Fic: "Exposition" by delicfcd
Author: Delicfcd
Title: Exposition
Challenge: Verse: Iron & Wine, Naked As We Came. ‘she says "wake up, it's no use pretending"/ i'll keep stealing, breathing her’
Rating: PG
Summary: Harry can’t explain how he feels, or why he’s stealing chances to be around Ginny. Luckily, Ginny just wants him to explain why he’s an idiot.
Genre: Flangst. Emphasis on the ‘Fl-’
Word Count: 2,723
Notes: Many thanks to magicofisis for the beta.
Exposition -- noun. A setting forth of meaning or intent; A statement or rhetorical discourse intended to give information about or an explanation of difficult material; An act or example of exposing.
Harry would be the first to admit that he was fairly crap at explaining his feelings; thus, he had absolutely no idea when or why he’d started feeling the way he did about Ginny.
He could, however, pinpoint the moment when he began to realise exactly how screwed he was. Not the day, or the events that preceded it, or even what time it was. He was pretty sure it had been night and winter, because he could distinctly remember there’d been a fire in the Gryffindor common room, but he was at a loss to describe the events that preceded it. All he could remember was Ginny falling asleep on top of him.
Since Ginny had a rather cat-like ability to fall asleep anywhere, Harry hadn’t felt at the time that this was an event of any significance, especially since it wasn’t like she’d meant to do it or anything; she’d simply fallen asleep while sitting on the couch next to him, then promptly toppled sideways. The only surprising thing about the whole incident was that she didn’t wake up when her head smacked into his shoulder. He hadn’t thought about how good her weight felt against him, or the way her hair shimmered in the firelight, because he was too busy worrying about whether her cheek would be bruised in the morning.
Then he’d stolen a look at her sleeping face, breathed her in, and thought, Oh, bugger.
He didn’t have much chance to deal with his feelings for Ginny that year, even had he been able to sort out what exactly those feelings were. Everything he felt that year was submerged under a sea of anxiety (marred by occasional squalls of outright panic), making it impossible to distinguish which part of his emotional turmoil related specifically to Ginny. All of his time and attention was focused - had to be focused - on the minor issue of the unstoppable Dark Lord intent on his death. Even when that was dealt with, and pushed to the back of his mind because he’d rather not think about it, he still didn’t have to come to terms with the matter of Ginny, because he was in Auror training and she was at Hogwarts.
Even with the separation, the problem refused to go away; he found himself spending far too much time examining her letters for subtext and resisting the urge to go to Hogwarts and hex any boy whom she mentioned. (There were surprisingly few; he tried to tell himself that there was no significance to ‘Colin can be kind of annoying, don’t you think’ being the biggest reference she made to a male who wasn’t one of her brothers).
When he did see her again, the next Christmas at the Burrow, he couldn’t stop himself from behaving in a completely ridiculous fashion. Any time he didn’t spend actively in her company was spent looking for excuses to be near her, and as it got later, he realised he was unconsciously manoeuvring so that when she did inevitably fall asleep in her chair, he’d be the one she was next to at the time.
The evening slipped into night; eventually it was just the two of them in front of the fire, Ginny curled up against his chest. Harry felt vaguely ashamed of himself, at the way he was taking advantage of their friendship just to have an excuse to have moments like this, to have a warm, soft, gently snoring girl attached to him, however fleeting or imaginary the moment. So, when she began to stir, he faked sleep.
Ginny ruffled his hair. “Wake up, Harry,” she said. “It’s no use pretending.” Wake up? Fat chance. He’d have to explain how he’d been stealing opportunities to be with her, to breathe her in, and he wasn’t about to ruin this moment by opening his eyes and having a conversation that he was guaranteed to stuff up.
“Alright, then, silly. G’night, Harry.” She kissed the top of his head softly and padded out of the room.
He was an idiot. He’d now half-convinced himself she fancied him, as if that would ever happen; sure, she’d been quite taken with him once, but she’d gotten that well out of her system ages ago. After she got to know him, in fact, which told him all he needed to know about his chances. It only confirmed what he had to do: Avoid any and all contact with Ginny Weasley, for the sake of his sanity.
Ginny was going to get an explanation for Harry’s behaviour if she had to beat it out of someone. At the present moment, it was looking like Ron would be first in line for a kicking.
It was annoying, because she’d been quite looking forward to this party. It was being held to celebrate Ginny finishing school, Harry and Ron completing their first year of Auror training, and Hermione’s promotion from being one sort of Unspeakable to another sort of Unspeakable.
(According to Ron that last part was only partially true - what they were really celebrating was the fact that Hermione had finally gotten the hang of not talking to them about things they weren’t allowed to know. Ginny could only imagine how frustrating it must have been to have every conversation with Hermione begin ‘-iviate! Sorry!’)
Ginny had been planning on spending some time catching up with everyone, sneaking some firewhisky since adult supervision was conspicuously absent, getting Harry to assure her that he had been ignoring her ridiculously flirtatious letters because he was just so busy with Auror training, and then jumping him the moment they were alone together.
Except he’d been avoiding her the whole party.
He’d greeted her at the door with a resounding “Hi! Uh, yeah, Ginny. I’ve got to… uhh…” and then scarpered. At first she’d been inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume there was in fact a pressing case of ‘uhh…’ that required his attention. But then he’d conspicuously stayed out of her way the entire party, most recently abandoning a conversation with Ron the moment she headed that way, leaving her brother to turn his back on family loyalty in favour of running interference for his coward of a prat of a best friend.
“Avoiding you? Why would Harry be avoiding you?”
Sometimes she wondered if Ron got sick of having to dye his hair all the time to cover up the fact he was adopted. Honestly, Percy could lie better than this. Time to show him how it was done, then.
She put on her best heart-broken and pining expression (she was somewhat annoyed by how easy the pining part was to summon up). “He hates me, doesn’t he? I went and fell for him all over again and he’s so sick of having to deal with poor ickle love-struck Ginnikins that he can’t even be in a room with me!”
Oh, bugger. All of that was potentially true. Maybe the real reason he’d stopped replying to her letters after Christmas was because she’d completely misread all the signs. He didn’t fancy her, didn’t have the heart to tell her, and that was why he’d spent the entire party playing Dodge the Ginevra. He could defeat the Dark Lord, but was too chicken to inform a girl that her attentions were undesired.
This was the worst party ever.
“Hates you? That’s ridiculous, Harry fanci-” Ron clamped his mouth shut and shot her an accusing look as if it were her fault he couldn’t keep a secret.
This was the best party ever.
“I KNEW IT!” Oops. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. And she certainly hadn’t meant to shout it to the rafters. She carefully controlled her voice. “Then why, dear brother,” - he was, really, her absolute favourite, as of this moment - “is he avoiding me?”
Ron gave her a defeated look. “I think someone stole his brain.” He sighed. “Look, I promised I wouldn’t tell you, alright? You’ll have to corner him somewhere and ask him.”
Bloody right she would.
It had been years since she’d sneaked out of her room at the Burrow via the window, but luckily it turned out to be like riding a broom: you never forgot how.
Just lower yourself from the windowsill till your foot finds the little gap in the wall there, then grip the vines and drop, resting your foot on the top of the next window down, then a sideways shimmy and slide down the spouting and then finally jump to the loose board sticking out and step from there to the ground.
As she completed this last step, she realised two things: First, she could have just Apparated from her bedroom now she had a licence.
Second, Dad had nailed that loose board back in.
She picked herself up, closed her eyes and Apparated to Grimmauld Place, fuming. There had better be one hell of a good explanation waiting for her at the end of all this.
When she opened her eyes, she was in Harry’s room. Damn. She’d meant to Apparate to the hallway outside his room, so she could collect her thoughts before she confronted him.
He was in bed, which immediately reminded her of all the times she’d fallen asleep curled up by his side. She resisted the urge to do so here. She reminded herself she was angry with him. He’d been shutting her out. He talked to Ron but not to her. He wore pyjamas rather than just his boxers, the inconsiderate git.
Something - the noise she made Apparating, maybe, or that involuntary gasp she’d made when she realised where she was, or possibly just instincts honed by various attempts on his life - alerted him to the presence of someone in his room and he went for his wand.
“Wait! It’s me!” Being hexed unconscious was really not the way she wanted this to go. Of course, she’d have the advantage when she came round because he’d feel guilty… plus, there was the possibility he’d put her in the bed while waiting for her to regain consciousness…
No. Stupid plan. Moot, anyway, because Harry was putting his wand back on the bedside table and picking up his glasses instead. “Who…” He peered in her direction. “Ginny?”
She sat down on the end of the bed and crossed her arms. “You have some explaining to do, Mister.” She kicked herself; this was why she’d wanted to give herself time to collect her thoughts. That was entirely too accusatory and wouldn’t get her anywhere, since Harry had a tendency to clam up when he was angry.
“Right. Yes. I think I’ll begin by explaining why you’re in my room in the middle of the night - oh, wait, I don’t know that. You wouldn’t happen to know, would you?” Of course, sometimes he was snide instead of clam-like. The trick was not to let him rile you.
“You ignore my letters, you avoid me, and now you’re being sarcastic at me? You sure know how to charm them, Harry.” It wasn’t a trick she was very good at, apparently.
He looked away (which happily made it easier for Ginny to think straight; she felt those eyes should really be made illegal) and muttered something that sounded like, “Yeah, that’s the problem alright.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed, carefully softened her voice. “Why have you been avoiding me?”
He still wasn’t looking at her. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”
“You thought I wouldn’t notice you acting like I have the plague? If you didn’t want to be around me, you should have just-”
“Of course I want to be around you, that’s the problem, isn’t it? You think I enjoy staying away from the girl I lo- I mean, one of my friends?”
Relax, Ginny, she thought. Lots of words start with ‘lo-’. Look. Loathe. Loot, although that didn’t really fit. Lozenge. It might be Auror slang for ‘am only moderately attracted too.’ I reckon that waitress is a bit of alright, how about you? Nah, I only lozenge her.
“I thought maybe if I stayed away for a while, it’d go away and we could go back to being friends.”
“Is that what you want? For us to just… be friends?”
“Well, no, but I know you don’t feel the same way-”
“I don’t?” She just wrote innuendo-laden letters to all the boys she knew, did she? Oh, no, she didn’t feel anything for Harry, she’d just followed him around at Christmas like a love-sick puppy for nostalgia’s sake.
“Look, I know you stopped liking me in fifth year-”
Fifth year? That was when she started again, right at the end-
-wait... he meant his fifth year; he was talking about the first time she fell for him, not the second - which hadn’t been a fall so much as a gentle downward slide, tugged downward by the real Harry, instead of the half-imaginary doppelganger that had so filled her head with rehearsed conversations that when confronted with the reality all the things she should or could say jammed in her mind and left her unable to say anything at all. She hadn’t even known him that first time, not really. “Of course I stopped liking you!” she said, realising too late how it sounded.
He flinched, turned away and started to get out of the bed. She reached across him and grabbed his shoulder, blocking his progress with her arm. He sank back down.
She found herself completely unable to move her hand from where it lay, right on the fringe where the soft cloth of his pyjamas was replaced with warm skin. If she just moved her hand sideways -
She forced her mind back to the conversation. “Look, I’ll explain first, shall I?” She tried to gather and order her thoughts; to assemble, as Hermione might, a coherent narrative correlating her developing feelings to specific events, a timeline to which she could point and say ‘this is where we were friends’ and ‘this is where we were more.’
Then she thought, Bugger that for a lark, and kissed him instead.
She’d expected, perhaps, for it to be awkward, as first kisses usually were, and to some extent it was; she was sitting a little too far away from him so her neck was strained, and he’d pulled up his leg when she moved towards him and his knee was jammed into her side. But he’d tilted his head and parted his lips when she moved and put one hand behind her head, stroking her hair a little, and she could think of nothing but the feel and taste of his lips, the warmth of his skin where she’d slipped her hand into the neck of his pyjamas, and the way he gasped into her mouth when she shifted so she was straddling him. When she pulled back, she felt more inebriated than she had after the firewhisky. He opened his eyes and looked at her; between the green flame and the way her head was spinning, she was reminded of nothing so much as travelling by Floo. She suppressed a giggle at the ridiculousness of the thought as Harry spoke.
“...I don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand?” A girl used him as her favourite pillow, wrote him embarrassingly saucy letters, sneaked into his room late at night and snogged him, and he still couldn’t figure it out? Maybe someone had stolen his -
“Uh, no. I think you’ll have to explain it to me some more,” he said, very seriously. “Repeatedly, probably. I’m really quite thick.”
Oh. Oh. Her traitorous face disobeyed her edict to be cool and composed and instead launched the ‘grin like a loon’ rebellion. She shifted slightly on top of him, eliciting a quite delightful groan, and purred, “Oh, are you now?” She leant forward. “You still have some explaining of your own to do, remember?”
Harry, it turned out, was quite good at explanations. He covered all the important (and many obscure) points at length; he made effective use of body language and eye-contact; he was attentive to the mood of the audience, and he took a most satisfyingly long time to reach a conclusion.
Title: Exposition
Challenge: Verse: Iron & Wine, Naked As We Came. ‘she says "wake up, it's no use pretending"/ i'll keep stealing, breathing her’
Rating: PG
Summary: Harry can’t explain how he feels, or why he’s stealing chances to be around Ginny. Luckily, Ginny just wants him to explain why he’s an idiot.
Genre: Flangst. Emphasis on the ‘Fl-’
Word Count: 2,723
Notes: Many thanks to magicofisis for the beta.
Exposition -- noun. A setting forth of meaning or intent; A statement or rhetorical discourse intended to give information about or an explanation of difficult material; An act or example of exposing.
Harry would be the first to admit that he was fairly crap at explaining his feelings; thus, he had absolutely no idea when or why he’d started feeling the way he did about Ginny.
He could, however, pinpoint the moment when he began to realise exactly how screwed he was. Not the day, or the events that preceded it, or even what time it was. He was pretty sure it had been night and winter, because he could distinctly remember there’d been a fire in the Gryffindor common room, but he was at a loss to describe the events that preceded it. All he could remember was Ginny falling asleep on top of him.
Since Ginny had a rather cat-like ability to fall asleep anywhere, Harry hadn’t felt at the time that this was an event of any significance, especially since it wasn’t like she’d meant to do it or anything; she’d simply fallen asleep while sitting on the couch next to him, then promptly toppled sideways. The only surprising thing about the whole incident was that she didn’t wake up when her head smacked into his shoulder. He hadn’t thought about how good her weight felt against him, or the way her hair shimmered in the firelight, because he was too busy worrying about whether her cheek would be bruised in the morning.
Then he’d stolen a look at her sleeping face, breathed her in, and thought, Oh, bugger.
He didn’t have much chance to deal with his feelings for Ginny that year, even had he been able to sort out what exactly those feelings were. Everything he felt that year was submerged under a sea of anxiety (marred by occasional squalls of outright panic), making it impossible to distinguish which part of his emotional turmoil related specifically to Ginny. All of his time and attention was focused - had to be focused - on the minor issue of the unstoppable Dark Lord intent on his death. Even when that was dealt with, and pushed to the back of his mind because he’d rather not think about it, he still didn’t have to come to terms with the matter of Ginny, because he was in Auror training and she was at Hogwarts.
Even with the separation, the problem refused to go away; he found himself spending far too much time examining her letters for subtext and resisting the urge to go to Hogwarts and hex any boy whom she mentioned. (There were surprisingly few; he tried to tell himself that there was no significance to ‘Colin can be kind of annoying, don’t you think’ being the biggest reference she made to a male who wasn’t one of her brothers).
When he did see her again, the next Christmas at the Burrow, he couldn’t stop himself from behaving in a completely ridiculous fashion. Any time he didn’t spend actively in her company was spent looking for excuses to be near her, and as it got later, he realised he was unconsciously manoeuvring so that when she did inevitably fall asleep in her chair, he’d be the one she was next to at the time.
The evening slipped into night; eventually it was just the two of them in front of the fire, Ginny curled up against his chest. Harry felt vaguely ashamed of himself, at the way he was taking advantage of their friendship just to have an excuse to have moments like this, to have a warm, soft, gently snoring girl attached to him, however fleeting or imaginary the moment. So, when she began to stir, he faked sleep.
Ginny ruffled his hair. “Wake up, Harry,” she said. “It’s no use pretending.” Wake up? Fat chance. He’d have to explain how he’d been stealing opportunities to be with her, to breathe her in, and he wasn’t about to ruin this moment by opening his eyes and having a conversation that he was guaranteed to stuff up.
“Alright, then, silly. G’night, Harry.” She kissed the top of his head softly and padded out of the room.
He was an idiot. He’d now half-convinced himself she fancied him, as if that would ever happen; sure, she’d been quite taken with him once, but she’d gotten that well out of her system ages ago. After she got to know him, in fact, which told him all he needed to know about his chances. It only confirmed what he had to do: Avoid any and all contact with Ginny Weasley, for the sake of his sanity.
Ginny was going to get an explanation for Harry’s behaviour if she had to beat it out of someone. At the present moment, it was looking like Ron would be first in line for a kicking.
It was annoying, because she’d been quite looking forward to this party. It was being held to celebrate Ginny finishing school, Harry and Ron completing their first year of Auror training, and Hermione’s promotion from being one sort of Unspeakable to another sort of Unspeakable.
(According to Ron that last part was only partially true - what they were really celebrating was the fact that Hermione had finally gotten the hang of not talking to them about things they weren’t allowed to know. Ginny could only imagine how frustrating it must have been to have every conversation with Hermione begin ‘-iviate! Sorry!’)
Ginny had been planning on spending some time catching up with everyone, sneaking some firewhisky since adult supervision was conspicuously absent, getting Harry to assure her that he had been ignoring her ridiculously flirtatious letters because he was just so busy with Auror training, and then jumping him the moment they were alone together.
Except he’d been avoiding her the whole party.
He’d greeted her at the door with a resounding “Hi! Uh, yeah, Ginny. I’ve got to… uhh…” and then scarpered. At first she’d been inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume there was in fact a pressing case of ‘uhh…’ that required his attention. But then he’d conspicuously stayed out of her way the entire party, most recently abandoning a conversation with Ron the moment she headed that way, leaving her brother to turn his back on family loyalty in favour of running interference for his coward of a prat of a best friend.
“Avoiding you? Why would Harry be avoiding you?”
Sometimes she wondered if Ron got sick of having to dye his hair all the time to cover up the fact he was adopted. Honestly, Percy could lie better than this. Time to show him how it was done, then.
She put on her best heart-broken and pining expression (she was somewhat annoyed by how easy the pining part was to summon up). “He hates me, doesn’t he? I went and fell for him all over again and he’s so sick of having to deal with poor ickle love-struck Ginnikins that he can’t even be in a room with me!”
Oh, bugger. All of that was potentially true. Maybe the real reason he’d stopped replying to her letters after Christmas was because she’d completely misread all the signs. He didn’t fancy her, didn’t have the heart to tell her, and that was why he’d spent the entire party playing Dodge the Ginevra. He could defeat the Dark Lord, but was too chicken to inform a girl that her attentions were undesired.
This was the worst party ever.
“Hates you? That’s ridiculous, Harry fanci-” Ron clamped his mouth shut and shot her an accusing look as if it were her fault he couldn’t keep a secret.
This was the best party ever.
“I KNEW IT!” Oops. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. And she certainly hadn’t meant to shout it to the rafters. She carefully controlled her voice. “Then why, dear brother,” - he was, really, her absolute favourite, as of this moment - “is he avoiding me?”
Ron gave her a defeated look. “I think someone stole his brain.” He sighed. “Look, I promised I wouldn’t tell you, alright? You’ll have to corner him somewhere and ask him.”
Bloody right she would.
It had been years since she’d sneaked out of her room at the Burrow via the window, but luckily it turned out to be like riding a broom: you never forgot how.
Just lower yourself from the windowsill till your foot finds the little gap in the wall there, then grip the vines and drop, resting your foot on the top of the next window down, then a sideways shimmy and slide down the spouting and then finally jump to the loose board sticking out and step from there to the ground.
As she completed this last step, she realised two things: First, she could have just Apparated from her bedroom now she had a licence.
Second, Dad had nailed that loose board back in.
She picked herself up, closed her eyes and Apparated to Grimmauld Place, fuming. There had better be one hell of a good explanation waiting for her at the end of all this.
When she opened her eyes, she was in Harry’s room. Damn. She’d meant to Apparate to the hallway outside his room, so she could collect her thoughts before she confronted him.
He was in bed, which immediately reminded her of all the times she’d fallen asleep curled up by his side. She resisted the urge to do so here. She reminded herself she was angry with him. He’d been shutting her out. He talked to Ron but not to her. He wore pyjamas rather than just his boxers, the inconsiderate git.
Something - the noise she made Apparating, maybe, or that involuntary gasp she’d made when she realised where she was, or possibly just instincts honed by various attempts on his life - alerted him to the presence of someone in his room and he went for his wand.
“Wait! It’s me!” Being hexed unconscious was really not the way she wanted this to go. Of course, she’d have the advantage when she came round because he’d feel guilty… plus, there was the possibility he’d put her in the bed while waiting for her to regain consciousness…
No. Stupid plan. Moot, anyway, because Harry was putting his wand back on the bedside table and picking up his glasses instead. “Who…” He peered in her direction. “Ginny?”
She sat down on the end of the bed and crossed her arms. “You have some explaining to do, Mister.” She kicked herself; this was why she’d wanted to give herself time to collect her thoughts. That was entirely too accusatory and wouldn’t get her anywhere, since Harry had a tendency to clam up when he was angry.
“Right. Yes. I think I’ll begin by explaining why you’re in my room in the middle of the night - oh, wait, I don’t know that. You wouldn’t happen to know, would you?” Of course, sometimes he was snide instead of clam-like. The trick was not to let him rile you.
“You ignore my letters, you avoid me, and now you’re being sarcastic at me? You sure know how to charm them, Harry.” It wasn’t a trick she was very good at, apparently.
He looked away (which happily made it easier for Ginny to think straight; she felt those eyes should really be made illegal) and muttered something that sounded like, “Yeah, that’s the problem alright.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed, carefully softened her voice. “Why have you been avoiding me?”
He still wasn’t looking at her. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”
“You thought I wouldn’t notice you acting like I have the plague? If you didn’t want to be around me, you should have just-”
“Of course I want to be around you, that’s the problem, isn’t it? You think I enjoy staying away from the girl I lo- I mean, one of my friends?”
Relax, Ginny, she thought. Lots of words start with ‘lo-’. Look. Loathe. Loot, although that didn’t really fit. Lozenge. It might be Auror slang for ‘am only moderately attracted too.’ I reckon that waitress is a bit of alright, how about you? Nah, I only lozenge her.
“I thought maybe if I stayed away for a while, it’d go away and we could go back to being friends.”
“Is that what you want? For us to just… be friends?”
“Well, no, but I know you don’t feel the same way-”
“I don’t?” She just wrote innuendo-laden letters to all the boys she knew, did she? Oh, no, she didn’t feel anything for Harry, she’d just followed him around at Christmas like a love-sick puppy for nostalgia’s sake.
“Look, I know you stopped liking me in fifth year-”
Fifth year? That was when she started again, right at the end-
-wait... he meant his fifth year; he was talking about the first time she fell for him, not the second - which hadn’t been a fall so much as a gentle downward slide, tugged downward by the real Harry, instead of the half-imaginary doppelganger that had so filled her head with rehearsed conversations that when confronted with the reality all the things she should or could say jammed in her mind and left her unable to say anything at all. She hadn’t even known him that first time, not really. “Of course I stopped liking you!” she said, realising too late how it sounded.
He flinched, turned away and started to get out of the bed. She reached across him and grabbed his shoulder, blocking his progress with her arm. He sank back down.
She found herself completely unable to move her hand from where it lay, right on the fringe where the soft cloth of his pyjamas was replaced with warm skin. If she just moved her hand sideways -
She forced her mind back to the conversation. “Look, I’ll explain first, shall I?” She tried to gather and order her thoughts; to assemble, as Hermione might, a coherent narrative correlating her developing feelings to specific events, a timeline to which she could point and say ‘this is where we were friends’ and ‘this is where we were more.’
Then she thought, Bugger that for a lark, and kissed him instead.
She’d expected, perhaps, for it to be awkward, as first kisses usually were, and to some extent it was; she was sitting a little too far away from him so her neck was strained, and he’d pulled up his leg when she moved towards him and his knee was jammed into her side. But he’d tilted his head and parted his lips when she moved and put one hand behind her head, stroking her hair a little, and she could think of nothing but the feel and taste of his lips, the warmth of his skin where she’d slipped her hand into the neck of his pyjamas, and the way he gasped into her mouth when she shifted so she was straddling him. When she pulled back, she felt more inebriated than she had after the firewhisky. He opened his eyes and looked at her; between the green flame and the way her head was spinning, she was reminded of nothing so much as travelling by Floo. She suppressed a giggle at the ridiculousness of the thought as Harry spoke.
“...I don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand?” A girl used him as her favourite pillow, wrote him embarrassingly saucy letters, sneaked into his room late at night and snogged him, and he still couldn’t figure it out? Maybe someone had stolen his -
“Uh, no. I think you’ll have to explain it to me some more,” he said, very seriously. “Repeatedly, probably. I’m really quite thick.”
Oh. Oh. Her traitorous face disobeyed her edict to be cool and composed and instead launched the ‘grin like a loon’ rebellion. She shifted slightly on top of him, eliciting a quite delightful groan, and purred, “Oh, are you now?” She leant forward. “You still have some explaining of your own to do, remember?”
Harry, it turned out, was quite good at explanations. He covered all the important (and many obscure) points at length; he made effective use of body language and eye-contact; he was attentive to the mood of the audience, and he took a most satisfyingly long time to reach a conclusion.