Chapter 3: Terms
I don't wake him. I sit in the armchair by the cold grate with the petition in my lap and read it eleven times, while the window goes from black to grey to the colour of weak tea, and Bartleby comes and sits on my feet.
It's in his handwriting. Not a secretary's, not his mother's. The narrow, slanting hand that labels every jar in the kitchen. Under Reason for Preference, where most petitioners would have written a family name or an amount of gold, he's written a single line.
She would argue with the Ministry's choice. Let her argue with mine.
He wakes at half six. He lifts his head off his arms with a crease across his cheek from his sleeve and sees me, and sees what's in my lap, and every bit of colour leaves his face.
"Hermione."
"You petitioned." My voice is very calm. It's my Wizengamot voice. I'm proud of it. "There was a Schedule C. I said there was a Schedule C. I stood up in front of the Chief Warlock in September and said the old families had bought their matches, and Undersecretary Gaunt looked me in the eye and swore the form was never issued."
"It was issued."
"To you."
"To about forty of us." He sits back. He doesn't reach for it. He doesn't try to take it from me. "My mother had a friend in the Department. She sent me the form in April that year, with a note. She said there were lists. She said your name was on one of them, and that the Ministry's first match for you was Cormac McLaggen."
I stare at him.
"Yes," Draco says. "I had the same reaction."
"So you, what? Rescued me? From McLaggen?"
"No." He scrubs a hand over his face. "Yes. Partly. I'd like to say that was all of it. It would make me sound better." He looks at the window, not at me. "We'd sat on that reparations committee for two years by then. Every Thursday. You argued with every single clause I drafted. You were right about most of them. I used to look forward to Thursdays the way other people look forward to Christmas, which is pathetic for a grown man who'd done what I'd done, and I knew it. I knew you'd never look at me twice. And then the Ministry was going to hand you to someone, whether you liked it or not, and I thought..." He stops. "I thought, if it has to be someone, let it be someone who knows what she's worth."
"And you never told me."
"How could I tell you?" It comes out of him raw. "You spent that whole year furious that the law had taken your choice away. Every night you came home from drafting the repeal and told me what an abomination it was. How was I supposed to say, by the way, it wasn't the law that took your choice. It was me. I wanted you, so I filled in a form, and you had no say." He laughs, a terrible little sound. "I'd stolen exactly the thing you cared about most. The least I could do was let you leave when the year was up. So I put the dissolution forms on the table. I thought it was the only decent thing I'd ever done for you."
The study is very quiet. Bartleby shifts on my feet.
"Is that why you went to the reading," I say, "and left before the vote?"
He nods. "I couldn't watch you win. I'm sorry. I wanted you to win. I just couldn't watch."
I put the petition down on the arm of the chair. I stand up. My legs are stiff from sitting. I walk to the desk and stand between his knees, in my blue dressing gown, and look down at him.
"Do you know what Hermione Granger got," I say, "the same week your petition went in?"
He shakes his head.
"A letter from Kingsley. Personal. Offering me an exemption from the Marriage Law, on account of my services to the war. I could have walked away from it. Never married anyone. Harry got one too, and Ron. They didn't need it, but I did, and Kingsley knew it, and he offered."
His face doesn't move. His hands do. They curl, slowly, on his thighs.
"I didn't take it," I say. "I waited for the match letter instead. I told myself it was principle. That I couldn't accept a privilege other witches didn't have. That was even partly true." I touch his hair. Push it back off his forehead. "And then the letter said Draco Malfoy, and I sat on the floor of my flat and laughed until I cried, because I'd wanted you since the second year of that committee, every Thursday, and I thought I'd won some kind of horrible lottery and I'd never be able to tell anyone."
"Hermione."
"You didn't take my choice," I say. "I made it. I just didn't think you had."
He stands up so fast the chair goes over.
This time is different.
He kisses me against the desk with the petition crushed somewhere under my hip, and it isn't desperate like last night, it's worse. It's slow. He undoes the belt of my dressing gown with his eyes on mine and pushes it off my shoulders, and his hands shake. He kisses me like he's saying something, over and over, and I finally understand what.
"Say it," I tell him. "Out loud. I can't do another year of guessing."
"I love you." He says it against my mouth. Then against my throat, and lower. "I love you. I've loved you since you called my second draft of clause six a moral catastrophe in front of the whole committee. I loved you every day in this house and I never said it once and I'm going to say it now until you're sick of it."
"I won't get sick of it."
"We'll see."
He lifts me onto the edge of the desk. Parchment slides off onto the floor and neither of us looks. I get his trousers open and he's already hard, and I wrap my hand around him and stroke him slowly, root to tip, watching his face go slack. He braces his hands flat on the desk either side of me and drops his head and lets me, his breath coming short and uneven, until he catches my wrist.
"I want to be inside you," he says. "Can I?"
"Yes."
He pulls me to the edge of the desk and pushes into me in one long, slow stroke, and we both make the same sound. I hook my ankles behind his back. The morning light is coming in grey through the window and I can see everything this time: the flush across his chest, the faded Mark, the way his jaw tightens when I clench around him. I can see the ring on his left hand where it grips my hip.
"I love you," I say. It's the first time. It's so easy, after all that.
He stops moving. He looks at me as though I've hit him. Then he presses his forehead to mine and starts again, slower, deeper, so slow it's almost unbearable, rolling his hips into me, and I hold on to his shoulders and let it build. There's nothing to hide behind any more. I tell him what I want, and he gives it to me. He tells me what he's thought about doing every night for eight months, in detail, in a low wrecked voice against my ear, and I start to shake.
When I come, he holds me through it, one hand at the back of my head. When he comes, he says my name like an answer to a question he's been asking for years.
We stay like that for a long time. The study smells of old paper and sex and the cold ash in the grate. Somewhere upstairs, a clock strikes seven.
"We have to be in Chancery Lane at nine," I say into his shoulder.
"I know."
"Section nine. Witnessed signature."
"I know, Granger." He kisses my temple. "Your clause."
Mrs. Agatha Pembury is in her office at five to nine in plum robes and pearls, with the papers laid out on her desk and two quills beside them, freshly cut. She looks at us over her spectacles as we come in. At my hair, which I didn't have time to do. At Draco's shirt, which is yesterday's and has dried with a crease down the side where it lay on the landing carpet. At the fact that we came in together, and that he's holding my hand, and hasn't let go.
"Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy," she says. "Shall we?"
I pick up the quill. I look at the nine pages I drafted in an afternoon, so tidy. The house to him. The library to me. The cat.
I put the quill down.
"We'd like to discuss a different settlement," Draco says.
Mrs. Pembury takes off her spectacles and polishes them with a handkerchief, slowly. "That will be billed by the hour."
"Of course."
"And you're both aware," she says, putting them back on and drawing a thick red Ministry file from her drawer, "of the transitional provisions of the repeal?"
Something cold goes down the back of my neck.
"Under section four," she reads, "any marriage contracted under the 2005 Act which is not re-registered by both parties, in person, before midnight on the Friday following royal assent, shall be dissolved automatically, without further proceedings." She looks up. "That Friday is tomorrow."
There's a pause.
Draco turns his head, very slowly, and looks at me.
"Granger," he says. "Did you write a clause that divorces us tomorrow?"
"It seemed very sensible at the time."
He stares at me. Then he starts to laugh, helplessly, the real laugh, the one I've heard maybe four times in my life. He laughs until he has to sit down in Mrs. Pembury's client chair, and I'm laughing too, and Mrs. Pembury is writing something on her pad that I'm fairly sure is an invoice.
When he can breathe again he looks up at me, still holding my hand.
"Marry me," he says. "Again. Properly. Without the Ministry. Without a form."
"Ask me tomorrow," I say. "Before midnight. In person." I squeeze his fingers. "I'd like to see you do it without a petition."