Chapter 1: The Schedule
The schedule was laminated.
Hermione had bought the laminator from Ryman's on Tottenham Court Road the week the Ledger paired them, along with a pack of coloured tabs and a ruler with a metal edge, and she had told the man at the till it was for work. It was not for work. It was for the single most humiliating document she had ever produced, and she had wanted it to be wipe-clean.
She had it in her handbag now, at her own wedding reception, in the private room upstairs at the Leaky Cauldron, while Ginny made a toast that was eighty percent threats.
"And if he so much as looks at her wrong," Ginny was saying, glass raised, "I want everyone here to remember that I have a Beater's bat in the boot of my car, and I have a car now, Harry taught me, so I can get to Chelsea in about twenty minutes, Malfoy. Cheers!"
"Cheers," said the room, uncertainly.
Draco Malfoy, her husband of three hours, raised his glass to Ginny with every appearance of sincerity. "Noted," he said. "Does Harry let you drive on the motorway?"
"Harry doesn't let me do anything."
"Wise of him."
Ginny squinted at him and then, to Hermione's enormous surprise, laughed.
That was the trouble with Draco, Hermione thought, drinking her champagne slightly too fast. He had been doing it for a month. Since the Ledger had written their names side by side in that horrible gold ink, he had been pleasant. Not friendly, exactly. Draco did not do friendly. But he had been courteous to her friends, prompt to every appointment at the Ministry, and so calm about the whole thing that she had started to find it sinister.
He had worn black dress robes today with a silver pin at the collar, and the cut of them made his shoulders look a mile wide. He had not done anything to his hair, which was white-blond and fell over his forehead in a way he had clearly stopped fighting. He looked like a portrait of some dissolute ancestor who had lost the family fortune at cards and not minded much.
He had kissed her at the registry because the registrar told him to. It had been brief and dry and completely proper, and she had thought about it, on and off, for the rest of the afternoon.
Across the room, he caught her watching him. He did not smile. He just let his eyes rest on her for a moment, steady and grey and unhurried, and she found something very interesting to look at in the bottom of her glass.
The ring on her left hand was warm. It had been warm since the ceremony, a plain band of Ministry silver with a thin line of enchanted enamel running all the way round it, currently the colour of a traffic light about to change. Amber. The registrar had explained it cheerfully, as if he were reading a gas bill: amber until the marriage was consummated, gold once it was. If it was still amber at midnight on the thirtieth day, the binding magic would turn back on both of them, and they would each lose the use of their wands for a year and a day.
The Act called it the Wedding Night Clause. Hermione had read every word of it. She had read the annexes. She had read the Wizengamot debate in which a ninety-year-old wizard called Elphias Dribble had argued, at length, that it was "only tradition."
Hence the schedule.
His house was on a quiet square in Chelsea, narrow and tall and painted the colour of clotted cream, with a black door and a brass knocker shaped like a dragon's head that snapped at Hermione's fingers when she reached for it.
"It doesn't know you yet," Draco said, and laid his palm flat against the door. The dragon looked at him, looked at her, and subsided with a sulky clank. "Granger, house. House, Granger. She lives here now. Behave."
"Does it understand you?"
"It's a door. It understands three things: me, my mother, and people who try to post leaflets." He stood back to let her in. "Your things arrived this morning. The elf put them in the blue room. Second floor."
"You have an elf?"
"I pay her a salary. She has a pension. She's also a better barrister than you, so I'd avoid arguing with her about it." His mouth twitched. "Her name's Tilly. She's been dying to meet you. She's read all your pamphlets."
The blue room was beautiful. There were bookshelves, empty, waiting for her. There was a window seat. There was a very large bed with a very white duvet and, at its foot, her three cardboard boxes looking embarrassed about themselves.
Draco leaned against the doorframe and loosened his collar. "Separate rooms," he said, "until you'd rather not. Mine's across the landing. The lock on yours works, I checked it myself. There's a bathroom through there and Tilly will bring you tea in the morning if you tell her how you take it. And if you don't tell her, she'll guess, and she'll guess right, and you'll find it unsettling."
She took a breath.
"Before you go," Hermione said. "I've prepared something."
He raised one eyebrow. She took the schedule out of her handbag and held it out to him, and he took it, and he looked at it.
She watched him read. She knew exactly what he was reading, because she had rewritten it eleven times. Thirty rows. Thirty days. Every row colour-coded: blue for practical matters, green for what she had titled, after a lot of deliberation, Getting Acquainted, and one single row, Day Twenty-One, highlighted in a sober and businesslike shade of red.
Day Twenty-One, Thursday. 7pm: dinner (light). 8.30pm: discussion of boundaries and preferences (see attached questionnaire). 9pm: Consummation. Notes: after Wizengamot session, so that I am not thinking about it all day.
There was an attached questionnaire. It had tick boxes.
Draco read the whole thing, both sides, with an absolutely straight face. He turned it over to check there was nothing on the back. Then he turned it over again and read Day Twenty-One a second time.
"Granger," he said.
"It's practical."
"It's laminated."
"So it doesn't get damaged."
"You laminated," he said, very slowly, as if he were savouring each word, "a document scheduling our first time for nine o'clock on a Thursday. After the Wizengamot."
"Some of us have demanding jobs, Malfoy. Some of us can't spend all day in a state of anticipatory dread."
"Dread." He looked up. "That's the word you'd use."
She lifted her chin. "It's a legal obligation with a deadline. I treat legal obligations with deadlines the way I treat all of them. With preparation and—"
"Do you know," Draco said, cutting across her, "what you look like when you're nervous? You look like this. You hold your chin exactly like that. You did it before your first case in front of the full Wizengamot, the Fenwick appeal, when I was the expert witness for the other side and you took me apart in cross-examination for an hour and forty minutes. You were so nervous your hands were shaking under the bench and nobody else in the room could tell."
She stared at him.
"I could tell," he said. "I was watching your hands."
The landing was very quiet. Somewhere downstairs a clock chimed eleven.
"I'm not doing it on a Thursday," Draco said. He held the schedule out to her between two fingers. "Or on day twenty-one. Or at nine o'clock after you've spent the day arguing about cauldron tariffs, with a questionnaire."
"It's the law."
"The law says thirty days. It doesn't say Thursday." He took a step toward her, and then stopped, and she had the sense that he had put the stop there on purpose so that she would see him do it. "Here's my counter-offer, since you like terms. You throw that out. I don't touch you. Not once. Not until you ask me."
She narrowed her eyes. "And if I never ask?"
"Then on day twenty-one I'll knock on your door at nine sharp, in a tie, and we'll do your questionnaire, and I'll never say a word about it again." His voice dropped. "But you'll ask, Granger. Before then. And when you do, you'll ask properly. In plain English. No sub-clauses."
"That's incredibly arrogant."
"Yes," he agreed.
"You realise I could just hold out to twenty-one out of spite."
"I'm counting on you to try," said Draco. "It'll be much more fun for both of us."
She ought to have been furious. She was furious, a bit. She was also, she noted with the clinical part of her mind that never switched off, extremely warm, and the warmth was not coming from her ring.
"Fine," she said.
"Fine?"
"Your terms. I'll consider the schedule suspended." She took the laminated sheet back from his fingers and did not tear it up, because it had cost her a whole evening. "But I'm keeping it."
"I'd expect nothing less."
He pushed off the doorframe. She thought he was going to leave. Instead he paused on the threshold, close enough that she could smell him: something green and bitter, like crushed fern, and under it clean linen and a trace of the champagne.
"There's one thing not on your schedule," he said quietly.
"Everything's on my schedule."
"I read it. Twice. There's nothing about kissing your husband goodnight." His eyes dropped to her mouth and came back up again. "It's not forbidden, either. I checked that too. So I'm asking. May I?"
She ought to have said no. It would have been the clever move. It would have established a precedent.
"Yes," she said.
He did not grab her. She'd half expected that, from the way he looked at her: something sudden and showy, a performance. Instead he lifted one hand and slid it along her jaw until his fingers found the curls at the nape of her neck, and he tipped her face up, and he took his time about it. He kissed her as though he was learning something. Slowly at first, the barest pressure, and then, when she made a small noise against his mouth that she would deny for the rest of her life, not slowly at all.
Her back met the doorframe. She didn't remember moving. His other hand was flat against the wood beside her head, not touching her, and it was somehow worse than if it had been. She caught a fistful of his dress robes and pulled, and he made a low rough sound and pressed in for a moment, the whole long length of him against her, and kissed her until she forgot what she had been going to argue about.
Then he stopped.
He stepped back. His hair had fallen into his eyes and his breathing was not quite even, and she noticed with savage satisfaction that his hand, as he lowered it, was not entirely steady either.
"Goodnight, Granger," he said.
And he walked across the landing and into his room, and the door closed with a soft, polite click.
Hermione stood in the doorway of the blue room for a long time.
Then she went in, and locked the door, and sat on the edge of the very large bed with the laminated schedule in her lap and her pulse going like a Snitch in a box. The ring on her finger glowed its stubborn amber. Twenty-nine days left.
She found a pen in her handbag. She uncapped it. In the margin beside Day Twenty-One, in very small and very neat handwriting, she wrote:
Do not ask him first.
She underlined it twice. Then, after a long moment, she underlined it a third time, because she already knew exactly how much trouble she was in.