Turn 17 of 36

Ask Draco what displays of physical closeness he would find tolerable

The words sit between them. *We will need to practice.* Hermione watches Draco's face for the flinch, the sneer, the reflexive curl of the lip that she has been watching since she was eleven years old. It does not come. What comes instead is a stillness so complete that she can see the moment he decides to hold himself in place rather than let whatever is underneath reach the surface.

"What displays would you find tolerable?" Hermione asks. She asks it the way she asks questions in the Ministry — direct, clear, stripped of anything that could be mistaken for invitation. Her quill is poised over her list. This is a negotiation point. It is a clause in a contract. It is not a woman asking a man where she may put her hands on him.

Draco looks at the documentation. Then at his cold coffee. Then at the window, where the fogged glass is running with condensation and a Muggle woman walks past with a pram, oblivious to the two wizards in the back corner negotiating the terms of forced intimacy. His throat moves.

"My arm across your shoulders at events. Your hand on my forearm when we enter a room. Standing close enough that our sides touch." He says each one like he is reading from a list he prepared before she arrived, and Hermione realises with a jolt that he has — he has thought about this before sitting down, has catalogued the touches that would satisfy the Ministry's requirements while minimising the cost to them both.

"Sustained but not — " he pauses. The pen turns between his fingers.

"Not performative. Something that looks habitual."

"Habitual," Hermione repeats. The word tastes strange. Habitual means muscle memory. Habitual means they have done it enough times that the gesture no longer requires thought. She writes it down. Beside it, in smaller letters: *requires repetition.*

"What would you find intolerable?" she asks, because the question matters as much as the first one — maybe more, because the line between tolerable and intolerable is where the choreography becomes something else, and she needs to know where that line is before they cross it by accident.

Draco's gaze comes back to her. It is steady, grey, and for a moment completely unguarded — the mask not held but simply absent, as though the question has slipped past the mechanism that usually controls access. She sees him register that she asked about his limits before stating her own. She sees him recognise what that means.