice, practicality and prurience.  

He leaned back on his elbows and she tore her gaze away from him to look at his face. He was, much to her surprise, blushing furiously, his lower lip caught between his teeth, smoky gray eyes half hidden by lowered eyelids. His chest was rising and falling rapidly. For a moment she forgot about her own awkwardness. 

"I don't know what I'm doing," she said as if she was confessing some shortcoming.  

His tongue stole out to wet his lips. "It's okay," he said. "Just . . ." he tried to smile and failed. "Hold it. Wrap your fingers around it, and—" he groaned when she obeyed him, and laughed meanly, but a bit breathlessly, when her eyes widened as his cock twitched against her palm.  

"I'm not doing this right, am I?" she guessed, frowning at her hand, wrapped around his cock. She was staring again. Her closed hand wasn't quite touching the plum shaped head of his cock or the nest of darker blond hair between his legs. It was just in between. She could see what she understood to be his scrotum. Given that he was so fair skinned it was a bit of a surprise to find it so . . . flushed.  

Was it supposed to look like that? It was fleshy and much darker than the glimpses of fair skin on his stomach, hips, and thighs. She frowned, wondering at the slightly puckered texture of his skin. It looked a little like ostrich skin, except— 

"Not really," he allowed, interrupting her train of thought when he shifted his weight onto one elbow to guide her hand. 

It was only fair, she decided. She had shown him where to touch her. She closed her eyes, feeling the slippery wetness between her slightly spread legs. The first few times he had touched her there had been clumsy for both of them. She had been embarrassed and a bit unnerved. He had been too . . . rough, not that it mattered so much when his finger slid inside of her. It was nice, but a little frustrating until she showed him how to touch her. 

He had paid attention, vaulting beyond anything she showed him initially. No one had ever paid attention to her in quite so rapt a way as he did when she showed him how she liked to be touched.  

Something wet touched her hand and she opened her eyes to examine the source of the dampness. The head of his cock was leaking some kind of clear fluid. She looked at him and he smirked at her, amused by her reaction.  

His face was tense with concentration, his attention centered on what he was feeling, and how she was affected by his touch—exactly as he looked when she showed him how to touch her. It was an expression that she understood in a way that made her feel like she couldn’t catch her breath for the shook of recognition. It was so different, so strange, to see in him what she felt in lessons, or inside the grasp of an idea that fired her imagination. Of all the things that she excelled at and was praised for, she never imagined that she would earn praise simply because she got so wet when he touched her.  

"You make me so fucking wet, Granger," he drawled and then laughed huskily at her expression. 

She started to move her legs together and he sat up, still guiding her hand in an up and down motion on his cock. He touched her face, kissing the corner of her mouth. His breath gusted unevenly against her lips. "It feels good," he said, his voice husky and soothing.  

The way he spoke, the way his breath gusted unevenly against her lips before he kissed her, made it sound more than good.  

She kissed him back, biting at his lower lip. Her fingers were becoming coated in the slick fluid from his cock. He turned his head, and she shivered when his tongue met hers. Wet, warm, velvety. He made a sound deep in his throat that made her want to rub herself against his chest. Her nipples hardened at the idea. His sweater was something absurdly expensive and soft, probably cashmere, and beneath it he was muscular and hard in a way that she could only describe as different than she expected. He wasn’t bulky by any means. She suspected that by tape measure, his waist was narrower, but there was something unyielding about him that she lacked. 

She had a fleeting thought that she hoped she would remember later to set on paper: thought is as conducive to desire as touch, maybe more so. She felt certain that she could set her observations about this down on paper because these were ideas that required examination. 

"So good," he crooned between kisses. "Love having your hand on me," he rasped.  

"Are you going to . . ." 

"Come?" he finished for her against her lips. She felt him smile. "Want me too? Want me to come all over your hand?" he made it sound like he was trying a little too hard to make it sound wicked and delicious. 

She did and she didn't. The conflict made her draw back from kissing to look at him. He followed her, one arm behind her thighs, his hand stroking the back of her leg, kissing her chest as he palmed the curve of her bottom, his head fitting neatly under her chin. He kissed the top of her breast.  

"I'm not sure what I want," she whispered, confused, and a bit ashamed of herself. He had never asked her to do anything for him. Undemanding was not a term that she associated with Draco Malfoy, but since this had started, he had been more give than take, willing to show her and tell her without demanding that she do things for him. He used his fingers to make her come and he had never demanded that she do the same for him.  

Her hand faltered on him and he gave it a squeeze. "Sssh," he soothed. "I'll tell you when to stop, if you want," he whispered back. "I'd rather be inside you, anyway. I think about it all the time," his fingertips stroked her arm, pausing at the inside of her elbow, bringing up gooseflesh as he cupped her elbow, pushing his face into the crook of her neck.   

That wasn't exactly what she meant. She had been worried about what would happen if he came, envisioning a messy and possibly unattractive gush of . . . stuff. She was more afraid of reacting badly, of appearing inept or foolish, but his words had a curious effect on her. She ran her hand up the length of his cock, feeling the head of his cock against her palm, fleshy and slick, squeezing lightly as she imagined it rubbing against her, pushing inside of her.  

She didn't want him to come on her hand because she didn't want to be embarrassed by her reaction to his orgasm. And because she wanted him to stay hard like this and fuck her while he panted against her neck and moaned, like he was now.  

Just thinking the word 'fuck' made her face go hot and she felt shaky inside. It was a bad word. It wasn't the kind of word she should associate with lovemaking or sex. Though as words went it wasn't as bad as 'cum'. Just seeing it written that way had made her feel queasy at the possibility that it wasn't simply misspelled. It was like someone had corrupted a perfectly good verb, while 'fuck' had the integrity of being a word that didn’t sound like a corruption of another word. It sounded harsh and crude, and she kind of wanted to hear him say it.  

He was pushing her skirt up, his palm pressing up between her legs to rub her through her wet knickers. "That's it," he groaned, his lips opening over her throat. "I'm so close, baby. If you are going to stop—" he was kissing her neck, feverishly, licking her skin and then sucking on it. When she didn't stop, his hips rotated, pushing his cock harder in to her hand. "Don't stop," he urged, and then laughed a little at his own about-face on the subject, his fingers slipping over her knickers.  

She could feel his thumbnail scratching against the wet panel of her cotton underpants and opened her legs wider, her knee sliding dangerously close to his balls as she clumsily shifted to straddle his thigh. The loose leather of his belt fell against the inside of her thigh and she pushed her face into his neck, her lips latching onto his skin when he tilted his head back to make room for her. 

"So wet . . . sweet . . . want to . . . yes . . . faster," he said hoarsely, making her buck against his fingers as two of them pressed against her and then slid against the saturated panel of her knickers. She felt the vibration of his voice under her lips and it seemed to race from her lips, to her nipples and down, down, down to hum against her clitoris as she imagined his fingers sliding into her while she felt him fumbling to touch her through her underwear. 

His hips jerked as he came, thick, white come spilled on his sweater and catching in the fibers. Before she knew what was happening he was pulling her down into the silky warmth of his coat spread over the ground, ignoring the mess on his sweater and trousers as he peeled her underwear over her hips.  

She was vaguely thankful that she had kicked off the chunky sandals that he had derided as ugly. The silky fabric of her skirt pooled against her stomach as he pushed it out of his way.  

"I never wash my hands after I make you come," he told her as he pushed her legs further apart. "Do you know why?" 

His fingers were spreading her apart. The question had to be rhetorical. She could barely think, much less form sentences. Her hand was covered in sticky, warm semen. She wanted to wipe it off. At the same time she wanted to taste it, and was a bit repelled by the thought. 

His thumb rotated over her clit. "Hello, darling," he greeted it, like it was his girlfriend on the side, his thumb pushing up from under the bundle of flesh. She almost felt jealous. He never called her 'darling'. He kissed it. "Miss me?" he asked, giving her clit a sweet, stinging lick that made her yelp. 

"I like to wank with the smell of your pussy under my nose and the taste of your come on my tongue," he drawled as his fingers slid inside of her. He hummed his pleasure in touching her like this against her. “I like to lick the taste of you off my skin." 

"Oh God," she whimpered, wondering again if he knew what she was thinking. It was more than possible, and not just because she was transparent. The thought that he might actually have those kinds of skills made her heart pound with fear. She preferred to think that he was dangerous to her heart or her virtue, but not that he was actually dangerous. 

His fingers twisted and plunged inside of her. "That's it, sweet, darling pussy," he crooned, giving her clit another lick. He bit at her with his lips, soft, but surprisingly firm. Her heels dug into the slippery satin lining of his coat, sliding as she pushed up against all of it, the tug of his lips and the steady stroke of his fingers. 

She wanted to grab his head and hold it to her, but it seemed rude somehow—her hand was sticky. She sneaked a taste of him on her fingers and almost got away with it until she noticed that he was watching her, peeking over the bunched up mass of her skirt through a veil of silky blond hair. He didn't look disgusted. His fingers slid out of her abruptly with a wet sound and his mouth left her long enough to shove them greedily into his mouth.  

She squeezed her eyes shut and used her sticky fingers to muffle the sound of her moaning when his fingers stabbed into her again. So different from the way she touched herself when she woke early and sank into the nest of blankets on her bed, cautiously slipping her middle finger inside herself while she used her thumb on her clitoris and fantasized about him sneaking into her dormitory, covering her mouth with his hand, pinning her down and-- 

"Fuck yourself on my fingers, baby." His tone of voice was demanding. In her fantasies he was always in control, always pushing her to achieve something that she wanted him to take from her. 

She bent her knees to push against the glide of his fingers inside of her, feeling the coil in her belly tighten as his lips plucked at her clitoris. 

She whimpered his name. That was what came out of her mouth, a single word, muffled by her hand. The pressure to say dirtier words was trapped in her head.   

His tongue lashed her clitoris over and over again as his fingers moved in and out of her with a wet sound that made her back arch a few more inches off the ground.  

"I want . . . I want," she panted desperately, "please! I want you inside me," she gasped.  

His fingers found the spongy spot on the wall of her vagina and pressed against it ruthlessly with each stroke until she convulsed as her orgasm caught up with her. His fingers left her only to be replaced by his tongue, frantically stabbing into her, wet and velvety as he savored her climax.  

Tears of relief and disappointment rolled down from the corners of her eyes. "I want to know what you feel like inside me," she whispered—and she did, but mostly only in theory.  

There was a part of her mind that remained detached, that might as well have been scanning lines from romance novels to feed to her. She was intensely curious about the mysterious dynamic that existed outside of understanding, or liking, or love, that made everything work just because he was male, and pleasing to her. There was a grain of truth in what she said. Because she was curious. Because she wanted and she wished to feel something that would blot out everything for a longer time than the fleeting moment of climax.  

He pushed her skirt down and moved to lie beside her, one hand cupping one of her bare breasts. She couldn't help feeling a little cheated.  

He wiped his mouth off with his fingers, breathing hard, and licked them before looking at her with raised eyebrows. "Greedy little bitch, aren't you?" he observed. 

She still didn't know how to take that tone of voice and she started to straighten her blouse.  

He sighed. "Come here," he ordered gruffly, rolling on his side and gathering her against him.  

She felt the stickiness of his semen on his sweater against her skin and the silkiness of his revived erection brushing against her abdomen. It was on her lips, too. She wondered if he would notice it if he kissed her now, or if he had noticed it and that was why he was talking, to avoid kissing her. 

"Happy now?" he grumbled. "I want you, desperately, okay? I'd love nothing more than to shag you rotten right now. Satisfied?" He didn't sound happy about it.  

"But—" 

He kissed her.  

She raised her hand to touch his hair, making a side trip to his ear before curling her hand against the back of his neck as they kissed, and she shivered a little at the strange taste of them coming together. 

"Shut up," he told her when they paused for breath. "As much as I'd rather, I really don't fancy your first time being a tumble in the woods." 

There was a certain glint in his eye that told her that he was uncomfortable talking about this. She ducked her head to rest under his chin, playing with the hair at the nape of his neck. Was he uncomfortable with the idea that she was a virgin?  

Was she comfortable with it? She frowned at the thought. There was the mysterious and unanswered issue of how experienced he was. A subject that he had dispatched by saying, "Not a virgin," in a 'subject closed' tone that she found irritating when she thought he was dismissing her.   

They had done everything but have actual intercourse, so she couldn't see what the big deal was about telling her how many times he had done this before, and with whom. Since he had. If he hadn't, then it wouldn't have bothered her at all.  

It bothered her a little tiny bit that he seemed to know more about it than she did, from experience, as opposed to books, that is. She suspected that it was like a lot of things, like certain spells, that she certainly knew more about before Harry waved a wand and bellowed the incantation. She did all the research and Harry just did the spell. It was probably exactly like that.  

She could do it.  She could want to do it. She understood that it would not mean the same thing to him. They didn’t talk about it, but she suspected that wanting to have sex with her meant something to him so significant that it might account in some part for how tired he looked. Not that she thought that it was all about her. His father was in prison. Sometimes she felt a kind of tension in him that made her think that he was fighting so hard to find his own answers. 

"Where then?" she mumbled into his sweater.  
 
 

Draco had never been able to think about her in any way that satisfied him. Hermione was neither who he thought her to be nor what he wanted her to be. He wasn't himself with her, which was what brought him back, time and time again. He had never felt less like himself with another person or dreamt that it would feel so good to be the boy he was when he was with her. If there had ever been another reason to be with her, it had been lost in transition.  

He frowned, smoothing her hair down. Where? He rolled his eyes at the question. 

"In a . . . bed?" she guessed when he didn't answer. 

He wished that she would drop it. "For a start," he tried to bring her face back up to kiss her. When he was kissing her she couldn't ask difficult questions. 

She was chewing on her lower lip, thinking. "I guess I could try to sneak you into my room—" Her fantasy was, after all, simply a fantasy.  

It was nearly impossible for her to imagine actually doing such a thing. It was wrong, and nearly impossible as well as deeply disrespectful of her dorm-mates, and impossible and impractical given the consequences of being caught. The horror of facing her Head of house or the Headmaster in the wake of such a transgression was too real. Not to mention Harry, who would be . . . shocked. And Ron—she pushed her face back into Draco's neck to push out the thought of Ron Weasley. She had deliberately and willfully chosen to break certain school rules before, willing to accept the punishment for it if it came to that, because it was a necessary thing.  

"Portraits and mirrors," he reminded her. She was so naïve it was ridiculous. "Not to mention the ghosts. There are eyes and ears everywhere in the castle, you silly bint," he saw her eyes narrow when she lifted her head at the insult and he tugged her lower lip free to kiss it. 

The thing was, he knew exactly where and how he wanted to consummate their relationship, and he wouldn't have told her even under torture. There was too great a chance that it would scare her off and he wouldn't risk it. That was it. His reluctance had nothing to do with how impossible it sounded in his own head and how dangerous it was to even allow himself to think that way. 

Her lips were reddened from kissing. He ran his thumb over her lower lip. "I think about it. Shagging you in some dark corner, or sneaking you into my room," that was close enough to her own imaginings that her eyes flew to his and she shifted restlessly against him. He smiled. "Yeah, that's a nice thought. Having to go so slow that it’s torture, just to keep the bedsprings from creaking," he smiled crookedly. "Or dragging you into some deserted classroom and flipping your skirt up and having you right there, bent over a desk," his smile became a lascivious smirk.  

She reared back, looking at him with a hint of interest under a wealth of astonished disbelief. "That's nice," she spluttered. 

He shrugged. "It's enough imagination for me and my hand to work with in under five minutes," he told her, combing his fingers through her hair. Considering how messy it looked, her hair separated like his fingers were charmed to tame it.  

"So, yes to a bed, and to privacy that is assured, and to having time to go about it properly," he tugged her down to his mouth. "And to at least three days of provisions so we don't have to go anywhere," he added teasingly, inwardly amused and pleased at how lover-like he sounded. 

She resisted the pull, a small, shy smile appearing. "That almost sounds romantic," she responded in kind, leaning down to kiss him. 

He propped his head up with his hand, studying her face. She had a fading tan from summer and there was a lingering flush in her lightly freckled cheeks that, combined with her dark eyes, and disordered hair, made her look unbelievably winsome. So very, very pretty, and he was in a way part of that, because his hands had been in her hair and on her body and his mouth had a part of making her lips look kissed and kissable. His free hand slipped inside her loose shirt to fondle her breasts and her eyes closed as they kissed. 

He indulged his favorite new fantasy as she threw her leg over his hips, her weight shifting as she rested against him trustfully or lustfully. He could never quite decide which it was. She was, to his delight, quite the wanton. He imagined lying like this, naked on luscious sheets in the baronial four-poster bed in his bedroom at Malfoy Manor. If the circumstances had been different, it might have been possible. Inviting a girl to spend the hols with him would not have been out of bounds in his sixth year, with the age of majority approaching.  

With his father at home, the rules would have been understood without being stated, not that that had ever stopped his father from voicing his expectations. With his father home, Draco would have fantasized about sneaking his girlfriend into his room, but he wouldn't have risked it. His mother was in some ways more perceptive, but a lot less strict, and she was easier to cozen into oblivious compliance. If he could pretend that his father was just on a long business trip, and that the house wasn't occupied by Death Eaters, and that he wasn't on a mission to murder Dumbledore that he was bound to complete on pain of death, and that Hermione Granger was the secret offspring of some impeccably pureblooded family . . . 

It was strange how bad he wanted that last bit to be true. He wasn't sure when that fantasy detail had developed, but he had lain awake at night, distracted by the idea of it. To him, it made sense. It made a hell of a lot more sense than the reality she represented that, from completely non-magical parents, sprung a girl who was of a certain indisputable quality. Forget that she worked hard at it, because there was a whole house at Hogwarts manically devoted to academic excellence, and that didn't really tell the story. No, it defied everything he had been taught to believe about the purity of blood, the potency of magic in purebloods, for Hermione Granger to be an actual Mudblood. 

There was a rational part of his mind that recognized this as a dangerously attractive distraction. Proving that she wasn't a Mudblood would consume time, energy, and resources that he didn't have at his disposal. Yet. Someday he would have the time and the resources, and he would prove it, and then all the unlikelihoods that seemed to stand as stubbornly as the castle's defenses, would collapse around and between them. 

He looked down at his hand, pleasantly occupied holding a breast that fit neatly into his hand, her nipple poking the center of his palm. He was rethinking his opposition to her first time being a tumble in the woods.  

"Can you get away during the holiday?" she asked breathlessly. 

Startled, his attention shifted from her creamy breast to her flushed face. Framed by the ridiculous weight of her hair, her lips red and wet from kissing, she looked deliciously distracted. 

He gave the idea his attention, and after a moment of thought, he frowned. He wasn't planning on leaving during the holidays, and for a moment the thought that she might stay if he told her this made him wonder if he could manage to work in being with her around his other occupations. He decided that it was better to lie, better if she left.  

"Yes. I'll arrange it." 

Irritation flashed in her eyes. "What do you mean? You'll arrange it?" she repeated. 

He smiled smugly, rolling her over onto her back, rubbing his chest against her breasts. "I mean, I'll arrange it," he said as if she was hard of hearing. "What did you think I meant?" Distracted by the sensation of her soft, yielding breasts and her firm nipples felt through a layer of cashmere, his eyes closed. "That feels good," he murmured appreciatively.  

"I liked your mouth better. It was my idea. I'll arrange it," she huffed at him. 

His eyes opened, dancing with laughter. "You are a spoiled little bitch, aren’t you?" he teased. "Used to having everything your way," he scooted down her body, his gaze shifting from her flushed face to her bare breasts.  

"I—" whatever she was about to say was lost in a soft moan when he lowered his head, wetting her nipple with his tongue.  

"Sweet," he whispered, blowing across her damp skin. "I want to fuck you, so bad. That turns you on, doesn't it? Knowing that I'm going to be thinking about it, making plans for it, wanking in the shower imagining it?" 

Her mouth opened, then closed. A telling blush pinked her cheeks. She rolled her eyes. "That's what you are going to be thinking about?" Her lips compressed disapprovingly. "You should be thinking of your grades." His classroom performance had been abysmal, something only the professors and Hermione would have taken particular note of. 

"Except that I'm a Malfoy, and I don't need to work as hard some Mudblood swot," he retorted, intercepting the hand that clumsily attempted to cuff him for using that word. 

"Bent over a desk," he said it again. She looked angry. She would be angry if he ever tried such a thing, which was why it was an enticing idea. She had a sense of herself that he willfully violated. "So pretty with your skirt flipped up and your knickers down around your knees, quivering like a mare in season with your sweet, wet cunt right there, waiting to be filled and fucked." 

"Shut up," she tried to twist her wrist free. 

"Roll over and we'll pretend that I'm going to do it," he taunted. "I'll fuck you with my fingers, and whisper filthy things in your ears until you come. And you will, love. You'll come so hard that I'll feel like I'm dying just because it is from me. From you thinking about me, inside you." 

She felt a fresh surge of thick, slippery, liquid flood her pussy, making her clamp her legs together.  

Then he was pulling her up, on her knees, moving behind her and she felt his cock between her legs as one arm circled her under her breasts and his hand moved down to direct the head of his cock as it rubbed against her.  

"I can feel it, you know. I can feel you. Hot, swollen, and so wet. I do that to you," his hand left his cock to grab her hand and pull it down to where his cock was. "Feel that? My cock, wet from you," his chin rubbed against her shoulder as he tried to push her hair out of his way to get at her neck and was frustrated in his effort. He rocked against her in the rhythm of dry humping, though there was nothing dry about it.  

It was so tempting. If he used his weight to push her down to the ground, if he canted his hips back and used his hand to guide the weeping head of his cock into her, if he pushed into her slow, while she stretched, like a cat with an itch that had to be scratched, if he abated the craving that was making his chest ache as bad as his balls . . . It wouldn't actually solve anything. He would still want her.  

A blandly anonymous hotel room was too much like the rooms where he met polyjuiced versions of her using hair he bribed a house elf to collect for him from her hairbrush. Before Granger put notions of being paid into the heads of the house elves, such a thing would have been impossible. That sad little sot of a house elf who did his bidding in exchange for firewhiskey knew better than to provide a wizard with such a potent and potentially dangerous spell ingredient.  

Fucking a body that was made to be a perfect copy of her was meant to be an insult, but it left him feeling sullied. It left him with an abhorrence of anything that would make her seem less than clean.   

Here, in the sunlight, with the castle in the distance, over the tree tops, nothing planned or prepared, was more right than anything he could have conceived of.  

He had hardly completed the thought when his body acted on it, and he felt the sweet, hot clench of her body as the head of his cock breached her and her breath caught in a cry so keen that he felt it in his gut and froze.  

For a moment they were stuck like that, and then he felt her hand, slipping further between her legs, touching him where they were joined together, and it was just too much. He had a moment of physical clarity, of mechanical grace. The hand that had guided hers came up to cover her mouth as the arm around her waist tightened and he flexed his hips just so—because he had done this before. Polyjuiced versions of Hermione had an intact hymen because they were perfect copies of her down to that intimate detail. He had discovered this and knew perfectly well how to do it. And then he was buried inside her, whispering soothing things to her about how good she felt to him, and how beautiful she was. 

He was half in love with this stupid, stupid, clumsy bastard who had carelessly, selfishly, taken her virginity on the cold ground, because with her, in her, he was that boy. The boy whose hips couldn’t stop jerking against her as he wallowed in the greedy pleasure of her tight cunt clamping down on him in quivery flutters of reaction.  

Taking her from behind hadn't been what he intended. He thought that when this happened, he'd cover her on clean sheets, and be more circumspect, more polite—show her that he had a sense of her dignity, and her worth, as well as his. He thought he would be prepared to stop at any moment, but his body was screaming at him to move, and he could feel her clenching around him, so tight and hot and wet that it was driving him crazy, because it was her, and it was real, and she was making sounds under his hand that were so delicious that he just wanted to make her come, shaking against him with the shock of his invasion of her body. 

For a second he thought that he hadn't done it. He hadn't felt her hymen, but she was shaking, and the sounds she was making were full of tears and breathing that seemed perilously close to hysteria.  

'I did not just do that,' he thought, desperately.  

Actually, he said it aloud, and she reacted by saying in a high-pitched whine, full of indignant fury, “Yes, you did!” 

She squirmed and his arm tightened around her. "Stop it," he snapped. He couldn't believe how badly he had screwed this up. He loved her hair, but right now it was in the way, keeping him from seeing her face, and gauging for himself how she felt about this. And the lower half of his body was nearly paralyzed with the blissful sensation of her, sleek and hot, gripping him with desperately awkward, unnervingly familiar spasms of muscle adjusting to him. He could feel her fingers, trapped between her thighs, her fingernails blunt and hard. 

She wasn't the same girl that he had sought polyjuiced copies of. That girl was a conquest. This girl, the one breathing raggedly into the palm of his hand had been won over her wariness, over his prior behavior, over the sheer unlikelihood of his intentions, and he felt that he had betrayed her. Not now, not in the sunlight, but by attempting to know her intimately by proxy.  

Once the shock of pain began to ease—not severe, just surprising for all that she understood that there would be some discomfort, Hermione found herself in the position she had fantasized about. He was inside her. Big and hard, and who knew that it could feel like this? 

"It's okay," she mumbled against his hand, though she sounded less than confident about it.  

He kissed her shoulder through the wrinkled fabric of her shirt. "Do you . . . I can stop," he said, and it was true. He could feel his soiled jumper sticking to him damply and he felt a little dizzy, almost sick actually. He had had sex before and thought that it gave him some insight into it. He had imagined it. Clean sheets, privacy, the luxury of time to take her so sweetly and gently that she'd be as boneless with the wonder of them as he felt the first time she had tentatively slipped her skinny, soft, sweet smelling girl arms around his neck while he was kissing her.  

He had been so fucking careful about how he kissed her. Careful not to press her lips too hard. Cautious about going too fast, about scaring her off.  

There was a long, fidgeting pause from her as if she didn't know quite what to say, and he kissed her shoulder again, loosening his hold on her face to try to find some clue to what she was feeling by exploring her face with his fingers.  

"It's okay," she said again. "I think," she shifted under him and he realized that she was trying to see him around her hair.  

He slid out of her, and she rolled over under him while he leaned over her, damp cock waving in the air, her eyes fixed on his face with singular determination, as he nudged her legs apart.  

"Do you want to keep going?" she asked. 

He was staring at his cock, wet from her, smeared with traces of blood, and he felt dizzy again, and sick, and nearly paralyzed with grief at how he was bound to screw this up and lose her because he had already done things that she would never forgive him for. And he would keep doing those things because he had no choice, really.  

She touched his face. "Are you all right?" 

His throat tightened and he nodded, guiding himself back to her, watching her face for any sign of discomfort as he entered her shallowly, and bit his lip at how hot and swollen she felt to him.  

"Does it hurt?" she misread his expression. 

Startled, he shook his head, smiling a little at her frown, her unknowing confusion. "Hardly," his voice dropped to a whisper. "I'm trying to make it . . . good. For you," he clarified. "Tell me if it hurts." 

Something rippled across her face, and he realized that she was trying to decide if discomfort constituted hurt. The bile of his failings ate at the lining of his stomach. Stupid. Selfish. Bastard.  

She moved under him, wriggling and stretching cautiously, like she was trying to find a more comfortable position, or—she canted her hips up and with an expression of intense concentration, the muscles in her tight cunt grabbed at him in a way that made him shudder, setting off a chain reaction as his hips flexed and she flinched, wincing.  

The apology he had been about to utter died on his lips as she patted his shoulders and smiled apologetically at him. "It's . . . better," she said, lying through her teeth. 

He felt his heart flip over, and shifted over her to feel her chest against his, carefully moving as sweat broke out down his spine while the breeze skimmed his bare ass, and his mind nearly went blank with how good it felt. The friction, the heated clench of her around him. So good.  

"Merlin," he breathed, "you feel so good." 

Surprise and pleasure lit her eyes, made her look at him, almost as if she were seeing something in him that she had never seen before. 

She deserved to know that it was something she put there. This was the potency of her magic, that she made him what she glimpsed in him.  

She touched his face. "Are you crying?"  

To his surprise, he realized that he was, and wasn't that a kick in the ass. She was dry eyed and calming down, adjusting to the unexpectedness of this. There were bits of twig and dried leaves in her hair and self-loathing reared its head again. He was such a bastard for doing this.  

"Yeah. I guess I am," he admitted it.  

"Do you want to stop?" 

It was the second time she asked, and it occurred to him that maybe she wanted to stop and was hoping that he would give her a graceful way out. The muscles in his legs and the unthinking impulse that drove his libido were whinging a litany of 'no, no, no' while his large silent conscience was planning a strategic withdraw that involved gently and carefully extracting his cock, wrapping her up in his coat, and begging her pardon for transgressions that she knew nothing of, and never would if he could keep them from her.  

"I won't be mad if you want to stop," she promised. 

He almost told her everything. Suddenly he understood all the clichés about sex making men weak, because he wanted to start with walking into the trap laid for him when he returned to his family home at the end of fifth year and tell her everything. Instead, he told her everything that wasn't going to get him expelled, murdered, or hexed beyond recognition. 

"I think I'm in love with you," he croaked. 

It sounded like the worst lie ever told, stiff and clumsy with disbelief, and the look on her face wasn't encouraging. It was dismay. It was a kind of rejection. It was confirmation that no matter what, she wasn't in love with him. It should have been devastating, but for some reason, it was a relief. She wasn't that taken in by him, after all. He would have never forgiven himself if he had deceived her so completely that she would have answered him in kind. 

"Oh," the sound left her, hollow with surprise.  

The rough edge of urgency had fallen off to the side. Unfortunately, the stimulation being inside her was providing wasn't taking anything off his erection. It was just nursing it gently along, though he was starting to recognize that orgasm was so remote a possibility that it might have been embarrassing if she knew enough to recognize his predicament. He moved because it was distraction, and he kissed her because it felt good even if he wasn't going to come.  

It was oddly asexual, she thought, lost in her perceptions. She could hear the wind moving through the leaves, and she felt a hint of biting cold in the breeze that hinted that winter was already in the mountains and creeping towards Hogwarts. Their disordered clothes made soft sounds, like animals rustling in the underbrush as they came together, and that sound was less obvious than the wet sound of flesh meeting and parting in a rhythm that was slow and steady.  

His eyes were closed, resolutely, and his face was damp with a combination of sweat and tears. She knew that she was lying too still, and she tried to listen to what her body was telling her to do. He wasn't hurting her. Not really. Her thighs felt a little achy from the press of his thighs, and there was something hard and knotty just to the left of her spine that she was sure was going to leave a mark on her back. Tentatively, she touched his arms, braced on the hard ground on either side of her, her fingers searching for clues to what he was feeling and finding lean muscle, flexing lightly with effort. He tilted his head a little to one side and she heard his breath rasp in her ear. 

It was stupid, but she wanted to make him talk to her. She wrapped one arm around his neck to urge him to relax into her more, and her body finally figured out something to do that made sense to her. She scooted to one side to avoid the root under her back, which threw off his careful balancing to keep his weight off her chest while she gathered him in with her arms and legs to hug him. He shuddered against her. 

"Oh, fuck! That feels so good," he ground out, rocking into her more urgently. Her hand moved down his back to his bare bum and he swore again and clutched at her fiercely, one hand buried in her hair, pulling it as he kissed his way up her throat and jaw, the other holding her hip as he ground his hips into her convulsively. 

She wasn't sure what she expected. Maybe to feel some spurt of foreign material inside her to signal the arrival of his orgasm? The way he was moving against her left her in no doubt that it had arrived, and that it had taken him by surprise and left him trembling and oddly vulnerable as he buried his face in her neck. She was a bit uncomfortable, but she held him, running her fingers through his hair, feeling the shameful ache of not loving him back stick in her throat.