Chapter 2: Seventy Minutes
Seventy minutes is a long time to stand in a lift with somebody.
For the first ten of them she tried every unlocking charm she knew on the grille, which was quite a lot, because she'd done a year of curse-breaking at Gringotts before the Ministry took her. I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and my arm held up awkwardly where the ribbon pulled it towards her, and watched her work. Her hair had started to come down. A long pale strand of it fell against the back of her neck, and every time she lifted her wand, it swung.
"You could help," she said, without turning round.
"The Ministry lifts are on a separate ward system. Security lockdown. Only the Head of Magical Maintenance can override it, and he's in Bermuda."
"How do you know that?"
"I wrote the report recommending it." I shrugged. "You corrected it. In green."
She lowered her wand. After a moment she sat down too, on the opposite side of the lift, which wasn't very far. Our knees were almost touching. The ribbon between our wrists lay slack across the floor, glowing faintly, like a line of spilled gold paint.
"Bulgaria," she said, not looking at me.
My heart did something complicated. "What about it?"
"You were going to kiss me. In the tent. Don't pretend you weren't."
"I wasn't going to pretend. I was going to. And you said goodnight and turned over and slept with your back to me for nine hours and then didn't speak to me for a month."
"Six weeks."
"Six weeks," I agreed. "I counted too."
She pulled her knees up and put her arms round them, and the velvet slid back off one shoulder. She has a scar there that I hadn't known about, a thin silver line along the collarbone, and I wondered with a sudden violent clarity who had given it to her and whether I could still find them.
"Do you know what happens," she said, "when a Malfoy kisses the Boy Who Lived? It ends up in the Prophet. My mother has to read about it over breakfast. Every Death Eater's widow in Britain writes me letters about blood traitors and every Order veteran writes you letters asking if you've been Confunded. It isn't a romance, Potter, it's a scandal with a body count." She pressed her forehead to her knees. "And then you get bored, because you will, because you're you and I'm me, and I have been stupid about you for longer than I will ever admit out loud, and I would have to go on working in this building watching you take the lift with somebody nicer."
I didn't say anything for a while. The lift creaked. Very faintly, from far below, I could hear the brass band still going in the Atrium, playing the Weird Sisters' Christmas song to an emptying hall.
"I kept a memo," I said.
She lifted her head.
"Dover. The smuggling report. You wrote, You are not a novelist, thank Merlin." I could feel my face going hot and I kept going anyway, because I had been a coward about this for seven years and I was so bloody tired of it. "It's in my desk. I take it out sometimes when I've had a bad day. I read your handwriting. That's how far gone I am, Malfoy. I read your corrections to cheer myself up."
She stared at me.
"I don't get bored of you," I said. "I've tried. I have spent seven years trying. You're the most interesting thing in this building and you know it, and I don't care about the Prophet, and I don't care about anybody's widow, and I'd sit in this lift with you till the twenty-seventh if that's what it took."
The gold ribbon between our wrists began to glow.
Neither of us looked at it. She moved first. She came up onto her knees and crossed the very small distance between us and stopped, close enough that I could feel her breath, her hands on either side of my face again but slowly this time, her thumbs brushing my cheekbones.
"If you're lying," she whispered, "I'll Transfigure you into a doorstop."
"I'm not lying."
"I know," she said, and kissed me.
The first one in the Atrium had been a slammed door. This was a door opening. Her mouth was soft and uncertain for one second, and then not uncertain at all, and I made a noise I'm not proud of and got a hand into her hair, and all those careful pins went scattering across the floor of the lift like hailstones. She tasted of mulled wine and something sweeter underneath. She kissed like she argued, thoroughly, with her full attention, refusing to concede an inch, and when I pulled her into my lap she came willingly and wrapped her arms round my neck and kept going.
Above us, something went pop.
We broke apart, breathing hard, and looked up. The mistletoe had turned from green to gold, all at once, every leaf and berry, and as we watched it drifted down like a feather and landed on Draconia's knee. The ribbon round my wrist was gone. So was hers. There was nothing between us now except a few inches of air and seven years.
"It's off," she said.
"Yeah."
"You can go." She hadn't moved out of my lap. "You could be home in ten minutes. There's a staff stair behind the Floo hall."
"I know." I didn't move either. I put my hand very lightly on her waist and kept it there, and looked at her, because I wanted to be sure. "Do you want me to go?"
She was quiet for a long moment, the gold mistletoe resting on her knee and her hair all down around her shoulders.
"No," Draconia said. "I want you to stay. I want you to take me to my office, which has a lock on the door and a sofa I've never once used, and I want you to stop being careful with me." Her fingers tightened on the back of my neck. "Is that clear enough, or shall I put it in a memo?"
I have never got a lift grille open so fast in my life. It turned out the security lockdown didn't care for a Blasting Curse used with real feeling.
Her office was on level five, at the end of a long dark corridor lined with portraits of past Heads of International Cooperation who were mostly asleep, though one of them, an old witch in a ruff, woke up as we went past and said "Well, really," and then, as Draconia pushed me against the door to kiss me again, "Well, really, at last."
She got the door open behind my back without looking. We went through it together, and she locked it with a flick of her wand and silenced it with another, and then she turned round and looked at me, and I forgot how to breathe.
The room was lit only by the enchanted window, which showed the London night outside, snowing hard over the rooftops. Her desk was perfectly tidy. The sofa against the wall was grey velvet and looked as though it had been chosen to impress Bulgarian ambassadors rather than for anyone to lie on. She was standing in the middle of the room in the holly-red dress with her hair down and her lipstick mostly on my mouth, and she reached up behind her neck and undid the single clasp that held the dress up.
It slid down to her waist. She didn't look away from me.
"Your turn, Potter," she said.
I crossed the room and kissed her, and she pushed my dress robes off my shoulders while I did it, and then she got impatient with the buttons of my shirt and simply Vanished them, which I thought was cheating and told her so against her neck, and she laughed, low and breathless, and pulled the shirt off me and put her hands flat on my chest. Her palms were cool. I felt them all the way down.
I kissed down her throat, over that silver scar on her collarbone, and she shivered and arched into me. I had wondered about this for years, if I'm honest, in the late nights when I couldn't sleep, and none of the wondering had come close. Her skin was warm and impossibly soft, and when I took her breast in my hand and ran my thumb over her nipple, she gasped and caught my wrist, not to stop me but to hold me there.
"Again," she said.
I did it again, and then I lowered my head and took her nipple in my mouth, and she made a sound that I wanted to hear for the rest of my life. Her fingers went into my hair and tightened. The velvet dress was still bunched at her hips and I pushed it down, slowly, kneeling as I went, until it pooled on the floor at her feet and she stepped out of it in nothing but her heels and a scrap of black silk, looking down at me with her lips parted and her eyes gone dark.
"You're on your knees," she said, a little unsteadily. "I've imagined that."
"Yeah?" I hooked my fingers into the silk and looked up at her. "Can I?"
"Merlin, yes. Harry. Yes."
She'd never called me Harry before. I nearly lost my nerve entirely. Instead I drew the silk down her legs and put my mouth on her, there in the middle of her office with the snow falling outside, and she grabbed the edge of her own desk to stay upright. She was already wet. She tasted like salt and heat, and I took my time, learning what made her breath catch, what made her swear, what made her hips roll forward against my mouth with a sound like she was coming apart at the seams. When I slid two fingers into her she said my name again, much louder, and the portrait in the corridor outside would have heard it if she hadn't silenced the door.
She came with one hand fisted in my hair and the other gripping the desk so hard the wood creaked, shaking, her head thrown back. I held her through it. When she could stand again, she pulled me up by my hair and kissed me, tasting herself on my mouth, and walked me backwards until the backs of my knees hit the sofa.
"Off," she said, tugging at my belt. "All of it. Now."
I obeyed. She pushed me down onto the grey velvet and climbed over me, her knees on either side of my hips and her hair falling round us both like a curtain, and for a second she just looked, her eyes moving over me as if she were committing something to memory.
"Still with me?" I asked. My voice came out wrecked.
"Seven years, Potter," she breathed. "I am absolutely with you."
She reached between us and guided me into her and sank down slowly, all the way, and we both stopped moving. Her forehead dropped to mine. She was hot and tight around me and I had to close my eyes and think very hard about tax law for a moment.
Then she started to move, and I stopped thinking about anything.
She rode me the way she did everything, with complete control right up until the moment she didn't have any at all. I had my hands on her hips and then her back and then her face, pulling her down to kiss her. The sofa creaked. Outside the window, London went white. She found a rhythm that made her gasp each time she came down, and I rose to meet her and she said "There, there, don't you dare stop," so I didn't, and I watched her face as she fell apart for the second time, her mouth open on my name, and that was what finished me. I came with her clenched around me and her hands on my chest, holding on to her like she was the last solid thing in the world.
Afterwards she lay on top of me, sweaty and boneless, with her face tucked into my neck. Neither of us said anything for a long time.
"George," she said finally, muffled, "is never to know about this."
"George," I said, "already knows. That's the whole selling point."
She bit my shoulder, not hard. Then she lifted her head and looked at me, and the look on her face was so open and unguarded that it frightened me a little, because I suddenly understood exactly how much I had to lose.
"It's past midnight," she said softly. "It's Christmas."
"Merry Christmas, Malfoy."
She smiled, slow and sweet and a bit wicked, and leaned down until her lips brushed my ear.
"I've got a flat in Kensington with a much bigger bed," she whispered, "and no portraits. Do you want to see it?"