Anyone But Me

Chapter Twenty-Five

She watched out of the corner of her eye as he tucked an arm underneath his head so he could look over at her. A timid smile crossed her lips but she didn't say anything. She was enjoying the feeling of his eyes roaming over her body, lingering once again at the exposed skin of her shoulder and collarbone.

"So what would you like to talk about?" He asked, his gray eyes taking on the silver hues that she had only seen accompany his amusement at a joke.

She wondered what he was thinking as she turned her head so she could return his look. Lounging across the black blankets he had somehow figured out how to make the action look graceful. She sighed before answering honestly. "Pansy..."

"Why would you want to talk about her?" He inquired, his eyebrow raised in curiosity.

"I guess... I was just wondering how you could go from wanting to be with girls like her to me." She asked, knowing that the answer had the potential to change everything. She wasn't sure how she would react if he said he wanted a change from the same old thing or something equally insulting.

"That is a hard one to answer Kitten. Let me preface the easiest rationalization by saying- It has always been you that I have wanted. Well... pretty much always. I can remember sitting there a couple weeks after you struck me in third year and I could not get how your eyes lit up out of my mind. It kept replaying over and over. And instead of feeling the disgust I was supposed to feel... I kept imagining being able to see it again. I found myself doing anything I could to get that look from you, because no one reacts like that if they don't care on some subconscious level. I couldn't have you, for so many reasons, but I could have that... The illusion that you cared."

Her eyebrows came together as she realized what he was telling her. Another surreal moment in a long line when it came to them. Conformation on an unrequited crush. At least until recently...

"As for Pansy or any other girl I might have hooked up with... They were the exact opposite of you and that was the point. I didn't need a replacement. I needed girls who could keep me from imagining you in their place. They needed to be overtly sexual and dominate so that I could get lost in the experience. Which is too bad really..." He said a soft smirk playing on his lips. "I like being in control..."

She barely got out a breathy, "Oh", as the instant spike of need at his words overwhelmed her.

"Not what you expected, pet?" He questioned as his teasing smirk widened. It was clear that he knew exactly what he was doing to her.

She shrugged, doing her best to appear unruffled. "I didn't know what to expect. You are always surprising me Draco."

His smirk lifted to a full blown smile that caused crease lines around his eyes. "Good."

Hermione smiled back at his gratified response. Go figure that he would want to surprise her, like it was a wonderful thing that he wasn't fulfilling her predictions. Of course, in his case, he was probably right...

She still couldn't get who he was out of her head. Always on edge she was expecting the switch to flip and not come back down after a few moments of heated discussion. They had been lucky so far that neither had said something that would cause all the carefully laid bricks to fall. And yet, the thought kept wiggling in the back of her mind that a major blow up with inexcusable insults thrown at each other was how this was all going to end one day.

His eyes darted down and focused on her hands as she absentmindedly wiped the perspiration that had collected on her palms onto the rough fabric of her jeans. He literally missed nothing... If he was as perceptive as he had proven himself to be and it was true that he had been watching her for years, he would know that her wandering thoughts had veered somewhere dark causing her to start to get worked up again. She could feel the invisible metal bands wrapping around her chest, making it hard to breathe.