Bygone

Rebecca insists they go caroling at the church. The first time they go, Steve is working at the docks. The second time he can come, and Darcy is slightly more excited.

It was nothing like caroling back home. Everyone piles into the church, mostly younger people, and there are snacks and hot cider. There’s dancing and singing. Darcy is surprised to learn that Steve has a wonderful singing voice.

And by wonderful she totally means delicious. Steve has the best voice anyway. Sometimes she can close her eyes and just listen to him talking at night, and it gives her shivers.

Mickey O’Brien asks her to dance, then Peter Jenkins is waiting but John slips in first. She fans her face after the dance, and John leads her to the refreshments table. Darcy returns to Steve’s side happily, wrapping her hand around his and leaning her head on his shoulder.

Rebecca plays the piano beautifully and Steve reveals that when Mr. Barnes had been alive he’d paid for twice weekly lessons for both Rebecca and Bucky. Darcy just likes to watch Rebecca glowing with happiness at the piano, John standing next to her singing along.

That night Darcy crawls back over the pipes and is kissing Steve before he can get the window shut. His hands brush over her hips, up her sides, and tortuously close to her breasts.

It’s too much for her and she pushes him towards the bed.

“Darcy.” His voice is hoarse.

“Do you have condoms?” She asks, then blinks. “Have you? Before?”

He nods.

“Me too.” She wonders if that will affect his opinion of her. “And I want you. Steve, please.”

His eyes darken with lust and she can see his pupils constrict and then blow out at her words.

He reaches for the button at her collar, but doesn’t work his way down. “Are you sure?”

“Steven Rogers, if you don’t undress me right now I may die.” She says before attacking his lips. If his hands shake as they undo her buttons, she says nothing, because her whole body is trembling with want.

The cold air doesn’t do much for her though. He seems to realize and tugs her to the bed, pulling the covers back.

Once they're under the covers, his lips are hot on her skin, and he kisses her everywhere. Her neck. Her collar bones. Her wrists and palms. He trails down her stomach and kisses each of her hip bones, then surprises her by hooking her legs over his shoulders and lavishing attention on her clit until she’s saying his name in a lust-drunk love-drunk unending litany.

Her muscles twitch and her heartbeat throbs in her ears when he sits up, carefully tucking the covers back around her, to put on the condom. His skin is winter pale, and his muscles are sinewy stretched over thin limbs. His knees and elbows tend towards knobby, and his chest is sunken.

She realizes he’s stopped moving and finds him watching her look at him. She pulls him back under the covers and tries to make him feel as loved as he’d made her. She drags her hands over his muscles and leaving suckling kisses everywhere she can reach.

When he’s shaking underneath her, groaning her name, begging her, she sits up.

“Please, Steve.”

He sits up, twisting and guiding her down. Her eyes roll back in her head when he slides into her. It doesn’t last long enough for her to come again, but she’s close.

Two days later, he’s coughing during their morning walk. He’s even worse on the walk back home. The morning after that she insists he not pick her up in the evening.

When she steps outside the bank, carrying her heavy case of copy work, it’s to find John waiting for her.

“It was the only way Rebecca could convince him to stay home.” John explains, taking the case from her.

Mrs. Barnes goes to sit with him through the days, and Darcy and John walk his commissions to Mr. Anderson. The man is reluctant to give Darcy any new assignments for him, but Darcy manages to convince him to do it.

John ignores her tears other than to hand her a clean kerchief.

Neighbors drop off canned goods and quick breads, most left outside the door without a note.

Darcy spends the two worst nights at his side. When he gets chills so bad his teeth chatter, she climbs into the bed next to him and falls asleep there.

Mrs. Barnes says nothing when she finds her there in the morning. Darcy doesn’t know what the woman might have said, if anything, if Darcy hadn’t climbed out of bed fully clothed.

Steve is more alert that night. He eats in bed and is strangely observant of her. His eyes follow wherever she goes. He grimaces when she tells him someone from the docks and the paper stopped by, both to tell him he’d lost his place there.

His jaw tightens when Darcy tells him Mr. Welker agreed to let her stay behind during the day’s final count so she could get more copy work done.

“I don’t mind Steve.” Darcy tells him. “I’ve always been a hard worker, and the Barnes let me stay with them like I’m family. I wouldn’t be able to afford a place on my own.”

Plus she wouldn’t be allowed one. Not without some fancy lies about being a widow or some such.

“I don’t want to live like you’re leaving.” Steve says suddenly.

“What do you mean?”

“Either one of us could leave. I could get sick again.” He laughs humorlessly. “I will get sick again.”

“Steve, stop.” Darcy takes his hand and squeezes his fingers. It’s not like him to be so pessimistic or bitter. It’s one of her favorite things about him, the way he just faces problems head on.

“And I’m going to keep trying to enlist until they accept me.”

“I know.” Darcy does know. She almost hopes that it doesn’t happen. But she can’t imagine what it would do to Steve to sit through the war that she knows is coming. She also doesn’t know what it would do to her to know he’s over there.

“But I want you to marry me, Darcy. I’ve never wanted anything the way I want you to be mine.” He looks around the apartment and down at himself in the bed. “I’m sitting here barely able to support myself now that I’ve lost my job again, too sick to walk you to work and back, but I swear Darcy, I’ll love you every day that we have each other. I swear I’ll make it all work, that I’ll give you the best-“

Darcy kisses him, overflowing with emotion. When it’s not enough, when his hands pull at her, she climbs onto the bed and straddles him. Relief that he really is getting better after the nights that his coughs seemed like they were going to break him apart. So, so much love.

Sadness that it seems like he’s saying goodbye, but what else could it be, a marriage between them? She’s seen his asthma attacks due to the cold and Rebecca had told her it would be worse in the summer. She’s seen his stomach reject the only food they can buy. She’s watched his pulse jump in his neck with what she can only assume is a heart murmur. And she’s as likely to stay here for the rest of her life as disappear in the next second.

But elation is the overwhelming emotion, the one that overtakes them all. That Steve wants to marry her. That she’s going to say yes, and they’re going to build a life together.

“Yes.” Darcy says against his lips as tears drip down her face. “Yes, yes, please, yes.”

“You’re always saying please, Darce. I’ll give you whatever you want, you don’t gotta say please.” He says, his hands threaded through her hair.

She laughs. “But I’m not cooking for you every day, buddy. And I don’t wear a girdle after I’m home. And I don’t buy that whole the man is the head of the household business, we’ll be partners. And I can’t sew. And I’m still going curse like a sailor, and unless Mrs. Barnes makes me, I’m not going to church.”

“I know. I already know all of this.”