Fic - "The Grown-Up Driver" | Harry/Ginny | PG-13
*
The Grown-Up Driver
Harry Potter; Harry/Ginny; 2700 words
Harry and Ginny, a car and the open road.
Notes: You know how in Dawson's Creek Joey and Pacey run away from it all, on a boat, just the two of them? Yeah, this is kinda Harry and Ginny's version of that. Also, this is the second story in a row I've written that involves travel; I think I have some major wanderlust happening. Much love to eviltish, akissinacrisis, and ssstevie for the beta and Brit-pick work!
Written for r_becca's Changing Seasons gift exchange. A gift for the lovely irislock! I hope you enjoy, honey! It's probably the most overtly romantic thing I've written in, like, ever.
*
It begins with an offhand comment. He says, "I don't really know what I want to do," and she says, "You don't have to figure it out right this second, you know." He cracks a piece of Drooble's Best Blowing Gum, and watches blue-bell coloured bubbles soar on the wind. Summer's just fully coming into bloom, the scent of Forget-me-nots in the air, turning it sweet and sticky.
Ginny's eyes are bright brown, slanted like a fox's, and when she smiles her freckles stretch across her cheeks.
He says, "Do you want to get out of here?"
She says, "Okay."
It's a lot more complicated than that, but the important part is that he asks, and she says yes.
*
It's maybe not the most ethical way of doing things, but then again, Harry learned a long time ago that ethics is a grey space that keeps widening the black and white further every day. He conjures up Muggle IDs for them and converts a shimmering pile of gold to pound notes and coins. For nostalgic purposes he rents a Ford Escort, four doors and cobalt blue, with a roomy boot that they don't fill by half.
Between the two of them they've got one Order of Merlin: First Class, two wands, enough Muggle clothes to blend in, Harry's pounds, one Hogwarts-approved education, and one year of Auror training.
They've got three books on travelling Britain and a road map that Ginny studies with alarming intensity, moving her wand along the winding lines, navigating from the passenger seat.
Beneath Harry's fingers the steering wheel is sun-warmed and it vibrates with the hum of the car. They find a Muggle radio station that plays music he feels his mum must have listened to, and Ginny's hair is pulled back in a low ponytail, sunlight glinting off of it.
Mrs. Weasley watches their send off with her lips spread into a thin line, worry stamped across her face. Hermione hugs him and she smells like Ron's cheap citrus cologne. Mr. Weasley makes them promise to send letters through the Muggle post.
Harry buys them matching sunglasses from a shop down in the village. They're too big for Ginny's face, square frames and black rims, and they make her cherry-red mouth look small and glossy.
There's something like anticipation pooling in Harry's stomach, gliding just under his skin. He feels young, carefree for the first time in maybe ever, and it's like flying, the car humming quietly and Ginny smiling beside him.
He glances at her. She scrunches her nose and asks, "What are you waiting for?"
The road unfurls before them. Harry adjusts his glasses and lets a smile stretch his face.
*
He shouldn't be surprised, the first time he lets Ginny behind the wheel after badgering him for three consecutive hours, that she peels out fast and quick, laughing brightly. Harry buckles his seat belt. "Your mother will kill us if we die on day one," he tells her, his hands white-knuckled on the door.
Ginny makes a sharp left, barely even paying attention to the road. She turns the radio up. "Sorry," she says, "can't hear you."
They head south first, drive through lush rolling hills made emerald under the sun's yellow warmth, and end up on the coast, Hastings, because Ginny wants to see the sandstone cliffs; they jut up like jagged mountains of salt against the grey-blue skyline, and the ocean air is warm.
They hold hands as they walk along the rocky beach. Ginny laughs when a gust of wind blows hair in her eyes, mumbles something about King Harold and the Normans. Her palm is dry and warm. Harry watches the way the horizon bruises from blue to dark purple, watches the moon grow bold. Ginny shivers, and he pulls her close, presses a kiss against her hairline.
*
The first time they lie in bed next to each other, Harry stares straight at the ceiling, imagining he can see the stars through it. Moonlight slants in the window, casting the room in blue shadow. Ginny's breath comes uneven and quick, though her eyes are closed.
Harry thinks: about facing death; about how falling asleep next to his girlfriend is scarier than anything else in the world. Ginny's so tiny, yet she takes up so much space, oceans of it. Outside, he can hear the sea. Inside, his own heart thumps loud, sending his blood to all the wrong places.
He's never shared a bed with anyone before, not where he was meant to be sharing.
He looks over. Ginny's watching him, wide eyes and blown pupils, curled onto her side. He turns, reaches out a hand. Her hand is dry and soft; his is wet. He falls asleep with the scent of nighttime and salt all around him.
*
Ginny sleeps on her stomach, face smooshed to one side, mouth slightly open, one hand curled up underneath her chin and her knees bent, just a little. Harry sleeps with one foot tucked warmly between Ginny's calves, one hanging off the mattress.
The first morning he wakes up next to her, something warm coils in his stomach. She's breathing softly, eyelashes sweeping like dark fans across her cheeks. Outside, dawn unfolds beneath a purple sky, and sunlight stretches across the bed.
Ginny grumbles a lot when she wakes up, pillow creases cut into her cheek and puffy eyes that blink up at him. It makes Harry happy, knowing how she needs forty-five minutes and two cups of coffee in the morning before she'll smile at him, but that she doesn't mind it if he kisses her awake, never complains about his morning breath.
*
From Hastings they head to Eastbourne, to Brighton, and then Portsmouth. They eat at pubs, greasy chips and sausages, and drink thick, dark ales that settle warm in Harry's stomach. They take whole days to wander around the coastal resorts with their cream and sky-blue streetlamps and row after stucco'ed row of early nineteenth-century houses. They walk along Eastbourne’s Victorian Pier and listen to brass bands.
They sit in outdoor cafes and sip strong tea made sweet with too many sugars. "I think I'd like to play Quidditch," Ginny tells him one day, a warm coastal breeze making her hair dance.
Harry says, "You'd be brilliant," and then he says, "I'd be proud," and he means it. Ginny dimples at him, and warmth crowds his chest.
They visit the Royal Navy Museum and Ginny tells him he'd have made a dashing pirate. She threatens to buy him an eye patch and a talking parrot. He winks and presses his lips wetly against her, then wishes he'd brought his Invisibility Cloak along for the ride.
*
Ginny's mouth becomes familiar again, the way she tastes, warm tea and cinnamon gum. The way she feels, lips always slightly chapped because she chews them when she's nervous or when she's thinking hard.
The first time she blows him her teeth scrape unpracticed against his dick, and he comes with her name on his lips, an invocation.
The first time he sinks into her, fourteen days into their trip, when they've started their slow crawl up the Western coast, she keeps her eyes open, locked on his, so he can see when the rush hits her, and his own orgasm tumble-roars out of him.
*
It's getting to know himself all over again, maybe for the first time. It's the summer sun shining down around him, and singing songs loudly with the windows down because he can. It's time and days stretching hazy and indeterminate, no school, no nagging friends, no worried teachers or snaking enemies.
He shovels roast beef and potatoes into his mouth in restaurants, lies in until the sun brightens the room just because he can, kisses his girlfriend goodnight and then kisses her awake, presses his mouth to her freckled thigh, to her belly button, to the pale skin behind her ear.
He discovers he prefers the Stones to the Beatles and at a used CD store near Bristol, Ginny buys him four albums for his nineteenth birthday, doesn't complain when he listens to Laugh, I Nearly Cried and Dead Flowers on repeat.
Ginny makes good on an old birthday promise, and she tastes like icing in his mouth. He closes his eyes and blows out candles, and doesn't even have to say that he's got no wishes left.
At midnight, they eat gooey raisin-topped cakes beneath the stars, the summer air glancing thickly off their skin, as they walk hand in hand along the shore, and it's nothing like he imagined growing up would be.
*
"You should be studying," Hermione had said, and Ron had looked at him like he was mad, said, "The whole summer, just you and Ginny?" like it was a bad thing. Like they would grow tired of each other.
The west coast of Wales offers candy-striped mountains, sandy coves, and towns that aren't much more than villages. They stop at St. David's and visit a stone cathedral.
Ginny glances at him. "Is this what you want?" she asks. It's dark and church-quiet, cool in the way that only cavernous spaces can be, with something like red incense on the air.
Brow furrowed, he whispers, "I still don't know what I want to do."
"No," Ginny says. She stops walking. "Not for life. Just….right now." She looks at him, her lashes spiky when they frame her eyes. "Are you happy? Now, are you?"
Inside, he thinks, infinitely. Allowed, he says, "Yes."
Her smile stretches wide like the English Channel, and she tells him, "I'm glad."
*
It rains for three days straight when they visit the Pembrookshire National Park, tumbles down like thick black sheets. The whole world is drenched and murky, flowers sagging beneath the weight of heavy water, the ground squishy beneath his feet.
Last week, an old lady had stopped them on the street to tell them they made a lovely couple; she'd asked if they were on their honeymoon and Ginny had laughed, loud and bright.
Sometimes it feels like playing house, waking up next to the same person, learning to read her moods, eating her olives because he knows she doesn’t like them, and pushing his tomatoes to the side of his plate, because they're her favourite.
Ginny's got tiny hands overrun with freckles. She sits by the fireplace and crams her slanted handwriting onto the backs of postcards for her father, longer letters to Hermione and her mum and Luna. She makes Harry write to Ron. He doesn't write about how he's no longer in love with the idea of Ginny, but really truly in love with her. He doesn't tell Ron about Ginny's different smiles, her goodnight smile that goes slow and sticky like warm treacle, or her embarrassed smiles that are few and far between, accompanied by blushes that pink the tips of her ears.
He writes about the three-legged dog they'd seen hobbling around on its owner's lead, how its ears had perked up and how it had eaten treats from Harry's hand. He writes about the football game they saw, how Ginny had screamed her head off and how much Ron would have loved it.
*
If he never sees the inside of a tent again it'll be too soon, and he's young, has enough money to blow a little of it on expensive hotel rooms in quirky coastal towns. One room they stay in has a Jacuzzi tub, and Ginny's skin is slick beneath his hands when he holds her down and presses his mouth against her.
They develop crazy inside jokes that nobody else would understand. Her facial expressions become familiar. They talk a lot, more than they ever did before, especially when it's not a mad rush of getting to know you, but a gradual fall of learning who you really are. They talk about how strange it is knowing Ginny won't be going to Hogwarts in the autumn, how gross Cockroach Clusters are, and how even the most expensive Honeydukes chocolate can't compare to chocolate frogs.
He learns her habits, like how Ginny takes two sugars in her coffee, how she burps loudly and cackles hysterically about it if she's pissed, how she flosses every night and writes in a diary just before bed. She blushes when he discovers this, looks at him with something like defiance in her eyes, but he just kisses her cheek and turns on the telly, lets her have her private time with her thoughts.
*
Ron had once told him, "She's got a temper," like it was supposed to be news.
They don’t really fight. It's never her temper that bothers him anyway. Ginny's temper is something to behold, the way she goes from zero to frustrated faster than the car can accelerate on the open road. They get a flat tire and Ginny's determined that they'll fix it without magic, because, "That'd be like cheating," and when she can't figure it out, she kicks the car three times, bruises her big toe and winds up with a long, dark grease smudge across her right cheekbone.
Harry waits 'til she's finished, admires the way her shirt gaps open to reveal freckled cleavage, then he kneels down behind her at the side of the road, can smell grease and black tar and sweat. Together, they turn the starfish-shaped wrench and undo the bolts.
When they're finished, Ginny breathes deeply, says thank you, and tips up on her toes to kiss his nose.
So, no, her temper's never a problem. It's when she gets really quiet, stares out the car window to watch the landscape roll by, that's when he's worried he's upset her, that she's grown tired of his skinny arms and his knobbly knees.
He reaches across the car, runs a hand along her shoulder. “Are you alright?”
She blinks and her eyes clear. Her smile is always genuine. She says, "Perfect."
*
She turns eighteen beneath clouds that look like marshmallows. Harry buys two bacon butties and they spread a blanket out on the grass. He lights a single candle with his wand and watches the way her eyes close when she blows it out.
*
Once, she looks at him and says, "I'm really proud of you."
Surprised, he glances over. "What for?"
The way she looks at him makes him feel like his chest is packed with cotton, all cushioned sentiment. She shrugs. "Just, for being you."
He pesters her, but she won't say more than that. He thinks maybe it's okay.
*
There's a slow, lazy drizzle, like the sky can't be bothered to make much of an effort to rain, and behind a wash of clouds spread thin, the sun slips beneath the horizon, a rush of murky orange.
Ginny leans back against him, sitting between his raised knees. The veins on the inside of her wrist are thin and blue, delicate. The air smells fresh, clean, and the grass is crisply green.
She says, "You think a rainbow, then?"
"Pot of gold," he murmurs around a sleepy smile.
He presses his thumb against her wrist, feels her pulse speed up.
*
The first of September always marked the end of something to Harry, and a new beginning. It's like he can feel the weather change, the nights get colder, a shift in the way the air smells, getting earthier, sharper.
The sky is autumn blue, so bright it hurts to look.
Ginny falls asleep with her sunglasses perched on the edge of her nose. He keeps the radio down, listening to her soft breathing. When he stops, he lets her sleep in the car, and he goes to sit by himself near the ocean.
Ginny wakes up while Harry's standing in saltwater that laps at his calves, studying the horizon.
She says, "You're going to ruin your trousers," and he turns to watch her kick off her sandals and cuff her jeans twice. The water's sun-warm, but it's going to grow cold soon.
He says, "I wish it could be like this forever."
She says, "Why can't it?"
Harry nods. They have to take the car back soon.
He doesn't have anything in his hand, but he goes down on one knee anyway.
Ginny bites her lip, like she's trying to keep her smile in check.
Of course, it's a lot more complicated than that, but the important part is that he asks, and she says yes.
*
End
The Grown-Up Driver
Harry Potter; Harry/Ginny; 2700 words
Harry and Ginny, a car and the open road.
Notes: You know how in Dawson's Creek Joey and Pacey run away from it all, on a boat, just the two of them? Yeah, this is kinda Harry and Ginny's version of that. Also, this is the second story in a row I've written that involves travel; I think I have some major wanderlust happening. Much love to eviltish, akissinacrisis, and ssstevie for the beta and Brit-pick work!
Written for r_becca's Changing Seasons gift exchange. A gift for the lovely irislock! I hope you enjoy, honey! It's probably the most overtly romantic thing I've written in, like, ever.
*
It begins with an offhand comment. He says, "I don't really know what I want to do," and she says, "You don't have to figure it out right this second, you know." He cracks a piece of Drooble's Best Blowing Gum, and watches blue-bell coloured bubbles soar on the wind. Summer's just fully coming into bloom, the scent of Forget-me-nots in the air, turning it sweet and sticky.
Ginny's eyes are bright brown, slanted like a fox's, and when she smiles her freckles stretch across her cheeks.
He says, "Do you want to get out of here?"
She says, "Okay."
It's a lot more complicated than that, but the important part is that he asks, and she says yes.
*
It's maybe not the most ethical way of doing things, but then again, Harry learned a long time ago that ethics is a grey space that keeps widening the black and white further every day. He conjures up Muggle IDs for them and converts a shimmering pile of gold to pound notes and coins. For nostalgic purposes he rents a Ford Escort, four doors and cobalt blue, with a roomy boot that they don't fill by half.
Between the two of them they've got one Order of Merlin: First Class, two wands, enough Muggle clothes to blend in, Harry's pounds, one Hogwarts-approved education, and one year of Auror training.
They've got three books on travelling Britain and a road map that Ginny studies with alarming intensity, moving her wand along the winding lines, navigating from the passenger seat.
Beneath Harry's fingers the steering wheel is sun-warmed and it vibrates with the hum of the car. They find a Muggle radio station that plays music he feels his mum must have listened to, and Ginny's hair is pulled back in a low ponytail, sunlight glinting off of it.
Mrs. Weasley watches their send off with her lips spread into a thin line, worry stamped across her face. Hermione hugs him and she smells like Ron's cheap citrus cologne. Mr. Weasley makes them promise to send letters through the Muggle post.
Harry buys them matching sunglasses from a shop down in the village. They're too big for Ginny's face, square frames and black rims, and they make her cherry-red mouth look small and glossy.
There's something like anticipation pooling in Harry's stomach, gliding just under his skin. He feels young, carefree for the first time in maybe ever, and it's like flying, the car humming quietly and Ginny smiling beside him.
He glances at her. She scrunches her nose and asks, "What are you waiting for?"
The road unfurls before them. Harry adjusts his glasses and lets a smile stretch his face.
*
He shouldn't be surprised, the first time he lets Ginny behind the wheel after badgering him for three consecutive hours, that she peels out fast and quick, laughing brightly. Harry buckles his seat belt. "Your mother will kill us if we die on day one," he tells her, his hands white-knuckled on the door.
Ginny makes a sharp left, barely even paying attention to the road. She turns the radio up. "Sorry," she says, "can't hear you."
They head south first, drive through lush rolling hills made emerald under the sun's yellow warmth, and end up on the coast, Hastings, because Ginny wants to see the sandstone cliffs; they jut up like jagged mountains of salt against the grey-blue skyline, and the ocean air is warm.
They hold hands as they walk along the rocky beach. Ginny laughs when a gust of wind blows hair in her eyes, mumbles something about King Harold and the Normans. Her palm is dry and warm. Harry watches the way the horizon bruises from blue to dark purple, watches the moon grow bold. Ginny shivers, and he pulls her close, presses a kiss against her hairline.
*
The first time they lie in bed next to each other, Harry stares straight at the ceiling, imagining he can see the stars through it. Moonlight slants in the window, casting the room in blue shadow. Ginny's breath comes uneven and quick, though her eyes are closed.
Harry thinks: about facing death; about how falling asleep next to his girlfriend is scarier than anything else in the world. Ginny's so tiny, yet she takes up so much space, oceans of it. Outside, he can hear the sea. Inside, his own heart thumps loud, sending his blood to all the wrong places.
He's never shared a bed with anyone before, not where he was meant to be sharing.
He looks over. Ginny's watching him, wide eyes and blown pupils, curled onto her side. He turns, reaches out a hand. Her hand is dry and soft; his is wet. He falls asleep with the scent of nighttime and salt all around him.
*
Ginny sleeps on her stomach, face smooshed to one side, mouth slightly open, one hand curled up underneath her chin and her knees bent, just a little. Harry sleeps with one foot tucked warmly between Ginny's calves, one hanging off the mattress.
The first morning he wakes up next to her, something warm coils in his stomach. She's breathing softly, eyelashes sweeping like dark fans across her cheeks. Outside, dawn unfolds beneath a purple sky, and sunlight stretches across the bed.
Ginny grumbles a lot when she wakes up, pillow creases cut into her cheek and puffy eyes that blink up at him. It makes Harry happy, knowing how she needs forty-five minutes and two cups of coffee in the morning before she'll smile at him, but that she doesn't mind it if he kisses her awake, never complains about his morning breath.
*
From Hastings they head to Eastbourne, to Brighton, and then Portsmouth. They eat at pubs, greasy chips and sausages, and drink thick, dark ales that settle warm in Harry's stomach. They take whole days to wander around the coastal resorts with their cream and sky-blue streetlamps and row after stucco'ed row of early nineteenth-century houses. They walk along Eastbourne’s Victorian Pier and listen to brass bands.
They sit in outdoor cafes and sip strong tea made sweet with too many sugars. "I think I'd like to play Quidditch," Ginny tells him one day, a warm coastal breeze making her hair dance.
Harry says, "You'd be brilliant," and then he says, "I'd be proud," and he means it. Ginny dimples at him, and warmth crowds his chest.
They visit the Royal Navy Museum and Ginny tells him he'd have made a dashing pirate. She threatens to buy him an eye patch and a talking parrot. He winks and presses his lips wetly against her, then wishes he'd brought his Invisibility Cloak along for the ride.
*
Ginny's mouth becomes familiar again, the way she tastes, warm tea and cinnamon gum. The way she feels, lips always slightly chapped because she chews them when she's nervous or when she's thinking hard.
The first time she blows him her teeth scrape unpracticed against his dick, and he comes with her name on his lips, an invocation.
The first time he sinks into her, fourteen days into their trip, when they've started their slow crawl up the Western coast, she keeps her eyes open, locked on his, so he can see when the rush hits her, and his own orgasm tumble-roars out of him.
*
It's getting to know himself all over again, maybe for the first time. It's the summer sun shining down around him, and singing songs loudly with the windows down because he can. It's time and days stretching hazy and indeterminate, no school, no nagging friends, no worried teachers or snaking enemies.
He shovels roast beef and potatoes into his mouth in restaurants, lies in until the sun brightens the room just because he can, kisses his girlfriend goodnight and then kisses her awake, presses his mouth to her freckled thigh, to her belly button, to the pale skin behind her ear.
He discovers he prefers the Stones to the Beatles and at a used CD store near Bristol, Ginny buys him four albums for his nineteenth birthday, doesn't complain when he listens to Laugh, I Nearly Cried and Dead Flowers on repeat.
Ginny makes good on an old birthday promise, and she tastes like icing in his mouth. He closes his eyes and blows out candles, and doesn't even have to say that he's got no wishes left.
At midnight, they eat gooey raisin-topped cakes beneath the stars, the summer air glancing thickly off their skin, as they walk hand in hand along the shore, and it's nothing like he imagined growing up would be.
*
"You should be studying," Hermione had said, and Ron had looked at him like he was mad, said, "The whole summer, just you and Ginny?" like it was a bad thing. Like they would grow tired of each other.
The west coast of Wales offers candy-striped mountains, sandy coves, and towns that aren't much more than villages. They stop at St. David's and visit a stone cathedral.
Ginny glances at him. "Is this what you want?" she asks. It's dark and church-quiet, cool in the way that only cavernous spaces can be, with something like red incense on the air.
Brow furrowed, he whispers, "I still don't know what I want to do."
"No," Ginny says. She stops walking. "Not for life. Just….right now." She looks at him, her lashes spiky when they frame her eyes. "Are you happy? Now, are you?"
Inside, he thinks, infinitely. Allowed, he says, "Yes."
Her smile stretches wide like the English Channel, and she tells him, "I'm glad."
*
It rains for three days straight when they visit the Pembrookshire National Park, tumbles down like thick black sheets. The whole world is drenched and murky, flowers sagging beneath the weight of heavy water, the ground squishy beneath his feet.
Last week, an old lady had stopped them on the street to tell them they made a lovely couple; she'd asked if they were on their honeymoon and Ginny had laughed, loud and bright.
Sometimes it feels like playing house, waking up next to the same person, learning to read her moods, eating her olives because he knows she doesn’t like them, and pushing his tomatoes to the side of his plate, because they're her favourite.
Ginny's got tiny hands overrun with freckles. She sits by the fireplace and crams her slanted handwriting onto the backs of postcards for her father, longer letters to Hermione and her mum and Luna. She makes Harry write to Ron. He doesn't write about how he's no longer in love with the idea of Ginny, but really truly in love with her. He doesn't tell Ron about Ginny's different smiles, her goodnight smile that goes slow and sticky like warm treacle, or her embarrassed smiles that are few and far between, accompanied by blushes that pink the tips of her ears.
He writes about the three-legged dog they'd seen hobbling around on its owner's lead, how its ears had perked up and how it had eaten treats from Harry's hand. He writes about the football game they saw, how Ginny had screamed her head off and how much Ron would have loved it.
*
If he never sees the inside of a tent again it'll be too soon, and he's young, has enough money to blow a little of it on expensive hotel rooms in quirky coastal towns. One room they stay in has a Jacuzzi tub, and Ginny's skin is slick beneath his hands when he holds her down and presses his mouth against her.
They develop crazy inside jokes that nobody else would understand. Her facial expressions become familiar. They talk a lot, more than they ever did before, especially when it's not a mad rush of getting to know you, but a gradual fall of learning who you really are. They talk about how strange it is knowing Ginny won't be going to Hogwarts in the autumn, how gross Cockroach Clusters are, and how even the most expensive Honeydukes chocolate can't compare to chocolate frogs.
He learns her habits, like how Ginny takes two sugars in her coffee, how she burps loudly and cackles hysterically about it if she's pissed, how she flosses every night and writes in a diary just before bed. She blushes when he discovers this, looks at him with something like defiance in her eyes, but he just kisses her cheek and turns on the telly, lets her have her private time with her thoughts.
*
Ron had once told him, "She's got a temper," like it was supposed to be news.
They don’t really fight. It's never her temper that bothers him anyway. Ginny's temper is something to behold, the way she goes from zero to frustrated faster than the car can accelerate on the open road. They get a flat tire and Ginny's determined that they'll fix it without magic, because, "That'd be like cheating," and when she can't figure it out, she kicks the car three times, bruises her big toe and winds up with a long, dark grease smudge across her right cheekbone.
Harry waits 'til she's finished, admires the way her shirt gaps open to reveal freckled cleavage, then he kneels down behind her at the side of the road, can smell grease and black tar and sweat. Together, they turn the starfish-shaped wrench and undo the bolts.
When they're finished, Ginny breathes deeply, says thank you, and tips up on her toes to kiss his nose.
So, no, her temper's never a problem. It's when she gets really quiet, stares out the car window to watch the landscape roll by, that's when he's worried he's upset her, that she's grown tired of his skinny arms and his knobbly knees.
He reaches across the car, runs a hand along her shoulder. “Are you alright?”
She blinks and her eyes clear. Her smile is always genuine. She says, "Perfect."
*
She turns eighteen beneath clouds that look like marshmallows. Harry buys two bacon butties and they spread a blanket out on the grass. He lights a single candle with his wand and watches the way her eyes close when she blows it out.
*
Once, she looks at him and says, "I'm really proud of you."
Surprised, he glances over. "What for?"
The way she looks at him makes him feel like his chest is packed with cotton, all cushioned sentiment. She shrugs. "Just, for being you."
He pesters her, but she won't say more than that. He thinks maybe it's okay.
*
There's a slow, lazy drizzle, like the sky can't be bothered to make much of an effort to rain, and behind a wash of clouds spread thin, the sun slips beneath the horizon, a rush of murky orange.
Ginny leans back against him, sitting between his raised knees. The veins on the inside of her wrist are thin and blue, delicate. The air smells fresh, clean, and the grass is crisply green.
She says, "You think a rainbow, then?"
"Pot of gold," he murmurs around a sleepy smile.
He presses his thumb against her wrist, feels her pulse speed up.
*
The first of September always marked the end of something to Harry, and a new beginning. It's like he can feel the weather change, the nights get colder, a shift in the way the air smells, getting earthier, sharper.
The sky is autumn blue, so bright it hurts to look.
Ginny falls asleep with her sunglasses perched on the edge of her nose. He keeps the radio down, listening to her soft breathing. When he stops, he lets her sleep in the car, and he goes to sit by himself near the ocean.
Ginny wakes up while Harry's standing in saltwater that laps at his calves, studying the horizon.
She says, "You're going to ruin your trousers," and he turns to watch her kick off her sandals and cuff her jeans twice. The water's sun-warm, but it's going to grow cold soon.
He says, "I wish it could be like this forever."
She says, "Why can't it?"
Harry nods. They have to take the car back soon.
He doesn't have anything in his hand, but he goes down on one knee anyway.
Ginny bites her lip, like she's trying to keep her smile in check.
Of course, it's a lot more complicated than that, but the important part is that he asks, and she says yes.
*
End