Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

“All right…” Harry set the yogurt down on the table while he unfolded the note. Draco eyed it hungrily.

“Is that blackcurrant?” he demanded, and when Harry nodded, snaked it off the table and began eating it thoughtfully. At least being heartbroken hadn’t affected his appetite, Harry noted.

The letter had clearly been written in a hurry — Ginny’s normally neat handwriting sloped all over the page — and took up most of a sheet of parchment. Harry began to read, but was swiftly brought up short.

“Er, Malfoy,” he said. “there’s some pretty steamy stuff in this letter. I'm not sure I should be reading it.”

Draco waved his non-yogurt-occupied hand airily. “We have no secrets from each other.”

“Yes, but — eurgh, okay, I’m skipping that part…I don’t even know how you managed that without breaking something. There’s some pretty ripe descriptions of your appearance in here, too. ‘Silver hair’? Who has silver hair?”

“I do,” said Draco. “Or what color did you think it was?”

“I dunno,” Harry said. “Blond?”

Draco snorted as if this were the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard.

Harry made a noise as if he were being strangled. “Not only that, Malfoy, but apparently you can go all night like a pile driver. Did I need to know that? I don’t think I did,” he added plaintively. “Now there is an image that will haunt me. Thanks a lot.”

“What’s a pile driver?” asked Ron, coming into the kitchen with his red hair sticking straight up as if he’d slept clutching a live wire.

Harry immediately shoved the letter down his shirt. “It’s a Muggle device that — that —“

“Runs all night long,” said Draco blandly. “Sort of a perpetual motion machine.”

“Perpetu-what?” Ron said good-naturedly, pouring himself a cup of tea.

“You blokes do manage to have the most boring conversations ever, don’t you?” he added, and wandered by them into the dining room. As he went past Draco muttered under his breath, just inaudibly enough, “Oh yeah?

Well I shagged your sister.”

MALFOY, Harry said silently, horrified, That’s only funny when it’s not actually true.

I disagree, said Draco, who was rapidly finishing the blackcurrant yogurt.

“Anyway,” he added out loud, “did you finish the letter?”

“Regrettably yes,” said Harry, fishing it back out of his shirt. “And I don’t see what you’re so worked up about.”

“She left me,” Draco said, again. “You don’t think that’s a big deal?”

“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised, given the bizarre way you’ve treated her for the past year. Anyway, she makes some good points here. She’s got another year of school and you don’t, so —“

“Hogwash,” said Draco. “She has used me for sex and then dumped me.

Nothing like this has ever happened to a Malfoy before.”

“Maybe they just leave that part out of the family histories.”

“Impossible,” said Draco, glowering down into his empty yogurt container. “This is humilating.”

“I don’t see how,” Harry pointed out reasonably. “You’ve been used for sex by a beautiful girl who disappears on you after a torrid night of passion. I bet that hardly ever happens to anybody. Much less anybody who’s seventeen years old.”

“You have a point.” Draco brightened. “Although I can’t believe you just said ‘torrid night of passion.’”

“Neither can I, really. Anyway, she didn’t dump you. She’s just sort of — put you off. For the time being.”

“I am Draco Malfoy,” said Draco, eating a biscuit. “I do not get put off.”

Still, he looked moderately pleased with himself. “Perhaps she feels if she spends too much time around me over the summer, she’ll be overwhelmed by passionate yearning when she goes back to school, and explode. Or something.”

“Or something,” Harry said dryly. Draco had eaten all the blackcurrent yogurt, so he contented himself with raspberry. “Anyway, aren’t you going on that world tour of yours all summer? You weren’t thinking of canceling that, were you?”

“No,” Draco said, looking entirely startled. “I hadn’t thought about it, but no. Of course not.”

“Perhaps Ginny had a point about you not being entirely ready for commitment.”

“That depends,” said Blaise, gliding into the kitchen in a sort of green silk dressing-gown that made her fiery hair look impossibly bright.

“Commitment to St. Mungo’s, possibly.” She poured herself some tea.

“There speaks the voice of bitter experience,” said Draco, buttering a roll.

Harry wondered if he planned to eat his way through everything on the table. “Draco Malfoy cannot be tamed.”

Blaise rolled her eyes and came around Harry’s left side to get the sugar bowl. Her arm outstretched, she paused and stared. “That’s Ginny’s handwriting,” she said, staring over Harry’s shoulder. “Why have you got a letter from Ginny addressed to ‘my dearest darling’?”

“I don’t! I mean, that’s not what it says. I mean —“ Harry, rattled, crumpled the note into a ball in his fist.

“That is too what it said,” insisted Blaise. “Why on earth’s Ginny writing you love notes, Potter?”

She said this, Harry felt, very loudly, and just as Ron and Hermione entered the kitchen, holding empty plates and chatting in a friendly manner. Their conversation broke off abruptly. “What did you say?” said Hermione, with saucer eyes.

“Oh dear,” said Blaise.

Ron looked baffled. “Why would my sister be writing love notes to Harry?

I mean, I thought that sort of thing was well in the past.”

“It’s not a love note,” said Harry, clutching the balled-up parchment to his chest.

“It is, rather,” Draco pointed out unhelpfully. “Clearly the product of an infatuated mind.”

“Yes, but —“

“But why would Ginny be writing a letter like that to Harry?” Hermione demanded, setting her plate down with a clatter.

“Well, you don’t need to make it sound like I’m an unfanciable berk who no one could possibly ever be fond of,” Harry pointed out, nettled.

“Don’t change the subject,” Hermione snapped, and before Harry could react, snatched the letter right out of his hand.

“Excellent reflexes,” Draco said admiringly. “Why didn’t you ever play Quidditch again?”

“Because it’s a loathsomely dull game,” Hermione replied, her quick dark eyes scanning the parchment. “It certainly is a love note,” she said coldly, and then, slightly less coldly, “but Harry, you haven’t got silvery hair, or moonlight colored eyes, or — my goodness,” she finished, flushing a dark red. “I have a feeling this letter was meant to be private.” She dropped it back on the table hastily, looking as if she’d picked up Crookshanks and he’d bitten her on the finger.

“Moonlight-colored,” mused Draco. “So true, so true.”

Ron, who might be a bit stolid but was not actually slow, looked from the letter, to Draco, and back. “My sister wrote a love note to MALFOY?” he demanded, and reached for the letter.

Harry, sensing imminent disaster, flung a hand out. “Immolatus,” he said, and the note shuddered once, and sifted into ashes.

“You burned my note!” Draco looked annoyed. “That note had sentimental value!”

Yes, well, your neck has sentimental value to me, in that if Ron found out what you got up to with his sister last night, he’d snap it in half, Harry pointed out.

Ron looked at Hermione, who was still pink about the cheeks. “What did it say?” he demanded.

Hermione looked from Draco, to Ron and then to Harry, who was wishing just this once that he could communicate silently with Hermione as he did with Draco. He did the best he could with his eyes, and she must have understood him, because she turned to Ron and said, “It was just a note saying that she’d had a good time at the party with him last night.”