Charlotte's hands weren't soft. Or, they were, Steve acquiesced, except that they were roughen up by work.
Her right ring finger had a callous since her childhood from where she has always leaned her pencil or pen against while writing. Her right pinky had a gnarly multitude of scars from where she's grated most of her finger off with a cheese grater when she was baking carrot cakes to sell to pay for Christmas presents for her family one year. Her left thumb and pointer finger both had a dark vertical line (not quite permanent scars, but ones that she'd had for a few months now) running from the nail to their wrist from when she'd dragged them along the edge of protective teeth at her work's safe when she's gone to retrieve change for the register. There was a burn scar on her right palm from where she'd distractedly pushed an oven rack in without wearing mittens. And her knuckles always had some sort of cut to them from something or other.
She had freckles on her hands. Not overly noticeable ones, just some scattered along a finger or two, a stray one on her left palm, and another two on her wrist.
And Steve loved them. Her fingers were long and slim, and she acknowledged it once when she's told him she thought she could have been good at the piano if she'd ever gotten classes. "They're good for typing on the computer and texting, though," she'd added with a grin and a wiggle of her fingers. Compared to his hands, big and calloused on more than one place from the nature of his work (the general punching of supervillains and the throwing and catching of his shield made them this way), Charlotte's were small and elegant, something she'd snorted in amusement at when he'd commented on them while sketching.
"They're rough, and borderline manly. But thanks," She'd answered with a smile, going back to the open book on her lap.
Charlotte was pale. Not overly pale, or sickenly pale, but an ivory color that contrasted with Steve's more tanned complexion. He'd brought it up once when he was trying his hand at adding color to some of his sketches, and couldn't come up with a suitable color for her.
"I'm yellow. I'm not even joking. I got my skin tested at a make-up store once and the lady told me I was yellow, Steve. It's sad. I'm from Arizona, literally hell on earth, and I can't even tan because the more I try to, the more yellow I get. I'm defective, really." And Steve had rolled his eyes and kissed the top of her head in acknowledgement but not in agreement. She wasn't yellow, at least not to him, and she was perfectly fine the color she was.
She had a splashing of freckles along her nose and under her eyes. They were light in color, only a few shades darker than her skin tone so that they were hard to see if one wasn't close enough to see them. She had one prominent one right under her left eyebrow, a dark brown that no amount of makeup could even begin to cover it. It was a true testament of how little Charlotte thought of her face that she only knew of it until she was leafing through his sketchbooks and had remarked on it.
"How do you not know you have a freckle that dark right underneath your eyebrow?" Steve had asked incredulously.
Charlotte shrugged, studying her face in the small compact mirror she had in her bag. "Huh. I have three freckles right under my lip too. They could form a triangle," she'd added. "Maybe I should pay more attention to my face." The last statement was an afterthought, her eyes intent on her image in the mirror.
She had a littering of wiry, pale stretch marks running vertically on both sides of her waist. Charlotte wasn't particularly shy about her body around him, but he'd noticed how she'd sometimes shy away from his eyes when she'd catch him staring while she dressed in the mornings. He'd tried tracing them one night while she laid on her side, a book in her hand and craning her head in what had to be the most uncomfortable position Steve had ever seen (but, then again, he had gotten used to her weird reading habits). The lose shirt she had wearing had ridden up, and he had gotten distracted from his sitting position next to her when he'd seen the patch of skin illuminated by the soft yellow light of the lamp beside her.
She had shivered, flinched against his fingers.
"Don't" she had said, quickly pulling her shirt down to cover the pale marks. She had gone back to reading, but he could see the tips of her ears burning a pale pink.
So he had laid his sketchbook on the bedside next to him, laying down flush against her and pulling him into a spooning position, his hands resting on her stomach, another place she was shy about, but had less reservations about because of the constant touching Steve did.
"I like them," he'd mumbled into her ear, squeezing her harder against him.
"Well, I don't, so…" she'd trailed off, the book slipping from her hands onto the floor. She began to get up to get it but Steve held her tighter.
"Why?" He had asked, kissing her shoulder blade.
"They're ugly," she'd responded, no longer struggling since she knew Steve wasn't one to let go when he was stubborn. She'd learn that when she had tried going to work with a fever, and he had held her down for an hour before she stopped her futile struggling against him, staying home for the day in bed. "I was a skinny child, and then puberty happened, and I got thunder thighs, and got fat, and then I lost some of the weight when I started working, and gained a bit again, and…" she trailed off with a sigh. "I don't have a body issue complex, but that's the one thing I would change if I could. Now I'm just stuck with them for the rest of my life."
"One, you don't have thunder thighs-"
"Have you even seen them?!"
"Two," he began again with a warning glare that she could not see with her back to his, but he hoped she felt, "You're not fat-"
"I'm borderline-like two pounds-"
"And three," he'd said with his voice a bit louder, "I love these," he said, his hands trailing from her stomach to the run his fingers underneath her shirt and through the small web of wiry lines. She'd shuddered against him and tried to kick her legs from his, but he'd made sure to hold them down with his own as well. "And if I have to spend the rest of my life telling you exactly that, then I will."
"You're so corny, I just got a cavity." She'd mumbled, and he let some of his hold on her go so that she could turn around in his arms to face him as he laughed.
"And you always ruin it. Maybe you're allergic to corny," He'd ran his fingers through the marks again after he'd said that, smiling at her the smile she loved to hate (it did weird things to her, after all).
"I think I'm just allergic to you," She'd jested.
And that had been that, with Charlotte soon getting used to the way his fingers would ghost over the light marks every time he could get his hands under her shirt.
But Steve loved her lips the most. They were small and full, and always had a purplish twinge to them even without any lipstick.
"According to personology-totally pseudo-science and something I would hate to believe-I have the lips of a dictator because they're so small," she'd remarked once, tracing the lips of the drawing Steve had drawn for her that day.
"You are bossy,'' Steve conceded with a teasing grin, watching as her lips thinned into a smile, and she let out a laugh.
"You say that now…" She sing-songed, handing back his sketchbook.
But they weren't always soft, like Steve expected of women. During the winter, they were often a bit chapped, always with a thick covering of Chapstick that seemed to do next to nothing. Charlotte blamed it on the fact that she'd grown up in Arizona, where she didn't have to worry too much about the wintry winds.
He loved when she'd bite her bottom lip when thinking hard. Or the subtle pout she swore she didn't get when she was mad. He'd come to recognize it after a few months of dating, since it was so subtle, so unnoticeable that one that didn't know her would not recognize it. But it was a thing, her top lip somehow taking on a plumper look than her bottom one in a reverse pout that Steve was both hesitant of (although that anger was not always directed at him), and enamored with.
When she smiled, it would start at the corners of her mouth, lifting hesitantly before she'd smile widely, her lips thinning into softer lines of plumpness.
And he was in love with her. All of it; the scarred hands, the freckles, the stretch marks, and the dictator lips. Ugliness and roughness (however much he disagreed with those particular adjectives) and snarky humor, everything. They were Charlotte, and they were his home and what he thought about when he was away from home.