Warm Spell on a Cold Night

WARM SPELL ON A COLD NIGHT

It's just before Christmas. The temperature has dropped steadily for the past two days, after the snow came, and now it's colder than I thought possible in this part of the world. In the dungeons, the cold is merciless, and warming spells don't seem to have much effect. It's late, but I decide to go out for a stroll through the grounds before going to bed. Walk fast. Try to get warm.

It's one of these rare nights when everything seems brittle as glass, clear and thin and fragile, shiny and transparent. The stars are bright jewels on display on the black velvet tray of the sky, and the recently fallen snow is dry and powdery light.

But I didn't go out to admire the beauty. I went out with the hope of accidentally running into Harry. We have been accidentally running into each other almost every night for two months.

Harry Potter.

Strange how someone so straightforward can be such a mystery.

When I'm with him, time breaks up. It loses its meaning, ceases to make sense. It's fragmented, slow, still, or it speeds past like a Snitch. It crawls. It has wings. It doesn't exist.

Harry Potter.

There has always been tension between Harry and me. Ever since we were just boys. But this new tension is – new. It's like nothing I've ever felt before. And I know he feels it too.

During the past months our venomous verbal duels have changed into snark contests, which in their turn were followed by long exchanges of glib, ambiguous comments. And then there was – silence. The flow of words slowed down to a trickle and faded out. Something has to replace the words. But we haven't yet found the replacement.

I think I know what it will be. What it will have to be. I don't believe those words can be replaced by anything but touch.

We're moving towards touch. But we haven't yet touched for real. We have invented excuses for physical contact. We have had snowball fights. We have been flying together, teasing, chasing, colliding. Carefully accidental. Casually suggestive. Real but not real.

I'm in no doubt about the kind of touch I would really like to share with him. In no doubt whatsoever about what my lips or my hands would like to do to him. And from the look in his eyes sometimes when I catch him looking at me, his wishes are not very different from my own.

I walk fast because of the cold, listening to the snow creaking under my heavy boots. I go down towards the greenhouses, where the tangle and jumble of plants dream long, slow winter dreams of light and tropical heat. And as I round the corner, I collide headlong with Harry.

He grips my upper arms to stay upright, and the contact of a warm body is like a shock. We reel and our boots slide in the snow, but when we have regained our balance he does not let go of me. Our faces are level, pale in the moonlight, our breath like smoke around us. And as our eyes meet, time breaks up, shatters into little pieces, falls soundlessly onto the ground.

I think we are both affected strangely by the clear, sharp beauty of the night, by the moon throwing handfuls of glitter over the snow and by the vague sense of danger that always hangs in the air like shards of glass in severe cold, making the sky jingle and twinkle like an enormous chandelier.

We stare. There is no other word for it. We stare.

And when the kiss happens, it's fierce and rather awkward, burning with a long contained fire that comes from both of us.

I have never, ever been so convinced that this is exactly where I want to be. I close my eyes to shut out the theatrical beauty of the evening. I don’t want anything to draw my attention from the hot mouth coming down almost brutally on mine, the hands pulling me close to a wiry body, taut and tense as a coiled spring, the eager but inexperienced tongue that enters my mouth too hard, too fast, too roughly. But I meet it with mine and I am rewarded with a gasp. My palms slide over hard muscle on his back. We have moved towards touch. We have found it. And when I hear him moan I know like I have never known anything before that I don't want this touch to go.

I want to see his face, his eyes, his desire. I want him to see mine. I pull away slightly, still holding on to him, or I would fall. His eyes are wide and bright, shining and excited, his arms still around me.

"What…?" His voice is hoarse and we are both breathing hard, white breath like a cloud around our heads. "Draco… what’s happening?"

"I don’t know. It seems to me we just kissed."

I am surprised that my brain finds words. I am surprised I have a voice. And I am surprised at the unmistakable laughter in it, soft and teasing. Harry looks annoyed and delighted.

"You… you don’t… mind?"

He seems to be surprised he has a voice, too. He blushes at this silly exchange of words and I laugh out loud. It is so cold, my laugh has a fragile jingling edge to it, like the sound when you crush the first, thin, clear ice on a puddle in the morning after a frosty night. I want us to stop talking. Words are so clumsy. Words should not be needed now that we have found touch.

"Did it feel that way to you?"

His eyes hold mine steadily and I know he can see the excitement in them. The heat of our kiss is pulsating in me. As if his mouth on mine is the only thing that makes sense. And he smiles just a little, a smile with a challenge in it, an edge of danger in those clear green eyes.

Laughing, scared, enthralled, I pull him to me again, smiling lips meeting smiling lips, smiles transforming into the wet heat of battling tongues. I want to eat him, devour his mouth, hold him until there is no telling what is him and what is me. His hands are in my hair now, fingers pushing through it, again and again, sliding down to the back of my neck. His mouth leaves mine and his tongue licks a wet path down my throat, instantly chilled by the night air while his breath comes in hot blasts. His arms tighten around my waist and he holds me to him in a way that makes me gasp and push my body into his for more, more, more. My head falls back to expose as much skin as possible to the mouth wandering over my throat; my fingers slide into his hair and play with it, marvelling at the softness, and as his tongue swirls into the hollow at the base of my throat I realise that the moans I hear come from me.

He lifts his head to meet my eyes again, my fingers still in his hair.

"Oh, God, Draco," he mumbles softly.

My name on his lips makes me shake. Words. Touch. Sometimes there is no difference.

He pulls me to him again and my face is hot against his. We stand there, immobile for a long second, trying to catch up with the situation, trying to understand what we are doing, where we are, how we came to be here. Trying to find our way back into time.

The dry snow creaks under our feet with each movement. We listen to the small noises around us, the ones you always hear in severe cold; little sighs and rustles and faint clicks of inanimate things adjusting to the cold, resigning to it, settling in it.

His hand touches my face and we kiss again. Kisses can be deep and hot, they can be liquid fire, they can be a dark well to drown in. I am only just learning this. I am only just learning.

And it seems we can't find our way back into time. Time is now, present, absent. It lives in a moment. It doesn't end. We have it, we own it, we can do what we want with it. And for now, all we want is this kiss.