Disclaimer: I own nothing, literally. Don't sue me J.K., please!
How did I get here? My reflection in the mirror is prettier than I've ever seen it, my hair piled elegantly on my head in a twist, my dress falling like clouds of silk around my shoulders. At his request I only applied light eye makeup. He says he likes me best like this, not made up. With hair this bright you really can't go too vibrant with makeup, red does seem dramatic enough.
I guess it all started in Hogwarts,. Times pressed in broom closets with his hands sliding their way up my skirt to my knickers, me moving my hips to keep his fingers from going to that placed that always seemed so important that he reach. I never did let him. At least back then I had some restraint. His mouth would lick and nip, leave open wet mouth kisses on my neck and the goose pimples would start from that point and lead to places that would make me blush later when I thought about it. My fingers would render his usually immaculate hair twigging out into different areas as my hands saw fit. Eventually I would hear his breathing become more than just slightly irregular and we had reached his breaking point. That was when I would leave. Seventeen year old boys only had so much control, I knew this from a past experience with Dean.
After he left I thought it was over. Days were fine, pre NEWTs and all. Nights I craved his touch, his mouth on places I was regretting him not going before. I dated a string of boys, their attentions seemed honest, all wanting to discuss marriage and kids after Hogwarts. None tried to do illicit things to me, none made me want them to do them. About three months before NEWTs he showed up in my Potions class. Snape announced that he would a remedial potions tutor if it was need and an assistant in his class. I was fixated on his steely gray eyes and long elegant fingers. I wondered if he ever tried to play the piano. The war was over, we had won and everything I had held dear was safe. I knew he had never taken sides.
It took three weeks for things to start again. It was three weeks for me of feeling his eyes on me in the hall,. Three weeks of his hand accidentally brushing my thigh under my skirt when he walked past me. I lost my virginity in a room in the dungeons he used as his study room. I kept my uniform on and my skirt was hiked up to my waist , he was completely naked. Painful, uncomfortable, passionate, sating, it was all those things. His mouth possessed mine and bruised me. The second time was in his own personal room, on his down feather bed with my arms around his neck and his eyes never leaving mine. After that I lost count.
I graduated with enough good marks to land a job in the high ranks of St. Mungo's as a Trainee Healer. Days were long and draining, but my nights were the thing of every woman's secret dark fantasies. We never spoke of commitment past sunrise, there was no pretence of a relationship. Nice wizards would ask me on dates and I would decline, pleading I had no time for a relationship due to study. Somehow these nights became months. In these months my mum would ask me when I was going to find some nice young gent and settle down. She already had grandkids from her sons, but she wanted one from me. I would smile sweetly and say I was dating someone nice and kind, but I didn't want to jinx it by talking about it. It pacified her.
However, like all faerie tales, this one had it's secrets. For all our passion and soul rendering sex I knew nothing of the man who spent his night in my bed. In an effort to make myself feel more valid in this, well, whatever it was, I asked him over for dinner one night. As my luck would have it that was the one night my brother Ron decided to apparate in uninvited while my lover and me were on the table. I had worked so hard on the dinner, taken great care to include things he had mentioned on occasion that he liked. Somehow the food ended up on the floor, plates and glasses broken and us half dressed. This was how Ron found us. I felt exposed, shamed, and embarrassed. Thankfully my bra and knickers were still on, and the man I had captured around the waist with my thighs was still in possession of his pants. Ron was bewildered, his mouth ajar in what seemed to me to be amazement. I looked up to see a smirk on the pressure red lips that hovered above me. Ron left without saying a word. I was mortified. Ron would tell my mum. Mum would cry that her daughter was a harlot, a whore. I started to cry about these things, how I would be such a disappointment to my family. When I moved out on my own they had been so proud of me. They thought it was for quiet time to study. Now they would know the truth. I watched as his expression darkened to anger. Not the petty look he would have when engaging in his taunts with my brother or his friends, but real anger. The kind that carried no words.
He kissed me to shut me up. He kissed me to stop his head. I never found out what clouded his eyes so much, what thought pushed him. I was too afraid to ask. We broke the table.
After that night it was different. He brought me flowers and took me to dinner, always out of the way places we wouldn't be seen in. Sometimes I wanted to confuse the travel with romance. Pastries and coffee in cafes in Paris, lamb kabob Kafka style in Greece. It wasn't hard to imagine that this was actually a real relationship, something to tell my mum about (I never did). He told me about his businesses in different countries, I talked about work and patients whose aliments mystified me. We would always end up at my house, clothes rendered useless by lust and impatience. The one time he brought me to his place I felt cold. I had never been in a place so, well, dark. Mostly in deep forest green and black his house was more like a museum. The coldness spooked me. We made love in his room that night and I felt as if we were single handedly trying to infuse the place with heat. His bed was like heaven, I felt like I was a resident of the clouds. He wouldn't meet my eyes. In the morning instead of leaving before he woke as was his custom with me, I stayed. I stayed to see him sleepy eyed and groggy. I stayed to see what his morning routine was. It ended up being kissing me from head to toe and back up again. This time as he was inside me his eyes never left mine. This was when I realized that the eye contact was his way of conveying to me what he wasn't allowed to. I just couldn't translate it yet.
Ron never mentioned what he saw. When I tried to speak with him about it all he said was that he didn't want to know. It's not like I knew what to say. How do you tell one's own brother that you like what the man he hates the most in this world does to you. That you like the feeling of his skin on yours and his tongue twisting with your own. That you like it when he walks in your home like he owns it, like he owns you, strips you bare and then takes you from behind bent over the sofa, table, bed, whatever we're nearest. All this time the only thought in your head is Oh, Merlin, can I keep him in me all night, moving, breathing at my neck, scratch marks on my hips? Those are things you cannot tell your brother. I let it go.
More months passed. I was finished my training and was now a full-fledged Healer in lime green robes. My schooling had been in-depth of many illnesses, mental and physical. I knew enough to know that I was obsessed. I found myself fascinated by the hue of his veins under his pale skin. I knew every freckle, every imperfection (only two, a scar on his knee and one on his elbow). I knew his mood before he knew it. The way he would tense his jaw when he was irritated, or the telltale way he smoothed his index finger over his eyebrow when he revealed something intimate. I knew I was obsessed and I didn't care. I finished my tasks at the hospital early everyday to sit home and wait for him. He was the reason I cleaned my house, wore nice undergarments, kept sweets in the fridge. I kept a bottle of Fire Whisky in my cabinet that I never touched. Dinners with my family were customary once a month, mum and dad insisted upon them. When mum would ask me questions about my apartment, or my love life, I gave vague answers. Ron shot me dirty looks across the table that I ignored. I didn't care. When dinner was over he would be there, he was my only thought.
Months became years. Our jobs began to take up so much of our time that our dinner nights were few and far in-between. Some nights he wouldn't show and I would pace my room until dawn. Some nights he would be there before I came home, already asleep and naked in my bed. On these nights I would curl up besides him and sleep, his scent and steady breaths lulling me into my dreams. At some point my dreams became less of him and work of the moment and more of him and me in the future. I saw little girls with red hair running behind me, boys with unreadable gray eyes sitting in my lap while I read. I saw him, a rare smile that I burned on my brain, waking up next to me in a bed I didn't recognize, in a room I did not know. We would be awoken by one of our children knocking on the door. I eventually began to wake up in tears. He would kiss me, try to comfort me, make love to me. The way his hips rocked against mine sent my hands to my sheets, gripping them with all my strength so that I didn't pull him into me. After every time we were done he would take out his wand and cast a anti-pregnancy charm over my womb. I would bite my lip to keep from crying when he did this.
It's not unreasonable to be twenty-three and want to start a family. My whole family was married, Ron had even found someone to take him in and produce his offspring. He and Luna were happy, and their children were a combination of parents who had red and blond hair. I would squint my eyes at them and in the blurriness try to imagine if that was what a child of mine and his would look like.
Tuesday became our early night. He would come over and we would cook diner, or he would bring takeout. He would kiss me leisurely and languidly. We took our time. Words of love had never been spoken between us, but I knew I was in it. I knew this was what it felt like. One Tuesday night came where I broke. I was still straddling his sitting form and we had our arms wrapped around each other, air was not present between us. While still inside me he brought his wand to us. I took it out his hand and threw it across the room. I could tell he was bewildered, his usual facade gone and replaced with confusion. I bent my head and kissed his neck.
"I want more."
I didn't say I wanted him because I knew that would be unrealistic. He was not mine to have. I wanted a baby. His. I could see our child in my arms, I told him. He didn't have to marry me, he didn't have to be with me. No one would know it was his. He didn't have to be involved. I wanted a baby.
Taking my face in his hands he kissed me. My heart stopped for that brief moment, hope flourished. Then shook his head no. Retrieving his wand he cast the charm. I began to cry. I had no real hope of him and me, no matter how much I wanted it. I knew the world I resided in was different form his. My fingers were calloused from work, his were smooth perfection. He told me the first child of his would be an heir. That the first would always be a son in his image, the trademark ice blonde hair and steel gray eyes of his family. That was the way it was, that was the spells and reinforcements ancestors of his had cast centuries ago to ensure the purity of the line.
I screamed at him to go away. I was angry and irrational. I knew what it meant to be apart of one of the Pureblood families that believed in keeping its roots. He asked me to understand. He kissed me in between compliments and confessions. That I was all he wanted. That my skin was the texture that he craved against his. I cried. I told him to leave me. That there were things I wanted in life and if he could not provide them, I would have to go else where. I did not care about convention, we had lived in the taboos of others for years now. He kissed my stomach, my ribcage, my heart. I stopped crying and had bruises the next morning on my wrists. We were over. I spent a few days thinking about him, missing him. My sheets held his scent and I refused to wash them. My nights became empty and my days were bleak. I began to rationalize everything. He needed a pretty, blond wife that came from his world. I was the one he fucked until that came about. Being a single parent was still a source of shame in the wizarding community, but there were some who didn't care. Hermione had refused to marry Harry on the bases that they needed not be married to have sex so why did she have to do it to comply with society. I wanted a child to raise and wasn't quite ready for the father/marriage aspect of it. At least that's what I told myself.
Every day I got better. I began to resent him more for 'leading me on', even though he never did. I dated aimlessly again like I had in Hogwarts, all men respectable enough for marriage but not one gaining my affection. Four months after he left he returned. Sloshed drunk, bottle in hand and clothes wrinkled, he knocked. He never knocked. I opened the door, dirty insults ready in my head to make themselves known and he kissed me. He tasted like whiskey and chocolate, smelled of spices and sweat. He had been walking the streets, his shoes were covered in mud. The bottle broke on the ground as he dropped it to pull me close to him. I was lost in my mind. Some part of me was angry that he showed up like this, but the larger part was rejoicing. He's here! He missed me! Some part of me is vital to him!
Against my hallway wall, on my floor in my bedroom doorway, on the bed. When he clumsily muttered the charm I didn't think about it. Dawn made it's presence known as we closed our eyes, him holding me close. When I woke he was gone, but that night he was back.
It continued like this for a while. A few days of happiness and then the life I was giving up for him would sneak up in the back of my mind. Every time he drove into me my minds-eye children became blurrier, as if I was squinting my eyes at my own desires. I would yell at him to leave me in peace, leave me to find my life and have the future he wasn't willing to give me. A few weeks or a few months would go by and he would be back, his drunkenness his excuse to darken my doorway.
I began to rationalize again. I knew I was attractive. I still got asked out, though not so much anymore since I had a reputation for turning men down or canceling last minute. Simple, I would go on a few dates, acquire a 'reputation', and get pregnant. If I was regarded as a witch who slept around no one would question when I refused to give up the father. I had only been with one person and even though I knew our passion and pleasure wasn't found everywhere I had heard enough gossip to know that sex was still enjoyable if you weren't in love. Then next time we were together I treated it as if it was the last. I left my mark on his skin, breaking the layers of his back. I bit his shoulder, lower lip. After he cast the usual charm on me he went to my mirror to repair the damage. I told him to leave it to remember me by. Bloody mouth and all he turned to me.
"Is this it again?"
"This is it for real. I need it to be."
He shrugged his shoulders. I knew he thought he would be back in a month. I knew he thought I would be here. I knew differently. He kissed me and left. When I woke in the morning I had dried blood on my mouth.
A week later was my date with Daniel. Daniel was a Curse Breaker at Gringotts like my brother. In fact, he introduced us. Dinner was fabulous and afterwards he took me to an orchestra-style concert where the conductor played all the instruments by waving his wand. Handsome and polite, I was his friend's little sister so he was a gentleman. When he went to kiss me goodnight I pressed my body flush to his so he would know my intentions. I instantly felt his reaction to me against my hip so I deepened the kiss. Bill would have been so ashamed..
We came inside. I had placed a fertility charm on myself before I left so that my chances of become pregnant were increased. An anti-pregnancy charm would counteract it, but I was hoping he would just forget it. As his lips made there way to my throat, we heard a voice in the shadows.
"Thank you for escorting her home. You may leave."
Daniel looked confused, but ready to contest. He looked to me for an answer and I looked to the ground. I had none. He left.
Our fight lasted hours. Was this what I was willing to do to get what I want? Would any bloke on the corner do? I never answered. I didn't want to care. I didn't want to love him. He threw things, he screamed and cursed. I never flinched. After his anger was spent he approached me, and my silence.
"Is this really what you want?"
The answer was no. I didn't want some bloke on the corner, I didn't want some nameless little child. I wanted his. I wanted a child of his to fill my void when he was gone from my life the way I knew he eventually would be. I didn't tell him all this, I couldn't. He was so close that I could smell him. No sweat, no whiskey, no mud on his shoes. His mouth found my forehead and I closed my eyes at the warm sensation of his lips. Taking my hand he led me to my room. My bed was never especially big; I was a very small person. Our bodies never left the space we allotted ourselves, his hands in my hair and his mouth never leaving mine until I came. I tilted my head back in awe of the feeling. I felt him thrust into me a few more time and groan into the crook of my neck. After he regained his breath he kissed my eyelids and went to sleep. Three weeks later the little plastic Muggle test Hermione gave me had two blue lines. I was going to have a blond haired, gray eyed boy.
I waited that night for him. Since my date with Daniel he had been there every night, making love to me every night, never saying his spell. He had to know this was coming. I never asked what changed his mind, why instead of pulling out his wand he would wrap his arms tightly around me and sleep. He would never be there when I woke up, the pillow that held the shape of his head and the wetness on my thighs my only proof he had been there at all. When he apparated in my living room I handed him the test and hoped that he knew enough about Muggles to know what it was. I didn't want to explain. He wasn't shocked, he wasn't phased at all. He threw the test in the waste bin and brought me to my room. Again it was our leisurely and languid motions and I found my soul in his arms. When I woke in the morning in the dent of his pillow there was a ring box with a large solitaire diamond in it. I didn't question it, I put it on.
Now here I am. My dress is beautiful, and I am only four months into my pregnancy so I'm not showing. My mum was perplexed that he was my nice and kind young man, and Ron for some reason looked relieved. Everyone was shocked. When had we started? Why was it a secret for so long? He left the planning up to me; I left it up to my mother and Fleur. White lilies and red roses are everywhere, and I am to carry a single white and red lily down the isle. We haven't talked about it. I'm to be his wife, live in his house, raise his child (or children), and we haven't talked about it. He hasn't even technically proposed. He only asked that it not be overdone, that I not be overdone. My mum has said frequently how I'm glowing, and my dad only smiles. I know he doesn't approve.
There is a knock at my door. I don't look, I know who it is. As he walks to me I hear the click of his dress shoes. Handsome as ever, his dress robes are black and immaculate. I don't question him, or lecture on how it's bad luck to see the bride before the wedding. I know he lives in his own world, and I need to know how to fit into it.
"This is a nice dress. I can always wear it to another occasion if this one doesn't happen."
He raises one perfectly arched eyebrow to me, "Such as?" He kneels down and puts his head in my lap. I fuss up his hair. Life is not perfect, why did he always have to be?
"Your funeral. I can dye it black."
He sees my humor. He laughs. My family doesn't have any events to wear something as fine as I'm wearing now, his funeral would be my only opportunity.
"I like it in white."
"Is that your answer?"
His eyes met mine. I saw adoration there, I saw pleading. I knew he loved me. He had given me all that I wanted. Space to scream, a child to call my own. I wanted to give him his out if that's what he was asking for. But he preferred my dress in white.
"Why?" I couldn't help myself.
He plays with the lace hem of my dress. "I imagined my life without you in it and I felt empty. Then I realized that I could handle empty, I was used to it before I had you anyway. After a few days I began to imagine your life without me in it, how you would find a husband, have your children, and be happy. Then I imagined hearing about it, or worse yet, seeing it. Seeing you in the life that you wanted, that I could have had with you, and I felt dead. I can't live feeling dead."
He gets up to leave. It took me seven year to get emotion from him, I didn't know how long an 'I love you' would take. It was then I realized that even though I had come to terms and understood my feeling for him, I had never told him. With his hand on the door I work up the courage to say what I never did, but for some reason expected him to come up with first.
"I love you."
He paused mid step, mid closed door. "I love you too."
Then he left. I smiled.
I was going to be Mrs. Draco Malfoy.
A/N: Thanks to Mimi001 for the beta, she spotted my stupid little mistakes I can't seem to catch.