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“Oh, for goodness’ sake Theo, you can’t touch the bottle, that defeats the entire point-”
“Try and stop me, Potter-”
“Who wants to bet that those two are going to end up in a round together-?”
“Hey, which one of you fuckers drank my Firewhiskey?! Bulstrode, you psycho-”
“Can you blame her? I’d need a whole bottle to recover from seven minutes in heaven with Weasley-”
“Fuck off Zabini-”
“Wait, whose turn is it?”
“I nominate Lovegood, she looks far too happy over there-”
“Seamus, I swear to God, if you try and make it stop on you again, my wand is going to go so far up your arse that you’ll feel it in your-”
“Ooh, kinky. Hey, everyone, Ginny’s kinky-”
“Wanna bet?!”
“Hell, no, you’ve already had two of my roommates-”
Hermione watched the proceedings with an amused grin.
Late-night Hogwarts parties were always like this, always raucous, the air heady with the scent of Firewhiskey and the giddiness of its consumption. Hermione had let Ginny drag her along to one several months ago, and her hesitation had soon vanished at the glorious chaotic fun that it had turned out to be.
Most students from the eighth year, and a few others besides, would monopolise the Room of Requirement each Friday night, squishing onto sofas, hammocks, and pillows to chat, gossip, and play games. Music from the Wizarding Wireless Network blared out of invisible speakers, conversation flowed as thick and sweet as red wine, and the assembled students invariably drank enough alcohol between them to flatten a Sphinx. Any animosity that may have existed between the Hogwarts Houses had vanished slowly but surely that year, united in the aftermath of the war. Unlikely friendships had formed, even more unlikely relationships had flourished, and parties had become an inter-House necessity which everyone came along to. Even… Draco Malfoy.
Hermione’s eyes flitted to him, sat on the other side of the large circle. He was also watching the progress of the game, amusement lined into the creases around his eyes. As she gazed at him, he took a long, slow drink from a bottle of spiced rum and turned to grin at something Pansy had said.
Perhaps anyone that hadn’t spent the last year at Hogwarts might see him as the exact same boy he’d been during the war.
But she knew better.
Draco had approached this year at school like a reformed man, a changed man. That didn’t mean it was always easy – there were several times he’d been reprimanded in the corridors, usually coinciding with upsurges of gossip about his family and their enforced reparations after the war – but in his everyday demeanour he was cautious, polite, even gentlemanly. And at parties, he had even turned out to be quite a bit of fun.
In fact, all the Slytherins had. Who on earth could have predicted that their House would have the best drinking games, the best gossip, and the best alcohol?
Huh.
Hermione watched as Draco pushed his shirt sleeves up to his elbows.
She had always considered herself to be someone that was very honest with herself. And so, in the realms of honesty, she could admit that she had even come so far as to find her former enemy attractive.
And why not? He had that classic angled jaw, a distracting physique, legs that screamed of years on the Quidditch pitch, and silvery-blond hair that he’d finally stopped slicking back, so it fell with ordered disarray across his forehead.
In fairness, he had always been good-looking, even despite his horrendous personality, so it was rather an added bonus that he’d started being nice to her this year.
She still remembered the day he’d waited outside Greenhouse Four after Herbology until everyone else had left, simply to ask if he could talk to her. Nodding bemusedly, she had let him walk her down to the lake where they strolled amicably for a half-hour, while he proceeded to apologise profusely for his actions over the last seven years. It had taken him a while to get through them all, she remembered, but that didn’t make it any less impactful.
No one had been more taken aback than she, but she wasn’t going to question it when he looked down at her with light eyes that all of sudden seemed so much lighter, and asked if she could forgive him.
An apology turned to an invitation to study together in the library, which turned to a regularly scheduled Saturday afternoon revision session, and ever since that day, the topic of Hermione and Draco’s unlikely friendship had coloured the spokes of the Hogwarts rumour mill like a permanent dye job.
Back in the Room of Requirement, Draco spotted her looking his way, and raised his bottle in acknowledgement. She grinned back at him, made a silly face, and turned back to the person next to her, who, she remembered just in time, was the Chosen One himself, currently engaged in a dare-fuelled snogging session with Ginny.
She wrinkled her nose. Typical.
It wasn’t even like Harry and Ginny needed any encouragement at all, going by the regularity with which the curtains of Ginny’s four-poster bed were found closed.
“Right then, that’s enough,” cried Pansy eventually, flicking a pumpkin pasty at the happy couple with the grace of a Hollywood actress. “Not everyone wants a front-row seat to the genesis of your freckly, bespectacled offspring. Let someone else have a go!”
“You first, Pans,” grinned Justin, and she rolled her eyes at him.
“I just went,” she protested. “And I suggest you don’t make me go again; I think Longbottom might actually implode.”
It was true. Pansy’s last dare had turned into an uncomfortable five minutes watching her demonstrate the correct way to pleasure a woman, using an empty Chocolate Frog wrapper, an Every Flavour Bean, and two pieces of Spellotape as an anatomical replica.
Hermione had thought it was a fairly informative lesson.
Neville had looked ready to self-combust.
Placing a mental bet with herself that Neville and Pansy would end up in the ‘seven minutes in heaven’ cupboard before the end of the night, Hermione leant out and grabbed the empty Butterbeer bottle from the centre of the circle.
“I’ve not been yet,” she announced. “I’ll go.”
There were a few loud whoops from around the circle, and several previously disinterested people turned their attention to the game.
Hermione had never quite managed to shake off her swotty reputation of the first six years of Hogwarts, but then again, that was hardly surprising. As a result, everyone tended to get a little more excited than they ought to when she deigned to take part in such a scandalous activity as a round of truth or dare.
But conversely, it also meant that people tended to give her tamer dares, which Hermione couldn’t really complain about.
With a quick turn of her wrist, she set the bottle spinning around the circle, settling back in place to watch it rotate slower, slower-
Until it came to a stop on Draco.
She beamed at him across the circle, and he grinned back. There was a small handful of people in this room that Hermione knew she could trust in this game, and Draco was one of them.
“Truth,” she said decisively. “What’s it going to be?”
He folded his arms over his knees, leaning forwards. “Hm.”
A handful of suggestions were immediately flung about the circle.
“What kind of underwear are you wearing-?”
“What’s your most embarrassing story-?”
“Which Professor would you shag-?”
“Who in this room have you thought about naked-?”
“Oh,” said Draco, a devilish grin spreading across his features. “That’s a good one, Blaise. Who in this room have you thought about naked?”
She gaped at him, heat flooding into her cheeks. So much for trusting him.
There were only two true answers.
There was Ron, obviously, but that ship had well and truly sailed, and she did not want it brought back up again, not when he was back with Lavender and they’d finally managed to reclaim some semblance of normality around one another.
Which left Draco.
Draco, who had become a friend, who had a wide smile when it wasn’t narrowed in a smirk, and kind, kind eyes that looked at her like it was the highlight of his day. Who had soft hands, and scrunched his nose when he was concentrating, and who brushed dirt off her robes after Herbology. Draco, who listened to every word she said, and understood a fair few that she didn’t.
Well. And there was also the fact that he had (in her imagination, at least) a very nice body.
But she’d be damned if she was going to admit that to his face in front of about twenty-five drunk eighteen-year-olds.
“Dare,” she squeaked. “I changed my mind.”
Blaise looked scandalised. “You can’t do that!”
“I can,” she defended, folding her arms. “No one said I couldn’t.”
“True,” said Theo. “And no one said you couldn’t invite Filch her for a cheeky pint tonight either. It’s implied.”
“I’ll show you implied,” Hermione muttered darkly.
“Slytherin council meeting,” announced Pansy, and the Slytherins (all bar Draco) convened to discuss Hermione’s fate.
All the Gryffindors convened to discuss whether it was fair or not that the Slytherins got to make all the elective decisions at these gatherings.
And the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws sat where they were, shook their heads in exasperation, and carried on enjoying their evening.
Eventually, Pansy resurfaced, wearing a smirk that immediately made Hermione’s heart sink about three feet. Oh dear. This couldn’t be good. Especially with the way that Pansy, since becoming an unusual fixture in her life thanks to her and Draco’s friendship, had recently decided to fixate on Hermione’s lack of a love life.
“The council have decided-”
“Boo!” said Ginny, more for effect than mutiny.
“-that you can have a dare. But only if” – Pansy wagged her finger in an authoritative fashion – “we get to set it. Do you accept?”
Hermione gulped.
Whatever the new proposed dare was, it was likely to involve nudity, innuendo, some kind of performance, or possibly a combination of all three.
But regardless, it was definitely a better option than confessing her attraction to Draco in front of her ex-boyfriend and a shedload of gossip-prone onlookers.
“Alright,” she conceded. “What’s my dare?”
And Pansy beamed her biggest smile yet.
“Seven minutes in heaven with Draco, of course.”
Hermione had jumped to her feet in protest.
Draco had downed the rest of his bottle in a panic and then done the same.
And with little heed nor ceremony, they were promptly shoved into the designated ‘heaven’ of the Room of Requirement (how convenient, Hermione thought to herself). It was a small side room with a dark chestnut door, lit only by a small torch, with just about enough space for two adults to stand about a metre away from one another.
Hermione had always thought that a metre sounded like plenty of room.
It really wasn’t.
Especially not when it felt like Draco’s bemused smirk and broad chest were taking up well over their allotted square metreage.
Her heart, lately rather taken with gymnastics, performed an ambitious barrel roll in her chest.
“So, er,” he said, rubbing absently at the back of his neck. “How are you?”
She laughed, her voice a little too high-pitched, as if she was one brush of the hand away from hysteria. “Splendid,” she announced. “And- and you?”
He bit his lip, amusement curving under his cheekbones. “Not too bad. A little tipsy.”
“Oh,” she said softly. “Me too.”
There was an awkward pause, then Hermione huffed out a frustrated breath.
“This is so childish,” she complained. “What are we, thirteen?”
“Hurry up and kiss already!” shrieked someone outside (probably Pansy, Hermione thought), followed promptly by an outcry of frenzied shushing. “If you’re not even slightly dishevelled when you get out of there, you’ll both owe a forfeit!”
Hermione scowled. “There definitely won’t be any kissing if you’re all stood outside!”
There was a pause, then the unmistakeable sound of about ten pairs of feet reluctantly leaving them to it.
She crossly folded her arms. “Ridiculous,” she huffed.
There was an indiscernible expression on Draco’s face as he fidgeted idly with his sleeve, masked only slightly by the half-light throwing shadows across his jaw. “Ridiculous,” he agreed slowly. “I, er… I assume you’ll want to just wait this out? Pansy might be mad, but she’ll get over it.”
There was a stiff silence while Hermione combed through a multitude of ways to respond that didn’t involve bringing up the fact that she had thought about kissing him long before she had been dared to. And that such musings didn’t ever tend to factor Pansy into the equation, really, just Hermione and Draco, pressed up against a bookshelf in the library, her modest skirt hiked up to her thighs-
Hermione calmly flicked an internal switch to send that train of thought careening off the side of a cliff.
Externally, she blinked. Twice.
“Oh?”
“Well,” he continued. “I know you don’t like doing things just because someone told you to. Unless maybe they’re a teacher.”
She laughed at that in spite of herself, and the uncertainty between them dissolved a little.
“You’re right,” she said eventually.
It was a classic checkmate situation.
If they did, it would delight the part of her that had been thinking about kissing him ever since she’d caught a glimpse of the way he looked, flushed and triumphant after a Quidditch match at the start of the year. And it would get Pansy off her back about the whole ‘when are you going to put yourself out there, Hermione?’ thing. However, it would also mean that she was kissing him for a dare, knowing that it was all a ruse, forced to designate their first kiss as a typical ‘they made me do it’ affair.
If they didn’t, as per the usual rules, she would have to take part in a forfeit, which was more often than not a highly embarrassing version of truths in which Veritaserum was administered beforehand. Hermione was not prepared for that. And she’d never hear the end of it from Pansy.
She toed awkwardly at a bump in the floor.
“I don’t want to feel forced to do it,” she admitted. “But I don’t want to forfeit.”
He stared at her.
God, why did he have to have such lovely eyes? And such clear skin? Handsome, angular features? And that hair, hair that practically begged to have fingers carding through it-
“Let’s not,” Draco said suddenly, and Hermione felt her traitorous heart sink to previously unfathomed depths.
“Let’s not,” he continued, “and say we did.”
Her heart made a spectacular return. “You want to pretend?”
“It’s a simple solution, don’t you think?” he continued, a slow grin appearing at his lips. “You get to keep your dignity. And we get away without forfeiting. What do you think?”
She thought that Draco looked practically irresistible.
Focus.
“Right,” she said. “Uh, yeah, that sounds like a plan.”
There was an expectant silence.
“But, er, we-” She swallowed nervously. “We’d need to be clear on, uh, exactly what we did. Or didn’t do.”
“Oh,” he said, taken aback. His eyes flitted down momentarily, then back up at her. “Do you want to talk about it?”
There was a drum of applause from her ribs as her heart moved onto some new sort of freestyle routine.
“Yes…?” she tried.
His brows knitted together, eyes fixing on some arbitrary piece of the backdrop above Hermione’s shoulder.
“Okay,” he said eventually. “Let’s go through this logically.”
It occurred to her that his words felt like a very Hermione Granger-specific brand of flirtation. She fought against the grin that twisted her lips.
“Logically,” she repeated. “Okay. Well, er, we waited for everyone else to go.”
He blinked at her. “And then we…?”
“I’m not doing all the work,” she complained, and he grinned hard then.
“Alright,” he smirked. “We, er, moved closer.”
She was suddenly very aware of her chest moving with each breath, up, down, pulse rushing beneath her skin.
There was a change in his expression, a flicker of intrigue, a softening of his mouth, a minute, tiny change that caught in Hermione’s throat like sherbet. He mumbled a Muffliato without even lifting his wand, and Hermione’s eyebrows rose. Logic and wandless magic. Well, those were two new steps she clearly needed to add to her personal recipe for complete seduction.
Up, down.
She blinked up at him. His tall form practically crowded her own, and yet she didn’t feel in the least bit threatened. “I…” What would she do if they were alone? “I lifted my hand, and I… I slid my fingers into your hair,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes.
It allowed for a perfect view of his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed, the fine muscles fluttering in his throat. “I put my hands on your waist,” he said stiffly. She looked down at his hand, saw the fingers flex. “And I, um, l pulled you towards me,” he finished.
Oh…
“I let you,” she murmured. “And I… looked into your eyes? While our, er, chests… pressed together?”
Her words felt upsettingly clumsy on her lips, but his eyes flitted sharply downwards to the buttons of her shirt as if she was some silver-tongued enchantress. She folded her arms over her chest in a futile attempt to protect her heart from launching itself into some never-before-attempted acrobatic manoeuvre.
Up, down.
“I liked it,” he murmured, and bloody hell, how on earth was Hermione supposed to stay upright when the timbre of his voice made her knees so incomprehensibly weak? “So, I er, I moved my hands to your school tie,” he continued.
She trembled. “What did you do to my tie?” she breathed.
He wet his lips with his tongue, and Hemione felt that he surely must be able to feel her heart beating through her ribs.
“I er-” He swallowed again. “I loosened it, slowly.”
Hermione lifted her hands to her tie, tentatively pulling the knot away from her throat. She couldn’t look away from the answering flash of heat in Draco’s eyes.
“I took it off,” he said quickly.
Hermione’s sensible school tie slipped to the floor in a coil of debauchery. Two perfect blooms of pink built in Draco’s cheeks.
“What did you do next?” she asked, and he bit his lip.
“It’s your turn,” he breathed. His voice was silken, breathless.
“Oh.” She swallowed. “I…” She had taken a step towards him without even noticing. “I wanted to kiss you.”
Draco went so still it was as if she had cast some sort of spell on him.
“You- you did?”
Up, down.
“Yes,” she whispered.
His gaze was burning, intense, too much. “In that case,” he said softly. “I brought my hand to cup the side of your face, and I – I leant down, and-”
“You kissed me,” Hermione said, the words spilling from her mouth in a nervous rush.
“I kissed you,” he breathed.
“And, how was it?” she asked, still nervous, still breathless.
He was looking at her lips, she realised. As if he couldn’t look away. He swallowed. “It was… amazing.”
Courage swelled in Hermione’s lungs. “I kissed you back,” she rushed. “And then, realised that you, er, you were too well-dressed.”
Draco blinked, and embarrassment flamed up the sides of her chest. Her heart’s exuberant performance stilled momentarily.
“Like, you-” She took a breath. “You have too many buttons done up,” she finished weakly.
And then Draco undid the top button of his shirt and her mouth went dry.
“T- two buttons,” she breathed, and there was a flicker of devilish excitement on Draco’s face as he complied.
“Two buttons,” he confirmed. “Anything else?”
She chewed her lip. “Maybe I’d untuck your shirt. So I could… touch you.”
Draco’s hands went to the hem of his shirt so quickly that her heart performed a triple pirouette.
“My hands would slide down your sides,” he murmured, and there was a strength, a determinedness in his voice that set her pulse to racing. “Over your waist, your hips, to your…”
“My arse?” she asked, and his lips parted.
“Yes,” he breathed. “And down to your thigh, maybe lifting your leg to my waist, so I could pull you closer as I kissed your lips, your jaw, your neck-”
There was a quickening in every organ of her body, but mostly down in her pelvis, a warm, effortless tug of a string at her navel. “You could touch my breasts,” she said softly. “If you wanted to.”
She saw the abrupt catch in his breath, the wild look in his eyes.
“Yes,” he gulped. “I would.”
She stared at him, took in the sight of his heaving chest, his dark eyes, the tension in every single muscle.
“I’d kiss you back against the wall,” he said desperately.
Hermione’s back hit the cold stone before she could think one way or the other. And Draco must have moved with her, because he was somehow even closer than before.
“And then I’d let my hair down, you know, like this-” she told him, pulling her hairband free with nervous elan.
And his eyes were wide then, rounded with nervous delight as he took in the sight of her curls falling delicately down her shoulders.
“I think I might want more,” he said, and it was as if the words had torn themselves free, choked out through hesitant lips.
She blinked at him in the abrupt realisation that her knickers were wet between her thighs, sticking to flushed skin. Her fingers twitched. “Me too,” she breathed.
Her mind was in chaos, every nerve and synapse firing with the great, desperate need to touch him, to be touched.
“Maybe I… maybe I put my hand on your hip,” she whispered. “And, and… slide it… down.”
“Down where?” His voice was giddy, untethered.
“To-”
And then Hermione made the mistake, that fatal mistake, of looking down. And she could see the shape of him, the building arousal that he held for her, all for her. For the things she was saying… the things she was doing… for everything they weren’t doing. And heat flushed up in her body, delirium, that great, rising need, that desire…
“How would you touch me?” he whispered desperately.
“I’d slide my palm against you,” she rushed, unable to take her eyes off him. “And I’d feel the shape of you, hear you gasp, rock against you, against your-”
“I’d kiss you back against the wall,” he said urgently, voice cracking. “I’d pin you there, grip your wrists so you knew, knew you were mine-”
She gasped, but she couldn’t stop. “And I’d beg you to touch me-”
“To press into you, to let you know exactly how much I want you-”
“And I’d grab at you, trying to pull you closer, kissing you like I’ve wanted to for so fucking long-”
“Let me touch you,” he rasped. “Please.” His voice was broken, wrung-out, desperate. “Please, it’s all I want-”
And Hermione launched herself forward and kissed him full on the mouth with a desperation of far longer than seven minutes.
His hands wound immediately around her waist, grasping and pulling, lips meeting hers with a hurried insistence that tore her breath from her very lungs. Her pulse was beating so fast that he must have been able to feel it in the palms of the hands that clung to her body as if he wanted to map out every line and curve of her in a single touch.
She raked fingernails into his hair, heart completing its gymnastics routine with an accelerative flutter into her throat at the sound he made. And then his knee was directly between hers and she let out a gasp-
Light flooded in.
And Pansy’s face appeared in the doorway wearing the smuggest of grins.
“Oh!” she said delightedly, as if stumbling across a charming tableau instead of a steamy romp in a cupboard. “About bloody time.”
Hermione slowly untangled herself from him, her lips swollen, shirt askew. And then she looked up at Draco, who was wearing an expression of such giddy, guilty delight through his pink cheeks and mussed hair that she couldn’t find it in her to feel ashamed.
“Oi, Potter,” Pansy called out over her shoulder. “You owe me five Galleons.” She turned back to Draco and Hermione. “I hope you’ve taken these seven minutes to reflect on the enormous crushes you’ve both had on one another all year,” she said, placing a victorious hand on her hip.
Hermione’s brows flew upwards. “Oh, we, er, didn’t actually… get that far.”
“Mm,” said Pansy critically. Her eyes swept them up and down, and her lips curved into a lecherous grin. “You went in a rather different direction, didn’t you?”
Draco shuffled a few inches to the left, behind Hermione.
Pansy snorted and turned back to the main room. “Erection detection!” she declared gleefully, and the rest of the party’s attendants fell into clamours of simultaneous delight and disgust.
Hermione chanced a glimpse a Draco and they shared a private, guilty grin.
His hand brushed hers and she threaded their fingers together.
“Next time we hang out,” she murmured, “I’m going to want much longer than seven minutes, okay?”
And Draco bit his lip. “I hope I can hold you to that.”
“You can hold me any way you want,” she said, without thinking, and another expression of disbelieving joy, followed by despair, washed over his face.
“Not that I’m not enjoying what you’re saying,” he whispered, with a worried glance downward. “But if you don’t stop, I’m not going to be able to walk back to the circle for at least an hour.”
And Hermione threw her head back in delight and laughed.