August 2002
Unsurprisingly, it was Hermione who got the joke first. Harry was at their place on a Friday night for fish and chips; it was a weekly routine although they varied the location between Ron and Hermione's, and Harry's flat.
Out of nowhere she snorted and covered her mouth with her hand to hide her giggles.
"What?" Ron demanded.
"You're like William and Harry," she said, gasping for breath.
"Yeah, so?"
"Like the princes. The Muggle princes, the Queen's grandchildren?"
Ron shrugged. Harry glowered.
"Really, Ronald, did you pay no attention at all during Muggle Studies?"
"You know I didn't," he said and kissed the top of her head.
His best friends knew a little bit about Will, but not much. It was hard to hide from them the fact that he'd met someone since he never did take those four drinks back over to the table; he'd hopped up onto a barstool instead to talk to this new, intriguing person. In the end Fred had come over, helped himself to his pint and winked at Harry before leaving him to it.
The whole mess was complicated by the fact that the people in his life who he was closest to were Charlie's brothers and his sister and sister-in-law. Despite the fact that it had been Ron who had encouraged him to let go, to see where the world would take him, he didn't want to rub the fact that he'd met someone in his face.
Sometimes his family felt far too incestuous.
The rules surrounding the Statute of Secrecy were understandably severe and frustratingly archaic. It was for this reason that Harry had decided that he wasn't going to go down that long and arduous route to try and get permission to tell Will that he was a wizard, and instead had told the other man that he worked in a special branch of the police.
It wasn't a lie, exactly.
They'd been on exactly two dates since Harry's birthday; one pre-arranged meeting at a pub not far from the one they met in, and a few days later, after spending the day sat home alone, Harry had turned up when he knew Will would be finishing his shift and offered to buy him a pint.
It was strange, this funny dance they were doing, neither yet quite sure how to approach what they were both afraid to refer to as a relationship. After Will asked for his phone number Harry had scratched it down onto the back of a beer mat and had received a call a few days later.
"You've got a landline," Will had said when he answered.
"Yeah..."
"I wanted your mobile number. You know, so I could text you."
And then Harry had been forced to lie about breaking his phone and not replacing it yet. The landline had been one thing - it came as part of the flat - that's what happened when you moved into a Muggle neighbourhood after all. And since it was already hooked up to BT and only cost a few quid a month to maintain, he left it there.
Sometimes Hermione phoned him; Dean did too, and sometimes Terry Boot, the few of his friends who were Muggle born and never quite managed to break the habit of picking up a phone to make contact.
"I like it, actually," Harry had told Will. "I like that people don't have immediate access to me."
"You know what... I kind of see where you're coming from."
And that was that. And Harry didn't buy a mobile phone after all.