"Are you blushing? You are, you're blushing," Natasha said, and she sounded delighted by it, entirely charmed as she curled into his side. "James Barnes blushes after sex, pass it on, I'm telling everyone I know." She smiled; how could she have done anything else? When she'd arrived in Starklandia, she had made it a point to - allow herself honesty, first and foremost, particularly in her relationships with the people who were most important to her, Clint and James, Tony and Carol, and it had never felt difficult, exactly, even if it had also felt new.
And it had paid off. It had, over and over again, when she'd been honest, it had resulted in moments like this, where she could carve out the kind of joy for herself that had been missing for so long. She'd told Carol once that if this was borrowed time, she was okay with it, but now, laying next to him with his flushed cheeks and his fingers running along her body, the soft cadence of his voice, she wasn't sure it would ever really be enough. There had already been so many years lost between them. Between all of them, really.
Honesty had paid off, and it meant that she noticed when she'd found herself slipping back into old habits, trying to conceal or play through when something had rattled her. At least in this instance, it meant that she was focusing on the joy, the good parts, the things that made her happy - that was a better way, to make the hard things smaller. It was never a distraction, it was something that felt so - vital, so necessary, and she threw one ankle over James's, slid down in the bed so that she could rest her head against his shoulder instead of on the pillow.
She watched the pattern of the moonlight on the floor, the little pools of shade thrown by the lamps as they played with the darkness outside. It was a quiet night, a calm one. "I do know," she promised him, because she did. "I never really - thought we'd do that, again. It's a little overwhelming."