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“Were you and Bucky ever—you know?”
Steve looks up. He doesn’t know—he suspects, of course, what Sam is asking, but he doesn’t know for sure. It feels like he so rarely knows exactly what people are asking.
Sam sighs. He might resent being expected to ask in stark terms, but Steve and Bucky were a lot of things to one another, and you know covers all manner of sins, so Steve sets his pencil down over the crossword and waits.
“Did you date?” Sam finally says, which is not quite the question Steve was expecting.
He’d been expecting—or, at any rate, he was fully capable of anticipating—a question more blunt (did you fuck? did you do it? did you touch one another?), or more abstract (did you fall in love?), but this directness leaves him momentarily blinded. A lot of definitions, interpretations, boundaries, and scenarios gather at the forefront of his brain, in that pinched place between his eyes where outdated memories gather and fester like they’re bottle-necked, give him pounding headaches. He blinked hard.
Did they date? Steve has never dated anyone, never gone to the movies arm-in-arm with someone twice, besides, of course, Bucky, but it wasn’t that kind of arm-in-arm. It was more immediate, less focused, less aimed. They were always together, then. As children, of course, they’d been like twins, conjoined, constantly—“those two are joined at the hip,” Mama used to say, and Steve would picture an odd, mutated body, his short and clamoring frame hooked by some bizarre strip of flesh or sinew to Bucky’s more sturdy one, their steps ragged and staggering, their bodies helplessly orbiting one another. They’d been inseparable, then, but later it was different. They were always together later, too.
That much was true—for all Bucky made it his mission to find them dates, as often as not they spent the nights alone together, in raggedy work clothes made stiff with the day’s dried sweat, sharing warm foamy beers and strolling so close together their elbows and shoulders knocked against each other, stopping under streetlights to straighten one another out, fixing or loosening their ties, setting their caps just so. They’d flit from bar to bar, getting in fights or toasting to each other, until everything was closed and watery purple dawn light leaked into the streets, over the brick and the concrete, and then they’d stagger home. After Steve’s mother died, they’d usually climb the many stairs to the Rogers apartment, while Steve still had it—he stopped being able to make rent just three months after Mama died—and later to the boarding room he rented, tiny and artless and mildewed, but better than a forfeit of his pride. Why can’t you jus’ move in with me, Bucky whined once, when they were boneless on the mattress, drunkenly melting into clammy, shared sleep, since I stay here jus’ as often anyways? Wha’s the difference?
The difference, of course, was both nothing and everything—it was tiny but it mattered, because Steve had eaten a lot of charity for dinner in his life and found he preferred hunger. It wasn’t a moral cause, it wasn’t a belief he could defend—he just couldn’t stand continued weakness, not after so long, not after all those years pinned by his own rattling lungs in his mother’s bed, beneath the piles of quilts and extra clothes, shivering nonetheless, helpless to so much as force a breath. Bucky sometimes came over, even then, sat on the edge of the bed, told him about the day at school, read to him from adventure books, rested a spread hand across his hollow, stuttering chest as he coughed. Breathe, Steve, he’d say, as if it were that easy, as if Steve forgot.
So he never lived with Bucky, on paper anyways, though they shared each other’s homes every time, really, even on the front, where their childhood selves stepped back inside their bodies and let these barrel-chested men from the movies lead the way. Bucky—Steve called him “Barnes” in front of everyone, then—was different, after the factory, but Steve felt weightless without him. The transplanted piece of home, of Flatbush and of the factory smells and the specific heave of jumping over a subway turnstile, made him Steve Rogers again, made his massive ungainly body believably his. Bucky had remarked, once, very drunk and seemingly far away from himself, that Steve could hold all of him now, not the other way around. Steve had listened without saying anything. They’d never tried it, in any configuration, either way.
So they’d come a long way, even before two falls into waiting ice and the passage of six decades, from the kids under those streetlamps giggling with their faces inches apart, thrilling a little in the closeness to one another, from the boys who watched movies from the projection box, where Steve worked, crushed close together and bumping elbows over popcorn. Steve never felt sure—he never had—that he could possibly mean as much to Bucky as Bucky did to him.
Because Bucky was whole, and handsome, and precise, and broad and sturdy, Bucky could hold his own and Bucky had finished high school—Steve had dropped out when he was thirteen—Bucky could hold a job and convince girls to unbutton their blouses bit by bit in darkened movie theaters. Steve had never understood how he fit into that equation, even when Bucky was younger and more awkward, drawn to his science fiction and his tales of men on the moon.
They’d done that, now, after Steve was dead and Bucky gone. They’d put a man on the moon, so long ago nobody thought it was exciting anymore, and Steve wasn’t sure if Bucky even knew. Or if he remembered that it mattered to him once, something so remote and seemingly imaginary. These days, Steve suspected, what mattered to Bucky was what he could see, what he could use, what he could hold in his hand.
He thought a dream, a recurring dream he’d had when he was a teenager, that he was swimming, naked, in the dirty waters off the pier at Coney Island, swept far from land by the waves and the tide, and that Bucky was next to him, moving through the choppy water as easily as if it were steam. “Stay still,” Bucky always said, in the dream, pressing his wet chest to Steve’s, “stay still.”
Steve never managed to do what he asked, and every time their bodies slipped apart—hands last, fingers entangled, cramping, pulled apart by the waves.
Bucky wasn’t so whole and handsome anymore, but Steve loved him nonetheless. Steve never stopped, even if he’d never said so, either.
Did you date?
“No,” he told Sam, and thought about all the words he could have said instead, cramped between those two insufficient letters.
Maybe Sam understood; probably, if he did, it was only a fragment, only a hint from his own unfinished lives he’d lived within his own. That feeling, at least, wasn’t so unusual, Steve was learning.
“Okay,” Sam said, and Steve looked down at his own hand, pictured fingers slipping through.