Summary: Weeks apart on separate missions leave you and Bucky Barnes aching, desperate, and one heartbeat away from unraveling. The reunion? Eighteen hours of pure, breathless release.
Disclaimer: 18+ (mdni!), explicit smut content, p in v, multiple rounds, overstimulation, edging, mutual desperation, shower sex, window sex, kitchen counter sex, use of restraints (soft), masturbation mention, lingerie tease, squirting (f), super soldier stamina, mild teasing from tb* members
It started like any other assignment.
A sharp morning. Polished boots. Steel chairs arranged around the Watchtower’s mission table. The kind of day where even the light felt clinical—too white, too bright, too final.
Valentina entered with a clipboard in hand and that usual glint in her eye, the one that said she already knew something you didn’t want to hear.
“Barnes, Yelena, Alexei, Bob—Bucharest first. Bogotá by week three. Rotating safehouses. No crossovers.”
You stiffened.
“Walker, Ava, and…”
She looked straight at you.
“You—Algeria. Then east through Istanbul. Targets on the move. You’re expected to stay mobile and out of range.”
The silence afterward said everything.
That pause before your name wasn’t a slip.
It was surgical.
Across the table, Bucky’s jaw tensed. He didn’t look at you, but his shoulders rolled tight. His metal hand flexed once, resting flat on the table like he was physically grounding himself.
This wasn’t routine.
This was designed.
The room shifted. Teams gathered their gear. Orders confirmed.
But neither of you moved.
Bucky brushed your fingers beneath the table—the kind of small, hidden touch that wasn’t meant to say goodbye. It was a promise.
We’ll find each other.
However we can.
—
Packing was mechanical.
Weapons, suits, coordinates, clearances.
Everyone was buzzing around the hangar level, focused on countdowns and jet fuel. But Bucky caught your wrist with a glance that made your breath hitch—then gently steered you down a side corridor.
He didn’t stop until you ducked into a quiet auxiliary room—once used for archive storage, now mostly forgotten. The lights were dim. A narrow bench ran along the wall. A few old mission files sat boxed in the corner.
He shut the door behind you.
“Just for a minute,” he said, voice low. “Just wanna be where you are.”
You barely nodded before he pulled you into his chest. He held you like he needed it—not tight or desperate, but complete. His warmth poured into you as you buried your face into the space between his neck and shoulder.
You ended up straddling his lap on the bench, both of you half-armored, half-undressed—hands roaming like you were trying to memorize every line, every scar, every breath.
“I hate this,” you muttered into his neck.
“I know.” His voice was steady. Anchoring. “But we’ll be okay.”
His mouth found the slope of your shoulder. Then your collarbone. Then lower—teeth grazing before lips closed around your skin and sucked.
You gasped—part surprise, part pure heat.
“Bucky—”
“Gonna leave a few. Let ‘em wonder how many more are where they can’t see.”
He left another. And another. The bruises bloomed warm beneath your skin—high enough that your tactical suit wouldn’t cover all of them.
When he pulled back to look at you, his pupils were blown wide, lips kiss-bitten and breath ragged.
“You’re mine,” he murmured. “Even if they split us across the damn planet.”
You ran your hands up under his shirt, nails scratching lightly across his ribs—grounding yourself in the solidity of him.
“You’ll text me when you can?”
“Every chance I get.”
“Even if it’s just one word?”
“Even if it’s just a photo.”
You smirked. “Of what?”
He grinned, leaning back like he had all the time in the world—even though you both knew better.
“I’m waiting for boob pics, love. Minimum one per timezone.”
You laughed into his neck and kissed his jaw, soft and smiling.
“You’re such a menace.”
“You love it.”
“Unfortunately.”
When the comm finally buzzed for final departure prep, you lingered another moment, forehead pressed to his.
“We’re good?”
“Always.”
And then you slipped out—his warmth still clinging to your skin, and his hickeys hidden beneath your collar like the loudest secret in the world.
—
The first few days weren’t unbearable.
Busy hours blurred the worst of it—briefings, drone recon, field scans. The kind of missions that demanded your hands stay full and your focus sharp. You told yourself it helped. That staying in motion kept the ache at bay.
But the nights were something else entirely.
By the third night, sleep wouldn’t come. The cot beneath you was too narrow, too cold. You rolled over instinctively and reached for the other side—empty. Your palm flattened against the mattress like it could summon him there.
It didn’t.
You’d already stripped out of your tactical suit, skin flushed from a lukewarm shower and a restlessness that refused to settle. The mirror over the sink caught your reflection just as the last of the sun dipped beneath the window—warm dusk light casting gold across your damp collarbone, your bare shoulder.
You grabbed your comm. Lifted your phone.
Pulled down your undershirt just enough to let the neckline dip low—sweat clinging to the curve of your breasts, a faint bruise from his mouth peeking out beneath the edge of the fabric.
The angle was deliberate.
Head tilted back. Lips parted. Not a full reveal. But it said everything.
Still thinking about the way your hands fit around my waist.
Bet you’d wreck me if you were here.
You hit send before you could talk yourself out of it.
—
His reply came six hours later. No text. Just an image.
The lighting was shit—whatever rooftop he was on barely lit by the glow of city spill—but it didn’t matter.
He was shirtless.
Dog tags heavy and low over his chest.
Hair a little messier than usual, as if he’d just run a hand through it before taking the shot.
But the part that made your thighs press together?
His sweatpants.
Slung low. Way too low. Obscene, really—the waistband clinging just above the vee of his hips, and beneath it? A thick, unmistakable bulge pressing upward. Not subtle. Not suggestive.
Hard. Veined. Heavy. Angry.
Like he’d taken the photo mid-thought, right before palming himself. Like maybe he had.
Your name was probably still on his tongue when he snapped it.
You sucked in a breath, cheeks hot, and held the screen to your chest like it could warm the parts of you he was supposed to be touching.
This was manageable, you told yourself.
Just teasing. Just playing.
It would pass.
—
It got worse.
What started as playful—just a little edge, a little fun—turned into something raw. Unbearable. Every picture, every breathy message only twisted the knife deeper.
Bucky cracked first.
The signal finally held long enough for him to send a voice note.
You were mid-gear check when it came through, tucked into a corner of the safehouse with your earbuds in.
“Woke up with my hand around my cock,” he rasped, voice low, wrecked. “Thought it was you at first. Swear to God, I could feel you there. Your breath on my neck, your legs wrapped around me. Then I realized I was alone again.”
A pause. A harsh exhale.
“And fuck, baby… I nearly lost it.”
You played it three times.
Nearly dropped your comm on the third.
—
You didn’t just tease back. You retaliated.
The next photo was a mirror shot—deliberately filthy. You stood in the dim light of your bunk, chest bare, your breasts fully visible this time, no shame. One hand was sunk into your panties, fingers clearly pressing against the soaked fabric. The other held your phone steady, angled to catch the full view: your messy hair, parted lips, heavy-lidded eyes, and the slick glint of sweat on your chest. No caption. Just raw hunger in pixels.
This help you sleep tonight? Or should I take more?
He didn’t respond immediately. But when he did, it was short.
You’re not playing fair.
My cock’s been hard since sunrise. Haven’t touched it. Saving every second of this for you.
You sent a quick clip later—just a few seconds long. You didn’t even speak in it.
Just six seconds. The camera angled low—your hand slipping beneath the blanket between your thighs. No real view, just the movement. The blanket shifted slightly with every circle you traced over your clit. Soft moans escaped—broken, breathy, like you were trying to stay quiet. Then a whimper—his name, trembling from your lips. No skin shown. No climax caught. Just the sound and the hint and the promise of you falling apart.
Bucky watched it on repeat like it was the only thing keeping him alive.
—
Then came Ava.
You’d crashed hard that night—exhausted, sweaty, and stripped down to just your lingerie. The maroon lace set he liked. The same one he’d picked out. It had become a habit—wearing it when you missed him. A reminder. A tether.
Ava had been reviewing footage by the window for perimeter movement when she caught it.
The camera was focused outward. But the mic had picked up your sleep sounds in the background.
She wasn’t trying to be cruel when she played it back.
She just raised an eyebrow and pressed play—a grin tugging at her lips as the soft moans filled the air. You were murmuring his name. Restless. Breathless. Like you were dreaming of him—no, feeling him.
Your voice cracked on the last word, a sharp gasp like you were right on the edge.
You could’ve died.
“Jesus,” Ava had laughed, not unkind. “Want me to send it to him? Y’know, for motivation?”
You didn’t answer fast enough. She already hit send.
—
He didn’t laugh.
He didn’t even text back. Just disappeared for a few hours.
Locked himself in the bathroom of the Bogotá safehouse, palms braced on the sink, sweat dripping from his temple to his jaw. The floor was cold. His cock throbbed painfully in the tight grip of his tactical jeans, already slick with precum from the sound of your voice in his ear—played over and over again like a goddamn drug.
He groaned low, forehead resting against the mirror as he finally undid his fly—reached in and freed himself with a hissed curse.
Hard. Angry. Red at the tip and twitching. His hand flexed uselessly beside him, trembling from restraint.
He closed his eyes and whispered, “Fuck, baby… what are you doing to me…”
But he didn’t stroke.
Didn’t move.
Didn’t dare.
Not without your hands.
Not without your thighs tight around his hips.
Not without your voice whispering that he could let go.
So he tucked himself away again—biting down hard on the side of his fist until it bruised, his pulse roaring like a storm.
Later, when the signal held again, he finally texted:
This was supposed to help.
All these videos. These fucking pictures.
It’s making everything worse, doll.
I need you so bad, I swear I’m gonna lose my mind.
—
He stopped sleeping properly.
The circles under his eyes were darker now, sharp enough to draw questions if anyone had the nerve. His mouth was constantly pressed into a tight, agitated line. The usual post-mission calm he carried—that calculated, steady presence of command—was cracking.
Every time he sat down to write up route plans, his hands twitched. His left hand—the metal one—wouldn’t stop flexing. Clenching. Releasing. Like he was trying to ground himself in anything that wasn’t your voice moaning his name.
The last time he tried to issue orders midbriefing, he nearly snapped a comm tablet in half.
“Safehouse Delta’s too close to the highway,” he muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose. “We’ll reroute south. Four klicks. We’ll—”
He trailed off.
Everyone stared at the map table, then at Bucky—who was clearly no longer looking at anything but the wall. Or rather, through it.
His jaw clenched again. He tried to redirect.
“We’ll send Bob first to—”
But Bob was already looking sideways at him.
“You gonna pass out?”
“No.”
“You look like your brain’s buffering.”
“I said I’m fine.”
But his voice had cracked. Just slightly.
Yelena leaned back in her seat with a dramatic sigh, chewing on the end of a protein bar like this was better than Netflix.
“Alright,” she announced loudly, “I’m just gonna say what everyone else is thinking.”
Bucky didn’t even turn his head.
She kept going.
“You’re clearly about three days from spontaneously combusting from blue balls. You’ve been staring at walls, misreading maps, and grinding your teeth like it’s a fetish. Which—respectfully—gross.”
Alexei smothered a laugh. Bob coughed loudly into his fist.
“You need to jerk off or jump off a building,” Yelena finished, deadpan. “Pick one.”
Bucky finally looked up.
His eyes were bloodshot. His voice was tight when he replied.
“I’m not jerking off.”
That shut them up.
Yelena blinked. “…Okay. That’s not where I thought that was going.”
“I’m saving it. All of it.” His hand twitched again. “She deserves every goddamn second of it.”
A pause. The silence stretched—not awkward, just charged.
Even Alexei nodded solemnly, as if that was the only acceptable answer.
Yelena rolled her eyes but muttered, “Romantic. Disgusting. Continue suffering, I guess.”
—
Later that night, Bucky paced the rooftop alone. Fingers twitching. Breath uneven.
He pulled up your last photo again.
Your hand between your thighs. Lips parted. That little text below it:
I’d spread for you right here on this cot if you were with me.
He groaned into his palm.
Pressed the heel of his hand against the painful bulge in his pants.
Didn’t move. Didn’t stroke. Just gritted his teeth and endured.
“You better be ready for what I’m gonna do to you,” he muttered into the dark.
—
It was just after 7:00PM when the jet touched down.
The sky above the Watchtower was bruised in golds and fading gray, clouds curling low like dusk had rolled in too early. Your shoulders ached. Muscles stiff from too many hours strapped in gear, too many days sleeping with one eye open.
Your boots hit the floor with more weight than usual—the kind that didn’t come from exhaustion alone. It was something else. Something thick in your chest, pressing behind your ribs.
Inside the compound, it was unusually quiet.
Operatives passed by in pairs. Brief nods. No chatter.
Ava veered off toward medical, threw a wink over her shoulder, and mouthed, “Go get your man.”
You didn’t smile. Not yet.
Not until your fingers brushed the key panel of your shared room, and the door clicked open beneath your touch.
Something shifted the moment you stepped inside.
The air smelled like candle wax, clean linens, and something warmer underneath—musk and sandalwood, with a trace of vanilla. The room glowed gold in low light. Flickering candles burned on the desk, by the bed, and one small one beside the bathroom mirror.
It was quiet. But not empty.
He was there.
And the second he saw you, his face lit up.
“Hey,” Bucky breathed, already halfway to his feet. His voice was low but clear, as if speaking pulled breath right back into his lungs. “You’re home.”
That ache—the one locked in your chest—snapped clean open.
You dropped your duffel just as he reached you, arms wrapping tight around your waist, your cheek pressed against his collarbone. He smelled like soap and steel and something distinctly him—warm skin, freshly showered, a hint of cologne that clung to his shirt.
He didn’t devour you. Didn’t grope, didn’t rush.
He just held you.
One arm around your back, the other cradling the back of your head. His lips brushed the top of your hair.
You clung back like it might hold you together.
His hand ran slowly down your spine. You could feel the control in it—the way his chest rose hard against yours, like he was barely keeping the rest of him contained.
“I changed the sheets,” he murmured softly. “Lit a few candles. Put your shampoo out. Thought maybe you’d want a hot shower first.”
Your heart cracked, melted, rebuilt itself.
You nodded against him, cheek brushing the curve of his neck.
“You remembered.”
“Of course I did.” His smile touched his voice, even as his hand lingered low on your back. “You always say you wanna feel clean before we get dirty.”
That earned a small laugh from you—quiet, but real.
He pulled back just enough to look at you, cupping your cheek in one hand. His thumb brushed gently beneath your eye, like he was checking you for damage.
“I missed you,” he said. “Like breathing stopped.”
You kissed him, soft and slow—lips barely parting, just enough to feel the warmth of him beneath the quiet.
“Missed you more.”
He didn’t rush you when you stepped out of your gear. Just watched with quiet reverence, helping peel the layers off your shoulders and arms. He kissed your shoulder once—right over the old bruise he left weeks ago—and whispered:
“I’ve been thinking about this moment for 36 days. But I’m not rushing it. Not until you’re ready.”
Then he took your hand, kissed the inside of your wrist, and nodded toward the bathroom.
“Go on. I’ll be right here.”
—
You hadn’t even closed the door behind you.
The steam was already thick, curling from the shower where hot water slammed against tile. You peeled your clothes off slowly, shaking the last of the travel dust from your skin, limbs heavy from the mission—but your chest felt lighter. He was here. You were home.
You stepped into the spray and let it hit you.
Heat flooded your shoulders. Rolled down your spine.
The ache you’d ignored for weeks cracked wide open across your bones.
You arched slightly under the pressure of the water, fingers dragging slowly down your stomach. Your thighs pressed together at the memory of his voice—his lips on your neck, his hands gripping your hips like they belonged there.
You knelt briefly to grab a bottle you knocked over. Bent forward. Stretched.
And then—
“Mmh…”
Just a sound. A breath.
But it came from somewhere deep—unconscious, raw, and aching. It slipped from your throat like his name was caught beneath it.
The floor creaked.
You turned, startled—and everything inside you tightened.
He was there.
Bucky Barnes. Standing in the doorway of the bathroom like something ancient and carved from firelight. His chest rose fast, hard, like he’d sprinted across the room. Hair damp with sweat, not water. Shoulders tight. Fists clenched at his sides.
And he was naked.
Completely.
You hadn’t even heard him undress. But there he stood—broad, solid, his cock achingly hard and already slick with precum, flushed dark and twitching with every strained breath he took.
His eyes drank you in.
Steam wrapped around his body, clinging to every line of him. You watched his jaw twitch, chest heave. His cock twitched again—another thick drop of precum beading at the tip.
“Baby…”
His voice cracked. A breath. A prayer. Hoarse and wrecked.
“Please…”
“Please stop torturing me.”
But he didn’t move. Not yet.
Like he was waiting for your permission—even now, even while unraveling at the seams.
You reached for him.
One hand. Simple. Open. You pressed your palm to the center of his chest—felt the hammering heartbeat beneath it, the way his breath hitched.
He whimpered.
The sound broke from his lips like it had been fighting its way out for days. He stepped forward, cupped your waist, then your jaw, thumb trembling against your cheek.
“You’re real,” he whispered. “Fuck—you’re here.”
You smiled softly. Nodded.
He stepped into the shower with you—no hesitation this time.
The water soaked him instantly, but he didn’t care. He was already soaked in you. The scent. The need.
His hands were everywhere. One warm, the other metal, both reverent. They dragged up your spine, gripped your hips, held your face like it was holy.
“Missed you,” he rasped between frantic kisses.
“Missed your mouth. Your voice. Your thighs. The way you sound when I’m inside you—fuck, baby, I’ve been dying.”
Your back hit the tile with a dull thud. His body pressed into yours, all solid heat and desperation.
His cock bumped against your stomach—hot, heavy, leaking.
He gasped. “Touch me… please, just—let me feel you.”
You did more than touch.
Your hand curled around the base of him, felt him throb in your palm. He swore low against your neck, forehead pressing to yours as his hands skimmed lower, between your thighs.
“Jesus, sweetheart—”
His fingers slid through the slick between your legs.
“You’re soaked…”
He groaned. Slid two fingers inside you.
You gasped, walls clenching hard around the intrusion.
“Fuck,” he hissed. “Tight… tighter than I remember. You really waited for me?”
You bit his jaw. “I didn’t even let myself finish, Bucky. You ruined me.”
That was all it took.
He gripped your thighs, lifted you off the ground like you weighed nothing, and pinned you to the shower wall. You wrapped your legs around his waist, arms around his neck.
“Hold on to me,” he breathed. “That’s it… Good girl.”
He lined himself up. Slick head pressed against your entrance. And then—
He sank in.
One thrust. Deep. Full.
You both cried out—voices echoing in the tile and steam.
The stretch. The heat. The sudden, perfect fullness.
He fucked into you with short, desperate thrusts—buried all the way, hips snapping with precision. You met him every time, nails clawing his back, gasping against his mouth.
Your orgasm ripped through you without warning—sharp, wet, loud.
“James, I—I’m coming!”
“I’ve got you. Let go. Soak me, baby.”
You did. You clenched so hard around him he almost collapsed.
He followed seconds after—buried deep, groaning your name as he came hard inside you, hips jerking, forehead pressed to your shoulder. His body trembled with the force of it. He held you there, still wrapped around him, his cock twitching inside your pulsing heat.
“You’re mine,” he whispered. “Not letting you out of this room for days.”
You kissed him through the fog, smiling against his lips.
“Good. I’m not going anywhere.”
—
Your legs were still shaking when he carried you out of the bathroom.
No towel. No words. Just the heat of his arms around you, the steady thump of his heart against your ribs, and the way the air between you still crackled like static. You smelled like him. He smelled like you. It wasn’t over. It had only begun.
He laid you on the bed like something sacred.
Candles glowed around the room, casting golden halos over damp sheets and flushed skin. The maroon lace slip sat untouched where he’d left it—delicate, sheer, wicked.
You reached for it with trembling fingers.
But Bucky caught your wrist gently. “Let me,” he said.
His voice was lower now. Hoarse. Reverent.
He lifted the slip over your head slowly, letting the lace fall like a whisper down your body. It hugged your hips, clung to your breasts just enough to tease—translucent and sinful. His lips brushed your spine as he adjusted the straps, hands shaking.
“I thought about this every night,” he murmured, lips brushing your shoulder.
“Fantasized about it. About you, straddling me in this. Had to lie there with my fists clenched, cock aching, just—breathing through it. Didn’t touch myself. Not once.”
His voice cracked. “Didn’t want to waste a single drop that wasn’t for you.”
You whimpered.
He hovered above you now—fully naked, flushed, his cock already hard again. Veined and glistening, twitching with the pulse of how badly he needed to be inside you.
But he didn’t rush.
Didn’t even move until you cupped his jaw and pulled him down into a kiss.
Mouths met softly, then harder.
Tongues sliding slow.
His body sinking into yours, heat to heat, heartbeat to heartbeat.
You grabbed the back of his neck and whispered against his lips, “Come here. Let me ruin you.”
He groaned, deep in his throat, and you flipped him onto his back, straddling his hips with shaking thighs. The lace slip rode up your thighs, leaving nothing in the way when his cock pressed hot and heavy against your dripping heat.
“Fuck, baby,” he gasped. “You’re soaked through.”
You leaned down, your breasts brushing his chest, and ground your hips against his length. “You did this,” you whispered. “With every text. Every picture. Every breath.”
He was gone. Let you take full control.
You gathered the hem of the lace slip, just enough to bare yourself to him, and guided him in—sinking down slowly, inch by agonizing inch, until he was buried to the hilt.
Both of you moaned, raw and open, mouths slack with need.
“Jesus Christ,” he groaned, head thrown back, fists clenched in the sheets.
“Still so tight, baby. Still fucking perfect.”
You started to move—slow at first, grinding your hips in deep, lazy circles that dragged the tip of his cock right against your most sensitive spot. His hands clamped hard on your thighs, trying to keep his control, but you didn’t make it easy.
“You gonna come again just from riding me?” he asked, breathless.
You nodded. “Already close.”
He groaned, slipping one hand between your bodies to rub firm, precise circles over your clit.
“There you go… let me feel you. Let go for me.”
And you did.
Your second orgasm hit like a goddamn wave—crashing through your spine, stealing your breath, squeezing around his cock so tight he choked on a moan.
He didn’t last much longer.
You kept grinding, whispering filth into his ear—how full he made you feel, how wrecked you were for him, how you still weren’t done.
That tipped him.
He came hard with a strangled moan, cock pulsing deep inside you, hips jerking as he flooded you for the second time. His arms locked around your waist as he gasped into the crook of your neck, trembling from the force of it.
You stayed like that, slumped against his chest, bodies stuck together with sweat and slick and heat.
“You alright?” he asked, voice scratchy.
“I’m feral,” you whispered back. “And I’m not finished.”
He chuckled, still panting. “Good. ‘Cause I’m not tapping out anytime soon.”
—
Later.
The wine sat untouched on the desk.
The lace slip lay discarded in a crumpled pile on the floor.
The candles had burned halfway down, wax pooling thick at the base.
And you?
You were flushed. Sweaty. Trembling.
Knees sinking into the mattress as you straddled his thighs once more, this time with your back to him—hips hovering, your whole body tingling.
He leaned against the headboard, sweat shining on his chest, watching you like a man possessed.
“You sure?” he rasped, voice ragged and frayed.
You didn’t answer.
You just reached back, gripped his cock at the base, and lowered yourself onto him slowly—inch by inch until he was buried to the hilt inside you.
Both of you moaned. Loud.
Deep.
Almost pained.
Your hands braced against his shins behind you for leverage, thighs spread wide as you rode him hard—your ass slapping against his hips, slick and flushed with every bounce.
“Oh, fuck—”
His hands gripped your waist like he was anchoring himself.
“Jesus, sweetheart—you’re still so fuckin’ tight…”
You started to move—slow, heavy grinds, rolling your hips like you needed every inch of him rooted inside you. Bucky gasped behind you, his hands traveling from your hips to your thighs to your breasts, groping, squeezing, completely feral.
“You ride me like it’s the only thing keeping you alive,” he growled.
“Look at that ass—fuck, I can see it bounce every time you fucking slam down.”
You moaned—head tilted back, chest rising and falling—sweat glistening between your breasts.
And then—his fingers slid between your thighs from behind. Two of them, circling your clit with ruthless precision.
“I wanna feel you come again, baby. Let me feel you fucking gush on my cock.”
Your thighs trembled. Muscles locked. Your core started to spasm.
“Bucky, I—I think I—fuck, I’m gonna—”
“Do it. Come on, baby. You’re dripping, you’re so fucking close—let it happen.”
You broke with a cry.
Legs shaking. Hands digging into his thighs.
Your pussy clamped down hard, and then it hit—
You squirted.
Hard.
Hot wetness sprayed between your thighs, down over his cock, soaking the sheets. Bucky let out a strangled moan, clutching your waist like he was going to lose his mind.
“Goddamn—fuck, look at you. You’re gonna make a fucking mess, aren’t you, baby?”
He didn’t stop.
He snapped his hips up into you, relentless now—grinding deep as your soaked cunt fluttered around him, so overstimulated your vision blurred.
“Still want more?” he panted, thrusting up again, angling perfectly.
“I can feel how much you need it. So greedy for me—so fucking full of my cum, and still not satisfied.”
You couldn’t answer. You just moaned, nodding wildly, nails dragging down his thighs, thighs shaking uncontrollably.
“That’s it,” he whispered, his breath hot on your shoulder as he leaned forward, one hand now wrapped tight around your throat.
“You gonna come for me again? Gonna make a mess on my cock one more time?”
“Yes—James, please—”
And you did.
A second wave slammed into you.
You screamed, back arching, body locking as you squirted again—wetter this time, gushing down over his balls, onto the sheets, soaking everything beneath you.
Bucky lost it.
“Shitshitshit— I’m coming—fuck, baby—I’m—”
He grunted, jerking up into you with three final brutal thrusts as his cock pulsed deep inside you, filling you again, so hot you felt it flood your walls.
You collapsed forward onto the mattress, his arms catching you just before you slumped completely. He held you tight from behind, your body still twitching, both of you covered in sweat, slick, and release.
“Holy fuck,” he breathed, voice dazed, completely gone.
“You just… soaked me, baby.”
You half-laughed, half-whimpered. “I couldn’t help it. You broke me.”
“Good,” he growled, kissing your neck. “You can break me next.”
—
You should’ve been done.
You should’ve been shaking, satisfied, breathless from three rounds and nothing left to give.
But you weren’t.
The ache still lived in your bones.
The emptiness still throbbed between your legs.
And when Bucky’s lips brushed your temple—slow, tender, trembling—you felt it in him too.
He needed more.
You both did.
The sheets beneath you were damp. Your thighs were slick. Your chest rose with every sharp breath, nipples flushed and sensitive, body still twitching from your last orgasm. And still… the hunger hadn’t dulled.
“You okay?” he whispered against your throat.
“No,” you rasped, voice cracking.
“I need you again. Right fucking now.”
Bucky exhaled a shaky breath. His cock twitched against your thigh—already stiffening again.
“Jesus, doll… you’re insatiable.”
He kissed your jaw. “You’re gonna be the death of me.”
Then he shifted—slow but deliberate—and suddenly, your wrists were gathered above your head. You gasped at the motion, but his grip was careful, tender. He reached for the discarded shirt at the foot of the bed and looped it around your wrists—soft, warm, not tight.
“Just wanna keep you here,” he murmured, kissing your palms one at a time.
“Let me take care of you.”
Your stomach fluttered. Your thighs clenched.
And when he dropped between your legs, your breath hitched so hard your back arched off the bed.
“James—”
“Shhh,” he purred, brushing his stubble along the inside of your thigh.
“Gonna keep you right here, sweetheart. Gonna make you come until your body forgets what rest feels like.”
His tongue dragged through your folds—slow, warm, filthy.
The first flick over your clit sent your hips off the bed—but he was already holding you down, fingers firm, spreading you open like he was fucking home.
“You’re so fucking wet,” he growled into your cunt, voice rough with disbelief.
“Jesus, baby, you taste like both of us… fuck. You’re perfect.”
He devoured you.
Long, slow licks that lapped up his own cum still leaking from you. Wet, obscene noises filled the room—every slurp, every moan against your pussy like it was the only thing that ever mattered.
You whined. Cried out. Legs trembling.
His mouth worked faster, tongue flicking your clit with maddening precision—soft then hard, gentle then firm, always changing, always knowing exactly how to ruin you.
“Bucky—fuck—baby I—”
Your voice broke.
Your hips bucked.
You were so close again, already, already—
He pulled back.
“Not yet,” he rasped, lips wet and eyes dark.
“Not until you beg for it.”
You sobbed—from the overstimulation, from the ache, from how badly you needed to fall apart.
“Please—please, baby, I can’t—just let me—let me come, please—!”
That broke him.
He groaned, deep and guttural, and latched onto your clit with his mouth wide and relentless—tongue flat, dragging fast and rough, his fingers digging bruises into your thighs.
You exploded.
A scream ripped from your throat as your orgasm hit like a strike of lightning—your whole body shook, fists clenched, toes curled, thighs trembling. You gasped so hard your ribs ached. The headboard thudded behind you.
“Good girl,” he murmured, voice soaked in reverence.
“One more, baby. Just one more for me.”
You didn’t even get to respond.
Didn’t even breathe.
Because his tongue never stopped.
He kept sucking—soft at first, then harder—until another wave curled sharp behind your ribs. You sobbed his name, pulled at the binds, tried to run but couldn’t move.
You came again.
Harder.
Legs seizing, slick gushing between your thighs, soaking his face, your body curling from the sheer force of it.
He kissed your trembling thighs through the aftershocks.
Pressed his forehead to your belly.
“You okay?” he whispered.
“I don’t even know where I am,” you panted.
“And I think I like it.”
—
Later—
Maybe thirty minutes.
Maybe five.
Time had stopped meaning anything.
It warped, curled, bled together beneath the hum of overstimulation and breathless ache.
You lay curled on your side, one leg bent, sheets tangled around your calves. Sweat cooled on your skin in sticky rivulets. Your breathing had started to even out, but your body still pulsed from the inside—too full, too stretched, too tender to be still.
And then—
The mattress dipped behind you.
You felt his warmth before you felt his hands.
He slid in close—chest to your back, thighs pressed to yours, breath curling against your neck.
His lips brushed your shoulder.
“Still want me?” he asked, voice soft as fog.
You answered with a sigh. Reached back without looking, your palm wrapping around the hard length of him, thick and hot and already twitching against your fingers.
“Always.”
You rocked your hips back, slotting yourself perfectly into him.
He kissed your spine.
Tucked his face into the crook of your neck, and whispered like a man undone.
“I’ll never stop wanting you.”
One hand lifted your top leg, just slightly—fingers gliding over your thigh. His other arm wrapped low around your waist. You felt the weight of him, the warm press of his tip teasing at your entrance—slow, so fucking slow—until he finally pushed inside.
“Jesus Christ,” he gasped, as if the heat of you had burned him.
“You’re still tight. Still fluttering around me.”
You whimpered.
He thrust deep.
Steady. Gentle.
Every movement an unspoken prayer.
No rhythm. No pace. Just a rolling, molten motion—his cock dragging deep and slow, slick with everything you’d already shared, stroking right against the spot that still trembled.
“I could live here,” he breathed. “I want to live here.”
Your hand gripped his forearm where it wrapped across your middle. He pulled you back against him with every gentle thrust, grounding you in the heat of his body, his breath stuttering where it ghosted along your neck.
“You’re so good to me,” he murmured. “So fucking good.”
“Still feels like a dream,” you whispered.
“Then don’t wake up. Just… stay right here. Let me have you like this.”
Your eyes fluttered shut. Tears stung, soft and sudden. It wasn’t pain—it was too much pleasure. Too much love. The way he moved inside you like your body was a temple. Like every inch of you was his.
“Tell me you’re mine again,” he whispered, voice breaking.
You choked on a moan.
“I’m yours, James. Always.”
You came first—slow and quiet. A gentle quake that rippled from your core outward, your body trembling against him as your inner walls clamped down tight. You gasped softly, a sob in your throat, your hands fisting in the sheets.
“That’s it,” he murmured, kissing your shoulder.
“Let go, doll. Let me feel you.”
He wasn’t far behind.
He buried himself deep, groaning low into your hair, his whole body taut as his release surged inside you again—slow and warm, his cock pulsing deep as he held still, hips locked to yours.
You lay there, body slack and soft, his cock still inside you.
He didn’t move. Didn’t pull away.
His fingers traced lazy shapes on your belly, his lips pressing soft, almost absent kisses to your damp shoulder, your neck, your cheekbone.
“You okay?” he asked eventually, voice quiet.
You nodded.
“I think I’m in love with you again.”
He smiled against your skin. “Good. I never stopped.”
—
Your body was trembling again.
Not with the sharp, writhing spasms of climax—but the deeper, low-grade tremor of exhaustion.
The kind that came after too many orgasms and too little rest.
Muscles fluttering, breath short, limbs weak. You felt boneless and heavy, like your body had melted halfway into the mattress.
And yet—
Your core still throbbed.
Your nipples still ached.
Your cunt still ached for him.
He noticed. Of course he did.
Bucky sat back on his heels beside you, eyes trailing over your form with something like worship—something like worry.
His hand reached out slowly. Brushed your sweat-slicked hair off your forehead. Pressed a soft kiss there.
“Hey,” he murmured, voice gentling. “You with me, sweetheart?”
You nodded once, eyes glassy. Your throat was too dry to speak right away.
“Breathe for me. C’mon.”
His thumb stroked your cheek.
“You look wrecked.”
“I am…”
Your voice came out hoarse.
“I’m so tired.”
That broke his heart a little—you could see it in the way his brows creased. His jaw clenched like he was trying to talk himself down from his own feral hunger.
“Then let’s stop, okay?” he offered softly. “Let me clean you up, hold you for a bit. You need rest.”
But your hand was already moving.
Shaky, slow—but determined.
You reached between his legs and wrapped your fingers around the base of his cock.
Still hard.
Still thick and flushed and leaking at the tip like he’d never finished.
His breath caught.
“Baby—”
“Don’t stop,” you whispered, tears suddenly springing to your lashes.
“Please, don’t stop. I need you.”
He looked stricken.
“I don’t wanna hurt you,” he murmured. “I don’t wanna take too much.”
“Then be gentle,” you gasped, stroking him slowly.
“But don’t pull away. I need more. I want you again. I want you.”
His restraint cracked like glass.
With a low, ragged sound, Bucky leaned down to kiss you—soft, shaky, like a prayer being answered. He whispered against your lips.
“Tell me when to stop, baby. Or I won’t.”
You nodded.
Wrapped your arms around his neck.
Pulled him into you.
He guided your legs open with reverent hands—watching your face the entire time, watching for any flinch or hesitation. You were sensitive. Sore. Spent.
But not done.
“I love you,” he said quietly, kissing the inside of your thigh.
“So much it hurts.”
You barely had breath left to answer.
“Then have me,” you whispered. “Take what’s already yours.”
His cock slid into you slow—so slow—inch by inch, the stretch deep and aching, but your body welcomed him like he’d never left.
He moaned into your throat.
“Fuck, baby… still so tight. I can feel your pulse around me.”
He moved gently. Just the slow grind of his hips, the full drag of his cock over soaked, sensitive walls. His hand slid under your back, pulling you flush to his chest.
“You tell me when to stop. You hear me?”
“Don’t stop,” you whimpered. “Just keep giving me all of you.”
And so he did.
With every thrust, he kissed you. With every shift of his hips, he whispered your name. His fingers stroked your side, your hip, your waist—every inch of skin he could reach. You shook beneath him, moaning soft and high each time he bottomed out.
“You’re incredible,” he rasped. “You’re still taking me like it’s the first time. My perfect girl.”
Your orgasm crept in like fog, soft and wet and overwhelming.
You came with a shuddered cry, barely able to hold him, but your body squeezed around him tight—fluttering, spasming, claiming him all over again.
“That's my girl,” he whispered, voice shaking. “So fucking good for me.”
And then he followed—hips stuttering, forehead pressed to yours as he groaned your name like a benediction. His cock throbbed deep inside, spilling more warmth into the mess already flooding between your legs.
He collapsed next to you, immediately pulling you into his arms. Your body was trembling. His thumb stroked your cheek.
“No more unless you ask,” he murmured against your hair.
“I’ll only give you what you want.”
—
The sky was beginning to lighten.
A dusky indigo bled into grey, softening the skyline behind the Watchtower’s windows. But inside the room, time was a blur of candlelight, heat, and the thick, dizzying scent of sweat and sex.
You couldn’t remember the last time you’d fully caught your breath.
Your whole body felt glass-thin. Shivering. Sensitive. The sheets clung to your skin with sweat, and your legs barely worked. But the ache was still there. Nestled low. Pulsing. It didn’t fade.
Bucky’s palm slid over your thigh—soft, slow, as if testing your response.
His voice came a moment later, raspy and hesitant. “Sweetheart… we can stop. You need rest. I can wait.”
But you turned to him, eyes half-lidded, lips parted. Your fingers found his, laced through them.
“I want more,” you whispered. “Please… take me there.”
He exhaled like you’d just saved his life.
Guiding you gently toward the windows—your legs shaky, but moving—he kissed your shoulder and whispered, “I’ll be gentle. Just let me see you.”
The whole room swam around you, golden in candlelight and glimmering sweat.
The skyline stretched before you. Towering buildings, distant lights. No eyes. Just your reflection—flushed, ruined, hair damp and tangled across your shoulders.
“Fuck,” Bucky exhaled when he saw you.
“Look at yourself, baby. Look what I’ve done to you.”
You braced your palms against the cool glass, breasts pressing to it as your body arched. The contrast of heat and chill made you gasp. Bucky moved in behind you, spreading your thighs with his knee. One hand on your hip. The other wrapped around his cock, dragging the head through your soaked folds.
“Still dripping,” he muttered. “Even now. Jesus, you never stop, do you?”
“I need it,” you whispered. “Still need you.”
He didn’t make you wait.
Not this time.
He slid into you with one deep, brutal thrust—your bodies colliding with a smack so loud it echoed off the glass. Your moan fogged the window instantly, your hands flattening harder against it.
“Bucky—fuck—”
He set a hard rhythm, pulling your hips back to meet every thrust, the wet sound of your bodies filling the room. You could barely stand, legs shaking, forehead pressed to the glass.
“That’s it. Just like that,” he groaned. “So fucking perfect like this. My girl. My pussy.”
His hand slid around your throat—not squeezing, just holding, grounding. His mouth hovered by your ear.
“You were made for me,” he said. “Fucking built for this.”
“Harder,” you begged. “Please—please don’t stop.”
“Look at your reflection,” he rasped. “Look how good you look. Look how you’re taking me.”
You opened your eyes—and the sight of yourself, cock-stuffed, sweat-slick, wild-eyed, flushed and wrecked against the window, nearly sent you over the edge.
He thrust harder. Faster. Your thighs trembled violently.
“Gonna come,” you sobbed. “Can’t—Bucky—I can’t hold it—”
“Then don’t,” he growled. “Come for me, baby. Come with the whole fucking city watching.”
You shattered.
Legs giving out.
A scream ripped from your throat as your orgasm slammed through you like lightning. Your vision blurred. Your body buckled. Bucky caught you before you hit the ground—arm locking around your waist as he kept moving, groaning into your neck.
“Fuck—fuck—gonna fill you again—”
His hips snapped hard, once, twice—and then he came with a guttural sound, spilling inside you with a heat that pushed out around the edges. His head dropped to your shoulder, body shuddering as he emptied himself again.
You stood there for a long time—pressed to the glass, panting, twitching. Your hands limp against the windowpane. Bucky held you like you were breakable.
“You okay?” he whispered.
You nodded faintly.
“Good. ‘Cause we’re not done.”
—
The sun was climbing now.
Pale gold spilled across the Watchtower skyline, casting long streaks of light onto the floor like it was forgiving the sins you were still committing.
Your whole body ached—but not in the way that begged for rest.
It was a deep, needy pulse. Faint, but still there. A hunger that wouldn’t let go.
You stumbled barefoot into the kitchenette, still bare, still slick between your thighs, wearing nothing but Bucky’s hickeys. Your hair was tangled. Your lips were swollen. Your legs trembled with every step.
Your hand landed on a protein bar. You peeled it open with shaking fingers and leaned on the counter for support.
“You better be looking for food,” you said over your shoulder, breathless and hoarse.
You heard the footsteps.
But they didn’t head for the fridge.
Bucky’s body pressed into you from behind—solid, burning hot, and still hard. He slid one arm around your waist, the other reaching up to gently move your hair aside so he could press a kiss to your neck.
“I am hungry,” he rasped, his voice low and feral.
“Just not for that.”
“Bucky,” you groaned, half-laughing, half-destroyed. “I can’t even feel my legs—”
“Good,” he whispered. “You don’t need ‘em.”
Before you could blink, he bent you over the kitchen island.
Your palms slapped down on the cold countertop, and you gasped as your bare nipples brushed the smooth marble.
You didn’t even get the chance to speak.
He lined himself up and pushed in fast—no prep, no warning, just the slick glide of his cock stretching you open again, sliding back into your wrecked body like it was home.
“Fuck, Bucky—!”
“Still so wet,” he growled behind you.
“Still squeezing me like you want more.”
His hands slid to your hips, gripping tight, pulling you back against him with every hard thrust.
This wasn’t slow.
This wasn’t tender.
It was filthy, frantic, barely-in-control fucking. Not because he didn’t care—but because he still needed you that badly.
The sound of skin slapping echoed in the tiny space. The sticky squelch of your soaked cunt taking him again and again filled the air. Your moans bounced off stainless steel and tiled walls.
You dropped your head onto your forearm.
“We… already did this—eight times,” you whimpered.
“I know,” he growled, fucking into you deeper.
“And you’re still fuckin’ perfect. Still taking it all.”
“You’re gonna kill me—”
“Then what a fucking way to go, sweetheart.”
He slid a hand around your front, fingers seeking out your clit, stroking with maddening precision. The way he touched you was still worshipful—even in this chaos.
Your whole body clenched.
“You want one more?” he asked, voice thick, rough, hungry.
“You got one more in you for me, doll?”
“Yes—yes—please—just one more—!”
You came hard. Your scream was ragged, echoing through the kitchen, and your knees nearly gave out from the force of it. The overstimulation blurred your vision with white-hot static, but your body still took every inch of him.
Bucky groaned deep and low, hips jerking as he spilled inside you one last time—his cock pulsing, his chest pressed to your back as he moaned your name like a blessing.
He didn’t sag against you. Didn’t drop.
He stayed upright, body still buzzing, cock still twitching inside you. You could feel him—full, ready again. You were the one shaking. Not him.
“Jesus Christ,” you whispered. “You’re still hard.”
“Told you,” he murmured, breath warm against your ear.
“I could do this for days.”
“James…”
He slid his arms around your waist from behind and pulled you upright, holding you there with his cock still buried deep.
“I’ll stop if you need me to,” he whispered.
“Just say the word.”
You leaned your head back against his shoulder, heart thudding weakly.
“…I think my soul already came twice.”
Bucky laughed softly. Kissed the crown of your head.
“Rest, baby. I’ll still be here when you wake up. Hard as a fucking rock.”
—
You didn’t know what time it was when you finally woke.
Only that the light outside was warmer. Honey-gold, slipping through the windows in slow streaks. The world felt distant. Blurry. But the weight behind you wasn’t.
Bucky’s arm was still around your waist, his chest pressed along your back. Warm. Steady. His breath ghosted over the back of your neck in a soft, familiar rhythm.
Your body ached in the best ways—sore thighs, puffy lips, bruised hips—but it was the ache in your chest that hummed the loudest.
You blinked. Shifted slowly.
He stirred.
“Hey,” he murmured, voice still sleep-rough.
“You okay?”
You turned to face him—carefully, slowly—and found his eyes already open, watching you.
“Mhm. Everything hurts,” you whispered. “In a good way.”
Bucky smiled. Just a little. One of those soft, private smiles he saved for no one but you.
“Told you I’d wreck you.”
“You did. Multiple times.”
He chuckled, then leaned forward to kiss you.
No tongue. No hunger. Just warmth. Lips brushing yours with slow reverence, like he was re-learning your taste now that the storm had passed.
You melted into it.
Pressed your forehead to his.
His fingers traced lazy lines across your spine, slow and aimless.
“Missed this,” he whispered. “Missed you.”
You whispered it back. Quiet. Honest.
Then let the silence settle over you both for a while—safe, sacred, slow.
Eventually, after a second nap and a shower where no one tried to fuck anyone against the tiles (God bless you), you both managed to drag yourselves into clothes and make your way toward the common area.
Bucky wore a black tee and gray sweatpants that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. You were in a loose hoodie and biker shorts—though judging by the soreness between your thighs, sitting might be a challenge.
His arm was around your waist the whole walk.
Your legs still wobbled slightly, and he adjusted his pace to match yours. Not a word about it. Just his warm palm pressing steady against your hipbone like a grounding wire.
—
The squad was already gathered around the Watchtower’s long dining table.
It was pasta night.
Yelena sat at the end, spooning pesto onto her plate with war-like intensity. Ava nursed a glass of wine. Bob looked half-asleep. Alexei was double-fisting garlic bread.
John Walker looked up the moment you stepped into view.
“Oh look,” he said dryly. “It lives.”
You flipped him off without stopping.
“Someone got their back blown out,” Ava added sweetly, raising her glass.
pairing: bucky barnes x emergency room nurse!reader
summary: it’s your name, written in the soft fog of his breath. and his name, traced endlessly across your skin. you've always been meant to cross paths this way. (soulmate au!)
word count: 11.4k words
content warnings: 18+ mdni, fem reader, praising, piv, overstimulation, shower sex, creampie, face riding, dirty talk, ungodly levels of yearning, mentions of violence and clinical situations, death, explores heavy themes
You’ve gotten very good at waking up without hope over the years.
Your alarm goes off at 4:48 a.m. because you refuse to wake up on the hour like everyone else. It’s a small rebellion—pointless, probably, but in a life built from shifts and protocol, those twelve minutes feel like something you own.
The soulmark itches before you even lift the blankets. You don’t touch it. Haven’t in years. It rests on your left side, just under the ribs, where your arm folds when you cradle a patient or scrub blood from your skin. The name’s still there. James Buchanan Barnes. Etched like a brand.
You learned to stop reading it a long time ago.
You were thirteen the first time you felt it — not the weight of it, not really, but the press of inevitability. The skin just under your ribs itched for three days straight, and no matter how you scratched, how you pressed cold washcloths to it or distracted yourself with school or swimming or the terrifying newness of puberty, it pulsed with the promise of something you couldn’t name.
"Maybe you're allergic to something," your mom said, more distracted than concerned, passing you a bottle of calamine lotion while balancing a phone call.
Then, the name came in the middle of the night.
You’d woken up disoriented, not from a nightmare exactly, but from the sense that something had shifted. That your body was no longer just your own.
You pulled up your pajama shirt with trembling hands, stomach flipped inside out with something like fear. Or awe. And there it was, written in a careful, antique script like it had always been there — James Buchanan Barnes.
You said it out loud. Just once. Just to see if it sounded real.
The next morning, you pretended to look up World War II details for an eighth-grade project. Typed his name into Google with fingers that wouldn't stop shaking.
This—this definitely wasn't what you were expecting. You were expecting someone… someone at least closer in age, someone who was maybe going through the same strenuous expectations of middle school, someone… someone who was alive.
It was underwhelming at first. Just a name. A war vet. Deceased. You didn't think you'd find him so easily. You spiraled past Wikipedia into forums your school firewall probably would’ve blocked if they knew what they were doing. You dug deeper. Wikipedia spiraled into conspiracy forums. Articles turned into footnotes, turned into theories, turned into pictures. Redacted documents. Old photographs.
That was when your chest started to ache.
He wasn’t a boy.
He wasn’t even a man in the way people are alive.
He was history, frozen in sepia. James Buchanan Barnes, colloquially know as Bucky, a soldier, missing in action. You found an old black-and-white photo with him half smiling in uniform, arm slung casually around the Captain America's shoulders, and your throat closed like you’d been punched from the inside. Because he looked real. Not just an idea, not just a ghost.
And you loved him. You didn’t mean to. But there it was.
That summer, you begged your parents to take you to D.C. "For the exhibits," you said. "The history. Please."
You cried in the car. Your mom reached back and handed you a bottle of water. “Carsick?” she asked.
"Yeah," you lied, watching trees blur past as the pit in your stomach grew deeper.
At the Smithsonian, your eyes scanned every exhibit like you were searching for a face in a crowd. You found him in a war display—just a photo, again. Yellowed and framed. A plaque. Sergeant Barnes. You stood there too long. An older woman beside you glanced over, then away, probably confused as to why this pre-teen was staring at the display with such fervent intensity.
You didn’t touch your mark.
Not there. Not in public. But you felt it, a phantom pulse echoing under your ribs. Like it knew. Like it missed him too.
That was the first time you understood what it meant to lose something before you ever had it. To mourn a future that could never come.
That summer, you grieved a stranger.
The rest of those months passed in a fog. Friends talked about boy bands and sleepaway camps and the boy from seventh grade who cried during dodgeball. You started reading old war journals and relics and Stark experiments just to feel closer to a time you’d missed. By the start of the school year, you'd already gone through your U.S. History syllabus and back.
At night, you lay awake imagining what it would’ve been like to meet him before the fall. What you’d say. If he’d be kind. If he’d recognize you.
If he’d regret it.
By sixteen, you had your mind made up. Not because you wanted to save people—though you did—but because it felt like the only thing that made sense. Something tethered. Something present. You’d learned how to triage your own feelings, how to hold grief without crumbling under it. ER nursing made too much sense. You wanted the immediacy. The clarity of purpose. The adrenaline to chase out the what-ifs.
You told your guidance counselor it was about the job stability.
You didn’t say that you needed a life that moved fast enough to keep you from looking back.
You got good at it. Fast. Precise. Reliable. The type of person they called first when a kid came in coding, when someone’s chest had to be cracked open at bedside. You learned how to operate under pressure. How to compartmentalize. You learned to move toward chaos, not away from it.
And eventually, you stopped looking at the name. Not because it faded—it never did—but because it became too familiar. Like a scar. Like an old story you didn’t tell anymore, because no one would believe it.
Because you hardly believed it yourself.
.
You peel yourself out of bed, step into the shower. The water doesn’t stay hot for long, but you don’t need it to. You just need enough heat to convince your muscles to move, your brain to stop stalling. The morning ritual is muscle memory now: shampoo, rinse, conditioner (leave-in), scrub your face, try not to look at yourself too closely. By the time you’re dressed and out the door, you’ve spoken zero words and swallowed two ibuprofen with the stale dregs of yesterday’s coffee.
The drive to the hospital is quiet, but not peaceful.
The city’s in that strange twilight lull between night and morning, where the drunks have staggered home and the nine-to-fivers haven’t yet left their beds. It feels like a ghost town with too many ghosts. Some days, you swear the silence carries weight. Residual grief, maybe.
You park in the far corner of the lot because the closer spaces are already claimed by the truly unwell—nurses who never go home, residents who sleep in call rooms, attendings who live to round. You used to be like them. You’ve grown out of the martyrdom. Or maybe you’ve just run out of energy to perform it.
The hospital doesn’t smell like death, not exactly. It smells like ammonia and latex and that synthetic lemon cleaner that’s supposed to mask the rest. You wave to the front desk nurse, badge in, and clock your shift the way you have every day for the last six years.
Your soulmark is never mentioned. Not because people don’t see it, though you keep it hidden well, but because no one talks about soulmarks anymore. It’s passé. Soulmate matching used to be romantic. Now it’s considered a statistical liability. There are support groups for people like you, sure, but they mostly spiral into grief therapy and long-winded self-help monologues. You tried one once. A woman wept about her soulmate dying in Sokovia. Another talked about her mark changing. Yours never did.
Soulmate politics are complicated now. Too many anomalies. Too many cases like yours.
There’s a thread on Reddit dedicated to soulmarks tied to dangerous people. Super soldiers. Villains. Politically gray mercenaries. Your name—his name—comes up sometimes. You don’t engage. You lurk. Scroll through the comments. Watch strangers try to figure out what they’d do if it were them.
The consensus always boils down to one thing: If your soulmate is a killer, you have a moral obligation to reject the bond.
You don’t know if you agree. You don’t know if you disagree either.
Most days, you just ignore it.
Your shift starts like any other. A stabbing. A toddler with a fever. An elderly man who doesn’t remember how he got here. The trauma bay gets two back-to-back ambulance drop-offs, both from the same freeway accident. The paramedics hand off a broken woman in pieces. You get her on oxygen. You get her to CT. You get her prepped for surgery. You don’t think about her name, or her face, or what might’ve been the last thing she said.
You think about the steps. You think about the chart.
This is what makes you good at your job.
You care. You just don’t let it show anymore.
Lunchtime—if you can dignify that title with a limp vending machine sandwich and fifteen minutes of couch—is spent in the staff lounge, watching reruns of The Great British Bake Off with the volume off. The man on screen is assembling an architectural sponge cake. You feel emotionally invested. Mostly because you think it might collapse.
One of your colleagues—Zoya, you think, though you’ve never quite decided if you like her or not—slides onto the couch beside you with the weary grace of someone who’s been on her feet for nine hours. She’s got a protein bar in one hand and her phone in the other.
“I read the polls,” she says, chewing like the bar personally insulted her. “People are actually fired up this time around.”
You hum in response. Noncommittal. You don’t take the bait.
“They say Barnes is running for Congress,” she adds casually, eyes flicking sideways toward you. “That surprises me. Who woulda thought?”
You don’t blink. Don’t flinch. Just peel a piece of lettuce off your sandwich like it’s offended you. “Guess being an Avenger's not the high-paying career it used to be.”
Zoya snorts. “Seriously. You think he’s for real?”
You lift one shoulder. “I think I’ve seen stranger things on C-SPAN.”
She lets out a low whistle. “Still wild, though. Imagine finding out your soulmate is, like… that guy.”
You glance at her. Smile. Tight. Unreadable. “Yeah,” you say. “Imagine.”
She doesn’t press. You both go back to watching a woman on screen cry over underbaked choux pastry.
It’s easy now. Easier than it used to be. Pretending he doesn’t matter. Pretending you don’t know his voice by heart. Don’t remember the way your mark burned that day in the laundromat. Don’t still check the news for his name the way other people check the weather. It’s a skill.
And like all your best skills, it was learned the hard way.
.
When you get home that night, your legs ache, and your stomach hurts from too much caffeine and not enough food. You drop your bag on the couch, toe off your shoes, and stand in the middle of your kitchen for ten full seconds trying to remember what it means to rest.
Your phone buzzes on the counter. A missed call. Your ex. You don’t call back.
Instead, you go to the sink, wash your hands out of habit, and glance down at the faint outline of the mark under your scrub top.
You trace it, just once. Not enough to mean anything.
Just enough to remember that it’s still there.
.
You were twenty-four when you first saw his face in motion. In reality.
It was a Tuesday. You remember because it was your one day off that month, and you’d spent most of it in a laundromat trying to get the smell of bile and bleach out of your scrubs. You were curled up on the plastic bench by the window, still damp from rain, watching a battered flatscreen overhead.
BREAKING NEWS: GLOBAL MANHUNT UNDERWAY FOR FORMER SOVIET ASSASSIN.
You didn’t flinch when the words came up. At first, they didn’t mean anything. But then the photo appeared, grainy and indistinct—a security cam freeze-frame. Dark jacket, metal arm, face caught mid-motion.
There he was. James Buchanan Barnes.
You felt it like a punch. Air gone. Sound sucked from the room. Your hands tightened around a bottle of Tide.
They said he bombed the Vienna International Centre. Killed a king. Injured dozens. Your brain refused the narrative, but not because you knew better. You didn’t. It was just … incongruent. Cognitive dissonance. You couldn’t square the name on your skin with the cold, feral man on the screen. But that didn’t stop you from watching.
You didn’t leave the laundromat. You sat there long after your clothes finished drying. Hours, maybe. Absorbing every second of the footage. Reading every chyron.
You watched the raw surveillance clips when they hit the web—him running, being chased, fighting like something born in a lab. Like something not quite real.
And then, all at once, the world tilted.
He was real.
Not a myth. Not a name in a book or a mark burned into your side to haunt you. Real. He was breathing the same air, walking the same crumbling sidewalks, looking over his shoulder beneath the same indifferent sky. There was this thrumming under your skin—louder than your heartbeat, sharper than breath—that said he's alive. Not long-dead. Not lost to time. But here. On this earth. Behind your eyes. And somehow, you had to keep living like that wasn’t the most destabilizing fact you’d ever known.
You memorized the cadence of how people said his name.
At some point, you realized you were shaking.
That week, your mother called, like she always did. You didn’t tell her. She asked how work was. You said fine. She asked if you’d seen the news. You said you hadn’t.
You started keeping your left side covered, even in the shower.
In the weeks that followed, he became a name everyone knew. The Winter Soldier. The media dug up every blurry photo from seventy years of history, every CIA leak, every whisper in a dossier. You catalogued them without meaning to. It wasn’t obsession. Not exactly. It was survival.
Then came the reveal: it wasn’t him. Not exactly. Not only him.
Mind control, they said. Brainwashed. Hydra.
You read the words like they were gospel. Like they explained something they didn’t. Like they offered you absolution by proxy. You hated that you wanted to believe it so badly. You hated how much of yourself you saw in the hollow of his eyes when he was caught on camera again—restrained, confused, a man unraveling.
You hated that you understood it.
.
Then came the Blip.
The morning the sky broke, you were in trauma bay three with a man who’d been impaled on a metal pipe. You blinked, and he was gone. Just … gone. The pipe, slick with his blood, clanged against the floor, still warm. Your brain froze. Your hands kept moving.
Your friend Ashley vanished mid-joke during lunch break. Half your ER staff was gone by the end of the day. You worked thirteen more hours without blinking. You only remembered bits—someone screaming in the stairwell. Someone trying to break into the pharmacy. A girl with burns and no parents left to consent to treatment. You remember the air smelling like copper and panic. The vending machines ran out by day two.
When you finally got home, your building was quiet. Too quiet. The streets were deserted, eerie and raw like the aftermath of a dream you couldn't fully wake up from. Someone had looted the gas station across the street. You stepped over broken glass to get inside.
You turned on the TV. Sat down on the floor. Let the flickering images wash over you in silence. Aerial shots of cars abandoned mid-commute. Apartment buildings full of empty beds. Hospitals choked with the chaos of subtraction.
Then his name came up. Just for a moment. In a reel of the missing.
James Buchanan Barnes. Missing. Presumed dust. It seems like the world would never get tired of those three words recurring in your life like a sick joke, like a sucker punch.
You knew it before they even confirmed it. Knew it in your bones. The soulmark burned for days after. A phantom itch. A psychic scream. You whispered to the room, “No. No, no, no—”
You didn’t go to work the day they called it. That he was gone. That it wasn’t speculation anymore.
You called out sick, which you never did. Stayed under the covers with your curtains drawn and your phone turned facedown. You didn’t cry. Not in the way that would’ve felt cathartic. There was no release. Just weight. A steady pressure under your sternum, like your lungs were packed too tight with silence.
Grief like that doesn’t come all at once. It drips. Slow. Insidious. A lifetime’s worth of maybes collecting in your throat.
You tried to tell yourself he wasn’t yours.
That you didn’t know him.
That the mark didn’t mean anything.
That you didn’t feel the loss like your own skin folding in on itself.
But you stopped wearing crop tops after that. Stopped sleeping on your left side. Stopped reading the news altogether, because every time they mentioned his name—even in passing—it felt like someone reaching inside your chest to twist the knife, just to see if you’d bleed.
Your friends thought you were just burned out. Work was hard. Everyone was struggling.
“Have you tried meditating?” someone asked once.
“Have you tried shutting the fuck up?” you almost said. Instead you smiled. Said you were fine. You let them believe it.
You threw yourself into the ER. Picked up extra shifts. Took on the worst cases. Became the one they called for the ugly ones—the resuscitations that didn’t work, the organ donors, the impossible parents waiting for bad news. It gave your hands something to do. Gave your grief a mask.
You were so good at pretending you didn’t care that even you started to believe it.
But sometimes, on the drive home—when the city was too quiet and the sky too empty—you caught yourself glancing at the passenger seat like someone should be there. Like you’d forgotten to pick him up.
You imagined what he’d be like. Not the soldier. Not the assassin. Not the man they called the Winter Soldier like he was myth, not bone.
Just… a person.
Would he have been quiet in the mornings? Would he have let you take the last piece of toast? Would he have liked dogs? Would he have hated how sterile hospitals feel? Would he have looked at you like your name was written on him, too?
The mark never faded. You used to check. Stupidly. Desperately. You read somewhere once that when a soulmate dies, the mark vanishes. But yours didn’t. Not even a little. It stayed sharp. Clear. Unforgiving.
You don’t know if that made it better or worse.
All you knew was this: it didn’t matter if the world called him a ghost. He was real to you.
And he was gone.
And you had to go to work tomorrow, like none of it ever mattered.
.
Time passed. You got used to the silence.
Then, five years later, he came back.
Just like that.
No fanfare. No press release. Just a name in a sea of billions. Alive again. Somewhere in the world.
You didn’t sleep for three days after that either.
.
He resurfaced differently this time. Tactically invisible. Not a headline anymore. Then, out of nowhere—a year or two later—he announced his candidacy for Congress.
You nearly laughed. Not because it was funny. But because it felt so surreal, so absurdly mundane, that your brain short-circuited. It had been three back-to-back 12-hour night shifts. Your scrubs still smelled faintly of antiseptic and vending machine coffee. Your eyes burned. Your feet hurt. And there he was—your mark, your ghost—printed five feet tall next to a mattress ad.
You stared. Read the copy three times. Just to be sure it wasn’t a hallucination.
You told yourself not to look him up. Then you got home and did it anyway.
His campaign site was minimal. No donation pop-ups, no splashy endorsements. Just a simple landing page, a schedule of town halls, and a single embedded video labeled Why I’m Running.
You clicked play.
It started with silence. Then the low rasp of his voice, steadier now, filled your apartment.
“I’m not here to pretend I’ve always done the right thing,” he said. “I’m not here to sell redemption. Just accountability. I’ve seen what happens when systems break, when good people fall through the cracks. And I believe we can build better.”
There were no slogans. No party jargon. Just him, seated on a worn bench near a city garden, hair shorter than you remembered, jaw shadowed with a few days’ growth. Still armored, but softer. Realer. He didn’t mention soulmarks. Or the war. Or the weight of being a name that history couldn’t agree on.
But he didn’t need to.
You watched the video twice. Then again the next night.
And you didn’t vote for him.
You didn’t vote against him either.
You just… waited. Watched. Tracked the polls like you were taking a patient’s vitals. Checked for signs of movement. Hoped it wouldn’t all combust before the finish line.
When he won by 6.4%, you sat in your dark apartment, phone lit in your palm, and felt something in your chest go still. Not relief. Not pride. Just… a strange, anchored kind of knowing.
He was out there. Alive. Choosing something. Choosing this.
And somehow, that meant something to you, too.
.
You still don’t talk about it. But every so often, you read the transcripts from his interviews. You pretend it’s because he talks about legislation affecting healthcare infrastructure. It isn’t.
You’ve never reached out. Never driven past one of his town halls. Never liked a single post.
But you know which office he holds. You know the hours of his community clinic situated right by the VA. You know what color his suit was the day he was sworn in.
The name on your ribs has not changed. It probably never will.
And maybe he’s never thought of you at all.
It starts with a nosebleed.
You’re just off shift. Third one this week. Your badge is clipped to your hip, your hands smell like latex and soap, and your brain is somewhere between REM and resignation. You’re half-waiting for the crosswalk light to change when you see a man slump against the side of the public library and slide down like his bones have given up.
At first, you think: drunk. Happens more than you’d like to admit, and it's Brooklyn you're talking about. But then you see the way his hand curls against his thigh—controlled, but shaky—and the tight set of his jaw. His suit is immaculate. Not a homeless guy. Not a junkie. And that look on his face? That’s not intoxication.
That’s pain.
You cross the street. Instinct before thought.
“Hey,” you call, crouching near him. “You okay?”
He looks up. There’s a beat—half-second, maybe less—where neither of you speaks. His eyes are blue. Really blue. And he’s not just handsome, he’s specific. Recognizable in a way that drops into your stomach like a lead weight.
You know who he is. You've spent half your life committing him to memory, watching him coming and going like a revolving door.
Selfishly, instinctively, you can't help but glance down at his left hand—covered by a glove. He notices, shifting slightly, uncomfortably.
Finally, he blinks. “I’m—yeah. Fine.”
“That’s a lie,” you say, because you’re too tired to be polite. “You’re about to pass out. I’m guessing low blood sugar. Maybe dehydration.”
He breathes through his nose like it’s an old habit, like he’s used to being clocked and is choosing not to bristle. “I was just at a council meeting. Forgot to eat.”
“Drink anything?”
“Two coffees and a Red Bull.”
You stare at him. “Jesus Christ.”
His mouth twitches. Just barely. “I didn’t say it was a good idea.”
You glance around. It’s midday. Plenty of foot traffic, but no one’s stopped to help him. Of course not. Most people pretend not to see, even if he's a U.S. representative who's helped save the world a handful of times. New Yorkers have learned to mind their own business these past couple of years.
“Alright, Mr. Barnes,” you say, because you don’t want to say James or Bucky, not the name etched on your skin. “Can you stand up?”
He lifts an eyebrow. “You know who I am?”
You consider lying. “Yeah.”
His expression doesn’t change, but something in him goes still. A readjustment. Like he’s running probabilities behind the curtain of his eyes.
“And you still came over,” he says.
“Don’t take it personally. It's my civic duty; I’d help a mediocre politician too if they were about to eat pavement.”
A snort. Then, with the faintest tilt of his head: “Lucky me.”
You help him to his feet. He leans on the wall. Doesn’t quite use you for balance, though you think he might want to. You guide him into the nearest air-conditioned bodega and deposit him on a bench near the pharmacy counter. Buy two bottles of Gatorade and a protein bar. You don’t ask for reimbursement.
He drinks like it hurts to swallow. Like he’s out of practice with kindness.
“Thanks,” he says. Eventually.
You nod, sitting on the far end of the bench. “You should probably have a handler.”
“I do,” he says dryly. “She left five minutes before I remembered I hadn’t eaten.”
You glance at him sidelong. “So what, she’s in the wind?”
“Texted her,” he replies. “Told her I was fine.”
“You always lie to the people trying to keep you alive?”
Something flickers at that—too fast to name. “Sometimes.”
A silence settles. Not uncomfortable, exactly. But charged.
You glance down at your hands, then back at him. “Do you get nosebleeds a lot?”
“Not usually.”
“Good. If it starts again, you’re going to the hospital.”
His smile this time is faint, but real. He takes a glance at your scrubs, gears turning in his head. “You work there?”
“Yeah.”
“Doctor?”
“Nurse.”
He gives a little hum. “Makes sense.”
You frown. “Why?”
“Because you didn’t flinch.”
The statement lands oddly. “New Yorkers don’t usually flinch at guys hunched against the wall mid-day.”
“Not that,” he says. “Me.”
You meet his gaze. Don’t look away. “Well. Maybe they should.”
He stares at you for a long moment. You get the sense he’s parsing something. Not calculating. Listening. Not just to what you said, but how you said it.
“You didn’t tell me your name,” he says.
You open your mouth. Then close it.
And for the first time in your life, you think: If I tell him, he’ll know.
You’re not sure what scares you more. Him knowing. Or him not.
He notices the hesitation. His eyes drop—unintentionally, you think—toward your ribs. Just a flicker.
You say, quietly, “Don’t do that.”
He nods once. Doesn’t ask again.
Another moment passes. You hand him the rest of the protein bar.
He doesn’t say thank you again. He just eats it.
Eventually, he stands. A little steadier now. You watch him check his phone. You think he might offer to walk you somewhere, but he doesn’t.
Instead, he looks at you like he’s memorizing something. Then:
“You know,” he says, “there was a time I thought she’d be dead.”
Your heart skips.
You try to sound normal. “Who?”
He doesn’t smile. Not this time. Just studies your face.
“My soulmate.”
You freeze.
“Figured she’d died during the Blip,” he continues. “Or worse. Thought I felt it. But I came back and the mark was still there. So. Who knows.”
You inhale slowly. “What would you have done if it was gone?”
“Moved on,” he says.
You nod. Try to play it off. “That easy, huh?”
“No.” His voice drops a register. “But I would’ve had to.”
Silence again. He exhales. Checks the time. Nods once.
“Well,” he says. “Thanks for saving me from an embarrassing death outside a library.”
You stand too. “Wasn’t gonna let a congressman die on my watch, Mr. Barnes."
He gives a lopsided smile, and suddenly, you see a flicker of that man you saw in the Smithsonian all those years ago. “Call me Bucky. I'm just a guy, today.”
Then, softer: “See you around.”
You don’t say anything. Just watch him go.
When you finally look down at your ribs, you expect the name to be glowing or bleeding or something dramatic.
It isn’t.
It’s just there. Quiet. Permanent.
.
You don’t see Bucky again for months. He's gone from James Buchanan Barnes to Bucky, and it feels like foreign territory.
Not in person.
You follow his trajectory the way you follow the weather—warily, with one eye on the exit. A year into being entrenched in politics, and he gets pulled into a team, a superhero one, nonetheless. The new Avengers become a household name, or something close to it. You don’t pay for the streams, but you hear the headlines. They’re sent in to handle things that the rest of the government won’t touch. Places too messy. People too expendable.
Their first mission didn't have a name. Just a black void on every screen.
For New York, it was basically another Tuesday.
It starts mid-shift.
You’re in the middle of helping intubate someone when the power flickers—just once, like the building’s held its breath. Everyone stops. Monitors beep a half-second late. The trauma bay lights blink. Then come back. Then cut out again.
You keep your hands steady. Overhead, a resident says, “Is it just us?”
Someone else says, “No, it’s the whole block.”
And then your phone buzzes.
Not a call. A national alert.
EMERGENCY ALERT: ANOMALOUS EVENT IN PROGRESS. SEEK SHELTER.
You finish the procedure anyway. You don’t panic. You don’t run. You switch to battery-powered floodlights and keep your mask on. That’s the thing about being on the inside when the world starts to fall apart. You don’t get to pause.
Outside, the sky changes. It turns the color of old bruises. A gash opens above the skyline—wide, black, impossibly still. Something like a mouth. Something worse.
They call it the Void later. You never see it in person. Not really. You just feel the air change, the pressure drop. You feel the way every patient suddenly stops bleeding. The way everyone holds their breath.
And then, hours later, the lights flicker back on.
The void collapses into itself like it was never there.
And just like that, you keep working.
Afterward, the news trickles in. Bucky was there. Of course he was. He and the others were part of whatever last-ditch plan got the void to close. Whatever sacrifices were made, they’re classified. What isn’t: the look on his face when they put him on the podium afterward.
You watch it from the break room, over a vending machine lunch.
The new Avengers are announced. Not the old guard. A stitched-together lineup of whoever’s left, whoever didn’t run, whoever’s willing to keep showing up.
Bucky stands at the edge of the stage.
He looks like a man being honored at his own funeral.
You watch the broadcast until it ends.
You don’t say a word.
.
Two weeks later, you run into him again. And it’s so dumb, so ordinary, you don’t even realize what’s happening until you’ve already said yes.
You’re coming out of the pharmacy with three days’ worth of migraine pills and a jug of Pedialyte, and he’s just… there. Baseball cap, dark coat, looking like he hasn’t shaved in a week. The glove's off, his metal hand shining under the sterile lights. He spots you before you spot him.
“Hey,” he says, not quite surprised. “Funny seeing you here.”
You squint. “You okay?”
“I was gonna ask you the same thing.”
You glance down at the bag in your hand. “Pharmacy run.”
He nods. “I’m heading to get coffee. Want one?”
You open your mouth. Pause. And then, God help you, you say, “Yeah. Sure.”
You don’t talk about the void.
You talk about everything but.
The café is half-empty. He orders a black coffee and a lemon poppy seed muffin like someone trying to prove they’re still human. You ask for a chai. He insists on paying.
You sit across from each other, not touching. Not leaning. But there’s something in the air between you—charged, familiar. Like a room you’ve walked into before in a dream.
“Still at the hospital?” he asks.
“Yeah. We don’t really get to retire. Or take vacations.”
“That’s a shame.”
You shrug. “It’s a calling. Or a curse. Not sure.”
“I know the feeling.”
You sip your chai. He breaks the muffin in half and doesn’t eat it.
There’s a pause. Then—
“You never told me your name,” he says again. Not quite a question.
You watch him. Something in your chest thuds like recognition.
You set your cup down.
“I didn’t think you wanted it.”
He blinks. “Why wouldn’t I?”
You glance at the window, at the people outside walking past like none of this matters. Like the world didn’t almost end. Like the two of you aren’t teetering on some invisible edge.
“I don’t know,” you say finally. “Because you didn’t press.”
He doesn’t speak for a second. Just watches you, something gentle and old in his eyes.
Then he smiles. Kind. A little bit weary around the edges.
“Because I wanted you to give it when you were ready.”
The silence between you shifts. Not heavier. Just realer.
You say your name.
It fills the air between you like a quiet truth.
He breathes it in like it means something.
“Can I see you again?” he asks.
Your throat tightens. But your voice stays steady.
“Yeah,” you say. “I think you can.”
You don’t say anything as you leave the café. Just nod goodbye and let the door close between you. But later, when you replay the afternoon in your mind, it lingers. The quiet between words. The fact that he didn’t ask to see the mark. That he didn’t flinch.
The fact that when you said your name, it felt like exhaling. You don’t expect to see him again so soon. Not really.
But you do.
Twice that week, by accident.
First, it's after an especially gruelling night shift. The sun's barely even peeking through the trees yet, and you're covered in miscellaneous bodily fluids and there's bags under your eyes that weigh you down. Outside the bodega near your building, where you planned on getting bread and bananas and off-brand electrolyte packets. He’s coming out with a six-pack of seltzer and one of those microwave dinners that scream I-don’t-trust-a-stove as you're coming in. You nod at each other, and, looking down at your scrubs and your state, he asks if you just got done.
You nod. "Every Tuesday at 7 AM."
He asks how your shift went. You lie and say easy. He doesn’t call you on it.
The second time, you’re on a park bench halfway through a sandwich you don’t want, getting some much-needed air during your lunch break when a shadow falls across your lap.
It’s him, in jeans and a threadbare henley, hair mussed like he slept wrong. It's oddly domestic. You resist the urge to tuck a stray strand behind his ear. “Didn’t take you for a turkey club kind of girl,” he says, like this is the kind of thing you’ve always talked about. You offer him half without thinking. He takes it.
It’s not every day. Not even often. But you start to spot him in places you never used to. On the corner outside the pharmacy. At the edge of the farmer’s market. Once in the hallway of the clinic where you pick up your medical license renewal. He doesn’t make it obvious. He doesn’t insert himself. But he’s there.
And slowly, without meaning to, you start looking for him.
There’s a night when the ER is chaos and the weather is worse and your body is vibrating with exhaustion. Your car's given out on you. You miss your bus. You consider calling an Uber, then don’t. You’re standing under the overhang by the staff entrance, shivering in your scrubs, scrolling your phone for nothing in particular, when headlights sweep across your shoes and stop.
A car idles. Familiar. Black. Out of place like a shadow with wheels.
You squint into the window, and of course, it’s him. “Stalking me?”
He straightens, just a little. “You said your shift ended at seven.”
“I did,” you say, walking toward him. “Didn’t mean it was an invitation.”
His mouth twitches. “Consider it a standing offer.”
You glance at the car, then back at him. “You gonna tell me how you got a vehicle this inconspicuous, or is that classified?”
He opens the passenger door. “Perks of being an Avenger.”
You eye him. “Is this kidnapping?”
“If it is, it’s the most considerate kidnapping ever. I brought snacks.”
You get in.
It becomes a habit after that.
That’s the first ride.
It becomes a habit. Not a routine, exactly. That would suggest he comes at the same time, says the same thing, follows a pattern. He doesn’t. He’s unpredictable in the way thunderstorms are—sudden, insistent, quietly necessary. He’s just… there. Enough times that your coworkers start raising eyebrows. Enough times that you stop pretending it’s odd.
You don’t talk about the soulmark. Not directly.
But you talk about other things.
The price of gas. The merits of different hospital coffee. He tells you, offhandedly, that he used to hate mornings until he had to start facing them at 5 a.m. with a loaded weapon. You tell him you’ve delivered twins in a supply closet. Neither of you laughs, but the air warms between you.
One evening, he brings you tea instead of coffee. He says it’s because you looked like you hadn’t slept. You want to ask how he knew. You don’t.
You get used to the way his presence takes up space. Quietly. Without pushing. You start saving podcasts to share. You start to notice the way his metal hand rests against the gearshift like he’s forgotten it’s not flesh.
He learns your tells. Which sigh means you’re burned out and which means you’re hungry. He doesn’t always talk, but he listens better than most people speak.
And slowly—terrifyingly—you start to want him to be there.
.
Bucky never texts.
Not once.
He calls.
Always.
Even for the smallest things. A grocery question. A movie suggestion. A let-me-know-when-you’re-done. Sometimes you don’t pick up, and he doesn’t leave a voicemail. Just calls again an hour later like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
One day, you ask him why.
He’s driving, one hand on the wheel, the other—metal—resting on the gearshift like it belongs there.
“I don’t like waiting for a response,” he says, after a beat. “Feels like talking to a wall.”
You nod. “Makes sense.”
He glances at you, then adds, “Also, I can't type for shit. And autocorrect thinks I’m a lunatic. My PR manager thinks I'm a walking liability waiting to happen."
You don't know what makes you snort first; the thought of him keyboard smashing his phone or the fact that he has a goddamn PR manager.
Then, the first time you see the arm up close, he’s asleep on your couch.
You’re supposed to be watching a movie. You don't even know who initiated, who invited who over. But something old and black-and-white is flickering on the screen, one of his picks. But somewhere around the twenty-minute mark, he dozed off. His hoodie’s bunched up at the elbow, metal catching the lamplight.
You don’t stare. Not really. But you don’t look away either.
It’s not the glossy, hyper-chrome finish you remember from the surveillance footage. Not the Soviet brutality of jagged red stars and burnished steel. This one’s different. Sleeker. Sleek but brutal. Matte black and dark silver, subtle gold veins etched faintly between the segmented plates—Wakandan tech, you realize. Lightweight. Adaptive. The sort of engineering that moves with a person, not against them.
It looks like something alive. Something that remembers things.
You wonder if he remembers it’s there. If it registers temperature. Pressure. Pain. If the nerves ghost in that space the same way yours do when your fingers go numb from fatigue. If it ever aches when it rains.
You don’t ask.
Not yet.
He stirs, eventually. Looks at you through half-lidded eyes.
“Did I miss the plot twist?”
“You missed a wedding, a car crash, and three dramatic monologues.”
“Damn,” he mutters, stretching. His hoodie pulls a little higher. You glimpse the sharp, seamless lines of the elbow joint. Compact. Clean. Not like a machine—like an exoskeleton. Like armor. You look away. “We can rewind.”
You shrug, smirking into your mug. “I don’t know. I’m kind of emotionally invested now. I might want you to suffer through the confusion with me.”
He huffs a quiet laugh, still half-asleep, eyes flicking toward the screen.
You don’t rewind.
You just sit there, the credits rolling, and listen to him breathe as he falls back to sleep. You start to wonder what it would be like to fall asleep with his hand on your side. With the mark between you, not unspoken, but accepted. Real. You start to feel it again—that pull. The one you used to ignore. The one you used to press down like a bruise that wouldn’t fade.
This is what soulmates are about, you think. What they’re meant to be.
Not the fireworks. Not the rush. Not the storybook symmetry or the neat little bow at the end. Not the lightning strike of recognition. It’s quieter than that. Slower. Messier. Built of hours and questions and the space someone leaves you to be tired, to be flawed, to be real.
You think maybe it’s this — the way he handed you your coffee earlier exactly the way you take it without ever having asked. The way he watches the road when you don’t want to talk and turns the music up just a little, like a soft wall between you and the world. The way he never reaches for your hand, but always lets his linger close enough that you could.
It’s the consistency. The patience. The terrifying kindness of being seen when you’re not trying to be. When your armor’s off, not because you dropped it, but because he never asked you to put it on in the first place.
There’s something in your chest that loosens when he’s near. Some old tension that stops buzzing like an alarm.
And maybe that’s what the mark is. Not fate, not prophecy, but permission. A tether, yes—but one you can pull at your own pace. One you can choose.
And every day you don’t walk away, you’re choosing him.
Even if neither of you has said it yet. Even if neither of you knows how.
“You ever get tired of people looking at you sideways?” you ask him once, on a late-night walk back from a diner you guys have started to frequent together. You’ve both got milkshakes in hand because Bucky insists they’re a cornerstone of civilization, and you’re learning not to argue when he gets weirdly nostalgic.
He takes a sip. Shrugs. “Used to.”
“And now?”
“Now I don’t care.” A pause. “It helps that you don’t.”
You look over. He’s not smiling, but he’s softer. Always is, around you. Less edge. Less shield.
“I used to,” you admit. “When I was younger. I thought it’d fade. The mark.”
He nods, like he’s heard that before. Like he understands more than you meant to say.
“It didn’t,” you add.
He glances at you, then at your side. Not lingering. Just a flicker.
“Good,” he says, so quietly you almost miss it.
You stop walking. “Why?”
He doesn’t look at you. Just finishes his drink. Crumples the cup in one hand.
“Because I’m still here,” he says, like it should be obvious.
And it is.
Somehow, it is.
He cooks, occasionally. Not well. But with effort. One night, he burns a grilled cheese so thoroughly the fire alarm goes off. You have to wave a towel at the smoke detector while he swears under his breath and throws the pan in the sink.
You’re still laughing when he sets two very sad sandwiches on the table and mutters, “Fine. Next time, we order.”
“There’s gonna be a next time?”
He gives you a look. “Unless I’m banned from your kitchen.”
You pick up half a sandwich. “You’re on probation.”
He watches you take a bite. Raises an eyebrow.
You chew. Swallow. “Tastes like regret and cheese.”
That gets a huff of laughter. He doesn’t laugh easily—not fully—but you’re learning the sounds he makes when he’s amused. The little exhales. The under-his-breath muttering. The half-smile he hides behind his hand.
You’re learning all of it.
And you’re starting to think he’s learning you too.
One night, he’s quiet.
Not in the usual way — not in the half-aware, hands-in-pockets, I’ve-seen-too-much kind of way you've learned he wears like a well-worn, favorite coat. This silence is heavier. Not a thing he’s hiding from you, but a thing he’s holding. Something sharp and delicate and dangerous, like broken glass wrapped in cloth. You don’t know what it is yet, but you feel it.
You’re curled up at opposite ends of the couch, legs almost touching, the ghost of his knee brushing yours whenever either of you shifts. The movie’s still playing, long-forgotten. It’s just noise now. A screen flickering in the background while your heart waits.
He inhales like it hurts. And then—
“Can I tell you something?”
His voice is quiet. Too quiet. And he’s not looking at you Blue eyes staring straight ahead at the TV, the little space between his brows wrinkled into something indecipherable.
You blink, slowly. “Yeah,” you say, just as softly. “Of course.”
That gets a breath out of him. Not a laugh. Not quite a sigh. Just something let loose. You watch him stare ahead, fixed on a point in the middle distance like it’s safer than you. Like your face is too much to hold right now.
“I used to hate it,” he says. “The mark.”
You don’t move.
You don’t breathe.
“I thought—” He rubs the heel of his hand over his sternum, just once, like something aches there. “I thought it was some kind of punishment. Like the universe picked me just to prove it could.”
Your heart twists.
He still won’t meet your eyes. But he’s speaking now, and it feels like something old and knotted finally starting to unravel.
“I didn’t know what it meant, not really. Not at first. Just this pain. A weight. And then the name came, and it didn’t mean anything. Just letters. A future that didn’t make sense.”
His hand tightens, flexes, then drops into his lap again. You watch the way his fingers curl, restless and bare.
“And then it did mean something. And it got worse.”
He swallows. Hard.
“Because I looked you up.” His voice dips, almost like he’s ashamed of it. “When I got the chance. I knew. Who you were. Where you were. For years. I didn’t—I didn’t do anything about it. But I knew.”
Something tightens in your chest. A coil. A knot. He looked for you. All those years, he searched and he reached and he wanted all the same. You want to reach for him, but you wait. You feel like if you breathe wrong, he might vanish.
“I kept thinking—if I left it alone, if I stayed away, maybe the universe would rethink it. Give you someone better. Someone cleaner. Someone safe.”
Finally, his gaze flickers to you. Brief. Bracing. The kind of look you imagine he’s given a thousand times in battle — checking to see if the person beside him is still alive.
“And I thought I could carry that,” he says. “I thought if I ignored it long enough, maybe it’d fade. That maybe you’d forget, or never know. And I could just—live around it.”
His laugh is bitter. Not sharp, exactly, but cracked around the edges.
“But it didn’t fade. You didn’t fade.”
You feel like you’ve stopped breathing entirely.
He leans forward, elbows on his knees, fingers knotted together. The mark under your ribs aches in quiet sympathy.
“You know what’s worse than feeling like you don’t deserve someone?” he asks, eyes fixed somewhere near your ankles. “Feeling like you do, for just one second. Like you could, if only you were different. If only everything hadn’t already happened.”
He sits back again. Slower this time. Exhausted.
Your chest is tight, full of static. Your eyes sting.
“I used to see your name and think, how cruel. That someone like you had to carry the weight of someone like me.” Bucky finally looks at you again, and there’s nothing distant about it. It’s searing. Devastating. “But then you showed up. That day at the library. And I—”
His voice falters.
He swallows again, blinking hard. “I’ve spent so long being looked at like I’m a weapon. Like I’m a ghost. But you looked at me like—” He stops, breath caught in his throat. “Like I was real. Like you’d known me. Like I wasn’t a mistake.”
You blink fast, because the alternative is crying.
“And I didn’t know what to do with that. I still don’t know what to do with that,” He exhales, a quiet tremor in his chest. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be the person who deserves this. Or you. Or the mark. But I want to be.”
He turns toward you fully now, and for the first time, he doesn’t look away.
“I want to try,” he says, softly. “If you’ll let me.”
You reach for his hand. Like it’s something sacred, and your fingers meet his.
You don’t say anything right away. There’s no need. His hand tightens around yours like an answer. Like a prayer. And under your ribs, where the mark lives, you feel it — not a tug, not a weight, but a warmth. Like the sun, breaking through after years of winter.
He doesn’t let go of your hand.
His fingers are rough in some places, calloused in others, warm where it counts. He holds you like he’s learning how. Like maybe the trick is not to grip too tight, but not to let go either. That sweet, aching middle ground. Like maybe you’re something breakable—but not fragile.
You’re not sure how long you sit like that. Just the two of you, suspended in this strange, soft liminal space between the past and whatever comes next.
The TV hums in the background. The couch dips where your knees almost touch. You swear you can hear his pulse—yours too—skipping every third beat, then rushing to make up for it.
He’s still watching you like he’s waiting for you to vanish.
You speak first. Barely a whisper. “I think I started loving you before I even knew what it meant.”
His eyes close, slow. As if the words are a balm. Or a blade. You’re not sure which.
“I used to feel you before I understood how,” you continue, voice steady now, stronger with each word. “Not in the mark. Not in the skin. But in the air. In the quiet. I’d be washing blood off my hands at three in the morning and think—I’m not alone. Not really.”
His throat moves with the effort of swallowing. He doesn’t speak. Not yet. You’re not done.
“I hated you for it too, for a while,” you admit. “For making me hope. For giving me something to lose before I ever had it.”
You shift, close the last few inches between you. He doesn’t flinch. Just watches, gaze dark and wide and impossibly open.
“I didn’t want this to be real. Because if it was, it meant I could break. That I had something to break for.”
He breathes out your name. Just once.
You touch his face. Thumb trailing the edge of his cheekbone. He leans into it like he’s forgotten what it means to be held. “I see you,” you whisper. “I see you. Not the headlines. Not the soldier. Not the mark. Just… you.”
And something inside him unravels. Not all at once. Not like a dam breaking. But like a thread pulled gently until what’s been bound up for too long begins to loosen.
“I love you,” he says, and it’s not polished. Not pretty. It’s real. Broken around the edges. Bare and breathless. “I love you, and it’s terrifying.”
You nod. Because you know.
He exhales. Then moves.
He kisses you like he means it. Like it’s the first and last time he’ll ever be allowed. His lips press to yours, slow at first, exploratory. Like he’s trying to memorize the shape of it. The feel. You breathe him in. Let your hand slip to the back of his neck, anchor him there.
He doesn’t rush.
His hands, warm and steady, skim your waist like he’s relearning what it means to touch without taking. To be given something instead of stealing it. He pulls you closer—not to possess, but to be sure you’re still there.
When he parts from you, it’s just for breath.
You lean your forehead against his. “We’ve already survived so much,” you whisper. “What’s one more impossible thing?”
His laugh is soft, unguarded. It shakes a little at the end.
You tilt your face, kiss him again—deeper this time. His response is immediate. Hands tightening, lips parting. You taste the urgency in him, the tremble beneath restraint. Your mouth moves against his like a promise. Like maybe this—you—was what the mark was always meant to lead to.
Not fate. Choice.
His metal hand brushes your hip, steady and impossibly gentle. He maps the curve of your ribs like he’s memorizing the lines of his own name. You press your palm to his chest, feel the echo of your name there too. Not carved in flesh, but in feeling. In ache. In the quiet places only the two of you have ever touched.
“Come here,” he murmurs, voice wrecked and low.
You’re already there.
Bucky kisses your neck. Your shoulder. The space just under your jaw. He doesn’t rush the way his hands roam—careful like he’s turning the pages of something sacred. You think your heart's going to burst or stop at any given moment, because there's no way, absolutely no way he's real.
When he pushes your shirt and your bra up over your head, your hands quickly move up to knot through his hair, anchoring them there until he's groaning and mumbling against your skin. He leans down, open mouthed kisses along the way until he finds what he's looking for, taking a pert nipple into his mouth and playing with the other with his metal hand. "Bucky, I—"
He doubles down, holding you closer against his core so he can feel you bucking against him, grinding uselessly against the rough fabric of his jeans so he can feel you pulse, head flooding your core. "Fuck, don't stop. Please don't stop, Bucky, I'm—" You sigh breathlessly when you look down and he's got your nipple between his teeth, gently tugging as he looks up at you with too innocent blue eyes. Like he's not pulling you apart.
"I won't stop, sweet girl," Bucky shakes his head, laughing softly like he can't believe it. "Don't even think I could, if I tried."
The rest of your clothes end up as a pile on the floor, and then it was just Bucky slowly undressing in front of you between your knees. It's enough to make you lose your breath, but his next words sends another sharp heat to pool between your legs. "I'm gonna make you feel so good. You're so good to me, you—fuck, I'm gonna take my time with you. You gonna keep being good for me?"
"Yes, yes," You whispered, arms coming to wrap around him as he carries you to your bed, nails scratching lightly on the toned muscles of his back. "I'll be so good, I wanna feel good—just be with me."
He comes back to you, bare and ready and when you glance down, you can't help the gasp that escapes you. He's big. Bigger than you've ever had, thick and heavy and weeping at the tip. Gorgeous. Fuck, he's gorgeous. At the quiet sound, he pulls back a little bit, just enough to ask, with concern that's mixed with a little bit of amusement. "You okay, baby?"
Baby. Baby. The word rings in your ears, pushing another quiet, needy sound through your lips that Bucky's all too eager to swallow. But then suddenly, he stops and you have to resist the urge to whine. He presses a kiss against your skin, eyes searching yours. "Baby," Fuck, there's that word again. "I'm—I didn't bring anything with me. I don't wanna—"
You part your thighs without being told and the want in your voice is so clear, so evident. "Bucky, I'm clean. I'm on the pill, and I want you so bad, I need it. I need you inside me, want you to mark me, fill me until I'm overflowing with you."
He curses, looking at the way you're spread out underneath him. His hand reaches out to cup you where you're glistening and swollen and impossibly soft. "I can't say no to that, can I?"
"No," Your legs hook around him as he situates himself between your legs, your heart rate rising as he's so, so goddamn close, you can feel his body heat. "No, you can't."
When he finally sinks himself inside of you, you feel like you're being consumed. It's like your birthday and Christmas and the fucking Fourth of July, all in one, making you moan and swoon in a way that you know will have your neighbors sending a strongly worded complaint in the morning.
He's hard and fast and brutal, rocking against you while he sings praises into your hair, and you're wondering how you've ever been able to live without this. How you can't possibly live without this ever again, but then his hand, warm and on a mission, snakes its way beneath your stomach and pulls and pinches at your clit, and it sends you on another high.
Bucky groans. "Just what you needed, huh, baby?"
You nod, moaning out his name in reply.
One particularly hard thrust, after pulling almost all the way out and then rearranging you in a way that should be impossible, and you're falling apart on him as he fucks you through it. He loves you, he loves you, and he means every single word.
When he cums, it hits you like a train, still reeling from the aftershocks of your last orgasm when he groans and roars, putting his face to your throat and babbles—baby, sweet thing, the love of my life.
Afterwards, you just wanna lay in the mess with him, tangle yourself up with his legs and arms and get stuck there, but you're–the mess between your legs is sticky and quickly drying and the though of Bucky, soaking wet and dripping with water under the spray of your—
"Shower," you murmur. And Bucky nods against you, leaning down so he can wrap his arms around you and carry you down the hall to the bathroom.
It doesn't end there.
You ride his face under the shower. He's so good, on his knees like this was penance. For not being there for years, for not coming home to you sooner. His name rattles around your mouth and his tongue makes delicate, soft little shapes on your clit and nibbles against your thighs when you squeeze him just the right amount to make him a bit dizzy. A cool hand on your back, heat rushing in between your legs. His beard sending pinpricks up your spine as you curl your hips closer to his mouth.
Then—all at once, you on his tongue with a stuttered gasp, head spinning as he laves you with all sorts of praise. His other hand snakes up, circling and rubbing your clit like a man on a mission. "Oh god, oh god."
"Let me have all of it, sweetheart, baby, god. Let me taste you."
You do, of course, fucking of course, you let him. "My baby, taking everything ya want from me. I'll always give it to you. Christ."
When Bucky moves over your body, standing up to his full height, you're all too eager to taste him on your tongue. He's smiling lazily against your lips, like he's won a fight. It's sweet, it's a little sticky, it's—god, it's so fucking attractive, the way his lips and his stubble shine under the bathroom lights with your juices. "Say my name, Bucky, say it—"
He says your name, over and over and over and it's perfect. The water continues to spray above you, soaking both of you, but especially him as it dribbles down to the base of his cock. When he sinks into you, thick and heavy and ready until your shoulder blades knock against the cool tile, you both hold your breath until he's all the way inside, flush against your skin.
There's his hands on your hips, a momentary pause, before his hips start snapping against yours. His dark hair, sopping wet and falling into his face, barely concealing the way he grits through his teeth. "Fuck."
You love him so much. You don't think you've ever felt a love so all-encompassing, a love that sets you on fire. You'd give him absolutely anything, everything he wants. Your words fail you, but it's the only thing you can think of as he continues to pound into you, up against that sweet, sweet spot that sends your vision spinning. In the haze of your mind, you can hear yourself moaning, begging—
Then you're falling apart again, cumming with a silent scream.
"There you go," Bucky groans and suddenly, you can feel it too, the way he fills you up, throbbing and pulsing inside of you. Until he was empty and you were full. "There you go. So good, baby. Been so good."
All at once, it all comes back to you.
The bathroom is fogged with steam, the mirror a blurred memory of your shapes, blurred edges, the safe hush of water hitting tile. He doesn’t speak when you finally wrench yourself apart from him, just to move behind him, doesn’t tense when your hands press against his shoulder blades to guide him just slightly aside—enough to step in beside him, under the spray. He shifts automatically, lets you in. Like it’s instinct now.
The water is hot, almost too hot, but he doesn’t flinch. He crowds you a little, warm chest to your back, arms curving around your middle like you’re something to protect. Or anchor to. Or both.
You feel the kiss of cold tile against your front, his breath low against your shoulder. It should be overwhelming. Should make you squirm. But instead, it feels inevitable. Like exhaling. Like gravity doing what it always does.
You lean back into him, and he lets you turn. No push. No pressure. Just a subtle retreat that gives you space. When your eyes find his in the low light, he’s already watching you, his gaze open in the way it only is now, after. After everything. After the storm and the silence and the choosing.
“Pass me the soap,” you murmur.
He obliges. Hands you something dark and nondescript, expensive-smelling and purposefully plain, like everything else he owns now. The scent hits as you squeeze a dollop into your palm—cedar, maybe. Bergamot. Clean, and quietly masculine. Like him.
He runs a hand through his hair, rinses under the stream, half turning away from you, blinking water from his lashes.
“Uh-uh,” you chide gently. “Get back here.”
His brow lifts, bemused, but he obeys. Always does, when it’s you. You rub your hands together to lather the soap, then step forward—closer than necessary. Not because you want to tease. Because you want to see.
You start at his sides, palms gliding slowly over his ribs, where old scars have long since faded into muscle. He sucks in a breath, low and sharp. Not from heat. From the contact.
Your fingers move across his stomach, up over the dip in his chest, across the swell of his shoulders. He stands perfectly still—except for the breath hitching in his throat, the twitch of his jaw. You press your body to his, full skin-to-skin, and feel his chest rise beneath your breasts, slow and tight.
He watches you like he’s never been touched like this before. Like the softness is the part that breaks him. Not the hunger. Not the fire. But the care.
You rise up on your toes, sliding your hands over the back of his neck, around the nape. One hand slips down between his fingers, rubbing suds over the back of his hand. His metal arm stays still at his side, but his flesh hand… it flexes beneath yours. Tightens around your fingers like something unbearable is unraveling in his chest.
That’s when you look up. That’s when you see it.
He looks wrecked. Not from what happened in bed. Not from anything physical. But from this—this ridiculous, tender act of washing him like he matters. Like you’re not asking anything in return. No demands. No debt.
Just love.
And he knows. You can see it—see the realization in his face as clear as sunlight on glass. He knows now, as fully as you do, what this is. What you’ve been. What you are.
You want to look away. Want to laugh it off, run, bite something smart and quick and false between your teeth just to fill the silence. You don’t.
He takes your wrist gently in his flesh one—fingers cradling the inside like it’s something delicate. Then, with his other, his metal thumb presses to your skin.
He traces a letter. Then another.
It’s not rushed. Not uncertain. The motion is familiar. Repeated. You've traced over his name countless of times, and the rough pad of his pointer finger goes through a path you've known for half your life.
Your throat tightens.
“You,” he says quietly, voice rough from emotion and steam and everything in between.
He takes your hand gently and takes it to his ribs, where your name's resided for the better part of his life. “And me.”
You stare down at the mark he’s making, not because it’s visible, but because it’s real. You can feel it there, etched into the space between heartbeats.
“You and me,” he murmurs again. “Always was gonna be.”
Then, still holding your wrist, he lifts your hand to his lips and kisses your knuckles. Softly. As if you were made of prayer.
There’s nothing else to say. No big revelation. No sudden orchestral swell.
Just this. Just the sound of the water, the warmth of his chest against yours, the slow unraveling of every wall you ever built around the part of yourself that's wanted to believe in love since you were thirteen, staring at your skin in awe.
Later, there will be groceries. Buses. Shifts at the hospital. He'll have to go back to being an Avenger. Other lives moving in parallel lanes around yours.
But right now, it’s this.
It’s weightlessness.
At the end, it's just your name, written in that soft fog of his breath. And his name, traced endlessly, infinitely across your skin.
Summary: After a night out goes violently wrong, you call Bucky—without knowing what you’re even asking for. He shows up anyway, staying long after the worst of it, until you finally start to believe you’re safe.
MCU Timeline Placement: TFATWS
Master List: Find my other stuff here!
Warnings: Physical assault (not described presently), implied attempted sexual violence, PTSD symptoms, self-blame, trauma responses, dissociation, anxiety/panic attacks, aftermath of violence, survivor’s guilt, Bucky’s past trauma, and references to Hydra’s abuse.
Word Count: 11.3k
Author’s Note: hey everyone—this one is heavy. please take care of yourselves and read only if you're in the right headspace. i think a lot about the way bucky barnes carries things. how he holds guilt in his bones, how he grips onto the past like it's something he has to bear alone. he’s spent so much of his life being used, controlled, losing pieces of himself to people who never saw him as anything but a weapon. and i think, more than anything, he never wants anyone else to feel like that—like they’re alone in something they never asked for. if you need support, there are resources here!
The alley reeked of rot. Garbage, piss, something acrid and chemical where a dumpster leaked sludge onto the pavement. A neon sign buzzed overhead, its flickering light cutting jagged shadows across the bricks. Your back was against the wall, knees drawn to your chest, breath tight and shuddering.
Adrenaline had carried you this far. Past the street, past the indifferent glow of headlights, past the weight of hands that had no right to touch you. But it was wearing off now, leaving behind a raw, scraped-open awareness.
Your lip trembled. You tasted blood where your teeth had cut deep, where a hand had pressed too hard against your mouth. Your whole body ached, your ribs tight, a sickening soreness spreading through you like oil.
You closed your eyes.
Breathe.
The night pulsed around you—muffled laughter from the street, the wet slap of tires on pavement, a car horn blaring somewhere distant. Your back pressed against the alley wall, brick biting through the thin fabric of your jacket. You shivered, the damp seeping into your skin, your hands gripping your phone like a lifeline.
This was stupid. This was so fucking stupid.
You could call the police. You could call anyone else. A rideshare, a hotline, a number that isn’t buried under hesitation and something fragile that doesn’t have a name yet.
You shouldn’t. You really shouldn’t.
You could see him so clearly in your mind. Arms crossed, mouth pressed into a thin line, that furrow between his brows that only deepened when he was worried. You knew how he’d look at you, how the shift in his expression would be subtle but absolute, how he wouldn’t say I’m sorry or what happened?
Because Bucky Barnes didn’t do empty words.
But you weren’t his problem. You weren’t anything to him, not really. Not more than someone he knew, someone who had sat next to him occasionally in briefings, who had made quiet conversation with him in coffee shops while Sam and Joaquin talked too much, who had sometimes caught his gaze lingering just a little too long before he looked away.
You were dialing before you had fully decided to.
It rang once. Twice.
You should hang up.
You should—
The thought barely had time to register before the line connected.
“Yeah?”
His voice was rough with sleep, and for a moment, you froze, paralyzed by the sheer wrongness of it. The normalcy. You’d heard Bucky’s voice like this before, low and edged with exhaustion, usually paired with a grumbled complaint about Sam waking him up at ungodly hours.
He sounded normal. But you were not.
You tried to wet your lips, but your mouth was bone-dry. You should say something. Anything. His name was on the tip of your tongue, but it won’t come out.
"Hello?" A pause. He exhaled sharply. “If this is some weird butt dial—”
Your breath hitched, a sharp, broken thing. Not quite a sob, but something close.
Bucky went silent.
The sound of traffic bled through the receiver. Muffled tires slapping against wet pavement, the distant shriek of brakes, the hum of a streetlamp overhead.
You pressed a hand to your ribs, trying to steady yourself. Your fingers came away damp.
A pause. You could hear something in the background, maybe the creak of a bedframe, the rustle of sheets. He was awake now. You had done that.
“Doll?”
His voice was quieter now. You flinched.
“I—” You swallowed against the rawness in your throat. You didn’t know what you meant to say. Your head felt full of static. The alley stretched around you, too dark, too cold, too open. You curled in on yourself, tucking your knees in, pressing your back harder against the brick wall.
“You alright?”
The question sent something sharp and hot splintering through your chest.
Your mouth worked uselessly around the truth, but the words wouldn’t come. The reality of them felt too big. You couldn’t hold it in your hands, couldn’t press it into the space between you in a way that wouldn’t shatter you.
Bucky made a small noise, something halfway between a sigh and a groan. “You’re breathin’ weird.”
The observation was so blunt it nearly startled you into laughing. Your breath came fast and uneven, your pulse hammering against your skin like it wanted out. It was all wrong, wrong, wrong.
You exhaled shakily, pressed a hand against your chest like you could stop the way it was caving in.
"I—I didn’t know who else to call." The truth came out in a rasp, barely more than a whisper.
“You at home?”
You shook your head. Realized he couldn’t see you.
“Talk to me.”
You wet your lips. “I—” The words tumbled out before you could stop them. “I don’t—I don’t know.”
His pause was too long. You imagined him rubbing a hand down his face, narrowing his eyes at nothing in particular.
“You don’t know what?”
You squeezed your eyes shut. “Where I—where I am.”
Another silence, sharper this time. He shifted, the rustling of fabric barely audible through the phone.
“Have you been drinking?”
It punched the air from your lungs. Your fingers tightened around the phone.
“Jesus, Buck.”
Your voice cracked. His name sounded foreign coming from your lips, like it belonged to someone else. The edges of your vision wavered, the dark pressing in, the alley stretching and swallowing you whole.
Bucky must have caught something in your tone, because his own changed, dropping lower, softer.
"Are you hurt?"
The question landed too hard. You flinched.
Your fingers twitched against the fabric of your jeans, nails digging in. "I don't—" You stopped, sucked in a breath. "I'm not—"
The words wouldn’t settle. Wouldn’t come out right. You weren’t hurt the way he meant. Not bleeding out, not broken ribs or a knife to the gut. But that wasn’t the same as okay, was it?
“Okay,” he said, carefully. “Okay. Just—stay on the line, alright? Where are you?”
You didn’t answer.
“Sweetheart.” He exhaled slowly, as if trying to ground himself. “You gotta tell me where you are.”
Your breath rattled in your chest. Your hands ached from how hard you were gripping the phone, your nails biting into your palms. “I can’t.”
The alley suddenly felt too loud. The hum of the streetlamp. The hiss of the wind. The distant murmur of voices—normal, laughing, oblivious. You pressed a hand to your mouth, sucking in air through your nose. The smell of rot and stale water curled in your lungs.
Bucky was speaking again, but the words blurred together, just sound, just noise, the edges of your awareness fraying—
“Hey. Stay with me.”
You shuddered, eyes snapping open. The darkness loomed around you, but the phone in your hands was solid, real.
You didn’t know what to say. You didn’t know how to say it. There was only one thing you could say.
“I’m sorry.”
Bucky swore. A sharp, angry sound. “Don’t do that,” he snapped.
You flinched.
“Don’t—” He exhaled hard, like he was trying to rein himself in. “Don’t apologize.”
A pause.
“Look around,” Bucky said, voice too damn steady, like he was holding himself together for you. “Tell me what you see.”
The alley swam as you tried to look up, but your vision blurred at the edges, black spots creeping in. The neon flicker of a rundown bar sign hummed somewhere past the street entrance. The streetlamp overhead buzzed like an insect, barely illuminating the damp pavement.
“A—A bar,” you whispered. “Red sign. I think I ran past 52nd, but I—I don’t—” Your breath stuttered. You dug your fingers into your arms. The tremors wouldn’t stop.
He made a frustrated sound, mostly at himself. “That doesn’t help, sweetheart.” He softened almost immediately, exhaling through his nose like he was trying to ground himself. “Which bar? Can you check street signs?”
You twisted, wincing when your body protested. Everything hurt. You blinked against the blurriness creeping into your vision, forcing yourself to focus.
There. A rusted sign, barely legible beneath flickering yellow light.
You swallowed. “Holland’s. It says Holland’s.”
You heard him moving. The unmistakable sound of keys, the sharp zip of a jacket.
“You safe where you are?”
You weren’t sure how to answer that.
It should have been an easy answer. A binary thing. Yes or no. But safe felt like a foreign concept, something loose and unfixed, something that had been stripped from you in the space of an instant. You could still taste blood, could still feel—
You pressed your knuckles to your mouth, stifling the sharp hitch in your breathing, nails biting into the raw skin of your palm. You had to keep breathing. Had to keep it together.
You didn't feel safe. But saying it would make it real. Would unravel something you weren’t sure you could put back together.
Bucky exhaled sharply. Not frustrated. Not impatient. Just… steadying himself. Like he already knew the answer but needed to hear it from you.
The roar of his bike igniting crackled through the speaker. Then, softly, “Okay.” A pause. “Okay, just stay on the line with me, alright?”
You nodded. Stupid. He couldn’t see you.
Your throat felt too tight when you forced out a whispered, “Yeah.”
Bucky hummed in acknowledgment. It was quiet, thoughtful. But his next words weren’t what you expected.
“What’s the last thing you ate?”
The question slid under your ribs, jarring you. Your brows knit together. Your brain felt slow, clogged with static and something thick, syrupy. “…What?”
“You heard me.” His voice was different now. Steady. Casual. Like he was dragging you into another conversation entirely. Like he could pull you out of this hole just by making you focus on something else.
It almost sounded normal.
Like you were back in that cramped coffee shop off 39th, knees brushing under the table, Bucky rolling his eyes while Sam went on about some protein shake that “tasted like a war crime.”
Normal.
“I—” You forced yourself to think. Pushed against the throbbing in your skull, the erratic way your heart hammered against your ribs. “I don’t know.”
“Bet you skipped lunch,” he said, voice still easy, controlled. “You do that a lot.”
Your throat tightened. It was such a simple observation. Such a small, stupid thing. But the weight of it pressed against your ribs like he had peeled back your skin and seen everything at once.
You wet your lips, voice barely there. “Not on purpose.”
Bucky made a quiet, amused sound, like a low snort. “Not on purpose, huh?”
A pause. Then, lighter—“Alright. What about breakfast?”
You focused on the weight of the phone in your hands. The solid feel of it. Something tangible, something real.
“…A bagel.”
He made a noise like he was considering that.
“Uh-huh.” A beat. “Dry?”
Your eyes fluttered, blinked. Confused. “What?”
He sighed, long-suffering. “Did you put anything on it, or did you just suffer through it like some kind of lunatic?”
A sharp, startled sound broke from your throat. Almost a laugh.
The moment it escaped, your breath caught, guilt slamming into your ribs. Like you had no right to that sound, not right now.
But Bucky only exhaled, relieved. “There she is.”
Your fingers clenched. Your lip trembled. God, you hated this. Hated feeling like this.
Bucky must have known, must have felt the shift in the silence, because his voice softened. “You still with me?”
You nodded again. “Yeah.”
He hummed. “Good. Stay with me a little longer.”
The distant purr of an engine rumbled through the receiver. You barely noticed. You swallowed, fingers gripping the phone so tightly your knuckles ached. Your other hand curled into the damp fabric of your jeans, grounding yourself.
“How’s your breathing?”
Your brows knit together. “What?”
“It’s fast.”
It wasn’t a question.
You blinked, only now aware of the way your chest rose and fell too sharply, too quick. The uneven pull of air, how your ribs felt too tight, like they might crack under the weight of your own lungs.
Bucky had heard it. Had felt it.
“Try to slow it down for me.”
You pressed your lips together, trying to exhale through your nose, but it shuddered on the way out. Your throat was too tight, your pulse a caged thing, erratic and unpredictable.
“I can’t,” you admitted, barely more than a whisper.
Bucky didn’t hesitate. “Yes, you can.”
A pause.
“Four seconds in, alright?”
You clenched your jaw.
“Doll.” A fraction softer. “Just try.”
You closed your eyes.
The night pulsed around you—humid, stale, thick with the stink of the alley. Your body ached from where you had curled in on yourself for too long, your legs stiff, your fingers tingling.
But you inhaled, forcing it slow. One. Two. Three.
Bucky was quiet, waiting.
“Good,” he murmured, once you exhaled.
You could hear the city moving around you—so normal, so indifferent. A car horn. The distant echo of laughter. Footsteps clicking down the sidewalk somewhere too far to be a threat, but your body still tensed, still braced for something unseen, unknown.
You swallowed hard. The nausea was creeping back up.
The engine was louder now. Closer. Not just bleeding through the phone speaker.
Your stomach twisted.
You had made a mistake.
Letting him come here, letting him see you like this. Fuck. He would look at you differently. You didn’t want that. Couldn’t stand that.
But it was too late.
The hum of the bike cut out. A heavy pause.
Then, the scrape of a kickstand. The sharp click of a helmet being unfastened. The weight of boots hitting pavement.
Your pulse pounded against your ribs, every muscle in your body going tight, your hands curling into fists like some part of you still thought you had to fight, had to run.
Your heart slammed against your ribs, your hands curling into the damp fabric of your sleeves, trying to make yourself smaller. Your whole body locked up, muscles screaming, ready to—
"Hey."
Not loud. Not sharp. But firm.
You squeezed your eyes shut. Not him. Not him. It’s Bucky.
He was close now. Close enough to see you, to take in the shape of you curled against the brick, wedged behind a dumpster slick with something dark and rotting, knees pulled tight to your chest. Close enough to see the way you flinched at the sound of his voice.
His breathing slowed.
“Sweetheart.”
You could barely lift your head. Couldn’t force your body to cooperate. You pressed your forehead to your knees, your fingers digging into your arms, shaking too hard to stop. The air was wrong in your lungs, your chest too tight, like it wasn’t working right, like your body had forgotten how.
You heard him shift, the quiet creak of leather. He crouched down a few feet away, not touching, not moving.
“I need you to tell me if you’re hurt.” His voice was steady. Low. “If I need to be lookin’ for someone right now.”
The question knocked the air from your lungs. Your mouth opened, but nothing came out.
You swallowed hard, forcing yourself to shake your head.
The silence stretched, humming and awful.
“Can I come closer?”
Your eyes squeezed shut even tighter. You weren’t scared of him. Not Bucky. Never Bucky. But your body didn’t understand the difference.
You forced yourself to nod.
The movement was barely there, but Bucky saw.
His boots scraped against the pavement as he moved, slow, deliberate, keeping himself low, non-threatening.
His voice softened. “Can I see you?”
It wasn’t a demand. It wasn’t a plea. Just gentle.
Your breath shuddered out of you. Your body was still wound tight, still trying to disappear into itself, but—this was Bucky.
Slowly, you raised your head.
His gaze locked onto yours instantly, searching, cataloging every detail. He didn’t try to hide the way his jaw tensed, the way his fingers flexed against his thighs. He took in the way your hands trembled, the way your body curled in on itself, the way your eyes were still too wide, still too far away.
But he didn’t press. Didn’t ask.
Instead, he exhaled, voice steady, grounding. “I’m gonna get you outta here. Can you stand?”
You barely knew. Your body felt hollowed out, boneless, nothing but exhaustion and too-tight skin.
You shifted, pressing your hands against the wall for leverage, but your knees buckled almost instantly.
Bucky caught you before you could hit the ground.
You flinched, but he didn’t pull away. Didn’t hold on too tight, didn’t move too fast, just steady. One arm braced lightly under your own, the other hovering close without touching, waiting.
His voice was softer now. “I got you. You’re ok.”
Your breath hitched. You clenched your eyes shut.
You didn’t have it in you to argue.
Bucky adjusted his grip, careful, gentle, helping you up. Your body barely responded. Everything felt heavy, off. You leaned against him before you could stop yourself.
His fingers twitched against your arm, like he wanted to pull you in closer, but he didn’t.
“Alright,” he murmured. “Nice and easy.”
The bike was parked just outside the alley. It gleamed under the flickering streetlight, still warm from the ride over.
You didn’t remember moving toward it. Didn’t remember how you got there.
Bucky let go the second you were steady, reaching for his helmet and pressing it into your hands.
Your fingers barely worked. Your hands shook too much.
Bucky hesitated, watching you, then carefully reached forward. “Here, let me.”
You didn’t resist when he took the helmet from your fingers.
His hands were steady as he eased the helmet over your head, adjusting the strap with careful precision, his gloved fingers brushing against your jaw, light but firm. He didn’t rush it, didn’t fumble. Just secured it in place, making sure it fit snugly, his thumb lingering for the briefest second beneath your chin before he withdrew.
Something about the weight of it settled you, just a little. Not enough to stop the tremors in your hands, not enough to uncoil the tight knot in your chest, but enough to make the world feel a little less raw, a little more distant.
Bucky watched you for a beat longer. His gaze flickered to your hands, still trembling, then back to your face. His throat bobbed.
Then he climbed onto the bike, the leather of his jacket shifting as he swung a leg over, settling his weight against the frame. His boots scuffed against the pavement as he steadied it, one hand gripping the handlebar, the other resting loosely against his thigh.
“Come on.” His voice was quieter, but sure. “I’ll take you home.”
You hesitated.
Not because you didn’t trust him. You trusted Bucky with your life.
But the idea of leaving this alley, of peeling yourself off the cold pavement, of moving forward when every nerve in your body screamed for you to stay small, stay still, stay hidden—
He must have seen it.
He didn’t rush you.
Just reached back, offering his hand.
Your fingers hovered over his for half a second, then curled around them, small and unsteady in his grip. His palm was warm even through the leather, solid, unyielding. The second you made contact, he squeezed—not hard, not urgent, just there.
Bucky exhaled, something almost imperceptible in his expression.
Then, steady as ever—
“Atta girl.”
He guided you forward, slow, patient, letting you climb onto the bike behind him without comment, without urgency. The moment you settled, the moment your thighs bracketed his, he reached back, guiding your hands to where they needed to be.
You stiffened.
“It’s okay,” he murmured, his head turning slightly, just enough that you could hear him through the helmet.
You barely registered the movement as he took your wrists, shifting them until your arms wrapped loosely around his middle. His jacket was cold beneath your fingertips, smooth and worn from years of use. The warmth of him bled through it, steady and solid beneath your touch.
Your hands curled into the fabric.
Bucky didn’t move until he felt you hold on.
His fingers brushed over yours once, grounding, before gripping the handlebars again. The bike rumbled beneath you as he kicked it into gear, the vibration sinking into your bones, thrumming through your ribs.
The bathroom light was too bright. Too harsh.
It burned against your retinas, carving sharp edges into the room, making everything too real. The porcelain sink was cool beneath your palms, grounding, unyielding. Your fingers curled against the smooth surface, gripping hard enough to feel the press of bone against flesh.
The mirror—God.
You couldn’t look at it.
Your reflection sat just at the edge of your vision, waiting, blurred and warped in the periphery. The stained fabric of your jacket clung to your skin, the smell of stale beer seeping into your lungs, mixing with the damp of the alley, the cold of the night.
Not blood.
Not blood.
Your throat bobbed, nausea curling in your stomach.
In the other room, the couch creaked.
Bucky was still there.
You hadn’t told him to stay. Not really. But you hadn’t told him to leave, either.
And he must have known. Must have felt it, must have understood, without you saying a single fucking word. Because he hadn’t asked. Hadn’t said anything. Just followed you upstairs, wordless, careful. Had stepped inside when you left the door open, had stood there while you toed off your shoes, while you locked every deadbolt behind you with trembling hands, while you disappeared down the hall without looking at him.
You squeezed your eyes shut.
Your skin felt wrong. Your clothes felt wrong.
You needed—Fuck, you needed this feeling off of you.
Your fingers moved on autopilot, stripping down, peeling away everything until there was nothing between you and the raw burn of the water.
The second you stepped under the spray, you flinched.
Too hot. Too much. But you didn’t move. Didn’t ease the temperature. Didn’t step away.
Just stood there, rigid, fingers curled into fists at your sides, breathing through the scalding heat as it seared everything away.
Your skin burned but you scrubbed at it anyway. Nails digging into your arms, over your ribs, dragging hard, like you could scrape it all off, like you could wash it out of you.
You weren’t sure how long you stayed like that, but at some point, the heat lost its bite. The water turned cold.
Steam curled around you as you reached for a towel, wrapping it around yourself, fingers weak, tired. You stepped onto the cold tile, the world tilting slightly as you braced a hand against the counter, water dripping from your hair, from your fingertips, pooling at your feet.
Breathe.
You dried off with slow movements, pulled on clean clothes that felt too soft, too fresh.
The hallway was too dark after the blinding sterility of the bathroom. The shift in light made the walls seem closer, the space too tight, your own breath too loud in your ears.
Your damp clothes clung to you as you padded barefoot down the hall, exhaustion dragging at your limbs, your stomach hollowed out by the kind of nausea that came from too much and not enough all at once.
And then you heard it.
The quiet clatter of cabinets opening. The slow scrape of something against a plate. The low, rhythmic sound of a knife against a cutting board.
You stopped short in the doorway.
Bucky was standing in your kitchen.
His jacket was off, draped carelessly over the back of a chair. His sleeves were pushed up to his forearms, the sharp contrast of flesh and metal catching in the dim light.
A pan sat on the stove, something sizzling faintly in its center. Your fridge was still cracked open from where he had pulled something out. A plate rested on the counter beside him, two slices of bread sitting bare, waiting.
Your stomach twisted.
You weren’t sure why. It wasn’t the smell—it should have been comforting, familiar, something simple and warm and safe. But your gut curled in on itself anyway, a tight knot winding deeper, like your body didn’t know what to do with this. With him here. With the quiet scrape of a knife against a plate, with the slow, practiced movement of his hands as he flipped whatever was in the pan.
Bucky moved like this was normal, like it was nothing, like he hadn’t just found you curled behind a dumpster, shaking so hard you could barely hold your phone. Like the smell of stale beer and sweat and something worse hadn’t clung to you so thick you thought it might choke you.
You swallowed. Cleared your throat.
“You know I have takeout in the fridge, right?” Your voice was thin, too light, like you could pretend this was just any other night. “I don’t really cook, but I can at least reheat something.”
“Takeout’s shit,” he muttered.
Your mouth parted, the first, stupid thing that came to mind slipping out before you could stop it. “You could’ve just ordered a pizza.”
Bucky snorted softly, the first real sound he’d made since you walked in. “You ever seen me order a pizza?”
A breath pushed from your nose, not quite a laugh, but something close. “No.”
Your fingers twitched against your sleeves. You exhaled, slow and sharp. “I’m sure you have better things to do than make me a sandwich, Bucky.”
He didn’t even pause. Didn’t look at you. Just picked up the knife, cut the sandwich clean down the middle, shifted one half to the side of the plate like this was any other night, like nothing was wrong, like you weren’t sitting there trying to claw your way out of your own fucking skin.
“I don’t.”
Something inside you twisted.
You stared at him, stomach curling tight, breath caught somewhere deep, somewhere painful. “You don’t have to—” Your teeth snapped together before you could say something stupid, something weak, something that would make this worse.
Bucky still didn’t look at you. Just carried the plate to the table, set it down, pulled out a chair, and sat.
You exhaled sharply through your nose, arms wrapped tight around yourself, fingers digging in like you could anchor yourself, like you could keep the shaking inside. “What are you doing?”
He finally looked at you then. And when he did, it hit you like a brick to the chest. Because it wasn’t pity. It wasn’t discomfort.
It was something else.
Something weighty, something heavy sitting behind his eyes, something familiar.
“I don’t think you should be alone right now,” he said, voice even, careful, one that didn’t make room for arguing.
The words knocked the air from your lungs. Your whole body went stiff, muscles locking up. You felt trapped, like a cornered animal, like something fragile about to snap. You should have expected him to say it. Should have been prepared. But somehow, hearing it out loud made it worse.
Your arms tightened around yourself, nails biting into fabric, into skin. “I’m fine.”
Bucky’s jaw flexed. His voice stayed level.
“Yeah?” A slow nod. “That why you’re still shaking?”
You curled your fingers deeper into your sleeves, willing them to still, to stop betraying you. But they wouldn’t. They never fucking would.
You swallowed hard, your throat burning. “I just took a shower.”
“I know.” His voice was softer now. Not gentle. Just real. “Did it help?”
A breath shuddered out of you. You pressed your tongue to the roof of your mouth, inhaled through your nose, tried to steady yourself. “No.”
Bucky exhaled, something measured, something controlled. His fingers curled around his knee. “It never does.”
Your stomach lurched. You blinked too hard, too fast, your breath catching. “Bucky—”
His hands flexed against his thighs, his metal fingers twitching before going still.
“You don’t have to tell me what happened,” he said, voice low. "But I need you to know—” He hesitated, just for a second, like the words were something he had to wrestle into existence, like he had to decide whether to let them out. Then, quieter, steadier—"I know what it feels like."
Something inside you fractured. Your breath hitched, sharp and uneven. You forced yourself to look at him, forced yourself to see him.
The tension in his jaw. The way his throat bobbed. The way his fingers curled into his palms, the way his left arm stayed just a little too rigid, like he was keeping himself contained.
Your nails dug into your arms. Your voice felt too small. “I hate this.”
Bucky nodded. “I know.”
“I don’t want to feel like this.”
“I know.”
You sucked in a sharp breath, shaking your head, pressing your palms over your face. “I can still—” Your voice broke. “I can still feel it.” Your hands trembled as you dragged them down your face, curling against your mouth. “I keep—I keep thinking about—” Your throat locked up. “I keep feeling—”
It was too much. Too much.
You gasped sharply, your lungs too tight, the air too thin, and suddenly your own skin wasn’t yours anymore. It was a prison, something foreign, something you couldn’t escape, couldn’t tear off, couldn’t get away from. Your arms wrapped around yourself, your nails pressing too deep into the meat of your arms, like if you could just press hard enough it would drown everything else out.
Your voice was wrecked when you choked out, “I shouldn’t have been there.”
Bucky moved. The chair scraped back against the floor, fast, sharp, like he hadn’t even thought about it.
His voice was rough. “Don’t.”
You didn’t listen.
Your throat burned as the words poured out of you, raw and ugly and desperate. “I should have left earlier. I should have—fuck, I should have known.” You sucked in a breath, chest tight, barely able to pull in enough air. “I was stupid. I—”
“Hey.”
A warm hand brushed against your wrist, light, barely there, as if asking.
You flinched, but Bucky didn’t pull away. Didn’t grip. Just let the warmth of his palm rest against you, unmoving. His voice came low, calm. “You didn’t let anything happen.”
Your whole body locked.
The air was too thick, the apartment walls too close. Your lungs wouldn’t expand right, your ribs clenching in on themselves. “I should’ve,” you whispered, the words barely escaping, your throat raw. “I should have done more. I should have—”
His fingers, warm and steady, curled over your sleeve. Not tight. Just there.
You sucked in a sharp breath, shuddering against the weight of it. The heat of his touch, the anchor of it, something solid and real in the middle of everything unmoored inside you.
His other hand rose, slow, deliberate. Not reaching, not pulling, just settling over your bicep.
“You were surviving,” he said, the words rough at the edges. “That’s what you did.”
A sharp sob twisted in your throat, but you swallowed it down, shaking your head violently. “That’s not—”
“It is.” His voice didn’t rise. Didn’t press. But something in it held.
Your breath was sharp, uneven, something jagged lodged in your throat. You shook your head again, harder this time, trying to break free of it, trying to force it out of your skin. “You don’t get it.”
Bucky’s fingers curled a little tighter around your sleeve, the pressure grounding, steady.
“I do.”
You swallowed hard. “You don’t.”
The silence stretched, thick, heavy. His hands didn’t move, didn’t waver. The apartment felt too small, too quiet, just the space between you and the way his breath was a little too measured, a little too controlled.
Then he exhaled, slow and careful.
“I remember everything they did to me.”
Your stomach twisted violently.
Bucky’s gaze flickered away, something shuttering behind his eyes, like he was somewhere else for a moment. “For a long time, I didn’t. But when it came back—” His throat bobbed.
Your hands curled against your ribs, your fingers digging into the fabric of your sleeves.
“Hydra didn’t just take my mind.” His voice didn’t waver, but it wasn’t steady, either. “They took my body. They made it theirs.” His jaw clenched, his breath uneven. “They could do whatever they wanted to me, and I couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t fight it.”
“I didn’t just wake up and remember it one day.” His voice had dipped, quiet but hard at the edges. “It came back in pieces at first. The way it felt. The way I—” He stopped, exhaled sharp through his nose. “The way I still felt them, even when no one was there.”
Your vision blurred, your throat tight.
Bucky swallowed hard, his jaw flexing. His fingers twitched against your arm, barely moving. “I don’t tell people this.” His voice was hoarse. “Not even Steve. Not Sam.” His breath stuttered. “Not anyone.”
You were still shaking. You couldn’t stop shaking. But Bucky was still here, still close, still holding you up when you didn’t know how to hold yourself together.
“I know what it feels like,” he said quietly. “To think you should’ve done something. That you should’ve fought harder. That it was somehow your fault.” His fingers pressed against your wrist, careful, deliberate. “But it wasn’t.”
Your breath hitched, sharp and broken, your fingers twitching. You felt like you were suffocating inside your own skin, like the air wasn’t getting in right, like nothing about you belonged to you anymore. Your hands clenched into fists, nails pressing into your palms, and before you could stop yourself—before you could think—
You reached for him.
It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t thought out. Your fingers curled weakly around the fabric of his shirt, barely gripping, like even now, you weren’t sure you were allowed to ask for this, for him, for something solid in the middle of everything slipping away.
But the second you touched him, the second your hands found him, Bucky moved.
His hands lifted, slow and careful, giving you time to pull away, to change your mind, but you didn’t. You couldn’t. You were already folding in, collapsing against him, pressing your forehead against his shoulder, your entire body shaking apart.
His arm came around you, warm and firm, pulling you in like it was instinct, like he’d been waiting for it. His other hand moved to your back, his palm pressing between your shoulder blades, grounding, anchoring. His warmth seeped into your skin, into your bones, pulling you back, keeping you here.
Your legs buckled.
Your knees hit the floor first, then his, and Bucky took you with him, not letting you go, not letting you fall alone. His hands tightened around you, one sliding up to cradle the back of your head, his fingers weaving gently into your damp hair. You clung to him, knuckles white against the fabric of his shirt, breath wrecked and uneven, the sob finally, finally tearing free from your throat.
Bucky exhaled, rough and shaking, his grip flexing like he wanted to hold you tighter, like he wasn’t sure how to keep you from breaking apart in his arms. He pressed his cheek against your temple, his breath warm against your hair, his voice low and hoarse.
“I got you,” he murmured. “I got you. You’re safe.”
His fingers flexed, just slightly, like he needed to feel you, to convince himself.
Your breath hitched, and you curled further into him, burying your face against the warmth of his shoulder, your nails pressing into his chest. You couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything but breathe, but even that felt impossible, like your lungs weren’t working right, like nothing inside you fit anymore.
Bucky swallowed hard. His voice dipped even lower, a rough whisper against your hair.
“You’re here.” His arms curled around you, pulling you in, pressing you closer, like he was trying to shield you from something that had already happened. “You made it out. No one’s gonna touch you again.” His breath shook on the exhale. “Not while I’m still breathing.”
The first thing you registered was warmth.
Not the heat of too-hot water scalding your skin. Not the raw burn of adrenaline still lingering at the edges of your nerves. This was different. Thicker. Real.
The second thing was breath. Slow. Steady. Not yours.
Your eyes flickered open, disoriented for a moment by the dim light filtering through the heavy curtains. Your apartment was quiet. Still. The silence wasn’t suffocating like before—wasn’t pressing in on you like a weight you couldn’t shake. It was something else now. Something… softer.
For a long moment, you just laid there, eyes open, staring at the slant of morning light cutting across the floor. Dust floating in the air. The sound of your own breath, slow, shallow. The sharp scent of coffee lingering from the kitchen, though no one was moving.
And then—
Another shift. A breath. The quiet rustle of fabric, so soft it could have been mistaken for your own.
Your stomach clenched.
Slowly, your gaze flickered downward.
Bucky.
He was on the floor, back propped against the base of the couch, arms folded across his chest. One leg bent, the other stretched out in front of him, socked foot flexing slightly in his sleep. His jaw was slack, breath even, though his fingers twitched every so often against his arm, like his body couldn’t fully trust rest, even now.
Your throat bobbed.
You didn’t remember falling asleep. You didn’t remember him staying. But he must have. He must have sat there, must have meant to sit there, just close enough to catch you if you fell apart again, just close enough to remind you that you weren’t alone.
Something in your chest curled tight.
Bucky stirred.
It was subtle—the kind of shift that wasn’t quite waking, but listening. The twitch of his fingers, the slow inhale, the way his shoulders tensed before his eyes even opened.
And then, slowly, blue met yours.
There was no confusion. No groggy disorientation. Just awareness. He had been awake enough times in unfamiliar places—awake enough times after nightmares, after fights, after worse—to know exactly where he was, to register immediately that you were watching him.
He didn’t speak right away. Just took you in, gaze sweeping over your face, searching. Cataloging.
You swallowed, throat dry. “Did you—” Your voice was hoarse, barely there. You cleared it, tried again. “Did you sleep?”
His jaw twitched.
Something close to a smirk ghosted over his face, too fleeting to hold on to. “Yeah.”
Liar.
Bucky shifted his weight, stretching out the stiffness in his back, his eyes scanning your face like he was looking for something, something only he could see. He wasn’t studying you so much as he was cataloging. Committing this version of you to memory, the one he’d woken up beside, the one still holding themselves too tightly.
You watched him, fingers twitching where they rested on your blanket. You should say something. Should acknowledge the fact that he’d stayed, that you weren’t alone, that some part of you was grateful for that. But the words sat thick in your throat, unmoving.
Bucky had never been the type to force a conversation, never been the type to demand things you weren’t ready to say, but there was something sitting behind his eyes now—something careful, something measured.
“You talk in your sleep,” he said finally.
Your stomach twisted, hands clenching tighter at the blanket, breath pulling tight in your chest. He said it casually, like he was mentioning the weather, like it wasn’t something that could snap you in half.
Your throat felt thick when you swallowed. “Did I?”
Bucky’s jaw shifted. He didn’t look away. “Yeah.”
Something cold slipped down your spine.
You forced your hands to relax, fingers stretching and curling before settling in your lap. You could feel the rawness in your throat, the remnants of sleep that hadn’t done what it was supposed to do, that hadn’t really helped.
You wet your lips, voice scratchy. “What did I say?”
A beat.
Bucky exhaled slowly, running his tongue along his teeth, something measured in his gaze. “Didn’t catch much,” he admitted, his voice low, even. “Mumbled a lot.”
That was a lie.
Maybe not all of it, but enough.
Bucky wasn’t the kind of man who missed things. And even if he had, he wouldn’t have said anything at all unless there was something he thought you should know. Something he needed to know.
Bucky’s voice was careful when he spoke again. “Do you… remember anything?”
The question was soft, not hesitant but considered. Like he knew he had to ask but wasn’t sure how you’d react.
Your mouth went dry.
“I don’t—” Your voice cracked. You cleared your throat, forcing out the words. “I don’t know.”
His head tilted slightly, his eyes dark and unreadable. “You don’t have to force it.”
Bucky’s gaze didn’t waver. Didn’t drop from yours, didn’t flick away, didn’t give you the out you half-hoped for. He wasn’t just listening. He was waiting. For you to say more. To fill in the gaps he already knew were there.
And yet, something inside you twisted when he didn’t say anything.
The thing about Bucky Barnes was that he didn’t fill silence for the sake of filling it. He didn’t ask questions he wasn’t ready to hear the answers to. He wasn’t like Sam, who would have told you to talk about it, to get it out, to not let it fester. Bucky didn’t do that. He just… sat with things. Gave them space. Gave you space.
And it was too much.
Your throat worked around nothing. “You know—” The words snagged, caught, but you forced them out anyway. “You know what’s fucked?”
Bucky exhaled sharply, not in frustration, but like he was bracing himself. “What?”
You let out a quiet, humorless breath. “I keep thinking about how much worse it could’ve been.” Your voice wasn’t shaking yet, but it was close. “How many things had to go right for me to make it out of there.”
Bucky stiffened. His fingers flexed once, twice, his body going rigid, but he didn’t interrupt. He let you keep going.
“I was already outside,” you murmured. “What if I had stayed another minute? What if I had bought another drink? What if I was drunk? What if I hadn’t pulled away fast enough, or hard enough, or at all?” The breath you let out was barely there, brittle around the edges. “What if there hadn’t been a car coming down the street when I broke away? What if there wasn’t anyone around? What if he had gotten me into that fucking cab?”
Bucky swore under his breath.
Your stomach curled tight. You stared down at your hands, at the way your nails pressed too hard into the fabric of the blanket. “There’s a version of last night where I didn’t make it out.” The words felt thick in your mouth. “Where I never would’ve called you. Where I never—”
Your voice cracked. You swallowed it down.
Bucky’s breathing had changed. You could feel the tension rolling through him, how his body had locked up so tight it might snap, how his hands had curled into loose fists before he forced them open again.
His voice was rough when he finally spoke. “But you did.”
You blinked.
He was looking at you like that made all the difference. Like it had to. Like if he didn’t hold onto that, he might lose his mind.
Your chest ached. “Yeah.”
Bucky exhaled sharply, dragging a slow hand over his mouth, then through his hair. His jaw flexed, his throat bobbed, and when he finally spoke again, it sounded like the words had been ripped straight out of him.
“I should’ve come with you.”
Your breath caught. You blinked. You weren’t sure you heard him right.
“What?”
Bucky exhaled through his nose, a sharp, frustrated sound. Not at you. Never at you.
“You said I could,” he muttered, quieter this time. His fingers flexed once, twice. “Last week. We were sitting at that shitty café on 42nd, and you said you wanted to go out.”
Your stomach twisted. Your mind scrambled, flipping back through the last few days, weeks, and then—
Oh.
You had barely remembered it, had barely thought about it when you went out last night. It wasn’t anything significant. It hadn’t meant anything.
You had mentioned bar-hopping, maybe meeting some new people, making new friends.
Bucky had snorted at the idea of you actually enjoying a crowd like that, and you had laughed, rolling your eyes, nudging his boot beneath the table.
“You can come if you want,” you’d said. Casual. Thoughtless.
It hadn’t been a serious thing. Had it?
It had been one of those offhanded, casual comments. A joke, almost. You hadn’t really thought about it. You had forgotten.
But Bucky hadn’t.
Your lips parted, something cold and sick curling in your chest.
“Bucky—”
“I thought about it,” he interrupted, his voice too level, too controlled. “For like—half a second, I thought about it. But then I figured—” He exhaled sharply, shaking his head once. Angry. Not at you. At himself. “I figured you didn’t actually want me there.”
Your pulse kicked.
“That’s not true,” you rasped, the words pushing past your lips before you could think about them.
His eyes flickered to yours. Something dark sat behind them.
“Doesn’t really matter now, does it?”
You inhaled sharply. “Bucky.”
His jaw flexed, the muscle there tight, too tense. “When you called,” he said, voice rough, unsteady, “I thought—” He cut himself off, dragging a hand through his hair, then over his mouth, like he was physically trying to keep the words in.
“I thought you were drunk.”
The admission sat heavy in the space between you.
Bucky leaned forward, his elbows braced against his knees, his hands flexing against his thighs. “I thought—” He swallowed hard, his voice lowering. “I thought maybe you had too much, maybe you got turned around on your way home.” His fingers curled into loose fists before he forced them open again. “And then when I realized, that I wasn’t there. I wasn’t—” He exhaled hard, shaking his head. His whole body was rigid. “If I had been there, maybe—”
Your stomach lurched.
“No,” you cut in. Sharp. Immediate.
His head snapped up.
“This wasn’t—” You inhaled through your nose, your hands clenching into the fabric of the blanket. Holding. Grounding. “This wasn’t because of you. It wouldn’t have changed anything.”
The look in his eyes burned.
“I could’ve stopped it.”
Your breath stuttered.
Bucky’s shoulders were too stiff, too tight, like he was still trying to contain himself, to hold something in. His fingers flexed once against his knee before going still.
You swallowed hard, forcing air into your lungs, but it felt thin, felt hollow. The memory was there, waiting just beyond the edges of your vision, just beneath your skin. You had been holding it back, keeping it locked away, refusing to let it breathe. But now it was creeping in, threading its fingers around your ribs, settling heavy in your chest.
Your throat tightened.
“I—” Your voice cracked, and you had to clear it. “I wanted to go home.”
Bucky didn’t move. He didn’t say anything. He just stayed there, letting you get the words out, letting you decide how much you could say, how much you could handle.
“I was talking to some people,” you continued, your voice quiet, careful, like speaking too loudly would shatter something fragile. “Just—casual. A group of us. I don’t even know their names.” Your breath wavered. “I wasn’t even drinking that much. I—I had a beer, maybe two. I wasn’t drunk.”
Bucky’s jaw tensed, but he stayed silent.
You inhaled slowly, forcing yourself to keep going. “There was this guy,” you murmured. “Tall. Broad. He—he wasn’t much taller than me, but he had this… presence. Like he knew exactly how to take up space.” Your fingers twitched against the fabric, and your gaze drifted, unfocused, back to some distant point. “He, uh, had a scar. Right—” Your hand moved before you could stop it, your thumb ghosting over your lip. “Here.”
Bucky didn’t move but he was looking at you like he wanted to tear something apart. Like he didn’t know where to put his hands if it wasn’t around someone’s throat.
Your stomach twisted.
And then, just as quickly as it came, he exhaled, pressing his hands against his face, dragging them down, his fingers threading into his hair.
“And a tattoo,” you added, brow furrowing. “Something black, something small—on his arm. I think I saw it when he reached for his drink.”
The image was hazy, but it was there, sharpening around the edges the more you focused. You could see the curve of his mouth, the way he had smiled at you like he already knew you would say yes to whatever he wanted. The way he had leaned in, close enough that you could feel his breath against your skin, smell the bitter tang of whiskey on his tongue.
Your stomach twisted violently.
“I was thinking about going home,” you admitted, voice barely above a whisper. “And then he offered. Said he could call a cab. Said we could share it.”
Bucky’s fingers curled into fists, knuckles going stark white, grip tightening on the edge of the coffee table. But he still didn’t move. Didn’t interrupt.
“I almost said yes.” Your throat bobbed. “I think—I think I did say yes.”
A sharp breath pushed from Bucky’s nose, but you weren’t looking at him anymore. You were staring at nothing, at the memory twisting itself into something real, something tangible, something that settled thick and wrong against your skin.
“We didn’t even make it to the curb.” The words felt like acid. “I changed my mind. I backed away.” Your hands clenched, nails pressing into your palms. “I told him I wasn’t feeling well. That I’d get home on my own.”
Your heart slammed against your ribs, something sick curling deep in your gut.
His hand had been on your arm, fingers pressing into your skin like he was staking a claim.
You had pulled away.
He hadn’t let go.
Your breath stuttered, eyes going wide. “Fuck.” The memory hit like a brick, slamming into your ribs, knocking the air from your lungs. “I—I told him no.”
Your pulse thundered in your ears. The room was tilting, the details clicking into place with a horrifying clarity, each second stretching long and suffocating. “I told him no,” you whispered, horror creeping into your voice. “I remember—he—he laughed. He said something—I don’t—I don’t know what. And then—”
You shuddered, the feeling of hands on you, fingers digging into your waist, your arm, your wrist—
The crack of splintering wood snapped through the room like gunfire.
Your breath hitched, your entire body jerking as the coffee table groaned under the force of Bucky’s metal grip. A deep, jagged fissure split through the grain where his metal fingers had driven straight into the wood, the pressure warping it like wet paper.
Your stomach lurched, breath catching in your throat as you flinched back, muscles locking up before you could stop yourself. Your ribs cinched tight, your skin going cold, the instinctive recoil thrumming through your limbs before logic could catch up.
Bucky’s head snapped up. His fingers released the table instantly, jerking away like he’d been burned. His expression twisted—something sharp, something agonized, something breaking. “Shit.”
His breath came hard, chest rising and falling too fast, his hands hovering mid air, like he didn’t know what to do with them, where to put them, how to fix what had already happened. “Shit. I—I’m sorry.”
You barely heard him. Your pulse was a hammering thing against your ribs, rattling your bones, pressing against the raw edge of your mind. Your hands were shaking, fingers curled tight against your own skin, nails biting too deep into your palms.
Before you could pull back further, before you could brace for anything else, Bucky’s hands found yours.
He was gentle. So fucking careful.
The contrast nearly shattered you.
His fingers slid over your trembling ones, not forcing, not gripping, just settling there. Just waiting. A weight, something solid, something grounding when everything inside you was unraveling at the seams. His touch was featherlight, his thumbs brushing over your knuckles, an apology written into every movement.
His voice was wrecked when he spoke, hoarse and thick, the words straining through his throat. “I’m so sorry.” His fingers curled just slightly over yours, not pressing, not forcing, just feeling. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
You swallowed hard, the burn in your throat unbearable. You tried to shake your head, tried to tell him he didn’t need to apologize, but the words wouldn’t come.
Bucky exhaled, a slow, shuddering breath. “You don’t deserve that. You didn’t deserve any of it.” His eyes were dark, too full of things you didn’t have words for, things you didn’t know how to hold. “You hear me?”
Your breath stuttered, throat locking up, but you nodded. Small. Barely there. But enough.
His grip flexed, just once, then loosened, like he didn’t want to let go but knew he couldn’t keep holding you together forever.
And then the worst question in the world settled into the silence.
Bucky didn’t say it immediately. He didn’t rush it. He just sat there, the tension in his body wound so tight it felt like it might snap. His jaw flexed. His fingers curled. His breath was too careful, too measured, like he was forcing it to stay steady.
And then—soft, raw, almost hesitant—
“Did he—”
The words barely made it out before they died in his throat. His gaze was on the floor, his breath came sharper now, uneven. He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t force it out. But you knew.
You knew exactly what he was asking.
You exhaled shakily, your fingers twitching beneath his, the smallest, weakest movement. You forced yourself to shake your head. “No,” you murmured. “No, it didn’t—” You swallowed, your throat raw. “It didn’t get that far.”
Bucky’s eyes squeezed shut for a fraction of a second. His breath left him in a rush, something like relief curling at the edges, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t even close to enough. Because his grip still trembled, jaw still locked, body still wound too tight, like he was bracing for something worse.
Your fingers twitched against his, curling slightly. “I—I remembered what you told me,” you murmured, something distant in your voice, something hollow. “When you—when you taught me.”
Bucky’s grip tightened, just a fraction.
It had been an offhand thing, something Bucky had offered once without pressure, like it didn’t matter if you took him up on it. But you had. Not because you expected to need it, but because it was him. He’d shown you how to break a grip, how to use surprise over strength, how to make someone let go long enough to run. You hadn’t thought about it since. Until last night.
Your eyes burned, but you kept going, because you needed to say it, needed to put it into the air, needed to remind yourself.
“He had my arms,” you whispered. “Pulled me close. He was—he was strong.” Your breath shook, fingers trembling in his. “I—I stomped on his foot first. Hard. As hard as I could. He got pissed,” you said, voice thinner now. “Called me a bitch. Grabbed my face.” Your nails pressed into Bucky’s skin, but he didn’t flinch, didn’t pull away, just kept holding, just kept listening.
“I—” Your throat bobbed. “I tried to go for his eyes, but I missed.” A sharp inhale. “I got his ear instead. I—I clawed at him. Hard.” Your breath rattled in your chest. “I think I ripped his earring out.”
Bucky’s grip twitched. He said nothing.
“He let go,” you murmured. “Just—just for a second. But it was enough.” Your stomach curled tight. “I kneed him in the stomach.”
The memories blurred at the edges, flickering between real and unreal, sharp and out of focus. You pressed your nails deeper into Bucky’s hands, forcing yourself to stay here, stay present.
“I don’t remember running,” you admitted, voice barely above a whisper. “But I did.” A hollow breath. “I just—I ran.”
Bucky was quiet for a long time. His grip stayed firm, solid around your hands, his thumb twitching once, just barely, like he wanted to move, wanted to do something, but couldn’t. His breathing was still too controlled, too measured, like he was forcing himself to stay still, to keep his hands from shaking.
“You did everything right,” he finally said, voice rough. “You got away.”
Your throat felt too tight. “Doesn’t feel like it.”
His hands tensed around yours, fingers flexing like he wanted to pull you closer, like he didn’t know how. “I know.”
Your vision blurred, everything pressing in too close, too tight. “I thought—I thought I was gonna die.”
Bucky inhaled sharply. His jaw clenched, his fingers twitching against your skin, like he wanted to shake you, to shake himself. “You didn’t.”
Your breath hitched. “But I could have.”
“I know,” he murmured.
You blinked, your throat burning. Your hands were still trapped in his, limp and shaking, but you couldn’t make yourself let go.
His grip tightened. Just enough that you could feel the pressure, just enough that you knew it was real. “I should’ve been there.”
Your stomach twisted. “Bucky—”
“I should’ve been there,” he said again, firmer this time, voice cracking at the edges. “I would’ve killed him.”
The breath left your lungs in a sharp exhale.
Bucky’s fingers curled tighter against your skin. “I still want to.”
A shudder crawled up your spine. He meant it. God, he meant it. The raw promise in his voice was too heavy, too sharp. His hands flexed against yours, like he was barely holding himself together, barely keeping himself from getting up, from finding a way to track this bastard down, from—
You exhaled. You didn’t have the energy for this. Not right now. “It wouldn’t change anything.”
His eyes met yours. The blue was darker now, stormier, something barely contained beneath the surface.
“I know,” he murmured. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want to.”
A sharp inhale rattled your chest. You didn’t know what to say to that. Maybe there wasn’t anything to say.
The apartment was too quiet. Your own breath was too loud in your ears. Your fingers were still locked in his, knuckles white against his skin, his hands anchoring you, keeping you here, keeping you grounded.
Bucky exhaled through his nose, slow, deliberate. “Listen.” His voice was softer now, more measured. “I know you don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
Your pulse thrummed against your ribs. “I—”
“I get it,” he interrupted gently. “I do.” He swallowed hard, the muscle in his jaw flexing. “But I need to ask you something.”
Your fingers curled against his. “What?”
His grip twitched. He hesitated, his breath uneven, his gaze flickering over your face, like he was trying to gauge how much more you could take. “You need to see a doctor.”
Your stomach dropped. “Bucky.”
“I mean it.” His hands flexed. “I don’t—I don’t care if you feel okay. I don’t care if you think it doesn’t matter. I need you to be sure.”
Your pulse spiked. “Nothing—”
“That’s not the point.”
His voice was steady, but there was something barely restrained beneath it, something quiet and desperate.
“You were hurt,” he continued, his fingers curling, tightening. “And I know you don’t want to think about it anymore. But you need to make sure you’re okay.”
Your throat felt like it was closing.
His hands were still on you, warm and steady. “If something happened—if something’s wrong, mentally or physically—you need to know.”
The words sat heavy between you.
You sucked in a sharp breath, your fingers twitching. You could see it in his eyes. The way he wasn’t letting this go, the way he wasn’t going to let you brush it off. He wasn’t asking for himself. He wasn’t even asking for you.
He was asking because if something was wrong, if something had happened, and he didn’t make sure—you’d never forgive yourself.
Neither would he.
Your stomach curled tight. Your breath shuddered.
Bucky exhaled, slow, steady, his grip shifting just slightly. “I’ll go with you.”
You swallowed hard, your voice barely above a whisper. “Okay.”
Something in his face eased, just barely. His fingers curled a little tighter, his grip a little firmer.
He nodded, once. “Okay.”
The silence stretched between you, but it wasn’t suffocating—not anymore. Not with his hands still wrapped around yours, his grip firm, grounding. Not with the way his thumb brushed over your knuckles like he was memorizing the shape of you, like he was convincing himself you were still here.
You weren’t sure when you had started shaking again, but Bucky noticed. He always noticed.
He shifted forward, closer than before. The movement was slow, careful, like he was giving you the chance to stop him, to pull away—but you didn’t. You wouldn’t.
His hands moved, one slipping free from yours just long enough to settle against the side of your face, his thumb barely skimming the hollow beneath your cheekbone. You knew that look. Knew the weight of it. Knew what it meant. His jaw clenched, his throat bobbed, and for a second, it looked like he might say something—something else, something bigger, something heavier—but the words never came.
Instead, his thumb traced the edge of your jaw, barely there.
His voice was hoarse, wrecked when he finally spoke.
“I wish I'd been there.”
Your chest ached. “Bucky—”
“I should’ve been there,” he repeated, lower this time, rougher. His fingers curled just slightly, like he wanted to hold on tighter, like he wasn’t sure he had the right. “I could’ve—” He stopped, exhaled hard, like he was trying to force something back down.
You swallowed against the lump in your throat. Your hand lifted on its own, reaching for him, gripping the fabric of his shirt where it stretched over his shoulder, holding. “You’re here now.”
Something passed over his face, something raw and open, something unguarded. His fingers twitched against your cheek. His other hand lifted, settling carefully against the back of your neck, fingers curling at the base of your skull.
His breath was warm when he exhaled. His voice was even warmer when he spoke.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Your chest hitched, something sharp and painful catching in your ribs, and before you could second guess it, before you could even think about what you were doing—
You leaned in, pulling him up and forward to the couch.
Bucky tensed for half a second, his grip tightening just a fraction—but then he pulled you in, one arm slipping around you, the other still cradling your face, pressing you closer, anchoring you against him. He was so warm. Too warm. Like he was trying to shield you from the cold, from everything that had happened, from the weight of it pressing against your ribs.
You buried your face in his shoulder, inhaled the scent of him—soap and leather and something distinctly, overwhelmingly Bucky. His arm curled tighter, his fingers pressing into the curve of your spine.
“I got you,” he murmured, voice rasping against your ear, wrecked and quiet. “I got you. You’re safe.”
The words cracked something open inside you. Bucky had always felt like this, somehow. Like something solid to press against when the world tilted too hard, when the ground threatened to give way. You had never questioned it before, never given it a name, never let yourself acknowledge the way he made everything feel quieter, steadier, safer.
And for the first time since last night, since the alley, since the neon buzz of the sign overhead and the cold bite of damp pavement against your skin—your body wasn’t bracing for the next blow, the next hand, the next shadow moving too close.
You weren’t anywhere but here.
The tension in your shoulders, the tight coil in your chest, the invisible thread that had kept you wound so painfully tight—it all loosened, just enough. Not completely. Not forever. But enough that you could breathe without counting the seconds between each inhale, without listening for footsteps that weren’t there.
Bucky shifted slightly, adjusting the hold he had on you, but he didn’t let go. Didn’t pull away. His grip was careful, deliberate, the quiet weight of it saying what he wouldn’t.
You were safe.
And for once, you believed it.
taglist (message me to be added or removed!): @nerdreader, @baw1066, @nairafeather, @galaxywannabe, @idkitsem, @starfly-nicole
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.
18+ smut mdni. oral (r). reader teases bucky. he jerks out while eating reader out. fingering (r). uh. p in v. daddy nickname. breeding kink. creampie. overstim. multiple orgasms.
2.7k word count
old upload mwehehehe. i like this one. a lot.
subby!bucky with this big blue eyes staring up at you as he’s kneeling at your feet. you’ve been ignoring him for god knows how long and while it’s been tough, you need to get this last bit of work finished up.
but he’s been in a mood and he’s been aching. the flirty texts weren’t working, walking around shirtless with his sweats hanging low and a very obvious hard on showing through his sweats didn’t make you drool. he could’ve sworn you would’ve come at the drop of a dime when you heard him touching himself in the shower. he was extra loud on purpose for that.
but you didn’t, which resorted him here, under your desk at your feet with his head in your lap. his cheek was pressed against your knee, exposed skin through the ripped material of your jeans. it felt like he hadn’t felt your skin in what felt like forever, but he knew that wasn’t true, he was just being dramatic.
you peered down for a second, feeling bucky’s lips kiss your knee gently, over and over until he went a little further up your leg. his eyes were closed, lashes resting gently on his cheekbones and his hair was tucked back into a low bun. a few curly strands of hair had fallen out of the bun and were framing his face. you reached out and pushed one behind his ear and his eyes opened, big blue needy eyes meeting yours. you gave him a small smile, caressing the side of his face as you cupped his cheek. he leaned into your palm, missing the feeling of your hand on his face while he was looking up at you.
he whined as you let go of his face and you turned your attention back to the laptop sitting in front of you. he knew you had other duties, but couldn’t you see how needy and desperate he was just for some sort of release? he angled his legs so your leg was right between him, his cock pressing harshly against his sweats and on your calf. you could feel how hard he was through the fabric and while it made you soaked thinking he was just sitting here as a silly little whore, you had to finish this paper.
but that didn’t mean you couldn’t let him have some relief.
opening your legs up a little bit without looking down at him, he took that as his advantage right away. his hands splayed across your thighs and squeezing them gently. he licked his lips, watching you shift a little as he squeezed your thighs, knowing you were getting a tad bit distracted. he smiled to himself, metal fingers ghosting lightly over the fabric enough to make you suck in a breath and take a short pause, acting as if you saw something incriminating on your job site.
but in all reality, you were focused on how his fingers moved closer towards your clothed core, the fabric of your jeans pressing against your clit. licking his lips, he popped the button open with ease, and you moved your hips enough to let him shimmy your pants off tossing them to the side.
he let out a breath, looking back up at you again but you weren’t looking in his direction. your eyes were skimming over your laptop, anything to distract you from him kissing up your thigh and how his hips were moving against your leg— dying to get some friction against his hard cock
your soft skin felt like heaven against his rough and calloused hands, the cool metal fingers digging into your skin as he massaged the flesh. occasionally his tongue poked out against your skin as he pulled you closer to him before nudging you clothed clit with his nose. he inhaled deeply, his cock twitching in his sweats at how good you smelled, how soaking wet you were through your panties.
his tongue licked up a stripe on your clothed slit, and you had to suck in a breath to keep your composure. he knew for a fact that you wouldn’t be able to last long, but that didn’t mean he couldn't tease you a little bit. as he kept licking, he pulled your panties to the side before his hot tongue found its way to your slit.
“fuck..” he groaned against you, tongue dancing up and down your cunt, lapping up your slick before pulling back. looking down, his lips were glistening with your slick, and a smile adorned his beautiful face.
“take yourself out for me, baby. wanna hear you stroke that pretty cock while you eat my pussy.” his cheeks heated up, nodding quickly as he shoved his sweats down. he didn’t ever bother to wear boxers anymore, mostly because they got in the way when he wanted to fuck you into oblivion.
his cock was red and throbbing, pre-cum dripping down the tip onto his length as he grabbed the base of his cock and tugged on it a few times. spitting in his hand, he started to stroke himself as he leaned back in and lapped at your clit gently. the squelching sounds mixed with him jerking himself off, and it made you even more wet at the thought.
he brought his other hand from your thigh, prodding your hole with his middle finger before pushing it in. you felt the stretch immediately, moaning softly as you sat back, opening your legs wider for him as he nestled closer. smiling against your cunt, he pushed a second finger in, curling them so they were hitting the sweet spot your fingers could never reach.
going at a slow pace as he fucked your cunt with his fingers, his hands worked his cock at the same speed, tugging the tip before rubbing his thumb around the slit. you watched as he fucked into you slowly, his hand matching the speed on his cock before he easily slipped in a third.
“fuck..sweetheart. you’re soaking..” you moaned gently, feeling your slick run down your crack knowing that it was making a little wet spot on the chair. he felt his palm soaked, flowing down his wrist and arm.
he picked up the pace, twisting his wrist and curling his fingers inside of you while he pulled away and rubbed your clit with his thumb. he rested his cheek on your knee, stroking himself a little harder as he made eye contact with you for a split second before you closed your eyes and bucked your hips up into his fingers.
“baby..’m gonna cum.. keep going, jus’ like that.” you gripped the edges of the chair, his assault on your cunt never faltering as he kept going, rubbing your clit harder with his thumb. his eyes were blown out, no longer being able to see the soft blue eyes that always were so inviting.
instead he was here to take from you, something that he knew you needed from being so stressed out for days. he felt you clench around his sensitive fingers, his hand on his cock picking up as you rolled your hips hard against his hand.
“thas’ it, sweetheart. take what you need, go on..” he egged you on softly, the sweet praises laced with his tone of wanting to be used by him, taking whatever you needed from him. your hands gripped the sides of the chair tightly as you felt your orgasm wash over you, strings of moans and his name falling from your lips were music to his ears. he was panting softly leaned against you, bucking into his own hand as he tugged and gripped the tip of his cock, not wanting to cum just yet.
he whined as he felt your cunt squeeze his fingers hard, pulling another orgasm unexpectedly from you before he slowed his movements, taking his fingers from you and popping them into his mouth tasting you. you let out a long breath, looking down at him underneath the table and in between your legs as he sucked on his fingers. your cream was ringed around his knuckles dripping down his wrist and his hand twisting his cock before he let it go.
another drop of pre-cum fell from the tip of his cock, and you licked your lips, needing to feel full of him. you leaned down, pushing the chair out enough to grab his chin and smash your lips against his in a heated kiss— tasting you on his lips. he let his lips part, tongues dancing with each other in need before you managed to get his tongue and suck hard on it.
he groaned, pushing the chair all the way back as he stood up, his fingers that were just in your cunt wrapped around your neck, the dynamic changing quickly the second he squeezed.
“do that again and im pumping you full of cum all night, princess.” you smiled against his lips, and he groaned, picking you up easily and tossing you over his shoulder before walking away with you towards the bedroom. your palms pressed against his lower back and you could hear his cock slapping his thighs with each step, making your mouth salivate at the thought of having it in your cunt.
you let out a squeal as he tossed you onto the bed and hovered over you, eyes looking over your face for a quick second before pushing his cock over your folds. your jaw fell over, the tip of his cock teasing your entrance with each rock of his hips and snagging your clit each time.
“pl - please buck..” you begged softly, wrapping your arms around his neck and pulled him closer, letting your legs fall open a bit more for him as he fully slid in between your legs. he pulled away, grabbing the base of his cock and tapped the tip on your clit, making you jolt your hips a little at the feeling.
“Is this what you want, doll?” you nodded, biting your lip as you tugged your shirt off and exposing your chest to him. he let out a quiet ‘fuck’ as you toyed with your nipples, tugging and pulling at them.
he shook his head though, stroking himself as he watched you touch yourself. “beg for it, then.” you pout your lips, in hopes that would make him change his mind but it didn’t. he pushed the tip of his cock into your hole, making you moan and shifting your hips for more before he held you down with his other arm.
“c’mon, sweetheart, use those words. tell me you want my fat cock splitting you open. its the least you could do for being a fucking tease all week.” you felt your face heat up, licking your lips and instantly losing all self control as he kept just the tip in your dripping hole. he could feel you squeezing it, jaw clenching with each squeeze trying to draw him in.
“ple - please daddy, need your cock so bad..” you whined softly, biting your lower lip as he smiled, pushing his cock deep inside you with a single thrust. he threw his head back, moaning out how warm and wet you were, reveling in the feeling of your pussy fluttering around his cock.
“fuck baby, missed my sweet pussy,” he drew his hips back, before slamming back into you, grabbing your legs and bringing them up to his shoulders balancing your ankles on his shoulders. he turned to kiss one of your ankles, watching the way your anklet engraved with a little ‘b’ bounced with each thrust.
you couldn’t take your eyes off of him as he fucked into you. he was so pretty— more strands of his brown and messy hair fell in front of his face and sticking to his forehead. his eyes only trained on the way your cunt swallowed his cock perfectly, how easily you stretched out around his fat cock. you were both drunk on each other starting just from some simple touching.
you whined gently, trying to muffle the sounds as you felt his cock spear into you, each thrust making you lose your mind more and more until your thoughts were only filled with getting pounded. he could see it too— the way your eyes rolled back into your skull, your back arching just to get him deeper, and how you gripped the sheets.
“like that, baby?” he smirked as he watched you nod, your tits bouncing with each thrust. “awe, too cockdrunk to answer me? that’s okay, daddy will give you exactly. what. you. need.” he accentuated each word with his thrusts, digging his hands into your hips and pulling you up a little more, his balls slapping onto your tight hole as your slick ran down his balls and onto the sheets.
at some point you felt the blood rushing to your ears a he fucked into you, your body moving up with each thrust until the pillow your head was on backed against the headboard. he smiled watching you squirm under him, toes curling and mouth hanging open. leaning over he gripped your cheeks, spitting right onto our tongue and you moaned as you swallowed. you were more bent in half in this position, the dog tags he wore around his neck dangling in front of your face.
you took it between your teeth as he fucked into you, and the moan that left his mouth made you squeeze around his cock. he hissed, bringing one of his hands in between your bodies where you were connected and furiously rubbed your clit. you moaned dumbly, mumbling incoherent sounds as he fucked into you.
“you feel me here, baby?” he pushed against your stomach with his metal hand, slowing his strokes enough for you to feel his cock protruding through your stomach perfectly. he was rearranging your guts and he was smirking about it since you couldn't actually say anything back.
“yeah you do, my perfect little cockdrunk slut.” as soon as the words left his mouth, you felt your orgasm rush through your entire body, lighting up and igniting each and every single nerve . you squirted on his chest and his cock, a loud moan leaving your lips as you squirmed under him. his thrusts didn’t let up, instead — you squirting encouraged him to fuck you through it while he held onto yoi tightly.
“that’s a good girl, fuck baby,” he was loosing self control as your cunt pulsed around him, milking his cock for his cum. his thrusts became erratic, pushing his hips flush with yours and you felt his hot cum filling your cunt up to the brim.
he leaned his weight against you, your legs falling from his shoulders and next you, his cock twitching inside of you as he moved his hips slowly. the squelching sound mixed with yours and his cum was enough to make you needy all over again.
he leaned up, kissing you softly before pulling out and you felt his cum drip down your hole and onto the messy sheets. he leaned back, admiring his handiwork before scooping up some of his cum and fucking it back into your cunt.
“bucky, please..” you tried to move away but he held your hips down with his metal hand, he tsked, pushing his fingers all the want into your pussy and feeling your walls clench around him from the overstimulation
“i think you can give me one more, hm princess? just for the blue balls you left me with all week.” you whined, and he just smiled as he kept fucking into you. he pushed his palm right up against your clit making you moan, grabbing his wrist and keeping it there as you needily grinded into him
“thats what i thought baby, you just can’t get enough huh? need me to fuck my cum back into this sweet little pussy. my little cumslut.” you nodded, completely fucked out and agreeing to whatever he said because you were drunk on his touch, anything that he would give you.
you felt your orgasm wash over you with a particular twist of his wrist, squeezing his fingers as more of his cum spilled out of you, making him groan. pulling his fingers from your abused cunt, he marveled in his work as your pussy fluttered around nothing.
“don’t think im done with you, sweetheart. we have all weekend to make up for lost time.” and you still hadn’t finished your work.
summary: Every psychic and every tarot deck tells the same story: love isn't meant for you. Every reading ends the same way—until one skeptical customer pulls three cards that were never meant to belong to him. Suddenly, the future you've spent years trying to outrun refuses to leave you alone.
word count: 11.3 k
warnings: sort of enemies to friends to lovers, meet ugly, tarot, soulmates, slow burn, mutual pining, hurt/comfort, fluff, happy ending.
a/n: based on The Prophecy by Taylor Swift, been 7 weeks stuck in my drafts, I hope you like the outcome as much as I liked writing it for you! Beta read by @kileyking & @buckysdecaflove ❤︎ | dividers by @strangergraphics
read on AO3
Your family doesn't mean to hurt you. They just do.
It's the same every reunion, somebody's hand landing warm on your shoulder. When are you going to bring someone for us to meet? Are you ever gonna get married? That boat's sailed, hon. You missed your shot.
And their newest addition, just now: So, when's your turn? We really thought you'd be the next one walking down the aisle.
You're in your thirties now. Two cats, an apartment that's exactly how you want it, and you learned a long time ago to deflect, to laugh, to change the subject before anyone got too invested in your answer.
But those words stung.
Because god knows you've tried dating. You wanted the thing everyone kept asking you about, but you couldn't seem to hold onto it. Somewhere along the way you accepted that maybe you weren't meant to, just like the cards said once.
When the answer your cards gave you wasn't good enough, you tried something else: the oracle, rune-casting, pendulum, palmistry. You even ran the extra mile and paid someone to read your matrix destiny, but the answer remained the same: Not for you.
Apparently, the person meant for you was born over a hundred years ago, it wasn't meant to be in this life. Or at least, that's what the woman interpreted for you, it wasn't your line of work, but that night you pulled the cards alone and they confirmed it.
Your mom leans over, snapping you out of your thoughts. "They want you to say something."
You already knew this, you prepared days ago sitting in your apartment with your cats. You wrote and rewrote on your phone, trying to keep your words light and genuine.
"I've known Sarah since we were kids," you say. "She was always the one who knew exactly what she wanted. Not confused like the rest of us, not second-guessing. She just knew."
You can see her smiling, David's hand rest on her shoulder. You take a breath, your eyes are swelling with tears, but that's fine. That's normal at weddings.
"Sarah, David… you deserve each other, and you deserve the whole beautiful future you're about to have together. I hope you know how lucky you are, how blessed you are." Your voice wavers just slightly on that word. "Not everyone gets this, not everyone finds someone who loves them the way you love each other."
You're looking at Sarah and you mean every single word, even though it's cutting into you.
You raise your glass, trying to keep your hand steady despite the awful feeling sitting on your stomach. "To Sarah and David, and the future you deserve."
Later, when you're home at the outskirts of the city, with your cats curled on either side of you, you let yourself cry. Not angry tears, just the deep kind that come from watching someone else get the thing you've accepted you never will.
You think about the cards, about the woman who read your destiny and the words that have chased you since you were seventeen: The person meant for you was born out of time.
And your cousin's husband was born exactly at the right moment, in the right place, in the right life.
You're happy for her, you really are.
You're just so tired of helping everyone else find the life the cards promised would never belong to you.
The fair comes to the edge of your small town every spring, and you've been here for three years now. Your shop is small—just enough room for a folding table, two chairs, and the cards that you've been reading since you've been a teenager and decided to expand the gift you've inherited from your great grandmother.
The bell above the shop door chimes on a slow afternoon, and you look up from the velvet cloth you're arranging to find a couple standing in the doorway. The woman sees your altar in the corner, the crystals and the candles and her face lights up.
"Oh, this is perfect," she says, turning to him. "See? I told you we'd find someone authentic."
The man—dark hair, broad-shouldered, pierced-blue eyes and a very defined jawline— gives you a polite, slightly uncomfortable smile.
"Hey," he says. "She's been talking about you for weeks."
"Come in," you say, standing. You wipe your hands on your skirt. "Welcome to The Velvet Oracle, do you have an appointment?"
"I called yesterday," the woman says, stepping forward, hand extended. "I'm Hazel, this is Bucky. I want a couple's reading, we've been dating for four months and I just thought, you know, let's see what the future holds for us."
You gesture to the chairs across from you. "Sit, let's see what the cards have to say."
Hazel settles in, leans forward eagerly. Bucky sits back with his arms crossed. You don't let yourself look at him too long, because every time you do it you feel your stomach dropping, like when you miss a step in the dark.
You shuffle the deck, the familiar worn edges of the cards grounding you against your palms.
"Alright," you start. "For a couple's reading, I usually pull a few cards for each person individually, and then we'll look at the relationship as a whole. Sound good?"
Hazel nods enthusiastically, but Bucky's expression is somewhere between polite discomfort and outright skepticism.
"I gotta be honest," he says, glancing around the tent at the crystals and candles, "this isn't really my thing."
"I know, baby, but it'll be fun." Hazel tugs at his sleeve until he relents, uncrossing his arms. "Just let her do the reading, okay? For me."
He doesn't look convinced, but he nods and his expression softens for her. You don't know why, but that somehow makes you wanna cry.
You focus on Hazel, spreading the deck in a smooth arc across the velvet. "Go ahead and pull three cards when you're ready."
She leans forward, her fingers hovering dramatically before selecting. The first card makes you nod slowly—the Ace of Pentacles. A seed planted in rich soil. The second is the Empress, all abundance and growth. The third one is the World.
"Completion, fulfillment, a cycle coming to a close in the best possible way."
Hazel beams. "That's good, right?"
"Very good," you gesture at the Ace of Pentacles. "Pentacles are earth energy—practical, grounded, built to last. This is a new beginning with a solid foundation. The Empress suggests growth and nurturing, maybe even family, and the World is a major arcana card of fulfillment. Whatever you're building toward, the universe is supporting it."
"I'm a Taurus!" Hazel claps her hand together. "That's an earth sign. This is so accurate, oh my god! Earth energy for an earth sign, that has to mean something."
"It suggests alignment," you say carefully, because you've learned not to over-promise."The path you're on has stability written into it."
Hazel turns to Bucky with bright eyes. "See? I told you she was the real deal."
Bucky shifts in his chair, unmoved. "Great, so what about the rest of it?"
"Your turn," you say, trying to keep your voice light. "Three cards, same as before."
He looks at the deck like it might bite him. "I don't really believe in this stuff."
"It's just cards," you say. "They only have the power you give them."
Something shifts in his expression—not quite interest, but maybe a grudging willingness. Hazel nudges him with her elbow. "Just do it, Bucky. For me."
He sighs, leans forward and taps three cards with a soldier's precision. One, two, three. No hesitation, like he wants it over with.
You turn the first card: The Lovers.
Your breath catches. You force yourself to keep your expression neutral, but your fingers have gone cold against the velvet.
"The Lovers," you say, and your voice comes out steady, despite the static in your ears. "This card is about significant choices. A crossroad in a relationship or a deep connection that requires a decision."
Hazel practically squeals with excitement. "That's us! A deep connection!"
Bucky doesn't react. His eyes are on the card, but his face gives nothing away.
You turn the second card. The High Priestess.
The card you've pulled for yourself more times than you can count since you were seventeen. Intuition. The veil between worlds. The woman in the card stares at you from the table, and for a disorienting second you swear the woman on the card has your eyes.
"The High Priestess represents hidden knowledge," you manage. "Things beneath the surface, secrets, intuition… the parts of ourselves we don't fully understand yet."
"What does that have to do with Bucky?" Hazel asks, frowning slightly.
"I'm not sure yet," you lie, because you're suddenly horribly sure of exactly what's happening, and you want to sweep the cards off the table and pretend you never touched them.
You flip the third card with a trembling hand. The Ace of Cups.
The card of new love, emotional awakening. The beginning of something that fills the heart. It's the same card that you've always pulled up reversed for yourself every single time you ask the universe if there's anyone out there for you.
Now here it is, on his spread… along with your arcana.
"A new emotional beginning," you say after a moment of silence. "The Ace of Cups is the start of something in matters of the heart. It's a very powerful, personal card."
Hazel turns to Bucky, her earlier enthusiasm dimming. "Is that about us? Wait— water and earth complement each other, right? Bucky's a Pisces, that's a water sign, I'm earth. That's good isn't it? They balance."
"Water and earth can be very nurturing together," you say, because it's true, even if the cards aren't saying that. "But these cards feel more like a personal message for Bucky, something individual, not necessarily about the relationship."
You don't remember what you say after that. Something about water signs and intuition, something about the cards reflecting individual journeys within partnerships. You're very good at small talk, at telling people something they might want to hear while the cards tell you something else entirely.
Hazel pays you in cash, and she leaves with her hand tucked into Bucky's elbow, already chattering about dinner reservations. He lingers in the doorway for half a second, looking back at you with an expression you can't read. Then the bell chimes, and they're gone.
You sit in silence for a long time, staring at the three cards, still laid out on the velvet. You gather them up with shaking hands and slip them back into the deck, but you can feel them there, warm against the others, like embers buried in ash.
That night, you pull your own cards for the first time in months. You stopped asking about love a year ago, because the answer never changed—the reversed Ace of Cups, Ten of Swords, the Tower. But tonight, you need to know if you imagined it, if the shop was too warm, if you simply wanted something so badly your mind bent the cards to fit.
You shuffle the deck until your fingers ache and cut the deck three times before pulling: The Lovers. The High Priestess. The Ace of Cups.
Exactly the same spread from earlier.
You throw the deck across your kitchen table and watch the cards scatter like birds. You don't read them, you don't need to.
The dreams start three nights later.
You're in the shop, but once you pay enough attention you realize it's not your shop—it's larger, older, with windows that look out onto a street you've never seen, snow falling in thick, silent curtains. Bucky is there, sitting across from you, but he's different. Younger, somehow, though you can't explain how you know that. He's smiling at you, and he reaches across the table to take your hand.
You wake up gasping, your sheets are twisted around your legs, your heart hammering against your ribs.
The second time you dream of him, you're dancing. You're not able to see if it's anywhere specific. It's a dark room, there is music playing from somewhere distant, his hand on your waist, his cheek pressed against your temple. He smells like cedar and leather. You can feel the calluses on his fingers through the fabric of your dress. When you wake up, you can still feel them.
You start drinking chamomile tea before bed. You burn sage. You place an amethyst under your pillow and a black tourmaline at your door, but nothing works. The dreams continue, threading themselves through your sleep like a second life you're living in parallel, and in every single one, he seems like the answer to a question you've been asking for a very long time.
You don't tell anyone. Who would believe you? What would you even tell them? I had a tarot reading go wrong and now I'm psychically stalking my client's boyfriend in my dreams. You'd sound insane. Worse, you'd sound desperate.
You don't hear from Hazel or him again. You tell yourself it's a good thing. You tell yourself the dreams will fade, that the thread between you dissolves with distance and time… except they don't fade, they get worse.
In your dreams you're now in Brooklyn, walking down streets lined with brownstones, and he's beside you, close enough that your shoulders brush. He's telling you about his day, about his past, and you listen until his words start to fade. When you wake up, you can smell his cologne in the air.
You start taking walks in the afternoon, though you don't know why. You pull your cards again, desperate for something—anything—to change.
The Tower. The Star. The World.
Disaster, then hope, then completion. The cycle you've been trapped in for years, except this time the Tower doesn't feel like another heartbreak waiting to happen. It feels like change—the kind you can't stop even if you wanted to.
You don't sleep that night. You sit on your kitchen floor with your cats weaving between your legs, and you rearrange the cards in every configuration you know: Celtic cross, three card spread, relationship spread, past-present-future. Every single time, the same arc emerges: something is ending, something is beginning. And whatever comes next will leave you irrevocably changed.
Your aunt Margaret—Maggie, as you've called her since you were little—tells the family that she has broken her hip on the cellar stairs, that the surgery went fine, but she doesn't want a nurse or a help aide. She wants someone from the family who can come stay with her or she'll manage alone.
The call gets passed down through the entire family, but nobody offers to go take care of her. Your cousins have husbands, kids, mortgages, school pickups… Meanwhile, you have two cats and a tarot shop you can shutter for a season, and nobody says it out loud, but everybody means it: you're the one with nothing to leave behind.
You arrive on a Tuesday with your two cat carriers, three suitcases and the deck wrapped in a scarf at the bottom of your tote. Maggie is waiting in the front room of the brownstone, sat in a wingback chair with a cane across her knees.
"There she is, I knew you would come," she says. "Come kiss me."
You oblige before setting the carriers on the floor and opening them to let your cats wander around and recognize the place you'd be staying for a few weeks.
"I got two rules," Maggie starts, taking off her reading glasses. "The thermostat stays where I put it, and no cards in my house."
"Maggie—"
"I know what you carry around, I have enough ghosts in this old apartment, so there's no way I'm letting you welcome more through…that."
"They're just cards."
"Then it won't kill you to leave them in the bag," she settles back into the chair and picks her crossword up off the side table, and that is the end of it. "The kettle's on, you can take the room at the top of the stairs."
You know arguing with her would be useless, so you go and install yourself in that cramped old room and decide you'll read when she's asleep.
It becomes a ritual within the first week: you wait for the apartment to go quiet, wait for her snoring to even out and you sit at the kitchen table with the deck and a single candle as if you were a teenager sneaking cigarettes. Your cats take turns supervising from the counter, but you keep one ear on the ceiling the whole time, just in case.
Every single time, the same cards you pull at your shop with Bucky keep coming.
The Lovers. The High Priestess. The Ace of Cups.
The dreams don't fade with the distance from home, they sharpen. Now the businesses have names, because you've walked past it every time you go run errands for your aunt Maggie. The stoop where he sat beside you, close enough that your shoulders touched, you know it. You've seen the exact iron railing, three blocks east. In one dream he laughs at something, and you wake up missing something you haven't even seen in real life.
You try to build a reasonable conclusion: You've been here previously, you know this neighborhood. You just did one reading to a ridiculous handsome man eight months ago and your lonely, overworked brain latched on, and now it's trying to dress a crush in destiny because it's something you've been trying to change your whole life. That's all this is. A simple crush and a reader's block. It happens sometimes to some people, right?
At least that's what Reddit said last time you checked.
You've almost convinced yourself by the third Saturday in October, which is when you see him at the green market, standing at a fruit stall with a paper bag in one gloved hand. You stop so fast a woman with a stroller clips your heel.
Eight months and four hundred miles, and he's right here, wearing a canvas jacket with his hair shorter than you remember, frowning at the fruit, and your first coherent thought is run, but your feet are refusing to move.
He must've felt your eyes on him, because he looks up.
"You," he says it flat.
"Hi," your voice comes out steadier than you expect, and you silently thank god, the universe and every existent deity. "Bucky, right?"
He crosses the few feet between you, and up close you notice a tension in him that you don't remember from the shop. "What are you doing here?"
"Buying some groceries." You lift the bag as evidence. "I'm here taking care of my aunt and—"
"Right, so now your aunt happens to live here. Funny."
"You can come with me and check if you don't believe me," the bite gets into your voice before you can stop it. "Is there a problem?"
He laughs once, but there's no humor in it. "Is there a problem, you ask? Why don't you pull your cards and figure it out?"
"Okay—"
"Hazel broke up with me," he watches your face while he says it. "Three weeks after that reading, you want to know why?"
The market noise keeps going around you, crates and gulls and a vendor calling out prices, but everything is reducing to background noise while you feel the cold coming up from through your boots.
"She couldn't let it go," he continues. "You said something about a new beginning, some big personal message and she turned it over until there was nothing left. Every conversation we had circled back to it, who is she? When did it start? The cards don't lie. Four months, gone, because you laid out three stupid pieces of laminated paper and made it sound like some stupid prophecy."
"That isn't what I said— "
"Well, it's what she heard."
"I told her those cards were about you, individually. I was careful—"
"You were vague," he says, "which is the whole trick, isn't it? Say something soft enough to fit any shape, take the cash, let people destroy themselves filling in the blanks… there's a word for that." He shifts the bag of groceries to his other hand. "You're a fraud. The polite version is intuitive, a fraud with esoteric words."
You should let it go. He's a stranger, he's grieving a relationship, the market is crowded and you have other things to do, but you don't let it go.
"I didn't make those cards come up." You step in instead of back, and something flickers across his face—surprise, maybe, that you didn't fold. "I shuffled, you pulled three cards, it was your own hands, no hesitation. I read what was on the table and I softened it more than I should have, for her sake. What she did with it afterward isn't mine to carry, and neither is what you do with it."
A muscle moves in his jaw. For a second neither of you says anything, and you notice—stupidly, uselessly—that his eyes are exactly the color they are in your dreams.
"For what it's worth, I'm sorry about Hazel."
"Yeah, you sure do." He steps around you. "Enjoy Brooklyn and stay the hell away from me."
You stand there with your own groceries until your hands stop shaking.
That night you don't pull cards. You lie awake instead, replaying it, building better arguments hours too late, and when you finally sleep, he's there—sitting across a kitchen table that doesn't exist, pushing a cup of coffee toward you, smiling at you the way he has never smiled once in real life.
You wake up furious at your own mind.
The radiator in the front room dies the last week of October, the same week the temperature does.
You find Maggie in her wingback with a blanket over her knees and the phone already against her ear. "It's the front one again," she's saying. "It clanks like the devil and gives nothing… No, don't be silly, after lunch is fine. You'll eat here anyway." She hangs up before whoever it is can argue.
"I could've called someone," you say. "There's a service the pharmacy recommends—"
"A service?" She huffs a laugh, like you've said something completely irrational. "I have James, he does the whole block—the Russo's gutters, Mrs. Ferreira's stairs… he won't take a dime, but I tuck it in his jacket when he isn't looking."
"James," you repeat.
"You'll like him," she says, returning to her crossword. "He's a serious boy, it's good with hands, single…"
The doorbell rings at one. You open the door and there he is, on your aunt's stoop, a tool bag over his shoulder, and you watch the exact moment his face goes through the market all over again.
"You gotta be shitting me," he mutters.
"Yeah, well, I'm not excited either, but I told you I was taking care of my aunt."
From the front room, your aunt's voice: "James! Don't let the heat out, it's the one radiator still working in here!"
You look at each other and there's a long moment where you genuinely cannot tell whether he's going to turn around and walk back down the steps, and then he exhales through his nose and crosses the threshold, being painfully obvious at avoiding brushing your shoulder in the narrow hall.
What follows is the strangest two hours of your autumn. Because the man at the market and the shop doesn't appear. With your aunt, he's somebody else entirely—patient, dry, gentle in an odd way for the way he's treated you. He kneels on the floor and bleeds the radiator and lets her direct him with her cane without complaining. Asks about her hip, and actually listens to the answer.
You stay in the kitchen, mostly. You make the coffee she orders you to make and when you bring it in, Nova—the bolder of your two cats—has installed herself on the tool bag, paws tucked underneath him, supervising, and for your surprise, Bucky is working around her rather than moving her.
He glances up when you set the cup down near him, just out of his way.
"Thanks," it's dry, but it's not nothing.
"You take your coffee black, right?" you say, and then bite your own tongue off, because you don't know that. You've been dreaming of that.
He pauses with the wrench mid-turn. "Lucky guess."
"Well, you look like a man who likes to keep it simple." You say it lightly and walk away before your face can do anything stupid, and behind you, Maggie says something about you reading people, and then you hear the small clank of metal as something in his hands slips.
He doesn't stay to eat, despite your aunt's best efforts. At the door, shrugging the tool bag back up, he stops with his hand on the frame. He doesn't quite look at you.
"Her hip," he murmurs. "If she needs anything lifted, or any errands to run, whatever… Maggie has my number."
"Okay."
"For her," he clarifies.
"I understood you the first time," you say sweetly and shut the door on whatever his face does next.
In the front room, Maggie has watched this entire exchange over her glasses.
"You didn't tell me you know James."
"Barely."
"Mm." She picks up her pen. "It seemed like more than barely to me. But if that's how you treat men no wonder why you're still single."
You gasped audibly and she winked an eye at you before going back to her crossword.
You start running into him in an almost daily basis. The neighborhood is small—twenty thousand people and somehow the same six faces every single day— and now that you know he's in it, he's everywhere. Outside the hardware store with a length of pipe over his shoulder. At the pharmacy counter, when you go pick up Maggie's medications and he's talking to an Asian man. Across the green market, where you both pretend with great commitment that the other one is invisible.
But there's no real conversation until now.
You've misjudged the sky and the distance, so you're hauling two grocery bags and a sack of cat litter up Pierrepont when the cold drizzle turns serious. You stop under sycamore to redistribute everything you're carrying, water running off the end of your nose, and a shadow falls over you. You lift your gaze and he's there, hood up, his hand already out reaching for you.
"What? Your cards didn't tell you there would be a storm?"
"Ha-ha. Very funny."
"Give me the litter."
"I've got it."
"You're going to put your shoulder out being stubborn. I said give me the damn litter."
You could protest, but you know it's pointless to fight with him, so you give him the litter and walk the last two blocks side by side without speaking, rain hissing on the pavement, his boots and your boots out of step.
He sets the sack on the second stair of your aunt's gate, but he doesn't leave immediately.
"At the market," he murmurs, to the gate rather than to you. "When I— when I said those things to you… I was out of line."
"You were rude."
"I was out of line," he repeats.
"You called me a fraud, and you said my intuition was exactly that, a fraud with esoteric words."
"Well, if you were so intuitive, wouldn't you have known about the rain?" It takes you a second to hear it, the dry shift under the flat delivery, and you laugh before you decide to. He looks surprised, like he wasn't expecting the sound either.
"Go home, Bucky," you say. "You'll catch a cold."
"Is that a prediction?"
You rolled your eyes. "There's no need for that, it's logical."
"Tell Maggie I left the wrench in the bin by the door… for the sink." He's already turning. "Don't let her do the sink herself, she'll try."
"I know my aunt."
"Then you know she'll try." And he's gone into the rain, shoulders up, and you stand at the gate watching him go for longer than you should.
That night you dream of him again, except the dream is just this: the two of you under a sycamore, rain coming down, but this time he's laughing—really laughing, head tipped, the whole architecture of his face rearranged by it— at something you can't hear yourself say.
You wake before dawn with your heart going hard and the echo of his laugh still in your ears.
It's a crush, you remind yourself staring at the ceiling.
Then why does your heart feel so heavy?
By November, your aunt has invented a maintenance schedule that no brownstone in history has ever required. The storm windows, the cellar light, a cabinet hinge you're fairly sure she loosened herself, because you watched her test it with her cane the day before she called him.
"You're matchmaking," you accuse, setting her tea down.
"I'm maintaining my property." She doesn't look up from the crossword. "Seven across, six letters. Foreseen by the stars."
"Fated."
"That's five."
"Destined is eight. Fated is five." You count it on your fingers. "What's six?"
Maggie hums thoughtfully and writes something down where you can't see it.
Bucky comes back on Thursday to check the storm windows. It's the fourth time, not that you're counting, and something has shifted in the dynamic between you—the hostility has burned down to a kind of wariness, and that wariness keep springing leaks.
He lets you hold the frame steady while he drives the screws, close enough that you can smell the cedar on his jacket. He answers your aunt's interrogation about his week in actual sentences. When Nova bolts for the open window, Bucky catches her one-handed without looking, absorbs the betrayed yowl and deposits her on the sofa with a flat "No". You expect retaliation, but Nova—who has never once obeyed you—stays.
"Traitor," you tell the cat.
"She respects the chain of command."
Maggie goes up for her nap at three with a theatrical yawning that should embarrass her. Bucky's packing up the drill in the kitchen and you're making coffee because it's cold and the radio on the counter—her ancient radio, permanently tuned to an AM station that plays classics—is murmuring under everything.
And you go still.
It takes you a moment to realize, and another to find why: he's humming. Barely, under his breath, and the song sounds pretty familiar.
The mug slips, you catch it against the counter, there's coffee slopping over your knuckles, and the burn makes you realize that song was playing in the dream where he danced with you in a dark room. You've never heard it awake in your life until right now. You don't know its name either, you only knew the next three notes after he hummed them.
"You okay?" He's looking at you now.
"It's nothing," you run your hand under the tap. "Just… wanted to heat my hands a little bit."
It's just an old song, it's an old radio station. Men hum old songs; it's logical. You repeat it in your head twice but your hands don't believe any of it. And god forbid you, you neither.
When you turn around, he's leaning against the counter, watching you with an expression you can't quite read.
"I've been meaning to ask you," he starts. "About the cards. Why do you do it? And I don't want the speech, I want the real answer."
You dry your hands slowly, deciding how much truth he's earned.
"My great grandmother read cards," you start, leaning against the counter across from him. "She read for people in her village back in the old country. My mom said she could look at someone and see the shape of their life, like… like they were made of glass. She tried to teach my mother, but the gift skipped her and landed on me instead."
You take a pause, watching the radio, the floor, anything but him.
"I was seven the first time I saw something I couldn't explain. I touched my grandmother's deck and I knew things about her neighbor who was sitting at the kitchen table. That she'd lost a baby the year before, that her husband was sleeping with her sister, that she was going to leave him by spring." You swallow. "I said all of it out loud, like an idiot child, because I didn't know you weren't supposed to just say those things."
Bucky's quiet. You can feel him listening, like he's cataloguing every word.
"My mother was horrified. My grandmother on the other hand wasn't. She said the cards chose me, and that I should learn to read them properly so I'd stop blurting out unfiltered truth at dinner parties." A small, humorless laugh leaves you. "So I learned. By the time I was a teenager, I was pulling cards for friends, for strangers, for anyone who asked. And most of the time, it's just… pattern recognition and intuition working together. The cards are a tool, not a magic trick, but sometimes—"
"Sometimes what?"
"Sometimes they show you something that doesn't fit any pattern you know. And you have to decide whether to believe what you're seeing or pretend you didn't see it."
The radio changes songs.
"Is that what happened with my reading?" he asks quietly.
No, you think. It's worse than that.
"I read what was on the table," you say instead, because it's the truth, even if it's not all of it. "I didn't make it up, Bucky. I've never fabricated a reading in my life. The cards that came up for you were clear… unusually clear. And I softened them because Hazel was sitting right there and I didn't want to hurt her, but I didn't lie."
He studies you for a long moment, and you can see the war happening behind his eyes—the part of him that wants to believe you fighting the part that needs to think you're a con artist, because the alternative is harder.
"Okay," he says finally.
"O—Okay?"
"I'm not saying I believe in it. I'm saying I believe you believe it, and that's… different."
It's the most generous thing he's said to you since the market, and it lands somewhere under your ribs.
It's a Tuesday in late November, and Maggie has sent him to fix a leak under the kitchen sink that you both suspect she caused by hitting the pipe with her cane. He's on his back under the counter and you're handling him tools, trying not to notice the way his shirt rides up when he reaches for the wrench.
When he slides out, wiping his hands on a rag, he looks at you for a while.
"There's a place two blocks over. They make decent coffee, if you're done pretending you don't need a break."
"That's the worst invitation I've ever heard. You're just observing that I look tired."
"You do look tired."
"Wow, thank you. A true gentleman."
His mouth twitches. "Do you want coffee or not?"
You want to say no, because saying yes feels too much like stepping off a cliff, but the word comes out before you can stop it. "Fine, but only because you're paying."
Maggie, from the front room calls out: "Take your time! I'm perfectly fine!"
You both know she's been listening to every word.
The walk to the café is silent.
The place looks cozy—it's small, warm and smells like cinnamon and cardamom. He orders black coffee and you order a latte and a slice of walnut cake. You sit t a table by the window where the afternoon light comes in, and for a few minutes neither of you says anything.
It should be awkward, being here without Maggie or your cats between you, but it isn't.
"Would you mind if I ask you something?"
"You're going to ask whether I say yes or not."
"Smart man." You turn the cup slowly. "Why do you do this? The handyman thing… Maggie says you work for the whole block. But you don't charge, you won't take money—"
"I take money, I just don't like to ask for it, besides, Maggie always invites me to eat."
"She tucks money in your jacket while you're not seeing."
"She's not as subtle as she thinks." He takes a sip of his coffee and ten looks at you. "I like fixing things, always have. When something's broken, there's a right way to fix it, and when it's done, it's done, it's done. You can see the result, it's not…"
"Ambiguous?"
"Yeah, exactly. It's not ambiguous."
You understand suddenly why he hated the reading and everything related to it. You gave him a puzzle with no solution, a fix with no steps… you made him sit with something unfixable.
The conversation moves easier after that. He tells you about the neighborhood, about Mrs. Ferreira, about Yori—the Asian man you saw the other day who feeds pigeons from his window, about the old man on the fourth who swears at everyone in Italian. You tell him about your shop, about your cats—Nova and Salem, about the time you accidentally read cards for a man who turned out to be an undercover cop investigating a psychic scam two towns over, and how you spent forty-five minutes proving your cards weren't marked.
You see him laughing, not the polite sound from always, but a real one. You drink your coffee and eat your cake and try to not think about the dreams.
It becomes a thing. He finishes a repair at Maggie's or passes by to eat and you end up at the café, or walking the two blocks to the park where the benches face the water, or simply sitting on her stoop in the last cold light of the afternoon while you both drink coffee.
You learn things about him in pieces. He's from Brooklyn—born and raised, he says, but the tone on his voice tells you it's partly a lie. He has a best friend named Sam who's a pain in the ass. He doesn't talk about his family, but you don't push. He served in the military, a long time ago.
He learns things about you too, like the fact you talk with your hands when you're passionate about something, or that you hum when you're thinking and that hum is always off-key. He learns about your habit of reading strangers on the street and narrating your observations under your breath.
The first week of December arrives with an ugly wind that rattles Maggie's windows and makes your cats burrow under the blankets. Maggie has graduated from the cane to limping short distances without it, which means she's mobile enough to meddle full-time.
Bucky comes by Wednesday to check a draft Maggie swears she can feel coming from the baseboards. You both know there's no draft, but he comes by anyway.
You open the door and he's standing on the stoop with his hands in his jacket pockets, his tool bag over one shoulder, and there's snow in his hair—not much, just dust, but it's there, melting against the dark of it—and your heart does something complicated because of how good he looks.
"Maggie's napping," you say.
His hand comes out of his pocket. He's holding a folded napkin, and he holds it out to you like it's a wrench.
"I made reservations," he murmurs. "At Valentino's, this Friday, seven o'clock."
You stare at the napkin. "Did you just… write it on a napkin?"
"I didn't have a paper." He shifts his weight. "Sam says you're supposed to give the person a specific time and place, so… there it is."
"You asked your friend how to ask someone on a date?"
"Well, he tells me a lot of things, more of it is useless." He's looking at the doorframe while he speaks, then he glances at you. "This part seemed right."
You unfold the napkin. His handwriting is surprisingly neat—small, precise letters. Friday, 7 pm- Valentino's on Henry St. —B
"Is this because Maggie put you up to it?" you ask, because if this is charity or pity or Maggie's matchmaking you'd rather know now and bleed later.
"No. She might take credit for it, but no. I was going to ask you at the café last week, but then you started reading people and I lost my nerve."
Bucky lost his nerve.
"So, Friday… at seven."
"Is that a yes?"
"That's a yes."
He nods once, and you can see his shoulders drop half an inch. You want to laugh, or cry, or both, so you just fold the napkin carefully and put it in your pocket.
"Are you going to come in and check the nonexistent draft, or…?"
"Might as well, just to keep the appearances."
He brushes past you in the doorway, and unlike the first time, he doesn't avoid your shoulder.
When Friday night comes, you don't understand why you're so damn nervous, but here you are, changing your outfit twice before settling with a blue dress and a pair of boots that Maggie claims make your legs look like they go on forever. You're halfway down the stairs when the doorbell rings.
He cleans up well. That's the first thought you have when you open the door. He's wearing a dark jacket over a sweater, and his hair is pulled back in a way that shows the sharp lines of his face, and he smells so good you have to resist the urge to lean closer and breathe him in again.
"You look nice," he says when you open the door.
"You too." You grab your coat from the hook. "Don't wait up, Maggie."
"Go. Don't come back before ten, I have a television program."
"We're going to dinner, Maggie, not—"
"Door will be locked before ten o'clock," she insists, and shuts the door on your face before you can answer, letting you at the bottom of the stairs.
You turn to face Bucky and the way he looks at you makes you forget every argument you've ever had with yourself about why this is a bad idea.
"Ready?" he asks.
"It depends. Are you going to accuse me of fraud tonight?"
"Not tonight."
"Then I'm ready."
Valentino's is tucked between a laundromat and a bookshop. The hostess greets Bucky by name and leads you to a corner booth where the candlelight flickers against the red-checkered tablecloth.
"Fancy," you tease.
"I said it wasn't fancy."
"Exactly," you unfold your napkin and look around—warm brick walls, fairy lights strung along the ceiling, and and old man at the bar arguing with the bartender about baseball. "I like it."
He orders wine for the table without asking, but it's the good kind, the kind that tastes likes blackberries, and when he catches you watching him over the rim of your glass, he doesn't look away.
You're talking about the shop—what you'll do when you go back, whether you'll reopen at all—when he leans back in his chair and takes a deep breath. "I want to ask you something, but I don't want to fight."
"That's a promising start."
"Why do you believe in it? The cards, destiny, all of it. You're smart. You read people like they're open books. How do you also believe that pieces of cardboard can tell the future?"
It's not hostile. It's genuine curiosity, and that's worse, because you owe him a real answer. You down the rest of your wine for a bit of liquid courage.
"When I was seventeen," you start, and your voice is careful, like you're walking on ice, " my great grandmother died. She'd been sick for a while, and when I went to see her in the hospital she… she told me she'd been reading my cards since I was born. That she'd asked about my future every year on my birthday, the way she did for everyone in the family. And every year, the same cards came up."
The restaurant noise fills the silence—the clink of glasses, a murmur of conversation from the next table—but you're hyper aware of him.
"She said love wasn't meant for me." You trace the rim of your glass with your finger. "I didn't believe her, I was seventeen, I thought she was a dramatic old woman who loved tragedy, or that maybe she was way too high on her meds. So I started reading for myself, I pulled my own cards every week, every month, every time I met someone I thought could be something. And every single time, the same answer. Reversed Ace of Cups. Ten of Swords. The Tower. Not for you, not in this life."
You laugh, but it comes out humorless.
"I even paid a woman to read my destiny matrix, I tried runes, I tried everything because I wanted so badly for the answer to be different; but it never was. I tried dating, I did. I wanted so bad to be loved. Apparently, the person meant for me was born over a hundred years ago, and I was born now, so the timing was wrong, and that's it."
Bucky is very still across the table. He hasn't moved, hasn't reached for his glass, hasn't done anything except listen with an intensity that makes your skin prickle. The silence between you stretches. He's looking at you with an expression you can't decode.
"Bucky?"
He exhales slowly, and his jaw works twice. Then he leans forward, resting both forearms on the table. "You don't have any idea of who I am?"
"Should I?" you ask, confused.
He stares at you for a long moment like he's looking for some sign that you're joking. "You really don't."
"Bucky, you're freaking me out a little. Are you in the mob? A famous musician? Because I have to be honest, I don't really follow the news, and history was never my strong subject. I know the major stuff, but—"
He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his wallet, sliding something across the table toward you.
It's his driver's license. You pick it up, squinting at the tiny photo—he looks exactly the same, of course he does, that hot bastard—and then your eyes drop to the birth date.
March 10, 1917.
You read it three times, but the numbers don't change. You look up at him, and he's watching at you with an expression you can't read.
"I was born in 1917," he says quietly. "Here in Brooklyn. I went to war in '43 and… I didn't come back the way I left. They did things to me, changed me. I don't age the way normal people do, and there's a lot of years in between that I'd rather not talk about in a restaurant."
Your hands are shaking. You set the license down on the table between you like it might burn you.
"The matrix destiny," you whisper. "It said a hundred years ago. You were born a hundred years ago."
"Yeah." He leans forward. "And here's the thing. I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in stars writing our stories for us, because if I did—" His voice breaks, just slightly, and he catches it. "If I did, then I'd have to believe that what happened to me was determined. That the things that I did, the things that were done to me, they were written in stone before I was even born. And that's too cruel, that's a crueler god than I'm willing to worship."
He's breathing harder now, and you realize with a start that he's scared. Bucky Barnes, who caught your cat mid-air and argued with you in the rain, is scared of what you might say next.
"But you," he continues, softer now. "You showed up in my neighborhood reading cards and talking about things you shouldn't know. And I kept seeing you everywhere, and I kept telling myself it was a coincidence, that Brooklyn is small and you were just… there. But there's something here. I feel it every time I'm in the same room as you, and I don't know if that's fate or if it's just—" He stops, running a hand over his face. "I don't know what it is. But I know I haven't wanted to spend time with someone like this in a long time. And if that means the stars finally decided to do something kind for once, then maybe… maybe I'm not as angry at them as I thought."
You don't know what to say. The pasta arrives and sits cooling between you, forgotten. You think about every card you've ever pulled, every spread that ended in the same lonely answer, every time you accepted that love wasn't meant for you. And now, he's sitting across from you, born in 1917, a hundred-year-old soul in a young man's body, and the math is so simple it makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time.
"You're quiet," he says.
"I'm not quiet," you manage, but your voice sounds like it's coming from very far away. "I'm just… I don't know what to say. You don't— you don't just drop 'I was born in 1917' into a conversation and expect someone to have a response ready."
The corner of his mouth twitches. "Fair."
"You fought in World War II."
"Yeah."
"And you're telling me you don't believe in fate, but you just handed me proof that the answer I've been getting my whole life wasn't wrong."
"I'm telling you that I don't care what the cards said," he reaches across the table, his hand hovering over yours for a moment before he covers your fingers with his palm. His skin is warm, calloused, and you feel it everywhere. "I care that you're here, right now. And I'm here. That's enough for me."
You look down at your hand under his, at the candlelight pooling in the hollow of his palm, and you think about the High Priestess card, the one you've pulled for yourself a hundred times. Hidden knowledge, the veil between worlds, secrets.
Maybe the secret was that you weren't waiting for a ghost after all.
You eat eventually, though you barely taste it. He tells you about Sam, about the boat they worked on together, about the neighborhood changing and staying the same all at once. You tell him about your cats, about the way Maggie pretends to be asleep every time he comes over so you'll have to answer the door alone.
But mostly, you sit in the candlelight and let yourself have this. Whatever this is.
He insists on walking you home. It's not far—five blocks, maybe six—and the December air is sharp enough to make you tuck your hands into your coat pockets. He walks on the outside of the sidewalk, closest to the street, the way men used to do when he was young, and something about that makes your chest ache.
"You okay?" he asks as you turn onto Maggie's block.
"Yeah." But you're not, not really. You're overwhelmed, full of things you don't know how to say. You want to tell him that you've dreamed about him, that you've known the shape of his laugh before you ever heard it, that you pulled his cards in your kitchen and you threw the deck across the room because it was too much to believe. You want to ask him if he feels it too, this gravity, this sense of falling into something you never expected to find.
But you don't say any of that. You just walk beside him in the dark, and when you reach Maggie's stoop, you turn to face him.
The streetlamp behind him casts a halo around his shoulders. You think about all the years he's lived, all the winters he's seen, and you can't believe any of them led him here. To you. To this moment in your aunt's cracked concrete steps.
"I had a good time," he says.
"Me too."
He steps closer. You can smell the wine on his breath, the cedar of his jacket, the cold night air clinging to his air. He's close enough that you have to tilt your head back to look at him, and his eyes are darker in the shadows.
"I don't think I need to." Your voice is barely above a whisper. "I think I already know how this goes."
"Yeah?" His hand finds your waist, tentative, asking permission. "How's it go?"
And then he kisses you.
It's soft at first, careful, like he's giving you time to pull away. But you don't pull away. You reach up and curl your fingers into the front of his jacket, and he makes a sound against your mouth before deepening the kiss. His hand slides to the small of your back, pulling you closer, and you can feel the warmth of him through every layer between you that suddenly feels like too many.
He tastes like red wine, and his jaw is rough under your palm, and when you break apart you're both breathing hard, foreheads pressed together.
"Okay," you whisper. "Okay."
"Okay," he repeats, and he sounds almost drunk with it. He kisses you again, lighter this time, on the corner of your mouth, your cheek, your temple. His lips brush your ear as he murmurs, "I don't care about fate. But if you want to tell me what the stars said, I'll listen."
You laugh, a little watery, and push at his chest. "Go home, Bucky. It's cold."
"I know." But he doesn't move. He tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, his fingers lingering against your jaw. "I'll see you tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow."
He finally steps back, down one step, then two. He's smiling, the kind that reaches his eyes and rearranges his whole face into something boyish and new. "Night, then."
"Night."
You watch him walk down the block, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders relaxed in a way you haven't seen before. You watch until he turns the corner and disappears, and you stand there for a long moment with your fingers pressed to your mouth, trying to remember how to breathe.
The front door opens behind you.
"You're welcome," Maggie says.
You jump so hard you nearly fall off the stoop. "Jesus, Maggie!"
She's standing in the doorway in her robe and slippers, her crossword in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. She looks entirely too pleased with herself.
"You were watching!" You accuse.
"I was observing, there's a difference." She steps back to let you in. "I told you he was a good boy, serious, good with his hands." She winks. "And now you know for sure."
"Maggie!"
"Don't 'Maggie' me. I didn't raise you to be ungrateful." She shuffles toward the stairs. "You can thank me properly at breakfast. And don't think I didn't notice you sneaking cards at my kitchen table for three months straight. I may be old, but I'm not blind."
You stand in the hallway, coat still on, cheeks burning, and listen to her cackle all the way up the stairs.
Your cats appear from the front room, twining around your ankles, and you bend down to scoop Nova up, burying your face in her fur. She purrs, loud and indignant, and you laugh against her soft orange head.
"Okay," you whisper to him, to the empty hallway, to no one in particular. "Okay."
You don't know what happens next. You don't know how any of this works, a tarot reader and a century-old soldier, two people the universe apparently decided to throw together just to see what would happen.
But as you climb the stairs to your cramped little room, you think about the spread you pulled the night before you left for Brooklyn. The Tower. The Star. The World.
Disaster, then hope, then completion.
Maybe The Tower wasn't heartbreak after all. Maybe it was just the world rearranging itself to make room for something you never dared to ask for.
You fall asleep that night without pulling any cards, without any dreams at all, and when you wake up in the morning, the first thing you hear is Bucky's voice downstairs, asking Maggie if she takes one sugar or two, and the sound it's better than any spread you've ever read.
June.
The summer breeze at Coney Island smells like salt and fried dough, and you were wearing the jacket Bucky lent you because you misjudged the wind off the water. It's still too big, the sleeves past your knuckles, and he keeps reaching over to roll them back up for you, his thumb brushing your wrist every time.
You can't remember whose idea it was to come here. Maybe yours, maybe his. Maybe it doesn't matter, because Bucky's hand is wrapped around yours. You've been official since January, though the line between before and after has blurred into something that feels like it started long before either of you were brave enough to name it.
The boardwalk is crowded with families and couples and teenagers laughing too loud, but Bucky moves through them like he was made for this—for cotton candy and carnival lights, for the easy joy of a Brooklyn summer night. He fits here, you realize. He fits now. A hundred-year-old soul learning how to be young again.
"Step right up! Test your luck!" A barker's voice cuts through the noise, and you follow it to a row of old arcade machines tucked beneath a stripped awning. Skee-ball, claw machines, a racing game with a faded steering wheel—and then you see it.
A fortune teller machine.
It sits in the corner like something out of another era, which, you suppose, it is. Madam Zola's Mystical Fortune Cards, the peeling gold paint reads. Insert coin. Receive Your Destiny. The mechanical woman inside has painted glass eyes and a silk scarf draped over her plastic hair, and her hand rests on a deck of cards that probably haven't been mystical a day in their life.
Bucky follows your gaze and laughs. "You're kidding me."
"I'm absolutely not kidding you." You're already digging in your pocket for a quarter. "Madam Zola and I are colleagues, I need to know if she's legitimate."
"She's made of plywood."
"So judgmental." You find two quarters and press one into his palm, your fingers lingering against his. "For you, professional courtesy."
He looks down at the quarter, then back at you, and something softens in his expression. "Alright," he says. "But if this thing tells me I'm gonna die alone, I'm blaming you."
"Fair."
You drop your quarter in first. The machine whirs to life with a dramatic creak. Madam Zola's hand moves across the cards in jerky, mechanical motions, and after a moment, a small white card drops into the brass tray below.
You pick it up. It's not a real tarot card—just cardstock, cheap, the edges already soft from humidity—but the image printed on it makes your breath catch. Two hands clasped, reaching across a starfield. Beneath it, in gold script: The Lovers.
And underneath that, smaller: You've found the one. Don't waste time doubting it.
You stare at it. Bucky leans over your shoulder to read it, and you feel him go still.
"Huh."
"Your turn!"
"I don't need a card to tell me—"
"Your turn, Barnes."
He huffs, but he drops in the quarter you gave him. The machine grinds and another card falls. He picks it up. You don't see it at first, but you see his face—the way his jaw loosens, the way his eyes soften at the corners.
It's the same image, but the text beneath reads: What was written in the stars has come to pass. Trust the path, trust your heart.
The noise of the fair fades to a distant hum. You look up at him, and he's already looking at you.
"Bucky—"
"I don't care if it's rigged. I don't care if every card in that thing says the same thing. You're—" He stops, swallowing thickly. "You're it for me. You know that, right?"
Your heart is doing that complicated thing again, the thing it does every time he looks at you like you're the only person in the world.
"I know," you whisper. "Me too."
He kisses you then, right there in front of Madam Zola and half of Brooklyn, his hand cradling your jaw like you're something precious. When you pull apart, you're both breathless, and someone's wolf-whistled from the skee-ball line, but none of you seem to care at all.
"Come on," he says, lacing his fingers through yours. "I saw a ring toss on the way in, I need to win you something."
It takes him four tries and an embarrassing amount of money, and by the end he's swearing at the rigged bottles while you laugh so hard you have to lean against the counter for support. But on the fifth throw, the last ring catches, and the barker hands over the prize with a grudging nod.
It's a ridiculous bear, oversized and caramel-colored, wearing a tiny red bow tie. Bucky presents it to you as if he was handing you over the Holy Grail.
"For you. I was gonna go for the giant panda, but this one looked like it needed you more."
You crush it against your chest, burying your face in its soft synthetic fur. "I love him. I'm naming him James."
"You're not naming him after me."
"I'm absolutely naming him after you. Look at him, he has your expression."
Bucky stares at the bear's blank button eyes and then at you, and then he laughs, tilting his head back and you want to take a picture of him like this—careless, happy.
"Let's go to the photobooth," you demand, grabbing his hand. "Before the light changes."
"Bossy."
"You love when I'm bossy."
He doesn't agree, but he doesn't deny it either.
The photobooth is tucked behind the funhouse, a vintage four-strip model with a faded red curtain and a sign that flashes OUT OF ORDER every third flicker. But when you slide your money in, it whirs to life, and the first bulb flashes before you're ready.
"Wait—" you laugh, still adjusting the bear on your lap.
Too late. The first picture capture you mid-laugh, Bucky leaning in with his mouth open, probably saying something sarcastic.
"Okay, okay, be serious," you say, turning toward him.
"Serious," he repeats, but his eyes are dancing.
The second flash catches you pressing a kiss to his cheek, his hand coming up to rest on your waist. The third finds him turning his head at the last second so your lips meet his instead, his fingers threading into your hair. The fourth flash finds you both laughing into each other's mouths, your foreheads touching, the bear crushed between you. You don't remember who kissed who, but you don't care.
When the strip slides out of the machine, you hold it up to the light, watching the images develop in slow motion. Four tiny windows into a perfect moment. You look at them, and you think about al the cards you've ever pulled, all the lonely spreads and reversed cups, all the years you believed love wasn't meant for you.
And here you are. Here he is. A love out of time.
"I'm putting these on the fridge," you say. "When we get back to the apartment."
"Our apartment," he corrects and your heart flips.
You're moving in together next month. You found a place in Brooklyn with a windowsill wide enough for two cats and a fire escape that gets morning sun. He's already planning on building a spare room for your appointments, and built a shelf for your cards. You told him he didn't have to, that you'd find another place to do your readings and keep the cards in the closet if he wanted, and he looked at you like you'd suggested drowning a kitten.
"It's your gift," he said. "Why would I want you to hide it?"
Later, when the moon is high and the fair lights are starting to dim, you sit together on the boardwalk with your shoes off, toes buried in cool sand, sharing a funnel cake.
"We should get home," you say, but you don't move. "Salem and Nova are probably destroying something."
"They're fine, Nova's probably sleeping on my tool bag, and Salem's judging her from the windowsill."
"How do you know that?"
"Because that's what they do every time I'm there." He licks powdered sugar off his thumb. "Those cats have a very established routine. Nova loves me, Salem tolerates me… it's a good system."
You smile, leaning your head on his shoulder. "Salem tolerates everyone, that's just his personality. Nova loves anyone who gives her attention. They're not a good benchmark."
"Okay." He pauses. "Then you love me. And you're a much better benchmark."
You go still. The word hangs in the air between you, but he doesn't take it back. He just turns his head and looks at you, waiting, his eyes reflecting the last of the carnival lights.
"I do," you whisper. "I love you."
His smile is small and yet so full of hope it makes your chest ache. "I love you too. I think I started loving you the day you shut the door on my face."
"You have terrible taste."
"Must be the century I was born in, we liked 'em feisty."
You laugh, pushing at his chest, and he catches your hand and presses a kiss to your knuckles. You sit like that for a long time, watching the tide come in, his thumb tracing slow circles in your palm. Eventually, he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out the fortune card from Madam Zola's machine.
"Do you think it's true?" he asks quietly. "The whole destiny thing. Do you really believe we were supposed to find each other?"
You look at the card, then at him—the man who was born over a hundred years ago, who fought a war and survived things you can't imagine, that sometimes admit not knowing how to do any of this, but that tries anyway for you.
"I believe," you start, "that the cards pointed me in a direction. They told me to wait, to not settle for something that wasn't right." You turn his hand over, tracing the lines of his palm—his life line, long and unbroken; the heart line, deep and sure. "But I don't think they made this happen, Bucky. I think we did. I think you showed up at my shop and you were rude and impossible and I couldn't stop thinking about you anyway. I think we let Maggie manipulate us into falling in love. The cards didn't do that, we did."
"Okay," he says. "I like that better anyway."
"Me too."
He folds the car again and tucks it back into his pocket, over his heart. "I'm keeping this, though. As evidence."
"Evidence of what?"
"That sometimes the universe gets it right."
You don't pull cards that night, haven't done it for a while, because you don't need to. You fall asleep with Bucky's heartbeat against your back, Salem purring at your feet, Nova curled on the pillow between you like a furry chaperone, and you dream of nothing at all—just the deep, peaceful dark of a life that's finally exactly where it's meant to be.
pairing: brother's best friend!bucky barnes x f!reader, AU setting
summary: It doesn't matter that you're obsessed with your brother's best friend - the one you have had a very complicated relationship with since childhood. It doesn't matter that you fantasise about him, nor does it matter that you keep a diary of all your dirty thoughts because he will never, ever know.
warnings: 18+ mdni!!, smut with minor plot, childhood frenemies to lovers, fingering, unprotected p in v, dumbification, creampie, dacryphilia, mean bucky, size kink, brat taming, bigdick!bucky, tummy bulge, general filth and debauchery, jealousy, use of petnames (sweetheart, baby, angel etc.), reader described having hair bucky can twirl and as being smaller than bucky, no use of y/n, lots of cursing, bucky convinces reader to let him hit it raw (idk if that's a warning lol), moodboard pics do not depict reader
word count: 11.1k
a/n: idk if this is deranged in a hot way or just deranged but i hope you enjoy lmao. bucky is very mean in this and invades reader's privacy so stay away if that's not your thing!!
The abrasive, thrumming buzz of the lawnmower lets you know he’s back. You stop tapping on your phone, pausing for just a moment while you try to resist the urge. You fail. You pull up to your knees and peer out the window beside your bed.
Bucky is in your back garden, driving forward the shabby rusted lawnmower that lives in your shed. The one that has likely never been used by anyone but him. He’s not shirtless like he sometimes is - he’s in a black t-shirt - but you swear you can make out the muscles of his strong back even from this distance. The way they clench and tense with mild exertion. A heat settles low and deep in your stomach.
He’s waving before you realise you’ve been caught. You roll your eyes - exaggerate it a bit so you know he can see - and slump down on your bed again when he gives you a slanted smile.
The air around you feels damp and raw now in a way that has very little to do with the early summer heat. You force yourself onto your stomach and stuff your face into your pillow.
You can’t keep doing this to yourself.
Or, rather, he can’t keep doing this to you. However excruciating his presence is when your family is around, it’s so much worse when they’re not.
Most of the time you want to throttle him. It had been that way since you were kids. You can still feel the grovelling embarrassment of being somewhere close to ten years old and begging him and your brother to let you tag along with them to do something stupid like peeking through the dirt-grimed windows of a neighbour’s house or sneaking into a derelict, moss-eaten hotel until someone called the cops. In defiance of all stereotypes, your brother never had a problem with it. He has doted on you since you were in the cradle.
Bucky, though. He was never receptive to it. He would let you make your case, watching you humble yourself with calculating, amused eyes that looked slightly wrong on a boy of only twelve years. You can still remember how he would make a big show of deliberating, before simply handing out a ‘no’, and moving away. Your brother would shoot you a remorseful grin but always followed after him without hesitation.
On the rare occasions he did let you trail after them, he made you regret it. He would poke and prod at you, pulling lightly at your hair or making fun of you until big, fat, brutally-resisted tears would well up in your eyes. Oh, you remember how much he used to enjoy that - the mean smile he wore while he called you a crybaby. It always ended with your brother sternly telling him to lay off, before walking you home.
Your parents refused to hear a bad word about him. They still won’t.
You’re not really sure what is up with Bucky’s family and his home life. You just know that he had always spent more time at your house than his own. Once summer rolled around, it was like he forgot he even had a house of his own to begin with.
Your parents treat him less like a guest and more like a favourite son. The guest bedroom became Bucky’s room when you were eleven. When he tinkers around and puts together your mom’s overly-complicated coffee machine or fixes the hot water or - the very worst - mows the lawn, your parents treat him like a king. They rave in public and private about how they don’t know what they would do without him. When you had tried to tattle as a kid, the most you would get was a patient rub on the back.
It was a push and pull between the two of you. Always had been. Bucky was either acting bothered at your presence, poking and prodding at you cruelly - or irritating you with his own presence and annoying taunts.
And all of that was annoying. Is annoying. But nothing compares to that feeling. The one you’re experiencing right now.
It started when you were pushing sixteen. You had stopped asking to tag along a few years ago but that summer was different. Bucky was told by your brother, firmly and categorically, that you would be hanging out with them whether he liked it or not. He stared at you with odd fixity but made no protests and suddenly you were part of the friend group. Your brother had a crush on your best friend Wanda, who was also hanging around a lot that summer. That played into it. But you took it as a win regardless.
You spent most of your time that summer hanging out in a clearing in the woods by your house. There was nothing else to do and even if there was, you had no money to do it. Most of the details of the day itself now evade you - they’re blurry around the edges. There was a new addition to the group whose name you cannot now remember. A persistent, uncomfortable pass made for you. Your brother distracted by Wanda. A few coarse comments made, before the new guy began to touch.
What you do remember - what you well and truly cannot forget - is what happened after that touch. The way Bucky propelled up from where he sat on tree branches and lichen. How he grabbed the collar of What’s-his-name and flung him to the ground with one heavy, solid punch. The silence afterwards. The crawling shameful pang of excitement in your gut.
You never looked at him the same.
It’s not for lack of trying.
God - you try. You try so hard. You have tried for so many years. But every fling you had in college ended up wearing his face when you closed your eyes.
Thoughts of him run through your mind while you fill your pillow up with gasps. You’re sure that if you wrung out the fabric or pressed down hard, those sighs would have to spill back out, surround the room with breathless cries of his name.
But you have graduated now. You’re back home until you find a full-time job and this childhood crush will no longer do. It’s remarkably inconvenient, the way your knees go weak and wobbly when he walks in the room, even while you paint a snarl on. The way a hot, sticky warmth begins to flood the space between your thighs when you watch him work like he is today.
And you’ve tried everything there is to try. You’ve tried dating other people - it usually ends sour. You made a trip or two to the counsellor on campus. You had even left stop-sign stickers around your dorm room as a reminder to snap out of it when you are thinking about him.
At Wanda’s recommendation, you have started a diary. Every time you think about him or let yourself get stupidly, fantastically turned on by him, you create a new entry. Not all of the entries are about him - some are flimsy little notes to distract yourself - but they all lead back to him one way or another. Once the book is full, you will burn it. You started it just before you left campus three weeks ago and the book is almost half-way full.
You know it’s a stupid idea. It won’t work, which is why you have already sought out a witch on Etsy for when this fails.
The deep, low tingle at the bottom of your stomach hasn’t ceased, because even while deep in thought, the image of Bucky’s strong back and his bold, lopsided smile are still running behind your eyes. You become suddenly aware that you’re lightly sweating. Your underwear is warm and damp.
You glance over at your diary on your bedside table - most recent entry late last night, courtesy of your traitorous imagination. You sigh and pick it up.
Bucky sees you in the window to your bedroom. You’re just a little floating head above the window sill. He can’t make out an expression very clearly. He waves and forces back a laugh when he sees your bratty eye-roll, the way you flop away dramatically.
You’re back home. For the summer, at least. Until all those fancy graduate jobs in New York or Boston or Philly start opening up.
He doesn’t need to be here, if he’s being honest. Has no reason to be. The lawn has no need for mowing and there’s not a damned thing left in the house to be fixed. His own apartment isn’t exactly a paradise, but it’s not bad either.
You won’t be here forever, though. He’ll take what he can get in the meantime.
He likes how it feels to annoy you without a buffer. With no parents to be on his best behaviour in front of, no brother to shoot him warning glances when he pokes too hard.
He regresses slightly every time he floats back into your orbit. Falls out of adulthood and back into the familiar rhythm. The push and pull.
His childhood crush has matured into something deeper, but his actions haven’t. He still tugs your pigtails in a metaphorical sense. It’s much too late to get you to see him as anything but an annoying, big brother-type figure now, but he can deal with that. He likes watching you get riled up, anyway.
You regress around him too. He takes great satisfaction in that. You walk into the house after months of being away, haughty and put-together, like you had finally done all your growing up in college. A few grating words from him can make you twitch a little bit while you fight the urge to snap, irritation spilling through the cracks. And you eventually do crack. All the way. Every single time.
He mows until the short tufts of grass turn to clippings. He spares no blade, weed or flower and thinks about you, lying up on your bed. Probably doing something dumb. Probably scrolling on your phone or flipping through some magazine. He remembers when you were thirteen and he found that stash of teen-pop magazines in your room, the pages with boyband members dog-eared, hearts circled around their pictures. He smiles, thinking about the way you screamed when you caught him red-handed. How you told him to “stop being such a pain in my ass”, pushing him out your bedroom door and slamming it shut behind him while he laughed. You were sulky at dinner afterwards.
He rolls the mower back into the shed, ties the padlock and tugs at it twice before walking into the house through the sliding glass doors.
He’s sweating lightly. He takes a quick swallow of water from the glass on the counter - whether it’s yours or his, he can’t remember - and licks a few beads of moisture from his upper lip. He feels good.
He flops down on the couch, puts on some show indiscriminately and wonders what you’re doing right now. He wonders if you’re on the phone with your college friends. Or with that Matt guy he had heard about through the grapevine. He wonders if you’re wearing the same tight shorts you had on yesterday.
He considers going upstairs to annoy you but thinks better of it. He will wait a while to see if you come downstairs on your own.
He imagines Matt as some football player. He can’t picture a face - just some obscure blur - but he’s probably handsome. Definitely blonde. Social butterfly. Good grades. He can’t see you going for someone without good grades.
Bucky’s grades were never great, but you were such a little swot. He used to sit alongside you while you did your homework. When you would tell him to get lost, he would shoot back that he had homework to do too. It’s probably the only reason he graduated high school.
Matt is probably biding his time right now until you both have steady jobs so he can propose. He’s probably boring as shit. Fucks you missionary for thirty seconds before rolling over onto his back. He probably asks you whether you came afterwards, and you probably talk to your stupid college friends about how much he cares and how respected you feel.
But that’s a dangerous avenue to walk down. Because now he’s thinking about how you would look afterwards, naked and unsatisfied. Would you ever think about shooting him a text when Matt drifts off to sleep after getting his rocks off? See if he could sort you out any better than your boring fuck of a boyfriend?
Obviously not. But it’s a nice thought.
You probably don’t do any of the things that Bucky would want to do with you - and definitely not with Missionary Matt. You’re too fucking prissy. No way in hell are you letting anyone take you the way Bucky wants to.
He doesn’t even understand why his brain has chosen you of all people to be the star of every daydream he has had since he was old enough to know what a crush was. You’re arrogant and spoiled and you think that just because you attract men like flies to shit that you can bat your eyes and get whatever you want. (You absolutely can. Bucky has tried to be the one exception to that rule, but he’s also just a man.)
Unfortunately, he knows all of this and still desires you desperately. And the want that pours out of him in waves isn’t strictly sexual - in fact, it’s mostly something else - but he’s not sure how to define it. He likes you, except ’like’ doesn’t seem strong enough to cover all he feels. So it’s easier to focus on the sex. Maybe that way he can convince himself it’s all he wants.
He has run out of patience. You still haven’t come downstairs and he can only deny himself for so long.
He takes the stairs two-at-a-time, but paces himself so you don’t hear his footsteps and think he’s eager. Your bedroom is at the very end of the hall. When he approaches your white door - still adorned with stickers and tags from every phase you ever went through - he thinks about knocking. He doesn’t.
He can’t remember the last time that he was in your room, but it is exactly as it always was. Pink wallpaper. A white desk in the corner armed with perfectly positioned sticky notes and neat, alphabetised folders. Stuffed animals perched in a line atop your bed like marching soldiers. Posters on the walls from films you thought made you seem edgy when you were fifteen, in direct opposition to the frilly pink decor of the room.
The only thing missing is you, but he can hear the shower going in your ensuite.
He goes to sit down on your bed and focuses deeply on not getting a hard-on while he watches the bathroom door. But he lands on something solid.
Reaching underneath his thigh, he picks up a little pink notebook, turns it over in his hands. More little stickers plastered to the front, hearts scribbled onto it with a pink gel pen. He knows instantaneously that he has gold dust in his goddamn hands. He expects to feel at least a little guilt or shame for what he is about to do and is mildly surprised to find he doesn’t.
This is your diary.
The first entry is from three weeks ago.
22 May
I just broke up with Matt. It was awful. He kept asking me why. I had to say that I didn’t want to live in Boston like him. He said he would find a different internship and we could go to New York instead, and then I really had no idea what to say. It’s not like I could tell him the real reason. He cried. I’m just glad it’s over.
I think I should feel at least a little bit sad about it, but I don’t. I’m just relieved and feeling awkward. I don’t think I could let him fuck me one more time without going out of my mind. This really is a curse. I hope he moves on quickly. I think Suzy is into him.
Bucky can’t help the stupid grin that breaks out across his face. Looks like Missionary Matt was too boring, even for prim little you. No engagement on the horizon after all. He shifts around slightly on the bed in the guest bedroom and tries not think about what might have been so lacking in the bedroom with Matt for you.
23 May
My family are ditching me. They’re all heading off to the south of France for three weeks, but I won’t be home from college early enough. They fucking suck. I wonder if Bucky will still be hanging around. Three weeks of torture incoming.
He laughs, loud and long, at that. What a spoiled little brat. Still, it’s kind of cute.
Bucky was asked to join your family on their holiday and declined. Partially because he still, after all this time, doesn’t quite believe them when they say it’s not a bother. But it was mostly because of a selfish hankering to be able to hang out with you alone. To not have to check himself when his gaze lingers a little too long or when he presses you a bit too hard to be able to convincingly feign disinterest. He reads on.
23 May
Now that I have thought about it, I can’t stop. Bucky is going to be hanging around the house. He always hangs around the house, even when nobody else is there. Dad said he’s going to help him with building a new shed outside. I wonder if he will be doing that while they’re gone. I remember that one time he helped Dad with that old vintage car he bought on a whim. I could see him from my window. He was shirtless and working under the car from a skateboard like something out of a goddamn porno. I think I’ll die if I have to see him do something like that again.
Bucky’s grin is frozen on his face, skin heating up around his bones. The shed would be a good excuse to stick around now that he’s done everything else - he had forgotten about that.
He wasn’t aware you had been watching him fix up that car from your window. That must have been, what - two? three? - years ago. Old Pontiac runs like new now. His eyes catch on the word ‘porno’, scribbled in your pink, curly writing. He thinks about you watching him from above.
24 May
I might be going insane. I shouldn’t have let myself think of the visual of Bucky under that stupid car last night. I think it’s a good thing I dumped Matt. I would have let him fuck me and felt so guilty afterwards for imagining someone else. I handled it myself but I woke up feeling just as riled up. My fingers aren’t big enough. Maybe I should buy a dildo or something. Bucky’s fingers are huge. One time he put his hand over my mouth because he said I was whining too much and it covered more than half of my face.
The blood rushes to his cock so fast it leaves him lightheaded. He has to read the entry twice to make sure he didn’t black out and invent something out of wishful thinking.
25 May
This stupid diary isn’t doing shit. It’s making it worse. Every time I write something down, it just makes me think about it more. I spent all of yesterday thinking about Bucky’s stupid fingers. I hate him so much. I want him to bend me over something and fuck me until I’m an inch from passing out. Maybe that’s all I need to get this out of my system.
26 May
Today I thought about that time last summer when we were at the bonfire and I made out with that guy in the Bulls jersey and snapback. I forget his name.
Bucky looked so angry. I think that’s why I did it. I think I wished he was jealous, even though I know he was just pretending he’s my fucking brother or something. It made me think of that time he punched that other guy in the clearing in the woods just for touching me. I forget that guy’s name too.
Bucky hasn’t forgotten either of their names. The bonehead from the bonfire was Jon and the asshole from the woods was Robby. And he was jealous. He was so fucking jealous. His dick is hard as a rock in his jeans, head spinning.
28 May
Yesterday was ok. I kept myself busy. Today has been terrible. Mom sent me a group picture of everyone eating dinner out in the back garden and Bucky was wearing a tight, white t-shirt. He looked so big, even bigger than when I last saw him. I just kept wondering if his cock would be big too. I zoomed in and took a screenshot like some fucking pervert. I got myself off so many times and I still feel like I haven’t gotten it out of my system. I literally fingered myself until my sheets were-
“Fuck,” he grunts, strained even to his own ears. His eyes squeeze shut and his dick throbs violently at the idea of your little fingers pushing themselves into your pussy at the thought of him. He’s not sure how much more of this he can read before jizzing in his pants like some kind of virgin.
Who knew? Who fucking knew? His stuck-up little priss isn’t so prissy after all. He’s a bit dizzy with want and some other unidentifiable sensation. Something warm and gooey in his chest.
He almost likes how ashamed you are of it. It makes it that much more satisfying - like he’s won some game that he didn’t even know he was playing. He’s dimly aware of the fact that he lost the very same game himself, but he ignores it.
You would be so embarrassed to find out he is reading this. You would yell and scream and throw shit around the room in a tantrum like a toddler. You might never speak to him again. Even so, he can’t help himself but flick over the pages to the most recent entry. It feels like a spoiler to a book he hasn’t finished.
14 June
He came around with the lawnmower again. It’s getting harder every day not to get myself off to the thought of him-
He clearly missed that part. He wonders how long ago you made that resolution. He will find out soon enough.
-when he looks that good. I could literally see the fucking muscles in his back through his t-shirt and it was black. I’m so fucking wet. I’m going to have a long, cold shower and tonight I’ll cum to the thought of someone else. Literally anyone else.
Then and there, Bucky decides that won’t be happening.
You feel better after your laborious shower but only for a matter of minutes. You walk into your room wrapped in your bathrobe and notice that you can no longer hear the lawnmower. Bucky must have finished the job. He’s probably in the shower now, washing off the pollen and sweat.
And that does it. You sigh at the stickiness forming between your legs and reach over to your bedside table for your diary.
Except it’s not there.
You open and close the small drawer underneath. Ruffle around in your sheets and pick up your stuffed animals one-by-one to look make sure they’re not sitting on it. Eventually you get up and remove the duvet from the mattress, pull the bed frame away from the wall, crawl to the floor. You even go to the bathroom to make sure you didn’t carry it in with you. It’s not there. It’s not anywhere.
You must have left it lying out somewhere outside. Your stomach lurches into your throat. Except that’s not possible, because your last entry was written right here on this bed just before you went in for your shower. You had left your room to get a towel and steal some of your mother’s hair stuff - maybe you had inadvertently carried it out with you. You had been severely distracted.
You dress as quickly as you can physically manage, ignoring the way your wet hair is soaking through your cotton sweatshirt, but when you leave your room your footsteps are hesitant and careful. The idea of Bucky picking up your diary somewhere and deciding to give it a browse sends a cold sweat of terror up the knobs of your spine. Oh god, don’t let him find it. Please don’t let him find it.
You tear the linen closet apart. You even pick up the piles of towels that you know you didn’t touch and shake them out. Nothing. You fold them in a way that would make your mother wince and put them back.
Your parents’ room wields no results either. You run your fingers over the wooden bannister faintly while you walk down the stairs. Bucky isn’t there - thankfully - but neither is your diary. You hadn’t even come downstairs between writing your last entry and going for your shower. That, you’re absolutely certain of. But you’re running out of options.
You have one room left to check, but you will have to play your cards carefully. One wrong move, a bit too much information, and you could find yourself on the receiving end of questions that you would really prefer not to be asked. Or of a bit too much curiosity for your liking.
Your fingers linger over the wood of Bucky’s bedroom door for a whole minute before you can bring yourself to commit to a small, tentative knock. Bucky grunts on the other side and it’s untranslatable but you take it to be an in invite.
He’s lounging on his bed, one ankle hooked over the other, head reclined back to rest lazily on the headboard. He doesn’t move his bored gaze from the television, where some reality television documentary about the daily lives of zoo veterinarians is playing. You’re distracted by it momentarily. You didn’t think this would be his sort of thing.
“What’s up?” he asks you, still not looking your way. He didn’t shower. He’s still sweaty and tense, the smell of grass sticking to his clothes and skin. You try not to look.
“Just saying hi,” you say, shifting feet. You look at the door for a brief moment before deciding to close it awkwardly behind you.
He looks at you then, one eyebrow and one side of his lip quirking upwards in tandem. “Just saying hi.”
You nod. His smile breaks free then, but it’s not altogether a nice one. “Well, hi,” he says.
“Hi,” you mumble back. You continue to look at each other while you fidget, stepping forward cautiously until your knees hit his bed. You look at him expectantly and he rolls his eyes before moving his own legs so you can sit.
“What’s got you all buggy?” he asks sardonically, giving you a light tap on the side with his foot. He’s not wearing his boots anymore, but some grass still rubs off on you somehow. You rub your side and shoot him a look as if it hurt, even though it didn’t.
“I’m not buggy.”
“Yeah y’are. You got bugs.”
“You got bugs,” you snap. “I’m perfectly fine.”
He laughs. “Alright, you don’t got bugs. I have bugs ‘cause I was out there mowing all day. Now what do you want?”
Your stomach gives an odd jerking motion at the memory of him out there mowing the lawn. You try to keep any guilt from showing on your face. “Maybe I just wanna talk to you.”
“Oh yeah?” He doesn’t seem convinced. You nod.
“Yeah,” you say, picking at a loose thread his bedsheet. “So what have you been up to?”
“Sweetheart, what’s goin’ on?” he chuckles, turning slightly on his side so he can see you. “You know what I’ve been up to. You saw me out there.”
“Duh,” you say. You roll your eyes again and you can feel him laugh more than you can hear it - the minute little vibration through the sheets. His skin is inches away from yours. If you reached out just a little bit, you could touch his hand.
“Duuuhhh,” he mimics you with an exaggerated Valley-girl drawl. “Why’d you ask then, smartass?”
“I meant, like, after that.”
“After I finished the lawn?”
You nod. You are so desperately bad at this.
“Not much. Watched this,” he says, pointing at the TV. He gets distracted by something there and begins to watch it again. “Did a bit of light reading. What about you?”
Your heart is moving up in a slow but steady elevator to the base of your neck. “I’ve been in the shower,” you say casually. “What are you reading?”
“Long shower,” he says.
“Well it was an everything-shower,” you say defensively, forgetting yourself for a moment.
“The hell is an everything shower?”
“Don’t be dense. It’s literally in the name. It’s called an everything shower because you do everything in the shower.”
His gaze flies back to you then, dark and questioning, eyebrows raised slightly. It takes for his lip to twitch into a small smile before you come to your senses.
“A-as in,” you stammer. “You do all your self-care stuff. Like shaving and exfoliating and hair masks. That kind of everything.”
His smile widens and he nods, half sarcastically. “Right. That kind of everything.”
Your face heats up. There’s a brief pause.
“So what are you reading at the mo-”
“Y’know I think you’d like this,” he says, pointing over to the TV again. You glance over distractedly. A giraffe is giving birth standing up. You can’t help the way your nose twitches slightly as you take in all the blood and goo onscreen.
“Why is that?” you ask.
“There’s this one girl who cries every time an animal dies. She’s been working there five years and she still cries every time. She’s like you.”
“I’m not like that.”
“Yes you are,” he laughs and the sound travels through you. “Remember that one time you cried because your dad asked me to catch and kill that mouse?”
You do. He had been strangely nice about the whole thing. He made a makeshift humane trap and brought it to the old railway line a few miles away instead.
“I was sixteen-”
“And if you’re tryna tell me you wouldn't react the same way right now, I say you’re full of shit.”
You look at him resentfully. “Like you’re any tougher. You’re the one who saved him.”
“Well you know I can’t help but give you what you want once the waterworks start. You’re a pretty crier, sweetheart.”
You just look at him, feeling a bit dazed and uncomprehending. Saliva floods your mouth and you’re forced to swallow. He just glances over at you for the smallest of instances. You like the handsome, self-satisfied smile he gives himself before turning back to his programme, even though it’s at your expense. You know instinctively that you’ll be failing at your new resolution tonight.
“Shut up. Don’t be weird,” you say, because you can think of nothing else. He huffs with humour and there’s something in his expression that you don’t like.
“So you said you were reading something?” you say. You’re aiming for a casual tone but you think you might be overselling it.
“Mhm,” he says, nodding once. The programme can’t be that interesting, but he seems absorbed in it.
“I didn’t think you liked reading.”
“I have a newfound appreciation for it.” He smiles at the screen and maybe you’re feeling a little jealous. You snatch the remote out of his hands, careful not to let your fingers brush, and blackness eats the image of a family of monkeys. His eyes snap to you with amused surprise.
“What are you reading?”
Your heart is pumping while Bucky appraises you for a second, eyes sliding their way around your flustered face. He licks his bottom lip slowly before sucking it into his mouth. He speaks low.
“Don’t worry about it. ’S’too dirty for you, sweetheart.”
You really fucking hope that doesn’t mean what you think it does. He has the book. Oh dear god, don’t let him have the book.
Your voice comes out weak and fractured. “Are you… reading smut?”
He laughs again, face lit up. Eyes still on you. “That what you call it? Sure. Something like that, at least.”
“Bucky,” you say, voice no more than a horrified whisper. There’s a brutal heat curling in your gut - embarrassment and something else. “What are you reading? Please.”
He looks at you for just a second longer before reaching under the blanket beside him. His hand reaches out again, fingers curled around a book that looks incredibly small in his large palm.
You blink at it for just a second, as if concentrating hard enough might make it disappear. Please make it disappear. Please make it nothing at all.
But then you’re rolling forward, hardly aware of what you’re doing until your back is bowed, a low, despairing groan escaping you while your limbs slip away from you. Eventually you’re played across the bottom of the bed, face firmly pressed to the soft memory foam. If you stay here long enough, your face might imprint itself there. A garbled, monotonous litany is spilling from your lips. You’re not even sure what you’re saying.
Your stomach is going haywire. Bucky is laughing like you knew he would - you fucking knew he would be an asshole about this - and you would go running from the room if it didn’t mean that you would have to move your face from the bed and look at him.
You suppose it’s better that he’s laughing than looking at you with the raw kind of disgust that you had pictured whenever you imagined him finding out about your feelings towards him. Maybe it means that you two can go back to normal at some point, even if the humiliation raging through your body begs to differ.
“Don’t be such a baby,” Bucky says and you hate him. Your face pops up to look at his. Still amused. Still wicked and gleeful.
“Where did you get that?” you bark.
“Your room,” he says, as if it should be obvious. “Interesting read. You should be a writer with that vivid imagination. What did you call it, smut?”
“Fuck you!” you screech, and Bucky physically recoils at the loud noise, irritation crawling onto his features for the first time in this interaction. “You had no right to go into my room and invade my privacy. What the hell is wrong with you? You are such a piece of shit!”
Bucky rolls his eyes while you make your way up the bed and take a swing for his chest. He catches your wrists in time and your traitorous body pauses at the touch.
“Like I said,” he says sternly. “Don’t be such a baby. You need me to help you get this out of your system? What was it you said again? Bend you over and fuck you until you’re an inch from passing out?”
You give one last valiant jerk to break free, but he has a death grip with seemingly minimal effort. You go still while the fight leaves you. Hot humiliation and more than a little arousal course through you.
“Fuck you,” you say again with considerably less vitriol.
“I will,” he says, eyes locked on yours punishingly. “If that’s what you want.”
Your breath stutters, heat rising up the length of your face. You’re not sure if he’s messing with you, but the words are having the intended effect regardless. Your thighs press together gently to alleviate some of the pressure that his words and his eye-contact are creating. His eyes flicker down quickly, following the movement, before moving back up to meet your own gaze.
“Got nothing to say now? That’s ok, baby. I saw enough in that little book. Let’s look.”
He lets go of your wrists and you immediately lurch forward to grasp the diary, but he gets there first. He opens it at a random page.
“I came home from college today,” he starts to read, voice low. “Everyone else was gone, but Bucky was here. I don’t know how it’s possible but he’s so much hotter since I last saw him. He wears a bit of stubble now and his muscles were almost bursting out of his t-shirt. We bickered a little bit in the evening, but the whole time I was just wondering what he’s like in bed. I don’t think he would be sweet and soft all the time, like Matt. Maybe sometimes but I think he would be so mean and rough most of the time. He seems like he knows how to make a girl cum.”
He looks up at you. You feel tears prickle behind your eyes, shame steamrolling through you. You reach for the book again but he moves it out of your reach effortlessly.
“You’re goddamn right I do,” he says, smiling as if he’s talking about something totally innocent. “You want me to show you, sweetheart?”
Your brain is scrambled and the only thing escaping your lips is a garbled mess of vowels. You’re still suspicious. It wouldn’t be entirely unlike him to get you to admit to this and then pull the rug out from under you a moment later.
He huffs an impatient sigh. “Don’t go dumb on me already, silly girl.”
He flicks to another page in the book, smiles, and finally hands it over to you. You take it uncertainly.
“Why don’t you read that for me? Out loud. Jog your memory a bit.”
You’re not sure what you’re doing, but at this point it’s easier to follow instructions than to figure out what to do yourself. You look down, take another hesitant glance at an encouraging Bucky and begin to read with a sheepish, shameful tone. Your face is burning.
“I want him so bad. I think I’ll die if I don’t have him. The orgasms I’m giving myself aren’t enough. I need him to fuck me, even just one time. I’ll never ask for anything else again in my life if I can get his cock inside me just once. I’m going so deranged, I actually pictured him choking me yesterday with those huge hands and it made me cum so hard.”
Your own words have done a number on you. You are stupidly, ridiculously turned on by his eyes on you and your own words echoing around the room. You raise your eyes slowly and sheepishly to meet his and the look on his face is nothing short of starving.
“Fuck it,” he breathes, pulling you forward and into a kiss.
Your unsuspecting mouth meets his with short, stabbing gasps. His right arm moves to the back of your neck, pulling you against him firmly, while the prosthetic arm pulls you onto his lap. His lips move against yours and the only word to describe it is filthy. His lips are still wet from licking them and his tongue is sliding over yours delicately but expertly.
You’re in a state of euphoria. Part of you always wondered whether you had played this up too much in your head. You wondered - if you were given the chance to finally touch him like this, whether it might be a bit disappointing after all you had imagined.
If possible, it might be the opposite. Your body is shaking with adrenaline. Without thinking too much about it, you grind down on his lap and feel his hard length through his jeans. A bolt shoots up your spine. Has he been hard this whole time?
He grunts at the friction, calloused fingers tightening their hold on you. His hand glides slowly down from your neck, through the valley of your breasts and over your stomach, playing with the waistband of your cotton shorts. You’re already so riled up, it makes you press down on him again, clutching at his shoulders as if you could possibly pull him any closer. You’re high off the feel of him when he pulls away, just a few inches.
“You ready to admit it yet? That you want me?”
“I want you,” you breathe. It’s almost embarrassing how automatic the response is. How little you even have to think about it.
You feel his smile spreading against your own face. “I know, sweetheart. Of course I know. Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of you.”
Bucky is on the warpath, tearing your sweatshirt and his t-shirt off in quick succession. He takes a second to zero in on your breasts and you feel mildly self-conscious about your plain black bra, but he seems adequately distracted by them.
He slows down. Unclips your bra with languor. You shove away the sick, jealous feeling that creeps up when he doesn’t fumble even remotely with the clasp.
Once you’re bared to him, he seems to move slower. His hands go up to fondle them with uncharacteristic gentleness and you suck in a breath. His eyes darken to black, shiny knobs at your reaction and he maintains eye-contact with you while he presses a gentle kiss over your nipple, pulling it into his mouth.
A moan slips out at the sensation. So that’s what that should feel like.
“Wanna know a secret?” he murmurs between kissing and sucking, moving over to your other breast. You nod, uncertain whether or not he can see you.
“Want you too. Wanted you since we were kids.”
You look down at him. He is seemingly avoiding your eyes. Your brain is a little hazy but still operational for the most part.
“Since when?”
“Just fuckin’ told you,” he says, moving a warm hand up your thigh. It’s a distraction tactic.
“No but when? What age?” Your voice is coming out breathy with the way his thumb is creeping underneath your shorts, stroking the sensitive crease between your thigh and the hem of your underwear. You wonder with some apprehension if his fingers can sense the warmth radiation from you. You’re soaked through.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says, moving back up to kiss you. His thumb strokes over your panties now and you gasp into his mouth.
“Yes it does. Tell me,” you say. Because you’re muddled and jittery and incredibly fucking worked up, but more than all of that - you’re stubborn.
He gives you a hard look for a second, likely deciding whether he will be able to get you to let this go. You’re not.
“Was sweet on you when I was ten,” he says, rubbing you over your underwear harder now. Stars are exploding in your eyes, but the heavy, sluggish machinery that is your brain in its current state still chugs along at its steady, slow rhythm.
“Isn’t that when we first-”
“Yes.”
The shock almost overrides the sensation of his thumb slipping under the waistband of your underwear. But not quite. A loud, whining moan makes Bucky smile, but you still haven’t lost your head completely.
“You’ve liked me since we first met as little kids?”
He makes a loud, frustrated noise that vibrates through you and flips you over so you’re on your back. It happens so quick that it makes you dizzy. He folds himself over you and presses a vigorous kiss to your lips.
“Can you shut the hell up for two seconds?” he grunts, yanking your cotton shorts and underwear over your legs until you’re completely bare underneath him. “Tryna do something here.”
You laugh at him, but it doesn’t last long. He palms your breast briefly before trailing his fingers down, down, down. His fingers just barely graze over your clit and you buck up with a moan. All the humour is gone - you’re struggling to remember what you even found funny in the first place.
He brings his fingers up then to show them to you, glistening with your wetness. “You see how fucking desperate you are?” he asks. “Barely touched you and look how you’re reacting. Nobody’s ever touched you right, have they?”
You shake your head unthinkingly and his smile widens. It’s almost predatory.
“Poor thing,” he says with a smirk, lowering his hand once again to stroke over your clit. “I can tell. All jerky and twitchy. Just wait ‘till I get my cock in you.”
The whine you emit at his words slowly turns itself into a moan as he dips a finger into you. Slow, just feeling. He adds another when he sees how easily you accept the first. You had been right in everything you had ever thought about his fingers and how good they would feel inside you, how much they would stretch you out. Except it didn’t quite cover it.
None of the other college boys you had fucked had fingers like this. Calloused and big and rough. You clench around him when he begins to stroke, expertly curling into the perfect angle to hit that spongey spot inside you. Where the fuck did he learn to do this?
He presses you down with his other hand splayed over your stomach, stopping your hips which are moving down, trying to meet the rhythm of his fingers. The pressure it puts on your lower stomach makes you clench around him.
“Y’feel so fucking tight,” he grunts, eyes on your lips. “This what you wanted, huh? This what you touched yourself thinking about?”
You nod, but it’s not enough. He pauses his ministrations and raises his eyebrows for an answer.
“Yes, I- fuck, yes keep going - I thought about this when I got myself off.”
“For how long?” he demands.
“I- what?” you ask, feeling a bit dumb. His lip twitches impatiently.
“How long have you been thinking about me like this? With my fingers stuffing your tight little pussy?”
Your face heats up with shame, but you know if you don’t answer him, he will stop again. And that’s a lousy deal.
“A long time,” you say, hoping he will accept it as an answer. Thankfully, he does.
“Fuck, sweetheart. Should’ve told me. Wouldn’t have let you go unsatisfied like all these other assholes. Would’ve kept this pussy so busy, you wouldn’t have had the time to write in that silly little book. Would’ve put you in your place.”
“Put me in my place?” you spit, dragged out of the floaty headspace you had been in. Unfortunately you can’t concentrate too much on your anger and indignation. The pleasure he’s giving you is too much to hold on to anything else but him. It does nothing to stave off your incoming orgasm - if it wasn’t so fucked up, you might admit that it probably brings you closer to the edge. His fingers push into you smooth and hard. He grinds his palm against your clit.
“Yeah, put you in your place. Such a fucking spoiled brat, always throwing tantrums and bitching. Whole time you just needed a good fuck. Well I’ll give you plenty, baby. Sort you right out. Your family can thank me for your good behaviour when they’re home.”
There’s something fucked up about the way his mean - and undoubtedly problematic - words push you over the edge. You clench down and all but explode over his fingers, bright spots in your eyes. You’re not sure if you’ve ever come so fast before, or so intensely. Your head is still spinning while you come down, twitching around his fingers until he draws them back out.
Your vision is still slightly blurred, but you see Bucky sliding his fingers into his mouth. He doesn’t even make a show of it - he’s not even trying to make you watch him. He’s just tasting you for the pleasure of it. Your pussy jumps.
When he kisses you, you can taste yourself on his tongue. You should be spent by now, or at least somewhat less horny but you’re not. Your brain and body have clearly made a pact to make the most of your time with the man who has been driving you crazy for years. You begin to gush again when he bites your bottom lip. He releases a smoky chuckle against your mouth when your hips twitch against him.
He pulls up, standing over the bed to unbutton his jeans.
You’re still a little mad at him over that boorish ‘putting you in your place’ comment, but it does not stop you from getting dizzy when his cock is bared to you.
He’s the biggest you’ve ever seen and it’s not even close. Part of you knew he would be, but you didn’t think it would be this pretty. You didn’t even know a cock could be pretty.
It’s huge and rock hard where it presses up on his stomach. It’s very slightly curved with veins running up the flushed, heavy length. Your arm raises upwards unconsciously just to see how it would look in your hand, but you think better of it and quickly tuck it away again.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” he asks and you realise he has been watching your reaction the whole time. Your face burns. “Feelin’ shy?”
Your mouth opens and closes. “I don’t know how much…” you trail off, uncharacteristically nervous. You’ve never had a problem butting heads with Bucky before. Why is he so intimidating like this?
“Y’don’t know if it’ll fit?” he asks. You nod lightly and watch his cock give a small, light twitch. He takes it in his hand and gives it one slow pump. It makes your mouth hang open.
“Don’t worry, angel, we’ll take it slow. Don’t want to break you. Not this time, anyway.”
Feeling brave, you reach forward and take his warm, heavy cock in your fingers. It looks so much bigger in your hand than it does in his own and the sight makes your gut curl in both dread and excitement. He throws his head back, eyes half-lidded and dazed.
You give him one small pump and he grabs your wrist, shaking his head at you. You glare up at him.
“What the hell, Bucky? Don’t-”
He leans forward, grabbing your jaw in his hand roughly. “I know you wanna play with it so bad, sweetheart, but you can do that later. I’ll let you play with it as much as you want. But I’ve waited long enough and I’m not wasting another second. Gonna fill that tight cunt now. You hear me?”
You’re back in that floaty headspace, body feeling light, head feeling dreamy. You nod.
He smiles, using his leverage on your jaw to bring you in for a kiss while he climbs on top of you. You can feel the head of his hard cock pressing against your stomach.
“Good girl,” he says, moving away to lather kisses over your neck. His hips move to press the tip of his cock against your clit and you gasp. “My good girl You’re so sweet when you’re doing what I tell you to. Wish I’d known I could shut you up like this.”
You’re trying to be pissed off. You really are. But if you can be completely honest with yourself, it’s just turning you on more.
Your brain is almost gone, but you have one last spark of sentience. “Condom,” you gasp. “In my room.”
Bucky laughs against your neck. “You think I’m wearin’ a rubber with you?”
“Wha- yes?”
“Don’t fuck with me, sweetheart, I know you’re on the pill. Seen it in your bathroom.”
“What were you doing in my-”
“I’m clean, just got checked. And I’m willing to bet you’ve never let anyone use this prissy little pussy without a condom before.”
You take a second, trying to assess how you feel about this. He really is such a douchebag, but he’s a douchebag you know incredibly well - he wouldn’t lie to you about this. You’re sure you could talk him into wearing a condom, but it might take a lot of back-and-forth. And his cock is teasing your hole now, and you’re squeezing around nothing, trying to suck him in. His cock is fully lubricated, all from the wetness between your thighs. You don’t say anything, but your body goes a bit limp.
“Yeah?” he says, celebrating his victory with a smile. You feel it against your collarbone. “You gonna let me skip the rubber?”
“Yeah,” you breathe. “Just stop fucking around Bucky. Please.”
He laughs lightly and begins to press in, the tight ring of muscle protesting against his size. You seize up while he stretches you out. It’s leaving a tight and uncomfortable sensation in your abdomen and you let out a quiet yelp.
“Such a good girl,” he says, reaching down to stroke your clit. He’s thrusting in slow, giving you just a little bit more with every press. His voice is low, as if he’s trying to comfort you, but it’s still coming across slightly patronising. “Letting me fuck you raw. Gonna take my cum like the good girl you are.”
You’re loosening up with the help of his dirty words and his fingers on your clit, drawing tight circles. It’s starting to feel good - more than good. But he’s still not in all the way. You have no idea how you’re going to take him.
His cock is insistent inside you, pressing in further and further while he whispers filthy praises and encouragements on your sweat-glistening skin. You brain is becoming jumbled with pleasure and the overwhelming sensation of fullness.
“This what you pictured when those other limp-dick assholes used to fuck you?” he grunts, bottoming out. You yelp at the angle he hits, body squirming around him. You thought you knew what getting fucked deep felt like, but you had never felt this.
He pulls out and presses another punishing thrust into you. You gasp. “Answer.”
“Yes,” you say and you might be on the verge of tears. You can’t wrap your head around what’s happening. Everything feels a little blurry and his finger on your clit is still drawing tight circles. You just know that you need him to move. “Pictured you every time.”
He rewards you by beginning to slowly pull out and in, gently getting you used to his size. You’re filled to the brim with him. “I know. Read all about it in that dirty little book. Made them take you doggy so you could pretend it was me. So fucking desperate.”
Shame and pleasure are amalgamating in your stomach. It’s creating something more powerful than just the feeling of him moving inside you. It’s all becoming a bit too much, but in a way that you can’t help but love.
“It’s okay, angel. I’m no better than you. You turn me into such a fucking creep. Picking up girls who look like you. Leaving the dinner table to jerk it in the bathroom when you get all bratty and whiny.”
Just the thought of that makes you startle, pussy clenching around him. He looks so pretty, blue eyes dark with want, pink lips crushed between his teeth, gaze zeroed in on where you’re taking him, the light imprint in your tummy. The pleasure of it - the culmination of all your want - has you gasping, tears leaking from your eyes and trickling down your cheeks.
He sees it and startles. You can read it all on his face now - the awe and adoration.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he cooes, thumb reaching up to brush a fat tear from the corner of your eye. “Always been such a crybaby. You’re so pretty like this, such a pretty crier.”
It makes the tears puddle faster, the pleasure bordering on too much.
“I know, baby. It’s so much, isn’t it? I know,” he soothes you, while his hips work in direct opposition - fucking into you with brutality. It’s not just the pleasure, but the overwhelming emotion. You can’t work out exactly what you’re feeling, and you know that now isn’t the time to figure it out anyway.
Instead, you just let yourself feel it. The way his hips grind against yours, the feeling of him stretching you out, the crescendo of all that pent-up want finally bursting into song. You can’t stop looking at him, how pretty and fucked-out he is above you, even when he’s still pretending he hasn’t lost an ounce of control.
“Stop with those fuckin’ eyes,” he grunts, catching your gaze. You’re still teary-eyed and pouty. “Gonna make me lose it early.”
The thought of him spilling inside you does nothing to curb the feeling. Your eyes widen and he grunts, pulling out of you and sitting up with his eyes squeezed shut. He takes a deep, dogged breath.
“Turn around,” he bites out.
With the way his face is pinched, eyes squeezed tight, he might be greatly suffering or experiencing a euphoria of pleasure. You don’t disobey a man at either point.
You spin around, face-down on the bed. You can hear him shuffle around, but seconds pass where you don’t feel his skin on yours. The anticipation makes you shiver.
When you finally do feel his touch, it’s his two hands slowly stroking down your hips. You lean backwards into his touch, whimpering just a little.
“What you whining for now?” he asks from behind you. You hear the smile in his voice.
“Put it back in,” you moan, pushing back on him until you feel his cock prod against your ass. You’re no longer feeling any shame at your desperation. You’re too far gone.
He takes your hip firmly with his prosthetic hand, the other moving down to give your ass a loving pat. “You need it that bad?”
“Don’t be a dick.”
He laughs low. “Still so fucking bratty. Think I can fuck it outta you?”
You can do nothing but nod, head rolling forward while the thick tip prods your entrance, sliding in slowly once more.
“That’s it,” he groans. He feels so much deeper like this. You can feel him all the way up your stomach to your throat. “Knew you’d take my cock like this. Knew you’d feel this good, just didn’t think you’d be this fucking dirty.”
“Fuck, Bucky, I need you,” you moan. You’re obscurely aware of the fact that you’ll probably be cringing at the memory of saying those words later, but it matters very little to you in this moment. “Needed you so bad.”
“Yeah?” he grunts. “Why don’t you tell me what you needed so bad?”
Your brain is moving like slow, heavy machinery again - too slow to come up with anything. “I- no, Bucky, I can’t-”
“Let me help you out.”
His arm reaches out in front of you, pulling out the godforsaken book that started this entire mess in the first place. You’re still a bit dumb, watching him pull open the book and flick to a page he has ear-marked - like a significant page in his favourite book. He slams it in front of you palm pressing it open until you take it from him cautiously. You look down at the book uncomprehending, body still jostling with the force of his thrusts.
“Read.”
Your head spins back, even though you can’t see him from this angle. He can’t be serious.
One firm pinch to your ass confirms that he is.
Face burning and stomach clawing with shame and arousal, you clear your throat. Your voice comes out breathy and high.
“Matt always wore a condom but I think Bucky would be such a jerk about it. I wouldn't even mind. The thought of him coming inside me turns me on so- ooh!”-
Bucky’s hand reaches down below you, stroking at your clit.
“- so much. I really want him to fill me up. I wonder if he - fuck, Bucky - cums a lot. Whenever I think about him fucking me, I picture him filling me up to the brim until I’m dripping with his…”
You can’t go on any more. It just gets filthier from then on and you’re already on the verge of coming again. Thankfully, that seems to do enough for him.
“Jesus, you have a thing for this shit? That’s real fucking dirty, sweetheart. I promise I got a big fucking load for you. You’re the only one who is gonna take it from now on.”
You want to snap that he clearly has a thing for it too, judging by how riled up he is. He’s panting behind you, losing his rhythm. But you can’t do any such thing. All you can do is moan unintelligibly. You feel the familiar prickle behind your eyes, tears spilling out while you sniffle.
“Aw angel, you know what those tears do to me. Can’t help but give you what you want. You want my cum?”
You nod enthusiastically, spasming around him. You just wish you could see his face right now, but you can picture it.
“Fuck, yeah you do,” he growls. “Such a good girl for me. My good girl, all mine. Gonna give you my cum now, never gonna let you go empty from now on.”
With a firm hand between your neck and shoulder, he drags you upright against him. Your hands reach out to balance yourself against the headboard and he moves your jaw back until your mouth meets his. The kiss is brutal and sloppy, the angle not-quite-right, but just the feeling of his lips on yours and the movement of your tongues against each other makes you tumble off the edge.
A surge of unbridled want courses through you. You cry into his mouth, tears spilling between your lips until you can taste the salt. It’s either the taste of your tears or the sensation of your walls fluttering around him that causes Bucky to grunt, dick twitching once before spilling deep inside.
You had thought about this almost obsessively since you were old enough to understand the possibility. Somehow, you underestimated what it would do to you.
You might be floating or flying or drifting out of consciousness, but you are very conscious of the fact that you had never really known what it means to experience true pleasure until this moment. The noises he makes are filthy while he pumps you full of him, but you’re sure you’re likely giving as good as you’re getting. Not that you have the faintest awareness of what you’re saying.
Bucky wasn’t lying. You can feel his heavy load dripping out of you you, messing your thighs and the sheets. He continues to bounce you on his cock slowly and gently even after you have both come down from your highs. You’re sensitive and sore, but there’s something comforting about small, shallow thrusts, even if the squelching noises it’s making are obscene.
Eventually, he slides himself out of you and wraps himself around you instead. He envelopes you in a sort of gentle tackle, pulling your exhausted body with him deeper into the sheets.
“You still with me, sweetheart?” he asks, brushing a strand of hair away from your face. You can feel his stubble against your temples, his breath on your skin.
“Uh huh” you try. It comes out as more of a garble. He laughs, light and airy.
You open your eyes, take in his tired, happy grin. His blue eyes have gone bright again.
“Thought you said you weren’t gonna break me,” you say sardonically.
He plays with your hair, twirls it around a finger. “Might have gotten carried away.”
You roll your eyes. He does a poor imitation of you, rolling his eyes all the way back into his skull in mockery. You try to glare but it doesn’t work against your smile. You settle back down against his chest. Feel it vibrate while he laughs.
“You really meant that?” you ask after a moment. You cough away a scratch in your voice. “About wanting me since we were kids?”
“Hell yeah,” he chuckles. Your head bounces against his chest lightly. “I was so crazy about you when we were kids. Can’t believe you didn’t know.”
“How could I know? You were always so mean to me.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know what that means in kid-language.”
“You still are. Sometimes.”
He raises his head to look down at you, searching your face. “Old habits.”
You nod, but you’re still working through everything in your head. Your post-orgasmic brain is working no faster than it was ten minutes ago.
“I’m sorry for reading your diary,” he says after a few seconds and you swear you might see the raw edge of panic sitting somewhere there on his face. “It was a shitty thing to do. I don’t regret it, because I don’t know that I would have ever had the balls to make a move otherwise, but I am sorry.”
It’s so bizarre, so completely unexpected, you can only stare. He’s looking back at you with an uncharacteristic nervousness that makes you slightly uncomfortable. Truthfully, you had forgotten you were even mad about the privacy violation in the first place. Maybe it’s the two orgasms.
You still don’t want to have a heart-to-heart with Bucky - that might be pushing things a bit too far, a bit too early. Instead you lean forward to give him a small, chaste kiss. He smiles.
“I’ll make it up to you,” he says, pressing small kisses to your lips, moving down your cheek and on to your neck. “Just wait ‘till I get my tongue on you.”
You tense up, resolutely ignoring the heat pooling low in your stomach. There is no way in hell you can endure another round right now. Your limbs are still shaking.
Whatever expression is on your face makes Bucky laugh. “Don’t look at me like that. I’ll give you a couple hours. We got two long weeks in this house by ourselves.”
a/n: the diary entries are basically just my dms with my moots lmao
SUMMARY⌇ sitting half-naked on your dad’s friend wilson’s lap during a car ride—what could possibly go wrong?
WORDCOUNT⌇ 1.9k
WARNINGS⌇ dad’s friend trope ⊹ dry humping ⊹ car sex sorta?? ⊹ grinding ⊹ public setting ⊹ risk of getting caught ⊹ unspecified age gap ⊹ guilty wilson… again
The car is stuffed to the brim—coolers wedged between legs, beach towels unrolling like lazy tongues over seatbacks, and a chorus of chatter blaring from the front seat. Someone’s yammering about sun protection with evangelical fervor, probably your dad’s coworker who takes SPF as a personal religion.
Wilson hovers by the open door, awkward in his neatly ironed slacks and a pale blue button-down, sleeves rolled up his forearms in a half-hearted stab at blending in. He’s mid-apology, gesturing vaguely toward the chaos, clearly about to martyr himself and wait for the next ride.
Too bad.
With an impish grin and something wicked glinting behind your heart-shaped sunglasses, you snatch his wrist in a middle of an excuse. You couldn’t help it—you’ve been hooked on the soft-spoken oncologist since forever. So with your dad distracted up front, it was officially go-time.
“Lap it is,” you purr, climbing in before he could blink—bikini-clad, bare-legged, unbothered—rear swaying with theatrical ease as you perch atop him, like it was pre-reserved with your name on it. Your skin, tinged with sunscreen and sharp citrus, was still cool from the air-conditioned house, a shock against the burn searing within his bones.
“Wha—-” Wilson choked on the syllable as your weight settles, soft and sun-warmed. His chestnut irises blown impossibly wide open at your boldness, hands flinching upward, frozen in a limbo of decency and doom.
“Uh… shouldn’t you have, I don’t know, changed at the beach?” he asks, pitch spiking as if he’s fifteen and allergic to this exact scenario. “Not that I claim to be an authority on carpool etiquette, but…”
He lets out a shaky laugh—brittle, and oh-so-panicked. “Lap duty was definitely not on my agenda today.”
You wiggle your hips with a satisfied hum, adjusting yourself until your ass is perfectly fitted over the ridge of his zipper. “Why wait?” you giggle, all teeth and honey, shooting him a smirk that could curdle virtue. “Besides… I figured if I’m gonna be sitting on your lap, I might as well dress for the occasion.”
The tie of your bikini top grazes his chin—loose, barely knotted. He could undo it by accident if he breathed too hard.
Wilson shakes his head, warding off all inappropriate thoughts threatening to root in his brain like weeds. It’s just a quick family-friendly car ride. Just a cramped backseat with his friends’s daughter on top. Nothing he couldn’t endure with a dash of self-control, right?
…If only he knew you had no plans to let him survive a much different type of ride.
You stretch to close the car door, arching with feline grace as your breasts lift just enough to threaten full exposure. Wilson sees it, tries not to, but his gaze lingers a second too long.
The engine rumbles to life, and so does the road, a rattling string of potholes and poorly timed stops that turns the backseat into a carnival ride. Each bump jostles you back against his pelvis, eliciting a startled grunt which he tries to disguise as a cough, even as your supple curves ripple over the firm rise swelling beneath you. You pretend not to notice.
Wilson’s breath comes shallow, lips parted around a sound that never quite makes it out. He’s hardening. Fast.
“Dear god,” he mutters, more to himself than anyone, a line of sweat beading at his temple as he squirms—futilely, laughably—to keep his raging hard-on from prodding at you. But it’s too late. You’re already molded to him, wedging down with a precise amount of pressure for him to see stars behind those poor, tortured lashes. Your ass cradles him, lush cheeks spreading and nestling onto the growing bulge below.
“Oh?” you chirp, syrup-sweet, sunglasses sliding down the slope of your nose as you glance at him with wide, mock-concerned eyes. “You okay back there? You’re looking a little flushed,” you press down on him for emphasis. “Want me to crank up the AC? Or would that just make things… harder?”
He doesn’t answer. Can’t. The car lurches again, and your tits bounce with the motion, jiggling inside the skimpy triangles of your top. One strap slips, ever so slightly. Enough for a dark flash of nipple to peek out then vanish, like a dare.
You lean back, your shoulder pressing into his clavicle as a whisper feathers the shell of his ear. “Feels like you’re enjoying the ride, Dr. Wilson…”
His hands finally find your hips—not to pull you off, no. Simply to hold you still. As if that’ll stop anything.
His knuckles flexes, tendons knotted under flesh, blanching with dwindling restraint. His grip wasn’t possessive, it’s utterly helpless—the way a man might cling to a ledge with nothing but rocks and open air below. Each shaky huffs stirs the hairs on your nape in staccato bursts, quavering and uneven, fluttering onto your dewy skin with every bump in the road.
Your thighs spread—no pretense of innocence now. Each little wriggle drags your ass across the rigid line of him, his cock now fully erect and caught painfully between your body and the prison of his shorts, swollen tip likely rubbed raw. The fabric must feel like sandpaper. Good. Let him squirm.
“Mmph!- you need to stop. You’re going to get me killed-” he protests weakly, voice thinned to a thread. It reaches for authority and lands somewhere closer to plea dressed up as one.
“I’m serious,” he grits out, low and swift. “Your father is three feet away. Driving. If he so much as glances back and sees this—sees me—he’s swerving us into a guardrail, and frankly? I’d deserve it.”
He risks a peep at the rearview mirror, already bracing for impact—or worse, conversation.
“And just for the record- I’m fairly certain ‘Sorry, sir, I accidentally ejaculated on your daughter’ doesn’t hold up in court.”
Yet despite the full-blown Wilsonian descent into moral panic, he doesn’t push you off. Doesn’t stop you. Because you’re warm, and you’re there, and his cock is practically signing a confession in pre-cum across the front of his slacks.
“Oh calm down,” you wave him off, reaching back to curl your arm around his neck when no one’s looking, fingers threading lazily through a piece of hair behind his ear. “He’s not gonna notice. He never does.”
“Even if he does look back, what do you think he’d see? Me sitting still, perfectly innocent… and you sweating bullets like you’re about to propose.” You snicker, bordering on cruel.
“If anyone’s blowing your cover, Wilson, it’s you.”
You punctuated your words by rolling your hips forward tauntingly, tracing slow, languid figure-eights that stroke his swollen shape through the cotton. It knocked the wind out his lungs, each pass coaxing a fresh tremor from his member. There’s slick warmth oozing from your barely-covered pussy slit, soaking straight through the gusset of your bikini, smearing over his lap in damning streaks. His khakis darken with it. A ruinous little brand. Yours.
Your lips brush close, shy of contact. “…Bet I could make you cum in your pants right now and you’d still smile through dinner like nothing happened.”
He groans, head thumping back against the headrest with a muted, defeated clunk. You hear it—the thick, guilt-laden swallow he tried to suppress, bobbing in his throat like a sob he doesn’t know where to aim.
This is his friend’s daughter. His friend, right there in the driver’s seat, blissfully focused on the road—while his boner was being ground into mush in the backseat by a bikini-clad siren half his age. He felt like every cliche he’d ever pitied—some sad, middle-aged divorcé with a weakness for younger women and no sense of boundaries.
…Well. He was that guy now. Exactly that guy.
His thighs twitch beneath you, muscles jumping involuntarily as his cock kicks, straining against the damp flimsy barrier between you. “This is—god—absurd,” he rasps. “I should be asking for a lawyer, not a… lap dance in the back of a Subaru.” It leaves him in a breathless rush—half-joke, half-defeat. The way his voice frays at the edges on the last word makes it clear: it’s already killing him.
Your pretty lips twists into a pout, one that’s too practiced to be pure. “Where’s the fun in that?” You croon, tone as deadly as silk over blade. “It’s not like your cock’s inside me… yet. So technically?” you trail off as your spine bows deliciously, bikini riding higher between your asscheeks—more string than swimwear now. “No crime. No foul. Just the perfect start to a very dirty little secret.”
You grind again—harder this time—and he hitches, eyes screwed shut and jaw clenched tooth-shatteringly tight as his shaft pulses violently under you, practically ready to burst free at the seams of his pants. His hands fly from your hips to the edge of the seat, clutching the hot vinyl as he’s afraid to touch you again. If he does, he won’t be able to stop.
The hushed noise that escapes Wilson is nothing short of pitiful—a strangled gasp snagged in the well of his chest, right above the frantic thrum of his stallion-quick heart. He’s trembling, every nerve sizzling and wound taut. It’s not from the cold—hell, it’s sweltering in here. But the tension you’ve stoked in him blazes white-hot, melting him down to a shivering wreck, knees jittering with no hope of stillness.
He’s flushed to the roots—neck to scalp lit up in a feverish crimson, the tips of his ears flaring cherry red. His dick throbs in his briefs, as if trying to claw its way inside you on sheer instinct alone. “P-Please,” he stammers, the plea nearly eclipsed by the drone of the highway. “This is a catastrophic idea- I’m about two seconds from losing any shred of self-control here.
“Catastrophic?” You echo. “Wilson, you’ve been gagging for it since I sat down. The only thing I made you do was stop pretending otherwise.”
Spurring him on, you lean in and whisper softly. “Come oooon… ditch the good boy act and cum for me already. I promise not to tell daddy…”
“Our dirty secret, remember?”
And just like that, his hips finally betrays him in the faintest disgraceful thrusts, every ghost of a buck into your clothed cunt an apology he’s too far gone to voice. A soft moan slips out of you, part from the friction, part from an unbearable, blistering ache low in your belly—dying for him to finish inside you next time.
However the rest of it? That’s unadulterated satisfaction—the victory of witnessing your long-time crush unravel under you, undone by an act so simple, so obscene.
“Dammit, wait—-” he hisses, louder than he meant to, the curse a tangled braid of guilt and relief. No one reacts. No one knows. And maybe that’s what makes it worse.
His frame staggers once, twice—then he’s gone, pleasure cresting through him in a silent, shattered surrender. A white, milky essence seeps through his underwear, drenching the space between your thighs and his lap, slathering across his crotch in trails of sticky shame. It’s filthy. It’s humiliating. It’s also easily the hottest thing you’ve ever felt.
He blinks open, but doesn’t move.
“Oopsie,” you smile so wide it aches, turning to catch a fine sheen glistening over the furrowed lines of his careworn features, turmoil etched deep around those sad puppy eyes.
“I think somebody made a mess.” your stare dips, unapologetically. “Hope you brought a spare change of clothes.”
Wilson exhales hard, hands scrubbing over his face as he kneads the bridge of his nose. He crossed a line. In fact—he obliterated it. And the worst part? He knows he’ll do it again.
ꜱᴜᴍᴍᴀʀʏ › bucky moves into your spare room expecting nothing more than four walls and a place to sleep. instead, he finds floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, sticky note conversations, late-night takeout, and a girl who always puts herself last.
ᴘᴀɪʀɪɴɢ › roommate!bucky x female reader
ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢꜱ › roommates trope, post tfatws, sticky note communication, friends to lovers, roommates to lovers, slow burn, domestic fluff, many many hot dog mentions, anxiety, work stress/burnout, author has mini geek speak moments, anthropology reader, emotional intimacy, quiet romance, self-doubt, mild emotional hurt/comfort, sticky note love language, reader insecurity, loneliness, not beta read we die like men.
ᴡᴏʀᴅ ᴄᴏᴜɴᴛ › 11.3k
ᴀᴜᴛʜᴏʀꜱ ɴᴏᴛᴇ › and they were roommates.... oh my god they were roommates
The number sits in his phone for three days before he uses it.
Three days of bad apartments and worse brokers. Places with paper-thin walls and windows that looked directly into brick. Places that smelled like mildew and old cigarettes. Places so expensive they made his jaw lock before the realtor even finished speaking.
He tells himself he's only looking because he has to. Not because he misses hearing another person in the next room. Not because going back to the apartment in Brooklyn every night feels too much like walking into a museum exhibit dedicated to a man he doesn't know how to be anymore.
Louisiana had almost made sense for a second.
He can still picture the dock at sunset, the water catching orange light, the sound of Sam's nephews shouting somewhere down the road. He can still hear Sam leaning against the kitchen counter, arms crossed, pretending not to look too concerned.
“You could stay here for a while,” Sam had said.
“No.”
“You don't even gotta stay with me. The VA's offering assistance out here now. They can help you get your own place.”
“No.”
Sam had looked at him for a long second then, the kind of look people get right before they decide whether or not to push.
“You know, accepting help doesn't mean you're weak.”
Bucky had laughed once under his breath, sharp and humorless. “Not taking charity.”
“It ain't charity.”
“Feels like it.”
Sam had sighed through his nose, digging through a kitchen drawer before pulling out a scrap of paper with a number scribbled across it.
“I know somebody in New York. Friend of mine has a spare room.”
Bucky remembers immediately opening his mouth to refuse, Sam had beaten him to it.
“You won't be coddled or given the sugar treatment,” he said. “You'll pay rent, keep your mess clean, same as anywhere else. I bet you'll like it too.”
That had been the only reason Bucky took the number at all.
Now, three days later, he stares at it again from the edge of a too-small hotel bed in Queens. The room hums around him. Old air conditioner rattling in the window. Pipes knocking somewhere in the walls. The smell of industrial detergent trapped in the sheets.
He types the message before he can talk himself out of it.
Sam Wilson gave me your number. He said you had a room for rent.
The response comes less than ten minutes later, not much text, no small talk. Just a picture. The room is simple. Bigger than he expected. A bed frame without a mattress, a dresser by the wall, a window overlooking the street below. Hardwood floors. Clean lines. Nothing flashy.
Underneath the picture is the address and rent amount. Reasonable, more than reasonable, honestly.
Then another message.
He told me you'd message. If you're interested, you can come look at it tomorrow. I work late tonight.
What would probably seem forward to others Bucky sees as efficient, Sam's recommendation is starting to make sense now. The building is in Brooklyn, far enough from the center of everything to be quiet but not isolated. The brick outside is old, the kind that has survived decades without anybody bothering to make it prettier.
There is a sticky note taped to the front door when he gets there.
Spare key is under the plant. Let yourself in.
He stares at the note for a second longer than he needs to. Something about it feels strangely normal. The kind of thing people do when they trust that the world isn't always waiting to hurt them.
The apartment is quiet when he steps inside, his shoes echoing off the walls. It's not empty per say, just still.
There are a pair of sneakers and loafers by the door lined up neatly on a tray. A light jacket tossed over the back of the couch, s mug sitting in the sink, a blanket folded over the armrest like somebody had smoothed it down before rushing out the door.
The place is nice. Not too fancy, not overly cluttered. There are soft colors everywhere. Cream walls. Warm wood floors. A kitchen with magnets on the fridge and a bowl of fruit on the counter. It feels lived in in small ways, like somebody exists here just hardly.
The bedroom at the end of the hall is bigger than he expected. Master bedroom with a bathroom attached, an amenity he hadn't lived with in too many years to count. Enough room for his duffel bags and the few boxes he still carries from place to place without unpacking.
But it isn't the room that makes him stop.
It's the hallway.
Bookshelves run from floor to ceiling along both sides of it, turning the narrow stretch between the living room and bedrooms into something else entirely. There are hundreds of books. Maybe more. Old hardcovers with cracked spines. Paperbacks with folded corners. New glossy editions wedged beside books that look older than he is.
His eyes catch on familiar titles. The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, The Hobbit. A worn copy of The Catcher in the Rye sits crooked on a shelf near the middle. Some of the older books have faded cloth covers, titles nearly rubbed away with time. He reaches out before he can stop himself, fingertips brushing the spine of one that looks like it has been opened a hundred times.
It reassures him in a way he can't explain. For the first time in weeks, maybe months, he can picture himself somewhere without immediately wanting to leave.
He pulls his phone out.
Nice place. I'll take it if it's still up for offer.
The reply comes before he even reaches the kitchen.
It's all yours. Lease is on the kitchen counter. Bring your stuff in whenever. I won't be back until late again.
He looks over at the stack of papers sitting beside the fruit bowl. A little strange and fast, maybe. But he isn't complaining. The lease is simple. Month to month, rent due on the first. No smoking inside, clean up after yourself. No coffee grounds down the drain.
That last one almost makes him smile.
He signs his name at the bottom then he goes back downstairs to start bringing his things in. Which, after a century of life, turns out to be less than he thought it'd be. It only takes him three days to move in.
Three days of hauling boxes up narrow stairs and carrying duffel bags that feel heavier than they should. Three days of unpacking only half of his things because there isn't much point in settling too deeply into anywhere anymore.
He never sees you once.
The first night, he hears the front door unlock sometime after midnight, quiet footsteps, the soft rustle of a jacket being hung up. Cabinet doors opening and closing in the kitchen. He stands frozen in the doorway of his room for a second, listening.
Then he hears the bathroom door shut down the hall and waits for some awkward introduction that never comes. By the time he wakes up the next morning, you're gone again.
There is a sticky note on the fridge.
Working late all week. Feel free to use anything in the kitchen except the leftover Chinese food. Learned that lesson already.
He pulls the note off the fridge after reading it, folding it once before sticking it in the pocket of his sweatshirt without really knowing why.
The second note comes two days later, left beside the coffee maker.
Heading upstate for work tomorrow. Back Friday night.
Then another on the kitchen counter.
If the sink in the kitchen makes that awful screeching noise again, jiggle the cold water handle.
It's strange, living with someone he has never met.
You exist in pieces to him. A mug left drying by the sink, a pair of shoes by the door one night and gone again by morning, a blanket folded on the couch in a different way than he remembers leaving it.
The faint smell of shampoo lingering in the hallway bathroom after he knows you've been home.
Sometimes he catches the sound of you moving around at night. The creak of floorboards in the hall. The soft thud of something being set on the kitchen counter. Once, half asleep, he hears quiet music drifting from somewhere in the apartment before it disappears again.
You are becoming something blurry around the edges, more presence than person, a ghost.
Not that he's one to complain. The arrangement works and for the first few weeks, he mostly keeps to his room anyway. He gets used to the attached bathroom. The way the pipes knock whenever somebody runs hot water. The patch of afternoon sun that lands across the floor by the window around three o'clock every day.
He unpacks slowly. One shirt at a time, one book at a time. He leaves most of his things in boxes because it feels safer that way. Temporary. Like if he has to leave suddenly, he can.
He still goes out most nights, he doesn't cook much.
The kitchen feels too personal somehow, like crossing into territory that belongs more to you than him. So he eats at diners, cheap takeout places, little delis with too-bright lights and menus that haven't changed in twenty years.
Eventually he starts stopping at the same hot dog stand three blocks from the apartment. The guy who runs it is older. Loud, talks too much, calls everyone sweetheart regardless of age or gender. The first time Bucky goes there, the guy takes one look at him and says, “You look like you need two hot dogs and a nap.”
By the third visit, he doesn't even have to order.
“Mustard, onions, no kraut,” the guy says, already reaching for the buns. “And a Coke.”
“You're getting too comfortable,” Bucky tells him.
“You keep showing up, that's on you.”
He reminds Bucky of Sam if Sam were louder and somehow even more annoying.
The guy asks questions constantly.
You got a girl? No. Job? Sort of. Why do you always look like somebody just kicked your dog?
Bucky never answers half of them, still, he keeps coming back. Mostly because the hot dogs are decent. Partly because it is nice, sometimes, to have somebody expect you to show up somewhere.
Back at the apartment, another sticky note waits for him on the kitchen counter.
Sorry for basically haunting the place. Work has been insane lately.
He stares at it for a second, then longer than that. A ghost with good handwriting, at least now he knows you know it too.
The first time he sees you, it feels a little like walking into the wrong apartment.
He comes back later than usual, the city already washed in blue evening light, a paper tray from the hot dog stand balanced in one hand and a soda in the other. The apartment door sticks a little when he pushes it open.
He hears your voice before he sees you. It's soft, firm yet an edge of exhaustion to it.
“You can tell them whatever you want, but I'm not driving six hours for a meeting that could've been an email.”
He stops just inside the doorway.
You're standing by the living room windows with your back to him, one arm folded across your middle, phone tucked between your ear and shoulder.
For a second, he just stares. Because he had almost forgotten, not completely, but enough. Enough that your existence had turned into sticky notes and moving shadows in the hallway. Coffee mugs in the sink. A coat that appeared on the hook by the door and disappeared again before morning.
He had built you into something abstract in his head.
Not a real person.
Certainly not a woman.
Not because Sam had said otherwise. Sam hadn't said much at all.
Just because there had been nothing obvious about you in the apartment. No perfume bottles cluttering the bathroom counter. No makeup bags. No floral blankets or pastel throw pillows or whatever other lazy stereotypes his brain had apparently reached for without him realizing it.
The place is sparse, practical. Books and soft lighting and a single plant by the window that looks one missed watering away from death. He mentally scolds himself for the assumptions.
You don't turn around right away, you're still talking and Bucky begins to wonder if he should walk out. Keep to the ghostly sticky notes and mugs in the sink.
“Yeah, well, that's not my problem,” you say into the phone, quieter now. “I sent everything over already.”
Then your eyes flick toward the entryway. Toward him.
You freeze.
It happens so quickly he almost misses it. The slight widening of your eyes. The way your mouth parts for a second before you catch yourself. It's clear you hadn't expected to see him either.
“Hold on,” you murmur into the phone.
For a second, neither of you says anything.
You are not what he expected either. You're standing barefoot on the hardwood floor with your heels kicked off next to you, hair a little messy like you've been running your hands through it all day and a suitskirt that's been smoothed down one too many times.
There are tired shadows under your eyes that make you look… real. Not like the blurry version of you he'd made up from scraps. He realizes, distantly, that this is probably the first time you've really seen him too. Not just the sound of boots in the hallway or the evidence of him in the sink.
The metal arm. The size of him. The way he takes up space without meaning to.
You recover first.
“Sorry,” you say, pulling the phone away from your mouth. “I didn't know you were coming home.”
“Yeah.”Brilliant move.
You blink at him once, then glance down at the hot dog tray in his hand. “Hope that's not dinner.”
He looks down too. “It was the plan.”
You huff a laugh through your nose, small and tired. “You eat like a divorced dad.”
He doesn't know why that almost makes him smile. Into the phone, you say, “I have to call you back,” before hanging up without waiting for an answer.
The apartment goes quiet, not awkward exactly. Well it's a little awkward but it's more unfamiliar than anything. Up close, he notices things he couldn't piece together from the notes. You look younger than he expected. Softer too, somehow. Not fragile, just... warm around the edges, like somebody people trust without thinking about it.
“Sorry about that,” you say, gesturing vaguely with your phone. “Work call, you know. I, uh... didn't expect it to go like this.”
There's something awkward in the air still, that strange lingering feeling of two people trying to fit reality over the outline they'd already made of each other.
“Don't worry about it.”
You shift your phone into one hand and hold the other out toward him.
“I don't think we've actually been properly introduced.” You say, offering your name. He looks down at your hand for a second before taking it carefully.
“No. I don't think we have.” His hand slips from yours after only a moment. “I'm Bucky.”
“I know. I suppose that's mainly my fault.” You give him a small apologetic smile. “I'm sorry. My job is very… time demanding and that won't really be changing anytime soon. But I'm glad to meet you, Bucky.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Good to meet you too.”
Silence settles between you again, not uncomfortable, just unsure. Then both of you speak at once.
“So what do you do?”
“How are you liking the place?”
You stop. He stops.
“Sorry,” he says, motioning for you to go first.
“I was just asking how you're liking the place.” Your arms fold loosely over yourself again. “Have you settled in well?”
“Oh, yeah.” He nods once. “Place is great. Thank you.”
And it is.
He likes the quiet. The neighborhood. The bookshelves. The fact that the apartment feels like somewhere a person could stay for a while without being swallowed by it.
You smile a little at his answer. “Good.”
More silence, then you clear your throat slightly.
“And you? Were gonna say...?”
“Oh.” He glances down for a second like he'd forgotten his own question. “I was just wondering what you do... that's so...” He makes a vague motion with one hand. “Time demanding.”
“Oh. Right.” You shift your weight against the windowsill. “I work in the anthropology division at the American Museum of Natural History.”
He blinks once. “Wow.”
You laugh softly at the look on his face.
“That sounds awesome.”
“It used to be,” you say with a wry little smile. “Now it's mostly a thousand phone calls and endless trips upstate to deal with the collections.”
He leans back slightly against the doorframe.
“If you work down there, why live in Brooklyn?” he asks. “Nasty commute.”
You glance around the apartment like you haven't looked at it properly in a while.
“I got this place before I got that job,” you say. “And I liked it.” Then, quieter, “Still like it.”
Your eyes move briefly toward the hallway. Toward the bookshelves, the kitchen, the little corners of the apartment that feel soft even when no one's in them.
“That's actually why I wanted a roommate,” you admit. “I love this place, and I want it to be loved, but...” You shrug one shoulder. “I just don't have the time to do that.”
Something in his chest shifts a little at that, because he understands. More than he wants to. What it feels like to care about something and still not know how to be present for it.
“Well,” he says, voice quieter now, “I'll... I'll do my best.”
You smile then, not the tired, polite kind you've been giving him all evening. Something warmer. Something that catches him off guard a little, like maybe you believe him.
“I'm sorry I've basically been living here like some weird cryptid,” you say. “Work's been insane.”
“You leave good notes.”
The second the words leave his mouth, he wants them back.
Your eyebrows lift. “That's maybe the weirdest compliment I've ever gotten.”
You open your mouth, like you're about to say something else, then your phone rings. The sound cuts through the room sharply. You look down at the screen and make a face.
“Sorry,” you say, already answering it. “I have to take this.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
You offer him one last apologetic smile before turning and disappearing down the hallway toward your bedroom.
A second later he hears your door close softly, then your voice again through the wall. Professional, calm and little tired. He stands in the entryway for another minute after that, hot dog gone cold in his hand. The apartment feels different now, smaller somehow. Not because there is less space. Just because now, finally, you are real.
The apartment feels different after he meets you.
Not immediately and nothing dramatic.
You still leave before sunrise some mornings, slipping out with your bag over your shoulder and your hair still damp from the shower. You still come home long after dark, moving quietly through the apartment like you're trying not to wake someone even when he isn't asleep.
But now there is shape to your absence. Before, the apartment had just been quiet, now it feels empty. Bucky notices things he shouldn't. Whether your shoes are by the door, whether the light under your bedroom door is on.
The difference between the sound of the upstairs neighbors moving furniture and the sound of you dropping your keys onto the kitchen counter.
He lingers in the kitchen longer now too. Sometimes with coffee growing cold in his hands while he leans against the counter pretending not to listen for the front door. Sometimes he catches himself glancing toward the hallway whenever the building creaks.
You still leave notes. One waits for him on the fridge Tuesday morning, tucked beneath a magnet shaped like a pear.
Upstate again. Back Thursday night. There's soup in the fridge if it hasn't gone bad.
He stares at it for a second, then longer than that. Before he can overthink it, he grabs a pen from the junk drawer and flips the note over.
Soup is still alive. I think.
He leaves it on the counter and immediately regrets it. Wondering if it's too weird, or too familiar. But when he gets back from a walk later that night, the note is gone.
Thursday comes, then Thursday night. He is standing in the kitchen making coffee he doesn't need when he hears the front door unlock. You walk in looking exhausted. Hair messy, tote bag slipping off your shoulder, coat half falling down your arms.
You stop when you see him.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Your eyes land on the counter and you laugh. It's quiet, tired around the edges, but real.
“Soup still alive?” you ask.
“Barely.”
You drop your bag onto a chair.
“Well.” You glance toward the fridge. “Soup can't technically expire if you're brave enough.”
Bucky blinks, you smile a little wider and something warm settles low in his chest.
After that, the notes become something else. Not just reminders but conversations. You leave one on the coffee maker.
Radiator makes weird banging noises around midnight. Ignore it unless it sounds haunted.
He leaves one by the fruit bowl the next morning.
Upstairs neighbors were fighting at 2 a.m. Pretty sure someone threw a lamp.
Another day:
Please water the plant by the window before it starts holding a grudge.
He forgets. Two days later, there is another note waiting beside the drooping leaves.
You had one job.
Bucky snorts to himself, then digs out a pen.
Sorry. It does kinda look like one bad day away from death.
You leave back:
So do I.
He folds that note into the pocket of his jacket and carries it around for three days. Slowly, without either of you meaning for it to happen, the notes stop being practical.
One afternoon he comes home to find one waiting by the sink.
New coffee filters are under the sink. Also, if you ate my leftover pad thai I forgive you because it was probably bad anyway.
He smiles before he can stop himself, then writes back underneath it.
Didn't eat it. Thought about it though.
The next morning there is another note sitting beside the coffee pot.
I appreciate your honesty in this difficult time.
And just like that, the apartment doesn't feel quite so empty anymore.
As great as everything else is, Bucky gets tired of hot dogs eventually.
Not completely. He still goes to the stand a few times a week, still listens to the guy behind the cart talk too loud and ask too many questions, but after a while the thought of another hot dog starts to make him feel vaguely ill.
So one night he cooks, nothing complicated. Just pasta.
Too much of it, because he has never quite figured out how to cook for one person and because some part of him has started thinking in twos without permission.
The apartment smells different afterward, warmer. Like garlic and tomato sauce and something softer underneath it.
He leaves you a bowl in the fridge with a note stuck to the top.
Made too much. There's pasta in the fridge if you want it.
You don't come home until after midnight. He's already in bed when he hears the faint sounds of you moving around in the kitchen.
The fridge opening, a plate clinking against the counter. Silence. Then the microwave.
The next morning, he wakes up to a note sitting beside the coffee maker.
This is the first non-takeout meal I've had in two weeks. Marry me?
He stares at it for an embarrassing amount of time. Long enough that his coffee goes cold. Long enough that he folds the note once, then again, before sliding it into the drawer beside his bed with the others.
After that, you start seeing each other more. Not on purpose exactly. Just in the little spaces between everything else. Six in the morning in the kitchen while the city outside is still gray and quiet.
You standing in one of his sweatshirts that got mixed up in the laundry over leggings, blinking sleepily into your coffee cup while he leans against the counter waiting for toast to pop up.
Passing each other in the hallway at night. Your shoulder brushing his as you move around each other in the narrow space between the dining room and kitchen.
Once, on a rainy Thursday, you both end up home at the same time. You sit on opposite ends of the couch, you with your laptop balanced on your knees, him with a book open in his lap.
The television hums quietly in the background, something neither of you is actually watching. At some point, without looking up from your screen, you stretch your legs out until your socked feet bump lightly against his thigh.
You don't move them away. Neither does he and slowly, you become easier around each other. You stop apologizing every time you leave dishes in the sink. He stops retreating to his room the second he hears you come home.
One night he brings back burgers and fries from a diner down the street.
You appear in the kitchen halfway through, hair damp from the shower, looking at his takeout bag like it personally offended you that he didn't ask if you wanted anything.
“Rude,” you say.
“You weren't home yet.”
“You could've texted.”
He tears the bag open and slides the fries toward you. You grin immediately and steal three before he even sits down.
“You're lucky you're cute,” he mutters.
You freeze for half a second, then keep eating like you didn't hear him. He fixes the sink handle one weekend after it starts making that awful screeching noise every time you turn it.
You come home to find him under the sink with a wrench in one hand and his sleeves pushed up to his elbows.
“What are you doing?”
“Fixing it.”
You lean in the doorway watching him for a second. “You know, normal people usually just call maintenance.”
“Normal people don't have metal arms.”
That makes you laugh. “Fair point.”
Then one evening he comes home and finds you asleep on the couch. The apartment is dark except for the lamp in the corner, there are papers everywhere. Open folders spread across the coffee table. A legal pad on the floor. Your laptop still glowing beside you, your glasses sit crooked on your face, one hand is still wrapped loosely around a pen.
You look exhausted. Like you've simply run out of steam halfway through existing. He stands there for a second longer than he means to, then quietly sets his keys down.
He grabs the blanket folded over the arm of the couch and drapes it carefully over you.
You stir a little, brows furrowing, but you don't wake up. His hand lingers for half a second near your shoulder before he pulls it back. Then he turns off the kitchen light and disappears down the hallway.
The next morning, the blanket is folded neatly over the back of the couch again. And beside the coffee maker, there is a note.
Thanks for the blanket.
Below it, in smaller handwriting:
That was very disgustingly nice of you.
A few nights later, Bucky wakes up thirsty. The apartment is dark except for the light over the stove.
He can hear pages turning before he even reaches the kitchen.
You're sitting at the table in one of your giant sweatshirts, laptop open, papers spread out around you in messy little stacks. There are sticky notes stuck to the edge of your screen, a half-drunk cup of coffee by your elbow, and your glasses are slipping down your nose again.
You don't notice him at first. Your mouth is moving slightly while you read through something under your breath.
He leans against the doorway. “Do you ever sleep?”
You jump a little in your seat, then you look up at him and huff out a tired laugh.
“Sometimes.”
“You sure?”
“Not particularly.”
He moves farther into the kitchen, grabbing a glass from the cabinet. “You know it's two in the morning, right?”
You glance down at your laptop clock. “Oh.”
“You didn't know?”
“I thought it was maybe midnight.”
He shakes his head a little as he fills his glass. “What are you even doing?”
You look down at the folders spread around you and for a second, you seem like you're deciding whether or not to tell him. Then you let out a breath.
“I'm… up for a promotion.”
Bucky looks over at you. “What kind?”
“A curator position.”
He leans back against the counter. “At the museum?”
You nod.
“In the anthropology division.” Your fingers start absently straightening the edge of one of your papers. “If I got it, I'd oversee acquisitions, exhibits, research trips. Most of the collections work too.”
As you talk, something about you changes, your shoulders loosen and your face softens. There is something brighter in your voice than he's heard before. You look almost younger like this, less tired, more like the version of you that exists underneath all the stress and late nights and rushed mornings.
“That sounds...” He shakes his head once. “That sounds awesome.”
“It would be.” You smile a little, staring down at your notes. “I mean, it would be everything.”
You glance around at the papers spread across the table. “I've wanted it for years.”
Then, just as quickly, you pull back from it. You shrug one shoulder like it doesn't matter as much as it clearly does.
“But it's probably unrealistic anyway.”
Bucky frowns. “Why?”
You laugh softly to yourself.
“Because you don't just get the job to be a curator at the American Museum of Natural History,” you say. “It's something holy that gets bestowed upon you with the anointed oil they gave Queen Elizabeth II.”
That gets a surprised laugh out of him. You smile faintly, but it doesn't quite reach your eyes.
“It's just wishful thinking,” you say quietly. “Then you die trying.”
He hates how fast you do that. How quickly you take something you want and turn it into something impossible before anyone else can.
He sets his glass down on the counter. “That sounds like exactly the kind of job you'd be good at.”
You look up at him, really look at him. Like you're waiting for the joke, but there isn't one.
“You know that, right?” he says. “The way you talk about it.”
Your expression shifts a little, because most people do not usually say things to you that plainly. You look down at your hands.
“I don't know,” you say after a second.
“Yeah, you do.”
The kitchen goes quiet, the radiator knocks somewhere in the wall. You sit there with your hands wrapped around your coffee cup, staring at him like he has said something far more important than he meant to.
Then you smile. “Thanks, Buck.”
And for some reason, it feels like being handed something fragile.
A few days later, Bucky finds himself standing in the hallway again.
It happens more often now. He'll be on his way to the kitchen or coming back from the shower and suddenly stop in front of the bookshelves like he forgot where he was going.
The shelves are uneven in places.
Some rows are organized by author, others by size or color or absolutely no logic at all. There are books stacked sideways on top of other books, faded bookmarks sticking out between pages, cracked spines and bent corners and little slips of paper tucked into random places.
It feels lived in, it feels like you.
He stands there for a minute, eyes tracing over the titles. Then he grabs a sticky note from the kitchen and presses it onto the edge of one of the shelves.
You actually read all of these?
He forgets about it after that. Until later that night when he gets home and notices something tucked into the spine of a book halfway down the shelf.
He pulls it free.
Used to. A lot. Some are mine, some were my dad's, some I found secondhand. I used to collect old editions too before work swallowed my entire personality.
He reads it twice. Then, without really meaning to, he starts paying closer attention. Not just to the titles, to the books themselves.
There are old clothbound covers with gold lettering worn thin at the edges. Tiny notes scribbled in pencil in the margins. Bookstore stamps from places all over the city. One copy of a novel has a dried flower pressed between the pages.
Some of them are old enough that even he remembers when they were new. One night he pauses in front of a shelf near the living room and pulls out a familiar green book.
The cover is faded, the spine is worn soft from use. He turns it over in his hands, then glances down at the copyright page. 1942. He stares for a second, then reaches for another sticky note.
You have a 1942 copy of The Hobbit.
The response is waiting for him when he wakes up the next morning, tucked beneath his coffee mug.
I know. Found it in a shop upstate for twenty dollars because the owner didn't know what he had. Second greatest moment of my life.
He smiles despite himself, and there is another note beneath it.
You can read whatever you want, by the way. And if there are books you like, you can add them.
He stands there in the kitchen holding that note a little longer than he should. Because nobody has said something like that to him in a very long time. To make yourself at home, that there's room for you here. It's such a small thing, just books, just shelves.
But it feels like more than that. That night he pulls one of the older novels from the shelf and reads half of it sitting on the couch while rain taps softly against the windows.
A few days later, when he finishes it, he leaves it on the coffee table. When he comes back from a walk the next morning, there is a sticky note tucked inside the front cover.
Well?
He snorts quietly to himself and grabs a pen.
Liked it. Ending was more depressing than I remember.
The next day:
That's because you have bad taste and no appreciation for tragedy.
He leaves another book out after that, then another. And you start leaving notes inside all of them. Little questions in the margins. Favorite character? Did you cry? Be honest, did you skip the boring parts? And without really realizing it, the shelves stop feeling like just yours.
They start feeling like something the two of you are building together.
One evening Bucky comes back from a walk and stops in the hallway without meaning to. Something looks different. It takes him a second to realize what it is. Wedged between two thick hardcovers near the end of the second shelf is one of his books, old and worn.
A history book about the forties that he'd unpacked weeks ago and left sitting on the edge of the end table next to the couch because he never knew where to put it. Now it's there between the others like it has always belonged.
Like you made room for it without asking. He reaches out and pulls it from the shelf. Inside the front cover, there's a sticky note with your handwriting:
Thought this looked lonely.
Something in his chest aches a little. Because it's such a small thing, nobody has made space for him somewhere in a very long time, but it shifts something inside of him. Something warm and soft blooming beneath his ribs as he slides the book back onto the shelf.
After that, you start spending more actual time together. Not just in passing, not just in notes and hallway conversations. Real time. He brings home takeout and the two of you end up sitting cross-legged on the living room floor because neither of you feels like cleaning off the coffee table.
You steal pieces of chicken off his plate. He lets you. You start walking to get coffee together on mornings you're both free, slow and sleepy and still half wrapped in hoodies.
Sometimes you don't talk much, sometimes you talk about everything. The museum. His nightmares. Books. Childhoods. Things that happened too long ago and things that happened yesterday.
One afternoon he comes back from the hot dog stand carrying two paper trays instead of one. You're in the kitchen when he gets home.
“You got me one?”
“You looked tired.”
You smile at him in a way that feels dangerous.
The hot dog guy notices eventually.
“Where's the pretty museum girl?” he asks one day while handing Bucky his usual order.
Bucky frowns. “Who?”
“The roommate you said you have.” The guy grins. “I wanna meet her.”
“No. Not happening.”
The guy laughs. “Oh, so that's what we're doing now.”
Bucky grabs the food and leaves before he can say anything else. You notice his mood immediately when he gets back.
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Mm.”
You take the hot dog from his hand. “You have a very specific face when you're annoyed, you know.”
He mutters something under his breath that makes you smile. That night the two of you are sitting on the floor in front of the couch, books spread around you, some old movie playing in the background.
Bucky glances over at the shelf. “You said finding that copy of The Hobbit was the second greatest moment of your life.”
You look up from your book. “Yeah.”
“So what was the first?”
You smile immediately.
“There was this used bookstore in Queens,” you say. “I was seventeen. They had this old locked case near the register and inside was the first book from a vintage set of The Canterbury Tales.”
He watches your face change as you talk.
“The cover was all cracked leather and gold leaf and completely falling apart. It was beautiful.”
You tuck your legs up closer to yourself.
“I used all the money I had to buy it.”
“And then?”
“And then I spent the next ten years trying to find the rest.” You laugh softly. “That was kind of it. That was the start of the whole problem.”
“You found all of them?”
“Almost.” You shake your head. “Never found the last one.”
There's something quietly sad in the way you say it. Like it's less about the book and more about what it meant to give up looking. Bucky watches the way your face slowly changes, something in the edge of your eyes shifting until you're looking at the floor. It hurts, and it makes him think that he would do anything to see you smile.
In a weak attempt he pushes the last of his fries to you, claiming they're too salty for him. You both know they're not but the small quirk of the corner of your mouth makes it worth it. The rest of the night passes in between condiements and bubbled laughter at the QVC channel, listening in to the televised conversations like they're the next hit reality show.
After a few days Bucky notices the calendar in the kitchen. Not because he is looking for anything in particular. Just because he is waiting for the coffee to finish brewing and his eyes drift to the wall.
The square for next Thursday is crowded with your handwriting.
Your own birthday is written last. Small enough that it almost disappears between everything else. Something about that sits badly in his chest. Because of course it does. Because even on your birthday, you have managed to make yourself the least important thing on the list.
He knows immediately you're going to forget it.
And you do. The morning of, you're rushing around the apartment before sunrise with one shoe on and your phone wedged between your ear and shoulder.
“I already sent the file,” you say into the phone, trying to shove your arm through the sleeve of your coat. “No, I know, but if they wanted changes they should've said that yesterday—”
Your bag slips off your shoulder and your keys hit the floor making you curse under your breath. Bucky is standing in the kitchen holding a mug of coffee when he says it.
“Happy birthday.”
You stop and blink at him.
“Oh,” you say after a second. “Right.”
You laugh softly, but it sounds tired. “I completely forgot.”
Then the person on the phone says your name and you hurry out the door with a quick apology before he can say anything else. It bothers him more than it should because birthdays are supposed to mean something. Yours especially.
So after you leave, he decides to do something about it. He remembers the bakery on the corner had a strawberry shortcake in the display case. Just something small, nothing flashy, whipped cream and strawberries layered across the top.
It reminds him of you somehow. Soft-looking and sweet to the core. He buys candles too. Then he spends the rest of the afternoon searching for the perfect gift. It takes him a few blocks of wandering around to think of what to get, but when it hits him he knew he found his mission.
He spends hours going from used bookstore to used bookstore. By the sixth one, he's almost ready to give up. Then, in a dusty little shop that smells like old paper and mildew, he finds it. Old leather cover, gold embossing faded at the edges a slight water stain on the back. Perfect.
That night, the apartment is dark except for the kitchen light. Bucky stands awkwardly by the counter with the cake in front of him, candles lit, the wrapped gift sitting beside it.
He has no idea what he's doing. But there's no going back now.
The front door opens a little after ten. You walk in looking exhausted, shoulders slumped, shoes dragging. Your hair falling out of whatever messy attempt you made to keep it back this morning. You stop dead when you see him. Then the cake lit with candles, the small box beside it.
Bucky shrugs one shoulder like he suddenly regrets all of it.
“You forgot your birthday,” he says.
You stare at him for a second too long. Nobody has done something like this for you in a very long time. Maybe ever. You don't look like you know what to do with being cared for.
“Bucky...” is all you manage.
He gets flustered immediately.
“It's not a big deal,” he says quickly, motioning vaguely toward the cake. “I just...” He looks down for a second. “Figured somebody should celebrate you.”
The look on your face almost undoes him. You set your bag down slowly and walk over.
“You got me a cake?”
“Yeah.”
“With candles?”
He glances at the little crooked row of them.
“That's usually how birthdays work.”
You laugh then. A little watery around the edges. You walk farther into the kitchen like you're afraid if you move too quickly the whole thing will disappear.
The candles flicker softly between you.
“You didn't have to do this,” you say quietly.
“I know.”
“But you did anyway. Why?”
He doesn't know what to say to that. So he just shrugs again.
You look down at the cake then back up at him.
“Okay,” you say softly. “Then I guess I should make a wish.”
You lean down and hover there for just a moment, the golden glow of the flames casting a light across your face that highlights features he doesn't think he's ever seen. A small beauty mark tucked under your eyebrow, a slight jagged silver scar down the bridge of your nose. He'll never not see them now, a gift of his own he thinks. You close your eyes and hum quietly to yourself before letting out a short breath to blow out the candles.
The apartment goes dark for a second after the smoke curls up into the air. He flicks the stove light on, then Bucky reaches for the wrapped book beside him and holds it out awkwardly.
“And this is... also a thing.”
You blink. “You got me a present?”
“You don't have to sound so surprised.”
You take it from him carefully, with a growing smirk on your face. The paper crinkles softly beneath your fingers as you unwrap it. Then you go still. Completely still. He watches your eyes move over the cover. The old leather, the faded gold lettering.
Your fingers hover over it like you're afraid touching it too hard will make it disappear.
“The last one,” you whisper. Your voice sounds a little broken around the edges. “The last volume of The Canterbury Tales.”
Bucky shifts awkwardly on his feet as you look up at him. Your face is fallen with a joy he's never seen, as if he just hung the moon and painted the stars.
You shake your head in disbelief. “Where did you even—”
“Just found it.” He shrugs.
“Bucky.”
“Took a couple bookstores. Made a deal with the owner once I found it, he was an old history buff on WW2 so…” he admits.
You look up at him then. And there is something in your face he has never seen directed at him before. Something soft, something overwhelming as a clear line starts to well at your eyes. You clutch the book to your chest like you don't know what else to do with it.
"Thank you, Bucky," you whisper, shaky lip tucked betwen your teeth.
A warm silence blooms between you two and Bucky is stuck under your stare, watching the soft dialtion of your pupils. Entranced by them he didn't even notice you had gotten so close, not until he felt the gentle brush of your lips against his cheek.
Words have never failed him like now, stuck and jumbled in the back of his throat only to come out like a garbled hum.
“What'd you wish for?” Bucky asks abrutly as he starts pulling the candles out one by one.
You smile a little, wiping quickly beneath one eye.
“Can't tell you,” you say. “State secrets now.”
He snorts quietly and grabs two spoons from the drawer. You end up on the couch sharing the cake straight from the container, knees brushing every so often in the small space between you. The television is on, though neither of you is paying attention to it. You eat strawberries off the top first and work your way down and Bucky follows suit.
You stay on the couch long after the cake is gone.
The empty container sits forgotten on the coffee table, two spoons abandoned beside it. The book never leaves your lap. At some point, you curl your legs up beneath you and start telling him about the first time you found one of the volumes. How you were seventeen and awkward and had spent an hour pretending to browse because you were too nervous to ask the owner to unlock the glass case.
Bucky laughs.
“So you've always been weird about books.”
“That's rich coming from a hundred-year-old man who still reads history books for fun.”
“Those are different.”
“They're really not.”
You grin when you say it. That soft, sleepy grin he thinks he could spend years chasing. Eventually the conversation drifts. To old bookstores, to the hot dog guy, to Sam, then to terrible movies. You insist he has never properly experienced bad cinema until he has seen Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.
He insists there is no way it can be as ridiculous as you are making it sound. Twenty minutes in, he realizes you were underselling it. By the middle of the movie, you're both laughing. Not polite little laughs either, real ones. The kind that make your stomach hurt and your eyes water and force you to pause because neither of you can hear the dialogue over the sound of the other person losing it.
He can't remember the last time he laughed like this.
By the time the movie is ending, your head is tipped against the back of the couch and your eyes are half closed.
He notices you fighting sleep before you do.
“You're falling asleep.”
“No, I'm not.” You yawn immediately after saying it.
He smiles. “You absolutely are.”
You make a soft noise of protest, but it doesn't have much conviction behind it.And a few minutes later, when he glances over again, you're out completely. Your head has tipped against his shoulder at some point, one hand still loosely wrapped around the book in your lap.
For a second, he just sits there. Listening to the sound of your breathing, the soft hum of the television, the city outside the windows. Then he carefully takes the book from your hands and sets it on the coffee table. He slips one arm beneath your knees and the other around your back.
You stir a little when he lifts you, brows furrowing for a second before you settle again against him.
“Buck?” you mumble sleepily.
“I got you.”
You make another quiet sound and let your head fall against his chest as he carries you down the hallway and into your room. The bedside lamp is still on, there are clothes draped over the chair in the corner and papers stacked haphazardly on your desk, everything is so utterly you.
He sets you down carefully on the bed and pulls the blankets up around you. You don't wake up, not really, you just shift a little beneath the covers and settle. He brushes a piece of hair back from your face and his hand lingers there for a second longer than it should.
Something overcomes him and he leans down, and presses a kiss to your forehead.
“Happy birthday,” he whispers.
As he walked out of you room he saw the book on the table, with a gentle hand he picked it up, brushing a thumb over the pages as he walks down the hall. The rest of the set is on the second highest shelf, lined up together. He slides in the last edition, eyeing the aligned spines with a ghost of a smile before walking off to his room.
The call comes on a Tuesday.
Bucky knows because you walk into the apartment looking vaguely shell-shocked, still clutching your phone in one hand.
You don't even make it all the way into the kitchen before blurting it out. “I got an interview.”
He looks up from where he's sitting at the table. “What?”
“For the curator position.” You blink at him like you still don't believe it yourself. “Next week.”
For a second, all he sees is the excitement on your face. Bright and hopeful, then it disappears almost as quickly as it came.
“Oh,” you say quietly. “Oh no.”
The spiral starts immediately after that. By the end of the week, the apartment is covered in notes. Practice questions taped to the bathroom mirror, flashcards on the kitchen counter, museum reports spread across the couch cushions.
You pace while talking to yourself, you stop sleeping, you definitely stop eating properly. The night before the interview, Bucky finds you sitting cross-legged on the living room floor in sweatpants and one of his old shirts, papers spread around you in uneven piles.
Your glasses are slipping down your nose and your hair is a mess. You look like you're about ten minutes away from a complete breakdown.
“You okay?” he asks, already knowing the answer.
“No,” you say immediately.
He sits down across from you. “What's wrong?”
You stare down at the papers in your lap. “What if I embarrass myself?”
“You won't.”
“What if they ask me something I don't know?”
“You'll know it.”
“What if I freeze?”
“You won't.”
You glare at him a little. “You don't know that.”
He leans back against the couch.
“I know you.”
That quiets you for a second.
Only for a second. Then you start rambling after that. About the anthropology wing. About acquisitions. About field research and exhibit planning and the exact kind of curator you would want to be if anyone ever actually gave you the chance. You talk about preserving history, about wanting people to care. About how every object in the museum used to belong to someone. How every piece of history was once just somebody's normal day.
Bucky listens every time. He listens while you talk yourself into circles. Listens while you explain all the reasons you think you aren't good enough for this.
“I didn't go to the right schools,” you say finally. “I don't know the right people. Everyone else interviewing for this is probably smarter than me and more qualified and—”
“They're gonna be lucky if they get you.”
You stop and the apartment goes quiet around you, scattered notes and pages from your journal fluttering in the air current. Bucky looks at you from across the floor, expression calm like he hasn't just said something that cracked you open right down the middle.
“You mean that?” you ask softly.
“Yeah.” He doesn't even hesitate. “I do.”
You stare at him for a second. Then you move before you can think too hard about it. You lean across the space between you and kiss him. It's quick and impulsive, your hand catches against his shoulder and your mouth brushes his once, soft and startled.
Then you freeze.
“Oh my God,” you whisper, pulling back immediately. “I'm sorry, I shouldn't have—”
Bucky cuts you off by kissing you again, this time slower. Deliberate. His hand comes up to cup your face and suddenly the whole world narrows down to the warmth of his mouth and the way he is holding you like you're something precious.
You melt into it, your hand tangles in the front of his shirt and a soft hum slipping past your lips against his as his thumb brushes softly along your cheek.
When you finally pull apart, both of you look a little stunned. Like neither of you knows what to do with the fact that this has been here all along.
“Okay,” you say softly.
“Okay,” he echoes.
After that, the air between you changes, not in some huge dramatic way. Just softer. He starts brushing his hand against your back when he passes you in the kitchen. You lean against his shoulder on the couch without thinking about it. He kisses your forehead when you leave for work. You steal his hoodies and stop pretending they're yours.
Sometimes you fall asleep together on the couch with the television still on and your legs tangled beneath the blanket. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, Bucky realizes he's stopped thinking of the apartment as somewhere he lives.
Now it just feels like home.
Bucky tries to wake up before you the morning of the interview.
He fails.
By the time he walks into the kitchen, you're already there in nice clothes, standing in front of the coffee maker with your arms crossed and that thousand-yard stare people get right before something important. You look beautiful, terrified and a little bit sick. Your hair is done. Your makeup is subtle. There is a necklace at your throat he thinks he's seen maybe twice before.
You don't notice him at first. You're staring at the coffee pot like if you look away it'll stop working.
“You okay?” he asks softly.
You blink. “No.”
He smiles a little. “You're gonna do great.”
You snort quietly and reach for your mug. “You legally have to say that because you live with me.”
“No,” he says. “I have to say it because it's true.”
That makes you look down for a second as you take a sip of coffee.
“Still feels like I'm gonna throw up.”
“You'll throw up after,” he says. “Like a professional.”
That earns him a small laugh. By the time you're ready to leave, you're standing by the front door shoving things into your bag with shaky hands.
“Keys,” you mutter to yourself. “Wallet. Phone. Museum badge—”
“Hey.”
You look up. Bucky steps closer and reaches for the necklace at your throat.
“It's crooked.”
“Oh.”
His fingers brush softly against your skin as he straightens it and your breath catches a little. So does his. For a second, neither of you says anything. Then he leans down and kisses you. It's quick and soft but it leaves your cheeks warm when he pulls away.
“You got this,” he says.
You nod once then you're gone.
The whole day, Bucky is restless. He tells himself he isn't waiting for you but he definitely is. He tries reading, and ends up readin gthe same page three times. He almost goes to the hot dog stand twice. He paces around the apartment, reorganizes the fridge for no reason, checks the clock so many times it starts to feel personal.
By the time the front door finally opens that night, he looks up so fast it nearly gives him away. You walk in looking different immediately. Not upset exactly, just strange and quiet. Very quiet. Like your thoughts are somewhere else entirely.
He assumes that means you got it. That you're in shock, that you're already halfway out the door toward whatever comes next.
“Hey,” he says carefully from the couch. “How'd it go?”
You stop in the doorway. You still have your bag over your shoulder, coat still on. You look at him for a second before letting out a slow breath.
“I didn't get it.”
The words land strangely between you, it makes Bucky sits up a little straighter.
“Oh.”
You laugh softly, but there isn't much humor in it. “Yeah. They said they wanted to move in a different direction.”
He doesn't know what to say to that. Because he knows how badly you wanted it, knows how much time and sleep and pieces of yourself you've poured into this thing.
But then you shrug one shoulder.
“But...” You look down for a second. “They gave me a raise.”
He blinks, surpised. “Okay.”
“And they're opening a new assistant position to ‘lessen my workload.’”
That takes him a second to process.
“So...” He leans forward a little. “You still got something?”
“I guess.” You look exhausted more than anything. “I don't know if I'm supposed to be happy or devastated.”
Bucky nods slowly.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I get that.”
Because he does. Because sometimes life gives you something almost-good and you don't know what to do with that. He watches you for another second, then he stands.
“Come on.”
You look up. “What?”
“Let's go get hot dogs.”
You stare at him for a second. Then, finally, you smile.
“Okay.”
The hot dog guy takes one look at the two of you and immediately points his tongs in your direction.
“Uh oh,” he says. “This feels emotional.”
You laugh for the first time all day. Real laughter. Bucky feels something unclench in his chest at the sound of it.
“Don't encourage him,” he mutters.
“Too late,” the guy says. “I like her.”
Bucky rolls his eyes and you smile into your sleeve. He pays before you can argue about it, and when you open your mouth to protest, he just gives you a look.
“You had a bad day.”
“So?”
“So let me buy you a hot dog.”
You don't fight him after that.
On the walk back, you stop for ice cream too. Now you're both carrying melting cones down the sidewalk, the city quieter around you than usual. Streetlights glow gold against the pavement. Somewhere in the distance, somebody is playing music with their windows open.
It feels a little like being kids. Or maybe just people who don't know exactly where their lives are going yet. It warms your chest either way. You walk beside him in comfortable silence for a while.
“Hey, Buck?”
“Yeah?”
“You ever hear that whole ‘rejection is just redirection' thing?”
He glances over at you. “...No?”
You laugh softly under your breath. “It's just this thing people say.”
“Okay.” He nods once.
“But that's not what I was getting at.”
He waits as you look down at your ice cream for a second before looking back up at him.
“You know on my birthday you told me to make a wish?”
“Yeah?”
Your smile is smaller now.
"I think it just came true.”
He frowns a little. “You… wished to get passed up on the promotion?”
“No,” you say with a breath of laughter. “No.”
You look at him then, really look at him.
“I wished...” Your voice goes quiet. “That I could spend more time with you.”
Everything in him goes still.
The city. The sidewalk, the half-melted ice cream in his hand. All of it. For a second, neither of you moves. Then Bucky smiles, small at first then bigger.
He ducks his head, shaking it a little.
“State secrets, huh?” he teases softly.
You blush immediately. “Shut up.”
But you're smiling too. You slip your arm through his as you keep walking and Bucky thinks maybe this is what happiness feels like. Small and warm and a little sticky from melted ice cream.
A week later, you come home before sunset.
Bucky is in the kitchen making coffee when he hears the front door open.
“You're home early,” he says, glancing over his shoulder. You lean against the doorway with your bag still hanging off one shoulder.
“I know. Weird, right?”
He smiles a little. “You get fired?”
“Not yet.” You step farther into the kitchen. “I actually have tomorrow afternoon off.”
“Wow.”
“I know,” you say again. “I'm trying not to be overwhelmed by all the free time.”
He laughs quietly and you watch him for a second, seemingly contemplating.
“Do you wanna come by the museum?”
He looks up. “The museum?”
“Yeah.” You shrug one shoulder, suddenly looking a little shy about it. “I could show you around. My favorite exhibits and stuff.”
He tries to act casual. “Sure.”
But secretly, he's thrilled. Because this is your world. He's seen pieces of it before in papers spread across the table and half-finished stories told at two in the morning, but this is different. This is you handing him something important.
The next afternoon, he meets you outside the American Museum of Natural History.
You're waiting near the steps in your work clothes with your ID badge around your neck. You look different now, more awake than he has seen you in weeks, more comfortable.
Like this place fits around you in a way most things don't.
You smile the second you spot him.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
You take him inside to see the old fossils first. You tell him which dinosaur skeletons kids always lose their minds over and which exhibits people walk right past even though they're some of the coolest things in the building.
You talk with your hands when you're excited.
You move quickly from one thing to the next, almost tripping over your own thoughts because there is so much you want to show him.
“And this one,” you say, pointing toward an old display case, “people never pay attention to, but it's one of my favorites.”
Inside are old tools and worn pieces of pottery. Tiny, simple things. You tell him where they came from, who used them, how old they are. Every exhibit comes with a story.
Bucky spends half the time looking at the displays and the other half looking at you. Because you light up here. Your voice gets faster, your smile gets bigger, you stop apologizing for caring too much. It's the happiest he has ever seen you.
At one point, you take him into the giant blue whale room. The enormous whale hangs suspended overhead, casting soft shadows across the floor below. You tilt your head back to look up at it.
“Every museum employee has a designated crying-under-the-whale moment at least once,” you say.
Bucky looks over at you. “Yours probably happened after a meeting.”
You scoff. “No. Mine happened because somebody mislabeled a Bronze Age artifact.”
He laughs harder than he should an you grin.
“I'm serious. It was humiliating.”
“You cried over a label?”
“I care deeply about accuracy.”
“You're insane.”
“Maybe,” you say, smiling up at the whale. “But I'm right.”
He shakes his head, still laughing quietly, standing there beneath the whale with you smiling beside him, he thinks he has never seen anything more beautiful. Eventually, you take him into the Milky Way exhibit.
The room is dark and cool, lit only by thousands of projected stars stretching across the ceiling and walls. Soft bands of white and blue curve overhead, and everything echoes slightly. Your footsteps, his breathing, the sound of the door shutting quietly behind you.
You lead him to one of the benches in the center of the room and sit together. For a while, neither of you says anything. The quiet feels different here. Not empty but peaceful. Bucky leans back and looks up at the stars overhead.
They're beautiful.
But not as beautiful as the look on your face when you stare up at them.
“I used to come here when I first got the job,” you say softly.
He looks over at you, your eyes stay fixed on the ceiling.
“I'd get so stressed and overwhelmed and convinced I wasn't cut out for it.” You smile faintly to yourself. “So I'd come sit in here.”
You lean back a little farther against the bench.
“It helped me remember how small I am.” A pause. “How insignificant everything is.”
You glance over at him. He looks down at his hands for a second before looking back up.
“You're probably the most important thing...” He swallows a little. “To me.”
The room goes quiet again. You blush immediately and turn your face back toward the stars and Bucky does too. For a second. Then he looks back at you, the way the light from the projections catches in your eyes and across your face. It softens every edge of you.
You turn toward him slightly, feeling the gaze from him.
“It's pretty, huh?”
He smiles.
“Yeah...”
But he isn't looking at the stars, you realize after a second, and the mood shifts. Like all the air between you changes. He leans in first this time, a soft breath fans across your face before you meet him halfway. The kiss is slow and gentle, the kind that feels like something settling into place. Your hand finds his without thinking about it, his thumb brushes softly across your knuckles.
When he pulls back, you're both smiling a little and he looks up at the stars again, then back at you.
“What are you gonna do now?”
You blink. “With what?”
“No promotion on the horizon. New assistant to keep you free. What's the future have in hold now?”
You let out a quiet breath, thinking.
“You know,” you say, “I have no idea.”
You lean your head against his shoulder. “For as long as I've been doing this, all I've ever wanted was that job.”
He tilts his head lightly against yours. “What do you want now?”
You look up at him and smile softly.
“You.” Then, after a second, "and a hot dog.”
He laughs and the sound echoes quietly through the stars, you both lean into each other, and suddenly the future doesn't feel so frightening. Because whatever it looks like now, you'll be in it together.
✦Bucky Masterlist - Main Masterlist - Read on aO3!✦
✦summary: you can't stand bucky barnes. despite all your attempts to get rid of him, he's always somewhere in your orbit. you say you hate it. hate him. but you're also a very good liar.✦
✦warnings/tags: bucky barnes x female!reader, college!au, frat!bucky, no use of y/n, mutual pining, rivals to lovers but the rivalry is one-sided, no description of reader (pictures for aesthetic only), fluff, angst, love confessions, bucky being a yearner, plot to earn porn, feral level smut, (teasing, stripping, nipple play, praise kink and degradation kink, soft dom!bucky, mean bucky but you're into it, possiveness, dacryphila, pussy spanking, brat!reader, fingering, manhandling, doggy style, dumbification, big dick bucky, p in v sex, creampie), soft!bucky outside of smut✦
✦wc: 9.2k✦
✦Author's Note: one day I'll just write porn without plot. today is not that day. we earn the horny. Enjoy!✦
You’ve gotten used to him. He’s like a fly that lives in your kitchen, and after a while you stop trying to kill it and just give it a name. It buzzes past your head and you swat at it, but it also sits on the window and you pretend it isn’t there.
Bucky Barnes laughs loudly from the table over, and you turn up the music in your headphones.
Telling him to be quiet never works in your favor. He smirks and tries to flirt with you. All his friends oooooo, like you’re still in middle school, then cause even more noise after you reject Barnes and they jump him like a pack of animals.
If you were smarter, you’d sit all the way in the corners of the cafeteria. Where there wouldn’t be a table big enough to fit all of them.
Something tells you they’d find a way to invade your space anyway. It’s one of their traits.
Pissing you off.
You’ve studied them. The little pack—or maybe pride—of frat boys that Barnes belongs to. It’s a good exercise. Field studying a microculture. You have a whole corner of your mind that’s devoted just to how they behave.
How Barnes behaves, with his pride. If his behavior changes. How it effects his values and actions.
You tell yourself that’s why you tolerate him. He interests you.
A very shiny fly.
You’d been in the same freshman orientation group. Barnes had been one of those boys that you’d long written off—since about middle school, when they’re started cropping up—with his styled hair, proud smile, and natural ease that flowed through the whole room. You don’t remember much from the actual group—the leader had pissed you off by talking like you were a kindergartener, but most people pissed you off—but at the time, you thought you wouldn’t have to.
It hadn’t seemed unreasonable to think that you’d never see these people again. The girls who you were nice to, but didn’t have anything in common with. The lanky boy who’d tried hitting on all of you, and struck out every time. The… others.
And Barnes.
He’d been charm personified. A sweet cake made out of chivalry and smooth words. You’d walked into the room and thought he was pretty. You’d walked out and thought he was gorgeous.
But that had been fine. Because you’d thought you’d never see him again.
And he hasn’t stopped buzzing around you since.
You’re in separate majors, separate lives, but every single GenEd class you take, Barnes is there. Freshman semester it had been your philosophy class, and you’d had to give a presentation together. You’d done most of the work. Barnes had tried to help, but he was bad at it, so he’d mostly just sat there flirting with you and looking pretty.
“I think man is inherently evil.” He said, grinning at you from the library table.
You snorted. “Of course you do.”
“Yeah, that’s- Is that not what our presentation is about?”
Barnes leaned over you, peering at the computer. His body radiated warmth. You hadn’t touched anyone in a while. You’d almost leaned in him, and he never had to know that.
“Nature versus nurture.” He read from the screen. His tongue flicked over his lips. “Uh- I thought we were supposed to be talkin’ about good versus evil, doll.”
“This is good versus evil.” You muttered. “I’m arguing that all people are good until taught to be otherwise.”
“But- You don’t actually believe that-“
“Yes, I do.”
Barnes snorted. “Yeah. You think everyone is good.”
That made you look up. His attention—so close and heated—made you feel all strangely fuzzy.
You ignored it.
You were going to get very good at that.
“I do think everyone is good.” You snapped.
“You hate everyone-“
“I do not hate everyone. I-“ Your face burned, as he’d just kept staring at you “I don’t.”
Barnes smirked, looking you up and down like you were some kind of fuzzy bunny. “Alright.”
“You’re still looking at me-“
“I gotta look at you to talk to you-“
“Not like that-“
“Like what?”
“Like you- You don’t believe me.”
He shrugged, his smirk widening. You thought about punching him in his smug, beautiful face, but decided that wouldn’t help your case.
“Whatever.” You turned back to your computer with a scowl.
Barnes leaned forward, saying your name far too gently. “Hey, I was just joking-“
“Really? I hadn’t been able to tell.”
He sighed. “If this- If it’s important to you that I believe you-“
“It’s not.”
It had been. For some reason, Bucky thinking that you really hated everyone had itched. You slept poorly that night. Stared at the ceiling with thoughts that tumbled and ripped over each other like a river.
He got under your skin. He’s always gotten under your skin.
After philosophy was theology. He sat next to you in every class, bugging you and trying to invite you to study.
“We work well together-“
“No we don’t.”
“C’mon, doll, we got that A before-“
“I got that A.” You shot him glare. “You stood there like a pretty statue, and bumped us down to an A-.”
Barnes wasn’t been fazed. You remember thinking he’d gotten hotter over winter break. Something in his eyes had started to shine, and he might’ve gotten a new product for his hair. It had smelled like thick, spicy fruit. He still wore it today.
It made you want to throttle him more.
“You think I’m pretty?”
He leaned forward, and that smell had flooded your senses. It was like a second hand high.
Barnes licked his lips. He looked down to yours.
You had to rip your gaze away.
“Shut up.”
He laughed. It sounded more like a sigh.
When he turned back to his own notes, you took a deep breath through your nose.
He always smelled so good.
And he was always so handsome. And charming. If you didn’t have your wits, you would’ve been dragged into his little den a long time ago. If you weren’t so careful with every place you stepped, you would’ve stumbled into his chest and let him sweep you off your feet like some damsel in distress.
He’s there for Spanish, both semesters of Sophomore year.
The first one, you saw a girl drop him off in class and watched them make out in the doorway. It was sloppy and loud. A few of Bucky’s little pride members had whooped when he walked inside, smirking and wiping his mouth.
You felt sick, and didn’t let yourself think about why.
The second one had been Spanish and arts. A painting class, where he’d made you a butterfly off of your spirit.
“Look.” He showed it to you with a proud grin. “It’s got your eyes.”
You squinted at it. It did. In an almost shocking resemblance.
“I didn’t know you could paint.” You muttered.
Barnes shrugged. “My best friend is in art school. We’ve known each other forever, I picked up a few things. Nothing big.”
You nodded, looking down at your own—relatively shit—butterfly. It had been more of a bat. You’ll dump it in the trash and start over in hour later.
“Stevie,” you mumbled absentmindedly.
“I- Yeah. How’d you know that.”
“You told me.” You glared at him under your eyelashes. “I listen.”
Barnes stared at you as if you’d just told him he was destined to be a king. It made you a little dizzy.
“And it’s good.” You muttered, against your will.
When Bucky looked at you, a lot of coherent thoughts tended to… Become lacking.
“Yeah.” He breathed, his ears turning red. “It- It is.”
You blinked. “Well, go turn it in, then.”
“What?”
“The butterfly.”
“The-“ He sat a little taller, his fingers curling on the paper. “Oh. Right.”
“Right.” You frowned. “What were you talking about-“
“Nothing. It’s- Nothing.” He stared at his butterfly with an odd expression, smoothing the edges with careful fingers.
Bucky always moved his fingers so carefully. Like everything he touched was glass. It makes you wonder how he’d touch a soft body below him, though he never gets to know that.
“You want this?”
“The-“
“I’m not turnin’ it in.” He held out the butterfly. “It’s for you.”
You stared at the butterfly. At Bucky.
An image of him wiping his mouth and laughing with his pride flashed through your head. It seared some kind of hole in your heart.
“I don’t think your girlfriend would like you giving drawings to other girls.” You muttered. The words had tasted bitter.
Barnes hadn’t seemed able to tell.
“I don’t have a girlfriend.” He said, giving you another strange look. “I’ve never had a girlfriend.”
You scoffed. “Please-“
“I have fun.” Barnes cut you off, lips twitching. “You know, doll. Fun?”
“I know fun.”
“Uh huh-“
“Stop doing that, I do-“
“Never seen you have it.”
“That’s- I don’t have it with you.”
You spat the words, and Bucky flinched back like you’d flung acid. He blinked, and you swallowed. You hadn’t meant for it to be so loud. To sound so harsh.
“James-“
“It’s fine.” He muttered, looking back to his paper. “I just- If you ever-“
He cut himself off, glaring down at nothing. He shook his head, nostrils flaring slightly.
You’d never seen him look like that before. You hadn’t liked it.
“Whatever.” He sighed. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”
And you nodded weakly. To this day you’re not sure what happened.
But you know Bucky had left the butterfly out on the table, after class.
You know it’s still in your bag, folded neatly and tucked safely. You pull it out sometimes to stare at it.
It’s better, really. Not to think about why.
Junior year was the community internship. Again, you and Bucky were in the same class. He bothered you, same as always, but always seemed to have some girl sticking to his side. They barely even seemed to see you.
All you could ever see was them. Running their hands over his broad chest and kissing the stubble he’d been growing. One bit his nose and your hands curled into fists.
You wondered if he made any of them butterflies.
You decide that he doesn’t. He’s only known them a handful of weeks, and he knew you for years.
“We gotta go down the library tomorrow,” he told you. You shrugged.
“I can go myself.”
Barnes frowned. “It’s not in a good part of town, you shouldn’t go alone.”
“I carry pepper spray-“
“That’s not enough.”
You sighed, giving him an exasperated look. “Fine. I’ll bring Brock.”
Barnes stiffened. You’d never seen him stand so tall. “Who’s Brock.”
“He’s in our class? He has been, all semester-“
“You talkin’ about Rumlow?”
You nodded. Barnes worked his jaw, looking off the side and huffing a low laugh.
“What-“
“You’re not goin’ with Rumlow.”
Your mouth fell open. “You don’t get to tell me that-“
“I know.” Barnes crossed his arms. “But I am.”
That had made you feel all gooey, in a very low part of you tummy. You’d gotten good at making sure Bucky didn’t see it.
“Fuck you, James-“
“He’s a dick.” Barnes didn’t waver. “He got kicked out of the frat, you know how big a piece of shit you gotta be for that to happen?”
You paused.
Fuck, that was a good point.
You hated it when he made good points.
“Fine.” You grumble, looking down to your phone. “You got with Natasha.”
Natasha. She’d managed to stick to Bucky longer than the others. She was gorgeous, and smart. You wished she was a bitch, too. It would make her a lot easier to hate.
You thought Bucky would jump at the chance to get one on one with her. They could fuck in the car after, and before, and you could drink yourself to sleep imagining it.
“No. I’m goin’ with you.”
You stick out your tongue. “Well, I’m not going with you.”
“Huh. Guess no one’s going then.”
You’d looked up with a glower. Barnes had raised his brows in challenge. He knew you’d cave. Knew you wouldn’t just let something slip through the cracks because of a petty fight.
He knew you.
You hated him.
“Fuck you.”
“You said that already.” He muttered. “And I’m not holding my breath.”
You blinked. “Wha-“
“I’ll pick you up at noon tomorrow.”
He walked away. You didn’t remember how to move for five minutes.
He asked you about Brock the next day. Like he was checking on you. Like he cared.
You don’t let yourself think he does. You’ve reminded yourself of that over and over, since Freshman year.
Bucky doesn’t care about you, so you’re allowed not to care about him. It’s necessary. Important to survival.
Because you’ve studied his kind. You’ve studied him.
Frat boys. In their natural habitat—the college campus—they’re apex predators. They’re loud because they don’t have to worry about being quiet. Most of them are here on athletics scholarships, so they care about that more than their actual classes. The ones who aren’t are rich, and never learned to worry about anything.
They have a lot of sex. They get girlfriends, then cheat on them. Your roommate Wanda knows a lot of people—she’s in a lot of clubs—so you’ve heard all the stories. Seen a few firsthand, or overheard crying in bathrooms. Everyone keeps dating and fucking them because they’re hot and athletic and rich, and you’re all young and stupid.
“It’s fun to make bad choices.” Wanda’s told you. “While we’re still young enough that it doesn’t matter.”
But you don’t make bad choices.
Ever.
You don’t understand that philosophy at all. Why make a bad choice when you could make a good one. Why risk someone curb stomping your heart when you could just… not.
Second semester of junior year, you take a public speaking class with Bucky. He comes up to you in the cafeteria, his pride just as loud as always.
“Hey,” he says your name, standing at the other end of the table. You don’t look up from your computer.
“Hi.”
“You got the homework for public speaking?”
“Yes.”
Barnes clears his throat, drumming his fingers. “You gonna share it with me?”
“It’s online, James.”
He’s silent for a moment, and you look up.
He’s staring at you, the expression on his face unreadable. You almost ask if he’s okay.
“I know that.” He says, rubbing the back of his neck.
You cross your arms. “Did you.”
“Yeah.” He throws you that charming grin. You hate that it still makes you think he’s beautiful. “I was asking if you wanted help with it.”
“If I wanted… Help?”
Barnes didn’t read the quiet, bubbling fury in your tone. He never does.
“Yeah, I was thinking you could come over, practice on me, you know. I’m a very good audience.”
You narrowed your eyes. Barnes kept grinning, and you wonder if he actually thought this was going to work.
“I don’t need your help.”
He deflated slightly. But he didn’t give up.
You’ve never known him to before. You shouldn’t have expected that he would now.
“Maybe I need your help?”
“You always need my help.”
Bucky snorted. “Yeah, you got no idea.”
“What’s that supposed to mean-“
“You wanna come over Thursday?”
“No.”
“Alright, I’ll go to you-“
“I’m working Thursday.”
Bucky paused. “You got a job?”
You nodded. He frowned.
“Where?”
“Corner store.”
His frown deepened. “That’s not safe.”
You scoffed. “Okay, dad-“
“You’re working late, it’s not-“
“I’ve been fine.”
“But what about when you’re not-“
“But I am-“
“I know you are now, but-“ He ran a hand over his face, his voice dropping with frustration.
It always went right to your core, when that happened. You wished it didn’t.
“What about when you’re not?” He demanded. “We live in a city, what about when someone does a holdup and you’re the cashier-“
“Why do you care.”
Bucky went still. He opened his mouth closed it, and gave that tight shake of his head that you know means something, but can never figure out what.
“What corner store.” He grunts.
“Fifth and twenty, why-“
“We’re studying while you work.”
Your mouth fell open. “No-“
“Yeah. Or- I’m studying. There.”
“I can kick you out-“
“You won’t.”
He walked away. And you hate him. You hate that you know he’s sleeping with Natasha—and who knows who else—and that makes you want to sink your teeth into his neck like some kind of claim. You hate that you are going to let him. You hate that he knows you so well he starts fucking things in the homework up on purpose, just so you stop pretending not to pay attention and study with him.
You hate how warm he is sitting next to you.
You hate that you don’t shove him away, and you feel colder when he’s gone.
He came over to work every night for the rest of the semester. You’re sure he had better things to do, but he doesn’t do them.
Bucky sat its behind the counter with you, and does homework. He did funny voices while practicing his speeches, and brushed his hand over the back of your knee whenever he stood up.
You shivered every time. A smug look flashed over his face.
He made you giggle.
You hate him for that, too.
And Wanda’s told you to make the bad choice.
Everyone tells you to make the bad choice.
Wanda had became good friends with Natasha. You try not to feel any way about it—Natasha, who’s touched what you’ve never allowed yourself to reach for—but then Wanda asks if she can move in, and you get sick.
You say yes. You won’t be one of those girls who holds those kinds of grudges.
Natasha moves in when summer vacation starts. And she’s lovely. You hate that she’s lovely. She’s cool and interesting and has pretty hair.
You wonder if Bucky liked running his fingers through it. You lie on the floor of the bathroom and refuse to cry about it, just staring up at the ceiling.
For the first time, you don’t have a class with him. It’s making you choke on clean air, because there’s this spicy, intoxicating fruit smell that’s supposed to be there, and it’s not, and you’re detoxing on a drug you never even got to take.
“My boyfriends coming over tonight.” Natasha tells you and Wanda one night.
Black spots dance in front of your vision. Faraway, you hear yourself say that’s fine.
It is not fine.
Bucky’s going to be here, and he’s going to be kissing Natasha in front of you, and that shouldn’t matter but it does, it does, it does.
But when Natasha’s boyfriend comes over, it’s not Bucky.
It’s Sam.
You know Sam. He’s one of the nice members of Bucky’s pride. He and Bucky are close. He’s always lingering in the background, laughing while you verbally impale Bucky and clapping his friend on the back when he walks it off. He and Bucky shared a room sophomore year. They go to baseball games together and eat five hotdogs every time.
You can’t think of any facts about Sam that aren’t related to Bucky.
And Sam kissed Natasha. And you stood there stupidly, certain that you really must have missed something.
“Oh,” Sam said when he saw you. “You’re Bucky’s girl.”
You stammered. Said a lot of babbling words you don’t really remember, while Sam gave Natasha an amused look. Natasha shrugged, light dancing behind her eyes.
Neither of them feel like elaborating that. No one ever does. There are just passive comments that make you more confused, like Wanda casually mentioning how you really should try going after Barnes and Natasha telling you that Sam asked her out after she and Bucky fizzled.
“We never really got started, though.” She mused. “His heart wasn’t in it. He even told me that, but-“ She laughed breathily. “You know. You think you’re going to be the girl that makes them settle, then you wake up and realize that you’re better with someone who actually wants that. With you.”
You blinked at her. You did not know how it was. You’ve had… affections for one person your entire college career, and you’ve known that he’d never settle with you.
There’s no point in telling Natasha that. With the glint in her eyes, you’re sure she already knows.
“He talked about you all the time,” she told you casually on another day. “God, it was so annoying, but-“ She looked you up and down. It always made you flush. “I get it.”
And people had been doing that a lot, lately. Telling you how much Bucky talks about you. Making little comments you think you’re supposed to understand, but you don’t.
Sam invites Bucky to go out with you guys, because Nat invited him. No one asked for your approval. They probably knew you would never have given it.
“You look nice.” Bucky muttered in the car.
Your thighs were pressed together, your shoulder bumped whenever the car rattled, and you had to keep yourself locked up to not melt into him.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.” He sighed. “It’s, uh- weird, right? Us not having a class together.”
You hummed. It was. It made the whole world tilt off it’s axis. Bucky didn’t get to know that.
“You know, I still got homework.”
You frowned up at him. “Okay.”
Bucky cleared his throat, and rubbed the back of his neck. “And, uh- I don’t have a study partner anymore.”
“You’ll find one.” You grumbled. There’s that acid again, stinging on your tongue.
He will. He’s Bucky. There will be a line of people clamoring to have his attention, because you’ve been stealing it for far too long and everyone wants a taste of that spicey, calming fruit-
“I’m still free most nights.” He said, looking straight ahead. “You still work at the corner store?”
You blinked.
Oh.
“Yeah. I do.”
Bucky nodded. His lips twitched. “Okay.”
And sure enough, he’s there on Monday. It’s strange talking about classes you’re not taking, but it makes you want to strangle him less.
Although you haven’t wanted to strangle him in a while. You’ve mostly wanted his hand around your throat, pinning you below him, touching you until everything is just floating light.
“You look tired.” He said. Something in his voice was too casual. Like he was weighing every word.
“I am tired.”
“You been eating enough?”
“I’m eating right now-“
“I brought you food.” He fixed you with a stern glare.
It made you feel all kinds of breathless and gooey.
That night you’ll lie in bed with your fingers between your legs. They’re not thick enough, slipping right in and out of your pussy with no relief. Bucky’s fingers would be bigger.
“I would’ve eaten anyway.” You grumbled, watching some teenagers move around the drink aisle.
Bucky chuckled. “Sure, doll.”
Your cheeks heated. You went over when the teenagers started shouting about the store not having the right drinks, but you had to stand on wobbly knees.
Bucky hasn’t called you doll in years.
It felt different now. It felt like it matters.
You’re not going to do the stupid thing. It didn’t matter how much Wanda pushed you into it, or how many comments Nat made about Bucky not sleeping around anymore. You’ve gotten this far. You graduate in the spring. And Bucky will just always be a warm memory you worship between your legs.
He left his folder at the store last night. You thought about giving it to him next time he dropped in, but then Natasha said she was going to his place for some party and you figured you could hitch a ride.
Not because you wanted to see him sooner. Nat made a comment about that, that teasing smirk over her lips.
You ignored her. You’re very good at it now.
The party is raging, when you arrive. It’s loud, so loud. You’ve stepped into the frat boy den, and it aligns with your every study. Hot, sweaty bodies grinding into each other, music you can feel in your ribs, drinks being poured and clicked open. So much noise. So many people.
“Go find Bucky!” Nat whispers in your ear, and you swallow.
“Where do you think he is- Nat-“
She’s already gone. You have to go find Bucky alone.
You think it’s going to be an impossible quest. There are so many people you’re sure it’s a fire hazard, you don’t know anyone but Sam and Nat—who are sucking face in the corner and no fucking help at all—and if you ask someone random to help you find Bucky, you’re going to get mocked about it.
Weird girl was asking for you, Barnes. Knew you wouldn’t care.
You bite the inside of your cheek, spinning around for any possible direction that might take you to Bucky.
He finds you first.
“You’re here!” Bucky calls your name, and you almost jump out of your skin. “Thought you’d never be here!”
You stumble a little as he collapses over you. He’s heavy, his eyes glossy and unfocused, and you’ve never seen him smiling so wide. He stops you from falling with an arm around your waist, and your breath catches.
“I’m here.” You whisper. “I- I have your folder-“
“Shhh.” Bucky drops his forehead against yours, eyes fluttering shut. “Don’t talk ‘bout my school.”
“I-“
“You can talk about your school.” He presses further over you. Backing you against the counter, his fingers digging into your hips. “Love it when you talk about stuff. ‘S smart.”
“Thanks.” You look off to the side, trying to see if anyone is watching.
Bucky grabs your jaw and turns it back. You almost whimper at the intensity in his gaze. You’ve never seen it so great, and you’ve seen it a lot.
“You’re here.” He mumbles. “In m’ house.”
“I needed to drop something off.”
Your voice is soft, but Bucky’s whole face falls.
“You’re not stayin’?”
“I- I don’t-“
You stumble, and realize you’ve grabbed the collar of his shirt. You’re already trying to stop him from moving away, even thought you know you shouldn’t.
“There’s a lot people.” You breathe. “I don’t like crowds.”
Bucky blinks. You could swear his eyes clear slightly, even if his grip on you tightens.
“Alright.” He gives that strange little nod. “C’mon.”
“Come- James-“
You squeal as he picks you up. Scoops you into his arms like you weigh nothing. And you knew he was strong, but you’ve never felt it.
Feeling it is dangerous. It makes you want that strength everywhere. Pinning you down and slamming into you, making your head nice and empty as you feel him everywhere.
“You’re drunk, be careful-“
“’M not that drunk.”
“You’re slurring-“
“I’m buzzed.” He says the words more clearly. Like he wants you to hear that he can. “Not drunk. I won’t drop you.”
You grunt, wrapping your arms tight around his neck. He gives you a tiny smile.
“You’re here.”
He says it like he can’t believe it. Like it’s the most beautiful thing in the world. He’s beaming like he adores you.
You can’t help yourself from smiling in return.
“Yeah. I am.”
Bucky’s grin gets impossibly wider. He kisses your cheek, messy and quick.
It’s like being shocked by lightning. Your heart does a flip in your chest, and you hold onto him a little tighter.
“James-“
“Y’know, you’re the only person I let call me James.” He reaches the top of the stairs, the music dulled by the distance.
The only drum left in your chest is your heartbeat. You wish he’d stop looking at you like that. It’s dangerous.
“You- You never told me you didn’t want me to.”
He hums. “You ever hear anyone else call me that?”
“I- Um-“
“One time a girl tried.” He pulls open a door. “Made me more into it, she got real excited.”
There it is. That toxic curl of jealousy in your gut.
“James-“
“Then I called your name with my dick inside her. Think that ruined it.”
Bucky says it lazily. Like it doesn’t change your whole life.
“What?” You squeak.
He just grins, slowly lowering you down his body.
“I call your name when I have sex.”
“I- I- Why-“
“’Cause I love you.”
“James-“ Your voice cracks, and tears are burning at your eyes.
You’re confused. So confused. You came over with a folder and a mission to be in and out. Your walls had been just as spiked and guarded as always, and maybe Bucky’s been able to slip through a few times, but you’ve learned how to not let that matter. Because it didn’t matter to him.
But now he’s saying this.
And you’re in what has to be his room, sitting on his mattress. If you weren’t so drunk on whatever’s happening, you’d be scanning around. You’d be studying how Bucky keeps his own space, because it’s another thing you’d get to have about him.
Instead, all you can see it Bucky kneeling in front of you. The impossible softness on his face. The lips that he’s licking again. The thick arms, keeping you sitting on the edge of his bed.
You say the only thing you can think of. The only thing that gets you out of here with your heart intact.
“You don’t mean it.”
Bucky doesn’t even flinch.
“I do.”
“You’re drunk-“
“I’m uninhibited.” His eyes shine. “You taught me that word.”
“James-“
“Hmm.”
He leans forward, tilting his head slightly. Your breath catches. You can feel the heat of his breath over your face. He’s looking at you like you’re the only thing in the world.
“Freshman year.” He murmurs. He won’t stop staring at you, that soft smile on his lips. “You were so bossy and mean to me.”
You flush deeper. “You- You were annoying-“
“I liked workin’ you up.”
“That’s mean.”
“Got me your attention.” He mumbles. “Otherwise you woulda just ignored me.”
You swallow. “I still tried to ignore you.”
“I know.” He shrugs. “But you didn’t. You’re not as mean as you wanna be. ‘S why I love you.”
Tears burn behind your eyes. “Please stop saying that-“
“But I mean it.”
“You can’t mean it.” Your voice cracks slightly. “It- It’s not fair if you mean it now.”
He frowns again. It’s adorable. Like he’s really worried about you. “What’d you mean, now?”
“I- I mean you won’t mean it in the morning.” You whisper. “And that won’t be fair.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
It’s all you can say. You haven’t even been able to tell yourself the reason, you’re certainly not telling Bucky first.
“’Cause why?” Bucky’s lips twitch. He leans forward until your noses bump. “Why do you care?”
You blink. And you can see it in his eyes.
The challenge.
Why do you care.
Of course you fucking care. You always care. It’s Bucky, it doesn’t matter how hard you tried, you’ve never been able to not care, and now you’re in his room, on his bed, and he’s saying things and looking at you like- Looking at you like-
Your brain short circuits, and it sparks in your core.
Your body moves.
Bucky grunts when you grab his face and drag him into a kiss. It’s quick and rough. A sudden slam of mouths together with no plan or real fire. He doesn’t kiss you back.
When you pull back, you’re sure you’re going to cry. You’re panting, your lips wobbling, and Bucky’s just staring at you.
“I- I’m sorry.” You shrink back. He can’t see you cry. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have- I’ll go-“
Bucky almost lurches. He dives over you like an animal, and before you know what’s happening, you’re kissing again.
Really kissing.
The way you’d always pictured it, in the greatest privacy of your mind and room. Hidden under the covers so no one could see the shame of how deeply you imagined it.
Bucky’s lips moving against yours. That tongue flicking over your lips before he nips on your lower lip, and grins at your moan.
This is that, and better. Because he’s really here. He tastes a little like liquor, but mostly like mint and something that’s purely Bucky. You’re being pressed backwards into the mattress, Bucky moving up until he’s caging you to the mattress. His knees braced over your waist, his chest pushed against yours, his hands wandering and grabbing every bit of you that he can reach.
Rough fingers slip under your shirt, teasing your sides. You gasp into his mouth, and Bucky groans.
“Ja- James-“
“I know.” He mumbles. “Wanna take care of you, doll.”
“Mhmm.” You whine in a half protest. It’s hard to think with one massive hand mapping every curve of your body, and the other sliding up to grab your neck.
Bucky tips your head back, and hums in satisfaction, when you willingly open your mouth to deepen the kiss.
“Please lemme take care of you.” He rasps. He sounds like a man wrecked.
And who are you to tell him no?
“Oh- Okay- Oh!”
Bucky doesn’t waste time. He pulls back with something like clarity in his eyes, licks his lips, and runs a large hand fully up your side. You arch into the touch with a soft gasp, eyes fluttering shut. He wraps around your breast, groaning as his thumb flicks over your perked nipple.
“No bra, hm?”
“Didn’t- Didn’t think I’d be here for more than five minutes-“
“Or you were hopin’ you’d be here.” He teases, smirking down at you. “Right here.”
He pinches your nipple, rolling it between expert fingers. You toss your head back with a moan. Bucky chuckles.
“Yeah, that’s right. This is exactly what you wanted, isn’t it doll.”
“N- No-“
Your words fall off into a whine as Bucky yanks his hand away. You grab his wrist, trying to drag it back, but he’s too strong.
“Wha- What’re you doing-“
“If you’re gonna tell me you don’t want this.” He shrugs, soothing the edge of your shirt like it’s a blanket. “I’m not gonna do it.”
“But- But I do want it.” You squeeze his wrist, pouting as tears start to gather in your eyes.
Bucky clicks his tongue. He’s moved on to soothing out your hair.
“Bucky, please-“
“Please what?”
He grabs your cheek, forcing your gaze onto his. Heat floods your core at the possessive motion, and your legs fall open. Bucky’s attention flicks down, but he doesn’t waver.
“You gonna spend the whole time pretending you don’t want me?” He demands, dragging his thumb over your lower lip. “Or are you going to be a good girl and let me have you how I want?”
And you realize what that glint in his eyes means. He’s giving you a choice, for how you want this to go. Soft and sweet, or what he wants to do.
What you want him to do.
You might be drooling. Your grip on his wrist tightens, and you feel a little faint. Every fantasy you’ve ever had is above you. You just have to grab it.
“I didn’t come here tonight for this.” You breathe out, testing the waters.
Bucky’s nostrils flare. His plants a hand on your hip, pinning you down to the mattress.
“You didn’t, huh.”
You shake your head. Bucky’s tongue flicks over his lips.
“You need me to show you what you want?” He’s using a low tone that rushes right to your pussy.
You nod, slowly trying to press your thighs back together. There’s too much pressure, you need a way to relieve it.
Bucky grabs your knee and shoves it back open, and you squeak in elated surprise.
“I’ll be good to you, doll.” He mutters, rubbing the inside of your thigh. His knuckles brush near your pussy, and you clench around nothing. “Show you exactly what you need.”
“You- You don’t know what I need-“
Bucky crashes back down, kissing you into the mattress with brutal, unrelenting force. Your arms fly around his neck and he groans, dropping his hips down over yours.
“Yeah, I do.” He says against your lips, rutting down. Forcing you to feel the push of his bulge against your clothed core. “And you fuckin’ know it.”
God, you do. You don’t have a single question of it.
Bucky pulls away, and you grumble in protest, trying to reach up and drag him back far another kiss. Just that is enough for you to feel like you’re in Heaven.
But Bucky swats your hands away, giving you a stern look.
“No touching.”
He starts to pull you shirt over your head, and you scowl.
“You’re touching-“
“I,” Bucky leans down to kiss over the valley of your breasts, his eyes gleaming with amusement. “Can do whatever the hell I want to you. Isn’t that right, babydoll.”
He must be putting a spell over you. You nod dazedly, and Bucky laughs. His lips wrap around your nipple, sucking and flicking the little bud like it’s candy. The sensation makes you restlessly needy, the heat between your legs only building and building.
“Buh- Bucky- Oooh-“
There’s an extra, strong little flick that only makes you think of what his mouth is going to be able to down where you need him.
“Fuck- James-“
Bucky groans, biting down softly. Your hips buck with delight, and your whine when he shoves them back down.
“C’mon.” He mutters, slowly kissing back to the other breast. “Keep still.”
You make an incoherent noise, but you try. You really do try.
Bucky wiggles down your pants and underwear without taking his mouth from your breasts, and you force yourself to keep still. Cold air doesn’t even hit your cunt, because he’s so folded over you. Trapping all the frictionless heat between your bodies, letting his covered cock drag against your core whenever he moans and ruts, but never offering anything else.
“More.” You breathe, eyes squeezed shut in frustration. “James, I- I need more-“
You moan as Bucky bites your breast again. He kisses over the hurt, humming lazily.
“Thought you didn’t know what you need.”
You shake your head, legs falling further open. “I- I need you- Bucky I need you-“
“Where’d you need me.” He kisses just under your breast. “’Cause I’m here. Touchin’ you.”
He grabs your thigh, rubbing it slowly back and forth. You try to arch off the bed, but you can’t get an inch out from under him.
“Touch- Touch me more.” You gasp out. “I need you to touch me more, I- I don’t care how, just- Touch me-“
You cry out, as Bucky brushes his thumb over your clit. He repeats the featherlight motion once more, then twice. It’s too much and not nearly enough. Your pussy is weeping, but Bucky just grazes you clit like he’s wiping something off your cheek.
“What a needy girl.” He coos against your skin, kissing along the side of your breast. Up to your neck. “You’re even more reactive than I thought you’d be, sweetheart. And I thought,” he presses his thumb down hard, and you scream.“You’d be plenty reactive.”
Tears push at your eyes, from frustration and humiliation. You’re being pathetic, you’ve dogwalked him the whole time you’ve known him and suddenly you’re a flushed, begging disaster below him.
Bucky sucks a dark spot on your neck, and you moan. His thumb drags between the lips of your pussy and teases over your hole. It’s gone as soon as it gets there, and the sound you make is downright undignified.
“You want to swallow me, don’t you.” Bucky nips at your ear. “Dirty fuckin’ slut.”
Oh, no. That shouldn’t turn you on so much.
“I- I’m not-“
“Yes, you are.” Bucky kisses along your jaw. “Say it, doll.”
You shake your head. Bucky repeats the slow drag, this time swapping for his middle finger, and pushing slightly into your cunt.
“Bucky- Fuck-“
Your arms fly up to grab him. Bucky leans up and fixes you with a stern glare.
“No touching.”
You whimper, but pull back away. You fist the sheets, splaying your body out in the hope it’ll make him you faster.
And it almost works. Bucky’s brow works and he slowly traces up the curve of your waist. Your breathing shutters, as he traces the outline of a love bite on your breast. His finger twists, and the pad of it presses right into the entrance of your pussy.
Bucky meets your glossy eyes, and his jaw clenches. There are big, fat tears welling up.
His voice drops to something soft. “Are you still-“
“Yes.” You push your chest up, trying to give him a better view of your breasts. “Please.”
Bucky nods to himself. He leans fully over you, searching your gaze, and slowly starts to push his finger into your pussy.
Your breath catches. Your eyes flutter, and Bucky grabs your cheeks.
“Eyes stay on me.”
He’s not asking. You don’t want him to. You moan and nod weakly, watching him under tear stained lashes. He slowly pulls his finger out, then drives it back in a little faster. He’s a lot bigger than your own hand is. Everything about him is bigger. You’re worried you’re going to die on his cock.
“You like that,” Bucky coos, squeezing your cheeks slightly. “Look at you, gettin’ so worked up over just a finger.”
You give him a pleading look, and he chuckles, leaning down to kiss your puckered lips.
“You get two when you tell me you’re my dirty little slut.”
You clench down around him, and Bucky groans, pushing in a little deeper.
He finds the spongey spot that makes your vision go all blurry. Your mouth falls open in a long moan, and bucky raises his brows.
“There it is. That’s what a wanna see.”
He pushes harder against it. You squeeze around him again, breath coming in pants.
“Who’s owning this pussy, baby, huh?” Bucky’s eyes bore into yours, and the hot shame pricks more and more over your skin.
You think a waterfall might be coming out of your cunt. The wet sounds as Bucky finger fucks you certainly seem like proof.
You can’t form a full answer. You gape at him, rolling your hips in tiny movements to try and chase a little bit more.
Buckly yanks his finger out of your pussy, lands a harsh smack on your clit, then shoves them right back in. It’s an overwhelming, electric feeling. The tears burst from your eyes, and you almost reach for him.
“That’s a girl.” He kisses your cheek so sweetly, pumping his finger deep into your soaked cunt. “Keep cryin’ for me, babydoll. Let it out.”
You pull at the sheets, a low hum of pleasure building in your lower stomach. Your head tries to roll to the side, but Bucky keeps it up. His staring just makes everything worse and better.
The deep affection in his eyes as he watches you right on the edge. Trying to claw your way to an orgasm while he keeps you from letting go. There’s no attention being given to your clit, only his finger bumping your g-spot. It’s throbbing from his spanking. You want him to do it again.
“Buh- Bucky-“
“Ah.” He pauses, and you almost scream. “Try again.”
“James.” You whimper, giving him your most pleading eyes.
A smile curves on his lips. “Yeah, babydoll?”
“Do it again.”
It’s less than a whisper. Part of you doesn’t even want him to hear it.
But he does. Of course he does. Surprise flashes over his face for the briefest second, and you think about running away. You shouldn’t have asked. He’s going to say no, it’s going to humiliate you more, and then that’s going to make you cum on his hand and he’ll never look at you again-
“What?” His voice dropped. You’re screwed. “This?”
Bucky pulls back and spanks your pussy again. You sob, nodding as the shock rushing through you again. Bucky licks his lips, leaning back to watch you. He does it again, and you seize up.
“Jesus, you’re spilling everywhere.” He traces two fingers through your pussy, and you clench around nothing. “Messy girl, bet you’re going to fucking squirt on my cock.”
You whimper, and Bucky chuckles.
“I know, sweetheart. But you’re gonna love it, aren’t you.”
He spanks your pussy again. Any thought to protest is drained from your head.
“Ye- Yes.” You cry out.
Bucky smirks, prowling back over your body.
“And?”
You blink at him through the tears. “And?”
“What are you?”
Your breath hitches. Bucky holds up his shiny hand, making a gun motion.
“Two fingers.” He reminds you.
And just like that, you cave.
“I- I’m your dirty-“ You hiccup a little, the tears starting to free flow again. “I’m-“
“Look at me.” He reminds sternly. “Come on, be good-“
“I’m your dirty slut.” You push out, grinding your hips up into Bucky’s knee. “James, I’m yours, I’m your cockslut, please-“
Bucky makes a feral sound from his chest, and you sob in relief when he shoves those two fingers into you cunt. You shudder, eyes rolling back and hips grinding down. Bucky doesn’t try to stop you this time, just groaning as he finger fucks you into oblivion.
“That’s it, that’s my fuckin’ girl.” He scissors his fingers, and you writhe in the sheets. “So pretty on my fingers, bet you’ll look even better when I’m fuckin’ you stupid on my cock.”
You moan. “Yes, oh- Oh my god- “
Bucky twists his wrist and starts to pummel your g-spot, right as his thumb finds your clit. He rubs it tight circles in time with his thrusts, and presses his lips back over yours. You almost can’t breathe, between the pleasure he’s pulling from you and the demand of his mouth. Your body starts to twitch and go all tight.
“I- I’m gonna- James, I think-“
“I know.” He kisses the corner of your mouth, then your upper lip. “Show me what you’ve got, baby, come on.”
Your orgasm rushes through you, staring in your tummy and leaking down Bucky’s fingers and through your whole system. He pulls out immediately, landing a few more spanks on your weeping cunt. In the post-orgasm sensitivity, it’s almost too much to take.
You spread your legs and beg for it anyway.
“Demanding, aren’t you.” Bucky mocks. “Want to feel me tomorrow, when you walk around all cool and collected, pretending you weren’t callin’ yourself my cockslut a few hours ago.”
You shake your head, shivering as Bucky rubs your pussy back and forth. “I- I won’t-“
“Won’t what? Keep it a dirty little secret. You want me to spell my fucking name on your face, so everyone knows who this tight little pussy belongs to?”
“Nuh- No-“
“You think you won’t feel me? Doll,” Bucky takes his hand away, and you almost start to cry again before he pushes two thick fingers between your lips.
“Mmmm-“
“That’s right.” He mutters to himself, and you can feel his attention as you clean your own release off his fingers. “Gonna ruin you for everyone else, doll, you won’t be able to fuck anyone without wishin’ it was me.”
You pull him away by his wrist, risking the punishment to give him your best, sexiest doe-eyes.
“Don’t want anyone else.” You say, and Bucky blinks. “Won’t pretend I wasn’t with you. Want everyone to know.”
Bucky’s nostrils flare. He stares, shoulders heaving, and you think he’s going to do the thing again. The one where he pounces over you and makes you beg.
Instead he grabs your hips like he’s steadying himself, and stares at you like you’re the moon.
“Flip over.” He grunts.
You frown. “Wha-“
“Over. Just-“
Bucky flips you onto your stomach like you weight nothing, then drags your ass high in the air. You squeal, grabbing at the sheets and trying to look at him over your shoulder.
A massive hand presses you back into the sheets by your shoulder blades. Probably for the best. Your knees were shaking too much to be steady.
“Stay there.” There’s a clink of metal behind you. He’s taking off his belt. “Need to be inside you. Now.”
“James-“
“Please.”
His voice cracks.
You’re far, far past trying to tell him no.
You flop obediently, and it earns you a soothing stoke over the curve of your ass.
“So pretty.” He says it so soft, you’re not actually sure you’re supposed to hear. “Wanted this for so fuckin’ long, ‘s even better than I imagined.”
Bucky rubs his cock between your pussy lips and you moan, melting into the sheets. Your knees almost drop down. Bucky wraps an arms around your waist and drags you back up.
“I’ve gotcha. There we go.”
He keeps rubbing it, gathering your arousal to make the entrance easier. There’s plenty of it. Even more when his fat head presses against your clit, and you wiggle.
“Done so good for me, babydoll.” His praise shoots straight to your already burning pussy. You try to push yourself higher with a whine. “Already nice and stupid for me, just gotta- Fuuuuck-“
Bucky pushes himself in slowly, and you cry out.
“Oh- Oh my god-“
It’s good he didn’t let you see him before. He’s big. Stupidly big. You can feel every thick vein, every pulse as you squeeze around him, every inch of Bucky dragging through your tight channel. You sob into the sheets, pushing back to try and take more. You have to take more. You need to take all of him, so when he fucks you he can drive every single fucking thought from your head.
“That’s it.” Bucky groans, pressing his face into the curve of your neck as he bottoms out.
He’s folded over you, fully buried in your pussy, breath hot and heavy. You whimper, trying to adjust to the size of him. Bucky’s arm snakes around you, rubbing your clit lightly. Trying to help you relax.
“You’re so tight, baby.” He rasps, kissing behind your ear. “Best pussy I’ve ever fuckin’ felt.”
“Mmmm.” You tip your head, pressing your cheek into the mattress. “You’re so big.”
“I know. But you’re gonna take it, aren’t you?”
You whimper, and Bucky chuckles. The sound vibrates between your legs, not helping anyone at all.
“Yeah. You are.”
And if Bucky says you are, you are.
He starts by pulling almost fully out, then rolling slowly back in. It goes easier than the first time, but still knocks the air from your lungs. Your eyes roll back. A strangled sound leaves your throat, and Bucky laughs.
“Look at you, silly girl. We’ve barely even started.”
“’S- ‘S a lot-“
“But it’s your my fuckin’ cockslut.” Bucky slams his hips forward, and you scream in pleasure. “You’re the one who said it, remember. My. Fucking. Cockslut.”
He emphasizes each word with another thrust, and soft, caring Bucky is gone. The hot, demanding version is back, and he brought your tears with him.
Bucky fucks into your like an animal, pushing you down into the mattress and forcing an impossibly deep angle. You’re sensitive. So sensitive it almost hurts in the best fucking way.
“Can see your pussy taking me, doll.” Bucky groans, his fingers digging into your hips. “Fucking gorgeous, greedy little thing swallowing this cock whole. Pussy made for me to fuck it.”
You keen, and Bucky laughs.
“Jesus, might tie you up and keep you just like this for me. Crying like a brat when you begged for it, can’t ever figure out what you want without my help, huh?”
You can’t form a strong enough thought to respond. Bucky’s drilling into you, and rubbing over your g-spot with every thrust and filling you up until there’s no space for things like words.
“No mouthy little comebacks?” He mocks. “My smart doll can’t even tell me to go fuck myself?”
“I- Jaaames-“
“Yeah, that’s right.” Bucky almost growls. “I own this pussy now, sweetheart. Gonna cum inside and make you walk around with it dripping out of your cunt, make you scream my name so loud everyone hears.”
You babble, clenching down on his cock. Bucky’s hips stutter slightly.
“Oh you love that. Love the idea of everyone knowing that I just made you my stupid little cockdrunk slut. Fuck-“
Bucky wraps an arm around your waist, hauling you back against his chest. You toss your head onto his shoulder, writhing in his arms as he keeps thrusting up into your pussy. God, you hope the music downstairs is loud enough that they can’t hear, but you also don’t know how they could hear anything else. The whole room is filled with Bucky’s groans and your open sobs.
“Still crying, babydoll?” He kisses over your neck, and you whimper, grabbing at his forearms.
“Can’t- Can’t take it-“
“Yeah, you can.”
You shake your head, tears streaming down your face. “Mh- I’m gonna cum-“
Bucky spanks your clit, and you shriek, arching into his hand.
“Fuckin’ cum, dirty girl, soak this dick like a good girl-“
You scream with this orgasm, thrashing in Bucky’s arms as it completely overtakes your senses. There’s a familiar wet feeling coming out of your pussy and slicking over your ass and thighs. Bucky groans, bending over to kiss you as he keeps your impaled on his cock. He thrusting sharply, chasing his own release. You try to grind down to help him, and he moans right into your ear.
“Wh- Where-“
“In.” You whimper. “In, James, wanna feel you, fuck-“
Bucky groans shamelessly as his cock starts to spurt hot cum over your gooey walls. The sound as he keeps fucking up into you is obscene, his lips over glued over yours as you both ride it out.
You’ve never been so ruined before. You think you might smell of cum and sweat for the rest of your life, and you can’t even bring yourself to mind.
And part of you worries that Bucky’s going to vanish. Kick you out of his room now that he got what he wanted, and break the heart you’d just offered him with shaking hands.
Instead, he kisses you before he pulls out, mumbling that he’ll be right back. He draws a bath and cleans you up, gets you water and wipes the dried tears on your cheeks.
“Too much?” He asks softly, and you can see the real worry in his eyes.
You shake your head, and offer him a tiny smile.
“Perfect.”
His eyes light up. “Really?”
You giggle. “Yeah.”
Bucky kisses your nose, and you hum happily.
“You’re were perfect too.”
“Thanks.” You breathe.
He pulls back, running a hand through your hair. His eyes soften.
“You still want me to take it back?”
And you almost laugh. Why would you ever possibly want to go back.
“No, thank you.”
Bucky chuckles. “So polite. Think I fucked some manners into you-“
“I had manners-“
“Yeah, but you’re gonna be nice to me now-“
“Don’t hold your breath-“
He shuts you up with a deep kiss. You could get used to it.
“Let me take you out.” He breathes when he’s done, looking at you with unending hope in his eyes. “For real.”
And you wonder.
If it had really been there, the whole time.
“Okay.”
✦End note: i love being so self indulgent with my horniness.✦
✦If you like this story, please reblog, share, or leave a comment! <3✦
✦Bucky Masterlist - Main Masterlist - Read on aO3!✦
✦summary: you and Bucky hate each other, so it's not unusual for him to act cold around you. but this is differant. this is... feral. and you're starting to wonder what's wrong✦
✦warnings/tags: bucky barnes x female!reader, enemies to lovers, ragebating Bucky Barnes, emotional angst, everyone's bad at feelings, fluff, sex pollen, sex pollen level smut, a little plot for the porn (dry humping, manhandling, bucky's feral, emotional sex, dry orgasm, truly foul dirty talk, hyperspermia, pussy eating like crazy, fingering, dumbification, dirty talk, sensitive reader, finger sucking, bucky gets nasty, body worship, overstimulation, sex pollen stamnia, mean!bucky, oral f!recieving, begging, praise kink, monster dick bucky, he fucks like a machine, breeding kink), no use of y/n, no descrption of reader✦
✦wc: 11.1k✦
✦Author's Note: i'm so normal about sex pollen✦
It doesn’t bother you. If you tell yourself enough, you’re really going to believe that it doesn’t bother you.
But he’s everywhere.
There isn’t a corner of the damn building without Bucky Barnes. You go to the kitchen and he’s there making a sandwich, watching you move around the counter like he thinks you’re going to bite him. In the gym he’s at the weights and the punching bags, and you try to ignore him but he grunts and moans and you think he’s doing it on purpose. the living area he takes over the TV and watches whatever he wants to catch up with the times. No matter how politely you ask him to switch to something else, he always tells you to just wait. Then you try, but he’s spread out on the couch until your knees have to bump, and your face gets all hot, and you have to stomp away before you start acting on all your stupid thoughts.
Because it’s not just Bucky’s eternal presence and stubbornness and smirking that burrows under your skin. It’s that you like it.
That when you’re next to him on the couch, all you can think about is that place where your body’s connect. He’s warm. Tall and warm. Your skin tingles at the contact point, and whenever he shifts it’s like you’re being shot up with a drug.
“You’re squirmy.” He grumbles, glaring at you in the dark. “No one ever teach you to sit still?”
You stick your tongue out. “No one ever teach you to mind your own business?”
“Hard to mind my business when you’re movin’ all the cushions, doll-“
“Then go sit somewhere else, robot man.”
Bucky’s jaw twitches. “I’m not a robot.”
“Uh huh.”
“I’m not-“
“You act like one.” You snap, and Bucky closes his eyes. Like he’s fucking praying.
“I was here first.” He mutters. You don’t balk.
“Congratulations.”
You hold his glare, and Bucky lets out a heavy breath through his nose. He narrows his eyes, tongue flicking over his lips. His full lips. Pretty and chapped, but in the perfect, soft way-
Get a fucking grip.
“There’s a chair over there.” You point across the room, sinking back into the cushions. “Go sit in it, if I’m so squirmy.”
Bucky scowls, and opens his mouth, but whatever jab he’s got for you, you don’t want to hear it. You reach over and unpause the movie—probably another one of Sam’s this is what you gotta catch up on, Barnes suggestions, because there’s no way Bucky picked out the Goonies himself—and fix your glower on the TV screen. You hate this movie. You’re going to watch it all the way through, just to show Bucky that he doesn’t bother you.
You spread your own legs wide, too. If men are allowed to do it, so are you. Bucky grunts as your knee pushes over his thigh, and you smirk at the TV.
It has nothing to do with the thick muscle you can feel under his sweatpants, that you keep your legs like that for the rest of the night. Bucky’s fingers flex a few times, and brush over the inner curve of your knee and the top of your thigh, like he’s thinking about just shoving you away. At one point, you hear him grunt, and look over with mockingly raised brows.
“Everything okay?” You almost simper, and he grunts and nods.
That’s all you get. Bucky fixes his anger on the movie, you win this round, and you get to be close to him without thinking about it.
You’ll think about it later. In the comfort of your own bedroom, you’ll think about it and think about it and think about it all night. You’ll think about it until your wrist hurts. But Bucky doesn’t get to know that.
As far as he needs to be concerned, you never spare him a second thought. It’s all he spares you. And you’re not going to be the pathetic girl who falls for someone who only thinks of her as a buzzing gnat around his head. Who worships the ground of a man who would step on her like a flower into concrete, not because he was seeking to hurt, but just because he didn’t notice you were there at all.
Although Bucky does seem to notice where you are.
The farmer does like to keep track of pests in his crops.
“You skipped the mission briefing.” Bucky grunts in the morning, glaring at you over a cup of coffee.
Something soft in you swells like a prodded bruise. He noticed where you were.
You ignore it in favor of flipping him off.
“I was busy.”
“Too busy for your job?”
“It’s not my job-“
“Your name was on the roster.” Bucky slams the folder down on the table, and your lips twitch.
“Have you been carrying that around all day?”
“That doesn’t matter-“
“Yes, it really does-“
Bucky hisses your name. There’s a fury under his tone, that makes your mouth snap shut. If he notices, he doesn’t say anything.
“You need to be there, Steve was talkin’ about safety shit, and if you don’t know it you could get killed-“
“I know how mission briefing work, I’ve been here longer than you have-“
“Really? ‘Cause you don’t act like it-“
“I don’t act like it?” You snort. “Last I checked I’m ranked higher than you, Sargent.” You raise your chin, letting your lips curl. “Which is why I’m allowed to defer missions, and you’re not.”
“I’m skipping.” You shrug, grabbing an apple from the counter. “And if I’m skipping, I don’t need to be at the briefing. But thanks for checking on me, dad.”
Bucky’s eyes narrow. You expect him to snap something about experience and you not being responsible enough or needing to care more.
But instead his fists curl and uncurl at his side. His nostrils flare. He grabs the counter, his scowl burning right through you. You take a large bite of your apple, and his gaze darts down. Juice drips down your chin, and you wipe it off with light fingers. That only seems to make him angrier.
“Why’re you skipping.”
You shrug. You should say none of your business. But part of you is childish. A very big, loud part that wants him to react to something you know he isn’t actually going to care about.
“I have a date.”
“A what.” It’s not a full reaction. He’s mostly staring at you like he didn’t understand the word. Maybe they called it something different in the 40s.
“A date?” You roll your eyes, a little meaner than you mean to be. He always bring that out in you, though.
Bucky always brings everything out in you. It’s incredibly annoying.
“You know.” You push mockingly. “Where you go out with someone. And flirt like people, instead of robots.”
“Robots flirt.” Bucky grunts, and you snort.
“Yeah, but they don’t have sex-“
The counter cracks. It’s loud, echoing through the kitchen. You start and twitch, and Bucky blinks at his metal hand, like he’s just as surprised as you are. He looks back to you, shakes his head, and takes a large step back.
“What’s-“
“Steve’s callin’ me.” He mutters, and you blink.
“No, he’s not-“
“Have fun.” Bucky ignores you. His words sound pushed through his teeth. “On your human date.”
Then he’s gone.
And you’re left in the kitchen with your apple and a cracked counter, staring at where he’d vanished through the door. You don’t care about the date.
You just need to know what the fuck that was.
There’s a part of you that feels bad, for the man Natasha set you up with. She’d picked him out specifically because he had a vague resemblance to Bucky—because you’ve never told her your secret, but you didn’t need to, she’s Natasha—but it wasn’t enough.
He didn’t have the underlying accent, or the gleam in his eyes. You made a sharper edged joke, and he just laughed. He didn’t spar. He didn’t push your buttons in a way that made you light up. He just smiled at you all night—wrong smile, too—and then didn’t pay. Bucky would’ve paid.
You have no evidence of that. It’s just a feeling, that comes from how he still opens doors for you, even when you’re at each other’s throats. All polite and handsome and insufferable. You hate him.
And there’s not a single point during the night, where you’re not thinking about him.
“We should do this again.” The Date—you’ve forgotten his name, and it’s certainly not a good time to ask—says at the end of the night.
You’re shivering. Bucky would’ve offered you his jacket. He did once, on a mission in the Andes. You got all cold and he rolled his eyes and muttered that he told you to bring another layer, but still gave you his jacket all the same. This man is just grinning at you after not calling you a cab and saying he wanted to stand outside in the misty, chilly night. He said he wanted fresh air, and now your freezing, and he thinks he’s getting a second date.
At the very least, you feel a little less guilty about only thinking of Bucky and the mission the whole time. He deserved it.
“Sure.” You smile, because even with superstrength, it’s easier to tell a man yes and then vanish than it is to deny them to their face. “Have a good night.”
He tries to hug you. Your phone buzzes, and you duck away to check it.
The mission is over.
Two days early.
Your jaw tightens.
Most people would think that a job being done early is a good thing. That it means the team was just so focused and coordinated that they sped through every single step, and ended in a total victory. But you’ve been on this job too long. Early mission conclusions only ever happen for one reason.
Something went wrong, and they have to come back.
You rush back to the compound with barely a goodnight to the Date. It’s mostly because you forget, in the blur of worry. You’d skimmed the mission files before they left, just to make sure it wasn’t anything too dangerous. Bucky had been mad about you not going with them. Maybe he’d thought they’d need the hands, but it had just looked like a retrieval mission. Old Hydra facility with some data Tony wanted. Nothing too hard.
But they’re back early.
And if someone’s hurt, you could’ve stopped it. You could’ve been there, instead of on that stupid fucking date. Which also means that Bucky was right, and that’s incredibly annoying. He’s going to weild it over your head, and the mocking is going to turn you on more, and you’ll have earned it which isn’t going to help anything at all.
You get back to the compound, and it’s not in lockdown. There aren’t med staff flooding the grounds or emergency sirens blaring. You go right to the hanger, and find that it’s already been cleared out. The jet isn’t being quarantined.
Maybe they really did just… Finish early.
You’re heading back to your room when you slam right into them.
Steve and Bucky, standing in the middle of the hall, arguing in hushed voices.
“You need to go, Buck-“
“I’m fine-“
“No, you’re not. You can lie to the docs, don’t lie to me-“
“I ain’t lyin’, I’m fine-“
Your too lost in your own head, barely even hearing what they’re saying. You barrel straight into Bucky’s back.
He goes rigid. You stumble a little, and he grabs your upper arm.
His hand is hot.
Not sexy hot—although it’s also that—but literally, physically hot. Almost searing, against your shivering skin. You look up at him, and swallow.
He’s flushed. There’s sweat clinging to his brow, and an exhausted shadow over his features. His eyes are so blown out they’re almost fully black. You blink at him, and his mouth falls open in a ragged pant.
“Hi.” You whisper.
His throat bobs. “You’re back.”
“I- I got the alert.” You glance over to Steve, who’s gone oddly pale. “Did the mission go okay? It was fine that I wasn’t there, right-“
“Yep!” Steve almost shouts, and you blink. “I mean- We were all good. Wish you were there, we all missed you, but- We were fine. Right, Buck?” Steve grabs Bucky’s shoulder. “We were all good.”
Bucky doesn’t look away from you for a single second. He grunts, and his grip tightens on your arm.
“Let go.” Steve mutters, and Bucky shoots him a glare.
He releases you like you burned him, then wipes his hand on his pants. You scowl. He was the one touching you.
“I was gonna.” He grumbles, and Steve sighs.
“I know, but-“ You get a weary look. Like Steve doesn’t want you to hear their conversation. “I think- You know what I think-“
“Steve-“ Bucky cuts himself off with a groan, running a hand over his face.
He still hasn’t looked away from you. Or moved that far out of your proximity.
“I’m fine.” He says, low and under his breath. You’re rooted to the ground under his gaze, unsure what you could even think of to say. “It’s- I’m fine.”
Steve’s lips press in a thin line. Bucky takes a large, jerking step back. Like he’s dragging himself away.
“How was your date?” He grunts.
“Bucky-“
“I’m just askin’ a question.” He snaps, still not sparing Steve a look.
The attention is getting to be too much. Bucky is looking at you like he wants to eat you alive, and it’s making your body almost buzz in anticipation. You want to jump on him and feel those hot hands all over your body. His nostrils flare like he can smell your arousal. If he can, you might jump off a bridge.
You hope he’d catch you, then fuck you until your can’t even walk.
Get a fucking grip.
“Bad.” You cross your arms over your chest, trying to keep your heart from bursting out of your chest. “He sucked.”
And that’s the kind of thing Bucky would usually mock you for. Skipping a mission just for a bad date.
But a low, rumbling growl falls from his chest. His tongue darts over his lips. He takes a half-step forward, and you lean in to the gravity of his stare.
“We have debriefing!” Steve shouts, grabbing the collar of Bucky’s suit. “Bye!”
Before you can even register it, Steve’s dragging Bucky down the hall. You swear you hear another feral noise, and a crash after they turn the corner.
Something had to have happened on the mission. You just have no fucking clue what.
Bucky’s only been acting stranger. You’d pretend it didn’t bother you, if you could get away from it for a single fucking second.
You walk through the compound, and he’s somehow more everywhere than he was before. Around every corner, in the library, on the grounds, even in the control room while you’re going through the mission files.
“What’re you doin’.” He grunts, and you sigh.
You’re not surprised he’s there. It’s the fifth time today that he’s snuck up on you.
“I’m going through the reports on the mission.” You drawl. “Don’t you have better things to do than follow me around?”
Bucky grunts. It seems to be a no. You roll your eyes and go back to poking through the system. It’s hard to pretend that you can’t feel his presence behind you. There’s heat almost rolling from his body, and thick, spicy and musky scent that’s filling the room. It’s making you a little dizzy. It’s all you can do, not to look back at him.
That would be dangerous. He probably still looks feverish and animalistic. You might moan.
You find the files for the mission, and try to open them. Big, read access denied, contact your handler for permission to these files flashes over your screen. Your mouth falls open, and you whip back to glare at Bucky before you can think about it.
Mistake. Just like you’d thought, big mistake.
He looks even worse and better than you thought. He’s wearing just a t-shirt and sweats, and they’re clinging to his sweaty body. His eyes are hooded and his lips are parted. His attention is so wholly fixed on you that it almost makes you fall out of your chair. You almost forget you’re annoyed with him. Every single nerve in your body is alight, and your fingers are itching to comb through his sweaty hair.
You somehow—just barely—fight it.
“Why can’t I access these files.”
Bucky leans over you, his nostrils flaring. If you reach up, you could trace the stubbled line of his jaw. It’s hard to maintain your glare.
“Barnes-“
“You weren’t on the mission.” He mutters. “Not your files to see.”
You scowl. “I can access the files of every other mission I was on-“
“Steve should change that.”
God, you wish he wasn’t so pretty. It would be easier to think about punching him.
“I know something happened out there.” You hiss, sitting up a little taller. “You can’t hide it from me. I’ll figure it out.”
Bucky chuckles. It’s a low, raspy sound that runs through your body, making you shiver.
“Sure, doll. Have fun with that.”
You shoot to your feet, and Bucky lurches back. Another one of those deep, rumbling growls rolls from his chest, and for a second you think he’s going to pounce on you.
And then you blink, and he’s gone. Leaving you with only that hazy smell, and desire rolling through your veins.
You wish that was the extent of it, but it’s barely the start. And it only gets worse.
Bucky doesn’t do his movie nights anymore, which means you get the TV all to yourself. You watch what you want, and try not to look at the spot next to you. Where your body feels like he’s supposed to be. You stretch out your legs, but they ache strangely without his touch. You get more restless without him. Around midnight, you shuffle to the kitchen, hoping one of those soothingherb thingys that Wanda says help with her nightmares will be there.
Instead, you find Bucky.
He’s drinking a glass of ice, with a little bit of water. He freezes when he sees you, and moves further behind the counter.
You sigh. You’re too tired to fight him.
“Can’t sleep?” You mumble.
He just nods.
You sigh, and walk over the cupboard.
“You want hot chocolate?”
A grunt. Better than silence. You make two mugs, one for you, one for Bucky.
And maybe it’s just that you’re really starting to worry, but you don’t bother pretending to hate him. Your fingers brush when you pass him his mug, and his body seizes like you shocked him, but you just offer a tiny smile.
His mouth falls open. He stares at you like he’s spent years only looking at the muddier reflection of stars in the water, and has finally thought just to tilt his head up. You let out a small, shaking breath. He’s still burning up. You can feel it from your place a foot away. But you don’t dare to push it.
Not when he’s looking at you like this. The way you’d always, secretly and shamefully, dreamed he would.
“I’m watching Star Wars.” You mumble. “You wanna…”
You trail off, and Bucky’s throat bobs.
He nods again. A new tendril of worry blooms, overlapping with the growing tangle of them in your gut. He might not be able to speak.
But he follows you to the living area, and takes his place on the couch. His knee pushes against yours. He’s breathing awfully shallow, but you’re a selfish coward that wants him close, so you don’t mention it.
You barely pay attention to the movie. All you can focus on is Bucky at your side. How he doesn’t even seem to be sparing the TV a glance. He’s not really touching you, save for that place where your thighs are always pushed together, but every time you shift he grabs your knee. You blink at him, and his throat just bobs. He still hasn’t said a word. You’re afraid that when he does, it will break this fragile illusion.
That he wants to be here.
Near you.
He passes out near the end of the movie. His head falls against your shoulder and his body goes limp, almost a blanket over yours. You don’t move, just staring at a lit up, black screen. He looks more peaceful than you’ve ever seen. His fever isn’t breaking, but it does seem to be easing. You run your fingers through his hair, and he makes a low sound like a purr.
Then he takes a deep inhale, right against the crook of your neck, and a different noise leaves him.
It’s almost a moan.
You swallow. Suddenly you need to move. You don’t know what’s going on with him, but this can’t be what he actually wants. To be asleep almost in your arms, purring and moaning. That’s not a part of him you get to have.
But when you try to move, his grip around you tightens.
You feel almost sick.
It takes almost an hour, to roll off the couch without him pulling you back. When you’re free, you still cover him in a blanket and press a hand to his brow. Just to check. You can’t really help it.
His fever is building again.
You wish he would just tell you what was wrong. Even if he thinks you hate him, he can’t think you wouldn’t care enough to help.
When you start to walk away, he moans again. You could swear it sounded a little like your name.
You force yourself to go to bed. You’re not sure if you want him to remember in the morning.
If anything, you just pray he gets better. It’s hard to hide your undying care for him, when he’s in pain. Impossible to ignore how much it bothers you, that he’s hurting. ‘
But it is Bucky.
And he’s never going to make anything that easy.
You walk out of your room in the morning, and he’s right there. Lingering in the hallway, staring at you with those blown-out eyes, working his jaw like he’s trying to bite his own tongue off.
“Hi.” You say lamely.
He stumbles back like you punched him. “You- You’re-“
“Bucky, are you-“
“’M fine.” He says it mostly to himself again. There’s sweat gathering on his brow and bags under his eyes.
You’re not going to tell him, but you’re getting worried. This is the third morning in a row you’ve found him here. The first night you asked if he’d slept there, and he’d scowled and stomped away.
But from the look of him, you don’t think he’s been sleeping at all.
“Do you need something?” You ask. You sound soft, but you can’t help it. The worse he looks, the more your heart tightens. “I can call Steve-“
“Don’t get Steve.” He steps back. The same jerked movement from the first night. It’s the only way he’s been moving around you, lately. “I’m fine.”
You give him a doubtful look. His tongue flicks over his lips. You take a step forward, and he takes another step back. Like you’ve got a polarity field around you. Like he can’t even stand to breathe the same air.
And yet he’s here. Outside your door, and breathing through his mouth like an animal.
“Bucky-“
“Don’t.” He shakes his head, stumbling another step back. “Just- Don’t.”
You swallow, and don’t give chase when he walks away. Jogs away. He yanks himself away, then runs like he thinks you’re going to catch him and drag him back. You won’t.
But you do go right to Steve.
“What happened on the mission.”
Steve flinches, gagging on his sandwich. You’re glaring down at him with your hands on your hips, and you think he knows his little charming smile isn’t going to work on you here. That doesn’t seem to stop him from trying anyway.
“Hey, um- Do you want a cookie-“
“Steven.” You hiss, and he swallows. “What happened.”
Steve winces, avoiding your gaze. “I’m not supposed to tell you.”’
“What do you mean you’re not supposed to tell me-“
“I mean I- I can.” He mutters. “But then Bucky will kill me. And I don’t want Bucky to kill me.”
You scowl. “Tough shit, because guess who’s going to kill you if you don’t tell me?”
Steve sighs. “Is it you?”
“Yep.”
He stares at his sandwich, like it’s somehow going to get him out of this situation. You wait for him to realize it won’t. You have plenty of time.
“I’m really not supposed to tell you-“
“I really don’t care.”
“Well- You will.” Steve looks up with a sad little puppy eyes.
You don’t have the same reservations about punching him in the face, that you have with Bucky. He’s basically asking for it right now.
“Steven, I swear to fucking God-“
“I can’t tell you.” He cuts you off with a shake of his head, and you scoff.
“No, you just won’t tell me-“
“That’s not- I can’t, okay? Please stop asking me to-“
“Why, because Bucky doesn’t want you to?” You leer. “Because last I checked, you’re the Captain. And if Bucky is your friend, you should be telling his teammates he’s in danger so they can help-“
“That’s the problem!” Steve shouts, and you blink. “You- Look, you’re going to want to help, and I can’t let you.”
“You can’t let me help?” You echo, and Steve winces.
“I know how it sounds-“
“Do you? Because what I’m fucking hearing that your best friend is in danger, and you won’t let me fucking help-“
“Why do you even want to help?” Steve fixes you with a pointed look. “All you ever do is complain about Bucky and how he’s annoying you. I would’ve thought you didn’t care.”
You narrow your eyes, and Steve raises his brows. You know what he’s doing. Smug fucking asshole.
“That won’t work on me.” You grunt, and he shrugs.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Steve-“
“But,” he says causally. “If I did, I’d say that’s why I can’t tell you. And you know that.”
You hate it when he speaks in riddles. Like you’re just supposed to read between the lines when your brain is fogged with worry about Bucky.
“I- I don’t-“ You let out a slow breath, looking down to your shoes. Heat is flooding your cheeks. It’s annoying. “It’s not- I’m just- Please.”
Your voice cracks suddenly. You’ve been losing more sleep over this than you’re ever going to tell anyone. You almost feel ill with it—like the worry is an infection, knotting up your stomach and making your heart pick up—but that might just literal exhaustion. Something happened. No one will tell you what. It’s making you feel useless and hopeless and torn up to tiny, useless shreds.
“Bucky.” You say slowly. “Is- He’s not okay. I know he’s not okay.” You force yourself to meet Steve’s gaze. “Just- Lie to me and say he’s fine, and fix it, or tell me and let me help. But I- I can’t just-“
You don’t even know how to finish the sentence. There’s a burning feeling behind your eyes and a lump in your throat. You’re so worried. Worried this is something that’s going to kill him, and you’re going to lose him forever.
And there’s pity, in Steve’s gaze. It’s enough to make him break, his voice softening completely.
“Alright.” He murmurs. “But- You can’t tell him I told you.”
You nod quickly. “I’ll say I just got into the files, or- Something- Please.”
Steve sighs. “Okay. Okay.” He shakes his head. “It was on the mission. Bucky was distracted the whole time, and when we got jumped he wasn’t being controlled with his punches. He swag to hard on an Hydra agent. Knocked them back into some vials, and- Well they burst. All over both of them. We put the agent in containment, but he was displaying worse symptoms. Bucky- I think it’s the serum, or just… Bucky. But he’s been controlling it better.” Steve grimaces. “But that doesn’t mean he’s not still knocked up with stuff.”
You nod slowly. That’s not that bad.
But Steve didn’t want you to know for a reason.
“What are the symptoms?”
Steve won’t meet your gaze. “Fever. Nausea. Hormone flares. Um- Increased… libido.”
Your eyes widen, your mouth falling open. “What.”
“Hydra makes some weird stuff. Tony thinks this was, um- A breeding drug. We don’t know why they were developing it, but- There’s no other name.” Steve’s nose wrinkles. “The agent- His cell is disgusting.”
“But- Bucky-“
“I told you, he says he’s got it under control.” Steve shrugs, but doesn’t really sound like he’s convinced himself. “The agent has been, ah… begging for anyone. Bucky doesn’t have the same liberty with what will help. He says it’s going to pass, and he’ll be fine.”
“And will it?” You breathe. “Pass?”
Steve shrugs. “It did for the agent.”
“Before or after the mating?”
Steve’s silence is an answer. You swear under your breath.
“Why wouldn’t you tell me this, Steve? We- We need to get him to someone, this could fucking kill him-“
“I know that!” Steve snaps. “I know that just as well as you do! As he does! But- Jesus.” He shakes his head. “He won’t take anyone. He’ll only- Well- You know.”
“I know? I don’t fucking know, none of you have been telling me shit-“
Steve says your name plainly. You blink.
“What-“
“Nothing. Just- Why do you think he’s been lingering around you?”
You stare at him. He raises his brows, and you swallow.
“Steve-“
“I didn’t say anything-“
“Yes, you did-“
“Nope.”
You press your lips in a tight line. He can’t mean what you think he means. That would be to easy. Too good. “Bucky- He doesn’t- That’s not how he feels about me.”
Please don’t say it is. It’s not fair if you’re lying.
“Funny.” Steve shrugs. “He says the same thing about you.”
This is a bad idea.
Bucky hasn’t left his room in a day. You’d spent all of last night replaying your conversation with Steve, trying to pick it apart for a single reason he didn’t mean what you thought he did. What you hoped he did. What you’d always hoped for, only in the dead of night where no one would ever find out.
But it didn’t matter how you turned or picked at Steve’s words. There was only one conclusion. The beautiful, horrible one that you can’t even fully wrap your head around. It would mean you spent years hating him for no reason. Year thinking about kissing his stupid face, when you could’ve been actually kissing him. If Steve’s right, you’re going to kill Bucky.
After you fix this for him.
If Steve means what you think, you can fix this for him. He just has to let you.
Which is why this is a horrible idea. If Bucky turns you down, you’re going to have to quit your job and change your name and move to Indonesia.
But if he doesn’t turn you down…
You steel yourself and knock on Bucky’s door. It’s worth the risk, just for him. Always just for him.
“Fuck off, Stevie-“
“I’m not Steve!” You call, and for a second there’s no response.
Then there’s a muffled banging, and you almost fall forward when Bucky yanks the door open.
He looks even worse than before. And better. And hotter, and oh God, your knees are already weak.
His shirt is gone, and his broad, muscled chest is shining with sweat. His hair flops over his eyes, mussed up and soft looking. He’s breathing through his nose, even as his swollen mouth hangs open. His metal fist is curled against the door, making the wood crack under his fingers. Standing through his sweatpants is the long, proud outline of his cock.
You swallow, your mouth watering. Bucky says your name, and you can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a plea or a prayer.
“You shouldn’t be here-“
“Steve said you need me.”
You stare at each other. Bucky’s tongue flicks out, and you chew on your lower lip. This is it. If he turns you down, you’ll walk away and live. A new life, across the world. You’ve never been to Indonesia, but you hear they have good food and community, and you’re sure you’ll be able to fit right in over time, and if you don’t at least Bucky will never find you to make you relive this humiliation, because it’s been almost two full minutes and he hasn’t said anything, so you should probably pull out your phone and start researching Indonesian names-
“Steve shouldn’t have told you anything.” Bucky growls, and you swallow.
“I- I made him.”
He sighs. You could swear his dick twitches. “Of course you did.”
“I was worried about you-“
“You don’t have to be, doll. I’m-“
“If you say I’m fine, I’m going to fucking punch you.”
Bucky scowls. You scowl harder. You have a feeling neither of you are going to back down.
“You’re sick.” You say plainly, and Bucky lets out a sharp exhale through his nose.
“Maybe. But it’s not the kinda sick you can help with-“
“Steve says it’s the kind of sick only I can help with.”
He’s silent again. You risk a tiny step forward, and he takes one back, muttering your name. It’s a warning. A plea.
“Don’t do this.” He mutters, fists balled at his side. “Not outta pity, not for me-“
“It’s not pity.” You stop in his doorway, making your voice soft. “I want to help, Bucky. Let me help.”
He shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut. “No, you- You just- You don’t feel like that for me-“
“You don’t feel like that for me.” You breathe, and Bucky’s body locks up.
“Who says?”
“You’re an ass to me-“
“You’re an ass to me.”
“I don’t mean to be.” You whisper. “I- I don’t- I’m not good at… You know.”
Bucky’s throat bobs. He still doesn’t move.
“Me neither.”
You nod. “But…”
“Yeah.” He swallows. “Yeah. I do.”
You take a deep breath. His whole room is filled with that musky, spicy smell. The heat is almost rolling off his body.
“Please ask me to help.” You don’t bother to hide the desperation in your voice. He needs to know that you mean it. “I- I want to, Bucky, I want you so bad-“
Bucky muffles your pleas, crashing forward and pressing his mouth over yours.
It’s not the soft, loving kiss of your fantasies. It’s rough and desperate, the kiss of a man finally letting his leash snap. He grabs your neck and scrunches his fingers in your hair, dragging a moan from the back of your throat. It turns into a hungry cry, when he pushes his tongue between your lips. Your knees wobble from the bruising force of it. You grab his shirt for balance, scrunching the fabric between your fingers.
Bucky grunts, pressing further over you. One arm drops to wrap around your waist, and the other slide up to cradle the back of your head. The touch his shockingly gentle, for the demanding way he’s almost eating your kisses. You’re standing nowhere near a wall, but he’s caged you all the same. There’s nothing to do but feel the way his cool, metal fingers dig into your hips, and the unrelenting heat of his mouth.
You kiss until your breathing is ragged. He tastes like mint and salt, and it’s a little addictive. Even after you’re light-headed and whimpering, Bucky sucks on your lower lip and takes just a little more. You whimper, gasping for air that he doesn’t seem to need. He tugs on your hair, forcing you to tip your neck back, and he plants open, hungry kisses over every place he can reach.
“You gotta be sure.” He murmurs against your skin. “Tell me you’re sure, doll, ‘cause- I don’t think I can go easy.”
And oh God, isn’t that lovey thought. Bucky not going easy. Combined with his tongue flicking over a pulse point, you almost fall over from the pure thought of it.
But he’s asking real permission. His hold on your hip is getting tighter, and his shoulders are squared and tense. He’s keeping himself from taking what he really wants, until you give him total permission.
You didn’t know you could want him more.
“I- Oh-“ Your eyes flutter, as he nips on sensitive skin under your jaw before kissing away the hurt. “I’m sure, Bucky, I- I don’t want you to go easy.”
For some reason, that only makes him more tense. He takes an uneven breath, pressing his brow against your head and almost pulling you off your feet as he hugs you tighter. You wait, slowly wrapping your arms around him and dragging your nails soothingly over the nape of his neck.
Bucky draws himself back, his expression unreadable as he scans over your face. You offer him a tiny, nervous smile, and he lets out a shaky laugh.
“You- You got no idea, do you?”
Your face falls to a pout. “I have a lot of ideas-“
“No, you don’t.” He drops his brow over yours. “You got no fuckin’ clue, what you do to me.”
And your brain stalls. It gets all gooey and soft, as you just blink up at him. You’re already on unsteady legs. You never thought he’d catch you if you fell, but with the way Bucky’s looking at you right now, you think he’d dive off a cliff to be at your side.
“Bucky…” You breathe, and he drops his forehead against yours. Your noses bump. His gaze darts between your lips and eyes, and you think you might be burning alive.
“You smell so good.” He mutters, before leaning down to press a soft, sweet kiss to your lips. “Taste better than I imagined.”
“You-“ You almost whimper, when he pulls away. “You imagined?”
He chuckles, kissing just your upper lip. You’re already putty under his hands, and you might turn to just a steam of desire if he doesn’t stop kissing you so softly.
“Didn’t you?”
You nod, and Bucky’s lips twitch.
“Bet I imagined more.”
And you doubt that, but Bucky’s kissing you again before you can tell him that you imagined so much it scared you sometimes. The way you were sure that you’d never be able to recover, from an addiction to a drug you’d never even taken.
You’re certainly never going to recover now. Kissing Bucky is even better than you’d let yourself dream about. His lips are just as soft as you thought. Even with the way he’s holding himself back, his touch is possessive. He traces your sides like he’s trying to memorize them, and kisses you the same way.
“Got no idea what I’m gonna do to, either.” He rasps against your lips. “If you let me, doll… You shouldn’t- But-“ He groans, pushing his nose into your cheek, kissing over the slope of your jaw. “Fuck, I want you to.”
You want him to. You want to feel those sloppy, devout kisses everywhere, to get that infernal tongue between your legs. His cock is almost bursting through his sweats, protruding into your thigh. He’d be heavy on your tongue, and split you better than the toys that you’ve used in his place before. The ache in your core throbs from just the idea, and you can feel your heart trying to burst all out of your throat with confession of desire and adoration. But you’re not sure if he’s going to believe them.
“Tell me.” You whisper. “Tell me what you’ve dreamed about doing to me.”
Bucky pulls back, and you worry you’ve stepped on an invisible landmine. That you’re going to be shoved out of the room, the door slammed in your face instead of behind you, locking you out of the room you’ve longer to be in since you met him. Bucky stares at you. You open your mouth to apologize and take it back, but he loves to move faster than your lustdrunk mind can understand.
You squeal as he walks you backward, but not out of the room. He kicks his door shut as you pass it. It slams, right as Bucky pins you between against the wall. He kisses you before you can protest or ask questions, and keeps going until you’re squirming against him and unsure if you should pull him closer or push him away. His kisses wander your cheeks, over your nose and hairline and back down to your ear.
“I wanted you just like this.” He chokes out, and your swallow. He sounds wrecked, and you’re not even kissing anymore. “Wanted you everywhere. Would see you in a meetin’ and think about bending you over the table. You’d get under me on the training mats and I’d wanna get in a headlock between your legs. Bet you taste so good.”
He shudders, pressing his face into the crook of your neck. His dick has shifted to push right near your core, and it’s almost too much pressure, while not being nearly enough.
“Would sit next to you on the plane and think about gettin’ on my knees.” He rasps, beard ticking against your skin. “Worshipping your pussy like it deserves. Makin’ you- Fuck- Call my name-“
Bucky moans, his hips jerking forward. A tiny moan escapes your lips, and Bucky almost whines and does it again. You don’t think he can help it.
“Wanted to stuff your pretty little lips with my cock.” He thrusts again, his whole weight almost collapses over your body. “You’d get all mouthy and I- I jerk off to the idea of puttin’ you over my knee or gettin’ you lying in my bed. I’d- I’d fuck you so nice, doll, I swear I’d be good, but- Fuuuck-“
He’s rutting between your thighs, and seems to forget the story he’s supposed to be telling you in favor of sucking on your neck. You whimper, pushing your hand between your bodies. Not to stop him—never to stop him—but to wrap your fingers around his cock through his sweats.
Bucky moans, his voice breaking with raw, starved relief. You try to pull him back to kiss him, but he just wraps closer around you. He’s almost shaking. You think he’s trying not to fuck your hand.
You can’t have that.
“It’s okay.” You drag your fingers over the line of his cock, and he whimpers against your neck. “I- I’ve thought about it too.”
Bucky slams forward, and you smile at the air.
“Wanted you to shove me down and fuck me stupid. Wanted to ride you until I passed out. I bought a dildo, baby, just to pretend it was you.”
You use your free hand to pet the back of his head, slowly sliding his sweats down to give yourself better access. Bucky’s thick and heavy in your hand. Your fingers don’t even come close to wrapping fully around, and whenever your nails graze his balls, he bucks forward with a strangled moan.
“Wasn’t as big.” You breathe, stroking his dick in long, tight motion. “You’re so big, Bucky, I don’t think it’s gonna fit.”
He grunts, his teeth grazing your neck. “Gonna- Fuck-“
You squeeze him at the base, and he doubles over. He’s almost fully collapsed against you. You want to feel him come apart.
“Gonna make it fit.” He hisses in your ear, and you hum.
“How?”
“Open you up.” He mutters, words slurred like he’s drunk. “Get you all over me, doll- Wanna watch you cum over and over and- God-“
His dick is twitching, and you giggle. He’s working himself up.
“You think this is funny?” He rasps.
You smile, swiping your thumb over the weeping slit of his dick. “A little. You wanna make me cum but you won’t even touch me.”
He makes an annoyed sound, and tries to push off of you. You tug his cock a little harder, and he falls back over with a moan. You giggle again.
“You- You’re a fuckin’ brat-“
“I’m helping you, Barnes.” You whisper in his ear.
He chuckles, and the sound rolls through your body. “Helpin’ me would be sitting on my face- Fuck-“
Bucky’s whole body shakes, when you squeeze him one last time, and his control slip. You pet him through his orgasm, unsure if you want him to notice how you press your legs tighter to try and get more stains of his cum. He pants and groans against your skin, his lips latching back around that one bruise he seems to be obsessed with.
There’s so much cum. Bucky grinds into your fist, and it just keeps coming and coming and coming until your fingers are sticky and drenched. The idea of him doing that inside you is almost a little terrifying. You’ve never wanted anything more.
A choked sound like your name comes out, muffled against your skin. You smile, leaning back to try and meet his gaze.
Bucky seems to need a second. You hope you didn’t already wear him out.
“You okay?” You whisper, and he tenses.
Bucky pulls back, and your pulse picks up into a drum.
Whatever he’d been before, it had been tame compared to this. His jaw is clenched, his attention fixed on you like a predator. His chest heaves, his hands limp at his side. You swallow, feeling a lot smaller than you did a second ago.
You can’t stop yourself from looking down. It only makes things worse.
He’s bigger than he felt. His cum is dripping down his thigh, and it’s barely been a minute, but he’s already getting hard again. You drag your eyes up the expanse of his chest—all flushed skin and muscle—and realize he hasn’t stopped staring at you. You lick your lips. He mimics the movement.
“It won’t fit.” You says again, but your tone has lost all the teasing mockery of before.
And Bucky’s smirk is dangerous. A thrill rushes through you at the sight of it. You’ve gotten exactly what you wanted.
“Gonna make it fit.” He growls.
You yelp, as he grabs your wrist and yanks you forward. You don’t even slam into his chest before he’s lifting you off the ground with another mind numbing kiss. It’s a distraction. You know that. You don’t really care, though, returning it in a second.
Bucky carries you like you’re a doll, your knees bent like some princess and his warmer arm locked around your waist. He leans over, lowering you to the mattress with a shocking care. For a second you’re fully lost in him. The gentle motion of his lips over yours, the way his hands wander and map your body as he settles you into the mattress.
“So soft.” He mutters. “All that bite, doll, but I knew you’d be so fuckin’ soft for me.”
You’d like to protest, and say that you’re not soft. But Bucky’s kisses are making your head spin, and no single, clear word can make it out of the daze. All you manage is a high, long whine.
Bucky chuckles. His hand pushes under your shirt, almost tickling over your sides.
“You like that?” He tease, his knuckles tracing over the underside of your boobs. “You like bein’ my sweet girl?”
You are not sweet. You try to snap that, but it mostly just comes out a feral grumble. You don’t know how he’s the one with a sound mind right now. You’re not under a sex drug.
You’re just under Bucky. Where it’s very, very warm, and sticky, and nice. His cum is dripping over your clothed core and midriff. You shiver as it hits bare skin, and Bucky smirks against your lips.
“Say it and I give you more.” He rasps. “Say you like it.”
And it’s a game. You know that you like it. He does too. But he’s poking and teasing you, trying to get you spar with him. To get you to play.
So you glare at him when he leans back, spreading your legs wider at the same time. You keep your mouth stubbornly shut.
Bucky grins. He traces the curve of your hips with massive hands, his thumb angling to smear his cum over your navel.
“Look at you.” He mocks. “Beggin’ for me and then can’t even admit she likes it.”
You wrinkle your nose, turning up your chin. Bucky smacks your inner thigh, then rubs his metal palm right over your pussy. The sudden sting then harsh pleasure make your hips push off the bed with a cry. Bucky takes his hand away to splay it on your abdomen, shoving you back down.
“You like gettin’ tossed around, too?” He laughs, and heat floods right to your core. “I’ll toss you around, baby. Make you into a nice little cockslut for me, even let you put my in that pretty mouth.”
He grabs your jaw, and you part your lips in a second. Bucky groans, his cock getting impossibly harder.
“Already listen so well.” He mutters, teasing his two forefingers over your mouth. “Just can admit you fuckin’ love it, do you? Can’t be a good girl and tell the truth.”
You narrow your eyes in defiance, and pretend to bite down on his fingers. It’s not a real bite. Just teeth grazing knuckles. But Bucky understands what it means.
Permission to go further.
His eyes gleam. His cock is already leaking with pre-cum.
“Alright, babydoll.” He rubs your thighs, a dangerous smile playing on his lips. “Have it your way.”
In a single second, Bucky rips off your clothing like it’s paper. You barely have time to feel the cold of the air before he’s grabbing your waist, flipping you onto your stomach, and dragging your ass up in the air. You yelp, fisting your hands in the sheets, and try to twist and see where he is.
A dazed part of your brain that doesn’t remember his hands on your hips sees no one behind you, and almost freaks out.
Then the first stroke of Bucky’s tongue hits your pussy, and you collapse fully into the sheets.
“Oh my-“ Your eyes roll back, as he teases the very tip of his tongue around your clit before dragging it through your folds. “Oh my God-“
“Sensitive fuckin’ pussy.” Bucky muses, and you feel the stubble of his cheek pressing against you thigh. “Barely even touching it. Wonder if I-“
His thumb drags circles just around your clit, and you squeak. He kisses the curve of your ass, going a little fast. You whine trying to drag your own ass in circles to match his motions. You can’t see him. Can’t know if you’re doing well outside of his lips tracing your thigh, and the pleased hums against your skin.
Bucky jerks his thumb suddenly to the side, pushing directly over your clit. You scream, your knees sliding back. Bucky grabs them and pushes them back up, fully exposing your pussy to the air.
“Look at you.” His breath is warm, over that most sensitive spot. “Bet I don’t even need to fuckin’ prep you. You’re so wet, you’d just…”
He makes a deep, rumbling sound, and you almost sob as he drags his tongue right back between your puffed pussy lips. You clench around nothing, his stubbled scraping your clit. Bucky angles his face, letting his tongue flick over your clit. It goes back and forth and back and forth, toying with it before pressing flat. He sucks, hard like a lollipop, and you almost sob into the mattress.
“Sweet.” Bucky whispers, his metal arm wrapping around your legs. “So fuckin’ sweet.”
“Bu- Bucky-“
“Shhh.” He kisses right over your pussy. “Wanna taste, pretty girl. I gotta fuckin’-“ He moans, and the vibration shoots right up your spine. “Gotta taste-“
Bucky presses his face fully into your cunt, and the sound that leaves you almost isn’t human.
He’s good at this. So good at this. It’s a little unfair. Your mouth can’t do anything but hang uselessly open, as Bucky works his jaw against you. He eats you like he’s starved for it. Like he’s a man that wants to drown of an insatiable thirst.
Two hands hold you up in the air, as his tongue plunges ruthlessly in and out of your cunt. You keen, trying to push further back, and the warmer hand wraps up to your spine and shoves your stomach down. It’s a tighter fit like this. Bucky drags his tongue around, and it hits every sensitive area. His beard tickles and scratches, and cold fingers tease your skin.
You get more and more sensitive, with every flick and suck and groan. You’re so wet it’s almost drooling down your legs, mixing with the stains of cum he’d gathered from your midriff and smeared over your legs. The dual heat with his cold hand makes all your nerves stand on end. You pussy clenches again, and Bucky chuckles.
“That’s right.” He mutters, making out with your clit as you gasp for air into the bed. “That’s it, baby, you’re already lettin’ go, aren’t you.”
You whine, and Bucky nips at your ass.
“Aren’t you?”
“Ye- Yes.” You mumble. “’S good, Bucky- So good-“
“I know.” He grunts, pressing his cold, metal thumb down into your clit. “Fuck, baby, I know.”
You whimper, and Bucky starts up on your dripping pussy again. He’s lapping at it, pushing his tongue into your tight hole as he plays with your clit, and white lines your vision.
“I- I’m gonna- Fuck- Bucky-“ You scratch at the sheets. “I’m gonna- Oh God-“
He smacks your clit, spits onto your pussy, and resumes with double the effort. You cry his name, as your orgasm wracks your body. You can feel yourself seizing around him, twitching and writhing in his tight grip as your vision lines with white.
And Bucky doesn’t stop. You’re making a mess all over his face, and he’s rising up, but it’s just pushing you further into the mattress. You whimper, your cunt too sensitive, but he doesn’t even come up for air.
“Shit- Bucky- Oh- Ohhhhh-“
The ache quickly fades into pleasure again. Blinging pleasure that’s just on the wrong side of too much, but pleasure all the same. You squeal, and Bucky just moans against your cunt.
Then you hear it. The slam of his fist against his cock.
He’s jerking off while he eats you out. He’s fucking himself so hard you can hear it, hear the slap of skin, feel all his little moans and grunts right against your pussy, and the thought sends you right over the edge again.
Bucky moans louder, as you cum on his tongue. Just like before, it seems to make him more and more feral. You have a feeling what lucidity that let him tease you before is gone. He’s eating you out the same way he’s kissed you, with rough lips and a fervor that’s almost animalistic. You’re boneless and whimpering into the sheets, taking it over and over as Bucky just keeps working his mouth against your cunt, and fucking his hand.
Then, suddenly, he’s gone. You whine from the lose, trying to roll over and look at him, but he just shoves you back down with a growl. The sound of his hand is getting faster and faster, and a hot weight drops over your back. Bucky presses his face into your neck, and takes a deep breath. You whimper, and he groans. His hips must be rocking, with how the bed is shaking.
“Smells good.” He rasps. “Gonna- Fuck-“
Bucky snaps back up, and you feel him cum more than you even hear it. Hot ropes spurt over your ass and back, seeping down the back off your thighs and into your pussy. You moan at the sensation, pushing back on trembling hands. There’s always just more of it, until you’re so marked up with him you’re sure you’ll never be able to wash it off.
You don’t want to.
With how Bucky grabs your hips and spreads the stain over your skin, you don’t think he does either.
“Shit.” He breathes out, and you hum in agreement. “Gotta- Flip for me, c’mon-“
Bucky helps you roll over. His touches are gentle again, but the gleam in his eyes hasn’t faded. You blink at him, flat on your back with your legs spread. Bucky traces the lips of your cunt, then slowly pushes two fingers inside you. Fucking his cum back into your tight hole. You mewl, eyes fluttering. Your head tosses back, and Bucky smiles
“Good girl.” He coos.
You try not get all gooey and weak just from the praise. Bucky laughs, and you think you might’ve failed.
“Strangling my fingers, doll.” He teases, pulling them right out.
You whimper. You’re too wet and ready not to take something. It’s really not fair to make you wait.
“I know.” He kisses your brow, voice rough. “Trust me, I fuckin’ know. You just gotta tell me you like it, then-“ His cock drags between your folds, and you keen. “All yours.”
You blink at him, opening your mouth to comply.
But you’re at an advantage.
Bucky’s hard again. His body is wound so tight above you, and his every word is thick. Like it’s an effort to speak. He’s still trying to fight against the drug running through his veins.
You want him to give in.
So you close your mouth, and give him a defiant glare.
Bucky growls again, and there’s no more teasing.
His mouth pushes over yours, and it’s not a loving kiss. It’s rough and quick, stealing your breath in seconds and distracting you as Bucky grabs your knees and shoves them back. You try to chase his lips, when he pulls away, but he shoves you back down with a grunt.
“Wanna be a brat.” He grunts. “Gonna get fucked like a brat.”
You almost beam. Yes, please.
Bucky folds you under him, your knees pressed to your chest and your cum-stained pussy on full display. He doesn’t waste time, tapping the head of his cock against your clit before slamming right inside. You’re so soaked you take it with only a hitched breath, but that doesn’t mean your eyes don’t roll back.
He hits right against you pelvis, when he bottoms out. His heavy balls sit on your ass, and the stretch of him is just enough pain to heighten the pleasure. Bucky kisses all over your face as he lets you adjust, but your pussy is greedy. He’d prepared you too well. You’re more than ready within seconds.
“Bu- Bucky-“ You gaps out, and he growls against your neck. “Move.”
If he’d told you to wait, you wouldn’t have been surprised.
But the drug seems to have overtaken him again, and all you get is a noise like a snarl against your throat before Bucky draws almost all the way out, and slams back in.
The air is knocked clean from your lungs. This time, he hit right against your g-spot, and your whole body seizes up. Bucky makes a low, deep noise, and repeats the motion. Again, he drives right into that gooey spot deep inside of you. You clench around him, and he doubles over, rutting deep inside of you.
“The- There-“ You whimper, fingers scrambling in the sheets. “Fuck, baby, right there-“
Bucky grunts an agreement, and starts to fuck you into the mattress. The angle is so deep you’re worried he’s going to permanently rearrange your guts. Every slam of his cock into your makes you see heaven, and Bucky pants over your, his eyes locked onto yours as your face contorts with pleasure.
He’s not even fucking you like a brat. He’s fucking you like a doll. He grabs at your limbs and moves them below him like you’re just a sleeve for his dick, and he needs you into just the right spot. One hand fists in your hair, forcing your neck a little up so you can watching your arousal gleam on his cock every time he pulls out. He moans every time he pushes back in, and you watch your cunt swallow his dick whole. A wet, smacking sound filling the room as he drills into you. He bends you even further to kiss over your neck and breasts, his tongue dragging in rhythm with his dick.
You try to clench around him every time he bottoms out, but your head is sort of empty, and now you’re just a drooling pussy around his massive cock, moaning his name and happily milking every bit of pleasure.
“Oh- Oooooh-“ You mewl, smiling like a cockdrunk idiot at the air. “Buuuucky-“
His mouth presses back over yours, and the kiss is strangely soft. His fucking hasn’t slowed or relented, but there’s a care with how his lips move over yours that makes you feel worshipped.
That’s what he’d said he’d do. Worship you. And you can really feel it here.
Bucky draws back, and the hand that had been fisted in your hair moves to your jaw. He squeezes again. You open for him easily, and his lips twitch.
“Good girl.” He coos, even if the words are tighter than before.
He spits into your mouth. You swallow obediantly, and open again when he squeezes your cheeks. Bucky slams forward with a groan, looking like a man wrecked.
“You fuckin’ like it, don’t you-“
“Love it.” You gasp, unable to even think to deny him again. “Love you, Bucky- Oh- Oh my god-“
Bucky makes a ragged, choked sound, and cums almost without warning. Your mouth falls open in a silent scream, as he pumps you full of his release. It feels like even more than before. Like you’re going to burst with how full you are, spurts of it still being forced out as Bucky fucks you through. You’ve never felt so totally claimed, with him all over every inch of your skin. He kisses you and you giggle, dazed and almost high on the feeling.
And he’s not even done.
The period of lucidity between orgasms gets shorter before it gets longer. Bucky’s ability to control himself almost vanishes all together. You get a kiss and broken mumble of your name before you’re being flipped back onto your stomach and fucked from behind. There will be handprints on your ass and thighs in the morning, and the sheets are stained with your drool from how Bucky railed you from behind.
You’re dragged into his lap right after, and he pushes his thumb into your mouth, then ruts up into your gaping cunt. You’re all moans and ditzy smiles by that point. When rolls you back onto your stomach and sits up on his knees, you just take it with moans and giggles and cries of delight.
He hasn’t just ruined you. He’s pulled you apart a million times over, until you’re just a puddle that sings his name.
You don’t even fully realize he’s done, when he kisses pulls out that last time. You whine, and clench around nothing, but expect to get filled right back up.
Then Bucky kisses you, and it’s slow. Savoring and sweet. Romantic. His voice is hoarse, but it’s lost the strained quality. He’s fully teasing again, smiling against your lips.
“So soft.” He coos, rubbing your thoroughly abused pussy with his warm hand.
You writhe, trying to get further and closer at the same time. Bucky chuckles, and kisses the corner of your mouth.
“Jesus, doll. You’d think you were the one that got sex drugged.”
You try to glare at him, but forget why the moment you see his pretty eyes, shining on yours.
They’re blue again.
“You’re back?” You breathe, and Bucky grins.
He ducks down, and presses another quick kiss over your lips.
“I’m back.”
You’re ordered not to move, while he cleans up. You don’t think you could if you tried. Your body is jelly, everything is sore in the best way, and your head is spinning with too many thoughts of what the fuck happened.
You told Bucky you love him. You told Bucky you love him. You’d never even fully admitted it in your head and he just fucked it right out of you. You said it fast, too fast, he thought you hated him four hours ago and now he must think you’re some kind of freak for just saying you love him.
He makes you drink water and go to the bathroom. Draws you a bath and brings you a snack and changes the sheets. You manage to find the strength to stand out of the tub and dry yourself off, wrapping the towel around your body before shuffling out in the center of his room.
God, he’s so handsome. All tan muscles and scars you want to trace with your tongue. Too bad you fucking blew it, and now you’re never going to get to touch him again-
Bucky turns, and smiles when he sees you. You swallow, bracing for the worst as he crosses the room.
He takes your face between his hands and kisses you. Deep and gentle and maybe he just forgot-
“Love you too.” He says against your lips. “Just- Uh- While we’re saying it.”
Oh.
Or that. That’s nice.
You throw everything you have into kissing him back, but end up tackling him down onto the bed with the sudden surge of strength. Bucky chokes out a laugh in surprise, wrestling you over onto your back with kiss and wandering hands. You giggle, trying to push back, and he nips at the tip of your nose.
Then he pauses, and pulls up with a small, worried frown.
“You’re stayin’ the night, right?”
You almost snort. There’s no getting rid of you now. You’re going to stay forever, and as long as he’ll allow after that.
“Yeah. I’m staying.”
✦End note: this was longer than my college thesis btw. and i. put more effort into it.✦
✦If you like this story, please reblog, share, or leave a comment! <3✦
"They wanted secrets. Avengers secrets," you reply. His thumb is still on your jaw, and right now, you're very aware of this. "But don't worry, Barnes. They didn't get any. Actually, I just talked about you for forty-five minutes instead."
Bucky's hand stops dead. "…pardon?"
Pairings: Avengers!AU!Bucky Barnes x Avengers!Employee!Reader
Warnings: Minors DNI; Explicit Sexual Content (oral f!receiving & penetrative; protection used!), Edging, (historical) Semi-Public Masturbation, (mild) Humiliation, Bucky's Kinda Smug About Thirsty!Reader, Non-Consensual Drug Use (Reader is drugged; not between MCs & not during sex!), (sort of) Kidnapping, (light) Interrogation, (kinda) Porn With Plot
Additional Tags: No Y/N, American!Reader, Post-Civil War, Civil War Good Ending AU, Bucky's An Avenger, Reader Works For The Avengers In PR, Reader Gets Truth Serum'd; It Was Super Effective!, Fluff & Smut, Rom-Com Vibes, First Dates & Other Firsts 👀
Author's Note: i'm gonna keep it 100%, this one-shot brainworm mainly came about because i read New Avengers #8 last month, and it gave me ideas that morphed into something that was most-suited to a one-shot :> honestly, i was just gonna leave this as pure fluff, but i want to try and keep improving my smut writing since i personally don't think it's my strongest aspect so (*/ω＼*) that part just kinda happened oopsie, anyways enjoy!!! also GO TEAM CANADA FOR OLYMPIC HOCKEY!!!! THEIR ENERGY MOTIVATED ME TO POST THIS UP CAUSE YIPPEE GO FOR GOLD BOYS
my fic masterlist!
Telling Truths (8.6k)
'Sodium thiopental' is one of those drugs you only hear about in TV shows and movies. You had assumed that—like most Hollywood tropes—reality would turn out to be less exciting than fiction.
Turns out, you were wildly off-base, because this stuff really does work. Which is extremely unfortunate for the masked men who are presently trying their very hardest to interrogate you.
"Tell us everything you know about the Avengers," they'd started with.
Big mistake, because you started talking. And talking. And talking.
Not about security protocols or safe house locations or Captain Rogers' morning briefing schedule—no, you launched into a fifteen-minute monologue about the time Bucky Barnes held the door open for you while you were carrying three boxes of press kits, and you were so flustered you walked directly into a wall—
"—and the worst part," you hear yourself saying, "the worst part is he asked if I was okay, and I said, 'yes, thank you, you too,' like he'd just told me to enjoy my meal or something. What does that even mean—"
"—ma'am." The first kidnapper—you've mentally dubbed him 'Frustrated'—pinches the bridge of his nose. "We need intelligence on—"
"—he has really nice hands," you interrupt, because apparently the sodium thiopental has made you physically incapable of shutting up. "Like, disproportionately nice hands. Both of them. The metal one is obviously impressive from an engineering standpoint, but the other one—"
"—please," Frustrated says, and he actually sounds a little desperate now. "Tactical intelligence. Security measures. Anything useful."
You blink at him, processing this with the languid curiosity of someone watching clouds drift by. "You want useful information."
"Yes."
"About the Avengers."
"Yes."
"Okay, well, did you know that Bucky doesn't like blueberries? He says they 'taste wrong' now. Post-cryo taste buds, I guess. I brought a bunch of muffins to the staff meeting last month, and he made this face—" You attempt to recreate the sour expression, which is difficult while zip-tied to a chair. "—like this, when he tried the blueberry ones. It was adorable."
Frustrated makes a sound like a dying engine.
The second kidnapper—who is henceforth 'Invested', you've decided—leans forward with his elbows on his knees. "Wait, go back. You brought muffins to a meeting, and he noticed?"
"He noticed," you confirm, nodding so enthusiastically your head swims. "He ate two of the chocolate chip ones and said—and I quote—'these are really good'. To me. Directly to me."
"That's promising," Invested says.
"I know, right?!" The zip ties dig into your wrists as you try to gesture. "But here's the thing; does he say that to everyone? Is he just really polite? Because he's been through literal decades of trauma, and maybe he's just being nice to the PR person because that's what well-adjusted people do, and I'm reading into—"
"—Yeah, but he ate two muffins," Invested interrupts. "If he was just being polite, he would've eaten one."
You gasp. This perspective has genuinely never occurred to you. "Oh my God."
"Can we—" Frustrated tries to get things back on track.
"—and he remembered you brought them," Invested continues, fully committed now. "That's attention to detail. Interest."
"But also he's a trained assassin," you counter, because the truth serum won't let you be anything less than thorough in your self-doubt. "Attention to detail is literally his job. He probably remembers everyone's muffin preferences. He probably has a mental file on the weird guy from IT who always takes the last bagel—"
"—what's his name?" the third kidnapper—'Professional', you decide, since he is still trying to salvage this—cuts in sharply.
"Whose name? Bucky's?"
"What? No. The weird guy from IT."
You open your mouth. Then close it. "I... don't know, actually."
"But you know Barnes doesn't like blueberries." Professional's tone suggests he's trying to make a point.
"Well, yeah, because I..." You stop. The implications hit you with all the subtle grace of a sledgehammer to the face. "Oh."
"'Oh'?" Invested sits up straighter. "What's 'oh'? That sounded like a significant 'oh'."
"I pay attention to him." The words float out, soft and mortifying. "Like, a lot of attention. I know he takes his coffee black, but he'll add sugar if he's been up for more than twenty-four hours. I know he runs the perimeter every morning at six, but he takes Thursdays off. I know he sits in the back row at press briefings and does this thing with his jaw when someone says something particularly stupid—"
"—Uh-oh," Invested says, grinning behind his mask. You can practically hear it. "That's a crush."
"It's such a crush," you agree miserably. "It's a catastrophic crush. I'm professionally compromised."
"Does he—" Invested starts.
"—Okay," Frustrated stands up abruptly, chair scraping against concrete. "New approach. Tell us about the Avengers compound security systems."
You look at him with the patience of a saint. "The security systems are designed by Tony Stark, so they're very advanced, but also Bucky helped consult on them because he's really good at finding vulnerabilities from his HYDRA days, which is both hot and sad, and one time I saw him reviewing camera placements with Tony, and he rolled his sleeves up to his elbows, and I had to excuse myself to the bathroom for like ten minutes..."
Frustrated walks away. Just straight up walks to the other side of the room.
"Focus," Professional says, still trying. "What were the camera placements?"
"I don't know; I wasn't looking at the cameras." You're pretty sure you're slurring now. "I was looking at his forearms."
"Legitimate," Invested nods.
"No, not legitimate," Frustrated shouts from his corner. "None of this is legitimate!"
Professional finally pulls out his phone, and you track the movement with delayed curiosity. "Who're you calling?" you ask.
"Our employer," he says flatly. "To tell them this was a massive waste of our time and resources."
"Wait." Invested holds up a hand. "Give me five more minutes."
"Why."
"I need to know if he's made a move on her!"
"He hasn't," you supply helpfully. "That's part of the problem. We're in this weird limbo where we're definitely friends, but I can't tell if he's just being friendly or if there's—" You wiggle your fingers as much as the zip ties allow. "—something there."
"Well, has he touched you?" Invested asks. "Casual touches, lingering eye contact, finding excuses to be near you?"
You consider this with the gravity it deserves. "He... steadies me sometimes. Like if I'm on a ladder hanging press banners or carrying too many things. Hand on my elbow, that kind of thing."
"How long does he leave it there?"
"Longer than strictly necessary for stability purposes," you admit.
Twenty minutes later, you're sitting on the curb outside the warehouse, still zip-tied, watching your kidnappers load themselves into a van.
Invested pauses at the door. "For what it's worth, I think he's into you," he offers.
"Thanks," you say, because the sodium thiopental is still very much in your system. "This was weird, but oddly validating."
"If you don't make a move, you're a coward," he adds.
"That's fair. I'll take that."
The van drives away. You sit on the curb and wonder vaguely if you should be more concerned about the kidnapping part of this situation. Your phone's gone, your head feels like it's full of cotton, and you're wearing yesterday's blouse because laundry day is Thursday and today is—wait, what day is it again?
Then the Quinjet lands in the street with the subtle grace of a small meteor, and you decide that this is probably the least weird thing to happen to you today. Why not just land a multi-million dollar jet in the middle of the road?
Bucky hits the ground before the ramp fully deploys, his gun drawn, eyes scanning for threats with the cold efficiency that makes your stomach flip even when you're drugged and recently kidnapped. Steve's right behind him, shield up, and you feel a distant flicker of guilt that they probably had to interrupt something important for this.
His eyes lock on you, sitting on the curb, and the gun lowers. "Are you hurt?"
"No," you say honestly. Then, because the truth serum is a snitch, you continue. "Just drugged. Sodium thiopental. I always thought it was just movie stuff. Turns out it's very effective."
He's crouching in front of you now, metal hand coming up to carefully tilt your chin, checking your pupils. The touch is gentle. It's always gentle. "What did they want?"
"They wanted secrets. Avengers secrets," you reply. His thumb is still on your jaw, and right now, you're very aware of this. "But don't worry, Barnes. They didn't get any. Actually, I just talked about you for forty-five minutes instead."
Bucky's hand stops dead. "…pardon?"
"So many details," you continue, because apparently your mouth is still operating independently of your brain. "Embarrassing details. The muffin incident. Your forearms. The fact that I know your running schedule and coffee preferences and the exact shade of blue your eyes get in morning light—"
Steve makes a choking sound behind him.
"—and one of them was really invested in whether you like me back, which was nice of him considering he'd kidnapped me, very emotionally supportive for a mercenary—"
"—okay," Bucky interrupts, sounding a little flustered. "Let's get you to medical. They just left you here?"
"Yep. They let me go because I was useless," you tell him as he cuts the zip ties with a knife that appears from nowhere. "Well, useless for intelligence. Apparently, very useful for romantic speculation."
"Uh-huh. I'm sure," he says, a little faint.
You're being guided to the quinjet now, Bucky's hand steady on your elbow—longer than strictly necessary for stability purposes, your brain notes—and you lean into him without thinking about it.
"Your forearms really are distracting though," you tell him seriously. "That's not the drugs talking. That's just facts."
Behind you, Steve is definitely laughing.
Medical smells like antiseptic and the particular kind of quiet that makes you want to whisper. You're sitting on an exam table, paper crinkling under you, while Bruce shines a penlight in your eyes with the resigned air of someone who's seen too much weird stuff to be fazed by sodium thiopental confessions.
"Pupil response is good," he says, clicking off the light. "How do you feel?"
"A little floaty," you report. "And like I've made some regrettable life choices."
"The drug should work its way out of your system in another hour or two." Bruce makes a note on his tablet. "In the meantime, try not to operate heavy machinery or make any binding decisions."
"Or talk," you add.
"Or talk," he agrees, mouth twitching. He pauses at the door. "Oh—F.R.I.D.A.Y. pulled audio from the warehouse security cameras. We've got a full transcript of your interrogation, for the debrief file."
Every drop of blood in your body relocates to your face. "A full transcript."
"Every word." Bruce has the decency to look sympathetic. "Standard protocol. The team leads will need to review it."
"The team leads," you repeat. "As in Steve. And—"
"—No worries, already sent it over." Bruce taps his tablet. "I'll give you two some privacy."
You blink. Process. Turn your head—too fast, the room tilts—and realize Bucky's still here. He's leaning against the counter by the sink, arms crossed, watching you with an expression you can't quite parse.
"You don't have to stay," you say. "I'm fine. Medically fine. Emotionally compromised, but fine."
"I know." He doesn't move, and you suddenly become very interested in the edge of the exam table paper, picking at it with your thumbnail. He watches. Neither of you speaks.
"So," Bucky says eventually. "Muffins."
You close your eyes. "Oh god."
"And my forearms?"
"I'm going to resign," you tell the ceiling. "I will submit my resignation and move to a remote island where no one has ever heard of the Avengers or truth serums or—"
"And my coffee preferences?"
"—Exactly. I'll become a hermit. I'll live off coconuts. I'll never speak to another human being ever again—"
"—hey." His voice is closer now. You open your eyes, and he's right there, standing in front of you, close enough that you have to tilt your chin up to meet his gaze. "Breathe. It's okay."
You breathe. It comes out shaky.
"For the record," Bucky says quietly. "I know your coffee order too."
Your brain stalls. "What?"
"Iced vanilla latte. Extra shot on Mondays." The corner of his mouth ticks up. "You do this thing where you wrap both hands around the cup even though it's cold. And you always smell like that lavender lotion from the dispensers on the third floor."
Oh no. Oh, no. You feel your face get warm.
"You hum when you're concentrating," he continues. "You reorganize the press clippings by colour when you're stressed. You fall asleep during team movie nights, but you always try to fight it because you don't want to be rude."
"That's..." You're having trouble getting air into your lungs properly. "That's a lot of details."
"Yeah." His eyes are very blue. "It is."
The implications of this are trying to surface through the remaining fog of sodium thiopental, but they keep slipping away before you can grab them. "So you're saying..."
"I'm saying you're not the only one paying attention." He shifts his weight, and suddenly, you're aware of how close he is, how he's standing in the space between your knees, not touching but right there. "And for the record, that thing you do when you're on ladders? Where you bite your bottom lip when you're concentrating on getting the banner straight?"
"Yeah?"
"Distracting," he says, and the single word drops straight through your stomach. "Very distracting."
"Oh," you say intelligently.
His hand comes up—the flesh one, warm and calloused—and tucks a piece of hair behind your ear. The touch lingers. "I was trying to figure out how to do this without making things weird at work."
"I think we're past that now," you manage. "I told mercenaries about your blueberry preferences."
That startles a laugh out of him, soft and genuine, and your whole chest goes warm and stupid with it. "Yeah, we're definitely past that."
"So..." You're still trying to process. "What does this mean?"
Bucky studies you, choosing his words carefully. "It means when you're not drugged anymore, and you can make decisions that aren't chemically influenced—" His thumb brushes your cheekbone, so gentle it makes you shiver. "—I'd like to take you to dinner."
"Like... a date-dinner?"
"Yeah, sweetheart. Like a date-dinner."
The endearment sweetheart hits you somewhere behind your ribs. You're definitely still a little drugged, because your response isn't exactly verbose.
"Your hands really are disproportionately nice, you know. I wasn't lying about that."
His smile goes lopsided, devastating. "You can tell me all about it over dinner."
"I'm going to be so embarrassed about this later," you inform him.
"I know." He's still touching your face, still standing close enough that you can feel the warmth of him. "But for now, just... sit with it, okay?"
"Okay," you whisper.
"Good." He steps back—slowly, like he's reluctant to break contact—and the loss of proximity makes you want to protest. "I'm gonna go debrief with Steve. Bruce will check on you in a bit."
"Bucky?"
He pauses at the door and looks back.
"Thursday," you say. "I'm free Thursday."
His whole face opens up—eyes crinkling, mouth crooked, and a dimple you've never seen before cutting into his left cheek. "Thursday works."
Then he's gone, and you're alone in the medical bay with your racing heart and the lingering warmth of his hand on your face.
From the hallway, you hear Steve's voice. "So that was—"
"—not a word," Bucky cuts him off.
"I'm just saying, the forearms thing was—"
"—Steve."
You drop your face into your hands and laugh, laugh until your sides hurt.
Thursday arrives.
You've changed outfits four times. Your apartment looks like a bomb went off in a department store. The lavender dress is too formal. The jeans feel too casual. The black top makes you look like you're going to a funeral. You're currently standing in front of your mirror in option number five—a burgundy sweater and dark jeans that hopefully thread the needle between "trying" and "trying too hard"—when your phone buzzes.
📱 Bucky: Outside whenever you're ready. No rush.
Your stomach does a complicated flip. He's early. Or you're late. What time is it?
You grab your jacket, check your reflection one last time (lipstick: present, hair: cooperating, overall vibe: please god let this be acceptable), and head downstairs before you can spiral further.
The motorcycle is parked at the curb.
Of course, it's the motorcycle. You don't know why you expected anything else, but the sight of Bucky leaning against it in dark jeans and a leather jacket does something catastrophic to your higher brain functions.
He straightens when he sees you, and you watch his eyes track from your boots to your face. The tension leaves his shoulders—he softens, warms.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi." You're trying very hard to act like a normal person on a normal date and not someone who recently confessed your feelings under chemical duress. "So, motorcycle."
"Problem?" There's a tease in his voice.
"No, just..." You eye the helmet he's holding. "I've never actually been on one."
"I'll go slow. Promise."
The helmet fits snugly when he settles it on your head, his fingers careful with the chin strap. He's standing close enough that you catch the scent of his soap—something clean and cedar-dark—and you have to remind yourself to breathe like a normal human being.
"Good?" he asks.
You nod, keeping your mouth shut before you can say something stupid.
His own helmet goes on, and then he's swinging a leg over the bike with the easy grace of long practice. He glances back at you and extends a hand. "Hop on. Arms around my waist."
Right. Arms around his waist. Pressed against his back. Totally normal, completely fine, not at all the kind of proximity that's been living in your head for months.
You climb on. Settle in behind him. Slide your arms around his middle, and—oh, that's solid muscle under the jacket. Okay, cool, you're being so normal about this.
"Too tight?" The helmet muffles his words.
"No, you're good—I mean, this is good, the grip is—" You're babbling. Stop babbling. "—I'm good!"
You feel more than hear his laugh. Then the engine rumbles to life beneath you, and you tighten your grip reflexively.
The city blurs past in streams of light and shadow. Bucky takes the turns smooth and easy, true to his word, and after the first few blocks you stop bracing for disaster and start actually experiencing it—the wind, the speed, the warmth of him against you.
It's terrifying, exhilarating—and very, very distracting.
When Bucky finally slows and pulls into a parking spot, you're almost disappointed. "Still alive back there?" he asks as he kills the engine.
"Surprisingly yes." You reluctantly unwrap your arms from around him and accept his hand to dismount. Your legs are slightly unsteady. "Where are we?"
"You'll see."
The restaurant is small, tucked between a bookstore and a vintage record shop on a street you've never noticed before. String lights are woven through the front window, and through the glass you can see exposed brick, warm lighting, and maybe a dozen tables.
"It's quiet," Bucky says, glancing at the empty street like he's checking for clearance. "Off the radar. Figured that might be better than somewhere we'd get recognized."
Translation, he's thought about this. About privacy, about comfort, about what would make this easier.
"It's perfect," you say, and mean it.
The hostess seats you at a corner table, and you're grateful for the low lighting because it hides the way your hands are shaking slightly when you pick up the menu.
"So," Bucky says after the waiter takes your drink orders. "On a scale of one to ten, how mortified are you about the kidnapping thing?"
You look up. He's watching you with that almost-smile, the one that makes his eyes crinkle slightly at the corners.
"Eleven," you say. "Easily eleven. I told armed mercenaries about your morning running schedule."
"Could've been worse."
"How?"
"You could've told them about the time I walked into the glass door in the conference room."
You blink. "I didn't know about that."
"Exactly." He leans back in his chair. "See? Operational security intact."
"When did you walk into a glass door?"
"Not important."
"It's super important, actually. I need all the details."
His smile goes wider, more genuine. "It was after a seventy-two-hour mission. I was running on maybe three hours of sleep. And someone had cleaned the glass really well."
The mental image makes you grin. "Did anyone see?"
"Sam," he says darkly. "Sam saw. I will never hear the end of it."
"That's incredible."
"Glad my pain amuses you."
"Immensely," you confirm, and just like that, the nervousness starts to dissipate. This is Bucky. You've had dozens of conversations with him—in the break room, in the hallway, during mind-numbing press briefings. The only difference is context.
And proximity.
And the way he's looking at you right now, with the kind of focus that makes you forget there's a restaurant around you.
Dinner arrives. You talk about everything and nothing—his adjustment to modern food (still suspicious of most things that need to be microwaved), your disastrous attempt at learning Russian on Duolingo (Natasha found out and laughed for ten minutes straight), and the truly baffling email chains that circulate through Avengers staff.
"There's one going around right now about the break room coffee maker," you tell him. "Seventeen replies. People have opinions."
"Yeah? What's your stance?"
"Nice try. I stay out of break room politics," you say seriously. "That way lies madness."
"Smart."
The waiter clears your plates. Bucky orders coffee—black, because of course—and you get tea because caffeine this late will have you staring at the ceiling until 3 AM.
"Can I ask you something?" you say, turning your cup in your hands.
"Yeah."
"When did you..." You pause, choosing words carefully. "When did you start paying attention? Like that? I mean. To me?"
He rubs the back of his neck, thinking about it. "You remember the first press briefing after I officially joined the team?"
"The one where that reporter asked if you were planning to 'leverage your HYDRA experience' for the Avengers?" You mentally flinch at the memory. "Yeah. I remember."
"You shut him down in about fifteen seconds. Polite and professional, but you made it very clear that line of questioning wasn't acceptable." Bucky meets your eyes. "After, when everyone was clearing out, you came up to me. Asked if I was okay."
You do remember that. He'd looked tense, and you'd acted on impulse.
"Most people tiptoe around it," he continues. "Or they go too far the other way and treat me like I'm fragile. But you just... asked. Direct. Like you actually wanted to know the answer."
"I did want to know."
"I know," he murmurs. "That's when I started paying attention."
Your chest aches. "Bucky, that was eight months ago."
"Huh. That so?"
"You've been—" You're trying to do math through the haze of feelings. "—this whole time?"
"Didn't know what to do about it," he admits. "Seemed like the kind of thing that could go real wrong real fast, if I misread the situation. And then you got kidnapped and told mercenaries about my forearms, so..." The corner of his mouth ticks up. "Figured that was a pretty clear signal."
You laugh, the sound slightly strangled. "Most people just... text, or something."
"I'm old-fashioned. Not gonna say I'm interested in a dame over text."
The check arrives. Bucky pays before you can even reach for your wallet, waving off your protest with a look that suggests arguing will be futile.
Outside, the air has cooled. You pull your jacket tighter, and Bucky's hand finds the small of your back, a warm point of contact as you walk to the motorcycle.
"Thank you," you say. "For dinner. For... all of this."
"Don't thank me yet." He hands you the helmet. "Still gotta get you home without crashing."
"Very reassuring."
"I'm good at what I do, sweetheart."
The endearment does the same thing it did in medical—your stomach drops and your hands forget what they're doing. You let him help you with the helmet again, hyperaware of every brush of his fingers.
The ride back is slower. Bucky takes the long way, and you don't complain, just hold on and watch the city lights blur past and try to commit this to memory—the rumble of the engine, the solid warmth of him, the way the night feels full of potential.
When he pulls up outside your building, you're reluctant to let go.
"So," he says after you've both dismounted, and he's walked you to your door. "How'd I do?"
"Fishing for compliments?"
"Maybe."
You pretend to consider it. "The motorcycle was a strong choice. Dinner conversation, solid and above average. Overall execution..." You tilt your head. "Eight out of ten."
His eyebrow arcs. "Only an eight?"
"Deducted points for making me wait eight months."
"That's fair." He steps closer, and your back hits your door gently. He braces a hand against the frame, leaning in. "What would it take to get to a ten?"
Your heart is hammering. "I might have some ideas."
"Yeah?" He's closer now, mouth near your ear.
"Yeah."
He kisses you. Slow and careful, like he's still figuring out what you like, and it's perfect—the warm press of his mouth, his thumb tracing the line of your jaw, slow and deliberate, the way he makes this soft sound when you curl your fingers into his jacket and pull him closer.
When you break apart, you're both breathing hard.
"Yeah. Ten," you manage. "Definitely a ten."
"Good to know."
You both stare at each other for a few seconds.
"...want to make it an eleven?" you ask innocently.
His grin turns sly. "Depends," Bucky says. "Are you going to invite me up, or are we doing this in the hallway?"
Immediately, you fumble for your keys. Then drop them. Bucky catches them before they hit the ground—because, of course, he does—and unlocks the door himself while you try to remember how to breathe.
The apartment is dark. You shrug your jacket off and reach for the light switch, but his hand catches your wrist and pins it flat to the wall.
"Leave it." His mouth finds yours before you can argue, crowding you back against the closed door. The wood is cold through your sweater, the deadbolt rattling in its housing when he leans his full weight into you. His grip on your wrist loosens—slides away—and both hands frame your face, tilting you where he wants you, and this kiss is nothing like the one outside—it's open-mouthed and wet, his tongue pushing past your lips and licking into you like he's starving for it. You whimper, and he swallows the sound, hips rolling forward to press the full length of his cock against your stomach through his jeans.
Your hands shove under his jacket, dragging it off his shoulders. It hits the floor. He's wearing a henley underneath, soft cotton pulled tight over hard muscle, and when you flatten your palms against his chest, you can feel the kick of his pulse under your palm, uneven and fast.
"You have no idea," he says against your mouth. "How many times I've thought about this."
"Tell me." Your fingers twist into the hem of his shirt.
His grin is filthy. "Too bad you don't have the sodium thiopental, huh?"
He catches both your wrists in his metal hand—vibranium fingers cool and immovable—and pins them above your head. The position bows your spine, pushes your tits up against his chest, and the easy, one-handed control of it sends a sick throb straight between your legs.
"Thought about it during briefings." His lips drag down the side of your throat, teeth scraping, tongue pressing flat to your pulse before he sucks a bruise into the skin below your ear. "Watching you take notes. Biting your pen... wondering if you'd make that same face with my cock inside you."
Your brain short-circuits, hearing that. "Bucky—"
"—thought about it in the gym." He lets go of your wrists to grab your hips with both hands, fingers sinking into the flesh hard enough that you feel every individual fingertip, and drags you flush against his cock. He's thick and stiff against your belly, and he grinds into you, deliberately. "Every time you walked past in those skirts. Wanted to bend you over the nearest surface and fuck you until you forgot your own name."
With your newly freed hands, you yank his shirt up, and he helps, pulling it over his head in one rough motion. And God—the expanse of his bare chest, the raised ridges of old scars, the smooth vibranium plates where metal fuses with skin...
"Is this okay?" Your fingers find the seam where metal meets flesh, tracing the border.
"Yeah." His voice is already coming apart. "Touch whatever you want. I'm all yours." One eyebrow lifts. "You did tell three mercenaries my arms are disproportionately nice. Only fair you verify in person."
"I'm never living that down, am I?"
"Oh, not a chance."
Even still, you take Bucky at his word, running your hands over the hard plane of his stomach, muscle twitching and clenching when you scrape your thumbnail across his nipple. He lets you, hands loose on your waist, his gaze half-lidded and intent, tracking every movement of your hands.
"My turn," he says, and walks you backward toward the couch. When the backs of your knees hit the cushions, you sit, and he drops to his knees between your thighs like he belongs there, his hands finding the hem of your sweater.
"Off?" You nod. He pulls it over your head, and his hands are still on your ribs. He's looking at you—the lace of your bra cutting into the swell of your tits, your skin flushed and hot—and he swallows, Adam's apple bobbing. "Thought about this too," he admits.
Bucky leans in, presses his open mouth to the curve of your shoulder, and breathes you in—and you catch the warm smell of his skin—cedar soap and clean sweat and something underneath that's just him. "What you'd look like underneath everything..." his thumbs dig into the soft underside of your breasts through the lace, kneading, and it's not enough—not close to enough. You push into his hands, and he makes a low, rough noise, reaching around to pop the clasp.
The bra drops. Bucky sits back on his heels and just looks, and the naked hunger on his face at the sight of your bare breasts actually makes your nipples tighten. "You're staring," you whisper.
"Fuck yes, I am," he retorts, with no shame whatsoever. He leans in and closes his mouth over your left nipple, and your whole body jolts.
Bucky's tongue is obscene—broad, flat strokes over the stiff peak, flicking the tip, then sucking hard enough that your hips buck off the cushions. The right hand cups your other breast, squeezing, calloused thumb rolling your nipple between rough fingers while the metal one grips your ribcage, holding you in place. He bites down—not a nibble, an actual bite, teeth denting the soft skin around your nipple—and the sharp sting of it rips a moan out of you that you couldn't hold back if you tried.
"Fuck."
"You like that?" Switching sides, he drags his wet mouth across your sternum, and takes your other nipple between his teeth, tugging.
"Yes, God—"
"Good." His hands drop to your jeans, thumb popping the button and fingers hooking into the waistband. "Need to find out what else makes you sound like that."
You lift your hips. He tugs your boots off first, impatient, letting them thunk to the floor, then peels the denim down your legs, underwear with it—the cotton sticking slightly to the wet mess between your thighs—and tosses everything aside. You're bare beneath him now, legs spread, pussy visibly wet, and the cool air on your exposed skin makes you clench around nothing.
Bucky puts his hands on your knees and pushes them apart. Wide. Wider than you're normally comfortable with. His hands slide off your knees, and he stares between your legs with an expression that borders on reverent. You can see the exact moment his composure cracks—his left hand flexes at his side, vibranium plates whirring and recalibrating.
"Jesus Christ." His thumb swipes through the wetness gathered on your inner thigh, smearing it. "You're dripping."
The touch makes you squirm. "Bucky, please."
His palms slide up your thighs, grip firmly, and spread you open with his thumbs so he can see everything—your swollen clit and the wet mess of you smeared down your thighs. His breath is hot against the inside of your thigh. "Gonna eat this pretty pussy until you can't think straight."
Bucky drops his head between your legs and licks you from hole to clit in one long, filthy, and unbroken stripe.
The noise you make isn't dignified in the slightest. His tongue is hot and wide and thorough, dragging over every slick inch of you, spreading you open, lapping up the wetness like he can't get enough. He groans against you—a low, rough vibration that buzzes straight through your clit—and his mouth seals over your clit. He sucks, hard, and your hips nearly jerk off the couch.
"Oh fuck."
His metal hand clamps down on your hip, pinning you to the cushions. The vibranium is cold against your overheated skin, and the shock of it tears a gasp out of you. He doesn't let up—tongue working in tight, focused circles around your clit, then dipping lower to push inside you, fucking into your hole with pointed, deliberate thrusts.
"Don't stop." You're panting, fingers twisted in his hair, thighs shaking on either side of his head. "Please, please don't stop—"
—And he stops.
His mouth lifts off your clit with a slick, obscene pop, and you whine—hips chasing his face, fingers yanking at his hair. He lets you pull. Doesn't budge. He presses his open mouth to the inside of your thigh instead, unhurried, like he's settling in for a long night.
"Bucky, what the fuck?" you gasp.
"You know what I keep thinking about?" He drags his lips along the crease where your thigh meets your hip. "That transcript of yours."
Your stomach drops. You'd almost—almost—managed to forget about that detail Bruce had mentioned in passing.
"There's this one part I've read about... six times, now." His thumb digs slow pressure into your hip bone—nowhere near where you need it. "About the day I was reviewing camera placements with Stark?"
You swallow dryly.
"The part where you said you had to excuse yourself to the bathroom." His eyes find yours, and there is nothing lazy about them. "For ten minutes."
"That's not—the truth serum was—"
"—yeah, sweetheart? Then what were you doing in that bathroom?" He kisses the inside of your knee, soft and patient as a saint, his fingers trailing up and down your inner thigh without ever reaching where you're aching the most. "After you saw me roll my sleeves up."
"You know what I was doing."
"I probably do," Bucky agrees, his thumb sliding through the wetness between your legs, grazing your clit—one slow, deliberate pass—and pulling away. "But I want to hear you say it. No serum. Just you."
The sound you make is pathetic. "I touched myself," you grit out. "In the third-floor bathroom. At work. Because you rolled your fucking sleeves up."
Bucky hums. "That's my girl." He rewards you—spreads your pussy with his thumbs and drags his tongue over your clit in one long, flat stroke, then seals his mouth around it and sucks. Your hips lurch off the couch. His metal hand pins them back down, vibranium cold and immovable against your skin. One finger pushes inside you—thick, calloused, and crooking upward—and he fucks you with it in a steady, grinding rhythm while his tongue traces wet circles around your clit.
You're close again in under a minute, which must be a new record for you. The pressure in your belly winds tighter, your thighs starting to tremble, every nerve ending zeroing in on his mouth—
—his tongue goes flat. Slow. And his finger stills.
"No." You yank his hair hard enough that it has to hurt. "I was right there—"
"I know you were." He bites the soft skin of your inner thigh. "What else?"
"What else?"
"The mercenaries got the PG version." A second finger pushes in alongside the first, and he spreads them apart—slow and stretching. "I want the rest. What did you actually think about, when you thought about me?"
God. Where would you even start?
The truth is you've thought about him in every configuration your brain could render. Him on top of you. Behind you. Under you with his hands on your hips, guiding you down. You've thought about his mouth on your neck, your tits, and between your legs. You've thought about the metal hand wrapped around your throat—not squeezing, just holding, the weight of it, the cool press of vibranium against your pulse.
Bending you over your kitchen counter. Pinning you against the wall of his quarters. Even fucking you in the back seat of one of Stark's cars in the compound garage. You've thought about it slow and sweet, and you've thought about it mean and rough, and you've thought about every shade in between, and the worst part—the worst part—is that none of it was ever enough. Every fantasy ended the same way; alone, catching your breath in the dark, wanting the real thing so badly your teeth ached.
And now the real thing is kneeling between your legs with two fingers inside you, asking you to tell him about it.
"I thought about your mouth. This—specifically this. Your head between my legs," you babble out mindlessly.
"How detailed?" He curls his fingers and licks you in one long, merciless stroke.
"I've gotten myself off to you—" Whimper. "—more times than I can count. In my bed, with the lights off, imagining your hands on me. Both of them." His metal fingers flex against your hip. The plates shift and recalibrate under your skin. "I'd think about the vibranium. How it'd feel inside me. Whether it'd be cold the whole time or if I'd warm it up."
His fingers falter inside you—actually falter, rhythm breaking—and when he lifts his head, whatever game he was playing is over. His mouth is slack, the blue of his eyes barely visible, and there's a flush crawling up his neck that has nothing to do with exertion. "You thought about the arm, sweetheart?"
"Every night for weeks, Barnes. So don't you dare stop again, please—"
—this time, he doesn't. His metal hand replaces his right between your legs—vibranium fingers sliding in where calloused ones were. Cool at first—almost cold—then warming fast to your body heat, smooth and unyielding, precise in a way human hands don't get to be. The answer to a question you've been asking yourself for weeks. He finds your G-spot and locks on, pressing with perfect, unrelenting accuracy while his mouth seals back over your clit—sucking, licking, greedy, and graceless, and done teasing.
"Come." He says it against your pussy, the words vibrating on your clit. "You earned it. Come for me."
You come so hard your vision actually whites out. Your thighs lock around his head, your whole body curling in on itself, and you can hear yourself making sounds you'll be mortified about later—broken, desperate, his name tangled up in profanity. You clench around his metal fingers in hard, rhythmic pulses, and he keeps going—keeps licking, keeps fucking you through it, drawing every last aftershock out until you're twitching and raw-nerved and shoving at his forehead with a broken, "too much, too much—"
—Bucky pulls back. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, but it doesn't help—his chin is smeared with you, lips puffy and shiny, and he's grinning at you like he just won the lottery. "Okay?"
"I—yeah." You can barely string the words together. "I'm very okay, thanks for asking."
He laughs at that, and drops his forehead against your knee. His thumb drags slowly along the outside of your calf, and you reach down and push his hair off his forehead, damp and tangled from where you'd been pulling it. His eyes close.
Then he turns his head and bites the inside of your knee—soft, deliberate—and when he looks up, whatever gentleness was there has gone sharp.
His belt buckle jingles as he stands and works it open, fingers unsteady, and he shoves his jeans and boxers down in one motion. His cock bobs free—flushed dark, thick, the head slick with precome. It's veined along the underside, and... he's big. Bigger than you expected, and you expected a lot.
"Bedroom?"
"Bedroom," you agree, and he hauls you off the couch.
You stumble down the hall together, naked and dripping, his cock bumping against your ass with every step. Your bed is unmade from this morning. You don't care—eight months of picturing exactly this, and the real thing is standing naked in your doorway, and every late-night fantasy you've ever had about James Buchanan Barnes is about to become a debrief liability.
Crawling backward onto the mattress, you spread your legs, and he follows you down—settling his weight between your thighs. The head of his cock slides through the wet mess of your pussy, nudging your clit, and you both groan at the sensation.
"Condom." You manage the word. "Nightstand. Top drawer."
Bucky reaches over, yanks the drawer open, and grabs a foil packet. Tears it with his teeth. You watch him roll the latex down his cock—watch the way his hand squeezes the base, the way his abs flex, and the way his hips cant forward involuntarily when the condom snaps into place. He's shaking. Barely holding it together.
"C'mere." He pulls back, plants his feet on the floor, and grabs your hips, dragging you across the mattress until your ass is at the edge, legs open on either side of him. He fists his cock, lines the head up with your pussy, and presses forward—just the tip, just enough to stretch you open around the thick crown. Neither of you moves.
"You sure?" he asks, and his voice is wrecked.
"So sure." You hook your ankles behind his back and drag him forward. "I didn't fantasize about you for eight months to be treated like glass, Barnes."
He pushes in. Slow. The stretch is obscene—his cock is thick enough that your body has to work to take it, opening around him inch by inch, the drag of latex and the pressure of him splitting you apart making your mouth fall open. He feeds it to you in a slow, grinding roll of his hips, watching your face the whole time, watching the way your eyes go glassy and your lips part. His thumb catches your lower lip, and drags it down.
"There it is," he murmurs, almost to himself. "Same face as the pen."
Every version of this you've imagined—lights off, alone in your bed, biting your own hand to keep quiet—and not one of them accounted for the weight of him, or the heat, or the way his eyes refuse to leave yours. The real thing is so much better than the fantasy, that your brain can't hold both at once.
"Breathe," he says, and you realize you've stopped. You suck in air. He sinks deeper, inch by slow inch, until he bottoms out and his hips are flush with yours.
Full. You're impossibly, achingly full, stretched tight around the base of his cock, your own pulse throbbing where your body grips him. The room disappears. There's nothing left but his breath and the stretch and the blood hammering in your ears.
"Fuck." His forehead drops against yours. His arms bracket your head, barely holding him up. "Eight months. Doesn't even come close."
"Move," you dig your nails into his shoulders. "Please move."
He pulls back—slow, the friction dragging against every nerve ending inside you—until just the head is still inside, and holds there. Your pussy clenches around the tip, greedy, already trying to drag him back in.
And Bucky slams forward.
The sound you make is filthy—wrenched out of you by the force of it, a noise you've never heard yourself make. He fills you in one hard stroke, cock driving deep enough to jolt through your stomach, and the wet slap of his hips against your ass echoes off the bedroom walls.
"Yeah?" He drives in again. Harder. "That the face you made in that bathroom?"
"Yes."
He finds a rhythm. Deep, deliberate strokes that drag against you on every thrust, his hips snapping forward hard enough to punch the breath out of you. Your fingers claw at the sheets, hips rocking up to meet him. He grabs your left leg—hooks his hand behind your knee and pushes it up, folding you nearly in half, thigh pinned to your chest. The angle opens you up. He drives in further, the head of his cock bearing down on that aching spot, and your vision swims.
"Oh God, oh fuck—right there, right there..."
"I know." He picks up the pace, hips driving forward, headboard knocking against the wall in a steady, damning rhythm. His metal hand slides between your bodies—vibranium fingers finding your clit, still tender and buzzing from his mouth—and he works it in fast, tight circles while he fucks you. Your brain gives up trying to process both at once.
Your pussy grips him so tight you can feel the drag of every vein, even through the condom.
"Look at me." Your eyes had screwed shut, and when you force them open, his face is right there—colour high on his cheeks, his mouth bitten red, the tendons in his neck standing taut. "Spent eight months picturing you like this." His hips don't slow. "Wasn't gonna miss the real thing."
"You like this," you breathe—the truth serum's ghost, or maybe just you, done pretending. "You've thought about this. Me under you. Saying your name."
His hips stutter. One uncontrolled thrust that hits deep and wrong and makes you both gasp, and the look on his face when he recovers is the most dangerous thing you've ever seen on a man who's killed people for a living.
"Bucky—Bucky, I'm—" The sentence dissolves. You're right there, seconds from it, every muscle locked—
"—then stop holding back." He doesn't slow down. If anything, he fucks you harder, driving his cock into you at an angle that makes your thighs shake. His thumb bears down on your clit, ruthless. "No more hiding it. Show me, sweetheart. C'mon."
You hold on for three more seconds. Two. One—
—and you stop fighting it. The orgasm opens through you like a wave—starting where his cock is buried and rolling outward through your belly, your chest, and the backs of your closed eyes.
And Bucky unravels, in kind.
His rhythm goes first—that controlled, deliberate pace dissolving into something graceless, hips driving forward without any of the precision he'd held onto all night. Then his voice—a sound he didn't mean to make—splintered your name in his mouth. Three more strokes, rough and uncoordinated, nothing left of the man who'd been calmly edging you on the couch—and he buries himself as deep as he can get before he finishes, filling the condom.
Pitching forward onto the mattress, Bucky barely catches his weight on his forearms before he sinks down onto you—heavy, heaving, the entire length of his body pressed to yours like he's a gigantic, living weighted blanket. His breathing hasn't slowed; it's hot and uneven against your throat. Every part of him is pressed to every part of you.
Your fingers are still dug into his back. You can't really make them let go.
The room smells like sweat and salt and the faint chemical bite of latex. Your sheets are destroyed. Neither of you moves. You're not sure either of you can.
"Okay," you wheeze, when you can form words again. "That was definitely an eleven."
His laugh vibrates against your collarbone. "Yeah?"
"Might even be a twelve."
He lifts his head. His hair is plastered to his forehead, and the look on his face is so stupidly satisfied that you want to kiss him and shove him off the bed in equal measure. "High praise."
"Well earned."
He kisses you—slow, thorough, the taste of you still thick on his tongue—and eases out. You wince at the loss, the sudden emptiness after being so full, and he makes a low, apologetic sound. "Don't move." The condom gets tied off and tossed in the trash, and then he disappears into the bathroom.
A warm washcloth. His knees on the bed beside you, nudging your legs apart. He cleans you up—the come leaking down your thighs, the mess smeared between your legs, the sticky residue of lube and wetness—with careful, unhurried strokes. Gentle where you're swollen, pressing the warm cloth against your pussy and holding it there until the sting fades.
"You don't have to—"
"—I want to." The cloth folds, wipes the inside of your thigh, and then presses his mouth to the red marks his fingers left on your hip. Then he tosses the washcloth toward the bathroom, misses, and doesn't even care to fix it. Back in bed, he pulls you against him—your back to his chest, his arm heavy across your waist.
"So," you say, after your breathing evens out. "This is happening."
"Yeah." His thumb digs into the knot at the base of your neck, kneading it loose. "But it's okay, that it is, right?"
"Of course it is." You tilt your head to look at him. "But, we're going to have to tell people eventually, you know. HR has forms."
"Forms," he repeats, sounding amused.
"Oh, yeah. So many forms. There's a whole disclosure process for intra-team relationships. Did you know that?"
"Uh, no. I didn't know that." He presses a kiss to your temple. "The paperwork will be worth it."
Bucky's fingers find yours across your stomach and lace together—metal and skin, cool and warm. You settle back against him, smiling.
"Is it weird," you murmur, "that I'm kinda glad I got kidnapped?"
"...yeah, sort of. But it's not like I'm complaining about the outcome, sweetheart."
"Bucky." You stare at the vial. "Why do you have truth serum in my kitchen?"
He leans against the counter. Crosses his arms. The leather of his jacket creaks. "Last time, you were the one who couldn't lie. Figured it's my turn."
"Your turn," you repeat dumbly.
Pairings: Avengers!AU!Bucky Barnes x Avengers!Employee!Reader
Warnings: Minors DNI; Explicit Sexual Content, Needles & Injections, Consensual Drug Use (Between MCs), (kinda) Porn With Plot
Additional Tags: No Y/N, American!Reader, Anxious!Reader, Established Relationship, Post-Civil War, Civil War Good Ending AU, Bucky's An Avenger, Reader Works For The Avengers In PR, Bucky's Got Super Soldier Metabolism (This Is Very Plot Relevant), Bucky Tells You One (1) Little Lie, (mild) Relationship Angst, Nobody's Said 'I Love You' Yet & This Worries Reader Big Time, Bucky Is A Grade A Simp However!, Some Power Dynamic Switching(?), mild!Sub!Bucky(?) x mild!Dom!Reader(?)
Author's Note: i've had this in my drafts for months so i'm like eh, time to let it out of the cage. LL is the angstier-but-still-rom-com little sister to TT. i recommend reading TT if you haven't read it yet before reading little lies, as this fic is a direct follow-up and it might not make sense if you don't! this'll get posted on ao3 eventually, i'm really not feeling writing summaries for my fics rn lmao
All Fics Tag List: @herejustforbuckybarnes
telling truths / my fic masterlist!
Little Lies (9.2k)
Three months in, and you decide that Bucky Barnes really is the perfect boyfriend, because he always keeps a glass of water on your nightstand.
He fills it before bed every night without being asked to, like its part of some internal checklist he runs through before he can settle. Doors locked, check. Arm maintenance, check. Your water filled, check. You noticed the first time you slept over in his quarters, where it had been waiting for you. And you notice it now, in your apartment, where he's spent four of the last seven nights and where his shampoo has quietly colonized your shower caddy.
It's Sunday morning, late enough that the light through the curtains has gone from pale grey to a warm gold. He's in boxers and nothing else, standing at your bathroom sink, and you can hear the tap run and shut off. He comes back with the glass and sets it down within easy reach.
"You're staring," he notes, dryly.
"Well, you're shirtless," you counter. "Cause and effect."
The corner of his mouth tugs up, at that. He climbs back into bed and the mattress dips under his weight, rolling you toward him. You don't resist, tucking yourself against his side like the space was made for you. His arm comes around your shoulders, metal fingers cool against your bare skin, and you press your nose to his collarbone and breathe him in.
"What time is it?" you mumble.
"Almost eleven."
"Disgusting. We're wasting the day."
"We're not wasting anything." His chin rests on the top of your head. "This counts as doing something."
You smile against his chest. This is what surprises you most, about being with Bucky. Not the sex, though that remains undeniably spectacular. Not even the quiet intensity he brings to everything, the way he focuses on you like you're a mission objective he's determined to complete with full marks.
It's the quiet.
The man who spent decades in motion, in violence, in the rigid machinery of someone else's agenda, is remarkably good at doing nothing. He can lie in your bed for hours, one hand in your hair, the other scrolling through his phone or resting on your hip, and seem genuinely content.
You, on the other hand, are terrible at it.
Not because you're restless. Because your brain won't stop cataloguing.
The glass of water. The way he always walks on the street side of the sidewalk. How he checks the lock twice when he leaves your apartment, not out of paranoia but because he wants you to hear it and know you're safe. The food he stocks in your fridge now, things you mentioned liking once in passing, appearing without comment. The way he says your name, lower and softer than the voice he uses for everyone else, like it belongs to a different vocabulary entirely.
You are building a case. Stacking evidence. Every small act goes into the file, and the file keeps pointing to the same conclusion, the same three words you haven't said because saying them first feels like stepping off a cliff.
"I can hear you thinking," Bucky says. His hand moves from your hair to the back of your neck, thumb pressing into the tension there. "What's going on in there?"
"Nothing. Sunday brain."
"Sunday brain," he repeats, skeptical.
"Symptoms include existential contemplation and an unwillingness to put on real pants."
He huffs a laugh. "Sounds serious."
"It's terminal."
His thumb keeps working your neck, finding knots you didn't know you had, and you melt incrementally into him. This would be a perfect moment to say it. The light is right, the mood is right, you're wrapped around each other in rumpled sheets and the apartment smells like the coffee he made an hour ago. The words are right there, sitting at the base of your throat like a swallowed stone.
I love you.
You think it so loudly you're half convinced he can hear it.
"Hey," he says, and you tilt your head up. He's looking down at you with an expression you've come to recognize but can't quite name. Something open. Something careful. Like he's standing at the edge of the same cliff and weighing the same math.
"Hey," you say back.
His mouth opens. Closes. His jaw works the way it does when he's choosing between words, sorting through options and discarding them.
"Breakfast?" he says finally. "I'll make eggs."
"Sure." You smile. It only takes a little effort. "Eggs sound great."
He kisses your forehead. Lingers there, lips warm against your skin, and you feel him exhale slow and deliberate. Then he's up, pulling on a shirt from the chair where he tossed it last night, and disappearing into your kitchen.
You lie there. Stare at the ceiling. Press your palm flat against the mattress where his warmth is already fading and think about the physics of what just happened. The way his mouth opened and something gathered behind his eyes and then dissipated, redirected, swapped out for breakfast.
He was going to say something.
But he didn't.
You've been here before. Not often, and not dramatically. Bucky will cross a room to fix your collar. He'll memorize your schedule so he knows when to text and when to leave you alone. He'll sit through your rants about interdepartmental email chains with the focus of a man receiving a tactical briefing. He'll hold you after sex with both arms and breathe against your hair like he's anchoring himself. He'll kill for you. You're pretty sure about that last one and it doesn't scare you the way it probably should.
But he hasn't said it.
From the kitchen, you hear the crack of eggs, the hiss of butter in a pan. Bucky hums something when he cooks. Always does. Low, tuneless melodies you're pretty sure he doesn't realize he's producing. It's one of your favorite things about him, this tiny unconscious proof that somewhere beneath the training and the trauma and the careful control, there's a person who hums while making scrambled eggs on a Sunday morning.
You get up. Pull on his discarded Henley because it's closer than your own shirt and because it smells like him and you're not above that kind of sentimentality. It falls to your mid-thigh, sleeves hanging past your hands, and you pad barefoot into the kitchen.
He's at the stove, spatula in hand, and glances over his shoulder when he hears you.
"That's my shirt," he says.
"That's correct."
His eyes travel down the length of you, slow and appreciative in a way that makes heat bloom across your skin even after three months. "It looks better on you."
"Obviously."
You hop onto the counter beside the stove, legs swinging, and watch him cook. He moves in the kitchen the way he moves everywhere; efficient, deliberate, no wasted motion. Two plates are already out. Toast in the toaster right on time. Your tea steeping in the mug with the chipped handle that you refuse to throw away.
He remembered which mug.
Of course he remembered which mug.
"You know," you hear yourself say, "if the whole Avengers thing doesn't work out, you could have a career in breakfast."
"High praise from someone whose idea of cooking is microwave popcorn."
"That's slander. I made pasta last week."
"You boiled noodles and put butter on them."
"Uh, yeah. That's pasta."
He plates the eggs and slides yours over, before he stands in front of you, close enough that your knees bracket his hips, and hands you a fork.
"Eat," he says. "Before it gets cold."
You take the plate. Your fingers brush his, and he doesn't pull away. Just stands there, looking at you in his shirt with your messy hair and bare legs, and something moves across his face again. That expression. The one that's almost a confession but isn't.
"What?" you ask softly.
"Nothing." He tucks a strand of hair behind your ear. "You just... look real good in our kitchen."
Our kitchen. This is your apartment. But neither of you corrects it, and the slip hangs in the air between you, warm and revealing.
"Our kitchen," you echo.
His hand drops. "Your kitchen. I meant your kitchen."
"Oh. Right."
He turns back to the stove, and you watch the back of his neck flush pink above his collar. Bucky Barnes, legendary sniper, former ghost operative, brought low by a simple possessive pronoun.
You eat your eggs. They're perfect, because everything he does for you is done with the kind of attention that borders on devotion, and you love him.
You love him so much your chest aches with it.
And one of these days, one of you is going to say it out loud.
That day just... isn't today.
And then it starts with the shirts.
You stop wearing his. Not consciously, not at first. You just start reaching for your own clothes in the morning instead of grabbing whatever he left draped over the chair. One day you do it and he doesn't comment. The next day you do it again. By the third day it's a pattern, and patterns are harder to break than impulses, so you let it calcify into routine.
It's a small thing. Meaningless, probably. You have plenty of shirts.
Bucky notices the change on day two.
You know he notices because his gaze tracks you when you come out of the bedroom in your own oversized tee instead of his Henley, and something flickers behind his eyes. Quick. Quiet. Gone before you can name it. He doesn't say anything. He hands you your tea—chipped mug as always—and you sit on opposite ends of the couch and read the Sunday paper like two people who are fine.
You are fine. You keep telling yourself this with the dogged persistence of someone reciting a mantra. The relationship is good. Bucky is good. You are a functional adult woman with a stable career and a gorgeous, attentive boyfriend who makes you eggs and fills your water glass and makes your tea just right. There is nothing wrong.
Except.
Except there's a distance growing in you, and you can't figure out whether it's a problem or just the natural settling of a relationship finding its level. Three and a half months now. The initial fever of it all has cooled into something steadier, something with a rhythm you can predict, and within that predictability you've started to hear the silence where certain words should be.
So you compensate. You're good at this. PR is, after all, the art of managing perception.
At dinner, you laugh at his jokes but don't lean into him the way you used to, your shoulder finding his like a compass finding north. You let a centimeter of air live between your bodies. On the couch, you tuck your feet under yourself instead of draping your legs across his lap. In bed, you roll to your side after sex instead of sprawling across his chest, and when he reaches for you, you go, but you stop reaching first.
Tiny retreats. Imperceptible, you think. You are building a cushion between yourself and the fall you're increasingly sure is coming, and you're doing it so gradually that no one could possibly notice.
But Bucky Barnes was trained to detect a target's change in breathing from eight hundred meters.
He notices.
"You good?" he asks you on a Wednesday night. You're at his place, on his couch, your laptop open on a press release you've been staring at for twenty minutes without typing a word. He's on the other end with a book, but you haven't heard him turn a page in a while.
"Yeah, fine." You don't look up from the screen. "Just work stuff."
"You haven't typed anything."
"I'm thinking."
"For twenty minutes?"
"It's a complicated release." You make a show of clicking keys, adding a sentence you'll delete later. "Lots of stakeholders."
The silence that follows has texture. Weight. You can feel him looking at you, that particular quality of attention he gives to things he's trying to figure out, and your skin prickles under the scrutiny.
"Okay," he says eventually.
He goes back to his book. You go back to your blank screen. Neither of you acknowledges the lie sitting between you on the couch cushions, taking up exactly as much space as the distance you've put there.
I'm fine is such a small lie. Two words. Practically nothing. But it's the first one you've told him, and some part of you registers the transgression with a flinch you keep off your face.
The problem, you've decided, is that you are being unreasonable.
You build this argument in your head during your commute, during meetings, during the twenty minutes of silence you carve out in the women's restroom on the fourth floor when the office gets too loud. The case against yourself is thorough, well-reasoned, and damning.
Exhibit A. Bucky Barnes spent seventy years as a prisoner of his own mind, stripped of autonomy, language, identity. The fact that he can form a relationship at all is extraordinary. The fact that he's good at it—attentive, generous and present—actually borders on the miraculous. Expecting him to also produce the exact verbal affirmation you need, on your timeline, in your preferred format, is objectively selfish.
Exhibit B. Words were weapons in his previous life. They were commands, triggers, a red book of horrors that rewired his brain. Of course he's careful with them. Of course he shows instead of tells. His love language—and you wince at the term even in the privacy of your own head—is acts of service because acts were the first thing he reclaimed. His hands learned gentleness before his mouth learned softness. You should honour that. You should be grateful for it.
Exhibit C. You are not owed those three words. Hell, nobody is owed those three words. Needing to hear them is a you problem, a product of your own insecurity, your own inability to trust the mountain of evidence right in front of your face. He fills your water glass. He hums when he cooks your eggs. He pulls you closer in his sleep, unconsciously, like his body is solving for the distance between you even when his conscious mind is offline. What more do you need?
The prosecution rests. The verdict? Is guilty. You are, in fact, guilty of wanting too much, and the sentence is to stop wanting it, or at least, to stop letting the wanting show.
This train of thought works for about five days.
Then Sam Wilson opens his mouth.
It's a Thursday. You're in the compound break room, refilling your coffee, existing in the pleasant background hum of people going about their business. Sam is leaning against the counter, telling a story about something that happened during a training exercise. Natasha is perched on the counter beside him, eating an apple with a knife because she's Natasha. You're half listening, half mentally drafting a statement about the upcoming charity gala.
"...and Barnes just stood there," Sam is saying, gesturing broadly. "Didn't say a word. Stone cold. You know how he gets."
Natasha makes a sound of agreement.
"I swear the man could win a staring contest with a statue. I've never met anyone so allergic to expressing a feeling out loud."
He says it lightly. It's a joke. It's the kind of joke Sam makes about Bucky constantly because their entire friendship is built on a foundation of mutual antagonism and genuine affection, and under normal circumstances you'd laugh and file it away as another entry in the Wilson-Barnes comedy archive.
Under normal circumstances.
Your coffee mug is very interesting all of a sudden. Ceramic. White. A hairline crack running from the rim to the handle that you've never noticed before. You trace it with your thumbnail.
"He's getting better," Natasha says mildly. She's watching you. You can tell without looking because you've developed a sixth sense for when Natasha Romanoff's attention lands on you, and it feels like a laser sight settling between your shoulder blades. "In his own way."
"Oh, sure," Sam agrees. "The man's a romantic. He just shows it like a Cold War spy. Dead drops of affection. Encrypted compliments. You gotta be a codebreaker to know what he's feeling."
He means it fondly. You know he means it fondly.
Your throat is tight anyway.
"Excuse me." You set your mug down. "I have a draft to finish."
"Hey. You alright?" Sam asks, and the genuine concern in his voice makes it all worse, somehow, because you know they care.
"Yeah, totally fine." You smile. It's a good smile. Professional-grade. You've been building smiles like this for a living. "Just on a deadline, you know?"
You leave before either of them can respond.
Your office is small, windowless, crammed with filing cabinets and framed press clippings, and right now it is the most welcoming room in the compound because it has a door that closes.
You close it. Sit in your chair. Put your hands flat on the desk and try to breathe.
Allergic to expressing a feeling out loud.
It's not fair to let Sam's joke land like this. Sam doesn't know about the gap you're feeling. Sam doesn't know about the way Bucky's mouth opens and closes around words he won't release, or the way your chest tightens every time it happens. Sam is just being Sam, ribbing his friend the way friends do, and you are the one turning it into something painful.
But the thing about pain is that it don't care about whether it's fair or not, to hurt.
It just hurts.
You pull up the press release on your computer. Stare at it. The cursor blinks with the patient indifference of inanimate objects.
What if he can't ever say it?
The thought arrives fully formed, as if it's been assembled somewhere in the back of your mind and has simply been waiting for the right moment to step forward. You've been keeping it at arm's length for weeks, but Sam's joke tore the wrapping off and now it's just sitting there, ugly and bare.
What if it's not about timing or readiness? What if the wiring in his head is damaged in a way that can't be fixed? What if HYDRA took the part of him that could say those words and burned it out, the way they burned out everything else? What if he feels it but can never say it, and you'll spend the rest of this relationship reading between the lines of his actions and hoping, always hoping, but never truly knowing?
And then comes the guilt. Because you're sitting in your temperature-controlled office, at your comfortable job, projecting your emotional needs onto a man who survived seventy years of torture, and framing his survival as a deficiency. As though the issue is that he's broken. As though he owes you his reconstruction on a schedule that's convenient for your anxiety.
You press your palms against your eyes.
I'm selfish. I'm selfish for wanting it and I'm selfish for pulling away because I don't have it, and he's going to notice, and he's going to think it's about him—
—it is about him—
—but not the way he'll think, not because he's doing something wrong, but because he's doing everything right and it's still not enough, and what kind of person needs more than everything—
—Your phone buzzes, and you drop your hands.
📱 Bucky: Heading out for a run. Dinner tonight?
You pick up the phone. Your thumbs hover.
📱 You: Sounds good. Your place or mine?
📱 Bucky: Yours. I'll cook.
📱 You: You don't have to do that.
📱 Bucky: I know. I want to.
You set the phone down. Press your fingers to your mouth. He wants to. He always wants to. He wants to so loudly and so consistently that the absence of the words shouldn't matter, and you hate yourself a little for the fact that it does.
📱 You: Okay. See you tonight ❤️
The heart emoji is a coward's substitute. You know it. He probably knows it. You send it anyway, because a red cartoon heart is easier to deploy than the real one beating traitorously behind your ribs.
That evening, he makes chicken. Some recipe he found online, slightly over-seasoned and over-salted because he's still calibrating his palate after decades of nutritional paste and whatever HYDRA fed its assets. You eat every bite and tell him it's great, and it is great because he made it for you, and when he smiles at the compliment you feel something fracture quietly in your chest.
He shows up unexpected on a Friday night.
No text first. No warning. Just three knocks, and when you open the door he's standing in the hall with a metal case tucked under his left arm.
It's small. Matte black. The kind of container designed to look nondescript yet announcing, by virtue of that very effort, that its contents are anything but.
"Hi," you say.
"Hey." He's watching your face with that particular intensity of his that you've only ever seen briefings, or in the field footage they sometimes screen for the PR team. It's his mission face, which is an odd thing to wear to your apartment on a Friday evening.
"What's in the case?" you finally ask.
He doesn't answer right away, which makes your anxiety spike. He steps inside, past you, and moves to set the case on your kitchen counter. With his thumbs he clicks the latches open, and lifts the lid. Inside, nestled in molded foam, sits a glass vial of clear liquid and a sealed syringe.
Your body recognizes it before your brain does. Something in your nervous system fires, a sense-memory that bypasses cognition entirely; the prick of a needle, the slow warmth spreading through your veins, the absolute inability to keep your mouth shut...
Your pulse spikes.
"Bucky, is that—"
"—yeah. Sodium thiopental." He says it the way he'd say olive oil or laundry detergent "Pharmaceutical grade. Lifted it from the med bay."
"You stole truth serum from the Avengers compound?"
"Borrowed. I borrowed it."
"Bucky." You stare at the vial. "Why do you have truth serum in my kitchen?"
He leans against the counter. Crosses his arms. The leather of his jacket creaks. "Last time, you were the one who couldn't lie. Figured it's my turn."
"Your turn," you repeat dumbly.
"Yeah. My turn, because you've been pulling away." No preamble, no easing in. Straight to it. "You say you're fine and you're not fine, and I can push or I can wait, and pushing isn't something I'm willing to do if it ends up just pushing you away. So." He nods at the case. "This is option three."
"Option three is injecting yourself with a drug that makes you incapable of lying?"
"No, option three is making sure you actually believe the answers." His voice is steady, but there's something underneath it, something running hot beneath the calm surface. "So, ask me anything. I won't be able to dodge it, spin it, or soften it. You'll know it's true because I won't have a choice."
You open your mouth. Close it. Open it again.
"Bucky, that's insane."
"Probably."
"No, that's actually insane. You can't just—Bucky, that stuff—I know what it does. I lived what it does. You lose control of—"
"—I know what I lose, and I'm choosing to lose it. For you."
Your heart is doing something unsustainable now.
"You don't have to do this," you say, and your voice comes out smaller than you want it to.
"I know I don't." He uncrosses his arms. Reaches for the vial. "But you need to ask, and I need you to believe the answers, and right now we're stuck because you don't trust the words without proof." He rolls the vial between his fingers, glass catching the kitchen light. "So here's the proof."
You watch him prep the syringe with the efficiency of someone who's been on the receiving end of needles more times than any person should be. Draw, tap, flick. No hesitation. His left hand holds the syringe steady—metal fingers don't shake—and he pushes his sleeve up his right arm with his teeth.
"Wait," you say. He pauses. Looks at you. "Just... are you sure?"
"Ask me that again in about two minutes and you'll know I mean it."
The needle goes in. He depresses the plunger with his thumb. Slow, measured, watching the liquid disappear with clinical detachment.
You can't breathe.
He pulls the needle out, sets the syringe on the counter, and drops into one of your kitchen chairs with the unhurried ease of a man settling in for a conversation. Rolls his sleeve back down. Flexes his fingers once, twice, like he's testing for a change.
"How long does it take?" you ask.
"Faster metabolism, so it should already be—" He blinks, then tilts his head. "—yeah. That's... yeah."
"Yeah... what?"
He rolls his jaw, testing. "Ask me something you already know the answer to. As a baseline."
You sink into the chair across from him. Your knees are unsteady. "Okay. Okay, um." Your brain casts around for something simple, something verifiable, and lands on the obvious. "Do you like blueberries?"
The change is immediate. His mouth moves before the rest of his face catches up, like the words have a head start. "No. Hate them. They tasted different before, in the forties. Sweeter, or maybe my tongue worked different back then, I don't know. Now they taste like watered-down nothing."
You press your hand over your mouth to stifle a hysterical little laugh. Because the delivery is so him—blunt, slightly indignant, more detailed than the question warrants—and because it's almost word for word what you told a room full of mercenaries three months ago.
"It's working," you say.
"It's working," he confirms. There's a flicker of something in his eyes. Amusement, maybe. Or anticipation.
"Okay. Okay." You tuck your legs up onto the chair, settling in, and some of the fear starts to give way to something else. Curiosity. The same reckless, giddy curiosity you imagine a scientist feels right before they throw the switch to a mad science experiment.
"What do you really think of Sam?" you ask, riding the momentum.
"He's one of the best people I've ever met. Genuinely good in a way that I don't think I've been, maybe ever. He's annoying and loud and he never lets anything go and he gave Steve his trust without hesitation even when he had no reason to, and then he gave me the same thing even though he had every reason not to." His expression looks almost pained. "If you ever tell him I said any of that, I will deny it under oath."
"Noted." You're grinning. He's scowling, but it's the fake scowl, the one that means he's not actually mad. "This is fun."
"For you. Fun for you, you psychopath."
"Very much for me, yes." You shift in your chair. The giddiness is still there, buzzing under your skin, but underneath it something else is rising. A tide. The real questions, pressing against the back of your throat.
Bucky sees the shift. You watch him see it. His body changes, some subtle rearrangement of posture that means he's bracing.
"Go ahead," he says. Quiet now. The humour's drained out and what's left is steady and open and terrifying.
You take a breath.
"When you go quiet," you say carefully. "When you're looking at me and you start to say something and then don't. Is that because of me? Because of something I did?"
His answer comes immediately, as though the words were already assembled and just needed permission to deploy. "Yes and no. It's because of you in the sense that you're the reason the words exist. It's not because of you in the sense that you're doing something wrong. I go quiet because I have something specific I want to say and I'm afraid of what it'll do once it's out. Not to you. To me. Because once I say it, you'll have it, and I have a long history of having things taken." He swallows. "That's not rational. I know it's not rational. You're not HYDRA, you're not a threat, you're the safest person I know. But the flinch is still there. It fires before I can override it."
Your eyes are burning. You blink hard.
"Are you happy?" you ask.
"Yes." The fastest answer yet. "I mean, not in every moment. I still have nightmares. I still lose time sometimes, get stuck in my head. But the overall shape of my life is something I would choose. You're something I would choose. I choose you every day. It's the easiest decision I make."
You press your fingers to your lips. Breathe through the ache.
"Do you think about leaving?"
"No." Just as fast. "I think about whether you'll leave. Whether you'll wake up one morning and do the math and realize you could be with someone uncomplicated. Someone who doesn't check the exits when he enters a room or sleep with a knife in the nightstand or flinch at fireworks in July. I think about that more than I should."
"Bucky—"
"—you asked." His voice is raw. "I'm answering. Can't lie, remember?"
You nod and swallow. There's one more question in the chamber and you both know it. You can feel it in the air between you, the way the room seems to contract around the weight of what hasn't been said.
"When you don't say it," you whisper. "Is it because you don't feel it?"
"I feel it constantly." His voice cracks on the second word and keeps going. "I feel it when you steal my shirts. I felt it when you stopped. I feel it when you hum while you're working and when you fall asleep during movies and when you eat my cooking even when I put too much salt in because you think I don't notice your face but I always notice your face. I feel it when I fill your water glass, which I know is a stupid thing, a small thing, but it's the first thing I thought of when I started staying here and I just kept doing it because it meant I could take care of you in this one tiny way while you were sleeping. I feel it in the morning when you haven't opened your eyes yet and you look so..." He stops. Breathes. "I feel it all the time. I feel it right now. The words aren't the problem. The words are easy. I've just been so afraid that saying them out loud makes them real, and real things can be taken away."
The kitchen is very quiet.
"Okay," you manage. Your voice is wrecked.
"Okay," he echoes.
You sit with it. Let the weight of it settle into the room, into your bones. He's watching you, and for the first time in weeks the gap between you doesn't feel like a gulf. It feels like a doorway.
You wipe your eyes with the heel of your hand. Breathe in. Breathe out.
"What are you thinking about right now?" you ask, and the register of the question has changed. Dropped lower. You're not sure when it shifted. Somewhere between I feel it constantly and the way his eyes went dark when he said I always notice your face.
Bucky's throat works. "You. Specifically, the fact that you're sitting in that chair in my shirt."
You look down. You are wearing the Henley. The one you stopped wearing. You grabbed it tonight without thinking about it, pulled it on after your shower because it was there and it was soft and it smelled like him.
"I thought you stopped," he says. His voice has gone lower too. Rougher. "When you stopped wearing them I thought it meant you were pulling away for good and it scared me more than most things I've faced, which is a long list."
"I'm wearing it now," you say.
"I know." His gaze drops from your face to the collar of the Henley, the way it's slipping off one shoulder, the bare skin beneath. "I noticed when you opened the door. Thought about pushing you against the wall right then."
The heat that moves through you is immediate and liquid. "Why didn't you?"
"Because we needed to talk first." His jaw is tight. "And because the drug means I'm going to say exactly what I'm thinking, and what I'm thinking right now is not about talking."
Your mouth is dry. "What are you thinking right now?"
"That I want to put my mouth on your shoulder where that collar is slipping." The words come out like they're being pulled. Low, strained, deliberate despite the supposed compulsion. "That I want to find out if you taste different when you've been wanting something. That you're sitting four feet away from me and it's too far."
You uncurl your legs from the chair. Place your bare feet on the floor. The distance between your chair and his is exactly the length of the kitchen table.
"Tell me," you say slowly, "what you think about when I'm not here."
His pupils dilate. You watch it happen.
"Specific or general?"
"No, specific."
He leans forward. Forearms on his knees. The posture should be casual but there's nothing casual about the way he's looking at you. "Tuesday. You left for work in that gray skirt, the one with the slit up the back. You kissed me goodbye and you tasted like the vanilla latte you'd been drinking and I stood at the window and watched you walk to your car and thought about pulling that skirt up."
Your breath catches.
"I thought about bending you over the kitchen counter. Right here. Pushing that skirt up around your waist and finding out what sounds you make when I take my time. I thought about it for twenty minutes after you left. I was late to training."
"Bucky." His name comes out thin.
"You asked." That phrase again. But this time there's a darkness in it, something that runs hot. "You want me to stop?"
"No." The word is out before you can think about it. "What else?"
He exhales through his nose. Controlled. Barely. "I think about your hands. The way you grip the sheets when you're close. The way you grab the back of my neck when you want me to kiss you harder. I think about the sound you make right before you come, that sound like you're surprised every time, like you can't believe it's happening, and I think about how I want to hear it over and over until you can't make any sound at all."
You're gripping the seat of your chair now. Your knuckles ache.
"I think about last Saturday," he says. "When you rode me on the couch. The way you looked. Your head tipped back and your mouth open and my shirt riding up your thighs because you'd stolen it again. The way you said my name."
The kitchen table is between you. Four feet of oak. It might as well be an ocean.
"What do you want to do to me?" you ask, hoarsely. "Right now?"
Bucky stands up.
The chair doesn't scrape. It just ceases to be beneath him as he rises with the fluid, deliberate motion of someone who moves through space like it owes him something. Two steps and he's in front of you, looking down, and the overhead light puts his face in sharp relief: the line of his jaw, the intensity of his eyes, the way his chest is moving faster than his expression would suggest.
He leans down. Hands on the arms of your chair, caging you in. His face is inches from yours.
"I want to take this shirt off you," he says, voice barely above a whisper. "Slowly, because you wearing my clothes does something to me I can't explain and I've been thinking about it since you opened the door. I want to pick you up and put you on that counter and find out how sensitive you are right now, because your pupils are blown and your breathing's changed and I can see your pulse in your throat and it's fast."
His mouth brushes your ear. "I want to make you come with my hands first because I want to feel it. Then with my mouth because I want to taste it. And then I want to fuck you so slowly that you forget every question you were going to ask, because the only word I want you to remember tonight is my name."
Your hand comes up and fists in the front of his jacket.
"Then do it."
He lifts you out of the chair like you weigh nothing.
Your legs wrap around his waist on instinct, arms looping his neck, and he carries you three steps to the counter before you pull back and say "No."
He stops. Instantly. Every muscle locked. "No?"
"Chair," you say. "Sit down."
Something shifts in his expression. Understanding, maybe. Surrender, definitely. He reverses course, sinks into his chair with you still wrapped around him, and now you're in his lap, knees bracketing his hips, looking down at him for the first time all night.
He's beautiful like this. Jaw tight, pupils blown, hands hovering at your waist like he's waiting for permission. The overhead light catches the planes of his face, and you think about all the times you've looked at him across conference tables and break rooms and crowded briefing halls, wanting exactly this. Proximity. Access. The ability to take his face in your hands, which is what you do now, tilting his chin up with your fingers.
"Rules," you say.
His throat bobs. "Rules."
"You can touch me." You drag your thumb across his lower lip and watch his eyes darken. "But you don't lead. You don't guide. You don't take over." You lean closer, mouth grazing his. "And you answer every question I ask."
"I couldn't lie right now if I wanted to." His voice is strained.
"I know." You kiss the corner of his mouth. "That's the point."
His hands settle on your waist. Light. Obedient. The restraint in his fingers, the controlled stillness of a man who could bench-press a truck choosing to hold you like glass, sends heat curling through your belly.
You kiss him properly. Slow, deliberate, your tongue sliding against his, and he groans into your mouth. One hand flexes on your hip, tightens, then consciously loosens. Following the rules you'd laid out.
You pull back. "What are you feeling right now?"
"Your weight in my lap." His reply is immediate and completely unfiltered. "Warm. The inside of your thighs against my hips. Your fingers on my jaw. My heartbeat in my throat." He swallows. "Want. A stupid amount of want."
You roll your hips. Just once, slow, testing, and his breath punches out of him.
"More specific," you murmur.
"I'm hard and you're right there and every time you move I can feel the heat of you through my jeans and it's making it very difficult to follow your rules." His hands are trembling on your waist. Fine, barely perceptible tremors. "I want to pull you down against me. I'm not going to, because you told me not to. But I want you to know the not doing it is costing me something."
"Good." You reach between you and pull his jacket off his shoulders. He helps, shrugging out of it, and then your hands are on the hem of his shirt and you're peeling it over his head.
You've seen him shirtless dozens of times. It doesn't matter. The topography of him still makes your mouth dry. Scarred skin and dense muscle and the gleaming juncture where vibranium meets flesh, and you flatten your palms against his chest and feel his heart slamming under your touch.
"My turn," you say, and pull the Henley over your head.
Nothing underneath. You hadn't bothered with a bra after your shower, which means you're bare from the waist up, and the sound Bucky makes is low and wrecked and involuntary.
"Tell me what you see," you say.
"You." The word comes out rough. "Your skin in this light. The mark I left on your ribs last week that's almost faded, and I want to put it back."
Your breath catches. His eyes drop to the spot in question, a faint yellow-green shadow above your hip, and his thumb finds it. Presses gently.
"Here," he says. "Right here. You made this sound when I did it. This gasp, like you weren't expecting it to feel good. I've been thinking about that sound for eight days straight."
You take his hand, lift it to your breast, press it flat. His fingers curve around you, metal cool against your skin, and a shiver runs through you. His thumb drags across your nipple and your hips roll forward involuntarily, grinding down against the hard line of him through denim.
"How long have you wanted this?" you ask, breathless. "Tonight. This specific thing."
"Since I loaded the syringe." His thumb circles, slow and maddening. "Before that. Since I decided to do this. I spent three days thinking about how it would go. Whether you'd ask the questions I needed you to ask. Whether you'd end up here." His free hand slides up your spine, fingers splaying between your shoulder blades, and even now he's not pulling you closer. Just touching. Mapping. "I hoped you'd end up here."
You reach down between your bodies and work his belt open. The metal clinks in the quiet kitchen. His stomach muscles jump when your knuckles brush them.
"Lift up," you tell him, and he does, hips rising just enough for you to drag his jeans and boxers down. He kicks them off, and then he's bare beneath you, hard and straining.
You stand just long enough to shed your own bottoms. His eyes track every movement, heavy-lidded, intent, and when you climb back into his lap the first press of skin against skin makes you both hiss.
You're wet. You've been wet since he started talking in that wrecked, helpless voice, and when you settle against him the slick heat of your cunt meets the hard length of him and his head drops back.
"Christ." His hands grip the sides of the chair. White-knuckled, both flesh and metal. "You feel—I can't—you're so warm and I can feel how wet you are and I need—"
"Need what?"
"You." His head comes back up. His eyes find yours. "Just you. Always you."
You rise onto your knees. Reach between your bodies and wrap your hand around his cock. He's hot and hard and his whole body shudders when you line him up against your entrance.
"Ask me," you whisper.
He understands. "Please."
You sink down.
Slowly. Inch by inch, letting gravity and your own slick heat do the work, and the stretch of him fills you so completely that the breath leaves your lungs in a rush. His jaw clenches. His hands abandon the chair and find your hips, fingers pressing in, but he doesn't pull. Doesn't guide. Just holds on.
"Tell me," you breathe when he's fully inside you. "Tell me what I feel like."
"Tight." The word grinds out of him. "Hot. Like you were made for—" He cuts off. Tries to stop. Can't. "—it's like coming home. Every time. That's what it feels like. Like I spent seventy years in the cold and you're the first warm thing I've ever felt."
Your eyes sting. You start to move.
Slow. Rolling your hips in a deliberate rhythm, taking him deep on each downstroke, savoring the way his face contorts. He's fighting himself. You can see it. Every instinct in his body wants to thrust up, to grab your hips and set his own pace, and he's holding back with the same iron discipline he brings to everything, all because you asked.
"What do you think about when you're inside me?" you ask, and your voice is barely steady.
"How you move." His breath is ragged. "Like right now, the way your stomach flexes when you roll forward. The sound you make at the bottom, that little catch. The way you get tighter when I say things like this, like the words themselves are doing something to you."
He's right. You clench around him involuntarily and he groans, fingers digging into your hips hard enough to bruise.
"I think about making you come," he continues, and his filter truly has dissolved entirely. "I think about it constantly. At dinner, in the field, in the shower at 6 AM. What angle, what speed, what words. I catalog everything that works. I have a mental file on what makes you fall apart and I add to it every time we're together."
You're trembling. Your thighs burn with the effort of maintaining this rhythm, slow and grinding, and the pressure is building, coiling tight.
"Bucky..."
"The way you say my name." His voice breaks on it. "Right there. That tone. Nobody's ever said my name the way you do. Like it belongs to someone worth wanting."
You lean forward and kiss him, messy and desperate, hips never stilling. His hands slide up your back and pull you closer, chest to chest, and the change in angle drives him deeper and you gasp into his mouth.
"What do you want right now?" you ask against his lips.
"To tell you something I should've said weeks ago." His forehead presses against yours. "I've been trying. Every morning in your kitchen and every night in your bed I've been trying to get it out and I keep choking on it because I'm terrified."
Your rhythm falters. "Terrified of what?"
"That saying it makes it real, and real things—"
"—can be taken away." You finish it for him. Your hands cradle his face. "I know. I know."
"But it's already real." His voice is raw, scraped down to bedrock. "It's been real for months."
"So tell me." You're barely moving now, bodies intertwined, your foreheads pressed together and your breath shared. "Tell me, Bucky."
He looks at you. And you watch every wall, every defense, every carefully maintained barrier come down at once. Like a building demolition. Like controlled collapse. Everything falling inward to leave clear ground.
"I love—"
"—I love you." It tears out of you first. Unplanned, uncontrolled, ripped from the exact place where you've been keeping it locked for weeks. Your eyes are blurring and your voice is cracked and you say it again because once isn't enough, because the dam is broken now. "I love you. I love you, I've been so scared to say it, I've been pulling away because I was afraid you couldn't—"
—he surges up and kisses you. Hard, bruising, both hands in your hair, and the careful restraint he's been maintaining all night shatters. His hips snap up into you and you cry out against his mouth.
"I love you," he says between kisses, between thrusts, his voice wrecked and fierce. "I love you, I've loved you since you stood up in that press room and told a man twice your size that his question was inappropriate and your hands were shaking but your voice wasn't. I loved you when you brought muffins to a briefing. I loved you when you walked into a wall because I held a door. I loved you when you told a room full of mercenaries about my blueberries because even drugged out of your mind the only secret you had was me."
He's fucking up into you now with purpose, one arm banded around your waist, the other gripping the back of the chair for leverage. The rhythm is punishing and deep and every thrust drives the breath from you.
"I love you when you steal my shirts." His mouth moves down your throat. "I love you when you hum. I love you when you sleep. I love you when you lie and say you're fine because even your lies are about protecting me and I don't deserve—"
"—no, you deserve," you gasp, grinding down to meet each thrust. "You deserve everything, you deserve the words, you deserve—"
"You." His arm tightens. "Just you. That's everything."
The orgasm builds like a wave, like pressure against a wall, like something too big to contain. You're holding his face in your hands and he's looking at you, right at you, no walls left, nothing hidden. Just his eyes, wide and wet and full of something so vast it terrifies you.
"I love you," you say again, and his jaw flexes, and his hips stutter, and you feel him swell inside you.
"Come with me." It's not a question and it's not a command and it's not a compulsion. It's a request, from the most honest voice he has.
You shatter.
It rolls through you, deep, total, pulling every muscle taut, and you bury your face in his neck and shake apart. You feel him follow. His arms crush you against him and he groans your name, the one that belongs to a different vocabulary, and spills into you with a shudder that runs through his whole body.
For a long time, there is only breathing.
Your face is wet. His shoulder is wet where your face has been pressed. You're not sure when you started crying and you're not sure you've stopped. His hand is in your hair, moving in slow strokes, and his chest rises and falls beneath you in a rhythm that gradually steadies.
"Hey," he whispers.
You lift your head. He looks wrecked. Beautiful. Open in a way you've never seen, the last of his architecture dismantled, and what's underneath is just a man who loves you. That's all. That's everything.
"Hi," you say.
He traces the tear tracks on your cheeks with his thumb. Flesh hand. Warm, calloused, impossibly gentle. "You okay?"
You laugh. It comes out watery and broken. "Yeah. Really okay. The most okay."
"Good." He kisses your forehead. Your temple. The bridge of your nose. "For the record, I didn't need the drug."
Your brow furrows. "What?"
"To say it. I didn't need the drug. I just needed you to believe it when I did." He tucks your hair behind your ear. "The drug was for you, not for me."
You think about this. About the vial and the syringe and the way he sat down in your kitchen chair and said ask me anything. About the elaborate architecture of permission he built so you'd trust the answer to the one question you were terrified to ask.
"You're a very strategic person," you tell him.
"Tactical vulnerability," he agrees.
You laugh again, less broken this time. He pulls you closer, shifts so your weight settles more comfortably in his lap, and you wince slightly at the movement.
"Sore?" he murmurs.
"Worth it."
He stands, still holding you, carrying you the way he did at the start of the night, and takes you to the bedroom. Lays you down. Disappears into the bathroom and comes back with a warm cloth, cleaning you up with careful hands.
You watch him from the pillows. "You're doing the thing."
"What thing?"
"The taking-care-of-me thing."
"I always do the taking-care-of-you thing."
"I know." You catch his hand when he's done, press your lips to his knuckles. "I love you."
The smile that breaks across his face is the most unguarded thing you've ever seen him produce. "Say it again."
"I love you."
"Again."
"I love you, you impossible, dramatic, tactically vulnerable lunatic."
He drops next to you in bed and pulls you against his chest, both arms locked around you like he's defending the perimeter, and you feel his lips move against your hair when he says it back. Quietly, like a secret that's no longer a secret.
"I love you."
Then, after a pause, he says, "I'm going to fill your water glass."
"You don't have to."
"Yeah, I know. I want to."
Bucky really did feel it hit him.
A warm bloom at the injection site, spreading up through the vein, reaching for his brain with chemical fingers. Sodium thiopental. The same compound that turned you into a forty-five-minute monologue about blueberries and forearms in a warehouse three months ago.
For you, it had lasted hours. For him? It lasted about... six seconds.
Then the serum in his blood burned it out of his system with the brutal efficiency of a system designed to neutralize poisons, toxins, and everything in between. By the time he sat down in your kitchen chair and said ask me something you already know the answer to, he would've passed a drug test with flying colours. His mind was sharp. Every synapse firing exactly the way it always did, free of compulsion.
He knew that would happen. He'd confirmed it with Bruce two days ago, framed as a hypothetical. If someone with the serum were exposed to sodium thiopental, how fast would the metabolism clear it? Bruce had looked at him over the rim of his glasses and said almost immediately and then asked why he wanted to know, and Bucky had said curiosity and left before the follow-up questions started.
He could have stopped every single answer that you coaxed out of him.
He chose not to.
Bucky shifts onto his side, careful not to disturb the arm you've slung across his chest. You're deep under, breathing slow, face slack with the particular peace of someone who got the answer they needed. Your fingers are curled loosely against his sternum, right above his heart, and he covers them with his own.
The truth is simple. He'd rehearsed every answer. He knew which questions you'd start with and which ones you'd build toward, because he knows you, because knowing you is the thing he's best at, better than fieldwork, better than the rifle, better than any skill HYDRA ever burned into his bones.
He knew you needed to believe that he couldn't lie. Because you'd spent weeks building a case against yourself, constructing an argument that wanting the words made you selfish, and no amount of voluntary honesty was going to dismantle something that fortified. You had to think the answers were compelled so you could trust them completely. So the part of your brain that interrogates everything, that qualifies and second-guesses and builds escape routes, would finally stand down.
You needed him to tell that one little lie, and it was the only one he told tonight.
Pressing closer, you murmur something in your sleep, your nose finding the hollow of his throat. He tightens his arm around you in response, and presses his mouth to the top of your head.
── .✦ do not copy, translate, or plagiarize any of my works. dividers by me.
✦ . Summary: Letters, codes, word of mouth—carrying information is your specialty. The Slenderwoods are vast and diverse, so an impartial messenger is necessary to keep the peace. Your job is easy, your tasks are simple, and being nosy has its perks. But when one resident has an affinity for buying you drinks and keeping you company, you find it very hard to stay impartial after all.
✦ . Characters: Brian Thomas/Hoodie x Female Reader
✦ . Warning: Alcohol, flirting, illicit affairs, car sex, semi-public sex, vaginal sex, vaginal fingering, oral sex, rough sex, scratching, cunnilingus, first time sex, creampie, multiple orgasms, multiple positions, a man who yearns is a man who earns
✦ . Words: 10.7k
✦ . Note: Something light! Don’t let the word count scare you, it’s 80% smut lol. I wanted to work more on my dialogue during sex scenes, and I think I did well with this one, let me know! I very much liked this one, happy reading!
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The first time you met Hoodie, it was out of necessity.
You weren’t a proxy, not exactly—your role was different, older, more neutral. A courier of sorts. The Slenderwoods were vast, and the different mansions and entities tucked within it didn’t always speak directly to each other. But they needed to. Resources were shifted, territories marked, whispers carried from one household to another.
That’s where you came in—a messenger who could slip between borders without ruffling too many feathers. You were tolerated by most, trusted by some, invisible to others. But all in all, you were a constantly moving piece on a constantly changing chess board.
It was rare to be stationed in one place for long, and rarer still to run into the same people twice. But Hoodie had been the exception.
The arrangement had started almost accidentally—one winter night on a highway that cut like a scar through the forest. There was a dive bar just off the exit, the kind of place truckers and locals drifted in and out of, with neon signs buzzing in the window and a jukebox that hadn’t been updated since the ‘90s. Hoodie had been waiting for a contact as a representative of the Slendermansion, and you’d been passing through with a message in hand. Fate, bad timing, or maybe the Operator himself had pulled your paths together.
The first meeting had been purely transactional. You gave him the sealed envelope, he gave you a stiff nod, and you both left without a word wasted. But it had happened again two months later. Then again. Eventually, it was no longer coincidence—it was ritual.
Every couple of months, you’d both find yourselves at that bar on the edge of nowhere. You’d take the booth near the back, the one with the cracked leather seat and sticky table, half hidden in the shadows. You’d slide a manila folder or a folded letter across the table, he’d take it without flourish, and that would be that. Except, after a while, “that” wasn’t enough.
One night, after the handoff, you’d lingered just a moment too long. He noticed you hadn’t touched the drink in front of you—cheap whiskey poured heavy, courtesy of the grizzled bartender. You had only purchased it because Hoodie was running late, and you didn’t want to look out of place. His gaze had flicked from your glass to your face, then, after a beat, he’d said in his quiet, muffled voice, “You gonna drink that or just stare at it?”
It was the first time you’d heard him joke, and it broke the ice enough that you’d ordered another round.
From there, things shifted. Meetings became longer. Intel was still exchanged, but the envelope became a prelude rather than the centerpiece. Some nights you’d talk. Some nights you’d sit in companionable silence, the jukebox groaning out classic rock while the world passed by unnoticed. He kept his hood up, mask in place, but you began to learn the cadences of his voice, the tilt of his head when he was amused, the sharpness in his eyes when he was assessing you.
Flirting came slow, like the lazy curl of smoke from a cigarette. It wasn’t overt, not at first. A brush of his hand when he slid your drink closer. The way his leg sometimes stretched out under the booth until it grazed yours. The way his voice dipped a little lower when he asked how the hell you managed to keep wandering these woods without losing your mind.
It was dangerous toeing that line, both of you knew it. These meetings weren’t supposed to mean anything—they were business, pure and simple. But the longer it went on, the harder it was to pretend.
Which led you here.
Another night, another rendezvous. It had been four months since you had seen him last. The woods outside were black and endless, the bar buzzing faintly with neon red light. You had your usual booth, your usual drink sweating against the tabletop, and Hoodie across from you, fingers drumming idly against the glass in his hand.
But something about tonight was different. The air between you wasn’t quiet—it was charged. The ritual had carried you as far as it could go. You both felt it, a thin thread pulled taut, ready to snap.
And tonight, it would.
You’d learned long ago that survival in the Slenderwoods wasn’t about brute force—it was about knowing how to move unseen. Every mansion had its own hierarchy, its own chain of command, its own brand of madness. Most outsiders didn’t live long after straying too close, but you weren’t quite an outsider. You were the thread between households, slipping notes, codes, and whispers from one master’s proxy to another.
Your neutrality was what made you valuable. You weren’t sworn to any single mansion; you were tolerated by all because your existence kept the fragile balance from snapping. A courier who didn’t ask questions, didn’t pry too deeply, didn’t favor one side over another. That was the rule.
But the truth was—messengers rarely lasted long. Getting caught in the wrong woods, cornered by the wrong resident, or intercepted by one of the Operator’s enemies could mean a quick, brutal end. You weren’t naive to that. Every time you stepped into the trees, you carried the awareness that this run might be your last.
And maybe that was why you clung so hard to these meetings with Hoodie.
They weren’t just about the intel anymore—they were an anchor. A strange sort of normalcy. A reminder that you weren’t just a ghost slipping messages through haunted corridors. You could sit in a booth, drink something cheap, argue about music on the jukebox, and—for a few hours—pretend the woods weren’t chewing you alive.
Tonight, you’d arrived first. The bar looked the same as always: neon beer signs buzzing faintly, pool table tucked in the corner with a warped leg, the faint smell of fried food clinging to the air. A couple of truckers nursed bottles at the counter, their shoulders hunched against the weight of the world. The bartender, same as ever, gave you a curt nod and slid your usual glass of whiskey your way without asking.
You took the back booth, habitually sliding into the shadowed side where you could see the door. It wasn’t long before Hoodie appeared, as he always did—quiet, fluid, like he’d simply stepped out of the night and into the neon haze. Hood drawn, mask in place, hands stuffed in the pockets of his jacket.
He didn’t sit right away. Just stood there for a beat, scanning the room, then let himself slide into the booth across from you. He placed a manila envelope on the table and tapped it once with his fingers before pushing it toward you.
“Fresh off the press,” he murmured. His voice was always low, muffled, like he’d swallowed half his words before letting them out. You accepted it, tucking it into your bag without breaking eye contact. The ritual was familiar, mechanical. But then came the part you both pretended wasn’t part of the deal: he flagged down the bartender, ordered two more drinks, and leaned back against the booth like he had nowhere else to be.
It wasn’t silence between you—it was anticipation. The kind that built slowly, feeding on every glance, every shift of his body. His gaze—completely obscured, but undoubtedly meeting yours—rested on you longer than it should have, and you caught yourself tracing the line of his jaw beneath the mask, the way his hand drummed restlessly against the glass.
The bartender dropped off the drinks with a grunt, sliding them across the sticky tabletop. Hoodie muttered a thanks without looking, fingers wrapping around his glass as if he needed the anchor.
“You’re early,” you said, breaking the silence first. Your voice sounded steadier than you felt.
He tilted his head, often a sign that he was amused. “So are you.”
Touché.
You took a sip of your whiskey, letting the burn linger on your tongue. “Guess we’re both eager to get this one over with.”
He made a noise—half a laugh, half a scoff. “Over with, huh? That what this feels like to you?”
There it was. A sharp little tug at the thread.
You smirked, tilting your glass in his direction. “Well, I don’t usually meet strange masked men in seedy bars off the highway. Gotta call it what it is.”
His hand drummed the glass again, once, twice, before he leaned in just slightly, elbows on the table. “If I remember right, you’re the one who started hanging around after a while.”
You rolled your eyes, but the heat rose in your chest anyway. “Only because you looked like you needed a babysitter. Sitting in the corner like some tragic loner out of a bad movie.”
That earned a real laugh out of him—low, rough, unguarded. It startled you a little; you didn’t hear that sound often. His shoulders shook once, then stilled, and when his gaze locked on yours again, there was something different there. Something sharper.
“Funny,” he said, voice quieter now, “I don’t remember you complaining about the company.”
You took another sip, slow and deliberate, because if you didn’t keep your hands busy, you’d fidget under that stare. “Maybe I didn’t.”
The silence that followed wasn’t awkward. It was heavy. Charged. The jukebox rattled out an old rock ballad, the kind that filled the space between you like smoke. Somewhere across the bar, the pool table cracked, voices rose, but none of it touched this little bubble.
Hoodie tipped his glass back, finishing half of it in one swallow. He set it down with more force than usual, his fingers tapping out a restless rhythm.
“You know,” he said finally, “for a messenger, you’re terrible at keeping things simple.”
You tilted your head, feigning innocence. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means…” His voice dropped low, almost lost under the jukebox, “…you’re not just business anymore. And you know it.”
There it was—the snap of the thread. Not fully broken yet, but frayed enough you could feel it unraveling.
You leaned back against the booth, the cracked vinyl creaking under the shift of your weight, and studied him. Hoodie didn’t fidget the way most people did under scrutiny; he sat still, deliberate, like every motion was a choice. But you caught the faintest twitch in his jaw, the restless flex of his fingers against the glass.
Your lips parted, but nothing came out. For once, the perfect retort didn’t surface. His words hit too clean, slicing through the layers you’d both been pretending to wrap around this thing.
Not just business anymore.
Your pulse thudded in your throat, louder than the jukebox, louder than the clink of bottles behind the bar. You tried to cover the silence with another sip of whiskey, but your hand betrayed you—just a small tremor, barely there, but you saw his gaze drop to it before rising back up to pin you in place.
He leaned in further, elbows still planted, voice low. “You feel it too. Don’t act like you don’t.”
Something in your chest twisted tight. “And if I do?” you murmured.
His head tilted, hood shadowing most of his face and his mask covering the rest, burned through the dim light. He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he pushed his glass aside with a quiet scrape of wood, then shifted. The leather booth creaked as he slid out from behind the table, taking a step toward your side before sliding in beside you. Close. Too close.
You shifted back instinctively, only to realize there was nowhere to go—the corner of the booth pinned you in place against the wall. He didn’t touch you, not yet, but the weight of his presence was enough to make your breath catch.
“Hoodie—”
He cut you off by reaching up, gloved fingers hooking the hem of his mask. For a moment, the world shrank to the sound of fabric dragging against stubble, the brief flash of pale skin. He tugged it up just enough—just past his mouth, his nose—until his jaw was bare, his breath warm in the charged space between you, and the glint of a tooth gap shone between his smirking lips.
“Say you don’t want this,” he murmured. A challenge. A warning. A dare.
You should have. It would’ve been the smart thing, the professional thing, the safe thing. But your body betrayed you—your gaze dropped to his mouth, your lips parted on an unsteady breath, and that was all the answer he needed.
In the next beat, he closed the distance, his mouth pressing against yours. Firm, certain, heated. The kiss wasn’t tentative—it was pent-up, months of unsaid words, long nights, lingering touches finally breaking loose. He crowded you further into the booth, one hand braced against the backrest near your shoulder, the other curling against your thigh, grounding you, claiming space you hadn’t realized you’d already given him.
The bar kept humming around you—music, voices, the clatter of pool balls—but it all blurred out. All you could taste was whiskey and heat, all you could feel was his chest pressed tight against yours, and the raw certainty that nothing about these meetings would ever be “just business” again.
His lips moved against yours with a hunger that made your head spin, his hand on your thigh tightening as though he’d been waiting months—years—for the excuse to touch you. His palm rasped against denim, inching higher, thumb brushing the sensitive inside of your leg.
You let out a sound—half gasp, half whimper—and he swallowed it greedily, deepening the kiss. His other hand slid from the booth’s backrest to your hip, tugging you closer until your shoulder pressed into the cool wall, your body bracketed tight between him and the cracked leather seat.
Every nerve lit up, buzzing like the neon outside, and for a dizzying second, you forgot where you were. Forgot the bar. Forgot the truckers at the counter. Forgot everything but the press of his mouth, the heat of his hand.
Until you didn’t.
Reality snapped sharp when his thumb brushed too close to the hem of your shirt, when a laugh from the bar cut through the haze and you remembered—anyone could look over, anyone could see. Your heart skittered in your chest, panic twining with the want.
You broke the kiss, breath ragged, hands braced against his chest. “Hoodie—we can’t—”
He froze, hidden gaze searching yours. For a heartbeat, you thought he’d pull away. Instead, something harder flickered in his body language. Without a word, he slid out of the booth in one smooth motion.
The absence of his body left you cold, unmoored. Then you watched as he pulled a crumpled bill from his pocket—twenty bucks—and slapped it onto the sticky table with finality.
Before you could say anything, his gloved hand was around your wrist, tugging you up and out of the booth. His grip wasn’t rough, but it was firm, insistent, leaving no room for second-guessing. The bar blurred behind you—the jukebox, the bartender’s raised brow, the truckers still hunched over their beers. You barely registered the neon lights buzzing overhead as he pushed through the door and pulled you out into the cool night replaced with the sounds of crickets and distant coyote barks.
His old pickup sat crooked in the gravel lot, paint chipped, headlights off. He steered you around the back of the truck, gravel crunching under your boots, and before you could process it, he had the passenger door wrenched open, hinges squeaking with the force.
“Get in,” he growled.
You barely had time to catch your breath before he all but pushed you inside, your back hitting the cracked vinyl seat. The door slammed shut with a metallic thud, and then he was circling around the hood, boots pounding the gravel. He climbed into the driver’s side, shoved the key into the ignition, and the engine roared awake, coughing and sputtering like it hadn’t been driven in days.
The truck peeled out of the lot in a spray of dust and stones, tires squealing as he hit the highway. Neon bled away behind you, swallowed by the endless black of the Slenderwoods. You threw your bag onto the floorboards by your feet, caring less about the encoded messages and secret treaties you were supposed to guard. You kicked your shoes off too, leaning into the console between you. The cab rattled, headlights cutting narrow beams through the dark rows of pines, but none of it mattered—not with his hand already on you.
Gloved fingers slid over your thigh, squeezing hard enough to make you gasp. Your hand shot out in response, clutching at his hoodie, tugging him toward you. The truck swerved just slightly as he turned his head, giving you his neck—bare where his mask was shoved up above his nose. You kissed it like you’d been starving, teeth grazing skin, the salt of sweat and whiskey on your tongue. He hissed out a breath, knuckles flexing against your leg, before his free hand left the wheel just long enough to fist the hem of your shirt.
The engine howled, the speedometer climbed, but all you could focus on was the heat of his skin against your mouth and the rough glide of his hand tugging at you, pulling you closer across the seat. He smelled like aftershave and tasted like heaven.
Your fingers fumbled at the zipper of his jacket, desperate to get beneath, to finally touch him without barriers. You could feel the tight coil of muscle underneath—his broad chest and strong shoulders, evidence of his constant work and endless strength. He let out a low sound—half a curse, half a groan—before shoving the truck hard to the right. Asphalt spat beneath the tires as he cut off the highway, barreling down a narrow break in the trees. Branches clawed the sides of the truck, headlights flashing over trunks and underbrush, until finally he jerked the wheel into a hollow cut deep into the woods.
Here, there was nothing. No signs, no lights, no people—just the night, the press of trees, the thrum of the engine idling beneath you.
Hoodie threw the gear into park, the truck lurching as he braced one hand hard against your thigh, the other still on the wheel. His chest rose and fell fast, breath ragged. For a moment, the cab was filled with nothing but your gasps, the scent of pine drifting through the cracked window, and the palpable heat between you. He shut off the engine, cutting the old body pickup into a sputter of pops and whines until it was silent. No sound except for the two of you.
The truck sat growling in the hollow, headlights casting long, skeletal shadows before Hoodie flicked them off. The cab plunged into darkness, broken only by slivers of moonlight filtering through the trees. Silver beams cut across the seats in fractured pieces, catching on your skin, glinting off the curve of his jaw. Outside, the forest pressed close, heavy and silent—no bustling bar, no people, nothing but the endless black tangle of branches and the whisper of night air.
You didn’t get the chance to take it in for long.
Hoodie released a sound—low, guttural, half a growl—and suddenly he was climbing over the console, his side braced on the vinyl as his hand clamped the back of your neck. The kiss hit hard, messy, teeth clashing in your desperation. He dragged you with him, not caring that your knee banged the gearshift or that you nearly tumbled sideways. By the time you caught your breath, both of you were half in the backseat, shoving and pulling until you collapsed into the dark leather with him on top of you.
His mask was shoved high, hood falling back enough for moonlight to catch the sharp line of his mouth. His teeth tugged your lower lip until you gasped, and he grinned against your mouth, breath hot and harsh.
“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for this?” His voice was low, almost a snarl, vibrating against your chest as his gloved hand slid beneath your shirt, rough and eager against bare skin. “All those nights in that bar, you sitting across from me, pretending you weren’t eye-fucking the shit out of me—fuck.”
You clutched his jacket, dragging him closer, pressing frantic kisses down the side of his throat where the mask didn’t cover. The taste of salt and sweat lingered on your tongue, and you bit hard enough to make him curse under his breath.
“You think I wasn’t watching you, too?” you shot back, voice ragged against his skin. “The way you couldn’t sit still, trying so hard not to flirt? I wanted this every damn time, Hoodie.”
That broke something in him. He pressed his hips down hard against yours, pinning you into the seat as his mouth crashed into yours again, harsher, wetter, heat and want spilling over like it had been caged too long. His hand fisted in your hair, yanking your head back just enough to drag his tongue across your throat, biting down until you whimpered.
“Could’ve had me in that booth months ago,” he growled into your skin. “You kept me waiting. You like teasing me, don’t you?”
Your laugh came out shaky, cut off by another kiss. “Maybe I wanted to see if you’d snap.”
“Careful,” he muttered, teeth grazing your jaw, “I’m snapping now.”
The truck rocked faintly under the frantic tangle of bodies, windows fogging as your hands clawed beneath his jacket, his mask riding up as you sought skin. The smell of pine and damp earth drifted through the cracked glass, mixing with the heat of sweat and breath, with the burn of whiskey still clinging to your mouths.
The moon was your only witness—silver light splintering through the branches above, painting flashes of pale skin and shadow, catching on the gleam of his eyes when he pulled back just enough to look at you. Hungry, relentless. Like he was finally holding something he’d wanted for too long to name.
His gloved hand shoved under your shirt, rough palm scraping up your ribs until he caught your breast, squeezing like he’d been starving for it. You gasped against his mouth, nails clawing into his back through his jacket.
“Fuck—” he groaned into your lips, breath ragged. “You feel better than I ever—ever—imagined.”
You bit his lower lip, dragging a guttural sound out of him, then pushed his mask up higher until it bunched just beneath his eyes. Moonlight caught the sharp lines of his face, pale skin flushed, mouth slick and swollen. You couldn’t help yourself—you kissed him harder, hungry hands pushing up into the sides of his mask until you felt the sweat tangled mess of his hair underneath.
“Months, Hoodie,” you panted against him, nipping his jaw. “Months of you staring at me across that booth, making me think I was losing my mind.”
His hips slammed down against yours, grinding his hard cock through his jeans into the damp heat between your thighs. You cried out, clinging to him, and he smirked against your throat.
“You weren’t losing your mind,” he rasped, voice raw and filthy. “I was. Sitting there, wanting to drag you across the table and fuck you right there. I started begging my boss to let me deliver more messages, just so I could see your face.”
The words punched a shiver straight down your spine. Your hands fumbled at his waistband, shoving under his jacket and shirt underneath, desperate to feel skin. He cursed when your nails scraped over his stomach, his abs tensing beneath your touch.
“Take these fucking clothes off,” you demanded, tugging at his zipper. “Now.”
“Bossy,” he muttered, but he obeyed, yanking his jacket and shirt over his head in one harsh pull. The moonlight washed over him—pale skin, lean muscle, scars scattered like secrets across his torso. He caught the tip of his gloves between his teeth and pulled them off, tossing them somewhere behind him. He was just as hot as you imagined, but he still kept that fucking mask on.
Then his hands were on you, tugging your shirt up, your bra down, his hands immediately finding your tits and squeezing. You arched into him, crying out, the backseat creaking as you rocked up against his grinding hips. You fumbled with the button of your shorts, tugging them down your legs until Hoodie snagged them the rest of the way off.
Then he grabbed you, gripping at your waist and dragging you across his lap until he was sitting back on the seats with your legs bracketing his hips. You scrambled up, tugging your panties back into place just enough to slide over him, straddling his lap. His jeans were still on—to your displeasure, rough denim brushing against your heat as you settled over the thick line of his cock. Even through the fabric, the friction was dizzying.
The truck groaned under the shift of weight, moonlight spilling across your body as you rolled your hips down against him. The slick drag of cotton against denim made you gasp, head tipping back, hair falling wild around your face.
“Fuck,” Hoodie hissed, his hands flying to your hips, thumbs digging in hard as he pulled you tighter against him. “That’s it. Work for it.”
You ground harder, panting, the rough press of his cock hitting you just right through the thin layers between you. He leaned forward, mouth latching onto your chest, teeth scraping over your nipple. The wet heat of his tongue closed around you, and you cried out, clinging to his shoulders.
“That’s what I wanted,” he muttered against your skin, lips dragging hot over the swell of your breast. “Wanted you like this, grinding on me in that fucking booth, acting like you didn’t need it.”
You rocked harder, chasing the friction, every roll of your hips pulling a groan out of him. His hands slid up your back, clutching you like he was afraid you’d vanish, before slamming back down to your ass to drag you harder along his lap. You gripped his shoulders tight, fingernails digging into the taught muscles there.
“God—you’re soaked,” he growled, low and filthy, eyes flicking down where your panties had gone dark against the bulge of his jeans. “All that teasing, fuck—you’re gonna have to earn it if you want more.”
The challenge lit something in you. You ground down harder, faster, whining at the delicious pressure building between your thighs. He bit down on your breast, not gentle, and the sting only made you move more desperately.
“Please,” you gasped, nails raking across his chest, leaving angry red marks in their wake. “Please, Hoodie—let me—”
He caught your jaw in his hand, forcing your gaze down to meet his. His mouth was twisted in a grin, sharp and mean.
“Keep working, sweetheart,” he drawled, breath hot against your lips. “You wanted to keep me waiting—now you’re gonna make yourself come for me right here, like this. Earn it.”
The words punched straight through your chest, heat coiling low and tight as you ground harder, chasing it with everything in you. His mouth went back to your chest, teeth, tongue, lips devouring, his hands dragging you down onto him until it was almost too much.
You were grinding yourself raw on him, panties dragging over the thick bulge in his jeans, every motion sparking white-hot pleasure. But every time you glanced down, your gaze snagged on the mask. Still shoved above his nose, hiding half his face from you. You’d gotten his mouth, his jaw, that cute tooth gap, those ragged breaths—but not all of him.
And suddenly, that wasn’t enough. Not after everything.
You slid your hands up from his chest, fingers curling around the edge of the fabric. He caught your wrists immediately, grip hard. “Don’t,” he growled, breath rough. “Not that.”
Your hips rolled down hard against him, grinding just right, and he groaned, eyes fluttering half-shut. You leaned close, lips brushing his ear. “Why not?” you whispered, voice sultry, teasing. “You were so done with the teasing earlier. I want to see that pretty face. What’s left to hide?”
He shuddered, fingers flexing tighter on your wrists. “No… safe.”
“Neither are we. I know all the info from every creature in these woods. You know I can keep a secret.” Your hands slipped free, tracing under the edge of the mask, your mouth kissing along the strip of skin it revealed. “I want to see you. All of you.”
You rocked against him harder, deliberately, and his head dropped back against the seat with a ragged curse. Seizing the moment, you slid your palms beneath the mask, cupping his jaw, kissing him deep and messy to distract him. He kissed back with all the pent-up hunger of months, hands fisting in your ass, rutting up against you.
And while he was lost in you, you pushed.
The fabric slid up, slow, over the bridge of his nose, past his lashes, tangling in your fingers—until finally, you tugged it free. His hood fell back with it, and suddenly, there he was.
“Hoodi—”
“Brian. Just… Brian is good.”
The moonlight cut through the window and painted him bare—sweat-damp hair clinging to his forehead, pale skin flushed, mouth swollen from your kisses. His eyes—sharp, hazel, burning—stared at you wide and raw, the first flicker of vulnerability cracking through the hunger.
You stilled, breathless, straddling him with your panties soaked and his cock straining under his jeans. One of your hands rose, brushing his cheek, tracing the edge of a scar you hadn’t seen before. Staring into eyes you only ever imagined before.
“You’re beautiful,” you whispered, no tease in your voice this time. Just truth. His jaw clenched, throat working like he wanted to argue. But then you rolled your hips again, slow and deliberate, and his head snapped forward, lips crushing against yours in a kiss so fierce it felt like it could tear you apart.
“Fuck—you shouldn’t—” he groaned against your mouth, but his hands were clutching you harder, hauling you down on him like he’d never let go. “You shouldn’t have seen me—”
“Too late,” you gasped, grinding harder, desperate. “I’m not letting you hide from me anymore.”
His laugh came out broken, jagged, as you kissed him again, mask crumpled and forgotten on the seat. With his face bare, every kiss felt different—hotter, hungrier, but also heavier, like you were finally breaking into a part of him he’d never let anyone touch. His mouth was everywhere: on your lips, your throat, your chest, biting and sucking until you were trembling in his lap.
You rode him harder, panties soaked through, dragging over the thick line of his cock beneath his jeans. Each grind made his breath catch, rough groans spilling into your skin, his hands bruising your hips to keep you moving.
“God—you’re—fuck—you’re drenching me,” Hoodie rasped, voice wrecked. “You really need it that bad?”
“Needed it for months,” you gasped, clutching at his belt. Your fingers fumbled at the leather, tugging so hard it creaked under your grip. He laughed—a dark, broken sound—before his hips jerked up hard, grinding up into you. “You gonna come just like this?” he taunted, mouth dragging across your chest. “Gonna come all over me when I haven’t even touched you yet.”
“Yes—fuck, yes—” You tore at his belt again, frantic, until the leather snapped through the buckle with a sharp crack. His jeans gaped open, boxers the only barrier left between you. You ground down and felt him even closer, hot and hard, the wet cotton of your panties dragging against the damp spot already spreading across his briefs.
The friction was too much. Perfect. Your whole body tightened, breath breaking against his mouth as you clung to him.
“Brian—” His real name ripped out of you, raw and desperate, as the climax hit. Your hips stuttered, grinding against him through the thin layers, body shaking while you moaned for him. He held you through it, arms like iron around your waist, pressing you down on him so you could ride it out. His own jaw was clenched, teeth gritted, eyes burning into yours as you unraveled.
“Good girl,” he muttered hoarsely, lips brushing your ear. “Making a mess all over me already. Doin’ exactly what I asked.”
You sagged against him, still trembling, panties clinging soaked to your skin, his cock straining against the damp fabric of his boxers. The air in the truck was stifling, windows fogged, the smell of sex and sweat heavy between you. Outside, the forest stood silent, moonlight spilling silver across his bare face as he held you in his lap, both of you ruined but not nearly finished.
Not even close.
You were still trembling, riding the aftershocks in his lap, when Hoodie suddenly shifted beneath you. His hands gripped your waist, and before you could catch your breath, he flipped you.
You landed face-down on the backseat with a gasp, the cracked leather sticking to your heated skin. Hoodie loomed behind you, heavy and hungry, one hand pressing between your shoulder blades, the other tugging your hips up until you were arched perfectly for him. Your cheek pressed against the seat, breath fogging the window, the whole truck rocking faintly with his movements.
“Christ…” His voice came low, ragged, almost reverent. “You’re soaked through. Can see it.” He shoved your panties aside, and the cool air against your swollen heat made you whimper. You heard the shuffle of his jeans, the clink of his belt, then the warmth behind you as he pulled his heavy cock from the restraint of his boxers. You tried to push back against him, desperate for the press of his length, but he held you there, his palm flat on your lower back.
“Not yet,” he muttered, and then you felt him—thick and hot—sliding the length of himself against your folds, rutting slow, deliberate drags that made your thighs shake. His tip caught on your clit, smearing precum with your slick, and you choked out a sound, hips jerking.
“You want it so bad, huh?” he teased, his breath hot against your neck as he leaned over you. “All that waiting, all that teasing—must be so exhausting now.”
His free hand slid to your cunt, two fingers circling your clit before dipping higher, gathering your slick. He pushed them into you, rough and unrelenting, curling until your back arched helplessly. You cried out, clutching at the seat, forehead pressed against the vinyl.
“Fuck—Brian, please—” you whined.
“That’s it,” he murmured, working you open, his hand slick with you. “So tight, so wet—fuck.”
And just as fast as they came, his fingers tugged back out of you, replaced by a deep groan from him. You twisted to look back, and the sight made you dizzy: Brian had his cock fisted tight, stroking himself with the same hand that glistened with you, smearing it over his shaft as he pumped slow, deliberate strokes. He caught your gaze, and the hand planted on your back slid down to your cunt, his opposite two fingers shoving their way inside your heat.
The wet sound of his fingers sliding in and out of you mixed with the slick glide of his hand on his cock, filthy and overwhelming. He watched the way your body shook under him, the way you pushed back, trying to take more, but every time you did, he pulled his fingers out just enough to make you whine.
“You feel that?” he rasped, stroking himself harder now, his other hand spreading you open wider. “That’s your pussy making a mess on my fingers. And I’m gonna fuck you when I’m good and ready. Not before.” He pushed his fingers back into you, curling rough and deep, his cock dragging over your ass, smearing precum against your skin as he worked you in time with himself. His breath grew harsher, his hips pressing into the back of your thighs, and you could feel how close he was, how much he was holding himself back just to torture you.
“I need it—Please, god—please—I need it—”
The truck rocked with every thrust of his fingers, every grind of his hips. Outside, the forest loomed silent and endless, moonlight breaking through the branches in silver streaks that washed over your bodies tangled in the dark cab.
“Don’t tell me to stop.”
“I won’t—I promise, I promise—please, Brian—” You were gasping into the seat, shaking from his fingers, when suddenly—he pulled away. The emptiness made you whimper, hips pushing back instinctively, but you didn’t get the chance to beg.
Without warning, he drove into you.
You gripped the leather seats so hard your fingernails popped and tore into the vinyl. The sudden stretch tore a cry from your throat, your whole body arching as his cock filled you, thick and unrelenting. One second it had been his fingers, and the next—you were split wide open, stuffed full, your slick clenching around him like you’d been waiting your entire life for this exact moment. You could feel the thick veins that lined his length inside you, pulsing in time with your fluttering cunt.
“Fuck—yes—” Hoodie’s voice cracked, raw and guttural, his hands gripping your hips so hard you knew you’d bruise. “Finally—finally in this tight little pussy—Christ, you feel even better than I dreamed.”
You couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. The stretch was overwhelming, fire lancing through you, but it was perfect. Everything in you clenched down on him, greedy, desperate. “Yes—yes—oh my god—” You were moaning into the seat, hands clawing at the leather, forehead pressed down as you tried to take all of him. “So big—so good—”
He bottomed out, grinding deep, making you sob his name. Then he started to move. Rough, punishing thrusts rocked your body forward, the old truck groaning with every slam of his hips against your ass. He held you bent over the seat, his chest pressed to your back, his mouth dragging across your neck as he panted curses into your skin.
“Fuck, you’re dripping—soaked my fucking jeans—so wet for me—” His words were broken, filthy, every thrust harder than the last. “You wanted this, didn’t you? It don’t matter. Months of teasing me, making me wait, and now you’re taking every fucking inch.”
“Yes—yes, Brian—” The name ripped out of you again, raw and desperate. His grip tightened at the sound, his cock slamming into you deeper, angling to hit that spot that made your legs tremble.
“Say it again,” he demanded, voice shredded. “Say my name while I fuck you.”
“Brian—fuck—Brian—don’t stop—”
You were both unraveling, your voices tangling in the hot dark, every “yes” overlapping until it was nothing but a litany, a chant, like you couldn’t believe it was real.
The windows fogged, the truck rocking with every savage thrust, the forest outside holding its silence like it was watching. The moon split the trees, silver light catching on the sweat and spit and skin, and for the first time in all those months, there was no pretending. No business. No distance. Just you and him, finally, the brutal satisfaction of giving in. The leather squealed under your knees, your cheek pressed hard into it as you gasped and cried out with every stroke.
Then he shifted.
He leaned back, hauling you up by your arms, your chest peeling off the seat until your back slammed against his chest. His hand wrapped around both your wrists, holding them like shackles against your stomach as he pistoned into you from behind. The sound was filthy—skin slapping skin, his jeans rasping with every thrust, the jingle-jangle of his belt buckle syncing with the brutal rhythm. Each slam of his hips made the metal bite against your ass, sharp and hot.
“Fuck—listen to that,” he groaned into your ear, teeth scraping your neck as he pounded into you. “Sound of my cock splitting you open. That’s all I’ve wanted to hear.”
You could barely think, could barely breathe. Your arms writhed uselessly against his grip, the stretch of him inside you making your thighs quake from the new angle.
“Yes—oh my god—yes!” Your voice cracked, bouncing off the fogged glass, and Hoodie’s laugh was rough, broken, like he couldn’t believe how good it felt either. He let go of your wrists suddenly, shoving your chest forward until you braced against the cold window of the truck door, palms splayed against the glass. The chill shocked through your skin, grounding you against the molten heat tearing through your core.
“Stay there,” he ordered, breath ragged, and his hand dropped to your panties—still shoved to the side, clinging damp and ruined to your hip. He gripped the fabric tight, pulling it hard enough to dig into your skin. Each thrust popped the elastic against you, sharp snaps that had you whining, gasping.
“Ruined these,” he growled, snapping them again against your ass while his cock slammed into you, fast and merciless, knocking the breath from your lungs. “Soaked through before I even got inside you. Pitiful.”
You braced yourself, arms locked against the door, head tipped back, every thrust rocking you into the glass until it rattled in its frame. The vulgar slap of your bodies filled the truck, tangled with the ragged sound of his breathing, your cries, the metallic rattle of his belt—fast, brutal, unrelenting. Brian was lost in it now, hips pistoning like he was making up for every month of waiting, every bar meeting where he couldn’t touch you. And from the wrecked sounds spilling from both your throats, neither of you wanted him to stop.
His hand finally slid lower. Calloused fingertips rubbed over your clit, quick and dirty, syncing with the brutal pace of his hips. The added pressure ripped a cry from you, your arms trembling against the window.
“Fuck—look at you,” he groaned, voice torn, breath hot against the side of your neck. His free hand skimmed down your side, catching on sweat-slick skin. “So soft—so fucking perfect.”
Even through the haze, you managed a ragged laugh, half a moan. “Careful now—hah—you sound like you like me or something, Brian—”
“Ah, Jesus,” he cut in, hips slamming into you harder, his fingers pressing cruelly against your clit. “Say it again.”
“Brian—” you gasped, and he shuddered behind you, hips stuttering.
“God, you’re beautiful,” he muttered, almost like he hated admitting it if only because he knew how much it ruined him. His teeth scraped your shoulder, biting down when you clenched around him. “So fucking beautiful bent over for me like this.”
Your lips twisted into a broken smile. “You gonna come first, tough guy?” you panted, grinding back into him as best you could, even with him holding you wide open.
He gave a ragged laugh, snapping your panties against your skin again while his cock drove into you. “Not a chance. You’re already shaking—mmhn—bet you’re seconds away from falling apart on me.”
“You’re not holding up any better,” you shot back, voice cracking on a moan. “You gonna come in me? C’mon, Brian.”
That made him snarl, his thrusts going sharp, desperate, his fingers circling harder over your clit until your knees buckled.
“Then let’s see who breaks first.”
The challenge was enough to push you both right to the brink. The pace grew feral—his hips pounding against you so hard the glass rattled, your voice gone hoarse from crying out his name, his curses hot in your ear. Every snap of his belt buckle, every wet slap of skin on skin pushed you higher, tighter, until—
You broke together.
Brian shoved deep and spilled hot inside you with a strangled groan, clutching your hips so hard it bordered on pain. The sensation dragged you under with him, your orgasm tearing through you, your arms giving out as you screamed against the fogged glass.
“Yes—yes—Brian—”
“Fuck—yes—” he groaned back, lost, rutting through it even as you both spasmed, clenching around him until you thought you’d shatter. You clawed at the window, nails scraping the condensation, while his hands were bruising on your hips, dragging you back onto him as if he could fuse you together. The truck rocked with the force of it, cab creaking with the constant rock.
When it finally ebbed, you collapsed against the seat, chest heaving, your panties still tugged to the side, his jeans shoved down just enough. Brian stayed pressed to your back, cock still buried deep, arms wrapped tight around you like he was afraid you’d vanish into the night. You were still panting, skin slick with sweat, when Brian finally pulled out. You felt the slick and seed drip from your folds, slicking your inner thighs and sending a chill up your spine. The loss made you whine, limbs trembling, but before you could recover, he hauled you up and flipped you onto your back.
“Hey, pretty girl…” he hummed.
Your spine hit the cracked leather, your legs falling open instinctively, and then his mouth was on yours—hot, messy, hungry. He kissed you like a man starved, devouring every sound you made, his tongue deep in your mouth.
You clung to him, arms wound tight around his shoulders, fingers digging into the back of his neck. Your hands slid higher, combing through the damp strands of his hair, tugging just to feel him groan into you. His weight pressed you down into the seat, his cock slick against your thigh, still hard, still aching.
But you weren’t done either. Not nearly.
With a sudden shove, you rolled him. Brian grunted as his back hit the seat, but before he could react, you were straddling him, thighs spread wide, panties still clinging wet to your skin. His bare face was beneath you now, flushed, jaw sharp in the moonlight, lips red and swollen from your kisses, but smiling like a wolf.
“Got enough for one more?” you teased, your voice wrecked but sharp as you rocked your hips against him. His cock, slick and heavy, pressed up against your soaked cunt, sliding perfectly into the mess between your thighs.
Brian’s head tipped back with a broken sound, his hands flying to your hips. “Fuck—don’t start something you can’t finish.”
You ground harder, dragging yourself along his length, every slow roll of your hips making him twitch beneath you. The sound was obscene—skin sticky, fabric clinging, the wet glide of your bodies still drunk on each other.
“Who said anything about finishing?” you whispered, leaning close, your lips brushing his before pulling back, grinding harder. “Maybe I just like watching you lose.”
His grip on your hips tightened to painful, his eyes snapping to yours, burning. “Keep talking like that and I’ll ruin you again, right here.”
You smirked, rolling your hips in another slow drag, the head of his cock catching just right against your clit. “Then what are you waiting for?”
The truck groaned under the shift of weight, the moonlight slicing through the trees outside and painting your bodies in silver as you ground yourself on him, dragging both of you right back into the edge of ruin. You rolled your hips slow, smirking down at him, when Brian snapped. His hands clamped around your waist and, with a guttural growl, he shoved up into you.
You gasped, the sudden stretch stealing your breath, no warning this time—just thick and deep, forcing your body to take him in one brutal stroke.
“Fuck!” you cried out, your nails raking across his chest as your hips jolted down to meet his. The sting of sensitivity from the first round sparked through you, sharp and overwhelming, but you clung to it, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing you fold.
“Oh, and you call me pitiful,” you hissed, planting your hands on his chest before grinding down harder, faster. Your thighs burned, your cunt clenched, but you rode him with sharp, punishing thrusts, daring him to keep up.
His head tipped back against the seat, a ragged laugh spilling from his lips as he groaned. “Jesus Christ—you’re trying to kill me.”
Your nails dragged down his chest, over the rough lines of muscle, leaving red tracks in their wake. “Didn’t know you were—hnn—hiding this under the hoodie,” you panted, your hands roaming over his pecs, his abs, the hard ridges that flexed under your touch.
He smirked up at you, even as his breath stuttered from the way you slammed down onto him. “You’ve had—hah—plenty of chances to imagine.”
Your hand slipped higher, wrapping around his throat, squeezing just enough to feel the rumble of his moan vibrate against your palm. “And these scars,” you gasped, fingers tracing one along his collarbone, nails scraping lightly. “Where’d you get them?”
Brian’s laugh broke sharp, jagged, as he bucked his hips up into you, making you yelp. “You think this is really the—fuck—the time to talk about that?”
“Why not?” you shot back, voice strained as you rode him harder, faster, the sound of your bodies colliding filling the truck. “You’ve got me exactly where you wanted me, and I’m still asking questions. Shit. What does that say about you?”
His eyes narrowed, fire in the silver wash of moonlight. His hand shot up, gripping your jaw, forcing your gaze down into his as he pounded up into you. “It says you don’t know when to shut the fuck up. I guess that’s a messenger for you.”
But his grin, sharp and wicked, told you he loved every second of your defiance. The seat groaned, the whole truck rocking, his cock splitting you open again and again while your nails dug crescent moons into his chest. You were both wrecked, raw, but neither willing to give the other the satisfaction of slowing down.
“It’s my job to get information,” you grinned.
Brian’s hand tightened around your jaw, his eyes locked on yours, sharp even through the haze of sweat and heat. “You want answers?” he rasped, hips snapping up into you hard enough to make your breath catch. “Then earn them. You can make me cum again—you can ask about every scar on my body.”
A ragged giggle slipped out of you, half-mad from the pace, from the burn of him splitting you open. “That’s all it takes?” you teased, breathless, your nails dragging across his chest again. “Guess I won’t be leaving empty handed then.”
You planted your knees firm on either side of his hips, bracing yourself, ready to ride him into the ground. Brian read you like a fucking book. With a grunt, he dug his boots into the cracked leather seat and drove up into you, hard.
“Brian—!” you cried out, your whole body jolting, shoved higher on every brutal thrust. He held your hips still, anchoring you while his cock pounded up into you mercilessly. The truck shook, the windows rattled, your hands scrambling for purchase. One clutched his shoulder, nails biting into muscle, the other gripping the seat back for dear life as he wracked your body with every savage stroke.
“Fuck—you’re still squeezing me so tight,” he groaned, voice breaking, his head pressing back into the seat as his chest heaved. “Goddamn it, you’re perfect.”
Your head fell back, a strangled cry tearing from your throat, and his mouth was there instantly, teeth clamping onto your chest. He sucked and bit at your tits, his hands rough, greedy, squeezing until you yelped. The sting only made your pussy clench tighter around him, dragging broken curses from his lips.
“Brian, oh my god—” you gasped, clinging to him as he pistoned up into you, each thrust sharp enough to make your vision blur.
He growled into your skin, one hand leaving your chest to wrap around the back of your neck, hauling you down so your forehead pressed against his. “Keep saying my name. Louder.”
“Brian! Brian—fuck—Brian!” you screamed, your voice bouncing off the cab walls.
The rhythm was merciless now—pure, animalistic need, every thrust lifting you, throwing you, the slap of your soaked bodies and the jingle of his belt buckle echoing like a drumbeat. Sweat dripped down his temples, your hair stuck damp to your face, but neither of you slowed, neither willing to be the first to give in. You clutched his shoulders, clung to the seat, your body wracked with the force of him, both of you teetering on the edge of breaking again.
The truck was a furnace, every window fogged, the cab shaking with the violence of his thrusts. You were both slick with sweat, skin sliding, your nails scoring fresh lines into his chest and shoulders as you rode him, as he drove up into you like he wanted to carve himself into your bones.
Both of you were trying to hold out, trying to keep that edge of control, the cocky defiance that had carried you through months of tension. But it was unraveling fast. You had survived off of only words for so long, your bodies weren’t so conditioned. The angle was too much. Each brutal snap of Brian’s hips slammed him straight into that aching spot inside you, sharp and relentless, and your body betrayed you—clenching, trembling, every gasp breaking higher as your resolve cracked.
“Fuck—fuck, Brian—” you whined, collapsing down onto him, chest pressed against his, your hair falling into his damp face.
He groaned, ragged, gripping your ass with both hands to slam you harder onto his cock. “Don’t stop now—don’t you dare—” But his voice was already fractured, his eyes squeezed shut as if even he couldn’t believe how close he was.
You buried your mouth against his, panting his name, and then—wrecked, desperate—you whispered the words against his lips, “Come in me—please.”
Brian’s whole body shuddered under you, his eyes snapping open, hard gaze blazing like fire through the dark. For a second he froze, like he couldn’t believe it—then every shred of restraint snapped. He growled your name, brutal, animal, and thrust up into you hard, deep, again and again.
You screamed for him, nails digging into his shoulders, holding on as he broke apart beneath you, spilling hot and deep inside. The sound he made was guttural, torn from somewhere deep, his cock twitching as he pumped every drop into you.
And it dragged you with him—your body locking tight, your orgasm ripping through you so violently you thought you’d split in two. You clung to him, trembling, gasping his name like a prayer, chest to chest, mouths crashing together in messy, breathless kisses as the climax consumed you both.
“Yes—yes—Brian—fuck, yes—”
The truck rocked with your bodies, the air thick with heat, the smell of sex, the sound of two people who’d finally given in after months of pretending.
When it finally ebbed, you collapsed against him, still clenching weakly around him, his hands trembling as they ran down your back. He buried his face in your neck, breath ragged, like he never wanted to let you go. The truck was heavy with heat and the smell of sex, your bodies still slick, hearts hammering, breaths ragged in the small cab. You sagged against each other, pressed together, thighs sticky, hair plastered to sweat-damp skin. Every groan, every shiver, still rolling through you from the double climax.
Brian finally pulled out of you, letting you collapse against him for a second before he tugged you up and sat you back across the seat. With a low grunt, he leaned into the driver’s side, fumbling with the keys until the engine hummed to life. Cool air hit the cab in a sharp rush, fogged windows clearing just enough to see the moonlight spilling through the trees. A scratchy, dull rock song rattled from the truck speakers, cutting through the thick haze of scent and heat, grounding you both just a little.
Brian tugged his discarded shirt from the cab floor and used it to wipe himself clean, still flushed and sweaty. He tugged his jeans back up, tucking himself back into place, snapping the belt closed, and for a second he seemed… almost casual, like he wasn’t still blissed out.
You shifted, reaching down to try and clean yourself, but he tsked, low and sharp, his hand clamping over yours.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked, voice smooth but dangerous.
Before you could protest, he yanked you across onto his lap. You gasped as he hauled you up, straddling him, then leaned you back until your spine pressed against the middle console. The truck rocked faintly under your weight, your knees braced on either side of him, legs splayed around his head. He tugged your sodden panties off of your hips, finally, and dragged them off your legs until they disappeared into his jean pocket with a smirk.
“Goddamn it,” he muttered, low and rough, eyes dark with hunger. “Such a fucking mess. Can’t have you leaving like this.”
Your hands flew to his hair immediately, fingers tangling in damp strands as you leaned forward, back pressing against the cool plastic of the console, watching him with a wicked grin. Brian growled, letting his hands roam your thighs, gripping tight as his face dipped between your legs. The heat of your slick pressed against his cheeks, the scent of you thick in the cab, and you shivered, gasping.
“I’ll be easy,” he smiled.
Before you could protest, his mouth was on you, hot and wet. His tongue traced every slick line of your folds, every sensitive patch of skin, dragging through your cunt with a slow, deliberate hunger that made you cry out. You arched into him, gripping the messy strands of his hair, tugging desperately as your knees shook on either side of his head.
“Fuck—Brian—oh God—” you moaned, the sensation raw and consuming. Every flick of his tongue sent tremors up your spine, the press of his face against you intoxicating. He groaned against you, and the taste of both your climaxes coated his mouth, warm and tangy, dripping down him as he lapped you clean. Every flick, every slide, every press was possessive, claiming you fully even after you’d already been wracked raw.
“You’re divine,” he rasped, voice thick, almost reverent, as he hungrily traced your folds, tongue plunging and circling. “All of you. Can’t get enough.”
Your hands clawed at his shoulders, down his back, tangling in his hair as you ground lightly against his mouth. “Brian—yes—fuck—keep going,” you gasped, hips jerking involuntarily. He moaned into you, face pressed deep, tasting, claiming, dragging you higher again and again. Every motion of his mouth sent sparks straight through you, chest heaving, legs trembling, until you were shaking, writhing, and coming apart on him once more, fingers fisted in his hair.
“Yeah—fuck—oh my God—Brian!” you cried, body shuddering as your second peak hit, raw and filthy, clinging to him, grinding, writhing, needing every slick, every taste. He didn’t stop. He held you there, lapping you clean, murmuring your name, groaning low and ragged, claiming you even in the aftermath, until he finally lifted his head, lips glistening, chest heaving, and eyes dark with want.
“You taste too good,” he muttered, dragging his hand down your spine to hold you close. “Can’t get enough of you. Ever.”
The cab was thick with heat, slick, sweat, and the smell of both of you. Neither of you moved for a long moment, just breathing, clinging, savoring the messy aftermath and the satisfaction of finally having everything you wanted in each other.
Brian shifted slightly, pulling his chest against yours, still slick, still warm, still tasting of both of you. His fingers traced absent patterns across your spine, brushing your damp hair out of your face.
“You know,” he muttered, voice low and teasing, “you can’t use this as blackmail later. Not that I’d let you get away with it anyway. I don’t need anybody else on my ass cause I’ve bribed the messenger.”
You giggled, the sound soft and breathless, still trembling from the ride and his ministrations. “Maybe I will,” you teased back, letting your head rest against his shoulder and he sat back, pulling you with him into his lap. “Maybe I’ll just remind you every time we meet.”
He snorted, tugging you closer, and for the first time all night, you were both quiet. The dull hum of the engine, the scratchy, low rock music spilling from the speakers, and the whisper of wind through the cracked windows were all that filled the cab as you tangled together. Limbs draped, skin slick, and finally, finally at rest in each other’s arms.
Your hands traced over his chest, fingers brushing scars and muscles alike, lingering in places you’d only just begun to notice. “So…” you whispered, voice still thick and warm, teasing but gentle. “Tell me… what’s this scar?”
Brian let out a long, low laugh, the sound rough, fond, and knowing. He pressed a soft kiss to your temple, tugging you closer against him.
“Jesus, we’re going to be here all night.”
── .✦
Months had passed since that night in the truck, but nothing had really changed between you and Brian. The excuse of “business”—of exchanging letters, passing intel between mansions in the Slenderwoods—was still there, a thin veil over what you both truly wanted.
You met like you always did, in the familiar dive on the highway, tucked into the woods. The smell of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and cracked vinyl was comforting now, a prelude to the inevitable. You’d barely managed to sit, barely managed to sip the first drink of the night, when Brian’s hand was on your thigh, pulling you across the booth.
“Get a move on, pretty girl,” he muttered, lips brushing your ear as he leaned close. “One drink, tops.”
And just like that, he was dragging you through the doors, throwing you into the passenger side of his truck. The engine roared to life before your second sip could touch your lips, and the familiar thrill of the holler waiting in the woods hit your stomach like lightning.
The forest was unchanged—trees like faithful silent witnesses, the moon spilling silver over everything—but the ritual was different now. There was no pretense, no casual small talk. Letters were exchanged between kisses, bodies curling against vinyl as hands roamed, skin slapping in heated, messy rhythm. Intelligence was whispered between moans and groans, urgent and almost irrelevant compared to the press of bodies against each other.
You barely remembered to slide the envelope from your bag. He barely remembered to keep the truck from sliding in the loose gravel of the off-road path.
It was chaotic. It was filthy. It was exactly what you both had wanted for months—sometimes, even years. Each meeting ended in the same way: tangled together in the backseat or on the console, sweat, laughter, and that familiar haze of raw obsession between the two of you.
The bar might have been the start, the excuse, but it was always just that. The rest—the heat, the hunger, the push and pull of skin on skin—was what you were both really after. And neither of you were pretending otherwise.
Over time, the “business” of being messengers and couriers in the Slenderwoods became something entirely different. You kept up the pretense of professionalism, slipping coded names and warnings into letters as if by accident, making sure that Brian—Hoodie—was always held in a quietly favorable light. Nobody ever suspected that the careful wording, the extra diligence, the subtle influence you wielded, was done with him in mind. That he, too, was protected by your hand, completely unaware.
And Brian, true to himself, returned the favor in his own silent, fierce way. He patrolled the woods in his quiet, methodical way, eyes scanning for threats, steering killers, monsters, and any other dangers that might drift toward you. He never interfered openly—never left evidence of himself—but he made sure the shadows of the Slenderwoods bent around you, that nothing could reach you that he couldn’t stop.
You both were supposed to be impartial, detached, and unmoved by outside forces. You were supposed to deliver information without interference, to observe without involvement. And yet, month after month, meeting after meeting, it became impossible.
It was never just business.
And you couldn’t find yourself wanting it any other way.
Thank you for reading! Comments and kudos are appreciated!
─────────────────────────────── ready to start - arcade fire
── .✦ do not copy, translate, or plagiarize any of my works. dividers by me.
CONTAINS NSFW, MINORS DNI
✦ . Summary: (No correlation to other parts, only prologue) The bottle lands on Tim.
✦ . Characters: Tim Wright (Masky) x Reader
✦ . Warning: Alcohol, cigarettes, erotic asphyxiation, breath control play, semi-public sex, dirty talk, oral fixation, blowjobs, choking, risky sex, nicotine high, dizziness, hair pulling, fingers in mouth, spit, oral sex, rough oral sex, first time blow job
✦ . Words: 12.1k
✦ . Note: Please do not hang me and kill me for how long this took to post. Apologies! Hopefully the length makes up for it! School is officially over, so now I can dedicate my time to writing more, so be on the lookout! For all my blow job lovers (I see you and I appreciate you), this is for you!!!
─────────────────────────────────────────────
It was ironic watching your fate be decided by a lousy beer bottle you hadn’t even gotten to drink out of yet.
But everything in this lousy mansion is out of your hands anyway.
The bottle spun on the coffee table, wobbling through the leftover alcohol and cigarette ash stains before it slowed and finally stopped.
It landed on—
You looked up.
Tim.
Before the room could go completely silent, Jeff let out a loud, ugly laugh.
“Well shit,” he crowed, leaning back on the couch and covering his face with his hands. “Looks like Timmy gets the consolation prize. Try not to bore her to death in there, old man.”
Tim didn’t snap back. He just stared Jeff down from across the circle, his eyes dark and narrowed. There was something almost smug in the way he tilted his head, like he already knew exactly how much this was eating Jeff alive, how he could practically see right through his asshole demeanor.
He stared at Jeff long enough for the boy to sink back into himself a little, but not without rolling his eyes and crossing his arms as he broke the stare down to glare out the window.
But then Tim turned and walked straight past you, his boots thumping on the floorboards as he headed down the short hallway toward the closet like he had all the time in the world.
You stayed seated for a beat, your heart suddenly kicking harder than it should.
Nina wasn’t having it. She popped up behind you with a bright, mischievous laugh and hooked her arms under yours, hauling you to your feet.
“Nope! Don’t be a baby, babe. Go on!”
She gave you a firm shove toward the direction Tim just went. A couple of the others whistled and clapped as you stumbled forward, but as you looked back one final time in anxiousness, all you saw was Jeff’s wide eyes watching you fade around the corner. In amongst the distraction, Brian had moved from his spot and was now leaning against the wall nearest the hall towards the closet. As you approached, he rummaged into his jacket pocket and fished out a silver flip lighter, pushing it into your hands before you could pass.
You looked down at it, feeling the cold weight in your hand, before looking at him—only for the blond to give you a very confusing nod before he let you go. You shoved it into your back pocket.
Tim was already at the closet door. He yanked it open, reached up, and pulled the chain for the single bare bulb dangling inside. Weak yellow light spilled out over the hanging coats and junk boxes, flumes of dust floated out, and you had to wave the air in front of your face to keep from coughing. He stepped aside, one hand still holding the door, and tilted his head toward the inside.
You hesitated. “Tim, I can just—”
“Get over yourself,” he cut you off, keeping his face flat and unreadable. Before you could retort again, he stepped in close, using his body to herd you forward until you were inside the cramped space. The door pulled shut behind him with a final click.
The muffled music and laughter from the living room dulled instantly, only the floorboard thumps under your shoes to keep you company.
Tim reached down and fiddled with the dials on his wristwatch, setting the timer with a few soft clicks. Seven minutes. The little hands began ticking immediately.
You both stood awkwardly about a foot and a half apart, your backs pressed against opposite walls of the cramped closet. You kept your eyes glued to the floor, occasionally fiddling with the hem of your shirt or picking at your fingernails. Tim, on the other hand, didn’t even try to hide the fact that he was watching you. His gaze was steadily honed on you, occasionally flicking toward the closed door like he was listening for footsteps or somebody snooping outside. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket, digging around until he found his trusty pack of cigarettes. He shook one out and slid it between his lips like he always did.
Then he started patting his other pockets.
“Shit,” he grunted under his breath. “Left my lighter with Brian.”
“Oh, wait.”
You hesitated for a second before reaching into your back pocket and pulling out the worn silver lighter Brian had given you moments ago. You held it out to him without a word.
Tim’s eyes flicked down to the lighter, then back up to your face. A knowing smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth as he took it from your fingers, his hand brushing yours.
He flicked it open, lit the cigarette, and took a long, deep drag. The tip glowed bright orange in the dim light. He exhaled a thick plume of smoke toward the ceiling, watching it curl and drift in the stale air, pockets of smog dancing like little ghosts around the lightbulb.
You raised an eyebrow. “You really think it’s smart to smoke in a closet this small?”
Tim shrugged one shoulder, completely unbothered. He took another drag, then lowered the cigarette, smoke pooling from between his lips as he spoke.
“Probably not.” His voice was gravelly. “But I've already decided to be in here with you. Might as well add this to the list of bad choices tonight.”
You laughed.
He leaned his head back against the wall, his eyes never really leaving you. The smoke continued to drift lazily between the two of you, filling the small space with the sharp scent of tobacco.
You shifted your weight against the wall under the intensity of his stare, your arms loosely crossed. The smoke was already starting to make the small space feel even stuffier.
“Do you think Jeff’s gonna retaliate at all?” you asked one-offedly, reaching for anything to conversate about.
Tim took another slow drag, then exhaled through his nose. “No.”
He sounded sure. Almost bored.
“Jeff’s emotional and jealous and got a nasty fucking temper,” he continued, flicking ash onto the floor. “But if he’s actually mad, he’ll turn that shit on somebody else. He’s too scared to come at me.”
You let out a laugh, nodding. “Yeah… that sounds about right.”
Tim tilted his head slightly, studying you. “Why’re you concerned?”
“No reason,” you said quickly, shrugging. “Just… you two seem like you’re in some kind of secret competition. It’s weird.”
Tim went quiet for a long moment. He brought the cigarette back to his lips, taking two slow puffs while he thought. Smoke curled up between you like a hazy curtain.
“Maybe we are,” he finally admitted.
You shook your head. “You’re not the type to do childish shit like that.”
Tim let out a short, rough laugh, almost like he was surprised by your response.
“For the right person?” he said, “I might.”
The silence that followed felt heavier than moments before. The muffled noise from the living room seemed to fade even further away, only the cadence of the speakers thumping enough to let you know the party was still happening. You were both just… looking at each other.
Then Tim pulled the cigarette from his mouth and held it out to you, offering it between two fingers.
You took it carefully. When you brought it to your lips, you could still feel the warmth from his mouth on the filter. You took a puff, the smoke filling your lungs with that familiar burn.
Tim’s gaze stayed locked on your mouth, watching the way your lips wrapped around the same spot his had just been. His head tilted slightly, something unreadable shifting in his face as he tracked the motion.
When you lowered the cigarette and exhaled, he was still staring. So you stared right back at him, no longer pretending to study the floor.
Tim looked… different tonight, even if only slightly. His clothes were his usual thick jacket and jeans, but they were cleaner than normal, no random gunpowder smudges, no dirt or dried blood. His hair was a little more put together, and that ever-present stern, gruff expression sat heavy on his face like it always did.
It was nice seeing him without his mask amongst so many people, but that also meant that he couldn’t hide behind it, that he had to face you and everyone else with his whole self—no Masky there to save him.
“You’re being tense,” he said bluntly, breaking the silence.
“Well, yeah,” you answered, letting out a short breath.
Tim shrugged one shoulder, reaching out to take the cigarette from you and promptly taking two deep drags. “We’ve been alone together plenty of times before. This isn’t any different.”
“It is different,” you countered. “This isn't a mission or some supply run or something. This is… this.” You gestured vaguely at the cramped space left between you.
“I didn’t know context mattered that much to our relationship.”
You let out an awkward little laugh, shifting against the wall. “It’s funny you’re even calling it a relationship.”
Tim raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
You just shook your head, laughing again under your breath, unsure how to answer. He was being so blunt tonight, more direct than usual, like the straightforwardness was a shield. You could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his jaw kept flexing, but he wouldn’t relax. It was like he was ready to punch you and run at any moment, if he wasn’t going to yell at you first.
“…Are you nervous?” you asked quietly.
Tim didn’t answer right away. He glanced down at the watch on his wrist, studying the little ticking hands.
“Six minutes left,” he said instead, completely sidestepping the question.
You let out an awkward laugh and shook your head.
“It’s okay if you’re nervous, you know,” you told him. “This is weird, but it’s just a stupid game to embarrass everyone. It’s not serious.”
Tim’s eyes narrowed. “I know that.”
He passed the cigarette back. You brought it to your lips and inhaled, mostly just to give your hands something to do. The smoke filled your lungs, but it did nothing to ease the thick tension sitting between you, even if it did make you a little lightheaded.
The two of you kept staring at each other.
You finally spoke again. “Are you only playing because Jeff egged you on?”
Tim let out a dry laugh and looked down at his boots for a second before his gaze returned to yours.
“No,” he said simply. “I’m playing because I wanted to.”
“Why would you want to play something like this?”
“Why would you?” he asked, turning the question right back on you.
The air felt heavier. You swallowed. “I’m… not sure.”
Tim’s eyebrow lifted slightly.
“Really?” It seemed like he was almost teasing you.
You held his gaze for a long second, then let out a breath.
“No.”
He took the cigarette back when you offered it, but he didn’t bring it to his lips right away. He just kept watching you, smoke curling slowly from the tip.
The timer on his watch continued its quiet ticking. Five minutes left.
Tim finally spoke again. “Good. At least we’re being honest now.”
You narrowed your eyes at him.
“You think I’m not being honest?”
Tim shook his head slowly. “Not with yourself.”
You let out a short, disbelieving breath. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You’re not being honest with what you want.”
“Oh, so you know what I want now?” you shot back, irritation rising fast. “You know what’s best for me?”
“Yeah,” he said simply, like it was obvious. “I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
That irritated you more than it should have. You pushed off the wall slightly, glaring up at him.
“You’re just being rude now, man.”
“You’ve never had a problem with my rudeness before.”
“Context,” you muttered, reiterating the idea he couldn’t seem to grasp.
“Ah, yes,” he said, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Context.” He took one last drag before dropping the cigarette and crushing it under his boot. “Like the context of Jeff pretending he’s got some kind of claim over you… and you going along with it.”
Your stomach twisted. “Jeff does not have a claim over me.”
The words had barely left your mouth before Tim took a single, big step forward.
The already cramped closet shrank instantly. He loomed over you, his broad shoulders blocking out most of the weak light from the bulb overhead. The smell of smoke and pine and that familiar warm scent that always clung to him filled the air between you, almost overwhelming you. You pressed your back against the wall once again.
He stared down at you, almost looming.
“Then who does?”
His face was close now, close enough that you could see the thick stubble on his jaw and the tired lines at the corners of his eyes. He wasn’t touching you, but the sheer presence of him made your back press harder against the wall.
You glared up at him, your heart kicking against your ribs as the silence stretched, but after a long moment, you finally answered.
“Nobody.”
You caught it.
For just a split second, Tim’s dark eyes flicked down to your mouth as you said the word, watching the shape of it on your lips. He snapped them back up to yours almost immediately, probably hoping you didn’t catch it. But you did.
You swallowed, then added, “Not even Slenderman.”
Tim let out a short, rough laugh.
“He wouldn’t like hearing you say that too much.”
“Well…” you tilted your head slightly, still staring up at him, “he’s not here, is he?”
This time, Tim didn’t even try to hide it. His gaze dropped to your mouth again and stayed there longer. You watched his jaw flex, the muscle ticking under the skin as his eyes traced the curve of your lips.
It felt like it was getting harder to breathe.
When his eyes finally dragged back up to yours, they seemed darker than before.
“No,” he murmured. “He’s not.”
Before you could say anything more, Tim reached into his jacket pocket again, pulling out the same pack of cigarettes.
You huffed. “Seriously? It’s been, what, two minutes since your last one. Can you really not take a break?”
He didn’t answer. He just shook another cigarette out, lit it with the same silver lighter you’d handed him earlier, and took two puffs. The tip burned bright orange, and exhaled the smoke through his nose.
Then his hand moved.
He reached out and clasped your jaw firmly, his thick fingers pressing into your cheeks and smooshing them together until your lips puckered. Your hand flew up on instinct, grabbing his wrist and tugging down, but he didn’t budge an inch. His grip was strong.
“Tim—” your voice was a little muffled against the strain of his grip. For a second you wondered if you’d actually pissed him off.
“Open.”
You blinked. “What?”
“Open your mouth.”
You searched his face, looking for any sign that he was joking, but there was nothing playful there. You didn’t know if you could laugh out of caution of making him more mad, so… you did what you were told.
When he was satisfied, Tim leaned in and placed the lit cigarette between your puckered lips, then used his thumb to close your mouth around it.
“You know what to do,” he murmured.
He didn’t let go of your jaw.
You had no choice but to inhale. You took a normal, comfortable drag, the smoke filling your lungs before you exhaled it through your nose. You stared up at him, confused, waiting for some kind of explanation. Was this supposed to be degrading? Some weird power move? Or some weird one-off joke that you’ve never known him to make?
But his grip stayed firm on your cheeks, and his expression didn’t change. He didn’t look satisfied.
You started to squirm, pawing at his arm. “Tim—”
“More,” he said.
You tried to speak around the cigarette, fumbling the filter between your teeth. “What’s happening right now—”
He stepped even closer, one of his boots planting between your feet so your legs were forced to part slightly. His other hand came up to tilt your chin higher, making you look straight up into his face. The overhead light cast harsh shadows over his stern features.
“Keep going,” he grunted.
You furrowed your brows, but obeyed, taking another drag. Then another. He watched every inhale with utmost interest.
“C’mon,” he said quietly, almost coaxing you. “Don’t stop.”
You inhaled again, deeper this time, pulling harder on the cigarette. The smoke burned hotter going down. Your head started to feel light.
“Again,” he continued. “As much as you can.”
You kept going, breath after breath, the nicotine hitting harder with every pull. Your vision began to swim. A heavy, dizzy fog rolled over your mind as the rush flooded your system. Your knees felt weak. The hand you had on his arm tightened, trying to steady yourself as the world tilted slightly.
Tim’s grip on your jaw stayed iron-still, holding you in place while he watched your face closely, seeing every detail of your flushed cheeks and drooping eyes and your steadily relaxing muscles.
“That’s it,” he muttered, soothing, almost. “One more. Big one.”
You whimpered softly around the cigarette, head spinning badly now, but you did it anyway. You pulled long and deep until your lungs were burning and the dizziness crashed over you like a wave. The nicotine buzz was overwhelming and sharp and heady, and making everything feel floaty and too warm.
Tim finally pulled the cigarette from between your lips.
You immediately exhaled hard, right into his face—a thick cloud of smoke rushing out as you tried to empty your burning lungs. The motion triggered a coughing fit. Your eyes watered, your vision became blurry, and you felt completely dizzy and messy, probably looking a little disheveled.
But Tim kept his hand firmly on your jaw, holding your face in place. A small grin tugged at the corner of his mouth as he watched you struggle, not out of malice but he was clearly satisfied now.
Your head was still swimming badly. You tried to steady yourself, taking shaky, deep breaths of the thick, smoggy air in the tiny closet. The nicotine buzz was intense, making everything feel too floaty and too warm and too out of your body.
“Tim… I feel really dizzy,” you managed, a little breathless.
You heard him chuckle, “I know.”
His thumb slowly dragged across your bottom lip, wiping away the spit that had gathered there from coughing and your heavy breathing. His eyes followed the motion.
Then, without warning, he brought the cigarette back to his own mouth, took one long, final drag, and dropped it to the floor. He crushed it under his boot right next to the first one.
Before you could even catch your breath, Tim leaned down and kissed you.
He grabbed both sides of your face with his rough hands, holding you firmly as he brought your faces together. Your hands shot up and pressed against his chest, bracing yourself against the embarrassment that was breaking through your mental haze. This was ridiculous. It was some weird, controlling kink thing… but your brain wasn’t working well enough to care.
All you could focus on was how warm his hands felt against your cheeks and how good his mouth felt on yours.
Then his tongue pushed past your lips, and he breathed the smoke from his lungs into your mouth.
The sudden rush made your head spin all over again. You let out a muffled groan and gripped the front of his jacket tighter, your fingers twisting into the thick fabric. Tim responded by dropping his hands to your waist and yanking your body flush against his.
Oh.
He was hard. You could feel him clearly through his jeans, pressed against your lower stomach. For a split second, nervousness flared in your chest.
Should you be nervous? Probably.
But the thought dissolved almost as quickly as it came.
Fuck it.
You kissed him back harder, desperate to feel something solid amongst all of your dizziness. Tim groaned in his throat and tilted your head, kissing you like he was starving for it, like this was all he’d ever wanted.
It became too much.
The smoke, the nicotine, the heat of his body—you couldn’t breathe. You pushed against his chest with both hands. Tim pulled back just enough for you both to gasp for air.
Thick smoke wafted out of both of your mouths, curling between your faces and up into the muggy air. You noted how Tim’s face looked, how the smoke parted around his jaw and up above the dark hair in his head. His eyes were dark, his pupils blown wide as he stared down at you. His hands stayed locked on your waist, but his chest rose and fell rhythmically under your palms.
It was getting hard to tell if Tim had always looked this good, or if the overwhelming amount of nicotine in your bloodstream was making your brain go numb.
But after a minute of panting, you felt your senses returning—most notably, the loud pulse of the music from the living room vibrating through the walls and into your shaky bones. You slowly started regaining your steadiness, the dizzy fog beginning to lift. Tim slid a flat palm up your back.
“Deep breaths,” he hums.
You obeyed without thinking, too deep in whatever headspace he’d pushed you into to pretend it didn’t feel ridiculously good. Each inhale felt almost euphoric, your chest rising and falling as you breathed in the thick, smoky air. You gripped the shoulders of his jacket, and after a moment you noticed he was breathing in time with you, drinking down fresh air as you did.
You glanced up at his face. The usual stern mask he wears had fallen into something lazier, almost hazy. He looked a little lost just staring at you with his half-lidded eyes.
When you blinked long enough to reset your vision, you met his eyes again, and he began to lean in toward your lips, his eyes dropping to your mouth in time with his movement. You let him come to you, tilting your chin up to meet him—
His watch started beeping sharply under his sleeve, knocking the moment right off kilter.
You both jerked back, staring at each other like you’d completely forgotten why you were even in the closet in the first place. Whatever obnoxious spell you both were under vanished. From outside, the music in the living room suddenly cut off. You could hear laughter and the sound of people scrambling down the hallway toward you.
Tim stepped back, putting space between you again. He adjusted his jeans, and tried his best to smooth his jacket out. By the time the door flew open, you were both standing roughly where you started with your backs against opposite walls, trying (and failing) to look casual.
The closet door swung open and you were immediately hit with fresh air and very nosy faces.
Toby’s was the only one you registered, though. The thick cloud of smoke rolled out past them into the hallway. He wrinkled his nose dramatically, grimacing at you two.
“J-Jesus, man,” he laughed. “You’re really smm-smoking in h-here? In a fucking clo-closet?”
Tim just blew air through his nose, clearly unimpressed. He shoved Toby’s head to the side and stepped out, brushing past the group without another word. He didn’t even glance back at you before heading down the hall.
You tried to follow, but Toby’s eyes locked onto you and he let out a shrill laugh.
“Ho-ly shit. You don’t loo-look too hah-hot right now.”
“Shut up,” you groaned, brushing past him as he started firing off questions.
“What’d h-he do? D-Did he make yo-you cry? Why do you smell like an ahh-ashtray? Wait—did you guys actually do an-anything or—”
You ignored him and made a beeline for the kitchen, desperate for something cold to drink. Your head was still swimmy and light, the nicotine making everything feel slightly tilted as you stumbled through the still-trashed house.
You passed Tim on the way. He had already found his usual spot right next to Brian, the two of them leaning against the wall like they were physically incapable of being more than three feet apart for more than ten minutes. Tim’s eyes flicked to you as you walked by, but he didn’t say anything. Brian, however, didn’t take his eyes off of you as you passed, gathering all the information he needed just from the state of you.
You yanked open the fridge, grabbed the first beer you saw, and popped it open. You drank nearly half of it in one go, the cold yeasty liquid soothing your raw throat and helping ground you a little.
Unfortunately, you weren’t alone for long.
Toby wandered in after you, Natalie right beside him and EJ trailing quietly behind them. The three of them formed a little triangle, watching you like a very nosy, very abrasive little troupe of bastards.
Most of the party in the living room had devolved into loud chugging contests and some money-gambling version of Go Fish that involved way too many rules and even more yelling. You were grateful almost everyone else was too distracted to notice how obviously rattled you were—except for these dipshits.
Toby leaned on the island counter, grinning wide enough to make your blood boil a bit. “So… you guh-gonna tell us what hah-happened in there or do w-we have to guess?”
Natalie tilted her head. “You look like you just got punched in the face… but, like, not in a bad way.”
You opened your mouth, ready to snap something mean and defensive, but before you could get it out, Brian walked into the kitchen.
“Alright, that’s enough,” he waved a hand at the trio. “Move along. Go have your little orgy somewhere else and leave people alone.”
Jack let out a raspy little laugh, which was rare enough that it surprised you into laughing too. Toby whined dramatically but let Natalie tug him away. The three of them shuffled out, Toby still throwing questions over his shoulder until they disappeared back toward the living room and out of your field of vision.
Once they were gone, Brian opened the fridge, rummaged through the junk and pulled out a beer for himself, then popped the tab. He leaned against the counter across from you and took a sip as he studied your face, which you were trying very hard to make seem normal.
“You alright?” he asked quietly.
You nodded, sipping at your beer if only to give your hands something to do. “Yeah… just a little… shaken up.”
Brian gave an understanding nod. “Tim can be a little intense sometimes. He’s either completely honed in or not interested at all. Sometimes he forgets that not everybody is like that, too.”
Your face burned with embarrassment, but if there was anyone you could talk to about this, it was Brian. He knew Tim better than anyone.
You tapped the cold glass of the bottle in your hands for a second, then asked, “Do you think he only did it because he was pissed about Jeff?”
Brian shook his head immediately.
“Nah. Tim doesn’t work like that. Jeff’s just an annoying, loud mouth kid to him. He doesn’t lose his head over shit like that.”
You stared down at your beer, chewing on your lip. “Then… why?”
Brian took another sip, then jerked his chin toward the back door.
“He’s out on the porch right now. And—he’s not smoking.” Brian raised his eyebrows. “When Tim’s not smoking, it means he’s thinking. Thinking real hard.”
He pushed off the counter, nodding toward the fridge.
“Go take him a beer. That’ll ease him up.”
You watched Brian disappear back into the living room, then immediately pressed the cold beer bottle against your forehead and closed your eyes. The chill helped a little, but your stomach was still doing nervous flips. Not scared-of-Tim flips. Just stupid, schoolgirl-crush, heart-in-your-throat flips. Barf. It was embarrassing as hell.
“Get it together,” you muttered to yourself.
You popped open the fridge again, grabbed the last beer, and started heading for the back porch.
But the second you reached the kitchen doorway, you froze.
Jeff was standing there, leaning against the frame, and blocking your path. He didn’t say a word. Just stared at you. And it was so… unreadable. His eyes flicked over your face, your slightly messy hair, the flush still lingering on your cheeks.
You stared right back.
The silence stretched uncomfortably. For a moment it felt like neither of you would move, but for as much ruckus as Jeff had caused tonight, you were more-than-willing to be rid of him right now. You had bigger things on your plate.
You squared your shoulders and shoved past him, knocking his arm out of the way with your shoulder.
He didn’t try to stop you.
You moved quickly through the hallway, the noise of the party fading behind you as you pushed through the back door and stepped out onto the wrap-around back porch.
The night air was cooler out here compared to the thick mug of coffee alcohol and smoke inside, trading the damp smells for fresh pines and wet dirt. Most of the party had moved or stayed inside, so the porch was vacant for the most part. But at the far end, where the railing curved into shadows and no one could see if they didn’t come outside, stood Tim.
He was leaning forward on the railing, staring out into the dark tree line like he was looking for something. He didn’t turn when he heard the door open. He didn’t glance over as your shoes creaked across the wooden planks. But you knew that he knew it was you.
You walked up and stopped beside him, setting the unopened beer on the railing near his hand, little beads of condensation dripping onto the wood.
For a few seconds, there was only the sound of crickets and the low hum from inside. You looked out into the treeline too, seeing how the dark shadows gave way to a black void beyond where the porch lights could reach. There were so many creatures and monsters out there, but none of them even came close to shaking your nerves like the man standing right next to you.
“Hey.”
Tim finally turned his head, his eyes sliding over to meet yours.
Tim’s stare had always been like iron, so sharp and guarded and prickling with intensity that kept almost everyone at arm’s length. But right now it looked… weary? Tired in a way that seemed deeper than just the late hour and the shitty beer.
Then his gaze dropped to the bottle in your hand.
“What’s this?”
“Peace offering,” you said, pushing it toward him a little further. “You looked like you could use one.”
Tim looked at you again, then at the bottle, before taking it. He twisted the cap off and took a long pull. Almost immediately his face twisted and he huffed through his nose.
“Jesus Christ, that’s awful.”
You couldn’t help but smile as you took another drink from your own. For a while, the two of you just leaned against the railing side by side, listening to the crickets and the distant rustle of the woods. The party noises inside felt miles away.
Eventually Tim huffed again, almost like he was annoyed with himself.
“I’m sorry for overstepping in there,” he said quietly. “I got lost in the theatrics of it all.”
You shook your head. “I would’ve told you to stop if I didn’t like it.”
…
You both caught it at the same time—the admission, the way it lingered. Your eyes met again.
Tim turned his head fully toward you, that weary look sharpening into something more focused.
“Did you like it?” he asked, and it’s like the words turned to static as they reached your ears.
You looked down at your shoes for a minute.
It had thrown you off, sure. The tightness of the space, the weird dynamic between you two, even the sheer amount of embarrassment from having to play this game at all made your brain feel like mush. But you couldn’t deny it.
It felt good.
The dizziness. The way your head went fuzzy and floaty. The way he took control of you completely and didn’t let you hide from it. The way every thought in your brain is stamped out the moment oxygen is absent from you.
Yeah… it felt good. A lot better than you were ever going to admit.
You took a big drink to buy yourself time for something witty to say, only to realize you’d already finished the entire bottle and there were only droplets left. You sighed and met his stare again.
“It’s a weird question,” you grimaced with an awkward little laugh.
Tim didn’t laugh with you.
He pushed off of the railing and stepped closer, close enough that you were suddenly the same distance apart as you’d been in that stupid closet. And who would’ve thought, but the fresh air out here suddenly became thicker in your lungs too.
His free hand lifted slowly. You watched it rise, your heart kicking off its rapid thumps like shoes in a washing machine once again. His fingers brushed the side of your neck first, and he was sure to feel the goosebumps that were rising there, before they slid from their position to lace around either side of your throat. His palm rested just under your chin.
You stalled completely. Went stock-still.
Heat flooded your face so fast you were sure you looked ridiculous. That familiar, stupid nervousness rushed back over you like a wave, making your breath catch and the tips of your fingers feel numb.
“Do you know your answer now?” he grumbled.
You stared up at him, completely dumbfounded. The words wouldn’t come. Your mouth opened, but nothing came out. Before you could find your voice, Tim reached down with his free hand and pried the empty beer bottle you’d forgotten about from your fingers. He set it on the railing beside his own, then closed the last bit of distance between you until your noses almost bumped.
His fingers flexed against the sides of your neck, applying the easiest amount of pressure to your airway.
You gasped sharply and your hands flew up on instinct, grabbing his wrist tightly.
“Is this okay?” he murmured.
You didn’t answer right away. The pressure made your breath go shallow, a warm, heavy feeling blooming in your head. It wasn’t painful—just intense. Overwhelming. Your pulse hammered against his palm.
After a second, you gave him a small nod.
That was all he needed.
Tim leaned in and kissed you, his beer-tasting lips sliding to meet yours, while his hand squeezed a little harder around your throat. It pinpointed your senses onto him—onto how labored he was making your breaths, how fuzzy he was making you feel, how warm and mushy and light all at once.
You whimpered against his mouth, the sound embarrassingly whiny and needy as you squeezed your eyes shut. Your fingers tightened around his wrist, doing little to keep yourself afloat as your knees weakened.
Tim’s other hand slid down and grabbed your hip firmly, fingers digging in as he pulled you tighter against him.
You tilted your head up further, sliding your hands from his wrist all the way up to the collar of his jacket. You tugged at him, yanking his chest flush against yours. Tim grunted, growling into the kiss and pushing his tongue between your lips, invading your senses.
Things started to get muggy really quick.
His hand around your throat tightened just enough to make your airway feel suddenly shallow. Every breath came out smaller, sweeter, turning your little gasps and whines into something embarrassingly needy between kisses. The more you whimpered, the more Tim chuckled warmly against your mouth.
He finally pulled back just enough for you to gasp in a proper breath, but his hand stayed glued around your throat firmly. Spit glistened on your swollen lips. You were the picture of bliss right now with your hazy eyes and flushed cheeks and lightheaded demeanor. Tim studied your face for a second, then shook his head slightly, like he wasn’t satisfied.
“You’re still too coherent,” he grumbled.
His hand left your hip and rose to your mouth. His thumb traced slowly around your wet lips, smearing the spit across them until they shone. Then he pushed his thumb between your parted lips, sliding it over your tongue.
You tasted the salt of his skin and sighed.
He gently bobbed his thumb in and out of your mouth, teasing, his eyes locked on the sight. You wrapped your lips around it instinctively and started licking, swirling your tongue under the pad of his thumb like it wasn’t completely desperate and embarrassing.
The effect on Tim was immediate, though.
“Fuck…” He pressed his thumb deeper for a moment, then pulled it out slowly, dragging it across your bottom lip. His hand around your throat flexed again, applying that perfect amount of pressure that made your head swim even more and your blinking grow more rapid.
“You have no idea what you look like right now.” His hips pressed forward against you, letting you feel exactly how hard he was. “How good you look.”
Tim dipped his thumb back into your mouth, sliding it slowly over your tongue. Without thinking, you started bobbing your head, sucking on it with gently eager pulls.
“Good job,” his voice dripped with approval.
The words hit you like a spark to dry tinder. Your stomach flipped, heat flooding low in your belly.
He pulled his thumb out, dragging it across your bottom lip and leaving your mouth open and wet. Then he latched his mouth back into yours, kissing you deeply while his hand squeezed tighter.
You moaned into his mouth, the sound snagged as your air began to dissipate.
The kiss turned heated, your tongues sliding hot and messy, teeth nipping each other's lips, both of you breathing hard through it. Tim growled against you, devouring every little sound you gave him.
He pulled back just enough to speak. “If you wanted this the whole time, you could’ve just asked, sweetheart.”
Then his grip on your throat tightened hard.
Your eyes widened. A sharp, shrill sound escaped you as your airflow suddenly cut off completely. Your hands flew back to his wrist, gripping tight. Your eyes fluttered with tears and rolled slightly as the pressure built fast in your head.
“That’s it,” he kept his voice steady. “Don’t be too loud now, can’t have anybody seeing what a mess you are, now can we?”
In your haze, everything felt overwhelming. The rush of blood making your face burn hot. The tight, rigid tension in your body. The floating sensation in your head. It was turning you on so badly you could barely think, could barely keep tabs on the rest of your body.
So, you gave in.
Your body went a little limp in his hold, trusting him, melting against his chest. Failed little breaths turned into choked, whimpering moans that rumbled against his palm. Your thighs pressed together as heat throbbed between them horribly. Tim groaned in time with your sounds, pressing his hard cock against your hip and grinding away, letting you feel how much this was affecting him too.
“Does it feel good?” his lips brushed your cheek as he kissed you almost tenderly. “You can let go. I’ve got you, doll.”
You were clawing at his wrist now, not to pull him off, but because the pressure in your head kept building at a staggering rate, a bright white heat spreading through your senses, numbing everything else. It felt so fucking good. So freeing. Like every nerve in your body was lit up and floating at the same time.
You felt warm lines of tears roll down your cheeks.
“Awh… poor thing,” he breathed. “Don’t you know anybody could walk around this porch right now and see you? Anyone can see what a… fuck… what a mess you are.”
He stilled up after he said that, like he realized something, like he just had the air punched out of him.
Then he finally let go.
The rush of air back into your lungs hit you like a truck. You coughed violently, your chest doing great swoops as you gasped and choked, desperately trying to pull oxygen back in and getting interrupted by your own coughs. Your legs buckled, but Tim caught you, his arms wrapping around your waist and holding you upright against his chest.
He grumbled his support through it, “There you go. Take it easy.”
When you finally felt steady enough, you lifted your head from its position of staring blearily down at your shoes. Your cheeks were wet with tears, and you could still feel the mess of spit on your swollen lips. The embarrassment tries to wash over you, but is ultimately overpowered by the thumping ache in your stomach and head.
Tim tilted your chin up with his thumb, studying your face carefully.
“You alright?” he asked, glancing from one eye to the other, registering how much wider your pupils had become.
You took a shaky second, then nodded. “…Yeah.”
It was silent for a moment, before you both spoke again:
“You satisfi—?”
“Can you do it again?”
Tim groaned. “Fuck.”
He grabbed your arm and tugged you backward along the porch, moving you both around the corner of the house where the wrap-around deck tucked against the wall. It was much more private here—someone would have to step fully outside and round the corner to see you.
The second you were hidden from view, Tim’s hands landed on your shoulders and pushed you down.
Your knees hit the wooden planks without any resistance. The dizziness was back full tilt, so you swayed a little as you settled, fighting the fog in your head to look up at him. Tim towered over you, broad and dark against the night sky, the porch light casting sharp shadows across his burly face.
Jesus Christ, he’s hot as fuck.
He stared down at you for a moment, breathing harder now, his chest rising and falling in big pulses. He brought both hands to either side of your face, cupping your cheeks and curling his fingers under your jaw. His thumbs brushed over your tear-streaked skin, wiping some of it away.
You broke eye contact and looked straight ahead, right at your eye level.
Fuck.
Tim’s bulge was obvious, straining hard against the front of his jeans, the thick outline pulsing slightly with his heartbeat. Your lips parted on a shaky gasp. Even with your vision still a little blurry from the lack of oxygen, it was so evident, you couldn’t look away. Your mouth watered.
You wanted it. Horribly.
Tim slid one hand to the back of your head, cupping it to keep your limp, oxygen-deprived body from tipping over. Your skin felt prickly all over, your nerves buzzing and firing off in little shivers.
You dragged your gaze back up to his face, swallowing hard.
“I want it,” you whispered, your voice so small you barely even heard it.
Tim’s lips curved into a grin, his eyebrows raising in mock question. The sight of it made your stomach flip.
“Yeah?” he murmured, stroking your cheek with his thumb. “You want it so bad… then you’re gonna have to take it for yourself.”
Your eyes dropped back down in front of you, then up to his belt. Your hands felt weak, but you raised them anyway and you worked at his belt buckle, the metal clinking as you pulled the leather through the clasps, fighting to get it open.
Tim didn’t help you. He just stood there, letting you struggle with the button and zipper, punctuating every step of the way with little sighs or grunts of approval.
“That’s it,” he said when you finally got the zipper down. “Go on, then. Show me what you want.”
Tim leaned his shoulders back against the side of the house, the wood creaking under his weight as he rolled his hips forward just slightly, like he was offering himself to you—or asking you to hurry up—you weren’t sure.
He was wearing dark navy boxers, and right at the tip of the very prominent bulge there was a small, damp spot where the fabric clung to him. Heart hammering, you shifted higher on your knees. Your hands were still shaky from the lack of oxygen earlier, but you reached up anyway, curling your fingers into the waistband of his boxers. His skin was warm, almost hot, under your fingertips. You noticed the dark trail of hair starting just below his navel, leading down and disappearing beneath the fabric.
You swallowed hard and tugged his boxers down.
The second you pulled them past his hips, his cock sprang free, so heavy, bobbing once right in front of your face.
Oh my god.
He was big. Not porn-star scumbag long, but thick like the rest of his body, girthy in a way that made your stomach tighten with nervous excitement. The flushed head was already glistening with pre-cum, a shiny bead forming at the slit and threatening to drip right there in front of your lips. He was thickest in the middle, the length curving a bit where a prominent vein snaked the underside, throbbing every few moments. You could see it twitch slightly in time with his pulse. All to lead to a dark, messy patch of hair at his pelvis.
Everything felt hazy. You were a little awestruck and more than a little intimidated.
Tim let out a relieved huff when his cock finally fell free, almost like he’d been holding his breath. You could feel the heat rolling off him, smell the musk of his skin and the air from the night. Your thighs pressed together instinctively as another wave of dizzy heat washed through you.
Tim’s voice groveled from above you, “You gonna just stare at it all night?”
There was a punch of amusement in his tone, but mostly it was strained, like he was trying very hard to stay patient while you knelt before him, wide-eyed and visibly overwhelmed.
His cock gave another twitch right in front of you, another bead of pre-cum forming at the tip.
“I… I’ve never… I mean—”
Tim chuckled. “Use your words.”
You swallowed over the lump in your throat, your cheeks burning hotter. “I’m nervous,” you mumbled. “I’ve never done… this before.”
Tim raised an eyebrow, tilting his head so he was looking down the bridge of his nose at you. The corner of his mouth twitched.
“Nobody’s used this mouth before?” he asked, almost disbelieving.
He slid his hand from the back of your head to cup under your chin, his thumb dragging across your bottom lip before tugging it down and parting your lips for him. His brows furrowed as he stared at your open mouth.
You licked your lips nervously. “Will you… be easy?”
Tim let out a chuckle, the sound warm in his chest.
“As much as I can be,” he grinned.
Then both of his hands moved to either side of your head, cupping your jaw and cheeks. You placed your hands over his, clutching his fingers tightly as he guided your head forward. Your heartbeat was so violent in your chest you thought he’d be able to hear it.
“Open up.”
You parted your lips wider, your eyes fixed on his tip as it disappeared under your nose and he eased the head past them. The tip bumped your tongue, the salty taste of his pre-cum spreading across your mouth. You let out a shaky breath through your nose, squeezing his hands harder.
The thick head of his cock slid over your tongue as he pushed in slowly. You opened your mouth wider on instinct, trying to make room for him. He tasted warm and a little gritty, exactly like how he always smelled naturally. Your eyes fluttered closed as you tried to relax your jaw, breathing quickly through your nose.
Tim let out a groan above you, “Fuck… so wet,” his voice tight with restraint.
He angled your head a little more with both hands and pushed forward again. The tip bumped against the roof of your mouth, making you jerk slightly. Tim hissed through his teeth.
“Watch your teeth, sweetheart.”
He adjusted the angle and pushed a little deeper. You felt your lips stretch around him as roughly the first third of his length filled your mouth. It was a lot and heavy on your tongue, stretching your jaw in a way that made your head spin even more.
You ran your tongue slowly along the sensitive underside of the head, licking at the leaking slit.
“Shit—” Tim cursed sharply, his hips twitching forward on their own.
He shifted his weight, steadying himself against the wall, then tugged your head back and forth, bobbing you along the first few inches of his cock. The motion was slow, letting you get used to the size and weight of him.
“That’s it,” he breathed. “Just like that. Relax your jaw… good. Suck a little harder when I pull you forward—mmh—yeah, fuck, just like that.”
He guided your head forward and back, daring to pull you a little deeper on his length every time.
“Easy now,” he instructed, stroking your cheek. “Don’t try to take too much yet. Just focus on relaxing—good. Yeah. You’re doing good.”
You could feel his hesitance in how he grabbed you, how he was holding himself stiff to not jar you too roughly. But you asked for this, so he shouldn’t hold back for your sake.
So when he pulled your head back, you scrunched your brows and pushed forward instead, taking more of him into your mouth. Tim groaned, his thumbs pressing harder into your cheeks as you stretched your lips wider around his size. Nearly halfway now.
You coughed around him, your eyes watering as he filled your mouth so completely. The stretch burned pleasantly at the corners of your lips and your jaw ached from the awkward stretch, but you didn’t pull away. Instead, you let go of his wrists. One hand braced against his pelvis, feeling the tense muscle straining there, while the other wrapped around the thick base of his cock and gave a tentative squeeze.
Tim cursed sharply under his breath, his thumbs digging harder into your cheeks. “There you go,” he grunted.
You leaned in and took him deeper, sucking on the first half of his length as best you could. The hand wrapped around his base made it easier to angle him, letting you slide your lips further down his shaft. You bobbed your head slowly, trying to find a rhythm, your tongue pressing and sliding along the underside as you worked him.
Tim's hips tried to buck forward before he caught himself.
“Shit… you sure you’ve never done this before?” he breathed, staring down at you. “You’re a fucking natural.”
He slid one hand into your hair, gripping just tight enough to guide you, and started pulling your head back and forth rhythmically. You let him set it, relaxing your jaw as much as you could while your hand continued stroking what your mouth couldn’t reach. Your spit was already coating him, making everything slick and messy, dripping down his shaft as your tongue ran over every inch you could reach.
Tim’s breathing grew ragged, broken up by low grunts and curses every time you sucked harder or swirled your tongue around the sensitive head.
“That’s it… ahh—fuck,” he murmured when you choked a little. “Who would’ve thought you’d be this good.”
He rocked his hips in time with the movement of your head, fucking shallowly into your mouth while his fingers stayed tangled in your hair. The obscene wet sounds coming from your mouth were the only noise rivaling the crickets and bugs in the woods, besides Tim’s heavy breathing and the mumbled jump of music from inside. Please let it be loud enough so nobody can hear, you thought.
You tried to take more of him, pushing forward eagerly, but the thick head of his cock nudged against the entrance of your throat and you immediately choked, coughing hard around him. You had to pull back, gasping with watery eyes.
Frustration burned in your chest. You wanted this—wanted him—so you tried again, forcing yourself deeper. Same result. Your throat closed up, and you gagged, pulling back with a wet, embarrassing sound.
One more try. You opened wider, shoved your face forward, and immediately choked again. Lewd, messy noises spilled from your throat as tears pricked at the corners of your eyes.
Tim’s hands tightened on the sides of your head.
“Easy,” he cooed. “Slow down, doll. You’re pushing too hard.”
He guided you back until just the swollen tip rested on your tongue. You sucked on it obediently, apologetically, swirling your tongue over the leaking slit, tasting the salty pre-cum that kept dribbling out. Tim let out a moan, gritting his teeth as he watched.
You tried again anyway, your jaw aching in protest as you shoved forward, furrowing your brows in concentration. The wet sounds that came out of you were filthy. Tim groaned again, but this time he pulled you off completely, his cock slipping from your lips with a slick pop.
You gasped for air, spit and tears smeared across your chin and cheeks as you recollected your senses. Tim wiped at your face with his thumb, smearing the mess even more as he looked down at you.
“You’re doing perfectly,” he strained. “What’s the matter?”
You swallowed, still catching your breath, staring at his throbbing, spit-slick cock hovering in front of you—which you wanted so desperately.
“I want you to go harder,” you choked over a hoarse voice.
“You’ve barely started. You need to get comfortable first—”
“I don’t care,” you cut in, looking up at him with watery eyes. “I want you to use me. Like how you choked me earlier… I want to feel that. I want you to make me feel that way.”
Tim stalled, staring down at you. His cock gave a big twitch right in front of your face, drooling another thick bead of pre-cum that slowly dripped down the shaft. You could see the conflict in his eyes—the careful, controlled part of him warring with raw want.
Then something in his expression shifted.
He reached down and planted his hand firmly on the crown of your head, his fingers curling tight into your hair. He jerked your head back so you were looking straight up at him. His face was dark now, eyes laden with lust.
“I’ll tell you what to do,” he gripped. “But you listen to me. You fight me and you’ll hurt yourself. Understand?”
You nodded quickly, your heart racing.
Tim gripped the base of his cock with his other hand and pulled your head forward. He tapped the glistening tip against your bottom lip a few times, teasing the spit that gleamed there.
“Open.”
You parted your lips obediently, slipping your tongue out to meet him. He slid the head into your mouth, letting you close your lips around it. Then his hand moved to the back of your head, planting a base there.
“Relax,” he ordered. “Don’t fight it.”
Before you could even nod, he pushed forward, sliding deep in one smooth thrust until the head bumped the back of your mouth and pressed against the entrance of your throat. You gagged instantly, but he pulled back just as fast, only to push in again, setting a relentless rhythm.
“Oh, there we go,” he grumbled through his pleasure. “Good fucking girl. Just let me use this pretty mouth.”
Tim didn’t hold back anymore.
He tightened his grip in your hair and started fucking your mouth with punctuated thrusts, his hips snapping forward to push deeper into the wet heat of your mouth with deep grunts and growls. You grabbed onto his jean-clad thighs for balance, digging your fingers into the rough fabric as you squeezed your eyes shut, trying your best not to fight the constant intrusion despite how your body wanted to.
Every forward snap of his hips made his belt buckle jingle beside your ear. Lewd gags and choked little noises escaping you with every thrust as the thick head of his cock battered the back of your mouth.
“Fuck…” Tim hissed through gritted teeth, tugging your hair. “That’s it—just take it. Christ, your mouth feels so goddamn good.”
He moaned when you gagged harder around him, his hips stuttering for a second before he pushed in again, a little deeper this time.
“Shit—easy, sweetheart, easy,” he panted, even as he kept thrusting. “I know it’s a lot—mmh—but your choking is so pretty. C’mon, try again.”
You grunted around him with every deep push, spit dripping down your chin as your throat convulsed. Tears slipped freely down your cheeks now, but you didn’t pull away. You held onto his thighs tighter, trying to take deep breaths of air through your nose whenever he pulled back.
Tim cursed under his breath, half at you, half at himself.
“Fuck, I shouldn’t be doing this to you… not like this—ah, shit—” He groaned loudly as you swallowed around him. “But you feel too fucking good. This greedy little mouth… sucking me like you were made for it.”
Tim slowed his hips, easing you forward until just the thick middle of his cock rested between your lips. He let you suck him slowly, dragging your wrapped lips from the middle of his shaft all the way up to the swollen, leaking tip.
“Relax,” he sighed. “Don’t fight it. You’re gonna take all of me.”
A sharp jolt of nervousness shot through you like electricity, but it only made the heat between your legs throb harder. You blinked slowly with glassy eyes, and nodded around him.
He cupped the back of your head firmer. “Lean your head back a little… yeah, just like that. Open wider for me, doll. Relax your throat. Let me give you what you want.”
You did as he said, tilting your head back and opening your mouth as wide as you could, sucking gently on the tip while your tongue swirled around it.
Tim started pushing in again. This time he didn’t stop where he had before.
You felt the prominent vein along his shaft slide over your tongue as he fed more of his thick cock into your mouth. Your jaw ached from the stretch, especially when he reached the widest part of him. You coughed around his length as the head pressed firmly against the tight entrance of your throat.
“Easy… easy,” Tim breathed, holding you still. “Just breathe through your nose.”
He abused that spot, shallowly fucking the head of his cock against the beginning of your throat with small, insistent nudges that made you gag and choke wetly around him. Spit dripped down your chin in messy strings.
“Relax your throat,” he grit out. “Let me in. Come on, sweetheart, open up for me. I know you can take it.”
You whimpered around his cock, tears slipping down your cheeks again, but you tried—focusing on his voice, on relaxing your throat even as your body instinctively fought the intrusion, on every buzzing nerve in your head.
He pushed forward again, feeding more of his thick cock past the uncooperative ring of muscle at the back of your throat. The stretch burned, and you choked around him, again and again, but Tim didn’t pull back.
“C’mon,” he growled. “Let it happen.”
You tried. God, you tried. But the deeper he went, the harder it became. It was like he was pushing into your brain. You couldn’t tell if you were more frustrated that you weren’t being choked on his cock, or that him choking you like this wasn’t working.
“Look at me.”
You forced your watery eyes to peel open and up to his. The intensity in his stare was almost too much—you had nowhere else to look. Only his tan skin, dark hair, and everything you never knew you wanted so badly.
“Just focus here,” he muttered. “Keep lookin’ at me.”
He kept pushing, inch by inch, until the widest part of his cock forced its way past that tight ring. Your throat spasmed violently around him. You coughed and gagged, your body jerking and trying to pull away, but Tim held your head firmly in place, refusing to let you pull away.
“Shh. Relax… just relax,” he growled, trying to be soothing even as his own breathing grew ragged. “You’re doin’… so good. Takin’ me so deep. Fuck, I can feel your throat squeezin’ me…”
Finally, with one last slow push, he bottomed out.
Your nose pressed flush against his pelvis, buried in the coarse patch of dark hair. His length throbbed deep down your throat, completely cutting off your air. The fullness was overwhelming to an alarming rate.
Tim let out a long groan, his hips jerking and settling as he held you there.
“Jesus Christ… all the way. You got every fuckin’ inch.” His voice was hoarse, something you’d never really heard before. “Good. Such a good fucking job for me.”
You were getting lightheaded fast.
The world blurred at the edges, a warm, floaty haze settling over everything. Your throat fluttered and squeezed around the thick length of Tim’s cock, every tiny twitch and throb pulling another noise from him. But underneath the strain, the ache, the burning stretch… you felt nothing but bliss.
He’d bottomed out completely. The heavy head of his cock nestled deep in your throat like it belonged there. It felt like a bell had rung somewhere inside your skull—a deep, resonant thrum. The pressure, the fullness, the way your body fought and then haphazardly surrendered… it was overwhelming in the best way. You couldn’t breathe. You were gagging softly around him, tears streaming down your face, but none of it mattered. It felt too good. Like being choked from the inside out. Like something filthy touching a part of you no one else had ever reached.
Tim’s hand slid tenderly over your wet cheek, his thumb brushing away some of the tears as he looked down at you.
“So pretty,” he rasped. “So warm.”
His hand drifted lower, cupping under your jaw for a moment, petting you almost sweetly. Then it kept going.
You felt his palm settle over the front of your throat.
Your dazed eyes blinked into focus.
Tim’s fingers curled around your neck, squeezing with a good amount of pressure while his cock stayed buried. Your hand flew up and gripped his forearm where you felt it. A muffled whine vibrated around his length as your vision began to tunnel, black creeping in at the edges. Your head felt like it was floating, pulsing with white-hot heat, but the lack of air made everything sharper and softer at the same time. Everything was contradictory.
“Settle down… I’ve got you,” Tim murmured. “Look at you. You’re doing great.”
He kept the pressure steady, not crushing, but firm enough that every shallow, failed attempt at breath turned into a weak, pathetic gag that made your head strain further. Your body trembled. You felt like you were burning alive—every nerve lit up, body aching, head spinning so badly you thought you might actually pass out.
And you didn’t care.
It felt too good. The numbness, the heat, the overwhelming fullness, how Tim was looking down at you like you were the only thing in the world… it was addictive.
Tim’s thumb stroked over the front of your throat, feeling the way his own cock bulged there as he held you pinned.
You gazed up at him through puffy, tear-blurred eyes, barely separating where his face began and the porch lights ended. But what you could see was flushed raw, his stern mask cracked open to leave nothing but visceral need.
He gave one involuntary bump of his hips, nudging just a little deeper, and cursed sharply under his breath.
“Shit… I’m not gonna last like this,” he growled.
Then something shifted in him. Anxious, restless energy took over, and his hands moved to either side of your head, his fingers threading into your hair as he carefully dragged his cock back. You felt every thick inch sliding out of your throat—the sudden rush of air, the wet, obscene pull, the way your throat shuttered and clenched around nothing once he was almost all the way out.
You barely had time to breathe before he thrust back in.
Fuck.
The stretch burned as he pushed deep again and bottomed out. Then he did it again. And again.
Tim started fucking your throat in earnest.
He was growly now, almost animalistic with deep, frustrated grunts escaping him with every rough snap of his hips. He’d pull back halfway, just enough for you to feel the head drag across your tongue, before slamming back in, forcing himself past that tight ring and burying his cock to the hilt.
“Fuck—that’s it,” he rasped, voice breaking. “Take it. Just fuckin’ take it all.”
Your jaw had gone completely slack, your lips stretched wide around the base of him as he used your mouth. Every thrust punched a wet, choked gag out of you. Spit poured down your chin in messy strings, dripping onto your chest and the wooden porch below. Your hands stayed clenched tight on his thighs, holding on for dear life while he fucked your throat with growing urgency. Your body fought desperately for air that never came, but your brain couldn’t be more happy.
Tim’s hand slid from your hair to your cheek, his rough palm surprisingly gentle as he brushed away some of the tears still rolling down your skin. Then his thumb slipped into the corner of your mouth, hooking inside and pulling your lips open even wider, exposing your tongue for him buried under the weight of his length.
You blinked slowly and let your head go completely lax in his hold. You wanted him to use you exactly how he needed.
“I’m close,” he rasped, groaning as his thrusts turned sharp and frantic. “Fuck… I’m gonna cum.”
You looked up at him through wet lashes. His usually neat hair had fallen forward, dark strands messy and sticking to his forehead, hanging into his eyes. He looked completely undone.
“Shit—fuck,” Tim cursed sharply.
He pulled his cock out of your throat in one smooth motion. You gasped in wet, raw breaths, your chest heaving as fresh air finally rushed back into your lungs. Before you could even steady yourself, his thumb tugged your bottom lip down, holding your mouth wide open for him.
He pressed the swollen, leaking tip of his cock right against your tongue and started stroking himself in fast, frantic strokes. His body shook with how close he was.
You whined loudly around him, the desperate sound vibrating against his tip as you looked up at him with teary, needy eyes, silently begging the best you could.
That did it.
Tim practically growled when he came.
Thick, hot ropes of cum spilled across your tongue and flooded your open mouth. He kept stroking himself through it, gritting his teeth hard to stay quiet, his shoulders shaking as pulse after heavy pulse poured over your tongue. You moaned, the taste so satisfying and evidence of your hard work.
“Ah, God… swallow it all,” he growled through clenched teeth. “Swallow what I give you.”
Even as he came, he kept his thumb hooked in the bottom of your mouth, holding you open so he could watch every rope land on your tongue. His whole body trembled with the force of it, his hips twitching as the last few weak spurts dribbled onto your lips.
“Christ.”
When the last of his release had spilled across your tongue, you closed your lips around the sensitive head of his cock and gently sucked.
Tim’s hips twitching at the overstimulation. “Mmnh… you’re gonna kill me.”
You pulled off, then swallowed, feeling the warmth of him slide down your throat. The taste of him lingered on your tongue, so salty and warm.
Exhausted, you slumped down, your chest heaving as you dragged in deep, full breaths. Your head was still spinning, and you could feel the mess of yourself, all the spit and tears drying on your face. You lifted a hand to wipe at your chin, but Tim caught your wrist and swatted it away.
“I got it,” he muttered.
He slid down the wall, his back pressed to the wood as he tucked himself back into his boxers and jeans, quickly fixing his belt. Then he leaned forward, using his rough hands to haphazardly clean the mess from your cheeks and chin. When he was satisfied, he wrapped his hand around your arm and tugged you forward to turn your back against the wall too, your shoulders leaned against the other’s. The warmth of his body grounded you amongst all the haze.
For the first time you could hear it over the rush in your head, the party was still kicking inside, random yelling and loud music still evident against the quiet out here now.
“You okay?”
You looked over at Tim, whose face was the picture of exhaustion, mental and physical. You nodded, bumping your shoulder against his playfully.
He watched you for another second, then turned his head to stare out through the porch rails into the dark woods. The crickets kept chirping like nothing had happened.
“I shouldn’t have done that to you,” he muttered. “Not out here.”
You let out a tired laugh, leaning your head back against the wall.
“You’re dumb if you couldn’t tell how badly I wanted it,” you said, your voice a lot more hoarse than it had started. “I’m more disappointed you didn’t pull something like that sooner. You clearly wanted it, too.”
Tim quietly chuckled, a bit of light breaking through that dark stormcloud that always hovered above his head. For a moment the two of you just sat there, catching your breath and relaxing again. Then you both turned at the same time, your eyes meeting together. You leaned in slowly, and he did the same, faces drawing closer until your lips were barely a breath apart—
“Whoops.”
You both snapped your heads toward the voice.
Brian stood a few feet away, looking mildly awkward but mostly amused, three open beers clutched between his fingers. He was trying and failing to hide the smirk on his face.
“Am I interrupting?” he asked, tone far too innocent.
Tim let out a long, exhausted sigh and dragged a hand down his face. “C’mon, man.”
Brian stepped closer anyway and handed over two of the beers. Tim took them, passing one straight to you without a word. You accepted it gratefully and took a big, long drink. The cold, bitter liquid felt like heaven on your raw throat.
“Toby had a whole stash under his bed,” Brian explained, leaning against the railing across from you. “Party’s kinda revived itself since you two disappeared. People are doing chugging contests again.”
He took a sip of his own beer, eyes flicking between the two of you with barely-hidden amusement.
“So… had a good time mingling?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
Tim shot him a flat look. “How much did you hear?”
Brian shrugged, the picture of innocence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was just guarding the door like a responsible friend looking out for his pals.”
You nearly choked on your beer. Tim just shook his head, muttering something under his breath as he took a long drink from his own bottle.
The three of you sat there for a moment in surprisingly comfortable silence, the distant chaos of the party drifting through the walls while the cool night air brushed over your heated skin and wore off the strain. Brian’s smirk never quite went away, but he didn’t push it.
Tim’s shoulder, however, stayed pressed right against yours.
Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are appreciated!
Southern generosity- or something like that. After being stranded on the side of the road, you try your hand at hitchhiking, hoping to catch a ride home.
But when the driver starts taking a detour, you realize you might be in over your head.
!! Masky + Hoodie + Toby x F! Reader !! W/C: 5.9k
-> Including: Dubcon/CNC, roleplay, gun + fear play, cunnilingus, oral (m-receiving), p in v, degradation, objectification, manhandling, choking, praise, dumbification, slight breeding, and domestic fluff :p ->
Moon divider by @strangergraphics
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— ^ ^ —
The breeze whistled like an omen.
You were out of luck after your date bailed, and now you’re stuck on the side of the highway. The guy you were supposed to meet up with ended up ghosting you, so with no change for cabs left, you waved down a truck.
The tires screeched to a halt, and a man stepped out. Dark hair, his parted bangs shadowed his eyes, the car headlights reflecting in his pupils as he called out to you. “Whatcha’ doin’ out here?” His drawl hit you first, then the faint scent of cigarettes followed.
You replied quickly. “My, um- my date didn’t show up. Can I catch a ride with you?” Cringing at your own desperation, but the stranger didn’t seem all too bothered, simply nodding at you. “Hop in.” You shuffled over, quick to slide into the backseat while the engine came to life.
In the rush, the darkness of the night, you’d only registered the others after the doors had locked.
Another man at the passenger side, dirty blonde, with a scar running from his lip to his brow. A boy to your right, his face covered in bandages.
He greets you excitedly, tittering. “Hey, y-you’re out here pretty l-late, huh?” His stutter restarted his words like a scratched record, and you smiled politely. “Yeah, I was supposed to see this guy, but y’know.”
He grinned at that, wide, sharp. “They’ll do that to you- Toby, by the way.” His hand extended out, and you met him there. His palm felt heavily calloused, matching the scars littering his knuckles.
You told him your name, and he hummed. He said he liked it, that it ‘suits you’. It’s almost flirty, but you couldn’t tell. The seat leather sticks to your thighs in the summer heat, street lights flashing by quickly.
As the ride drags on, every time you thought that you had a read on Toby, he’d say something that throws you off. Yet he appears nice enough. Brian, as you’d come to find out, chimed in five minutes later.
“Where ya’ headed?”
Right.
“I’m not too far from here. Barter Drive- Just a little into town.” You responded, fidgeting with your thumbs. The air in the truck is a little stale- dingy, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. Hunters came and went all the time, and they looked like the type.
Toby scooted closer and closer with each passing minute. Your legs were nearly touching when you finally looked up.
He was barely a couple of inches from your face, and the backseat suddenly felt cramped. “I like your s-shirt.” His raspy murmur warmed your cheeks. “Thank you, I like your, uh, sweater.”
You swallowed while he snickered. “Thanks,” Throwing his arm over the headrest, Toby cocked his head to the side, glancing at the dashboard.
“The GPS says you’re a whole t-thirty minutes away. It’s already almost one in the m-morning.”
He spoke lazily, like he knew something you didn’t. As if a decision had already been made long before you opened your mouth. “Well, if it’s too much trouble, you guys could leave me on the edge of town. I can walk the rest of the way.”
He tensed his jaw slightly, shrugging. “Mm. We’re staying at a cabin near t-the lake. It’s closer. Why don’t you spend the night? Tim can drop you off early.” A jarring offer that had you simpering nervously. “Oh, I couldn’t. It’s your space, and you don’t really know me-” However, you were cut short by a grunt from the driver's seat.
“It’s no problem. ‘Sides, we’re right up ahead, and we got a spare bedroom. You’ll be fine.” He didn’t even give you the time to respond, the truck turning off the main road and onto a path between the shrubbery.
The wheels ground against the gravel, the vehicle jolting until it slowed to a stop. Through the window, you could spot a sign in front of the car. “Dead End Road.”
The trail went past their cabin slightly, cutting off abruptly at the trees' border. The house itself sat in the middle of the small clearing. Built from scuffed wood, with a single porch light hanging above the door. Something about the seclusion, the sign that stood out amongst the vast oak, had your gut uneasy.
A warning.
You inhaled shallowly, then Toby hooked an arm around your neck. “Let’s go, c’mon.” Too cheery, he tugged you out of the backseat, dragging you to the porch while your feet scrambled to catch up. The other two followed suit, and you were standing in the foyer in less than five minutes.
“It’s nice in here.” Trying your best to be cordial, you set your shoes on the mat as they did the same. “Well, it ain’t much, but it does what it’s supposed to,” Tim said, nodding at you. Toby then ushered you to walk, and you made your way down the hall. Upon entering the living room, you met eyes with Brian, the man already settled on a lounge chair.
The fireplace crackled, and you waved at him, unsure of how to proceed. “Hi.” His lips twitched up at that, an almost smile when you locked eyes. “Hey.” Toby rested his palm on your lower back, intimate in a way you didn’t expect. His hand pushed you deeper into the room, and he brought you over to the couch, dropping down next to you.
Tim had slumped into a recliner to your left, your seats circling the hearth. His lighter sparked once, twice, before he inhaled, the cigarette burning faintly. “You want somethin’ to drink?” You shook your head, fidgeting with the hem of your shirt. “Where’s the spare room? I think I’m gonna’ turn in-” Brian piped up, interrupting you.
“The night's young, ain’t it?”
Even without looking around, you could feel their eyes boring into you. Like starved wolves waiting for prey to take the bait. “You’re s-so tense,” Toby’s hand was too warm on your thigh, and he closed the proximity by a fraction, nose almost brushing yours when you faced him. “Breathe, jeez.” He sniggered, his pupils flicking down to your lips.
Your heart beat loudly in your ears, body frozen by the atmosphere. Borderline claustrophobic. “Sorry.” You mumbled, having his grin stretch. In that moment, your dead phone came to mind, the evident lack of outside communication enveloping you. “Don’t apologize. We’re just t-talking, nothing s-serious.” His voice had muted to a whisper, then he leaned forward.
Your mouths slotted together, and you scrambled to grip his shoulders. The force of the kiss knocked you onto your back, his frame effectively pinning you down. He wasted no time, with his hips beginning to grind as you struggled for air.
Saliva breached in strings between your lips when he withdrew. “You’re so pretty, y’know that? It makes it h-hard to hold back.” Your eyes were wide, breath coming in short puffs. “I- I thought-” You stuttered, and Tim shoved off his chair, coming into view while you swallowed dryly. His cigarette had been stubbed out into an ashtray, and he crouched.
“I know you’re pent up, s’alright. You jus’ need a little push.” He grasped your chin, forcing your head to the side. His tongue invaded your mouth in a blink, exploring the cavern hungrily. Messy, as your teeth clicked, and you felt Toby start to nibble down your throat. Drifting lower until he slinked off the sofa, his knees thudding against the carpet.
Your jeans were unbuckled, his fingers moving fast- you jerked, making Tim recline. He ran his tongue over his canines. “Relax. It’ll feel good, promise.” Dread, fear and a violating excitement licked up your spine. These were not good men, disgustingly scummy at best, and dangerous at worst. Yet your thighs twitched at the base of his words anyway.
The shorts were towed down your legs, getting tossed onto the floor before Toby mouthed at your clothed cunt. The heat of his tongue had you gasping, and Tim hooked a finger at your shirt’s edge. It was yanked up, exposing your chest. “No bra? I’m startin’ to think you were planning for this.” He snickered, groping the plush.
With Toby humming against your core, Tim began to leave hickeys across your breasts- you arched involuntarily. “Wait, please.” The pleasure came crashing through your body, principal and self-preservation clashing with the wetness building inside your panties. Toby was lapping at you through the cotton, his tongue prodding between your folds, nose nudging your clit.
Your hips started moving on their own, bucking against his face as you whined. He parted from you, licking his lips. “Masky- s-she’s soaked, man. I didn’t even do anything yet.” He chuckled. Yanking you towards him while Tim swirled his tongue around your sensitive bud. Mouth on one, his hand toying with the other.
“Sensitive, ain’t you?” He drawled, giving you one last nip, then rising to his feet. You trembled, Toby devouring you whole when your eyes finally focused on Tim. His buckle clinked, belt hanging loose. You watched him tug at his zipper before his boxer band was pulled down. Hefty, pre-cum beading at the tip of his cock, with a vein along the underside.
He propped a knee behind your head, guiding himself to your lips. “Open up, girl.” He rasped, and your jaw fell slack, salt coating your palate. He rocked inside slowly, lids drooping as he groaned. The sound had you clenching on nothing, and Toby pushed your ruined underwear to the side.
His mouth was so wet. Licking up your spillage, the slick dribbling down his chin. Your eyes rolled up, moaning lewdly around Tim’s length, and he buried his fingers in your hair. Sinking deeper, with the tip grazing the back of your throat. You scratched at the cushions, hands balled by your sides. “Look at you- just fuckin’ askin’ for it.” He scoffed, a cruel smirk spreading across his face.
His grip became harsh, and he hauled you flush against his pelvis. Thrusting his cock balls deep while you gagged. “Chokin’ on me like I’m your man. Where’s yer’ shame, yeah?” He huffed, watching the tears stream down your cheeks. “You ain’t too bad on the eyes, though. Prettiest whore I ever seen.” You writhed in his hold.
The coil in your gut curled taut, building and building- your thighs clamped around Toby’s ears. Your cunt was pulsing wildly, overwhelmed by his tongue. “Mm- fuck.” He groaned into your mound, gulping like it’d kill him if he let your cum go to waste. His fingers dug into your hips, grinding you onto his mouth.
Your legs were shaking when Tim grunted, spilling down your throat hotly. He slid himself past your lips with a low whistle, satisfied. Toby wiped his chin clumsily, crawling onto you as the other man stepped back. However, he was halted by Tim calling out to him. “Rogers, the hell I tell you?” He pouted at that, begrudgingly pushing away from you.
“But I prepped h-her-” He was silenced by Tim’s cold glare, gritting his teeth while he slouched into the armrest. “Can I use her mouth then?” He said, glancing at you, and Tim gave him a curt nod.
Shifting your limp body upright, then hoisting you onto his lap. His cock nudged between the folds of your pussy, lining up the tip with your entrance.
Your head was spinning. Their hands felt wrong on you, but your body was betraying you. Your thighs were sticky, and the mewl that left you when he sank you down on his girth didn’t help your case. You were being stretched beyond your limits, skin dewy with sweat. His cock had fit snug inside you, and it curved to press on your sweet spot hard enough to make your eyes cross. “Ah-”
Toby had shuffled in front of you, jeans already shoved below his ass as he pumped his cock. “Y-you want it, right?” He loomed over you, petting your cheek with an unsteady hand. “Say it. You w-want me-” His careful nature seemed to wane the longer it took for you to respond- ignoring the fact that he was talking a mile a minute.
His once-gentle touch turned abrasive, and he yanked your head back, his grip tangled in your hair. “Say you f-fucking want me.” He snarled, his eyes swimming with a violent desperation. When you nodded frantically, his grasp softened a bit, Toby laughing as if he was drunk. Pupils blown wide. “Yeah- yeah, okay. ‘Cause y-you’re really special, and I don’t wanna’ make you s-sad.”
His pre-cum smeared against your lips while he angled his cock head, filling your throat in one thrust. You hiccuped pathetically at the intrusion, and he cradled your face, rolling his hips forward. “Oh, shit. Ngh- you’re so perfect. Feels s’good- fuck.” You didn’t even have the time to adjust, because Tim started bouncing you a second later.
His cock was thumping up into your cervix, arms hooked under your knees as leverage. Stuffed from both ends, with Toby fucking your mouth, and Tim slamming into your cunt. Your brain was melting.
You could barely keep your eyes open, vision blurry while you blinked. Your gaze drifted past Toby, and the sight had you whining. Brian was slumped against the loveseat, boxers towed off just enough for him to stroke himself. At first glance, he appeared unaffected, but if you looked closer, you’d see it.
The flush in his cheeks, the heave of his chest. His brows were fighting to knot together as he stared, with his eyes half-lidded. Something about being watched with such fervour made you shiver, and Tim’s head pitched back.
You were squeezing down on him like a vice, your little noises having him twitch inside you. He reached up, dragging his hand over your chest and kneading the fat of your tits.
“Fuckin’ made for this, yeah? Gettin’ off to being used by motherfuckers you ain’t know-” He rolled his neck to the left before burying his nose into your shoulder.
“You wanted to act like you hated it, huh? Cry like you ain’t beggin’ for it- fuckin’ slut.” Mocking, his hips drove into you harder, pounding into you with abandon.
You clenched around him, and he cooed, licking a stripe up your neck. “I know, baby. I’ll fill you up- hah- real good.” The squelch of your pussy was embarrassingly loud, your arousal drenching his thighs.
Toby collapsed into you, catching himself with a palm against the couch’s headrest. He held your head firmly in place, his length pumping in and out of your throat. He was panting, drooling like a dog. You felt so fucking good, he couldn’t think. “Ah- shit, please.” His base smacked against your chin, slobber mixing with semi-opaque white.
He came with a breathy grunt, hips jolting- before he quickly tugged himself free. Jacking off onto your face, painting your skin with thick ropes. The gluey substance dripped down your features, milk pooling on your tongue as you presented your mouth. Too far gone, and he giggled, manic. “You’re s-such a good girl, y’know that?” Mashing his lips to yours, cum swirling with his own spit while the other man flooded your tunnel.
“Shit. You’re makin’ me wanna’ keep you.” Tim drawled, taking a moment to catch his breath. he pulled you off of him, letting you slump into the sofa, boneless. Once his words actually registered, the alarm in your gaze made him chuckle.
“Oh, honey- don’t tell me you thought you were still goin’ home.”
Your blood ran cold when he nodded at Brian. “Have at ‘er.” The man stood after the quick acknowledgment, padding over to you, half-tucked back into his boxers. If you’d been more observant, more cautious or weary, you would’ve noticed the holster attached to the back of his belt.
The distinct click of a pistol's safety rang out as Toby sat down to your right, and he kneeled in front of you.
Holding up the weapon, he cocked his head to the side. “You know what this is?” Panic spread from the end of your legs up to your skull. Your mouth faltered, gaping at him until he hummed, monotone. “You scared?” Your body refused to respond, and he lowered the gun, tapping your bare stomach twice with the barrel. “You should be.”
The hairs on your nape rose while he got to his feet. He trailed the cold steel along your collar, stopping at your lips. The harshness of the barrel left goose bumps in its wake, lethal, unhallowed. “Suck.” You swallowed thickly, tears collecting at your lashline. You leaned forward, quivering when you took the metal into your mouth.
The taste coated your tongue bitterly, like grit and unsanctioned barbarity. Adrenaline kept you upright, the only thing holding you back from hyperventilating.
You wish you ran. You wish you had toughed it out till morning, finding a payphone to call a friend. But you didn’t, and you hadn’t.
You bobbed your head slightly, gurgling around the pistol when he forced it deeper. In your periphery, you saw the blur of his hand, and you flinched—
A pet.
He was petting your hair. Smoothing down the strays, his thumb rubbing back and forth. The shock made you freeze, but he was swift to remind you. “Go on.” Not yelling. Not barking demands. Because he didn’t need to.
His calm demeanour was terrifying, too calculating- like he could snap at any moment. As if your fate could be altered at a second's notice, your life sitting in the palm of his hand.
Brian’s inhales grew heavy, dragging his tongue across his teeth. His touch descended from the top of your head to your nape, resting the gun’s grip where his buckle would be as he began rocking his hips. “See? That ain’t so bad.” He murmured, grunting under his breath. He was grinding his bulge against the pistol, the muted pleasure rolling up his frame.
You were scared, fearing your end, your sanity hanging by a thread. Every muscle in your body was screaming, winding tight- before a debased want sparked at your core. Small flickers of ember, matches being struck onto the brick. They scraped and scraped until a flame burst into the dark.
The repetition of the gun thumping into the back of your throat had your mind hazy. Lulling you achingly slow, your shoulders drooped, and you let out a faint whine. But it was enough.
Tim took a drag of the freshly lit cigarette, peering at you. “Well, I’ll be damned, she likes it.” He sniggered, and Brian clicked his tongue. “Course she does. Bet she’s been dreamin’ ‘bout this for years.” Mean as he removed the metal from your mouth, he threw the weapon onto the couch haphazardly. “Jesus, you’re a fucking whore.” His lip curled up into a sneer like he was disappointed.
“On your feet.” He said, eyes cold- you urged your legs to move. Yet your reaction came too late, and his arm shot out, fingers clamping around your windpipe.
He hauled you upwards, your limbs flailing to steady yourself. “When I speak, you listen, and you listen good. Understand?” You clawed at his wrist weakly, whimpering like a hit animal. Your lungs were burning.
He scoffed at your pitiful strength and released you after a beat, spinning you to face the sofa. Your legs buckled when he shoved you forward, wrestling your body to arch. Your knees were spread on the cushion, with your hands finding purchase on the couch top. Quiet rustling, then a calloused palm at your waist-
Brian speared you onto his cock to the hilt, and you wailed.
He didn’t ease you into it; there was no buildup or warning. With his length bullying in and out of your over-sensitive cunt, he fucked you fast and rough. “I can’t- too much, please- please.” He grunted at that, spitting onto your pussy from the back. “Dogs don’t talk.” His hips snapped against you even harder, cruel—
You didn’t mean to.
It wasn’t your fault. Your thighs were barely able to hold your weight, but in the heat of it, your foot jerked. Kicking him with enough power to make the man stagger a tad. He paused instantly, and your heart sank at his next words. “Bad girl.”
You were yanked to his chest, his bicep locking around your neck. He started pounding into your walls, bruising your poor insides as punishment. “Mm- haah- p-please. Didn’t mean it- didn’t-” Your pleas fell on deaf ears, and slick poured down your trembling legs. From the angle he had you in, his tip kept knocking into a spot that had your pupils rolling up.
It felt like you were being ripped in half, bred like a toy with no other purpose. The lack of air was making your vision dot with black, and Toby grinned, watching while he pumped himself. His hand extended, pressing down on the bulge that protruded every time Hoodie would thrust. “You’re s-suh-so pretty like this.” You think your skull was going to explode.
Drool was leaking from the corners of your mouth, jaw slack. Moans punching up your throat by force, “Ah- ah- oh-” You scratched at his bicep, squirming pathetically. He huffed and loosened his hold. Barring an arm around your chest instead, condensing your breasts, his fingers digging into your skin. His breath was feverish against your ear.
“At least pretend you hate me.” He panted, taunting you while driving deeper into your pussy. “Lettin’ us spread your legs, didn’t even have to ask.” The fabric of his sweater was tacky on your back, coarse as he chuckled. “Shit, yer’ makin’ a fucking mess on me- you gonna’ cum?” Your moans scratched your throat raw, and you bucked into him.
Tim clenched his jaw in thought, then he laughed, snatching the pistol. “Don’t worry, hun. We’ll take care of you real nice.” The barrel was pressed to your clit, making you jerk. “No- ngh.” The contrast in temperatures was euphoric, cool metal against your sweltering cunt.
You were toeing the ledge, on the brink, when your shoulders bowed— before Brian stilled behind you.
You squirmed on him, twitching, and he reclined. Stopping you from falling with a fistful of your hair, as he gave your ass a stinging spank. “If you wanna’ cum, you’re gonna’ work for it-”
Rasping, he set his palm on the curve of your spine, pushing you to arch. “Grind.” His voice had dropped an octave, and the baritone had you dripping.
It was mortifying, but you couldn’t help the sway of your hips. With each rut, the steel slid between your folds, pussy split open on his cock. Embarrassment flooded you, your face aflame while your whines heightened in pitch.
Back and forth, back and forth, your orgasm simmering while you shook. Too much and too little all at once.“Please- please, wanna’ cum- please.” You begged, the woven fabric of the sofa sullied beneath you.
Brian gritted his teeth. You were throbbing around him, cunt pulsing. He could fucking hear how wet you are, the sticky squelching echoing through the room every time your ass pressed onto him. He dug his grasp firmer into your waist, the dull pain fuelling your pleasure. Wires had crossed in your head, and you moaned, wanton and needy.
He was staving off his own peak, biting down on his lip to stifle his groan. His patience had withered to nothing, and he sharply hauled your hips back. Cockhead forced against your cervix, stuffing you to the brink. Not fucking you, with the only stimulation being from the stretch and the tainted metal of the weapon. You were too full, so full it hurt— the ecstasy crashed into you mercilessly. “Brian.”
Your head spun, and your view phased in and out, white at the edges. He acted before he could think it through. Perhaps it was your blatant desperation, the way you breathed his name like a prayer. Either way, you felt a stern hand on your jaw.
Jerking your face to the side, his lips molding over yours. His tongue invaded your mouth, sweeping your teeth, consuming you entirely.
He was corrupting your mind, his touch both desecrating and reverent. You whined, and he drank in the sound. Spurting inside you, then releasing you with a messy smack. “Christ.” He exhaled, his length slipping out of your pussy. Brian’s spend leaked from your sopping hole, and his thumb pried you wide when he hummed in approval.
Tim gave your clit a final tap. Tugging the pistol out of the way just in time, your body crumbling onto the chair, beyond exhausted. The surface stuck to your sweat-slicked skin, and you were uncomfortably sticky from head to toe. Yet, just as your lids began to close, a flash went off behind you. It made the last of your adrenaline surge to the front. “W-wait-” Arms like lead, you peeked over your shoulder.
His unfeeling smirk told you everything, camera in hand, and the scent of smoke wafted into the air before Tim spoke. “We ain’t the type to keep souvenirs. You should be honoured.”
Toby snickered at the man's praise. “Told you, y-you were s-special.” He peeled you off the sofa, propping you against his chest, with your thighs straddling his own.
“It’s my turn, pretty. You can’t p-pass out yet, okay?” You didn’t have the energy to reply if you wanted to, limbs useless by now. All you could do was moan quietly as he sank you down onto his cock. “Fuck, you’re s-so warm.” He groaned into your ear, anchoring his palms under your ass to bounce you. Your arms hung limp by your sides, Toby fucking up into your puffy cunt.
Your clit kept bumping into his base, and the sparse hair of his happy trail ground against your sensitive skin. Even through Toby’s sweater, you could feel the ridges of roped muscle. Strength nurtured by gruelling labour and nothing else.
The perspiration had dampened his face, his bandages lifting at the corners. Another thrust, another jerk of his head- and the patch peeled off.
A gnarled, ragged scar tugged at the skin on his cheek, revealing his gums. It looked like it had healed and reopened over and over again, his teeth exposed at the deepest part of the gouge. You think there’s something wrong with you. A festering infection that you’d ignored, only revealing itself now.
You pulled yourself from his shoulder and leaned in as he eased his rhythm, confused. “What-?” Then your tongue ran over his unconcealed teeth. You were licking his fucking scar. He screeched a laugh, yanking you back by the hair.
“You’re f-fucking sick.” Toby smashed your lips together no more than a second after, pelvis slapping against your mound.
Tim chuckled in disbelief, nodding at Brian. “Look at that- we should’ve grabbed her sooner.” He extended the gun loosely, and the other man agreed with a grunt, snagging the grip from his hand. “I’m surprised she made it this far with a head that empty.” He stepped to you, trailing the barrel up your spine while you rode Toby’s cock.
It felt too good- you couldn’t stop. The veins on his girth dragged in and out of your tunnel, catching on the ridges and making you drool. Fucked dumb on it and high off the friction. Brian huffed, sneering.
“Humpin’ him like an addict. I bet you can’t even fuckin’ hear me.” He said, using the top of the pistol to lug your head back, the metal pressed against your throat. “Open.” An order that you obeyed swiftly, tongue stuck out. He spat onto your palette, clamping a palm over your mouth, and watching you swallow without a fight. He scoffed.
Swapping the weapon with his hand, your windpipe was snug in his grip before he raised the gun to your temple. “You got five minutes to finish him off, or I’m pullin’ the trigger.” The gun was rammed so hard against your skull that it burned, aching from the shooting pain. You slammed your hips down fervently and hiccuped.
Your nervous system was at war with itself, your mind sending out alerts. Blaring sirens, and going comatose from fear, while your body struggled to keep up with the agonizing pleasure. You sobbed, panting as Toby threw his head back, eyes scrunched shut. “Shit- fuck- fuckfuck—” He arched, writhing under you, and Tim whistled to your side, jeering. “I’m startin’ to like you, baby. You ain’t wanna’ break my heart, do ya’?”
Your cunt felt raw, the nonstop usage having hot tears stream down your cheeks. They’d been so rough, and your inner thighs hurt, bruises already forming. Your orgasm seized you painfully, your arousal squirting onto Toby’s stomach as he keened, brows knotted up. He tensed completely, then sagged into the cushions, chest heaving.
The pistol slid off your neck when you collapsed into him.
Spittle mixed with snot and salt had your face a mess, and you snivelled, nearly hyperventilating. You were sore all over, head heavier than cement, your muscles screaming from overexertion. You were so tired.
Your ears were stuffed with cotton, but you could still make out Tim’s voice, the faint shuffling as he moved closer. His hand brushed the hair out of your eyes, and you sniffled, hiccuping loudly.
Yet even through your bleary vision, his worry was laid bare.
“Come back to me, sugar- c’mon.”
Toby adjusted you carefully while Brian rushed to grab water and hot towels. “You’re okay. We g-got you.” He muttered, smoothing his palm down your back. Tim pressed a kiss to your damp forehead. “It’s done, you did so well. So, so good, you hear me?”
Softly, he cradled your cheek, thumb rubbing back and forth. “You’re alright, just breathe for me, hun.” Your inhales finally began to slow, and Brian rounded the couch.
Walking to the front of the chair, he stood with one knee settled between you and Tim to steady his weight. “Heya,’ dolly.” He whispered, cautious not to shock your system further. The bottle was brought to your lips, and you gulped down the water. The liquid cooled you swiftly, making you nuzzle into Toby’s arms once you were satisfied.
Brian’s hands rested on your arms when he pitched forward, littering your features in feather-light pecks.
He withdrew after a minute and towed the coffee table towards himself. Taking a seat, then supplying Toby with the clean rags as Tim laced his fingers with yours. Your tremors still hadn’t ceased, and he frowned.
“Can you tell me where you are?” Tim mumbled, holding your knuckles to his chest. The warmth of his hand, along with Toby's body, had you fighting sleep, slurring. “At home…” He hummed at that, sighing in relief.
They’d been wary when you’d initially brought it up, but you said you were sure. It’s not like you hadn’t done roleplay in the past- it’s just that this was going the extra mile. You wished to go all in, setting up a whole scenario for it. You had debated storylines the night prior and decided on the hitchhiker trope.
You would be stranded, alone and vulnerable- picked up by three strangers in a truck. They would take you back to an “unfamiliar cabin” to have their way with you.
Cliche’, yet you’d been excited. And one very, very long conversation about safewords later, you took a bus to a decently far gas station. Walking back for authenticity, according to you. You didn’t talk to them for the full twenty-four hours leading up to it and everything.
Still, the concern remained present. The last thing they wanted was to actually scare you, and this would be a heavy role to partake in. The fear of pushing you too far, being too rough or hurting you had been circling their minds the entire night. Always waiting an extra second after an act, just in case you needed a break or to stop the scene entirely.
Tim kissed your bare shoulder. “You know who we are?” Some would say it was dumb, but he didn’t care. Facts would ground you- reminders would ensure your comedown was stable. He needed you to know you were safe.
You swallowed, blinking at him lazily. “My boys.” He smiled, nodding, pupils dilated while he gave your palm a squeeze. “Mhm.” Toby finished wiping the grime from your back, pecking your crown. “How are you feeling, angel?” He cast the towel aside and snatched a fresh one from a bowl filled with warm water. “Sleepy.” Brian chuckled at your dazed expression, hushed.
“S’been a long night, hm?” He rose, redoing his buckle halfway. “Let’s get you cleaned up, darlin’. Yer’ gonna’ catch a cold like this.” Tim followed suit, and Toby shuffled to stand, hoisting you upwards. With your legs wrapped around his waist, the four of you made your way upstairs.
The bath was heavenly for your sore joints, and you breathed out, content. Tim and Toby had taken the standing shower, with you and Brian cuddled in the tub after a quick rinse.
You scooped the sudds in your hands, reclining into his chest. “You are a very convincing actor, Bri Bri.” He laughed, one arm resting at your hip, the other thrown over the porcelain ledge.
“Mm- nearly broke character when you flinched. I felt like a fuckin’ bastard.”
“Yeah, but that’s the point! You were all ‘grrr, obey me or else- you whore.’ It was crazy.”
He cringed at the memory. “Lord, that sounds awful out loud. You sure you liked it?” The water sloshed a bit, your feet wiggling, and you giggled. Peering at him. “Yes. And I thought you were very sexy. What if you wore your masks next time?” He shot you a look, squinting at you. “Dolly, I think you have a thing, and we should talk about it.” You jutted out your bottom lip. “But you could chase me through the woods—”
“Absolutely not.”
Tim had shoved his head out from the shower door, the glass fogged with steam. “The forest is dangerous. You could trip- what if you hurt yourself, huh? And there are animals and bugs, and I’m not defiling you on the dirt while you cry. It ain’t right.”
His hair was foamed with soap, and Toby swiped at the condensation, creating a little window to look through. “It’s t-too risky, muffin. You could fall or s-something.” You huffed, defensive. “I’m not even that clumsy.”
“It ain’t about bein’ clumsy, it’s principle.”
“Tim.”
“Uh uh. It’s in the house where it’s safe, or it’s not happenin’. Yer’ lucky we even agreed to that lil’ gun thing.”
You groaned, sagging against Brian as you pouted. “It was empty!” He snickered from behind you, and Tim narrowed his eyes, pointing a finger at you. “Don’t start with me, girl.” He closed the door, the attitude radiating off him when Toby snorted.
“I know you wanna’, but it’s dangerous out there- and what if EJ s-sees? He’s super strict about that s-stuff. He’d kill all of us before we could explain.” His explanation had you raising a brow, and you leaned your cheek onto Brian’s bicep.
“Really?”
“Yeah- Jack’s moral compass is s-strong. Like. Strong.”
“I thought he just ate people?”
“Angel, if I told him I called you a whore with no context, he’d punch m-me into a wall—”
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