"I'll see you then."

They go for a walk and she shyly asks if she should write her parents maybe soon?

"- I should probably feel out mine, first, my father can be prickly if he decides he's going to be -"

Nod, nod. "I don't think mine will have any objections so that makes sense." She smiles up at him.

He kisses her. 

She is not drunk so she doesn't do anything too terribly inadvisable. Standing up on tiptoe and kissing back happily is not too terribly inadvisable, nor making happy little noises!

Those things are not frightening at all!

He finds Fredrick and casts half a dozen charms for secrecy and - "do you think I should marry Jocosa Smith?"

"Are you serious?"

"What, are you planning to never get married?"

"Don't know. Probably."

"Well, I can't never get married."

"If she knew the truth would she want to marry you?"

"...no."

"So if you have to marry someone marry someone who'd answer yes. Even if you can't ever tell them, answer someone who would still go ahead if you did -"

"There might not be any girls like that."

"You're cheating on her. You do realize that, right? That is the thing you are doing. It occurs to me you might've mentally applied the term to Michael's dramas and not generalized successfully but that is the word for the thing you are doing. She is feeling terribly grateful you didn't take advantage before marriage and you. Are. Cheating on her."

"I'm not trying to hurt people I'm just trying to - stay safe, keep the pieces together, I should never have -"

"You were in a bind. I love you. I don't think you're a bad person. But don't marry the poor girl. Tell your father in a way that makes him have objections."

That isn't very difficult. It involves some lying and lots of mentions of, of course, Fredrick's family.

He gets an owl and leaves the Slytherin table visibly upset, a few days later, and when he sees Jocosa he hugs her and cries and tells her that Finis is being worse than a bit prickly over it and refuses to entertain any such match at all.

She cries too. ...Bawls. Eventually flees to do so less on-Timothy.

His crying is not insincere. She was nice, and if he wanted girls the right way then when she'd said that at the ball his heart would have leapt and he'd have had difficulty refusing her for an entirely different reason and now he'd be itching to marry her so he could - 

- it could have just been that way, it would have been so easy - 

He takes abundant precautions and meets his cousin twice a week and finds to his delight that it's entirely different without the Imperius and he has to get married but it can wait a few years...

Jocosa is mopey for the rest of the term.

Karen's parents owl her to tell her that she will have a baby sibling in August.

Minor talks the merpeople into not attacking accidental trespassers on the lake; he's very proud of himself. Michael's two girlfriends fall in love with each other but want to keep using him for cover; he finds this very frustrating. The seventh-years bury themselves in studying for their N.E.W.T.s. Theodore declines to study at all for his O.W.Ls, and only passes three of them; he wants to leave Hogwarts early and go work on a dragon reserve, and Hogwarts is inclined to accommodate this. 

Timothy can't exactly have Fredrick over but it'd be a shame not to see him all summer. "Polyjuice?"

"And here I was going to suggest you just occasionally visit London."

"My brothers would all want to come along and it'd be suspicious to keep refusing."