Work Text:
Hermione Granger was a collector. A gatherer of knowledge. An accumulator of books. A stockpiler of facts. And if there was one thing she had been acquiring for months now, it was datapoints on the many sounds of Draco Malfoy.
It was how she’d known she was in trouble.
She’d asked him several detailed questions about a file, six weeks ago, in their shared office at the Ministry. His responses (a range of unhelpful, noncommittal, extremely male chest-to-throat noises—Nos. 6-11) had sparked the immediate reaction of arousal inside her instead of vast annoyance…and she’d understood it was dire. When she’d gotten turned on the next day by the low voice he’d used to request her spare quill she was certain of it.
She wanted to shag him. Badly. In fact it might go a bit beyond that by now.
The sound he was making at the moment—an irritated huff (Noise No. 22) at a snowy, scenic vista—was not quite as endearing.
It also, unfortunately, did not make her want to shag him less.
She put down her omnioculars to glare at him.
He narrowed his eyes back at her.
She worked in the Life-Magic Chamber as an Unspeakable, tasked with studying magical creatures and their evolutionary relationship to their non-magical counterparts, and had desperately needed a controlled environment—one with no magic—to advance her research. He worked as a liaison between the Space Chamber and the Time Room, studying mysterious areas of the Earth that were magically inert—Magic Voids, they called them—and had needed living test subjects.
They had been paired up six months ago by their Division heads, who had been much more pleased with the situation than either of the two of them, and told to report back when they hit a breakthrough.
This little field trip they were currently on somewhere in the middle of Scotland was supposed to be said breakthrough.
The specimens she’d insisted on starting with were flying reindeer—very similar to their non-magical counterparts—and both species’ natural habitat coincided with a tidy patch of forest in the Cairngorms where there was a known magical void near a henge.
There was one small problem: they were also most likely to be active and observable on only a few particular nights of the year.
To say Malfoy wasn’t thrilled about the imposition on his time off might be understating it.
In the months they’d been working together, she’d been exposed to an entire symphony of his sounds. As she’d pored over maps with him looking for intersections between the migratory patterns of erumpents, rhinoceroses, and a void area in Kenya (bored tsking—Noise No. 15). As she’d turned down suggestion after suggestion as too far, too time-intensive, too infeasible (a frustrated rumble in the back of his throat—Noise No. 19). After she’d had the audacity to propose that they might need to work a very teensy bit into their holiday (the response to that had been less of a sound, and more of a rant…unprecedented megalomania—delusions larger than your hair—if you think that impinging on a sorely needed respite from your badgering is an acceptable overtime request…although Dangerous Noise No. 13 had featured some).
She couldn’t have come without him; she needed him there to monitor the perimeter of the void and make sure they didn’t accidentally cross it. It was potentially very dangerous to have the magic suddenly pulled from one’s body.
Thus far, however, his primary contribution had been complaining about the fact that it was fucking freezing and that she had dragged him up here on Christmas.
“It’s not Christmas, it’s Christmas Eve,” she interrupted after the third, and loudest, grievance yet. He was edging very close to Noise No. 23 (grumpy petulance she thought he’d left behind in their school days).
“As good as.”
She put the omnioculars back down again, a little bit worried that the gently falling snow might be starting to obscure their visibility. “You know, this is precisely your problem. You’re not…” fuck. “…precise enough. You’re a terrible scientist.”
“This isn’t science Granger, it’s magic.”
“It’s both! All these months listening to me talk about creature terminology and how much Mysteries could be learning from muggle systems and I bet you still don’t even know basic muggle nomenclature for biological life forms.” She wasn’t convinced he was quite that bad, but if she needled him enough sometimes she could get him to make Noise No. 5 (a sort of breathy growl).
“Not true. I could recite the muggle taxonomic system for you right now.”
“Oh really.”
“Really.” He looked at her with a sudden gleam in his eye that she suspected she was about to regret.
“Domain of Bossy Swots.” He ticked off one finger. “Kingdom of Smart-Arse Know-it-alls.” And a second. “Phylum of Self-righteous Wet Blankets.” A third. “Class of Judgmental Do-Gooders. Family of Reckless Workaholics—”
“I am not reckless!—”
“Genus of Power-mad Harpies,” he spoke over her.
“Power-mad!—”
“—Species: Granger, Hermione,” he concluded, looking entirely too pleased with himself.
The frisson she always felt upon the vanishingly rare instances she’d ever heard him use her first name shut her right up, and she did her best to suppress it. She hadn’t ever allotted that particular sound its own number and she tried very hard not to think about why.
So instead she affected a bored study of the grey sky (weather outlook distinctly poor), and the state of her cuticles (not much better), and then glanced casually at his stupidly gorgeous face. “I’m sure you think you’re very clever, but there were several compliments in there, actually. If someone cared to look.”
A sceptical eyebrow, and even more sceptical sniff (Noise No. 20). “Compliments.”
“An entire species all to myself Malfoy? You must think I’m quite singular.” Her gaze returned her nails.
“You are a singular pain in my arse—“
“Also, you forgot Order after Class.”
Ahh, there was Noise No. 4: Exasperation so acute it usually preceded crimes that sent one to Azkaban (it was a secret favourite).
She sent another worried peek upwards; it was definitely getting worse. The suggestion of occasional snowflakes had, between one blink and the next, somehow become more of a strong statement.
He followed her line of sight into the sky and then immediately verbalised what she was afraid of. “I think we’re going to need to pack this in. We aren’t going to be able to observe anything at all soon.” He paused. “I’m sorry about the limited timeframe. I know how much you were hoping this would work.”
He did sound mostly sincere, for whatever that was worth, but she refused to give in that easily. To put off something that would advance her research so effectively for an entire year wasn’t acceptable.
She cast a forecasting charm. It did something odd, the first result sputtering and glitching out of her wand, but her second attempt worked and she gave him a brilliant smile. “Says it should clear up in a few hours.”
He blinked at her for a few moments before he said, “It will be dark in an hour.” Like she was an idiot.
“Yes, I’m aware, but I brought a field tent from the supply room just to be prepared and we could easily finish this up in the morning.” She had been working very hard to keep the pleading tone out of her voice, but maybe that was worth a try. She attempted some doe-eyes.
“Tomorrow. Morning. Is. Christmas.” He said the words very slowly, as though his audience had reverted from idiot to small child. “Don’t you have somewhere you need to be? I would have thought a whole passel of red-headed menaces would be expecting you in Devon—”
She looked up at him in surprise. “What? No, Charlie and I broke up months ago.” As far as she knew she had made it fairly obvious. Her tone became plaintive. “I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind?” She felt ridiculous even suggesting it. Just because she was facing down an empty flat and the sad approximation of a solitary Christmas dinner tomorrow didn’t mean he was. “It’s only—you mentioned a few weeks ago your mother would be in France this year for the holiday, I thought might as well…”
“Might as well make me work over Christmas?” He ended his rhetorical question with a scoffing sort of noise (No. 17), but then he stared at her for a long moment like he was attempting to work something out in his head. When he finally spoke it was to offer up a weary sigh (No. 16) and a “Fine.”
She was shocked. She had no idea why he’d suddenly dropped it and agreed, but she merely nodded and moved to pull the tent out of her bag. She didn’t want to say anything to push her luck.
The tent spell worked very quickly, and when they entered she realised why. It was very small—certainly, like most magical tents, larger on the inside than the outside, but not by much. It was essentially the size of a bedsit and made to feel even more cramped by the fact that there were two of them in there, and he was not a small man.
There was a lot of inevitable brushing past each other.
There were two spartan camp beds set up on either side of the single narrow room, which she augmented with some extra blankets taken from her bag, but not much else to occupy them. Eventually, in exasperation, she suggested they just try to get some sleep, as it would get him out of her way, and there was little else to do.
Neither of them had been prepared for this, and had nothing to wear to bed, so they transfigured some of the towels into pyjamas and took turns changing in the tiny loo. After she tripped on something of his for the second time—not completely his fault to be fair, there was nowhere to stow anything—she shoved all their possessions into her bag and went to lie down.
He was generally grumpy and terse but other than the expected horrified grumbling at the tent’s size and lack of amenities, he mostly went around eyeing everything dubiously before agreeing that yes, the tent was awful, and yes, there was nothing else for it but to wait out the snow while asleep.
“I figured out what Order you belong to.”
It was sometime later. She was lying in bed, having abandoned the book she’d been trying to read by the light of the little hearth fire and getting distracted watching the snow fall outside the tent window. She had been slowly drifting towards oblivion when his words startled her back awake.
She looked across the narrow space at him, but he wasn’t looking back at her, focused instead on the glow from the fireplace.
He had the perfect sort of face for firelight, all deep hollows and sharpness that made him look broody and Promethean. He could have been a piece of Greek marble statuary, detailed in shifting gilt edges as the flames flickered. It was hideously unsporting of him to be this absurdly fit.
Despite her earlier assertion about compliments, whatever classification of her that was about to leave his mouth was likely to be unflattering. She attempted a deflection via academic nitpick. “Malfoy, I’m trying to sleep, but on the subject, you know you can’t have a species that’s just one person. How would I propagate?”
“Granger.” He rolled to face her as though now she had his full attention. “It sounds like you just asked me to tell you how to fuck yourself.”
God, she loved the sound of him saying fuck. (No. 2. It was very special to her). The harshness of the final consonant of the word echoed in the several feet of space between their camp beds.
She knew he’d said it just to throw her off. Knock her for six. Spin a dizzy, witty little circle around her like he was so fond of doing—always to try and regain the upper hand in their stupid, never-ending, back-and-forth sniping.
But it did something to her. And when her eyes flared wide and she jerked her head up at him, she thought maybe he hadn’t thought very hard about the words that had just come out of his mouth.
There was a stillness. She swallowed, and she watched him mark it, his eyes moving to her throat.
She wet her lower lip with her tongue—just a momentary slip—but he tracked that too, and the ridges of her cheekbones warmed. She knew she must be flushing. He sat further up in his bed with a question on his face, eyes very intent on her suddenly, and leaning up on an elbow. Like he could feel a new change in the air—his little bit of repartee was morphing and catalysing the atoms in the several feet of space between them. A charge of electricity that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“Draco—” His name fell out of her mouth. Soft. A whisper—mostly statement, but with the barest flavour of a question in the ‘O’.
She knew abruptly the exact thing she wanted to gift herself for Christmas. The particular noise from him that would make the substantial risk of what she was about to do worth it. She had no idea how he felt about her, but if that was indeed a spark of interest there in his eyes—slowly becoming less grey and more black—it just might be worth it.
And even if she only managed to greatly shock his delicate sensibilities and nothing else, the resulting sound he’d make would no doubt be a worthy consolation prize.
She expected the reaction she’d get might be vague embarrassment. Maybe flustered. Maybe intrigued. Before he ultimately backed down. Instead he looked at her intently with an expression she’d never seen before and she heard the sharp sound of a breath pushed from his lungs (she wasn’t sure she had a number for that. Yet).
He was just so tempting. Only a few feet away and looking like all the things she wanted most.
She used a hand to slowly push the blanket down her body, and watched her own fingers moving inch by mesmerising inch, gilded and flickering in the light of the fire to match him.
He made the softest sound, deep in his chest, and she shut her eyes in delight at how it melted over her.
He sat up even further. “Gra—”
Reality exploded.
There was a tear in the fabric of the atmosphere, and the tent contracted violently around them, throwing them towards the centre of the space as everything went dark.
She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, for the feeling of something torn savagely out of her body. She could barely see in the sudden blackness, but the way he was doubled over, and the sounds of ragged inhalation told her he must feel the same.
She felt like she’d been plunged into ice and realised the sleeping clothes she’d transfigured out of the towels were gone; she was only wearing underwear.
“What—what—” she gasped.
He held a hand out towards her face, as if to demand a moment, and she wondered in the darkness if it was shaking as badly as her own. He seemed to reel his body under control.
It was at least a minute before he was able to speak.
“I think—” He paused, chest still heaving. “I think we just crossed the void border. Or—or rather, it crossed us.”
“What the fuck does that mean?!”
“The borders can shift sometimes, remember? I explained that months ago, it’s why it took us so long to find a good place for your study. I can’t believe you were on me about taxonomy and you weren’t even paying attention—”
“First of all! Yes, I do remember,” she broke in testily. “You made it sound like they gradually creep out of place by a few feet. Not—whatever that just was. Secondly! Why the fuck did you select this place then if it was going to do that!?”
“I didn’t know it was going to do that. Obviously.” He sounded slightly less indignant and a little more abashed. “There’s a lot we still don’t know—”
“But this is your entire field of study—”
“It’s anomalous,” he protested. “It’s magic.”
She breathed very heavily through her nose in frustration at that. “There should still be some rules—”
“Yes, I’m well aware of your feelings on magic theory and science, spare me for the moment. None of that is going to help us currently.”
“Alright…” Fine. “What will help then? Can we just go and cross the new border? We need magic back,” she said, redundantly. It was starkly evident this turn of events was a problem that needed solving immediately.
“I don’t know where that is—the void is usually several square kilometres; we could be right in the new centre of it for all I know.” He started muttering to himself as though he were trying to understand how on earth this had happened. “There’s a ley line intersection nearby—that could be what’s thrown it off. Although…”
“What?”
“Well, it’s just past the winter solstice right now, it could be acting up because of that. There’s every chance it could return back to its old boundaries soon.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
“What if it doesn’t?” Her mind was starting to spin with a lot of terrible possibilities.
“We start walking until we find the edge again.”
“But you just said it could be kilometres—”
“I know,” he said grimly. “We’re going to have to wait until the snow stops. It’s too cold to be outside like this, and too dark to see. We’d probably just be going in circles.” She heard him shifting, like he was feeling around for something.
She looked around in the dark in total dismay. The tent was no longer magical—nothing was magical—and it had gone from the size of a bedsit to the size of an actual, miserably compact, muggle tent. No loo, no kitchenette, certainly no food, and worst of all—as she sat there shivering in her knickers—no heat source.
They were on top of the pile of blankets she’d pulled from her beaded bag—those, thank God, had not disappeared, and must still be here because they weren’t associated with the tent’s magic. Remembering her bag, she felt for it until her fingers brushed the telltale beads. It was only a foot from her; the amount of space inside the tent was positively microscopic. She reached in to pull their clothes out—the fact that she was freezing was only one good reason among many why they couldn’t continue to sit here like this.
Her fingers hit silk lining a few inches down.
“Fuck!” she swore, just as she heard Malfoy ask in a deceptively light tone, with a lilt at the end (Noise No. 21)—
“Granger, do you know where my clothes are?”
“Well, there was so little room in here—” Ironic considering the size it was now. “—and you’re always so messy with your things—”
—He made Dangerous Noise (No. 13)—
“—I tidied up. I put most of our clothes away in my bag,” she rushed out.
“So? Where’s the bag then?”
She handed it over to him in defeat.
Silence, then. “I don’t suppose this bag happened to have a very illegal extension charm on it? One that’s no longer working without magic?”
She didn’t answer him.
He chucked the bag into the corner of the tent in irritation.
“Hey!”
“Oh I’m sorry, did you need that?”
She huffed, and moved to wrap herself in the blanket she was sitting on; the gentle rustling and sounds of his movements indicated he was doing the same. Their clothes were clearly beyond reach now.
“So you really didn’t know this could happen?”
“Of fucking course not, do you think I would have picked this one if I’d known? There was an option in Sweden that’s over a massive territory and has been stable for decades.” She could hear him blow out a frustrated breath. “But the Cairngorms are in the UK…by the time you got the clearances from the Swedish ministry it was going to be too late—you’d have to wait a whole entire year, and I—I know how important progress on this project is to you.” She couldn’t see his face, but his voice sounded surprisingly earnest.
That was actually sweet of him. That he’d tried to pick somewhere that would give her a better chance, even if it made his own task harder.
She returned to their predicament, shivered, and wrapped the blanket she was sitting on around herself. “So…we just…wait, then?”
“No good options until the visibility is better. Then we can start walking and find out how fucked we are.”
She looked out of the mesh suggestion of a window, although she could no longer see much, and considered what he’d said about the void possibly resuming its former perimeter. “Maybe we’ll get a Christmas miracle,” she said hopefully.
A dubious sort of mphm (Somewhere between Nos. 8 and 9) from his general direction made it clear how likely he thought that would be.
She shivered harder.
The cold had seeped below her skin. The blanket was helping a touch, but with no heat to trap there was only so much it could do.
“Granger, this is fucking ridiculous.” His low voice emerged out of the silence. “I can hear your teeth chattering. Come here.”
She wanted to argue, because she always wanted to argue with him, but on the other hand…
Well, it was very cold.
And she wasn’t above admitting that cozying up to him held other temptations as well, although she attempted to infuse an aloof, if-I-must quality into her cheeky “No need to beg.”
She hesitantly scooted a bit closer to him and it sounded as though he was slowly mimicking her movements until their bodies met in the centre of the minuscule tent.
She stretched out alongside him, still shivering violently, while he tucked her up against him, her back to his chest, and wrapped himself around her. They were on one of the blankets, and he dragged the other over top of them.
And then she laid there quietly—awkwardly—and tried to meditate herself into a coma to avoid dwelling on things she shouldn’t be.
She had been thinking about him for months. Collecting his hums and rumbles and lilts and exasperated exhalations. But for two minor details—the current temperature and the reason he had her encircled in his arms right now—it would have been lovely.
As it was, she was too cold to think anything other than semi-coherent thoughts and bitterly regret these particular circumstances.
She focused on willing her body to stop shaking and they slowly dropped into something that approximated a doze.
She came awake sometime later with a start. There was no telling how much later—no way to know the time at all—but she was at least much warmer than she had been. And she suspected the cause of her wakefulness was a delightfully sleepy sounding groan into her hair that was still echoing in her half-conscious ears (cousin to that No. 3 gentle noise he’d made once during a desk nap, but an order of magnitude better).
Her back arched as she tested muscles that ached from sleeping on a very unforgiving surface and bemoaned the lack of a bed.
Malfoy was a wall behind her. A warm wall. She surreptitiously burrowed towards him a bit further, wondering how deeply asleep he was. And if maybe she might be able to get him to make that delicious groaning noise again.
As she did so, he shifted his body backwards by a few inches, but remained stubbornly silent. She could feel his warm breath on the back of her neck though, and the subtle movement of his chest. It seemed deep enough, and slow enough, that he probably was indeed asleep.
She considered for a moment, and then moved with more intent, dragging her arse against him in a very slow roll. Nothing dramatic, nothing that would give the game away or wake him, but more of a fact-finding expedition.
She felt a small smile creep over her face.
He was hard.
The question of how awake he might be remained, and to that she added what he might be willing to do about it if he were to become—perhaps—more awake. Maybe if she suggested that it would warm her up…
She was lying on top of one of his arms—the one he had used to reach across her chest and cup her shoulder while she’d been awake and violently shivering. In sleep his hand had fallen and rested on the blanket surface a few inches in front of her. She softly dragged a finger along his forearm, making little patterns. The edge of her nail scraped his skin gently—just playing—unsure if she had a plan yet.
She could hardly see past her nose in the dark, but she could hear the brush of his fingers as they curled inwards against the blanket.
She continued with her light touches, squirming a little bit against him, and the soft fidgeting caused sleepy little movements from him in turn.
The arm over the top of her was draped over her hip, and as he twitched his palm came to rest on the ridge of her hip bone, thumb brushing the edge of her knickers where they spanned across it.
That seemed promising. She arched against him again, this time a bit more aggressively.
His hand began to drift softly along the edge of her knickers, and then travelled at a snail’s pace down the sensitive skin of her stomach, tracing the lace edge.
Back. And forth. Down towards where her thighs met. And back up again. Just subtle enough that she wasn’t quite sure it was conscious movement. His fingers moved once more, still brushing along, and got perilously close to a certain damp patch of fabric.
She was, generally speaking, rather enamoured of his hands—so much larger and stronger than hers. She’d paid a lot of attention to them over the last several months. They were dexterous with a quill. Quick with his wand. And possessed of long fingers that she’d never appreciated quite so much as when they slipped underneath the edge of her knickers.
She stilled. It was possible…
Her palm, almost of its own volition, ran along the muscled forearm lying on the blanket in front of her, and she interlaced her fingers with his free hand.
The fingers now solidly and unquestionably in her knickers dipped lower, just brushing the top of her folds. She had expected she was already drenched, and the teasing easy glide he suddenly embarked on confirmed it. It was a light path, one that skated through her, and she twitched. It was nowhere near enough for her.
He couldn’t still be asleep could he?
She took the hand that was interlaced with her own and brought it up to her chest. There was the faint flex of a muscle in his palm, and then she pressed it against her breast, wanting him to slip fingers into the bra cup. She wanted to be touched there almost as badly.
The deep, slow breathing at her neck was no less warm than it had been, but at some point it had become considerably less deep or slow. It remained a steady presence.
Another teasing stroke of a fingertip that only just grazed her clit and she tensed her thighs. An arch to meet it—improve the contact—and he seemed to acquiesce.
A solitary finger moved downwards, but with blessedly increased pressure, and circled her where she ached just as she felt his lips at the very top of her spine.
Her mind blanked.
He slipped through her soaked cunt and her nipples tightened—he had begun to brush a thumb over the one she’d brought his hand to. She sank her teeth into her bottom lip—she had the sense that if he wasn’t going to make any noise perhaps she wouldn’t either—but as that skillful finger started to slowly work her clit, her lips parted in a sigh she couldn’t contain.
God, having his finger doing this was so much better than her own. Bigger. Longer. Rubbing her. Swirling. Pressing down.
She held her breath as his rhythm began in earnest, seeming to test what was working on her.
The answer was all of it.
Her heels dug into the hard, blanketed ground to try and shift against his hand; her eyes shut against the dark, getting lost in the pace.
A corner of her brain begged her to explain what exactly was happening right now between her and a co-worker she regularly engaged in hours-long snipe-fests with. She resolutely told it to fuck off.
He was going too slowly. Much too unhurried. She needed more.
He seemed to know it. Every so often he’d slip down, almost as though it were accidental, and gently circle her entrance. One too many times and she nearly moaned. Her hips had started to chase after it and she was getting dizzy with the teasing, almost salivating at the thought of how badly she wanted his fingers stretching her. Filling her, in a way her own were wholly inadequate for.
She wanted to force it—to finally get him inside her, and she pressed her lips shut to hold in an embarrassingly needy protest when he moved away again.
He was beginning to change things up—rubbing harder one moment and then withholding the next. She moved her hand to press on his fingers herself. She needed to come so badly; at this point she’d do it herself if he wouldn’t. He bit her lightly on the back of the neck but picked up the pace again.
She dropped one of her hands to the blanket, fisting it, and he suddenly sank his middle finger into her, until it could go no further. His palm was cupping her now and she clenched around him, mouth falling open on a gasp.
She ground herself against his hand, revelling in every point of contact, and he pressed back. Chasing after him had somehow worked her backwards and she found herself up against his erection at her spine, a hard and welcome reminder.
The blanket on top of them slipped a bit, bringing a bite of frigid air into their cosy sanctuary, and he withdrew his hand to fix it. She whined, until he returned, easing a second finger in with the first. Her chest inhaled sharply at the delightful resistance, but he didn’t return his palm to her, instead twisting his hand so that his thumb was at her clit and finally, finally, rubbing fast enough, thrusting firmly enough.
His fingers were curling, exploring her more fully, dragging along her walls, and she was squirming. Straining. So close.
She was obscenely wet. She could hear it. He worked a third finger inside of her, and his thumb made tighter and tighter circles until her cunt was clenching. Walls fluttering. She was breathing in deep, shuddery exhales. Mindless. Coiled like a spring.
Despite the weather, the research failure, the magic disaster…this was undoubtedly the best Christmas Eve on record.
His lips were still at her neck and he kissed her there, and pinched her nipple with his other hand just as the tension snapped. She shook, her hips bucking as she rode out her climax, and through it he never stopped slowly pumping his fingers inside her.
He was breathing heavily, and she was melting as she slowly sank back into him. He curved his entire body around her a bit more, dragging her further into his warmth and holding her closer at exactly the moment she most needed it.
The cold from hours before was a distant memory.
That had been…well. Mind blowing was certainly one way to put it. But as she gradually recovered a small degree of higher brain function she recalled that she hadn’t actually achieved her primary objective.
He still hadn’t said anything. Not even one of those nice, low-in-his-chest sort of hmphs in the No. 7-8 range she could get out of him on occasion.
A minute or two passed and she shifted again. Tried to squirm a bit. She could still feel him hard against her arse. After a particularly obvious wriggle he gripped her hips.
“Stop. Moving.”
The first time she got to hear his voice since waking and that was what he went with?
She didn’t.
No. No, because obviously he was interested and she was absolutely not done with him. Not after that. She still wanted more. His hands and his noises and his cock—
He stilled her more forcefully. “Are you that insatiable?” he drawled. There was an undertone of amusement in his words.
She spun herself around in his arms as she debated how to answer that, with the conclusion that a “yes” and a lot more squirming would probably do it. She reached down to touch his cock and he grabbed her wrist.
“No—it’s pitch black in here. I can’t even see you—”
“You can hear me though,” she said softly, right next to his ear. And then she dragged her tongue up the column of his throat.
“Granger, I’ve been thinking about you writhing around on my cock for months. It’s not going to happen until I can see your face while I push inside you.” He paused. “Slowly.”
If he’d been looking for a way to stun her into immobility, that was more effective than a Stupefy. She awarded all twenty-nine words in that sentence a place of honour among every sound she’d ever heard him make.
“I—months?”
“Months.”
“Why didn’t you—”
“Until about two hours ago when you informed me why you had no Christmas plans, I had no idea I had a real shot at it. But I refuse to let the first time we do this be in a muggle tent in total darkness.” (He’d somehow married the words ‘muggle tent’ to a No. 14, which indicated such a profound state of appal she was a bit offended. It wasn’t that bad).
She heaved a sigh. “Draco—”
His low voice was in her ear. “I have a plan. In the morning it’s going to have stopped snowing—” (this was said with the conviction of a man whose strength of will was determined to vanquish the weather) “—we are going to figure this out, and we will be apparating back to my flat, where I’m going to make up for this absolute travesty of a Christmas by fucking you so hard they’ll hear you in the North Pole.”
“I—”
“Now be quiet, and go back to sleep.”
She did.
She woke on a much plusher surface than she had fallen asleep on, with lovely warm firelight on her face. It seemed magic had seen fit to make a reappearance in the last few hours, the void presumably retreating back to wherever it had come from. The tent had restored itself, and atoned for its sins by providing a nice mattress beneath them.
A Christmas miracle after all.
A glance out of the window told her it was—unfortunately for her research—still snowing heavily, but the sleepy noise from the chest of the man next to her cheered her considerably.
It was the sort of thing she had managed to grow quite attached to despite this only being the second time she’d heard it. She was trying to determine what number it ought to be when she suddenly found herself on her back as he manoeuvered himself quickly on top of her.
He stared down at her face.
She imagined, based on how beautiful his own looked in the firelight, that she must be lit up with all the rich ambers and golds and buttery browns that he was and reached out a hand to brush the hair back from his forehead.
“Granger. About my previous plan—”
She raised a sleepy brow in question. “The magic is back, we could apparate from here—”
“Forget it. This is better.”
She parted her lips to respond but he was kissing her then, before she could even answer him, with the sort of dizzy, euphoric skill she ought to have suspected he was capable of.
His tongue explored her gently; he took his time about it. He opened her up with light touches, tentative and searching, that made her yearn for more—for harder—but when she traced fingers along the side of his face he stopped to study her again.
An Accio had his wand in hand in seconds.
“Looks like the magic really is back.” He murmured against her lips as he banished their underwear to a spot in the corner of the room.
“And you were so sceptical of a miracle,” she teased softly between kisses.
She wrapped her legs around him, taking advantage of her newly naked state and delighted in the press of her cunt against his abdomen. She was eager to recommence what she hadn’t been allowed to finish last night, but he pulled back and looked down at her with large hands that framed her face. His hair was dropping down over his forehead again and she wanted to sigh he was so sickeningly beautiful.
She had the urge to say something outrageous, like she would occasionally do at work, just so he’d say something predictably overdramatic and snap her out of her besotted haze.
His hot gaze tracked all over her body but it kept returning to look at her eyes. Her lips.
She was still so ready. Embarrassingly ready. It was so obvious that he grinned, and then he pressed the tip of his cock just inside her. She fought the need to shift her hips, to force him further in.
He dragged himself back out, slipping along her, and then pressed his thumb against her tongue. He found her clit after that and coherent thought made an abrupt departure.
She held her breath as he started to make excellent use of some very specific facts he’d discovered last night, and all the while his eyes never left her face, which she was certain must be distorting in pleasure by now. She tried to turn into her shoulder and his other hand gripped her chin and turned her back to face him.
And then he slowly, slowly, slowly pushed all the way into her.
“Fuck.” It was wrenched out of his chest and oh, that sound was so, so good she couldn’t help the one she made in turn, a begging sort of please that fell off her lips as she tried to arch up.
He pressed his hand down on her stomach in response—his thumb still against her—and the please turned into a moan that drifted away against the sound of the wind whistling through snowy branches outside.
A steady rhythm then, a delirious in-and-out that, combined with the swirling motion on her clit, and a delicious groan from him, caused her toes to start curling and her spine to arch off the mattress.
He was adjusting his motion at every moan of hers—every minute writhe or twitch—giving and then depriving in a way calculated to drive her mad with need. It was working too well on him though, the guttural sounds in her ears made it obvious.
He grabbed one of her legs to push her open wider and hissed as it did something good for him. She shook at the stretch before curling her knees up to her chest. There was a peak spiralling closer and closer and as her hips shuddered, he increased his pace to match.
The pleasure was beginning to ricochet within her—almost there—but with a flex of his arm he quickly reached down, grabbed her hip and rolled them both over. She found herself on top of him.
Her lungs were stuttering next to her heart, her walls inside fluttering—she was so close—although he was still driving into her from underneath steadily, like he might never stop.
She was aching, twisting—he saw what she needed in her face, in the language of her body, and returned his thumb to her clit. She shifted her hips, arching her back while it rubbed over her, working her higher and higher.
She was coming out of her skin and bent over him so that he could suck her nipple into his mouth.
That did it.
Her head fell back, curving her chest toward him, her knees curling into his sides and he sat up as she came. He drew his hands up—along her sides, her ribs, her throat, her face—and a series of slow implosions completely overtook her. He swallowed her bliss-stained moans with a deep kiss.
Outside the window at that precise moment an Eurasian Tundra reindeer took flight less than three metres from the tent, but they were both much too passionately preoccupied to care.
His stomach tensed, thrusting harshly up inside her, murmuring her name against her lips, and fuck whatever noise of his had been No. 1 before, because that was her new favourite.
Her bones had all disappeared somewhere—perhaps on display in some museum collection under the heading Orgasmus Maximus—and she was wrecked, slumped over him.
She rolled off of him slowly and they both lay there in the light cast by the hearth. Her eyes followed the snow flurries outside the window.
They were quiet for a long time before she recalled something.
She thought back to the middle of the night. “Draco? Why was it so important?”
A very sated, distracted hmm from his direction (No. 6—that was another good one).
“Why was it so important for you to be able to see my face?” She leaned up and rested her head on a bent elbow to look at him.
He made another sound in his chest (of the deliberately obtuse No. 11 variety) that made it seem like he might be embarrassed to say.
“Draco.” She gave him her most effective version of limpid, guileless eyes and an encouraging little half-smile. “Please tell me.”
He flushed a little bit but shrugged in concession. “I—like to keep track of the faces you make. I’ve been doing it since we started working together. There’s the one you make while you’re answering a question you think is idiotic. Your eyes roll and your brow gets all scrunched. And that absorbed one when you’re reading where someone could cast a Confringo next to you and you’d never know it. You get the dreamiest look to you. I really like the attempt at doe-eyes you make when you’re trying to convince me to do something—I call that ‘Granger Thinks She’s Being Persuasive’.”
She couldn’t contain a grin.
“In September I saw the smile you made while eating that salted caramel chocolate torte thing that Bones had brought in for your birthday—it was like nothing had ever tasted as good in your life and I haven’t stopped wanting to see it again. Like I could have it and collect it and keep it for myself. And seeing you in the firelight all amber and gold like sort of Greek fire deity—I knew that whatever you’d look like while I was inside you…it would be the best Christmas gift.” He smiled at her hesitantly. “It’s probably stupid—”
“No.” She beamed down at him. “I understand completely.” She leaned over and kissed him. “You’re not going to believe it when I tell you what I wanted for Christmas.”
