Part Eight
The next week was a blur of unanswered owls, pathetic drinking, and then complete ignorance of the world beyond my office and the hallway in my flat. I worked without noticing. I ate without tasting. I slept without quite sleeping.
Ginny came home three days before the wedding, in a fit to triple-check everything you had already prepared while she had been helping her brother and his wife. She left me alone. I was grateful to her.
I was kicked out of my flat the night before the wedding so that we would sleep separately and not see each other again until the vows were to be said. It was a silly idea to me, but I didn't care very much until I realized I was to be staying with Ron. At your flat. And you would be staying with Ginny at mine.
It was a blessing that there would be much drinking involved that night, as it was a stag party. In fact, it was a stag party organized by Ron, who I sometimes think should be canonized as the patron saint of all such intoxicating beverages.
I don't know how I looked at him that night. I don't know how I looked at him and smiled and laughed and, actually, had fun with him. Maybe it was the alcohol, after all. It was relatively easy to put you out of my mind that night, so distracted was I by the friends that joined us. Hell, I was distracted enough by keeping track of where we were, as we wandered from pub to pub obnoxiously. But any time I was left alone for more than a minute, there you were. And with every drink I had, you became more and more vivid.
However, I made it through. Even when Ron started babbling about you, I held my calm. I suffered those feelings of mine in silence. I nodded along and I was his best friend. It didn't matter how I betrayed him, somehow. It didn't mean I didn't love him. And yeah, it's shitty, but why was it so bad if he didn't know, would never know? It's not like you even wanted to know. It's not like you were trying desperately to hold on to every damn thing we could have had. No, it was a secret we would share until we met our ends.
Walking back to your nearby flat, too drunk to apparate or even walk properly, we were laughing hysterically at who knows what. We had left George, Bill, Percy, Charlie, Neville, Dean, and Seamus back at the dance club to find something to eat. Oh, that's right. We were laughing at the fact we had no recollection of eating at all, but the receipt to the restaurant on the corner begged to differ. Well, that's kind of amusing.
We kept stumbling into each other as we walked. Every five minutes he would check his pockets for his key. That, too, was amusing. With the exception of being completely pissed, it felt like old times again when he and I would hang out and laugh at the most ridiculous things and enjoy the fact that we were probably the only two people who understood.
A pause in our inebriated laughter had me saying, "Thank fuck the wedding isn't 'til sunset."
He snorted in his laughter and stopped walking for a moment. "Ginny'd kill us if you fell over while she was walking down the aisle."
"Maybe that's why she didn't want it any earlier," I said, laughing with him. "Guess she didn't want blood stains on the dress."
His laughter died suddenly but he didn't continue walking. He stared off as if in thought for a moment, looking quite drunk and pained. "You know," he said after a few moments. "Maybe it's time for me to ask Hermione to marry me. I think she'd like that."
And my laughter died, too. I could blame it on the alcohol, but a sudden urge to be sick came over me. I didn't respond to him. I couldn't. I kept seeing visions of you in a white dress, walking down an aisle toward the wrong man. My stomach lurched and I leaned against the wall of a blurry, nameless building to react to the feelings my best friend's simple, natural thought had given me.
Ron laughed, unknowing, and when I could react no more, he pulled my weak arm around his shoulders and led me clumsily to his flat. Your flat. My hell.