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Had somebody told Hermione in 1997 that the same house they were hiding would eventually host the most festive Christmas party she had ever taken part in, she would have burst into laughter or, even better, cried.
But 1997 had been gone for six years - seven in a few days - and with it the horrors and dreads of the war which had almost destroyed them.
Almost.
Truthfully, Grimmauld Place looked nothing like the grim house the Order had used as head-quarters or the shelter in which her friends and Hermione had hidden for a long time as the summer became autumn. Not that Harry Potter had anything to do with it, for the Saviour was many things but an interior design he was definitely not. In fact, he had repeatedly assured her that he had had no idea of what was happening to his house and he had told her that while gripping her wrist in his fist and nodding maniacally as the mere thought of being associated with those renovations shamed him to the core.
Hermione could not understand why, since she was certain Grimmauld Place had never known such splendour, not even when it still belonged to the noblest family of the Blacks. From the dark green velvet loveseat she was sitting on, holding her Eggnog, Hermione was silently admiring the Christmas tree, a majestic, snowed fir which towered to the ceiling, each branch decorated in golden and green and with shining small lights that crowned the top in a bright star.
Wanting to nitpick, Hermione found there was too little red around, which was however unsurprising, given that Mrs Pansy Potter despised that colour with all her heart and had strictly forbidden it in her home.
And that was the reason why her sharp green eyes had glared at Hermione when she had marched out of the fireplace in a bright-red, a-line dress with bracelet sleeves. Not even the black stilettos she had condemned her feet to had spared her from having Pansy scrunching her nose up and declaring in a martyred tone that she was doomed to suffer both for love and friendship.
A peculiar statement coming from a woman with a golden ring shining on her finger, and with her house full of people.
For the sake of honesty, Hermione hadn’t picked her outfit to displease Pansy - she was in fact quite surprisingly fond of her - but in a desperate and ludicrous attempt to attract a pair of famed grey-silver eyes.
“Red suits you, Granger. You should wear it more often.”
Draco Malfoy had casually delivered those words while dressed in full-Auror-regalia, and as he stood no more than a foot from her in one of the lifts of the Ministry. He had had his gaze cast down to look at her, a rebellious platinum lock hanging from his forehead, and his lips arched in a half smile Hermione had refused to read through to preserve the tattered remains of her sanity.
Said meeting had occurred a week earlier, when - in a spirit of festive mood - Hermione had worn a knitted red sweater instead of the plain white blouse she was used to going to work with.
Unfortunately for her, her desire to lure Draco’s attention was not so young and was in fact starting to age, not like wine but more like vinegar, turning more bitter with every day, month, and year she spent doing nothing but silently pining, admiring him from wherever she could.
The occasions in which that happened were frequent, partly because they both worked at the Ministry and, above all, because of the weekly Friday night meetings at The Leaky Cauldron, a routine strongly supported by Pansy from the very first moment she had started dating Harry.
Nonetheless, that didn’t mean she and Draco were friends - acquaintances, at best. There was a chance - a terrifically good chance - that he didn’t even regard her as anything but the best friend of one of his closest friends’ husband.
Not that he was anything less than courteous to Hermione, and never lost an occasion to cause her heart to somersault with one of those charming and magical smiles that hollowed his cheeks with dimples. It felt illegal that a man whom nature had already blessed with sculpted features could also produce the sweetest smiles.
And she would not start talking about how his husky voice could flawlessly converse about the correlation between the Second Dynamic Law of Curse Binding and the side effects of Belladonna, all while elegantly holding a tumbler of Ogden in his hand.
She had tried to resist, to tell herself that it was nothing but a silly infatuation for a handsome man, still she had had to succumb to the truth when the traitorous organs of her body started picturing marvellous scenarios in which they were together.
Unfortunately, they were not just sexual fantasies that she could have indulged with a secret escapade of her mind. She imagined waking up to find him in the kitchen, a pair of grey joggers and a black short-sleeved t-shirt, barefoot against the cold floor, brewing tea for her - he was a master in tea-making in her mind. He would greet her good morning with a kiss on her lips, a toned arm sliding around her middle while he twisted his index finger around a curl.
She fantasised about stimulating conversations at the dinner table before cartons of take-away, brandishing chopsticks and waving them in the air as she moved her hands with wide gestures.
There was a also large section of cuddles on the couch: in some of those made-up scenarios, she sat between his legs, resting her back against his hard chest, while in others he laid on the cushions and rested his head on her lap, granting her the chance to rank her fingers through his platinum locks.
As for the movies her mind had directed in the bedroom, they could only be described as the most exquisite delirium she had ever pictured, with their bodies playing each other like chords of a violin to fill the air with a symphony of cries, moans, and pleas.
Hermione had vowed to herself never to mention it aloud, but Draco Malfoy was the unwitting culprit of her breaking up with Ron. She had no intention of confessing her feelings to the blond wizard - who back then was involved in a later failed relationship with Astoria Greengrass - yet she could not pretend anymore to Ron, not when she closed her eyes when they made love, allowing her mind to take her into Draco’s arms.
To prove herself she was not so into the young Malfoy per se and that the issue was she had failed to understand she just liked blonde men, Hermione had let Luna set her up with her colleague Luke Oller. Luke was a handsome and charming wizard with blond hair, blue eyes, a taut physique, and a quick mind that she had so desperately forced herself to like to the point she had voluntarily initiated sex intercourse on their second date. It didn’t work, and no matter how many lies Hermione stubbornly told herself, it was not due to his dark blond hair.
The sad and devastating truth was she was positively besotted with Draco Malfoy, who instead had zero interest in her. She was not even so deluded as to believe that her red gown would have somehow leer him to her - it would be ridiculous to even suggest it - yet she had secretly hoped it could function as a pretext to initiate a conversation with him.
That was the amount of desperation Hermione was currently struggling to live with.
So far, there was no sign of Draco Malfoy anywhere in the house and she would rather drown herself in the Eggnog than ask Harry or his lovely wife for him.
It was not that Hermione hadn’t tried to enjoy the party - she had even hit the dance floor twice with Andrew Mackle - but his were not the arms she wished to swirl in.
It was a rather asinine behaviour for a grown witch to carry, namely when the air around her was thrilling with festive Christmas songs that served as a background for lively chats, jolly laughs, and merry dances.
Besides, if she kept on staying on the loveseat with the Eggnog to keep her company, someone - read Pansy - might notice something was off, and start tormenting Hermione to tell her what the matter was, forcing a lie out of the Gryffindor’s mouth that she would not believe for a second.
No, she had to stop sulking over a man who was not even there, and even if he was it would not change anything, as once again, it hadn’t happened in the last year.
She was in drastic need of some fresh air.
Confident the chilly night would solve what days and nights of overthinking hadn’t, Hermione emptied her glass with a long gulp, and finally resolved to leave the loveseat she was merging with.
Given the street was not an option, for she would have to pass before too many people before she reached the door, with the risk somebody might invite him or herself in to ruin her moment of relaxation, Hermione opted for the stairs, climbing them up to the door on the third floor.
She pushed it open, moved her feet over the small step, and closed it behind her back, leaving the party behind and momentarily away from her.
Although there was not a single gust of wind, the cold December air found its way to her, making goosebumps appear on her skin, and instantly chilling her to the bone. Occurring to Hermione that freezing to the point of death was perhaps not the best approach to have to get into a more joyful mood, the witch took the wand from the pocket conveniently hidden in the inner line of the skirt and cast a Bluebell Flame charm strong enough to not let her die of hypothermia.
The roof terrace was - like the rest of the house - sheltered from indiscreet sights by wards and protection spells Harry had cast himself, and that Hermione knew he checked routinely - old habits were difficult to eradicate. It allowed whoever walked on the solitary roof to enjoy the view of London without the risk of being spotted.
Not that there usually was much to see, for Grimmauld Place was famously a quiet street filled with cosy houses and flats of families.
Hermione expected to find silence to welcome her, yet she was instead greeted by a series of notes that guided her steps to the parapet. The road was deserted but for a man sitting on the pavement, an acoustic guitar in his arms and a harmonica close to his mouth to play the symphony which echoed under the full Moon.
“Great sound, isn’t it?”
She nearly jumped out of her skin, and would have reached for her wand had she not recognised at once whom that husky voice belonged to.
Struggling - and failing - to slow the rate of her heartbeat, Hermione enlarged her chest to drag air into her lungs as if that would be enough to give her courage, and finally resolved to turn on her heels and face him.
In the furthest corner on the right, leaning against the chimney pot, Draco Malfoy was sitting on the floor, lit up by the glow of the street lamps and the surrounding houses, and by the moonlight. For the occasion, he had opted to wear a cobalt blue tuxedo which ignited the mercury in his irises.
She should have breathed deeper.
“Yes. It’s beautiful,” Hermione managed to answer. “What are you doing here?”
“Enjoying the night. What about you?”
He didn’t seem to have to think about it, promptly delivering the answer.
She bit down on her bottom lip and vaguely gestured towards the closed door that divided her - them - from the Potters’s Christmas Party.
“I came up her to…well…”
“Escape?” Draco finished for her, and Hermione wondered what he would have thought if only he knew who she was running from.
Since telling the truth was not an option, the witch resolved to answer with a silent small shrug.
He cocked his head to the side, a few locks falling right, looking straight to her with a hearted smile.
“Come. Sit with me,” his voice invited her, as he patted the palm of his left hand against the cold floor. “I promise I won’t bite.”
A low, purring, and dangerous chuckle erupted from his chest, carried to her by the notes of the music played by the man on the street.
“Okay,” Hermione whispered and ordered her feet to take her to him, the click of the heels against the floor sounding almost offensive in the poetry of that night.
His gaze never left her while she sat down by his side, pushing the fabric of the skirt under her buttocks, her legs bent to secure the lower hem of her dress right over her knees. It wasn’t the most appropriate way to sit with a dress for, despite her tightly together ankles, her thighs and knickers were surely on display. Still, it was something Hermione decided not to care about, both because there was nobody in front of her and because it would not be a problem if the man by her side caught a glimpse of what she was sheltering from the rest of the world.
“So…” Draco trailed off, luring her into turning her head to face him.
There was a marvellous shade of violet in his normally grey irises, a brightness that created a preternatural contrast with the darkness of his eyelashes.
“Must I suppose Andrew’s moves were not fascinating enough for you?”
Hermione knitted her eyebrows together, her brain spinning at light-speed trying to understand what he was talking about.
“Who? I don…”
The not-so-distant memory of her dance with Andrew Mackle found its way into the chaos of her thoughts, making the witch finally aware of whose moves she should have been captivated by.
That meant Draco had been at the party and she had failed to notice it because she had been busy swirling into another man’s arms. It wouldn’t have changed anything if she had witnessed his presence before, yet Hermione felt the urge to reprimand herself about her negligence.
“Oh, Andrew,” she started again. “We were just dancing.”
In a clear and blatant attempt to murder her, Draco schooled his lips to arch in a wolfish and conspiratorial smirk.
“Just dancing, uh?”
She wondered whether he would notice her cheeks were on fire and that she would probably soon melt by his side.
“Is it so odd two people were dancing at a party?” Hermione asked back, not sure how to reply to his question.
He slightly moved his legs, but the movement was enough to have his left thigh brushing against hers. He didn’t switch to his previous position, leaving their clothes to touch.
“I was under the impression you two were close. From the way you were holding onto each other.”
If he kept on looking at her with that intensity, Hermione would not live long enough to witness the dawn of Boxing Day, mercilessly killed by a pair of mercurial irises.
She did not know what to say.
From her recollections of that dance, there was nothing which could have misled somebody into thinking there could be something between her and Andrew. The wizard had made her spin a few times and had then pulled her to him but they were just having fun.
“I know your Auror training always brings you to over-analyse everything but I’m afraid you are going to be disappointed this time. Nothing romantic between Andrew and me,” Hermione noted in a cheerful tone.
Her words had Draco staring at her pensively.
“Why do you believe I would be disappointed to know you are not romantically involved with anyone?”
Of course there was no reason for him to be disappointed since he couldn’t care less about her relationships.
After all, it was a good thing indeed she was already sitting, or else her legs would have given up, leaving her to fight her inevitable ruination on her arse.
Nonetheless, Hermione firmly believed she had to try everything to save the remains of her shattering dignity and, above all, of her breaking heart.
She rolled her eyes to the firmament, faking annoyance.
“I’m sorry. I almost forgot who I was talking to,” she heard her voice utter.
“Right.”
With those few syllables, the conversation stalled and even the musician in the street stopped playing, as if he too longed to be as unhelpful as possible.
Hermione found silence to be a friend to welcome with a ready mind and an open heart, however the circumstances in which she found herself made her fervently wish that something - anything - would happens to break it.
Still, his thigh was grazing against hers.
“When I was a kid, my mother told me that if I made a wish to the Moon aloud, it would fulfil my wishes.”
She looked at Draco again, captured by his hoarse, soothing voice. He had tilted his chin up, his gaze mirroring the bright sphere in the dark sky.
“I haven’t done it in a while.”
He smiled and there was a touch of melancholy in it that gave the wizard the aura of a tragic hero.
“Were you talking to the Moon? Before I came here.”
The second that question slipped out of her lips, Hermione realised it was an asinine thing to ask and foreshadowed him replying that he was not the kind of man who just sat on a roof during Christmas to talk to the Moon.
“Yes.”
There was no mockery in his voice when that lonely syllable hovered in the air, flying up to the stars.
“Did it fulfil your wish?”
She asked, enraptured by the play of lights and shadows the night was casting on his face, darkening the corner of his lips and the side of his nose.
Draco cocked his head to the side to direct his eyes on her again.
“I don’t know. Not yet.”
She curled her lips into a soft smile and bobbed her head down. “Of course. Wishes usually take time.”
“I know but this one is taking too long to become true,” the wizard replied, his mouth now twitching to match his annoyance. “It’s upsetting, to use an understatement.”
Hermione rolled her lips underneath her teeth, curiously looking at Draco.
“Isn’t there something you could do to fulfil this wish? Perhaps the Moon can’t do it all by itself.”
The last s had yet to be pronounced by her tongue that a music filled the air, notes that were carried to them by the night.
Hermione knew that song, and she had always found it agreeable, nothing more. But there was something in the version played by the man in the street that touched the chords of her heart; the romantic sound of the guitar and the harmonica lit her mind and she was helpless to the fantasy of a dance in Draco’s arms, with that song playing in the background and the full Moon shining among millions of stars.
It was a dangerous and mostly idiotic thought to have when the object of her desire was sitting by her side.
She shook her head - a vain attempt to clear her mind and close the door to the realm of those impossible to be realised fantasies.
Draco stared at her with sudden seriousness in his glimmering eyes.
It made her worry there might be something wrong with her face or that she might have wiped away part of her make-up with her hands.
“What are you looking at?”
“You.”
If there had ever been a chance for Hermione to survive that Christmas night, it vanished into thin air under the power of that simple syllable whispered by Draco’s husky voice.
Might there be a chance that for once in her life she was not misreading what was happening?
It was stupid and nonsensical to say the least, nonetheless it seemed to be the only logical explanation to the wizard’s reply.
Her brain was already on its way to a breakdown, when Draco abruptly stood up and, instead of walking away, he stretched his right arm down, offering her his open palm.
“Would you dance with me?”
“Yes.”
His hand was hot when Hermione touched it, wrapping hers as he helped her to stand up. However, when she was on her feet, Draco entwined his fingers with hers, placed his left hand on the curve of her waist and pulled her closer to his body.
She had a vague notion that her right hand should rest on his shoulder, still Hermione decided to instead place it on his bicep, squeezing the silky fabric of his suit to feel the hard muscle under her palm.
They began to dance, although it would have been more precise to say they just swayed while standing on the same spot.
His thumb was caressing her skin.
Their eyes oblivious to everything but each other.
“I came here because I couldn’t stand seeing you dancing with him,” Draco whispered.
Her heart skipped several beats.
“We were just dancing.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want to enter a room and see you swirl into another man’s arms.”
The hand on her waist moved down and held even stronger on her hip.
It sent a shiver up her spine.
There was no misreading in those words - there could not be. As there was no different way to interpret the possessive and yet impossibly sweet light that shone in his eyes.
“You should have come and asked me to dance with you.”
“Even if you were with someone else?”
Hermione tightened the grip around his biceps, hoping there were fewer - or no - layers between them, for there was nothing she craved more than to caress his skin.
“There is no one else. Not for me.”
His hand slithered on the small of her back, the heat of his palm passing through the fabric of her dress to warm her.
“And you think there is someone else for me?” His voice murmured, as he leaned forward to shorten the distance between their faces.
“I thought that there was no me.”
Draco disentangled their fingers only to rest it over her cheek, the tip of his thumb grazing over the corner of her lips.
“There is no one else but you.”
Her brain caught fire and her heart started a mad race inside her chest, slamming against the ribcage with such ardour Hermione was sure it would bruise her bones.
But she did not care.
They had stopped swaying.
She raised on her tiptoes and fulfilled one of her fantasies in a first brush of her lips against his. But the delicate touch lasted less than a heartbeat, for it lost all its chasteness when Draco parted his mouth for her, starting another dance which took them into exploring each other, tasting their flavour on the tip of their tongues.
To Hermione, Draco tasted of promises, happiness, warmth.
He tasted of home.
She wished she could overturn every law of the universe to pass underneath his skin, knock on his heart and see if he could keep her sheltered there, for there was no better place she could think of where to spend the rest of her life.
He halted the kiss to adjust his arms and lifted her, one of his hands holding her by the waist while the other rested on the side of her right knee.
His pupils were more dilated than before and, even if that might be a direct consequence of the darkness, the dim light couldn’t explain the reason behind the bright smile which took her breath away.
“You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this, Hermione.”
Her name was a melody on his lips, soft notes that played the chords of her heart.
“I think I’ve been waiting all my life,” she replied, before her mind could graciously supply that those could not be the most suited words to profess after their first kiss.
Her worries, however, didn’t get the time to find their way out of her brain, for Draco pressed his mouth on hers once more and tightened his grip on her body.
“I love you,” he whispered, breathing his air into her lungs. “I’ve been in love with you for years and I don’t want to waste another second pretending I don’t. I love you, Hermione. Deeply. Madly. Completely.”
He punctuated each adverb with a kiss on the lips Hermione couldn’t anymore stop from arching up in an ecstatic grin.
“I love you too, Draco.”
She clasped his face between her hands, laughing and kissing him at the same time, while her heart was exploding into a constellation of joy.
“I’m taking you to my house. First I’m going to kiss you senseless on the couch, and then I’m going to take you to my bedroom. You are beautiful in this red dress but I’m dying to have your bare skin under my touch.” Draco licked his lips. “What do you think of that?”
Hermione enlaced her finger on the back of his neck, so close to his eyes she could see a shade of amber in the blue-silver sea.
“I think you should apparate us right now.”
They vanished into thin air, leaving behind them the echo of their kiss to dance under the romantic notes of Moondance.