Theo smiled, youthful and mischievous. For a moment, Draco didn’t feel like a twenty-one year old wizard on the other side of a war, financially bound to an estate and a family failing to modernize, and saddled with a fiancé with whom conversation floundered and died like rotted fish.
Instead, he felt a bit like an idiot. It was wonderful.
He offered her his arm, an instinct from a different version of himself who didn’t have to consider what it might look like for Hermione Granger to walk arm in arm with Draco Malfoy.
And strangely, unbelievably, inexplicably: she took it.
When, exactly, had Granger gotten pretty? He’d noticed before that she’d changed since school, but he hadn’t connected those changes to the face in front of him: open and warm and glowing from the candlelight at the center of their table. Flickers of light danced across her freckles, illuminating them not unlike the stars in the sky. He wanted to reach out and trace every path between them: draw constellations on her skin.
Oh, he was so very fucked.
And how, at some point, he stopped having to pretend. And it had been a marvelous feeling.
*Gods* he wanted to belong, to something, to someone, to fucking anything.
It was hardly as if he could open with *I ended my betrothal because I realized I couldn’t keep doing what everyone else told me to do. But I also ended it, in very large part, because I can’t stop thinking about how you’ve practically moved into my home, into my head, into the space inside my chest I might tentatively call my fucking heart.*
And even though she wasn’t even looking at him, certainly wasn’t touching him, he could *feel* her observation. He could feel her fingertips, grazing book spines or his own, it felt the same. Reading the titles felt like reading him, knowing him. He could feel the prick and tingle of scrutiny shooting a thrill through him: a surge from being seen. These were his books. Not the manor’s. Mostly potions texts, a few on herbology, an odd novel or two. Hardly a complex collection, but things he’d chosen to bring with him when he moved and that felt like it mattered.
“I think if anyone deserves to move on, fully move on, from—all that. It’s got to be Hermione Granger, doesn’t it?”
“I was planning on going by myself,” she said. “But—if you’re available. I was wondering. I could use a date for Harry’s wedding—”
“Yes.”
He’d go to Harry Potter’s wedding ten times over if it meant going with her.
Her rejection hurt him so much because he was in love with Hermione Granger.
*In love with her.*
He’d never been in love before.
It hurt more than he expected. There was more fear involved, too. But also, a level of certainty, of calm that came with accepting it.
“Do you remember when you said you could be friends enough for the both of us until I figured myself out?” He’d softened: shoulders, voice, soul. She responded to it, tension unwinding, death grip on her lower lip loosening.
She nodded, evidently too trapped in her own head to speak.
“I suppose I could be in love enough for the both of us until you figure yourself out.”
They stood there, in the quiet, until Theo came, stumbling and drunk, to find them. It broke the silent understanding they’d formed.
She’d waited for him.
He could wait for her.
He’d said there was no girl. The easiest, boldest lie of his life. His lie greeted him as he stepped back into his bedroom, still curled beneath his covers, a book propped open in her hands, and a wide smile offered freely upon his return. Of course there was a girl. A woman. The girl. *The* woman.
“You will not insult your family by spending time on a holiday with some harlot we’ve never met.”
Anger careened down Draco’s spine. He shoved his hands in his pockets, hiding the way they shook. He took a deep breath—in through his nose, out through his mouth—and dug himself a grave, right there in the sitting room.
“Oh, you’ve met her.”
Hermione *would* be a permanent part of his life.
He wouldn’t let his father win this time, not again, not now.
“I never wanted you to have to give them up for me.”
Propped up on his elbows, still feeling a little unsteady, he said, “I’m giving them up with or without you. I’d much rather do it with you.”
The word wife hit Draco square in the chest. His diaphragm seized, breath halted for the several seconds it took to reconcile that such a word had not been spoken in jest. But rather, it represented a very real, very likely future state in his life.
He could feel her breathing, tight and forced, expanding and contracting her ribs against his. “I don’t know why I’m so nervous.” She said it in barely a whisper, low and slow, words melting from her mouth like candle wax.
“Of course you know.”
She laughed. “Saturdays aren’t your day anymore, you know.”
“Do I?”
“Of course you do. They’re all yours now.”
This was a hozier song. Absolutely perfect.