THREE DAYS PASSED, and in addition to her usual notes for Bruce Banner, Maisie had begun to spend a couple of hours out of her day in Tony Stark's workshop. He'd developed a habit of barging into Bruce's lab randomly and dragging Maisie out the door, in the middle of both Bruce's and Maisie's work. In the workshop, he'd tinker or experiment, and sometimes he'd have Maisie assist in small ways, like holding a fire extinguisher or a camera while he ran tests. But there was a pair of robotic arms that seemed rather disgruntled by Maisie's presence, and she had a feeling she'd been stealing their jobs.
The real reason she was there was to keep Tony company; she could tell he wanted it. He was extroverted, and talked incessantly as he worked. He liked having her there to laugh at his jokes and be impressed by his genius, neither of which were difficult tasks for her, really. Especially the latter. In Tony's workshop more than anywhere else in the Tower, Maisie felt like she was in a big budget science fiction movie. It was the life of it, the motion of the technology all around that made it so surreal, she thought. He had an effortless ecosystem with his machines, which all worked in response to his cues.
It was Thursday morning, and Maisie was at the counter in the center of the workshop. She sat on a tall stool, and her feet dangled uncomfortably, because they didn't quite reach the ground, and there was no rung to rest them on. The stool and counter were built for someone much taller than her—namely Tony, who at the moment was working across from her, referring to three different screens at once while typing on a touchscreen that was built into the counter.
"What are you doing this weekend?" he asked, after quickly glancing at his phone, reading a text, and then continuing to type, attention on the screens again. Maisie didn't understand how he multitasked like that. Both the conversation and the engineering were second nature—everything was easy for him.
"I don't know," Maisie said. "Why?"
"I'm still going to the west coast if you want to come. Leaving tomorrow."
Maisie swung her feet, crossing her ankles and then uncrossing them, a habit she'd developed over the past days spent on that particular stool. "What are you going for?"
"I get cabin fever in New York for too long," Tony said. "If we get any more snow, I might snap and kill Steve. Or anybody. Or Steve."
"You don't have a meeting or anything?"
"No," he said. "That a deal breaker? No business school?"
Truthfully, Maisie was picturing what exactly he might be doing there, if he was going for pleasure and not business, and she didn't come along. She pictured the models and celebrity women from the covers of the magazine stand she passed by each morning on her walks to and from work.
"I'm gonna stay here," she said. She re-crossed her ankles.
"Alright," he said. "Miss me while I'm gone. Don't have sex with Steve. Or anybody. Or Steve."
Maisie didn't react, because she wasn't listening. She was still thinking about the magazine women—Even worse, she'd remembered a specific celebrity woman who graced those magazine covers from time to time. Tony had called her "P-uttercup" more than once, and Maisie had finally googled his relationship status to find the P name in question.
"Would I stand out in Los Angeles?" Maisie asked. "Would you be embarrassed of me? If I did go. Even though I'm not going to."
Pepper Potts was five foot nine, according to Google. Maisie couldn't envision that height in her head without having seen her, and so she constructed in her head a woman who was more like a tall, slim goddess than a human. She was, in Maisie's mind, as tall as a skyscraper. An elegant one, too, she thought, modern, yet classic, Art Deco—the Chrysler Building, maybe. And Maisie felt like something else entirely. Shorter, and not so slim, and yet still much more likely to sway in the wind until she was swept out of the city entirely. Maisie was a flimsy tent, really—hollow and with no foundation, not belonging, not built to belong.
Maisie couldn't recall a time that Tony had almost mistaken her name when he'd been actually looking at her, or if he was stooped down low to kiss her, or if he had handfuls of her curves. He only mistook her when he was distracted in conversations like now, in the workshop. He'd also called Maisie "Dum-E" once, while asking for her to hand him a screwdriver, so she was certain the mix-ups had nothing to do with real similarities.
Tony raised his eyebrows at her question, a slightly delayed response, finally looking away from the screens. "Did you finally look at a map? You barely knew which state Malibu was in last time."
"Yeah," Maisie said.
"Well, I'm never embarrassed," he said. "And nobody cares if you use the wrong fork at dinner."
"What do you mean?" Maisie said. "The wrong fork? Have I been doing that?"
She wracked her brain to recall the dates he'd been taking her on all week. She'd barely been home at all, walking home from work to get ready before Tony came to pick her up. She hadn't slept in her own bed all week. So it all felt blurred, like one long evening. But she was sure there hadn't been multiple forks.
"It was a joke, buttercup. When have I ever taken you somewhere with multiple forks?"
"Is that on purpose? You think I'd use the wrong one?"
"You can use whichever fork your heart desires," he said. "But I'd keep cameras off you the same way I do here. That's why we've been going strictly to one fork restaurants."
"Oh, okay." Maisie swung her feet lightly, bouncing the backs of her dusty-pink loafers off the legs of the stool. She internally debated whether to tell Tony that her concern was her body, not her lack of status and wealth. Or, at least, her body had been her only concern until he'd suggested a new potential insecurity.
She weighed her options as Tony returned to his work, unconcerned. She'd googled the weather in February, and while it wouldn't be hot yet, it also wouldn't be puffy coat season, as it was here. "What about the weather?" she asked. "I wouldn't have to wear a bikini or anything, right? 'Cause it's still kinda cold there, right?"
"Are you asking me if I'm planning on forcing you into the freezing ocean?" Tony asked. "No, I'm not. If you come, bring something I can rip off in a hot tub, though." He leaned down to rummage through a drawer in the counter below him.
"So, I wouldn't be, like, in public with my stomach showing?"
"No, buttercup," he said, coming back up with a blowtorch in hand. "Why? You're worried about the scar?"
Maisie blinked. She hadn't even considered the surgical scar, about four inches long, which ran vertically above her belly button. It was about six months old, healed but still tinged pink at the edges. Tony was the first person, other than doctors, nurses, and herself, to ever see it. So, it hadn't yet crossed her mind to feel insecure about it until now.
"Yeah," she answered.
"Don't be," Tony said, flicking the blow torch on and reaching for a piece of metal, some part of a machine. "A doctor could get rid of it easy, though. If it bothers you. Not that it should."
Part of her was at least relieved he didn't guess her original concern. If he'd said You're worried about the pudge? she was certain she would have excused herself to retrieve her big puffy coat from Bruce's lab, zipped it all the way up, and insisted that no one ever perceive her again.
"Oh," Maisie said quietly. "No, I don't like doctors."
Hearing her tone, Tony flicked the blowtorch off and glanced up again for a split second. His eyes darted over her face, then down to her body, but the counter made it so he couldn't see lower than her breasts. She wasn't sure what he was trying to determine anyway. She was in a pink sweater, which hugged her shape, but she only felt comfortable in it because her twill pants were high waisted, making her feel tucked in. And it wasn't as if he could see her scar at the moment.
But he said, almost serious, and yet still flippant, as he returned to his work, "You're welcome to open up about your mysterious past any time now. I'm all ears."
"I don't have—" Maisie's heart pounded with a sudden panic. "I'm not—mysterious. It's boring. No big deal."
"You don't get to decide if you're mysterious or not," he said, scrolling on the touch screen again. "It's more of an eye of the beholder sort of deal. And I'm beholding mystery."
"Ohio," Maisie blurted out, because he could easily get her resumé from Bruce, and she didn't know how much information about her was available on the Internet if the person who was looking happened to be Tony Stark. So, the less inclined he was to solve a mystery, the better. "I'm from Ohio. I went to college at a really small school. I didn't think you'd be interested, 'cause it's not Ivy League or whatever."
"See?" he said. "Was that so hard? I know you better already. Is it anywhere near Cincinnati? I like Cincinnati."
"Um, no."
"Cleveland?"
"No."
"Columbus? Why are you making me guess?"
"It's just, like, super rural," she said, pulling her sleeves over her palms, a self-soothing habit. "You wouldn't be familiar with it. The closest city is kinda far away."
"Wow," he said. "I've seen the corn fields, but I forgot people lived in them."
"Oh," Maisie said. "No, people don't usually live in corn fields. Mostly they live in homes."
Truthfully, Maisie had just snapped at him. But it hadn't sounded like it, because at the last milisecond before the words left her mouth, she became afraid of losing his approval. So she edited her tone to sound innocent, as if she truly didn't understand his meaning.
"That's what I meant," Tony said. She was relieved, at least, that she'd gotten away with the comment without rashly revealing that she had thoughts and feelings. She didn't think he'd like her so much if she had those pesky things.
"Give me your finger," Tony said after a pause. She's noticed he couldn't bear it when her mood dipped; he couldn't sit in discomfort or silence. He held out his hand expectantly, and Maisie extended her index finger across the counter. She'd just painted her nails a soft, muted yellow the day before, as she was sitting in this same spot. She watched him take her hand and thought she'd picked a nice shade.
He pressed her finger onto the touchscreen of the counter in front of him. Then he guided it over and pressed it down again. Maisie leaned forward to see that he was guiding her through a string of numbers and letters on the keyboard.
"You're coding," Tony said. "So now your name can go on the patent for this. Great for a resumé."
"I know there's gonna be a catch."
"You're also taking on 50% of the blame if this project goes south now."
She accidentally laughed a little as she said it. She'd been doing that more and more the past few days, accidentally finding him charming. Stupid, she thought.
She felt even stupider when he kissed her knuckles before he let her go, and she felt the contact travel into her veins and tingle through her whole body, even as she pulled her hand back. Last week, he'd kissed her hand like that too, in the break room, and it hadn't made her feel like that.
There was a hard, dense rock of dread in her stomach, which made itself more apparent each time she realized she was approaching a dangerous delusion. Because that was what it was—deluded—to think he'd want a relationship with her.
And anyway, Maisie didn't want a relationship either. She couldn't fall in love again—it wasn't safe. So every time she felt a flutter, she reminded herself of the P name, and she remembered that Tony would certainly break things off before the point where she'd even be at a reasonable risk of falling in love.
"Do you have your laptop with you?" Tony asked. "In the interest of actually teaching you something, I've been thinking of software I could install for you to learn."
"Oh. I don't have a laptop," Maisie said. Her stomach was a solid fist. The question had reminded her of Isaac.
"You don't have a laptop?" he asked. "Weren't you just in college?"
"Um, I had one, but it's broken," Maisie said.
"What's wrong with it?"
"I don't know. It just doesn't turn on."
"Click any funny links?"
"No, it's, um, physical damage," she said. But she thought that sounded suspiciously vague, so she added, "I dropped it. Clumsy."
"I'd offer you a new one, but that sounds like solving half the problem. Because my spidey senses are telling me that you didn't have any of your files backed up," he said, then muttered shit under his breath as he nearly singed his thumb with a blowtorch. Maisie looked away as he continued swearing, not urgently, but with annoyance, as he noticed a small fire. "Don't even think about it," he said, causing a robotic arm to halt as it turned toward the fire. Then he dumped out half of Maisie's water bottle.
Maisie was relieved by his distraction. She tilted her face up toward the ceiling and willed gravity to keep the tears safely in her eyes.
"Dum-E here gets trigger happy about fire safety," Tony said. But when he turned around to face Maisie again, he paused, sobering at the sight of her. "You okay, buttercup?"
"I'm fine," she said, nodding vigorously, running a hand through her hair.
Tony shrugged, accepting the answer. "Was that right? About not backing up your files?"
"Yeah," Maisie admitted, a little embarrassed.
"I'll recover them. Bring your laptop out when I pick you up tonight. It'll take five seconds."
Then, Maisie was exploding with butterflies all of a sudden, worse than ever. She watched him turn his attention back to a disassembled machine in front of him, not realizing the impact of the offer on her. He pushed up his sleeves, readjusting on the stool. Maisie crossed her legs, gaze trailing over his hair, slightly askew, to the Black Sabbath logo on his shirt, which he really did fill out, well built. She thought about the way he'd tossed her into bed the night before. He told FRIDAY to put on his "hardly working" playlist as he flicked on the blowtorch again.
Lately, she'd been trying her best not to be naïve and easily impressed by men. But all of the music he played was from before she was born, and he'd bought her dinner every night this week, and when they were walking together, he did that thing she'd always liked in movies, where he'd put his hand on her back and lead her places—and in her heart, really, Maisie was tired, and she just wanted to be taken care of.
"You've gotta back up your files, though, buttercup," Tony added as he worked. "After you're set up again, I'm gonna check the cloud, and I'm gonna spank you if they're not on it."
She leaned her cheek onto her palm and watched as he turned in his stool and motioned for a touch screen suspended above the counter to come down within his reach. It lowered down, and she watched his hands flex as his fingers moved rapidly over a new keyboard, this one with symbols she didn't understand. His knuckles were red, and distinct veins ran toward a futuristic watch on his wrist, which also had symbols that Maisie didn't understand.
"Okay, I will," she said, replying to his comment a little too late.
He half-glanced up at her, a quick read over her face. "Find something to bend over," he said. "I'm almost done."
"All I did was agree!" Maisie said, self-conscious.
One hand still typing, Tony used the other to sweep over the counter next to him and knock several expensive looking pieces of equipment onto the ground. "FRIDAY, cover your ears," he called.
"Auditory processing disabled," said FRIDAY.
"And Dum-E, close your eyes, you pervert," he added. The robot turned and faced the other direction. "Come here, buttercup, I cleared you a seat."
★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★
EVEN THOUGH BUCKY was gone by the time Steve arrived in Prague, and even though Bucky had done a thorough job of scrubbing away any trace of himself in the city, Steve remained in the area for three more days. He wanted to be close the next time there was a lead. But three days of waiting was too much for him—Steve couldn't stand to be idle—and finally, he returned home to New York, angry with himself.
When he landed the jet on the rooftop of the Avengers Tower that morning, in a moment of he stopped in the center of the tarmac to look around at the city. Off to one side, Steve could see the Chrysler Building. He remembered the period of time—brief, brief—when it had been the tallest building in New York City. Then, what was it, a year later, that the Empire State Building topped it? He turned his head to see that one, too, in the skyline. Steve had only been a kid back then, when so many of the skyscrapers were built, and each day and month and year he survived to watch the city grow had been unpromised, an unlikely outcome. Even now, staring out at them, Steve felt that his life was balancing precariously on an aching, small, tired body with a weak, irregular heartbeat.
And yet, he saw the skyline now clearer than he ever had growing up. Those old, grainy photographs from the 1930's weren't so far off from how he'd really experienced the city back then. They would be spot on if they had they been in dull, vague colors instead of black and white, and with blues that looked green, and purples and reds that were the same shade, and yellow and pinks that he couldn't distinguish from one another.
He hadn't realized how bad his vision had been until he'd taken the serum and felt a shock of brightness, color, crispness. His hearing was the same—Steve had gone from being partially deaf to hearing more precisely than anyone he'd ever met. Not only that, but he could take all of the brightness and loudness in without pain shooting through his head. Even if the serum had given Steve average senses, he still would have felt them enhanced.
In another direction, and farther in the distance, past the Rockefeller Center, Steve could see the new tallest buildings in the city, next to Central Park. The luxury, residential skyscrapers of Billionaire's Row, several of them still under construction, shot up above the rest. They were different from the older ones, the pre-war buildings. These were impossible looking—slender, industrial rectangles, which utilized a small amount of ground space by building upward, upward, upward.
He found Billionaire's Row rather ghostly, out there in the distance, in the fog of the early morning. Maybe it was because he knew there was no glass in the windows of a quarter of the floors, the mechanical floors, in an effort to reduce the sway of the buildings. In a quarter of the building, the wind just billowed through, like an empty frame.
There was emptiness in the other floors, too, even the ones with apartments. Each apartment was hundreds of millions of dollars each—difficult to sell, he supposed, and so many weren't. But the ones that were, which had rich owners, were still often vacant. No one really wanted to occupy the noisy, swaying buildings, and so the rich purchased space in them as assets, as fifth homes that went unused. Excess for the sake of excess.
The thought irritated him more than he'd already been, and he turned to go inside. When he pushed the door open, he accidentally smacked it into the wall. But he barely registered the impact, and he didn't apologize. He didn't even almost apologize to the wall; he didn't start to form the words and swallow them down. If the wall had been a person, his apology instinct would have been delayed by at least a beat of time.
And when the air around him felt warm as he entered the Tower, and as the door swung shut behind him, blocking out the freezing winter, Steve didn't feel relieved. He'd slept on the jet, which was heated and certainly not the most uncomfortable sleeping arrangement he'd ever had. He'd showered in a nearby gym, too, and hadn't gotten grimy at all, since there had been nothing to do, no action, no problem to fix.
When chasing a ghost like Bucky, Steve found, there was an overwhelming surplus of adrenaline that went unused. Currently, that adrenaline was itching him out of his skin.
Rather than rushing toward his apartment as he usually would, Steve was rushing toward the training room. He wished he'd stayed in New York all week; he wished he'd asked Maisie out. He was in the stairwell now. He wished he'd asked Maisie out weeks ago, before Tony ever noticed her. He built up too much momentum going down the stairs, and the most natural course of action was to skip the last five steps and jump straight to the landing. Actually, he thought, jerking open another door, what he wished most of all was that Tony wasn't fucking Maisie.
He felt a surge of guilt at the crassness of the thought. Fucking her. But that was what Tony was doing, wasn't it? He tried to push away the mental images.
But as he walked through an empty hallway, on a floor with limited access, in relative solitude, his mind cut Tony out of the images. Steve imagined her in his own bed instead, with her hair spread out over his pillow and her body underneath him. He imagined fucking her. He imagined her in ecstasy, begging, wanting him, her nails digging into his shoulders.
His thoughts were interrupted as he approached the training room. Natasha and Sam were exiting, carrying gym bags on their shoulders, apparently having just finished a training session. Usually, Steve would have been disappointed to have missed the company. But today, he was relieved.
Natasha looked him up and down. "Hey," she said. "Any luck?"
"No," Steve said, feeling scrutinized, which put him even more on edge. "What'd I miss?"
"Somebody's gonna have to brief you," Sam said. "The good news is that Tony traced the bioweapons to a known syndicate. The bad news is that they're ghosts. They're linked to half the weapon and drug trafficking operations in the city this year, but nobody's talking."
"They leave trails of bodies, that's why," Natasha said. "Bodies don't talk."
"Right," Sam said. "And a trail of bodies keeps everybody else quiet, too."
Steve opened his mouth to speak. He was supposed to decide something, he was sure. Or ask for more information. It was a routine. But he closed his mouth again, conjuring nothing to say. In the back of his mind, he was imagining his face in Maisie's hair, his lips on her neck, her voice breathy and needy in his ear. He shook his head, giving up. "Let's talk later. I've gotta clear my head."
"Alright," Sam said. Now he was scrutinizing Steve too, with a long, concerned look. "If you wanna talk about—"
"Thanks, but I just need to move on," he said. "She's with Tony. It's fine."
"Oh," Sam said, with a nod of understanding, as if Steve had revealed much more than he'd realized.
"What?" Steve said.
He looked at Natasha for an answer. She had the ghost of a knowing smile on her face. "We didn't know what was on your mind."
"I was gonna say you could talk about 'anything,'" Sam said, amused, turning to Natasha. "In his defense, Maisie's included in that."
Steve managed to crack a smile, although he felt like an idiot. "Like I said: I'll move on."
His entire body felt tense. He was hyper-alert, aware of his senses as the heat kicked on loudly. The sound pissed him off for no reason in particular. Far down the hall, outside of Sam's or Natasha's earshot, he heard Clint's voice, followed by Thor's laughter.
"Did she call you?" Natasha asked.
"No," Steve said, pulling his phone half out of his pocket, as if to make sure, as if he might have missed a vibration in his pocket, and as if he had any reason to think that vibration might be Maisie, despite the fact that she'd never called him before. In fact, he realized, she'd never sought him out before at all. "Why would you think she would?"
"I told her to," Natasha said. "Damn. Now I'm gonna have to kick her out a window."
"Give her a break," Sam said. "I think she seems shy or something."
"I think she seems aerodynamic," said Natasha. "How far do you think I can kick her?"
Steve listened to the dull blasting of the heater. He heard Clint's laughter down the hall. He very desperately wanted to punch something. But he breathed deeply and spoke evenly: "When did you talk to her? Tell me exactly what you said."
"I broke into your office on Monday and gave her the flowers you bought her," Natasha said. "I didn't want them to wilt. Seemed like a waste."
"She's actually just a romantic," Sam said, ignoring the glare that followed. "She loves love."
Steve's brain skipped directly over the break-in. He wasn't stunned by that. He couldn't believe he hadn't expected it, really. But a wave of anger crashed through him again at the thought of Natasha approaching Maisie out of nowhere. "You said she's scared of you, Romanoff. Did you scare her?"
"No. I can be friendly."
"You can also be scary."
"She liked them," Natasha said. "She was blushing."
Steve's heart stirred a little. He remembered hearing Tony say that, too, that she'd been blushing after the last time Steve spoke to her. He wished he could see her like that. He imagined the way she must have looked, pretty and flustered, and maybe her heart rate picked him because of him, and maybe she could feel the heat in her face—he was newly enamored of the thought of her body reacting to him in small ways. "Did you tell her they were from me?"
"Why else would she be blushing, Steve?"
Natasha had asked the question like he was an idiot, but Steve still didn't quite believe her; too good to be true. "What did she say?"
"She asked when you were coming back. I lied and said I didn't know. Then I told her to call you."
He tuned back into reality at the reminder. Rewinding back to the beginning of the conversation—she hadn't called him. What did blushing even mean? She hadn't blushed when he'd watched her with Tony in the break room that day. She probably blushed when she was embarrassed, he realized.
"Thanks," Steve managed to say evenly, despite the guilt wracking over him at Maisie's discomfort. Some other current was coursing through him, too, threatening to explode. Maybe it was because he was already irritated and beaten down, but he was angry with himself. He felt positively volatile toward his own mind, retrospectively, at having been stupid enough to think she could want him.
"You okay?" Sam asked. "Just talk to her today. Find out if—"
"I will," Steve lied, purposefully relaxing his jaw and shoulders, releasing visible tension. It was still there, the frustration, in his body, in his mind, but he didn't want it to be seen. It was an issue of morale for the team. "I do need to clear my head, though. Just give me an hour or so."
Both teammates left with sympathetic squeezes of his shoulder. He wondered if the tension had still been apparent in them after all.
★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★
MAISIE HAD DEVELOPED a bad habit within the past three days. As if it wasn't bad enough that she'd been accidentally feeling something romantic toward Tony, she had also—accidentally—thought far too often about that last time she'd seen Steve before he left. His shoulders in that dark shade of blue kept rudely barging into her consciousness, so disruptively that she actively tried not to think of him at all.
But it was especially impossible not to think of him after she received the flowers—a confirmation that Steve wanted to, or was at least trying to, fuck her. (Indeed, Maisie had a new opinion of Steve which would have certainly caused his heart to return to its old palpitations in a life-threatening, horrified way. Because Maisie failed to even consider the gesture for what Steve had intended it to be, as an old-fashioned admittance of his earnest infatuation with her, and maybe an attempt to get her to stop looking so miserable for another second, to get her to smile at him again.)
The flowers were still in her apartment now, hanging to dry. She'd hammered two nails above her bed, in that expanse of white, unused wall. Then, she'd strung a line of Rosa's sewing thread between the nails and split the bouquet into three groups, tied on the line upside down.
Tony had given her red roses before dinner that same day, and she'd put them in a vase on the table, mostly for Rosa and Sherry's enjoyment. The preservation, she told herself, only had to do with a preference in the flowers themselves. She just liked the colors, the pinks and yellows and greens and creams. There was a part of her that wanted to cry at the thoughtfulness of guessing her favorite colors, probably based on her wardrobe, despite the fact that he'd only spoken to her a handful of times. But the part of her that wanted to cry was stupid, and she pushed it down.
Of course Steve had to be more thoughtful than Tony. They were using her as a pawn in some kind of pissing contest, the MacGuffin of a deeper feud between two heroes, and right now Tony was winning. She tried not to be delusional and consider herself anything more than disposable, replaceable. She'd might as well be a magical stone or ring; anything to move the plot along.
Still, it was, for some reason unknown to Maisie, impossible not to eventually drift into thoughts about Steve while Tony fucked her. It wasn't that she didn't like Tony—rather, it felt good, explosively so, and so hard and deep at times that it made her dumb, and she didn't feel she could be held responsible for her brain and body losing inhibition in those moments.
It was helpful, too, she reasoned. Maisie couldn't orgasm except on her own in private, had never been able to otherwise, and when she felt obliged to fake it the past several nights, all she had to do was picture Steve letting her ride his thigh or kneel in front of him. Her body would tense up and flutter all on its own, a certain wave of ecstasy, even if not a real orgasm. Once, she'd accidentally imagined Steve's hands closed over her wrists, pinning her down, and she'd practically been screaming in Tony's ear.
It was more dangerous to Maisie when the images came late at night, when she couldn't sleep, or during idle lulls in her work day, when Tony was especially focused and not talking to her. Those were the ones she really wished she could stop, because those were of a delusional nature. She'd recollect Steve's hand, how steady it was, and instead of the other fantasies in which he touched her, hungrily, possessively, she'd imagine herself reaching out for him instead. She'd picture brushing his hand in a silent request, and then picture him responding easily, interlacing their fingers, letting her hold onto him.
She hated those images. It meant, in her mind, that his attempts to manipulate her—with the stupid color palette of the flowers and the stupid comfort on the stairwell and the stupid, stupid emotional vulnerability of showing her his sketchbook—was working.
Currently, Maisie was seated on her stool again. Twenty minutes ago, when she was bent over the counter, her face buried in her arms, Tony had immediately morphed into Steve, and even afterward, as she pulled her clothes back on, walked to the bathroom, and returned, she accidentally imagined what it would be like if Steve had just fucked her. She imagined she'd had an orgasm, and that they were in bed, and she'd lie there for a moment, relaxed, and he'd kiss her in small, loving ways. Her lips and her cheeks and her forehead.
"Cap's coming back today. Forgot to mention it," Tony said. Maisie paused, her eyebrows high. For a moment, she was terrified that some machine in the vicinity was giving him mind reading abilities. She wasn't sure what he wanted her to say, and she took too long to reply, so long that it became unclear whether she would reply at all, really. He looked away from a blue hologram to ask, "Thoughts?"
"Sorry, what did you ask?" Maisie said.
"I didn't ask anything," he said. "I told you Cap's coming back today. He might already be here. He texted me earlier."
"Oh. Okay." Maisie tucked her fist under her chin, crossed her ankles, and stared down at a novel that she had yet to open all day.
Tony was still watching her. "Forecast's saying he'll be handsome and swoon-worthy this afternoon," he said.
"I'm sorry I blushed!" Maisie said finally. She knew he was talking about the last time they'd seen Steve. Tony had rolled his eyes and complained about the warmth that had apparently been visible in her cheeks.
He kicked off from the counter to roll his stool back to a different counter. "His eyes are projected to be dazzling, and he may be seen playing with random babies in strollers and helping old ladies cross the street," he called over, rummaging noisily through a drawer as he spoke.
"I was just overwhelmed because you both wanted me to do different things!" Maisie called back.
"They're cautioning all the adorable, corruptible little interns in the area to keep their legs crossed and watch for flooding."
Maisie didn't reply. She drummed her fingers on the counter. She kicked the backs of her shoes against the stool legs. She glanced toward the door, aware that Steve might be in this very same building at this very same moment, and that she might see him again. She finally turned to the first page of the novel in her hands.
A/N:
me: the pace of this book really needs to pick up, people are gonna get bored
also me: hmm I think we could use 12 more skyscraper metaphors and some more solid walls of prose with no dialogue