Chapter Text
Pansy Parkinson watched as Hermione Granger, Golden Girl, Brightest Witch of Her Age, Modern Business Witch, Swottiest Swot That Ever Swotted, flowed down a wide staircase wearing a gold silk gown, closely fitted from the bust through the hips, floor-length skirt bundled up in one hand. The gown had Desrosiers written all over it, timeless and expensively tasteful, draped just so, and exactly nothing like what Pansy would have put her in for the occasion. At the bottom of the stairs, Draco stood looking up at her with the wide, glistening eyes of a besotted carp.
Pansy tossed her copy of the Daily Prophet into the bin beside the downy expanse of her freshly made bed.
She’d be damned if the wedding dress wasn’t Parkinson.
Pulling first at one earring and then the next, she dropped them into a jewelry dish sitting on the top of the bureau, drew her heels off and chucked them into the corner next to a patinaed Savonarola chair. Her dress, the simple but beautifully constructed black shift she wore often when she was working, was slung over the back. She threw herself after it, clad in nothing but her very expensive underclothes, to drape her limbs loosely in exhaustion over the chair's wooden sides. She pressed a hand firmly to her eyes through a long exhale.
It had been a long day: fittings with two Wizarding celebrity clients; meetings with suppliers; an elegant, lingering lunch in a private dining room with a famous female designer who had graciously agreed to mentor her; and endless hours in her new Milan showroom. She'd fussed over details that she would have to learn to delegate, ensuring everything was up to her standards, and confirming that the deputies running the Italian side of the business had everything they needed to do their jobs as well as she would herself.
Exhausting. Fulfilling, but exhausting.
And now, everything short of a personal Floo confirmation indicated that Draco Malfoy had finally slid into Hermione Granger’s starched white knickers.
She was glad for him, truly, even after everything she’d put up with from that platinum blond idiot over the last few years, but he didn’t owe her the wedding dress commission; he owed her the clothes for the whole bloody wedding party.
She tilted her head back and sighed deeply again.
She needed a drink.
And a shag.
She didn’t care in which order.
Gripping her wand, and now wearing a plunging wrap dress that showed off the elegant lines of her frame and a pair of delicious heels that she’d almost decided against packing, she Apparated across town to a spot just outside of a hotel.
It was one of those bustling little corners of the world where the Magical and Muggle collided, everyone mingling together as unaware as the passengers coming and going at King’s Cross station. It was also a place that she understood to be nice, in the way that the bourgeois always declared and wanted things to be nice, with nice rooms, a nice restaurant, and a very nice pool, but one that also had a surprisingly chic little bar, often full of young men who she trusted would not be as nice as all that.
She stashed her wand in the depths of one of the spacious magical pockets she included at the side seams of even her most body-conscious dresses, and walked in the way she’d been brought up to (she wouldn’t need to play catch-up like a soot-smirched foundling in a Victorian ladies’ novel; for Merlin’s sake what were any of them thinking) through the dimly lit room to take a seat at the bar.
“I’d like a martini, dry, straight up,” she told the bartender. She’d feigned a preference for Muggle liquor in her teens purely to annoy her mother, but in the course of doubling down on the gambit had found that Muggles really did know how to do some things better than wizards, and getting themselves drunk in style was one of them.
Drink in hand, she swiveled slightly on her stool and gazed with a cultivated lack of interest around the bar.
Men there were, in spades, many in Muggle business suits, but plenty with the telltale flourishes of Wizarding menswear.
Gods she was tired of men.
Drinks first, then.
She swigged her martini in a way that she also knew from her drinking experiments drove her mother up the tapestries, and tapped one short, manicured fingernail against the side of her glass while giving the bartender a loose, flirtatious smile. One down, time for another.
The first man in the room to bite was a brunette with soft-looking skin the color of strong tea with just a splash of milk, and a smirk that she wanted to wipe off his face with the red-soled ball of her high-heeled foot. Would she like another drink? He liked her accent. He wanted to know what she was doing in Milan. His hand was on her knee. And that smirk.
Insufferable.
She pulled him off her hook and threw him back into the sea with a withering glance.
“Not interested,” she told him, flatly, peeling his fingers off her skin and muttering a wandless spell that made him cough lightly on his own saliva before he could say anything more.
Men. Boys, really, most of them, and maybe the ones with greying hair and fantasies of being some bright young thing’s Daddy were boys, too, chasing their own misspent youth or a fantasy they formed during some critical moment of puberty.
She drained her second martini, wrapped her lips around the smooth green skin of the olive and bit down with a sigh.
The couple sitting at the bar to her left vacated their stools, and as the movement pulled Pansy’s eyes in their direction, her attention fell on a figure hunched over further down the bar.
He was broad-shouldered and tall—even sitting he was clearly tall enough to have developed the atrocious posture of people who wish to shrink themselves to better fit the world—almost luminously pale, lightly freckled, and with a mop of loose, dark curls. His suit was simple, but clearly of Wizarding make, and he nursed a glass of beer so dark no light could escape it.
A boy, this one, certainly, but something about his height or his strangely sweet hunched shoulders made her belly roll in curiosity.
She turned her attention firmly away from him and sucked lazily at the olive in her third martini.
It was less than five minutes before her peripheral vision caught him standing to take the few steps toward her. She braced herself for the come-on, hoping it was enough to get him into her knickers, but she was not prepared, not at all, when he said—
“Heya, Pansy.”
She rotated on her stool to face him.
Bloody. Fucking. Hell.
It was Neville fucking Longbottom, that useless sop who hadn’t done anything right in his entire closeted Hufflepuff of a life until he miraculously grew a pair in 7th Year.
She hadn’t seen him since she left Hogwarts, and he had gone and become fuckable.
Not even slightly fuckable, no. Clearly. Eminently. Unanimously.
He was tall, Merlin what did they put in the water over in the greenhouses, and very lean but muscular, like the Muggle footballers Pansy secretly appreciated. He had grown into that absurd mouth of his (apparently he just needed a few more centimeters of jaw), had obviously undergone some magical work on his teeth, and Gods, his eyes; had they always been like that? Why the Harry Potter ocular obsession when there was a pair of deep hazel wells like these knocking about in Gryffindor Tower?
“Longbottom,” she answered, not needing to feign surprise.
“Do you mind if I sit?” He nodded to the stool next to her.
“Of course not,” she answered in her most well-bred drawl, shifting her knees toward him as he folded himself into the seat beside her.
“Funny seeing you here,” he chirped awkwardly, sloshing a puddle of stout onto the bar as he caught the edge of the coaster with the bottom of his pint glass.
And like a magic trick, there he was: the Neville Longbottom she'd just been briefly convinced the world had lost forever to the inevitability of physical maturation.
“Indeed.” She smirked a smirk she thought had been left behind her at Hogwarts along with the weird, shabby-looking Neville who was overfond of anything that had to do with dirt. Only now the smirk was less mean, and more, she was more shocked than anyone to realize, interested.
“What brings you to Milano?” she asked, plucking at a cocktail napkin.
Milano? Had she gone insane?
“I’m here for a conference,” he said. “It’s being held at the hotel, I just came down for a beer before I turn in for the night.”
“Ah.” Don’t ask what sort, she told herself, and then immediately inquired, “What sort of conference?”
“It’s on magico-organic herbology. The Italians are at the forefront of the magical soil restoration movement.”
He was, apparently, still playing in the dirt.
She nodded and put her lips to her martini, not as curious as maybe she ought to have been about whatever plant-based movement the Italians were leading.
“What brings you here?” He sipped his black brew, then licked away a mustache of cream-colored foam.
“Work. I’m a fashion designer, and this”—she gestured broadly—“is one of the places I need to be.”
Neville leaned back, and for a moment looked like he was performing some mental Arithmancy. She watched in real time as his synapses fired.
“Hermione’s been wearing your clothes, right?” he asked.
Gods. Even Italy wasn’t far enough to get away from the subject of Golden Girl Granger for two minutes altogether. She may be the making of Parkinson as a fashion designer, but it came at a steep cost to her personal pride.
“Yes, she is. How did you know?”
“I saw the photos in the Daily Prophet. Really lovely, if I remember. You should be very proud.”
Pansy arched one of her impeccably shaped brows and smiled. “She is very beautiful, isn’t she?”
Neville looked perplexed for reasons Pansy couldn’t fathom. “Oh, Hermione? Well, I suppose.” He laughed uncomfortably. “I meant your clothes, actually, they’re quite nice. I think they’d suit any witch.”
Pansy looked at him like he’d sprouted a second, also alarmingly handsome head.
“You don’t find Granger attractive?” she asked, disbelieving.
“Oh, no, I mean…” He seemed perplexed. “She’s like a sister to me, isn’t she?” He looked at Pansy furtively over the rim of his glass and finished the last swallow of his beer. “And not to offend anyone, but she’s not really my type.”
Pansy laughed openly. Not his type. What was Neville Longbottom’s type, exactly? Professor Sprout?
He echoed her with a thin, nervous laugh of his own, not really following. “Am I supposed to be attracted to her?”
“Not at all, but I’m beginning to think you’re in a shrinking minority.” Pansy tilted her head to one side and considered him. “Are you seeing anyone?”
He signaled for another beer, and turned more fully toward her. “No. I don’t really want anything serious right now.” For a long moment, he paused, chewing gently on his bottom lip. “I’m honestly not sure why everyone from our year seems to be in such a rush to pair off and mate for life.” He blushed slightly. “I’m still young, you know?”
Pansy ran a finger around the rim of her martini glass. “It’s the war. Isn’t that a thing? A conflict happens, a bunch of people die, then afterward there’s a great big rush to procreate and shore up the population?”
“Yeah, that makes sense. But, I guess, in spite of everything, I feel like we have lots of time. Killing Voldemort felt...freeing. Like the world opened up to us for the first time. And my job is fantastic. I get to do what I love, make a real difference in how the magical community interacts with nature, and travel all over the world. I’m headed to Japan next month.”
“That’s wonderful,” she answered, genuinely.
“I’m not saying I’m not interested in seeing people. I am. But casually, I think.”
Pansy’s finger stopped moving around her glass.
“How casually?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.
He blushed furiously.
Pansy looked around the bar at the polished young Italian women, the tourists, the men in suits, and made a decision.
Neville Longbottom left Hogwarts and...grew up. Neville Longbottom had a passion for work and travel. Neville Longbottom wasn’t looking for a wife. And Neville Longbottom didn’t understand what the great big bloody deal was about lovely, perfect Hermione bloody Granger.
“Would you like to ask me to come up to your room?” she said.
He choked on a mouthful of stout.
As he coughed and wiped his shirt front, he looked at her unsteadily. Then, seeming to have come to a conclusion, he turned away from her, took another long draught of his beer, tossed a few bills on the bar, and stood.
He cleared his throat, then asked in a thin voice, “Pansy, would you like to come up to my room?”
“Let me settle my tab.”
She was on him the moment the door to his room clicked shut.
His mouth—that ridiculous, overgrown, completely absurd mouth she’d hated so much at school—was reforming her. Rehabilitating her. Remaking her into something penitent and willing to change.
His mouth was at her mouth, and she was sorry, so very sorry, that she had ever thought or said or done anything against it—this perfect, hungry mouth of his—which was soft and hard all at once and licking into her like she was an ice cream cone dripping into his hand on a hot summer’s day.
Neville Longbottom could kiss.
Who taught Neville bleeding Longbottom to kiss?
Pansy was suddenly, irrationally, outraged that it hadn’t been her.
She nipped his bottom lip, hard, and he groaned.
She had kicked off her heels at some point and stood on the balls of her feet, reaching up to that mouth with her own while he stooped down to meet her, and she was thinking about...his hands. His hands were at her backside. They were large. So large. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? He was tall, so the hands made sense. They were large, and grabbing firmly at her ass, covering all of her and pulling up and up into his tall, lean body.
And then those large hands were questing, slipping beneath the fabric of her knickers to grasp at the skin of her backside.
She wanted her fair share of skin, too.
Running her hands around the waist of his trousers, she pulled his shirttails free and pushed her hands up to slide across his back.
Closer, she thought, urging him into her, and without taking his hands off her ass or his tongue out of her mouth, he began to walk them, her going backward, him forward, like an awkward tangled backward-forward kissing clutching slow-motion three-legged race, up to the edge of the hotel bed, where she pulled her hands from his back and unbuckled his belt, unzipped his trousers and jammed one hand down the front of his pants to dig around until she found what she wanted.
She did, and it was...startling.
She broke her mouth from his for the first time since they’d entered his room, and looked down at where her hand disappeared into his pants.
“What the fuck is this?”
He stared at her like a badger caught in the high beams of an oncoming lorry. “It’s my—”
“I know it’s your cock,” she practically shouted, “but you’re Longbottom.” She looked between him and where her hand gripped him like he ought to know what she meant. He didn’t.
“Neville. Longbottom,” she clarified.
“Yes?” he confirmed.
I watched you pour maple syrup straight down your shirt front in third year, she thought. The whole cup of it, just straight down the shirt and tie.
She pulled close to him and pressed tiny flicks of her tongue in a line from his collar bone to his chin by way of explanation.
What right do you have to just go walking around like this? And being tall? And your mouth, Neville. Have you thought about that?
Her mind was veering off topic. She steered it back to the subject at hand.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Oh. Um, well, you could…”
“Don’t tell me what to do with a cock.”
She latched her mouth to his again, stroking him firmly with one hand while the other wrestled with the buttons on his shirt. She was going to lick him, everywhere. It was the only solution. Just absolutely everywhere.
He pulled his hands from her ass and began sliding them around her dress, searching for whatever buttons or zip or ties held it closed, and his travels brought his fingers across the outside of her thigh.
“What’s this?” he asked around her tongue, his hand stopping over her hip.
“That’s my wand.” She finished off the third button down and aggressively approached the fourth.
He leaned away from her, taking in the lines of her dress lying smooth against her frame.
“How?”
“It has pockets,” she said. “Honestly I don’t know what’s taken the Wizarding community this long to put decent-sized pockets in women’s garments. It’s the simplest bit of magic, absolutely nothing at all. It’s like no one cares about the day to day needs of real women.”
“I care about women,” he said earnestly, taking over with the buttons and removing his shirt before continuing to search around the perimeter of her dress for the access codes.
“Of course you would,” she hissed at him, reaching down and rolling his balls in her palm.
His eyes rolled back in his dumb, beautiful head.
A moment later, he came back around and peered futilely down the front of her dress. "How does it open?"
“It wraps, at the side—no, the other side—like a present. Just like a present. Pull. Just pull on the—there.”
It came off neatly, and then her bra clasp only took three passes.
“Gods, you’re beautiful,” he breathed into her skin before he swept most of her small breast into his mouth.
She had nothing to say to that, so she squeezed him, hard.
“Fuck. What do you want?” he whispered close to her ear
“I’ve had your truly impressive—one might honestly say intimidating—cock in my hand for five minutes, what do you think I want?”
“How do you want it?”
Well. That was a new question.
“I haven’t looked at the menu,” she answered, urging his trousers and pants down his legs. “What are my options?”
“Do you like it slow, fast, lots of touching, less touching…?”
“Merlin, Longbottom, just fuck me how you like to fuck,” she growled at him.
With that, he yanked her knickers down her legs, then hopped around in a short circle while he pulled his trousers and pants over his heels.
“Socks off,” Pansy commanded.
“Of course,” he responded, incredulous. "Who leaves their socks on for—"
Before he could finish the thought, she bowled him over onto the bed.
Mouthing at her neck, he rolled onto his back, then pulled her to sit over his hips.
“This is your first move?” she said, laughing.
“I want you to come straight away." He smiled in a way that had Pansy thinking maybe she didn’t give people who like dirt enough credit. “Before anything else happens.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said, then lined him up and began to take him in.
She was ready. Merlin, she was more than ready, almost shamefully ready had she been capable of feeling embarrassed by her own arousal.
Still, it was...a lot. She went excruciatingly slow, letting herself adjust. His face as she took him in a centimeter at a time—strikingly like a person witnessing fireworks for the first time–was an image she’d have liked to keep in a frame.
“Neville,” she panted.
“Yes, Pansy? You alright? Do you want to stop?”
“No. Absolutely fucking not. I’m not a quitter.”
As she continued to lower herself, he took one of her breasts into his hand and firmly rolled her nipple between his fingers, then dragged his other thumb through the wetness at her cunt up to her clit.
He didn’t scramble at her furiously, just brought the broad flat of his thumb over her in a firm, steady rhythm, over and over and over again.
How the fuck does Neville Longbottom know how to do that, she wondered.
The second she took the last inch of him, feeling overwhelmingly, deliriously full, she came, her thighs trembling around his hips and her cunt clenching for dear life around him.
She was boneless when he pulled out of her and flipped her over onto her back, and she fully expected him to push in again and fuck her into the mattress until he came. Instead, he moved to lie down next to her, and stroked the smooth skin of her belly with his fingertips while her chest rose and fell with her returning breath. It was lovely.
“What are you doing?”
“This?” He looked down at his hand. “Do you not like it?” He drew back.
She rolled her eyes, and brought his hand back to where it had been.
“No, it’s very, very nice, but”—she looked meaningfully at his still extremely hard cock—“in my past experience, men have been in rather a hurry to take care of their erections.”
He had the audacity to blush.
“I can wait,” he said, “I wanted to give you a few minutes. Then I thought you might like another orgasm, if that’s alright.”
Pansy stared at him.
“And then what?” she whispered.
“Well, we could…”
“Don’t tell me, Longbottom,” she said. “Show me.”
And he did.
She came the second time with her hips at the edge of the bed, flat on her back with her knees in her hands, pulled away to the sides. She couldn’t be open enough, couldn’t give him enough of her as he stroked her steadily with his tongue and pressed his fingers into her aching cunt.
“Who taught you how to do this?” she asked, trying and failing to catch her breath.
“I learned,” he muttered around her clit, “from a book.”
The third time, she was on her side, back flush against him, leg draped over his hip, as he pressed into her in a steadfast, unfaltering rhythm. He guided her hand down to her cunt, brought both of his hands to pinch firmly—just this side of too hard—at her nipples, and watched over her shoulder as she swirled two fingers around her clit. It was so good. So good. She realized after a moment she was saying it, over and over again, out loud.
“A book?” she asked.
“Well, not just a book. A few witches have been willing to let me practice.”
“Of course they've been.” She laughed.
“I was terrible at everything,” he said. “I didn’t want to be terrible at this.”
“You’re not." She slid her fingers over herself faster as she felt her body begin to tighten around him. “You most certainly are not.”
Her fourth one came while she was on her hands and knees in the middle of the bed, arching her back against him as he slammed into her from behind. One of his large hands gripped her hip and pulled her back against him with each thrust, while the other worked at her clit in exactly the way he’d watched her stroke herself before. It was the hardest, most relentless fuck of her life. She caught herself just before she drooled onto the pillow in front of her.
“Is this good?” he asked. His voice was, finally, strained. She felt a ridiculous surge of pride.
“It’s the best, Neville. It’s the best,” she whispered into the pillow.
When she came, her limbs shook and she moaned, long and outrageously loud, like one of the women she’d seen in the pornographic moving pictures Blaise watched on the weird Muggle picture box he kept hidden in his closet during the summer between third and fourth years.
Silly, she thought under the waves as they crested and broke in her body, but apparently the sound and sight and feel of her coming under him one last time was enough to break Neville, too, and he fell across her back, positively roaring into her shoulder, and bit her, hard.
As they collapsed into the damp sheets, Pansy on her stomach, Neville beside her with one of his long legs hooked between hers, she looked at the Muggle electric clock sitting on the nightstand.
It was 1 a.m. Merlin, how long had they been fucking?
“I ought to go,” she said once she’d caught her breath again, shifting her leg out from under his.
“Oh,” he said, flatly. “Do you have to work very early?”
“No…”
“Then stay.” He squeezed one cheek of her bottom in his hand, then gave it a light smack.
“Tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day, Neville.”
“So?”
“So, you, Neville Longbottom, want to wake up with me, Pansy Parkinson, on Valentines Day? What are you going to do—order up chocolate-dipped strawberries and make tender love to me? Perhaps we could lick whipped cream from one another’s nipples?”
He smiled broadly with that dumb, beautiful mouth.
“Trite, but still,” he mused, “that doesn’t sound half bad, Parkinson.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“What can I say?” He laughed, rolling over to cover her body with his and mouthing softly at the back of her neck. “You’re rather my type.”
It was Tuesday morning when Pansy walked back into her cottage to find Blaise lolling about on her sofa, leafing through proofs of her Fall/Winter collection.
As soon as he heard the front door open, he shouted, without looking up at her, “Gods, Pans, I've been Flooing you for ages. I had to Portkey out here, you know. Glad to know you’ve not been kidnapped by a vampire coven. Wait until you hear what’s happened.”
“Draco shagged Granger.” She dropped her clutch on the console table by the door and winced as she bent to shuck her heels.
“How’d you know? Did he Owl you?”
“Merlin help him if he had,” she muttered. She’d showered, more than once, with Neville, but she was desperate for a wash that actually got her clean. “I saw the pictures from the Prophet. Anyone in the Wizarding world who doesn’t know they’ve shagged hasn't been paying attention.”
“Too true,” sang Blaise. “You’ve had three owls since I arrived this morning,” he continued, “You won’t believe this, but one of them looks like it’s from Neville blinking Longbottom. You remember, that Hufflepuff kid?"
"Gryffindor," she murmured.
He finally looked up from her line of form-fitting women’s trousers and blouses with masculine tailoring details. “What in Merlin’s mystical ballsack happened to you?”
Pansy pulled a hand through her normally perfect bob, now a mess of partially tangled strands. Her make-up had been long gone 24 hours ago. She'd legitimately been too knackered to do anything to fix any of it.
"You wouldn’t believe me if I told you," she said.
She pulled her wand from her pocket and headed into the kitchen to conjure herself a cup of tea.
“Whoa, Pans, where’d your wand just come from?”
Palming the hot cup under her chin, Pansy sighed.
“Pockets, Blaise. It has pockets.”