Ginny was always impulsive, and that day perhaps most of all. No thought went into the action -- her blood was singing with the thrill of victory, she was so happy she felt as if she were floating on air, and then… Harry was there. He stepped through the portrait hole and as soon as she saw his face she was racing across the room towards him. It seemed to happen as though the decision had been made long before.

Michael asked politely if he could kiss her, one day after Herbology. She agreed, although what she really wanted to say was finally. He drew her behind the corner of the greenhouse wall, leaned close and pressed his lips to hers, dry and warm and soft. A sharp rapping interrupted them, and they sprang apart guiltily. Ginny looked up to see Professor Sprout on the other side of the glass wall, scolding them with a trowel in her hand. It was a good first kiss, she thinks now, even though there was no spark, no energy between them. At the time, she didn't even know what she was missing, not really.

On Harry's seventeenth birthday, she was ready to give him the gift of herself. She laughs about it now, to think she really thought that way at sixteen years old. She kissed him there in her bedroom, pressed against him so he could feel every curve and want of her teenage body, and he pressed back, every bit as eager. She knows now that the only true way to give oneself to another is about much more than just sex. Still, Ginny wishes they'd never been interrupted, that she could have shown Harry that experience before he left. He shouldn't have had to die a virgin.

With Dean, it was different. There was no lack of spark or energy, and they had so much fun together, sneaking around and exploring possibilities. Behind the tapestry in the left-hand corridor, Dean traced his hands across her body and Ginny arched up, hungrily pressed her mouth to his, and forgot all the other things that were missing. Until those things came blundering into their secret place one day: Harry, standing there with a strange look in his bright green eyes. He had no claim on her, had made no declaration. She owed him nothing. Nothing. She could kiss her own boyfriend if she wanted, no matter what look Harry Potter had in his eyes. So why did she feel as if something was missing?

"Ginny, I--" Harry said, and he gave up on words and kissed her instead. It had been seven months and eighteen days since the battle, since she'd watched him die, and every one of those days she'd thought about going to him but decided to give him space. And after all that time, this kiss was like nothing else she had ever experienced -- it wasn't tentative or confused, wasn't purely physical or entirely impulsive. In its own way it was all of those things, but there was more, too. Harry was communicating with her as his lips pressed against hers and his arms pulled her close: there was a message in his kiss, and a question. Ginny answered the best way she could, leaning into his embrace and opening her mouth to deepen the kiss.