Well, that was ominous. Really meant this thing could go one of two ways, though Natasha could wage a guess, after the scene that she and Clint had walked in on when they'd come to pry him off his back porch and nudge him back out into the land of the living. Still, it meant James was coming into this with a targeted list of specific points he wanted to hit, and Natasha could appreciate a targeted list. He looked - upset, though. He looked upset, too, that deep breath, the way he'd looked away from her eyes, and she stretched out a hand to touch the side of his face, soft, reassuring, but only for a moment. She didn't linger over it; she didn't like to make promises in advance.
He'd asked her to go first, and she'd come here to be honest.
"All right," she agreed. Hers was fairly straightforward, anyway, it was just the one thing, and she thought - she imagined, anyway, that it may not come as too much of a surprise. She and Clint had hardly been slinking around in dark corners about it. If anything, they'd been overly open. Braggy, even, was the term Natasha had used when they had discussed it, and maybe it would tamp down a little so they didn't end up annoying the holy hell out of all the rest of their friends and fellow citizens, but - she was entitled to that, wasn't she? Weren't they both?
She had never been able to show it before. With anyone. Her whole life. It was addictive.
"I told you when I showed up here, that I loved Clint," she said, because whatever James's news was - and maybe, well, maybe there was a chance he'd thought about it and had decided he'd like to leave her in the past, maybe that was what he didn't want her to change his mind about. "I thought at first that maybe he was just - indulging me, or he missed his own version of me, or he felt guilty for the fact that where you and I come from, it wasn't returned. Lots of things. I thought it would settle into something more like - what I'm familiar with, that it would burn out pretty quickly. But I think." She bit the inside of her cheek.
It was a strange thing to say to James. It was a harder thing to say out loud, to herself, because believing it meant there would something to lose, now. "I think he means it when he says he loves me," she said. "I think we might - we might both be serious, about each other. I wanted to be upfront about that."