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“You’re in love with her.”
Steve startled at the sudden change in topic from his dinner partner. He was on a date with a lovely girl, but his heart wasn’t exactly in it. The whole thing had been set up a few weeks before, Natasha being a friend of Steve’s best friend’s boyfriend. Even though he’d known about it for so long, Steve had spent the days leading up to it absolutely dreading having to go out and had made several aborted phone calls to cancel.
They’d met at a quiet restaurant and had been getting on surprisingly well. Well, that was until a sudden arrival at another table had dragged all of Steve’s attention away. Despite Natasha’s bright personality and her dry humour, Steve had found himself drifting out of the conversation quickly.
She had been talking about, well, Steve couldn’t actually quite remember what she had been talking about, but it certainly hadn’t been anything about love.
“What?” Steve looked back to see Natasha looking at him closely, one finger circling the rim of her wine glass and a small smile playing around her lips.
“You’re in love with her,” she repeated. There was no judgement in her tone, not even intonation or a lift; it wasn’t a question. It was as though Natasha was stating a fact. She said it so simply and with understanding.
“What? No, I’m not.” Steve was quick to disagree, fighting the urge to drop his gaze and hide away.
“You keep staring over there.” Natasha titled her head to the side to point subtly to the table that Steve had been staring at for most of the evening and Steve couldn’t stop his eyes from flickering over there once more.
At the table sat a giggling couple made up of a beautiful brunette girl in a flowing dress and a man in a fitted suit with light brown hair styled up in a tall quiff that was just begging to be stared at. Or pulled.
“Hey.” Natasha reached out a hand and covered Steve’s where it lay on the table, bringing his attention back to her. “It’s okay.”
“I’m not in love with her,” Steve said again, turning back to his own table and grabbing his beer.
“It’s okay, Steve. You can admit it. I’m not going to get mad and scream at you; I didn’t have expectations of a blind date set up by Clint anyway – no offence, but, well. You know Clint.” Natasha let out a light laugh as she smiled over at Steve.
Steve chuckled as well. He did indeed know Clint and his expectations had been kept pretty low as well, although Natasha really was a lovely woman and that was a pleasant surprise.
“You can tell me,” Natasha continued softly. She looked back over at the couple who had started to share their meals, holding out heaped forkfuls of their plates for the other to try, and couldn’t help but smile sadly.
The girl suddenly let out a loud barked laugh, her head thrown back and her hands reaching out for the man opposite her. Steve gritted his teeth and clenched his fist when he saw the man take her hand and press a kiss to her knuckles. Luckily, he was only looking at the back of the man’s head, his body facing the opposite way so that there was no way he would look back and see Steve staring.
“She’s gorgeous,” Steve heard Natasha say and he nodded. As much as it pained him to admit it, the woman really was and Steve couldn’t do anything but agree.
“She is. But I’m not in love with her.” Steve kept his eyes trained on Natasha once more, swallowing thickly and steadfastly ignoring the couple he had been watching so intently before. He could see out of the corner of his eye that they had started to lean a little closer together and Steve had no intention of seeing that sort of thing.
Natasha caught the slight emphasis that Steve placed on the end of his sentence and the penny suddenly dropped. “Oh,” she said quietly. “It’s not her.”
“No,” Steve said just as softly. There was no point in hiding it. Not that Steve had been doing well at that anyway.
“It’s him.” Understanding coloured Natasha’s tone, words coming out barely louder than a whisper.
Steve didn’t answer this time, choosing instead to grab the glass in front of him and threw what was left of his beer back in one gulp.
“Does he know?” Natasha asked after a moment, waiting patiently as Steve took a moment to collect himself.
“No,” Steve finally said, fixing his gaze on his placemat in an attempt to stop his eyes from wandering back to the torture in the form of the table to his left.
“I take it you know him then.” God, Natasha did so not deserve this. Steve was going to buy her all the drinks she wanted and multiple desserts. Maybe even send her a bouquet of flowers as an apology for being the world’s mopiest date.
“Yeah. His name is Tony.” Swallowing thickly, Steve’s eyes lifted again and he looked at Natasha, blinking away tears as he spoke about Tony Stark, the man who was somehow both the love and the bane of Steve’s life.
“We’ve been friends for years. We met in his first semester of college and I just never quite shook him off.” Steve huffed out a laugh and shook his head at himself. “He seemed to be there every time I turned around. He was in the coffee shop when I went in to get my morning fix, he’d be in the library when I went to study, he even got the bus at the same time that I did every Monday and Wednesday for months. One morning someone pushed him into me and he dropped his coffee all over my shoe. He made some joke about me stalking him and that was it; we just clicked. We quickly discovered that we both lived in the same dorms, even though we were years apart, and then, I don’t know. I don’t really remember when it turned into something more.”
Steve had tried everything that he could think of when he had realised he’d fallen for the younger man. He’d tried to distance himself from Tony before he realised that that wasn’t doing anything but bringing him more pain than being around Tony and not touching him did. He’d tried internet dating – never again, he’d decided after the third failed date in a row and a very near mishap with a stalker. After that, Steve had had tried channelling his feelings into new workouts at the gym – all that had done was earned him more unwanted attention and some flirty comments from Tony that gave him a lot of mixed feelings. As a last ditch attempt, Steve had even tried making a list of the things he hated about Tony. When an hour had passed and all Steve had was a piece of paper that only said ‘doesn’t love me back’, Steve had given up on that whole plan and called Bucky for a night out.
After about seven years of sheer torture, Steve had finally given in to the near-constant begging from his friends about dating once again. At the start of the night, he had honestly thought that Natasha could have been the one to pull him out of this funk, but then Tony had walked in and derailed that plan.
Natasha was beautiful, truly stunning, and the longer they had talked the more Steve liked her. She was funny, witty, smart; everything that Steve looked for in a date. Except that she wasn’t Tony Stark.
“We began to spend all of our free time together,” Steve continued, fingers trailing through a small puddle of water at the bottom of his beer glass. “We’d study together, crash in each other’s apartments, have stupid game nights with the rest of the guys that always got alarmingly competitive. We’d take it in turns to drive back to California together for the holidays – his family has a beach house there and they’d let us run riot. I don’t really know when we grew up, but all I know is that we did it together.”
Steve wasn’t prepared for this tonight. He wasn’t prepared to have to confront his feelings about his stupid man and to have them all spilled out in front of someone else for the first time. But it seemed that now he had started talking about it, he just couldn’t stop. Natasha was sitting quietly, leaning forward with her forearms resting on the table as she slowly sipped her wine.
“He’s just intoxicating; you can’t meet him and not be enthralled. He isn’t an easy person to love, not by a long stretch, but once you do fall, you just can’t stop it. There was a girl years ago – Christine, her name was – and she’d known him in his first year, when he was still young and even more stupid than he is now. She fell too, hard and fast and never quite got back up. She told me what if feels like, to love him and to know he will never love you back. And she was a girl. She had a chance.”
Steve had tried to get over Tony, he really had. Not many people believed him, but Steve had made a huge effort to try and be a better friend, not to be one that pined away and spent his nights dreaming about kissing his best friend.
Christine had noticed Steve’s pining from afar even when she’d been dating Tony, had noticed the longing just from seeing their interactions at their usual coffee-shop-lunch-date. It wasn’t something he’d ever confessed to anyone else, but she had cornered him one morning when Tony hadn’t been with him, telling him that he needed to stop panting after her boyfriend.
And Steve tried, even back then he had tried so hard, but he was in so deep already. Deeper than he had known, or ever thought that he could go.
It hadn’t been anything special that had finally prompted Steve to try again. All it had been was an evening at Tony’s where the other man had been excitedly bubbling over about some new project at work and how much he was going to love working on it. Steve hadn’t been able to tear his eyes away for the entire night.
It was on his way home in a hastily-called Uber that Steve had taken a deep breath and phoned Clint to ask him in a shaky voice whether he was up for a bit of matchmaking. Jolting the phone away from his ear at Clint’s excited squealing at finally having a chance to help Steve move on, Steve had sworn up and down that it was the right thing to do.
And Steve was ready; he had finally been ready to throw himself into that opportunity head on and embrace the change.
But then Tony derailed it. Of course he had. He’d done it without even trying.
Tony was just constantly there, always an ever-present force wherever Steve was. It was some sort of cosmic joke. The universe had set it up by putting the love of Steve’s life in every second of his day and then pulling him away before Steve could reach out and claim him. On the night that Steve had finally decided to put himself back out there and find someone new to shower with his love, Tony had also decided to go on a date.
Steve thought that he meant something to Tony, thought that they had a special relationship. Steve knew when Tony was there; whether he could see him or not, he always knew when Tony had appeared in his vicinity. He’d thought that Tony could do that too. Ever since they’d been young and dumb and the masters of pranks, Steve could never sneak up on Tony because the man always knew that he was there.
But tonight? Tony hadn’t even noticed that Steve was in the same restaurant with him, sitting no more than five tables away.
“You never said anything to him?” Natasha’s voice cut through Steve’s thoughts again, her voice soft but genuinely curious, not pitying at all.
“Look at him,” Steve said in reply, his eyes straying back over to the man across the room.
“I’m looking at you,” Natasha said softly. “I don’t see a reason that he shouldn’t know how you feel about him.”
Steve scoffed. “There are so many. I could list a hundred right now.”
“Go on then.”
“What?”
Natasha settled back in her chair, hands resting on her stomach as she leant back, appraising Steve. “If you’ve thought of so many reasons that you and Tony shouldn’t be together, then tell me.”
“It’s not that we shouldn’t be together,” Steve said, heart aching at the words, “it’s that he doesn’t like me like that.”
“But you haven’t told him. How do you know?”
“You want a list? Fine,” Steve snapped. “I’ll give you one. First, he’s insanely popular. He’s funny, he’s ridiculously smart, he’s absolutely beautiful. Oh, and he’s possibly the straightest man I know. He’s rich, absurdly clever always the most sought after man in the room, and so far out of my league that it’s embarrassing that I even have his number in my contact list.”
Natasha leant forward again and reached out a hand to cover Steve’s, squeezing it tightly. “Those aren’t reasons,” she said, impossibly softly. “They’re excuses.”
Steve opened his mouth to reply but Natasha shook her head and carried on speaking. “You’re just as popular as he is; Clint’s told me a thousand stories about a lot of people and you’re always in them, at every party. You’re funny, albeit in a sarcastic, kind of asshole way. You did a double major and then a postgrad degree in biology so you can’t say that you’re not smart too. And you have to know you’re beautiful.”
Though Steve rolled his eyes, a warm smile tugged at his lips and he felt a genuine rush of gratitude for the woman in front of him.
“He might be straight, but you can tell him, Steve. He won’t hate you just for telling him, even if he doesn’t feel the same way.”
“Natasha, it’s fine.”
“Steve, I swear. If you’re as close as you say you are then what’s to say he wouldn’t–”
“No.” Steve shook his head sadly before Natasha could even finish her sentence and turned back to her. He knew what she was going to say. “He wouldn’t feel the same way. He’s had years to give me some sort of hint. Of any kind.”
“So have you.”
Steve smiled at Natasha’s gentle voice and her attempts at convincing him that he was wrong even though they had only just met. God, she was so lovely and it just made Steve feel that much worse. But he was a stubborn fool through and through.
“You’ve had the same time to tell him that he has to tell you and yet you say that he doesn’t know and has no idea at all, so how do you know that he doesn’t feel the same way about you and just didn’t want to say anything for the same reasons as you?”
Steve blinked. She was so much like Tony, rambling on without pausing to breathe. Maybe that’s why he had felt an instant connection with her. Shaking his head slightly, Steve lifted up a rogue teaspoon, spinning it round and round between his fingers.
“It’s better this way,” he said decisively, his smile tinged with sadness.
“Is it?” Natasha didn’t sound at all convinced, but the look on her face said that she was willing to let it go if Steve could give her as straight answer on this.
Steve let himself have one last look at Tony, drinking in the sight of him before he cut off his heart. The younger man was off in his own little world, his gaze locked on the woman seated opposite him as he held out another bite of his food for her to try.
Steve could just tell that he was smiling widely as she leant in and took the piece delicately, his eyes darkening when she licked her lips far too seductively for the public setting that they were in. Steve took a steeling breath and tore his eyes away with some effort. He looked at Natasha and turned his hand over, interlocking their fingers and squeezing them tightly in a silent thanks, taking comfort in her touch.
“Yes,” he said determinedly, swallowing around the lump in his throat. “It is.”