Chapter Text
The party had mellowed into that pleasant, hazy stage where laughter came easier and the music drifted softer through the sprawling rooms of the Potter house. Ginny leaned against the kitchen counter, nursing her third firewhisky of the night, watching the remnants of their gathering scattered throughout the downstairs.
It had been a month. A full month since she'd been home, and when she'd flooed in that afternoon with her Quidditch bag still slung over her shoulder, Harry had looked at her like she'd hung the moon. James had been in his arms, chubby fists reaching for her, and the guilt had started immediately—sharp and familiar.
She'd kissed them both, held her baby boy until he squirmed, and then looked at Harry's tired, hopeful eyes and said, "We should have people over tonight."
The disappointment had flickered across his face for just a second before he'd smiled.
"Yeah? You sure you don't want to just... relax?"
Relax meant cuddling on the sofa. Relax meant talking about his month with James, about teething and sleep schedules and whether they should start looking at primary schools yet. Relax meant eventually heading upstairs where he'd look at her with that quiet love that made her feel like a fraud.
"You need to let loose, Harry," she'd said instead, already pulling out her wand to send patronuses. "You've been doing this alone for weeks. Molly can take James for the night. Let's actually have some fun."
And he'd agreed, because Harry always agreed when she asked for something. Six months of mostly-single parenting and he still couldn't say no to her.
Now, hours later, the house was full of their friends and Harry had already retreated upstairs. He'd found her around eleven, pulled her close in the hallway, and murmured against her ear, "Don't stay up too late. I've missed you."
His hand had been warm on her lower back. His voice soft with want that was completely genuine, completely devoted, and completely wasted on her.
"I'll be up soon," she'd promised, and watched him climb the stairs with that particular exhaustion that came from caring for a baby alone.
She hadn't followed.
Instead, she'd drifted back to the kitchen where Pansy Parkinson stood near the window, dark hair cascading over one shoulder, lips curved in amusement at something Hermione had said before wandering off with Draco.
Ginny couldn't stop watching her.
"You're staring, Potter," Pansy said without looking over, though her smile deepened.
"You're worth staring at," Ginny replied, and the words came out lower, rougher than she'd intended.
Pansy did look at her then, one elegant eyebrow arched. "Careful. Your husband might get jealous."
"Harry's asleep." The firewhisky was making her bold, reckless. "And he trusts me."
He shouldn't, whispered the guilty voice in the back of her mind. He shouldn't trust you at all.
Because the truth—the truth that Ginny had been trying to bury for years now—was that she'd realized as James was conceived that she was a lesbian. Not bi-curious. Not experimenting. Actually, fully, completely gay.
And she was married to Harry Potter.
You didn't divorce Harry Potter. You didn't break the heart of the man who'd saved the wizarding world, who adored you, who let you travel eight months a year playing professional Quidditch without complaint. Who took care of your son and sent you photos every day and said "I miss you" like it was a prayer instead of a reproach.
Harry was a great husband. Truly. He was kind and supportive and patient and—
And she wanted absolutely nothing to do with sleeping with him.
What she wanted was standing three feet away, all sharp edges and knowing smirks, openly bisexual and available and so completely, devastatingly out of reach.
"You're thinking too hard," Pansy observed, moving closer. Close enough that Ginny could smell her perfume—something dark and expensive. "That's not very fun-party-Ginny of you."
"Maybe I'm trying to figure out if you're flirting with me or if I'm imagining it."
"Does it matter?" Pansy's voice dropped, playful but with an edge that made Ginny's stomach flip. "You're married. And I don't do complicated."
The words hit like a Bludger to the chest. Because Pansy did date women—Ginny had seen her at clubs in between matches, had heard the rumors, had spent far too many nights lying awake next to her sleeping husband imagining what it would be like to actually be with someone who made her feel the way Pansy did just by existing.
But Pansy was right. Ginny was married. Had a kid. Had a life that looked perfect from the outside and felt like a cage she'd locked herself into with one experimental post-war shag.
"You're terrible," Pansy murmured, though her dark eyes were soft with something that might have been understanding.
"I've been told." Ginny forced herself to look away, to drain the rest of her firewhisky, to remember that she was a wife and a mother and that Harry was upstairs waiting for her to crawl into bed beside him.
She'd made her choices. She didn't get to complain about them now.
"I should probably head up myself," Pansy said eventually, stifling a yawn that Ginny suspected might be partially performance. "Where's Blaise crashing? Third floor?"
"Third door on the left, second floor," Ginny answered automatically, grateful for the change in subject.
Pansy nodded and pushed off from the counter, pausing just long enough to squeeze Ginny's shoulder—a touch that lingered a second too long to be entirely friendly.
Then she was gone, footsteps soft on the stairs, and Ginny was alone in the kitchen with her empty glass and the weight of everything she couldn't let herself want.
She should go upstairs. Should slip into bed next to Harry, let him pull her close, pretend that this was enough. That he was enough.
Instead, she poured another drink.
——-
The hallway was dark and blessedly quiet, the party sounds muffled to a distant hum that barely penetrated the thick walls. Pansy counted doors as she walked—one, two, three—and slipped inside the third room on the left, closing it softly behind her.
She didn't bother with lights. Her eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness, making out the shape of a massive bed against the far wall, the outline of furniture she didn't bother cataloging. Blaise was a cuddler, not a conversationalist at this hour, and she was too pleasantly tipsy and too emotionally exhausted from whatever the hell that had been with Ginny downstairs to care about pleasantries.
They'd done this a dozen times before—climbing into bed together after parties, seeking warmth and comfort without complication. They hooked up occasionally, sure, but mostly they were just cuddle buddies. Easy. Uncomplicated. Safe.
Unlike whatever dangerous game she'd almost played with a married woman in the kitchen.
She stripped efficiently: jeans puddled on the floor, button-down tossed over what she thought was a chair, leaving just her oversized t-shirt and black thong. The bed was massive and inviting, and when she slid under the covers, the sheets were already warm from another body.
Perfect.
A body shifted beside her almost immediately. An arm came around her waist—strong, sure, familiar—and pulled her back against solid warmth. The weight of it, the way he tucked her close and instinctively spooned her, pressing a kiss to the back of her neck that was tender and drowsy and completely automatic.
"Mmm," came a sleepy murmur against her hair.
Pansy sighed, letting herself melt into it, into the simple comfort of being held without expectation or complication. Her eyes drifted shut, the alcohol and exhaustion finally catching up with her.
Sleep claimed her almost instantly.
——-
The last guest finally stumbled out through the floo around two in the morning, and Ginny waved them off with a lazy flick of her wand that probably wasn't entirely necessary but felt satisfying anyway.
The house was finally quiet. Blessedly, perfectly quiet.
She was pleasantly drunk—not sloshed, but definitely warm and loose in a way she hadn't been in months. It felt good. She felt good, despite the complicated mess of feelings Pansy had stirred up downstairs.
Ginny climbed the stairs slowly, one hand trailing along the bannister, and pushed open her bedroom door.
The room was dark, but enough moonlight filtered through the curtains for her to make out the shape of Harry in their bed. He was on his side facing away from the door, one arm draped over...
Ginny stopped, blinking.
Over someone with dark hair splayed across the pillow.
It took her foggy brain a moment to connect the dots—third door on the left, Pansy asking where Blaise stayed, her own automatic answer without thinking about which room was actually hers—and then she had to clap a hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh.
Oh.
Oh.
She'd accidentally sent Pansy to her own bedroom. And Harry, half-asleep and probably assuming it was Ginny finally coming to bed, had just... pulled her close and spooned her.
Ginny should probably wake them up. Should definitely wake them up. Should gently extract Pansy and redirect her to the actual guest room where Blaise was probably wondering where his cuddle buddy had gone.
But instead, she stood there in the doorway, staring at the silhouette of her husband wrapped around the woman she'd been mentally undressing all night, and felt a heat low in her stomach that had nothing to do with the firewhisky.
That was... kind of sexy, actually.
Really fucking sexy.
Ginny bit her lip, swaying slightly, and made a decision that was probably terrible but felt right in her pleasantly drunk state.
She closed the door quietly behind her and stripped down to her boxers and t-shirt, leaving her clothes in a pile next to what were probably Pansy's jeans. The bed was massive—easily big enough for three—and Harry was dead asleep in the middle, Pansy tucked against his chest on the right side.
Which left the left side wide open.
Ginny crawled in carefully, settling onto her pillow, close enough to feel Harry's warmth radiating across the small space between them. Close enough to hear Pansy's soft, steady breathing on the other side of her sleeping husband.
She closed her eyes and let herself drift, a small smile playing at her lips.
Tomorrow was going to be very interesting.
——-
Harry woke at two in the morning like clockwork, his body jerking to consciousness the way it had every night for the past six months. He lay still in the darkness, ears straining for the sound of James crying through the monitor on the nightstand.
Silence.
Just the soft hum of the house settling and the quiet breathing of sleep.
It had only been a week—one single week—since James had finally, finally started sleeping through the night, and Harry's body still hadn't adjusted. Still expected the wail that would send him stumbling down the hall to the nursery, still braced for the exhaustion of rocking and soothing and coaxing his son back to sleep.
But James was at Molly's tonight. And the house was quiet.
And Ginny was home.
Harry became aware, all at once, of the warm body in his arms. The soft weight of her against his chest, the curve of her waist under his palm, the sweet scent of her hair tickling his nose. His wife. Finally. After a month of sleeping alone in this too-big bed, after a month of single parenting and lonely dinners and missing her so acutely it hurt.
She was home.
He nestled closer instinctively, tightening his arm around her waist and fitting his body more snugly against her back. His legs tangled with hers, his chest pressed flush to her spine, and he buried his face in her hair with a contentment that flooded through him like warmth.
God, he'd missed this. Missed her.
It had been crazy, living alone with James. Wonderful and exhausting and sometimes desperately lonely in a way Harry hadn't quite expected. He loved their son more than he'd thought possible, loved every moment even when he was running on three hours of sleep and covered in pureed carrots. But there was something about doing it mostly alone that made him ache for what he didn't have.
For Ginny beside him every night. For shared parenting and shared moments. For another baby.
The thought crept in unbidden, the way it had been doing more and more lately. Another baby. A sibling for James. The image of Ginny round and pregnant again, of a tiny newborn in his arms, of James learning to be a big brother.
He wanted it. Wanted it so badly it was almost painful.
They'd already be a year and a half apart if he got her pregnant right now. That was good spacing, wasn't it? Close enough that they'd be playmates, far enough apart that James wouldn't feel displaced. He could picture it so clearly—two kids, maybe more eventually, filling this huge house with noise and chaos and love.
But Ginny didn't want another baby. Not now. Maybe not for years. Maybe not ever, especially given that they had only shagged a handful of times.
Double especially because her career was taking off, the Harpies had just made her a starting Chaser, and she'd made it clear—gently, but clear—that one child was enough for the foreseeable future.
Harry understood. Really, he did. He'd never pressure her, would never ask her to give up what she'd worked so hard for.
But that didn't stop him from wanting it. From imagining pulling her close just like this and whispering let's have another baby against her ear. From thinking about getting her pregnant, about watching her body change, about putting another child—his child—inside her.
Heat stirred low in his belly at the thought. His body responding to the fantasy even as his mind knew it wasn't going to happen. The feeling of her soft and warm in his arms, the scent of her, the way she fit so perfectly against him after a month apart.
He shifted slightly, pressing closer, and felt himself begin to harden in his sleep trousers. The arousal was gentle but insistent, born from many months of celibacy and the presence of his wife and all those desperate thoughts about babies and pregnancy and her.
Harry exhaled slowly against her hair, trying to calm himself. She was asleep. She'd been up late with the party, probably exhausted. The last thing she needed was him waking her up because he couldn't control his body's reaction to having her home again.
He could wait until morning. Could hold her now and love her later and maybe—just maybe—steal a few moments alone with her before they had to pick up James from Molly's.
For now, this was enough. Having her here, warm and real in his arms.
He closed his eyes and let himself drift, one hand splayed possessively across her stomach, and tried not to think about how much he wanted to see it swell with another child.
——
Pansy woke slowly, pulled from sleep by sensation rather than sound.
Something was pressing insistently against her bum. Something hard and unmistakable, even through layers of fabric. And there was a hand—large, warm—splayed low across her stomach, fingers spanning her lower belly in a way that made her breath hitch.
Oh.
Oh.
Her body knew what that meant before her mind fully caught up. She was ovulating—had to be, based on the way her body was responding with an immediate, visceral interest in cock that she only ever felt at this particular time of month. It was probably why she'd wanted to find Blaise tonight in the first place, why she'd felt that restless energy thrumming under her skin all evening.
Usually she thought about witches. Usually she preferred women, sought them out, lost herself in soft curves and knowing touches. But right now, with that pressure against her and that hand on her belly, her body was singing a very different tune.
The hand moved slightly—just the thumb, really, stroking a small, unconscious circle against the bare skin where her t-shirt had ridden up. The touch was gentle, almost tender, and it sent a shiver of heat through her.
Pansy stretched languidly, arching her back like a cat, and pressed her bum back more deliberately against the hardness behind her. She felt it twitch in response, heard the softest intake of breath against her hair.
She rolled her hips experimentally, a slow back-and-forth motion that created delicious friction, and was rewarded by the hand on her stomach tightening slightly, pulling her back more firmly against the body behind her.
The hand began to travel upward, sliding under the hem of her t-shirt, fingers skimming over her ribs. Pansy's breath caught as it moved higher, and then—
His palm cupped her breast, warm and sure, and her nipple hardened immediately against his touch.
A soft sound escaped her throat—half gasp, half hum of approval—and she pressed back against him more insistently, her body making demands her sleep-fogged mind wasn't quite ready to articulate.
This was good. This was exactly what she'd needed without knowing she'd needed it.
She let her eyes drift closed again, surrendering to the sensation, to the heat building between them in the darkness.
——
The wetness coating the thin scrap of fabric of his wife’s underpants was unmistakable.
Harry couldn’t believe his luck. Ginny rarely wanted to have sex with him. And while he didn’t mind, he loved her no matter what, he was excited that she was wet for him.
Reaching down, he shoved his pants and freed his cock, palming the base, one finger coming out to gently lift the fabric of the gusset and pull it to the side. Then he pressed his crown to the wet heat and huffed a breath as he slipped inside.
His witch clenched around his length. Merlin, she’d never done that before. His hips began to move gently, almost imperceptibly slow. He had to go that slow otherwise he would come way too fast. Given that he couldn’t even remember the last time they’d had sex, it surely wasn’t when they made games was it, Harry was going to make this last.
His fingers splayed over her lower abdomen as he enjoyed the feeling of his cock pressing out against her lower belly.
Gods, if only he could put another baby in her. She’s given him a maybe, weeks after James was born when he asked, but he wasn’t holding out too much hope.
She may be loyal with her potions, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t get off at the idea of coating her insides.
Fuck the thought had him wanting to cry out, and he gently kissed at the back of her neck. She was arching slowly, matching him thrust for thrust.
He was so fucking deep inside her. His balls were already tightening up.
“I’m not on the potion,” she whispered almost imperceptibly.
The words knocked right in the chest. Or maybe in the balls. Maybe both. He gripped her tighter, pushed deeper, and let his balls empty as she clenched around him.
——
Despite the fact that he had just emptied a few months worth of come into his wife, Harry was still rockhard, and so he didn’t even stop thrusting through his orgasm, using his semen as a delicious lube as he continue fucking up into his witch. His witch who was not on the potion. His witch who was filled with his seed. His cock had never been harder.
He went harder now and was more shaky and desperate as he thrust his hips. When the second wave came, he pulled out, painted her thighs with his release.
——
Pansy woke to grey pre-dawn light and a headache that announced itself immediately behind her eyes.
She lay still for one disoriented moment, cataloguing details. Unfamiliar ceiling. Warm body behind her. The particular quality of silence that meant a big house rather than a flat.
Right. The Potter party. Blaise’s guest room.
She extracted herself carefully, muscle memory guiding her through the art of leaving a bed without incident. Her jeans were on the floor. Her button-down was on the back of a chair. She dressed in the half-dark with practised efficiency, not looking at the sleeping shape in the bed, and padded out into the hallway in her socks.
The headache needed a potion. The potion was at her flat. Her flat was through the floo.
She was down the stairs and gone before the house stirred.
——
The bed was enormous and warm and Ginny was still mostly asleep when the door opened.
She registered it distantly — the soft click of the latch, footsteps she knew, the particular way Harry moved when he was trying to be quiet and failing slightly — and pulled the duvet up around her ears with the specific determination of someone who had been on the road for a month and intended to sleep until at least ten.
Then she smelled bacon.
She opened one eye.
Harry was navigating through the bedroom door sideways, because he had to. Because he was carrying a tray the approximate dimensions of a small country. Ginny watched, both eyes open now, as he turned carefully — tongue between his teeth, glasses slightly askew, wearing the ancient Gryffindor t-shirt with the hole in the collar that she’d told him to throw away approximately forty times — and set the tray down on the foot of the bed with the focused satisfaction of a man completing a very important mission.
Then he looked up and found her watching him and smiled.
It was an absolutely ridiculous smile. All of him, really. His hair was doing the thing it always did in the mornings, which was everything, simultaneously, in every direction, and he had a tea towel tucked into his waistband for reasons that were not clear, and he was smiling at her like she was something extraordinary, like she’d done something recently that warranted this particular quality of attention.
Ginny looked at the tray.
There were eggs. Scrambled, the way she liked them, with the chives from the windowsill pot that Harry tended with a seriousness usually reserved for more important things. There was bacon — proper bacon, not the sad stuff — and grilled tomatoes and mushrooms and two slices of toast and a small pot of the really good marmalade that lived at the back of the cupboard and only came out for special occasions. There was a glass of orange juice. There was a cup of tea, already made to exactly the right colour, with the little pottery jug of milk on the side so she could adjust it.
There was also, inexplicably, a small vase with a flower in it. A flower from the garden, she thought. He’d gone outside at — she glanced at the clock — seven forty-three in the morning and cut a flower from the garden to put on her breakfast tray.
“Harry,” she said.
“Hungry?” He was already moving around to his side of the bed, completely casual about it, like this was normal, like he hadn’t just carried the entire contents of their kitchen upstairs on a tray with a flower on it.
“What is—” She sat up. “What’s the flower for?”
“It’s from the garden.”
“I can see that.”
“The yellow ones are out.” He settled onto his side of the bed, on top of the covers, facing her. “I thought it looked nice.”
Ginny looked at him for a long moment. He looked back, still with that smile, that warm slightly unfocused smile that she associated with him holding James and occasionally with him watching her play Quidditch from the stands.
“Are you feeling alright?” she asked.
“Brilliant.” He nodded at the tray. “Eat before it goes cold.”
She ate. Harry sat beside her and drank his own tea, which he must have left on the nightstand, and watched her eat with an attentiveness that was not quite normal but not quite alarming, like a very contented dog. Ginny worked through the eggs — they were good, actually, really good — and tried to remember if she’d forgotten an anniversary or a birthday or some significant date she was supposed to have remembered.
Nothing came to mind.
“Harry.”
“Mm.”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on.”
“You made me a full fry-up and brought it upstairs on a tray with a flower.”
“I wanted to.” He said it simply, like it was obvious, and reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear in a gesture so gentle and automatic she felt it somewhere behind her sternum. “You’ve been away for a month. Let me make you breakfast.”
He wanted more than breakfast. She was sure of that.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to. That was the complicated part — the part she’d spent a lot of time not examining too closely. It wasn’t Harry specifically, it wasn’t revulsion, it was more like trying to eat something when you weren’t hungry and finding the texture wrong even when the food was fine. Harry was fine. Harry was lovely. Harry was looking at her right now like she’d personally invented the concept of Saturday morning and she felt the familiar tangle of guilt and fondness and something else she didn’t have a name for that lived in the same neighbourhood as despair but wasn’t quite that either.
“Come here,” he said.
She went.
He kissed her slowly, which was new — Harry’s default register was enthusiastic rather than slow, always had been, like he was worried she’d change her mind if he didn’t get on with it — and she registered the unfamiliar patience of it with distant surprise. His mouth was warm. His jaw was scratchy, two days of growth at least, and the scruff caught against her chin and she felt herself tense slightly at the wrongness of it, the maleness of it, the specific texture that her body logged as not right with the quiet efficiency of a system that had been logging things for years without her full permission.
She breathed through it.
His mouth moved to her jaw, her neck, and she stared at the ceiling and let her mind do the thing it sometimes did — the thing she’d taught herself years ago as a kind of survival mechanism, a small private mercy she allowed herself in lieu of anything real. She let the ceiling go soft and unfocused. She let the hands on her become abstract, just warmth and pressure and the fact of being touched, and she thought about —
Dark hair. A mouth that curved like it knew something. The particular quality of attention in a pair of dark eyes across a kitchen that had made her stomach drop all the way to the floor.
Her breath caught.
He kissed down her stomach, which — fine, good, that was the right direction. His stubble caught against her skin and she breathed through it.
His hands found the waistband of her boxers and he paused there, and she could feel him hesitate — actually hesitate, a beat too long — and she cracked one eye open to find him looking at the boxers with an expression of such genuine, furrowed-brow confusion that she almost laughed.
She watched him shake his head, visibly deciding not to ask, and tug the boxers down, and she closed her eye again and let him.
The stubble was lower now. She breathed.
Think about something else.
It wasn’t hard to find the image. It had been sitting right there all night like a coal, quietly burning. Dark hair. The expensive smell of Pansy’s perfume, something that had probably cost more than Ginny’s last Quidditch boots. The knowing tilt of her mouth when she’d said you’re staring, Potter and hadn’t even looked up.
Ginny felt the tension in her shoulders ease a fraction.
Harry, emboldened by this, chose an extremely counterproductive moment to go entirely off course, sucking on the lip of her pussy, and Ginny’s hand was in his hair before she’d consciously decided to move it.
“That’s not—” She stopped. Tried again. “In the center.”
He went slightly to the left. Down too low now.
“Harry.”
He surfaced, blinking, hair completely catastrophic, with an expression of someone who was genuinely trying their best and was aware the best wasn’t quite landing. She almost felt bad. She mostly felt frustrated.
“Here,” she said, and moved his head herself. Not rudely. Just efficiently, the way you repositioned a lamp so it actually illuminated something useful.
“My clit, Harry. That pink thing in the center. That's what feels good.”
He made a sound of understanding and she put her head back and let the dark hair flood back in, let herself actually lean into the image this time instead of just skimming the surface of it. Pansy sitting on the counter, dark eyes amused, completely unbothered. The way she’d squeezed Ginny’s shoulder at the end, that last touch that had lingered.
Would you like that? she thought, at the imaginary Pansy. Would you actually rather be the one doing the licking, showing Harry how to—
Harry found the right rhythm, almost accidentally, and Ginny’s breath left her body.
“Oh,” he said, muffled. Surprised. Like he’d discovered something. Then, with rather more confidence, “Oh, right.”
Don’t make it weird, she thought, and also don’t stop, and she kept her hand loosely in his hair and her eyes firmly closed and let herself sink back into the warmth behind them.
She didn’t feel guilty, exactly. She couldn’t afford to, right now, with the particular pressure of this moment and Harry’s newly acquired enthusiasm and the image of dark hair spread across a pillow in her head. The guilt was there, filed neatly in a drawer she’d been filling for years, but right now the drawer was closed and she was here, in this bed, in this body that wanted things it wanted regardless of what she thought about it, and she decided — the same way she always decided, every single time, the small private mercy she allowed herself — that she was allowed.
She was allowed.
Her fingers tightened in his hair and Harry, interpreting this correctly for once, didn’t stop.
Her mind raced through images to find the right one. Pansy’s tongue in place of Harry’s. Or no, Ginny on her knees in the kitchen, lapping at Pansy. Tasting her. Sucking her clit and maybe sticking her tongue inside, just because she could. Or maybe something else inside Pansy. Fingers, maybe. Or Harry’s cock?
Heat flooded her body at the unexpected thought and yes, that was something. Harry trusting inside Pansy, coated in her juices while Ginny lapped at where they connected. At the glistening mess—
“Fuck!” she cried out as her orgasm sent her shaking, vision whiting out as she rode Harry’s tongue to a spectacular finish.
Her chest sawed for breath as she sunk deeper in the bed and went boneless. Barely registering as Harry grunted, his hips pushing into the mattress unevenly with his own release.
His stumbled cheek resting on her thigh didn’t feel so unwelcome. They breathed in tandem, until everything slowed to a pleasant hazy.
She looked down at him and his smile was smug.
She huffed a laugh, raked fingers through his hair. “That was brills, love.”
His grin went lopsided. Green eyes bright and sated.
There was a certain quiet, humble triumph to him. His hair was, impossibly, worse.
“Yeah?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. It was even true.
He lay back beside her, and she could feel the warmth radiating off him, that particular contentment he had after any kind of physical closeness, like a dog allowed on the sofa. In a few minutes, she knew, he’d fall back asleep. He always did.
She lay in the striped morning light and stared at the ceiling and thought about nothing useful for as long as she could manage, which was not very long at all.
——
The thing about having Pansy Parkinson in your kitchen was that your kitchen suddenly looked like it was trying too hard.
Ginny couldn’t explain it. The kitchen was fine. The kitchen was good, actually — big and warm, with the good copper pots Harry had bought when he’d gone through his cooking phase and the herbs on the windowsill he maintained with slightly unnerving devotion. It was a perfectly respectable kitchen.
And yet somehow Pansy leaned against the counter in it looking like she’d been placed there by a photographer, dark hair over one shoulder, and the kitchen became a backdrop.
“You’ve got chives,” Pansy observed, looking at the windowsill.
“Harry grows them.”
Pansy looked at Harry, who was at the stove and had James balanced on his hip because James had decided that being set down was no longer acceptable and had made his position on this known clearly and at volume. “Of course he does,” she said, with a particular dry warmth that Ginny had been cataloguing for months and still couldn’t entirely decode.
“I also have mint,” Harry said, without turning around. “And basil. The basil’s been difficult.”
“I didn’t ask about the basil.”
“I’m telling you anyway.”
Pansy looked at Ginny. Ginny grinned. This was, she was aware, a slightly unhinged response to watching her husband and her best friend exchange words for the first time in a domestic setting, but she couldn’t help it. Something about the specific frequency of it — Pansy’s dry, Harry’s oblivious, the two of them bouncing off each other without any of the social lubrication normal people required — made her want to sit on the counter and watch it for approximately several hours.
“He’s like this about the garden too,” Ginny offered. “There’s a whole section he calls the difficult bed.”
“It is difficult,” Harry pouted.
“He talks to them,” Ginny continued, to Pansy. “The plants. He thinks I don’t know.”
“I know you know,” Harry drawled. “I just don’t see why it’s funny.”
“It’s not funny,” Pansy deadpanned. “It’s deranged.”
Harry considered this, stirring something. “They grow better.”
“He’s not wrong, actually,” Pansy said haughtily, to Ginny, which was somehow funnier than if she’d said it to Harry. “There’s research.”
“Don’t tell him that,” Ginny huffed. “He’ll be insufferable.”
“I can hear you,” Harry grumbled.
“I know,” Ginny intoned cheerfully.
James chose this moment to make a grab for the wooden spoon with both hands and an expression of total commitment, and Harry pivoted to deal with this in the seamless way he always did — redirecting, offering the less dangerous utensil, murmuring something in the low even voice he used with James that Ginny had always privately found—
She looked away.
“Come sit down.” She motioned to Pansy. “He’s going to be at least twenty more minutes. He won’t let anyone help.”
“I’ll let you help,” Harry called.
“He won’t let anyone help correctly,” Ginny amended.
Pansy sat. She moved through the kitchen the way she moved everywhere — like she’d assessed the room on arrival and identified the best position — and settled into the chair at the end of the table, which was Ginny’s chair actually, but Ginny didn’t say anything about it. She poured them both water and sat at the corner adjacent, close enough to talk, and tried not to notice the way Pansy’s perfume did something complicated to the general atmosphere.
“How’s the shoulder?” Pansy asked.
“Better. Physio says another two weeks and I can go back to full training.”
“You were favouring it in the second half. I noticed.”
“I know, I saw you wince.”
“I was not wincing.”
“You made a face.”
“I have a naturally critical expression,” Pansy said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
From the stove, Harry made a sound. Pansy glanced at him.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he hummed, and his shoulders were doing the thing they did when he was trying not to laugh, which Ginny had catalogued extensively over the years.
“Potter,” Pansy growled.
“I just think the naturally critical expression thing is very self-aware for someone who spent most of the third quarter doing this—” He turned briefly and did an impression of Pansy watching the match, which involved a very precise facial arrangement that was both cruel and accurate, and then turned back to the stove before she could respond.
Pansy turned to Ginny. “I don’t look like that.”
“You a little bit look like that.” Ginny snickered.
“You’re supposed to be on my side.”
“I’m not on sides. I’m objective.”
“You’re absolutely not objective, you’re completely—” Pansy stopped. James had arrived at her knee. He’d been set down at some point without Ginny noticing — Harry must have finally managed it — and had made his way across the kitchen with the focused determination he applied to movement, and was now standing at Pansy’s leg with both hands gripping her trousers and looking up at her with enormous eyes.
Pansy looked down at him.
“Hello,” she said slowly, in the careful voice of someone who didn’t entirely know the rules.
James continued looking up at her. He was doing his assessment thing, Ginny knew — the long, serious evaluation he gave to new things before deciding what he thought. He’d done it with Hermione’s new sofa. He’d done it with a particularly interesting cloud.
Then he raised both arms.
Ginny watched Pansy’s face do something she’d never seen it do before. A brief, unguarded moment of being completely disarmed, like a system encountering something it hadn’t accounted for.
“He wants to be picked up,” Ginny explained.
“I can see that.” A beat. “I’ve never— is it—”
“Support his bum,” Harry said, from the stove. “He does the rest.”
Pansy picked James up. James, who had very strong opinions about most things and had rejected approximately four of their friends and relatives as structurally unsound, settled into her lap with the immediate ease of a person arriving somewhere they’d meant to be. He put one hand on the table. He put one hand on Pansy’s collarbone. He sighed.
Pansy looked down at him with an expression Ginny was going to think about later in great detail.
“He likes you,” Harry said, from the stove. He sounded pleased in a way he probably wasn’t aware of.
“He doesn’t know me.”
“He knows,” Harry said, with absolute confidence.
“He’s fourteen months old. He’s a good judge.”
Pansy looked at Ginny, clearly expecting backup. Ginny shrugged. “He really is. He hated Seamus for three weeks.”
“Seamus was going through something,” Harry defended, in the tone of someone who had taken this position before.
“He kept doing a voice.”
“He was going through something that manifested as a voice.”
James patted Pansy’s collarbone.
Ginny watched Pansy look down at him again. Watched the corner of her mouth do something small and reluctant. She topped up Pansy’s water and her own and didn’t examine why she felt warm, exactly, watching the two of them — Harry comfortable at the stove, Pansy at Ginny’s own kitchen table with Ginny’s baby in her lap, all of it fitting together in a way that made something in her chest go quiet and ache at the same time.
Don’t, she told herself.
She did anyway.
Dinner was good. Harry had made something with pasta that he would only describe as “a thing” and which turned out to involve approximately four cheeses and the difficult basil, and Pansy had eaten two helpings without comment and then conceded “fine, it’s good, don’t make it weird” when Harry noticed, which made Ginny laugh so hard she knocked over her wine.
James had been fed and was in Harry’s lap growing heavy-eyed, making occasional contributions to the conversation by placing things on the table — a spoon, a piece of bread, Harry’s phone — with the air of someone adding to a communal pot.
“He’s going to be out in twenty minutes,” Harry said, adjusting him.
“He fought sleep for an hour last week.” Ginny crossed her legs, recrossed them the other way. “Just vibrating with fury about it.”
“He gets that from you.” Harry shifted the baby.
“He absolutely does not—”
“The fury about inconvenient biological needs—”
“I don’t—”
“You once described needing to eat lunch as an ambush.” Harry laughed, looked to Pansy very seriously. “An ambush. By her own body.”
Pansy turned to Ginny.
“It was a busy week,” Ginny defended.
“It’s always a busy week. She’d forget to sleep if she could.”
“You say that like it’s a flaw.”
“It’s not a flaw, it’s—” He paused, looking at her, and something in his face went briefly soft. “It’s very you.”
Ginny looked at her wine glass.
Pansy, she noticed, had gone slightly quiet.
“What about you?” Harry asked Pansy. “Are you—” He seemed to be searching for the normal version of the question. “Are you still at the firm?”
“Consulting, now. Fewer hours.” A pause that Ginny clocked but didn’t understand. “I’ve been restructuring some things.”
“Nice to have the flexibility,” Harry said, in the easy way he said things he meant simply.
“Yes.” Something in Pansy’s voice had changed register slightly. “It is.”
Ginny looked at her. Pansy was looking at James, who had made one final contribution to the table — a piece of carrot from somewhere unknown — and was now listing heavily against Harry’s chest with his eyes at half mast.
“I should probably put him down.”
“You always say that,” Ginny said.
“And then he falls asleep anyway and I feel terrible about moving him.”
“He weighs as much as a medium-sized stone,” Ginny said. “Just transfer him.”
“It’s the waking up between rooms,” Harry said, with great seriousness. “The look he gives me. I can’t—”
“He manipulates you.” Ginny leaned back in her chair. “Consciously.”
“He’s fourteen months old.”
“He’s a good judge,” Pansy added dryly.
Harry pointed at her. “Exactly. Thank you.”
“That’s not—” Pansy stopped. “That didn’t support your argument.”
“It supported the general principle.”
“There is no general—”
“He trusts good people,” Harry said, simply, looking at her, and Pansy went quiet again.
Ginny refilled everyone’s wine. She was doing a lot of liquid refilling tonight. It was giving her something to do with her hands.
“Oh, no, none for me,” Pansy said, into a small lull, and Ginny opened her mouth to say I noticed, should I get something else— and then registered Pansy’s tone and closed it again.
That wasn’t an I’m-driving tone. That wasn’t an I-don’t-feel-like-it tone.
Ginny looked at her.
Pansy was looking at the table, and there was something slightly careful in her face, like someone who had been carrying something for a while and was deciding whether to set it down.
“Pansy,” Ginny said, quietly.
“I’m pregnant.”
The kitchen went very still.
James breathed softly against Harry’s chest. The basil sat in its pot on the windowsill. Harry had gone completely motionless in the particular way he had when something had landed and he was letting it land properly before responding.
“God,” Ginny said. “Are you— how are you feeling about it?”
“Still deciding,” Pansy said, and it was so plainly honest that Ginny felt it somewhere behind her ribs.
“It wasn’t planned.”
“Whose—” Ginny stopped. Restarted. “You don’t have to—”
“Blaise’s.” Pansy picked up her water glass. Set it back down. “You remember that night in October, the party after the Puddlemere match. I stayed over.” She said it to Ginny directly, naturally. “We must have—.” A small, dry exhale. “I was off my potion. Terrible timing. Very unlike me. So.” She looked up, and there was that armour, perfectly in place. “Apparently I’m having Blaise Zabini’s child.”
Ginny heard it in the exact order it arrived.
Blaise’s.
That night in October.
I stayed over.
And then the whole thing assembled itself in her head like a cold, perfect, terrible puzzle, and she sat completely still with her wine glass in her hand and felt the blood leave her face.
Pansy had ended up in their room. Ginny had seen her there. Harry had thought it was Ginny. Harry had—
She looked at Harry.
Harry was stroking their son’s head, utterly oblivious.
James shifted in his sleep and made a small sound and Harry looked down at him, and when he looked back up his expression was completely, carefully, deliberately neutral in a way Harry Potter almost never managed.
“Congratulations,” he said, unable to hide the jealousy. “That’s— congratulations, Pansy.”
“Thank you,” Pansy said, and she was looking at Ginny now, Ginny who was still holding her wine glass and had not said anything for slightly too long.
“Gin?”
“Sorry,” Ginny said. “Yes. That’s— yes. Congratulations.” She put the glass down. Picked it back up. “Blaise will be— has he— does he know?”
“Not yet.”
“Right.”
“Are you alright?” Pansy said, with the directness she deployed when she’d decided to be kind. “You’ve gone a colour.”
“Fine,” Ginny said tightly. “I’m fine. I just—” She looked at the table. At the pasta. At the difficult basil on the windowsill. At Harry, who was looking at James with an expression that was doing many things simultaneously, none of which she could afford to look at directly right now. “I’m really happy for you.”
Pansy searched her face for a moment with those dark eyes that missed almost nothing.
“Mm,” she said, and thankfully, mercifully, let it go.
Ginny picked up her wine and drank rather more of it than the moment required, and across the table Harry said nothing at all, and between them James slept on, completely peaceful, with absolutely no idea.
——
The house had that particular quiet it only got after guests.
Not empty — more like exhaled, the rooms still holding the warmth of people who’d been there recently, the low hum of a night that had gone well settling into the walls. Ginny could smell dinner from upstairs. Garlic and basil and the good cheese Harry refused to name because he claimed naming it made it pretentious, which was the most Harry Potter thing he’d ever said.
She was on her back with one arm across her stomach, staring at the ceiling.
Harry was on his side facing away, which under normal circumstances meant unconscious in under four minutes. She’d learned years ago the difference between Harry actually sleeping and Harry lying in the dark with something circling. The quality of his stillness was different when he was thinking. Too careful. Like a person trying not to disturb their own thoughts.
She waited.
Down the hall James made his small sleep sound — a murmur, a resettlement — and both of them went briefly, instinctively alert before the monitor charm went quiet again.
Harry shifted. Rolled onto his back.
“Sorry,” he said, to the ceiling.
“You’re not keeping me up.”
A beat of quiet that wasn’t restful. She could feel him looking at the same ceiling she was.
“Good night,” he murmured.
“It was.”
A pause. She could feel him deciding whether to leave it there.
“She’s good company.” The words came out almost wondering. “Pansy.”
Something moved in Ginny’s chest, warm and complicated. “She is.”
“Didn’t expect that.” Not a criticism — just honest, the way he got past a certain hour when the day had worn the edges down. “That thing she does. Like she’s three seconds ahead of the room the whole time and just deciding whether it’s worth engaging.”
“That’s exactly what it’s like.”
He made a small satisfied sound. Like she’d confirmed something he’d been quietly working out. Then the restlessness came back — she felt it in the mattress, that almost-movement of someone whose body wanted to turn over and whose brain hadn’t committed yet.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Harry.”
“I’m just—” An exhale, long and slow. “Thinking.”
“About.”
“Tonight.” He was quiet for a moment. “James with her. Did you see? He just climbed straight into her lap like—” A quiet laugh, soft in the dark. “Like he’d decided already.”
“He had decided already.” Ginny smiled at the ceiling. “You saw the assessment.”
Harry made a sound that meant he was filing that away. She felt the warmth of him beside her, that specific heat he put off when he was content, and for a moment the night was just this — the dark and the quiet and James breathing steadily down the hall and Harry lying next to her thinking kind thoughts about her best friend.
Then his breathing shifted slightly.
“I keep thinking about her news,” he said.
“Mm.”
“The baby.” He paused. “October.”
Ginny looked at the ceiling.
“Funny timing.” His voice had gone quieter, more interior. Not quite talking to her anymore — just thinking out loud because she happened to be there, which was a thing he did, a thing she’d learned to receive without filling the space. “Same month.”
She turned her head on the pillow. “Same month as what?”
“As us.” Easy. Warm. A little shy, even, the way he sometimes got about things that mattered to him. “That night. After the Puddlemere party.”
Ginny went still.
“I’ve thought about it a lot, actually.” He laughed quietly at himself, almost embarrassed. “Probably too much. Whether it worked. I kept thinking — the timing was right, and you seemed—” He stopped. Exhaled. “I don’t know. I really thought maybe.”
She lay without moving.
“Harry.” Her voice came out careful. Too careful. She heard it herself. “What night are you talking about?”
A small pause. Puzzled. “October. The night everyone stayed over. When you came to bed late.”
“I came to bed and went straight to sleep.”
“Gin.” A little confused laugh. “We were together. You came in late and we—”
“We weren’t.” The ceiling was very white in the darkness. “I came upstairs and got into bed and went to sleep. We didn’t—”
“We did.” Not defensive — just certain, the way he was about things he’d held close for a while. “I remember. I woke up and you were there and—”
He stopped.
The silence had a different quality now. She felt him register something in her voice, some absence of the confirmation he’d expected, and recalibrate.
“You told me you weren’t on your potion,” he said. Slower now. Watching her even in the dark. “You whispered it.”
Ginny said nothing.
“I came inside you.” Quiet and deliberate. The words placed down carefully, like he was offering them as evidence. “Because you said— I thought you were telling me it was alright. That you wanted—”
He stopped.
She heard it. Felt it land in the specific way that things landed when they were going to matter for a long time.
I came inside you.
Not spooning. Not just warmth in the dark. Something had happened in that bed that she hadn’t known about, had slept through, had gotten up the next morning and eaten breakfast and not known, had spent four months not knowing, and Pansy had spent four months not knowing either, and the baby—
“Harry.” She sat up. The duvet fell back. “Pansy was in our bed that night.”
Nothing.
“I gave her the wrong room.” The words came fast now, unstoppable. “She asked where Blaise was staying and I said third door on the left and I wasn’t thinking, I’d had a lot to drink and I just answered automatically and it wasn’t until I came upstairs and opened the door that I realised—” She stopped. Steadied. “You were already asleep. You’d pulled her close, you were spooning her, and she was just— she was out, dead asleep, and you both looked so—”
She stopped again.
“I thought it was an accident,” she said. “I thought you’d just reached for her in your sleep thinking she was me and nothing had happened. I didn’t want to wake you both up and make it weird so I just—” Her voice went flat. “I got in the other side and went to sleep. Harry, you and I didn’t touch each other that night. That wasn’t me.”
Harry did not move.
The house creaked.
James’s monitor charm glowed amber on the nightstand, steady and oblivious.
She turned to look at him. He was sitting completely still on his side of the bed, feet on the floor, elbows not yet on his knees but moving there, his whole posture doing the thing it did when he was taking something apart very carefully so he could look at all the pieces.
“Harry.”
Nothing.
She watched him sit with it. Watched the shape of his back in the dark, the line of his shoulders, the particular stillness of a person who is not being still voluntarily but has simply run out of movement.
“She thought she was in Blaise’s room,” he said finally. His voice had gone to somewhere she didn’t recognise. Low and very even. “She thought I was Blaise.”
“Yes.”
“And I thought she was you.”
“Yes.”
“And you—” He stopped. The muscle in his jaw moved. She could see it even in the dark, even from behind, the way she could read him after all these years. “You saw us and you got into the bed.”
“I didn’t know anything had happened between you. I swear I didn’t know.”
“But you got into the bed.”
She didn’t have anything for that.
He stood up. Not dramatically — just stood, the way a person did when sitting suddenly felt impossible, and moved to the window. He didn’t look out. Just stood there with his back to her and one hand on the windowsill and his head slightly bowed.
“The baby,” he said.
“We don’t know—”
“Ginny.”
“We don’t know that, the timing could still be—”
“She was off her potion.” He turned around. She couldn’t quite read his face from here, the light was wrong, but she could read the quality of the silence he was carrying. “She told me she was off her potion. She thought she was telling Blaise.”
The words sat between them like something physical.
Ginny pulled the duvet up over her knees without knowing she was doing it. Some animal instinct toward warmth, toward cover.
“Harry, I’m so sorry.” Her voice cracked on it, finally. “I’m so sorry, I should have woken you both up, I should have—”
“Don’t.” He said it quietly. Not cruelly. Just — closed that door for now. His hand dropped from the windowsill. “Just— let me think.”
She watched him stand in the dark in the old t-shirt with the hole in the collar and his hair doing everything it always did and she felt the specific grief of knowing exactly how much he’d held onto that night. The breakfast. The flower. The way he’d kissed her slowly that morning like he was being careful with something precious.
He’d thought she’d given him something.
“I need to sit with this.” His hands pressed flat against his thighs. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know it wasn’t you, I would never have—”
“Harry, you don’t have to—”
“I slept with your friend.” The word friend came out fractured. “I finished inside her and I didn’t— I thought she was my wife, I thought you were finally—” He stopped. Pressed his fist briefly to his mouth. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“It’s not yours either, it was a mistake, it was dark and we were all— it was an accident.” He was nodding, convincing himself, doing that thing he did where he tried to be fair-minded about something that was currently tearing him apart. “It was an accident.”
“Yes.”
“But you saw us.” The nodding stopped. “Ginny, you stood in that doorway and you saw us and you just—” He turned to look at her fully for the first time, and the expression on his face was not quite anger and not quite hurt and was somehow worse than both. “You got into the bed. You went to sleep.”
“I didn’t know anything had happened—”
“Something was clearly happening.” His voice cracked on it. “I had my arms around her. You saw that. And you just— you thought it was fine, you thought you’d just climb in and—”
“I thought it was funny.” The words came out before she could stop them. “I thought it was an accident and I’d had a lot to drink and I just— I thought—”
She stopped.
He was looking at her very steadily now. Waiting.
The thing she should have said was I thought it was harmless. The thing she should have said was I wasn’t thinking clearly. The thing she should have said was approximately anything other than what she was about to say, and she knew that, and she said it anyway because it was dark and she was tired and the truth had a way of coming out when there was nothing left to lose.
“I thought it was kind of hot, actually.”
Harry went completely still.
“I know how that sounds,” she said immediately.
“Do you.”
“I was drunk and I’d been thinking about her all night and seeing you two together was just—” She stopped. Closed her eyes. “It’s been a fantasy. If I’m being completely honest. The two of you. I’ve thought about it.”
The silence that followed was the loudest thing she’d ever heard.
Then Harry made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite anything else and put his face in his hands.
“Harry—”
“Give me a second.”
“I know it’s—”
“Ginny, I need one single second.”
She waited.
He sat with his face in his hands for a long moment. His shoulders were doing something complicated. She watched him and thought about every possible version of what was happening inside his head right now and didn’t like any of them.
Then he lifted his face from his hands and looked at her and his expression was the most unhinged thing she’d ever seen on a human being — a man actively horrified by his own internal weather.
“You can’t say that to me right now,” he said.
“I know, I’m sor—”
“You cannot say that to me right now because I am trying to be appropriately—” He gestured at the room. At the situation. “And my brain is doing something that I am not going to— I’m not going to say it.”
“Harry—”
“No.” He stood up. Sat back down. Stood up again. “No, this is— Pansy is pregnant. Pansy might be pregnant with my— and you’re telling me it’s a fantasy of yours and I can’t—” He turned to face her and pointed, the way he did when he was flustered beyond recovery. “That is deeply unfair.”
“I know.”
“That is an insane thing to say in this moment.”
“I know.”
“Why did you say that?”
“I don’t know.” She said it honestly, which was the only register she had left. “I think I’ve been holding it for a while and you were upset and I just— it came out.”
He stared at her.
She looked back at him.
“I’m going insane,” he said.
“You’re not.”
“Something is wrong with me because for approximately one second I thought—” He stopped. Pressed both hands over his face again. Dragged them down. His expression on the other side was the face of a man conducting a stern internal audit and not liking the results. “That’s not the point. That’s so far from the point. Pansy is—” He stopped again. Swallowed. “She sat at our table tonight and told us about the baby. Blaise’s baby. And she doesn’t know. She thinks she’s doing this alone and she’s making plans and she doesn’t know.”
The warmth drained out of the room.
“No,” Ginny said quietly. “She doesn’t.”
“We have to tell her.” All the unhinged weather in his face settled into something clear and awful and decided. “Tonight. Now. We can’t let her go another night not knowing.”
“It’s midnight, Harry.”
“I don’t care.” He was already reaching for his phone on the nightstand. “I don’t care, Ginny. She’s planning her entire life around wrong information and we’ve been sitting on this for—” He stopped himself. Exhaled through his nose. Put the phone down. Picked it back up. “We have to tell her.”
Ginny looked at him — at the phone in his hand, at his hair, at the hole in the collar of his t-shirt, at the expression of a man who was about twenty things at once and had decided to act on the only one he could actually do something about.
“Okay,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Call her.”
He looked at her for a moment. Something moved across his face — not the warmth from earlier, not that easy contentment, but something rawer than that. Something that knew the next several days were going to be very hard and was bracing for them anyway.
Then he looked down at the phone.
“She’s going to be furious,” he said.
“Yes.”
“At both of us.”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” He nodded, mostly to himself. Thumb hovering. “Okay.”
Down the hall James slept on, completely oblivious. She envied him.
——
The front door clicked shut behind them.
Ginny moved past him into the sitting room. Dropped onto the sofa. Pressed her palms against her eyes.
Harry stood in the hallway in the dark for a moment, looking at nothing. Then he went to the kitchen and filled the kettle because he didn’t know what else to do with his hands and standing still felt impossible. He made two cups of tea. Carried them in. Set one in front of her and sat in the chair across from her and wrapped both hands around his mug and stared at the middle distance.
Ginny lowered her hands from her face. “She’ll calm down.”
Harry said nothing.
“Once the shock passes. She’s not— you know how she is, she reacts big and then she comes back to reason, she’ll—”
“You have a handprint on your face.” He said it quietly. “It’s been there for three hours. You’re lucky all she did was slap you.”
Ginny touched her cheek. Dropped her hand. “I deserved it.”
“Yeah.” He drank his tea. “You did.”
She looked at him.
“I just need to sit. Can you let me just sit for five minutes without—”
“Of course.” She picked up her mug. “Yeah. Sorry.”
The lamp threw amber across the floor. Outside the world was the specific blue-black of nearly five in the morning, the hour that belonged to nobody. They had gone together to St. Mungo’s, to confirm their suspicions. The handprint had remained through it all.
Harry looked at his tea and tried to find the floor inside himself, the solid thing, and kept not finding it.
“I keep thinking about her,” Ginny said. “Whether we should—”
“Ginny.”
“I know, I know, I just—”
“I asked for five minutes.”
“I know.” She pulled her knee to her chest. “Sorry.”
He breathed. In. Out. Looked at the ceiling. Came back down.
Thirty seconds.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “I genuinely—”
“Oh my god.” He set the mug down.
“I’m just saying—”
“You said five minutes. I asked for five minutes and you lasted thirty seconds.”
“I can’t just sit here and not—”
“Why not?” He looked at her. “Why can’t you? Why is that impossible for you?”
“Because you’re upset and I’m trying to—”
“I’m upset because my life just exploded, Ginny. I’m allowed to be upset. I don’t need you to fix it in the next thirty seconds.”
“I’m not trying to fix it I’m trying to—”
“You’re trying to make it comfortable.” His voice had an edge now, something unfamiliar in it even to him. “You’re trying to find the angle where it’s all fine so you don’t have to sit in the part where it’s not fine. That’s what you always do.”
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
“Go on then,” he growled. “Say the thing.”
“I wasn’t going to—”
“You were. You’ve been assembling it since we walked in. Just say it.”
She looked at her tea. Looked at him. And he could see it, the calculation, the decision, and then—
“I just think,” she said carefully, “that there might be a silver lining here. That’s all. I think if you can get past the shock of how it happened, there’s something actually—”
“A silver lining.” His voice was hard.
“You’ve always wanted—”
“A silver lining.” He laughed. It came out completely wrong, nothing like a laugh. “Right. Yeah. Silver lining.”
“Harry—”
“No, tell me.” He leaned forward, voice rising. “Tell me what the fucking silver lining is. I want to hear you say it.”
“You’ve wanted another baby.” She said it quietly, but she said it. “And now maybe—”
“Maybe what?” His voice had dropped dangerously low. “Maybe I’m getting one? Is that the silver lining? That I accidentally got someone pregnant because you sent her to the wrong fucking room and then stood in the doorway thinking it was sexy and climbed into the other side of the bed?”
“That’s not—”
“Because that’s what happened, Ginny. That’s the actual sequence of events that led to your silver lining. The one where you don’t have to have more kids with me.” He was on his feet now, he didn’t remember standing, just suddenly upright with nowhere to go. His arms waving around madly without his consent. “My wife thought it was hot. My wife stood there and watched and thought well this is a nice thing and went to sleep and now four months later we’re sitting here at five in the morning with a handprint on your face and you’re telling me it’s a fucking silver lining.”
“I know how it sounds—”
“Do you? Do you actually know how it sounds? Because I don’t think you do.” He turned away from her. Turned back. “You think I just wanted a baby. You think that’s the thing. That’s what you’ve reduced it to in your head, Harry wants a baby, silver lining, problem solved.”
“I’m not saying problem solved—”
“I wanted a marriage.” His voice broke on the word, not in pieces, one clean crack through the middle of it. “I wanted a bloody wife who wanted to be here. Who wanted to be in this house, in this bed, who wanted— Christ, I can’t believe I have to say this out loud—” He laughed again, that terrible sound. “My own wife doesn’t want to fuck me. That’s where we ended up. Years. Years of lying next to you and knowing, feeling you tolerate it, feeling you just— just endure it every time like I was something to be managed and I just kept going, I kept thinking if I was patient enough, if I was good enough—”
“Harry—”
“I planted a garden!” His voice came out louder than he intended and he didn’t pull it back. “I taught myself to cook because I thought— I don’t know what I thought. That if I made it nice enough you’d want to stay. That if the house was warm enough and the food was good enough you’d actually choose this.” He gestured wildly at the room, at all of it. “I sent you photographs of our son every single day when you were away. Every day. Did you want them? Did you look at them and think, gods I miss my family, or did you look at them and think well at least I don’t have to pretend tonight—”
“That’s not fair—”
“I don’t give a fuck if it’s fair!” His voice was fully raised now, unrecognisable, six years of careful quiet coming through all at once. “I don’t fucking care about fair right now! I have been so fair for so long. I have been perfectly understanding and perfectly patient and so fucking reasonable about every single thing you’ve needed and wanted and I never once— I never complained, I never pushed, I never made you feel bad for leaving or for not wanting me or our son or for any of it and look where we are! Look where being fair got me!”
She was crying.
He saw it and felt something shift in him — not softening, not yet, something more complicated, the part of him that would always love her doing battle with the part of him that was bleeding.
“Don’t,” he growled. His voice came out ragged. “Don’t you fucking dare cry right now. I’m not— I can’t be the one who makes you feel better about this.”
“I’m not asking you to—”
“You’re crying. That’s what you do. You cry and I comfort you and then somehow we end up talking about your feelings and mine just—” He pressed both hands into his hair. “Mine just disappear. Mine just get folded up and put away because you needed something and I provided it and that’s just. That’s just what we do.”
“That’s not what I—”
“Isn’t it?” He looked at her, voice got hard and cold. “When was the last time you asked me how I was? Not about James, not about the house, not about whether I’d sorted the nursery waiting list. Me. How I was. What I needed.”
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
He watched her not be able to answer and felt something in his chest go cold and certain.
“Tell me the bloody truth,” he snapped. “Right now. No management, no making it okay, just the actual truth. What is wrong with me. Why am I not good enough for you?”
“Harry—”
“Tell me!” He was shaking. His hands trembling. His heart pounding. He was afraid of the answer. He wanted it anyway.
She looked at him for a long moment. Something assembling behind her face. Then something else — something that had been held for a very long time letting go.
“I’m gay,” she whispered the words.
The floor dropped out from under his feet, like he’d missed a step on the stairs.
He stared at her. Frowned.
“I’ve known since— I knew after the first time we were together. I think I knew before.” Her voice was steady in the way voices went steady when the shaking was happening somewhere you couldn’t see. “I didn’t want to know. And then when I couldn’t not know anymore I looked at you and I thought—” She stopped. Her jaw set. “You’d lost so much. I thought I can’t be another thing he loses. And then we found out I was pregnant. I thought if I just kept going, if I could just be enough of a wife, enough of a— I thought I could make it work.”
Harry said nothing.
“I love you,” she sobbed. “I do love you. That’s real.”
“Just not like that.”
She winced.
He laughed.
It started low and came up wrong, completely detached from anything humorous, and she flinched at the sound of it.
“Our whole marriage,” he laughed, a bitter sound. “Our whole fucking marriage, Ginny.”
“Yes.”
“James.”
She said nothing. The nothing was its own answer.
“You let me think—” He stopped. Shook his head. Started again. “I thought we were trying. Last year when we talked about another baby I thought you were actually— I thought you were considering it. I thought we were having a real conversation about our future and you were just—” He looked at her and the laughter had gone completely, left nothing behind it. “Were you ever actually there? Any of it. Were you ever actually in this with me or was it always just—”
“I was always there. I was just—”
“Not the same way.”
“I’m sorry.” Barely a whisper.
“Right.” He nodded. Kept nodding, the way you did when your body needed something to do. “Right. Okay. So.” He looked at the window. The grey beginning at the edges of it, the first dirty light of early morning. “That night in October that you thought was sexy. Watching someone else in bed with your husband.”
“Harry—”
“Because she’s a woman.”
Silence.
“That’s the thing, isn’t it.” Not a question. “That’s why. It wasn’t just drunk and— it was because she’s a woman and that’s what you actually—”
“Please don’t—”
“I’m not angry about it.” His voice came out strange. “I’m genuinely not angry about that specific thing, I don’t—” He stopped. His hand went over his mouth. Came down. “I’m angry that you didn’t tell me. I’m so fucking angry that you looked at me on our wedding day and you knew. You already knew.”
“I thought I could—”
“You knew, Gin.” His voice cracked fully this time, broke in multiple places, and his eyes were bright and he didn’t look away from her. “You stood there and made those promises and you knew they weren’t— that you couldn’t—” He pressed his fist against his sternum like something physically hurt. “I would have been okay. Eventually. I would have been devastated and then I would have been okay. You should have let me be okay. You should have let me go find something real instead of keeping me here in this—”
He stopped.
She was crying harder now, silently, the way she cried, the internal way.
He was crying too. He didn’t know when it had started. His face was wet and he hadn’t noticed.
“Too late,” he said. Quiet. Final. “I’m sorry. I know you were scared and I know you thought you were doing the right thing and I know you love me but it’s too late. It’s already broken. Every day you didn’t tell me it just kept—” He shook his head. “I can’t unfeel it. I can’t go back and unfeel two years of knowing my wife was somewhere else.”
“I know.”
“You need to leave.”
She blinked. “What?”
“Tonight. I need you to—” He looked at the stairs. At the room above them where their bed was. “I want you out of my house.”
“Harry—”
“Go to your mum’s.” His voice came out harder than he intended and he didn’t soften it. “James is already there. Go be with James. Go be his mother for once instead of—” He stopped. He saw her face and knew that one had landed exactly where he’d thrown it and some mean small part of him thought good and the rest of him felt sick. “Get the fuck out of my sight.”
She stood. Slowly. Like she’d aged something in the last hour.
“In the morning—” she started.
“Fuck. Off.” He sat down heavily in the chair. Suddenly exhausted past the point of staying upright.
She stood there for a moment. He didn’t look at her. He looked at his hands in his lap and listened to her breathing and waited.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know that doesn’t—I’m so sorry, Harry.”
He looked up at her finally. Her face, the slap print almost gone now, the wet cheeks, the jaw set against the crying she was still doing. He loved her. That was the thing with no clean answer, the thing that was going to hurt for a long time regardless. “Fuck. Off.”
She went into the hallway. He heard the quiet sounds of her getting her coat, her bag. The scrape of her key off the hook.
The front door opened.
Closed.
And then the house was just the house. The lamp. The two cold cups of tea. The basil on the windowsill in the kitchen that he’d grown and tended and talked to because he’d thought if he made everything good enough she’d want to stay.
Harry sat in the chair and put his face in his hands and cried in a way he hadn’t let himself cry in a very long time. Not the careful kind. The ugly kind. The kind that had been waiting for years behind the patience and the garden and the breakfasts in bed and all the small devoted acts of a man who had believed, despite everything, that love was enough if you just did it hard enough and long enough and right enough.
It wasn’t enough.
It had never been going to be enough.
Outside the window the sky went from black to grey to the first pale suggestion of morning, and Harry Potter sat in his sitting room and finally, finally let himself know it.