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He’s exactly where I knew he would be—behind the farthest broomshed, shoulders to the wall, haloed by smoke and the golden kiss of his Lumos.
He’s already smiling when I round the corner, like he was expecting me—like he knew I’d be along. I settle against the wall beside him, so close that there’s barely a sliver of evening air separating me from the heat and fire of him.
“I thought you quit,” I say.
“No you didn’t.” When he laughs at me, he flicks the tail end of a plume of smoke my way. I breathe it in, feel the acrid sting of it on the back of my tongue.
He’s right.
The next time he lifts his hand—languidly, but intently, as though he has nothing in the world better to do—I intercept it. My fingers are a bracelet at his wrist, and though he keeps his hand loose, I can feel the thrum of tension that quickens in him, the effort of holding himself still. This close, so soon after a long game, he smells of the sky. The sky, the sharp tang of fresh smoke, and warm skin.
I lean in, bend his hand towards me, feel the stretch and slide of bone and tendon under the pads of my fingers. He has a fresh broom callous just where the plump curve of his palm meets his wrist. I want to lick it, and then move down along the delicate tracery of veins to meet the kiss of his pulsepoint with one of my own.
I don’t.
Instead, I take the cigarette between my lips, and I draw deep on it. It’s one he’s rolled himself, by hand—no magic, just the casually erotic crease and roll of paper between his capable fingers, the efficient slide of tongue to wet and seal the tube—and the end has been shaped and flattened by the press of his mouth. I can feel the tempting dent of it, the hint of dampness where it has sat against the enticing wetness of the inside of his lower lip. The intimacy of it feels like a violation. I breathe in.
“That’ll kill you, you know.”
There’s a thread of amusement running through his voice, and I want to tell him that maybe it will. But I’ve thought that other things would kill me before, and none of them have managed it yet. Not for good, anyway. Not Bellatrix or the Whomping Willow or Aragog or even Voldemort; not being pitched headfirst from a broom last summer at the Burrow; not any number of searing hexes and bungled Avadas that I meet every day at work; not even this hopeless, endless longing for stupid Malfoy, or this debilitating need to kiss the taste of smoke right out of his stupid mouth.
“Potter,” he says, and his voice is almost even, but as I exhale, his eyes slide shut. A fresh wreath of smoke blooms and quivers around us. I tighten my grip, and the hand holding the cigarette flutters, sparks cutting through the twilight.
He takes another drag, pauses, then sighs the smoke back out into the air.
I watch him through the haze and billow of it, feel the staccato rap of his pulse beneath my thumb. He flicks the butt lazily, sends it on a spinning arc, its glowing tip a tiny Catherine wheel of heat.
“It’s a bad habit,” he says, “but I don’t want to quit.”
“I know what you mean,” I reply.
I keep his hand in mine.