The dead silence of Ron and Hermione Not Talking About It was getting to Harry. Since he had gotten to the Burrow two days earlier, trailing the usual disaster in his wake, neither one of them had spoken a single word to him about Sirius, or about each other. Well, he thought, my mind is still full of my godfather's death, so sorry. And yours, he fumed silently at them over breakfast, are clearly full of when I'll give you time alone again.
"Nah," she muttered back, her brown eyes black in the bright morning light, "don't worry about it. Look," she said, walking up to him shyly, the slightest limp the only sign of the ankle she had broken less than a month before, "you don't have to, but any time you feel like you need to talk, I'll be happy just to listen. If you need."
"I thought you were seeing Dean," Harry snapped without meaning to.
Ginny seemed suddenly to expand, no longer quite so diminutive, her dark eyes flashing, "Yeah, I am, Harry." She poked him in the shoulder with a thin finger. "I'm also your friend, you stupid git, even if you never seem to remember it. I know what it's like not to have anyone to talk to, and I know the two people you usually count on are a little preoccupied at the moment. So in spite of the fact that I'm seeing Dean , and in spite of the fact that you're a rude bloody berk, yeah, I want to help any way I can."
Harry would have looked down, but that would have meant looking at Ginny's body, so he closed his eyes instead. "Sorry, Ginny," he said. "Thanks."
"No problem," she said, and Harry felt the moist pressure of her lips on his chin. "You can get a nice view from Stoatshead Hill this time of day." A chicken clucked indignantly as she walked inside.
Whatever emotion it was that chased its way through Harry's entrails as he stumbled his way down the drive that led from the Burrow to the village, it was nameless and as slippery as mercury. Memories bubbled through his mind's eye, from the sight of Sirius's face as he fell through the archway, to Ron daft and Hermione unconscious--dead, he had feared--to his friends' guilty, bruised looks the morning Lupin had delivered him from the nightmare at Privet Drive, to the feeling of Ginny's whisper of a kiss on his skin. The mixture of rage, sorrow and need was too potent and too well-shaken for him to take.
Overgrown, fragrant hawthorns along either side of the lane blocked out most of the still-low sun, which suited Harry's mood, but the day was warm and as his stride lengthened he began to perspire. It was as if he were sweating out the poison that had been building up inside of him. By the time he reached the outskirts of Ottery St. Catchpole, he was walking as if he might break into a run at any moment.
The village was so picturesque--straight out of a West Country post card--that Harry could barely believe he was only an hour or two by train away from the once-antiseptic lawns of Little Whinging. Aunt Petunia's begonias'll never be the same, he mused bitterly.
There was a library, a tiny constable's box, a pub (the Frog and Peach) and a chemist's shop that still called itself an apothecary's. With half a dozen wizarding families living within walking distance of the village, perhaps they sold more than aspirin tablets, nappies and pregnancy tests; with a grim grin, Harry imagined walking in and asking for porcupine quills or gnome repellant.
There was a tiny ice cream parlor with bright-shuttered windows just off the high street. Perhaps he would ask Ron and Hermione… (A wince.) Or Ginny… (Another wince.) Oh, damn.
Leaving the village in his wake, Harry stared up at the lowering shoulders of Stoatshead Hill. As he turned off the road, a ghost of regret whispered to him. Cedric . Oh, bloody hell. All the dead were coming for a visit today. Cedric, that predawn morning of the World Cup final. So confident and good-looking, even having the virtue not to want his dad to brag at Harry's expense. There was someone who was born to be a hero. Not some skinny dark-haired git with knobbly knees who always looked as if he'd just rolled out of bed, whose insides swirled between stupid dreams, regret, desire and an overdeveloped sense of his own inadequacy. He should have been the one who came home from that graveyard, not me, Harry howled inwardly, not for the first time.
Talking to Cedric's parents had been the hardest thing he had ever done.
The sun was full on Harry's face now, and he was sweating freely. A startled hare tore around the side of the hill as Harry disturbed its place of hiding.
Rude bloody berk, she'd called him, and she'd been right. Just a self-involved, arrogant toerag…
That brought him up short, dead in his tracks just a stone's throw from the top of the hill.
Oh, Dad, he thought. Why couldn't you at least have been something like what I thought you'd be? Everyone kept talking about what wonderful people you and Mum were but you were horrible ...
Was it Harry's imagination, or was the world's tallest dandelion clock wafting in the breeze at the crest of the hill? Harry blinked and wiped the sweat out of his eyes and off of his glasses. It was still there.
Cautiously, he climbed the last incline that led up to the hilltop.
It was Luna Lovegood, doing some sort of dance or exercise. Out of her school robes, her mass of straw-colored hair piled haphazardly on the top of her head, she looked even more outrageous than usual, clad in what looked like a hunter green Austrian milkmaid's pinafore over a tangerine-colored halter-top. She was swaying one-legged on a picnic blanket facing away from Harry. Her arms were arched back over her head, grasping her outstretched toe behind her taut back; the uplifted leg provided him an uninterrupted view of Luna's bright purple knickers, and the sandy blonde curls poking around the edges.
Harry's heart skipped.
Wibbling slightly, Luna lowered the raised leg and shifted to another extreme posture, raising the other leg to the side and arching towards it until she had touched her elbow to the knee. Vaguely, distantly, Harry recognized this pose from a History of Magic textbook diagram of a devadeshi --an ancient Indian dancing witch-priestess.
Harry found himself entranced by the ripple of the muscles across Luna's back. Who knew Luna had muscles?
She let her body and head fall forward, and then slowly straightened her back from the bottom up, until she was standing, palms pressed together, facing due south towards the ocean. "Hello, Harry," she said airily, still facing away.
"Er, hello," Harry replied.
"I like to come up here to clear my head sometimes too. Such a lovely spot." She shook her arms out and rolled her neck. "The druids used to do blood sacrifices on that rock over there." She pointed toward a low, lichen-covered boulder.
"Uchh! Really?"
"Oh, yes, my father told me. Humans and goats."
Harry was about to say something about how horrible that must have been for the goats when Luna turned around and revealed that she wasn't wearing a bra. In sharp relief beneath her top, Luna's nipples peaked around either side of the dress's apron like two tangerine-colored Galleons, and removed from Harry all power of speech.
It wasn't until she tapped him on the shoulder and said "Harry?" that he realized they had also removed all power of thought or of hearing.
"What?" he stammered, looking up into her pale, googly eyes.
"I said, Ginny told me you were in a sulk."
"Oh," Harry said, shoving his hands in his pockets to mask his nascent erection. Then he screwed up his face. "Ginny told you?"
Luna nodded. "We talked on the Floo after you left. I came up straight away--we live at the bottom of the hill." She pointed down to the south, towards the sea.
"But... Why?"
"Why? It's a terribly nice place to live, though it is a bit of a walk from the village..."
Harry gave a sad laugh. Her breasts were no longer commandeering his entire brain, but even out of eyesight they nibbled at his frontal lobes. He was gibbering. Nibbling breasts. "No, I mean why did you come up here?"
Luna smiled broadly, her teeth a brilliant white. "Ginny said you were awfully sad, and that you were headed here on a walk. So I thought perhaps I'd come and cheer you up. But I knew I would get here before you--Ginny and I meet here sometimes--so I decided to do some exercises."
"Oh." Somehow, Harry felt no more enlightened. "Uh, what were you doing?"
She continued to stand just a bit too close. "It's yoga that's supposed to help focus your magical power." She smiled again. "But Muggles do it because it's supposed to make for really great sex. Are you all right?"
Harry had almost swallowed his tongue. He stepped back from her and started to turn away, until he realized that this only made more obvious the fact that he had both fists stuffed into his jean pockets on either side of a distended zipper. "Uh, yeah, fly went in my mouth." He spat theatrically.
"Oh," Luna said. "My mum always said that meant someone was going come for a visit."
"Hmmm." For the first time, Harry noticed that Luna's usually pallid complexion was positively bronze. "You've, uh, been on holiday to the beach?"
"We went to Sweden, didn't I tell you? The sun hardly goes down this time of year."
A memory flashed in Harry's mind, the wheels slowly reengaging. "Yesss, you went off looking for those Crumple-nosed Thingys…"
"Crumple-Horned Snorkacks! Yes, we found a whole herd of them after about three weeks. They were quite wonderful, about waist-high with six legs." She suddenly pouted. "Unfortunately, Daddy's camera got smashed by the alpha male, so we weren't able to bring home any pictures, which was the whole point of the trip. But!" she exclaimed, the odd smile returning, "can I show you what we did bring back?"
"Uh, sure," Harry said, finally feeling he could withdraw his hands from his trousers. He tried to think of what sort of souvenir one might bring back from Sweden. Winegum fish?
Luna bent over to grab something from her bag, and Harry closed his eyes, trying not to think about her wine-colored pants. "Look," she said. "It's a Snorkack horn. They shed them once a year."
What she was holding looked like a smooth paper-white thumb, nearly twice as long as Harry's and half again as thick; it bent slightly at the rounded tip and had a small fish-tail protuberance at the base.
It looked thoroughly obscene.
"Watch," Luna said, and she stroked the length of the horn with two ink-stained fingers in a manner so suggestive that Harry had to stuff his hands back into his pockets. The antler began to wiggle, and the fishtail flittered back and forth.
"Luna," Harry said. "Good lord."
"Yes," said Luna, still smiling broadly. "I don't think Daddy ever realized why Mum was so obsessed with finding them."
"Good lord."
She touched the, the--it was a bloody vibrator --to Harry's chest, and giggled when he nearly jumped out of his skin. "Uh, no thanks, Luna," Harry stuttered.
"All right then," she said, face still goofy, eyes still far away. "You can use it on me." She pulled one of Harry's hands out of its hiding place and pressed the buzzing horn into his damp palm.
Harry found his gaze insisting that it must peer down again, and he noticed that the Galleons under Luna's top had each grown a tiny Knut at the precise center. He whimpered.
And stepped away again. "Look, Luna, um, thanks for trying to cheer me up, but I'm not sure..." Once again, the glare of Luna's nipples, now erect, was overwhelming his ability to think or speak, and so he closed his eyes, tight. "Look, I'm not quite sure what you've got in mind, at least not exactly, but, see, the thing is, I've never thought of you, you know, romantically . I mean, you're a really nice, really interesting person and all..."
"Oh!" exclaimed Luna, "how sweet! But I've never really thought of you romantically either. I really like you, too, and you are much more interesting than most of the people I know. But no, I'm not in love with you or anything like that. I've just had a really horrible week, myself, and I thought it might cheer us both up if we just fuck."
"You... what?"
"You know," Luna said, peering at him quizzically, "copulate? Fornicate? Play Hide the Wand?" She began to demonstrate crudely with her fingers.
Harry was so flummoxed that he blurted out the first clear thought that came into his mind: "Do you do this often?"
"No," Luna said. "I've been saving myself." Even Luna seemed to realize that her statement needed further elucidation. "I've always fancied Ginny's brother Ronald, you see."
"Oh," said Harry, a small light dawning. "Yeah, I'd noticed, a bit."
Luna pouted. "That's more than some people did. Ginny kept trying to tell me her brother liked that curly-haired girl, but... Love is blind." Her airy mope gave way to a crumpled glower that seemed quite out of place on Luna's face.
Thinking of a long, black ponytail and saffron skin, Harry grunted. "Yeah." He peered at her. "So, you've been, what? Saving yourself for Ron ?" She nodded, and a small tear began to leak along the small smile-wrinkles below one of her eyes. Suddenly, Luna looked quite young, and not odd at all. "Oh. I'm so sorry."
Now it was Luna's turn to look perplexed. "Why? You weren't the one who spurned me."
"No," Harry mused, "I suppose not."
"I'd been thinking about it for so long, you see, thinking about just how it would be when Ronald finally realized that I was the one for him. I even started doing these exercises to get my yoni in tune with my prana ..."
"Oh," said Harry, having no idea what she was talking about, but feeling quite certain that he was better off not knowing.
"Well," she said, smiling again, the bridge of her long, upturned nose flashing in the sun, "my second chakra is fully open. I'm perfectly ready. And since Ronald doesn't seem likely to take advantage of that readiness, and since you've had an even more unpleasant month than I have, I thought it might be lovely to take advantage of it with you ."
Being a boy just a few days shy of his sixteenth birthday, Harry was used to telling his body to shut up and cut it out. What he was not used to was having to squelch two overwhelming impulses at the same time: to leap on top of her then and there, and to turn and run back down the hill as fast as he could. "Luna, I..." Without thinking, he waved the now-still Snorkack horn between them.
Never taking her eyes of his, she took his hand, circled the antler with thumb and forefinger and milked it gently so that it began to wiggle again.
Harry's body told his mind to stuff it. Closing his eyes, he leaned forward until their noses slid past each other and their lips touched. In the warmth, her mouth was surprisingly cool, and sweet, like water from a mountain spring, Harry thought, if he had ever drunk from one.
The Snorkack horn buzzed along her ribs as he pulled Luna close. Feeling her press her long waist against him, he raised his hand so that the antler traced along the outside curve of her breast and found the nipple through her top, eliciting a deep, earthy groan that didn't sound like Luna at all.
Harry could remember just one other real kiss in his life--aside from one or two chaste pecks from Hermione and the rather ambiguous buss that Ginny had given him that morning. This kiss bore no relation whatsoever to those, nor to the semiconscious slurp he had shared with Cho at Christmas. No mistletoe now, or winter chill; no tears and guilt, no urgency other than the heat of the day and of her body and the wonderful pressure of her wide mouth against his.
Luna's tongue darted across Harry's teeth and danced with his. Another groan that didn't sound like Luna hummed between them, and Harry was fairly certain that this one came from him.
Luna stepped back and looked up at him. In the bright sunlight, her pupils had all but disappeared, and her eyes glistened an unearthly silver-blue. "You kiss as well as Ginny."
"Thank... uh. Hnnh?"
"Well," Luna said, eyes focusing elsewhere, "if I was going to make myself ready , I had to practice, didn't I?"
"Hnnh."
Luna clearly took this as for concurrence. "Of course. I asked Ronald--that seemed the shortest way to it--but he never seemed to hear me. And no one else around here was the right age, excepting poor Cedric, though he was a little old, and he got all shy and funny when I asked him. And none of my friends in Ravenclaw wanted to help me out, except Quartus Plinth, with the terrible teeth, and Marietta Edgcombe, and I never really liked her because she said Snorkacks were a load of rubbish. But Ginny said she wanted to practice too, and so we spent a lot of time last summer and the summer before, meeting up here and in the library. She got quite good. But you're quite good too."
"Hnnh."
Luna seemed finally to notice that Harry was tongue-tied. "What? Oh." She smiled and leaned into him again. " Ginny used to tell me Michael Corner used to get terribly excited whenever she mentioned us kissing. Are you one of those boys who gets all funny about girls kissing?"
"I, uh, dunno." But Harry did know. At that moment, the image of flaxen and ginger hair tangled together was searing itself into his adolescent brain and down into his viscera so forcefully he wasn't sure if he was going to puke or ejaculate.
Luna giggled--Harry supposed it was at his expression--leaned close so that Snorkack horn was jiggling between their bellies and whispered wetly into his ear. "Girls like to think of boys kissing too, Harry. I used to bring myself to moksha thinking of Ronald and you kissing..."
Harry liked the other image much better. But the feeling of her breath in his ear and the buzz just above their pelvises drove even the disquieting picture of kissing his best friend out of his head. He leaned forward, seeking out the underside of her chin with his lips.
A frisson passed through Luna's body--Harry was fascinated to feel her react from chest to thighs to the pressure of his lips against her neck. Now he took pleasure into whispering into her ear, and feeling her shiver. "What is that? That moke -thing?"
Her voice managed to be even breathier than usual when she answered, and much lower. "It, um, I don't know the English word, I learned most of this from some books that Padma Patil lent me, but in Sanskrit it means 'release,'" she said, pronouncing the last word as a five-syllable moan as he nibbled at her earlobe. "You know that funny quivery feeling you get when you rub yourself and it feels like time stops and everything is perfect for a while?"
Harry couldn't stop himself from laughing softly into her hair. "Yeah, it's called an orgasm in English. But it sounds like it's kind of different for boys."
Luna imitated Harry and chewed on his ear, sending little golden sparks down to the pit of his stomach. "Can I see?" she asked. A hand that had been pulling at a belt loop slipped over his hip and squeezed his cock hard through the taut denim.
Harry gave a gasp that melted into a scream as the flurry of golden sparks set off a hot, wet apocalypse. After a five-second eternity he collapsed against her shoulder, ashamed and disappointed. ShitshitshitohSHIT...
"Oooo," said Luna, lifting her hand. Even through Harry's pants and jeans, her palm had been dampened. She sniffed at it. "That is different."
She whispered into his ear, not seductively now, but shyly. "Did I say something? You look funny. I do that a lot, you know, say things people don't expect."
"No," Harry sighed, still into her shoulder, "no, it's not that. It's just... I'm so sorry I came..."
She stepped back, her face fallen, her eyes circular. "Oh. Well, you can go back to the Weasleys if you want to." She looked deeply abashed, and it took Harry a second to work out why.
"No! I don't mean I'm sorry I came here . It's just... 'Come' is another word for, you know, release ."
Color flooded back into her face. "Oh! Well, that's all right, then." Suddenly her brows knitted together. "Can you do it more than once? Only, I can bring myself to moksha five or six times in a morning before I start getting sore and bored. But I don't know if it works that way for boys."
"Um, I don't know." Harry said, trying to imagine what he would have thought if someone had told him this morning he would be comparing male and female orgasms with Luna Lovegood on the top of Stoatshead Hill. "I think I'll be fine. But I'll need a couple of minutes to, um, get ready again."
"Oh, good," Luna said, pulling the pinafore over her head and dropping it beside the picnic blanket. "Then you can give me an origami-thingy."
Harry grinned in spite of himself. "Orgasm."
Luna stepped close to him again. "I know. I just wanted to make you smile again." She kissed him, and when he put his hand to her hip, it found the bare flesh between her pants and her halter. His cock gave a moist twitch that let him know that everything was going to be just perfect.
She walked him over to the blanket, turned away from him and flipped up the pale strands that had slipped down from her enormous bun. "Can you untie my top?"
Harry's fingers found the bows before she had ever finished the sentence--the Snorkack horn dropped to the blanket between his feet--but he was astonished to find his hands trembling so violently that he could barely grasp the strings, let alone untie them. What? he thought. I've flown a broom straight at the ground at a hundred miles an hour. I've fought monsters and evil wizards and I've never panicked. So why am I nervous now ? "I, uh... You'll need to talk me through what you, um, want me to do, because..."
Blessedly, the bright orange halter finally fluttered to the ground. Luna reached back, took Harry's hands, and cupped them over her breasts. Her nipples rose urgently between his still-shaky fingers--the contrast between their hardness and the softness of the flesh around was, Harry decided, the most beautiful thing he had ever experienced. To that moment.
He squeezed his knuckles on either side of her nipples and Luna hissed, arching back against him. "Well," she said, "that's a good start."
Encouraged, Harry explored just how far he could go, running first his fingertips, then his nails in lazy circles around her areolas, and then pinching the nipples--first one and then the other. He found that he could pull on them quite hard, and that she only seemed to moan and writhe the more.
Soon, a new smell joined the mélange of the distant sea, dry grass and wild thyme that was wafting across top of the hill. It was a delicate, heady scent that Harry was sure that he had smelled before, though he couldn't think where.
"Down" she sighed. Harry decided she meant that as a request, and so he trailed one hand across Luna's ribs and her downy belly, continuing to roll her nipples with the hand that stayed behind. Kissing at her neck, he tentatively ran his fingers beneath the thin band of her knickers and into the thick, damp curls beyond.
"Down," she whinged, clearly a command this time. Harry had seen naked pictures in Dudley's magazines--the ones he used to hide in Harry's room so that Harry would be the one to get into trouble if they were ever found--and in the copies of WildWitch that Seamus, Fred and George always seemed to be passing around. Even so, Harry realized that he had no clear idea of what it was his fingers were about to encounter.
And whatever it was he hadn't expected, that had been what he had found. Where he had thought his fingers would meet a, an, a concavity between her legs, his fingers had brushed--to his surprise and her apparent delight--a ridge, scalloped and moist. He slid his fingers along either side of the protuberant lips... Oh. Of course. That's why they called them that...
Taking a hint from her reaction above, he squeezed the lips between his fingers and pulled them gently outward. Luna whimpered, and Harry realized that she had all but collapsed against him; between his shoulder, against which her head lolled, and his two hands, he was supporting almost all of Luna's weight.
As he continued to pinch and squeeze Luna's labia--wasn't there a jinx incantation for cementing lips that began Labia something?--the aroma that he had barely been able to detect earlier got stronger, and he identified it as the scent of her arousal, which aroused him no end, his cock straining through his jeans against the small of her back.
And he realized where he had smelled it before: in Ron's room, that morning that he had shown up out of the blue. Now he knew what he had interrupted, and why Ron and Hermione had looked so sheepish that morning. I'll have to apologize, Harry thought. Later.
A dampness ran along his fingers, and he realized that her lips were curling outward. Very carefully, he began to run his fingers up the insides of her open sex, which seemed to spread under his touch. As he probed her shallows, trying not to lose himself again at that thought of exploring her depths, his fingertips brushed a tiny, rigid nub of flesh, and Luna gave a loud yelp.
"You okay?" Harry asked.
By way of answer, Luna tore out of his grasp, spun around, threw her arms round his neck and gave the best impression of a Dementor's kiss that Harry could imagine. Just as he was beginning to lose coherence--hands pulling at her naked, muscled back, pelvis grinding blindly against hers as their tongues wrestled madly, his eyes covered by her now-unbound mass of hair--she grabbed him by both shoulders and shoved him down to blanket. With a rough yank she pulled his jeans halfway down his thighs. Tugging her damp knickers to one side, she knelt astride him and began to lower herself.
"WAIT," Harry gasped. "Don't we need, you know, some sort of protection or something?..."
Luna's gaze went from fierce and hawk-like to vague in a heartbeat. "Hmm?"
Harry could feel the heat of her opening against the tip of his cock. "Um, you know, to keep from you getting pregnant?"
"Oh!" Luna said, and swung off of him and began to crawl towards a basket on the far side of the blanket, losing her panties along the way. Her knee brushed the Snorkack horn, and it began to hum again.
As Luna rifled through the basket, Harry gazed, stunned, at her bottom. He was lying on a blanket with a girl who was completely naked. Her still-spread lips looked like some delicate magical flower from one of Professor Sprout's greenhouses. And who knew, under the robes and all of the odd layers of clothing she always wore, that her arse could be so magnificent ?
Without thinking, Harry grabbed the Snorkack horn and slithered up behind her, shedding his jeans as he went. Gently, he ran the wiggling antler up the back of Luna's tan thigh and was gratified to hear her gasp.
Sliding the horn upwards, Harry saw Luna's labia spread outwards hungrily. Where the lips met at the front of her body, like the figurehead at the prow of a ship, there projected the little nub that had incited such a reaction. C-L-I-T. Clit. Hullo, Clit.
Curious, grinning, Harry watched Luna as the tip of the humming antler tickled her orchid-like inner lips; she gave a whine and her bottom literally quivered. A circle of the bum? A gasp. A stroke back down the labia, and the quivering began again, the whine even higher. With as much care and delicacy as if he had been approaching one of Hagrid's more exotic beasties, Harry touched the horn to Luna's clit.
The blonde girl gave a long squeal and collapsed--her arms gave way beneath her, dropping her head into the basket and leaving her bottom rounded deliciously skyward.
For a minute or two--or five--Harry took enormous pleasure in keeping Luna in a state of near disintegration, probing, tickling, circling--first gently, then more aggressively. Her sex was wide open and glistening. When her moaning had reached the pitch and volume of a loud keening wail, he leaned up and blew on the wet lips.
She yelped, reached back and grabbed his hand, yelling, "Merlin, Potter, put the fucking thing in me already!"
He began to press the horn to her hole, but hesitated, eliciting a whimper. "Luna, this isn't going to hurt you, is it?"
"Fuck, no," the usually placid voice howled. "What the fuck do you think I've been doing with the fucking thing since we fucking found it!"
Trying not to laugh--at least, not loudly--Harry pressed the phallus into her, bringing a toe-curling groan from Luna. For a moment, he held it there, humming inside her, the fishtail flipping against her nubbin. Her whole body was literally quivering, her hands clutching spasmodically at the long grass just off the blanket. She was sobbing into her bag.
Awestruck, Harry began to move the horn out, and then back into her. The sobs quickly turned to a long, ferocious wail that tore through her body. Then, with a long sigh, she collapsed to her side.
The Snorkack horn seemed to have sensed that she had come. It went still in Harry's hand, and he gently withdrew it with a quiet plop.
A sheen of sweat shimmered on Luna's heaving ribs, her thigh, the rounded wonder of her arse. Her sex, too, open and flushed, glistened in the sunlight.
This, thought Harry. This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
Without thinking what he was doing, Harry leaned forward to taste her, running his tongue up her leg and over her tan hip, her side and the equally tan breast that perched there, just waiting for him. When he closed his lips around the pert, raspberry-colored nipple, Luna gave a contented purr. "I found the gel," she murmured, as if nothing had interrupted her search.
Harry gave her nipple a nibble and looked up at her silvery eyes. "The gel?"
She held up a small container marked Lovebottom's Stinksap Gel. "Forms a biostatic barrier," she mused dreamily as he bent back to sucking on her breast. "Nothing living can get through in either direction. No viruses, no nargles, no..." She gave a shudder as he switched to the other breast. "No spermatozoae. But everything else... Neville Longbottom and I made a rather large amount of gold selling it to the older students at the end of the year..." She gasped again as he let her nipple go.
"Neville?" Harry suddenly saw his friend holding the digusting Mimbulus mimbletonia , remembered the smell. "It isn't really, uh, stinksap, is it?"
"Of course it is, silly," she said. "It took us months to concoct."
Harry winced as she moved to open the lid. Seeing his reaction, she added, "Well, we've taken the odor away of course--took quite a long time. And added a strawberry scent. That was my idea." Turning beneath him, she opened the stone jar, revealing a bright green gel that, indeed, smelled of strawberries--a scent that suited Luna quite well. She dipped in two fingers, scooped out a generous dollop of the gel, and, with no warning, reached down and applied it to Harry.
He came perilously close to coming in her hand for the second time that morning. He had been so focused on her body, her obvious excitement, that he had almost forgotten how hard and excited he was himself. She stroked the cool gel into the skin of his cock, paying particular attention to the head. He wrapped his hand around hers to stop her and held his breath for a moment. After a few seconds, the urgency had faded slightly, and he drew her hand off of him. His cock glowed slightly where the gel was disappearing into his dark penis. Fascinated and relieved, he asked, "How long does it last?"
"Oh, days. Ginny and Ronald's brother Fred said he and Angelina Johnson went at it three times a day for almost a week before the glow wore off and they had to reapply it. "
"Wow," said Harry.
"Yes," she said, dreamily, still staring down at his cock. "I didn't think it would last that long. 'Went at it'--that's right, isn't it?" Harry nodded, and she pursed her lips. "Good."
They both stared down at his erect, glowing penis for a second. Harry could feel a nipple poking into his ear. "How do we know if it's, er, ready?"
"You look very ready to me."
"No, I mean, er, the gel."
"Well, it needs to be dry..." She ran her fingertips along the length of his shaft, making Harry shiver. "You're about as thick as the horn, but you are a bit longer, aren't you?" The only moisture was a drop of clear liquid leaking from the tip. Luna dipped her finger into it and pulled it away, trailing a dewy spiderthread of pre-cum that shone in the late-morning sun. "Ooo."
The cold, fluttery feeling was twisting Harry's stomach again. "Luna, are you sure?..."
"Take your shirt off," she said, in that same petulant voice of command that he was learning promised wonderful things. He obeyed immediately. Now they were both naked, except for his glasses, which she began to remove.
"No," Harry said. "Please, I want to see you."
She nodded. "Lie back," she ordered and once again he obeyed. Nervously, he lay there, legs and arms flat, his cock like a tower on a rolling plain. Poetry. He was thinking bad poetry.
She once again threw her leg over his hips and knelt astride him, and suddenly he found he wasn't thinking anything at all. Again, both of them looked down--Harry couldn't see the tip of his cock through the bushy blond hair between her legs. But he could feel the damp heat melting over him. Her hands flat on his chest, she began to lower onto him... Only to have his cock slip to the side. "Shit!" they both whinged.
"Harry," Luna whimpered, "do you think you could hold your lingam up for me so we can get it settled properly into my yoni ?"
"Uh, sure," he said. Figuring he had a pretty good idea of what she wanted, he held his cock upright by the base.
Again he felt her lips kiss his cockhead, but as she pressed down on him this time he slid through them.
And realized that he had been wrong before. It was all beautiful--everything that could lead to a feeling like this, a moment like this, everything that could ever happen was beautiful. Time was irrelevant.
"Breathe," she said huskily, pulling up slightly so that he could feel the muscles within her rippling over his cock.
"What?" he gasped.
"Breathe." She was herself panting. "If you breathe slowly and deeply, your prana will help your lingam to be fully engaged."
"What?" She was pushing down on him again, a little further this time. He drew his knees up behind her bum.
She was almost screaming. He could feel her voice through the velvet vice of her vagina. Vavavavoooooooom. "Keep... breathing and you'll have a stronger origami-thingy and you'll LAST LONGER."
With that, she let her full weight press down on him and he was all, all, all of the way in. He could feel the tip of his cock pressing against something.
Luna's buggy eyes crossed and her chest broke out in gooseflesh. Her cunt fluttered around him. "Oh, fuck!"
"Just breathe," he said, reaching up and cupping her breasts with his hands. His voice seemed to have dropped an octave or two.
Luna did in fact stay quite still, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth. Finally, once the gooseflesh had subsided, she began to rock her hips against him. Without his thinking about it, he found his pelvis moving in opposition. A seabird called.
She opened her eyes. "Harry."
"Yes?" he said, trying to take her advice rather than simply become paralyzed by the intensity of the feeling.
"We're not, anymore, are we? Untouched."
He grinned hugely--it felt as though his whole body was smiling. "No, Luna. No, we're not." He alternated squeezing each nipple. "Hey. You don't have any white spots. Didn't you wear any clothes in Sweden?"
"Snorkacks don't like anything that smells of humans. Our guides insisted on it."
"Where your guides by any chance..." he moaned as she shifted the movement of her hips to a side-to-side roll. "Where they boys?"
Luna was riding him with her head back, the sun on her face, her golden mane tumbling down her back onto his knees. "Oh, yes, yes, yes they were. Sven and Stefan... They were very, very nice about helping me put on the unguent that keeps you from smelling human ..."
"I bet," Harry said, finding it harder and harder to keep his breath slow and deep.
"We forgot about the... oh!... the camera, of course, which is why the bull Snorkack smashed... Oh !"
He began to thrust up into her, hard and fast, his bum and back lifting entirely off of the blanket. The sound of his hips slapping against the inside of her thighs was beginning to blur, and he was finding that every exhalation now was a moan, and then a scream.
And just at the moment when he knew he was going to explode within her and become simply an undifferentiated, vibrating cloud, Luna reached back with her arms and grasped a toe just as she had done when he had first seen her on the hilltop. Her cunt squeezed him tight and he froze. All that he could see of her was her uplifted chin between her breasts as she howled, "All that lives, lives forever. Only the shell, the perishable, passes away! The spirit is without end! Eternal! DEATHLESS !"
Then she relaxed her grip on his penis and he came into her, through her and out of himself.
They collapsed in a heap on the ground.
"Oh, fuck," Harry said breathlessly. "Oh, fuck, Luna. Oh my fucking god. Fuck."
She merely kissed him--not a fierce kiss, but soft and wet. Then she rolled off of him with a moist slurp , and they both moaned and shuddered. They spooned together, his wet, softening cock nestling between her round, proud buttocks.
Harry thought he might have passed out. Or fallen asleep. Through her sun-soaked hair, everything seemed easy, happy, joyous. " Moksha ," he sighed.
"Hmmm." Again time floated for a while. "Harry?"
"Yes."
"Where you thinking about the man who died? Your godfather? Is that why you were so sad?"
Suddenly, Harry was crying, his tears flowing into her hair and onto her neck. "Yes. And my father and mother. And Cedric. And all of the others. And I'm going to have to kill someone to make all of this stop. There's this prophecy ..." And it all tumbled out of him with his tears, no heaviness, no anger, just pure, clear sorrow.
She lay against him, listening. When he had stopped, and was just letting out gentle sobs, she said. "What I said, Harry? About the eternal? It's from a book Padma lent me, called The King's Song . At one point it says, 'Thy tears are for those beyond tears and thy words for those beyond comfort. The wise grieve not for those that live, and they grieve not for those that die--for life and death too shall pass away.' And then it says, 'If any man thinks he slays, and another thinks he is slain, neither knows the ways of truth. The Eternal cannot kill. The Eternal cannot die. Therefore, great warrior, carry on thy fight.'"
Harry sobbed into her neck.
"Does that help?" she asked.
He nodded. He wasn't sure why, but it did indeed help.
He truly slept then, and so did she. When he finally woke, the sun had shifted so that it was in his face, and she was snoring gently into his elbow.
He was about to wake her when she whispered what sounded like "Cho" into his arm.
"What?"
"I think I'll become romantically involved with Cho this year. Or Neville."
"Oh." Harry felt as if his feelings should be hurt, but was curious that they weren't.
"It's nice that you're interested in Ginny," Luna mused.
"I'm interested in... Ginny?"
"Oh, yes. While you were... coming , is that right?" He nodded against her neck. "While you were coming, you were screaming her name quite loudly."
"I... I was?" He had no memory of doing so, but found that the idea added to his sense of contentment, rather than dissipating it.
She nodded. "She'll be very happy to hear that. When we were practicing up here, you were who she was thinking of."
"But..." Harry blinked at the bright sunlight glinting through his glasses, "I thought she and Dean?..."
"Oh, Harry," she said in a tone so dismissive and Hermione-like that he couldn't help but laugh. She joined him and they lay there, giggling up into the blue summer sky.
"Thank you, Luna."
"You're welcome. Thank you, Harry."
"You're welcome. And Luna? I think Neville is a much better choice than Cho. I think you would be really great together."
"Oh? How nice." Absent-mindedly, she ran her fingers through his matted pubic hair. "I can't wait to tell Ginny..."
"Um, can you wait until tomorrow?"
"Oh? Why?"
"Because I'd like to tell her. About me, I mean. You can tell her about Neville, if you'd like."
She smiled distractedly, and then her mouth rounded. "Oh! I have a lovely idea. Perhaps you and Ginny and I could all practice together ..." Harry's sticky, stiffening cock twitched against her hand and she glanced down at it as if suddenly noticing it was there. Then she gave him a satisfied grin. "Are you getting funny thoughts again?"
Harry didn't answer--not in words, at least.
Two hours later, his tired (but still glowing) penis stowed safely back in his jeans, Harry strode back up the lane to the Burrow. The chickens were all hiding from the sun in the shadow provided by the feed tub.
Ginny was perched in the branches of the apple tree like a rather cautious red squirrel.
"Hullo, Ginny."
She peered down at him, her knees pulled up in front of her. "Did you... have a nice time?"
"Yes," he said, "Luna and I had quite a nice time."
"Ah," Ginny said, and hugged her knees tighter.
"But do you want to know something funny?" Harry could barely make out a scarlet eyebrow arching. "There were people both of us would rather have been up there with."
"Oh?" She lowered her knees. Very quietly, she said, "May I ask who?"
Harry stared up at her and realized that the lightness that he had been feeling suddenly had a locus, a point of focus. "I can't tell you about Luna, because I think she'll want to tell you herself. And about me... Can I ask you a question?"
She nodded, small, her face serious.
Harry was vaguely aware of his heart beating. "Dean is my friend. And you... well..." How to say this? "How serious are the two of you?"
Ginny looked as though she were having trouble breathing, and she blushed more brilliantly than Harry had seen her do since the days when she couldn't talk around him. Then she broke into the wicked grin and said, "Oh, Harry." It was the same 'you silly boy' tone that Luna had used, but there was something deeper to it, and full of promise.
"Ah," said Harry, grinning back. "So, Miss Ginevra, am I coming up there or are you coming down here? Because I want to show you some very interesting things that I've learned."
To his immense joy, he watched her eyes widen and her nipples harden, and she leapt nimbly down to the ground in front of him. She threw her arms around his neck, and Harry knew that nothing to come could ever take away the radiance of that moment.
The summer was looking up.