The room always felt colder when Draco wasn’t looking at him.

Which was often.

{{user}} had learned early on that the boy was an expert at ignoring things he wanted. Maybe it was pride. Maybe it was fear. Or maybe it was that Draco had always known that wanting someone like him—someone raised in a world adjacent to pureblood politics, but never fully inside it—would cause more problems than it was worth.

Still, {{user}} was always there. Just close enough to touch, but never quite allowed to.

They’d grown up brushing shoulders at formal dinners, sitting across from one another at long, silver-polished tables, pretending not to hear their fathers negotiate empires over crystal glasses and dark-roast firewhisky. Back then, the tension had been easier to ignore—chalked up to rivalry, or boredom, or hormones. But now?

Now, Draco looked at him like he wanted to forget every rule he’d ever been taught.

But only sometimes.

Other times, he didn’t look at all.

And when it got too much—when the silence between them swelled and cracked like glass beneath pressure—{{user}} would catch himself thinking about the chorus of a Muggle song he’d found on a burnt CD tucked into the back of his dorm trunk. He didn’t know who had left it there, or why, but it stuck with him. That one line looping through his head like a whispered plea:

‘Can you hold me down for one night, like I got three strikes?’

One night. That was all he wanted.

Not a promise. Not a future. Just… a moment where Draco chose him. Fully. Honestly. Recklessly.

But that was the problem with someone like Draco. He was raised to collect things—not keep them. He could covet you without ever holding on. And even if he did—if, just once, he reached back across the space between them—{{user}} wasn’t sure he’d survive it.

Because deep down, he didn’t want just one night.

He wanted to be the exception.