Tainted Love

Always Yours

DRACO

Wednesday morning dawned, unsurprisingly, with a hangover.

Draco's head seemed to move slower than his body as he rose, dully aching. The ends of his limbs felt like they were pulling him towards the ground. His stomach turned, the flames from the firewhiskey turning into claws that pawed at his insides, sending bile up his throat.

He had always been shit at healing spells, but he managed to numb the pain in his stomach. He could at least do nonverbals again.

He walked down the hall from his bedroom. The living room was a disaster and so was the kitchen. He almost wished that there was a wall between them so that he didn't have to see both at the same time.

Bottles of firewhiskey littered the table and the counters, his couch cushions were pulled out all over the place, and there were little spots of blood on the floor from where he had cut his hand.

He could see a reddish-brown smear on the kitchen wall, too. He didn't even want to look at the couch.

He sighed, rubbing his eyes, and decided that he would clean it up when he got home.

It was becoming harder to make excuses for his own behavior. He had been drunk yesterday morning, or at least a combination of drunk and hungover. That could explain away what had happened, sort of. Mostly.

And he had been drunk on Friday too. Well, that wasn't exactly true. He had taken two shots of firewhiskey that hadn't even hit him before he was walking to the bathroom and signaling for her to follow.

And he hadn't been drunk the first two times, either. But he could find other things to blame. Sexual frustration, withdrawal from Pansy, the fact that Iris was, in many cases, the closest and only girl available to him.

They were not the best excuses and he knew it.

If he was just fucking Iris because she was available, because he needed someone, he should be thinking of her in the same way he thought of the girl from Monday, the same way he thought about all the girls he never cared about.

By which he meant that he shouldn't be thinking about her at all.

But he was. He had been thinking about her all morning. He saw her in his head as soon as he woke up, which perhaps explained the headache. And they weren't angry thoughts, either - he wasn't thinking about pissed off he was, wasn't thinking about ways to get her fired.

He was thinking of how she had looked against his wall, against his couch, wide eyes, her lips beneath his thumb, her legs around his back.

And now he had to see her, to go in to work and compare the properties of Amortentia brewed with and without an artifact.

He could dismiss her and probably would. He would probably face the opposite wall all day, get annoyed by her footsteps as she walked aimlessly around the room, take notes about his potions and side-eye the clock.

But part of him wondered what would happen if he didn't. If he went inside and regarded her with an undisguised gaze, if he walked up to her and brushed her sleeve, if he trapped her eyes in his, what would she do?

He murmured the nose-blocking charm before he entered, tamping down those thoughts.

Over the years, Draco had found that most girls seemed to confuse him fucking them with him liking them. He didn't picture Iris being much different, all things considered.

Iris probably had the mistaken notion that he liked her, that he wanted her even when she had her clothes on. Giving her any more attention would only encourage those thoughts in her, and Draco didn't want to deal with it.