look away
MDNI 19.4K
warnings ۶ৎ 18+ mdni. modern au. explicit smut, body insecurity/body image thoughts, jealousy, miscommunication, pool party tension, wet swimsuit, oral sex, fingering, multiple orgasms, protected piv, dirty talk, praise, possessive bucky, semi-public tension, soft aftercare.
synopsis ۶ৎ bucky spends the whole pool party trying not to stare. you spend the whole pool party thinking he can barely stand to look at you. a slippery pool step, one bitter comment, and tony stark’s guest room fix that problem rather loudly.
evie’s input ۶ৎ not beta read. tumblr is a bitch for making my format go to shit. but please enjoy folks. dividers by @/cursed-carmine
you bought the swimsuit out of pure delusion. pure, bright, sun-drunk delusion, the sort that made sense at two in the morning with your laptop glowing against your face and natasha sitting beside you on the bed, eating chips directly from the bag while telling you that black one-pieces were for women hiding from federal charges or their own thighs. she had said that with such calm authority, such casual violence, that you had clicked away from the perfectly safe black one-piece and ended up on a page full of colors that made you feel personally attacked. cherry red. powder blue. white, which felt like an invitation for god to humiliate you. green, which nat said would look pretty on your skin and you said would make you look like a decorative salad, and then she had hit you with a pillow hard enough to send two chips flying into your blanket.
so you picked the dark blue one.
dark blue seemed mature. forgiving. almost responsible, if swimwear could be responsible. it had a low back that made you sit up straighter just looking at the model, and the top had little gold rings at the straps, small enough to pretend they were classy instead of slutty. the bottoms sat high on the hips, which nat called flattering and you called invasive. still, you ordered it. you even paid for express shipping, which felt like signing a contract with your own downfall.
now, standing in tony stark’s guest bathroom with the swimsuit cutting into places you had never invited fabric to develop an opinion about, the delusion had fully left your body. “this is a hate crime,” you mutter at your reflection, tugging the side higher, then lower, then higher again, like one of those positions will suddenly unlock a new body. “against me, specifically.”
the mirror gives you no sympathy. it just shows you exactly what you are trying very hard to survive. thighs. hips. stomach. skin. actual human flesh, very rude of it. you turn slightly, regret it, turn back, regret that too. the swimsuit is pretty. that may be the worst part. if it were ugly, you could blame the swimsuit. but it is pretty and soft and fitted, which means the problem is clearly you, and that feels legally actionable.
natasha knocks twice, then opens the door like locks are a decorative suggestion. she is wearing a black bikini and a loose white shirt, hair braided back, sunglasses resting on her head. she looks like she has never feared a changing room mirror in her life. maybe she killed that fear at sixteen and buried it in a forest. “if you’re dead in there, say something,” she says, leaning against the doorframe with a drink already in hand.
you glare at her through the mirror. “i’m suing you.”
“for making you look hot?”
“for elder abuse.”
“you’re younger than me.”
“for emotional elder abuse.”
her mouth twitches. she steps inside, closes the door with her heel, and turns you by the shoulders before you can protest. the inspection is quick and blunt, clinical in the scariest possible way, then her brows lift. “yeah. you’re wearing it.”
“you didn’t even pretend to think.”
“i did think. silently. very sexy of me.”
you pull at the bottom again, mostly so your hands have a job. it feels safer when your hands have a job. otherwise they might wander up and cover your stomach or your chest or your face, and then nat would make one of those sounds. a small sound, barely a sound, the kind that says she loves you and also wants to shake you until your bones make music. “it’s too much,” you say, quieter.
“it’s a pool party.”
“exactly. people will be near pools. with eyes.”
“tragic.” nat takes another sip. “people might also have necks. horrifying world.”
you make a face at her, but your fingers have started twisting the hem of the towel around your shoulders. the towel is the only thing keeping you from turning around, putting your shorts back on, and telling everyone you’ve developed a sudden aquatic allergy. chlorine intolerance. water-related moral conflict. any excuse with a medical-sounding word might work on steve. sam would ask questions. tony would ask if the water offended you personally, then offer to replace it with imported glacier melt.
bucky would look at you. that thought is the whole disease. bucky barnes looking at you in this swimsuit is either going to kill you outright or make you wish it had. he is already too much in normal clothes. jeans, shirts, those stupid henleys that cling to his shoulders with religious devotion. shirts in general seem desperate around him. fabric has never looked more underpaid. and now there is a very real chance that you will walk outside and find him shirtless by the pool, all broad chest and sun-warmed skin and dark hair falling around his face, and you’ll have to behave like someone who pays taxes and owns a toothbrush. impossible.
even worse, he may look at you and then look away. the thought is small. mean. familiar. he does that sometimes. looks away when you enter the room like your presence is a lamp turned directly into his eyes. you’ve built a whole religion around it. bucky finds you irritating. bucky tolerates you for nat’s sake. bucky can flirt with cashiers, grandmothers, dogs, possibly dangerous machinery, but when it comes to you, he either teases until you want to bite him or turns cold like you spilled something on his favorite memory.
“he’s already here,” nat says.
you blink at her. horrible woman. witch. spy. roommate. “who?”
“the pool boy.”
“tony has a pool boy?”
“no, but if he did, i’d respect his commitment to the theme.” nat watches you through the mirror. “barnes. he’s outside with steve and sam.”
your mouth goes dry. very mature reaction. very dignified. you deserve an award for remaining upright. “thrilling.”
“he asked where you were.”
“to insult me?”
“probably to write a poem.”
you snort despite yourself, then hate the sound for being too fond. bucky inspires many feelings in you, most of them medically confusing. rage, attraction, pettiness, fondness, the strange urge to press your face into his chest and stand there until society collapses. you used to think crushes were supposed to be fun. light. giggly. yours feels like chewing glass while a beautiful man laughs in another room. “i’m putting clothes on,” you announce, turning toward the pile you abandoned on the sink.
natasha catches the towel before you can turn it into armor. her face softens, which is alarming. she is much easier to handle when she is threatening people or calling men idiots. tenderness from nat tends to make you confess things. “you can wear whatever you want. but if you’re changing because barnes might see you, i’m going to be annoying.”
“you’re already annoying.”
“i have levels.” her hand squeezes your shoulder once. “he’s one guy.”
“he’s a large guy.”
“still one.”
“that’s debatable. he has the surface area of three men.”
she smiles into her glass. “come outside.”
you stare at yourself again. the gold rings at your shoulders glint under the bathroom lights. a soft breath leaves you, slow and unwilling. the girl in the mirror looks terrified, which is rude, because you were aiming for bored. maybe indifferent. possibly mysterious. something with less of a wet-cat energy.
bucky is one guy. one guy with eyes. one guy who probably won’t even look long enough to form an opinion. that is worse. “fine,” you say, grabbing the towel and wrapping it around your shoulders instead of your body. “but if i cry, i’m pushing you into the pool.”
nat opens the door, smug and fond. “deal. i swim beautifully.” you hate her. you follow her anyway.
sunlight hits you like a personal accusation. tony’s summer house is all glass, white stone, obnoxious wealth, and views so good they make you suspicious. the pool stretches across the back patio in a ridiculous blue sheet, bright enough to look fake, with lounge chairs lined along one side and a shaded outdoor kitchen on the other. music plays from speakers hidden somewhere in the landscaping, low and expensive. the air smells like sunscreen, grilled pineapple, chlorine, and the rosemary bushes tony probably paid someone to make look effortless.
everyone is already there. wanda is stretched on a lounger with sunglasses over her eyes, red hair spilling over one shoulder. vision sits beside her reading a book in the sun like a man who has never sweated once in his life. steve is by the grill, wearing swim trunks and a white shirt he left open, looking like a recruitment poster for sunscreen safety. sam is in the pool, arguing with clint over a foam football. tony is wearing sunglasses indoors, technically outdoors, but under the shaded bar, so spiritually indoors. bruce is speaking to pepper near a bowl of fruit like he has been assigned fruit diplomacy.
and bucky. bucky is near the far side of the pool, one foot up on the lower rung of a lounger, laughing at something steve says across the patio. shirtless, obviously. cruelly. swim trunks low on his hips, hair tied back in a loose half-bun, a pair of sunglasses hanging from the collar of the shirt he has abandoned on a chair. his skin is already touched by sun, golden at the shoulders, marked with faint scars and old history, and your brain takes one look at him and files for retirement.
of course. of course he gets to look like that near water. like some mythological punishment. like a sailor’s bad decision. like if marble got warm and developed a bad personality.
you stop near the sliding door. nat keeps walking. traitor. sam sees you first. “hey, finally! we were about to send a search party.”
“i was in the bathroom for seven minutes,” you call back, which is mostly true if you ignore the years spent negotiating with your own reflection.
“seven minutes in woman time,” tony says, lifting his drink. “so either twelve seconds or a fiscal quarter.”
“rich men shouldn’t speak,” you say, and tony points at you like you’ve wounded him.
“see, this is why i invite you. keeps the ego limber.”
that gets a few laughs, easy and warm. you can handle them. most of them. everyone here has seen you in pajamas, sick, angry, half asleep, and once crying over a video of a dog getting prosthetic legs. skin should be nothing. thighs should be nothing. a stomach should be nothing. human bodies have been happening for ages. terribly common things.
then bucky turns. it is fast. too fast. his smile is still there from whatever steve said, wide and relaxed, and then his eyes find you and the smile fades in pieces.
you go so still the towel slips down one shoulder.
he looks at your face first, then lower. hardly a second, maybe less, barely enough to count, but your body counts it. the line of his gaze touches your swimsuit, the bare places around it, the curve you have spent twenty minutes trying to negotiate with, and then he looks away.
just like that. his jaw tightens. his hand curls around the back of the lounger. his attention swings back to steve with such sudden force that you almost laugh. there it is. there it fucking is.
you knew this would happen. stupid, stupid girl. standing in a bathroom telling yourself he was only one guy when that one guy apparently needs to look anywhere else the second you show too much skin. amazing. beautiful. maybe you can walk straight into the pool and keep going until you reach a new continent. the patio sounds louder now. sam’s laughter, clint yelling about cheating, ice clinking in tony’s glass. everything keeps moving around you with obscene casualness. no one else saw it. no one else felt the tiny, sharp slice of it. bucky looked at you and looked away, and everyone else gets to continue eating fruit.
natasha glances back. you arrange your face into something flat and vaguely hostile. a familiar costume. better than the swimsuit.“drink?” she asks.
“yes.”
“alcoholic?”
“aggressively.”
tony hears that and brightens. “finally, someone with taste.”
you make your way toward the bar, aware of every step. the swimsuit feels too tight and too revealing and somehow too loud. bucky is across the patio, speaking to steve. he does not look again. that is fine. excellent. merciful, even. you hope he develops hiccups. tony slides a drink toward you. “for the lady with the aggressive liver.”
“thank you. sorry about your personality.”
“accepted. i bought another one.”
sam hoists himself out of the pool with a dramatic groan, water streaming down his shoulders. He grabs a towel, wiping his face, and his gaze flicks over your swimsuit without the weirdness men can sometimes bring to it. Just appreciative, warm, and easy. “Damn. Look at you.”
your fingers tighten around the glass. for one stupid second, praise lands in a place that has been sitting empty for too long. you lift your brows, aiming for casual. “is that surprise?”
“that’s respect,” sam says, pointing at the gold ring on your strap. “little fancy thing going on. i see you.”
“it’s swimsuit technology.”
“no, that’s a whole look. hey, buck.” sam turns his head before you can stop him. “you seeing this?”
murder becomes briefly understandable.
bucky’s shoulders go rigid. Steve looks between sam and bucky with the pained expression of a man witnessing a grenade roll under a picnic table. the second stretches. maybe two. your drink sweats against your palm. bucky does turn, but his eyes barely make it to your shoulder before skating away again. “yeah,” he says, voice rough enough that it sounds dragged from his throat. “i see it.”
that is worse than silence. you swallow. “fantastic. all votes counted.”
sam squints, sensing something in the air with the survival instincts of a man who has chosen chaos as a hobby. “you okay over there, terminator?”
bucky’s mouth moves into something that could pass for a smile in poor lighting. “fine.”
“sounds painful.”
“sam.”
“what? i’m checking on my friend.”
“check quieter.”
you take a long sip. It is sweet, cold, and strong enough to make your teeth feel clean. Wonderful. Tony Stark may be a public hazard, but the man stocks good alcohol. You let the burn settle on your tongue and decide, with the private little click of a door closing, that this is fine. Bucky can avoid looking at you. Great. Wonderful. Plenty of people have eyes.
Sam, for instance. Sam is grinning at you, towel around his neck, eyebrows lifted. He is handsome and safe and not Bucky, which immediately lowers his value in the ugliest part of your brain. But he complimented you. He looked at you without flinching. That counts for something. “you getting in?” sam asks, jerking his chin toward the pool. “or did you dress up to intimidate the tiles?”
“both can be true.”
“come on. clint’s cheating and i need a witness.”
you glance toward the water, then toward nat, who has settled beside wanda. Then, against all better judgment, toward bucky. He is looking at his drink. Very invested in it. Possibly falling in love with it. Good for them. your drink goes onto the counter. the towel slides off your shoulders and onto a chair before you can give yourself time to become normal again. Cool air brushes over your bare back. Too many places. Too much skin. Your arms fight the urge to cross over your middle.
Bucky’s head turns a fraction. You see it. You hate that you see it. The movement is so tiny anyone else would miss it, but you have a tragic little doctorate in James Barnes pretending indifference. His eyes make it to your legs this time. Then his mouth presses flat, and he turns away again.
Fine. Your chin lifts. “i’m a terrible witness,” you tell sam, stepping toward the pool. “i lie under pressure.”
Sam laughs and offers his hand from the water like he is helping royalty down from a carriage. “perfect. we’ll frame clint together.”
The pool is cold at first, a shock around your calves as you sit on the edge and lower yourself in. You bite back the sound that tries to escape, mostly out of pride. The water closes around your waist, then your ribs, and for a second the swimsuit stops feeling like a spotlight. Underwater, everything blurs kinder. Your hips, stomach, thighs. The body becomes a body again. Less evidence. Less argument. Sam tosses you the foam football. You catch it against your chest with both hands, splashing yourself in the face. “very athletic,” clint calls.
you wipe water from your eyes. “i’m preserving my mystery.”
“your mystery is that you suck at catch.”
“my mystery is that i haven’t drowned you.”
That gets a laugh from wanda. Nat smiles behind her sunglasses, proud and terrible. You start to loosen after that. The water helps. The drink helps. Sam helps too, in his loud, easy way, making you feel included without making you feel studied. He shouts fake strategies, accuses clint of crimes against recreational sport, and once spins you by the shoulders to aim your throw while you laugh so hard pool water gets in your mouth.
It should be enough. It almost is. Then you glance over and see Bucky watching. He is no longer pretending to listen to Steve. His sunglasses are on now, hiding his eyes, but his head is angled toward you. His arms are crossed over his chest, one shoulder leaning against a patio pillar, sun catching along the metal of his left hand where it grips his own bicep. There is nothing soft in his posture. Nothing open. He looks carved into place.
Caught, he turns his head slightly. Of course. Your laugh thins. Sam says something, but you miss it. Maybe your name. Maybe a joke. The pool sounds muffle, slipping in and out around your ears. Bucky can look from far away, apparently. From behind sunglasses. From a place where you cannot look back properly. The second you are close enough for him to have to acknowledge you as a body with feelings, he finds the nearest wall or drink or horizon.
There’s a special sort of humiliation in wanting someone who seems vaguely offended by the evidence of you. “you alive?” sam asks, splashing water near your arm.
You blink back to him. “unfortunately.”
“you looked like you were plotting.”
“I plot as cardio.”
“that explains the stamina.”
Bucky’s jaw moves across the patio. You see that too. Tiny. Annoying. Delicious, if you were a healthier person. A reckless little thing uncurls in your chest. It is petty and hot and stupid, so naturally it feels almost holy. You turn back to sam with a brighter smile, the sort that probably looks normal to everyone else and insane to Nat. Sam raises his eyebrows. Brave man. “teach me to throw better,” you say.
He narrows his eyes. “this a trick?”
“i’m asking for athletic help. cherish the moment.”
Sam laughs, then shifts behind you in the water, hands hovering over your elbows before settling lightly when you nod. It is friendly. It is nothing. It is two people in a pool with a foam football and a crowd of friends around them. But you feel Bucky before you see him. His attention has weight. A dark little weather system rolling over the patio. Sam adjusts your arm. “okay, elbow up. no, less like you’re threatening the ball’s family.”
“I am threatening its family.”
“gentle. release here.” His hand taps your wrist.
Across the patio, Steve says something to Bucky. Bucky does not answer. You throw. The ball arcs beautifully for half a second, then smacks clint square in the forehead. The silence is immediate. Then clint sinks under the water like a betrayed submarine. You clap both hands over your mouth. Sam loses his mind laughing, one hand braced on your shoulder as he folds forward. Wanda sits up. Tony lowers his sunglasses. Steve looks concerned. Nat looks delighted. Clint resurfaces, hair plastered over his face. “attempted murder.”
“self-defense,” you gasp, still half laughing, half horrified. “you had criminal energy.”
“You hit me in my innocent head.”
“no jury would convict her,” sam says, wiping his eyes. “that was art.”
A sound comes from the patio. Low. Short. You look before you can stop yourself.
Bucky is laughing. Not loud. Not like sam. Barely more than a breath, but his mouth has curved despite whatever terrible thing he has been doing with his face all afternoon. He is looking at you now. Fully. Sunglasses pushed up into his hair, blue eyes narrowed against the sun, and for one ridiculous moment, all the air in the day seems to gather in your throat.
Then he catches himself. The smile fades. His gaze drops to the water near your waist, moves away, and he reaches for his drink. It is a slap with no hand.
Your smile goes with it. The water suddenly feels too cold. “i need another drink,” you announce, heading for the stairs before anyone can see your face arrange itself badly.
Sam calls after you, still laughing about clint’s tragic head injury. Nat’s sunglasses follow you from the lounger. Bucky stays by the pillar, but the closer you get to the edge, the more you feel him there. A terrible awareness. Like walking past a stove you know is on. Your hands grip the metal rail as you climb the pool steps. Water streams down your body, cooler where the breeze hits. The swimsuit clings hard now, slick to your skin, making every curve more obvious instead of less. Wonderful design choice. Truly innovative cruelty. You reach for the towel on the chair, but it is farther than you thought, and the stone under your wet feet is slippery.
Your heel slides. For one bright, stupid second, you are suspended in pure indignity. Then a hand clamps around your upper arm. Not sam. Not nat. Not anyone safe enough to survive.
Bucky. His other hand catches your waist, broad palm spreading over wet skin, fingers pressing into the soft give above your hip. The contact goes straight through you with such force that your brain empties. Chlorine, sun, his skin, the faint spice of whatever soap he uses, all of it crowds too close. Your hand lands on his chest to steady yourself, and he is warm. Warm and solid and right there, which is deeply unfair for a man who has spent the afternoon treating eye contact like a hostage negotiation.
“careful,” he says.
One word. Low. Rough. Stupid. Your embarrassment catches fire. You laugh. It comes out bitter, thin at the edges, nothing like the easy laugh you gave sam. Bucky’s fingers tighten once at your waist, and that little pressure makes the whole thing worse. “relax, barnes.” You pull your hand from his chest, hating the wet print your palm leaves behind. “you don’t have to touch me longer than necessary.”
The whole patio seems to keep making noise, but in your little corner, the sentence has teeth. Bucky goes still. His hand stays on your waist for half a second too long, then leaves like he has been burned. The absence is immediate and awful. You hate him for touching you. You hate him more for stopping. His face has changed, though you refuse to name the change. His brows draw together, mouth parting slightly as if he has lost the next line. Good. Let him lose something. “What?” he says, quiet.
You grab the towel and pull it around yourself, too late to feel covered. “Nothing.”
His eyes narrow at that, and for once he does not look away. “That didn’t sound like nothing.”
“You’re very observant.”
“Don’t do that.”
A laugh tries to crawl out of you and dies ugly. “Do what?”
“Act like I did something to you when all I did was catch you.”
You look at him then. Really, probably too much. Big mistake. His skin is still damp at the temples from sweat or the pool water someone splashed earlier, and the sun catches the blue of his eyes so sharply you want to be mad at nature. His chest rises under your gaze. Your palm still remembers him, every warm inch. A handprint in reverse. “you looked away,” you say, and the words escape before pride can shoot them down.
Bucky’s face tightens. “When?”
You hate him. You hate him so much you could kiss him until both of you forget language. “Forget it.”
You turn away, but he catches the edge of the towel. Not enough to pull you back, only enough to stop the escape from being clean. “When?” he repeats, and the softness in his voice is so much worse than anger.
You should have kept your mouth shut. You should have stayed in the bathroom and sued Natasha from there. Instead you’re wet, half naked, humiliated, and Bucky Barnes is holding your towel like it matters. “When I came out,” you say, staring hard at the bar instead of him. “When sam called you. When I got in the pool. Pick one, you’ve been consistent.”
His grip loosens. For a second you think he will explain. He might laugh. He might say you’re imagining things. He might finally cut the whole sickness open and tell you he does not want to look, and then maybe you can be free through the healing power of public devastation. But he says nothing. Of course he says nothing.
Your eyes sting, which is unacceptable. Chlorine. Obviously chlorine. You pull the towel free and walk toward the bar with as much dignity as a woman can manage while dripping on expensive stone. Behind you, Steve says Bucky’s name. Low. Warning. Or concerned. You do not turn around. Tony is pretending very hard to examine a lime. “Drink,” you say, dropping onto a stool.
He pushes one over without commentary for maybe the first time in his life. “Hydration adjacent.”
“your discretion is unsettling.”
“i’m multifaceted.”
You take the glass. Your hand shakes once, barely. You curl it tighter until it stops.
Across the patio, Bucky remains near the pool steps, one hand low on his hip, the other rubbing over his mouth. Steve stands near him now, speaking quietly. Bucky shakes his head. His eyes cut toward you. This time, you look away first.
Pool parties become less fun once you have emotionally exposed yourself near a wet staircase. A tragic discovery. Someone should tell the youth. The afternoon drags onward with the mean persistence of a song you cannot skip. People eat. People drink. Sam retells the clint football incident with increasing betrayal of facts, making himself sound like a coach and you sound like a trained assassin. Clint claims he can see sounds now. Wanda orders him to stop making it tempting to hit him again. Tony brings out enough food for a wedding and calls it “light snacks,” which makes you wonder if billionaires understand hunger as a concept or merely as a branding opportunity. You sit with nat under the shade, towel around your shoulders, swimsuit drying tight against your skin. The drink has made you warmer, loose at the edges, but not enough to soften the place Bucky opened and then abandoned. He has stayed away. Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone could call obvious. He helps Steve with the grill, talks to Sam, lets Tony make jokes at his expense. He is normal.
That might be the ugliest part. You are sitting here with your nerves scraped raw, and he gets to hold a plate of grilled chicken. Do you want to talk about it?” nat asks.
“No.”
She hums, sipping from her straw. “Do you want to lie about it?”
“Desperately.”
“Go ahead.”
You stare at the water. Sam is trying to shove clint off a float. Clint has accepted death with more grace than expected. “I’m having a nice time.”
“Terrible lie. Try again.”
“I enjoy sunlight.”
“Worse.”
“Bucky Barnes is a normal man whose opinion does nothing to my blood pressure.”
Natasha’s mouth curves. “Almost funny enough to pass.”
You pick at a loose thread on the towel. The fibers are soft, expensive, probably worth more than half your closet. Tony’s towels have better career prospects than you. “He looked at me like he wished I’d worn a tarp.”
Nat says nothing for a second. Her silence is rarely empty. It moves around, checks exits, evaluates weak spots. “That’s what you saw?”
You glance at her, defensive already. “I have eyes.”
“Unfortunately, yes. Dramatic ones.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.” She turns her head a little, and you follow her gaze against your will.
Bucky is standing at the grill beside Steve. His posture is casual enough for a stranger. Not for you. You know his casual. This is held too tight at the edges. His shoulders are set, left hand curled around a bottle of beer he has barely touched, eyes trained on the pool with such grim commitment that the pool may owe him money. “He’s been weird all day,” nat says.
“He’s always weird.”
“With you, yes.”
“That’s very comforting.”
She nudges your knee with hers. “You two are exhausting.”
“There is no two. There’s me, suffering heroically, and him, being confusing and broad.”
“Broad?”
“Don’t make me defend my vocabulary. I’m injured.”
“You slipped.”
“Emotionally.”
Natasha laughs softly, then reaches over and plucks the drink from your hand. “Slow down.”
You glare. “This is theft.”
“This is friendship.”
“Friendship would let me make poor choices.”
“I let you buy the swimsuit.”
“That was attempted murder.”
Her hand squeezes your knee once. “He’s looking again.”
Your entire body betrays you. It wants to turn. It wants to pretend it has not been starving for that exact sentence. You hold still with the grim focus of someone defusing a bomb under poor lighting. “Good for him,” you say.
Nat’s smile turns small and unbearable. “You’re allowed to like being looked at.”
“By normal people, maybe.”
“Barnes is many things.”
“Normal does seem optimistic.” The words come out light enough. The thought under them sits heavy. Bucky looking at you feels dangerous because you cannot tell what he sees. All day, you have been trapped between wanting his attention and being wounded by how he spends it. Too quick, too hidden, too late. You want him to look in a way that lets you rest, which is insane. A person should not need another person’s eyes to feel real in their own skin. There are self-help books about that, probably. You have not read them because they would tell you to journal and you would rather eat sand.
Tony calls everyone for food, and the shift saves you from Nat’s terrifying accuracy. Chairs scrape. People gather around the long outdoor table. You end up between wanda and sam, safe enough, with nat across from you and Bucky diagonally down the table beside Steve. Diagonally is awful. Diagonally means accidental glances. Diagonally means you can pretend to look at the salad and still see his hands. Diagonally means his knee might bump yours if the table were smaller, which it is not, thank God, or no thanks to God, depending on where you are in your moral development.
Food helps. A little. Grilled corn, charred sweet at the edges. Watermelon with feta. Skewers. Tony’s obscene little sliders made with buns so soft you briefly understand wealth. You eat more than you expected, mostly to give your mouth a reason to stay busy. Sam leans closer while reaching for the corn. “You ever think about joining a league?”
You stare at him. “For what, pool homicide?”
“Foam football. You’ve got raw talent.”
“I injured one man.”
“That’s how legends start.”
You laugh, easier this time. Sam is lovely. Sam is safe. Sam has never once made you feel like a bug under glass or a prayer no one taught you how to say. His attention is warm and uncomplicated, and maybe that is why it fails to do the thing you wish it would. You want it to. That would be convenient. You could turn your head and smile at the man making you laugh, and your body could decide to be sensible for once. Across the table, Bucky’s fork scrapes softly against his plate.
You glance up. His eyes are on Sam’s shoulder, where it nearly touches yours. His mouth has gone flat again. When his gaze shifts to yours, it stays. No sunglasses now. No immediate retreat. You should feel triumphant. You feel pinned and furious and too warm under the towel.
Sam keeps talking. You answer. Probably. Words happen from your side of the table. Bucky looks away first, but slower this time, and that almost makes you angrier.
After food, Tony declares a mandatory sunset swim like a man whose money has left him unfamiliar with the word optional. Wanda declines by pretending to sleep. Vision declines with such politeness that Tony thanks him. Steve gets dragged in by Sam. Clint goes willingly after shouting that the water may heal his head trauma. Natasha sheds her shirt and dives so cleanly that half the patio claps.
You mean to stay on the lounger. You really do. Then Bucky sits on the chair two spaces away with a beer and no intention of swimming.
You stand.
“Coming in?” sam calls from the pool.
“Apparently.”
Bucky’s head lifts. There. There it is again. That first startled drag of his eyes as your towel drops onto the lounger. This time you catch all of it. He looks at your shoulders, your chest, your waist, the high cut at your hips, the damp lines where the swimsuit still clings from earlier. His throat moves. His fingers tighten around the beer bottle.
Then he looks away. Again. The hurt comes faster now, less sharp and more tired. You have run out of ways to be surprised by it. “You coming?” you ask before you can stop yourself.
Bucky looks back. “What?”
“In the pool.” You gesture toward everyone else, voice mild enough to deserve applause. “That large wet rectangle behind you.”
Sam laughs from the water. Steve watches Bucky with the concerned patience of someone looking at a friend about to step on a rake. Bucky’s eyes flick toward the pool, then to you. “I’m fine here.”
“Tragic. We’ll notify the rectangle.”
That gets a laugh from Tony. Even Bucky’s mouth twitches, but it dies before it becomes anything useful. “You scared?” you ask.
The words are easy. The ache under them is less so. You want him to rise. You want him to refuse. You want him to look. You want him to leave. You want so many impossible things at once that your own skin feels crowded. Bucky leans back in the chair, jaw set. “Of you?”
“Of fun.”
“Terrified.”
“Figures.” You turn before he can answer, stepping into the pool with all the dignity you can scrape together. The water feels warmer now after the heat of the day, soft around your knees, your waist, your ribs. Sam splashes near you, and you splash him back half-heartedly. The game restarts in some altered form. Someone throws a beach ball. Tony judges from the side with a drink, claiming he is “morally participating.” The sky slowly bruises pink and gold over the trees.
You laugh again. You even mean some of it. But Bucky stays on the chair. He stays dry and distant, one elbow on the armrest, beer untouched, gaze roaming everywhere except you until it does not. Then you feel it between your shoulder blades, across the back of your neck, sliding down where the swimsuit reveals more than it hides. If he is disgusted, he has a strange way of torturing himself with it.
Maybe he is bored. Maybe he is judging. Maybe he is thinking about someone else. Maybe you are pathetic. That last thought arrives with such calm familiarity that you almost miss the ball flying toward your face.
“Duck!” Sam shouts.
You duck too late. The beach ball clips the side of your head, harmless but startling, and you stumble back with a laugh that turns into a yelp when your foot misses the pool step under the water. This time, you do not fall. This time, Bucky is already there.
The splash of him entering the pool sends water up over your arms. You barely process the movement before his hand catches your waist under the water, bare palm meeting bare skin, fingers firm enough to halt every thought you were trying to have. His other hand closes around your wrist, anchoring you while your toes find the step.
The whole pool erupts around you. Sam says something. Tony whistles. Clint declares another murder attempt. None of it matters.
Bucky is in the water. Bucky is touching you.
Bucky’s hair is wet now, loose strands clinging near his jaw. His chest is inches from yours, water beading on his collarbones, eyes fixed on your face with the sort of focus that makes you feel both held and dissected. The metal hand around your wrist is cool. The flesh hand at your waist is warm even underwater. Your body, treacherous little idiot, forgets every insult it has been rehearsing and leans a fraction closer. “Careful,” he says again.
The same word. Same roughness. Less distance. Your laugh barely works this time. It leaves your mouth thin and tired. “You need a new line.”
His eyes drop to your mouth. Stay there. Move back up. “You need to stop slipping.”
“I’m sure the tiles are honored you blame me.”
“Wasn’t blaming you.”
“No, you’re just leaping into pools now. Very casual.”
His hand slides half an inch on your waist as someone’s wave rolls against you both. The movement is tiny and devastating. Your stomach pulls in under his palm before you can control it, and his fingers flex like he felt the reaction and had to restrain his own. Sam clears his throat loudly. “Everybody alive?”
Bucky does not look away from you. “Yeah.”
“You sure? That looked like a rescue.”
“Wilson,” Steve says, warning plain in his voice.
“What? I’m just asking. Man moved like a torpedo.”
Your face heats, and that saves you. Embarrassment brings language back. “I’m fine,” you say, trying to step back.
Bucky lets go of your wrist. His hand at your waist lingers. You glance down at it. He follows your gaze and releases you, slow enough to feel intentional, quick enough to hurt. “Fine,” he repeats, almost to himself.
You step away, wrapping your arms around your middle under the water. The swimsuit feels nonexistent now, yet somehow everyone can see the exact place his hand had been. Maybe there is a mark. Maybe your skin has announced it to the patio in bright letters. “I’m getting out,” you say, mostly to the water.
Bucky’s brows pull together. “Again?”
“Try to survive it.”
Sam says your name softly as you pass him, but you keep moving. The pool steps are kinder this time. You grip the rail, climb carefully, and grab your towel with wet hands. The sky has gone warmer, streaked with orange, and the air makes goosebumps rise along your arms. You head toward the house before anyone can ask.
The sliding door is blessedly close. The kitchen inside is cooler, dimmer, quiet except for the hum of Tony’s expensive refrigerator and the muted thump of music through glass. You leave wet footprints across the tile and feel guilty for half a second before remembering Tony could probably buy new tile by blinking. The towel goes tighter around you. Your face feels too hot. Your chest feels worse. Everything is tangled. Bucky looked away. Bucky watched. Bucky refused to get in. Bucky jumped in without thinking. Bucky touched you like instinct. Bucky let go like regret.
A normal person would accept complexity. You prefer suffering. The kitchen island has a bowl of cut limes, a bottle of tequila, and a tray of tiny desserts covered in plastic wrap. You peel one back and take a mini tart just to have something to destroy. It tastes like lemon and butter and wealth. You chew angrily. “stealing dessert before dinner’s fully over?”
You close your eyes. No. Absolutely no. The universe can go bother someone else.
Bucky’s voice comes from the doorway behind you, lower after the pool, rougher around the edges. You keep chewing. Swallow. Pick up another tart because dignity left hours ago and dessert is here now.
“Tell tony,” you say. “He’ll have me arrested by the pastry police.”
Wet footsteps cross the tile. He has followed you in dripping too, which should make him less intimidating. It does not. The room fills with him, chlorine and sun and that clean masculine smell under it, the one that has ruined many evenings and one perfectly decent pillow you once pressed your face into after he left it on your couch. He stops on the other side of the island. You look at the tart tray instead of him.
“I was checking on you.”
“Very heroic. I’m eating a tart.”
“So I see.”
“Then your work here is done.”
The old rhythm tries to come back. Snap, deflect, survive. Usually he takes the bait. Usually he smiles or scoffs or says something that makes you want to throw a household object. This time he stays quiet, and the quiet crawls right under your towel. You reach for a third tart. His hand covers the tray.
You stare at his fingers. Human hand. Calloused. Thick. The same hand that had been on your waist in the pool, warm through the water, possessive for one second before he remembered he did not want to be. Your own hand hovers uselessly near his. Lemon sugar sticks to your thumb. “Move,” you say.
“Talk to me.”
Your laugh is small and mean. “About dessert?”
“About what you said outside.”
“I’ve said many beautiful things today.”
His fingers press lightly against the plastic wrap, making it crinkle. “At the pool steps.”
The room cools further. Somewhere outside, Sam laughs. The sound reaches the kitchen thin and far away, like it belongs to another life where people can swim and flirt and enjoy fruit without turning into an open wound near a marble island. “I said you didn’t have to touch me.” You lift one shoulder. The towel slips a little. His eyes move to fix on your face with almost painful discipline. “Seems clear.”
“No.” His jaw tightens around the word. “It doesn’t.”
“It really does.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing?”
There it is. Softer than you expected. Worse, somehow. He sounds angry, but the anger has nowhere clean to go. It sits between you, wet-haired and broad-shouldered and too close. You pick at the sugar on your thumb. “Standing in a kitchen?”
“Trying to stop touching you.”
A humorless sound leaves you. “Aren’t you?”
Bucky’s hand slowly leaves the tray. He comes around the island, and you hate yourself for how fast your body registers each step. Wet tile under his bare feet. The shift of muscle in his thighs. Water slipping from his hair to his neck. He stops beside you, close enough that you can see tiny droplets on his lashes. “You think that’s why I looked away?”
Your fingers curl into the towel at your chest. “I’m very tired of talking about where your eyes go.”
“I’m not.”
“Congratulations.”
His voice lowers. “Look at me.”
“No.”
He breathes out through his nose. A patient sound. Not gentle. Not quite. “Please.”
That word does the damage anger could never do. You look up, furious with him for asking nicely. His face is tense, mouth set, eyes darker in the dim kitchen. He looks too serious for a pool party. Too serious for you standing here in a damp swimsuit and a towel, lemon sugar on your thumb, embarrassment turning your throat tight. “Happy?” you ask.
His gaze moves over your face like he is trying to read something written under your skin. “No.”
That almost gets you. Simple answer. No joke. No little smirk to save either of you. Your own mouth opens, then closes again.
Bucky glances toward the patio doors. Outside, the others are loud and bright and drunk on summer. In here, the air holds still around the refrigerator hum and your wet footprints. “I looked away,” he says, each word measured like it costs him, “because if I kept looking, everybody out there was gonna know.”
You stare at him. It takes a second. Maybe more. Your brain receives the sentence, turns it over, rejects it, picks it up again, then shakes it until meaning falls out. “Know what?”
His laugh is almost silent, rough at the bottom. “Don’t do that.”
“I’m asking.”
“You know what.”
“I really don’t.”
His hand lifts, then stops before touching you. That restraint again. Always that. A hand held back like your skin has rules written over it. You hate it more than anything, and maybe you have loved it too, which is inconvenient and humiliating. His fingers curl into his palm. “That I wanted you.”
The fridge hums. Music thuds through glass. Someone outside yells for Tony to stop cheating at whatever stupid rich-man game he has invented. Your towel slips another inch down your shoulder. Bucky notices. This time, he does not look away fast enough.
Wanted. Past tense? Present tense? A cruel grammar question at the worst possible time.
“You’ve been acting like looking at me causes physical pain,” you say, and it comes out less sharp than you need. More wounded. Awful.
His eyes cut back to yours. “It does.”
You blink. Bucky looks almost mad at himself now, which is satisfying for one brief second before it becomes sad. “You walked out in that thing and I had two choices. Look away, or sit there with everyone watching me stare at you like I’d lost my damn mind.”
“That thing?”
His gaze dips. Brief. Hungry. No disgust in it. None. The realization makes your stomach hollow out and fill at once. “The swimsuit.”
“You hate it.”
His mouth parts, then closes. His brows draw down. “I hate that Sam got to tell you first.”
That sentence finds a deep, stupid place in you and presses there. You hate that place. It has no pride. “He was being nice,” you say.
“I know.” in his mouth, right now, it is not reassurance. It is surrender. It is a man admitting something he does not want to resent and resenting it anyway.
“He looked at you like a friend,” Bucky says. “That made it worse.”
You set the tart down slowly, afraid any sudden movement might shatter the room. “Why?”
His eyes come back to yours. “Because I didn’t.”
The answer moves through you like a slow spill. Outside, someone opens the patio door. You both turn your heads at once. Tony leans in halfway, sunglasses still on though the sun is dying. His gaze takes in the water on the floor, your towel, Bucky’s expression, the tray of tarts, and he immediately lifts both hands.
“Fantastic. Haunted kitchen. Love that for us.” He reaches blindly for a bottle near the door. “Pretend I’m rich furniture.”
“Tony,” Bucky says, voice tight.
“Gone. Emotionally, spiritually, legally.” Tony backs out with the bottle and slides the door shut.
The interruption should break the tension. It does not. It makes it worse. Now the world has peeked in and retreated. Now privacy feels chosen. You wipe your sticky thumb against the towel, then regret it. “People are going to come looking.”
“Let them.”
Your eyes flick to his. “That’s a bad idea.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re agreeing?”
“Trying something new.”
Despite everything, a tiny laugh escapes you. Bucky’s face shifts at the sound. Not a smile, exactly. More dangerous than that. Like the laugh handed him proof he had been starving for and now he is trying to keep from grabbing.
“I thought you were embarrassed,” you say, quieter. The words scrape more than they should. “Of looking. Of me.”
His whole body seems to pull toward you without moving. “Jesus.”
You flinch at the roughness, and he sees it.
“Hey.” His hand finally touches your arm, just above the towel’s edge. Warm, careful, barely there. Still enough to ruin you. “No. I’m angry at myself. Not you.”
“You keep looking away.”
“I was trying to be decent.”
“That felt awful.”
His thumb moves once over your damp skin. You wish it did less. You wish it did more. “I see that now.”
“Great. Character development.”
He huffs, but there’s no real humor in it. His eyes have gone to the place his thumb touches your arm. “I’m sorry.”
You blink again. Bucky apologizes sometimes. To other people. Usually with grumbles and half-smiles and enough charm to make forgiveness feel inevitable. With you, apologies are rarer. Maybe because both of you prefer biting to bleeding. Maybe because he never seems to understand where the wound is.
This one is plain. You have no idea what to do with it. “I don’t want your pity apology,” you say.
His thumb stops. “Pity?”
“Yes.”
“You think I’m standing here half naked in Stark’s kitchen, dripping on a floor that costs more than my first apartment, apologizing out of pity?”
“When you put it like that, it sounds stupid.”
“It sounded stupid before.”
You glare up at him, relieved by the spark of irritation because anger is easier to hold. “Careful.”
That word. His word. It changes something in his face, turns his attention heavier. Your mouth goes dry. Bucky’s hand slides down your arm, slow enough that you could move away. You do not. His fingers find your wrist, then your hand, lifting it between you. Lemon sugar still clings faintly near your thumb. His eyes meet yours, asking nothing aloud, and maybe you nod. Maybe your hand simply gives up and lets him.
He brings your thumb to his mouth. The first touch of his tongue is warm and wet and obscene in its quietness. He licks the sugar from your skin like he has all the time in the world, lips closing around the tip of your thumb for half a second before he lets it go. Your knees forget their duties. The island is behind you, so you lean back against it before your body can embarrass you further.
Bucky watches the movement. “There,” he says, voice rougher. “No pity.”
You breathe through your nose, which is impressive since your lungs appear to have resigned. “That was unsanitary.”
“Pool water’s worse.”
“Comforting.”
His hand stays around yours. “You always do that.”
“What?”
“Make a joke when you’re shaking.”
You glance down. Your fingers are trembling in his grip. Treacherous little things. You consider cutting them off. Too messy for tony’s floor.
“I’m cold,” you say.
Bucky’s eyes drop to the towel, the damp swimsuit, the little bumps risen along your arms. “Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Want me to get you dry?”
There is nothing clean in that question. Maybe there could have been, from someone else. From him, with his mouth still wet from your thumb and his hand around yours, the words turn thick. You pull your hand back, mostly so you can breathe. “I can manage a towel.”
“I saw.”
“You saw me almost fall.”
“I saw a lot today.”
A pulse starts low in your body, slow and hot and deeply inconvenient. “You looked away for most of it.”
“I looked back.”
That shuts you up. His hand goes to the edge of the towel. He does not pull. Just touches the cotton near your collarbone, where it has started to sag from water and poor decision-making. “I looked back all damn day.”
You try to swallow. It takes effort. “Bucky…”
The patio door opens again. This time it is Nat. She takes one look at you, one look at Bucky, then at the wet floor. Her face gives away nothing, which means she has figured out everything.
“People are asking about dessert,” she says.
You stare at her helplessly. Bucky’s hand drops from the towel. He turns his head, expression suddenly murderous in a very contained, socially inconvenient way. “They can wait.”
Natasha’s brows rise. “Can they?”
“Yes,” he says.
Something about that single word, the calm certainty of it, makes your thighs press together under the towel. Nat’s eyes flick down for barely a second, then back up. You want the tile to open and swallow you. Preferably gently. With snacks. “Right,” she says. “I’ll tell them the kitchen is occupied.”
“Nat,” you hiss.
Her mouth curves. “What? By wet people.”
Bucky sighs like he is in physical pain. “Romanoff.”
“Relax, Barnes. I’m leaving.” She reaches for the tray of tarts, slides it away from you both, and pauses at the door. “Use one of the guest rooms. Tony has cameras in weird places.”
Your soul leaves your body. “What?” you choke.
Tony’s voice carries from outside. “I do not have cameras in weird places. I have cameras in strategic places.”
Natasha closes the door again. The silence after that is different. Less fragile. More aware of its own stupidity. You cover your face with one hand. “I’m moving.”
Bucky makes a sound that might be a laugh if he were less ruined. “Where?”
“Into the ocean.”
“Pool’s closer.”
“Too many witnesses.”
His hand returns to your waist, over the towel this time, and the casual possession of it melts the last few scraps of your brain. “Guest room’s closer too.”
You lower your hand. He is looking at you now. No retreat. No disgust. No careful sideways glance. He looks exactly how you had feared wishing for. Hungry and unsure and trying to make himself stand still. “This is a terrible idea,” you whisper.
“Probably.”
“People are outside.”
“Yep.”
“You were ignoring me two hours ago.”
His mouth tightens. “I was trying to keep my hands off you two hours ago.”
“And now?”
His fingers press into your waist, pulling you one inch closer. Not enough. Enough to make you greedy. “Now I heard what you thought.”
Your chest aches. “And?”
He leans in, slow. Gives you time. Too much time. Your eyes dip to his mouth, and he sees that too. Of course he sees that, the bastard. His lips brush the corner of yours, barely a touch, more breath than kiss, and your entire body answers like it has been waiting years for a command. “And I’m done letting you think it.”
The first kiss is almost gentle. Almost. That is what ruins it. Bucky’s mouth touches yours with restraint at first, warm and careful, and you stand there stupidly with your hand hovering near his chest. It has taken so long to get here that your body does not trust it. He kisses you once, then draws back just enough to look at your face, and something in that tiny pause makes you angry. “No,” you breathe, grabbing the wet hair at the nape of his neck.
His eyes darken. “No?”
“You don’t get to kiss me like I’m fragile after making me feel insane all day.”
The words are barely out before his hand slides behind your head and his mouth comes back harder. This kiss has teeth in it. Not cruel, not careless, but hungry enough to make your fingers tighten in his hair. He tastes like beer and lemon sugar from your skin. His other arm wraps around your waist, pulling you in until the towel is crushed between you and his damp chest, and you make a sound into his mouth that you would deny in court. Bucky answers with a low groan, and the sound breaks something open. The kiss turns messy fast. Your feet slip a little on the wet tile, and he catches you without breaking away, almost lifting you onto your toes. The island edge presses into your back. His hand spreads wide between your shoulder blades, then drags down over the towel, as if he hates every layer between his palm and the body he kept refusing to look at.
Outside, laughter rises. You jerk back. “Guest room.”
Bucky’s forehead touches yours for one second. His breathing is rough, uneven, gratifyingly ruined. “Yeah.”
He takes your hand. That simple thing nearly undoes you. His fingers lace through yours, warm and firm, and he leads you through Tony’s absurd house with far more purpose than a man dripping pool water should have. The hallway is cool and dim, lined with art that probably costs enough to rescue a small nation. You barely see it. You see his back, the muscles shifting under wet skin, the dark hair curling at his neck, your hand held in his like something he does not plan to misplace. A laugh bursts from the patio behind you, then the sound dulls as the hallway turns. Your pulse beats everywhere. Mouth, wrists, thighs, the places the swimsuit rubs too tight. You have spent hours wishing he would look, and now he is taking you somewhere private to do more than that, which means panic arrives right on schedule, prim little nightmare clipboard in hand.
What if he changes his mind when the door closes? What if this is heat and misunderstanding and chlorine? What if he touches you and finds every soft place you spent the day trying to hide? Bucky stops at the first guest room and opens the door. The room is airy, pale, ridiculous, with a king bed dressed in white and a view of the trees beyond the windows. Too pretty. Too clean. A room for people who have sex beautifully, probably, with matching underwear and no body anxiety.
You hover at the threshold. Bucky turns. His gaze drops to your face, then your hand still in his. “What?”
You hate the gentleness. You might start wanting it everywhere. “Nothing.”
He steps closer, slowly enough to make the hallway feel narrower. “Try again.”
Your fingers tighten around his. “I’m wet.”
His brows lift a fraction. “From the pool,” you snap, heat flooding your face. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your face did.”
“My face is having a day.”
Despite yourself, a laugh slips out, small and anxious. His thumb strokes over your knuckles, and the laugh fades into something softer. God, this is bad. This is tender now, and tender is much more dangerous than horny. Horny you understand. Horny has a beginning and an end and terrible decision-making in the middle. Tender grows roots. Bucky steps into the room and draws you with him.
The door closes behind you with a quiet click. For one second, neither of you speaks. The silence fills with water dripping from both of you onto the floor, distant music, your own uneven breathing. His hand leaves yours. You miss it immediately, which is humiliating.
Then he reaches for the towel. “Can I?”
You want to say something sharp. Something clever. Something that protects the swollen, nervous thing in your chest. Instead, you nod.
He unwraps you slowly. Not theatrically. Not like some polished movie scene. His fingers fumble once at the tucked corner, and that fumble does more to you than smooth confidence ever could. The towel loosens, slipping from your shoulders, down your arms, catching at your elbows before he pulls it free and drops it onto a chair.
Cool air touches your damp skin. Your hands twitch toward your stomach. Bucky catches them. The movement is fast, but his hold is gentle. Both wrists in his hands, lifted slightly away from your body. His eyes stay on yours. “Don’t hide from me.” The words are low, quiet, and absolutely devastating.
You try to laugh. It barely forms. “That’s ambitious.”
“I can be patient.”
“You? Since when?”
His mouth twitches. “Since about three seconds ago.”
You breathe out, shaky but almost amused. He lifts your hands and kisses the inside of one wrist. Then the other. Your throat tightens. It is so stupid, how much that gets to you. A kiss there. Not your mouth. Not your chest. Just the soft skin where your pulse is making an idiot of itself. “I’m going to look at you,” he says.
Your face burns. “That sounds like a threat.”
“It’s a warning.” His thumb moves over your wrist. “A fair one.”
“Very gentlemanly.”
“Trying.”
You swallow. “Don’t try too hard.”
His eyes darken. The shift is immediate, and you feel it under your skin. The little softness remains, but something hotter moves through it, something less careful. His hands lower yours to your sides. He waits. Gives you the chance to lift them again.
You don’t. Bucky looks. This time, he lets himself. His gaze starts at your face, maybe for mercy, then slips down your throat, over the thin straps, the gold rings, the wet fabric clinging to your breasts. You feel each inch like touch. He looks at the curve of your waist, the high cut at your hips, the soft places you wanted to fold away. His jaw sets hard. A slow breath leaves him, and the sound is not disgust. Not even close. It is almost anger, but turned inward, like he cannot believe he denied himself this all afternoon.
Your eyes sting again. “Oh,” you whisper, then immediately want to slap a hand over your mouth. Not a standalone reaction, you tell yourself absurdly. Put it in a sentence, idiot. “You actually…”
Bucky’s gaze snaps back to your face. “Yeah.”
“You looked away.”
“I was an idiot.”
“That’s established.”
His smile is brief and strained. “Fair.”
His hands come to your hips, bare now, no towel, no water softening the contact. Skin to skin. You inhale too sharply and his grip steadies, thumbs pressing near the swimsuit’s edge. “You thought I didn’t like this?” he asks, voice dragging lower.
Your eyes drop to his chest, safer than his face by maybe half a degree. “You looked like you were suffering.”
“I was.” His fingers slide along the high curve of your hip, then stop there, squeezing once. “Sweetheart, I saw you come out in this and forgot what language I spoke.”
That sounds impossible. It also sounds like him. Rough, a little annoyed, painfully sincere under all that heat. “You recovered fast.”
“I didn’t recover. I panicked.”
The laugh that leaves you is shaky and wet at the edges. “That was panic?”
“Steve asked if I was having a stroke.”
Your mouth opens. “He did not.”
“He did.”
“Was he concerned?”
“Very.”
You laugh fully this time, and Bucky’s hands tighten like he wants to hold the sound against you. The laugh fades when he steps closer. His wet chest brushes the front of your swimsuit. Barely. Your nipples tighten under the damp fabric, and his eyes drop just long enough to notice before returning to your face. The restraint almost kills you. “Sam complimented you,” he says.
You blink, following the turn. “Yes.”
“You smiled.”
“He was nice.”
“I know.”
There it is again. Acknowledgment. His thumbs move, small circles over your hips that turn thought into warm static. “You hated that?”
“I hated how easy it was for him.” Bucky’s voice goes rougher. “He could just say it. Stand there in front of everyone and tell you that you looked good. I stood ten feet away acting like looking at you too long was gonna put me in the ground.”
You study him, the damp hair, the tense mouth, the eyes that keep trying to fall and climb back up. “Would it?”
“Yeah,” he says, and this time he does smile. Small, wrecked, honest enough to hurt. “Maybe.”
That does something worse than praise. Makes you ache. Makes you stupid. Makes you lift your hand to his chest, pressing your fingers over the warm skin where your palm had landed earlier. He looks down at your hand like he wants to thank it. “You could’ve said something,” you murmur.
“I thought I had time to figure out how.”
“Figure out how to say you liked a swimsuit?”
“How to say I wanted to peel it off with my teeth without getting slapped in front of Steve.”
Your fingers curl against his chest. He watches your face. “Too much?”
The question is sincere, but barely. Mostly he is reading you now, and whatever he sees in your expression pulls his mouth into something darker. “No,” you say, and your voice sounds smaller than you want. “Continue.”
His laugh is quiet. “Continue?”
“You heard me.”
“I did.” One hand leaves your hip and comes up to your jaw, thumb brushing near the corner of your mouth. “Trying to decide if I wanna continue with my mouth or my hands.”
Your knees feel untrustworthy. “You’re taking suggestions?”
“From you?” He leans in, lips grazing your cheek, not quite kissing. “Always.”
The word slides down your body and settles low, hot, awful. You press your thighs together, barely, but he is too close to miss it. “Yeah?” His lips brush your ear now. “That where it goes when I say that?”
“Shut up.”
“Been trying all day.”
“To shut up?”
“To keep from saying worse.”
His mouth touches your neck. Your eyes close before you can pretend dignity. It is only one kiss at first, warm and damp from pool water, placed under your jaw with almost unbearable care. Then another, lower. His fingers at your jaw angle your face up, and the little stretch of your throat makes the room tilt through your body without the phrase in your head. You grip his shoulder, nails pressing into skin.
“Bucky,” you whisper.
He hums against your neck. “That sounded nice.”
“Don’t get smug.”
“Too late.”
You would scold him, but his teeth scrape lightly over your pulse and the scolding falls apart into a weak sound. He hears it. Of course he hears it. His hand on your hip slides around to the small of your back, pressing you closer, and the hard line of him through his swim trunks meets your lower stomach.
Your entire body pauses.
Bucky goes still too, but only to let you register it.
“Oh,” you breathe, then rush to fix it, face flaming. “That’s, um. That’s there.”
He pulls back enough to look at you. His eyes are nearly black. “Yeah. It’s been there.”
Your mouth parts.
“All day,” he adds, almost cruel now, and the hand at your jaw keeps your face tipped up. “You want the truth? I had to sit down after you got in the pool.”
A tiny, helpless sound leaves you.
His thumb strokes your cheek. “No. Look at me.”
You do, barely.
“I’m gonna say things,” he says, voice softer but dirtier somehow, stripped of performance. “And you’re gonna believe me this time.”
Your throat works around nothing. “That’s demanding.”
“Yeah.”
“Usually people ask.”
“I spent all day asking myself if I was allowed to want you.” His hand slides from your jaw to the back of your neck, fingers sinking into damp hair. “I’m done asking me.”
That should terrify you. It does, maybe. But it terrifies the part of you that has been begging for exactly this.
His mouth comes back to yours, and this time neither of you pretend at gentleness for long. You open for him almost immediately, and he groans into the kiss, the sound vibrating through his chest under your hand. His tongue slides against yours, slow at first, then deeper when your fingers dig into his shoulders. The kiss turns wet, hungry, breathing ruined between mouths. He walks you backward without breaking it, guiding rather than pushing, until your calves hit the bed.
The bed. White sheets. Guest room. Pool party outside. Bucky’s hands on you.
Your brain tries one last heroic effort at thought.
What if someone comes in?
Bucky’s hands move to your hips.
What if the door isn’t locked?
He turns you, sits on the edge of the bed, and pulls you between his thighs.
What if this changes everything?
His mouth leaves yours and moves down your throat, and your remaining thoughts scatter like birds.
He is sitting now, which makes him lower, makes your body the thing above him for once. It should help. It does not. His hands spread over your thighs, thumbs running along the place where the swimsuit cuts high, and he looks up at you with damp hair falling around his face. He looks wrecked. Actually wrecked. Like the sight of you standing between his legs has finished what the swimsuit started.
“You were hiding under that towel,” he murmurs, tracing the edge of the fabric at your hip.
You swallow. “It was cold.”
“Liar.”
Your face heats, but his mouth presses to your stomach before you can answer. Right over the swimsuit. Soft. Deliberate. You freeze.
He does it again.
Lower this time.
Your hands hover over his shoulders. You do not know what to do with them. Push him away? Pull him closer? Applaud? Cry? Move to Romania?
“Bucky…”
His eyes lift. His lips remain near your stomach. “Yeah?”
You hate the question. Hate how much room it gives you to stop him. Hate how badly you want him to keep going without making you beg for it. “That’s…”
“What?”
You glance away. “You don’t have to…”
He sits back so fast you regret speaking. His hands remain on your thighs, but the warmth of his mouth is gone. “Don’t.”
The single word is sharp enough to bring your eyes back.
His expression is serious again. “Don’t say I don’t have to. I know I don’t have to.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I want to.” His fingers press into your thighs, almost too tight, then ease as he notices. “I have wanted to put my mouth on you since you walked outside.”
Your body responds so hard it feels unfair.
His eyes lower, following the tiny shift of your thighs. His jaw tightens. “Since before that.”
The room has become too warm. Your swimsuit is drying in patches, damp fabric clinging between your legs, and every tiny movement makes you aware of how wet you are under the pool water. Not just pool water anymore. Maybe not for a while. Horrible. Amazing. You may need medical attention. Or less medical attention and more of his mouth.
Bucky’s thumb slides along your inner thigh.
“You thought I didn’t wanna look.” He says it quietly, but the words carry a rough little bite. “You thought I looked away because I didn’t like your body.”
Your fingers curl into his hair. You do not answer.
He leans forward and kisses the inside of your thigh, just below the swimsuit’s edge.
Your breath leaves in a broken little rush.
His mouth lingers there. “I looked away because I wanted to do this in front of everybody.”
“Bucky,” you whisper, scandalized and so turned on you can barely feel your feet.
His lips move higher, still over skin, slow and warm. “Wanted to drag you out of that pool when Wilson had his hands on you.”
“He was helping.”
“I know.” His teeth graze your thigh. “Still wanted to.”
“You’re terrible.”
“Today?” His eyes flick up. “Yeah.”
His fingers hook under the swimsuit at your hips, then stop. The pause makes your skin prickle. He is waiting. Again. That careful, maddening decency under all the dirty want.
You nod, too fast.
His mouth curves, but it is not teasing. More relief than anything. “Words, baby.”
That name hits deep. Worse after the whole day of being looked away from. Baby means wanted. Baby means chosen. Baby means the towel can stay on the chair and the body you were trying to hide is now the only thing he seems able to focus on.
“Take it off,” you say.
Bucky closes his eyes for a second.
You almost laugh. Almost. Instead your fingers tighten in his hair, and that ruins him faster. His eyes open, and the polite thread in him snaps.
The swimsuit comes down slowly at first, peeled over your hips with such careful attention that you want to crawl out of your skin. The damp fabric resists, clinging where it can, and Bucky seems almost personally offended by it. He leans forward, mouth brushing your hip as he works it lower, then your lower stomach, then the soft skin above your mound. Every kiss makes the wait worse. Every inch exposed feels like a confession.
You expect him to look up at your face once you are bare.
He does not.
His gaze fixes between your thighs, and the sound he makes is quiet, dragged deep from his chest, almost pained. You try to close your legs on instinct, but his hands are already there, spreading warm over your thighs.
“Don’t hide,” he says again, rougher now.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“You’re staring.”
“Yeah.” His thumbs slide higher. “I missed a lot today.”
Your face burns so hot it almost hurts. “You can’t just say that.”
“I can.” He kisses the crease of your thigh, eyes still on you. “I am.”
The swimsuit slips lower, down your thighs, then to your knees. You lift one foot, then the other, and he drops the ruined damp thing somewhere on the floor. A wildly expensive room, white sheets, your swimsuit abandoned in a wet little heap. It should feel humiliating.
It does.
It also makes you throb.
Bucky’s hands return to your thighs. He sits there on the bed, still in his wet trunks, and looks at you like this is the first quiet moment he has had all day and he plans to spend it badly. Your arms cross over your chest, but he catches the movement at once.
“Hey.”
You glare, but there is no force behind it. “What?”
His hands slide around to the backs of your thighs. “Come here.”
“I am here.”
“Closer.”
“There is physically no closer unless I climb you.”
His expression changes.
Ah. Idiot mouth. Treacherous mouth. Mouth with no survival instincts.
Bucky leans back slightly, spreading his thighs more. “Then climb.”
Your body gives an almost embarrassing pulse at the command. “You’re very comfortable giving orders for someone who spent half the day staring at landscaping.”
“I had a hard day.”
“You had a chair.”
“I had you in that swimsuit ten feet away from me.”
“That must have been so difficult.”
He pulls you forward by the backs of your thighs, and the sudden movement makes your hands land on his shoulders. “It was.”
There is no joke in his voice now.
Your knees go onto the mattress on either side of him before you fully decide to move. Straddling his lap like this, bare while he is still partly clothed, feels obscene in a way full nudity might not have. His trunks are wet beneath you. The hard length of him presses up between your thighs, thick and hot even through fabric. Your hips jerk before you can stop them, and his hands clamp around you with a groan.
“Shit.” His forehead drops to your collarbone. “Do that again and I’m gonna embarrass myself.”
That should make you smug. Powerful. Instead it makes you needy in a way you did not agree to. You roll your hips again, smaller this time, dragging your bare pussy over the soaked fabric of his trunks. The friction is rough enough to make your mouth fall open. His hands grip your ass, helping and stopping at once, torn between instincts.
“Baby,” he says, warning and pleading in the same breath.
The word feeds something awful in you. You do it again.
Bucky’s head tips back, throat working, eyes squeezed shut for half a second. This beautiful, irritating man who looked away all day now looks as if your body might actually kill him. Good. Maybe balance exists.
“You like this?” you ask, and your voice is shaky, but the question still has a little bite. “Or are you going to look at the curtains?”
His eyes open.
You may have gone too far.
His hand comes up and catches your jaw, not hard, but certain enough that your hips still. “Say it again.”
Your lips part. “What?”
“What you said outside.”
The pool steps return all at once. Wet stone. His hand at your waist. Your own stupid voice, bitter and wounded.
“You don’t have to touch me longer than necessary,” you murmur, quieter now.
Bucky’s jaw flexes. His thumb strokes once along your lower lip, and the tenderness of it makes the shame worse somehow. “That.” His other hand presses at your lower back, bringing you down against him again. “Every time you thought that today, I want it back.”
You have no idea what that means until he kisses you.
It is not careful now. It is deep, claiming, his tongue sliding into your mouth as his hand guides your hips over him. The wet fabric drags against your clit, and you whimper into the kiss, the sound swallowed by him immediately. He does it again, rolls you down, grinds you over the hard shape of his cock, and the pleasure is dirty and sharp, mixed with the faint scratch of his trunks and the slickness between your thighs.
“Long enough?” he mutters against your mouth.
You clutch at him, face burning. “Shut up.”
His hand slips between your bodies, fingers finding your clit with such sudden precision that your whole body jerks. He rubs slow, tight circles, using your wetness and the water still on your skin, watching your face from inches away.
“Answer me.”
You shake your head, pride making a brave final appearance before dying in combat. “No.”
“No?” His mouth brushes yours, and his fingers press a little harder. Your hips chase the touch, humiliating you on contact. “Still not long enough?”
You hate him. You love him. You want to bite his shoulder until he says your name wrong. “Bucky…”
“That’s not an answer.”
His fingers dip lower, sliding through your folds, and his eyes go heavy at what he finds. “Fuck, sweetheart.” His voice drops into something rough and almost disbelieving. “You’re soaked.”
“Pool,” you manage, immediately ashamed of yourself.
He laughs then, a low sound against your mouth. “Yeah? Pool did this?”
His fingers push inside you, two at once, thick enough that your head drops forward to his shoulder. The stretch steals whatever joke you had left. Your hands claw at his back, and he groans like that hurts in the best possible way.
“Guess I owe the pool an apology,” he murmurs, pumping his fingers slowly. “Been mad at it all day for touching you more than I got to.”
Your laugh breaks into a moan. The sound is embarrassing, open, too needy, and he reacts to it with a thrust of his hips up against your bare thigh, his cock hard and trapped in wet fabric.
“Bucky,” you whimper, turning your face into his neck.
His fingers curl.
Your body goes liquid.
“There,” he breathes, and then seems to remember himself. “Yeah, right there?”
You nod into his skin, too far gone to be difficult.
“Use words.”
A sharp little pulse goes through you. He feels it. His laugh is quieter this time, almost awed.
“Oh, you like that.” His fingers press the same spot again, slow and deliberate, and his thumb finds your clit. “All that mouth at the pool, and now look at you.”
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.” His mouth moves to your ear, breath hot over wet skin. “You hated thinking I didn’t want you.”
That one splits you open more than his fingers.
You try to lift your head, but he holds you where you are, face tucked into his neck, body in his lap, nowhere to go but the truth.
“You hated me looking away,” he continues, quieter, filthy and tender in equal measure. “Hated Wilson saying you looked good because you wanted it from me. Hated that I sat there like an idiot when all you wanted was for me to come over and put my hands on you.”
Your thighs shake around his. The pleasure is building faster than you expected, pulled tighter by every word. He is too accurate. Too close. Too deep, and it is only his fingers, which makes you dizzy with terror over what the rest of him will do.
“I didn’t…” You try. Fail. “I didn’t want…”
He kisses under your ear. “Liar.”
“Bucky.”
“You did.” His hand around your waist slides up your back, holding you as his fingers fuck into you a little harder. “You wanted me jealous. You wanted me to see you. You wanted me to stop acting like a saint and do something about it.”
Your nails dig into him.
“There,” he says, sounding pleased and ruined all at once. “That one.”
You are close. Horribly close. Hips rocking into his hand now, your body making choices your pride would never sign off on. His thumb rubs your clit steadily, and his fingers hit that same spot until your vision goes soft at the edges. You bite down on his shoulder to keep from being too loud, and he makes a strangled sound, hips bucking under you.
“God, do that again.”
You do. Harder.
His fingers slip out of rhythm for one second, and that small loss almost makes you sob. “No, no, no, don’t stop.”
Bucky’s hand tightens at your back. “I’ve got you.”
“You keep saying things like that,” you gasp, words breaking as he finds the rhythm again.
“Yeah?”
“It’s annoying.”
He kisses your temple, and the sweetness of it almost tips you over. “Cum, then complain.”
That should not work.
It works.
The orgasm rolls through you hard enough to make your mouth open against his shoulder without sound at first. Then the sound comes, muffled into his skin, high and wrecked. Your hips grind down on his fingers, chasing every last pull of it, and Bucky talks you through it in a rough whisper that barely sounds like him anymore.
“That’s it, baby. Fuck, there you go. Just needed someone to touch you right, huh? Needed me to stop being stupid and put my hands on you.”
Your body shakes in his lap, every muscle loose and trembling. His fingers slow but do not leave right away. He lets you ride the last of it, forehead pressed to the side of your head, breath rough in your ear. The patio music is still going somewhere far away. Someone outside cheers. Maybe a game. Maybe a toast. The world is criminally unaware that you have just collapsed into a man you were pretending to hate this morning.
Then Bucky starts to pull his fingers free.
You whine.
The sound is pathetic. Immediate. You wish to file a complaint against yourself.
Bucky freezes, then laughs under his breath. “Greedy.”
“Shut up.”
His fingers slide out fully, wet and obscene between you. You mean to look away. You fail. He watches your face as he brings them to his mouth, licking them clean with a slow, dirty satisfaction that makes your cunt clench around nothing.
His eyes darken. “Saw that.”
“You see too much.”
“Not enough.” His hands go to your hips again, turning you carefully and laying you back on the bed before you can protest. The white sheets are instantly doomed, damp under your body, but Tony’s laundry issues are not your ministry. Bucky kneels between your thighs, still in his trunks, cock straining hard beneath the clinging fabric. “I’m making up for it.”
A nervous laugh leaves you as your head sinks into the pillows. “By staring at my vagina?”
His brows lift.
Your face burns. “Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your face again.”
“My face likes you.”
“Your face is an idiot.”
“Yeah.” He presses a kiss to your knee, then lower, then lower again, hands sliding under your thighs to open you wider. “It’s got company.”
The first touch of his mouth between your legs almost makes you levitate.
He does not ease in. Not really. Maybe he means to, maybe he has some beautiful plan involving patience, but the second his tongue parts you, his control seems to go with it. His hands hook around your thighs, dragging you closer to his mouth, and the sound he makes against your pussy is so filthy you cover your mouth with one hand.
Bucky stops.
Your eyes fly open.
He lifts his head, mouth wet, eyes furious in the best way. “Move your hand.”
Your fingers loosen over your lips. “They’ll hear.”
“Let them hear the pool wasn’t the reason you left.”
Your whole body clenches. He sees that too. Obviously. Curse him and his newly unleashed observational skills.
“Bucky,” you whisper, scandalized.
He kisses your inner thigh, close enough to make you twitch. “Move it, baby.”
Slowly, your hand drops to the sheets.
He smiles against your skin. “Thank you.”
Then his mouth is back on you, and gratitude becomes a weapon. He licks into you with slow, messy strokes at first, tasting you like he has been denied water and blames you personally. His tongue drags from your entrance to your clit, lingering there until your thighs tense around his head. Then he does it again. Again. Learning with horrifying speed what makes your hips jerk, what makes your fingers twist in the sheets, what makes your mouth form his name without quite saying it.
You understand, distantly, that he is good at this.
Of course he is. Of course Bucky Barnes eats pussy like he has a vendetta against sanity. Of course the man who looked away all afternoon now has his face buried between your thighs with a concentration that feels almost insulting. Like he is determined to win an argument you did not realize your body had started.
His metal hand slides up your stomach, cool against heated skin, holding you down when your hips lift. The contrast makes you moan. His eyes flick up. He does it again, palm pressing lightly between your ribs as his tongue circles your clit.
“Please,” you breathe, though you have no idea what you are asking for.
Bucky hums into you.
Your back arches. The hum vibrates through every over-sensitive nerve he has already ruined, and your hands shoot to his hair. He lets you pull. Encourages it, maybe, with another wet, open-mouthed suck that makes your thighs clamp around his ears.
“Sorry,” you gasp, trying to loosen your grip.
He pulls back just enough to speak, lips shining. “Do it again.”
“What?”
His teeth scrape your thigh. “Pull my hair again.”
You stare at him, then obey with trembling fingers.
His eyes close for a second, and the expression on his face is so openly pleased that something inside you folds. This is him. Not the cold look-away version from the patio. Not the teasing version with everyone watching. This man, wet-haired and greedy, kneeling between your legs like he has found religion and plans to be terrible about it.
He lowers his mouth again, and this time you pull when his tongue presses inside you.
Bucky groans into your cunt.
The sound is enough to make your hips jerk up against his mouth. He holds you down, but barely. Like he wants the fight. Like every needy movement makes him worse. His tongue fucks into you, then slips back to your clit, alternating until you cannot predict anything except pleasure. It grows too quickly. Your last orgasm has left you sensitive, swollen, every touch brighter than it should be.
“Bucky, I can’t,” you gasp, then hate yourself because you absolutely can and probably will.
He lifts his head, but keeps his thumb moving over your clit in lazy, devastating circles. “Can’t what?”
“Again. I can’t…”
His mouth curves, wet and wicked. “You can.”
“You have too much confidence.”
“I have evidence.” His thumb presses a little harder, and your legs shake. “Look at you.”
“No.”
“Yeah.” He leans up over you, thumb still moving, mouth hovering above yours. You can smell yourself on him. The realization makes you clench so hard his eyes drop. “You gonna get shy now? After soaking my fingers? After grinding all over me like you were trying to ruin my life?”
“I was making a point.”
“You made it.” His lips brush yours. “Very persuasive.”
You mean to roll your eyes. He kisses you before you can, pushing the taste of yourself into your mouth while his thumb keeps working your clit. The kiss makes it dirtier. More intimate. Your hand wraps around his wrist, but you don’t pull him away. You hold him there, grinding up in tiny helpless motions as the pressure builds again.
Bucky’s mouth leaves yours only to speak against it. “You’re gonna cum on my hand, then I’m gonna fuck you. If that’s what you want.”
If. Somehow that word remains. A door, not a trap. It makes your eyes sting again, which is so deeply inconvenient while naked with a man’s hand between your legs.
“I want it,” you say, voice shaking.
His forehead touches yours. “Yeah?”
“Yes.” Your grip tightens around his wrist. “I want you. I wanted you all day. I wanted you before today, and you were horrible and confusing and shirtless, which was unnecessary, and I hate that you looked away, and I hate that I cared, and I want you to fuck me so badly I can’t think about any of it.”
Bucky stares at you.
For a moment you regret speaking. Then his mouth crashes into yours, and regret becomes impractical.
His fingers replace his thumb, sliding down and pushing into you again, three this time, the stretch sharper after his mouth. You gasp into the kiss. He swallows it, pumps his fingers deep, heel of his hand grinding against your clit. The pleasure turns immediate and rough, your body already primed by his mouth and his words and the unbearable fact of being wanted after hours of believing the opposite.
“That’s it,” he mutters against your cheek. “There’s my mean girl. Thought I lost you under all that pouting.”
You whimper and slap weakly at his shoulder. “I was wounded.”
“You were jealous.”
“You were avoidant.”
“I was hard enough to see God.”
A shocked laugh bursts out of you, then breaks as his fingers curl. “That’s vulgar.”
“You asked for honesty.”
“I did not ask for theology.”
He laughs into your neck, and somehow the warm sound mixed with the filthy rhythm of his hand tips you closer. You clutch at his shoulders, then his hair, then the sheets. Nothing helps. The orgasm comes slower this time, dragged out of you with cruel patience. Your thighs tense, stomach pulling tight, and Bucky feels the change before you can warn him.
“Yeah, baby. Give me that one too.” His mouth presses near your ear, voice a wrecked whisper. “Need it. Need to feel you cum before I get inside you.”
Need. From him. Bucky Barnes needing anything from you.
Your body gives in.
The second orgasm is messier, wetter, less contained. You cry out before you can bite it back, hips bucking into his hand, and Bucky groans like the sound goes straight through him. His fingers keep moving, slower but deep, dragging the pleasure until you are shaking and trying to push at his wrist.
“Too much,” you gasp.
He stops at once.
The loss makes you whine again, and he laughs softly, kissing your cheek, then your jaw, then your mouth with absurd sweetness for someone who just fingered you into temporary stupidity.
“You’re impossible,” he murmurs.
“Your fault.”
“Yeah.” His hand smooths over your thigh, gentle now. “I’m starting to like that answer.”
You open your eyes. He is above you, wet hair falling forward, mouth swollen from kissing and eating you, eyes on your face with such naked affection that it scares you more than the hunger did.
Affection is hard. Desire has a script. Affection looks at you afterward.
Your hand lifts before you can stop it, touching his cheek. He turns slightly into your palm. That tiny movement ruins you.
“You really wanted me?” you ask, hating the softness in your voice.
His expression tightens. “All day.”
“Before today?”
He presses a kiss to your palm. “Yeah.”
“How long?”
A pause.
The room becomes too quiet again, but this silence is not empty. It is full of him deciding whether to lie. He does not.
“Long enough to act stupid about it.”
“That could be any amount of time.”
“Months.”
Your chest squeezes. “Months?”
“Maybe longer.”
“You’re terrible at flirting.”
“I panicked,” he says again, like that explains the whole tragedy of him. Maybe it does.
You laugh softly. He smiles this time, real and quick, then kisses you. The kiss starts gentle, then deepens when your legs wrap around his waist. His cock presses against you through his trunks, and the teasing drag makes both of you go still.
He looks down between your bodies. “I need these off.”
“Finally, a smart idea.”
His hands go to the waistband, then pause. “Condom?”
Reality returns in a less catastrophic way. Important. Practical. You gesture vaguely toward the side table, then remember this is Tony’s guest room, not a hotel minibar for sex supplies. “Unless Tony keeps them next to the complimentary existential dread, I don’t…”
Bucky drops his forehead to your shoulder with a pained groan.
A laugh bubbles out of you, helpless and mean. “Very prepared seduction, Barnes.”
“I was supposed to be ignoring you by the pool.”
“You did great.”
He bites your shoulder lightly. You yelp, then laugh harder. His own laugh shakes against you, warm and frustrated, and the absurdity of it makes the room feel human again.
Then he lifts his head. “I have one in my wallet.”
You stop laughing.
His brows draw together. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re judging.”
“I am judging.”
“I’m a grown man.”
“With pool-party condoms?”
“One condom. Singular. Emergency.”
“What emergency did you anticipate?”
He gives you a look. “Apparently this one.”
You should make another joke. You truly should. But the thought of him having one, of this actually happening, drains humor out of you and leaves want in its place. “Wallet,” you say.
Bucky’s eyes darken again.
He climbs off the bed, and the loss of his body makes you cold for exactly three seconds before he turns toward the chair where his discarded shirt must be absent, then remembers his wallet is out by the pool with his things. His face changes into genuine despair.
You clap a hand over your mouth.
“Don’t,” he warns.
“You left your emergency outside?”
“I didn’t plan to need it indoors.”
You dissolve into laughter. It is quiet, desperate, half muffled, but laughter all the same. Bucky stares at you, then shakes his head, smiling despite himself. He looks younger like this. Less impossible. Still shirtless and wet and hard in his swim trunks, which does complicate the innocence.
“I’ll go,” he says.
“You are not going outside like that.”
His gaze drops to the obvious tent in his trunks. “Fair.”
You look around the room and spot a folded robe near the bathroom door, white and plush. Perfectly Tony. “Robe.”
“I’m not wearing Stark’s sex robe.”
“Guest robe.”
“Same thing.”
“You want the condom or a philosophical debate?”
Bucky points at you. “Stay there.”
You sink back into the pillows, naked and grinning like an idiot. “Where would I go?”
“Knowing you? Window.”
“Only if things get worse.”
He grabs the robe, pulls it on with visible resentment, and the sight of Bucky Barnes in a plush white guest robe with wet hair and a furious erection is so absurdly beautiful that you almost cry. He catches your face and pauses at the door.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He narrows his eyes. “That smile says something.”
“It says hurry.”
That works. He leaves, closing the door behind him.
The second he is gone, you become aware of yourself again. Naked on white sheets. Swimsuit on the floor. Body cooling, thighs damp, mouth swollen. The laughter fades slowly, leaving a trembling little silence behind it.
This is real.
Bucky wanted you. Bucky is coming back. Bucky went to fetch a condom wearing Tony’s guest robe like some obscene, damp ghost of poor planning.
Your hand presses over your stomach. Not hiding now. Just grounding. It feels different under your own palm after his mouth, his hands, his eyes. Still yours. Still soft in places. Still carrying every insecurity from the bathroom mirror. But his wanting has touched it now, and you hate how much that helps. Hate how badly you needed someone else’s hunger to quiet the awful little voice in your head. Maybe you can work on that later. Maybe growth can wait until after orgasms.
Voices rise in the hall.
You freeze.
Sam: “Barnes, why the hell are you wearing a robe?”
Bucky, low and deadly: “Move.”
Tony, delighted somewhere farther away: “That is Egyptian cotton, by the way.”
Natasha laughs. “Let him live.”
Sam again, audibly grinning: “Is there a fire?”
Bucky says something too low to hear.
A beat of silence.
Then Sam barks out, “Oh my god.”
Your soul exits again, does a lap, returns out of morbid curiosity.
The door opens. Bucky steps in, face red, jaw tight, wallet in hand, robe still tied around him. He closes the door and locks it this time.
You stare.
He points at you again. “Don’t.”
“I said nothing.”
“You’re laughing with your whole face.”
“I would never.”
He stalks back toward the bed, tugging at the robe tie with enough aggression to threaten the cotton’s lineage. “Wilson knows.”
“Oh no.”
“Tony knows.”
“Tony knew before we did.”
“Steve looked proud.”
That breaks you. You roll onto your side, laughing into the pillow. Bucky tosses the wallet onto the bed and grabs your ankle, pulling you back toward him. The movement turns your laughter into a gasp. The robe falls open as he kneels on the mattress, and there he is, absurdity gone in a single second, his body over yours again, desire returning like a hand around your throat.
“Laughing at me?” he asks.
“Yes.”
His hand slides up your calf, over your knee, spreading your leg aside. “That’s brave.”
“I’m very brave.”
“You slipped twice today.”
“Physically brave and spatially cursed.”
His mouth twitches. He bends down and kisses the inside of your knee, then the thigh, and the laughter fades into a softer sound. “You okay?”
The question is quiet. It stops the teasing better than any command could. You look down at him, fingers resting in his wet hair.
“Yes,” you say. Then, more honest, “Nervous.”
His hand stills on your thigh. “About me?”
“About you seeing me.”
His face changes again, but he does not use any of the easy lines. No polished praise. No smooth answer. He moves up your body instead, covering you with his warmth, bracing one arm beside your head. His other hand cups your cheek, thumb damp against your skin.
“I see you,” he says. “I want you. Same sentence.”
Your throat tightens. “That’s unfairly effective.”
“Trying to be clear.”
“Terrible habit.”
His mouth brushes yours. “Can I keep seeing you?”
You nod. “Yeah.”
His lips press to your cheek, your jaw, your neck. “Can I keep touching you?”
Your legs part wider around him. “Yeah.”
His hand slides down between your bodies, and your hips lift when his fingers stroke through your folds again, gentle now, checking. Teasing. Both. “Can I fuck you?”
The bluntness sends a hot pulse through you. Your fingers tighten on his shoulders.
“Yes,” you breathe. “Please.”
Bucky’s eyes close for a beat, and when they open, patience is hanging by a thread.
The robe is shoved away. His trunks follow, dragged down his hips with a wet, clinging sound that would be funny if you had enough brain left. You do not. You are too busy staring. He is thick, heavy in his hand, flushed at the tip, and your mouth goes dry so fast it is almost comic.
Bucky notices. Naturally.
“Still judging my emergency condom?” he asks, tearing the foil with his teeth.
You look up at him. “Less now.”
“Thought so.”
The condom rolls on. His hand pumps once, twice, and your thighs press together around empty air. He sees that too, then settles between your legs and guides them open again. The head of his cock drags through your wetness, and both of you go quiet.
The first press against your entrance is almost too much.
He pauses there, forehead lowering to yours. “Tell me if you need slow.”
You hate that. You love that. You want to ruin him for it.
“I need you to stop talking like a responsible adult,” you whisper.
A short laugh leaves him, strained. “Sweetheart, I am hanging on by a thread.”
“Then stop hanging.”
His hips push forward.
The stretch is slow and full and immediate enough to make your mouth fall open. Bucky watches your face as he enters you, jaw clenched, breath breaking through his nose. He gives you the first inch, then another, then stops when your nails dig into his arms.
“Okay?”
You nod too quickly, body caught between ache and hunger. “More.”
His control slips for half a second. His hips roll deeper, and the sound that leaves both of you is ugly and perfect. He is bigger than his fingers, thicker than your imagination had kindly prepared you for, filling you in a way that makes thought stagger. Your legs wrap around his waist. His hand grips the sheet beside your head.
“Fuck,” he breathes, almost helpless. “You feel…”
You wait for the line. Pretty. Tight. Perfect. Something dirty and easy.
He lowers his face to your neck. “I’m gonna lose my mind.”
That is better.
You clench around him, and his hips jerk. His teeth press into your shoulder. “Do that again and this ends fast.”
“Maybe I want that.”
He lifts his head, eyes dark. “No, you don’t.”
Your body gives you away, warmth spreading under your skin. “Annoying.”
“You want me to take my time now.” He pulls out slightly, then pushes back in, slow enough that you feel every inch. “You wanted me to look, right? Wanted me to stop looking away?”
Your hands twist in the sheets.
He does it again, dragging the pleasure into something deep and almost unbearable. “I’m looking.”
You cannot answer. There is no room. He fills too much of you, his body heavy over yours, wet hair brushing your cheek, the scent of chlorine and him wrapped around every breath. His eyes hold your face as he starts a slow rhythm, each thrust smooth and deep, his mouth parting when you tighten around him.
“Bucky,” you moan, and his name sounds ruined.
His hand slips under your knee, hitching your leg higher. The angle changes, and his next thrust hits so deep your back bows off the bed. He groans, dropping his head to your shoulder.
“There?” he asks, already doing it again.
You nod, frantic. “There, please, there.”
“Yeah, baby.” His pace picks up, still controlled but rougher now, bed shifting under both of you. “Knew you’d sound pretty begging.”
Your face burns. “I’m not begging.”
He thrusts harder.
The words vanish.
“That sounded like begging.” His mouth presses to your cheek, deceptively sweet while his hips drive into you with enough force to make your fingers claw at his back. “Pool made you mouthy. My cock’s fixing it.”
The filth of it makes you clench.
Bucky laughs, but it breaks halfway into a groan. “Shit, you like that.”
“You’re so smug.”
“I’m inside you,” he says, breath hot against your mouth. “I earned a little.”
You would argue, but his hand slides between you and finds your clit. The first touch makes you jolt. After his mouth and his fingers, you are too sensitive, every nerve overfed and greedy. He rubs tight circles as he fucks you, watching your expression collapse.
“Oh, that’s it.” His voice turns thick, affectionate in the dirtiest possible way. “There’s my girl.”
My girl.
You fall apart a little just hearing it.
His eyes sharpen. “Yeah? That one?”
“Bucky…”
“My girl,” he repeats, and his hips hit deeper, harder. “Mine to look at. Mine to touch. Mine to pull out of the pool when she’s trying to make me jealous.”
You shake your head, but your body is a liar and both of you know it.
“No?” His thumb presses harder on your clit. “You didn’t like me jumping in after you?”
“You looked ridiculous,” you gasp.
“Yeah, well. You looked wet and half naked and mad at me. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
A laugh escapes you, then turns into a moan when he rolls his hips. He smiles against your mouth, kissing the sound away, and for a few seconds the rhythm becomes messy. Kissing, thrusting, breathing into each other, his hand working between you, your nails leaving half-moon marks in his shoulders. No clean choreography. No grace. Just damp skin, white sheets, the slap of his hips against yours growing louder, the ridiculous fear that someone outside might hear and the worse realization that you want them to know he came after you.
You turn your face into the pillow to muffle yourself.
Bucky catches your jaw and pulls you back. “No.”
“They’ll hear.”
“Good.”
“Bucky.”
His eyes are dark, almost feverish. “Spent all day watching you think I didn’t want you. Let them hear me prove it.”
Your orgasm rises so fast it scares you. It starts low, tightening through your stomach, then spreads until your thighs tremble around his waist. He feels it. His thrusts lose some smoothness, turning heavier, more desperate.
“You close?”
You nod, helpless.
“Say it.”
“I’m close.”
His mouth brushes yours. “Ask me.”
Your eyes open. “What?”
“Ask me to make you cum.”
The request should annoy you. It does. It also sends pleasure twisting sharply through your body, so your irritation lacks credibility.
“You’re impossible,” you whimper.
“Ask.”
His hips slow.
That is evil.
You grab at his shoulders. “Don’t slow down.”
“Ask me, baby.”
A second passes, filled with the obscene pressure of him buried deep and almost still, his thumb barely moving over your clit. You glare at him with whatever strength remains.
“Please,” you say, hating how breathless it is. Loving how his face changes. “Please make me cum.”
Bucky groans, and the restraint goes.
His hips drive into you hard enough to shove you up the bed, one arm hooking under your back to keep you close. His thumb works your clit faster, and his mouth moves over your jaw, your cheek, your lips, wherever he can reach while he fucks you. He is talking now, rough and uneven, less like performance and more like words escaping under pressure.
“Wanted this so bad. Wanted you so bad, sweetheart. Sitting out there in that fucking swimsuit, looking at me like you wanted to scratch my eyes out. Thought I was gonna snap when you smiled at Sam. Thought I was gonna drag you inside when you said I didn’t have to touch you. Stupid thing to say to me. Like I haven’t been thinking about putting my hands on you for months.”
Months. Again. The word breaks over you with the thrusts, with the pressure, with the hard heat of him inside you.
Your orgasm hits with his name in your mouth.
It is bigger this time, deeper, pulled from every place he touched and every place he looked. You cry out, hips lifting into him, cunt clenching around his cock so hard his rhythm stutters. Bucky curses against your throat, fucking you through it with short, rough thrusts that make the pleasure keep sparking long after the first wave should have ended.
“That’s it,” he groans. “That’s it, baby. Fuck, you feel so good when you cum.”
You cannot answer. Your body is trembling too hard, arms wrapped around him, face pressed into his neck as he loses the last of his rhythm. His thrusts turn desperate, deeper and less controlled, and something about that undoes you almost as much as your own release. Bucky, who spent all day looking away, is now buried inside you and shaking apart over it.
“Where?” he rasps.
The condom. Practicality. Again, somehow.
“Inside,” you breathe. “You have the condom, inside, please.”
He makes a sound against your skin, broken and almost grateful. His hips slam once, twice, then bury deep as he comes. His whole body tenses over yours, breath caught against your shoulder, hands gripping you like he needs somewhere to put the force of it. You feel the pulse of him through the condom, feel the weight of him, the shudder that runs across his back under your hands.
Then he softens by degrees.
His forehead rests against your shoulder. His breathing is rough, warm, damp over your skin. Your own body feels boneless, wrung out and too sensitive, thighs still locked around his waist like they have not received news of the ending.
Outside, someone cheers again.
Bucky huffs a laugh into your neck. “If that’s about us, I’m moving to Siberia.”
You laugh weakly, fingers combing through the wet hair at his nape. “That was my plan.”
“We can carpool.”
“After you get off me. You’re heavy.”
He lifts his head, affronted and beautiful. “You wound me.”
“You crushed me.”
“You wrapped around me.”
“You were available.”
His smile comes slowly this time, soft and disbelieving, and the sight hurts in a new way. Not bad. Just big. Too big for a guest room during a pool party. Too big for a body still buzzing from sex.
He kisses you once, gentle and quick. “I’m gonna move.”
You make a deeply embarrassing sound of protest before you can stop it.
Bucky pauses. The smugness returns in miniature. “Yeah?”
“Don’t start.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your face is speaking.”
“My face has been through a lot today.”
He eases out carefully, and even that makes you wince. His hand strokes your thigh in apology, and the tenderness of it makes you look away. He handles the condom, ties it off, finds a trash bin in the bathroom, washes his hands. Normal things. Human things. Meanwhile you lie in Tony Stark’s guest bed naked, damp, and fucked so thoroughly that your bones feel rearranged.
When Bucky returns, he grabs the towel from the chair and wipes gently at the wetness on your thighs. The care makes your throat tighten.
“You don’t have to do that,” you murmur, then immediately regret the phrasing.
His eyes lift.
Right.
You both hear the echo.
This time, he does not get angry. He leans down and kisses the inside of your knee. “I want to.”
The answer settles over the old wound quietly.
You nod, unable to make a joke fast enough.
He cleans you with warm water from the bathroom after that, careful between your legs while you try not to squirm from sensitivity. Then he finds another towel, pats the sheets around you with the resigned air of a man who knows Tony will make comments for the rest of his life. Your swimsuit remains on the floor. He picks it up, holds it between two fingers, and gives it an unreadable look.
You lift your head. “Don’t insult it. We’ve all grown.”
Bucky’s mouth twitches. “I owe it an apology.”
“You owe me an apology.”
“I gave you one.”
“I want another.”
He climbs back onto the bed beside you, still naked, shameless in a way that should be illegal. The mattress dips under his weight. “For what?”
“For being weird at the pool.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For looking away.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For making me think you hated it.”
His face softens in that unbearable way again. He reaches for you, then pauses until you shift closer yourself. Once you do, his arm slides around you, pulling you against his chest. His skin is warm now, less wet, still smelling faintly of chlorine. “I’m sorry.”
You rest your cheek against him, listening to his heart. It is beating fast. Not hammering. You refuse to give it dramatic language. Just fast enough to comfort you.
“And for making me feel like I needed sam to tell me I looked nice,” you add, quieter.
His arm tightens.
A few seconds pass. Not empty. Not awkward. Full of that sentence sitting between you and breathing.
“You looked beautiful,” he says, voice low. “You looked so good I forgot how to act like a person. And that’s on me, not you.”
Your eyes sting again, which is becoming repetitive and rude. “You need to stop saying decent things after sex. It’s confusing.”
His lips press to your hair. “Would it help if I said something indecent?”
“Yes.”
“Your thighs almost killed me.”
A laugh bursts out of you, wet and startled. “Bucky.”
“I’m serious. National threat.”
“You’re so stupid.”
He kisses your forehead, smiling against your skin. “Yeah, but you like me.”
You go still for half a second.
He feels it.
The words sit there, too close to another word neither of you has touched yet. Like. Want. Months. My girl. All safer than the one with teeth. Bucky’s hand moves slowly over your back, giving you somewhere to put the panic.
“You like me too,” he says, softer, almost cautious beneath the tease.
You close your eyes. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Don’t get greedy.”
His chest moves under your cheek with a quiet laugh. “Too late.”
A knock hits the door.
Both of you freeze.
Tony’s voice comes through the wood, bright with theatrical politeness. “As the owner of this house, its Egyptian cotton robe, and several traumatized guests, I would like to announce that dinner part two is happening in twenty minutes. Clothing encouraged. Applause optional.”
You bury your face in Bucky’s chest.
Bucky sighs. “Go away, Stark.”
“Gladly. Also, Wilson owes me fifty dollars. Carry on.”
Footsteps retreat.
Your face is burning so badly it may light the bed on fire. “I hate everyone.”
Bucky’s hand slides possessively over your hip. “Want me to get your clothes?”
The thought of walking back outside in the swimsuit after everything makes you want to dissolve. But then again, the old shame does not bite quite the same now. The swimsuit is still a damp heap on the floor. Your body is still your body. Your friends are still awful. Bucky is still a confusing, broad disaster.
Only now he has seen you. Touched you. Wanted you. Said it clearly enough that even your mean little brain has to work harder to ruin it.
“Eventually,” you say.
He hums. “Eventually sounds good.”
“You can’t keep me in Tony’s guest room forever.”
“No,” he agrees, hand moving lazily over your side. “But I can try for another ten minutes.”
“That’s ambitious.”
His mouth finds your neck, and the smile against your skin is warm enough to melt whatever was left of you. “I can be patient.”
“You said that before.”
“I lied.”
You laugh, and he kisses the sound before it can get away.
