1) The cold had addled his brains.

Draco Malfoy had not expected to be doing what he was, but he was anyway, and he thought that he was very confused.

It had started months ago, four months ago, when the littlest Weasley, the one he’d only noticed to use as ammunition, stormed up to him and shoved him into a broom closet.

Draco had shouted in shock and no little pain, clattering back into a mess of mops, his foot landing in a bucket. The girl followed him in, closed the door behind her, and proceeded to grab his head, dragging it down to her level.

After his brains had been snogged away for nearly half an hour, she finally drew back with one last kiss and an enigmatic smile, and walked away, leaving him alone and very confused, foot still in the bucket.

~*~*~

2) It was a really pretty night.

Draco had shaken it off, emerged very discreetly, and went about business as usual, with one exception: he noticed the littlest Weasley.

So, when she approached him suddenly one afternoon behind the Quidditch changing rooms and shoved him against the wall to kiss him fiercely, he wasn’t as shocked as he’d been last time.

This time, he kissed back even more eagerly, and when she started to leave, he almost snatched her sleeve and pulled her back, but thought better of it.

~*~*~

3) She had incredibly long eyelashes.

The third time was in the kitchens, late at night. She had walked deliberately up to him, and when he’d ignored her, she scowled and caught his chin to yank him forward against her. This time, he was ready: he caught her waist and swung her against the wall, and he took control.

The only problem was, now he was no longer sure of what to do. He just kept on snogging her: not only because he enjoyed it quite a bit, but also because he was trying to delay having to speak to her.

She pushed him off her after a while, and glared at him very fiercely. Draco scowled right back, more confused than ever, and when she slapped him and stalked off, he very slowly picked up a mug and dropped it on the floor, just to hear it crash.

~*~*~

4) She could do that wiggling thing.

Draco glared at Ginny discreetly all through breakfast, but when he was done eating, he swept away, not caring that she stared forlornly after him.

He was pulling a book out of a shelf in the library, when she appeared in front of him and grabbed his head, fingers sliding through his hair. When Draco resisted, she did a very odd wiggling motion that he figured would excuse him in any court of law.

~*~*~

5) And the thing with her tongue.

Not a day later, she picked a loud fight with some other student in the Great Hall and got detention from Snape.

It happened to be when Draco was supervising detention (the Potions professor often delegated detentions to his Slytherin Prefects). He didn’t comment on this, merely raised an eyebrow to himself and ate an apple.

When he saw her in detention (along with two other Gryffindors and a Hufflepuff), he said hello without thinking, and that night, he found her waiting in front of a passage he regularly used.

“Hello,” she said, and then practically attacked him, to the point that when she left, Draco was forced to lean against the wall and breathe very slowly for ten minutes before he started walking again.

~*~*~

6) Strange things happened to him when they were alone together.

Things continued that way for a few weeks. Without even realizing it, Draco started acknowledging Ginny more and more, nodding in the hallways, and even holding short conversations here and there. After an unfortunate incident involving flirting with Elaine Protten, and then not being ambushed for a week, Draco stopped that too. When, at the end of the week, he had walked up to Ginny in the hallway out of nowhere and followed her to her class, chatting innocently, he was rewarded with another one of those kisses that left him letting something other than his legs support his weight and having rather inappropriate daydreams.

If talking got him that, then what about hand-holding?

He was very pleased to find out.

~*~*~

7) Her hair seemed carrot-orange at times, but then he would blink and it was titian.

Draco was very disturbed to realize one day that he was dating Ginny Weasley, had been for more than a month, and the whole school knew about it. Upon learning this at breakfast, he stood up, stormed over to the Gryffindor table, grabbed her hand without a word, and yanked her out of the room.

Ginny put her hands on her hips, scowling. “I was eating toast.”

“Yeah, you love toast, and you tricked me!” Draco snapped, or more accurately yelled, not making much sense.

Ginny blinked up at him, and then smiled widely. She leaned up and kissed him very, very softly. Draco stayed perfectly still, willing himself not to respond, and it almost worked.

“Yeah, I guess I did, huh?”

~*~*~

8) Her freckles really weren’t that bad.

The next morning, Ginny was waiting for Draco outside the Great Hall. She snatched his hand up and led him off to a broom closet, and kissed him quite a bit. Draco tried to resist, but he was dismayed to learn that now the touch of her hand on the back of his neck caused him to shiver, and her lips on the same place made him melt.

They ended up talking for several hours.

~*~*~

9) It would make her brother very, very angry - again.

Ronald Weasley came after Draco one day, long after most of the school knew – habitually oblivious as usual, glaring and shouting, and punching Draco in the nose. Draco would never pass up the opportunity to fight with a Weasley boy, and he threw himself into it as well, with glee.

He was rather surprised by how apologetic and caring Ginny was, when she healed his broken nose and the bruises on his knuckles, not to mention the fact that she had visited him, not her brother. It was almost nice, and somehow he didn’t quite have the heart to be nasty back.

~*~*~

10) He wasn’t thinking with his brain

Draco was smart enough to ask Ginny to the (now yearly) Yule Ball on November 20th (they had to move it up because of the holidays), although he was rather disappointed that she hadn’t done that wiggling thing again. But he’d gotten under her shirt briefly, and she’d done something involving her tongue and his ear that he was pretty sure melted his bone marrow, and that was more than worth it.

Even if Pansy had shouted at him for nearly an hour, and he’d gotten a disapproving (to put it lightly) letter from his father.

She might have expected that such things would make him want to break things off, because she came out and took a school broom up to join him during his solitary Quidditch practice, and kissed him midair, which was very enjoyable. As was her criticism of his technique, and the ensuing battle of wits.

~*~*~

11) She had probably cursed him and this was a medication-induced dream.

He grew more and more worried as Christmas approached, and he debated on the merits of gift-giving. At first, he had thought that the whole relationship thing was a sham, and that Ginny was basically just leading him around by his… private bits, for the hell of it. But after his fight with Ron – and her reaction to it – he’d changed his mind.

Now, he was going on the theory that she was using some odd sort of barter system: the more he acted like her boyfriend – or, more accurately, the more he became her boyfriend – the farther she let him get with her.

Draco wasn’t really sure which was more surprising: that Ginny was basically trading her body out in exchange for… well, him; or that he was so hooked on her that, despite knowing what was going on, he went along with it anyway.

He had asked her to the Yule Ball…

Draco ended up buying Ginny a new pair of dress robes, returning them, and getting her a broomstick. Then he changed his mind again, and tried to break up with her on the day he left to go home. She was staying at the castle over the holidays.

Ginny looked unsurprised, nodded, and mentioned that she might just change her mind about not going out on a date with Justin Finch-Fletchley, in that case. He was, she remarked, a very nice guy.

For pretty much the first time, Draco initiated the kissing, and didn’t let her go until he was quite convinced that she’d forgotten all about Justin’s eyes.

Then he shoved the wrapped broom into her stomach, muttered “Merry Christmas,” bitterly, and stalked off.

She sent him his present in the mail, carried by three owls. It was a big warm blanket, silver and blue, which she’d apparently made herself.

~*~*~

12) She’d woven a charm into the bloody warm thing.

He arrived back at the castle on a cold, clear night, and he and Ginny went up to the Astronomy tower. And it was there, exactly four months after she had first shoved him in a broom closet, that Draco found himself sitting against the castle wall, Ginny Weasley curled up in his lap with her head on his shoulder, and a blanket she’d made over their backs, staring at the stars. His arm was also around her back, and they hadn’t done anything inappropriate yet.

Draco had felt bitter and angry earlier, and he’d felt confused and he’d been quite simply bowled over, but it was still no excuse for what happened next.

“I love you,” he whispered into her hair, and Ginny snuggled a little closer.

“I know,” she said, warm breath puffing on his collarbone, “I love you too.”

~*~*~

13) She made him do it. It was all her fault.

After all, she started it.