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It was hot.
Miserably hot.
There was so much fucking sweat on his forehead that it dripped down into his eyes, the salt stinging them and blurring his vision.
It was hot, and his eyes were burning, and his boxers were so soaked through that they were clinging to his ass. Bucky was thoroughly miserable.
Sam, on the other hand, seemed to be immune to the sweltering Louisiana heat. Brown skin covered in nothing more than what looked to be a healthy glow, Sam actually seemed to be thriving on the court beneath the hellfire sun. And if the fact that Bucky was so sweaty his clothes felt like a soggy second skin and Sam was hardly breaking a sweat wasn’t enough to send him over the edge, the way he was currently losing gloriously to Sam in their one-on-one basketball game was plenty to drive him there.
“Gotta be,” he pants, “fuckin’ kidding me.”
“No jokes,” Sam laughs, the sound uninterrupted by any labored breathing. “Just me straight whooping your ass.”
“Relax,” Bucky sidesteps him, dribbling the ball. “Eight points up. Wouldn’t call that whooping my ass.”
Grabbing the ball mid-dribble, Sam shoots and scores yet again before Bucky can even blink. “Eleven points up,” he corrects. “Think I’m whooping your ass yet?”
And maybe if the sun wasn’t lighting his skin aflame and the sweat in his eyes wasn’t practically blinding him and he wasn’t so goddamn miserable, Bucky would have clenched his fists and worked on his breathing. Used some of those exercises the doc had taught him for when he saw and wanted red.
But fuck it, he was miserable, and the sweat was blinding him, and the sun was broiling him alive.
It happens so fast that he isn’t sure how Sam has time to react.
Bucky scoops up the ball and chucks it in the direction of Sam’s head, no words but an angry yell leaving his lips. He throws hard and fast. For a split-second of non-red neural activity, he wonders why he hadn’t considered retiring from world-saving and seeing if there’s a spot for him on the mound at Yankee Stadium. Pay would be better, and his teammates wouldn’t be so goddamn infuriating as Samuel fuckin’ Wilson—
“Dude, calm your ass down—”
Sam ducks just in time, the ball an orange blur as it whizzes past his head and towards the bench at the edge of the court. The occupied bench at the edge of the court.
Shit.
The scene seems to play out in double speed and in slow motion all at once. The ball that he’d thrown—stupidly, idiotically—with near super soldier strength had collided squarely in the forehead of an unsuspecting bystander. An orange bullet between the eyes.
She’s lying flat on her back, hand rubbing at the angry red bump already forming on her face, by the time he makes it to the bench.
“Are you–are you alright?”
Jesus fuckin’ Christ, of course she’s not alright.
But to Bucky’s immediate relief, she nods anyway. “You hit me in the fucking face.”
“I, uh,” he fumbles, feeling the shame that rises up in him when her eyes flutter open and he’s able to take in the totality of her features. Even a basketball to the face wasn’t able to obscure a face that pretty. “Yeah, I did.”
“Fuck, man,” Sam pants—of course, now he’s panting—once he’s finally caught up to the scene. “Help her up.”
They each offer her an arm, pulling her up on wobbly feet and helping her settle back down on the bench. She’s blinking back tears—from shock or from pain, or both. It makes his stomach curdle. He looks away.
Bucky notices a book, likely the one she’d been reading before being nailed in the face, strewn across the mulch. It’s dog-eared. He hopes that, at the very least, she was able to save the page she’d left off on.
“You need a doctor? Hospital or, uh, something?”
She seems a bit dazed, but otherwise alright. Or alright enough to level him with a look of annoyance.
“An ice pack would be nice.”
Bucky nods, but his feet don’t move in the direction of the gym. Odd. They’d never not marched towards action.
Sam gives him a quizzical look before offering, “I’ll grab some ice. Maybe some water, too. Least I can do, considering that ball was meant for me.”
He casts an almost glowering look over his shoulder as he retreats into the building. Bucky kicks at the mulch and avoids the pair of eyes that watch him from the bench.
“You’ve got anger problems,” she observes almost nonchalantly.
A wood chip flies upon contact with the toe of his sneaker. “Hmph. What makes you say that?”
“The throbbing, basketball-sized welt on my forehead.”
He meets her face then. The tears are now ghosts that haunt him in the form of red eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says sincerely. “About your face.” It’s a nice face, he almost catches himself saying.
She sighs, rubbing at the tender spot in the center of her forehead again. Bucky’s surprised when, after a moment, she begins laughing. Full belly, body shaking laughter.
Fuckin’ Christ. He’s scrambled her brains.
“You sure you don’t wanna see a doctor—?”
“I’m fine,” she says, breathlessly, between fits of laughter. “It’s just that I—I had this date tonight.”
“Oh?”
“I had this date, and now my face looks like this,” she gestures to the rapidly forming lump a few spaces about her brows, laughter still interrupting her. “Blind date. Imagine, you’re sitting at the bar, and this,” she gestures again, “walks in.”
He shrugs, careful to tamper down the desire to draw his lips up into a smile. “Sounds like a good ice breaker to me.”
There’s a flash of surprise across her features, and then it’s gone.
“You wouldn’t run the other way?”
Bucky kicks at the ground again, chewing at his lip, before picking up the discarded book. “I mean,” he holds it up, settling down awkwardly next to her on the bench, “I might now, knowing you dog-ear your books.”
She rolls her eyes. He can’t miss the twitching of her lips into something of a playful, if not reluctant, smile.
“Oh, that’s a deal breaker for you?”
“Shouldn’t dog-ear the pages. Ruins the book.”
“Ruins the book? That’s so dramatic.”
“Not dramatic. The truth. The paper gets weak, worn. It’ll rip right off.”
“I’ve never had a dog-eared corner rip off.”
“Just wait.”
A pause.
“You’re arguing about this… with a stranger?”
“Bucky,” he offers suddenly, extending his hand.
“What?”
The metal glints beneath the sun. “I’m Bucky.”
She nods slowly for a moment before reaching out and shaking his hand. He doesn’t recoil from the touch, and when she pulls away, he finds that his palm feels almost impossibly cold despite the heat.
“Nice to have a name to the face of the guy who concussed me.”
Bucky’s about to ask for her name when Sam’s footsteps echo across the court.
“Got an ice cold water bottle and an ice cold ice pack.”
He passes a look between the two benchwarmers as she takes the offerings gratefully. An eyebrow lifts when she rises to her feet, Bucky following suit to place a steadying hand at her elbow, and she begins to dig around in her canvas bag.
“Sure we can’t take you to a hospital?”
She nods. “Got a friend waiting for me at Hopper’s,” she explains, nodding towards the direction of the bookstore Bucky knows to be just a few blocks away. “But I tell you what.” She opens to the dedication page of her novel, scribbling neatly onto the page. “Call me. I’ll forward you my medical bills.”
A soft smile paints her lips—and again, Bucky finds himself in awe that anyone could be so lovely with a goose egg in the center of their face—as she places the book into his hands.
He flips open the cover, finding her name printed in neat, black ink on the page.
“Will do.”
After thanking Sam for the water and ice pack, she glances over Bucky one last time before disappearing behind the chain-link fence into the town.
He kicks up a wood chip.
“Only you could manage to nearly knock a girl unconscious and get her number afterwards,” Sam teases, bench creaking with the weight of him settling down. “Lady killer.”
“Whatever.”
Bucky grins—a toothy sort of grin—for the first time all day.
“You got shit aim.”
“Whatever.”
Later, over a round of beers, Sam would tease him again. Bucky would roll his eyes and fail horribly at trying to suppress a smile.
“We gotta celebrate,” Sam would joke. “Misery found company today.”