Chapter 2: One Last Night
For a long moment he doesn't say anything, and I think I've got it wrong. I think the dressing gown was laziness, or kindness, or simply that he never goes in there any more, and that I'm about to be very politely shown the airing cupboard.
Then he says, "Turn around."
I do. He's two steps down from the landing, which puts his eyes almost level with mine. His shirt is soaked through on the left side where he held the umbrella over me. He hasn't pushed his hair back. I want to push it back so badly my hand aches.
"Say it again," he says.
"I don't want the spare room."
"What do you want?"
It's such a Draco question. Precise, unhelpful, designed to make me do the work. For a year I'd have stepped around it. I'd have said something clever and let him decide for both of us. I have nine pages of divorce papers in my bag downstairs, and in fifteen hours I'll sign them, and I've stopped having anything to lose.
"I want one night," I say. "Just tonight. And then we sign."
His throat moves. "One night."
"Then we sign. I'm not asking for anything else. I just..." My voice does something I don't approve of. "I just want to remember it properly. The last time. I didn't know it was the last time, before. I want to know."
He comes up the two steps. He's very tall up close; I always forget. He puts one hand on my face, his thumb along my cheekbone, and he looks at me for so long that I start to feel it in my knees.
"Are you sure," he says. Not a question the way he usually asks questions. He means it. "You can still go to the spare room. I'd understand. I'd make you tea in the morning and we'd never mention it."
"I'm sure."
"Hermione."
He never used my first name. Not at breakfast, not in front of other people. Only here, upstairs, in the dark. Hearing it in the landing light with my glasses on the hall table downstairs goes through me like a struck bell.
"I'm sure," I say again. "Please."
He kisses me.
It isn't careful. Nothing about it is careful. It's eight months, and it's the arch at Gray's Inn, and it's every morning I spent pretending I didn't want to touch his hair. His mouth is cold from the rain and then it isn't. He backs me into the doorframe and I go, gladly, and my hands are in his wet hair at last, pushing it back off his forehead, and he makes a noise against my lips that I haven't heard since February and have thought about every single night since.
"Bed," I manage.
"Not yet." He's working at the buttons of my blouse, his fingers clumsy with cold. He swears softly when one sticks. "You're soaked."
"So are you."
"Then we'll have to do something about it."
He gets the blouse open and pushes it off my shoulders and it lands somewhere on the landing carpet. My skirt is next. The zip is at the back and he finds it without looking, because he always could. Then I'm standing in the doorway in my damp underwear with my skin prickling in the cold air of the house, and he stops. Just stops, and looks at me, his hands on my waist.
"What," I say. I'm suddenly, absurdly shy.
"Nothing." His voice is rough. "I'd forgotten. No. That's a lie. I hadn't forgotten anything."
I take his shirt off him. It peels away wet and heavy and I drop it on top of mine. He's leaner than he was. The Mark is a grey shadow on his forearm, faded almost to nothing. I put my mouth to his collarbone and feel his breath stutter, and his hands spread wide on my back and pull me in against him, skin to skin, both of us cold and getting warmer.
We get to the bed eventually. It's the same bed, the same grey sheets, and I think it should feel strange and it doesn't. He lowers me onto it and kneels over me and takes my bra off slowly, as though he's unwrapping something he isn't sure he's allowed, and then his mouth is on my breast and I stop thinking about whether it's strange.
He takes his time. He always did. He kisses down my ribs, the soft skin below my navel, the jut of each hip, and when he hooks his fingers into the sides of my knickers he looks up at me and waits.
"Yes," I say. "Draco. Yes."
He draws them down my legs and drops them over the side of the bed. Then he puts his mouth between my thighs, and I have to grab the headboard.
I'd forgotten. I had, actually. I'd forgotten how he does this, how patient he is, how he learns. He licks into me slow and wet and then flattens his tongue and drags it up over my clit, and I hear myself make a sound that would mortify me on any other night. He hums against me. His hands are on my thighs, holding them open, thumbs stroking the crease of my hips, and he works me with his mouth like he has all night and intends to use it. When he slides two fingers into me and crooks them, I come apart almost at once, arching off the sheets, my hand fisted in his hair, his name breaking in half in my mouth.
He doesn't stop until I'm shaking and pushing at his head. Then he rests his cheek against the inside of my thigh and breathes, and I can feel him smiling.
"Don't," I say, when I can talk.
"Don't what?"
"Look pleased with yourself."
"I'm not." He kisses my hipbone. "I'm devastated. This is my devastated face."
I pull him up by the shoulders and kiss him, tasting myself, and get my hands on his belt. He's hard against my palm through the wet wool of his trousers. I get them open and push them down and take him in my hand, and he drops his forehead to mine and lets out a long, ragged breath.
"Hermione."
"I know."
"If you keep doing that..."
"I know," I say, and guide him to me.
He holds himself above me on his forearms and pushes in slowly, so slowly, and we both go still when he's all the way inside. I can feel the full length of him. I can feel his heart going hard against my chest. He looks down at me, his hair falling in his face again, and I push it back, and he turns his head and kisses the inside of my wrist.
Then he moves.
It's slow at first, deep, the old rhythm my body remembers before I do. I wrap my legs around his waist and he groans and goes deeper. His mouth is at my ear, my throat, my jaw. He says my name again and again, low and wrecked, like it's the only word he has left. I dig my heels into the backs of his thighs and he gets the message and fucks me harder, the headboard knocking against the wall, the rain hammering on the window, the whole narrow house full of the sound of us.
"Look at me," he says. "Please. I want to see you."
I look at him. His eyes are almost black. There's something in them I can't name, something raw and frightened and fierce, and I have to look away from it or I'll say something I can't take back. He catches my chin and turns my face back to him, gently.
"Don't," he says. "Not tonight. Don't hide tonight."
So I don't. I hold his eyes while he moves in me, and when he slides a hand between us and finds my clit with his thumb, I hold them still, and when I come the second time it's with his name in my mouth and his face an inch from mine, and he follows me over a moment later with a sound like I've broken something in him.
Afterwards we lie in the dark, tangled, the duvet half on the floor. Bartleby has come in at some point and settled at the foot of the bed with an air of profound judgement. Draco's arm is under my neck. My cheek is on his chest. I can hear the rain easing.
"Why did you stop talking?" I say into the dark. "After your father."
I feel him go still. I expect him to change the subject. He's very good at it.
"Because I thought you'd be relieved," he says at last. "When he died. I thought the year was nearly up and you'd be free soon, and the last thing you needed was to carry another Malfoy's grief around on top of everything else. You'd done your part. You'd married the Death Eater for the Ministry. I didn't want to be one more obligation you couldn't put down."
I lift my head. "Is that what you thought I thought?"
"Wasn't it?"
I don't answer. I can't, quite. The thing I'd have to say is too large to get out of my mouth, and if I said it we'd have to do something about it, and tomorrow at nine we're signing. One night, I said. I made the terms.
So I put my head back down and he strokes my hair, and I pretend to fall asleep, and after a while he does, for real.
I wake at four. The rain has stopped and the room is silver with streetlight, and his side of the bed is empty and cold.
I find my dressing gown on the back of the door, and it still fits, and it still smells like this house. I go downstairs barefoot. There's a light under the study door.
He's asleep at the desk, his head on his folded arms, still wearing nothing but the trousers he must have pulled back on. There's a glass of water by his elbow and a pile of parchment under it, and I should go back upstairs. I know I should.
The top sheet has the Ministry crest on it. I'd know that form anywhere; I spent all autumn arguing against it. Marriage Law (2005), Schedule C: Petition for Preferred Match. A form the Ministry swore to the Wizengamot it never used. A form for old families with gold and influence, letting them name who they wanted.
Petitioner: Draco Lucius Malfoy.
Preferred match: Hermione Jean Granger.
The date at the bottom is three weeks before my letter came.