Chapter 2: Ask Nicely
You didn't bring the quill.
You thought about it. You stood in front of your desk at half seven on Saturday with your coat on, looking at the quill in its stand, and thought: if I take it, this is research. If I take it, I'm the columnist, and he's the story, and I'm in charge. Then you thought about two fingers under your chin in a cupboard full of furs, and the way he'd said it's always going to be your choice, and you left it where it was.
His flat was on the top floor of a tall, plain house in a Bloomsbury square, five flights up, no lift. You were out of breath by the fourth landing and furious about it by the fifth. He opened the door before you knocked.
"Wards," he said, when you narrowed your eyes at him. "They tell me when someone's on the stairs. You were swearing from the second floor. It was very charming."
He was in shirtsleeves. That was the first thing. You'd never seen Theodore Nott without a jacket. Grey shirt, open at the throat, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and his forearms were not what you'd expected from a man who sat at a desk in the Department of Mysteries all day: long and corded, a scatter of dark hair, a thin pale scar across the inside of one wrist. No watch tonight. Barefoot on the wooden floor. It shouldn't have been indecent. It felt indecent.
"Come in," he said.
The flat was not what you'd expected either. You'd imagined something dim and leather-bound and old-fashioned, a younger version of whatever gloomy manor his father had kept. It was bright and almost bare. White walls. One long low sofa. A wall of books, organised, you saw at a glance, by colour, which was frankly unhinged. A gramophone playing something with a cello in it. Big windows looking out over the treetops of the square, and a single lamp on, low.
He took your coat. Of course he did. He hung it up on a hook by the door and turned back to you and said, quite seriously, "Before anything else happens, we're going to talk."
You blinked. "Talk."
"Sit," said Theo, and you sat, which surprised you, because you'd never sat on command in your life.
He didn't sit next to you. He poured two glasses of wine, handed you one, and sat on the low table in front of the sofa, facing you, elbows on his knees. Close enough that his knees bracketed yours.
"You've written about me for two years," he said. "I've never once told you what I want. So I'm going to, and then you're going to tell me what you want, and then we'll see if there's anything in the middle." He turned his glass slowly in his long fingers. "I like being in control. Not of your life. Not outside that door. Out there you can savage me in print every week and I'll fetch your coat and thank you for it. But in here, I like to give the orders. I like to take my time. I like to make people wait for things until they ask me for them properly." His dark eyes held yours. "And I like to hear them ask."
Your mouth had gone completely dry. You took a sip of wine to fix it. It didn't.
"That's what you meant," you said. "By improper."
"That's what I meant." The corner of his mouth moved. "Now you."
Nobody had ever asked you that. Not straight out, not like this, sitting in front of you like a man taking a statement. The men you'd been with had either assumed, or guessed, or not thought about it at all. You looked at Theo Nott, the quiet one, barefoot in his own flat with his sleeves rolled up, waiting, patient as a stone, and you heard yourself say it.
"I want you to stop being polite," you said. "I've watched you be polite for two years. I want to see what's under it. I want you to tell me what to do." Your face was burning. "And I don't want you to be gentle about it unless I ask."
He was very still. Then he set his wine glass down on the table beside him with a soft click.
"If you want me to stop," he said, "at any point, for any reason, you say Zabini. Not stop. Not no, because sometimes people say no and mean more, and I won't guess. You say Zabini, and everything stops, and I'll make you tea and we'll talk about something boring. Say it back to me."
"Zabini," you said, and nearly laughed. "Mrs Zabini's going to haunt us."
"Mrs Zabini would be thrilled." He reached out and took your glass from your hand and set it down next to his. "Stand up."
You stood up.
He stayed where he was, sitting on the low table, so that for once you were looking down at him. He let his eyes travel over you, slowly, the whole length of you, the way he'd read you in the cloakroom. Your dress was black and simple and buttoned up the front, and you watched him notice the buttons.
"Undo them," he said. "Slowly. I want to watch."
Your fingers were shaking. You did it anyway, one button at a time, from your collarbone down, while the cello sawed away on the gramophone and the lamp burned low and Theodore Nott watched every inch of skin you uncovered without moving or speaking. When the last button was open, you let the dress slip off your shoulders and pool on the floor, and stood there in your underwear in the middle of his bright bare flat with your heart hammering.
"Good," he said quietly. And that one word, low and approving, did something to you that two years of men saying you're gorgeous had never come close to.
He stood. Now he was looking down at you again. He walked round behind you, not touching, and you felt rather than saw him there, the warmth of him, his breath on the back of your neck. His fingertips found the clasp of your bra and opened it with one movement. Then they traced down your spine, slowly, vertebra by vertebra, to the small of your back, and stopped.
"Hands behind you," he murmured. "Hold your own wrists. Don't let go until I tell you."
You did. It pushed your shoulders back and your breasts forward and left you with nothing to do with your hands but grip, and you heard him breathe in, slow, behind you.
"Very good," Theo said.
He took his time. He'd warned you he would. His mouth found the side of your neck, just under your ear, and lingered there until you were tilting your head to give him more. His hands came round to your front and cupped your breasts, thumbs circling your nipples, slow, slow, until they were hard and aching and you were pressing back against him without meaning to. You could feel him through his trousers, hard against the small of your back. He didn't do anything about it. He just kept touching you, with that same unhurried, devastating attention.
"Please," you breathed.
"Please what?"
"Touch me. Properly."
"I am touching you properly." His hand slid down over your stomach and stopped at the waistband of your knickers. Waited there. "Ask me nicely. Tell me exactly where."
You did. Your voice cracked halfway through, and your cheeks flamed, and you said it anyway, every filthy specific word, while he held you against him and listened with his mouth at your ear. When you'd finished, he made a low sound in his throat that you felt all the way down your spine.
"There," he said. "Was that so hard?" And slid his hand down inside the silk.
You'd have collapsed if he hadn't had an arm around your waist. His fingers found you soaking and he swore, very softly, the first time you'd ever heard Theodore Nott swear, and then he began to stroke you, slow circles, firm and patient, learning you. Your hands clenched round your own wrists. Your head fell back against his shoulder. He talked to you the whole time, low and quiet, praising you, telling you how wet you were, how good you looked holding still for him, how he'd thought about this at every single party for two years while you sat across the room taking notes about him.
When you came, it was with his name and a sound you'd never made before, and he held you up through it and kissed your temple and didn't stop until you were twitching.
"Let go of your wrists," he murmured, and you did, and he turned you round, and kissed you for the first time.
It was nothing like you'd imagined. You'd imagined something careful and gentlemanly. It was deep and hungry and absolutely in charge. He walked you backwards while he kissed you, through a doorway, into a bedroom you didn't look at, and laid you down on cool white sheets, and stripped off his shirt and trousers with a briskness you'd have laughed at if you'd had any breath left. He was lean and pale and long, and very hard, and when he knelt between your thighs he caught both your wrists in one hand and pressed them gently into the pillow above your head.
"All right?" he asked, and there was the gentleman again, just for a second, checking.
"Yes. Don't you dare stop."
He pushed into you in one long slow stroke, watching your face the whole way, and held there, deep, until you were writhing under him. Then he moved. Slow, then not, his rhythm steady and merciless, his free hand gripping your hip, angling you, finding the place that made you cry out and staying there. He made you ask for it faster. He made you ask for it harder. He gave you both, every time you asked nicely, and praised you for it, his voice wrecked and low in your ear, until you came apart again with your wrists pinned in his hand and your heels digging into his back, and he followed you with a groan into your hair, shaking.
Afterwards, he made you tea. He brought it to the bed and handed it to you and then sat against the headboard with his arm around you, and was suddenly, impossibly, Theo again: quiet, a little shy, his thumb moving absently on your shoulder.
"Was that," he said, then stopped and started again. "Was that all right?"
You looked at him over your tea. "Theo. I'm going to have to invent new words."
He laughed, low and pleased, and kissed the top of your head.
You stayed the night. You hadn't meant to. In the morning there was toast and the Sunday papers, and you walked home through the square in last night's dress, feeling like someone had rearranged the furniture inside you.
On Monday, Witch Weekly came out. You bought it at the newsagent on the corner the way you always did, to check they hadn't butchered your copy.
Behind the Green Door was on page four. Your pen name. Your typeface. Your dear reader in the first line.
You hadn't written a word of it.
Which gentleman of the Slytherin set, it began, was seen on Saturday night admitting a certain sharp-tongued lady to his Bloomsbury flat at eight o'clock, and not letting her out again until ten the next morning?