bucky barnes x fem!reader - FATWS era x
summary: you quite literally bump into a beautiful stranger, spilling coffee down your favourite white shirt. as in, this scene from notting hill, pretty much: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kxBu82Dte10
reader recognising bucky can be for any reason that u choose while reading <3
warnings: none, just fluff. bad writing, perhaps? allusions to a past worth moving on from - no details given. also, SORRY ABOUT MY OBSESSION WITH ORANGES. i just love them 🍊🍊🍊
You were aware of two sensations simultaneously, and yet somehow couldn’t process either one as they occurred. The first was that a solid weight had struck hard against your right shoulder, jostling the styrofoam cup that your hand you’d been clutching just moments before the collision. The second was that something wet was seeping across your chest, spreading hot brown liquid across what had been only those same moments before, a white shirt.
Your very favourite white shirt that you owned, at that. The one you wore for luck on anxious days.
You started to doubt its true properties of mysticism as you regarded the paper at your feet: the torn final remnants of your marketplace bag, bearing groceries one moment, not the next. Already tenuous with balancing it on only one free arm, your grip had fumbled at the contact of hot drink meeting your skin through fabric. Oranges, the goddam sweetest ones that money could buy in this city, now spilled out bright across the rain-slick street, and god damn it but your upper chest burned.
You could’ve cursed whatever stranger had collided with you, but the sound of a voice gave you pause. “Oh god, I am so so sorry,” someone said. You looked up at the source of it and stilled.
The stranger stood before you had his phone in one gloved hand, and the other reached out as if to steady you. A second voice — and a cranky one at that, by the obvious sound of it — still hammered down the line to the man no longer listening, but with a quick click the receiver was off, and all the while his eyes had never left yours.
Eyes that were desperately, piercingly blue. Eyes easier to drown in than the sea.
You couldn’t help but notice them as you stood stock still before him, somehow forgetting the fact that your best shirt was ruined, that you were running late for work, and in pain.
Indeed, as the stranger bent swiftly yet somewhat awkwardly to retrieve them, you almost forgot that you’d even bought those oranges in the first place, so transfixed were you on this beautiful stranger.
You were acting like a goddamn teen.
The ridiculous reality of your current situation dawned fast and humiliating then: here you were, covered down your front in your very own coffee, and a guy you’d just straight on collided with was stooped and picking up your lost fruits one by one. He looked sheepish, yet somewhat determined despite the pink flush that had risen to his cheeks. Appalled now at yourself for only standing there and staring, you realised that you hadn’t even helped him to help you.
Instead, you’d just warned your heart against its rapid beating as you watched him, feeling lame yet strangely touched by the kindness of a stranger. You shook it off quick.
And as he stood from his crouch with your oranges assembled as best as they could be in what was left of the bag, you had the odd urge to laugh as he straightened and cradled them to him with a small, flushed smile of defeat.
Indeed, he truly was blushing.
And what was more — and worse — so were you. So were you. With each elongated second that passed with your silence, you noticed more that you’d said nothing all this time. Your cheeks were reddening fast — but then how could they not? This man was achingly beautiful.
His hands were gloved in black, the same colour in the leather of the jacket he wore. Through him wearing it unzipped, so too could you see that his t-shirt was also black, as was his hair and the aura he exuded — all but his eyes. They were colour in the dark.
Sea-blue, they were — you noticed again — and desperately hard to look away from. Hard to even make you want to try and look away; but you did, because your skin was flushed in heat. A ripe, mortified heat.
So instead, you shook your head and toyed with your now-empty styrofoam cup. It hadn’t even come with a goddamn lid when you’d bought it at the stall just before. It felt like that must’ve been hours ago, but you knew it had only been minutes. “No please, that was completely my fault. I wasn’t looking where I was going at all,” you said honestly.
Because it was true — you really had taken that street corner too fast in your haste to get back to your apartment. You still had to eat and get changed before work, more so now that your shirt was still sodden.
And besides, it was nothing to admit to defeat as you tried to look anywhere but at the man’s blue gaze. Or even at the effortless black leather of his outfit that made him just exactly your type — if not better.
You felt your cheeks heat all over again at the thought, worse even — and much more embarrassing — than the heat still on your chest. But you could see that the stranger was feeling somehow even more flustered than you, with the hand of one arm at the back of his neck in what you guessed to be a sort of nervous habit.
Though why you cared exactly, you didn’t quite know.
In any case, you had to give him something, if only to dispute his muttered claim. He was rambling as he said, “No, it was that damn phone call that had me all distracted,” and that the blame was consequently his for what he called “an appalling lack of spatial awareness.”
As he said it, his eyes couldn’t settle between your own or the spillage on your front, as though he was wanting to somehow help you yet couldn’t without seeming ill-intentioned or perverse. Perhaps that was why his laugh was nervous and unsure, so plainly smitten with you just as you’d taken to him so soon, in return.
So you don’t know why you did it exactly, but you blurted out anyway, “I’m [Y/n].” Your look was half shrug, half apology — all sincere — and an olive branch to offer starting fresh.
“Bucky,” he responded with a smile that rivalled sunlight, reaching for your hand which you hadn’t expected, but still gladly accepted in your own.
The gloved leather was warm.
And as you held it, shook it slightly in what was more like a nervous squeeze, you only then noticed how your torn grocery bag was still supported without effort on his other arm, most unlike the graceless way in which you’d fumbled round the corner as you’d tried to hold both it and your sacrificed coffee.
Which was what had gotten you here.
Here in the middle of a crowded public street, holding the hand of a beautiful stranger — no, not a stranger —
The name pulled at some part of you, a recognition lost now but once apparent. He looked familiar, if not strongly then vaguely, but the thought was there and gone in an instant. What held your attention now was the hold that he had on you, taking your breath. As well as the fact that you found yourself wishing that he wasn’t now wearing those gloves; wondering if his hands would as soft as his smile to touch, or if his cologne smelt as good up close as it did with these few inches between you.
God, you’d literally only just met him.
You retracted your hand if only to give them something else to touch, something to focus on that wasn’t this guy Bucky who you were already damn close to falling for. Feeling stupid and careless and light — for what might have been just the first time in weeks — you huffed a laugh at the utter way your mind had seemed to leave you: only now did you realise that you should’ve taken the damn bag back by now, that what Bucky cradled in one leather-clad arm was still yours; you took it from him, face warm.
It seemed that hearing his name had completely thrown you off; Bucky too looked upended.
It was as though he knew you’d leave when you retrieved what you’d dropped, so had held it so long. It was as if he’d wanted to put off the inevitable end of your unexpected meeting.
You couldn’t place quite what about him held you so tight in its grip, but you felt it. All that mattered was you felt it. It was just in the self-conscious way he’d said, “I’m sorry I don’t have any tissues”; how he’d hurried to help you with that bashful, earnest look that said he meant well, but just couldn’t talk to women.
But you had no care in the world for tissues now, or anything else. You cared not that the coffee had dried on the white and so stiffened the fabric to staining; didn’t give a damn about the coffee, or the shirt, or anything else. Anything but this man.
There was only Bucky standing in front of you, speaking now in a voice that might’ve once held confidence. Now though, there was a charming vulnerability to it; a near-shyness that made him all the more a gentleman.
“This might be, uh… a little forward?,” he began, and you thought against your will, bless him, he’s really not that good at this. He continued on, oblivious and trying, and in that moment your heart went tender with something you couldn’t quite bring yourself to name. “But could I make this whole thing up to you with…? Perhaps another cup of coffee? I promise I won’t spill this one on you.” His smile spoke volumes to him trying and failing to cover his own embarrassment, and the urge came and steadily went for you to reach out to him now, though you couldn’t place why.
And so it was with genuine regret that you said, “I would’ve loved that, truly, but I was meant to have started work at …” You checked the time on your phone and saw it was quite a lot later than you’d thought. Than you’d hoped it would be, if you were honest with yourself, as you said, “Ten minutes ago, actually.”
You saw the same regret all in his face, though he worked not to show it. “Some other time then?” he offered in a customary way, as though not expecting it to come into fruition.
But on knowing you’d now have to leave, and thinking it unlikely that he’d see you again, he was emboldened by a sudden foreign courage to just do it, and his eyes flew downwards as he admitted almost too damn quick for you to even hear: “To be honest, it’s just that you’re so beautiful I know that if I leave here without asking you out, I’m gonna hate myself.”
An incredulous laugh crawled up your throat — that was somehow the absolute sweetest thing you’d ever been told. You were seized then by the urge to just kiss him, or something, but you knew you couldn’t — shouldn’t. It was nuts.
Bucky was still flustered, and what was more, he was annoyed that he was flustered; you could almost see the question in his eyes that he asked himself even as he spoke. You guessed it went something like, Why are you like this? I thought you used to have game with women.
It was enough to make you relent to the voice in your head that said you liked him — and why run from that fact? Bucky was charming, and obviously kind; not to mention so gorgeous he’d fully stunned you into silence. There was no true reason not to open up to that, irrespective of your past and its brutality.
So you put the poor man out of his misery and met his eyes. Again. As if you could do anything else. Neither then could you stop the broad smile that made its sure spread across your face, parting your lips to suggest instead, “But how does dinner tonight sound? I leave off at seven, so you could pick me up at eight?”
You didn’t know what made you bold, but there it was. There was something about him. Something that lived in his answering smile, as if you’d just hung the stars by hand. That made you look back at him one final time when you left, to find him doing the same.
Something that got you to thinking that maybe your white shirt did bring some luck, after all.
