𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙡𝙮 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙨

You'd imagined it to feel at least a little weird. It doesn't. If anything, this is the most comfortable you could've felt moments before your first time having sex. 

Yes, the final lesson. Probably gaslighting yourself by calling it a lesson, but then this is you. 

The most alarming thing you can say about the moment is that it feels completely, devastatingly ordinary. Like you've been here a hundred times. Which you kind of have, just not like this. 

Not with that small square of foil sitting on his nightstand being very loud about itself.

Bucky's talking. He's doing the responsible thing, the Bucky thing, making sure you have the information you need. And you're listening, because he's right about all of it. 

Condom, doesn't matter what the guy says, non-negotiable. 

Yes. You're nodding. 

But he keeps saying 'the guy'. He. Some future hypothetical person standing in this exact spot who you'll have to talk to. And something about that specific word keeps catching in your chest, snagging on a part of you that you have been carefully not naming for weeks.  

You'd really rather it stopped. You're not going to say anything about it. There's nothing to say. You came to him with a very specific ask and he said yes and that's the entire thing, start to finish.

You're not going to make it weird by having feelings about a pronoun.

You're not.

"Hey." His hand finds your jaw and tips your face up. Of fucking course he caught it. One moment you zone out, and get caught. His eyes move over your face with attention. You feel like being read by someone who's already a few pages ahead of you. "Talk to me."

"I'm fine."

"You just went somewhere."

"Bucky." He's starting to pull the thread until it unravels. And because you can already see it happening, you lean in and kiss him. 

Because it's easier than explaining. Because you've learned by now that this is the fastest way to shut down a conversation you're not ready for.

It's a deflection. You know it's a deflection. The difference between kissing him to avoid something and kissing him because you want to is fucking massive.

Only it doesn't go the way you planned. He kisses you back in a way that feels like being held still. Whatever you were going to outrun dissolves. Something blooms in its place that you don't have a category for and don't try to make one.

When he pulls back, he looks at you. Something in his expression that he keeps mostly to himself.  

Then he tips you back. Everything after that stops being about thinking.

His mouth is warm on your jaw, your collarbone, and lower. His tongue drags over your nipple and you make an embarrassing noise. He repeats it, to embarrass you further, you think. Only it's slower, sealing his mouth around it and sucking until it's aching and tight.

Equal attention is given to the other one. 

By the time he starts moving lower, you've got a fist in his hair and a completely unreasonable amount of feeling in your chest for someone in the middle of an educational exercise.

Educational. Right.

His mouth presses into the soft of your stomach, the skin below your navel, making you jerk. He smiles against you, which you feel more than see. You feel it everywhere. You feel everything. His mood through the room, his attention like a physical weight, his amusement before it reaches his face. You've been feeling him for longer than you want to admit.

Without any hurry, his hands are spreading your thighs and his breath is on your inner thigh and all of that thinking goes quiet. Everything else goes quiet. 

He looks up at you from between your legs, and the look on his face makes something clench in your chest that has nothing to do with what his mouth is about to do. It's want, is what it is, and it's not just the physical kind. You are not going to look at that right now because his face is between your thighs and this is not the moment.

Bucky drops his head and noses through your folds. When you make yet another embarrassing sound, he groans back.

Like you just gave him something good, and licks up through you in one long drag that has your hips lifting off the bed.

The noises he makes when he eats you out are something you are going to be thinking about for a very long time. Sounds of a man who is genuinely, thoroughly into what he's doing. Tongue working through your folds and circling your clit and sliding down to your entrance and back up. Drinking you.

You can hear how wet you are. A week ago that would have mortified you. Right now it barely registers because he makes that greedy, wanting sound every single time and presses closer, like the answer to you is more of you.

When your fist tightens in his hair he groans straight into your cunt. Vibration everywhere. Your thighs clench around his head before you can stop them.

His lips seal around your clit, sucking with with intent, and you actually cry out this time. He does it again and keeps doing it, tongue working against you while he holds the suction.

You realise your thighs are shaking on either side of his head, hips rolling into him. Holding them with his forearms, he keeps going. Like he made a decision and he's seeing it all the way through.

There's something devastating about his certainty. He always knows what he's doing. He always knows what you need before you've fully understood it yourself. That quality, which you have admired in him for years — not in this context though — is currently taking you apart.

Two fingers press inside you to curl. "Just stay with me."

You don't have much choice. The whole world has narrowed down to his mouth and his hand and the devastating combination of his tongue working your clit while his fingers find that specific spot inside you with the ease of someone who has been paying very close attention. You're gripping his hair with both hands now and making sounds that you'll think about with mild horror tomorrow. But right now tomorrow doesn't exist. 

Right now there is only this, him. The tension coils tighter and tighter, everything pulling to one point, and then everything snaps.

You come with his name somewhere in your throat. He works you through every single wave of it, slower and softer as you come down, drawing it out until you're shaking and your hands in his hair have gone slack. 

Pulling weakly at his hair to get him to stop doesn't seem to faze him, even then he presses a last kiss to your inner thigh before he moves.

You hear the soft tear of foil and press your face into the pillow for those few seconds because you need them. Your heart is doing something with a lot of force and nowhere particular to put it. 

The specific feeling of not knowing what to do with how much you feel is not a new one. By this point, you've been managing it for the past several weeks with varying degrees of success. But it's never been this loud before. It fills up the room. It fills up the pillow. The pillowcase smells like him and that is not helping.

He settles between your thighs, but looks at you. The reading-you look. "Still with me?"

"Uh-huh. Yeah."

His hand presses flat against your lower belly, all five fingers spread across your skin. He holds it there while he lines himself up. Like he wants to feel what's about to happen from the outside too. Like that's something he wants. 

You don't know what to do with that so you just feel it. You feel his palm pressing warm against you, the blunt pressure of him at your entrance, the gravity of the moment without any of it needing to be said out loud.

"Breathe," he says.

"I'm breathing."

He gives you a look. Look that says 'don't start shit now'. 

You breathe.

He pushes in. Slow. So careful. The stretch of him opening you up is significant and new. You make a sound that you've never made before in your life, this broken wrecked thing. He just stops. Palm still flat on your stomach. Holding you, letting you have a second.

"You okay?" 

The far end of your brain wants to laugh, a little. Because the answer is yes and also something much larger than yes, something that doesn't fit inside okay. The far end of your brain tells you that nobody would compare to him. Nobody would ask you this, nobody would be considerate of you like this. 

But the part that's currently in control of your body is not the one. It's the one that breathes, "don't stop. Just — don't stop."

He searches your face. Whatever he finds there must be sufficient because he pushes in, impossibly slow, the fullness building and building until he's all the way seated. The exhale that comes out of him sounds like something leaving him, something he'd been holding for longer than just tonight.

He drops his forehead to your shoulder. His weight settles against you. You feel his heart going fast against yours, faster than his breathing would suggest. 

His heart going fast. His heart going fast because of you.

There's something warm at the corner of your eyes at this information. Completely uninvited there are tears you didn't anticipate. You blink hard at the ceiling trying to sort yourself out. Before he notices.

But Bucky lifts his head and goes completely still.

"Did I hurt you?" His voice has changed. Softer, lower, stripped of the easy composure. 

"No."  

"Tell me the truth —"

"You didn't." Your hand goes to his face. Cups his jaw, and he stops talking. His eyes find yours and they search, careful and very blue and intent. "I promise. They're good tears. I'm okay."

For what, you can't say. You're not going to say. His palm has been on your stomach this entire time, and he stopped the moment he heard something in your voice. Right now, he's looking at you like your answer is the only thing in the room that matters. Like he would wait all night for it.

You've spent the last however many weeks telling yourself this is a practical arrangement. A smart, useful, sensible arrangement that you came up with yourself and that made complete sense at the time. Clean and contained. 

Somewhere in the middle of all of it you stopped believing that. You can't remember exactly when. The crying is just your body being honest in a way you haven't been letting yourself be.

You don't say any of that.

"Good tears," you manage. "Really."

He holds your gaze for a long moment. Long enough that you think he might push it, might ask the actual question underneath the one you answered. The real question — what are you crying about? 

If he asked it, you genuinely don't know what you'd say. Something true, probably. Something that couldn't be forgotten.

But he doesn't. He leans down to kiss you instead and starts to move.

Long, slow drag, his cock pulling back until just the head remains, then pushing home again just as slowly.

The fullness of it, the completeness of it. You don't think there's a word for it. His hand stays flat on your stomach and you feel him through it, feel the movement from the outside and the inside simultaneously, feel your own body accommodate him. It is an almost absurd amount of sensation. Not just physical. All of it, all at once, too much to sort through while it's happening.

He mouths at your throat, comes back to your lips. The kissing gets less careful the longer he moves, goes softer and messier and more real. You feel the difference between careful-Bucky and less-careful-Bucky. 

Less-careful-Bucky is catastrophic.

You have thought, a lot, over the past weeks, about what it means to be careful with someone. He's been careful with you from the start. Patient. Never rushing, never making you feel like you owed him anything, never letting the patience have a price. And you categorised that under 'he's a good person'. You categorised everything under 'he's a good person'. What you didn't think about  was why he is specifically like this with you.  

But he's less careful now, and that is also him being specifically like this with you, and you are going to need to deal with that later.

His hips find a rhythm. The drag of him hits somewhere deep and your cunt clenches in response and the sound you make into his mouth is not measured. His breath catches, a short, almost surprised sound. His grip on your hip tightens a fraction, like he didn't expect that. Like your body surprised him. The thought that you could surprise him, that there are things about you he's still discovering, makes you feel warm inside. 

"More." You didn't plan to say it out loud. It just comes out.

His eyes, which were focused on the place you two were joined, leave it reluctantly to look at your face. The longest he's ever taken to look at you. There's a question in them. 

"Harder. Please."

At that, his hand tightens on your hip and he gives you what you asked for.

Your breath punches out. Wherever your hands land, you grab. His shoulders, the plane of his back. His cock drives through your slick with this obscene, wet sound you've never heard before and the drag of it hits that deep spot with every stroke and your brain is nowhere useful, it's just gone. There's nothing here but sensation and Bucky and the specific sound of his breathing coming apart.

He's making sounds now. Barely contained. Hearing him like that is almost as good as the rest of it combined. Maybe better. You've been collecting his composure slipping in pieces for weeks and this is all of it at once. He's not controlling it anymore, he's just in it, with you.  

His thumb finds your clit without warning. "Look at me." 

You whimper into his ear. He makes a sound low in his chest like you just handed him something he badly needed.

His lips find your forehead. There's this soft, unbearably tender kiss that has absolutely no business existing alongside everything else he's doing to you. His voice goes rough. "Cum for me."

You cum for him. His eyes are almost black and he's looking at you like you're the most precious thing in the room. Thing is he's not doing anything to hide it. That is what that tips you. His thumb and his cock would be contributing factors, sure. But the way he's looking is more than anything physical ever could be.  

"Bucky—"

"I've got you." Against your mouth.

Your walls clench tight around him, as he buries himself and stills. You feel him throb inside you while you're still shaking. 

There's nothing else except the two of you, and this fragile thing that could end any moment.  

His weight on you is the heaviest you've ever carried. Nothing physical in this too. You think the weight of it comes from knowing this could be the last. The thought evaporates when his lips nip at your throat. 

You hold him. Both arms. You don't decide to do it, your arms just do it. Your hands press into his back and hold, like you could keep him here, like you could make this not end.

He lets you.

For a moment that goes on longer than a moment, everything stills. His breath is warm on your skin. You feel his heartbeat starting to slow under your hands. Something fragile exists in this room and you are aware of it.

You don't think about that. You think about his heartbeat instead. You think about the fact that his breathing is still a little uneven, and that you did that. That you are the reason his breathing is uneven. 

You have spent a significant amount of time over the past weeks thinking about how you were learning things. Processing experiences in the tidy way of someone taking notes. The date on the beach — lesson. The kissing — lesson. All of it, catalogued and labelled and filed away under something that felt safe.

And somewhere it stopped being safe and you kept going anyway.

You can feel him tense, not wanting to pull out. You want to clutch at him, tell him that you don't want that either. What you want is what you have. 

But you don't say that. 

He pulls out. 

It is so careful, tears threaten to spill out. You close your eyes, you will not let him see that. 

The absence of him is physical in a way you weren't prepared for, a hollow feeling that has nothing to do with the physical and everything to do with something you still haven't put a name to. It claws at your chest. It is like giving away something that's been yours all along. Takes everything in you to not reach out, not grab him, not push your face into his neck. 

You don't do that. He walks away. 

Faint sounds of him running the tap.  

He comes back with a cloth, warm from the tap, the right kind of warm. Like he stood there testing the temperature until it felt exactly right.

Sitting beside you, he's close enough that his thigh brushes yours. His other hand rests on your knee the whole time, thumb stroking slow little circles.

"How’re you feeling?" His voice is rough from everything you just did to each other. You mumble a little 'fine’ and he huffs a soft laugh. 

The cloth drags gently over your inner thighs first, wiping away the slick. Then he folds it and presses it right against you, the tender skin around your entrance, from the crease where your thigh meets everything that’s still throbbing and sensitive. 

What you're doing is something entirely different. You stare at the wall and blink and think about literally anything else.

You physically cannot bring yourself think about anything else.

You think about how nobody has ever done this. Not because the chance hasn't come up. Obviously the chance hasn't come up, that's entirely the point of the last few weeks.

But even imagining it, you wouldn't have imagined this. Someone sitting beside you after and just quietly, without being asked, taking care of you like it is simply what you do for a person. Like not doing it would be the strange thing.

There's not going to be another person like him. That's the thought you've been keeping in a box with the lid pressed firmly down. It's out now.  

He takes his time, folding the cloth again when it gets too wet, going back over every inch like this is the most important thing in the world right now.

You feel yourself twitch under the warmth of it and he murmurs, "Easy… I’ve got you," like he can read every tiny reaction your body makes.

"So I take care of you every time we do something, right?" He's still focused on wiping you clean. "That’s called aftercare."

"That’s — that’s a thing?"

He huffs a soft laugh that’s mostly breath, eyes still on what he’s doing between your legs. "Sorry. I forgot to tell you." The words come out so easy, like it never even occurred to him that this part needed explaining. Like he’s been doing it on instinct every single time and didn’t stop to think it was something he had to teach you. 

The realization settles warm and a little devastating in your chest. He didn’t see this as a lesson. It was just second nature to him. Taking care of you like this was never part of the curriculum. It was just Bucky.

He keeps talking, voice never rising above that low murmur. "After sex, after something this intense, your body goes through a lot. Sometimes you feel strange or sad or cold for no reason. Sometimes you cry, like you did earlier. It’s normal. Just your system coming down. Needs a little tending." He folds the cloth one last time and presses it gently over you, letting the warmth soak in. 

"So what do you do for it?"  

"Water first, always. Warmth. Touch. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Main thing is you don’t disappear on each other. You stay. The other person needs to know you’re still right here."

He sets the cloth aside but doesn’t move away. His hand stays on your knee, thumb still moving in those slow circles.

He's still there. He's stayed. He's taken care of you. 

He's taken care of you every time. Every single time, without fail, without exception. And you have done none of it in return. You never thought to ask what he needed. You never thought to stay and take care of him the way he's taken care of you.

"What do you need?" When he holds your gaze, you continue, "For aftercare. What do you actually need?"

The question surprised him, you can see that. He's been very thoroughly in the mode of what you need and coming at it from this direction might be unfamiliar ground. It requires him to be on the receiving end, he doesn't live there.

There's a small internal thing happening that you can see clearly and he probably thinks you can't. 

"I like to cuddle."  Without any of the careful composure he sometimes wraps around the things.

Not even a second is needed for you to process this, you open your arms.

He looks at them. One beat. One second of stillness that you read as surprise, or something softer than surprise, something that looks a lot like being moved. Then he comes down. Head to your chest, arm across your stomach. Your chin finds the top of his head.

The long breath he lets out when he settles. Something goes out with it. You feel it in his shoulders, the way they drop, the way his hand on your stomach stops holding anything and just rests.

Your hand moves up his back in slow passes. His hair is soft under your jaw. He's very warm, almost too warm. It makes you want to stay put indefinitely. His heartbeat under your palm is steady and slowing.

His hand finds yours after a while. Folds your fingers into his.  

The thing you've been struggling with is still there. It's been there longer than tonight. You've been careful about it, genuinely careful, because you're not an idiot and you knew what you were walking into and you were going to be sensible about the whole thing.

You were so sensible. Right up until you weren't.

Twenty years old and, in the notable absence of any prior romantic experience, you went and fell for the one person you specifically arranged things with in order to avoid exactly this. The irony is not lost on you. Steve would absolutely never let you hear the end of it. Steve cannot ever find out about any of this.

You press your lips to the top of his head. Barely a thing, just for a second, because the feeling needs somewhere to go and this is the least damaging option available.

He makes a soft sound and pulls you fractionally closer, arm tightening across your stomach. Reflex, probably. Something that happened without him deciding to do it.

There's always a moment with Bucky, when he's coming out of sleep, where his face does something unguarded. Where all the easy competence he walks around with during the day hasn't quite loaded yet. He's just a person, blinking at the room, figuring out where he is. 

You've seen it a handful of times now and every single time it does something to you that you'd rather it didn't.

He looks at you.  

"Morning."  

"Morning." His voice is rough with sleep, different from his regular voice. Softer. You've thought about this voice, oftentimes than you'd like to admit. "How'd you sleep?"

"Fine. Good." Both true. You slept better than you have in weeks, actually, which is information you're keeping to yourself. "You?"

"Yeah." He scrubs a hand over his face. "How're you feelin'? You sore?"

He's been awake for approximately twelve seconds and that's what surfaces first.

He thought of that before anything else. Before his brain had fully loaded. You didn't think of it first. Your first thought this morning was not about whether your body was still feeling last night. You're not sure what your first thought was. Something less generous to yourself. But his was this.

"A little bit," you say.

The corners of his mouth pull down. The softest frown, private, the kind you only see on someone who doesn't know they're being watched. "I'm sorry, baby." Quiet. The soft version of his voice, the one he doesn't use for everything, just for when he means it.

"Bucky, it's fine—"

"I am sorry."

"You were—" careful, you want to say. You were so careful, and patient, and you went so slow that it almost felt like being taken apart by someone who actually gave a damn whether you were still in one piece after. You also want to say his hand on your stomach was the best and worst thing that has ever happened to you simultaneously. But you say, "you didn't do anything wrong. First time is just — first time. It's a body thing."

"I know what it is."

"Then stop doing that with your face."

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're —"

He looks at you sideways. The face is still happening. You reach over and push at his jaw with two fingers, gently, like you're trying to manually rearrange the expression. Catching your hand, he presses his lips to it. For one second, just held there against your palm. Nothing about it is incidental.

"I'm fine. Really." You might be fine from the soreness, but you sure aren't fine from that gentle press of lips. 

His thumb moves over your knuckles, and you let him. You feel that thing in your chest that you decided not to think about until you got home, doing its thing anyway without your permission.

"Guess I'll have to deal with Jenna's scrunchie situation again." You don't entirely mean to say it. It just sort of comes out, like your mouth was filling the silence while your brain was doing something else. You hear it the second it drops and you hear exactly how it sounds and you cannot take it back.

"What do you mean?" His body goes still beside you.

Here you are. Standing at the edge of something, the words already out there, sitting between you both. You can see exactly where they came from. Probably from the feeling you've been carrying since the beach, maybe earlier, maybe much earlier, looking for any door that might lead somewhere without you having to walk through it directly. Poorly disguised as a casual observation. Even you are not entirely sure what you were hoping for when you said it. Something. Anything. Some signal.

You're not brave enough to say it plainly. But you're past pretending it wasn't anything.

"I mean— I mean you've kind of — taught me everything." A small, careful shrug. Casual. Like it's just an observation, like your heart isn't doing something extremely loud. "So."

You look at him.

He looks back at you and for a second — one second — there's something in his face that you can't read. Something that moves across it fast, like a thing he almost lets out but doesn't. And then he gets it under control, or puts something back in place, or whatever the thing is that he does when he decides to be Bucky-who-is-very-calm about something.

He looks unaffected.

It stings so badly you feel it in your stomach.

"So I should be able to, like. Date. Go out there. All of that." Your voice comes out completely fine, which is impressive because nothing inside you is fine. "That's the whole point, right? We're obviously done with lessons."

Something about saying it out loud — lessons — makes you feel sick. Like the word is a trap you built yourself and walked into with your eyes open. You handed him the word and he used it and now you have to live inside it.

He opens his mouth. You wait. You are waiting very hard, in a way that probably shows, in a way that you'll be embarrassed about later, but you wait. You wait with everything you have.

"Yeah." One syllable. Like it's the most uncomplicated answer in the world.

All the air leaves your body at once.

You stare at the wall where there's a photo of him and Steve. You look at it very carefully because it's better than looking at him.

Yeah.

Yeah, obviously, yes. That was the point, that was always the point. You came to him with a specific ask and he fulfilled it. Now you've asked if you're done and he said yeah. That's the appropriate answer, that's the correct answer, that's the answer you should've been hoping for. You knew this. You went in knowing this.

Your heart doesn't agree. Your heart is being extremely unhelpful.

The warmth of his skin where it's touching yours is suddenly too much. Last night you would have stayed here indefinitely. Now the room is too small and he's too close and that word is sitting in the air between you and you need to leave. You need to be somewhere that isn't next to him while you figure out what to do with the fact that you've been an idiot.

You sit up. The sheet catches and drops. Half a second where you're just there, bare in the grey light, all of you in front of him.

You grab for the sheet. Too late, but you grab it and pull it up to your chest with a speed that you'll be mortified about later, like something happened in between last night and this morning, like there's a rule about daylight that nobody told you but you feel it anyway. He saw everything last night, has seen everything multiple times over. He was inside you less than six hours ago. Yet you still you grab for it like it matters. Your body making its own decisions about vulnerability without consulting you.

He doesn't look at you the way you expected. He looks at your face — once, just your face — and then looks away. His jaw does something. Like he started to say a thing and decided against it. Like he weighed it and found the moment wasn't right or the words weren't ready or some other reason he is keeping to himself, because that's Bucky, he holds things until he's sure about them. You don't see what his face does after that because you're looking at your hands.

Bucky pushes back the covers on his side and swings his legs off the bed. You realise after a second that he's giving you space. Going to the bathroom so you can get dressed without feeling looked at. 

A small courtesy, a Bucky courtesy, and it makes something in your chest ache so badly you want to laugh at yourself.

You hear the bathroom door.

You move fast. Faster than you probably look cool doing, but he's not watching so it doesn't matter. Underwear, jeans, your shirt from yesterday, shoes. Phone off the nightstand. One look around the room for anything else that's yours. 

There's a moment where you think about waiting for him to come back out, where you think about the conversation you could maybe have, where you think about the look on his face before he got it under control and what might have been on the other side of it.

But you walk away. 

Out the front door and down the steps and out onto the path. The morning is bright and completely indifferent to the fact that you just made a very cowardly exit from the apartment of a man who is not your boyfriend and never will be. 

The walk back to your dorm takes ten minutes.

It feels both longer and shorter than that. You're fine.

You're going to be fine.

This was always going to be the ending of this particular thing, and you knew that, and you were always going to have to walk home the next morning and feel however you feel about it, and now you're doing that, so. Progress.

When you get back, Jenna is asleep and the room is dim. You sit down on the edge of your bed and look at the photo on your nightstand. It's the same one on his wall. Steve and Bucky.

Two days.

Two days of checking your phone and then putting it face down and then picking it up again, like something might have changed in the eleven seconds since you last looked. 

Two days of Jenna asking if you're okay and you saying 'yeah just tired', which is technically true, you are tired, you're tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. 

You sit at your desk and open your book and read the same paragraph four times without absorbing a single word of it. You have no idea what it says. You close the book. You open it again. You close it again. You put it on the floor so it stops looking at you.

Jenna makes you a cup of tea on the morning of day one. You say thanks, and she sets it on your nightstand, and it goes cold while you stare at the ceiling. She doesn't push it. She's perceptive in that quiet specific way and she knows when to leave someone alone.

On the afternoon of day one you get up and go for a walk because lying still is making you feel sorry for yourself in a way that's becoming circular. The campus is busy in the end-of-classes way. People in groups, the noise of uncomplicated days. You walk until your feet hurt and then you go back and lie down again.

On the morning of day two you pick up your phone, look at his name in your contacts, and put it face down. You are not going to be that person. You went in knowing how this ended, you made a decision, and you are going to get through the next few days without doing anything embarrassing.

The plan does not account for the fact that you still have his hoodie in your bag because you left in such a hurry that you forgot to give it back. You have put it at the bottom of the bag. You are not thinking about it.

But this situation in itself is embarrassing. And there's nobody you can tell about it. Which makes it worse. Because at least if you could tell someone you could be embarrassed out loud and get it over with. 

Instead you're just sitting here being embarrassed at yourself in private, which is somehow the worst version.

The thing is, it was always going to end like this. You wanted lessons, he provided lessons, lessons concluded. That's not a tragedy, that's just a transaction completing.

So the part you can't figure out is at what point your brain decided to stop treating it like that.

Because something went wrong in the gap between what you told yourself this was and what it actually became.

And you can trace it. If you're honest with yourself — which you haven't been — you can trace it all the way back to a parking lot and a bunch of hydrangeas in one hand.

It was a lesson, you reminded yourself at the time. You just didn't file it properly. You put it somewhere mislabeled and kept going.

That's your own fault. That's entirely your fault and you know it. You can't even be angry at him about it because he didn't do anything. 

He did exactly what you asked. He was kind and patient and thorough and he told you the truth at every step. 

Never once — not once — did he say anything that suggested this was anything other than what you agreed it was. 

If anything, he was more careful than he had to be. He gave you just pleasure an innumerable number of times before he let things go any further. He was careful with you. He was so careful with you.

And the fact that he was careful with you is part of the problem. Because it made it very easy to forget that being careful with someone isn't the same as wanting them.

There will not be another person like him.

That's the real damage. You went in with no experience and he's what you got, and now you have a reference point. Now you know what it feels like to be with someone who puts you first without making a thing of it. Who would rather wait another week than rush you through something. Who puts his mouth on you for your benefit, not as a warm-up for something else.

You remember every single time. The tent in his sweats, the controlled breathing, the way he always made sure you finished before he even came close to thinking about himself. You filed it away under 'body being body', under 'he's experienced he can handle it'. 

You did not let yourself think about what it meant that he lay next to you hard enough to be uncomfortable and not doing a single thing about it except holding you.

Body being body needs relief. That's just biology. He could have asked. You would have. Obviously, eagerly. Hell, he didn't even have to ask. 

But he didn't. 

He never once made you feel like you owed him anything, like the patience had a price, like the patience was even something he was exercising rather than just something he had.

There's not going to be another person like that.

The sad little story goes like this : She wanted experience, she got it, and somehow managed to ruin herself for everyone who comes after.  

Congratulations. Growth.

You walked in wanting a lesson and fell in love with the teacher. Which is the most clichéd possible version of this story, by the way. You'd hate yourself for it if you had the energy.

Tired of sitting still, you decide you'll go see Steve. 

He's been texting all month asking if you've settled in and you've been saying 'yeah, great, so busy', which is the oldest deflection in your sibling playbook. He buys it every single time because Steve is earnest and takes people at their word. You could use some of that energy right now.  

The bus gives you an hour. An hour of towns sliding past the window and music you're not actually listening to. Your brain is doing a thing, where it is turning the whole situation over and over like it's looking for an angle that makes you look less stupid. 

It hasn't found one yet. You're starting to think it's not going to.

Here's the thing you've been trying not to look at.

You've always liked Bucky.

The whole tape, you're running it back now. He's there earlier than you want him to be. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, Steve bringing him over and you finding reasons to be downstairs. 

Bucky was older and loud and took up all the air in whatever room he walked into. You told yourself you found that annoying. You did find it annoying. You were also ready in ten minutes every time Steve said he was coming over. Which is not the behaviour of someone who finds a person annoying.

You were seventeen when you saw him talking to a cheerleader at one of Steve's games. Long legs, laughing at something he said. And you felt  something. Something you classified as 'general bad mood' and immediately forgot about. You were in a bad mood that whole week. Funny, that.

Because here's the thing about Steve always bringing Bucky. Here's the thing about all those years of hanging around whenever he came over. You told yourself you were just being sociable. You liked having people around. You liked Bucky's stupid arguments about films and the way he laughed when something caught him off guard. You liked him the way you like someone who's been around since you were small enough that they're just part of the furniture.

Except the furniture doesn't make you feel like hell when it talks to a cheerleader. The furniture doesn't talk to a cheerleader. 

You put your headphones in and stare at the window.

The boys you didn't date in high school. You've spent years blaming Steve for that. Watchful eyes and warning looks. And Steve was a factor, you're not letting him off the hook entirely. But you're on this bus right now and you're turning the question over properly for the first time and you're wondering : Was it Steve?

Or was it that none of them were Bucky?

Was it that you'd had Bucky as some kind of baseline since you were fourteen, all that warmth and sharpness and the way he actually listened and remembered things. And every boy your age just felt thin by comparison? Was it that you set an impossible standard completely by accident and then spent years confused about why nobody was clearing it?

Your stomach turns over.

And then, because your brain apparently hasn't finished being cruel to you today, it offers up the next one.

College. New place. Clean slate. Steve an hour away. Finally, finally some room to breathe, finally a chance to figure all of this out without his shadow in the frame.

And you came here and knocked on Bucky's door inside of a week.

You went to Bucky.

You told yourself you wanted experience. Told yourself you were being practical, that you picked him because you trusted him and he was close and you'd known him forever and it just made sense. 

All of that was true. But you could've done any number of things. Downloaded an app. Gone to a party. Done literally anything that normal people do when they want to figure this out.

You went to Bucky.

You wanted Bucky.

If you're being fully and completely honest with yourself, you've always wanted Bucky. And your brain  built a whole reasonable-sounding explanation for why going to him was the logical choice. You'd bought it completely, and walked into his apartment and asked him to teach you to kiss and told yourself it was educational.

You are so stupid.

You are so fucking stupid.

The bus pulls into the stop and you get off. You've made a decision on the way here. You're going to tell Steve. Not everything. Obviously not everything, there are details that you should be taking to your grave. But something. 

You've been carrying this alone for two days and it's pressing against your ribs. You need to put it down somewhere, even briefly, even partially. And Steve is your brother and he loves you and he'll know what to say or he won't and you'll feel better anyway because he's Steve.

Third floor. You know this building. Your feet know this building.

You knock.

The door opens.

Bucky's standing there with a mug in his hand and his hair doing the morning thing and a grey shirt that's seen better decades. And he looks at you.

The floor drops out from under your stomach so fast you actually put one hand on the doorframe.

The universe has a genuinely terrible sense of humour.

Steve's voice carries through the apartment before Bucky's even finished stepping back from the door.

"Is that — oh my god!"

You hear the genuine delight in it when he calls your name.

Bucky is not looking at you, and that's the first thing you notice. Not your brother.  

"This is literally the best day of my life," Steve says, from the couch, with the energy of a golden retriever who just saw two of his favourite people walk side by side. 

He looks between you and Bucky and back, radiating a happiness that is completely disproportionate to what is actually happening in this room.

"Hi, Steve." You sit in the armchair. The armchair is good. The armchair is far away from the kitchen — where Bucky currently is — and gives you a clear sightline to the door if you need to leave quickly.

"You look terrible." Steve tells you, which is his version of concern.

"Thanks."

"No, I mean — are you sleeping?"

"I'm fine."

"You look—"

"Steve." You give him the look. He subsides. He's known you long enough to know when the look means drop it. To his credit he usually does.

Bucky comes back from the kitchen with a glass of water and sits at the other end of the couch from Steve. 

He hasn't looked at you once. He looks at Steve, at the coffee table, at some middle distance that isn't your face. You, on the other hand, look at your own hands. And Steve looks between the two of you with an expression you can't quite read from this angle and choose not to try.

There are two people in this room actively not acknowledging something, and the third is Steve. Who is either genuinely oblivious or performing oblivion with professional precision. With Steve it's sometimes impossible to tell which.

He talks. He tells you about the internship, something about a project that went sideways and then un-sideways. You listen and nod and make the right noises and in your peripheral vision Bucky sits at the other end of the couch with his elbows on his knees and his eyes somewhere that isn't you.

This is fine. This is completely fine. You've been in rooms with Bucky before. You've sat on this couch with him three feet away, you've watched bad television next to him for hours. You know how to be in a room with Bucky Barnes.

You just haven't done it … since you-know-what.

Steve somehow doesn't notice what's happening here. 

You've always marvelled a little at Steve's skill for that. For being so thoroughly good that he just assumes everyone around him is also okay, that the world is basically fine, that people he loves are probably not sitting six feet apart doing an extremely committed impression of strangers.

"Hey," he says suddenly. The way he sounds when something's occurred to him. "Buck, who's this girl Sam keeps going on about?"

Your hand goes very still.

Bucky glances up. "What girl?"

"The one you've been hanging out with? Sam said something about it."

"Sam needs to mind his own business."

"So there is a girl."

"There's not a—" Bucky stops himself. "It's nothing. It was nothing."

"Sam said you were sneaking around."

"I was not sneaking around."

"Said you're being weird, Buck."

"I'm not weird, I'm just—" His jaw works to spit out the rest of the sentence. "It's nothing. Drop it, Steve."

Steve, with the particular stubbornness of a man who has known Bucky Barnes his entire life and has never once successfully dropped anything, looks at him for a long moment and then does something shocking. He drops it.

He turns to you instead. "What about you? How's things? You seem off."

Your brain is doing several things at once right now. It is attempting to formulate an answer for Steve. It is also replaying the last thirty seconds on a loop — was nothing, it was nothing — and trying to figure out what nothing means and who nothing was. And whether the timing of it lines up with anything. 

Nothing. He said it in the voice of someone saying something they don't mean, the voice of someone getting the word out because it needs to be said and not because it's true. You know his voice. You have been listening to his voice since you were eight years old and there are versions of it you know as well as your own. That was not his honest voice. That was his covering voice. You know the difference.

"I'm fine," you come back from your head to tell Steve.

"You keep saying that."

"Because I am."

Steve gives you the look that is his version of your look, which you've been on the receiving end of since you were approximately six years old and it has never once stopped working. "Something happen?"

"No."

"You sure?"

"Steve, I'm—"

"She said she's fine," Bucky says, from the other end of the couch. Like he's doing you a favour, giving you the exit.

You look at him.

He looks at you.

It's the first time he's looked at you properly since you walked in, and it lasts about two seconds, and then he looks away again. 

But two seconds is enough. Two seconds is more than enough because you've gotten very good at reading Bucky's face over the past few months and what you just saw on it was in fact, not nothing.  

Unaware, yet again, Steve starts talking. "Hey, you know Jenna's boyfriend? The one from your dorm?"

Something about the subject change is so random that you answer without thinking. "Yeah, the one who kicks me out of my own room every other night."

"Right." Steve nods. "He works part-time in my building, actually."

"How does he even have time for work anyway?" Bucky quips, and you want to throw a throw pillow at him. 

You don't. 

"Saw him in the lift the other day," oblivious-Steve continues. 

"Small world."

"Yeah." He pauses. "He was saying he hasn't been able to visit Jenna for two days because her roommate's been in the room the whole time. Moping, apparently."

Your mouth goes dry.

"Wouldn't leave. Just lying there all day." Another pause. Steve is looking at absolutely nothing in particular, which is how you know he's being very intentional. "Funny, right?"

Your jaw is doing something. You're fairly sure Bucky has gone completely still on the other end of the couch.

"Steve—"

"I know," Steve says.

Two words. The calm of someone who has been sitting on this information for a while and chose this exact moment to put it on the table.

The silence that follows is genuinely one of the more extraordinary silences you've ever sat in.

"How long?" Bucky asks because you currently cannot bring yourself to speak.

"Buck, I've known you since we were eight." Steve looks at him with a fondness that is also, honestly, a little smug. "You think I couldn't tell?" He looks at you. "And you're my sister. You really thought I don't notice?"

You think about every time you found a reason to be downstairs when Bucky came over and told yourself it was nothing. You think about Steve, who notices everything and says nothing, who has apparently been sitting on all of this like a very patient man waiting for everyone else to catch up.

"You didn't say anything," you say.

"Wasn't mine to say." He stands up. The smug falls away and what's underneath is just Steve, your brother, Bucky's best friend, who loves you both and has clearly been quietly hoping about this for longer than you knew. He puts one hand on your shoulder and one on Bucky's.  

"Talk it out."

He picks up his jacket, his keys, and he leaves.

The door clicks shut.

You and Bucky sit in the wreckage of that. Both still sitting in the positions you were in when he stood up, like neither of you quite knows how to be the one who moves first. 

You become aware, slowly, that you are gripping the arm of the armchair.

Bucky shifts on the couch. "You know, you should be out there dating." He says it like he's picking up something he set down earlier, like it's a thought he's been turning over. "Isn't that what all of this was for? Why are you moping around your dorm room?"

And there it is. The tone. The slightly pointed tone that you know as well as you know your own name, that you've been on the receiving end of since you were old enough to give it back.

You take the bait. You always take the bait with him, that's the whole problem, that's been the whole problem since you were fourteen years old and you didn't know it. Now you know, and do it anyway. "Go back to your girl."

"What?"

"Go back to your girl." You parrot. 

Confusion paints his face. "What girl?"

"The one Sam told Steve about. The one you've been seeing this whole time —" You want to complete the sentence by saying 'behind my back', but even you know that you don't have any rights for that. 

"Jesus." He drags a hand through his hair like he can't quite believe what's coming out of your mouth. "Can you not?"

Fury comes from somewhere specific, somewhere you'd been keeping a lid on, and it tastes a lot like hurt. "Seriously, Buck. Go back to your girl."

"Why —" He looks pained as he runs his hand through his hair again. "Why can't you just fucking understand?" 

"Understand what?" 

"You're the girl." His voice isn't by any means muffled, but it still reaches your ear warbled. 

"What?" 

"You." He looks right in your eyes for the first time since you walked in. "Are. The. Girl."

The thing that happens to your chest is immediate and enormous and you don't do anything with it yet because you're still processing the words. You. Are. The girl. The one Sam mentioned. The one Bucky's been sneaking around with. The one who he'd said was nothing, but there was something. 

"I don't—" You shake your head. "What does that even mean? We were just — I just asked you for help. I asked you to teach me —"

"Can we stop?" He says that like someone who has run out of patience for the performance of it. "Can we just stop doing this?"

"Doing what, I'm not doing anything —"

"You're doing everything! You did everything! You ran out on me." His elbows come to his knees as he leans forward, pinning you under his gaze. "I came out of the bathroom and you were gone. Your shoes were gone, your phone was gone, you were just… gone. Why?"

"Because you said I was ready to date." You cross your arms in front of you. "Why do you care if I left?"

"Because it was the morning after the best night of my life." He says it like he'd rather not be saying it but he's saying it anyway. "I was already sitting there feeling like shit because you were sore, and then you came out with —" his voice shifts, doing something that is a deeply unflattering impression of you, "I guess I have to go deal with Jenna's scrunchie situation again."

"Don't do the voice."

"You said it like you couldn't wait to leave."

"I said it because I wanted you to say something!" The words come out louder than you meant. You correct yourself, lower your voice. "I was testing the waters. I wanted to see if you'd—"

"And then," he keeps going like he needs to finish, "you asked me point blank if you were ready to go out there and date other people." He looks at you like he still can't quite believe it. "What was I supposed to say?"

"Something other than 'yeah' maybe?" The yeah is intentionally higher in octave, mocking him. 

He doesn't take the bait like you. "What would you have had me say?"

"I don't know, something! Anything! You could have — I don't know, pushed back, said wait, said—"

"You covered yourself."

That stops you. "What?"

"The sheet." His voice is quieter now, different. "You sat up and you grabbed the sheet and you pulled it over yourself. And I've — we'd just — I've seen you. All of you. Every single part of you, and you looked at me like you needed to hide, and I thought—" He stops to catch his breath, voice dropping lower. "I thought you'd already decided something and I wasn't going to be the guy who makes that weird."

The memory of it is very specific. The grey morning light. The sheet slipping. The way you grabbed it like you didn't want to be seen. 

"I covered myself because you said it was fine for me to date." You bring up technicalities even though he probably knew it himself. Like talking about the timeline of it all could shift the blame. "Not before. You asked me to date other people and I felt about this big— " you bring your pointer finger and your thumb together to specify that you felt so small. The gesture softens something in his eyes, in him.  "— and I didn't know what to do with my hands so I grabbed the sheet. That's the only reason."

When he opens his mouth, you continue. "You looked completely fine about it. You were just… fine. Like it was the obvious answer. And I thought 'okay, that's it then, that's where we actually are', I left because I didn't know what else to do."

"I looked fine because you asked me like it was a real question." His voice has lost the edge now, the flatness of it gone. "Like you'd made up your mind already and were checking in. What was I supposed to do — tell you 'no, don't go date anyone, stay here'?"

"Yes! That's what I wanted you to say."

He looks at you like he cannot quite believe the audacity.

"I wanted you to say no." You're past the point of dressing it up. "I wanted you to say you didn't want me going out there with someone else. I wanted you to ask me to stay instead. I didn't know how to just ask for that so I asked a question I thought might get there eventually, and it didn't."

Bucky is quiet for a moment, where he sighs like he has to deal with this shit. "That is the most complicated route you could have possibly taken."

"I —"

"You could have just said—"

"Could I have?" You look at him straight. "You had the same information I had. You knew how the morning was going. You could've said something before I even asked the question. You could've said it the night before. You could've said it any of the other times we were sitting in your apartment" You watch him clench and unclench his jaw. "But you didn't. So we're the same amount of stupid and I think we have to just accept that."

"You know, you really wanted them to be lessons."

"Bucky."

"The beach —"

"James Buchanan Barnes."

"Okay," he says. "Okay, fine. We're the same amount of stupid."

"Thank you."

"It's not a compliment."

"Right."

He leans back against the couch. You sit in the armchair. The gap between you is exactly the same as it's been all afternoon and somehow it feels different now.

"Why were you moping?" This time it's not pointed, it's just a question.

You look at your hands. At the armchair arm. At the bookshelf full of Steve's books on the wall behind Bucky's head.

"Because I've always liked you." It's easier when you're not looking at him. "I think I've liked you for a long time. Way longer than I realised." You inhale and exhale once. "I always wanted to hang out with Steve because you were there. I think that's been true for years and I just didn't look at it directly." You do look at him then, because it feels cowardly not to. "And I think when I came to you about all of this — about the lessons, about teaching me — I think I came to you because it was you. Not because I needed teaching. I did need, that's besides the point, but I could've done a million other things, but I came to you — I think I just wanted an excuse to —" You stop because that was long and you need a breath. You need a breath because what you're about to say might be the truest thing you've ever said. "It was always you, Buck. I think it's been you for a long time." And, you try to deflect with sarcasm, true to self. "Possibly since you used to steal my Halloween candy when I was eight. I'd like to have some words about that, actually, but probably not right now."

Bucky doesn't say anything. But he does something you weren't expecting, which is that he gets up from the couch, crosses the space between you, and drops down to kneel beside the armchair so he's at your level. He looks at you from there, close enough that you can see the exact colour of his eyes in Steve's place. "It's always been you too."  

Something in your chest cracks open in the quietest possible way. "Wha —"

"At first —" He almost smiles, but it's too soft to be a smile, it's something adjacent to one. "At first it was just Steve's little sister that I couldn't get rid of. You were everywhere he was and you had opinions about everything and you'd argue with me about anything and I thought, fine, annoying." His eyes stay on yours. "And then I went to college and you weren't around and I —" A moment he takes to gather his words, but his eyes don't leave yours. "I missed you. One second, you were there, and then you weren't. And, God I missed you. I tried not to, I tried telling myself you were just Steve's little sister. But you were never just that."

"Bucky—"

"When Steve told me you were coming here," he continues, "I took the internship at the same campus. Originally, I was supposed to go with Steve. But I took this because you were coming."

You stare at him, thinking you like his voice. You've always liked his voice. Now you like it exceptionally more, because his voice is saying things about you. Nice things. 

"My allotted dorm was on the other side of town," he confesses. "Did you know that? I moved off campus because your dorm was ten minutes from the apartment and I wanted —" He shakes his head slightly, like he's still getting used to saying this out loud. "I wanted to be close."

"Your apartment is ten minutes from my dorm," you repeat.

"Yeah."

"You moved there on purpose."

"Yeah."

"You absolute —" You don't finish that sentence because you don't have a word big enough. "I think I chose this college because of you," you say instead. "I told myself it was because Steve studied here. Because the programme was good. Because I knew the area, because it made sense logistically. Those are all true. But —"

"What?" His turn to look surprised. 

"I knew you would be here, and I wanted to be close to you."

He looks genuinely thrown. Like he didn't expect that particular surprise from this conversation, like he'd braced for other things and not this.

You look at each other from about eighteen inches apart. The whole weight of the last however many years sits in the room with you. 

And it's a lot, and it should probably feel heavier than it does, except that it just feels true. Like something that was always going to lead here, just took the scenic route.

"We've been so stupid," you break the minute long silence.

"Yeah."

"Years of stupid."

"To be fair—"

"No, there's no fair. It's been years, Bucky."

"Okay, yeah." The almost-smile again. "Years."

The afternoon light comes in through Steve's window and does something to the angles of his face. You've been cataloguing those angles without meaning to for six years now and you're done pretending you haven't.

You lean forward. You're not asking if you're doing it right this time. Because it's not him teaching you. 

This is your decision, your need to be close to him, to close the distance and meet his mouth with yours. He makes a sound and kisses you back immediately, his hand coming up to your jaw. 

It is different from every other time, it is completely different, because this time you both know what it is.

His thumb traces your cheekbone and he kisses you just as slowly. "Go on a date with me," he says against your mouth, your lips moving with his.

"No." You reply against his mouth too. 

Bucky pulls back. "Sorry?"

"No."

"What do you —" He looks at you, and you can see him trying to figure out if you're joking. The look on his face is so genuinely confused that you'd feel bad about it if it weren't also the funniest thing you've seen in two days. "I just — we just —"

"You can take me on a date… after you ask me to be your girlfriend."

The confusion rearranges itself. The corner of his mouth starts to commit to something, his hand still at your jaw. His eyes are doing several things at once.  His face is fond and exasperated and something much softer underneath both of those things. "Will you be my girl?"

"Yes."  

"Thank god." He kisses you again, speaks against your mouth like it's the only way he knows now. "I moved across the entire city."

"I know. It's very romantic."

"You should have seen my commute."

"I'll make it up to you," you reply. He laughs against your mouth, the one that gets all the way to his eyes, the one you've been storing up without knowing you were storing it.

Time becomes a foreign concept now. For you don't know if it's been minutes or hours. 

From somewhere down the hallway comes the unmistakable sound of a door, and then Steve's voice, entirely too casual. "So should I come back later or —"

Bucky doesn't stop kissing you. "Later, Steve," you say into his mouth.

"So how did the two of you start anyway?"

Steve's looking at you both with this expression that's mostly fond but also slightly curious. Like he has most of the pieces but still not the whole picture.

You're sitting on his couch, Bucky's at the other end, and there's approximately three feet of space between you that feels like it's doing a lot of work right now.

"I asked Bucky if he could teach me dating."

The words come out before you've really thought about whether this is information Steve needs. But here you are, might as well commit.

Steve looks at you like you’ve grown two heads. "Teach you dating?"

"Yeah, Steve." Your tone is pointed. "For people who are so inexperienced because of an older brother, there should be lessons for these kinds of things."

In your peripheral vision, Bucky has gone very still. When you glance at him, he's looking at the coffee table like it's the most fascinating thing in the room. There's a flush creeping up the back of his neck.

Steve's eyebrows are doing something. "No, I mean — why did you ask him to teach you?"

"Because he's Bucky."

"Precisely why you shouldn't have asked him."

Bucky shifts, opens and closes his mouth before he decides to speak. "I think what he's trying to—"

“Why?” You ask, cutting him off exactly the same moment Steve says, "he's never dated anyone."

What?

Your head whips around to look at Bucky. He's still staring at the coffee table, but now the flush has spread to his ears.

"Sorry, what?"

Steve's looking between the two of you like he's watching something unfold that he finds deeply amusing. "Yeah, he was too busy pining over you to actually date anyone in college."

A deadly silence follows.

Bucky looks up at Steve with something between betrayal and resignation. "I'm sorry, how did you know I was pining over her?"

"Guys. You really aren't that slick. Both of you.” He points at Bucky, “especially you.”

You're still processing. The whole time — every single lesson — you'd assumed he was this experienced person showing you the ropes because he'd done all of this a hundred times before. And he just... hadn't?

You turn to Bucky. "So you've never dated anyone?"

He finally looks at you. His eyes are doing that thing where they're very earnest and also slightly embarrassed. "Yeah..."

"What about the other stuff?"

Steve's up and out of his chair in half a second. "Aight, I'm out. I don't need to hear this."

"I've kissed a girl once." Bucky’s voice has gone quieter.

The words register slowly at first. Then all at once. "So that's why you came in your pants!"

Steve, who's almost made it to safety, stops dead in his tracks. His shoulders go rigid. "You did what—" Then he shakes his head violently, like he's trying to physically dislodge the information from the crevices of his brain. "You know what, I don't wanna know."

He disappears into the kitchen. You hear the tap running far too loud. The sound of a mug being set down too hard.

You're still looking at Bucky. He's looking back at you with this sheepish expression, but also something else.

"What about—" You lower your voice even though Steve's clearly trying to give you distance. "What about when you... with your hand. You definitely said you'd done it before."

His mouth twitches into a half formed smile. "My hand's met my dick many times."

"Bucky!"

"What? It has."

"No, you were — you said that about blowjobs. Said you’d done it before."

Bucky exhales loudly like a child caught in a lie. You don’t know how exact that analogy is going to be, to the point where it’s not an analogy anymore, just the truth.

He closes his eyes for a second before meeting yours again. "I lied."

There's something blooming in your chest that you're trying to figure out what is and falling short. Something warm and a little bit ridiculous.

"You what?"

"I lied."

"Why?"

"Because — " he takes a deep breath like that could help and continues, "you’d asked me to help you and I just — I just couldn’t say no. You came to me. And I didn't want you to know you were my first everything too. Seemed like a lot of pressure to put on the whole thing. You were already nervous enough without knowing I was figuring it out same time as you."

"But you—" You gesture vaguely at him, at the space between you. "You were so good at it. Like you knew exactly what you were doing."

"I watched porn."

A laugh startles out of you. "You watched porn?"

"I watched an unhealthy amount of porn." He scrubs a hand through his hair. "I spent about three weeks on some deeply questionable websites making sure I wasn't going to fuck it up when you actually let me —" He stops himself to clear his throat. "Yeah."

The warmth in your chest is spreading. It's taken up residence in your ribs, your throat, behind your eyes, making him blurry.

"So all my firsts… are your firsts too."

"The ki—"

"Except the kiss." You cut him off because you know where that's going. "You kissed a girl once. I'm not counting that."

"It was in eighth grade and it lasted maybe two seconds."

There's something in his expression that's so open it makes your chest ache. Like he's giving you every single card in his hand and trusting you not to do anything terrible with them.

From the kitchen, you hear Steve muttering something that sounds like "...should've shut this shit down when I saw those hickeys..."

Your brain catches on the word. "You showed him your hickeys?"

"He facetimed me."

"And you answered with those hockeys?"

"I forgot about the — I wasn't thinking, baby."

You lean in closer, try dropping your voice to a whisper. "So that's how he figured it out."

"Guys." Steve's voice carries from the kitchen, done with it but fond at the same time. "You genuinely aren't slick. Like at all."

  Main Masterlist || Series Masterlist

EXTRAS. Dedicated to this anon (adding this here bc I didn’t want to spoil anything lol)

Thank you for reading this. I told myself I would never start another series because babydoll gave me such burnout. But this idea got rooted into my head and just wouldn’t leave. I got so many comments and asks, and it genuinely made me so happy. I appreciate each and every single one of them. Thank you, thank you 💕 I truly hope I met your expectations. I also HAVE to know if you saw those two things coming (not me thinking I’m that slick lol). If you don’t like the last scene, pretend it didn’t happen. Personally, I just fancy the idea of a guy being so in love with his girl, he doesn’t even try. Less realistic, more endearing and romantic — basically me. Any asks and requests for these two babies are always welcome. Please send some, they will genuinely make my day.