Tainted Love

Hotel Walls

DRACO

The moon hung high then fell so slowly that Draco could watch it the whole way down. It paled like it was sick, overshadowed by the brightness of the morning sky. We give in to things that are greater than us.

The sun had risen a couple of hours ago, slightly dulled by the cloud cover. The windows on the skyscrapers outside the hotel window reflected its bright gray.

Draco hadn't slept at all. Thinking of the sleeves on Iris's dress, how they fell into her back. Thinking of the things they had said to each other, how her words matched the weight of the stones in the wall. How he had assumed that she would come back to his room with him up until the moment she hadn't.

Was it a mistake to write Simon the letter? To convince him that inviting Draco to his engagement party would be good for Iris? It was unfair. He hadn't expected Iris to be happy with him. He knew it might not be good for her at all. But he needed it.

He had been expecting to find her unmoored from the crowd, drifting away with champagne in her eyes, downturned lips. Waiting for him to come get her, waiting for her to ask if he really did love her.

Yes. And she would cry, and he would kiss her. He'd take her out onto the balcony so she could see all the stars, like she was a dying horse. Look back inside at the candlelight, fires burning and burning out, wax disintegrating into the air. Aimless and excruciating.

Her body drifting in his arms. They would have gone home, and he would have pulled her sleeves off her shoulders in front of the mirror.

But when he walked through the doors of the ballroom and saw her, she was not astray. All her limbs were accounted for, fingers curled around a glass of champagne, her face tilted in happiness. She didn't notice him because she didn't need to.

She was talking to a man who turned just far enough for Draco to be able to make out his face. He recognized him immediately. Draco knew Tremblay enough to hate him. He was Pansy's first fiance's best friend, endlessly photographed in papers around Paris with them.

That was an old wound, one that had long since scabbed over. Leo had always thought that Pansy and Draco were still together and Draco had always longed to have the satisfaction of confirming his suspicions. That didn't matter anymore.

Now he longed for Leo not to be in the world at all, or at least not in this room. He longed for Iris to be smiling less, to make her shoulders lower.

He stopped to stare at the ceiling and wondered whether he meant that -- whether he would rather Iris be sad than happy. What did it mean if he did? All his life, Draco had never once let jealousy get the best of him.

He had watched the girl he loved breeze through two engagements, cry in his arms one night and fuck another man at a gala the next. He was cruel and consistent, hurt her to get the better of her -- but he never tried to stop her.

Because he knew that Pansy was never happy apart from him; because he hadn't loved her in the way people are supposed to love others.

Draco wasn't sure he had the ability to love people in the right way at all. Standing there, wishing for Iris's smile to drop, he thought he might not ever be able to.

But Iris knew he would be there, he was sure of it -- Simon wouldn't have kept it from her. And she knew he read the paper. She was doing it on purpose, exchanging intimacies with other people in front of him. She was trying to make him angry, sad.

So why shouldn't he be allowed to wish the same?

He knew he deserved it, deserved it as much as he deserved the empty house and the fear of flying and the clouds in the sky. It would be easier to accept it. It would be easier to forget everything she had said to him last night.