Drive
1
By Libertine
Disclaimer: All characters and places belong to J.K.Rowling and Warner Bros.
Author's Notes: Sections of 1 by Ivy Blossom
Drive
1
By Libertine
Ginny is sitting in the passenger seat of her father’s flying automobile and Pansy is driving. Pansy drives like this: one elbow out the rolled-down window, three fingers on the wheel, cigarette caught in the corner of her mouth, defying gravity. Her hair is blonde and short and is trapped under the cap she wears backwards, because she doesn’t like fly-aways, she doesn’t like it when things are coming undone.
The wind is cold out but Ginny doesn’t mind. Eventually she can pull a blanket out from the back seat and huddle inside it, and Pansy never gets cold. Even in the winter, even with bare feet against stone floors. It’s dark and Ginny isn’t sure how Pansy can see where she’s going, but trusts that she can. She watches Pansy’s foot shift against the accelerator, and tries not to think about what her father will say when he finds out she’s taken the car.
Arthur Weasley doesn’t know about Pansy. He knows about Neville and Colin and Harry, but Pansy’s never been the subject of Weasley dinner-table discussion, Pansy’s not something Ron would dare to rag her about in front of their parents. Because he’s a little scared of Pansy, scared of Pansy and Ginny, Pansy-and-Ginny - you can hear him hyphenating it when he speaks, like even in language they’re bound up somehow in each other. Ron doesn’t understand them, never has and never will, because Ginny doesn’t have the patience or desire to explain.
Ginny doesn’t understand Pansy-and-Ginny either, truth be told.
She understands bits of it, admittedly. She understood, for instance, that when she said to Pansy tonight: ‘I want to go for a drive,’ that Pansy’s answer wasn’t going to be a question, it wasn’t going to be, ‘Why?’ or ‘How?’ - she understood that Pansy would simply nod and smile and tuck an errant strand of Ginny’s hair behind her ear and say, ‘Sure, baby. Whatever you want,’ like hotwiring the car would be the easiest thing in the world.
Ginny understands Pansy’s body, too. Or has learnt to over time. She’s learnt that they aren’t so different, really, in spite of her freckles and Pansy’s paleness, her red hair (down there, too) and Pansy’s blonde fluff. What makes Pansy cry is exactly the same as what makes Ginny cry: a tongue and lips under the blankets, and a finger, sometimes, curling.
But for the moment it’s just cold air, a need for motion, the feel of vinyl under her legs and the plastic dashboard clinging to her fingers. She watches Pansy push in the stick shift and shivers. In her mind that stick shift is Ginny herself, it’s her body, her breasts Pansy strokes her thumb over. And that roar of the engine is the pleased purr unraveling from the back of her throat.
She’s heard people talk of the car as the womb, listened in on those insensible conversations of Hermione’s - some days it’s politics, other days it’s magic, yet other days it’s philosophy: what makes us tick, what motivates us. The car is a womb, Hermione says, because you’re safe inside it, you’re trapped in from the outdoors like you’d never be on a broom. Inside the car you’re safe, you’re safe and it feels like home.
Only the windows are open, the air is frosting in on them, and Ginny doesn’t think the car is a womb right now. The car is dangerous, the car is a ton of air-borne metal, it is all awkward twists and turns and split-second decisions - stop, start, fast, slow - and it makes Ginny sweat a little, the way Pansy controls it so easily, like she’d been born to it, like she’d grown up with this intuitive knowledge of automobiles.
Not to mention an intuitive knowledge of Ginny, too. That expression on Pansy’s face now is the same intense look she gets when she runs her hand along Ginny’s stomach, grazes the tips of her fingers along Ginny’s inner thighs: concentrated, passionate. Not reckless, though. Not reckless because she cares, the same way Ginny cares. Ginny sees Pansy’s hand dither over the stick shift, and she is thinking: You could be driving me, right now.
Drive. Ginny peers out the open window and down over the city, quiet from this distance up. There is no moon tonight. All there is is this limitless blackness punctuated below by a train of lights, and if she leans out the window slightly, squints up her eyes, they all blur together in step with the machine-rumble that echoes through the vinyl seat covers. Dazzling. When she closes her eyes the stars slither up underneath her lids the way they do on the brink of orgasm, and briefly she tastes Pansy’s skin against the rough of her tongue.