A Second Look - A Dramione Story

Chapter 14

Warning: This is not my story. It is from RiverWriter on ao3.

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She hadn't suffered through such a terrible night's sleep in years. She was irritable at work the next day and spent hours debating whether she should owl Draco or not. The more she thought about it, the more she realized how callously she'd walked away from him the previous evening. If he had behaved in a similar manner she would have been thoroughly confused and quite hurt.

The truth of her behavior had her retreating to the one place she felt completely safe, which meant that she practically frog marched Harry to lunch. He was suspicious but blessedly unquestioning... for about five minutes.

"Alright, spit it out," he said, swallowing a bite of sandwich.

"What?" She asked, trying to look innocent.

He scoffed. "Hermione, it's me, I know you better than anybody. If you wanted somebody who wouldn't notice that you're upset, or who would leave you alone about it, then you would have forced somebody else to go to lunch. I'm only here because you secretly want to talk, so spit it out." A thought seemed to suddenly occur to him and he perked up. "Did Malfoy do something I can kill him for?" He asked hopefully.

She huffed, pulled out her wand and cast a privacy charm. She didn't care that everybody in the general vicinity would think she was rude for doing so; they had saved the world, or at the very least the country, and they were regularly spied upon for their trouble. She did not want this conversation overheard.

"Draco asked me to stay with him last night and I kind of freaked out," she confessed.

Harry dropped his sandwich. "He tried to make you spend the night at Malfoy Manor?" He growled, a dark look crossing his face and he actually began to rise from the table, presumably to storm Malfoy Enterprises and murder Draco.

She reached across the table and grabbed his wrist to stop him. "No, it wasn't like that! He didn't try to force me into anything, I slept there Monday night anyway, and I was fine. He just wanted my company, he'd had a bad night."

Harry blinked at her, obviously trying to make sense of her tangent. "But that bothered you?" He asked, switching from enraged to confused, and deliberately returning to his lunch.

"No, not at all, it was nice that he wanted me around. And I wanted to stay, but I just thought that it was a bad idea, and I kind of jumped in the floo and warded my flat so that he couldn't follow."

And when she said it out loud, she realized that she sounded like a crazy person; Harry was certainly looking at her like she was.

"So let me get this straight," he said slowly. "He wanted you to stay with him, and you wanted to stay. But instead of doing what you both wanted, you ran and locked him out of your flat?"

She ran a frustrated hand through her curls. It was something she'd been doing compulsively all morning and she just knew that her hair was going to be a complete mess- rivaling its Hogwarts era bushiness- by the end of the day. "I just think that this is all happening so fast. I mean, isn't it too soon for me to be spending the night? I've already done it once and I've seen them every night this week. And you know how I went to look at that house with him?"

Harry nodded.

"Well, what I didn't tell you is that it's in St. John's Wood- the muggle world, Harry! And not just that. He wasn't only looking for my opinion as a witch, he specifically wanted my approval before he bought it, and when he got it, he did!"

"Wow," Harry intoned, his sandwich gripped in his hand, frozen between the plate and his mouth.

"And, Merlin, it's so beautiful, I love it! I made a simple joke about being willing to provide free babysitting if he would just allow me to live in the smallest guest room, and he said that when I moved in, that it would be into the master bedroom.