She came to on the bathroom floor of the seventh floor of Stark Tower.
Naked, except for the maroon pair of Prada pumps she’d bought with the pay-check after she’d helped seal the oil-substitution deal with PRI Technologies, satisfaction in suede four and a half inches. No hangover, that was the first thing but oh god, it was also the only.
She’d been eighteen and cut-glass cheekbones and admirable hips and she’d spent her night drinking the way she hadn’t since college, all the care of realizing the man who’d come back from the literal darkness determined to find its end in the bottom of a glass wiped out in the need for an escape from being young and pretty and oh so blond. She came to with a smile that was remembered laughter and it drained away under fluorescent light.
Naked. Apart from the shoes she’d worn on the way over in the cab, with Tony in her ear and the phone dead seconds before it all began. She’d liked the shoes. She kicked them from her feet so hard they hit the wall and she curled her knees to her chest with a high, strangled sound she didn’t recognize was coming from her own mouth until she put her shaking fingers to her lips.
She didn’t have a pass to the building anymore and she didn’t have photo ID but she knew he wouldn’t have cleared her office, not yet. She forced herself up on knees that buckled at the face in the mirror, and she wasn’t going to go to pieces because it wasn’t practical at all and she was that even if she didn’t know what else.
She gathered spare clothes from the bottom desk drawer that hadn’t been emptied by security and she went for the penthouse because she couldn’t think of dragging clean cotton over the sticky skin and the empty apartments lacked towels and toiletries to use. She was practical and she was that, even if she didn’t know what else to be. She showered briefly and perfunctorily and with an entire bar of brand new soap her fingers shook too much to unwrap for several minutes.
She didn’t look at her face in the mirror, wet hair and raw white beneath the freckles, and she left the shirt untucked over the pants and she went bare foot instead of sliding on the heels. She had meant to come to Stark Tower all along. She had meant to come for a stubborn man who could talk and talk and say nothing, who pretended he could live forever even as death tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to dance.
She didn’t want to see him now. But she was practical and she went to his office, not hers on bare feet as the morning cleaning crew began to circulate through the building and she poured a fifth from the bottle into the glass that was there because no one now thought to hide them away, and she drank it in one long shuddering gulp and poured another. Because she was practical and this new violation could be kept at bay, just a little, just long enough to be assured he wasn’t going to go anywhere and leave behind nothing but guilt.
She drank the second as she looked at dawn coming up over New York from the tempered glass of his office, and swallowed slowly against the burn in her throat and her fingers shook only a little as she set it down on the tray. Because she was practical, and she’d see him and she’d go. He wouldn’t see, she knew and that was calming, the old frustration she was now grateful for. He wouldn’t see and she’d keep it until she could go somewhere she could be quite by herself, and she wouldn’t have to be practical anymore.