find me

54. peace and quiet

25th October

Bucky pushed himself up. Sharp breath out, then slowly lowered himself as close to the ground as he could, and then took a deep breath in. With another strong push, he pressed down on his hands and raised himself up again. His eyes stared at a fixed point in the grass. 

Finally he reached the final rep for his set and let his body fail on the dirt. He turned on his back with a heavy huff and rested for a moment, his chest expanding with every deep breath and then lowering with every long exhale. He felt a sting on his side, not painful but tight, and definitely there as a reminder he still needed to take it easy. His eyes stared at the vast blue above him. 

His lips pulled on one corner, an amused smirk painting over his flushed skin.

He wondered what wonderful and crazy question Natalie might have come up with if she had been there next to him, staring at the clear sky. She always seemed most attuned to the natural environment around her. 

Maybe it was because she was an element of nature herself. Effortlessly beautiful, powerful in that way that is truly unstoppable, captivating. Undeniable. 

That's how she captured him, effortlessly. 

At first it was mostly her looks that drew him closer, then it was her words, her brain and the way she saw the world. Then it was what animated her, her intentionality, the principles that guided her and the kindness that moved her. The next thing he knew, her hand was in his for the first time and his whole life was changed. It felt like being struck by lightning, kissed by the warmth of a midday sun, held by the currents of an ocean. 

What could he do? He had no choice. He let himself go. 

He had kept falling ever since. Never stopped. Every day, when he thought he couldn't fall any harder, something unexpected found a way to sneak its way into his chest and squeezed hard enough to make him sink deeper, dropping him even lower into his feelings and devotion for her. 

It had happened again just the night before. And not even because of something as cliché as their first time having sex. For something so small it should have actually been insignificant. Except to him it really wasn't. 

Right after finally making love to her, she had turned to him and asked for his hoodie to sleep in. She had hoodies, right there in the room too. He knew she had them, he had seen her wear her own hoodies. But he had been so struck by the soft request that he didn't even ask why she wanted one of his. Not that it would have mattered in that moment, he would have given it regardless of the reason. 

In all fairness, it shouldn't have been such a big deal anyway, but fuck, hearing her ask had made his heart grow another size. 

And he could feel it when he woke up in the morning. The way nothing felt real, because that experience with her was the realest shit he had ever felt. Getting out of bed had never been so hard. The only reason why he forced himself out of it was because otherwise he would have ended up doing something stupid, like staring at her until she woke up, which would have likely taken hours. Instead, he decided to try something more normal and less psychopathic, like training. It would have been the first time in a while, since before he got shot. He knew he'd have to take it slow, and maybe it was actually still too early to start training again, but he needed it. That morning especially, when he could still feel her naked body pressed underneath him, her warmth wrapped tightly around his cock; he needed something to ground him, to distract him. He needed to feel the pump of blood coursing through his body, his muscles tensing and stretching as they worked hard, and only two things would give him that. One was currently asleep, the other was training.