分卷阅读22（2 / 2）

“That doesn’t have to be done tonight, but this does.” Harry straightens up, and his back pops when he does, proof to how long he had been sitting like that. “I need to keep working.”

“No.” Draco crossed the room and pulled his work away from him, and Harry made a half hearting grabbing motion, but let it slide away. If he had really wanted to stop it, he could have. “It doesn’t. The world won’t stop turning just because you took a break for an hour.”

“But—”

“You deserve a break.” It felt like they were married. This is what it feels like all the time, like they are married and in love and do everything that couples do, accept for kiss and admit that they’re a couple. It’s quite frustrating. “Come hang out with me, just long enough to have dinner.”

He felt like a house wife, tearing his busy husband away from his work just so they could spend time together before the kids got home from their mothers. It’s a bad analogy, one that would get him a lecture from Ginny about sexism and gender roles, but it’s the one that he keeps coming back to.

“Come on.” Draco shoves Harry’s coat at him, and then vanished the papers for good measure. They’re just on top of a set of cupboards, but Harry clearly doesn’t have the motivation to go look for them. “For me?”

Harry wavers, and Draco can see when he makes the decision. “Alright.” he grabs the coat and shrugs it on, then wraps his own scarf around Draco’s neck, ignoring the flinch when Harry reaches toward him. “But only because you asked nicely.”

Chapter 19

Harry

He’s at the pub with Dudley (a gay sports bar, because as Dudley said, there’ll be something for you and something for me and no evil wizards likely to look for you there) to celebrate his birthday when theyr relatively easy friendship comes screeching to a halt.

See, the thing is, Harry still isn’t really sure if he wants to be friends with Dudley, because there are a lot of memories from when they were kids that he doesn’t want to think about. Like getting his head shoved into a toilet, like the whole class turning on him in dodgeball and ending up with a broken nose, all the times that Dudley’s friends pinned Harry’s arms behind his back and let him get used as a punching bag. He’s learning that the bullying aspect of their relationship wasn’t as strange as he had thought (turns out a lot of siblings were cruel to each other when they were younger and grew up to be just fine), but he still can’t forget all the things he watched and didn’t stop—getting thrown into the cupboard, being hit with Aunt Marge’s cane so hard his knuckles bled, being starved, being left alone for as long as he could remember.

So he was tentative, the day he went back to walk down Privet Drive for the last time and ran into him. He hadn’t known what to say, but thankfully Dudley didn’t either.

“Hello.” He was thinner, but still very large, more like a walrus instead of a whale. “You lived, then?”

Harry snorted. “Yeah, Dudley.” He rocked back on his heels and stared up at the room that used to be his. You could still see where they fastened the bars on back when he was twelve, but it didn’t look like something to be afraid of anymore. “I lived. The bad guy died. Life goes on.”

Dudley nodded, long and slow, like he was trying to give them both as much time as possible to chicken out of this conversation. “Cool.”

They did end up talking, grabbing food in the local diner, which Dudley paid for. Harry let him, because a part of him thought he was owed that much, one shitty diner burger and fries after everything this family put him through. But then they were walking out into the sidewalk to their separate cars, and it hit Harry that after eighteen long years, this might be the last time they would see each other, and Harry realized that maybe he didn’t want that. Maybe he wanted something like a real family, even if it’s just the one person.

“Hey.” He took out a dollar bill because it was the only paper he had and scrawled his phone number on it. “This is my number. Call me, and we’ll get together sometime, alright? I want to keep in touch.”

Harry hadn’t thought he was going to, but then one week later, they were meeting up at one of those Japanese places where they cook the food in front of you, at a private table that Harry paid extra for just so they could talk freely about all the wizard stuff. Dudley actually seemed interested and it was the first time that Harry realized that even though Uncle Vernon was afraid and Aunt Petunia was jealous, maybe Dudley was just a little bit excited about having a wizard in the family, even if he never thought he could show it.

That starts a trend. They go out, hitting every restaurant in town, never going to the same one twice. They go to a place where they serve salads so big he has trouble fitting them on the table, to a burger joint with a hamburger the size of his head, to a place twenty minutes outside of the city where they serve the hottest wings on earth, even to a tea shop that Dudley said Aunt Petunia was forcing him to test out before their cousin’s bridal shower. After a few weeks, Harry finds he’s actually looking forward to their meetings each week. It’s like they’re actually on their way to becoming friends, or turning into the family they should have been all along.