Chapter 3: Separate Taxis
He didn't answer me. He said, "Pansy exaggerates," and Pansy said, "I absolutely do not," and he said, "Your ledgers, Parkinson, the VAT, now," in a voice like a closing door, and the two of them disappeared into his little back office and argued in furious whispers while I stood alone on the warehouse floor with the wireless still playing.
After a while I switched it off and took the bus home.
For the next nine days we did not talk about it. We had dinner at Harry and Ginny's, where Draco and Kreacher discovered a shared contempt for modern silver polish and spent half an hour in the kitchen in what Harry described as "the most terrifying friendship of my life." We were photographed outside Flourish and Blotts, where he carried my books, and outside the Ministry, where he held the door. He was courteous and dry and funny and never once, by so much as a glance, brought up the green scarf. I wore it twice that week, and I'm not proud of it.
The licence came through from Hendricks on the Friday before the gala, on the merits, with a note from the Head of Department apologising for the delay. I sent Draco a copy by owl. He sent back two words: Thank you. And then, on a second line, in smaller letters, as if he'd hesitated: Still on for Saturday?
He could have walked away then. He had what he'd come for. I sat at my kitchen table with the cat on my feet and looked at those four words for a long time before I wrote back, Yes. Rule one.
The Ministry does one thing beautifully, and that is spend other people's money on a party.
They'd charmed the Atrium ceiling into a summer night sky, deep blue and freckled with stars that moved if you watched them too long. The Floo fireplaces along the walls had been banked with white roses. Somebody had enchanted the plain fountain to run with something gold and sparkling that was not, a sign insisted, for drinking, and that Seamus Finnigan had already drunk. There was a string orchestra on a floating dais. There were four hundred people in their best dress robes, and every single one of them, when we came down the steps from the lifts, turned to look.
I'd known they would. I'd prepared for it. I had a dress the colour of dark wine that Ginny had made me buy and a pair of heels I had practised in for three evenings, and Draco Malfoy at my side in black robes cut so well they looked like they'd been poured on him. I hadn't prepared for his hand to find mine on the top step, before anyone was close enough to see, and squeeze once, quickly.
"Breathe, Granger," he murmured.
"Rule five."
"Nobody can hear me. Breathe anyway."
I breathed. We went down.
The first hour was easier than I'd feared. People came up to us in ones and twos, curious and careful, and Draco was very good at it. I'd forgotten that he'd been raised for exactly this: small talk as a contact sport. He knew everyone's name. He knew whose son had just made the Wimbourne Wasps and whose shop on Diagon Alley had flooded in April. He introduced me to a tall, frosty witch in silver called Ottoline Bletchley, who owned a chain of apothecaries across the north of England and who had, he told me in an undertone, refused to stock a single Malfoy product for four years.
"Miss Granger," said Mrs Bletchley. "I read your paper on the Ingredient Import Reforms. It was a very good paper."
"Thank you."
"It made it possible for a great many small importers to survive their first year." Her eyes slid to Draco. "Some of whom I've been told I ought to be buying from."
"Mr Malfoy's dittany is the best in the country," I said, before I could think. "He has very strong opinions about the Welsh stuff. You should ask him."
She did. They talked for ten minutes. When she left she gave Draco a card and said, "Owl my buyer on Monday," and Draco looked at the card in his hand as though it might bite him.
"You did that," he said.
"You did that. I just mentioned the Welsh."
He tucked the card into his robes and looked at me, and for a moment I thought he was going to say something real. Then Cormac McLaggen arrived, holding two glasses of champagne, and offered me one with the air of a man presenting a medal.
"Hermione! Gorgeous. You've grown your hair."
"I haven't."
"Well, it looks longer." He turned to Draco without any warmth at all. "Malfoy. Didn't think they let you in here."
"They let you in, McLaggen," said Draco mildly. "Standards are clearly flexible."
Cormac laughed too loudly and turned his back on him to tell me, at length, about a proposed amendment to my Elf Welfare Act that he thought I'd really benefit from hearing explained. I was halfway through composing a reply that would get me a disciplinary hearing when Draco's hand settled at the small of my back, exactly where it was supposed to be, respectful to the inch.
"Sorry, McLaggen," he said. "She promised me this one."
The orchestra had just begun a waltz. I hadn't noticed. He had.
We went out onto the floor. Four hundred people watched us, and I didn't count. Not once. I could feel him leading, the slight pressure of his fingers, the turns that came before I'd thought of them, and I looked up at him, at the sharp clean line of his jaw and the pale hair that had fallen across his forehead and the grey eyes looking down at me, and I thought: three years.
"You're not counting," he said.
"You told me to stop."
"I didn't think you'd listen." The corner of his mouth moved. "You never listen to me."
"I listened to you about the coffee."
"You drank the coffee. That's different."
We turned under the starlit ceiling. Over his shoulder I saw Ron with Marigold, who was laughing at the ceiling, and Ron caught my eye and raised his glass to me, very slightly, and smiled. Not the sad smile. A real one. Rule four. I didn't mention it. But I smiled back, and something in my chest that had been held tight for two years let go.
"Draco," I said.
His hand at my back tightened, just for an instant.
"Rule five," he said, but his voice had gone rough.
"I know the rules. I wrote them." The waltz was ending. I could hear the strings winding down. "I want to know about the three years."
He looked at me. Then he looked over my head at the four hundred people, the photographers by the fountain, the Minister on the dais, and his jaw set.
"Not here," he said.
We left by the visitors' entrance, which is a red telephone box on a side street off Whitehall, and which is not designed for two people in formal robes. We came up into Muggle London pressed together in the box like a pair of spoons in a drawer, and I had my hand on his chest for balance and could feel his heart going very fast under the black silk, and then the door swung open and we spilled out onto the wet pavement, and it was nearly midnight, and raining softly.
He walked a few steps away from me, to the kerb, and stood with his back to me and his hands in his pockets.
"It's not as dramatic as Pansy made it sound," he said.
"I'll be the judge of that."
He laughed, without much humour. "Of course you will." He turned around. The rain was flattening his hair. "When I started the business, nobody would sell to me. Nobody would buy from me. I'd sunk everything I had left into that warehouse, and I had about four months before it went under. And then this new Undersecretary at Magical Law Enforcement rewrote the entire ingredient import system from the ground up, so that a licence was judged on the application and not the name on it." He looked at me. "I didn't know it was you. I found out later. I read every line of it. It was brilliant. It was the first fair thing anyone had done for me in years, and you didn't even know I existed."
"I knew you existed."
"You knew Malfoy existed. Not me." He pushed a hand through his wet hair. "And then I started seeing you at the coffee kiosk. Every morning. You'd stand in the queue with a stack of files and read them while you waited, and you'd frown at them, and you'd say 'flat white, extra hot' like you were swearing an oath. And that was it. That's the whole sordid story. I stood behind you in a coffee queue for three years and never said a word, because what was I going to say? Thank you for the statute? Nice scarf?" His voice had gone sharp and embarrassed. "Pansy thinks it's hilarious. Pansy can go to hell."
I didn't say anything for a moment. A black cab went past with its light on, hissing through the wet. Neither of us hailed it.
"You let me go first," I said.
He blinked. "What?"
"In the queue. Every morning. Whenever we got to the kiosk at the same time, you'd step back. You'd look at something on the wall and step back like it was an accident, and let me go first." I swallowed. "I noticed, Draco. I noticed every single time. I just thought it was a coincidence, because you're you, and I'm me, and I'm not exactly good at," I made the vague gesture again, "people."
He was staring at me.
"You wrote a rule," he said slowly, "about not falling into any sort of feeling."
"I know. I'm a hypocrite." The rain was getting into my eyes. "In my defence, I'd broken it by the coffee. Possibly by the puddle."
"The puddle."
"You were so dignified about it. Your sock was full of water and you didn't say a single thing. It was the most Malfoy thing I've ever seen."
Another cab came down Whitehall. Its light was on. He stepped to the kerb and raised his hand, and it slowed and stopped beside us, the engine ticking in the rain.
"Rule nine," he said, without looking at me. "Separate taxis home."
"I wrote that one too."
"You did." He opened the door. He held it there. Then he turned and looked at me, finally, properly, and his face was open in a way I'd never seen, unguarded and uncertain, the face of a man who'd spent eight years learning not to ask for things. "I'll take the next one. Unless."
"Unless what?"
"Unless you'd like to amend it."
I stepped forward. I put my hand flat against his chest, where his heart was still going much too fast, and I went up on my toes in my three-evenings-practised heels, and I kissed him.
He made a small sound against my mouth, surprised and almost pained, and then his hands came up to cradle my face, careful and certain, and he kissed me back like a man who'd been waiting in a very long queue. The rain came down on us both. Somewhere behind me the cab driver said, "You two getting in or what, mate?" and neither of us answered him for a while.
When I finally pulled back, Draco rested his forehead against mine. His eyes were closed.
"Rule one," he said, unsteadily. "The arrangement ends with the gala."
"It's after midnight," I said. "The gala's over."
He opened his eyes.
"So it is," said Draco Malfoy, and smiled, slow and crooked and entirely real, and held the cab door open for us both.
The next morning, at eight-fifteen, I was standing in the queue at the Atrium kiosk with a stack of files when somebody stepped up behind me.
"Flat white, extra hot," said a voice in my ear. "And a black Americano for the man who's paying."
I turned. He was holding out two coins and trying very hard not to look pleased with himself.
"Good morning, Granger."
"Rule five," I said.
"We abolished the rules," he said. "Last night. In a taxi. I distinctly remember you saying so." He leaned down, so close that only I could hear. "Although I'll be honest. I've got some proposals of my own."
Behind the counter, the barista who called me the Act dropped a cup.