About Last Night

Tequila Chance

Wulfric Macnair had not pressed charges on Draco after it took one wailing house-elf, two shocked board members, and a furious Lucius Malfoy to stop the assault the latter insisted on worsening. Sure, Draco had broken Macnair's nose, chipped and knocked out several teeth, busted his bottom lip, bruised his left eye, splintered a rib, and dislocated his right shoulder, but that was hardly enough punishment. Draco vowed to murder him with his bare hands as he was being dragged away by his father, but all that could be heard was Macnair's delighted laughter echoing behind them.

While Draco had been serious on killing Macnair, neither he nor anyone else believed it would come to that. For his behavior, he was simply suspended from work until the board deemed him stable enough to return.

Draco could give fuck all about returning to work after the disastrous dinner with those pathetic dinosaurs any other day, but this time around the silence in his flat was maddening. Once before he thought the sound of nothing was sweet and comforting, but now Hermione was not there. He thought she would be; he thought he would return home, red-knuckled, awaiting her screams of fury to rattle the walls, but she was gone. Only the books on his center table, her favorite mug on the kitchen counter, and her beast of a cat were the only trace of evidence she had once even been there at all.

"Mister Malfoy!" squeaked an intern by the name of Sanderson (or whatever) when he saw Draco exit the Floo in the main lobby of Malfoy Industries. His eyes were wide with fear as his fingers fidgeted toward his wand on the reception desk. "Sir, with all due respect, your father said you were not allowed—"

"With all due respect, Sydney, fuck off," Draco hissed as he entered the empty lift up to his floor.

When the doors of the lift parted, Draco expected to find Olive at her desk, smirk on her face, and a shot glass in her hand. He was wrong. There was no Olive, no smirk, but there was a bottle of tequila on her empty desk beside a stack of his mail. He grabbed the bottle, scanning the tag wrapped around the neck with a string of yarn that read:

Arriba. Abajo. Pal centro. Pa'dentro.

Here's a token of my gratitude from my homeland.

C. Rivera.

Shane choose that moment to stomp up from the staircase, heaving as he flushed red from his run. "Sir," he wheezed, "you cannot be on the premise until—"

"I won't be taking any visitors today. Understood?" Draco marched toward his office, waving a wrist so the doors would open and allow him in. They closed behind the intern just as he was sputtering out more protests.

Draco settled on his chair, pulling open the bottom drawer of his desk to retrieve one of the many spare shot-glasses he had lying around.

From the moment he opened the cap on the bottle until there was a loud, annoying knock on his office door, Draco did not know how much time had passed. All he knew was that there stood Blaise.

"For fuck sakes, mate," Blaise whistled, shaking his head at what he was looking in on. Simmons (what was his fucking name?) hid behind him, cowering away from whatever curse Draco was going to send his way. He wanted to, he was about to (he warned him about visitors, hadn't he?), but something seemed off about Blaise. Draco hadn't seen him in over a week, and now he was blurred around the edges (or perhaps that was just half the bottle of tequila fucking with his eyesight). "I know you own the company, but I'm pretty sure you can still get sacked for being hammered on the job."

Draco blinked back down to his glass, quite tempted to throw the thing at Blaise, but instead he refilled it. When the golden liquid splashed onto his desk, he swept it into the glass. Blaise scrunched his nose when Draco shot it back.