Before
There are fingers dancing over his chest, smooth and gentle. Sunlight is filtering around them through the leaves of the trees overhead and he can hear running water nearby as a breeze blows past him. Bucky smiles before his eyes are even open. Because they’re safe here. They’ve always been safe here, in the forest outside the city. No one has ever found them here, nothing bad has ever happened here, and he always gets Y/N to himself. She’s tucked snugly against his side, the warm sun doing nothing to deter them from being pressed together.
“You’re awake and very bad at hiding it.” She traces her fingers up to his throat, rubbing the light stubble littered there and on his jaw and cheeks. “Are you going to let it grow?” Before he’d always been clean shaven but now, as he started to gain popularity, he needed to look more intimidating. Steve and Sam suggested Bucky let it grow.
He opens his eyes to meet hers before she leans up to press her nose into the skin of his throat, letting out a content sigh. “Maybe. Depends on how my girl likes it.”
“She likes it just fine. Although her thighs kind of hurt because of it.”
“Sorry babydoll. I just can’t help myself.” She’s wearing just his shirt, and panties. The rest of her clothes are scattered by the creek and in the grass, along with his own. He presses his mouth to her ear, whispering, “You just taste too good.”
Y/N giggles as he rolls them over, hovering over her as her eyes roam his body. “You’re starting to get pretty big.” She trails her hands over his biceps. “It’s all that training. You need to slow down a bit.”
“Can’t. Not if I wanna be the best. Not if I want to be able to give you everything you deserve.” Slowly he leans down to brush his lips over hers. “Did you have a good nap? Sleeping like a cat in the sun?” She just keeps tracing up and down one arm, seemingly mesmerized before she looks back to him and grins.
“You fell asleep too,” Y/N accuses. But her smile is wide and Bucky only mirrors it. “And I did have a good nap.”
“Wore you out, didn’t I?”
He smirks down at her and she groans. “You’re a menace! I’m still sore-,” He rolls his hips against hers, lowering his forehead to rest against her neck. A quick breath hitches out of her lungs and so he does it again, agonizingly unhurriedly so she can feel every bit of him.
Bucky kisses her neck gently, just the way she likes. “C’mon doll, let me love on you.” He nips at her throat, soothing over the sting with his tongue.
“We need to be getting home soon. I have class in the morning and I have a paper to write and Dad needs help at the gym and-,” She voice trails off as she rakes her hands up his sides, pleasure flooding her as she forgets entirely about everything else.
Rutting into her in earnest now, slow and deliberate, trying to get as much friction as he can, he lets out a sound between a moan and a growl. She arches up into him and pushes her hands into his short, dark hair. “Please baby? I know you want me too.” He punctuates that fact by stilling himself and reaching between them to slip one hand into her panties. “You’re wet for me.” He presses his thumb to her clit and circles it slowly. “Please, babydoll? I’ll go easy on ya this time.”
“I want you,” her voice is heady and needy. “On one condition.”
He stops and groans and pulls back from her neck as he removes his fingers from her clit. She’s smiling devilishly at him. “God you know how to ruin the mood.”
Y/N throws her head back and laughs, loud and echoing, full of unchecked happiness. His breath catches as he looks down at her, so beautiful and wild when she laughed. Reaching up, she takes his face between her hands and strokes her thumbs beneath his eyes. “The next story I write for you is going to be called: The Boy With No Patience And The Girl Who Ruined The Mood.”
“I love it already.”
“You can’t! It hasn’t been written yet! Besides I’m going to make you the antagonist because you’re always antagonizing me.”
He leans down and presses a sweet kiss to the tip of her nose. “But I love you. Always have. And so everything you create I love. Even if I’m the antagonist.”
She blushes, her eyes skirting his, and deigns not to answer before she wiggles her eyebrows at him, “Wanna know my condition?”
“Now who has no patience?”
“Hush.” Her smile is so wide and bright it hurts his heart to look at. “My condition is that I get to be on top.”
Bucky has them flipped again almost immediately. “Done.” He grips her hips hard and whispers, “Not much of a condition, baby. I love to watch you like this.”
She rolls her hips into his a few times, looking as though she’s thoroughly enjoying what he’s sure is a blissful expression on his face. “You love a lot of things when it comes to sex,” she murmurs, trailing her fingers teasingly down his stomach, making his muscles clench. In an effort to get her to get on with it and stop teasing him, he puts his hands on her hips and makes her drag slower over his hardened length. She hisses and throws her head back before taking the hem of her shirt and lifting it over her head.
“God,” he whispers, stroking her thighs gently. “Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?” Bucky just keeps staring at her, his long fingers now playing with the waistband of her underwear, a soft smile on his face.
Just as he’s about to reach up and touch her, pull her in for another kiss, she leans down and brushes her nose against his. “I love you,” she whispers, her voice tender and cracked with sudden emotion.
“I love you.” Bucky presses his forehead against hers, his voice just as wrecked as hers. “I always will. No matter what.”
“Want me to fuck you now?”
“Jesus Christ, yes.”
Full laugher echoes through the trees as the sun starts to set.
~
Bucky jerks awake in bed. The lighting is wrong, the angle of it distorted and slanted strangely. He’s panting and sweating and the room is spinning. Steve is calling for him.
The door opens suddenly. “Buck?” Steve’s eyes find him on the bed. “Are you alright?”
“F-fine.” He sits up and closes his eyes, waits for the world to stop spinning so fast.
They hadn’t known they were being watched that day. Not only had someone seen them being intimate but they had seen just how much he loves her and that, as it turned out, was dangerous.
“Y/N’s here.” The light starts to make sense. It's late afternoon and he never usually sleeps past early morning, unable to silence his mind.
“What?” The words aren’t computing as he tries to push away the sheer happiness and bliss associated with that memory but also the rage and heartache that came with it later. Once he came into their lives. “She isn’t talking to me, remember? I’m not allowed to see her.”
Steve stares at him for a few seconds, eyebrows raised, before the last few days come rushing back. “Sorry. Sorry. I-,”
“It’s okay, Buck. She’s worried about you. She said she was supposed to call you and you didn’t pick up. She got so worried she came over…”
“Send her back.”
“Buck-,” Steve looks apprehensive bordering on last night’s distrustfulness.
“It might help her remember something Steve. This room is half hers. Not her childhood bedroom. Something more recent might help.”
Steve bites his lip and shifts from foot to foot before he nods and disappears again. A few minutes pass in which Bucky tries and fails to make himself and the room a bit tidier. Y/N pushes the door open looking supremely concerned. “Hi. I…maybe I shouldn’t be here but…I said I’d call and I did and you didn’t answer.” She ducks her head and frowns, tugging at the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “And I worried that maybe I’d upset you or that maybe something bad had happened and I started to panic and here I am.”
Bucky looks at her for a second, really looks at her. At the way she shakes just a little, trembles, her fingers twitching against her crossed arms. At the way she shrinks into herself and does her best not to make eye contact, stares at the hard wooden floors as though it’s the most interesting thing in the world.
It’s such a contrast from who she used to be. Confident. Wild. Happy. Loud.
But he’s different too.
“Come here.” She walks forward, sits on the bed, keeps her eyes forward. “I know they told you that you lived at home, a-at your dad’s apartment. But you didn’t. You lived here. With me. And Steve and Peggy, when she’s here that is.”
Y/N frowns. “Peggy?”
He winces, “Sorry. She’s, uh, Steve’s girl. Away at school at the moment.”
Silence. But it isn’t harsh. It’s contemplative. “Bucky.” She states his name and then looks at him, pulling her bottom lip between her teeth. “You forget a lot. I don’t have memories but you forget things.”
Looking very much like a curious puppy she tilts her head to the side and waits. “I’ve had my share of concussions over the years. Sometimes things don’t stick. Or they do and it takes a minute to come back.”
“Why do you call me doll?” The sudden change in subject has his head spinning and so he doesn’t answer immediately. “It’s sort of an old timey thing to call someone isn’t it?”
He swallows thickly, remembers Y/N’s eyes gazing at him as they laid together on her father’s living room floor. They had both been on their stomachs, facing each other. Y/N legs had been bent at the knee, her feet visible above her head as he looked at her. She had been wearing overalls and missing both her front teeth. She had been drawing him and he had been looking up pet names in a book he found at the library.
“I’m gonna be a ladies man, Y/N.”
“Are you?” She smiles and looks up.
He nods, “Gonna have all the girls sweet on me.”
“And how are you going to do that when you smell like sweat all the time?”
“I do not!”
“Fine. Now tell me.”
Bucky shakes his head and smiles. “When we were maybe eight or nine I got it in my head that I was going to be good with girls. And to stand apart I found sort of older pet names. And I started calling you doll. I kinda hoped you’d get it y’know? That I liked you. But you never cottoned on and I had to tell you later on.”
That makes her smile. “Did it work?”
“Did what work?”
“The pet names!” She tugs at her sweater sleeves, smiling before she bumps her shoulder with his. “Did it turn you into a ladies man?”
He pats her thigh, “I was only worried about one lady.”
Heat floods her cheeks and she quickly stands and moves away from his touch. Instead deciding to examine the art on the walls. “I didn’t answer your call because my phone died,” he explains as she slides her hands over the easel. "I'm sorry. I had a sort of rough night."
“Oh.”
“It’s mostly yours you know.” She turns away from the bookshelf she had been browsing. “You just had a way of commanding space. You’d be studying on the bed, papers everywhere, books and pencils scattered everywhere that would jab me in the side in the middle of the night. And I just had to sleep around it. And I was glad to because it meant we were together.”
She wraps her arms around herself again and looks uncomfortable. “I’m sorry-,”
“Y/N.” He says her name softly. “Don’t. It’s okay.”
“I had a dream about you.”
“Y/N-,”
She shakes her head and walks back across the room until she’s standing between his knees. Bucky stares up at her, wishing that she would reach out and touch him. “I found the letters and photos they took off my wall and I read them. And I didn’t tell Sam that I did. And then I cried and fell asleep. And I went looking because he told me something I didn't know yet.”
His throat closes. To think that they had spent their nights the same way but apart from each other. “Because I loved you so much. I cried because of how much I loved you.”
Loved. As in the past. There’s a tightness in his chest that chokes him. “I still love you.”
“But I don’t know you.”
“We can know each other again.”
“Sam told me.”
“Told you what?”
“That we fought. That our relationship isn’t what you make it out to be.”
He shakes his head, “They don’t understand. They weren’t a part of it. There was a lot of miscommunication and misplaced anger on my part and-,”
“But I asked you to tell me the truth.”
“I am.”
She reaches out and grazes her fingers along his cheek. “I dreamed that I woke up next to you and I kissed you. It felt so real. I think it was. And I think I miss your short hair.” His breath catches. She makes him breathless.
Y/N leans down and presses her forehead to his. “But please tell me the truth. Don't omit anything. Don't spare me.”
Bucky closes his eyes and nods against her. She pulls away and presses a kiss to the bridge of his nose. And that’s how he knows that something has come back to her. About them, about everything. But he doesn’t ask because he knows it’s supposed to be silent, she knows he’ll get it and that he’ll leave her be.