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The save-the-date arrives on a Tuesday morning, tucked away inside a baby blue envelope.
It matches the gleam in Steve’s eyes—all cotton candy, mid-afternoon skies blue—in the photo that falls out from it. He beams up at you so hard from the picture that you have to blink back the image of him decades younger, backwards baseball cap on his head and dirt caked in the hollows under his eyes and lips split so wide around those missing baby teeth that his cheeks look pinched, like his ma’s fingers had just caught him there, drawing all the red blood to the apples.
“He looks happy, doesn’t he?” Bucky’s expression mimics that of Steve’s in the photograph when you tack it to your refrigerator, an easy, white-toothed smile at his lips.
The look must be contagious—or maybe it’s the fact that one-third of your childhood trio would be getting married come spring—because your own mouth slides up into a relaxed smile, teeth not quite making their appearance yet.
“Yeah,” you nod, hopping up on the counter to peel the last orange from the fruit basket. A hint of citrus hits your nose as your fingers dig into the ream. “He does.”
Bucky doesn’t look away yet, crepey skin of his eyes still crinkling as he looks between Steve and Peggy’s inked faces. “Looks kinda dopey.”
“‘Course he does,” you laugh around an orange slice, tart juice sugaring your tongue. “He’s in love. He always looks like that when he’s in love.”
It’s the sweet smell of the orange that finally draws his attention away from the card stuck to the fridge, long limbs seeming to move towards you on their own accord. He leans back against the quartz island countertop, elbow brushing your waist.
Placing the flesh palm of his hand in your lap, the backs of his fingers tickling the bare and dimpled skin of your thigh, he awaits the offering. “Please tell me I don’t look so damned goofed up when I’m in love.”
“Never seen you in love,” you shrug, dissecting the little orange between your fingers, your nails collecting remnants of its peel beneath them. His fingers curl around the slice you’ve given him, pink lips enveloping it, even as his brows furrow. Another slice settles against your tongue as you continue, “Tara? Evie? Claire? You think it was love with any of them?”
He chews, jaw sliding back and forth, lips pursing against the slightly soured sweetness. “Guess not.”
He’s licking his fingers, droplets of juice or the flavorings of food never allowed to go to waste from James Barnes’ tongue. How many times had his ma smacked him upside the head for that? Given him that silent warning with her eyes, just as steely blue as her boy’s, just as scary when sharpened with reproach?
It’s rude, James, she’d tell him. Go wash your hands, son, for Christ’s sake.
But you’re not his ma.
“Last one,” you tell him, holding the final, near-translucent fruit slice up to the light streaming in from the kitchen window. “Wanna split it?”
“Nah,” he shakes his head, a strand of hair falling in his eyes. “You have it.”
He knocks his elbow against your knee—the heat of his touch still looming there—pushing away from the counter to go dig in your refrigerator, the sound of drawers opening and bottles rattling in his wake.
“Wanna beer?”
“From my own fridge?”
“Yeah.”
You swallow down the last of the orange, tossing the peel into the bin. The scent of citrus is soaked deep into the skin of your palms, deep into the skin of his fingers. You smell like the juice that he’s licked from those long, flesh and bone digits—your shared scent tangy on his tongue—and the thought sends you clearing your throat before answering him.
“Yeah, hand me one.”
The glass bottle clinks against the silver ring on your middle finger as he tucks it into your hand. Bucky’s eyebrow raises at the sound, eyes flickering to where the band glitters beneath the fluorescent kitchen lights before meeting your gaze again.
“He’s gonna be there, ya know,” he says instead of asking the unuttered question that’s already been swallowed down with the first barley-tinged swig of his beer. It’s probably swimming around deep in his belly by now, but you know him better than he knows himself, know the words dissolving in his stomach acid: Why are you still wearing that thing?
“It’s pathetic, isn’t it?” You twist the band around your finger, watching the sapphire twinkle blue in the light as it slides up and down past the knuckle. It never did fit your ring finger.
He shrugs, another swallow of the beer. “A little.”
There’s the tilting up of his right mouth corner, white-squared teeth playing peek-a-boo from the window his lips create.
“Wanna hear something even more pathetic?” You offer to the sliver of cornflower blue in his eyes, the color darkening to harbor belittlement or shame in your direction.
“Always,” he says, eyes lightening—always lightening, only ever lightening towards you—in amusement.
“I ran into him at Sam’s work thing last weekend,” you begin, Bucky’s eyelids narrowing slightly now, looking at you down the neck of the amber bottle. “He was with her—Jo—and he asked how I was doing, and I panicked, and I might’ve told him I was seeing someone.”
“Might have?”
“What was I supposed to say to him?”
“I don’t know,” he huffs, annoyance not directed at you but still grazing your cheeks as he sets the bottle aside to rest his hand against his hip. “Tell him to kiss your ass? That he owes me about fifty bucks for all the ice cream it took to get you out of bed that first week?”
“Bucky—,”
“No, come on,” he says seriously now, grabbing your left hand up in his, fingers wet from the condensation as they rub at the place where the ring’s left an impression in your skin. “You gotta pawn this thing, alright?”
“I’m not going to—,”
“Jesus, your hand’s freezing,” he ignores your protest, frowning at the chilled flesh of your digits that rivals the coolness of the Heineken abandoned against your thigh. “Remember when you used to chase me and Stevie around in the winter with those cold ass hands of yours, trying to press ‘em up against our cheeks?”
You laugh then, watching as he tries to melt away the ice in your skin with the familiar flint of his thumb. “Yeah—and I always caught you.”
His tongue pokes out, swiping around his bottom lip like he wants to say something and he’s got to slicken up the runway for the words to slide out just right. At the last moment, he just chuckles instead, shaking something from his head like a swimmer shakes the water from their ears.
“Steve and those skinny little legs of his—outran every last one of us.”
“And then he’d have to come to my rescue, hauling you off me when you’d wrestle me to the ground, shoving my hands in your jacket pockets,” you shake your head like you’re developing the memories like film in your mind, a Polaroid of a pre-teen Bucky, all dark hair and a dimpled chin, holding you down in the snow, his breath hot and stuttering with laughter against your neck, grows clearer. “You were such an asshole.”
But even then, you were harboring the secret, the one you hadn’t dared spoken into the air lest it became real—you liked the way the furnace of his skin, the smoke of his breath, reduced the glacier in yours to ice water in your chest each time.
“Hey, I was doing you a favor,” he argues, pulling your palm up to rest flat against his chest like he used to back then, shoulders broader and sternum stronger all these years later. His heart still beats the same beneath the lifelines. “Your ma sending you out without mittens—you know Steve’s ma used to threaten to knit you a pair every Christmas?”
You nod, grin at your lips softening at the memory of Mrs. Rogers, thick Irish accent wrapping around your name as she called out to you from their apartment stoop, warning that she’d better not see you at St. Andrew’s after dinner with frostbitten fingers or she’d lob ‘em off herself.
Something shifts in the conversation with the mention of Steve’s ma.
Bucky’s sweatshirt is soft and well-worn against your fingers as you grab up the material and gather it up inside your fist, pulling him back into the present—back to this version of you with time-marked skin and furnace-heated cheeks—by the collar. “What am I gonna do?”
“About the wedding?”
“I’m going to look so stupid when I show up without a date, and he’s sitting there with Jo, smiling like an idiot because she looks so perfect and—,”
“I’ll go with you,” he says, fingers curling around your grip on his shirt.
“Well, yeah, I figured we’d go together—,”
“No,” he shakes his head. “I mean I’ll go with you—be your date. Pretend to be your boyfriend, or whatever the hell will get his eye twitchin’.”
And now your eye might begin to twitch, eyelid jumping in beat with the sudden quickening of your heart, a Morse code of fluttering eyelashes betraying you at the prospect of Bucky being your date, your romantic partner—even if just for a night, even if just in pretending.
You say his name like a hiccup against the obtuse feel of your heart in your throat. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun,” he insists, eyes so light now that crystalline. “You, me, a little dancin’, too much champagne? Don’t tell me you don’t want to see the way Steve’s eyes will bug out when we tell ‘em we’re together.”
You can’t help but laugh at the thought of how your friends would react, even as your mind can hardly think of anything but the warmth of Bucky’s fingers still wrapped around your own, the ice in them long melted by his touch.
“Nat’ll know,” you tell him in a breathy giggle. “Nat always knows.”
It’s your attempt at giving him an out—giving yourself an out before this goes too far, before you get a taste of what it would be like to call Bucky yours, enough of him on your tongue that you’d have to admit that it’s what you’d been craving all along, a hunger in your belly all these years you could never let yourself sate.
He shrugs, and there’s a cerulean glint of mischief in his eyes—and something almost indigo in shade that you can’t quite place—when he says, “We’ll just have to make it believable then… if we’re gonna fool Romanoff.”
Your stomach is somersaulting, all acidic and light from the orange still lingering beneath your fingernails, as you swallow down the fleshy red organ of your heart enough to tease, “Let’s see how much you remember from drama club.”
His heart flutters strongly beneath your palm, teeth glittering white like snow, in reply.
“You comin’ or what?”
His knuckles tap against the hotel room door, exasperated tone of his voice muffled by the thick wooden barrier.
“I’m coming,” you call out from in front of the mirror, neck angled uncomfortably to peer at the back of your dress. A huff of irritation blows past your painted lips. “Can’t get this fucking zipper to zip up.”
“Steve’s gonna have my ass,” he groans against the wood, voice a little clearer now. The shadow of his loafers peeks in from underneath the gap between carpet and door. “Kinda fuckin’ important that the Best Man isn’t late.”
“Co-Best Man,” you remind him through another huffy sigh, dropping the material between your fingers and shuffling over to the door in your heels. “Sam can cover for you for a second,” you say as you start to unlock the bolt, “Just get in here and help me with the damn thing.”
When you swing the door open on its hinges, Bucky stumbles forward a bit, righting himself from where he’d been leaning up against it.
“Jesus, couldn’t give me a warning—?” he begins to complain, scowl marring his features, before his neck snaps and he’s blinking at the sight of you in the doorway, jaw slackening as the words catch in his throat. “Uh, hey.”
The way he’s looking at you, as if he’s never truly seen you before, makes you shift uncomfortably in your heels.
“Hi,” you test, a nervous smile creeping up on your lips. You’re suddenly second-guessing the extra swipe of blush to your cheeks. “Everything okay?”
His fingers fiddle with the bow tie at his collar, blue eyes blinking back that strange indigo tint again, before he’s correcting his face, placing a familiar half-cocked smile at his mouth that puts you more at ease. “Yeah, it’s fine—I’m great. Uh, you needed help with your dress?”
“Yeah,” you nod, turning your back to him to allow him to trail you into the room. As you retreat, two pairs of feet padding against the carpet, it’s impossible to not feel the burn of his eyes at the bare skin of your back. “It won’t zip up.”
He grunts, nodding, as you stop in front of the mirror, watching the eyes of his reflection flicker from where the zipper rests just above the curve of your backside up to your own reflection in the glass.
You offer him a soft smile, lips not quite parting to display a flash of teeth, to coax him on. His Adam’s apple bobs beneath the milky skin of his neck as his left hand hovers for just a moment at your waist before he gingerly leverages it above the swell of your hip.
The feel of those firm, metal fingertips pressed into the material of your dress sends your heart hammering away inside your chest. Your pulse is a deafening thunder in your ears that follows the lightning strike of his touch.
How many times had he touched you before, hooked a casual arm around your waist, without calling the thunder to your rib cage like some Norse god? This was a new power over you.
His right hand finds the zipper, mouth flattening into a straight line as he tugs at it, fingers digging a little less featherlight into the bunched material of your gown for purchase.
“Damn thing,” he mutters under his breath, and you feel the curse hot on your shoulder. His lips are so close to the blade of your back that he could lean forward, just less than an inch, and press a kiss into—
There’s a little puff of relief that fans across your neck when the zipper pulls upward on its track, Bucky smoothing the material of your dress at your back before taking a step back, eyeing you with a raised eyebrow in the mirror. Pink dusts his cheeks like windburn.
“Alright,” he rubs a large palm down his face. “You ready? Steve’s gonna kill me.”
“Let’s go,” you nod, grabbing your clutch up in your hand as Bucky opens the door for you to step out into the hallway in front of him. “You can tell Steve it’s my fault you’re running late.”
“Still don’t think he’s buying that we’re seeing each other.” He presses the white button for the elevator, and it glows yellow beneath his fingertip, beckoning the lift to your floor.
The elevator doors open with a ding. “Nat’s not buying it, either,” you tell him as you step inside, leaning up against the stainless steel wall opposite from him. “Sam’s the only one convinced.”
“Yeah?” Bucky’s lip twitches amusedly, ghost of a laugh rolling off his tongue. “What’d he say?”
“‘Finally,’” you parrot Sam’s voice from earlier in the day when you’d told him that you and Bucky had started seeing each other.
Bucky laughs at your impression of the man, running a hand through his hair as the elevator doors close. “Well, at least we’ve got one down. Three more to go.”
Your bottom lip works its way between your teeth, the waxy taste of lipstick in your mouth preparing your tongue to speak a name you’d forbidden from it months ago. “Nate’ll probably be quick to believe it. He was always jealous of you.”
A surprised little chuckle catches in his throat, nose scrunching into itself. “Of me?”
“Yeah,” you laugh a little awkwardly, a little ungracefully. “Always thought that maybe there was something between us.”
Bucky doesn’t respond outside of a grunt, head nodding back against the metal wall of the lift before a smirk begins to transform his features. He’s shaking his head a bit incredulously, shoulders shivering with a silent laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
He drags his shoulders up into a nonchalant shrug. “Guess I just like the idea of making the prick jealous.”
“Bucky—,” you begin to warn.
“No, I’m serious,” he shakes the air of fun from his voice, picking up a sharper, more serious quality as he crosses the lift to stand next to you. “He’s a prick—he was a prick for leaving you, and he’s gonna feel like a prick when he walks in tonight and sees you with me.”
He’s so close, face just inches from yours, that you can smell the mint of his toothpaste still on his breath.
Your mouth parts in time with the parting of the elevator doors, an image of a guest in a maroon wrap dress coming together on the other side. Before you can speak, Bucky’s already leaning, lips nearly brushing the hot skin of your cheek in their path to your ear.
To anyone else, it would appear he’s placed a gentle kiss on your temple. “Follow my lead.”
You nod, words lacking the air needed to produce sound, and then he’s pulling you by the hand, fingers interlaced with yours, off the elevator and towards the reception hall.
The sound of your heels clicking against the floor reverberates in your mind, colliding with the constant stream of thoughts bouncing against your cranium.
Bucky’s held your hand a hundred times before—guiding you through the crowds at the fall fairgrounds, pulling you to your feet after Kat McNamara knocked you down at Sam’s twenty-first birthday party, bracing you against the clergyman’s words at Ms. Roger’s funeral—but it had never felt like this. Never had it felt so tender, so warm with affection, and yet so electric.
The feel of fingers interlocked with yours, his thumb pad rubbing circles into the underside of your hand, sends white hot bolts of lightning into your veins, the energy following the path-of-least-resistance straight to your heart. Underneath your dress, away from prying eyes, you’re certain there’s a tree-branch marking of his lightning strike branded into your skin.
He’s motioning for you to sit on the end of a row of chairs, the aisles still mostly empty save for a handful of guests. Ahead, Steve is talking to the officiant, hands in his pockets and head bowed slightly. When he catches sight of you and Bucky, he waves a little exasperatedly, but the annoyance doesn’t reach the edges of his face. Instead, he wears a broad smile, gesturing for Bucky to join him and the rest of the groomsmen.
“Better go,” he tells you, hand unlacing from yours. “I’ll be right up there the whole time—I’ll find you after the ceremony, okay?”
“Okay, go,” you smile up at him, raising your hand to swat him away. He catches your open palm, delicately closing your fingers into a fist and pressing his lips to your knuckles before dropping your hand and bounding down the aisle without another word, seemingly entirely unaware of the state he’s left you in.
Watching him while you try to steady your heartbeat again, you take in the sight of him, muscular shoulders cloaked in his navy suit.
He’s all sharp cheekbones and angular jawline and dark hair as he laughs with Steve and Sam, eyes crinkling so familiarly. He looks the same as ever—still your Bucky with the flattened nose bridge and the round eyes and the two parallel lines between his eyebrows—but none of this feels familiar.
You’re absent-mindedly rubbing at the joints where he’d pressed his lips, soft and pink and warm, when someone clears their throat beside you.
He’s smiling when you angle your neck up to get a glimpse of him, a beautiful woman you’ve met only one other time before on his arm. “Mind if Jo and I sit with you? Everyone we know’s in the bridal party.”
“Oh, uh,” you flicker your eyes towards the flower-covered arbor that Bucky stands beside, drawing strength from his side profile. “Sure.”
They both nod their thanks, bright smiles plastered against their cheeks, as they scoot past you into their chairs. Your left middle finger burns, the indent from Nate’s ring long disappeared, as he leans closer to ask, “So, where’s this lucky guy of yours? Been dying to meet him.”
Bucky’s already looking at you when your eyes flit up from your hand to find him, concern etched into those two parallel lines at his forehead.
“You’ve already met him,” you smile sweetly, nodding in Bucky’s direction. He waves, the worry dissolving in the wrinkles in the center of his face, melting them down to the lines that form around those cornflower blues instead.
Nate doesn’t try, or maybe isn’t able, to hide the note of surprise in his voice. “Barnes? I didn’t know you two were—uh, when did that happen?”
“It was still pretty new when I saw you at that Christmas party, the one at Steeple & Chase?”
The lie rolls off your tongue easily, and you’re a bit surprised by it, by how easily you’re allowing yourself to slip into this fabricated reality where you and Bucky are some happy couple.
“Right,” he nods slowly, fingers drumming in his lap as they always did when the gears in his mind were overworking. He glances down at your left hand, finding the fingers bare. “Well, I’m happy for you. Guess you and Barnes were always meant to be.”
And just like that, the runaway train of your heart hits a solid brick wall. That little red caboose stills in your chest, one last push of red hot blood to your cheeks before the engine sputters out, dark steam practically billowing from your ears.
“Thanks,” you force out against the sudden, smokey thickness in your throat.
You paint a smile at your lips, one that Bucky returns from across the room, unable to see the wreckage of your heart, ribs a splintered mess like uprooted tracks and twisted turnstiles.
And when the ceremony begins—when everyone rises as Peggy walks down the aisle looking like an angel in white and with lips of red, when Steve’s a little teary-eyed and Sam’s clapping him on the back with a smile that shows that little gap between his teeth—that matrimonial march is the work song singing in your chest as Bucky winks at you. A vision in a navy suit, he untangles the railings, refastens the crossties, and welds the pieces of you together with a single gesture.
“Be honest, is my mascara everywhere?”
Bucky’s holding you close, arms wrapped around your waist as the two of you sway to the soft rhythm set by the live band, the bright white lights of the banquet hall acting like the heat lamp of an incubator. Sweat clings to your hairline, and you swear you feel your makeup beginning to slide off around the edges of your temples.
“Nah,” he shakes his head, toothy smile on his face that hasn’t managed to make a disappearance all night. “Still looks good… you look good.”
Even as the blood rushes to your face, dizzying you a little, you grin. “Steve did you a real favor, picking out navy for the suits.”
“Yeah?” There’s a gleam in his eyes, irises impossibly blue.
“Yeah,” you nod, hands leaving the back of his neck to straighten the bow tie at his throat. He peeks down at you beneath a fan of dark lashes. “My date just so happens to look good in blue… something he should have heeded when picking out his tux for prom.”
“Now that’s low,” he shakes his head, the motion doing little to dislodge the reflection of string lights, like little white stars, in his eyes. “You know my ma picked it out for me.”
“I think she was trying to deter Krista Levens from meeting you under the bleachers.”
He laughs out her name, nostalgia blanketing the syllables. “Krista—ma never did like her.”
“No,” you mimic the airy noise. “She did not.”
When you finish smoothing the wrinkles in his bow, more pop up around the corners of his eyes as your fingers find the warm skin of his neck again. He leans in close, lips hovering millimeters from your cheek.
Just barely over the thundering of your pulse in your eardrum, you hear him say: “Always liked you, though.”
Warm lips climb the highest peak of your cheek—the place where flesh is most scant over angled bone—and deposit a kiss so gentle that it would be easy to believe that you’ve imagined it.
But it’s not a figmentation; that much is clear when Natasha catches your attention from across the dance floor, her own arms draped around Sam’s shoulders. Her lips, plum in color and plumped in satisfaction, draw up into a smile. Those eyes, green and so often dangerous, glint brightly.
They’re filled with belief.
Suddenly, the temperature beneath the lights—beneath Natasha’s approving gaze and Bucky’s false attentions—has risen to become unbearable.
“I’m dying in here,” you mumble, pulling away from his grip. You already feel cooler, familiar chill returning to your skin, as his hands drop from your waist. “I think I’m gonna get some air.”
You’re already several steps towards the French doors marked by the glowing red exit sign when his fingers catch you around the wrist, spinning you on your heels to face him. His eyebrows are drawn together, eyes rounded in concern.
“You feeling okay?”
You force a smile, and he notices. “Yeah—just burnin’ up in here.”
He nods. This time, the motion does seem to shake some of the glittering from his eyes.
“Okay,” he drawls out a bit. When he slows his cadence down like that, he sounds like Brooklyn. Sounds like home. It makes you suck in a breath as he says, “I’ll come check on you in a bit, yeah?”
“Yeah,” you exhale, feeling his grip on your wrist falter, releasing you to scurry towards the exit, heart beating in time with the clacking of your heels.
The sun had set hours ago, stealing away the April warmth with it.
Dogwood trees and neatly-pruned hedges and just-bloomed lilies meet you in the courtyard, the rustling of their branches and leaves and petals in the wind a hushed greeting. There’s an iron-wrought bench beneath a particularly lonely looking tree, and as you sit down on it, the chilled metal digs into the exposed flesh at the underside of your thighs.
The sensation sends goosebumps rising on your forearms, your teeth gritting against the coolness of the evening, but you don’t move to return to the reception yet.
It’s too hot in there.
Nat’s in there, lips stained like merlot, pulled up at the edges in an undeserved, misplaced blessing of a lie. Nate’s in there, too, swirling Jo around, skirt of her dress spiraling pink across the dance floor like his words in your mind: Guess you and Barnes were always meant to be.
Bucky’s in there, too—the blazing hot sun at the very center of this solar system. If you orbit him again, his arms wrapped around your waist like solar flares from a red hot star, it’d surely mean an extinction-level event for your little blue planet.
It seems you’re meant to orbit one another, gravity working like fate, when he eventually comes hurtling through the door like an asteroid.
He searches the ill-lit garden, eyes like sad, demoted-to-dwarf-planet Plutos until they land on your face. He crosses the courtyard silently to sit beside you on the bench, leaning casually into the intricate iron details of its back.
There’s a beat of silence between you, the most uncomfortable pause there’s ever been in the twenty-year expanse of your friendship, before he’s clearing his throat. “Cold out here,” he says without turning towards you.
“A little,” you lie. Before the night is through, maybe you’d actually grow to be good at weaving fabrications and falsehoods, as good as him.
He’s watching you out of the corner of his eye, you can feel it. “Your hands cold?”
You pause the absent-minded rubbing of your hands together you’d been doing. “No.”
“You’ve always been shit at lying,” he laughs, though the noise lacks its usual lightness.
His hands reach forward and gather yours up in them, gently guiding your freezing fists to the pocket of his suit jacket. Almost immediately, the ice that’d set into the long bones of your fingers begins to melt.
“Better?”
When you look up to meet his face, his eyes are so warm—ever warm, always warm in your direction—that they boil the blood in the capillaries of your cheeks. It feels like anger, something easier to acknowledge in its regard of Bucky than this other burning, all-consuming fire that threatens to eat up every bit of oxygen in your lungs.
Your tongue sharpens the words like a whittle. “How is this so easy for you?”
“What?”
“This,” you nod down to your hands resting in his pocket, avoiding that irksome, unplaceable shade of indigo in his eyes. “Lying. Lying to our friends. To Steve, to Nat, to Sam. Making them think that we’re together.”
He blinks, and you can’t look at the surfaces of those dwarf planets. The coloring of them looks too much like pity.
“How is it so easy for you to touch me like that?” And even as your voice begins to break, like hot magma oozing from the crater he’s dug in your exterior, you don’t have the strength to fall out of his orbit. “To lie about—to pretend like you could love me?”
There it is.
Extinction.
You shut your eyes against the sight of it, decades of friendship imploding because you couldn’t take the heat of him, couldn’t force the molten, ugly truth of your feelings back down into your core.
“Wanna show you something.”
You pry your eyes open, expecting to see unfamiliar blue planets on the horizon. It’s still two Plutos that greet you, welcome you back with reddened rust on their surfaces.
Cool, metal fingers brush away tears from the hollows under your eyes. “Come with me to my car?”
It takes you a moment to collect your voice. “Where are we going?”
“Nowhere,” he chuckles like he’s tired, pulling you to your feet. He loops his arm around your shoulders, and it feels nothing like a lie. “Just something I’ve been meaning to show you in my trunk.”
Your heels are scuffing against the asphalt of the parking lot. “Your trunk? The last time you showed me something in your trunk, it was that box of pizza that’d been in there for—,”
“It’s not old pizza, alright?”
“Better not be.”
“It’s not,” he insists, palming his pocket for his keys. He presses his thumb against a button on the fob, and the car unlocks, tail lights flashing red as the trunk pops open.
There’s a little silver paper bag inside with silver handles, a card taped to its front. Your name is written across it in his neat, blocky handwriting. When you look at him with a question in your eyes, he nods, gesturing for you to open it.
“Your birthday present,” he says sheepishly, palms spread flat and fingers flexing nervously against his thighs. When you raise your eyebrow at him, he says, Uh, last year’s.”
“I thought you forgot.” He’s put enough tissue paper in here to completely obscure whatever’s lying in wait at the bottom from view, but you begin to make out something fuzzy and maroon. “You paid for mine and Nate’s drinks—I thought that was you making up for forgetting.”
He shakes his head. “Since when have I forgotten your birthday?”
But you don’t answer him—can’t answer him when you fish the hand-knitted, maroon mittens out from the bottom of the bag. They look just like the ones Steve and Bucky used to wear, woven on the end of Mrs. Roger’s needle, every winter.
“Bucky,” his name is a choked sound in your throat, coated in disbelief. “Did you… did you knit these?”
“Fuck no,” he laughs now, and it’s a sound that’s familiar. “Got ‘em on Etsy.”
“They’re—,”
“Read the card.”
He nods towards where the envelope flaps against silver, wind picking it up before the tape tethering it to the bag brings it back down. It rips as you glide your index finger between its flap, revealing the little yellow card inside.
On the front of the card is the image of a dog wearing a party hat, blowing out the candles on his birthday cake. Happy Doggone Birthday!
You laugh, splitting the card open to read the message he’s undoubtedly scrawled inside—every year, he’d wish you a happy birthday in that comic book lettering font of his. To your surprise, a lengthy letter in blue ink, blocked letters even smaller than usual to fit within the space, is dashed into the paper.
Your eyes flit up to his again, and he simply nods, spurning you on.
Mittens.
You have any idea how long I spent on Etsy, searching for the perfect pair of mittens? I’ll tell you how long. Three months, every night before bed, I’d be scrolling and searching and reading reviews before I finally found a real nice lady, lives in Michigan, to custom knit a pair just like the ones Mrs. Sarah always threatens to knit for you.
Still, three months is nothing. Nothing compared to how long I’ve been wanting to write this letter—hell, needing to write this—and chickening out. I always was the chicken, wasn’t I?
You and Steve, you were the brave ones. Brave but so damn tiny. I was just the one with the height, the one that followed the two of you into whatever trouble there was to find.
Jesus, my stomach hurts just writing this, telling you about the damned mittens, and I haven’t even gotten to the hard part yet.
Truth is, my stomach’s been upset for a long-time now. All twisted up.
Thought I was gonna puke, when you called me that night, telling me you were engaged. Even went to the toilet bowl, clingin’ on for dear life, but nothing would come up. You sounded so damn happy. Couldn’t even get sick, couldn’t push that happy laugh of yours out of my stomach if I tried.
Even if it’s killing me, seeing you smiling with that damned ring on your finger, too damn small to fit the way it should—the way it would, had someone who cared enough about you been the one to ask you that question.
And really, it’s nothing personal against Nate. He’s a prick, but you seem happy. Real happy.
Fuck, I’m running out of space. Alright. Here goes nothing.
I wish it was me. God, I wish it was me who’d asked you. I always thought it’d be me and you. Believed it so bad that I guess I never realized I’d have to come clean with it, tell you the truth, for that to happen.
I got you these mittens—took them six weeks to come in the mail, mind you—because I know your hands stay so cold all the damn time. Doesn’t matter if it’s summer and the AC’s out, your hands are freezing, and I can see now that I won’t always be there to hold them, warm them up against my chest or in my pockets or in my own hands, like when we were kids. I bought them because I know you, and, dammit, I love you.
So, happy birthday.
I hope these keep your hands warm, but there’s a bigger part of me still hoping that you’ll never stop letting me do it.
Love always,
Bucky
The card wavers between your fingertips, but it’s not the wind that sends it fluttering now. It’s the tremor in your hand, the same tremor at your bottom lip, when you breathe out his name.
“Couldn’t give it to you,” he shrugs weakly, his voice sounding choked and wet. “Not last year.”
“Chicken,” you tease, but it comes out softer, affectionate like a pet name.
His face splits open in a smile, area around his eyes wrinkling, and you realize that you’d never want to do anything that’d risk ironing them out from the silk of his skin.
“It was easy.” He doesn’t dare move, allows you to orbit always closer to him, as he watches. “So damn easy today, ‘cause it was the first time all these years that I wasn’t pretending, not for even one second.”
It’s a gentle collision—a satellite docking into a space station always expecting its arrival, built to welcome it home—when your body meets his. There’s nothing between you now, nothing but the little silver bag and the card and the mittens.
His hand finds your face, cups your cheek. There’s that indigo in his eyes again when he leans down to close the gap between your features and his, and you finally understand.
Before, when Bucky asked you what he looked like when he was in love, you didn’t have an answer for him. You thought you’d never seen how it might’ve impossibly widened his smile, like Steve, or heard how it would honey his voice like Sam.
It never occurred to you, not until now, with his lips so close to yours that you can already feel their warmth, that you’d been seeing what it looked like for Bucky to be in love every day. Same angular cheekbones, same hardened jawline and pink lips and parallel lines between his brows. Same round, blue eyes.
Just a tint of indigo to color them.
“Been wanting to do this for a long time,” he says against your lips, thumbpad stroking your cheek. “Dreamed about it.”
“Feels like I’m dreaming,” you whisper.
He kisses you then, lips smothering any doubt that this could be anything but real, and his tongue tastes like the mimosas they’d passed around on little white trays earlier. Champagne and orange juice.
Citrus, on your tongue and his.