Chapter Text
It’s a Tuesday like any other until Ginny Weasley, Gryffindor’s newest chaser and crown jewel of the Weasley matriarch’s reproductive tiara, sits down next to me in herbology.
“Good morning, Orla,” she says, removing books and a quill from her bag. Her arse is halfway off the stool, as though she might sprint off at any moment.
I mutter a “Good morning,” unsure what she’s doing here. Across the greenhouse, I clock two other Gryffindor girls glancing at Ginny between whispered exchanges.
“Trouble in paradise?” I ask. She’d been sitting apart from Dean at breakfast this morning. I’d assumed they’d had another spat – they’d been having them since before the Christmas break, each one resulting in a short stint apart followed by obnoxious snogging in some hidden corner of the castle. Not that I cared.
But the glances Ginny is getting from Mary and Rowan suggest that whatever disagreement she had with Dean has continued. And no one is taking Ginny’s side.
“We broke up.” Her voice is matter-of-fact, her expression uninterested. In fact, she’s not even looking at me, but at the front of the greenhouse. Professor Sprout begins talking before I can respond.
“Today, we’ll continue our work on fanged plant species. Can anyone tell me what this is?” Sprout gestures to a dense shrub growing to her right. It has large, dark green leaves and bulbous flowers that are currently closed tightly. I haven’t a clue what it is. I’m rubbish with plants. As Professor Snape enjoys reminding me every year when I manage to scrape by with an Acceptable in potions.
“She has no instinct for the properties of the ingredients,” he’d remarked to my father, who’s a doctor at St. Mungo’s. The comment was a bit cruel, but at least it ended my father’s campaign to get me an internship at the hospital last summer. He’d hoped that a few months working with disordered bodily functions and injuries weeping viscous purple ooze would convince me to “keep my options open” as I prepare for my O.W.L.’s this year. It greaves him deeply that his daughter is an “artsy fartsy” Ravenclaw rather than a “brilliant one” (My words, not his).
Across the greenhouse, a Gryffindor boy answers Sprout’s question. “That’s a bush with teeth, that is!”
With a pasted-on smile, Sprout rebuttals, “Please raise your hand, Mister Murray.” She turns back to the rest of the class. “Can anyone tell me the shrub’s proper name?” She scans the room, bypasses the raised hands of her star pupils, and looks directly at me.
Fuck.
“Miss Bracken! Educate us.”
A whisper comes from behind my head. “Fanged Geranium.”
“Fanged Geranium,” I repeat.
Sprout gives a content nod and gives five points to Ravenclaw, though I notice her eyes flit to Ginny before she proceeds with the lesson.
Once the lab portion begins, I thank Ginny for the help.
“No problem,” she says. “I hate when they do that. It feels like bullying.”
I couldn’t have put it better, so I don’t try to, and silence descends between us. Not the pleasant kind, but the stiff, thick silence between two people who have known each other’s names for four years but never exchanged more than pleasantries.
I want to die.
Ginny at least behaves normally. She pretend to know less than she does or offer half-confident advice when I almost lose my finger to the Demented Geranium. Instead, she pulls my hand away and spells out the instructions that were probably in the chapter of assigned reading I opted out of this week. After a quick demonstration, she gives me a handful of the flower’s food – live worms.
“What if you just did it instead?” I joke.
Ginny locks me in her gaze, and her brown eyes are arresting. “If that’s what you want.”
What I want is to press your mouth to mine. I want to know what your lips taste like.
“I should probably have a go,” I say instead.
“Probably,” she agrees.
It’s a point of embarrassment, having a crush on someone so obviously straight. Dean Thomas may be her second official boyfriend, but 15-year-old Ginny already has a small trail of broken hearts behind her. By all reports, the Boy Who Lived is hoping he’s next in line.
I feed the geranium its worms, cringing as the plant snaps its teeth around the gooey bugs. “This is why I don’t go outside,” I say when the job is done. I wipe my gloved hands on a spare towel, and I notice Lucy Hoffman watching me. When our eyes meet, she gives me a secret little wink.
This is why I don’t tell people about my crushes. She’ll be teasing me mercilessly about this for days. God forbid Ginny decide I’m her new lab partner. I’ll never hear the end of it from Lu.
When class ends, Ginny gives me a charming goodbye, then disappears into a sea of students rushing off to their next period.
I’m supposed to spend the next hour in study hall, working on a dense essay for McGonagall on the correlation between a creature’s biological complexity and the number of options for its transfiguration. Instead, I end up doodling Ginny Weasley’s eyes.
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Ginny doesn’t sit next to me in herbology on Thursday, but her breakup with Dean seems to be real. She’s resorted to sitting with Harry, Hermione, and Ron at meals, ignoring Dean and the Gryffindor girls in our year.
On Saturday, I catch a glimpse of her climbing the stairs toward Gryffindor tower after quidditch practice. Her hair is pulled up in a knot to keep it off her neck, which is glistening with sweat. Her cheeks are flushed with life, though it’s clear from the look on her face that she’d rather collapse on the stairs than climb them. When the image of me crouched on the stairs between her legs, licking the sweat off her thighs, comes unbidden, I decide it’s time to go finish my charms homework.
On Sunday, I’m sitting in the library tending to my homework like a good little Ravenclaw when Ginny strides in. She walks with purpose, long red hair swishing behind her. There’s a brief discussion with the librarian, and then she turns around. It’s too late to avert my gaze, so I return the wave she offers me.
My heart sinks a little when she doesn’t come over.
Instead, she disappears into the stacks, and I turn my gaze back down to an astrological map charted during 8th century B.C.E Egypt.
I don’t know how long I spend poring over the maps, but when I look up, Ginny is perched in a window, reading.
Her right knee is up, the book propped against it and angled toward the sunlight. Her left leg drapes down toward the floor, and her foot dangles inches above the carpet, swinging absently back and forth. The position causes her robes to part, revealing the skin of her winter-pale thigh and half of her calf.
Once again, I see myself kneeling before her, kissing the inside of her leg, licking her in ways Dean or Michael can’t possibly have discovered yet. She’d grip her fingers in my black curls, whisper my name.
My core is hot. My body tingles. I need to be somewhere private, and I need to be there now.
Ginny glances up. She must have felt my gaze.
I drop my eyes, realize a second too late that I was biting my lip. Fucking Merlin. FuckfuckFUCK.
I gather my books, blindly stuffing them into my bag. I leave the maps scattered across the table and dart out of the library without glancing up from the floor.
I’m going to die. I shouldn’t be allowed outside my dorm. I’m a disaster. Who does that? I might as well have been flicking my bean in the middle of the library.
Fuuuuuck.
She’ll never speak to me after this, and I don’t blame her. No one wants to be eye-fucked by a relative stranger in the middle of the Hogwarts library.
Could I be any creepier?
Maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up dead. Yeah. Yeah, that’d be good. I’ll just wake up a ghost, and I can take to moaning poetry in the bowels of the castle. An appropriate ending to a life of loneliness.