Chapter 3: Friday
Harry wants to come with me. Of course he does.
"Absolutely not," I tell him, in the doorway, with my coat on and Adrian's letter folded in my pocket. "You'll walk into the Puceys' drawing room in that shirt and he'll challenge you to a duel and you'll *win*, and then it'll be in the *Prophet* and my mother will die and I'll have to wear black for a year. I look terrible in black."
"You look incredible in black."
"I look incredible in everything, Potter. That's not the point." I put my hand flat on his chest, over the scar. "Let me do this. Please. Let me do one brave thing in my life by myself."
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he covers my hand with his.
"You came up the hill today," he says. "That was brave."
I go before I can cry on him again.
The Puceys live in Hampstead, in a tall white house with a garden full of clipped bay trees and a drawing room so tasteful it makes my teeth ache. Adrian meets me there himself, not an elf. He's in his shirtsleeves, which I've never seen. He looks as though he hasn't slept.
"Thank you for coming," he says. "Will you have a drink? I'm having a drink. I'm having several."
He pours us each a large whisky from his father's decanter. We sit on opposite sofas with a low table between us and an arrangement of white lilies on it, and he looks at his glass for so long that I begin to wonder whether he's forgotten I'm there.
"How long have you known?" I ask.
"About four months." He turns the glass in his hands. "I didn't follow you. I want you to know that. I'd never... I saw you. In Bath. On a Thursday in November. You were coming out of a hotel on Lansdown Crescent in a blue dress, and you were laughing. And there was a man holding the door for you." His mouth twists. "I'd know Harry Potter's hair anywhere. Everyone would."
"What were *you* doing in Bath?"
Adrian Pucey goes red to the tips of his ears.
It's so unexpected that I simply stare at him. In eight months of coffee and bond issues I've never once seen him go red. I didn't know he could.
"There's a Quidditch pitch," he says, very carefully, "in the hills above the city. Unplottable. Puddlemere use it for training in the off season."
I stare harder.
"Thursdays," Adrian says to the lilies, "are the Keeper's day off."
It takes me a moment. When it lands, I put my whisky down on the low table quite suddenly, because otherwise I'm going to drop it.
"*Oliver Wood?*"
"Don't," he says. "Please. I know. He's insufferable. He talks about Quidditch in his sleep. He once drew me a set play on a napkin at dinner and I *kept the napkin*, Draconia, I have it in a drawer." He drinks his whisky. "It's been nearly two years. I asked my mother for permission to break it off with you last November, when I saw you. I thought, she's got someone too, it's all right, we can both just... stop. And she said that if I did, she'd make sure my father lost the Under-Secretary's office, and that it would be all over the *Prophet* why."
"Oh, Adrian."
"So I didn't. I've been coming here every Thursday afternoon to drink coffee and talk about bonds and feel like a monster." He looks up at me, finally, and his face is so tired and so decent that I want to reach across the table and hold his hand. "I wrote to you today because I saw the owl in the hall this morning that Kingsley sent my father. Harry Potter on the gate on the third of May. And I thought, I can't do that to him. I can't make him stand there. I'd rather lose the office."
For a long time, neither of us says anything.
"My mother," I say slowly, "is going to scream."
"Mine's going to set fire to something."
"Is Wood going to be at the wedding?"
"He's a groomsman," Adrian says miserably, and I start to laugh. I can't help it. I put my hands over my face and laugh until there are tears in my eyes, and after a while, very reluctantly, Adrian starts laughing too, and we sit there in his mother's tasteful drawing room among the white lilies, laughing like a pair of lunatics, two people who've been lying to everyone for so long that we'd forgotten we could stop.
"We'll do it together," I say at last, wiping my eyes. "Tomorrow. Both our mothers, in the same room. They can't destroy us both."
He raises his glass to me. "To the worst engagement in pure-blood history."
"It wasn't so bad," I say. "You were always very polite about the flowers."
It's worse than I imagined. I won't tell it all. There's screaming; there's a vase. Mrs Pucey says a word I didn't think she knew. My mother sits through the whole thing at the end of the long table in the morning room at the Manor, white as paper, saying nothing at all.
Afterwards, when the Puceys have gone in a blaze of green fire, she asks me to stay.
I think she's going to shout. I think she's going to cry. I sit opposite her and wait for it.
"Is he kind to you?" she says.
I look at her. "Mother?"
"The man. In Bath." She folds her hands on the table. "I'm not a fool, Draconia. You've worn your hair down every Thursday evening for eight months. You come home smelling of the sea." Her mouth moves. "Bath isn't on the sea, I know. But it's what you look like. Like someone who's been somewhere with a horizon."
I can't speak.
"I married your father," she says quietly, "because my family asked me to. I loved him, eventually, after a fashion. And it nearly cost me you." She looks at me directly for the first time all day. "Is he kind to you?"
"Yes," I say. "Yes. He's very kind."
"Then go," says Narcissa Malfoy. "I'll deal with the Puceys."
It's Friday.
I've never seen Grimmauld Place except in the *Prophet*. I find it at last between Number Eleven and Number Thirteen, the way Harry told me once on a pillow at three in the morning without either of us meaning him to, and I stand on the cracked step in the blue dress and the camel coat with my hair down and knock, before I can change my mind.
He opens the door himself. He's in a grey jumper and old jeans and bare feet. He looks like he's been awake all night. He looks at me on his doorstep in daylight, in London, on a Friday, and his face does something that I'll remember for the rest of my life.
"It's Friday," he says.
"I know."
"It's against the rules."
"I'm aware." My voice shakes. "I'm not getting married. Adrian's in love with Oliver Wood. My mother is going to deal with the Puceys and I'm frankly a bit frightened of her. And I've come here on a Friday, in broad daylight, in London, where anyone can see. I'm told there's a photographer from *Witch Weekly* who lives in your square." I take a breath. "I'd like there to be a future now, please. If that's all right. If you still..."
He doesn't let me finish. He pulls me over the threshold by both hands and kicks the door shut behind me, and kisses me in the dim hallway of Grimmauld Place under a row of shrunken elf heads that he swears he's going to take down one of these days.
Somewhere upstairs, an old woman's portrait starts screaming about *blood traitors and filth*, and Harry says, against my mouth, "Ignore her, she does that," and I laugh into his kiss.
We don't make it upstairs. We barely make it to the kitchen.
He lifts me onto the old scrubbed table among the breakfast things, the teapot and the half-eaten toast and a stack of Auror paperwork that goes onto the floor, and I wrap my legs round him and pull him in, and kiss him with everything. With eight months of Thursdays, and every day in between that I wasn't allowed.
"I love you," I tell him. I say it against his mouth, first, where it's easy, and then I pull back and make myself say it to his face, in the daylight, where he can see me. "I love you. I loved you on the third Thursday, when it rained. I loved you when you straightened the picture. I've loved you for months and I couldn't say it, because it was against the rules, and I'm *finished* with the rules."
He stares at me. His glasses are crooked. His hands are shaking on my waist.
"Say it again."
"I love you, Harry."
"I love you," he says, all at once, like it's been sitting in his chest for eight months waiting for the door to open. "I love you. God, I love you. I've loved you since you cried in the Pump Room and blew your nose on my napkin and called me *Potter* like it was my fault."
"It *was* your fault. You had a terrible newspaper."
He laughs, and kisses me, and pushes the blue dress up my thighs, and I help him.
It's different, on a Friday. There's no clock. There's no train. I unbutton his jeans and he lifts me against him and sinks into me there on the edge of his kitchen table, and we both stop, foreheads together, breathing, as if we're each waiting to be told it's allowed. Nobody tells us. No one has to.
"Yes?" he whispers.
"Yes," I say. "Always yes. Every day of the week."
He moves in me, slow and deep, his hands under my thighs, and I hold onto his shoulders and watch his face in the grey London daylight, and he watches mine. It isn't frantic. It's something better. It's the first time I've ever made love to anyone without a secret in the room, and I can feel every inch of him, and he keeps saying my name, and I keep saying his, and I don't care who hears.
When I come, it's slow and it goes on and on, and I cry a little, and he kisses the tears off my face without saying anything, and then he follows me, gasping into my neck, holding me so tightly I can feel his heart through both our chests.
Afterwards he doesn't let go. We stay like that for a long time on the kitchen table among the scattered paperwork, his face in my hair, my arms round his neck.
"I'll have to tell Kingsley," he says eventually, muffled. "That I'm not doing the wedding."
"There isn't a wedding."
"There isn't a wedding *on the third of May*," Harry says. He lifts his head. His eyes are very green. "That's not the same thing."
I look at him for a long time.
"Potter," I say. "Is that a proposal? On a Friday? On your kitchen table?"
"No," he says. "It's a warning. I'm going to do it properly. In Bath. On a Thursday." He grins at me, crooked and terrible and dear. "You'll have to come, to find out which one."
"You're impossible."
"You're in love with me."
"Yes," says Draconia Malfoy, on a Friday, in daylight, with her hair down. "Yes. I really am."