I Can't Be Your Friend Anymore

For many years the burning desire to be close to her had been growing.

Draco knew he had to tell Hermione that she was on his mind every single minute of the day. It was no use trying to pretend that she did not matter to him at all. When in fact, she kept Draco alive during the long summer vacation.

Nevertheless, even with the thoughts of her running through his head all day long, it was nothing compared to the real thing. The soft brown eyes softly framed by the head of bushy hair made his heart race and the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

He knew he had to tell her.

He knew he could not go on much longer without her knowing, and without his knowing her answer.

He was scared though. Of rejection and humiliation. Worse than that, of acceptance.

There were times during the day that he would want to owl her and let her and the whole world know the thoughts that he had been keeping to himself all these years.

Then he would sit back and remember that she was a mud-blood (errrr, muggle-born to be exact) and that it did not exactly look good for a Malfoy to be in love with someone like her.

"No," he thought, "I will just wait. Waiting until the time is right will be just fine, and then it wont be a spur of the moment decision where I could scare and potentially hurt us both."

Therefore, he kept his thoughts to himself and waited.

Summer faded, but the hunger she felt for him did not.

"There has to be a way," thought Hermione, "why else would I feel this passion so strongly."

Scenes of Draco kept zooming in and out of focus in Hermione's clever mind, and every time she saw his eyes, she would receive only goosebumps that traveled up and down her spine.

Those eyes that would pierce her soul and find the secret that she kept so well. From the silvery green of his eyes, she would travel to his hair, which always seemed to move just as gracefully as those lean muscular legs that carried his toned body.

And when she got there, she had to stop thinking about him, because the pain in her heart would start to hurt so bad she sometimes wanted to run, straight into those arms. The ones that to her seemed so hopeless, so forbidden; yet so inviting.

Sometimes she would sit at her window at night and wonder what he was doing, what he was feeling, if he was dreaming.

At night, her dreams would be punctured by images of the softest lips she had ever seen, and she would wake up in a cold sweat, breathing heavily.

She could not take it anymore. She had to tell him, but she could not. There was simply no way she could. It was not meant to be.

"I'll just have to live," she would think with a hopeless sigh.

There was not much else she could do.

However, in her heart she knew she could not. She knew what the night held for her. She knew that once she hit the sheets, she would not be able to stop thinking about him. That is where it hurt her the most.