Chapter Text
Bucky kicked the hotel room door shut behind them, the girl’s back hitting the wall a second later. She was all eager hands and hot breath, already tugging at his belt as he shoved her Saints jersey up to her neck.
“Fuck, Barnes,” she moaned, legs wrapping around his waist. “You’re huge.”
He didn’t ask her name. He never did. She was just another pretty face who’d waited outside the tunnel wearing his number like an invitation. But tonight he was in the mood to play a little. The win still hummed in his veins, and she was warm, willing, and clearly starving for him. He kissed her hard at first, grinding his cock against her core as he carried her toward the king-sized bed, then slowed it down just to watch her squirm.
He dropped her onto the mattress and stood back for a second, peeling off his hoodie and undershirt with a lazy grin. “Been thinking about this since the third period, huh?” His voice carried that low rough drawl, teasing. “All those hits got you worked up?”
She laughed breathlessly, reaching for him. “Maybe. You gonna keep talking or finally fuck me?”
Bucky chuckled, crawling over her and pinning her wrists above her head with one hand. “Easy, gorgeous. We’ve got a little time.” He dragged his mouth down her throat, sucking a mark just below her ear before moving lower. He shoved the jersey higher and took one nipple into his mouth, tongue swirling lazily while his free hand trailed down her stomach. She arched into him, but he kept the pace torturously slow, teasing her other breast with his fingers until she was panting.
“Shit—yes,” she gasped, trying to roll her hips up against him. “Harder, baby. Fuck me like you hit on the ice.”
He released her wrists with a smirk, nipping at her ribs. “Demanding tonight, aren’t we?” He shoved his slacks down just enough, rolling on a condom with practiced fingers. Then he spread her thighs wide, rubbing the thick head of his cock along her slick folds, deliberately avoiding where she wanted him most. “You sure you can handle it?”
She whined, nails digging into his shoulders. “Stop teasing and give it to me.”
Bucky finally pushed inside her in one smooth, deep thrust, bottoming out with a low groan. She cried out, back arching tight as her pussy clenched around him. He held still for a moment, savoring the heat, then started rolling his hips in slow, grinding circles instead of the punishing pace she’d begged for.
“God, look at you,” he murmured against her ear, voice rough but playful. “Bet you’ve been wet for this since the final buzzer.” He kept the rhythm deliberate, dragging out each thrust until she was trembling beneath him, her moans turning desperate.
He reached between them, thumb circling her clit in lazy strokes that matched his hips. When she finally came, shaking, pulsing hard around his cock, he grinned against her neck. “There we go. Good girl.”
But he wasn’t finished. He flipped her onto her stomach without pulling out, pulling her hips up so he could take her from behind. The new angle made her moan louder as he drove in deeper, one hand fisted gently in her hair, the other sliding around to play with her clit again.
“Another one,” he coaxed, voice low and teasing as he slowed once more, drawing it out. “C’mon, babe. You can give me one more. Let me feel you.”
She pushed back against him, chasing the friction, and when she came again, tighter, louder, cursing his name, Bucky finally let himself go. He buried himself deep and groaned through his own release, hips stuttering as he spilled into the condom.
For a few long seconds he stayed draped over her, breathing against the back of her neck, the high still buzzing pleasantly through him. Then he pulled out, tied off the rubber, and tossed it.
She rolled onto her side, flushed and smiling, reaching for him again. “Round two? I’ve got all night—”
“Can’t.” Bucky was already pulling his pants back up, but his tone stayed light, a hint of that post-sex grin still lingering. “Got somewhere to be. My sister just had a baby—can’t keep the little guy waiting.”
He grabbed his hoodie off the chair and checked his phone. Rebecca had texted twice, nothing urgent, just the usual sisterly impatience mixed with a photo of the baby in the new onesie he’d sent last week. Bucky smiled faintly at the picture before pocketing the phone.
The girl sat up, pouting. “Seriously? You’re just gonna leave?”
“Family thing,” he said with a small shrug. He leaned down and gave the girl a quick, distracted kiss on the forehead. “You were incredible, doll. Car service is on me, front desk’ll set it up. Order whatever you want from room service too, on my tab.”
She muttered something disappointed as he headed for the door, but Bucky was already slipping out, the pleasant buzz from the hookup fading into the background as he stepped into the hallway.
It smelled like stale carpet and someone else’s cologne. He rode the elevator down, still loose-limbed and satisfied, but with that quiet, familiar tug starting to creep in underneath it all.
Another win. Another body. Another generic hotel room that all looked the same.
It had been fun, really fun, for a while. But the second the door clicked shut, it was already starting to feel like just another night.
He slid into the black SUV, cranked the engine, and pointed it toward Brooklyn and the one place that still felt real.
By nine o’clock, the good grocery store was already giving up on itself.
The overhead lights buzzed too bright against the linoleum. One of the freezer cases had started making a wet, struggling sound. Somewhere near the front, a toddler was crying with the kind of full-bodied despair Lena understood on a spiritual level.
She stood in front of the refrigerated sushi case and stared through the glass like wanting hard enough might make another spicy tuna roll appear.
It did not.
There was one left.
One.
Eight dollars and forty-nine cents, which was insulting on principle and financially irresponsible in practice, but Lena had been thinking about it since two in the afternoon when Mrs. Alvarez from room 412 had brought in sushi for her own lunch and eaten it apologetically while Lena had pretended not to care.
She had been craving it ever since.
Not even good sushi. Grocery store sushi. Slightly cold rice. Too much imitation crab. Soy sauce packet impossible to open without getting it on her sleeve.
She wanted it anyway.
She had forty-three dollars in her account until Friday morning.
Forty-three dollars for three days.
Which meant the correct thing to do was buy eggs, rice, the cheap lentil soup she could stretch with toast, and maybe bananas if they weren’t all bruised. It did not mean buying an eight-dollar roll of mediocre sushi because she had spent eleven hours convincing sick children that needles were brave and medicine was magic and everything was going to be okay.
Still.
Lena reached for the little plastic container. A large hand got there first. She blinked.
The hand belonged to a man in a dark hoodie, broad-shouldered and careless, moving with the easy assumption that space would make room for him. He took the last sushi roll, dropped it into his basket, and kept walking.
Lena stared after him. For a second, she genuinely considered saying something.
Excuse me, I was emotionally attached to that. Excuse me, I have exactly one joy left tonight and you just put it next to your organic protein bars.
Excuse me, why do you hate me specifically?
But then he turned slightly, and she saw the side of his face beneath the brim of his baseball cap.
Beautiful, of course.
Because men like that always were. It was part of the irritation. Sharp jaw. Dark stubble. Mouth like he knew it got him forgiven for things. A tiny fading bruise near one cheekbone that somehow made him look more expensive instead of less.
He did not look back.
Lena looked down at her basket.
Eggs. Rice. Store-brand tea. A dented can of soup. Discount bread with a sticker that said manager’s special, which was grocery store language for technically still edible.
Fine.
Fine, fine, fine.
She did not need sushi.
She was an adult woman with a master’s degree and a job that required training in trauma response. She could survive not having spicy tuna.
Her stomach made a quiet, traitorous sound.
“Shut up,” she muttered.
A woman beside her glanced over.
Lena smiled weakly. “Not you.”
She abandoned the sushi case before she could do something humiliating, like check behind the seaweed salad for a hidden roll. The hot bar was already packed away, shiny metal pans empty and scraped clean. The deli counter was closed. The bakery had nothing left but a single sad muffin and a stack of cookies decorated like basketballs even though basketball season had ended months ago.
She chose a cup of instant noodles from the sale bin. Seventy-nine cents. Victory, apparently.
By the time she made it to the front, there were two registers open and a line curling past the seasonal display of Mother’s Day cards no one had bought.
Lena joined the shorter one and shifted her basket from one aching arm to the other. Her phone buzzed in her coat pocket.
A text from Sam.
**SAM: did you eat yet?
Lena stared at it. Then at the cup noodles in her basket.
LENA: lavishly
SAM: that sounds fake
LENA: shut up
SAM: come over tomorrow. I’m cooking.
Her throat tightened before she could stop it.
Sam did that. He offered things casually because he knew she hated being offered things seriously. Food. A ride. His couch when her radiator broke. Tickets to whatever stupid thing his new boyfriend had dragged him into.
She typed back:
LENA: maybe
Then deleted it.
Typed:
LENA: depends if you' ~boyfriend~ is there
Deleted that too. Before she could settle on something sufficiently un-needy, someone stepped directly in front of her.
Not beside her. Not near her. In front of her.
Lena looked up slowly
The sushi thief.
Of course.
He had added flowers to his basket. Not cheap flowers either. A glossy bouquet wrapped in brown paper, all soft yellows and whites, the kind arranged by someone who used the word florals instead of flowers. There was also the stolen sushi, a small container of pickled ginger, two absurdly expensive cold-pressed juices, and a package of chocolate-covered strawberries.
Lena stared at the back of his head. There were several things she could do.
She could let it go, because people were tired and oblivious and the world was an endless parade of small rudenesses no one was ever held accountable for.
She could move to the other line, which was now longer and contained a man arguing about expired coupons.
Or she could be herself.
“Excuse me.”
The man did not turn around.
Lena raised her voice. “Excuse me.”
This time he glanced back.
Only briefly.
Only enough for his eyes to pass over her face, then her basket, then the line behind her, like he was checking whether she was speaking to someone else.
That, somehow, was worse than the sushi.
“I was in line,” Lena said.
He blinked once, like it took a second for the words to reach him through whatever was happening on the other end of the phone.
In his ear, a voice was saying something sharp and fast. Lena could hear the faint tinny cadence of a lecture
The man’s mouth tightened. “Yeah, Steve, I heard you.”
Lena waited.
He lifted a finger, not quite at her, not quite not. One second.bLena stared at the finger.
The finger was very close to becoming a crime scene.
“Buck,” the voice on the phone snapped loudly enough that Lena caught it. “Are you listening to me? She posted from the room. Already. There’s a picture of your hoodie on the chair.”?
The man, Buck, apparently, closed his eyes.
“Jesus Christ.”
The cashier called, “Next!”
He moved forward automatically. Lena stood there for half a second, stunned into silence by the sheer audacity of it.
Then she stepped after him.
“No,” she said.
He turned again, finally irritated enough to acknowledge her for more than a heartbeat. “What?”
“I was next.”
His gaze dropped to her basket. Eggs. Soup. Rice. Tea. Noodles. Something flickered across his face, quick and shallow, but his attention was already split again.
“I know, Steve. I said I handled it.”
Lena laughed once. It was not a nice sound.
He covered the phone with his hand. “Sorry. Go ahead.”
But he did not move. The cashier had already started scanning his flowers. Lena looked at the flowers. Then at him.
Then at the sushi.
“You know what,” she said. “Don’t strain yourself.”
He glanced back like he had already forgotten she was there. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“That didn’t sound like nothing.”
“It wasn’t.”
He stared at her for half a second.
He was handsome. Annoyingly, stupidly handsome. Broad shoulders, dark hair tucked under a baseball cap, a bruise shadowing one cheekbone like even his injuries had professional lighting. He had the kind of face that had probably gotten him out of trouble his entire life.
Lena hated faces like that. Not because they were beautiful. Because they knew.
The cashier finished scanning the bouquet.
“Big night?” the cashier asked, smiling in that automatic, overly friendly way people smiled at attractive men buying flowers.
The man gave a distracted half-smile, barely there. “Something like that.”
Lena rolled her eyes. The cashier scanned the sushi. Eight dollars and forty-nine cents. Lena looked away.
The man shifted his phone to his other ear, jaw tight. “I’m not talking about this right now.”
A pause.
“No, I didn’t tell her she could post anything. I didn’t tell her anything.”
Another pause.
“Because I didn’t ask her name, Steve, what do you want from me?”
Lena’s eyebrows rose before she could stop them. The sushi thief was also apparently the kind of man who left women in hotel rooms and got lectured about it by someone named Steve.
That tracked. He paid with a black credit card. Obviously.
The cashier bagged his things carefully. Too carefully. Like the flowers might bruise. Like the sushi deserved dignity.
Lena’s stomach growled. She pressed a hand discreetly against her coat. The man grabbed his bags, still listening to Steve.
Then, without really looking at her, he pulled a twenty from his wallet and tossed it onto the little metal ledge near the card reader.
“Put hers on that,” he said.
Lena froze.
The cashier blinked. The man was already stepping away.
“For the trouble,” he added, distracted, and then he was gone, grocery bag in one hand, flowers tucked under his arm, phone still against his ear.
The automatic doors opened for him with a sigh of cold night air.
Lena stared at the twenty. There were several things she could do. She could call after him.
She could tell him exactly where he could put his twenty dollars. She could explain, in careful detail, that being rude and then throwing money at the problem did not make him generous. It made him worse. It made him the kind of man who thought guilt had a cash value.
She could leave the money there on principle.
She could pay for her own groceries with her own card and preserve the small, brittle dignity she had left after an eleven-hour shift and an eight-dollar sushi tragedy.
Her fingers tightened around the handle of her basket.
Forty-three dollars. Three days.
The cashier looked at her carefully, not unkindly. “Do you want me to…?”
Lena swallowed.
Pride was a beautiful thing in theory. In practice, pride did not make breakfast.
“Yeah,” Lena said, voice flat. “Use it.”
The cashier nodded and scanned her eggs.
Lena stood very still.
She felt hot all over. Not embarrassed exactly. Something sharper. Anger with nowhere to go. Anger at him, at herself, at the twenty-dollar bill, at the fact that twenty dollars was nothing to him and a lifeline to her. Anger that she was hungry enough to accept it. Anger that she was sensible enough not to refuse.
The soup beeped across the scanner. The rice. The tea. The cup noodles.
“Eighteen sixty-two,” the cashier said softly.
The twenty disappeared into the register. Lena hated him. She hated him more for being useful.
The cashier started to count out the change.
“Keep it,” Lena said.
The cashier paused.
Lena picked up her bag. “Seriously. Keep it.”
It was only a dollar thirty-eight. It was barely anything. But it was the only way she could make the money feel less like his.
The cashier’s expression gentled in a way Lena could not stand.
“Thank you.”
“Have a good night,” Lena said, because she had been raised right and poverty had not managed to beat manners out of her yet.
She stepped out into the parking lot.
The rain had started again, thin and cold under the streetlights. The kind of rain that did not commit to being rain but still ruined your hair and made the cuffs of your pants damp
At the far end of the lot, a sleek black SUV pulled out of a space and rolled toward the exit.
Big. Dark. Expensive. The kind of car that looked like it had opinions about tax brackets.
Lena stood under the awning with her one paper bag clutched against her chest and watched the SUV pause at the red light.
For half a second, she could see him through the driver’s side window. Phone still to his ear. Head tipped back against the seat. Flowers on the passenger side. Sushi in the bag.
Then the light changed, and he turned out of the lot.
Gone.
Just like that.
A careless man on his way to somewhere warm and wanted, leaving behind twenty dollars and the distinct impression that he had already forgotten her.
Lena exhaled through her nose. Her bus was not due for nine minutes. She looked down at the grocery bag.
Eggs. Rice. Tea. Soup. Noodles.
And now, because of him, she still had forty-three dollars. That should have made her feel relieved. It did, technically.
Which made her even angrier.
She walked to the bus stop in the rain, shoulders hunched, shoes splashing through shallow puddles. By the time she reached the bench, her hair was frizzing around her face and the paper bag was going soft at the edges.
She sat carefully, balancing the groceries on her knees. Her phone buzzed again.
SAM: you alive?
Lena stared at the message.
Then typed:
LENA: unfortunately
SAM: dramatic
LENA: a man stole my sushi and then bought my groceries
A beat.
Then:
SAM: did you murder him?
Lena looked out at the wet street, at the smear of red taillights disappearing into Brooklyn traffic.
LENA: worse
SAM: what did you do?
Lena’s mouth twisted.
LENA: said thank you to the cashier and left with my dignity in critical condition
Sam sent back three skull emojis.
Then:
SAM: come over tomorrow. I’m making enough for leftovers.
Lena closed her eyes.
She should say no.
She should say she was busy. She should say she had food. She should say something light and sharp and untrue.
Instead, because it was raining and she was tired and she had spent all day being brave for other people’s children, she typed:
LENA: okay
The bus arrived with a hiss.
Lena climbed on, dropped into a seat near the window, and held the grocery bag against her stomach.
She thought about the man’s hand closing around the last sushi roll. The careless way he had stepped in front of her. The twenty hitting the counter.
For the trouble.
Like she was a mess he could tip his way out of. Her jaw tightened.
She hoped he choked on the sushi. She hoped his flowers wilted in the car. She hoped Steve, whoever he was, yelled at him for the entire drive.
By the time Lena got home, the noodles tasted like salt and surrender.
She ate them standing over the sink.
And three days later, when Sam dragged her to a hockey game she did not want to attend, Lena had almost stopped thinking about the man from the grocery store.
Almost.
By the time Bucky hit the next red light, the girl from the grocery store had already started to fade.
Not completely.
She lingered at the edge of his mind in pieces: tired eyes, sharp mouth, the way she’d said, I was next, like she was holding herself back from saying a hell of a lot more.
He felt bad.
A little.
Enough that he glanced once at the rearview mirror, even though the grocery store was already two blocks behind him and there was nothing to see but wet asphalt and headlights bleeding in the rain.
Then Steve’s voice cut through the speaker again.
“Are you listening to me?”
Bucky exhaled hard through his nose. “Unfortunately.”
“Don’t get cute.”
“I’m always cute.”
“Bucky.”
There it was. The tone. Steve’s disappointed-captain voice, which was especially irritating given that Steve had never actually been his captain and had instead appointed himself moral supervisor of Bucky’s entire adult life.
Bucky shifted the wheel with one hand and checked the passenger seat with the other. Flowers intact. Sushi still cold. Chocolate-covered strawberries not crushed. Good.
“I’m handling it,” Bucky said.
“You said that already.”
“Because I am.”
“She posted from your hotel room.”
“Yeah, you mentioned.”
“With your hoodie in the background.”
“Tragic. Alert the league.”
Steve made a noise like he was physically restraining himself. “Do you understand that if the team account gets tagged in one more half-naked hotel story after a win, Pierce is going to call me again?”
Bucky rolled his eyes. “Pierce calls you because he likes hearing himself be important.”
“Pierce calls me because you keep making my job harder.”
“I won the game.”
“That is not the only part of your job.”
“It’s the part people pay me for.”
“Buck.”
Bucky’s fingers tightened around the wheel. The light turned green. He drove.
Outside, Brooklyn slid by in wet streaks of neon and brake lights. The city looked softer in the rain, blurred at the edges, like if he squinted hard enough he could pretend it was somewhere else. Somewhere quieter. Somewhere that didn’t have his face on bus shelters and teenagers filming him when he ordered coffee.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Bucky said finally. “I hooked up with someone. She posted. I’ll deal with it.”
“You don’t even know her name, do you?”
Bucky said nothing.
Steve sighed. That was worse than yelling. Steve’s sighs had weight. They came preloaded with history.
“I’m not judging you for having sex,” Steve said.
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“I’m judging you for being careless.”
Bucky barked out a humorless laugh. “Christ, you sound like my mother.”
“Good. Then maybe listen.”
The corner of Bucky’s mouth twitched despite himself. Then his phone buzzed against the cupholder.
Becca.
BECCA: are you still coming or did fame finally make you forget your favorite sister?
Bucky smiled for real. Just a little, but enough that the tightness in his chest loosened. He hit the button on the wheel to mute Steve and answered the text at the next light.
BUCKY: you’re my second favorite sister
Her reply came almost immediately.
BECCA: emmett says you’re dead to him
Bucky snorted.
BUCKY: emmett can’t hold his own head up
BECCA: and yet he judges you
BUCKY: tell him uncle bucky has sushi
BECCA: uncle bucky may live
The light changed again.
Bucky unmuted Steve.
“—and I’m not saying you have to become a monk,” Steve was saying.
“Good, because I’d be terrible at it.”
“I’m saying maybe stop letting strangers into your hotel room when you know half of them are looking for a headline.”
Bucky’s jaw shifted.
There it was. The part that made it feel less like concern and more like accusation. The reminder that he should know better. That he was old enough now to be smarter. That somehow being twenty-eight meant he was supposed to have outgrown wanting to be wanted.
“I gotta go,” Bucky said.
“Buck—”
“I’m at Becca’s.”
He was not, technically. He was still six blocks away. But he was done. Steve went quiet for a beat. Then his voice softened, which was worse.
“Tell her congratulations from me.”
“Yeah.”
“And don’t bring this shit into her house.”
Bucky swallowed the first thing he wanted to say.
“I won’t.”
He hung up before Steve could answer. The silence that filled the car afterward was sudden and complete. For three seconds, Bucky sat with it.
Then he turned the radio on. Not loud. Just enough to keep from hearing himself think.
Rebecca and Gabe lived in a narrow brownstone on a tree-lined street Bucky had offered, more than once, to buy outright for them. Becca had told him, more than once, that if he tried, she would change the locks and let their mother yell at him until he cried.
So instead, he paid for the roof repairs and pretended Gabe had beaten him to the contractor’s invoice by accident.
The porch light was on when he pulled up.
So was the lamp in the front window.
It was late enough that most houses on the block had gone dark, but Becca’s glowed warmly against the rain. Curtains half-drawn. A pair of tiny socks sitting on the windowsill for no reason Bucky could understand. One of those ridiculous baby swings visible in the corner, surrounded by burp cloths and unopened cardboard boxes.
His chest did something strange. Small. Quick. Gone before he could name it.
He grabbed the flowers, sushi, and strawberries, locked the SUV, and jogged up the steps.
The door opened before he knocked.
Gabe stood there in sweatpants and an old Columbia hoodie, hair flattened on one side, eyes bloodshot behind his glasses. He looked like he had not slept since the Clinton administration.
He also looked annoyingly happy.
“Hey,” Gabe said, voice low.
Bucky held up the bag. “I come bearing raw fish and emotional support berries.”
Gabe’s entire face changed. “You may be the best man alive.”
“I’ve been saying that for years.”
“Yeah, well, I was skeptical until the sushi.”
Bucky stepped inside, toeing off his shoes automatically because Becca would appear from the shadows and murder him if he tracked rain through the house.
The place smelled like laundry detergent, takeout containers, and the faint sour-sweet warmth of baby formula. There were burp cloths everywhere. One draped over the back of the couch. One on the coffee table. One, inexplicably, hanging off a lampshade.
Bucky pointed at it.
“Is that decorative?”
Gabe looked. Squinted. “Honestly? No idea.”
From somewhere deeper in the house, Becca called softly, “Is that my sushi?”
“Not even hello?” Bucky called back.
“Hello, give me my sushi.”
Gabe grinned and took the flowers from him. “She’s in the living room. Be warned, she cried earlier because Emmett yawned.”
“I heard that,” Becca said.
“You were crying.”
“He has a very emotional yawn.”
Bucky followed Gabe into the living room and stopped short.
Becca was curled into the corner of the couch in leggings and one of Gabe’s old T-shirts, hair piled on top of her head in a messy knot. She looked exhausted in a way Bucky had never seen on her before. Pale and soft around the edges, eyes shadowed, mouth bare, one fuzzy sock half-falling off her foot.
And she looked happy. Not game-day happy. Not birthday happy. Not Becca-getting-her-way happy. Something deeper.
Quieter. Like joy had moved into the room and wrecked the place.
In her arms, wrapped in a gray blanket, was the smallest human being Bucky had ever seen. His nephew.
Emmett.
Bucky forgot the sushi in his hand.
Becca smiled up at him, tired and smug. “Took you long enough.”
He tried to answer. Nothing came out.
Gabe took the grocery bag from him gently. “I’ll plate this before she starts chewing through the packaging.”
“Thank you,” Becca said primly.
Bucky barely heard them. He was staring at the baby.
Emmett’s face was scrunched and red, one cheek pressed against Becca’s chest, mouth open slightly like he had fallen asleep in the middle of being deeply offended. A tiny fist had worked itself free of the blanket and rested under his chin.
His fingers were impossibly small.
Bucky had seen plenty of babies. Teammates had them. Cousins had them. Fans handed them over glass for photos sometimes, which was insane, but people did it anyway.
But this was different. This one belonged to Becca. This one had Barnes blood in him. This one was family.
“He’s so little,” Bucky said.
Becca’s face softened.
“Yeah,” she whispered. “He is.”
Bucky stepped closer carefully, like the floor might shift under him.
“He was bigger in the pictures.”
“That’s because Mom zooms in like she’s photographing evidence.”
A laugh slipped out of him, quiet and startled. Emmett stirred. Everyone froze.
Bucky froze because Becca froze. Gabe froze halfway to the kitchen. Becca looked down with the alert, terrified focus of someone defusing a bomb.
Emmett made a tiny snuffling noise. Then settled again. The whole room exhaled.
Bucky looked at Gabe. “Is it always like that?”
Gabe nodded gravely. “We live under his rule now.”
“He’s very strict,” Becca said.
“He looks strict.”
“He gets that from me.”
“Obviously.”
Becca adjusted the blanket and looked up at him. “You wanna hold him?”
Bucky’s stomach dropped. Which was ridiculous.
He had stood in arenas with twenty thousand people screaming for his blood. He had taken slap shots to unpadded places. He had thrown hands with men missing teeth and common sense.
But Becca asking if he wanted to hold her two-week-old son made his palms sweat.
“I—” He glanced at his hands automatically. Big hands. Scarred knuckles. A healing split near his thumb from last night’s game. “I dunno. What if I—”
“You won’t.”
“He’s tiny.”
“Yes, Buck, babies are famously not regulation size.”
Gabe came back from the kitchen, plate in hand, smiling. “Sit down first. It helps.”
Bucky obeyed because for once he had no smart answer.
He sank carefully onto the couch beside Becca, sitting too straight, knees apart, hands hovering uselessly. Becca shifted closer with the slow precision of someone who had become, in two weeks, an expert in the architecture of a sleeping infant.
“Support his head,” she murmured. “Here. Arm like this.”
“I know,” Bucky said automatically.
Becca looked at him. He shut up. She placed Emmett into his arms. The weight was nothing.
That was the first thing that hit him.
After all the fuss, all the fear, all the careful passing over, Emmett weighed almost nothing. Less than Bucky’s gear bag. Less than a stack of sticks. Less than the pressure Bucky carried around every day without thinking.
And somehow that nothing-weight pinned him to the couch.
Emmett’s head rested in the crook of his elbow. His little body curved against Bucky’s forearm, warm through the blanket. He smelled like milk and clean cotton and something new Bucky did not have a name for.
Bucky stared.
“Hey,” he whispered.
Emmett did not respond. Obviously. Bucky swallowed.
“Hey, buddy.”
Becca made a tiny sound.
Bucky looked up. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re crying.”
“I’m postpartum. Mind your business.”
Gabe sat on the arm of the couch beside her and rubbed her shoulder. “She cried because I folded a onesie earlier.”
“It was very small,” Becca said defensively.
Bucky looked back down at Emmett’s fist.
It was tucked against the blanket now, fingers curled so tightly they looked like they were holding onto a secret.
He had never been trusted with anything this small before. Not really.
People trusted him with games. With contracts. With the blue line. With killing penalties and taking hits and showing up when the Garden needed a reason to scream.
But this was different. Emmett’s mouth moved in his sleep. Bucky’s throat tightened.
“Does he do anything yet?” he asked, because he needed to say something before the room got too soft.
Gabe nodded. “He eats. Sleeps. Screams. Poops with alarming confidence.”
“Sounds like half the guys on the team.”
Becca snorted, then immediately pressed a hand to her stomach. “Don’t make me laugh. Everything still hurts.”
The smile fell off Bucky’s face. “You okay?”
She waved him off. “I’m fine.”
Gabe looked at her.
Becca sighed. “I’m tired. And sore. And I cried yesterday because I couldn’t open a jar of peanut butter. But I’m fine.”
Gabe leaned down and kissed the top of her head. The gesture was small. Automatic.
He did not make a thing of it. He did not wait for praise. He just kissed her hair because she was there, because she was his, because her pain mattered to him in a way that required no audience.
Bucky looked away. Not fast enough to be obvious. But fast enough.There it was again. That strange, quick shift in his chest.
He bounced Emmett once by accident, barely a movement, and the baby’s face scrunched.
Bucky panicked. “Shit.”
“You’re fine,” Becca said.
“I moved.”
“Babies can survive movement.”
“He looked mad.”
“He always looks mad. He’s a Barnes.”
That helped.
A little.
Bucky looked down again, and Emmett’s eyes opened. Not fully. Just narrow, unfocused slits, dark and glassy, staring at nothing and somehow directly into Bucky’s soul.
Bucky went still.
“Becca,” he whispered.
“What?”
“He’s looking at me.”
“He can’t really see you yet.”
“Don’t ruin this for me.”
She smiled. Emmett blinked slowly. Bucky’s heart did something stupid.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “He’s perfect.”
The room went quiet. Not awkward quiet. Not empty quiet. Full quiet.
Rain tapped against the front windows. Gabe moved around the coffee table, making room for the sushi and strawberries. Becca tucked her feet under herself and watched Bucky hold her son with an expression he did not know how to read without feeling exposed.
For a little while, nobody needed anything from him.
No cameras. No fans. No Steve in his ear telling him to clean up another mess. No woman in a hotel bed wanting a version of him she could post about later. No coach. No agent. No press. No roar.
Just Emmett, breathing tiny warm breaths against his arm. Bucky should have felt peaceful. Maybe he did.
Maybe that was the problem.
Because underneath it, faint and slow as a bruise forming, came something else. Not sadness exactly.
Not jealousy either. He was not jealous of Gabe, not really. Gabe looked like he might fall asleep face-first into a paper plate. Becca had spit-up on her shirt. Their living room looked like a storm had passed through a baby aisle.
None of it was glamorous. None of it was easy. But Gabe looked at Becca like she was the center of the house.
Becca looked at Emmett like the whole world had narrowed down to one fragile, furious little person and somehow gotten bigger at the same time.
And Bucky—
Bucky had a penthouse with floor-to-ceiling windows. He had women who wore his number. He had a contract with more zeros than his father had ever seen in one place. He had people chanting his name like prayer.
He looked down at his nephew’s tiny hand and felt, for one sharp second, the shape of everything he did not have.
Then Emmett made a squeaky little noise and ruined the moment. Bucky startled.
Gabe laughed under his breath. “That means he’s either hungry, gassy, or preparing to ruin everyone’s night.”
“Helpful,” Bucky said, voice rougher than he meant it to be.
Becca reached for the sushi with one hand and pointed at him with her chopsticks. “You’re doing good.”
“I’m sitting still.”
“With a newborn. That counts.”
Bucky looked down at Emmett again.
The baby’s face had relaxed, cheek squished against the blanket, utterly unconcerned with the fact that his uncle was having some kind of quiet existential event over his head.
Bucky breathed out slowly.
“Hey, Emmett,” he murmured, so low only the baby could hear. “I’m Uncle Bucky.”
Emmett slept on. Bucky’s mouth curved.
“I’m the fun one,” he added.
Becca groaned. “Absolutely not.”
“I’m rich and irresponsible. That’s literally the fun one.”
Gabe said, “Please do not teach my son that sentence.”
“Too late. We’ve bonded.”
Becca leaned back into the couch, smiling around a bite of sushi like she had been waiting for it her entire life. Bucky watched her eat, watched Gabe hover, watched the baby sleep.
The hollow feeling did not go away. It settled. Quietly. Somewhere beneath his ribs, where he could ignore it for now.
And because he was good at that, because he had spent years becoming excellent at not looking too closely at anything that might hurt, Bucky smiled when Becca asked about the game.
He told her about the win. He told Gabe about the fight in the second period. He let Becca laugh at the cut on his cheek and call him an idiot. He held Emmett until his arm went numb and did not complain once.
By the time he left, the rain had stopped.
The house behind him stayed warm and lit as he walked back to the SUV. Through the front window, he could see Gabe taking the baby from Becca so she could stand, one hand braced on the couch, moving slowly. Gabe bent his head toward her. Becca leaned into him.
Bucky looked away. He got into his car. For a moment, he did not start it. His phone lit up with notifications.
Texts. Mentions. Missed calls. A message from Steve.
A photo notification from an account he did not recognize. Probably the girl from the hotel. Probably damage control. Probably more noise.
Bucky set the phone face down in the cupholder.
Then he sat alone in the dark leather quiet of his expensive car, parked outside his sister’s warm, messy house, and stared through the windshield at nothing.
He thought, briefly and without meaning to, of the woman in the grocery store.
The tired one with the sharp mouth and the cheap basket.
He wondered if she had used the twenty. Then he hated himself a little for wondering.
Then he turned the engine on and drove home.