Tainted Love

Affection

DRACO

A gruff Tuesday night. The air was thick with cold, snow receding into the cracks on the sidewalks. People walked down the street with their heads down, not bothering to look at each other, their hair and scarves flapping wildly behind them.

Stray copies of the Prophet and the lesser newspapers of London drifted through the streets on intermittent gusts of wind, making it only inches away from the spot they began in. Pages flapped open, quick flashes of Minister Shacklebolt and an injured Auror and Diagon's property listings.

And Draco and Iris.

Draco watched from his window, his fingers tapping the air at his side. He didn't need to see the picture to know exactly what it looked like. It was burned into his brain. He had actually burned it a couple of hours ago.

The pictures weren't the offending arena, though. Draco wasn't dumb enough to believe that the Prophet would never catch wind of his new relationship - though, admittedly, he didn't think they'd get to it so fast.

The problem was the caption. The direct quote. Knightley vehemently denied any connection to Malfoy outside of work.

His fingers tightened at his side.

It shouldn't have been surprising, maybe. He'd been dealing with denial, with secrets, for years. Perhaps for a good reason. Draco was who he was, after all, and he couldn't change.

His eyes flicked from the street to his left forearm. Somewhere beneath the fabric of his shirt, the Dark Mark was branded into his skin. Iris wouldn't want to be his, not publicly. She could only admit it while they were fucking.

Draco thought she might be different from Pansy, in that way at least. He thought she might not care, she might just let them be and fuck what the papers had to say about it. If she wanted a secret, he might as well just have Pansy back.

He probably shouldn't be thinking like that.

Draco got the Prophet delivered every day at a prompt 9 o'clock in the morning, and every morning he regretted buying it, considered burning it, and, ultimately, read it anyways.

So when it got delivered the next day, he opened it immediately and flipped through it with a leisurely precision. He assumed the reporters would follow up on the news they had dropped about Iris and Draco - perhaps with some fake interviews with other Ministry employees or a fake eyewitness account of a bartender.

Instead, there were more pictures.

Iris outside a building Draco didn't recognize. A blurry figure passed through the shot, but once he exited you could clearly make out two people embracing. They broke apart. Iris and Theodore.

Draco dropped the paper on his counter and looked out the window for a second before looking back. It didn't have to mean anything. For all Draco knew, Sebastian and Tracey were standing just outside of the shot. Or maybe they weren't.

He shouldn't be finding this shit out from the Daily Prophet either way.

Without work to occupy his thoughts and hands, all Draco had to do with himself was sit around the apartment and think - overthink. He didn't bother reading the article because he knew it would only piss him off more, and he didn't want to be angry at Iris. But he was.

He had done a lot for her. Breaking up with Astoria, giving up Pansy, finding her address in the Directory and apparating there on a Monday night to tell her something that he had never told anyone besides Pansy - that he refused to let her go.

And she had let him have her. Let his hands move up and down her body, her head rocking back as he fucked her, her nails tightening on his neck and her legs tightening around his back.