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The thing about being exceptionally good at pub quizzes was that it left very little room for being gracious about it.
Hermione had known this in the abstract—had known it the way she knew most things, intellectually and with footnotes—and had chosen, every third Thursday of the month without fail for the past two years, to set that knowledge politely aside.
"Literature round," she announced, not looking up from the answer sheet. "Bathilda Bagshot."
"We haven't heard the question yet," Ron protested.
"It's always Bathilda Bagshot."
Across the table, Malfoy said nothing. He had said very little all evening, which was not unusual in these settings amongst the friend group— he was quieter out here, more contained. He was also, objectively and inconveniently, the most attractive man in the pub, which was a fact Hermione had long since filed under not helpful and tried not to dwell on too much.
Time had been kind to Malfoy. He had grown tall and broad-shouldered, and tonight his jaw was shaded with a day's worth of dark stubble, which had absolutely no business looking so sexy on someone so insufferably put-together in every other respect. He drew eyes the way expensive things did, the involuntary double-take of someone registering something worth noticing. Two women at the bar had been at it since round three.
Malfoy hadn't looked at them once.
He had, instead, fetched Hermione a second glass of Sauvignon Blanc without being asked and refilled it precisely when the level dropped below a third. He'd passed her the bowl of crisps. He'd leaned back in his chair with his own drink and watched her hold court over their little table—Harry and Theo, Ron and Luna, Neville perpetually late from whatever Herbology crisis he'd been attending—with an expression that might, from a distance, have looked like boredom.
Hermione knew better.
"Right, question seven," called the quizmaster from the front. "Which celebrated magical historian authored A History of Magic as well as the lesser-known The Thorough Compendium of Wizarding Wars, Volume Two?"
"I told you," Hermione said.
"You're insufferable," said Harry, with great fondness.
"You're welcome," she said, and wrote Bathilda Bagshot in her very neat handwriting.
She didn't look at Malfoy. She was making a point of not looking at Malfoy.
This was, if she were being perfectly honest, entirely the problem.
It had started in the geography round, with Belgium.
Specifically, it had started with Hermione correcting Malfoy’s suggestion of Brussels as the capital in a tone that—she could admit, in hindsight, privately, under duress—may have been slightly condescending.
"Brussels is the de facto capital," she'd explained, because she was helpful like that. "But technically, Belgium has no single official capital. It's complicated because of the linguistic regions. I'd have thought you'd know that, given the Malfoy estate's trade connections on the continent."
There had been a silence.
Then Malfoy had said, very pleasantly, "Mm," and taken a long sip of his whisky.
It was the mm that should have warned her. It was the particular quality of the mm—the one that came with a slight tension at the corner of his jaw, barely visible if you weren't looking, and she was always looking, even when she was making a point of not—that she had categorised, by now, as dangerous.
She had looked at it, registered it, assessed it, and then done the following: corrected him twice more in the history round, talked over him to explain to Harry why his answer for the founding date of the Wizengamot was close but not quite right, and, in the Quidditch round, leaned across him to physically take the pen from his hand so she could write the answer herself.
His hand had gone very still under hers.
She'd written the answer down without looking at him.
She should have looked at him. She'd known, even then, that she should have looked—that not looking was its own kind of provocation, a deliberate turning away from something she absolutely knew was there. But she'd kept her eyes on the answer sheet instead, very calmly, and felt the weight of his gaze on her face like a hand at her throat.
Theo had said nothing, neither had Ron. Luna was examining a beer mat with great serenity. Neville had gone very still in the particular way of a man who had learned, over years of proximity to dangerous magical flora, to avoid drawing attention to himself near something volatile.
Harry had cleared his throat and asked if anyone wanted another round.
It was, Hermione reflected, a very particular kind of social contract they'd all arrived at by unspoken agreement. Nobody asked. Nobody acknowledged. Ron had once opened his mouth, caught Hermione's expression, and discovered a sudden pressing need to read the back of a crisp packet. Theo, who had known Malfoy since they were still in nappies and had the self-possession of someone who'd survived considerably worse, simply watched the two of them with the mild, pleasant attention of a man watching a weather system he'd correctly predicted. Luna thought it was lovely, but Luna thought most things were lovely, and had the tact—unusual for someone so relentlessly honest—to keep that to herself. And Neville had once told Hermione, in the side alley after a particularly eventful quiz night, that he was very happy for her and had then immediately changed the subject to a new variety of Mandrake he was cultivating, and they had never spoken of it again.
It suited Hermione perfectly.
She excused herself between rounds eight and nine with a practised sort of vagueness—just slipping away to the loo, nothing remarkable—and threaded her way through the warm press of the pub, past the sticky dartboard corner and the slightly broken, magical jukebox someone had put a pint glass on top of, and into the narrow corridor that led to the loos.
The ladies' was empty as she entered. She washed her hands even though she didn’t really need to, but because she needed a moment of cold water and something sensible to look at. The mirror gave her herself back: flushed cheeks, bright eyes, hair frizzing slightly at the temple from the pub's warmth. Entirely composed. Absolutely fine.
The door opened.
Malfoy stepped in, turned the lock—a single deliberate click—and leaned back against it.
He hadn't said anything yet. He was still holding his whisky glass, which struck her as deeply unfair; it was the studied casualness of it, as though he'd just happened to wander in. The loo was not a large room. He filled rather a lot of it—she'd forgotten, somehow, in the ordinary scale of the pub, quite how much of a doorway he occupied, how far she had to tip her chin when he was standing close. His eyes were light and extremely attentive, doing that thing where they took stock of her all at once.
"This is the ladies'," Hermione said.
"Astute." He set the glass down on the edge of one of the sinks. "You've been very impressive tonight."
She knew better than to say thank you. She said, "The Belgium point stands, by the way. Technically."
"You're right," he said agreeably. "You usually are."
Something in the agreement sat wrong. It was too even, too unbothered.
"Then what," she started.
"I'm not here to argue with you about Belgium." He crossed the small room in three steps, and she backed up in response—the cold edge of the sink catching her at the back of her thighs, his hands coming to rest on the counter on either side of her, not touching. "You took the pen out of my hand."
"You were going to write the wrong Seeker."
"I wasn't." He said it without heat, just fact. "I was going to write Roderick Plumpton and I was correct."
She opened her mouth, then closed it. The 1921 League Cup—Plumpton's controversial snitch catch, three and half seconds, shortest in history—she was almost certain she was right about the year. Sixty, perhaps sixty-five percent certain, which was, for Hermione Granger, effectively the same as being wrong.
"You've been doing it all evening," Malfoy continued, in that same even tone that meant she was in a very specific kind of trouble. "Talking over me. Correcting me in front of our friends. Taking things out of my hands." A pause. "What do we call that?"
Heat climbed the back of her neck. "An assertive communication style."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not entirely a smile. "Try again."
She held his gaze. It cost her something. "Being a brat," she said.
"There she is." He straightened slightly, his thumb finding the line of her jaw, tilting her chin up to meet his darkened grey eyes. "And what happens to brats?"
She could feel her heart doing something embarrassing in her chest. "They get lectured in pub lavatories?"
"They get punished," he said, with the patience of a man who had all the time in the world and knew it. "Turn around."
She turned around.
The mirror gave her the image of herself again: dishevelled now at the edges, eyes blown dark, watching his hands come to her hip—the way they slid her dress up slow and steady, as though this were nothing, as though he were simply making a small adjustment to the world. The hiss of cool air against her thighs, her stomach, the revelation of the dark green knickers she'd worn and had not, she realised now, chosen by accident.
"Pretty," Malfoy said, without sentiment. Just observation, the way he might note the time.
"Don't patronise me," she said, which was not quite the sentence she'd intended.
"I'm complimenting your underwear." He hooked his fingers in the waistband and drew them down with the same unhurried economy. "And noting that you wore your good ones to a pub quiz."
"I always wear—" She stopped. She didn't, actually.
He let her reach that conclusion in silence, which was worse than him saying it.
"Hands on the sink," he said.
She put her hands on the sink. The cold of the porcelain was immediate and grounding. In the mirror, she could see the shade of flush along her cheekbones, the slight part of her lips; behind her, Malfoy watching the back of her head with that expression that told her she had been a bad girl.
The pub was loud, but muffled through the door. The loo was not that loud. The first smack landed sharp and without preamble, resounding in the quiet loo. Hermione swallowed the sound of it—caught it behind her teeth, pressed it flat.
"So you told poor Potter he needed to check if he had any brain cells left," Malfoy said, in a conversational tone, and landed another. "In front of everyone."
"He was—"
"Not the point." Another. She exhaled through her nose, slowly, because the alternative was considerably more embarrassing. The sharp heat of it was building at the base of her spine, spreading outward and—she was not going to think about the fact that it was spreading inward as well, that her body had apparently decided to be catastrophically unhelpful about this. "The point is that you have a tendency, when you're comfortable, to forget that you don't actually run the table."
"I do run it," she said. The words came out slightly breathless. "Otherwise we will never win."
"You run half the table." He smoothed his palm over the heat he'd raised, a brief and maddening softness that made her jaw clench with the effort of staying quiet. "The visible half. We've discussed this."
They had discussed this. She had agreed with it, in a bed in his flat, in the specific way one agreed with things at two in the morning when they were pressed against expensive cotton sheets, had been shagged senseless and everything felt extremely reasonable.
Out there, her pride reassembled itself with tedious speed. In here, it didn't quite survive contact with his hands.
He gave her three more in quick succession. She bit down on her lower lip, hard, harder than she'd intended, tasting the ghost of blood. The sounds from the pub felt suddenly thin and insufficient to cover her escaped squeaks. The voices and the dull thump of the music all going on not twenty feet away while she gripped the sink and struggled to keep her breathing even and tried, very hard, not to make any of the sounds her body was desperate to release. She was not going to moan in a pub lavatory. She was Hermione Granger. She had a reputation to maintain.
And then he brought his hand down one final time—harder than all the rest, the sharp crack of it swallowed only barely by the noise beyond the door—and the sound that tore out of her was nothing she could have caught in time. Low and broken and entirely involuntary, it escaped before she'd even registered it was coming. Hermione felt the heat of it everywhere at once: flooding down her spine, pooling deep and molten in her core, and—oh, that was, she could feel it—a slow, humiliating warmth trickling down the inside of her bare thigh.
She pressed her forehead to the mirror. Her own reflection looked back at her, flushed and undone and absolutely betrayed by her own body.
"There," Malfoy said, with a note of satisfaction that she wanted to smack off of his face. "Now stay still."
She heard the soft sounds of his belt being loosened and the drop of his pants, leading to a heightened awareness of what was to come. Hermione closed her eyes briefly, which did nothing to help calm her racing heart. His hand came to her hip, and then moved down her exposed bum before slipping between her thighs from behind.
"What are you going to do," he said, low, against the back of her neck, "at the next quiz?"
"Win," she said reflexively, but then his finger pressed inside her—one long, unhurried stroke—and the word dissolved into something she caught only barely, the sound muffled by the mirror.
He stilled there, not moving.
"Granger," he said, with a quality of voice she had catalogued under extremely dangerous. "You're absolutely soaking."
She said nothing. There was nothing to say. Her body had already said it with considerable eloquence.
"All that," he continued, in the same conversational tone, as though he were commenting on the weather, "from a bit of a spanking." He moved his finger, slowly, and she pressed her forehead to the mirror and breathed. "What does that tell us?"
"It tells us," she moaned, "that you should stop narrating and—"
"It tells us," he said, over her, "that you've been wanting this all evening." Another slow, deliberate curl. She felt the sound building at the back of her throat and swallowed it whole. "Haven't you."
It was not a question. She answered it anyway, because she was thorough like that, and because the alternative was letting him be right in silence which was somehow worse. "Yes," she said, into the mirror, into her own flushed and undignified reflection.
"Try that again."
"Yes, sir," she said, face entirely flushed red.
"Mm." He withdrew his hand, and she nearly made a sound about that too, which was mortifying. "Good girl."
The words went through her like a tuning fork finding the right note.
He lined his hardened cock with her entrance, and then pushed inside her in one smooth stroke. Malfoy was large. Larger than the average man, and he took up every space inside of her. Hermione tried to bite back the noise she made—pressed her forearm against her mouth and held on to the sink with her other hand while he set a pace that was hard and fast and calculated to make her insane. She could see herself in the mirror, messy and panting, and gripping the sink of a pub lavatory like it was the only solid thing left. Behind her, Malfoy was still mostly composed, jacket still on, silver cufflinks catching the fluorescent light.
The difference was the point. She understood that. She had spent considerable time understanding that.
"Look up," he said.
She lifted her eyes to the mirror. His were already there, waiting. Molten grey and absolutely attentive.
"Stay with me," he said.
She stayed with him. This was, she had come to understand, the thing he actually asked of her—not submission exactly, not in the dramatic sense she'd initially imagined when she'd first catalogued what was happening between them. It was simpler and stranger than that. It was look at me. It was be here. It was the particular version of her that existed in this, that she couldn't quite access with anyone else, and which she had given him more or less by accident the first time and then with full deliberateness every time since.
Malfoy changed the angle. His grip tightened on her hips, fingers digging into the soft flesh as he pulled her back to meet each thrust. The sound of skin against skin filled the small bathroom—wet, obscene, and unmistakable—and Hermione bit down on her lower lip until she tasted copper again.
"You like being bad, don’t you?" he grunted out.
She couldn't answer. The head of his cock hit the edge of her cervix deep inside her—it made her vision blur at the edges, and sent sparks racing up her spine. She gasped, the sound swallowed by the distant pub noise.
"Look at you," he said, voice dropping lower. "Taking it so well."
She was. She was taking it and she wanted more of it, wanted him deeper, harder, wanted the perfect humiliation of knowing she'd been fucked senseless in a pub lavatory while their friends waited twenty feet away. The thought made her clench around him, and he groaned—a low, dangerous sound that went straight to her core.
"Fuck," he said, and his composure cracked. Just a little. Just enough for her to see it. "You feel—"
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. His pace changed again, even faster now, harder, his pelvis slamming against her with enough force that she had to brace herself against the sink to keep from sliding forward. The porcelain was cold under her palms. The mirror was fogging at the edges from her breath.
This was the consequence. This was what happened when she was too clever for her own good, when she forgot herself and tried to run the table.
She loved it.
The realization hit her with the same force as his cock hitting that perfect spot again—a wave of heat and shame and desperate, aching want. She loved being punished. Loved being taken. Loved the particular quality of his attention when she'd pushed him too far, when she'd made him need to remind her.
"Please," she said, not entirely sure what she was asking for.
He gave it to her anyway. His hand came around her hip, fingers finding the sensitive bundle of nerves at her center, and he pressed down as he fucked into her with a rhythm that made her see stars.
"That's it," he said, against the back of her neck. His breath was hot. "Let me hear you."
She couldn't stop the sound that escaped her—a low, broken moan that she felt more than heard, vibrating in her chest and throat.
"That's not what I mean," he said, his voice as velvet against her ear, "and you know it."
He stilled inside her. And withdrew almost entirely. His hand at her hip went still, his cock went still, everything went still except the maddening, feather-light drag of his fingers against her clit—barely there, barely touching, the ghost of pressure that made her clench around him involuntarily and get nothing for it.
She whined. The sound was mortifying and she couldn't stop it. "Draco—"
"Use your words." His fingers didn't speed up. They just stayed there, maddeningly soft, the way he'd do when he wanted to prove a point, the way he knew drove her absolutely out of her mind.
"I don't—" She tried. Her voice came out wrecked. "I don't know what you—"
"You know exactly what I want."
She did. She absolutely did. She knew it the way she knew most things about him, which was with a thoroughness that bordered on mortifying. She pressed her forehead to the mirror and felt her heartbeat pounding in her ears, and she didn't say it.
He angled his cock at her entrance again and pushed, just slightly. Just the head, barely breaching her, not giving her the fullness she was aching for, not giving her anything at all except the promise of what she could have if she'd just give in.
She made a sound that was closer to a sob than she would ever admit.
"Please," she tried again.
"That's not it either."
Another fraction of an inch. The stretch of him just barely inside her, not enough, not nearly enough, and her thighs were trembling and she could feel the heat of him so close and so far away and she wanted it and he was going to make her—
"Please," she said, and the word cracked open in the middle of it. "Please, daddy."
The sound of it in her own voice—her voice, Hermione Granger's voice, the voice that had given lectures and corrected ministers and delivered closing arguments in front of the Wizengamot—saying that, in a pub lavatory, with her dress rucked up around her waist and her knickers around her ankles and her reflection looking absolutely wrecked—she would think about that later. She would think about it a lot.
“Such a good girl for Daddy.”
He pushed into her so hard that she slid forward on the sink, her palms squeaking against the porcelain, and the sound she made was not a sound she recognised as coming from her own body. He was deep, impossibly deep, and her vision went white at the edges and came back in fragments—the fluorescent light, the silver of his cufflinks, her own face in the mirror looking utterly ruined.
His free hand came down on her arse—one sharp, bright crack that echoed off the tile—and then he was moving, hard and fast and relentless, his fingers finding her clit with the exact pressure that would lead her to bliss, and she couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't do anything except hold on to the sink and take it.
She came with his name in her mouth—Draco, a silent scream—her whole body going taut and then loose, the grip on the sink white-knuckled and then releasing. He followed her over with his forehead pressed to the back of her neck, which was the most privately devastating thing he did and which she had chosen, consciously, not to analyse too closely.
Afterwards, Hermione tidied herself with brisk efficiency. Malfoy straightened his jacket.
Then he turned to her, and did something she had not expected: he cupped her face in both hands, tipped her chin up, and kissed her—sweet and tender, nothing that resembled the last fifteen minutes. It was the kind of kiss that had no agenda. She felt herself settle into it, her hands finding the lapels of his jacket, and for a moment the pub didn't exist and neither did pub quizzes or Belgium or the 1921 Quidditch League game.
He pulled back just far enough to look at her. She looked back. His thumb moved once across her cheekbone.
"Alright, love?" he asked, quietly.
"Yes," she said, her heart melting just a bit. And then, because honesty had always been her worst habit. “Very."
The corner of his mouth moved. He retrieved his whisky glass from the edge of the sink and examined it, apparently satisfied.
"Roderick Plumpton," he said.
She blinked. "What?"
"The 1921 League Cup. Three and a half seconds. I was right."
"The question was about the fastest catch in a World Cup match, which is an entirely different—"
"You won't find what you're looking for." He unlocked the door. The sounds of the pub flooded back in, immediate and cheerful. "Round nine's started. You're probably missing something you'd like to correct."
"Someone has to," she said, with slightly less certainty than before.
He stepped aside to let her through, ever the gentleman, one of the many courteous gestures he made in public that drove her quietly mad, and she walked back through the corridor and the press of the warm pub, past the dartboard and the jukebox, and slid back into her seat between Theo and the answer sheet.
The quizmaster was asking about Goblin rebellions.
"Ragnuk the First," she said, picking up the pen.
"We haven't heard—" Ron tried to protest.
"It's always Ragnuk the First."
Across the table, Malfoy sat down with his whisky, crossed one ankle over his knee, and looked elsewhere. He looked the same as he always did: smooth and composed, looking slightly bored with the situation.
Theo passed her the crisps without being asked.
"You were a while," Harry finally said.
"Queue," she replied without looking at him. She could feel the slight flush in her cheeks.
Harry's expression suggested he had, in fact, received this information, and had categorised it alongside several other pieces of information, and had chosen—correctly and wisely—not to say anything about any of them.
Malfoy's mouth curved over his glass, just slightly. Just enough.
She did not look at it. She was very busy not looking at it.
The thing about being exceptionally good at pub quizzes was that it left very little room for anything else, and that was, Hermione had decided a long time ago, almost certainly for the best.
They won by eleven points.