Chapter 22

Chapter 22

Steve wiped the steam off the mirror and stared at his own reflection.

"What are you doing?"

The reflection didn't answer.

"You're being polite, that's what you're doing. The girl just gave up her Saturday morning to bring you something you had no right to ask her for. The least you can do is buy her a cup of coffee!"

Steve combed his hair and checked his chin for razor stubble. It had only been several hours since he had last showered and shaved. He had no excuse for delaying. It felt as though he had a swarm of butterflies in his stomach. He hadn't felt this jittery around a woman since … since …

"Who am I kidding?" Steve told the reflection. "You asked her for coffee because all you've been doing is thinking about her ever since her grandmother died."

The reflection was kind enough not to remind him he'd also dreamed about Bernice the last three nights in a row. Which was why he'd been shocked to come flying off the still rings he'd been showboating on and find Bernice standing there, watching him. Not that there had been anything … inappropriate … about the dreams. They'd just been … dreams.

'I feel shorter,' Bucky said as a woman gave him a disdainful glare and walked away. He grabbed the beer they'd just both ordered. 'Now I know what it feels like to be you.'

'I don't know,' Steve said. 'It was a lot easier being me when I was still … me.'

'Tell that to THEM,' Bucky said. He nodded towards several dames eyeballing Steve as though he were a piece of meat. Big band music played in the background, GI's from all over the world tearing up the dance floor with the British girls, but there was now an earthy undertone to the music, a sixth band member playing the drums.

A commotion at the entrance to the Stork Club drew their attention. A striking black-haired woman wearing a fitted black tee-shirt and ripped jeans walked in, her attire in stark contrast to the way the other patrons were dressed. She looked lost. Several men approached and asked her to dance, but she waved them off, clutching her art portfolio to her chest as though it were a shield.

'Ex-excuse me,' Bernice asked. 'I'm looking for someone.'

'Well you just found him,' Bucky said, moving into his classic dame-schmoozing pose. 'Can I buy you a drink?'

Bernice gave Bucky a sweet smile. Steve felt a stab of jealousy.

'No thank you,' Bernice said. 'I'm looking for someone special. I was told I could find him here.'

'No one here but me,' Bucky said. 'Would you like to dance?'

'No thank you,' Bernice said. She turned and looked at Steve as though she could see straight into his soul. 'I'm waiting for the right guy.'

Steve's breath hitched in his throat. Her eyes were as dark as the arctic waters he'd been imprisoned in for 67 years, and yet there was warmth. How he wished to crawl back into that dark, quiet place and pretend the drumbeat marring the perfection of the big band, the strange moves the dancing couples added to their jitterbugs, did not exist. These were not Peggy's eyes. They were someone else's entirely. But for the first time in his life, it occurred to him they were a bridge between his time and the strange dance taking place in front of him.

Bernice turned back to Bucky.

'If you find him, will you please tell him that I'm looking for him?'

'Yeah, sure.' Bucky said.

Bernice turned and walked out of the room, some of the GI's following her as though she were the pied piper despite her unremarkable attire. Steve fought the urge to run after her.

'You going to let her get away?' a familiar voice asked.

Steve turned to see Peggy leaning back against the bar in her red dress. She took a drag of a cigarette and blew smoke into a burly GI's face who'd come up to buy her a drink.

'What?' Steve asked.

'I said are you going to just let her get away like that?' Peggy said. She gave him that wolfish grin she'd always had right before she kicked some overly cocky boot camp trainee right in the crotch.

'I … you…' Steve stammered.

It was Peggy, but something felt different. –He- felt different. A tall, lanky man with a mop of unruly blonde hair came up and asked Peggy for a dance. She gave the man her red-gloved hand, a tender smile lighting up her face as he led her out onto the dance floor. They moved like a couple who had danced together for an entire lifetime.

'Go after her,' Peggy called over her husband's shoulder. 'If you let her get away, you'll never find another like her.'

The dancing couples closed around Peggy and her husband, leaving Steve standing alone at the bar, not even Bucky there to share his misery any longer. The music changed, the couples erupting into jerky movements that made no sense as a bone-jarring rhythm shook the walls. The GI's were gone. Bucky was gone. Peggy was gone. Even the bartender had been replaced with a buxom waitress with cleavage that barely covered her nipples. Steve looked towards the doorway and saw that Bernice had gone, too.

He was alone…

Who the hell was he kidding? He'd asked Bernice to go out for a cup of coffee because she was the closest thing he'd discovered this day and age, except for a few washed-up ex-veteran prize fighters not much younger than his true age, who bore any semblance to normalcy since he'd woken up 67 years in the future.

"Just don't say anything stupid," he said to the reflection. He yanked on some clothes, agonizing over what he should wear. Coffee. He had asked her to go out for a cup of coffee. Wearing a tie would be … desperate. Stepping out of his private quarters, he saw she stood surrounded by his gym clients discussing the mural he'd started to paint. He realized he'd forgotten his wallet. Racing back into his room, he grabbed it, glancing down at the precious stack of pictures Bernice had brought him. His own past.

Breathe. Just breathe. He did his best to not trip down the stairs and appear nonchalant as he came up behind her, totally oblivious to his approach as she explained the finer aspects of ancient Grecian art to her spellbound audience of washed up prize fighters, body builders, and other men of action who otherwise wouldn't be caught dead at an art exhibit. The gym clients gave Steve a knowing look, one customer who'd proven a capable sparring partner giving him a wink when Bernice wasn't looking.

"There's a nice little coffee shop just around the corner," Steve suggested. He stepped between Bernice and the gym members, some of them single and considering themselves to be ladies men. "It's nothing fancy. But they have good service."

"Okay," Bernice said, smiling up at him. She glanced down and then peered up again through her long, black lashes.

Not sure what to do with his hands, he stuck them in his pockets as they walked, both silent except to direct her to cross the street and turn left. The coffee shop was a run-down old place, the kind of café that had countertop service and little stools that spun around while you waited for an overworked waitress to get everybody their grub. Thelma was long past retirement age, but she knew every customer by name and remembered the stories she drew out of them like a knitter unraveling a ball of yarn. It was a service Steve had taken for granted back in 1945, but which was now non-existent in a fast-food world.

"The usual?" Thelma asked.

"Just coffee," Steve said. They both knew he'd already been in once this morning, just as he was at 6:00 on the nose every morning for his usual breakfast of two eggs, toast, hash browns and a cup of joe.

"And what will you have, Miss?" Thelma asked as she plunked a coffee cup onto the counter and poured Steve a cup. Without being asked, she plunked down a sugar shaker and tiny pitcher of cream, the exact same ingredients Steve added to his coffee every morning.

"Do you have … um … a vanilla chai?" Bernice asked.

Thelma laughed.

"We've got coffee, decaf, and tea," Thelma said. "But if you want to add your own vanilla, I'll see what Enrique can dig up in the back."

"Just … coffee," Bernice said. "With Splenda."

Steve frowned. Should he have brought her someplace fancier? He avoided the newfangled coffee shops like the plague, the dizzying array of exotic-sounding choices of coffee, coffee-sizes, and things you could add to coffee making his head spin. Why would people want coffee, a beverage you drank when you were tired and needed to perk up, to require a Ph.D. to simply order?

"No Splenda," Thelma said. "Just Sweet-and-Low. Would that be alright?"

"That would be fine," Bernice said. She picked up the pink packets, shook them, and tore them open without enthusiasm. Thelma came out with a small bottle of vanilla extract, which Bernice waved off. "No … thanks. That's alright. Do you have skim milk?"

"No skim," Thelma said. "Would regular milk be okay?"

"Regular milk would be fine," Bernice said. She stared straight ahead, their stools locked into facing the counter and the waitress instead of each other. A setup designed for single men like him who had no choice but to eat alone. They sat, shoulder to shoulder, unable to make eye contact unless they turned their stools. He did that so he could see if the dark eyes he had dreamed about were real and ended up knocking into her with his knee, nearly knocking her off her stool.

"Maybe we should, um, sit in one of the booths?" Steve said. He pointed to three red-and-white Formica booths, the vinyl on the seats torn and taped back together with matching duct tape. He usually avoided them because he came here for Thelma's company as much as the food, but he hadn't come here now to see Thelma for the second time today. He was here because…

Why was he here?

He was here because he'd been having strange notions lately about looking up Peggy's pretty little granddaughter and he wanted to give himself a hard dose of reality. That's why. It had been so much easier dealing with Bernice when he had simply thought of her as Peggy's granddaughter instead of … of …

What did he think of her?

He didn't know.

"So … do you eat here a lot?" Bernice asked, pinning him with those perceptive brown eyes that could see straight into his soul. The shape and intelligence dancing behind them were like Peggy's, but there was an additional quality he hadn't noticed before. The eyes of an artist who didn't miss any detail, no matter how small. Steve felt as though he were suddenly being put under a microscope.

"Um…"

A simple question. Why was he suddenly so tongue-tied? It wasn't as if he'd been having sultry dreams about her. In fact, in the dream, she never spoke directly to him, only to Bucky. It felt like one of those times Bucky had dragged him along on a double-date and the friend-of-a-girlfriend had turned her up her nose because he was a scrawny asthmatic.

"I'm sorry," Bernice said, color creeping into her cheeks. "I didn't mean to interrupt your day. I just … none of us had any idea to get in touch with you until Pepper gave me this note." She pulled a tiny pink note out of her purse and held it in front of her as though it were a hall pass in high school. "I was too … I'm sorry I didn't speak to you more at the funeral. I was too overwhelmed to be thinking of anybody but myself."

There was a note of regret in her voice that drew Steve out of his own self-flagellation. He hadn't been deliberately excluded? Of course he hadn't been excluded. Nobody except Pepper had any idea how to contact him. Just because he had prevailed upon the CEO of Stark Industries to give Bernice a job didn't mean the talented young artist would feel comfortable barging into her boss's office and asking for his address. Especially not her first few weeks on the job!

"I'm glad you came," Steve said, reaching out to take her hand. He realized he was being too forward and jerked back, accidentally spilling some of the coffee from his own cup. Bernice reached to blot the spill and knocked her own coffee cup clean over, leaping up just in time to avoid the hot liquid spilling into her lap. Steve jumped up, too, not because he was at risk of getting a lap full of coffee, but because he was afraid she'd run right out the door and never speak to him again. They both grabbed napkins out of the container on the table and bent down to the floor, crashing their skulls together hard enough for Steve to see stars.

"I'm sorry," Bernice said with a laugh. She gave him a sheepish grin. "They don't let me out much! I'm getting as bad as the engineers Pepper keeps locked up in the basement of Stark Industries and never lets see the light of day!"

He realized Bernice was every bit as nervous as he was. Peggy had said Bernice favored him, only instead of acting like one of the offensively brazen women who had propositioned him ever since Doctor Erskine had turned him into a super-soldier, Bernice was acting like…

Him.

Bernice was acting every bit as nervous as he was acting. And he was acting nervous back. No wonder Peggy had started intruding into his dreams telling him to stop being so darned … thick!

"That's okay," Steve said. "They don't let me out much, either." They both kneeled on the floor, mopping up the spilled coffee together with a rag given to them by the elderly waitress so Thelma wouldn't have to get down on her swollen knees.

Bernice laughed. A delightful, tinkling sound. Like sleigh bells on a horse-drawn carriage. The ice broken, they ordered fresh coffees and talked about the one interest they knew they both shared. Art. Bernice instinctively knew all talk about his work as an Avenger was off-limits, while he managed to neatly dodge the few references she made to his so-called 'grandfather' without actually lying to her. It was the easiest conversation he'd had with a woman since Peggy had died. Three coffees later, he walked Bernice to the entrance of the subway station and promised he would call her.

It wasn't until he'd gotten back to the gym that he realized he'd been so giddy he'd forgotten to ask for her telephone number…

X

Note: Aw! Man! Steve! What a knucklehead! How much you want to bet Peggy's going to be back in those dreams of his, scolding him for being such a dunce? But Steve promised Bernice he'd call her, and we all know Steve Rogers keeps his promises. The question is … how?

[*snicker*]

The next chapter will be some more intrigue, a little action, and a bit of 'eating your hat with hat-sauce.' Be sure to hit the gold happy 'like' star and tell me what you think!