The sky was pitch-dark, but away from the city the stars glowed brightly, sprinkling the ground with white light. The moon was nowhere to be seen, but Ginny's face was round and pale and seemed lit from within.
"Harry," she said, her arm linked in his.
He angled his head and looked into her eyes, huge and indistinct in the low light.
"I love you," she said simply, pressing a kiss into the rough fabric of his cloak, near his shoulder.
Harry sucked in a breath. It got caught between his lips and throat, thrashed around for a bit trying to escape, and fled back the way it had come. The cold winter air seemed to target his skin with thousands of tiny daggers, rushing through his cloak as if he was wearing nothing at all, and he felt so cold that it was as if his skin had frozen solid.
Ginny herself seemed impossibly far away and unbearably close. He wanted to look at her and see the expression on her face, but he found he couldn't turn his head. He wanted to run away, and at the same time wished he could open his arms and draw her close, but neither of those seemed to be quite possible either.
He struggled to draw breath, the muscles in his throat working frantically but ineffectually. Finally, he managed to choke out a sound.
"Erk."
Ginny looked up at him, and something in the petrificus totalus must have broken; this time Harry managed to look down at her. Her bright red hair looked nearly black in the starlight, and he could hardly see the outlines of her clothing but her eyes held a warmth he'd come to recognize, and her lips turned up at the corners.
"You don't have to say it," she said, and he didn't have to ask what. "In fact, don't unless you know it's true."
"Ah." The inside of Harry's mind was like a blank wasteland, a Saharan desert or Arctic tundra where the conditions were so inhospitable that no word or thought could find the nourishment it needed to grow.
"I just wanted you to know, that's all."
She turned to face him, and reached out with her free hand to grasp his, so that they stood with heavily-cloaked chests touching and each of her hands holding one of his. Slowly, giving him plenty of time to run away, Ginny lifted up on her tiptoes and pressed a soft kiss to his lips.
"You should hear it more often. I love you, I love you." With each repetition, she pressed another kiss to his face with her winter-cold lips.
That was three time she'd said it now, Harry thought. Three. Three times in eighteen years that someone had said those words to him. After only three times, they seemed foreign, almost meaningless. More often, indeed.
Maybe one day he'd say them back to her.
And one day, after four hundred and seventy-four additional repetitions, he did.