Happy Birthday

[courtneybelle]

Characters: Draco Malfoy/Ginny Weasley romance

Genre: Humor/Romance

Summary: Ginny gets an unexpected birthday present from her materialistic, self-absorbed blond formerly-Slytherin boyfriend. Of course, it takes a fair bit of convincing to get him to hand over the goods... My first attempt at Draco/Ginny fluff.
 Happy Birthday

It was late afternoon at the Burrow on the hottest day of August, also known as the 11th of August, also known as Ginny Weasley’s birthday.

It was a lazy day, the kind of day that made a girl want to strip off her clothes and lie half-naked underneath the broad-reaching shade of an old, sturdy tree. Possibly a tree by a lake, or a pond, or a body of water in which she could take a dip should the whimsy so strike her.

For her part, Ginny was stuck in the kitchen preparing dinner. On her birthday. For her birthday dinner. On the hottest day of August.

It was to be a small, family affair, so her mother had risen at dawn to begin preparations. Charlie and Bill were engaged in their usual table war on the back lawn while Ron stood nearby with Hermione and tried not to take sides. She could hear the scraping and giggles that meant her dad’s particular brand of charity had lured the gnomes back to their freshly covered holes, and with her luck it would be her mum assigned to dispose of them before they sat down to eat.

Ginny decided this treatment was vastly unfair. After all, it was her birthday, and the one person she wanted to celebrate it with was forbidden to eat at the same table with her brothers ever since that nasty occasion earlier that summer... Needless to say, Charlie had been smug and insufferable all throughout breakfast and into the first half of lunch, before Bill threw a spoon at him when mum’s back was turned and he became more concerned with the rapidly forming bruise on his swarthy face than with her love life.

Which was going swimmingly, if she could only escape her mother’s iron grip long enough to actually kiss him, much less have an actual conversation that didn’t focus on her family, his family, why they were snogging in the spider-infested broom shed and couldn’t they find somewhere more classy that wouldn’t get dust all over his new robes?

Also, she would really like to shag him again before she went prematurely gray from the lack of physical contact.

So, as her favorite foods sat simmering on the stove and cooling on the windowsill, she traipsed to the fireplace under the pretense of ‘buying some more candles for the table so we can actually see out there tonight, won’t be more than a minute, mum!’ and whispered “Malfoy Manor” as quietly as she could without risking the chance of landing in some good, upstanding Australian family’s dining room. Not that that had ever happened to her before, or anything...but it was certainly a risk to consider!

The world spun around her in a flourish of green before the fireplace spat her out in the sitting room the Malfoy family used to receive incoming guests. The other fireplaces in the manor were connected to the Floo Network, but only linked to other hearths within the grounds, as the extent of the house was too massive to walk everywhere on foot. One night, for dinner with Daphne and Theodore, she had actually had to Floo to the dining room from Draco’s room to avoid being twenty minutes late!

Because of the distance and not any wanton activities they had been getting up to just before that, of course.

One of the family house elves, a squat young female named Toffee, appeared in her ill-fitting dressing gown. After an incessant guilt trip from Hermione, Ginny had pouted and pleaded and finally convinced Draco to allow the house elves wages and clothing - ‘allow’ being a loose term for ‘force upon’. It was really only to keep her future sister-in-law from badmouthing her boyfriend’s house every time she mentioned it in casual conversation.

“Good evening, Miss Weezey!” Toffee beamed brightly, spreading her chapped lips across her yellow, crooked teeth. Ginny had taken a like to Toffee, ever since the first time she had taken a cup of tea from the cute little thing and heard her accidentally call Draco a bastard when she bowed low to the ground. She had only been repeating Ginny’s own sarcastic declaration of affection, and it had taken all her feminine wiles to keep the poor house elf from being dismissed. “Master Malfoy,” she paused to touch her spindly nose to the ground, “is not expecting company.”

“I know,” Ginny brushed the soot and dust from her shoulders and hoped none of it had settled too deeply in her hair. If only people were allowed to Apparate on the Malfoy grounds, she wouldn’t always turn up looking like a Knockturn Alley beggar-woman. “And don’t bother telling him I’m here, I think I’ll surprise him.”

Toffee’s eyes widened and she nodded enthusiastically - so enthusiastically that the knots on her ear ribbons loosened significantly.

“It is being our secret, Miss Weezey! Toffee promises!”

Ginny decided to walk the few corridors it would take to get her to Draco’s bedroom, and endured the snide remarks from his ancestor’s portraits on the way over expensive rugs, polished flagstone, and plush carpet. House elves flittered here and there, trying to stay out of sight, but less worried about disembowelment since Draco was the ‘master’ now and Ginny tended to withhold affection if she caught him slipping into his old habit of kicking them around. He got his jollies by demanding they call him ‘master’ and ordering them to bow every time they referred to him to anyone else.

Of course, Ginny would never call him ‘master’, and she definitely wouldn’t bow down to him.

At least, not outside of the bedroom.

His door didn’t creak like hers did when she opened it, so she was able to slip through its opening without drawing any attention to herself. Draco was sitting on his too-large, too-comfortable bed, his back turned to her and his blond head bent diligently over a mostly hidden piece of parchment. Curiosity instantly sparked Ginny’s interest, cultivated from years of nosing around in her brothers’ business without them being any the wiser. Why was he hiding it if he was in his private bedroom, presumably alone, and not expecting any company?

So, instead of crawling up behind him like she might have otherwise done, she tilted her head inquisitively and tried to get a glimpse of what he was writing. “What are you doing?”

He didn’t jump, or give a start, or even render an emotion at all. In fact, she very strongly suspected he had been well-aware of her presence from the moment she had turned his door handle - maybe even since she had tumbled through his public sitting room fireplace. She liked to pretend, sometimes, that she could sneak up on him, but he had an uncanny way of knowing exactly where she was at all times; she had considered a Tracking spell on several occasions, but Hermione assured her Draco could only perform a Tracking spell if he had something of hers to use in the spell, and when had he ever been inside her bedroom long enough to take something like that?

...So, Ginny figured it was a Tracking spell.

“What?”

“With that parchment,” Ginny qualified, hopping on the bed behind him and trying to peek over his shoulder. “What are you doing with it?”

Before she could make a good grab for it, Draco had folded it into four corners and tucked it safely into the breast pocket of his black shirt. “Nothing you should concern yourself with.”

Her Weasley Intuition told her that was a load of rot, so she wrapped her arms around his neck from behind and attempted a sexy sneak attack on his chest that would lead to the flawless swiping of that parchment, if her lover would only play along and give into her ministrations...He did so love the feeling of her fingernails on his chest, after all.

“Ah,” he warned, taking her hands in his and prying them away from his pocket. “Hands off the merchandise.”

She let her long sheets of red hair fall around her shoulders, just the way he liked, so they draped over his own shoulders and tickled the exposed skin of his neck. Then, when she was sure the dripping curls had caught his eye, and as soon as she saw his fingers twitch longingly in their direction, she breathed a hot sigh against his ear and lowered her tone to the whispery tenor she only used in bed.

“But I like the merchandise.”

Without batting an eyelash, he tightened his grip on her hands and smirked. “I know you do.”

Fed up with trying and failing to seduce her way past his expertly raised guard, Ginny pouted, huffed “Give it!”, and lunged for his pocket in one brave, courageous tackle that any Gryffindor or world-class Quidditch player would have been proud of. Draco’s reflexes were attuned to her every tactic, unfortunately (in that particular case, anyway), and he caught her by the forearms before she could escape too much and stopped her attack in its stride.

“It’s nothing,” Draco assured her flippantly. “A piece of parchment.” Then, he lifted her left hand to his pale lips and trailed possessively tender kisses over her knuckles, lingering on her ring finger before darting his tongue to mark her pinky. “Trivial.”

Ginny smiled. Draco, Draco, Draco. If he thought using her own tactic against her would yield different results just because she was helpless against the attraction her body had for his, he had another thing coming. He wasn’t the sneakiest snake in the garden patch, after all - more than once, her brothers, Colin, Harry, Hermione, Luna, random strangers in bookshops and apothecaries, and Draco himself had told her that the Sorting Hat had been terribly mistaken for not shipping her off to Slytherin.

“Then you won’t mind me looking at it.”

“You’re incredibly nosy.” A characteristic scowl etched the sculpted, pointed levels of his face, and he released her hands in agitation. “A Weasley quality, I imagine.”

She ignored the perfunctory jab at her heritage and responded in a much more productive way - by sliding her way around his body and settling herself right in his lap, right where she could look right into his eyes with her perfectly endearing pout and have him right where she wanted him, with that laden breast pocket only a clawing hand away. It was the same pout that had earned her many things, including Arnold the pygmy puff, Ron doing her chores for an entire month, and an extension on a paper for Potions in Professor Slughorn’s class her fifth year.

“I’m a marble statue,” he refused to yield to her ruse, or at least he pretended to refuse to yield to her ruse. Ginny could see the spark behind his stormy gray eyes that meant he had been thinking about her the same way she had been thinking about him all afternoon, and her pout was going to earn her much more than a look at his Top Secret parchment project. “Nothing affects me.”

He tried to assure of this by turning his head away, but this only gave Ginny the opportunity to lift her lips to the spot on his neck. It was hidden, just at the peak of his tensed tendon and nestled in the crevice between his earlobe and throat. She only pressed a ghost of a kiss to it, then peppered more phantom pecks up and down his jaw, before returning to the spot with her teeth bared and her tongue pointed and prepared to tease him into submission.

“Wench,” Draco smirked again, fondly this time. She knew her moment was at hand, so she tiptoed all ten of her fingers up the trail his button’s shirt provided to his open collar, which planed upwards and sloped so easily into the depths of his pocket.

“What’s this?” Suddenly, his hands were on her hips, and her back was on the mattress. “The statue comes to life?”

Then he was on her, and the paper had been removed from his pocket and flung to the other side of the bed. Her arms weren’t long enough to reach, and even if they were, he put his weight on her thighs and pinned her arms over her head to prevent all means of escape. Draco loomed over her, his blond hair silver in the broken sunlight streaming across his bed, and she could only despair about the distance between her wriggling fingers and that mysterious parchment.

“This isn’t fair,” she groused, wriggling uselessly in a futile attempt to worm her way free.

He raised an eyebrow at her plight and said only, “Slytherin.”

Ginny didn’t pout again, nor did she use their physical proximity to distract his iron grip, or resort to kneeing him hard in the priceless family jewels; but she did grumble under her breath, “Stupid Slytherins...” A few choice phrases followed, such as bane of my existence and take a flying leap off a broomstick headfirst into a pit of starving lions.

“At least we’re not suck ups.” His drawl was sexy and deep and annoying.

“Gryffindors are not suck ups!” Not the most articulate retort she could have chosen, but his sweet and spicy scent was starting to overwhelm her olfactory senses. Not to mention the way his shirt was so very unbuttoned at the top, and his horizontal leaning made it dangle so temptingly over her and allowed a tantalizing shadowed peek at the treasures that hid beneath.

Draco drew his tongue slowly across his bottom lip. “Right, right...”

When he lowered his head to touch his lips to hers, Ginny smiled sweetly. “Suck this.” Then, when he was close enough, she parted her teeth and bit down hard on that same, freshly moisturized lip.

When he managed to wrangle himself free and secure her struggling arms back against the comfortable cushion of his bedclothes, his narrowed glare shone down at her in all its intensity. “Did I say rude? Gryffindors are rude, too.”

No one insulted her house that way! Especially not Draco Malfoy, the very snarky and very annoying prince of everything green and silver and actually rude. He could make jibes at her ramshackle homestead, belittle her haven in the dank and badly lit broom shed, even poke fun at the family pigs and chickens, but he would not besmirch her house pride.

“How many games did Slytherin lose to Gryffindor when you were at school?” Ginny pretended to do the sum in her head, then bit her lip and lowered one brow deviously, so the low blow she was about to deliver would not be unexpected. “And...how many of those years were you their Seeker?”

“We let you win,” Draco scoffed, digging his pelvis into her hips and tightening the muscles in his thighs to keep her positively motionless in his grasp. “Plus, we had better things to do. Making fun of the poor...”

“...Picking the wings off flies...”

He shook his head. “We’ve moved onto bats.”

Ginny wrinkled her nose. “That sounds very messy.”

“Oh, it is,” Draco nodded, and fine strands of his silky soft hair floated over his eyes. “But Goyle does so enjoy bathing in the blood of the weak.”

There was one very blatant error in that statement that Ginny could not go without correcting. “Slytherins don’t bathe, it’s common knowledge.”

“That’s actually a myth.” He straightened up and, as if he was teaching her a history lesson, he cleared his throat and added, “Fabricated long ago by Gryffindors who shall not be named.”

“Wise, wise men.” If Ginny could have put her hand over her heart in a patriotic display of loyalty, she would have. Of course, with him holding her wrists steadfastly together somewhere over the top of her head, she had no choice but to lift her chin in a solitary show of devotion. “With names too precious to be spoken.”

“Their names were incredibly gay,” he expounded. “Too gay, in fact, to be mentioned.”

“Not like Draco,” she did her version of his winning smirk.

“Eunuchs, I heard,” he continued, unfazed and talking over her. “Completely lacking in genitals - ”

“ - Like you will be if you don’t stop badmouthing my forefathers? - ”

“And fashion sense.” He shook his head in false mourning for that contemptible mistake. While Draco Malfoy was as heterosexual as a wizard could possibly be, except in extreme cases when he was drunk and alone and lacking in judgment and seated beside a rather attractive man named Bill Weasley, one highly amusing night at the pub she was forbidden to ever tease him about, he had impeccable taste in clothes and had no pity for any human being who did not. Even purebloods didn’t get a reprieve. Especially not purebloods. “They all dyed their hair pink and joined a male brothel, way back in the day.”

“The same male brothel Salazar Slytherin frequented every Tuesday and Thursday when he could drag himself away from having evil Tupperware parties and nailing puppies to walls?” Before Draco could talk over her again, Ginny raised the volume of her insult - something she was very good at due to living in the Burrow with her brothers and, most of all, her mum. “Because Slytherin was also, in fact, gay. Gay as a Spring day, in fact.”

“False,” he protested.

“Fact,” she insisted.

“Daily he shagged both Helga Hufflepuff and Rowena Ravenclaw,” he paused to wink. “And they enjoyed it.”

Ginny shot him a mocking wink of her own. “Yeah, when it was over.”

Not to be deterred now that their game had lasted so long, Draco leaned closer and let the breath waft from between his lips just hard enough to tickle the invisible, downy hairs on the curves of Ginny’s face. “Godric Gryffindor spent most of his time crying alone and wanking off to photos of his dear mother.”

“Myth, actually.” Ginny shook her head back and forth in slow, sweeping motions.

Draco cleared his throat and straightened into a sitting position on her stomach, releasing her wrists and finally granting her use of her arms. “I do believe I’ve read the entirety of Hogwarts, a History, while you have not. So listen to the smart one, for a moment.”

Ginny rolled her eyes and rested the heels of her palms against the top of his trousers, applying just enough pressure to taunt his lower abdomen, but holding back just enough to let him know that her fingers weren’t going to be venturing under his belt any time soon unless he took a few of his snide comments back. Or at least cut the bullshit and ripped her clothes off first. “I got the summary from Hermione and she’s smarter than you are.”

“She’s also sexually repressed.” Ignoring her implied and well-planned hand pressure, he took his own palms and pressed her hands against his slightly bulging crotch. Their daily back-and-forth was foreplay to him, but she hoped he realized her time constraints. It didn’t take thirty minutes to pop into one of Diagon Alley’s specialty shops and pick out a few candlesticks. “So who’s the smart one now?”

Despite the fact that it was crueler to do it than not to do it, she granted him one small squeeze before answering. “Me.”

“No...” He trailed his hands back up her arms, but diverted his path at her shoulders and let the pads of his fingertips glide feather soft over the peaks of her breasts. As it was the hottest day of August, Ginny had dressed only in a thin cotton tank top and a pair of denim shorts Hermione had leant her from her traveling trunk, so she wasn’t exactly in any position to hide her arousal from his possessive palms. “You’re the cute one.”

“That too,” she had to agree. “And spunky. But also incredibly smart.”

“For a Gryffindor,” he allowed. “I find the whole lot of you to be terribly and miraculously...dumb. Actions speak louder than words. I mean,” he stopped talking long enough for his eyes to trace every curve and dip her thin clothing allowed him to gaze upon. The intensity of those tempestuous silver eyes drove the soft hills on the upward swells of her breast to sharpen into deprived peaks. “You’re sleeping with me. That’s not very smart.”

She gasped at this, as if the thought had only just occurred to her, and propped her upper body up on her elbows. “You’re right. What was I thinking?” The words ‘that I have a big prick’ were begging to burst forth from behind his teeth - she could see his lips forming the first shape he would need to pass the sounds along. “We’re not sleeping together anymore.”

That was bound to stop him in his tracks.

“That I have a big prick,” he hummed lazily anyway.

“Yes,” Ginny nodded for a few moments to appropriately boost his ego. Then, “You are a big prick. I know that’s what you meant to say.”

“How silly of me.” He smirked at her again, one time too many as far as she was concerned. This conversation was all hers.

“Maybe I’ll start seeing Blaise Zabini...” She knew Draco loathed the fact that his old friend found her physically attractive and never missed an occasion to tell her so; she also enjoyed the steam that flew from under his ears like the after-effects of Pepper-up Potion every time Blaise leaned into her ear and told her, in that rich, deep, rumbling voice of his that if she ever tired of his impotent friend, she knew where to find him. “We’ll try not to make too much noise when he takes the guest room right next door...but,” she fluttered her eyelashes and looked up at him from beneath their sultry shade. “You know how I get.”

Her lover remained unfazed, but that’s what she loved about him. In her world of hot tempers and ticking time bombs, he was the one person she could snipe and snip at and still hold a civil conversation with. Or, at least, what passed for a civil conversation between them. The one they were having right that second was probably the most mature discussion they’d had in months.

“Oh, you wouldn’t want to sleep with Blaise,” he put his fingers in her hair and massaged some soot from her scalp. “He’s incredibly selfish.” Ginny closed her eyes and enjoyed the sensation of his alternately rough and gentle caresses, not even minding that it made her conviction less convincing. Draco had many talents, and one of them was the ability to give a damn good massage. “Daphne told me so.”

The next threat that cropped into Ginny’s head signaled that their banter should come to an end, and quick. “I’d say Crabbe and Goyle at the same time, but even I’m not willing to take this charade that far.”

Draco chuckled, low in the back of his throat and leaned back into her, so his breath mingled with hers. “You’d be in for a full night of grunting.”

“Before the sex, you mean.”

“Before,” he granted, but there was more, “after, during. They’re very fond of grunting.”

“Fine...”

She filed through the list of men whose advances might drive Draco to the most insane jealousy, but he was pretty confident in his ownership of her, now that they had slept together more than too many times to count, visited his various estates all over Europe for quiet holidays away from their loving mothers - hers the busy-body who pestered them for grandchildren, his the statuesque society queen who pestered them for heirs to the Malfoy name. Oh, and ever since he had convinced Toffee to sew ‘property of Draco Malfoy’ into every article of clothing she accidentally left on his bedroom floor. Mostly the knickers, but also a few jumpers and more than one pair of her patterned socks.

“This being pinned down is inconvenient,” she decided aloud. “If only I had six very rambunctious older brothers and knew how to get out of scrapes like these...” Draco tried to wrap his long fingers around her thin wrists again, but before he could so much as flatten his upper body against hers in one last-ditch effort to keep her under his thumb - or hips, as it where - Ginny rolled them over so she landed triumphantly on his chest.

Content in his defeat, the blond put his hands behind his head to enjoy the view.

Of course, she didn’t stay for long.

“Oh, bollocks,” he cursed when Ginny lunged across the bed for the long-forgotten piece of folded parchment.

Her face disappeared behind it when she drew it to its full scale, and Draco pushed himself upright to try and gauge her reaction, perhaps from the lift of the part of her brow he could see, or from the angle of the bottom of her chin that peered at him from beneath the folded yellow parchment’s lower corners. All he could make out was her mass of freckles, however, and he was resigned to staring at the back of that damned stupid parchment with a mixture of 90% annoyance, 7% menacing aggravation, and 3% discomfort on his quirked lips and arched eyebrows.

“Don’t laugh,” he warned seriously, dreading what he would do if she did. Kill her, probably. Avada Kedvra right to her full, supple chest.

Ginny didn’t make a sound, just kept hiding from him on the other side of the parchment. Her silence was unsettling.

“Don’t you dare.”

After a few moments, her wide brown eyes came into view, followed by the upturned button of her nose, then the beaming blush of her lips. Still, she didn’t speak, but the sight of those magical sparkles glaring so offensively at him where he’d written HAPPY BIRTHDAY with the tip of his wand made him think that he would Avada Kedavra himself, instead. Right in the head, because his brain was absolutely useless when it came right down to the case of Ginny Weasley and her mass of curls and that devious slant to her smile.

“You’re going to laugh,” he knew it, he just knew it. She always twinkled at him like that when she was about to laugh. “Don’t do it.”

She tossed the homemade birthday card aside, put her palms flat on the surface of his bedspread, and bit her lip enticingly. “We’re sleeping together again,” she informed him. Had she not referred back to that empty threat of hers, Draco would have entirely forgotten her vow to abstain from their vigorous and infamous marathon shagging sessions. Of course they were sleeping together, but there was no ‘again’ - it was merely ‘still’ and also, probably ‘for a good damn long time’.

“...Starting now.”

“Ah, good.” Draco let his own lips slant deviously. “Get naked.”