Chapter 3: The Tease
The night became a slow, granular torture. Harry lay rigid on his sliver of mattress, the space between him and Ginny now a charged void. Her casual touch had branded him. He could still feel the ghostly impression of her breast against his arm, a soft, maddening weight that seemed to linger in the darkness.
Hermione’s breathing had eventually evened out into sleep, but hers was the tense, shallow rhythm of someone forcing themselves into oblivion. Ginny, between them, slept with the deep, untroubled cadence of the victorious.
Hours oozed by. The faint luminescence of a pre-dawn sky began to bleed around the edges of the curtains, painting the room in shades of deep grey. Harry’s eyes were raw from staring at the ceiling. Every muscle ached from stillness. A different, more urgent ache had settled insistently in his groin, a relentless throbbing that pulsed in time with his heartbeat. He was painfully hard, the fabric of his jeans a cruel constriction. He willed it away, thought of Quidditch plays, of dusty Dursley cupboards, of anything cold and unfeeling. It was no use. His body was a traitor, hyper-aware of the young woman sleeping inches away.
He heard it before he felt it: a soft, sighing breath that wasn’t sleepy. Ginny stirred.
She stretched, a long, sinuous movement that made the fused bed frame creak. Her foot brushed his leg. He froze.
“Mmm,” she murmured, a sound of waking. She rolled onto her side, facing him. In the dim grey light, he could see the outline of her face, the dark pools of her eyes. She was awake. Watching him.
“Harry?” Her voice was a sleep-roughened whisper, intimate in the shared dark.
He couldn’t speak. He gave a slight, stiff nod.
“I need to pee,” she said, as casually as if they were discussing the weather.
He lay there, stupidly. The path to the door was around the foot of the massive bed, a clear route.
She didn’t take it.
Instead, she pushed herself up on one elbow. Then, with a fluid, deliberate motion, she swung one leg over his waist.
He sucked in a breath. She was straddling him, not sitting, but using him as an obstacle to climb across. Her knees pressed into the mattress on either side of his hips. The thin, worn cotton of her sleep shorts brushed against the denim covering his erection. A jolt of electric sensation shot through him, so intense he saw stars.
“Ginny—” he choked out.
“Shhh, you’ll wake Hermione,” she whispered, her face now above his. Her camisole had twisted. The neckline gaped open, a yawning window of shadow. He couldn’t look away. In the grey light, he saw the smooth, freckled expanse of her chest, the elegant lines of her collarbones. The curves of her small breasts were pushed together by her position, creating a deep, tantalizing valley. The fabric trembled with her slightest movement, threatening to slip entirely, to reveal the tight peaks he’d dreamed of. They were right there. A centimeter of fabric was all that stood between him and the sight he craved.
She paused, feeling him tense beneath her. A knowing, sleepy smile touched her lips. She shifted her weight, leaning forward to brace a hand on the mattress by his head. The movement made her camisole swing forward. For a breathtaking second, he was certain he would see everything. The shadow deepened, the shape became more defined, but the ultimate revelation remained cruelly hidden.
Then she moved again, sliding her other leg over him. As she did, her backside, rounded and firm in the shorts, pressed down against the hard ridge of his cock. It was not an accident. She settled her weight for a fraction of a second, a warm, perfect pressure that made him bite his own tongue to keep from groaning.
Then she was past, kneeling on the other side of him, between him and the edge of the bed. She glanced back over her shoulder, her hair a dark cascade. “Comfy?” she breathed, the tease dripping from the word.
She slipped off the bed and padded silently to the door, leaving it slightly ajar as she disappeared into the hall.
Harry lay in a state of shattered shock. The pressure where she had sat burned into him. His cock ached, a blunt, furious demand. Shame followed hot on its heels, a sickening wave. He had promised Molly. He was in bed with two of his best friends. And his body was reacting like a live wire.
He heard the toilet flush, the soft pad of returning footsteps. He screwed his eyes shut, pretending sleep. It was a pathetic, transparent ruse.
The door clicked shut. She didn’t go around.
This time, she approached from his side of the bed. He felt the dip of the mattress as she knelt on it. She was going to climb over him again. He kept his eyes closed, his breathing deliberately slow, a poor pantomime of slumber.
He felt her hover. Smelled the clean, sleep-warm scent of her skin.
Instead of climbing, she lay down. Not in her middle spot, but directly beside him, on her side, facing him. Her body aligned with his. Her knee came up, nudging between his thighs. Her arm draped over his waist.
Her lips were close to his ear. “You’re a terrible faker, Potter,” she whispered, her voice a velvet stroke in the dark.
Her hand, resting on his stomach, slid lower, fingers splaying. They stopped just above the waistband of his jeans, a hair’s breadth from where he was straining against the zipper. Heat radiated from her palm.
On her other side, Hermione let out a small, distressed sound in her sleep and turned over, her back a rigid line.
Ginny went still. Her hand didn’t move away. Her breath was warm on Harry’s neck. He dared to open his eyes.
Her face was so close their noses almost touched. Her expression was unreadable in the gloom—part challenge, part curiosity, part something softer he couldn’t name. Her gaze flicked down to his mouth, then back up to his eyes.
The moment stretched, fragile and immense. The entire world was the heat of her body, the weight of her hand, the forbidden territory under her fingertips. The promise he’d made felt like a thin, fraying thread.
Very slowly, watching his face for any reaction, Ginny’s pinky finger dipped below his waistband, touching the burning skin of his lower abdomen.
Harry stopped breathing.
A floorboard creaked loudly somewhere else in the Burrow.
The spell shattered. Ginny withdrew her hand, rolled away in one smooth motion, returning to the center of the bed with a quiet, rustling sigh. She pulled the blanket up to her shoulders, presenting him with the unassailable wall of her back.
Harry exhaled a shuddering breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. The throbbing in his groin was now a dull, persistent agony. The first true rays of dawn, thin and sharp as blades, sliced through the gap in the curtains, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air over the fused bed. They fell across Hermione’s hunched form, across the delicate curve of Ginny’s shoulder, and across Harry’s wide, guilty eyes, staring into a day that had arrived far too soon.