GW/RL. AU, No magic, Underaged.
I Think I'll Keep You (Like a Secret)
Ginny knows that what they have isn't normal; it isn't healthy. She knows that she should be focused on so many other things than him. She knows that he has no business in being interested in a seventeen year-old girl. She's not stupid; what the others tell her, she's thought a dozen times over on her own. Her mind lies wanton between logic and a desperate wish that make-believe can be real.
Time moves a little bit more slowly for her now. Before, it was a frantic rush of colliding memories. Now it's measured by the time that she spends with him and the time she does not. When he's near her, the frantic rush becomes the rapid thudding of her heart, her quickened pulse caused by something animalistic, wild, that she doesn't altogether understand. Late at night she'll lie awake instead of sleeping and ache for the smell of his cigarettes or the gravely sound of his laugh. Without him, she'll just stop.
While folding a pair of her favorite skinny jeans, freshly out of the washing machine, fingertips burning where the pads touch the metal buttons, she'll look out the window into the yard and be reminded of him. An auburn haired boy will run into the alley below her apartment, and she'll think of that time when he was laughing, head bent over, eyes closed, smiling, and then that moment directly after when he looked back up at her like she was the only person in the world. The wind will brush a tree's leaves up against the pane of glass, and she'll think of the time when they were walking down the street, saying nothing, but the comfortable silence saying everything, and he grabbed her hand as a cold breeze blew past, making her glad that she had forgotten to wear her gloves when she felt his leathery skin against hers, getting goose bumps that had nothing to do with the temperature.
Then she remembers where she is, and what she's meant to be doing. She'll toss the jeans into the laundry basket and reach for a bright blue shirt that launches her into another memory of him.
It isn't a subtle ache that works its way up through her stomach and into her chest, but an overwhelmingly intense pain that strikes her when she least expects it, when she thinks that she can stand up without needing another memory of him to bolster her. She tells herself that she doesn't need him; she shouldn't need him. The self-sufficient side of her grumbles at the neediness she's flaunting, but any time she's able to hide it away, she deteriorates and he has to put her back together again.
Sometimes she wonders if he feels the same way too. At times when she's sitting in the corner, mascara running down her cheeks, she's spiteful and hopes that what he's feeling is just as bad as what she's going through, if not worse. When she's with him and loving him, she hopes that he never feels that amount of heartache in his life.
And she does love him. There is no other word that she can think of to describe how she feels about him. The depressing lows and the spaced out highs must be normal, she tells herself. After all, she's never really loved someone before.
She doesn't know how to act. All of this is new: the stolen kisses behind the convenience store, the cool disappointment when he acts like he doesn't know her in front of people they both know.
She's stuck between being a child and being an adult. A part of her still wants to draw hearts all over pieces of paper and etch Ginny Lupin into her bedside table, while a part of her is embarrassed to admit that she even had those thoughts. She would ask him how to behave, but she knows that he wouldn't know what to tell her, that she has to figure it out herself.
Ginny knows that in the end, she'll probably end up heart broken when he picks up and leaves the mess of a relationship they've been staging. She knows that she probably doesn't mean as much to him as he means to her. So for now, she'll just keep him, locked away from reality, stirring a tempest in her heart, like a secret.
Title stolen from hoosierbitch on livejournal.