"Sure, I could go for dinner."
The issue with this scenario was that, when Steve quietly asked his bold question, Bucky was facing his half remodeled kitchen with a smear of grout on his cheek and his hands on his hips, utterly distracted by the task at hand. His hair, growing out a bit more now and just at his ears, was a bit sweaty, and sticking up in a few places, and his expression was one of vague annoyance. Distracted, he had utterly missed the softness in Steve's tone, the gentle tension between them when Steve had stepped into the wide archway that separated the kitchen from the living room, and he had missed the fond look he wore while those eyes were watching him fume over his DIY nightmare.
(In all honesty, the vintage tile effort was going well between the two of them, and most of the walls were done.)
If Bucky had been paying less attention to the pale blue clay squares and more to the man whom he had loved for eight decades in deep secret, he might have realized that the one thing he had wanted more than anything as a much younger man had just been dropped neatly into his lap without any prompting. As it happened, he wasn't, and he huffed a sigh and shook his head.
"I don't know, maybe it's just all in my head that something's crooked - you're the artist here, not me," Bucky grumbled as he turned and pulled the gloves from his hands. The strains of Count Basie filtered in front the refurbished radio cabinet in the living room behind where Steve stood, framing the moment so perfectly that it would have been an absolute shame if he had missed it. Bucky turned then, wiping his hands on his dirty jeans, and glanced up to meet Steve's gaze.
"Anyway, what'd you have in mi -"
Bucky stilled as he caught the look in Steve's eye, and suddenly, the music faded into the background. He forgot the spackle, the grout, the tile, and quickly went back over the last several sentences that he and Steve had spoken to one another as his heart rate increased.
Impossible. No way, he couldn't have said what I think he said. What I think he meant.
Bucky had thought he had seen that look before, once, a long time ago, when he had thought he had caught Steve making goo goo eyes at Peggy Carter during the war. It had upset him then, so much that he remembered it now, all these years later, with clear memory - but had he been mistaken? He'd been standing behind Peggy, loading a few things into a jeep for departure, while she was addressing Colonel Phillips in between him and Steve. He'd been damn certain that Steve's eyes were on her, looking like that, and he'd quickly looked away and focused on his efforts instead of his pained frustration and resignation. But now...
Would you like to go out to dinner with me sometime, Buck?
"...Wait. Wait," Bucky said softly after a moment, and straightened, suddenly feeling as though the seven feet between he and Steve stretched for miles. "...Hang on. Did you just..." He almost couldn't get the words out of his mouth, it seemed so utterly ridiculous. Bucky's tone was soft, stunned more than anything - and perhaps touched with a bit of awe.
"...Did you just ask me...on a date?"
