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Early October, 2021
“Fuckin’ Scott, man,” Chris tosses his phone onto the dining room table and shrugs out of his jacket, folding it in half and draping it over the back of a chair.
“Uh oh,” she calls over her shoulder from where she stands at the kitchen counter, cutting vegetables to roast for dinner, “what did big-baby-brother do this time?”
Chris doesn’t say anything at first, coming to stand behind her and resting his left hand on her hip while the right reaches around her to pluck a chunk of red bell pepper off the baking sheet. “His stupid,” he pops the pepper into his mouth and chews, “his Halloween party.”
She sets the knife carefully onto the cutting board with the half-chopped head of broccoli she was working on and pushes it away from the edge of the counter. She turns and lifts her hands to his chest, fingertips resting on his collarbones. “Since when do you not enjoy a good Halloween party?”
“A good one, yeah,” he rests his hands on her waist then slides them around onto her back and down into the back pockets of her jeans. “But he’s got all these rules, apparently.”
She cocks her head a little to the side and furrows her brows. “Rules?”
“Yep.” He squeezes her butt a little in both hands then takes a step back and moves to stand beside her, resting his hip against the counter and reaching for the pan of vegetables again.
She smacks the back of his hand as she asks, “What kind of rules?”
“Costumes,” Chris says, turning his hand over to link their fingers together, then reaching between them with the other hand to grab a slice of carrot, staring her down, smirking, the whole time.
Rolling her eyes, she scoffs and turns to grab the vegetable pan and scoop the cut broccoli onto it before moving to the kitchen island. “Well yeah, it’s a Halloween party. Of course he expects costumes.” When she turns to look at him over her shoulder before going on, he’s right behind her, salt and pepper in hand. “Thank you.”
He holds the seasonings out to her with a small smile before going on. “The rule isn’t just costumes,” he tells her while he watches her drizzle olive oil over the pan before shaking on the salt, “it’s couples’ costumes.”
She pauses with her hand in mid-air, pepper grinder poised over the baking sheet, and furrows her brow a little as she looks down. “So … single people aren’t allowed to go?” She finally grinds the pepper over the vegetables then turns back to Chris and hands both seasonings back to him.
He rolls his eyes a little as he starts to back away. “Well, no. I guess I should have said no solo costumes. So couples or pairs or, like, friend-groups.” He puts the salt and pepper back in their rightful places beside the stove then turns to lean back against the counter and crosses his arms over his chest as he looks back at her. “Basically, your costume can’t just be a costume, it has to be part of someone else’s costume.”
“And this is a problem because you don’t want to have to match me?” She mock-glares at him and crosses the kitchen slowly to stand in front of him, still talking as she goes. “You don’t want people to know you’re with me.” She grabs the front of his shirt in both hands as soon as she’s close enough and tugs. Chris pushes off the counter behind him and lets her pull him close, his hands falling to her hips as he does. “You wanted to get all dressed up in a costume and pretend you were single for a night, that you didn’t have a fiance floating around there somewhere.” She’s still fisting his shirt in her hands, her lips pursed as she looks up at him through narrowed eyes.
It’s obvious Chris is fighting back a grin as he smirks down at her. “It sounds like you’re describing a role play situation. And yeah, I’m totally down for that, especially if it ends with you and me pretending to be strangers in a closet somewhere.”
She scoffs. “You act like you wait for an excuse to do that.” She pulls him down for a kiss, just a quick one, and lightly slaps his cheek before spinning on her heel and reaching over the stove to turn on the oven.
“Hey,” he lifts a hand from where they’ve fallen off her hips, pointing at her, “that’s only happened once -”
“My mom’s house that first Christmas,” she holds up a finger, “ your mom’s house last Christmas,” she adds a second, “and here, Fourth of July.” She holds up a third finger and wiggles them.
“Okay, fine, it’s only happened three times, and there was no role play or costumes involved, just the closets.” He sticks his tongue out as she moves toward the fridge and she returns the gesture. “Anyway, that’s not the point with Scott. I just … why do you gotta put restrictions on it, ya know? The whole fun of a Halloween costume is that there are no rules. You just do whatever fun, goofy thing you want.”
“Chris?” She asks as she backs out of the fridge with a glass dish holding two marinating salmon filets. “Are you just mad because this means you can’t just pull a bunch of random stuff out of your closet the morning of the party?” He says no, but he won’t make eye contact when he does it, and his voice sounds very much like that of a pouting child. “Okay, how about this,” she moves to set the salmon on the counter next to the vegetables while she waits for the oven to finish pre-heating, “I’ll take care of the costumes. I’ll come up with a couple’s idea, I’ll find all the pieces, you just have to promise not to argue and to wear whatever I give you.” He looks at her a little skeptically as his eyes follow her around the room. “I’m not going to make it anything humiliating.” She rolls her own eyes when he continues to squint at her, even as she points to the air fryer behind him and he turns to pull it away from the wall. “Remember, whatever I pick for you, mine has to go along with it, so it would be stupid of me to make it terrible.”
He looks at her for another couple seconds like he’s deciding whether to trust her, then he finally says, “Okay, fine,” and pushes away from the counter when the oven beeps. He meets her in the middle of the room and takes the baking sheet of vegetables from her to put it into the oven. “I guess I’ll trust you. But don’t make me regret it,” he adds, turning on his heel to peer down at her, arms crossed over his chest.
“When have I ever?” she smirks, slipping her fingers into his hip pockets and tugging him forward.
October 30, 2021
She examines herself in the full-length mirror in the closet of the master bedroom in Chris’s L.A. house. Well, their L.A. house, she supposes, it just doesn’t quite feel like that. The Boston house has felt like home pretty much since the day she moved in at the beginning of the summer. It’s where she spent most of last spring and summer, during the most restrictive part of the pandemic lockdown, where she and Chris spent last Christmas and New Year’s together, and where he proposed. Hell, over the past two years she’s spent almost as much time in that house as she did in her own rented townhouse in Virginia. But this is actually the first time she’s been in this house. It wouldn’t have been, if Covid hadn’t swooped in and turned everyone’s world upside down. There had been plans for them to spend a week there in the summer of 2020, hanging out with Scott, Chris doing some work-related things, before she and Scott both ended up basically just moving into the farmhouse during quarantine. (The guys did go, at one point, to take care of some things, but it wasn’t a semi-necessity for her, like it was for them, so she opted out.) They probably would have spent some time here this past summer too, or maybe she’d have gone to visit during spring break, while he was out here working; instead she’d stayed home in Boston any time he had to come out for work, because as much as they loved their time together, it just didn’t seem worth it for her to go along under the circumstances. Anyway, none of their loosely planned joint trips to L.A. had actually happened, and now they’re just over a month away from getting married, and she’s just now seeing this house, where she will presumably spend some time, if not nearly as much as she spends in the farmhouse, for the first time. She likes the house. It doesn’t quite feel like home, like the farmhouse does, but she likes it.
When she heads out of this somewhat foreign bedroom to meet him in the living room, it will be the first time he’s seeing her costume, let alone her in it. He doesn’t even know what her costume is. He doesn’t know what his is, actually. He knows what he’s wearing, of course - and she assumes he’s already fully dressed, considering the simplicity of it all - because the first thing she’d done once they got to the house last night was go rifling through his closet to find what she was looking for. (She hadn’t found the outfit at their house back east, so she’d really, really hoped that it was here. She had a backup plan, just in case it wasn’t, but she’d done a little happy dance in the middle of all his rarely worn “California clothes” when she found all the pieces.) She hasn’t told him why he’s wearing that, though, what exactly the costume is supposed to be . That had been part of the fun, for her, planning the whole thing and leaving him completely in the dark.
His costume may have been quick and simple, once she found it, but she’s been locked away in the closet for over an hour now, getting her whole look together. She’s just finished up the last touches, though, zipping up her boots and tying the red white and blue ribbon around her ponytail, and she has to say - she likes the look. She just hopes he will too, that he’ll find the whole concept as clever as she did when she first thought of it.
“Are you ready?” she calls down the hall from the doorway to the bedroom.
He snorts. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Hey, it’s not my fault yours was so much easier!”
“Actually, yes, it is.” She hears laughter in his voice. “It is literally 100% your fault.”
It’s not like she can argue with him. “Okay fine, whatever,” she says instead. “Well, I’m coming out now!”
She takes a deep breath, willing confidence and self-assuredness into herself that she doesn’t fully feel (she knows there’s a chance he’ll hate it), and makes her way down the hall to the living room. She stops at the end of the hall, planting her feet about hip-width apart and crossing her arms over her ribs, just under her breasts. “Alright, ready,” she says to the back of Chris’s head where he sits in an armchair a few feet in front of her.
He doesn’t get up at first, just turns and looks at her over his shoulder. His eyebrows shoot up toward his hairline and he drops his whole head forward just a little bit, his chin tucking toward his chest. “Holy. Fuck.”
“Language.”
Chris pushes himself out of the chair, never taking his eyes off her. He closes the book he’d been reading while he waited - and he has no idea yet just how perfect that is - and sets it on the arm of the chair as he walks around it to get to her. He stops just in front of her and lets his hands rest on his hips. She watches his eyes scan her from top to bottom, only to do the same thing again just before walking around her to look at her from behind. The whole time, she doesn’t move, tracking his movement with her eyes and just barely turning her head to the side and down so that she can still see him out of the corner of her eye when he crosses behind her.
“I don’t,” he starts as he moves to come back in front of her, her eyes still following and a smirk growing on her face, “where did … how?”
She lifts one shoulder. “I have connections.”
Chris scoffs. “Yeah, I guess you do.” His hands leave his own hips, gravitating toward hers, but he stops himself, his hands freezing just a couple inches from her body. “Can I touch it?”
Her smirk gets bigger. “You haven’t asked permission for that in over a year.”
She’s pretty sure a low growl works its way up out of his throat as he takes a step forward and rests his hands on her hips. He squeezes lightly, his thumbs rubbing over the rough fabric, then slides his hands down the outsides of her thighs. The pads of his fingers explore the deep navy material, the way it’s stretched tight across the muscles of her thighs, the cargo pockets on the outsides of them. He works his way back up, then, back over her hips to her ribs, and she finally drops her arms to her sides. His hands find their way to the front of her body, working over the ridges running from just under her breasts down to the belt slung around her waist. Finally, he moves to just under her arms, tracing the leather straps of the holster that runs over each shoulder and across her back.
“This is really fuckin’ good,” he tells her, his left hand dropping away from her body and the right coming to the star in the center of her chest, his fingertips outlining the shape. “ Really fuckin’ good.”
So. She guesses he doesn’t hate it. She’s pretty sure that has a lot to do with the fact that she didn’t just go to a Halloween store and grab a cheap polyester Cap suit in a plastic bag. No, she called his agent, who called someone at Marvel, who put her in touch with the head costume designer from The Winter Soldier, who then passed her exact measurements and the modified instructions along to the same company that had manufactured the stealth suits Chris had worn in the movie. Aside from the fact that they’d made the pants to fit snugly against her legs rather than the looser fit that the suit had had on Chris’s thighs, and the slight design adjustments that had to be made to the torso portion to account for her curves, as opposed to the long, strong lines of his upper body, it was a pretty perfect replica. (And when she’d tried to settle the bill, she was told to consider it an early wedding gift. She wasn’t sure from whom, whether the manufacturer had just done the work for free, or whether maybe the costume designer, or someone at Marvel, or even Chris’s agent, had paid for it, but she’d sent effusive thank-you cards and bottles of champagne to everyone involved in the process, just to be safe.)
“So I pass, huh?” She asks with a wink.
He scoffs. “Yeah. You could say that.” Chris takes a step back then, putting several more inches between them, and looks down at himself, smoothing his hands down his own body, over the sweater vest and the front of the dress slacks he’s wearing. “But now I’m just really fuckin’ confused. Because what is this,” he gestures to himself, moving his hands up and down his own body, a couple inches in front of himself, “and how exactly is it a couple’s costume with that? Or,” his face lights up, “are we skipping the party and staying home? Alone.” He wiggles his eyebrows suggestively.
She rolls her eyes and shakes her head as she steps closer to him. “This,” she reaches up with both hands, carefully closing the thumb and forefinger of each over the arms of the navy plastic-rimmed glasses perched on the top of his head and pulling them down gently to sit on his nose, “is something I’ve had fantasies about for a really long damn time.” He just raises his eyebrows and looks back at her through the non-prescription lenses. “God, you have no idea how well the whole nerdy-serious-professor look works for you.”
“Hey, who you calling a nerd?”
“Sweetie, you’re wearing a sweater vest.” The funniest thing is that he finds anything about what she’s saying to be remotely insulting, because she means it absolutely as a compliment. She’d been, well, less than happy, when the Newsweek story had run, because he’d been here in L.A. without her when it happened, making it impossible for her to get her hands on him (and those clothes off him), and had told her nothing about it prior to it being all over the internet. (So, were you just not going to warn me? She’d asked him. It’s just another piece about ASP, didn’t think it was all that noteworthy at this point, he’d answered. Just make sure you keep the outfit she’d snapped back. And that conversation was exactly what had been on her mind when the idea for tonight’s costumes came to her.) “You are wearing it very, very well, though, if that helps you feel any better.” She drops her hands to where his hang at his sides, skimming her fingers over the backs of his and up his forearms until she gets to the bottom of the rolled up sleeves of his blue and white striped dress shirt then tucking them under the fabric just a little as she curls her hands around his arms.
“Fantasies, huh?” he asks, as if he’d been so distracted by her calling him a nerd that he’d missed that part at first.
“Oh yes.”
He lifts his hands a little to close them over her elbows through the fabric of the suit and pulls her closer as she nods up at him. She doesn’t remove her own hands from his forearms until they’re toe-to-toe, when she lets go and moves them just enough to rest on his ribs, palms settling on his sides and fingers curling around to his back. “The fact that you’re smart is sexy. The fact that you’re able to pull off looking smart?” She bites her bottom lip and shakes her head. (And they both know that the whole concept of ‘looking’ smart is a stereotype that doesn’t actually mean anything. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s exactly what his stylist - and the people at Esquire in 2017 - has in mind when she dresses him in things like this.) “Fantasies,” she whispers, “lots of them.”
Chris dips his head and brushes the tip of his nose up the bridge of hers before ducking a little farther and slowly pressing his lips to hers, pulling away after a second only to go back in for a second kiss, tugging at her bottom lip lightly with both of his own. She tightens her hands around the soft material of his sweater and pushes up onto her toes, letting out a soft whimper when he pulls back enough to actually break the kiss. “Well,” he says, his forehead pressed to hers and his breath wisping past her lips as he speaks, “I hadn’t had fantasies about this before this,” he drags his hands up her arms from her elbows and curls them around the outsides of her shoulders, “but I’m damn sure going to now.”
With a hum, she says, “Maybe you can tell me about them later.” She wiggles her eyebrows. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
He groans and drops his head forward, slumping until he can bury his face in her neck. “God, you’re trying to kill me, aren’t you?”
“Nope.” She grins and reaches up with one hand to comb her fingers through his hair while the other slides around his ribcage to his back, coming to rest on his spine. “Just trying to give you a reason to make it through this party.”
His weight collapses a little more against her as he sighs. “Fuck. We still gotta go to this party.” Then, hopeful, “ Do we still -”
“We’re going.”
He huffs again then whines, “Fine.” He straightens back up a second later and takes a step back, and, brows furrowed, says, gesturing between their bodies, “I still don’t understand what this is, though.”
~~
“Uh uh,” Scott is calling at them before they’re even halfway up the driveway of the house his boyfriend has recently started renting (Scott had insisted that throwing a Halloween party together there for their vaccinated friends was a perfect way to both break in the new place and celebrate things being kind of, sort of, mostly back to normal). “No.” He shakes his head and crosses his arms, one hand holding a clipboard and the other holding a pen, over his chest. “What part of cou-ples-cos-tume do you two not understand?”
“We can leave,” Chris says smugly. “Trust me, I can think of other ways to occupy my time right now.” His hand slides from where it had been resting on the star in the center of the shield strapped to her back down to give her ass a quick squeeze before coming back up to curl around her hip.
She doesn’t respond to him, pursing her lips and looking primly back at her future brother-in-law. “This is our couple’s costume.”
Scott glares at them until they’re standing right in front of him then looks them both up and down and says, “Fine. Explain yourselves.”
“We’re Chris Evans,” she says, resting her right hand on her own chest. “And his fiancé,” she lifts her left arm, hooking her hand over Chris’s right shoulder, “mild-mannered, slightly nerdy high school English teacher.” At that, Chris grins and reaches back with his left hand to pull a paperback copy of The Great Gatsby from his back pocket and whip it in front of himself, just in front of Scott’s face.
“I … that’s not,” Scott sputters, “you’re … that’s cheating!” he finally manages.
“Nope,” Chris shakes his head as he works the book back into his pocket. “You said couples or pairs or groups only, no solo costumes. We are dressed very much as a couple.”
Scott’s eyes go dangerously narrow, but he finally uncrosses his arms and looks down to write something on the sheet of paper on the clipboard. “When you get inside, stop at the bottom stairway landing and let Steve take a polaroid. Go to the dining room table and find the box with your names on it. Tape the picture to the box. Grab a Sharpie and write your character names under your real names. Which,” he doesn’t finish the sentence, just kind of flicks his wrists to wave both hands in their direction and rolls his eyes. “In about an hour we’ll pass out tickets and you’ll put your ticket in the box of the best costumes. Most tickets at 11 o’clock wins.”
“Best how?” Chris asks, smirking. “Best like … scariest? Most creative? Funniest? Most couple-y?”
“Best, Chris, okay? Just fucking best. Your favorite.”
“Thank you, big brother,” she says, then, her grin widening, “or should I say little brother, for tonight?” Scott glares at her and she bites her lips to keep from laughing out loud. “Love you,” she says quickly, darting forward to press a kiss to his cheek, “looks like a great party, thank you for inviting us.”
~~
“So,” she starts as Chris eases the car up the long driveway, “on a scale of one to ten, how mad do you think he is that we won?”
Chris turns his head to look over at her, his eyes darting down to the cheesy plastic trophy in her hands, “Seventeen?”
She laughs. “That sounds about right. I think Steve even voted for us?”
“Oh, he definitely did. I saw him sneak over to put his ticket in our box when Scott went to the bathroom.” He puts the car into park after pulling into the garage and slips the key from the ignition. “It was a really good idea,” he turns to look at her through the dark. “You did a really good job.”
She feels herself blushing a little, her cheeks and the tips of her ears starting to warm. “Thanks. And thank you for playing along, even when I wouldn’t tell you what you were playing along with.”
Chris shrugs and turns to get out of the car. “I trust you,” he says, once she’s out of the passenger side and rounding the front of the car to join him. He lifts his arm to drape it across her shoulders, then remembers the shield is in the way and lowers his arm to reach for her hand instead.
She leads him into the house, just a couple steps ahead of him with their hands hanging between them, and when they get inside and he turns to lock the door and reset the security system, she carefully and quietly sets the trophy on the credenza in the entryway then turns to face him. When Chris spins on his heel to face her, she’s back in the same position she’d been in when he first saw her in her costume, strong stance with her feet planted at hip-width, arms crossed over her ribs, stern look on her face. “That’s good, Mr. Evans,” she says seriously. “Trust is important. And I hope I can trust you.” He swallows and nods. “Good. Now, I have some questions I need you to answer. I hear,” she drops her arms and takes a step toward him, then, slowly, another, “you have some information that might be of interest to me.” She walks just past him then reaches out to rest a hand on his hip, just above the waistband of his pants. That hand slides across the small of his back as she crosses behind him to stand on his other side. “Some … fantasies, let’s call them.”
“I,” he swallows again, and she’s not sure if she’s just really caught him off-guard, or if he slipped into character that easily. It doesn’t matter. “Yes, if you think they’ll be useful for your mission, I can share them with you.”
Well, in-character it is, it would seem. This is going to be fun. “Why don’t you follow me into the office, where you can have a seat and get comfortable. There’s also,” she clears her throat and looks up at him, “a video camera, if you wouldn’t mind me recording our little … interview. The evidence may need to be reviewed later.” It’s a webcam, actually, but she has every intention of turning off the laptop’s wi-fi before turning on the camera, and making sure the video is safely stored on an external harddrive and deleted from the computer before turning it back on. Besides, Chris has gotten very careful about this sort of thing over the past year or so, and become quite knowledgeable about things like secure data storage and internet privacy in the process.
Chris’s eyes go wide then and his cheeks and neck flush almost instantaneously. Now she’s caught him off guard. “If you think that will,” he stops, blinking rapidly back at her. “I mean, yes, if the recording will be beneficial in the future, then of course. I want to help.”
“Good,” she smiles at him and reaches up to adjust one of his lapels then curls her hand over his shoulder and squeezes. “Don’t worry, Mr. Evans,” she takes a step forward and he moves with her, “you’re in no danger and I’m going to take very good care of you.”
“Yes ma’am,” he nods as they make their way farther into the house, “Captain.”
Maybe it’s weird, or twisted, she doesn’t know. But she does know that those words send a rush of heat through her body. And besides, it’s Halloween, and they’re in a house that doesn’t yet feel like her home, if they’re going to do something like this, there’s no better time. “Okay then, let’s get started. I’ll need to begin, of course, by checking you for a wire, so let’s work on getting that vest and shirt off.”