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________________________
When it happens it isn’t planned and if it had been, his breath wouldn’t be stale from quinjet air and his hair wouldn’t be mussed from his helmet and he wouldn’t be wearing the SSR t-shirt from Camp Lehigh. She pokes through a bullet hole in the fabric and her nail is sharp on his skin.
It’s not planned, so he knows she’s considering every hitch in his breath, every one of his movements. Compiling the data. He knows because he’s doing it too.
She’s tracing around the stains on his shirt when he stops her hand. There’s a moment while she looks up at him, and it feels golden and stretched like photos he’s seen of insects frozen in amber. He has an overwhelming feeling that something important is about to change between them.
“Natasha,” he says. This isn’t planned; he’s tempted to call of off so they can do this better, could plan it out a little nicer. She has bruises and dirt on her legs from an ambush a day ago. He has a bandage on his upper arm and back from the week spent trying to find their informant, and a healing bullet wound from the week spent trying get away from him. There are a pair of mud-stained boots on the mat by his door.
It’s hard to concentrate on the reality of this situation. It feels like whiplash, somehow, going from finding Bucky and losing him again and fighting for their lives for the second time in as many weeks to this, now. To Natasha in his arms. There’s no precedent for kissing a friend while the world is shifting under his feet.
He whispers, “Nat, are you sure,” for the second time, and this time she presses the pads of her fingertips under his jaw. He is, suddenly, very aware of how fast his pulse is beating, of how dry his mouth is. “Natasha—”
“Steve,” she whispers back, and then she kisses a yes where her fingers were.
He breathes an okay to calm his nerves, and she blows against his neck to tell him she heard, and when she pulls away her hair tickles his nose.
“Okay?” Nat asks softly. She is smiling with half her mouth and Steve knows her enough to see this is uncertainty, and then he realizes the gift she’s giving him. To see past the Widow’s front on her own terms.
Steve offers his hand and she takes it. And he says, “Yes.”
____________
The next morning Steve trips over her shirt and she laughs from his bed. He sticks out his tongue and leaves the door cracked just slightly, and out of the corner of his eye he sees her pluck his SSR shirt out from underneath her bra.
In the kitchen, he cracks some eggs into a pan and lets them sizzle while he pours a glass of orange juice. He’s vaguely aware he’s humming some old dance tune, and lets himself smile. He slides them onto a plate with some toast and, balancing the plate and glass, he goes back to the bedroom.
The first thing Steve sees are his curtains, which billow toward him. He last remembers the window closed.
The second thing he sees is that Natasha isn’t in his bed.
He eats the eggs on his own.
____________
They fall into this pattern without talking about it. A mission, a whispered conversation in his house, her fingers on his pulse. Her shirt on the floor and his hands on her waist and breasts and her lips on his. Cracked veins from her mouth on his neck that disappear within thirty minutes.
In the morning, eggs enough for both of them on the stove and Natasha gone just before he comes back into the room. A shirt missing from his closet, perhaps, and only a still-warm indent on the right side of the bed to say someone else was there at all.
Steve’s started taking his time in the kitchen, taking longer when he hears the floorboards creak in the morning. He’d never been one for breakfast food, or cooking in general, really. On a whim he tries his hand at omelets and imagines, while the window slowly slides open in the next room, that if he just perfects them that she’d stay.
He goes through omelets and eggs Benedict and over medium, poached, baked. After the seventh time he finds his bed empty, he loses himself in the internet finding recipes. The day he hears the curtains rustle for the ninth time, he loads his plate with nearly everything in his kitchen. Hash browns and goat cheese, tomatoes and avocado and every other green thing he can think of.
It helps some. He spends those afternoons poring over their case files, trying to find the thread he’s missing.
____________
Sam comes over the afternoon after the eleventh time and takes one look at the pans in the sink and the way his hair is still mussed from bed, and Steve can tell by the way his face changes that he puts it together. Sam doesn’t ask about her, but he does say, “You’re a mess, Steve, a fucking mess, how long were you going to let these pans soak here?”
Steve shrugs a little helplessly. He doesn’t ask what Sam’s thinking.
“C’mere, you nut,” Sam says. He rolls his sleeves up and grabs the scrub brush off the sink. “I’m not gonna do Captain America’s dishes for him. Get your scrawny ass over and help.”
“Alright, keep your pants on,” Steve says.
In his defense, there wasn’t much to do; he only used three pans for his french toast and omelet combo, and he’d already dealt with the orange juicer, French press, and industrial Stark patented kitchen knives.
Steve hip bumps Sam out of the way and fills the sink with bubbles and water. Sam, very familiar with the layout of Steve’s kitchen, pulls out a dish towel and waits.
“How’s that cold case going?” he says conversationally. He balls up the towel and tosses it in the air lazily. “Nat says you two have been really getting into it lately.”
Steve nearly chokes. He focuses on the feeling of the pan in his hands. “What?”
“The cold case, Steve.” Sam’s voice is highly amused. Steve flicks water at him.
Of course. “Right,” Steve says, and forces himself to forget about last night. He rinses the pan and hands it to Sam. “We’re working on it. Think we’ve got another lead on another informant.”
Sam says, “Working hard all day and night, huh,” and now Steve can’t not say anything. He sets the next pan down and dries his hands.
“What do you know?” he asks, and Sam sighs as he dries the pan. He hands it back to Steve to put away.
Sam says, “You’ve both been acting funny for a few months.” Steve takes the pan, frowning. “And you butt dialed me last night. Scarring stuff, man.”
“I’m sorry,” Steve tells him as he puts the pan away. Sam shrugs, but he looks concerned. The pan clatters in the cupboard.
“You don’t have to be, you know.” Sam hands him a saucepan lid. “I mean. Please don’t call me again while you’re going at it. But you don’t have to be sorry about this.”
He’s hitting close to something Steve’s been worried about. Not being sorry, per se, but unsure. Off balance. Steve doesn’t like feeling unsteady.
“You don’t know, do you,” Sam says, his voice light.
“Know what?”
Sam shrugs. “What you guys are doing.”
“I know most of what we’re doing,” he replies, raising his eyebrows for emphasis. He doesn’t want to have this conversation right now. “I’m there when it happens.”
“You know what I mean.”
Steve sighs, putting the lid away. “I don’t know, Sam. It’s not the time for—”
“I’m sorry for putting you on the spot right now,” Sam says. “If I’m making things more weird, or confusing. But coming from someone who’s had his fair share of whatever this is? Talk to her about it.”
“I don’t know how to have that conversation.”
Sam says, “Probably best that you have it, then.”
Steve tilts his head to the side.
He clarifies without further prompting. “If you can’t talk about what you’re doing, it’s not a good sign. From my experience.”
“I cooked her breakfast,” Steve says quietly, “every morning after. She’s never stayed long enough for it.” He pauses, but Sam doesn’t say anything. He continues. “I don’t — I don’t know why, exactly. She,” and Steve pauses again to take a sip of water. “I don’t always read her easily.”
They’re quiet again, steadily working their way through the dishes in Steve’s sink. It’s a comfortable rhythm.
Steve doesn’t think Sam’s going to reply when he says, voice gentle, “All the more reason to talk about it.” And then: “Wash your fucking dishes, man. You’re Captain America. This is embarrassing.”
____________
This time it’s fumbling hands and sharp breaths and it’s daylight, or the afternoon at least. He feels underprepared; should he have made dinner? He doesn’t know how to cook dinner unless it’s scrambled eggs—
“Did you tell Sam,” Nat whispers, words coming quick and nearly without inflection. It takes her two tries to undo the first button on his shirt. He yanks it over his head, and she runs her fingers over the muscles that run from his neck to shoulders and then lightly over his collarbone.
Steve tugs on the hem of her shirt and she raises her arms and her hair’s caught by the neckline, and when he tosses the shirt beside the bed, her hair poofs. He focuses on the way one strand of her hair is on the completely wrong side of her hairline in order to ignore the fact that her bra cups are two Captain America shields. He’s not sure who’s behind the design, but he suspects Sam had something to do with it. He tucks the strand of hair behind her ear. She turns her face and kisses his palm soft and slow.
“Two weeks ago,” he whispers back, stunned. She makes it hard to breathe sometimes.
Nat bites her lips just slightly, splays her hand flat on his chest. Steve wants to kiss her. She strides forward and pushes so he bumps into and then falls back against the bed and she’s straddling him almost before he realizes.
She opens her mouth like she’s about to speak, but then seems to shake her head at herself. She presses her fingers against his pulse. He taps her bra strap questioningly, and she nods.
“Whose idea was this?” Steve asks, outlining the star. Nat shivers. She quirks a smile.
“Mine.”
For whatever reason, the idea of her customizing her bra with his shield is unreasonably arousing. He shifts so he’s sitting somewhat upright and she adjusts, bracing herself with a hand against the headboard. His breath hitches.
“You okay?” Nat asks, her eyebrows creasing. She pulls back.
Steve threads his fingers through her hair and she leans down, mouthing at his neck. “Yes,” he says. She takes his hand and places it on the clasp of her bra.
“Take it off,” she whispers. He does.
He massages underneath her breasts, trying to rub away the red marks the underwire left on her skin. Nat noses underneath his jaw and sucks at his pulse and his breath catches again, and she huffs a laugh against his neck.
He murmurs, “I’m ticklish,” and she lightly traces circles down his chest and around his nipples.
Steve wants — he wants to kiss her. She’s teasing him, and he knows it, and she knows he knows, and the fact of that makes him want to—
Oh. Nat brushes over his nipples and he closes his eyes a moment. When he opens them, she’s grinning down at him. She rolls her hips, slow and deliberate and sucking at his pulse point in his neck, and now he can’t — take it anymore—
He nudges Nat off him abruptly and she stands too, reading his intentions. Steve takes off his pants and trips over his feet when they bunch up around his ankles. Nat laughs at him and takes off her own, and she’s so beautiful standing here in front of him in her underwear.
He tilts his head to the side.
“Do those have my shield on them too?”
Nat just lies down on the bed and grins and says, “Why don’t you come and find out?”
That’s all the invitation he needs. Steve kisses his way up her body, trailing kisses from her knee and inner thigh to her breasts and neck. He lingers at her jaw before pulling away.
Her eyes are closed. “Steve.”
“Nat.”
She looks at him now up at him, wearing an expression he’s never seen on her before. She seems softer. Vulnerable in a way she so rarely allows herself to be. “Kiss me,” she whispers.
Steve brushes his thumbs over her cheekbones. “Okay,” he whispers back. He ghosts his lips over hers, sucking lightly on her bottom lip.
“Steve.”
“Nat?”
She runs her hand through the hair at the base of his neck and pulls him closer to her. He feels her next words on his mouth. “Kiss me.”
He does.
____________
She’s still asleep when he wakes up. Steve rolls out of bed, careful not to wake her; she mumbles something in Russian and he freezes, but she just pulls the blankets up around her shoulders. Her breathing settles. He exhales.
Today feels like a day for fried eggs, and he takes his time cracking them open and dusting them with salt and pepper. Easy and familiar. Steve needs to recenter himself; there’s a conversation they need to finish, about Sam and their cold case, and all his thoughts are on Nat’s lips on his and the way she looks, flushed and red, underneath him. He’d caught a glimpse of her bra and underwear while leaving the room and he’d needed to stand in front of the open freezer for a minute.
Steve slides the eggs onto two plates, like always, and stands in the hallway just outside his bedroom door.
The window scrapes slowly, gently, against the frame.
He closes his eyes before going back into the kitchen.
____________
He doesn’t see her for a month. She’s off in Europe somewhere with Fury and Clint, and he and Sam putter around their houses. Steve picks up Sam’s fridge so he can sweep underneath. Sam flies up to clean Steve’s gutters. They don’t talk about her, but they brainstorm ideas for a cleaning service. Sam’s angling for “Falcon and Captain Feather Duster.”
“It’s perfect,” he says, out on the porch one night after repainting Steve’s house for no other reason than for the hell of it. He opens a beer and hands it to Steve. “You can be my sidekick for once, we’ll figure out a good uniform.”
Steve says, “We can use my USO tour one,” and Sam snorts. “Tagline can be something like, ‘Sweeping away the competition since 1918.’”
“It’s perfect,” Sam repeats, sounding sleepy.
Steve leans back on his hands. It’s such a beautiful night. The stars are different now than the ones he grew up with, but they’re still bright. Still give him the same sense of wonder. He’s struck with a sudden, fierce appreciation for Sam Wilson, for coming over tonight of all nights. He was driving himself crazy looking for new recipes to make. Sam had taken one look at the mess in the kitchen and walked him outside, slapping a paintbrush in his hand a few minutes later.
“Thanks,” he says quietly.
Sam glances at him, taking a sip of his beer. “Any time, man,” he says easily. “My sister has some good recipes too, you know. I can send them over.”
Steve says, “That’d be great,” and they spend the rest of the night searching the sky for shooting stars.
____________
Bucky’s face smiles up at them from the folders strewn on his kitchen table. Nat sips her coffee while shuffling through his notes, pausing now and then to ask him about his cramped writing. She’s wearing a pair of his boxers, having come over in response to his text and immediately changed into his clothes. He focuses on scraping egg residue off the pans to keep from acting on how exactly the sight of her in his clothing makes him feel. A hickey a few days old peeks out of her shirt.
“Did we ever follow up on this?” There’s a frown in her voice; Steve sets the pan down gently and turns to see her pointing at one of several blurry photographs.
He asks, “Is that the parking structure one from Chicago?” and crosses next to her to study it better. It’s not the best quality, but they’ve all three come to expect this by now. Sam’s become fond of comparing the texture of the pictures to the various soft blankets Nat inexplicably has on her at any given moment. This particular photograph is timestamped from a week ago and shows an almost-indistinct Bucky in one-quarter profile facing away from whichever camera snapped the image. There’s a silver flash in the bottom left hand corner, presumably from Bucky putting his hand in his pocket.
Maria had used their dead drop to give them these photographs a 4 days ago while they were trying to regroup after a disastrous interrogation. Steve slides them closer, wondering what he missed,
Nat smells like raspberries. He clears his throat. “What’re you looking at?”
“There’s a camera,” Nat says, jabbing her finger at a tiny, fuzzy blotch perched on a concrete support beam.
He tilts his head to the side for a moment, scanning the other photographs quickly. It only takes him half a second to realize what she’s noticed.
“We don’t have any photos from that angle,” he says, and it feels like something’s crushing his lungs. How could he have missed this? “Nat, how far could he have gotten in a week?”
She shrugs, but the movement is tense. “I’m not sure.”
Now Steve holds the photograph up to the light and squints and it hits him again, like a cement brick slammed into his stomach. That flash in the corner —
“Natasha,” he says. His voice is steadier than he feels, and he knows she can tell.
“Steve?”
He flattens the photograph on the kitchen counter and turns on the lights mounted underneath the cabinets, being careful not to smudge the edges on the water from the pans drying in the rack. “Does this look like,” he starts, but he doesn’t have to finish the sentence before she says, already dialing, “I’ll call Sam.”
____________
The first thing Sam says is “Steve. Clean your pans,” but he’s very clearly on edge. He joins Nat and Steve at the table — Steve sees him notice Nat in his boxers, the marks on her neck, but he doesn’t comment — and reaches for the photograph. The minute Sam takes to analyze it feels like an age. Every one of Steve’s muscles is tense.
He’s surprised when he looks down and sees Nat massaging his palm and fingers. He raises his eyebrows, and when she rolls her eyes he smiles. It’s a strained one, and small, but it helps him relax a little. She rubs the crease between his eyebrows with her thumb.
Sam clears his throat very pointedly, and they both look up.
“I think it could be,” Sam says. “The bright side is, if it hit him at all, the trajectory looks like it would’ve hit his left arm. If that helps.”
“I just want to know,” Steve says, his breath coming in a hard jerk, “whether or not someone shot him.”
Sam reaches across the table and takes his hand, squeezing gently. Nat does the same on his left. “Hey,” Sam says. “We’ll find him, okay?”
Steve touches the picture and nods.
____________
They spend the day gathering supplies. Sam greases the hinges of his wings, calling out commentary now and then on the reality show Nat has playing in the background. Nat, cleaning her guns, fires back at him through her laughter while wedding dresses and veils flash across the TV behind her head.
Steve listens to all of this while packing his bag in his bedroom. Some of Nat’s clothes have snuck their way into his drawers over the past few months, and seeing her bras and shirts mixed in with his socks is a dull ache in his stomach.
Her Captain America bra is on the blankets pooling off the side of the mattress. He stuffs a few shirts and pants and underwear into his duffel and slumps on the bed. The door creaks; he sighs.
“Hey,” Nat says softly. She leans on the doorway and folds her arms. There is still a reddish purple blotch under her jaw, and it’s not the time for this but—
Something in his expression must shift, because she pushes off from the doorway and stands in front of him. She weaves their fingers together, kisses the inside of his wrist. He smiles at her tiredly.
He says, “Maria dropped off the coordinates for the safe house,” and Nat says, “I know.”
She smooths his hair back from his face. He tugs her closer; she kisses him once, briefly, on the cheek before reaching across for her bra.
“It’s not a good time,” Steve says, as she puts it on.
“It’s not,” she agrees.
____________
Nat drives while Sam DJs from the passenger seat, leaving Steve the backseat to stretch out and go through the photographs again. He hears bits and pieces of their conversation — “Cotton Eye Joe, really?” “Don’t give me that, it’s a cultural classic.” — and lets them wash through his rising anxiety, strategically dismantling his worries. Nat laughs now and meets his eye in the rearview and when she winks, Steve smiles.
Sam glances in the mirror too, and twists around to face both of them, and when he asks, “What is this, exactly?” Steve has a feeling he’s been wanting to ask both of them for some time. The music shifts to “Call Me Maybe.”
“Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to tell me,” he continues. “Just want to know whether I need to invest in noise cancelling headphones when we get to the motel.”
Steve flushes. He says, “Sam, no—” at the same time Nat says, “You might want.”
They both trail off abruptly. She shifts slightly, flicking on her left turn signal.
There’s a rather lengthy pause that Sam breaks by apologetically and loudly debating the pros and cons of “Never Gonna Give You Up” versus “Thriftshop” in terms of cultural value. He ends up playing both.
____________
They’re halfway through both Pennsylvania and the night when Nat pulls into a rest stop, yawning. Sam jerks awake when she cuts the engine, and Steve stretches as best he can in their tiny rental car. It was not, as he’d realized around hour two, built with super soldiers in mind.
“Remind me again why we didn’t fly,” Steve says. He gets out of the car and bends at the waist, trying to work some feeling back into his ass.
Sam says, “You’re not exactly inconspicuous, man,” which isn’t a lie.
What he isn’t saying is that Fury, Maria, and Clint still aren’t sure which of their government pilot contacts are purely SHIELD. Steve hears it all the same.
Nat hops out of the car and says, yawning, “I’m getting a fucking McFlurry.”
“That’s the most American thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Steve says.
They’ve ordered and are waiting off to the side when she murmurs, “If you’re lucky, maybe I’ll say ‘God bless America’ later tonight.”
Steve chokes on his fountain drink.
“Oh hell no,” Sam says, pounding the heel of his hand on Steve’s back. “You damn well better not.”
She just laughs.
____________
The highway leading to Chicago is backed up with bumper to bumper traffic and he really, really wishes they’d chanced it and flown, Bucky could be so close and he’s stuck sitting on I-80 West. He’s half tempted to ditch the car and continue on foot.
Sam and Nat are both asleep, for which he’s grateful. He doesn’t want them to see him breaking down like this. And there’s a conversation he needs to have and he’s never had to bring it up before. She’d never been around in the morning to have that talk, and now isn’t a good time.
He’s thinking about what the silver flash in that photograph could have been if not a bullet when Sam stirs in the passenger seat. Steve focuses on the wheel under his hands and Nat’s calm breathing in the back to avoid the look Sam’s giving him.
“What,” he says finally.
Sam says, “Didn’t say anything.”
“You’re thinking very loud right now.”
“Running through the logistics.” Sam fiddles with the aux cord, curling and uncurling it. “We’re sure this is a real picture?”
“Maria left it at the drop,” Steve says, but even that, now that he’s saying it—
“When was the last time you spoke to her?”
He has to think about that. Sometime before Nat left for Europe; Maria had been the one who’d very vaguely briefed him on what was going on. Nat had left a sock at the end of his bed instead of intel.
Steve tells him this. Sam puffs his cheeks out, frowning the way he does when he’s thinking and doesn’t like what he’s coming up with.
Finally he says, “I don’t know about this, Steve,” and from the backseat Natasha says, “About what?”
Sam fills her in. Steve holds the wheel like he’s gonna fall apart if he lets it go.
“It’s been almost six months,” she says slowly. Steve meets her eyes in the rearview mirror; she looks uneasy. “Since before we — you know.”
“Started not talking about whatever this is, yes, I know,” Sam murmurs, rolling his eyes. Tension screams from every inch of his body. “Let’s get to a hotel and call her.”
Very quietly, Steve says, “I don’t know what I’ll do if this is false intel.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Nat says simply. She reaches forward in the crack between the door and the seat and grazes his waist with her fingers. “We always do.”
Sam says something like “Make out already” under his breath. They’re quiet the rest of the drive in, Nat’s fingers on Steve’s waist, his own clenching the wheel so hard the fake leather squeaks.
After a few heartbeats, she withdraws her hand.
After a long held breath, he reaches back, palm up and open. A silent please.
Nat slides her fingers up his and presses them briefly to his pulse point and he’s very aware of his heartbeat crashing in his ears. She laces their fingers together as if it were as easy as anything, and for a second he believes her. That this is something they do. That they always have figured it out before.
____________
There’s a lot of swearing involved in getting all their gear upstairs into the room. He’s surprised they aren’t stopped or escorted out, due to a suspicious amount of duffel bags and the fact that Steve ends up carrying Nat from their car. It does not fill him with confidence in the hotel’s security.
Sam closes the blinds and collapses onto one of the room’s two queen beds. “There it is,” he says, eyes already closing. “Much better than a car seat.”
Steve carefully sets Nat down on the other bed, noting tiredly that the marks on her neck have nearly faded. She opens her eyes and stretches lazily, reaching for a pillow even as she tugs gently on Steve’s hand. He sits next to her, brushes her hair off her forehead. He wants to kiss her.
He threads their fingers together and presses her fingertips to the pulse point under his jaw and when she brushes her thumb over his cheekbone, he kisses her palm.
From across the room, Sam groans. “Don’t sexile me, I drove four and half hours today,” he says, throwing a pillow at them.
“We weren’t—”
“Uh huh, sure. I don’t want to know what your bedroom eyes look like, guys, so if you don’t mind…”
Steve rubs the back of his neck embarrassedly and says, “I’m taking a shower.” Sam finger guns at him, and this more than anything is why he adds, “Nat, coming with?”
Sam’s next pillow hits him directly in the face and even he has to agree that he deserves it.
It’s worth it, though, to have Nat’s mouth on his ear and he’s allowed to hold her like this and her hands are pruned and warm on his skin, and they don’t do anything other than kiss, but it’s warm and lazy and Steve would take several pillows to face to be able to have this for longer than whatever this is.
____________
Sam calls Maria in the morning, and then calls again, and a third time. His jaw tightens with every call.
By the time the first is over, Nat’s out of bed getting dressed. She tosses Steve his phone frantically and he dials Fury’s number with slightly shaking hands. Sam texts one handed as he struggles back into his jeans. Steve’s wrestling with his shirt when Fury answers.
“Fury.”
“Where’s Hill?”
Sam and Nat freeze, staring at him.
“She’s right next to me,” Fury says. Steve frowns; he doesn’t think he’s lying, but he’s never really been able to read Fury any more than Fury wants to be read.
Steve says, “Put her on,” and Fury blows a raspberry into the speaker. “Fury I swear to fucking god—”
“You kiss your mother with that mouth, Rogers?”
Relief floods through him. “Thought we were done with that joke, Maria,” he says, making meaningful eye contact with Sam and Nat. Sam exhales shakily. Nat drops to the ground, sitting down hard, and presses her hands against her eyes. Steve’s about to go over to her when Sam starts playing with her hair. She leans her head back gratefully.
“Never,” Maria says, laughing. “I take it you started following the Chicago false thread?”
“How did you—”
“We were watching the drop. Someone was impersonating me. Wanted to see if their friends would come out while you all were in town, and then we got too distracted dealing with the situation to call. Sorry about that.”
Steve runs his fingers through his hair and pulls. “Want us to look around?” he asks. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Sam tense. He mouths an apology; he doesn’t really want to, either. It’s sinking in that Bucky isn’t nearby.
He wants to go home.
“No,” Maria says, and Steve falls back against the bed. “Go home. Sleep. We’ll figure out another way to be in touch.”
“Okay,” he whispers. He’s about to hang up when she says his name. “Yeah?”
“Thanks for looking for me,” she tells him, and he hears a smile in her voice. She hangs up first.
____________
The drive back is long and tired. None of them say much, aside from calling out when they see a new license plate. Sam’s idea. Apparently he has a lot of road trip games.
“You would too, if you moved around so much growing up,” he says mildly. Steve imagines he would.
They get drop Sam off first and he gives Steve a look that either says get your shit together and talk to her or clean your dishes you disgusting man. It’s Sam, though, so it’s highly possible it was both.
Steve waits until Sam’s inside to drive away. Nat plays something a little funky and upbeat through the aux, humming along, and as Steve eases onto the main road, he feels her looking at him.
It reminds him of driving through Jersey, the talk they had about her being his first kiss since he went down in the plane. He smiles at the memory.
“What’s funny?” she asks, smiling a little herself. It’s one of her secret smiles, the ones somewhere between her own and the Widow’s smile. He’s not sure where the lines are drawn. Looking at her, he’s not sure he needs to know. A matter of circumstances, she’d said about herself back then.
She’d done her hair in a braid, and somehow it softens her. Combining the braid and his sweatpants — he’d casually held them out to her that morning, heart pounding, and she’d taken them simple as anything — the way some of her bangs stick out at odd angles, all of it—
The circumstances here are this: Steve thinks he might, maybe, be a little in love with her.
It’s even funnier thinking it when it’s not a revelation. Somewhere along the line he must’ve fallen into it without realizing.
“Just thinking,” he says finally. She arches an eyebrow, and he sighs. He flicks on the turn signal for his street. “I guess it isn’t really funny. I wanted to say, I really think we should talk about this. I think it’s a good time to talk about it. I wanted you to know I want you to stay in the morning. We never planned it, but I wanted you to know I would’ve done this better, if we had. And that I can would still do it better.”
Nat doesn’t say anything until he’s parked in his driveway. He studies his hands, head bowed; he can feel her gaze studying him. She gently takes his head in her hands and turns him to face her, running her fingers over his cheeks, his neck, his shoulders. His nerves light up under her fingers.
“Natasha,” he whispers.
“I—” she stops, looking frustrated. “Steve, I’m really much better showing you what I think, and I really think you need to carry me into your room and your bed. And then we are going to kiss some and talk and then we’re going to fall asleep, and you’ll spoon me like you always do even though you steal all the blankets, and then I’ll be there in the morning.” She trails off, searching his face. “Okay?”
This, after the complete farce that was their mission — it all sounds too good to be true.
He whispers, “Okay,” and she pulls him toward her in a kiss that leaves him full, somehow. Like she’s trying to give him something.
He unbuckles and gets out of the car and walks around to her door, and then picks her up, and carries her into his room and his bed.
“Are you sure?” he asks, already out of breath. She’s got him on his back, shirt off and tossed into the corner, pants tangled up by his ankles. She kisses his calves while she works them off.
Softly, she says, “Let me show you,” and then she eases her way back up his body and does.
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Steve wakes up first to the sound of Nat mumbling in her sleep. He counts to ten before quietly getting out of bed, careful not to disturb her. She reaches out toward his side of the bed, eyes still closed, and he holds his breath while she steals his pillow. On impulse he crosses the room and kisses her forehead. Just in case.
He feels like trying one of the recipes Sam sent him. It’s a little more complicated, needs two pans instead of one for some fancy technique he isn’t going to get right this time around, but that’s okay. He isn’t naive enough to believe Nat’s going to stick around today. There’ll be time to get this one right.
He splits the eggs onto two plates and walks down the hallway mechanically, trying to remember if he left the window open or shut and whether he should be feeling a breeze right now. No wind. A small bubble of hope rises in his chest before he squashes it. He opens the door.
And nearly drops his plates.
“Is that for me?” Nat asks sleepily. She reaches down for his t-shirt from the night before and puts it on before reaching for a plate. “Smells good.”
Steve sits on the side of the bed and says, “You’re still here,” and she runs her fingers through his hair like he’s something wonderful. He presses a kiss to the inside of her wrist.
“I’m still here,” Nat says, smiling, and takes a bite of eggs.
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