Chapter 3: Terms
He didn't let go of your wrist. He didn't tighten his grip either. He lay there on your aunt's velvet couch with the gold light of her collection on his face, naked and unhurried, and looked at you as if you were a problem he hadn't been set before.
"What would you do," he said, "if I said yes?"
"That's not an answer."
"It's a better question." His thumb moved, once, over the inside of your wrist, over the pulse. "If I say no, you'll know I'm lying, and you'll never believe another word I say. If I say yes, you'll have to decide what to do with it, and you'll have to decide now, with your wand in your hand and me lying here without mine." His mouth curved. "I left it in my coat, you'll have noticed. You've just been holding it."
You looked down. You hadn't noticed. You'd had your fingers right on it, in the inside pocket, thirteen and a half inches of yew, and you'd been so busy looking for a cup that you'd passed it by.
"You're telling me you're unarmed."
"I'm telling you I came here tonight and put myself in your hands." He let go of your wrist. "That's a thing I don't do. I'd like you to understand how unusual it is."
You sat back on your heels on your aunt's carpet. Your wand was in your right hand, his coat was still in your left. Neither of you moved for a long time.
"Hokey couldn't add," you said at last. "But she could remember. Every elf can, if you know how to ask. Before they took her to Azkaban, before she died there, a man came to see her. A professor from Hogwarts. He asked her about the night my aunt died, and he took the answer out of her head, and put it in a phial, and he gave a copy of it to me. Because I'm family, and because he thought I ought to know." You watched his face. "I've watched it fourteen times. You're in it."
He didn't move. But something went across his face, very fast, like a shadow across a field. "Dumbledore," he said.
"Dumbledore."
"Of course." He laughed softly. It didn't sound pleasant, this time. "Of course it was him. He always did take an interest."
"The phial's in a drawer in my hall. There's a letter with it, and another one at Gringotts, and another with a solicitor in Cairo. If anything happens to me, any of them goes straight to the Ministry, and to the Prophet, and to every client Borgin and Burkes has ever had." You held his gaze. "I'm not threatening you. I'm telling you why I let you in."
"You let me in," he said slowly, "because you knew you couldn't be killed."
"I let you in," you said, "because I wanted to see if you'd try."
The silence went on a long time.
Then Tom Riddle sat up on the couch, slowly, so as not to startle you, and leaned his elbows on his knees and looked at you kneeling on the carpet with your wand in your hand, and his face did something you'd never seen it do, not in the shop, not at dinner, not even when you'd had him under you on the velvet. It was surprise. Plain, unguarded, almost bewildered surprise.
"Nobody," he said, "has ever done that before."
"Done what?"
"Told me no. And then made it safe for themselves to keep saying it." He looked at your wand, and then at your face, as if one explained the other. "I've spent my life arranging things so that I'm the only one in any room who can't be hurt. I'm very good at it. I'm going to be better. And you've walked into my shop and arranged the same thing, with a phial and three letters, without even raising your voice." He breathed out. "Yes."
You went very still.
"You asked me a question," he said. "That's the answer. I'm not going to tell you I'm sorry. I'd be lying, and I've decided not to lie to you. I wanted something she had and she wouldn't sell it to me, and I took it, and she was in the way. I've thought about that night about as often as I think about breakfast." His dark eyes held yours. "I'm telling you because you're the only person I've ever met I'd rather have know the truth than like me. That's all. You can do what you like with it."
There it was, out loud, in your aunt's gallery, in front of her empty case. You'd known it for nine years. You'd known it in Cairo, reading her last letter. You'd known it watching Hokey's memory, the shape of a tall young man at the door with a box of cakes. And still, hearing it in his voice, flat and calm and without a trace of shame, went into you like cold water.
You should have reached for the drawer in the hall. You knew that. A better woman would have. Your aunt, who had called him a charming boy with such a lovely face, would have expected you to.
"She was a silly, vain, greedy old woman," you said, "who kept every lovely thing she owned behind glass so no one else could touch it. She used to make me wear gloves in this room when I was small. She left me her house and every single thing in it and I haven't moved one teaspoon in nine years, because I didn't know if I was keeping it for her or keeping it from her." Your voice wasn't steady. You let it not be. "I loved her. And I came back from Cairo to bury her, and I stood in this room looking at two empty cushions, and the first thing I felt, the very first thing, God help me, wasn't grief. It was that I wanted to meet whoever had been clever enough to get past her."
He was absolutely still.
"So don't tell me what I'll do with it," you said. "I don't know yet. But I know I'm not afraid of you. And I know that's the thing you can't stand."
He came off the couch and down onto the carpet in front of you, on his knees, so you were face to face. He didn't touch you. You still had your wand. He looked at it, and then he took your wrist again, very gently, and moved it until the tip of your wand rested against his chest, over his heart.
"Then set your terms," Tom Riddle said.
You looked at him for a long time. The light from the cases was gold on one side of his face and dark on the other.
"You never lie to me," you said. "Not once. Not about anything."
"Agreed."
"You never touch anyone of mine. Not my house-elf. Not my friends. Not my solicitor in Cairo."
The corner of his mouth moved. "Agreed."
"And one day," you said, "when you've stopped needing it, whatever it is, whatever you've done with it, you bring me back my aunt's cup."
He didn't answer for a long moment. Something moved behind his eyes, deep down, a long way back, like something turning over at the bottom of a lake.
"One day," he said at last, very quietly. "Not yet."
It was the most honest thing he'd ever said to you. You could tell, because it cost him.
You put your wand down on the carpet between you. You didn't push it far away. Then you took his face in both your hands and kissed him.
It was different from the first time. The first time had been a duel. This was the morning after one, both of you wounded and wary and alive. He kissed you back slowly, and when you pushed him down onto your aunt's carpet among the scattered clothes he let you, and lay there looking up at you with that bewildered look still on his face, as if he couldn't work out why he was allowing it.
"I want to watch you," you said, straddling him. "This time. I want to see your face."
"You'll see it," he said, and his hands came up to your hips, and held on.
You took him inside you slowly, sinking down an inch at a time, and watched every bit of polish go out of his expression as you did. His eyes went half closed. His lips parted. His fingers dug into your hips, hard enough that you'd find marks in the morning, and you wanted them. When you were fully seated, you stayed there, perfectly still, until he said your name in a voice like something breaking.
Then you moved.
You rode him slowly at first, rolling your hips, finding the angle that made you gasp and keeping it, and he let you set the pace, let you take what you wanted, his hands sliding up your sides to your breasts and back down. You bent and kissed him and he pulled you down hard against his chest and thrust up into you, deep, and you both cried out. The glass cases glittered all around you. You caught sight of the empty black marble stand at the end of the room, two hollow cushions catching the light, and you shut your eyes and didn't look at it again.
He rolled you over without warning, onto your back on the carpet, and you laughed, breathless, and pulled him down. He drove into you with long deep strokes, his forehead against yours, one hand braced on the floor and the other sliding down between your bodies to touch you, the way he'd learned you liked it, slow circles that got faster as you got louder. You wrapped your legs around him and dug your heels into the small of his back and held on. You came with your nails in his shoulders and his name in your mouth, Tom, Tom, and he followed you with a broken sound, burying his face in your neck, holding on so hard it felt like he was afraid you'd disappear.
Dawn came up grey over the rooftops. You lay on the carpet under his coat, which he'd pulled over both of you at some point, your head on his shoulder. He was awake. You could tell by his breathing. He'd been awake a while.
"I've applied for a job," he said, to the ceiling. "At Hogwarts. I'm going up to see Dumbledore next week. Defence Against the Dark Arts."
You lifted your head. "He'll never give it to you."
"I know." He smiled faintly. "I'm going to ask anyway. I want to see his face."
"You're a terrible person."
"I'm aware." He looked down at you. "There's something else. In the interests of not lying."
You waited.
"I've been building a name," he said. "For years now. Something to go by that isn't Riddle, because I've no wish to carry a dead Muggle's name around for the rest of my life. A few people use it already. More will." He hesitated, which you'd never seen him do. "I've never told anyone outside of that circle. Lord Voldemort."
You looked at him for a long moment.
"Voldemort," you repeated.
"Yes."
"Like the pudding?"
His face went perfectly blank. "What?"
"There's a French pudding," you said. "In Lyon. Voldemort. Or something very like it. A sort of soufflé that collapses if you look at it."
"There is not."
"There might be."
He stared at you. And then something happened that you'd swear afterwards, to no one, because there was no one you could ever tell. Tom Riddle laughed. Not the soft, warm, beautiful laugh he used on witches in the shop, not the cold one from the night before. A real one. Startled out of him, helpless, ugly, his head going back against your aunt's carpet and his whole body shaking with it under his coat.
You lay there in the grey light and watched him laugh, the most dangerous man you'd ever met, and thought about the drawer in the hall, and the phial, and the three letters. And you knew, quite clearly, the way you knew a fake from a real piece in an instant, that you'd never send any of them. Not as long as he kept his terms.
Not as long as he kept coming back.
"Friday," he said, when he could breathe again. "Same time."
"I haven't said yes."
"You haven't said no." He kissed your forehead, very lightly, a strange careful gesture, as if he'd read about it in a book. "You're the only person alive I'd let say it. I'll take my chances."