CHAPTER SIX - Cleaning House
Two days. She had two days to prepare to have him over for dinner Thursday evening.
Hemlock suddenly seemed like a really wonderful choice for seasoning chicken.
Ginny didn't know where to let her anxiety begin. What was worse, the simple fact he was coming to her home or knowing he had an army of house elves to cook for him on any other night? Was she nervous because she'd completely forgotten how to entertain, or nervous because she'd gotten herself in too deep?
Did she panic because her flat was too modest, or did she panic because she didn't want him anywhere near her?
Or did she panic because she did, on some level, want him near her?
She thought the last thing was as good a place to start as any. Attraction couldn't be helped on an elemental level, but it could be helped beyond that. Worrying about what he thought of her was a waste of time, a waste of energy, a waste of emotion.
Two days.
Well, she thought, changing out of her office attire and into more appropriate attire for cleaning, two evenings was more like it. She still had to work, after all.
She could have cleaned by magic and had things done much quicker, but she needed an excuse to think, needed the mindless menial labor that would allow her brain to click along and sort things out. But Ginny didn't really think there was enough cleaning in the world to help her figure out what she was doing.
She should have just moved away, and she'd considered it more than once when she'd left Harry. But she couldn't leave her parents, her brothers, her work. She couldn't leave the only place she'd ever known.
She might have deserved to be alone, but she just couldn't bring herself to make that cut.
She had scrubbed and mopped her way through the tiny kitchen of the flat before it was time to eat something, and because she'd cleaned, she took a sandwich standing over the sink, indulging herself in a glass of wine.
Bottle of wine, she made a mental note. She'd certainly have to get some of that for dinner, if only for form's sake.
Or sanity's sake. She wondered if dinner would be easier if she got completely pissed before the main course.
Sighing, she set the glass aside, restricting herself at one, and looked into the den. "This looks awful," she said aloud, biting at her lower lip. The furniture was all haphazard, just in the position it had been upon move-in, when her brothers had dropped it wherever it would fit. She'd decided she liked the asymmetrical feel, but now it looked slovenly, ridiculous. Two crates of her things from Harry's flat still sat just inside the doorway; she hadn't quite gotten the nerve to go through them yet.
Dismayed, grabbed her wand and started moving furniture, accidentally tipping a shelf in the curio and nearly breaking everything on it, nearly demolishing a set of matching chairs, and completely upending two of the cushions on her sofa. "Dammit," she muttered, growing more frantic by the second.
Why couldn't she have been a better housekeeper, like her mum? Did she have to be so bloody busy, so absentminded, so sodding stupid about these things? How had Harry ever lived with her?
The thought wrenched at her and she squeezed her eyes shut, daring the tears to come. When they'd subsided, leaving her eyes hot and dry, she yanked one heavy wooden crate from the corner and started digging through it.
There were clothes there, things he'd given her, things she'd merely taken over there. A tatty robe he'd teased her about more than once. A photograph of the two of them, laughing and kissing at the Burrow. She tore that one in two, closing herself off from the reactions that took place inside the photograph. With a shaky sigh, she started pulling things out one after the other, hardly paying attention to what they were, only knowing what they meant, what they stood for. Within moments, she was surrounded by clothes and fragments of letters and photographs.
She pressed the back of one shaky hand to her forehead, her breath coming in pants and pained whispers.
The smack of the doorknocker tore her breath from her in a gasp, and though she knew it wouldn't be Harry, for a moment that was all she could think of.
She'd made it more than perfectly clear he wasn't to come after her, and he had done nothing but agree.
It was her mum, no doubt, or the twins come to cheer her up or dog her for the incident with Malfoy. Mustering as much breath as she could, she yelled in the direction of the front door. "Go away!"
Rude, yes. But succinct. She simply couldn't deal with anyone right now.
A muffled voice on the side of the door, the slight trembling of the lock, told her exactly what was happening. "Dammit, not right now!" she said, gaining her feet and stumbling to the door. She'd sat wrong, and now her feet were asleep. She grabbed the lock to keep it from turning with the spell, putting as much force as she had into it. "Fred, George, I swear," she started, and the lock slipped from her fingers. She had just enough presence of mind to step back before the door opened.
"That's better," Draco said, stepping in and shutting the door. He wasn't oblivious to her condition-she was standing there looking at him as though she would either cry or scream or fall completely to pieces, and the room was an utter wreck. Though she was a Weasley, he had his doubts it looked like this all the time.
"Get out of my home," Ginny ground out. "You were given your invitation and no other leave to be here. You can't just break into places whenever you-"
She recoiled as he reached toward her and he raised an eyebrow. "A little unsettled, are we?" he asked, plucking a scrap of a photograph from her shoulder.
He'd come to tell her to forget dinner, or rather, to talk her into canceling. The papers would be much kinder to her than to him, he thought, although the press's recent resurgence of Potter-worship certainly made things harder for both Draco and the little Weasley.
But now that she was standing here in front of him in, for Merlin's sakes, a pair of torn-up denims far too large for her and a tee-shirt edging up on too small, her hair escaping its tie and falling down around her face, he was having a hard time insisting she do anything but change clothes.
And it was all back to the vulnerable. He saw the piles of clothes, some of them feminine and frilly, a few Quidditch jumpers with Harry's name and number stitched to the back.
"Are we housecleaning or reminiscing?" he looked down at her and asked, his tone of voice suggesting either was equally distasteful.
Her midriff was showing. Bloody nuisance.
Ginny followed his cool quicksilver glance and crossed her arms over her stomach, feeling sick at heart and utterly beaten. "Housecleaning," she bit out. "What in the hell do you want, Malfoy? Could you not go one day without making my day hellish? Have it out and have done with it, for I've no patience to spare for you." And, she thought, she didn't have enough strength to make it through this visit if it lasted much longer.
Standing in a room with Malfoy among the things that were hers and Harry's made her feel absolutely crazy.
"I came to give you the chance to change your mind," he said, but his tone was absent as he wandered around the room and made himself insanely at home, picking up clothes with two fingers and shifting them to look at her furniture, a few books on planning a traditional wizarding wedding, and the pictures. Draco saw Potter in a few of those pictures and wondered what, precisely, had brought on such a tantrum if she'd been the one to leave him.
Ginny smacked a string of pearls out of his hand, somehow satisfied at the ugly clattering noise they made when they hit the wall. "I'm not changing my mind," she said, loving the rage he was banking in her, loving how it could burn everything else down and clean it up.
This was good.
"If you think for one moment you can make me back down by your presence alone, you're wrong. And if you think poking through my things and making snide insinuations is going to make me be the bad guy and cancel, you're wrong." She pushed her hair out of her eyes and succeeded in making more strands fall from her haphazard bun. "Now get the hell out of my house," she said, pointing at the front door. "And don't come back until you're bloody well invited."
It was a good speech. Or she thought it was.
But he didn't move toward the door.
He moved toward her instead, and this time when he reached for her, she didn't flinch. He put his fingertips under her chin and forced her to look him in the eye. "What is it you think you're doing, princess?" he asked, and when she started to step back, he stilled her with one hand on her bare waist. She was radiating heat, and he resisted the urge to slide his hand to her back, sink into that warmth. Merely a physical reaction, of course, but he wasn't about to give into it.
"I asked you to get out of my home. In fact, I asked you not to come in at all." She kept her voice steady but her eyes moved down and away, her eyelashes shielding her from his stare.
"You came to me first," he said, ducking his head so his lips grazed her cheekbone and settled above her ear, his breath hot and suddenly short. "I'd ask you to keep that in mind."
She smelled of her office, of paperwork and ink, but she smelled of some sort of lemon cleaner, and underneath it all, a perfume or a shampoo, something lingering under all of it.
And not for the first time, he wondered what Potter had done to screw things up with this one.
He let her go abruptly, stepping back and flexing his fingers to forget the feel of her. But the look of her-eyes half-closed, lips parted, just on the edge, the brink between anger and something else-would stay with him for quite some time.
"Expect me on Thursday," he said. "And I don't believe in being late."
She didn't let out the sob until the door had shut behind him.