She had a hidden life, lived purely in paper. He would often joke about that, saying she loved all of him but he could only love half of her, he would choose the left side and tickle her until she gasped for air, until she stopped giggling and looked at him with the biggest brownest eyes he could ever love. The best jokes are half-truths, which is why he'd bring it up with a smile on his face, which is why he could never sit her down and ask her, yet he ached to know 'What do you write at night when you leave the bed empty, thinking I'm asleep, thinking I'd never know?'. But the beauty in Ginny was her mystery, he knew that now, he had always known it, that's why he'd never rustle through those papers. Obviously she knew he'd never interfere, that's why she'd leave the papers strewn across the dark desk in the study, maybe it was a test of his strength.
Everything had settled easily after the war, yes there were losses, but Ginny was there, she soothed him through those nightmares where he spiralled into darkness calling and calling and no-one hearing him, the ones where he'd stroll through town and no-one could see him, could hear him and they'd walk straight through him. She massaged his shoulders and whispered to him, she made him cups of tea to calm him down. Then everything fell into place, there was a small wedding (to Mrs Weasley's disappointment) and a weekend honeymoon in Cornwall where it rained solidly. He got a job at the ministry, they couldn't turn him down really, he was offered the job of Minister of Magic but turned it down to work with the Aurors, and she worked in a legal firm, she never talked about her job. They hardly argued, they'd arranged an alternative night cooking scheme within the first weeks and... everything had fallen into place.
Ginny sat at her desk, not reading the hundreds of sheets of paper scattered into every inch of space. She underlined the title of one case "Mrs Dooley vs St Mungos" and shuffled round the papers on her desk. She pulled a paper-clip from a small box at the very corner of her desk and pulled it apart, carefully unfolding each bend, then folded it back. She looked across the room to the one person she shared her office with and saw him staring straight at her, a small smirk on his face.
"Coffee, Mrs Potter?" His calm voice broke the silence and seemed a lot louder than it was, it almost startled her, she smiled and they left together. One of the best things about being a partner in a law firm your friend owns is that you can go for coffee whenever you want, for however long you need.
They entered their favourite cafe together and sat together at the back, a small table with giant armchairs either side, they wrote down their order and watched the order slowly sink into the table, then watched the gargantuan cups rise through the solid table, filled with the darkest aromatic coffee in the country.
"Harry says I shouldn't drink coffee, you know, I've given it up" Ginny's eyes twinkled as she took the first deep sip. Her counterpart smirked again,
"Well I say you should drink coffee, so now what?" He lent towards her with a predatory look in his eyes. She knew this was his way of bringing up the old argument, the argument that had led her previously to throw almost everything on her desk at his face.
"Now," She faltered then looked back to his deep grey eyes, "I'd ask Mrs Malfoy what she said to that" She raised her eyebrows in challenge and watched him sink back into his chair, cupping his coffee mug before he smiled,
"She'd probably say that dearest Harry was right. For that matter she'd probably remind me I gave up smoking for her and I should really stick to it. In fact, if you told her she'd probably ban me from coffee too, how would you like that?" Scenes of Draco entering the office, throwing the pot plant on the floor, pushing everything off his desk and screaming at her for making any noise flashed in front of Ginny's eyes,
"I don't think that's entirely necessary, particularly remembering last time you didn't have coffee for a week"
His foot brushed against hers as she dropped her gaze, and as she glanced back up his eyes drew her in with their titanium undercurrent covered by the matt side of tin foil. She could look in his eyes forever, could come up with a hundred more analogies but he pulled her out of them,
"Hmm?" He enquired, he had clearly asked her a question but she had not heard a word. She'd have to make a decision as to her answer, the question could have been anything.
"Yeah, why not?" She replied in a blasé manner, eager not to let him know she'd been day dreaming again.
"And you're happy to wear a pink dress?" He chuckled at her shocked reaction, shook his head at her and dismissed her with a wave of the hand muttering "drink your coffee, woman"
She swear she didn't know how it had happened, they had fallen into it. She had worked her way up the law firm with surprising ease, as had he it seemed, then she was offered the opportunity of being a partner, having a large window office and going to all sorts of expensive events on the firms expense. Apparently they didn't have enough large window offices, and suddenly the man she had exchanged a few glances, a couple of words and a handful of friendly gestures with was to be the man she would spend her working life with. Neither of them had eased into their forced relationship...
"I HAVEN'T SEEN IT" Ginny screamed at him from behind her desk, trying to settle her nerves as she wrote 'Dick' on a piece of paper she had been writing her notes on,
"Of COURSE you've seen it, don't be so ridiculous Ginevra, did you or did you not use it about 10 MINUTES ago?" He was pacing around the room, full of impotent rage, brushing his stupid yellow hair away from his hair every two second.
"YES," She shouted back in a patronising tone as if she were talking to a toddler, she may have well been and it would have been a lot simpler if she had been, "and I put it back on your desk" she emphasised the last three words, pausing dramatically, being enticing his anger.
"I've checked my desk and, would you know, it's NOT THERE. Do you have any evidence? Do you have an alibi? No. Who else could it have been? WHO?" He paced infuriatingly close to her desk and lowered his face to hers. Ginny sensed it was time for action and grabbed her letter opener, wielding it like a much more deadly knife, and slowly got up from her chair.
"Jesus CHRIST, Malfoy, you are-" She had her face up to his, knife pointing towards his side as if she were to stab him, as she spoke he looked to the knife and his expression changed. He let out a chuckle, and grasped her wrist, looking into her eyes with a deadly stare.
"What are you going to do with that knife, Weasley?" he stepped forward and she was forced to back up until she felt her back against the wall, she then realised she was still holding the knife and released her grip on it so it fell to the floor with a thud, in the silence it was clear to hear. Still holding her wrist in his right hand, he moved his left hand to press against her shoulder, pushing it further into the wall. "Did you honestly-" He snarled, his face inches from hers, then he pushed his lips against hers and fought her lips. After being locked in the embrace, battling tongues with Ginny's hand and shoulder still being pinned against the wall for long enough for their senses to get back to them, Draco sprang away from the stapler-stealer.
"What on earth are you doing, Weasley? Don't you know I'm MARRIED?" The incredulous look on Ginny's face obviously made no impact, so she strode over to the stationary cupboard, grabbed the afore-argued-about stapler and threw it at him as she screamed,
"YOU'RE MARRIED? I'M MARRIED, and, more to the point... oh for Merlin's sake, you are... IMPOSSIBLE" She sank back down to her chair and fumed until the day was done and she stormed out of the office, hardly remembering why she was so angry.
She should've told Harry about that first kiss, but it seemed pointless, silly office trivia. She didn't want to tell him from day one, not because she was nervous about his reaction but for some other reason. She wanted to have a secret, to have something only she knew about, something she could cling onto as her own. She thought about him a lot after that, and it seemed they fell into arguments just so they could kiss, just so they could feel something. Emotions had been put on hold during the war and it seemed like everything around her was duller now that it had ever been, her memories of Hogwarts were so vivid, so full of colour... but now it seemed everything was grey. When she started to hear the rumours about Harry and his secretary she wasn't particularly surprised, nor particularly upset. Instead, the next time she found herself locked against Malfoy she pulled off his expensive white shirt, kissing the skin that was revealed, tasting his aftershave and then, as she kissed lower, his bare skin. As she pulled her head back up to him, brushing her lips against his, he growled her name before tearing her shirt off her, lifting her up so her legs wrapped around him and finally laying her on his desk.
It became, before long, that the life Ginny wanted, the life Ginny lived was the life outside her house, in hidden moments during work hours. Then her home life became time where she relived the work hours, after massaging the tension out of her husband's shoulders and eating whatever her husband had recreated from his muggle cookery books (with some reluctance, but at least he was cooking) she would wait until he had reached deep sleep before she crept out of bed, to her desk of papers. It was between these sheets of papers that she wondered if she had loved Draco Malfoy all along, if she had loved him first, before all the toils and torment, before Harry, before Voldemort. It was between these sheets of paper that she tried to calculate their fate, wonder why they could never be. It didn't matter if they ran away from everything, if they built a new life together, because it was written, it was written that they could never be, that Ginny was supposed to be with Harry and that's how it would be. She just tried to calculate who had written her such a fate.