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“You’re stronger than me,” says Yelena.
It’s not a question, but Bob answers it as one. “No,” he says. Then adds, “Not emotionally anyway.”
This makes Yelena laugh. A month ago, or less, Yelena’s laughter during sex might have caused Bob to throw himself directly off the tower, an act that would not have killed him but would have likely killed many others, so it’s good he now finds her amusement nothing to fear. She is simply happy astride him, and it is such an easy, natural thing to receive her joy and to tune it up and up, to make her laugh. Or to circle his thumb over her clit and to make her come. Any idiot with a halfway decent cock and adequate motor skills could accomplish it. And Bob just happens to be that lucky idiot.
“But physically,” says Yelena, and she is breathy but smiling as she rocks on top of him. Bob cannot believe how often he’s seen her smile now; he has the mad idea it's more than the rest of the world combined has seen it. “You’re much stronger,” she says and caresses his arm appreciatively. She runs her hand across his chest and down until her palm rests atop his hand that is curled into a fist except for his thumb, still attentive to her clit.
Bob is very close to coming. Yelena, seemingly thrilled by his purported strength, contracts tightly around him, and he knows it’s too soon, but—
“I know many ways to kill a man,” says Yelena with a sigh, and this thought, too, seems to make her happy. “But I can’t think of a single way to kill you.”
“No, I think—I think you’ve figured it out,” says Bob. “Yelena, I’m—”
“Don’t you dare.”
She looks astonished for a moment, like Bob might actually disappoint her, so of course Bob cannot. He flips them, so she’s beneath him. It’s easy for him to overpower her, though he does not fully understand how this can be. Yelena is delighted when he does it, and he does not fully understand this either except to know that anything she wants from him, he will gladly give her.
With just one of his hands, he can pin both of her arms above her, and he does so—truly pins her, for she tests the hold on her wrists to see if she can escape, and she cannot. She wraps her legs around him, her heel pressing into the small of his back like she’s trying to get him deeper—like it’s possible for him to be any deeper inside of her—and she comes like that, saying his name as a choked off little sob. For the briefest of moments, Bob is regretful. He wishes for a more elegant name, one that doesn’t sound like a made up cover for something more sinister. But then he’s coming too, buried in the pulsating heat of her, and all thoughts flee except for the one that tells him this is more pleasure than he can possibly bear or deserve.
He is shaking and weak after, no steely grip within him to hold Yelena down, but it’s alright. She doesn’t mind him like this in the end. Sometimes he cries, and she doesn’t mind that either. Her hands stroke soothingly through his hair, and she kisses him very sweetly, and in between kisses, she says his name and things like, “No one ever—” and “Only you.” This he understands to be about the sex. He was experimented on, and those experiments gave him powers beyond belief, and one of those powers is to give Yelena Belova the best sex of her life. The bar is surely not very high given her overall history, but he’ll take it. He’ll take it.
#
“Stay behind me, Bob.”
Bob often thinks of the bunker that they were all meant to be incinerated in—how they had barely met, but Yelena’s instinct had been to protect him. She was smaller than him, younger than him, and though neither had known it at the time, far more vulnerable to injury than him, but she had yanked him behind her, put herself between him and danger. For Bob, this is monumental. This is his: “No one ever—” and “Only you.”
He imagines shielding her in turn. He is more bulletproof than Walker’s shield, than Bucky’s dishwasher-safe arm, but it is not in battle that he imagines protecting her. It is in the wintry forest where he wants to envelop her so she can neither see nor hear the other girl being killed. It is in the room of children assembling guns that he imagines pulling her away, escaping, and it is when she is very low, drunk on the bathroom floor, that he imagines lifting her, carrying her to bed, making her drink a glass of water.
All in all, it’s not a bad way for his mind to pass the time as he putters around the tower, finding things to do. He swaps out the wood shavings in the guinea pig’s cage for a fleece lining that was recommended to him in the r/guineapigs subreddit. He refills the little pig’s water and gives him fresh lettuce, makes for himself a smoothie from a hodgepodge of ingredients that mostly belong to Walker, and waits for Yelena to come home to them.
Yelena, who is in no need of rescuing now. The hero’s life suits her. The public life suits her. She is camera ready nearly always. He’s watched her apply her makeup with precision, add a small plait to her hair with care. She is beautiful in a way that even jaded New Yorkers cannot help but turn their heads at. She doesn’t smile for pictures, but it is rare for her to take a bad one. Maybe she knows her angles by instinct, but like many things, Bob suspects her posing is, in fact, studied—something she’s put much effort into until it has the appearance of effortlessness.
Power suits her too. She enjoys the leverage she has over Valentina, though as far as Bob can tell, she’s only ever used that leverage for— employment . For her and for Alexei and Ava and Walker. Work they can be proud of, a headquarters that is also a home.
She is sober, and she has decided that due to the fortune part of fame and fortune, she is all in on overpriced mocktails. He knows this because she took him to dinner once, to a trendy spot where some fortune was required to dine, and she made fun of herself for ordering what was essentially a $20 juice. But she loved it and its artful presentation, made him try a sip, said it made her feel faux-sophisticated, which was better than being actually sophisticated, didn’t he think so? She looked strangely nervous after she asked, a shyness he would not have thought her capable of, as if she were not—in gold dangling earrings and a supple leather coat—looking exactly like what she claimed she only pretended to be. He assured her he had no wish to know any truly sophisticated people. He wanted to pretend at sophistication with her for all of his days.
Bob wonders when she will get a real boyfriend. He tries to picture what such a man would look like, and mostly he pictures Bucky but younger; someone she has more in common with. Or maybe she will get a girlfriend? And then he pictures Carol Danvers because it would have to be someone—someone really extraordinary like that.
#
Bob has been sitting in his favorite armchair for about an hour, attempting to read a book that he stole from Bucky’s room, rather than scroll through paparazzi photos of Yelena on his phone, when Yelena and everyone else arrive back to the tower. Yelena kicks off her boots to climb directly into the chair with him. She is small and the chair is wide, so she fits well tucked against his side, and she throws her legs over his lap and declares she is starving, which is a hint for someone else to figure out dinner, not her, and not him. Alexei says he will cook. Ava says she will order Thai.
Yelena is in her hard tactical gear and smells of gunpowder. Bob is in an oversized hoodie with the Avengers A on it, and it feels deeply wrong that Yelena doesn’t mind the others knowing they are sleeping together, but she doesn’t mind. She’s never minded. Once she had departed the common room with him in tow, announcing to all present that they were going to netflix and chill. Once she had been dressed for a gala as if enrobed by the sky—in a pale blue slip of a gown—and Bob could not let her leave without kneeling beneath that sky, pressing two fingers within her, licking her to completion. Her silken gown was wrinkled in the aftermath, and there was no time to fix it, but she laughed it off, proud of her debauchery, or else too bright to be diminished by such a minor thing.
Alexei does not cook so much as he likes the idea of being a father who can cook for his daughter and one day might, so of course Ava wins out, and they order from LumLum. Bob says not to choose delivery; he will pick it up. Yelena says he will not , but she falls asleep so soundly he is able to extricate himself from beneath her. At the restaurant, he adds to their order a butterfly pea yuzu soda, which is a pretty-colored thing that comes with a paper straw made to look like bamboo. This adds to his wait time, for the restaurant is very busy, but the food will keep.
By the time he returns to the tower, Yelena is showered and changed. She has on a branded hoodie and sweatpants that match his. She is barefoot. She kisses him square on the mouth and forgives him for leaving because she is happy with her mocktail. All the others give Bob a hard time for being slower than doordash and for not bringing them a special drink too, but the tower is well-stocked with the seltzer water they have a brand deal with, and Bob points them to the cans, which he organized in the fridge not by color or flavor, but by whose visage appears on the side. He takes a raspberry lime with Yelena on it for himself.
There is no shortage of good Thai restaurants in New York, but they all like LumLum because the turmeric curry is fantastically spicy and because the pad thai is served in an egg net—a small flourish that shouldn’t impress a group so hardened, but it does somehow. Bob has been to Thailand. Everyone has been to Thailand except for Walker, who is rather put out by this fact, so they make much of it, though Bob has only the tertiary knowledge of a tourist and the rest have only whatever depth of knowledge mercenaries have.
Bob joins in their discussion about Chiang Mai and Northern Thai cuisine because he likes to be a part of something, but in truth he’d been on drugs when he was there and remembers very little of it. He stumbles over his memory or lack thereof and is lost for a minute, but Yelena scoops up a fried dumpling with her chopsticks and holds it up to his mouth. He accepts it unthinkingly, and its savor brings him back to the present.
No one talks of whatever mission they were on, which might mean it went poorly. Bob doesn’t ask about it until later, when Yelena comes to his room and they are alone.
“It was an easy one,” she says. “Someone stole weapons they shouldn’t have, and we took them back.”
She pulls off her hoodie over her head and slips out of her sweatpants so that she is in nothing but her underwear. Bob understands this is for his benefit that he might touch her, examine her even, as he likes to do when she is returned. He is grateful and runs his hands all over her, finding nothing more grievous than a bruise, an old one, not even from this latest incident. But he wonders if she is distracting him, preventing him from asking further questions. He does not know where this thought comes from; he has no reason to disbelieve her.
Sometimes Yelena’s approach to him sexually feels not dissimilar to her approach when encountering a particularly difficult target whom she needs to take down, the challenge of which she isn’t sorry for because it relieves her boredom. It was like this the first time, and Bob had scarcely wrapped his head around what was happening, except to know that he wanted more and more of it, when she was kneeling before him and taking him into her mouth. She does this now too, and it is like the first time, like she is determined to prove just how quickly and expertly she can get him off. But like then, she glances up at him expectantly. And like then, his heart stutters at the need in her eyes, and he is sorry to keep her waiting for whatever it is she needs from him: praise or affection or both, which he has in excess for her and tries to convey, cupping her face between his hands.
#
A phone rings in the tower, a landline Bob was barely aware of existing. No one else is home, and he stares at it as it rings until it stops. After a few minutes, it rings again. He ignores it. His cell phone rings. It is Mel. She wants to know when Ava will be available to visit a children’s hospital, says that Ava was asked for specifically and that they will take Yelena or Bucky as a backup, or in the worst case, Alexei, but he is not to send Walker under any circumstances.
Bob has no idea why Mel is asking him, but he does know that broadly speaking and barring any emergencies, Ava is free on Thursday and Friday mornings because that is when she will occasionally invite Bob to breakfast at an Australian cafe she favors, a habit which for too long gave Bob the impression she was Australian, but as it turns out she is just a big fan of the cafe’s flat whites and eggy brekkies. Mel gives him instructions to convey to Ava, and Bob scrambles to find a piece of paper to write everything down on because though the instructions are simple, he worries he is liable to forget.
When Ava arrives home, she looks over Bob’s scribbled writing and says she is glad the hospital asked for her because she knows what it is to be a child who feels imprisoned by their illness, wanting nothing more than to join the world. Bob says he is sure that is why they asked her, and after a moment’s hesitation, he embraces her because she looks like she needs a hug. She hugs him back, solid and corporeal in his arms.
A week later Mel calls and says that they need someone to throw out the first pitch at a Yankees game and obviously Bob shouldn’t ask the Russians, nor Bucky unless he wants to invite a diatribe about the Los Angeles ( née Brooklyn) Dodgers, but Walker is an acceptable choice for this sort of thing because rah, rah, rah SPORTS and bla, bla, bla PATRIOTISM. Mel sounds slightly crazed, and Bob wonders if she is alright, but he thinks he should ask her in person rather than over the phone, so he says he’s sure Walker will be thrilled, and Walker is thrilled when Bob tells him later where he needs to be and when.
Walker wonders out loud if his ex-wife can be persuaded to bring their son to the game, and Bob finds himself saying that he’s sure Mel would get them tickets. Then Walker says no, he is being stupid, of course they won’t come, so Bob offers to call Walker’s ex-wife and invite her. Olivia is her name, and Bob has a polite conversation with her in which she inquires how John is doing. Bob admits to having limited knowledge or points of comparison, but he says that John is part of a team now, so he is probably doing better than he would be otherwise. Olivia declines traveling with a toddler from Atlanta to New York for the purpose of seeing a baseball game but says to tell John they will watch it on tv. Both Bob and Walker count this as such an unexpected win they high-five over it.
Bob makes Yelena go to the baseball game with him, and she pretends to be annoyed, but she isn’t really. It’s a nice, temperate evening, the crowd has a pugnacious attitude she enjoys, and the slow-paced rhythm of the game is dull but comforting. Walker buys them popcorn and crackerjacks and two baseball caps but not one for himself. He says to wear the hats because they are New Yorkers now and also because it will annoy Barnes, and so they do.
It starts like that and spirals into Bob requiring a workspace account so that he can maintain an online calendar for each member of the team. Mel sets him up with a macbook pro and an email, [email protected] . She makes him fill out a bunch of paperwork that results in him getting biweekly deposits into his checking account and a health insurance card in the mail, but it takes a second notification reminding him to select a 401K plan for him to realize he is employed.
Ava is particular about what she will make appearances for; Mel is particular about what Walker is allowed to make appearances for; Yelena and Bucky are meant to be used sparingly and typically only for A-list events, though Bob knows without Mel having to tell him to never admit to this. Alexei’s calendar is the busiest. Alexei is willing to go to the opening of a hotdog stand, to the unveiling of a new crosswalk, and Yelena says to let him because it makes him happy.
Mel says that Bob is a “lifesaver” and a “godsend,” which Bob understands to be corpspeak meaning he is minimally competent enough to help alleviate some of her workload. He’s not sure what it says about him that he relates to the industrious and ambitious Mel even less than he relates to international assassins, but he likes her. He likes how often she calls him because it makes him feel useful. And he likes that she sometimes takes the train up from DC, settles in one of the tower’s underused conference rooms, calls it their “warroom” and asks him to join her to plot out the team’s travel, sort through hundreds of requests, and move around blocks of time commitments on the calendar like tetris pieces until she’s satisfied with how they all fit.
It occurs to Bob to ask Yelena if she pressured Mel, through Valentina, into giving him a job. He’s curious, but it doesn’t matter much one way or the other to him. If she did, it’s no more than she did for anyone else she cares about, and Mel’s not unhappy with the situation. And if she didn’t, then it came about through some combination of Mel’s desperation and his own merit. There truly seems to be no bad answer here, but Yelena is upset by the question.
“I didn’t,” she says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think of it. I’m a terrible girlfriend.” She ejects herself out of the armchair they’d been sharing.
“What? No,” says Bob, reaching for her and pulling her back to his lap. He’s seen her unflappable in the face of a dozen armed men, in the face of many a sharp-toothed creature of unknown origin, making her current distress borderline comical. He smooths her hair back with his hand, gently traces over her one, two, three, four, five piercings on her right ear. “You’re not. You’re the best—the best girlfriend.”
“No, Bob! I’m shit. I knew I would be. What do I know about healthy relationships?”
“Probably more than me.”
“Exactly! So I’ve tricked you into thinking this is a good one. You don’t know any better.”
“I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.”
“We only ever talk about my job.”
“Because I don’t have a job! I mean I didn’t. And because you get shot at and—and punched and kicked at your job. And I worry about you.”
“That’s no excuse.”
“I’m pretty sure it is.”
Yelena frowns. She says, “Sometimes I think: what will happen if they take you?”
“Who?”
“Bad guys. If they take you and put you in a box again, bury you in a vault again. But the way I think about it, it’s selfish. I think: what will happen to me? Will I start drinking again? Will I stop taking care of myself—stop living again?”
Bob has not considered the possibility that he might be put back into a box and finds it somewhat disturbing that Yelena has. But also romantic. It’s how they met. “You’ll be okay,” he says. “You’re a hero. And you won’t be alone. You have a team now.”
“No, Bob. I will NOT be okay. But I will find you. That’s what I decided. I’ll just—what’s the word?—flatten the earth until I find you.”
“Raze. Raze the earth.”
“Yes, that.”
“Okay—so seems like you got it figured out then.”
“No,” snaps Yelena, angry, like Bob has tricked her into something. But she seems to have lost the thread of whatever the problem was or else realized it was of her own invention because she settles back into him, rests her head on his chest, and asks him to replay the video of Walker being beaten up by a little girl, who turned out to be an alien shapeshifter, but it’s still pretty funny.
#
Bob’s salary is not much, relatively speaking, but it’s more substantial than any he’s had in the past and plenty sufficient to buy some new things. He asks Bucky to go shopping with him. Partly it’s that his other options are Alexei and Walker, neither of whom are particularly deft with women, and both of whom would probably have him dressing worse than he already does.
And partly it’s that he’s observed how Bucky is with Yelena. Bucky always positions Yelena to be the team lead while also coaching her through the responsibility in a casual, offhand sort of way. If Bob is going to position himself as a romantic lead, he thinks being nudged along in this same gentle manner is the type of support he would like to have.
Bucky correctly surmises that Bob is wanting to take Yelena out on a date and to look nice for the occasion.
Bob doesn’t say, “I’ve decided that I am Yelena’s real boyfriend. Me, Bob Reynolds. You and Carol Danvers can’t have her,” because that would be weird. What he says is, “We’re pretending to be sophisticated.”
A pause as Bucky absorbs this. “Yeah,” he says. “That sounds about right for you two.” He adds wistfully, “I used to love taking girls out on the town.”
“You still could,” says Bob, thinking of poor Mel, who would drop everything immediately and take not a train but a jet up from DC at the mere suggestion of a double date. Mel’s crush on Bucky is ill-advised, but Bob’s not enough of a hypocrite to advise her against it, given his own foolish hopes.
Bucky shakes his head. “That was another life. Feels like a cover story. But come on”—he clasps Bob on the shoulder—“I still know how it’s done. And Rogers was a sorrier case than you, let me tell you.”
#
“Don’t overthink it,” says Bucky after they’ve returned to the tower.
He’s responding to an inquiry of Bob’s—does Russian food hold any appeal for Yelena or is it too likely to conjure bad memories?
Bucky says, “Either you wine and dine a girl at a French restaurant or you wine and dine her at an Italian restaurant. That’s it. End of list.”
Ava, who has materialized through a wall to join their conversation, says to Bucky, “You’re quite a sad old man, aren’t you?” Her delivery makes it one of her more withering takedowns.
“We won’t be drinking wine,” says Bob.
“I know,” says Bucky kindly. “Figure of speech.”
Ava says, “I know a horribly romantic little Argentine restaurant in the East Village. It’s like something you would find in Buenos Aires. Music, candlelight, teeny tiny tables, but that’s a good thing—you’ll be seated together very snugly.”
Bucky tells Ava she is only proving his point—a place like what she’s describing will serve a Porteño take on Italian classics, and he looks up the restaurant’s menu on his phone and begins reading from it: gnocchi, ravioli, carbonara. The fact that Bucky is capable of starting off a sentence sounding very cosmopolitan, only to end it shouting out pasta dishes in the broadest of New York accents, Bob files away as something to tell Mel about later to make her laugh.
Ava ignores Bucky totally, tells Bob she came to see what clothes he picked out, and Bob feels like he’s in the shop again because he’s forced to go into the bathroom, change, and come out for inspection. Ava ends up approving of his appearance so much she says that Bucky may have been a shit congressman, but let it not be said he has no talent.
Embarrassed that the whole venture is threatening to become a group project, Bob keeps his new clothes tucked away in the back of his closet and doesn’t make arrangements to take Yelena out to dinner until the following week.
The night of, he wants to sneak out of the tower without running into anyone else, so he goes directly from his room to the lobby and texts Yelena to meet him there. Yelena texts him back a thumbs up, and a few minutes later, she steps out of the elevator, takes one look at him, says, “Oh my god! Where are we going?” and retreats back inside the elevator. Dumbfounded, Bob is slow to move and doesn’t catch her before the doors close, whisking her away.
So it’s not the best start.
He takes the next elevator up to her floor, knocks on her door, calls her name.
“I’m changing!” she shouts. “I’ll be right out.”
Bob paces the hallway. He is not even that dressed up, is the thing. He’s just dressed up for him, in clothes that are cut slim, fitting him properly, and his hair is tamed and combed back. He’s worried Yelena now has the wrong expectations for the restaurant, which he chose for intimacy, not opulence. She’d already looked spectacular. She always does.
Yelena emerges from her room in a black dress with a bit of shimmer to it, and finding Bob waiting for her in the hallway, she gets a determined look on her face, steps out of her heels, rucks up her dress higher over her thighs, apparently so she can have greater range of motion, because she then jumps him. He’s not expecting it, but he catches her on instinct. Her legs straddle and wrap around him.
She pulls his head down to the crook of her neck, and for a wild moment Bob thinks she is going to snap his neck—he’s seen her do this to others. But she says in his ear, “We can, right? A quick one? I’m already wet.”
“Jesus. Here?” asks Bob, incredulous and incredibly turned on.
“No,” says Yelena impatiently, “bring me to my room.”
They move from hallway to room and fuck in the same position, undressed only to the point of necessity, so both nearly fully clothed. It’s easy for Bob to hold Yelena up against the wall. She feels not weightless exactly but light, the opposite of a burden. He likes how her mouth comes to his, hungry. And he likes how she is entwined all around him, her legs around his waist, her arms around his shoulders. Her grip on him is such that he starts to wonder if she is the one holding him up.
Yelena says, “It’s not about the clothes.”
Bob says, “This really feels like it’s about the clothes.”
“Fine,” says Yelena. “Maybe this is about the clothes. But I love you in your cozy sweaters too—in your too-big pajamas.”
Wholly unprepared to be told he is loved, Bob gets lost in the gossamer sheen of Yelena’s dress. It’s black but not black. He thinks if he stares at it long enough stars will appear. He fears weeping on it.
Yelena tugs on his hair, and Bob looks up and wonders not for the first time how she was ever successfully a spy with a face so expressive. She looks both annoyed and betrayed, and Bob doesn’t understand why at first. But her face softens at whatever she sees in his, and what she might have said as a command, she instead says very softly, nudging her forehead against his: “Don’t stop, Bob.”
He’s obeying before she even gets out a whispered please that pierces right through him.
#
They miss their dinner reservation, but it’s alright because the hostess manages to squeeze them into seats at the bar, where they serve a full menu. It’s very cozy nestled together. His legs bracket Yelena’s and one of his hands rests on her thigh.
He feels out the fabric of Yelena’s dress, moving his hand up towards her hip and back again, and says, as an experiment, “I love you in your Avengers uniform too.”
“Of course you do,” says Yelena. “I look very cool.”
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Super cool.”
Yelena, perusing the menu, asks if he likes gnocchi. Bob says that he does.
“Also,” he says, aware of how clumsy and artless he is but unable to stop himself. “I love you in general. You know, all the time.”
“Aww, I know,” says Yelena, looking up at him brightly. “I love you too. You make every part of my life better. Should we get the olive plate?”
There are holes in Bob’s memory. He knows this about himself. But he feels certain he would remember if Yelena had told him before today that she loved him. He could never forget something like that.
Maybe Yelena is the one who has forgotten. Maybe she thinks she already told him. And that he already told her. Or maybe this is just how she gives and receives love. Maybe this is the correct way. Easy. There is comfort in thinking that the enormity of what he feels might be commonplace.
Bob decides his confusion about Yelena’s matter-of-fact delivery is not of great importance. She is, after all, much stronger than him emotionally and bound to demonstrate it from time to time. And he knows now that she loves him and perhaps more miraculously, believes it.
“Anything you want,” he says, meaning the olives but also, like, in general.