He Never Said Goodbye

They were leisurely strolling along a completely deserted street next to a shadowed park. The streetlamps cast a dull orange haze over the benches on the patches of grass located on their right and turned the asphalt of the road they trod on a murky sand-like colour that reminded Ginny of her husband's hair.

She graced the memory of Seamus Finnigan with half a thought as to whether he was waiting for her at her apartment, but immediately dismissed the idea as the click, click, click of the expensive boots worn by the man walking in front of her invaded her ears.

Strolling would actually be the wrong word to describe what they were doing, Ginny thought.

Draco's long, measured strides could hardly be classified as a 'stroll', and his hands were dug into his trouser pockets. His unblinking stare was fixed on the ground ahead of him, his hair swished over his eyes like a pale curtain.

He hadn't even offered his jacket to Ginny, who trailed somewhat behind him, arms wrapped around herself to keep in whatever warmth she had left, sending sharp glares at Draco's back for his lack of gentlemanly conduct as the height of rudeness.

He stopped suddenly and spun around, as though he'd only just noticed that she wasn't walking next to him. "Don't lag behind," he said brusquely.

"Well, I'm sorry if your Royal Highness objects to his servant's slowness," Ginny bristled, "but I'm afraid you're going to either slow down or abandon me here and now. I'm not going to get any quicker before the night is over."

The dinner had ended on a rather sour note. Ginny's curiosity had got the better of her and she continued to badger Draco with questions about his marital issues until his eyes spat sparks and shut her up.

Consequently, both were in a foul mood when they'd finished eating, Ginny for Draco's reluctance to be open with her, and Draco for Ginny's incurable desire to poke her nose where it really didn't belong and wasn't ever invited.

Presently, Draco ran a long-fingered hand through his hair and looked around him for a bench to sit on. Spotting one to his left, he took a few more lengthy strides to reach it and seated himself in the middle of it, stretching his legs out, and crossing his arms and ankles. He watched Ginny walk up to him with hooded eyes.

"Is your tongue the only part of your anatomy that you regularly exercise?" he drawled.

"I happen to be a human, not a horse," Ginny spat back, "and therefore don't find the need to gallop when I go walking somewhere."

"Funny, that," Draco smirked unpleasantly, "I hadn't actually noticed. You've got an arse like one, at any rate, and a face to match."

"For your information," said Ginny viciously, "there is no part of my anatomy that concerns you in any way, so please keep your filthy opinions to yourself, because I certainly don't want to hear them!" She threw herself onto the bench and crossed her legs, a deep scowl firmly planted on her face.

"Temper, temper," Draco chuckled, "I was merely commenting."

"Well, go comment on someone who cares," Ginny retorted testily.

Draco shrugged and looked away from her to the dark, impenetrable gloom of the park beyond, waiting for Ginny to speak again. He was not disappointed.

"Well?"

"Well what?" He drew his eyes away from the dark shrubbery that bordered the path into the park and turned them onto her irate face.

"Aren't you going to apologise for insulting me?"

"My dear child, I never apologise for telling the truth. What's the point, when you'll come crawling back to me anyway?"

"What?! I - I come - I come crawling - " Ginny spluttered furiously. "You were the one who just took me out ot dinner!"

"And, if I remember correctly, you thoroughly enjoyed it."

"Until you started showing what a prick you really are!"

"My darling innocent! I thought you discovered that ten years ago!" Draco pressed a hand to his chest in mock surprise.

"Ooh!" Ginny jumped up and loomed over him, hands on hips, her face contorted with rage. "I have half a mind to leave right now!"

"I am quite unaware of the supposed fact that your incompetent brain has conjured to make you believe I'm preventing you," said Draco composedly.

Ginny grimaced and plopped back down onto the bench. "Why do you have to do this? Why do you have to ruin everything?"

Instead of sniping back, Draco was silent. He was leaning away from Ginny and his face was shrouded in shadows, so Ginny could not comprehend what his expression was.

"I've never done anything to hurt you," Ginny continued, "and here you are, bold as brass, insulting me right and left, without a speck of conscience - "

Draco leaned forward ever so slightly and the lower half of his face caught the light. Ginny was further incensed to see his mouth curved in a smile.

" - and stop smirking at me like that! How you even dare to approach me after all that's happened must be a reflection of your rotten character, but - "

"Ginevra Weasley?" cut in Draco's voice, interrupting her furious diatribe.

" - I just wish - what?" Ginny halted, momentarily dumbstuck at his use of her full name. How did he know it, anyway?

Draco moved closer to her until their faces were less than two inches apart; Ginny thought she could feel the minuscule hairs on her face stand up in attention as they came in contact with his breath.

"Shut up," he said simply, and filled the space between them.

Every thought Ginny had at that moment was bowled away along with her reason by the sensation of how odd and wonderful it felt to have Draco's lips pressed to hers. Fireworks exploded in front of her eyes and all she could hear was a soft purring that seemed to be coming from her own throat.

His wiry fingers snaked around her upper arms and crushed her shoulders ruthlessly. Ginny whimpered in pain and he slid one sinewy arm around her waist instead, the other twining her neck, the pads of his fingers chilling her skin and sending convulsions through her body.

Her lips soon became numb from the coldness of his. Ginny tentatively slipped her hands into the front of his jacket and pressed them against his silk-clad chest - it was cold too. She moved her hands lower down towards his abdomen, feeling slippery material and taut muscles, all of it icy.

Draco felt his insides melting from the heat of her skin, felt his brain spinning from the lack of oxygen, felt his lungs choke from the fumes of the fire her touch had stoked within him, but he couldn't understand it. He couldn't fathom exactly how she could burn like that; her mouth aflame; every patch of her skin as hot as fire, and as painful to the touch.

He could almost feel the welts forming on his skin from her firey touch ... he could feel the flames licking at his insides - in his stomach, in his heart, his mind - burning everything to a crisp ... he was going to crumple beneath her passion, and he liked it ... he wanted to crumple, to die for once ...

He was a towering building, crumbling into dust and destruction ... he was a gilded mirror, shattering into infinity ... he was a glittering glacier, melting into nothingness ...

Draco disengaged his mouth from Ginny's, eliciting a cry of loss from the woman trapped by his vice-like grip. Ah, he thought, her fingers circling his icy chest like tendrils of flame, so this is what it feels like ...

He was caught in a storm of fire, a ship-wrecked sailor swept into a strange land, so wonderfully trapped in red hair, soft lips and trembling limbs ... cocooned in an all-consuming passion, deadly and mysterious, foreign and frightening ... so like death ... just like death ...

"Ah," he breathed aloud on her cheek, "so this is what it is ..."

Ginny barely heard him but couldn't even begin to comprehend what he meant. Her mind was too full of him, just like ten years ago, and her mouth ached for his, cold as it was.

She wrapped her arms around his torso as he proceeded to ravage her mouth with his. She pressed her soft, aching flesh against his cold, hard body, and moaned into his mouth. She was trapped in a solid cage of ice, shivering and weak ... his mouth was a pool of arctic water ... his skin as cold and hard as a block of ice ...

Oh, how she ached from the cold! It seeped past her skin, past her flesh and into her blood, into her bones. She couldn't stop trembling ... she was going to freeze to death ... the pain was so beautiful ... little icy rivulets of it ran up and down her arms and legs, pooling in her stomach and her chest, deluging her mind, drowning her senses ...

Draco was the glacier, the ice; the pain and pleasure. He was savage, and exciting, and beautiful, and terrifying ... his icy mouth bruised her lips ... wiry fingers had threaded themselves into her hair and were ripping the flaming strands from their roots, pulling her head back as though to snap it off ... his other hand was firmly clamped around her waist, brutal fingers digging into her side ...

It was a deadly cocktail - pleasure spiked with pain. She so wicked and wild, he so vicious and terrible. It was a match made in hell, with fire and ice, the devil presiding as priest, nodding complacently at the guiltless proceedings.

Guiltless?

An unwanted feeling of culpability planted itself into her heart and anchored its roots there. Her brain dimly registered the fact that she had married Seamus out of compassion, both for him and herself, for life is always so much easier to bear when one has company, and it was possible that she'd spared him the two dozen more proposals he would probably have made to her in the future had she not accepted on the third.

Seamus deserved compassion.

In a rare and unexpected moment of introspection, Ginny distantly recognised that she had wronged Seamus, as well as herself, by marrying him. She had hurt him more by becoming his wife than she would have had she refused his third proposal. She had used him to make herself feel better, to make him feel better, but only ended up making things worse for both of them.

Not only had she denied him the rightful place of a husband by his wife's side, but here she was, enjoying herself very much indeed in the arms of another man! Another man, furthermore, who had more or less the same morals as a praying mantis!

Yes, Seamus deserved compassion.

Suddenly, her reason burst back into her brain, late as it was, clutching the stitch in its side and panting curt instructions. The conflict between her reason and the signals her body was sending to her brain to make the reason shut up nearly made her fall into unconsciousness.

How was Draco Malfoy involved in this? Compassion could not apply to him. He was, above all, a cruel and selfish bastard, who cared for no one unless he could see profit in it for himself. Ginny hated to think how much alike she and Draco were.

He did not deserve compassion. He was the one who had deserted her ten years ago. He was the one who married three different women (Ginny wanted to assume they were different for the sake of her own sanity). He'd probably been a cruel and selfish bastard to each of them and threw them off just as easily as he'd thrown off Ginny.

The next thing that Ginny's brain could comprehend was that this very same cruel and selfish bastard was weaving his tongue between her welcoming lips, further freezing her blood as it ran through her veins, as though he was some kind of human Dementor.

When did he get so cold? Ginny thought dazedly, her hands shaking where they were pressed against his chest.

She realised, withdrawing her hands from his body, that compassion for Draco was wrong and illogical, because there was not a single cell in his body that deserved it.

She nearly lost her reason again when the tip of Draco's tongue touched hers and began to swirl around it, doing magical things to places of her body she would rather have stayed dormant.

She weakly pushed against his chest, trying to extricate herself from his iron grasp, but she could no more do this than remember how many windows Hogwarts castle had. It actually seemed to present him with an invitation to slide his cold hand up her burning thigh, making her shiver and gasp.

So she tried to slide backwards along the bench, her hands snailing her bottom along the seat, her mouth still in Draco's possession. She kept sliding along the bench until her palms suddenly met thin air and she fell onto her back on the grass.

"Oof!" she exhaled, her mouth now free of Draco's.

He was perched on the edge of the bench, her legs splayed open on his lap. Ginny hadn't even realised that he'd somehow managed to manoeuvre her so that she was sitting on him.

Draco manoeuvred himself in between her legs to grin down at her wolfishly. "Well," he said huskily, his eyes glinting, one pale, slender finger tracing the inside of her thigh, "what an interesting position you are in."

Ginny's face burned the same red as her hair as she slapped his hand away and rolled onto the pavement, glaring at him with all the disgust she could muster. It really didn't help that she was panting and quivering with desire quite obviously; nor did the hungry look in Draco's lust-darkened eyes bring back any feelings of dignity or modesty.

All she wanted was to oblige that hunger and rip off all their clothes to tumble naked on the grass. Instead, hating her body for being so contrary, she pulled down the hem of her dress as far as she could and smoothed her hair.

"Running home to protect your virtue?" Draco inquired in a falsely solicitous voice.

"I'm quite finished with you tonight, thank you," replied Ginny in a would-be calm tone, making a fuss of brushing off her clothes so as to avoid his eyes.

"Ah, but that portends more meetings! Dare I hope that you will descend from your maidenly throne and discard your virginal veil for more sordid affairs?"

"You'll only be able to hope, then," said Ginny nastily, vaguely wondering why the hell she was still hanging around when that stare of his was fastened on her like a too-tight belt, squeezing the breath and brains out of her all in one. "And stop staring at me like that!"

"Like what?" he asked in a mock innocent voice that didn't fool Ginny one bit.

"Like that! You - you look like you're going to - to - oh, for goodness sake! - to eat me or something!"

"I admit the idea has crossed my mind." Draco's voice was low and sensual, sending goosepimples all along Ginny's body and making her jump. He laughed then, quiet and dangerous, and Ginny wondered again why she wasn't running in the opposite direction from him. "Does it bother you, Ginevra?"

The emphasis he put on her name wracked her body with another shudder. Even though he wasn't touching her, Ginny had an uncomfortable (yet very pleasurable) feeling that he was mentally undressing her with his eyes, as though he could see right through her dress and cardigan, which, at that moment, seemed like nothing but flimsy rags compared to his penetrating gaze.

His voice made a moan rise up from her stomach into her throat, but she stifled it before she opened her mouth, feeling it would have an irreversible effect on the situation.

Her eyes seemed to have roamed completely out of the control of her brain, which was positively screaming for her to Apparate out of there immediately, as they travelled from Draco's tousled hair (had she done that?), to the molten granite colour of his eyes that drilled holes into her physionomy (she gulped), to his marvellous, magical mouth that was curved in a predatory grin (another gulp), and all the way down his neck, the collar of his shirt and its jewel-like black buttons, to where his trousers descended from his silver-buckled belt.

Ginny's breath quickened as she contemplated whether his trousers tented there because they were a little too big for him, or because he was seated oddly, or maybe because a certain unmentionable part of his anatomy was definitely hoping they would finish what they started?

Ginny gulped very audibly. Was it just her imagination or did whatever it was that made his trousers bulge there move?

"Does it bother you?" Draco echoed, the intensity of his lust making his voice break just a little.

Ginny tore her eyes away from his pants and met his eyes. She wasn't sure exactly what he meant - the fact that he admitted to wanting to eat her or the something in his trousers that - no, don't think about it!

She swallowed with an effort before replying, "Nothing about you bothers me," mentally cursing her voice for wobbling.

Draco stared at her for a moment longer before he, too, swallowed heavily and, with a great effort, masked his feelings with detachment and crossed his arms, leaning back against the bench. "You better be getting home to Finnigan. He's probably been stripping the streets of London to find you."

Ginny briefly wondered if his choice of words was intentional before saying, "He shouldn't care where I am anymore. We're getting divorced."

Draco's upper lip curled and he muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like, "How convenient," but before Ginny could think any further about it, he said, louder, "Either way, you're not going to consider finishing what we started here tonight?"

Ginny hesitated for a fraction of a second before exclaiming, "Certainly not!", with as much indignation as she could muster.

Draco caught the hesitation, however, and it was with the trace of a shark's grin that he said, "Then I'll just have to finish it off myself."

"Ooh!" Ginny stamped her foot, trying to collect her scattered senses. She searched her brain for something scathing to say in parting. "I hate you!"

The last thing she remembered before Disapparating was Draco's mocking laugh and herself wondering if he really would finish it off himself.