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Imagine the headlines, she mumbles, conspiratorially, to the little cocktail umbrella in her drink, if the Prophet's infernal paparazzi found her here.
Gin-evra & Tonic, she chuckles darkly. Champion Chaser Quaff-les Away Her Sorrows.
Saccharine-snide concern dripping from the page, for the heartbroken former fiancée of the Saviour of the Wizarding World. As though, no matter how many months it had been, how she'd single-Cleansweepedly levicorpus-ed the England squad into the quarter-finals of the World Cup, she’d always be the girl Harry Potter dumped, when he finally realised that he didn’t need to marry his mother.
Not-Her for Potter, the Witch Weekly had crowed.
He's a Seeker, She's Not a Keeper, the Prophet had opined.
Above a gleeful spread of photographs of the new witch Harry was blissfully happy with… sodding Andromeda Tonks.
Bewitchingly aristocratic, intimidatingly beautiful, impossibly poised Andromeda Tonks.
The closest he could get, Ginny snorts, to shacking up with Sirius Black.
And so here she is, six months single and drinking to forget on the fifth anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts, skulking beneath a glamour charm in a Muggle wine bar.
Avoiding the official commemoration up at the castle, and the orgy of camera flashes that'll turn the Highlands night into a psychedelic disco, the frenzied scrum of reporters swarming the solemn ceremony by Dumbledore’s grave. Enchanted long lenses trained, like a niffler with a knut, on the Chosen One as though he’s Merlin's scruffy-haired second coming.
And on her. Ginny Weasley, the Girl Who Wasn’t Going to Marry Harry.
She mashes the garnish in her drink with the straw. Getting engaged; they’d been so naïve. She and Harry both; as though real life was ever going to match up to the exhilaration of the victory over Voldemort. Swept up in the adrenaline and the relief and the flurry of post-war proposals – Neville and Luna, Flitwick and Firenze, Hagrid and Madam Maxime. Sodding Charlie, the dark horse, and Viktor Krum.
Naïve, and so young. She’d hadn't had a sniffling snallygaster of a clue how to handle Harry’s post-war malaise; trying to study for her NEWTs while the boy lying next to her in bed grappled with finding his place in a future he hadn’t expected to live to see.
Severus Snape had come back from the dead, too, Ginny had heard - something about phoenix tears and Aberforth Dumbledore's emergency bezoar. Maybe he'd understand Harry.
But Snape had had the option of disappearing without a trace into the Muggle world. Ginny almost envies him.
And so, she'd funnelled her focus into tryouts and training and workouts and World Cups, the Potter heirloom diamond engagement ring glittering accusatorially on her finger as though it could read the doubts in her mind. While Harry begrudgingly settled into his role as the Auror Office's poster boy, headlines and hagiographies, saving the world from kneazles stuck in trees and little old squib grandmothers blowing bingo halls.
Impossible, really, for her to come first, ahead of all of that.
Or come at all, by the end.
She drowns that thought in the dregs of her third mojito of the evening, or maybe it’s the fourth. Swigs the fruity, icy mush at the bottom of the glass and stands up to leave. It’s been so long since she’s had Muggle cocktails; so much more stealthily potent than wizarding alcohol. Or perhaps she feels freer, without the spectre of lurking Prophet paparazzi.
Pauses. She could go home and fume silently.
A desultory heating charm at the monotonous Magical Macronutrients Mealbox the Harpies’ nutritionwitch preps for her. Glaring at the inevitable happily-hand-holding photographs of Harry and Andromeda on the front pages while she pretends to decipher the fifty scrolls of gobbledygook Oliver Wood's written scouting the Bulgaria B-squad’s beaters.
Or, the hinkypunk of humiliation on her shoulder whispers, she could have another drink.
Reason versus wounded pride; it’s not a fair fight.
It’s five years since the worst day of her life, and her ex-fiancé’s a frustratingly famous flaccid flobberworm. She adds another layer to her glamour, just to be sure, and heads toward the bar.
Wobblier than she’ll admit, as she picks her way back through the rowdy crush. Balancing an overfull wine glass; the fruits of flirting with the bartender in a way that always used to make Harry splutter in flustered indignation.
As if Aberforth or Tom at the Leaky Cauldron were remotely her type.
Madam Rosmerta, though...
She’s jostled sharply sideways by an overly-amorous couple; doesn’t have the time to appreciate the irony, because her mojito-dulled Quidditch reflexes fail her, and she stumbles on the ridiculous Muggle heels she’s not used to wearing. Like she's been hit with a trip jinx, tossing a golden geyser of pinot grigio high into the air-
It’s as though she’s caught in a broken time turner; the seconds slow to a treacle-thick tick as the world tips on a precarious angle, one she’s only ever experienced halfway through a Wronski feint. The trendy reclaimed hardwood floor looms fast, too fast, up toward her, and, between the Singapore Slings and the shock, she’s forgotten any spells which might help, like one of Flitwick’s first years struggling to levitate a feather.
Before strong hands catch her around the waist, saving her from a broken nose and having to flee London in polyjuiced disguise for a new life in the Lithuanian Quidditch League.
It takes a moment for the rum and the mint and the lime to slosh to a standstill inside her skull, and the room to stop spinning. Sticky with white wine, she looks up at the man whose lap she’s fallen into.
All she can see is a pair of startled dark eyes behind a forbidding curtain of black hair, dripping with pinot grigio, too.
She stutters apologies, trying to scramble upright, heels slipping on the wet floor like a kneazle on ice.
If only the cackling hags at the Prophet could see her now.
The hands holding her tighten momentarily, setting her carefully back on her feet. Before rapidly retreating to the safety of gripping the bar.
Now that she’s straightened up, ineffectually smoothing down her sodden dress, she can take in her saviour properly.
Thin, hunched-shouldered as though he’d prefer not to be noticed. And tall, much taller than her, even perched on his bar stool. A nose she’d thought, at first glance, was hooked, but when she looks back it’s straight, unremarkable. And those wary dark eyes, staring at her like she’s apparated into his lap from another planet.
“Are you alright?” he asks, as though he’s concerned she might be a madwoman. Or, perhaps, a drunken refugee from the shrieking hen’s night down the other end of the bar.
His voice is a gravelly rasp – like a lifelong pipe smoker’s, but worse. Something familiar in the sneer of it, Ginny thinks, dimly.
Familiar and attractive, the mojito-horny corner of her mind perks up. In an older, quietly-heartbroken kind of way.
She realises that, while she's been staring at him, all wide eyes and pinot-smudged mascara, he’s been waiting for a response.
“Fine. Yes. Umm. Great. Thanks to you-"
Ordinarily, she’d flirtily brazen her way through the awkwardness, but there’s something intimidating about this Muggle stranger. Making her feel as though she’s back at Hogwarts, dripping mud from the Quidditch pitch over the flagstones of the Entrance Hall and about to lose fifty points for Gryffindor.
“I’m, umm, I’m sorry about the-"
Waving a hand, inarticulately and inadequately, at the mess she’s made of both of them.
Dark eyes, they’re almost black, glance down at the wet patch on his jacket. A handful of napkins materialises in front of them – he must have grabbed them from somewhere behind the bar – and he wordlessly hands her half the stack.
Marooned on a stony-silent island in the babbling sea of happy-hour chatter, dabbing in synchrony at their wine-drenched clothes. Ginny’s reminded of nothing so much as long-ago detentions in the Potions classroom, scrubbing cauldrons without the aid of magic, under Snape’s glowering supervision. Doesn’t dare risk a muttered tergeo, not with the intense gaze she can still feel watching her.
“Do I need to worry,” he asks eventually, as though he’s decided she’s the least-uninteresting diversion on offer amongst the disappointment of the Friday crowd, “that throwing yourself headfirst into the bar was a deliberate attempt at self-harm?”
Ginny looks up sharply, catches a twitch of thin lips. Feels herself smiling, for the first time that evening.
“Oh, err, no.” It’s as if she's been imperiused by a Weasley's Wizard Wheezes shop assistant; bad jokes bubbling up from the deepest reaches of the mojito-y mush between her ears. “It’s just how I meet people – cartwheeling across the room to throw drinks in their faces.”
Her mother’s always warning her that she’s been hit in the head by too many bludgers.
“It must happen to you all the time,” she continues; her tongue flirting without permission from her brain.
She winces through the too-long, arched-eyebrowed pause that follows. Wonders if disapparating in the middle of a Muggle bar would be a violation of the International Statue of Secrecy, or if she could argue extraordinary circumstances in front of the Wizengamot.
Though she’d probably splinch herself, the number of mojitos she’s thrown back.
“Isn’t there someone here with you,” he asks carefully, “to be the designated recipient of your wine-tossing?”
He’s asking whether she’s single, Ginny realises, with a rush of astonishment. He's flirting back.
She doesn’t bother trying to condense the Prophet’s favourite sob story – that the boy she’d been in love with for a decade changed, left her behind, after he was murdered by an evil wizard - into anything he'd understand. Just shrugs. “The tosser-" gratified when he smirks at the pun- “and I broke up, six months ago.”
Dark eyes flick over her face, piercing as though he’s a legilimens, and Ginny reminds herself that she’s barely recognisable beneath her glamour.
“Whoever the tosser is, he's clearly a dunderhead,” he concludes, with that too-attractive almost-smile, again.
Dunderhead. Ginny banks that description in her memory, for the next time a Witch Weekly gossip columnist owls her for comment on the Ministry's plan to erect a twenty-foot monument to Saint Potter’s Penis.
Not that Harry’s exactly the ‘Chosen One’ in that department.
The beady-eyed barman’s wandered over, probably to check that he doesn’t need to evict her for being drunk and disorderly. He sets a tumbler of scotch down in front of her reticent white knight.
Who nudges it toward her. “It would appear that you need this more than me.”
Ginny blinks at the glass for a moment. “I’m the one who should be buying you a drink, to apologise.”
A dark eyebrow arches ruefully at the puddle of soggy napkins on the counter. “I think you’ve been generous enough, sharing that with me.” Nodding at the whisky again. “Take it, I wasn’t going to drink it, anyway.”
Ginny glances from the orange juice he’d been sipping, before she’d waterboarded him with white wine, and then questioningly down at the glass now in her hands.
Thin shoulders shrug. “I don't drink much, these days. I had a- an accident. My heal- doctors would crucify me if I had another.”
So will Ginny’s physiowitch, she doesn’t mention.
“Five years ago today, actually," he continues, and Ginny has the mad feeling of being a Muggle priest in a confessional. "Barely survived.”
Too casually, his gaze fixed on the apparently-fascinating pulp in his juice.
She’s not the only one for whom the date holds ghosts, it seems. “And this is how you’re celebrating?”
A long finger draws a pattern in the condensation on the side of his glass. “Indeed.”
Well done, Weasley; she’d have kicked herself, had her heels not still been wobbly on the sticky floor. A sympathetic squeeze in her ribcage, at the idea that this sad-eyed, terse Muggle is here on his own, commemorating being alive on a lonely bar stool with just a mid-priced scotch for company.
“So why the whisky?” Taking a long, smokypeaty sip of it, in the hopes that occupying her mouth might keep her from shoving her foot into it any further.
He huffs what might be a dark laugh; it sounds unpractised. “A tribute to lost friends. I was just going to look at it, for old time’s sake. So it makes more sense for you to have it.”
It's certainly the least-conventional way a man's ever bought her a drink.
Lost for words, as she almost never is; all she can think to do is reach out and clink her glass against his. Can’t help noticing, again, how long and elegant his fingers are.
“S- Simon,” he offers, as though he's the secret keeper of a reluctant Fidelius charm, and Ginny thinks that it doesn’t suit him at all.
Remembers, just in time, that she’s incognito in Muggle London.
“Gin- Jennifer.”
Divorced, Ginny guesses, glancing around the spartan flat as she follows him in. From the unreadable sadness in his eyes, she’d thought he might be a widower, but he’s not wearing a ring.
Divorced she can handle; she’s slept with plenty of divorced men. Probably some married ones too, not that she cares to examine that too closely. It’s easier, especially with Muggles, and their gratifyingly bewildered eagerness, when they’re propositioned by a twenty-something red-haired force of nature, makes up for the usually below-average sex.
And bewildered certainly describes the expression on probably-not-Simon's face right now, his long arms hovering uncertainly in mid-air as though he’s not sure if he’s allowed to touch her.
The awkward stiffness is appealing, Ginny thinks. He’s a challenge.
Takes pity on him, pressing him up against his front door for a rough snog. He’s tall; she has to stand on tiptoe and drag his head down to hers, but it’s worth it when, after a few seconds of hesitation, he returns the kiss with singular focus.
The faint sweetness of orange juice on thin lips, and for a mad moment she’d swear she feels the tingle of magic. It must be the warmth of the whisky in her veins.
Gryffindor bold, she lets her hands roam, down into the back pockets of his jeans. Groping his arse, like she’d been thinking about doing the whole time she was following him up the stairs on their way to his flat. Grinding against his thigh, revelling in the way that makes him groan involuntarily and snog her more deeply.
Tugging him away from the door, impatient to feel his skin on hers before either of them comes to their senses.
“Bedroom?” she asks.
His eyebrows have leviosa-ed into a surprised arch, and – she feels a stab of triumph – his spikysardonic superiority seems to have abandoned him. High-buttoned starched shirt rumpled and her lipstick on his collar; the idea of dishevelling him is somehow particularly delicious.
Particularly forbidden.
She leads him by the hand toward the door he’d nodded at, on the far side of the room. Shedding her heels as she goes; frustrated that their height difference means there’s no way she can reach up to kiss him now.
A situation she resolves by shoving him down onto the grey sheets of the double bed that’s almost the only furniture in the room.
A room that’s just for sleeping in, she thinks. Wonders what happened to him, that he’s wiped his life back to a blank, lonely slate.
He sinks down on the end of the mattress, knees folding like the spokes of a broken umbrella. Ginny straddles his lap, tongue down his throat, fingers urgently working open his shirt buttons.
He’s twitchy, skittish underneath her, when she trails her hands down his chest.
Vampire-pale; skinny ribs stand out under thin skin, a greying dusting of hair and a darker trail leading below the waistband of his boxers. He startles when her fingers brush over the faint echo of a raised red scar, slashing across the hollow of his throat.
“Sorry-" She pulls her hand away.
An unreadable expression on his face, and Ginny has the mad feeling he’s surprised she noticed the mark.
“Is that-?” From the accident that nearly killed him, she supposes. She doesn’t know much about Muggle surgery, but she guesses it must have been a close-run thing – the faded jagged line pulses with remembered pain.
He gives a tight nod; Ginny’s all too familiar with men who don’t want to talk about their scars.
Changes the tone. “So do you think you can still-?” she teases.
A raised-eyebrowed pause.
“Jennifer-"
She takes a moment to remember that’s supposed to be her name.
“I assure you that the blood supply to… relevant components of my anatomy has not been compromised, if that is your concern." His lips flicker into the tiniest hint of a smirk. "And, should I feel any particular convulsions coming on, I will give you adequate warning.”
Ginny returns the smirk, leans in to snog him again. Hands sliding down to fumble with his belt buckle, slipping a hand into his trousers to palm him through the thin cotton of his boxers, and he gasps into her mouth.
He’s hard, painfully hard – he wasn’t boasting about the effectiveness of the surgery – and hung like a hippogriff, from the way he’s straining against the elastic.
Perhaps tonight won’t be such a write-off after all.
He lingers on the zipper of her dress, dark eyes demanding burning permission with every notch he slides it down, as though he has no idea he's sending trails of sparks across her skin, everywhere he touches.
She wriggles out of the rest of her clothes, tossing them to the floor. Relishing the gratifying slackness to his jaw as his eyes drink her in.
She hasn’t been the cover model for the Holyhead Harpies fundraising calendar three years running, for nothing.
Especially with the glamour covering the worst of her bludger-and-broomstick scars, and the spattergroiting of freckles she’s already drenched in, this early in the spring. Like an orange dalmatian, Harry had always teased.
Just because she wasn’t carved from high-cheekboned aristocratic porcelain like Andromeda Tonks-nee-sodding-Black-
“You’re beautiful,” not-Simon manages. Hoarsely, as though the words are unfamiliar, and the sheer need in his gravelly voice is as exhilarating as a packed World Cup stadium cheering her as she smashes past the Maltese keeper to score the winning penalty.
Arching into his touch, as cool, elegant hands come up to cup her breasts, hesitant thumbs circling her nipples. Her skin feels electric and so, so sensitive, the buzz of the cocktails and the thrill of his body – unfamiliar, skinnier, older – against hers.
It’s like he can’t stop touching her, now that he’s started; a one-handed struggle to shove his trousers and boxers down his hips. As though he’s forgotten how Muggle clothing works; Ginny tries not to giggle at his frantic writhing; the thought that, if he were a wizard, he’d evanesco the offending cotton away.
He makes a helpless little noise when she scrapes her teeth down his throat, so she does it again, smirking against his collarbone.
Feeling the crisscrossed web of raised scars he’d hidden under his high shirt collar, which radiate off the long slashed one. She hadn’t noticed them before – caught up in the moment, she supposes.
Long fingers grip her hips; a second’s confusion as he pulls her insistently forward. Until she’s straddling his face, knees either side of his head, her insides flipping with realisation and arousal.
“You don’t have to-" Barely able to form the sentence, with the teasing of his breath on her inner thighs.
“I am aware of that,” he replies. “Nonetheless, I would like to.” A twitch of a dark eyebrow. “If, that is, you are amenable?”
Smug bastard; Ginny likes this more cocksure side of him.
And she certainly isn’t going to argue, as he nudges her legs wider apart. Eyes fluttering shut as he leans in to press his mouth to her.
Sparks of exquisite pleasure at the hot, wet glide of his tongue. Digging her nails into her palms, to keep herself from crying out as tastes her, explores her.
This ought to be what they teach in Muggle Studies.
“Merlin-" her voice sounds ragged, even to her own ears.
Cursing herself for the slip, but, buried between her thighs, she supposes he can’t have heard. Not with the way he’s getting down to task.
The rest of him might be wary, taciturn, she thinks, arousal flooding her veins, but his tongue belongs to a more daring, much more wicked, man.
She whimpers; doesn’t think she’s ever whimpered in her life, before. It’s all she can do to grip onto the headboard, to hold herself upright as her back arches into the teasing swirls and flicks of his tongue.
Her other hand winds into his hair. It’s longer than she’d realised, now that it’s come loose from the ponytail. Thin, a little greasy, but soft.
Fingers raking across his scalp; he groans, and the vibrations nearly make her come on the spot.
There’s something… competitive about how focussed he is, how precise. The way he chases every little inarticulate noise she makes, as though he's strategising all the ways to drive her to distraction. He pulls her closer to him, tongue dragging slow and flat and decadent against her.
Daring her to beg him for more.
Her only answer is to grind down harder; riding his face roughly. Certain she must be suffocating him, tugging painfully on his hair as he obeys her silent command, and licks and sucks and fucks her into another dimension with his impossibly clever tongue. His fingers dig into her skin, holding her in place. As though she’d want to move away.
“Don’t stop,” she hears herself pleading, thighs shaking.
Pleasure bubbling up to a breaking point, all of her nerve endings on white-hot alert. Clutching the headboard, certain she’ll collapse if she doesn’t hold on.
She’s always been loud; Harry had had kneazles the first time they’d shagged in Grimmauld Place and she’d woken Walburga Black’s portrait. She giggles at the memory – Harry’s cock flopping comically out of his Chudley Cannons boxers as he hopped about trying to silencio the rabid oil-painted howls decrying sordid ejaculations of half-blood filth and wanton whores; wonders how old Walburga likes it now, listening to the Messiah of the Mudbloods railing her beautiful blood-traitor niece.
And so, when not-Simon finally lets her tip over the edge, plummeting into white-hot ecstasy, she's certain that all his neighbours will hear her, through the thin walls of his flat. Maybe she ought to have cast a wordless muffliato.
That thought dissolves into jumbled oblivion, as he holds her there, teasing tongue drawing out the fireworks of her orgasm through wave after wave, while she swears and shudders and sparks dance behind her eyelids.
Thighs squeezing the sides of his face, exquisitely oversensitive as he finally relents, and she stumbles back so that she’s sitting on his bony shoulders. Fighting to catch her breath and for the room to stop spinning.
When she’s able to open her eyes again, the state of his face between her legs almost makes her come a second time, untouched.
Mouth and chin glistening with her wetness, and a hint of a pink flush across sallow cheeks. Sweaty hair sticking up on end where she’s been pulling on it.
One of his hands – his forearm’s covered in a dark sleeve of tattoos, she hadn't noticed – comes up to wipe his face, just the ghost of a self-satisfied smile playing across thin lips.
Where did he learn to-?
He could certainly teach every wizard she's ever slept with a thing or two.
Shuffling off his chest and flopping, boneless, down onto the mattress next to him, heart still racing.
She should do this to celebrate every anniversary of the Battle.
“I trust you found that satisfactory?” he turns his head to ask. The arch of his eyebrow shouldn’t be so attractive.
She leans in to snog the smugness, and the taste of herself, off his lips.
Lost in the tipsy blissful post-orgasmic fog; just not-Simon’s hands on her skin and her tongue in his mouth and the press of his erection against her hip. His scent’s so intriguing; bitter sage and sandalwood, the hint of woodsmoke, familiar in a way she can’t quite put her finger on.
He’ll smell of her perfume, by the time she leaves tonight; the thought turns her on unreasonably.
He’s on top of her, now, bony body pressing her into the mattress. Dark gaze locked on hers as though he’s worried she might disappear. As though he’s desperate for a moment of connection. She wonders why he seems so alone.
Shakes herself out of Luna-like sentimentality; a sharp reminder that this is just a meaningless one-night stand. She pushes him back.
“Condom?” Contraceptive potions can be hit-and-miss, with Muggles.
He’s gratifyingly out of breath; swallows hard. “Right. Yes. Of course.”
Stretching over her shoulder to rummage around in his bedside drawer; Ginny strains her neck to try to see how empty the box is.
Tearing open the foil square he hands her; wordless gratitude for the hours spent shoving bananas into these things while revising for her Muggle Studies OWL. His breath catches sharply as she takes his cock in hand, the lightest of strokes.
Looking down at her, eyes dark with want mixed with wariness. “I haven’t-" she watches his scarred throat working- “it’s been… a long time. Since-"
Five years? Ginny wonders, incredulously. Since his accident?
Eyeing his erection – thick and hard and leaking. That seems like a waste.
Chooses not to comment on the choked-off gasp he makes as she rolls the condom down his length; she’s not immune, herself, muscles already clenching in anticipation of how he’ll feel inside her, for all that she’s just come so hard the room’s still spinning.
He’s holding his breath as he scrambles up onto his elbows over her, Ginny can feel his arms trembling. The cocksure man of just minutes ago replaced by a far more uncertain, wary creature.
“I want you,” she assures him; Gryffindor-straightforward to, she knows, a fault. And, for once, she means it; more than she usually does.
He squeezes his eyes shut as he pushes into her, a shuddery exhale. Ginny has to bite her lip at the glorious stretch, adjusting to the size of him. If she’d ever wondered what it’d be like to shag a shy Abraxan…
He’s frozen, for a moment, like a thestral startled in the headlights. Until she runs her hands down his chest to bring him back to the present – Ginny recognises the expression – from whatever faraway remembrances he was caught up in.
Hesitant, uncertain thrusts at first; she’s not sure if he’s worried about hurting her, or himself. But he’s so responsive when she rolls her hips against him; groans at the sensation, builds up speed.
She wraps her legs around him, pulling him in closer, feeling her muscles fluttering around his cock.
Ordinarily, she’d close her eyes, try to lose herself in the sensation, slip into whatever fantasy was more exciting than the overeager fan, or sardonic Slytherin ex-schoolmate, or muscled Auror she’d made sure she was photographed leaving the Harpies’ stadium or Knockturn Alley nightclub, with. Let her mind wander to the werewolf erotica novels Lavender lends her, tucked away in the side pocket of her kit bag, or the dragon dildo Luna bought her during their last girls’ weekend in Brighton.
But she can’t stop, doesn’t want to stop, looking at the man who isn't called Simon.
Starkly, angularly arresting above her in the dim light; hair falling in a dark curtain around his face, brow furrowed with exertion. His focus a burning incendio, his breathing shallow, the sheen of sweat making the angry red scar across his throat stand out even more against his pale skin.
He’s so deep now, hitting the perfect spot inside her with every thrust. Ginny doesn’t know if it’s skill or luck, but either way, she’s not complaining.
Part of her wants to encourage him, tell him how good he feels, but she’s worried her orgasm-addled brain will say something clumsy and exposing about sex being just like riding a broomstick.
And then one of his hands raises her hips, shifts the angle, and she’s not sure she’d be able to form any words at all.
Scratching her fingernails down his back, thighs squeezing his sides, stretching up to bite at any part of him she can reach.
“Jennifer-" his voice is beautifully raspy, like something’s clawed at his throat- “I’m not going to last much longer if you keep on doing that.”
She does it some more, relishing in the way it makes him swear and jerk his hips forward faster. Fucking her exquisitely hard, now; she arches up against him, chasing his rhythm.
Can tell that he’s on the verge of losing control, and the adrenaline and the rush of power and the glorious pounding of his cock inside her combine to have her spiralling upward again, too.
He notices, the clever man. Slips a hand between their bodies, long fingers fumbling in the slickness, rubbing circles in the same rhythm as his thrusts. Enthusiasm over dexterity, but it’s delicious friction, and she’s already careering beyond the point of no return.
His thrusts become choppier, his breathing ragged, the tendons in his scarred neck stand out; and Ginny’s insides melt at the chivalry in the way he’s trying to hold himself back.
He bites his lip in concentration, and it’s that, of all things, that’s her undoing.
Free-falling into a shuddering, hot bright oblivion, fingers digging into his shoulders hard enough to bruise, burying her face in the crook of his neck to muffle her half-cry of the name that doesn’t suit him.
She feels his cock throbbing inside her as she clenches around him. His hips stutter, and his long, deep groan as he comes inside her might just be the sexiest thing she’s heard in forever.
His elbows buckle and he collapses on top of her, a solid, panting dead weight, boneless and vulnerable. Ginny can feel his heart galloping, breath catching; a brief stab of worry at the thought of his scarred throat. Stroking her hands down his sweaty shoulders and back, feeling the notches of his spine and fighting to dull the euphoric crackle of magic from her fingertips.
He seems to come back to himself with a start, rolls awkwardly sideways to thump beside her on the mattress. Skinny chest still heaving, cheeks flushed, a punchdrunk dazed expression on his face.
It's been five years for him, she thinks, a funny fluttering sensation in her ribcage. Five years of hiding himself away.
She’s never been one to hang around after sex; with Harry or the parade of anonymous quickie fumbles that’ve followed him. But now, here, she’s tempted by the intoxicating haze of the afterglow. Eyelids heavy, her skin beginning to prickle with goosebumps in the cool air-
Pull yourself together, Weasley.
Reluctantly disentangling her limbs from his, swinging her legs down off the bed. Reaching for her dress, where it’s crumpled on the floor.
She feels dark eyes on her.
“You could stay?”
He looks as surprised at the words as Ginny feels. As though his tongue’s a double agent he hadn’t realised he was harbouring.
“No,” he corrects himself, and she has the sense of him hastening to episkey over the slip. “Of course, you have-" An inarticulate wave of long fingers which, not five minutes ago, had been stroking her to nargle-scrambling ecstasy.
“That’s right,” she stutters, her own tongue bumbling into the fray, without permission from her brain. “I have, umm, plans. Tomorrow. Early.”
Not sure why she can’t form sentences; why it’s so hard to lie to this spikywary sad-eyed man she barely knows.
Sad eyes behind which shutters drop; his gaze black and unreadable once more. Ginny’s taken aback by the wrench in her insides.
Anyway, it’s not a lie, she rationalises. She has got plans, plans that include an entire cauldron of hangover potion and ignoring her ex-fiancé’s messy-haired humility on the front pages of the Prophet and lying to her physiowitch about how much she'd had to drink the night before. And sending urgent owls to Luna and Lavender for an emergency debrief at Fortescue’s, on the forty-something-year-old Muggle with whom she’s just had more fulfilling sex than she’s experienced in her entire sordid roll-call of relationships to date.
Wriggling into her dress, yanking up the zip. Why did these stupid things have to be so fiddly?
Not-Simon’s still watching her, expression guarded now.
“Sorry,” she adds. Cringing at how inadequate that sounds; she’s never felt the need, before, to justify herself to a one-night stand.
There’s no sign of her underwear, but she’s willing to sacrifice last season’s Gladrags lingerie in her haste to make a quick exit.
“I can call you a-" a pause, as though he’s reaching for the word- “cab.”
Ginny blinks at the speed he’s somehow summoned a dressing robe, when she turns back around.
A hand on his chest, sternly admonishing herself not to notice how well the emerald-green silk suits him. “I’ll be fine. And I, umm, I had a really nice night. Thankyou.”
Thankyou?
Dark eyebrows knit together into blast-ended skrewt of scepticism, but he gives a tight nod. “As did I.”
On impulse, it seems, he leans forward to very lightly press his lips to her forehead. So unexpectedly sweet that, for a moment, Ginny – who’s never suffered from sentimentality when it comes to shagging – isn’t sure her knees will be able to hold her up.
She’d started all of this by falling into his arms, after all.
Shakes herself back to what’s passing for sanity, tonight, and steps away. “Right. Well, umm, goodbye.”
Kicking herself for the little awkward wave she does as she scurries backwards out the door, leaving him standing in his only-for-sleeping grey bedroom, shoulders rigid with tension.
Depulsos aside any mad notions of leaving a note. Idiot; it’s not as though she has a Muggle fellytone, and he’s hardly going to send her an owl.
Shoves her feet into her ridiculous shoes, pulls the front door closed behind her. Too distracted to notice the hiss of wards sliding back into place as the latch clicks shut on sardonic, confusingly sweet Simon and his scars and sad dark eyes.
Ginny's not remotely in the mood for this sodding Order reunion.
Would rather spend the evening on a candlelit date with a dementor, or de-lousing a lethifold. Or heaving her guts up all over the Ilfley Park pitch after one of Oliver Wood’s Infinite Intervals cardio sessions, which the Wizengamot ought to have added to its list of Unforgiveable crimes long ago.
Anywhere but the stylishly-renovated kitchen of Grimmauld Place. Harry and Andromeda’s house, its ancient bricks humming contentedly again, in a way they never had in the brief time Ginny lived there with Harry, because its new Mistress has Black blood in her aristocratic veins.
Wasn’t the anniversary up at Hogwarts enough? she’d protested to the fiery red Howlers her mother had sent along with the invitation.
The anniversary you failed to show up for, Ginevra?
She’s grateful nobody in the Order of the bloody Undying Phoenix will ever find out how she marked the date, with the taciturn tattooed Muggle and his sardonic dark eyes and magical tongue.
Forcing herself to smile and clink glasses and toast fallen comrades. To ooh and ahh over Winky’s baby bump – silently hoping the baby elf takes after its mother, rather than a beaming-with-pride Kreacher – and exchange raised ginger eyebrows with Ron at how obvious it is that Aberforth and McGonagall are shagging again.
And to ignore Harry – ever the perfect host, topping up everyone’s butterbeers as he carries Teddy Lupin, who's adopted a very familiar messy head of black hair, these days, on his shoulders. And Bill, watching her with werewolfish big-brotherly concern.
Until, she can't stand it any longer, the feeling that some malevolent dark wizard's cast a shrinking charm and the walls are closing in, and escapes out into the manicured back garden. Gulping down the fresh night air; a moment’s nostalgia for years ago, when this had been a scruffy overgrown sanctuary for an ill-tempered fugitive hippogriff.
Trying to tune out the hubbub from the hallway back inside – snatches of hearty greetings and backslappings and astonished exclamations of 'we didn’t think you’d join us'. As though the latecomer's a resurrected Albus Dumbledore, rather than, more likely, Arabella Figg bearing her famous fruitcake.
She sighs into a long sip of her butterbeer, wishing it was something stronger, for all that she’s forsworn drinking after last Friday. When she made a series of decision she really ought, but can’t bring herself, to regret.
And then sloshes her drink across the front of her dress, for the second time in a week, but she barely has time to appreciate the irony. Because the latecomer has shaken off the overbearing welcome scrum to sweep out into the garden; a tall, thin figure in black Muggle jeans and a high-collared, severely-buttoned starched shirt that just hides the ragged crisscross of snakebite scars slashing across his throat.
A dark sleeve of tattoos up his left forearm, to hide a faded cursed serpent and a skull, and a jacket which, for all the scourgifies she imagines he’s cast on it, still bears the faint stain of a thrown glass of pinot grigio.
Frozen in silhouette against the French doors, looking as though he’d rather go another round with the Dark Lord who almost murdered him five years and one week ago, is the man whose bed she’d awkwardly clambered out of the Friday before.
The man whose tongue and touch and thin-lipped sardonic smile she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about ever since.
Not-Simon...
Severus Snape.