Chapter 2: Rules for Being Seen
GRANGER AND MALFOY: WAR HEROINE SPOTTED WITH FORMER DEATH EATER IN DIAGON ALLEY. That was Tuesday. By Wednesday the Prophet had found a better photographer and a worse headline: GOLDEN GIRL'S SILVER SECRET? Under it was a moving picture of the two of us outside Fortescue's, which had reopened under Florean's niece, and in which I appeared to be laughing at something Malfoy had said while he looked down at me as though I'd hung the moon.
I had not been laughing at anything he'd said. I had been laughing because he'd stepped in a puddle and tried to pretend it hadn't happened, and he had been looking down at me with the specific expression of a man whose sock was filling with rainwater. But the camera doesn't know that. The camera only knows what it sees, and what it saw, apparently, was romance.
"It's a good picture," Ginny said. She was sitting on the corner of my desk at nine in the morning, eating my biscuits, having come up from the Prophet's offices on Diagon Alley specifically, she said, to "see my face." "You look happy. He looks like he wants to eat you with a spoon."
"Ginny."
"I'm only describing the photograph." She held it up and squinted. "Is that a puddle?"
"No."
"It's a puddle. You were laughing at him." She lowered the paper and looked at me over the top of it, and for a moment she was not my friend, she was the woman who'd once broken a Bludger-beater's nose for calling Harry a fraud. "Hermione. Is this real?"
Rule seven. I thought about it very hard.
"It's new," I said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got." Which was, at least, true.
She studied me for a long moment, then stood up and brushed the crumbs off her robes. "Harry's going to want to talk to him."
"Harry is not going to talk to him."
"Harry is absolutely going to talk to him. He's been practising in the bathroom mirror. I heard him say 'intentions' twice." She paused at the door. "For what it's worth, he looks at you like that in the other photos too. The ones where you're not laughing."
She left before I could ask which other photos.
Our arrangement had required, it turned out, a great deal more than one evening.
"You can't just turn up on my arm at the gala," Malfoy had said, on the Monday, standing in the Atrium beside the new fountain, which the Ministry had replaced after the war with a single plain basin and a ring of names carved around the rim. "Nobody will believe it. People need to have seen us. Coffees. A lunch. Something they'll gossip about for a week, so that by the time we walk in, it's old news, and they're bored of it, and they'll believe anything."
"That's very cynical."
"I've had eight years of practice at being gossiped about. I'm an expert." He handed me a paper cup. "Flat white, extra hot. You'll want to drink it before the lift. The fourth floor's freezing."
I looked at the cup. Then at him.
"How do you know my coffee order?"
He shrugged with one shoulder, a small, irritated movement, as if the question were beneath him. "I've stood behind you in the queue at the kiosk most mornings for three years. You say it every day in exactly the same tone, like you're giving evidence. Extra hot. The barista's terrified of you."
"She is not."
"She calls you 'the Act.' As in, 'Look out, here comes the Act.'"
I opened my mouth, shut it, and drank my coffee. It was perfect, which made it worse.
So, coffees. Then a lunch, at a little place near Gringotts with checked tablecloths, where he ate like someone who'd been taught table manners by a governess and then spent several years in a hurry. He told me about Malfoy Botanicals. He didn't brag, exactly. He just talked about Fwooper feathers and the difference between Cretan and Welsh dittany with a precise, unshowy pleasure that I recognised, because it's how I talk about statutory frameworks, and nobody ever wants to listen to me either.
"You actually like it," I said.
"I like things that do what they say on the label." He turned his glass a quarter-turn on the tablecloth. "Ingredients are honest. If you crush asphodel wrong, it tells you. It doesn't smile at you in public and then cancel your order by owl."
"Is that what happened?"
"That's what always happens." He said it lightly. "Don't look like that. You'll ruin the photographs."
I looked out of the window. There was a man with a camera across the road, pretending to read the menu outside the Leaky Cauldron. "How did you know he'd be there?"
"I told him." Malfoy reached across the table and took my hand. His thumb rested on the inside of my wrist. "Smile, Granger. You're madly in love with me."
I smiled. It wasn't difficult, which I found alarming.
Harry came to Deptford on the Thursday. I know because I was there.
I was there because Malfoy had pointed out, with infuriating accuracy, that "one dance" was in the rules, that I had signed them, and that the last time he'd seen me dance I had looked like someone trying to stamp out a small fire.
"When did you see me dance?"
"Bill Weasley's wedding anniversary. Shell Cottage. I was delivering six crates of Mandrake leaves for the cake. You stood on Potter's foot four times in one song."
"Harry's a bad dancer."
"Harry's a perfectly adequate dancer. You count out loud."
So on Thursday evening he'd pushed the workbenches back against the shelves, charmed an old wireless on a crate into playing something slow and full of strings, and stood in the middle of the cleared floor in his shirtsleeves with one hand held out like a challenge.
"I'm not doing this," I said.
"You signed it."
"I signed a dance. Not a rehearsal."
"Granger." He was very patient, which was new and suspicious. "You are going to walk into a room with four hundred people in it, half of whom have been waiting eight years to see me trip over my own feet in public. If you step on mine, it'll be in tomorrow's paper. Help me out."
I took his hand.
The trouble with Draco Malfoy, it turns out, is that he is good at almost everything he bothers to learn, and he has clearly bothered to learn this. His hand at my back was exactly where rule two said it should be, respectful to the inch. He led without seeming to, a slight pressure here, a turn of the wrist there, and I started counting under my breath before I could stop myself, one-two-three, one-two-three.
"You're counting."
"I like knowing where I am."
"I know." His voice was close to my ear, and quieter than I'd expected. "Stop counting. I've got you."
I stopped counting.
We went round the warehouse floor twice, past the dittany and the lovage and a shelf of jars labelled DO NOT OPEN, MEANS YOU, PANSY, and somewhere in the second circuit I stopped thinking about my feet entirely and started thinking about the smell of him, which was cedar and crushed mint and the faint warm pepper of the shop, and the fact that his hand at my back had become, without changing position at all, the only thing in the room I could feel.
That was when the bell over the door rang, and Harry Potter walked in.
He had clearly come straight from the Auror Office. He still had his badge on. He stopped just inside the door and looked at us, standing in each other's arms in the middle of an empty warehouse with violins playing, and his face went through about six expressions in rapid succession and landed on something I can only describe as betrayed curiosity.
Malfoy didn't let go of me. I noticed that later. At the time I only noticed that I didn't step away either.
"Potter," he said.
"Malfoy." Harry looked at me. "Hermione."
"Harry. You're early."
"I didn't tell you I was coming."
"I'm aware. I meant generally. In life." I was babbling. I disentangled myself and smoothed my skirt, which didn't need smoothing. "Draco was teaching me to waltz."
The name came out of me without permission. I'd been practising it in my head for days, and I'd meant to use it at the gala, for effect, and instead it fell out in the warehouse in front of Harry, soft and ordinary, like I'd been saying it for years.
Malfoy turned his head and looked at me. Just for a moment. Then he looked back at Harry and said, perfectly pleasantly, "Tea, Potter? I've got a kettle and some very good Assam that I'm told was not smuggled."
Harry stared at him for a second longer. Then, astonishingly, he said, "Go on, then," and sat down on a crate.
They talked for twenty minutes. I've never been so uncomfortable in my life. Harry asked about the business. Malfoy answered. Harry asked about the licence. Malfoy said I'd recused myself and passed it to Hendricks in Permits, which was true, and which he could only have known because he'd asked. Harry asked, finally, while I was pretending to read the label on a jar of powdered moonstone, what his intentions were.
Malfoy put his tea down.
"To get her through one evening without anyone looking at her the way they've been looking at her," he said. "After that, I expect she'll decide what she wants. She usually does."
It was, I realised, perfectly true. It was the arrangement, word for word. He hadn't lied at all.
Harry looked at him for a very long time. Then he looked at me, and something in his face relaxed that I hadn't known was tense.
"Right," he said, and stood. "Ginny says you're both coming to dinner next Sunday. Don't bring wine, Kreacher's got opinions." At the door he turned back and pointed at Malfoy. "If you hurt her..."
"You'll do something heroic and violent," said Malfoy. "I've read the books, Potter."
Harry snorted, and left, and the bell rang behind him.
I let out a breath. "That went—"
"Better than expected," said Malfoy. He was standing very still by the workbench. "You called me Draco."
"Rule five. I can't call you Granger either." I was flustered and I could hear it. "I mean, you can't call me Granger. I was being consistent."
"Of course." He didn't smile. He looked at me as if I were a label in a language he almost spoke. "You were very consistent."
The bell rang again.
I thought it was Harry, back for something. It wasn't. It was a dark-haired woman in a sharp black coat with a stack of ledgers under one arm and a pencil behind her ear, and she was halfway into the room before she saw me. She stopped dead. Her eyes went from me to Malfoy, to the cleared floor, to the wireless still playing violins on its crate.
"Oh, thank Merlin," said Pansy Parkinson, and dropped the ledgers on the bench with a thump. "You finally asked her. Do you know how long I've had to listen to him go on about you, Granger? Three years. Three years of 'she reorganised the whole permit system,' and 'she wore the green scarf today,' and..."
"Pansy," said Malfoy, in a voice I had never heard him use, very low and very calm.
She stopped. She looked at him. Then at me. Then at the parchment of rules, which was pinned, I now saw, to the wall above his workbench beside his delivery schedule, in plain view.
"Ah," said Pansy. "It's that sort of arrangement."
Nobody said anything. The violins played on. I turned to look at Draco Malfoy, who was standing beside his workbench with his ears gone pink and his jaw set, staring at a fixed point somewhere above my left shoulder like a man facing a firing squad.
"Three years?" I said.