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Harry looked up at the clock; its slow ticking was rhythmic and persistent as it pulsed with the room, cutting through the quietness of this entire floor of the Ministry. Everyone else had gone home for the evening—back to their families—leaving behind nothing but silence weaving through the endless corridors and empty stairwells.
Not that Harry blamed them for leaving; it was later. Late enough that the light coming in from the westward window had turned from a shocking, bloody, red to just a few smouldering chars that settled like ash on the furniture. If Harry were to leave his sanctuary of the large Chesterfield and go to stand by and stare through the thick panes of glass, he would see the outside world as just a blackened haze—no evidence of the Auror training grounds that should be there.
But Harry did not move, not even to shift his weight off his numbing left leg. He merely turned his gaze back to the papers that he was supposed to be reading; the words lit by the tuffets of candles burning steadily about the room. Their lambent light giving the space a cosy, comfortable, quality that was at odds with how it felt to actually be within its walls. To sit there—inside—and breathe the thickened air and feel the claustrophobia pressing down on his lungs like he was trapped within one those iron torture devices that moulded to your shape.
Though for all his attempts, he couldn’t concentrate on the words in front of him and they blurred together; the high twirls of ink oozing off the page and blending with the black corners of the room. And, as much as Harry didn’t want to admit it, he knew why his words were running away from him.
It was the other presence in this room; the man who was currently still here, and just sitting ever so casually across from him. He was the reason that Harry was distracted; his fingers twitching and his eyes drifting off the passages he was supposed to be reading.
They weren't even supposed to be sharing an office space, but it was a simple fact that everyone knew he was Harry Potter and that was causing some problems in terms of the productivity of the Auror Department. If he was in the office, the interns never did anything other than stare, and if he shared an office with a fellow Auror, even another senior one, the problem was only amplified, with a large congregation forming in—and blocking—the corridor outside. The only apparent solution had been to pair him with someone who was outside of the Aurors; someone who was entirely unmoved by his celebrity status.
The answer had been Tom Riddle. The man had barely even given Harry a second glance, let alone been interested in who he was. At first such anonymity had been quite liberating but now… now it was maddening. Harry could do anything he liked and it would scarcely get an eyebrow raise out of Tom, much less anything profoundly meaningful and being ignored only fuelled the desire to be noticed.
Harry swallowed and chanced a glance at his companion, who was still working even at this hour.
Tom was sitting at his desk—less than five feet away—slicing apart envelopes with a pearl-handled letter opener. Every so often, the blade caught the glow of the candles and a thick, bloody, strip of light was slung at Harry’s face; it burned his cheek and started an inferno under his tongue that licked around his body and swallowed him up.
Looking past the sticky glaze of the light, it was obvious that Tom was an obscenely attractive man—he had one of those faces that almost hurt to look at. The sort fashioned with those high arches and sharp angles that are only found in expensive, prestigious, people.
Without explicitly meaning to, Harry's eyes wandered down the curve of Tom's neck to the line of his collar, dyed the colour of peaches and cream by the light. And down further, tracing the silhouette of his shoulder and the point of his elbow and right down—like a man grazing the edge of hell—to the length of his thigh. His gaze lingered, watching as Tom shifted back in his seat, his thighs spreading a fraction wider and his hand coming down to smooth out a crease.
Harry stared at that hand. The spike of the knuckles and the curve of the fingers making his tongue scratchy like he was back to his closeted, adolescent, self
—mesmerised by the only part of men that he was allowed to see. He swallowed. There was little denying that he hadn't thought about Tom's hands doing more than just smoothing out creases. In the long hours he spent at his desk with just Tom in his eye line, he'd done a lot of thinking about those hands; how heavy they would be on his thigh, how warm they would be on the back of his neck, how hard they would grip at his shoulder.
Tom was the one to interrupt that hazy-edged fantasy; just as he always did.
“I can feel your eyes on me,” he said, his voice soft between the sounds of another envelope being slashed open, its entrails being hooked out with the tip of the letter opener. It was an insidious softness, at once rich and decadent, and buttery and slick; like oil it coated everything it touched and leached under your skin, corroding you from inside out.
Just as Harry was hoping to ignore him—to refute his claims with mere silence—Tom looked up from his letters and fixed his eyes on him.
"Care to tell me why?" he said, the blade still cutting open his final letter with an unnerving precision even without his sight to guide it. Harry watched the movement; that slow, sensual, vivisection of the envelope, and the equally slow drag of Tom's hand as it gripped the handle of the letter opener.
Harry said nothing.
"If you don't offer an explanation," Tom continued, pausing his work and placing the envelope, but not the letter opener, down onto his desk, "I will have to draw my own conclusions." Although it was veiled by a gauze-thin politeness, the threat was easy to pick out and Harry found himself shifting in his seat and rustling his papers unnecessarily. At once determined to show Tom that there was no conclusion to be drawn and even if there were, it was not an inappropriate one.
He shrugged as casually as he could and placed his papers down beside him. Though for all his feigned informality, Tom continued to watch him; his eyes appraising every detail until Harry was squirming against the leather, uncomfortably aware of how warm it was beneath him and the stickiness it left under his skin, as though the space around him had become a microcosm of steaming vegetation and sultry air sluggishly pushing its way through his lungs.
"You like to look at me, don't you, Harry?" Tom said eventually and standing as he spoke—limbs unfurling and muscles stretching out so sensuously that Harry dipped his head in fear of being caught staring at what he shouldn't be. But he still looked, looked up from under his lashes, and he could see the glimmering handle of the blade gripped in Tom's left hand; the pearl inlay shining between his fingers and the blade glowing in the light. Harry swallowed again and didn't look up from the floor.
The room stayed quiet; no sounds pervading through the space aside the ruthless ticking of the clock—fragmenting each moment of experience into minutes and seconds that were lost to the nebulous ether as soon as they happened. Harry just continued to trace his eyes along the grains of the floorboards, tracking their pathway across the floor from his side of the room to Tom's. But the uneasy peace cultivated by the silence was unravelled almost before it had properly taken hold with the sound of Tom's footsteps on the wood.
"I do believe I asked you a question, Harry," he said softly as he paced forward, his weight making the old floorboards creak in rhythm with Harry's heart. "Are you going to answer it?"
Harry gave him a noncommittal shrug and when that didn't seem enough, he added a half hearted, "perhaps I do."
That seemed to encourage Tom and he stepped closer, always using that same, slow, pace that gave the apprehensions in Harry's chest just long enough to sprout into something worrying.
"Maybe I should have been clearer," he said, "I know you like to look," Tom said, confidently, as though every person he came across had developed the same yearning sickness towards him—that gasped desperate need to have him like them—and the same magnetic attraction to everything he said.
But before Harry could protest, Tom was sinking around the back of the sofa and speaking in those soft, hypnotic tones again.
"And I know," he said, "you like to stare at me from behind your papers and lick your lips." Quite subconsciously, Harry found himself mimicking the movement and licking his lips—the natural reaction to to looking for long periods at someone as tasty as Tom, so how was he to blame?
“I'd say," he continued, "you even like to delude yourself into believing I don't know what you're thinking about, when you look at me like that,” Tom said, right behind him now, his nails scratching over the leather.
Though in that precise moment, Harry cared less for his proximity and more for the sheer audaciousness of it. That casual assumption that he was so desirable got something simmering in the base of Harry’s stomach, something so hot and dense and crushing that this tiny space that sat between them, could not possibly hope to contain it. He turned his head with that slow determination he used for disciplining out-of-order Aurors and glared.
"And what do you want me to do, Tom?" he said, emphasising his name simply because it would twang a nerve, "drop to my knees and tell you that your handsome."
For the first time that evening, Tom stayed silent and that was all Harry needed. "Or perhaps," he continued in what he liked to believe was the same devastating tone, "you want me to sing your praises to the entire department—declare that you are so fucking irresistible that I can't control myself around you, that I'll just melt wh—"
Harry stopped, the words choked from his tongue by the pressure of Tom's hand curling around his shoulder. Tom smiled at him, unable to hide his amusement, "now, there's an idea," he said softly—that gorgeous hand of his crawling down to press into the hollow of Harry's collarbone. "But, to be candid, Harry," he continued, "I don't think you need to, not when you so obviously like what you see."
As he spoke, Tom's other hand—the one holding the letter opener—slid over the back of the sofa and rested, surreptitiously, at the base of Harry's throat. He could feel the coolness of the metal pressed into his neck, and the sharpness of the blade lingering in one of his shirt creases, close enough to his skin that if he were to move suddenly, or indeed, Tom was less than careful with his hands, he would be sliced open like one of Tom's letters.
"What makes you say that?" Harry said.
"Oh, Harry," he said, all quiet and low, his tone saturated in something as seductive as it was sly and made Harry feel too much like he was a fly in one of his department's honey-traps. He swallowed and shifted back an inch in the chair, trying to put distance between him and the cool, gilt-edged letter opener.
"I say it," Tom continued, entirely unfazed, "because you look at me like a starving man looks at a cadaver—you don't want to...," he murmured, sliding the point up Harry's throat and over his jawline as though he was carving it out of butter, before resting the metal on Harry's lips. He twisted it and a sliver of pain cut him ooen right down to his tailbone—it shouldn't have felt so good.
"...But you know you're going to have a taste," Tom said, now pushing the point between Harry's lips and pressing the tip right into his tongue. It was heavy, so heavy, and the striking coolness only served as a reminder of what it could do if Tom shoved and sent the length of it down his throat and out through the back of his neck. Harry just stayed as still as he could with his head against the back of the chair and his stomach clenching; he could taste the metal leaching onto his tongue and, as best he could, he resisted the urge to swallow around it.
"And anyway," Tom continued, "I know where your mind wanders, Harry."
With an unnerving dexterity, Tom slid the wet edge of the letter opener out of Harry's mouth and lowered it, scraping over every button of Harry's shirt before he reached the thin buckle of his belt. The press of it against his waist was almost worse than his tongue and Harry's entire throat was itching as he thought of where Tom was going with this—this after all, there were limited places you could go and all of them were inappropriate for the office.
Keeping his eyes on Harry's, Tom traced the tip of the knife down the crease of Harry's thigh and for nearly a minute—each second painfully marked out by the clock—Tom teased the letter opener over the crest of Harry's thigh and along the line of his belt. "I know what you're really thinking about when you pretend to work," Tom murmured.
Harry swallowed. The flat, shining, edge blade was unbearably close to the straining outline of his cock that was visible to anyone who cared to look—though the only person looking now was Tom—and Harry desperately wanted to rub his thumb along its length just to relieve some of the ache. But he kept his hands by his sides—scrunched up into fists—and tried not to squirm.
Not that it mattered, Tom had clearly noted his problem and, as if to emphasise the point, he slid the tip of the blade over the crown—barely grazing the swell of it—but Harry couldn't help the insidious groan that curled up from the back of his throat. Just the thought of his length—hard and pulsing—in Tom's hand, teased by the flat edge of the blade was enough to make Harry dizzy with the sick cousin of want. But he wasn't about to admit that, least of all to the subject of such feelings.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Harry said.
Tom hummed. "Shall I remind you, then?"
Scarcely a moment after the words left his lips, Tom shoved his hand down in a single, slick, movement and the letter opener went through the leather of the sofa, close enough to Harry's groin to get his heart pounding and his hands tightening into fists—his nails digging into his palm.
He jerked his head back. "What the fuck, Tom? Why did you do that?" Harry said, trying not to think how close the blade was to him, or the tingling in his spine at the thought of it getting even closer. The cool metal grazing over his thigh and pressing into his cock. As though he could read his mind, Tom shifted the angle to tantalisingly
press the heel back into him; Harry did the rest as he shifted himself forward, grinding against the blade.
Tom smiled. "Because, Harry," he murmured, "I know how much you like it—the danger, the risk," Tom said, as he draped himself over the back of the sofa, the heat of his mouth eating into Harry's skin. "That little spark of adrenaline you're just itching to taste on the back of your throat," he murmured, dipping his head down to catch the shell of Harry's ear between his teeth.
"You adore it, don't you Harry?" he said, "you want it so bad, and you want to know what else I know you want?"
Harry looked down; he could still feel the heat of his flush crawling over his skin and coiling around his throat.
"I know you want me to fuck you," he said, unwinding each obscene syllable into Harry's ear until he was scrunching his toes in his shoes and squeezing his thighs together, "and I don't think you want me to be nice when I do," Tom said, "do you, Harry?"
"That—that—" Harry swallowed, but his saliva stuck in his throat like oil and every word was a slicked-up, slunked-out mess, "that sounds like... wishful thinking on your part," Harry said between three, deep, trembling, breaths. His hands pressed into the leather, his nails scratching its surface as he watched Tom lever the letter opener forward and back, each time pushing it into the venomous throb between his legs.
Tom merely hummed in that amused way of his and slipped the blade out of the sofa—it made an obscene sound—and, instead, began to trail it upward, over Harry's stomach and up his chest, but not back to the hollow of his throat. Rather, Tom slid the blade passed Harry's neck and up over the shell of his ear, and then it was gone and the space it left behind seemed infinite. This great aching space that had him clenching every muscle just to try and recreate the itching danger under his skin.
Tom had the audacity to step away. His tread as light as before as he retreated to the chair across from Harry—a single leather wingback—and ran the letter opener over the arm.
"So, if I were to ask you," Tom said, turning to face him and sitting down with his legs spread wide enough to get Harry's gaze lingering between them, "to get to your knees and crawl over here so I can use this properly...," Tom paused to sway the letter opener between his thumb and forefinger, the blade catching the light and slicing into Harry's skin, "...you wouldn't?"
Harry clenched his jaw and didn't say anything.
"Shame," Tom said, "when you already got me like this." He paused to run his hand along his thigh and up between his legs; still holding Harry's gaze, Tom exhaled—slow and deep—the pad of his thumb stroking the heavy profile of his cock through his trousers. He squeezed. "It seems a pity to waste it, don't you think?" he said, the words thick on his tongue and so low that Harry strained to hear them.
"Yeah," he breathed, the words spilling out of his mouth before he had the opportunity to stop them. Though as soon as he realised the flush pricked at his ears and made his face burn; a heat unspooling itself in his stomach. He glanced at the door.
"There's no one left here to interrupt us," said Tom, stretching his spine out and spreading his legs a fraction wider, "so why don't you come over here, Harry? Come over here and let me give you what you want."
"And what is it that I want?" Harry said even as he stood from the sofa—he would not crawl—and took a step towards Tom and another and another. Each footfall making the beat of his heart louder in his throat and his palms hot and nervous. When he reached him—standing between those pretty thighs and those unbearable smoothed-out creases in his trousers—Harry lowered down to his knees. "So what do I want, Tom?" he repeated.
"Well, that's easy, Harry," Tom said as he leaned forward—his spine curving and that insidious smile not leaving his mouth—and slid the tips of his fingers through Harry's hair, from the crown to the the back of his head. The hot weight of Tom's palm making his skull prickle and the thrilling point of the letter opener pushing into the nape of his neck making his insides weak with want. Tom pressed the harder into his skin and stopped low enough to run his mouth past Harry's ear.
"You want me," he murmured, "and I rather think I want you too."