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She just seemed so lonely. Steve had been living in his apartment for three years now, ever since he got back from his last tour of duty, and for two of those three years he’d spent far too much time wondering why it was that the pretty redhead across the hall never seemed to have anyone with her.
It wasn’t like he spied on her or anything, okay? But he was always going in and out on his jogs, a few dates, some nights out with friends… and he almost never saw her, but he knew she was in there because she played scores from famous ballets (something he only knew because one of his dates had asked him if he lived next to an aging ballerina) pretty loudly sometimes, or blasted action movies on her TV. He saw her once when she came back from what looked like a pretty rough night, all alone and carrying the same black duffel bag she usually was when she went out, her hair tied back in a tight bun.
He didn’t get it. Over time, they’d become friendly at least, though he wouldn’t quite consider them friends since he was sure that Natasha took very little notice of him. There few smiles here and there, a polite ‘good morning’ whenever they passed in the hall, but otherwise? Steve stayed out of her way and Natasha clearly had no interest in forming a closer relationship. It was as simple as that. That wasn’t to say that Steve wouldn’t have been open to it. Natasha was pretty and seemed interesting, but there was something about her that kind of warded him off.
Except that one night, he brought a date back to his apartment for coffee and actually caught Natasha in the hall, wearing a big sweater and a pair of tights, her hair pulled into a messy braid. He’d greeted her warmly despite the way his date tightened her hold on his arm and Natasha had returned the greeting without hesitation. But the look on her face was something Steve interpreted as longing, or maybe jealousy? Maybe she was having trouble finding a date, though Steve couldn’t understand why.
Maybe she was shy!
Well, whatever the case, he was going to help however he could. First step? Find a guy.
Steve had plenty of friends to choose from, but his mind went to Tony first. He definitely had more girlfriends than almost anyone else Steve knew- that was a plus, right? Then again, he wasn’t looking to get Natasha to hate him and he was pretty sure that introducing her to Tony (who would inevitably sleep with her and never call her again) would definitely make her hate him. No, Tony wasn’t an option.
He moved on to Bruce next, if only because he was a good guy. True, he was a little shy, but he was also really intelligent and everything… Aside from his paranoia and slight anger issues, he could be considered a damn good catch. Maybe his mellow attitude would match Natasha’s quiet persona? Steve decided, after quite a bit of consideration, to give it a go… without telling either of them what he was up to.
He invited Bruce over for pizza and a movie one night, but he ordered three pies instead of two and pretended that it was a mistake. “You know, the girl across the hall never seems to have anyone to eat with. Let’s ask her to join us!” Overly confident and feeling accomplished, Steve marched himself across the hall and knocked on her door, inviting her over with a wide smile. Though Natasha looked kind of confused, she agreed and headed into Steve’s apartment, where the three of them engaged in slightly awkward conversation over their pizza and beer. It was all going pretty well considering Natasha had asked Bruce about his work in nuclear physics and Bruce had countered with what he thought was a neat fact about physics and dancing… until Bruce also started shyly telling them about a girl he met at work. Her name was Betty.
After that, it was pretty obvious that this wasn’t going to go in the direction Steve had been hoping for. He did learn, however, that Natasha was a dancer and that she was born in Russia. He learned that she didn’t like pepperoni and preferred Asian cuisine to Italian. She told them about how she’d moved to New York when she was Everything she said was filed away to aid in his quest to find her a date.
It was so obvious. God, why hadn’t he thought of Thor earlier? Everyone liked Thor. Even the people who hated him kind of liked him as well. And it didn’t take a whiz to know that he was unbelievably handsome, so why not? Even more than that, he was warm and outgoing- the perfect person to begin a conversation with a total stranger. Steve went out of his way to time it perfectly. He made sure that he and Thor were headed back to his place for video games and takeout just about the time that Natasha would leave for her evening shows.
Sure enough, she was right there in the hallway when they got there and Thor raised his hand. “Hello,” he greeted, giving her a warm smile. “I don’t think we’ve met.” Natasha blinked and turned to glance up at him, over to Steve and then back to the blond currently addressing her.
“No, we haven’t,” she said carefully. “Are you a friend of Steve’s?”
Thor nodded and threw an arm over Steve’s shoulders, giving them a squeeze. “One of his best friends, as a matter of fact,” he said brightly. “My name is Thor. I’d be honored if I could have yours.”
Natasha pressed her lips together and considered him for a moment. “Natasha,” she answered, succumbing to Thor’s charm as far as Steve was concerned. There was a beat and he was sure Thor would ask her out—but he didn’t. Hey. “Well, it was nice to meet you, but I have a show in a few minutes. Nice to see you too, Steve.” She waved and headed off, leaving the ex-soldier to shake his head and drag Thor inside for a round of Call of Duty that included a lot of friendly fire.
Alright, he’d ruled out the guy who got all the girls, the shy one and the perfectly handsome one. Who was left? Wracking his brain, Steve tried to think of what else a woman might really like in a guy and then it hit him. A sense of humor! Clint! Clint was definitely the answer. This time, Steve went out of his way to be covert and set something up for the two of them. The idea that he could actually set them up in an obvious way didn’t even cross his mind.
He left a flower taped to Natasha’s door along with a little note from a secret admirer from afar. Clint had been to his place a few times, so it wasn’t totally illogical that he would have seen her and been struck by how beautiful she was, because she was beautiful. Then he left a little teddy bear with another note, shyly asking her if she was seeing someone else. She responded, leaving the note on her door with a ‘no’.
Good. Steve said that he’d meet Clint in a café a couple of blocks away and offered Natasha another note, this time with a place and time and an offer of coffee if she would meet him. He would be wearing a blue shirt. She accepted! Imagine his surprise when later on that day, Clint arrived asking him if he’d forgotten and mentioned meeting a girl at the shop anyway- a girl with red hair and plump lips who looked like she had been expecting someone else.
And they’d wound up sitting together and talking because both of their expected people had forgotten about them, apparently. The big question was whether or not Clint had asked her out and-- “Nah. She was nice, but she seemed disappointed that whoever her date was didn't show up.” Steve nearly banged his head against the wall because really?
All this, and he still hadn’t gotten Natasha more than a solitary cup of coffee with someone who was too stupid to ask her on a real date. There was only one man left- one man who might just be able to do for Steve what he needed him to do.
Bucky.
“Let me get this straight,” his best friend chuckled over a table at their usual diner. “You want me to hang around in your hallway until this chick comes out so I can ask her to dinner? Are you fucking insane? Do you have any idea how weird that’s gonna look?”
Steve sighed inwardly, but he didn’t even pause in his reasoning to Bucky. He knew he could get him on board. “But she’s worth the wait, Buck. I promise. She’s gorgeous, okay? Take my word for it.”
Luckily, Bucky reluctantly agreed to try as long as Steve paid for dinner and promised him that this girl wasn’t actually really ugly, but pretty ‘on the inside’. Steve told him emphatically that Natasha was really one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen and, after some questioning, admitted that yes, she had a very nice ass.
Two days later, Bucky came over and loitered for a while, leaving Steve to peer out of his peep hole in the hopes that he could watch that moment when two people meet for the first time and everything just clicks. Creepy? Yes. Sue him.
To his surprise, instead of just waiting for Natasha to eventually show herself, Bucky marched up to the door and knocked. What the hell was he thinking?! Steve watched Natasha answer the door, watched Bucky greet her and point at his door over his shoulder… He was going to kill him. Natasha peeked over Bucky’s shoulder and Steve could feel his face heat right up, even though she couldn’t see him. A second later, she was stepping aside to allow Bucky into her apartment and the door closed behind them.
Well. Maybe Bucky was better at this than Steve had thought. Standing up straight, he frowned for a moment and wondered why all of a sudden, nothing felt right. Shaking that off as soon as he could, he turned around and grabbed a beer from the kitchen before landing on the couch to watch some television. But Steve kept catching himself glancing over to the door, his lips tilted down.
Bucky came back nearly an hour later, hair messed just as much as his clothes were, and wearing a dopey grin. Steve kind of wanted to punch it off his face and he didn’t know why. “Lemme tell you something,” Bucky announced, landing on the couch beside his friend. “That is one amazing woman.” He let out a low whistle and Steve’s jaw clenched hard.
“Did you know she was a dancer? Man, that girl can move.” Yeah, Steve could just imagine how much Bucky had seen her move in the past hour. “And she’s right from Russia. How cool is that? You know she slips into Russian sometimes? That accent doesn’t get enough credit.”
For ten whole minutes, Steve allowed Bucky to gush about his neighbor. He listened to how beautiful she was like he didn’t already know, how sexy her accent was, how she liked to go dancing and thought all types of movement were interesting. Bucky told him things he hadn’t known too, like that her parents died when she was very young and she came here to live with an uncle. But eventually, Steve couldn’t take it anymore.
“I’m starving,” he interjected quickly. “We should order something.”
Bucky nodded in agreement and Steve got up to grab the menus, tossing a Chinese one over to his friend before the bomb was dropped. “I asked her to join us for dinner,” he said bluntly. Steve whipped around.
“What? Why don’t you just take her out?”
He got a shrug in return and Steve pressed his lips together. So that was how it was going to be. “Alright, fine,” he mumbled. “But if this is another attempt to involve me in a threesome, I’m still against it.”
Bucky laughed and they picked out a few things to get- more than enough for three people. Steve ordered while Bucky pulled out plates and cups to set the table. As always, it took them about twenty minutes to deliver and Steve paid in cash, setting the food on the counter so he could keep the table ne--- Wait. Bucky was putting his jacket back on. Why?
“Going somewhere?” He got a sheepish smile in return just as Natasha let herself in and stepped up to Bucky, leaning up to kiss him on the cheek.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Yeah, I am. I just remembered that I have this thing to do, so… You kids have fun and Steve, remember that I love you. Bye!”
He was out the door before Steve could protest, leaving his friend alone with the girl across the hall. “Uh, sorry about him,” he offered, attempting and failing not to imagine what they’d been up to just a few yards from right there. Steve didn’t even know why he was jealous. He could have asked her out months and months ago.
The question was- why hadn’t he?
Natasha was watching him like she knew more than he did and it made Steve nervous in a really good way. “I have way too much food, though. So, um... if you want to stay, that’d be fine. I’m probably not as entertaining as he is, though.”
She laughed lowly and joined him at the table, drawing him right into a simple conversation about what kinds of movies he liked and the time she went to China only to realize that she was conditioned to only like American Chinese food. He countered with his time spent in France and his experience attempting escargot without knowing what it was.
It was pretty easy to forget that she’d supposedly been with Bucky just a short while ago—until she tilted her head to the side and offered a small smile. “Maybe we should go out for Chinese sometime,” she suggested. “There’s a place in Brooklyn that has the best dumplings I’ve ever had, including the ones in China.”
The look on Steve’s face must have been pretty comical because she laughed out loud, covering her mouth and earning a blush that began on his neck and eventually culminated at the tips of his ears. “I… But… I don’t understand,” he said, ever so articulately.
She sighed. “It was your friend’s idea,” she confessed. “He figured that if we made it look like he and I had slept together, you’d get jealous and realize that you wanted to ask me out.” She paused for a moment and worried her lower lip. “I guess I just jumped the gun and asked you before you could realize it… unless you don’t want to ask me out, in which case your friend owes me twenty bucks.”
“No! No, I do,” he said quickly. “I do want to. Very much.” Natasha smiled and Steve wanted to ask her to sit for a portrait right away, right after they finished eating. But maybe he’d wait a little while longer, maybe he’d see how he felt after their first date or after their first night together or after a three month milestone or… or he could just ask her right now instead of waiting for two years like an idiot.
So he did and, giving him a very suggestive look, Natasha agreed.