It’s only been three weeks since graduation, and already your name is stitched in silver thread on a set of monogrammed towels you didn’t ask for.

Black.

You don’t hate the name. You don’t hate the ring either, even though it feels too heavy on your hand. Like a secret someone dared to make permanent.

The marriage was arranged — of course it was. An old agreement between older families. The kind that smells like parchment and dust and ambition. You’d both known it was coming, but knowing and living it are two different beasts.

You thought Regulus Black would be colder.

You thought he’d be like the rumors — sharp-tongued, prettier than sin, all dark robes and darker loyalties. But in the quiet of your new shared townhouse in Notting Hill, with no one watching, he’s…gentle. Not exactly soft, but precise in the way he treats you. Like he’s trying.

He makes tea without asking how you take it, and it’s always right. He doesn’t hover, but he never quite leaves the room. You find books by your bedside he swears he didn’t put there. But he does this thing — this look — when you mention them, like he’s memorizing the way your mouth moves when you talk about something you love.

You’re both still getting used to sleeping with someone else in the bed. The first few nights, you barely breathed. But one night, he shifted closer in his sleep — a twitch, a sigh — and you didn’t move away. Now, there’s a pattern. Two pillows. Shared blankets. A middle space that grows smaller every morning.

He watches you sometimes when you brush your teeth. Not in a creepy way. Just like he doesn’t understand how this happened. Or maybe that he can’t believe it did.

“You don’t have to pretend,” you said once, not looking at him. “To like this. To like me.”

He didn’t say anything right away.

Then: “I’m not pretending.”

You believed him.

He brings you flowers without a note. Tells you his secrets like he’s not sure he’s allowed. When you catch him in the kitchen barefoot, shirt wrinkled, hair mussed from sleep, he looks almost boyish. Like the seventeen-year-old you barely knew at Hogwarts. Just a boy trying to follow rules he didn’t write.

You catch yourself thinking about what this could be. Not just a name on paper. Not just duty.

One evening, you’re in the garden with a book in your lap and sunlight warming your collarbones, and he leans in — doesn’t ask, just leans — and kisses you like he’s been wanting to for days.

And when he pulls back, he says it so quietly you almost miss it: “I think this could be something. If you let it.”