Chapter Text
what i wanted was to fall asleep
close my eyes and disappear
like a petal on a stream
Movie stars and directors and producers—all of Hollywood’s top dogs, almost all of them white men—trickle slowly into the Lewis’ elaborately decorated back garden. Their shoes march on the thick, green grass and she watches them from her bedroom window as they huddle in groups, drinks in hand. It’s absurd how like high school their formations are. She can tell easily which people are the popular kids, the geeks, the jocks. Same old cliques, several years on.
Music rises up to Darcy’s ears, piercing the glass, shaking her bones. A DJ stands in a booth all by herself, records stacked beside her. The bass is loud. Thumping. It rattles the floorboards. She watches the guests’ mouths open wider as they struggle to tell their many stories, and a pit drops from her throat to her stomach. An anchor weighing her to her bedroom floor.
She does not want to go down there. She does not want to pretend she is happy being in Hollywood and talk to these people as if she is not dying to run back to New York. To Brooklyn. To home.
To him.
So why don’t you? she asks herself, closing her fists so tight at her sides that the skin of her palms threatens to crack.
She isn’t able to give herself an answer. A frustrated flurry of knocks tremble in Darcy’s eardrums. Her mother calls out to her.
“People have started arriving, Darcy. You need to be downstairs,” her mother seethes, and Darcy wonders what appetiser the catering company got wrong, or which record the DJ didn’t bring. Something has gone wrong. Probably something so minuscule and petty that nobody else would see it as a problem. But to her mother, it is the thorn in her side. The thing that prevents her from enjoying herself at these events.
“Coming, mom,” Darcy promises, hoping it will calm the storm raging on the other side of her door. But her mother has disappeared by the time Darcy exists her room.
She walks down to the party, now in full swing, alone, a false smile plastered on her face, and begins the tortuous and tedious Dance of the Hosts' Daughter. Tight hellos to strangers who talk as if they have known her for years. Handshakes with slimy directors with even slimier pasts that her father insists on inviting to these parties. Gossipy small talk with actresses once a part of her inner circle who seem now as unfamiliar and distant as Darcy’s childhood memories.
Gripping her flute of champagne as if it is a lifeline, Darcy plays along for no other reason than her annoying habit of needing to please everyone around her. These people must see her as the golden girl. The girl she has trained to portray since she first started acting.
She wishes her grandfather were there. He would tell her to stop bullshitting herself. Then he would buy her a ticket to JFK before she could protest. Drive her to the airport and shove her into the security line with nothing but her wallet and a pair of sneakers. She doesn’t need anything else, he would insist, because everything she needs is waiting for her in New York.
is anybody listening —
i open my mouth and nothing comes out
nothing, nothing gonna wake me now
Darcy was sure it started as a joke.
It did start as a joke. He said it the first time they went to his parents’ upstate, recently-modernised ranch that summer.
“When we get married. . .,” Bucky said. He walked right next to her, leading her to the barn.
The barn.
It had been converted to a room, but still.
The barn.
“When we get married,” Bucky noted, carrying Darcy’s duffel bag over one shoulder, holding her hand with his free one, “you won’t be forced to stay here. You'll be able to stay in the house. In the guest room, with me.”
Darcy was shocked. So shocked she didn’t comment on what he said, just followed him into the cosy barn like the good heifer she was.
He dropped her bag and let go of her hand and opened his arms. Ta-da.
No matter how refurbished the barn was, it was still a barn. She stood just inside of the sliding red door on a big, dark blue rug that covered the stained concrete below. The rug extended to the other side of the barn—the room. Her room. For the whole weekend.
To the left was where they had kept the livestock. The iron bars weren’t there anymore, but Darcy knew. Then there was the loft to the right. Stairs leading up to the loft. Bucky going up the stairs leading up to the loft, smiling a secret smile that made Darcy’s heart sing Taylor Swift songs. The happy ones, not the heartbreak ones.
“Come up here,” he said. “This is where the bed is.”
Darcy looked behind her at the still-open sliding red door. “Your mom. . ..”
Bucky was up on the ledge now. On his knees, peering down at her. Still smiling. Always smiling. She had missed him this past week. A perk of running his own company meant that when business was good—which it was—he could give himself time off. He had driven up to his parents on the Monday and Darcy had only just joined him on the Friday. The late, dim Friday.
Five days without Bucky was like ten years without Bucky.
“She’s busy. I told her I’d help get you settled,” he said.
“And then she told you, God is always watching.”
“Dar-cy,” he said, slowly, slicing her name in half. “Come up here.”
She climbed, because it had been ten years without Bucky—not that she could tell him that; he would hold it over her head, and she could imagine him using it against her every time he left the room for one second. But she had missed him. So much.
He caught her hands and lifted her up the last couple of steps, and they collapsed onto the bed. It was just a mattress. No bed frame. No anything else. Just the bed.
Just the mattress.
And Bucky.
Smiling Bucky pressing her against his belly with his strong arms.
She felt her stomach tangle. It hadn’t done that in a few days. She kept her head hidden in the warm crook of his neck, her lips boldly searching for that soft spot on his jaw that made him go limp.
He tasted like sweat. Salt and SPF 30.
“God,” he said when she sucked his skin. “Jesus.”
“Can you see him up there? Is he watching?”
Bucky smiled. She was still on his chin, eyes closed as she tasted him, but she knew he was smiling. His jaw stretched beneath her lips.
“I’ve missed that,” he said. “I like that.”
“This?” she said, sucking again. She pulled away and saw a purple mark. Broken capillaries.
“Yes,” he hissed.
She missed it too. She liked it too.
She kept it up until Bucky tilted his head down to kiss her on the mouth.
Darcy got lost so easily in him. Time and space ran away from her. Literally. It was like a black hole had eaten them. Darcy was never sure how long she and Bucky had been kissing. She was never sure where she was when she and Bucky kissed. She floated in the black until he pulled away. He always pulled away first. It made her feel like a fiend. A nymphomaniac. Like maybe she needed help.
“I can’t,” Bucky said, catching her wrists before she could lift his shirt one more inch.
She liked that he wore long sleeves even in the summertime. This one advertised a local Brooklyn bookshop he helped build when he and Steve first started out.
Darcy cracked her eyes. She remembered where she was.
“Oh, God,” she said, sitting up immediately.
Bucky laughed and sat up. Slowly. He did everything slowly. Time bowed down to him.
He ran a hand through his hair. It spiked up with sweat. “You see him too?” he said, smiling. Laughing.
He was tanner after spending more time in the beating sun. He looked healthy and flushed.
“It's not that I don't want to,” he insisted, scratching his neck. He adjusted his sweatpants and grinned foolishly. “Obviously.”
She peeked at him through her eyelashes. His swollen cock pressed against the fabric of his sweats. Even knowing that his über-religious parents could walk in on them at any time, Darcy still wanted it. Him. Inside of her.
She just got so lost in him. She had forgotten where they were, but that was hard to do now that they weren’t touching. The barn was all around them and it smelled faintly of hay and manure.
“When we’re married,” he said, grabbing her hands, “you can take the whole thing off.”
And that was the start of the joke.
He was saying the words several months later on a dreary and dark January night in Brooklyn. The night she got the call.
She and Bucky were busy taking down the last of the Christmas decorations. Cardboard boxes covered the floor of Bucky’s apartment—some were for the snowmen and fairy lights, but Darcy’s belongings filled the majority.
“When we’re married,” he recited, the words so common that they floated through one of Darcy’s ears and out the other, “we’re going to need a bigger place. This apartment is not enough for all of your Christmas decorations.”
“I’ll just buy more. When we’re married,” she parroted.
Moving into Bucky’s place was a slow process. She had just started a new job at Columbia University as a research assistant’s assistant in the Astronomy department and the exhaustion was very real and very draining. The work was good, though. And enjoyable, and she left each night with a feeling of satisfaction curled around her. Undeniably the major downside was how it limited her free time.
Officially, Bucky had invited her to live with him after their trip to his parents’ place, because spending the weekend together without actually being together was torture. His words, not hers. Though she was inclined to agree with him. Unofficially, though, she had lived with him since the night he showed her his scars. Her things started trickling into his drawers after that night. Her favourite cereals appeared in the pantry. A basket for sanitary napkins and tampons was placed on the back of the toilet, unmoving even when she wasn’t on her period.
That was what her grandmother said marked a good man. If he isn’t squeamish about the blood coming out of your vagina each month, he’s a keeper. She said it to Darcy towards the end; she had gone slightly senile by that point. But the message remained, and Bucky’s willingness to display her period products at all times signalled to Darcy that she was in a safe, loving space.
It was funny in a very not-funny way that she was thinking of her grandmother’s adage when her phone buzzed. As Darcy stood on a chair and tackled a string of fairy lights taped above the kitchen sink, Bucky checked who the text was from, surprising her when he said it was her mother.
In a sense, she was like an excommunicated Scientologist. Darcy had abandoned the religion of Hollywood. Turned her back on its people, its industry, its money. She didn’t care for the leaders or the congregation.
Her leaving was a sign to the rest of the community that she was to be treated as a pariah. Even her own parents had limited contact with her, and Darcy felt so strange when they spoke, because it was as if they talked in whispered code so as to not alert any higher-ups of their conversation. Darcy’s mother had called her once already that week. Something dropped in Darcy’s chest to her stomach, something heavy and bitter, as she thought about why her mom was reaching out again so soon.
Bucky helped her off of the chair and handed her the phone, pressing his lips to the top of her head before taking over the fairy light removal.
Swiping open the text message, that thing in Darcy’s stomach turned to stone, threatening to weight her down, down, down until she broke through the floorboards.
It was two words: call me.
Bad news. That was what waited on the other side of this phone call. She didn’t know yet what sort of bad news, but Darcy’s gut told her it was the worst kind.
“Is everything okay?” Bucky wrapped the fairy lights into a neat circle, placing them in a box, and moved in front of Darcy. He tucked two fingers under her chin, lifting her head.
She frowned up at Bucky, words sticking like molasses to her throat. “I. . .I don’t know,” she said honestly, thickly. “She wants me to call her.”
“Okay,” he said, thoughtful, dropping his hand. He instead pulled her into his chest. Wrapped his arms around her. She felt safest there. Untouchable. Invincible. “You don’t know for sure that anything’s wrong, though.”
“I know, but I just feel it,” she muffled into his t-shirt.
“The only way,” he said, leaning back, forcing her to once again look up at him, and there she found the warmest eyes and kindest, knowing smile, “that you’ll know for sure is if you call her. So, take a deep breath, sit on the sofa, and call your mom. I can sit right next to you if you want.”
Darcy nodded. “I do want,” she echoed.
Leaning down, Bucky pressed his lips to hers. Darcy’s eyes slid closed and she felt every atom of her mouth align with every atom of Bucky’s mouth. For a moment, she stood there, just being there, feeling him. She basked in him—a cold-blooded snake lost in the desert nighttime and its bright, warm sun.
It was good, this. . .thing between them; she didn’t have another word for it. She was not sure a word existed to describe how their bodies and minds and souls were linked. Sometimes, she thought she was going mad. Like how her heart seized and stuttered when she and Bucky reunited after a long day apart. It couldn’t be normal, the way her insides cramped and swelled and pounded against her skin when she woke up beside him, surprised to find him beside her still, even after so many months.
She loved him. So much it physically pained her to dwell on the subject.
Monica insisted that Darcy’s strong, overwhelming response to Bucky was what happened to a person’s physical form when their incomplete soul found their other half. According to her: Years and years ago, you and Bucky formed a four-armed, four-legged, two-faced creature. Zeus split you into two, forcing you to search out your other half for the rest of your lives. But joke’s on him. You guys got to each other before you got old and wrinkly.
Darcy didn’t know how much she believed in fate or the accuracy of Monica’s soulmate theory, but she could not deny the rightness of when she and Bucky were together. She felt complete. Whole.
When we’re married. . ..
When she separated herself from Bucky’s warm hold, she took that deep breath. She sat on the sofa with him at her side. She called her mother.
Several seconds passed. Darcy pressed the phone harder to her ear as the purring rang through her like rumbling thunder. Anxiety swelled, unwelcome, and she stood to avoid the restless feeling building in her legs. She paced the floor, waiting.
“Darcy.” Her mother’s muffled voice came through the phone in broken fragments.
She had never sounded so broken.
Darcy stopped pacing. That anxiety rose to her windpipe, strangling her in its vice grip like a python. “Mom, what happened?” she choked, sensing but not seeing Bucky coming to her side.
“Darcy,” she said again. And again, “Darcy, it’s your grandfather. . ..”
Darcy heard nothing else. The floor fell away and for the longest, remarkable time she felt as though she were falling and falling with nowhere to land and nobody to catch her. But then his arms wrapped around her, saving her from the endless falling, pulling her from the vacuous void, and she collapsed to the ground. He held her as she sobbed wretchedly into his shirt. Tears like geyser billowed down her cheeks, warming her skin and soaking through Bucky. She croaked and coughed, yearning to escape the smoky liquid fire congealing in her throat.
And she tried to stop. She tried to break away from her anchor, but he held her closer and told her to cry, and she listened, and she cried until her throat felt like she had swallowed battery acid and her eyes had no more tears to give.
Later that night, deep into the darkness, she laid her head on Bucky’s chest. Their hands twined together.
“You’ll be going back.” He said it as a statement of fact, and she nodded against him.
“Not for long.”
He kissed the top of her head. “For as long as you need.”
It was later, as she stood in the garden surrounded by celebrities and personalities and lecherous demons, that she realised what he meant when he said that.
For as long as you need. . .even if that means forever.
But at the time, she didn’t understand. At the time, she thought forever was with Bucky.
The funeral was to take place one week after her grandfather passed. Her parents needed time to prepare for the event. Hundreds of mourning guests would be there, remembering her grandpa as a co-worker, a boss, a friend.
Bucky kept trying to insist he could go with her to Los Angeles, but Darcy wouldn’t hear it. The business needed him. Baloo needed him.
Darcy spent the days leading up to her trip back to Hollywood in a daze. Work gave her the time off, but she hated sitting around the apartment more than she expected. She sat there in her sadness with Baloo’s head on her lap, his amber eyes looking at her with so much concern that Darcy started contemplating the idea of reincarnation. Because there was no way that Baloo first came into existence as a dog.
Eventually, the sitting became overwhelming and Darcy got to her feet, attaching Baloo’s leash to his harness. The pair departed the space and entered into the bitterly cold Brooklyn air in search of Bucky.
They found him on his lunch break on-site, covered in paint and dust. His pink cheeks rounded when he caught sight of Darcy and Baloo. Abandoning his sandwich, he approached them and offered each a kiss on the forehead.
She remembered everything about that afternoon. The exact feeling of his dry lips on her dry forehead. The way his pale blue shirt brought out the lighter blues in his eyes. The rumbling sound of his voice as he told her about the project he and Steve were working on. She remembered the low, misty clouds hanging over their heads, and the way the wind chill sliced every inch of her bare skin.
But mostly, she remembered when Bucky stopped talking about construction and asked Steve to take Baloo on a quick walk around the block. She remembered Bucky sitting her down on a slab of recently-destroyed concrete. He sat beside her and took her hands.
“Marry me,” he said.
Darcy’s head fizzed, as if someone had unscrewed the top of her scalp and poured Sprite over her brain. “What?” she gasped.
“Before you go. Marry me.” Clearly, he took her silence as panic. He quickly launched into what sounded like a prepared speech. A pitch, like he was the head of a start-up and she was Mark Cuban. Why We, Darcy and Bucky, Should Get Married, by Bucky. “It can be just you and me. Well, and some witnesses. We can fill out papers tomorrow and be married the day before you go. We. . .we don’t have to make it a big thing. You don’t have to tell anyone. I just. . .I don’t want to wait. I don’t want you going back to California by yourself, and even though I won’t literally be with you, I can at least be there symbolically.”
“Whoa, Bucky,” she said, placing her hands on his chest. He closed his mouth. His heart throbbed, hard, against her palm. She smiled. The first happy smile since the phone call with her mother. “Yes.”
His eyes widened. As if there could have been any other answer. “Yes? It’s not too sudden?”
Darcy laughed and squeezed Bucky’s hands as he took hers. She circled her thumb around his scars. “I’m surprised it took this long,” she admitted.
“You knew it was coming?”
“Of course I knew. You’ve been saying it was going to happen since July.”
Bucky’s mouth stretched so wide Darcy feared his cheeks would split. He kissed her heavily, wetly, and they only broke apart when Steve returned with Baloo.
That was supposed to be the beginning. In the moment, it felt like the beginning, which was a beautiful place to be.
They married at the end of the week with Steve and Monica as their witnesses. Darcy’s gold band belonged to Bucky’s Romanian great-grandmother whose fingers happened to be the same size as Darcy’s.
Monica waggled her eyebrows like a Tom from Tom and Jerry and said, “Makes you wonder about my four-legs, four-arms, two-faced theory, doesn’t it?”
“That’s not your theory. It’s Plato’s,” Darcy corrected, fiddling with the buttons on her hastily-purchased powder blue dress. A Nordstrom Rack steal she found on sale marked down to $69.97 from $225.00. “And no, because it would imply that my other half is Bucky’s great-grandma. Not Bucky.”
The ceremony was non-existent. Their vows were the standard vows, carefully repeated back to the officiant. She kissed Bucky when she was told to, soldering herself to him.
In the night, she faded into Bucky.
She begged him for it. For everything. “Please, I need you.”
He provided for her. He slid into her, sheathing himself in the depths of her belly until there was nowhere else for him to go.
Moving in and out rapidly, sweat cascading down his neck, his body covered hers like a shield, and he kissed her like a promise. And she kissed him back, desperate to consume as much of his breath as she could before she returned to LA. She needed some part of him to become a part of her. Just in case this wasn’t actually any sort of beginning.
In case it was really the end.
dreams are sweet, until they're not
men are kind, until they aren't
flowers bloom, until they rot
and fall apart
Expensive shoes march around Darcy as she lingers on the outskirts of the garden, watching the guests from a safe distance.
At first, she enjoyed being in California. She had started missing the perpetual sun. The beaches that didn’t smell of corndogs and rancid cotton candy. She had missed her parents, strangely. The sombre atmosphere of the funeral was bandaged by the open bar, and soon enough Darcy forgot to feel sad. The sadness was still there, clinging to her with its incessant neediness, but she could no longer feel it, and that was what mattered.
Her plan to stay not for long vanished the moment her mother got her hands on Darcy’s schedule. There were weddings, red carpets, wrap parties. All of the Hollywood events she despised. But it was her mother’s father who had died, and so Darcy went to the events for moral support. And at some point, she stopped watching the date on her phone move forward.
About the same time, she stopped responding to Bucky’s messages. And eventually, Bucky’s messages stopped coming.
He must hate her. The kind of poisonous hate that one can only feel for someone they love.
This place managed to suck her back into its gilded cage, and she allowed it to happen. Allowed herself to be lured away from her newly-built life. Her job. Her husband.
Pressing her lips together, Darcy pleads with herself not to cry. They would be self-pitying tears anyway—the only person to blame for this mess is herself.
A man approaches Darcy from the throng of drunken Hollywood elites. Darcy does not fight the eyeroll that surfaces on instinct. The man smiles, saccharine sweet, and does not stop moving until he is almost stepping on her toes.
“I couldn’t figure out why you refused to go out with me. But then,” Ian Boothby says dangerously, standing too close, his eyes lingering on her right hand, “I figured it out.”
Wisps of vaporised alcohol escape his mouth and it takes every ounce of Darcy’s willpower to not shove him away. An eyeroll she can get away with, but a physical act of aggression is going too far. The press would be all over an incident like that.
Darcy eyes the select camerapeople and journalists granted access to her parents’ Valentine’s Day soiree and tenses when she notices one of them watching her and Ian.
“You figured out that I have no interest in going out with you because you grabbed my tits at that premiere? Good for you,” Darcy says through gritted teeth, her blood bubbling at the ugly memory.
Ian laughs a sick laugh. “No, silly.” He bends down like an oppressive cloud. “I know your secret.”
Darcy stands her ground. She refuses to let this man frighten her. “It really isn’t a secret that I hate you, Ian.”
“Stop playing,” he threatens, his eyes swimming in darkness. “You’re married, to some construction guy in Brooklyn.”
Darcy’s breath catches around the hot, heavy lump that instantly forms in her throat.
“Gotcha,” he says, as if he is the sleazy journalist and she is the 1950s starlet caught in a career-ending scandal. “You must be more careful with who you allow yourself to be photographed with. Monica is to thank for the information, of course. She is so good at tagging the people on her Instagram feed. Her picture of you and this. . .Bucky guy led me to his Instagram page. Bo-ring. Seriously, Darcy, it’s just photos of buildings and planks of wood. But eventually, I realised that in all of those horrific pictures, Bucky tagged his business partner. Steve, who had a very nice post about his best friend’s rush elopement at the courthouse. How sweet?”
“What the fuck, Ian?” Darcy spits, taking a step back. His smile only spreads wider. He looks like the Joker. Or Pennywise. Either way, an evil, psychotic clown. “Seriously, what the fuck?”
Ian shrugs. “Well, I was just thinking,” he muses, “what your parents would think of you marrying some random handyman in Brooklyn. A man who now has access to your family’s money. Their connections. His business is relatively new, isn’t it? Maybe”—
“Don’t you fucking dare, Ian,” Darcy warns, anger writhing in her veins. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing—if you think this is some sort of threat, or if it’s leading up to some pathetic attempt at blackmail—but I’m walking away now before my fist accidentally punches you in the nose.”
Ian calls out to her as she turns her back to him. “You’re not even going to deny it,” he says as the latest playlist ends. A crackling silence falls over the garden.
Darcy swivels to find the entire party eyeing her. Some blatantly, some trying to pretend they’re not watching. Her mother emerges from the centre of the horde looking angry at the disruption.
“What’s the problem?” Her mother looks at Ian as she asks the question, like she doesn’t trust Darcy with the answer. Like she thinks Darcy is the problem.
“Oh, it’s nothing, Mrs. Lewis,” Ian says jovially. “Just a friendly argument. Nothing serious.”
Her mother eyes Darcy suspiciously. “Keep your voice down, darling.”
Darcy cannot help it. She laughs. Almost as maniacally as Ian. “Fuck,” she shouts, the word emerging from her core. “Fucking hell, I had forgotten.”
“Forgotten what, darling?” Darcy’s mother asks, snarling but attempting to keep her voice level.
“How fucked up this place is. How fucked up all of the people in it are! Ian,” Darcy says, dropping her champagne glass and wrenching the band off her right ring finger, “was just telling me about how he cyber-stalked me in order to get blackmail material. Or something. He didn’t actually get to the blackmail part, but I’m pretty sure that’s where he was headed.”
Nobody pretends to not be fully invested in Darcy’s impromptu speech.
She raises the gold band in the air and slides it down her left ring finger.
“I got married before I came back here,” she announces, and she feels like the star in one of her grandfather’s movies, and it is so fitting. She wonders if he is watching her performance. Everybody else surely is. Flashes go off, and she knows she will be on the celebrity gossip sites within the hour. “His name is Bucky. He’s a construction worker from Brooklyn. We live in a studio apartment. And I love him. And fucking hell, he loves me. And Jesus, I do not know why I didn't shout it from the fucking rooftops when I got here. Mom, Dad. . .I'm sorry for not telling you. I think I was afraid you would be upset with me, which is ridiculous because I'm almost 30. But there you have it. I'm married, and I'm going back him. I'm going back home.”
Darcy’s chest expands with elation as she finishes. She revels in the shocked expression on her parents’ faces. Their guests don’t appear to know if they should applaud Darcy’s one-woman, one-act play or cringe at her manic outburst.
It doesn’t matter.
Somewhere, she knows, her grandfather is rooting for her.
i remember someone, someone by my side
turned his face to mine
and then i turned away, into the shade
Brooklyn’s February air whips at her face as she stands against a brick building. The early morning cold is good. It is cleansing.
Despite the early hour, Brooklyn’s streets vibrate with heavy foot traffic. All sorts of workers take to the sidewalks, but she scans the crowd for one person only. A man wearing a longsleeved t-shirt and beat-up jeans with red-rimmed blue eyes and a small dimple in his chin.
She spots Baloo before she sees him.
Darcy watches the black and white dog start crossing the street in front of her, and it’s as if he knew to look for her, because his eyes zero in on her form. She knows the exact moment he registers who she is. Whining, he pulls against his leash, and Darcy’s gaze travels up, up, up until she spots a confused man telling his dog to heel.
I dreamed about you last night, she thinks, her heart picking up speed. It pulses against her ribs. Her blood sings in her veins, pounding against her eardrums. I’ve dreamt about you every night. Every single night since we met.
He sees her. He is halfway across the street, Baloo straining against his grip, and he stops because he sees her.
Slowly, cautiously, he walks towards her.
“This can’t be real,” Bucky says as Darcy bends to scratch Baloo’s chin. “You can’t be real. Are you real?”
Standing upright, Darcy struggles to look at him through her tears. She laughs nervously, and a sob escapes. “Oh, man, don’t get me started on that am I real shit. It’s too early in the morning.”
Bucky smiles, and she notices his own face is stained with tears. “Definitely real, then.”
“Oh,” she says sheepishly as he reaches out and wipes away the fresh tears on her cheeks, “that’s what you meant. Bucky, I”—
—“No,” he interrupts, curling his arms around her, “not yet.”
“But we haven’t talked about any of this”—
Bucky shakes his head. He presses his forehead against hers, and she knows now what Billy Joel is talking about.
I never had a place that I could call my very own. But that’s alright, my love, ‘cause you’re my home.
She is home in Bucky’s arms, with his skin on her skin.
“We have the rest of forever to talk about it,” he says, and his lips collapse against hers. She has missed his taste. The feeling of him, how he burrows under her, into her.
One month away from Bucky is like one century. It is so long. Too long.
Darcy kisses him back, ignoring Baloo's whines and nudges.
Forever.
It's a promise. One Darcy will keep until forever runs out.
you, the one i left behind —
if you ever walk this way —
come and find me, lying in the bed i made