Chapter Seven

Ginny waved goodbye to Hermione from her porch, then sighed and turned to the front door. She put her key in the lock and thought about turning around and going back to Hermione, Oliver, and the prospect of a night out catching up with friends. Well, she considered as she turned her key, more like a friend and someone she knew. She didn't really consider Oliver a friend. In fact, he seemed somewhat creepy to her after the painting incident.

She shut the front door behind her and lazily hung her coat over the banister. Unwinding her scarf, she called for her boyfriend. Harry appeared at the top of the staircase and smiled down at her. "I was sure you would want to go out with Hermione after a terrible evening of painting," he said.

"The painting wasn't so terrible," she replied, climbing the stairs slowly. "Oliver Wood was our teacher, isn't that weird?"

"Wow, he's not playing Quidditch now?" Harry asked, surprise in his voice. "He was such a fanatic in school."

"I guess everyone has changed since then," Ginny said, reaching Harry and the top of the stairs.

He smiled at her and took her in his arms. "Good thing we haven't," he said, love in his voice. "I still love you just as much as I did in school."

Ginny smiled, remembering their early days at Hogwarts. "We were so young," she said, then winced, thinking of how like her mother she sounded.

"It's crazy that we've been together for four years," Harry murmured, his head resting on her shoulder and his lips moving against her neck. "I've spent a lot of my life with you, Ginny."

"I know," Ginny said, stroking her boyfriend's hair. "It's been a nice time."

Harry pulled back until he was looking at her and smiled, a glint of wickedness in his eyes. "Just nice, hmm?" he teased, pulling her against him tightly.

"Well," she said slowly, rolling her eyes and trailing her fingers from his shoulders down his chest, "I guess 'nice' might be a little weak…"

"Since you're home and all," Harry said, leading a giggling Ginny toward their bedroom, "let's see just how nice things can be between us tonight."

Ginny let all the breath out of her lungs at once. "Harry, how could I ever leave you?"

"That's exactly the kind of thing a man wants to hear after displaying his sexual prowess in the bedroom," Harry replied, rolling off of his girlfriend. "How you're thinking of leaving me."

Ginny rolled her eyes lazily; she felt exhausted all through her bones. "You know that's not what I meant."

"I know," Harry said, settling on his side and looking into Ginny's eyes. "I never want you to leave me. I love you so much, Ginny."

"Of course you say that after that… experience," she said. "How could you think any differently, I mean, that was the hardest you've-"

"I mean it," Harry said in a low voice, cutting across her gently. "I've meant it ever since we were at school. I knew you were right for me almost from the moment we started dating. I don't know if it was the surrounding circumstances-"

"Like a giant war where either of us could have died any day and an evil wizard after our lives?" Ginny asked sarcastically.

"Yes, those," Harry replied, smiling but still serious in tone. "But in any case I made my decision quickly. I just wish you'd let me marry you."

"Let's not talk about this now, Harry," Ginny said sleepily. "I'm tired and I feel good and I want to go to sleep with you, and maybe later wake up and make out and go for round two with you, but I don't really have the energy to talk to you about this right now."

"Damn," Harry said, moving closer to Ginny and wrapping his arms around her. "I was hoping you'd be tired enough to just say yes."

"I think you know by now that I'm not really that type of girl," Ginny sighed, resting her forehead against her boyfriend's chest and tangling her legs with his. "I'm only twenty-one, I don't want to be married yet. Maybe never at all."

"I know," Harry said, a sleepy edge creeping into his voice. "I just thought I'd ask again. I really want to be married to you, Ginny, that's all."

"I know," Ginny said, "but I don't think I'm going to feel differently about it in the morning."

There was a silence, and Ginny worried maybe she had hurt Harry's feelings. True, she wasn't exactly foaming at the mouth to get married, but she hadn't wanted to offend her boyfriend. She waited for a moment for him to speak, then tentatively said his name, looking up to see if he looked angry.

She was answered by a light snore. Harry had already fallen asleep.

"Thank goodness it's my day off," Ginny murmured, and then followed her boyfriend into dreamland.

Ginny woke up abruptly three hours later, slightly sweaty and short of breath. Harry had at some point moved in his sleep so she was resting almost sideways over his chest, and her sudden start into consciousness didn't seem to have disturbed his slumber. She got up slowly, still trying not to wake Harry up, and tiptoed to the bathroom, closing the door before turning on the light.

She stared at her face in the mirror uneasily, wondering where that dream had come from. She had started taking dreams fairly seriously at age fourteen, when Harry had had that dream about her father that had ended up saving Arthur Weasley's life. Whenever she had a dream that she could remember, she either wrote it down or thought it through until she thought she knew what it meant. But how was she even supposed to think about this one without feeling uncomfortable and even guilty?

She had dreamed about the painting Oliver had done. It had come to life, this painting of her, and stepped from the canvas, utterly naked and gleaming with oil paint. Her painting-self had looked around the art classroom- which was where she had appeared in the dream- and out of seemingly nowhere, but probably off another canvas, stepped Oliver.

But it wasn't exactly Oliver. He looked like she did, shimmering in the fluorescent lighting as if paint covered his skin. Ginny had realized that Oliver was also supposed to represent a painting, although one hadn't been done of him in the class. And after his image of her had emerged, she felt less than enthusiastic about attempting something so creepy as painting someone she hardly knew. However, the dream-projection of him was worth looking at; his body, clothed only in the sheen of the paint, was proportional and fit, and he still had the twinkle in his eye that had been present throughout his lecture earlier. He beamed a smile at the painting-Ginny, who returned it warmly and joined hands with the oil Oliver. Together they started to dance in the middle of the classroom, moving faster and faster until they whirled into one spinning tornado of colors. Their painted limbs and torsos had run and blurred together into one abstract Van Gogh-ish twister and they splattered all over the classroom walls and floor, joining the splotches that were already there. What remained of their bodies then fell in a puddle in the center of the room, congealing and rippling smaller and smaller until it remained still, neither figure distinguishable in the mess.

Ginny shook herself in reality, pale in the bathroom mirror with no remnant on her skin of the sheen from her dream. She didn't want to tell Harry. She didn't know what the dream meant at all, and she didn't feel like he'd appreciate it. Harry always got a bit funny when she mentioned other men appearing in her dreams. Not funny enough to annoy or stifle her at all, but she didn't want to hurt or worry him over something from her subconscious. It was probably just the remembrance of the class and the fact that she and Hermione had made plans for Thursday to get drinks with an old friend.

She sighed happily, relaxing into a sudden understanding- or, at least, interpretation. She was probably just subconsciously thinking about bonding again with an old schoolmate in combination with the whole art class theme of the evening. The painting aspect probably came from her utter surprise at actually enjoying the class.

"It's so helpful to understand dreams," Ginny whispered to herself, turning out the bathroom light and returning clumsily to the bedroom. "Although I don't understand why we were naked."

It didn't seem very important to her anymore as she got into bed, draped again over Harry's chest and, with a sigh, fell back asleep.