分卷阅读20（1 / 2）

“Hey.” When he gets closer, there is no mistaking him for anyone else. “Wait a minute, will you.”

He grabs him by the elbow and yanks him backward, the motion to hard, and it wrenches Draco around to face him. “What?”

Draco spits the word at him. And why shouldn’t he? It was Harry’s best friend who threw him out, after all. “I’m sorry.”

“You shouldn’t be.” Draco stared at the sky, and Harry knew that the shaky way he was breathing meant he was trying not to cry. “He doesn’t have to forgive me. I did awful things.”

“But you did good things, too.” Harry didn’t know why this was so important to him. Maybe he just wants these two people to be as important to each other as they are to him. “You’re good.”

“Not good enough. And you shouldn’t…” A deep breath, one that was meant to force calm. “You shouldn’t be here, you should go inside.” It doesn’t look like he really means that. “They’ll miss you.”

“I don’t care what they think. I don’t care about him.” It was true, suddenly, and Harry knew it, that he could turn his back on the rest of them if they didn’t want Draco, he would be willing to make that trade. He was also standing close to him now, so close, close enough to be dangerous, but Harry cannot make himself step away. “I want this.” A pause, where he got even closer, his hands on Draco’s shoulders and his fingers twisting into the fabric of this shirt that was too thin for the cold weather. “I want you.”

Draco closes his eyes like it pains him, and then bows his head so his forehead is pressed against Harry’s. “We can’t.”

“We can.” Harry says. ‘We can do anything we want, and damn the rest of them.”

The exclamation felt so good, so perfect, that he realizes that it must be true and closes those last few inches until they are kissing. It’s really not even that, just a ghost of a touch against his skin, but it could be, it could be more, until Draco shoves them apart and starts to shake his head.

“No,” He steps away, and the moment vanishes into awkwardness and unease, the two of them staring at each other uncertainly. “We can’t.”

He shakes his head one last time, then aparates leaving Harry to turn back to the party alone.

Chapter 16

Draco

The silence between them is stifling.

Not that Draco thought that he and Hermione would be able to meet at their usual time and pretend that things are normal, after what Ron had said to him and Draco left her crying in the middle of her own apartment, but he didn’t really expect it to bother him all that much. A part of him really had fooled himself into thinking that this was just a sort of academic arrangement, that it would all evaporate once they had figured out how to make the potions work. Like this was a sort of we’re the only two people who can do it, so let’s call a truce while we work, and that the minute they were finished all the school yard taunting he had done would rise up between them.

Clearly, like so many other things, he was wrong, because now he couldn’t stand the way that they were talking strictly only about the potion gurgling in front of them (though it was a less like talking and more like mildly panicked screaming, because neither of them could figure out why it was brown and overflowing the onto the table) and pretending not to look at each other out of the corner of their eyes. It seemed that somewhere along the line of hard work and late nights, they had become friends.

And maybe that was inevitable, when all the random scraps of information they tell each other about their lives and their hopes start to pile up, or when he throws a blanket over her when she falls asleep on the couch, or when he finds out her favorite food and makes sure the kitchen is always stocked with it. And he’s glad of it, really, but it does make things supremely awkward, because if he’s not mistaken he has now become the best friend the boyfriend doesn’t like.

Draco decides to be the brave one. “Listen.” He takes a deep breath, and then a shaky one, and then vanishes the potion with one jerky motion of the hand. Hermione makes a small noise of protest in the back of her throat, but Draco was always much faster to recognize a lost cause than Hermione. Sometimes, there really is nothing left to do but start over. “About last night.”