All They Want For Christmas...

Kissing

Hermione awoke the next morning knowing she had slept in due to the large amount of light streaking across her closed eyes. She'd probably missed breakfast. She groaned into her pillow and rolled to her side, away from the light and right into something solid... solid and warm. Hermione's eyes snapped open. Upon seeing a shirtless, unknown male in bed with her, Hermione shrieked and tried to escape from the bed. In her haste, she became horribly tangled in the silk sheets that had covered her and was unable to do little more than fall onto the floor with a thud in a tangled mess. Wait... silk sheets? She didn't have silk sheets. Ohmymagic, I'm not in my room! She panicked and continued to scream as she tried to untangle herself.

Draco awoke to screams. He winced and then realized that Hermione must have woken up before him. In a flash he was awake. He jumped out of his four-poster bed and was kneeling at her side in mere seconds before he clamped his hand over her mouth to muffle her screams. "Do you ever stop screaming?" His grey eyes looked deeply into hers and she was silent. He removed his hand from her lips. "Are you okay? Do you remember what happened last night?"

She concentrated as she looked into his eyes. "Last night... We... We went flying, didn't we? And then I..." Her eyes started to water, "Oh, I fell and I thought I was going to die and all I could see was the ground and knew I was going to hit it and"

Draco shushed her. "It's alright. You're perfectly fine. I caught you before anything happened." Hermione was frozen for a moment before she threw her arms around Draco's neck and started to cry. This time it was Draco's turn to freeze, as he had no clue how to cope with tears. Sure, he had seen people cry during the war and stuff, but never to him. Never on him or because of him. Well, okay. Maybe some people had cried because of him, but not to him. Draco didn't know what to do. What he normally would have done was pull back, tell her to suck it up, and then walk out... but he knew he couldn't do that with Hermione. She was different. And the way he felt about her was now different. And so, Draco hesitantly wrapped his arms around the crying girl and let her sob onto his bare shoulder, not knowing what to say.

A few minutes passed and Hermione's cries grew softer, her tears slowed their flowing, and she gradually pulled away from him. She looked away from him, embarrassed. "I'm sorry," she apologized. "I just... I've never been so frightened in my life. I thought that was it for me." Her honey-brown eyes slowly found his. "Thank you... I owe you my life."

"I'm the one that took you flying," was his guilt filled reply

"But I was foolish. I tried to do something I shouldn't have. You kept me perfectly safe the whole time." She touched his arm gently. He felt a slight tingle shoot through his body when she did. "It wasn't your fault. You're practically a hero." He shrugged sheepishly. "I don't know how to repay you..."

"You don't have to. This is what friends do for each other, right?" Hermione nodded. She wasn't sure if normal friends saved each others lives on a regular basis, but her core group of friends seemed to. "Then you don't have to repay me."

"Okay." She said slowly. "Can you tell me why you brought me back to your room as opposed to mine?"

"There are wards on your room. A male can only be allowed inside with explicit permission from you, and we closed the window when we left, and they can only be opened from the inside. Since you were unconscious I couldn't really get permission to get into your room, and I wasn't just going to leave you on the couch in the common room, so I brought you here."

"Right. Now I remember." She paused for a moment and looked around the room before speaking again. It was laid out similarly to her own, except like a mirror image. The décor was subtle, masculine, and dark. The sheets she was wrapped in were jet black in color, as were the rest of his sheets and blankets, and the hardwood floor was a deep, dark mahogany. The drapes that hadn't been closed that night were a deep green with silver stitching and looked to be made of heavy velvet. Everything looked... rich. Rich and heavy and dark. The contrast to her room, though decorated similarly, was near startling. Draco was