Desideratum
Lavender likes to pretend that she can see the future. There is a security in meaningless clumps of tea leaves; in looking back and saying that she knew it all along.
She isn't sure how she got here.
Small hands with chipped blue fingernails are everywhere at once, in her hair, running down her back, tracing her spine. Lips, warm and pink and little, kiss her own lips, cheeks, eyelids, wherever they can find skin in this forgotten closet on the seventh floor.
Cho is pretty. She is not beautiful, breathtaking, nor bewitching. That is all that Lavender requires.
A sharp edge of panelling presses into her back, but she merely shifts, bringing the small girl closer, sliding her fingers around Cho's waist, slipping them under her shirt. Cho is like an ocean, all cool and supple and salt tears; she whimpers against Lavender's neck. It seems to be a good thing, this time.
Sometimes Cho says things while they're in their closet. Lavender wonders if she's speaking to ghosts, if they're whispering back and if it's only she, Lavender, who doesn't hear their hazy responses. She never asks because she thinks she already knows.
Lavender isn't sure if she ever breathes when they are together.
They were found, once, and the memory is so faint now that Lavender doesn't remember when, or how, or who. All she remembers is Cho's delicate hand scraping along the shelf behind her head, Cho's delicate knee rubbing along her inner thigh, Cho's delicate voice and her wand and obliviate.
She doesn't remember speaking, but Cho had looked up at her through blue-tinted eyelashes and whispered, "You know we can't..."
And Lavender had swallowed and nodded and said "I know" and she had known, then, that whatever Neptune had foretold about the month of February was wrong.
Lavender pretends that she can see the future. There is a security in saying, when Cho walks away, that she knew it all along.