Chapter 3: The Marriage Bed of the Household
It took her forty minutes to find it, and she found it wearing nothing but his shirt.
She had the whole Act spread across the library floor by then: the main text, the three schedules, the annexes, the Wizengamot debate transcripts she had Summoned from her own bedroom upstairs. Draco sat on the sofa behind her in his unbuttoned trousers with a glass of brandy, watching her work and occasionally passing her a document before she asked for it, which she found both useful and unnerving.
"You don't have to stay up," she said, without turning round.
"And miss this? You're cross-referencing in my shirt. I've had less interesting nights at the opera."
"You've never been to the opera."
"I've been to the opera eleven times. My mother has a box. I've slept through every one of them." He leaned forward. "What's Annex C?"
She was already reading it. Annex C was where the Wizengamot had put everything they had copied wholesale from older law, because it was easier than writing anything new. Most of it was harmless. Some of it was very old. Paragraph four had been lifted, word for word, from a marriage statute of 1693.
She read it twice. Then she put her face in her hands.
"Granger?"
"'The union,'" Hermione read through her fingers, "'shall be deemed sealed when it is consummated in the marriage bed of the household.'"
There was a short silence.
"The marriage bed," said Draco.
"Of the household."
"Not the library."
"Not the library," said Hermione. "Or the rug. Or the bookcase. Or, specifically, I'm afraid, the Wizengamot Law Reports."
She heard a strange sound behind her and turned round. Draco Malfoy had his head tipped back against the sofa and one hand over his eyes, and his shoulders were shaking. It took her a moment to realise he was laughing. Properly laughing, helplessly, the way she had never once heard him laugh in all the years she had known him, until his breath hitched and he had to put his brandy down on the floor.
"It's not funny," she said, and then she was laughing too, curled on the rug in his shirt with tears running down her face. "It's not funny, it's a drafting disaster, I am going to write to the Chief Warlock—"
"Write to him. Please. I want to read that letter. 'Dear Chief Warlock, re: the bookcase.'" He wiped his eyes. "Merlin. Seventeen ninety-three—"
"Sixteen."
"Sixteen ninety-three, and some wizard in a periwig decided the floor didn't count." He looked at her, still grinning, flushed and dishevelled and more beautiful than any man had a right to be at one in the morning. "Well. I suppose we'll have to do it again. In a bed. Purely for legal reasons."
She meant to laugh. She meant to say something quick and cutting back.
Instead, to her absolute horror, she looked down at the ring on her hand and went quiet.
He noticed. Of course he noticed. He noticed everything about her; she was only just beginning to understand how much.
"Hermione," he said, in a different voice entirely. "What is it?"
"Nothing."
"You've got the face you make before you lose an argument you've decided not to have."
She turned the ring round her finger. It was still warm, still amber. It was stupid. It was the stupidest thing she had ever let herself feel, and she had once spent a week crying over a man who couldn't spell "fortnight."
"It's just," she said, and stopped. "When it goes gold. That's it, isn't it? Legally. Obligation discharged. You won your bet. And then you'll go back across the landing, and be courteous to my friends and bring me tea, and we'll be very civilised about the whole thing for the next forty years." She made herself look up. "And I'll know what it was like. That's all."
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he got off the sofa, and came and knelt on the rug in front of her among all her papers, careful not to crease any of them, and took her left hand in both of his.
"The Fenwick appeal," he said.
"What about it?"
"Three years ago. I was the expert witness for the defence. You had me in that box for an hour and forty minutes, and you pulled my testimony apart one thread at a time, and you were so polite about it I wanted to applaud." His thumb moved over her knuckles. "Your hands were shaking under the bench and your voice never moved at all. I went home that night and couldn't eat. I sat in my kitchen until three in the morning thinking, that's her, that's the most frightening person I have ever met, and I'd let her take me apart every day for the rest of my life."
She stared at him.
"Three years," Draco said. "I came to every one of your hearings I could get away with. I sat at the back. You never saw me. When the Ledger wrote our names I thought for a full minute I'd finally cracked and imagined it." He laughed, short and unsteady. "I didn't throw your schedule out because I was laughing at you. I threw it out because I could not bear to be one item on it. I didn't want to be your obligation, Granger. I wanted you to want me. And you asked." His voice dropped. "You asked."
"Draco."
"I'm not going back across the landing," he said. "Not unless you send me. That's not a term. That's just the truth."
She was crying again, she realised. Not much. Enough. She pulled her hand free and he let her go at once, and she saw him brace for it, saw him think she was about to stand up and walk away.
Instead she reached past him to the sofa, where her handbag had landed when they came through the Floo, and took out the laminated schedule.
There was a wax pencil in the inside pocket. She had brought it for the laminate. She uncapped it now, turned the schedule over to the blank back, and wrote, in handwriting much less neat than usual:
Day thirty-one: Draco.
He read it upside down. She watched his face change.
"And day thirty-two?" he asked roughly.
She wrote Same. And drew a long arrow all the way down to the bottom of the page.
"I'm going to need a bigger laminator," she said.
He kissed her so hard she dropped the pencil.
His room was across the landing, dark green and quiet, with tall windows looking out over the sleeping square. The bed was enormous and old and had a canopy, and Hermione thought, distantly, as he laid her down on it, that it was exactly the sort of bed some periwigged idiot in 1693 would have had in mind.
It was different this time. She had not expected it to be different.
In the library they had been all teeth and hurry, twelve days of tension tearing loose at once. Now he took his time. He took his shirt off her one button at a time, and kissed every inch of skin it revealed, her collarbone, the hollow of her throat, the soft underside of her breast, as if he were making a map he intended to keep. When she reached for his trousers he caught her wrists, gently, and pressed them into the pillow above her head.
"Let me," he murmured. "I spent three years at the back of a courtroom. Let me."
So she let him.
He moved down her body slowly in the grey light from the windows, and by the time he settled between her thighs she was already trembling. He used his fingers this time as well as his mouth, two of them curled inside her, finding a place that made her arch clean off the mattress and grab the canopy post with one hand. He kept her there for a long time. Every time she got close he slowed, and she swore at him, and he laughed softly against the inside of her thigh and did it again, until she was saying please, please, Draco, and meant every word.
When she came, it rolled through her slowly and went on and on, and he held her hips and stayed with her through all of it.
Then he moved up her body and settled his weight over her, propped on his forearms, his face very close to hers. She could see the faded Mark on his arm beside her head and she turned and pressed her lips to it, deliberately, and felt the shock go through him.
"Hermione," he said, barely audible.
"I know," she said. "Come here."
He pushed into her slowly, his eyes on hers the whole way. She wrapped her legs around his hips and pulled him deeper, and they both made the same sound at the same moment, and for a while there was nothing in the room but breathing.
He moved slowly. Long, deep strokes that she felt all the way up her spine, his forehead resting against hers, his hand cradling the back of her head. She could feel every inch of him. She ran her hands down the long muscles of his back and felt them shift and tense as he moved, felt the silver scar across his ribs under her fingertips, felt him shudder when she dug her nails in.
"Look at me," he said hoarsely. "Please. I want to see you."
She looked at him. She did not look away again.
It built slowly, and then not slowly at all. His rhythm faltered and turned ragged and she rose to meet him, harder, faster, the old bed creaking under them and the canopy swaying, her heels pressed into the backs of his thighs. He got a hand between them and touched her, and she broke for the second time with his name in her mouth and her eyes open, and she watched him follow her a heartbeat later, his whole body going taut, her name torn out of him like something he had been keeping under lock and key for three years.
He collapsed half on top of her, then rolled so she was tucked against his side with her head on his chest. Neither of them said anything for a long while.
Then she felt it. A warmth on her left hand, spreading, like sunlight on skin.
She lifted it between them. The thin band of enamel around the ring was gold. Not a pale or careful gold. Bright, deep, triumphant gold, glowing in the dark of the room like a tiny sunrise, and on his hand, resting on her stomach, his ring was glowing exactly the same.
"Well," Draco murmured into her hair. "That's that, then."
"Legally binding."
"Signed and sealed." He pressed a kiss to her temple. "In the marriage bed. Of the household. The periwig would be so proud."
She laughed, and he pulled the duvet up over both of them, and somewhere between one breath and the next she fell asleep.
She woke at seven to the sound of an owl tapping at the window.
Draco was asleep beside her, sprawled on his stomach with one arm flung over her waist and his face turned into the pillow. Asleep, he looked softer than he ever let himself look awake, and much less guarded. She slid out from under his arm as carefully as she could, pulled his shirt on again from where it had ended up on the floor, and padded to the window.
It was a Ministry owl, small and self-important, with a long scroll sealed in Wizengamot purple. It was addressed to them both.
She broke the seal and read it standing at the window, in the first grey light of the morning.
Dear Mrs Granger-Malfoy, Mr Malfoy. The Matrimonial Compliance Office regrets to inform you that, owing to a transcription error in the Pairing Ledger identified during routine audit, your match was recorded in error. Your marriage is accordingly voidable at the election of either party, without penalty under any provision of the Act. Should you wish to petition for annulment, please complete the enclosed form and return it to Level Two within fourteen days.
Hermione read it twice. Then she looked at the bed, where her husband was sleeping with his hand still stretched across the empty space she had left, as if he had reached for her and not found her.
"What's that?" Draco mumbled into the pillow, not opening his eyes.
She looked at the letter. Then she drew her wand from the pocket of his shirt, and touched its tip to the corner of the parchment, and watched it curl and blacken and burn away to nothing in the palm of her hand.
"Nothing," she said, and brushed the ash off the windowsill. "Junk post."
"You've never called anything junk post in your life."
"Then I'm starting." She climbed back into bed and fitted herself into the curve of his arm, and his hand settled at her waist as if it had always belonged there. "Go back to sleep, Malfoy. It's day thirteen. You've got a very long schedule."