Nick didn't miss that frustrated sigh, the tension and release of it in Samantha's body. He wouldn't have even if he hadn't been annoyingly tuned into her every move that night, just like he had been every time they'd had to be in the same room since he'd joined the Avengers. If he'd known that it came as a package deal with her, he probably wouldn't have agreed to it when Troy invited him along.
Who was he kidding? Of course he would have. Where there were Avengers there was probably Steve (and there had been), and Bucky wouldn't walk away from that. And... maybe he'd thought, just for a second once he realized that Samantha was there and who she was, that things could work out differently.
Not that he'd really done much to change that in the last two months. He hadn't known what to say, after the way everything had ended. No more than he'd known what to say when things were in the process of ending, during that awful fight when everything that had started to go right in his life had crumbled to dust right in front of him. It had been too little too late, when he'd gone straight later. Too long spent lying to her to go to her, to the best thing he'd ever had in his life, and tell her that he was clean now, for real, that he would never work for a man who did the kinds of things that his old boss did again.
In truth, he'd never planned for Samantha to know that he'd gone straight. It had been easier torturing himself with the thought of what she might have said if she'd known than torturing himself with the reality that she wouldn't care.
"Maybe the next one," he said before he could think too much about it. He shouldn't have said anything. He should have just let the moment pass and waited until the next time it was necessary to speak to her, because that time would come. The silence was starting to feel even more tense than he could be comfortable with, though, and he could put up with a lot of tension and a lot of silence. It was different when it was with her.