Untitled Ravenclaw Story

(c)2005 by Josh Cohen. May not be reprinted, except for personal use. JK Rowling owns the Potterverse; I\'m just visiting for a time.

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YEAR FOUR: GOODBYES

This is the last chapter in the American arc.

Samantha had gone back to her room to pack, but she’d come back to my room to spend the night. We didn’t have sex, but we had a rather torrid mutual oral sex session which ended with her grinding her sex into my mouth as she jacked me quickly, and my come covering her breasts. When she’d rolled onto her back, it glistened like pearls before I brought her a towel to wipe it off with.

We also took a shower together, and I very nearly drowned making her come. When she returned the favor, it was with me sitting on the edge of the bed, my penis in her mouth as she cupped the warmth and softness of her breasts against my balls.

But all good things always come to an end, and it was with a heavy heart that we dressed for the last time, shared several long kisses, and finally made our way to the lobby.

I’d met Mr. and Mrs. Branch a couple of times; I shook their hands and wished them well.

Then I watched the three of them leave.

In my hand was something Samantha had passed me as I’d hugged her and kissed her cheek before they’d all gone. When I got back up to my room, I unfolded the small piece of paper.

David,

This has been the best summer I’ve ever spent here. Thank you for that.

By the time next summer comes, I’ll be 18, and probably starting college. And because of the difference in our ages, it won’t be legal for us to be together. At least, not here.

I don’t know if I love you, but I definitely have feelings for you, and I know you have feelings for me. I don’t ever want to forget that.

I wouldn’t trade these few weeks for anything.

Keep in touch. You have my address and my telephone number.

I’ll miss you.

Love,

Samantha

PS: Okay, I guess I do kind of love you. Enough to write “love”, anyway.

PPS: More than kind of.

I folded the note very carefully and placed it in the side pocket of my kit bag. Then I changed, slowly and deliberately, into a pair of shorts, a t-shirt, and trainers, and went down to the gym. The treadmill was being used, but there was a stationary bicycle; I climbed onto it woodenly, adjusted the seat, and started to pedal.

Faster.

Faster.

Faster.

My legs were pumping. I was bent over the computerized display, the red lights flashing, the numbers changing before my eyes.

The machine was beeping, and still I pedaled.

The foam on the handles was becoming dented, and still I pedaled.

Samantha was out of my life, and still I pedaled.

Tears stung my eyes, and still I pedaled.

I was soaked with sweat when I finally stumbled back into the room; Mum and Da, who were sitting on the couch, reading the Seer, looked shocked. “Are you all right, David?” Mum asked.

I nodded wordlessly and then, just as wordlessly, slumped to the floor.

I woke up several hours later – it had to be – in my bed in the hotel room. The lights were dim. I didn’t feel dirty; I’m guessing someone cast some kind of cleaning spell on me while I was unconscious.

I rolled onto my side to see Aunt Natalie, in her wheelchair, hands in her lap. “Welcome back,” she said.

“Hi.”

She passed me a glass of water; I drained it quickly, then set it on the nightstand. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She wheeled closer. “Want to tell me what happened?”

I turned onto my back and tried to sit up, but the muscles in my legs and stomach weren’t cooperating. “Exercising.”

“That wasn’t exercise,” she said. “Whatever you did, you nearly drained yourself. Scared the shit out of your parents.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to them. I’m just sitting with you because your mother’s asleep and your father’s at the OMI.” Her eyes gleamed. “What the hell happened?”

I left out a few of the juicier details, but related to Aunt Natalie the story of how I’d met Samantha, how we’d become friends, and how she’d just left a little while ago. But at the look on Aunt Natalie’s face, I realized too late that I was talking to a very skilled Legilimens. “Don’t tell Mum and Da. Please.”

“I won’t. I should, but I’ll keep your private things private. I just wanted to make sure you were all right in the head.”

“I thought I was.” Tears pressed at the back of my eyes again. “I thought it was just a thing.”

“I saw the letter,” she confirmed. “I could tell how it made you reevaluate how you felt about her.”

“So what do I do?”

Aunt Natalie shrugged. “You do what anyone else does. You go on. You go back to England, back to Hogwarts, back to your friends and your life. And you look back upon these few weeks as having given you good memories. And maybe, in a few years, you get together with Samantha for drinks, and maybe sparks will fly then.” She reached up to cup my cheek. “Life will continue. I promise you.”

I leaned forward and hugged her as best I could. “Thank you.”

We separated, and she said, “I have one other little piece of advice for you.”

“What’s that?”

“That thing you did to her. Toward the end of the first time. Don’t ever initiate that. Always let her do it.”

I blushed. “Thanks. I think.”

She laughed, and a moment later, I joined in. Then I got up and followed her out into the living room area.

The OMI had spared no expense in flying us back to England. We actually Flooed to JFK Airport in New York, and then flew from there to Heathrow on a massive jetliner. Mum, Da, and I all had first-class accommodations, right down to the seats that actually didn’t feel like they were compressing us down to the size of an infant. It was nothing like my last flight, which had just been to Israel and hadn’t taken nearly this long, either.

I slept through most of it. Except for the times I crammed myself into the loo. And got up to stretch. And had dinner. And looked out the window as the ocean rolled by far below.

The heat of July in Ottery-St-Catchpole was nothing compared to the heat in Washington; oh, it was certainly warm, but not oppressive. On Sunday afternoon, Luna, her father, and the Clearwaters sans Penelope, who was off somewhere with Percy, all came over to welcome us home.

Monday it was back to normal. Da went to work, Mum did whatever it was she did around the house or in town, and I went over to the Weasleys to play Quidditch. I’d like to say that something more exciting happened, but after what I’d experienced in America – the ups with Samantha, the downs with Aunt Natalie – little could compare.

One afternoon, Fred and George had gone to visit Lee Jordan at his parents’ home in Manchester, and Ginny and Mrs. Weasley were out doing who-knew-what, so it was just me and Ron tossing around a Quaffle in my backyard.

“So, what was it like?”

“Sorry?” I performed what the American sports channel had called a hook shot, tossing the Quaffle over my head from the far side. It landed exactly where it was supposed to: in Ron’s hands. This had possibilities.

“America! How was it?”

“Oh, all right, I guess.” Ron passed the Quaffle back and I motioned him over toward one of the goal hoops I’d put up when summer ended. “I mean, I wasn’t really there to have fun, you know. My aunt was in hospital, and then home, recuperating. I spent most of my time with her and my parents.”

“Come on, David, you had to do something that was interesting.” Ron started hovering in front of the hoop, Keeping. “You can’t have done nothing.”

I thought about some of the basketball plays the sports channel had shown – there was some sort of tournament going on in town, so I saw a fair bit of it – and leaned back on my broom, shooting the Quaffle like it was a basketball. Ron completely misjudged its arc and speed and it flew through the center of the hoop. “Well, the hotel had a pool. I went swimming a lot. Rode the bus, which was an adventure. Saw a couple of films. Nothing spectacular.”

Ron picked up the Quaffle and moved to where I was; I floated to the hoop to Keep for him. “What about the girls?”

Just then he tossed the Quaffle into the air and knocked it toward me with the tail of his broom. I barely managed to deflect it. I hoped he hadn’t noticed the flush in my face. “Girls?”

“Yeah! I mean, there was a pool, right?” I nodded and tossed him the Quaffle; this was an exercise we used when it was just the two of us, where you would shoot until you scored. “So what was it like? I’ve heard stories about how American girls don’t cover themselves up when they go swimming. Not like here, at any rate.”

Ron circled the goal and fired from above; I caught the shot easily and passed back to him. “Well, I did see a fair bit of skin, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He floated to the lawn and dropped off his broom; I followed, but stayed perched on mine. “Did you see any… well… you know?”

Ron always had trouble talking about girls. Or talking to them, Hermione excepted.

I just shrugged. “Mostly I just swam to stay in shape. They feed you way too much in American restaurants. The hotel breakfast was enough to feed your entire family.”

He chuckled. “You seem to have made out all right.”

“Davies will kill me if I don’t come back in playing form.” I hopped off the broom and we put them on the back porch before going inside. “Best to do what I can.”

We trooped into the kitchen and I retrieved two cans of Wizard Cola from the refrigerator. Ron nodded his thanks before he cracked the top of the can and guzzled down about a third. I sipped mine at a more sedate pace. “But come on,” he pressed as we went up the stairs to my room. “You didn’t do anything interesting?”

As he got to the top of the steps, I raised an eyebrow. “Well, there was this one girl.”

“Thought so!” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Good, was she?”

I must have nodded off into some kind of reverie, because he tapped me on the head. “You in there, mate?”

“Oh? Sorry.” We went into my room and I rooted around in a cardboard box until I found what I was looking for. “Here. We brought this back for you.” I handed him the t-shirt (it was a map of the Washington Metro, like the London Underground but less labyrinthine) and he held it up to look at it.

“Thanks, mate. It’s cool.” He dropped it on the chair at my desk. “So, what about this girl? Got a picture?”

“Nah, never came up.” I pointed to a sheet of paper on my desk. “She passed me this letter when she left, but I’d rather not share the intimate details, if that’s all right.”

“Fine with me.” Ron dropped to the floor, back against the wall, and slipped out his wand. He pointed it at the chess set I kept in a box under the bed. “Game?”

“You’ll crush me.” I pulled it out and shook the pieces out, much to their chagrin. It was a commemorative set that Aunt Natalie had sent me a few years ago for my birthday; each of the pieces was a different player on either the Giants or the Bills, two American football teams who’d played in the World Cup – although they called it a “Super Bowl” – that year. “You always crush me.”

“Yeah, probably.” He chose the Giants – apropos – and started setting them up. Then he moved one of his pawns forward two squares. I sent out a knight. “But you let things slip when you play chess. Maybe you’ll tell me about this girl.”

“Maybe not.”

Ron did beat me in fairly-short order the first time, although the second game I played what Stephen, our year’s Ravenclaw chess master, called “controlled suicide chess”, and nearly beat him. I probably could’ve stalemated him more than once, but I had taken to heart what he had said.

I didn’t mind giving vague hints about Samantha – how she was seventeen, pretty, and wizarding-but-only-just; how she and I saw films and went to parks and things; how we compared American schools to Hogwarts – but there was a lot I was planning to keep private. “Did you get to kiss her?”

I nodded. “A couple of times. But it wasn’t what I’d call a relationship, if you know what I mean.”

“I wouldn’t know.” We were on our third game now, and Ron was winning, but I saw a way that I might be able to at least pull out a stalemate. “I’ve never been in a relationship dammit Luna don’t do that!”

I turned around and there was Luna, floating calmly on her broom outside my window. I sent an Alohomora to the latch and she slid it open and clambered in. “Sorry, Ronald. Just came by to say hello. Ginny’s not around and I was bored.”

“Well, by all means, have a seat,” I said. “You can try your chess wits against Ron. I’m done.” I tipped my king and stood up.

“I’d rather not.” Luna went to my desk and started riffling through some papers I had laying there; I reached around her and snatched the letter from Samantha before she saw it. “What was that?”

“A letter,” Ron said, “from his American girlfriend.”

“Ron, don’t be a prat. She’s not my girlfriend.”

Luna looked at me very seriously. “Denial’s just another way to tell people that you’re telling the truth.”

“Luna, you’re weird.”

“Too right,” Ron put in.

“Maybe,” Luna shot back, “but if she’s not your American girlfriend, she’s definitely something to you.”

“Yes.” I folded the letter and put it in a drawer, then closed it and warded it shut. “She’s my friend. Or, at least, she was.”

“Was?”

I shrugged and waved toward the door; Ron scooped the chess pieces back into the box before he got up. “I won’t go into detail, but she did say the odds were good we probably wouldn’t see each other again.”

“That must have hurt.”

I closed the bedroom door behind me and we walked down the hallway. “You know, Luna,” I said, “for someone who seems to have her head in the clouds all the time, you sometimes say some pretty insightful things.”

We all went back outside and walked down the street to Ron’s house. His mother was back, and she put the four of us – including Ginny – to work in the garden. “Dratted gnomes,” she’d said. “I think my husband’s soft on them.”

We’d all de-gnomed the Weasley garden plenty of times, but it gave us something to do until about three, when Fred, George, and Lee all Flooed in. Mrs. Weasley made dinner for everyone – never a dull prospect, as Mrs. Weasley cooks better than almost anyone I know, including my own mother, who’s not shabby at it either – and Luna, Lee, and I joined the entire family sans Bill and Charlie.

After dinner, Ron saw me to the door; I had to get home anyway. “Look, mate, I know you and Harry haven’t gotten on all too well, but I want to let you know that he’ll be coming at the end of the month for the World Cup. I’ll understand if you don’t want to come by.”

I offered Ron a weak smile. “It’s not that I don’t respect him as a person or anything. It’s just that growing up in families like ours, we hear about him all the time. It sours a person.”

“If you say so. Have a good night. Quidditch tomorrow?”

“Sounds all right to me.”

I headed for home slowly, kicking a stray stone ahead of me.

I missed Samantha something fierce, but I was doing my best to put it behind me. Day visits with Terry and Padma had helped, and I spent the last week of break at Terry’s in London. It was kind of odd how that happened; one day, Terry and his mother Flooed over and told me they were picking me up and that they’d be bringing me to Hogwarts in a week. My parents seemed pretty rushed about the whole thing, as if they were trying to get me out of the house for some reason.

But any excuse to get out of Potter’s immediate vicinity, especially since I wouldn’t be hanging out with the Weasleys while he was there, overrode what was going on. Terry and I had a pretty good time in muggle and wizarding London, and when we reunited with our housemates at the Express, I completely forgot about it in the rush to get back to school.

After all, I had to start training for this year’s Quidditch season – and I had to start dealing with Fiona again – and that was going to take up all of my time.

Or so I thought.

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A/N: Go ahead. Guess why David got hustled out of the house so quickly. I ain\'t telling.