Tainted Love

PART TWO: Benefits

PART TWO: BENEFITS

DRACO

The air was sickeningly hot. The end of July always brought with it a bout of such intense heat that everyone in the entire country felt as though they might be living in a furnace. Every year, people convinced themselves they had been overreacting. Then when it hit, everyone overreacted all over again.

Draco, who had always preferred the relative anonymity of nighttime and the abrasiveness of the cold, loathed summertime. The long days, the blazing sun - he could think of nothing he wanted more than to put on a coat and watch the sun disappear as he walked home.

He hadn't walked home on Friday, though. Walking left him too much time with his thoughts. His brain had inexplicably gone missing for fifteen minutes on Friday afternoon and he didn't trust himself left alone with it.

It was Monday morning now, and he had spent the greater part of the weekend trying to disassociate himself from whatever had happened after work Friday. During work.

Disassociation on such a grand scale required going out to the Siren on Friday and Saturday, drinking himself into blankness, and forcing himself to only think about the things directly in his field of vision.

He tried to sleep for the majority of the day on Sunday. He had always found people who sleep during the day lazy and unsophisticated. But if the alternative was thinking about what had happened with Iris, he would rather be the most unsophisticated person alive.

Unfortunately, it didn't exactly work. His mind tended to flit back to his memories of the event whenever he left it unattended - and sometimes even when he was actively trying to think of something else.

You know exactly what I'm talking about.

She was so brazen with her confidence, the way she spoke to him. Draco could tell what she was about to say, about to do, with one look into her eyes. They had a sort of brashness to them that he despised.

Yes, he had tried to ignore what happened on Wednesday. What had almost happened on Wednesday. And she hadn't let him.

The thought came to him late Sunday night, ugly and rearing: what if she didn't let him forget this, either? What if she demanded to talk about it? What if she told her friends about it?

In truth, he had been thinking about what had happened more than he would like to admit. And not just the fears of having to talk about it and be reminded that it had happened.

No. He had been thinking about the thing itself. Fucking her.

He hated the way her eyes burned. He hated the way her hips curved, the shape of her collarbones, the drag of her fingers light on his back and the sting of her fingernails digging into his biceps. He hated how her voice changed, how her skin had looked pressed against a table.

But somehow his hatred of her had made it better.

The way she spoke to him, stared at him... he knew she hated him too. She hated what he was doing to her. She had tried - and succeeded, for a second, at controlling him. Her hands on the band of his boxers, her gaze trained on him as she spoke.

The way her eyes had widened as he flipped her over, pressed her down.

It wasn't sex. It was an argument they had while fucking, showing each other how much they despised one another with hands instead of words.

And he couldn't explain away the way she felt.

But he could. He could. He had to - the alternative was accepting... accepting something that he couldn't accept.