avengers!bucky seems to hate you, and you find his hatred for you kinda hot
cw: 18+ minors dni — fem!reader, avengers!reader, frenemies to lovers, reader is lowkey a freak, suggestive content
bucky barnes masterlist ༻ navi
you honestly shouldn’t find bucky’s hatred for you hot.
the way he sighs when you walk into a room, or the way he grumbles under his breath when you’re both paired together on a mission. the way his eyebrows furrow and his lips pinch together in a thin line, just makes you want to climb his big body like a tree and maybe that thought is crazy, but god forbid a girl is attracted to a six foot something man with massive biceps.
you let out a proud grin when you manage to sneak your leg under bucky’s and slam his back onto the mat.
you see the way bucky clenches his jaw, sitting up with a frown.
“awh dont be upset that i kicked your ass while sparring… again.” you let out a high pitched laugh, running away as soon as bucky jumps to his feet.
“you piss me the fuck off.” bucky grumbles, going to the side to take a sip of his water.
“i know.” you shrug, coming closer to him since he’s made it obvious that he’s not going to chase after you like last time.
“i don’t know why though.” you sigh, sitting down on the bench beside him. “i really don’t do anything bad to you, i just… exist and to you that is somehow a problem.”
you hear bucky let out a long, loud sigh, before he gets up. “cmon let’s go again.” he says, cracking his neck.
you roll your eyes, realising that he just completely ignored everything you just said.
this happens all the time and now it’s starting to get annoying. every time you try and have a normal conversation with him that doesn’t include cussing or cursing, he ignores you.
you stand up crossing your arms. “no.”
“no?” bucky repeats, his eyebrow raising.
“no.” you say again. “im done. im always nice to you, i never cause any problems for you and you. you’re just ugh.” you throw your hands in the air because you can’t exactly tell him that even though he’s never once said a positive thing about you, you still want him to rail you into the fucking mattress.
you let out a frustrated sigh, picking up your water bottle and walking out of the training room.
before you can even get close to the door, you feel a hand wrap around your wrist and pull you back.
you gasp, when you’re spun around so you’re facing bucky. bucky who’s jaw is clenching so damn hard, you’re surprised he still has his teeth in his mouth.
“wha—mmph” you eyes widen in surprise, when bucky roughly crashes his lips against yours. your eyes quickly close, when you feel him push you against the nearest wall, his hands sliding around your waist. you kiss him back more fiercely, pushing your tongue in his mouth and nibbling on his bottom lip. he groans, one of his hands wandering down to your ass, giving it a light squeeze before he pulls his mouth away.
he pants, resting his forehead on yours. “that’s fucking why i can’t speak to you. or look at you. or be any fucking where near you, because everytime you smirk at me, or look at me with those damn ‘fuck me’ eyes, all i can think about is bending you over the nearest fucking surface.” and with that, he turns around and walks out of the training room.
for the first time ever, you’re left speechless.
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AN: hehe just a lil something until i publish my main fic 💋
⭑Prompt.ᐟ "You should be grateful I chose you. No one else is worthy of my touch." For @theoracleofsin's Summer of Sin event ꨄ︎
⭑Summary.ᐟ Needing to feed for sustenance, you capture a man who proceeds to bargain his way out of your clutches.
⭑Warnings.ᐟ Slight power imbalance, reader can be seen as a dom, a few mentions of blood, reader has Steve alllll tied up, no use of y/n, no descriptors used for reader except she has fanged teeth, open ended
⭑Word Count.ᐟ 500
⭑Phoenix Chirps.ᐟ This event seemed like so much fun when it came across my dash!! I can't promise I'll do every prompt, but a few of them sparked some things, and with a small word count it allows me to practice just a bit in the darker fics. A quick note about our vampire reader - I do imagine her like a Twilight vampire in that she got turned a long time ago, but stays the age she was turned. In reader's case, that was when she was in her late 20s. I didn't tag age gap, mostly because I don't believe there is one, but lowkey let me know if I need to add it haha. Okay, enough yapping Aly...
"Stop struggling handsome," you tsked, running a dark painted fingernail along the ties holding your latest victim to the table, who was now waking up to realize just what had occurred. Fight or flight senses going into overdrive that were of no use when cornered by someone who had done this for hundreds of years.
Propping your elbows on the edge of the cool metal, you got to eye level with the man who unknowingly walked into your trap.
The veins in his neck you longed to feed from bulging as he tried to fight a way out of the straps. A futile, desperate move of prey when cornered by a predator. "This isn't how it was supposed to go," he lamented, voice hoarse from both no use and likely dehydration.
And you couldn't have that.
"No?" you pouted in exaggeration, settling your temple on a closed fist while bringing a glass of water with a straw to his lips. "And how was this meant to go?"
His face turned away, lips pursing in refusal at the offering.
"Now we can do this the hard way or the easy way," you sighed, grabbing his chin, the ease of which you could prop his mouth open showing in his wide blinking eyes. Like he'd never before been used to someone being stronger than him.
"Though the hard way is my favorite," you whispered in his ear as he drank the water.
He sighed deeply once finished, the ties creaking slightly in protest. "What even is this?" he grumbled. "How did I get here?"
Standing to your full height, you began rummaging through the pockets of his jacket, nosiness getting the better of you. "Don't you remember hitting on me in the grocery store? After we exchanged numbers I couldn't get the smell of your blood out of my head."
His expression morphed as the memories came back, eyes closing like he was pleading with some higher being. "So you kidnapped me because my - my blood smelled good? Are you a fucking vampire?"
"Yes! Good job," you said warmly, pulling out a wallet.
"Brendan?" wrinkling your nose at the ID enclosed. "You told me your name was Steve."
He sighed, shifting again in an attempt to check for weak points - of which, he would find none. "I go by Steve."
"I see," you hummed, hopping onto the table and settling into his right side. "Well, Steve, since you're such a smart boy and figured out what I am, surely you know what comes next."
"Wait! Wait…I can help you," he pleaded, the tremors of his body increasing.
The sharp tips of fanged teeth grazed the smooth skin of his neck, desperate to finally sink in. "Don't be scared, it doesn't hurt at all…" you whispered, snuggling in closer. "Most people tell me they're grateful I chose them at the end."
"What if you didn't have to do all of this though?" Steve bargained. "I can bring you people to feed on."
Not the heavy, lonely kind that used to settle over the apartment before Bucky learned how to exist in peace, but a soft, fragile quiet. The kind that feels earned. The kind that makes you instinctively hold your breath so you don’t disturb it.
Sunlight filters through the curtains in thin golden stripes, stretching across the bed and warming your bare shoulder. For a moment, you let yourself stay there, cocooned in the warmth, in the stillness.
Then you hear it.
A faint, sleepy babble. Followed by a hushed, familiar voice.
“Hey, hey… easy there, sweetheart. You’re okay.”
Your chest tightens instantly.
You sit up slowly, pushing the covers back, careful not to make the mattress creak. The bedroom door is cracked open, and through it, you can see the hallway—just enough to catch a glimpse of broad shoulders and dark hair.
Bucky.
He’s standing just outside the nursery, one large hand braced against the doorframe like he needs the support. The other arm is cradling your daughter against his chest, her tiny body bundled in soft cotton pajamas with little yellow ducks on them.
She’s wide awake and it's barely seven in the morning.
“She’s got your timing,” you murmur, voice still thick with sleep as you pad quietly toward them.
Bucky glances up at the sound of your voice, and the look on his face—God, it gets you every time.
Soft. A little tired. Completely, utterly in love.
“There you are,” he says, just above a whisper, like speaking too loudly might shatter the moment. “Was gonna let you sleep.”
You lean into his side, resting your head briefly against his shoulder before peeking down at your daughter. She blinks up at you with wide, curious eyes, her tiny fist tangled in the collar of Bucky’s shirt.
“Hi, baby,” you coo, brushing your fingers over her cheek. “You waking up early again, huh?”
She responds with a delighted little noise, kicking one leg against Bucky’s stomach.
He huffs a quiet laugh, adjusting his hold on her automatically. Effortlessly.
You remember when he was afraid to even touch her.
Now, he moves like he was made for this.
“She wouldn’t settle back down,” he explains softly. “Figured I’d walk her a bit. Didn’t want her cryin’ and wakin’ you.”
You hum, watching the way his thumb strokes absentminded circles along her back. The way his metal arm stays tucked close, careful, controlled, while his flesh hand does all the gentle work.
He still does that. Even now.
“You can wake me, Buck,” you say gently.
“I know.” He shrugs one shoulder. “Just… you do enough. Thought I could take this one.”
Your heart squeezes.
“You always take more than ‘one,’” you tease quietly.
His mouth twitches, almost a smile.
“She’s got lungs,” he mutters. “Didn’t think something that small could be that loud.”
As if on cue, your daughter lets out a happy squeal, waving her arms like she’s proving his point.
You both freeze.
Then you laugh—soft and breathy, trying not to encourage her too much.
“Okay, maybe she gets that from you,” you whisper.
“Me?” he scoffs, though it’s barely audible. “I was a perfect angel.”
“Mm. Sure you were.”
He shifts his weight, glancing back toward the nursery. “You wanna go back to bed? I got her.”
You hesitate.
There’s a part of you that wants to say yes—to curl back up under the covers and steal another hour of sleep. But then you look at him again.
At the way he’s holding her like she’s the most precious thing in the world.
At the quiet pride in his posture. The carefulness. The awe that still hasn’t faded, even months later.
You shake your head.
“No,” you say softly. “I wanna stay.”
His eyes flick back to yours, something warm settling in them.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He nods once, like that’s all he needs.
You reach out, gently smoothing down a tuft of your daughter’s hair. She grabs your finger instantly, her tiny hand impossibly warm and strong.
“She’s got you wrapped around her finger already,” you murmur.
Bucky snorts quietly. “Had me the second I heard her cry.”
Your throat tightens.
You remember that moment too.
The way he had stood beside the hospital bed, completely frozen, like he didn’t trust himself to move. Like one wrong step might break everything.
And then she cried.
And something in him just shifted.
“I didn’t think I’d be good at this,” he admits suddenly, voice lower now. More vulnerable. “Still don’t, some days.”
You look at him, really look at him.
At the man who survived a century of war and pain and came out the other side still capable of this kind of tenderness.
“You’re kidding, right?” you say softly.
He shakes his head, eyes dropping back to your daughter. “I just… I don’t wanna mess her up. Don’t wanna—” He cuts himself off, jaw tightening.
You step closer, pressing your palm gently to his chest.
“Hey,” you whisper. “Look at me.”
He does.
“You’re not him,” you say, firm but soft. “You’re not your past. You’re her dad.”
His breath catches.
“And you’re the best one she could’ve gotten.”
For a moment, he just stares at you.
Then his shoulders drop, tension easing in a way that tells you he needed to hear that more than he’ll ever admit.
“Yeah?” he murmurs.
“Yeah.”
Your daughter lets out another happy noise, like she’s agreeing.
Bucky huffs a quiet laugh, pressing a soft kiss to the top of her head.
“Guess that settles it,” he says.
You lean into him again, the three of you standing there in the soft morning light, wrapped in a kind of peace that feels almost surreal.
“C’mon,” you whisper after a moment. “Let’s get some coffee before she decides we’re done being quiet.”
He grins—really grins this time.
“Too late for that, I think.”
As if she understands, your daughter squeals again, louder this time.
Hii! I’ not entirely sure how to make req, but if its here,, id like to req a smit bucky fic— like imagine he’s js so into sneaking around with u in the tower!! size and breeding kink go brr i feel like thats so him. sneaking around w him and praying you dont get caught even when everyone else is already making smart comments ab ygs :3 🎠
. ୨୧ ݁ ꒰ 𝐃𝐎𝐍’𝐓 𝐆𝐄𝐓 𝐂𝐀𝐔𝐆𝐇𝐓 ⊹ . bucky x fem!reader. minors are prohibited from interacting.
𝔀arnings 18+ : explicit smut, no use of y/n, size kink, heavy breeding kink, semi-public sex/risk of getting caught, rough sex, unprotected sex, creampie, possessive dirty talk
𝓪uthor’s 𝓷ote : I LOOOVED THIS REQUEST!!! it was so much fun to write!!!!
The Tower was never truly quiet. Even at 2 am, faint hums from the labs, distant laughter from the common room, and the occasional clink of Steve’s shield being polished somewhere down the hall kept everything on edge. But that didn’t stop Bucky.
He had you pinned against the cool metal wall of the service stairwell on the twenty-third floor, one large hand clamped over your mouth while the other shoved your leggings down just enough. His breath was hot against your ear.
“Quiet, doll,” he growled, voice low and rough like gravel. “You know what happens if they hear us.”
You nodded frantically, heart hammering. The team had been dropping hints for weeks, Tony’s smirks, Nat’s knowing eyebrow raises, Sam’s not-so-subtle “get a room… or don’t, we all know you won’t” comments. But Bucky loved the risk. Loved dragging you into elevators between floors, fucking you stupid in supply closets, bending you over in the gym at dawn before anyone woke up. It all made him feral.
His metal fingers flexed on your hip as he freed himself from his sweatpants. God, he was huge, thick, heavy, the flushed head already leaking as it nudged against your soaked folds. Every time he pushed in, it felt like he was splitting you open in the best way.
“Fuck, you’re tight,” he hissed, sinking the first few inches in slow. Your eyes rolled back, a muffled whimper vibrating against his palm. “That’s it… take it. Take every fucking inch like you were made for me.”
You were dripping down your thighs already, legs shaking as he worked deeper. He bottomed out with a grunt, hips flush against your ass, stretching you so full you could barely breathe.
Bucky’s voice dropped even lower, filthy right against your ear. “Gonna fill this pretty pussy up. Breed you right here where anyone could walk in. You want that? Want me to pump you so full it leaks out for days? Want my baby growing in you while you try to act normal around the team?”
You clenched hard around him at his words, nodding desperately. The breeding talk always destroyed you. He knew it. He lived for it.
He started moving, deep punishing thrusts that made your toes curl. The wet slap of skin was obscenely loud in the stairwell, but he didn’t care. One hand stayed over your mouth, the other slid down to press on your lower belly, feeling the bulge of his cock moving inside you.
“Feel that? That’s me, doll. Ruining you for anyone else. Gonna breed you so deep you’ll be swollen with it. Walking around with my cum dripping down your legs while Steve asks you about mission reports.”
A door opened somewhere above you. Footsteps. Voices. Sam and Clint, arguing about pizza toppings. Bucky froze balls-deep, grinding slow and dirty, his hand tightening over your mouth as your eyes widened in panic.
“Shhh,” he breathed, lips brushing your neck. He rolled his hips in tiny circles, pressing right against that spot that made you see stars. “Don’t you dare make a sound while they’re right there.”
The footsteps faded. As soon as the door clicked shut again, Bucky lost it. He fucked you hard, fast, brutal strokes, metal arm wrapped around your waist to hold you up as your knees gave out.
“Such a good little slut for me,” he panted. “Taking my cock while the team’s wandering around. Gonna cum so deep in you. Knock you up right here.”
You came first, biting his palm to stay quiet, pussy fluttering and squeezing around his massive length. Bucky followed with a choked groan, burying himself to the hilt as he spilled. Thick, hot pulses of cum flooded you, rope after rope until you felt impossibly full, some already leaking out around where he stretched you.
He stayed inside you for a long moment, rocking gently, pushing his release deeper.
“Mine,” he whispered, pressing a surprisingly soft kiss to your temple. “All fucking mine.”
You barely had time to catch your breath before he was pulling your leggings back up, smirking at the way you wobbled.
“Better fix your face before we go back out there, doll. Can’t have them knowing I just bred my girl in the stairwell… again.”
As you stepped out onto the floor together, trying to look casual, Tony’s voice drifted from the couch without even looking up.
“Stairwell this time? Bold choice, Barnes. The vents are getting jealous.”
Bucky just grinned, metal hand possessively on your lower back, already thinking about round two in the elevator.
Summary: Bucky is ready to take the next step in your relationship. Which means buying a ring, and talking to your father, which are almost equally terrifying ventures.
Word Count: 3k
Content: fluff, smut (18+ MDNI) - floor sex, riding, unprotected p in v (don’t do that); nervous bucky, bratty reader
A/N: Presenting part 4 in my mafia!bucky series! I think this dynamic is so fun, so I couldn’t resist one more addition to the story.
The last time Bucky was in a jewelry store, he was robbing it under cover of night. Being here in the daytime, in an official capacity, ready to purchase something feels like wearing someone else’s skin. He's waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the staff to realize that he doesn’t belong here and escort him out.
The sales associate sits across from him, clean and pressed and patiently waiting while Bucky fumbles to pull up the notes he typed up on his phone.
He awkwardly clears his throat. “Uh… three carat, elongated cushion cut, pave setting, thin white gold band. Natural, no lab grown.” He doesn’t know what half the words mean, but he knows they’re important.
The sales associate raises an eyebrow, pleasantly surprised.
“She was very specific,” Bucky adds, rubbing the back of his neck self-consciously.
“A woman who knows what she wants,” she remarks, typing and clicking away on her computer. “That’s good. We can make that happen. Assembly is four to eight weeks for custom rings. Does that timeline work for you?”
Bucky nods. A month or two will give him the time he needs to figure out how the hell he is even going to ask. Bucky is not a words guy by any means, and he’s a little terrified of saying something stupid or cliche or—
“This is a model of what the ring will look like,” the sales associate says as she turns the monitor towards him, “based on her specifications.”
Every thought in Bucky's head flies out the window. The image on the monitor slowly rotates, showing every sparkling angle. It’s very… you. His chest tightens with some nebulous emotion hovering between adoration and excitement and abject terror.
This is really happening.
“Wow,” he mutters under his breath.
“What do we think? Will this meet her exacting standards?” the associate asks, somewhat playfully.
Bucky finds his voice after a moment, clearing his throat again. “Yeah. Looks good.”
She smiles professionally. “Let me print you out an estimate.” There’s more clacking away at the keyboard, followed by the mechanical complaints of a printer whirring in the air.
The associate slides a piece of paper towards Bucky, tapping different figures with her pen as she speaks. “There is a deposit, that’s the amount you see here. Covers materials and design time.”
Even the number listed for the initial deposit makes Bucky wince internally. Steve had joked a couple weeks back, “You know what they say — three month’s salary or he doesn’t love you!” Bucky doesn’t have a regular salary, but if he did, this would be more than three months.
“When the ring is ready, you can pay the rest in full,” she continues. Perhaps sensing his hesitation, she adds, “Or we have certain financing options available, if you’re interested.”
Bucky straightens up in his chair. He had promised himself that he would handle the ring above board — that way if the fuzz ever came knocking, god forbid, they would have no claim to it in any kind of investigation. Shoes and furs and purses are one thing — perks of the job, but just things at the end of the day. This is more than that.
It’s a symbol of the promises he wants to make. Of his devotion, his protection, of the life he wants to build with you.
When it comes to you, anything less than exactly what you want isn’t good enough, as far as Bucky is concerned. He's got savings. He can pick up more jobs in the next couple months. It'll be a little bit of a stretch, but… it’s doable.
“If all this is all agreeable to you, you can sign there, and we will get you started,” the associate says.
Bucky nods emphatically. “All right. Let's do it.”
It's nearly a perfect evening. Bucky is home for dinner at a reasonable hour, for the first time in at least a week. A glass of wine, an episode of Real Housewives, and a foot rub later, you and Bucky are intertwined on the couch, making out like teenagers. Nothing to worry about but the lazy grind of his hips into yours, and the decadent stroke of your tongue against his.
But then you feel him pull away. You feel it energetically, before he even takes his hands off you.
Your hands grip his shirt, trying in vain to drag him closer. "Don't go,” you murmur against his mouth.
“I gotta work, baby.” He kisses underneath your jaw in apology, then sits up and reaches for his shoes. “Family stuff.”
That earns him a sigh. You kneel behind him on the couch and knead his shoulders, your mouth at the nape of his neck.
“You been workin’ so much lately, I feel like I never see you.” You try not to whine, but it comes out that way anyway.
“There's a lot of irons in the fire right now,” he replies vaguely.
“I miss you.” You say it because it’s true. You miss falling asleep in his arms. You miss his hands, his mouth, his steady demeanor, his teasing exasperation with you. In the last few weeks, it feels like you only ever get pieces of him.
With his shoes on, he stands to face you, his hands coming up to cradle your face. You can see the apology in his eyes, how much he wishes he could stay. “I know, baby,” he mumbles, his thumb gently stroking your cheek. “I miss you, too. This is just temporary.”
You can tell he means it, but it doesn’t make you feel better. In a last ditch effort to get your way, you turn on the eyes, begging silently for even twenty more minutes of his attention.
For a moment, you think he just might cave.
“Tell you what.” Bucky takes your hands and coaxes you off the couch to stand. As he speaks, his lips drag across your neck, kisses and nips interspersed between his words. “Tomorrow you’re gonna sleep in, go get your nails done, put on somethin’ pretty, and when I'm done with work, I'll come home and let you put on a show for me.”
Pure manipulation. Nevertheless, you feel a bit like a puppy hearing all your favorite words.
“Promise?” you ask, with a hint of a pout.
“I promise.” His mouth finds yours again for a goodbye, a sweet but fleeting brush.
“Mmm. I love you,” you surrender, releasing him from your hold.
“I love you.” One final press of his lips to your forehead, and he’s headed for the door.
“Be safe,” you call after him, flopping down onto the couch again with a huff.
“Always am,” he calls back, and without the jingle of a set of keys and the click of the door, he’s gone.
“So. You want to marry my daughter.”
Bucky freezes to the spot. “I…”
Your father leans back in his desk chair, a glint of amusement in his eyes. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”
When Bucky had requested this meeting, he hadn’t thought he’d been quite so obvious about his intentions. But your father is quite the people-reader, and Bucky supposes that this conversation has been expected for some time.
“I, uh… yes, sir,” he stammers.
“I trust you’ve discussed this with her before coming to me. It's the twenty-first century, after all.”
Bucky nods, making a concerted effort not to fidget under your father’s stare. “Yes, sir. She said I didn't need to ask permission. It still seemed like good manners to ask.”
“Good answer.” Your father gestures to the seat on the other side of the desk. “Sit down.”
His uneasiness gradually fading, Bucky follows the order and settles down into the chair.
“You’ve done well for yourself,” your father begins, folding his hands on the desk. “You know I already consider you part of this family. If you marry her, that makes you as good as blood. There’s duty that comes along with that. You sure you’re ready?”
“Positive, sir,” Bucky replies, resolute.
“Then consider my permission granted.” He smiles, somehow fond and terrifying at the same time. Bucky smiles back, relieved and grateful and still so nervous that sweat beads on the back of his neck.
“You buy a ring already?” your father asks.
“I’m working on it.”
He gets to his feet, reaching into his pocket for a wad of cash, large fingers counting out more bills than Bucky is comfortable taking. “Make sure to buy her something classy.”
Bucky starts to protest, “Sir—“
But he won’t hear it, pressing the folded stack of bills into Bucky's palm. “Take it. I want my little girl to have something special.”
It would be bad manners to reject the money after an insistence like that, so Bucky concedes and gingerly slips the cash into his jacket pocket. “Thank you, sir,” he says, quietly but sincerely.
You’re beginning to suspect that something is afoot.
To make up for all Bucky's late nights and long days, he suggests going down to Rockaway Beach on his day off. A little unusual, but not completely out of character. and the weather is warm enough that you think nothing of the idea at first.
But as the day progresses, it becomes all too clear that something’s up.
For one thing, Bucky is suspiciously… twitchy. While you try to relax on the beach, stretched out on a blanket, he fidgets beside you, his shoulders closer to his ears than normal. Every time you crack an eye open to glance at him, he glances away, caught.
That's another thing. Bucky won’t stop looking at you. You feel his eyes clinging to you all day long. It can't be the bikini doing the work, because obviously he’s seen it before. And it's not that kind of attention, either. You can tell the difference in that regard.
He insists on staying for sunset, and the crowds thankfully begin to thin slightly after the four p.m. mark. When he takes your hand and suggests a walk down by the water, the request is so uncharacteristic of him that alarm bells start going off in your brain.
Is this (finally) the moment?
As the sun sinks low in the sky and turns the clouds vibrant oranges and reds, you try to act casual, just in case. You don’t want to hedge your bets and then find out that this is just another date. You don’t want to go home disappointed.
As you walk, his hand squeezes yours to get your attention. You turn to him expectantly, and he makes an effort to meet your eyes, his spine military straight.
“Baby, hold on a minute. I got somethin’ I wanna say to you.”
He pauses as if to gather his thoughts, and you’re positive that this is the moment. Unable to contain your excitement, you blurt out, “Oh my god, I knew it!”
Bucky sighs and scrubs hand over face as the spontaneity of the moment dissipates.
“You went through Natasha, didn’t you? I knew it was weird she wanted to reschedule!” Your mouth is a runaway train, babbling away. “We always get our nails done on Sundays! You thought you were being soooo sneaky—“
“Are you gonna let me say this or not?” he grumbles, his ears turning bright pink.
You settle down and try unsuccessfully to repress a smile. “Go ahead. Let's hear the speech.”
Bucky kneels right there in the sand, and you have to hold yourself back from throwing yourself into his arms. Taking a deep breath, he locks his eyes into yours, nerves and doubts visibly dissolving.
“You are the most stubborn woman I have ever met in my life.”
That catches you so off-guard that you half-snort a laugh, your hand flying to your mouth.
He laughs too, a rich and rumbling sound. “You're spoiled, and hot-headed, and extremely annoying on occasion. And I have been head over heels for you pretty much from the moment we met.”
As he reaches into his pocket, your heart pounds like it’s trying to stage a breakout from your chest. His hand re-emerges, closed around a small box.
“You are compassionate, and fierce, and funny, and you love me better than I ever hoped I was gonna get. And I just wanna hurry up and marry you already.”
The box opens. Nestled inside, a diamond ring straight out of your dreams, that glints in the light of the setting sun. You choke back a gasp, your hand still pressed to your mouth, your eyes sparkling in delight.
“Whaddaya say, princess?” he asks, his smile crooked and sheepish and eager all at once.
Your happiness bubbles over like an overfilled champagne flute, and you exclaim, “Yes! Of course, yes!”
In your excitement, you pull him off his knees and into your arms, your lips crashing messily into his. There’s a smattering of applause and a few distant hoots from the remaining beachgoers in the vicinity, but it all fades to the background when his arms surround you, pulling your body flush against his.
“That —,” you mumble between kisses, “was the most romantic thing — I've ever heard in my life.”
When you pull back far enough to look at him, he’s grinning down at you like you’re a trophy or a winning lottery ticket, giddy with pride.
“And if you ever call me annoying again,” you warn him playfully, “you’re gettin’ slapped upside the head.”
He rolls his eyes and gives you a squeeze before releasing you. “Just put on the ring.”
You bounce on the balls of your feet as Bucky frees the ring from the velvet box and slips it onto your finger. The glint of the stone almost blinds you with its beauty.
“Bucky…” you whisper, momentarily speechless.
“Did I do all right?” he asks, though the satisfaction in his expression says he already knows the answer.
“You did. It's beautiful.” As you spend a moment admiring the boulder on your hand, Bucky leans in to kiss your cheek, victorious.
He looks so incandescently happy that you can’t resist teasing him one more time. “Are you sure this is three carat?” you muse aloud, raising a discerning eyebrow. “It looks more like two-point-five…”
That earns you another squeeze, and a temporary loss of gravity as Bucky lifts you off your feet. “You are such a brat,” he growls through your breathless giggles.
“I love it,” you concede. “I love you.” Your legs hook around his waist, and you kiss him again — longer, deeper, verging on a little too intimate for a public setting. “You are getting the ride of your life when we get home.”
Bucky sets you down with a smirk.
“Promise?”
You don’t make it to the bed. You don’t make it to the couch, either. The two of you barely make it past the front door. As soon as it shuts behind you, you’re kissing him and tugging at his clothes, taking him down to the floor in your urgency.
As you grind down on the already hard length of his cock, your hands on his chiseled chest, you can’t help but admire the glint of your ring on your hand, set against his tan skin.
You kiss him, deep and filthy and totally in love. Your fiancé. You love that you get to call him that now.
Peeling off your coverup and pulling the gusset of your bikini bottoms to the side, you shift to fit him at your entrance and purr, “Tell me you love me.”
“I love you.” Bucky grips your hips, his eyes dark and his grin sinfully crooked. “So fuckin’ much.”
You moan softly as you sink down onto him, already wound up halfway to heaven. Once you’re fully seated on his cock, you take a beat to adjust and then move, riding him at a steady pace.
“Fuck, that’s it,” he mutters, already shifting his hips up pn every stroke to meet you. “My pretty girl. My fuckin’ wife.”
A sound escapes you that’s half-giggle, half-moan. “Not yet.”
“Details.” He groans and pulls you close before rolling over and trapping you beneath him, picking up your rhythm exactly where you left off.
“Gonna give you everything you want.” His voice is wrecked, his thrusts sloppy and deep. “Gonna give you the whole damn world, princess. You name it, it’s yours.”
“Bucky,” you whine and arch into him, your climax already fast approaching listening to your fiancé talk about the future. Your future, together.
“Baby, I'm close,” he rasps. With one arm braced by your head, Bucky reaches his other hand between your bodies to find your clit.
The first contact steals your breath, each little circle against the bundle of nerves sending you careening towards the edge. “Inside,” you beg breathlessly. “Wanna feel all of you.”
Bucky curses, rutting messily into you, just managing to hold out until your pleasure crests before he loses control. Warmth coats your insides as you feel every pulse and twitch of his cock, as your cunt clenches almost gratefully to take every drop of him.
The two of you stay on the floor, wrapped around each other, the hardwood gradually cooling down your sweaty, overheated bodies. Bucky doesn’t even bother to pull out yet, just nuzzles into your neck and mutters in a blissed out voice,
~ I honestly didn’t think I had enough pics for this (most of my camera roll are my crushes, purple aethestic for my phone layout and my OC - the elf in red)
Three characters I identify with
Fictional crushes tag
Bucky Barnes
Aymeric de Borel (the first guy from the camera roll pics)
Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd
tagging (but do not feel obligated to do this!):
@maplesyrizzup @slutdier @erina00 and anyone else who wants to do it
I have a thot of u will? Bucky finishing in u, liking where he is so much he's getting hard again before pulling out. Guess we're going for round two already hunni 🫢
The heat between you and Bucky had been building for hours—slow kisses that turned hungry, hands roaming with desperate need, clothes shed in a frantic trail from the living room to his bedroom.
Now, you were lost in the rhythm of him, his body pressed flush against yours on the rumpled sheets. His metal arm braced beside your head, cool vibranium a stark contrast to the fevered warmth of his skin. His flesh hand gripped your hip, fingers digging in just enough to anchor you as he thrust deep, each stroke dragging a broken moan from your throat.
"Bucky..." you gasped, nails raking down his back, feeling the corded muscles shift under your touch.
He was relentless, the super-soldier stamina turning every movement into a perfect, devastating glide. His cock filled you completely, thick and hard, stretching you in that way that made your toes curl and your vision blur at the edges.
Sweat slicked his forehead, dark hair falling into those storm-blue eyes as he watched you, intense and unblinking.
"That's it, doll," he growled, voice low and rough like gravel. "Take me. Just like that."
His hips snapped forward harder, the wet sound of your bodies meeting obscene in the quiet room.
You clenched around him, thighs trembling as pleasure coiled tighter in your core.
He leaned down, capturing your mouth in a messy kiss, tongue sliding against yours in time with his thrusts.
You were close and he knew it.
Bucky always knew, reading your body like a mission briefing.
One hand slipped between you, thumb circling your clit with practiced precision.
"Come on, sweetheart. Let go for me."
The orgasm hit you like a wave, crashing over you with white-hot intensity. Your back arched, walls pulsing around him as you cried out his name. Bucky groaned, burying his face in the crook of your neck. His rhythm faltered, hips stuttering as he chased his own release.
"Fuck—I'm—" He thrust once, twice more, then buried himself to the hilt.
You felt the hot spill of him inside you, pulse after pulse as he came hard, filling you completely.
His body shuddered against yours, metal fingers curling into the sheets beside your head with a soft metallic creak.
For a long moment, he stayed there, cock twitching with the aftershocks, buried deep where he belonged.
Bucky didn't pull out.
Instead, he let out a shaky breath, lips brushing your collarbone as he savored the heat of you around him.
The feeling was addictive—the slick warmth, the way your body still fluttered faintly from your climax, milking every last drop.
He shifted slightly, just enough to make you both gasp at the sensitivity, but he stayed nestled inside, unwilling to break the connection.
"Goddamn," he murmured against your skin, voice husky with satisfaction and something darker, hungrier. "Feels too good to leave. So warm... so perfect."
His hips gave a lazy roll, testing, and you felt him—still half-hard, but already thickening again, the length of him growing firmer with each subtle movement.
Bucky's breath hitched, a low chuckle rumbling in his chest as realization dawned. He lifted his head, blue eyes meeting yours with a wicked, boyish grin that made your stomach flip.
"Looks like I'm not done with you yet," he said, nipping at your lower lip. "Guess we're going for round two already, baby"
You laughed breathlessly, the sound turning into a moan as he rocked forward again, slower this time, deliberate.
The oversensitivity made everything sharper, every inch of him dragging along your walls in a way that bordered on too much and not enough. His hand slid down your side, cool palm cupping your breast, thumb brushing over your nipple until it pebbled under his touch.
"You feel that?" he whispered, voice laced with awe and lust.
"Already getting hard again just from being inside you. Can't help it. You're ruining me, doll."
Bucky kissed you deeply, tongue exploring as his hips began to build a new rhythm.
This time it was unhurried, savoring—long, deep strokes that had you wrapping your legs around his waist, heels digging into the small of his back. The wet slide of him, slick with both your releases, made each thrust smoother, filthier.
You could feel the evidence of his first orgasm leaking out around him, but he didn't seem to care. If anything, it spurred him on, a possessive growl escaping as he fucked his cum deeper into you.
Your hands tangled in his hair, pulling him closer. "Bucky... yes—"
He shifted angles, hitting that spot inside you that made stars burst behind your eyelids.
The metal arm hooked under your knee, spreading you wider for him, opening you up completely.
"Mine," he breathed, the word a vow against your throat. "All mine."
His pace quickened gradually, the bed creaking under the force of his powerful body. Flesh and metal hands worshipped you—gripping, caressing, pinning you down in the most delicious way.
Pleasure built again, slower but no less intense, coiling in your belly like a live wire. Bucky's forehead pressed to yours, breaths mingling as he drove into you.
"Wanna feel you come around me again. Wanna stay right here... fuck, just like this."
You shattered for the second time, clenching hard around his now fully hard cock. Bucky cursed, hips snapping forward with renewed urgency, chasing that edge once more. But this round, he didn't hold back—he fucked you through it, drawing out every cry and whimper until you were a trembling mess beneath him.
Only when you were both gasping, bodies slick and spent, did he finally slow. But even then, he lingered inside you, softening gradually while pressing lazy kisses along your jaw.
"Round three?" you teased weakly, fingers tracing the scars where metal met flesh on his shoulder.
Bucky's laugh was warm, genuine. "Give me five minutes, sweetheart. I'm not pulling out anytime soon."
Kenny darlin I neeeeed you. I’m lonely and making stupid decisions over a younger man — I NEED a meet-cute with Bucky to cure my insanity. Give me the fluffy give me the cute give me Bucky pleeeeeeeease
It happens on a Monday.
Not a good Monday. Not even a neutral Monday. The kind of Monday where your coffee tastes burnt no matter how much sugar you dump into it, your phone keeps lighting up with messages you absolutely should not answer, and your judgment, already questionable lately, feels like it’s hanging on by a thread.
Case in point: the younger man.
You stare down at your phone where his name is still sitting at the top of your messages, thumb hovering over the screen. There’s a draft reply typed out—something witty, something a little flirty, something you’ll regret approximately five minutes after sending.
“Don’t,” you mutter to yourself, locking your phone with a decisive click and shoving it into your bag. “We are not doing that today.”
Growth. Maturity. Healing.
You repeat the words like a mantra as you push open the door to the little corner bakery you’ve started frequenting lately, the one with the crooked chalkboard sign out front and the soft golden lighting that always makes everything feel calmer than it actually is.
The smell hits you first. Warm bread, sugar, something cinnamon-y. It wraps around you like a hug, easing the tight knot in your chest just a little.
“Okay,” you whisper under your breath, stepping into line. “New plan. Carbs instead of bad decisions.”
Progress.
You’re so busy trying to decide between a croissant and a muffin (or both, let’s be honest) that you don’t notice the man stepping back from the counter at the same time you step forward.
You collide.
Hard.
“Shit—!”
“Oh—sorry, I—”
It’s chaos. Your bag slips off your shoulder, your phone tumbles out, and the iced coffee you’d been holding tips dangerously, sloshing over the lid and straight onto him.
You freeze.
There’s a moment—a long, horrible moment—where you just stare at the spreading stain across his dark henley, your brain short-circuiting as panic floods your system.
“Oh my god,” you breathe. “Oh my god, I am so sorry. I didn’t— I wasn’t looking and—”
“I stepped back,” he interrupts gently, already reaching for napkins. “That’s on me.”
His voice is low. Warm. Calm in a way that immediately slows the frantic spiral in your chest.
You blink up at him and then promptly forget how to breathe.
He’s unfair.
That’s the only word for it. Tall, broad-shouldered, with dark hair that looks like it never quite behaves and eyes so blue they almost don’t seem real. There’s a softness to his expression, though, something careful tucked beneath all that intimidating size, like he’s worried about startling you.
You, meanwhile, are actively dying.
“No, that is absolutely not on you,” you insist, grabbing napkins and dabbing uselessly at his shirt. “I assaulted you with coffee. This is—this is a crime, actually.”
That gets a small huff of laughter out of him.
“It’s not that bad.”
“It is,” you say firmly. “It’s cold brew. That stuff stains souls.”
He smiles at that and something in your chest does an unfortunate little flip.
“It’ll wash out,” he assures you. “Promise.”
You finally manage to look away, crouching to scoop up your phone before you can embarrass yourself further. “Still. I owe you. Dry cleaning, at least. Or… a new shirt. Or… emotional damages.”
“Emotional damages?” he echoes, amused.
“I’ve ruined your morning,” you say, straightening. “That counts.”
His gaze lingers on you for a second, something soft flickering there before he shakes his head. “You didn’t ruin anything.”
You huff a quiet laugh, tucking a loose piece of hair behind your ear. “You’re being very nice about this for someone who just got baptized in caffeine.”
“I’ve had worse mornings,” he admits.
You don’t ask.
Instead, you gesture toward the counter, where the barista is watching the entire exchange with open curiosity. “At least let me buy your coffee. Replacement coffee. Non-weaponized this time.”
He hesitates just for a second.
Then, “Only if I can buy yours.”
You blink. “That feels like a scam.”
“Compromise,” he counters, one corner of his mouth lifting.
You study him for a moment, suspicion warring with something much softer, much more dangerous.
“Fine,” you say finally. “But if you try to Venmo me later, I’m blocking you.”
He laughs again—quieter this time, but just as warm. “Deal.”
You step up to the counter together, placing your orders side by side. It feels easy. Weirdly easy, considering you just committed accidental coffee-based assault.
While you wait, you shift your weight, glancing at him from the corner of your eye. He’s watching the barista, hands tucked into his pockets, shoulders relaxed now that the initial chaos has passed.
“You come here a lot?” you ask, immediately wincing internally. Wow. Original.
He doesn’t seem to mind.
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s close to my place. Good bread.”
“Strong argument,” you nod. “I come here when I need to make better life choices.”
He glances at you then, brow faintly furrowed. “Better than what?”
You hesitate.
Your phone feels heavy in your bag, like it’s listening.
“…questionable texting habits,” you admit vaguely.
Understanding flickers across his face—surprisingly quick, surprisingly gentle.
“Ah,” he says. “Yeah. Been there.”
You raise a brow. “Really?”
He shrugs, a little sheepish. “Once or twice.”
Something about that—about the way he says it like he’s not proud of it, like he’s learned from it—makes your chest tighten in a way that has nothing to do with anxiety.
Your name is called.
You step forward, grabbing the drinks before turning back to him and holding one out. “Here. Peace offering.”
He takes it, fingers brushing yours briefly.
It’s nothing.
It’s everything.
“Thanks,” he says. “I’m Bucky.”
You repeat your name, and it feels strange, like it matters more than it should.
You linger by the counter for a second too long, both of you sipping your drinks, neither quite moving to leave.
“Well,” you say finally, gesturing toward the door. “I should probably go make more responsible choices.”
“Yeah,” he nods. “Me too.”
Neither of you move.
Then he clears his throat, shifting slightly. “Hey, uh—”
You look up.
“If you ever need a distraction from those questionable decisions,” he says, a little tentative now, “I come here most mornings.”
Your heart does something very inconvenient.
You glance down at your coffee, then back up at him.
“…carbs instead of bad decisions,” you murmur.
He smiles. “Sounds like a solid plan.”
You hesitate for half a second longer, just long enough to feel the weight of your phone in your bag, the ghost of that unfinished message still waiting.
Then you make your choice.
“Tomorrow morning?” you ask.
His smile softens, something warm and almost relieved settling into his expression.
“Tomorrow morning.”
And just like that, the Monday doesn’t feel so bad anymore.
hi ken! hope you're doing fine. i'm in such a bad mood becuz of things going on in my life. can you do a bucky x reader thing where no one sees how reader is there for everyone but at the slightest reason the others call the reader selfish and wrong but bucky sees all of it and wants to make sure that at least one person out there is appreciating reader and comforts her through a break down?
-🐰
The accusations hit so quietly that, at first, you almost convince yourself they don't hurt.
You've spent months being the person everyone depends on without ever really thinking twice about it. You're the one answering late-night phone calls when someone's relationship falls apart. The one who remembers birthdays, orders everyone's favorite takeout, offers rides to the airport before sunrise, and somehow always has tissues, Advil, or a phone charger when someone needs one. If a friend is overwhelmed, you rearrange your own schedule without hesitation. If someone needs help moving, you're already on your way. You never keep score because that's what people who love each other do, right?
You don't realize that no one notices until the first time you ask for something yourself.
The evening starts like every other gathering at Sam's apartment. You arrive twenty minutes late because you'd spent the afternoon helping another friend carry furniture into a third-floor apartment before stopping to grab coffee for someone who'd texted you on the way over. By the time you walk through the door, your arms are full of drinks and grocery bags, your feet ache, and all you can think about is curling up in bed once this is over.
No one thanks you.
Instead, someone glances at the clock.
"Finally."
Another rolls their eyes. "We thought you weren't coming."
You laugh awkwardly, apologizing out of habit as you hand everyone the things they'd asked you to bring. The conversation moves on almost immediately, and so do you. You help set the table, refill empty drinks before anyone asks, and clean dishes as people continue talking around the kitchen island. It feels familiar enough that you don't question it.
Not until, a couple of hours later, you quietly mention that you're going to head home.
"I think I'm gonna call it a night," you say with an apologetic smile. "It's been a long week."
The room goes strangely quiet.
"Already?" someone asks.
"You literally just got here."
"I've just been really tired."
Another friend snorts. "You always leave early lately."
You blink. "I... don't think I do."
"Honestly," someone else chimes in, "you've been kind of selfish recently."
The word lands with enough force to steal the air from your lungs.
Selfish.
You stare at them, waiting for someone to laugh or tell you they're kidding, but no one does. Instead, more voices begin piling on, each one somehow making the knot in your chest tighter.
"You've been saying no to things."
"You've seemed distant."
"We never ask you for much."
"You've been making everything about yourself lately."
Your mouth opens, but nothing comes out.
Because all you can think about is every single thing you've done for them over the past few months. The weekends you gave up. The errands you ran. The countless times you dropped everything because someone else needed you.
All of it disappears the moment you admit you're exhausted.
Across the room, Bucky has been watching the entire conversation unfold in silence. At first, he'd assumed someone would catch themselves. That one of your friends would realize how unfair they sounded and backtrack before any real damage was done.
Instead, he watches you shrink a little more with every sentence.
Your shoulders curl inward. Your smile disappears. Then, somehow, despite everything they're saying, you whisper the words that finally push him over the edge.
"I'm sorry."
The apartment falls silent when Bucky speaks.
"No."
His voice isn't loud, but it cuts through every other sound in the room.
"No, we're not doing this."
Every head turns toward him as he pushes away from the kitchen counter, his blue eyes sweeping across the room before settling briefly on you. The hurt written across your face makes something twist painfully in his chest.
"You're calling her selfish?"
No one answers.
Sam shifts uncomfortably. "Buck..."
"No." He shakes his head. "I want somebody to explain it to me."
His gaze moves deliberately from one person to the next.
"Who picked me up after missions because I couldn't drive?"
Silence.
"Who spent fourteen hours sitting in the hospital with Clint when everyone else went home?"
Still nothing.
"Who remembers every birthday, organizes every dinner, checks on all of you when you're struggling, and somehow always knows exactly what everyone needs before they ask?"
His voice never rises, but it doesn't have to.
"It's always been her."
No one argues.
"She gives every single one of you her time, her energy, and every piece of herself she has to spare. Then the first time she says she's tired..." He lets out a humorless laugh. "Suddenly she's selfish?"
The weight of his words settles over the apartment like concrete.
For the first time all night, everyone actually looks at you.
Really looks.
They notice how tightly you're gripping your sleeves. How your eyes have filled with tears. How exhausted you actually look.
Bucky doesn't wait for anyone to respond.
Instead, he crosses the room until he's standing directly in front of you, every trace of frustration melting into something heartbreakingly gentle.
"C'mere, sweetheart."
The endearment is all it takes.
The moment his arms open, every wall you've spent months holding together collapses. You step into his embrace without thinking, and the first sob tears itself from your chest before you've even buried your face against him.
His arms wrap around you immediately, one hand cradling the back of your head while the other rubs slow, steady circles across your back.
"I'm sorry," you cry, the words muffled against his shirt.
He pulls back just enough to look at you, his brow knitting together in confusion.
"What are you apologizing for?"
"I don't know," you admit through broken breaths. "I just... I tried so hard."
"I know you did."
"I wanted everyone to be happy."
His heart breaks right there.
"I know."
"I don't understand what I did wrong."
His thumb brushes beneath your eye, catching another tear before it can fall.
"You didn't do anything wrong." His voice is impossibly soft. "You just reminded people that you're a person instead of someone they can keep taking from."
You stare at him.
"They got so used to you always giving," he continues, "that the first time you needed something back, they mistook it for selfishness."
A shaky laugh escapes you, though it sounds more like another sob.
"I feel so stupid."
"No." He shakes his head immediately. "I think you love people with everything you've got. I think you're the kind of person who would happily carry everyone else's burdens if it meant they smiled a little easier. But somewhere along the way, they stopped appreciating what you were giving because they started expecting it."
Fresh tears spill down your cheeks.
"I just wanted someone to notice."
"I do."
He doesn't hesitate.
"I notice every single thing you do."
You look up at him, eyes wide.
"I notice the way you text everyone to make sure they got home safely. I notice you remembering how Sam takes his coffee, how you always pack extra snacks because Nat forgets to eat, how you ask Steve about therapy when everyone else assumes he's fine. I notice how you quietly clean up after everyone leaves without asking for help."
His hand cups your cheek.
"But I also notice the things nobody else seems to."
His forehead rests gently against yours.
"I notice when you're forcing a smile because you don't want anyone worrying about you. I notice when you're running on empty. I notice the way you keep saying you're okay even when you're barely holding yourself together."
Your breathing stutters.
"I wanted one person to see me," you whisper.
A sad smile tugs at his lips.
"You've had one all along."
He presses a lingering kiss against your forehead before wrapping you back into his arms.
"You don't have to earn love by exhausting yourself. You don't have to prove your worth by giving away every piece of who you are."
His embrace tightens just a little more.
"And as long as I'm here, you'll never have to wonder whether someone appreciates you."
Around the room, no one says a word.
Because while they had spent months taking you for granted, Bucky had spent those same months seeing every quiet sacrifice, every hidden exhaustion, and every small act of love you never expected anyone to notice.
And he silently promised himself that, from this day forward, you would never again have to question whether you were enough.
Bucky Barnes is using that metal arm to lock your shit down. Beard rubbing on the sensitive skin of your inner thighs, fingers pistoning in and out of your squelching cunt while he’s got the heavy metal sitting on your hips, not even pushing down, just letting it sit heavy on your tummy while you’re helplessly thrashing against his tongue. Can’t even kick up off the bed, your hips aren’t lifting an inch with that heavy metal resting on your hip bone, bruising as he’s curling his fingers up into you, pressing long tongue stroking kisses on your aching clit.
warning: post tfatws!bucky, fluff, first date nerves, use of pet names (doll, honey), no use of y/n, not beta read, all mistakes and mine
author’s note: I saw this clip on YouTube showing a man making his wife feel good about herself rather than a backhanded compliment, and immediately I knew that Bucky would totally do that. This is just a fun little short based on that.
It had taken over two hours, and that was in just prep time. It didn’t include how you’d spent days agonising looking at dresses, how you’d picked one, then returned it, and finally settled on this one. How last night you’d got it out of your wardrobe, trying to pair it with jewellery and make up that matched.
Then you were up at 6am, already anxious and tense, doing anything to calm yourself before you headed to work.
The hours had dragged, but when returned home time sped up. There wasn’t enough time, the shower didn’t feel long enough, the make up had to wiped off several times before it looked right and the dress kept hanging wrong.
Even now, looking at the mirror, you could still feel the jitters in your belly. No matter how many times you told yourself it would be fine, it just didn’t feel fine.
The light tapping on the door jolted you out of your stupor.
“I’m coming!” You shout then cringe internally at your wording, cursing at saying such a thing to a man before you even started your first date.
“Get your head out of the gutter,” you murmur to yourself, and you walk down the stairs.
It was hard. You knew who well was behind that door. James Buchanan Barnes, the former Winter Soldier, who had been on plastered all over news after he and the newly anointed Captain America had quelled a “terrorist” group, a group of people who had been unfairly been moved from their homes.
You hadn’t known who he was when the notification popped on your phone, you’d forgotten you’d even signed up for a dating app at all.
Curiosity got the better of you, you’d replied to his DMs, making general conversation that never went further. He respected boundaries and asked questions. So many questions.
He made you feel wanted, and it made you want to impress him.
Your fingers wrap around the handle, and pull on the door to reveal the man on the other side.
“Hey,” his photos did him no justice. Startlingly blue eyes, broad shoulders covered in a white shirt and a brown leather bikers jacket, with simple trousers.
One hand was gloved and holding a bouquet of hydrangeas, your favourite.
Your lips part at the sight of him.
“Bucky,” your voice is quiet, almost choked at the sight of him.
He seems to pause in places, eyes flickering up and down.
“Damn,” he murmurs, his tongue briefly coming out to lick his bottom lip. “Could you… mind doing a twirl for me, doll?”
Your mind races at his words, but your find yourself stepping around.
“Slowly,” his voice sounds deeper. “I wanna see all the effort you put in.”
Your heart tightens slightly, but you listen. You move slowly in a circle, right on your doorstep, a mix of embarrassment and excitement rushing through your veins.
“Any good?” You ask.
“Good doesn’t even describe you,” a tinge of his Brooklyn accent slips though. “The photos were nothing on this.”
You exhale in relief as a smile crossed your face. “I was thinking the same about you. You’re gorgeous, Bucky.”
His eyes widen at the compliment.
“Honey, I’m meant to be flattering you,” he chuckles and hands you the flowers. “Now, how about we go on that date, huh?”
You nod enthusiastically in agreement, your hand taking his with no plan to let it go.
⌗ SUMMARY For a long time, loneliness was easier to live with than wanting. Now every morning asks him to let you go, and every night convinces him to forget why he should.
⌗ WARNINGS sex worker reader, explicit sexual content, sweet but awkward and emotionally constipated bucky, yearning, hyperspermia — lots of cum and lots of sex, detailed warnings in each chapter, happy ending. no use of y/n.
— ⟡ DISCRETION REQUIRED
For James Buchanan Barnes, control had always been the closest thing to safety after years spent without either. Funny how a stranger with a warm smile and even warmer hands could bring down every wall he'd built so carefully.
— ⟡ GUEST ROOMS AND OTHER EMPTY THINGS
There’s something especially cruel about a guest room that never gets used. Made it far too easy to pretend you belonged in his bed. But morning does come, peeling away the comfort of his carefully constructed illusion.
— ⟡ WHEN NOBODY IS COUNTING
They say distance makes the heart grow fonder. Unanswered habits, empty mornings, and reaching for someone who was never supposed to become part of your every day — no one ever mentions how much it hurts.
⌗ NOTES giving myself something to look forward to lol. coming soon… soon as in september. stay mad, stay mystified (tell me you get it), and stay tuned.
moodboard inspired by @mariasont ; images sourced from pinterest
pairing: bucky barnes x reader | 10.2k words | modern soulmate au
warnings: explicit sexual content (18+), soulmate bond/past life memories, multiple lifetimes, memory flashes, discussions of war, brief references to trauma/recovery, love at first sight across lifetimes, wedding night smut, destiny vs choice, happy ending
summary: when you and bucky reach for the same bag of lemons at the farmer’s market, the touch triggers flashes of the many lifetimes you’ve spent loving each other. as those memories keep surfacing, the two of you have to figure out what it means to fall in love again in the life you’re living now.
authors note: this is very loosely inspired by everything is romantic by charli xcx, and by “loosely” i mean i took several lyrics, made them devastating, and then built an entire soulmate reincarnation love story around them. many many thank you's for this fic! thank you to @/iamthatonefangirl and @/barnesonly for organizing our bwat summer collab; go check out everyone else's work! thank you to my baby, @/pinksplace for giving this idea and listening to me continuously crash out about it🫶 and a very special thank you to @/buckybsdoll for not only beta reading it, but for also encouraging this fic is indeed NOT buns, and i can do hard things. love you all🩷
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Saturday mornings belong to James Buchanan Barnes.
That is what Bucky tells himself, anyway—what he has been telling himself for the better part of three years, ever since recovery stopped feeling like a cliff edge and started, slowly, cautiously, feeling like a road. Not an easy road, not a straight one, but a road all the same. Something he can wake up and keep walking.
Saturday means the same coffee stand on the corner where the barista with the chipped purple nail polish starts making his drink the second she sees him coming. It means the farmer’s market under the green-striped awnings in the square, where he buys a loaf of crusty sourdough from the old Polish couple in stall fourteen and fresh eggs from the woman who always insists the yolks are brighter in spring. It means peaches if they’re in season, because one summer in Wakanda he had bitten into one so ripe it had run down his wrist and made him laugh out loud in the middle of a field, and ever since then peaches have felt like proof of life. It means flowers some3times, too, if the apartment feels especially bare. Something cheap and cheerful in a mason jar on the kitchen counter. Something that says a man can make a home even if he was taught for years he did not deserve one.
It is a good routine. A hard-won one. Bucky likes the honesty of it, the way these small rituals ask nothing of him except that he show up.
This morning, June sun already warming the pavement, his paper cup of coffee hot in his hand, he feels almost light. The market is crowded enough to buzz but not so packed he gets hemmed in. A violinist near the fountain is playing something bright and quick. Someone’s kid is trying to pet every dog within reach. The air smells like basil and strawberries and the faint yeasty sweetness of fresh bread.
Bucky buys his loaf first. Then tomatoes. Then a bunch of green onions. He pauses at the peach stand, testing one for give with his thumb, and decides they need another week.
By the time he reaches the citrus table, the vendor is rearranging pyramids of lemons in rough wooden crates, their skins bright and dimpled in the morning light. Bucky reaches automatically, already picturing chicken piccata for dinner, and another hand reaches at the same exact moment.
Your fingers brush his.
The world splits open.
One second he is standing in the farmer’s market with coffee on his breath and sunlight on the back of his neck, and the next—
Neon. Laughter. Chapel bells tinny through cheap speakers. Your mouth, painted the color of a ripe cherry, open on a breathless laugh. White satin clinging to your hips. A fake Elvis in a rhinestone jumpsuit grinning around too-big teeth beneath a plastic crucifix bolted crooked over the altar.
Bucky gasps.
The bag of lemons slips from both your hands and tumbles to the pavement, yellow fruit rolling in wild directions as if they’ve been startled too.
The vision doesn’t stop there. Visions of different lifetimes flash through his eyes like he’s watching the life of ten different couples all at once.
A steering wheel under his palms, worn smooth with use. Summer wind through open windows. You in cutoff shorts, feet on the dashboard, singing badly and loudly while the road curls ahead of you like a dare.
White sheets. Lace curtains breathing in a warm midnight breeze. Gold band on your finger catching moonlight where your hand presses against his chest. Your mouth moving against his throat with a broken little sound that is half laughter, half prayer.
A rough cabin wall. Splintered pine under his palm. You in a wool shift with your hair braided down your back, cheeks wind-burned, smiling over your shoulder as foxes cry somewhere out in the dark and a baby sleeps in a cradle by the fire.
Smoke and jazz and blackout curtains. East London. Silk black as sin against your skin. Your hand catching his by the wrist before he can disappear back into the war.
A beach. Bright afternoon. Children shrieking at the tide. Orange drinks sweating in glass pitchers while he kneels in the sand with his sleeves rolled up, helping a little girl press shell fragments into the turret of a sandcastle, and you walk toward him laughing, sunlight at your back so fierce it turns you to gold.
Then all of it is gone.
The market snaps back into focus so suddenly it hurts. Sound crashes in—vendors shouting prices, stroller wheels rattling, the violinist sawing away by the fountain. Bucky stumbles backward a step. Across from him, you catch yourself on the edge of the citrus crate, looking exactly as wrecked as he feels.
Your eyes lock on his.
“Oh my God,” you whisper.
Bucky’s heart is pounding hard enough to bruise. “You saw that too.”
It isn’t a question.
In this world, everybody knows about soulmarks and first-flashes. Knows that when you meet the person your soul is tied to, memory can strike like lightning. Some people get a single image. A porch swing. A train platform. A hand in a hospital room. Some get a rush of several lives at once, enough to leave them reeling for days. Most people dream of it when they’re young. Spend adolescence looking at every stranger a little too long. Wondering when it will happen, if it will happen, whether the person on the other end of them is alive or halfway across the planet or just around the corner.
Bucky stopped wondering a long time ago.
HYDRA did not leave much room for destiny.
You swallow. “That was not normal.”
“No,” he says, voice rough. “No, that was… not.”
The lemon vendor is gathering the fallen fruit with admirable indifference, the kind that says he has seen stranger things at this market and will see stranger still. “You two need a minute?” he asks.
You make a sound that could be a laugh or a near-sob. “Maybe five.”
Bucky buys the entire bag of lemons because it feels like the least insane thing he can do, then follows you blindly toward the edge of the square where there’s a row of benches under a sycamore tree. The shade dapples your face when you sit, and for one unmoored second he knows the pattern of it. Not from now. From somewhere else.
He stays standing until you glance up at him and pat the spot beside you with a shaky hand.
“You’re real?” you ask once he sits.
He almost laughs. “I was about to ask you that.”
You rub your palms over your knees as if trying to ground yourself. You’re wearing denim shorts and a white tank top and sunglasses pushed up into your hair, and you look like someone who belongs to summer. Not delicate exactly, but bright. Alive in a way that makes Bucky’s ribs ache. “I know this is a weird question,” you say, “but are you going to tell me your name, or am I just supposed to keep calling you fake-Elvis-groom in my head?”
“Bucky,” he says automatically. Then, because he has spent years relearning how to offer the softer pieces of himself without flinching, he adds, “James. But people call me Bucky.”
Your mouth curves, the first real smile since the vision hit. “I’m glad to know at least one of us looked better in Vegas.”
He huffs out a breath that is almost a laugh. “I looked good.”
“You looked reckless.”
“That too.”
You tell him your name, and the moment it lands between you something in his chest settles with a frightening kind of certainty. Not because fate says so. Not because the universe stamped your names together in some cosmic ledger. Because the sound of it moves through him like recognition. Like stepping into a room he did not realize he had been trying to get back to his whole life.
For a while neither of you says anything. The market hums on around you. Somewhere nearby, a dog sneezes. Someone drops a crate. Bucky stares at the paper sleeve around his cooling coffee and tries to swallow around the strange thickness in his throat.
“I’ve heard of people getting strong first-flashes,” you say at last, quieter now. “But not like that. That was… a lot.”
“A lot,” he agrees.
You tilt your head toward him. “How many do you remember already?”
He thinks of the chapel. The truck. The bed with the lace curtains. The cabin. The club in London. The beach. “Six,” he says. “You?”
“Same.”
A breeze stirs the leaves overhead. It smells like sun-warmed bark and citrus oil.
“I don’t know what to do now,” you admit.
That, strangely, is what steadies him.
Because Bucky knows that feeling. Knows what it is to be handed something overwhelming and not know where to put it. Knows that survival sometimes looks like doing the next smallest thing instead of solving the whole impossible shape at once.
He glances toward the coffee stand, then back at you. “You want to start with coffee?”
You look at him for one long beat, then laugh softly, incredulously, like maybe you can’t believe that is the question that just saved you from bolting. “Yeah,” you say. “I think I do.”
So that is how it begins.
Not with thunder. Not with immediate declarations. Not with some cinematic collision that resolves every loneliness in a heartbeat.
With coffee. With your hand wrapped around a paper cup. With the two of you sitting at the edge of the market, dizzy on each other’s borrowed memories, learning the outlines of the present slowly enough to survive it.
He learns that you come to the farmer’s market most Saturdays too, though usually later. That you always buy flowers you don’t strictly need. That you live twenty minutes away in an apartment with bad plumbing and excellent light. That you work in graphic design and keep odd hours and have a weakness for peaches even when they’re underripe. You learn that he is in therapy. That he likes routine because sometimes routine is the difference between drifting and staying. That his apartment in Brooklyn is small but his windows face west and the light there in the evening is good. That he cooks. That he bakes bread when the weather turns cold because kneading something until it rises feels like a miracle he can participate in.
He does not tell you everything that morning. Not about HYDRA, not about the winter that lasted decades, not about the names he no longer answers to. But you do not push. Maybe because you can feel, in the strange echoing chambers of whatever ties the two of you together, that he has already been dragged open too many times to count.
When you part, it is almost noon.
You both hover awkwardly by the fountain, neither one wanting to be the first to say goodbye.
“So,” you say, shifting the bouquet of daisies and feverfew you bought somewhere along the way into one hand. “Do soulmate rules say we’re supposed to immediately move in together now, or is there like a grace period?”
Bucky smiles before he can stop himself. “I think there’s paperwork.”
“Tragic.”
He glances at the lemons peeking out of your canvas bag. “You still owe me half of these.”
You grin then, bright and quick and devastating. “That sounds fake.”
“Maybe,” he says. “But it’s a reason to see you again.”
Something softens in your expression. “Okay,” you say. “Then I’ll take the fake reason.”
He gives you his number. You type your own into his phone and hand it back, your fingers brushing his again. No flash this time. Just warmth. Just the sharp, impossible awareness of skin.
“All right, Bucky Barnes,” you say. “Text me when you want to split custody of the lemons.”
He watches you walk away.
At the corner, you turn and look back.
The city seems to hold its breath.
Then you smile at him one more time and disappear into the crowd.
Jesus Christ on a plastic sign
The Vegas lifetime comes back first.
Not all at once. In drips. In flashes that catch Bucky at strange moments over the next few days, as if the memory has been jarred loose and is still deciding how much of itself to reveal.
He is washing dishes on Tuesday night when he looks down at a ring of soap suds circling the drain and suddenly he is twenty-six—or thirty, or some other age in some other body—and the air smells like desert heat trapped in asphalt. He can hear slot machines from the lobby below the motel balcony and your laugh from inside the room, where the air conditioner is fighting a losing battle and you are standing in front of the cracked mirror pinning your hair up with bobby pins you bought from the gift shop downstairs.
“Tell me again,” you say, smiling at him through the mirror, “why exactly we’re doing this.”
Because you had met forty-eight hours earlier in line for dollar margaritas and spent the night talking until sunrise on the motel roof. Because you had missed your flight on purpose. Because he had looked at you over watery eggs in a diner the next morning and known, with the same bone-deep certainty he feels now on a Brooklyn Tuesday in a kitchen lit by one warm overhead bulb, that life was sometimes simplest when it was ridiculous.
Because you had asked if he wanted to get married as a joke and then kept grinning at him after he said yes.
“Tax benefits,” he answers solemnly, sitting on the end of the bed in his borrowed suit jacket.
You laugh. “Romantic.”
“Practical.”
“Liar.”
You cross the room barefoot, white dress swishing around your thighs. It is not really a wedding dress. It is a satin slip from a resale shop with a tiny champagne stain at the hem and thin straps that make him forget his own name every time he looks at you. You stop between his knees and hook your fingers in the lapels of his jacket.
“Tell me not to do it,” you whisper. There is laughter in your voice but something trembling under it too, a softness that asks to be taken seriously. “Tell me we’re being insane and I’ll call it off.”
He looks up at you and feels his whole impossible life narrow into one clean, brilliant line. “I think,” he says, resting his hands on your hips, “that if we don’t do this, I’m gonna spend the rest of my life wondering why I let the best idea I ever had walk out of a motel in Vegas.”
Your expression cracks open into something so nakedly happy it almost undoes him.
The chapel is tiny and tacky and perfect. The plastic crucifix is screwed above a velvet curtain backdrop. The fake Elvis officiant keeps winking like he personally invented love. You say your vows through laughter because your bouquet is made of silk roses that smell faintly like dust and the minister’s sideburn is half detached. Bucky can barely get the ring onto your finger because his hands won’t stop shaking.
Afterward, you run into the sun with your shoes in one hand, your new husband’s name in your mouth as if you were born to say it.
On the sidewalk outside the chapel, there’s a sign for a twenty-four-hour wedding package with JESUS CHRIST LOVES YOU printed above a blinking arrow in red bulbs, and the whole thing is so absurd that you double over laughing. Bucky catches you around the waist before you can fall.
“Mrs. Barnes,” he says into your hair, tasting the words.
You lift your face to his, eyes wet from laughing. “That sounds made up.”
“Probably is.”
You kiss him anyway.
In the present, water runs cold over Bucky’s hands in the sink. He blinks hard and finds himself staring at a plate gone slippery in his grip.
He dries his hands, sits on the edge of the counter, and texts you before he can think better of it.
Got another one. Vegas.
The reply comes so fast it is almost a breath.
me too
Then, after a beat:
did we really get married because the line for margaritas was too long and we needed something else to do?
Bucky smiles helplessly at his phone.
we were committed to the bit
You start texting every day after that.
At first it is practical. Did you remember this detail? Did the chapel carpet have stars on it or was that just me? Do you think the fake Elvis was secretly judging us?
But the practical gives way to easy almost before either of you notices. He sends you a picture of a dog in a raincoat outside the bodega. You send him a photo of the flowers you bought even though your rational brain said you didn’t need them. He tells you when therapy goes badly. You tell him when work is making your eyes cross. By Friday, your name on his screen feels less like a surprise and more like the continuation of something that was already in motion long before lemons hit pavement.
The next Saturday, he finds you at the market before he reaches the citrus stand.
You are standing at the peach table, frowning at a fruit in your hand with the seriousness of someone evaluating a gemstone.
“You know those need another week,” he says.
You glance up and smile in a way that makes his whole body wake up. “I know. I’m being optimistic.”
“Reckless.”
“Wow. You meet one man in Vegas and suddenly he thinks he knows you.”
He laughs, and there is no fear in it this time.
You spend the morning together again. Coffee, bread, flowers. At the tomato stall your shoulder brushes his and warmth skates down his spine, but no memory comes. At the herb table he tucks a stray basil stem behind your ear and your breath catches, but still nothing.
It hits later, when the two of you are leaving the market and pass an old pickup truck parked crooked by the curb, windows down, classic rock spilling tinny from the speakers. You stop dead. So does he.
Your head turns toward him.
His chest caves in around a heartbeat that is no longer entirely his own.
Winding roads, doing manual drive
In that life, you are eighteen and everything feels enormous.
Summer stretches in front of you like a dare. The town is small enough to suffocate if you stay still too long, so you never do. Bucky has a beat-up blue truck with a sticky clutch and a radio that only works when you slap the dashboard in exactly the right place. He teaches you how to drive manual in the abandoned church parking lot at the edge of town, laughing every time the engine stalls because you keep popping the clutch too fast.
“You’re mean,” you tell him, gripping the steering wheel.
“I’m helpful.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“Because you cuss like my grandpa.”
You cut him a glare so ineffective it makes him grin wider. He reaches across the bench seat to guide your hand to the gearshift, his palm warm over your knuckles.
“Slow,” he says. “Feel it catch. Don’t force it.”
Outside, cicadas scream in the heat. The sun is dropping behind the trees, turning the windshield gold.
You try again. This time the truck lurches, shudders, then rolls forward smooth as breath.
“Oh my God,” you say, startled into laughter. “I did it.”
Bucky looks at you the way boys in movies are always supposed to look but almost never do in real life—like the sight of you happy is enough to rearrange his whole future. “Yeah,” he says softly. “You did.”
Once you know how, you drive everywhere with no destination at all. Back roads. County lines. Winding stretches of blacktop between soybean fields and creeks and gas stations with flickering signs. You drive because gas is cheap and the cab of the truck is a world no one else can enter. You drive because Bucky’s knee pressed against yours feels better than anything either of you have a name for yet. You drive because being young and in love can make movement feel holy.
Sometimes you pull over on the shoulder just to watch the sky bruise purple over the fields. Sometimes you kiss at red lights until the truck behind you honks. Sometimes you park at the overlook above the quarry and share a bag of gas station peanuts while Bucky tells you all the places he wants to see one day, voice gone soft with wanting.
“Anywhere specific?” you ask.
He shrugs one shoulder. “As long as you’re there.”
You laugh because you think he is teasing. Then you look at him and realize he is not.
The air changes.
He reaches up, pushes a strand of hair behind your ear with trembling fingers. “I know we’re eighteen,” he says, trying for casual and failing spectacularly. “I know people say that means we don’t know anything. But I know this.”
Your breath catches.
Behind you, the truck ticks and cools in the dusk.
“I know,” he says again, “that I could drive with you forever and never get tired of the road.”
Then he kisses you, and the whole wide summer tilts.
The memory drops away while a bus sighs to the curb and someone nearby curses over a jammed stroller wheel.
You are breathing hard. So is Bucky.
“That one hurt,” you say quietly.
He knows what you mean. Not because it was bad. Because it was good in the simple devastating way only youth can be. Because watching some other version of yourself love with that much unguarded certainty feels like pressing a bruise you didn’t know you had.
“You drove stick,” he says.
“I was bad at it.”
“You were terrible.”
You laugh then, startled and watery, and he thinks he would do almost anything to keep hearing that sound.
There is a diner half a block away with cracked vinyl booths and a waitress who calls everyone honey. He nods toward it. “Come on.”
“Is this where we process our cosmic psychic episodes now?”
“Pancakes seem medically necessary.”
So you sit across from each other in a booth smelling faintly of syrup and coffee grounds while the waitress tops off your mugs and pretends not to notice that the two of you keep staring. The market bag rests by Bucky’s boots. Your flowers lie across the seat beside you like a witness.
“You ever think about what it means?” you ask after a while.
He traces a thumb over the seam of his coffee cup. “The past lives?”
“The soulmate thing. Any of it.” Your gaze is steady on his. “Like… are we supposed to just trust that because we loved each other before, we automatically will now?”
Bucky is quiet for so long, the waitress comes by to ask if he wants more bacon.
When she leaves, he exhales. “I don’t know,” he says honestly. “I think maybe it’d scare me if it worked like that.”
You nod once. “Me too.”
Because obligation is not love. Because destiny without choice starts to look too much like a cage.
Bucky leans forward, forearms on the table. “I don’t want this to be automatic,” he says, surprising himself with the urgency in his own voice. “I don’t want you because of… cosmic paperwork.” Your mouth twitches at that. He presses on. “I want to know you. Now. Here. I want whatever this is to be because we choose it.”
Something in your face softens so completely it leaves him winded.
“Okay,” you say.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” you repeat. “Then we do it the hard way.”
His mouth curves. “Dating?”
“Scandalous, I know.”
He looks at you across the table, sunlight striping the booth through the blinds, and feels a piece of his life click gently into place.
“Yeah,” he says. “Dating.”
The smile you give him then follows him home and waits with him through the week and sits with him at the edge of sleep. It is still there when he picks you up for your first actual date on Thursday, when you buzz him into your apartment building wearing jeans and a green top that makes your eyes look unfair, when he spends ten whole seconds forgetting why he came.
You cook together in his kitchen because restaurants feel like too much too soon. Lemon chicken. Roasted potatoes. Salad with too much parmesan because you insist there is no such thing.
It is simple. It is easy in the kind of way Bucky once would have distrusted on principle. You move around his kitchen as if you’ve already learned its shape. You lean against the counter and steal bites from the pan. You laugh when he pretends to guard the sauce from you and do not look startled when he laughs back.
After dinner, you help him wash dishes. After dishes, you stand by the open window drinking wine while the city breathes warm and loud below.
“I had a nice time,” you say, glancing at him over the rim of your glass.
His pulse kicks. “Good.”
“I’m serious. For a man who hoards lemons as a manipulation tactic, you clean up pretty well.”
He snorts. “I’ll put that on my dating profile.”
“You should. Honest branding.”
He smiles, and you smile back, and the air between you changes.
It is not sudden. Not violent. Just the slow, unmistakable tightening of a thread.
He sets his glass down first.
You do the same.
When he steps closer, you do not move away.
“Can I kiss you?” he asks, because in every life he has ever loved you there has been want in it, but in this one he wants the shape of your yes more than he wants air.
Your eyes go soft. “Please.”
He kisses you carefully at first, because he is not eighteen in a truck anymore and he is not some reckless fool in Vegas with rings in his pocket and a grin too wide for his face. He is a man who has taken years to learn how to touch gently. Who knows what damage carelessness can do.
But then your hand lifts to his cheek and your mouth opens beneath his and the careful part of him turns molten.
The flash hits so hard he breaks the kiss with a gasp.
You are hit by it too. He sees it in the way your pupils blow wide, the way your hand clutches the front of his shirt.
“Oh,” you breathe.
The apartment falls away.
Early nights in white sheets with lace curtains
The room is small and gold with lamplight.
In that life, you have been married for six hours.
Your shoes are by the door. Your veil lies in a pearly heap over the chair back. Somewhere downstairs the last of the wedding guests are still laughing over cake and champagne, but up here the inn is quiet except for the tick of rain against the lace-curtained window and your own uneven breathing.
You stand with your back to Bucky near the bed, fingers trembling where they rest at your throat. The silk of your nightdress skims the backs of your knees. Your wedding band glints like a promise.
He has never seen anything more beautiful.
You are not delicate. Nor candlelight that makes you look like something painted. You are real in all the ways that matter most—nervous and wanting and trying to be brave.
You glance at him over your shoulder, and the vulnerability in your face brings him to his knees faster than reverence ever could.
“We don’t have to,” he says softly.
Your brows draw together. “I want to.”
“I know.” He steps closer, slow enough to stop if you need it. “But I want you to know we don’t have to do anything tonight except be married.”
Something in you loosens. Relief. Love. A tenderness so intense it almost aches to look at.
“I want to be married,” you whisper.
He smiles, cupping your jaw. “You already are.”
“No,” you say, eyes luminous. “I mean like this. Here. With you.” Your breath shakes. “I want tonight.”
He kisses you then, gentle enough to ask, deep enough to answer.
The nightdress slips from your shoulders a little at a time. He learns your skin by lamplight and fingertips, by the soft sounds you make when he touches somewhere that matters, by the way you cling to him when pleasure finally starts to outrun nerves. The white sheets twist around your legs. The lace curtains stir in the open window. Rain cools the room, but your bodies are all heat.
You are not shy for long.
He kisses his way down the column of your throat, your collarbones, the slope of your breast. Your fingers knot in his hair when his mouth finds your nipple and he sucks gently, then harder at the sound that tears from you. By the time he lowers you onto the bed your hair is loose around your shoulders and your face is flushed and he is so hard it hurts.
“Bucky,” you whisper, reaching for him.
“Tell me what you need.”
You laugh softly, dazed with wanting. “You. Obviously.”
He smiles against your mouth, then works two fingers between your thighs and nearly loses his mind at how wet you are for him already. Your hips jerk. Your eyes flutter shut.
“That’s it,” he murmurs. “There you go.”
He takes his time because he can. Because there is no war waiting outside this room, no clock to race. Because after the vows and the music and the endless hands grabbing at you all day, he wants this moment to belong only to the two of you. He strokes you until your body learns the shape of pleasure under his hands. He brings you apart once with his fingers, your back arching off the bed, then again with his mouth until you are clutching the sheets and crying his name into the rain-soft dark.
When he finally settles between your thighs, braced on one forearm, your gaze on his is wrecked and certain all at once.
“You still sure?” he asks, voice gone rough as gravel.
You wrap a hand around the back of his neck and pull him down until your foreheads touch. “I have never been more sure of anything.”
He pushes into you slowly, giving you every inch with a care that feels like worship. The stretch of you around him steals the breath from his lungs. Your mouth opens on a gasp. He stills.
“Okay?” he whispers.
You nod, biting your lip. “Move.”
So he does.
Slow at first. Then deeper when your nails dig into his shoulders and you lift to meet him. The bed creaks softly. Rain taps the window. He kisses you whenever your face crumples with feeling, every thrust turning more desperate as your body opens for him. You cling to him, legs wrapped around his hips, whispering his name like a secret you intend to keep forever.
When you come, it is with your mouth against his throat and tears bright at the corners of your eyes.
He follows with his forehead pressed to yours, his whole body shaking with it.
Afterward, you lie tangled in white sheets gone warm and wrinkled around you, the lace curtains stirring like breath. He draws lazy circles over your stomach while you trace the line of his mouth with one sleepy fingertip.
“This counts as a successful wedding night,” you murmur.
He laughs softly. “Good. I was hoping.”
You turn into him, already half asleep. “Anywhere is home,” you whisper, the words blurred at the edges with exhaustion, “if you’re in the bed.”
He never forgets them.
When the memory releases you both, Bucky is still standing in his apartment with his chest heaving and your hands fisted in his shirt.
The kitchen light is too bright. The city outside the window too loud. He can taste you without ever having had you in this life.
Your face is flushed all the way down your neck.
“Well,” you say after a stunned second, voice frayed. “That was wildly inconvenient timing.”
He laughs once, brokenly, because if he does not laugh he might combust.
“You okay?” he asks.
Your gaze lifts to his, honest and heated. “Ask me in five minutes.”
He brushes his knuckles over your cheek, a touch so careful it is almost absurd after what you both just saw. “I mean it.”
“I know.” Your hand slides down to cover his where it rests against your face. “Yeah. I’m okay. A little overwhelmed. A lot turned on. But okay.”
Heat hits him hard and immediate. He closes his eyes for a second.
You laugh softly. “Right. Sorry. That was—”
“Don’t apologize.”
When he opens his eyes again, your expression has gentled. “Bucky.”
He knows what you are asking. Not just whether he wants you. That is almost insultingly obvious. You are asking whether he can separate memory from present. Whether he can stand in this kitchen and want what is in front of him without letting the weight of every before crush what could be now.
He answers by leaning down and resting his forehead against yours.
“I want this,” he says quietly. “But I want our first time in this life to be ours.”
Your breath leaves you in a rush. So does some tightness in his chest he hadn’t fully realized he was carrying.
“Okay,” you whisper.
He kisses you once more, soft and lingering. Then he walks you home because if you stay the night he is not sure either of you will survive your own restraint, and because there is something holy in wanting badly and still choosing patience.
At your door, you touch his wrist before he can step back.
“For the record,” you murmur, eyes warm, “that other us had very good taste.”
He grins helplessly. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I get it now.”
Then you kiss him quick and disappear inside with a smile that haunts him for days.
The weeks that follow feel like being built from the inside out.
The flashbacks do not stop, but they become less like ambushes and more like weather—still sudden, still powerful, but no longer catastrophic. A scent, a sound, a patch of light can call one up. Sometimes you text each other in the middle of the workday with fragments: did you remember the red truck in the mountain life had one broken taillight? or I think Bucharest-you stole that robe from the hotel. Sometimes a memory arrives whole when you are together and leaves both of you laughing or aching or red-faced in its wake.
In between, you date.
Real dates. Present-tense ones.
You go to a bookstore in Cobble Hill and accidentally spend two hours arguing about whether people who dog-ear paperbacks can be trusted. You sit in the park eating takeout and watch a wedding party take photos under the arch. You make pasta in your kitchen and burn the garlic because you are too busy kissing against the fridge. You let him meet your friends, who like him immediately and try not to look too smug about it. He tells Sam about you over beers and gets stared at for a full ten seconds before Sam breaks into the kind of grin that means Bucky will never hear the end of this.
And slowly, because slowness is another name for mercy, you get used to the fact of each other.
One night in late July, you fall asleep on Bucky’s couch halfway through a movie. Your head ends up in his lap, your bare feet tucked under his thigh, the credits rolling blue light over the room. He does not move for an hour because the weight of you there feels too precious to disturb.
When you wake, drowsy and disoriented, you blink up at him and smile.
“There you are,” he says before he can stop himself.
The words do something strange to the air.
You sit up slowly, blanket slipping down your shoulders. “What?”
He swallows. “Nothing. I just—”
But then the memory comes, not violent this time. Gentle as smoke.
You see it in each other’s faces as it arrives.
Sleepyhead ’cause all the fucking foxes kept me awake last night
The cabin is barely more than one room and a stubborn prayer.
In that life, winter has a vendetta against you. The land is raw and half-finished around you—trees felled and stacked, fields only partly cleared, the nearest neighbors hours away by horse. Everything aches. Your hands, your backs, your hope.
And still, you build.
By day Bucky swings an axe until his shoulders burn and your tiny patch of earth starts, slowly, to look like something that might feed you come spring. By day you mend, cook, scrub, carry water, keep accounts in a little ledger with cramped neat writing, and somehow still find the energy to laugh when the hen gets loose again and wreaks havoc under the table.
By night you sit by the fire mending his shirts while he carves handles for tools and the baby—your daughter, round-cheeked and solemn—sleeps in a cradle made from wood Bucky planed himself.
It is not easy. God, it is not easy. There are weeks when the roof leaks and the wind gets through the chinks in the walls and your flour goes sour and the loneliness of so much open land makes your chest feel flayed raw. There are days Bucky comes in from the field looking so worn you have to bite the inside of your cheek not to cry.
But there is you. There is him. There is the little sleeping weight of your child and the fire and the bed you built with your own hands.
Sometimes that is enough to make hardship look almost like devotion.
One night in early autumn, the foxes scream outside the cabin so long and loud that neither of you gets any real sleep. By dawn you are cross and bleary-eyed, hair half falling from its braid as you stand over the hearth trying to stir cornmeal mush that refuses to thicken.
“Sleepyhead,” Bucky says softly when he comes up behind you.
You elbow him weakly. “I’ll kill you.”
He laughs into your hair and wraps his arms around your waist anyway, his chin settling on your shoulder. Outside, the new fence leans and the world is still cold and demanding. Inside, his body is warm all along your back.
“We’re doing it,” he murmurs after a while.
You blink at the pot. “Doing what?”
“Building it.” He turns his face into your temple. “A life.”
The words are simple. They hit with the force of revelation.
You tip your head back against his shoulder and close your eyes. In the other room your daughter stirs. The foxes have gone quiet. Morning light pushes pale and stubborn through the little window above the table.
“We are,” you whisper.
He kisses your cheek. “Told you I’d build you something.”
You smile, tired and full to aching. “You built me everything.”
The memory fades with the warm dim glow of Bucky’s living room around you.
You are still on his couch, the television a muted wash of menu screens no one bothered to turn off. For a while neither of you says anything.
Then you reach out and lace your fingers through his.
“That one felt different,” you say.
He nods. “Yeah.”
Not youthful. Not fevered. Not all heat and spark and want. That life had been built plank by plank. Through work. Through weather. Through choosing each other when the choosing was made of practical things—fences, soup, babies, roofs, morning fires.
It lands in him heavier than some of the others. Maybe because recovery has taught him what it means to build anything worth having by hand.
“I liked them,” you say quietly. “That version of us.”
He rubs his thumb over your knuckles. “Me too.”
You glance around his apartment then, at the bookshelf he assembled crooked and fixed himself, at the herb pot on the windowsill, at the loaf of bread cooling under a dish towel on the counter.
“You’re doing it too, you know,” you murmur.
He looks at you. “Doing what?”
“Building a life.”
The thing in his chest, scarred and careful and too often braced for loss, goes very still.
You squeeze his hand. “It’s a good one.”
He kisses you then because there is no other answer big enough.
By August, you keep a toothbrush at his place.
By September, there is a sweater of yours folded over the back of one of his dining chairs, two hair ties on his bathroom sink, a half-used bottle of your fancy conditioner in his shower that he is under strict orders not to touch. None of it is dramatic. None of it is announced. The shape of your presence simply grows until it feels absurd to remember the apartment before it.
The flash that takes you next comes in early October, on a rainy Thursday when you duck with him into a jazz bar in the West Village to escape a downpour.
The room is all amber light and low ceilings and cigarette-scarred booths preserved from another era. A singer in a black dress stands by the piano, crooning into a microphone. Bucky goes still before you even make it to the bar.
You know before the memory hits what it will be.
The note hangs in the air.
Then London rushes in.
late nights in black silk in east london
The war has made everything look dimmer around the edges.
Bucky is young in the way only war can make a man young—old enough to be exhausted by it, young enough to still be surprised by beauty. He is stationed overseas for too long in a city stitched with blackout curtains and ration books and the bruise-colored exhaustion of people trying very hard to act as if life is still ordinary.
Then one wet December night, a fellow soldier drags him down a narrow stairwell off an alley in East London and the whole world changes shape.
The club is hidden beneath a tailor’s shop with no sign out front. Music seeps through the floorboards before the door even opens. Inside, the room glows low and gold around the edges, tables crowded close, voices pitched just above the band. Women in silk and men in uniform and civilians with danger in their smiles. Someone is laughing at the bar like the war has never existed. Someone else is dancing with one shoe off.
And there you are.
You should not stick out. You’re not center stage or demanding attention. You’re leaning one hip against the bar in black silk gloves and a slip dress that gleams when you move, listening to the pianist with your head tilted slightly as if you know a secret about the song.
Bucky sees you and forgets how war works.
Maybe he forgets how breathing works too.
“Careful,” his friend mutters, following his line of sight. “That one looks expensive.”
Bucky barely hears him.
When you look over and catch him staring, you smile. Not coy. Curious, amused, entirely too direct. Then you lift your glass in a tiny salute.
He is doomed.
Later, after he has found enough courage or foolishness to cross the room, you tell him your brother runs supplies out of the docks and your mother thinks this place is scandalous and your favorite thing in the world is men who look like they’d fall apart if a woman in black silk talked to them too long.
“I am not falling apart,” he says, already half gone.
You laugh, low and delighted. “No? That’s a shame. You’d be awfully handsome doing it.”
You dance with him before midnight. Then again after. The band slows, the room blurs, and you fit against him so easily it feels less like meeting and more like remembering a step he somehow learned before birth.
Outside, the rain has stopped. The alley smells like wet brick and smoke.
“Are you always this easy?” you ask when he walks you to the corner.
“Only in London.”
“Convenient.”
You stop beneath a streetlamp draped in wartime dimming paint. Your lipstick has worn soft at the edges. His gloves are damp. Somewhere far off, a siren starts and then dies.
“I don’t know how long I’m here,” he says, because war steals the illusion of endless time from a man pretty quick.
You look at him with that same level, fearless steadiness you will carry in every life. “Then don’t waste the nights you’ve got.”
So he doesn’t.
He spends every free hour he can find with you in that black silk East London life. Dancing in hidden clubs. Eating chips from newspaper parcels by the river. Kissing in doorways while the city holds its breath between bombings. Falling in love so fast it would look irresponsible to anyone not living under the same shadow.
On his last night before shipping out again, this time to Bucharest, he finds you in the club after closing, curled barefoot on the stage in your black dress with your knees drawn up, humming to yourself while the pianist smokes by the door.
He sits beside you. The stage creaks.
You do not ask him if he is leaving. You already know.
For a long moment you just lean into him shoulder to shoulder, breathing in the dark.
Then you take his hand and lace your fingers with his as if you have always had the right.
“I hate war,” you say flatly.
“Yeah.”
“I hate that it teaches people to love in a hurry.”
He turns to look at you, but your face is tipped toward the empty room. “Maybe,” he says after a while, “it just teaches people not to waste time pretending they don’t.”
That makes you smile a little, though your eyes shine.
When you finally kiss him, it feels like grief and promise all tangled together.
“I’d have found you anyway,” you whisper against his mouth.
He believes you.
Presently, the jazz bar swims back around you in amber and brass.
Your hand is flat over your heart. Bucky is gripping the edge of the bar hard enough his knuckles ache.
“You were terrifying in that one,” he murmurs.
You blink at him. “Terrifying?”
“You had me done in about twelve seconds.”
Your laugh spills out warm and bright enough to make nearby heads turn. “Good.”
He stares at you, at the woman in front of him and the woman in black silk and the impossible thread between them, and something old in him loosens. That London memory is the first one that brushes directly up against the era he remembers in his bones. The first one that lets him feel, without the cold hand of history around its throat, that he once had youth. Flirtation. A version of himself that existed before damage became the loudest fact in the room.
Later, walking you home under a shared umbrella, he tells you more.
Not everything. Not all at once. But more.
About Brooklyn in the forties. About enlisted men and too much bravado and the way the world sharpened at the edges when war started circling. About the years after, in pieces, with pauses long enough to breathe in between. You listen without interrupting except to ask where it hurts. Not where it happened. Where it hurts. The difference matters so much he nearly stops in the middle of the sidewalk.
At your building, rain dripping from the umbrella’s edges, you cup his face and kiss him like he is something to return to, not something to be rescued.
That night he sleeps six straight hours for the first time in weeks.
The last of the big memories comes in November.
By then, the market has become yours together. Saturday mornings are no longer Bucky’s alone. They are yours in the plural, so natural now he sometimes forgets to be startled by it. Coffee for two. Bread for two. Peaches finally back in season for a heartbeat before the weather turns. Your fingers hooked through one of the canvas bag straps while he carries the heavier side.
At the stall with the glass-bottled lemonades and orange sodas, you reach for a bright neon-orange drink at the same time he does.
The glass knocks against his ring finger.
Sunlight slams through him.
Neon orange drinks on the beach
Salt lives in the walls of that house.
Here, you and Bucky live in a little coastal town where everyone knows everybody’s business and no one minds much as long as you bring enough food to the potluck. The house is white clapboard with a porch swing and chipped blue shutters. Sand collects in the doorway no matter how often you sweep. Wind rattles the windows in winter and smells like sunscreen in summer.
You have children in that life. Three of them.
A girl with your laugh and Bucky’s serious eyes. A boy who climbs everything he’s told not to. A baby still soft at the wrists who rides your hip with one fist full of your shirt.
The beach is five minutes from your front door. On hot afternoons you walk there loaded like pack animals—blankets, towels, snacks, toys, a cooler that bumps against Bucky’s leg every other step, the toddler already whining for the ocean before you’ve even crossed the dune grass.
It is a beautiful chaos. Your favorite kind.
The day memory gives you is bright enough to ache.
The sky is clear blue from edge to edge. Your youngest is asleep under the shade tent with one plump foot sticking free of the blanket. Your son is digging a moat around a sandcastle with all the focus of a man handling explosives. Your daughter, solemn with purpose, is handing Bucky shell fragments one by one so he can decorate the towers properly.
“No, Daddy,” she says with immense patience. “That one goes there.”
Bucky, thirty-something and sun-browned and already half buried in sand because the children have no respect for rank, nods gravely. “My mistake.”
You come down from the boardwalk carrying a tray of neon-orange lemonades in plastic cups, ice clinking. Condensation slicks your fingers. The sun catches on the rims of the cups until they glow like tiny lanterns.
Bucky looks up when your shadow falls across the sand.
Even after years, even with sunscreen on your nose and beach hair whipping your cheeks, he looks at you like there has never been anyone else worth the trouble of sight.
“You’re my favorite person,” he says as you hand him a drink.
You arch a brow. “Even over the tiny tyrants?”
“Depends. Are they giving me lemonade?”
Your daughter takes her cup in both hands and squints up at you. “Mama, Daddy made the castle wrong.”
You laugh. “I’m shocked.”
“It was sabotage,” Bucky says.
The children shout over each other. The baby wakes and starts fussing. A gull swoops dangerously low near the pretzel bag. The tide inches closer. Everything is loud and sandy and sticky and imperfect.
It is paradise.
Later, when the children are collapsing in a sugar crash on towels striped green and white, Bucky stretches out beside you and tugs you down until your head rests on his chest. The ocean hisses and folds itself a few yards away.
“You think,” he says after a while, fingers combing absently through your damp hair, “we’ll ever get tired of this?”
You tip your face up. “The beach?”
“This.”
The life. The family. The ordinary miracle of it.
You can feel the answer in him before he says it. In the steady beat under your ear. In the salt-warmed skin of him. In the children making sleepy, disgruntled sounds nearby because even paradise requires snacks and naps and somebody always getting sunscreen in their eye.
“No,” you say softly. “I don’t think so.”
His mouth brushes your forehead. “Good.”
Because in every lifetime, it turns out, what the two of you build is not grandeur.
It is a table. A bed. A road. A cabin. A dance floor. A beach towel in the sun. A thousand tiny places where love gets to put its shoes by the door and stay awhile.
When the memory loosens its grip, you are back at the market with cold glass sweating in your hand.
You are crying.
So is Bucky, though he only realizes it when you reach up and wipe at his cheek with your thumb.
“That one was rude,” you say thickly.
He laughs through the ache in his throat. “Yeah.”
It isn’t the children, not really. Though that got him. It’s the ordinariness of it. The ease. The way love in that life had settled into the bones of things so thoroughly that joy looked almost plain. A beach day. Lemonade. Sand. A family.
A future.
You look at him with tears still bright in your eyes. “Do you ever think maybe that’s why it keeps happening?”
“What?”
“Us.” You glance down at the bottle in your hand, the impossible orange brightness of it. “Not because we’re destined in some giant dramatic way. Maybe just because every time the universe throws us somewhere new, we keep making the same choice.”
The market blurs around the edges.
Bucky takes the bottle from your hand and sets both your drinks down on the stall so he can hold your face in both palms.
“I think,” he says, voice low and unsteady, “that no matter where I find you, you keep teaching me that a life doesn’t have to be extraordinary to matter.”
You inhale sharply.
He goes on because he has spent too much of his existence losing time, losing names, losing chances to say what needed saying. Because he will not waste this one.
“I loved you in a chapel with a plastic sign. In a truck on back roads. In a bed with lace curtains. In a cabin when we had almost nothing. In London when the whole world was on fire. On a beach with kids climbing all over me and sand in places there should never be sand.” Your mouth trembles around a laugh. His thumbs catch the tears on your cheeks. “And every time, it wasn’t because things were perfect. It was because it was you.”
Your hand covers one of his. “Bucky—”
“In this life,” he says, holding your gaze, “I don’t care what fate says. I don’t care what we were before unless it helps me be better to you now. I just…” He exhales, helpless in it. “I just know I am more myself when you’re in the room. And I want to keep choosing that. For however long I get.”
Something breaks open in your face.
Then you are kissing him in the middle of the farmer’s market, November wind cold around your ears and strangers surely staring and lemons probably within a three-yard radius somehow, and Bucky does not care about any of it.
When you finally pull back, you rest your forehead to his and laugh wetly.
“You took forever to say that,” you whisper.
He blinks. “I did?”
“Yes.” You kiss him once, quick and smiling. “It’s okay. I was going to let you.”
That night you come home with him.
Home, because that is what it is now no matter how recently he learned to say it.
The apartment smells like the rosemary chicken you cooked together and the bread he baked that morning and the cold air that followed you in when he opened the door. Your overnight bag sits by the couch. Your laughter is still in the walls from where you nearly dropped the oranges while making cocktails because he kissed your neck and ruined your concentration on purpose.
There are no visions this time.
No past lives pouring through the cracks.
Just the two of you in the warm gold hush of his bedroom, lamplight soft on the sheets, your sweater slipping from one shoulder as you sit on the edge of the mattress and look up at him.
“This is ours,” you say quietly.
He nods. “Yeah.”
You reach for him.
The first time you make love in this life is not a reenactment of any before. There are echoes, maybe. The same reverence. The same hunger braided with tenderness. But this is its own living thing, shaped by who you are now—older in different ways, scarred in different places, more careful and more certain all at once.
He undresses you slowly, like unwrapping something he intends to keep. You do the same for him, kissing each mark on his body as if introducing yourself to every chapter. When your fingers brush the long scars at his shoulder and side, you do not hesitate. You just look at him for permission and then kiss them too.
His throat goes tight.
On the bed, he takes his time. He is afraid this time, rather he wants to feel every second of being chosen with full knowledge. Your skin under his mouth. Your breath hitching when he drags his thumb over your clit. The way you smile against his lips when he says your name like a marvel. He works you open with his hands first, then his mouth, until you are clutching the sheets and half laughing, half sobbing because pleasure in this body, in this life, feels new and familiar all at once.
“Bucky,” you whisper when he comes back up over you, eyes dark and wrecked.
“I’ve got you.”
You nod, hands framing his face. “I know.”
When he pushes into you, slow and careful, your mouths are open against each other. He feels your body welcome him in inch by inch, feels your legs tighten around his hips, feels the tremor that runs through you when he finally settles deep. It is overwhelming in the simplest way. Not because of memory. Because of presence. Because you are here. Because he is too.
He moves. You move with him.
Outside, the city keeps being itself. A siren in the distance. Somebody laughing on the street. Heat clanking faintly through old pipes. Inside, his bedroom narrows to breath and skin and the soft wreck of your voice. You scratch lightly through his hair and murmur yes against his mouth and he nearly comes from the sound alone. He holds himself back long enough to watch the exact moment pleasure overtakes you, the way your eyes go bright and your body arches up into his with a cry he feels all the way to his ribs.
He follows soon after, buried deep, forehead pressed to yours, your names tangled together in the dark.
Afterward you lie under the sheets while the room cools around you. Your head rests on his chest. His hand drifts up and down your bare spine. The curtains are plain cotton, not lace. The sheets are soft gray, not white. The city outside is Brooklyn and not some inn in another century. It does not matter.
You draw lazy circles over his sternum.
“You know,” you murmur sleepily, “I think I liked every version of you.”
His fingers still for a second. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” You tilt your chin to look at him. “But this one might be my favorite.”
Emotion catches him so hard it almost hurts.
He bends and kisses your forehead because if he tries to speak right then, he will probably embarrass himself beyond repair.
Months later, when winter gives way to spring and then, at last, to summer again, Saturday morning finds the two of you at the farmer’s market under the same green-striped awnings where everything began.
Bucky has two coffees in a cardboard carrier. You have a bouquet of sunflowers tucked under one arm. The bread guy waves. The peach stand is finally, gloriously in season. The lemon vendor clocks you both and grins like he has been expecting to see how this turns out.
“Need a bag today?” he asks.
You glance at Bucky. Bucky glances at you.
Then, smiling, you both reach for the same lemon on purpose.
No flash comes.
There is no need.
Your fingers lace together instead, easy as breath.
The square is bright with morning. The violinist by the fountain is playing something warm and sweet. Coffee steams between you. Peaches perfume the air. Beside you, your soulmate—your chosen person, your present-tense miracle—squeezes your hand.
And because love, in the end, is often this simple, you walk the market together like you have done it all your life.
Maybe you have.
Maybe you will again.
Either way, the peaches are ripe, the bread is warm, and Bucky Barnes is laughing at something you said with his whole face open to the sun.
It is not a dramatic ending.
It is better.
It is a life.
And every ordinary second of it feels, impossibly, like falling in love again and again.
