Three Months Left

Chapter 1

Draco's having trouble concentrating.

He's revising in the Slytherin common room, a recent necessity. Zabini's just asked him a question for the second time, and it's the second time he's had to do it. Now he's looking at Draco oddly and that won't do.

He won't question Draco, though. Not like he would have done last year. Zabini knows better but even so, Draco can't afford people wondering. There's only one thing Zabini – or anyone else – is allowed to speculate on, and since no one will mention that aloud either, Draco decides to let Blaise assume it's more of the same.

After all, Draco is the only one who knows something is different. Something is irrevocably different from only a week ago.

His occlumency has been helping during lessons, tremendously, but even that is starting to show some cracks now. That concerns Draco more than his various Slytherin housemates noticing he's preoccupied.

Draco feels in control of so few things that lessons had become inordinately important this year. He thinks his failure at his other task is inevitable, and that will have severe consequences. Consequences that top marks in lessons won't mitigate, by the way, but it's a small, short-term sort of boost when he does well. It helps keep his morale up, so to speak.

But now something else has positioned itself. Someone else has positioned herself.

At first she'd had nothing to do with it on purpose. He'd enjoyed partnering with her for projects, knowing those top marks were all but guaranteed, but he'd also begun to enjoy the fact that it was her specifically, and not any other top student.

She's so different from Pansy. From Daphne and Astoria. From Sadie, back at home in Wiltshire, who was sent to Durmstrang. Over the past year or two, she's gotten really pretty. Hot, in fact, because she doesn't know it. That wild hair that always looks like someone's just had her in bed, the full lips she's always biting, the flush in her cheeks like she's thinking of something dirty.

The uniform skirts they wear always get shorter as the girls get taller, of course, legs growing longer and all that. Granger's haven't. She's short, a short witch. She barely comes to Draco's chest. But that's made the glimpses of skin above her knee that much more tantalising, because they're rare. Girls like Pansy and Daphne tug theirs up just a smidge when they sit, a subtle motion meant to escape the professors' eyes but never the wizards'. Granger doesn't. She tugs hers down, just covering her knee with her legs crossed.

She's a good girl.

Those legs are perfectly shaped, with delicate calves and fine-boned ankles. Draco wants to run his hands over them. Across, around, up. He wants to thumb her anklebones, slither his fingers over the arches of her feet and hope she's ticklish. He wants to see each perfect toe. He wants to know if he tongues one of the smaller ones and imagines he's between her legs instead, does she visualise it that way also? Would it send a stab of heat to her stomach? The same kind that imagining her licking and sucking his finger does to him?

And her chest had filled out beautifully. He doesn't think she'd noticed this either, the tightening of the buttons on her uniform blouse, the extra work they're having to do this year. Maybe she has and is trying valiantly to ignore it. Either way, wizards can't ignore it and Draco's been no exception.

He'd had all these thoughts long before she propositioned him in the library. She'd been the visual bright spot in a royally shitty year, one Draco was more than happy to soak up at every opportunity. More joint projects and revision, please.

But then she had propositioned him and he'd nearly fallen over.

Generally speaking, witches made their attraction known in a less... overt way. Well, less and more, in an odd contrast. Daphne, for instance, would spend full minutes blatantly staring at him. He'd finally look at her and she'd smirk and bite a lip, wink an eye, maybe. But had she actually walked up and asked him to shag her? No.