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“I didn’t figure you for the little spoon,” Natasha drawled, appearing in Sam’s room like a ghost. He jerked forward in alarm, knocking his phone off the bed. Steve adjusted his arm on Sam’s waist, but didn’t make any moves of surprise. Sam could feel his breath, hot and steady against the back of his neck.
He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Nat, how many times do we have to talk about boundaries?” He yawned a jaw-popping sort of yawn.
Natasha smirked. “I think we set the tone for this friendship when I showed up on your front step uninvited and, to your knowledge, unaware of your address.”
Sam grunted. “Do you need Steve to save the world again? He’s pretending he’s still asleep.”
“I am asleep,” Steve mumbled. He squeezed Sam closer and almost by habit, Sam pressed backward so that his back was flush with Steve’s chest.
The first time Sam and Steve slept together—just slept—Sam had noticed with surprise how comfortable Steve’s hard body actually was. And even though the guy gave off heat like a furnace, Sam liked sleeping in his arms; it was the most secure he’d felt since before the Air Force. Sam liked being the little spoon.
So did Steve, actually. Sam suspected Steve still wasn’t 100% aware that he wasn’t a scrawny guy anymore and that he was taller, bigger, and heavier than Sam by a good amount. They always ended up trying to outmaneuver each other into the most comfortable position on the bed and Sam had joked once or twice that they needed a third person who was exclusively into big spooning. Steve had looked just a little too thoughtful at that and Sam felt compelled to say: “I don’t share.” Although for Steve, damn him, Sam might do a whole lot of things he’d never thought to do.
But that was neither here nor there right now, unless Natasha was offering to get in with them.
Natasha wasn’t much for physical affection or affection affection, really. She preferred wry smirks and witty one-liners that either flew over Sam’s head or got under his skin. When he’d told her she was going to frustrate the hell out of the person she ended up with, she’d tilted her head and, for half a second, looked shockingly vulnerable before her lips curved into that familiar smile of mystery. “We’ll see about that.”
At first, Sam had thought Natasha and Steve were a thing, until he saw how brother/sister they were with each other. And once he saw Clint and Nat together, he thought maybe they were the real deal. But if Sam was reading that relationship right, they weren’t romantically involved either. They definitely had each other’s backs and would probably walk through fire—slow if they had to—to protect each other. They were fiercely, passionately platonic. Which was its own sort of love, a love Sam really admired.
Sam had a knack for falling for anyone who got that close to him—case in point: Steve.
But trying to figure out Natasha—her love life or her favorite color—was an exercise in futility and Sam didn’t beat his head against walls. “Is there a particular reason you dropped in at 3:12 in the morning?” he asked. He was—unfortunately—almost awake.
“It’s Halloween,” Natasha said, as if that explained anything.
Sam yawned again. “Are the trick-or-treaters already laying siege to the house?”
“Bucky, Clint, and I thought we could do something lowkey with you guys.”
“Three o’clock in the morning is not lowkey,” Sam pointed out.
Natasha shrugged. “The three of us started early, but Clint can’t hold his liquor and we thought we’d just crash here.”
Sam squinted at Natasha in disbelief. She looked as coiffed and composed as ever. “You’ve been out drinking all night?”
She tossed her head. Her hair was in a high, polished ponytail and the loose ends bounced. “I’m Russian,” she explained. “Or at least, I used to be.”
“Right,” Sam muttered.
“So,” Steve said, abandoning his pretense of sleep, “this is just you letting us know you broke into our apartment and you’ll be here in the morning?”
Natasha’s eyebrow lifted and her lips pursed. “Our apartment?”
“I was asleep ten minutes ago,” Sam sighed.
Natasha ignored him. “Moving kind of fast, aren’t you? That’s zero to sixty, boys. Took a year for you two to notice you had the hots for each other.”
“The hots?” Steve repeated.
“Sorry, Captain Fossil.” She held up her hands and made finger quotes in the air. “That you wanted to court one another.”
Sam snorted and Steve jabbed him in the side.
“I’m not complaining,” Natasha said. “I won a pretty hefty sum from Tony and Pepper about when you two would…” She knocked her fists together.
Sam groaned and he didn’t have to look over his shoulder to know that Steve’s cheeks were flushed.
This was one of the downsides of dating a supersoldier with a hot mess of a surrogate family.
“Maybe we could do this in the morning,” he suggested. “When the sun comes up?”
“Clint’s in Steve’s room and Bucky’s on the couch,” Natasha said, lifting her chin. “Bucky snores and Clint’s a kicker.”
Sam could see where this was going and not for the first time since Steve and his band of heroes entered his life, Sam thought maybe he should buy a bigger place to house them all. He inclined his head at Natasha’s unsaid request.
She smirked. “I like being by the door.”
Of course, she did. Sam hated being in the middle, even if it was only Nat, who took up so little space, she might as well not have been there. And she certainly wasn’t going to be a big spoon for anyone.
Steve did all the work of dragging Sam across the bed to make room. Sam let himself be tugged, didn’t open his eyes, resigned to his fate. He listened to Natasha’s heels clunk against the floor—Sam had kept a shoes-off home before these barbarians crashed into his life—and the various sounds of fabric, zippers, and buttons. “Do you mind if I borrow a shirt?” she asked, even as Sam heard his drawers flying open.
Boundaries, Sam thought. That’s what they needed: firmer boundaries.
But that was the first thing that went out the window when you teamed up and threw yourself into a battle against a many-headed monster with no limit to its evil; when you chased after a ghost and brought him back to his body; when you holed up in motels and spent all your downtime crammed around Sam’s kitchen table eating pancakes, chugging orange juice, and watching the news to see what new madness to stymie with wings, a shield, some arrows, a metal arm, and a smirk.
The mattress depressed as Natasha climbed in. She smelled of vodka and her perfume—some discontinued line she scoured the Internet to restock from time to time. It was a complex fragrance—feminine, but bold, like roses and fire and something dark and unnameable. It fit Natasha as well as her catsuit.
“You smell like a bar,” Steve grumbled.
Natasha yanked on the covers and they slipped off of Steve completely and partially off of Sam. “Good-night,” she said, tucking herself into a tiny knot right on the very edge of the mattress. That’s how she slept, always. Sam had been in enough motels and camp sites with her (on the search for Bucky) to know she wasn’t going to move again—not one muscle—until she woke up, that her ever-present smirk was going to turn down into a slight frown, that when she woke up, she would need a second or two to locate and center herself.
Sam leaned back into Steve’s embrace, accepted his fate as the eye in a storm of superspies and superheroes. He concentrated on his breathing, synching it up with Steve’s. It was an effective sleep-inducing technique because Steve breathed so deeply.
Innnnnnnnnn. Ouuuuuttttttt.
Innnnnnnnnn. Ouuuuuttttttt.
Innnnnnnnnn. Ouuu…..
If he listened hard enough, he could hear Bucky’s snores from downstairs.
Sam sank even further into relaxation.
Tomorrow, Clint was going to be cranky from his hangover, demanding coffee and painkillers; Nat was going to insist they watch the scariest movies she could think of while Sam failed to guide them toward something less traumatizing; Bucky was probably going to insist they go out for full-size candy bars for the trick-or-treaters (none of those fun-size frauds for Bucky); and Steve was going to let a bunch of kids hold and ooh and ahh over his shield.
Halloween had always been such a meh holiday for Sam and you’d think that being woken up and bullied in his own bed would put a damper on the day, but Sam fell asleep with a smile on his face, looking forward to a lowkey day with his infuriating friends.