Carry You Home (#3)
Series Summary: After Bucky cheats on you, you leave the Tower shattered, humiliated, and convinced that love has only ever made you smaller. Steve comes back from a mission to find you gone - and when he learns the truth, his loyalty is tested in ways he never expected.
Wordcount: 9.1 k
Pairing: Steve Rogers x Female reader
Warnings: tower fic, alternative mcu, slow burn, healing arc, hurt comfort, emotional hurt comfort, angst with comfort, infidelity angst, second chance at love, cheating / infidelity, emotional betrayal, toxic ex relationship, Bucky Barnes is OOC, forced kiss, non con elements (very light), boundary violation, sexual assault implications, emotional manipulation, jealousy and possessiveness, panic attacks / panic response, vomiting due to distress, STI scare / medical testing mention, violence / physical fight, blood mention, breakup grief, trauma recovery, found family, protective steve rogers, soft steve rogers, toxic bucky barnes, self-worth issues, mentions of emotionally abusive family dynamics, reader has a difficult childhood, happy ending, MDNI, some chapters will have smut or explicit intimacy
Important note about Bucky: Bucky is very OOC in this fic. I want to be very clear about that from the start: I know he is OOC, I know canon Bucky would not act like this, and I am not presenting this as my interpretation of canon Bucky Barnes.
This story uses him in a deliberately darker, more toxic role for the sake of the angst, conflict, and Reader’s healing arc. So please, before sending me an ask or leaving a comment to tell me that Bucky would never behave this way: I know. That is what this warning is for.
I will not be replying to complaints about Bucky being written OOC. You have been warned, and if this version of him is not something you want to read, please feel free to skip this fic.
A/N: I'll be honest, if this part gets a ton of engagement, I'll really consider posting two parts per week coming next week. Beta read by Cassie as always.
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“If I had fewer principles,” you murmured, “I think I would’ve tried to sleep with you tonight. Just to hurt him.”
For a moment after that, Steve thought he had misheard you.
Not because the words were unclear. They were quiet, yes, worn thin by crying and rum and exhaustion, but clear enough. They slipped out against his shirt in that small, stripped voice of yours and settled between you with a weight far heavier than their volume.
Steve went absolutely still.
The hand on your back did not stop moving – not at first, because stopping would have made the moment harder, sharper, more visible than he wanted it to be. But something in him seized all the same. His throat tightened so suddenly it almost hurt. His chest felt too small around the breath he took.
Not because the thought itself tempted him.
That was the first thing he knew with certainty.
Not because some ugly part of him felt satisfaction at being named in the fantasy of retaliation.
It didn’t.
If anything, the sentence struck him like another form of grief – evidence of how far the night had dragged you from yourself, from whatever steadier ground you usually occupied. It told him how angry you were, how humiliated, how exhausted by the sheer uselessness of your own pain. That was what he heard first. Not invitation. Not possibility. Just hurt sharpened into the shape of a weapon and then set down again before you even fully lifted it.
Still, Steve was only human, and he could not pretend the words passed through him without consequence.
He swallowed once and said, quieter than he intended, “You’re drunk.”
It was not an accusation. Barely even a correction. More like something he reached for because it was easier than saying what else had flashed through him in the instant after your confession: the hot, immediate refusal of the idea; the anger at Bucky for having reduced the night to this kind of thought at all; and beneath both, the deep unsettling ache of knowing that even now, when you were raw and hurting and not wholly steady, part of you trusted him enough to speak the ugliest truth in your head aloud.
You gave a faint sound that might have been irritation.
“No. No, I know my limits. I’m not.”
Steve believed you.
Or rather, he believed that you meant it exactly as you said. You had been drinking, yes. Enough for your balance to go soft, enough for your words to blur at the corners. But not enough to become someone else. Not enough to turn your thoughts foreign to you. If anything, the alcohol had only worn down the barriers between feeling and speech.
You were not saying this because the rum had invented it.
You were saying it because you were too tired to hide it.
Silence followed.
Steve felt it like another presence in the room. Not awkward, not quite, but charged in a fragile way. He became acutely aware of everything all at once: your weight against him, the warmth of your body in his arms, the dampness still drying on his shirt from your tears, the low lamp light pooling across the floor, the bottle sitting abandoned a few feet away, the faint city noise behind the windows.
He did not know where to put his eyes, so he kept them on the wall beyond your shoulder and let his hand continue its slow path up and down your back.
Then you spoke again, and this time the words came softer. No edge left in them. No provocation. Only truth, plain and almost childishly simple.
“I’m just… tired, Steve.”
That undid something in him.
Because yes. Of course you were.
Tired of the crying, tired of the anger, tired of being asked to survive a day you had not chosen, tired of thinking, tired of feeling humiliated, tired of wanting things that no longer existed in the shape you wanted them, tired of holding yourself together for one more hour and one more conversation and one more wave of hurt.
Steve understood that kind of tiredness far too well.
Not the same story, never the same story, but the same bone-deep exhaustion that turned every emotion into weight. The kind that made sleeping seem less like rest and more like surrender, and yet left a person desperate for it all the same.
He shifted slightly – not enough to dislodge you, only enough to look down a little more fully at the top of your head.
“Do you want to try lying down?” he asked.
He kept his voice low, careful not to make it sound like dismissal. Not you should go to bed now in the way people said when they wanted grief tidied away. Just an offer. A possibility. A gentler surface than the floor.
You did not answer right away.
Instead you tilted your face just enough that your voice reached him less muffled than before.
“You’ll stay with me?”
The question came so quickly after the last one that Steve knew it had been waiting there already, underneath everything else.
He did not hesitate.
“Yes.”
A beat passed.
“Promise?”
That word entered him differently.
Smaller than the others. Softer. And for that reason maybe the hardest to hear.
He closed his eyes briefly.
You had already asked for truth once tonight and taken it like a lifeline. Now you asked for something even more fragile: certainty. The simple assurance that he would not get you on your feet, guide you to the bedroom, settle you under a blanket, and then disappear once you were horizontal and quiet enough to be left alone with the rest of your thoughts.
Steve understood that fear too.
Not because he would ever have done it. Because he knew why you needed to hear the opposite spoken aloud.
“Promise,” he said.
He felt the slightest slackening in your body then, the small involuntary release of somebody whose mind had been braced for abandonment and, for the moment, no longer had to be.
Steve waited another second before moving. “Okay,” he murmured. “Come on.”
He loosened his hold carefully, one arm sliding from around your shoulders so he could rise without dropping you. The second the support changed, your fingers caught at his sleeve on instinct.
“I’m here,” he said at once.
Only then did he push himself to his feet.
He stood and turned back toward you immediately, offering both hands. You looked up at him with eyes still swollen and lashes clumped from tears, and for a second he had the absurd thought that no one should have been allowed to hurt you on a day when you looked this defenseless. It was an unhelpful thought. A useless one. He pushed it aside.
You put your hands in his.
He pulled you gently upward.
You came to your feet in stages, unsteady not just from the alcohol but from the sheer physical aftermath of crying. Your legs wavered beneath you almost at once. Steve stepped in without thinking, catching you by the elbows first and then more firmly by the waist when your balance tilted too far forward.
You made an irritated little sound, half at yourself, half at the betrayal of your own body.
“Easy,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
The automatic answer was so familiar that if the situation had been different it might have almost made him smile.
Instead he only said, very mildly, “No, you’re not.”
You huffed a breath through your nose, but you did not argue harder than that.
The bedroom was only a few steps away, yet Steve moved as if crossing something longer and more dangerous. Not because the apartment required caution. Because you did. Because the moment did. His hand stayed at your back while the other steadied your forearm, and he felt every tiny correction your body made to stay upright. Every sway. Every pause. Every second where you leaned into his support just a fraction more than before.
He did not mention it.
At the bedroom doorway he stopped.
The room was bare in the particular way safehouses always were. A neatly made bed. One lamp on the side table. Curtains half drawn. A dresser with nothing personal on it. A chair in the corner. Stark’s idea of comfort stripped down to functionality. It looked impersonal enough that Steve’s chest tightened again at the thought of you spending the night here alone if he had not come.
You looked at the bed and then, unexpectedly, back at him with something almost like reluctance.
Steve understood at once.
“You want me to stay close,” he said softly.
It was not really a question.
Your mouth tightened. You looked away, embarrassed maybe, or simply too tired to hide the truth elegantly.
“I don’t…” You swallowed. “I don’t really want to sleep by myself tonight.”
The honesty of it felt intimate in a way far more dangerous than your earlier remark about revenge. Because this was not about anger. Not about making anyone pay. This was need in its simplest form.
Steve nodded as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
“Okay.”
You searched his face again, perhaps for pity, perhaps for judgment, perhaps for that tiny recoil people sometimes failed to hide when confronted with another person’s dependence.
He gave you none of it.
Instead he asked, practical because practical was gentler, “Do you want under the blankets or on top?”
That seemed to help. The question gave you something small and manageable to answer.
“Under.”
“Alright.”
He moved to pull the covers back, but before he could do more than turn toward the bed, another thought struck him. He looked at you more closely in the lamplight and asked, “Have you eaten anything today?”
Your expression went blank for half a second in the way people’s expressions did when they genuinely had to search their memory and found nothing useful there.
Then you shook your head once.
“No. Wasn’t hungry.”
Steve exhaled slowly through his nose.
Of course you hadn’t been. Hunger had no place in a day like this until suddenly the body demanded payment for being ignored.
“You need something that isn’t alcohol,” he said.
The words came out firmer than most of what he had said tonight.
You leaned one shoulder against the doorframe and looked at him with all the exhausted stubbornness of a person who had reached the end of her usable strength hours ago. “I’m not hungry now either.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
One corner of your mouth twitched, not with humor but with weary annoyance. “Bossy.”
“Yeah,” Steve said. “A little.”
He stepped closer again when your balance dipped.
“You don’t need a meal. A piece of toast. Crackers. Anything. But you’re not going to bed on an empty stomach after drinking and crying for half the night.”
You closed your eyes briefly, as if even the prospect of chewing sounded like a task someone invented specifically to torment you.
Steve’s expression softened despite himself.
“I know,” he said. “Still.”
You opened your eyes. “You always do that.”
“Do what?”
“Sound patient while actually not giving me a choice.”
This time he did smile, faintly. It barely touched his mouth, gone almost as soon as it appeared. “Eat first,” he said. “Then you can accuse me of tyranny.”
That earned him the smallest real reaction yet – a breath that might have become a laugh in another life, on another night.
It vanished quickly, but he had heard it.
He guided you back toward the living room rather than letting you collapse into bed immediately. You complained under your breath once, too low for him to catch every word, but you came. In the kitchenette he found what he expected: emergency supplies, bland and practical. Bread in the freezer. Crackers in a tin. A jar of peanut butter. Instant soup packets. Bottled water.
He settled for toast and water because it was fastest and least likely to turn your stomach.
While the bread browned, you stood leaning against the counter with your arms folded and your eyes half-lidded, looking like someone only a step away from lying down directly on the kitchen floor if left unattended. Steve opened a bottle of water and pressed it into your hand.
“Drink.”
You obeyed with poor grace, taking a few swallows before muttering, “You’re enjoying this too much.”
“I’m really not.”
That was true. If he was firm, it was because he had no desire to spend the night holding your hair back while your body rebelled against an empty stomach and too much rum on top of too much grief.
He set the toast on a plate and handed it over once it had cooled enough not to burn you.
You looked at it as though it had personally insulted you.
“Steve.”
“You can eat half.”
You stared another moment, then took a reluctant bite.
He watched the way you chewed slowly, more from fatigue than reluctance now, and felt an absurd wave of relief at the simple fact of you swallowing something. It said nothing about healing. Nothing about tomorrow. But it was care, and care sometimes reduced itself to the least glamorous acts in the world – making sure somebody had bread in their stomach before they tried to sleep off heartbreak.
You ate more than half in the end, though the last bites seemed powered entirely by stubbornness and his unwillingness to look away until you finished enough to satisfy him. Then you drank more water. By then your eyes had gone glassy with exhaustion again.
“Done?” he asked.
You nodded.
“Good.”
The bedroom seemed even quieter when he led you back there.
This time, when the bed came into view, you did not hesitate. Steve pulled back the blankets and turned down the lamp to a softer glow. You sat on the edge of the mattress first, then looked up at him with sudden uncertainty that went straight through him.
“You said you’d stay.”
“I did.”
“I don’t want…” You stopped, rubbed at your face once, and started over. “I don’t want you on the chair.”
Steve glanced at the chair in the corner, then back at you.
You looked miserable, embarrassed by the need and too tired to pretend otherwise. There was no seduction in it. No awkward charge beyond the one his own awareness tried and failed to suppress. Only the plain truth that after everything, you did not want distance. Not tonight. Not when sleep would mean losing conscious control for a few hours and trusting the room not to change while you weren’t watching.
He answered just as plainly.
“Okay.”
Your shoulders dropped.
He toed off his boots, set them by the bed, and shrugged out of his jacket. You watched him do it with heavy-lidded concentration, as if reassuring yourself he really meant it. He left his T-shirt and jeans on – there was no question of anything else – and pulled the blanket aside farther so you could climb in first.
You did, slowly, curling onto one side with the boneless caution of someone whose body had finally admitted how exhausted it was.
Steve settled on top of the covers for a moment instead, trying to decide the least intrusive way to keep his promise.
Then you turned your head on the pillow and asked, voice already blurred by sleep and weariness, “Are you coming?”
He hesitated only long enough to move under the blanket rather than over it. He lay down beside you fully clothed, on his back at first, leaving careful space between your body and his.
The mattress dipped.
For maybe two seconds you stayed where you were.
Then, with the complete lack of self-consciousness of someone too tired to invent any, you moved toward him.
Not fast. Not dramatically. Just a slow instinctive shift until your shoulder met his side, until your hand found the fabric of his shirt, until you were close enough that the space he had left no longer existed. Steve went still again, but not because he meant to pull away. Only because the reality of your nearness hit all at once.
You made a tiny sound of relief.
Then, even more quietly, “Can I–”
You did not finish.
You did not need to.
Steve turned onto his side toward you and opened one arm.
That was all the permission you needed.
You came into him immediately, fitting yourself against his chest with none of the hesitation you had shown in words. One arm slid across his middle. Your forehead tucked under his chin. Your knee bumped lightly against his thigh as you settled. It was not graceful, and it was certainly not calculated. It was the movement of someone seeking warmth and safety before their body shut down from sheer depletion.
Steve wrapped his arm around you.
Carefully at first. Then more securely when he felt how hard you pressed in, as if closeness itself was the only thing convincing your nerves that the night had truly changed shape.
There.
He had you.
He could feel your heartbeat through the layers of fabric between you – too fast still, but slowing. Could feel the lingering tremors in your muscles each time your breathing threatened to catch. Could smell the faint trace of rum on your skin, the salt of tears, the ordinary familiar scent of your shampoo underneath.
It nearly hurt, how much tenderness the moment demanded from him.
He kept his hand between your shoulder blades and resumed that slow, absent caress that had steadied you on the floor. Your body answered almost immediately. Tension bled out of you in increments. Your hand, still fisted weakly in his shirt, loosened a little. Your breathing deepened.
“Better?” he murmured.
You nodded against his chest.
“Don’t go anywhere.”
The words were so quiet he almost missed them.
“I won’t,” he said.
You seemed to consider that for a second, then tightened your hold on him by a fraction anyway, as though your body wanted physical proof in addition to verbal promise.
Steve let you.
He would have let you hold on all night if that was what it took.
After a little while you shifted one leg between his, not seductively, not even consciously he thought, only in that blind sleepy way people chased the most stable position when they had finally found somewhere they felt safe enough to rest. The intimacy of it shot through him with humiliating force, and Steve had to close his eyes and breathe carefully once through his nose.
Not because he wanted this to become anything else.
That distinction mattered.
He held onto it with both hands.
You were tired. Hurt. Barely keeping yourself together. You wanted his arms around you because they made the room feel less empty, not because the line between comfort and desire had blurred for you in some meaningful way. Steve knew that. He would keep knowing it. Whatever his body did with the information was his problem, not yours.
So he concentrated on the weight of responsibility instead.
On the fact that you were finally, slowly relaxing.
On the way your breaths had begun to even out, though every so often one still shuddered at the edges. On the trust of being allowed to hold you through that. On the simple practical truth that he had promised to stay and this – this was what staying meant.
Your voice came again, drowsy now, almost drifting.
“Steve?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
The word hit him with absurd force.
He looked down at the top of your head, though he knew you could not see him well in the dimness.
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“I know.” A pause. “Still.”
His hand moved once, lightly, over your hair.
He said nothing after that because there was nothing to say that would not turn too sentimental or too false. Instead he held you and listened as the room grew quieter and your body, inch by inch, surrendered to exhaustion.
Your breathing steadied first.
Then your fingers lost some of their grip on his shirt, though they never let go completely.
Then the little tension at the corner of your mouth eased where it had been set all evening with hurt and anger and pride.
Twice more your body twitched with the aftershock of a nearly remembered sob. Each time Steve tightened his arm around you just enough that, even half asleep, you seemed to settle faster.
He did not think about morning.
Not much.
Morning would bring its own difficulties. Embarrassment perhaps. Headache. Questions. The long, ugly road of what came next. He knew better than to borrow too much from tomorrow while tonight still needed tending.
So he stayed in the dark with you tucked against him, awake long after your breathing finally slipped into the deep soft rhythm of real sleep.
And when, even asleep, you shifted closer instead of away – seeking his warmth with the unquestioning trust of someone whose body had decided for her what it felt safe beside – Steve only tightened his hold the smallest fraction and kept watch while the night moved on around you.
Steve did not remember the exact moment sleep took him.
One minute he had still been awake in the dim hush of the safehouse bedroom, staring past your shoulder into the half-dark and listening to the quiet, steady rhythm of your breathing as it deepened against his chest. The next, the night had folded over him too.
When he woke, morning had already slipped into the room.
Not bright, not cheerful – just a thin grey wash through the curtains, the kind of light that belonged to late mornings after bad nights, when the day had clearly started without asking anyone’s permission. The safehouse bedroom looked flatter in it, more ordinary. The chair in the corner. The rumpled blanket. His jacket tossed over the back of the chair. Your discarded socks on the floor near the bed where you must have half-kicked them off before collapsing.
For one brief second, he did not move.
Your weight was still there.
You lay curled against him almost exactly as you had fallen asleep, one arm tucked between the two of you, your face tilted up just enough that he could see you properly now. You were awake. He knew that before your eyes met his. There was a certain tension in the stillness of you, a held breath under the quiet.
Then he looked at your face and understood something else immediately.
You had a headache.
Your eyes were narrowed against the grey light in that particular way people got when their skull seemed one heartbeat away from splitting open. There was a faint crease between your brows. Your mouth looked dry. Even the way you kept your head very still against the pillow suggested that moving too fast would be a terrible idea.
The sight tugged a tired, helpless kind of sympathy out of him.
You were still watching him.
Not awkwardly. Not even warily, exactly.
Just… closely.
As if waking up and finding him here had answered some question you had still half expected to turn cruel overnight.
Steve stayed where he was, one arm still around your back beneath the blanket. He did not pull away. He did not act startled or hurry to create distance just because daylight had arrived and made everything less forgiving. That felt like a rejection of the trust you had placed in him during the night.
So he only said, quietly, “Morning.”
Your mouth twitched faintly, though it was not quite a smile.
“Morning,” you answered, and your voice came hoarse from sleep, from crying, from the aftertaste of rum and all the things the night had done to you.
Steve searched your face for another second. “You look like your head’s killing you.”
“It is.”
The honesty of that almost made him smile for real.
“Water,” he said. “And probably coffee later. Maybe aspirin if Stark stocked the place like a sane person.”
You made a low sound that could have been agreement.
He was just beginning to wonder whether he should move carefully enough not to jostle you too much and go find what you needed when something changed in your expression.
It happened quickly, but not so quickly that he missed the thought arriving.
Your gaze dropped – briefly – to his mouth.
Then back to his eyes.
He felt the shift in the air before he understood it. A tiny, charged stillness. The kind that came just before a decision.
“Hey,” he began, though he had no idea what he intended to say after that.
You kissed him.
It was not clumsy, though sleep and hangover and the softness of waking lent it a slight uncertainty in the first second. It was also not hesitant in the way he might have expected if you had given yourself time to think. You did not hover there, asking permission with your breath. You closed the distance and pressed your mouth to his with a directness that sent shock clean through him.
For one impossible instant, Steve forgot everything except sensation.
Your lips were warm and a little dry from the night, softer than he had ever allowed himself to imagine with any detail. The angle was awkward because of the way you were half-curled into him, but the very awkwardness of it made it feel devastatingly real. No fantasy ever accounted for the slight drag of morning breath, the warmth trapped beneath blankets, the ache in a shoulder slept on too long, the faint sting of surprise so sharp it bordered on pain.
He tasted salt first.
Then the last trace of rum.
Then simply you.
And because he was not made of stone, because he had wanted this in ways he had never once let himself name aloud, because desire sometimes outran morality by a heartbeat before morality caught it by the throat, he kissed you back.
Instinctively.
Completely.
It lasted no more than a second or two, maybe less. But in that space his body answered before the rest of him could stop it. His hand tightened involuntarily at your back. His mouth softened under yours and then moved with yours, answering the pressure, the warmth, the startling intimacy of waking to find you here and then this. A rush went through him so sudden and fierce he felt it everywhere at once – chest, stomach, throat, the backs of his arms, the pulse jumping hard under his skin.
It was not gentle in the sense of detached caution.
It was gentle because he knew no other way to be with you.
That was what shocked him most.
Not that he wanted it.
That he already knew the shape of how carefully he would.
Then the rest of him caught up.
Steve broke the kiss.
Not violently. Not with any recoil that might have shamed you. He only drew back just far enough that your mouths no longer touched, his breath suddenly far too shallow in the small space between you.
“No,” he said.
The word came rough.
He swallowed and forced more steadiness into it. “No. Not like this.”
The reaction on your face hit him immediately.
It darkened – not with anger first, but with something quieter and more dangerous. Hurt. Embarrassment. The quick closing of someone who had just made themselves vulnerable and gotten pushed away in return. Your eyes shut for a second, and Steve hated himself for putting that look there even though he knew he had done the right thing.
He lifted his hand from your back toward your face, then stopped before touching you, uncertain whether even that would feel like too much right now.
“Not because I didn’t want to,” he said, voice low. Honest. Maybe too honest. “That’s not what I meant.”
Your eyes opened again, but you did not look at him straight away.
Steve forced himself to keep going.
“Not because you’re hurting and reaching for something. Not because of him. Not because of revenge.”
Your gaze flicked back to his then, sharper despite the headache and the sleep still clinging to both of you.
“It’s not revenge,” you said.
There was no slur in your voice this morning. No softening excuse left to hide behind. Only exhaustion and certainty.
Steve frowned slightly. “Then why?”
The question escaped him before he fully meant to ask it.
You stared at him for a long second, and then something in your expression shifted into a tired kind of resolve.
“Because if it were revenge,” you said quietly, “I would’ve done it in front of him.”
That landed with brutal clarity.
Steve felt the truth of it at once. You were not wrong. If you had wanted vengeance in its purest form, humiliation would have been part of it. Spectacle. Witness. The knife twisted where Bucky could see it.
This had not been that.
This had happened here, in the morning hush of a safehouse bedroom, while the world was still reduced to two people under one blanket and the aftermath of a ruined night. No audience. No punishment. No performance.
The realization only made the air between you feel more dangerous.
Steve said nothing.
You went on, and now your voice changed again – softer, but not less direct.
“Because I never said anything.” You wet your lips once, as if the movement itself reminded you of the kiss. Steve had to drag his eyes back to yours. “But I always knew the way you looked at me.”
Steve closed his eyes.
Not dramatically. Not because he meant to shut you out. Simply because that sentence entered him too deeply to meet with his eyes open.
For one brief, unbearable moment he could still feel the kiss in full sensory detail. Your mouth against his. The instinctive answer of his own. The way your breath had mingled with his in the small warm space between you. The ache now left by stopping. It all sat bright and immediate in his body, impossible to dismiss as imagination because it had happened, because he had let it happen for that fatal split second, because no matter how much discipline he possessed he could not unknow the exact feel of your lips on his now.
And over that came your words.
I always knew the way you looked at me.
He wondered, with a kind of exhausted disbelief, whether he had truly been that easy to read all along.
Maybe he had.
Maybe Bucky knew because Bucky knew him too well, had known him too long, had grown up beside him in the narrow old corridors of Brooklyn where every expression became familiar through repetition. Maybe you knew because you were you – because people sometimes saw most clearly the things directed at them, however quietly. Maybe Steve had been less careful than he believed. Or maybe some truths simply refused permanent concealment when they lived in the body long enough. In a look held half a second too long. In a silence that came too swiftly to your defense. In the reflex of watching for your reaction first.
He opened his eyes again.
You were still there. Still close. Still looking at him with none of the confusion he might once have hoped for, because confusion would have made this easier. Instead there was something almost calm in your expression now, despite the pain in it. As if naming the truth had at least removed one layer of uncertainty from the room.
Steve let out a slow breath.
“I tried not to let that matter,” he said at last.
The words came quieter than most of what he said, as if volume itself might damage them.
Your gaze did not leave his face. “I know.”
He almost laughed at that, but there was no humor in him for it. Of course you knew. Apparently you had known far more than he wanted to admit.
“It mattered anyway,” you said.
That was not a question either.
Steve looked at you for a long moment.
Every instinct in him pulled in two directions at once. One toward truth, the other toward restraint. He had spent so long forcing those two things to coexist that sometimes he could no longer tell which one was winning. He wanted – God, he wanted – to answer you plainly, to stop pretending his feelings existed only in the abstract. But he also saw you here, pale with a headache, bruised by heartbreak, still waking inside the emotional wreckage of the day before. Any confession from him now risked becoming entangled with all of that in ways neither of you could undo later.
So he chose the narrowest truth.
“Yes,” he said.
Your face changed.
Not into triumph. Not into relief, exactly. More into something sadder. A recognition, maybe, of how long this silence had lived between all three of you in different forms. Of how many things people could know and never say until the wrong moment dragged them out into daylight.
You shifted back half an inch, enough to give both of you slightly more space without truly leaving his arms.
Steve missed the warmth of your mouth instantly and despised himself for noticing.
His body had not yet caught up to his principles. His pulse still moved too fast. He still felt the ghost of the kiss along every nerve. It would have been easier, in some base physical way, if he had not answered you back at all. If he had gone rigid and cold and turned himself into a wall. But he had kissed you. Briefly, yes. Still enough. And now his own restraint sat inside him like a blade turned inward.
He dragged a hand over his face once.
“You can’t do that because you’re hurting,” he said finally, more to anchor himself than anything else. “And I can’t let you do it because I’ve wanted it.”
The truth of that seemed to thicken the room all over again.
You looked at him steadily. “That wasn’t exactly a no.”
It nearly undid him.
Steve let out one breath that might have become a laugh if things had been even a little less raw. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”
The corner of your mouth shifted, faint and tired.
Then the pain in your head must have surged again, because your eyes squeezed shut and your brow furrowed.
Steve seized on the practical distraction at once, grateful for it.
“Okay,” he murmured. “Before we say anything else either of us can’t sort through properly, I’m getting you water and aspirin.”
You opened one eye. “Running away?”
“Temporarily.”
That actually drew the ghost of a smile from you, fleeting but real.
Steve carefully eased himself out from under the blanket before the warmth of the bed and the memory of your mouth on his could persuade him to stay where he had no business staying if he wanted to keep his head clear. The mattress shifted as he sat up. Cool air touched the skin your body had kept warm. He felt the loss of closeness with ridiculous intensity.
He stood and had to steady himself for a second on the edge of the dresser, less from balance than from the sheer physical aftermath of the kiss. His body still hummed with it. The taste of you lingered just enough to be maddening. He pressed his thumb once, hard, into the heel of his palm as if a sharper sensation might discipline the rest of him.
When he turned back, you were watching him again through narrowed eyes, one hand up at your temple now.
The sight reset something in him.
Need first. Always.
He fetched water, found aspirin in the bathroom cabinet, and brought both back. You pushed yourself halfway upright with a wince, took the pills from his hand, and swallowed them obediently.
Then you held the glass a second longer than necessary and said, not looking at him this time, “I meant what I said.”
Steve stood at the side of the bed, quiet.
“I know,” he answered.
Because he did.
That was the trouble.
He believed you.
Not entirely in the shape of what the kiss meant yet – there would be time, or there would not, and he was not going to steal certainty from your vulnerability this morning. But he believed that it had not been revenge. He believed that you had seen him for longer than he understood. He believed that whatever passed between you now existed in its own right and not merely as a weapon against Bucky.
And that knowledge was both terrible and tender.
You set the glass on the side table and leaned your head back against the pillow with your eyes half-closed. “My head’s killing me.”
Steve almost smiled again, softer this time.
“Yeah,” he said. “That part I could tell.”
He sat back down on the edge of the mattress, but not too close. Close enough to stay. Far enough to give the room a little air.
After a second, your fingers reached out blindly and caught the hem of his T-shirt.
Not pulling. Just holding.
Steve looked down at them, then back at you.
You never opened your eyes. “Stay until the aspirin kicks in.”
The request undid the last of his resistance to the simple shape of care.
So he did.
He stayed beside you in the grey morning light, his mouth still remembering yours, his body still full of the shock of that brief instinctive answer, and his heart caught somewhere painful between what he wanted, what you had admitted, and what decency still required of him now.
“Steve?”
Your voice came soft through the dim, aspirin-dulled quiet of the room.
Steve turned his head toward you at once, but he did not answer immediately. He had already learned, in the space of a single night and morning, that you sometimes needed a second just to gather the courage for the question itself. So he waited.
The bed dipped faintly under his weight where he sat on the edge, one forearm resting on his thigh, his other hand loose near your knee on top of the blanket, close enough to reassure, far enough not to crowd. Morning still lay grey beyond the curtains. The safehouse remained hushed around you, stripped down to the small sounds of survival: old pipes in the walls, traffic far below, the faint hum of a refrigerator in the other room.
You kept your eyes closed when you asked, “Am I taking advantage of you?”
The question entered him more deeply than he let show.
For one brief second he simply looked at you.
Your face still bore the fragile evidence of the last twenty-four hours – swollen eyelids, the faint pinched set at the corners of your mouth, the exhausted stillness of somebody who had cried too hard, slept too little, and woken into a reality that had not improved in daylight. Yet the question itself was so painfully, unmistakably you that Steve felt something tight and tender pull through his chest.
Even now.
Even after the drinking, the tears, the kiss, the headache, the humiliation, the rawness of everything.
Even now you were still thinking about his boundaries. His feelings. The possibility of being unfair to him.
He answered immediately, because hesitation would only have hurt you.
“No.”
Your mouth did not move. Your eyes stayed shut.
You did not say thank you. Did not ask him to explain. Did not press.
You simply breathed out, very quietly, and let the answer settle.
Steve watched that tiny release happen in real time. The fraction of tension easing from your brow. The way your fingers, which had still been loosely holding the hem of his shirt from when he sat down beside you again, loosened a little more.
The silence that followed was not empty.
It felt full, but not unpleasantly so. Thoughtful. Weighted by too much still unresolved, and yet no longer sharp in the immediate way it had been earlier. The aspirin had begun to take the edge off your headache; he could tell by the way you no longer winced every time you shifted against the pillow. The worst of the hangover would still be there, but dulled. Your breathing had grown steadier. The room felt less like a place of crisis now and more like a place where consequences had come to rest, at least for the morning.
Minutes passed.
Steve did not count them exactly. He only sat there and let them happen. He glanced once toward the door, already thinking ahead in practical lines because practicality kept him from dwelling too hard on the lingering memory of your mouth on his. He should go back to the Tower. Shower. Change. Report in properly. Make sure Tony knew you needed a new phone. Make sure Bucky stayed the hell away from Brooklyn, if it came to that.
The thought of Bucky made something colder move through him.
He pushed it aside.
Then, with your eyes still closed, you asked, “You got back from the mission yesterday?”
Steve looked at you again.
“Yes.”
You nodded faintly against the pillow.
He could almost see the thought assembling itself behind your face, moving one tired step at a time through chronology. He had returned. He had walked into the Tower and found out you were gone. He had seen Bucky. He had come here. He had stayed. That left all the ordinary parts of his life suspended somewhere just out of frame, waiting to reclaim him the second he stepped back into them.
“You’re going back to the Tower after this.”
It was not phrased as a question.
Steve leaned back slightly in the chair and answered with the same plainness you had used. “Yeah. For a little while.”
You were quiet long enough that he knew there was another question coming.
When it arrived, it came small and almost casual in tone, which only made the vulnerability inside it more obvious.
“If I asked you to come back after, would you?”
Steve did not need to think.
“Yes.”
This time your eyes did open.
You looked at him across the narrow space between bed and chair, and though the morning had softened none of the last day’s damage, something in your gaze sharpened with surprise. Perhaps not because of the answer itself. Perhaps because of how quickly it came.
He held your stare without looking away.
You searched his face like you had at the door last night, except there was less suspicion in it now and more wondering weariness.
“You’d actually do it?” you asked. “Don’t you have a report to write, or debriefing, or literally anything more interesting than sitting around with me?” The faintest, driest shadow of your old humor touched your mouth and vanished again. “I’m not exactly the most fun person in the world right now.”
Steve almost smiled.
Not because you were funny, though even now you managed it. Because that reflex in you – to make yourself smaller, more manageable, less trouble than you clearly felt – had become visible to him in a hundred ways over the last twelve hours, and every time he noticed it he wanted to refuse it on principle.
“I don’t care about the report,” he said.
He could have softened the sentence. Said I’ll handle it later. Said It can wait. But none of those would have carried what he actually meant, and he had grown tired of trimming truth down to polite size around you.
So he added, “And I don’t care about anything else more.”
The words hung in the room.
Not grand. Not dramatic. He did not say them like a confession. Only as fact.
Still, Steve felt the air shift after them.
Your eyes stayed on his face a beat longer than before. Then your gaze lowered briefly to his mouth, just for a moment, and his entire body noticed.
He ignored that.
Or tried to.
You let out a slow breath. “Okay.”
It was not a demand. Not even a triumph. More like acceptance of something you had been afraid to ask for and had now received without having to bargain.
You talked through the practical details after that with a gentleness that almost made the conversation feel normal.
Steve would go back to the Tower.
He would shower, because you said with sleepy bluntness that he still smelled vaguely like quinjet fuel and the city.
He would change clothes.
He would do whatever he absolutely had to do to keep the world from collapsing in his absence, and then he would come back.
You asked – more cautiously now, as though embarrassed to need one more thing – if he could talk to Tony about getting you a new phone.
Steve thought of the shattered one by the wall in the living room, of the relentless buzzing that had driven you to throw it, and nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll get you one.”
You closed your eyes again after that, the effort of the conversation clearly costing you more than you wanted him to notice. Steve watched the line of your face relax by degrees. The aspirin was helping. The toast sat in your stomach now instead of only rum. Some color had returned to you, though not much. It would do for an hour or two.
“I should go,” he said at last, quietly.
You made a soft sound of agreement that did not sound much like agreement at all.
Steve stood.
The movement seemed to wake you more fully. You pushed yourself up with less difficulty this time and sat on the edge of the bed while he collected his jacket. He glanced at you once, half expecting you to stay there and let him leave from the bedroom, but instead you swung your legs over the side and stood too.
“You don’t have to get up,” he said.
“I know.”
You said it the same way you had said everything else that morning: aware of the option, uninterested in taking it.
So he let you follow him.
You moved slowly through the apartment, but with more steadiness now. Tired, yes. Sore. Hollowed out. But no longer wavering on your feet. Steve noticed everything automatically – the way you kept one hand briefly to the wall when turning out of the bedroom, the way you blinked against the brighter light in the living room, the way your shoulders still seemed to curve slightly inward as if some instinct in your body had not yet accepted that the immediate blow was over.
He also noticed the toast plate in the kitchenette sink and felt, absurdly, a small pulse of satisfaction.
At the door, he turned to face you properly.
The safehouse looked different in daylight. Smaller. Less intimate, maybe. The couch where you had fallen apart the night before. The kitchen counter where he had made you eat. The living-room floor where your broken phone still lay in pieces because neither of you had bothered to touch it. All of it now carried the strange, quiet weight of shared aftermath.
Steve reached for the doorknob.
“Steve.”
He looked back.
You had stopped about a step away from him.
“Mmh?”
For one second he thought you were going to ask him again not to be long. Or remind him about the phone. Or say something practical and small, something meant to make the goodbye easier to wear.
Instead you stepped in.
You kissed him.
There was nothing uncertain about it this time.
No hungover confusion. No half-sleep instinct. No startled collision of mouths in the soft grey haze of waking. You kissed him with intention – your hands rising to his neck, then higher, fingers slipping into the hair at the nape and along the sides, holding him there with a quiet certainty that made the breath leave his lungs in one sharp rush.
“This,” you murmured against his mouth first, your breath warm over his skin, “is to say thank you.”
Then you kissed him again before he could answer.
Steve responded.
There was no point pretending otherwise.
The kiss deepened almost immediately, and because he had already spent the entire morning trying not to think about how your first kiss had felt, the second one hit him with the force of everything denied catching flame at once.
Your mouth was softer now, fully awake, deliberate. He felt the exact shape of your lips this time – warm, pliant, insistent in a way that sent sensation racing under his skin. One of his hands went to your waist on pure reflex, steadying, anchoring, pulling you just a fraction closer before he consciously registered that he had done it. The other hovered for the briefest second as if asking permission even now, then came up to cradle the side of your jaw.
You made a faint sound into his mouth.
It wrecked him.
Because it was not a dramatic sound. Not loud. Not theatrical. Only a quiet little exhale of approval, surprise, relief – he could not have named it exactly if asked – but the intimacy of feeling it there between your mouths, of hearing it swallowed by the kiss itself, made something low and dangerous uncurl in him.
He kissed you more fully then.
Still careful. He could not seem to stop being careful with you even when he was kissing you like this, like he had been denying himself the right to learn the shape of your mouth and suddenly could not stop. His thumb slid once along your cheekbone. He felt the way you leaned into him, the way your hands in his hair tightened, the way your body moved closer of its own accord until there was almost no space left between you.
And then your teeth caught his lower lip.
Just a light bite. Not enough to hurt.
Enough to send a shock so immediate through him that the sound he made escaped before he could stop it.
It was low and rough and embarrassingly involuntary. A startled, broken little noise dragged up from somewhere far more honest than dignity. Under different circumstances Steve would have blushed to the roots of his hair over it. He knew that even while it happened. But in the moment there was no room for embarrassment, only the searing awareness of your mouth on his, your teeth on his lip, your fingers in his hair, his own pulse pounding so hard it felt like impact.
He felt you smile into the kiss.
That only made it worse.
Or better.
He had no language for the difference right then.
Steve deepened the kiss again in answer, just enough to taste that smile and lose himself in it for one more dangerous second. The hand at your waist tightened. His other hand slipped from your jaw into your hair, not tangling, only holding, as though the softness of it might disappear if he did not keep contact.
This time it was you who pulled back.
Not far.
Only enough that your mouths no longer touched, though your breath still did.
Steve stayed there, forehead almost touching yours, his mouth close enough that if either of you moved half an inch the kiss would begin again. He could feel the warmth of your skin under his palm, the rise and fall of your breath, the slight tremble in his own restraint. His lips still tingled where yours had been. His lower lip still carried the sharp sweet ghost of your teeth.
“You thank all your friends like that?” he asked.
The words came out against your mouth, quieter and rougher than he intended, carrying more of the kiss than the joke.
You smiled.
A real smile this time – small, tired at the edges, still shadowed by everything else, but real enough to strike him harder than the kiss had in its own way.
“Just the ones who put me first,” you said, “despite how they feel.”
Steve went very still.
Because of course that was what you had noticed.
Not only the care. Not only the staying. The restraint.
The refusal to take what was easy when you were hurting.
The truth of what he felt, and the fact that he had placed your well-being in front of it anyway.
Something in his chest pulled tight enough to hurt.
He looked at you for a long second, the smile still ghosting at your mouth, your hands not yet fallen away from his neck, and wondered how many times he was going to underestimate the sharpness with which you saw him.
Then he let out one slow breath and pressed a brief kiss to your forehead.
Not because he wanted less.
Because he wanted more, and because that still mattered.
“I’ll come back,” he said.
You nodded once.
“I know.”
And somehow those two words felt even more intimate than the kissing had.
Steve forced himself to step back then, though every part of him objected to the movement. Your hands slid from his hair, down the back of his neck, then away entirely. The loss of contact felt immediate and disproportionate.
He opened the door.
Cooler hallway air moved in around him. The ordinary world waited just outside: elevators, traffic, the Tower, Tony, reports, Bucky, consequences, all of it.
Steve paused on the threshold and looked at you one last time.
You stood barefoot in the doorway light, hair still a little disordered from sleep and his hands, mouth kiss-swollen, eyes tired but steadier than the night before. Hurt still clung to you. So did anger. Grief. None of that had disappeared. But now something else stood beside it too, fragile and dangerous and undeniably alive.
He left before either of you could say anything that would tangle the moment further.
The walk down to the street felt unreal.
The city was too bright. Too loud. Too normal. Steve crossed the sidewalk to the Harley and only once he had his helmet in hand did he allow himself to stop and breathe.
His body still held the kiss in vivid pieces.
The press of your hands at his neck. The softness of your mouth. The sting of your teeth on his lower lip. The sound he had made, swallowed by your smile. The way you had kissed him not out of vengeance or confusion, but with clear-eyed gratitude and something more dangerous underneath.
He shut his eyes briefly.
Then he put on the helmet, started the bike, and headed back toward the Tower with the taste of you still on his mouth and the certainty, sharp as a blade, that coming back to you afterward was no longer a question at all.
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