Maybe, baby

It's not like I walked up to Charlie and said "Hi, Mr good-with-children-and-animals, wanna go halves on a baby?" If only because I couldn't say that kind of thing with a straight face. Although I suspect that's rather the point of lines like that. You share a crap joke and thusly a bonding moment which, theoretically, should lead to a naked bonding moment.

(Maybe not that line. A different one worked fantastically.)

I'd fancied Charlie for a while. He's good looking, funny and stupidly charming. He's not Bill, Mr Sex-On-A-Stick (Office straw poll says: Yes, oh god, please, yes), but I've never really gone for Bill-types, and besides, Fleur's only slightly possessive of her guy. Charlie's mad fun. I can always convince him into doing something that'll have Moody shaking his head at me. Like jumping out of planes. That was fun.

He's rugged, but not in a hairy, Neanderthal kind of way. More a "I-spend-all-day, every-day-outdoors-doing-manly-things" kind of way, which is so many kinds of sexy.

All the Weasley guys are sexy in their own way. And girls too. Or rather, girl. Ginny may be the only one, but she's quality. But yeah, they've all got their own thing. Even Percy's got his admirers, as girly gossip tells. I'm sure you understand what I mean. There's got to be some fire beneath that uptight exterior.

I keep trying to tell myself that I didn't mean to sleep with Charlie, but I can't even convince myself, let alone anyone who had spoken to me in the months before. There was planning. There was plotting. There were hours spent in front of the mirror, trying to decide if I wanted to up my bra-size, or if my hair clashed with his, or a thousand and one stupid things that I'll deny to my dying day ever even thinking about.

And eventually, he came back to London. Order thing. Ron nearly blew all my planning with a misplaced comment. It'd all have been ruined, bar a sharp elbow from Ginny. I think that means I get sisterly approval. Which is a good thing, if rather terrifying. I never get sisterly approval. They plot against me, all of them. All of them.

So anyway, my plotting paid off, and when the meeting was over, and we were suitably ballasted with Molly's cooking, a load of us, the younger Order members, the ones that can afford to be seen out and about together, decanted to the local pub. Chatting happened, flirting happened, and so did bad pickup lines and we were both getting along like a house on fire (Ever been in a house on fire? Screaming, people running for safety...) It was a Friday, we'd all had a long week and so maybe we got a bit drunker than we usually would.

I hate to say it, but I don't really remember that night. I never do, past a certain point of drunkenness. Which usually then entails a whole host of embarrassing little stories along the lines of "you do know what you did, don't you?" Joyous.

I wasn't downing them. I wanted to stay a little bit more sober than everyone else (and that worked out, didn't it?) We took over a couple of tables at the beginning, but by the time my memory starts to fuzz, we were all drifting off. I remember Fred and George hitting on everything with breasts, and failing miserably - the boys just try too hard. Hestia was off gossiping with a couple of guys from various bits of the ministry and a witch that was at school with me. Hufflepuff. Can't remember her name, which might have been embarrassing, if she'd come over to talk to me. Bill and Fleur were off being terribly attractive and nauseatingly couple-y at a couple of their Gringotts colleagues, like the perfect people they are, and there my memory of people that aren't Charlie runs out. So we're chatting away, getting on like the aforementioned burning house, and I'm so sure I'm over-egging the pudding, because I can change my appearance, but not my personality, and my personality doesn't lend itself easily to out-and-out serious flirting. Jokily, yep, I can do that. I can, despite what anyone will tell you, do subtle. Serious flirting tends to go horribly, horribly wrong, but he wasn't looking at me like I'd grown a spare head, which was encouraging until I had the thought that there might not be too many women at the reserve, and oh Merlin, how strong was I coming on, was I really that desperate?

I don't remember leaving the pub. I don't remember getting home. I remember being home, turning on the Wizarding Wireless Network to "Muggles at Midnight" and dancing round the living room to King (Possibly Queen. Or Prince. Some sort of royalty) before tripping over a discarded jumper. He picked me up and kissed my bumped head better. And this would be an appropriate point for a tasteful fade to black.

So, we resume the tale the next morning, with that moment of hideous existential dread that I insist on believing everyone suffers from after a big night out. That audit you do in the morning - two arms, two legs, working out that the furry thing in your mouth isn't in fact a dead mouse, it's your tongue, and then, as you slowly surface from that nice pit of sleep and your brain speeds up and works out that there aren't four limbs in this bed, that there's eight, and Merlin's beard and dangly bits, just who and what did I do last night? We resume at that moment.

I didn't mean to sleep with him the first time. Honest. I had every intention of having my wicked ways with him, but not that first time. I've been there before, and it doesn't work out well. But it was a bit late for wibbling about that.

People are meant to look vulnerable when they're asleep, aren't they? He doesn't. He just looks asleep. I mean his mouth is open, and he sprawls all over the bed, and throws a big and heavy arm over me so I can barely move. It'd be comforting if it didn't restrict my breathing.

So, eventually he wakes up. And in a perfect world, it'd be all roses and more fade-to-black. Alas, alack, this is not a perfect world, and instead we end up with more than a moment of awkwardness?. I mean, what do you say in that situation? Is there a person in the world who has figured it out? But somehow we muddle through the morning, with many ums and ers, and blushes and many a pregnant pause, because I'm not one of the "perfect" people, and neither is he.

I eventually broke the deadlock, or rather, my stomach did, when it rumbled loudly. And we grabbed clothes and went downstairs. He headed off then, something about meeting Bill for some brotherly bonding. But we arranged to meet again that night, and when he'd gone, I turned up the wireless and danced round the living room again. And I didn't fall over that time either.

So we met up that night and lo, it was good. But he was back to Romania at the end of the week, which was not a happy thing, but not exactly unexpected. I owled him first. You're not meant to do that, are you? Girls aren't supposed to be the one to make that move. Stupid social norms, who knows what kind of opportunities you miss out on from being afraid to write a damn letter?

At that point, it was mainly a friends thing. The distance was a bit too far for anything else. But you can say a lot in a letter, even if you don't write much. He came back a few weeks later, and things progressed. Work took me over that end of the continent, and well, it'd have been rude to not drop in and see him.

For all my earlier efforts, my planning and plotting things weren't moving very fast. Probably because I'm not very good on the follow-through. It's as though I've made my intentions clear, made the first through moves, and then run out of inspiration for how to keep it going. Luckily, he's better at that than me. By degrees, it all came together. He stopped crashing on Bill's floor when he came to London.

We argue, we fight, but I've never had a bad time with him. He's funny and charming and sensitive and passionate and so on. You don't want to know all the details. It'd take too long. But if it makes you happy, there's a happy ending. Or rather, to date, no ending. It's not a perfect relationship. He still lives in Romania, and I live in London, and our schedules clash, and his mother thinks I'm a careless little scarlet woman seducing her baby away from her with the fearsome power of my reproductive organs, and the baby we've got growing there. He doesn't understand what it's like to wish for the death of half your family, and we don't get enough time together as it is without arguing about stuff that really shouldn't be a factor. His spending on Portkeys has gone through the roof, and I think I'm developing an allergy to floo powder from overuse.

But he's putting in for a transfer to Wales, and we're picking up a flat in Bristol as a compromise between London and Pant-Y-Gyrdl, or wherever the hell the reserve is, and it might not all work out, since we've not been able to spend a really significant amount of time in each other's physical presence, and we can both argue for England and don't ever back down, ever. It could get horribly complicated. But it might work out too, and it's worth a shot. For her sake, at least.

I worry about what it's going to be like, when she finally arrives. I'm no Molly. I have all the maternal instinct of a cuckoo. I don't like babies, and they don't like me. Oh, Charlie says that he knows I'm not going to be a mum like his, with being all house-proud, and the knitting and the cooking and daily miracles of budgeting that woman pulls off, but I don't know if he knows it, if he really believes it. All this parenting stuff comes naturally to him anyway, and then he got to practice on his brothers. I don't think he understands that my upbringing was a bit different, and I don't have that kind of background.

What happens when he finally realises that? Will he be angry with me for not knowing what to do or how to do it? What if we split up? He's a better parent than me already. What happens then?

There's work too, making me wibble. I couldn't stand to be stuck behind a desk for the rest of my life. I'm watching Bill put himself through that, and it's driving him insane. I love my job. It's a defining part of me, Nymphadora Tonks, Metamorphmagus and Auror. But it's dangerous. I knew that when I signed up, and You-Know-Who wasn't back then. Now? I couldn't be more of a target than if I painted concentric rings on me. But I love it, and I can't think of another job I could do half as well. Charlie can't leave his dragons. It's just weird to contemplate that, even though he goes through burn creams like other people go through socks. We couldn't switch to desk jobs. We'd end up resentful and stressed, if we tried to change. Like Arthur used to be, apparently, before he gave up pushing for promotion.

We. Despite everything that's happening, those two little letters still make me squirm. We. I am no longer an autonomous being, I am a We. It's weird. We're considering baby names. We're looking for a flat. We're fending off daily inquiries about wedding bells. We.

And soon there'll be a third part to the We. Not that there isn't already, but she'll be out here, rather than in me. I'm nervous as hell. This wasn't the plan. Naked bonding moments were the plan. Not three a.m. feeds and dirty nappies. Her daddy and I don't know if our relationship can withstand each other, let alone her.

It might all go horribly wrong. But maybe, baby.