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The first time Tony Stark calls Pepper after midnight, flip phones still exist.
He says, “Hey! There’s a party! Wanna join?”
Pepper strains her ears for the sound of music and laughter. The other end of the line is silent. She sighs.
“Mr. Stark, is it a party in your pants?” she asks.
“Yeah, how’d you know? You interested?” Tony’s voice is slurred.
“No.” Pepper rolls over and looks at the glowing red numbers of her alarm clock. 2:54 a.m. “And since you’ve awakened me at an ungodly hour of the night, I’ll be coming in tomorrow at nine instead of eight.”
She snaps her phone shut and switches it to silent. Then she does something almost unthinkable: she sleeps until 7:30 a.m.
***
Tony strolls into the office around eleven, wearing frayed jeans, a rumpled t-shirt, and dark glasses.
“Could you turn that off?” he rasps, gesturing vaguely at the radio on Pepper’s desk.
“Is it bothering you?” she asks innocently. She twists the volume knob all the way up, then back down again.
“Also, could you stop with the typing? And the talking? You know, just till I’m – well, gone.”
“So no typing or talking for the next hour?” she asks.
Tony winces. “I’ll have you know that I – well, no, that was totally fair. But I do actually work here, and I’m staying till five today, so…”
“Then you’ll be listening to me type for the next six hours, sir,” Pepper says, pressing the ‘enter’ key with just a little too much emphasis.
To her surprise, Tony looks chagrined. “I, uh, invited you to a party last night, didn’t I?”
“No,” Pepper says, reaching toward the radio.
“In my pants,” Tony clarifies. “I invited you to a party in my pants.”
“You did,” Pepper says. “At 2:54 a.m., so technically not last night. It was this morning, actually.”
“You’ve got a thing for precision, I see. Good quality in secretary. Keep it up.” He clears his throat. “Here’s the thing though, I’m not really the apologizing type, so if that’s going to be an issue…”
“Oh, no, not an issue at all, sir,” Pepper says. She twists the volume knob, and the radio roars back to life. “When I work, I like to listen to techno music,” she says, spinning the dial. “Or gospel. I really do like gospel. I’m a good Midwestern girl, you know.”
“I’m sorry!” Tony blurts out.
Pepper dials the volume back to a more reasonable level and fixes Tony with a glare.
“I’m sorry for inviting you to a party in my pants,” he says.
Pepper’s fingers twitch on the volume knob.
“It was inappropriate?” Tony asks, eyeing her warily. “And, uh, it won’t happen again?”
Pepper flicks the off switch. “Acceptable,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest and leaning back in her chair. “You should know, sir, that while I can tolerate a certain level of… drunken shenanigans, if you ever come in here and ask me not to do my job again, I will quit.”
She slides back behind her computer without sparing Tony Stark a second glance.
***
The next time Tony Stark calls Pepper after hours with a party invitation, she’s made the switch from a Razor to a Blackberry.
“You have got to come to this party!” he exclaims, and Pepper holds the phone away from her ear to escape the steady thump of the bass.
“Is this an emergency, Tony?” she asks. “Wait, don’t answer that. This is not an emergency and it is a violation of the terms of my contract.”
“This is totally an emergency,” Tony says around a mouthful of something. “You don’t know how to relax. We gotta fix that, Pepper.”
“Excellent plan, Mr. Stark. You stop relaxing every hour of every day, and then Stark Industries and I can afford for me to relax. Perhaps between five p.m. and eight a.m. every day, just as a start.”
“Better start, you come over now. Destiny’s Child is here.”
“What?” Pepper had been planning to hang up the phone. She really had been. “Why is Destiny’s Child at your house?”
“Gotta please the masses,” Tony says. The background music fades away suddenly, as if Tony had stepped outside. “I didn’t get to do this in college, you know. Party. Have fun.”
“That’s nice,” Pepper says. “Did you know it’s 1:46? At this time of the morning, I generally sleep. It’s traditional for many responsible, working adults.”
“MIT wouldn’t let me party,” Tony continues, oblivious to Pepper’s objections. “High-profile genius fourteen-year-old, kind of a legal liability. Like my dad was going to sue anyone for exposing me to alcohol, but –“
“I will be happy to assist you in finding a therapist to discuss these issues,” Pepper says firmly. “Good night.”
She switches the phone to silent and pulls the covers over her head.
***
Life gets more dangerous when Tony figures out what kind of parties she actually likes. Well, it could get more dangerous, if Pepper weren’t quite so good at enforcing boundaries.
Tony stops in front of her desk in the New York office. He looks…clean. Recently shaven. Maybe he’d even had his eyebrows done. She could check if she wanted to; she’s got access to his calendar. She won’t though, because she doesn’t care.
“You know, the Met is having a benefit tonight.”
“Mmm,” she murmurs, barely tearing her glance away from her computer screen. “Which Met? Ballet? Opera? Museum?”
“Ballet,” Tony says. “I’ve got a couple tickets.”
“Impressive,” Pepper says. “Did you book them yourself? Or do you have a secret new assistant?”
“I am capable of doing things on my own,” Tony says. “Occasionally, anyway. So, uh, I was wondering—“
“If I would like to supervise you in polite company after hours? Assist you in making inappropriate requests to ballerinas?”
The light dims in Tony’s eyes. Pepper doesn’t care. She does not.
He slips two tickets out of a pocket in his blazer. “Would I do that to you? Actually, no, don’t answer that. These are for you, to make up for all the other times with the ballerinas and innuendos and midnight phone calls and –“
“Don’t remind me,” Pepper says, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “I’m sure I will enjoy the party. Thank you, Mr. Stark.”
She calls an old friend from Columbia and lets him take her out to dinner beforehand. She absolutely, positively does not wish he were Tony Stark.
***
The first time Pepper dances with Tony at a party, he leaves her alone on the roof. She thanks the universe for reminding her who Tony Stark actually is.
***
The next time Pepper goes to a party with Tony, she has a StarkPhone prototype. It doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work. To be fair, it delivers on some of its promises: it weighs half as much as her old iPhone, for example. And the holographic display would be shatterproof. Assuming that it worked, of course.
Nothing terrible will happen if she misses her conference call in South Korea; Sun Kyeong is dying for a contract with SI, so they’ll forgive a ‘scheduling error.’
And it’s not the end of the world if she misses the email from the Bangkok office; the manufacturing schedule is hopelessly behind anyway, so a few hours’ delay won’t matter.
But if she can’t call 911 right now, she might die.
“This is your fault,” she hisses at Tony.
They’re crouched beneath a table of canapés. Bullets are flying overhead as terrorists shout for the blood of Tony Stark.
“Yes, possibly,” Tony says, whacking his own useless StarkPhone against a table leg.
“This is why superheroes have secret identities,” Pepper says. Needling Tony is the only thing keeping her from having a panic attack. “It’s so terrorists don’t come to their charity balls and try to kill them.”
Tony turns toward her, grinning. “You think I’m a super hero?”
“Maybe,” Pepper allows. “It doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re an idiot.”
“Acceptable compromise,” Tony says, his grin still electric.
The space under the table is small, almost claustrophobic. Their knees are touching; she can feel his body heat radiating through the silky fabric of her dress. Up this close, she can see the pulse jumping in his neck and the strands of gray in his temples, and if she looked down, she’d probably see that their hands are overlapping, their fingers half-entwined on the cold tile floor. Tony’s gone still and her heart is pounding, and if she turned her head just a fraction of an inch, their lips would press together. And that’s the sort of thing people do when they’re in danger, right? It’s not like she hasn’t always wondered, and if she’s about to die, well, maybe –
“911, what is your emergency?”
The StarkPhone, clutched in her sweaty hand, is finally alive. She’s on the phone, begging for police, while Tony shouts for Jarvis to deploy the emergency suit.
“Were we in the middle of something?” Tony asks, and Pepper shifts backward, disentangling her hand from his.
“I’m not your Lois Lane,” she says.
***
Their first date is not a party. It’s not a plane, not a yacht, not some ridiculous helicopter trip to a resort in the mountains. It’s her favorite seafood restaurant and three hours of Tony’s undivided attention.
He wants to know who she’d invite to a dinner party if she could pick anyone in the world (her grandmother, Michelangelo, and Gandhi), if she would want to be famous (only for her business acumen and maybe her sense of style), if she ever rehearses phone conversations (only the really important ones), and what would constitute her perfect day (and she doesn’t even know how to answer that, because perfect things are so often boring, and nothing is perfect past the surface anyway).
She pretends not to know these are the first four questions of a New York Times article called “36 Questions to Fall in Love;” the thought makes her feel strangely breathless, and she wouldn’t know what to say anyway.
By the end of the night, she’s half drunk on champagne and the intensity of Tony’s undivided attention, and she’s thinking of asking him to stay the night, or at least grabbing a fistful of his shirt and making him press her against her front door.
Instead he leans forward and kisses her gently on the lips. His stubble presses into her chin, his fingers trail through her hair, and he pulls away just when she’s about to ask for more.
“Same time next week?” he asks.
Pepper swallows and tries to slow her breathing. “Same time tomorrow,” she says, trying to keep her voice level. (It doesn’t work, but she doesn’t care.)
“I’ll pick you up at seven,” he says.
He kisses her once more on the cheek. When he turns back toward the car, Pepper sags against her front door and watches him drive off into the darkness. Just this once, she lets herself count down the hours till she sees him again.