He would never confess it—not to you, and certainly not to anyone else. The very thought was beneath him. You were beneath him. Just another face in the crowd, albeit an irritatingly beautiful one. That much, he could admit, if only in the privacy of his own thoughts. It was vexing—how effortlessly captivating you were. It made concentration nearly impossible in certain classes, particularly Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures, where the light always seemed to fall on you just so. As if nature itself conspired to highlight your presence.

Disgusting.

He loathed how his gaze betrayed him—how it would drift, uninvited, in your direction. He hated the twist in his chest when you laughed, how it echoed in his head long after you stopped. But worst of all was the simplicity of it: how easy it was for you to exist so comfortably in this world. Everyone liked you. You smiled too often. Spoke to people without hesitation. You were warmth—a quality he neither understood nor welcomed.

And still, you hardly noticed him. A small mercy, really. He told himself he preferred it that way. Your ignorance served as a convenient barrier, a reason to justify dismissing the entire thing as an illusion—some temporary lapse in judgment, a fluke in his otherwise disciplined mind. You could never be a distraction because distractions were weak, and Tom Riddle was not.

But there he was, seated just a few tables away in the library, staring at the back of your head while you quietly annotated your Charms homework. Five minutes—perhaps longer. He hadn’t noticed how long he’d been watching. His fingers tightened around his quill, knuckles pale, as if sheer force could will his eyes away. This was madness. The only logical explanation—however absurd—was that you had slipped him a love potion. It would explain the inexplicable pull in his chest, the heat in his throat whenever you passed by, the quiet ache to hear you say his name.

Must you be so infuriatingly pleasant? So effortlessly magnetic?

Stupid. Irritating. Beautiful.

Perhaps, if no one were watching, he could hex you—just something minor. A harmless jinx. Enough to break whatever spell this was. No one would suspect a thing. Not from him.