Lavhander @lavhandoll - Tumblr Blog

SECOND CHANCES

congressman barnes x female med resident! reader

summary. one stolen night with congressman barnes leaves you with more than memories: a positive test and a man who's determined to prove he's worth a second chance.

word count. 19.5k warnings. age gap, accidental pregnancy, smut, MDNI, 18+, angst, bucky is an asshole for a second, pregnancy hormones, protected and unprotected pnv, pregnancy sex, oral (f receiving), no use of y/n. notes. reader is said to have a blocked lactation duct and one of the treatment options is manual suction. it’s a little embellished for plot.

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This is not your scene. The chandelier must have cost a fortune just to hang there and look pretty. You know this because you spent the better part of your first ten minutes staring up at it with your mouth slightly open, trying to calculate how many months of your salary it would take to even come close. You stopped at four years because it was getting depressing. Sarah had promised you open bar and good food. She had failed to mention that you’d feel like a fraud the entire time. “You look fine,” Sarah had said this evening, watching you smooth down the front of your dress in the mirror of her condo. You had gone back and forth for longer than you’d like to admit. The dress is nice. It’s the kind of nice where you’d wear it to a birthday dinner, maybe a date somewhere with cloth napkins. It is not, by any stretch, gala nice. The other women in this room are in floor-length gowns with jewellery that probably has names, and here you are in a midi dress off a sale rack. “You’re a guest of a congressman’s daughter,” She’d reminded you, fixing her own earring. “Nobody’s gonna care.” Nobody might care, but you sure do notice. There’s an ease to the way these people move around each other. There’s air kissing, the laughing at things that aren’t funny, the way they hold their champagne glasses by the stem like it’s second nature. You hold yours like you’re scared of dropping it, which you are, because you’re fairly certain the glasses alone are worth more than your monthly metro card. Still. Free champagne. That part, at least, Sarah had been right about. You’ve had two glasses and are working steadily on your third, which is making the whole scene considerably more bearable. The food is also ungodly good. You had swiped four of the little crab toast thingies off a passing tray and felt zero shame about it. You were coming off a forty-eight hour shift two days ago. You deserved the crab toasts. Sarah, for her part, has completely abandoned you. Her father is a congressman from Virginia and this is his world, so she knows everyone in a twenty foot radius of wherever she stands. It hadn’t taken long before she was absorbed into a circle of people you didn’t know.

She’d shot you an apologetic look over someone’s shoulder, and you’d waved her off.

You’re fine. You’re a grown adult. You can stand by the tall cocktail table near the windows and people-watch by yourself like a normal person.

The problem with people-watching, as it turns out, is that occasionally the people watch back.

He’s been drifting in your periphery for a few minutes now. You clocked him when he walked in, because he’s the kind of man you can’t not clock when he walks into a room.

Easy forties, maybe pushing further than that, with dark hair and the kind of jaw that belongs on something carved out of stone. He’s in a suit that fits him the way suits are supposed to fit, which is to say, perfectly. There’s a slight silver threading through the dark at his temples. His left arm is gloved, metal just barely visible at the cuff. You know who he is, vaguely. Congressman James Barnes. Before that, the Winter Soldier. You’ve seen him on the news twice and found him credible both times, which is not something you say lightly. Not that this is relevant. You’re just noting that he’s across the room. That’s it. Just noting.

What is relevant, however, is the man currently sidling up next to you, because the man currently sidling up next to you has had considerably more of the open bar than you have, and he smells like it. “Lovely evening,” he says, in the way that people say things when they are not actually talking about the evening. You give him the polite smile. The one that says I see you, and I’m too tired to be rude. “It is.” “You here with anyone?” “My friend,” you answer, with a pointed glance across the room in Sarah’s general direction. “She’s just over there.” He follows your gaze, disinterested, and then looks back at you. He introduces himself as something, and you honestly don’t catch it because your brain has already filed him under do not engage. He’s maybe mid-fifties, the kind of man who introduces himself at parties by his job title, and his eyes haven’t quite been at eye level this whole conversation. “What do you do?” “I’m in medicine,” you say, keeping it deliberately vague. In your experience, the vague answer is the one that ends conversations faster. It does not, in this case, end the conversation. In fact, it seems to invite more of it. His hand lands on the cocktail table next to yours, he leans in like you’d asked him to, and the smell gets considerably worse. “Beautiful and smart,” he says. “That’s dangerous.” Gag.

“Mm,” you say, which is not agreement, but which he takes as agreement. His shoulder shifts incrementally closer to yours, and your brain is already doing the math. How do you extract yourself from this without making a scene, because making a scene at a congressman’s fundraiser gala, at which you are a guest of a congressman’s daughter, feels inadvisable at best and catastrophic at worst. You can’t exactly do what you’d do at a regular bar, which would be to simply say not interested and walk away, because this is not a regular bar and these are not regular people and you’re suddenly very aware that the champagne glass you’re holding probably costs two hundred dollars. The man leans in further. “Can I get you a drink?” “I have one,” you say, lifting your glass, which is clearly almost empty, which he also clearly notices. “Let me get you another, then.” And that is when, for the second time tonight, you make eye contact with Congressman Barnes. He’s a little closer now, not by much though. He’s watching the scene with an expression that you can’t quite place. It’s not pity, exactly. Not amusement either. It’s more like someone who has correctly identified a problem and is turning over how to address it. You do the only thing that seems sane to you in this moment. You hold his gaze, and your expression says, if you speak even one word of fluent English right now I will owe you forever. He receives it. You can tell by the slight shift in his posture, the barely perceptible nod. Then he’s making his way over, like he’s just wandering and it happens to be in your direction. “Sorry,” he says, stopping at your side. Not to the drunk man. To you. Like he’s the one who’s late. “Got caught up.”

His voice is … nice. A lot different from TV. The drunk man recalibrates visibly. He looks at Congressman Barnes, recognises him the same way you did. There’s that small double-take of oh, him, and suddenly the lean is gone, the arm is pulled back, the proximity becomes appropriate. “Congressman,” the man says, in a completely different register than the one he’d been using on you. “Didn’t realize you two—” “Good to see you.” Congressman Barnes’ voice is perfectly pleasant, perfectly even. He extends his hand and the drunk man shakes it, quietly excuses himself to the bar, which is where he should have stayed to begin with. “Thank you,” you say, once he’s out of earshot. “I really didn’t want to make a thing of it.” “I could tell.” His eyes are blue. A shade darker than you’d expected, up close. “He giving you trouble for long?” “Long enough.” You take a sip of your champagne to have something to do with your hands. “I’m not really sure of the etiquette for telling a middle-aged man to leave you alone at a formal event.” “Usually just telling him works.” The corner of his mouth pulls up, barely. “But I get it.” He reaches past you for the appetizer that a passing server is offering, takes one of the small bruschetta thingies, and doesn’t immediately move away.

You notice that. He doesn’t immediately move away. “You’re Sarah’s friend,” he says. It’s not really a question. “Jackson’s daughter.” “Yeah.” You blink. “How’d you—” “He mentioned his daughter was bringing someone tonight.” A small lift of a shoulder. “I know Richard well. He’s a good man.” “He is,” you agree, which is true, having met Sarah’s father a grand total of three times. “She didn’t warn me that good meant—” you gesture vaguely at the chandelier, the room, the twelve-piece orchestra, “—all this.” His face looks like he found that funny, but he also looks like he doesn’t want to give you the satisfaction. “First time at one of these?” “That obvious?” “Little bit. He doesn’t say it unkindly. “You’ve been staring at the chandelier for the most part.” Your face does something embarrassing. “I was doing math.” “Math.” “About how long it would take me to afford it. On my salary.” You stop yourself, because that is possibly the most un-gala thing you could have said, and he is a congressman, and you are already wearing the wrong dress. “Which — never mind. I’m a resident. I don’t have the money for light fixtures.” He does laugh at that, quietly, more of an exhale than a real laugh, but it counts. “What kind of medicine?”

“Emergency.” You set your now-empty glass down on the nearest surface. “I’m in my third year.” “Long hours.” “Long doesn’t really cover it.” You glance sideways at him. Up, technically, because he has several inches on you and you’re in heels. “But I’m not going to complain at a gala. It seems rude.” “You can complain… I don’t care.” Something about the way he says it is disarming, and you weren’t expecting that. You’d expected… you’re not entirely sure what you’d expected. Polished, maybe. The kind of conversation that sounds like a conversation but is really just two people exchanging pleasantries until someone finds a more useful person to talk to. That’s what galas are, as far as you can tell. This doesn’t feel like that. “How long have you been doing this? The congressman thing.” “Six momths.” He picks up a glass from a passing tray. Water, not champagne. You notice that too. “Why?” “I saw a clip of you once. About pharmaceutical pricing.” You pause, aware that this is maybe strange to bring up. “You didn’t let him deflect.” He looks at you for a moment, and you can’t quite tell what he’s thinking. His face is not an easy read. “Most people don’t bring that up.”

“Most people here probably benefit from him deflecting.” Another one of those almost-laughs. You’re starting to like those unreasonably. “Fair.” He turns slightly toward you, weight shifting, and it’s the kind of body language that says I’m not going anywhere yet, which you are reading, as positive. Possibly incorrectly. “What made you go into emergency medicine?” “I like knowing the answer fast.” It is the honest version. “Other specialties… you wait for labs, wait for imaging, wait for rounds. Emergency, you have to think right now, decide right now. I like that. Also I’m bad at small talk, so at least in the ER nobody expects it from me.” “You’re not bad at it.” “I’ve been talking about chandeliers and my salary.” “I liked it,” he says, like that settles it, and the frankness of it catches you off guard enough that you don’t have an immediate response, which almost never happens to you. You tuck a strand of hair behind your ear. The orchestra has transitioned to something slightly livelier and a few couples have migrated toward the cleared floor at the center of the room. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“How old are you?” The words come out before you can dress them up more politely, you wince slightly at the delivery. You’re three champagnes deep and apparently that’s what three champagnes does.

He doesn’t look thrown by it. If anything, he looks like he’s deciding how to answer, which is its own answer. “Forty-four or biologically a hundred and eight.”

You do the math without meaning to. The math is not small. “Right.”

“How old are you? Just so we’re both working with the same information.”

“Twenty-eight.”

He doesn’t look away from you. “So… age change anything for you?” His voice is quiet enough that it doesn’t carry anywhere.

Oh. We are going there straight. Okay. The warmth that works its way up your neck is something, that even the air conditioning can’t seem to help with. You look down at your empty glass and think about how Sarah is absolutely going to scream when you tell her about this tomorrow. “That’s—” you start. And then Sarah materializes at your elbow like she has a sixth sense for inconvenient timing, slightly flushed and smelling like champagne and grabbing your arm with both hands. “There you are! My dad wants to say hi, he knows you’re here—” She clocks Congressman Barnes. Her eyes go very wide and then very carefully neutral, which is the least neutral expression you’ve ever seen on a human face. “Congressman Barnes, hi, I’m so sorry to interrupt—” “You’re not,” he says easily, and he means it, you can tell, which is somehow worse than if he were being polite. He looks at you. “It was good talking to you.” “Yeah.” Your voice comes out smaller than you want it to. “It was.” He holds eye contact for exactly one beat longer. And then he nods, and turns, and Sarah is already dragging you in the opposite direction with her grip iron-tight on your wrist. “Oh my god,” she hisses, the second there’s enough ambient noise to cover it. “Oh my God—” “It was just talking.” “It was not just talking—” “Sarah—”

“He’s so hot,” she says, almost mournful. “He’s so hot and he was talking to only you for like twenty minutes and I need you to know that Bucky Barnes does not do that—” “Bucky,” you say, and your stomach does a small stupid thing. “His name is Bucky?” She stares at you. “Please tell me you got his number.”

You didn’t. You are, the longer you stand here being dragged toward Sarah’s father, increasingly annoyed about that.

You find him again by accident. That’s the part you’ll tell Sarah later. That it was an accident and she will not believe you, and she will be partially right not to.

Because when you excused yourself from the conversation with Sarah’s father after approximately nine minutes, you were not not looking for Congressman Barnes. You were getting another drink. Those are two different things that happened to involve the same direction.

The bar is less crowded, so there’s an actual open stretch of marble counter to stand at. You order a club soda because your limit is three champagnes and you reached it. You’re stirring it with the little cocktail straw and staring at the ice like it did something to you when someone stops next to you. Not just anyone. You know before you look, from the proximity, from the particular way the air in the vicinity shifts. “Club soda,” Bucky says, nodding at your glass. “Smart.” “I’m a doctor… In theory.” “In theory?” “I mean residency.” You glance up at him. He’s looking straight ahead at the bar, not at you, and yet every part of you is acutely aware of him. “I know my limits.” “Three glasses?” He sounds like he already knows. “How’d you— Were you watching me?” He doesn’t answer immediately. He signals the bartender for something and then he turns his head to look at you. The look on his face is the least congressman-like look you’ve seen from him all evening. It’s quieter than that. More direct. “Yeah… I was.”

The bartender sets his glass down. You notice that it’s water again.

But Bucky doesn’t reach for it yet. He’s still looking at you. You have been through four years of medical school and almost three years of residency, which means you have stood in front of attendings who looked at you like you were a problem they needed to solve, and you did not flinch. You are flinching a little now. Just a little. “You didn’t come find me,” you try to keep your voice even. “You were with Richard.” “For like eight minutes.” Something moves across his face. Not quite a smile but in the neighborhood. “Were you counting?” “I’m not answering that.” He reaches for his water, finally, and takes a drink. You watch his jaw because you’re only human. There’s a scar that runs just beneath his jaw. You have the reflexive urge to ask how he got it, which is the emergency medicine in you, and also probably something else. “I thought about asking for your number,” he says, and he says it the same way he says everything, like he just decided to set the thing down in front of you and see what you do with it. “What stopped you?” He considers you for a moment. “Didn’t want to do it in front of Sarah. Felt like a thing that shouldn’t have an audience.” “That’s—” you press your lips together. “That’s actually reasonable.” “I have my moments.” The orchestra finishes something and starts something else, slower, and the lights in the ballroom dim imperceptibly.

You should go back. Sarah is probably wondering where you are. You have a club soda to finish and heels that are beginning to make their unhappiness known and a 6 AM shift on Wednesday that is always at the back of your mind. His hand finds the bar just next to yours. The same way the drunk man’s hand had, earlier. Except nothing about it feels the same. Not even close. “I have a suite upstairs… I stay here when I’m in the city for these.” A pause. “I’m not— that’s not—” “I know what you’re saying.” He looks at you. “Yeah?” “Yeah.” His pinky finger moves. Just barely. Just enough to press against the side of your hand, the lightest possible contact, and you feel it everywhere. “Tell me if I’m reading this wrong.”

You look down at where his hand is next to yours. You look back up at him. And then you do the most impulsive thing you have done since you signed a lease on an apartment you couldn’t afford because it had good light. “You’re not reading it wrong.” He walks slightly behind you toward the elevator, which is not nothing. It is discrete, and you appreciate that without saying so. His hand presses briefly to the small of your back as you reach the elevator, guiding you left. Even through the fabric of your dress, the warmth of his palm is enough to make your brain go briefly offline. The elevator ride is quiet. It’s the kind of quiet that’s loud. He’s not looking at you. He’s looking at the floor numbers. You’re doing the same. The back of his hand grazes yours and neither of you moves away, and by the sixth floor you have resigned yourself to the fact that you are going to be completely useless. The suite is significant. Of course. You take approximately two seconds to register that the entryway alone is bigger than your apartment’s living room before you stop looking at the suite. He closes the door. Turns around. And the way he looks at you when it’s just the two of you, without a ballroom background, is different. There’s nothing measured about his eyes right now. “Hi,” you say stupidly, because your brain has officially handed in its notice. “Hi.” And then he’s crossing the room and his hands are on your face and he’s kissing you. It is hungry in a way that makes your knees register a complaint.

Both of your hands come up to grip the lapels of his jacket just to have somewhere to put them. He pulls back just enough to breathe. His thumbs are at your jaw. “Okay?” he asks.

“Very,” you manage. He kisses you again, slower this time but no less certain, and his hands slide from your jaw to your waist. He walks you backward until your shoulders meet the wall. You make a soft sound against his mouth that you are immediately embarrassed by. “Don’t,” he says against your lips. “Don’t what?” “Do that thing where you get embarrassed.” He pulls back to look at you, properly. “Don’t.” You open your mouth and close it. He’s still in the full suit — jacket, tie, the whole shebang — and you are suddenly very, very aware of that.

His hands find the zipper at the back of your dress. Watching your face the whole time like he’s making absolutely sure. The zipper gives and you feel the fabric loosen across your back, cool air reaching your skin. “Arms up,” he says. You raise your arms and he lifts the dress over your head, and sets it on the chair behind him like it matters, like he’s thinking about the fact that it’s the only dress you brought. Something about that short, practical gesture does more to you than it should. And then he takes you in. It’s for a long moment. His eyes move over you and there’s not a single thing performative about how he looks at you. It’s not the look of someone who is trying to make you feel good, it’s the look of someone who genuinely cannot help himself. You are standing in front of a congressman in a four-hundred-dollar-a-night suite in a bralette from Target and underwear that does not match it, and you are acutely aware of this fact. “These don’t match.” Your face goes hot. “I wasn’t exactly planning this.” “No?” “I was planning on eating canapes and going home by ten.” Your voice comes out more defensive than you intend. “So no, I didn’t— I didn’t put on a matching set, I just—” “Hey.” He says it gently, and his hand comes up to tip your chin. “I’m not complaining.” “You literally just pointed it out—” “Because it’s cute.” His thumb traces your jaw. “Because you’re standing there looking like you can’t decide whether to be embarrassed or annoyed, and it’s—” something moves through his expression, “—it’s really cute is all. And I’m flattered” You stare at him. “You’re a congressman.” “I’m aware.” “You give floor speeches.” “Also aware.” “You can’t just… say things are cute.” “Sure I can.” He’s guiding you back toward the bed, and the backs of your knees hit the mattress and you sit down. He doesn’t follow you down. He just stands there, looks at you, still fully dressed, tie still knotted, and goes to his knees. Oh.

Oh. His hands slide up your calves, and he watches you watch him. You’re gripping the duvet with both hands because he hasn’t even done anything yet and you already feel like the floor dropped out. “You don’t have to—” you start. He looks up at you, and his eyes are very, very dark. “I want to.” His fingers find the waistband of your underwear and pulls them down your legs with an efficiency that should not be as attractive as it is. Then his hands are on your inner thighs, pushing them apart. He looks at you one more time like he’s checking in, which he clearly is.

“Good?” “Please,” you say, which answers nothing and everything. He lowers his head. The first press of his mouth to your cunt makes you bite down on your lip hard enough that you taste something. He takes his time with it. There’s nothing hurried here, nothing obligatory, he moves against you like he has absolutely nowhere else to be and no interest in being there anyway. His tongue finds the bundle of nerves at your center and stays there, slow and devastating, and you have to press the back of your hand to your mouth to keep the sound in. “Don’t,” he says, again, pulling back just enough. His breath is warm against you and it’s its own kind of torture. “I want to hear you.” “There are other rooms on this floor—” “Thick walls,” he says, and then he’s back at it. You stop thinking about the other rooms. He’s good at this in the way that makes you forget your own name temporarily. His hands are on your hips, keeping you from squirming away when it gets to be too much, which it does, quickly, because he has apparently decided to be completely merciless about this.

You have your fingers in his hair now. His perfectly styled hair, which you’re currently ruining, but do not care. And you are saying his name at a volume that would embarrass you under any other circumstances. “James—” you breathe, and then, when he does that specific thing with his tongue, laving at your entrance, “—God, Bucky, please—” He makes a sound against you that you feel everywhere. His fingers find the slick of you, and he looks up at you from where he is, which should be illegal, the visual of this is going to live in your brain for years. “This okay?” he murmurs.

“Yes, please, yes—”

He sinks two fingers into you slowly, and your head drops back. He works them against your walls while his mouth moves on your clit and you grip his hair tighter and he doesn’t tell you to let go.

The tension builds fast. Faster than you’d like, because you’d like this to never stop. When it breaks it breaks completely, your whole body pulls tight and then releases, the sound you make is completely beyond your control. He works you through it. Every last second of it. His fingers slow but don’t stop, his mouth gentles but stays, until you’re twitching away from the sensitivity and pressing weakly at his shoulder, and only then does he pull back. He stands, and he looks… composed, almost, except for the flush at the collar of his very nice shirt, the slick in his beard and the way his hair is thoroughly destroyed.

He’s still in the full suit. The tie is still knotted. You are lying on his hotel bed having just come completely apart and he looks like he’s about to chair a subcommittee meeting. “That’s unfair,” you say to the ceiling.

“What is?”

“You.” You lift your head to look at him. “The suit. All of that.” Chuckling, he reaches up and loosens the tie, pulls it over his head, starts on the buttons of his shirt. You push yourself up to sitting, because if he’s going to do that, you are watching.

He shrugs out of the shirt and underneath is a white undershirt, and underneath the undershirt — well. You were not unprepared for the shoulders. You were unprepared for everything else. “Hi,” you say again. He should be tired of hearing it. He isn’t. He almost smiles. He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket, and comes up with his wallet, and from his wallet— “You just… carry that?” you ask. “I was hoping,” he says.

Something about the admission makes your chest do a complicated thing. You reach for him as he comes down onto the bed, pulling him in. He braces his forearm by your head and kisses you and you can taste yourself on his mouth, which makes the complicated thing in your chest considerably worse.

“Tell me if anything’s—”

“I will… I trust you.”

He pulls back to look at you at that. Just for a second. Something moves through his eyes that you don’t quite have a word for.

“Okay.”

He takes his time. He works you back up with his hands first, until you’re arching into him and your nails are at his back and the patience of it is making you slightly insane, and when he finally rolls the condom on and shifts over you and pushes in—

The noise you make is entirely involuntary. Because he’s big. No, that would be an understatement.

“Still with me?” Right by your ear.

“More than with you,” you get out, and he exhales a short laugh into your neck and then starts to move, and you stop being capable of full sentences.

He’s thorough about it in a way that makes your brain melt clean out of your head. He learned what makes you gasp and then does that thing again. His hand slides under your ass and tilts your hips and hits something that makes you dig your nails in hard enough that he hisses.

“Right there,” you say, uselessly, since he clearly already knows.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t stop—”

He doesn’t stop. He does exactly that, again, and you’re gripping his shoulders with both hands and talking without fully knowing what you’re saying.

He’s got his face pressed to your temple and his breathing is not steady anymore, which is information you file away with tremendous satisfaction.

“You feel—” he starts, and stops, like he doesn’t finish that sentence with people often.

“Tell me.”

He pulls back to look at your face. His hips don’t slow. “Perfect,” he says, like it’s a simple fact.

Your whole body clenches around him at that and he groans. His rhythm shifts. Deeper, more insistent, and you have completely stopped worrying about the other rooms on this floor.

His thumb finds your clit and you cry out. He watches your face while he does it, and there is something about being looked at like that, while he’s inside you, while he’s taking you completely apart for the second time—

You come with your face buried in his neck and his name on your lips and his hand pressed flat to your lower back like he’s trying to keep you together while he undoes you.

He follows not long after with a groan against your temple, his whole body tensing.

Then he’s still, and the room is just the sound of both of you breathing.

He doesn’t move immediately. He stays where he is, most of his weight on his forearm, his other hand moving to push your hair away from your face. It’s a gentle thing, automatic, like he did it without thinking. Like it was just the natural next thing to do.

You stare up at the very expensive ceiling of the very expensive suite.

“I came here for canapes,” you say.

He laughs. A real one this tim. Not the almost-laugh from downstairs, an actual laugh, and it does something devastating to his face. “How’d that work out?”

“Better than expected.”

He presses his lips to your temple, and it’s soft. It lingers for a second, and when he pulls back he’s looking at you with that look again. The one you don’t have a word for yet.

He gets up to deal with the condom, comes back with a glass of water that he sets on the nightstand next to you, and gets back into bed like he does this, like this is just a thing he does, take someone apart completely and then bring them water after.

He’s pulled on his undershirt and his briefs and he looks unfairly good in both, and you’re in nothing, and neither of you seems to have a problem with this.

“Bucky.”

“Mm.”

“What actually made you come over? Downstairs. Earlier.” You turn your head to look at him. “Before that drunken guy. You were watching me before that.”

He’s quiet for a moment. He’s on his back, looking at the ceiling, and his jaw shifts slightly the way it does when he’s thinking.

“You were looking at the chandelier,” he says. “Everyone in that room was pretending they belonged there. You were just standing there, looking up, in the wrong dress. I liked that.”

You look at him for a long moment. “I got it on a sale,” you say.

“I like that too.”

You press your face into the pillow so he can’t see you smiling, and he doesn’t say anything about it, which is possibly the most considerate thing anyone has ever done for you.

Light is the first thing you register. It’s not the thin, grey light that seeps through your blackout curtain at home. This is different, the kind that comes from curtains that cost more than they should and don’t quite meet in the middle.

For a moment you don’t know where you are, which is a feeling you’re familiar with from overnight call, that brief horrible second of complete disorientation before your brain catches up.

Then it catches up.

The sheets are softer than yours. The room is too quiet. And the other side of the bed, when you reach for it without opening your eyes—

Empty.

You open your eyes anyway. On the off chance. The suite looks the same as it had last night except for the light, and the way the silence in it has a different quality now. A full kind of silence. The kind where someone has recently left.

His jacket is gone from the chair. Your dress is still on it, folded carefully over the back. So carefully, actually, that it takes you a second to really process the image. He’d folded your dress before he left. Which means he’d been here, moving around the room, and you’d slept through it.

The glass of water he’d set on the nightstand is still there, half full or half empty or whatever. You stare at it for longer than you need to.

You didn’t expect anything. That’s not entirely true; you’re a grown adult and you know the difference between what you expected and what you’d maybe hoped, and those two things are not the same thing, and it’s fine, it was one night, it was always going to be one night, you knew that going in.

Still. You look around the room. Almost wanting to find something. A note on hotel stationery, his business card under the water glass, anything.

Some small proof that it happened to him too, that you didn’t imagine the careful way he pushed your hair back.

Nothing.

You check the bathroom. The bathroom is pristine and smells faintly like whatever he’d used from the amenity shelf, and there is no note on the mirror, no nothing.

Of course there isn’t. He’s a congressman. He has a schedule. He was probably on a 7 AM call somewhere, probably has a driver waiting downstairs, probably has twelve things on his agenda and last night was just one of them. Item six, maybe, between a donor dinner and a briefing.

You sit back on the bed. You pick up the glass of water and drink the rest of it.

Fine.

You find your underwear, the mismatched ones, and even now that makes your cheeks do something. And then your dress, and your heels, and you check your phone.

Three texts from Sarah that escalate in punctuation, one from your roommate asking if you’re alive. Nothing from a number you don’t recognize.

Obviously.

The elevator ride down is considerably less charged than the one going up. The lobby is already busy, morning check-outs and businessmen with rolling luggage, and you walk through it in last night’s dress and last night’s heels with your chin up, because you are an emergency medicine resident and you have walked into much worse rooms than this.

The glass of water, though. He’d gotten up and gotten you a glass of water and now he was just… gone. Without a word.

That part stings a little. You’d be lying if you said otherwise.

Seventeen days later, you are standing in your kitchen at six in the morning counting backwards on your fingers, and the number you keep landing on is not the number you want.

Your period is late. Not a little late. Late enough that you’ve noticed, which takes something, because your cycle has always run regular, every twenty-eight days, reliable enough that you’ve never had to think about it.

You think about it now. You’ve been thinking about it for four days with increasing focus, telling yourself it was stress, it was the hours, it was the back-to-back overnight shifts that had wrecked your sleep, because that’s what happens to residents, your hormones get strange when your cortisol stays high, it happens.

Except.

Except that two weeks before your missed period, which would put it at about a week after the gala, you’d had spotting. You had noted it the way you noted things and filed it under irregular and moved on, because you’d had a fourteen-hour shift and the last thing you wanted to do was think about your own body on top of everything else. You’d thought mid-cycle spotting, stress, nothing.

And the fatigue. God, the fatigue had been something else, but again you’re a third year resident. Fatigue is the baseline. Fatigue is just Tuesday.

Except implantation spotting typically occurs six to twelve days after fertilization. Except you are standing in your kitchen doing obstetric math at six in the morning, and the number you keep landing on is seventeen days post-ovulation, which is—

That’s too late for it to be stress.

You know this. You know this the way you know things you don’t want to know yet, the way you knew a patient’s CT wasn’t going to be clean before the radiologist called. You just know.

You get to the hospital forty minutes early, which is easy enough to explain away to anyone who asks. You’re always early, everyone knows you’re always early.

You take a detour to the ground floor pharmacy. You stand in the family planning aisle for probably thirty seconds longer than a person who is confident about what they’re grabbing would stand there.

You take one off the shelf and tuck it under your arm, and take the stairs up to the third floor resident bathroom, which has a lock that works and more importantly, privacy.

The instructions are not complicated. You’re a doctor. You know what two lines mean.

You sit on the edge of the closed toilet lid you look at the water stain on the ceiling tile for the full three minutes.

There’s a crack in it that branches from the fixture in a way that looks like the course of the facial nerve in the middle ear. You have stared at this ceiling before during bad shifts, during the kind of nights where someone didn’t make it and you had to go somewhere quiet for six minutes, and it has never felt quite like this.

You turn the test over.

Two lines.

Both of them dark. Two unambiguous, immediate, definitive lines.

You sit with that for a long moment. The tile. The test.

You’re pregnant.

You are twenty-eight years old and you are a resident and you had a one-night stand with a congressman whose number you do not have and you are pregnant.

You turn the test face-down again. Pick it up. Put it in a cover at the bottom of your bag under your stethoscope, which feels insane but you’re not leaving it in the trash where someone could see it.

You look at yourself in the mirror. Your face looks the same as it always does. That’s somehow the strangest part.

You unlock the bathroom door. You have a shift to get to.

But one thing you’re sure about is that, you want this baby. Be it a maternal impulse, or whatever it is you don’t have a name for it yet. You want this baby. You need this baby.

Two days of carrying it around inside you like a stone in your chest, and by the third morning you’ve made the decision, or the decision makes you.

Either way, you’re sitting on your bathroom floor at midnight with your back against the tub and the thing is settled.

He needs to know. Whatever happens after that is not something you can fully think about yet, but the part where he doesn’t know is no longer something you can live inside of.

The problem is getting to him.

You try the obvious thing first. His official website has a contact form. For constituents, it says, and you are technically not his constituent, but you fill it out anyway and it autoresponds within thirty seconds with something about being committed to responding within five to seven business days, and you close the laptop.

Five to seven business days.

His office number is listed publicly and you call it the next day on your lunch break. It rings three times before someone picks up.

“Congressman Barnes’ office, how can I help you?”

“Hi.” You try to keep your voice level. “I’m — I’m trying to reach Congressman Barnes. It’s a personal matter.”

There’s a small pause on the other end. “The Congressman has a full schedule. Can I take your name and a callback number? Please describe the nature of your inquiry.”

Right. The nature of your inquiry. “It’s — it’s a private matter. I’d really need to speak with him directly.”

“Ma’am, any personal correspondence for the Congressman goes through his office. If you can describe—”

“I know him personally.” You are aware of how this sounds. You are aware that people who call congressional offices claiming to know the congressman personally are, in fact, not people who know the congressman personally. “I’m not a — I’m not a constituent with a complaint. I’m a personal acquaintance and it’s urgent.”

“I understand,” the woman says, in the tone of someone who does not entirely believe you. “I can pass your information along and someone will follow up.”

Someone. Not him.

“Okay.” You give her your name and your number. You know with complete certainty that you will not hear back.

You dissociate for a minute after you hang up, and then you text Sarah.

You : Hey. Random question. Completely unrelated to anything. How hard would it be for you to get Barnes’ personal number from your dad

Three minutes of silence, which for Sarah is practically geological time.

Sarah: why

You: Sarah please.

Sarah: whyyyy

You: I'll explain later. Is it possible?

Sarah: my dad would notice if i asked. but his phone’s usually just sitting on the counter when he’s in the shower soooo. give me 12 hours and a good reason

You: I promise I'll explain everything.

Sarah: oh this is GOOD. this is so good. okayy

You put your phone in your coat pocket and go back inside.

Sarah texts at eleven seventeen the following night, which means Richard Jackson apparently showers late, and the text is just a phone number and then:

Sarah: okay i need the full story. not a summary. the FULL story. what did you DO??????

You look at the number for a long time.

You: Thank you. I’ll explain everything soon I promise.

Sarah: are you okay??

You think about the test at the bottom of your bag. The ceiling tile with the crack in it. The empty side of the bed with the sheets still warm from him.

You: Yeah. I'm okay. Thank you Sarah.

You add the number to your phone. You just stare at the digits, and your chest is doing the complicated thing again, and you have no idea what you’re going to say when he picks up.

If he picks up.

The first time, it rings five times and goes to voicemail.

His voicemail. His actual voice, which you were not prepared for. You hang up before the beep because you don’t know what you’d say and you can’t practice it out loud yet. The words exist inside your head in a specific order that you’ve rearranged a hundred times since eleven seventeen last night, and none of the arrangements feel right.

You set your phone face-down on your kitchen table. You make coffee you don’t drink. You sit there for twenty minutes and then you pick your phone back up.

It rings three times. You are working out, specifically, how to begin. Not hi, too casual. Not hello, Congressman, too formal and possibly insane. Maybe just his name, just Bucky, like you have any right to—

“Hello.”

Just that. One word. And your heart does something it has absolutely no business doing.

“Hi. This is— It’s — we met at the fundraiser, I mean the gala. About three weeks ago. Sarah Jackson’s friend.” A pause, because you can’t tell if any of this is registering. “The one in the wrong dress.”

“I know who you are.”

Something in his voice. Something that is not nothing. You press your free hand flat to the kitchen table just to have something solid.

“Okay. Good. Hi.”

“Hi.” And there it is, threaded through the single syllable — a smile. The same almost-smile from downstairs at the bar. “It’s good to hear from you.”

You close your eyes for a second. You had not let yourself think about whether it would be good or awkward or somewhere cold in between, because thinking about it felt like jinxing it.

“I need to—” The arrangements in your head are all wrong again. “Is there any chance we could meet? In person. I have something I need to tell you, and I’d rather not do it over the phone.”

“Is everything alright?”

“Yeah.” The word comes out before you can think about whether it’s true. “I just — it’s better in person. I think.”

“I can do tomorrow. I am free tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow works.” Your voice is admirably steady, and you are giving yourself full credit for that. “Wherever’s easiest for you.”

“There’s a place on 54th. Briar something — Briar & Co. You know it?”

“I’ll find it.”

“Two o’clock?”

“Two o’clock,” you confirm. And then neither of you say anything for a second, and you don’t know who should end this.

“It’s good to hear from you,” he says again. Quieter this time, like maybe he’s saying it more to himself than to you.

You don’t know what to say to that. “Right. See you tomorrow.”

You hang up.

You sit back down at your kitchen table, look at your untouched coffee going cold. You breathe in and out very carefully for a minute, and you do not let yourself think about what it meant that he said it twice.

You’re not going to do that. You’re going to be a reasonable adult who goes to work and eats lunch and sleeps normal amounts, and tomorrow you are going to sit across from Bucky Barnes in a coffee shop and say the thing that needs to be said.

That is the plan.

You’re three minutes late. When you push through the glass door and scan the room you find him immediately, because he’s not a man that takes effort to find.

He’s already there. Of course he’s already there, he’s probably never been late to a thing in his life.

He looks like something out of a campaign ad, which is annoying, because you are in your off-duty jeans and the overcoat you’ve had since forever.

He’s at a corner table, which is a thing you file away and he’s got a coffee in front of him already.

He looks up before you reach him. Like he sensed it.

You pull out the chair across from him, sit down and unwrap your scarf. The whole time he’s watching you with an expression you cannot read, which is the same as before, which should not feel as familiar as it does.

“Finally,” he says.

You blink. “Am I late? I thought I was only — what time is it?”

“You’re not late.” The corner of his mouth pulls into a smile. “I’ve just been— Never mind.”

He said finally like he was waiting for you. But he wasn’t waiting long. Does that mean he meant that you finally called? But how would you call if he didn’t leave a number?

No. Nope. You’re not going there.

You look down at the menu you don’t need and tell yourself firmly that it doesn’t mean anything, that he is a politician and politicians are good at making people feel like the only person in the room, it is literally a professional skill.

You’ve rehearsed this. You’ve rehearsed it on the subway here, in the shower last night. You had a version that started with some context, that built up gradually, that eased both of you into it. That version is somewhere on the sidewalk because you don’t have access to it right now.

“I have to tell you something.”

He sets his cup down. “Okay.”

“It’s—” You press your hands flat to your thighs under the table. “It’s not a small thing.”

“Okay.” The steadiness of it is almost its own problem.

Just say it. Say the thing. Spit it out.

You have said hard things before. You have sat across from people and told them their person wasn’t coming home, you have held those conversations together with nothing but your hands and your voice, you can say six words to one man in a coffee shop on 54th Street.

“I’m pregnant.” The words land flat on the table between you. “It’s yours. It’s from — from the gala. That night.”

Silence. Absolute deafening silence.

Not the kind that means he’s gathering himself to respond, or the kind that means he missed it. You can tell from his face that he didn’t miss it. It’s a longer silence. The kind you have to sit with no idea what’s on the other side.

You watch his face. You had run through versions of this moment in your head. There’s shock, the obvious thing, or anger, or some careful measured political blankness.

But it isn’t quite any of those. His jaw is tight and his eyes are on you and he is… not here, quite. He’s somewhere slightly behind his eyes, somewhere you don’t have access to.

“Bucky,” you say, because the silence is going somewhere you don’t like.

He comes back. Just slightly. His hand around his coffee cup tightens and releases.

“Are you sure it’s mine?”

You hear the words. You take a second to make sure you heard them correctly.

“I wore a condom,” he says, and his voice has changed. It’s careful, like he’s walking on ice. “I just — I want to be sure that we’re—”

“Yes.” The word comes out sharp, which you didn’t mean, or maybe you did. “Yes, it’s yours. I’m sure.” You make yourself hold his gaze. “I haven’t slept with anyone else.”

Something shifts in his expression. You can’t tell if it’s belief or the beginning of it or something else entirely.

“We can do a paternity test,” you say, and your voice is admirably level and you hate that you have to say this, you hate that you’re sitting here offering this like it’s a reasonable next step. “If you want confirmation. That’s — that’s available to you. I understand.”

Then you both speak at the same time.

“I didn’t come here asking for anything,” you say.

“What do you want?” he asks.

If only you’d spoken a moment sooner.

Four words. They’re not unkind, exactly. But they land cold, because of what they assume, maybe, or because of what they don’t. What do you want.

As if the only reason you’d be here is because you want something from him specifically, as if this is a transaction he’s being presented with rather than a fact of his life, as if you’d spent three weeks carrying this alone and called his number and rearranged the words a hundred different ways just to want something.

You feel it move through your chest before you can stop it.

“Nothing… I don’t want anything.”

You can clearly see his face change. “That’s not what I—”

“I have to go.” You reach for your scarf. Your hands are steady and you’re glad for it. “I shouldn’t have — I thought you should know. That was the only reason. I’m sorry for wasting your time.”

“That’s not—hey—” He’s half out of his seat. “That’s not what I meant—”

“It’s fine.” You stand. You loop your scarf once around your neck and your body is doing the automatic things while your brain is somewhere else entirely, somewhere a little removed and glassy. “I’ll be in touch about next steps. Whatever you want to do. If you want the test, just—” You stop yourself before you finish the sentence because your voice is doing something you don’t want it to do. “I’ll be in touch.”

And then you’re walking. Through the small tables, out through the glass door that lets in a rush of cold air that you are grateful for because it hits your face and gives you something to feel that isn’t this.

The sidewalk is busy, you merge into it and walk because walking is something you can do. You’re not going anywhere in particular. You’re just walking.

“Hey.” His voice is behind you. Close. “Just — stop.”

You don’t stop immediately. You take two more steps, which is honest.

“Please.” His hand closes around your arm, just above your elbow. There’s barely any pressure in his grip, but you stop because ‘please’ is not a word he uses easily, you’ve already gathered that, and the way he said it is not a politician’s please.

He’s standing there without his coat. He left it inside, apparently, didn’t stop to grab it. He looks like a person, suddenly. Not a congressman anymore.

“That came out wrong.”

“It’s fine.” It’s something you have said twice now, which is increasingly not true.

“It’s not.” He runs a hand through his hair. The same dark hair you’d pulled at in a hotel suite three weeks ago, but you cannot think about that right now. “I panicked. I said something stupid and it came out wrong and I— I’m sorry.”

“You asked me what I want,” you keep your voice low. “Like I was — like this was something I came to negotiate.”

“I —”

“I’ve been sitting with this for two weeks by myself.” You hadn’t meant to say that part, hadn’t meant to let him know, but there it is. “Two weeks of figuring out how to even find your number, two weeks of—” You stop. You are not going to do this on 54th Street, you are absolutely not. “I’m not asking you for anything. I just thought you deserved to know.”

He’s looking at you with an expression that you can’t name and have never seen on him before. Something stripped of the careful management, the controlled stillness.

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

The wind picks up and he doesn’t even flinch at it, no coat, and you look at him and you are… tired. You are so, so tired, and you don’t have the energy to hold onto any of this out here on the street.

“I have to get back. I have a shift.”

“Can we— Can we try this again? Somewhere. When you’re ready.” He holds your gaze. “I’d like to do that right. If you’ll let me.”

You look at him for a long moment. The sweater. The cold. The line of his jaw that you’d had your hand against on a different night in a different context. The fact that the two things are the same person is almost too much to hold at once.

“I’ll think about it.”

It is not a yes. It is not quite a no. He seems to understand this, because he doesn’t push.

You turn and don’t look back. You get half a block when your phone buzzes in your pocket.

Bucky: I’m sorry. I mean it.

The phone is an inconvenience right now. It’s him.

You stare at it for two full rings.

Then you pick up, because you are apparently a person who does that.

“Hey.” The same voice that said I’m sorry on a windy sidewalk six hours ago, except now it’s evening and you’ve been on your feet since noon and you have considerably less patience available than you did then.

“I’m in the middle of a shift,” you say, instead of hello.

“I know, I just— Have you eaten?”

You open your mouth. Close it. Look up at the ceiling for a moment, which is a habit you’re developing, apparently. Ceilings when you need a second to not say the first thing that comes to mind. “Bucky.”

“It’s a simple question.”

“It is not a simple question, it is a—” You lower your voice because a nurse just walked past and you do not need this. “Can you just not, please? I’m working.”

“Have you eaten?” he repeats, like he didn’t hear the second half of what you said, or heard it and decided it wasn’t load-bearing.

“I had lunch.”

“It’s 8 PM, I’m not asking about lunch—”

“I’m a resident. Having lunch is a privilege.” You hear an ambulance. “Gotta go.”

“I’ll —”

You don’t let him finish.

At eleven thirty, one of the nurses at the front desk — Maya — stops you in the hallway with an expression that is doing something specific.

“There’s a guy at the front desk.”

“…Okay.”

“He brought food.” She pauses. “A lot of food.”

You look at her. She looks back at you with the energy of someone who has decided this is the best thing that has happened on this shift and possibly this month. “He’s very—” She searches for the word.

“Maya.”

“He’s asking for you specifically.”

You close your eyes for exactly one second. Then you go to the front desk.

There’s a paper bag on the desk in front of Bucky and he’s talking to the security guard with the easy manner of a man who talks to people for a living.

When he sees you coming, his expression shifts into something that is not quite relief but is in the direction of it.

“You didn’t have to do this,” you say, before he can say anything.

“I—”

You don’t let him finish. “I’m working.”

“I’m not staying.” He nods at the bag. “It’s just food. You said you hadn’t eaten.”

You look at the bag. You look at him. Maya, behind you, is doing an absolutely terrible job of pretending to type something. “You didn’t have to drive here.” You keep your voice quiet enough that it stays between the two of you. “I’m fine. I can take care of myself.”

“That’s not why I’m here.”

“Then why are you here?”

His jaw does the tight-release thing. “Because after you left I felt like an ass… and I need you to know that I’m sorry. Not over a text. In person.” He pushes the bag slightly toward you. “And because you said you hadn’t eaten.”

You stare at the bag. Thai food, from the smell of it, something with lemongrass. Your stomach, which has been ignoring you all evening, suddenly has opinions.

“This doesn’t fix what you said.”

“I’m not trying to fix it. I’m trying to—” He stops himself, and you can see him editing, which is strange to watch on a man who normally seems to say the exact amount he means to. “I’m showing you I’m sorry. That’s all.”

The energy to process this is something you don’t possess now. You pick up the bag. It’s heavier than it looked. “Thank you.” It comes out stiff and you don’t have the bandwidth to soften it. “You should go home.”

“Right.”

“I mean it. You don’t have to — this isn’t something you have to do. Standing in hospital lobbies with Thai food isn’t gonna be your thing, okay? We’re not— that’s not what this is.”

He’s quiet for a second. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

“Get some food in you.”

“I was going to,” you say, which is not strictly true, and he seems to know it. But he doesn’t say so, which you are choosing to be grateful for.

He nods once, and walks back toward the entrance. You watch him go for exactly two seconds before you make yourself turn around and go back to work.

Maya spins her chair to face you the moment you’re within range. You point at her before she can speak.

“Don’t.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Maya.”

“He’s so—”

“I will give you a terrible evaluation.”

She turns back to her computer, failing entirely to hide her smile, and you take the bag to the break room and eat the whole thing. It’s very good, which you resent.

Six hours later, at ten past two, you come out of the hospital into the cold. Your brain is running on fumes, and the black car in the far corner of the parking lot does not immediately register.

Then the door opens.

“You have got to be kidding me,” you say, to no one in particular. To the night. To whatever version of your life this is.

He gets out slowly, like he hasn’t spent six hours in a parking lot. He’s in the same coat and he looks it. A little, around the eyes.

“Bucky.” Your voice comes out flatter than you intend.

“I—”

There’s a pattern developing here, the way you don’t let him finish talking. “You’ve been here this whole time.”

“I fell asleep for a bit.”

“In your car. In the hospital parking lot. Why?”

He stops a few feet from you. His face looks tired in a way it hadn’t the other night, something honest about it. “I wanted to make sure you got home okay.”

“I do that everyday… I’ve been doing that everyday for almost three years.”

“Right.”

“Then why—” You stop. You’re too tired for this. The cold is getting into your coat and your feet hurt and you are twenty-eight years old and you do not have the reserves for whatever this is. “Go home, Bucky. Please. Get some actual sleep.”

“Let me drive you.”

“I have my car.”

“You’ve been on your feet for—”

“I have my car.” You hitch your bag up on your shoulder. “Thank you for the food. I mean that. But you can’t just— sit outside my hospital all night, that’s not— you can’t do that.”

He’s looking at you with that expression again. The unreadable one that isn’t quite unreadable anymore, or maybe you’re just too tired to not see it. “I handled it badly yesterday… or today — I don’t know — I said something that I would take back if I could.”

“I know. You said that.”

“I’m saying it again.”

“Bucky—”

“I need you to understand that I’m not— I’m not the guy who says something like that and means it. What I said, the way it sounded. I need you to know that’s not— that isn’t who I am.”

You look at him for a long moment. The parking lot is quiet. A couple of birds somewhere. A car turning out onto the street.

“I know.” Because you do, or you think you do, or you’d like to. “I just need you to give me some room to figure out—” You gesture vaguely between you. “All of this. Okay? I can’t think straight when you’re standing in my parking lot.”

Something moves through his expression at that. He looks down at the ground and then back at you, and the corner of his mouth shifts. “Okay. I’ll go.”

“Thank you.”

He holds eye contact a beat. “Drive safe.”

“You too,” you say, which is automatic, which is ridiculous, and you turn before your face can do anything about it.

You think about him walking to his car in an empty parking lot, and you think about him falling asleep in there, and you don’t do anything with that. You file it somewhere.

You go home. You sleep for nine hours straight. It’s the best you’ve slept in three weeks.

He calls two days later.

You’re off shift, sitting on your couch with an unopened anatomy refresher on the cushion next to you because you’d told yourself you were going to be productive and had instead been staring at nowhere in particular.

You pick up on the second ring. “Hi.” His voice is the same, which isn’t entirely a good thing to your composure.

“Hi.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine. Tired, but that’s— that’s normal.”

“Oh?”

“The fatigue is normal first trimester. The nausea I’ve been managing, mostly… I’m not telling you this to update you, I’m just— you asked.”

“I’m glad you told me.” His voice is quiet. Careful in a way that doesn’t feel like walking on ice anymore, more like he’s choosing things with intention. “I want to know how you’re doing.”

When you don’t say anything, he continues. “I want to come to your appointment.”

You close your eyes. “Bucky.”

“Hear me out—”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I — I want to.”

“You said that in the parking lot too, about the food, and I told you—”

“This is different. This is— this matters. I want to be there. I know I gave you every reason to tell me to stay out of it. What I said at the coffee shop— I know. But I’m asking you to let me— I’m asking… please”

For some reason, you think about the hotel room. The folded dress. The empty bed. The water glass. You think about a parking lot at two past midnight and a man who fell asleep in his car because he wanted to make sure you got home safe.

“It’s at my hospital… next Tuesday. Eleven.”

“Eleven,” he repeats.

“And if you say anything—” You hadn’t meant to go there, but you’re going there. “If you say anything like what you said on that day, I will walk out. And that’ll be it. I mean that.”

“That’s fair.” Without hesitation. Like he expected it and meant to agree to it.

“I’m serious, Bucky.”

“I know you are. I know.”

You nod, even though he can’t see it. “Okay. Tuesday.”

“Okay… Thank you.”

You don’t say you’re welcome. You don’t say anything for a second.

“Get some sleep,” he says. It’s like the water glass. The automatic thing, the thing that comes out before he decides whether to say it.

“You too.” This time it doesn’t feel ridiculous.

You hang up and open the textbook on whim. You read four pages before you fall asleep on the couch with the lamp still on.

He’s standing at your door at ten thirty with peonies.

Actual peonies, fat and pale pink, the kind that look like someone made a decision.

You open the door in your coat already because you’d been about to leave, keys in hand, and the two of you look at each other for a second in the doorway.

“How do you know where I live?”

“Sarah.”

Of course. You make a mental note to have a word with Sarah, except Sarah will laugh at you and you both know it.

You look at the flowers and then at him and he has the decency to look slightly uncertain, which is the most uncertain you’ve seen him look, and it does something small and involuntary to your chest.

“You didn’t have to—”

He just holds them out, without saying anything.

You take them because leaving them in his hands would be strange. They smell like something expensive and vaguely like outside, and you stand there for a second not knowing what to do with them.

You turn back into the apartment and find a glass in the cabinet and fill it with water, which is not a vase but it will have to do.

Setting them on the counter, you look at them. White and pink against your very normal kitchen, and something about the image makes you feel things you don’t have the time or inclination to examine.

The waiting room at the OB practice is warm and aggressively neutral, the kind of beige that has been carefully selected to be soothing. It achieves the opposite.

You sign in at the front. Bucky sits beside you, and he doesn’t make small talk, which you’re grateful for. He’s looking at something on his phone with the focused stillness of a person who is trying to be unobtrusive, and you watch the fish tank in the corner for lack of anything else to do with your eyes.

Your name gets called and you both stand. There’s a second, while walking towards the exam room, where you’re very aware of him behind you and you don’t know what to do about that.

The room is what it always is. Exam table with the paper that crinkles, the blood pressure cuff on the wall, the small screen angled toward the bed. You hop up on the table without being asked.

The nurse takes your vitals and says the doctor will be in shortly. Then it’s just the two of you in the room.

Bucky takes the chair in the corner.

“You can sit closer,” you say, because the chair in the corner feels like he’s been sent there. “You don’t have to be all the way over there.”

He moves the chair, just enough, and sits back down.

“How are you feeling?” he asks. Same question as the phone call, except in person it is different.

“Okay. A little nauseous this morning but it passed.” You look at your hands. “I have to go back on in the afternoon so I’m hoping the appointment doesn’t run long.”

“I can have you back by one.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I want to.” Right. That’s his line.

You don’t argue with it this time.

Dr. Reyes comes in five minutes later and doesn’t react to Bucky’s presence in any visible way, which you appreciate, because you’d anticipated some version of aren’t you. Congressman Barnes or Winter Soldier.

You did not want to deal with that today.

She’s warm and efficient in the way of someone who has done this enough times, and she goes through the questions with you and you answer them like the doctor you are. Last menstrual period, no significant history. Bucky stays quiet in his chair and you don’t look at him.

Then Dr. Reyes reaches for the gel.

“This’ll be cold,” she says, and you nod. She picks up the transducer and you are doing the thing you planned to do. Stay clinical.

Except your resident-brain has never been on this end of a transabdominal ultrasound before and it turns out those are two different things.

The screen fills with the grey static of it. Dr. Reyes adjusts the angle, and—

There.

The flicker. Fast and insistent, one hundred and fifty beats per minute or close to it, the cardiac activity clear enough on the doppler even before she turns the sound on, but then she does turn the sound on.

It’s the sound that gets you.

You’ve heard fetal heart tones a hundred times. A thousand times. You’ve stood in rooms while other women heard this for the first time and you’ve read the chart and noted the rate and moved on, because it was clinical, because it was data.

Except right now your body is doing something entirely outside of your control, something warm moving through your chest without asking permission, and you press your lips together and breathe.

“Strong heartbeat,” Dr. Reyes says, with the particular quiet of someone who knows what this moment is. “Right around a hundred and fifty-four. Looking good.”

You nod. Your throat is doing something it shouldn’t.

From the chair beside you, you hear Bucky exhale. Like he’d been holding something and set it down.

You turn your head and look at him.

He’s looking at the screen, not at you, and his jaw is tight and his hands are braced against his knee. His expression is… soft. You know because it’s the same on your own face.

“Can I—” His voice comes out different than you’ve heard it. Rougher. He clears his throat. “Can I get a copy of that? The image.”

Dr. Reyes glances between you, and you nod. “Of course,” she says.

He looks at you then. Quick, like he’s checking whether that was okay. When you nod, he immediately turns back to the screen.

Dr. Reyes does the measurements. Everything is how it should be, and she gives you the due date. Mid-July. Which you’d already calculated, but hearing it out loud is its own thing.

She goes through the first trimester expectations with you and you listen to all of it with the clinical half of your brain taking notes while the other half is somewhere else, somewhere watching the flicker on the screen and not knowing quite what to do with itself.

When she hands you the printout of the image, you put it in your bag. She hands one to Bucky too, without being asked again, and he takes it with both hands and looks at it for a second before sliding it into his inside coat pocket. Like it’s something he doesn’t want to bend.

He drives you back. You sit in the passenger seat and watch the city go by.

Neither of you speaks for a while, which is fine. Which is easy, actually, and you resent that a little.

You’d like to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is useful.

“Thank you. For letting me be there.” He’s the one to break the silence.

“You asked,” you say. Which is true, but not the full answer, and you both know it.

He doesn’t push.

In front of your building, he puts it in park. “Do you need anything? For the apartment, or groceries, or I could pick stuff up—”

“I’m okay.” You’re already half out of the seat.

“Prenatal vitamins, or—”

“Bucky.” You pause with one foot on the curb. “I have prenatal vitamins. I ordered them the morning after I tested. I’m a doctor. I know what I need.”

He has a hand on the steering wheel and he’s looking at you, and there’s something in his face that isn’t quite hurt and isn’t quite frustration. More like a person who wants to do something and doesn’t know how.

“I know you do.”

“I’m not—” There’s a version of this that comes out wrong, and you navigate around it. “I’m not keeping you out of it. That’s not what this is. I just— I don’t need you to manage things. Okay?” You look at him. “I’ll call you when there’s something to call you about.”

He’s quiet for a second. “Okay.”

“The heartbeat. That was… yeah. It was good.” You don’t know why you said that, only you didn’t want that to be the last thing you told him.

You’re already inside your place by the time you hear his car pull away.

The peonies are still in the glass on your counter when you get back in, and you stand there looking at them.

You are a person who has her prenatal vitamins already ordered and her charting caught up and her shifts covered, and you are also a person who left a one-night stand’s flowers in a water glass because they were too nice to throw out.

You said no three times.

The first time was on the phone, two days after the appointment, when he called with what he’d clearly prepared as a reasonable proposition. He delivered in the tone of someone who has won arguments in rooms full of people who didn’t want to lose.

His apartment was twelve minutes from your hospital by cab. Your commute was forty, on a good day. The first trimester fatigue was going to get worse before it got better. He had a spare bedroom. It was just practical.

The second time was a week after that, in person, when he’d swung by your hospital on his way from somewhere official to somewhere else official. He’d shown up in your break room with a coffee you hadn’t asked for and had the conversation again.

He laid it out like he was briefing someone. The proximity to your hospital, the fact that his building had a doorman and a parking garage and an elevator, the fact that your building had none of those things and three flights of stairs that were already becoming a thing you noticed at the end of a long shift.

The third time was on a Tuesday when you’d gotten home at midnight and stood at the bottom of your stairs for longer than you’d like to admit before making yourself go up them.

You’d texted Sarah about it not entirely meaning to, and Sarah had apparently mentioned it to her father, and her father had apparently mentioned it to Bucky. Your phone had rung at twelve fifteen.

How does news travel so fast?

The fourth time you said no it was because you’d run out of actual reasons and had to fall back on principle, which he received with the patience of someone who understood the difference and was content to wait.

That patience, somehow, was the thing that wore you down. Not the logic of it.

He’d just set the option on the table and waited with his hands in his pockets while you turned it over and found fewer and fewer things wrong with it.

That time you’d said, “Fine. A month. We’ll see how it goes.”

His apartment is on the fourteenth floor of a building that has a lobby with actual plants in it and a doorman named Gerald who learned your name on the second day and now says ‘good morning’ like he means it.

The spare bedroom has a window that faces east, which you hadn’t expected to care about. But find that you do, when the morning light comes in early and clean.

The first few days felt like moving around a furniture arrangement that hadn’t fully settled. Two people with established routines in one space, both of you figuring out the other.

You learned that he woke up early, always, and that the coffee was made before you came out of your room.

You learned that he watched the news in the living room in the evenings with the sound low and that he didn’t talk during it. Which suited you fine because you had charts to finish.

You learned that he stocked the fridge with things you’d mentioned offhand once, twice, in passing.

The ginger tea appeared on the third day, on the shelf above your coffee mug. You hadn’t said you needed it. But you’d been slightly more nauseous every morning and apparently he’d noticed, because there it was, three boxes of it, like it had always been there.

You’re fourteen weeks now. Which means you’d started to show in the way that is noticeable if you know what you’re looking for, the small firm curve of it below your navel that your regular clothes are beginning to politely argue with.

Looking down at it in the mirror still does something to you that you don’t have a clean word for.

Bucky doesn’t comment on it. That might be the thing you appreciate most.

What he does is quietly rearrange things. The stuff on the highest shelves moved down without discussion. A non-slip mat appeared in the shower.

He started being in the kitchen when you came home late, putting something together, and there was always enough for two.

You’d tried to protest the first time and he’d handed you a bowl of whatever it was and said ‘sit down, eat’, and something about the directness of it had short-circuited your objection.

The dynamic between you had shifted in a way that was hard to articulate. He made you laugh twice last week, genuinely. Once about something on the news and once about something Gerald had said in the lobby. You’d felt the laugh leave your body and thought afterward, with some surprise, that you hadn’t been performing it.

You still felt the thing from the coffee shop, underneath. You didn’t think you’d stop feeling that for a while. It is something that won’t stop hurting when you think of it often, and you think of it often.

Tuesday morning, you’re off until noon.

Off, for a resident, means you slept until eight instead of five and only have emails to deal with instead of a full shift, but still.

You come out of your room in your robe and your thick socks, hair in the kind of chaos that only nine hours of actual sleep can produce, and you’re running through the schedule of the day in your head when you turn the corner into the kitchen and stop.

Bucky is at the stove.

In a towel.

Just a towel. White, knotted at his hip, his hair still damp against the back of his neck. He clearly just stepped out of the shower and he’s got the skillet on and he’s doing something with eggs, fully concentrated on it.

You should say something. You should announce yourself, the way a normal person would, and give you both a second to reorient.

You don’t.

You’ve seen him in suits, casuals at home, you’ve seen him in the sweater from the coffee shop, you’ve seen him in the dark of a hotel room. But this is different in a way that your body is entirely on board with and your brain is slightly behind on.

He’s solid, broad across the back and tapered down, and the towel sits low on his hips and the morning light in the kitchen is doing things you’d like it to stop doing.

His left arm, the metal one, catches the light differently than his right, the lines of it tracing the shape of a shoulder, a forearm, fingers curled around the handle of the pan.

You’ve always been a normal amount of attracted to him. You’ve been telling yourself that it was circumstantial. Hormones, proximity, those things. And that it would settle down, because that was the sensible thing for it to do.

It is not settling down.

You press your lips together and look at the ceiling briefly and remind yourself that you are a grown adult in her first trimester who is going to behave appropriately. The first trimester is notoriously unkind when it comes to this, your body does not always know what’s good for it.

“Morning,” you say.

He turns around. To his credit, he doesn’t look particularly thrown. A little caught, maybe, but he rolls with it. “Hey. Sorry… I was running late, I figured I’d just start breakfast before I—” He gestures vaguely at himself with the spatula, which you choose not to find charming. “Didn’t hear you get up.”

“It’s fine,” you say, and you get yourself to the coffee maker and give yourself something to do with your hands. “What time is it?”

“Eight-forty.” He turns back to the eggs. “I would’ve had it ready before you got up usually. Woke up late.”

“You know you don’t have to make me breakfast every single day.”

He shifts the pan off the heat. “I was making eggs anyway. Seemed wasteful not to.”

You look at his back. His very… whatever. You pour your coffee. “Are you going to put clothes on?”

“Yeah, I— are the eggs okay first or should I—”

“The eggs are fine,” you say, which possibly comes out with slightly more feeling than the eggs require, and you turn and look very deliberately at your mug.

He dishes the eggs onto two plates, sets yours on the counter in front of you with a piece of toast that has appeared from somewhere.

Then he takes himself and his towel situation to his room.

You sit at the kitchen counter and stare at your eggs and feel extremely normal about everything.

Hormones. First trimester. Completely explicable.

You eat your eggs. They’re good. They’re always good, which is its own kind of inconvenience.

He comes back in grey sweatpants and a t-shirt with his damp hair and sits across the counter from you with his own plate.

The thing about Bucky Barnes in grey sweatpants is that it is somehow worse than the towel because you cannot blame it on anything. You cannot say you were caught off guard.

He is just sitting there in normal clothes eating scrambled eggs and looking at his phone. This is just your morning now. This is what your mornings are.

“You have the afternoon appointment Friday?” he asks, not looking up from his phone.

“Two o’clock.”

He nods. Puts his phone down. Picks up his coffee. “I can drive you.”

“I can get there.”

“I want to be there.”

You consider pointing out that he says that a lot. You decide not to. “Okay.”

The scrubs have been sitting in the bottom of your bag for three weeks. The dark navy set, the ones you’d bought in your first year when you finally had enough shifts under your belt to feel like they were earned.

You’d packed them when you left your apartment and told yourself it was practical, that you’d need them before the end of your residency, that they’d still fit by then.

Today is the final week. Last stretch before your exams, before whatever comes after, and you’d woken up this morning with the particular weight of an ending sitting on your chest. The bittersweet kind, the kind that doesn’t fully resolve into either sad or glad and just sits there asking you to feel both.

You’d thought about your locker at the hospital, the mug you kept in the break room, the nurses who knew your name and your coffee order and the specific way you liked your charts organized. You’d thought about who you’d been when you started, which felt like another person’s life viewed through glass.

The scrubs had seemed right. Nostalgic. The way you might put on an old sweater, or drive past your childhood home. Just to remember what it felt like.

That was the theory.

In practice, you’re standing in front your mirror at eight in the morning and the scrub top is bunched at your midsection, stuck there, going neither up nor down.

Your stomach has done what stomachs do at nineteen weeks. It is present, unmistakably, the firm round curve of it that you’d spent weeks watching appear like something surfacing through water.

The scrub top, which had been fitted-ish even before, has no interest in accommodating it. The fabric is straining across your chest in a way that would be funny in a different context, because your chest has also done what chests do, which is become something you are still getting used to seeing in mirrors.

The whole picture is that the scrub is basically a crop top, currently. The bottom six inches of your stomach are exposed. It will not go down.

You already know. You knew the moment you got it over your arms.

Still. Something cracks anyway.

It’s not rational. You’re a doctor, you understand what’s happening to your body better than most people get to. You’d read the weekly summaries without sentimentality. You’d taken your vitamins and gone to your appointments and been, all things considered, fairly functional about the whole thing.

But there’s something about the scrubs specifically that you hadn’t accounted for. Three years of who you were, and they don’t fit. You cannot explain why that particular fact is the one that finds the crack, except that it does. And your eyes are burning before you’ve fully registered that they’re going to.

You pull at the hem once more anyway. Just to try. It doesn’t move.

“Hey—” Bucky, in the hallway, knocking twice before he pushes the door slightly open. He does that, announces himself before the door, which you’d noticed in the first week and filed away as a thing you appreciated without saying so. “Breakfast is—” He stops.

You’re not crying. You’re at the stage just before, the one where your face is doing something you can’t control and your eyes are bright and your throat has that specific tightness. And you’re wearing a scrub top bunched up to your ribcage with your stomach completely exposed and your bra visible and your hands still fisted in the fabric.

He comes into your room properly, and stands behind you. You look at him in the mirror. He looks at you.

“The scrubs don’t fit.” Your voice comes out steadier than you expected.

“Yeah,” he says. Like he’s agreeing with whatever the real sentence is underneath the one you said.

“I know they weren’t going to.” You let go of the hem. “I don’t know why I thought—” You press your lips together. The burning behind your eyes is doing what it wants to regardless, and you look up at the ceiling briefly and breathe.

“It’s the last week,” you say, after a second.

Bucky doesn’t say anything right away. Your eyes meet in the mirror and there’s nothing in his face that looks like he doesn’t understand.

“I know.”

The simplicity of it helps more than anything elaborate would have. You breathe again and feel the tightness in your throat ease a fraction.

His hands find the hem of the scrub top, and he looks at your face in the mirror first. When you give the smallest nod, he eases it up and over and off.

You stand there in your bra and maternity leggings.

In the mirror, his eyes make a trip south that he doesn’t intend you to catch. Quick and involuntary and immediately corrected, back to your face. But you caught it. The fraction of a second where they landed, where they stayed, before he pulled them back up.

You don’t say anything.

You’d spent weeks rearranging your sense of your own body, cataloguing the changes the way you would with a patient.

Maintaining the clinical distance had always been your competence.

But clinical distance has a way of not applying when someone’s eyes do what his just did.

This is not the hungry look from a hotel room. This is the helpless half-second kind. The involuntary kind. The honest kind, the kind a person can’t manufacture.

The fact that it was involuntary is the part that does something.

“Breakfast is probably cold,” you say, because you have to say something and the other things aren’t available yet.

“I can reheat it.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I’ll reheat it.”

You look at yourself in the mirror. You don’t look like yourself in the way you’ve always expected to look like yourself.

And you can’t tell yet whether that’s loss or just change, whether there’s even a meaningful difference between those two things.

“Bucky…. Thank you.” For the way he’d come in and just stood there and let the thing be what it was without trying to fix it or reframe it or promise you it would be fine.

The anatomy scan is at twenty weeks, which you know from the part of your brain that has been doing obstetric math since the positive test.

It is the one where they can tell you. If you want to know. If you ask.

You hadn’t decided, going in.

Bucky hadn’t asked whether you were going to find out, which you’d appreciated. He’d just shown up, same as always, jacket and the particular stillness that he brought into medical spaces with him.

The scan takes twenty minutes. You lie on your back with the transducer moving over your stomach while Dr. Reyes takes her measurements and narrates in the calm voice she has.

Bucky sits in the chair and watches the screen.

The anatomy is normal. All of it—the cardiac chambers, the spine, the cerebellum, the face. You listen to Dr. Reyes confirm each structure and your brain files it the way it always does, methodical.

Underneath the methodology there is something that is not methodology. something that has been building since the first scan, something that you have been calling various things and none of them have been entirely right.

“Do you want to know the sex?” Dr. Reyes asks.

You look at the ceiling. Then you look at Bucky.

He looks back at you. His expression says it’s up to you, the same way it said that about the apartment, about the appointments, about all of it.

He’d been very careful, the whole time, not to lean on decisions that were yours to make. You’d noticed. You’d been noticing for months.

“Yeah.”

Dr. Reyes smiles, and moves the transducer.

A girl.

You hadn’t had a preference, or you’d told yourself you hadn’t, but when she said it you understood something, like—oh. Oh, of course. Of course it’s her.

You don’t cry in the office. You make it to the elevator.

Its the sudden, quick kind. Two breaths worth, your hand pressed to your mouth, and then it passes.

You’re left standing in an elevator with your eyes bright, and Bucky is beside you looking at your face with the expression that isn’t unreadable anymore.

“Sorry,” you say, which is stupid, crying is a completely normal response to—

“Don’t.” He puts his arm around your shoulder and you let him.

By the time you’re in the lobby you’re fine, or close enough.

“A girl,” you say out loud, just to hear it.

“A girl.” Something in his voice makes you look at his face, and what’s there stops you. He’s looking straight ahead, jaw working slightly, and he looks like a man who has just understood the full size of something and is very quietly being changed by it.

His arm comes down from your shoulder but his hand finds yours briefly, just for a moment.

The first kick happens on a Thursday evening at twenty-three weeks.

You’re on the couch. You’ve been on the couch for an hour, which has become a thing you do now. Come home and decompose horizontally for a while before you can face anything requiring vertical effort.

Bucky is somewhere in his officr and you’re watching something on the television that you’re not fully watching.

It’s not what you’d expected. It isn’t a kick exactly, it’s more like something — someone really — turning over. A rolling flutter from the inside, unmistakable once it happens, unmistakable in the way that means you’d know it anywhere forever.

You go completely still.

It happens again. Clearer this time. More definite.

“Bucky.” You don’t mean to say it at volume. It just comes out.

Following footsteps, you see him. He reads your face immediately and crouches beside the couch without asking ‘what’s wrong’, because whatever your face is doing right now clearly isn’t wrong.

“She’s moving.”

His eyes go to your hands on your stomach. “Now?”

“Just now. She—” It happens again, and your face does something you’re completely not in control of. “There.”

He looks up at you and then at your stomach and then at you again. “Can I?”

“Yeah.” You take his hand and put it where yours is, your palm over the back of his.

For a moment nothing happens, and you think maybe it’s stopped, and then—

His face.

You’ve catalogued Bucky’s expressions for months. You know the almost-smile and the real one and the careful one and the behind-the-eyes one, but this is none of them.

This is something you haven’t seen before and can’t name, something stripped entirely of everything else, just… pure. Open in a way his face almost never is. His eyes are bright and he is looking at your stomach like it is the most astonishing thing he has ever encountered.

“That’s her.” His voice is not steady.

“That’s her.”

He doesn’t move his hand. You don’t move yours. The kick comes again. The two of you stay like that on the couch, with his hand under yours, her making herself known between you.

There are things between you still. Not resolved, the coffee shop, his words you seem to can’t get past.

But right now it’s quiet.

“She’s strong,” he eventually says. A little undone. Trying not to show it and not quite succeeding, which you love. Which you note, quietly, that you love.

He looks up at you and something passes between you that doesn’t need words, something that would have been impossible five months ago.

His thumb moves slightly on your stomach, a small unconscious thing, a hello from the outside. You let your head fall back against the cushion and close your eyes and feel her move again.

Today you notice that your left breast is tender in a specific way. Your colostrum has been leaking for the better part of five days.

Now there’s this localised tenderness. You press two fingers against it, and find the spot immediately.

Blocked duct. Clean and obvious. You’d diagnosed it in approximately four seconds.

The knowing doesn’t make it hurt less.

You get in the shower and let the hot water run directly on it, and you work at the tissue the way you know. Gentle, firm strokes toward the nipple, drained before it blocks further.

It helps a little. Enough to get dressed and eat breakfast and tell yourself it would resolve on its own by afternoon, which it might, which blocked ducts sometimes do when caught early.

By afternoon it hasn’t resolved.

By evening it’s worse.

Bucky makes dinner and breakfast and lunch. It’s something he took it upon himself, and no matter what you did, he insisted he wanted to. You decided that was the least he could do, since you’re already growing a whole human.

You’re on the couch when he brings you your plate, but don’t really eat it, which he notices. Because Bucky notices things. That is one of the more inconvenient facts about living with him.

“You’re not eating.” An observation.

“I’m eating.” You take a bite to demonstrate.

He sits down on his end of the couch, his own plate, and looks at you in the way he looks at things when he’s decided something. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine.”

“You’ve been holding your left side since you sat down.”

You look at him. You hadn’t realized you were doing that. Your hand is braced just below your ribs on the left, the pressure of it a reflex you hadn’t consciously authorized. You move it to your lap.

“I’m fine.”

“Okay.” He eats a bite of his dinner. “What’s wrong?”

The repetition startles a short laugh out of you. “Bucky.”

“I’ve got time.”

You look at your plate. The thing about the past several months is that you’d stopped performing fine quite so much. You still did it sometimes. Habit, mostly.

But the effort of maintaining it in the face of someone who was going to sit there and wait it out had started to feel like more work than just saying the thing.

“Blocked duct.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means one of the milk ducts is… blocked”

“You’re… producing?”

“Yeah, for like five days. It’s normal. Don’t worry.”

“Normal? You’re in pain.”

“The milk part is normal. The blocked part is not normal even after delivery.”

“So, what do we do? What’s the treatment?”

Of course. Of course that’s the immediate question. You set your fork down. “Warm compress, massage, expression. In that order.”

“Have you tried all of that?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And it’s… helping. Some. Not fully resolved.”

He’s quiet for a second, and you can hear him thinking, which is a thing you’ve learned to recognize. “Do you want me to— I could help with the massage. If that’s— if it would help.”

Something happens to your body that you are immediately and completely dismissive of. You are thirty-eight weeks pregnant and you are sitting on a couch across from the man who is the father of your child and who is also just a person asking a practical question.

Your body’s response to that question is frankly embarrassing and entirely the fault of the third trimester hormonal profile.

“I’m fine,” you say, for the third time, which even you can tell is getting less convincing.

“You said that.” He puts his plate on the coffee table. “What else is there?”

“What do you mean?”

“For the duct. If massage doesn’t work, what else is there?”

Your face does something you are not responsible for. You think about how to answer this question, which should be simple, which is a medical question with a factual answer, and yet.

“Suction.”

“A pump?” He’s already standing with his not even half finished place. “I’ll go buy one—”

“It’s not the pump.” The words come out before you’ve decided to say them. You look at him.

He looks back at you.

“Tell me what it is.” His voice is even.

You hold his gaze for a second. There are thirty-eight weeks of something between the two of you, not all of it clean, most of it good, and you are in pain that has a solution that you are not asking for.

“Manual suction would be equally effective than the pump. It’s also direct. You don’t have to— I don’t need you to do anything. It’ll resolve.”

He’s very still. “Will it?”

“Probably.”

“Probably,” he echoes.

“Yes.”

He’s looking at you with the expression that isn’t unreadable anymore, hasn’t been for a while, the one that means he’s made a decision and is waiting to see if you’ll come to the same one. “You’re in pain.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve said that four times and eaten approximately one bite of dinner.” His voice is quiet and not unkind and leaves absolutely no room. “You’re in pain, and there’s something that would help, and you’re sitting there not asking for it. So I’m asking. Do you want me to help?”

“It’s not— This isn’t—”

“I know what it is and what it isn’t. I’m asking if you want me to help.”

The honesty of the question, the way he’s asking plainly if you want him to, does something to the knot of your refusal, loosens it.

“Okay.”

The bedroom lamp is on low, which you’re grateful for. You’re sitting against the headboard in just your tank top because bra is compression and compression makes the pain worse.

Bucky is sitting beside you. You’ve walked him through it in the voice you use for medical explanations. Impersonal, methodical, this is the direction of drainage, this much is the pressure we’re aiming for. He’d listened the way he listens to everything, completely, without interrupting.

“Tell me if I’m doing it wrong.”

“You’re not.” You’d watched his hands and the technique was right, working from the periphery inward the way you’d told him.

The heat of it was immediate, the specific relief of pressure moving in the right direction, and you let your head fall back against the headboard and breathe through it.

It hurts. It hurts in the way that relief sometimes hurts, the way that unkinking something that’s been kinked for too long. You press your lips together and exhale.

“Still okay?” he asks.

“Yes.” Your voice is not entirely steady. “Keep going.”

The blocked duct is stubborn in the way they get when they’ve been compressing for a day. The massage alone was never going to be enough, you’d known that, you’d known it since Wednesday morning and done it anyway because asking was harder.

But his hands are warmer than yours, the pressure more sustained, and the way his fingers glide over your swollen skin sends an unexpected shiver through you, the warmth pooling not just in relief but in a deeper, aching need between your thighs.

When his mouth closes over the nipple, the sensation is overwhelming at first.

The sound you make is entirely involuntary and you press your hand to your own mouth immediately.

His hand stills on your ribs. He doesn’t stop. The suction is careful and rhythmic and nothing about the way he’s doing this is anything other than what it is.

Yet your body does not seem to fully understand the assignment. The wet heat of his mouth envelops you, his tongue pressing softly against the sensitive peak as he draws gently, each pull sending a spark of unwelcome arousal straight to your core, making you clench involuntarily around nothing.

You tell yourself you’re not turned on by him relieving your pain. You’re wrong.

Just for a fleeting moment, you wonder, if it's affecting him too. If the intimate act of tasting you, feeling your body respond under his lips, is stirring something in him the way it's unraveling you.

With continued suction, the colostrum releases slowly, the hard cord of tissue beginning to soften under his hand. You feel the pressure shifting, the acute point of pain diffusing.

And your eyes fill without your permission, the specific relief of it after a day of something that just quietly hurt and hurt and hurt.

“There.” Your voice breaks on it, just slightly.

He pulls back. Looks at your face. And then without discussion he puts his arm around you and pulls you into his side carefully. His hand finds the top of your bump in the way he does sometimes without thinking and you let him.

“You’re okay,” he says into your hair. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”

You breathe. The ache is fading and you are okay.

But the lingering warmth of his mouth on your skin, the ghost of his breath against your nipple, has left you throbbing with need.

There’s this heat in you that has nothing to do with pain or hurt or blocked ducts. And everything to do with him and his proximity. You don’t think you can blame it on your hormones anymore.

You’re focused on not doing anything more. Because you don’t know how he feels. Just because he’d offered to help doesn’t mean he’s into this. Into you.

“Why didn’t you call me?”

You don’t know what he is talking about.

You lift your head a little. “What?”

His hand moves slightly on your back, a small motion, like he’s deciding how to continue. “The morning after the gala.” He’s not looking at you directly. “I had an early call. I had to be out by 5.30. I didn’t want to wake you.”

That morning comes rushing back like it was yesterday. The empty side. The folded dress on the chair. The glass of water.

“I left my number on the hotel notepad, by the lamp. I thought— I thought you’d call.”

“What—”

“Left side of the lamp. I figured maybe you didn’t want to. And then weeks went by and I thought—” He doesn’t finish that sentence. He doesn’t have to. “And then you called. And I picked up and heard your voice and I thought, okay. Okay, she called.”

If only you’d looked properly.

You close your eyes. Your brain does the math. How close you’d been to something, how much the last eight months might have looked different… if only you’d looked properly.

“And then the coffee shop. I said something— I said something I would take back ten times over if I could. The look on your face.” He finally glances down at you, and his expression is the honest one, the one stripped of the management. “I’d been thinking about you for weeks, and then there you were, telling me something that big, and I panicked and I said the worst possible thing, and I’ve been—”

“Bucky…”

“I’ve been trying to show you that I’m not that… Since then. That — that isn’t who I am.”

“I know.” You mean it fully. “I know.”

His hand hasn’t stopped moving on your back and you’ve gone completely loose against his side.

You turn your face slightly into his shoulder. He smells like the same thing he always smells like.

Something clean, something his.

You look up. He’s looking down. At you.

”I looked, I searched… I — I am so sorry, Bucky.”

He shakes his head, “you have nothing to be sorry about.” His voice is a whisper, gently wiping something off your face, only then do you realise you’d been crying.

Later if you thought about it, you could not have said who moved first. Maybe it was you, maybe it was just the proximity and the angle and months and months of near misses.

But his mouth is on yours and it is nothing like the hotel room. Nothing at all like that.

That had been hunger and dark and mutual want in its simplest form, and this is something else, something that has been earned in increments. When you kiss him back you feel the whole weight of it.

His hand comes up to your jaw, the right one, and he kisses you the way he does things when he means them. Slow. Sure. Like he is not going anywhere and wants you to know it. This time there’s no tears.

When you pull back, his thumb is on your cheek and your foreheads are together and you’re both breathing.

“Hi,” you say, which is what you always seem to say when he takes you off guard.

Something changes in his expression. Soft and a little helpless and very, very him. “Hi.”

You kiss him again, slower, and his hand slides from your jaw to your neck, and when you shift against him you feel him go still.

“I don’t want to—” He pulls back enough to look at you, and his face is flushed, and he’s trying to be responsible about something and finding it difficult. His eyes go briefly, helplessly, to your stomach, and then back to your face. “I don’t want to hurt her.”

You look at him. Something warm and fond moves through you, which is perhaps not the most practical emotion for this particular moment, but there it is.

“Sex is not contraindicated,” you say.

His brow furrows slightly. “How do you—”

“Bucky.”

“I just—”

“It’s actively encouraged in the two weeks before the due date.” You hold his gaze. “Prostaglandins in semen help with cervical ripening. And orgasm stimulates uterine contractility, which—”

“Okay.”

“—can help initiate labour at term, which is why—”

“Okay.” He’s slightly flushed. “I get it.”

“Do you? Because I can explain the mechanism—”

“How do you know that?” He asks with the expression of a man who has already realized the answer.

You cock your eyebrow.

“Right. You’re a doctor.” He looks like he’s genuinely embarrassed, with the kind of blush you have never seen on him before in eight months of looking at his face. “Sorry.”

You press your lips together so you don’t smile too much, because this is not the moment for I told you so, except that it is a little. “It’s okay.”

“I just—I didn’t want to—”

“I know.” You put your hand on his jaw, the same way you’d put it on his jaw in a hotel room eight months ago in a completely different life. “I know. She’s safe. I’m safe. Okay?”

This is different from the hotel room in every way that matters.

“You’re beautiful.” He says it simply, like it’s the truth.

“I’m enormous.”

“Yeah.” He says it like those are the same sentence. Like enormous is included in beautiful, like the distinction doesn’t exist.

You pull his shirt over his head and he lets you, and then his hands find your tank top and he eases it off fully. His eyes move over you the way they’d moved that day in the mirror, except now there is nothing to look away from, and he doesn’t.

“Tell me what feels good. Tell me what doesn’t.”

“You’re going to make me talk the whole time?”

“I’m going to make you talk when I need to know something.” His mouth moves to your jaw, your throat, and his voice is warm against your skin. “Which will be often.”

Your hands find his hair and you hold on.

His hands learn it the way you’d watch him learn anything else. With attention, nothing half-done.

He finds your hip, your thigh, and his fingers trail up the inside of it with the unhurried patience of a man who is not going anywhere. When they reach the apex of your thighs and slip between your folds, finding you slick and swollen, he exhales slowly against your neck.

“Jesus.”

“I told you it was—”

“Not the physiology… Just— you.” His fingers part you gently, circling your clit with soft strokes, and your grip on his hair tightens. “This.”

You stop talking.

His fingers are gentle in a way that is its own undoing. He’s learning, finding the places that make your breath change and staying there, pressing and rubbing with just enough pressure to send heat pooling low in your belly.

You’re on your side, which is where he’d guided you with the easy practicality of someone who’d done their research and wasn’t going to make a thing of it.

His chest is warm against your back and his hand is over your hip and everything about the angle lets his fingers delve deeper, one sliding inside you while his thumb works your clit.

He keeps going until your thighs are shaking and you’re saying his name with your face pressed to the pillow and when his fingers slow, you make an undignified sound

“Don’t stop—”

“I’m not stopping,” he says into your shoulder. “Just changing.”

He shifts, settling behind you, and you feel the warm blunt pressure of his cock at your entrance, the head nudging against your wetness.

He pauses there. His hand is on your hip, his mouth is at your temple. “Okay?”

“Yes… Please.”

He pushes in slowly. All the way slow, inch by inch, stretching you, giving you time to feel every ridge and vein as he fills you completely. You exhale through it and he stays still when he’s fully seated, buried to the hilt. You feel his chest chest rising and falling against your back. “Okay?” he asks again.

“More than okay,” you manage, which makes him exhale a short, warm laugh against your neck.

He moves. The kind of pace that builds rather than rushes, his cock sliding out almost to the tip before thrusting back in. His hand on your hip holds you in place, and you feel every movement everywhere, the particular fullness of him inside you, pressing against that sensitive spot with each stroke, the particular closeness of his body wrapped around yours.

His hand slides from your hip to your stomach and just rests there and something about that, the fact that he thought to do that, his palm warm and open on the curve of your belly while his cock moves inside you, does something to you that is beyond physical.

“Bucky.” It’s not a request for anything, just his name in your mouth, just needing to say it.

“I’m here.” His arm tightens around you. “I’ve got you.”

His other hand finds your clit again, fingers slick with your arousal, rubbing in tight, slow circles that match the rhythm of his hips. You feel the tension building in slow long waves, nothing like the urgent snap of the hotel room, this is the accumulative kind, the kind that climbs and climbs, your walls clenching around him with each thrusts.

His mouth is at your ear and he’s saying your name, just your name.

When you come, you come with his name on your lips and his arms around you and his hand on your belly.

It moves through you like something warm breaking loose from somewhere it had been held for a long time, your body pulsing around his cock, drawing him deeper. You feel it in your chest as much as anywhere else.

His hips stutter and slow and he presses his face into your neck and follows you, spills inside you. His arm fully wraps around you, and then everything is still.

You lie there with his heartbeat at your back, fast still and slowing.

This time there’s no condom to dispose. But he does move, and comes back with a washcloth and a glass of water. A glass of water, again.

His hands are soft and his touch gentle when he cleans you, wiping away the mix of your release and his from between your thighs.

After a while, after he’s made you drink half a glass of water, and you’re settled into him, his hand moves on your stomach. “Hey,” he says. To her. Like a hello.

You press your hand over his.

Something moves under your palms and you realise it’s a hello back from the inside.

my masterlist !

extras. if this flops, i’ll cry. also why was this so long lmao 😭

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