obvious glee. No doubt that the sight of such fine, well-paying, pureblood flesh, spread out on her decrepit workbench was a rare treat.
What followed was admittedly a bit of a blur. Hermione vaguely recalled lolling back against the smelly couch and falling asleep. When she awoke, she abandoned the bottle of Ogden' s and padded across the room to check on Draco' s progress. The blood that the tattooist was occasionally wiping away from Draco's back ought to have been alarming, as was the size of the actual tattoo.
But Hermione found the sight of the beads of dark red liquid welling up on his skin to be strangely stirring. She held her breath as she watched, not wanting to interrupt or unwittingly contaminate what felt like a very special ritual.
"Where'zer whiskey?" Draco had asked in a hoarse whisper. He seemed to know she was there without needing to open his eyes.
"Drank it all," she lied, thinking she was being extremely funny. Draco seemed to think so too. He opened his eyes, gave her a dazzling, if slightly goofy smile, before reaching up to bury his fingers in her long hair and tug her head down for a wet, sideways kiss.
To simply look at him, let alone to know him, Hermione would never have guessed him capable of such a kiss. It was his antithesis. Warm, welcoming, genuine and extremely gentle.
It had been the kind of kiss to make a girl's knees weak for hours after and cause her logic and intellect to apparently go into voluntary remission.
The squalor of the tattoo studio had melted away and the stick of rolled incense that burnt lazily in the corner imbued the room in a heady, intoxicating haze. There had been more than just drunken lust and teenage stupidity permeating the thick air in the room.
Hermione suspected that the spell had taken whatever mild inclination she and Draco might have had towards each other and increased it ten-fold, such that it had become impossible to see beyond the raw, pulsing attraction between them.
Their desire had been a living thing. Hermione's senses heightened to fever pitch. Everything she touched and observed held new fascination, Draco most of all. As the tattoo slowly took shape under the old woman's whippet-fast hands, Hermione longed to crawl into his skin to experience what he was experiencing. She had wanted to pull his long, lean body from the table and run her hands over the lines and hollow of him.
"Sweet," he had whispered to her, his thumb riding over her cheek.
His glib tongue had been on hiatus during the tattooing, lulled into submission by the sheer force of the experience. And indeed it had been sweet. So sweet and so powerful that they had taken off for the first motel they found and proceeded to do the only thing that felt natural at the time- consummate the union.
Several times over.
Draco had not been himself while the old woman has painstakingly needled his skin, and neither had Hermione. It was exactly as Tallowstub described in his book- a period of mind altering euphoria that had reduced their considerable brainpower into that of a pair of horny rabbits.
They had been lost in the moment, lured and lulled by the old spell. The trouble was that moments did not exist on their own. Each was inextricably, inescapably linked to the next.
And so here she was, days later, attempting to unravel the damage. With a sigh of self-disgust, Hermione flicked quickly to the last chapter.
Chapter Six: Treatments
Ten minutes later, her summary of the extremely concise chapter was not at all reassuring.
- Spell is largely irreversible, short of the death of either party, excision of marked skin or amputation of marked limbs.- Consult local practitioner for more advice.
Lovely. Just lovely.
Hermione shifted in the hard, straight-backed chair, painfully aware of the flush in her cheeks, the subtle warmth that had crept into her hands, the crisp, stiffness of her school blouse and the rough, scratchy texture where the collar of her outer robes chafed against the soft skin at the back of her neck.
Idly, she wondered if Draco was experiencing similar side effects. If he was, the git was doing a remarkable job of hiding it. He still sauntered down the hallways, seemingly without a care in the world. He still parted the sea of Slytherin subordinates in the Great Hall when entered the room. Still carried out his duties as if nothing at all was amiss.
And every time he looked pointedly at her