Dramione: stop calling me Malfoy

6. Walk around the pond

Will didn't call that night. He didn't call the next night, or the night after that. Draco had efficiently scared him off. It must have looked like we were a couple to him, from Draco's flushed face and our argument in the hallway. I couldn't blame him for not calling, and in some ways I was glad he didn't. If he had called I would have lost all of the progress I had made with Draco. He had shared a big secret that day at the bookstore, and from that day on, things weren't the same. Our eyes would meet during dinner and I would feel a jolt of happiness rip through me, or his hand would graze mine as we sat next to each other on the couch, me writing a report and him working in his notebook. There was a spark there, and I wanted to hold onto it, even if I could get burnt. Christmas was soon approaching and I had a good feeling about it. I just knew something was going to change.

A few days before the holiday Draco and I went out to a pond that was a mile or so up the mountain behind our house. It was snowing, and the flakes fell onto our cloaks and into our hair. As usual Draco was fairly silent. So silent in fact that it caught me completely by surprise when he flung a snowball at my head.

"Gotcha!" he yelled, laughing for the first time with me. A big smile spread across his face and his cheeks went rosy. I lent down to make my own snowball as another one hit my back.

"You are so dead!" I yelled back, and threw my projectile at him. He ducked, but I managed to knock off his felt hat. Giggling, I ducked as he sent another at me. A large war ensued. After throwing a large ball at me I stumbled and knocked him over. Some how I landed on my back, with him on top of me, his face was right above mine, and his hair swung into my eyes. He was putting his weight on his hands, a la push up position. His eyes were glowing and his lips were only inches from mine. My senses were going haywire with him pressed up against me. I could smell him, musky and almost chocolaty, with just a tad of mowed lawn, a sent I recognized from... the love potion in Prof. Slughorn's classroom years ago. Was Draco my, dare I say it, my soul mate?

I looked up into his eyes and had the sudden urge to kiss him. I willed him to just lean down and do it. But then the moment was gone as suddenly as it came. He rolled off me and muttered an apology. I sat up and dusted myself off. He pulled me up and I got the feeling that he had wanted to kiss me too. The normal tension between us intensified ten fold and I felt nervous and jumpy. We walked on in silence together for a while until the silence became too much to stand.

"So you were going to explain how baseball is played?" asked, his voice still shaken from before. I sighed, grateful for a conversation. I went on to describe the bases, but it was totally worth it, because the pond was unlike any other pond. It was a deep blue in color and was small in diameter but deep, maybe 15 feet down in the middle. There was a wooden dock that you could sit on and dangle your feet into the water. Cattails clustered together on the far bank and water lilies scattered around the edges. The pond itself was in a clearing in the forest of trees that cover the mountains. In the summer frogs would jump around it and my dad and I would try to catch them in buckets. Now there was a thin sheet of ice over the pond and all the fish and frogs found shelter underneath it.

Draco walked down to the edge of the dock and knelt down and brushed the ice with his fingertips. It cracked under them and water chilled his hand. I knelt down next to him, then sat down and pulled the string that was attached to a ladder on the side of the dock. The string was wet and mucky as I kept pulling. On the end was a water thermometer. Draco read it over my shoulder.

"Minus three degrees," he whispered. "That's cold." I dropped it back through the ice and watched it as it sank until I couldn't see it anymore. Draco and I sat together in silence, staring at the picturesque landscape in front of us.

"Can I ask you a question?" I asked, struck with a thought. He nodded, his fingers still skimming the ice. "Why were you so afraid on the plane?" The question had been bugging me for a while. He didn't answer right away, forming his words.

"I didn't know what was ahead of me," he said with a sigh. "All my life I've known what's before me but then I," he pondered for a minute. "I was afraid of loosing control." I nodded, then wrapped my arm around his back and rested my head on his shoulder. He didn't pull away. We stayed like that for a while. The peacefulness, and the chill, and the warmth between us made it a perfect moment.