Forget-Me-Nots
Ginny pondered for a moment about waking. She knew what she had done. Her eyes closed tightly shutting out the sun from a bright Sunday morning. The smell wasn't Hermione's she knew that straight away the distinct tang of a man's aftershave; and the arms were square, angular, furry, and she didn't slot into them like she did Hermione's she was very much a jigsaw piece with no hollows or juts, forced into a space into which she does not fit.
She didn't want to look, but she knew who it was. She could sense it was going to happen, but unfortunately her will power had died along with copious amounts of alcohol, some kind words and a warm bed. The more she thought about it the more she realised it was easy to cheat on someone. Even someone you know only in transcendent love that had no beginning and until the day you find yourself making the mistake of waking up in someone's arms had no foreseeable end.
"Morning" The gruff male voice uttered. Ginny flinched, it didn't sound right, his rough, broad touch did not feel right. To Ginny's absolute horror she was naked, though by the way the linen hung on her skin she already knew. This cemented in her mind what she didn't want to think about. What she had done. People rarely wake up in their exes bed, naked without some sort of sexual activity somewhere in the timeline of events of the night before.
"Morning" she said curtly, looking around in blind panic like a cornered mouse, searching for means of escape as though his dorm was impenetrable fortress, and not just a teenage boys room. Her mind began to work at lightning pace, thinking of excuses, what to tell Harry to get her out of their without questioning, What to tell Hermione about why she wasn't in the prefects dorm last night. Truth or Lies, a simple enough question in theory though at the minute it was blinding her with it's ambiguity. She had already decided fast enough that she was to tell the truth to Hermione she didn't want to be a liar and a cheater on the same day. But how much of the truth should be given? It's a strangely potent medicine if e'er there was one, and too much had consequences. 'I stayed in Harry's dorm because I was drunk' – Not a lie, but not a whole truth. Ginny was good at the boundaries in truth and lies, she worked well on perfecting it with the twins around, it's a shame she couldn't take it as a subject, or she'd be a star pupil without a doubt.
"Harry, I've got to go" She sighed. Wrapping the white sheet around her, hiding what little of her modesty wasn't on display to anyone with eyes.
"You don't have to" Harry stressed, but Ginny was tired, and couldn't take anymore emotional baggage as she was already the emotional atlas, a weight so heavy on her shoulders it was tantamount to a whole globe of emotions.
"Yes, Harry. I do" She said, putting on her school shirt, it hung loosely at her sides unbuttoned, making her look boyish, apart from the obvious curves of her womanhood hidden by a ghostly white sheet.
"Oh" was all Harry could muster at that point. Ginny reached for one of Harry's cigarettes and lit it. "Gin, you don't smoke" He insisted.
"Then what do you think I'm doing." She said, sparking the lighter and letting a contradictory cigarette hang both limp and rigid in her lips. Letting the smoke bellow out in a thick, belching, grey cloud with a soft woosh and a gasp.
"You're very good at that" Harry smiled, propping himself up on one elbow.
"Shut up Harry" she snapped, slamming his lighter down lightning fast on his bed side table, and gushing a sharp intake of breath on the victimised cigarette. "I need to think" She looked around frantically as though chasing a fly, and paused every few seconds to express her stress at the situation by making a deep and hissing sigh. Harry paused for a moment, observing the rare creature in front of him, as though she was some kind of rare species. Harry had never seen her with such intensity before, and it baffled him; he wanted to simultaneously let her go and chase her over an everlasting field, and pin her wings down in a glass case, he couldn't decide which would be preferable.
"Are you going to tell her?" He pondered, leaning over to collect a cigarette for himself, all the while brushing Ginny's skin; She recoiled as though he had all the softness of a brillo pad, and gave him a stone faced glare.
"I, think maybe, no? How should I know! Yeah, I should, yes, yeah I will" She said in-between two inhalations on her rapidly shortening cigarette. She was rubbing her temples, and inside her mind a film reel of every moment with Harry and Hermione separately blurred together at a much faster rate than twenty-four frames a second. Ginny lay back on the huge pillows that had been plumped from two heavy heads resting on them the night before, and let out a sigh. A door creaked, but it was too far away in either of their consciousness' to be noticed. But the figure in the door way was recognisable, the bushy hair, haphazardly scraped into pseudo-tidiness, those eyes and the pale skin.
"Hermione" Harry spluttered. The cigarette almost dropping from his mouth, but caught just in time to stop a blaze, that would probably have been preferable to the situation they found themselves in at that present moment in time. Hermione stared for a moment, Ginny wearing nothing but a shirt, both of them enjoying a relaxing cigarette, and before Harry realised it, Hermione had spotted him unconsciously draping his arm around her. They all waited for the explosion to come; as everyone knew Hermione was reserved but she was so passionate when the moment suited her, they were both sure they'd be dead within the minute. However, the minute passed, and nothing; she was just staring blankly as though she'd walked in on a squirrel eating and didn't want to disturb it. Harry and Ginny exchanged glances, Harry stared and Ginny nodded; She would speak first.
"Hermione…" She began, but Hermione just raised her hand, her eyes unmoving from the tiny spot of fluff on Harry's bedroom rug.
"I just wanted to know where you were" she said in a tiny, hollow, nasal voice that was so unrecognisable Ginny watched her lips move to check that it was indeed her who had said it. She caught her eyes for a moment, then Hermione looked away. "I'll come back later" and she slid out of the door silently, not a hint of an explosion or uncontrollable rage within her at all, just emptiness.