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It started with a text. Five words with her best friend’s photo smiling at her in the dim light of her bedroom.
Do you remember this song?
Of course Pansy remembered. She remembered all of it – that summer after graduation when she and Draco had traveled the world, hopping from city to city searching for a place to call their own.
That song had been theirs. Hundreds of times they’d listened to it on trains and as they walked down bustling streets filled with colors and smells and Muggles that looked prettier in the moonlight. And afterward, when she and Draco returned to their hotel room, it played while he licked his name onto her skin, the word mine clear as day on her upper thigh.
With Harry in the shower and the song playing quietly on her phone, Pansy dared to look beneath her silk nightgown and found only pale, unmarked skin. She ran a hand along the space bite marks had once existed, any trace of them long purged by her marriage to the Chosen One. He’d lifted her up on a pedestal the moment she returned to London and Draco made good on his agreement to marry Astoria if he failed to find love on the continent.
“There’s no such thing as bad thoughts,” Theo had told her shortly after their individual engagements were announced. “Only your actions talk.”
Six years and Pansy didn’t know if Theo had been right. Because the things she thought about – Draco having his way with her in his Ministry office, hiding in smoky bars the way that they once did, ankles locked and noses inches apart – only served to bring up memories of shared cigarettes and drunken dancing beneath street lights.
Of course I remember , she replied when what she meant was, How could I forget?
A moment later, Draco’s text had her turning off the song and setting her phone on her nightstand.
Singing that song to you in Paris was the last time I felt free.
As if he had any right to feel anything less than free. Draco had done what they all expected, and the wizarding world had rewarded him handsomely for it. Without Harry, Pansy was a pureblood harlot unworthy of her old friends and disdained by those she now ate dinner with on the weekends. One wrong move and they would crucify her in the papers.
The shower shut off, and Harry stepped out with a towel hanging low on his hips. He was beautiful in every way that Draco wasn’t, and opened doors Pansy hadn’t even realized were closed to her until he led her through.
“Are you alright, love?” Harry asked, crossing the room and crawling into bed beside her.
“Wonderful,” she smiled even as his hands crept up her leg, too soft and too respectful to reclaim what someone else already owned.
It was wrong. In her heart, Pansy knew. But when her phone vibrated again, she pressed her lips to Harry’s, eager to be pulled from the blue nile she found herself drowning in every time her best friend reminded her of those downtown lights.