The door clicks shut behind you and his head lifts, blue eyes sweeping over you slowly, deliberately, darkening when they land on the tiny shorts you wore to tempt him. The corner of his mouth curves because you’re already playing the game.

“Been thinkin’ about you all day, doll,” he says, voice syrup-thick, gravel just beneath. His gaze snags on the delicate chain resting above your collarbone. “C’mere.”

A single word, quiet, and your pulse kicks against your ribs.

You toe off your shoes and cross the carpet, stopping only when your knees brush his. He’s so much bigger up close; it never fails to make you feel impossibly small, every inch of you a perfect fit for his shadows.

His hand finds your hip, thumb stroking lazily along the waistband of your shorts. Heat blooms through you. He hums low in amusement.

“These look painted on,” he murmurs. “You tryin’ to kill me?”

You shrug, all faux innocence.

“Maybe I missed you.”

The admission is soft, nearly swallowed by the tension crackling between you.

His eyes lift to yours, the teasing fading for a heartbeat.

“Missed you too, sweetheart.”

The sincerity hits harder than any flirtation ever could.

Then suddenly you’re airborne.

A surprised sound leaves you as he lifts you effortlessly, settling you against the wall beside the couch. Your legs instinctively wrap around his waist. One broad hand braces your back while the other supports your thigh, holding you as though you weigh nothing at all.

“Tell me what you need,” he says quietly, forehead resting against yours.

You swallow.

“You.”

His eyes darken.

“All of you.”

A low rumble vibrates through his chest as he presses closer, and your breath catches.

“That what the shorts were for?” he asks. “Wanted me thinkin’ about you all day?”

“Yes.”

The answer comes far too quickly to be embarrassed about.

His grin is slow and devastating.

“Honest girl.”

He kisses your throat, lingering there while his hand traces soothing paths along your skin.

“You’ll get what you want,” he promises softly. “But we’re gonna take our time.”

And he does.

Because for all his size, all his strength, all the ways he could overwhelm you if he wanted, Bucky has always treated you like something precious.

He takes his time with every touch, every kiss, every whispered praise.

Every reminder that he’s paying attention.

That he’s listening.

That he knows exactly how to make you feel safe enough to let go.

When he eventually carries you back to the couch, settling you beneath him, his gaze never leaves yours.

He brushes a strand of hair behind your ear before leaning down to kiss you again, slow and thorough, stealing every coherent thought from your head.

The world narrows until it’s only him.

His hands.

His voice.

The familiar weight of him surrounding you.

“Look at me,” he murmurs.

You do.

And just like always, he’s watching you with that impossible combination of devotion and desire that makes your chest ache.

“There she is.”

The praise settles deep.

Every touch after that feels deliberate.

Every whispered compliment chips away another piece of your composure.

By the time pleasure finally crashes over you, you’re clinging to him, breathless and trembling.

Bucky follows moments later, burying his face against your neck as he holds you through it.

Neither of you rush afterward.

Neither of you ever do.

Instead, he gathers you into his lap and wraps a blanket around both of you.

The apartment is quiet again.

Peaceful.

His hand drifts lazily along your thigh while you curl against his chest.

“You okay?” he asks.

You smile against his skin.

“Better than okay.”

A laugh rumbles through him.

“Good.”

You tilt your head up.

“Why?”

“Because,” he says, pressing a kiss to your forehead, “I plan on spending the rest of the night proving something.”

Your grin widens.

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

His arms tighten around you.

“That there’s no such thing as too much of me for you.”

You laugh, melting further into his embrace.

“Mom?”

You push up onto one elbow. “Ivy?”

Your daughter stands in the doorway clutching her stuffed rabbit by one ear, hair mussed from sleep, big green eyes blinking against the dark. She looks so small it makes your chest ache.

“I can’t sleep,” she says, voice serious in that way only five-year-olds can manage. “My room is too dark.”

Bucky groans softly behind you but doesn’t move his arm from around your waist. “Baby doll,” he murmurs, still half buried in the pillow. “You got the nightlight shaped like a unicorn. That thing could guide ships at sea.”

“It flickers,” Ivy says flatly.

You bite back a smile. “It does not flicker.”

“It flickers in a spooky way.”

Bucky lifts his head just enough to squint toward the doorway. “You tryin’ to negotiate, kid?”

Ivy doesn’t blink. “Yes.”

You swing your legs over the side of the bed and pat the mattress. “Come here, honey.”

She pads over, climbs up between you both without asking, immediately burrowing into your side like a tiny determined mole. Bucky’s arm instinctively shifts to accommodate her, draping over both of you like he’s shielding you from something.

You smooth Ivy’s hair back. “Sweetheart, you know we’ve talked about this. You’re getting big. You can’t sleep in our bed every time you get scared. You need to work on your independence.”

She stares up at you, expression unreadable.

Bucky makes a quiet offended sound. “Hey.”

You ignore him. “Remember what we practiced? Deep breaths, turning on your lamp, reminding yourself there’s nothing in your room except your books and your stuffed animals and the laundry you refuse to put away.”

Ivy narrows her eyes. “The laundry is suspicious.”

“It is not suspicious.”

She props herself up on one elbow and studies you with far too much calculation. You can practically see the wheels turning in her head.

“Well,” she says slowly, “what about Dad?”

You blink. “What about him?”

“When is he going to learn his independence and sleep alone?”

Silence.

Then Bucky sputters. “Excuse me?”

Ivy rolls onto her back and gestures vaguely behind her without even looking at him. “He sleeps next to you every night.”

Your lips press together hard as you try not to laugh.

“That’s different,” you say carefully.

“How?”

Bucky pushes himself up onto one elbow now, hair sticking up in every direction, blue eyes narrowed in exaggerated suspicion. “Yeah,” he mutters, “how?”

“You’re my husband,” you say, turning to him.

“And?” Ivy challenges.

“And grown-ups share a bed.”

Ivy tilts her head. “So you don’t need independence?”

Bucky’s mouth opens and closes.

You glance at him and see the exact moment he realizes he’s walked straight into a trap laid by a five-year-old.

“Listen,” he tries. “It’s different for me. I’m big. I can protect Mom.”

Ivy’s gaze sharpens. “From the dark?”

He hesitates. “Well.”

“You said there’s nothing in the dark,” she points out.

You bury your face in your hand.

Bucky looks personally betrayed. “You’re using her words against me.”

Ivy crosses her arms over her tiny chest and gives him the same deadpan expression he uses when Sam annoys him.

“So,” she says calmly, “when are you going to sleep alone to practice?”

You lose it.

A laugh bursts out of you before you can stop it, and Bucky shoots you a wounded look like you’ve sided with the enemy.

“Oh, that’s funny to you?” he mutters.

“She’s got a point,” you say, wiping at your eyes.

He huffs. “Unbelievable. I raise her to be clever and this is what I get.”

Ivy flops back down dramatically. “I think Mom should sleep in my room tonight. To practice independence.”

“That’s not how that works,” you say weakly.

“It is for Dad.”

Bucky leans over you to look at her. “Kid, I earned this spot.”

“Did you?” she asks.

You can’t breathe from laughing now, and Bucky finally cracks, a grin spreading across his face despite himself.

“Alright,” he says, pulling Ivy closer to him with his flesh arm. “You wanna know a secret?”

She squints at him suspiciously.

“I don’t sleep alone,” he admits. “Because I don’t want to.”

She pauses.

“You’re not scared?” she asks.

“Sometimes,” he says honestly, his voice gentler now. “But mostly I just like being close to Mom. Makes me feel better.”

Ivy processes that. “So you don’t have independence?”

“Oh, I do,” he says solemnly. “I just choose not to use it.”

You snort.

Ivy looks between the two of you, then nods like this information has been logged and categorized. “Okay.”

“Okay?” you repeat.

She scoots down under the blankets and wedges herself firmly between you both. “Then I also choose not to use mine.”

Bucky barks out a laugh and collapses back onto the pillow.

You open your mouth to protest—but then Ivy’s small hand slips into yours, warm and trusting, and Bucky’s metal arm settles carefully over both of you.

Your bedroom feels smaller now, but softer. Safer.

“Ivy,” you murmur gently, “we can’t make this a habit.”

“Mhm,” she says, already sounding drowsy.

Bucky leans over and presses a kiss to her messy hair. “Just tonight,” he whispers.

She nods against the pillow.

You glance at him over her head, raising an eyebrow.

He shrugs, sheepish. “I’m practicing not using my independence.”

You roll your eyes but shift closer anyway, tucking yourself against his chest while Ivy stays curled between you like the world’s most stubborn little buffer.

Within minutes, her breathing evens out.

Bucky’s thumb traces slow circles against your arm. “She’s too smart,” he murmurs.

“She learned from you.”

“Yeah?” He smiles softly. “Then she’ll be okay.”

You look down at your daughter, small and fierce and brilliant, wrapped in both of you.

“She will,” you agree.

Bucky tightens his hold just a little, pressing his lips to your temple.

In the dark, surrounded by the quiet hum of the house and the steady rhythm of the two people you love most in the world, independence feels overrated.

He remembers how you take your coffee, which side of the bed you prefer, the exact brand of shampoo you use. He notices when you're tired before you do. He can tell from a single glance whether you've had a good day or a bad one.

And when it comes to intimacy?

The effort he puts in should honestly be studied.

He's patient. Gentle. Eager. Always asking what you like, always paying attention, always trying.

The problem is that your body has never exactly cooperated with anyone before.

It's not unusual for you. You've spent years assuming that getting all the way there just wasn't something that happened easily for you. You've had partners who got frustrated. Others who stopped trying altogether.

Bucky never does.

Not once.

Every time you're together, his only concern is making sure you feel good.

Every single time he notices you getting discouraged, he cups your face and kisses your forehead and says, "Hey. No pressure, sweetheart."

Which somehow makes you love him even more.

Bucky starts treating the whole thing like a puzzle he hasn't solved yet. Not in a way that makes you feel pressured—if anything, he's careful to make sure you never do—but you know him well enough to recognize that particular look in his eyes. It's the same expression he gets when he's trying to assemble furniture without instructions or when someone tells him something can't be done. Determined. Focused. Completely unwilling to give up.

"You're thinkin' too hard."

His head snaps up from where he's stretched across the couch. "I am not."

"You absolutely are."

"I am not."

"You got the face."

Bucky narrows his eyes. "What face?"

"The mission face."

The look of personal offense that crosses his features nearly makes you laugh. "There is no mission face."

"There is."

"There isn't."

"There really is," you insist, and by then you're already giggling. Bucky responds by hauling you into his lap with a dramatic grumble, burying his face against your shoulder while muttering about betrayal.

Somehow, that's what changes everything.

Not that night, and not even the next. There isn't some magical breakthrough or sudden discovery. Instead, the pressure simply fades away over time. The two of you stop treating intimacy like something with a finish line and start enjoying it for exactly what it is: being close to each other.

Somewhere along the way, it stops being about what might happen and becomes about the way Bucky looks at you like you're the best thing that's ever happened to him. The way he presses sleepy kisses to your forehead before either of you are fully awake. The way his face lights up whenever you walk into a room. The way he touches you so carefully sometimes, as if you're something precious he's still amazed he gets to hold.

Safe.

Wanted.

One rainy evening, curled together beneath tangled blankets while the steady patter of rain taps against the windows, something finally clicks.

There's no expectation hanging over the moment. No goal. No pressure. Just warmth, comfort, and the overwhelming certainty that you're loved exactly as you are.

At first, you barely notice the shift. Only that something feels different. Your breath catches. Your fingers tighten against his shoulders. Then suddenly the feeling rushes over you so unexpectedly that a startled laugh slips out before you can stop it.

Bucky freezes.

His eyes go wide.

"Were you laughing?"

You can hardly form a sentence. "No."

"You were."

"I wasn't."

"You absolutely were."

Then you watch realization begin to spread across his face in real time. First confusion. Then suspicion. Then hope.

And finally pure disbelief.

His mouth actually falls open.

"Wait."

You immediately start laughing again.

"Bucky—"

"No, wait."

Both of his hands cup your face as though he's afraid you'll disappear if he lets go. His eyes are enormous.

"Doll."

"Oh my God."

"Doll."

The grin stretching across his face grows wider by the second.

"DID THAT JUST HAPPEN?"

You immediately hide your face in your hands.

"Bucky—"

"IT DID!"

His voice cracks with excitement. He actually sits upright, pointing at you like he's presenting evidence to a jury.

"You did!"

"Oh my God, stop."

"You did!"

"Bucky!"

The man looks like he just won the lottery. His grin is so wide his cheeks have to hurt.

"I am gonna frame this moment."

"You cannot frame an orgasm."

"I'm gonna find a way."

"Bucky."

"I'm tellin' Sam."

"If you tell Sam, I'll kill you."

He nods immediately. "Fair."

Still grinning like an idiot, he flops back onto the mattress beside you. You shove his shoulder, fighting your own smile.

"You're ridiculous."

"I know."

The teasing remains in his expression, but something softer slowly settles underneath it. The excitement doesn't disappear—it probably never will—but now there's something emotional woven through it, too.

Something that makes your chest ache.

Because when he looks at you, he suddenly looks close to tears.

"You happy?"

The question catches you completely off guard.

He isn't asking about his performance or about himself. He's checking in on you.

And that's when you understand what this has really been about all along.

Not his ego. Not some personal accomplishment. Not proving that he could.

He simply wanted you to experience something you'd always felt was out of reach. He wanted you to know you deserved good things. Wanted you to feel cared for, cherished, and loved.

Wanted you to be happy.

Your eyes sting unexpectedly.

"Yeah."

Bucky notices immediately.

"Hey."

His fingers slip between yours.

"You okay?"

You nod.

"Yeah."

Your voice comes out softer this time.

"Just happy."

The smile that spreads across his face could power an entire city.

"There she is."

You roll your eyes. "There who is?"

"My girl."

Your heart doesn't stand a chance.

Because despite all the celebrating, despite the fact that he's clearly treating this like the greatest achievement of his life, what matters most to him is still you. It always has been.

Bucky pulls you against his chest and wraps both arms around you. You settle there, listening to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat while the rain continues outside.

Several minutes pass before he breaks the silence.

"So."

You groan immediately.

"No."

"I'm just saying—"

"No."

"I think this officially qualifies me as an Avenger-level hero."

You bury your face against his shoulder while his laughter rumbles through his chest.

And even though he's absolutely going to spend the next six months acting like he deserves a medal for this, you find you don't mind nearly as much as you should.

Because he's smiling.

You're smiling.

Though you had Bucky to thank for keeping you upright.

Did you really drink that much?

It was supposed to be a couple of drinks with the crew to unwind. A fun night. Bucky made sure you had a seat right next to him and never took his eyes off you. He even brought your last drink over for you. Your favorite.

How did he know?

“Jeremiah was a bullfrog. Was a good friend of mine. I never understood a single word he said…” You giggled again, leaning on the bulky super soldier for support as he helped you walk. “I haven’t heard that song in ages, and now it’s gonna be stuck in my head.”

“I think I was on ice when that song came out,” he tried to joke, giving you a lopsided smile. It looked a little sinister under the harsh street lamp. “But we can listen to music when we get back to my place.”

Your eyes lit up, even with how blurry your vision was getting. “Really?” you asked before your brows furrowed. “Wait… your place?”

You didn’t recall saying you’d go to his place. 

His grip tightened as he pulled you closer. “Yeah, my place,” he replied, bringing his mouth to your ear. “You can even sleep over.”

You shivered but not from the chill in the air. “Oh, I wouldn’t… want to impose.”

“You’re not,” he promised, smirking to himself. “I’m gonna take care of you.”

I would've gone willingly! Love and thanks for reading. ❤️

This was probably the worst decision you have ever made.

But, hell, now you officially jumped without a parachute, the ledge is gone, the air is passing by quickly, and your only hope is that you’ll somehow learn how to fly on the way down and you’ll be able to land on your feet.

The hallway outside has lost its symmetry, as you have lost your sanity, and now nothing seems to make sense anymore. Everything seems longer and crueler, your panic stretching the hallways into a long, suffocating throat. Each of your hectic footsteps makes you feel too exposed in this big mansion, they seem to echo your exact coordinates throughout the floors. Every hallway hears you, the walls themselves are turning their heads.

You take the first turn on instinct, then another, and another, trying to remember the route, trying to retrace the thread that brought you here, but your terror and all that bottled-up panic smashes sequence, steals direction, leaves you with nothing but speed because you know that if you stop, you’re done.

Your feel your heart everywhere. In your throat, in your ears, behind your eyes, beating against your teeth.

You blow past a side table where a cluster of pale lilies sits, blooming so aggressively, looking so wrong and even ugly in the corner of your eye, you have to take another turn.

You’re no longer thinking, you’re just running.

Your chest is a hollow chamber and all you hear is your own pants when you pass a maid who startles and calls something you don’t catch. You pass a window tall as a church promise and for one insane second consider throwing yourself through it. 

Somewhere behind you, from the office, you hear a loud crash. His voice follows. His voice. It sounds so much more blood-curdling now. 

He’s calling your name. Loud and baffled and then sharper. He doesn’t sound angry yet, but definitely alarmed in a way that makes every warning bell inside you turn rabid. Because there is something uniquely petrifying about hearing alarm in the voice of a man like him. It means you have disrupted the script. It means he does not understand. It means he is coming.

You run harder, every nerve in your body overflowing with adrenaline.

But, as expected, the house doesn’t simply spit you out. Corridors feed into corridors, archways into alcoves, burnished halls into rooms you have never seen, and every choice you make seems to slide you deeper into the belly of the place instead of toward freedom. 

With a ragged and desperate breath, you shove through one swinging door expecting another passage, and stumble instead into a kitchen vast enough to feed a wedding. There is all this gleaming steel and those butcher-block islands and hanging copper, bright under the lights in a way that feels grotesque after the dim severity of the office. 

It is wrong, all wrong, too open and yet somehow still a trap, because there is no front hall here, no visible exit, only counters and cabinets and startled staff, and you realize with a sick plunge of your stomach, that you have run yourself into a dead end dressed as luxury. 

This is bad, this is so bad. 

You stop abruptly, spinning around helplessly. The breath tears in and out of you like it is trying to escape without the rest of your body. The halls behind you are full of pounding footsteps, and you know it’s just one single set, but you also know it’s him.

He’s advancing and you can’t keep escaping.

A woman near the far counter goes still with a mixing bowl in her hands. Another man freezes by the sink with his hands in water. No one speaks. No one moves. The whole room seems to hold itself in suspension around your panic, everyone watching without watching, and then from somewhere behind you in the corridor comes Bucky’s voice sounds again, practically yelling your name—no confusion left now, only alertness, apprehension; and it punches you in the gut. It rings through you, through the kitchen, through the bright metal and tile and silence, and you know it has all been for nothing. 

But before there is anything you can do, before the ground can open a portal for you to fall through, Bucky appears in the kitchen doorway, looking like an avalanche with a name. A big name. A dangerous name. A name that will be the end of you. 

He doesn’t look raging in the obvious way, but he’s lost a bit of control. And for the man that he is, you don’t know how to survive it. And this intensity with which he came thundering after you is so extremely frightening because it looks expensive on him, tailored to fit, like one of his suits, like one of his watches, like all the impeccable and dangerous things he wears so naturally you once mistook them for elegance instead of that blaring warning sign they actually are. 

Why just have you been so stupid, my god.

He’s totally got you wrapped around his finger—and dick, as embarrassing and daunting as it is—or you would have maybe been able to open your eyes for a second, you idiot. 

But now they are open, wide, wide open, and you see him. You see him as the man he is. But maybe it’s a little too late now. 

He stops the moment he sees you pressed half-backward against the dark island, sees the way your hands have come up slightly as if your body has decided on defense without consulting you, sees the wet shine gathering in your eyes, the terror you are no longer managing to powder over, and something happens to his face that is so brief and so devastating, but all you can do is stare at him so you see that clean strike of realization. 

He doesn’t look confused anymore, and it makes him even more menacing.

He knows. He knows that you know. And he probably knows what he’s going to do to you now but you don’t know if you want to know that.

The air seems to cinch around you, seems to wrap itself around your throat, and squeezes. You can’t breathe. You don’t try to.

Bucky—James, your mind insists now with a sick recoil, James Buchanan Barnes, James Buchanan Barnes, biggest crime boss in the city—does not look away from you when he tilts his face to the staff. That, more than anything, makes your blood run strange. His attention stays fixed on you with a steadiness so absolute it feels like a physical thing, a hand at the back of your neck, while his voice turns toward everyone else in the room and comes out low and unquestionable. “Everyone out.” 

His command is dropped into the kitchen and nobody argues. The immediate obedience of his people makes you visibly shudder. 

A woman near the stove sets down a towel with trembling fingers. The man by the sink lowers his eyes and moves. Another staff member glances at you once with a quick look that seems almost guilty, almost pitying, and you feel the pulse of it pounding all around you, everywhere inside you. 

Nobody looks at you too long, nobody does anything besides leaving the fucking room. They won’t meet your fear and they won’t step between it and the source. Nobody here belongs to themselves enough to choose you over him. But it’s clear that they don’t. They’re his people for a reason. Nobody here will be on your side, whatever happens. 

A door swings. The kitchen empties in a matter of seconds, everyone slipping out with the furtive speed of people evacuating a room where something dangerous has just unsheathed itself. They leave with the scene in their eyes. They leave you with him. And the silence after the last one goes is so sudden it roars.

You take another step back and only feel the unhelpfully solid press of marble against your spine. There is nowhere else to go unless you want to climb onto the counter like a cornered animal, and for one hysterical beat of a second, the idea does not even seem ridiculous. 

You keep your eyes on him because looking away feels somehow more chilling, but your gaze is frantic within that line of sight, darting to the side entrance, to the swinging service door, to the corridor beyond him, to windows that suddenly seem decorative rather than useful, to every possible seam in the room where escape might be hiding in miniature.

There is none. The whole kitchen gleams at you with pitiless order that’s just full of steel and stone and copper, knives in their block and pots all around. 

He notices you looking, but you can’t care; all you have to care about is the distance between you and him, the distance between you and anything that might become escape if panic suddenly grew wings. 

Could you run past him? Maybe, if he were anyone else. Maybe, if this were some ordinary man with ordinary reflexes and an ordinary body and an ordinary life. 

But he is none of those things. You’re in this damn situation because he’s none of those things. 

He fills the doorway without even trying. He stands there in the collectedness of his dark clothes and encroaching presence, looking at you as if he can hear your thoughts tripping over each other and your fear has turned you transparent. 

His shadow has finally caught up to his skin and you now realize how dark it is.

Even if you got around him, where would you go? The front hall might as well be on another continent. Every corridor in this house has already left you stranded. There is no map in your mind now, only panic. No way out.

The knowledge gathers in your chest until it hurts. Behind your eyes, heat stings. Your throat tightens around a lump and only something choked leaves your lips. 

And Bucky sees all of it. You keep trying to shrink back from him because his very outline has now become a threat, and it doesn’t make your situation better, but he already knows, so you don’t have to pretend anymore. 

And his face alters. It’s as if the floor has given way under him. As if he had stepped expecting hard tiles and found air.

He does not advance. That should help. It does not. He stays where he is, one hand dropping slowly from the doorframe to his side, as if he understands that any sudden movement from him might send you straight through the nearest pane of glass. 

There is a fervor to him now that feels different from the one you knew in bed, at dinner, in the soft-lit luxury of his attention. It has made you feel protected, loved, worshipped. 

But there is no feeling of that anymore, none of that, because now it’s stripped of adornment, revealed as what it perhaps always was beneath all that heat and gentleness. It’s focus. Pure and frightening focus. 

His eyes are on you in that unwavering, devastating way of his, but the expression in them is nothing easy. There is something dark in there, something grim and braced, something that knows a door has just slammed shut and is already calculating what can still be salvaged from the wreckage. 

His mouth is set. His jaw is hard enough to cast shadows. He looks, absurdly, heartbreakingly, like a man who has been struck and is refusing to touch the bruise. But he stands, and he’s still so tall, much taller than you thought he could become, and he is not the man you thought you knew. 

He stands there with his hands visible, shoulders squared but not aggressive, and the intensity in him is bridled.

His stare does not feel like a threat in the crude sense, but it’s so full of attention, too much attention, because total attention from a man like him is its own species of fear. 

“Sweetheart.”

His voice has changed. It is calm but only in pretense. It is soft, technically, but not the way it was before. Before, his softness had warmth in it, a hand held out in the dark. 

But this is lower. Straighter. It has gone cool around the edges. It’s not vicious or unkind in any sense, but your body clocks it instantly. It’s almost formal in its restraint, as though he’s speaking across the lip of something that’s close to breaking and he’s trying not to widen the crack.

And that nickname makes you want to let the tears fall. Whatever he tries to achieve by calling you that, it doesn’t work. It’s just torture how familiar he tries to make it sound. 

His gaze falls in fast snaps over your face, your posture, your trembling hands. “This looks bad,” he concedes roughly. His throat works once before he continues. “I know it does. But it isn’t what you think it is.”

The words land in you and do nothing. They just sink. Sit there.

He studies your face, sees he has not reached you at all. “What did you see, baby? What has you—” He breaks off with a crack, shakes his head slowly, and lets out a shuddering breath, eyes still on you. “Tell me what you saw.”

What answer could you possibly give him? 

That you are looking at his mouth and thinking of all the times it softened around your name, and your own mind keeps turning traitor and overlaying that tenderness with headlines, with whispers, with ravening rumor? 

That the same voice which once coaxed and soothed now sounds capable of making rooms empty and men obey and whole situations forgotten? That the current version of his voice is a masterclass in control and it terrifies you to no end?

That his hands are hanging open at his sides, looking so damn human and ordinary, as though they’ve never done anything wrong? 

Which is a lie, you now know, a lie that runs deep and leaves you scarred, because all you can think is that these bare hands are the same hands you’ve had under your chin, lifting your face to his, tucking hair behind your ear, buttoning you up against the cold, and you’ve had them gripping you tight in the dark, moving inside you until you couldn't breathe, wrecking you in the best way possible.

These hands were your favorite things. 

But looking at them now, you picture what they are doing when you aren’t around. Doing the dirty work, the ugly work, the unspeakable work, hidden back in the blacked-out corners of a life he kept under lock and key.

Your throat feels too dry to talk and you stay quiet, letting the stillness in the room ripen, letting your lack of words and the fear in your eyes speak for themselves.

A hard, hollow tension knots his face, makes his jaw grind, and look as solid as a piece of rock. His hands ball into fists and when your eyes snap to them immediately, your body already flinching, he flexes them, but it seems forced. There is an almost brute rigidity to his throat, a silent scream of dread choked down only barely.

“What do you know?” he grits out through clenched teeth. 

The question is gentle in shape and brutal in substance. It makes your stomach turn. Because it sounds like a test. It sounds like inventory. It sounds like the kind of thing a ruthless man would ask before deciding what to do with the damage.

You let your fingers grip the edge of the counter. You can’t answer him. All you can do is try to breathe. All you can do is stare at the exit behind him, and his body standing between it. 

He draws in a slow breath, lets it out. “Look at me, Y/n. Please.”

You didn’t know some part of you would still obey, but you notice too late. Maybe it’s better this way. Your eyes lift fully to his. 

And you can actually see the way he has lost his grip. It’s right there in his eyes. If you were to describe it you’d say it looks distraught. As if he’s lost, his entire biography that’s been neatly written on paper now ripped away and he can’t find the next line. 

Judging by the way you act and look at him, he knows you know something, he just doesn't know what, and the mystery is eating him alive. Just for one disorienting second he doesn’t look that much like this untouchable figure from all those disturbing rumors, but rather like a simple man who knows that if he tries to force his way out of this, he’s just confirming your worst fears about him.

“My name,” he starts with a little hesitance. The gravelly low timbre of his voice makes you shudder, “is James Buchanan Barnes.”

Something in your face gives you away. 

You feel it the moment it happens. Some tiny involuntary flinch. Some helpless widening. 

Because something crosses his expression, his throat bobs hard enough to show that everything inside him is suddenly in pieces. 

He sees that the name is not new to you. He sees that you are already standing several steps ahead of where he hoped this conversation was.

He goes very still.

“You knew that already,” he acknowledges, and it almost hurts how he tries to sound calm about it all. 

Your mouth is dry. Your whole body feels like a struck match. You let out a pitiful small breath.

He takes one careful step forward, and it’s not really a step, not even truly an advance, but you recoil so sharply, you ram your whole body against the wall of marble behind you. Your back stings, but your eyes sting more. 

His face changes with your reaction, something like pain flashing through the severe framework of him before he reins it back in. 

“How?” he asks, and he’s no longer trying for calm. He ducks his head, pleading eyes on you, and he speaks with a wounded quiet. “Sweetheart, how did you find out?”

Your throat works around the answer. “Your tags.” It comes out so faint it is almost nothing, just a shaking breath that accidentally caught a few letters on the way out. 

For a second he shuts his eyes. For just one cut of time. 

His head tips back the slightest amount, and he deflates. A breath of air leaves him in a hitching, rattling shudder, like he’s finally run out of things to hold onto.

He looks back at you and seems briefly at a loss. James Buchanan Barnes, man of closed doors and fixed outcomes, with no ready sentence in his hands. 

It is strange and unnerving and it makes you talk more, bracing for him to yell and threaten and turn cold. 

“And,” you whisper, voice wobbling and blundering around in your mouth, “there was a gun.“ 

You want to explain, want to urge that you didn’t mean to find it, didn’t mean to come across anything at all. You want him to know you would like to dump your eyes in a container of white paint so your vision is a blank canvas and you can color it with other pictures, but it’s too late, and your words already seem to break across him, differently.

He does not move at first. He almost flinches, but catches it halfway, as if his body forgot for a moment to be disciplined. 

His eyes stay on you, and all that’s in there are things you’ve never seen in him before. Or in anyone, really. It is a stricken grief, resulting from the way every new piece of your fear is arriving inside him one by one and finding purchase. 

He looks at you like he can see the exact route your mind took from one discovery to the next, and hates every mile of it.

“Baby, I—” he croaks, having to pause. Instead, he starts toward you again, even slower this time, palms open a little, perhaps meaning only to soothe, perhaps meaning only to be nearer, but simply more trepidation triggers in you before thought can intervene. “Please listen to me—”

Your gaze snags on the knife block. 

The sleek black handles. The bright clean suggestion of defense. It’s without thought that you run to grab one. 

It is graceless and frantic and you don’t brandish it like someone brave in a film. You don’t know how to do this well enough for that and you don’t have the nerve to think about it. 

Your hand shakes around the handle almost immediately, and you pull it close to your chest, because fighting this vile man would be ludicrous considering who he is and who you are, knife or not, but you use it to protect yourself with the mere fact of holding something sharp. Hopeful that this thing will keep your horror from spilling out of your body altogether. 

The blade catches the light and makes it meaner. You hate that you have done this. You hate more that you had to.

Bucky stops dead.

The whole room seems to stop with him.

His eyes go first to the knife, then back to your face, and what crosses his expression then is so nakedly agonizing it is difficult to bear. 

Because he sees that you are not trying to threaten him, unlike how someone in danger might. 

You are not foolish enough to think a kitchen knife turns you into his equal. You are holding it because your body needs one small fiction to survive on—the fiction that you are not entirely empty-handed in a room with a man who could ruin you if he chose to. The fiction that you still belong, in some tiny harrowed way, to yourself.

“Hey,” he says, and his voice cracks clean through the middle of the word.

You have never heard that happen to him before. Never heard his composure split like badly fired glass.

His stare stays locked on yours, but now there is no distance in it, no coolness, no stranger’s cadence. Just a visceral, human ache. “Hey,” he says again, softer, but it sounds so incredibly heavy. It’s the way you’d talk to someone who’s just woken up from a nightmare and doesn't know where they are yet. “I’m— I’m not going to hurt you.”

Your grip tightens. The knife trembles visibly. “Don’t come closer.”

He stops breathing for half a beat and nods slowly. 

“Okay.” The word is a single rasp. “I won’t.” He swallows. You see the muscle move hard in his throat. “I won’t come any closer.”

You cannot stop shaking, no matter how hard you try, because a man with his power shouldn’t see you be so obviously afraid, but there is nothing you can do.

“Please believe me, sweetheart, when I say that I never intended to hurt you,” he swears, and there is no command in him now, none of that cold-sounding authority from a moment ago when he emptied the room with few syllables.

This is worse, in its own way. This undone version of him, this man trying to hold himself very still because the sight of you recoiling has clearly perturbed something structural inside him. “I have a thousand sins on my head, and it’s no use to claim otherwise now,” he speaks with a vulnerability in his tone that washes past you. “I’ve done a lot of things I can’t take back, but hurting you was never on the table. Okay? It was never even a possibility. You were supposed to be the only thing I didn’t ruin,” he ends with a lacerated wince.

You stare at him and have no idea how you can understand anything at all.

The knife handle bites into your palm. Your chest rises and falls too fast. The kitchen is suddenly too loud with all that humming of the refrigerator, the lights, the distant bloodstream of the mansion; and in the center of it all he stands facing you with that wrecked look in his eyes, as if your fear is not merely inconvenient to him but unbearable, and he’d rather be struck than watched this way by you.

And in a world that wasn't currently collapsing, maybe you’d actually care, maybe you’d actually notice how he would take a bullet to the chest just to stop you from flinching, but all you can think is that you are standing in the house of James Buchanan Barnes, with a knife against your own ribs as much as against him, and the man looking at you like heartbreak has found him at last is still the same man the city says should never be underestimated.

It’s so silent all of a sudden that the kitchen seems to be held in a trance. It feels as if there is a vacuum pressing against the walls and now the molecules of the room are terrified to touch the mess of what’s happening. 

The last bit of help you could have possibly still leaned on due to your desperation has vanished, echoes of footsteps now pull back into the depths of this mansion.

The overheads feel hostile, throwing down a flat glare that skims over the stainless steel and floorboards with an inert eye. 

And centered in that manufactured peace is him. 

James Buchanan Barnes.

The name has already erupted once inside your chest, but it keeps echoing, reverberating through your bones in smaller aftershocks. It feels strange to attach it to the man standing in front of you, when his hands have mapped every part of you—right to the most intimate ones—you’ve come to recognize his voice even in half-sleep and his laugh once wound through the cage of your ribs, vibrating against the bone until you couldn't tell its rhythm from your own heartbeat.

It feels like a wronged ownership. It feels like a glitch, an error in the logic of the world, but who are you to find a way out of it. Surrounded by him, in a mansion that is now suddenly as big as the world itself.

But you see it now. And god, it’s so painfully clear. So agonizingly obvious. 

You were delusional, you know that. It’s what hurts so terribly bad. You know exactly how this looks to anyone else. After all, this all started with you dating a guy for over a month and not even knowing his actual, legal name. But when you’re used to being nobody, a little bit of hyper-focused attention feels like a drug. He looked at you as if you were the only person in the room, and you would get this tight, anxious knot in your throat, thinking don’t ruin this. Asking for a last name or a background check felt like a quick way to feel high-maintenance, and you didn’t want to give him a reason to feel uncomfortable and walk away.

It was a habit born of pure insecurity, being so grateful for the crumbs of love that you don’t dare ask who’s baking the bread. He must have picked up on that on day one. He must have realized right away that as long as he kept making you feel special, you’d keep your mouth shut and let him stay hidden.

He used your loneliness, your blind spots. You were so desperately hoping to be seen, that you fell for the most obvious trap. And it’s your own fault, really. But it still makes you feel completely hollow, like someone scooped the air right out of your lungs with a cold spoon.

Now you have to live with the shame of that mistake.

Your jaw aches from clenching it, trying to swallow down the urge to throw up right there on the kitchen floor.

His presence alone seems to pull at the corners of the ceiling, dragging it down to squash you like a grape. He anchors the room to his foundation, consumes it with all he has, and tracks you with a pinpoint focus that has you shivering and sweating, because his gaze is treating the harsh thudding of your pulse as more vital than the massive, blood-stained kingdom currently cooling its heels on the other side of the door.

The roar in your ears turns outwards, seemingly engulfing the whole room with your panicked pulse. Your vision narrows down until the room stops spinning, and for the first time, you actually feel the air in the kitchen

And in the quiet, your awareness gives you the alarm that there is still something jarringly chilling resting just above your heart. It takes you a moment to realize it’s something physical. There is a weight there that now suddenly feels so deeply misplaced. 

Your hand moves on its own, your fingers lifting toward your throat to find the source of that cold, sinister pressure.

The tips of your fingers brush pearls. 

And for a moment, you stay frozen there, grazing the smooth curve of one luminous bead where the necklace drapes across your throat. 

It once made you smile, had your shoulders drop in ease when you made contact with this present of Bucky. But it no longer feels like a present at all, it feels like a bribe, a hook, a trap because its ultimate purpose surely wasn’t meant as a gift but rather to restrict your freedom and keep you bound to him.

This necklace, these shiny pearls, they aren’t about you. Honestly, you don’t think anything is about you. It never was. It’s just a reflection of what he wants you to be, confining you in his version of your identity.

He manipulated you and stole you and wanted to make you believe you’re the luckiest damn girl in the world.

And you had been. But now you’re just the stupidest.

And you keep on being, because your mind just continues jumping back to the evening he gave it to you, how it felt so soft and intimate, something chosen carefully and fastened around your neck with that glint of pride that lived in Bucky’s eyes. And you want to cry and break down at the way he stood there in front of you so awkwardly with the luxurious velvet box in his hand like it was something far more serious than jewelry. The way his voice had gone rough when he said he saw them and thought of you.

And now, sitting against your collarbone all cold, these are no longer gems, but tiny hooks sinking deeper into your skin, reminding you with every little sting, that you walked into this prison willingly.

You let James Buchanan Barnes clasp it around your neck. The man whose name crawls across newspapers like a stain. The man whose stories carry blood and conspiracies and savagery in their wake.

Somehow you manage to close your fingers around the strand despite of their shakiness.

Across the kitchen, Bucky’s gaze drops to your hand the moment it moves.

The necklace feels impossibly smooth beneath your touch, each pearl round and shining like a row of innocent little moons.

A gift.

From a man you didn’t know.

Or maybe a man you knew too well, just not in the way the world did.

Your throat feels hot suddenly and you know it's the cursed pearls burning holes there, pressing into your pulse with every overwhelmed beat of your heart.

You cannot stand it.

Your fingers curl harder.

Bucky's gaze snaps up to your face, then quickly back to your hands, and then he goes still. But still in the way of an animal that sensed the crack of a branch in the forest. Every line of him tightens in subtle increments, his shoulders locking, his breathing halting so abruptly you see the pause ruffle through his chest.

He knows what your heart doesn’t yet.

His attention sharpens and his eyes grow wide. It almost seems like he’s about to move toward you.

“Hey—” he starts softly, though the word is unfinished, frail, fearing the direction your thoughts are taking.

But your brain is no longer interested in choosing to make decisions carefully.

The necklace feels oppressive, every inch of it tied to a truth you did not have when he first placed it there, and so you can’t think or react any differently.

Your hand jerks in one swift motion just as Bucky releases a desperate choking sound.

The strand snaps free from your neck with a sharp little noise, like a thread breaking under too much strain, and now the pearls explode outward from your hand and scatter across the kitchen floor like a sudden spill of tiny white stars. They strike the tile with a bright, haphazard clatter that echoes far too loudly in the empty room.

tik—tik—tik—tik—

Some bounce high, ricocheting against cabinet legs. Others roll wildly across the floor, spinning in spasmodic circles before coming to a stop beneath stainless steel counters and chair legs.

The sound fills the kitchen in poignant, crystalline bursts.

A rain of little impacts.

A beautiful mess.

For a second you don’t even breathe.

You just stare at them—those small, perfect pearls—rolling farther and farther away from each other, punctuating the heartbreak in the air.

Across from you, Bucky doesn’t move. Something is breaking across his face. His breath leaves him in a soft, stunned exhale, and all he can do is stare with his eyes unguarded. It startles you.

He takes a step back. Not a deliberate one. More like his body forgot the floor was there. His boot slides half a pace behind him as though the sound of those pearls hitting the tile physically pushed him away from you.

His mouth parts.

For a moment he looks like he cannot quite process what he just witnessed.

His eyes—those confident, storm-colored eyes that usually hold such controlled intensity—have widened in a way you have never seen before. It doesn’t seem to look like anger, or anything like it.

It looks like hurt. Pure, unhidden hurt.

His gaze falls to the floor, tracking the scattered pearls skittering across the kitchen tiles, watching them roll away from where you stand with that look in his eyes that says he never wished to see them destroyed.

Then his eyes return to you. Slowly. And the expression there is devastating.

Because it is not rage.

It is not even disappointment.

It is heartbreak so unexpected and unfiltered it seems to hollow his chest from the inside.

His jaw tightens as if he tries to speak, but no words come immediately. The muscles along his throat move with a hard swallow, his chest rising and falling once in a slow, unsteady breath.

You realize then that he is looking at your bare throat.

The place where the necklace used to rest, and he stares at the place with sullen eyes.

Then his eyes lift again, meeting yours, and they are still wide, still aching.

For the first time since you’ve known him, Bucky Barnes looks like a man who has just watched something precious fall apart in his hands and realized too late that he cannot gather the pieces fast enough to put it back together.

And in the bright, echoing kitchen, the last pearl finishes rolling.

Tick.

Then silence returns, and your dread turns harrowing and now Bucky doesn’t seem to know where to put his hands, which is such a small, irrational thing to notice in the middle of your terror and yet your mind notices it anyway, because this is a man who has always seemed like a structure that was built out of conviction, who has been a straight line for you to follow in your world of scribbles, a man who enters every room as though the room had the good sense to expect him, and now he stands before you with your fear pointed at him in the shape of a kitchen knife and looks, inarguably, like he has been shoved off-script and dropped into the crack that formed in his foundation and now he is walled in by the very bricks he laid.

His eyes stay on your face, then the knife, then your face again, careful, heartbroken, alert in that frighteningly intense way of his, and you feel yourself shiver as he is tracking every tremor in your fingers, every drag of your breath, every microscopic shift in your balance in case you bolt again or collapse or cut yourself by accident on the trembling edge of your own panic.

“What you think you know about me,” he starts, and his voice is lower now, roughened at the seams, “what you’ve heard… what people say, it isn’t the whole truth. It isn’t even most of it.”

You barely hear the words. They hit the air and fall uselessly to the floor. Because what else would a man like him say, standing in a cathedral-sized kitchen in a house full of people who obey him before he finishes speaking, after you found the gun and the tags and the name that can turn a city’s rumor mill rabid by itself?

No matter what he says, no matter that he looks so unbelievably shattered—the shape of him is wrong now. That is what your body keeps insisting on. Wrong in the doorway, wrong under these lights, wrong with that caution and that gentleness still trying to live in his face as if it is genuine. You cannot make him fit into one meaning anymore. He is split down the middle in your mind—tender and terrible, gentle and catastrophic—and the fracture is making noise inside you.

He takes a breath, slow, as if he is trying not to startle you even with the sound of his lungs working. “I know how this looks.”

A cough breaks in your throat, or maybe it's a huff or a wet laugh, or whatever, but it hurts coming up and out of your throat. Your hand shakes so badly the knife glints in nervous little flashes. “You used me.”

The sentence leaves you wheezy and small and much too true-feeling inside your own head. But they are out, and you take a whimpering breath, and two tears fall. They don’t arrive elegantly, and they sure as hell don’t spill subtly. They feel hot and you feel humiliated and betrayed, so deeply betrayed, and you hate that they are coming in front of him, giving him the satisfaction because your body is not able to choose a fight, to give you steel and armor and an exit and a miracle. All it can provide you with is dread and tears, and a terribly shaking kitchen knife in your unpractical hands. Your whole body has become an argument against calm and there is nothing you can do.

His face changes so sharply it is almost like watching a flame twist drastically in wind.

“No,” he gets out quickly, and his voice trips over itself. It is denial stripped to the bone. Pure and cruel because he’s genuinely the greatest actor on earth. “No,” he chokes out again, softer and somehow more desperate. “No, no, I— It's not— I never—” He swallows, the line of his throat moving hard. He looks like he is about to walk barefoot through broken glass without letting you see the blood. “You matter to me. You— God, shit, that doesn’t even come close to—”

“Stop,” you whimper while a fresh tear slips down. You shake your head because the words feel obscene now, feel almost insulting in their tenderness, like someone laying roses on a crime scene.

“I’m not pretending.”

“Stop.”

His jaw flexes. He looks toward the ceiling for half a second, and it seems like he is trying to gather language before it deserts him entirely, and when his gaze comes back to you there is something naked in it, something grim and pleading and painfully real. He seems to grope for something that keeps him standing.

“I wanted to tell you,” he despairs, voice scratchy. “I was going to.”

You stare at him through your blurred vision. Every instinct in you rejects the sentence on impact. It sounds nonsensical. The knife quivers against your chest with each breath you are somehow able to take, but they are shuddering.

“When?” you choke out. “After what? After I was stupid enough? After I—”

“No.” He takes a step before remembering himself and stopping immediately, hands opening at his sides. “No. When it was safe.”

The word safe almost makes you laugh, except there is nothing funny left in you.

He hears how deranged it sounds in this room, and grief moves across his face in one dark, swift shadow. “Listen to me,” he presses, and his voice cracks, stripped of that expensive control he wears so well. “I know this life is ugly from the outside. I know what my name sounds like to people. I know what kind of stories get told. I knew if I handed you all of it too soon, all at once, you’d run before you ever had the chance to know what was real.”

Your tears keep coming and you don’t have it in you to wipe them away. You fear your heart won’t ever be able to unclench again after this day. If you even make it out of here. “So you thought you’d just let me” —fall in love first— “into your life the way you did?”

He closes his eyes, and you know the sentence hit exactly where it meant to. When he looks at you again there is nothing smooth or seamless about him, and you have never seen him this way. Because you have never really known him. He is no longer buttoned-up and bulletproof. He honestly looks about ready to be hit in the heart one final, fatal time. “I thought I would give you time,” he supplicates quietly, voice husky. “I thought I would let you know me before the rest of it ruined everything.” The breath that follows his words sounds full of sorrow and a deeply seated regret. “Which it seems like it has.”

Yes, it has. Yes, he ruined it. But would you have felt any other way if you found out another way? In another setting, maybe while you were tangled in the sheets together, or while he was holding your hands? You don’t know because it didn’t happen that way and you found out the way you did and now the world is upside down and all wrong-angled, and your mind is spinning in a room with no corners, completely unanchored by a lie you never saw coming, or maybe you have, because a guy like him couldn’t ever want a girl like you, and perhaps first and foremost you’re just mad at yourself.

Your throat has gone tight with crying, with fear, with the dizzying effort of keeping your body upright when your whole nervous system is trying to flee in eight directions at once. He sees you struggling and looks halfway to moving again, then stops himself so hard the restraint shows all over him.

“I’m a patient man,” he keeps going, and you just want to run past him, out of this hell. You don’t hear how there is no pride in his voice, no menace, just a worn sort of honesty, as if this is the one truth he can still offer without it breaking on impact. “I would have waited. As long as I needed to. I was waiting for the right moment, for when you felt safe with me, for when I knew you wouldn’t hear my name and only hear every lie this city tells itself at night.” His voice lowers further. “For when you loved me enough to at least stay in the room while I explained.”

You blink at him as if he has said something in a language your body no longer speaks.

And then, because this nightmare apparently still has room to worsen, he says, very softly, “Because I love you.”

All you can do is stare at this stranger, and it feels like you are looking at him through a broken window.

It is not the first time he has said it, not at all, and you had loved how he had no shame in telling you, how he pressed those very words into your skin night after night, even this early into your relationship.

Gosh, you had cherished it, fallen deeper for him because of it, and now you know it's all been part of his manipulation. So what else should it be now. But at the same time—why should he still be saying it? How can he still say that? How can he say that now, after all of this, after you know who he is, after the room has filled with the bomb of revelation? What kind of man says I love you while being the very thing you are trying to escape from?

You don’t understand him. You have no clue about who this man is and it is making your hands sweat around the handle. You don’t understand how his eyes can look this shattered, how his voice can sound this human, how his face can hold this much pain and still belong to James Buchanan Barnes.

The knife is still trembling against your chest. Your arm aches from holding it so tightly. The tears keep slipping down no matter how furiously you blink. He stands there with grief in his eyes and power in every line of his body, and both things are true at once, and both things are hurting worse because no single version of him will stay still long enough to be hated cleanly.

“I was going to ease you into it,” he explains achingly, as if confession has broken loose now and cannot be coaxed back in. “Slowly. Over time. I was going to tell you what I could, when I could, and let you decide what to do with it piece by piece. I was never going to throw you into the deep end and watch you drown in it.” His throat works. “Y/n, I’m so fucking sorry you had to find out like this.”

But you are not really listening anymore. Or rather, you hear every word and none of them settle. They clatter against your panic and bounce off immediately only to land in a repressed corner of your mind.

Because maybe he means them. Maybe that is the tragedy of it. Maybe he means every single inconceivable word. But meaning them does not open the door. Meaning them does not make this house less of a trap or his name less of a threat or your pulse any less palpitating in your throat. Meaning them does not undo the gun, the tags, the scathingly smooth way everyone in this place disappears when he tells them to. Meaning them does not turn James Buchanan Barnes back into only Bucky, back into the man whose shirt you wanted to pull on because it smelled like him.

All you need now is a way out.

You don’t want justice, or answers, or even the damn truth. You just want a way out of this. You want to get the hell away from him and everything that smells and looks like him. And the room starts reorganizing itself around that instinct. The service door behind him. The hallway to the left. The distance to the far counter. Whether he is standing on the balls of his feet or flat. Whether the island might slow him for a second. Whether dropping the knife would help or harm you. Whether there is any point at all in planning when this is his house, his kingdom, his maze, and you are just a girl crying in the center of it with shaking hands and nowhere good to go.

He sees your eyes move and something in his face folds inward with understanding, with woe, with the excruciating knowledge that while he is pouring his heart out in rough little pieces, all you are doing is looking for exits. He looks completely emptied out, as if his ribs had been pried open and the only soft part of him had been torn away.

“Baby—” And now he just sounds pleading. But he doesn’t get the chance to keep on going with his drama.

The kitchen ignites with noise before you even understand what you are hearing. There was just you with your messy breathing and Bucky standing a few feet away with that awfully gutted look on his face and then the door slams open so hard the plaster cracks and the sound ricochets against your nervous system.

A crowd of men comes flooding through the opening, like a breach in a dam, so fast and threatening and all of them primed for dirtier work than anyone should ever have to do. The floor shudders under their hard slam of boots. Nobody hesitates and nobody asks questions. They all just move on some sick instinct, weapons out and raised in the space of a single heartbeat.

And now all of them are pointed at you.

The sound that hitches in your throat is not at all dignified or brave. You wish you could stare at the end of your life with at least a small sense of bravery, but it doesn’t seem like it. Every weapon these uniformed men hold is fixed on your ribs, your throat, your eyes, and the paring knife you are gripping feels pathetic. It is a useless piece of household metal against a wall of black iron, against men who don’t care that you are small and fearful.

Even so, your knuckles go numb around the handle from how hard you are gripping it. Your fingers lock up, your skin flashing from freezing cold to scorching hot while your heart thrashes against your ribs.

You think, irrationally, that this is how it happens then. There is no big speech, no lightning strike from the sky. It is just going to happen here on the linoleum, next to a bowl of apples on the counter, and a row of clean water glasses that are catching the light of the kitchen while strangers decide to put bullets in you.

Bucky pivots.

It happens so quickly it feels supernatural, like a weather change, like the room altering under the weight of him. He steps in front of you without quite blocking you, but enough that every single man in that doorway seems to remember all at once who exactly they have just disobeyed.

His expression does not merely harden; it shears. Whatever softness had remained in his face a moment ago is gone so completely it is frightening, scraped away until all that remains is authority in its most lethal form.

You feel fused to the counter behind you. You wish you would be.

He fixes his stare on his men and his eyes become glacial, pale and freezing, incandescent with a fury that somehow feels far more menacing than an outburst. He speaks, and the volume is so low that the room has to go completely breathless to catch it.

“Guns down.”

The response isn’t fast enough. No one moves quickly enough. One of the guards hesitates—just a fraction, just long enough to die for it in any other circumstance—and Bucky’s gaze lands on him so heavily, it’s as if he is deciding where to leave the body.

“I said,” he repeats, and his voice comes out with a rough friction, stripped of any emotion except the promise to do harm, “if any one of you ever points a weapon at my girl again, I’ll put you in the ground myself and make sure nobody bothers digging you back up. Do you understand me?”

His words are deadly. It doesn’t even sound like he’s acting at all, he just sounds absolutely lethal. He talks as though he has already buried people before and wouldn’t think twice about doing it again.

Around you, the momentum of the raid falters. The guards look genuinely unnerved, expressions switching so quickly between shame, panic, and obedience in ugly little flashes. Guns lower and now point toward the floorboards. A muted apology gets muttered into the silence and some of them take a step back. But it is too late, far too late, because the last thread inside you has already snapped, and your body no longer cares about reason.

You run.

There is no time for anything else; you simply hurl yourself at the nearest gap in the room, toward the delusive hope of open space, of slipping between bodies, of somehow becoming smoke, becoming speed, becoming anything but this cornered and shaking thing inside your own skin.

You aim for the narrow corridor between Bucky and the island counter, convinced by sheer panic that if you can just get past him this once, just this once, the house might cleft and let you go. Your shoulder twists, your breath catches, your feet slip against tile and then catch again, and the world blurs into motion and noise and the blood-bright animal need to escape.

But Bucky is faster.

His arms hook around your waist in one brutal, seamless movement, and it yanks you backward before you’ve even made it past his shoulder. Suddenly you are no longer running, your feet lose the air, leaving you floating for half a heartbeat, before you are driven hard into the breadth and heat of his chest.

The cry you let out this time actually tears your throat. You thrash on instinct, your body fighting him with the full deranged force of your mind freaking out, and somewhere in that struggle your hand jerks.

The knife you have been using as a means of senseless protection, hits resistance. It slides cleanly, sinking into skin and it makes you gasp sharply, your lungs suddenly jamming. It’s not your skin.

The blade has opened a shallow red line across his forearm.

And that’s gotta be it. You’re now totally and completely fucked.

The knife drops from your hand and clatters to the floor.

For one aghast second you stare at the bead of red welling against his skin, bright as a neon sign, and horror crashes through you so adamantly it almost eclipses your fear.

But Bucky does not let go. He does not even flinch properly or draw back his arms. His wounded arm stiffens only enough to keep you from pitching forward, his other hand coming up to cradle the back of your head, not pinning now so much as containing, as if he is trying to physically keep something from breaking apart right there in his grip.

He seemingly is completely blind to his own bleeding skin, as if the knife you were holding was never a danger to his life and only a threat to yours. Even with his blood on the floorboards, his only instinct is to pull you deeper into his chest.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he calls, and the transformation in his voice makes your head spin, because the man who just threatened death into a roomful of armed soldiers is gone again, folded away, leaving only this hoarse, pleading tenderness that feels almost more agonizing. His mouth is at your temple, right at your hairline, his breath gasping against your skin. “Baby, baby, stop. Please—please, don’t do this, you’re gonna hurt yourself.”

You fight him anyway because your body refuses to do anything else. Your hands shove uselessly at his chest, your shoulders wrench, your whole body convulses with the effort of getting free. But he is built like a locked gate, and every single push only burns through the last of your energy. Tears pour hot and shamefully down your face. Your lungs burn. The room swims at the edges. Somewhere nearby, boots shuffle, and Bucky snarls over your head without releasing you.

“Out.”

It is one word, but every person in the kitchen obeys it instantly. You hear the kitchen staff backing away, hear the door open and shut, feel the room empty until there is no one left but you and him and the sound of your own sobbing.

Bucky’s hold eases just a fraction, softening the pressure so you can actually draw in air even if inhaling right now feels like swallowing water. He presses his cheek against your hair for one heavy second, and when he speaks again his voice is breaking in places you have never heard it break before.

“Listen to me,” he murmurs, each word roughened by strain, by remorse, by something that sounds so heartbreakingly sincere you almost hate him for it. “Hear me out, sweetheart, please. I got you. I got you. Nobody’s gonna touch you, nobody’s gonna lay a hand on you. I won’t! I would never. You hear me? You’re safe.”

Safe.

The word is a total deformity. It is so grotesque in this moment you could probably laugh, except it comes out as a broken cry instead.

You feel the way his body tenses around the sound, how it seems to travel straight through him with his heart as the target. He bows his head, his lips brushing your temple by accident or desperation, you cannot tell which.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and now there is nothing controlled left in him, no command, no careful poise, only a man fraying in real time. “Jesus Christ, I’m so sorry. I wanted you to know, doll, I did, just—not like this. Fuck, not like this. You mean everything to me. You gotta believe that. You are everything.”

You shake your head against his chest, small and uncoordinated, feeling spent. You do not know whether you are denying him, begging him, or simply coming apart. His shirt is damp beneath your face now, whether from your tears or the sweat chilled over your skin or the blood from his arm, whatever it is, it feels symbolic somehow—one more blurred line in a night made of them.

“I wasn’t gonna let anybody hurt you,” he whispers, and even that seems to drag through his throat, hitting the walls of it. “Nobody would ever be able to hurt you. Especially me, my love, especially me! I swear to God.” His forehead grinds into yours until you can taste the heat of his skin. “I’m still the same guy who kissed you this morning. I don't care if I’m a monster to the rest of the world, but not to you, sweetheart, please not to you. I would never—god, I would cut my own hands off before I ever used them to hurt you. You have to believe me, darling, please!”

But your body no longer knows the language of swearing, or soothing, or reason. Your muscles don’t translate his pleading into safety. Your body only knows that he is stronger than you, and that the arms holding you are the same arms that can dismantle a life without raising his pulse. The palm mapped so carefully across the curve of your head is the exact same hand that commands a firing squad, directs the local precincts, and seals fates with a slight tilt of his chin.

Every touch from him now delivers a repulsive duality—a rescue that feels like an arrest, a stroke that resembles a chokehold, an overwhelming affection that wears the exact outline of a cell.

You can feel how easy this is for him, how negligible his effort is in keeping you contained even while he tries his best to appear harmless. That insulting fact finally starves out the last bit of resistance left in your veins. Your nervous system runs out of fuel, leaving your body to go completely toothless against his chest, without actually surrendering or any returning trust. Your body is simply done.

Your fingers drop their useless leverage against his chest, your joints go limp and your knees refuse to carry your weight anymore.

You sag in his hold all at once. The sobs keep coming, but weaker now, thinning out, scraping instead of breaking. Bucky feels the change immediately. His grip loosens just enough to become support instead of restraint, his palm rubbing between your shoulder blades in one of those soothing motions you used to love so much and it makes your chest ache with a fresh wave of grief.

“That’s it,” he coos, though his voice sounds completely mangled by the words. “That’s it, honey. I know. I know.”

You don’t know what he means by that. You’re not sure he does either. Perhaps he simply recognizes that your stamina has bottomed out, that even the sharpest panic has its boundaries, and that the rush of survival instincts always burns hot and fast, leaving behind this full-body collapse.

He holds your dead weight upright anyway. He keeps murmuring into your hair but it doesn’t glue your broken pieces back together or erase the reality of what he is, what this fortress hides, and what you stumbled into. His sliced arm stays locked around your waist. You can feel the sticky warmth of his blood soaking through your clothes. It is startlingly human, and it should probably make him look less like a monster, the simple fact that he can bleed. But it makes every detail about your situation so real and dreadful.

When your body finally ceases its rebellion entirely, it isn't an act of submission. It is pure depletion.

And Bucky, keeping you pinned against the wall of his chest, seems to grasp that exhaustion better than anyone else could. His lungs expand and contract in uneven hitching motions. He drops his chin heavily onto the crown of your head. He closes you in not like a conqueror taking a prize but like a man trying, too late, to keep a catastrophe from widening under his hands.

Beyond the kitchen threshold, the entire estate drops into a dead, listening sort of silence, as if the plaster and timber have cocked an ear to the room.

He keeps holding you as if you are something he has no right to touch anymore and still cannot seem to make himself release, and it’s crazy that even like this, even with your body rigid from all the things you have learned too quickly and too late, he is still somehow heartbreakingly careful, his hand spread wide and warm between your shoulder blades, his hold immovable but never bruising, his mouth close to your temple as though he cannot bear to put distance between you if distance means losing you for good.

It is all just so utterly confusing because this is not entirely what you had expected would happen.

“The way you looked at me,” he continues, and his voice comes out rough as gravel dragged through water, ruined by restraint, by panic, by the sheer effort of trying not to frighten you further with the depth of what is in him. He does not sound like the man in the hallway, not like the man who commands rooms into silence with a glance, not like the man whose name can make other people blanch and step backward and say yes, sir, with their pulse all up in their throats. He sounds flayed open. He sounds like the sight of your fear has gone into him like shrapnel and lodged somewhere vital. “The way you looked at me in there—” He stops, breathes in shallowly, like he has run straight into a blade and is trying not to lean on it harder. “Christ. I’ve taken bullets that didn’t hit like that. To have you look at me like I’m something you need to survive.”

Your face is turned into his chest, your tears soaking through the expensive dark fabric of his shirt, and still your whole body is listening against your will, because his voice is all around you now, low and urgent and splintering in places that make something cold move through you.

His hand slides back up the back of your head, not forcing, only cradling, his fingers threading carefully into your hair as though the gesture itself aches. When he speaks again, there is something almost disbelieving in him, some stunned grief that does not seem feigned, cannot possibly be feigned for this long without becoming madness.

“If I could do it over, I would do every goddamn thing different,” he breathes brokenhearted. “Every part of it. I would tell you sooner. I’d tell you cleaner. Shit, I should’ve just told you. I should’ve given it to you straight before it got this messy and before you had to figure it out by yourself and piece me together out of all the worst parts with nobody there to shield you. I would have died before I let it happen like this. I swear.” He swallows hard enough that you feel it where your cheek presses near his sternum.

The kitchen is too bright and everything is stinging so harshly with those clean counters, the severe gleam of copper pans above the island, the neat little arrangement of knives in their block where one slot is now empty, the overhead lights turning everything brutally visible.

There is nowhere for your agony to hide. It shivers right out in the open, lives in the tightness of your lungs and the salt on your mouth, and the fact that every soft word from him only makes the unreality of this more baffling. Because he sounds sincere. He sounds devastated. He sounds like a man speaking over the body of something precious he helped kill.

He says all of this like he’s offering you his throat, while all around you the evidence of his power still glints and twinkles from every glazed surface, every distant footstep, every forced silence in a house built to keep his secrets and carry out his will.

He is talking with all the gentleness he has. He is nearly breaking with it. And still, inside you, fear sits and it pants and it is unconvinced, because love does not make a cage less locked simply because the hands closing it are shaking.

You make a small sound then—not a word, not even close, just some thin and wrecked little fracture of breath—and he tightens around you reflexively, then instantly checks himself, as if terrified you will read force into even that involuntary movement.

His next words come faster, crowding each other, not panicked exactly but pressed by urgency, by the sense that you are slipping through his hands even while he is still physically holding you.

“I know what I am.” He breaks off again, and this time you feel the tremor that runs through him. “I know what kind of man I’ve been, what people say about me, what they’re right about. I know exactly what it looks like from where you’re standing.” His voice goes raw. “But, darling, I never meant for you to be afraid of me. This was never supposed to happen.”

The words enter you but you just don’t know where to store them. There is something so naked in the way he says them that your mind keeps tripping over it, keeps trying and failing to fit it beside the other truth—the guns, the guards, the coldness in his authority, the name that belongs in whispers, the empire standing tall all around you in all its obedience. Or maybe it’s just loyalty. Respect? What even is it?

It’s hard to acknowledge that he still sounds like himself. James or Bucky, the man who kissed sleep into your skin and tucked blankets around your legs and pressed absent-minded kisses to your shoulder while reading beside you in bed still exists inside this other, larger, more terrible man. He has not vanished cleanly enough to make your fear simple. You give a small whimper.

“I was selfish,” he rasps, and now the confession lands without defense. “That’s the truth. I was selfish as hell. Because I wanted you anyway. I wanted you even knowing I should’ve stayed away from you. I know I should’ve left you out of all this. A girl like you deserves something clean and safe, and I’m neither of those things. I knew that. Fuck, I knew that. And it’s been killing me. I let myself have you and it’s been so fucking selfish.”

His breath hitches around the last word, and the grief in it is so unexpectedly torturous it almost makes you nauseous. His forehead lowers for a second against your hair, and he scarily looks so weary, suddenly too full of feeling to carry it elegantly.

“Because you are...” He exhales a broken laugh with no amusement in it whatsoever. “Christ, sweetheart, you are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. You couldn’t ever imagine what you walking into my life did to it.”

Your eyes squeeze shut and fresh tears slip out anyway. Somewhere inside you, some tired and furious part wants to scream at him for speaking like this now, for laying tenderness over terror as if one can cancel the other out, as if love—even if it is love, even if it is real and not just another instrument in his alluring hands—can unmake what you know. But before you can push any of that into sound, he keeps going, quieter, the words drawn so close to your skin they seem less spoken than confessed into it.

“If you want to go,” he states, and there is a pause before it, the kind that tells you the sentence is costing him blood, “I’ll let you go.”

Your breath snags. You don’t trust it nor believe it instantly, but even imagining the words coming out of him feels like a tectonic event, a mountain bowing. He does not release you yet, but his body changes with the promise, some iron set inside him going rigid with the effort of saying it and meaning it.

“I will,” he says, with more force now, as if he knows you don’t believe him and cannot bear that either. “If that’s what you want, I will. I’m not gonna keep you somewhere you don’t wanna be. I’m not gonna turn into that for you. But, baby—” and here his voice gives way altogether, drops into something so human and stripped down it hardly seems to belong to the same man who froze a room full of armed guards with one look, “—I am begging you not to make that choice before you hear me. I am begging you. Stay this one night, give me one chance to explain it all to you, to answer every possible question you could have. One chance to do this right, even if I already did it all wrong.”

Begging. The word would sound absurd from almost any other man. From him, it sounds cataclysmic. His hand shakes at the back of your head before steadying, his chest rises too sharply under your cheek, and he continues speaking as if silence might kill him.

“I love you too much to let this be the end of it if there’s anything I can do to stop it,” he croaks. “Too much to let you walk out of here thinking none of it was real. It was real. Every second of it was real. Me wanting you, loving you, worrying about you, making room for you in my life in ways I never made room for anybody—none of that was a lie. The only lie was thinking I could hold both worlds apart long enough to protect you from what I am. That was the lie. That was my arrogance. My mistake.”

The mansion remains hushed in that eerie, cathedral-like way that comes after a disturbance, as if everyone occupying this huge mansion is pretending not to hear the aftershocks.

But here in the kitchen, everything feels narrowed to his voice and your breathing and the blood drying on his forearm and the fact that he is speaking to you like a man on his knees, even if he is still standing, even if his arms are still around you, even if his kind of desperation does not know how to unclench fully.

There is a daunting sincerity in him now, not because it is soft but because it is not. Because it is fierce. Because even his tenderness carries the shape of obsession, of decision, of something chosen with his whole irreversible heart.

What can you possible answer here. What can you possibly think.

“I’ll do whatever I have to do.” He sounds so full of conviction. Technically, the words are quiet, but there is a hard core somewhere in his tone, and it glows fiercely. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make you feel safe again. To prove this to you. To earn back one inch of your trust. I don’t care how long it takes, I don’t care what you ask for, I don’t care what I have to lay down at your feet. I’ll do it. I will.” He takes a beat and the next words are so low you almost miss them. “I know I don’t deserve another chance and you have all the best reasons to run, but I’m asking for it anyway, Y/n.“

At that, finally, he leans back just enough to look at you. It’s not much, but the hand at the back of your head can guide your face up with painful gentleness, giving you every opening to pull away if you need to, though you are too wrung out now to do much except tremble.

His eyes find yours and stay there, and the sight of his face nearly brings you to your knees all over again. There is no coldness in him. No cruelty. No mockery. Only a kind of bereft intensity, a ravaged devotion, and beneath it the severe understanding that he is seeing himself reflected in your fear and cannot survive the image.

The whole fact of how broken he sounds starts to mess with your head. It cracks the armor of your panic, if only just a little bit. You’re trying to hate him. Because, honestly, you want to. You want the fear to be this insurmountable wall between you, but his voice keeps crumbling pieces of it.

The worst part is that you can’t just flick a switch and stop loving the guy you were tangled up with this morning. You fell for him so fast, so completely, because his version of happy felt like the safest place on earth. But with all those shocking revelations, that same love feels like a trapdoor that just dropped you into a cellar, and you are so angry at your own heart for still wanting him to hold you.

Underneath the exhaustion, there is a nauseating doubt starting to rot everything you remember about the last few weeks, and you really don’t need your mind going that far, but it does. You start wondering if you ever actually loved him, or if you were just hooked on the way he looked at you.

He treated you like you were the only important thing in the world, and you just hung off that affection, soaking up the protective way he took care of you. Even though he’s standing here right now, bleeding and hollowed out, swearing that every single touch was real, how can you ever be sure? Every memory you have is suddenly poisoned by the thought that it was just a beautifully built illusion, and the whole thing makes you feel completely seasick.

It’s just too much to handle all at once. Your brain is trying to hold two completely different men in the same space—the gentle guy who tucked the blankets around your feet in the dark, and the boss who froze a kitchen full of killers with one word. They are both real. They are both right here in front of you, and the fact that he isn't a cartoon villain makes it a hundred times worse.

If he were just a monster, you could run. But he’s a monster who tells you he loves you with this gut-wrenching, unyielding honesty, and looking at his ruined face, all your willpower just turns to mush.

“I should have asked more questions,” you whisper, and still, your voice breaks, the words tumbling out of you like loose gravel. You aren’t trying to be eloquent anymore, you are just trying to get the noise out of your head before it chokes you. “From the start, I— When you wouldn’t tell me things. I— I don't know, I was scared, I guess.”

Your fingers tighten into the expensive wool of his lapels just to keep your knees from giving out. Letting this mob boss know about your fears is probably a bad idea. But your life consists of you making bad decisions and so your mouth keeps opening. “I think I just liked the way you were to me too much to risk messing it up.”

The words drag themselves out of you like they do not want to be born, like each one has to force its way through the knot in your throat and the salt on your tongue and the simple, mind-numbing fact that nothing in you knows where to place anything anymore—not him, not yourself, not the last weeks, not the hands that held you so tenderly and the empire those same hands command with a flick of the wrist.

Bucky’s gaze is piercing as he looks down at you, listening with his breath visibly held.

“But I— I still don’t understand. I think.“ Your voice comes thin at first, scraped nearly transparent by crying, but it sharpens on pain the way a blade sharpens on a whetstone. “I just— I saw this gun, and—,” you blur out, the memory making your heart do that awful stutter against your ribs again while Bucky nearly flinches. His eyes go wide, pupils shrinking until they look like two dark pinpricks. “It was an accident. I swear it was an accident. I was just— you told me to grab a shirt of yours but I couldn’t reach up your wardrobe and so I was just going to go grab the shirt you've been wearing, but your jacket was there and then it just fell out. And I— I completely lost my mind because I realized I didn’t actually know anything about you, and I’ve been so stupid, and I’m really not good at this. I'm not good at talking things out or figuring out the right things to say. It’s just— this is so much to take in.”

Bucky´s chest hitches, a rough, dry stutter or air that sounds like he just took a fist to the solar plexus. His face looks almost unrecognizable with the pain plastered on it. You feel his hands tremble against you and he slowly takes them away, putting himself at a small distance to perhaps give you some space. His palms stay open, as do his eyes. He looks entirely unhinged by the clumsiness of his own life seeping into yours.

How could anyone understand how a man can kiss your forehead like a saint and still have blood and fear braided into his name. It’s so hard to understand how someone can look at you the way he is looking at you now—like you are both miracle and mortal wound—and still have lied, still have omitted, still have arranged the world around you so skillfully that you walked through it unknowing, barefoot and bright-hearted, straight into the center of his hidden life.

You do not understand what parts were real and what parts were merely curated, and worst of all, there is a terrible little splinter of you that already suspects the answer is not clean enough to save you. That some unbearable amount of it was real.

Your mouth trembles and you know that he can see it.

“You lied to me,” you sob, and although you mean for it to, it doesn’t sound like a weapon you’re throwing at him. It just sounds sad. “You made it so easy. I didn’t even think about it. I just— I just woke up every day and trusted the way you looked at me. And the whole time, I didn’t even know you.”

You look down at his chest so you can stop having to meet those devastatingly sunken eyes. “You let me fall in love with you not knowing who you were.” Your sentence has a shape now, the grief in you finally managing to find a spine. But you still can’t make your words sound all that accusing. Because you got yourself into this situation. You’re supposed to be furious at yourself first.

You haven’t used the word love before. You just dropped it, being the first time it cleared your teeth and the timing of it feels completely disastrous.

And Bucky suddenly undergoes a drastic freeze, as if his nervous system has been struck by lightning. He seems to tip back just a tiny bit but stays in your orbit. He stares down at you, his mouth parted, his chest stalling on an intake of air that he forgets to let back out.

The fact that you love him—and that you are saying it right now, while covered with dread and shivering nearly against his chest—seems to completely break his brain.

There is a dark heat flooding his face, his jaw tight enough to snap a tooth. He looks agonizingly vulnerable like this, the dangerous mob boss utterly gutted by four letters. His fingers twitch where they are now hovering near your neck, desperately wanting to bury themselves in your hair and pull you back into his skin, but he forces his hands down to his sides, his knuckles trembling against his tailored trousers.

“You…,” he starts, eyes burning with a starved intensity that makes the air in the kitchen feel boiling hot. He swallows loudly, taking a moment, staring out into some space behind you, and switching focus back to you. “Don’t call yourself stupid,” he goes on, voice dropping into a rasp that shakes with the failure of his own arrogance. “None of what you told me and none of what you felt makes you stupid.”

His face leans closer to yours and somehow you only shrink back a tiny bit, not really at all. You can feel the wavering rhythm of his breath against your lips. He looks thoroughly undone by his own greed, stuck in the realization that he won the only thing he ever wanted, right at the exact moment he stopped being the man who holds you in the dark and turned into the reason you’re afraid of the dark.

“The love was real,” he sounds so convinced. His face is breaking, but his voice is not. He knows what he is saying. “Every single second of it was real. I am the one who ruined it. But what I feel, and what we have, that isn’t a lie. I swear to you on my life, it was never a lie.” His eyes close briefly, and it looks like he is losing his footing somewhere internal. “I know how it feels from where you’re standing. But I wasn’t playing some game with you. I wasn’t trying to—” He drags a hand over his face, and for an instant he looks older than you have ever seen him, not in years but in burden, in wear. “I wanted more time. That was my sin in it. I wanted time. I wanted to tell you in a way that didn’t make you look at me like this.”

Like this.

The phrase feels unkind. Because yes—there it is again, the damn nucleus of the whole thing. The way your eyes have changed on him. The way he has noticed every flicker of fear in you as if each one were a cut and he keeps taking your terror not as an insult to his pride but as an injury to something much more private and much more vulnerable. And that, more than any fake excuse could have, is so hard to process. 

Because men who only know cruelty do not usually grieve like this over being feared by the woman they supposedly love. Men who are only monstrous do not usually look half-unmade by it.

You don’t want that thought, you honestly don’t, but it does arrive.

Because he has not hurt you. He hasn’t done a single thing to hurt you, and that makes him so much more complicated at the exact moment you most need him to stay simple.

He has had a thousand opportunities by now to become the thing you are bracing against. In the hallway. In the office. In the kitchen. When you ran. When you fought. When you took the knife. When you cut him. At every turn, there has been room for rage, for punishment, for the kind of retaliatory violence your frightened mind keeps expecting from a man like him, and instead he has done nothing but hold himself on a brutal leash, speak softly, plead, bleed, look at you as if your fear is the one thing in this world he has no defenses against.

And it makes you weaker.

Because fear is easier when it is clean. Outrage is easier when there are no counterweights. But now your thoughts begin to buckle under the strain of contradiction, and you feel yourself growing tired in some deeper way, not merely from running or crying or panic, but from the effort of sustaining one total version of him against the evidence of another.

The story you are trying to tell yourself—that he is simply bad, simply dangerous, simply false—keeps snagging on the memory of his hands shaking when he begged, on the way he threw his men out for aiming guns at you, on the heartache in his face now, open and unarmored and miserable with not knowing how to reach you.

None of it erases anything, how could it this fast, but still it matters, and still some fatal hope flares.

Your lungs are burning. You become dimly aware that your body is leaning, not exactly by choice, but because exhaustion is making choices for you now. The kitchen feels too bright and too far away at the same time. Your fingers feel chilled, your knees unreliable, your heart still overworked from all that horror. Even your anger is beginning to lose its clean edges, dissolving into something wetter and more helpless.

“I don’t know what to do,” you admit, and there is no strength in it at all.

The sentence is barely more than breath, but it changes him instantly, makes his misery seem softer, as if your confusion pains him almost as much as your fear did. His gaze searches your face carefully, greedily, looking for any sign that you have not vanished completely from him.

“You don’t have to know right now,” he comforts, and this time his voice is gentler still, worn down to the most tender parts of his body. “You don’t have to decide anything this second. I know I dropped all of this on you in the worst possible way. I know you’re overwhelmed.”

Overwhelmed. The word is so pitifully insufficient you want to cry some more, but the sound catches and turns to another shivery exhale instead.

Overwhelmed is a rainstorm. A bad day. A missed train. This is seismic. This is having the floor beneath your life cleave open and discovering it was built over a fault line all along.

Still, you know what he means.

Because beneath all the fear, and the betrayal and the urgent need to flee, there is now also this leaden, disorienting fatigue, this collapse of certainty.

You cannot keep all your alarms ringing at once forever. The body is not made for it. At some point even terror begins to sag under its own weight, and in that sagging comes the most dangerous thing of all. Maybe not trust or forgiveness yet, but confusion. A human confusion. The realization that if he truly meant to destroy you, perhaps he would have done it already. That if cruelty were the point, he has passed up too many easy chances. That whatever else he is—and God, he is still intimidating, still hidden, still a man with too much power and too many locked rooms in his life—his feelings for you do not look counterfeit. They look catastrophic. They look real enough to have ruined him too.

He had every opportunity to end this argument with force, not even making his hands dirty in a physical sense. But he didn’t, and that roughened sincerity that seems so deeply wounded keeps gnawing at all the things you thought you found out about this man, the stereotype you made him out to be. It makes a guilty stone drop into your belly and land with damaging intentions.

And you do not know what to do with all this honesty and realness, when real arrives dressed as the very thing you were trying to escape.

But you have to acknowledge that your lack of strength is not the only reason why you have stopped fighting him, stopped trying to get away.

Bucky seems to read some fragment of this in your face, because he does not press harder. He does not crowd you with arguments. He simply stays where he is, close enough for warmth, far enough now that his care has space to breathe. His injured arm hangs at his side, blood drying in a dark seam along his skin, ignored. His other hand lifts as if to touch your cheek, then stops halfway and falls again when he sees the flicker in your eyes. That tiny restraint breaks something in you all over again.

“I know I lied by not telling you,” he says quietly. “I know that. I’m not asking you to call it something prettier. I’m just telling you it wasn’t because you meant nothing. It was because you meant too goddamn much, and I was trying to find a way to bring you closer without making you run.”

The honesty of it is so ugly, so naked, so free of self-congratulation that it feels like he just threw a wet sandbag right at your chest, knocking every scrap of air straight out of your lungs. It’s not an excuse, not quite. More like the shape of the selfishness itself, held out in his own hands for you to look at. He wanted you. He kept you. He delayed the truth because he was afraid the truth would cost him the one bright thing he had allowed himself to love. There is no innocence in that. But there is something crushingly human.

Your eyes burn again and your grip on your own certainty loosens another inch.

You hate that, too, because, damnit, it would be easier to stand here shaking and loathing him if he would just become less tender and less heartbreakingly earnest in his regret. But he stays persistently, ruinously genuine, and all at once you feel not only afraid, not only betrayed, but emptied out by the effort of trying to hold every contradiction at once. He is a bad man. He may also love you. He lied. He is also hurting. He hid things from you. He is also standing here looking like your fear is flaying him alive. None of these truths cancels the others. They just crowd together until your thoughts feel waterlogged, too swollen to separate.

So all that is left is the simplest truth again.

You really are overwhelmed.

You are so overwhelmed that language itself seems too heavy to lift.

Your breathing has started to slowly settle in increments, like a storm reluctantly retreating from a coastline it battered too long. It feels like there are bruises left behind in your lungs, but it no longer aches with each inhale.

Your fear has ebbed enough to make you think again, to make you see again, to make you look at him not as the single monstrous shape your panic tried to build, but as the complicated, human contradiction standing in front of you now.

His shoulders are still too tight, drawn up, and perhaps trying to seem smaller. He keeps his hands visible and loose at his sides to perhaps avoid startling you. The cut along his forearm has darkened into a narrow seam of red, drying in flaking lines against his skin and remaining completely ignored by the man attached to it.

His focus hasn’t left your face. And in that focus, there is not an ounce of triumph. Rather, the opposite. There is only pain. Such a grave torment that lives in the corners of his mouth, the prominent crease between his brows, in the cautious way he keeps tracking your movements as though you still might shove him away and try bolting for the door again.

You swallow and feel the ballast of everything press back down on your chest.

“I—” you start, timidly, using every last scrap of your bravery. You don’t meet his eyes, staring at the floor beside him. “I’ve seen them.” Your voice sounds strange to your own ears, small but a little bit more poised now, like glass that hasn’t shattered but still remembers the impact. “I've seen the news, and the headlines. All the stories about you.”

The words suspend themselves in the space between you.

Bucky takes a moment to answer. His gaze drifts downward, just briefly, as if the floor might offer him something easier to look at than the defenselessness sitting in your eyes. The vulnerable questions there. When he exhales it is long and tired, and it sounds like all the versions of himself he has spent years outrunning are catching up to him anyway.

“Yeah,” he mutters out breathily. But a little flat. There is no denial in it or some sort of excuse. He drags a hand across the back of his neck, his jaw flexing slightly before he speaks again. “I figured you probably had.” He takes a shivering breath, his whole chest lifting. “They’re not all lies.”

You hold your breath, but don’t step back, don’t let fear take its seat at the forefront of your mind again.

He lifts his eyes back to yours then, and the seriousness in them deepens, intensifying into something resolute.

“I’m not gonna stand here and tell you I’m a good man,” he says. The words come slowly, and his eyes are searching yours while he talks. He is placing them carefully like he’s building something honest out of wreckage. “I’m not.”

Your heart stumbles in your chest, but you still keep your feet grounded and meet his eyes.

“I’ve done things I’m not proud of. Things most people wouldn’t forgive if they knew the full story.” His voice lowers slightly. His eyes are full of sorrow. Despite the things he’s saying he unexpectedly doesn’t look threatening at all and it makes something startle abruptly in your chest. “And yeah, I’ll probably keep doing some of those things.” He doesn’t force anything into his tone that maybe should be there. He´s not saying those things with pride or arrogance or even threat. He has just accepted the callous contours that make his life the way it is. “But not for the reasons people think.”

His eyes soften then, slightly. And it makes you realize that they’ve actually been soft all along.

“I do what I do because there are people in this world who deserve protection. People who don’t have the power to protect themselves.” His gaze holds yours a little more firmly now. “And sometimes the only way to keep those people safe is to be the guy willing to do the ugly work.”

Your throat tightens.

“I’d do just about anything to protect you, Y/n. Even if it’s me you want protection from.”

The kitchen feels very still.

You don’t know what to say to that. You’re not even sure there is something to say. The statement isn’t a justification so much as a window, and looking through it leaves you with more thoughts to sort through and you’ve already gone through so many. But you hear him. You really do.

And he seems to notice that you’re listening now—maybe not agreeing, not forgiving, but truly listening, hearing him out—and some small measure of relief loosens the tension in his shoulders.

He doesn’t move a single muscle, standing before you like a brick wall, his legs pinned wide on the kitchen tiles, his frame perfectly still except for the anxious heave of his chest. His arms are hanging at his side, and shit, your gaze just has to focus on that bloody trail on his forearm. Because right, you’ve cut James Buchanan Barnes through his expensive suit enough to make him bleed. The redness runs from his wrist to his knuckles and you see some dots on the floor. The fabric of his suit is soaking it up, turning a dark wet black around the tear.

He still doesn’t glance down at it. He’s still so entirely anchored to your face, his broad shoulders squared as if he’s trying to shield you from the very room he owns. The survival instinct that had you clawing at the air drops away and now there is a sudden freezing emptiness in your head. And in that blank space, something takes place.

You look at the knife on the linoleum, then at the wet red tracking down his arm, and your stomach completely plummets through the ground. The panic you felt earlier didn’t protect you, it turned you clumsy and ignorant.

“Oh, no,” you choke out, gaze fixed on his arm, your words hacking up from your chest miserably. “Bucky, I— Your arm, I— I didn’t mean— This is my fault, I swear I didn’t mean to—”

“Hey,” he cuts in, his voice lowering into a rough, immediate hush that clips the words right out of your mouth. “Hey, no, sweetheart. No.” He steps back into your space and his huge palms come up, traveling slowly until they map themselves carefully across your jawline.

His fingers are trembling and the pressure is incredibly light. His skin is warm, smelling of that same familiar soap from upstairs, and his thumbs softly brush the wet tear tracks off your cheekbones, forcing you to look straight into his eyes. He doesn’t even spare a glance at his forearm.

“You don’t ever apologize to me for that,” he whispers hoarsely, his chest hitching against yours as he tries to get his breathing normal. There is so much regret in his voice, it is too much for your heart to handle. “You were scared out of your mind and I did that to you. That?” He tilts his arm toward you, indicating that he is talking about the cut. “That is nothing, sweetheart. Nothing.” The corner of his mouth lifts faintly, but the expression is gentler and definitely much more somber than humorous. “I’ve taken hits that should’ve put me in the ground, and none of them touched me.”

You shake your head in his palms. “But, I—”

“Doll,” he shushes, his arms keeping your chin locked, but not firm at all. His gaze is drilling into yours and it feels like he’s bleeding more from the inside and not the outside. “That little scratch hurts a hell of a lot less than watching you run from me.”

Your hands slowly stop trying to find leverage against his chest. The heat of his palms against your jaw feels like a grounding force, something so familiar but also completely new. It’s not entirely unpleasant in its newness.

You look up into his eyes, seeing the complete lack of the monster he just unleashed on his guards, and you can’t help but feel a little unmoored.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now,” you admit breathily, your voice cracking as your forehead drops forward to rest against his tie.

Bucky lets out a long, ragged exhale, his chin resting against the top of your head as his arms wrap around your shoulders, pulling you into a hold that feels firm but unforced.

“You don’t have to figure it out right now, darling,” he eases, his words spoken with a splintered scrape into your hair. “You don’t have to decide anything today, or tomorrow, or next week. Take all the time you need. Turn it over in your head. Think about everything you saw, everything I am. And whatever you choose to do—if you want to pack your bags, and disappear, if you never want to see my face again—I will let you go. I will make sure you are safe, and I will support whatever choice you make. I swear it.”

He pulls back just an inch, his thumbs gently guiding your face up again so he can look straight into your eyes. There is something desperately begging in his stare, but he keeps his posture completely still, refusing to pressure you.

“But please.“ His knuckles tremble slightly against your cheek. “Just stay the night. Don't run out now while this is all still so new. Stay until morning. As soon as the sun’s up, the car is yours,” he promises sorrowfully, his thumbs catching the last of the dampness on your cheek. “If you want to leave, you leave. You can walk out of here and never look back, and I won’t follow you. I won’t look for you. If that’s what it takes to make you feel safe, I’ll let you go.”

He stops, his jaw clamping tight for a second, a sharp, jumbled hitch in his ribs breaking his breathing.

“But god, I hope you don't,” he shoves the words past the tightness in his throat, his eyes wide and burning into yours so achingly. “I will spend every single day of my life doing whatever it takes to fix this. I’ll earn back an inch of your trust at a time. I’ll show you the rest of me—the real parts—if you just give me the chance to try. I want you to love me again. I want that more than anything.”

He hitches his weight just a fraction closer, his large hands still framing your jaw with agonizingly slow caution.

“But just stay this single night,” he pleads with a strain in his voice, his forehead dropping down to rest lightly against yours. “Just stay until morning. Let me get you out of this kitchen, and you can just sleep. That’s all. Just tonight.”

You stare at the dark red crusting on his wool cuff, then look into that heavy, broken-down look in his eyes. Trying to picture next week or even tomorrow feels like watching a knotted ball of wire and not finding out where to start untying it.

But right now, your muscles are just running on empty, completely flattened and powerless from feeling all that panic. You let out one long shudder of air, asking your awareness for any reasons why you should still try to get the hell away from this guy, and come up with nothing yet. It’s all too fresh to truly give this some thought and right now all you want to do is curl up in those silky sheets and sleep it all off.

You give him a small nod. “Okay. Okay, Bucky, I’ll stay the night.”

Bucky’s shoulders drop with a massive, rattling relief. He doesn't say anything else, he just tucks your head back under his chin, his big arms closing around you to carry your weight out of the quiet kitchen, leaving the knife and the blood behind on the floorboards.

You don’t know what comes when the sun is up. You don’t know what loving a man like him means. You don’t know if the life he lives can ever exist beside the life you thought you wanted.

You don’t know if trust can grow again from the cracked ground beneath your feet, and considering your decision making skills, you shouldn’t let your heart handle things anymore.

But, frighteningly and also not all that much surprisingly after all, when you imagine leaving now—truly leaving, turning your back on him and walking out of this mansion forever—the image doesn’t bring relief.

It brings something bleak.

Because for all the discoveries of tonight and all that fear, all that shock, and the trust that has been abruptly broken, there is a bullheaded part of you that understands something you can’t yet put into words for him to hear.

You could run from this house.

You could run from his name.

But you are not sure you could run from him.

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple”

- Oscar Wilde

A/n: Looking at the word count now, I honestly probably could’ve turned this into a mini series but because this whole thing is essentially one long scene, splitting it up even more just didn’t feel right to me. So I guess I just have to admit that this became an unexpectedly long two-parter lmao.

As always, I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on this continuation, if it gave you hope, or even if you expected something different to happen. I always enjoy hearing your interpretations and feelings after reading ♡

I also wanted to gently address something else. I’ve received a few critical comments regarding certain reactions, choices, and dynamics in the story, and I truly hope this second part helped answer some questions or at least offered a little more perspective. If it didn’t, that’s completely okay too.

What I want you to know, I genuinely do appreciate helpful criticism, especially when it comes to my writing itself, because I’m always trying to improve and become better at what I do. Constructive feedback that gives me something to work with is always welcome and appreciated. But if something in the story simply wasn’t for you, or you personally disliked a choice I made, then sometimes it’s okay to just move on from it instead of tearing it apart. And if you do choose to criticize something, I just ask that you do it kindly. We’re still a community here, and there’s no reason to be harsh or blunt. Talk to me like a human being.

I put a lot of time, emotion, and effort into these stories, not to be told this makes no sense or this is weird without any real conversation behind it. Sometimes I don’t think through every single detail deeply because at the end of the day, this is still fiction born from messy little ideas in my head, written for comfort, entertainment, and emotion—not perfection!

Still, thank you to everyone who continues to boost me and my work and helped me stay motivated to finish this part ♡

Bucky’s hands tightened instinctively, thumbs brushing slow circles into your thighs. “Little minx.”

You grinned at that, leaning down just enough for your noses to brush. The evening had already been full of lingering touches and heated kisses, the kind that made the air between you feel thick. You could still taste whiskey on his tongue from the drink you’d shared earlier.

Your fingers traced down his chest thoughtfully before you bit your lip. “Can I ask you something?”

His brows lifted. “Depends.”

“I’m serious.”

“That’s what worries me.”

You laughed softly and shifted in his lap, feeling the way his breath caught at the movement. “Tell me your fantasies.”

Bucky blinked.

You tilted your head. “Like… the things you think about. The stuff you want.”

A faint flush crept up the back of his neck, surprisingly shy for a man who could pin you against a wall with one hand and make you forget your own name. “Doll…”

“C’mon,” you coaxed, kissing the corner of his mouth. “I told you some of mine.”

“Yeah, but yours were filthy.”

You smirked proudly. “Thank you.”

His laugh rumbled low in his chest, but his expression softened after a moment, blue eyes flicking over your face like he was trying to decide how honest to be. You expected him to say something teasing eventually—something about bending you over the kitchen counter or hearing you beg for him.

Instead, his thumbs stilled against your skin.

“I think about seeing you in a wedding dress.”

Your teasing smile faltered.

Bucky kept going before he could overthink it, voice quieter now. “All the time, actually.”

Your chest squeezed unexpectedly.

“I think about waitin’ for you at the end of the aisle,” he admitted. “Think I’d probably cry like an idiot the second I saw you.”

“…Bucky.”

“And you’d laugh at me for it,” he said with the faintest smile. “But then you’d start crying too, so it’d be even.”

That soft, achy feeling spread through your ribs so fast it almost hurt.

You had expected dirty confessions. Kinks. Secret desires whispered into your skin.

Not this.

Not him looking at you like you hung the moon while he talked about marrying you like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“You think about that?” you asked softly.

“All the time.”

His hands slid higher along your waist, grounding himself against you. “I think about what kinda flowers you’d carry because I know you’d change your mind ten times before deciding.” He huffed a small laugh. “Think about dancing with you after. You’d have your head on my shoulder and I wouldn’t wanna let you go all night.”

You could feel your eyes burning already.

“Oh my God,” you whispered, completely wrecked by how sincere he sounded.

Bucky frowned slightly, suddenly uncertain. “Was… that not what you meant?”

“No, I just…” Your throat tightened. “Jesus, Buck.”

The tips of his ears turned pink. “I can stop talking.”

“Don’t you dare.”

Something tender flickered across his face then, and he relaxed beneath you again.

“I think about kids too,” he admitted quietly. “A little girl with your eyes who wraps me around her finger immediately. A boy that follows Alpine around the apartment and drives you crazy.” His mouth twitched. “Think about teaching them how to ride a bike. Taking family pictures where nobody cooperates.”

A watery laugh escaped you.

“And anniversaries,” he continued softly, almost embarrassed now. “You and me old and gray. Maybe taking trips somewhere warm because my bones hurt in the cold.” His fingers brushed your cheek gently. “I think about waking up next to you for the rest of my life.”

Your heart genuinely ached.

Because Bucky wasn’t saying it casually. He wasn’t throwing pretty words around to charm you.

He meant every single one.

“You’re supposed to be telling me your dirty fantasies,” you whispered shakily.

His expression turned impossibly fond. “Honey, this is worse.”

Your lips parted in surprise.

“I spent seventy years thinking none of that was ever gonna belong to me.” His thumb swept beneath your eye when a tear escaped despite your best efforts. “Now I can’t stop thinking about it.”

That did it.

You bent down suddenly and kissed him hard enough to steal the breath from both of you.

Bucky made a startled sound against your mouth before melting beneath you instantly, metal hand settling carefully at your lower back while his flesh hand cradled your jaw like you were something precious.

The kiss changed quickly after that.

Every slow drag of his mouth against yours felt weighted with all the things he’d just confessed. Every touch lingered. Every breath shared between you felt intimate in a way that made your chest ache.

You pulled back only enough to press your forehead against his.

“You want all that with me?” you whispered.

“There’s nothing I’ve ever wanted more.”

Emotion clogged your throat so badly you could barely breathe around it.

Bucky’s gaze searched yours carefully. “Hey,” he murmured. “Don’t cry on me now, sweetheart.”

“You made me emotional.”

A soft laugh left him. “Yeah?”

“You’re talking about babies and wedding vows while I was trying to seduce you.”

“I am seduced,” he promised solemnly. “Very seduced.”

You laughed wetly, and the sound seemed to relax him completely.

His hands slid up your back slowly before he kissed you again—gentle and unhurried. The kind of kiss that felt like home.

And when you finally sank into him later, tangled together beneath soft sheets while rain tapped against the windows, there was nothing rushed about it.

Bucky touched you like he was memorizing you.

Like he already saw forever every time he looked at you.

His lips pressed against your shoulder, your jaw, your wrist where your pulse fluttered wildly beneath his mouth. Between kisses, he whispered soft things that made your heart squeeze impossibly tighter.

“My girl.”

“So beautiful.”

“Love you so much.”

You clung to him afterward, legs tangled with his beneath the blankets while his fingers lazily traced circles against your bare spine.

“Y’know,” you mumbled sleepily against his chest, “next time I ask about fantasies, I’m specifying.”

Bucky’s laugh vibrated beneath your cheek.

“Too late,” he said softly, pressing a kiss into your hair. “You already know the worst one.”

You tilted your head up. “What’s that?”

His eyes softened so completely it nearly ruined you all over again.

Roommate!Bucky who stares at the way your tits bounce as you jump up suddenly. Remembering what you had planned for the evening. Who looks at your ass sway in those tiny fucking shorts as you rush to your room.

Roommate!Bucky who smiles all big and wide as you bring out a plastic box with a hundred different kinds of beads and charms and strings. The way your face lights up during times like this, it's almost enough to keep the dirty thoughts away.

Roommate!Bucky whose heart threatens to burst out of his chest with how hard it's beating when you take his hand and place it in your lap. so very near to your clothed cunt. so close all he'd do was curl his fingers and he'd be met with your wet, drippy heat, all ready to welcome him in.

Roommate!Bucky who enjoys the feeling of your smaller hands trying to measure the size of his wrist. He is so much bigger than you, could do so many things to you, and you'd just take them, right?

Roommate!Bucky who goes to bed that night with smooth blue and green beads clad on his wrist. Who still feels your soft touch on his, as you put the bracelet on him, telling him just how pretty he looked with it on. How it matches his eyes just right.

Roommate!Bucky who takes the bracelet off, the beads rolling on his skin, before putting it back on--the smooth glass sliding with ease.

Roommate!Bucky who sheds away his boxers, kicking them off to somewhere towards the end of his bed.

Roommate!Bucky who takes off the bracelet yet again, only to place it on top of his hard cock, coating the beads in the precum that leaked out.

Roommate!Bucky who rolls the bracelet up and down, the sensation of the glass pressing in against his throbbing cock making his eyes roll back into his head.

Roommate!Bucky who laughs at how this bracelet was especially made for him, how you made it with so much love, just to make him cum tonight.

Roommate!Bucky who looks at the way the string threatens to snap when he reaches the base, the bracelet too small to fully take him all in.

Roommate!Bucky who cums and coats the blue and green with thick, hot spurts of white. Looking at the sticky mess for a long time, before deciding to let it stay like that, not wiping away the remnants of his feed.

Roommate!Bucky who smiles and hugs you the next morning, showering you with praises about your pretty blue dress, sliding the bracelet on your wrist.

"Just fits so good, angel."

yes i know this isn't a fic and it doesn't make sense. This was written in 15 minutes and with no intention to actually make sense. I'm still tagging everyone cus... it's bucky hehe🤭🤭

You surely are about to taste your own blood on your tongue any second now if you keep biting your lip so hard. But all you do is tighten your grip on those messy, dark hair your fingers are knotted into, and you can’t fight the reflex to shift your hips away an inch so that the embarrassing sob that is growing in your throat won’t make it out.

Though you should have known that that would make him stop. His mouth pauses against your clit, and you squeeze your eyes shut.

His hands remain firmly at your thighs, thumbs soothing those slow and drowsy circles against your skin. But his eyes lift to yours, the usual bright blue of them gone dark and concentrated in the dimness of his bedroom. His gaze is fierce enough to make your breath hitch, but melted into its depths is that softness you know is there just for you.

With his gaze still on yours, he begins to kiss a languid path up your stomach, pausing just beneath your ribs and letting his eyes flutter when worshiping your breasts with his skilled tongue. Your mind and soul are soaring up to his high ceilings.

Your teeth are imprinted upon your bottom lip, and you hope you can continue keeping your breathing as even as possible, though you’re not managing all that well.

His hands move slowly across the skin of your hips, pinning you to the mattress. He doesn’t use all his strength but enough for you to feel stuck in his hold.

He crawls further up your body with that deliberate drag that leaves you shivering and panting. He hovers over you and his bare chest brushes your heaving breasts.

His face is now inches from yours, his stubble grazing your cheek, smelling like vanilla and something like cardamom, and you breathe it in automatically. His pupils are blown as they sear into yours.

“Stop that,” he orders, though his voice is a warm whisper. He reaches up, his thumb catching your bottom lip and tugging it out from between your teeth. He soothes the imprint. “Don't you hide those pretty sounds from me.”

“Bucky, the guards,” you breathe out, your voice trembling, still weak from the way he used his tongue on you. Your face burns. The room feels enormous again, full of listening walls. “Your people. They will hear. They will think—”

Something flits across his expression. It seems to be something proud, even possessive. You could say it looks dangerous, but being the person that you are, and considering the sweet albeit intense person that he is, it turns you the hell on and makes you sigh.

“I don't care what they think. I want them to know.” He leans down, his lips hovering over yours, his breath hot and smelling of you. “I want every man on my payroll to hear the way you sound when I’m the only thing on your mind. I want them to hear who I’m answering to tonight. And every other night from now on.”

With a stunned shake of your head, you stare up at him, a huff of embarrassment trying to bubble up and fall out of your mouth but it fails because his mouth is on yours, kissing you aggressively before he dives back down, not waiting for you to argue. You’re entirely overwhelmed, but damn, not in a bad way at all.

His hands lock you into place, and the way he’s eating you out has you flying straight to heaven with a one-way ticket. He’s being greedy. He’s using his tongue with a blunt, feverish sort of worship that makes your head hit his pillow with a thud.

He’s a businessman, that’s what he told you. But as his mouth works over you with all that bottled-up intensity he carries around all day, you feel the latent power he usually keeps veiled behind a tie. He’s a man who takes what he wants, and right now, what he wants is to hear you break, and you might actually, because god is he good, so incredibly good, you could definitely get used to it. Maybe you already are, but who’s to blame you for it.

The first real moan tears out of you, and you cringe internally at how loud and breathy it sounds, the way it vibrates in the cavernous room, landing in the farthest corners of the high ceilings.

Bucky grunts against you, and it sounds so purely satisfied, it even seems to rumble within your own body. You gasp, trying to suppress another moan, and he only presses harder, licking and sucking and slurping, and it makes you feel like you’re the only meal on his plate.

His thumbs dent the soft give of your hips to make sure you’re pinned the way he wants you, the way he has the best access to all of you. It’s dizzying, it makes your gut lurch in the best possible way, and you feel like a queen and a ruin all at once. He’s gentle, yeah, but it seems to be the gentle kind you would use on a porcelain heirloom right before testing its breaking point.

Your hands don’t know what to do with themselves. Gripping the sheets or pillows, touching yourself—it all doesn’t feel like enough, so you go back to sliding your fingers into his hair and basically watch them disappear in it. You feel powerful and helpless, and oh god you should really keep those noises down or you won’t be able to look at his people anymore.

He is a mountain of a man, intimidating in ways you don’t understand yet, full of secrets; and yet here he is, kneeling for you and eating you out as if that’s all he’s been waiting for his whole life.

Damn, you’re a lucky girl.

He is drinking you in, his mouth molding to you with a suction that feels like he’s trying to draw your very soul to the surface.

It feels as though each individual bristle of his stubble is caressing your inner thigh, and it's abrasive and burning but also so damn good. It makes the gliding heat of his tongue feel so soft and vivid, and it pulls the tension right out of your bones.

He tracks you through his lashes, and you’re careful not to meet his eyes or that dark gaze of his would surely make you come already. But he doesn’t stop documenting you and the way you react to him. He thrives on it, so very much that it doesn’t seem to embarrass him in the slightest.

Then he dives past your entrance, his tongue finding that soft, sharp intake of your breath. And your spine bows upward out of pure blinding pleasure. The sound that leaves you is startled, too loud for your liking and so you try to clamp your hand over your lips.

He catches your wrist.

He’s not harsh with it, but he brings your hand down to the mattress and pins it there decisively. His fingers lace through yours.

“What’d I say,” he warns, voice low, husky.

You swallow, your eyes are fluttering. “Bucky—”

“Make the noise,” he whispers as he kisses along your inner thigh, eyes on you. “All of it.”

His free hand slowly wanders upward and it almost feels possessive how he ascends your heated skin. You glimpse that little hint of something feral, something prehistoric in the trail of his eyes. You’ve seen it before, and as always, it pulls you under completely. His ferocity isn’t some thrashing kind of wild, honestly, he seems perfectly comfortable with his position, as though he’s already done the math but there’s no clear solution and he just has to keep calculating. Has to keep going.

He lunges back and buries his face in your heat, his tongue flat and broad, applying a rhythmic pressure that whites out your vision and has you moaning without thought. It’s thorough and hungry, his mouth drawing you in eagerly, and it feels like he’s trying to pull the very center of you into his throat.

“Bucky—,” you gasp, your fingers tightly clamping around his, knuckles white.

He growls, and it rattles his entire chest, it vibrates against your sensitive skin. He uses his teeth—just a graze, a tiny, sharp nip that sends a scalding current straight to your core. Your hips jerk reflexively, his hands are pinning you open, and you are forced to take every unsparing lap of his tongue.

He shifts his weight, his nose dragging through your wetness as he focuses his attention on the very top of your nub. He works his tongue in a cadence so constant it sends the pressure straight to the back of your skull until the room dissolves behind your eyelids. It feels almost like a breaking point, but hell, you would throw yourself out of those high windows if he were to stop now.

He’s fast and skilled and you’re made to take it.

“Open up,” he commands against your skin, his voice muffled and wet although you couldn’t possible open up more for him.

There is no more warning before he fills you with two fingers, sliding them deep inside you and stretching you while his thumb maintains that dizzying pressure, and the friction burns a hole through your focus. The two sensations fight for room in your head, effectively demolishing whatever was left of your pride and it makes you let out the highest moan. You’re straining upward, seeking the release he’s dangling just out of reach.

He looks up at you, his face flushed, his breathing ragged against your thigh. A stray, damp shimmer glistens on the curve of his lower lip, and he licks it clean. You watch mesmerized and utterly overdrawn. His gaze is stripped of any pretense, it’s dark and appeased and entirely fixed on the way your face is breaking.

"That's it," he coos, watching your chest heave. "Scream for me, sweetheart. I'm not stopping until you do."

He dives back in, his tongue swirling deep inside you before curling back to hook against your clit, and suddenly there is no perspective on anything anymore, and the floors are walls and the walls are floors, and—

And then his phone begins vibrating against the mahogany nightstand. It’s a sharp and intrusive sound and it’s stripping the air of its heat.

Bucky doesn’t seem to care, though. He doesn’t so much as glance over at it. His gaze stays welded to yours, his pupils taking up the beautiful blue. His thumb continues trailing your heat, collecting your slick, and he turns to watch in amazement, as he licks a long stripe up your center, making you choke on your spit.

The vibration of his phone still ringing grates against the wood, loud enough to feel like a physical itch.

Bucky is a man who has built an empire on timing, yet he seems perfectly content to let the world outside the bedroom door spontaneously combust.

The phone dies.

He keeps sucking, you keep moaning.

Then, it begins again, more insistent this time. His phone is pulsing. It seems urgent.

You feel his jaw tighten against you. Feel the shift you’ve come to recognize but never quite know what to do with. The air around him thickens by a single degree. The temperature of him changes, not in heat but in authority. Somewhere beyond these walls, the world is knocking its head against his patience.

“Bucky,” you breathe, the word leaning on the dryness in your throat. Your chest is still heaving, your skin flushed a beautiful pink. You softly pull at his hair to make him look at you, a weak gesture that feels like trying to move a mountain. “You should get that.”

His eyes meet yours. There are galaxies in them and something darker orbiting behind them. He leans in and presses a slow, devastating kiss to the inside of your thigh, all calm and relaxed while the phone continues vibrating angrily.

“It can wait,” he decides, voice an octave lower and threaded with promise as he trails a line of punishingly soft kisses along your skin.

Another buzz, the sound now an impatient thrum that seems to vibrate the very legs of the bed. It feels like a summons, a reminder of the business that pays for the guards and the maids and the high ceilings.

He exhales through his nose and lets out a rumble of annoyance. His thumb strokes a calming line along your hip, as if reassuring you that his irritation belongs elsewhere. He looks like some wild animal being interrupted mid-meal.

“Bucky—,” you start, carefully, your hand sliding to cup his face, feeling the heat of his skin, but he clicks his tongue to interrupt you.

“My girl deserves to get off first,” he hums, not letting his lips off your skin, his stubble a deliberate, intoxicating scrape against your thigh.

And when his tongue drives home, flat and strong against that hyper-sensitized knot of nerves, it doesn’t take long for that jolting pleasure to cloud your vision and bleach the dark corners of his bedroom into a searing, blinding white.

Your spine arches and snaps and leaves you suspended between the silk sheets and the cold air, held down only by his weight.

The embarrassing sob you were trying to hide earlier finally tears free, but it isn’t a sob anymore. It’s a melodic wail that echoes off the shadows-drenched ceiling. It climbs high and rings out with a clarity that makes the idea of guards and business feel like a fever dream from another life.

Your body is trying to crush his fingers in a desperate pulse that feels like a heart beating where it shouldn't.

And Bucky drinks it all in. He keeps his head down, jaw locked against you, refusing to let the moment end. That rough graze of his stubble is brutal but it keeps you somewhat in the room. He is taking the time with the mess he made, leaning into the way you are trembling, his mouth ensuring that every last bit of your control is gone.

By the time your vision starts to clear at the edges, and the room starts to solidify back into reality, you feel hollowed out, as if he’d reached inside and pulled the very soul of you to the surface. You slump into the mattress, your limbs too heavy to even twitch, your lungs burning with the effort of remembering how to breathe.

When you begin to squirm in his hold, Bucky finally pulls back, his expression bluntly victorious. He is breathing hard, his lips stained, his eyes trained on the way your ribs are still hitching with those dying tremors. His hand tightens at your hip.

Then he rises over you in one fast movement, bracing himself above you with his weight carefully balanced. You don’t need any more physical proof that he wants you, considering how hard and ready you can feel him against your leg, with his control barely in check; and it makes your lungs seize up.

Wordlessly, he leans down to pull you into a slow kiss that goes so deep, your thoughts evaporate and your fingers tangle in his hair. He groans against your lips, breathing your name. You feel him twitch against you as he lets his hand slide back between your bodies—when the door rattles with a knock.

Bucky stills with his forehead on yours, eyes still closed, jaw a block of ice. “Boss?” a slightly hesitant voice comes through the door.

His nose presses into the crook of your neck. For a long second, he just breathes you in, a deep, possessive inhalation as if he is trying to pull in all of your scent to survive the coming interruption.

With a low curse that is more a growl than a word, he rolls onto his side and promptly pulls you with him, tucking you into his chest. His body angles slightly toward the door, building an instinctive shield. His arms remain draped over you, his left hand splayed protectively across your back.

“What,” he calls, voice suddenly stripped of warmth. There is a pause on the other side.

“Sorry, boss,” The voice is male. Sounding even more hesitant now. And definitely embarrassed. “But, uh— it’s important. You are needed.”

You want to let out a heavy sigh. But you’ve seen this coming, really.

Bucky closes his eyes briefly and there is something pinched around them. He’s not usually a short-tempered man, at least not with you, but right now he looks ready to snap at the door.

“I’m busy,” he replies flatly, and you believe his voice is only calm for your sake.

Another pause. The poor man outside is probably staring at the door waiting for it to shoot him.

“It’s Sam,” he explains carefully, seemingly afraid to say too much.

You know Sam. Or, you have heard Bucky mention Sam. Sam, the colleague. The one your boyfriend refers to with a mix of irritation and reluctant brotherhood. A pain in the ass, he told you with a half-smile. But loyal. Does good work. One of the few men he trusts to argue with him and live. You had laughed at the way he said it so seriously. He hadn't really laughed with you, but he kissed you stupid afterwards and so you no longer thought of it.

Bucky gives a long exhale.

“Give me five.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hurried footsteps retreat down the corridor.

And Bucky doesn’t make a single attempt to leave your side. He just peppers your neck with tiny kisses.

You try to turn to his face. “Bucky, you should go.”

His eyes meet yours, and the stoicism buckles immediately. Back is the softness.

“You come first,” he hums, and his thumb brushes your cheek. There is something apologetic in the gesture, though he hasn’t done anything wrong.

You smile faintly and let a slow pout form on your lips. “I don’t want to hold you back from work.”

“You’re not,” he reassures you softly, leaning down to kiss you with a lack of the urgency he should probably be feeling right now.

But then he’s shifting away, sitting up on the edge of the bed, and the loss of his heat is a stinging chill. The chandelier light spills over his naked back, over the breadth of his shoulders. Your eyes glide down the tiny pink scars on his left shoulder with a sinking feeling in your stomach—those scars are another mystery he hasn’t let you into yet. But all you want to do is kiss them and hope to make it better, even if just a little.

You watch the way he runs a hand through his hair, reassembling himself piece by piece. By the time he stands, he has edges. He always seems different when he’s no longer touching you.

He pulls on a pair of dark trousers and doesn’t bother with a shirt. The phone is in his hand now. He checks the screen, jaw grinding briefly before he glances back at you. And the hardness that stepped into his eyes softens again, dissolving the moment they meet your face. It’s almost ridiculous, how quickly it happens. Like watching a knife remember it was once a piece of silver meant for candlelight.

You’re still half-sunk into the bed, hair falling around your shoulders, limbs loose, and sheets wound around your naked body. Around you, it smells of cedar, expensive soap, and Bucky himself, which is somehow warmer than both.

“Stay here,” he says gently. “I’ll handle it.”

Handle it.

The words mean spreadsheets and contracts in your mind. Annoying colleagues. Late- night negotiations.

He walks back to his bed to press a tender kiss to your forehead.

You push yourself up slightly on your elbows, the blanket sliding down your side. And you definitely see the way his gaze drifts for an appreciative and unashamed moment before it returns to your eyes. There is a small smile tugging at his mouth, and it’s the one you always get to see when you’re the only audience.

“Make yourself at home while I’m gone, yeah?” he whispers, nodding toward the massive wardrobe along the far wall, keeping his attention on you. “If you get cold, grab a shirt of mine. Top shelf on the left.”

You smile at him, nodding softly.

His eyes move over you slowly, and there is something warmly adoring in them that makes your chest tighten in a strange, bright way. He reaches out to brush his fingers along your jaw. The touch is thorough, absentmindedly tender, soothing out something only he can see.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he adds, voice rougher now. Reluctant. “Didn’t plan on having to step out. Told Sam he better handle his own ass today. Should’ve known better, though.”

“You’re the boss, Bucky,” you ease lightly. “I assume dramatic interruptions are part of the brand.”

His mouth curves.

“Unfortunately.”

He kisses your forehead once more, lingering long enough to make your lashes flutter.

“I’ll make it up to you,” he murmurs sweetly. “Soon as I’m done with this.” His thumb traces your cheek. “I’m coming right back. Gonna give you my full attention.” His eyes darken slightly, voice dipping just enough to send a warm shiver through you. “Cuddle you properly. Maybe take things a little further.”

Your stomach does a small, excited flip. “Maybe?”you tease, leaning into his touch.

He presses his smirk against yours. “Definitely.”

With that, he pulls back and straightens, that sovereign steel slipping back over him piece by piece. It’s almost visible, the way he steps into whatever role the rest of his world knows him for. The man who answers phones about Sam and things that sound suspiciously more complicated than spreadsheets.

At the door, he glances back once more. Same softness, just for you. “Lock it behind me, doll.”

The door opens. His phone lifts to his ear.

His voice changes instantly as he steps into the hallway.

“Get Wilson on the line,” he demands, tone clipped. “Now.” And then the door shuts.

You’re left in the echo of him and his scent in the sheets, his warmth still imprinted on your skin.

You don’t get up immediately to lock the door. He can get just a little too protective sometimes, so you don’t deem it necessary to lock the door when he’s just out taking a call. And you’re sure his guards would be in much worse trouble if they were to enter and see you nakedly spread out in his bed.

So you flop back into the mattress—that certainly was expensive too, due to the way it feels—and stare at the ceiling for a moment.

Then you laugh, incredulously. A quiet little wheeze of disbelief escaping into the big room.

Because really. What on earth.

You roll onto your side, pulling the blanket with you, and glance around the bedroom again like maybe you hallucinated the last two hours. Or the last two months.

The place is obscene.

And not in a tacky-rich, or gold-fountain rich kind of way. This is the quiet kind of wealth. Everything is polished wood and deep colors and furniture that probably has a historical backstory longer than your résumé.

There’s a fireplace bigger than your entire first apartment. A chandelier that looks like it was handcrafted by depressed angels.

And somewhere downstairs, there are actual maids.

Maids.

And guards.

Actual human beings whose job description probably includes phrases like protect the property and stand menacingly near large gates.

Meanwhile, you used to eat instant noodles on a couch that leaned slightly to the left like it had given up on life.

And somehow—how the fuck—you have ended up in the bed of a man who owns more suits than you own pairs of socks. A man who is tall and broad and so absurdly handsome, who steps into those razor-sharp tailored suits as though they were invented solely for him. Who wears that self-confident authority in his voice that makes the people around him straighten without realizing why.

And yet, he was on his knees for you just moments ago.

The thought sends heat creeping up your neck again. But in a giddy way.

You bury your face briefly into the pillow with a muffled groan. Because honestly, how did you pull that.

A man like Bucky should logically be dating a diplomat. Or a CEO. Or some terrifyingly poised woman who drinks champagne for breakfast and owns fifteen languages.

Instead, he found you.

You.

Who once tripped over a grocery store display and apologized to the oranges. And yet he looks at you like you hung the moon with questionable hardware.

You grin into the pillow.

Also—objectively speaking—the man is incredible in bed. Like, it’s crazy.

Biting your lip and staring up at the ceiling, you wonder if the chandelier is as baffled by your luck as you are. It’s like winning the lottery without buying a ticket, and you’re silently pleading with the laws of probability to stay bent in your favor just a little while longer; at least until he realizes you’re a mere mortal and not the goddess he’s treating you as.

It’s weird that a man like him noticed you. Weird that he’s so sharp with the world but so gentle with you. Weird that he lives in this fortress of wealth and power and still tells you to steal his shirts if you’re getting cold.

Your eyes drift toward the wardrobe.

Top shelf on the left, he said.

You imagine one of his massive shirts swallowing you as a whole, and snort softly.

Yeah.

You definitely pulled a mob-boss-looking, suit-wearing, ridiculously attentive gentleman who apparently worships the ground you lie naked on.

Weird. Very weird. But you’re not complaining. You’re just mentally haggling with the universe, offering to never ask for another favor again if it just promises not to reclaim its prize or realize he’s a solid ten and you’re way out of his league.

He told you he runs a company.

You imagine glass walls and long tables and men in suits who nod too quickly while he stands in front of them all in his suit, looking all delicious and hot. You imagine paperwork, meetings, a name etched into metal on an office door. He never corrects you. He only smiles in that small way of his—enigmatic, a little asymmetrical, a little careful, as if the smile is something he built from spare parts and polished until it gleamed.

You’ve been dating for a short time. And considering the mystery he surrounds himself with, you guess it’s going to take a while until you truly get to know him. Until he truly starts telling you how his day has been and what he has been up to—and what taking a call means in his business.

But he kisses as though he’s been starving in a snowstorm. As though warmth is an endangered species and your mouth is the last sanctuary. His hands are large and soothing, and they never wander without purpose. He touches and handles you like the first blossom of a century-plant, something that has spent a hundred years preparing to bloom for a single day. And he looks at you as if you are that miracle. As if you are the only soft thing in a life built of stone.

And so, you tell yourself, you can wait for him to be ready to talk.

You don’t know what he does after midnight. You only know he sometimes steps onto the balcony to take calls. His voice changes there. It drops. He doesn’t smooth over his words and instead lets the corners stay pointy. You just never catch his words. The only thing you can do is admire the way the city lights flicker behind him like they’re afraid of him. Or in awe.

And when he comes back inside, he presses his forehead to yours as if he’s returning from war.

Contemplating, you lie there for a moment longer, staring at the ceiling. Then you sit up.

It’s not cold, the room is perfectly climate-controlled in that rich-people way where seasons are merely decorative suggestions outside the window; but you suddenly want one of his shirts.

Not for warmth, but for him, for the smell of him, for the proof that this is all actually happening and you are actually here with him somewhere out there in this huge mansion, waiting to get his mouth back on you. For the possibility that his detergent—whatever luxury forest-scented nonsense it probably is—might trick your brain into thinking he’s still right there.

You glance toward the wardrobe.

It’s enormous, who would have guessed. Cathedral enormous. Dark wood doors that probably cost more than your childhood bedroom set. It suggests that Bucky owns multiple versions of the same devastatingly expensive suit.

You slide out of bed and pad across the carpet, which is so soft it feels apologetic for touching your feet. Putting on your underwear for comfort, you make your way over to his wardrobe. The doors open without making a single sound.

You step inside and it feels like even the air is filtered for perfection. It’s a humbling difference to your own apartment, where the dresser functions less like furniture and more like a high-stakes game of Tetris, with your favorite sweaters perpetually losing the battle against a jammed bottom drawer, and where finding a matching pair of socks requires the luck of a seasoned treasure hunter.

There are rows of shirts, jackets, trousers. Everything spaced just enough apart to breathe. Everything immaculate. A faint scent of sandalwood and something clean and expensive drifts forward to greet you.

You tilt your head up.

The shirt shelf is ambitious.

You stand on your toes but you don’t reach anything. You reach higher, basically for nothing. Your fingers waggle uselessly in the air, far away from touching anything.

You sigh.

Because obviously, the man built like a six-foot-something war monument thinks a shelf near the ceiling is perfectly reasonable.

You walk out of the wardrobe and glance back toward the bed. Then toward the chair near the window.

His jacket is draped there. It looks like it belongs at the head of a mahogany table, brokering peace or declaring war with a single sharp lapel. And in between there’s the shirt he’s tossed aside as soon as you both entered his room, with an untidiness that feels like a glitch in his otherwise perfect Matrix.

It’s the shirt he didn’t bother to put back on when leaving you here. You grin.

Well.

That works too. Perfectly, even.

You wander over, the carpet not letting any sound free. The chair sits near the tall windows, moonlight cascading across the floor in long silver rectangles. It looks graceful somehow. His jacket catches the light along its seams, and you shiver at the thought of how elegant and powerful it makes him look.

You reach for it, intending to lift it aside and claim the bunched shirt.

But the moment you grab the jacket, something feels off. It’s heavy. Not normal-jacket heavy. Weighted. You frown faintly, adjusting your grip. You pick it up fully, wanting to fold it neatly, when something slips out of it.

There’s a short, dense thud against the floor. It makes you freeze.

The object lands on the dark carpet inches from your toe; a short, metallic punctuation mark in the silence. It drinks in the chandelier’s glow and spits it back out with a cold, silver arrogance. It ignites an unmistakable shimmer that makes the air in the room feel ten degrees colder.

Your brain takes a second to translate the shape.

It’s a gun.

You stare at it.

The word sits adamantly on the floor of your mind and turns the room into a crime scene before anything has even happened. It’s a sharp fracture in the timeline—there is the version of you from five seconds ago, and the version of you staring at a hunk of lethal metal.

This thing is real. Very real. Not movie-real. Not plastic-prop-real. More like heavy-metal-object-that-could-alter-the-entire-direction-of-a Tuesday-real.

Your knees grow weak and you crouch down so very slowly. Who knows, maybe sudden movements can already trigger it. You’ve never seen a real gun. You never expected you would, not like this, at least. This feels pretty surreal.

The jacket still hangs half off the chair behind you. The shirt you wanted is crumpled innocently beneath it, but you’re not grabbing it.

Your attention remains on the gun. You don’t touch it.

It’s not like your heart is racing noticeably, but there is a new tightness in your chest and it’s making you feel as though your thoughts all have quietly stood up at once.

Because. Right. Of course.

You know Bucky runs a company.

You know he’s wealthy enough to own a mansion that probably requires a map and a tour guide.

You know he has guards. Actual guards. You knew all that.

But with this gun sitting there on the carpet, it feels like looking through a new lens that snaps the blurry facts you know of this man into a slightly different focus.

If it’s frightening, you’re not sure, but it’s definitely clarifying.

You sit back on your heels for a moment, staring at it. He carried this in his jacket pocket. Casually. Just around. Like a wallet. Or keys.

Your mind tries to rewind through the past weeks. The way he watches exits. The midnight phone calls. The men who seem oddly respectful around him. The commanding note in his voice when he tells someone to do something.

You bite your lip, a hectic internal editor trying to bridge the gap between the little you know about the man and the metal you’ve found. You tell yourself not to panic, because panicking won’t give you any answers. And there’s no need to panic, because he’s just a man with power, a man who’s a boss and bosses tend to have people who don’t like them.

That’s no reason to use a gun on anyone, but it’s probably just a formality. A piece of insurance stored away like a fire extinguisher you hope to never use. Maybe it’s not meant for violence at all, just for peace of mind.

He’s protective. You’ve seen and felt it. Just last week, he was absolutely livid, after one of his guards stepped out of line with one of his maids, who’s this sweet old woman who had been with his family since his father’s time. He was in such a blind tailspin over it, and your soothing touch was the only thing that was able to pull him back to earth.

He would build a wall around everyone he cares about just to keep the wind from blowing too hard. Perhaps this gun is just part of that wall, a safety he keeps close so he never has to feel helpless. It doesn't have to mean he’s dangerous. It just means he’s prepared. It’s a precaution, a tool, a just in case that will likely collect dust until the end of time.

You try to settle the thought, but it feels like trying to pin a map against your chest in a storm; the harder you flatten your palms against the paper, the more wind tunnels through the gaps, ballooning the center and snatching the corners from your grip. If you manage to squash one section still, the air pockets behind the rest, turning the whole thing into a thrashing thing that fights to fold itself back up or fly away entirely. No matter what you do, no matter how much you lean into it, the wind will always be a second faster. The wind will always have the upper hand, hollowing out the space between your hands and the whole truth you are trying to read.

You just have to believe that the man who touches his girl so carefully is the same man who would only ever use that steel to keep the world at bay.

Your gaze lingers on it.

You don’t know much about guns. Your knowledge is mostly assembled from movies, news articles, and the vague understanding that they belong firmly in the category of things you should probably treat with respect. And it definitely belongs to a world you’ve never really stepped into before.

But apparently, Bucky lives there.

You glance toward the door he disappeared through. This is the guy who permitted you to steal his clothes, who pressed a kiss to your forehead with the softest lips. When he looks at you, it’s with that specific focus, that startled sort of wonder that always makes you feel so over-exposed, but also exponentially adored.

Your chest softens despite yourself. Still.

You eye the gun again, and one thing has become very clear in the last thirty seconds. You might be dating a man you know less about than you thought.

And that realization sits in the room with you now, waiting for you to act on it.

But you don’t know how. You simply keep staring. The chandelier light kisses its metal edges until they gleam faintly, indifferent to the fact that your brain is currently eroding into a new shape.

You swallow, and even that sounds strange in the imposing space, like it wandered too far from home.

Leaving this thing on the floor feels wrong.

And if Bucky comes back and sees it there... You don’t know why, but the thought makes your stomach tighten.

So you reach down, only now seeing that your hands are slightly wavering. Your fingers close around the grip, and the first thing you notice is the weight. It’s heavier than it looks, solid in a way that makes your palm immediately aware that this object was designed with very serious intentions.

You lift it slowly. Nothing happens, obviously. The world doesn’t explode. The chandelier doesn’t shatter. The mansion continues breathing its wealthy breath around you.

But holding it still feels like stepping one inch deeper into a room you didn’t know existed.

You turn it slightly, meaning only to orient it so you can slide it neatly back into the inside pocket of his jacket, but you spot an engraving, small letters carved into the dark handle.

JBB

Your brow furrows. You stare at them for a moment, tracing the edges with your eyes.

The metal around the letters looks softened. Not scratched exactly, but worn in the way objects get when they’ve lived in someone’s hand for a long time. Like a favorite pen. Or a well-loved watch.

If guns can look old, this one does. It’s not antique-old, but familiar-old.

You tilt your head. JBB. You try to assemble a name around the letters. The only name you know for the man currently pacing somewhere in this mansion making serious phone calls is Bucky.

Just Bucky.

You don’t know his last name, you realize suddenly, and you don’t like that.

You know his favorite whiskey. You know the exact shape of the scar on his shoulder. You know the way he presses his nose into your hair when he tries to calm himself down.

But his last name leaves a blank space in your mind. You glance down at the gun again.

JBB.

Maybe it belongs to someone else. Someone with a J. Jake? James? John? Jacob?

Maybe it’s a family thing. Maybe it belonged to his father. Maybe it’s one of those rich-man- heirloom objects that get passed down through generations alongside cufflinks and complicated legacies.

You exhale quietly.

That explanation sounds reasonable enough that you decide to borrow it for the moment.

Very carefully, and with explicit intent, you slide the gun back into the inside pocket of his jacket. The fabric settles around it like it knows exactly where it’s needed.

You smooth the lapel automatically.

There.

No evidence.

Your fingers linger on the jacket for a second longer than you want.

It still smells like him. Clean soap. Dried tobacco. Something stronger beneath it that you can’t put a name to but always recognize immediately as Bucky.

You step back, and suddenly the room feels different. Not threatening, but it does feel larger still.

Because now your brain is busy counting the things you don’t know.

You don’t know his last name.

You don’t really know what his company does.

You don’t know why men knock on his bedroom door looking nervous.

You don’t know why he carries a gun like it’s just another accessory.

You rub your arms lightly, because now there is a faint prickle of awareness crawling along your thoughts and it is spreading throughout your body.

You’ve been dating for six weeks. Is this long enough to demand answers? To justify interrogations? Gosh, you’re not sure. You’re not sure about a lot of things right now, really. You’ve been floating through the beginning part—the sweet, dizzy, honeymoon fog where the only facts that matter are the ones you feel.

But now there’s a small string of sunlight sliding through the fog. A string of curiosity. You turn back toward the bed where your clothes lie in a small, careless pile.

Maybe you’re overthinking this.

Maybe.

Still.

You pull your shirt over your head, the fabric rustling softly in the quiet room. Your jeans follow, and then your fingers reach automatically for the necklace resting on the nightstand.

The pearls catch the light when you lift them. Bucky gave it to you two weeks ago.

It’s delicate. Real pearls, because he just can. Everything about him seems to come with an expensive quality attached.

You remember the way he looked when he gave it to you. Almost shy, which was deeply unfair considering how the man is built.

Saw it and thought of you, he’d said. Think about you all the time, he’d added.

Which had melted approximately seventy percent of your internal structure. You fasten the necklace and touch it lightly now.

Gentleman.

Ridiculously good in bed.

Mysterious.

Possibly carrying engraved guns.

You sigh.

You feel a little guilty. Because what you’re about to do is technically snooping. And snooping is not great. Your mother would absolutely deliver a lecture about boundaries if she could see you right now.

You glance around the massive room again. The desk by the window. The bookshelves. The curated neatness of everything.

You bite your lip. You’re not looking for secrets. You’re just looking for context. A clue. A name.

Something that tells you who Bucky is when he isn’t kissing your forehead and telling you to raid his closet.

Your feet move before your conscience can finish filing complaints.

Your steps make no sound as you move across the carpet, wandering deeper into the room and scanning the shelves and surfaces with a caution that can’t suppress your intrigue.

You don’t need all the answers. Just one or two. So you start with the obvious places.

Drawers.

It feels less intrusive somehow; opening something that was clearly meant to be opened. You move slowly, like a guest in a museum after hours, careful fingers, quiet breath, a mild sense that the walls might be watching.

The first drawer slides out with a wooden noise and even that sounds rich. Inside, there are watches. Several of them, lined neatly in velvet compartments. Dark metal, silver, leather straps. You don’t know brands, but you know enough to guess that each one probably costs more than your car.

You close the drawer.

The next one holds cufflinks. Rows of them. Small polished things that look important and serious and entirely uninterested in your investigation.

And it only goes on this way. You open drawer after drawer, and there is nothing strange. Nothing suspicious. Just the belongings of a very wealthy man who liked things neat.

Your shoulders loosen a little. Maybe you overreacted. Maybe the gun is just a rich man's security thing. The guards downstairs carry them too, probably. It doesn’t automatically mean anything bad.

You open another drawer.

Paperwork. Boring looking things. A passport tucked neatly inside a leather sleeve. You hesitate for half a second before closing it again.

That one definitely feels like crossing a line.

You step away from the wardrobe and wander toward the nightstand instead.

The wood gleams darkly under the chandelier.

You pull open the top drawer.

More ordinary things. Wallets. Sunglasses. A small tray of rings.

Further back in the drawer, you find a small stack of Polaroids. You fish them out, because you recognize the first picture. It’s a picture of Bucky and you from a few weeks ago. You had found an old Polaroid camera and wanted to try it out, practically levering him into the frame while he grumbled about how he wasn’t photogenic which was total bullshit in your eyes. But he isn’t even looking at the camera in the photo. He is looking at you with a fond little half-smile.

Looking at a few others, you realize they are of you. All of them. One is a shot of your back as you walk toward a sunset, another is a blurred profile of you sleeping on his shoulder.

There is a warmth prickling at the back of your neck and you feel something slacken inside your stomach as you slowly lower the photos back where they were.

Nothing about all of this screams crime lord. Your nerves ease another notch.

You almost laugh at yourself. Your brain likes to get dramatic. Bucky is archiving your relationship, he is sweet and protective and tender and just—

As you are about to pull your hand out, your fingers brush against something cold and metallic near the back of the drawer.

You pause.

It’s partially hidden beneath a folded black cloth. Just the faint glint of a chain catching the light.

Curiosity taps gently on your shoulder.

You slide the cloth aside and notice the silver chain. It’s thin and tangled loosely like it’s been dropped there without much thought.

You hook your finger under it and lift. Something heavier at the end slips free. Two small metal plates fall against each other with a quiet clink.

Dog tags.

You blink.

That’s not strange, exactly. Lots of people keep sentimental things. Maybe Bucky served in the military. That would even make him hotter, to be real. But it does feel a little hurtful that he didn’t share this information with you.

You turn the tags over idly, expecting to see a name you don’t recognize. However, though, you do recognize the name that’s neatly spelled out on the metal plate. And it has the air in your lungs turn to stone, refusing to move a single inch.

James Buchanan Barnes.

Your stomach drops in such a harsh way, there is no ending to the fall. Your internal organs are unmoored and everything about you feels dizzy and weightless. It’s like stepping down a staircase that isn’t there. You’re still gripping the metal, but the connection between your brain and your hands has been cut, and now your fingers feel distant and wooden, filled with a needling sensation you know comes right before they start to shake.

And they do shake.

A thin tremor at first, then worse, until the tags begin to chatter against each other. Each sharp nick of the steel feels so biting and loud, broadcasting the exact moment you are losing it.

Your mind flips through memory like rifling a deck of cards too fast.

News headlines.

Conversations overheard in cafés.

Podcasts about organized crime.

New York’s most notorious mob boss.

The man whose name floats through the city like a ghost story told after midnight. James Buchanan Barnes.

JBB.

Heat rushes up the back of your neck while the rest of you goes ice-cold. It feels like standing in two climates at once—your skin clammy, your spine rigid, a cold sweat blooming between your shoulder blades.

Every breath you pull in is labored and metallic, coating your lungs in a film of disbelief that makes your chest ache. You can almost hear the gears of your reality grinding to a convulsive, screeching halt, stripping the teeth right off the life you thought you were living.

Your pulse is a furious SOS tapped out against the underside of your throat; a muddled, thrumming reminder that you are standing in the epicenter of a storm you didn't even know was brewing. You feel thin, translucent, like a sketch of a person that someone could erase with a single, hard look.

Your fingers tighten around the dog tags. No.

No no no.

Your brain scrambles to reject it. Because that’s outrageous.

That man—the one people call dangerous in all kinds of languages, the one whose operations stretch across half the city, the one who apparently runs things so carefully that no one has ever managed to pin a crime on him—

That man is a myth.

A shadow.

A name in newspapers. No photos. No confirmed identity.

Just whispers.

James Buchanan Barnes.

JBB

You stare at the letters again. You recall the way his initials were engraved in the gun.

Your mind scrambles for explanations—wrong tags, coincidence, someone else with the same name—but every attempt at reason breaks apart in your hands.

Bucky. James. Bucky. James.

James Bucky Barnes.

Your eyes drift slowly across the room.

The suits.

The mansion.

The guards.

The midnight phone calls.

The seriousness.

The gun.

Your hands are shaking tremendously. JBB.

James.

Buchanan.

Barnes.

Your mind repeats it over and over again. The math is suddenly very simple.

He kissed your forehead fifteen minutes ago. He told you to steal his shirt if you get cold. He gifted you present after present because he simply could. He spoke your name as if he had ingrained it on his tongue.

He is the most dangerous man in the city.

Something uncomfortably glaring and stinging climbs up the back of your neck, and it’s making you feel watched by a predator you once mistook for a protector.

You’ve heard the stories. Everyone has. Illegal shipments. Rival gangs disappearing overnight. Entire businesses quietly changing ownership after one meeting with Barnes.

And yet there is no evidence. Never evidence. Just the name. James Buchanan Barnes. The general public doesn’t know what he looks like. There are no confirmed photographs. Just rumors.

But you know exactly what he looks like. You know the way his hair falls into his eyes when he’s tired. You know the scars on his body, know his reactions to your lips on them. You know the exact sound he makes when you laugh unexpectedly.

You are standing in the bedroom of the most notorious mob boss in New York. Wearing the pearl necklace he gave you.

Sleeping in his bed.

Dating him.

For fucks sake, he’s been inside you. You came on the most wanted dick in this city.

The walls of his seemingly huge room, so pristine and elegant, now seem to turn from a sanctuary into a beautifully curated cage.

You have been falling for the most dangerous man in the entire city and until two minutes ago, you had absolutely no idea.

Your hand moves to put the dog tags back in their place, but it’s like you’ve switched to autopilot. Your fingers operate with a sense of detachment while your mind is still a mile behind, screaming.

You lower the chain back into the velvet-lined dark with a tremble you can’t shake. You should crush it in your fist, should throw it at the ground and stomp around on it, should spit on it for what this man did—to the world, to you—but all you can do is handle it with a carefulness that is usually reserved for unexploded ordnance.

The metal hits the bottom with a tiny clink. The sound is so small, yet it feels like a heavy iron gate slamming shut between who you were five minutes ago and who you are now.

You slide the drawer shut, the wood-on-wood glide sounding like a long, slow exhale of a secret that’s finally been caught. You do it with agonizing slowness, as if by moving quietly enough, you can trick the universe into rewinding the last sixty seconds, or rather the last months so you could have avoided stumbling into his strong but deceiving arms.

And immediately, your brain begins doing what brains do best when frightened—it rewrites the past with fresh ink.

Everything changes. Everything. You look around the bedroom again. But it’s not the same room anymore. It’s not a beautiful space where you spent evenings laughing and tangled in sheets with a man who handled you like he was scared to hurt you.

Now it’s a room belonging to James Buchanan Barnes. Mob boss. Ruler of the underworld. The man people whisper about like saying his name too loudly might summon him like the devil.

Your stomach is curled into a hard stone, your fingers still numb. And suddenly every memory of the last few weeks starts recoding itself.

You remember the first gift he gave you. Not the pearls. The flowers. Three dozen white lilies delivered to your apartment door a day after your first date.

You’d laughed at the absurdity of it, calling him to tell him that this is too much, way too much, but he had smirked over the phone, so soft and unabashed, only replying that you deserve it, that you deserve way more than that.

At the time it felt romantic. But now your mind shears the memory, leaving the colors bled and the angles wrong. You turn all the memories of him over in the light until the shadows fall differently, until they take on shapes that start to build a picture.

Maybe it wasn’t romance. Maybe it was a strategy. Because that’s what men like him do, right? They buy people. They build golden cages out of small, glittering gestures.

You rub your arms slowly.

Another memory surfaces. The restaurant. The one with the insane skyline view where the waiters treated him like visiting royalty.

You’d joked about it. Do you secretly own this place?

He’d smiled that slow, mysterious smile of his and simply offered you more wine. He had looked so pleased.

Tension coils behind your ribs, but your mind keeps going.

The necklace. The pearls. One month together and he gives you something that probably cost more than your entire wardrobe.

You had protested. He’d looked almost offended. He pouted at you. He looked so adorably soft, so hopeful you would take this gift from him, that you thought it to be sweet.

Maybe a little over-the-top.

But that was just Bucky, is what you thought. A little intense. A little larger than life.

However, now the thought hatches, its spindly legs prickling against your focus.

He wasn’t spoiling you, he was buying you. Buying your affection. Buying your trust. Buying your silence.

Heat floods your face. Shame webs across your heart in a dark lace of regret. You feel so embarrassed. It spreads across your whole chest and even stains the air around you.

Because you fell for it. You idiot fell for it.

Hook, line, and embarrassingly enthusiastic sinker.

You believed the soft way he looked at you. The way his voice dropped when he said your name. The way he kissed you like he had been wandering the desert and you were the first water he’d seen in years.

You believed the way he listened to you ramble about dumb things like your coworkers, your favorite movies, the stupid podcast you liked.

You believed the way he touched you. Gentle and devoted, and it all seemed so loving.

Your throat is tight, turned into parchment, the soft tissue shrinking and hardening until it feels ready to crack. Because all that might have been a performance. A simple performance to fool you.

Of course, he would know how to act. Of course, he would know how to charm someone. Men like that survive on manipulation.

But you don’t understand why it’s you. Why you of all people? You’re not wealthy. Not powerful. Not connected.

Which somehow makes it all the more humiliating because maybe that’s exactly why. You imagine the possibilities, and each one feels worse than the last.

Maybe he needed someone clean. Someone with no ties to his world. Someone who could unknowingly hold something for him. Transport something. Sign something. Test something.

Maybe you were never a girlfriend, but a tool. A pawn. A convenient, smiling civilian. Someone harmless enough that no one would suspect anything.

Your hand flies to your mouth to stifle a sound that hasn’t even formed, but you cannot lock out your mind, and a keener thought pushes through.

What if he didn’t need you for anything practical at all? What if you were just entertainment?

A normal girl to play house with for a few weeks. A soft distraction between grating business meetings and dangerous deals.

Your eyes and cheeks burn at the thought that somewhere behind those soft eyes and tender hands, he might have been laughing at how easily you melted. How quickly you trusted him.

You feel sick. Your stomach heaves in a frantic attempt to purge the very air you breathe. It drags liquid heat up from your gut to your searing cheeks.

Your gaze drifts to the chair by the window. His jacket still hangs there. Inside it, the gun rests quietly.

Your stomach flips again.

Because suddenly it feels impossible that the man who carried that gun tonight was the same man who tucked the blanket around you earlier, who swiped his tongue against your pussy this deliciously and stopped you from hiding your reactions.

It was simply a power play, and god, are you a stupid girl.

You hear his voice in your head again. Stay here. Lock the door.

A shiver runs down your spine. Because now the words sound different. There is none of that protective and caring cadence. All you hear is a command. Containment. Showing you he is the one with the power, he is the one dealing the cards.

Oh, god. What have you gotten yourself into. This is definitely the worst thing yet.

You know you have to get the hell out of here. High-tail it. Let your panic lend wings to your feet to carry you the fuck out of the devil’s quarters.

You absolutely cannot still be in this room when he comes back. Pretending you didn’t notice the gun was one thing. Pretending you didn’t discover who he actually is, is another thing entirely.

The lie would be too large. It would sit between you like a loaded weapon much deeper and more fatal than that damned gun.

Your pulse is a vibrating scream inside your throat, your chest, your whole body, because what happens when he sees that you know?

What does a man like James Buchanan Barnes do with loose ends?

Fear and dread pin your lungs against your ribs and make the hairs on your arms stand up.

You don’t want to find out. You grab your phone from the nightstand with shaking hands. Inside your mind, your thoughts are colliding and yelling at one another, memories reshaping themselves into something darker.

He was so worshipful. So attentive. So careful with you.

And it hurts. It hurts so fucking bad.

He really is the best actor you’ve ever met.

You glance once more around the room. The bed. The wardrobe. The luxury of everything.

Then you head for the door. Because whatever this was, whatever he was, you need to be gone before James Buchanan Barnes comes back.

There is that low, now seemingly threatening rattle vibrating through the wood of the door. Somewhere down the long dark of the hallway, a mess of voices spills out—too muffled to catch the words, just a low drone. Then there’s the sound of footsteps on the marble, over and over, like a pendulum, until it gets softened by the rugs.

It’s eerie how this place just functions. No clanking, no friction. Just the invisible, midnight grinding of a house that knows exactly how to keep itself running while everyone else is dead to the world.

Bucky's house.

No—your mind corrects strictly.

James Buchanan Barnes’s house.

You inhale slowly, steadying yourself, and turn the handle.

The door gives a tiny, smug click, and you step out slowly, looking around to see nobody.

Ahead, the hallway just stretches out forever, all that dark, expensive wood shimmering under these wall lamps that just stare at you, glowing like something waiting for its turn to speak.

It’s wide enough that you expect a massive echo, but the carpet is so thick it just eats your footsteps. It’s unsettling. The whole place feels like it’s sucked in its gut, just holding its breath, waiting to see if you’ll decide to jump through the floor-to-ceiling windows to your right in your desperation to leave this place.

The door closes behind you, and even though it doesn’t really make a sound, you flinch so hard, your little jump through the window plan might be accidental.

Your heart begins to pound harder now that you’ve left the safety—no, the illusion—of the bedroom.

Because this house feels much larger and colder out here. Maybe you should have taken the gun with you. But you don’t know how to use such a thing, because you’re a normal person, and normal people don’t carry those things around like an innocent handbag.

You take a few unsure steps and it feels like you’ve stepped backstage at a theater and suddenly realized the play you were enjoying might actually be a crime scene.

You know the way to the front door.

He walked you through the mansion when you first visited, his hand resting lightly at the small of your back, guiding you through endless rooms and hallways with an easy familiarity that felt charming at the time.

But you know better and realize he was just showing you the cage. But at least you were paying attention. Every turn, every hallway he bragged about is burned into your head. That charming tour just became the only map out of here.

Two hallways down. Past the staircase. Through the long gallery with the ample paintings.

Then the front entrance.

Simple.

Except for the fact that his mansion is apparently populated by a small army.

Maids. Guards. Staff who move through the house like quiet satellites orbiting the gravity of one man.

These were all signs you simply overlooked because he’s handsome. You bite the inside of your cheek out of frustration with yourself. How can one person be so fucking blind.

You start walking.

Your footsteps are soft, but your heartbeat is anything but.

A maid appears at the far end of the corridor just as you round the corner, and everything inside you locks up.

She pauses when she sees you, instantly throwing you a smile that genuinely looks pleasant. She recognizes you. You don’t recognize her. Your stomach turns and turns until it is knotted too tight to even be able to move.

“Miss,” she starts politely. “Aren’t you feeling well?”

You force a smile that you hope doesn’t look like it’s made entirely of nerves and the urge to run down this hall, disappearing out of sight.

“Hi,” you say, keeping your voice light, a little apologetic. “Sorry— I just... I think I need some fresh air. I have a bit of a headache.”

The lie comes out smoother than you expected. Maybe panic is a good acting coach.

The maid’s expression softens immediately. She even looks a little too concerned for you for whatever reason.

“Of course,” she says sweetly, and you actually feel bad for lying to her. Does she know who she’s working for? Does she know who you are supposed to be for the man who is her boss? Maybe you could ask her. Maybe she would shoot you for it, who knows. Maybe everyone in this godforsaken building owns a gun, ready to use it. “Would you like me to call the boss—”

“No,” you interrupt quickly, then soften the urgency with a small laugh. “No, it’s fine. He’s busy with work, right? I don’t want to bother him.”

You hate how natural the sentence sounds. How easily you can say work when you now know that word hides a thousand darker things.

The maid nods, but she does seem a little hesitant. “Of course.” Thankfully, she leaves it at that.

With the wish for you to feel better soon, and an awkward thank you from your side, you continue walking.

One corridor.

Then another.

Your mind keeps racing ahead of your body, building plans like emergency scaffolding.

It all suddenly looks so terrifyingly menacing. Especially in the dark. It feels so much like a trap. The lights are down and the shadows feel like they’re actually reaching for you. There’s this dreadful, suffocating weight pressing out from the walls, like the house itself is holding a grudge. Your skin is crawling, and the air feels too thick to actually get into your lungs. It’s stale, as though it’s been sitting in a basement for a hundred years, and now the building has finally stopped pretending to be a home and turned into a giant cave with only dead ends so you will never have a way out and will end up as a rotting corpse in some forgotten corner.

The dark walls feel like they are crowding your shoulders. Those deep red carpets are laid out just a little too perfectly, too insistent on keeping you in the center of the floor. Walking down those corridors feels like being threaded through a needle.

And it’s not that the place is ever actually quiet, it’s just that every sound here is on a leash. There is the clink of glass coming from somewhere deep in the gut of the mansion. The dry, dusty thud of footsteps on rugs that are probably more worth than your life in the eyes of the mob boss. Voices that stay low and thick, never quite hitting the walls. It’s too disciplined. It’s a silence that’s been trained to keep its mouth shut.

He probably won’t notice you slinking out of his home. However, what he will definitely notice, is that you will never see him again, or answer his texts or calls. So that will be a problem.

The man owns a gun, and whatever else he can kill people with. So you can’t go home, is what you think as you descend the wide staircase. When you get out of here, you can’t flee to your apartment.

Because he knows where you live. He picked you up there. Dropped you off there. Walked you to your door like the perfect gentleman.

You almost laugh at the bitter irony.

The most dangerous man in the city knows your address. He played the perfect gentleman just to find out where and how you live.

Which means going home would be like walking back into a trap you’ve just barely escaped.

But you know just who is badass enough to help you out of this situation. Natasha.

Natasha lives across town. Natasha answers calls at ungodly hours. Natasha once helped you move apartments at two in the morning with nothing but her wry commentary and a borrowed truck.

You could stay with her. For a few days, weeks, maybe even longer. You know she won’t mind. She’s just that kind of friend.

You could figure things out from there.

Your hand tightens slightly around your phone as you reach the bottom of the stairs.

You’ll text her once you’re outside.

Not before.

Because paranoia is part of your bloodstream now, and who knows who might glance at your screen, who might casually mention later that they saw you messaging someone.

So you keep walking until the entrance hall opens before you like the lobby of a five-star hotel. It’s extensive, with vast floors and tall ceilings and capacious doors at the far end like the exit to another world, a world you want so desperately to be a part of again.

You wipe your clammy hands on your thighs and try to mentally prepare yourself for this last step.

You cross the obsidian floor toward the doors with what you hope resembles casual determination.

Not too fast. Fast looks guilty. Not too slow. Slow looks hesitant.

You aim for something in between—the walk of a woman with a mild headache and absolutely no catastrophic revelations fluttering around inside her skull.

God, everything about the place seems so much darker now. The darkness even slinks upward into the walls, which are paneled in matte-finished ebony that drinks the light before it can reach the corners. There is no glow, not the one you imagined when you first walked in here, hand in hand with a man you thought you could fall so deeply for and would be safe with. But everything now feels iterative and cold and to feel safe means to leave and never return.

The guards notice you immediately.

Two of them stand beside the colossal front doors, tall shapes in dark suits, shoulders squared in that particular way men stand when their job description includes the possibility of violence. They’ve always been polite to you before. Quietly respectful. The way staff are supposed to be with someone important to the man who owns the house. You only now know the direction this importance takes.

They both straighten slightly when you approach.

“Ma’am,” the left one says with a deep voice that gives nothing away.

You offer another careful smile, layering it with just enough exhaustion to make your earlier excuse believable.

“I’m heading out,” you say, keeping your tone breezy, like this is the most normal thing in the world to do in the middle of the night after spending hours in their boss’s bed. “I have a headache, and don’t want to interrupt Bucky while he’s working.”

Your voice nearly stumbles over the name.

Bucky.

The harmless version.

The one that belongs to the man who kissed you like you mattered. Not the one attached to James Buchanan Barnes.

The guard on the left side of the door glances at the other one. It’s subtle, but you see it. A quick trade of communication.

Then he looks back at you.

“Boss aware you’re leaving, ma’am?”

The way he uses the word boss makes bile rise up your throat. You are actually getting a headache.

You force yourself to keep smiling.

“Oh, he’s busy,” you say lightly, waving a hand as if this entire situation is mildly inconvenient but otherwise harmless. “I would feel bad for bothering him while he’s working. And I could use some fresh air and a little rest. So I thought I would just head home.”

Neither guard moves. The doors remain closed.

You swallow tightly, and it feels like there’s a stone coming down your throat along with it, which makes your limbs feel heavier.

“I will call him,” the second guard offers, already reaching toward the small device clipped at his belt.

“No,” you blurt too quickly.

Both men look at you again, and your pulse tumbles when you feel a subtle shift sliding into place, into the invisible perimeter around this house, the machinery of control that keeps things exactly where James Buchanan Barnes wants them.

Your throat feels dry. Your voice tries to find a hiding place inside the hallway of your throat. You pull yourself together as best you can. “That’s really not necessary,” you add, softer this time, trying to patch over the crack you just made in your own story. “It’s just a headache. I don’t want him to be distracted by that. You can just let him know I left once he is done.”

The first guard studies you more closely now. He doesn’t seem suspicious exactly, but he does seem cautious.

And suddenly the hallway behind you feels very long. Too long. Because if they call him, and he walks in here while you’re standing at the door trying to escape his mansion—

Your thoughts spiral into vile possibilities faster than you can control them.

What does a mob boss do to a girl like you when he realizes she has discovered his identity? Certainly no good things.

Your heart pounds so loudly, it’s a single roar all around your skull. You feel hot, so hot, you could burst into flames.

The second guard lifts the radio slightly, eyes on you. “Sir—”

“Baby?”

The voice comes from behind you and it sounds so soft. Confused.

Your insides startle into a panic so bright, you turn blind for a second.

Your entire body freezes up.

Baby.

A freezing shiver breaks loose at the base of your skull and slides all the way down to your heels.

Baby.

The word traces the line of your back, making every hair stand up.

Baby.

You know you have to react in other ways than fear to your so-called boyfriend, so you turn around slowly, trying to unpin your strained expression.

He’s standing halfway across the hall.

Except, now he looks like a stranger.

While he was gone and taking that business phone call, he had changed into one of his perfectly tailored suits. The charcoal wool is stiff and sits snugly, and it would have ignited a heated flutter in your lower belly just an hour earlier, but now it just makes him look malevolent. He looks terrifying in his elegance. So symmetrical, your lungs are wheezing out of sheer fright.

The sweat on your skin, once warm from him, has now turned into a layer of ice. You look at him and think that no, this man doesn’t love you. All you have been to him is a soft room he stepped into to wash off the smell of whatever he does in that suit.

The business he talked about isn’t spreadsheets and meetings. It’s the way the two guards behind you have gone absolutely still, like dogs waiting for a whistle.

He looks dangerous. You have never associated Bucky with direct danger, only with protecting you from danger. But this is not a boyfriend’s posture, it’s a king’s. Even that softly confused frown he is giving you doesn’t make him seem less threatening. It’s just the look of a man who owns everything he sees and knows what to do with it.

Bucky.

Except now your brain whispers the other name.

James.

Every inch of that expensive tailoring screams that he could have you erased before his morning coffee, and he wouldn’t even get a crease in his trousers.

While you were falling in love, he was just managing a distraction.

Your heart is breaking all over again.

“What are you doing down here?” His voice sounds the same as always, and yet it doesn’t.

The guards immediately straighten although he is talking to you, though you wish he wouldn’t.

“Sir,” one of them starts, but Bucky lifts a hand slightly without even looking at them, silencing whatever explanation they were about to offer.

His eyes are on you. Only you. Concern tightens his face almost immediately.

There is a cold needle threading through your nerves. You feel like a deer that has been eating out of a hunter’s hand, only just now noticing the rifle leaning against the tree.

“I—” Your voice nearly betrays you, cracking halfway through the first syllable. Act. You have to act. You drag in a breath and force your shoulders to loosen, shoving your face into something resembling mild embarrassment rather than existential terror. “I wasn’t feeling well,” you lie, carefully smoothing your tone. “I didn’t want to interrupt you. It seemed pretty important.” You look toward the door, turning your body slightly with it in a gesture of longing. “So I planned on just heading home.”

His brows only pull further together, his expression turning deeper, and it doesn’t make this better at all. “You’re the only important thing, sweetheart. You know that.” His voice is low, but how does he manage to make it sound this gentle? Even soft.

Oh god, he’s coming closer. Of course, he’s coming closer, he’s your boyfriend, pretending to be your boyfriend, pretending to be worried, because his girl allegedly has a headache and wants to leave when he promised earlier to continue pleasing her in bed and asked her to stay and lock the door behind him because he doesn’t expect her to leave in the middle of the night.

But that doesn’t make it any easier for you to handle, doesn’t make your body react less in the horrifying way that this scary man is moving toward you, and he doesn’t know you know what kind of scary he is.

You feel your body fight against itself. You want to swirl around, run, bolt, fly through the door outside into the night, never to be seen again. Or at least not by him and his people. But you can’t. You have to stay, you have to remain planted to the floor. Even taking one step back would be a fatal mistake.

And suddenly he’s right there with all his tallness and built, and he still looks warm, but so much more intimidating.

You feel your insides shrink into themselves, your heart slipping into a corner somewhere deep.

The sheer scale of him in that suit makes your stomach drop. He is not a man, he is an entire system of brutality hidden behind a charming smile and gold cufflinks.

You shiver at the fact that your boyfriend could end a life with a nod of his head, and then come home and press his face into your neck as if his hands were clean.

“You’re not feeling well?” His voice drops into a frequency that is meant to be gentle and soothing, but for you, it just sounds like the rumble of an engine. The furrow in his brow grows shadows on his forehead. His eyes shift between yours so fast and piercing, with such a concentrated focus, scanning for the source of your pain as if he could kill it for you.

His hand comes up instinctively, the same way it always does when he’s worried about you, or when he’s not. It’s just normal for him to touch you. But watching his hand move toward you this time makes your back stiffen and a ring of alarm sounds out in your skull, shrill and poignant.

His fingers brush your cheek.

Your skin crawls of its own accord, and you flinch. You force your reaction to be small, but you can’t suppress it entirely. Your brain blanks, and your heart strikes high.

His hand stills, and so does your heart as it feels like.

Bucky notices everything. You guess it comes in handy with being the most wanted crime boss in the city.

His eyes sharpen slightly, and his concern turns more piercing. He looks at his hand still hovering awkwardly, then at you. His eyes are distraught, hinting at something deeper that just broke in two. And he looks so deeply puzzled.

“Hey,” he lets out, and it sounds a little raspy. You scramble.

“I’m sorry,” you breathe quickly, forcing a small laugh that sounds thin even to your own ears. “I’m just a little dizzy, I think.”

He studies you for a long moment.

The guards are silent now and you feel them watching from behind your back.

The house feels too quiet, too attentive, too alert.

James’ hand lowers slowly, though his gaze doesn’t leave your face.

“You’re pale,” he acknowledges, his voice grainy. He sounds like he is holding his breath.

You shrug weakly. “Yeah, well. Not my best look.”

He’s not smiling, and you start sweating. How did you never notice just how scary this man looks.

He’s thinking. You can see it. Pieces moving behind that stormy gaze. Your heart hammers harder.

Please don’t see it.

Please don’t see that you know.

He exhales slowly, then reaches for your hand, and he doesn’t do it possessively, nor roughly, just tenderly closing his fingers around yours.

“Come with me,” he says quietly, and it could sound like a plea if he weren’t the man that he is.

Your skin is a furnace. You might explode. You force a shaky breath, praying he doesn’t hear the way your heart is trying to kick its way out of your ribs.

“Bucky, I really just—”

“I know,” he cuts in softly, but there is something thick and hunted in the way he talks. “Just a minute.”

He looms over you with his whole presence and those intensely fevered eyes and he sucks the oxygen clean out of your lungs.

He nods toward the hallway behind him.

“My office is right there. We’ll sit down for a second, make sure you’re okay. And if you think I’d let you go home alone with a headache you can think again, doll.”

Doll.

God, you really have been stupid. Doll.

This is not a sweet endearment. This is literal. You are a thing made of porcelain that he is scared of dropping—or since a man like him isn’t scared of anything—you’re a thing he realized he can break.

Your pulse spikes.

Office.

Private.

Closed door.

Every alarm bell in your body begins ringing at once.

In his office, the rules of the outside world—the rules where you are safe—don’t apply. It’s where the blood gets mopped up.

But the guards are watching. The exit is behind them.

They aren’t moving a muscle and stand there like gargoyles, guarding your only hope for escape.

And Bucky—James—is standing right in front of you, his thumb brushing lightly across your knuckles.

“You’re shaking,” he murmurs, concern weaving through his quiet tone.

Well, you’re shaking because you can feel the callouses on his hands, the strength in his grip that suggests he could snap your wrist without his expression changing. He knows you are vibrating with nerves, but he has misdiagnosed the fever.

You force yourself to breathe. To smile. To pretend. Just like he has all these weeks. Just like he does now.

“Just the headache,” you whisper, and it’s tasting like bile.

He studies you for another long second, and for a moment you think he might see the truth. You think the mask is going to be ripped away right here in the hallway.

Then he squeezes your hand gently. “Come on, sweetheart.”

He turns you away from the door that would bring you to safety, moving his hand to the small of your back, and it is the gentlest thing in the world. But that somehow makes it so harrowing, because there is nothing rough in the gesture, nothing that could be called force by anyone watching, nothing but warmth and assurance, leading you into the heart of his house with the grace of a protector, and yet your whole body reads it like a sentence being handed down.

You are now thoroughly trapped, you realize while swallowing down the rising tide of bile. It feels like a master painter adding the final, darkening stroke to a portrait you can no longer step out of.

But there is nothing you can do. You let him steer you away from the door because what else are you supposed to do? Rip away, run, scream? That seems impossible in a house that breathes his name through every vent and doorway. A house where even the air seems employed by him.

The mansion appears to lengthen as you walk through it, as if corridors are being pulled like taffy just to spite you, just to show you how laughably far the front door already is, how absurd it was to think you could simply walk out with a polite excuse and a swallowed scream in your throat, hoping nobody heard it rattling behind your teeth, pretending you were still a girl who had a choice in where she slept tonight.

You try to pay attention. You try to mark the route the way people do in movies when they’re kidnapped or hunted or trying not to fall off the edge of the earth—left at the long console with the black granite top, right at the staggering painting in the gilded frame, straight past the alcove with the antique lamp and the white flowers that smell expensive and funereal at once.

But panic is a vandal and it is paralyzing and it comes in and smashes every useful thought with a chair.

Your heart is beating too hard, your blood too loud, your mind too busy manufacturing horrors to do something practical like remember turns. Foyer, hall, archway, staircase, another hall. No—was it staircase first? Was the office past the library, or past that room with the dark green walls?

Oh god, this is horrible. You're really starting to feel lost and this might be a catastrophic blow to your faith.

You try to pin each detail to the inside of your skull, but they slide off slick as fish, and every second spent trying to memorize the geography of this place only makes you more conscious of the fact that you are being walked farther and farther from the only exit you knew.

Why would he take you this far? The question lets sweat collect at the base of your neck. Why not the room just off the main hall? Why not one of the closer offices? Why not let you leave if you are only dizzy, only pale, only under the weather the way you claimed?

Does he suspect something? Has he already seen it, the wrongness in your face, the recoil you were too slow to hide, the way your voice came out laced too tight? And worse than that, more awful than suspicion because it drips with intention—was there always going to be a moment like this? Had he always been walking you here in one way or another, from the first date, from the first gift, from the first time he looked at you as if you were worth the chase?

Maybe this is what men like him do. Maybe he had a plan long before you ever had a clue. Maybe there has never been a single unarranged second between you, and you were just too lovesick and dazzled to notice the rails under your feet.

His hand stays at your back the entire time, broad and warm, but it makes you want to shove him away from you. When you hesitate, the pressure spikes just enough to remind you which way the door isn't. He is leading you forward and it would have felt gentle, but it doesn’t. No longer.

His thumb-strokes across your back don’t feel comforting at all and more like he is smoothing out a wrinkle in his own sleeve or the way he might polish a piece of silver he has decided to keep.

You suppress a chilling shiver he surely would have felt.

When you glance at him, because some abhorrent part of you still does, still wants to; you find concern in his face and it nearly brings you to the floor. You can’t glimpse any coldness, no strategic thinking whatsoever. At least not the kind you expected to see. His eyes aren’t narrowed and sharpened with discovery, there is no clipped impatience, no telltale crack in the mask.

He looks at you the way he has always looked at you when something seemed off, with his little frown and that determination, as if your problems are things he would like to drag outside and beat to death with his bare hands.

His gaze moves over your face with the same intimate concentration that once made your stomach warm for all the right reasons. It does not help. It makes everything worse.

Because if this is performance, then he is monstrous at it. If this is an act, he’s lived in the skin of it for a lifetime.

A lie shouldn’t feel this solid, shouldn’t have a thumb that knows exactly where your tension hides.

If he is acting, then he deserves a stage and an audience and perhaps a crown.

You can barely stand it, this collision between what you know and what he appears to be. A man can’t look at you like that and still be the most feared name in the city. Except apparently he can. Apparently, men can be two things at once. Apparently, the universe is vulgar enough to make both true.

You pass a maid coming the other way—a small, neat woman in a crisp uniform. She is carrying folded lines in her arms, and Bucky acknowledges her with nothing more than a curt nod, and she responds with a warm little smile aimed at you and the faintest dip of her head—something halfway between greeting and curtsey, so practiced it is almost invisible, but not invisible enough, not to you, not now.

It makes your breath hitch, how he doesn’t swell with importance, or doesn’t put on a show of his control.

He’s so comfortable in his power that he doesn't even need to show it off; he just steers you onward, knowing nobody will do a single thing to stop him.

And your stomach lurches so suddenly it feels as if your bones have missed a step. Because there it is. There, in one small exchange, is the whole persona of him. He is not loud or cartoony with his power, he just has it. It’s real. It doesn’t need to announce itself because everyone in its radius already knows where to bend.

The maid’s smile is kind, almost affectionate, and that somehow shames you more, because it suggests this has been obvious to everyone but you.

They all know what he is. The guards know. The staff knows. The men at the gate, the drivers, the strangers in tailored suits who always nod to him with instant stillness in their spines—they all know.

And you, meanwhile, had been floating around this house in your pretty little ignorance, accepting tea on silver trays, accepting jewelry in velvet boxes, accepting his mouth and his hands and his delicious attention as if you had simply stumbled into the arms of an intense, rich man with old-fashioned manners and a dangerous face completely by accident.

You would like to face palm yourself, but this is a bad moment.

Natasha will definitely do it for you once you get out of here and manage to escape to her apartment.

You had looked at the signs and called them charm. You had looked at vigilance and called it romance. You had looked at fear arranged into etiquette and thought that wow, he really runs this company proficiently.

The embarrassment of it blooms hot under your skin, nearly as painful as the fear. You have been blind. Worse—willingly blind. Blind not by accident but by appetite, by wanting. Love, or whatever this early ferocious thing is, has wrapped a hand-woven scarf around your eyes and led you smiling into a cathedral built from warning signs and decorated with red flags.

And the humiliating part, the part that makes you feel like you could peel yourself out of your own skin from sheer mortification, is that you had even congratulated yourself for being so unbothered by his world.

Look at you, cool girl extraordinaire, dating the beautiful, mysterious executive in his deluxe mansion, pretending not to notice the guards and the driver and the way everyone waited half a beat too long for his approval before moving.

You had thought you were being mature. Sophisticated. Unruffled. Meanwhile, you were essentially a decorative houseplant with a pulse, sitting in the sun of his attention and calling it insight. It would almost be funny if it weren’t your life currently doing a slow and terrible cartwheel off a cliff.

How could you have ever believed that a guy like him would be interested in that naive, silly girl that you are.

Honestly, if you survive this ordeal, you will end up in some corner of your small, meager apartment, bawling your eyes out, and keep living that unlucky life of yours.

He glances at you again as you walk on that burgundy red carpet deeper into the hole that is another hallway, and his hand presses a little more firmly between your shoulder blades. It’s protective rather than possessive to anyone looking in from the outside, but the gesture sends another flare of panic through you anyway.

You wonder if he can feel the fear on you, if it comes off your skin. You wonder if men like him are trained by experience to smell a lie the way dogs smell storms. You wonder whether he is leading you to comfort or containment. Every room you pass seems too opulent to be real with those chandeliers like frozen explosions, rugs plush enough to kill the sound of literally anything, the dark wood twinkling creepily under low gold light, paintings in heavy frames, looming over everything, looking down their painted noses at anyone not born into the frame.

The place no longer looks luxurious so much as fortified. You see the thickness of doors now. The depth of corridors. The strategic sightlines. The subtle placement of people. This house is not merely beautiful. It is defensible. It is a kingdom in disguise.

And you had been letting yourself be loved in it. You stupid girl had let him come way, way too close to you.

But it’s what makes every step hurt more than it should. Because despite everything, despite the gun and the initials and the name on the tags and the avalanche of terror crushing common sense into powder, there is still some small perfidious corner of you that keeps stumbling over the memory of how gentle he was, how attentive, how he watched your face as if your feelings were weather and he meant to learn every season.

You hate that part of yourself right now, and that it even exists in the first place after everything you found out about the man and what knowing him entails.

You want cleaner fear, simpler fear, fear without ache in it. But your fear is contaminated by affection. By memory. By the wrenching possibility that whatever else he is, whatever blood has dried invisibly on his hands, the softness he’s shown you may have been real. And if that is real, then the rest is not easier to understand. It is harder. Infinitely harder. It means the monster did not wear a mask. It means the monster kissed your forehead and tucked blankets around your legs and remembered how you take your coffee. But your brain can’t follow all of that.

Another turn. Another corridor. Another room you cannot catalogue fast enough.

You try again to memorize the path, because panic may be a vandal but desperation is stubborn.

The wall here is paneled more deeply. There is a bronze wolf on a pedestal. A narrow window at the end of the hall. A runner rug patterned in deep red, almost the color of old cherries, almost the color of dried blood if your mind is in the mood to be cruel, which it surely is.

Your thoughts keep darting ahead of you and slam themselves against every worst-case future they can find. If he knows you know, what does that mean? If he does not know you know, what then? Which is safer? Is there a safer version of this at all?

You imagine phones taken gently from your hand. Doors locked with apologetic clicks. Promises made in that low warm voice while your life narrows to the width of his will.

The terrible thing is that none of your imaginings need to be loud to be horrifying. A man like him does not need spectacles. He has infrastructure.

By the time he slows in front of a set of double doors farther inside the mansion than you have ever been allowed, or invited, to go; your nerves are so frayed they feel almost luminous, every sound oppressive, every movement enlarged.

He looks down at you, his face still threaded with worry, and sweeps his hand from your back to your elbow in a gesture so careful it would be beautiful in any other universe. In this one it only makes your chest tighten until breathing feels like work. He leans slightly closer, and his voice drops, intimate as a hand at your throat, though there is nothing harsh in it.

“What’re you thinking about, baby,” he asks quietly, searching your face.

Well, you’re thinking about the front door.

It’s where you left your mind.

Or maybe it was lost in his room already. Maybe it stayed with the gun on his carpet.

And the other, the more rational part of your mind, the one that told you this couldn’t have been true anyway, because you are you and he is him, lingers in every news story you ever half listened to.

You are inside the tormenting, glittering realization that you have not just fallen for a dangerous man, but for the dangerous man, and that all the softness you took as sanctuary may have only been the most exquisite blindfold ever tied.

“Nothing, Bucky,” you reply weakly, trying to ease, but your voice is shaking just that tiny bit, and judging by the uncomfortable twist of his mouth, he caught it.

You’re too lost in your stupidity that you’re hardly present when he opens his wooden office door and ushers you inside, again with the most tender movements.

The office is warmer than the hall, quieter too, and it makes goosebumps rise on your arms and the hairs stand tall at the back of your neck because this room is built to keep any sound inside and secrets fat and sleeping in the walls. Everywhere you look there is dark wood and low amber light and books lined up in stern, handsome rows as if knowledge itself has been drafted into his service.

You feel the world shrink from cathedral to chamber, from public performance to something confined, more dangerous, more indiscreet, because now there are no guards, no maids, no witnesses to help keep either of you inside your assigned role.

There is only him, only you, only that soft snick of the door as he shuts it behind him; and that small, tidy sound feels like it’s happening inside your own chest. You watch his hand leave the brass knob, and the logic in your head just gives up. There’s only a hysterical, messy scramble of thoughts, all of them howling at once and all of them useless.

He turns back to you immediately, all his attention gathering around you with that familiar chilling completeness, and before you can decide whether to stand very still or bolt like a startled animal with nowhere sensible to run, he is guiding you toward the couch near the fireplace with one hand steady at your waist and the other brushing over your arm, then your back again. He’s never forcing or gripping hard, but he’s just not letting go of you and it makes you want to jump against the wall in hopes it’ll crack and you’ll land on the other side because his touch is making you more and more nervous.

He treats you as if he thinks you might faint at any second.

It is infuriating, that gentleness. It feels like a kind of torture that’s impossible to fight because your skin has a longer memory than your head. Your body still knows him first as safety. It still recognizes the heat of his palm and the strength of him, the way he moves as though you’re the center of the room.

And now every instinct is splitting at the seams. All you want to do is run, you want him away from you, you want to be far gone from all of this, you want to scream and scream some more, but the other half of you is remembering how carefully he tucked a blanket over your legs last week when you fell asleep during a movie or the way he has checked you for bruises after literally making love to you with that distressed frown upon his face, scared he’s been too rough with you.

The collision makes you dizzy enough that, absurdly, he may not be wrong. You might actually faint. Just from the sheer vertigo of finding out that the man who kissed you so devotedly has a name the whole city says with a tremble in their voices.

“Sit down for me,” he coaxes, and his voice is low, soft, carrying none of the steel you used to hear when he dealt with his men, and that contrast nearly makes your skin crawl.

You lower yourself onto the couch because your knees are not reliable enough to argue with him. The room seems to have acquired a faint sway, because the blood in your veins feels thin and feverish, and he stays right there, close enough that his thigh nearly brushes yours before he drops into a crouch in front of you.

The sight of this dangerous man folding all that height and breadth down to your level, gaze lifted to your face with plain concern would have melted you an hour ago.

But all it does now is frighten you some more. It feels too intimate, too earnest, too much like care, and care from a man like him is no simple thing. It is not a ribbon. It is a chain in softer clothing.

You swallow hard and that alone almost makes you flinch.

His eyes move over you with increasing worry, taking inventory in little silent increments. Your face is pale, you feel the damp shine of stress at your temples, you can’t keep your fingers still in your lap, and you can’t quite tame the uneven hitch in your breath.

He reaches up and lays the back of his hand against your forehead, then your cheek, his brows knitting tighter, and his mouth presses into a serious line. “You’re sweating,” he murmurs, more to himself than to you, as if he would like to issue orders to your body until it starts behaving properly.

His thumb grazes the curve of your jaw, feather-light, and you have to stop yourself from jerking away too sharply. You have to refrain yourself from slapping his hand away.

He notices even the version of restraint. You guessed, he does. A man like him has to. A man like him would. But it does worsen your situation.

A chill spreads along the base of your neck.

His eyes sharpen, not with suspicion exactly, but with apprehension deepening into something more searching, more troubled. “Talk to me, baby,” he pleads, softer still. “Did something happen? Did I do something?”

You stare at him.

For a moment the question does not make sense, your mind too busy running in circles with sirens in its hair, but you notice the shadow in his face, the hunch, the way his gaze jumps to your mouth, your throat, your posture curled too tight, and it seems bizarre because he honestly looks as though he might dread he pushed you too far, touched you too much, misread your body, took a liberty you weren’t ready for.

The absurdity of that nearly splits your head open because earlier when he—god, when he had his criminal tongue on your pussy—he acted so attentive, he seemed genuinely careful and devastatingly patient, and yet now, knowing what you know, even that lightness now hardens into a new breed of atrocity.

Because if this is him being careful, if this is him holding himself in check, then what does rough look like in a man built the way he is, in a man whose name can make grown men go quiet? What shape does cruelty take when it belongs to someone with this much power and this little need to raise his voice?

“No,” you answer too fast, the word skidding out of you. “No, you didn’t— nothing like that.”

Well, he did do something. A lot, really. Things that would put him in a cell never to be let out.

But he didn’t do anything to you yet. Yet. He might, if you don’t get your shit together.

His shoulders loosen by a fraction, but not enough. Not nearly enough. He still looks wound up. He still looks a little perturbed.

“Are you sure?” he asks, and there is something sincere in his voice, it is disorienting. “Because, honey, you can tell me if I was too much. If I missed something. If I—” He stops, swallows, and the hand at your cheek gentles further, as if he is trying to make himself seem safer. Funny. “I need to know. Need to know if there was ever a moment when you didn’t feel good.”

Something is dipping in the air around you, and everything feels distorted. Your head is hazy and a complete maze, because how is he even doing it this well?

You pull back then, small at first, because having his hands on you for longer will surely drive you insane. You don’t shove him off, or smack his hand away, you simply move out of his palms enough to break the line of his touch, but even that has him looking at you more closely.

You gather your hands together in your lap so he won’t see them tremble and shake your head with a smile that feels stapled on, brittle and thin, and one wrong breath away from snapping in half. “I’m okay,” you say, aiming for sheepish, for embarrassed, for normal. “I just need some sleep, I think. That’s all. It’s probably stupid. I’m probably just a little exhausted and overreacting.”

He doesn’t buy it.

You can tell immediately, and you hate that you can tell, but you notice how his whole face changes in that subtle way his face does when he has decided something is amiss and he is not going to stop until he gets to the bottom of it.

He shifts closer, forearms braced loosely on his thighs, his attention absolute. “Then sleep here,” he deadpans. As if this is simply the answer to all the problems in the world. “You don’t need to go anywhere tonight. 'Specially when you’re not feeling well.”

Your stomach contracts into a hard, cold knot, and it feels like there’s a displacement in your chest. It’s the sensation of a staircase ending one step too soon and you didn’t notice so now you’re hitting air instead of floor with a heart-shaking jolt. It is jarring. It is petrifying, because it means you’re not getting out of here that easily. You might not be getting out of here at all if he continues to look at you like that.

Sleep here.

Stay here.

In his house. In his reach. In the center of the web.

Your pulse stutters so hard it hurts.

“I should go home,” you try, and even to your own ears it sounds small, unconvincing, more instinct than argument.

His frown deepens, utterly baffled by your insistence in the face of what he clearly sees as a solvable problem. “Why?” he asks quietly, and his voice sound a tad hoarse. “If you feel bad, why would I let you leave?”

Your lungs can’t seem to catch any air although it’s all around you.

Why would I let you

He didn’t say why would you leave, no he said why would I let you.

Good god, you really have been a stupid girl. The signs were all in front of you, weren’t they? They were literally speaking to you.

He’s talking in a tender tone, making his voice all soft and gentle, even soothing and so concerned, but that’s just the outside. You never paid attention to what lay underneath, hidden deep inside, because the outside was pretty and alluring enough. And maybe you are imagining it now, the gravelly implications in his tone, maybe your body’s just trying to see and hear things that aren’t there, but perhaps it truly has been there all the time and you were too wrapped in him to notice it.

You stand up quickly.

And you shouldn’t have done that because he will think what the hell you’re doing now, but your body decided and now your body is doing it.

The room sways, your vision going soft at the edges for one humiliating second, and his hands are on you—one at your elbow, one at your waist, and there is no shaking them off.

You flinch despite yourself and he stills as if you have struck him. You know he doesn’t understand your reactions, how could he.

“Hey,” he coos, his voice lowering even further, and there is definitely something thick in his voice. “Easy.”

“I’m fine,” you insist, too breathless, too papery, trying to peel his hands off you without making it look like peeling, which is impossible, because every move feels too fast or too urgent, every instinct either too frightened or too telling. “Really, Bucky, I’m just tired. I’m probably being ridiculous.”

His gaze searches yours with such intensity it feels almost physical. “You’re trying to get away from me.”

The words are quiet, and although there is no anger in them, no threat at all, it has your mouth go dry.

“No,” you answer, and it is not a good lie. “No, Bucky. Of course not. My head’s just really hurting.”

Something in him clicks into a higher gear—not a lack of trust or anything like that, but a kind of piercing, automated focus. Something in his eyes snaps into high definition. All that soft, vague concern is gone, replaced by an attention so bright and infiltrating it feels like being pinned to a board under a microscope.

Carefully, he makes you sit back down on the couch and lands right beside you. You feel the heat of him pressing into your side, though he does give you a bit of space.

His hand comes to your upper arm, stroking once, and you hate your own pulse for noticing how familiar it feels despite it having lost its appeal. “Look at me,” he presses, and it almost sounds like an order. His voice seems serious enough to make you shiver in fear.

You look at him because you have to and refusing would be louder than screaming.

His eyes are so damn blue in this weirdly dim light, clear and intent and lined with such deep worry. He’s definitely denser, his concern losing its fluff, but not its patience. There still is no trace of coldness, no roughness, nothing that is overly intimidating despite the man he is.

Just that same irksome softness, that same look like your distress is something he wants to fix with both hands, with all of himself if necessary.

It rattles you more than if he had come in hard and sharp and monstrous. A monster would be easier. A monster would let your fear stand up straight. But this man looking at you like your pain pains him is a labyrinth with no clean exits.

And it feels foreboding. It has you more on edge. It’s the way the woods go quiet right before something heavy steps out of the brush; a sudden, absolute alignment of intent.

Maybe he knows you know and now he’s waiting for the right moment to pounce. You do your best to keep your fright behind your eyes.

“You can sleep here tonight,” he offers again, gentler now, and it seems as though he believes repetition might soothe you into agreement. “I’ll stay with you. Or I won’t, if you want space. I’ll get you water, food, whatever you need. But I’m not sending you home like this.”

Not sending.

Again that wordless, soft-toned authority.

Again that sense that his care and his control are fused so tightly together they share a bloodstream.

You are running out of room inside your own face. Running out of expressions that can pass for normal. Running out of ways to keep the panic from drawing its blade.

So you do the only thing you can think of, the stupidest thing, the most desperate thing—you lean in and kiss him.

It’s short and small and only meant to reassure, to smooth over, to redirect. Your lips meet his and every cell in your body revolts.

And it’s not at all because he kisses badly, god no. Even startled, even worried, he receives you with immediate tenderness, one hand lifting to cradle your jaw, his mouth warm and careful and heartbreakingly familiar but also so, so foreign, a cold shiver seizes your back.

It is what makes nausea roll through you so suddenly you nearly choke on it. Because this is James Buchanan Barnes.

This is the name on the dog tags, the name on the news, the name people lower their voices around as if it might hear them and turn its head.

This is the most feared man in the city and his mouth is still the same mouth that kissed the corner of your smile with one of his own.

Your stomach turns so sharply you have to concentrate not to pull away in disgust too soon, not to betray yourself with the wrong kind of urgency.

You kiss him once, twice, tasting dread under the memory of want, and every instinct in you screams that you are pressing your lips to a loaded weapon and pretending it is a rose.

When you ease back, you make yourself smile.

It feels gargantuan, the effort of it.

“I’m okay,” you whisper, like that explains anything, like that proves you are only tired and not terrified, only overwhelmed and not trying to survive. “I promise. I can go home like this.”

His thumb brushes under your eye so lightly, and you run your tongue over your lip, trying to get that uncomfortable tingling to go away.

But he still looks unconvinced.

More than unconvinced, actually. Plagued. As if the kiss reassured him of your affection but not your state, and now that mismatch is bothering him in ways he can’t make sense of.

His gaze lingers on your face, then your mouth, then your hands clenched too tightly in your lap. He takes one of them and turns it gently palm-up, his fingers closing around yours. You can feel how much bigger his hand is. You can feel how easily it encloses.

And all at once the room feels narrow as a throat, the walls leaning in, the lamplight too gold, the air too warm, and you are sitting inches from a man who could ruin your life before breakfast and is looking at you like the only thing he wants in this world is to make you feel safe.

“What’s going on, doll?” His voice could even be pleading, just a little bit. It’s definitely croaky. “I— I get the feeling—”

“I told you, Bucky. It’s just a headache.” He sighs to that, but all you can think about is how completely his hand closes over the bones of your own. How easy it would be for those fingers to tighten from comfort into command, from tenderness into something unarguable.

His other palm is at your arm, and your body does this awful arithmetic without your permission, subtracting your strength from his and arriving, every single time, at the same answer—none.

There is none. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

You notice things you never let yourself notice before because before they were part of romance, of safety, of the warm relief of being cared for by someone larger and more grounded than you.

Now those same details come back rearranged into something atrocious. The width of his shoulders. The thickness of his thighs where they bracket the edge of the couch. The controlled way he moves, never wasted, never sloppy, suggesting he has long ago become intimate with force and no longer needs to flaunt it.

Even the gentleness feels frightening because it is so deliberate. You can feel, in every cautious touch, that he is handling you lightly not because he must, but because he chooses to. And choice is a nightmarish thing when done by a man like him. Choice means there are other versions of him. Choice means there are rooms in him you have never seen. Choice means the tenderness is not the whole house, only one lit window.

You sit very still because being still feels safer than moving, and panic has made your limbs feel both too heavy and too ready to misfire. While he studies your face with that immensely worried crease between his brows, your thoughts keep slipping sideways into grotesque little visions of what would happen if he decided to stop being soft.

Not even dramatic visions. That would almost be easier. Nothing so loud as being thrown or shouted at. Your fear is smarter than that now. It imagines quieter things. A wrist caught before you can pull away. A door closed with no visible hurry. Your name said in that low voice while every route out of the room gently, politely disappears.

You hate yourself for thinking it, hate the way your pulse kicks harder with each new image, hate most of all that his touch remains careful through all of it, remains incessantly kind, so that your fear begins to feel almost counterfeit in the face of what he is actually doing, and then the next thought corrects you suddenly—no, not counterfeit. Instinct. Instinct finally dragging itself awake after weeks of sleeping with its face turned to his chest.

He must notice something fresh pass through you, some new tremor or tightening, because his jaw flexes and then he reaches into his pocket for his phone.

He is glancing at the screen and some shutter drops behind his eyes. It doesn’t slam, it just falls shut, as simple as that. Just sliding into place as neatly as a blade returning to its sheath.

He lifts the phone, says a name you don’t catch because your ears are too loud with your heartbeat, and when the person on the other end answers, his voice changes so completely that a chill runs over your skin.

“Bring cold towels to my office. And painkillers. Water too.” That is all.

Simple words. Ordinary words.

But the voice that carries them is stripped clean of softness, and that is what makes your blood curdle. There is no gentle edge worn smooth for your benefit. It is a voice pared down to function, to expectation, to command. Not loud, not theatrical, not cruel in any obvious way, it is just cold the way a simple black stone is cold. Cold the way a locked gate is cold.

There is no room in it for hesitation, no room in it for mishearing, no suggestion that obedience is a favor rather than the natural order of things. Whoever is on the other end responds immediately, and he ends the call without another word, already moving to set the phone aside, already turning back toward you, and your whole body has gone thin with dread because all you can think, stupidly, helplessly, is this is how he speaks when he is not pretending to be gentle.

And if this is his ordinary command voice, then what would he sound like if he knew? If he looked at you and saw recognition staring back, saw the name James Buchanan Barnes fully formed in your eyes, saw that you had found the gun and the initials and the tags and had welded them all together into the truth? Would his voice sharpen? Flatten further?

Would he say your name with that same smooth authority and turn it into a thing that could pin you in place?

The thought is a beaded sweat of ice trailing down the ladder of your back.

You try not to react. You fail a little. He sees the shiver, he sees, because he is James Buchanan Barnes for goodness sake, and immediately his focus softens again as he leans a fraction closer, anguish returning to his face as if the colder version of him never existed at all.

The door catches your eye over his shoulder.

It is simply there. Closed, but not locked, at least not that you can see. Dark wood, brass handle, a square of possibility in a room rapidly losing oxygen.

And once you look at it, you cannot stop.

Your gaze keeps darting back like something hooked. You begin to map the distance with desperate measurements.

If you stood up now—no, not stood, launched—if you shoved him hard enough to buy yourself one puzzled second, maybe two, could you make it? Out the office, into the hall, left or right—God, which one had you come from?—and then what? Down one corridor, past another, through that impassable warren of pragmatic but pristine floors and expensive silence and armed loyalty, praying that your body would remember what your mind failed to memorize?

You picture it anyway. You can’t help it. You picture yourself bolting, slipping on gleaming floors, turning wrong and wrong again, heart exploding in your throat while the mansion multiplies around you like a bad dream, each hallway birthing three more, each staircase leading not to freedom but to another floor full of his money and his people and his reach.

Still, the image won’t leave you. It grows instead, takes on velocity. You imagine the first breath of motion, the clean scary choice of it. The couch under you unweighting. The door handle cold in your palm. The sudden crash of everything becoming honest.

You don’t have a lot of choices here. So maybe fate would take pity on you. Maybe panic would become a compass. Maybe your body would remember a route your mind cannot hold. Maybe the front hall would be merciful and simply appear in front of you, all that dark wood and those massive doors and the guards too startled to stop you before you ripped yourself out into the night. It is preposterous. It is probably impossible. It becomes, nevertheless, the brightest thought in the room. Bright enough to burn.

You are too poised on the edge of movement now, too taut, every nerve drawn tight as wire.

“Baby,” Bucky starts, a little alarmed, and he shifts closer again, one hand lifting instinctively, probably to touch your face, your shoulder, your wrist, some place he thinks he can soothe.

But the sight of that hand coming toward you almost does it. Almost tips you over from imagining escape into choosing it. You can feel your muscles gathering without permission, your body preparing itself in secret, a rabbit under the hawk’s shadow. Run, run, run. For one crazed second you are already halfway gone in your mind—up off the couch, around the table, through the door, don’t think, just move, just run, run, run—

And then his fingers brush your arm, so lightly, so soft, but it breaks something inside you because you want his sweet touch, you want him to hold you, to soothe you, to love you, but you don’t want it to be James Buchanan Barnes, you want it to be Bucky, but he’s no longer Bucky, he won’t ever be anymore, and so you simply react.

You jerk, shoving his hand away before you can stop yourself, not enough to really hurt, but enough that the gesture hangs in the air between you like a shattered glass note.

Your breath is now gone entirely.

There are a few beats where simply nothing happens.

Then his hand drops back.

You stare at him, your own hand hovering stupidly in midair as if all you have to do is snip your finger to turn back the time.

And Bucky—James—just looks at you. For a small moment, he simply looks startled, like a deer in the headlights of your rejection. He looks so tremendously confused, his face totally unglued, but then his eyes shift gears, shift into alarm, shift into a concern so much deeper than before. It seems as if your recoil has unhinged him. As if it has frightened him for an entirely different reason than the one clawing its way through your chest. As if it has confirmed something he’s only lived in a nightmare before.

His features warp into something resembling desperation, his mouth hanging open, his eyes wide and asking, and it is nauseating to watch—the way he’s already cobbling together a version of reality where he isn’t the monster you’re trying to run from.

He is misinterpreting your panic and it makes you sick.

He isn't thinking She knows what I am. His mind is sprinting in the exact opposite direction to protect itself.

He thinks the headache is actually a migraine that has you reacting strangely, or it’s a panic attack, or some hidden trauma he didn’t know about, and he is already frantically building a scenario where he gets to fix it. His mouth stays slightly open, his breath hitching as if he’s about to choke on his own breath. He looks around the empty office with this desperate, wild squint, his eyes darting to the corners of the room as if he expects to find a physical monster standing there—something he can actually put a bullet in to make you stop shaking.

“Alright,” he lets out, and his voice is completely broken, a rough, dry scrape that sounds like it is tearing his throat.

He doesn’t lunge for you or do something big. Instead, he actually hitches his weight backward, trying to make himself smaller, which is harrowing because he is still twice your size and wearing a suit that could be sprinkled with blood in under an hour. His hands stay out in front of him, palms up, fingers twitching with this jittery, helpless energy. He is looking at you with this forlorn begging in his widened eyes, practically pleading with them for you to blame it on the lights, or the noise, or anything else in the world—because the alternative is that he is the thing making you look at him like he’s an executioner.

You might be running out of time to pretend.

“I’m sorry, Bucky, I— I’m so sorry, I don’t—” You don’t even know what explanation you are going to give him now, only that you are suddenly full of the clumsy need to fill the room with words before the room fills with something worse, and so your mouth opens on instinct, on panic, on the miserable little scraps of sanity still fluttering inside you. You hear yourself stammer out some thin, transparent nonsense about feeling strange, about maybe being overwhelmed, about maybe needing air, maybe needing to go home, maybe nothing, because every excuse sounds flimsy the second it leaves you, and every sentence makes your spirit mulch and dissolve into a gray slurry that won’t hold a shape.

And Bucky is still so close and still so beautiful and still so racked with his brows pinched into a severe, pained knot. His eyes are full of shadows, and this is all so bad.

His softness somehow makes all of this worse, not better, because if he were cruel already, if he were cold already, if he gave you even one clean villain’s grin, one sharp look, one thread of honest menace, maybe your fear would have somewhere proper to sit.

But he only examines your features as though it truly physically aches him to see you like this, as though your panic has reached inside him and laid a dirty hand around his heart.

“Don’t apologize, sweetheart,” he starts, and he says it so quietly, with so much care, still, but also with a mounting unease that is just about to reach its peak. “I just wanna know what’s going on. Talk to me, baby. Please. I—” he breaks off with a sigh, his jaw grinding. “If something’s wrong, if something’s going on, then I gotta know.”

You swallow hard in hopes that anything might help soothe the sting behind your eyes. You don’t believe him, not fully anymore, but some humiliating, hopelessly romantic part of you still recognizes the cadence of the man who kissed your forehead this morning, the man who tucked a strand of hair behind your ear with the most tender hands, the man who remembered how you take your tea and which side you prefer to sleep on and the fact that you hate when socks twist inside your shoes.

It is unimaginable, it is desolating how tenderness can survive in the same body as terror, how your heart can continue making a fool of itself even while your mind is setting the whole house on fire.

“Bucky, really, I’m just...” Your voice hitches, the words sticking like thistles in your throat. You look down at his hands and they are so huge and capable, currently flexing with an empty urge to hold you. You know those hands have held weapons. You know they’ve ended lives and carried blood. But right now they are trembling because you won’t let them touch you.

You can feel yourself growing sharper and shakier by the second, every nerve in you pulled too tight, every breath arriving shallow and unhelpful, and still he keeps speaking to you in that quiet and gentle tone, asking whether it was something earlier, whether he pushed too far, whether he missed something, where exactly it hurts. You can’t tell him it’s your heart and not your head that is currently in shambles.

The concern in him seems real. That is the terrible part. It seems real enough to bruise. You shake your head too quickly. You try to smile and feel it crack before it even fully forms. You say you are just tired. You say you do not know. You say you are fine with the kind of desperate brightness you would use when standing on the edge of a roof insisting you are only admiring the view.

His gaze drops to the space you are slowly clearing between you, and his expression hardens. Gears are grinding behind his eyes and suddenly he looks like the man in the hallway, filled with command and so fucking terrifying, your pulse spikes to unhealthy numbers. He doesn’t look at you, he turns his head to look in the direction of the closed door, his posture squared.

“Did someone say something to you?” He asks, his tone dropping into a low, scraping register that makes the hairs on your arms stand up. “In the hall? Before I came out?”

You blink at him in disbelief. Does he think someone threatened you? Does he think one of his own men, or some interloper in his kingdom, stepped out of line with you? The fact that that would cause such an intense reaction in him makes you want to be catapulted straight out of here because this is genuinely just getting all too much. He seems about ready to tear his own house down to find the monster that scared you, completely unaware that he is the one wearing the monster’s skin.

You are about to open your mouth to improvise your way to freedom, when there is a brisk knock on the oak door and it makes your entire body jerk.

Bucky turns toward the noise, but not before you catch the brief, hot flare of irritation that darkens his features. He rises with all his coiled grace and contained force, and for half a second you just stare at his back, seeing even that differently now. He really is a tall man. He is immense. Broad. Space seems to make room for him as he steps to the door. God, what the hell did you walk yourself into. The only thought that gives you a tiny bit of ease is that there surely have to be other girls out there who would have fallen for it all, looking at him.

He cracks the door open. A man stands in the corridor holding a tray balanced with a folded stack of damp, cold towels, a bottle of water, and a blister pack of painkillers. And it’s weird how this would have struck you as absurdly thoughtful just hours before but now it feels sinister. It is purely ominous. It is comfort orchestrated by absolute authority; a display of care that only exists because of total, unquestioning submission.

Bucky, or James, or the most wanted mob boss of all time; thanks him, quickly, absently, not unkind but distracted, his thoughts still hooked to you so visibly that even the man at the door registers the tension.

And that man glances inside just enough to catch sight of you on the couch, sitting there sweating, pale, rigid as a hunted thing.

A manic urge strikes you to scream for help. You want to yell at this stranger to run, to call the precinct, or to simply throw you over his shoulder and get you the hell out of this building. But the impulse dies in your throat. It would be entirely useless. Every single person under this roof operates on his frequency. This man wouldn't take a single order from you even if it would be more of a plea than anything else. All of these people in this damn building listen to his every word. He wouldn’t do a thing to help you.

And before you can even let go of the fantasy, the man immediately drops his eyes again and leaves, because everyone in this house seems trained in the art of not seeing too much.

But you see too much now. That is the problem. That is the irreversible thing.

Because while Bucky’s back is turned, while he takes the tray and shuts the door with his shoulder and crosses toward the sideboard, your gaze begins to snag on the office around you with new eyes, and suddenly nothing is only furniture anymore.

Nothing is only decoration. All the wood in here is dark and expensive, perhaps even that is getting paid to stay silent, and there are details you would once have filed away as masculine and stylish.

But now everything is imposing. Everything reads as evidence.

Like that locked cabinet that is too reinforced to hold unimportant paperwork. There is a map pinned behind glass with inked markings that look less like commerce and more like a tactical grid. A stack of files sits bound with a suspicious kind of neatness. Then there is a heavy antique letter opener glinting on the desk like a civilized version of a threat.

Even the art on the walls seems changed, the frames too severe, the subjects too stern, everything in here curated by a man who does not simply possess things but controls them. He dictates outcomes. He governs people. His office is a single spider web woven from all this darkened wood and his suits, and you are the only thing inside it that is still vibrating, sending signals straight to the center where he stands, and it is making your skin grow cold in patches.

He is opening the water bottle for you.

That tiny, stupid gesture nearly does it—the torturous way he makes this all so normal and so intimate when he says, “Here, baby,” without turning yet, as if this is still salvageable, as if you are merely unwell and he is merely worried and the world has not already split clean down the middle.

Something primitive detonates inside you, and perhaps if it were a conscious thought or a decision or just some other thing in a civilized sense, maybe you wouldn’t do what you are doing, but your body is revolting before your mind can dress the fear in language, and you’re up.

Oh god, you’re up.

You’re off the couch, you’re on your feet, and now there’s no going back, now there’s no sitting down because now you sprang up and now you will run. You will run because the suddenness of your own movement has chosen the path for you.

Without looking back, without another word, your feet move you to the door and they move so fast, the room is moving with you, your vision is filled with streaks. Your hand fumbles blindly before finding the door handle, wrenching it open, and then you are sprinting.

“You love me, you say. You love me, you say. You love me, you say. Then why are you shaking?”

- Richard Siken

A/n: I know this is basically one single scene and I truly don’t know how I managed to make it this long. I always add unnecessary details and emotional spirals wherever possible but I worry that I sit in the emotions for too long sometimes.

So please feel free to let me know if the emotional introspection and all those feelings got to be a little too much at any point because I know I tend to ramble and take a while getting to the point in my writing and it’s getting a little frustrating. Hearing what you guys think would be really helpful 🫶🏻

And if you enjoy my writing and would like to support me, please feel free to consider my ko-fi

The man is a menace. A complete and utter disaster of a human being who somehow manages to fail half his classes while looking like he stepped out of a cologne ad. He doesn't give a single flying fuck about his GPA, shows up to lectures hungover more often than not, has this way of smirking at you that makes your blood pressure spike in more ways than one. 

Three days ago, everything changed. And by changed, you mean you fucked him in a club bathroom like some kind of feral animal in heat, and now you're sitting here trying to pretend it never happened while your pussy has the audacity to clench at the memory.

It went down like this. Steve and Nat had dragged you both to that overcrowded club downtown, sticky floors and watered-down drinks that cost twenty dollars. You'd volunteered to be the designated driver because you're a good friend, responsible, the kind of person who thinks ahead. What you didn't know — because why the fuck would you, since you and Bucky barely exchange civil words — was that he'd made the same decision.

So there you were. Stone-cold sober, watching Nat and Steve get progressively more handsy on the dance floor while nursing the same Coke you'd been working on for an hour. You were contemplating faking a family emergency just to escape when you noticed some guy sidling up to you at the bar.

He was fine. Decent smile, nice enough jawline, generically attractive. And you were bored, so you smiled back. Laughed at his mediocre joke. Let him lean in close enough that you could smell his cologne, woody and expensive that did absolutely nothing for you.

What you didn't notice, what you were too focused on Mr. Mediocre to catch, was Bucky watching from across the bar, jaw doing that tense thing it does when he's pissed, fingers drumming against his beer bottle.

The guy's hand landed on your lower back, and that's when Bucky materialized beside you like some kind of vengeful spirit. "We need to go."

You turned to look at him, ready to tell him exactly where he could shove his we, when you caught the look on his face. "Excuse me?"

"Steve's sick. We're leaving."

The guy next to you raised his eyebrows, clearly picking up on the tension, and Bucky's gaze slid to him with something that might have been a smile if smiles could draw blood.

"Bucky —" But he was gripping your elbow, steering you away from the bar, toward the bathroom hallway, and you were too stunned to resist.

The second you were out of earshot from the main crowd, you yanked your arm free. "What the actual fuck is your problem?"

"My problem?" He laughed, and it wasn't a nice sound. "My problem is you throwing yourself at some random dickhead when you're supposed to be here with us."

"I wasn't throwing myself at anyone, you absolute asshole. I was having a conversation. You know, that thing normal people do?"

"Looked like more than a conversation to me."

"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize I needed your permission to talk to people." Your voice was getting louder, going shrill. "And Steve's not fucking sick, so what's the real issue here? Mad I'm not paying attention to you?"

Bucky's jaw clenched and unclenched before he spat his next words. "You're such a fucking brat."

"And you're a mean drunk. As usual."

"I'm not drunk."

"What? Then why the hell am I not drinking?" The words came out with frustration that had been building. "This whole time I could've been getting shitfaced instead of playing babysitter to —"

"I'm not taking care of your ass," Bucky cut in. His chest was rising and falling too fast, the way his eyes kept dropping to your mouth and then snapping back up like he was fighting himself.

"Fuck off, Barnes."

You turned on your heel and headed for the bathroom, needing space, needing air, needing to be anywhere but near him and the confusing mess of anger and heat that seemed to tangle in your stomach whenever you fought.

The bathroom was one of those single-occupancy ones with a lock on the door and a mirror that had seen better days. It was blessedly empty. You braced your hands on the sink and took a breath, trying to calm the frantic beating of your heart.

The door flew open behind you. Bucky filled the frame, broad shoulders and wild eyes, and before you could tell him to get out, to leave you the fuck alone, he was inside with the lock clicking home behind him.

"What are you —"

His mouth crashed into yours, and every coherent thought evaporated. The kiss was mean, biting, aggressive, tasting like the anger that had been simmering between you for months, since the first time you met maybe. His hand fisted in your hair, yanking your head back so he could devour your mouth properly, and you heard yourself moan before you could stop it.

"Shut up," he growled against your lips. You wanted to argue, push him away and knee him in the balls for being such a presumptuous prick, but his other hand was sliding up your thigh, shoving your skirt up around your hips.

"You're such an asshole," you did manage to gasp out when he moved to your neck, teeth scraping over your jugular.

"Yeah?" His fingers found the edge of your underwear, you felt him smirking against your skin. "Is that why you're soaked?"

God, you wished he was wrong, but your pussy had apparently missed the memo about hating him, embarrassingly wet and dripping down your thighs already. His thick fingers made filthy, wet squelching sounds as they slid through your slick folds, spreading your juices everywhere. "Bucky —"

"That's right. Say my name." He pushed two fingers inside you without warning, and your knees nearly buckled. "Let everyone in this shitty club know who's making you feel this good."

You bit down on your lip, trying to stay quiet out of pure spite, but he crooked his fingers just right and a whimper escaped before you could stop it. He was good at this, unfairly good. His thumb found your clit while his fingers worked inside you, and you could feel yourself getting close already, wound too tight from months of unresolved tension.

"Look at you," he murmured, wonder creeping into his voice even as his words stayed cruel. "So fucking desperate. How long have you been thinking about this, huh? How long have you been getting yourself off to the thought of me?"

"Fuck you," you spat. Spat might've been an exaggeration for it came out breathy and weak.

"Oh, I'm gonna fuck you, baby. Gonna fuck you so hard you forget that asshole's name. Forget your own name."

He pulled his fingers out. Before you could protest the loss, he was spinning you around and bending you over the sink. Your palms slapped against the porcelain, as you felt him behind, the hard length of his cock pressing against your ass through his jeans. The sound of his belt buckle alone made you wetter.

"You want this?" Voice rough, he tugged your hair to make you meet his eyes in the mirror. "Tell me you want this."

"Yes." It came out as a hiss. "Now stop talking and fuck me already."

"Needy little thing." Bucky shoved his thick cock inside you in one brutal thrust, stretching your open around his girth until you were gasping and clawing at the sink. Nothing could have prepared you for the stretch. He was big, bigger than you'd let yourself imagine in the privacy of your own room. The burn of it mixed with pleasure, had you gasping. "Tight," he gritted out, pupils blown so wide and face slack with pleasure as he gripped your hips, and thrusted into your weeping cunt. "Jesus Christ, you're squeezing me so fucking tight." Brutal, punishing strokes had you scrambling for purchase on the sink. Each thrust pushed you forward, and you had to brace yourself to keep from smacking into the mirror, heavy balls slapping against your clit with every snap.

"This what you wanted?" he panted, one hand gripping your hip hard enough to bruise while the other slid up to wrap around your throat. "Wanted me to ruin this greedy little cunt?"

"Yes — fuck — yes —"

"Who's making you feel good? Say it."

"You — Bucky — oh my god —" The bathroom filled with the obscene sound of skin slapping against skin, the wet slide of his cock pistoning in and out of you, and your moans that you couldn't control anymore. He felt incredible, impossibly good

"That's it, fuck." His grip on your throat tightened just enough to make your head spin. "Take it."

You could feel your orgasm building, coiling tight in your belly like a spring wound too far. His cock was dragging against your walls, thick and perfect, so much you were babbling now, words falling out of your mouth, uncontrolled. "Please — please — I need —"

"You need to cum?" His laugh was mean. "Look at you, begging so pretty for me. Such a good girl when you're getting fucked stupid." The hand on your hip slid around to your clit, pressing down hard, circling the swollen bundle of nerves in time with his thrusts. That was all it took. You came with a broken cry, clamping down around him so hard you felt him stagger.

"Fuck — fuck —" He pounded into you through it, chasing his own release, getting sloppy, losing his rhythm. "Gonna fill this pussy up. Gonna make you drip with my cum."

True to his word, he buried himself deep and came with a groan that you felt vibrate through your whole body. You could feel him pulsing inside you, spilling hot and thick, triggering another smaller aftershock that left you trembling. His forehead pressed between your shoulder blades, cock still buried inside you.

Reality started creeping back in. The uncomfortable reality that you'd just fucked Bucky Barnes in a club bathroom, smeared makeup and all. He pulled out slowly, his cum immediately starting to leak out of you in a thick, creamy trail down your thigh. You felt him watching it, possessive. "This is never happening again," you said, trying to inject some steel into your voice even though your legs felt like jelly.

Through the smudged mirror, you could see his expression, something like disappointment or hurt taking over his features, but it was gone so fast you couldn't be sure. "Yeah. Never again."

When you turned to face him, his face was carefully blank. Expecting a fight or at least some sarcastic comment, you stared at him, but he just looked at you with those blue eyes that gave nothing away. "Seriously? You agree?"

He shrugged, already tucking himself back into his jeans with an insulting efficiency. "You said it, not me. But yeah, probably a bad idea."

It shouldn't have stung. You were the one who said it first. But how quickly he agreed, how easily he dismissed what had just happened, made your chest feel tight. 

Of course he agreed. He hated you just as much as you hated him. This was just... what? Hate sex? Getting it out of your systems? It didn't mean anything. "Right. Bad idea," you echoed, trying to fix your skirt with shaking hands.

He watched you struggle with your appearance for a moment, then reached out and gently tucked a strand of hair behind your ear. The gesture was so at odds with everything that had just happened that you froze. "You good?" his voice was soft.

"Fine."

"Okay." He unlocked the door but paused with his hand on the handle. "Wait like five minutes before you come out. Don't want anyone getting ideas."

Now, he’s sitting right in front of you, hands flying over his phone, not one look to your face.

Nat's grip on your wrist is unrelenting, dragging you down the hallway toward Steve and Bucky's dorm like you're a toddler being hauled to the dentist.

"I don't know why I have to be here," you complain, but she's not listening. She never listens when she's on a mission. And tonight's mission involves you third-wheeling while she and Steve do whatever disgustingly domestic couple activity they have planned.

"You've been holed up in your room for two days and it's getting weird," Nat says, not breaking stride. "Besides, we're just watching a movie. It's not a big deal."

It shouldn't be a big deal. You've done this a thousand times before. You've crashed at their place, sprawled across their furniture, stolen their snacks. But that was before. Before you knew what Bucky looked like when he came, how his cum felt like dripping down your thighs. Before everything got weird and complicated in ways you're desperately trying to un-complicate. 

Steve opens the door, and you scan the room behind him automatically. The couch is empty. The kitchen is empty. No dark-haired asshole anywhere in sight. There's an annoying twist happening inside you. 

"Where's Barnes?" Nat asks, stepping inside and immediately gravitating toward Steve.

"Class ran late," Steve says, slinging an arm around her shoulders. "He texted like twenty minutes ago. Should be back soon."

You settle onto the couch and try to figure out why you're irritated. There's a prickling sensation under your skin, this restless energy that has nowhere to go. It doesn't make sense. Usually when Bucky's not around, it's a relief. A chance to breathe without his smirking presence taking up all the oxygen in the room. Since when do you care if he's here or not?

Since never. You don't care. You're just... noticing. That's all.

Nat and Steve are doing that thing where they're technically watching the movie but mostly just existing in each other's space. It's sweet. It's nauseating. It's making you feel like a massive third wheel, which is exactly what you told Nat would happen.

An hour creeps by. The movie's some action thing with explosions you're not paying attention to. You're checking your phone every thirty seconds like a psycho, which is ridiculous because you don't even text him, the chat is nonexistent. 

The door finally opens and Bucky looks like shit. Like he's been awake for seventy-two hours straight and spent most of that time getting hit by a truck. There are dark circles under his eyes, hair a mess. His usual sharp energy has been replaced by something dull and heavy.

"You good, man?" Steve asks, pausing the movie.

"Fine." Bucky's voice is rough. His eyes sweep the room and land on you for half a second before skittering away. "Long day. Gonna crash."

"There's pizza in the kitchen if you want —"

"Not hungry." He disappears into his room, door clicking shut with a finality. Steve and Nat exchange a look, shrug and go back to the movie. But you can't focus now, can't stop thinking about the way he couldn't quite look at you.

Before, he'd have said something. Some stupid comment designed to get under your skin, to start a fight, to make you snap at him. Before, he was always here, always present, finding new and creative ways to piss you off. Now he's not. It's wrong somehow. Off-balance.

You last another fifteen minutes before you can't take it anymore. "Bathroom," you mutter, standing abruptly.

The hallway to Bucky's room is short. The actual bathroom is to the left, and you don't care. You turn right and knock on his door before you can talk yourself out of it.

"Go away, Steve."

"It's not Steve."

Silence keeps you company before his voice comes. "What do you want?"

Without waiting for permission, you push the door open. Bucky's sitting on his bed, still fully dressed, looking up when you enter. His face slips for a fraction of a second, a raw, unguarded edge breaking through before he shuts it down like it never happened. "Can't you read a room? I said I was tired."

"You look like shit."

"Thanks. That why you're here? Give me a wellness check?" His voice comes out sharp, waking your frustration that was simmering beneath. 

"No, I'm here because you've been acting weird and I want to know why."

He laughs, but it's not a nice sound. "I'm acting weird? That's rich coming from you."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. Forget it." He stands up, and you realize how small his room feels with both of you in it. "Seriously, go back to the movie. I'm not in the mood for whatever this is."

"Whatever this is? You're the one who's been avoiding me."

"I haven't been avoiding shit. I've had class and practice and a fucking life that doesn't revolve around you."

"Oh, so now I'm being self-centered? That's hilarious, Barnes, really. Because last I checked, you're the one who can't go five minutes without being a condescending asshole."

"And you can't go five minutes without starting a fight. What do you want from me? You said never again. I agreed. So what the fuck are you doing in my room?"

He's inside your bubble, closer, and you don't have a good answer. Don't have any answer that makes sense except for the truth, which is that you missed fighting with him. Missed the way he looks at you like you're the most infuriating person on the planet. Missed him, which is insane, stupid and absolutely cannot be true. "I don't know — I just... you weren't here and then you were and you looked like hell and I —"

"You what? Cared? Don't waste your energy. The only good thing about me is my dick, right?"

Oh. He's pissed about that. About how you treated him in the bathroom, one round of messy sex and immediately shutting down anything else.

"I didn't —"

"Yeah, you did." He's so close that you can smell him, the sweat of a hard day. "And you know what? You're right. That's all this is. All it's ever gonna be. So if you're here for round two, say it. But don't pretend it's anything else."

Your heartbeat stutters, starts hitting too fast, like it’s trying to climb out through your ribs. "Fuck you."

"That an offer?"

"You're such a prick."

"And you're a fucking brat who can't figure out what she wants." His hand comes up to grip your jaw, forcing you to look at him. "So let me make it simple for you. You want me to fuck you again? Is that what this little tantrum is about?"

Slapping him would make sense. Turning around, walking out, cutting him off completely. But your pussy is getting wet, he can probably see it in your eyes, the way you're leaning into him despite yourself. "That's not true." It sounds weak even to your own ears. "Your dick's not the only good thing about you."

His fingers press in harder, thumb digging into the skin just beneath your chin. "No? Then what else?"

"I don't know... your mouth?" It's a gamble. A stupid, reckless gamble that could blow up in your face. But his eyes darken, a dangerous smile curving his lips.

"My mouth," he repeats it syllable by syllable. "Wanna know what my mouth can do besides piss you off?"

Before you can answer, he's kissing you. More urgent, more hurried than the bathroom, but not any less filthier. His mouth moves over yours and then deeper, testing how far he can go before you pull away. The drag of his tongue lingers, presses, coaxes your mouth open wider until you’re reacting before you can think about it. A sound slips out, caught somewhere between your throat and his mouth, swallowed almost as soon as it happens. "Get on the bed."

"You can't —"

"I said get on the bed." The command goes straight to your cunt. "Unless you want Steve and Nat to hear me make you scream."

That gets you moving, climbing onto his bed, him immediately on trail, caging you in with his body. Hands slide up your thighs, pushing your skirt up. "These are cute," he says, fingers hooking into your underwear. Light pink with a little bow. "Be a shame to ruin them."

"Don't —"

He yanks them down your legs and dangles them in front of your face before shoving them into his pocket. "Too late."

"You're —"

His hand sliding between your thighs cuts you off, thick fingers spreading your soaked lips wide open, putting your dripping cunt on full display for him. He spits directly onto your exposed cunt, the warm, thick glob of saliva landing with a wet splat right on your swollen clit. He rubs it in, smearing the spit all over your slick folds until it mixes with your own juices and drips down your ass. Holding your pussy lips open even wider with both thumbs, his fingers dig into the soft flesh so nothing is hidden. He spits again, this time aiming straight into your twitching hole, watching the spit disappear inside you. "Look at this needy little pussy. Already soaked and I've barely touched her."

Humiliation and arousal both flood your system as he's inspecting you like you're something he owns, thumb dragging through your slick folds, smearing your juices everywhere before circling your swollen clit with just enough pressure to make you squirm and whine. "Bucky —"

"Shh. Let me look at what's mine."

His?? 

"It's not—"

"Whose cum was dripping out of this cunt two days ago?" He slides two thick fingers inside you, pumping them slow and deep, a moan slipping out, teeth clamping tight to pull it back. "Who fucked you so good you could barely walk straight?"

"That doesn't mean — oh fuck —"

"It does." Broad, rough fingers pump into you faster, your slick juices coating his knuckles and dripping down to his palm. "Got my cum all in this greedy pussy and you loved it. Loved being full of me. Bet you've been thinking about it, haven't you? Getting yourself off to the memory of my dick splitting you open."

What's worse is that he's not wrong. You have been thinking about it. Every night since it happened, fingers between your legs, trying to recreate the feeling of him inside you. "You're delusional," you lie through your teeth, and he laughs like he's caught you in it.

"Am I?" His fingers curl inside your walls, hitting that sweet spot that makes your vision blur. "Then why are you clenching around my fingers like you're trying to keep me inside you? Why's this pussy begging for more?"

Bucky pulls his fingers out abruptly, a filthy wet sound echoing as a whimper slips past your lips in the wake of the loss. Bringing them to his mouth, maintaining eye contact the whole time, he licks them clean, sucking every drop of your slick off with a groan. "Taste so fuckin' good."

Without wasting another breath, he moves down your body, shoving your thighs apart roughly and settling between them, mouth sealing over your throbbing clit like he's starving for it. Nothing is gentle about this. Calloused fingers dig into your thighs, holding you spread obscenely wide while his tongue works your clit in ruthless, sloppy circles, sucking hard enough to make your back arch off the bed. "Oh my god—"

"Let me hear how much you love my mouth. Thought it was only good for pissing you off?" The words against your cunt are muffled, but the vibration of it makes you writhe under him. 

"Shut up and — fuck — keep doing that —"

He slides his tongue deep inside you, fucking your dripping hole with it in long, filthy strokes while his nose grinds against your clit. You forget how to breathe. Forget your own name. One of his hands leaves your thigh to push two fingers back inside you. The combination of his tongue and fingers has you climbing toward orgasm embarrassingly fast. "Such a messy girl," he says, pulling back to look at you. His chin is wet with your arousal, the sight of it making your pussy clench around his fingers. "Making a mess all over my face. Getting my sheets wet. Think they can hear you whimpering in here?"

"Bucky, please —"

"Please what? Use your words."

"Make me cum, you asshole —"

"Nope, ask nicely." A sharp smack lands straight to your swollen clit, the sting shooting straight up your spine, making your pussy clench hard around nothing.

"Please, Bucky. Make me cum." The words leave you in record speed, the need for release much more than the desire to keep your self-respect. 

"Since you asked so nicely." His mouth goes back to your clit, sucking, while his fingers work inside you. You come with a strangled cry, thighs clamping around his head. The squeeze doesn't do anything to him, he continues his attack on your weeping hole, until you're pushing at his shoulders.

Looking entirely too pleased with himself, he pulls back to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. "Still think the only good thing about me is my dick?"

You're still trying to remember how to form words, whole body feeling like jelly. There's a suspicious wet spot spreading beneath you on his sheets. "You're still an asshole."

"Mhmm, but I just made you come so hard you nearly broke my jaw with your thighs. So, be nice." The finger which was buried inside your cunt, still slick with your release, taps your nose once.

He's hard, painfully so, you can see that. You almost say 'fuck me', beg him to put his dick in you and make you forget your own name again. But then reality creeps back in. Steve and Nat are just down the hall, more than that, you two are supposed to hate each other, and this was supposed to be never again.

"This can't keep happening." Sitting up, you try to fix your skirt even though your underwear is currently in his pocket.

"Right. This again."

If you didn't know him better, you'd think his face was neutral. Unfortunately for both of you, you do know him better. "I'm serious. This was — this was the last time."

"You said that two days ago."

"Well, I mean it now."

For a second too long, he stares at you, an expression you can't read this time. Hurt or anger or frustration or all three. "Fine," he finally says. "Last time. Got it."

"I'm serious, Barnes. We can't — I don't want —"

"I said fine." He stands up, adjusting himself in his jeans. "You should probably get back out there before they notice you've been gone for twenty minutes."

On shaky legs, you stand, very aware that you're not wearing underwear and that your hair probably looks like a disaster. At the door, you pause. "Bucky—"

"It's fine. Really. We're good." His back is to you. 

Nothing about this feels good at all. You slip out of his room and head to the actual bathroom, taking a minute to clean yourself up and try to put yourself back together. When you look in the mirror, your lips are swollen, eyes too bright, and you look like exactly what you are — someone who just got eaten out within an inch of her life.

This was the last time. It has to be. Even if some traitorous part of you is already wondering when the next never again will happen.

Bucky Barnes never ignores you. He might annoy you to death, but ignoring you was beyond him. That is, until now. 

The coffee shop smells like burnt espresso. There's a crack in the table that keeps catching your pen, your notes are all haphazard, the result of you not paying enough attention in class. But none of that matters because Bucky is sitting across from you and acting like you don't exist.

Before, he'd make a show of it, intentionally looking past you, making little comments to Steve that were clearly designed to get a rise out of you. This is different. He's genuinely not paying attention. Eyes on his textbook, highlighter moving across the page in steady strokes, completely absorbed in whatever bullshit he's supposed to be learning.

It's infuriating.

Steve and Nat are comparing notes, discussing, you're supposed to be doing the same but you can't focus. Because Bucky's right there, close enough to touch, and he might as well be on another planet.

You stretch your leg out under the table, let your foot bump against his calf. Nothing. No reaction. He just shifts slightly and keeps reading.

Fine. Maybe that was too subtle.

You lean forward to grab your coffee, making sure to press your shoulder against his. He's warm, you can smell that soap he uses, the one that's been haunting you for days. He glances up, shifts to give you more room and goes back to his reading. 

What the actual fuck.

"Can you pass me that?" you ask, pointing to his highlighter even though you have three of your own sitting right in front of you.

He hands it over without looking at you.

There's a pressure building in your chest, hot and uncomfortable, anger or something much worse. You click the highlighter open and close, open and close, the sound obnoxiously loud, out of place.

Bucky doesn't say anything. Again. 

You highlight a random sentence in your notes. Then another. You're not even reading what you're marking. Neon yellow drags across the page while you watch him from the corner of your eye. But he's a statue. A really attractive statue that ate you out yesterday and is now acting like it never happened.

At this worst possible moment, you also remember what his mouth felt like between your legs, the filthy things he said, how he pocketed your underwear like some kind of trophy. Fuck him for being able to compartmentalize like this. Fuck him for sitting there looking all studious and put-together while you're falling apart.

'Accidentally', you knock your notebook off the table. With a soft thud, it lands on his foot. Bucky closes his eyes, takes a breath that looks like it's taking considerable effort, and leans down to pick it up. When he hands it back, his expression is carefully neutral.

"Thanks." The word is saccharine. 

"Mhmm." That's it. That's all you get. Not even a proper word.

You last another five minutes before you physically can't take it anymore. You nudge his leg again, harder this time, and he finally looks at you. Exhaustion in his eyes makes an ugly twist in your gut. 

"You done?" His words are simple. Calm, even. But they land like a slap, and suddenly you're furious. Furious at him for being so unaffected, at yourself for caring, at this entire fucked-up situation that you can't seem to escape.

"Yeah. I'm done."

It's been fifteen minutes and Bucky hasn't even acknowledged that you exist. 

The bar is crowded, loud, and you're three drinks deep, feeling pleasantly buzzed. The tall, dark haired, decent smile guy, has been buying you drinks.

His name is Mike or something with an M. You're just nodding while you scan the room. You spotted Bucky the second you walked in, sitting at a high-top with some guys from his team, nursing a beer and looking like he'd rather be literally anywhere else.

He hasn't looked at you once. Not when you walked in, not when M-name put his hand on your lower back, not when you threw your head back laughing at something that definitely wasn't that funny.

You don't care. Why would you care? He made it perfectly clear at the coffee shop that he's done with whatever game you two have been playing, agreeing oh-so readily that it was a mistake.

The alcohol makes this easier somehow, looser. That's how you let the guy pull you towards the mass of bodies near the speakers, when he says something about dancing. The music is too loud, bass thumping in your chest. His hands land on your hips, chest to chest. You press back against him, definitely more grinding than dancing.

Over his shoulder, you can see Bucky. Still at his table, still not looking.

Fuck him.

You roll your hips, let this random guy's hands wander, and pretend you're having the time of your life. The guy's mouth is at your neck, saying something you can't hear over the music, hands sliding too low but you don't stop him.

Three songs. That's how long you last before you can't take it anymore.

You extract yourself from his hands, with a smile and an excuse about needing another drink, and make a beeline for Bucky's table. His friends scatter like they can sense the incoming storm. Then it's just the two of you. "Having fun?" you ask.

Bucky takes a long pull from his beer. "Could ask you the same thing."

"I am, actually. Matt's a great dancer."

"It's Mark, actually. And that wasn't dancing."

You lean against the table, invading his space. "Oh, so you were watching? Thought you were too busy brooding over here to notice."

"Hard to miss when you're putting on a show."

"I'm not —" You cut yourself off, force a breath. "Why do you even care?"

"I don't." He clearly doesn't, what with you storming over here to make a point. But his knuckles are white around the bottle and there's a muscle jumping in his jaw that makes you look closer.

"Liar."

"Go back to your date." His voice is so cold it actually makes you flinch. "I'm sure he's missing you."

"What's your problem?" The words come out loud, but the music swallows most of it. "You've been acting like I don't exist. Like nothing happened."

"You said it couldn't happen again. I'm respecting that."

"By ignoring me completely? By acting like we're strangers?"

"What do you want from me?" He finally looks at you, a burn in his eyes. "You want me to what, pine after you? Beg you to change your mind? You made your choice. Multiple times, actually."

"You agreed!"

"What the fuck was I supposed to say? No, I won't respect your boundaries? Jesus Christ." He runs a hand through his hair. He looks tired, worn down. "Go dance with Mark. Go home with him. Do whatever you want. Just stop —"

"Stop what?"

"Stop looking at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you want me to do something about it."

The bass of the music has nothing on your heart, you can feel it in your throat. You do want him to do something. To fight for this, whatever this is, to care as much as you’re suddenly realizing you do.

Reckless with alcohol and frustration, the words get past you. "Maybe I want you to —"

He sets his beer down with a force. "Well I'm not going to. So go find someone who will."

The dismissal stings, the casual way you're written off, like you're an inconvenience he's tired of dealing with. You're drunk enough that your filter is nonexistent, angry enough that you don't care about the consequences. "You know what? Fuck you, Barnes. I was trying to —"

"Trying to what? Start another fight so we can fuck about it later? I'm not playing that game anymore."

"I'm not —" But you are. You came over here specifically to get a rise out of him, to make him react. "God, you're such a —"

"Watch it," he warns, but you're too far gone to stop now.

"Or what? You'll ignore me harder? Give me the silent treatment? Real mature, Bucky. Really —" His hand shoots out and catches your nipple through your flimsy top, pinching hard enough to make you gasp. Right there in the middle of the bar, where anyone could see.

"Mind your manners," his words are quiet, only to your ears, but there's nothing quiet about the look in his eyes.

The pain mixing with pleasure makes your brain go numb. The shock of him touching you after days of ignoring, shoots straight to your cunt. The way he's looking at you like he wants to devour you whole definitely helps. "Or what?" The words come out breathy, challenging.

His other hand comes up to your mouth, calloused fingers pressing against your lips, pulling your lower lip down, even as you try not to give in. "You really wanna find out?"

When your mouth opens — to say what, you're not sure, — his fingers slip inside. The taste of salt and skin floods your senses. And because you're you, because you can't help yourself, you bite down. Hard enough to make a point.

Saliva smeared fingers pull out, only to hold your cheeks, smushed together. "That's it. We're leaving."

"'m — ngh — n’goin’ any — wheh —" 

Bucky doesn't let you finish your pathetic excuse of a sentence, he's pulling you through the crowd, fingers wrapped around your wrist in a grip that's just shy of painful. You could fight him, dig in your heels and make a scene. But you do what lost causes do best, follow him. 

He drags you out a side door into an alley that smells like garbage and stale beer. The door slams shut behind you, muffling the music. It's just the two of you in the dim light from a flickering streetlamp.

"You're a real piece of work, you know that?" His voice is rough, angry, and he's backing you up against the brick wall.

"Takes one to know one."

"Can't go five minutes without running your mouth. Can't follow a single fucking boundary you set yourself. What am I supposed to do with you?"

His hand slides under your skirt, where you're already wet. You've been wet since he pinched your nipple in the bar, maybe since you saw him sitting there looking miserable.

"This what you wanted?" His hand yanks your soaked panties aside so his thick fingers can drag through your dripping folds. "Wanted me to lose my shit? To stop being nice?"

"You're never nice," you gasp as he pushes two fingers inside you.

"No, I'm not." He curls them viciously, battering that spongy spot inside you while his thumb grinds rough circles over your swollen clit. "I'm the guy who can't stay away from you even though I know I should. I'm the guy who gets hard every time you look at me like you hate me, who's so fucked up over you I can't think straight."

The confession should probably mean something, but you're too busy trying not to collapse as he fucks you with his fingers. Fast and rough, his thumb circling your clit, his other hand gripping your hip to hold you in place. "Bucky — please —"

"Please what? You want my cock?" He's grinding his rock-hard bulge against your thigh so you can feel every thick inch straining against his jeans. "Want me to fuck you against this wall where anyone could see?"

"Yes —"

"No." He emphasizes the word with a particularly brutal thrust of his fingers. "Bad girls don't get cock."

"That's not fair —"

"Life's not fair, darling'." His fingers are pistoning into you, three thick digits stretching your pussy open, the wet squelching sounds obscene in the quiet alley. "You cum on my fingers or not at all."

Whimpering, you're chasing your orgasm, feeling his hard length against your hip, but he's not giving you what you want. Won't give you what you need. "C'mon," he murmurs, almost gentle despite the way he's finger-fucking you. "Let me feel it. Let me feel this greedy pussy cum for me."

It crashes over you sudden and intense, your cunt clamping down hard around his fingers, gushing slick all over his hand as your legs shake. He works you through it, fingers gentling as you breathe hard against each other.

After the post orgasmic haze, you realise you you just let him finger you outside a bar. He just made you cum, now he's pulling his hand away and putting distance between you like he can't stand to be close anymore. "Bucky —"

"Go home." He won't look at you. "Go home and sleep it off."

"I'm not drunk."

"Then you've got no excuse for acting like this." His eyes finally meet yours, the look in them makes your chest ache. "We're done with this. Whatever this is, we're done." Walking away into the bar, he leaves you standing in the alley his fingerprints bruised into your skin.

The first thing you register is that your mouth tastes like something died in it. The second thing is that you're not in your bed. The third thing, the thing that makes your eyes snap open in pure panic, is that you're in his bed.

Bucky's bed. The same bed where he'd eaten you out two days ago, where you'd gripped his sheets and fallen apart on his tongue. The same room you'd stormed into and started a fight that ended with his hand between your legs. The mattress is firmer than yours, and there's this indent in the pillow that smells like him.

You sit up too fast and immediately regret it. The room spins, a pounding in your skull that suggests last night was a terrible series of decisions. You're wearing a t-shirt. Not yours though. Grey and soft from too many washes, hits mid-thigh, it's his. 

Your jeans are folded on his desk chair. Your top, the black one with the low cut, is there too, along with your bra. Which means you're bare under his shirt, which means —

The door opens and Bucky walks in holding a bottle of ibuprofen and a mug of what smells like coffee. He's already dressed in a jeans and a Henley, that looks ridiculously hot on him. Hair is slightly damp like he just showered, looking way too put together for whatever the fuck happened last night.

"Did we—" You can't even finish the sentence, mortification crawling up your throat. "Did we fuck?"

Bucky laughs, a sound you realise you've grown to miss these past few days. "We've fucked before," he says, setting the ibuprofen on the nightstand. "But no. Not last night."

The relief is immediate and confusing. "Then why am I wearing your shirt?"

"You don't remember?" His words are soft, so soft so as to not spook the skittish animal — you. 

"No?"

Something flickers across his face as he sighs, too quick to read. Could be frustration or concern or maybe just exhaustion with your bullshit. He sits on the edge of the bed, which feels weirdly intimate considering you're barely dressed, and runs a hand through his hair. "After the alley, you went back to the bar. Did a few more shots with Nat. Then you puked in the bathroom, I had to change your clothes because you'd gotten it all over yourself."

Oh god. Oh god. You want to sink through the mattress, disappear into the floor and maybe cease existing entirely. He had to change you. He had to see you messy and puking, had to strip off your clothes and put you to bed like you're some kind of disaster he's responsible for. Your voice is small when you ask, "why didn't Nat help me? You didn't have to do that."

"Nat was in the exact same condition as you." He hands you the coffee, your fingers brushing his when you take it. "Steve took care of her."

The parallel. Steve and Nat. You and Bucky. Like you're couples, like this is normal, like taking care of each other when you're shitfaced drunk is just what you do. Except you and Bucky aren't anything. You're just two people who can't stop fucking each other in semi-public places and then insisting it'll never happen again.

Panic starts crawling up your spine. This is too intimate and domestic.

"You can shower before you go," Bucky says, standing up. "I'll get you some clothes to wear home. Your stuff from last night is probably beyond saving."

He's being nice. That's what's so disorienting about this whole thing. He's being genuinely nice to you, and you don't know how to process it. Where's the smirk? Where's the condescending remark? Where's the Bucky who makes you want to simultaneously punch him and jump his bones? This version, the one who brought you coffee and pills and is offering you his shower, is uncharted territory. "Thanks." The word feels awkward in your mouth.

Bucky nods, closing the door behind him with a soft click. You sit there, holding the coffee mug and trying to organize your thoughts into something that makes sense. The coffee is exactly how you take it, meaning he's been paying attention. This is somehow worse than you thought.

The shower helps. There's something grounding about standing under the hot water, washing off last night's mistakes with his soap and shampoo. You're now going to smell like him all day, which is just another thing to add to the list of problems you're actively ignoring.

When you come out, there's a stack of clothes on the bed. Sweatpants with a drawstring, another t-shirt, a pair of boxers. Which you're definitely not going to wear. A lie to keep yourself sane.

The walk home is a blur. You spend the rest of the day aggressively not thinking about any of it. His hands steady while he dressed you when you were too drunk to manage it, the coffee fixed exactly how you take it, the way he didn't just drop you off, even though he could've. You wouldn't blame him. 

By evening, the guilt sets in. You need to return his clothes. That's what a decent human being would do. Definitely not because you want to see him, not because you can't stop replaying the morning in your head.

You fold the sweatpants and t-shirt neatly, walk to his dorm with a stomach full of nervous energy. The boxers you're keeping, because returning used underwear is a level of awkward you're not prepared to handle. That's what you tell yourself now, what you'll tell him if he asks. 

He answers on the second knock, surprise in his eyes.

"Hey," you hold out the clothes. "Wanted to return these."

"Could've kept them." But he takes them. There's this moment where you're both just standing, not knowing what to say.

He looks good. He always looks good, but right now he's in joggers and an old t-shirt, barefoot and relaxed, something you rarely see in him. Your stupid brain is reminding you of all the ways you know what's under those clothes, all the ways he's made you fall apart.

Bucky does what you're not expecting, he leans in slowly, giving you time to see it coming, time to stop him if you want. Close enough that you can feel his breath before it happens.

No, not again. You turn your head at the last second, his mouth missing yours, catches your cheek instead, the contact soft and wrong all at once. He goes still, not sure of what he just touched. "We can't do this anymore." The words taste like ash on your tongue.

His expression is carefully blank as he pulls back. "Right."

"I'm serious, Bucky." You're talking fast, words tumbling out before you can stop them. "Last night was — this morning was — we need to stop. This whole thing, whatever it is, it needs to stop."

"Okay."

"No offense, you're a great lay —" God, could you sound more like an asshole? "— but this is getting too complicated. And I just think it's better if we —"

"I said okay." His voice is flat, face carefully set, not to give anything away. The problem is, you don't want him to just agree. You want him to fight you on it, to argue, to do literally anything other than just accept it. But he's standing there looking at you with those blue eyes that give nothing away, and you're realizing that maybe he's relieved. Maybe he's been looking for an exit and you just handed him one.

The insecurity, the pain in your chest, doesn't reflect on your words. "Okay. So we're good?"

"Yeah. We're good."

There's nothing left to say after that. Walking away feels wrong, even though it was you who'd suggested it. 

The truth you're not ready to admit, the one that's been building since that first bathroom encounter is that Bucky's not really that much of an asshole. Or maybe he is, but you're starting to not find it annoying. You like the way he challenges you, pushes back, doesn't let you get away with your bullshit. You like the quiet moments too, the coffee this morning, the way he took care of you when you were a disaster, how he looks at you sometimes like you're more than just someone to fight with.

You can handle hating him. You can even handle wanting him. What you can't handle is this other thing, this softer thing that's taking root in your chest and making everything more complicated than it needs to be.

So yeah. It has to stop. It has to. Even if you're already missing him, and he's only been gone from your sight for thirty seconds.

The thing about trying not to think about someone is that the harder you try, the more they invade every corner of your brain like some kind of parasitic thought you can't evict. It's been three days since you handed back Bucky's clothes, since you told him it was over, did the mature, responsible thing and ended whatever fucked-up situationship you'd stumbled into.

It's also three days of failing spectacularly at not thinking about him.

You see him everywhere. In the guy at the coffee shop who orders black coffee, the way Bucky takes. In the dark-haired stranger at the crosswalk whose shoulders are just a little too broad. In every fucking corner you turn, there he is. 

Except he's not. He's never actually there.

Fourth afternoon you end up at Steve's dorm. Not on purpose — well, maybe a little on purpose. Nat wanted to pick up some textbook Steve borrowed, and you tagged along. With a thin, embarrassing hope inside your ribs that thinks Bucky would be there on the couch like always, smirking at you over his laptop.

He's not.

Steve's alone, doing dishes in his hideous yellow rubber gloves, and he barely looks up when you walk in. "Bucky's at practice," he says, like you asked. Like it's written all over your face that you're looking for him.

"Cool," you aim for casual and land near manic. "I wasn't — I didn't ask."

Steve gives you a look that says he's not buying it, but he's nice enough not to call you out.

The next day, you hit the cafe where you do study group. Your regular table is empty. The corner booth where Bucky always sits, is occupied by some freshman with headphones the size of dinner plates. You order your latte and sit in the wrong seat. Everything feels off-kilter.

Your phone sits on the table in front of you. You've opened his contact approximately sixty-seven times in the last three days. His name just sitting there, never texted him, never called. The message thread between you is completely blank, just a white screen full of possibility and cowardice.

What would you even say? Hey, remember when I said we should stop? Yeah, about that. Or maybe: I think I made a mistake. Or the truth, which is something closer to: I can't stop thinking about you and it's making me crazy and I don't know what to do.

Your thumb hovers over his name. You close the app. Open it again. Close it.

Next night you end up at the bar. Same one where he fingered you in the alley, where you drank too much and ended up in his bed wearing his shirt. The bar is busy, some kind of hockey watch party that you don't care about. You scan the crowd automatically. Looking for dark hair and blue eyes.

He's not here either.

You end up doing a shot with some girls from your class. They're nice alright, but you're barely listening to what they're saying. An exam, about a professor's office hours. Your brain is white noise and static, all Bucky all the time, and you hate it. Hate that he's taken up residence in your head without paying rent, and that you can't seem to function like a normal person anymore.

The group chat is the worst part. Steve posts a meme about a professor. Nat responds with crying-laughing emojis. Bucky texts back with 'lmao'. Your thumb swipes his text, ready to reply, or react. But what use is it? 

He's alive. He's fine. He's out there somewhere living his life like nothing happened, like you didn't happen, while you're spiraling in this pathetic tornado of your own making.

What do you say to someone you pushed away? What do you say when you're realising that maybe you made the biggest mistake of your life?

Next morning, Nat corners you in your dorm room.

She uses the key you gave her for emergencies. You're still in bed even though it's almost eleven, wrapped in your comforter like a burrito. She takes one look at you before sighing, sitting on the edge of your bed. "Okay. We're talking about it."

"Talking about what?"

"Don't play dumb. You've been weird. You're not eating, you're not sleeping —"

"I'm sleeping fine."

"— and you've been moping. So we're talking about it."

You could deny it, brush her off, change the subject, keep pretending everything's fine. But you're so tired of pretending, and it's Nat. Maybe if you say it out loud, it'll make more sense. "I slept with Bucky."

There's not an ounce of surprise in her face, she doesn't even blink. "I know."

"What? How —"

"Please. You two have been eye-fucking each other for months. It was only a matter of time. How many times?"

"Does it matter?"

"Humour me."

You count in your head. The bathroom at the club. His room when he ate you out. The alley. "Three. Ish."

"Ish?"

"It's complicated."

"It always is with you two. So what happened? Why do you look like someone kicked your puppy?"

You spill all of it. Nat listens without interrupting. By the time you're done, you feel wrung out and empty. "I told him it was too complicated. That we needed to stop. And he just... agreed. Like it was nothing. Like I was nothing."

"Did you want him to disagree?"

The question you don't know the answer to, or rather, gaslighting yourself into not knowing the answer. "I don't know. Maybe. Yes. I don't know."

"Babe." Nat reaches over and squeezes your hand. "Why did you tell him to stop?"

"It was getting messy. Because we were supposed to hate each other and instead we were —" The words gets caught in your throat.

"Instead you were what?"

"I don't know. Something else."

"Like what?"

You close your eyes, and try to find the words for this feeling that's been building in your chest for weeks. "He knows how I like my coffee. When I was drunk and disgusting, he took care of me. He gave me his clothes. He's an asshole but he's also... he's not. He's funny and smart when he's not trying to piss me off, and the way he looks at me sometimes —"

"You like him." Three words you were not ready to hear. 

"No. I don't — we hate each other. We fight constantly. He drives me crazy."

"Yeah, because you like him." Nat says it gently, like she's explaining something obvious to a child. "You like him, and it scares you, so you pushed him away before he could hurt you."

"That's not —"

But it is. The realization hits you like cold water. You like Bucky Barnes. Not just his dick — though, that too —, but him. The way he challenges you, the way he sees through your bullshit, the way he makes you feel alive in a way nothing else does. You like him, and you sent him away. "Oh my god. I'm so stupid."

"Little bit, yeah."

"What do I do?"

"Tell him."

"I can't just — he agreed it was a mistake. He was probably relieved when I ended it. He hasn't tried to contact me once in three days, Nat. Not once."

"Because you told him it was over. What's he supposed to do, ignore your boundaries?"

She's right. Of course. You set the boundary, and he respected it, he even said so. Now you're mad at him for doing exactly what you asked.

Your phone is in your hand before you fully decide to grab it. You don't let yourself think this time, thinking is what got you into this mess. It rings, and rings, and rings. 

After more ringing and more nothing, you're ready to give up, and he picks up. "What?" His voice is rough, annoyed, your courage almost failing you.

"I need to talk to you."

There's silence first, sigh second, and then, "I'm busy."

"It's important."

"I said I'm busy."

"Bucky, please."

Another pause, longer. You can hear noise in the background. Voices, music maybe. He's somewhere, anywhere but talking to you. "Fine," he finally says. "Library. Tomorrow. Two o'clock."

"Okay. Yeah. I'll be —"

He hangs up before you can finish.

Bucky is ten minutes late.

Not that you're counting.

Eleven minutes now.

You picked a table in the back corner, the one behind the stacks where people go to make out or cry during midterms. Private enough for this conversation, whatever this conversation is going to be. Your hands are shaking, like you're some kind of nervous wreck, which you are.

Twelve minutes.

Maybe he's not coming. Maybe this was his way of telling you to fuck off without actually saying the words. You pull out your phone, pull up his contact for the thousandth time, and that's when you see him.

He looks wrong. There's no better word to describe him right now. Bucky always carries himself like he owns whatever space he's in, loose, confident and just arrogant enough to be annoying. But right now he's tense, shoulders up near his ears, and he won't quite look at you as he drops into the chair across from you.

"Hey." Your voice comes out too soft.

"Hey." That's it. That's all you get. He's looking at the table, at his hands, at anything that isn't you. There's this wall between you that wasn't there before. Or maybe it was always there and you were busy being annoyed to fully notice it.

"Thanks for meeting me," you try again.

He shrugs. 

This is going great. Really stellar. You've had more productive conversations with your houseplant.

"I wanted to talk about — about what happened. About what I said."

"It's fine." His voice is flat, bored almost. "You were right. It was getting complicated."

"No, I wasn't right. I was —" You take a breath, try to organize the thoughts that have been ping-ponging around your skull for four days. "I was scared. And I said things I didn't mean because I didn't know how to —"

"Don't." The word cuts through your rambling, sharp enough that you stop mid-sentence.

"Don't what?"

"Don't do this." He's finally looking at you now, his eyes cold in a way you've never seen. "Don't come here and try to rewrite what happened. You said you didn't want this. I respected that. We're done."

"But I do want —"

"Want what? To fuck again? Is that what this is?" He leans back in his chair, arms crossed. "Because if you're just looking for a booty call, you could've just sent a text."

The casual cruelty of it makes you flinch, you try to hold yourself together. "That's not what I'm saying."

"Then what are you saying?"

Okay, here it is. The moment you've been building toward, the confession you practiced in your mirror this morning like some kind of lunatic. Your heart is trying to beat its way out of your chest. "I like you." The words feel clumsy and inadequate. "I know I said it was just sex, and I know I pushed you away, but I was wrong. I like you, Bucky. I want to — I don't know what I want, but I want to try. To see if this could be something."

The silence that follows is excruciating. He's just staring at you, face completely blank, you can't read anything even if you try so hard. 

"You're confused," he says finally.

"I'm not —"

"Yeah, you are. You're confusing good sex with feelings. It happens."

"Don't tell me what I'm feeling." There's an edge creeping into your voice now, frustration bleeding through. "I know the difference between —"

"Do you?" He leans forward, there's a meanness in his smile. "Because from where I'm sitting, this looks like buyer's remorse. You ended things, realized you miss getting fucked, and now you're trying to make it into something it's not."

"That's not fair."

"No? Then explain it to me. Explain how four days ago you couldn't get away from me fast enough, and now suddenly you're catching feelings."

"Because I was scared, okay? I was scared because it was starting to feel like more than just sex, and I didn't know how to handle that, so I —"

"So you ended it. Which was the right call."

You're getting angry now, the frustration boiling over. "Why are you like this?"

"Like what?"

"Like an asshole. Like you don't —" You take a breath. "You took care of me. When I was drunk and disgusting, you took care of me. You made my coffee the way I like it. You gave me your clothes. That wasn't nothing."

"That was basic human decency. Don't make it into more than it was."

"I'm not —"

"You are." He stands up, the sudden movement making you jerk back. "You're making up a story in your head where this was something it wasn't. We fucked. It was good. It's over. That's it."

"Bucky —"

"I don't like you that way." Each word lands on you like a physical blow, bruising your skin. "I liked fucking you. That's not the same thing."

Sitting feels wrong now, feels too vulnerable, too small compared to him, you stand too. "I don't believe you."

"I don't care what you believe."

"Then why did you take care of me? Why did you —"

"Because I'm not a complete monster. Leaving you to choke on your own vomit seemed like a dick move. Don't romanticize it."

You're too close now, in his space, you can see the tension in his jaw, the way his hands are clenched into fists at his sides. Under all that, there’s a raw, painful part of him he’s trying to hide behind cruelty. "You're lying."

"I'm really not."

"Then why are you so angry?"

"I'm not angry. I'm annoyed. There's a difference."

Without giving yourself time to think it through, you reach for him. Your palm lands against his chest, warm through the fabric, fingers curling like you can hold him there, keep him from slipping out of this moment. It comes out of you all at once, that need to make him stay, to make him understand what this is doing to you. You push up on your toes, closing the distance, tugging him closer as you go for his mouth like it might fix something, like it might make this real in a way words haven’t managed to.

He turns his face away, just a quiet shift, a small angle of his head at the last second. Your lips miss his mouth, drag across his cheek instead.

The contact is wrong. You feel it immediately, the way your mouth presses into skin that isn’t answering, isn’t meeting you halfway. Your hand is fisted in his shirt. You can feel the rise and fall of his breathing under your palm, steady, unchanged, like this isn’t cracking anything open for him the way it is for you. The rejection is clean, absolute, leaving a sharp burn behind your eyes you can’t blink away fast enough.

"I just wanted to fuck you. That's all this was. That's all it's ever going to be. So if you're looking for feelings, if you're looking for some kind of relationship, you're barking up the wrong tree."

"No — no — you're —" You choke on your own words, trying to get the word 'lying' out, but you cannot. 

"I'm not. You're just too caught up in your own bullshit to see it. You want the truth? You're too much drama. Too much back and forth, too much hot and cold. I don't have the energy for it. The sex was good, great even, but dealing with you? With all your shit? Not worth it."

Each word is a knife, precise, designed to cut you, gut you, you feel yourself bleeding out right there in the library.

"Fuck you." Your voice cracks on the words.

"Yeah, that's about all you're good for."

Whether you want them or not, the tears flow. But you're not going to cry in front of him and give him the satisfaction of breaking you. You just won't. Grabbing your bag, you run. Past the stacks and the reference desk, you don't stop until you're outside in the cold air that bites at your wet cheeks.

What use is knowing you like him when he doesn't like you back? When he never did? When all those moments you thought meant something were just your imagination filling in blanks that were never there to begin with?

You were stupid to come here. Stupid to think he felt the same way, to think you were anything more than a convenient fuck.

He wasn't respecting your boundaries. He was relieved when you ended it. The anger, the coldness, the cruelty, that was all him, telling you the truth. That was him showing you exactly what you meant to him.

Nothing.

You meant absolutely nothing.

Heartbreak is supposed to be metaphorical. That's what you always thought, anyway. Just a turn of phrase people use to describe feeling sad. But it turns out your body doesn't know the difference between metaphorical and literal, and it's staging a full-scale revolt against the fact that Bucky Barnes doesn't want you.

Day one, you can't eat. Your roommate makes you toast. It sits on your desk going cold and hard while you stare at the ceiling. Your stomach feels like someone filled it with concrete, and the thought of putting anything in your mouth makes your throat close up.

Nat texts. You don't answer. She texts again. You turn your phone face down and watch the light bleeding around the edges when it buzzes.

Sleep doesn't come. You lie there in the dark, and your brain plays the library scene on repeat like some kind of sadistic highlight reel. Too much drama. Not worth it. That's about all you're good for. The words have teeth, and they're chewing through your chest cavity, making a home in the empty space where your self-respect used to be.

Day two, your head starts pounding. It's this dull, persistent ache that sits right behind your eyes and pulses in time with your heartbeat. You take two ibuprofen and they sit in your empty stomach like rocks. Everything hurts. Your muscles, your joints, your skin when the blanket touches it, everything. You tell yourself it's just tension. Just stress manifesting physically. Just your body being dramatic because apparently you are, according to Bucky, too much of everything.

The crying comes in waves. You know how in the movies, a single tear rolls down your cheek? Yeah, it's not that. This is ugly, snotty, hiccupping, making your eyes swell up so bad you can barely open them. You cry so hard you throw up, and then you cry about that. The whole thing is so pathetic you almost laugh. 

Throat feels you swallowed glass. Every time you try to drink water it's a special kind of torture. You've got a fever. Skin too hot, too cold at the same time, thoughts getting fuzzy, everything feels like burning. 

Nat comes by. You pretend you're asleep. She leaves soup outside your door that you don't touch.

You're not heartbroken, you tell yourself. You're just sick. Getting sick right after emotional trauma is just a coincidence. People get colds all the time. This has nothing to do with the fact that you put yourself out there and got eviscerated for your trouble, nothing to do with the fact that you cried your eyes out. 

The room swims when you open your eyes. Everything's blurry and soft, like someone smeared Vaseline on your corneas. You try to blink, the ceiling fan is on, rotating slow because you're freezing even though you're pretty sure you're burning up. There's your hot water bottle on the nightstand, the one shaped like a box that Nat got you as a joke. There's your water glass. There's Bucky.

There's Bucky? 

Sitting in your desk chair like he belongs there, you must be hallucinating, delirious with fever because there's no way he's actually here, in your room, looking at you with something that might be concern if you didn't know better.

You reach out without thinking, hand stretching toward him like you could touch him if you tried. Your fingers are shaking. Everything's shaking. "Hey," you mumble, voice sounding like someone beat you up for days. "You're not real."

He leans forward, and dream-Bucky looks tired. Worried. Nothing like the cold, cruel version from the library. "What do you want?" Dream-Bucky asks, his voice soft. Softer than he's ever used with you, softer than you knew he could be.

"Not fair," you slur, coherent sentences are beyond you right now. "S'not fair of you to haunt my dreams."

"It's not a dream, baby."

Baby. He's never called you that. Not even when he was inside you, not even in the heat of the moment. You almost laugh, but it comes out as a cough that rattles your chest.

"Sure isn't," you speak when the coughing stops. "Dream-Bucky would hate me too. Just like real Bucky. Can't even have nice hallucinations."

You think dream-Bucky says something else, but the words blur together and you're already sliding back under, into the dark where nothing hurts quite as bad.

Hours later — could be three, could be ten, time is meaningless when you're this sick — you surface again. The room is dimmer now. Your mouth tastes like death, and your whole body aches like you got repeatedly hit.

And dream-Bucky is still there.

Still in your desk chair, but now he's got his elbows on his knees, head in his hands, hasn't realised you're awake yet. It's nice watching him, even if it's just a dream. He looks tired. "Can't you just leave me alone? I don't want to dream of you."

Your voice brings him to your room again, head snapping up, relief plastered on his face. "You're not dreaming."

He reaches out, hand cupping your face, palm cool against your too-hot skin. Real. Definitely not a fever dream. "You've still got a temperature."

You jerk back from his touch like it burns. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

"Nat told Steve you were sick —"

"Why the fuck do you care?"

Bucky flinches, like the words hit him physically. "Can we not do this right now?" he asks, tiredness in his voice prominent.

The audacity of this man, flinching like you hurt him and not the other way around. "Yeah, of course. Get out."

"I just want to help you. You're in no shape to take care of yourself."

"Better me than you. So get out." You try to sit up and the room tilts sideways. 

"I'm sorry. Please let me help you." His words are pleading, an act, you think. 

You're upright now, barely, using the wall for support. "Sorry for what? For saying I'm just a good fuck? For telling me I'm too much drama? For —"

"For everything. I'm sorry for everything." There's hurt in his eyes, but you're too angry to care about right now. 

"I don't fucking care, Bucky. Get out."

His jaw sets in that stubborn way you recognize. "No. I'm not doing this push and pull again."

"Oh, that's great. Because I'm just pushing you. There's no pull whatsoever."

He stands up, takes a step toward you. "Please. Let me just take care of you, help you, and then I'll be gone if that's what you want."

"What are you gonna possibly do that I can't do myself?"

"I made broth." He gestures toward your desk where there's a thermos you didn't notice before. "I'll heat it up. It's supposed to help with the cold. I also got aspirin for the fever, and some throat lozenges, and —"

"Fine. Leave that here." You swing your legs over the side of the bed, trying to stand, the floor immediately rushes up to meet you.

Bucky catches you, though you wish he didn't. His hands are on your arms, steadying you, you're too dizzy to push him away. "Did I say you can touch me?" you snap when the world stops spinning.

"Please. I just didn't want you to fall."

The irony is not lost on you. Didn't want you to fall. The audacity of that statement when he's the one who made you fall in the first place — metaphorically, emotionally, completely. Now he's worried about the literal fall? Fuck him. Fuck him for every mixed signal, every cruel word, every moment he made you think you might mean something.

You're too weak to fight his hands on you, the touch burns, even if you're the one running hot now. "You know," you say, and you hate how shaky your voice sounds, "I can't really fuck you right now. Since — you know — I'm sick and all."

The embrace of his touch leaves you like you'd slapped him, hands dropping to his sides. "That's not — I didn't come here for that."

"No? Then why are you here?" You're shuffling toward the bathroom because you desperately need to pee and also need to get away from him. "Come to finish the job? Make sure I'm completely destroyed?"

"I came because I was worried about you."

"Well, don't be. I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You can barely stand."

"Not your problem." You make it to the bathroom and shut the door in his face, leaning against it, legs shaking.

Through the door, you can hear him moving around. The sound of your microwave running. Cabinet doors opening and closing. He's still here, still in your space, you don't have the energy to keep fighting him.

You finally emerge, teeth brushed, face washed, feeling slightly more human. The smell hits you first, however slight they may be. Savory and warm that makes your stomach remember it exists. Bucky's set up your desk like a sick station: the bowl of broth with a spoon, aspirin, a fresh glass of water, those throat lozenges he mentioned. "Sit," he says, gesturing to your bed.

"I'm not a dog."

"Please sit down before you fall down."

You sit, mostly because standing is taking more effort than you have to give. He gently moves the bowl to sit in front of you. 

"I'm not hungry."

"You need to eat something."

"I said I'm not —"

"When's the last time you ate?" His voice is gentle but firm, and it pisses you off how much he sounds like he actually cares. If you didn't know what he's capable of, you'd trust this act. 

"Doesn't matter." Truth is, you can't remember. Day before yesterday, maybe? Time is soup.

"It matters. Drink the broth."

"You're not my mother."

"No, I'm the guy who made you soup at four in the morning because I've been losing my mind worrying about you. So please, for the love of god, just drink the fucking broth. "The words come out sharp, frustrated. 

You don't point out that he has no right to lose his mind worrying about you, and take the bowl mostly to shut him up. It tastes even better than it smells, rich and salty with actual vegetables and herbs you can't identify. Your stomach wakes up properly, growling, and before you know it you're halfway through the bowl.

Bucky sits back in the desk chair, watching you with what looks like relief.

"Happy now?" you ask between bites, because you can't let him think this means anything.

"Getting there."

You want to throw the bowl at his head and scream at him for showing up here, for being nice to you, for confusing everything when you were just starting to build up the walls you need to survive this. You want to ask him why he said all those horrible things if he was just going to show up at your door with homemade soup like some kind of reformed asshole.

But you're so tired. Tired of fighting, of hurting, of not understanding what he wants from you.

After the soup, your body decides it's had enough excitement for one day. Bucky helps you back to bed, his hand on your elbow, steadying you even though you don't ask for it. The sheets are cool against your fever-warm skin, and you're asleep before you can tell him to leave.

When you wake up, the room is bright with morning light. Your head feels clearer, the fever-fog lifted enough that you can think in actual sentences instead of fragmented thoughts. The chair where Bucky sat is empty.

Of course it is. He came, he did his good deed, checked the 'take care of sick girl' box off his list, and now he's gone. Probably relieved to escape before you woke up and made things awkward again. The thermos is still on your desk, the bowl washed and sitting in your dish rack. The whole thing feels like something you might have dreamed except for the physical evidence that he was here.

You sit up slowly, testing your body's response. Better. Definitely better than yesterday. Your throat doesn't feel like shredded glass anymore, the headache has downgraded from horrible to a dull throb. Progress.

Thing is, you can still feel where his hand was on your face. The ghost of his touch like a brand, and you're pathetic enough to wish it was still there. To wish he was still here, sitting in that stupid chair, looking at you like you're worth worrying about.

You're reaching for your phone, to do what, you don't know, maybe check the time, maybe torture yourself by looking at his contact, when your door opens.

Bucky walks in carrying another bowl, and you just stare at him. He's wearing different clothes than last night, so he definitely left and came back, which means this is intentional. A choice he's making. "Sorry. I went to my dorm to make this. You didn't have enough ingredients here."

You continue staring. Your brain is trying to process the fact that he left to make you soup. That he came back. That he's here, in your room, in the morning light, and he doesn't look like he's planning to run.

He sets the soup on your desk and crosses the room quickly, crouching beside your bed. "Are you feeling better?"

Words seem beyond you right now. You're too busy cataloging the worry in his eyes, the tension in his shoulders, how he looks at you like he's afraid you might shatter.

"Hey." His voice softens, warmth seeping through. "I'm gonna check for fever, okay? Is that alright?"

He's asking you permission to touch you. You want to trust this. The gentleness, the care, the softness he's showing you. But soft can turn sharp so quickly. You learned that in the library.

"People usually do that with a thermometer." Your voice is still rough but functional.

"I'm a college student. I don't own a thermometer." The corner of his mouth twitches, almost a smile, and you feel an answering pull in your own lips before you remember you're supposed to be mad at him, supposed to be protecting yourself.

When you nod, his hand comes to your forehead, gentle, soft. His palm is cool, and you fight the urge to lean into it. "Better. Still warm, but better."

The shower helps. Standing under hot water, letting it beat against your sore muscles, washing away two days of sick-sweat and misery. You take your time because the steam feels good, and also because you're half-convinced that when you come out, Bucky will be gone. This is a fever dream. An elaborate hallucination. He's not really here making you soup and checking your temperature and asking permission to touch you.

But when you open the bathroom door, wrapped in your towel, he's still there, still sitting in your chair. Very much real. You really should've brought a change of clothes inside. 

His eyes drop to the floor immediately, color creeping up his neck. "Uh. Uhm. I'll go — I'll step out. While you — you know — change."

The awkwardness is almost funny. This is the same guy who's been inside you, seen you fall apart on his tongue, who's had his hands all over your body. Now he can't look at you in a towel?

"Dude, you've seen me naked before. You don't have to be this awkward."

The memories hit you both at the same time, you can see it in the way his jaw tightens. All the ways he's touched you, all the sounds you've made for him, all the times you've been bare and vulnerable.

Maybe it's defiance or maybe you're just tired of this dance, but you reach for the edge of your towel and start to unwrap it. Bucky crosses the room in three strides, hand catching yours. "No."

You're backed against the wall. He's close enough that you can feel the heat coming off him, close enough to see the specks of gray in his blue eyes. "Yeah, sorry." The words tasted bitter in you head, tastes bitter when they come out too. "Forgot you can't keep it in your pants with me. That's all I'm good for, right?"

"Stop." His hand moves to your waist. His other hand catches both of yours, pins them gently above your head, no force in them. You could break free if you wanted. Except you don't want to.

"Bucky, what the fuck —" You twist against him, pushing at his hold, more stubborn than urgent, trying to get free more out of principle than actual desire to escape.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, okay? I fucked up. Monumentally." His words are earnest, desperate. 

Your heart is trying to break out of your ribcage. He's so close, and he smells like coffee and that stupid soap he uses. This is too much, confusing, reminiscent of all the times you've been in this position, pinned, wanting and completely at his mercy.

"I was horrible to you that day," he continues. "In the library. I haven't been able to sleep since I fucked up."

You stop squirming inside his touch. Stop breathing, maybe. Because he's looking at you like you matter, like hurting you actually hurt him. "Then why did you — You don't get to simply apologize and be done with this."

"You know you're confusing, right?" He sighs as he says it, almost a fond exasperation. His thumb is tracing circles on your waist through the towel, probably without him realizing.

"What?"

"Baby, you fucking confuse me. All the fucking time."

Baby again. He keeps saying it like it's natural, like it belongs in his mouth when he's talking to you.

You're still very aware that you're in a towel. That his hand is on your waist, warm through the terry cloth, your hands still above your head, however light his hold is. "You know, if you don't want to see me naked, maybe don't put me in this position. The towel's gonna slide off my tits any second now."

He drops your hands like they burned him, steps back, putting distance between you that feels wrong now that it's there. "Sorry," he mutters.

You want to tell him to stop apologizing. Or maybe apologize more. Or maybe come back and put his hands on you again because the absence of his touch feels like a loss. Your thoughts are tangled up in themselves, a mess of want, hurt, anger and confusion that you can't sort through.

"I liked you." The words burst out of him like he's been holding them in too long. "Fuck it— I like you. I've liked you since the very start. Since Nat and Steve started dating. No, even before that."

Hope starts building in your chest, easing the pain, soothing the hurt, which is dangerous, which you can't afford right now.

"I saw you in class one day and I've liked you ever since." He's rambling now, words spilling out faster than he can organize them. You've never seen him like this. Bucky doesn't ramble. "That's how Steve got to know Nat, actually. Because Nat's your friend. I talked about you all the time to Steve and that's how Steve got to know Nat."

Wait.

"And then you're this firecracker who can't shut up, and we got off on the wrong foot —"

"What?" Your brain is trying to rewrite history, slot this new information into the narrative you've been carrying around forever.

"I didn't mean to pick a fight with you that day." He runs his hand through his hair, looking almost sheepish. "I didn't mean to pour coffee over your notes, I was — I was nervous. And we've been butting heads ever since, and it's my fault because I had this huge crush on you and I poured coffee all over your fucking notes. How dumb is that?"

The coffee incident. You remember it, the way your carefully highlighted notes had turned into a brown-stained disaster. You'd snapped at him, and he'd fired back instead of apologizing. That was the start of it. The first battle in a war you thought he wanted to fight. But he's saying it was an accident. An accident born from nerves, from liking you, from being so focused on trying to impress you that he'd fucked it up spectacularly.

You think about all the fights since then, all the barbed comments and intentional provocations. You'd convinced yourself he hated you when, this whole time, he was just trying to get your attention the only way he knew how.

"Ever since then, you've not let me know peace." He's pacing now, and you're still standing against the wall in your towel like an idiot. "I just wanted to get to know you, and then we started annoying each other, and I started liking it because it was kinda our thing. Our love language, you know?"

Love language. Like fighting with you was how he showed affection, like every argument was actually him trying to be close to you. 

"And then we — uh — had sex that day," he continues, "and you told me it wasn't happening again. I was crushed. Then it happens again, and you say the same thing."

"You agreed," you point out, because that part still stings.

"What was I supposed to say? No, I love you so much, please don't break my heart? I thought if I could just have you in whatever way you'd let me, that would be enough. Even if it was killing me."

Love. He said love. Did he notice? His face doesn't change, like the word slipped out without him registering it, and you're standing here holding this piece of information in your chest, this fragile thing, while he's still walking back and forth like standing at one place could kill him. 

"And then that night," he says, and his voice gets quieter. "The night you got drunk."

"What about it?"

"You told me you liked me."

Suddenly, the room starts spinning, like you're both drunk and hungover at the same time. "What?"

"We — uhh — I — I fingered you in that alley, and then we went inside, you got drunk, and you told me you liked me. Said you'd been thinking about me, that you couldn't stop thinking about me."

No, no, no. You don't remember that. You remember drinking, remember Bucky's hands on you in the alley, remember waking up in his bed. But confessing your feelings? That's a blank space in your memory. "I don't — I don't remember that."

"I know." He stops pacing, looks at you with what might be sadness. "The next morning, you didn't remember anything. Asked if we'd fucked like the idea horrified you. And I realized you had no idea what you'd said to me."

Oh god. Oh god, the morning after. You'd been so mortified, so convinced it was just another mistake, and he'd been hoping. He'd been carrying your drunken confession around like a promise, and you hadn't even known.

"I thought maybe — I don't know what I thought. That maybe on some level you meant it, even drunk. So I was hopeful. And then that evening, you came to return my clothes, and when I tried to —"

The way you'd turned your face, the way you'd said he was a great lay but it was too complicated. Fuck. 

"You pulled away, said I was — I was — Like that's all I was to you."

The hurt in his voice is tangible, the way he couldn't even repeat your words, and you're realizing how many ways you've wounded each other without meaning to. Or maybe meaning to, because hurting him felt safer than being vulnerable.

"That fucking destroyed me," he admits. "I'd just heard you say you liked me, and then hours later you're reducing me to a dick. So when you showed up at the library saying you liked me, I — I panicked. I thought you were confused, or trying to spare my feelings, or that you'd just had some realization about missing the sex. I couldn't go through that again. Couldn't let myself hope and then watch you take it back."

It's all clicking into place now. The cruelty in the library wasn't because he didn't care. It was because he cared too much, because you'd hurt him first, even if you didn't know you were doing it.

"So you decided to hurt me first," you say. 

The pain in his face is visible, pulling at your heartstrings even though he was the one that hurt you. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. That wasn't fair at all. I thought I was protecting myself, because I couldn't bear to be hurt like that again."

He's pacing like a caged animal now, three steps one way, pivot, three steps back. His hands are running through his hair, tugging at the ends, and he's still talking, apologizing, explaining, words tumbling out in this stream of consciousness that you can barely keep up with.

"Bucky," you call, but he's not listening. 

"— and I just kept fucking it up, kept saying the wrong thing, kept pushing you away when all I wanted —"

"Bucky." 

"— and in the library I was such a dick, I can't believe I said those things to you, I can't —"

You step into his path, hands on his chest, and physically push him backward until his the back of his knees hit your bed and he sits. The look of surprise on his face would be funny if this whole situation wasn't so fragile, so precarious, like one wrong move could shatter whatever's happening between you.

This position — him on your bed, you between his legs — feels intimate, maybe even more than those three times. His hands come to your hips automatically, looking up at you with eyes that are red-rimmed and devastated, pulling you closer, wrapping his arms around your waist, pressing his face against your stomach. The hug is tight, almost desperate, you can feel him shaking. "I'm sorry." His voice is muffled against the towel. "Please don't leave me."

His words pry you open from the inside. This is Bucky Barnes, the guy who struts through life, who never asks for anything, who'd rather die than show weakness. And he's holding onto you like you're the only thing keeping him anchored, like the thought of you leaving is unbearable.

Your hands find his hair without conscious thought, fingers threading through the dark strands. You've had your hands in his hair before, have pulled it while he was between your legs, gripped it while he fucked you. But this is gentle, tender, you offering comfort instead of taking pleasure.

There's wetness seeping through your towel. At first you think it's just water from your shower-damp skin, but then you feel his shoulders hitch, feel the way he's breathing in these controlled inhales like he's trying not to fall apart completely.

He's crying.

Bucky is crying, face pressed against your stomach, arms locked around you like you might disappear.

The realization hits you at the same moment you feel wetness on your hand. Your hand that's still in his hair, your own tears dripping onto your fingers. When did you start crying? You didn't notice, too focused on him, on the way he's holding you, on the impossible fact that this is happening.

You're both crying. Two people who've spent months hurting each other, finally breaking down.

"You hurt me." The words need to be said, need to exist in the space between you, even if he's not ready to hear it again. "What you said in the library — it hurt me so much I got physically sick."

His arms tighten against you, pulling you closer. "I'm so fucking sorry." The words are desperate, broken. "I will never hurt you. Ever again. I said those things and I couldn't breathe afterward — hurting you hurt me too, baby. I'm so fucking sorry."

Baby. This time it doesn't make you bristle or question. "I thought you hated me," you whisper. "I thought I was nothing to you."

He pulls back enough to look up at you, face wrecked, tears tracking down his cheeks, eyes swollen. Beautiful, broken and completely open in a way you've never seen. "You're everything to me. You've been everything to me for so long, and I've been too scared to say it. Too scared you'd walk away."

One of his hands leaves your waist to cup your face, thumb brushing away your tears even as his own keep falling. The gentleness of it makes you want to sob. How many times has he touched your face? But never like this. Never with this kind of reverence.

"I'm not walking away. I'm right here." You mirror his movement, your hand on his cheek. 

"You're right here," he repeats, like he can't quite believe it.

You're both a mess. Crying, shaking, holding onto each other, towel soaked through with tears. You're pretty sure you look like a disaster, and Bucky's face is blotchy, eyes red. But none of it matters.

None of it matters because he's looking at you like you hung the moon. "I love you." This time there's no mistaking it for a slip. "I'm in love with you. I don't even know how long. I love the way you argue with me. I love how you never back down. I love that you called me out on my bullshit from day one. I love —"

You kiss him. Soft, tentative almost, afraid of breaking whatever fragile thing is forming between you. His lips are salty with tears, so are yours, and you can feel him trembling as he kisses you back. He's pulling you closer while trying to be gentle about it. The towel is probably going to fall, but you can't bring yourself to care. This kiss feels like a promise. Like an apology, a confession and a beginning all wrapped into one.

Breathing hard, you pull back. His forehead drops to rest against your stomach again, his breath hot against your skin through the damp towel. "Say it back," he whispers. "Please. I need to hear you say it."

Maybe it's too soon, maybe you should make him work for it, make him prove he means all these pretty words he's saying. Maybe the smart thing would be to guard your heart a little longer, keep some walls up just in case.

But you're so tired of being smart, of protecting yourself, of pretending you don't feel what you feel. "I love you too." The words feel like jumping off a cliff. "I love you even though you're an idiot. I love you even though you hurt me. I love you even though — maybe because — you drive me completely insane."

His whole body sags with relief, like he was holding his breath waiting for your answer. "Thank god," he breathes.

No more pretending this is just physical when it's been emotional from the start.

He kisses your stomach through the towel, pulling you down onto the bed with him. You land in a tangle of limbs as he wraps himself around you like he's trying to merge your bodies into one.

He's quiet for a second, looking at you with those devastated blue eyes, "I'll never hurt you like that again." Unadorned, nothing poetic or flowery about the words. 

You're a realist even now, even in this moment. "You can't promise that. People hurt each other. It happens."

His hand caresses your face, thumb tracing your cheekbone. "Not like that. I'll never speak to you like that again, never make you feel like you're nothing to me. I promise. I promise, baby."

There's a desperate sincerity in his voice that makes you believe him. Or maybe you just want to believe him. Maybe it's the same thing. "Okay," you whisper.

"Okay?"

"I believe you."

His exhale is shaky, relieved, and he pulls you closer, the towel finally giving up its fight to stay in place and gaping open at the side.

"I'm gonna fuck this up sometimes," he says. "Probably a lot. I'm gonna say the wrong thing or do something stupid because I'm an idiot who doesn't know how to handle feelings."

"Yeah, probably. I'll fuck up too. I'll push you away when I get scared. I'll pick fights because it's easier than being vulnerable." You're tracing patterns on his chest through his shirt, random swirls and shapes that don't mean anything. 

"So we're both disasters."

"Seems like it."

His laugh is quiet, almost surprised, like he didn't expect to be laughing right now. "At least we're disasters together."

Together.

Your fingers find the hem of his shirt, slip underneath to touch warm skin, the need to feel him solid beneath your hands, maybe to tell yourself this is real. "Tell me something."

"Anything."

"That first day. When you spilled coffee on my notes. What were you actually trying to do?"

He groans, the vibration of it you feel against your cheek. "I was trying to ask you out. Had this whole speech planned. Then I got nervous and forgot I was holding coffee and — yeah. Disaster from the start."

"What was the speech?"

"Absolutely not. That's going to my grave."

"C'mon."

"Nope. Some secrets stay buried. All you need to know is I'd been watching you for weeks like a creep. Knew your coffee order, knew what corner of the library you liked, knew your schedule."

"That's actually kind of creepy."

His hand slides into your hair, fingers gentle against your scalp. "I know. I'm not proud. But then you yelled at me about the coffee and you were so pissed and so pretty, and I just... kept trying to talk to you. Even if it meant fighting with you."

You think about all those fights. The debate that got so heated the TA had to separate you. The time you fought about nothing at all, just because you could, because it meant you got to be in each other's space.

"I liked fighting with you," you admit.

"I know. I could tell."

"It was the only time you paid attention to me."

"Baby, I was always paying attention to you." His voice gets more serious. "Every single second you were in a room, I knew exactly where you were, who you were talking to, if you were smiling. I was so far gone for you it was pathetic."

All this time you thought he barely noticed you except to annoy you, he was cataloguing your every movement.

"The club. That first night. You got so mad. Was it — was it about that guy?"

There's no shame in his words. "I wanted to punch him, wanted to drag you away and tell him you were mine even though I had no right. I was jealous, pissed off and I followed you to the bathroom to yell at you about it."

"And then we fucked instead."

"Best decision of my life. Fuck, it was incredible. But, after that I couldn't pretend anymore, couldn't pretend I just wanted to annoy you. I was addicted."

You lift your head to look at him, there's a softness in his expression that makes him look vulnerable.

"Every time you said it was the last time, I died a little," he continues. "But I kept coming back for more because having you for a moment was better than not having you at all."

The words hurt in the best way. You did the same thing, kept saying never again while knowing you'd end up right back in his orbit. "I'm sorry," you say.

"For what?"

"For pushing you away. For not seeing it sooner. For — For making you think you were nothing to me."

"Hey." He sits up, brings you with him so you're straddling his lap, towel falling away completely now but neither of you caring enough to correct it. His hands cup your face, making you look at him. "We both fucked up. We both hurt each other. But we're here now, right? We're figuring it out."

"Yeah. We're here."

His lips brush yours, and you think about all the ways you've kissed before. It's nothing like before, it's a kiss that means something beyond want, that says I'm sorry and I love you and I'm not going anywhere.

There's a specific kind of torture in wanting someone you think you can't have. You'd lived in it for months — watching Bucky, fighting with Bucky, fucking Bucky, all while convinced it meant nothing. Convinced you were nothing to him beyond a convenient release. The torture was in the wanting, in the knowing it could never be more, the way your heart skipped when he walked in a room even as you told yourself you hated him.

You'd gotten good at that torture, had made a home in it, learned to navigate the ache of unrequited feelings dressed up as animosity.

Now it's gone. This is having Bucky, knowing he wants you back.

He is lying next to you now, your head on his chest, his heartbeat steady under your ear. Your towel is somewhere on the floor. You're still sick, still running a fever, but he's here. He stayed. 

He's going to keep staying, you realize. Through the sickness, fights and the moments when you both fuck up. 

It won't be easy. You're both too stubborn, too quick to anger, too used to hurting each other to suddenly become soft and gentle all the time. There will be fights. Real ones, not the foreplay kind. And there will be days when you drive each other crazy, and there will probably be moments when you wonder if this was a mistake.

But then he'll make you coffee exactly how you like it. Or you'll catch him watching you like you're precious. Or you'll patch him up after a game, or you'll fight about something stupid and end up laughing instead of crying.

His fingers are tracing patterns on your bare shoulder and you think about how touch can mean so many different things. All the times he's touched you in anger, in desperation, in hunger. And now this. Gentle, aimless touching, just because he can, because you're his and he's yours.

"What are you thinking about?" he murmurs.

"How we got here."

"Long fucking journey."

"Worth it?"

"Every second of it."

The torture of wanting someone you can't have is finally over. The torture of having someone you could lose is just beginning.

But as Bucky presses a kiss to the top of your head, as his breathing evens out and his heartbeat steadies under your ear, you think maybe this is the kind of torture you can live with.

Maybe this is the kind of torture that's actually called love.

MY MASTERLIST!

EXTRAS. first time writing smth where both of them are this toxic, please go easy on me! thank you for reading!

“She made a noise,” he whispers urgently.

You blink. “Babies make noises.”

“No, this was different.”

From the bassinet comes a tiny snuffle. A soft, congested little puff of air. Then a squeak. Then silence.

Bucky is already on his feet.

He leans over the bassinet like he’s guarding something sacred. In the dim light, her face is scrunched, lips pursed, fists curled up near her cheeks. She lets out a faint, dramatic sigh and settles.

“She’s fine,” you murmur.

He doesn’t move. His metal fingers hover over the edge of the bassinet, not touching, just close enough to feel her warmth.

“I know,” he says quietly. “I just want to make sure.”

That becomes a pattern. The tiny grunts at two in the morning. The sharp little inhalations that make his heart leap into his throat. The hiccup-squeaks that have him leaning over her in seconds flat.

He learns quickly that newborns are noisy sleepers. He learns that half the sounds that send him into a panic are just her adjusting, stretching, existing.

He doesn’t stop checking.

He just checks more calmly.

---

Days blur together in a haze of feedings and naps and the soft shuffle of his socked feet across the nursery floor. Bucky moves like he’s afraid of breaking something at first. He holds her like she’s made of glass.

But babies aren’t glass.

They’re warm and wiggly and surprisingly opinionated.

The first time he feeds her on his own, he looks terrified.

“What if I do it wrong?”

“You won’t.”

He settles into the couch, broad frame carefully arranged around her tiny body. His flesh hand supports her head. His metal hand steadies the bottle with slow, precise movements, adjusting the angle every few seconds like he’s calibrating delicate machinery.

She latches onto the bottle with surprising determination.

“Oh,” he breathes, stunned.

Her cheeks puff in and out as she eats. There’s milk at the corner of her mouth. Her eyelids grow heavy halfway through, fluttering lazily.

By the time she’s done, she’s completely limp against him. Boneless. Milk-drunk and content. Her mouth hangs open slightly, breath warm against his shirt.

Bucky just stares.

“She looks like she just had the best day of her life.”

You smile from where you’re watching. “She probably did.”

He adjusts her carefully against his chest, letting her rest there. And something in his shoulders softens. Something in his spine unwinds.

“She trusts me,” he says quietly.

It’s not a question.

It’s wonder.

---

He becomes obsessed with the way she curls.

It happens most often after diaper changes or baths. The second she’s laid back down, her knees pull up instinctively. Her arms tuck close. Her whole body folds inward like she’s trying to recreate a shape she remembers.

The newborn scrunch.

The first time he notices it, he freezes mid-swipe of a burp cloth.

“Hey,” he calls softly. “Come look at this.”

You step closer, and there she is—tiny and folded, face scrunched in mild outrage at the cold air.

“She looks like she’s trying to go back,” he murmurs.

Your heart squeezes at the tone in his voice.

“She’ll stretch out more as she grows.”

He doesn’t like that answer.

He scoops her up before she can protest, bringing her against his chest. Instantly, she curls there too. Tucks in. Fits.

His chin rests lightly on top of her head.

“Okay,” he whispers to her. “You can stay right here for now.”

He memorizes that feeling—the way her body molds to him. The way her breathing evens out when his does. The way her tiny fingers flex against his shirt like she’s anchoring herself.

Sometimes he’ll catch himself just watching her sleep against him, counting the rise and fall of her chest like it’s the most important job in the world.

Maybe it is.

---

Parenthood, he realizes, isn’t one big transformation. It’s a hundred small ones.

It’s learning the difference between her hungry cry and her overtired cry.

It’s recognizing that little “neh” sound she makes right before she starts wailing for food.

It’s discovering she calms faster when he hums low in his chest rather than sings.

It’s the way he instinctively sways now, even when he’s holding nothing at all.

One afternoon, you find him in the nursery rocking chair long after she’s fallen asleep. He hasn’t put her down yet. He just sits there, moving gently back and forth, eyes distant.

“You can lay her down,” you whisper.

“I know.” He looks down at her, at the way her cheek is squished against his shirt, at the faint milk-sweet scent clinging to her. “I just… I don’t want to miss anything.”

You understand what he means.

He’s missed enough in his life.

He won’t miss this.

---

Weeks pass, and he grows into it without noticing.

His movements lose their hesitation. His hands become sure. The metal one that once hovered now cups the back of her head with confidence, adjusts her swaddle, pats her back in slow, steady rhythms.

He doesn’t flinch at every noise anymore.

But he still wakes before the monitor even crackles.

He still leans over the bassinet sometimes just to make sure she’s real.

One night, when the room is lit only by the faint glow of the hallway light, she wakes fussing. Not crying. Just unsettled.

Bucky lifts her first.

He presses her gently against his chest, one broad palm spanning her tiny back. She squirms for a moment, then stills. Her fist finds the collar of his shirt.

His voice is barely more than a rumble.

“I’ve got you. You’re okay.”

Her breathing slows. Her body relaxes fully against him, milk-drunk from the earlier feed and heavy with sleep. She makes a small, satisfied sigh and melts into him.

He exhales like he’s been holding it all his life.

Later, when he climbs back into bed, he doesn’t say anything dramatic. He just reaches for your hand in the dark and squeezes it.

There’s awe in him still. There probably always will be.

But it’s steadier now.

Less panic. More certainty.

He knows the nighttime noises. Knows the newborn scrunch. Knows the weight of her, the smell of her, the way she fits against him like she was always meant to be there.

And as he drifts to sleep, the bassinet pulled just a little closer to his side of the bed, one thing settles deep and solid in his chest:

For the first time in a very long time, he isn’t bracing for something to be taken.

He gestures vaguely over your shoulder. “The tall one. Broody. Looks like he could bench-press a car.”

You don’t even have to turn to know who he means.

You shrug, feigning innocence. “Oh. Him? He’s not my boyfriend.”

The guy pauses.

Slowly grins.

“Does he know that?”

You snort. “There’s nothing to know.”

It’s true. Technically.

You and Bucky aren’t dating. There was no conversation, no labels. Just a slow slide into something that looks suspiciously like commitment. Movie nights that turned into falling asleep on his chest. His spare hoodie living permanently on the back of your chair. Him showing up at your place after missions without knocking, like he belongs there.

But you never said the word boyfriend.

And neither did he.

The guy nods like he’s just been given permission. “So he wouldn’t mind if I—”

A shadow falls over you.

Heavy. Familiar.

Warm.

You don’t turn around. You don’t need to.

Bucky’s voice comes from directly behind you, low and even. “If you what?”

The guy straightens immediately. “Nothing. Just talking.”

“Yeah,” you add lightly, taking a sip of your beer. “Just talking.”

Bucky’s metal hand settles on the small of your back.

Possessive. Casual. Unmistakable.

The guy glances between you.

“Thought you said he wasn’t your boyfriend,” he says to you, smirking.

You shrug again. “He’s not.”

Bucky goes very still behind you.

You can feel it—the way his chest stops moving for half a second. The way his hand tightens just slightly at your back.

The guy raises his brows at Bucky. “You hear that?”

There’s a beat.

Then Bucky says, voice soft and dangerous, “Yeah. I heard.”

The guy laughs nervously and excuses himself within seconds, something about checking the grill. You watch him go, amused.

Then you finally turn.

Bucky’s staring at you.

Not angry.

Not exactly.

But something is simmering there.

“You’re not my boyfriend,” you repeat, teasing.

His jaw ticks.

“Funny,” he says evenly. “Could’ve sworn I’ve been acting like one.”

You tilt your head. “Have you?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He starts counting on his fingers. “Carry your groceries. Fix your sink. Sleep in your bed three nights a week. Threaten any guy who looks at you too long.”

“I never asked you to threaten anyone.”

“You never asked me not to.”

You bite back a smile.

He steps closer, crowding you just enough that your breath catches. His fingers hook into the belt loop of your shorts, tugging you in until your chest bumps his.

“So,” he murmurs, “I’m not your boyfriend.”

“Correct.”

His eyes darken.

“And you’re single?”

“Technically.”

“Technically,” he repeats, like the word offends him.

You’re enjoying this far too much.

“Why?” you ask sweetly. “Does it bother you?”

His laugh is short and humorless.

“Does it bother me,” he echoes, then leans down until his mouth is brushing your ear. “You know what bothered me?”

“What?”

“That guy thinking he had a shot.”

You hum thoughtfully. “Maybe he does.”

Bucky’s hand slides from your belt loop to your hip, gripping harder now.

“Don’t,” he warns quietly.

“Don’t what?”

“Pretend you don’t know.”

Your pulse is hammering. He smells like smoke and soap and summer air. His thumb presses into your waist like he’s staking a claim he hasn’t technically made.

“You’re not my boyfriend,” you whisper again, just to see what he’ll do.

That does it.

He pulls back just enough to look you in the eyes.

“Fine,” he says flatly.

And before you can process the tone, he turns.

And walks away.

Your stomach drops.

You didn’t expect that.

You stand there, watching him retreat toward the dock, shoulders tight, hands shoved in his pockets. He doesn’t look back.

Well.

Shit.

You make it maybe thirty seconds before following him.

He’s at the end of the dock, staring out at the water like he’s contemplating swimming to another state.

“Buck,” you say softly.

He doesn’t turn. “You’re single. Shouldn’t be out here with me.”

You wince.

“I was joking.”

“Didn’t feel like it.”

You step closer. The wood creaks under your feet.

“You know you’re the only one I want.”

Silence.

“That’s not the same thing,” he says finally.

You swallow. “Then what is?”

He turns then, and the look on his face knocks the air out of you.

Not angry.

Hurt.

“I don’t share,” he says simply. “Never have. Don’t plan on starting now.”

“I’m not sharing.”

“You just told a guy I’m not your boyfriend.”

“Because you never asked to be.”

That stops him.

You step into his space now.

“You never said it. I didn’t want to assume. I didn’t want to scare you off.”

Bucky stares at you like that possibility has never once occurred to him.

“You think I scare that easy?”

“I think you’ve lost a lot,” you say gently. “I didn’t want to push.”

His throat works.

Then, softer: “You think I’ve been sleeping in your bed, holding your hand in public, memorizing the sound of your laugh because I’m… casual?”

Heat creeps up your neck.

“When that guy asked where your boyfriend was,” he continues, stepping closer again, “I liked it.”

Your breath stutters.

“I liked that people assume I’m yours.”

You blink.

“You are,” you say immediately.

“Then say it.”

The lake is quiet behind you. The music faint from the house.

You step fully into him, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt.

“You’re my boyfriend,” you say, steady this time. “You’re my grumpy, possessive, terrifying boyfriend.”

Something in him softens.

“And you’re mine,” he says.

“Obviously.”

A ghost of a smile curves his mouth.

“Good,” he murmurs.

Then he kisses you.

A hand in your hair, the other firm at your waist, like he’s sealing something in place. Claiming. Confirming.

When he pulls back, your lips are tingling.

“So,” you say breathlessly, “does that mean you know?”

He huffs a laugh against your mouth.

His thrusts are desperate, yet measured. It’s been two weeks since he was last inside you. Two agonizing weeks. As much as he could, he’s focused on not blowing it in five minutes.

Your soft moans filling the room while your hands clutch at his thighs drive his desire higher, and he grips your hips harder, allowing himself to rut deeper.

It’s almost too much - the way you smiled with your eyes when you let him in, how you played with the ends of his too-long hair while he told you about the mission, and your warm, welcoming pussy taking it like a champ as he sinks in further yet.

“Missed you,” he groans into your neck, his breath tickling against your pulse point.

“You just missed getting your dick wet,” you counter, knowing the unspoken rules of your arrangement. You trust each other enough to get off and de-stress, but that’s where it ends. The definition of friends with benefits.

Bucky pulls back and looks at you. “I missed you.”

“You’re cunt drunk, Barnes.”

He pulls out completely and sits up. “Is it unbelievable that I could actually miss your company?”

His eyes are wide and sincere under a furrowed brow. You trace it with your finger before bringing it down across his lips. He’s never said anything like this before. It’s usually a symphony of moans, hushed praise, and sometimes a distant meow from Alpine if you’re at his place. Then one of you gets dressed and heads home. You could write an SOP on your routine.

“It’s not unbelievable,” you start, drawing your hand back. “It’s just not part of… us. Our thing.”

His mouth turns down into an involuntary frown. “Does it bother you? That I missed you?”

“No,” you answer quickly and honestly. “Is it weird that it doesn’t bother me?”

“No,” he answers just as quickly.

“Good. Glad that’s settled. Now make me come,” you whine, pulling him back toward you.

He kisses your hand and settles back inside of you. Missionary gets a lot of flack, but when you look and fuck like Bucky, there’s nothing better. He cradles your head in his cool left arm and rubs perfect circles on your clit with his warm right hand. His hips are slower now, less frenzied and more reverent. This feels different. More… intimate.

“Don’t stop,” you rasp, raking your fingers through his hair. Maybe he’ll let you trim it soon. He always comes to you instead of a barber. I trust you with scissors, he says.

“I’m not stopping,” he promises.

Your lower tummy constricts and you instinctively wrap your legs around him.

“Come on,” he encourages you. “Let go for me.”

Your eyes roll back, and you whisper his name with a strangled curse. He doesn’t slow or let you come down from the high, instead chasing his own before spilling across your stomach and thighs with another “Fuck, I missed you”.

He looks at you covered in him, and you notice a fire in his eyes, almost like possession. It lights you up in a way you haven’t felt before, and you trace a finger down your body until you meet his warmth. You collect some on your finger and bring it to your mouth, making a show of sucking it off clean.

His mouth opens, tongue darting across his lower lip as he watches you hungrily. Like you both weren’t just sated by your shared orgasm.

“Two weeks was a long time,” you say.

“Too long,” he agrees.

He gets off your bed and jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “I’ll get a washcloth for… that.”

“Thanks!” You say as he disappears from your room. You sit up, pulling the sheet up under your arms from where it has been kicked down to the foot of the bed. It always looks so easy in the movies, a lover wrapped perfectly in a bedsheet. In reality, you know it means the sex was quick and not messy enough to fuck up the bed linens. You’ll take a comforter on the floor and untucked sheets any night.

“You’re getting the sheets sticky,” he laughs softly as he walks back in with a wet washcloth.

You shrug. “I’ll wash them tomorrow.”

He peels them back and cleans up the mess he made on your skin before kissing your shoulder. Your skin tickles when his lips leave it.

“It was good to see you,” you say.

“Yeah,” he says, clicking his tongue and looking away. He reaches for his phone in his tac pants on the floor. “It’s almost 3 AM.”

“Late,” you agree. “Or early.”

“Yeah,” he agrees quietly as he gathers his clothes.

“Bucky,” you say at the same time he says your name.

“You go first,” he nods.

“I was just going to say… uh, you could stay? It’s late.”

He runs a hand through his too-long hair. “The time of night has never stopped us from leaving before.”

He’s right. You both know he’s right. But he said he missed you.

“Maybe I missed you too. You, not just… the sex,” you admit, feeling your cheeks grow hot.

“Two weeks,” he repeats. “Long time. Got me thinking…”

“Bucky,” you interrupt him. “Don’t… you don’t have to say anything you don’t mean.”

“I never do,” he answers. “Let me finish.”

You sit back against the headboard and nod for him to continue.

“I want to be here in the morning,” he says. “And not to bring you a Plan B and a breakfast burrito. I want to wake up next to you. Why can’t we try this?”

Your heart is beating rapidly in your chest. “I just… I know you like your solitude. I don’t want to ruin what you have going on.”

“So it’s not because you don’t want me? It’s because you think I prefer drinking my coffee in peace and going to bed alone?”

You nod.

“So you do want me? Too?” He asks, crossing his arms.

You nod.

He sits on the bed. “How long?”

“What?” You ask.

“How long have you wanted this to be more than a hookup?”

“A while,” you admit, reaching for his hand.

“A while,” he repeats, cupping your hand between both of his. “Scoot over. I’m done wasting our time.”

“The sheets are sticky,” you whisper, trying not to let your voice crack.

“I don’t care, sweetheart.”

—

The next morning he’s up before you, coffee brewing. He searches the cabinet for mugs, and smiles as he comes across one that says Grumpy Old Man.

You walk to the kitchen, bleary-eyed and wondering if you dreamed the night before. But there he is: shirtless, pouring coffee into two mugs in your kitchen.

“Mornin’,” he chirps. “You snore. You know that?”

You nod as he turns, eyeing the mug in his hand that you found at the thrift store a few weeks ago. It reminded you of him, and you bought it for this moment that you thought would never happen.

“This for me?” He asks, smiling at the cup.

“You’re all those things,” you say with a laugh.

He takes a drink, handing you your own cup with a kiss to your forehead.

“Let’s shower,” you suggest. “You look good in the morning.”

“Are you propositioning me?” He asks with a deep laugh.

“Absolutely I am.”

“More than friends?” He asks, holding out a pinky.

“More than friends,” you agree, swearing it.

Nothing major. Just a small gathering with a few familiar faces, some friends and agents, and good food. Maybe a few games, some music and conversations. Bucky only agreed because you batted your eyes and promised that you wouldn’t overdo it. 

As if he could ever say “no” to you. 

“You could smile a bit more, you know,” Steve teased, handing him a beer. 

He scoffed, the bottle cool against his warm hand. “I am smiling,” he argued.

His general demeanor had improved since you came into his life. He liked to think he smiled more than he scowled most days. Well, at least he smiled more when you were around. Or when he thought of you, which was all the time.

So, yeah, his demeanor was much better. 

“You only smile like that when you look at or think about your wife,” Steve pointed out, like he knew exactly what he was on his mind.

Bucky’s gaze softened immediately when he heard you laughing, watching you from where you stood a few feet away. 

You were glowing.

A pregnancy glow, yes, combined with something warmer. The dress you picked somehow flowed while showing off the shape of your body perfectly. Your smile lit up your face and you had a hand on your belly like you’d done for weeks now without thinking. It was beautiful. 

You were beautiful. 

“Can you blame me for having a smile just for her?” Bucky asked.

“Not at all,” his best friend replied. 

You shifted your weight before you took a seat, your smile brighter when you spotted Bucky watching you. He never strayed far from you. Didn’t even sip the drink in his hand. He had his eyes on you like you were the only thing in the world that mattered. 

You and Sprout. 

Pride flickered through his chest when his gaze dropped to your belly. His wife and his baby. His family. 

Everyone was waiting on you hand and foot. At least, they tried to. The moment someone tried to bring you a drink or food, he stepped in. He couldn’t help himself. Once you were taken care of, he went back to his spot. The perfect place to keep an eye on his surroundings since some old habits died hard.

And you just smiled, soft and bright. 

Steve nudged him with his shoulder. “You deserve this, you know.”

Bucky swallowed hard. It didn’t always feel like he did. The past liked to seep into his mind at unexpected moments and make the world look a little darker. Depending on the day, he’d either hug you close or take you to bed to drown out the noise. Sometimes both.

And no matter what, you made the world look brighter again.

“So, you’re saying I deserved to knock up my wife?” he joked to deflect. 

The blonde snorted. “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying,” he said, giving him a small smile. “Also saying you deserve this life.”

His chest tightened when you laughed at a joke Sam made, your head tipping back slightly and your hand going back to your belly. There was no fight to worry about. No past to haunt him. Just small precious moments like this. 

His lips twitched upward when you found his gaze again, your love for him burning bright in your eyes.

He did deserve this kind of life.

“Thanks, punk,” he mumbled, clinking their bottles together.

“Jerk.”

You turned your attention back to Sam and Bucky pushed off the wall to move closer before a voice stopped him.

Something low and careless.

“Is that chair gonna break? Jesus Christ, she’s fucking huge. How many are in there?”

The thought of domesticity and peace left Bucky’s mind, replaced by something cold and dangerous. 

You were blissfully unaware that some prick had just insulted your beautiful body, still smiling and enjoying yourself. As you should be. You only deserved good things. No one else around you seemed to notice the change in the atmosphere either.

But Steve stiffened out of the corner of his eye. He heard it. They both heard it. 

Super soldier senses really were handy at times.

Ice took over the blue of his eyes, his head slowly turning to look at the fucker stupid enough to open his mouth and even breath the same oxygen as you. A new agent with a very punchable face who wore too much cologne. There was a good chance that you kept your distance for that very reason since some smells still overwhelmed you. The snickering prick certainly wasn’t a friend of his or yours. He was only “invited” because someone else thought it would be good for him to hang out outside of work. 

That wouldn’t happen again. 

“Better snag a brownie before she stuffs her face with the whole tray.”

My wife can have all the fucking brownies she wants, you fucking piece of shit.

The bottle in his hand began to crack. It would shatter if he kept squeezing. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself.

Not yet.

“You know that’s Barnes’s wife, right?” The asshole’s friend shifted uncomfortably. “She’s really nice, and he’s… well, he’s pretty protective of her.”

Bucky’s gaze flicked back to you, much softer, before looking at the soon-to-be-dead fucker again.

No. Can’t kill the guy. I have a wife and kid to think about.

The prick had the nerve to laugh. “So? Does that give her a pass to look like a whale?”

…He’s fucking dead.

Steve took the cracked bottle from his hand. “Want me to handle him?” he asked, his voice low. 

He exhaled through his nose. Steve didn’t like bullies. Never had. But he knew why he was asking instead of just stepping in and taking care of it.

Because you were his wife. His to defend. His to love and care for. 

This was his fight.

“I got this,” he replied, subtly nodding to where you were sitting. “Just keep an eye out for a minute?”

Steve nodded in understanding, positioning himself to block your line of sight without looking too obvious. 

Bucky took deliberate steps toward the table, his movements controlled and measured. His jaw tightened the closer he got, his fingers itching to toss the guy out with his bare hands. He wouldn’t cause a scene out of respect for you. 

But he wasn’t going to stay silent. 

The atmosphere shifted the second he got to the table, the chatter ceasing immediately. 

The prick, of course, had the nerve to smile. 

“Hey, man! You-”

“You got something to say about my wife?” he asked, his voice as cold as his stare. 

The man’s eyes widened, maybe from shock that he was overheard or that he was being confronted. “I… What?”

Had no problem using your words seconds ago, asshole. 

“You were talking about her.” Bucky tilted his head slightly, his eyes flat and unreadable. “My wife.”

The air shifted more, something cold settling over the surroundings as the guy sputtered to come up with an excuse. 

“Say it again,” he ordered, placing his hands on the table and leaning down to his eye level. He made sure there was no warmth in his expression. “Where I can really hear you.”

The idiot swallowed and looked to his friend for help and found none; his friend was suddenly very interested in the beer in his hand. “Um… Barnes, I-”

“My wife, the love of my life, is carrying my child. Our child.” His lip raised in a small snarl and he leaned in enough that Agent Asshole had to back up. “And you think you can sit here and make fun of her? You think I won’t do something about it?”

“I-It was a bad joke,” he tried to reason.

Reasoning only worked with people when they were in a forgiving mood. 

He wasn’t. 

“Oh, now it’s a joke? You think you’re funny?” He smiled with no trace of friendliness behind it. It was likely how a wolf looked baring their teeth before sinking them into their prey. “You think I’ll laugh while you crack ‘jokes’ about my wife?”

The prick looked like he was a heartbeat away from pissing himself, which made Bucky question the hiring process for agents. This sort of “interrogation” was nothing. Child’s play. 

Then again, how many agents could say they had the former Winter Soldier in their space?

“I-I really didn’t mean-”

“Don’t.” His voice dropped even lower. “Don’t insult my intelligence.”

He glanced back and saw Sam looking his way, his eyes narrowing when he sensed the tension. Steve subtly shook his head. There was no reason to intervene. He was still in control.

Barely.

But you were still smiling, which was the important thing.

“You know what I see when I look at her?” he asked rhetorically, his chest tight. “I see the strongest person I’ve ever met.”

He smacked his hand on the table hard enough to make the bottles rattle and the guys flinch. 

Sam, thankfully, chose to tell another joke at the same time and Steve cackled so the noise at the table wouldn’t draw your attention.

I really do have good friends. 

“I’ll say it again. She’s carrying our baby. She’s uncomfortable and exhausted and guess what? She still walks into a room smiling and thinks of others first. And you sit here and act like she’s something to mock when she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” His jaw clenched even as his heart swelled with pride. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

The guy shrank lower as every word washed over him.

Good.

Bucky stared at him for another long moment before something colder settled into place behind his eyes.

“Get up, Chet,” he ordered.

“Chet’s” mouth fell open. “That’s not my-”

“I know what your name is, and I don’t care,” he cut him off, straightening up. “Because you don’t respect my wife, so I refuse to respect you.”

A bright shade of red passed through his cheeks before he paled. 

As someone who was stripped of his own agency for years, identity mattered to Bucky. Basic decency mattered. So, maybe it was a little petty to call him by the wrong name, but it was also a good way to put him in his place by letting him know he didn’t matter.

Chet, as his name was Chet to him now, got to his feet on shaky legs. “Sorry.”

“I’m sure you are sorry now, but it’s a little too late for that.” 

Bucky clamped a hand on the back of his neck. To just about anyone looking over, it would’ve looked casual. Almost friendly. But they would’ve missed the firm squeeze. 

“Move.”

The prick didn’t need to be told twice.

He guided him away from the table and made sure to smile as he did so. He shot his friend a quick glare for good measure, but at least he stuck up for you. That was the only reason he didn’t make him leave, too. 

The chatter continued behind him, but he barely noticed it over the sound of Chet’s pounding heart and his own blood roaring loudly in his ears. But then he heard your laughter and he took a deep breath, picturing your loving smile and hand on your belly. 

It kept him from snapping completely.

Once they were in the driveway, Bucky shoved him forward. Hard. He stumbled, but somehow managed to stay on his feet. He wished he could punch him for good measure, but he seemed like the type of coward who would cry and call the cops. 

Even if they let him off with a warning, he didn’t want to add any stress to your plate.

“Christ, man,” Chet muttered.

“You stay the fuck out of my house and never come back,” Bucky said, his voice low and lethal as he stepped forward. “And don’t you ever disrespect my wife again.”

Chet nodded quickly. Too quickly. “I won’t.”

Bucky looked every bit like the Winter Soldier wrapped in civilian clothing when he added, “You’ll never speak about her like that again. You’ll never look at her like that again. And you sure as hell will never come near my family again.”

“I understand,” he swore, his voice cracking.

“Good.” Bucky’s nostrils flared as he looked him over one last time, disgust curling in his stomach. “And the next time you come across someone pregnant, maybe try showing them some goddamn respect.”

He looked down at his feet, avoiding his gaze and swallowing any excuse he had left to give.

Fucking coward. 

Bucky pointed toward the street. “Get the fuck out of my sight.”

The idiot practically ran to his car. 

Bucky glared as he drove down the street, rolling his shoulders and cracking his neck once he disappeared. He exhaled the remainder of his anger through his mouth, his hand moving through his hair. There was nothing to be upset about anymore. Agent Asshole was gone and now he could get back to you.

Where he belonged. 

The second he walked back to the yard, his eyes found you automatically. 

Still smiling, safe, and his.

He grabbed a couple of brownies from the tray before he walked over, giving Steve and Sam two nods. One to let them know everything was fine. The other to thank them for shielding you from that display.

They nodded in return. 

You were his wife and family, but you were their family, too. 

“There’s my handsome husband. I wondered where you went off to for a minute.” You smiled up at him when he approached, his heart skipping a beat. “You okay?”

Bucky stared at you in awe. 

God, she’s so fucking beautiful it makes my chest ache.

Up close, your glow was even brighter. You looked at him like he put the sun in the sky just for you. He would if he could. And your belly moved slightly under your hands, and he wanted to feel Sprout move, too. 

“I should be asking you that,” he replied, his brows furrowing. “Are you okay? Are you thirsty? Hungry?”

He observed you carefully, looking for signs of discomfort or fatigue. The conversation with Chet and kicking him out didn’t take very long, but it felt like hours now being apart from you. Steve and Sam had been watching over you, but it wasn’t the same. 

“I’m just fine,” you assured him, and he knew you weren’t just saying that for his benefit. “But you didn’t answer my question,” you added teasingly. 

Always thinking of me. 

“Yeah,” he murmured, gentler than he had spoken all day. “Everything’s fine now.”

You studied him for a moment, sensing something underneath the surface. He didn’t falter under your gaze. There was no need to. 

“Everything’s fine now, which means it wasn’t fine before,” you guessed. 

Bucky sighed. He should’ve known you’d feel that something was off. You were too intuitive for your own good. That was one of the things he loved about you. And part of him loving you was trying to protect you from harm, physically, mentally, or verbally. 

But there was also no hiding from you, even when he did his best to shield you. 

“Just… needed to throw some trash out,” he said carefully. 

It was true. 

Chet was trash. 

“That’s one way of putting it,” Steve muttered into his drink, making Sam snort. 

Before you could question him further, he set the brownies down and crouched slightly in front of your chair so he could rest a hand gently over your belly. He didn’t chastise Sam for snapping a photo, and he didn’t care who saw him like this. The two of you were his world and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. 

“Hey, Sprout,” he murmured, his entire expression softening. “You behaving for your mama?”

The baby kicked almost immediately beneath his palm.

He smiled wide, making him temporarily forget about the dickhead he just  threw out. 

“Sprout’s just fine, too,” you promised, placing your hand on his, your gaze thoughtful. “You sure you’re okay?”

He leaned up slowly, pressing a kiss to your forehead. He remembered sitting on the couch and comforting you after the mean voice in your head made you doubt that you’d be a good mom. And how you didn’t think your stretch marks were pretty but he thought they were so beautiful. You were so strong and inspiring. His wife. The mother of his child. 

He wasn’t about to ruin your fun and relaxing afternoon by telling you what happened. 

But as much as he wanted to protect you, he would tell you later once everyone left because he refused to keep secrets from you. There was a good chance you’d cry. Not because of the cruel words spoken or hormones, but because he stuck up for you so fiercely. He would always stick up for his family. 

And if you wanted him to punish Chet even more, he’d do it without question.

That was how much he loved you. 

And he’d take you to bed later, kissing and touching every inch of you he could. He’d make you feel beautiful and cherished if any of your insecurities began to surface. He’d silence any mean voice in your head, hopefully for good, the same way you drowned out the horrors he experienced and made him feel loved. 

I love you both so much. 

“Yeah, sweetheart,” he whispered, glancing down at your stomach with so much love. “I’m better than okay.”

We all deserve to have someone in our corner. Love and thanks for reading! ❤️

You’d hummed. “You’re always screwed. What’s new?”

“I need a model for my life painting class. Carmen bailed. Again.” He’d sighed, running a hand through his hair, already smudged with ultramarine. “Professor says if I don’t log enough hours with a live figure, I can’t pass.”

You’d closed the book slowly, eyes gleaming in that way that always meant trouble. “Life painting,” you’d repeated, too innocently. “Like… nude?”

He’d groaned. “Yes, like nude.”

There had been a beat of silence. Then you’d sat up, grinning. “I mean, I can do it.”

He’d blinked at you. “What?”

“You’ve seen me just about naked,” you’d said with a shrug. “We practically grew up glued to each other. You trust me. I trust you. Paint me like one of your French girls, Buck.”

He’d rolled his eyes so hard it hurt. “That’s not even the right movie reference.”

But he hadn’t said no.

Now, two days later, you’re standing in the middle of his studio with your heart in your throat.

The space is warmer than usual, the overhead lights angled just right to mimic the setup he’ll use in class. A chaise he borrowed from the theater department sits in the center, draped in soft cream fabric. His easel is positioned a few feet away, canvas already stretched tight.

You’re in his oversized flannel and nothing else.

“Honey,” he says gently from behind the easel, not looking at you yet. “You really don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

You swallow. You can see the tips of his fingers curled around the edge of the canvas, faintly trembling. “No, no. It’s okay. I’m gonna do it.” You force a grin, even though your stomach is somersaulting. “I’m gonna show you my boobs now.”

He lets out a choked laugh. “Jesus.”

You slide the flannel off your shoulders, letting it pool at your feet. For a split second, you’re tempted to cover yourself, to cross your arms over your chest like some cliché modest statue. But you don’t. You force yourself to breathe. You’ve known him since you were six. He held your hand when you got your ears pierced. He let you cry into his shoulder after your first heartbreak. He is safe.

Still, the air feels electric the moment your skin is bare.

There’s a long pause.

Then you hear his breath hitch.

You lift your chin stubbornly. “You can look, you know. That’s kind of the point.”

He exhales slowly and steps slightly to the side so he can see you fully. The look on his face almost undoes you.

You’ve seen Bucky paint sunsets and strangers and abstract grief that made professors cry. But you’ve never seen him look at anything the way he’s looking at you now.

Reverent.

“Okay,” he murmurs, voice rough. “Sit back. Lean on your left arm. Yeah—like that.”

You lower yourself onto the chaise, shifting until you find something that feels natural. One knee bent, the other leg extended, your spine curved just slightly. Vulnerable and open.

He starts painting.

At first, it’s almost easy. The scratch of bristles on canvas is familiar. You joke about how you expect to look like a lumpy potato. He shoots back that he’s an artist, not a miracle worker. You both laugh, tension bleeding out in small, manageable doses.

But then the silence stretches.

His gaze moves slowly, mapping every line of you. The curve of your breasts, the dip of your waist, the soft slope of your hips. His eyes darken, focus sharpening in a way that makes your skin prickle.

You become acutely aware of everything—the way your nipples tighten under the lights, the way your thighs press together instinctively, the way your breathing grows shallow.

He clears his throat. “Tilt your head a little.”

You do.

“Good. Don’t move.”

You try not to.

Minutes pass. Or maybe hours. Time feels syrup-thick.

Finally, he steps out from behind the easel.

Your pulse spikes immediately.

“Can I just… adjust you really quick?” he asks quietly.

Your mouth goes dry. “Sure.”

He approaches slowly, like you’re something fragile. Something precious.

He kneels in front of you first, lightly nudging your ankle to extend your leg another inch. His fingers are warm. They linger for too long.

You feel it.

He rises to his feet, close enough that you can see the faint stubble along his jaw, the paint smudges on his collarbone. His hand comes up to your shoulder, brushing a strand of hair back.

His fingertips skim your bare skin and your breath catches.

His hand trails down—just barely—along the curve of your arm, then your waist, adjusting the angle of your hip. His thumb presses into the soft flesh there, steadying you.

You look up.

He makes the mistake of meeting your eyes.

Everything unravels.

There’s years in that look. Sleepovers and shared secrets and stolen glances at fifteen. The way he’d once almost kissed you behind the bleachers and then pretended it never happened. The way neither of you ever crossed the line.

“We’re so fucked,” you whisper.

His lips part.

And then he’s kissing you.

It’s messy and desperate and nothing like the slow, careful way he paints. His mouth crashes against yours, paint-stained fingers cupping your jaw. You gasp into him, hands fisting into his shirt, pulling him closer.

He groans, the sound low, and suddenly you’re the one dragging him down onto the chaise.

Somewhere in the chaos, a jar of paint tips over. Something splatters across the hardwood floor.

He breaks the kiss just long enough to breathe. “Tell me to stop.”

“Don’t you dare,” you pant.

That’s all he needs.

He kisses down your neck, teeth grazing your collarbone, paint-smudged hands sliding over your breasts like he’s memorizing them. You arch into him, breath hitching as his thumb brushes your nipple, spreading a streak of cobalt blue across your skin.

“Jesus,” he mutters. “You’re unreal.”

You tug at his shirt, desperate. “Take it off.”

Clothes disappear in frantic handfuls. His jeans hit the floor with a thud. Your laugh dissolves into a moan when he presses you back against the chaise, body covering yours completely.

There’s paint everywhere now—on your hips, on his chest, smeared between you like some abstract masterpiece.

He moves against you slowly at first, like he’s still afraid this might vanish. Like you might change your mind.

You don’t.

Your nails drag down his back. His name falls from your lips in a breathless plea. When he finally sinks into you, the both of you gasp like it’s a revelation.

It’s messy. It’s heated. It’s years of restraint snapping in one explosive moment.

Paint streaks across your thighs as he moves. His forehead presses to yours. You feel him everywhere—warm and solid and yours.

“Baby,” he whispers like it’s a prayer.

You cling to him, breath shaking. “Don’t ever sweep this under the rug again.”

He laughs softly, kissing you harder as everything crashes into something blinding and overwhelming and perfect.

Later, you’re tangled together on the studio floor, half-covered in dried paint and discarded fabric.

The canvas stands abandoned behind you.

You trace lazy patterns over his chest, smearing what’s left of green across his skin. “So,” you murmur.

“So,” he echoes.

You tilt your head, studying him with a small smile. “Are you in as deep as me?”

He snorts softly. “Yeah. Probably.”

“Probably?”

He rolls you beneath him again, grinning in that way that used to make you blush at fourteen. “Definitely.”

You’d been waiting on the couch in one of his old henleys, legs tucked beneath you, the fabric skimming your thighs. Three weeks he’d been gone. Three weeks of texts that grew shorter and sharper the longer he stayed away.

You knew that look in his eyes the second he met yours.

Exhaustion wrapped in armor.

“Hey, soldier,” you said softly, standing. “Come here.”

He crossed the room, but he didn’t reach for you the way he usually did. No immediate tug into his chest. No burying his face into your neck like he needed your skin to remember who he was.

Instead, he dropped onto the couch with a heavy exhale, elbows braced on his knees as he stared at the floor.

“Rough one?” you asked quietly, stepping between his spread thighs.

“Too many ghosts,” he muttered. His voice sounded like gravel. “Felt the old programming whispering again. Had to shut it out.”

Your fingers slid through his hair, brushing it back from his forehead. He leaned into the touch for half a second before catching himself and straightening.

“I’m fine,” he said automatically.

“You’re not.”

You cupped his jaw, thumb stroking over the stubble there. “You’re wound so tight I’m worried you’ll snap. Let me help.”

His blue eyes flicked up to yours, wary.

“Doll, I’m not—”

“I know.”

You kissed him slowly, soft and patient. He kissed you back instantly—hungry, desperate, familiar—but when your hand drifted down his chest toward his belt, he caught your wrist.

“You don’t have to,” he said roughly. “I’d rather focus on you. That’s what I need.”

Your chest ached at how practiced the response sounded.

Because lately, every intimate moment had become about you.

His mouth. His hands. His body.

Always making you come apart while he held himself back like pleasure was something dangerous. Like accepting it would mean accepting the love attached to it, too.

Like he still couldn’t separate being wanted from being useful.

“Bucky,” you whispered, kneeling between his legs. “I want this. I want to take care of you for once.”

Conflict flickered across his face immediately.

The tension in him was everywhere—corded neck, clenched fists, the stiffness in his spine. For a moment you thought he’d shut down completely.

Then, finally, he gave the smallest nod.

You undid his belt slowly, deliberately, watching the way his breathing changed with every touch. By the time you freed him from his jeans, he was already half-hard, heavy against his stomach.

Your hand wrapped around him gently.

Bucky’s head tipped back against the couch with a broken groan.

“Fuck… baby.”

You stroked him slowly, twisting your wrist at the head the way you knew he liked. His metal fingers dug into the couch cushion while his flesh hand rested lightly in your hair—not guiding, not controlling.

Just holding on.

Like he needed the reminder that this was real.

You leaned forward, pressing a soft kiss to the inside of his thigh before taking him into your mouth. The sound he made was wrecked immediately, low and helpless in a way he rarely allowed himself to be.

“Jesus Christ.”

You worked him carefully, slow and warm, letting him feel every ounce of affection behind it. His thighs trembled beneath your hands. His breathing turned uneven.

And still, even now, he tried to hold himself together.

“Slow down,” he rasped. “I’m not gonna last if you keep—”

You pulled back just enough to look up at him, hand still stroking him steadily.

“Good,” you whispered. “I want you to let go.”

That did something to him.

You saw it happen in real time—that final crack in the control he held onto so desperately.

His eyes darkened as he watched you. Vulnerable. Bare. Almost frightened by how badly he wanted this.

Wanted you.

You took him deep again with a soft hum, and his hand tightened carefully in your hair as his thighs shook beneath you.

“Doll—shit—I’m—”

He came with a guttural moan, head falling back against the couch as every bit of tension snapped at once.

When you finally pulled away, wiping your mouth gently, Bucky looked stunned.

Completely wrecked.

His chest heaved beneath the open collar of his shirt, cheeks flushed pink, shoulders finally loose for the first time since he’d walked through the door.

You climbed into his lap immediately, straddling him.

His arms wrapped around you on instinct, pulling you flush against his chest like he couldn’t stand even an inch of distance now.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he whispered into your hair, voice cracking slightly.

“I wanted to.”

You pulled back just enough to look at him properly.

“I love you, Bucky. Not what you can do for me. Not what you can survive. You.”

Something fragile crossed his face at that.

His metal hand lifted to your cheek with impossible gentleness.

“I don’t know how to let somebody love me like that yet,” he admitted quietly. “Spent too long thinking I didn’t deserve it.”

You kissed him slowly, letting him feel every word you didn’t say aloud.

“Then we keep practicing.”

His forehead rested against yours for a moment before the kiss deepened again naturally, heat building slow and sweet between you. His hands slipped beneath the hem of your shirt—his shirt—palming over bare skin like he needed to reassure himself you were still there.

This time, when he laid you down on the couch beneath him, there was no frantic rush to make it about you first.

Bucky settled between your thighs, letting you guide him inside with one smooth thrust while he buried his face in your neck with a shaky exhale.

“Move, baby,” you whispered against his ear. “Let me feel you.”

And he did.

Slow, deep strokes that felt less like sex and more like surrender.

Every sound he let himself make felt like a victory. Every gasp against your skin, every quiet groan, every trembling breath.

You whispered praise into his ear the entire time—how good he felt, how safe he was here, how loved he was—until his rhythm finally broke and he came again with your name breathed against your throat, pulling you apart with him in one warm, rolling wave.

Afterward, wrapped together beneath a throw blanket, Bucky traced lazy patterns along your back with cool metal fingertips.

The tension was gone now.

In its place was something softer.

Quieter.

“I’m still gonna struggle with this,” he admitted eventually. “Old habits die hard.”

You pressed a kiss to his collarbone.

“I know. But I’m not going anywhere.”

His arms tightened around you instantly.