Ginny paused outside the door to the Room of Requirement and chewed her bottom lip. She’d been a little surprised to be awoken by the insistent tapping of an owl outside her dorm window so early in the morning – it wasn’t even quite light outside – but that was nothing to her surprise when she’d recognized her brother’s untidy scrawl on the parchment asking her to meet him straight away.
She took a steadying breath and slipped into the room, casting a quick locking spell as she entered. She smiled to herself as she noticed how vastly different the room looked in comparison to the night before. The big bed on which she’d played with her lovers and her brother was gone, a low table surrounded by a squashy sofa and arm chair in its place. Ron stood on the far side of the room, one foot propped on a window box as he looked out onto the school grounds, watching the pink and orange glow of the slowing rising sun.

“What do you want, Ron?” yawned Ginny. “It’s still so early and we were all out late last night.”

Ron turned and motioned toward the sofa, willing Ginny to sit there, as he seated himself in the arm chair and fixed his eyes nervously on her face.

“I wanted to talk to you about Hermione,” he began hesitantly, color creeping into his cheeks, “and about you, well, about the two of you. I thought maybe you could tell me, you know, what I should do when I’m alone with her. When getting things started is up to me.”

“You’re kidding, right? Hasn’t Dad given you “the talk” yet?”

Ron frowned slightly and quirked up an eyebrow. “Well, yeah, I guess. He actually talked to me and Harry at the Burrow, this past summer, the night before Harry’s birthday. I think Harry was kind of touched Dad included him, I mean, who’d want to hear about sex from Harry’s Uncle Vernon, but it was still a horrible experience. Dad kept saying stuff like ‘I know you boys are getting old enough to experience feelings that could be a bit embarrassing if they popped up at the wrong time’ and assuring us it was ‘perfectly okay to take the problem in hand, rather than to rush into something with a girl before you’re sure she’s the right one for you.’ It was dead embarrassing, particularly since Harry and I had been taking each other’s problems in hand for well over a year.” Ron paused, then he laughed, “Dad would do a knut if he’d known he was giving Harry how-to lessons for buggering his own daughter.”

Ginny threw a pillow off the sofa at Ron’s head before he could continue with that particular line of thought.

“But seriously, Gin, Dad told me and Harry all about the mechanics of sex – you know, Tab A goes into Slot B – but he didn’t tell us a thing that would help us get a girls pants off in the first place so we try out the tabs and slots.”

“Maybe Mum should have talked to you,” Ginny teased, and Ron blanched. “She cornered me and Hermione three days before we came back to school. Hermione had already had ‘the talk” from her parents, Mum and Dad together, but her parents are dentists you know, and I don’t think they really told her much of anything useful. From what she told me, it was all pretty clinical and made it sound like something you would really only want to try if you were hoping to produce a child.”

“Mum was really good about it though, and even though she managed to cover the ‘mechanics’ as you called it, she was pretty candid about certain activities make you feel and how we could expect our bodies to react to them. Then she gave us this book about sex, with pictures and everything, to familiarize us better with a wizard’s body. It was called The Modern Witch’s Guide, or something like that. Hermione has it now. But Mum told us we were to study it carefully, but not to plan on taking any tests on what we’d learned until well after seventh year.”

“That’s great, Gin, but it doesn’t help me one sodding bit. You know exactly how to please Hermione. I’ve watched you do it, and more importantly, you obviously know how to get her out of her clothes, so tell me what to do!”

“Oh!” Ginny was surprised Ron’s nerve at asking her so directly, “Well, umm, let me think a minute. Our first time was sort of unintentional.