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When Draco stepped out the back door and wandered into the rose garden, he found his mother there by herself, sitting on the wooden bench sheltered under the arbour. She had the sleeves of her ocean-blue dress rolled up to her elbows and its buttons undone to her sternum – something she hardly ever did – and her hair was tied up off her neck.
She looked up, in his direction, when his footsteps hit the gravelly stones of the slender path leading to her, revealing her face flushed – prettily pink across her cheekbones – and a few strands of her hair having come loose and now flying around her temples.
“Oh, Draco,” she said, fanning herself with the folded copy of the day’s Prophet in her hand, “it’s unbearable. Even the cooling charms aren’t working properly.”
Draco awkwardly loosened his own sweaty collar and went to sit down beside her, instantly feeling the warmth of the wood through his linen trousers. His mother reached up with her free hand to adjust the silver pins in her hair, her wrist turning as she worked at securing them, wiping the back of her neck after.
“The study is like an oven,” he mumbled. “I couldn’t stay in there.”
She let her hand drop, “I know.” She chuckled and added, “I tried to go in earlier. This is entirely ridiculous. Besides the summer before your fifth year, I cannot recall a heatwave like this.”
Draco nodded, because neither could he. It was unfathomable, how everything, everywhere, truly was intolerably hot – had been intolerably hot for over a week already, each day marking another boiling of his insides. With the house being largely made of stone, it should have been cooler inside, yet he was going through laundry quite like his father had been going through celebratory cigars since he’d been pardoned.
He was off somewhere – Draco didn’t know where, so they sat there for a minute, neither of them talking – and then, beside him, Narcissa reached down and undid several more buttons of her dress with an audible sigh of exasperation, continuing well down – just like that. Her fingers worked inhesitantly, because she was visibly sweating and he was him and it shouldn’t have mattered what he saw.
Except, the dress was gaping open now, so open, Draco could clearly see the line of pearly sweat running down between her breasts, and the freckles – she had freckles there. He’d never noticed them before. And when she leaned forwards and kicked off her heels, the soft-looking fabric fell away from her body, forcing him to tightly swallow at the sight of the slope of her full chest, the pale skin held only by something lacy, of a darker shade of blue.
His mouth went excessively dry.
Narcissa set the newspaper down and leaned her head back against the arbour, eyes falling closed, and murmured, “At least there’s a breeze out here.”
There wasn’t. But Draco chose not to remark upon it, looking instead towards the coral roses – wilting in July, the petals browned already – and when he looked back, his mother was blindly reaching down to hike the hem of her dress up over her knees.
Quickly, he tore his gaze away, back to the suffering roses, but his face and ears felt aflame all over and he knew – he knew – that it had nothing to do with the weather.
His father must have seen her like this before, countless times, seen far more, seen everything, all of her – but, had it made him feel like this? Did it still? Whatever this was. Whatever it could be called, this skin-tightening rush that made Draco’s throat parched throughout and made him want a glass of water or lemon juice or something to quench his thirst – but moving – moving away from her – seemed an impossibility, though the wood now felt like it was burning through his trousers. He needed to adjust how he was sitting, but that would have made his discomfort blatantly obvious, might have alerted her and make her move, so he ground his teeth and stayed still.
She was right there.
Carefully, he dared look back at her, to find her thick-lashed lids still closed, her had tilted back, not paying any attention to him, whatsoever. And that made a sharpness twist in his stomach over the different heat pooling there – that she could just do this and not think about what it did to him. But, how would she know? She thought he was still twelve, probably.
He wasn’t, though. He was nineteen.
Helpless, his eyes sought out her shapely legs, now on a rare, full display for him. She wore nail varnish on her toes – a vivid wine-red – and her calves had a clear curve to them – strong – forged from decades of walking in those killer heels that always accentuated her figure in all the right ways. Usually, she’d wear stockings, but the heat hindered her normal practices, leaving him free to study the smooth-looking skin up to her mid-thighs.
If only she’d bunched the dress up a little higher. He wanted to know if her undergarments were all the same blue.
If they were sweaty and moist, too.
The thought made his still inexperienced prick harden. Slowly, careful not to make a sound, he crossed his legs and rose his gaze higher.
There was another bead of sweat sliding down the skin of her chest, languidly dripping into her cleavage; watching its path, he wondered, slightly embarrassed, what it might have been like if he’d been braver, if he’d been bolder, if his father had still been in Azkaban and he’d been free to simply lean over and chase the droplets with his lips and taste her perspiration on his tongue. There’d been a night, just last month, when he’d stumbled out of Theo’s fireplace late and found his friend half-naked on the sofa with a moaning Evelyn Zabini, her heavy tits out and Theo’s face buried between them, slurping obscenely, loudly, and afterwards, Draco had wondered – wondered – wondered so many things.
Chief among them, doing to same thing to her.
Her eyes opened, suddenly – in all their potent blue – and he jerked his gaze away from her cleavage in immediate embarrassment.
“Darling, you’re staring,” she noted with a brief frown.
“N-no, I wasn’t, I was just… just–”
Stammering – like he really was twelve and caught with his hand in a cookie jar – but his mother’s forehead smoothed out and she gave a brief, throaty laugh, then gracefully rose off the bench, before proceeding to pick up her heels by their ankle-straps and making Draco’s stomach drop through the bench. Because now her legs were covered and she was leaving – she’d caught his lewd gaze and now she was just going to leave and the kind smile on her blossom lips only made it all the worse, her thinking he was embarrassed about something childish, something innocent, something darling dragon – and he wanted her to know it wasn’t that.
Never that, anymore.
Her eyes quickly flicked down to his lap, then back up.
“I’m going to the library,” she announced. “It faces north. Are you… staying out here?”
Draco gulped and gave a single, reluctant nod of his head in the face of her expectant eyes. With another smile, she then barefoot began to walk back towards the house, with her heels in hand but leaving him the folded Prophet. He watched her the entire time, his gaze lingering on the intricate pinning of her golden hair, the way the fabric of her dress moved with her body, how it dipped with the curve of her back and then swelled lower.
When she reached the back door, she glanced back at him, but he couldn’t read her expression at all. Then, she went inside.
He should have gone inside, too; his linens were uncomfortably hot, sticking to him, his pulse pounding and his chest feeling like he’d been holding his breath for the last five minutes. But he couldn’t – didn’t want to, wanted to be alone as he replayed the way she’d looked at him, the curiosity-laden cadence of her voice when she’d said darling, you’re staring.
He was. He was always staring, these days.
Always looking.
Looking, in his mind’s eye, still, when he later heard the back door open again and his mother’s voice calling him inside for tea.
fin.