Chapter 2: The Handshake
The photograph Barnabas Cuffe wanted was a handshake. He had it planned down to the angle: Granger on the left, Malfoy on the right, the anniversary banner over their heads, two famous enemies clasping hands in the name of a free press. He had told the photographer to get it in one, because neither of them would agree to a second.
He got it in one. That was never the problem. The problem was that afterwards, neither of them let go.
Hermione arrived late, which she had planned, and stood at the top of the stairs down into the Grand Ballroom of the Leaky Cauldron for nearly a full minute, which she hadn't. The room was hot and gold and loud. Someone had charmed a hundred and fifty years of front pages to drift beneath the ceiling like lanterns, and every few seconds one of them turned over and a headline flared: DARK MARK OVER QUIDDITCH WORLD CUP. HARRY POTTER: DISTURBED AND DANGEROUS? Under them, the whole of the Prophet was drinking as though it were being paid by the glass.
She saw Rita Skeeter first, which was a bad omen. Rita was by the bar in acid-yellow robes, her Quick-Quotes Quill hovering at her shoulder like a pet wasp. She saw Barnabas second, red-faced and beaming, waving at somebody across the room.
She saw Draco third, and then for a while she didn't see anything else.
He was standing by one of the tall windows with a glass of something he wasn't drinking. He was in black, very plain and very well cut, and his hair was longer than in his column photograph, falling across his forehead, and he looked nothing at all like a man about to ask someone to step outside. He looked like a man who had been watching the stairs for an hour.
He looked up. He saw her.
She would think about his face for a long time afterwards. Not because it did anything dramatic. Because it didn't. It just went very still and very open, all at once, like a door with the lock taken out, and he put his untouched glass down on the windowsill without looking, and it missed, and fell, and smashed, and he did not even glance at it.
She came down the stairs. It took a year. Then she was in front of him.
"Granger," he said.
"Malfoy."
"You said you weren't coming."
"You said you'd be at home with your cat."
"Bartholomew sends his regards." His eyes went down to the green silk and back up again, slowly, and his jaw tightened. "He'd also like me to say, on his behalf, that the dress is a cheap trick."
"Is it working?"
"Catastrophically," said Draco.
They looked at each other. A year of letters stood between them, thousands and thousands of words, and she found that in person, with him close enough to touch, she could not think of a single one. Her mouth had gone dry. His eyes were grey. She had known that, obviously. She had seen him across courtrooms and corridors and once, briefly, across a drawing room she did not think about. But she had never stood near enough to see that there was a darker ring around the grey, like a pencil line someone had drawn round it to make sure it stayed in.
"This is much worse than writing," she said.
"I did warn you." His voice was low. "In March. I said I wouldn't run out of things to say. I'd just stop wanting to say them out loud."
"You said that in April."
"Granger, I'm trying very hard not to kiss you in front of Rita Skeeter. Please don't correct my dates."
That was when Barnabas found them, and the photographer, and the banner, and the handshake.
His hand was warm and dry and closed round hers firmly, a proper handshake, the kind you would give a rival you respected. The flash went off. Barnabas said, "Marvellous, marvellous, that's the front page," and bustled away. The photographer lowered his camera. Rita Skeeter's Quick-Quotes Quill turned slowly in the air by the bar, like a compass needle finding north.
Draco did not let go of her hand. She did not let go of his. His thumb moved, once, across her knuckles.
"Is there somewhere," she said, very quietly, "that isn't here?"
He did not answer. He just turned, still holding her hand, and walked her straight out of the ballroom through a side door she had not noticed, past a startled waiter with a tray of champagne, up a narrow back staircase that smelt of beeswax and old ale. At the first landing, in the half-dark, under a portrait of a sleeping goblin, he stopped and turned and looked at her.
"I took a room," he said. "Upstairs. In case I needed to be carried home. That isn't an assumption. You can say no. You can say goodnight and I'll walk you back down and we'll go back to writing and I'll never mention it."
"Draco."
"I mean it. I've wanted this for a year. I can wait a bit longer if…"
She put her hand over his mouth.
He went absolutely still. Above her palm, his eyes went wide and then very dark. She felt his breath catch against her fingers. She felt him understand.
"I imagined this," she said. Her voice was shaking. "I wrote it down and sent it to you, which was the stupidest thing I've ever done in my life, and you didn't laugh. You said 'with you looking at me.' I'm looking at you." She took her hand away, slowly. "Show me the room."
The room was small and low-ceilinged with a window over Diagon Alley, where the lamps were still lit and someone was singing outside the Leaky. He shut the door behind them. Neither of them reached for the light.
"Say it again," he said. "That you want this. I'd like to hear it."
"I want this. I want you." She stepped closer. "Is that clear enough, or would you like it in three thousand words?"
He laughed, low, and then he wasn't laughing, because she had rolled up onto her toes and put her mouth on his.
He kissed exactly the way he wrote. Precise at first, and then suddenly not precise at all, as though he had been editing himself for a year and had just thrown the red pen across the room. His hands came up to her face, both of them, and then slid back into her hair, and he made a rough helpless sound against her lips that she felt all the way down her spine. She bit his lower lip. He groaned and walked her backwards until her shoulders met the door, and then he pressed into her, all of him, and she could feel exactly how much he wanted this, hard against her stomach through the thin silk.
"Hermione," he said into her neck. "Tell me what you imagined. All of it. I want to get it right."
"You," she managed, "out of things to say."
"Then make me."
She turned them. It surprised him. She pushed him back against the door, the way she had imagined at two in the morning with a bottle of elf-made wine, and he let her, his head falling back against the wood with a soft thud. She undid his robes with clumsy fingers, then his shirt, button by button, until she could put her hands on his bare chest and feel his heart slamming under her palm. She dragged her mouth down his throat. She kissed the line of his collarbone. She kept going.
When she sank to her knees on the floorboards of a room at the Leaky Cauldron and looked up at him, Draco Malfoy, columnist, contrarian, the most articulate man she had ever met, said, "Oh, God," and then nothing coherent at all for some time.
She took him into her mouth slowly. She had imagined this too, in the dark, and the imagining had been nothing like it. He was hot and heavy on her tongue and he tasted of salt and skin, and the sounds he made were the best thing she had ever heard. His hand was in her hair, not pushing, just holding on, as though she were the only solid thing in the room. She found a rhythm and he swore, softly, then not softly. She looked up. He was looking down at her, the way he'd promised, his eyes black and his lips parted, as though he could not believe what he was seeing.
"Hermione." His voice cracked. "Stop. Stop, or I'm…" He drew her up by the shoulders, gently, and kissed her hard, and she could taste herself on his tongue and him on hers. "Not yet. I want to be inside you. Please. Can I?"
"Yes," she said against his mouth. "Yes. The dress has a zip."
"Thank Merlin."
He found it. The green silk slid down and pooled on the floor and he stepped back to look at her in the light from the street, and his expression was something she would have sold her soul to have in print. Then he picked her up and carried her three steps to the bed and laid her down on it and covered her body with his.
He was slow at first, unbearably slow, his eyes on her face as he pushed into her, and she arched up off the bed and held on to his shoulders and heard herself say his name in a voice she had never used for anyone. He stopped when he was fully inside her and just breathed, his forehead on hers.
"All right?" he said.
"If you stop now I'll write about it."
"Noted."
He moved. She met him. It was nothing like the letters. It was better, because she could see him, because she could feel him shake when she wrapped her legs around his hips and pulled him deeper, because when she dug her nails into his back he gasped her name and lost the rhythm entirely and had to find it again. He kissed her through it. He kissed her jaw and her throat and her breasts and her mouth, and he whispered things against her skin, broken half-sentences, nothing like the polished prose of his column. Wanted you so long. Every letter. You have no idea. She came first, hard and sudden, gasping into his shoulder, and he followed her almost at once with a groan that she felt in her own chest, his whole body going taut and then slack over hers.
Outside, someone in Diagon Alley was still singing.
They lay tangled in the sheets and caught their breath. After a while he laughed, quietly, into her hair.
"What?" she said.
"You were right," said Draco. "I ran out of things to say."
It was half past two in the morning when the owl hit the window.
It was a Prophet owl, a big tawny one with the paper's crest on its leg band, and it looked deeply put out about the hour. Draco untied the letter and read it by wandlight. She watched his face change.
"What is it?"
He handed it to her without a word.
Rita got you both on the back stairs. The landing, under the goblin. It's a very good photograph. She's written eight hundred words to go with it, all of them filthy and half of them true, and it runs on page one at six o'clock this morning in place of your handshake. Unless one of you can give me something better by four. B. C.