Gold to Airy Thinness Beat

Chapter Fourteen

Stephanie jumped in surprise. How he'd managed to move from the river to her side that quickly, and without her noticing, she had no idea. He didn't seem quite as angry as he had before but there was still a fire in his eyes that told her the argument they'd started in the yard was far from over. She opened her mouth to answer him but snapped it shut again as she was once again hit by the same realization she'd been hit by when she'd seen him on that table and again when he'd confronted her in the yard.

She was talking to Bucky.

Bucky who she hadn't seen in months, who she'd feared was dead, the pain of that possibility so bad she'd barely been able to breathe.

And now he was here. Here and she could talk to him and touch him and even if all they were doing was yelling at one another it was a thousand times better than the alternative which would have been awful, soul crushing silence...forever.

Her willpower gave in. She sucked in a sharp breath and stepped forward to wrap her arms around him. The second her hands touched him the very last tendrils of her control fled and she surged forward, her arms sliding around his body, fingers fisting in the fabric of his shirt and curling into the muscles of his upper back. She buried her face against his shoulder, drew in a shuddering breath...and promptly burst into tears.

Once she'd started there was no stopping. She burrowed harder into him, her entire body pressed against his. She let out a wail ripped somewhere from the core of her being, the sound barely muffled by his shirt. It morphed into sobs after that, each one a reflection of the misery she'd felt when he'd left, the fear when she'd thought him dead, and the terror every time she turned a corner to find he wasn't there.

She cried so hard her body shook from the force of it but she only curled even more against him, as if she could physically share the same space he did if she just tried hard enough. She didn't care who heard or saw, it simply didn't matter. She'd thought he was dead. She'd thought she'd lost him and it had left a gaping wound in her soul that would have never closed no matter how many years had passed by. She'd spent time in a world that told her he had gone where she could not follow. It had been a cold and ugly world left in his wake and it was only by the grace of God she hadn't had to stay there.

She cried herself out eventually, leaving her breathing short and hitched, her eyes swollen and dry and her head pounding with the promise of a headache. Her body felt as if she'd run a marathon and she relaxed against him, listening to the faint thud of his heart and feeling the movement of his chest as he breathed.

Bucky hadn't reacted initially, simply standing still as she'd clung to him, probably to shocked to respond. Slowly though she'd felt his hands move to rest on her hips before, almost hesitantly, sliding up to her waist. Then, a few minutes later, his arms had suddenly just wrapped around her in a tight embrace, dragging her body even closer to his own. Currently, he had one hand cradling the back of her head while, with the other, he lightly trailed his fingers up and down her spine.

"You have always been enough," Stephanie whispered into his shirt, finally getting to the point where she trusted herself enough to speak without breaking down again. "And I did do it because of you, because I wanted to help you." She took a deep, shuddering breath. "But I probably would have done it anyway, even if you hadn't gone over. You going just meant I needed to get it done sooner rather than later. I couldn't stand the thought of you being over here without me. If you were going to face danger, or worse, I wanted to be there facing it with you."

"And what do you think I'd have done if you'd been the one to go over without me?" Bucky asked. He sighed. "Damn it, Steph, why do you have to be so reckless?" his voice was heavy with resignation, almost bordering on despair and Stephanie flinched to know she was the cause of it. "What the hell did you do?" Bucky asked, pulling back from her enough to look her in the eyes. His hands moved to her shoulders, his eyes tracking over the changes in her height and weight, the new muscles he could feel under the sleeves of his dress uniform and shirt. "What did you do?" he repeated.