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Sometimes it felt like the universe was trying to tell Sarah she had to live her life jumping from one boring cliché to the next. Even with her brother cast as a famous superhero, the only role the outside world seemed to want to assign her was merely Sarah: single mother, scraping to make ends meet, widow-spinster for life. What bull.
Even as a kid, when she'd had her growth spurt in the fifth grade—outstripping Sam by three taunting inches he couldn't help but resent—instead of the world remarking on her remarkableness, the other kids just started calling her Sarah-Plain-and-Tall. Which: no. First of all, she wasn't some boring, prairie white lady. And second, though she may have been tall, there was nothing plain about her. Those classless, short losers had it all wrong.
The universe, like those schoolyard bullies, didn't seem to care that her life was vibrant, and full of joy and wonder and, yes, maybe a little boring sometimes—nine straight years of bedtime routines could humble anyone's joie de vivre. The point was, she wasn't a cliché and she refused to live her life that way.
So what if she stuck to a routine? So what if she did the same things all the time with all the same people? So what if she got painfully lonely some nights missing her husband's arms around her?
That didn't make her a cliché. That made her human.
That was called being in her groove.
And then, out of nowhere, something came along and pinched a little crimp in that groove.
Just sitting there one afternoon, on the work table under the Wilson Family Seafood sign, acting as innocent as could be, was a knife.
An 8-inch chef's knife in a black polymer sheath, to be exact.
"What the?" she said under her breath.
She withdrew the blade from the sheath to inspect it. Maybe there would be some kind of identifying mark on it?
Nothing. It looked brand new, never used.
"Whose knife is this?" she called out, holding it aloft. "Anybody leave this here?" It really was too new and too sharp—and too expensive looking—to be mistreated this way by its scatterbrained owner.
"Gotta be yours," Carlos said unhelpfully. "That young white boy left it for you." He scratched his beard like he was trying to remember which white boy in particular might be hanging around with the Wilsons. "The strong one with the funny arm."
Huh. So Bucky Barnes was sneaking around leaving knives in her things? Sam's Bucky? That was weird. She didn't like that. Her boys came out here and helped her sometimes. It was dangerous. But, also. Expensive. Huh. That was, like, a fifty dollar knife. Lucky Sam.
Except. That's not what Carlos had said, was it.
"He left it for me? Are you sure?" She twisted the handle back and forth and admired how the blade gleamed in the sunlight. "It's not for Sam?"
Carlos shrugged.
"Okay, then," she said, still a little confused, but not confused enough to not add that bad boy to her kitchen collection.
It was a really, really good knife.
Three days later there was a bouquet of fresh flowers on her work table, sitting in a round glass vase. Tiger lilies and aster daisies and purple bellflowers, the tag said.
"Whose—" She looked around. "What's with the flowers?"
"White bo-o-oy!" Carlos hollered with just a little too much glee in his sing-song voice.
So this man, this Bucky Barnes, was out here acting like a stray cat, leaving random stuff at her feet. Except instead of dead birds they were nice, thoughtful things that she kind of appreciated. The knife, the flowers, a basket of oranges, a dog-eared copy of The Hobbit, for some reason, that had 'For your boys' written on the inside cover.
It was all very nice, but still so confusing. What was he playing at here? What was the goal?
Sarah was on the porch, savoring a cold glass of pinot grigio and flipping through a thirty-year-old home and garden magazine her mom had kept in a box with other magazines in the attic, when it finally occurred to her. When she finally got what this was all about.
He was old fashioned after all.
Courting, or whatever, was totally different back in the 50s, or whenever. A man had to ask permission first, back then. From the family. And since Daddy was gone...
In a completely dorky way, it all made perfect sense.
It all made perfect sense, that is, until Bucky Barnes sidled up to her one day on the dock and took a sledgehammer to her little theory.
"Hi, Sarah," he said with his usual little half-wave.
"Hi," she said back. If it came out a little breathless, it was only because she was lugging heavy crates around.
"I was just wondering..." He sounded nervous, which was pretty cute, she had to admit. He looked around, and then picked up another crate in the heap to help her along. The way he made it look like it weighed nothing still surprised her, even after all this time. He smiled at her as he put it down. "I was hoping, you know, I could maybe take you out? Drinks and dancing, or something?"
"Uhh..." was her coherent reply.
Whatever she'd thought he'd been planning to ask, it certainly hadn't been that. He raised his eyebrows at her continued speechlessness.
"Sure?" she finally said, just to say something.
"Tomorrow night?" He pointed at her with two sets of finger guns, which seemed excessive.
"Fine?"
She caught him pumping a celebratory fist as he walked away, then high-fiving a grizzled old fisherman she was one hundred percent sure he didn't know.
No. Suddenly things didn't make any sense at all.
Sarah waited until after dinner, when the boys had their video game time upstairs, to turn to Sam and ask him:
"Why is your boyfriend asking me out on a date?"
Sam dropped the plastic mixing bowl he'd been scrubbing into the bottom of the kitchen sink. "My what?"
"Bucky," she clarified. "Why would he ask me out dancing? Is this like an old gay 50s thing I don't know about?"
"He asked you out?" It didn't seem to make him any happier when Sarah nodded. He balled up a dish rag and aggressively dried off his hands. "After I specifically told him—? That's it. I'm gonna kill him. For real, this time. He's getting a murdering."
"Oh, come on, Sam." She made a pish-posh motion at him. "I'm sure it's nothing. He probably just wants to butter me up before he asks me for my blessing."
The dishrag hit the floor. "He better not go anywhere near your" —he waved down the front of her vaguely— "blessing."
Sarah just gaped at him in total confusion. These men, they were absolutely nuts. There was no way they'd successfully saved the U.N., or New York, or whatever. No way.
"Wait," Sam said after a good thirty seconds of silent fuming. "What gay 50s thing?"
"I need to sit down," Sam said before leaving her in the kitchen to collapse onto the couch like a sack of potatoes.
Sarah followed him only so far as the threshold, leaning against the wall and crossing her arms.
"I'm lost," she said. "So you and Bucky? You're not... together?"
"Not that there's anything wrong with it," he started, leaning forward and resting his chin on his clasped hands, "but what even gave you the idea I'd be with another man?"
"Besides your 'confirmed bachelor' status? Let's see." She started counting off on her fingers. "There was Riley, and then Steve, and—"
"Okay, okay, I get it. But those were just like... really intense, emotional connections. The kind forged in war. Epic stuff, like—like Lord of the Rings epic."
Sarah nodded in understanding. AJ and Cass loved those movies. "So you're saying they were the Sam to your Frodo."
He lifted his chin and unlaced his fingers to snap at her. "Exactly. And thank you for casting me as the lead, and not the plucky sidekick."
Sarah shook her head and gave him the most pitying smile she could muster. Sometimes he just walked right into it. "Oh, honey. Sam and Frodo are so gay."
"Whatever," he said, eyes going just a touch wild. "He's not my boyfriend, is all I'm saying." He made a ta-da gesture to finish out the thought. Sarah couldn't help but smile. For Sam, this was practically flailing, and it was adorable.
"Hmm." And when he was acting flustered and adorable like this, it was just too fun to mess with him. She put her finger on her chin in mock-contemplation. "So it would actually be totally fine if I went out with him then."
"No." He pointed a finger at her in warning. "It would not be totally fine."
She pushed herself off the wall and walked to the couch to clap him on the shoulder. "Always so jealous, little brother."
"Tssch. Little. I'm thirty minutes older than you."
"And I've lived five years longer. This is the only thing about getting old that brings me joy, so don't you dare take it away from me." She gently swatted the side of his head and returned to the kitchen.
The next afternoon she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror, wondering just how one prepared for a date one accidentally accepted with a man one thought was one's brother's gay lover.
As one did.
She'd agreed to go on a date without knowing it was a date, and she wasn't even sure she was in the right mindset to go on a date, and this whole thing was just a hilarious disaster from start to finish. And yet... she wasn't calling him to cancel, was she?
She covered her face with her hands and laughed. Maybe just a tad maniacally.
"Sarah. Girl," she told the mirror after dropping her hands back to the sink counter. "Get it together." The mirror started laughing back at her and she couldn't make it stop. "He gave you a knife." She bit her knuckle to try to stop. "The romance."
"No funny business!" Sam warned as Sarah trotted down the front steps toward her car.
"Jealous, jealous, jealous," she replied.
"I mean it. He's a menace!"
Bucky was already at the jazz club when she walked in. His back was to the bar, and he was casually resting his weight on his elbows behind him. For some reason the word insouciant popped into her head, but she wasn't exactly sure it meant what she thought it did, so she filed it away under Not now, Sarah, and strolled over to him.
"Hi, Bucky," she said.
He turned to her and immediately straightened. "Sarah, hey. I got you this."
Another random gift? she wondered. A basket full of puppies?
He handed her a full bottle of beer off the bar.
"Ah. Just what I wanted," she said, sincere, and took it from him gratefully.
"You look nice," he remarked.
"Thanks." After staring at her closet for what felt like six hours, she'd finally decided to keep it casual: a loose, sleeveless, charmeuse shirt in burnt orange, tucked into a pair of dark skinny jeans. "You too," she said back, taking the opportunity to check him out in his navy blue Henley and black jeans. The shirt just had to be cliché about it and bring out the blue in his eyes. Typical.
They stood at the bar together while the live band set up, making small talk. Generic first-date stuff. The house music, playing low over the speakers, was peppy with a lot of clarinet; it slipped Sarah into a groove that eased any leftover nerves from before she got there, reminding her that she was actually good at this, even if it'd been a while. Watch her master any banal subject: the weather, the brand of beer they were drinking, the boat's most recent coat of paint. At one point Bucky made the rookie mistake of asking her about AJ and Cass, and if he'd wanted to have his ears talked off his nicely-shaped head, he was gonna get his wish. But he smiled at her and seemed genuinely charmed by the mixture of praise, annoyance, and wonder those terrible little miracles brought out of her.
Watch out, she reminded herself after a few minutes. She didn't want to stumble into a cliché, herself. The saintly mother whose only defining characteristic was her ability to act as a vessel for the creation and cultivation of human life. Why couldn't he have asked her about cooking, or something, instead?
"What about you?" she said, worried she might be thirty seconds away from taking out her phone and boring him to death with pictures of the boys doing absolutely nothing of consequence except being perfect and/or terrible. "You got any kids out there, wandering the world?"
He almost choked on his beer.
"Um. No. And not even in a 'not that I know of' way." He shook his head. "Just: no."
She wondered about that. About his certainty. For some reason it made her think about Sam's weird jealousy. Her brain was making electric little connections on its own and forgetting to clue her into the process.
"Good for you," she said, bringing her bottle up for a cheers. He toasted her back with a warm smile.
"And even if I did, they'd be like" —he looked up at the ceiling, doing mental calculations— "eighty-five years old or something."
"That's... wow." She didn't know what compelled her to say it; the music was just too good at relaxing her shoulders and making her loose-lipped. "That's quite the dry spell, huh."
He threw his head back and laughed. It gave her a chance to admire the long line of his neck. Not that that's what she was doing. Couldn't really do that while also giving her full attention to his Adam's apple, now could she. She stepped in just a little bit closer and felt the heat of his body as it moved with his laughter.
Listen, she hadn't been out in a long time. (Not eighty-five years long, but who could match that?) She was determined to savor every little bit of this strange encounter. Even if it never ended up going anywhere.
But why wouldn't it go anywhere? Her brain was sparking away, making more buzzing, synaptic connections. Because maybe Bucky hadn't been getting around lately because he'd been too preoccupied, pining away for a certain someone. Perhaps a certain Wilson sibling who wasn't named Sarah.
"The lone wolf howls alone," Bucky said, like a huge nerd, momentarily interrupting her thoughts.
Maybe she hadn't been entirely wrong in her previous assumptions.
"Look." Sarah leaned her elbow on the bar—ew, sticky—before pulling herself back up. Somehow she'd managed to angle herself even closer to him in the process. "You gotta tell me straight. Did you only ask me out because you want my brother, and you can't have him?"
She tried not to be insulted by the look on Bucky's face. Like he was holding back his laughter, but also judging her for asking such a weird question out of the blue. Which, fair enough.
"Interesting," he said. He coughed into his fist and it was clearly hiding a laugh at her expense.
"What?" She put her beer on the bar next to him, keeping her fingers around its cool body. "It's a perfectly reasonable question, for anyone who's got eyes and who's seen the two of you together."
"Sarah." He looked her in the eyes and his gaze pierced her. Which annoyed her. Who gave him the right to look so good while laughing at her? And to smell so good? Rude.
He bit his bottom lip, released it, and said, "Who says I can't have him?"
Now it was Sarah's turn to choke on her beer.
"If I wanted him, that is." He reached for her hand, now returned to the bar next to him, and, with the barest touch, ran a smooth, metal fingertip across the inside length of her index finger, clutched around her beer bottle. "But I'm here. With you."
It took her maybe fifteen or twenty seconds too long to pull her hand away from him. Her eyes didn't get the memo, though, and stayed locked in with his.
"I'm honestly confused right now," she said. Somehow, against the very laws of physics, she managed to move even closer to him. "But I'm not mad about it."
There was that laugh again, deep and throaty and making her spine shiver a little bit.
"Listen. I love your brother, I really do." He took a drink like a salute. "He's like the best friend I've got. But we were never gonna be that way."
"Uh huh," she said, with just a crumb of disbelief. "You sure he knows that?"
"Hundred percent." His eyes really could light up, couldn't they. "You see, there's the problem of rank."
"What problem?"
"He's a captain, and I'm just a lowly sergeant. It would never work between us. The power imbalance alone." He shook his head theatrically, and she caught the teasing gleam in his eyes.
She slapped his arm. Hard. It stung her hand, and she felt a little stupid for doing it, but it was the principle of the thing. "Boy, I will walk out of here."
He laughed again, lighting up his whole face now, and oh. Oh, damn. What was she saying again?
"Sarah. You really don't have to worry about me and Sam. We barely work as friends. There's no way this town could survive anything else. I may be a glutton for punishment" —she raised her eyebrows at that and his face went just the tiniest bit crimson— "but I know a bad idea when I see one. Your brother? He's the King of Bad Ideas." He was still using that dry, sarcastic tone. Maybe that was just his factory setting. "He'd only break my heart."
His free hand settled dramatically over the organ in question.
Sarah rolled her eyes, but damn if she wasn't smiling. "If he's the King, what's that make me?"
The Duchess of Second Choices? she mused, taking another pull of beer around her smile. God, he was annoying. She maybe understood Sam now, when he called him a menace.
"You, Sarah Wilson, are an incredibly attractive, smart, sexy woman I'd like to get to know better." She could see he wanted to go for her hand again. She didn't think she'd pull away this time if he did. She'd be annoyed about it, but she wouldn't do anything about it.
The live band behind them seemed like they were finished with set-up, and had moved on to warming up their instruments and testing the sound system.
Sarah looked up those measly few inches at him, tilting her head and scrunching her brow. "You are bi, though, right? I'm not imagining that?" If she hadn't been kinda annoyed with him, she would've been mortified by her own rudeness.
Bucky merely shrugged and took a casual drink of beer. "Sure, if that's what they call it now." He turned his body toward the bar and leaned his weight on it with both elbows, angling his head at her with what could've only been called a shy smile. "It's just... everybody's got something nice about them, right?"
"Everybody, huh?" She gave him a knowing look and watched him go red again, even brighter this time, and it went a long way toward easing any earlier annoyance. He broke eye contact and faced toward the bar. But she wasn't through with him just yet. She waited until he lifted his beer to his mouth, then said, "So tell me, Bucky Barnes. Are you just a big ol' slut?"
He spat his beer across the bar, and that pile of wedged limes were definitely going in the trash. After apologizing to the bartender for what seemed like ten whole minutes, he turned back to her with an offended-yet-impressed look on his face.
"You're a little wicked, aren't you, Sarah?"
She really liked the way he said her name.
"Big time," she agreed with a grin, clanking her beer bottle against his in a one-sided cheers.
His eyes went a little dark then, and he held his hand out to her. "Dance with me?"
The live band was halfway into their first song as he slowly led her by the hand out onto the dance floor. There was a low-swaying groove to the bass and the drums that was easy to find her pulse to. Bucky, too, seemed to get into the beat of it easy enough. His style looked like it was more swing, but she could work with that.
She let herself fall into the rhythm of the push-pull, the steps coming easy and loose, her shoulders deep in the flow. Bucky wasn't half so bad, she thought. A menace would be stepping all over her toes out there.
Every so often he would send her out into a spin, and on the catch he'd pull her closer into his arms, and they'd pivot together to the sweet, high song of the trumpets. With the energy up, the rhythm so smooth, there was no containing the joy that spilled out of her in musical peals, like bird calls lofted along a wild summer wind.
The way he smiled back at her—it put a feeling of something like pride in her chest.
His hands were big and warm around hers, and when she brushed up against the whole of him at the center point of an inside spin, he was like a furnace made of bricks. She was drawn to it. The moth and the flame, oh the cliché.
When the second song started up, it was slow and bluesy, a deep-dark molasses flowing through those horns, and he pulled her to him, back to front, wrapping one arm around her waist, and swayed with her in a tantalizing circle of his hips. She let herself fall into the flow of it. No thoughts on the dance floor; that was a rule here, or at least it felt that way. She leaned her head back over the top of his shoulder and brought an arm up to slip behind both their necks, syncing them together as one.
Poor old Sam didn't know what he was missing out on with Sergeant Hips here, she thought a little smugly.
She could feel Bucky's breath on her cheek, and with the low pulsing bass echoing through her, it was like being out on a stormy sea, letting the waves take her where they may.
Finally, regrettably, the song ended, and he released her.
"I think I need another drink," he said, with a low chuckle, right in her ear.
"Lightweight," she teased, but led him away anyway. If her hips were still sashaying to the music as she walked back to the bar, it wasn't specifically for his benefit, but she'd let him enjoy it anyway.
Bucky put his hand up for a second round. The bartender glowered at him as she handed the bottles over; clearly she hadn't forgiven him for his earlier mess. Sarah resolved to leave her a very generous tip as compensation for her teensy little bout of jackassery that may or may not have instigated said mess.
Bucky wisely moved them over to a small pub table—and she meant small; it could barely fit more than their two drinks—that had opened up in the corner. He glanced over his shoulder halfway, as if in fear of some kind of retaliation from the bar.
Settling herself behind the table, Sarah swallowed nearly half her beer in two long gulps. Bucky looked genuinely impressed, which, whatever; she was thirsty.
"You know," she said, watching him down his own beer with that post-dance enthusiasm that couldn't be contained. "You never really answered my question before. You and Sam?" Though after feeling him move against her like that, she was starting to care less and less about it.
"You want the truth?" he asked. "Me and Sam?"
"Been wanting it this whole time."
"I could never date Sam," he said with a gentle shake of his head and another drink.
This, she could tell, was genuine.
"And why is that?"
"Because." He held up his hand briefly, as if taking an oath. "And this is the God's honest truth, I swear. Because he's really, really—and I mean this—really annoying."
"God, he so is!" she blurted, then immediately slapped her fist over her mouth, feeling guilty for the sudden lapse in family loyalty. She was such a two-beer traitor.
But that only got Bucky smiling. He leaned in close across the small table, and practically purred in her ear, "See, I knew there was a reason I liked you."
She looked up at him as he pulled back slightly. But only slightly. He was still right there in her space, all warm and magnetic and still smelling so good. There was nothing that piddling little table could do to hold back his intensity. Sarah's pulse thundered away, coming on like gangbusters.
"You wanna get out of here?" said someone who definitely wasn't her. It may have sounded like her, and the words may have come from out of her mouth, but it wasn't her. Wasn't Sarah-Plain-and-Tall, lonely single mother, widow-spinster for life. Sarah the cliché. She would never.
"God yeah," Bucky breathed out, taking her warm hand in his.
One step outside the club door, and the cool night air was a refreshing gust against her flushed face. She turned toward him as she walked, and he moved with her, hands light on her hips, until her back was up against a lamp post. He leaned his head in: a question.
She captured him by the jaw with both hands and kissed him: the answer.
She drove him back to the house without even thinking about it. It didn't matter if there were so many other places they could go. It was just—having home field advantage was too strong a temptation.
As long as they didn't go inside it would be okay. She could make it work.
It being... something. She was kind of winging it here.
When she stepped out of the car, Bucky had already made his way around to her side, crowding her up against the door she'd only just managed to close, his mouth soft and hungry against hers.
She curled her hands into the fabric of his shirt, up by his collarbone, and gently pushed him back, walking with him in the dark, hands groping, mouths barely coming apart, until she felt him bump up against the trunk of the big tree out front.
A wild rush flowed through her. She felt like a teenager again, necking in the woods with the captain of the football team.
Bucky slid his hand down her neck, over the front of her shirt, stopping politely atop the curve of one breast as if to make a formal introduction, before moving down to her waist. He tugged slightly at her shirt where it was tucked into her jeans.
"This okay?" he asked in a low voice. Instead of answering, she untucked it for him herself. "Guess so," he chuckled against her ear.
He slipped his hand under her loose-fitting shirt, but, like a gentleman, kept it over her bra.
"Look at you, mister dry spell," she teased, dropping a kiss on the underside of his stubbled jaw. "Getting fresh."
He turned his face back to hers and the taste of his laugh on her tongue was divine.
She didn't know how long they stood out there in the cool night, his hand on her chest like a fire keeping her warm.
"Hey," she said eventually. Something important had just occurred to her.
"Mnnmm," he replied against the juncture of her jaw and earlobe.
"Hey. You can, like," —he swallowed the word with a deep, biting kiss that dragged her bottom lip into his mouth and made her shiver— "stop with the" —another pause while he tasted her top lip this time— "presents now." She let him tip her head back slightly and brush two light kisses against each corner of her mouth. "Starting to get stalker-y," she finished, breathless.
"Don't worry," he said smoothly, against her mouth. "Those were for Sam."
"What?" She pulled away slightly, ignoring the loss of warmth as his hand slipped out from under her shirt. "No."
He leaned back against the tree, looking as relaxed as a sunbathing otter. "You know, to get his blessing."
Sarah slapped the back of her hand against his ribs. "You did not try to bribe my brother for me, you creepy old man." She poked her tongue into her cheek to try to stop from smiling.
"Okay, okay." Bucky laughed and playfully cuffed her belly in retaliation. "I'm sorry. They were definitely for you. If I ever gave Sam a knife he'd just stab me with it."
"Well, you can stop it now." She curled into him again, satisfied with his faux contrition. "I won't accept any more stuff."
"Alright," he said, assenting easily enough. "But can I still—?" He ran metal fingertips up the length of her arm, leaving goosebumps all along the way.
"This, I accept," she said, then brought him in for another searing kiss. He pinched her side and she let out a ticklish squeal. The joy of it seemed to echo through the night.
All of a sudden he was bathed in a faint yellow light, and it made him look soft and pliant under her.
Bucky pulled back to look over her shoulder, eyes widening.
Sarah turned her head to see light coming from the front of the house.
"Oops," Sarah said at the same time Bucky muttered, "Shit."
The front door slammed open. "Oh no," Sam bellowed. "No you don't. Not on the first date!"
Bucky grabbed Sarah by the hand and pulled her with him as he skirted around to the backside of the tree.
"Bucky!" Sam was getting closer, practically running at them, she could tell by the heaviness of his footfalls. "You keep your grubby little cyborg hands off her!"
"No!" Bucky yelled back as he started into a real dash now, keeping her hand in his. She couldn't help cackling like an absolute fool as she chased after him. Who was she, the farmer's daughter caught in the hayloft?
Suddenly Bucky came to halt in front of her and she felt her feet being swept off the ground. Bucky scooped her up and cradled her against his side like she weighed nothing at all. God, the way that sent a hot thrill to her core. He looked up at her, waiting for her breathless nod. She didn't make him wait long.
She hugged her arms around his neck, her legs wrapping tightly around his solid waist, and then they were off, loping through the trees.
"Not... fair...!" she heard from behind as the distance between them and Sam grew. "Damn... you... Barnes!" The last cry was faint, drowned out by the rush of air whipping across her face.
It was only a minute later that he slowed, gently removing his tight hold from her lower back to release her to her own two feet. The way she practically slid down him was maybe a little embarrassing.
"That should do it," he said, seemingly to himself. "For now."
Sarah leaned herself up against a nearby tree. Not that she was out of breath or anything. She just needed... a minute.
Bucky sauntered up to her slowly, until he was only a few inches away. He put his hand just over her left shoulder to rest his weight against the trunk.
"Hi, Sarah," he said.
"Hi, Bucky," she said, grinning.
"I'd very much like to take you out again," he offered, in a sudden bout of old timey politeness. "If I live through the night, that is." He glanced over his shoulder as if he just remembered the pissed off brother coming for them in the night.
The "Aaarrgghh!" of Sam's frustration did seem to be howling a tiny bit closer.
Sarah laughed, and felt it through her whole chest. "Yeah, alright. Sure."
His face broke into a dazzling smile before he leaned in and kissed her one last time. It was smooth and deep and oh, oh so good. And then he was gone, running through the night like some kind of albino cheetah, while Sam, finally back in the picture, huffed after him, threatening to slice off his balls.
Sarah let herself fall back against the tree. Her blood rushed all up under her skin in a shivering thrill.
Okay then, she thought, trying to reset herself. This was a thing that was happening. She shook her head. Falling for her brother's best friend? Her brother's cybernetic, hundred-year-old, super-powered best friend?
What a cliché, she thought, unable to suppress her smile.