Birthday fic
Title: Birthday Butterflies
Author: lucy_lupin
Dedicated to: maniacalmuse
Set: The Golden Trio's seventh year
Characters: Parvati Patil, Eddie Carmichael, with mentions of Lavender and Seamus
Pairing: Eddie/Parvati, with hints of Seamus/Lavender
Genre: Romance
Rating: R for medium-level sex descriptions - nothing too heavy though
Word Count: 3,058
Disclaimer: I own neither Parvati nor Eddie. Nor any of the other characters mentioned. And if I did own Eddie, I'd loan him to maniacalmuse for the day. Because it's her birthday!
Summary: Parvati is a seventh year Gryffindor mourning the absence of her sister when she meets Eddie Carmichael, a recently graduated Ravenclaw working as Slughorn's Potions assistant. She's at Hogwarts by herself for the Christmas holidays and an uneventful eighteenth birthday. So far...
Author's Notes: This fic is based off the universe of the RPG hogwarts_blogs, particularly off celebren's characterisation of Eddie.
* ~ * ~ *
Parvati Patil was stomping along the seventh floor corridor towards the Room of Requirement she and the other DA members had frequented during their fifth year, rubbing her hands together with the cold and grinding her teeth. Her breath came in short, sharp bursts of foggy air. As if it wasn’t bad enough that she had to spend Christmas - and therefore her birthday, which was also during the festive period - at Hogwarts, but now she had landed herself a detention to boot. A detention! She hadn’t known it was possible to get one over the Christmas holidays, but apparently it was.
Dean was going to give her so much shit about that when he got back. Not even during their wildest capers had he and Seamus accomplished such a feat. And for what she was currently doing, she’d probably end up with a second detention. If she was caught. But Parvati didn’t trust her luck to hold that much.
Bloody Merlin, it wasn’t her fault that Draco Malfoy was such an annoying little twat. And due to the comment he’d made, she had no choice but to respond. Well, technically she could have not hexed him. But she didn’t want to. And along a similar vein, if her best friend had sent her a pleading owl imploring her to meet and discuss a huge altercation between her and her boyfriend, well, what could she do but go along?
If she did get caught though, she might just knock Lavender and Seamus’s heads together. Not perhaps the most civil means, but the way she was feeling right now, she wasn’t above resorting to such brutality to bang some sense into her friends. Once again she wondered if it wasn’t too late to owl her parents and ask if she could at least spend the last few days before term at home, but steeled herself against this urge. Her parents had made their choice. So had Padma. And so had she.
Merlin, how she ached to see her sister again.
After a few false alarms, however, she was outside the door of the Room of Requirement. Her eighteenth birthday, meaning she was now of age in her mother’s as well as her father’s universe, and she would have to spend it comforting her best friend. And it was New Year’s Eve to boot. New Year’s! “I know that you and Seamus have had a falling out,” she began, pushing the heavy oak door open, “but I would have preferred it if you hadn’t made me walk-” She broke up abruptly as her eyes adjusted to the dim light and took in the figure seated at the far end of the room. “You’re not Lavender!”
“Indeed I’m not.” Eddie Carmichael, erstwhile Ravenclaw and current Potions assistant, took a few steps across the room, a small, wry smile on his face. “Certain scenarios would hardly be on the cards if I was. But I admit that the two of you would make an attractive couple. I’d say that you’d have beautiful children together, but again, that’s also a physical impossibility.”
“You’re…I…well.” Parvati was so startled by his sudden appearance that she neglected to call him up on his remarks. “But where’s Lavender? Oh.” Her eyes narrowed in sudden understanding. “She’s not coming, is she? She was never coming. You two set all this up.”
“If you call arranging a surprise birthday party a “set up,” then yes, we did.” Ernie said, taking her arm and helping her into the room. “And a little gratitude wouldn’t exactly go amiss at this point.”
“I…um…thank you,” Parvati said, trying to force her brain back into gear. “And sorry. I just…wasn’t expecting it…I suppose. I thought you would have-”
“Forgotten?” Eddie suggested, looking rather amused. Parvati bit her lip and gave him an abashed look. “We haven’t been doing this for very long though,” he added as a compromise.
“And you don’t exactly have the best memory in the world,” Parvati opined.
“I remember the important things,” Eddie said. He stepped behind her and helped her out of her coat, his hands brushing against her shoulders as he did so. “So, what do you think?”
“Nice,” Parvati said truthfully, looking around the room. He had set it up to look like a cosy but expensive restaurant, a chandelier dangling down towards the centre of the room and a piano tinkling away quietly in a corner. “Thank you. I’m…well, “surprised” would imply that I didn’t expect you to do anything which might make you feel bad and isn’t really true, so I don’t mean it that way, but I do feel, um…“surprised.” In the best possible way.” Eddie was wearing a shirt and black pants. She finished surveying the room (and him), then glanced down at her outfit and said, “But I’m not dressed for it!”
“That can be fixed,” Eddie said. He gave his wand a flick in her direction and she felt her simple jeans and jumper twist and shrink around her body until they had been transfigured into a classic little black dress. Reflexively she grabbed at the hem as it crept up her legs, but fortunately Eddie stopped the spell and ended the dress so that it was a few inches above her knees, but far from indecent. “Don’t worry,” he added with a smirk as he noticed the gesture. “I wouldn’t expect to see that much of you this early in the evening.”
Parvati gave him a swipe for that comment, but it was half-hearted. She still felt honour-bound as a female to make some sort of retaliation for things like that, but over the last three months she’d figured out that Eddie was merely playing a role for humour’s sake when he said things like that. Besides if that was all he was interested in, there were greener and more accommodating pastures to visit.
Her bare arms and shoulders were breaking into goosebumps from the cold night air. A fire would be nice, she thought, and instantly one appeared across from the table on which a candelabra flickered. “Sorry,” Eddie grimaced. “I should have thought of that.”
“You’re fine,” Parvati said. She took his arm as they crossed over to the table. “You’d redeem yourself if you pulled out my chair for me though,” she told him, a teasing smile on her lips.
“Done,” Eddie said as a chair slid out with a flick of his wand and he helped her into it. This time his hand brushed the bare skin of her shoulders, and it wasn’t just the coolness of his fingertips that made her flesh break into fresh goosebumps. She wondered if the two of them would be able to hold out this evening, and a thought crossed her mind that somehow it would be harder than previously.
Eddie sat down across from her, concentrating hard on the tabletop. A full platter of food appeared between them, complete with curry and roti, her favourite. It didn’t occur to her to point out that roti was really only served with morning meals, which it would have done perhaps at the start of the school year. Instead she said, “Thank you. I’ve been missing it,” and broke off a piece to dip in the curry. Neither did she tell him that wine usually wasn’t served with roti, yet here it was at her elbow served in a tall, silver goblet. These things didn’t appear to be terribly important right now.
After a while, he pulled out a package and put it on the table next to her. “Here,” he said. “It’s not much but I hope you like it.”
Parvati carefully removed the wrapping to see a little velvet jewellery box. Nestled inside was a simple silver hairclip with a blue topaz butterfly on its tip. Topazes were the Hindu birthstone for her month. She knew there was more to Eddie than what he let on to most people, but still, she was touched that he had gone to such thought and trouble for her.
“You don’t like it.” He misinterpreted the worst from her silence. “I’m sorry I didn’t get you anything nice.”
“Oh no!” she said quickly. “It’s more than nice. I really like it. I’m just surprised that you remembered that I like butterflies.”
“Yeah, well, as I said, I remember the important things.” He shrugged now, awkward. She leant across the table to kiss him thank-you, then sat down again before things got too out of hand. They continued their meal.
People who didn’t know them probably assumed that they didn’t have much to talk about. How could they, with one half of the couple being the giggly Gryffindor gossip and the other a boy a year ahead of her whose claim to fame was attempting to invent Baruffio's Brain Elixir during his sixth year? But in her experience, comedy usually came from something serious and for her own part, she was as smart as her Ravenclaw twin. She just applied it towards other things. So it was that once they had bypassed the usual double entendres - intentional or not - and catch-me-if-you-can style flirting, their conversation drifted onto more serious things. Like how after she’d saved up money from modelling, she was interested in starting her own clothing label and wanted to do a business course to learn how to manage her assets. Like how he was paying off an apartment in Hogsmeade and wanted to open a store of flying motorcycles catering exclusively for wizards. There was an untapped market out there, he claimed. After all, what red-blooded bloke would want to zoom around with a fit bird behind him on a nobbly old broomstick? What was hot about that?
Parvati’s own mind drifted to Eddie’s motorcycle and to what she may have liked to do involving herself, its padded leather seat - and Eddie. She blushed.
Talk turned to their families and after a bit of awkwardness they broached the issue of Parvati’s. In September after Neville Longbottom had got into an entanglement with some of the friendlier, larger plants in Greenhouse Six and was only found three days later, her parents had owled her and her twin requesting for them to return home. Padma complied. She didn’t. As she discussed it with Eddie, she found herself being candid in a way that she hadn’t been with others, even Lavender and Seamus. And she also realised that in his company, the longing she had to be home - not home as it existed now with all its various tensions, but home in the past with memories of fond Christmases together - had diminished. She supposed that was the natural progression of things. After all, she wouldn’t be having Christmases at home forever. Someday she’d be spending them with her own family: her children and her-
Fucking Merlin, did that mean she wanted to marry Eddie? No! They were too young, they’d only known each other for a matter of months, and just because there was a war on didn’t mean she had to start popping out babies like a Butterbeer production line. And they hadn’t even…yet…and she’d always pictured herself as marrying someone more serious, like a dour Ravenclaw or stoic Hufflepuff, who didn’t make her laugh as much.
At the thought of herself getting married, she started to choke on her wine.
Instantly Eddie charmed a glass of water out of the air, pressing it into her hand and helping her to take a swallow. “Are you alright?” he asked.
“Yes,” Parvati managed, placing the now-empty glass on the table. “I was just thinking about you…me-” she glanced down and realised that while she had been choking, she had knocked over her wine and now the tablecloth was being stained a deep, blood red “-the table!”
“The table?” Now Eddie himself seemed short of breath, and in his case it had nothing to do with choking on wine.
“The table,” Parvati echoed breathlessly. Eddie hadn’t moved closer towards her, but she was suddenly more aware of him; his lips seemed nearer. Oh, bollocks to this, was her last conscious thought.
Eddie managed to imagine the tablecloth and the remainder of the food and drink away just in time. They were kissing as if neither of them had ever been kissed before, let alone by each other, their hands tracing over all the familiar haunts with a new frenzy. Her foot was falling asleep as she sat, twisted on the table in an awkward angle, but she didn’t give a fuck. As far as various body parts went, it was currently the lowest on her list of priorities right now. She encircled her legs around Eddie and pressed herself closer, her lips clinging to his as if they were the only things between her and certain death.
As her legs tightened around his waist, Eddie slid his hands underneath her and lifted her off the table, carrying her across the room and lowering her on top of a velvet chaise lounge. A distant part of her mind noted that the chaise lounge hadn’t been present before and Eddie had probably requested the room for one, but she was a seventh year witch and had grown up with magic - and at the moment there were more important things on her mind. Like how as an aspiring designer she appreciated the nice, clean lines of Eddie’s clothing, but it had to come off in order for her to enjoy the still nicer and cleaner lines of his torso that lay beneath. Her hands managed to grasp at the lapels of his shirt, then pull - and tear. Eddie raised one dark eyebrow in amusement at that. Pressing a grinning mouth against hers, he chuckled, “I never thought you’d voluntarily wreck an item of clothing.”
“It - can - be - fixed - with a - charm - after - wards,” Parvati managed between kisses, pushing him away so that her lips could find better access to his chest. Eddie groaned and wrapped his fingers through her hair. He was pulling a little too tightly, but she could ignore it and she figured, what were a few strands of hair anyway? She was quickly reconsidering the importance of good grooming. It was overrated anyway. Particularly in certain scenarios. Like this one. She’d give up hair charms for a week to repeat this experience. A month, even. That time frame stretched out to a year - and then to eternity - as the straps of her dress slid southward and Eddie returned the favour on her own décolletage, and then lower. “Oh, bloody Merlin,” she groaned, imbuing her usual favoured curse phrase with unspeakable longing.
Parvati’s speech, despite its lack of coherency, seemed to being Eddie to his senses. Somewhat. Which was the last thing Parvati wanted to do right now. She gazed up at him as he drew back, her mouth opened in silent protest. “Vati?” he said, taking the straps of her dress and pulling it back up so that she was once again somewhat decent. “Is everything alright? I mean, are you sure you want to do this?”
“Well, everything was alright until you stopped kissing me.” She was torn between feeling touched by his concern and exasperated that he’d stopped things right there. “And in case you need a more exact answer, yes, I am bloody well sure that I want to do this. Now get back down here and finish what you started.”
He needed no second bidding. They both picked up where they left off, but the pace had become still faster and more frenzied. She hoped that along with her dress, he had charmed her sensible cotton knickers into something more appealing, but there was no time to think or worry because they along with the rest of her clothing were off as quickly as if they had been Disapparated. Then he was lying on top of her, his full weight and length of her body pressed against her. But before things could go any further, she pressed one finger to his lips. “Eddie,” she began.
Eddie pushed himself upright, supporting his weight with his forearms. “You’re not on contraceptive potion?”
“Yes I am, Eddie, but that’s not-”
“You’re still a virgin?” His eyes widened. “Oh Rowena’s tits, you’re a virgin. I mean, it’s not a problem. It’s fine. We can wait. I can wait. I mean…oh Rowena’s-”
“No! Eddie, calm down.” She reached up to place a hand over his mouth. “I’m not a virgin. I was just about to tell you that it’s been a while, so be gentle, alright?” Her brown eyes, usually merry with gossip or scowling at an offending boy, were wide and moist with vulnerability. She didn’t often show that emotion, not even around him.
Eddie carefully took his weight off his arms, leaning down to kiss her on the forehead. “I’ll be careful,” he said, then sunk into her.
Their movements were at first awkward and jarring, not quite merging and blending with finesse together, but as the fire dimmed and the night crept on, they gained more of an understanding with each other until when at last they were still, their limbs docilely curled together but with a sort of dormant, spent energy. Eddie was the first to speak. “You must have really liked that hairclip then, yeah?”
Parvati gave him a punch on the arm, then snuggled closer. The sweat was cooling on their bodies, and he concentrated hard on the need for more warmth until the fire flared up and a thick blanket appeared on top of them. Lulled by his fingers sifting through her hair and the fatigue brought on by their previous exertions, Parvati gradually drifted asleep, one hand still half cupping his own.
“Happy Birthday, Vati,” Eddie whispered. “And Happy New Year too.” But for the softly breathing witch next to him, he was left alone with his thoughts. She was lying on his arm, which was going numb. He could ask her to move and she would, but then she might - no, she mostly certainly would - be hurt and he didn’t want that. I love her, he realised, quickly followed by, Rowena’s Tits, where did that come from? Parvati’s weight was pressing down heavier on his arm. My arm, bugger it, my arm, he thought, and then he too was fast asleep.
The End
Author: lucy_lupin
Dedicated to: maniacalmuse
Set: The Golden Trio's seventh year
Characters: Parvati Patil, Eddie Carmichael, with mentions of Lavender and Seamus
Pairing: Eddie/Parvati, with hints of Seamus/Lavender
Genre: Romance
Rating: R for medium-level sex descriptions - nothing too heavy though
Word Count: 3,058
Disclaimer: I own neither Parvati nor Eddie. Nor any of the other characters mentioned. And if I did own Eddie, I'd loan him to maniacalmuse for the day. Because it's her birthday!
Summary: Parvati is a seventh year Gryffindor mourning the absence of her sister when she meets Eddie Carmichael, a recently graduated Ravenclaw working as Slughorn's Potions assistant. She's at Hogwarts by herself for the Christmas holidays and an uneventful eighteenth birthday. So far...
Author's Notes: This fic is based off the universe of the RPG hogwarts_blogs, particularly off celebren's characterisation of Eddie.
* ~ * ~ *
Parvati Patil was stomping along the seventh floor corridor towards the Room of Requirement she and the other DA members had frequented during their fifth year, rubbing her hands together with the cold and grinding her teeth. Her breath came in short, sharp bursts of foggy air. As if it wasn’t bad enough that she had to spend Christmas - and therefore her birthday, which was also during the festive period - at Hogwarts, but now she had landed herself a detention to boot. A detention! She hadn’t known it was possible to get one over the Christmas holidays, but apparently it was.
Dean was going to give her so much shit about that when he got back. Not even during their wildest capers had he and Seamus accomplished such a feat. And for what she was currently doing, she’d probably end up with a second detention. If she was caught. But Parvati didn’t trust her luck to hold that much.
Bloody Merlin, it wasn’t her fault that Draco Malfoy was such an annoying little twat. And due to the comment he’d made, she had no choice but to respond. Well, technically she could have not hexed him. But she didn’t want to. And along a similar vein, if her best friend had sent her a pleading owl imploring her to meet and discuss a huge altercation between her and her boyfriend, well, what could she do but go along?
If she did get caught though, she might just knock Lavender and Seamus’s heads together. Not perhaps the most civil means, but the way she was feeling right now, she wasn’t above resorting to such brutality to bang some sense into her friends. Once again she wondered if it wasn’t too late to owl her parents and ask if she could at least spend the last few days before term at home, but steeled herself against this urge. Her parents had made their choice. So had Padma. And so had she.
Merlin, how she ached to see her sister again.
After a few false alarms, however, she was outside the door of the Room of Requirement. Her eighteenth birthday, meaning she was now of age in her mother’s as well as her father’s universe, and she would have to spend it comforting her best friend. And it was New Year’s Eve to boot. New Year’s! “I know that you and Seamus have had a falling out,” she began, pushing the heavy oak door open, “but I would have preferred it if you hadn’t made me walk-” She broke up abruptly as her eyes adjusted to the dim light and took in the figure seated at the far end of the room. “You’re not Lavender!”
“Indeed I’m not.” Eddie Carmichael, erstwhile Ravenclaw and current Potions assistant, took a few steps across the room, a small, wry smile on his face. “Certain scenarios would hardly be on the cards if I was. But I admit that the two of you would make an attractive couple. I’d say that you’d have beautiful children together, but again, that’s also a physical impossibility.”
“You’re…I…well.” Parvati was so startled by his sudden appearance that she neglected to call him up on his remarks. “But where’s Lavender? Oh.” Her eyes narrowed in sudden understanding. “She’s not coming, is she? She was never coming. You two set all this up.”
“If you call arranging a surprise birthday party a “set up,” then yes, we did.” Ernie said, taking her arm and helping her into the room. “And a little gratitude wouldn’t exactly go amiss at this point.”
“I…um…thank you,” Parvati said, trying to force her brain back into gear. “And sorry. I just…wasn’t expecting it…I suppose. I thought you would have-”
“Forgotten?” Eddie suggested, looking rather amused. Parvati bit her lip and gave him an abashed look. “We haven’t been doing this for very long though,” he added as a compromise.
“And you don’t exactly have the best memory in the world,” Parvati opined.
“I remember the important things,” Eddie said. He stepped behind her and helped her out of her coat, his hands brushing against her shoulders as he did so. “So, what do you think?”
“Nice,” Parvati said truthfully, looking around the room. He had set it up to look like a cosy but expensive restaurant, a chandelier dangling down towards the centre of the room and a piano tinkling away quietly in a corner. “Thank you. I’m…well, “surprised” would imply that I didn’t expect you to do anything which might make you feel bad and isn’t really true, so I don’t mean it that way, but I do feel, um…“surprised.” In the best possible way.” Eddie was wearing a shirt and black pants. She finished surveying the room (and him), then glanced down at her outfit and said, “But I’m not dressed for it!”
“That can be fixed,” Eddie said. He gave his wand a flick in her direction and she felt her simple jeans and jumper twist and shrink around her body until they had been transfigured into a classic little black dress. Reflexively she grabbed at the hem as it crept up her legs, but fortunately Eddie stopped the spell and ended the dress so that it was a few inches above her knees, but far from indecent. “Don’t worry,” he added with a smirk as he noticed the gesture. “I wouldn’t expect to see that much of you this early in the evening.”
Parvati gave him a swipe for that comment, but it was half-hearted. She still felt honour-bound as a female to make some sort of retaliation for things like that, but over the last three months she’d figured out that Eddie was merely playing a role for humour’s sake when he said things like that. Besides if that was all he was interested in, there were greener and more accommodating pastures to visit.
Her bare arms and shoulders were breaking into goosebumps from the cold night air. A fire would be nice, she thought, and instantly one appeared across from the table on which a candelabra flickered. “Sorry,” Eddie grimaced. “I should have thought of that.”
“You’re fine,” Parvati said. She took his arm as they crossed over to the table. “You’d redeem yourself if you pulled out my chair for me though,” she told him, a teasing smile on her lips.
“Done,” Eddie said as a chair slid out with a flick of his wand and he helped her into it. This time his hand brushed the bare skin of her shoulders, and it wasn’t just the coolness of his fingertips that made her flesh break into fresh goosebumps. She wondered if the two of them would be able to hold out this evening, and a thought crossed her mind that somehow it would be harder than previously.
Eddie sat down across from her, concentrating hard on the tabletop. A full platter of food appeared between them, complete with curry and roti, her favourite. It didn’t occur to her to point out that roti was really only served with morning meals, which it would have done perhaps at the start of the school year. Instead she said, “Thank you. I’ve been missing it,” and broke off a piece to dip in the curry. Neither did she tell him that wine usually wasn’t served with roti, yet here it was at her elbow served in a tall, silver goblet. These things didn’t appear to be terribly important right now.
After a while, he pulled out a package and put it on the table next to her. “Here,” he said. “It’s not much but I hope you like it.”
Parvati carefully removed the wrapping to see a little velvet jewellery box. Nestled inside was a simple silver hairclip with a blue topaz butterfly on its tip. Topazes were the Hindu birthstone for her month. She knew there was more to Eddie than what he let on to most people, but still, she was touched that he had gone to such thought and trouble for her.
“You don’t like it.” He misinterpreted the worst from her silence. “I’m sorry I didn’t get you anything nice.”
“Oh no!” she said quickly. “It’s more than nice. I really like it. I’m just surprised that you remembered that I like butterflies.”
“Yeah, well, as I said, I remember the important things.” He shrugged now, awkward. She leant across the table to kiss him thank-you, then sat down again before things got too out of hand. They continued their meal.
People who didn’t know them probably assumed that they didn’t have much to talk about. How could they, with one half of the couple being the giggly Gryffindor gossip and the other a boy a year ahead of her whose claim to fame was attempting to invent Baruffio's Brain Elixir during his sixth year? But in her experience, comedy usually came from something serious and for her own part, she was as smart as her Ravenclaw twin. She just applied it towards other things. So it was that once they had bypassed the usual double entendres - intentional or not - and catch-me-if-you-can style flirting, their conversation drifted onto more serious things. Like how after she’d saved up money from modelling, she was interested in starting her own clothing label and wanted to do a business course to learn how to manage her assets. Like how he was paying off an apartment in Hogsmeade and wanted to open a store of flying motorcycles catering exclusively for wizards. There was an untapped market out there, he claimed. After all, what red-blooded bloke would want to zoom around with a fit bird behind him on a nobbly old broomstick? What was hot about that?
Parvati’s own mind drifted to Eddie’s motorcycle and to what she may have liked to do involving herself, its padded leather seat - and Eddie. She blushed.
Talk turned to their families and after a bit of awkwardness they broached the issue of Parvati’s. In September after Neville Longbottom had got into an entanglement with some of the friendlier, larger plants in Greenhouse Six and was only found three days later, her parents had owled her and her twin requesting for them to return home. Padma complied. She didn’t. As she discussed it with Eddie, she found herself being candid in a way that she hadn’t been with others, even Lavender and Seamus. And she also realised that in his company, the longing she had to be home - not home as it existed now with all its various tensions, but home in the past with memories of fond Christmases together - had diminished. She supposed that was the natural progression of things. After all, she wouldn’t be having Christmases at home forever. Someday she’d be spending them with her own family: her children and her-
Fucking Merlin, did that mean she wanted to marry Eddie? No! They were too young, they’d only known each other for a matter of months, and just because there was a war on didn’t mean she had to start popping out babies like a Butterbeer production line. And they hadn’t even…yet…and she’d always pictured herself as marrying someone more serious, like a dour Ravenclaw or stoic Hufflepuff, who didn’t make her laugh as much.
At the thought of herself getting married, she started to choke on her wine.
Instantly Eddie charmed a glass of water out of the air, pressing it into her hand and helping her to take a swallow. “Are you alright?” he asked.
“Yes,” Parvati managed, placing the now-empty glass on the table. “I was just thinking about you…me-” she glanced down and realised that while she had been choking, she had knocked over her wine and now the tablecloth was being stained a deep, blood red “-the table!”
“The table?” Now Eddie himself seemed short of breath, and in his case it had nothing to do with choking on wine.
“The table,” Parvati echoed breathlessly. Eddie hadn’t moved closer towards her, but she was suddenly more aware of him; his lips seemed nearer. Oh, bollocks to this, was her last conscious thought.
Eddie managed to imagine the tablecloth and the remainder of the food and drink away just in time. They were kissing as if neither of them had ever been kissed before, let alone by each other, their hands tracing over all the familiar haunts with a new frenzy. Her foot was falling asleep as she sat, twisted on the table in an awkward angle, but she didn’t give a fuck. As far as various body parts went, it was currently the lowest on her list of priorities right now. She encircled her legs around Eddie and pressed herself closer, her lips clinging to his as if they were the only things between her and certain death.
As her legs tightened around his waist, Eddie slid his hands underneath her and lifted her off the table, carrying her across the room and lowering her on top of a velvet chaise lounge. A distant part of her mind noted that the chaise lounge hadn’t been present before and Eddie had probably requested the room for one, but she was a seventh year witch and had grown up with magic - and at the moment there were more important things on her mind. Like how as an aspiring designer she appreciated the nice, clean lines of Eddie’s clothing, but it had to come off in order for her to enjoy the still nicer and cleaner lines of his torso that lay beneath. Her hands managed to grasp at the lapels of his shirt, then pull - and tear. Eddie raised one dark eyebrow in amusement at that. Pressing a grinning mouth against hers, he chuckled, “I never thought you’d voluntarily wreck an item of clothing.”
“It - can - be - fixed - with a - charm - after - wards,” Parvati managed between kisses, pushing him away so that her lips could find better access to his chest. Eddie groaned and wrapped his fingers through her hair. He was pulling a little too tightly, but she could ignore it and she figured, what were a few strands of hair anyway? She was quickly reconsidering the importance of good grooming. It was overrated anyway. Particularly in certain scenarios. Like this one. She’d give up hair charms for a week to repeat this experience. A month, even. That time frame stretched out to a year - and then to eternity - as the straps of her dress slid southward and Eddie returned the favour on her own décolletage, and then lower. “Oh, bloody Merlin,” she groaned, imbuing her usual favoured curse phrase with unspeakable longing.
Parvati’s speech, despite its lack of coherency, seemed to being Eddie to his senses. Somewhat. Which was the last thing Parvati wanted to do right now. She gazed up at him as he drew back, her mouth opened in silent protest. “Vati?” he said, taking the straps of her dress and pulling it back up so that she was once again somewhat decent. “Is everything alright? I mean, are you sure you want to do this?”
“Well, everything was alright until you stopped kissing me.” She was torn between feeling touched by his concern and exasperated that he’d stopped things right there. “And in case you need a more exact answer, yes, I am bloody well sure that I want to do this. Now get back down here and finish what you started.”
He needed no second bidding. They both picked up where they left off, but the pace had become still faster and more frenzied. She hoped that along with her dress, he had charmed her sensible cotton knickers into something more appealing, but there was no time to think or worry because they along with the rest of her clothing were off as quickly as if they had been Disapparated. Then he was lying on top of her, his full weight and length of her body pressed against her. But before things could go any further, she pressed one finger to his lips. “Eddie,” she began.
Eddie pushed himself upright, supporting his weight with his forearms. “You’re not on contraceptive potion?”
“Yes I am, Eddie, but that’s not-”
“You’re still a virgin?” His eyes widened. “Oh Rowena’s tits, you’re a virgin. I mean, it’s not a problem. It’s fine. We can wait. I can wait. I mean…oh Rowena’s-”
“No! Eddie, calm down.” She reached up to place a hand over his mouth. “I’m not a virgin. I was just about to tell you that it’s been a while, so be gentle, alright?” Her brown eyes, usually merry with gossip or scowling at an offending boy, were wide and moist with vulnerability. She didn’t often show that emotion, not even around him.
Eddie carefully took his weight off his arms, leaning down to kiss her on the forehead. “I’ll be careful,” he said, then sunk into her.
Their movements were at first awkward and jarring, not quite merging and blending with finesse together, but as the fire dimmed and the night crept on, they gained more of an understanding with each other until when at last they were still, their limbs docilely curled together but with a sort of dormant, spent energy. Eddie was the first to speak. “You must have really liked that hairclip then, yeah?”
Parvati gave him a punch on the arm, then snuggled closer. The sweat was cooling on their bodies, and he concentrated hard on the need for more warmth until the fire flared up and a thick blanket appeared on top of them. Lulled by his fingers sifting through her hair and the fatigue brought on by their previous exertions, Parvati gradually drifted asleep, one hand still half cupping his own.
“Happy Birthday, Vati,” Eddie whispered. “And Happy New Year too.” But for the softly breathing witch next to him, he was left alone with his thoughts. She was lying on his arm, which was going numb. He could ask her to move and she would, but then she might - no, she mostly certainly would - be hurt and he didn’t want that. I love her, he realised, quickly followed by, Rowena’s Tits, where did that come from? Parvati’s weight was pressing down heavier on his arm. My arm, bugger it, my arm, he thought, and then he too was fast asleep.
The End