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Darkness crowded around them, huddling them closer. Steve could barely see the details of Bucky, but he felt every inch where they touched, where his thigh met Bucky’s hip. They sat together in the middle of Steve’s bed. Bucky had asked for the lights to be off.
Shifting to hold him closer, Steve slipped his arm around Bucky’s waist, touching the strip of bare skin between his rumpled shirt and low-slung pants. Every shiver that trembled down Bucky’s spine, Steve felt rumble against his arm. Bucky’s breath ghosted across Steve’s neck whenever he lay his cheek against his shoulder.
When Bucky sighed, Steve shivered, too.
“It’s OK.” Steve nudged his nose against Bucky’s hair; he smelled like sandalwood soap, the fancy stuff Pepper bought for Avenger’s tower.
“No, it’s not,” Bucky said. “I could walk out of here and systematically kill everyone in this building in probably under twenty minutes without giving it much thought, but I shake like a newborn kitten whenever you kiss me. There’s nothing OK about that.”
Steve breathed deeply. “I know. But it’s going to be OK, because you’re not out there killing anyone, you’re here with me and we don’t have to do anything but sit here together. I have you.” He drew Bucky tighter against his chest.
Bucky let out another sigh and Steve closed his eyes a moment. How did something so simple feel so good?
“No one should be that patient.”
Steve shrugged slightly. “Patience was forced upon me. I’ve learned.”
Without a clock in sight to count the time, Steve could only sense that many minutes passed. Neither of them moved beyond their slow, even breaths; beyond the insignificant shifting of muscle.
Then Bucky sighed, his breath twirling across Steve’s Adam’s apple. “I don’t remember it, Steve.”
“Remember what?”
“Sex. When you talk about me--the /me/ from Brooklyn, that’s someone else’s story. I don’t know it. It feels somewhat familiar, like a story I’ve heard before, a long time ago. But it’s not my memory.” Bucky lifted his head. “You say I had girlfriends who let me go too far because…” His voice drifted off.
“Because you were incredibly charming,” Steve finished, then smiled. He could see the brightness of Bucky’s eyes, even in the dark.
Bucky laid his head back down. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Steve rubbed his cheek against Bucky’s hair. In some things, Bucky wasn’t alone. He probably didn’t realize that. “I’ve never....” Steve started, fumbling with the right words. “It never happened for me. Sex.”
Bucky picked his head back up. “But--Peggy?”
They’d talked about her; Bucky remembered her. Of course, she would be hard to forget, so beautiful and dynamic. Steve smiled, but he felt the sadness of it, weak at the edges as he thought about yet another moment which had slipped through his fingers.
“We never had the chance. After you--died…” Steve faltered on the word. “Everything became about stopping Schmidt. It consumed me those last few weeks, ending Hydra, letting them feel my anger. Peggy stood by my side. She held my hand and said all the right things, but--we both assumed there would be an /after/. And there wasn’t.”
Bucky didn’t speak, he continued to look at Steve. In the last several months, Steve had become adept at reading Bucky’s expressions, to hear his unspoken words. But darkness shrouded his face, so Steve waited.
Finally, Bucky said, “So you’ve never had sex and I can’t remember it.” Steve saw the tiny twitch of a smile, even in the darkness. “Aren’t we a pair?”
Steve grinned. “Seems so.”
Bucky laid his head back down and Steve felt another ten minutes pass.
“I don’t actually mind the shaking so much,” Bucky said.
Steve smiled against Bucky’s hair. “No? Well, as the man making you shake, it’s kind of intoxicating.”
Bucky lifted his head. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s how I was charming. Saying shit like that.”
Steve had never been close enough to know exactly what Bucky used to say to the pretty girls they knew from the neighborhood. He suspected it was more than words, but a huge dose of a cocky grin and handsome face that let them cast off their Catholic guilt long enough to climb into the backseat of a borrowed car or sneak him into their bedrooms via windows and fire escape stairwells, but it sounded good. “I think so.”
“You should kiss me again.”
Most of their kisses had been like this: languid, slow, deep breathing of each other’s breath. It made everything rise up in Steve’s body, from the fine hairs of his nape to his thumping heart against his chest, down to his cock.
Before long, though, as always, Bucky drew back with a shiver that echoed up Steve’s arms.
“It’s like I’m terrified.”
Steve rubbed his cheek against Bucky’s hair again. “You don’t remember intimacy. It can be scary. I may not be shaking like you, but you can feel my heartbeat, can’t you?”
Steve shifted Bucky’s hand from his waist up to lay over his sternum. Bucky spread his fingers and closed them together as Steve spoke. “That’s not strictly excitement. You’re this forbidden, wonderful part of my past. A longing I denied myself all my life. And now you’re here and I’m holding you, kissing you. I keep expecting to wake up.”
Another long pause followed as Bucky spread and closed his fingers again, resting against Steve’s chest. “Kiss me again,” he said, hushed.
Steve did as he was told. He nudged his nose against Bucky’s cheek before taking his mouth again. The kiss lasted longer this time--though maybe only a split second longer. That part didn’t matter. It was that the kiss ended as they each took a breath. Bucky hadn’t broken away.
With a long exhale, Bucky said, “That was better.”
Steve shivered with a spike of excitement. “It was.” He spoke in a hush, too. It was so much and so little all twisted together in the same moment.
“Do you think I’ll ever remember?”
The question struck Steve like pain, making him grimace. He was glad for the darkness then. “I don’t know.”
Bucky sniffed, then shifted his arm to wrap around Steve’s waist again. He laid his head against his chest.
After another long stretch of silence shrouded in darkness, Bucky said, “Maybe it doesn’t matter.”
Steve smiled. “Maybe.”
Bucky nodded, only barely noticeable in the darkness. “Kiss me again.”
END