Draco stares at him. “You don’t like it?”
Harry shakes his head. “I thought I did once. But I just….”
“Don’t,” Draco finishes for him.
“Hm.” Draco shifts on the couch, folding his legs underneath him, resting his chin on the back of the couch, toying his fingers through the pillow tassels.
Harry sits absolutely still and watches him, waits for him to say something longer than a couple words at a time. The heater is humming and clicking the same way it’s been doing all autumn, and the wireless taps out an indecipherable rhythm from the far corner.
The apartment is quiet and comforting in the way it always is, better than it always is because Draco’s here tonight, and they don’t usually come to Harry’s because the clicking heater annoys Draco. All the same, it’s nice. It’s being here instead of at Draco’s that gave Harry the strange burst of courage to tell Draco what he hasn’t been saying since they started dating five months ago. Which is that he doesn’t like sex.
Draco sighs and Harry blinks. “Can you explain it?” Draco asks. “I want to understand. I’ve always known I wanted to… with someone. Have sex, that is. I suppose there’s no reason to skirt around it.” Draco isn’t looking at Harry, he’s looking down at the olive green pillow tassels, but his feet are still folded up under his bum and his shoulders face Harry, so Harry isn’t worried. Not yet. “You don’t want sex?” he asks, to confirm what Harry’s already said twice.
“Not really. It kind of grosses me out.”
Finally, Draco’s eyes lift to Harry’s. His eyebrows run straight across his face, his mouth relaxed. Harry isn’t sure if Draco is calm, or if he’s only pretending to be so he won’t scare Harry off.
“It doesn’t gross me out,” Draco says, his eyes still settled on Harry’s face. “I like it. I like being close with someone. I like knowing that every part of me is close to every part of someone else. It’s about intimacy, and feeling good.”
Harry swallows. This is the part of the conversation he’d been worried about. Not because he thinks Draco will judge him, or shun him, or think he’s weird, but because it isn’t what Draco wants. Draco wants this, and he likely wants it with Harry, and Harry doesn’t want it, so where does that leave him?
“Right,” Harry says, and clears his throat.
Draco’s eyebrows tip up at the corners. “Harry,” he says softly. He reaches his hand out, and his fingertips brush over the veins winding over Harry’s knuckles. “Don’t look like that.”
“Like I’m stabbing you repeatedly with a blunt knife.” Draco smiles a little. “I’m not leaving. I don’t think you’re wrong.” His thumb rubs the back of Harry’s hand, like a soft breeze soothing down the waves of the twisting rivers of Harry’s blood thundering through his veins. “I’m here. Right here.”
Harry looks at him, all the things that Draco is. Silvered strands of hair glowing orange in the reflected light from the fire, dropping over his cheekbones, tangling around his ears. His eyelashes, too dark for the rest of his face, shadowing over his eyes. The jut of his collarbones through his shirt, the bony knobs of his knees and his elbows. His hands, warm and big and real.
“I’m listening,” Draco says. “I want to know.”
“Okay,” Harry says. “Okay.”
There is quiet in the moments and the space between them. A waiting quiet, a peaceful quiet. Harry sits in it, revels in it, the fact that they have it, before he speaks.
“I used to think that I would want sex,” Harry begins. It’s easier to stare down at his own knees as he says this, so he does. “I’m attracted to men and women, their bodies. I like their arms, their shoulders, their hands. I want their stomachs, and their chests, and their legs. Their thighs and their heels and the underside of their jaw.” Harry shakes himself a little. “That’s too general. What I want to say, is I want those things from you. I’m attracted to those things about you.”
Draco’s breath catches, Harry hears it. He doesn’t acknowledge it, but carries on with the speech he’s been whispering to his reflection for months, waiting to say it aloud for someone - for Draco - to hear.
“I want to trail my fingers down your stomach, and bury my face in your neck, and hold onto your hips. I want to kiss your thighs, the small of your back, the inside of your arm, the palms of your hands. I want to do those things to you, and I want you to do them to me.” Harry pauses. He’s never said anything like this, so blatant, so loud, so clear.
Draco, in all of the new sweet goodness that Harry has found in him, lifts one of Harry’s hands to his mouth and kisses it.
“But I don’t want sex.” Harry breathes slowly, in and out. “Genitalia makes me feel gross. It makes me uncomfortable. I don’t want it. I don’t want anything to do with it. And-” Harry takes another slow breath. “It took me a long time to figure that out. I didn’t know anyone who felt like that, the way I did. People either wanted to have sex, or they didn’t. No one felt desire for someone… but didn’t want to have sex with them.”
Harry glances up from his knees. Draco is nodding, his eyebrows drawn together in the middle, and his hands still holding firm to Harry’s.
“You know what, Harry?” Draco says.
Harry’s throat goes dry. “You- what?”
Draco turns to Harry, holding his hands and looking straight into his face. “I’m in love with you. So, so incredibly in love with you.” The calm look on his face dissolves, and Harry sees Draco, truly. “I don’t care if you want sex, or if you don’t. I don’t care that you drink cheap tea, and you don’t wipe the steam off the mirror when you shower, and that you never let me tidy your hair after your naps.”
“Tidying never works,” Harry mumbles. Draco grins at him.
“Those things don’t bother me in the slightest.” Draco shuffles closer to Harry on the couch. “Because it’s you. Because-” Draco laughs, his voice cracked and full of air. “Because I’m in love with you.”
Harry’s stomach twists around and drops, and his heart thuds, and the rivers of blood winding over his knuckles are pounding, pounding, pounding.
Harry can only nod. Words have abandoned him.
“’M not,” Harry mutters, shaking his head so hard his cheeks wobble.
“You are perfect for me.” Draco tilts his head and looks at Harry so earnestly and sweetly, that all of Harry’s thoughts and doubts tumble down him and away in dizzying cascades. “I love you.”
Harry doesn’t say it back. He tips over, falling into Draco, his head tumbling into Draco’s stomach and then his lap, and he doesn’t say anything. He winds his arms around Draco’s waist, and he presses his face into his stomach, and he cries a little and whispers thank you, thank you over and over again.
He doesn’t say it back, but he knows that Draco sees it. In his breath, and the turn of his head, and the press of his fingertips, Draco knows.
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