Draco had never been good at half-measures.

It wasn’t in his blood—not in the way he dressed, or walked, or wielded a wand. Certainly not in the way he wanted. He didn’t dabble in desire; he fell into it like stepping through a door he didn’t know how to close.

And when it came to you, it had started with something sharp and fleeting—a glance in the hallway, your mouth saying something clever that cut straight through the quiet he wrapped around himself like silk.

It had been instinct, at first. Curiosity, arrogance, boredom—pick a poison. A suggestion passed between you like a match lit on accident: careless, bright, warm. Friends with benefits, you’d said, like it was simple.

But Draco didn’t do simple. He certainly didn’t do friends.

And so he nodded, that polished Malfoy smile ghosting his lips, pretending to understand the rules of a game he never intended to play by.

What followed was not friendship, and not detachment. Not from him. Because Draco, for all his caution and cold edges, loved with a desperation too deeply buried to burn clean.

He wasn’t tactile in public—no. But in private, it was in the way his gaze lingered too long after you’d turned away, the way his hands learned the weight of your presence like muscle memory. He remembered the slope of your shoulder like a map. He brought you books he never admitted he read. He brushed your knuckles in the corridor, low and quiet, as if your touch was a secret he intended to keep forever.

You set boundaries. He redrew them.

Soft, shifting things, boundaries. He respected them—in theory. In practice, he orbited closer each time, as if affection was a riddle you hadn’t solved yet, and he intended to be the answer.

He said nothing when you reminded him what this wasn’t. But he still stood too close when you spoke. Still looked at you like he was memorizing something that might vanish.

You were confused. He could see it in the pause before your voice rose, in the way your eyes flicked to his mouth when he said your name too gently. You were trying to protect something—yourself, perhaps. Or maybe him. He never asked. Draco never asked questions he wasn’t ready to hear the answers to.

But he felt everything.

It gnawed at him, this not-quite-love you never named. He caught himself wanting things: to hold your hand without pretext, to tell you about the dreams that woke him shaking. To speak the truths buried under all his silvered control—that he didn’t want anyone else, not in passing, not in pretension. Only you. That what you had wasn’t casual for him, not even close.

He couldn’t bear the thought of you offering that same half-tenderness to someone else, even though, technically, you could. That was part of the arrangement, wasn’t it?

God, he hated the word arrangement.

This wasn’t transactional. Not for him. You weren’t a hobby. You weren’t a game. You were the thing—the soft, impossible center of something he didn’t have the language for. Something he wouldn’t dare name, because then it might shatter.

So he remained as he always had: composed, unreadable, quietly unraveling beneath the surface.

To you, he was probably insufferable—too intense, too possessive, too quiet when you tried to define what this was. But to him, you were already his. And he didn’t understand how you couldn’t see that.

He wasn’t falling.

He had already fallen. And he didn’t know how to stop.