How I Like It

How I Like It

It isn´t always fluff and bunnies and roses and lovely domestic bliss. More often, there are glares and slamming doors and a whole load of alcohol being consumed. But it is at times like this when Harry remembers just why he´s here, in a house living with a person he had considered at one point in his life, his enemy.

Harry is sitting out on the porch, looking out at nothing in particular. Draco´s head is in his lap. If anyone were to look at them, Harry muses, they´d think he and Draco were the perfect couple.

They´re not. Draco can start arguments over the littlest things, like where to place a new lamp or the fact that Harry forgets to pick up his socks sometimes. Harry thinks inwardly that this is rather girly of Draco, and only women actually complain about socks being on the floor, but if he ever told Draco this, he´d go off on a rant about his injured masculinity, and those could last for a long time.

And sometimes, after a big argument, Draco will leave the house and the door will slam and Harry is left standing in the middle of an empty house that seems all too big with only one person in it. And Harry will go to work everyday at the local newspaper -- he always wanted to be a reporter when he was young -- and he´ll come home and there´ll be no one to greet him. And maybe a week later, when Harry´s finally getting used to coming home to complete silence, Draco will be in the kitchen, washing the dishes with his sleeves rolled up, and when he hears Harry´s footsteps, he´ll look up and smile at Harry and say, `Dear god, don´t you ever wash the dishes? What would you do without me, just buy new ones every time you ran out?´ And when Harry comes closer to him, he´ll smell alcohol on Draco´s breath, but he never says anything because he´s too happy that Draco´s home. All he ever does is take Draco into his arms and hold him for a long time.

And then, Draco is strange. Harry can come home sometimes, and Draco will be on his hands and knees scrubbing the floor vigorously, and he´ll be crying. Harry thinks this is strange because, didn´t Draco grow up with house-elves to do everything for him? And yet he takes solace in cleaning their house. Harry will get down on the floor with Draco and kiss his hands, which are sometimes bleeding, and he never asks why Draco´s doing this, because he already knows. He remembers Hermione locked away in St. Mungo´s, Pansy Parkinson tortured and dumped outside the borders of Hogwarts, Cho Chang crying everyday until she was found in the Prefect´s Bathroom with her wrists cut, and he knows why Draco´s crying.

Draco considers himself an amateur novelist, and had Harry buy him a computer just so he could sit in front of it and figure out how all the keys worked and what everything did, and now he sits there everyday and types up a novel that he won´t let Harry read. Whenever Harry asks, he just smiles and says, `I´ll show you someday.´ Harry loves to watch Draco sit at his computer and type and yell at the computer when he types something wrong, as if it´s the computer´s fault.

Harry doesn´t know if he loves Draco. He just inherently knows just how much Draco hates pumpkin pie, and how Draco will deny his love for television, but will sit on the couch, wrapped up in a duvet and watch old movies until morning, and how Draco´s feet are always cold. He knows this, and he finds it endearing, which, when he actually thinks about it, is a sign that he´s going senile, and he hasn´t even hit thirty-two yet.

Harry doesn´t know if Draco loves him either. He knows, however, that Draco always makes his coffee in the morning exactly how he likes it (Harry takes it white; he hates it black), that Draco has a ritual of kissing him before they go to sleep every night, and that he catches Draco looking at him sometimes with this look that he doesn´t know how to describe, only that it makes him feel like there´re bubbles floating around inside him, and they buoy him up and make him smile inanely, even when there´s nothing to smile about.

If Harry were asked why he was living here, in a suburban home, with a giant backyard and two cats and a loud canary that Draco glares at every time he walks into the living room and of course, a blond who could be petty and prissy and annoying as those damned vulture reporters, he wouldn´t know what to answer. He´d shrug his shoulders and say, `I dunno.´ Then he´d smile and say, `It´s `cause he´s the only person in the world that knows exactly how I like my coffee.´