"Your place or mine?" wasn't really a consideration when 'your place' was a hole in the ground with a sleeping Captain America in the twin bed opposite you. And it turned out Gina's place was quite a trek away.
"Are we lost?" Bucky demanded, beginning to get a little nervous about the fact he was a walking target on the open road
"No." Gina replied. She looked up at him, amused.
"We're in the middle of nowhere." He swallowed, narrowing his eyes at her. There was every chance she was a Hydra operative, leading him out into an open space by the open road, waiting for a black van to drive past and capture him.
She examined his face again and suddenly laughed. It jolted him a little and he scowled at her.
"You're getting suspicious of me- you're paranoid." She told him matter-of-factly.
"Shut up" he glared back, his state of mental health was not up for discussion. She was probably trying to get him to open up and lull him into a false sense of security.
"No, I mean it's a side effect of cocaine." She told him, laughing even more at his misunderstanding.
"Great." Bucky huffed.
"But we are lost, yes." Gina said, rummaging in her bag and pulling out a hipflask. She took a long swig and shuddered.
He made a low growl. He really, really, really disliked this woman. But it had been so long since he'd been with someone, and he knew that on the road like this, relationships weren't to last. Better he messed around with someone like her than some nice, quiet girl that deserved more.
"Wait, what does that sign say?" She stopped short and he almost tripped into her. He could see her struggling to focus her eyes on the sign, a few meters in front of them. To be perfectly honest his vision wasn't the clearest either.
"There's a motel 500 yards from here. I think. Is that your motel?" He asked.
"Yeah, I reckon so." She mumbled, and they made their way forwards.
Bucky definitely was not impressed by the dwelling of his companion for the evening- her entire room was strewn with clothes, empty glass bottles of cheap vodka were haphazardly thrown into the mix, there was an ashtray surrounded by an infestation of cigarette butts, like papery beetles crawling to the grave. Assorted drug paraphernalia.
It was exactly as he'd pictured.
"Home, sweet home," she commented dryly as they stepped in.
As she reached in to flick the light switch, Bucky grabbed her by the arm and spun her round, their mouths meshing together before she could catch a breath. Desperately, she grabbed on to his metal shoulder for support as she lost her balance from shock. He used the momentum of sudden closeness and propelled his lower body forward; they clung to one another, suspended, suspecting that their balance would not hold out for long.
He grasped the backs of her thighs with both hands and she understood immediately, springing her legs up and around his waist with his guidance in the effortless movement of his wide-spanning hands, almost encompassing the width of her leg entirely. Once she'd gotten a good grip, digging her fingernails into the muscles of his back, he entangled his hands in the mess of her hair, sweat and brittle hairspray. They stopped for a breath, for a moment, and she narrowed her eyes, swinging her hips forward and taking him by surprise. He fell back, holding her, onto the dusty mattress behind. She cackled slightly.
"Did I take you by surprise, Winter Soldier?"
"Sort of," he grinned.
Her small hands worked deftly, pulling off his shirt in record time, as he fiddled with the buttons on her shorts, yanking them hurriedly off her hips.
She slowed suddenly. He knew what she was staring at.
"It's a temporary fix," he motioned to his metal arm with his flesh one.
Flesh scarring welded with metal at his shoulder, and then, soldered on to what was left of the high-tech metal arm Hydra had given him, was a far rougher rendering of a similar prosthetic.
"Does this work as well?" she asked
He shrugged, "Mobility's about the same, but it's not as… pretty. And I've got a lot less feeling in this arm. Practically none."
Playfully, she arched an eyebrow, drunk and breathless. He noticed that she had made a tiny fist. He watched it pound the metal.
"Nothing?" she quizzed, shaking out her sore hand.
He rolled his eyes, catching her by the elbows and pulling her down on top of him.
Their sex was not affectionate, far from it. It was hot and spiteful; it evoked a loathing of themselves, with each of them almost competitively striving to prove to themselves and each other that they were a bad person, a worthless person. It was heated but the only passion was in the spitting rage they both felt at the world around them, and the people they'd become within it.
Afterwards, Gina pulled on an old t-shirt. It had clearly been designed to be worn by a man, and in jagged white writing across the black fabric was scrawled the name of a band Bucky hadn't yet discovered. They were probably awful.
But more noticeably, this t-shirt had been sheared at the sleeves, lanced across the bottom with a pair of scissors so that no man could ever wear it again without exposing quite a bit of flesh.
"Where did you get that?" he asked, lying back against the headboard as he watched her dress.
She smiled at it fondly, "It belonged to someone from New York."
"An ex-boyfriend?" he mocked.
She threw him a sarcastic glare, "No, actually. It belonged to my ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend. She left it at my place by accident and I found out."
Bucky stiffened. Before he'd fallen off the train, back in his own time, women being with other women wasn't unheard of but it certainly wasn't talked about casually. He understood attitudes were different now, which struck him as a good thing, but he was suddenly very paranoid about saying the wrong thing and betraying, well, his age.
"How…. Modern." He said, and instantly regretted it.
"Keep your slacks on, old-timer" Gina laughed, amused by his discomfort, throwing him his boxers, discarded on the floor.
Bucky rubbed his temple, then flipping his hair back from his face with his outstretched thumb and index finger.
"You really do need to cut that." Gina commented. She walked over to the chipboard dresser and reached inside a drawer, bringing out a pair of scissors that seemed huge in proportion to her slender hands. Her eyes twinkled playfully and her smile shot up the left side of her face, like it always seemed to do when she was playing with someone.
Bucky blinked, "No."
"Come on," she sashayed towards him with a slow smile, "Don't you feel far more at ease now?"
"I don't like that you're coming towards me with scissors," Bucky's face fell serious, he stretched out his hand to block her advances, "I might do something we'll both regret."
She ducked under his arm and snaked around his shoulder, so that she was crouched behind him with her thighs either side of his waist. There was a 'snip' and Bucky found himself looking at long strands of straight, dark hair on the bed sheet.
"We'll need to wait and see, won't we?" her cool breath tickled the back of his ear as she murmured playfully to him.
"What the fuck, Gina?" He whirled his head round, angrily, grabbing the front of her shredded t-shirt.
"Ah, ah, ah-" she wiggled a finger at him, holding the scissors beyond his reach, "You need to let me finish now- see?" she took his head in both hands and after a few moments of resisting her grip, he let her wrench his head round to look at a grubby mirror, leaning against the wall.
A chunk of his hair was visibly missing.
"Do you even know what you're doing?" Bucky snarled, resigned.
"We'll soon find out," she giggled, reaching to the bed stand for her hipflask.
She took the scissors, trailing her fingers through another section of his hair, squinting at it in comparison to the section she'd already cut. Despite himself, he loved the feeling of her nails softly scraping his scalp as she sorted out each individual area. Every now and again she'd reposition herself for a better vantage point and he'd feel her soft, exposed skin brush his own.
Not only that, but it was the quietest she'd been since he'd met her, all those hours ago. He almost felt relaxed.
"Done," she said softly, running her fingers through his hair repeatedly, ruffling it in rhythmic tugs to shake out any of the hair she'd cut that was clinging on.
"It's not awful," she remarked, a little surprised
"It's not great either," he reprimanded. The image of his hair in the mirror was a little choppy and he had a suspicion that in the cold, sober, light of day it was only going to look worse. But what he wasn't ever going to admit to her was that a bitter nostalgia had started to rise up in his throat, because the silhouette that he cast on the wall beside them, despite being a little rough around the edges, was one that he hadn't seen since the year 1945. It was the silhouette of his former self.
Gina yawned and rolled over onto her side, "I'm going to sleep." She announced, too drunk to feel any shame at the abrupt end to the evening. Bucky shrugged and rolled over too, so that he shadowed the shape of her body with his own.
"That wasn't so bad was it?" she whispered, swivelling her head towards him momentarily.
He knew she wasn't talking about the impromptu haircut. Well, at least not solely that. He struggled for a response, but was saved as he felt her body go slightly heavier on the mattress beside him and he knew she'd fallen asleep.
"I had fun." Bucky admitted quietly, surprising even himself. Only once he'd said it, did he realise that it was true.
He'd had fun.