Chapter Eleven

From Draco’s rambling to himself in his room:

“Right. Steal Ginny’s broom. Check. My own broom, check. Now to grab a duvet – I’ll steal Blaise’s – YOINK – and I’ll have to snap up some chocolate, got to see the house elves for that, then… off to steal FOTA’s heart?”

She’d been ordered to wait in the Entrance Hall at noon for her escort for her detention. Annoying – she’d been told her task, collecting Rogettian Spoor from a foul, carnivorous plant in the dead center of the Forest – but she hadn’t been told who was going to oversee her suffering.

Then Draco appeared, beaming nearly as brightly as his highly polished Prefect’s badge.

In disbelief, Ginny sighed, and groaned.

“And a good morning to you too, Weasel. Some comment you’d like to share?”

Wary of his chipper mood, she bit her tongue to keep back what she was going to complain about – she’d only piss off Draco, repeating what Harry and Ron had said about how miserable he was to take into the Forest on detentions, acting like a prat and a coward.

She was just as glad she hadn’t said anything as he hustled her down the lawns, all business, and steady as an arrow despite the awkward bundle under his arm.

Then they reached the trees, and he dropped the bundle, giving her a deliciously wicked grin of excitement. “I have a surprise for you,” he sang out, unrolling the bundle, which proved, to her shock and delight to be her broom and Draco’s, wrapped in a blanket to disguise an otherwise all-too obviously shaped bundle. “Blaise’s blanket,” he confided with a conspiratorial wink.

“Wicked…” she said in a tone indicating she wasn’t certain at all that it was wicked – “but what are we going to do with them? We still have to collect the Rogettian Spoor.”

“Oh, and we will,” he promised, grin widening till Ginny was half convinced she saw little devil horns peeping out the sides of his head. He mounted his Nimbus, impatiently waiting for her to take her Cleansweep. Then he kicked off the ground, hugging the terrain, heading straight into the woods.

“Draco?” she questioned, and he cackled as he rapidly pulled away. “You’re fucking nuts!” she howled at his back, kicking off and following hot on his heels, his infectious grin stealing over her face.

It was sheer madness, and that was undoubtedly how he knew she’d love it. He did his damnedest to shake her, wheeling around rocks and obstacles, ducking and swinging around trees…

Realizing whereabouts in the forest they were, she had a wicked, wicked idea. Pulling wide, level with Draco, she made sure he was slightly behind her.

That was when she dropped to the ground, tumbling head over heels into a heap, cloak crumpled over her like a shroud.

“HA-!” came from Draco, cut off as he realized why he had just surged past her – the triumphant noise quickly morphed into a strangled yelp, and he circled back, tumbling the last few feet from broom to ground and stumbling the few feet to where Ginny lay among the gnarled roots of an old, thick tree.

“Boo,” she said mildly, popping up from under her cloak, and still managing to startle him badly.

Then he checked himself, recovering enough to be his usual courtly self, extending a hand to help her up. “Fairest of them all,” he said, with a bite behind it – “WHAT was that?!”

Her fingers were running through her thoroughly mussed hair, and incidentally checking the goose-egg rising on her temple – she didn’t let Draco notice that trace of clumsiness in her spectacular prank-prat-fall, though, he’d only worry – and so she finger-combed her hair to one side to hang over it. “What?” she answered his question in an innocent tone. “If you get to be fucking insane, so do I. Besides, I wanted to stop here, and it was the easiest way to get us both back on solid ground.”

He was still less than thrilled with her for scaring him, but nodded acceptance, grey eyes flicking round them to take in the trees. “Not that we don’t have all the time in the world, since we don’t actually have to walk to the middle of the forest and back before dark, but, why stop here?”

A sly expression came over her face. “You don’t recognize it?” He shook his head. “Excellent,” was her response, and she happily collected up her broom and tugged his hand to follow her. He obediently trailed along, but rebelliously didn’t let go of her hand when she would have let his drop. Studiously, she avoided looking at him, and pretended she’d hardly noticed.

Given it had been well over a month since the Quidditch match when he and Blaise had shown up flushed and satiated, Ginny didn’t blame him for his momentary hesitation, as he reconciled the bank of the frosted-over spring, littered with dead leaves, with what must have been an idyllic sight closer to summer. But he recognized it after a moment, sure enough – his mouth turned up at the corners into what was definitely either an evil grin, or a full-on smirk.

Since Ginny had seen the stream more recently, when she and Blaise had been working on Narcissa’s birthday present, she was less surprised, but the differences in those few weeks reminded her just how chilly it was now that winter was fully upon them, and she shivered hard.

“Here, take this,” Draco murmured into her ear, and the blanket he’d bundled the brooms in was settled around her shoulders.

The daredevil broom race through the trees, followed by her hare-brained stunt, had gotten her blood up – that was Ginny’s excuse for her naughty response – “Oh, but then you’ll be cold!” She threw one of his own smirks back into his face – “Unless… we share?”

Which was how she found herself cuddled up with Draco under a tree in a light snowfall, snogging pleasantly. While Draco’s kisses were of their usual superbly divine quality, melting not only Ginny’s knees but also the snow around them (well, ok, that was his spell’s doing), Ginny was pleasantly surprised that Draco wasn’t pushing for anything further – the last time they’d snogged, in the carriage with Blaise, he’d been incredibly, insistently pushy.

Then his hand went wandering down under the folds of the blanket, and the Weasley Temper flared, ready to fire – and his hand came back up, cupping something that wasn’t her.

“Close your eyes,” he suggested. Since he hadn’t tried to molest her yet, she did.

Something hard, angular, definitely not Draco’s tongue, pushed against her lips. Tentatively she opened her mouth slightly, got a small taste – and inhaled it so fast she nearly took Draco’s finger off, too.

When she’d sucked, savored, and swallowed the bit of fudge, she sighed happily, then peeked an eye open, guilty. “Er, sorry – I didn’t nip your finger or anything, did I?”

“No, just sucked it a bit… but nipping it sounds hot too, go ahead and do that if you like,” he urged huskily, and she was aware of how he was pressed tight and hard against her.

“Oh,” she said softly, and lowering her eyelashes, accepted another piece of fudge, this time, deliberately sucking his fingertips, then kissing each digit lightly. He whimpered.

“Did you just whimper?” she asked, incredulous.

“Of course not,” he replied stiffly, in a tone colder than the wind around them. She opened her mouth to press the point, so he put his tongue in it. When her attempt to speak turned into wordless hums of enjoyment, he traced his tongue down her jaw, down her neck, hunting for the spot Blaise had suckled with such good results two weeks ago, after Kama Sutra.

“Oh, God, Malfoy, you bastard…” she hissed, curling her fingers in his hair and inching closer into his lap. He snickered, and sucked harder. “You’re a fucking tease,” she told him.

He drew back, studying her face and licking his lips. “Hmm, yeah, keep talking dirty to me.”

“Just because you have a phenomenally talented tongue, think you can get away anything…” she muttered resentfully.

He leaned in, capturing her lips, and murmuring against them, “Quite.”

She gasped almost before she even realized what he’d done as he’d leant in – where his hand had gone – the weight of his palm on her breast was recognized by the flare in her groin, first, not by her brain.

‘Lousy traitor brain…’ she thought sourly, for only a second – had her brain recognized what was going on first, she might have stood a chance at stopping him, but not when her nerves were responding to his kneading and massaging as though he were conducting a symphony… The sodding bastard knew it, too – his kisses became smug, cocky.

“Sodding cocky bastard,” she accused him. In response, he pinched the nipple he had in his hand already. His other hand started snaking up the back of her shirt, darting for…?

Her bra suddenly came apart at the back, the straps flopping uselessly on her shoulders, and he released her nipple in order to plunge down her shirt and cup her breast carefully.

“Sodding plunging necklines, sodding useless bra… sodding feels too good,” Ginny was murmuring into Draco’s ear, hardly aware of the words pouring from her mouth because, good heavens, who knew her modest, nothing-special chest could wind her up in a situation like this?

His warm, tender hands roamed across her breasts, making her sigh and settle dangerously close on his lap, and do silly things like nibble his earlobes because they looked delicious. It seemed to go on for ages. Then he was kissing down her collarbone, his chin already trying to nudge her shirt out of the way to clear a path down her breast for his lips, and far sooner than she’d have liked to, she had to put a stop to it.

“Draco,” she tried, inching back slightly. “Draco!”

He just lunged forward, trying to catch her exposed nipple in his mouth. It was electric, it was incredible, and as he spoke, his lips buzzed around her pointed bud… “Oh, that’s it, moan my name,” he was saying, and she jerked back hard this time, leaving him gaping like a puzzled infant, and landing herself in the snow, where her rear was of course instantly soaked.

Head still spinning from his intoxicating touch, she gasped, huffed a moment trying to gather up steam to lay into him for her snow-encrusted bum, and gave up, laughing weakly and crawling back into his embrace.

But not before redoing her bra, buttoning her shirt up much higher, and instructing him that “Come on, baby, say my name,” was never going to fly with her.

“This is no time for homework,” Draco informed Blaise solemnly, an urgent look in his smoky eyes, as he dragged his boyfriend away from his table in the Dungeon’s common room and down to the seventh years’ dorm.

Blaise rolled his eyes, half-way between being alarmed at Draco’s burning urgency, and being irritated because, the day before it was due was indeed an appropriate time to start a fifty-inch essay on the fundamental laws of Malgreave’s Horticultural Transfigurations.

When Draco locked the door, tugged off his pants to release his hard-on, and grabbed Blaise by the crotch, he groaned, and not entirely in exasperation with his boyfriend.

“I have work to do,” he informed Draco dolefully, but he was already reacting to Draco’s touch, grinding against his hand.

“Well, this should be a good break, then – just lie on the bed like a good boy, won’t you?...”

Finally, Draco, too, lay still, though he was still sprawled on top of Blaise, kissing his way up and down his lover’s spine lazily.

“So I take it detention with our favorite red head was less than fulfilling,” Blaise asked with a chuckle in his voice.

“Actually,” Draco perked up, “it was quite amazing progress.”

“Progress? Without me? Why, Malfoy, who knew that stiff-upper-lip nobility act could get you beyond a peck on the lips?!”

Steaming at his playful jest, Draco pouted a moment before an evil smirk stole over his face. “Oh, I was kissing much more than lips…”

He picked himself up from his careless recline, draped across Blaise, so that his incredulous boyfriend could sit as well and face him, astonishment in his eyes. “Spill,” he urged.

“Oh, I sucked at her lips… her neck… her nipples…”

“You son-of-a-bitch, you’re shitting me.” Draco, well-accustomed to Blaise’s foulness, smirked broadly. But his boyfriend was serious in his shock. “Do you know how mad I’ve gone wishing I could nuzzle those breasts? Hell, even get in a decent grope? And you’ve been suckling away, specifically the one time I couldn’t join you?”

Exasperated and dismayed, Draco tried to explain, “It’s not like I planned it that way, like I’m trying to corner the market on Ginny’s breasts… I could hardly invite you along on detention. And give me a break, it wasn’t like I knew it was going to happen – you’re the one in Divination, not me!”

Blaise, sour from the tension of his day so far, scrabbling to do two months’ worth of research, and lacking the rush of relief Draco had just so energetically gotten, muttered, “You didn’t plan it, but you sure as hell took advantage of it… just trying to show me up. I thought this was my idea, my project.”

Draco cut a cold sneer at the whine in his boyfriend’s voice. “Oh really? I thought it was ‘ours.’ My mistake.” He left Blaise alone in their dormitory, feeling empty.

Ginny had her own torturously long essays to write, and so for the first week of December, she barely even noticed the lack of Slytherin studs in the stacks at the library – well, not while she was working, at any rate. When she was tucked cozily up in her warm four-poster in Gryffindor tower, she’d suffer elaborate fantasies of two Ravenclaw-clad brunettes appearing in her dorm, then shedding their disguises… and their clothes…

When she finished her damnable Potions take-home test, though, she was free to search out a pair of scrumptious snogging partners to take the edge off her steamy fantasies. So it was with a great deal of dismay that she stumbled on the Head Boy and the Prefect carrying in a Christmas tree and squabbling.

She watched them proceed down the corridor, and the single glimpse she caught of Draco’s stormy, stony expression made her balk – all the fun and intimacy of their last time hanging out, in the forest during what was supposed to be her horrible, awful punishment, couldn’t outweigh her nervousness at approaching him, so while he rooted around in a box of decorations on the other side of the hall, she sidled up to Blaise. “You free later? If you could show me back to wherever you found that pine tree, I’m sure there’s some lovely pinecones to be collected…”

He grunted dourly. “I don’t know what I’m doing later, really,” he told her stiffly.

Quite put off – she’d expected Blaise, at least, to be his usual puppy-fun self – she drew back. “Well alright, then.”

She set off following the wet snowy tracks the boys had left out of the castle, then traced their footprints into the forest. About fifteen minutes later, Blaise appeared silently at her side, handing her pinecones and clusters of holly. He was moping, staring down at the snow, so she refused to take the plant from his hand, making him finally look up, questioningly.

Ginny met his questioning gaze with a sterner one of her own, at which he finally looked abashed. “Sorry. Had to help Draco finish decorating before following you. Fuck knows I don’t need him having even more reason to be pissed off with me.”

“Oh,” she said, quietly, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

He shrugged. They picked up the forest’s litter among the snow in silence.

It was the second-to-last day before the holiday break. This time, the brawny pair of boys were tasked with hauling in crate after crate of Christmas crackers. Who the hell was going to pull them, in a castle filled almost solely with teachers, was something of a mystery. Practically without exception, all the students were going home, to be with their families, for this particularly grim Yuletide.

This time, it was Draco who approached Ginny, while she was lurking across the Entrance Hall in a nook, watching them. This time, he didn’t look formidable, just pitiable. “If I ask nicely and promise you amazing chocolates as a Christmas present, will you do me a favor?”

“What, and why?” she asked suspiciously.

“I need you to let Blaise down your shirt as a Christmas present from me, so he’ll stop resenting me.”

At her flabbergasted expression, he pulled out a puppy-dog eyed display of abject hopelessness. “Please? I swear, I’ll buy one of everything from Godiva’s, just… please? It’ll set everything right between us, and he’ll know I didn’t mean what I said, and we won’t fight anymore…”

Now Ginny was torn between the pleasurable sight of Draco groveling and the tantalizing vision of Godiva’s chocolate. “Even fresh-dipped chocolate strawberries?” she asked, to be sure.

He wasn’t so abject that he missed an opportunity to be lewd. “Especially chocolate strawberries,” he murmured, with a suggestive wriggle of his eyebrows, and Ginny lamented the fact that between the promised aphrodisiac treats, and letting Blaise feel her up just before going home, she was going to be… tightly wound, over Christmas.

“You’ve got a deal,” she assured him confidently, completely ignoring the sinking feeling of trepidation in her stomach.

Blaise met up with her in the completely empty library the next evening, back in the Magical Law Collection. Ginny leaned gingerly against a shelf, hoping she hadn’t just gotten lines of dust all across her back, so that she could coolly survey him, arms crossed, as he approached.

“So apparently I’m your Christmas present…” she said with a sarcastic smile.

“Red bow on your head, and everything,” he said wryly, taking in the way she’d happened to curl her hair that day.

She frowned sourly. “Yeah, my wand and I had some disagreements about Curling Charms.”

“No matter,” he said lightly, immediately tangling his hands in her curls and rendering the whole question obsolete. He gave her a delicious kiss, but broke it off hesitantly – “Are you, um, irritated that…”

“That you’re here just to paw me?”

“No! I want to hold you against me, I want to kiss you…” Blaise’s protests died off when she gave him a brilliant, amused smile. “Hmphf, I see. I take it you’re ok with it?”

She pouted flirtingly. “That depends on how well you paw me.”

Blaise’s cerulean eyes darkened towards midnight at the implied competition with his boyfriend. “Oh, I’ll suck your nipples till they poke through your shirt all the next day,” he whispered in her ear, edging a thigh between hers so he could press snugly against her body.

She laced her hands around his back, let them slide down to his bum… and squeeze. Then she looked up through the vivid red ringlets framing her face, and batted her eyes at him. With a pleased growl, he tugged her hair to one side to hone in on all the spots along the slope of her shoulder that drove her wild.

The first time she ground back against his hips – which had, of course, been crushing against hers the whole time – he smiled broadly, a hand running lightly under her shirt, as he diverted the attention to her lips, kissing hard, and her breasts – those glorious curves he had coveted so desperately. They both let out happy sighs as his fingers found her nipple, rubbing gently across it, back down, ringing around her breast so lightly it nearly tickled.

At that point, she undid her bra with a quick snap to give his hands free play. Another tantalizing moment… Ginny whimpered with need, and he felt her hands fumbling between their bodies.

A few seconds later, he looked down to a breath-taking sight – Ginny’s shirt hanging partway open, bra dangling from the crook of one elbow, so that it was just two swells of snowy white skin inviting Blaise to bury his head there.

Scooping her up, setting her on a table, knees to either side of him, he brushed aside her school blouse and did his best to do homage to the sight before him. By the time he was finished, Ginny wasn’t sure that she’d have two points poking from her shirt the next day, but she also didn’t expect that the red, ravaged look (or the chain of hickeys trailing from one breast to the other) were going away any time soon.

“So Draco is back in your good graces?” Ginny asked with a poise that surprised herself as she did her bra and buttons back up.

Blaise looked longingly from his bulging trousers, to her, but nodded. “Is he ever. We’re certainly even now.”

Ginny smirked. “I gave Draco his Christmas present by helping him end your stupid fight… now I get to give you yours…” She hopped down from the long table, strutting to Blaise’s side.

He had to lean down to hear what she whispered faintly in his ear: “Whatever he may have told you, Draco only got his mouth on my boob for about half a second.”

She let that sink into Blaise’s consciousness, enjoyed the startled, beaming smile that came over his face, and strode out of the library to finish packing.

A.N. - OKAY. A, um, Christmas-in-July present for you all. Can't tell you how much fun I had writing this chapter, too... ;) anyway enjoy! Because I'm going on vacation for a bit and not sure when the next update will be. Trust me, it falls in a good place for a break anyway. Meanwhile... go read my sequel to 'To Return to the Chamber of Secrets,' titled 'Riddle's Inheritance.' Or if you haven't read the TRttCoS you could try that... it's as snarky as this one, but dark. Depends on your tastes I suppose. Anyway. Till I next post - see ya, guys! (Should only be a couple weeks tops.)