Re: Tony & Pepper
Pepper didn't care for the multifaceted focus. She knew that sometimes it felt like she was conducting conversations with only ten percent of his attention engaged in them and even then, only to interject when he thought she might be veering on annoyed. If there were problems, it was not apparent. In the seemingly unadulterated spotlight of his attention, her smile filled and warmed. She didn't care for the sling, nor what it promised, but conversations about medical standards had been almost entirely parked temporarily. A detente, in a really good dress.
The curve of his arm was warm. Pepper ceased to pat the collar into completely unnecessary order and slid one palm along the slope of his shoulder; close to she couldn't detect the ever present, lingering smell of engine grease and the lab, just the clean cotton of the shirt. The curve of her mouth deepened.
"Thank you," she said, with the careful primness of voice that was all the office and the laughter at the back of it that was not. She didn't feel hungry. Pepper felt like too much champagne and nothing to eat for the day before a benefit dinner, effervescence spilling through open space. But dinner was a date. Where JARVIS didn't run the show on voice command, and out where this - whatever this was, stood in Tony's living space as if it were the first time instead of the umpteenth - was in public. Real.
"Tell me you're proposing more than pizza out of a box in the lab and I'm all yours," she curled her fingers around his arm, and leaned inward, the briefest brush of lips against his as her eyes closed in the bathed blue light.