StanTastic-Association

You barely made it to the couch before you collapsed, groaning as you buried your face in the cushion. You only lifted your head to breathe and check your phone when it went off. A smile touched your lips when you sat that Bucky texted you. 

No matter how rough the days were, your boyfriend was a bright spot.

“Barely heard from you today, sweetheart. You okay?”

Your heart sank when you scrolled through the chat. You usually sent him memes or gifs that you knew would make him laugh, along with sweet messages to let him know you were thinking of him. Today you hardly sent a thing with everything going on.

It was touching that he noticed something was off.

“Rough day. Sorry I worried you.”

You curled up with a yawn, the phone resting beside you.

“Just resting my eyes,” you mumbled.

You weren’t sure how much time had passed when the familiar rumble of a motorcycle engine cut through the quiet of your apartment, making you sit up slowly. Your heart fluttered, not needing to look out the window because you knew exactly who was there. One of your favorite people.

Bucky.

Your Bucky.

The sudden knock at the door sounded impatient as you stood up and stretched. You almost laughed when the knock continued, louder and more persistent. Maybe it was time to give him a key.

You barely got the door open before Bucky pushed his way inside, forcing you to step back as he kicked the door shut without taking his eyes off you. Your breath rushed out of your lungs when you looked him over. The sight of him in a leather jacket always did something to you.

But the crease between his brows pushed the excitement away. 

“Bucky?” you asked.

A small sound left your mouth when he wrapped an arm around your waist and pulled you against him. His other hand came up to cradle the back of your head, his hold protective and tender. It felt like your feet weren’t on the ground. 

“I’m here,” he answered, his voice rough and low. “I’ve got you.”

You felt his heart beat against you steadily, grounding you as your fingers curled in his jacket. The scent of leather and cologne filled your nostrils as you took a deep breath. Your eyes burned suddenly when he held you tighter, almost like he was giving you permission to fall apart if you wanted to. It wasn’t just a hug.

It was exactly what you needed without realizing it.

“I’ve got you,” he said again, his lips touching your temple.

You didn’t break down, but you did sniffle.

“Today sucked,” you said, proud of yourself for not pouting.

It sounded ridiculous. Bucky had lived through years of torture, brainwashing and more. You hadn’t experienced even a tenth of the pain he endured and you were whining about-

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said sincerely, rubbing your back soothingly. He never invalidated your feelings. “I’ll listen if you wanna talk about it, or I can punch something or someone if it makes you feel better.”

You let out a watery laugh. “No punching,” you said, pulling back far enough to look at him. “Did you really speed all the way here because I said I had a rough day? I know you sped.”

“I may have.” The small smile on his face made you smile. “You tell me something like that and you think I won’t drop everything to get to you?”

Your heart skipped a beat. No other boyfriend dropped whatever they were doing to get to you in the past. But Bucky always managed to find ways to put you first. The male species could learn a thing or two from him.

“You were probably busy,” you guessed.

“Doesn’t matter. Nothing’s more important than you.”

Your eyes burned again, but you blinked the tears away. “Thank you.”

The corners of his eyes crinkled. “You don’t have to thank me for showing up,” he said, grasping your chin carefully. “Can I do one more thing?”

His mouth found yours before you finished nodding.

It wasn’t a rushed or hungry kiss. It was something warm and impossibly gentle, like the grip on your chin, a kind of kiss that resonated in your core. He deepened it, like he needed a reminder that you were real and safe as he comforted you. 

It felt like love.

His forehead rested against yours when he broke the kiss. “Did that help at all?” he asked, his breath ghosting your lips and thumb stroking your chin.

“More than you know,” you murmured, leaning into him. 

“Good.” He pressed another soft kiss to the corner of your mouth. “Did you eat?”

Your silence answered that question.

He sighed, not waiting for permission as he walked you backward toward your couch. “I’m ordering your favorite,” he said, pulling you onto his lap once he took a seat. His jacket was still on. “And I’m gonna hold you until it gets here, feed you if you let me, and do whatever you want for the rest of the night.”

You settled into him, your body truly relaxing this time. “Even watch a bad romcom?” you asked, still in awe of how much he wanted to take care of you.

He rested his chin on your shoulder. “If that’s what helps.”

“Getting a hug and kiss from you did wonders,” you said honestly.

Knowing that someone saw you made a world of difference. 

“Wonders, huh? Didn’t know I was that powerful,” he teased, taking out his phone to order.

You giggled and titled your head a bit. “You didn’t tell me about your day.”

“I got to see you,” he said, smiling gently. “So it’s a good day.”

And being in Bucky’s arms made your day much better.

I know a hug and kiss from Bucky would help me, okay? Love and thanks for reading! ❤️

You'd been assigned to him, more or less. Some liaison arrangement, a name on a form. You were supposed to help him with the practical things – the phone, the money, the hundred small humiliations of a world that assumed he already knew. And on the first day you'd taken one look at the list they'd given you, the tidy little curriculum for reassembling Captain America, and you'd folded it in half and dropped it in the trash and said, “Okay. Forget all that. What do you actually want to know?”

He'd stared at you.

Nobody had asked him that.

Not once.

Not what do you need to be able to do but what do you want.

He hadn't had an answer ready. So you'd made him one. You'd started small – coffee, the good kind, from the place on the corner that you swore by and he came to swear by too. Music, but not the important music, not the canon they kept trying to hand him; you played him ridiculous things, songs about nothing, and laughed when he frowned, and slowly, slowly, the frown had learned to be a smile again.

You were the one who made the century small enough to hold.

And here was the thing Steve knew about himself, the thing he did not say out loud, the thing that lived underneath his gratitude like rebar under concrete: he had studied you.

He didn't think of it that way, not usually. But it was what he'd done. In those first raw months, when the whole world was noise, you had been the one clear signal, and he had turned the full force of his attention on you the way he'd once turned it on a map before a drop. He'd learned you. Your moods, your tells, the particular quality your silence took on when you were happy versus when you were hiding something. The way you took your coffee. The two friends you'd cut out of your life and the reasons. The exact register of your laugh when it was real and the slightly higher one you used when you were being polite.

He told himself it was love. Attention like that – surely that was love.

He didn't examine, too closely, the part of him that had always been most at peace when he knew a thing well enough to move it.

Two years. Then three. Somewhere in there the assignment had quietly dissolved and left behind the realest thing in his life. You were his best friend. That word was true and he leaned on it. Best friend. He said it to himself like a boundary. Like a wall he was keeping up.

He was very good at keeping up walls right until the moment he decided to take one down.

Here was the thing Steve did not know, in all his careful study, for all his reconnaissance.

You were in love with him.

You had been for longer than you'd admit to yourself, and much longer than you'd ever admit to him. It had come on the way these things do – not a lightning strike but a slow tide, a rising, until one day you'd looked at him laughing in your kitchen over some song you'd played to torment him and realized the water was already at your throat.

You never told him. Of course you never told him.

You had your reasons, and they were the mirror image of his, though neither of you would ever know it. You were his best friend. You were the person who'd caught him when he fell out of the sky and into the wrong life, and you were not going to be the one who made it weird, who wanted more, who looked at Captain America – at Steve, your Steve, who left his socks on your radiator and argued with you about films – and dared to think mine.

So you held it.

You got good at holding it.

You dated other people, sometimes, in a distracted half-hearted way, and none of it took, and you told yourself that was just how it was for you, that you were picky, that you'd never met the right anyone.

You had. That was the joke of it. You'd met him and made his coffee for three years and never told him and never would.

Steve missed all of it.

He missed it because he wasn't looking for it – because in his model of you, the one he'd built so carefully, you were the sun and he was the man grateful for the warmth, and the sun didn't want, the sun just shone. He had never once let himself imagine that the way you touched his arm when you laughed might be the same thing that lived in him, held just as still, just as hidden.

But here was where the missing got complicated. Here was where a decent man's blindness started to shade into something else.

Because Steve, not knowing you loved him, still could not stand the men who tried to love you.

There'd been a few, over the years. A colleague of yours who'd asked you to dinner. A man from your building. Someone you'd met at a wedding and lit up about for a week. And every single time, without ever once raising his voice, without ever doing a single thing you could point to, Steve had found himself in the middle of it.

Nothing so crude as forbidding. He'd never. He was your friend; he only wanted you happy – he told himself this constantly, and the telling had the slightly overworked quality of a man reinforcing a floor he suspects won't hold weight.

But he'd ask questions. Gentle ones.

The colleague – did he seem like he really listened to you, or did he just wait for his turn to talk? The man from the building – didn't it seem a little convenient, how fast he was moving? The wedding one – and here Steve had been at his best, his most careful – Steve had simply been around, more than usual, that whole week. Present. Attentive. Making your apartment the warmest place you could be, so that the pull of somewhere colder and newer never quite caught.

He'd tell himself he was protecting you. Looking out for you. That was what a friend did.

He never let himself finish the other sentence. The one that went: and if I keep you close enough, keep the warmth turned up high enough, no one else ever gets a real hold on you.

He never finished it. But he ran the strategy all the same, the way a body breathes without being told. A man who had spent a war learning that you don't win by attacking – you win by controlling the ground, by patience, by making sure that when the moment comes, it comes on terrain you've already shaped.

He was playing a long game. He'd have been horrified to hear it called that. He'd have believed, sincerely, hand on heart, that he was just being a good friend.

That was what made it work. On you. On himself.

It came out on a night that was like a hundred other nights, which was why it caught you both off guard.

Rain. Your apartment. The second bottle of wine, opened with the specific recklessness of two people who have nowhere to be in the morning. Some film playing that neither of you was watching. You were sprawled on the couch with your feet tucked under his thigh, the way you'd been sitting for years, a closeness so worn-in that neither of you flinched at it anymore.

He was watching your profile in the blue light of the screen. He did that more than you knew.

You'd been talking about a man. A recent one – a date, two dates, a third that had ended at your door with a question you'd answered by saying goodnight and stepping inside alone. You were telling it as a funny story. You were good at that, turning the ache of your own life into something you could laugh at from a safe distance.

“–and I could tell he thought that was it, you know,” you were saying.

“Like, third date, obviously. He had the whole face on. And I just–”

You made a small helpless gesture with your wine glass.

"I couldn't.”

“Because you didn't want to,” Steve said. Carefully. Reading you.

“Because I never do.”

You said it lightly, but something had shifted under it, some floor giving way, and you'd had exactly enough wine to keep walking out onto it.

“That's the– okay. Don't make it a thing.”

“I won't make it a thing.”

“I mean it, Steve.”

“I know you mean it.”

You looked at him for a long moment, and he held very still, the way he'd learned to, and then you laughed – the higher laugh, the covering one – and said it.

“I've never actually had sex. With anyone. Full stop.”

You waved the glass again, a whole life dismissed in a gesture.

“There. The world's oldest– whatever. It just never happened. And now it's this whole–”

“You're not old,” he said, automatically, and it came out rougher than he meant.

“–thing in my head,” you finished, ignoring him, because you needed to get to the end of it now that you'd started. “And I don't want you to think it's because I'm– God, some blushing innocent girl. I'm not. I know what I like. I've had a lot of time to figure out what I like.”

You said it with a flash of something almost defiant, and he watched your mouth make the words and felt the room tilt.

“I just never let anyone– that far. That's all. It stopped being about the thing and started being about who gets to–”

You stopped.

You looked into your wine.

“Who gets to be the one,” you finished, quiet now. “And nobody ever was.”

Steve did not move.

Outside, the rain kept on. The film murmured to itself, unwatched. Your feet were still tucked warm under his thigh and he was aware of every point of contact between you like a man aware of a live wire.

He should have said something kind and friendly and safe. He had a whole vocabulary for that. That's nothing to be embarrassed about. The right person will come along. You deserve someone who understands what a gift that is.

He didn't say any of it.

Because something had happened in him in the space of your last three sentences, something fast and total and quiet as a door closing, and it had rearranged him from the inside, and when he opened his mouth he honestly did not know what was going to come out.

Who gets to be the one.

And nobody ever was.

Here was what happened inside Steve Rogers in that moment, and this was the truth of him, the part he'd spend a long time not admitting even after he'd admitted everything else.

His first feeling was not tenderness.

Tenderness came. It came a half-second later and it was real, an ache at the thought of you carrying this, at the flash of defiance you'd needed to defend yourself against a hurt no one had even landed yet.

But the first thing – the very first thing, the thing that arrived before he could dress it in anything better – was mine.

Not a word.

Faster than a word.

A kind of heat that went through his whole body and closed a fist around something at the base of him.

The knowledge, sudden and absolute, that there was a first, still, out there in your future – a man, some man, some faceless deserving man who'd get to be the one – and that Steve wanted, with a violence that frightened him, for that man not to exist.

He didn't want you to have a first who wasn't him.

He examined the thought, in the fractional silence, the way you'd turn a strange coin in your fingers. He was good at examining his own thoughts; the war had made him honest, at least in the privacy of his skull.

And what he found, under the tenderness, under the years of best-friend and the sun doesn't want, was this: he didn't just want to be your first.

He wanted to be your last.

That was the shape of it.

Not a night.

Not a favor.

Not some noble one-time kindness to spare you a lesser man.

He wanted to be the one and stay the one, wanted to close the door behind him and have there be no more afters, wanted – the word came to him plainly, and he didn't flinch from it the way he should have – to keep you.

A quieter man might have been ashamed.

Steve was ashamed, distantly, the way you register weather through a window.

But mostly, God help him, mostly he was clear. Clearer than he'd been in three years. All that careful holding-still, all those walls, all the times he'd told himself the sun didn't want – it fell away, and what was left was appetite with a strategy attached, and the strategy came to him already half-built, because some part of him had been building it for a long, long time.

He couldn't just tell you. He knew that in the same breath. If he told you now – best friend, wine, rain, your feet warm under his thigh – you'd panic. You'd rebuild the wall between you before he finished the sentence. He knew you. He knew you the way he knew the load of a shield in his hand, and he knew that the direct assault would lose.

So he wouldn't make the direct assault.

He'd do what he was good at. He'd shape the ground.

He looked at you, and he let none of it show – not the heat, not the mine, not the plan already assembling itself behind his steady friendly eyes – and when he spoke his voice was gentle, and warm, and exactly, precisely the voice of a man who wanted nothing for himself.

“Hey,” he said softly. “Look at me.”

You did.

“You didn't do anything wrong,” he told you. “Waiting for someone who's the one. That's not a thing that's wrong with you.”

He let a beat pass.

Let it land.

Then, easy, almost offhand, planting the first seed so lightly you'd never feel the soil move, “Honestly? I think it says you've got better sense than everyone I know. You held out for it to matter. Most people would kill to have done that.”

Something eased in your face. He watched it ease. He'd known it would.

“You think?” you said.

“I know,” he said.

And he smiled at you – the good smile, the one you'd rebuilt out of a broken century, the one you trusted absolutely – and he tucked the blanket a little more snugly over your feet where they rested against him, a small warm gesture of a man taking care of his friend, and inside the calm cathedral of himself Steve Rogers began, quietly and without any hurry at all, to plan how he was going to become the one.

He had time.

That was the beauty of it.

He was patient; the war had taught him patience, and love had taught him more.

He'd move slow. He'd move so slow you'd never see it as moving. He'd make himself the warmest place in your whole cold new world, warmer than any man who ever asked you to dinner, so that when the moment came – and he'd know the moment, he'd make the moment – it would feel to you like the most natural thing in the world.

Like your own idea.

Like coming home.

He'd give you a first you didn't have to be brave for.

And once he was your first – once you'd let him that far, further than you'd ever let anyone – well…

He didn't let himself finish that one either. But the shape of it sat warm and certain in his chest as the rain came down, and your feet were tucked against him, and the film played on, unwatched, telling its little story to no one.

First, he thought, watching your profile in the blue light.

And last.

You had no idea. You leaned your head back against the arm of the couch and let his kindness settle over you like the blanket, grateful, unguarded, feeling – for the first time all night – completely safe.

You were, of course, exactly the opposite of safe.

You'd never been more thoroughly in someone's sights in your life.

But it felt like being loved. It felt, from the inside, precisely like being loved.

That was the whole trouble with Steve Rogers.

It always did.

He didn't move for three weeks.

That was the part no one would have believed of him, if anyone had been watching – and no one was, that was rather the point.

Three weeks of nothing.

Three weeks of being, in every visible particular, exactly the friend he'd always been.

But underneath, he was watering what he'd planted.

He did it so gently you'd never have called it anything. He simply returned to the thing, now and then, from oblique angles.

A film you watched together where a couple waited years for each other, and Steve, offhand, eyes on the screen, “See, that's the thing people don't get. Waiting for the right one isn't weakness. It's the opposite.”

He didn't look at you when he said it.

He didn't have to.

He felt you go still beside him, felt the words go in and find the soil he'd already turned.

A week later, a friend of yours got engaged, and you were happy for her and a little raw underneath, and Steve was there for that too – present, warm, and somewhere in the evening he said, easy as anything,

“You know what I've always thought about you? You're not waiting because you're scared. You're waiting because you know what it should feel like. That's rare. Most people just settle.”

You know what it should feel like.

He watched the sentence do its work over the following days.

He was patient.

He'd learned in a war that the ground does most of the fighting for you, if you shape it right and wait.

And you – you didn't know you were being shaped.

You only knew that lately, when the old ache came, the one about being the last of your friends to have never, Steve's voice was there in your head to meet it. Not making you feel broken. Making you feel chosen by your own restraint.

Turning the wound into something almost like pride.

You didn't notice that the voice comforting you and the ache it comforted had started coming from the same place.

That was the craft of it. He didn't just want to be your first. He wanted you to arrive at him feeling like it was the wisest thing you'd ever done.

He chose the night the way he'd once chosen drop zones.

He didn't force it.

He waited for the conditions and let them assemble, and when they did – a Friday, rain again because the rain was on his side, a week where you'd been tired and worn thin and had said, twice, that you just wanted to be somewhere that felt safe – he simply made sure the somewhere was him.

He cooked.

He didn't usually cook; he made a point of it now, and made a point of it looking effortless, so that you'd arrive at his door and be met with warmth and food and low light and the particular gravity of a room that has been made ready for you without ever announcing that it has.

You didn't notice the candle.

You noticed you felt better the second you were through the door, and you didn't ask why, because that was what his apartment always did to you, and you'd never once wondered whether that was an accident.

It was not an accident. It had never been an accident.

You ate. You drank a little – not much; he watched that too, careful, because he did not want a version of this you could tell yourself later hadn't been real.

He wanted you clear.

He wanted you to choose it. The choosing was the whole prize.

And he let the evening soften into the shape it always took, you curled into the corner of his couch, him near, the rain, the low light, the safety he'd built for you brick by brick over three years and you'd never once seen the trowel.

He waited until you brought it up yourself.

He'd known you would. He'd shaped the whole night so you would. And you did – sideways, the way you always came at the tender things, some joke about the engaged friend, about being the last one standing, and the laugh you used to armor it.

He didn't laugh with you this time.

He let a silence open instead. And into the silence, gently, like setting something down that he'd been carrying a long way, Steve said:

“Can I tell you something I've been thinking?”

He'd rehearsed it.

Of course he'd rehearsed it.

He'd rehearsed it in the shower and on his runs and lying awake, editing, the way he'd rehearsed the last one, except this time he'd learned from watching you for three weeks exactly which words would land and which would spook you, and he'd built the speech to your specifications without you ever knowing you'd given them.

But he delivered it like a man thinking out loud.

That was the art.

Nothing rehearsed.

Just a friend, arriving in real time at a hard, honest thing.

He started with you. Always start with them; make it about them.

He said he hated that you carried this like a weight. That someone had made it a wound. That you were the least broken person he knew and it killed him a little that you didn't see it.

He watched your face soften and open.

Then he moved – one careful step, so smooth it didn't feel like a step at all.

He said the thing he was about to say, he was only saying because he was your friend. That he needed you to hear it that way. No expectations. Nothing owed. Nothing changed. He needed to say that part first, he said, because otherwise he'd lose his nerve.

Nothing changed.

The oldest lie in his arsenal, and he laid it down first, deliberately, because a lie told up front lowers the guard against everything after it.

And then – gentle, reluctant, a man dragging the words up against his own modesty, a performance so good he half-believed it himself – he offered.

He said he didn't want your first to be someone who'd be careless with it. Someone who'd take a thing that mattered and not understand that it mattered.

He said the word he'd built the whole campaign on, the one he'd planted in you three weeks ago and watered ever since – someone who makes it matter – and he watched it land in the exact soil he'd prepared, watched you recognize your own comfort in his mouth, watched it feel to you like being understood.

He said, if you ever wanted – if it would take the weight off – it could be him.

Because he was your friend.

Because he'd be gentle.

Because he'd take care of you, and make it good, and never once make you feel like the thing that man had made you feel.

He ran the whole thing so warm, so selfless, so entirely about you, that the want underneath it never showed – the mine, the first and last, the fist that had closed at the base of him three weeks ago and never once let go.

He kept all of that behind his steady friendly eyes, where he kept everything, and he let you see only the kindness.

And then he stopped.

And he let the silence do the last of the work.

He'd learned, in a war, that you don't take the ground. You make the ground so untenable that the other side walks into your arms believing it was their idea.

He watched your face. He read every flicker of it. He'd been reading it for three years.

He saw the moment you decided.

He saw it before you knew it yourself.

“Okay,” you said.

Quiet. Barely more than breath.

But he heard it land in the room like a struck bell, and something in his chest surged so hard he had to hold his face still against it.

“Yeah?” he said.

Soft.

Careful.

Give it back to them gently, let them feel it was freely given.

“Yeah.”

You laughed a little, shaky, and it wasn't the armored laugh, it was a real one, undefended, and it went through him like sunlight through the wrong century.

“God. Yeah. I– with you. It should be– of course it should be you. Who else would I–”

Who else.

He'd built that, too.

The whole architecture of who else. Three years of being the warmest place in your world so that when the question came there'd be no other answer in the room.

It had worked. It had all worked. He should have felt like a man who'd won.

He did feel that. He felt it low and hot and certain.

But he felt, too – and this surprised him, this he hadn't planned for – a swell of something enormous and unbearably tender, because you'd said of course it should be you with your whole open face, and for one vertiginous second he forgot the campaign entirely and was just a man in love who'd been told yes.

That was the strange thing about Steve Rogers.

Even the manipulation ran on something real.

Especially the manipulation.

He reached over.

He took your hand – didn't pull you, didn't move toward the bedroom, didn't do a single thing to break the spell by making it suddenly, crudely, about the act.

He'd thought about this part, too.

He was not going to rush you. Rushing you was for lesser men, the careless ones, the ones he'd spent three years defining himself against.

He was going to hold you right here, on this threshold, in the warm ruin of your yes, and he was going to let it be enormous.

Because if the first thing after your yes was a scramble toward a bedroom, some part of you might flinch, might feel it become transactional, might wake up.

He wasn't going to let you wake up.

So he just held your hand.

And looked at you.

And let the moment stretch until it was almost too much to bear, until the whole air of the room had changed, gone thick and slow and charged, until you could feel your own heartbeat in your throat.

“We don't have to do anything right now,” he said, low.

And you'd have sworn – you did swear, to yourself, in that moment – that it was the kindest thing anyone had ever said to you.

You didn't hear the other thing in it.

The patience of a man who'd waited three weeks and could wait one more hour, because he knew that making you wait now, holding you here trembling on the edge of it, was going to make everything after so much more completely his.

“I know,” you said. “I just– can we just–”

“Yeah,” he said. “We can.”

And he settled back, and drew you in against his side, and you let yourself be drawn, your yes still ringing in the air between you like the note after a bell, unspent, everything still ahead of you, nothing crossed yet.

His heart was slamming.

Yours was too.

Neither of you moved toward the door that both of you were now, unmistakably, going to walk through.

He looked down at the top of your head, tucked against him, trusting, chosen, caught.

First, he thought, and this time he let himself finish it, slow, savoring it, the whole long game folding shut around you like a hand.

And last.

The rain came down. The candle he was sure you hadn't noticed burned lower. And Steve Rogers held you on the threshold he'd spent three weeks building you toward, and did not, for one more perfect suspended minute, move.

It wasn't that night. That was the first thing that surprised you.

You'd said yes on his couch, in the warm ruin of the rain, and some part of you had braced for the rest of it to happen then and there – for him to lead you to his bed while the yes was still ringing.

He didn't.

He held you on the threshold and let it be enormous and then, when the candle had burned low and the hour had gone soft, he'd walked you to the door and kissed your forehead and said goodnight.

You'd lain awake most of that night not knowing whether to be relieved or bereft.

What you didn't understand – what you wouldn't understand for a long time – was that the waiting was also his.

That a man who has spent three weeks and one careful evening bringing you exactly here does not squander it on a single unplanned night.

He wanted it chosen.

He wanted you to walk toward it in daylight, awake, sober, with days to change your mind and no wine to blame – because a yes you could take back and didn't was worth infinitely more to him than a yes he'd caught you in.

So the days passed.

Four of them.

And they were strange, luminous, unbearable days.

Because now it was between you.

He'd hand you a coffee and your fingers would brush and you'd both go quiet a half-second too long.

He'd text you something stupid and you'd read it eleven times.

The whole architecture of your friendship, three years of it, had been picked up and set down one degree to the left, and everything looked the same and nothing was.

Now it lived in every ordinary thing.

He'd hand you a coffee and your fingers would brush and you'd both go quiet a half-second too long. He'd text you something stupid and you'd read it eleven times. The whole architecture of your friendship, three years of it, had been picked up and set down one degree to the left, and everything looked the same and nothing was.

And this was the part that undid you – he talked to you about it. Like it was ordinary. Like it was allowed.

“I don't want it to be weird,” he said, on the phone, on the second night, his voice low in your ear in the dark.

“I want you to actually think about it. What you want. How you want it. If you change your mind at any point, even walking in the door, even after– you tell me and it stops. I mean that.”

“I know you mean it” you said, and you did, and that was somehow the most dangerous part of all.

“And if you don't change your mind,” he went on, careful, “then– Friday? Your place?”

Your place.

He'd chosen that too, though you didn't clock it.

Your bed. Your room. Somewhere you'd feel safe, somewhere that was yours – so that when he took it, it would feel like being kept rather than taken.

“Friday,” you said. “My place.”

You heard him breathe out, slow, on the other end of the line. You thought it was nerves.

It was a man watching the last piece of a very long game slide quietly into place.

“Friday,” he agreed. “I'll bring dinner. We don't have to rush anything. We've got all the time in the world.”

He said that a lot, that week. All the time in the world. You thought it was reassurance.

It was a promise.

You just didn't know yet what he was promising.

On Thursday, you were off all evening, and he clocked it inside four minutes.

That was the trouble with being known by Steve Rogers. Three years of a man studying your face the way other people study scripture, and there was nowhere left in you to hide a mood. You'd arrived at his door on the third day with takeout and a smile that didn't reach anywhere, and you'd been fine, determinedly fine, aggressively fine, all through dinner.

He let you be fine for an hour and a half. He was patient like that.

Then he put down his fork and said, “Okay. What is it.”

“What's what?”

“You've laughed at three things tonight and you didn't mean any of them.”

You looked at him. He looked back, unmoving, with that terrible mild patience of his, the one that had gotten more out of you over three years than any interrogation ever could.

“It's nothing.”

“It's not nothing. You've been chewing on something since you got here.” He tilted his head. “Is it Friday?”

And there it was, said out loud, in his kitchen, over cold noodles. Friday. The word had been sitting between you for three days like a lit fuse and neither of you had touched it.

“No,” you said.

Then, “Sort of.”

Then, because his eyebrows had gone up a quarter inch and that was somehow worse than any question, “It's stupid. Steve, it's genuinely stupid, can we not–”

“You're allowed to change your mind.” He said it fast, and something in his voice had gone very slightly wrong at the edges. “I meant that. Any point. You don't have to have a reason, you just say the word and it's–”

“That's not it either.”

He waited.

God, he was good at waiting.

He'd sit there all night.

He'd sit there for a week.

And the silence he made was never cold or expectant, it was warm and patient and completely unbearable, and it pulled things out of you the way heat pulls water.

You cracked in about nine seconds.

“How many people have you slept with?”

Steve blinked.

Whatever he'd been braced for, it hadn't been that. You watched him actually recalibrate – watched the careful machine of him stop, reverse, and start again in an entirely different direction.

“...Why?”

“Forget it–”

“No. Hey.” He leaned forward. “No, I'm not– I'm not dodging. I'm asking why, because I want to answer the actual question and I don't know what it is yet.”

You put your hands over your face.

“Because you've done this,” you said, into your palms. “That's the– okay, look. You've had women. Obviously you've had women, you're–” a helpless gesture at all of him, “–that, and it's been three years, and you're not a monk, and I never asked because it wasn't my business, and now it's Friday and it is my business, sort of, and I keep–”

You stopped.

“You keep what,” he said quietly.

“I keep thinking about them.” Your voice had gone small. “Whoever they were. That they knew what they were doing. That they were– that you have something to compare me to and I've got nothing, I've got nothing, I don't know how to do a single part of this and you're going to be so–”

“Don't say bored.”

“I was going to say disappointed.”

Something crossed his face that you couldn't read.

He got up. Came around the table. Crouched down beside your chair so that he was lower than you, looking up, which was a thing he did sometimes and which you'd never once been able to withstand.

“Okay,” he said. “Ask me properly. I'll answer anything. Straight.”

So you did, because you'd already humiliated yourself and there was nothing left to protect.

“How many?”

“Few.” He said it without flinching. “Since the ice– three. One that lasted about eight months, back at the start. Two that didn't last at all.” A pause. “Before the ice, none. For the record. I was a hundred and ten pounds and nobody was interested, and then there was a war on.”

“Eight months.”

“Eight months.”

“Did you love her?”

He considered it. He didn't rush to say no, which somehow you respected and hated in equal measure.

“I wanted to,” he said finally.

“I tried pretty hard. She was kind, and she deserved better than a man who was – ” He stopped. Restarted. “I wasn't really there. She said that, actually. At the end. She said it was like living with someone who was waiting for a phone call.”

You didn't understand, then, what he was telling you.

You would, later. On a grey morning, in the clear light, with all the pieces laid out. You'd count backwards and realize that the eight months had ended about two years ago, right about the time a man had looked up in this kitchen and noticed the shape of your hands, and you'd understand exactly what phone call he'd been waiting for.

But that was later. Right then you just sat there feeling worse.

“Great,” you said. “So there's an eight-month person. Who presumably knew how to–”

“Hey.”

“–and I'm going to be lying there like a–”

“Hey.” His hands closed over yours in your lap. “Look at me. You want the straight answer? Here's the straight answer. I can't remember her face without trying.”

You went quiet.

“That's not me being cruel about her,” he said. “She was a good person and she didn't do anything wrong. It's just true. I've had three, and I couldn't tell you one specific thing about a single one of those nights, and I've been sitting in this apartment for three days now unable to think about anything except–”

He stopped.

Very suddenly. Like a man who has walked to the exact edge of a cliff at speed and put his heel down just in time.

The kitchen was very quiet.

“Except what?” you asked.

Here was what was happening inside Steve Rogers at that moment, and it was not what you thought.

He was cornered. Genuinely cornered, for the first time in three years of careful navigation – and by his own hand, which was the galling part.

Because he'd built this whole thing on a lie of omission.

I'm doing this for you. No expectations. Nothing changes.

He'd told you it was a kindness, and the trouble with telling someone it's a kindness is that it makes them the charity case, and now you were sitting in his kitchen with your hands shaking under his, believing you were a favor he was doing, believing there were better women in his past that you'd be measured against.

And he could fix it.

Instantly.

One sentence would fix it, and the sentence was I have wanted you for two years and there has never been anyone else in the room, not once, not ever, they were all just places I was standing while I waited for you.

He couldn't say it.

Not yet.

Not three days out, not with the whole thing balanced this delicately, not when saying it now might spook you into calling Friday off – because he knew you, he knew what you did when something got too big, you ran, you laughed it off and rebuilt the wall and he'd have to spend another year getting back to here.

So he did the thing he was best at.

He told you the truth – as much of it as he could afford, and not one word more. He gave you the edge of it and let you believe the edge was the whole.

“Except you,” he said.

Your breath caught.

“That's– Steve–”

“Three days,” he said, low. “I haven't slept much. I keep–”

He shook his head, and the frustration in it was completely real, which was what made it work.

“You think you've got nothing to offer. You think you're gonna disappoint me. I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to tell you that I've been half out of my mind since Friday got put on the table and it's got nothing to do with being helpful.”

“But you said–”

“I know what I said.”

You stared at him.

He held your gaze and let you look, and he let just enough of it show – not all of it, never all of it, but enough. Enough that something in your chest turned over hard.

“I don't understand,” you said.

“I know.” He squeezed your hands. “You don't have to yet.”

And then he moved you off it – deftly, warmly, the way he moved you off everything.

“Here's the part I do want you to hear,” he said, “because it's the part that's actually true and I need you to stop carrying it. Ready?”

You nodded.

“There's nothing to be good at.”

“That's not–”

“There isn't.” He said it with total conviction.

“That's a thing people made up to sell you something. Nobody's grading it. There's no technique that matters more than–” he searched for it, “– than the person actually wanting to be there. That's it. That's the whole thing. And the idea that you'd need to perform for me, that you'd be lying there worried you're not–”

He broke off, and something flashed across his face that you'd never seen before, something with a great deal of heat in it.

“That's not going to be a problem,” he said. “I promise you that's not going to be a problem.”

“You can't know that.”

“I can,” he said. “I do.”

And there was such flat, absolute, unarguable certainty in it – the certainty of a man who has run this scenario in his head several hundred times and knows precisely how it goes – that you felt the ground shift under you.

“Okay,” you said faintly.

“And for what it's worth.” He got up, sat back down in his own chair, and reached over to steal a piece of your food, so casual, so ordinary, so completely deliberate. “The comparison thing works both ways.”

“What does that mean?”

He shrugged, eyes on his plate.

“Means they're not the ones who spent three years learning what your face does,” he said. “So I'd say I'm at something of an advantage.”

You laughed. It surprised you, coming out.

He smiled at his plate, and let you laugh, and did not look up – because if you'd seen his face in that moment, all the careful work would have been for nothing.

Three years learning what your face does.

He'd told you the truth. He kept doing that, all week, in small unbearable increments – offering you the actual shape of it in pieces you weren't yet able to assemble, so that later, when you finally could, you would understand that he had never once lied.

Only ever waited for you to catch up.

“Friday,” you said.

“Friday,” he agreed.

And he thought, watching you go back to your food with your shoulders finally loose and every day after that, if I've done this right.

Friday came the way you'd been half-dreading and half-dying for it to come.

He arrived with food and you barely ate it. You both knew you wouldn't, really; the dinner was a courtesy, a soft place to land the first hour, a way to let your nerves burn down to embers before anything else.

He was good at that.

He was good at making you feel like there was no clock, even as he watched the evening move exactly where he'd meant it to.

He kissed you standing, in the middle of your living room, with the rain going on the windows and the dinner neither of you had eaten gone cold behind you.

He took your face in both hands to do it.

That was the thing that undid you first – not the kiss, the hands.

The way he framed your jaw between them, thumbs along your cheekbones, tilting you up like something he'd been given permission to hold at last.

Careful.

Almost formal.

As if after three years of not being allowed, he intended to do this properly.

The kiss was soft.

Softer than you'd expected from a man that size. He kissed you like he had all night – because he did, because he'd made sure of it – slow closed-mouth presses that asked and asked and never once pushed. His breath was warm on your upper lip. His thumb moved once against your cheek.

You'd waited three years for this. Three years of standing in kitchens and doorways and not letting yourself, and now it was happening and it was gentle, and something in you went molten and impatient all at once.

So you bit him.

Not hard. Just caught his lower lip between your teeth and pulled, a small deliberate provocation, more instinct than plan.

Steve made a sound like he'd been struck.

And the careful thing broke.

It happened fast. His hands left your face and found you properly – one at your waist, one at the small of your back – and he moved you, three steps, no effort at all, until your shoulders met the wall.

Not hard.

He'd never put you into a wall hard. But the ease of it, the sheer thoughtless strength of being relocated by a man who could do it without straining, punched a moan straight out of you before you'd decided to make one.

Because you felt him then. All of him, all at once. The whole solid front of him pressed flush against you from chest to hip, and it was so much – so much more real than anything you’d ever conjured alone in the dark – that your knees genuinely went. You could feel the thick, heavy line of his cock already hard against your stomach, straining against his jeans, and the heat of it made your mouth go dry.

“Fuck,” he breathed against your mouth, voice rough. “‘M sorry. Been waiting three years to feel you like this. Sorry, too much?”

“Don't you dare apologize.”

He laughed, wrecked, and kissed you again, and this time it wasn't soft at all.

It went hot in the space of a breath.

His mouth opened over yours and yours opened under his and it stopped being careful entirely – teeth catching, tongues sliding, the graceless wet urgency of two people who have waited far too long for a thing and have suddenly stopped being polite about it

He kissed you like he was trying to get through you. You kissed him back like you'd been drowning.

His hands didn’t stay still. One kept its grip at your waist, fingers spanning half your ribcage, holding you exactly where he wanted you against the wall. The other went into your hair and held – cradling your skull, tilting your head where he needed it, giving him the angle he wanted so he could fuck his tongue into your mouth deeper.

You couldn't breathe properly.

Neither could he.

Between kisses there were these ragged half-seconds where you both just gasped into each other's mouths, foreheads pressed, and then one of you would go back in like it hurt not to.

And then he slid his thigh between yours.

You didn’t even register it happening. One second there was space and the next there was the hard, thick muscle of his leg pressed up tight between your thighs, taking your weight, holding you up when your legs had stopped bothering. The seam of your jeans dragged right against your clit with every tiny shift, and you were already so wet the fabric felt soaked through.

You made a sound into his mouth. He swallowed it.

“There it is,” he murmured, rough, dragging his mouth along your jaw. “There’s that sound. God, you have no idea– three years I’ve wondered what you’d sound like when you finally stopped holding back. Three years I’ve thought about getting my hands on you and finding out.”

He didn't finish it. He bit the side of your throat instead, open-mouthed and greedy, and you keened.

He’d meant it to be slower.

That was the thing. He’d planned this – of course he’d planned this, he’d been planning it for months, every careful conversation, every soft offer to “make sure it was someone who actually gave a damn” – and in the plan this part was fifteen minutes of taking the edge off your nerves before he moved you toward the bedroom and began, slowly, methodically, the careful hours of work he’d mapped out in his head.

He was managing it. Just about. His control was fraying but it was holding.

And then he felt you move.

He went absolutely still.

Not stopped-kissing still.

Something deeper.

A stillness that started somewhere behind his sternum and spread outward, because his body had just registered a piece of information his mind was three full seconds behind on.

You were rocking against his thigh.

Small. Slow. An unhurried little roll of your hips, back and forward, grinding your cunt against the hard muscle of his leg, seeking the pressure of him, entirely without instruction – and when he made himself pull back an inch to look at you, he understood in one glance that you had no idea you were doing it.

None. Not a shred of awareness.

Your eyes were half open and gone somewhere far away. Your mouth was red and swollen and slack from him, still parted, still chasing. Both your hands were buried in his hair, fisted tight enough to sting. And your hips just kept going, small helpless movements, riding the muscle of his thigh with the unthinking single-mindedness of a body that had stopped consulting anybody about what it wanted.

You weren't performing. You weren't trying to be anything. You weren't even present enough to be embarrassed.

Steve stared at you.

Something enormous turned over in his chest.

Because here was the thing he had never allowed himself to properly imagine, not in three years, not in a single one of the shameful careful fantasies he'd built and dismantled in the dark: that you might want him like this.

Not sweetly. Not gratefully. Not as a favor accepted from a good friend.

Like an appetite. Like a woman with a body that knew exactly what it was after and had gotten tired of waiting.

She's not innocent, he thought, dazed. God help me. She’s just never been touched. And she wants it. She wants me.

And he almost let it happen.

He came so close. Every animal part of him wanted to press his thigh up harder and hold you there and watch you come apart against him in your own hallway – and for one long second his hand actually moved to your hip to help, fingers digging in, guiding the roll of your body so the seam of your jeans dragged tighter over your clit.

Then he stopped.

Because he'd promised himself something four days ago, lying awake, rehearsing.

Not against a wall. Not in a hallway with her shoes still on.

Not the first time.

He had spent three years getting here and he was not going to spend the first thing you ever felt from another person on a rushed ten minutes in a corridor. He wanted you on a bed. He wanted hours. He wanted to watch your face when he finally pushed inside you.

So he took his thigh away.

The sound you made was awful.

A high, thin, wrecked little whine, muffled against his throat, so entirely undone and so completely unlike anything you’d ever let him hear that it nearly finished him where he stood. Your hips kept moving anyway, chasing the pressure that was no longer there, cunt clenching around nothing.

“I know,” he breathed. “I know. I know, sweetheart– you were right there, weren’t you? I felt it. You were gonna come on my leg like that.”

“Steve–” You were shaking. Your hips were still moving, mindless. “Please, I was– I was almost–”

“I know you were.” His voice was barely holding together. His hands slid down, gripped the backs of your thighs hard enough to leave marks. “That’s exactly why I’m not letting you. Not here. Not like this. I’ve waited too fucking long to take you against a wall for the first time.”

And he picked you up.

Just lifted you, straight off the floor, as effortlessly as picking up a coat – and your legs went around him on pure instinct and your arms went around his neck and the sound you made this time was different, because the position had put you flush against him, directly against the thick, hard length of his cock, nothing between you now but two layers of ruined clothing.

You ground down on him without deciding to. Hard. The ridge of him dragged right against your clit through the fabric and a broken sound punched out of both of you at the same time.

He staggered half a step.

“Baby.”

“I can't– I can't stop–”

“Then don’t.” He got his mouth back on yours, kissing you as he walked, taking the whole weight of you on one forearm so the other hand could hold your face. “Don’t stop. Rub yourself on me all you want. Just don’t come. Not yet. Give me one more minute, that’s all I’m asking–”

You whimpered into his mouth and rolled your hips anyway, shameless, grinding your soaked cunt against the hard line of him with every step, and he laughed, breathless and ruined, and kept walking.

The hallway was three metres long. It took a while.

Your shirt went first – he’d got it halfway off you against the wall and you finished it, dragging it over your head, throwing it somewhere that turned out to be the kitchen. His went next, and it was you who did that too, both hands under the hem and shoving, desperate for skin. He had to set you down for two seconds to get it over his head and you both made frustrated noises about the two seconds of separation.

One of your shoes came off in the corridor. The other one you kicked at the bedroom door and it hit the frame and bounced.

He got you up again. You got your legs back around him. He walked you the last few feet with your mouth on his throat and his hands full of your ass and his belt half undone by fingers that had no business being that clumsy. You could feel how hard he was, the thick shape of him trapped against your stomach, and every step made you grind harder against it.

By the time you made it to the bed, most of it was gone. The rest went in a graceless heap somewhere between the door and the mattress – jeans, underwear, the last of your clothes – neither of you looking, neither of you caring, both of you making sounds into each other’s mouths that would have mortified you in daylight.

And then there was nothing left, and he was carrying you bare against him, skin on skin down the whole length of you. You felt the heavy, hot weight of his cock trapped between your bodies, the head of it already slick against your stomach, and you both stopped dead at the shock of it.

He held you there. Breathing hard. Forehead against yours. His hands were shaking where they gripped the backs of your thighs.

“Okay,” he managed, voice wrecked. “Okay. Look at me.”

“Okay,” you agreed. Neither of you moved. You could feel how wet you were against him, the slick heat of your cunt pressed right against the underside of his cock.

He turned to lay you down on the bed.

And stopped.

You felt it happen – felt the whole enormous frame of him go rigid, felt the change in his breathing – and you lifted your head from his shoulder to see what he was looking at.

Oh, God.

The nightstand. Half-tucked behind the lamp, where you'd meant it to live out of sight and had entirely, catastrophically forgotten it would be visible from this angle, held in these arms, naked, tonight of all nights.

Small. Yellow. Absurd.

A little rubber duck, except for the shield painted on its chest, and the tiny painted mask, and the unmistakable, ridiculous, unmissable A on its forehead.

“Oh my God.” You said it into his shoulder. “Oh my God. Steve. That's not– okay, that is not–”

“Whose is that.” Quiet. Not cold. Quiet.

“A friend gave it to me.” The words came out in a rush, muffled, desperate. “As a joke, it was a birthday thing, everyone laughed, she thought it was hilarious– because of you, obviously, because I never shut up about–”

You stopped.

You’d said too much and not nearly enough, and you were naked, wrapped around him, held off the ground by a man whose bare skin was pressed to every inch of yours – the thick, hot length of his cock trapped between your bodies, the head of it already slick against your stomach – and the horror of it and the heat of it hit you at the exact same moment and came out of you as a sound that was not a word at all.

Because you were still at the very edge. He’d taken you to the brink in your own hallway and left you there, and your whole body was still humming and furious about it, cunt still throbbing and empty, and now this – his arms, his chest, the shameful little yellow thing on the nightstand, the sheer overload of it…

You moaned. Right against his throat. Helpless. Your hips rolled once, involuntary, dragging your wetness along the underside of his cock.

He felt it. Every part of him felt it.

“A joke,” he said.

“Steve–”

“And you used it?”

The question dropped into the dark and stopped everything.

You could have lied. He felt you decide not to. He felt the truth come up through you, hot and honest, and you lifted your chin the smallest fraction – that flash of defiance that told him you were not, whatever else, some blushing innocent – and you said it.

“Yes.”

One word.

It went through him like a struck match through paper.

Because there it was – the thing he’d told himself he was too decent to feel. You’d taken him – this ridiculous painted duck-version of him, this joke, this stand-in – and in the privacy of this room, alone, in the dark, you’d spread your legs and pressed that little yellow body between them and come with his face in your head. Every other man who’d ever asked you to dinner had been turned away at the door, and the only version of anyone you had ever let into this bed had been him.

Even as a joke. Even in rubber. It had been him.

The possessiveness that took him then wasn’t a thought. It was tidal. It closed over the last of his careful decency and pulled it under without a sound.

He didn’t touch the duck. He’d get to it. He’d get to it in his own time, and the knowledge of that sat in him warm and patient and certain.

“Okay,” he said, very softly, and you heard the change in him – the way his voice dropped into something darker, rougher, almost hungry – and your breath caught. “Okay, baby. So you’ve been using me to get yourself off. For how long?”

You didn’t answer. You couldn’t.

He laid you down.

And then he stopped, and looked at you, and didn't touch you at all.

You’d have squirmed under it if you’d had the coordination left. He was kneeling over you, braced on one arm, completely naked, cock heavy and flushed against his stomach, and he was just… looking. Taking his time about it. His eyes moving over you slowly, thoroughly, from your face down the length of your body and back up again, lingering on your breasts, the soft curve of your stomach, the wet shine between your thighs, like a man reading something he’d been told about for years and had never been allowed to see.

“Steve–”

“Give me a second.” His voice was unrecognisable – low, rough, almost reverent. “Three years I’ve imagined what you’d look like under me. Give me one second to actually see it.”

So you lay there and let him look, and watched what it did to his face, and it was almost worse than being touched. His cock twitched visibly against his stomach. A bead of precome welled at the tip and slid down the underside.

Then he took his time – which, after the hallway, after being carried, after being left shaking on the very edge of it, was almost cruel.

He touched you like a man with nowhere else in the world to be. Slow palms up the outsides of your thighs, spreading them wider. Along your ribs, thumbs spread wide so they brushed the undersides of your breasts. His mouth at your throat, your collarbone, the soft give beneath – unhurried, methodical, learning you by hand and by inches while you writhed underneath him and made sounds you’d have been mortified by in daylight. Every time his fingers drifted close to where you needed them most he pulled them away again, stroking the crease of your thigh instead, feeling how wet you’d already gotten just from being looked at.

You told him, at least three times, that you were going to lose your mind.

“I know,” he murmured, into your skin, entirely unmoved. “I know. Almost. I’ve waited three years to get my hands on you. I’m not rushing the first time I get to touch you like this.”

“You left me–”

“I did.” Not sorry. Not remotely sorry. His mouth moved lower, open and wet against the soft skin just above your navel. “I wanted the first time you came for me to be right here. In this bed. With my fingers inside you and my mouth on you so I could watch every second of it.”

“That’s–” You had to stop and breathe when his tongue dipped into your navel. “That’s a horrible thing to do to someone.”

You felt it more than heard it – the warm huff of air, the curve of his mouth.

“Probably,” he agreed. “But I’ve been hard for you since the second I walked through your door, and I’ve been thinking about this exact moment for months. You’re going to have to live with it.”

And you understood, dimly, through the fog – the way you understand a thing you won't be able to name until much later – that he was enjoying this. Not the way a man enjoys being generous. The way a man enjoys having something exactly where he wants it, after a very long wait.

And then he touched you properly, and you stopped being able to form sentences.

The first thing was the shock of how different it was.

That was what nobody had ever told you. You knew your own body – you’d had years alone in this room with nothing but time and a joke made of rubber, you weren’t some blank page – but you had never once considered that another person’s hand would feel like an entirely different category of thing.

You couldn’t predict it. That was the difference. You didn’t know what was coming next, or how long it would last, or when it would change, and your body couldn’t brace for any of it – so every single thing he did landed unguarded, straight through, nothing between you and the sensation at all.

His fingers slid through the soaking folds of you, parting them, and the sound was obscenely wet. You made a noise like you’d been hurt. His head came up instantly.

“Okay?”

“Don't stop. Don't you dare stop–”

“Not stopping.” His mouth came back to your jaw, voice rough against your skin. “Not stopping, sweetheart. Just checking. Fuck, you’re soaked. Is this all for me? Or is some of it left over from thinking about that little yellow duck while you touched yourself?”

It didn't take long. It couldn't have.

You’d been strung tight since the hallway, since before the hallway, since a Tuesday in his kitchen four days ago – and he knew it, and he used it. He read every twitch of you, every hitch of your breath, adjusting to each one, cataloguing in that ruthless observant way of his exactly what made you shake and exactly what made you sob.

Three years of watching your face for the smallest tells, put to this.

Two thick fingers circled your entrance, gathering slick, then pressed inside you in one slow, steady push. The stretch made your back arch off the bed. He curled them immediately, searching, and when he found the spot that made your whole body jolt he made a low, satisfied sound against your throat that you would think about for weeks afterward.

“There,” he said, voice dark with triumph. “There it is. That’s the place you’ve been rubbing that little duck against, isn’t it? Right here.”

“Steve–”

“I know. I’ve got it now.” Something had come into his voice that hadn’t been there before. Something certain. Something almost proprietary. “I’ve got you. I’m not going to lose it again.”

He didn’t. He held that exact angle, merciless, and worked his fingers inside you in slow, deep strokes while his thumb found your clit and rubbed firm, steady circles. It built in you fast and hot and impossible, and you had a moment of genuine panic – of I can’t, it’s too much, this is too much with someone watching – and he felt even that, because of course he did.

“Yes you can.” His forehead against your temple. His breath ragged now too; he wasn’t unaffected at all, he was breathing like he’d been running, hips shifting restlessly against the mattress so his cock dragged against your thigh. “Yes, you can. You’re going to come on my fingers exactly like this. Let me see it. Please– sweetheart, let me see what you look like when you finally let go for me–”

Then he kissed you.

And that was what finished you: his mouth over yours, swallowing every sound you made, taking them straight out of you as they came – as if he’d decided that if he couldn’t have the rest of you yet, he’d have those.

You broke apart underneath him.

He watched every second of it.

Your cunt clenched hard around his fingers in rhythmic pulses, so tight he groaned into your mouth. Slick flooded his hand. Your thighs shook violently on either side of his wrist. He kept working you through it, slower now but relentless, dragging every last tremor out of you while he watched.

He’d kept his face inches from yours the whole time for exactly that reason. He wanted the front-row seat and he took it, and he watched you come apart under his hand with an expression you had never seen on him in three years and would not be able to describe afterward – something between reverence and hunger and a kind of naked disbelief.

Three years, he was thinking. Three years and it looks like that.

It was better than the fantasy. It was so much better than the fantasy that the fantasy seemed insulting in hindsight – thin, polite, invented by a man who hadn't known anything.

When it finally released you, you were boneless. Shaking. Your hand had fisted so hard in the sheet that it took a moment to unclench. You could feel how wet his fingers still were inside you, the slow, filthy slide of them as he gently eased the intensity.

He pressed his mouth to your temple and held you through the aftershocks, murmuring things against your skin.

“There,” he said. There was wonder in it. And something much darker underneath. “There you are. That’s what you look like when you come for me. Fuck, baby. I’ve been imagining that for so long and it still wasn’t enough.”

You couldn’t speak. You couldn’t do anything but breathe.

“Okay?” he asked, voice softer now, though his fingers were still buried inside you, still moving in the slowest, laziest strokes, like he couldn’t bring himself to pull them out yet.

You managed a nod.

He kissed you again – softly this time, almost sweetly, at odds with everything – and when he drew back his eyes had gone very dark. He slowly withdrew his fingers, watched the way your body tried to clench around the emptiness, then brought them up between you so you could both see how they glistened.

“That’s one,” he murmured, and licked them clean without looking away from your face.

Something in the way he said it made your stomach drop.

He moved to shift you – hands at your hips, turning you, guiding you up onto your knees to face the mirror in the corner, beginning the thing he'd been building toward for three years–

And you caught his wrist.

He stopped instantly. Every part of him stopped. His eyes came to yours in the dark, alert, already scanning your face for the thing he'd promised he'd watch for. “Hey. Hey– we can stop, if you want to stop–”

“No.” Your fingers stayed closed around his wrist. You could barely get all the way around it. “No, I just–”

You were steadier now. That was the thing. The edge had come off; the desperate humming urgency that had run you since the hallway had finally, mercifully quieted, and in its place was something calmer and far more dangerous: you could think again. You could look at him.

And you had been wanting to touch him for three years.

You had to make yourself say it. It came out smaller than you'd meant.

“Can I touch you first?”

Steve went completely still.

And here was what you did not know, and could not have known, and would not understand until much later.

That question was not in the plan.

He'd planned everything. Every hour of the last four days, every word of the three weeks before them, three years of shaped ground and patient warmth and doors quietly closed on other men. He had run this night in his head so many times he could have recited it. He knew what he'd do, and how slowly, and in what order, and what he'd say when you got frightened, and how he'd make it painless, and exactly how he intended to ruin you for anyone who ever came after.

In none of it – not once, not in a single version – had it occurred to him that you might want to touch him.

He'd never imagined being on the receiving end. That wasn't a thing that happened to him. He was the one who gave; that was the whole architecture of him, the shield, the plan, the man who takes care of it. Nobody took care of Steve Rogers. Nobody had reached for him in seventy years and meant it.

“You–” His voice came out strange. “You want to?”

“Is that okay?”

He made a sound. It wasn't a word. He nodded, once, jerkily, like a man agreeing to something whose terms he hadn't understood.

So you touched him.

You weren’t an expert. You had no idea what you were doing and you didn’t pretend otherwise – you just put your hands on him, at last, after three years of not, after three years of that constant low ache of proximity, and you let yourself learn him.

His chest first. Flat palms, spread wide, the ridiculous solidity of him under your hands. The heat of his skin. The way the muscle jumped the second you made contact. You felt his breath go wrong immediately – a sharp, broken inhale that he tried and failed to hide.

Then slower. The line of his collarbone. The old pale seam of a scar under his ribs that you’d never seen and had no story for. The heavy shift of muscle in his shoulder when he swallowed. You mapped him the way you’d wanted to for years and never once let yourself, and every place you touched, something in him jumped. His cock, still hard and heavy between you, twitched against your stomach when your thumbs brushed over his nipples.

“Okay,” he breathed. “Okay– fuck–”

He was trembling. This enormous man, trembling under your hands like it hurt.

You put your mouth on him – his sternum, the hollow at the base of his throat, the place where his pulse was going wild – and he made a low broken sound and his hand came up to the back of your head. Not guiding. Just holding on, the way you hold onto something in weather. His fingers flexed in your hair every time your tongue dragged over his skin.

“You’re allowed,” you murmured against his throat, because you could feel how still he was making himself, how hard he was working to simply let this happen. “Steve. You’re allowed to want it. You’re allowed to feel it.”

“I don’t–” He stopped. Started again, wrecked. “I’m not used to– nobody’s– it’s been so fucking long since anyone–”

“I know.”

You didn’t, entirely.

But you felt it: the way a man goes rigid when someone is kind to him in a way he has no defense against. You’d spent three years watching him take care of everyone in his orbit. It had never once occurred to you either, until this moment, how long it had been since anyone had touched Steve Rogers just because they wanted to.

You went lower.

Your mouth traced the center line of his chest, then the hard ridges of his stomach. Your hands followed, sliding down the deep V of muscle that led straight to where he was thick and flushed and leaking against his own skin. When your fingers finally wrapped around him – tentative, learning the weight and the heat and the way he pulsed in your grip – he made a sound that was almost a sob.

He let you. For a while, he let you – and he was so unguarded about it, so vocal, so entirely undone by having hands on him after seventy years of nobody, that it went to your head like wine. Every sound he made was involuntary. Every one of them was because of you. His hips gave tiny, aborted thrusts into your fist, like he couldn’t stop them. Precome slicked your fingers. His thighs were shaking.

For now you weren’t the one being managed. He was in your hands, and he was coming apart, and you were the one doing it.

Then his hand closed around your wrist, hard.

“Stop.” Ragged. Urgent. “Stop, you have to– sweetheart, stop.”

You froze. “Did I–”

“No. God, no.” He was breathing like he’d run somewhere. His eyes were shut, his jaw locked, his whole body strung tight as a wire. His cock throbbed hot and heavy in your grip, so hard it looked almost painful. “You didn’t do anything wrong. That’s the– that’s exactly the problem. You keep going and I’m going to come in your hand like a fucking teenager and that is not how tonight is supposed to go.”

It took him a moment to get himself back. You watched him do it: the long haul of a man dragging his own control into place by main force, one breath at a time. His hand was still locked around your wrist, keeping you from stroking him again.

When he opened his eyes they were black.

“Not like that,” he said, low. “Not tonight. Tonight you get all of it. Every inch. I’m not finishing anywhere except inside you.”

“Steve–”

“Do you have any idea,” he said, and his voice had gone rough and strange, almost shaking, “how many times I’ve thought about this? How many times I’ve jerked off thinking about finally getting to push inside you and feel you take me? How many times I’ve had to stop myself from just showing up at your door and begging?”

He stopped himself. Visibly. The end of that sentence sat between you, enormous, unsaid – but the damage was already done. You could see it in his face: the raw, hungry truth he hadn’t meant to let out.

He exhaled hard through his nose, then reached up and cupped your face with both hands, thumbs stroking your cheekbones like he needed the contact to stay grounded.

“Later,” he said, quieter, but no less intense. “You can touch me as much as you want later. You can take me apart if that’s what you need. But not tonight. Tonight I need to be the one who does it. I need to be the one who takes care of you. Can you give me that?”

Later.

You'd think about it a great deal, afterward – about how many things that man had put in the box marked later, and how long the box had been full, and what it must have cost him to carry it around for three years, smiling at you over coffee.

He kissed you then, hard, and turned you.

Gentle hands on your hips, guiding, until you were kneeling up on the bed facing the tall mirror in the corner – the full-length one, the one you saw yourself in every ordinary morning, that had never once seen anything like this.

You saw yourself in it. Bare, kneeling, undone. Cheeks flushed, mouth swollen, thighs already shiny with how wet you still were.

And then you saw him rise up behind you, broad and solid, and settle in close, chest to your back, and meet your eyes in the glass.

His breath was still short. You could hear it – could feel it uneven against your shoulder, not yet recovered from what your hands had done to him – and there was something enormously satisfying about that. About having put it there. His cock, still hard and heavy, rested against the small of your back, leaving a wet smear of precome on your skin every time either of you shifted.

“I want you to see,” he murmured, low, against your ear. “I want you watching. I want you to see who’s finally touching you. Who’s going to be the first one inside you.”

He didn’t finish the thought out loud. He didn’t have to. It was already the truest thing in the room.

Then he reached over to the nightstand.

You knew what he was doing before his hand closed on it. You’d known since the way he’d looked at the little yellow duck and set it down and made you wait – and knowing didn’t help at all.

“Steve.” Your voice came out thin. “Steve, no, that’s– that’s not–”

“Mmmh-hmm.”

He picked it up.

It sat in his palm, small and yellow and absolutely ridiculous, and he turned it over once with his thumb the way he had the first time, and the sound you made was half a laugh and half a sob and entirely disbelief.

He pressed a slow, open-mouthed kiss to the side of your throat.

“No,” he said, warm and wrecked and almost amused. “No, we’re not wasting this. You used me. You put this little thing between your legs in the dark and thought about my hands, my mouth, my cock. Now I get to use it on you while you watch.”

“That’s not– it’s not the same thing–”

“It’s exactly the same thing.” His mouth moved to the shell of your ear, voice dropping even lower. “You were in this bed, in this room, in the dark, with this. Thinking about me. Coming with my name in your head.”

A pause, deliberate, cruel.

“Weren’t you?”

You didn’t answer. Your reflection in the mirror looked wrecked already – eyes wide, lips parted, chest rising too fast.

“Sweetheart.” Softer. Absolutely relentless. “Were you thinking about me when you used it?”

“…Yes.”

“Yeah,” he breathed, and there was something in it that was not amusement at all – something dark and hungry and deeply satisfied. “Yeah. Well. Now you don’t have to pretend. Now it’s actually me.”

“Steve, I can’t– I just– I just came, I can’t–”

“You can.”

Total certainty. No room in it anywhere. He was already settling the little yellow duck into place, low and sure, pressing the curved head of it right against your still-swollen clit, exactly where you’d set it yourself all those nights – and the sheer indignity of that, of him knowing precisely where, of him being right, burned through you hot and shameful and somehow made everything tighter.

“You will,” he said against your ear. “Trust me.”

And he thumbed it to life.

The sound was absurd. A small ridiculous hum in the dark, comic, the sort of noise that should have made you both laugh – and for exactly half a second it did, you felt the laugh start in your chest–

And then it landed.

On nerves still raw and singing from what he’d done to you ten minutes ago. Everything oversensitised, everything already wrung out, and your whole body went rigid and then bowed backward against his chest with a sound that had nothing funny in it at all. The vibration was sharp, focused, merciless against your clit. Your thighs jerked. A fresh rush of wetness slicked the insides of them.

The comedy burned clean out of the room.

“Steve–”

“I know.” Rough, against your nape. “Too much?”

“I don’t– I don’t know–”

“Then we’ll find out.”

His other hand came up to your throat.

Not squeezing. Never that – he’d have died first. Just there: a warm broad span across the front of your neck, no real pressure at all, only enough to keep your head level and your chin up and your eyes forward.

Only enough to keep you facing the glass.

That was the whole purpose of it, and you understood the purpose about a second after it was too late to object. You couldn’t look away. You couldn’t drop your head, couldn’t turn into his shoulder, couldn’t hide your face the way every instinct in you was screaming to – because that hand was there, patient and immovable, and it held you exactly where he wanted you.

“Watch,” he said against your nape, voice low and rough. “Look at yourself. Look at what you look like when I’ve got you like this.”

“I can’t–”

“You can.” His mouth moved down: the curve of your neck, the point of your shoulder, unhurried, worshipful, taking his time about it while the little yellow vibrator kept humming steadily against your clit. “You can, and you’re going to. That’s the whole point of tonight. I want you to see every second of it. I want you to watch yourself come apart for me.”

So you watched.

And that was the thing that undid you – not the hum, not his hands, not even the shameful little object he was holding against you. It was the mirror.

You saw your own face, flushed and open-mouthed. You saw the way your breasts moved with every shaky breath. You saw his big hand spanning your throat, his other hand working the vibrator in slow, deliberate circles that made your hips twitch helplessly. You saw how wet you were, the shine of it on your inner thighs, the way your body kept trying to rock into the vibration even though it was already too much.

You watched yourself.

Kneeling up, bare, held. Flushed all the way down to your chest. Your mouth open, your eyes glassy, your whole face wearing an expression you had never once seen on it – not in all the years of getting ready in front of this exact mirror, not ever.

You didn’t recognise her. That was the vertigo of it. There was a woman in your bedroom mirror who wanted things and was getting them, and you’d never met her.

Then you looked past her, at him.

Steve, over your shoulder. Eyes half-shut, jaw tight, the muscle in it working hard. And on his face – plain as anything in the low grey light – years of discipline coming apart in real time.

You had never seen him without it. Not once. Not in three years of coffee and films and rain on the windows. He was the most controlled human being you’d ever met and you were watching the control fail, live, in your own bedroom, because of you.

He caught you looking. His eyes came up and met yours in the glass and held.

“There,” he said quietly, voice rough. “Now you see.”

“Steve–”

“That’s what you do to me.” His hand shifted at your throat, the barest adjustment, keeping your chin up so you couldn’t look away. “Three years of that. Every time you laughed at me. Every time you sat on my couch with your feet under my leg. Every time you leaned in too close and I had to pretend I wasn’t hard. You want to know what it looked like underneath?” His mouth found your shoulder, open and hot. “That’s what it looked like. That’s what I’ve been holding back.”

You made a sound you couldn’t control – high, broken, helpless.

“There she is,” he murmured, watching it happen in the mirror with dark, hungry eyes. “Look. Look at her. Look at what you look like when I’ve got a vibrator on your clit and my cock against your ass.”

And you watched him hold you like something he’d won and couldn’t quite believe he’d won.

That was the other thing in his face – under the hunger, under the fraying discipline – a kind of stunned disbelief, as though some part of him were still standing in a kitchen three years ago watching your hands around a mug, certain this would never in a hundred lifetimes be his.

It made your chest hurt. It made everything worse. It made you want to give him absolutely anything.

Time did something strange after that.

You lost the thread of it entirely. There was only the relentless little hum of the duck against your oversensitive clit, and the rain on the windows, and his mouth moving over your shoulder, and the two of you in the glass – and every so often his voice at your ear, low and steady and coming apart at the edges, telling you exactly what he could see.

“You’re dripping. Look at that. You’re making a mess of my cock and I haven’t even been inside you yet.”

Your moans were small and helpless and you couldn’t stop them and he drank each one like it was owed to him.

Then he moved.

Not into you. Not yet. He shifted his hips and settled the thick, heavy length of himself against you instead – flush, close, unbearably present – sliding the whole of him between your slick folds without pushing in. The sound that came out of both of you at the contact was the same sound, torn from two throats at once.

He’d meant it to be a moment. Just a moment, just a taste, just enough to take the edge off the pressure that had been building in him for three weeks and three years.

It was not a moment. It went on and on.

Because the first slow drag of him against you told him something he hadn’t been prepared for, and it undid what was left of his composure in one clean stroke.

You were soaked.

Wet through, slick and hot and ready, everything he’d done to you gathered there waiting for him – and he felt it coat him as he moved, felt himself glide through the thick evidence of exactly how much you wanted this. His forehead dropped hard to your shoulder and he made a sound like he’d been punched in the gut.

“Oh– fuck, sweetheart.”

Wrecked. Barely a voice at all.

“You feel that?” He rocked again, slow, deliberate, dragging the entire thick length of his cock through the heat of you, the head of him catching on your clit with every pass, the underside of him sliding through your folds until he was shiny with you. “You feel what you’re doing to me? God. God, you’re so wet. I didn’t know you’d be this wet. I didn’t know you’d feel like this.”

He couldn’t finish the thought. His breath had gone to pieces.

He’d imagined this. That was the thing that was killing him. He had imagined this, in the dark, for years, in a shame he’d never confessed to anyone – and every single version he’d built had been a pale, polite, dishonest little thing next to the reality of you slick and shaking and arching back into him.

Because you were. That was the other thing. You weren’t just letting it happen.

You were meeting him.

He felt it the second time he moved – your hips tilting back, chasing the thick drag of him, your body seeking the friction on its own without any instruction from the wreck of your mind. Small greedy movements. Rolling up into him so that every slow thrust of his hips dragged the head of his cock right over your clit and the vibrator at the same time.

“There you go,” he breathed, and there was something dangerously close to awe in it. “There you go. Look at you. You’re– fuck, you’re riding it. You’re actually fucking yourself on my cock and you haven’t even taken me yet.”

“Steve–”

“Say it.” His voice cracked. “Say it while you watch yourself do it.”

“I want–” Your voice broke on it. The hum was still going, still relentless against your clit, and the thick slide of him through your folds was making everything tighten again already, and you could barely get the words out. “I want it. Please. Please, I want you inside me–”

The sound he made then was not a word.

And you felt him.

That was what none of your quiet nights alone had ever, ever come close to – the fact of another body, alive and undone, reacting to you.

You felt him shiver.

You felt the great controlled bulk of him – this man built to withstand things that killed other men – actually shudder against your back when you rolled your hips a certain way. You felt his arms tighten convulsively around you. You felt the tremor run the whole length of him like something coming loose.

You felt his breath, hot and broken and far too fast at your ear, catching every time you moved.

You felt his heart going like a hammer against your shoulder blade.

And you felt him twitch against you — an involuntary jerk of his cock, hard and hot and slick where he was pressed to you, a thing his body did entirely without his permission — and that was the moment it stopped being something being done to you and became something you were doing to him.

The power of it went through you like a drug.

“Oh,” you breathed, stunned, watching his face in the mirror as another full-body shiver ran through him. “Oh, you–”

“Don’t.” His voice was barely holding. “Don’t say it. If you say it I’m gonna come all over your back before I even get inside you–”

You said it anyway. You leaned back into him and turned your face and said it right against his jaw, eyes still locked on his reflection.

“You’re shaking.”

He swore.

Actually swore, a low ruined syllable against your throat, and his hips snapped forward once, hard, uncontrolled – dragging the entire thick length of his cock through your soaked folds, right over the exact place the little humming duck was working your clit – and you both cried out.

He caught himself instantly. Went still. Breathed hard against your neck.

“Fuck– sorry, I didn’t mean–”

“Do it again.”

He froze.

“Do it again,” you said, voice shaking but clear.

And the sound he made – half a groan, half a broken laugh, entirely destroyed – was the sound of the last strut going out of a structure that had held for three years.

He did it again.

He moved against you slow and deep and endless, the thick, heavy length of him gliding through the slick heat of you, the head of his cock catching on your clit with every pass, the underside of him coated in how wet you were. Neither of you could keep quiet anymore. His breath came ragged and open-mouthed against your neck, punctuated by low, helpless grunts he wasn’t managing to swallow – small sounds of effort, of restraint, of a man holding back something that badly wanted to be let go. Your own noises had stopped being anything you could control: high and broken and continuous, rising every time the thick drag of him lined up just right with the vibrator.

The slide of it had gone effortless. Slick and hot and perfect. Every pass of him gathered more of your wetness until the sound of it was unmistakable under the hum – the wet, filthy noise of his cock sliding through you – and it made you burn scarlet and it made you want it more.

“Listen to that,” he said hoarsely against your ear. “Listen. That’s you. That’s how fucking wet you are for me.”

“I know–”

“That’s how much you want me.” His arms had gone tight, all of him strung, the muscle standing out in his forearm where it braced across your chest. “Three years and I never– I didn’t know. I didn’t know you’d feel this good. I didn’t know you’d be this ready.”

He broke off. Rocked into you again, harder, the thick head of him catching deliberately on your entrance this time without pushing in.

“Steve.” You were shaking. “Steve, I can’t– you have to–”

“I know.”

“Please– inside me, please–”

“I know, baby.” He was panting now, openly, past hiding it. “I know. Me too. Look at me– look at me in the glass– Christ, look at us–”

You looked.

And what you saw in the mirror finished you: the two of you moving together in the low grey light, his eyes wild and blown and locked on yours in the reflection, his jaw clenched, his whole enormous frame trembling with the effort of holding at the edge for you – and you understood, with a lurch, that he was as far gone as you were. That the patient man, the careful man, the man who had planned every second of this, was hanging on by a thread thinner than yours.

“Steve,” you whispered. “Now.”

His breath stopped.

“You’re sure–”

“Now. I want you inside me. Now.”

And then–

Both of you gasped at once. The same breath, torn out of two throats. That first give, that first fraction, that first impossible inch of him finding you – the blunt, thick head of his cock pressing against your entrance and then slowly, carefully, beginning to stretch you open. The surprise of it, the sheer overwhelming fact of it after all this waiting, after three years, after four days, after a joke made of rubber that had somehow led here–

You froze. He felt you freeze.

He went utterly still behind you, buried his groan in your shoulder, and got his mouth to your ear.

“Just the tip, baby.” Rough. Ragged. Barely holding. The words slurred as if he were drunk. “'S just the tip. 'S okay. 'S okay, I've got you, look– look at us– 's just the tip, we've got all the time in the world.”

He kept you there a long time.

That was the thing you’d remember, after – not the ache, because there was almost no ache, only a deep, stretching fullness that bordered on too much – but the patience. The way he held the two of you suspended at that first impossible fraction and refused, absolutely refused, to hurry through it. A lesser man would have taken the yes and pushed deeper. Steve held it in his hands like something that might break if he breathed wrong, and he breathed carefully, and he waited.

Every time your body tensed around the newness of him – that instinctive clench, the ancient bracing of a self that had guarded this for years – he stilled. Completely. Went to stone behind you, his whole enormous frame locked around the effort of not moving another millimetre, and got his mouth to your ear, and gave you something else to feel instead.

The hum, low and shameless, where his hand held the little yellow duck tight against your clit.

The mirror, and the two of you inside it, lit silver-grey by the rain-light: your face flushed and open, his face wrecked and focused, the place where his body disappeared into yours.

His other hand at your throat – no pressure, never pressure, only warmth, only the wordless instruction of it: watch. Turning your face gently back to the glass whenever your head tried to fall, whenever your eyes threatened to close and hide from how much you were feeling.

He had redirected everything. That was the craft of it and the tenderness of it, and by now the two were the same thing. He had taken every scrap of your attention and moved it somewhere else – to the absurd little song of the toy, to the sight of yourselves, to the slow worshipful drag of his mouth along the top of your shoulder – so that when he pressed a fraction deeper, the smallest rock of his hips, the barest give of another thick inch, there was no room left anywhere in you for fear. Only more.

You never felt the stretch as anything but more.

He worked you open by inches and the inches took forever and forever was the whole point, the whole gift. Tiny movements. A rock forward, a pause held so long you thought you’d die of it, his groan buried hot in your nape, another fraction of him sinking into the tight heat of you, another pause, another. He read your breath the way he’d once read a battlefield – every catch of it, every shiver, every place your body softened or resisted – and he answered each one, adjusting, coaxing, never taking more than you’d give and always, somehow, making you want to give more.

“There you are,” he breathed once, when a long slow press drew a sound out of you that you’d never made before – high, broken, almost disbelieving. “There. Just like that. Feel how you’re taking me. I’ve got you.”

And he did. That was the thing. However this had begun – however carefully he’d shaped the ground beneath your feet for three years to bring you exactly here – right now, in the dark, with the rain on the glass, you had never in your life felt so completely, so unbearably held.

Somewhere in that endless slow undoing you felt it start to build.

You felt it gather at the base of you, low and hot and coiling – the relentless hum against your clit and the thick, stretching fullness of him and the sight of his face behind you in the mirror all winding tighter and tighter, a tension with nowhere to go, climbing past anything you’d ever managed alone in this room with a joke made of rubber. Because it had never been like this alone. Alone there had been sensation. This was him. This was three years of wanting given a body and a weight and a mouth at your ear, and it was too much, and it was not enough, and it kept climbing.

“That’s it.” His voice had gone thick, watching your face come apart in the mirror, drinking the sight of it. “That’s it– look at you– look at us– don’t look away, stay with me, let it happen–”

You came like that.

Held on the very threshold of him, the little humming thing pressed hard against your clit and only the first thick inches of his cock inside you, and it broke – it broke over you in a long bright wave that took the room with it. Your body clenched sweet and helpless and rhythmic around him, and the tight, pulsing heat of your orgasm dragged him the rest of the way home while you were still shaking, still gone, still lost in it.

So that by the time you surfaced, gasping, boneless, blinking at the two of you in the glass, he was fully seated. All of him. Buried to the hilt, his hips flush against your ass, exactly where an hour ago you’d have sworn you couldn’t take him – and you hadn’t felt a single second of the final stretch as anything but coming apart.

He held still inside you then. Every thick inch. Both of you trembling, his chest heaving against your back, his heart slamming so hard you could feel it through your own spine. You could feel the heavy pulse of him deep inside you, the way your body kept fluttering and clenching around the new fullness.

“There,” he said, wrecked, against your ear. His arms had come around you, holding you upright, holding you together. “There. All of me. See? Told you.” A rough, reverent kiss pressed to your temple, your cheekbone, the corner of your jaw. “Didn’t hurt at all. Not for a second. I wouldn’t let it. You’re perfect. You’re taking me so fucking perfectly.”

It hadn’t hurt. He’d made certain of that. He’d redirected every ounce of you so thoroughly, so deliberately, that the thing you’d carried for years as a kind of wound had passed while you were looking somewhere else entirely – and now it was simply done, gone, dissolved, replaced by the impossible fullness of him and the singing wreck of your own body, and you understood dimly that he had planned even this, this mercy, this sleight of hand, and could not for the life of you find it in yourself to mind.

Then he drew back – slow, so slow, dragging every nerve in you awake as the thick length of him slid almost all the way out – and gave you the first real stroke.

And the world went white at the edges.

Because this was different. This wasn’t the careful inching-open, the patient claiming of ground. This was him – the whole heavy length and deliberate drag and deep certainty of him filling you completely – and the sound you made didn’t even sound like your own voice, some low broken thing torn up from a part of you that had never spoken before.

He did it again. Still slow, but full now, complete, unhurried and total, burying himself to the hilt with every stroke. His forehead dropped hard to your shoulder at the feel of it, his breath shuddering out of him in broken bursts. You felt his control fraying with every deep unhurried pull, felt the discipline of three years coming loose thread by thread, and it was the single most intoxicating thing you’d ever witnessed – this vast, contained, careful man beginning, at last, to lose himself inside you.

And then, with a low rough sound of decision, he threw the duck away.

You barely registered the small absurd clatter of it hitting the floor somewhere across the room – because his hand, the one that had held it, came straight back to you, bare now, his own thick fingers finding exactly where the toy had been. And it was so much better. So much warmer, so much surer, so much more him. He rubbed firm, knowing circles over your swollen clit while he fucked you in long, deep strokes, and the dual sensation made you sob aloud and sag back against his chest.

“Don’t need it,” he muttered, half to you and half to himself, hips rolling, fingers working you with a knowledge of your body he had no right to and had somehow earned anyway. “Don’t need the fucking toy. It’s me. It’s just me now. Just us. Only ever gonna be me inside you after this–”

And you shattered again.

Just from that. Just from him – his hand and his mouth and the deep, slow, relentless certainty of his cock filling you over and over – a third orgasm, harder than the two firsts, folding you forward over the strong braced line of his arm while he held you up through all of it and worked you through every wave. He watched every last second of it in the glass with dark, greedy, disbelieving eyes, like a man who could not quite believe the thing he was seeing was real and was his.

And in the middle of it – past the roar of your own blood, past the last shred of anything guarding you, barely conscious of your own mouth moving…

“I love you,” you whispered.

It just fell out of you. You weren’t even certain you’d said it aloud. It slipped free the way breath slips free, involuntary, unbidden, the truest thing in you rising to the surface in the one moment every wall you owned was down at once.

Steve went absolutely still.

You felt it – the whole of him, stopping. His fingers on your clit. His hips. His breath. For one endless suspended second the only sound in the entire world was the rain against the glass and the ragged double-time of your own heart, and the thick pulse of him buried deep inside you.

And then something broke in him that had never broken before.

Not the strategist – that was already gone, dissolved somewhere back at the nightstand the moment you’d said yes. This was deeper. This was the last thing, the thing underneath all the other things, the belief he had quietly built his entire careful campaign on top of and never once examined in the light: the sun does not want. The sun simply shines. I am the man who gets to stand in the warmth, and I will ask for nothing, and reach for nothing, because reaching was never something I was allowed.

And you had just whispered, half-gone, not even meaning to, that the sun wanted him back.

Three years of holding still. Three years of a man convinced that the very best he could ever hope for was to live near your light and never dare to touch it. Three years of loving you in a silence so complete he’d nearly mistaken it for peace. And you’d said I love you into the dark with your whole body wrapped around his – without deciding to, without performing it, without any reason to say it but that it was simply, helplessly true – which meant it was real. Which meant it had been real for longer than tonight. Which meant that all this time, in some room of your own, behind some wall of your own, you had been holding your breath exactly the way he’d been holding his.

He lost it.

Every last thread of the control he’d carried into this room like armor – gone.

His hand left your throat – gently, gently, always gently, even now – and cupped your jaw instead, and turned you, up and back over your shoulder, until your mouth found his. And he kissed you like a man surfacing from under ice. Deep and desperate and endless. All of it at once, everything, nothing held back. He kissed you like he was trying to breathe you in, like the three years had all been leading to precisely this and he could not bear to have waited even one second longer. His hips started moving again while he kissed you, deeper, less careful, the thick length of him sliding in and out of your still-fluttering cunt with a wet, rhythmic sound that filled the room.

“Say it again,” he breathed against your mouth when he broke for air. Ragged. Wrecked. Not commanding – begging. This man who had strategized his way to your bed, reduced now to a plea. “Please. Say it again. I need– please, sweetheart, say it again.”

Your eyes came open. Wide. You heard it land in the air a full beat too late – heard your own voice replaying I love you into the quiet – and felt the panic surge up hot in your chest, the instinct to snatch it back, to laugh it off, to rebuild in a single second the wall it had taken you three years to hold…

He didn’t let you.

“No,” he murmured, and kissed it away, kissed the fear right off your open face, his hips moving harder now, deeper, the last of his restraint gone and something helpless and overflowing rising in its place. “No, no. Don’t. Don’t take it back. Don’t you dare take it back, I’ve got you–”

“Steve–” your voice cracked, “–I didn’t mean to–”

“Love.” The word broke out of him like it had been waiting three years for permission to exist. “Sweetheart. Look at me– no, not the mirror, not the glass– me. Look at me.” And he turned your face fully to his and held it there, forehead pressed to forehead, both of you coming apart in the dark, his eyes so close they were the only thing in the world. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you. You hear me?”

His voice cracked clean down the middle.

“I’m never letting you go. Not ever. Not after this. You don’t get away from me now– I won’t let you. I’m keeping you.”

And it wasn’t a cage, the way he said it. It wasn’t the possession that had roared through him an hour ago at the sight of a painted rubber duck. That was gone too – burned off, transfigured, remade into something rawer and simpler and completely undefended. It was a man who had lost everything once – every friend, every anchor, an entire world, a whole century swallowed by the ice – waking one more time into a life that finally, impossibly fit, and finding you at the center of it, and refusing, this time, with everything left in him, to let the cold take the thing he loved.

Keeping. Not caging. Not owning. Keeping – the way you keep the one thing you’d walk back into the freezing dark to save. The way you hold on to the single warm thing in a life that has taught you, over and over, how easily warmth is lost.

“Okay,” you gasped, past tears you didn’t fully understand, past the very last of your own unraveling, your hands scrabbling back to find his and lacing tight through his fingers, holding on like the whole world had tilted and he was the only fixed point left. “Okay. I love you. I do– I said it, I meant it, I’ve meant it for so long, I love–”

He kissed the rest of the words out of your mouth.

And the two of you went over the edge together – finally, completely, no threshold left to hold at, no careful inch left to preserve, nothing between you anymore. Not the years. Not the silence. Not the strategy or the shaped ground or the walls you’d each built so high and held so long. All of it gone at once, and only this left standing: him, and you, and the rain on the glass, and the two of you in the mirror moving like a single thing breathing.

He came with a broken, helpless sound against your mouth, burying himself as deep as he could go, pulsing hot and thick inside you while your body clenched around him in long, rhythmic waves. Your fingers stayed locked. Your foreheads stayed pressed together. Both your hearts hammered the same impossible rhythm.

And a ridiculous little yellow duck lay forgotten on the floor across the room, having done, in the end, exactly what it was always secretly for.

Afterward he held you against his chest and would not loosen his arms, and you let him – boneless, wrung clean through, wearing the heavy steady slam of his heart under your cheek like something you had been given and meant to keep.

For a long while neither of you spoke. There was only the rain, and your breathing slowly finding each other's rhythm, and the warmth of him around you like a wall built to keep out cold instead of to keep you in.

“I meant it,” he said at last, into your hair. Quiet now. Sure. No campaign left in his voice, no strategy – just the plain flat truth of a man who has stopped, finally, being careful. “All of it. Every word. The keeping part especially.”

“I know,” you murmured.

You didn't, yet. Not the whole of it – not the three years and the three weeks and the four days, not the film chosen on purpose, not the seeds planted and quietly watered, not the drop zones and the shaped terrain and the long patient war he had waged to bring you to this exact bed. That would come later. Some of it. As much of it as he would ever bring himself to tell you.

But you knew the part that mattered. You had felt it break wide open in him in the precise instant you stopped guarding your own heart – felt the whole vast careful machine of him come apart the second you said three words he'd never once let himself believe he might hear – and you knew, with the certainty of a thing felt rather than reasoned, that whatever else was true about how you'd arrived here, you had not been the only one holding your breath for three long years.

“Stay,” he said. Not a question.

“I live here,” you pointed out, muffled, smiling helplessly against his skin.

You felt his laugh move through his whole chest – low and startled and completely undone, the laugh of a man who has spent so long braced for loss that joy still catches him off guard.

“Then I'm staying,” he said, and pulled the blanket up over the both of you, and drew you in closer against him, and did not, for the rest of that long rain-soft night, let go of you even once.

The rain came down. The duck lay where it had fallen.

And Steve Rogers – who had planned everything, shaped everything, won everything he'd set out to win, and been utterly, helplessly undone anyway by the one thing he had never dared to plan for – fell asleep at last with your heartbeat beneath his hand. Kept, and keeping. And, for the first time since the ice closed over him a lifetime ago, entirely, dangerously, finally home.

You woke before he did, which never happened.

In three years you had never once beaten Steve Rogers awake – he ran at dawn, he'd been built to need less sleep than the rest of the species, he was always up and moving and quietly making coffee by the time you surfaced. But this morning you swam up out of sleep into grey light and rain-washed quiet and found him still under you, still around you, his arm heavy across your waist, his face slack and open and years younger in sleep than you'd ever seen it awake.

You lay very still and looked at him.

And in the clear unhurried light of morning, with your body pleasantly wrecked and your head finally quiet, you started – slowly, the way you turn something over that's been sitting in your hand all along – to think.

About last night. About the four days before it. About the phone call where he'd been so careful, so patient, so ready. About the candle at his place you were fairly sure you hadn't imagined. About the film, weeks ago, and the thing he'd said about waiting not being weakness. About the engaged friend and you know what it should feel like. About how, every single time you'd tried to fall for someone else in three years, you'd somehow ended up back on his couch instead, warm, safe, home, the pull of anywhere colder never quite catching.

About how the only version of anyone you'd ever let into this bed had been a joke made of rubber wearing his face.

The pieces sat there in the morning light. You looked at them.

And here is the thing you understood about yourself, in that moment, that you would maybe never say out loud: you weren't afraid.

You should have been. Some sensible part of you noted, distantly, that a wiser woman might feel a chill right now – might look at the sheer duration of it, the patience, the shaped ground, and feel like something had been done to her rather than with her. That part of you spoke up, dutifully, and then fell silent, because the rest of you had already gone somewhere else entirely.

The rest of you was on fire.

Because three years. Because he'd wanted you for three years and said nothing and built a whole quiet world to keep you in and you'd never seen it, never once, and the not-seeing didn't feel like violation this morning – it felt like being wanted on a scale you had never in your life been wanted. Steve Rogers, who did everything deliberately, who had planned wars, who never in three years did a careless thing – had spent all of it, patiently, deliberately, on you.

The thought went through you low and hot and you had to press your face into his chest to hide what it did to you.

He woke to that. To your mouth against his sternum and your heart going too fast.

“Hey,” he murmured, rough with sleep, his arm tightening. “You're up first. That's new.”

“Steve.” You didn't lift your head. You weren't sure your face could be trusted. “Can I ask you something?”

You felt him go still. Not tense, exactly – alert. The particular stillness of a man who has just registered a change in the weather.

“Yeah,” he said. Carefully.

You lifted your head then and looked at him. And you asked it plainly, watching his eyes, because you already half-knew and you wanted to see him not be able to lie to you.

“Last night. And the four days. And– all of it.” You held his gaze. “How long?”

He didn't pretend not to understand. That was the thing about him; he could shape the ground under you for three years, but he couldn't, when you looked at him straight, actually lie to your face. It was the one thing his whole careful arsenal had no answer for.

Something moved behind his eyes. A long, complicated something.

“...A while,” he said finally.

"Steve."

“A long while.” He looked away, then made himself look back, jaw tight. “Longer than I should've– longer than was fair to you, probably.”

“How long,” you said again. Softer.

And he gave you the truth, but only at the edges, the way a man confesses when confessing fully would cost more than he can pay. “Since about the second year,” he said. “Maybe before. I stopped keeping track on purpose, because keeping track felt like–” He stopped. His hand moved on your hip, absent, restless. “I told myself I didn't want anything. I got real good at telling myself that.”

“And the candle,” you said. “At your place. The other night.”

A pause.

“Yeah,” he admitted, low.

“And the film. The one about the couple who waited.”

His eyes came back to yours, and there was something almost helpless in them now, something caught. “...Yeah.”

“And you told me waiting made me smarter than everyone you knew. Right after my friend got engaged and I was – right when I was feeling it most.” You watched his face. “You knew exactly when to say that.”

He didn't answer. He didn't have to. The not-answering was its own answer, and he let it be, and he watched you take it in with an expression you'd never seen on him before – braced, unguarded, ready for the exact moment your face would change into something that would end this.

Because he thought you were going to be afraid.

He'd shown you the shape of it – half of it, the demandable half – and now he was waiting, the way a man waits under fire, for you to understand what had been done and pull away from him and be right to.

Your face did change.

Just not the way he'd braced for.

“Steve,” you breathed – and he heard it, the thing in your voice, and his eyes sharpened, because it wasn't fear at all, it was the opposite, it was low and warm and stunned and it went straight through him. “You wanted me for two years and never said anything.”

“I–”

“You planned all of it.” You'd come up onto your elbow now, over him, and there was color high in your face and your voice had dropped somewhere new. “Every part. The candle. The film. Last night. You've been – God, you've been steering me, this whole time, for years, and I never–”

“Hey.” He caught your face in his hand, alarmed now, his careful control scrambling back into place, mistaking your voice for the beginning of hurt. “Hey, listen to me, I never– I'd never make you do anything you didn't– you always could've said no, every single time, I'd have stopped, I swear to God I'd have–”

“I know,” you said.

And then you told him the truth, the one that undid him more thoroughly than any of his own confessions, the one that turned the whole morning over on its head.

“That's not– Steve. I'm not upset.”

He went still.

“I should be.” You said it wonderingly, half to yourself, watching your own reaction like it surprised you too. “I know I should be. Some part of me is standing way back there being very sensible about it.” Your hand flattened on his chest, over the hard fast slam of his heart. “But the rest of me just found out that the man I was in love with for three years spent two years quietly rearranging his entire life around keeping me, and never asked me for one single thing, and–”

Your voice caught.

“–and it doesn't scare me,” you said. “It does the opposite. It does completely the opposite.”

You watched it land in him. You watched him understand.

You watched Steve Rogers realize that the thing he'd been most afraid of – that you'd see the whole careful machine of his wanting and be repelled by it – was not going to happen. That you'd seen it, or enough of it, and that it hadn't cooled you at all. That it had lit you up.

His breath went ragged. His hand slid from your jaw into your hair.

“Say that again,” he said – the same words as last night, the same helpless plea, except now there was something dangerous waking under the wonder in his voice, something that had spent three years leashed and had just been told it never needed the leash at all.

“It doesn't scare me,” you whispered, leaning into him, your mouth almost on his. “Knowing you did all that. Knowing how long. Knowing you'd– Steve, knowing you're not going to stop–” You felt the shiver go through you at your own words. “It should. And it doesn't. It just makes me–”

He kissed you before you could finish. Hard, this time. No careful patience in it now, no ground being shaped, no strategy – just a man who had been handed permission for the one thing he'd never let himself have, which was to want you out loud, in daylight, without dressing it as kindness.

“You don't know what you're saying,” he murmured against your mouth, and it was half a warning and half a prayer, his hands already moving, already sure. “Sweetheart. You don't– if I stop pretending it was ever about being good–”

“Then stop pretending,” you said.

And felt the last of the careful, decent, three-years-holding-still Steve Rogers come apart in your hands – not into cruelty, never that, but into something honest and hungry and finally, completely unhidden – and understood, with a thrill that curled all the way down your spine, that you had just told the most patient man alive that he never had to be patient with you again.

Outside, the rain had stopped.

Somewhere on the floor, a small painted duck lay on its side, watching the ceiling, entirely redundant now.

Neither of you got up for a long, long time.

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Every time you roll over and smack the pillow in an attempt to find a more comfortable position, your mind replays memories of the night like images flashing across the silver screen. The crooked, excited smile on his face. His hand tugging yours to the dance floor. The gentle way he held you when the music slowed, his arm wrapping more securely around you. The look in his eyes when he pecked your cheek, like he wanted more but wasn't going to take it.

Your heart stutters.

Bucky wanted more.

The man who is—was?—like a brother to you, who listened to you complain about the way men treat you like you're something to claim, who never actually gave the advice you asked for and offered reassurance instead. He wanted more. But he didn't take it. He didn't even ask for it.

Because despite all the stories people have told about him since his freshman year of high school, despite all the women who have chased him, James Buchanan Barnes is, first and foremost, a gentleman.

Your gaze flicks to the vase your mother set near your windowsill. The flowers he brought specifically for you stand proudly under the soft glow of the streetlights outside, each petal a delicate display of something dangerously close to affection. Knowing he somehow knew exactly what flowers you prefer has something warm settling in your chest.

Years of being around the Barnes siblings, of being Rebecca's best friend. Years of looking at him like he's just Bucky. Now? The world has shifted, tilted on its axis before you could even think to brace yourself for the flood of realizations and subsequent emotions that can only mean one thing: you have feelings for him.

The thought makes your heart race and cheeks burn like a nervous schoolgirl.

Flipping your pillow over for the cool side, you shove your face into it hoping if it doesn't help you fall asleep, maybe it'll smother the thoughts running rampant in your brain.

Because Bucky Barnes is suddenly no longer just anyone.

And Rebecca is going to kill you.

The sun is just beginning to light the sky when sleep finally claims you, only waking at the incessant ring of the telephone down the hall. You're already pulling yourself out of bed and rubbing sleep from your eyes when the warm sound of your mother's voice answers the call. She smiles when you poke your head out the door.

"Phone's for you, dear." She holds out the receiver.

Mind still foggy with sleep and remnants of a dream you can barely recall, you head to the phone.

"Hello—"

"Come over, we're going to Rockaway," Becca's voice comes over the receiver, quick and impatient.

"No greeting?" you tease, leaning against the wall and fighting back a yawn. The house smells of lemon and sugar, making your stomach growl.

She sighs and you swear you hear her eyes rolling. "Hi, hope you're well. Bucky and Steve both have the afternoon off and if we leave soon we might still see daylight. Get over here."

— — —

The door to the Barnes residence swings open almost as soon as your knuckles touch it. A wild-eyed Becca beams the second her eyes land on you, the scent of Winnifred's fresh baked bread wafting out into the street.

"It's about time! That train is going to take us forever," Becca turns, calling to who you can only assume is Steve and Bucky in the living room. "She's here! Let's go!"

Steve's the first to come around the corner, a couple strands of his blond hair falling to the middle of his forehead. He offers a polite smile and a nod in greeting before Bucky rounds the corner, tossing an arm around his best friend's shoulders and meeting your gaze.

He looks unfairly handsome today; dark hair perfectly mussed, a grease smudge lingering near his temple from working at the garage this morning. The easy smile forming on his lips makes your stomach flip.

"Nice of you to finally show up," he says coolly. His gaze trails over your face, like he's searching for something. Or maybe he sees right through you.

Before you can even think to stop yourself, your mouth opens. "Miss me that bad?"

Bucky's eyebrows lift almost imperceptibly, his eyes flashing with something too quick to interpret.

"Maybe I did."

Becca, who is pretending not to watch the interaction and failing miserably, smirks and clears her throat. "Hey, Romeo, can we go now?"

Your eyes widen. Steve bites back a laugh while silently mouthing "Romeo?" and Bucky chuckles, already stepping forward and dragging Steve along with him out the door. Becca grins, clearly proud of herself, the loose curls of her hair bouncing as she falls into step beside you.

The day is bright and warm, bordering on uncomfortably hot as the mid-afternoon sun beats down on the sidewalks of Brooklyn. By the time you step off the train in Rockaway, mild relief comes in the form of a salty ocean breeze as the group walks down the boardwalk.

People sprawl out in all directions along the beach and across the street to Rockaways' Playland, earning a displeased grumble from Becca before leading the way through the crowd. She slips through easily, Steve following quickly behind her. Bucky falls in step behind you. Despite all the people, you can't help but be aware of exactly where he is, the sound of his shoes on the pavement, the low "excuse me" as he brushes past someone to keep up with you.

The crowd inside the park is only slightly less crowded as the beach itself. A line for the park's specialty wooden coaster snakes around in a neat line before ending near the carousel. The scent of fried funnel cakes and popcorn mixes with the salty air. It brings back memories of all the times this same group went to Coney Island growing up, when everything felt effortless for four kids in Brooklyn.

Your gaze lands on Bucky. He's laughing with Steve as they approach the line for the ticket booth ahead, carefree and happy as the afternoon sun highlights his sharp features.

Becca catches you looking and hooks her arm in yours. She leans over and whispers conspiritorially, "How was the date last night?"

Your eyes snap to hers, heart racing. Bucky glances over across the midway.

"Date?" you ask a little too quickly. As if Rebecca Barnes hasn't been able to read you like a book for most of your lives. You hadn't told her yet. You hadn't mentioned any Friday night plans to her, let alone that said plans had involved her older brother.

She gives you a look, all but rolling her eyes as the corners of her lips pull into a knowing smile.

"With my idiot brother, obviously."

Years of friendship, of shared laughter, tears, secrets and jokes have made you as close as any two people can possibly be. Things have changed overnight. You know it. She knows it. Yet she doesn't seem angry. If anything, she sounds relieved, like she's been waiting for the day Bucky finally stepped up.

"You're not mad?"

"Of course not," she scoffs before pressing further, giving you a little shake. "Details, girl, come on."

You swallow and huff a nervous laugh, suddenly finding a nearby pigeon incredibly interesting. "It was fine." Understatement of the century.

"Just fine?" she asks, leaning closer, voice raising in utter disbelief. "He came home practically floating on cloud nine last night. I've seen him go on a lot of dates over the last ten years, but there's only one person I've seen make him smile like—"

"Atom Smasher, ladies, let's go!" Bucky calls, his voice booming louder than necessary and pointing to the coaster rumbling by. People nearby glance at him sideways. Someone spills popcorn. He's staring at Becca with the look of an older brother knowing exactly what's about to be said and silently begging her not to continue.

She looks at you but doesn't finish her statement, turning on her heel and leaving you standing near a hot dog cart processing her words. You follow slowly, stomach flipping from more than just the thought of the roller coaster.

The afternoon moves in a blur of laughter, adrenaline, and too much sunlight for anyone's own good. Bucky attempts to play ring toss, insisting his aim is perfect, before wildly missing two of the three shots.

"What was that?" Becca snorts, doubling over in laughter and wiping non-existent tears from her eyes.

"Distracted, Buck?" Steve asks. His lips twitch with a knowing smile.

"What? No," he says quickly. The tips of his ears turn pink. "My arm's tired from the shop, shut up."

You bite back a smile from the sudden realization that James Barnes isn't always as suave as he appears and is, in fact, human—nerves and all.

He catches your eye before he rubs the back of his neck and clears his throat. "Anyone up for the shooting gallery? A quarter says I can hit the bullseye on the first try."

Steve and Becca glance at each other sideways.

The gallery sits toward the middle of the park, tucked between concessions and skill games against the roller coaster, with scooter cars across the midway. Lights flicker on, the sun beginning to set and casting an orange glow across the various structures. Bucky doesn't hesitate the moment the gallery comes into view. He rushes over and hands a dime to the attendant, wearing a grin that is far more confident than it probably should be.

The moment the gun touches his hand, his demeanor changes. He lifts it with all the seriousness in the world—intense focus and smooth movements that speak of a man who's done this more times than he can count. He pulls back the forend and fires a shot before you even blink. A bulb flashes immediately.

"Bullseye!" The attendant calls, grabbing the photo that just printed and setting it on the counter next to Bucky.

"Lucky shot," Steve scoffs.

"Jealous, Rogers?" he asks, lowering the gun.

"How—" you start.

Bucky glances over at you, his grin back. He grabs the picture and shoves it in his pocket unceremoniously. He shrugs, but the look on his face betrays just how confident he is. "Easier than it looks."

"Liar," Steve and Becca mumble simultaneously.

Bucky ignores them, his focus solely on you. "I'll prove it. Give it a try." He gestures with his head for you to come closer, the gun securely in his hands.

As you step towards him, interest piqued yet moving slower than strictly necessary, you barely register Steve clear his throat. "We're gonna go find something to drink," he announces before dragging Rebecca off somewhere.

"I'm going to embarrass myself," you mutter when you finally reach him.

Bucky's lips curl into a smirk that would be almost infuriating if it didn't make your pulse spike. "Not a chance, I'll help you. Do you trust me?"

"After ring toss? No."

He blinks, looking offended for a moment before a smile spreads across his face. "Oh come on, did I not just prove myself right here?" he laughs. "I'm better with a gun, I promise."

"Fine." With a resigned sigh and a roll of your eyes, you take the gun from him and step up to the counter. It's heavier than expected, the metal cool against the summer air, the wood polished just enough to be smooth in your palms.

Bucky waits for you to nod before he steps behind you. His hands are warm and careful as they guide your form; firm grip on the forend, butt plate braced against your shoulder, elbow just so.

His hands move to your shoulders, fingers squeezing gently. "Relax. Too stiff in the shoulders and you'll definitely feel it tomorrow."

"Easier said than done," you mutter, all too aware of how close he's standing and how heat is radiating from him.

He doesn't respond right away. Instead, he just watches, waiting. Your eyes are locked on the center of the target, finger on the trigger guard, breath coming out a little too quick.

You can feel the weight of his eyes on you, making your heart beat quicken. Then he leans down slightly.

"Do you have any idea how fun it is to watch you try to keep your composure?" His breath is hot against your ear. You shiver. You don't even have to look at him to know his lips are curved into that familiar Barnes grin that means trouble.

"Shut up," you huff, the gun still aimed at the target. Heat warms your cheeks, and the way your heart beats against your chest makes it hard to focus on the target in front of you.

He chuckles and takes a half step back, giving you space to focus.

"Rest your cheek against the wood. Line up both sights and take a breath. You can do it."

You take a deep breath, grateful for the space. The coaster roars by, rattling the ground beneath your feet. Then, with relaxed shoulders and a slow release of breath, you pump the forend and squeeze the trigger.

A bulb flashes.

"Bullseye!"

You stare at the target in disbelief. A beat passes. Two. A low whistle sounds from behind you.

"Would you look at that," Bucky murmurs, tone full of pride. "Careful. With a shot like that, they might send you to Camp McCoy."

A laugh slips from your lips and you shake your head, lowering the gun and handing it back to the attendant who hands you the souvenir photo.

You glance at the picture in your hands and everything stops.

Centered in the image is you, hair slightly ruffled from the afternoon's activities, face focused. Behind you is Bucky. Standing just beneath the Shoot-A-Photo sign, he stands tall. Proud. His eyes aren't on the target; they're on you, with a look on his face you've never noticed before—a soft smile, softer eyes. It makes your breath catch.

Bucky peeks over your shoulder at the picture, your silence making him curious. His gaze lingers on the photo for a moment before flicking up to your face, watching your expression.

"You're overthinking again," Bucky teases softly, pulling you from your thoughts. He nudges you with his elbow for good measure, chuckling when you attempt to swat him away.

"I'm not."

"Your eyebrows say otherwise."

You huff and turn to look at him. He grins before you speak again. "I'm just…trying to make sense of some things."

"Yeah," he sighs, his expression softening with an understanding nod. "I know the feeling."

His gaze drifts down the midway, finding Steve and Becca near the carousel. Steve suddenly finds something interesting in the sky, but Becca doesn't back down from watching the scene unfold.

"Walk with me?" Bucky asks, his eyes finding yours again.

You hesitate for a moment before nodding, the grip on the photo in your hands tightening slightly.

As the two of you walk through the park, each step slow, Bucky lets the silence stretch, allowing the amusement park's general chaos and tinny music fill the space instead. It's comfortable in a way you hadn't expected. Years of friendship now teetering on the edge between possibilities that could make or break everything you've ever known.

Bucky breaks the silence first, his hands shoved in his pockets. His shoulders are tense. "Remember how we used to spend essentially entire summers at Coney Island?"

The reminder makes you smile. "We spent far too much time there. Too much sun."

Bucky laughs. "And too much cotton candy. Becca used to badger me to not eat so much sugar."

"You never did listen. Those poor employees."

"Hey,"—he throws his hands up in surrender—"it's not my fault they offer pure sugar for so cheap and then have the best coaster in Brooklyn directly opposite the stand. It's like they encouraged it."

You both laugh, the nostalgia a welcome distraction for a moment before your thoughts comes crawling back. Bucky gives you a moment before speaking again, his voice low.

"Anything I can help you make sense of?"

You shake your head, unsure where to even begin or how honest to be. Your mind replays the past twenty-four hours and Rebecca's words. The photograph in your hand is physical proof that you aren't crazy.

"I don't even know how to explain it."

"Try."

"I'll sound ridiculous."

"Impossible."

You sigh, shoulders raising with a deep breath to brace yourself. "I thought you asked me out because you pitied me."

He stops in his tracks. His brows pinch in confusion as he looks at you.

"Pity?" The word leaves him like he's not sure he heard right. He says your name with a short huff of disbelief. "Why on earth would you think that?"

You shrug, not quite meeting his gaze. "Because my love life is hopeless. Because you're Rebecca's brother. Because I've watched women throw themselves at you for years. Take your pick."

His mouth opens and closes a couple times, processing your words. When he doesn't answer right away, you finally look at him, and for a moment, he looks torn between being honest or making a joke to ease the tension thickening the air. He picks the former.

"Last night was the furthest thing from pity. That was me finally doing something I should've done several years ago."

That admission hits hard, making your heart skip. "What?"

Bucky hesitates, rubbing the back of his neck. He takes a deep breath, voice low and steady.

"Every smile aimed in my direction makes me feel like I can take on the world. Every time you laugh at one of my stupid jokes…" he chuckles and shakes his head, his gaze falling to the concrete where the toe of his shoe scuffs the concrete. "Then you came over after another bad date asking me for advice with men that don't deserve you, and I had no idea what to say. Because to me, those men are just too blind to see how incredible you are."

The silence stretches between you, your mind and heart racing. His eyes lift to find yours again.

"Every time I look at you, I have to fight not to reach for you, to hold you. I took you out last night because I wanted you to know how I'd treat you if you gave me the chance."

"Why didn't you tell me sooner?" you whisper, voice barely audible among the noise.

He sighs. "I was scared—I still am. The last thing I want is to ruin what we have. You mean a lot to me."

The air stills.

"You really mean that?" Your feet move a half step closer.

Bucky looks at you, hoping flickering in his eyes. The tension in his shoulders ease.

"Every word," he murmurs. His hand lifts, his fingers brushing against your cheek. The touch is soft, barely there and different than last night—tentative and full of silent questions.

You find yourself leaning into his touch, warm and familiar in the best way. His eyes glance at your lips before searching your face for any signs of hesitation. His thumb brushes your cheekbone.

Then, slowly, he leans in.

The kiss is short but sweet. A simple press of lips, uncertain, yet enough to forget the noise and people around you as his hand moves to fully cup your cheek.

It ends too soon.

Bucky pulls away just enough to rest his forehead on yours. Opening your eyes, you find his still closed, lips parted with breaths that fan across your face in light puffs, brows drawn together just enough to cause a crease between them. He slowly pulls back again. A muscle in his jaw twitches when he finally opens his eyes, immediately flicking to your lips like he's committing how they feel to memory.

You smile before you can stop yourself, feeling lighter than you have in a long time. He licks his lip and grins back, a soft laugh escaping him.

"That was…" he starts.

"Terrible?" you offer. Bucky laughs again, his free hand lightly touching your waist like he wants to pull you closer.

"Better than I'd hoped, actually."

The admission is soft and makes your heart flutter.

"So…what happens after this?" you ask.

He nods thoughtfully, taking a half step back like he just remembered you're in public, Rockaways' Playland hardly being a place for privacy. His touch lingers for a moment before dropping back to his side.

"I'd like to give us a real chance. If you're open to it."

You don't let him finish before your answer comes tumbling out. "I'd like that, too."

Bucky's blue eyes sparkle under the midway lights. He doesn't say a word as he reaches for the hand not holding the photograph, fingers intertwining with yours like it's second nature.

"Perfect," he says softly. "Come on, I think fireworks are starting soon."

The walk back down the midway feels shorter than it did before. Maybe it's the weight of everything now lifted off your shoulders, or maybe it's the feeling of his hand in yours. Maybe it's the lingering memory of his kiss—an answer to the million questions you asked yourself over the last day. Whatever it is, the crowds heading towards the beach barely register.

Steve spots you first, smiling to himself at the sight of your joined hands before gently nudging Becca's side. Her eyes go wide. Her grin goes wider. No one says a word as the four of you follow the crowd to the beach across the street.

The sand is still warm from the day when you sit down, placing the picture on your lap. Bucky doesn't let go of your hand, his shoulder brushing yours as he joins you, his long legs stretching in front of him.

It's a short wait before the first firework bursts, red lighting the sky and reflecting across the water. Golds and blues join quickly and fill the air with a dazzling display.

You glance at Bucky. He's not looking at the fireworks. He's watching you, lips curving into a soft smile when your eyes meet.

His fingers tighten around yours, and you scoot a little closer, resting your head on his shoulder. He lets out a quiet sigh and gently leans his cheek against your head before finally looking at the fireworks overhead.

A/N: If you’ve made it this far, I just want to extend a massive thank you for reading and supporting this story. It’s been almost a year in the making, which blows my mind when it wasn’t meant to go this far. You’ve also seen me grow significantly as a writer and it genuinely makes me emotional. Anywho…as of now, I’m tentatively calling this the end—but you never know what inspiration might hit me and maybe there will be a sequel someday. Lots of love 💜

⤷ Everything S. Stan: @steelandvibranium @/phoenix-in-writing @syd-vixious @sebastians-love @overwintering-soldier @wintersgirllost @wint3rbarnes @miraclediviner @barnes-babydoll @buckytakethewheel @bucksbby @sheriff-bodecker @wherewinterblooms @dei-dreamz @ladymiseryy @ornateglass @galactict3a @take-u-2-an0ther-w0r1d @alyssinwunderland-blog-blog @blue-eyes-in-august @/juniebjonesin @erina00

⤷ Bucky Barnes only: @phantom-wolf-girl @bartonsparrow25 @biaswreckedbybuckybarnes @highhopes1008 @hagridshaircare @jamesbbcrnes

⤷ Everything Taglist: @sunday-bug @tw1sters @/castielscaplan

⤷ Barnes Knows Best Taglist: @lost-girly-014 @dreamiierose

Bucky pushed the door open with his shoulder and grinned over at him. “You say that like you don’t love my taste.”

“I say that like your taste got us thrown out of a place in Soho last month.”

“That was one time.”

“That was three times.”

Inside, the bar glowed amber through smoke and crowded warmth. Soldiers filled most of the room, British and American uniforms muddled together with working men, girls in worn dresses, and old women who sat straight-backed with their drinks and judged everybody equally. Somebody laughed too loud near the counter. Glass clinked. Boots scraped over the floorboards. In one corner, a handful of musicians crowded together with the familiarity of people who had played shoulder to shoulder for years.

Bucky barely registered them at first. He shrugged off his damp coat, ran a hand through his hair, and looked around with the easy hunger of a man determined to wring something good from a bad century.

Then the bagpipes started.

He stopped dead.

The sound cut through the room, wild and high and strange as a mourning cry dragged through reeds. It rose over the fiddle and whatever else accompanied it and drove straight between Bucky’s eyes.

His face twisted at once.

“Oh, come on,” he muttered. “What is that?”

Steve followed his look and failed, very visibly, not to smile. “Music.”

“That,” Bucky said, “is a wounded animal making peace with death.”

Steve gave a quiet huff that passed for laughter. “You could try being less dramatic.”

“I am being restrained.”

The note swelled, fierce and nasal and unashamedly itself, and Bucky winced harder.

“Whoever invented that thing had a personal grudge against joy.”

“Well,” a voice said nearby, cool and distinctly amused, “good evening to you too.”

He turned at the sound of it.

You stood not far from the musicians, one hand curled around a glass, the light from the bar catching along the line of your cheek and the dark sweep of your hair. Nothing about you seemed arranged to be noticed; perhaps that was why he noticed you all at once. You belonged there in a way he did not. The room seemed to bend around you naturally. Even before he knew anything else, he saw that much.

For a second, he could only look.

Then his mouth curved, slow and easy, instinct taking over before thought quite caught up with it.

He smiled on instinct, because smiling had always been easier for him than caution.

“Now,” he said, shifting closer, “I could pretend I didn’t mean a word of that, but I figure honesty might serve me better.”

“Will it?” you asked.

Your accent brushed the words soft at the edges, shaped by someplace older than London. Scotland, he guessed a moment later when he really looked at the musicians. You did not sound offended. You sounded amused. That was worse. Amusement meant you had measured him quickly and found him manageable.

Bucky leaned an elbow on the nearest table like he had all the time in the world. “Depends how much you like honesty.”

“I imagine it depends on the honesty.”

Steve, traitor that he was, drifted away toward the bar with the deeply suspicious look of a man abandoning his friend to a fate he deserved.

Bucky kept his eyes on you. “Then here’s some more. You’re the prettiest thing I’ve seen all week, and I’d like to know your name.”

Your mouth curved. “That sounded practiced.”

“It was,” he said. “But not inaccurate.”

A few of the musicians shifted. The piper adjusted his grip. Bucky heard the scrape of the drones starting up again and grimaced before he could stop himself.

Your eyebrows rose.

He caught the expression and knew at once he had made a mistake, but he did not yet understand how much of one.

“That your first love over there?” he asked lightly, trying to recover. “Because if it is, I should tell you I’m not built for competition.”

“My brother,” you said.

Bucky closed his eyes for half a second. “Well. That is unfortunate.”

“For you?”

“I’m beginning to think so.”

You regarded him in silence long enough to make him feel it. Not embarrassed, exactly. Bucky Barnes did not embarrass easily. But something close. He had expected laughter, or annoyance, or perhaps a sharp remark if you had a taste for sharpness. He had not expected to feel like a schoolboy who had spoken out of turn in front of a teacher cleverer than he was.

Then you glanced toward the musicians and said something to them in Gaelic.

Bucky did not understand a single word, but the piper – your brother – snorted under his breath and looked at you the way brothers looked at sisters when they had known them their entire lives and still sometimes found themselves outmaneuvered.

“No,” he said in what sounded like weary affection.

You answered him in the same language, calm and unmistakably certain.

Another musician laughed.

Your brother sighed, adjusted the bag beneath his arm, and nodded once.

Bucky narrowed his eyes. “What was that?”

You turned back to him, and there was satisfaction in your face now, bright and dangerous.

“A lesson,” you said.

Before he could answer, the room shifted.

The fiddle drew out first, gentler than before. Then the bagpipes came in beneath it, not as a noise now but as a long, carrying ache. The chatter nearest the musicians faltered. A few people turned. Someone at the bar lowered his voice.

And you sang.

Not for the room.

Not for applause.

For him.

Bucky knew it with the same instant certainty with which he knew that he had been foolish. You had not lashed out. You had not taken offense and walked away. You had done something worse, something more elegant and much more devastating.

You had decided to show him exactly what he had mocked.

Your voice was not loud. It did not need to be. It was clear in the way cold water was clear, and old in the way some griefs were old – polished by being carried, not dulled. The bar seemed to fold itself around it.

By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes, Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond...

He did not know the song. He caught the place-name, the shape of the words, the rhythm of something held for generations and offered now without flourish. You did not sing to charm him. If anything, you sang with a kind of composed defiance, as though each line laid another stone in the case against his ignorance.

Where me and my true love will never meet again On the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond...

Something in the room stilled.

Bucky had heard beautiful women sing before. He had flirted with chorus girls and danced with girls who sang in Brooklyn parlors and knew the warm, easy thrill of being near sweetness. This was not that. There was too much sorrow in the song, and too much pride in the way you held it. You sang as though it belonged to your bones. As though the words had passed through your family long before they ever reached his ears.

The bagpipes rose with you, and this time the sound did not strike him as ugly. It cut, yes. It keened. But beneath the strangeness he heard something else now – distance, mourning, country, farewell. Not a joke. Not a grotesque instrument. A wound with breath in it.

You looked at him once, only once, in the middle of the refrain.

O ye’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road, And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye...

It was a look with a point to it. Not cruel. Just precise.

See? it said.

Listen.

Learn.

For the first time in many years, Bucky had no idea what to do with himself.

He stood where he was and forgot the room, forgot Steve, forgot the drink he had not yet ordered. He forgot, briefly and entirely, how to perform. There was only your voice and the strange grieving cry of the pipes, which had become beautiful without asking his permission.

Then the line came again, the one that lodged somewhere deep before he fully understood it.

For me and my true love will never meet again...

The words should not have meant much to him. Not there. Not then. Yet they landed with a force he could not explain, as if some part of him recognized the shape of loss long before the rest of him had to.

By the time the song ended, he was lost.

He knew it with perfect clarity in the small silence that followed. Not in the cheap way he had used the word before, with girls and evenings and charming lies that dissolved by morning. He was undone in a quieter, more dangerous fashion. He had come over to flirt with a beautiful woman and found himself standing before something he did not know how to touch without reverence.

Around you, the room breathed again. Glasses lifted. Somebody clapped. A few people murmured praise. Your brother pretended not to be pleased and failed entirely.

You turned to Bucky.

“Well?” you asked.

He opened his mouth and closed it again.

You smiled then, slight and victorious.

“That bad?”

“No,” he said, and his voice came out rougher than he expected. “No. I just–”

He stopped, then laughed once at himself and shook his head.

“I think I owe your brother an apology.”

From the corner, the man in question barked a laugh.

You looked over your shoulder at him, then back to Bucky. “That would be a start.”

He glanced toward the bar. Steve stood there with two glasses in hand and an expression of such open satisfaction that Bucky wanted, briefly, to kill him.

Instead he looked at you and asked the only question that mattered.

“What did it mean?”

That changed you.

Only a little. Your amusement softened into something more attentive, more serious. You studied him for a heartbeat as though deciding whether he had earned the answer.

Then you nodded toward an empty table near the wall.

“Sit,” you said.

Bucky did.

Steve passed behind him on the way and muttered, “You look stunned.”

“Get lost.”

“With pleasure.”

You sat across from Bucky with your glass between your hands. Up close, he saw details he had missed the first time – the steadiness in you, the quick intelligence, the faint shadow of tiredness beneath your eyes that war had written there like it had on everyone.

“It’s an old song,” you said. “Older than either of us. There are different stories told about it. The one most people know is about two Scottish prisoners. One died. One lived. The dead one took the low road home.”

Bucky frowned slightly. “Home.”

“To Scotland,” you said. “Before the living man could get there by the ordinary road.”

He leaned back, trying to catch up with the shape of it. “So the low road was–”

“Death.” You said it simply. Not theatrically. Just as fact. “Or the road of the dead, depending on who tells it. The high road was the one the living took. The long one.”

He looked at you for a long moment.

“And you sang that,” he said slowly, “because I made a face at the pipes.”

“I sang that,” you replied, “because you insulted something you didn’t understand.”

The candor of it hit him like cold water, and he laughed despite himself. “That was a lesson, all right.”

Your chin lifted a fraction. “Did you learn anything?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

He looked at you, at the curve of challenge still in your mouth, at the room around you with its smoke and shadows and impossible temporary warmth.

“That I was wrong.”

You waited.

“And,” he added, “that you sing like you’re trying to haunt a man.”

That earned him a real smile.

“That,” you said, “was a little better.”

He asked your name then, properly this time, with none of the easy arrogance from before. You gave it to him. He repeated it once, careful with the shape of it, and you laughed at the way his American mouth handled it.

The bagpipes started again later that evening.

He did not grimace once.

He came back the next night.

He told himself he might not find you there, and that was true enough. London turned people into chance encounters and absences with equal speed. But some part of him had known he would return from the moment he stepped out into the rain.

Steve knew it too.

“You’re going back for the girl with the bagpipes,” he said as they walked.

“She’s not the girl with the bagpipes.”

“She’s adjacent to the bagpipes.”

“She sang one song.”

“You look like a man who got clubbed over the head with it.”

Bucky shoved his shoulder. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Steve’s smile was faint in the darkness. “Sure.”

You were there.

You stood near the bar this time, speaking to your brother with your head bent toward him. When you saw Bucky, your expression gave nothing away for a second. Then one eyebrow arched, and he knew he had been expected after all.

“Back so soon?” you asked.

“Couldn’t stay away from the terrible music.”

Your brother, close enough to hear, made a rude sound.

You laughed.

That laugh became, in the days that followed, one of Bucky’s favorite sounds in the world.

The war did not pause for you. That was what made everything between you feel both brighter and more fragile. Nothing happened in a place protected from danger. You met in streets still carrying bomb damage, beneath signs dimmed by blackout rules, in cafés where the tea was weak and the bread rationed, in parks where the grass bore the memory of barracks boots and drill lines. The city gave you no illusion of permanence. So you took what it offered and made something of it anyway.

He learned the shape of your hands around a cup.

He learned that your brother pretended to be suspicious of him while quietly making space at the musicians’ table whenever Bucky appeared.

He learned that you had lived in London long enough to move through it without hesitation and yet still missed Scotland with an ache that sharpened when the air turned damp.

He learned that you could cut through his nonsense with a single look.

He learned that you did not forgive foolishness, but you did reward sincerity.

You learned, in turn, that behind Bucky’s practiced charm sat a quick mind, a reckless loyalty, and a tenderness he hid as if tenderness embarrassed him. You learned the way his face changed when he spoke of Steve, and how rarely he spoke of fear except by joking around its edges. You learned that he liked to touch when he laughed – a hand on a shoulder, a brush at your elbow, the casual contact of someone who had grown up crowded and warm and never quite unlearned it.

One evening, after the musicians finished and the last of the crowd thinned, he walked you back through wet streets shining under the moonless dark. Your gloved hands brushed once. Then again. Neither of you pretended the second time was accidental.

“You never told me why London,” he said.

You glanced up. “For work at first. Then because war made moving anywhere else rather difficult.”

“That sounds practical.”

“It usually is.”

“And Scotland?”

Your expression softened at once, as if the very name had opened something.

“Home,” you said.

He thought then of the line in the song.

And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye.

For reasons he did not examine too closely, it touched something in him every time.

“What did you ask your brother that first night?” he said.

You laughed under your breath. “You still want to know?”

“Of course I do.”

“I told him,” you said, “to play properly if he meant to cure an American of his bad taste.”

Bucky groaned. “You set me up.”

“You deserved it.”

“I walked right into it.”

“Yes,” you said. “You did.”

He stopped beneath the shadow of a doorway, looked down at you, and saw the city in fragments around your face – the wet shine of stone, the thread of cold air, the pulse of distant traffic and soldiers’ voices and all the things that made the war feel, for one impossible second, far away.

“Do you always punish men by singing at them?” he asked softly.

“Only when they are particularly arrogant.”

“And did it work?”

You searched his face like you meant to catch him trying to be clever. He let you look. For once, he had no trick he wanted to use.

“Yes,” he said. “It worked.”

The kiss that followed was careful at first.

Not because he was uncertain of wanting it. Because he was not.

It was careful because you had not been won with any of the easy methods that had once served him elsewhere. You had seen through those in an instant. So when he touched your face and bent toward you, he did it with the strange, new seriousness you had called up in him. Your gloved fingers rose to his coat, caught there, and then your mouth met his.

He had kissed women in crowded dance halls, on stoops, in cabs, behind theater curtains. He had kissed for the joy of kissing, for the spark of being young and wanted and alive.

He had never kissed like this.

When you drew back, your breath warmed the cold air between you. He rested his forehead briefly against yours and heard you laugh once, quiet.

“What?” he asked.

“You looked very pleased with yourself when you walked over to me that first night.”

“I’m always pleased with myself.”

“No,” you said. “You were certain.”

He smiled. “I was.”

“And now?”

He touched the edge of your scarf, tucked it closer against the wind. “Now,” he said, “I’m trying very hard not to say the wrong thing.”

That pleased you. He could tell.

“Then perhaps you are improving.”

The bagpipes stopped sounding harsh.

That, more than anything, made Steve laugh at him.

It happened on the sixth or seventh evening – Bucky never afterward remembered the exact day, only the astonishment of realizing he had sat through an entire set with your brother playing at full force and had not once flinched.

You noticed too.

“You didn’t make a face,” you said when the tune ended.

He pretended to consider it. “Maybe I’m going deaf.”

“Or educated.”

“Careful,” he said. “You’ll make yourself impossible to live with.”

Your brother snorted from three feet away. “Too late.”

But Bucky shook his head. “No,” he said, looking at you. “That’s not it either.”

“What, then?”

He could have joked. He often did when anything grew too plain. But you had made plainness easier somehow.

“It sounds different now,” he said.

You held still.

“How?”

He glanced toward the pipes, then back at you. “Like something I know.”

It was the nearest he came to saying it then. Not that he loved you. That knowledge had already taken root, but the word felt too narrow and too fragile all at once beneath wartime skies. Instead he let it live in smaller things – in the way he always turned first when you entered a room, in the way he listened when you spoke, in the way he began to carry your songs inside him without noticing when they settled there.

One night you taught him fragments of Gaelic badly enough that you laughed until you had tears in your eyes. Another time you sang under your breath while he leaned against the wall and watched you, and he understood with a quiet shock that he could have spent the rest of his life listening.

That thought came and went so quickly he almost did not catch it.

The rest of my life.

It was an absurd thought to have in wartime. Perhaps that was why it felt so true.

The order came three days later.

Bucky knew the look on the faces of the men before anyone said it aloud. Something sharper. More focused. A mission with teeth.

He found Steve first. He always did, when things mattered.

“You knew,” he said.

Steve did not deny it. “Not until this morning.”

Bucky exhaled slowly. “Good one?”

“No.”

They stood in silence for a moment in the corridor, the sounds of the base moving around them like distant machinery.

Then Bucky said, “I need to go out tonight.”

Steve looked at him once. “Go.”

That evening London seemed colder than it had in days. The air bit through wool and into bone. Bucky walked to the bar and found you not inside but just outside, wrapped in your coat, one hand braced against the wall while your breath made pale ghosts in front of you.

You turned before he spoke, as though you had felt him coming.

For a moment neither of you said anything.

Then you looked at his face and knew.

“You are leaving,” you said.

It was not a question.

He nodded. “At dawn.”

The street behind you lay quiet except for distant traffic and one burst of laughter from somewhere farther down. Overhead, the blackout left the sky blank and immense.

“How long?” you asked.

He gave the only honest answer. “I don’t know.”

You lowered your eyes once, then lifted them again. Steady. Always steady.

He hated that he had so little to offer you. No certainty. No safe promise. Nothing but himself in a world that could take that without warning.

“I’ll come back,” he said anyway.

The words came out instinctively, half vow, half plea. He heard in them the bravado of every soldier who had ever left a woman on a dark street with war between them. Yet he meant them. God, he meant them.

Your face changed in a way he could not name. Not disbelief. Not acceptance either. Something older. Sadder.

“Don’t promise me because you think you should,” you said.

“I’m promising because I intend to.”

“That is not the same thing.”

He let out a breath that almost became a laugh. “You always do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make it impossible for me to sound noble.”

A faint smile touched your mouth and vanished.

He stepped closer until there was no distance left worth naming. His gloved hand cupped your cheek. You leaned into it for the briefest second, and that small motion hurt him more than tears would have.

“I keep hearing that song in my head,” he said quietly.

“Which part?”

He swallowed.

For me and my true love will never meet again.

He did not say that line. He could not bear to.

“The road part,” he said instead. “The high road. The low road.”

Your gaze held his. “It was meant to.”

He laughed once under his breath, pained and fond all at once. “You really never let me off easy, do you?”

“No.”

“Good.”

You kissed him first this time. Harder than before, as if softness would have broken something in you. He answered with both hands on your face, with every word he could not make useful. When you pulled back, your forehead rested against his and he shut his eyes.

“Sing it for me again,” he said.

Not there in the street. Not truly. He knew that. But you understood what he meant.

You drew one hand up to his collar and said, almost too softly to hear, “O ye’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road...”

He closed his eyes harder.

“Don’t,” he whispered.

You touched his jaw. “Then come back.”

He kissed your palm.

When he finally turned to go, he did not look back at once. He knew if he did, he might stay. He walked several steps down the street, stopped, and turned anyway.

You were still there.

The wind moved the edge of your coat. Your face was pale in the dark. Somewhere inside the bar, someone struck up the first searching note of the pipes.

Bucky stood very still.

For the first time in his life, the sound of the bagpipes broke his heart.

Steve came alone.

You knew before he spoke.

The war had taught everyone to read grief on sight. It altered the body. It hollowed the eyes, tightened the mouth, made every movement careful as though the world had become full of sharp edges. Steve carried all of it when he stepped into the bar and asked your brother for a word.

Your brother looked toward you.

You crossed the room before either man could come to you, because some instincts were not habits but mercies. Better to meet sorrow standing.

Outside, the afternoon lay cold and gray over the street. Steve took off his gloves one finger at a time as if the order of small motions mattered.

“He fell from the train,” he said.

Nothing in his voice tried to soften it. You loved him for that. He respected you enough not to lie.

For one suspended second the world narrowed to that single sentence.

He fell.

Not died. Not was killed. Fell.

Space opened beneath your feet that did not exist anywhere visible. If you had not already learned, long before London and before him, that grief often arrived without spectacle, you might have expected yourself to break. But breaking belonged to stories told by people who had time. War gave you tasks instead.

“When?” you asked.

Steve told you.

“Did he–”

He shook his head once, answering the question you could not finish.

No body.

No burial.

No return.

You looked past Steve at the wet street, at a woman carrying parcels, at a truck rumbling at the end of the block, at life continuing with the vulgar steadiness it always had.

“Thank you for coming yourself,” you said.

Steve swallowed. “He cared for you.”

The words almost undid you. Almost.

You folded your hands tighter around each other to keep them still. “I know.”

Steve stood there a moment longer, perhaps expecting more, perhaps fearing it. Then he nodded and left you your dignity.

You watched him go until the street swallowed him.

Only then did you close your eyes.

Later, your brother found you in the back room with your hands flat against the table and your breathing measured to the edge of pain. He said nothing. He only set the bagpipes down in their case beside you with a care that bordered on ritual.

Within the month, you and the musicians left London for the work you never called heroic.

You crossed the Channel under false papers and names that shifted like shadows. You carried messages folded into instrument cases and hems. You played in taverns and village halls and farm kitchens where the Resistance met in glances and murmurs and the exchange of ordinary things. Music covered many movements. People underestimated musicians. That helped.

You never stopped missing him.

But missing and mourning were luxuries that had to live in the cracks between tasks.

By then, perhaps, you understood the song differently too.

Not as warning.

As truth.

Years later, in New York, a bagpipe stopped Bucky in the middle of the street.

The sound rose above traffic on a bright afternoon, sharp as a blade and old as weather. Some tourist somewhere laughed. A bus hissed at the curb. Someone jostled past with shopping bags and a phone pressed to their ear.

Beside him, Sam kept talking for two more steps before he realized Bucky had stopped.

“Bucky?”

The note held.

Bucky did not answer.

The world folded.

Not around him. Through him.

He saw wet London pavements. Smoke-light. Your hand around a glass. The slant of your smile when you told him he had insulted something he did not understand. Your voice pouring sorrow into a crowded room while he stood there like a fool and fell in love with you and the song and the sound of the pipes all at once.

He saw your face the night before the mission.

He heard you say, Then come back.

His chest locked so hard it bordered on pain.

“Hey.” Sam stepped into his line of sight. “Talk to me.”

Bucky dragged in a breath that did not feel sufficient. The street around them blurred strangely, as if time itself had slipped. He had lost so many memories over the years that he had learned to live around the emptiness, to accept that whole rooms in his mind remained locked or ruined. But this was not emptiness. This was a door blowing off its hinges.

“There was someone,” he said.

Sam said nothing. Just waited.

“In London,” Bucky went on, the words rough and uneven. “During the war. I–” He pressed a hand briefly to his mouth. “I forgot her.”

The admission came out like confession.

Sam’s expression changed. Not pity. Something better. Recognition.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “Then we find out what happened.”

The piper turned out to be some man from Staten Island with no connection to anything that mattered. It did not matter. The sound had done its work.

Memory gave them pieces first.

A bar.

Scottish musicians.

A brother.

A song.

Gaelic.

Then more came, maddeningly slow and then all at once. A street shining with rain. Your voice rising over the room. The shape of your smile when you decided to make an example of him. Your hand in his. A doorway. A kiss. Your face in the dark the night before the mission. The sound of you saying, Then come back.

That was all Bucky had at first – fragments with feeling still clinging to them, sharp enough to hurt and too incomplete to bear.

Sam helped him as only Sam could – without crowding, without trying to make the grief tidy. They pulled military records, old city directories, oral histories, and the scattered fragments left behind by ordinary people history rarely bothered to keep intact. One name led to another. A musician’s registry. A mention of a Scottish family living in London during the war. A surviving reference in a church archive. Then, eventually, a village in the Highlands and a brother who still lived there under a sky large enough to make silence feel holy.

Scotland met them with wind.

The drive north took them through roads that narrowed and climbed, past lochs holding the pale light of afternoon, past heather and stone and distances that seemed built from old songs. Bucky sat mostly quiet in the passenger seat. Sam did not press him. Every so often he pointed something out – a stand of trees, a ruin, a sheep planted absurdly in the middle of nowhere – not because it mattered, but because gentleness often wore the shape of ordinary conversation.

The cottage stood alone except for a low stone wall and a wash of purple creeping over the hillside behind it. An old man opened the door before they reached it, as if he had seen the car from half a mile away and had no intention of pretending surprise.

He looked at Sam first, then at Bucky.

Everything in him stilled.

Age had thinned him, bent him slightly, silvered his hair. But the eyes were the same. Bucky knew them at once. He had seen them across a crowded wartime room over the shoulder of a bagpipe, bright with long familiarity and no patience for fools.

For a moment nobody spoke.

Then the old man said, in a voice weathered but steady, “James Barnes.”

Bucky swallowed. “Yes.”

The man looked at him a second longer, and something unreadable passed through his face. Not shock. Not exactly anger. Grief, perhaps, finding a form it had not expected to see.

He had your eyes.

The realization hit Bucky with quiet brutality. Not exactly the same – age had changed them, sorrow had dimmed them – but close enough that, for a moment, standing in that doorway felt like standing before a ghost.

Your brother let them in.

The cottage smelled faintly of peat and tea and old wood. Bagpipes rested in one corner of the room, worn with use and time. On the mantel stood photographs, some new, some very old. Bucky’s eyes went to one and stayed there.

You.

Not London-you, though it was still you. Younger perhaps than when he had known you, standing on some hillside with your hair blown loose and your head half turned toward the camera, smiling at the person behind it.

His hand twitched at his side.

“She kept one of you,” your brother said.

Bucky looked up so fast it almost hurt.

The old man crossed to a drawer, opened it, and took out a photograph with movements made careful by habit. He held it out.

Bucky took it like something breakable.

He had never seen it before.

For a moment, he could only stare.

It had been taken in London. You were standing beside him, close enough that there was no mistaking what you had been to one another. His arm was around you. Your face was turned toward him, caught in the beginning of a smile, while he looked back at you with an expression so open it made something in his chest twist. He barely recognized himself in it. Or perhaps he recognized himself too well.

On the back, in your hand, a line had been written.

He finally learned to like the pipes.

Bucky stared until the letters blurred.

Sam, across the room, politely looked away.

Your brother sat down slowly. “She loved you,” he said.

The simplicity of it nearly drove the breath from Bucky’s body.

“I loved her too,” he said.

The old man nodded once, as if that at least had never been in doubt.

For a while the only sounds in the room were the kettle beginning to stir and the wind touching the windows. Then Bucky asked the question that had brought him across an ocean.

“What happened?”

Your brother rested his hands on his knees. They were old hands now, broad and weathered and still. Musician’s hands. Survivor’s hands.

“She kept working after your friend came with the news,” he said. “There was no persuading her otherwise. None of us stopped, but she...” He paused. “She had less fear after that. Or perhaps less interest in obeying fear.”

He told it plainly.

The group traveled through occupied France under the cover of performances. They carried messages, names, routes, codes. They hid what they could in instrument cases and lining and sheet music. Twice they evaded searches. Once they barely escaped an informant. Then, in the winter of 1944, near Lyon, they were caught.

“We were taken together at first,” he said. “Questioned together. She understood before the rest of us that they suspected a network larger than musicians passing letters. They wanted names.” His jaw tightened. “She gave them none.”

Bucky did not move.

“She told them it was her,” the old man went on. “That she had used us. That we knew nothing. She made herself the center of it because she thought, if the story was narrow enough, the rest of us might live.”

“And you did,” Sam said quietly.

Your brother nodded once. “Most of us. Not all. But more than would have otherwise.”

Bucky’s hand tightened around the photograph until he feared he might crease it.

“They deported her,” the old man said. “There were reports for a time. Fragments. A prison. Then transport east.” He looked toward the window and beyond it, to distances only he could see. “After that, nothing. Not nothing, perhaps. History always leaves scraps. But nothing certain. No grave. No confirmation I could hold in my hand.”

No return.

The phrase rang so loudly in Bucky’s head that it eclipsed the room.

He had lived. That was the cruelty in it. He had fallen from the train and not died. He had been taken, erased, broken, remade. The war had stolen him from himself, but it had not buried him. He had gone on breathing through decades you had never seen.

And you – you had waited long enough to hear of his death, gone on fighting, and vanished into the machinery that devoured millions.

For me and my true love will never meet again.

He understood then, fully and too late, what the song had always known.

Sam drove him out later, when the light had begun to turn gold at the edges of the hills and the old man had clasped Bucky’s forearm at the door with a grip that said more than words could have borne. They did not go far. Just to an overlook where the land opened wide and the air smelled of water and heather and old rain.

Bucky got out and stood at the edge of it.

The Highlands rolled away in folds of muted green and purple, cut by stone and distance and the silver thread of a loch far below. Wind pulled at his jacket. Somewhere unseen, a bird called once and went quiet.

Sam stayed a respectful distance back.

Bucky took the photograph from his pocket and looked at it again. At his own younger face. At your handwriting. At the life that might have been small and ordinary and therefore more precious than any grander thing.

He thought of you in the bar, chin lifted, deciding to teach an arrogant American soldier a lesson he would never finish learning. He thought of your voice threading sorrow through smoke. He thought of the way you had said Then come back as if you had known promises and intentions were not the same.

“I’m sorry,” he said aloud, though the wind nearly took it.

Sorry for not returning. Sorry for surviving wrongly. Sorry for forgetting. Sorry for all the years in which you had been dead and he had not even known where to grieve.

The hills did not answer him.

Then, faint and far off, a bagpipe began to play.

The sound came from somewhere beyond the ridge, carried thin and true by the wind. Not close enough to see. Only close enough to hear.

Bucky shut his eyes.

He no longer heard something sharp and ridiculous and foreign. He heard a road. A country. A loss too old for repair. He heard you.

When he opened his eyes again, the light had shifted over the loch below, turning it to muted silver. He stood there until the tune thinned into distance, and when the words came back to him at last, he did not fight them.

For me and my true love will never meet again On the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond

GENERAL taglist: @mellowfurynight | @castielscaplan | @whatisanniedoin | @barewithme02 | @mathcat345 | @overwintering-soldier | @alpinebarnesworld | @alwaysreenie | @iceyyycapsicle | @karlahan

BUCKY taglist: @metal-armed-muse | @greatenthusiasttidalwave | @highhopes1008 | @phoenix-in-writing | @mollyherondale | @sassandscribbles | @alyssinwunderland-blog-blog | @pattiemac1 | @buckysdecaflove | @fantasyfootballchampion | @sebbymybaby21 | @theoryxwaller | @apenny4thots | @mishkatelwarriorgoddess | @allthingswickedpodcast | @vicmc624 | @strangerthing93 | @galaxygoddess30 | @peachiestevie | @evilplansandstuff | @nicobidd | @i-lie-here-charmed

Screenshot. Blocked. Done.

Bucky walked in with a mug in his hand and took a seat beside you, which brought a small smile to your face. He liked being close. You were one of the only people he let into his personal space bubble.

“You okay?” he asked when you set your phone down. “You’re being quiet.”

“I’m quiet sometimes,” you tried to tease.

He tilted his head. “No, this is a different kind of quiet. Something happened,” he said because he knew you so well. “And I want to fix it.”

You smiled again. Of course, he wanted to fix it. That was the kind of man he was. 

“Apparently, I’m too old to have hobbies,” you stated.

An adorably confused look crossed his face and you wanted to kiss him for being so cute. “You’re… what?”

“I got some anonymous ask on my blog basically telling me to stop posting fanfiction because I’m too old and I should do something my age,” you explained, showing him the screenshot.

Bucky stared at the screenshot, his fingers twitching before they curled into fists. He didn’t say anything. It didn’t even look like he was breathing.

The cold that filled his blue eyes told you he was about two seconds from somehow climbing into the internet and finding this person.

“And before you asked, I didn’t respond. I blocked them,” you explained, keeping the phone out of his reach. “They’re just trolling or trying to get a reaction.”

One of the wonderful things about your blog was that you could curate it for your own experience. If you didn’t want to respond to rude asks or messages, you didn’t have to. If you wanted to, you could. It was that simple.

A downside of the website was that some people seemed to forget to curate their own experiences, like simply unfollowing or blocking blogs and tags if they didn’t like, agree, or want to see them.

“I am reacting,” Bucky said in a quiet voice tinged with building rage.

“I noticed,” you said, not flinching when he set the mug down with a little more force than necessary and took a deep breath.

“That… is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of stuff.”

You almost laughed, but he was dead serious.

“Does this…” He gestured to your phone and flexed his fingers again. “Askhole really thinks that there’s an expiration date on hobbies? Because there isn’t.”

You shifted and tucked your legs underneath you, giving him your full attention.

“That’s so fucking…” He let out a bitter laugh. “People collect baseball cards into their seventies. Eighties. They paint miniature trains. Build model airplanes. Knit. Garden. Fish. Hunt.”

“They do,” you agreed, running your fingers through his hair just because you could.

He closed his eyes at your touch before he continued. “People go to comic cons and cosplay. They play D&D. Video games.” His voice was starting to rise and your nails touched his scalp again. “And what about grown ass men paint their faces and spend entire weekends yelling at sports games?”

“You sound personally offended.”

He looked at you incredulously. “I am personally offended on your behalf.”

You snuck in a kiss because you couldn’t help yourself. You felt some of the anger leave his body when your lips touched. It meant a lot that he cared so much.

“Don’t distract me,” he whispered.

“I’m not,” you whispered back, smiling when you pulled away. “You just have very kissable lips.”

“So do you,” he said with a smile before he frowned. “But I’m still not happy because they’re acting like people writing stories is somehow less respectable because what? Other people read them online and not from a book?”

You shrugged a little. “It’s fanfiction,” you said softly.

He shrugged, too. “So?”

“So…” You tried to find the words. “Some people think it's an inferior form of writing and a waste of time.”

His brows pinched, something sad filling his eyes. “I think creating something that makes you happy is one of the most adult and superior things you could do.”

You were quiet for a moment. “Really?”

“Really.” He opened his arms for you to move close. “You have two kids who love and adore you and vice versa, and they’re busy with so many activities that you have a calendar to keep it all straight. You make sure they’re never without.”

Your heart swelled. Your babies. No matter how old they got, they would always be your babies. And you wanted them to thrive in life. That was one of the reasons you worked so hard to give them not just a nice home, but a loving one.

“You work 40 hours a week. Sometimes more,” he said, his lips brushing the top of your head. “You pour so much of yourself into that job and your teammates that it wears on you by the end of the week.”

Mist filled your eyes. You did put a lot into your job because your parents taught you the value of hard work. And as frustrating as growth in your job could be, there were perks to your job and you had a great team. That wasn’t easy to come by.

“And when you aren’t pouring yourself into the kids or work, you have a pretty amazing husband who always wants your attention,” he teased, tilting your chin up with a tender smile. “Seriously, I can’t keep my hands off you half the time.”

Heat filled your cheeks and a laugh bubbled up. It amazed you after so many years how your husband still wanted you. Still admired you. He was an amazing partner and father.

You couldn’t ask for anyone better.

“And when you aren’t dealing with a handy husband.” He smirked a little. “You’re paying bills, handling responsibilities, and checking on others. Online and offline.”

Your heart sank a little. Messages sometimes went unanswered. Asks got buried. Comments got late replies. Not on purpose. Never on purpose.

But you felt guilty just the same. It didn’t feel like enough some days. There wasn’t enough time. There wasn’t enough of you to go around. 

“I try,” you said sadly.

“You do your best, and people see that,” he said proudly. “And after all that, you write.”

“Yeah.”

You wished you could write every single day. Life rarely gave you the opportunity to do so. You accepted that.

“I’m in fucking awe of you,” he said so seriously that your mouth fell open. “And not just you, but the community you all have online. They may not have your same kind of life or schedule, but they have their own struggles and they still find the time to create and share. You all help keep fandoms alive.”

Everyone had a life and a story to tell. Everyone had their hardships. That was one of the reasons so many of you gravitated to certain characters and communities. Life was tough enough. Building connections helped.

“I guess we do,” you said, much softer.

“Does that piece of shit askhole realize that your creations have touched people? Helped people?” 

“I haven’t-”

He silenced you with a deep kiss, the words dying in your throat.

“Don’t you dare say that your writing hasn’t touched or helped at least one person because it has,” he said fiercely, cupping your cheek. “Fluff, smut, angst, soft, dark. There’s something for everyone.”

You did your best to provide a variety of stories, and you adored your readers. They were cheerleaders, supporters, and friends. You wanted them to feel loved and cared for. They deserved that. 

“And some coward.” The word tasted bitter in his mouth. “Hiding behind a button doesn’t get to treat you like you don’t belong in your own space because of your age.”

Your eyes burned again. “Bucky…”

“Not to mention, you do this for free in the very limited free time you have.” He brushed his thumb along your cheek. “I’m glad you blocked them. You don’t need that trash in your inbox.”

“I’m glad, too.”

It wasn’t the sort of energy you needed in your space, and blocking them helped take your power back.

“And look at me? I’m over a hundred years old. I’m an old fucking man, and I still have hobbies.” He smiled when you snorted. “Like jumping out of planes.”

“You take after Steve,” you joked. 

That beautiful man could be reckless in the best way.

“I like old records.”

“And we dance in the kitchen while listening to them.”

You always felt cherished when he held you close.

“I read,” he said, nodding to the chair where he usually sat to read.

“I should get you reading glasses,” you mused.

Even if he didn’t need them, he’d look sexy in them.

“I’m a science nerd,” he stated proudly.

“I still want to get your glasses.”

Because nerds were sexy as hell.

“I like fixing motorcycles.”

You sighed dreamily. “And you look good on your bike.”

Maybe he could take you for a ride later… in more ways than one.

“I bake with Sam’s nephews.”

You sighed again because the man looked good with kids. “They do love when you add extra chocolate chips to cookies.”

“Extra chocolate chips make it better.” He winked. “And I’m still saving the world every so often.”

You put your hand over his. “My hero.”

“So, if I can still have hobbies at my age, why can’t you?” he asked rhetorically. “If this person really thinks people should stop once they hit a certain, they’re going to live a sad life. If anything, people get better at their hobbies because they’re getting more experience which happens with age.”

You didn’t disagree.

“I don’t care if you’re in your twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, whatever age,” he promised you. “If it brings you joy? If you love it? Then don’t stop creating. Don’t stop writing your stories.”

You closed your eyes when he kissed your forehead. “Even the self-indulgent ones?”

He smiled against your skin. “Especially the self-indulgent ones.”

“Even if I write about other characters?” 

“I’ll support you,” he promised.

“What if someone else says I’m still too old?” you asked.

“Then I’ll remind them, once again, that I’m over a hundred years old and they can get fucked.”

“You look very good for your age.” You giggled when he playfully growled and managed to grab your phone. “Hey!”

“You look very good for your age.” You giggled when he playfully growled and managed to grab your phone. “Hey!”

“Forget about them,” he ordered, tucking the device away. “And talk to me about one of the next ideas brewing in that beautiful brain of yours.”

An almost shy smile appeared on your face. Almost. He knew better.

“It might be better if I… show you.”

He leaned back against the cushion and helped you straddle him, his eyes dark as his hands settled on your hips. “I like the sound of that.”

You stopped him before he could pull you down for a kiss. “Bucky?”

“Yeah, sweetheart?”

You gazed at the man who brought so much light into your life. He helped you connect to others. He fueled your creativity. 

You felt very lucky.

“Thanks for loving and seeing me,” you whispered.

His eyes softened. “Thanks for loving and seeing me, too,” he said, meeting you halfway. “And if some askhole bothers you again, send them my way.”

“Yes, sir,” you teased, letting him kiss you.

So, yes, you’d keep posting your stories on your blog.

The self-indulgent ones. The ones you struggled to tell. The ones you put your blood, sweat, and tears into.

You’d joke about the writing process. You’d apologize for late updates. You’d keep on doing what you were doing.

Because there was no expiration date on creativity and hobbies.

And anyone who thought there was?

Well, they didn’t need to read your stories. 

Yep. I'm a mom. A wife. A friend. I work. I adult. Fanfiction isn't just fanfiction, lovelies. It's community. Keep doing you. Curate your own experience. Love and thanks for reading. ❤️

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꒰Wanda Maximoff x F!Reader

18. Precious jewels ▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||၊၊||၊၊၊||၊||။၊|။•

꒰Sugar Daddy!Jack Abbot x Sugar Baby!Reader

19. Sleight of hand ▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||၊၊||၊၊၊||၊||။၊|။•

꒰Harvey Specter x Barista!F!Reader

20. If not more ▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||၊၊||၊၊၊||၊||။၊|။•

꒰Thunderbolts!Bucky Barnes x Gf!Reader

21. Roses and Honey ▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||၊၊||၊၊၊||၊||။၊|။•

꒰Alpha!Winter Soldier x Omega!Reader

22. Girl of his dreams ▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||၊၊||၊၊၊||၊||။၊|။•

꒰Beefy!Bucky Barnes x F!Reader

23. Such an Asshole ▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||၊၊||၊၊၊||၊||။၊|။•

꒰Dirtbag!Curtis Everett x Cheerleader!Reader

24. Creature of the night ▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||၊၊||၊၊၊||၊||။၊|။•

꒰vampire!Lloyd Hansen x human!Reader

25. Friendly Competition ▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||၊၊||၊၊၊||၊||။၊|။•

꒰Bucky Barnes x Reader x Steve Rogers

26. Forever Changed ▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||၊၊||၊၊၊||၊||။၊|။•

꒰Bucky Barnes x Dora Milaje!Reader

27. Living in Darkness ▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||၊၊||၊၊၊||၊||။၊|။•

꒰Mafia!Steve Rogers x Mafia!Princess!Reader

28. Northern Attitude ▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||၊၊||၊၊၊||၊||။၊|။•

꒰Lumberjack!Robby x F!Reader

29. Spring Break ▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||၊၊||၊၊၊||၊||။၊|။•

꒰Frat!Bucky Barnes x F!Reader x Frat!Steve Rogers

30. Home ▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||၊၊||၊၊၊||၊||။၊|။•

Moonlight spills into the room from between half-open curtains, a steady stream of silver that settles perfectly at the foot of the bed on the side Ma usually occupies.

Lee's flat on his back, blanket thrown in a heap on the floor. One arm is outstretched toward the center of the bed, his pale skin practically glowing in the soft light like an invitation meant just for you.

The excuse shifts.

Bare feet cross the threshold, the door's hinges squeaking when you push it open further, but he doesn't stir and you keep moving. You're curling against his side before your brain even catches up.

It's easy. Almost too easy. Just a few minutes, you tell yourself. Harmless, really, until his arm pulls you in tighter so your chest presses against his ribs and your head rests on his shoulder.

Lee hums, an unusually soft sound from the man half the town fears, his nose brushing against the crown of your head. He inhales. For a moment you think he might be awake. His thumb rubs soothing circles just beneath your arm over the soft cotton of your shirt, his hot breath tickling your skin, but then he mumbles something unintelligible upon exhaling.

You lay there in silence. Heat radiates from him, yet his heartbeat and the gentle rise and fall of his breaths beneath your palm has you melting into him anyway, legs tangling with his.

The warmth should be too much, sweat already beading where your skin meets his, but being in his arms—a place that has quickly become your favorite to be—has a different heat pooling between your thighs.

You try to focus on something else instead. The soft chirp of crickets outside the window. The hum of electricity. The way his calloused fingers catch on the fabric of your shirt.

Squeezing your eyes shut to try and regain any self control you have left when it comes to him, you take a deep breath.

And then his fingers slowly slide down your side, flooding your mind with memories of his rough hands making that same trail along the soft skin of your ribcage. Your heart stutters.

It was a conversation you'd had before.

His hours at the station are crazy. His role as sheriff—and his other extracurricular activities—means he comes home at all hours, day and night. It also means he has an enormous amount of stress laid on his broad shoulders, and on nights like tonight when ma is called for a late shift in the next town over, that left him to either suffer through it or handle it alone.

And you didn't want that.

It came out fast when you originally offered, like a confession that wasn't meant to be heard. Any time, any where—even if you're asleep—Lee could take what he wanted as long as Ma didn't know.

He had stared for a minute, blinking rapidly like his brain was short-circuiting, before a mischievous grin and a twinkle in his eye accompanied his quick promise you could do the same.

The conversation felt like a lifetime ago now despite being a matter of mere weeks.

The memory has your teeth catching the flesh of your bottom lip, the ache between your legs growing when he gently caresses your waist in his sleep. Your hips move without even thinking, pressing slowly against his in an effort to relieve the growing desire.

Fingers toying with the fabric of his white undershirt, slightly damp with sweat, you begin tracing the neckline before wandering slowly down towards the soft curve of his belly. Lee hums again when you draw nonsensical lines across it.

A small sliver of skin peeks from below the hem, which you don't hesitate to move towards. Warm skin and a soft patch of hair greet your careful touch, goosebumps rising in your wake. He shivers before tightening his hold.

You finally slip your hand beneath his undershirt, fingertips staying light as a feather as they move across his skin. Lee's breath hitches, lips grazing your hairline when you look up.

He looks content. A scowl tends to grace his handsome features, blue eyes cold from years of law enforcement and the corruption Ma somehow isn't aware of—or turns a blind eye to. But in his sleep, the lines of his face have softened and he almost looks younger.

It makes your mind wander to what he must've been like when he was your age. Was he always bitter? Was he fit? Did women see him in his deputy uniform and swoon? Those piercing blue eyes paired with the smug smile he's given you when your ma isn't looking must have done a number on the women in this town over the years.

Your fingers dip beneath the waistband of his boxers finding more warmth. You pause.

"Tell me to stop, Lee," you say into the moonlit darkness, watching his face for any signs he's uncomfortable. "Tell me to stop and I will."

He mumbles something in his sleep, but nothing that sounds like rejection.

Keeping an eye on his face for any possible sign of discomfort or unwillingness, you slip your hand fully inside and wrap around his soft length.

He grunts, his brows twitching up. A quiet sound but encouraging nonetheless. You take your time, pushing the fabric of his boxers down in a half successful attempt to free him. He moans softly with every light squeeze and pump of your hand, his cock twitching to life.

Lee's breath picks up slightly, hips bucking up to meet your hand, when he murmurs your name. Faint, almost imperceptible, but you heard it. And then—

"Good girl."

Fighting back a groan, you carefully maneuver out from his side—earning a small sound of protest from him—and place yourself between his thick thighs, which part easily. His musk fills your nostrils quickly when you lean close. It's almost intoxicating.

With a bit more tugging on the fabric of his boxers, half his cock springs free, tip flushed and leaking.

"Are you gonna let me have all the fun alone?" you tease. He grunts.

Wrapping your fingers around him again, his brows furrowing, you lean in to press a kiss against the tip.

Lee whines softly, his hips bucking towards your face. A smirk tugs at your lips.

"Yeah?" A kitten lick has you tasting the salty precum and his hips move again, his cock twitching in your palm.

Licking a stripe from base to tip has him moaning a bit louder, filling the quiet room. His head presses back into the pillow, eyes fluttering, and when you envelope him fully into the warm wetness of your mouth, a groaning sigh of relief rumbles from deep in his chest.

For a brief moment, his eyes open just enough to look down at you. The corners of his lips twitch with smirk and a mumbled, "fuck," before they close again.

You take that as a sign to keep going.

Bracing one hand on his hip, thumb stroking the line where his hip meets his belly, your head bobs slowly along the freed portion of his length, tongue swirling and tasting every vein, every inch it can reach. He's warm, heavy, heady.

Lee's hips move at your pace, slow with small, eager twitches like a silent plea to speed up. He groans again. It's music to your ears.

And then his hand moves from the sheets it had begun to grip in quiet desperation until it finds your hair, resting on top of your head like he's trying to ground himself even in his sleepy state. You look up beneath your lashes, mouth not leaving his length, to find his lips parted and eyelids fighting to open.

Releasing him with a pop, you continue to stroke his cock.

"C'mon, Lee…you're missing your favorite part."

You're back on him without blinking, slowing it down—if that's even possible—and savoring it even more, which earns you a deeper groan from him that sends a jolt straight to your core.

He grunts again, eyes fluttering more before finally reopening. He blinks, adjusting to the darkness and clearly disoriented until he looks down at you, taking in the way your lips stretch around him.

"Oh, fuck," he mumbles. His voice is rough with sleep, lips curling into a tired smirk. "What're y'doin', sweet thing?"

You pull off him slowly, eyes locked on his.

"Needed you," your voice comes out sickly sweet. "That okay?"

"Mm. More than okay, darlin'."

With a grin, you hook your fingers into the waistband of his boxers, and with his help, slip them completely off.

The room is dead silent for a moment as your gaze flicks between your fingers wrapped around his saliva-slick length and his blue eyes glittering in the darkness. But then an idea occurs, and the way want burns hotter between your legs makes you release him quickly and slip your own soaked panties off.

Lee watches you curiously. His mouth opens with words only half formed when you climb on top of him, oversized shirt dangling off your shoulder—except instead of sinking onto his throbbing cock, you guide him through your slick folds…and keep him there.

"What—"

His question is cut off when you slowly begin to roll your hips. One pass. Two. His hands come up to rest on your hips while yours brace on his belly, the undershirt bunching under your fingers.

His brows draw together and deepen the permanent crease between them, a rougher sound that's not quite a growl pulling from his throat. His grip tightens subtly.

"Well now you're just teasin' me," he says, his hips rolling in time with yours. "Wakin' me up with your beautiful mouth only to keep your perfect pussy from me? This what you needed me for?"

You can't help but smirk and continue rubbing your sopping cunt along his length. Up. Soaking up the feeling of every ridge gliding through your folds. And down. The way the flushed tip of his cock nudges against your clit as it passes.

"Who says I want you inside me tonight?" you retort, though the wobble in your voice betrays the resolve keeping you from giving him what you both want.

Lee's lips twist into a full blown grin, but he doesn't say a word. Instead, he seemingly settles further into the pillows, his hips slowing their momentum and forcing you to do all the work.

Your resolve cracks fast.

Pressing a hand to his chest and leaning forward, you lift your hips just enough that the head of his cock notches tantalizingly against your entrance.

A moment passes where the only sound is your heart beating rapidly against your ribs. Both of you hold your breath, gaze locked and burning, before you finally sink down onto him.

Every inch splits you open, filling you more completely than any of the guys at college, and no matter how many times you feel it, it's like the first time all over again. Your mind goes blank.

"There we go," he mutters, his eyes slipping closed. His hands slide down to your bare thighs for the first time tonight, kneading the soft flesh and pulling you back to the present.

Your hips begin to roll, your hand still pressed to his chest where you can feel his racing heartbeat. It's a slow start at first, savoring the way he feels, the way his cock drags against your walls, hitting the one spot that makes you see stars without even trying.

But then impatience takes over and the need for more becomes overwhelming. You pick up the pace.

Lee's hands slip under your sleep shirt, thumbs sliding up your inner thighs until rough palms find your hips and help guide you.

A soft whimper falls from your lips.

"That's it," he groans. "That's my sweet girl. Look at you ridin' my cock so well. Let me hear you."

Another sound, desperate and needy, escapes you as his cock drags against your inner walls. He grins, the look on his face full of pride and unadulterated lust.

"Let it out, sweetness, let daddy hear you. I know you want to."

Leaning forward and pressing both palms to his chest now, you work your hips faster, the new angle making you moan.

That doesn't quite satisfy him. Lee's pink tongue sweeps across his bottom lip, one hand coming up to cup your cheek with hunger in his eyes before his hips slowly thrust up into you.

"Oh," you breathe, feeling yourself clench around him.

He pulls you in for a kiss, tender and sweet, continuing his thrusts and swallowing the little noises spilling from your lips.

"Good girl," he murmurs. "Just like that. Let daddy take care of you."

Every move, every quiet grunt from his lips, every thrust sends sparks up your spine. It's like someone started a fire in your veins—one that Lee has no intention of putting out any time soon.

He kisses you again, only this time he uses it to roll you over until your back hits the mattress with a soft thump, lips moving slowly over yours before becoming desperate and trailing to your jaw. His hips pick up speed now, arms braced next to your head to keep too much of his weight off you. Your arms encircle his neck, pulling him closer as your legs wrap around his waist. Lee growls against your neck, sweat dripping off his forehead and onto the sheets.

"Fuck, darlin', best way to wake up," he grunts, his thrusts only picking up speed when he hears you moan. "Pretty little thing needs her daddy when he's sleepin', she's gon' get 'im."

The sound of skin slapping skin fills the room, mixing with sounds of pleasure to create a symphony not meant to exist, let alone heard. Lee's hand trails down the side of your face, stopping only briefly at the neckline of your shirt before continuing your breast to roll your nipple between two fingers.

"Know what I wanna do, baby girl?" he asks, looking deeply into your eyes. It's almost soft and romantic given the situation and how wrong this relationship is. But the blue you've come to know is almost gone, something that looks like possessiveness flashing briefly before a smile crinkles the corners of his eyes.

"Some day I'm gon' get you a pretty little necklace." His gaze flicks to your mouth, lips kiss-swollen and agape. His large hand moves down your ribs and keeps going, slowly, torturously, to the hem of your shirt. "Maybe a little gold chain, somethin' dainty."

Your nails lightly scratch his scalp as he keeps talking.

"Or…" his hips pause, only the tip remaining. He meets your gaze again. "Maybe pearl."

Lee doesn't give you time to register what he means before his hips snap into yours, hard, his thumb reaching between your sweaty bodies and brushing against your clit. You gasp, clinging onto him for dear life and moving your hips to meet his thrusts, pressure building fast in your gut the way only he seems to know how to do.

"Lee—" you whine. His lips cut you off, pounding into you so hard the headboard knocks against the wall above your head.

"You're grippin' me so tight, darlin'. You have no idea how"—he groans—"addictin' that is. I know you're close. Let me hear you."

His thumb works your clit in tight, furious circles, his cock hitting all the right places and making you moan. Three more thrusts and you're crying out as the climax washes over you, air becoming difficult to breath as he keeps working you and drawing out every bit of pleasure he's giving.

Suddenly he pulls back and tugs at the hem of your shirt until your stomach is exposed, the underside of your breasts just barely peeking out. He growls at the sight, his pace unrelenting until he pulls out without warning, his release landing on your skin in hot spurts.

Lee drops down on the bed beside you, one arm wrapping around the still-clothed part of your torso, his heavy body making the springs of the mattress squeak. Your gaze stays on the ceiling for a moment to allow your breath and heartbeat a chance to slow as his breath fans across the side of your face. The moonlight reflects faintly off the eggshell paint, the sounds of the crickets outside filling the newly returned silence.

After several minutes, he lets you go and stands, his footsteps heavy on the floor, and makes his way to the en-suite bathroom. He returns with a warm, damp cloth, and carefully cleans your sensitive folds before wiping up his release still clinging to your stomach and tossing it in the laundry basket in the corner.

"C'mon, let's get you back to bed before your ma gets home," he says, holding out his hand. You take it and climb out of bed, snatching your discarded panties off the floor before he walks you back to your bedroom with nothing but his undershirt on.

Before you can enter, he gently grabs your arm and turns you, cupping your cheek with one hand and kissing you with more tenderness than he's ever shown.

"Good night, Lee," you whisper when he finally pulls away. The ghost of a smirk tugs at his lips.

"Good night, sweet thing."

<- Part 1 || Series Masterlist || Main Masterlist

⤷ Everything S. Stan: @steelandvibranium @/phoenix-in-writing @syd-vixious @sebastians-love @overwintering-soldier @wintersgirllost @wint3rbarnes @miraclediviner @barnes-babydoll @buckytakethewheel @bucksbby @sheriff-bodecker @wherewinterblooms @dei-dreamz @ladymiseryy @ornateglass @galactict3a @take-u-2-an0ther-w0r1d @alyssinwunderland-blog-blog @blue-eyes-in-august @juniebjonesin @erina00

⤷ Between Us: @iamthatonefangirl

Inside, Professor Barnes, who has the reputation for being the toughest grader in the department and object of half the campus’ unrequited crushes, looks up from his desk, one brow arched, red pen hovering whatever he had been grading, silver-rimmed glasses perched on his nose and sleeves rolled up to his forearms.

You recognize it immediately, the slightly judgemental expression of someone who was not expecting to have his work interrupted with even as much as a knock; but the moment he notices the expression on your face, your hands still shaking with adrenaline, his own shifts from professional uptightness to something much softer. A soft look you’ve come to know, too, after the two of you began a secret relationship a little over four months ago.

“Sorry,” you say, already stumbling through words. “Sorry, I know I didn’t knock, I just—"

 “Come in. Lock the door.” His voice drops, shifting from Professor Barnes to your James in the space of a few words.

You do just that. Then you stand there, backpack still hanging off one shoulder, hands twisting the strap.

“I’m freaking out about the European History exam,” you start. Professor Barnes shows no signs of being bothered by you immediately firing information his way.

“Sit down first.”

“I can’t sit down, James. I’ve been sitting for the past four hours, trying to—" You drop your bag onto the floor and start pacing the narrow strip of space between his bookshelf and the leather couch pushed against the wall. “I completely bombed it, okay? I know I did. Question three asked about the socioeconomic impacts of the Treaty of Tordesillas. I wrote about trade routes, James. Why did I write about trade routes? That wasn’t the prompt. And then I couldn’t remember some exact years, so I guessed, and I’m pretty sure I guessed about two decades off. If I fail this exam—”

“Please, sit—”

“—my GPA drops, and if my GPA drops, I lose my seminar slot for next semester, and then my entire track is ruined, and I'll end up living in a cardboard box—”

“Love.”

You stop, the way you always stop when he calls you that, like your mind still hasn’t quite learned to process that this man, older, more experienced, with a salt and pepper beard that makes your knees weak, would want to call you love.

James is leaning back in his chair now, arms crossed with muscles straining slightly against the shirt, and watching you with a particular patient expression, despite your serpentining conversation.

“The exam is done. You're spiralling," he tells you, and the second after he is getting up from his chair and stepping into your pacing path. A hand reaches for your wrist and makes you stop in front of him. “Breathe for me?”

“I’m not breathing, I can’t breathe, I have three more finals this week and I feel like my skull is gonna fracture from the pressure,” you whine, but are already leaning into his touch, seeking the warmth of him through your most stressful moments. He lets out a sympathetic sigh, fingers curling firmer around your wrist and pulls you fully to him before he presses a lingering kiss to the top of your head.

“There’s nothing you can do about it now.” And he’s not wrong. You open your mouth, close it, then sigh. Because there is nothing you can do about it now, and that’s somehow better, but also considerably worse. James tips your chin up with two fingers, ocean blue eyes meeting yours from behind his glasses.

“You have barely slept or eaten properly for the past week. I don’t like it. The way you chastise yourself whenever something goes wrong.” His thumb traces your jaw, and some of the tight coil in your chest loosens very much against your will. “Take a seat.” 

“James, I don’t need to—"

“I’m not asking,” he says gently, which makes it incredibly more effective than if he had said it any other way, then nods towards the leather couch. “Sit. You’ve been white-knuckling it for days, give yourself ten minutes.”

You consider it. Not because you want to sit down, not because the exam is finally slipping away from your mind, but because James has shifted into that version of him he only ever lets out when he’s near you, with you, the one that breaks down all your defenses and leaves you bare, although not unsafe. You always feel safe with him.

Slowly, you agree and take a seat on the couch, back slumping against the cushions. Your body recognizes it as home almost immediately, letting the familiarity seep into your bones and making you relax.

James crouches down in front of you and rubs one hand over your right knee.

"Still thinking about it?" he asks.

"...A little."

You sink deeper into the worn leather of the couch, the tension in your shoulders only kind of melting under the weight of his gaze. James remains crouched between your knees for a long moment, large hands taking residence on your thighs, now, thumbs stroking soothing circles through the fabric of your jeans.

“You know I’ve always got you, right? Prettiest girl I’ve ever met. Smartest, too,” he murmurs, voice wrapped in velvet. That does it quickly, for you, and you know he knows it. He showers you in praise every time, because every time your body opens to him like a flower blooming in the sunlight.

Before you can overthink it, you simply nod. There’s a brief moment where you’re sure he whispers something like ‘let me take care of you’, and you do, you let him, the permission being the way your legs gently pry open right in front of him. A shaky exhale, head falling back against the couch. All the agreement he needs.

His long fingers travel upward and make easy work of the button of your pants before peeling them down your legs slowly. James pulls your boots off, then the pants along with them, and he leans forward, mouth pressing a kiss to your left knee. Upward, to the skin of your thigh, a bit to the side, to the inside of your leg. Three days' worth of stubble prickles against you as he moves, and you make a noise, something he sees quickly as desperation, and you know the complaint is futile. When has Professor Barnes ever given you anything quicker than the exact pace he wanted to?

“Relax,” he says against your thigh, then presses his lips to the skin again, an open-mouthed kiss before he bites down so gently you are barely even able to call it a bite. “Didn’t I just say I’ve got you?”

Large hands slide from your thighs to wrap firmly around the backs of your legs, fingers digging in with just enough pressure to tug you forward on the couch, sliding your ass closer to the edge so you’re perfectly positioned for him. That’s when you open your eyes again, just in time to watch him hook his fingers into the waistband of your panties and peel them down slowly, dragging the fabric along your thighs and off your ankles. And he does it all with his eyes on yours, two blue pits making you feel dizzy, but you still don’t look away. You couldn’t if you tried.

Cool air hits your now exposed pussy, making you shiver. James lets out a quiet hum of approval at the sight of you, already glistening with arousal.

“She’s always so beautiful,” a reverent whisper before his large hands wrap around your legs again and lift effortlessly to drape them over his broad shoulders, heels of your feet resting against his back. The new angle tilts your hips up towards his mouth, spreading you open for him completely, and before you can even catch your breath, or take a moment to push down the flush on your skin growing from the vulnerable way you are exposed to him, he leans in and drags his tongue through your folds in a filthy stripe from your entrance to your clit.

A breathy moan tears from your throat, echoing in the quiet office like a confession, and it unravels the last threads of your anxiety as pleasure rises in its place. Then James does it again, a little slower, savoring the taste of you, messy and unhurried, spit mixing with your arousal until your folds are slick and shining. On his knees in front of you, this brilliant man, esteemed professor, becomes nothing more than a servant doing worship at the altar of his Goddess. His broad shoulders carry your legs like an honor he would gladly take forever, and his eyes flutter shut as he presses closer.

He’s incredible at this; you’ve known it from the first time he fell to his knees, right here, in this office, always reading every twitch, every gasp, mouth moving with exquisite skill. Slow and indulgent at first, mostly for himself, drowning in the taste of your slick, before giving way to teasing flicks of the tip of his tongue around your swollen clit only to dip lower again, lapping messily at your entrance where your arousal flows for him.

Wetness coats his silver-streaked beard, glistening on his chin as he buries his face deeper between your thighs. The obscene sounds of his mouth feasting on your fill the room, wet slurping and sucking noises, a slick glide of his tongue, an occasional hungry groan into your cunt that sends sparks flying up your spine, all of it the actions of a man who could be on his knees for hours.

Your hands fly to his hair, gripping the dark strands as your thighs tremble around his head. “James…”

No words come out of his mouth then, none you can understand, anyway; instead, the response comes in the way he sucks your clit between his lips, wet suction making your hips jerk, before he releases it with a lewd pop. One hand claws at your thigh, keeping your legs right in their place, while two thick fingers slide into your welcoming heat, curling against the spongy spot inside you that makes stars explode behind your eyelids. James pumps them slowly, in time with the dance of his tongue over your clit.

Exam long forgotten, the world narrows to nothing but him, the way his blue eyes will sometimes flick up to watch you through fogged glasses, dark with lust and adoration. Only when he needs to take a moment to breathe, a quick one, enough to allow him to keep going for as long as you need him to, does he speak again.

“Goddess,” he whispers teasingly, slowing his fingers as if to get your attention. Your head tilts forward and you watch him through hooded eyes. “Will you cum for your most loyal subject?”

You huff in soft frustration, the sound breaking into another shaky moan as your body refuses to cooperate with your irritation. Because the edge is so close, molten in your belly, and here he is, being a wicked scholar and working you through comedic words.

“James, don’t… fuck, I’m so close, don’t play with me right now…” you manage, trying to reprimand him. But even as you say it, your cunt betrays you completely, clenching hard around his fingers, fluttering and squeezing with need and pulling them deeper as slick coats his hand.

Your favorite Professor gleams with amusement, lips curled into a devastating half-smirk, swollen and shiny. “You like it when I’m funny. You’ve told me before.”

You want to protest, but he curls his fingers again, strokes the perfect spot and dips his head again, sucking your swollen bud with perfect pressure, flicking the tip of his tongue rapidly in a rhythm that makes your vision spark white. For a second, he slips his fingers out and instead fucks you with his tongue, thrusting it inside you, before dragging it back up to torture your clit again while his fingers move back to their rightful place. His free hand grips your thigh harder, holding you open for him as you start to grind against his face, chasing the pleasure.

The combination is merciless. Frustration melts instantly into overwhelming pleasure, and another broken moan rips from your throat as your thighs tighten around his shoulders, heels digging into his back. Every stroke, every suck makes the coil in your belly tighten, pulling you deeper into a sea of sensation where exams and fears cannot reach. His beard scrapes deliciously against your sensitive skin with every movement of his head, and arousal drips down his chin onto the leather couch, but he only presses closer, as if he would gladly drown in you.

And just like that, your orgasm crashes over you like a tidal wave, sudden and blinding. You cry out sharply, back arching off the couch as pleasure tears through every nerve in your body. James moans against your pussy like a man receiving divine absolution, your walls pulsing and fluttering around his fingers, gushing against his mouth. And he drinks down every drop of you until your trembling begins to quiet down, slowly easing his movements before pressing a couple of tender, open-mouthed kisses to your oversensitive pussy and to your inner thighs.

Still, he keeps your legs draped over his shoulders a moment longer, gazing at you through glasses that look slightly uneven with the most loving expression you have ever seen on a man. Breathless and floating, you manage to meet his eyes, and you smile at the sight of your brilliant professor on his knees, face glistening with the evidence of your pleasure.

“You’re trouble,” you whisper, though the words carry no real heat in them. James is busy kissing down your legs, lips reaching softly to every inch of skin, but he smiles in the midst of it.

“Trouble?” he repeats, feigning offense. “My goddess calls me trouble after I’ve knelt here and offered proper tribute? How cruel.”

You let out a breathless laugh that turns into a soft gasp when he nips gently at the crease of your thigh.

“You do know I love you, right? Even when you’re being silly while going down on me.”

That makes him smile wider. “I reckon you love me especially when I’m being silly while going down on you.”

And he’s not wrong at all.

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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! ❤️

The sheets felt unusually cool to the touch, buried in Egyptian cotton, your hand reached to the other side of the bed— empty — is he not in bed anymore?!

You were up before you could even put on your glasses on first, "shoot shoot shoot!". The scent of fresh coffee lingered in the air, that meant he was one foot out the door if he hasn't left already.

The front door slammed shut, the echo of it like a held breath finally released.

With a reluctant sigh you sat on the bed, looking into your beautiful papered walls; mentally preparing yourself for the day that would come.

Since you didn't have to cook for John anymore, you opted for a simple breakfast, a piece of toast and a soft boiled egg, but of course not before making the bed, ironing his pajamas and robe, refilling his liquor cabinet and placing a new package of his favorite cigars — which you hated the smell of — sometimes you wondered if he noticed the small things you did for him.

With your hair securely in rollers, and a special little red dress you wore the first time you met John, you tweaked your eyebrows until you accidentally drew blood, maybe he'd like that shade of blush on you, no no no, too much red, you know what they say…

A fair amount of time later you walk up to the full length mirror, feeling like a hundred bucks! that is until you carefully examine yourself — the hair —horrified you pull the pins out of your hair without a second thought, today you had to be perfect.

With a fresh new look and determined to make the best of today, you decided some ice cream would hep with the summer heat, you bargained with yourself that the cleaning could wait just a little.

Wiping the dust off your grandmother's hand-cranked ice cream maker, you put yourself to work, on your counter you lined up sugar, eggs, heavy cream, strawberries from your garden and of course some milk.

Earlier in the morning the milkman dropped off fresh bottles, you wondered why Bucky hadn't dropped by to say hello, probably just busy with Mrs Scavo down the street, or according to Carol Danvers he's been making extra special deliveries to Wanda Maximoff, a real operator that one.

As you cranked, you wondered why those women had such an easy time cheating on their husbands, sure Bucky had eyes that made you want to swim in the ocean, a smile that could make you feel like you're in front of the sun… soft hair that you'd love to rake your fingers through while he sleeps next to you-

Your hands stopped moving — gosh, what a silly crush! — Not even that, curiosity, you decided to call it. Surely it was normal to wonder if so many women raved on and on about him, your marriage was safe and you loved your husband, — he gave you everything — you reminded yourself.

You churned until your shoulder ached and the handle grew stiffer with every turn, focusing on making the perfect consistency instead of the real reason you decided to make the sweet treat in the first place.

With the ice cream locked away in the freezer, you saw the time and you felt your stomach drop, if you wanted to get everything done on your list you'd need a miracle.

You would never tell this to another living soul but you found it aggravating to clean such a big house, you felt ungrateful for even thinking it, it was any woman's dream to take care of such a lovely home, you tried to make it your own, to imagine your children playing and laughing; you always wanted a big family, but you still haven't been able to get pregnant, maybe buying such a big house jinxed it, you told John as much and he laughed in your face, even after 5 years of marriage, you still weren't used to such nice things, you felt out of place in your own home.

A small part of you, the voice you rarely let speak its mind, felt relieved you haven't been able to carry a son for John, you loved him of course but-

Shaking your head you caught yourself standing at the sink with the water running, not sure how long you'd been there, with a sigh you took off your gloves, —the cleaning would get done so much faster if you lived in a smaller house.—

You pick up his shirt to smell the neck, powdery and sour of course, what kind of self respecting- wait no, you're not mad at her. You should focus all of your anger on your idiot of a husband.

Moving from room to room, dusting and sweeping, finally the last thing you had to do was laundry. As you picked up clothes to put on the basket, there's a particular smell in one of John's shirts that caught your attention. It was unfamiliar, powdery, sharp.

It wasn't yours.

You stood there for a long moment, the shirt still in your hands, the smell of it settling into something you couldn't understand. Powdery. Sharp. The kind of perfume a woman wears when she wants to be remembered. You knew it wasn't L'Air du Temps — too bold for that — and it certainly wasn't Chanel, whoever she was, had no taste. You almost pitied her.

You folded the shirt and put it in the basket with the rest.

The roast was resting on the counter when you heard his key in the door. You had set the table the way he liked it — napkins folded, glasses polished, the good place mats — and changed into something presentable, something that didn't look like you'd spent the afternoon unraveling.

"Something smells good," John said, the way he always did, dropping his briefcase by the door without looking at you.

"Pot roast." You smoothed your apron and carried his plate to the table. "Sit down."

He loosened his tie and settled into his chair with the comfortable authority of a man who had never once questioned his place in the world. You poured his drink without being asked.

You always did.

The conversation moved the way it always did over dinner — his day, Henderson's incompetence, the traffic on Millbrook Avenue. You listened with your chin resting lightly in your palm, nodding at the right moments, laughing softly at the right places. Picture perfect wife.

"Carol Danvers called today," you offered, when the silence stretched a little too long.

"Mm." He cut his meat without looking up.

It was somewhere between the second glass of bourbon and the end of dinner that he said it — the way he always eventually said it — casual as a change in weather.

"She is expecting again, isn't she?" He reached for his glass, ignoring anything you had to say. "Third one."

You kept your smile exactly where it was. "Yes, she is."

"Three years younger than you." He swirled his drink. Not looking at you. Never quite looking at you when he said things like this. "Funny how these things work out for some people."

Right on time.

"It is," you agreed pleasantly, and stood to clear his plate.

In the kitchen you ran the water hot — hotter than necessary — and stood over the sink scrubbing a dish that was already clean. Through the small window above the faucet the night had settled dark and still over Waiting Willow Lane. Across the street a light was on in the living room, blue and quiet behind their curtains, you wondered if they ever felt as miserable as you did now.

You knew what perfume it was, you just hadn't wanted to name it yet.

You set the dish in the rack and reached for the next one.

You asked about his secretary on the way to bed — her name, how she was managing with the new filing system — and watched his face for just a fraction of a second twitch before he answered. He was a decent liar. You had married a decent liar and spent five years becoming a better one.

Goodnight, you said.

Goodnight, he said.

The morning came the way mornings do after nights like that — indifferent and bright, the sun spilling through the curtains without permission.

Like muscle memory, despite your anguish you did your hair and makeup quickly, cooked him a delicious breakfast and packed his lunch, all with a graceful smile.

As he shut the door on his way out you just stood there for a moment, as the house settled into its particular morning quiet, and then you moved.

You made coffee you didn't drink, stood at the kitchen window in your robe and watched the sprinkler next door sweep back and forth across a lawn that looked exactly like yours, funny. As hard as you tried to locate something useful inside your chest — anger, resolution, a plan — you came up with nothing.

He gave you everything, you reminded yourself.

The thought felt different than it used to.

When he bell rang you hesitated to answer, despite having your hair and makeup done, you felt as if you were the living dead, so when it rang again you pulled your silk robe tighter and opened the door.

"Fresh milk, straight from the farm!"

Bucky Barnes stood on your doorstep with two glass bottles tucked under one arm and a smile that had no business being that easy this early in the morning. He was already in his whites — sleeves rolled to the elbow despite the hour — and his hair perfectly soft in the morning light.

"Morning," he said, adjusting his tone slightly, the way people do when they realize they've walked into something quieter than they expected.

"Good morning." You held the door open a little wider. An invitation, "You brought me that butter I wanted?"

He tilted his head, just slightly. Something shifted behind his eyes — curiosity, or recognition — and then he smiled again, softer this time, and crossed the threshold, "of course!".

The kitchen felt smaller with him in it, he set the bottles on the counter and stood there with his cap in his hands while you poured two cups of coffee without asking, because it gave you something to do with yours.

"Lovely home," he said, and he meant it — you could tell the difference, he wasn't performing the way some men did, eyes moving around a room cataloguing what things cost. He was just looking, genuinely, the way people look at things they find beautiful.

"Thank you." You set his cup in front of him. "I try to make it feel like one."

He looked at you over the rim of his cup and didn't say anything for a moment. That was unexpected, it wasn't uncomfortable, surprising actually, most men filled silences, Bucky seemed comfortable in it.

"I heard you've been making special deliveries," you said lightly, settling onto a chair. "All over Waiting Willow." You paused, smiling into your cup. "Mrs. Maximoff must go through an awful lot of milk."

Something crossed his face — not guilt exactly, amusement, maybe, edged with something more careful. "You been talking to Carol Danvers."

"Carol Danvers talks to everyone."

He laughed at that — a real one, low and easy — and set his cup down. "And what do you think about it?"

You turned your cup slowly in its saucer. "I think you're a real operator," you said pleasantly, "the kind that practices in mirrors."

He looked at you for a long moment. Then — "And yet here I am in your kitchen."

"And yet," you agreed.

The silence that followed was a different, the dangerous kind that you recognized at a distance, the way you recognize weather changing before you can see it.

"I made ice cream yesterday," you said, standing before it could settle any further. "Strawberry. From the garden." You moved to the freezer and retrieved the metal container, setting it on the counter between you, deliberate. "Have some."

Not even waiting to be asked a second time, Bucky took a spoon and scooped some pink delight. He went very still for a moment, "is it good? I haven't tried it yet".

He looked up at you with an expression that was almost accusatory. "You made it and didn't try it?"

"I got distracted."

"That's a crime." He said it so seriously that you almost laughed. He was already feeding you a spoonful before you could even react. The strawberry hit your tongue cold and sweet and perfectly balanced and you understood immediately why he'd looked at you like that.

"Oh," you said.

"Right? It's so much better than store bought", he took another spoonful but his eyes remained on you, attentive, you felt seen.

You hadn't noticed you'd gotten some on your chin until his thumb was already there — just below the corner of your mouth — catching it with the kind of ease that suggested he hadn't thought about it either. His hand didn't move away immediately, neither did you.

Suddenly the summer heat became suffocating and his eyes dropped, just briefly, to your lips.

The percolator chose that exact moment to let out a sharp hiss from the stove top and you both came back to the kitchen at the same time, the morning light, the two coffee cups, now unfrozen.

Bucky pulled his hand back slowly and cleared his throat, reaching for his cap.

"Best ice cream on Waiting Willow Lane," he said, and his voice was only slightly hoarse.

You smiled as your heart beat in your throat, walked him to the door and stood on the threshold watching him go back down the path to his truck, bottles clinking softly against each other. He didn't look back, but the air felt different, you knew he would be back.

You stood there long after he had turned the corner, your heart doing something unreasonable in your chest, your thumb pressed lightly to your own chin where his had been.

Curiosity, you reminded yourself.

You went back inside and washed both coffee cups, feeling really curious.

Days had passed and for days you couldn't stop thinking about the infamous milkman.

You felt despicable for even thinking how his lips would feel across your skin, if his arms would be strong enough to hold you; over and over you thought of the way you almost took his thumb in your tongue, your mouth watered imagining the saltiness.

Despite your husband's disregard for your marriage, you still hated the thought of betraying your vows, you didn't know if you'd be able to live with the guilt.

But that damn voice, it told you things in the dead of night, you'd find yourself rubbing your legs together imagining Bucky whispering terrible terrible things in your ear.

Would he be a gentle lover, or would he take your virtue like something that belonged to him?

Was it worth destroying your marriage?

Then again, John already had.

You had every intention of keeping your distance, set boundaries…

But this morning you woke up with a particular ache between your legs, too painful to ignore. Staring at the ceiling you tried not to wake your husband, almost praying over and over that you felt nothing.

It wasn't working.

At 4:37 in the morning you gave up entirely, pulled your robe around you, and went downstairs.

The street was the kind of dark that exists only in the hour before the world wakes up— completely still and strangely serene. You sat on the front steps of your porch with your knees pulled up and your glasses on watching the street all the way down the Lane where the road curved out of sight.

You heard his truck before you saw it. That familiar low rumble, unhurried, moving through the dark in peace.

He almost didn't see you.

The truck rolled to a stop in front of the house and Bucky climbed out with two bottles and made it halfway up the path before pulled up short.

He looked at you for a moment. Then at the window behind you. Then back at you.

"You're up early," he said carefully.

"Couldn't sleep."

He nodded slowly, the way people nod when they know that isn't the whole answer. He set the bottles down by the door and instead of going back to his truck like you thought he would he stayed where he was, cap in his hands again,raked his fingers through his hair and waited.

You looked at the end of the street where the sky was beginning — barely, there to consider the color blue. —

"Would it be so wrong?," you asked quietly, shame be damned.

The silence that followed had weight to it.

"No," he answered.

"Then why are you looking at me like that?"

With a huff he walked to the other side of the porch, you followed shortly.

Bucky kept his distance, avoiding your eyes, you had to swallow the urge to grab him and make him look at you, as if he sensed your frustration after looking out the dark street he finally set his eyes on yours.

"Because I actually like you," he said simply. "And I don't want to be something that happens to you."

Your chest did something complicated.

"It wouldn't—"

"Don't tell me it wouldn't hurt you." He said it gently but without apology. "All these other housewives, they don't care about me— and I see the way you look at me."

"You look at me too!" you whispered defensively, feeling your cheeks heat up.

You took your glasses off and cleaned them on the hem of your robe for something to do with your hands.

Put them back on. The street came back into focus — the identical lawns, the sleeping houses, the tulips along your front path standing perfectly still in the windless dark.

"I'm not asking you for anything complicated" you said finally. "I just—" You stopped. "I'm so tired of being careful."

He turned and looked at you then, really looked, the way he had in the kitchen days ago, like he was trying to find uncertainty.

"I won't break," you said.

Something shifted in his expression — something that had been holding itself back — As he moved toward you, you walked back until you hit a wall, the distance between you on that porch became a different kind of distance entirely.

"Your husband is right upstairs," he said. His voice was very low, almost like a warning.

"I know."

As the smell of his cologne overwhelmed you in the most delicious way, he slowly raised his hand towards your face, his rough fingers a stark contrast against your soft cheeks, it made your knees weak.

The sky had gone from black to the deep bruised blue, almost morning. Somewhere down the street you could hear the faint chirp of the birds waking up.

His other hand found the doorframe beside your head and the world narrowed down to the small warm space between you and the thrill of it — the sleeping street, the dark windows, John right upstairs, the whole of Waiting Willow Lane not yet awake — you've never felt more alive.

His mouth found yours slowly, the kiss was sweet and gentle, the kind that you dream when you're a girl, but then there's a spark of guilt that unconsciously makes your head tilt back but he's quick enough to hold you by the back of your head and chin, his tongue asks for more and as easy as breathing, you let him in.

You'd only ever kissed John and this was nothing like it, with him it was proper, painfully slow. This felt like a rush, everything moved so quickly; you could feel your blood pumping and his heart felt like it was your own. Smashed between the wall and him, a small gasp escaped you when your hand grazed the outline of his hard cock.

Logic and all sense went out the window as you unbuckled his belt, the sight of your beautiful hands handling him with such hunger, that alone almost made him come. With the same fervor he worked open your robe to find you completely nude.

"Well, aren't you a firecracker" he grinned, while his fingers found your clit with ease. As you worked on him with quick tugs, his weight dropped on you, the grunts against your neck mixing with your quiet moans.

"We're gonna get caught if you keep singing for me" Bucky nipped your skin, proud of being the one making you like this; the thought of getting caught by John or your neighbors, the scandal, was enough to make you both finish at the same time, you had to bite your tongue to silence your scream while he groaned into your jaw, you could feel his cream between your fingers, you shivered in delight.

"You're dangerous" he whispered to himself.

It started with hushed moans and grunts in his truck.

Parked three streets over on a road that went nowhere in particular, engine off, the early morning sitting quiet around you like it was keeping your secret too. It felt reckless and nothing like the life you had ironed and folded and tucked into neat corners for five years. It felt like something that was entirely yours.

On Wednesdays you met him in the park when John had his lunch meeting with Henderson, coming home late and smelling like cheap perfume. You sat on a blanket under the elm tree, it wasn't just about using each other anymore, Bucky would bring you something from the bakery on Millbrook and you would talk for hours before you did anything else. That part surprised you, that he wanted to talk.

He told you about his route, the way he could see small moments in people's lives that most never saw. It was strange how easy you opened up to each other, you told him things John laughed at, and he marveled at. If you were honest with yourself, he's the first person you've ever been completely honest with, you told him about your life before John, about the affair…

He never judged, listened like it mattered, every word.

Over the next few months it was harder and harder to stay away from Bucky or for him to keep his hands to himself. You got reckless the way you always feared you would.

It started small — a moment too long on the doorstep when he made his deliveries, coffee that stretched past the reasonable hour, Wednesdays in the park that edged too close to afternoon when every mother took their children to play. You told yourselves each time that you would be more careful next time, and next time you were even less careful , you realized somewhere along the way you just stopped caring, the urge to be together was all consuming.

It was Carol Danvers who heard it first, which meant it was everywhere by the next 24 hours.

It's on the days you never expect when horrible things happen, John came home on a Friday. You knew he was angry before he was fully through the door — something about each step he took, the way he put his keys and briefcase down like it insulted him.

Taking a deep breath, your brain already expected the worse, you were at the stove and you kept your eyes there, kept on whisking batter, your face arranged into the pleasant neutral expression like nothing was wrong.

"Heard something interesting today," he said cold and calculating, from somewhere behind you. Looming.

"Oh?" The spoon kept moving.

"About you." A pause. "And the milkman."

The silence was heavy, as you felt your blood run cold, the day you were most afraid of was here.

You turned from the stove with a careful smile. "You know how people talk on this street."

"I do." He loosened his tie with one slow pull. "I also know you could never do that to me" he stated with venom in his voice… "But why would Carol Danvers tell such lies about you?", if you didn't know any better you'd say he was actually confused.

Of course . "Carol Danvers once told Wanda Maximoff she saw a UFO over the Hendersons' roof." You set the spoon down and reached for two glasses. "Dinner is almost ready Hon-."

His hand smashed down against the kitchen counter, rattling the utensils.

"Don't do that." His voice dropped a register. Not loud — John was never loud, that wasn't what made it frightening. He was the kind of man who got quiet when he was angry, he's never laid a hand on you, but deep down you always feared one day he would.

Clearing your throat, you set the glasses on the table and smoothed out place mats that didn't need smoothing.

"I'm not doing anything," you said calmly

"Look at me."

Without hesitation, you did, kept your face open and calm and faintly puzzled, the face of a woman who has nothing whatsoever to hide, and you held his gaze without flinching. If John ever found out what you did, what you have been doing under his roof, you don't know what he would do to Bucky, and you would do anything to keep him safe.

Something moved behind his eyes — rage building up — his fists closed tightly, the silence making your heart beat incessantly, acting on instinct your hand came to rest against your stomach, protectively.

You moved it away before he noticed.

"I am married to you John" you carefully said, "no matter what, that's the only thing that matters", your own words slapped you like a brick to the face.

He looked at you for one more long moment, still not quite convinced, but refusing to push any further, tentatively you took off your apron, revealing your waist perfectly accentuated by your dress, your eyelashes fluttered as you walked up to him, arms slowly wrapping around his neck, his stare remained cold but he couldn't help but grab onto your hips, pulling you closer

"Miriam Patterson had her baby. A boy." He muttered with the particular cruelty of a man who knows exactly where to press, you felt the sting behind your eyes but in a blink you replaced the hurt with a small smile.

"How wonderful for them," you whispered, as you kissed his cheek, then the other, next his neck, "Maybe we'll be just as lucky soon" you purred into his ear, fingernails scraped lightly against the back of his neck.

As his hands wondered your body, you wondered if you'd ever stop feeling sick.

You were on the porch before four.

Sat on the top step in the dark with your robe pulled tight and your glasses on, hands folded in your lap while your fingers nervously nitpicked your skin, despite having made your decision, knowing it was the right thing to do, you felt like a wicked woman, cursed to ruin anyone who cared for you…

You didn't mind waiting for him, the tulips along the path were black in the dark, you enjoyed watching the sun slowly shine on them, slowly turning them red again.

You heard his truck at the end of the lane and felt your heart do the thing it always did — that stupid, inconvenient, involuntary thing — and then he was coming up the path and kneeling down in front of you, worry taking over his face, "Jesus Doll, what are you doing out here? it's freezing", his arms wrapped around yours, rubbing them to warm you up and kissing your cold face with his warm-soft lips —You almost smiled —

Because you didn't respond, Bucky pulled back , his face going soft the way it always did when you were upset. He smelled like the warm bread and something underneath that was just him. You had take a deep breath before you trusted your voice.

"I need to tell you something," you said.

He waited.

"I'm pregnant." You blurted.

Bucky didn't move. You couldn't read his face until you saw the biggest smile break out — still in disbelief a genuine laugh escaped him, the joy that radiated off of him almost made your resolve crack.

"Okay," he said quietly, cupping your face with pure adoration is his eyes. — "Okay."He repeated, like he was already making plans in his head. "Okay, so we—"

"Bucky."

He stopped.

You were going to be sick but you weren't so sure it was morning sickness, swallowing down any hesitation, you sighed.

You turned and looked at him. In the thin grey light just beginning to suggest itself at the edge of the sky his face was very open,

"I'm can't leave him Buck," you whispered.

He looked at you. Something shifted behind his eyes — understanding arriving before he was ready.

"You don't want to leave him… there's a difference."

"I'm sorry."

A long silence.

"You're sorry," he repeated. His voice had changed, not mad, at least you didn't think he was mad, he was good at keeping his feelings at bay.

"We can't see each other anymore" you said in defeat, your throat aching to let yourself cry.

He stood up abruptly and took three steps down the path and stopped with his back to you, one hand pressed to the back of his neck, his shoulders tense in a way you had never seen on him before. Your Bucky who was easy about everything, Bucky who worshiped you and listened like it mattered, his eyes were red, and he could barely keep looking you in the eye.

"Did you sleep with him." It wasn't quite a question. The words came out low and tight. "Once you knew. So he wouldn't suspect," he spat.

You were too stunned to answer. He'd never raised his voice to you like this, you couldn't blame him.

He laughed — a short, broken sound that had nothing of his real laugh in it — and turned around and looked at you from the bottom of the path with something in his face that you would spend a long time trying to forget.

"Bucky—" You cried, quick on your feet, moving down the steps, your voice lower than a whisper. "You have to be quiet, please, he's right—"

"I know where he is." His voice cracked, "Maybe I should go up there, talk to the man who's going to raise my son!"

"Please." You reached him and put your hand against his chest and felt him breathing too fast, he tried to back away from you "our son!" the words caught in his throat, but you wouldn't let him, looking up at him with everything you had left you pleaded "Please."

You took his hand and brought it slowly, carefully, to your stomach.

Held it there.

He went very still.

 His jaw worked, eyes were bright red, you could see his internal fight, his body begged him to push you away and go inside your house to kill the bastard, but then his thumb rubbed your belly, reminding himself that you were carrying the best parts of himself.

You don't know for how long you stood there, the sleeping houses remained quiet, except for the faint sound of their sprinklers. You watched him trying to ground himself .

"Let me go," you whispered, tears falling down both your faces. "Do this for me. Let us go."

The sky from black to blue to the first pale suggestion of morning Waiting Willow Lane was beginning, to wake.

His hand was still on your stomach when he closed his eyes, committing to memory the sound of your laugh, the smell of your hair in the mornings, he imagined a perfect world where he would raise a family with you, a world where he could be enough.

When he opened them again the look on his face told you with a quiet and terrible certainty, he would do as you asked.

He pulled his hand away gently, stepped back. You knew it was selfish but you desperately wanted to kiss him one last time, but before you could even take a step forward his eyes told you it wasn't a good idea.

He might never let you go if he kissed you right now.

Straightening his cap with the careful deliberateness of a man reassembling himself from the outside in, he looked you in the eyes one last time.

"I loved you well", he didn't say it anger or disappointment, just a gentle statement.

You nodded in return.

"Take care of yourself," he said, his voice was even. It hurt more than when he yelled.

You stood on the path and watched him walk back to his truck, you did not call after him, you just held your stomach like your life depended on it.

The truck turned at the end of the lane and was gone.

You stood there until you couldn't hear it anymore.

Wiping your tears with your sleeve, you went inside and washed your hands at the kitchen sink, started the percolator and began, with care and precision, to make your John's breakfast.

Then return to their familiar situation 250 words

The baby came on a Tuesday.

Small, perfect and furious about it, the way all new things are, the moment the nurse had placed him in your arms, you looked down at that small outraged face and felt something so large move through you that you forgot, for just a moment, every single thing that had brought him to this world.

He had his eyes.

Back at home, John held him the way most men held babies — carefully, at a slight distance, as though he were something that might make a sudden movement. He'd been slightly more helpful than you expected after the delivery, he said the right things, fed him when you couldn't, changed one diaper, still you couldn't help but wonder if you'd made the right decision.

"He has my eyes" he said, settling the baby into the crook of your arm.

"He does" you said softly, holding back a laugh.

Looking down on him again. His little face was simply looking now, experiencing the world, his cerulean blues wide and new and completely unimpressed, there was something in his expression that was so familiar and so devastating that you had to press your lips together for a moment and breathe very carefully through your nose.

"He's perfect," John said, and for once you believed he meant it.

You nodded and looked at your son, this way he would be taken care of , you reassured yourself.

Across the street the night was still.

Bucky sat in his truck with the engine off and the lights off , watching the warm yellow square of your bedroom window the way a man watches something he has no right to anymore and cannot look away from.

He had told himself he wouldn't come. He had told himself every night for 9 months he'd respect your wishes and leave you alone, despite his military training, you made him weak.

He could see your shadow behind the curtain. Just the outline of you, soft and warm against the light, and the smaller shape in your arms that you were rocking with the slow, unconscious rhythm of a woman who had been waiting her whole life to do exactly this.

Bucky smiled, despite everything, he wouldn't want any other woman to be the mother of his child, you were happy and he would be happy too, that's all that mattered.

He watched you move. Back and forth, back and forth, the shadow of you against the warm light of that room, that house, that life that had no place for him in it.

The tulips along your front path had come back. Red and perfectly upright in the dark, standing in a row like they didn't know anything had happened, which of course they didn't. Things grew back. The world kept its own schedule, indifferent and bright, the same way mornings came after nights that felt unbearable.

He thought about a Wednesday in the park under the elm tree, a blanket on the grass, paper bag from the bakery on Millbrook. The way you had talked about wanting a family and to be able to care and protect them; the way you had looked at him when you thought he was distracted.

Your shadow stilled at the window. — Just briefly — you stopped rocking and stood there, and in the perfect quiet of the room, with every house dark and every curtain drawn he had the irrational, hopeful feeling that you knew he was there.

He stayed until he couldn't anymore, fingers gripping the wheel until white and then he stayed a little longer, when he finally reached for the ignition his hands started shaking.

The truck moved quietly down the empty street.

At the end of the lane it turned, and was gone, and the night closed back over Waiting Willow Lane like water over a stone, as though nothing had ever been disturbed at all.

In the warm window your shadow rocked on.

He didn't say much when he came in. He usually doesn't. The tension in his jaw, rigidity of his shoulders, and deep bags under his eyes is more than enough to know he needs a moment—or a few—to collect himself before he can say a word.

So he moved through the apartment, footsteps almost unnoticeable once his boots are off, and disappeared into the bedroom with barely more than a single nod in your direction.

It used to hurt. It felt like a casual dismissal, like maybe you were impeding on his territory somehow; an unwanted presence after being alone for decades. But mission after mission, you came to learn he needed a break, however small, to gather his thoughts. To unwind from the stress that comes with being Bucky Barnes.

So you give him time. Let him come to you instead, like an animal who's been hurt too many times and is still learning to trust. Sometimes it takes minutes. Sometimes hours. Occasionally, if the mission was bad enough, it'd be days before he says more than a grunt. You never push. You never ask. But every time, without fail, he comes back to you.

The bathroom door creaks open, followed by a soft meow, before a blur of white fur rounds the corner and leaps onto your lap. Alpine purrs as she settles onto the blanket thrown over your lap, nudging the book in your hand like it's in the way of her getting your full attention.

"Yeah, yeah," you murmur, placing a bookmark between the worn pages and setting it on the side table. "Miss Princess needs some attention. Did you not get enough tuna treats earlier?"

She meows, bright blue eyes giving you a look that says she could always use more.

"Don't trust her," Bucky grunts softly as he exits the bedroom. "I don't know how many you gave her, but I'm sure it was too many."

His hair is damp from the shower, hands stuffed in the pockets of the gray sweatpants he's changed into. He slowly moves towards the couch, steps silent, shoulders still tense. You can almost hear a sigh of relief when he sits down, thigh pressed to yours, his large frame sinking into the plush cushions.

"I've never given her that many. She just acts like I've never fed her in her entire existence."

His head, resting on the back cushions, rolls to the side to look at you, one corner of his mouth tipping up.

"Are you starving my cat?"

"Our cat," you correct, "and no. She's just spoiled." Alpine meows indignantly, moving to lay on his lap instead as though she's offended.

He almost laughs, a sharp exhale of air from his nose just loud enough to be heard over the rain. He stays quiet for a moment, tired eyes roaming over your features like he's studying them…or recommitting them to memory.

"Fair enough," he finally mutters, his gaze falling to the book you were reading. The seemingly permanent crease in his brow deepens just a fraction, hardly noticable if you weren't paying attention. "Is that mine?"

You follow his gaze to the old copy of The Hobbit that had been carefully tucked away on the bookshelf, small and unassuming. It'd been there long before you moved in and left untouched, a fine layer of dust had gathered on top of the pages before you pulled it out.

"Is that okay?"

You glance back at him, his eyes locked on the cover like he's trying to remember something he had forgotten existed.

The silence that falls isn't uncomfortable, but emotion swirls in the blue depths of his eyes and it oddly feels like you're intruding on a private moment.

"I'm sorry, I'll put it back." You pick up the book and move to stand, but his metal hand reaches out and grabs your wrist. Not tight, just enough to halt your movements.

"Don't." His voice is quiet, rough in a way it wasn't before despite the exhaustion that has seeped into his bones. "It's okay."

It's quiet again for another moment, Bucky's grip loosening slightly but not fully letting go. You don't meet his eyes, both of you staring at the hardcover of the book in your hands until he finally breaks the silence.

"Will you read it to me?"

The thought crosses your mind to push back, to argue that reading Tolkien aloud is hardly ideal when reading it could already be difficult. But Bucky knows that already, surely. There's something in his tone—softer than it was a moment ago, a hint of nostalgia mixed with something you can't quite name—but it's the loosening tension in his shoulders that tells you he might need this; a welcome distraction from whatever is going on in his head.

So you nod instead, flipping the book back open to the first chapter. He releases your wrist, his hand falling back to the couch in the small space where your thighs aren't touching, the metal whirring softly.

"'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…'"

His gaze finds the ceiling again as you begin to read, his jaw working.

The rain continues its rhythm against the windowpane, Alpine's purring accompanying it like a beautiful symphony of white noise. Bucky slowly relaxes next to you, eyes slipping closed as he listens to a tale about a hobbit going on an unexpected journey.

Everything Taglist: @steelandvibranium @phoenix-in-writing @syd-vixious @sebastians-love @overwintering-soldier @wintersgirllost @wint3rbarnes @miraclediviner @barnes-babydoll @sunday-bug @buckytakethewheel @bucksbby @sheriff-bodecker @wherewinterblooms @nikkitabarnes @dei-dreamz @ladymiseryy @ornateglass @galactict3a @take-u-2-an0ther-w0r1d @alyssinwunderland-blog-blog @blue-eyes-in-august

Bucky Taglist: @phantom-wolf-girl @bartonsparrow25 @tw1sters @biaswreckedbybuckybarnes @highhopes1008 @hagridshaircare

Not here as in this room, or this city, or this war-torn life that keeps dragging us from one battlefield to another. I mean here – to this place between us, this ruin we built with our own hands, this thing made of longing and resentment and hunger, this bond that never knew whether it wanted to kiss or kill. Do you remember the road? Do you remember which path we followed, which road we ran beside, which exits we did not take, which warning signs we ignored? Do you remember what was too much, what was missing, what we should have said, what we should have buried, what we should have resisted, what we should have surrendered to?

Do you remember those intersections we crossed without seeing them? Those moments when everything could still have become something else, something easier, something gentler? Do you remember when we still had the chance to turn around?

I do not.

That is the cruelest part of all of this. Not the pain. Not the loss. Not even the fear.

It is the fact that I cannot remember where the hatred ended and where the rest began.

I do not remember which hatred brought us here, which love dragged us further, which wound first made us turn toward each other instead of away. I forgot how it started. Sometimes I think it was with an insult, something sharp and careless and full of the kind of contempt that only matters because it hides something deeper underneath. Sometimes I think it was with a blow, some act of violence aimed at one of us while the other stood too close, close enough to feel it, close enough to take it personally. Sometimes I think it started much earlier than that – before either of us had spoken, before either of us had touched, before we were anything at all to each other – back when we were only two people built in opposition, destined to recognize the worst and the most familiar parts of ourselves in someone else’s eyes.

What I know for certain is this:

It did not begin in peace.

There was never any peace in us.

Not the first time you looked at me, and not the last.

You looked at me like I was an offense. Like I was something wrong in the architecture of the world, some flaw you had not expected to find and now could not stop seeing. And I looked back at you like I wanted to drag every bright thing in you into the dark just to prove it could survive there – or to prove that it could not.

You were too much from the start.

Too steady. Too righteous. Too controlled. Too infuriatingly good at carrying your pain without letting it spill onto the floor for everyone else to see. You wore decency like skin, and I hated you for it. I hated the way people breathed easier when you walked into a room. I hated the way they looked at you, as though you were proof that not everything in this world had rotted through. I hated that hope seemed to cling to you like a second shadow. I hated that you made impossible things look survivable.

And most of all, I hated that you looked at me and did not look away.

There should have been fear. There should have been disgust, distance, caution – something. Anything. But you kept looking. Not kindly. Never kindly. But honestly. Like you understood, from the very beginning, that I was dangerous not because I was monstrous, but because I was familiar. Because there was something in me that recognized something in you, and we both resented it before we ever had the language for it.

So yes, I hated you.

I hated you because you were easy to hate at first. Because you stood for everything I had learned to distrust. Because you made loyalty look effortless. Because you believed in things I had spent my whole life watching fall apart. Because the world had put you on a pedestal and told the rest of us to measure ourselves against your silhouette. Because you were the kind of man everyone wanted to become and the kind of man I wanted to break.

And maybe you hated me too.

Or maybe you hated how quickly I saw through the performance. Maybe you hated that I did not care about the myth, only the man inside it. Maybe you hated that I knew your goodness was not softness, that your morality was not innocence, that your restraint was not peace but discipline, hard-won and white-knuckled. Maybe you hated that I kept pushing at the places where you were still bleeding.

Whatever it was, it was there from the beginning: that sharpness, that friction, that constant sense that the air changed when we were forced into the same room. It unsettled people. I noticed. They could feel it, even when they did not understand it. They thought it was only hostility, only competition, only ideological contempt. They thought we despised one another because we were opposites.

But hatred is rarely that simple.

Hatred watches.

Hatred learns.

Hatred memorizes.

Hatred waits.

And ours did all of those things. We studied each other like enemies, yes – but enemies who had somehow become landmarks. Constants. Proofs.

You became proof for me, Steve.

That is another truth I hate admitting, even now.

You were proof that something in this world would remain. That no matter how far things fell, no matter how badly everything shifted and twisted and burned, I would still find you there – stubborn, furious, glaring back, alive in exactly the way I had come to depend on. You were not warmth. You were not comfort. You were not kindness, not really, not with me. But you were there. You were solid. A rock, perhaps. Not a gentle one, not one anyone would want to rest their head against without bleeding, but a rock all the same. A marker. A point on the map. If I could still find you, then the whole world had not yet gone mad beyond recognition.

That was the first trap, I think.

Not desire.

Need.

Need is always uglier.

I needed your hatred because it met mine without pretending to cure it. I needed the certainty of your disapproval because it meant you were still close enough to judge. I needed your anger, your eyes on me, your refusal to let me vanish into the corners where I had learned to survive. I needed the shape of your resistance because everything else in my life moved too easily, broke too quickly, betrayed too often.

You were difficult. You were infuriating. You were relentless.

You were still there.

And then, somehow – quietly, treacherously – that stopped being enough.

I cannot tell you when trust came into it.

I have tried to find that moment in my head, to isolate it, to pin it down and accuse it properly, but it slips away every time. Maybe because it did not arrive like revelation. Maybe because nothing that ruins you ever arrives with ceremony. It comes in slowly, like a draft under the door, like poison diluted in clear water, like exhaustion turning enemies into confidants because they are too tired to keep performing their hate with proper conviction.

That is how it happened, I think.

At night.

It was always at night with us.

Daytime belonged to everyone else – to missions, to politics, to expectations, to the roles the world had written for us before we were ever asked if we wanted them. In daylight, we remembered what we were supposed to be. Opponents. Contradictions. A man made into a symbol and a woman made into a problem. In daylight, we knew how to look at each other the way they expected us to. Coldly. Sharply. Like a loaded question.

But nights were treacherous.

At night, there was less of the world between us.

At night, hatred became tiring.

That is the truth no one ever tells you about hate: it is exhausting. It takes effort to keep cutting someone with the same blade over and over. It requires performance, posture, intention. And some nights, after all the battles we had already fought against everyone else, we simply did not have the strength left to keep fighting each other too.

So there was a truce.

Never spoken. Never negotiated. Never acknowledged. But there all the same.

The late-night kitchen. The safehouse balcony. The hallway outside medical after a mission gone wrong. Long drives with the city unspooling outside the windows and silence humming in the car like a third presence. Rooftops. Fire escapes. Empty training rooms. Those strange in-between hours when the rest of the world slept and two people who had spent the whole day pretending could finally stop.

We talked then.

Not about us. Never about us.

We talked about the world because it was easier to hate the world aloud than to admit what had begun mutating between us. We spoke about failure, corruption, compromise, the filthy machinery that kept grinding people up and calling it justice. We spoke about war and power and governments and grief. We spoke about the cost of being used. We spoke about exhaustion. About not fitting in the versions of ourselves other people kept demanding. About how lonely it was to be needed for what you could do and never for what you were.

And in the middle of those conversations, trust happened.

Not the kind that heals.

Not the kind that softens.

Ours was a worse kind. The kind built on knowing exactly where the knife could go and choosing, for one more night, not to use it. The kind built on shared silences and unfinished confessions and the certainty that if the whole room turned on us, the other would at least understand why we were dangerous.

We were not friends.

That word has always been too innocent for us.

We were not lovers either, not then.

We were something darker. Something in between. Something without a proper name. Two people who knew they might one day be forced to stand on opposite sides of the same disaster, and who still kept coming back to these stolen hours as if understanding each other were already a form of betrayal.

Do you remember when I started walking beside you?

Not physically. I had walked beside you on missions before, shoulder to shoulder, back to back, all discipline and muscle memory and necessity. I mean truly beside you. When I began following that twisted road of yours, that impossible road that never promised safety but still somehow promised movement, light, purpose. That road of yours was winding and ugly and exhausting. It was paved with sacrifice and duty and stupid, impossible hope. I should have hated it. I did hate it. And still I followed.

I followed because you asked me without asking.

I followed because there was a light in you that repelled me and drew me in with equal force.

I followed because being alone had become heavier than being angry.

I followed because you looked back, once, as if you expected me to disappear, and I realized I wanted to prove you wrong.

I followed because I thought I had nothing left to lose.

That was naïve, of course.

I had everything to lose, and eventually I lost it all.

But at the time, it felt simple: you and I, two solitary creatures too damaged for anything clean, walking forward because standing still would have meant acknowledging how broken we already were. We never paused long enough to ask what was happening. We never named anything. We just kept going. Side by side, against reason, against instinct, against every warning either of us might have heard if we had been wiser.

And as we kept moving, something grew.

Respect, first.

That came before anything else.

A reluctant respect. Bitter, stubborn, almost insulting in the way it settled into us. I learned the shape of your courage, not the theatrical kind, but the miserable, costly kind – the kind that makes a person get up again when there is no glory left in it. You learned mine too, I think, though you rarely said so. You watched me survive what should have broken me, and I watched you carry burdens that should have crushed you. That was the beginning of a different kind of seeing.

Then came understanding.

Then the glances.

Then the pauses that lasted too long.

Then the quiet smiles neither of us was supposed to notice.

Then the hand at the small of my back that stayed there a second beyond necessity.

Then my fingers brushing yours and neither of us moving away quickly enough.

Then the nights that stretched and stretched because ending them meant returning to daylight, and daylight had become unbearable once darkness taught us what truce felt like.

We still did not call it love.

Even now, I am not sure that was the right word for it at first.

It was attraction, yes. God, it was attraction. Violent, humiliating, consuming. It lived under my skin like a fever. I could feel it every time you came too close, every time your voice dropped low, every time you said my name like it was either a warning or a confession. But attraction alone would have been easier. It would have burned fast and ugly and then left us. It should have. It should have stayed simple and physical and temporary.

But it did not.

Because it attached itself to everything else.

To trust.

To resentment.

To admiration.

To loneliness.

To the impossible relief of being understood without being forgiven.

And that is where it became dangerous.

Do you remember the first time I almost left?

You must.

You were standing by the door, your hands bruised, your mouth split, your silence worse than any answer you could have given me. I had heard enough by then – enough from you, enough from myself, enough from the thing growing between us that neither of us was brave enough to touch in daylight. I was angry. No, not angry. Anger is hot and useful. I was emptied out. Hollowed. Afraid in the way I only ever was with you, because you had become one of the few things in this world capable of hurting me in ways I could not heal from alone.

So I said I was done.

I said it quietly.

That is important. Quiet is always worse.

I put my hand on the door and for one second – one impossible, suspended second – I believed I might actually leave. I believed I might tear myself out of this before it rooted any deeper.

You did not stop me.

I hated you for that.

For days, for weeks, maybe longer, I hated you for staying still. For keeping your hands at your sides. For letting me walk away as though I were not already carved into you somewhere deeper than either of us wanted to admit.

But later I understood.

You did not stop me because you were afraid.

Not of losing me.

Of wanting me to stay.

That was when I realized how far gone we already were. Because if you had touched me then – if you had grabbed my wrist, if you had said my name the way you said it when your control slipped, if you had taken one step toward me – I would have stayed.

And you knew it.

And I knew that you knew it.

So I left.

And then, of course, I came back.

I always came back.

That was our most pathetic, most inevitable truth: no matter how many times we wounded each other, no matter how fiercely we tried to keep our distance, absence only sharpened everything. Distance did not cure us. It made us worse. Made the hunger meaner. Made the silence louder. Made your ghost appear in rooms you had never even entered. I could not get away from you because you were no longer outside me. By then, you had already settled somewhere under my skin, where no amount of pride could reach.

When I came back, we did not speak about it.

Of course we did not.

We looked at each other and let all the missing days stand between us like an accusation.

Then you smiled – that awful, knowing smile of yours, the one that always felt a little like a threat – and asked if I could not stay away.

And because I have always been at my weakest when I am trying to wound you, I told you that neither could you.

That was the first honest thing we said to each other about this. Not what it was. Not yet. But that it existed. That it had power. That it had already begun to decide things for us.

After that, the line dissolved.

I do not know how else to say it.

There was no grand confession, no clean surrender. Just a long sequence of almosts. Almost touches. Almost admissions. Almost mercy. Almost escape. Until one night almost was no longer enough.

Do you remember the stairwell?

I know you do.

Dark except for the emergency light. The smell of dust and concrete. A fight between us that had started over something trivial and ended, as our fights always did, somewhere rawer and uglier and truer. You had said something cruel. I had said something crueler. We were too close. Breathing too hard. Looking at each other like we were already on fire and trying to decide whether to spread or extinguish.

I shoved you.

You caught my wrist.

And then everything changed.

There are moments when the body understands what the mind is still too cowardly to admit. That was one of them. Your hand around my wrist. My back against the wall. Your face close enough that I could see every fracture in your restraint. Fury, yes. But not only fury. Never only fury with us. There was hunger in it too. Hunger and fear and something like grief, as though we both knew we were seconds away from making a mistake that would ruin any chance of returning to the clean lie of hatred.

You asked me to tell you to let go.

I should have.

God, Steve, I should have.

Instead I told you that you would not.

And you did not.

Your mouth on mine felt like violence first. Then like relief. Then like disaster. There was nothing tender about it. Nothing accidental. It was all the things we had refused to say turned into impact. Months, maybe years, of anger and tension and starving restraint collapsing into one unbearable point. You kissed me like a man who had spent too long pretending not to be starving. I kissed you back like I wanted to punish you for it.

When it ended, we looked at each other like we had both been betrayed.

Perhaps we had.

By ourselves.

After that, there was no going back.

That is the simple truth of it, stripped bare: once we crossed that line, every other line became theoretical.

We became greedy.

For touch. For proof. For each other.

A hand on a shoulder became fingertips at the throat. A glance became a challenge. A challenge became a fight. A fight became a kiss. A kiss became an embrace. An embrace became teeth and nails and gasping breath and the kind of desperation that makes the whole world disappear for a few stolen minutes. You learned the map of my body with a reverence that looked too much like anger to be gentle. I learned every way your control broke, every tremor in your breath, every expression you tried to hide after. We tore into each other like the world was ending and we wanted to meet it already ruined.

And still, even then, hatred did not leave.

That is what makes this impossible to explain to anyone who has not lived it.

We did not stop hating each other when we started touching. We did not stop resenting the power the other held. We did not become soft or safe or simple. If anything, the hatred grew sharper because now it had teeth. Now it had a body to live in. I hated how much I wanted you. I hated the way you could unmake me with one glance, one touch, one command spoken in that low voice that always made me feel like I was standing on the edge of something irreversible. I hated how alive I felt when I was with you. I hated how ruined I felt when I was not.

And I think you hated it too.

You hated your lack of control around me. Hated that I could drag something savage out of you with barely a word. Hated that all your discipline, all your restraint, all the years you had spent building yourself into someone reliable and good and strong could come apart in my hands so quickly. Hated that I made you want things you could not justify in the language of heroes and duty and noble sacrifice.

We were like magnets, I once thought.

But that was too neat, too scientific, too innocent.

Magnets do not choose.

Magnets do not wound.

Magnets do not lie awake at night trying to decide whether what they feel is desire or damnation.

Still, there was something true in it. You were all impossible light, all stubborn hope, all forward motion. And I was everything that recoiled from that, everything darker, sharper, meaner. We should have repelled. We did repel. Again and again. Yet every time we pushed away, we came back harder. Drawn in by the very opposition that should have kept us apart.

And then the whole thing shifted again.

Because eventually, Steve, our hatred found a better target.

At first, it was easy to aim it at each other. Convenient, even. We had been taught to stand on opposite sides. Taught to distrust. Taught to classify. Taught to simplify each other into roles. But the world made a mistake.

It pushed too hard.

It tried to use us.

It tried to define us.

It tried to separate us and sell that separation back to us as order, as necessity, as righteousness.

It tried to make you into a symbol and me into a warning.

And in trying to force us back into those shapes, it only taught us how much we had already become something else.

So the hatred turned outward.

Together.

That was when we became truly dangerous.

You and I against each other had always been inevitable. But you and I against the world? That was catastrophe. Because by then we knew each other too well. We knew how to move together. How to read silence. How to anticipate violence. How to trust in the ugliest, fiercest, most complete way possible. We became a closed circuit. A private war. A language no one else could speak. We hated the people who tried to manipulate us. Hated the games, the politics, the false moralities, the systems that devoured people and called it peacekeeping. We hated the ones who fed on chaos from a distance and never got blood on their own hands. We hated a world that kept asking us to die beautifully instead of live honestly.

And all of that hatred – every drop of it – bound us tighter.

That is why I cannot separate the love from the hate when I think of us. They grew from the same root. They fed on the same wounds. Without love, perhaps we would never have hated with such intensity. Without hate, perhaps we would never have understood how much power the other had to destroy us. Each feeling sharpened the other until they became almost indistinguishable.

Do you know what the worst part was?

The desire.

Not because it was there. Desire is easy. Ordinary. Human.

No, the worst part was what it did to us.

We stopped being able to leave. We stopped being able to think straight around each other. It became too much and never enough all at once. The need for the other’s presence, the other’s breath, the other’s touch – God, Steve, it made us pathetic. It made us reckless. We could go from screaming at each other to tearing into each other’s clothes in the span of a heartbeat. We could spend days avoiding eye contact and then end up with my nails in your back, your mouth at my throat, both of us shaking like the world had narrowed to skin and heat and the kind of hunger that feels half like worship and half like revenge.

And afterward – always afterward – there was that silence.

That terrible silence.

Not peaceful. Never peaceful. Just full. Heavy with all the words we did not say. We could talk for hours about missions, failures, governments, betrayals, casualties, consequences. We could analyze the whole broken world with ruthless precision. But speak about us? Never. Not really. We insulted. We mocked. We snarled. We bit at each other with language because language was safer when it wounded than when it confessed.

I think we were afraid of words.

Afraid that once spoken, they would become real.

Afraid that real things can be taken.

Afraid of loving wrongly, unevenly, alone.

Afraid that if one of us said too much and the other did not say it back, then whatever remained would not be hatred anymore, only humiliation. And neither of us had ever been built to survive tenderness without armor.

So we kept it silent.

We let our bodies speak. Our glances. Our choices. Our violence. Our restraint. You standing between me and danger before I asked. Me keeping your secrets when I had every reason not to. You touching me like you were trying to remember I was alive. Me watching you sleep and hating how much peace there was in your face when no one was demanding anything from you.

That was our compromise.

We did not confess.

We enacted.

We did not promise.

We returned.

And maybe that was worse, in the end, because it allowed us to pretend that what we had was temporary, nameless, survivable.

It was none of those things.

You know, I think we came closest to happiness in those moments no one else ever saw.

Not some soft, innocent happiness. Not the kind from stories. Not the kind they promise children when they speak of love like it is a reward for being good. Ours was darker than that. Dirtier. It came dressed in guilt and exhaustion and bruises. But it was real. In the mornings when you were half-asleep and unguarded. In the moments when your forehead rested against mine and the whole world seemed held outside by nothing more than our shared refusal to let it in. In the rare, impossible seconds when we laughed and neither of us regretted it immediately after. In the way your hand sometimes found mine without permission, without ceremony, as though it had known where to go all along.

That was happiness, wasn’t it?

Or the nearest thing people like us were ever meant to touch.

Maybe we were only capable of it together.

Maybe that was the curse.

We were cursed lovers, Steve.

Not in the sweet, tragic way people mean when they compare themselves to old stories. Not in the foolish, theatrical way of teenagers who think suffering makes them profound. No. We were cursed in the ugliest and simplest sense: we found the one thing that could have saved us and discovered it carried the power to destroy us too.

We were never going to love each other gently.

There was too much ruin in us for that.

Too much blood already on our hands.

Too much rage.

Too much fear.

Too much history that had taught us closeness is always leverage waiting to be used.

And yet I loved you.

That is the sentence I have spent the whole letter circling because it is still the hardest one to write.

I loved you.

Not sweetly.

Not safely.

Not in any way that would make sense to decent people.

I loved you with the same ferocity with which I fought you. I loved you in all the places I had once reserved for anger. I loved you with suspicion and obsession and hunger and grief. I loved you in the pause before impact and in the trembling aftermath. I loved you when I wanted to leave. I loved you when I wanted to hurt you. I loved you when I could not stand the sight of you and when I could not breathe without it. I loved you when you were cruel, and when you were careful, and when you were exhausted, and when you looked at me like I was the one thing in this world you did not know how to survive.

I loved you as much as I hated you.

Maybe more.

Maybe they were the same thing by then.

And perhaps that is why I had to leave.

Or why I let them take me.

Or why I made myself disappear before the world could do worse.

Choose whichever explanation helps you sleep, if any of them do.

But listen to me carefully now, because this is the closest thing to truth I know how to give you:

I did not go because I felt nothing.

I went because I felt too much.

Because loving you had become a weakness other people could smell on me.

Because wanting me had become a fracture in you they could exploit.

Because one day, sooner or later, someone would realize that the easiest way to destroy us was not by aiming at our bodies, but by aiming at the thing we had never dared name aloud.

And they would not hesitate.

The world has always known where to strike.

It would use me against you.

It would use you against me.

It would put your goodness on trial and my darkness in chains and call the whole spectacle justice.

I could not bear that. Not for you. Not because I think you are fragile – God knows you are not – but because I know what you would do if given the choice between the world and me.

And that terrifies me.

It has always terrified me.

So I am writing instead of speaking. Hiding instead of asking. Leaving instead of staying long enough for us both to be cornered by the truth. Cowardly, perhaps. But then, you and I were always cowards when it came to the words that mattered most.

Do not make me into something pretty after I am gone.

Do not clean me up in your memory. Do not turn this into some noble tragedy where we were victims of timing and circumstance and fate. We did this too. We built it. Fed it. Kept choosing it. There was rot in it from the beginning, and we loved it anyway. That matters. The ugliness matters. The obsession matters. The damage matters. If you remember me, remember me whole. Remember the cruelty and the tenderness and the jealousy and the ruin. Remember the way I could wound you with a sentence and undo you with a look. Remember the way you held me like restraint was a language your body had forgotten. Remember the fights. The bruises. The laughter that sounded almost shocked to exist. Remember the nights when we hated the world together and thought that was enough to count as hope.

Do not forgive me too easily.

I am not asking for absolution.

I am asking to be remembered accurately.

And if part of you still wants directions, still wants cause and effect, still wants a final answer to the question at the start of all this – how did we get here? – then perhaps this is the only answer I have left:

We got here because hatred was easier to admit than love.

Because love would have asked too much of us.

Because hatred let us stay armed.

Because desire made liars of us.

Because trust came quietly and ruined everything.

Because we were lonely in exactly the same places.

Because the world gave us opposite masks and we got tired of wearing them.

Because you saw me.

Because I saw you.

Because once that happened, there was no clean way out.

So this is my confession, if that is what you need to call it.

You were the worst thing that ever happened to me.

You were the only thing that ever made me want to stay.

You were the wound.

You were the fever.

You were the truce.

You were the war.

You were the only person I ever looked at and thought: if the world ends, let it end with you this close.

And for whatever it is worth, for whatever remains worth anything at all now –

I loved you.

I loved you in every broken language I knew.

I loved you in silence because I was afraid of the sound.

I loved you in anger because anger was safer.

I loved you with my hands, with my mouth, with my absence, with every return.

I loved you enough to leave.

Or enough to hope you would follow.

You see? Even now I am not honest all the way through.

That has always been our problem.

I want to tell you not to look for me.

I want to tell you to let me become one more ghost among all the others you carry.

I want to tell you to put this letter away, to burn it, to hate me properly, to survive me.

But if I am honest – truly honest, for once – then I know exactly what I am doing by writing this. I know you too well. I know what these words will do inside you. I know the shape of your loyalty. I know how impossible it is for you to leave unfinished things in the dark, and I know that I have never been unfinished to you.

So no, I will not insult you by pretending this is a clean goodbye.

It isn’t.

It never was.

This is me putting the knife in your hand and trusting that if you use it, you will know where to cut.

This is me leaving you the truth too late.

This is me telling you that if there was ever any holiness in my life, it did not come from innocence. It came from the terrible, wrecked, unholy way I belonged to you.

And if there was ever anything worth saving in yours, I hope it survives me.

If it does not, then at least let the ruins be honest.

Do you remember how we got here, Steve?

No.

Neither do I.

But I remember you.

I remember your glare, your mouth, your hands, your impossible restraint, your terrible mercy. I remember the first time I trusted you and the first time I let you hurt me and the first time I understood those two things had become inseparable. I remember every night that made a liar out of the day. I remember every time I almost left. I remember every time I came back. I remember how we turned our hatred into a bridge and then set fire to it while we were still standing on it.

And I remember this, most of all.

I loved you as much as I hated you.

Maybe that was always the same thing.

– Yours, in all the worst ways

GENERAL taglist: @/mellowfurynight | @castielscaplan | @whatisanniedoin

STEVE taglist: @mrsevans90 | @blobfishlol | @phoenix-in-writing | @sassandscribbles | @alyssinwunderland-blog-blog | @pattiemac1 | @fantasyfootballchampion | @theoryxwaller | @thatisamericas-ass | @allthingswickedpodcast | @katarina1224 | @kryptidfiles | @greatenthusiasttidalwave | @vicmc624 | @strangerthing93

Thursday had become his favorite day of the week thanks to you. 

His favorite passenger. 

Someone bright and soft during his long shifts and rough nights. 

He came to a stop in front of your building, making sure he adjusted the heat so you wouldn’t be too cold. There was a blanket in the back just in case it wasn’t enough. He also changed the radio station to something he knew you’d enjoy but kept it low enough in case you wanted to talk. 

He liked it when you talked to him. 

“Do I look okay?” he asked himself, checking his hair in the mirror before he chuckled. 

Bucky didn’t dress up a lot since he drove a cab for a living, but he tried to take a bit of pride in his appearance. Clean clothes and a subtle amount of cologne. Beard and hair kept neat, too, even with the bit of gray showing more in his chestnut strands these days. 

He liked to think it gave him a refined look. 

Something you might notice.

The steady hum of the engine grounded him as he looked at the door, his breath catching when you stepped outside. You paused on the top step, your gaze sweeping along the street as you adjusted the bag on your shoulder. Something warm bloomed in his chest when you spotted him and gave him that familiar soft wave and smile. He wanted to believe that smile was reserved just for him. 

Get it together. You’re just her driver. Nothing more.

It didn’t stop him from hoping. 

He straightened up when you made your way to the car and opened the door. 

“Happy Friday Eve, Buck,” you said, sliding into the backseat. 

The corner of his lips twitched at the familiar greeting. Not “driver” or “sir” or anything like that. Just Buck. Steve was the only other person who called him that. 

It sounded right coming from you. 

“You mean Friday Junior,” he teased, trying hard not to make a show of breathing in your scent.

There were plenty of passengers who practically bathed themselves in colognes and perfumes. It was enough to choke on before he aired out the cab. But not you. You always smelled so nice. So sweet. 

Jesus fucking Christ. Get a grip. 

“Same thing,” you teased back, slipping your shoes off and tucking your legs beneath you. 

The first time you asked if it was okay for you to take your shoes off, he almost laughed. It surprised him more than anything that you cared enough to ask. Like you cared about his space and him. He didn’t mind as long as you were comfortable. 

He always wanted you to feel comfortable and safe in his presence. 

“We made it through another day,” you sighed. 

“And your prize for making it through another day is spending time with me,” he joked.

You laughed, a soft sound like music to his ears. “Lucky me,” you said without a hint of sarcasm. 

He cleared his throat, his heart skipping a beat. “Blanket back there and the heat’s on.”

“Thanks,” you said, adding above a whisper, “You’re so good to me.”

Bucky opened his mouth and closed it. “Just doing my job,” he said, the words bittersweet on his tongue. 

“Well, I appreciate it.” You hummed a little as you dug through your bag. “And… I got something for you.”

He already knew what it was.

“Protein bar?”

“Protein bar,” you confirmed. 

He made an offhand comment in the beginning about his favorite brand. 

You surprised him by giving one the following week, and you have brought him one every week since then. 

Part of him wanted to save the wrappers, but Sam shut that down by saying it was serial killer behavior. 

Your fingers brushed his when he reached back to grab, a jolt running through his body and settling deep in his chest. “I think you’re too good to me,” he said. 

It was a thoughtful thing for you to do. 

“Just being a good passenger,” you said casually, but he caught the hint of affection there. 

Something soft… and real.

Bucky glanced at you in the mirror, his gaze lingering longer than it should’ve when you covered yourself with the blanket and settled into the leather with a sigh. His chest puffed out a little, a sense of pride filling him since you used the blanket. He picked the softest and warmest one he had. 

You looked completely at ease, like you belonged there. 

“Heading to your brother’s place, or you gonna switch it up on me?”

“Same trip as always,” you replied. 

Of course.

A visit to your older brother’s place on the other side of the city. Dinner. Helping your sister-in-law with some chores. Spending quality time with your niece and nephew. 

Every Thursday.

He knew about your routine more than he probably should, but he couldn’t help but pay attention. It was nice knowing that you had family close by. Nice that you got to spend time with them.

Some nights though, you looked a little worn down by the time he brought you home. 

He carefully pulled away from the curb and glanced in the mirror again, catching your eye. “How was your day?”

Bucky was polite to his passengers, but didn’t typically initiate small talk. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the people he transported. He did. But his job was to get people where they needed to go, not force them into conversations to fill the silence. If he sensed that they wanted to talk, he’d engage. Most were glued to their phones anyway. But not you. 

Never you. 

You groaned, your head falling back against the seat. “Work was a pain today. Short-staffed. Didn’t really get a full break. You know how that goes.”

He hummed sympathetically. “Sorry you had to deal with that.”

“Don’t be. Not your fault,” you said with a small shrug. “On the plus side, we’re close to the weekend, and I can relax once I get home.”

“Glad you can still see the bright side,” he said. 

It wasn’t always easy to do that. 

“I try.” You lifted your head with a soft smile. “How are you?”

He swallowed hard. It was nice to have someone outside of his normal circle ask him sincerely how he was doing. “Not too bad. Some guy tried to correct my driving.”

You sat up straighter. “Are you kidding me? You’re the best driver in the city.”

Warmth bloomed in his chest from how fiercely you defended him. You stated it like it was a fact. He wasn’t one to brag, but he was an excellent driver.

“I want his name,” you added, narrowing your eyes. “I’ll handle him.”

He laughed. “Oh, you’ll handle him, huh?” he asked, turning his blinker on. 

“Oh, yeah,” you answered, his heart racing faster. 

“I appreciate that,” he said above a whisper. 

You really were something.

“And if I can’t, Alpine can scratch him up for me,” you mused lightly. 

A wide smile broke out on his face. “Al’d make sure he never messed with anyone ever again.”

Alpine, his beautiful white cat. He found her in an alley when she was just a kitten, trying to stay warm on a chilly day. One look in her blue eyes and he knew he couldn’t leave her there. 

“My place isn’t much,” he warned her when he crouched down. “But it’s warm and I have milk.”

She curled right in his arms and tried to burrow her face in his leather jacket. 

She became his partner-in-crime from that day forward.

The feline flourished in his apartment, making herself right at home and sticking by his side whenever he was around. He admittedly spoiled her with toys and such, but she deserved it. She was also protective of him, quick to hiss at anyone who got too close, and could imitate his grumpy stare well. He knew she’d adore you.

He certainly talked about you enough to her.

He talked about you with his younger sister, too. 

“Becca messaged me a bit ago, too,” he said, smiling a little. “You know how she likes to check in and make sure I’m not living off just protein bars and stubbornness.”

Becca didn’t live as close as your brother did, but he visited when he could. She visited, too, between work and her new boyfriend. She seemed happy, and that made him happy. 

“And here I am giving you protein bars. I hope she doesn’t mind.”

“Not at all,” he promised. “She knows one extra bar a week won’t hurt.”

You smiled softly. “She cares a lot about you, doesn’t she?”

“Yeah,” he said warmly. “She does.”

And she liked that he had someone like you who cared, even when he tried to argue that you were just being nice. 

“She isn’t just being nice, big brother. She cares.”

He liked to think so.

“Hey!” you said suddenly, leaning forward in your seat. “You know what I just realized?”

“What?”

“This is the thirteenth Thursday that you’ve driven me around.”

“Is that right?” he asked softly, knowing full well exactly how many Thursdays he had seen you.

Because he had been counting.

“That is right.” You settled back into your seat with a smile. “Feels like ages… and not long at all.”

It seemed like only yesterday to him.

He remembered the exact shade of blue you wore on the first ride, something pleasant against the harsh city lights. How you shivered when you slid into the car, and the smile you gave him when he turned the heat on. You were so beautiful. And kind. 

The kindest passenger he had that day.

“Thanks for getting me here safely, Bucky! Happy Friday Eve!” 

“Friday Junior,” he’d called after you like an idiot.

“Same thing!” 

He was a goner.

Every week his crush grew stronger.

But every week he told himself he was just your cab driver and nothing more. 

“Thirteen Thursdays,” he said. “That why you look so nice today?”

Your gaze flickered to your lap, smiling. “You think I look nice?” you asked gently. 

His heart hammered in his chest. “Yeah. You always do,” he said honestly, willing himself to concentrate on the road.

Don’t make it weird. Don’t make her uncomfortable. 

“Thanks, Buck,” you whispered.  

He should’ve left it at that, but he didn’t.

“You sure I’m taking you to your brother’s and not some date?” he blurted out.

The air thickened in the cab, his grip tightening on the steering wheel. Something uncomfortable twisted in his gut. He paid enough attention to know that there wasn’t a ring on your finger, and you hadn’t mentioned having a boyfriend. 

Not once. 

But what if there was someone? What if one day you dressed up for someone else? What if you gave some other man that soft smile you always gave him?

His jaw clenched and he was thankful you couldn’t see his expression. 

I have no reason to be jealous. She isn’t my girl. She can see whoever she wants. 

I just wish it was me.

“A date?” Your laughter made its way to his ears. “Please. I’m very single.”

For a moment, all Bucky could hear was the sound of his heart slowing to a steady rhythm, effectively blocking out the moving vehicles around him. His next breath was easier, his grip loosening. It shouldn’t have been such a relief to hear that, but it was.

Single. Good. That’s good. Stay single. Stay away from bad guys. Stay… here. With me.

…I’m in deep. 

“Haven’t dated in months,” you added.

That made him pause. 

“Months?” he repeated. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Well, it’s true,” you said, quieter than before and gazing out the window. “Guess I haven’t caught anyone’s eye.”

Your words wiped out his relief. You didn’t have to say out loud that you were lonely. He sensed it. Recognized it. 

It just didn’t make sense to him that you were alone. You were a catch. How were guys not lining up down the block to ask you out?

Your words also weren’t true. Because he was there and he saw you. Wanted you.

“Or… maybe you have,” he said carefully. “And they just haven’t said anything yet.”

A beat passed. “Maybe,” you said. 

He tapped the wheel when he stopped at a red light.

Say it. Tell her. Tell her that she caught my eye. Tell her that she’s…

He sighed to himself, the cab feeling smaller than usual. He wanted to admit how he felt, but he couldn’t like this. It wasn’t right when he was in the driver’s seat and you were back there. 

“And what about you?” you asked, turning away from the window. “You seeing anyone?”

He huffed out a laugh. “No.”

Women weren’t exactly fighting to date a cab driver. 

“My ‘date’ nights are me, a book or a movie, and Al,” he told you. “That or kicking the guys out of my place once the pizza and beer are gone.”

You smiled. “Those sound like good nights to me.”

“They’re not bad,” he said casually.

As if the idea of a date night with you wasn’t painting a picture in his mind.

“You know,” you said, snuggling into the blanket more. “If you ever need anyone to critique your book or movie choices, I’m available.”

He didn’t think it was possible for his heart to trip over itself, but it did. “Yeah?” he asked, keeping his voice even.

“Yeah,” you said casually, but your eyes flicked to the mirror. “I mean, I’m sure you have great taste, but it doesn’t hurt to get my own confirmation.”

Bucky swallowed hard. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

You smiled. “You better.”

The cab fell into a comfortable silence after that, but something shifted. You had given him an opening that would’ve been easy to take. But maybe you were just being nice. Maybe it didn’t mean anything at all. 

Or it might mean everything.

He eased the car to a stop at your brother’s building minutes later. “Here we are.”

You slipped your shoes on and folded the blanket as best as you could. “Thanks,” you said, holding out the cash for him. 

He reached back automatically to grab it, feeling that spark again when your fingers touched. He didn’t need to count it to know it was all there, along with a nice tip. You were generous. 

Always. 

“Anytime.”

You lingered when you opened the door. “Hey, Buck?”

“Yeah?”

“You look nice today, too,” you said.

It was a simple compliment, but it hit him square in the chest. 

“Yeah?” he managed to ask. 

“Yeah,” you said, smiling softly. “You always do.”

It was an echo of his own words to you. 

Before he could respond, you slipped out and tapped the roof twice. “See you later. Drive safe.”

“See ya,” he whispered.

He didn’t leave right away. He watched as you made your way inside safely, his hand still clutching the cash. Glancing at the protein bar on the seat beside him, he exhaled. 

You said he looked nice. Offered to watch a movie with him. Kind of. 

But he was just your driver. 

Nothing more. 

“I’m in trouble,” he muttered. 

By the time Bucky pulled back up to your brother’s building later that night, things felt quieter. But his mind didn’t. It was too busy racing with thoughts of you and wondering how long he could keep his line drawn in the sand. 

You waved to him when you stepped outside, your steps a little slower. Your smile wasn’t as bright as earlier, but it was still soft and easy. It made sense. Family time after a long work day was tiring, even if it was nice. 

“Hey,” he said once you got in. 

“Hey,” you echoed, settling in. 

“Good night?” he asked, easing back into the road. 

“It was,” you replied, laughing a little. “But those kids wear me out.”

He smiled to himself. No way they didn’t adore spending time with you. “Sounds about right.”

“Did you have a good night?”

It was the best night because he got to see you again. 

“Not too bad,” he answered. 

You checked something on your phone and put it away. “Random, but I have a few extra dollars in my account, so I may do takeout for dinner tomorrow as an end of the week treat for myself.”

You could have takeout with me.

“Get those noodles from the place you like on 5th,” he suggested instead. “The number seven, right?”

Why did I say that?

“That’s right.” You giggled. “Am I that predictable?”

He almost said, “I notice everything about you.”

“You’re not predictable,” he replied instead, easing his foot off the gas. “I just… pay attention.”

Because you’re… you.

It was quiet for the rest of the ride. 

He glanced back a few times and saw that your eyes were heavy. He hoped you were able to relax more when you got back to your place. You deserved the rest. 

A pang of disappointment hit him when he got to your place, the drive seeming quicker than normal. “Here we are.”

You stifled a yawn. “Thanks.” 

“Anytime.”

“Oh. I almost forgot.” You sat up, seemingly more awake now. “I have something for you.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You already gave me a protein bar.”

“Well, this isn’t from me,” you said, handing him a folded piece of construction paper along with the cash. “It’s from my niece and nephew.”

He opened it carefully, his heart melting on the spot. 

A drawing of a car stretched across the sheet. It was lopsided with uneven wheels and windows that were too big. There were two stick figures inside. One in the back with a large smile that was clearly you. And one in the front with brown hair, blue eyes, and a small smile. 

It was him. 

There was a message in crooked letters above the car, surrounded by glitter glue. 

BUCKY DRIVING AUNTIE! YAY!

His throat tightened unexpectedly. “That’s us?” he asked with a hint of disbelief. 

You mentioned him to your family?

“That’s us,” you said affectionately, making him wonder if that was for him or your niece and nephew. “They wanted to thank you for always getting me there and back every week.”

He swallowed, his throat dry. “You… talk about me?” 

“Of course, I do,” you said like it was obvious. “You’re part of my week.”

He folded it back up like it was something fragile, your words slowly sinking in. 

You talked about him. Your family knew he existed. Your niece and nephew had never met him, but still made him a card like he mattered. 

His heart felt full. 

And he didn’t know what to do with that feeling. 

“Tell ‘em I said thanks,” he said quietly. “Really.”

“I will,” you promised, hesitating when you reached for the door handle. 

You waited long enough for him to look at you over his shoulder. Long enough that his heart thudded. Hope flickered deep within. 

She feels something, right? It can’t just be me. 

Your fingers tightened around the strap of your bag, but your eyes were soft. “I…” Your gaze flickered down before looking back at him, sighing a little. “I’ll see you next week, Buck.”

He exhaled, trying not to let disappointment show. Something passed between you. He felt it. It was real. 

Or… maybe he just imagined it. 

“Yeah,” he said, offering you a small smile. “Next week.”

“Good night.”

“Good night,” he repeated. “And thanks again for the card and tip.”

You smiled softly before you got out. 

He leaned against his seat and once again stayed to make sure you got inside safely. You didn’t rush inside when you got to the door. You paused instead and glanced over your shoulder at the door, like you were waiting for him. It was an opening. Maybe. 

But he didn’t take it.

He kept that line drawn. 

You waved before you went inside, and he closed his eyes, the quiet surrounding him once again.

His fingers brushed the construction paper in his lap.

Steve and Sam would flip when he told them about it. Hell, they already did whenever he talked about you. He could practically hear them now once he gave them the recap of tonight’s events.

Sam shaking his head and saying, “She gives you protein bars, offers to watch movies with you, her family knows about you, her niece and nephew made you a card, and you didn’t ask for her number?”

Steve, a little quieter but no less insistent, with, “Buck… you’re allowed to want something.”

Bucky’s jaw clenched. They acted like it was simple, like he could just ask and it wouldn’t change a thing. It would change everything. 

He didn’t want to risk losing you or holding you back when he didn’t have you to begin with.

For now, he’d continue driving you where you needed to go and leave it at that.

Coward. Life’s too short.

He set the card aside and took one last look at your building.

“Yeah,” he sighed. “I’m in big trouble.”

Bucky arrived a couple of minutes early the following Thursday. 

He told himself it was habit. Being mindful of traffic. Not because he was eagerly waiting for you. 

Not at all.

And you also weren’t the reason he spent ten extra minutes picking out a shirt.

Just because she said I look nice…

He made a mistake of checking the group chat he had with Steve and Sam while he waited.

Sam: “Be a man and get her number.”

He gritted his teeth, quickly typing. He almost regretted confiding in them about you. It would’ve been easier to keep his mouth shut. 

“Fuck off, Samuel. I am a man.” 

The dots appeared with both of his friends writing something back.

Sam: “OOH. Samuel. My full name. Hit a sore spot, huh?”

Maybe he did.

Stevie: “Just go at your pace, jerk. We got your back.”

Some of the tension left his shoulders. 

“Thanks, punk.”

He put his phone away and smiled just a little. They were good guys. Had been with him through thick and thin. Brothers.

Sam definitely acted like an annoying brother in the most supportive way.

And as much as he adored Becca, he didn’t want to bother his little sister with his lack-of-relationship woes. She had enough on her plate. He’d be just fine.

Eventually.

His attention snapped in your direction when you left your building and everything else faded away.

There you were again.

The same familiar sweep of your eyes along the street before you found him. The soft smile. The small wave. How you always looked incredible no matter if you dressed up or down. 

Like tonight, you had on the same soft sweater you wore last month. It reminded him of comfort. It also made you look gentle in a way that made him want to take care of you.

The instinct hit him harder than before.

Yeah. I’m royally fucked.

He straightened up as you walked closer, his brows furrowing. You were still smiling at him, but your steps didn’t look as light as normal. There was tension in your shoulders. 

“Happy Friday Eve, Buck,” you said, unfolding the blanket with extra care. 

There was a touch of weariness in your tone under the warmth.

It would’ve been easy to miss if he wasn’t paying attention. 

“You mean Friday Junior,” he said automatically.

“Same thing,” you murmured. 

“Your brother’s place?” he asked gently.

“Same trip as always,” you replied just as gently.

He looked at you in the mirror after pulling away from the curb. You were already gazing out the window, relaxed but not completely. His chest tightened when he spotted the slightest frown on your face.

It didn’t belong there.

Is she okay? Was work extra rough?

He waited a couple of blocks before he asked, “Long day?”

Bucky didn’t want to push if you didn’t want to talk, but he did want to make sure you were okay. If something upset you, he wanted to fix it. If someone upset you, he wanted to handle it.

Let me help however I can.

“Yeah,” you replied after a second. “Long week, actually.”

“Those are the worst.” He tapped a finger on the wheel. “Becca always tells me to take a breath and not let the week eat me alive.”

“That’s good advice.” Something soft and a little sad flickered in your eyes. He didn’t know if his words triggered a memory, but it felt important. “Especially coming from a sibling.”

“It is,” he replied. “Siblings just get it some days.”

You hummed in agreement, but didn’t say anything else. 

He bit his tongue. It was times like this when he wished he wasn’t driving. He wanted to turn around and give you his attention. You deserved it.

“Would it make you feel any better if I said you look nice today?” he asked, hoping he didn’t sound as desperate as he felt. 

That brought a smile to your face. “It does make me feel better,” you said, your tone almost back to normal. “Thank you.”

He smiled back gently, the sound of the engine and low music filling the space for a moment. It didn’t fix your long week, but he was glad the compliment helped. He’d consider that a win.

“You look nice, too.” You craned your head to look at him. “I really like that color on you.”

His pulse jumped. The usual ease was coming back, the cab lighter. And you noticed his shirt. 

I chose well. 

“Oh, this old thing?” he teased, like it wasn’t a big deal. “Really brings out my eyes.”

You giggled. “It sure does.”

He stole another glance at you when you looked out the window again. You were tired, but you were okay. Still warm. Still you.

He felt like he could breathe again.

“Hey,” he said after another block, reaching into the console. “I, uh… made you a list.”

“A list?” Your eyebrows went up. “What kind of list?”

“Movies. Some I like. Some I think you’d like,” he clarified, passing it back to you before he could change his mind. “You did offer to critique them.”

“And you’re taking me up on it?” You gasped, putting a hand to your chest. “I’m both shocked and flattered.”

“You should be,” he deadpanned before grinning.

You smiled, a little tired but genuine. “The first title has a star next to it.”

“Because it’s my favorite and a good one to start with.”

“Did you get Steve and Sam’s seal of approval?”

He scoffed. “They’d like it. Enough oldies for Steve, and Sam has somewhat decent taste in recent stuff… but he’ll never know I said that.” He coughed into his hand and added, “They’ve heard about you.”

You smiled. “Is that right?” 

“Yeah, I talk about more than I probably should.” He shrugged, but his left foot lightly tapped. “You’re a good passenger.”

And I’m just your driver.

Your smile faltered, just for a second, before you smoothed it over with a laugh. “And you’re a good driver.” You scanned the small piece of paper once more. “You put a lot of thought into this, didn’t you?”

Warmth rushed to his cheeks. “You should see the book list I’m making for you,” he muttered. 

He valued your opinion, and the lists were a way for you to think of him between rides. A way to keep you two connected. Maybe it was selfish that he wanted you to have him on your mind. 

But maybe it wasn’t.

“You’re making me a book list, too? Oh, I can’t wait for that.” You folded it neatly and put it in your bag. “I’ll watch the first movie tomorrow night.”

Another Friday night with no date? I wish I could man up and change that.

“I expect a full report next week,” he teased.

“You got it, Sarge,” you teased back.

His breath caught. “Sarge?” he repeated. “You remember my military ranking?”

Sergeant Barnes.

It was mentioned only once, just like the protein bars. A passing comment and nothing more. But you listened. 

You remembered.

“Of course, I do.”

The same thing you said about mentioning him to your family. 

He blinked rapidly, trying to steady the emotions stirring inside him as he drove. You continued to surprise him with your soft words and smiles, making him feel special in your eyes. You undid him in ways nothing or no one else could.

“Here we are,” he said minutes later.

“Thanks, Buck.” You gathered your things before you stopped, your inhale sharp. “Oh… you kept it.”

He followed your gaze to the dashboard. Your niece and nephew’s card was proudly on display. It was a beautiful reminder of you.

“Of course, I did,” he said, trying to play it cool. “It’s a nice drawing.”

“That’s really sweet, Buck.”

He shrugged a little, but heat crept up his neck. “It deserved a front and center spot.”

Your gaze softened more. “They’ll think you’re the coolest guy ever when I tell them.”

They made him feel cool by giving him the card. 

“Guess I’ll have to try to live up to that.”

“You already are,” you said without missing a beat, passing him a protein bar with the cash. 

His heart pounded in his chest. Another thoughtful gesture. More words that made him feel good. 

Say something. Do something. 

But he didn’t. 

There was a small pause before you sighed and got out, the door gently closing behind you. Tap. Tap. The familiar rhythm against the roof should’ve felt normal and comforting. 

But why did it feel like you were disappointed?

“See you later,” you said. “Drive safe.”

“See ya,” he exhaled.

He watched until you went inside, half tempted to hit the dashboard since he chickened out. He held himself back. There was no sense in taking his frustration out on the car. He could hit a punching bag later.

Maybe he could knock some sense into himself, too, and man up. 

“Should’ve said something,” he muttered, running a hand through his hair. 

Some of the frustration at himself faded when he looked at the card. He imagined your niece and nephew were the kind of kids who loved when the garbage men came by every week or drivers dropped off packages. They’d probably have a blast riding around in his cab, cheering him on for driving you around. If Becca ever had kids, they’d likely be the same way.

He wondered, briefly, if you’d ever meet her, and the thought didn’t scare him the way it should.

But what would your brother think of me? Would he think I’m good enough?

At the end of the day, didn’t it matter only what you thought and saw in him?

His phone buzzed. 

Sam: “Well??? We’re waiting.”

Bucky stared at the message before typing back. “Dropped her off. Didn’t ask.”

Three dots appeared immediately. He didn’t want to look. Didn’t need the additional salt on the open wound of his self-doubt. 

But he looked since he was a glutton for punishment. 

Sam: “Man, if we can even call you that, you're killing me! I’m gonna lose the bet.”

Bet? What fucking bet?

Stevie: “There’s no bet. You’ll do it when it’s right.”

Sam: “Don’t make me get Becca and Sarah involved. I’ll do it.”

He tucked his phone away and shook his head. Tough and gentle love. He needed both. 

And he needed just a little more time to convince himself to erase the line he had drawn. 

The next passenger he picked up, a man complaining about the state of the economy, didn’t shift his focus fully away from you. The restaurant he dropped him at seemed like a nice one to take you to, something quiet and romantic. A couple of women he drove after that mentioned an acoustic concert in the park, which made him picture you leaning your head on his shoulder while listening to music together. Every passenger was like that, managing to tie something back to you. 

He still got everyone where they needed to go safely since that was the job. 

He just couldn’t stop thinking about you. 

By the time he arrived to pick you up again, the city lights had taken over the streets. He spotted you immediately, your arms wrapped around yourself to keep warm. You looked about the same as when you went in. A little more tired, but okay. 

And you still gave him a smile when you got in. 

Smiling like she’s happy to see me. 

“Hey.”

“Hey,” he replied, double checking the heat. “Kids wear you out again?”

“You know it. They had so much energy tonight, and I almost stepped on a lego when I was chasing them around.” 

“Occupational hazard of being a great aunt.”

“You know it.” You laughed a little. “They were also thrilled that you have their card up.” 

That warmed his heart. “So, they think I’m cool?”

“The coolest.”

He smiled at the sincerity. He believed that they believed that. It was a feeling he needed to lean into more. 

“Did you have a good night?” 

“Yep. Just driving. Getting everyone where they need to go,” he answered. 

And thinking of you. Always thinking about you. 

He turned the radio up a notch after that instead of trying to fill the silence, letting you relax. For a moment, he pictured swaying with you. Minus the quick brush of your fingers, he hadn’t touched you in any way. 

To hold you would be a gift.

“Hey, Buck?” you asked once he pulled up to your place. 

“Yeah?”

You bit your lip. “I wanted to give you something.”

“Yeah?” he asked, his chest tightening in anticipation as you reached into your bag. 

You hesitated before you nodded. “Yeah.”

Your hand shook a little when you passed him a small slip of paper with the cash. He unfolded it, blinking hard to make sure he was reading it correctly. He turned it over, too. 

It was your handwriting. Your name. Your number. 

You gave him your phone number. 

His heart forgot how to beat before it thundered. He imagined this scenario for weeks, but he hadn’t prepared himself for the reality of it. He didn’t think the universe would be that kind to him.

“I just figured, this way you don’t have to wait until next week for my report on the movie. You could just text me and see what I think,” you explained, trying to play it off casually. “Or if you ever want to send me pictures of Alpine. Or you’re just… bored.”

His pulse roared in his ears. You wanted to hear from him. You gave him another opening while he kept mentally blocking the door with his foot. 

You trusted him enough to want a connection outside of the cab and the rules he internally created and enforced.

“But you don’t have to,” you added quickly, reaching for the door handle. “I can wait until next week to talk to you and-”

“Wait,” he begged, trying not to panic. The last thing he wanted was for you to think he didn’t want to reach out. “I’ll, um… give you mine, too.”

You met his gaze in the mirror. He wanted to memorize how you looked at this moment. Hopeful. Beautiful. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he whispered. 

He found a pen and a receipt, making sure his writing was legible as he jotted it down. Your smile when he handed it over soothed his nerves. The smooth thing to do would’ve been to put his phone number on the movie list when he gave it to you earlier. But this was better. 

This felt more right. 

“Thanks.” You tucked it away like it was something sacred. “I’ll text you.”

He nodded, his throat tight. “I’d like that.”

You stepped out into the cool air, glancing back at him. The tension was almost completely gone from your shoulders. The glow from the street lamps made your eyes sparkle. 

He couldn’t look away from you if he tried. 

“Good night, Buck.”

“Good night.”

Once you were inside, he glanced at your number again, reading it until the numbers ran together. He reached for the phone to message the guys and Becca before deciding against it. Sam would lose his mind. Steve would tell him not to overthink it. Becca would be somewhere in the middle. He didn’t need that tonight.

He wanted to hang onto this just a little longer and let it sink in that it was real. 

Besides, it was just an exchange of phone numbers. You didn’t ask him out. He didn’t ask you out. He was still being professional. 

But he did check his phone immediately when a new message popped up. 

“Happy fourteenth Thursday. Thanks again for the ride.”

Still counting like me. 

“Anytime. Get some rest. And let me know when you watch the first movie.”

A neutral message. Polite. Professional. 

“I’m still in trouble.”

And he grinned like an idiot because of it.

You messaged him on Friday night.  

He saved you under his contacts as MFP, my favorite passenger.

MFP: “Halfway through the movie.”

His fingers hovered over the screen. If he typed back too quickly, he’d look desperate. If he waited too long, he’d look aloof. 

A full minute was enough time. 

“And?”

He winced at himself. That was too short. Too blunt. 

MFP: “They switched part of what happened in the book. Trying to reserve my judgement until the end.”

A sense of awe filled him. You read the book. Of course, you did. That made him want you even more. 

But he couldn’t say that. 

“I didn’t like the switch at first either, but keep watching. Trust me.”

MFP: “I trust you.”

That made his breath catch. 

He scratched behind Alpine’s ear, smiling when she purred. “She’s watching it and texting me. That’s good, right?”

She meowed happily. 

He put the movie on, too, in the hopes that he wouldn’t keep checking his phone. 

You messaged him again an hour later. 

MFP: “My score: 8/10. Adventurous, heartwarming, and visually stunning. I see why it’s your favorite.”

He smiled, typing out, “Dinner and tell me more?”

He deleted it and started over.

“8/10? I’ll take it. What didn’t you like besides the book switch?”

MFP: “A one point deduction was for the book switch. Another deduction for the bad wig. I mean, a huge budget like that and they couldn’t give the lead some good hair? Tragic.”

Bucky chuckled. “You make a good point. It was pretty bad.”

MFP: “But movie wise? So far, so good for your taste.”

That was a win in his book.

You didn’t message him again until Saturday night. 

MFP: “Is brinner an acceptable choice on a Saturday night?”

He smiled immediately. 

“Brinner is an acceptable choice every night.”

MFP: “I knew you’d understand. I can eat while I watch the second movie on the list.”

“I bet you’ll give it a 7/10.”

MFP: “We’ll see if you’re right. Hope you're having a good weekend.”

He reread that statement twice. It felt measured. Careful. 

“You, too.”

He read the message again after sending it. 

Maybe it was another message that was too short. 

And it was too late to erase it. 

You sent him a photo of a white cat on Sunday. 

MFP: “Is this Alpine’s doppelganger?”

He chuckled. The image wasn’t too far off but Alpine was prettier. He was a bit biased when it came to his feline. 

“There’s no cat like Al.”

MFP: “I believe it. And you were right, but the way. 7/10. I deducted two points for the one terrible accent.”

He tilted his head and laughed again. He had almost forgotten about the bad accent. It was amazing how one actor or actress could throw off an entire scene. 

“Much deserved deduction. Al would approve.”

MFP: “I’m honored.”

He didn’t hear from you for the rest of the day. 

It was his turn to message you first. 

“Hope you have water and caffeine to get you through Monday.”

He stared at it after sending. Maybe that too personal. Maybe it wasn’t enough. 

MFP: “Do I have to have water?”

He laughed, picturing you scrunching up your face. 

“Need you to stay hydrated.”

Because he cared.

MFP: “But what if I try to live on stubbornness like you?”

You’re too good to live on stubbornness. 

“Still need water.”

MFP: “Yes, Sarge.”

Oh, that did something to him. 

MFP: “But only if you drink some water, too.”

“I will.”

He would for you. 

He didn’t hear from you on Tuesday. 

That was fine. You were busy. You had a life outside of him. And he didn’t want to bother you. 

But he checked his phone more than he should have. 

You messaged him first thing on Wednesday. 

MFP: “Is it Friday Eve yet?”

Relief hit him faster than he expected. 

“Almost. You surviving?”

There was a delay this time. Long enough for him to notice. 

MFP: “Barely, but I’m trying.”

He frowned a little. 

“Hang in there.”

He hesitated before adding another message. 

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

There was another pause. 

MFP: “Yeah. See you tomorrow.”

He stared at it longer than he meant to. 

Something about it felt different. Quieter. He could’ve been imagining it. 

He sent one more message before he could stop himself. 

“Can’t wait.” 

He meant it. 

Even if something told him tomorrow would feel different.  

Bucky waited at the curb as patiently as he could, checking his hair three times. Just like every week before, he looked forward to seeing you. But this felt different because the texts had been good overall. Almost effortless.

Almost. 

Tonight could be a turning point.

Bucky checked his phone again, even though he told himself he wouldn’t.

Sam: “You better not fumble this now that you got her number.”

Stevie: “Ignore him. Just be yourself.”

He huffed under his breath, locking the screen.

Like it’s that easy.

He turned his attention back to your building, his heart sinking the moment you stepped outside.

The usual sweep of your gaze didn’t happen since you were looking at your feet. You hardly seem to notice or care that your bag slipped from your shoulder. When you finally lifted your gaze, you looked worn out in a way he had never seen before. 

It was like someone took the light inside you and dialed it down.

Everyone had bad days. That was a normal part of life. But this was you. 

It didn’t sit right with him at all.

“Happy Friday Eve,” you stated with a dim smile, hugging the blanket against your chest like a pillow. Your fingers trembled just enough that he spotted it. 

“Friday Junior,” he said because that’s what he was supposed to say.

Same thing.

You didn’t say it.