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“Takeout tastes like shit here,” you grumble into the phone, mouth full of food despite your complaints.
“Takeout tastes like shit everywhere,” she tells you with a laugh.
“No, really,” you insist, gesturing to one takeout box of many on your coffee table. “How do you mess up crab rangoon?”
“Your tastebuds are probably revolting against you.” Her voice sounds distant, muffled slightly by the sound of passing cars and trucks in the background. “What is this—the fifth time you’ve ordered takeout this week?”
Strategically avoiding her question, cheeks burning with shame as you look around your messy apartment, you say, “Sorry we can’t all have big Saturday night plans every weekend, Nat.”
“Hey,” she sounds mockingly offended. It’s easy to imagine the dramatic pout at her lips, green eyes sweeping over your face in that way that would make your stomach flip. “Don’t be like that. If you hadn’t taken that job, they’d be our Saturday night plans.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“I’m not going to say that I told you so, but…”
“I know,” you sigh. “Should’ve stayed in DC.”
“Hey, you said it,” she teases, though there’s something in her voice that sounds much more weighted, as if buoyed to something you wanted to imagine sounded like longing.
There’s a pause. You bite your thumb nail to the quick. “I miss you, Nat.”
Without pause, before your next heartbeat, she says. “I know you do.”
It pulls a laugh out of you, a shake of your head that she can’t see. What you wouldn’t give to see the way that corner of her lift would be just ever so slightly raised right now, eyes shining like a spotlight in your direction.
“Hey,” Nat says suddenly—softly—and you draw your knees up to your chest, press the phone a little harder against your cheek. “I gotta go, but I miss you, too. Try not to mope too much, alright?”
“Alright,” you concede, cheeks aflame with the warmth of the rasp in her voice. “I’ll do my best.”
“That’s my girl,” she chuckles, an airy noise that inflates your chest, before hanging up. You practically float, the lightest you’ve felt in days, to your bedroom, intent to sleep somewhere other than your couch for once this week.
As you settle beneath the duvet, cheek flush against the pillow, you can’t help but to smile at the memory of Nat helping you build your bed frame months ago, holding a nail between her teeth and a hammer in her capable hands. She was dangerous, you knew. She could kill you ten different ways with that hammer, lodge that nail between your eyebrows like a bullet if she’d needed.
But she was incredibly soft, too—and you were one of the few who knew it, who she’d let see her hands work to build and her tongue to taste a rust that wasn’t blood.
You dream of red hair and red fingernails and red lips.
The knock at your door is barely audible over the sounds of your Sunday afternoon—television playing in the background, dryer tumbling a load of laundry, faucet running steadily as you wash up the pile of dishes you’d been neglecting.
It takes a second round of knocking for you to set the sponge aside, dry off your hands, and check the peep hole for who might be on the other side.
The tiny, distorted view leaves your hands shaking as you struggle to unlatch the lock quickly enough.
“Hey there,” Natasha greets you casually, leaning against the frame, as you swing the door open on its hinges.
“W-what are you doing here?” You’re incredulous, tears welling in the corners of your eyes.
“I was in the neighborhood,” she lies.
“Nat,” you try to scold, wanting to tell her she shouldn’t have driven the twelve hours to you, but it dries up in your throat. “I can’t believe you’re here,” you say instead.
She holds up a brown paper bag, raising an eyebrow at you. There’s a new scar interrupting the auburn hairs in its arch, and you fight the urge to reach forward and smooth your thumb across it.
“Couldn’t let you go another week without eating a fresh vegetable,” Nat teases, lips pursed in the way they do when she’s holding back a full fledged, toothy grin. You long to draw one of our her. “Was worried you’d catch scurvy.”
You frown a bit around your own smile, drawing her into your apartment, leading her into the kitchen. “Isn’t that a pirate’s disease?”
“It’s an illness for people who eat takeout five times a week.”
“You know I can’t cook.”
“Lucky for you, I’m here,” she grins, settling against the counter. She nods to the brown paper bag. “And I brought gifts.”
Inside, there’s a pile of the most perfectly rounded, ruby red tomatoes you’ve ever seen. They still smell earthy and a little sweet.
You palm one in your hand, thumb gliding across the fleshy red skin. “Beautiful,” you murmur. “What’s the plan for these?”
Gently, she grabs the little red crop from your hand. It’s the same color as her lips, you realize, when she holds it up to her face.
“You, me, and these fellas,” she gestures to the other equally perfect tomatoes in the bag, “have a reservation for Italian tonight.”
And later that evening, a glass of wine flushing her cheeks, Natasha wields a knife and slices chops and crushes those little fleshy red tomatoes with all the precision and skill of a woman who could just easily do the same to your heart.
When dinner is done and the two of you sit across from each other on the couch, she eyes you, a please smile at her lips, as you twirl the noodles around your fork.
“What?”
She shrugs, eyes glittering. “Just glad I happened to be in the neighborhood.”
And later when she wipes at the sauce at the corner of your lip with a napkin and pours herself another glass of wine as you clean the dishes, your heart nearly skids to an abrupt stop when you understand that Natasha Romanoff had told you that she loved you in a language of her own—the language of Dreykov’s daughter, the language of a spy.
Maybe the words would never leave her lips, but she’d tell you in other ways. She’d leave secret messages in agonizingly picking out the most perfect tomatoes at the produce stand. She’d write love letters in the mileage on her tire treads. There were silent stanzas hidden in the gleam of her eyes.
So, in a language she understands, you tell her, too.
“I want to come home.” The dishes sit, drying, on the rack. “I’m coming home.”