The World Keeps Changing

Chapter 22

I woke to the alarm I'd set with Bucky still wrapped around me, his face against my neck, breath warm against the back of my ear. "Hey," he said softly, feeling me stir.

I reached out to my phone and turned off the alarm. "Hey," I answered, feeling a little hoarse. "Did you sleep at all?"

"Some," he lied, but I let it go.

"We should probably get going."

"We have time..." His lips grazed down my neck to kiss at the curve where my collar lay.

My hand reached behind me into his hair at the base of his neck. "Bucky..." I breathed as his fingers dipped beneath the hem of my shirt, his metal hand splaying over the bare skin of my stomach. My back arched with a sigh of pleasure, pressing the curve of my ass into him, feeling him already hard behind me.

He growled my name into the curve of my neck, sending a shiver through me and his hand flexed against my stomach as he rolled his hips, grinding himself against me.

I tried to stifle a pained sound at the movement and he froze. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah... Stomach hurts."

He rose up and pushed the covers back, nudging my shoulder. "Let me see."

I rolled toward my back, groaning as my body protested the movement, having gone stiff in the few hours of sleeping in a single position. He lifted my shirt to expose my stomach and made a pained hiss.

I looked down and the bruise on my stomach from the imprint of my gun handle had spread into a huge, lurid purple blotch on the right side of my stomach, filling a space as big as a saucer, spreading nearly navel to hip. I could also see dark, angry bruises down my legs and forearms, pretty sure my back looked similar. "Well, I guess that explains why my everything hurts," I deadpanned.

"You told me it hurt... God, sweetheart," He was looking down at my body, my shirt rucked up under my breasts, taking in every bump and bruise, checking them with his fingertips. Under any other circumstances, I'm pretty sure having Bucky kneeling between my legs taking in every inch of me would have been hot as hell itself, but his eyes were so full of regret, his hair falling down around his face the way it used to a few months ago, like he was hiding. "I was a jerk last night, wasn't I? I'm so sorry."

"For a while," I said softly. I struggled to a sitting position with a grimace, every inch of movement an exercise in will. He helped me and I looked up into his face. "But I know why you did, and I know why you felt you had to." I reached up, smoothing his bed tousled hair back from his face. "We both got out, Bucky, and we saved a lot of people in the process." I pulled his face down to me and kissed his forehead, then his nose, then his lips. "Everything else matters less than that."

He rested his forehead against mine for a long moment.

Finally I broke the quiet. "I don't have a lot of gas in the tank today, so if we have a two hour bike ride ahead we should get moving, okay?"

"Okay," he nodded. Then, he kissed my forehead and moved away. He brought me the rest of the food pack I'd saved from last night with some pain killers from my bag. I took the pills and told him to eat the food.

"You saved it."

"I saved it for you," I retorted, rolling off the bed with a groan. "I don't eat this early in general and you need like 7,000 calories a day to function. I don't."

"I'm fine, Cookie," he answered stiffly.

"You're not, you're hungry."

He was about to protest, but was interrupted by a loud growl from his stomach. I raised an eyebrow. He had the good grace to look defeated. "There's some protein bars in the front side pocket of my pack. Eat a couple of those, too, please." He gave me an indignant look. "Please, Bucky. Let me do the things I can." He gave up on eye contact and nodded.