“I’ll have another drink.”
“That’ll be your ninth, and you haven’t danced once,” remarked the bartender. “My guess is it’s a woman.”
“A woman? Let me tell you something. It’s not a woman,” Ron said, pleased to find his voice was only a very, very little slurred.
The bar was dark and dilapidated, the ceiling above stained with dark spreading patches of yellow. The floor was crowded with cheaply and barely covered bodies, made decent only by wreaths of smoke. And Ron had just been to the bathroom, and heard someone in the left cubicle snorting coke and in the right vomiting.
Hermione would never have ventured in here, and if she had she would have shuddered and turned upon her heel.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” Ron said, leaning heavily on the bar. “Fuck women.”
There was a gloomy pleasure in that, too. Saying something Hermione and his mother would never have approved of, and God, he’d been under the thumb of women all his life, hadn’t he?
Outshone by his friend and his brothers and bloody well bullied by his mother and his teachers and the woman he’d… he…oh, the hell with it.
“And I could dance, you know,” Ron added, not noticing that the bartender had turned his back on him and was serving another customer. “I could. Anytime I wanted. How can’t you say I dare?”
He frowned. If there had been something wrong with that sentence—he didn’t care. It just made him feel angrier and more defiant.
“I will,” he announced loudly. “I’ll show you.”
And he let go of the bar. He staggered for an instant—he was probably too used to leaning against it—but then the press of bodies kept him up whether he wanted to be up or not. It even moved him, as if he’d been caught in a wave.
Dancing wasn’t so hard. Well, that showed his mother who’d sent him out to dance—who could have danced in those robes?—and Hermione who’d danced with someone else, and Padma Patil who had looked at him scornfully as if she knew he couldn’t dance and knew he was jealous and thought he was pathetic.
Showed them all.
Ron stumbled and grabbed onto something to keep himself upright.
It worked admirably, and the something was the waist of a woman who had her back to him.
She obviously mistook the gesture, and shimmied backwards up against him.
Ron stared, saw only a tight black dress covering very little of a back that had sweat glistening on it, a fall of wild black hair and a generous curve of hips below his hands.
He didn’t let go. The woman moved into his body, and he rocked his hips along with her sway, and she fitted and rubbed against him and he leaned his head back a little and thought…
“Fuck women,” he said again.
The woman tossed back her hair.
“How many did you have in mind?” she asked with a laugh, and turned her head to glance at him.
Considering she had insinuated herself in between his thighs, he supposed it was about time he saw her face.
That was all he thought for a minute, and then that snub nose and curling mouth hit his brain like a brick applied to the side of his head.
“Shit,” he said. “Pansy Parkinson?”
Her eyes flicked up to his hair, and then back down to his face. He knew that she was probably on drugs when she laughed again.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “I’m rubbing up against Weasley bits.”
“I’m not too happy about this either!”
Pansy lifted an eyebrow. “Opinions seem to differ below stairs.”
Ron registered this, and the fact that she was still between his thighs, with what he dimly recognised as mortification.
“Look,” he said loudly, to cover it, “I can’t hear a word you’re saying. Come here.”
He meant to pull her gently into some side room where he could be sure nobody they knew would see them, and talk to her until he was sure that this subject never had to be brought up again.
He hadn’t really considered that there were very few side rooms to dank bars, and that he was far too drunk to gauge how to pull someone, and that there were things besides the subject that could be brought up.
Further up.
It ended up with them both staggering, and Ron stumbling into another room and against a wall, with Pansy Parkinson in his arms.
“Weasley,” Pansy said thickly, “this is the mens’ bathroom.”
It had been months since he’d had a woman crushed up against him. And he was very drunk, so drunk the whole room was blurring behind her head.
And it was another thing that would disgust Hermione.
So he kissed her.
It was a sloppy drunken kiss, tongues probing clumsily and teeth clicking together, but it was a good excuse for friction. His cock was against her stomach, her breasts crushed warmly against his chest. She pulled back only a fraction; her wet lips and eyes gleaming.
“Why not,” was all she said, her words rough and hurried, and kissed him fiercely.
He wasn’t used to an aggressive kiss from a woman, but he liked it that it was so different from Hermione. He didn’t care who she was or what she did so long as she was that, and so he liked her tongue shoving down his throat, the way she pushed him against the sink and crawled all over him, the fever heat of contact and friction and…
“Oy. Come on, get her out of here, this is the bloody men’s room,” said a man’s voice, and they were manhandled out of there, still stumbling and almost falling over each other and their own feet.
Ron hurried her urgently out of the club before she could change her mind. She didn’t seem inclined to, as soon as they were out of the club he fell against a wall and she looked up at him, his head knocked back against the brick and trying to maintain his balance.
“God, you’re drunk,” she said in a slurred, amused voice.
“I don’t care.”
He still had hold of her arms and he yanked her up against him, both of their mouths already open and soon he had her tongue in his mouth and he was holding onto her breast and he moved against her and maybe in a moment…
She pulled back. “Your place, then,” she said.
Ron never really remembered how they got there. He remembered lamps shining oddly, as if they were underwater. And he remembered the dark musty inside of the taxi, and Pansy saying how Muggle, and him telling her to shut up and her ending up in his lap and how she was just about to unbuckle his trousers when it stopped in front of his apartment block.
Nothing of how they got upstairs, but vividly how he pressed her up against his door and she pulled his shirt up over his head before the door was quite shut.
He bucked against her and she was laughing again and mumbling the Protectus Charm as they fumbled their way to his bedroom.
Never before had he tried anything like this drunk. He’d been sober, the room had been dark, the sheets clean and specially laid out for this, he’d been awkward and considerate and it had all been tasteful and considered and it had always been intended as love, before.
He didn’t bother to turn off the lights as they tumbled onto the unmade sheets. She wriggled under him to take off her dress and with his drunken vision and the lights on, her body seemed lurid yellow and indecent and he liked it, and liked her hot hands on him as she undid his trousers and he yanked them off.
No consideration as he grabbed a handful of her breast and shoved inside. She gasped and moved underneath him, like a huge slippery fish instead of a woman. His other hand was snagged in her hair as he moved, but he didn’t care about that either.
She didn’t shut her eyes. Hermione and Linda always had. Her gaze was fixed and bold, and maddening and he kept moving and pounding and feeling as if he’d like to spite her, and what a bitch she’d been in school and she moved much more than was decent for a woman.
“Christ, Weasley,” she groaned, and arched.
He bit hard into her shoulder as he came, and then they gasped stickily together for the few minutes before he fell into abrupt unconsciousness.
Ron was woken by the sound of someone knocking on the door. He knew it was probably Miles with the offer of a lift to work. The bastard kept muttering about incognito and Muggles in the block and how taking the car with him was better than Flooing every day, and he never realised that Ron came close to murder every Monday.
“Go AWAY!” he bellowed, keeping his head under the covers.
The knocking continued. Damn Miles.
Which was when the covers moved.
“SHOVE OFF!” screamed a female voice.
The knocking stopped abruptly, but that didn’t help as Ron moved abruptly and then a tom-tom started up in Ron’s head.
Trying frantically to think past the blood pounding in his ears, he stared down at the cross, screwed-up face of Pansy Parkinson.
Last night. Oh, God. Oh, hell.
“Oh, gross!”
Pansy looked up at him, blinked in brief confusion and then grimaced.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, my God. I did Ron Weasley! How am I going to look anyone in the face ever again?”
“Did you cast some kind of curse on me?” Ron demanded. “I don’t think your Slytherin sense of humour is very funny and—”
“So help me, if you tell anyone—”
“I don’t want to tell anyone! I don’t want for this ever to have happened! I was drunk!”
“Just drunk?” Pansy sniffed and looked smug. “I was stoned too.”
“What kind of girl drinks and takes drugs and—”
“Oh no you don’t, Weasley. You absolutely do not get to have a one-night stand with me and then lecture me on my morals.”
“I DON’T have one-night stands!” Ron yelled indignantly.
Pansy gave him a long look, and then rolled her eyes. Ron clutched his bedsheet to him as if it was his maiden virtue.
“Well, I don’t,” he said defensively. “I mean—I didn’t. I mean, that’s hardly…”
“Any time you want to vocalise, Weasley,” Pansy snapped, leaning over the bed and producing her dress. “And obviously, admit that I am right and you are wrong.”
“We’ll go out on a date tonight,” Ron said triumphantly. “And then it’ll all be perfectly decent.”
Pansy gave him another Look.
“Are Gryffindors hit on the head with large mallets as some sort of initiation rite?”
“Wh—No,” Ron snapped, making a face at her. “Do Slytherins take special courses in how to be complete bitches?”
Pansy looked smug. “It just comes naturally to me.”
“Obviously.”
“At least I’m not such a stupid bastard that I think I can salvage my own pathetic do-gooder self-image after making a mistake by spending more time with that mistake.” Pansy paused. “Can I borrow some clothes?”
“Huh?”
Pansy waved her dress. “This is a bit tarty for work, which I have to get to in fifteen minutes. Can I borrow some clothes?”
And that was when Ron had his stupid idea.
He was perfectly aware it was stupid. But his urge to get one up on a Slytherin (no innuendo, don’t even think it, Ronald Weasley) was much stronger than his urge to behave like a reasonable human being.
“You can if you go out on the date.”
Pansy gave him a long stare. “You hate me and I hate you, and you’ve already had sex with me, and you’re blackmailing me to go out on a date.”
“Um. Yeah.”
“All right, then.” Pansy shrugged. “It takes me back, actually. Adrian Pucey blackmailed me into going out with him for two months in sixth year. It was this whole business with some photographs of…” She coughed. “Never mind.”
“Slytherins are disgusting,” Ron said with deep conviction, and then squawked at high volume.
Pansy raised an eyebrow.
“Is there a problem, Weasley?”
“You… you’re… not decent,” Ron said, and felt his ears burn as he looked resolutely away.
Pansy had slipped out of bed and was standing at his closet, completely naked.
“Did you, sort of, not notice that I was naked last night?”
“It’s just not nice,” Ron answered, trying to gather up his dignity.
Hermione had kept a white dressing gown next to bed. She had always tied the tie at her waist carefully, a double knot on her left side.
Pansy laughed and took his good robes out of the top shelf, shaking them out and slipping them on. They didn’t fit her too badly, which was unusual. Ron was six three and in proportion, even if he wasn’t as muscular as sodding Charlie.
She was tall for a woman, of course, and built on a large scale, with full breasts and hips.
Hermione and Linda had both been of middle height. Ron remembered Hermione’s wrists pushing out of one of his old maroon sweaters; she’d rolled the sleeves up several times and they were bulky and made her bones look delicate.
“Do you want coffee?” Ron asked reluctantly, knowing how one should treat a lady, even if a Slytherin didn’t count as a lady.
“I wouldn’t touch your cheap and probably horrible caffeinated swill if I was dying of thirst,” Pansy returned brightly. “See you tonight, lover. Fiwindo’s. You’re paying.”
She left with a swirl of black robes that reminded Ron of the way Professor Snape used to make an exit.
He contemplated beating himself to death with a pillow.
Fiwindo’s was a large, ostentatious restaurant, and Ron thought the waiters were shooting him supercilious glances. Pansy was half an hour late, and when she did arrive he gave her a horrified look.
“Did you forget to put your dress on?”
Pansy glanced down at her red dress, which was stretching over her thighs like a bandage, and slipping down off her breasts like snow in June.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“People are staring,” Ron said coldly.
Pansy tossed a look over at a very intrigued looking business wizard, tossed her long black hair over one shoulder and winked.
“That’s sweet of you to say.”
“I meant, you’re making a public spectacle of yourself!”
“Weasley,” Pansy snapped, “were you born with the attitude of a conservative forty year old, or have you spent years reading about wizards in tweed robes in Horse and Hobgoblin?”
Ron scowled. Pansy kicked him in the ankle. Ron yelped and Pansy beckoned the waiter over and ordered the most expensive meal on the menu for both of them.
Ron seized the waiter’s arm as he moved off.
“Alcohol,” he said hoarsely. “Lots and lots.”
Pansy smirked. “I believe that was an order for two bottles of your most expensive wine. And once we’re done with that—bring more.”
“Wait,” Ron said. “How expensive is the most…?”
“Don’t worry your garish head about it, Weasley.” Pansy smiled. “There’s nothing you can do about it, anyway.”
“So. I haven’t seen you in six years. Something halfway interesting should have happened, even to you.”
Ron scowled over their hideously overpriced appetisers.
“What do you mean?”
“What have you and your little Gryffindor buddies been doing since we left school?” Pansy elaborated. “I won’t sit here for hours bored out of my skull. Pretend I’m interested, make the effort to entertain me a bit.”
“Well… Dean Thomas and my sister just got engaged.”
Pansy waved her fork. “Please. We were all predicting that in school. He followed her for two years with that slow-but-steady devotion thing going on. She had to get with him or beat the deliberately oblivious Potter to death with a shoe.”
Ron stared. He’d actually been pretty surprised when Dean told him he wanted to go out with Ginny.
Pansy laughed nastily at his expression. “Women really do know everything,” she informed him. “It isn’t just your insufferable ex-girlfriend. We can all do it.”
“Can you keep a civil tongue in your head?” Ron snapped.
Pansy smiled. “Oh,” she said. “It’s like that, is it?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“All right,” Pansy said. “When did you break up, anyway?”
Ron ripped some bread in half, causing crumbs to fall on the expensive-looking tablecloth and the waiter to give him a scandalised look from across the room.
“A year and a half ago,” he answered reluctantly.
“So…” Pansy frowned. “You started going out in fifth year, a couple of months after Draco and I did. That’s sixteen to twenty-two. Jesus, six years. Everybody thought you were going to get married, and you practically did… What happened?”
She actually looked curious. But Ron was tired of repeating Hermione’s stupid, stupid reasons and having people nod and murmur, ‘Fair enough. Hard luck.’
“It wasn’t my idea,” he told her irritably.
Married, he thought as their main courses arrived. Yeah, he’d thought like that. It had all been just like his parents, worked out, uncomplicated. Meeting in school, friends, childhood sweethearts and then a comfortable routine of occasional arguments and constant companionship.
He had been planning on asking her father at the holidays, and then buying the best ring he could afford. He had been thinking, in a couple of years, when her work settled down, they could choose a baby name.
“Let me guess,” Pansy said. “She didn’t give you a real reason.”
Ron blinked. “What?”
“She said she didn’t know what it was, and she loved you and you were her friend. As if that would make you happy, when you wanted to be more. And she talked about transcendence, and wanting more, and leaps, and better for both of you when she meant better for herself, and finally she said she wasn’t and couldn’t be in love with you and she never explained why. She acted as if because she was more intelligent than you, she was the one feeling the right thing, and she said you know a lot, and she walked out and you never, ever knew why.”
“You don’t know me,” Ron snapped. “I suppose that was how Malfoy broke up with you. Swooning over rodent boy for your entire time at school, and going out with him for one year, and you’re still talking about it six years later. Now, that’s pathetic.”
Pansy’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve gone out with plenty of people,” she said. “Don’t talk to me about pathetic. I bet you’ve been hiding in your nasty little apartment licking your wounds ever since she left.”
“I haven’t!” Ron replied, stung. “I had a girlfriend for three months!”
Pansy raised her eyebrows. “I bet she was a Polyjuice copy of Granger.”
“She was not! She was a Muggle.”
“And oh, Granger was so far from being a Muggle, wasn’t she? You chose the nearest person who reminded you of Granger. That’s beyond pathetic.”
“That’s not true!”
Linda was a librarian, and she’d lived across the hall and had bushy hair she couldn’t control with a barrette. She had liked to choose restaurants, and they were sensible places with polite staff and reasonable prices. When he had taken her home on their third date, she had eaten the cheese he kept buying because Hermione had liked it.
Ron tipped back the last of his glass, which was the last of the bottle, and motioned for more.
“Still talk to Granger?” Pansy asked. “I bet you do. I bet she calls you casually, drops in for a visit and tells you about her work.”
Like they had never been anything but friends, and when she had met Linda she had sat there in that chair they’d picked out together, taken his hand and told him how pleased she was. Then she had smoothed down her skirt and left their flat as if she had always been a guest.
“Is that what Malfoy does?” Ron sniped back.
Pansy shoved her spoon into her enormous chocolate dessert. “Yeah,” she said, musing. “But it does get better, over years. We also tease each other about our sex lives, and we have this little stick to poke Vince with so he’ll get up and get us snacks. It’s safe to flirt now—not that Draco ever did anything else—and now and then he’ll put on a transparent shirt and come clubbing with me, get very drunk in that calculated way he has and have a crowd of people try to take him home.”
“Thank you,” Ron told her with quiet horror. “I don’t want to hear anything about Malfoy’s sex life. Ever.”
“It’s not all that exciting,” Pansy informed him, and Ron cheered up. “Better than Vince’s, of course,” she added.
“Who’s Vince?”
“Vincent,” Pansy explained. “From school.”
Ron’s expression remained perfectly blank.
“Vincent Crabbe,” Pansy elaborated, looking annoyed.
“Oh Crabbe,” Ron said, enlightened. “Ew! Crabbe! He looks like a gorilla, I don’t want to think about that!”
“Oh, you’d rather think about Draco?”
Ron choked on the last bite of his dessert. “I hate you,” he told Pansy indistinctly.
Pansy crossed her legs, looking pleased. The business wizard glanced appreciatively over at the slender curves of her legs, the dangling necklace in her ample cleavage.
“Will you wait for the bill here, or have some sherry in the reading room?” inquired the impassive-faced waiter.
Ron glanced over at the business wizard. That kind of behaviour was just rude.
He grabbed Pansy’s hand, none too gently, and pulled her upright.
“We’ll take sherry,” he said.
Pansy adopted a mock-awed look, leaning forward and pretending to whisper into Ron’s ear.
“Oooh, Ron,” she murmured. “You’re so manly.”
“Oh, sod off, Pansy,” he said, and dragged her behind him.
The fire was blazing and the couch was too close to it, and they had had four bottles of wine and three sherries apiece. Pansy was surveying her high heels with regret.
“Shouldn’ have worn these,” she murmured. “Can hardly walk. But I know few men who would still have been taller than me while I was wearing them. I s’pose you have your uses, Weasley.”
“Maybe one or two,” Ron said wryly.
“C’n only think of the one,” Pansy returned.
Even dead drunk, she never let up. And it was hardly ladylike to drink all that. Hermione had always limited herself to one.
“So—whatever happened to Potter?” Pansy asked suddenly, pulling herself a little upright. “After—well, the war, and all that I know about.”
“Oh… he’s happy,” Ron said. “I think. He’s an Auror, and he belongs to all these organisations to help people understand Muggles and combat racism, and he holds Quidditch practise for some talented kids on Sundays. You know—you knew Harry. He was never happy unless he was making a difference, unless he felt he was being useful.”
Unless he felt he was being a bloody hero.
“And Ned keeps him happy, I suppose,” he continued. “Ned’s a good guy. I guess you’ve heard about him?”
Pansy nodded, slowly.
“It’s only been three months. But Ned’s devoted to Harry, and I suppose Harry needs that.”
And so he got it. Ron remembered hanging around Harry’s flat, and he was still just slightly uncomfortable with the whole business, but he had seen the—passionate longing in this stranger’s eyes, to have and to hold and to make right. He had seen it and he had thought, there’s just another thing Harry has that I don’t, and it all comes because he’s rich or famous or because it just happens. That’s the real magic, and Ron Weasley was a Squib about the kind of magic that brought you what you wanted.
“Don’t talk to me about what people need,” Pansy said, and her voice was only a shade thicker than usual. Her dark eyes were fixed on and filled with the fire. “People always seem to need something so special, something so right. They’re never happy with—with just someone. And you get left behind, and you don’t understand and you know if you could understand they wouldn’t be leaving you. It’s all so stupid.”
Ron looked at the necklace between her breasts, the fine glittering chain. He heard the spoiled tone of her voice, Pansy Parkinson, the girl with the solid gold watch the Nifflers had gone for. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t have what she wanted.
And then he thought, damn it. He didn’t understand it either. All his life, it had happened, and he hadn’t understood it.
“Potter got what he wanted, did he?” Pansy asked. “And I’m sure he trampled on people to get it. These, these spectacular people with their bravery or their brains, they get their shining reward, and some of us don’t seem to be born for it and there’s nothing we can do and they—they just turn away.”
She sighed, and the necklace shone gold against the red of her dress, and the irony alone could have killed Ron.
And he thought of her gold watch and her sneering face under Slytherin colours, and the obvious, pathetic way she had adored that rat Malfoy. Almost as pitiful as the awkward, clumsy way he had tried to hide how he felt about Hermione. And he hated them both. In a way.
She reached out first, slid her hand up his arm and into his hair.
“Damn them all,” she said, and her mouth was on his, warm and wet and uncalculated.
Her hands were tangling in his hair then and he had her on her back, sliding against the sofa, gasping and thoughtless.
Ron liked that.
Ron woke up with nobody beside him. He was still muzzily trying to sort out why he was surprised about that when he felt Pansy’s mouth move down his abdomen.
“Hey!” Ron yelped, flinging the covers back. “What’re you doing?”
She blinked up at him, heavy hair disarranged. “I would’ve thought it was obvious,” she answered.
“I—but—you don’t—”
He and Hermione had gone through things in stages, she had carefully mapped it all out. Those few fumbling kisses had turned into more comfortable holding and caressing, and then there had been that cautious first time, and then discreet lovemaking, all those safe traditional gestures in the sanctuary of darkness. And a few experiments in the shadows where blushing was unnecessary, after a couple of years, maybe because they felt obscurely that they should.
Not this bold touch in the light, so casual and shocking.
Pansy’s lips curled.
“Maybe good girls don’t,” she said. “But I do.”
She opened her mouth and it was casual and shocking and hot. He twisted and grabbed a handful of her hair, very very smooth and strange and it wasn’t like anything before, so surely it was all right to shove up and be inconsiderate and…
Ron groaned, and Pansy sat up, wiping her mouth.
“Well, Weasley, thanks for dinner,” she said briskly. “It was—interesting to catch up.” She snagged and began to slip into her red dress. She was putting on her shoes before Ron had closed his mouth, and she tossed over her shoulder, “And I told you even Gryffindors have one-night stands.”
“What?” Ron said. “I did not! That wasn’t—!”
“No, that was a perfectly normal date,” Pansy responded. “The night before was a one-night stand.”
“It was n—what do you mean, a perfectly normal date? Do you normally sleep with men after the first date?”
Pansy shrugged. “Quite often, yes. Do you have a point?”
“So—so what, the date cancels out one—sleeping together and the other one is a one-night stand and—?”
“A masterly summary, Weasley.”
“You’re really weird,” Ron said fervently. “And sick and depraved. Fine—we’ll, I don’t know, we’ll go out again. And then we can never see each other again.”
“Your logic is insane and happenstance,” Pansy told him with an almost frightened look in her eye. “And I suppose I’ll see you tonight. Especially since if I do that, I can borrow some more clothes.”
She took another set of his good robes.
It was a good thing he would never consider ever seeing her again, since if he did he would be all out of decent clothes.
Ron chose a more reasonably priced restaurant this time. Not one of Hermione or Linda’s places, but a place he had gone to with Harry and Miles. It served food he liked because his mum wouldn’t have made it, and Harry’d told him it was mostly Mexican.
“How bloody atrocious,” Pansy had said as they walked in, and Ron had cringed. But Pansy had sent the waiter a cheeky wink, and he had winked back, and things seemed to be all right. Pansy was wearing a black bandage masquerading as a dress, and Ron thought this might have helped matters.
Pansy also ate an awful lot for someone who thought the food was atrocious.
“Mmm,” she said indistinctly at one point, spearing something on her fork. “What’s this called?”
“Actually, it’s called my fajita,” Ron informed her.
Pansy made a face at him and polished off the last of the salsa dip with her bread.
“Are you a professional public nuisance?” Ron asked.
“Close,” Pansy said. “I’m in advertising.”
“Ad—” At this point in time, Ron stopped short in horror. Miles had just come in the door.
Moving briskly, sandy hair falling into his eyes, surely he would miss them, and no, what was he thinking, because Miles never missed a scantily clad woman.
“Ron!” he said cheerily, bouncing over to them, and Ron had never hated him or his garish football shirt or his loud upper-class English voice so much. “And who’s this?” he asked, eyeing Pansy’s breasts.
“Actually, I haven’t quite got around to naming them yet,” Pansy replied brightly. “But my name’s Pansy.”
Ron was horror-struck. That was part of her problem—all the Slytherins’ problems. They came out with stuff without thinking of what was decent, or without caring. Longbottom, you’re fat, Weasley, you’re poor, Potter, you’re parentless. And isn’t that funny?
Miles actually laughed. The bastard.
“You must be something special to get Ron to miss the game.”
It was like someone had hit Ron with a Stunning Spell. The game! The Chudley Cannons against the Worcester Whizzers! He’d bloody forgotten about it, and now he was missing the game, the Game, in order to take Pansy Parkinson out for dinner.
“Alicia and I are watching it at my place. I just ran out at the ads to pick up some take-out.” Miles obviously noticed the stricken look on Ron’s face. “You can watch it with us, if you’d like,” he added generously.
Ron took a deep breath. There was no way to accept without being ungentlemanly. His mum had taught him how to behave with a lady, even if he didn’t think Pansy qualified.
“Yeah!” Pansy answered enthusiastically. “Quick, Weas—Ron—get the bill. I don’t want to miss this.”
He felt the urge to seize her and kiss her, and thought they must have put something in the salsa.
“Advertising,” Pansy explained as Ron paid. “I advertise Quidditch games. I get the posters, publicise the tours and the big matches, arrange what advertisements are put in the Telemagicking break shots.”
“That’s so weird,” Ron said, as they hurried out into the street. “I work in Telemagicking.”
Telemagicking, in Ron’s mind, was the reason his brother Percy had been put on this earth. After all his rabbiting on about thin-bottomed cauldrons, all his meticulous attention to detail and flashes of brilliance about proper filing systems, his massive brain had finally come up with something useful.
If one could transpose the image of someone’s head onto a fireplace, why not transpose the image of a Quidditch game? Then people could watch Quidditch in their own fireplaces, from the comfort of their own homes.
It had been a sideline diversion of Percy’s, a little business enterprise, and a fiendish Muggleborn investor had come up with the idea of advertising products in the Quidditch game breaks. Percy had made a fortune, and when Ron graduated he was so excited about the prospect of spreading Quidditch around the wizarding world that he joined the team and was stunned to find out he was good at the practical spells you laid down the system with.
It was good pay, though, and satisfying work.
Whereas Percy had still not been promoted at the ministry, which caused Ron a good bit of secret amusement.
“I didn’t know you were into Quidditch,” Ron said as they hurried into the apartment block.
“Oh, well.” Pansy shrugged. “I went to every game of Draco’s for years and heard him going on about it. After a bit I got really interested. You didn’t ever play, did you?”
“No,” Ron said shortly, not thinking of Harry the prodigy, or of a mirror where Ron was the Quidditch captain, or what Harry had told him when he tried out… “I wasn’t good enough.”
“Me neither,” Pansy said, almost tripping up in her heels. Ron grabbed her arm. “I hoped that it was just because Marcus didn’t want girls on the team, but when Draco was captain he told me I wasn’t good enough.”
And they were knocking on Miles’ door, Ron still holding Pansy’s arm so she didn’t fall in those stupid shoes, red-faced and out of breath.
“Here’s Ron and his new girl,” Miles shouted out to Alicia as she opened the door. “Quidditch enthusiasts both of them, I’d wager, since they ran all the way here.”
“Hi,” Alicia said pleasantly, clearly not recognising Pansy. Well, she had been two years ahead of Pansy and Ron both. Ron had only known her through Harry, and then through Miles-from-the-office.
Still, she was a nice, sensible girl, and she was the only reason he could put up with Miles for any length of time. Miles was a lovely chap, but he was the equivalent of Seamus Finnigan reared on cucumber sandwiches and speed, and then placed in Hufflepuff.
“Who’s winning?” Pansy and Ron asked in urgent unison.
“The Cannons,” Alicia replied, with a smile.
“Oh yeah, baby,” Pansy said. Ron contented himself with punching the air.
And there was a rush for the couch, and it was only a small one, so somehow Ron ended up with Pansy in his lap, but he was too concerned with the game to mind terribly.
Alicia had made biscuits, and they all munched them as they watched the game, and then the Cannons’ Keeper turned upside down to save a goal and Ron yelled in triumph.
“Weasley, you fool, you just sprayed crumbs down my neck,” Pansy laughed.
“Ron,” he reminded her in a low voice.
She turned her head and gave him a dazzling smile that made him choke on his drink, it was so exceptionally fake.
“But I forgive you, my darling Ronniekins,” she added, her voice like syrup.
Ron contemplated doing away with her, but then the Whizzers made another scurrilous attempt on the Cannons’ goal.
“YES!” screamed everyone, after another miraculous save.
When people were awarded penalties, Ron leaned forward and put his chin on Pansy’s shoulder, and when the Cannons got all theirs in she relaxed back against him.
Somehow she got hold of his hand and almost crushed it flat while they were all tensed, watching the two Seekers dive neck and neck for the Snitch. And when the Cannons’ Seeker caught it, everyone was yelling and punching the air and bouncing all over the couch and it was just a physical reaction and perfectly normal and Ron wasn’t at all embarrassed about it.
She smiled at him slyly, her hair fluffed up and her face red with the excitement, and while Miles and Alicia were clearing up the biscuit trays in the kitchen they snogged on the sofa. She almost ended up going down on him in Miles’ bathroom, but instead they both tumbled out shouting thanks and goodbyes.
“Come to the party on Saturday,” Miles urged them. “Bring your new girl. Pansy, it was a pleasure.”
They kissed once, twice, three times against the walls on the way to Ron’s apartment, and then had wild, messy, exuberant sex and almost fell off the bed.
Ron woke up with Pansy Parkinson in his arms. Given the events of the past few days, this should not have been so surprising.
It felt—strange, though.
Hermione and Linda had been practical about it. Nobody sleeps tangled all together, it’s uncomfortable, just like nobody sleeps naked. Each person has their side of the bed, and you lean across the bed in the morning to give them a kiss.
They had been right. Pansy was lying on his arm, and it had gone dead. Their skin was sweaty and stuck together, and there was going to be more pain when they moved. Her long hair was all over his face, and he had to spit some of it out before he sleepily kissed her on the neck, which wasn’t romantic or decorous at all.
“Mmmf,” said Pansy, before she said “Mmm,” and it wasn’t supposed to go like that at all.
“‘S twenty t’nine,” Ron mumbled. “We’re going t’be late…”
“Mmm,” said Pansy, and batted him lightly in the face. “Inna minute. I’ll get up innaminute.”
“Mmm. Kay,” Ron said, his eyes drifting inexorably shut again.
At five to nine, they both sprang up in a panic from the bed and conducted a brief, frenzied fight for the toothbrush, which Pansy won because Ron had stopped to grab his dressing gown. Pansy smugly brushed her teeth, and then purloined his last good set of robes and while he was searching for something decent to wear to the office, she got herself a bowl of cereal.
He came out, and it was odd, having breakfast together, even if it was leaning against the sink bolting down cereal in a mad rush. He saw her glance sideways, and think it was strange too.
“Um,” he said.
“So,” she said.
“I suppose—”
“It’s been bizarre, Weasley,” she said. “See you around.”
“Well—yeah,” he said.
They put their bowls in the sink, neither one bothering to clear up further. Then they stood looking at each other. Ron rubbed his neck, feeling acutely uncomfortable.
They leaned forward and kissed briefly. Ron wasn’t entirely sure why.
“Give my excuses to Miles and Alicia,” Pansy said.
“Oh no—I mean—you should come,” Ron said, thinking that he could be just as polite as any Parkinson.
“Maybe,” she said, and left.
Ron was grumpy and sleep-deprived in the office that day, and Miles chuckled and rolled his eyes at him.
“The start of a relationship, eh?” he said. “Nothing like it. Shagging all night and trying to nap all day.”
Ron scowled at his reflection in a passing window. It had messy hair.
“I’m not in a relationship,” he muttered mutinously.
That Saturday, he came over early to Miles’ to help him set up. Of course Alicia ended up doing the whole thing, and telling them how incompetent they were.
“Is Harry coming?” Ron asked as he tried to slice cucumbers and almost made Ron-finger-dip.
“No,” Alicia called from the sitting room. “He’s sick. But Ned’s coming. That’ll be nice, he’s a lovely fellow and I’d like to get to know him better.”
“How about Pansy?” Miles inquired.
Ron wished he hadn’t been anticipating this question. “Er—no, I don’t think so.”
“Shame. I liked her,” Miles said. Ron wondered what Miles would do if Ron said that was more than he did. “Sporty, and a bit of fun. Plus—” he added sotto voce. “She has that certain je ne sais quoi.”
“Sorry?” said Ron. “Um. She has a pug nose.”
“Well yes,” Miles admitted. “But she’s got all that hair and that confidence and a great figure. She’s sexy.”
Which was a very strange word, when applied to Pansy ‘Pug Face’ Parkinson, and a very strange concept, which Ron thought he was going to put down carefully and never look at again.
The party began at eight, and for about an hour Ron vacillated from room to room, thinking, well, if she turns up I should at least be civil.
She didn’t turn up, and so Ron ended up in the kitchen making small talk with Ned about Harry and the quality of Ron’s cucumber dip.
“He runs himself into the ground,” Ned said earnestly, and put another tortilla chip into the dip. He ran fingers through his white-blond hair until it stood on end, bristling with anxiety, but was kind enough not to comment on the tiny pink swirls in the dip.
One very weird friend of Alicia’s had not been able to stop raving about it. Ron darkly suspected her of being a vampire.
He looked out into the sitting room to check she wasn’t about to swoop down on him, and saw Pansy being cordially welcomed by Miles and Alicia.
Instantly he thought perhaps he should duck back into the kitchen.
But then Alicia saw him, and waved him over. Pansy gave him a tight-lipped smile.
“This is Pansy,” Miles said to their assembled workmates. “She’s Ron’s new girlfriend.”
Now Ron exchanged a look with Pansy that was pure panic.
“Isn’t that right, Ron?”
Ron advanced very cautiously into the sitting room and towards Pansy’s side, feeling like a soldier negotiating enemy territory.
“Er,” he said. “Well. Sort of. In a way.”
He felt Pansy gamely reach out and take his hand. It would be just embarrassing to correct everyone.
Now, though, they were standing in front of almost all his friends on the hearthrug, holding hands, and it felt almost like they were getting married. An arranged marriage like in the old days, and Ron was peering into the face of his wife and feeling very uncertain about the future.
“Try some of the dip,” Alicia invited hospitably, offering it.
Pansy peered into it. “It looks like there’s blood in there,” she said. “Were you silly enough to let—er, Ron—try to help in the kitchen?”
Ron felt almost cross, because she shouldn’t have known enough to guess that, but everyone else laughed.
And then they just mingled in the party, and the embarrassing moment was over.
But at one point Pansy was on the couch and three men from the office were sitting around her, trying to talk to her, and Ron thought again of the word Miles had used to describe her, that alien word. Sexy.
He crossed over to the couch, leaned over the back of it and lifted her hair, stroked her neck. He might have given the other men a slightly belligerent look, because after all she’d been introduced as his girlfriend and this sort of thing was just not on.
“Having fun?” he’d asked, a bit gruffly.
“I am now,” Pansy replied, looking at the other men with dancing eyes.
The vampire lady, who turned out to be called Velma, corned Ron and complimented him extravagantly on his dip. Ron had shrunk into a corner in terror, convinced she was eyeing his neck.
“Finding fine food een zis country ees such a trial,” Velma told him, staring deep into his jugular vein. “It ees a rare privilege to find a true cook.”
“I wouldn’t call, um, myself a cook,” Ron said, clawing at the walls behind his back.
“He only has a few talents,” Pansy had said, appearing miraculously to take his arm. “But he’s very skilled in certain areas.”
She smiled brilliantly at Velma, who pouted and bit her full lower lip with her alarming incisors. Ron had sagged with relief.
Alicia asked them at one point to get extra glasses from the high-up shelves in the cupboard, since they were both tall. Ron held the trick door of the cupboard open for her, and as she ducked under his arm to reach up he moved in clumsily towards her, and put his mouth against hers. The shadow of the cupboard door was on them, and she was held under the curve of one of his arms by his other arm around her waist. He kissed her a little deeper, and the cupboard door hit him in the back of the head.
She almost choked to death laughing, and never asked if he was all right.
But she sat near to him on the couch afterwards, and her knee and her hand were almost touching his.
“You two run along,” Alicia said when Ron offered to help clear up afterwards, and they were expected to so they left together. He tried to help her on with her coat but she didn’t notice, and she grabbed his hand and he gave her a startled look.
They walked in silence to his flat, and they both went in and this time he didn’t turn on the light in his bedroom. But she didn’t shut the curtains, or slip decorously and immediately between the bedclothes.
So like a Slytherin, he thought as they stood pressed against a mirror, skin clinging together with light sweat. He kissed her deeply as he tried to undo her bra, and he’d always been given instructions before. Things were rough and clumsy and desperate, but just a little more hesitant and thoughtful than they had been.
“This is just—” Ron said, and licked a hot trail along her terribly naked breasts.
“Mmm, convenient,” she agreed, a little breathless, her hands in his hair. “There’s no reason—”
“Not to,” Ron continued, and the moonlight had no effect on her hair, which was such a dense constant black. “It’s nothing important. Everyone needs—”
“Something,” Pansy murmured, and when he lifted her to lie her on the bed her back was wet with sweat cooled against the mirror, and she felt smooth and chilled as a windowpane against the winter.
“Yes,” he said, and her skin was as soft as the little sounds, and the extremely strange was becoming familiar.
She put her arms around him as he buried his face in her hair, and murmured against his neck.
“Makes perfect sense.”
On Sunday morning they were able to get in a long, comfortable and unproductive morning in bed, despite the sweaty tangle. They had breakfast after noon.
“You have nothing decent in the house,” Pansy sniffed disdainfully, spreading liberal amounts of jam on her toast.
“Stop being snotty,” Ron said, and she made a face at him.
Alicia’s face appeared in the fireplace then, smiling and asking if they wanted to go to the pub later.
“Oh, why not,” Pansy had said, turning to Ron and shrugging. She was wearing his ratty dressing gown, and it had slipped down to show one bare shoulder. “Convenient, right?”
“Right,” Ron replied, taking her knife to spread his jam and then waiting for her to tell him off.
She didn’t notice.
It wasn’t like having a girlfriend. Ron knew how that went.
Nothing was scheduled. No new calendar with appointments in it appeared in his kitchen. But sometimes he would come home, and she would be there. And sometimes he would go out, and she would come with him.
She didn’t help him choose new clothes, just insulted his clothes remorselessly. When he bought more, she insulted those too.
She didn’t bring a sensible amount of her clothes to his house to keep there. She borrowed his, and occasionally he found discarded items of her clothing in the oddest places.
When she had work to do, she didn’t want peace or space. She liked to sit by the fire driving him mad by wailing loudly about all the work she had to do, until he forced alcohol down her throat to shut her up, and they inevitably ended up in bed.
Neither of them ever cleaned up. Once they spent an afternoon throwing dirty dishes at the bin from the carefully placed sofa.
Girlfriends didn’t flirt with other men and leave you angry and embarrassed, and then laugh.
With girlfriends, things were covered, complicated, tracing patterns meant to be messages on skin and hoping you were coming to understand. With Pansy you kept the lights on, and everything was loud and clear.
“Good Lord, Weasley,” she said, looking in the fridge one day and making a horrible face. “You don’t actually like this mouldy cheese, do you?”
Ron had looked over at her. She was wearing one of his shirts and her hair was wet, tied back in a ponytail. She looked a mess.
She either looked a mess or took an atrociously long time getting ready. Girlfriends looked neat and presentable all the time, but never made too much of a fuss.
“Nah,” he said. “I never eat it.”
She had thrown it in the bin, which was wasteful, and stretched and smiled.
“I was thinking we should have sex in the shower,” she added casually, and laughed when he looked shocked.
Two weeks into the not-relationship, they had a fight. She was worse than anyone he’d ever seen in a tantrum. She threw things at him, and girls definitely weren’t supposed to do that. She tipped up the bookshelves and called him some filthy names and sent him running out of his own flat, slamming the door, going up to Miles’ and telling Alicia that she was impossible, awful, frustrating, he didn’t want anything like this and he certainly didn’t intend to put up with it.
The next day he came home from work and she was there, and he didn’t speak, braced for those still reproachful, resentful silences that always come after fights.
“You’re late,” she said. “Come on, I want to get a curry.”
She acted like it hadn’t happened, and that was annoying and off-putting and simple.
After a month, they had another fight, and Ron thought it over, and he shouldn’t have badmouthed her friends. Even if she did have worse taste in friends than a male black widow spider generally had in wives.
So he came home the next day with flowers, and she had looked very surprised and asked him what they were for.
She also smiled and told him they were ugly, and then kissed him.
“You’re so weird,” she added. “I kind of like it.”
It was difficult and easy in entirely unexpected ways. And when the Christmas holidays came, they both went to different parties and then came home. Pansy was wearing a long formal gown and some beautiful jewellery. It made a tinkling sound when he tore it off her, kissing her and more under the mistletoe.
“I once had a lover who liked me to wear just the jewels,” she remarked, breathlessly, shoved up against the wall.
“I’m not like that,” Ron told her, voice ragged. Something sparkling crunched under his heel.
“I know,” Pansy answered, and he had her skin bare and shining under the moonlight.
Ron’s workmates sent them joint Christmas cards, which lay in a pile on Ron’s welcome mat for hours before either of them picked them up. They were standard, ordinary cards, with the usual, ‘Dear’ and ‘Have a happy’ and ‘Love.’ But she lingered over his shoulder, and they both looked at the front of the envelopes, where these people had written ‘Ronald Weasley and Pansy Parkinson‘ as if they had been sent a puzzle.
Pansy threw out the cards in January, but he found one of the envelopes folded up in the jewellery box he’d given her for Christmas. She kept things like that in there, movie tickets when he took her to the cinema—she’d never been before—a fortune from the time they had fortune cookies, and she added ‘in bed’ to every fortune they got.
She never kept jewellery in there. Hermione had liked to keep things in their proper place.
Ron thought he understood, though.
He dropped by his parents’ house on New Year’s, and his mother asked him about this new girlfriend. Alicia had told Angelina, who like a dutiful daughter-in-law had duly reported to her.
“It’s not important,” Ron answered, telling her the words of their bargain. “It’s convenient.”
“I like your new clothes,” his mother had told him.
“What…? They’re just like the ones I bought when I wasn’t—seeing anyone.”
“I know,” Mum had answered, and handed him two presents. “I want to see her. Bring her home soon.”
He and Pansy agreed that that wasn’t a good idea, but he gave Pansy her jumper. She told him it was hideous, and they had another fight.
Sometimes she wore it. It was maroon like his, and she looked hideous in it, and they looked absolutely ridiculous both wearing theirs.
A guy at the office he barely knew told him he was lucky. He didn’t know what to make of it.
Harry called him, and demanded, laughing, to see his new girl. He said that Ned had liked her, and Ron thought—well, maybe, and then why not.
“What would you think of having a dinner party?” he asked. “Harry wants to see you. It’d be less difficult. Would you behave?”
“Sod off, Weasley, I have impeccable manners,” she said.
“Don’t be stupid, Parkinson, you’re a complete bitch most of the time. Should we order in Chinese?”
“Are you suggesting I can’t cook?” she snapped.
“Seen no evidence of it so far.”
“I can cook. I will cook. You won’t believe the gastronomic delight I will present to you and your scruffy band of friends. Potter’s brain will sizzle behind his disfiguring scar.”
“Don’t talk about Harry that way. Kiss me.”
No, it wasn’t anything like having a girlfriend.
Ron came home from work on the day of the dinner party and Pansy seized him by the robes and tried to stuff him back in the fireplace.
“Pansy!” he spluttered. “What are you doing?!”
“Get out!” she hissed. “Go away!”
“I live here!”
“All right,” she wailed, “then go blind and deaf! How do I put out an oil fire?”
“What?”
“Water just made it worse! You didn’t like those curtains, did you?”
“What?”
“Or the wallpaper. Tell me you didn’t like the wallpaper, who could like that wallpaper?”
“Pansy. What happened? I thought you said you could cook!”
“I can cook!” Pansy screamed. “I spent all day making out that menu, and then I gave my orders to the house elf that lives in the special box!”
“Oven,” Ron corrected absently. Then his brain caught up with his ears. “The house elf!”
“But it wouldn’t obey me,” Pansy said. “So I hit it with the iron. And then I borrowed some—some cookery books from Mrs Waters upstairs, and it told me to cook stuff over a slow fire but I think you have the wrong kind of kitchen because when I lit a fire on the floor—don’t you dare go in there!”
She spread-eagled herself in front of the kitchen door. There were crackling sounds coming from behind it.
Pansy looked quite desperate. Her hands were covered with flour and her high heels were slightly scorched.
“I’ve got everything under control,” she panted. “It may seem a little crazy at the moment, but—”
“You set my floor on fire!”
Pansy made an agitated gesture. “Well, your house elf should work properly!”
“I don’t have a damn house elf, you stupid little rich girl!”
“Well, I don’t know what to do! And it’s all ruined, and now your stupid friends will have to starve!”
Ron grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.
“Okay. Okay. An oil fire has to be smothered. I know spells for that. Now go and call the Chinese!”
Pansy sniffed. “How do you know how to put out an oil fire?”
He took her hands and shoved her gently towards the telephone.
“I was raised in a poor family with five brothers. You think men didn’t have to cook?”
He tried not to look at the kitchen as he put out the fire. When he went back inside, Pansy was sitting by the telephone.
“I ordered six chicken satays,” she said. She sounded sulky. “I… did try.”
“All right, then,” he said awkwardly. “I know.”
“I’ll have it fixed,” she told him, looking up. “I’ll have it made better.”
“I can afford to have it paid for,” he snapped.
“That’s not what I meant!” she snapped back. “I just thought I should fix it, since I broke it! Don’t be an oversensitive prat!”
“Don’t think you can throw around money and fix everything!”
“It’s not just money,” Pansy told him grumpily, crossing her arms. “You need a woman’s taste. I’ll help pick out the colours. It was a horrible kitchen anyway.”
He softened. “All right then.”
She got up and went over to him. Her green robe was too low-cut and too heavily embroidered with jet. She always went overboard.
It didn’t bother him so much. He kissed her until the guests started to Floo in.
He couldn’t understand why Alicia kept coughing so much, until he saw the imprint of a large floury hand on Pansy’s left breast.
Then his ears burned.
Harry hadn’t come. He had been taken sick at the last minute, but Ned and Ron’s friends from work were all there. And it all went well. It all went easily.
Pansy and Alicia ended up having a confidential chat in the kitchen. He and Ned were left outside, as the others had left and Miles was being sick in the bathroom.
“I don’t think Harry was really sick,” Ned told him, biting his lip. “I’m not sure—he wanted to be with me. I—don’t know how well things are going between us.”
Ron shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “You’ll work it out.”
“I hope so,” Ned answered. He sighed and looked at the tablecloth. “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Belong together,” Ned said. Ron choked. “Be happy.”
“I don’t know.” Ron stared fixedly at the fork in his hand. “It just works out that way.”
He and Pansy decided to decorate the kitchen in Chudley Cannon colours.
They were walking home from a Quidditch game one day, and they ran into Linda. She was clearly coming home from work, and she just barely glanced at Pansy’s laughing face and short, swinging skirt.
Pansy held his hand too tight. She did that sometimes, either in an extravagant display or to crush it in moments of excitement.
“Why did you break up with her, anyway?” she asked later.
“She broke up with me,” Ron said reluctantly.
Pansy laughed. “Weasley, you Casanova.” He had been moving his hand across her stomach, and he resisted the temptation to punch her in it. “Well then, why did she kick your enormous ginger ass out?”
He paused. But you don’t lie to ladies.
“I—said Hermione’s name one night,” he muttered.
“You never said her name with me.” Pansy sounded thoughtful.
“Well. No. That’s different.”
Linda was supposed to mean something. Linda was supposed to recapture love.
“I know,” Pansy said. “Linda wasn’t convenient.” She yanked down his head and put her lips and teeth to his neck. “Mind you,” she said against his exposed throat, “if you had said her name, I would have stabbed out your eyes with ice picks.”
“You’re such a sweet little lady,” Ron said.
She’d laughed.
Linda had called him the next day, and said, did he ever think of them…? He had been nice about turning her down, and Pansy had asked him to repeat the whole conversation and laughed again.
“My family are having a soiree,” she told him about a week after that. “I need an escort.”
“I hate your family,” Ron responded instantly.
“You’ve never met them,” Pansy pointed out.
“I don’t have the dress robes.”
“We’ll go shopping for them. I’ll buy them.”
“You don’t need to buy my clothes!”
“So you’ll buy them? That’s great.”
Pansy had leaned against the couch and smiled triumphantly over at him. Ron had snarled and gone back to the paper.
Which was how he’d ended up in a huge manor, apparently belonging to Pansy’s Uncle Casper. His dress robes were scratchy at the neck, Pansy was dressed in robes apparently made out of black gauze and lace and he spent most of the evening playing a game of ‘Who here was tried on suspicion of being a Death Eater?’
Her Uncle Casper sidled up to him and said, “Any relation to the wealthy Percival Weasley?”
“My brother,” Ron answered stiffly.
“Ah. Lovely chap,” Casper practically purred. “So—wealthy. Planning to follow in his footsteps?”
“I don’t have any interest in wasting my life being a dogsbody for the Ministry,” Ron snapped, visions of his father and Percy rising before his eyes. “I’m in Percy’s other line of work.”
“The profitable one?” Casper asked. “Excellent. Excellent. Good chap.”
“Uncle Casper was impressed with you,” Pansy said on their way home.
“I wasn’t impressed with him,” Ron informed her curtly. “I wasn’t impressed with any of them.”
She hadn’t argued with him, which had surprised him. She had just laid her head against his chest. He liked to see her quiet, though he suspected that was only because of the rarity value.
After a minute, she began to nibble on his ear.
The next day, he came home and found her on the couch. She was reading a paper she had twisted in her hands, a cup of coffee beside her.
“Uncle Casper’s been arrested for belonging to one of those splinter Death Eater groups,” she said. She had picked up her cup, and her knuckles had been white as they twisted around the handle.
He had sat by her, and taken her other hand.
“It’s—okay,” he told her, trying to be comforting and aware he made a clumsy job of it. “We’ll get him a good lawyer. Don’t be—upset. I’m sure he’s innocent.”
He wasn’t sure, but that was surely what she wanted to hear.
Pansy threw her cup, and it shattered loudly against the wall.
“Of course he did it!” she said fiercely. “Of course he was in it. They’re all like that, my whole family, the stupid—stupid—”
It was easier to hug a woman when she was fighting you. Ron thought so, anyway.
“You didn’t like being poor,” Pansy said in a muffled, furious voice. “Well, that’s what I hated when I was growing up. Despising them all. They’re so pathetic—”
“It’s okay,” Ron told her, rubbing her back.
He wasn’t doing it wrong, this comfort thing, because so few people had tried it on her before.
“Uncle Casper was the last of us with the big money,” she added. “I think your family’s richer than mine now. Funny how things work out.”
“I don’t care either way,” Ron said.
“You’re so thick, Ron Weasley,” she let him know in a tired voice, which he thought meant she appreciated it.
She leaned back, and looked at him closely. He wondered what she was looking for.
“I could—pretend to be Hermione,” she offered at last.
“What! What are you talking about?”
“Well—I mean, it’s what you want, isn’t it?” she asked. “I saw that Linda woman. I could be—enough like her. I wouldn’t mind. It’s not like this means anything.”
And did that mean if he didn’t want to, it did mean something?
“All right,” he said warily.
She kissed him then, carefully, gingerly, like a food taster or someone planning to make a map of his mouth.
They walked into the bedroom and he turned off the light and she closed the curtains and slipped in between the sheets. He couldn’t see her face or her body, and he couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
She didn’t move or speak or give him any clue. He just tried to do the best he could, and it was over quickly.
Then they both rolled away to different sides of the bed.
He was woken up at about three in the morning by a bright light being turned into his face. Pansy had rolled over on top of him, her hair snarled around her face and the light too fierce behind her. She looked like a harpy.
“Pansy,” he murmured, and reached out for her.
“Did you like that?” she hissed, and her face was strained. “Is that what you want?”
He tried to sit up and she pushed him down against the pillows.
“Is that all, just someone faceless in the dark, just, just—” She was panting and her hair was hanging in his face. He pushed it back behind her ear, to see her better, and arched up under her.
Sweat was running down between her breasts, glistening like a golden chain.
And this was different, but that was all right, because it was different but it was her, and he could see and he could understand.
“Is that what you want?” she demanded, and her thin little keening cry afterwards was good to hear, almost as good as seeing her.
“No!” he panted back. “No! Of course not!”
And then he had arched up against her again, muscles in his back screaming, calling out.
“Oh Christ. Pansy. Pansy!”
She fell against him, breathing hard into his ear, breasts crushed and slippery against his chest. They didn’t talk.
They fell asleep again in the light, still tangled together, and it was messy and impractical and right again.
“Am I going to get fat if I eat pizza in bed?” Pansy mused one Saturday in February.
Ron kissed her ear and poked her stomach.
“Ah, you’re already a bit fat.”
“You know,” Pansy said dreamily, “My friend Morag likes to enchant the bits of the men she sleeps with to be detachable, and carry them around with her in a jar. Once her boyfriend said something like that to her and she—”
He put his hand over her mouth.
“Please. We’re about to eat.”
At that point, the doorbell rang.
“You get it,” Pansy said in muffled tones. “The money’s in your trousers.”
He made a face at her but located his trousers, and for decency’s sake, a shirt. But Pansy had to be having a bad influence on him because he answered the door still buttoning it up.
Hermione and Draco Malfoy stood in his doorway, staring at him.
“Blargh,” said Malfoy, shutting his eyes. “That’s more Weasley than I ever wanted to see.”
“Hi, Ron,” Hermione greeted him with false airiness.
He did up his shirt very quickly.
“Er—hi, Hermione. Is that better?”
Malfoy risked opening his eyes a slit, and then theatrically clapped a hand to them.
“Please do up your trousers as well,” he requested in pained tones.
Ron did so, though for a moment he wanted to punch Malfoy’s covered lights out and then do up his trousers.
Once he was decently attired, everyone seemed to try and start over again. All at once.
“It’s nice to see you again, Ron,” Hermione said.
“What are you doing here, Hermione?” he asked. “And most importantly, what is he doing here?”
“Hello Weasley,” Malfoy said with a smile sweet as poisoned sugar. “Charmed to see you again.”
As if they hadn’t made every effort to avoid each other since the glorious day when school had finished and he had been released from the pain of seeing Malfoy every day.
A horrible thought struck him.
“You two aren’t—you’re not—”
“No Ron, of course not!” Hermione said quickly. “What an idea!”
Malfoy leaned against the door frame and drawled, “I could have you if I wanted.”
“I hadn’t seen you in ages, Ron,” Hermione explained, pointedly ignoring Malfoy. “I set aside this lunch time specially, but then the board asked me very urgently to ask Malfoy here about his outrageous expenses.”
God. He’d forgotten Malfoy was an Unspeakable too.
Malfoy scowled. “I have to have caviar for lunch every day,” he informed them both. “It’s a medical condition. Anyway, the real reason she took me along was to have something decorative around. God knows this place isn’t a thing of beauty or a joy forever.”
He prowled inside. Ron had forgotten the way Malfoy even moved sneakily.
“You’re not welcome in my home,” he said sharply. “Hermione, this isn’t really a good time—”
Hermione was still standing politely in the doorway. Malfoy was eyeing the couch suspiciously.
“I bet I’ll get a disease if I touch anything in here,” he predicted darkly.
At which point Pansy came out, dressed in Ron’s old, short dressing gown, doing up the tie as she did so.
“What’s taking so l—” she began, and then stopped.
Hermione froze in the doorway. Framed there like the perfect guest, her hair neatly clipped back, her white blouse and pencil skirt pristine, her face frozen in a small polite smile.
Pansy was one inch away from indecency, her hair tangled long and wild down her back, the mark of a pillow still pressed against her cheek. She looked like a mistress who’d just been caught by the wife.
Ron stood there staring at both of them.
The silence was broken by Malfoy, of all people.
“Pansy?” he said incredulously, and sank weakly onto the couch. “You—you are Weasley’s new girlfriend?”
“Er,” Ron said.
“Not exactly,” Pansy muttered. “It’s a—”
“Pansy Parkinson?” Hermione spoke the words as if she was hoping to be contradicted. “Oh—Ron.”
“Ew!” Malfoy said suddenly, apparently shocked into sitting upright. His hair had actually gone static. “It just occurred to me. Weasley bits! How could you, Pansy!”
Hermione came inside and shut the door.
“Weasley bits,” Malfoy repeated, experimentally. “Weasley bits.”
“Shut up, Malfoy!”
“It’s preying on my mind,” Malfoy replied absently. “Did you like it, Pansy?”
Pansy went an even deeper red than she had been before.
Malfoy decided on a course of action, and fell backwards laughing.
“Will you shut up, Malfoy!” Ron snarled, striding over to the couch with his fist raised.
“Ron, no!” Pansy said quickly, speeding over to him.
“What—you can’t still—” Ron glared down at her. She glared silently, stubbornly, back at him.
Hermione coughed delicately.
“I think,” she said. “I’ll go make some tea. Pansy—” she gave her a look of extreme distaste “—why don’t you get dressed?”
“Fine,” Pansy barked, and slammed into Ron’s bedroom.
Hermione went into the kitchen, closing the door with a very decided snap behind her.
Malfoy sat up again, and fixed Harry with those cool grey eyes.
“So you’re the new man she’s been neglecting all her friends for,” he said smoothly. “My, those bits must be a good bit more impressive than I ever gave them credit for.”
“How’s your love life, Malfoy?” Ron asked sharply. “Found someone special?”
His smile was slow and cold as Malfoy’s smile had always been. “Weasley, I can find someone special every night of the week. But one just gets tired some nights.”
“Ned and Harry had dinner here a few weeks ago,” Ron mused. “They get on so well. They’re so happy. It’s wonderful to see him.”
“Ah, love’s young dream,” Malfoy said, his expression not changing. “I’m sure it’s a picture.”
“Have you met him?” Ron inquired.
“Twice,” Malfoy informed him blandly. “Seemed a lovely fellow. Very good-looking.”
“He is, isn’t he? Best hair I’ve ever seen.”
Malfoy raised an eyebrow. “Why, Weasley, aren’t you full of surprises tonight.”
Ron felt his ears burn. “That’s not what I meant!”
“Oh?” Malfoy queried. “Of course. I should have known. Pansy’s the only one for you, I assume? She’s your little frosted crumpet, your sugar rabbit of love, the one true—”
“Malfoy, stop making a mockery—”
“Me mock such a pure and beautiful love?” Malfoy asked innocently. “Why, I—”
“Shut up!”
Ron slammed into the kitchen. It only occurred to him afterwards that this left the smug bastard in possession of the field.
Hermione was making tea in a quiet, methodical manner. Only the over-vigorous tinkle of a teaspoon in the cups gave an indication of her feelings.
“This kitchen is hideous,” she told him in chilly tones.
“I like it,” Ron said defensively.
The teaspoon said clink, clink, clink angrily before she replied. “It clashes with your hair.”
There was a pause, stretching on. He was used to these kind of silences, the ones which told him Hermione thought he should think this said more than words.
Eventually, she said, “Pansy Parkinson? This is the girl everyone’s been saying is so good for you, the one you’re so serious about? I didn’t know I had hurt you that much.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Ron said.
It seemed like he had been saying that to her all his life.
She threw the teaspoon down with a little sound where Pansy would have thrown the tray full of cups.
“Well, let’s face it, Ron,” she said with a brittle laugh. “She’s hardly your type.”
“Oh, what would you know,” he snapped. “Maybe it was you who weren’t my type.”
He had no idea what made him say that. Her eyes narrowed.
“What—so you are serious about her, then?”
“No!” Ron almost shouted. “It’s—we have an agreement. It’s not serious, it’s just—convenient—”
Hermione looked as if she might like to slap him.
“Well, Ron, I think that’s disgusting,” she said icily. “Sleeping with a woman you don’t even like for—what—to comfort you, to have a warm body next to you, because I broke your heart, because you just want sex?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Ron snarled. “This isn’t about you.”
“So it’s just sex then, is it?” Hermione inquired. “My God, that’s horrible. I’d ask what Pansy was going to get out of it,” she added, walking over to the door with the sharp tap of her heels, carrying the tray with precision. “But I’ve heard about her. She doesn’t have to care about you. The way I hear it, she doesn’t even have to know you.”
She said that as she was walking out the door, and Pansy was standing outside, listening as Malfoy said,
“And playing Granger’s little replacement for him is no better than being Weasley’s whore.”
Pansy heard what Hermione said, too.
And she strode up to her and knocked the tray out of her hands. The water hissed as the cups broke against the ground and she stood there with her hair flying against the maroon sweater.
Ron had already launched himself over the couch at Malfoy.
If Malfoy hadn’t moved like a snake, he would have been laid out cold on the hearthrug. As it was, he got his wand pointed at Ron’s throat.
“Easy, Weasley,” he said. “I’m feeling a bit testy today. It would be terrible if something happened to you like, say, someone detaching your bits and stepping on them for using his friend.”
“I’m not—you don’t know anything about that!”
“Oh, no? So you haven’t been treating her like your personal slut?”
“You’re a piece of work, Malfoy,” Ron snapped. “I don’t believe Harry ever—”
At that point Malfoy chucked away his wand and hit Ron in the jaw. Ron bellowed and ran at him.
They both hit the floor hard. Ron hit Malfoy in the stomach. Malfoy twisted and struck out dishonourably.
“Both of you stop before I Stun you.”
Ron looked up at Hermione, who was pointing her wand at them. Pansy’s fists were clenched.
“I say go ahead,” she said in a steely voice. “I thought it was quite hot.”
Ron and Malfoy got away from each other as fast as possible. Malfoy made a big production of dusting off his clothes.
“You would think that,” Hermione said.
“Why are you making such a fuss?” Pansy asked in a thin voice. “Why is it your problem? You didn’t want him.”
“He’s my friend,” Hermione answered. “And do you want him?”
Pansy was silent. Ron supposed it wouldn’t be polite to say ‘no’ in front of the person in question, or in front of the person you really wanted.
Malfoy, who moved too fast to hit and said just what he chose. The rich boy who thought he looked like sin made twice as tempting in his black jeans, and who could make all the girls and many of the boys agree.
Ron had always hated that bastard, but never quite as much as at that moment.
“And are you using her?” Malfoy asked politely, as if he was requesting sugar in his shattered cup of tea.
“No!” Ron yelled.
Pansy’s chin came up. “Oh, no?” she asked. “Of course you were. Of course you are. That’s all it ever was. That’s what you wanted, that’s what you said—don’t bloody well lie in front of them to make it look—” She stopped and took a deep breath.
“I didn’t mean it to be—”
“What about when I pretended to be Hermione?” she asked slowly, lifting her eyes to his face.
“Oh God, stop,” he heard Hermione say faintly, from a long way away.
“Were there costumes involved?” he heard Malfoy ask.
“I didn’t—” Ron said again, but Pansy wasn’t listening.
“We ran into each other in a sleazy bar and we had sex,” she yelled. “There’s no way to make that—the kind of thing you’re expecting, the kind of thing you want. That fairy tale of normality, that girl who’s decent and who you’re going to marry and—”
“You know, saucy as this is, I think we should leave,” Ron heard Malfoy say, and somehow he was at Hermione’s elbow, steering her towards the door. “Yes, definitely, time to go… I have lots and lots of work to do, caviar to eat, you know how it is—”
“I can’t leave Ron—”
“I don’t think it’s any of your business!” Malfoy said into her ear. He shoved her towards the door, and then paused. “I, ah, I don’t think much of your taste, Pansy,” he tossed over his shoulder. “And you can come over later if you need consoling.”
“And what the hell do you mean by that?” Ron demanded, whirling on him.
Malfoy was already leaving, dragging Hermione after him by main force. Hermione cast a distressed look over her shoulder as she went.
Pansy hadn’t looked over at them, and didn’t seem to hear the door slam after them.
Ron turned back to her.
“I didn’t want you to be Hermione,” he said in low tones.
“Oh, no?” she asked in a trembling voice. “That was all I ever thought you were doing. Measuring me up against her, thinking of how different we were—”
“Well—yes—but it’s not what you think—”
“It’s not what I think?” Pansy asked. “You’re in love with her! You’ve always been in love with her!”
“And what about you?” Ron roared. “You’re in love with Malfoy! That much is obvious. You’re in love with that sneaking rat, and that’s why you’re unhappy enough to sleep with any guy you meet in a bar, or who takes you out for dinner—”
She hit him then, her palm connecting with his face so hard he saw nothing but blackness for an instant, then her furious flushed face.
“Why don’t you just say whore?” she demanded viciously. “That’s what you thought about what I did.”
“Maybe it is!”
“Well, fuck you, Ron Weasley, what you did was no different!” She wiped her face against her sleeve. He didn’t know why. “And what can come from starting like this?” she asked suddenly. “Nothing. You’d never even want anything. And I’m wasting my time here.”
When Hermione left, she made a list, she packed carefully, she talked it out.
When Pansy left, she turned on her heel and she stormed out the door.
Ron stood in the centre of his living room, the sound of the door slamming echoing in his ears.
And he looked around his home, and thought of what a mess it was. And he thought of loud obvious fights and loud obvious everything, and simplicity, and things starting out absolutely wrong with absolutely the wrong person.
And he wondered when Hermione had stopped being the measure, and Pansy had become it. Because he had been thinking of that as Hermione moved around the kitchen, and maybe she had been right because she was smarter.
She didn’t belong there.
Ron looked around under the light, and thought about guesses in the dark, and tried to make things clear to himself, because he wanted things to be clear…
Because he’d only ever wanted for things to be clear. To understand.
He bolted out of the door and took the steps two at a time, until he reached the bottom floor. Pansy was sitting with her back against the wall there, crying in an angry half-hidden way.
He wouldn’t have left either. They weren’t the types who left.
She looked up, and sniffed hard. “What the hell do you want, Weasley?” she asked.
“Come back,” he said. “You know. Come home.”
“And what does that mean?” she snapped.
He knelt down awkwardly to get his face level with hers. “Well, you spend most nights there anyway.”
“What are you saying, Weasley?” she said in a loud, obnoxious voice.
She’d been wearing mascara, and it had run, and now she looked like a mad racoon.
And she did have a pug nose, whereas he’d never really wanted to see the physical faults in Hermione, and she drove him absolutely mad some days. The house was never going to be clean and he hated all her friends and he understood her, he got it, and people like Hermione or Malfoy had been smart and had left people they loved and had gone searching and were still searching and he’d just stumbled on it and he was incredibly, incredibly lucky.
Ron looked at her and thought, I’m going to spend the rest of my life with this woman.
“I’m saying that I love you, you thick bitch,” he said.
Pansy burst out crying.
He could put his arms around her because that was easy, with her, because she felt what he felt and what he wanted she wanted and it was all so beautifully simple.
“Well, I’d hoped the news wasn’t going to upset you quite this much,” he said gruffly.
“It’s not that,” Pansy said, scrubbing her face with his shirt and probably ruining it.
She rested her head on his chest, sitting there in his arms on the grubby landing floor, and said quietly,
“I’m crying because now I have to move into your rat’s nest of an apartment.”