“If you want, we can still talk about it. You know. What we were talking about the other day.” Steve stands next to the couch, feeling ungainly, one hand shoved into the pocket of his chinos. In front of him, Bucky is sitting with his knees drawn to his chest, a paperback in his left hand and the right hand tracing light circles on the side of his face. It’s mid-morning. Bucky doesn’t have class today.
They both slept in and they made out slowly and sweetly after waking up. Bucky whispered between kisses, “What awful things do you want to do to me, huh?” and Steve whispered back, “You said something about a knife—” and Bucky cut him off by kissing him more, with renewed fervor.
They had leftover pizza for breakfast. Bucky seems floppy and cheerful and sated. It’s a good time for getting emotional shit on the table.
“You mean being smothered to death by volcanic ash?” Bucky doesn’t look away from his book, but he does start smiling. “Steve. Sweetest. Darling. Steve. I think we exhausted that. I think you exhausted that.”
“Not the volcano. You know what I mean.”
Now he puts the book down, leaving it spread open on the couch’s back.
“I think I plainly don’t.”
“I mean Andrews, Buck.”
“I told you, we don’t have to. If it upsets you, that’s okay. We’ll leave it alone.” He holds his right hand out, inching the left backward so it’s almost hidden between him and the couch. Steve goes to him, taking his hand and sitting. One leg is bent up on the couch, knee knocking against Bucky’s knees, and the other remains on the floor.
“Does it upset you? That’s what matters.” He holds Bucky’s hand tighter.
“No? I don’t miss him, if that’s what you mean. We had fun, and he was nice enough, but.” Bucky shrugs. “He was certainly no you. None of them were.”
“You had fun.”
“No, Steve, I was fucking him because it was boring.” He rolls his eyes. “What’s boring is sitting in a safe house reading Reader’s Digest. You ever done that? You ever read a Reader’s Digest? That’s torture. I fooled around with a few different people over the years. It’s something to do.”
“Yes.” Steve hears his own voice as if from over a bad phone connection. The disembodied voice says, “I’ve read a Reader’s Digest.”
“So you get it. We have any eggs? I want to make French toast.”
Steve drops it. They do have eggs. Bucky hums as he goes to the kitchen, though his gait is strange, hesitant, like he’s literally walking on eggshells. Steve sits on the front steps and draws cityscapes in his sketchbook until he feels like he can go into the kitchen and say, “How’s the French toast going?” without interrupting himself halfway through to ask for the names and physical descriptions of these few different people.
Walking up behind a humming and apparently content Bucky, he comforts himself with the thought that at least some of them must already be dead.
One morning, he wakes up to two texts from Bucky. The first is a string of emoji: a girl in a crown, two boys holding hands, three cups of coffee, an alien, and a lipstick kiss. The second text is more articulate:
Hey S. katarina wants to go for coffee after class she asked if I could bring my “hunky gentle giant” so can I bring you? I didn’t tell her u aren’t gentle she can believe what she wants. Xoxo.
The hunky violent giant meets them for coffee. Apparently, Katarina is the older of the two women he met from Bucky’s class. She’s sitting on the same side of the table as Bucky when he walks in, like they’re a firing squad, with a chair opposite them already pushed out. Her lipstick is a vibrant peach today. Steve hastily recalls the facts Bucky’s passed on to him about her:
1. “You know, Katarina used to teach tap dance? Fucking tap dance. I told her I’ve always had the hots for Fred Astaire and she called me lovely.”
2. “Guess who’s been getting too many dick pics on Snapchat lately?”
3. “Katarina’s got that same sweater. Uncanny. You both look good in it, don’t get me wrong, but, uh, you, sweetheart—” Bucky’s tentative hands grasping at his hips—
She leans toward him and offers her hand. “Hi, Stewart. We met.”
Steve pumps her hand and says, “So, shop at Old Navy much?”
She makes the same face Bucky makes sometimes when he’s asked to give his opinion. Focused but glassy. Open-mouthed.
Steve wonders if he should just go for broke, knock her coffee into her lap, and run for it. Her coffee is iced; she’d be fine. But before he gets the chance, she smiles and meets his eyes. “Yes. Sometimes.”
“Oh.” Bucky looks flustered. “Sorry. He means the sweater—”
“Oh!” Her laugh is low and rough. “The sweater, right. Old Navy. Yep.”
“That’s great,” Steve says. “It’s always great to have something in common.” Bucky raises an eyebrow at him and pushes a large black coffee across the table. “Oh. Thank you, you didn’t have to—”
“It was a real hardship getting my husband his boring-ass coffee, you’re right.”
Steve flips him off and takes a long sip, burning the tip of his tongue.
Katarina passes him a small stack of napkins. “So how did you like the art gallery? I know Jake called it, uh, ‘the swellest date on Mother Earth,’ I think it was?”
Bucky makes a show of hiding his face in his hands, laughing as he says, “Jesus. Stop. Do I sound that embarrassing?”
She pokes him in the shoulder instead of answering. “But what about you, Stew?”
He’s always fretted about how Stewart Roberts would react to being called Stew. Apparently he doesn’t react at all. How disappointing.
“Well, there were some very nice photographs on the upper level. Right, honey?”
Bucky grins at him. “Yeah, they were nice.”
Katarina asks around her straw, “You weren’t into the statues?”
“They. Uh. No, not really. They were. Off-putting.”
“Well. Still not too far from the swellest date on Mother Earth, I hope. My worst date ever—“
And she’s off, explaining in agonizingly lustrous detail how a woman she was seeing in college took her on a “date” to break into a neighbor’s basement in the middle of the night and vandalize everything in sight. They had sex on top of a smashed-up model train.
“It was awful!” She and Bucky are falling into each other in hysterics. “And she kept calling me ‘sugar!’ in this fake Southern accent!”
“Dating is a terrible idea,” Steve says. Katarina smiles at him like he’s said something interesting instead of just said something for the first time in ten minutes. He rubs his hand over his beard. It’s always there.
Bucky has his forehead on Katarina’s shoulder, his body still wracked with a giggling fit. She pats him on the cheek and says, “You doing all right, Jake?” and he turns his head enough to look at Steve.
“Yeah. Sorry about that.” It’s not clear which of them he’s talking to. “It was a funny story.” He lifts his head, and slides further down in his chair. He stretches when he does, like a cat in a sunbeam. The pointy toe of his shoe kicks against Steve’s shin.
Steve kicks him back. “You look like you broke something laughing. Oh, no, that’s what your face already looked like. My mistake.”
Bucky snorts. He takes out the huge, toothy clip holding his twisted hair off his neck. Katarina starts eating a croissant she had somewhere, and says, “Dating is a terrible idea. Thank god for both of you that you’re out of the game.”
Bucky looks at the clip in his hand. He opens and closes its jaws a few times.
“Yeah,” Steve says. “I thank god every day.”
Bucky doesn’t react to the sentimentality. He just narrows his eyes, shakes his head a little, and sticks his hair back in the clip. Then he smiles, huge, so that his nose wrinkles up and one of his eyes squints, and he reaches across the table to place his left hand on Steve’s shoulder. He puts his right hand on Katarina’s shoulder. He swivels his head to smile at them both.
“This is nice,” he says, and Steve says, “Uh, yeah, it is…Jake,” and Katarina covers his right hand with hers and squeezes.
The moment doesn’t last as long as Steve fears it might. Bucky moves his hands to his lap, folding them there, still smiling at them both in turns.
“Where,” Katarina asks, aiming a tiny play punch at Bucky, “did you even find such a delightful guy, Stewart? Seriously.”
“Oh, well. Wandering the streets. Causing an array of mayhem.”
“No,” Bucky says. “He was my knight in shining armor.”
Steve is embarrassed. He kicks at Bucky’s shin again, but Bucky doesn’t kick back. “Sure. That’s me. Covered in armor.”
Katarina stuffs more croissant in her mouth. She turns to Bucky and says, “I bet your worst date was the one with the, uh, right—” She holds one hand flat in the air, then makes little legs out of the fingers on the other hand, and mimes jumping off of something. “The cliff.”
“Aw, no, Stewart hates this story.” But he’s already laughing, looking lovely and lively.
“No, I don’t. I don’t know this story.”
“How can he not know this story?” Her shocked mouth is cartoonish. “Jake!”
Bucky says, “Eh. It’s just so long.”
“It is. It’s long. But you don’t even need the rest of the story for the part, where Dorsey, you know—” She puts her hands on either side of her face and makes little exploding motions.
Bucky rolls his eyes. “I know, I know. What a loser. More than once, mind you. He had a habit.”
She makes a disgusted noise.
“Uh,” Steve says. “You going to tell the story or just dangle it above my head like table scraps?”
Bucky winces. “No, really, you wouldn’t like it. It’s fine.” He shakes his head at Katarina like Steve can’t see him, and she shrugs. Then he slaps his hands down on the table, almost knocking his own coffee over. “What’s everyone’s favorite building in this town? Because have I got a doozy of an answer.”
FILL: The True Repairman Will Repair Man (3/?)
They both slept in and they made out slowly and sweetly after waking up. Bucky whispered between kisses, “What awful things do you want to do to me, huh?” and Steve whispered back, “You said something about a knife—” and Bucky cut him off by kissing him more, with renewed fervor.
They had leftover pizza for breakfast. Bucky seems floppy and cheerful and sated. It’s a good time for getting emotional shit on the table.
“You mean being smothered to death by volcanic ash?” Bucky doesn’t look away from his book, but he does start smiling. “Steve. Sweetest. Darling. Steve. I think we exhausted that. I think you exhausted that.”
“Not the volcano. You know what I mean.”
Now he puts the book down, leaving it spread open on the couch’s back.
“I think I plainly don’t.”
“I mean Andrews, Buck.”
“I told you, we don’t have to. If it upsets you, that’s okay. We’ll leave it alone.” He holds his right hand out, inching the left backward so it’s almost hidden between him and the couch. Steve goes to him, taking his hand and sitting. One leg is bent up on the couch, knee knocking against Bucky’s knees, and the other remains on the floor.
“Does it upset you? That’s what matters.” He holds Bucky’s hand tighter.
“No? I don’t miss him, if that’s what you mean. We had fun, and he was nice enough, but.” Bucky shrugs. “He was certainly no you. None of them were.”
“You had fun.”
“No, Steve, I was fucking him because it was boring.” He rolls his eyes. “What’s boring is sitting in a safe house reading Reader’s Digest. You ever done that? You ever read a Reader’s Digest? That’s torture. I fooled around with a few different people over the years. It’s something to do.”
“Yes.” Steve hears his own voice as if from over a bad phone connection. The disembodied voice says, “I’ve read a Reader’s Digest.”
“So you get it. We have any eggs? I want to make French toast.”
Steve drops it. They do have eggs. Bucky hums as he goes to the kitchen, though his gait is strange, hesitant, like he’s literally walking on eggshells. Steve sits on the front steps and draws cityscapes in his sketchbook until he feels like he can go into the kitchen and say, “How’s the French toast going?” without interrupting himself halfway through to ask for the names and physical descriptions of these few different people.
Walking up behind a humming and apparently content Bucky, he comforts himself with the thought that at least some of them must already be dead.
One morning, he wakes up to two texts from Bucky. The first is a string of emoji: a girl in a crown, two boys holding hands, three cups of coffee, an alien, and a lipstick kiss. The second text is more articulate:
Hey S. katarina wants to go for coffee after class she asked if I could bring my “hunky gentle giant” so can I bring you? I didn’t tell her u aren’t gentle she can believe what she wants. Xoxo.
The hunky violent giant meets them for coffee. Apparently, Katarina is the older of the two women he met from Bucky’s class. She’s sitting on the same side of the table as Bucky when he walks in, like they’re a firing squad, with a chair opposite them already pushed out. Her lipstick is a vibrant peach today. Steve hastily recalls the facts Bucky’s passed on to him about her:
1. “You know, Katarina used to teach tap dance? Fucking tap dance. I told her I’ve always had the hots for Fred Astaire and she called me lovely.”
2. “Guess who’s been getting too many dick pics on Snapchat lately?”
3. “Katarina’s got that same sweater. Uncanny. You both look good in it, don’t get me wrong, but, uh, you, sweetheart—” Bucky’s tentative hands grasping at his hips—
She leans toward him and offers her hand. “Hi, Stewart. We met.”
Steve pumps her hand and says, “So, shop at Old Navy much?”
She makes the same face Bucky makes sometimes when he’s asked to give his opinion. Focused but glassy. Open-mouthed.
Steve wonders if he should just go for broke, knock her coffee into her lap, and run for it. Her coffee is iced; she’d be fine. But before he gets the chance, she smiles and meets his eyes. “Yes. Sometimes.”
“Oh.” Bucky looks flustered. “Sorry. He means the sweater—”
“Oh!” Her laugh is low and rough. “The sweater, right. Old Navy. Yep.”
“That’s great,” Steve says. “It’s always great to have something in common.” Bucky raises an eyebrow at him and pushes a large black coffee across the table. “Oh. Thank you, you didn’t have to—”
“It was a real hardship getting my husband his boring-ass coffee, you’re right.”
Steve flips him off and takes a long sip, burning the tip of his tongue.
Katarina passes him a small stack of napkins. “So how did you like the art gallery? I know Jake called it, uh, ‘the swellest date on Mother Earth,’ I think it was?”
Bucky makes a show of hiding his face in his hands, laughing as he says, “Jesus. Stop. Do I sound that embarrassing?”
She pokes him in the shoulder instead of answering. “But what about you, Stew?”
He’s always fretted about how Stewart Roberts would react to being called Stew. Apparently he doesn’t react at all. How disappointing.
“Well, there were some very nice photographs on the upper level. Right, honey?”
Bucky grins at him. “Yeah, they were nice.”
Katarina asks around her straw, “You weren’t into the statues?”
“They. Uh. No, not really. They were. Off-putting.”
“Well. Still not too far from the swellest date on Mother Earth, I hope. My worst date ever—“
And she’s off, explaining in agonizingly lustrous detail how a woman she was seeing in college took her on a “date” to break into a neighbor’s basement in the middle of the night and vandalize everything in sight. They had sex on top of a smashed-up model train.
“It was awful!” She and Bucky are falling into each other in hysterics. “And she kept calling me ‘sugar!’ in this fake Southern accent!”
“Dating is a terrible idea,” Steve says. Katarina smiles at him like he’s said something interesting instead of just said something for the first time in ten minutes. He rubs his hand over his beard. It’s always there.
Bucky has his forehead on Katarina’s shoulder, his body still wracked with a giggling fit. She pats him on the cheek and says, “You doing all right, Jake?” and he turns his head enough to look at Steve.
“Yeah. Sorry about that.” It’s not clear which of them he’s talking to. “It was a funny story.” He lifts his head, and slides further down in his chair. He stretches when he does, like a cat in a sunbeam. The pointy toe of his shoe kicks against Steve’s shin.
Steve kicks him back. “You look like you broke something laughing. Oh, no, that’s what your face already looked like. My mistake.”
Bucky snorts. He takes out the huge, toothy clip holding his twisted hair off his neck. Katarina starts eating a croissant she had somewhere, and says, “Dating is a terrible idea. Thank god for both of you that you’re out of the game.”
Bucky looks at the clip in his hand. He opens and closes its jaws a few times.
“Yeah,” Steve says. “I thank god every day.”
Bucky doesn’t react to the sentimentality. He just narrows his eyes, shakes his head a little, and sticks his hair back in the clip. Then he smiles, huge, so that his nose wrinkles up and one of his eyes squints, and he reaches across the table to place his left hand on Steve’s shoulder. He puts his right hand on Katarina’s shoulder. He swivels his head to smile at them both.
“This is nice,” he says, and Steve says, “Uh, yeah, it is…Jake,” and Katarina covers his right hand with hers and squeezes.
The moment doesn’t last as long as Steve fears it might. Bucky moves his hands to his lap, folding them there, still smiling at them both in turns.
“Where,” Katarina asks, aiming a tiny play punch at Bucky, “did you even find such a delightful guy, Stewart? Seriously.”
“Oh, well. Wandering the streets. Causing an array of mayhem.”
“No,” Bucky says. “He was my knight in shining armor.”
Steve is embarrassed. He kicks at Bucky’s shin again, but Bucky doesn’t kick back. “Sure. That’s me. Covered in armor.”
Katarina stuffs more croissant in her mouth. She turns to Bucky and says, “I bet your worst date was the one with the, uh, right—” She holds one hand flat in the air, then makes little legs out of the fingers on the other hand, and mimes jumping off of something. “The cliff.”
“Aw, no, Stewart hates this story.” But he’s already laughing, looking lovely and lively.
“No, I don’t. I don’t know this story.”
“How can he not know this story?” Her shocked mouth is cartoonish. “Jake!”
Bucky says, “Eh. It’s just so long.”
“It is. It’s long. But you don’t even need the rest of the story for the part, where Dorsey, you know—” She puts her hands on either side of her face and makes little exploding motions.
Bucky rolls his eyes. “I know, I know. What a loser. More than once, mind you. He had a habit.”
She makes a disgusted noise.
“Uh,” Steve says. “You going to tell the story or just dangle it above my head like table scraps?”
Bucky winces. “No, really, you wouldn’t like it. It’s fine.” He shakes his head at Katarina like Steve can’t see him, and she shrugs. Then he slaps his hands down on the table, almost knocking his own coffee over. “What’s everyone’s favorite building in this town? Because have I got a doozy of an answer.”