Dealing with Boisterously Irascible Men
Or A Practice so Pleasurable
3/?
Day 2-Morning
"I'm scared to go to work today." Draco admitted baldly, though even if there were ample evidence he would never admit to a receeding hair line. He stood in the middle of her living room clad only in his towel and dripping like a greek proto god that was just coming back from a quick dip in the Aegean. Hermione, genuinely distracted by his naked glory, could only manage,
"Sorry, what?" Her brain was very detached from reality as it traced the path of a drip as it wound it's merry way down the ripples in Draco's abdomen.
"Hermione?" Draco asked, concerned that she was starting to get a glazed look on her face.
"Abdomen!" She exclaimed nervously, rather like a witch with Tourettes.
"What?" Draco asked, completely mystified by his wonderful, if a bit odd, girlfriend.
"What?" She asked, not entirely sure what she had shouted but was sure it was perfectly understandable as well as intelligent. That was the best thing about being so smart, everyone assumed you were smart all the time and had a tendency to overlook when you were making a complete idiot of yourself with your attractive boyfriend.
"Hermione, are you quite well?" Draco inquired politely, coming forward a bit to check her temperature. "I thought I was the one supposed to crack up a bit."
"Don't be ridiculous, Draco." Hermione said breezily after she collected herself while batting away his hand. She gave a nervous laugh and tried very hard not to concentrate on the beautiful muscles no longer marred by silly hair. When he came up close, she could focus on his face, but it made it harder not to reach out and touch them. The biggest problem was that she knew she could reach out and touch them, fondle them even if she cared too, and she would be well within her rights to do so.
And oh how she wanted to exercise that right. But it was not the time, if the place, because it would be far to easy for them to get carried away and be late for work. Hermione did not trust Kingsley's apparation spot to be clean even after one day.
"Hermione?" Draco said, his voice colored with amusement. "Hermione, if your hand gets any closer to my towel, it's coming off and I'm having my way with you right here."
"What about my clothes?" Hermione asked, properly horrified. Draco considered how much damage he'd do to them if he just ripped them off of her and she firmed her lips.
"I'll take you shopping." He conceded, his fingers roaming towards her buttons, intending to rip them open.
"My best blouse? I think not." Hermione said firmly. Draco's fingers roamed even closer at her admonishment and it wasn't until she took a smart step backward that he sighed and decided that it might be in his best interest to let her go. "Well thank Merlin you won't have to, I have to be at work in five minutes."
"Take a day off?" Draco cajoled, attempting to brush her hair behind her ears before getting his fingers stuck in it. After a moment of disentanglement, Hermione gave him a peck on the cheek before Apparating as she turned, with barely a puff of air. Draco made a noise of frustration and picked up his wand before swishing it to summon his clothes from his manor. After dressing himself in his obligatory dress robes, tie included, he left the discarded clothes on Hermione's bed.
He ate his breakfast and guilt drew him back to her room where he stared at the mound of accoutrements piled high as a small mountain and was momentarily distracted by her dresser. Deciding that it wouldn't hurt, he searched through the drawers and noticed that there was some empty space including one whole drawer which contained nothing except a layer of dust. Clucking his tongue at his girlfriend's lack of obsession with clothes, he flipped his hand with a muttered spell and all his clothes sorted themselves, folded and stashed themselves neatly into the drawer so that next time he wouldn't have to wander around in a towel when he took his shower at her apartment. He dallied a bit in the kitchen and then, deciding he'd wasted enough time, slunk into work.
There was a flutter of excitement as he came in the front door, but it was no where near the level of hubbub as the other day. With a sigh of relief, he slid into his office, shutting the door firmly behind him. Gertrude grinned up at him as he entered, snickering behind her withered hand. "Such a little coward."
"Yes, well." Draco fanned himself with one hand as he settled down to his work, winking at the old lady as he slid behind his desk.
"Hermione had a word with you didn't she?" Gertrude asked shrewdly, grinning toothily at him.
"She may have disparaged my manhood in a thoroughly uncharitable manner and distracted me a bit." He thought back to that morning when he rolled over and the first thing that he saw was the curve of her shoulder before he realized that it was attached to something that sounded rather like the revving of one of those giant metal rolling contraptions that the Muggles went about in. He allowed himself to become further distracted when later, after his shower, she was tugging at the collar of her shirt, exposing a thin cord of muscle that vanished into a shapely collarbone and gentle slope of her chest. Draco sighed when he thought of that tantalizing window of flesh. If asked, he would promptly reply that his favorite things in the world were her breasts. Followed closely by her face and trailing in a rather pathetic third was her brilliantly witty intellect. The third lost some ground as he realized that nowadays, her wonderful brain was bent towards making him look like a complete idiot, while her chest and face had no such ulterior motives.
"Please stop thinking about Hermione." Gertrude said, giving him a hard stare over her pince nez, as she shuffled through the papers on her desk.
"Have I neglected to report you to the Unspeakables for being psychic again?" Draco asked, pursing his lips into a frown before nibbling on the nib of his quill.
"You make a funny little sound in the back of your throat whenever you think of her." Gertrude's voice was dripping with scorn as she motioned indelicately towards her throat with wizened hands. "It's quite distracting."
"I hadn't a clue." Draco marveled, thumbing his way through a file. His mouth flapped open and closed for a moment as some previous comments from his friends suddenly made sense. Pansy especially had a look that involved pursed lips and furrowed brows that always made him feel like he were ten years old again when Pansy ground his face into the mud when he made fun of her nose. He then pressed his lips together and stared hard at Gertrude. She lasted quite a while before his burning stare alerted her to his attention and she quirked an eyebrow that reminded him so much of his wonderfully insane woman that he realize sooner than he expected what exactly that sound was. He stopped it immediately and flushed quite red.
"Yes, Malfoy? Did you need something?" Her voice was as dry as her humor that wiggled it's way through her words. The raised eyebrow wiggled a bit and then descended as if it realized that it was distracting him. "Have you got anything to say, at all?"
"No, not particularly." Draco said, plumb forgetting what he had thought he was going to ask in the distraction caused by the gyration of her eyebrows and merely grinned up at her while asking, "Do you think that I will get to sit in Kingsley's chair when Hermione becomes Minister?"
"Knowing you, Draco, that chair will have to be bleached or thrown out after the things that you will manage to get up to." Gertrude sighed, taking a moment between her sorting to rub at her eyes with a wrinkled hand.
"How outrageous!" Draco objected, grinning up at his secretary with his delightful boyish charm in full swing. He paused for a moment before giving a manly giggle and correcting her, "I'd really more aptly say the things I'd get into in that chair."
"Draco, you are quite the exhibitionist, do not for a moment even let me entertain the idea that you may be able to contain yourself when faced with that chair and Hermione." Gertrude gave a funny little snort while she stared hard over her pince nez.
"Huh. True facts." Draco said, popping the file in his mouth in order to hold it while he shuffled some papers around. It effectively muffled his big mouth and stifled their conversation at a tolerable level of awkwardness between them. Considering that he was hearing the stiff, old, Gertrude speculating about the future of his sex life, they had reached an awesome level of awkwardness. He pounced on another sheet of paper and then made a noise full of happiness and glee before bounding towards the door. "Got it!"
"Where are you going?" Gertrude asked, doing that ear wiggle thing that made her glasses slide down her nose to rest on the tip. He saw that hard, calculatingly stern gaze that made him feel like he were four years old and caught by his grandmother with his fingers already in the cookie jar. He had the same reaction as well, he froze, halfway out of the door, with his hand on the doornob.
"I love working for Kingsley!" He said vehemently, before fleeing out the door, his newly mobile hair flowing.
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