Unforgivable

They lay next to each other on the narrow bed. He felt her small slender body touching his at every point, beneath the long white nightdress. The evening had turned very warm, and no Cooling charms had been cast anywhere in the hospital yet. She had unbuttoned his shirt without comment, pulling back his robes, and had run her fingers along his painfully thin chest. Her hand was curved into his. She turned her face to him.

"Would you kiss me, Draco?" she whispered.

"Are you sure?" he asked.

"Yes."

"But why?"

She lifted one of her small hands, skimmed it over his brow, his cheek, his chin, her touch lighter than a butterfly's wing. He tried not to show how surprised he was that she had touched him for a second time.

"I have the strangest feeling," she said. "I'm not sure I can describe it. It's as if we're coming to the end of things."

"You mean that after we snog for a bit, you're going to kill me?" Draco tried for his old light, sarcastic tone. He failed miserably. His words sounded rather desperate.

Ginny rolled her eyes; she couldn't help it. "Is that what you'd like me to do?"

Draco thought of all the times he had looked out the window of his bedchamber at Malfoy Manor after his father had taken him back from Hogwarts. It had generally been three or four o'clock in the morning, after one of the nightmares about Ginny's eyes. He had stared out over the blackened rose garden, stiff with snow, and quietly wished he were dead. Night after night after night.

"No," he said, quite seriously. "Not anymore."

Her own voice grew serious again, to match his. "What I mean," she said, "is that everything feels--worn out, in a way I can't describe. The war has worn us all out. And I feel like it's going to be the end of things for everybody. Don't laugh!" Ginny put a finger over his lips. Draco shook his head. Laughter had never been further from his mind than it was at the moment.

"Maybe I've thought that as well," he said.

"Really?"

"Yes." He sighed, putting his linked hands behind his head and staring up at the ceiling. "Although I don't know if I'd put it like that. It's more as if... well, my father and the Death Eaters and the Dark Lord all planned their campaign for years, you know. And then it fell apart anyway. All of that effort was for nothing."

"Because of you," said Ginny.

Draco smiled slightly. "Not because of any heroics on my part, I assure you. But I suppose you're right. It was because of what I didn't do... Anyway, I've thought about that sometimes. And it's always made me remember a saying I read once, the summer I got hideously bored and read through the whole section about Kaballic wizards in the library at Malfoy Manor."

"What was it?"

"Man plans. God laughs."

Ginny rolled over to look at him. "Do you think the gods are laughing at us?" she asked thoughtfully.

"Perhaps." He turned to face her as well. "But whether they are or not, that still doesn't explain why you're asking me to kiss you."

"It's simple, really," she said. "I want to know something, before it's too late... "

"Yes?" he whispered, bringing his face closer to hers.

"I want to know what it's like when--when I want it."

"This was the experiment you talked about, wasn't it?"

"Yes." Her face looked very resolute.

He reached out a hand first, and entwined it with hers, stroking her stiff fingers until they curved around his. His arm went around her shoulder. Ginny tensed, then forced herself to relax. "Shh," said Draco. His lips moved over hers, gently, scarcely brushing her mouth. She gave a deep sigh.

Still he held himself a little apart from her, as if afraid she would become frightened.

"Kiss me harder," she whispered.

"As you wish."

His teeth nibbled at the edge of her lower lip. She giggled nervously. When her mouth opened, he pressed himself closer, and his tongue slid along hers. His bare chest was against her breasts, shielded by one thin layer of cotton between them. Ginny tensed, but he made no further move. One hand stroked her hair soothingly.

"Stop," she said.

He went very still. Then he pulled back from her, sighing, and began to feel around on the floor for his shoes. She put a hand on his arm. "Come back to me," she said.

"But--" He stopped. I don't understand were the words that sprung to his lips. But he did, or at least felt as if he could. Understanding was a newborn thing in him, and it quivered under her light touch.

"I needed to know that you would stop, if I asked," she said. "But I find that I don't want you to, after all. Now kiss me again." Kiss me as if this were the last night this world will ever see.

And although she had not spoken the last words, Draco obeyed her silent wish.

The new sensations spun through Ginny in a dizzying rush. The pleasure was like the pleasure she'd so unwillingly felt on that afternoon six months before, at least a little. But it was pure now, clear as sunlight, no shame, no pain, no hatred for herself over her treacherous response. That had been wrong. This was right. His mouth moving against hers, his hands so carefully slipping her nightgown off her shoulders, even the evidence of his arousal pressed against her thigh, the thing she had thought would frighten her most, would make her think not only of what had already happened with Draco but of Tom Riddle in the Chamber of Secrets... all, all was right and good.

Caught up in the extraordinary feelings that Draco Malfoy coaxed from her body, Ginny did not even hear the stealthy footsteps moving down the corridor and towards the door to her room. Neither did he.

If I ever did one good thing in my life, he thought fleetingly, or thought one good thought, or prayed one sincere prayer to the gods... but have I? I never thought that good that could be returned for evil, and I have done evil. Ginny could never know the gift she gives to me, the undeserved gift...

She moved against him, pressing one of her legs between his, and he moaned blissfully into her mouth. He ran his hand up her thigh and slowly began to do what he had done for her eight months before, except that this time, his touch was very different indeed. His fingers approached her most secret places with something like reverence, and something like fear.

"Yes," she said, quite clearly. Ginny pulled the nightgown over her head and threw it to the floor, guiding his hands to pull her knickers down. "Touch me, Draco."

She closed her eyes and threw her head back as he drew her closer and closer to climax.

"Open them," he said in a whisper. "Open your eyes, Ginny. Look at me."

She did so with some effort, because the sinfully sweet melting sensations were beginning to seize all her inner muscles and there scarcely seemed the slightest bit of energy left for anything else. Her body shuddered in the first waves of pleasure.

"More," she whispered. "Again." And he obliged, over and over, and her golden eyes remained open, looking into his.

Ginny took off the rest of Draco's clothing. He seemed to understand, she thought, that she needed him to be passive for the moment. She unbuttoned the khaki trousers, pulled off the light summer hospital robes they all wore, and slid down the green plaid boxers over his hips. Each removal tested her resolve afresh. She kept expecting to feel fear, but she never did.

He looked at her gravely, and she feasted her eyes on him. Even if she had sought out what had happened between them eight months before, even if she had wanted it unreservedly, she now knew that she could never have been content with it. She hadn't seen him, not then. But she saw him now.

His body was spare and light, too thin but beautifully sculpted, from his high cheekbones to his sensual jawline to his surprisingly broad shoulders. The curving plane of his ribs was too visible in his thin chest. She pressed a kiss to his left nipple, then to his right, and felt them harden under her tongue. She felt him start in surprise, as well.

"You--you want to touch me?" he asked.

"I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't, now would I?"

"I don't deserve this," he muttered.

"We're all of us lucky that we don't get what we deserve," she said.

She skated her fingers over the long muscles of his thighs, entangling them in the golden hairs that ran along his calves, and back up again to--to--Ginny blushed. She reached her hand out very very slowly, and smoothed it along the flat plane of his stomach. She felt the muscles quiver under her touch. She gathered up all her courage and grasped at what lay below his slim waist. It stirred in her hand like a living thing, a separate entity. Ginny stared at it in fascination. She had never thought that this part of a boy's body would be beautiful, but his was. Draco threw his head back and groaned softly.

"You should stop," he managed to say, putting a hand on her wrist.

"But I don't want to," Ginny replied, moving her own hand down, then up again.

"Ginny, if you don't stop while I can still control myself..."

She made no reply.

"Aren't you afraid?" Draco asked with some difficulty. She had not stopped touching him.

"I don't think so. I've liked everything we've done so far," she said thoughtfully. "It feels all different from the way it did before. Will I like what comes next, do you think?"

"I think you will."

He pulled her on top of him. Ginny was not sure, when it came to the pinch, that she really was completely free of fear, but her dominant position helped allay any little twinges she had. She realized that Draco had known that it would. She wondered how he had learned all the things he seemed to know. "You've slept with a lot of girls, haven't you?" she asked, wondering, too, what the feeling was that those words gave her. She could not put a name to it.

"This hardly seems like the ideal time to--" He broke off, closing his eyes, when she slid up and down his body in an experimental way. "Gods, yes, Ginny, keep doing that--ah--I mean, you can't really want to hear about that right now."

"But I do."

"If you like." She had seized his hands, and he clenched onto her fingers rhythmically, in time to her movements. "I would tell you anything you asked, right now, I think... even that... yes, I have. Slept with a lot of girls, I mean."

"Why?" She was poised above him, looking down at him in a way that was casual but made it clear that she would go no further until he answered her question.

"I--I can't think right now, Ginny," he whispered. "Please--"

"I want to know." She stroked the length of him with one finger, as lightly as the touch of a butterfly's wing.

"Because they were there," he said in a rush. "Because it was easy. Because I wanted to, and so did they. Nothing more to it. Nothing more than that. None of it meant anything beyond a bit of fun, not for them, not for me. They were all experienced with that sort of thing, anyway. Older, mostly. "

She looked down into his eyes. "So none of them were like me?"

He was transfixed by her eyes. The pupils were so large, the irises such a bright golden-brown. He wondered fleetingly if it were possible to drown in Ginny Weasley's eyes, to sink into their depths and never, never return to the surface. "No-one has ever been like you," he said.

Her mouth opened slightly, as if in surprise, and something entered her eyes that he never seen before in the eyes of another human being. She sank down upon him with a soft exhalation of breath, and he arched up to meet her.

Time melted. Became fluid. Her descent onto him, or his ascent into her, might have spanned a single moment, or a thousand years. Then she stopped, and so did time, until he showed her how to continue in touches and whispers and gentle motions of his hands on her hips. Tears streamed down Ginny's face. Draco was horrorstricken at first, but she said softly, "Nothing's wrong. Nothing," and she leaned down so that he could kiss them away.

"Am I doing it right?" she asked.

He was unable to speak, but his face must have contained the answer. She smiled in satisfaction.

But he was a seventeen-year-old boy, and he had not touched a girl since that afternoon in the abandoned classroom eight months before. This would end soon, he realized. Much too soon. There was something else that he felt, beneath the amazing physical pleasure of Ginny Weasley's body, and he nearly grasped it... but not quite...

She tensed, tensed, tensed, and cried out, falling forward across his chest. It was too much; there was no resisting the way the sensations had been intensified, although he struggled to try. Still too soon!

The door to the room was opening. In some remote corner of his brain, Draco catalogued that fact. The blissful seizing pleasure and the elusive realization were racing each other in his body and mind. Not one bit of him could be spared to deal with anything else.

Apparently, his struggle showed on his face. She looked down at him with troubled eyes. What is it? He heard the question asked as clearly as if she had actually spoken the words.

And then he knew.

I love you, Ginny Weasley.

He did not say the words. He could not. But he had been wrestling against an unacknowledged force since that afternoon eight months before, and now he knew what that mysterious titan was. He loved her. Perhaps he had done for a very long time, long before that afternoon in the abandoned room, long before he ought to have been old enough to have had these feelings for any girl. But then he had hurt her, not knowing how to show his shameful feelings in any other way. And his nature was such that he might continue to hurt her. He loved her, but he must not, for her sake, ever let her know.

Footsteps were moving into the center of the room, long and slow and heavy. If he had been in his right mind, Draco thought dimly, the fact that someone had just come into the room would have seemed important enough to stop what was about to happen. But he could no longer hold back for any reason; his body eclipsed his mind utterly, and he let himself go, exploding into Ginny Weasley.

Her head jerked back. Her eyes widened in shock. At first he thought that it was from the sheer physical force of it; the sensations were certainly stronger than anything he'd ever felt before. Her lips formed a word, although she made no sound.

"No," she mouthed.

A shadow fell over the bed.

Draco looked up into the murderous face of Ronald Weasley.