Chapter 3: A Correction
By Draco's watch it was ninety minutes to four, and he had never in his life written anything worth printing in ninety minutes.
"We could deny it," he said.
Hermione was sitting up in the bed with the sheet pulled round her and Barnabas's note in her lap, reading it for the fourth time with the expression she wore when a piece of legislation had been drafted by idiots. Her hair had gone completely feral. There was a mark on her neck he had put there. He was having enormous difficulty thinking about anything else.
"Deny it," she repeated. "There's a photograph."
"Photographs lie. It's a trick of the light. You'd tripped on the stairs, I caught you with my mouth. Very chivalrous. I'll write a strongly worded letter."
"Draco."
"Or we let it run." He sat down on the edge of the bed. "Rita writes her eight hundred words, everyone has a lovely Sunday, you're the Muggle-born war heroine debauched by the Death Eater on a back staircase, I'm the Death Eater who finally found a new way to ruin you. It's a better story than anything I've ever written. She'll sell out by nine."
He said it lightly. It didn't come out lightly. Hermione looked up from the note.
"That's what you're worried about," she said. "Not the photograph. What they'll say it means."
"I've read Rita Skeeter on the subject of me before." He looked at the window. "I know what it'll mean by the time she's finished with it. And it won't be anything you wrote me at three in the morning."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she held out her hand, palm up, and when he didn't move she reached out and took his and pulled.
"Get your quill," said Hermione Granger.
They wrote it in bed, because the room had no desk and because neither of them, it turned out, was willing to be more than an arm's length from the other. She lay on her stomach with a pad of hotel parchment and he sat against the headboard with the quill, and they argued over every single word.
"You can't open with 'I,'" he said. "It's vain."
"You open with 'I' every Friday."
"I'm vain. It's my brand. You're principled. It confuses the readers."
"Fine. 'We.'"
"'We' is worse. 'We' sounds like a royal decree."
"Then what do you suggest, Mr Against the Grain?"
He thought about it. He looked at her, lying across the sheets with ink on her fingers and a pencil line of frown between her eyebrows, and he thought about a year of letters arriving at the Manor at breakfast and at midnight, about how he'd started to know her owl's knock on the window from the other owls, about reading "you can't tell me that" in the bath with his heart going like a fist on a door.
"Start with the date," he said. "The first one. July. Start with the saucepan."
She stared at him. Then she started writing.
It went faster after that. Not easily, never easily, but fast. She wrote a paragraph and he crossed out half of it. He wrote a line and she said, "That's beautiful and it's a lie, you weren't 'indifferent' in September, you sent me three letters about my hair," and he had to concede the point. She used "fundamentally" and he reached over and struck it out without a word, and she laughed so hard she had to put her face in the pillow. At one point he found himself watching her mouth while she read his paragraph back under her breath, and forgot what he had written, and she noticed, and set the parchment down.
"Draco. We have an hour."
"I know."
"We have a deadline."
"I'm very aware of the deadline, Granger."
"Then why are you looking at me like that?"
"Because you're naked," he said, reasonably, "and you're editing me, and it's the single most unbearable thing that has ever happened to me, and I'm only a man."
She looked at him for a long, considering moment. Then she crawled up the bed, took the quill out of his hand, set it carefully on the nightstand next to the parchment, and swung one leg over his hips.
"Finish the sentence," she said.
"What?"
"The last line you wrote. 'I had not expected.' Finish it." She lowered herself onto him, slowly, so slowly, her eyes on his, and he stopped breathing entirely. "Out loud. While I do this."
"You're a menace," he said hoarsely. "You're an absolute… I had not expected…"
She rolled her hips. He lost the end of the sentence somewhere in the back of his throat.
"Try again."
He gripped her thighs. She was hot and slick around him and she was moving in a slow devastating rhythm that was, he was quite certain, designed specifically to make sure he never wrote another coherent sentence in his life. Her hands were braced on his chest. Her hair fell around both of them like a curtain.
"I had not expected," he managed, "that when she finally…"
She leaned down and kissed him, deep, and pulled back.
"Keep going."
"That when she finally looked at me… God, Hermione… that she would…"
"That she would what?"
He sat up. He wrapped his arms around her waist and held her there in his lap, deep inside her, chest to chest, and looked her in the eye from an inch away.
"That she would look at me like I was worth reading," he said.
Her face changed. Her lips parted. For a second she stopped moving entirely.
Then she kissed him so hard their teeth knocked, and the rhythm went to pieces, and after that there was no more writing for a while. There was her breath hot and ragged against his ear, and his hands on her hips moving her faster, and her nails in his shoulders, and the creak of the old bed and someone banging on the wall next door and neither of them caring in the slightest. She came with her forehead pressed to his and her eyes open, saying his name like the end of an argument, and he held on to her and let it take him with her, and for a long moment afterwards the only sound in the room was the two of them breathing.
"That," said Hermione into his neck, eventually, "is the last line."
"It's mawkish."
"It's true." She lifted her head. "Put it in."
He put it in.
"Whose name goes first?" she asked, while he was blotting the ink.
"Alphabetical."
"That's me."
"I'm aware. I checked before I suggested it." He signed under her name anyway, with a flourish she rolled her eyes at, and then sat looking at the two names together on the hotel parchment for longer than the deadline strictly allowed. Granger and Malfoy. It looked like a firm of solicitors. It looked like a headline. It looked like something that had been true for a long while and was only now being set in type.
"Draco," she said softly. "It's all right. Let them read it."
"I know." He folded the parchment in half, then in half again. "I've just never written anything I was frightened to send."
She took it out of his hands and kissed his knuckles one by one, the ink-stained ones first. "I have," she said. "At two in the morning, with most of a bottle of elf-made wine in me. It turned out fine."
The Prophet owl took the parchment at four minutes to four, still looking deeply put out, and vanished over the rooftops of Diagon Alley towards the Prophet offices, and they lay in the rumpled bed and watched the sky over London go from black to grey to the faintest edge of gold, and did not sleep at all.
Daily Prophet, Sunday, 2 July 2006. Front page. Anniversary edition.
A CORRECTION by Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy
In July of last year, one of us wrote in this paper that he had asked his house-elf whether she wanted a wage, and that she had thrown a saucepan at him. This was not true. The other of us wrote to say so. That was the first letter.
There have been, by a conservative count, three hundred and forty since. Some of them were about Latin. Some were about goblin budgets. Several were about hair. Most were written after midnight, by two people who had spent years being very publicly certain that they could not stand each other, and who were discovering, one owl at a time, that they had been wrong.
You may see a photograph today, elsewhere, of the two of us on a staircase. We would like to save you the trouble of interpreting it. It is exactly what it looks like. It is also the least interesting part of the story.
We disagree on almost everything. We intend to keep disagreeing in these pages, loudly, every week. We wanted you to hear the rest from us before you heard it from anybody else.
One of us would like to add that she had not expected, when the other finally looked at her, that he would look at her like she was worth reading.
The other would like it on record that he wrote that line first, and that she is, as ever, wrong about the dates.
Rita's eight hundred words ran on page nine, beneath an advertisement for Gladrags, and nobody read them.
At midday a Prophet owl tapped on the window of a flat in Islington, where the curtains were still drawn. The note it carried was very short.
Joint column. Wednesdays. Starting this week. I'm calling it "Hate Mail." Don't argue. B. C.
They argued about it until Tuesday.