15 | ﴾ Moonstone ﴿

                                    

                                          
For the rest of the afternoon I resigned to reading in the library on the third floor, sitting cross legged on the carpet by a huge fire and finding comfort in the stormy day. After I'd been there for hours I made my way back to the bedroom, clutching at texts about magical items - I had begun a new quest to find anything that had reference to the mysterious cloak which allowed the wearer to simply vanish. 
                          
When I opened the door to his bedroom the candles were lit on the walls and he was at his desk - home at seven, much earlier than usual. I swallowed nervously at the sight of him being so close to where I'd stolen the cloak from but maintained a straight face.
                          
I went to the bed and threw the thick books down on the covers and his head slowly turned to take in the amount of reading I was doing. His eyebrows scrunched up as he evaluated my double braids, overalls and pink sweater, looking positively the opposite of anything a Malfoy would darn, "Are you going to the local farmer's market? What are you wearing?" He lifted his arm to rest on the backside of his chair, twisting his spine to partially face me and genuinely laughed at my girlish appearance. 
                          
I pressed my lips into a thin smile and kicked off my slippers, rudely uncaring of where they landed, "I think et es cute." I rolled onto the bed on my belly and my knees bent up behind me as I continued to flip through the pages of a book aptly named Magical Materials and Elements. I kicked my legs back and forth and tried to ignore his icy grey eyes on me.
                          
He eventually turned back to his desk and continued writing, but I heard him laughing under his breath. The storm continued to wail against the glass in front of him and I noticed that the Lionspurt was now huddling into itself, thankfully ignoring Draco in it's fear of the weather outside. 
                          
My eyes drifted to him several times as he wrote fervently, the sound of his quill scratching fought to outdo the thunder outside. 
                          
He was wearing a shiny silver sweater and dark blue sweatpants. His reflection in the glass before him showed a young man, barely twenty years old. I couldn't avoid feeling pangs of sympathy for him, imagining him as a boy in the multiple, abusive scenarios I'd learned about his childhood that day. Had he been sweet? Had he cried much the way I did now? What was he punished for that would warrant being locked away in parts of the Manor that were scary? He had liked science and craftsmanship, did he still like those things? 
                          
I wished none of those details and questions were on my mind but they were, flowing like a river between the cracks of my brain. Suddenly his eyes darted straight forward into the glass reflection and found mine. He turned his head and looked at me blankly and my cheeks went hot with embarrassment. I bit my lip and looked back at my book now wanting to turn inside out. 
                          
"Why are you staring at me?" I heard him ask brusquely. 
                          
My eyes lifted again with indignity and met his unbroken confrontation. His eyes were wide and questioning, but not aggressive. I shrugged again, feeling silly and nervous.
                          
He gave me a confused look and went back to writing, but I noticed now that his vision frequently flickered up to the glass, eyeing me down to catch me a second time. I eventually slid my books off onto the floor with an exhausted huff and several of the potted plants on the nearby floor hissed with disapproval. I unsnapped the buttons on my overalls, letting them drop with a thud and saw that he was now fully watching me undress in the reflection.
                          
"Now who is staring?" I shot at him accusatorially. 
                          
He snorted and his lip curled up, "At least I don't try to hide it." His quill was frozen in place and I could see an ink blot forming under the tip. I stood there in my white lacy underwear and tight pink sweater, not breaking eye contact in the glass, twisting around so he could see multiple angles of me. The room became tense. The air felt thick like water and the sounds of our breathing were unusually loud.