Dramione Drabbles

22. For My Wife

Hermione leans back in her seat, liquor-coated lips lifted into a cheeky smile, watching as the man across the table ogles her bare legs. He leans forward, tinged in expensive cologne and cheap nicotine, and asks, "Want to get out of here?"

"No, she doesn't," a familiar voice answers for her, a possessive hand curling over the backrest of her chair.

Only the clench of her jaw hints at her displeasure.

Her companion frowns. "Do you know him?"

"No," she says, at the same time the newcomer says, "Yes."

"He's from a past life," she allows. "An old classmate."

Malfoy steps forward, hooking his jade-eyed serpent cane beneath the man's chin. "Leave," his voice is cold. Loaded.

Her handsome stranger goes pale and vacates his seat without looking back.

She crosses her arms as Malfoy claims his place. By now she's certain he has her watched. Letting her play, flirt, brush elbows with freedom, but before any real fun begins, he appears, loath to share her even for a few minutes.

"You play with fire," he tells her in a low voice. No matter how often she denies him, defies him, infuriates him, he never raises his voice. Never points a wand to her chest.

"Is it wrong to crave attention?" She nudges her drained glass to the centre of the table, slivers of ice floating at the bottom. "To want a man to buy me a drink?"

His gaze lowers to her curved hand. He waves a signal, and a server rushes over, eager to please. "Scotch," Malfoy orders, without tearing his gaze from her naked ring finger. "For my wife."

When they're alone again, he tilts his head to the side. "You can try to glamour me away, Hermione." He doesn't say Granger anymore, refusing to acknowledge a time when she didn't belong to him. "But you'll always be mine."

When she looks down at her hand again, the glamour is gone and the exorbitant emerald-cut diamond has returned, gleaming and loud, calling for attention like a beacon of light.

She hates him.

Has hated him since their names were drawn in tandem and their fates bound together. But she can't deny the way his gaze makes her feel, how a single look from him liquifies her bones. Pulverizes doubts to dust.

The Scotch comes fast. She downs it faster. And then Malfoy is on his feet, fragments of light from the three-tier chandelier glimmering in his hair, palm outstretched towards her. "Let's go home."

And even though she'll fight tooth and nail to dismantle his attempts to tame her into an obedient society wife, which she suspects he never wanted in the first place, she takes his hand. Weaves her fingers through his, allows him to swathe her in his heavy cloak, and whisk her away to cold silk sheets and unfettered time. Hours, days occasionally, forfeited to shared breath and tangled limbs, foolish sweet-talk pressed into sweat-slick skin.

She's got him wrapped around her little finger.

(500 words, first written November 2021)