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“Oi! Watch where you’re going!”
“Why in Merlin’s name are you in such a hurry?”
“Lady, you dropped your—oh, okay, fine. No need to thank me or anything.”
“Thanks!” Rose Weasley yelled back; her first response to any of the (embarrassingly literal) run-ins she had had with people in the last 30 seconds or so. She could apologise later, if she ever ran into those people again. She had far more pressing issues on her mind, as she would have thought would be obvious by her sprinting down the hallway as though it were a train station and she had just under a minute to get to a platform that was at least five minutes away.
Running through the Ministry of Magic was not the method of getting to the International Magic Co-operation meeting rooms that Rose generally favoured. Unfortunately, however, lately she was finding that this was more often than not the only viable option she had. She had been sleeping so terribly lately that by the time she did eventually manage to enter the land of nod, she would attain so little sleep that her body would refuse to get her out of bed until she was running late.
Of course, she wouldn’t be having any trouble sleeping at all if Simon hadn’t left her. Well, no. Rose knew that it was unfair of her to say that Simon had ‘left her’. It was not his fault, after all. But Rose still felt entitled to be bitter. Thoughts of him were making her lose a significant amount of shut-eye, after all.
She finally reached her target destination. Without pausing for breath, she opened the heavy oak door.
She was greeted by the amused faces of about thirty of her colleagues, who had all turned in their seats around the elaborate conference table to see who had interrupted the meeting that had been going for a good fifteen minutes. Her boss, a kind but rather fastidious woman in her early fifties, raised a disapproving eyebrow.
“Sorry,” Rose mumbled, keeping her head down as she shuffled over to the nearest empty seat. She was not remotely proud of her current tendency to be late all the time, and her boss knew well enough that, prior to this, Rose was always a good five or ten minutes early to inter-departmental meetings. Rose supposed that that was why her boss hadn’t called her out yet. But she knew that that courtesy was not going to last much longer. Rose allowed herself a quiet sigh. Could her morning get any worse?
“So nice of you to finally join us, Weasley.”
Evidently, it could. Rose closed her eyes. Of all the places where she could have sat, why did it have to be the seat next to the right-royal pain-in-the-arse that she happened to have spent an unprecedented amount of time in the company of for her teenage and adult years, Scorpius Malfoy? If he had just been the aristocratic, self-absorbed prick that both of her parents assured her with absolute certainty was the spitting image of his father, that would have been enough. But he also seemed to take great delight in directing a lot of his completely unwanted attention towards her. Everything about him rubbed her up the wrong way. The arrogant smirk he would always throw in her direction when his suggestions won over hers, his tendency to rest his feet on his desk when he was reading through paperwork, the fact that he poured milk into his teacup before he added the tea… it all irritated her.
And as for his smoking… it was probably best not to get Rose started on that disgusting habit of his. And she wouldn’t have even minded it so much, if he didn’t choose to blow the smoke into her face as often as he did.
In all fairness to him, he was not smoking at the moment. He was just making a run-of-the-mill, completely unnecessary and somewhat insulting comment.
“I overslept,” Rose whispered back. Why she was bothering to justify herself to him, she didn’t know.
“I see. Well it clearly can’t be because of Simon giving it to you good and proper anymore, so what is it? Somebody else giving it to you good and proper?”
“People oversleep for reasons other than their having been given a knobbing the night before, Malfoy.”
“Really?” He sounded surprised, and a quick glance in his direction revealed that his forehead was, indeed, ridged in amazed consideration. “It’s never been that way in my books.”
“Yes, well, the difference between you and us regular human beings is that you can sleep for two hours and still manage to shake yourself awake and do what must be an embarrassingly long hair-and-make-up ritual before coming to work every morning.”
“Hair and make-up?” Scorpius repeated, running a pale hand through his blonde, silky strands. If it weren’t for his smoking, Rose would say that it was Scorpius’ infuriating perfect hair that she hated most of all. “Are you implying that these spectacular tresses and this flawless skin don’t happen naturally?”
“I’d be well surprised if they did. Nobody’s that perfect.”
“Nobody, except me.”
“You really are the most arrogant git I’ve ever known—“
“Weasley? Malfoy? Are you two paying attention?” Rose looked up to see her boss frowning at the two of them, along with everybody else at the table. She blushed crimson.
“Of course we were paying attention, M’am,” Scorpius spoke for both of them. “We were just discussing whether or not the Minister’s latest preliminary budget write-ups are really going to affect our department as we think they might.”
Rose placed her forehead in her open hands. How Scorpius had been able to argue with her, and listen to the general discussion amongst the table, at the exact same time, was a mystery completely lost on her. Scorpius was one of the most proficient multi-taskers she had ever known. She would never admit it to him, but for work in a department such as this one, where people are shooting different ideas back and forth at the same time, Scorpius was an ideal person to have on the table. He remembered everything that people said, and his mind worked logically enough to categorise people’s views and come up with solutions that worked best for the greatest number of people, much faster than most other people could. He did this sort of thing at Hogwarts all the time. He clearly had been Sorted into Ravenclaw for a very good reason.
Rose looked up again as her boss continued speaking. “We are thinking that the best way to determine whether or not the budget will affect us, is to find out how budgets are being organised in Ministries of Magic in other European countries. A lot of these countries evidently feel the same way, which is why the French Ministry has apparently organised a conference for select members of the International departments to discuss this very topic. It is to be held this weekend.”
Rose stifled a yawn. That was probably the most boring-sounding conference she had ever heard of since her dad had told her about Uncle Percy and the International Cauldron Bottom Regulation Conference of 2003. She loved Uncle Percy, but in terms of his interests, he left a lot to be desired. But still, the sheer ridiculousness of an entire conference being held on cauldron bottoms was in itself more interesting than a conference on the International Magic Co-operation department’s budgets. Fortunately, since the conference would only be for ‘select members’, there was no way that she, as a relatively junior member of the department, would be asked to attend such a thing—
“So would it be all right if both you and Miss Weasley were to attend this conference, Mr Malfoy?”
“We would both be perfectly delighted to attend, Ma’am.”
Oh, bollocks.
~*~
“You seem annoyed,” Scorpius commented airily, sitting opposite her in the cafeteria.
Rose sighed. So much for enjoying her chicken salad sandwich in peace. “Really? I can’t imagine why. It’s not like there’s a boring-as-all-fuck conference that I now have to attend this weekend, thanks to my colleague volunteering both of us without my permission, or anything.”
“Language, Weasley. Please. There are some very sensitive upper-class Ministry employees around here. And anyway, it wasn’t as if you had plans this weekend, right?”
Rose frowned. “My weekends are none of your business, Malfoy. But since you asked, I did, actually, have plans.”
“Really?” Scorpius raised a sceptical blonde eyebrow. “I don’t think lolling around your apartment eating chocolate chip ice cream and breathlessly masturbating to past memories of yourself and your ex-boyfriend shagging in the Cannons’ locker rooms qualifies as ‘plans’.”
“Malfoy!”
“I’m sorry, did I get the ice cream flavour wrong? Is butterscotch ripple more to your liking?”
Rose took a large bite of sandwich, refusing to look at him, or to think about the pint of Florean’s Best Chocolate Chip Swirl currently nestled in the back of her freezer.
“All right, so as you’re cooling off, I’ll try to help you look at this a bit more positively,” Scorpius said, before pausing for a moment to light a cigarette. “This thing’s being held in Paris, right? I don’t know if you have ever been, but they don’t call it the City of Love for nothing. It’s beautiful there. And you’ll get to spend a weekend, in Paris, paid for by the Ministry—“
“I don’t know what kind of fairytale world you live in, Malfoy,” Rose interrupted him, waving the smoke from his cigarette away from her face with a scowl, “but surely you know that the weekend isn’t going to be remotely fun. We’ll be spending all day in the dusty hot offices of the French Ministry, listening to whiny old men rambling about how in their day international offices were treated with more respect, before being allowed to go back to our 2-star hotel to collapse on our hard, lumpy mattresses, they being all our cheap-arse department is willing to pay for us, for an hour or so, then summoning up just enough energy to order a ridiculously overpriced Parisian pizza and getting through about half of it before falling into a fitful, dissatisfied sleep.”
Scorpius blew a contemplative cloud of smoke, seemingly unconsciously, right into her face. “Wow,” he said as she coughed and spluttered. “With prose like that, you should consider taking up writing as a profession.”
“Hardly,” Rose managed to gasp out, wiping tears of exertion from her eyes. “I was merely describing every bloody weekend conference I’ve had to attend so far in my career.”
“Ahh yes,” Scorpius nodded, flicking his cigarette into the ashtray between them. “But of course, this conference will be different, for one very important reason.”
“And what’s that?”
“This time, you’ll be with me.”
Rose rolled her eyes. “Yeah. That’s the part I’ve been trying my very hardest not to think about.”
“Aww, come on Weasley. What’s so bad about me?”
“Well,” Rose said, standing up and picking up her now-empty tray. “For one thing, you’re about the only person I know who smokes more than the French do.”
“I’m confused,” Scorpius replied. “I thought I’d asked you to tell me my bad qualities.”
Rose left the table in a huff.
~*~
Saturday morning arrived way too quickly for Rose’s liking. After a pathetic two and a half hours’ sleep, she was awoken at 7am by a loud and annoying voice in her living room shouting “coo-EEE!!”
“For fuck’s sake,” Rose grumbled to herself, rolling out of bed. What the hell did he think gave him the right to make himself present in her living room and start shouting loudly? It was rude.
“What are you, Australian, now?” she yelled in the direction of the living room.
“Oh, very good,” Scorpius’ voice came floating back. Rose guessed that his head was in her fireplace. “There aren’t many that know that ‘cooee’ is of Aboriginal Australian origin.”
“Well, my maternal grandparents did live in Australia for some time,” Rose said, struggling to pull her trousers on. “They picked up a thing or two.”
“Did your mum ever tell you why she sent her parents to Australia, of all places?” Scorpius asked. “It wouldn’t have been my first choice.”
“Why not?” Rose asked, looking hastily around her room. Where in Merlin’s name had she put her overnight bag? “Australia was far away from Voldemort, it’s a beautiful country, and it’s probably one of those places that all British people should at least have a look at before they die. A significant part of our modern history occurred in Australia.”
“Yeah, the bit that involved all our criminals,” Scorpius agreed scornfully. “Your overnight bag is in here, by the way. So can you please hurry up? This arrangement is hurting my knees.”
Rose shook her head, running her fingers through her tangled hair as she left her bedroom. Of course he would have figured that she was looking for her bag. Instances like this, where Scorpius demonstrated his intelligence to her, reminded her of Hogwarts days. Even then they had been fighting each other, trying to prove themselves the better one, in Quidditch, studies, rule-breaking, prefect-becoming, you name it. They had made Head Boy and Head Girl (which had been an interesting year in terms of them trying to get along), and were pretty much neck-and-neck at subtle rule-breaking, even in their Head Boy/Girl year. But she had always maintained what she considered to be a sizeable lead ahead of him in Quidditch playing. And he, correspondingly, absolutely topped her in every school subject bar Herbology. He was smarter than her and he knew it, wasting no time in demonstrating just how clever he was to her on every occasion that he could.
And his ability to annoy had never since faltered. The day at the start of their Ministry training when she discovered that they were going to be working in the same department would live on in her memory as the day that she should have insisted on a transfer. She had naively thought that, since they were of similar age, they would probably be put at opposite ends of the department, nowhere near each other. She had been wrong. The two of them even had to share an office together; an office that became a perpetual war zone whenever they were arguing about some Ministry policy or work-related crisis.
But, Rose now reasoned, now was probably not the right time to be thinking about that. She had a conference to get to, and as little as she was looking forward to it, she was not prepared to risk Ministry officials getting irritated at her tardiness.
“So where am I going?” she asked Scorpius’ head, which now burned green in the fireplace.
“The Paragon Hotel, Paris,” Scorpius told her. “Apparently our room has quite a passable view of the Arc de Triumph.”
“I see,” Rose said. Then something hit her. “Wait. OUR room?”
But Scorpius had already disappeared. Rose grabbed her overnight bag and furiously threw Floo powder into the fire as fast as she could.
~*~
Rose landed arse-first onto the tacky linoleum floors of a rather grim reception area.
“Bugger off,” she told the hand that Scorpius was offering her, instead using her own momentum to stand up. “Why don’t we get separate rooms?”
“I love how you assume that I would know the reason,” Scorpius answered her. “I’m guessing that it’s because the Ministry don’t want to pay twice as much for hotel rooms when it’s unnecessary.”
“They have a pretty warped definition of ‘unnecessary’ then,” Rose countered. “Because it is definitely not going to be okay with us in the same room.”
“Aww, come on Weasley. I don’t snore that much.”
“It’s not your snoring I’m worried about.”
“Oh.” Scorpius took a moment to ponder this. “Would it be wrong if I found the fact that you snore kind of hot?”
“Yes, it would. As would you finding me hot in any other fashion.” Rose smiled at the tired-looking receptionist. “Bonjour.”
“We should probably count our blessings,” Scorpius said as the two of them approached the counter to fill out the appropriate forms. “At least we won’t be put in a room with only one bed.”
~*~
“Okay,” Scorpius said. “So I was wrong.”
Rose stared at the singular bed in their tiny hotel room. If she hadn’t known better, she would have sworn that somebody was playing some sort of belated April Fool’s joke on her. She could tell, just by looking at it, that the bed was going to be horrifically uncomfortable. There was a small couch in the room as well, and a tiny ensuite bathroom that just seemed to fit the miniscule shower, toilet and sink inside it. The window did indeed present a view of the Arc de Triumph, but it was so far away that it might as well have just been a generic grey blob on the landscape, particularly on a foggy day like today.
Scorpius coughed, and Rose looked over to see him covering his mouth. The edges of his eyes were crinkled in obvious mirth.
“Something funny?” she asked.
Scorpius uncovered his mouth and grinned at her. “I was just thinking that this scenario – you know, the two of us, a work conference, a room with only one bed – it’s sort of typical.”
“Of what?”
“Of any corny love story, of course.”
“Right,” Rose said, shaking her head in sleep-deprived exasperation. “Except this isn’t a love story, git.”
“My mistake,” Scorpius said. “And there I was getting all excited at the possibility. Anyway, you’re good with me taking the bed, yeah?”
“Like hell.” Rose threw her overnight bag on the bed and entered the bathroom.
~*~
By 9:00, Rose and Scorpius had gathered their professional belongings together, donned their Ministry robes, Apparated to the French Ministry, exchanged formal greetings with what felt like every country that had had a revolution at some point, as well as a fair few that hadn’t, taken their seats at the table marked “Anglais”, which in true France-England relations was crammed right at the back of the room, and were now upright with quills poised, ready to take notes of the proceedings.
By 10:00, Rose was doodling cartoon snitches on the corner of her parchment. The speaker was speaking in French, which Rose knew enough of, thanks to Victoire and her training in the Ministry, to get by, but what he was saying was so extraordinarily boring, and obvious, that writing it down seemed like a complete waste of her energy.
By 11:00, the French bloke had been replaced by a prim German lady, who was doing wonders to preserve the hostility between just about every European country in existence by refusing to speak any language but German, even though she would have been taught English during her teenage years, and French during her Ministry training. Rose sighed. Her idle drawings had started to progress to a full landscape depiction of a particularly memorable Quidditch game from her Hogwarts years (the first time Hugo caught the snitch for Gryffindor. Even though she herself was not a Gryffindor, she had never been prouder of her brother up until that point. He had since made her just as proud and prouder many times since then, but this moment stuck out for her). So far, all she had gleaned from the conference was that the French were pissed about how little money was being allocated to their department, and the Germans were not too happy either. Who would have thought that the French and the Germans would ever agree on something?
By 12:00 it was lunchtime, and Rose could not recall having been more grateful about the midday break since Hogwarts days, when lunchtime came straight after History of Magic lessons.
“So, what did you learn during that morning session?” Scorpius asked as they were packing up.
“That Quidditch arm guards are hard to draw,” Rose answered, holding up her Quidditch scene.
“Nice.” Scorpius nodded in approval. “I learnt that the French are easier to caricature than the Germans.” He held up his own parchment, and Rose took one look and had to bite back a shout of laughter. Scorpius had drawn the French man, who was a portly fellow, thinning slightly on top and sporting a nose that could rival Professor Snape’s and probably win, as a morbidly obese, completely bald cartoon, with a face completely obscured by his mammoth nostrils. The prim German lady was only half-finished, but it looked as though she would have a fairly massive head by the time Scorpius was finished.
“Good one,” she said. Scorpius grinned, tucked the parchment away and gestured that she should lead the way towards the cafeteria. Rose smiled and exited the room, surprised that she and Scorpius had managed to complete a conversation without her feeling unequivocally pissed off.
By 1:00 they were back in the conference room, and a Spanish bloke was on the stand saying his piece. This man, at least, was deigning to speak English. It seemed that the Spanish were getting slightly more funding than the French and the Germans, but in Spain the International Magic Co-operation were in charge of a fair amount more than the corresponding departments in France, Germany, and indeed Britain, not that anybody in the room would be finding that out. Neither Rose nor Scorpius would be saying anything during the conference. It was almost as though they had only been invited last-minute, which would certainly explain the short notice. Rose was considering giving her drawing to Hugo as a present when they were done, just to show him how much more important and worthwhile her job was to his helping out Dad in Uncle George’s joke shop.
By 2:00 the Italian man had taken the stage, and Rose was finding the tediousness of this conference intolerable. She glanced over at Scorpius, who was, presumably, continuing his cartoon drawings. His hair fell over his face in an evidently bothersome way, as he would rake his hand through it in an effort to brush it away every now and then. Really, it was a bit of a shame that he was so annoying, because he was kind of cute. Once you looked past the hauntingly pale skin and what appeared to be a total lack of body hair (something Rose found disturbing on men) and the constant smell of expensive cigarettes on him and his being an utter tosspot, he was, well… more than kind of cute. ‘Pretty bloody gorgeous’ would be a better way of putting it.
It was a good thing, Rose supposed, that she had standards. And those standards certainly did not extend to Scorpius Malfoy.
By 3:00, Scorpius had abandoned his drawing and was now sitting, one leg crossed over the other in that effortlessly elegant way that Rose, with her stubby legs, could never hope to accomplish. His arms were folded and he was watching the Belgian representative with seemingly rapt attention. Rose could not see what was so interesting about the Belgian. He was saying exactly what everybody else had said so far, and it wasn’t like he was really a very attractive she. What could be so interesting to him?
Nothing, as it turned out. After a few more moments of the Belgian waffling on about wand tax cuts, making Rose think in dazed amusement about Belgian waffles, Scorpius turned to her and whispered “bugger this. We should go.”
“What?”
“We should go,” he repeated. “This is more boring than that time Father forced me to watch traditional Japanese theatre, we’re learning absolutely nothing, I’m hungry, I’m desperate for a fag, and we’re in Paris. We should go out and explore.”
“But…” Rose said. She looked over at the Belgian, who was continuing to ramble in his strange French dialect. The prospect of leaving, even if it was with Scorpius, was beyond tempting, but what if somebody found out that they had skived the conference? Surely that would cause some sort of issue?
“…we might get in trouble,” she finished, lamely.
Scorpius frowned at her. “Am I hearing this correctly? Where’s the rebellious Rose Weasley I remember from Hogwarts days? Have you become a coward?”
“No, I have not!” Rose answered, feeling her cheeks warm up in indignation. “I’m just not willing to risk my job on some flighty idea of yours.”
“Rose,” Scorpius said, startling her with his use of her first name, “be reasonable. We’re sitting at a tiny table, crammed into the furthest, least visible corner of the room. It is astonishingly clear to me that none of these people want us here. Do you really think that they would bother to report us?”
Rose tried to come up with a reasonable argument, but could think of none. Scorpius was perfectly correct – it was crystal clear that the other Europeans did not care much about their presence there.
“Come on,” Scorpius coaxed, nudging her with his elbow. “I want to go shopping, and I would rather have some company while I do it.”
“Even if it’s me?” Rose glanced at him sceptically.
Scorpius smiled at her. “Especially if it’s you. Nobody else gets so delightfully pissed off when I blow smoke in their face.”
“I knew you were doing that deliberately!”
“Well if you didn’t react in such an amusing way, I’d stop!”
“Oh, bugger this!” Rose stood up, shoving her parchment and quill haphazardly into her bag. “Let’s go.”
“Yes!”
~*~
“Well,” Scorpius said, a glass of white wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other, “I think this afternoon was very successful.”
“It certainly appears to have been for you,” Rose agreed, taking a sip from her own glass of wine. “I would honestly not be surprised if you have spent a million Euro in the past four hours.”
“Well, the equivalents that they sell in England are absolute crap.” Throughout the course of the afternoon Scorpius had revealed to Rose, beyond a shadow of doubt, that he knew a lot about Paris. He had dragged her into more shops, fancy boutiques and off-licences than any of her female family members would have dared dragged her to – they knew full well that she was not the biggest fan of shopping. Whilst in these places, Scorpius had purchased frightening amounts of expensive alcohol, tobacco, clothing, chocolate, and a solid oak coffee table that he claimed was necessary because the one he had at home was “showing its age”. Rose pointing out that most oak tables are supposed to be old seemed to fall on deaf ears. Everything except the tobacco he asked to be specially posted to his home, so now all he was carrying was a briefcase filled with cigarettes. By the time they had arrived at a restaurant that Scorpius insisted was one of the finest along the Champs-Élysées (by ‘finest’ she assumed he meant ‘most expensive’, but knowing Scorpius, he would probably insist on paying, and her pathetic payroll would make it difficult to argue with him), Rose had seen enough snotty salespeople and state-of-the-art luxury consumables to last a lifetime.
“So,” Scorpius continued, blowing yet another cloud of smoke at her. She had been trying to keep her features neutral whenever he did that now, but he seemed if possible even more amused by her attempts at neutrality than her normal gagging reflexes. “Why didn’t you get anything? I know tobacco isn’t your thing, but there were some nice liqueurs and chocolates in some of those places, and you’re small enough for the absurdly-sized women’s fashion in this country to fit you.”
“Unlike some people, I’m not made of money,” Rose answered, smiling at the waiter as she placed a cut of filet mignon in front of her. “Anyway, it’s not like I really need anything at the moment.”
“Apart from a really solid dicking.”
Rose sighed, placing a hand on her forehead for good measure. “Are we really going to discuss my sex life – or lack of one – here, now?”
“I don’t see why not,” Scorpius answered. “It gives us something to talk about, and I won’t have to pretend that I’m interested in it, because I genuinely am interested.”
“I cannot understand why it would be a subject of interest to you.”
“Mainly it’s because I want to dig deeper into your other life, and eventually find out why you and Simon broke up. You refuse to tell me.”
“Well, yes. Because I know that if I tell you you’ll take the mickey out of me. And it isn’t as though I can lie about the reason, because you’ll give me a hard time no matter what the reason.”
Scorpius placed a hand on his chest in mock horror. “Are you saying that you do not enjoy my taunting? And there I was thinking that it was your favourite thing about me. Aside from the smoking, of course.”
Rose took another sip of wine. “I really don’t know why I put up with you.”
“Because I’m as handsome as I am fabulously wealthy?”
“To other pale-faced obnoxious aristocrats, perhaps. If they were blind and desperate.”
“All right, so we’ll cover your eyes up with a scarf and you’ll be set.”
“Git.”
“I love you too, Weasley.”
Rose turned back to her steak, glad that she’d asked for it to be well done, since the French had a tendency to interpret “medium” to mean “blue”, so at least she could safely say that her meat was somewhat dead. Scorpius had asked for medium rare, and she swore that his filet was still moving.
She supposed she should be angry at Scorpius’ jibes against her. Certainly, if anybody else had insinuated that she was ‘desperate’, she’d have decked them one. But with Scorpius it was perfectly acceptable, and even somewhat expected now, for him to make such harsh remarks about her. She could only assume that she held similar privileges as far as he was concerned. This suited her perfectly well. Insulting Scorpius was oddly stress-relieving.
She heard a huff of laughter, and looked up to see him watching her, his arms folded over his chest.
“What?”
“Nothing, nothing. You just look oddly content.”
Rose smiled. “Well, maybe I am oddly content.”
“That’s good to know.” He reached again for his glass of wine, and Rose returned to her dinner. Scorpius had not been lying; this was probably the nicest steak she had ever eaten. And she had eaten a fair few steaks in her time.
“You know,” Scorpius said, and Rose looked up. “This is pretty typical of a classic love story as well, don’t you think?”
Rose rolled her eyes. “Well, yeah, I suppose. Except for the fact that this isn’t a typical love story. It isn’t a love story at all.”
“Whatever you say.” Scorpius dug into his suitcase for another expensive French cigarette. Rose sighed. He had been doing so well at not pissing her off.
~*~
Rose felt just about ready to die.
Well, no. That was a bit extreme. But she certainly felt as though she had never been so bored before, ever, in her life. It didn’t help that she’d been sporting a slight headache all day from that one glass too many she had drunk the night before.
After they had arrived back at their hotel last night, Rose was suddenly hit by an incredible wave of tiredness. She only just managed to struggle into her pyjamas (an old t-shirt and pair of tracksuit bottoms, which made Scorpius cluck his tongue as soon as he saw them, before inquiring as to why a woman with a body as fabulous as hers would not be in a negligee, and her replying with scorn that some women like to be vaguely comfortable when they sleep) and brush her teeth before falling face-first onto the lumpy mattress, unconscious before she hit the pillow.
When she had woken up that morning, she sat up and felt her back crack in several places. The mattress had been as horrible as she had known it would be. She would never take her own, comfortable bed for granted again.
She had just about managed to sit up, rub her eyes and locate her towel, when the door to the bathroom opened and Scorpius came out, wearing nothing but a towel, which, thankfully, was around his waist.
“Wow,” he said, “you really are just about the sexiest thing I have ever seen right now. How Simon could have ever thought to let you go…”
“Oh fuck off,” she snapped, rolling off the bed. “Fuck off, and put some bloody clothes on. Believe me, I get that you love how you look without a shirt on. Merlin knows you went without one a lot of the time in the Ravenclaw common room. But some of us aren’t so enamoured.”
“All right, all right. To be fair though, fabulous though this” he indicated his upper body “is, out of the two of us I’d rather see you starkers from the waist up.”
“Yes, well, keep dreaming.”
After a lukewarm shower and a surprisingly decent breakfast of fresh baguettes, butter and jam, the two of them had Apparated to the Ministry, greeted the same official-looking officials as yesterday (none of whom said anything about their skiving the day before), settled in to the same hard seats, and started the day-long struggle of trying to keep their eyes open as more officials said their bits.
Or at least, she was struggling to stay awake. Scorpius was having no trouble. Indeed, he was even standing up and saying things to the other officials when policies were being discussed. How he was able to feign interest, when she was positive that he was finding the proceedings just as boring as she, she would never know.
When 5:00 finally came around, Rose almost felt like crying with relief. She had learned nothing from this conference, she would have nothing interesting to report from this conference to her superiors tomorrow morning, and she was sad that she had missed a fabulous two days that she could have spent showing that tub of Florean’s Best Chocolate Chip Swirl a really good time, in order to attend this conference.
The only part of the weekend that she had found remotely enjoyable was spending time with Scorpius. Not that she would ever be telling him that. She was somewhat surprised that she had managed to have a good time with him, but she supposed she shouldn’t be, really. As insufferable a git as Scorpius Malfoy was, she could not deny that they spend a lot of time together and they knew each other well. Scorpius certainly had the same level of access to her life than her friends and family did, and she had a similar level of access to his. And sometimes, when she allowed herself to relax, she could honestly say that she enjoyed being in his company. Perhaps she and Scorpius were, indeed, friends.
Although if they were friends, theirs was probably the weirdest friendship she had ever seen.
She looked over at Scorpius, who had finished packing up his briefcase and was watching her expectantly.
“Hey, Malfoy?” she asked him.
“Mmm?”
“Are we friends?”
Scorpius looked surprised for a fraction of a second, before one corner of his mouth raised in a smirk.
“Of course we are, Weasley. Why would you think otherwise? Are you ready yet? I’m hungry.”
He lifted himself off the desk he had been leaning against and started heading toward the door. She followed him, head reeling slightly from this realisation; a realisation that he had evidently known all along.
“So,” Scorpius asked her an hour and a half later, after a hearty dinner had been consumed and plates of chocolate gateau had been placed in front of them, “was this weekend at least somewhat better than what it would have been, had you stayed in England?”
Rose stared at him for what she swore must have been at least a minute, and when he didn’t seem to get it, replied, “Um, were you at the same conference as me? If I wanted to see snooty old people arguing for two days straight I’d just arrange to have my mother argue with your father.” She took a bite of gateau and closed her eyes. The cake put everything the English deigned to call ‘cake’ to absolute shame.
“Maybe. Your mother’s pretty hot though, and none of the old people in the conference can claim to have that magnificent a rack.”
“Oh, Merlin.” Rose raked a hand through her unruly hair. “Have you no shame? Those are my mother’s breasts you’re talking about.”
“So?” Scorpius lit a cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke in her face before continuing. “Like mother, like daughter, and there’s nothing weird or fetish-y about appreciating your tits.”
“Maybe not for you,” Rose said, adjusting her jumper to cover more of her chest.
Scorpius smiled. “You don’t seem to like it when other people look at you appreciatively. Why is that? Most girls I know are only too happy to show themselves off.”
“Yes, well, most girls you know are probably able to spend a lot more time and money making themselves look hot than I am.”
“Perhaps,” Scorpius agreed, biting into a forkful of gateau and chewing it thoughtfully. Rose had to look at her plate while he did that – she was not the type to normally think that a person eating was attractive. But Scorpius made it incredibly nice to watch. He was a slower eater than most, and he seemed to savour every mouthful, licking his lips and chewing thoroughly before swallowing. He was very much a creature of decadence – the type that sought out only the best food, wine, clothing and company, and accepted nothing other than the best. It was snooty, to say the least, and one of Scorpius’ many character traits that she found frustrating beyond belief. But it was sexy too. She would be lying to herself if she denied that.
“The thing is though,” Scorpius continued, having finished his mouthful of cake, “you don’t really need to spend all of that time and money.”
“Don’t I?” Rose asked. “And why is that?”
“Because you’re hotter than all of them.”
Rose opened her mouth to retort scathingly, but stopped short at the sight of Scorpius’ face. He was looking at her in a way that she had not seen since NEWT year, when they had been studying furiously for exams. He was being completely serious. And for once, Rose did not know how to respond to him.
They sat there, looking at each other for a good while. At least, Rose felt like she was staring at him for a good while. Eventually Scorpius smiled and leaned back. Rose blinked a few times and returned to her cake, confused as hell.
It was Scorpius who broke the silence, which lasted until both of them had finished their dessert. “Are you ready?” he asked, standing up and pulling on his jacket.
Ready? Rose thought. “For what?”
“For having some fun?”
~*~
“Fun?” Rose asked, looking around the dark, crowded room in disgust.
It was nearly midnight. Scorpius had taken her to a bar, and then to another bar, and then to another. He spent a good half an hour at each bar telling her that she was going on what was called a ‘bar crawl’, which promptly stopped whenever she finally got fed up and hit him, telling him that she was perfectly aware of what a bar crawl is, and him replying that she goes out so seldom that he just wanted to make sure. Although he was admittedly right about her not going out very often, she did enjoy going to the odd bar, and the bars Scorpius had taken her to had nice atmospheres and were pretty clean. After drinking several cocktails, she could even say that she was quite happily buzzed.
The buzz all seemed to leave her, however, when Scorpius pulled her into the Muggle club.
She could not believe that Muggles actually came to these places. Frequently, if Scorpius was to be believed (which he probably was). They were standing in a large, dark room. Artificial beams of light were shooting from all across the ceiling, achieving the task of looking pretty and yet failing abysmally at lighting the room. To one side was a raised platform, on which stood a man with more facial piercings than Hugo’s gothic ex-girlfriend. The man was operating a variety of electrical instruments on a table in front of him. She assumed that it was this man who was causing the nauseatingly loud music, that was blasting out of several speakers dotted around the room. In the centre of the room was what Rose was absolutely sure had to be the entire population of Paris aged between 18-25, all dressed in trendy, generally skimpy clothing (or at least without shirts on, in the case of many of the men) and moving against each other, vaguely to the tune of the music. The few people who weren’t doing this weird dancing were standing in line at the bar, screaming their orders at the bartenders, who, Rose noticed with amusement, were wearing Muggle earplugs. The place smelled of sweat and alcohol, and what little of the floor Rose could see looked sticky and was littered with plastic cups and beer bottles.
This place, in short, was utterly revolting. Rose could not even begin to fathom why Scorpius thought that she would want to come here.
“Fun?” she repeated, when Scorpius did not answer her the first time.
Scorpius grinned at her, before handing over a device Rose recognised from Uncle George’s shop. They were mini ear plugs, which when inserted into the ears blocked off other noises while amplifying the voices of anybody else wearing earplugs of the same calibration. She stuck her set into her ears and waited for Scorpius to do the same thing with his before yelling, as loudly as she could, “FUN?!”
“Ow!” Scorpius held his hands over his ears. A fruitless gesture, of course. “Come on, Weasley. You liked all the other places I took you.”
“Those other places were clean!” Rose exclaimed. “And relatively quiet, and not, well… that!” she pointed at the gyrating bodies. “Who the heck does this sort of thing on a Sunday night anyway? Don’t these people have work tomorrow?”
“If they’re Muggles, they probably don’t have university lectures until three in the afternoon, or something,” Scorpius answered. He took her arm and led her to a small circular table. “Wait here,” he said, before disappearing into the enormous crowd. He returned (unscathed, to Rose’s surprise) with a small tray holding six shots of clear liquid.
“I agree that these places are generally quite foul,” Scorpius said, passing three of the small glasses to her. “That is why everybody drinks; so the fact that these places are so revolting is not noticeable.”
“I see.” Rose took a glass, tipped her head back and downed the clear liquid in one go. As she coughed and spluttered from the sharp taste of the alcohol, Scorpius downed a shot himself. He, of course, did not cough and splutter at all.
“So,” Scorpius said, when Rose was able to breathe again. “Will you tell me why you and Simon broke up yet?”
Rose frowned at him. “What on earth makes you think I would tell you now, as opposed to last night?”
Scorpius shrugged. “I’ve taken you to more bars tonight, and you seem to have had a good time. Surely that gives me some points?”
“It would, sure, if you hadn’t then brought me here.” Rose downed another shot, this time just managing to avoid coughing. “Ahem. If it is so unsanitary-looking, why do Muggles come here, even if they are drunk?”
“The atmosphere,” Scorpius answered. “This is a place for young Muggles to be wild and go crazy. A place for them to get drunk and dance to loud music in extremely close proximity. They go for the buzz, or for the night out, to celebrate that they’re young and alive. And sometimes while they’re there, they’ll tell their incredibly doting friends why they broke up with their ex-boyfriends.”
Rose couldn’t help it; she smiled. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”
“Nuh-uh.” Scorpius downed another shot, and grinned at her. She tried her best not to focus too much on how perfectly straight, and therefore completely un-English, his teeth were. “I promise not to take the mickey out of you.”
Rose sighed, and tossed back her third shot. She was starting to feel the tingly buzz of tipsiness again, which was nice. She supposed it would be easier for her to just tell Scorpius the truth. After all, she could say what she wanted about Scorpius, but at least he wasn’t a gossiper. Even if he was, the truth was far less big a deal than any rumour he could make up.
“All right, fine,” she agreed, setting down her glass and ignoring Scorpius’ immature fist-pump of triumph. “It honestly is not that huge a thing. It’s not like one of us cheated, or he turned out to be gay or anything like that. He just … decided that he didn’t like me in that way anymore.”
“I see.” Scorpius’ long fingers were delicately stroking the sides of the glass still filled with alcohol. Rose watched his fingers as they moved up and down, slowly, gently, caressing the glass as though it were a lover’s hand. “So why have you kept so silent about it?”
Rose shrugged, still watching his fingers. “I guess I’m embarrassed. The reason for breaking up was not embarrassing, but my continuing reaction to it is.”
“Reaction?”
“Yeah. I can’t sleep. I’m always late for work, and I’m often distracted. I know eventually I’ll be all right. But for now, it’s difficult, because I, well … I haven’t loved anybody more. Ever.”
Rose blinked, surprised at herself. She hadn’t told anybody that part of the story. Not even Hugo, who was oddly good to talk to about that sort of thing, for a brother. She dragged her eyes away from Scorpius’ fingers and looked at his face. He was looking at her curiously, as though she was an enigma he had yet to figure out. It was an odd expression for him, since he normally had something figured out as soon as it was presented to him. But, his eyebrows were drawn together in evident sympathy as well, which Rose had to admit was nice. Maybe Scorpius knew a little something about unrequited love?
After a moment or two of silence, Scorpius pushed the glass he had been fondling toward her. “I think you need this more than I do,” he said.
Rose opened her mouth to argue, and closed it again when no credible rebuttal came to her. She took the glass and downed it, grimacing at the taste. The alcohol travelled quickly through her, giving her just the right amount of extra tingles. She felt pretty good, despite the story she had just told.
“Do you want to dance?” Scorpius asked her.
Rose stared at him, surprised for two reasons. One, if ever a conversation had been crying out for a segue, and had not received one, that was it. Two, exactly how drunk did he think she was?
“Um, absolutely not,” she said.
Typically, Scorpius ignored her. He slid off his chair, crossed the table, placed his hand on top of hers and pulled her out of her chair. She would dearly have loved to wrench her hand away, but she found herself unable to do it. It was a relatively meagre gesture on his part, but, probably because he had never held her hand before, it felt surprisingly intimate. And it was a nice kind of intimacy, even though it was with Scorpius. Indeed, it was a nice kind of intimacy, because it was with Scorpius. That realisation hit Rose like a tonne of bricks, and her head whirled with a confusion not caused by the alcohol. She wondered, not for the first time that day, what was happening to her.
Scorpius pulled her towards the crowd, and without any warning, dived right in. Rose gave a shout of protest which she was pretty sure he would have heard, but he ignored it. They fought through a sea of people until they found an empty spot. Scorpius came to a halt and pulled Rose until she was facing him.
“I’m not grinding my hips against you, all right?” she said to him.
“Bugger,” Scorpius answered. “I suppose I’ll have to get my required amount of hot-arse-against-groin action some other time, then.”
“What?”
“Just dance.”
The song currently playing was some hip hop number that Rose had a feeling she had heard the last time she was in Muggle London. She looked around and saw that the more conservative of the people around her were sort of bopping along, drunken smiles on their faces. She was not sure if she could imitate the drunken faces, but the bopping seemed relatively straight-forward. She began to move, and when she was not immediately met with a gale of laughter for her abysmal technique, she presumed it safe to continue.
Scorpius, she noticed, even managed to do this style of dancing with a ridiculous amount of grace. He moved like a trained dancer (and Rose realised that he probably was a trained dancer, to an extent) lifting his arms and gliding from side to side. He looked kind of silly, to be honest, and she had to stifle a chuckle.
After about ten minutes, during which time Rose wondered if this was it, and would she have to do it for much longer before she could go back to her seat, she felt a hand on her arm. She looked up and saw that Scorpius had been pushed much closer to her.
“Can I tell you something?” he asked.
“You can, thanks to these earplugs,” she answered.
“Yes, I thought you might like them. Anyway, I think Simon is an idiot.”
That was unexpected. “Er… I really don’t know how to respond to that.”
“You don’t have to respond,” Scorpius assured her. “I just wanted you to know.”
“Why do you think he’s an idiot?”
“Because,” Scorpius said, dragging a hand through his hair. Rose envied how his hand could go all the way through his thin strands and not get stuck, like her hand did whenever she did that, “it bamboozles me, how anybody could not like you ‘in that way’.”
Rose shrugged. “Maybe I’m rubbish in the sack, too.”
Scorpius snorted. “Yeah, that’s likely. Are you sure he wasn’t gay?”
She let out a shout of laughter, which he probably didn’t appreciate, with the earplugs and all. “He did listen to some pretty feminine music, now that I think about it. But I’ll be honest. I can be a bit of a headache. I think I’m generally a difficult person to like.”
When he didn’t reply, Rose stopped moving and looked up at him. He was staring at her as though she was absolutely crazy.
“What?” she asked. “What did I say?”
“What did you say?” Scorpius repeated. “Only about the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard since Father told me that a duck’s quack doesn’t echo.”
“It’s not that ridiculous,” Rose defended.
“Yes it is.”
“How is it?”
“Because,” he said, and Rose felt his hand on her arm. “If you are difficult to like, then why am I so in love with you?”
Rose felt her brain completely freeze. “You wha—“ she started to say, but was cut off by Scorpius’ mouth clamping down on hers.
It took about five seconds for her brain to reboot, and when it did, she pushed him away as forcefully as she could in the crowded space.
“Are… are you crazy?” she gasped, touching her lips with her fingers. They tingled, like she’d been playing a brass instrument for a long period of time.
“No,” Scorpius said, shaking his head. His hand slid down her arm, until his fingers found hers. “I’m not crazy, and neither are you. Admit it, Weasley. I’ve seen how you’ve been looking at me this weekend. I saw how you reacted when I held your hand just before. You’re just as hot for me, now, as I’ve been for you for… Merlin knows how long. And I am going to take you back to our horrible hotel room that smells of feet, and make wild, passionate love to you on that lumpy mattress, and it’s going to be the best sex you’ve ever had, you’re going to completely forget that anybody named Simon ever existed, and you’re going to wonder why the bloody hell it has taken us so goddamned long.”
Rose could not believe she was hearing this. What Scorpius was saying was crazy … utterly crazy. She was only just beginning to accept that the two of them were friends, and that he was pretty damn attractive. She was not the type to jump into bed with someone she spent most of the day being irritated with.
And yet … she couldn’t pull her hand away from his. Again.
“I … I’m so not going to do that,” she said, breathlessly. He was way too close, and staring down at her, his normally pale blue eyes darker than normal. She could feel herself shaking, and she could not honestly say that the shaking had nothing to do with feelings of anticipation.
Maybe he felt her shaking, or maybe he just knew, but his reaction was to smirk at her, and whisper “Liar.”
~*~
As soon as they Apparated into their room, Scorpius’ lips were on hers again.
This time, she didn’t resist. To be fair, she was not entirely sure that she could have resisted if she’d wanted to. He was so tall, and so pale, and so … Scorpius … and as always, he was totally right. She was hot for him. After a moment his arms crept around her waist, and he tilted his head in order to kiss her more deeply. She responded by placing a hand on either side of his head and kissing him back.
One thing she noticed, in a dazed, slightly drunk, lust-ridden sort of way, was that Scorpius kissed quite differently to Simon. Simon was always shy and tentative with her. She couldn’t say that she minded his approach – it was nothing short of adorable, as far as she was concerned, that he had always been so unsure with her. But Scorpius was strong. Not forceful, but certainly determined. There was not a trace of uncertainty in his kisses. It was as though he knew he was good at this, and if she didn’t think so then she had clearly lost her marbles. Thankfully for her marbles, she found his technique marvellous.
Not that she would be telling him that. Not unless he complimented her first.
When he broke the kiss (to her annoyance), his hand slid up to brush a few of her impossible curls behind her ear. The curls bounced stubbornly back to their original position. She felt a rumble of laughter in his chest before his forehead was pressing against hers.
“You’ve no idea how long I’ve wanted to snog you,” he said, voice low and so filled with lust that Rose felt her knees weaken at the sound of it.
“How long?” Rose whispered back, not trusting her vocal chords to do their full job just then. “It’s okay. I won’t take the mickey out of you.”
Again, Rose felt a rumble of laughter. “Let’s just say that when you and Simon got together, I was kicking myself for not getting there first.”
“Me and Simon?” Rose asked, her voice miraculously back in business, “that was sixth year!”
“Rest assured, I know that,” Scorpius replied. Rose could hear bitterness in his voice. “And believe me when I say that I spent many-a-restless-night fantasising about hexing his smug Hufflepuff arse from here to Aberdeen. Truly, the sight of him flying away would have been glorious—“
“Malfoy?” Rose interrupted him. “Do we really need to be talking about Simon right now?”
Scorpius lifted his forehead from hers, and evidently noticed the hand that was playing with the zipper of his jacket. He smirked, and said “well, I suppose I can hold off talking about him for an hour or two, if pressed.”
“Well, I’ll press, then,” Rose said, yanking the zipper down.
They lost no time getting each other’s outer garments off. When they were down to their underwear, Scorpius pushed her toward the bed and they fell onto it, giggling hysterically at the feeble humph sound the sad little mattress made when they landed. Scorpius trapped her underneath him with relative ease, one hand managing to hold each of her arms above her head.
“This position is utterly impractical,” he commented. “I can’t touch you at all. But fuck me if it isn’t the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Really?” Rose asked. “Even sexier than me with bed hair, first thing in the morning?”
Scorpius seemed to ponder this. “Well, you are pretty damn hot first thing in the morning. But bed hair? I thought that was just your hair’s permanent status.”
Rose kneed him in the stomach. She was feeling relatively merciful, considering where else she could have kneed. “Git.”
“Would you have me any other way?” He let go of her arms then, choosing instead to slide them underneath her to undo her bra. He undid it with such practiced effortlessness that Rose wondered if he had worked on the skill with mannequins or something. The thought left her mind when Scorpius trailed one long finger down the centre of her chest, tickling her sensitive skin, until he reached her navel. He traced the outside of her belly button several times, and then pressed his finger into it. He seemed quite satisfied with her reaction, which involved her gasping and biting her lip.
But he wasn’t done there. His finger trailed down lower, lower, until Rose realised with no small amount of excitement that he had slipped his hand under the elastic of her pants. His hand glided along the patch of curls that lay within, and Rose could not have missed Smirk No. 4558 if she’d tried.
“Why did I know that you’d be au natural?” he asked.
Rose raised her eyebrows at him. “Probably because you knew I would be the type to think that having junk that looks like a 12-year-old child would really not fit my definition of ‘hot’.”
“You’re probably right,” Scorpius agreed. Rose felt his hand sliding still lower. “Fortunately for you, it doesn’t fit my definition of ‘hot’ either.” At that point, Scorpius pressed down on her clit, and Rose released a moan of pleasure.
“Finally. A more guttural sound.”
“Your face is a guttural sound.”
“Oh, surely you can come up with a better comeback than that?”
“I probably could, had it not suddenly occurred to me, just this second, that this is probably the only time in history that two people have given each other lip while shagging.”
Scorpius’ eyes glinted. “You must have had some pretty noiseless sex in your time, if that’s what you think.” She felt his hand leave the vicinity of her area. He was now tugging at her pants. “Although, I admit that I enjoy giving you lip most of all.”
“I’m flattered.” She lifted her hips, and together they managed to get rid of their underwear, with only one kick to Scorpius’ face. And Rose was prepared to admit that said kick may not have been accidental.
After Scorpius had triumphantly flung their underwear away, Rose wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him down to kiss him again. His tongue plunged into her mouth with enthusiasm, and as he shifted slightly on top of her, she felt the evidence of his arousal pressing against her stomach. Clearly they were moving in sync with each other, because she was feeling pretty ready too – something Scorpius observed with amusement when he snaked one hand between them again.
“And they say it takes women ten times as long to become aroused than it takes men.”
“Rubbish,” Rose said. “I used to get off twice before Simon would even consider orgasm.”
Rose watched with amusement as Scorpius’ face twisted into a scowl. “Are you trying to deflate my hard-on as quickly as possible? You’re the one who requested that we not mention that half-wit Hufflepuff hammerhead.”
“Oh, that’s some of the nicest alliteration I’ve heard in a long time.”
“Why thank you. It’s certainly much more sophisticated than the repetition you’ll be uttering in a few moments.”
“Repetition?”
“Yes. I’m thinking a lot of sounds in the ‘oh’ and ‘yes’ and ‘more, Scorpius Malfoy, you captivating stallion, more’ realm.”
“You flatter yourself.”
“Do I?” He pressed her clit again, and Rose groaned, her back arching up slightly.
“That was pretty close to an ‘oh’, I thought.”
“Oh, shut up and fuck me.”
“Certainly.” Before Rose could say anything more, he brought his mouth down to hers again. As they kissed, Scorpius’ hand was stroking her inner thighs, nudging them apart. Rose felt her heartbeat quicken with anticipation, and she tightened her grip on Scorpius’ shoulders. If he noticed her doing that, he did not give any indication. When he finally entered her, her back arched once more, trying to take him in further. It was so nice, after all of this incredibly strange foreplay, to finally have him filling her completely.
“Be honest with me,” Scorpius said. Rose looked up at him. “Am I at least bigger than him?”
She gave him a smirk that she was sure would be on-par with at least a couple of his very finest. “And if you aren’t?”
“I think I would probably die. Or, I’d at least go flaccid very quickly.”
“Seriously? That’s … incredibly petty.”
“Hey, it’s male pride. It’s petty by nature.”
Rose would have rolled her eyes, but she noticed with no small amount of amusement that he actually looked quite worried. She rested a hand on his cheek. “Honestly,” she said, “you feel slightly bigger. Not much, mind you. But just slightly.”
“Awesome,” Scorpius said, giving her a crooked smile. But Rose noticed, to her surprise, that the smile did not quite reach his eyes.
“Hey,” she said softly. He looked down at her. “Yours could be the size of a peanut, for all it matters. The fact is, this is probably the most fun that sex has ever been for me. And you know what? Being with you is the most fun I ever have, period. You’re one of the most irritating people I know, Scorpius Malfoy, but somehow that works for me. You’re amazing.”
If the Rose Weasley from several hours ago had heard her say that, she would have seriously injured her, and thusly really buggered up the space time continuum. But present-time Rose meant every word of it, and it had only taken her the better part of five years in Scorpius’ company to come to a conclusion that everybody around them had probably known for a very good long while.
Scorpius took a moment to digest all of that information. When he was done, he smiled at her; one of the few smiles she had seen on him that had no trace of a grin or smirk. It was just a smile. And his face had never looked more beautiful than it did then.
“Same to you,” he said, before thrusting against her. Hard.
“Oh!” she gasped.
Scorpius’ grin returned full bore. “See? Knew I’d get an ‘oh’ out of you.”
“Yes, well, if you think I’m going to call you a captivating stallion, you can forget—oh, Merlin.”
Words left Rose’s mind as Scorpius continued to thrust. She wrapped her legs around his arse, heels digging into him with each thrust downwards. Rose started breathing faster, her eyes closing with the incredible sensations of sex that had for a long time been denied to her. She could hear Scorpius’ heavy breathing as well, so at least she knew he was getting as much out of this as she was.
She felt his mouth on hers, and parted her lips eagerly for another mind-blowing kiss. As their tongues battled with each other, his hand somehow managed to get between their writhing bodies, find her clit again, and start to massage it. Rose accidentally bit his lip in surprise, and for once he seemed too preoccupied to complain.
Their lips parted just in time for her to let out a loud groan, which he reciprocated with equal fortitude. They were close, and Rose knew that this was going to be one to remember. Two more hard thrusts from Scorpius and she was there, letting out a shriek of delight as her world exploded in a tidal wave of pleasure. She clutched desperately at him, wanting him to ride the wave with her. She could feel her muscles working around him, and soon he was also letting out a shout of release, pumping into her frantically as he climaxed as well. As they rode out the final spasms together, she pulled him close to her. Their sweat-slicked bodies were touching almost everywhere, and she was determined, now, to never let him go.
She felt him go limp above her, and her legs slid off him as he rolled to the side. She couldn’t help but feel a touch disappointed at the loss of contact, but his hand on her hip, pulling her to him, made her disappointment vanish.
“Well,” Scorpius said, after the long moment that it took for them to get their breath back, “I’ll admit one thing.”
“What’s that?” Rose asked, feeling relaxed and satisfied like she hadn’t felt in far too long.
“That certainly was not at all like most traditional love stories.”
Rose would have grabbed a pillow and whacked him in the face, but she decided that, just this once, he could have a free pass.