twelve

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Days passed. Two weeks. I fell into a routine. I woke up in the morning to the changing of hands from my night chaperone to my morning chaperone. I ate breakfast. I looked out the window in my room. My morning chaperone switched places with my afternoon chaperone when I was dragged out of my room to eat lunch. I played Uno with Scott in the afternoon, regardless whether he was my chaperone or not. Twice we played monopoly with Thor but he flipped the board around the third time he was asked to pay rent on a property. I had dinner in my room when my afternoon chaperone switched to my night one and I went to sleep early. Then I got up and did the same the next day.

I didn't talk to Natasha. I hadn't seen her in two weeks. Radio silence. It was the most I had ever not spoken to her in my life, apart from my time with Silver, and I had to try and ignore the ache it set in my barely beating heart. She didn't reach out to me and I didn't reach out to her. I wasn't ready to forgive her for the information about Fallon she had hidden from me and I guessed she wasn't ready to forgive me for the comments I'd made that hurt her.

Steve had been gone on an undercover mission with Sam for the past week and a half, and I hadn't spoken to him since he'd left. He had come to my bedroom the night before he'd left, after a tiresome fight with Tony about the mission, and had finally granted me the hate sex I'd been asking for. It wasn't exactly a goodbye, but he had stayed in my room till morning and we had spoken with only a little animosity until it had been time for him to leave and he had let me crawl into his lap to fuck him hard enough that I knew he would still be thinking about it by the time he came back. It hadn't been enough for me to wipe the need to be touched from my body.

Little to no headway had been made on Silver, or if it had nobody had included me in the conversation. No attack had been made on my life, though, and nobody had brought up searching for Carina and Reid again, so I saw that as progress. I woke up most nights with nightmares, though my chaperones mostly ignored them now as they realised it was a common thing. Flashes of Silver's hands around my neck, Axel's gun cocked at me, my own blood staining my hands were branded into my subconscious.

"They're home," Scott said as he reshuffled our Uno cards. I glanced up at him in confusion. "Sam... and Steve." The way he glanced up at me for half a second before back down at the cards made me frown.

"I don't care," I told him even though I had kind of been waiting for the day they would come back and we could fight again.

"You haven't missed him?" Scott said, looking visibly surprised. My expression mirrored his.

"Did I give you the impression I was waiting around for him to come back?" God, I was more pathetic than I'd thought if that was the impression I was putting out into the world.

"I mean, Mia..." Scott rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. "We play Uno at the same time everyday." My eyes widened as I realised that was the impression I'd been giving.

"Oh, god, not because I'm waiting for Steve!" I said quickly. "I'm just not a very sociable person, I thought you knew that! I don't really like to go outside." I felt my cheeks redden.

"So you're not... together?" He asked carefully. If my eyes could widen any further, they would have fallen out of my head.

"Absolutely not!" I cried, drawing the nearby attention of Maria who was working from the couch in the common room on her laptop.

"But I thought..." He trailed off, looking confused.

"No. No way. You thought wrong. It's happened... twice, maybe three times, it isn't a big deal. It's just a casual thing," I told him. He nodded slowly.

"Steve doesn't really strike me as the casual kind of person," Scott admitted. I smoothed my hair back from my face.

"Well, he is now," I said.

america's assassin ➻ steve rogersWhere stories live. Discover now