Turn 19 of 36

Suggest we start practicing the tolerable touches now, here, where no one is watching

Hermione looks at the table between them. The portfolio is open, the annotated pages fanned out, the word *choreography* in Draco's handwriting staring up at her from the margin. She has spent the last hour treating this like a negotiation because that is what she knows how to do — she organises, she categorises, she reduces the impossible to a list of actionable items. But the list will not teach her how his arm feels across her shoulders. The list will not make the first time she reaches for his hand in front of Ministry observers anything other than a stranger's touch performed under surveillance. And the first formal event is not weeks away. It is days, possibly, if the Ministry schedules the inspection early and the event follows immediately after.

"We should practice," she says. She has said it once already, but this time the words land differently — not as a strategic observation about the documentation but as a proposal, here, now, at this table.

"Here. Where no one is watching."

Draco's hands are still flat on the table. She watches the word *practice* reach him and watches the brief, visible struggle — the instinct to deflect warring with the part of him that prepared a list of tolerable touches before he walked through the door. The part that is trying to survive this rather than perform his way through it.

"Which one?" he says. His voice is careful. Not cold — careful, the way someone handles an object they have been told is fragile but have never touched before.

"Your arm across my shoulders. It is the most visible of the three. If we can make that look habitual, the others will follow." She keeps her tone practical. She is proposing a rehearsal, not a confession. Her hands are steady. The binding magic is warm against her ribs and she ignores it.

Draco lifts his arm. The movement is stiff, self-conscious, the gesture of someone who has thought about where his arm should go but has never actually put it there. His hand hovers behind her shoulders for a moment — she can feel the heat of his palm through her coat, the slight tremor in his fingers that he is controlling through sheer will — and then he settles his arm across the back of her chair. Not her shoulders. The chair. Close enough that the Ministry would call it proximity, far enough that it is not yet touch.

"This is ridiculous," he says. But he does not move his arm.

"It is," Hermione agrees. She shifts slightly, letting her shoulder press against his side, and the binding magic flares — not pain, not pleasure, but a deep, physical recognition, as though something inside her chest has unclenched after years of holding. His arm is rigid. The muscles beneath his coat are locked. She can feel the effort it is costing him to stay rather than pull away, and she understands that effort because she is paying the same cost on her side of it.

"It will not look like this," she says. "At an event. We will be standing, walking. It will need to be fluid."

"It will need to look like I have done it a thousand times."

"Yes."

"I have never done it once."

The honesty of it sits between them. His arm is still across the back of her chair, her shoulder still against his side, and the café is warm and close and full of Muggle jazz and the clatter of cups and nobody is watching. Nobody knows. They are two people in a corner booth pretending to touch, and the pretending is already less terrible than she expected, and that fact frightens her more than the alternative.