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She wakes up slowly, and she's disoriented for a few moments. This can't be the Burrow. It's too quiet—no chickens, no harried mother, no garden gnome–throwing, no one randomly Apparating in and out. And the smells are too muted: no cooking, no herbs wafting from the garden, no unwashed brothers. It's still, serene, just her and...
Sam.
Eyes still closed, she resettles herself in the crook of his arm, her hand on his chest. He's wearing his usual two to three layers of shirt, but she still imagines that she can feel his heartbeat through her palm, can feel the warmth of his skin. He's so much bigger than either Harry or Dean (Thomas, not Winchester—the latter is a rather horrifying thought for a number of reasons), and, God knows, bigger than she is: Her hand is tiny on the expanse of him. The diameter of his upper arms is greater than that of her neck.
You'd think she'd be scared. Intimidated. Wary.
You'd be wrong.
She feels something in her chest breaking and opening, something difficult and a little bit clumsy but also joyful and new, like a creature fighting free of its shell to come into the world. This is ridiculous, she thinks, and buries her face in Sam's flannel. Ridiculous. I have known him less than three months and he's older than I am and I have to go back to England and the Muggle Aurors are hunting him and his brother and my mother would screech and my brothers would take up arms and I haven't even kissed him, and I am not in love with him. I am not, she informs herself.
Except then some traitorous part of her brain opines, I could wake up this way for the rest of my life, and Ginevra sighs and gives in to it.
He's still asleep, deeply and peacefully, his hands on her shoulders and back. Once she's awake, she's awake for the day, but she doesn't make a move to get up, just lies there drinking in Sam and silence and sunlight. It's autumn now, and the light is softer, a gentler pale yellow instead of the diamond-bright morning sun of the summer. All of her is warm, the parts washed in sunlight and the parts resting against him, and she can't sleep, but she can close her eyes again and feel a profound and uncharacteristic sense of peace.
She can feel it when he wakes up: His muscles tense and then relax again, as though he, too, has just realized where he is. He kisses the top of her head, winds her hair around his fingers.
"Wotcher," she says, and looks up.
He's smiling. "What does that mean, anyway? Watch what?"
"It's more like 'what are you doing': 'wotcher doing,' 'how are you doing.'"
"What's the appropriate response?"
"You just say it back."
"Wotcher," he says in his unmistakably American accent, and she laughs.
"Do you want breakfast?" she asks. Perhaps he can be convinced to make pancakes.
"Not yet. Unless you're hungry."
She could be. She could also lie here for a while longer and catalog the various things he smells like: clean, unperfumed soap; the musty but pleasant odor inherent to the Impala; a peppery scent she realizes is Dean's, but imprinted indelibly on his brother; chocolate and raspberry, faintly, which means that some of last night's gelato must have found its way onto him.
He's moving his hand gently up and down her spine, and she can feel her usually tight muscles—Quidditch, hypervigilance—relax under the touch. It's slow, tenderness without demand, but he pauses when she resettles herself, moves so that she's closer to his eye level. They're still for a moment, in stasis, as if they both know what will happen when one of them moves.
They both move at the same time.
His mouth is soft on hers, and she doesn't care that he tastes like sleep—she must, too, and it doesn't matter anyway, because she's finally kissing Sam. His hand moves from her back to tangle in her hair; both his hands are buried in it. She wants to outline his body with her fingers—the elegant bones, the ridges of muscle—but he'd need to take off a shirt or two for that, and she's not ready to start removing clothes, even if there are layers more underneath them. She settles for tracing the nape of his neck, the little bit of collarbone that's exposed, the beautiful and deadly precision of his forearms. She loves his hands—loves them warm and protective on her own, on her shoulders, cupped around the back of her head. She loves his fingers—Merlin, the ideas she gets, just thinking of it makes her shiver. She remembers the noise Harry made the one time she sucked on his—she's still not sure what possessed her to do it, but his expression of startled, wide-eyed arousal and the sound that had come out of him signaled that she'd done the right thing. She wonders if Sam would make a noise like that.
They shift again and she settles her leg over his hip. It feels so good, having him this close, but he pulls back and looks at her. His lips are pink, and she can't help but lean forward and kiss them again. It goes on for a while and she can feel her breath catch, quicken. "This is OK?" Sam asks the next time they come up for air. She wants to touch him—wants her hands on his skin, wants to know what it tastes like. But she's also not ready for everything else that would mean—she knows this—and so she's swimming in desire, confusion, wanting all of him, just perhaps not yet. But she does want, so much, and it's strong enough that his words don't register at first.
"Ginevra?"
"Yes! Yes, Sam, it's ever so much more than OK."
They shift positions—it's a small space, awkward, and Ginevra nearly falls off the sofa—and now he's on top. There's so much of him, sprawled out above her like a gift, and Ginevra wants her legs around his hips, wants to bite him and listen to the noises he makes. He leans down to kiss her neck, lick the curve of her ear, suck on her earlobe, and when his mouth finds that spot at the base of her throat—that little hollow whose name she doesn't know—she has to bury her face in his shoulder to stifle her gasp. She doesn't realize until she sees the expression on his face that she's breathed his name.
Sometime when she's surer of herself (and when Hermione and Dean aren't here), she wants to do this in her bed, let him stretch out across the white lawn, press her into it, let her press him into it, all that space where they can roll and play and be wrapped up in each other.
She kisses him again as a promise to herself—and to him, though he doesn't know it.
The kiss turns into a second, and a third, and then a fourth, and then more. More, until Ginevra's stomach growls, and they both laugh. Sam moves again, resettles her on his chest, smooths her hair, which must be a mess. His heartbeat is still rapid, and she can tell that he's making an effort to control his breathing. Hers is still unsteady, too.
"Hungry?" he asks.
"A little," she admits. "Alright, a lot."
"What do you feel like eating?"
"How are your pancakes?"
"Better than Dean's."
She laughs. She doesn't want to get up yet—getting up means rejoining the world, even if all they do is walk to the kitchen, and she's ready to tell the world to go stuff itself for a good while.
Her stomach growls again.
"We should have breakfast," she acquiesces.
They sit up, but she has to kiss him again, and then she's back in his lap again, thighs on either side of his hips. Now she's the one to lick his neck, to suck at that soft place where ear meets jaw. He makes a completely satisfying noise, and she lets her lips keep exploring—back down his throat, nibbling at his collarbone, back up to kiss his mouth, the arches of his cheekbones, the corners of his eyes.
They stop again for breath. He cradles her head against his shoulder, holding her like she's something precious.