Chapter 2: Five More Thursdays
I didn't answer him. That's the truth of it, and I'm not proud of it. I got up and dressed and stood with my back to him doing up the zip myself, badly, and he didn't offer to help, and I went down the stairs past the woman on the desk without saying goodbye.
I spent the next six days being an excellent fiancée.
I chose a cake. I wrote to my father, who lives in Bruges now and signs his letters *L.* as though he's ashamed of the rest. I sat through a fitting at Twilfitt and Tattings while three witches pinned ivory silk around me and told me I'd be the most beautiful bride of the season, which I will, because I am always the most beautiful anything of the season, and it has never once been any use to me. I went to dinner at the Puceys' and laughed at Adrian's father's jokes and caught Adrian, once, across the table, looking at the window with such naked unhappiness that I almost dropped my fork.
On Wednesday night I didn't sleep. I lay in my bed at the Manor and thought: *I won't go.* It would be easier. It would be kinder. He'd sit on the window seat and wait, and I wouldn't come, and by six he'd understand, and he'd catch his train, and on the third of May he'd stand at the gate in his dress robes and look straight past me, and I'd deserve it.
On Thursday morning I lied to my mother over the marmalade.
I'm late. I'm very late. I stood in the alley behind the Abbey for twenty minutes, in the blue dress, trying to make my feet move, and when they finally did I walked up the hill so fast I had to stop in the Circus with my hand pressed to my side.
He's not on the window seat.
He's standing in the middle of the room in his shirtsleeves, and the bed is made, and his bag is packed and sitting by the door, and he turns when I come in with such a look on his face that I have to put my hand on the doorframe.
"You came," Harry says.
"You packed."
"I thought you weren't coming. I thought..." He stops. He takes his glasses off and puts them on the side table, which he only does when he's about to say something he doesn't want to see my face for. "It's twenty to three. You're never later than five past."
"I was in the alley."
"For an hour?"
"For an hour and a quarter. I was being a coward. I'm very good at it, I've been practising since I was born." My voice is doing something strange. "I was going to tell you. I was going to tell you last week, I had it all planned, I had the words. And then you took my coat off and said I wear the blue dress when I've had a bad week, and I couldn't."
He looks at me. Without his glasses his face is more naked somehow, and his eyes are very green.
"Six weeks," he says.
"Five, now."
"Five." He breathes out. "Right."
"We have rules," I say. "No future. You made me promise."
"*You* made *me* promise." His voice cracks, very slightly. "I've been keeping that rule for eight months. Do you know what that's been like? I used to lie awake on Wednesday nights. I used to get to Paddington two hours early. I stood in the Pump Room every Thursday at half past one like a bloody idiot until it was late enough to come up here, because I couldn't stand to be in London one more minute knowing you were somewhere in it, behaving." He takes a step towards me. "And I never said a word, because you'd have stopped coming."
"Harry."
"So you can have your rules," he says. "For five more weeks. I'll keep every one. And then I'll stand on the gate and let you walk past me, if that's what you want." Another step. He's close now. "But I'm not doing it with my bag packed by the door. If this is the last five Thursdays I get, I want all of them."
I don't know which of us moves first. I want it on record that it doesn't matter.
He kisses me against the door with his hands in my hair and my back against the wood, and it isn't like the start of a Thursday. It isn't slow. It's as if we've both been holding our breath for a week and have only just been allowed to let it go. I pull his shirt out of his jeans and get my hands on the warm bare skin of his back and he groans into my mouth and presses me harder against the door.
"Tell me you want this," he says, against my jaw. "I need to hear it. Today, I need to hear it."
"I want this." I get his face in my hands. "I want you. I've wanted you every day of this week, all six of the days I'm not allowed to. Is that enough?"
"It'll do," he says, roughly, and lifts me.
I wrap my legs round his waist and he carries me to the bed without looking where he's going, and we land on it crossways with the old brass frame creaking like a ship, and he's laughing, and so am I, breathless and stupid. Then he's kneeling up over me and drawing the blue dress up my thighs with both hands, and neither of us is laughing anymore.
He undresses me as if it's the first time. Every Thursday he's done it, and somehow today it's different; he takes his time over each thing, the dress, the stockings, the plain silk underneath, and he looks at each bit of me as it's uncovered as if he's committing it to memory. As if he's afraid he'll be asked about it later and won't be able to say.
"Stop looking at me like that," I whisper.
"Like what?"
"Like you're saying goodbye."
"I'm not," he says. "I'm saying hello. Every bit of you. Properly. I should have done it months ago."
Then he lowers his head and puts his mouth on the inside of my knee.
He works his way up slowly. My thigh, the crease of my hip, the softness of my belly, every inch, and by the time his breath touches me between my legs I'm trembling and my hands are knotted in the sheets. He looks up at me along my body, asking. I nod, and then, because he waits, because he always waits, I say it.
"Yes. Please. *Harry.*"
His mouth is hot and patient and devastating. He licks into me slowly, then less slowly, learning the sounds I make, and when he slides two fingers into me and curls them and closes his lips around my clit, I come so hard I see white and hear myself cry out his name to the sloping ceiling and the paper birds. He doesn't stop. He gentles, and keeps going, and takes me up again until I'm pushing at his shoulders and begging, and then he crawls up the bed and kisses me so I can taste myself on his mouth.
"Clothes," I gasp, pulling at his shirt. "Off. You're a disgrace."
He stands to get rid of them and I watch him do it, propped on my elbows on the rumpled bed, naked in the afternoon light. He's beautiful. He's never believed it. He's built lean and hard from the job, scarred all over, the curse mark white on his chest over his heart, and he's so hard for me it looks like it hurts.
"Come here," I say, and hold out my arms, and he comes.
He pushes into me slowly, our eyes open, his forehead against mine, until he's all the way in, and we both stop and breathe. I can feel him everywhere. I can feel his heartbeat where his chest is pressed to my breasts.
"All right?" he whispers.
"Don't you *dare* go slowly," I tell him, and wrap my legs around him and pull.
He doesn't go slowly.
The brass bed knocks against the wall. Somewhere downstairs the woman on the desk will be pretending not to hear it, and I don't care, I don't care at all. He drives into me, deep and hard, and I meet him, my nails in his back, and he says my name into my neck over and over like it's a spell. Not *Malfoy*. Not *Mrs Black*. *Draconia*, *Draconia*, so I can't hide from it, until I'm clenching around him and coming again with my mouth open against his shoulder.
He follows me a moment later, his whole body going taut, his face buried in my hair, with a sound I feel all the way down to my bones.
We lie tangled in the wreck of the sheets with the window open and the noise of the city coming up to us. The Abbey bells. A busker somewhere playing the same four bars of something over and over. Pigeons on the roof.
"Five more," he says, into my hair.
"Five more," I say.
I don't believe it. I don't think he does either.
At half past five I get up to dress. I'm standing at the window doing up the zip of the blue dress, badly again, when he comes and does it up for me, kissing the top of my spine where it ends. I turn to kiss him properly. Over his shoulder, through the window, something moves on the sill outside.
An owl.
It's a large handsome tawny with a ring of Pucey green around one leg, and it's sitting on the sill of a Muggle hotel in Bath, on the top floor, at the back, and looking straight at me with polite yellow eyes.
It has a letter in its beak. Addressed in Adrian's neat, kind, unmistakable hand.
*Draconia. Room at the top, Lansdown Crescent, Bath.*
I don't move. Harry turns, and sees it, and I feel him go still.
I take the letter. My fingers aren't steady. I break the seal and unfold it, and there are only two lines, written in the same tidy brown ink he uses to write me notes about bond issues.
*I know where you go on Thursdays.*
*Please come and see me tonight. I think we should talk.*