Chapter Eight: New Path

Everything about the evening was slow. Draco teased her as he removed Hermione's Ministry robes, driving her to frustration and demands that went unanswered. When she was finally, blissfully nude before him, he lifted her into his arms, carrying her back to her room. She lay her head against his chest, kissing his shirt softly, wishing he had already removed it to reveal his skin. Instead, he tortured her again. He dropped her onto the bed and stood back from it, languidly removing his own clothes with deliberate care for each and every motion. She ached to try and help him along, but she refused to play his little game. With each moment that he delayed, killing her a little more, he was killing himself too, and she knew it. She knew he wanted her, knew that his will was fighting his own desire, battling it out for dominance.

So, she watched and waited. Spread out naked on her bed, she touched her own body with eager fingers, playing the game right back at him. By the time her fingers had explored her breasts and stomach thoroughly and were dipping into the heated expanse between her thighs, Draco was pulling off his pants, leaving him bare before her. She arched and let out a sharp breath as she touched her clit, eliciting a tiny bit of relief.

"That's my job," he chided her, as he moved across the room.

"Well, you aren't doing it," she told him, her fingers twisting sweet, sweet circles around the nub. Draco grabbed her hand and pulled it away, making her huff in irritation.

"If you're going to play games, I'm perfectly capable of helping myself," she said plainly, smiling at him.

"I'm not playing any games. I'm savoring what it's like to be with you and not wonder if you're worried about who might find out." He dipped his head down and kissed the inside of her thighs. "What it's like to be with you and wonder if you're as desperately in love with me as I am with you." She flushed in response to his words, not sure that she would ever tire of hearing him say that he loved her, certainly not any time soon. Draco's tongue trailed a path up to her core, and he began to devour her, tasting every bit of her need and want. He moaned against her skin, and the tremors caused her to moan in response, her body dying to arch into him, to increase the pressure he was creating.

"Fuck," she murmured. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." His tongue drew out the words again and again, spinning a dreadfully illicit pattern across her slit. She dug her fingers into the sheets to keep from ripping out his hair. His own fingers dug into her flesh, pulling her into him, helping him bury himself deep inside of her.

Small ripples started to shake from her core, drawing and pulling and shoving her closer and closer to the edge of perfection, and still he moaned. It was so fucking hot to have his face buried in her, his mouth completely focused on her pleasure, and have him reacting so viscerally in response. "Draco," she cried, this time she did grab his hair, holding him captive as she let out an indescribable noise as her orgasm washed over her, shattering her bit by bit.

As she fell back against the sheets, Draco emerged, wiping at his grinning mouth. "You're ridiculous," she told him, blushing for an entirely different reason than before.

"You were doubting my abilities. I couldn't have that," he replied coyly.

Hermione reached out, pulling him up to her. They kissed hard, the need bubbling up inside of her again as he spread her legs. She urged him on, whispering foul things in his ear, things that she would never repeat in the light of day, or even in the light of her bedroom without this intensity, this fire between them making it seem like the perfect thing to do in the moment when he buried himself in her, stopping himself from crying out by taking her breast in his mouth.

And, he tried to be slow. He tried to tease and play and make her ache, but his resolve crumbled into a frenzy of his own loss of control, and he became quick instead, his body moving with instinct rather than calculation. Hermione loved every moment of Draco's spiral out of control, knowing that he was just as lost as she was, lost in each moment as if it was their last to show the other just how much they cared about them, wanted them, no, needed them. It was a need so deep at this point that she was sure it was part of her soul, and to try and take it away now would surely rip it from her body and leave her an empty husk.

They collapsed eventually, a tangle of limbs as their hearts raced as one, pounding so loudly they could feel it in their ears as they tried to recover. Hermione thought she may have drifted off for a few moments, her mind needing a rest. When she felt Draco kiss her shoulder, she hummed in response to let him know she was awake.

"Talk?" he asked, and she let out a soft sigh.

"I don't know if I can," she admitted. It needed to happen, this talk, but a few more moments of bliss would have been welcome before real life came demanding to be dealt with.

"You can." He kissed her shoulder again, and she nodded.

"Okay," Hermione turned towards him, pulling the blankets closer to her. It made her feel more secure to have something physical to hold on to. Even though they had agreed to talk, neither one of them seemed to know how to begin. She watched his face as he watched hers, both quiet.

Finally, after several silent minutes, Draco asked, "What are you thinking?"

"That I'm not going backwards," she told him.

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not going backwards. I'm not going back to whatever we were doing before." She was done with hiding and secrets and things that only caused them both pain.

"Okay." Draco nodded. He reached out and ran his knuckles against hers.

"What are you thinking?" she asked, letting her fingers unravel from the blanket she had been holding tightly.

Draco linked his fingers with hers as he formulated a response. "That I don't want to ruin your career, but I don't want to go backwards either."

"I want you to meet my parents." She hadn't really thought about the words before they were coming out of her mouth. They just tumbled out, unbidden, laying everything out there.

Draco raised an eyebrow at her, and she blushed. "I mean, if you want to have lunch with Narcissa we can, but …"

"I do." She squeezed his fingers in hers for a moment.

"What? Really? Why?" He laughed, and it hurt her heart to think that he could imagine a world where they would be together, and his mother wouldn't be part of Hermione's life.

"If we're going to try to be something real, something outside of this bed, then I want to know all of you, every part. Your mother is part of you," Hermione explained.

"Yes," he agreed. "The crazy part I have spent my entire adult life working to change."

"Draco -" Hermione leaned forward, kissing him softly "- not everything you learned from your parents is horrible."

Draco pulled back, releasing her hand as he pushed into a sitting position. He rubbed at his face and closed his eyes. Hermione followed him, unsure of how to progress from this point. She didn't want to push him too hard, but he needed to know what she wanted, what she expected as they continued, which was everything. She expected everything, no holding back.

"I want date night with our friends. I want to dance at Harry and Ginny's wedding with you." Draco looked up, his cool steel eyes not revealing his thoughts. "I want to know that when I need you, you're going to be there, and when you need me, you're going to let me in."

"Hermione," he began, but she held up a hand.

"Draco, I'm done with this." She motioned around them at the room they had hidden in for the past two years, her heart nearly breaking as she prepared to say the rest of it. "I'm done hiding. I'm in this 100%, or I'm out. I can't take anymore hiding."

"You don't understand what being with me means," he insisted.

"I don't care. Let them wonder how in the world we could end up together." Hermione held her voice steady even as her blood raged again in her veins. She would destroy them, each and every person involved in this bullshit taking place in the DMLE. She would rise, higher and faster than any Muggle-born before her, and she would be Minister with Draco at her side, and she would destroy them before they realized what had even happened.

"Has anyone ever told you that you're a bit mad?" Draco asked, a smile curling up at the corner of his mouth.

Hermione nodded, unfazed. "Ron. All the time, actually."

"I know that you think you know what you're getting into, but there are things you don't know about what …" He seemed to be struggling to come up with the right words. She waited, letting him find them. "Just, what it's like to be around me every day."

"Then, tell me. I want to know. I deserve to know and be able to make my own decisions," Hermione reminded him.

"I know you're right, but it doesn't make it any easier."

"Why is it so hard?" It wasn't easy for her to be so patient about this, to keep her calm. She was so used to speaking her mind and being independent and taking care of everything herself, and now she had learned that he had spent the last two years of her life deciding over and over that she couldn't make this decision for herself. It was a constant battle to remind herself that he had been trying to do what he thought was best.

"It's … well, embarrassing, honestly."

"What is?" She thought she knew. Harry had told her, but Draco deserved the opportunity to tell her himself, in his own way.

"I still get hate mail nearly every day," he whispered, clearly ashamed.

"Because of the war?" she asked.

"Yes, and because I work so closely with Harry. People think that I've bewitched him into being my friend and partner. I must … have him under the Imperius Curse."

"That's absurd. No one who knows you would ever believe that." She felt the fire in her belly raging more fiercely than before.

"I know, but it doesn't stop people from believing it."

"The people who matter would never believe that," she told him.

"That's the thing, though," he said. "Some of them do."

"What do you mean?"

"Hermione," he sighed her name, shaking his head in the process, as if he was losing steam. She needed him to tell her, to be open with her, so that they could deal with this head on. She wasn't about to let these fools destroy the rest of their lives the way they had destroyed the past two years.

"You can tell me anything, Draco. We'll … figure it out," she tried to sound reassuring, but she was so angry that she wasn't sure how successful she had been.

"You say that, but … I really don't think you understand the effect that I can have on your career."

"Just tell me what's going on."

"Harry, when he was promoted, they tried to get him to replace me, find another partner to be his deputy head."

"Because of the war?" Hermione asked him again.

"Yes. It was the same bollocks. They were concerned about me being too close to him, about the perception of us as a team. They were … they still are reviewing all of our cases."

"Draco," she said sadly.

"Don't," he said shortly. "Don't pity me."

"I'm not pitying you. What they are doing is wrong. It isn't pity to be angry for you, and Harry."

"Either way, I'm not someone you want to be associated with on a personal level, Hermione," he insisted.

"I'm not going to let some arseholes at the Ministry-"

"Dammit, this is your life we're talking about. Your dream. Everything you've ever wanted," he was angry now, his cheeks tinged pink.

"All of this," Hermione motioned at the world around them, "it doesn't … if I have no one, if I'm alone the rest of my life, what does it matter?"

"You're not going to be alone the rest of your life. You would … someone," he told her, pained.

"I don't want someone. I want you." She squeezed his hand again.

"You'll be making your job very, very hard overnight."

"My job is already hard. No one likes to listen to a Muggle-born know-it-all. Let them try to keep me from what I know belongs to me."

"I just don't -"

"Draco, just stop. I want to be with you. I want you. You've given me all of the information, and I made my choice two years ago, and it hasn't changed. Unless you tell me that you don't love me, and you don't want to be with me, I'm in. I'm jumping in, damn the consequences."

Draco was silent for a long time, looking down at his own hands, and then one moved, reaching to grab hers. "So, how should we do this thing, then?"

Hermione shifted quickly from convincing him to planning. "I think we should do something publically to get the hard bit over with as quickly as possible," she told him.

"Okay."

"We have a few options. We can head out for dinner alone somewhere that we know we will be spotted, or with some friends, or I can talk to some contacts at the Prophet. We could do an interview or leak it." She had been thinking about their options all day, trying to determine what the best path would be. The sooner they got this part over with the less time he had to try to martyr himself again.

"An interview sounds horrible," he told her.

Hermione put up her hands, laughing. "I agree, but it's an option that we have available."

"Okay. No interview," he said. "Do you want to swing it alone or with friends?"

"It wouldn't be horrible to have some moral support along," she told him. "And, Oliver's been gone for ages, so I'm sure Ron would be glad to go out."

Draco nodded. "I'll talk to Harry then. See when he and Gin are available."

"Are we really doing this?" Hermione asked, unable to keep the mad grin off her face.

"As long as you don't wake up and realize you're making a terrible mistake." He moved forward, kissing her deeply as his hands pulled at the blanket, revealing her body to him.

"Never," she whispered against his lips. "As long as you actually feed me soon. I get crabby when I don't get my dinner."

Draco made a noise suspiciously close to a snort. "Oh, is that why we got into a screaming match when I tried to take you to dinner?"

"No." Draco's hand traced a path up her stomach to her breast. "We got into a screaming match when you tried to take me to dinner because you are an idiot."

"We'll you're signing on to an official courtship with this idiot, so what are you?" His thumb began to spin circles around her nipple, bringing them to attention.

Hermione nearly giggled in response to his words. "Did you just say courtship?" She rose to her knees, shifting closer to Draco's body.

"Oh, shut up. What do you know about the delicate speech of the well bred?" He bent his head to suck at the sensitive skin below her ear.

"You should be careful." She struggled to maintain control over her voice. "I know just how indelicate your speech can get." She reached for his cock, stroking him as she spoke.

"I thought you were hungry," he reminded her as his hips rocked into her hand.

"It can wait a bit." She shoved him, pushing his back down to the bed, and slid her body over his. He stared up at her like she was the only meal he would ever need again.

XXX

A/N: Thank you so much for your continued support and for asking how I'm doing. I'm doing wonderful, just busy with real life. I'm trying to get as much writing in as I can, and I will do my best to update as often as I can.

XOXO

Meg