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December
The affair doesn’t end as planned.
They never do.
Nested atop a barstool amidst billows of red satin, sucking down another vodka cranberry, it’s the wasted time that bothers Hermione most. Professionally, she’s never squandered a minute. The Oxbridge years. The Zürich residencies. The paediatric neurology practice at St. Mungo's. At twenty-seven, the weekend wand buzz urging her to fire-call the hospital affirms she's not merely competent, she’s indispensable. A future of innovations, publications, keynote speeches and department chairs crests a tantalisingly infinite horizon.
Yet here she sits in the underwhelming now, sermonising to Draco Malfoy on the subject of her sexual grievances from the pulpit of an open bar.
No philanthropic opportunity has been left unexploited on his quest to rebrand. He's expensive as ever, working the St. Mungo's Children's Hospital Foundation holiday gala with the swagger of Paul Newman in Venice, 1963, weaned off hair wax and congenitally acquired bigotry onto canapés and auctioned wine.
She's surprised when he takes the neighbouring barstool, gliding in on the correct amount of scent and lacquered with self-satisfaction, but she's drinking away fresher injuries than he can offer and can’t be bothered to care.
“Here alone, Granger?”
What a question.
Hermione’s used to explaining things to people. She’s also used to watching people's eyes glaze over, but Malfoy hangs onto every word of a speech that edges uncomfortably close to bitter tirade.
She’s “with”—she brackets the word with exasperation—Roger Davies, only now she’s not, because there are only two ways for these things to end.
“Which are?”
"One," she says, "it runs its course."
A few months, maybe a year if the sex is good, then someone stops getting what they want from the arrangement and the love train chugs into its terminus with the energy of a trombone slide.
“Two,” she continues.
The option Roger chose. The one Hermione must now rank second-worst amongst a lengthening history of awkward and disagreeable outcomes.
“He waits until your employer’s annual black tie fundraiser,” she says, “to produce a jewellery box containing his flat key with a ribbon attached, and announces he’s ready for more.”
“And that's not what you wrote Father Christmas for?”
Hermione stabs her lime wedge with a cocktail straw and scoffs. “‘Please bring me a lifetime supply of a man's dirty socks on my bedroom floor.’ If I wanted that, I'd have married Ron five years ago.”
He regards her with interest, cool as the ice in his G&T. “What do you want?”
On close inspection, he's a bit deadly. It's the combined power of self-regard, an open ear, and a cunningly tailored suit.
Hermione wants—
“An expiration date would be nice.” She suctions up the watery dregs and signals for more. “Let’s say I want . . . a year. Exactly one year of monogamy without the possibility of further commitment."
"Quite the scheme. Do you accrue fines if your lover's returned past due?"
"Five Sickles daily. Honestly, people are constantly trying to squeeze out more than what they’ve been told they can have or survive on less than what they need. It’s humiliating for everyone involved.” She trades glasses with the bartender. “Abhorrently disorganised system.”
Draco has the gall to laugh.
“It's not funny!" She catches his wrist in supplication, tamping down a laugh of her own. "Listen! I'm serious.”
He peels her hand away and settles it on the bar. “I’m listening.”
“Good.”
“I’m hearing that you’d like strings. But loose ones. Precut.” He gestures at the crowd, brimming with Healers, rising Ministry stars, and a handful of plutocrats the right side of middle age. “I'm sure any man here would let you tie him up.”
“It couldn’t be anyone I know,” says Hermione. “Socially, I mean. Professionally.”
She omits: or anyone who’ll hold her back. Drag her down. Measure his talents and ambition against hers and discover himself resentful. Unilaterally attempt to convert his invitation to Hermione’s overscheduled now into a claim on her bright and illimitable tomorrow.
Draco leans close, breath stirring in her ear. “I’m getting married in a year.”
Their proximity registers like a slap: face to face, knee to knee, hands nestled on the bar like confidantes. Hermione recoils.
“I had no idea. I would never—”
“Relax.” He slips a fifty Galleon piece to the bartender. “I only wanted to mention it beforehand.”
“Before what?”
He stands, shrugs out of his tuxedo jacket and slings it over his shoulder. “Before you follow me home and come to bed.”
February
“Are you ever going to ask why?” Satisfaction looks obscene on him, lounging in the wreckage of a superlative romp like the cat that got the cream. “Curiosity should be killing you, of all people.”
Hermione gives up locating her knickers and shimmies into her dress.
“Would you like me to?”
"I'm only surprised you haven't."
“Arranged marriages make perfect sense. So long as they’re an option and not a requirement.”
She asked the pertinent questions the first night he brought her back to his pied-à-terre and undressed her in front of the fire.
Does your fiancée know you’re taking women home?
Woman. Singular.
Will it bother her?
I don’t intend to bring it up.
She studied his marriage contract while he eased her dress off her shoulders and kissed his way down her spine.
The document was Pureblood boilerplate. Total freedom during the engagement. Magically-enforced fidelity thereafter. Practising discretion in premarital affairs, Draco explained, was a courtesy, not a requirement. His forefathers had all been profligates.
“Marriage is an inherently practical domestic arrangement,” she muses as she bends over to fasten her shoe. “I don't see why the selection process shouldn't be dispassionate. Anyway, are any of us truly knowable?”
He shifts in the bed behind her. Gathers her skirt to her waist. Breathes across her bare wet skin.
“Two months down,” he says.
“Already?”
“We aim for superior service, so—” His fingertips skate between her legs. “Opening the floor to constructive criticism.”
They’ve always gone to his. Never Hermione’s. Never the Manor where he'll welcome his bride. She suspects she’s become erotically conditioned to the smell of his laundry detergent. The arrangement strikes her as neat, rather than sordid. Forward-thinking. Considerate.
Words she never imagined attaching to his name.
“You’re so good,” she murmurs.
He hums victoriously as he drags her back into bed.
April
He gives her a key. There’s a ribbon, too, but Draco’s is green. It's a necessary expedient, not a shove into more. Greater access frees up time. Safeguards confidentiality. Allows Hermione to retrieve what she’s left behind.
Draco's at home when she arrives to collect a dress for Ginny's baby shower—barefoot, shirt untucked, sipping tea from a Chinoiserie cup and contemplating a sea of stationery.
Hermione fetches the sundress from his closet. By the time she emerges dressed and freshly showered, he’s gathered the cards in a stack.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?”
He holds out her favourite cup. Herbal tea. Lemon, for the antioxidants.
To her surprise, Hermione doesn’t chafe between the pages of their closed book. She likes being a secret. Enjoys keeping him like one, too. They’ve drawn a veil around themselves, and behind it they are revealed. She knows his morning hair. His sunken scars. The never-waning thrill of his quickening breath as she grapples with his trouser buttons. They're squatters in the house of delight, and the mementos of their time will be the catch of morning sun in his clear grey eyes. His knees on the floor and her knees to her chest, her orgasmic toe curl and their bodies lathered with cleanser when they're done. This time will be forever private, and so forever theirs, and she covets all the secrets she’s privileged to store inside him. The parts of him she keeps concealed inside herself.
“What are these?” Squeezing water from her hair, she peers at the elegant papers.
He hesitates, and Hermione swallows the sting.
There are infinite shades of white. Here lie one hundred.
“They’re—” he begins.
“Sample invitations. I know.” Hermione turns over a response card. Draco and Astoria. Astoria and Draco. She touches an ecru envelope lined with midnight blue. “I like this one.”
He cages her against the table. Brushes the papers aside. Toys with her sundress strap.
“This is very nice.”
“They’re expecting me early at the Burrow.”
His lips drag across her skin, trailing the strap as he lowers it.
She counts their secrets as he takes her over the table, his key swinging rhythmically on her wrist.
His shower stall tenor.
My taste in his mouth.
Draco and Hermione.
Hermione and Draco.
Accepts with pleasure.
Declines with regret.
We are a secret, she thinks, and is satisfied. To have and to hold and to keep.
May
“Come away with me.”
Hermione chucks her research papers onto the nightstand and rubs her eyes. “The probability someone recognises us outside this flat is not as low as we'd both like to think.”
“I mean actually away.” Draco sets his book aside. Snakes a hand beneath the duvet. “For a week.”
“I can't take an entire—oh. That's cheating.”
“All's fair,” he preens, ducking under the sheets. “Et cetera.”
Hermione parts her knees. “Is this war?”
June
He sends a Roman coin in a velvet box, and along with it a note:
Pack nothing.
Hermione tries to be annoyed. But if he intends to spend the week naked, she can’t bring herself to complain.
On a dreary London afternoon, the Portkey coin swirls her away from Crookshanks’s narrow-eyed contempt and deposits her on a terraced cliffside scented with saltwater and citrus blooms. She’s dressed for sun. The reward for her optimism is arid heat mitigated by a nearby bay.
Under a pergola dripping with summer-bright lemons, she shields her eyes and peers down on a stuccoed town pinched between cliffs and sea, sun battering its terracotta roofs and the sailboats tacking in the harbour.
“Buongiorno, Signorina.”
An elf, button-up shirt tucked into linen trousers, ferries a cup of granita on a tray.
Hermione piles icy spoonfuls into her mouth and lets them melt. When she’s finished, the elf returns and bids her to follow him.
They trace a waterfall uphill past terraced lemon groves and vegetable gardens to a villa welded to the cliff face like a barnacle. The elf—“Mi chiamo Lello, Signorina”—deposits her in the doorway of a vaulted room, its balcony vista sweeping along the terraces to the town and harbour below.
A mountain of wrapped packages obscures the bed. There's a note:
Try them on.
Hermione tugs the nearest ribbon and gasps. Both ribbon and paper fall away in a cascade of glitter that winks out like a firework. What’s left behind is a folded rectangle of black lace. She unfurls it and blushes.
She tears through package upon package, revealing scanty sundresses, dresses in watery silk with floor-length skirts, scarves and sun hats and sunglasses, thin gold bangles and elegant hoops, capri sandals and two-piece bathing suits ready for a Grace Kelly wardrobe call. There’s not a stitch of pyjamas, only an endless froth of the most exquisite lingerie Hermione's ever seen.
“That one’s my favourite.”
Draco leans in the doorway, modelling the perfected form of the casual open collar.
“Is this place yours?” she asks.
“Blaise's. I told him I have an enemy I can only defeat with lemon zest and extraordinary sex.”
"And I'm meant to make do with erotic macramé for armour?" An indecipherable tangle of straps dangles from Hermione’s fingers. “Where will I put all this when I get home?”
He crosses the room like he's savouring the wait.
“You’re a witch.” He runs a knuckle over the swell of her breast. “You’ll figure it out.”
Lounging in a velvet chair, he watches her model dresses, sandals, earrings and a gold watch whose price point she will not consider.
“This is beyond ridiculous, even for you.” She twirls before him, skirt floating to her waist.
He catches her hips and draws her into his lap, then tucks a finger into her bodice and peers inside. “If a man can’t buy himself everything he wants whenever he wants it, I don’t see the point in living.”
“And here I thought I was meant to give you something.”
He’s never looked more guilty.
She lifts her chin. “I'm offended you thought I didn’t know."
Who could have missed the steady stream of owls to the Hogwarts breakfast table once upon a time? The towers of gifts: Quidditch gear and leather-bound books and boxes upon boxes of chocolates and extravagent sweets.
"Mi scusa, my nosy little scholar.” He plants a penitent kiss between her breasts. “As a birthday gift from myself, to myself, I plan to enjoy you for one week. Recreationally.” Another kiss. “Intellectually.” Yet another. “Licentiously.”
She peels her dress over her head. Tosses it aside and cups her naked breasts like they're an offering.
“Then enjoy me.”
For a week, they walk hand in hand up steep pedestrian streets, eating Delizia al Limone and Ricotta e Pere and cups of chill granita. They sail a golden coast in a trim teak boat, and amidst the jewel-coloured splendour she can only see him, windblown and tranquil, body tensing as he hauls on the lines.
They climb ladders to harvest the Sfusato Amalfitano, the famed Amalfi lemons larger than a fist, under the watch of elves with names like Nino and Gigi, all free, all fairly compensated, all—Draco treats the word like it’s intentionally pissed on his shoe—“Collectivized.”
The lovers bite through the thick-skinned fruit like apples, liquid sweetness dribbling down their chins. They drink watered-down wine from the hollowed out rinds. Twirl their forks in fettuccine snowed over with zest. Make love beneath a lemon tree, his hips between her sun-drenched thighs.
At night, underneath him in the vast white bed, clutching his arm over the flat, glossy scar where long ago he burned away the skin, she marvels at the stars wheeling across the enchanted ceiling overhead and wonders if his wife will ever see them.
September
There's no trace of the wedding after the invitations. He never mentions his post-December plans. She rarely speaks about hers. The effect is like walking away from one another inside a fog only to meet again some hours later, neither ever explaining where they’ve been. They talk about books and current affairs, theatre and food and medical research, history and poetry and Potionery, topics Hermione rarely indulges as deeply as she'd like with her friends.
It never occurs to bring up Neville’s dinner invitation, and the woman he's anxious to introduce.
Hermione’s doubts begin with the Mayfair address, and crescendo as she approaches the house. Half of Gryffindor tower plus Luna wait for her on the pavement, every one of them afraid to knock.
The instant Hermione raps on the door, it swings wide.
Harry says, “Christ.”
Seamus hoots.
Pansy Parkinson stands in a cocktail dress and Louboutin pumps in the foyer of what is obviously the incorrect address.
Her lips part and close, sculpting a phrase adequate to the occasion.
She runs with, “Please, do come in,” and then, a bit defensively, “I’ve made flan.”
By the end of the dessert course, licking streaks of caramel custard from a literal silver spoon, Hermione's nearly prepared to let it slide that Pansy's a titanic bitch. She's never seen Neville so serene. Never watched him struggle to keep his hands off a woman's arse.
For her part, Pansy leans into the better angels of her breeding, playing hostess with an iron grace Hermione almost allows herself to envy. But despite Pansy’s steady stream of tailored conversation starters—each immediately overwhelmed by Quidditch ramblings—Hermione feels, not for the first time in company, that she's alone. She raises her voice in raucous Gryffindor laughter, compliments Pansy’s cooking and the wine, coos over photographs of Harry and Ginny’s heavily salivating baby and longs for the warmth of Draco's hand.
The long-term implications of a Pansy-Neville conjunction don’t land until Hermione's helping Neville with the washing up.
And then they do.
Pansy's trying hard. Not for them, but for Neville, and, Oh, God, Hermione thinks, they’re actually, horrifically, hopelessly in love. And if they are, and it doesn’t stop—
“Are you giving a dinner to break it to Pansy’s friends as well?”
“We are,” says Neville. “Next week.”
“Who do you plan to—”
“God, Hermione.” Neville covers his face, and when his hands slide away he’s as apple-cheeked as Harry’s silly-looking baby and unreservedly, incandescently happy.
“I’m going to marry her,” he says. “I knew the first night.”
And just like that, Neville signs Hermione up for a course in the endurance of pain.
She sees the photo in Pansy’s hall.
Unable to look away, Hermione strokes the patinaed frame to remind herself it’s only an image. Draco stands stock still in a suit and tie, cradling a placid, dark-haired young woman, reed-thin in a slim white dress, left hand resting on Draco’s lapel to display a diamond the diameter of a Knut.
A question germinates in Hermione’s chest like a seed of malignancy.
Does he kiss her?
“Personally,” says Pansy, “I think the ring’s a bit much.”
She leans in the doorway, wine glass in hand.
Hermione’s intellect flounders in a flood of cortisol. Her mouth is dry. She takes too long to respond.
Pansy tilts her head.
“Your birthday’s coming up, isn’t it?” She brings the glass to her lips, gaze never leaving Hermione. “We should go shopping.”
An impertinent note arrives at the hospital during office hours.
I gave you my key. Now give me yours.
That night, making out like teenagers on the sofa, Hermione guides Draco’s hand into her pocket. He finds a brass key there, dangling from a red satin ribbon.
“It’s yours,” she says, “even though you have no idea where my flat is.”
“You have no idea what I do and do not know.”
Draco tosses the key aside and begins working open the fly of her jeans.
“Do you need my address?”
“No.” He angles an impatient hand past her lowered zipper. “I need in your knickers. Have you seen your arse in these?”
He gives up and flips her onto her stomach.
She glares at him over her shoulder as he peels her jeans down her thighs. “What are you planning?”
Draco draws her back onto her knees. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
On her birthday, she wakes to Crookshanks yowling at the smell of bacon.
Draco’s in her kitchen manually cracking eggs into a bowl and swearing like a naval recruit. Autumn flowers clutter every surface, and a hand-painted sign hung over the kitchen table reads A Very Muggleborn Birthday! in a fussy hand Hermione recognises from impertinent notes she receives.
Should she feel self-conscious about her overnight moisturiser and satin-wrapped curls? The dense wool socks on her feet? Her plain cotton pants?
“Is that mine?” Draco points a silicone turner at her oversized sweatshirt.
"Of course it is."
He plies Crooks with bacon, speaking to him like they’re members of the same nineteenth century social club.
“I’m terribly sorry about all the sitters she’s foisting on you, old man. It’s just that it’s frightfully difficult to persuade the filthy little minx to leave my bed.”
Hermione lifts Crooks off the floor and gets a bacon-drunk hiss for her trouble.
“You’re spoiling him.”
“No,” he says, “I’m spoiling the eggs.”
He’s spoiled nothing, and slides just-set eggs with livid yolks onto two plates already piled with sausages, fried tomato, and the bacon he’s not yet fed to the cat. A shiny new high-end toaster sits on Hermione’s worktop, and she watches as Draco puzzles out its operation, under-toasting then burning until he produces four Platonically ideal golden slices. He scrapes expensive butter across them with a knife, feeds Crooks both pieces of his bacon, then joins Hermione at the table with a flourish of his serviette.
Hermione nibbles a sausage tip. “What are you doing, Malfoy?”
“Celebrating the anniversary of your auspicious Muggle debut,” he says. “No magic today, by the way. Are the eggs overdone?”
The eggs are brilliant.
The morning proceeds to Hermione’s unmade bed—
“Why,” he grumbles, hot breath seeping through the white cotton crotch of her pants, “are these turning me on?”
—then to the shower and a waiting cab.
They take the train from Victoria station—
“You’re mad,” she hisses, “do you know how many people—”
“I do,” he admits, and kisses her mouth.
—to Bath.
Settling headphones over his ears, he makes a face like he’s slipping into wet jeans, then holds Hermione’s hand in the open air while they follow a Jane Austen audio tour.
The bitter kernel never leaves her heart, almost ignorable until they’re back in London and sat brazen in centre-orchestra at the Scottish play.
It’s a bud of pain, she thinks, a compacted embryo that will inevitably bloom. A prearranged exit seemed clever. Now she’s shackled to an inescapable awareness that everything ends.
She catalogues sensations the way her child self copied out rare volumes in the library. The chill of the cab’s vinyl seats. The heat of his hand through her tights. Candlelight cupped in a half-empty glass. The silence when the record needle lifts.
Take comfort, she tells herself. This ends in grace.
With painstaking effort, she excavates the freedom in acceptance. The power in letting go. Finds nothing to cling to or run away from. No one to convince. No one to let down.
Gathers the courage it requires to give in.
His first night in her flat, Draco sleeps like the dead. Crookshanks, disgusted with Hermione for locking him out of the bedroom during sex, lies curled behind his knees.
When she's certain Draco's asleep, Hermione whispers the malignant question.
“Do you kiss her?”
His grip tightens around her waist. He breathes in. And slowly out.
“No.”
Crookshanks purrs in the quiet.
“Never?”
“Listen, minx.” Draco guides Hermione’s ear to his chest. “What’s it say?”
Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Steady and slow.
“It says, ‘Hermione, Hermione,’” he mumbles. “Now go to sleep.”
December
The affair ends as planned.
“We should schedule it.”
Draco sends a string of silver bells coiling around Hermione’s tree with a wand flick. “Schedule what?”
Hermione doesn’t answer.
He adds cranberries. Ribbons. Glittering icicles. A perpetual snowfall.
“The 20th,” he says.
“That’s the day before your—”
“The 20th.”
“They’re having a Christmas party," says Hermione, deliberately casual. “Pansy and Neville.”
“I know.”
“I think—it’ll be fine, won’t it?”
Draco reaches over her shoulder to adjust the shower tap.
“It will.”
She’s delicate. Fine-boned. Slight.
Hermione hates that she notices. Despises that she cares. Rages against a valuation of women that prizes compactness.
Astoria and Draco travel the room like salt and pepper shakers, forever together and always apart.
She’s kind, Hermione thinks. Soft-spoken, with sweet mannerisms and a pleasing, open curiosity towards her conversation partners.
She looks tired.
It’s worse—infinitely worse—to know that Hermione could like her. Will like her. Does. She understands too well the comfort in disliking people when they have something you want. The urge to scratch a shiny surface and uncover rot. Absent animosity, you're left with your own dissatisfaction. Resentment curdling your nature. Turning it sour.
It is a choice, Hermione thinks, to live that way.
“It’s extraordinary,” she says of the ring.
Astoria looks at Draco with wide blue eyes, gentle in ways Hermione will never be. There’s affection between them. It won’t take long for them to love.
“I told him it was overgenerous.” Astoria’s smile is natural and warm. “Which was terribly ungenerous of me. He's always so kind."
Hermione will not be sour. She's drunk from the cup of a sweeter lemon, and wears its memory like a perfume on her skin.
They spend their last night at his. She doesn’t ask about his stag party, though it was her bed he stumbled into. They don’t discuss the hour he’ll leave in the morning. How she won't cry until he’s gone. That when she’s done, she’ll gather up her things and take them home.
Dinner goes cold while they fuck in front of the fireplace, fast and rough and vulgar, and it stays cold while they lie naked in each other’s arms, kissing deep and long and slow like they’ve forgotten how to stop.
Near midnight, he summons a silver-wrapped box.
“Happy Christmas.”
Hermione's unprepared, wearing nothing but his bed sheet while she hoovers up a box of takeout noodles on the sofa.
It’s a heart-shaped gold locket. Small. Anonymous. Unobtrusive.
When she lifts the lid, a pair of tiny gold keys flutter out, smaller than Hermione’s smallest fingernail, miniature gold wings flapping as they circle midair, coming together and drifting apart but always staying near.
Draco tucks a coil of hair behind her ear. “I never asked for more, did I?”
"No."
Their time has fled and gone.
It's all gone.
She scoops the keys out of the air with the open locket. They fold their wings and lie side by side like they’ll go to sleep once she closes the door.
In all Hermione's plans and calculations, she never considered how to endure a catastrophic haemorrhage of the heart.
She failed to account for the bud and the bloom, for a vast, extravagant grief that must mean—can only mean—one thing. This is a death, she thinks, howling against a still-warm pillow steeped in the smell of him, I am dying, only they'll both go on living, through galas and dinner parties and weddings and births, carrying inside their bodies the undisclosed ephemera of a year.
She purges pain until she's clean and hollow.
Washes her face.
Changes his sheets.
Leaves the key out on the table.
At half past six—sick with sorrow, fastened into a green velvet gown for a gala she won't attend—Hermione answers the hammering at her door.
Pansy seethes on the landing, a fascinator clinging to the side of her head like a tropical bird in mating season.
"Lovely gown, Granger," she growls. "Party?"
"A gala, actually. For the hospital. Unfortunately I'm not feeling—"
"Are you actually this obtuse," Pansy interjects, "or simply cruel? I suppose you might be both.”
Hermione's head hurts. She doesn't understand.
"I’m not sure I—”
“Obtuse. Fucking perfect." She presents a downturned fist. "Fix it.”
It takes Hermione a moment to understand she’s meant to hold out her hand. When she does, Pansy releases an object from a handkerchief into her palm.
The world turns.
She’s been here before.
Dressed for a wedding, Malfoy Manor is almost unrecognisable: floating candles and crystal swags, ice-crusted pine boughs and columns of snow-white roses, and somewhere down the hall a violinist.
Hermione pockets the hair pin Pansy fashioned into a Portkey and swallows a swell of nausea.
She didn’t choose to be here. Yet here she stands, the other woman in a low-cut gown, trying to figure out why she shouldn’t run.
Fix it.
Fix what? Someone else’s major life decisions? Burst through the doors on their perfect day and offer a second opinion?
The keys flutter inside Hermione’s locket like they want out.
The first step is the least advisable and hardest to take. The rest happen all on their own.
She follows the violin—surely a recessional, surely she’s too late, surely Pansy has everything wrong—to a set of double doors.
Thinking is what got you here, Hermione thinks, and throws them open.
Flowers flood the margins of a stainless white aisle. Overhead and all around, candles flicker through the longest night. In an alcove, a lone violinist plays while the orchestra idles beside their instruments, drinking lager.
It’s a room full of empty chairs.
Alone, head in his hands, Draco sits before a wall of immaculate white roses. He lifts his face, and it's obvious he's been crying.
Fix it.
The keys crash frantically against the lid of the locket as Hermione walks down the aisle.
He's more than a bit deadly. It's the combined power of his beloved face, familiar arms, and her longing to be safely wrapped within them.
“You're here,” he says, and his relief breaks her heart.
It's the wasted time that confuses Hermione most.
“Why?” she asks.
“Because I’m obligated to marry before I turn thirty.”
“Or?”
“Several rather ingenious heirloom curses start kicking in.”
“My God." Fear and rage burn through her. "Why didn’t you say?”
“I kept telling myself it didn't matter."
"It did," says Hermione. "It does."
His body sets down an invisible burden.
"Did Astoria know?" she asks.
“She's . . . very ill. A year ago, it seemed—” He weighs his words. “She was doing me a tremendous favour. I made a promise to care for her in whatever time she has left, but—” His voice falters. "I couldn't keep it. I tried. But I can't. Not when there's you."
Guilt rises like bile in Hermione's throat.
“Is she alright? Will she be alright?”
“She was concerned about you, actually."
"Of course she was."
“Hermione, may I please fucking hold you?"
He can, and he does, like they're falling through thin air.
"What do you want?" he asks.
Only uncut strings. A draught of improbable sweetness, with a tonic sting. Someone who’ll urge her on. Lift her up. Recognise her faults and limitations and discover himself enraptured. Hold her in the irretrievable now like he knows that everything, everywhere, someday will have its ending. Love her like he'll have to let her go.
“Let’s say”—she looks down at the locket and fidgets with its lid—“I want a year.”
“Of—?”
“Monogamy. I don’t like to share.”
“Agreed," he says. "And at the end?”
The keys batter the locket’s interior like the tongues of a bell. She pries open the lid and they burst into the room, winging high above their heads and glittering in the candleglow.
“I’ll ask for more.”