English Girls, Approximately.

I, once again, appreciate my reviews to no end, and love arriving back home after the weekend to see the number of hits. Thank you all so much; I'm glad I've gotten such a positive reaction to all of this. That's a rewarding feeling in its own right, I have to say. I hope that you continue to read and to enjoy, and whatnot.



________

"Said you didn't love me, it was right on time, I was just about to tell you, but okay, alright
Said you didn't love me, it didn't want a thing, English girls can be so mean."

The long, cozy room—the kitchen—has not changed at all. Buttery folds of sunlight are beaming through the windows, slipping across the floor. The curtains are pulled back, girded in the middle with all the sashes tucked neatly in. This is a touch that Ginny hasn’t seen since mum died—Dad never was very good at housekeeping, and even though Charlie and Sarah would come down once a week to do the cleaning, neither of them ever remembered to tuck the sashes back. Ginny pauses a moment at the windowsill, smoothes the curtain creases gently with her finger. The bright gingham pattern is rough from half a hundred washes, with a few loose threads hanging out like little hairs. She gives them another fond stroke before letting her gaze slide elsewhere, over the ramshackle floors: the cupboard full of the good china, the scarred dinner table, still leaning slightly to the left on its odd-length legs, dust filtering down in the wide beams of golden light streaming between the curtains.

Sarah is at the stove, an apron tied about her ample waist. She is still humming to herself, and pauses a moment to smooth back a strand of her chestnut hair. It’s only just beginning to turn gray at the temples. Ginny can remember when she and Charlie married—a long time ago, now—and how Sarah’s cheerful face had beamed out of all of the photographs. She never lost that smile since the day that they were been wed, and there are still faint strains of it tracing its way across her plump lips even as she works. Her cheeks are pink, as they are always; she catches sight of Ginny and her mouth breaks into a wider grin.

“Ginny! When did you get here? Oh, it’s wonderful to see you,” and she drops her wooden spoon onto the counter, practically flies across the room to pull Ginny into an embrace. Stringy tiny Ginny is lost in Sarah’s crushing hug, but does her best to return the suit.

“I just arrived. Bill and Charlie accosted me at the door to make their hellos.” Sarah lets her go, brushes a piece of lint from Ginny’s shoulder. It’s strange how alike to mum Charlie’s wife is. “Do you normally let your husband traipse about covered in mud?”

“There’s no arguing with him when he gets it into his mind to do something,” Sarah replies with a little snort, rolling her eyes. “That’s how we ended up doing leg of lamb for tonight—have you heard?”

“Yes, they told me all about it.” Ginny takes a seat at the kitchen table, lets Sarah bustle around, getting the pot of tea from the stove and waving a hand at two teacups in the dish-drainer. They sail over to the table as Sarah comes toward it, landing just in time to have steaming tea poured into them.

“Do you still take yours plain?”

“Yes, thanks.”

Sarah plops the pot onto the table and raises her cup to Ginny. “Cheers.”

“Bottoms up,” Ginny mutters into the lip of her cup as she takes a sip. “Where is everyone?”

“Bill’s girls are all upstairs, getting their hair brushed. They take a bath every afternoon—Charlie’s been out to the water tank twice already; I don’t think the pipes in this old place are used to such abuse.” Sarah takes a sip of her tea, smoothes back another piece of her hair. “And let’s see; well, our Laurie’s out back, playing with Ron’s boys.”

Ginny was good at keeping herself neutral, but she still couldn’t stop herself , because, If Ron’s here . . . “Oh, he’s arrived already, has he?”

“No, he’s still off wherever he is this time. Hermione came early with their lads, and Ron’s due to arrive sometime tomorrow.” Sarah takes another drink, and Ginny has to remind herself to keep sipping at hers. It’s so hot it’s nearly scalding, and she tucks her tongue against her cheek, bites down to dull the little pain that’s seeping down the back of her throat. A little swallow of blood fills her mouth instead, and she quickly gulps that back too, rids her mouth of the salty, bitter backwash.

“The twins have been in and out”—Sarah is still talking, hasn’t noticed Ginny’s quiet; Ginny doesn’t mind that—“You’ll see them later, since we’re having our dinner—shame Ron can’t be here tonight, but you know what he’s doing these days—he doesn’t always have a say in the matter.”

There’s something here that neither of them is saying, some handful of awkwardness that Sarah is skirting around, like a bad stain in a tablecloth that no one wants to own up to. Ginny knows it, and Sarah knows it, and neither of them is saying a word about it. Sarah was a year after Charlie at school; she wasn’t there for the beginning and she was barely involved in the end of it—she doesn’t know, but at the same time she does.

Ginny likes Sarah, more or less. More or less—she can’t bring herself to commit to any real feeling in the matter. She’s a likeable woman, and she and Charlie are so disgustingly in love, even after nearly three years of marriage; she’s adorable in a plump hennish way. But Ginny just can’t bring herself to seal the deal, and maybe it’s because she doesn’t know. Oh, she knows, more or less—everyone does, or thinks they do these days, and surely Charlie hasn’t kept completely quiet on it all. But she doesn’t know firsthand, and Ginny can’t quite bring herself to like anyone who stands on the outside like this.

She swirls her tea in her chipped cup, glancing down into the brown dredge left behind. It’s almost empty—sodden leaves huddle in a half-filled porcelain, stained a little from decades of tea drunk in the same kitchen. Ginny smoothes the worn handle with her hand, runs the pad of her thumb along the pink-painted rim, wishing it was a cigarette she was twirling between her fingers. Sarah is talking but Ginny is not listening.

She can’t quite explain why, but her eyes fill with tears. Not tears for her father, though Ginny is sad that he is dead. Here are tears for something else, for funerals that were a long time ago, for countless cups of tea drunk, for warm sunshine in this kitchen and something that they’ve lost, a long time ago. Some part of them—of her—that’s been missing for far too long.

Ginny swallows more tea, works her closing throat around the mouthful, and blinks it away.


They used to make love in his bed, because Ginny still lived at home in those days. Because dad was still alive, and dad would have hated to know that his little girl was having sex.

“He’s got to know that you’re doing it,” Harry said, laughing, one night. He was drunk on a little too much Fire Whiskey, and kept scrubbing at his stubbled chin with one hand. “I mean, how old are you, Gin? He’s got to know, got to have some idea—”

“It’s never come up,” she told him, “of course. That would be a tad awkward, don’t you think?”

“It’s really a bit of an inconvenience,” he grumbled, but Ginny pressed herself against him with a silly little smile that she could always dredge up to make him do what she wanted, and he melted against her, pressing his lips to hers.

This had been before, of course. Before even everything.

Ginny loved his bed, the four thick posts that shuddered when you kicked them in fits of passion. There was a spot on the back of her left thigh that Harry would brush with his lips that could just make her tremble and kick out with one loose leg gone all to jelly and pieces, and her heel would always manage to strike the base of the post with a resounding shudder.

“Like a dog getting his belly rubbed,” Harry laughed.

“Not the same thing at all,” Ginny would gasp back, finishing with, “Oh,” as he finished kissing his way along her leg, to the place where they fused in the center, hot and warm.

She really did feel indescribably beautiful, more and more with every touch of his hand, every brush of his fingers bringing her closer to a perfection she never thought that she could keep. Each morning after, she would roll out of bed and pull on her tatty bathrobe, feel plain and simple again, simply Ginny and that was all; but before that, at night, rolling between the sheets with him, in the garden having private picnics, walking to the park hand-in-hand, she would think, Jesus, it doesn’t get better, and she would feel beautiful as though she were glowing. And she knew, she just knew, everyone who saw her knew it; everyone who saw her recognized that she was with him, that they were together, that he formed her and molded her and made her more beautiful than she could ever be without him.

Once, shyly, after they had made love and were laying together in perfect quiet in the big bed in his bedroom, when she was laying half across him, elbows resting in the little dug-outs his shoulder bones made against his skin, with her lips inches from the hollow of his throat, she had tried to tell him how beautiful he made her feel.

Harry was smoothing her hair, trapping it beneath the palms of his hands and pushing it down as though he were flattening it out, working out the kinks. Like red silk, he always told her, and Ginny believed it when he was touching her hair. Never mind the mornings she spent attacking her tangles with a brush, screaming and swearing and stomping her feet: when she was with Harry, it was silk. “But you are beautiful, you dumb cooze.”

She punched his shoulder, but not too hard. His skin seemed softened in the moonlight drifting through the curtains; there were scars, but they were muted pink puckers, traced out gently over his skin. “I mean, you make me feel beautiful. I mean—hell, I don’t know what I mean. You think I’m beautiful, so it makes me feel beautiful when I’m with you. Does that make sense?”

“Not quite,” Harry replied, wrinkling his nose. She loved watching the bridge of his nose crinkle up; his glasses winked on the bedside table, the nosepiece unable to get in the way of one of his little details. “I mean, yeah, it almost does, loosely. But you’re beautiful even when we’re not together.”

Ginny dropped her head, nuzzled against his collarbone. “I don’t feel it,” she muttered.

“You are.”

“You’re a liar, Harry Potter.”

The corner of his mouth quirked into a smile; she could see it out of the tops of her eyes. “And you’re a dumb cooze, Ginny Weasley.”

She punched his shoulder again, and he started laughing, and that was that. And she never told him again, because maybe he just didn’t get it.

It wasn’t the sex that made her feel beautiful, though that probably had something to do with it. Where he was awkward and fumbled around with the lights on, blushing if she asked for a kiss in public, he pressed his lips to every piece of her in the dark of night, leaving marks that made her shiver even under the blankets. He had a way of smoothing out her skin, of making her forget that she hated her freckles, her knotty hair, her muddy eyes and the way she smiled. Before he dropped off to sleep, Harry would murmur into the top of her head as she lay cast over him like an afghan. His eyes would be half-lidded, the lashes brushing against his cheek, coal-black butterfly kisses, and she would feel his breath ruffling her hair as he whispered, “Love you, Gin,” and he’d fall asleep.

He was never awake long enough to hear her answer, to hear her whisper back in the still of the night-touched room: “I love you too, Harry.” Maybe that was half of the problem. Maybe he had never heard her say it. She was afraid, she knew that; maybe he had thought that she didn’t love him. But how couldn’t she? He had to know.

It wasn’t compliments that even made her feel beautiful, though he wasn’t stingy with those, either. Oh, he was clumsy in public, in his tongue-tied way, but he could pull her to the side of a room, kiss the hollow of her wrist tenderly, just so, and whisper, “Gin, you look great,” and she would believe it. He had her eating out of his hand most days, with sly looks and little smiles touching the corners of his lips, and she couldn’t wait to get back to his flat, to turn the key in the rusty lock and throw him down on the bed and cover him with kisses from toe to top. She tangled her fingers in his hair, ran her hands along his chest, over his arms; feel the hard muscles of his legs growing taunt, relaxing, pushing against her and into her and filling her with warmth, wrapping her in his arms and whispering her name in her ear with a passion that thrilled her and made her toes curl in a strange sort of fevered delight. She loved him, every bit of him, every part and molecule and atom: the way he couldn’t get his hair to stay flat, his fingernails laying partially gnawed at the tips, the half-smiles he would give her across the room, the wrinkle on the bridge of his nose when he grinned (too often hidden by his glasses), the way he burned the eggs he tried to fry for her in little hysterics of housekeeping that overtook him; even the rough way that he shouted when he was angry, running his fingers through his hair, knitting dark eyebrows together, pacing around the room like he was trying to wear a track in the carpet—that was Harry Potter.

She even loved that goddamn scar.