Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It ain’t over ‘til we say it’s over, and I say: it’s not over! If you’re getting this message, it means you are formally invited to come hang out at Camp Renner in Lake Tahoe from April 28^th to whenever the fuck you wanna go home as we celebrate 8+ years and one hell of a run. Directions will be sent upon request. Bring a bathing suit, a bottle of something strong and if you’re feelin particularly crazy, your kids.

Assemble, avengers. (And for the love of fuck, do NOT TELL PEOPLE THAT ARE NOT INVITED I CAN ONLY DEAL WITH SO MANY OF YOU HELLIONS)

Beautiful is a relative term, but I’ve always found something beautiful to LA. Born and bred in New York City meant that I would never get rid of the city lights and continual sound of traffic that was in my bloodstream. LA, in all of its superficial and gilded glory, is still beautiful to me. I think of an eternal summer whenever I come to LA; I think of sunsets and palm trees and an easier breeze ruffling through my hair. I think of forced smiles and the ones that came naturally, I think of camera flashes blinding me and I think of nights where the moon was swollen in the sky over an otherwise empty space that stretched out in front of me. There’s something about the frequency I switch to whenever I’m in LA that I continue to find alluring and that I chase after whenever I’m here. LA is a temporary sort of place and more often than not, I’m a temporary kind of woman.

Nothing lasts forever. I know this, and I do well to remember it. I knew nearly ten years ago when I first came aboard on the S.S. Marvel that someday it would come to an end because all things do. I knew the same about my marriages, my time in different places, the days when I could throw my daughter onto my hip and not feel like I was winded ten steps in. Nothing lasts forever, everything comes to an end, and bringing the Avengers chapter of my life to its close stung just as much as everything else did when it ended. Endings, though they be inevitable, hurt like a bitch. I know this, yet it always surprises me.

The release of Endgame drained me more than any other movie I’ve ever put out – the magnitude at which Endgame stood made every other project I’ve taken on pale in comparison. I cried in hotel rooms ‘round the world, and not just because I missed my daughter or because I’d let an otherwise unidentified Chris get too much tequila in my system and then shook me loose to go watch Gone with the Wind. This time, I cried because all of it was the last time for the foreseeable future, if not for forever. The last time we would all be together with some real purpose and excuse to it. I think that it’s simply human nature, tangling yourself in your emotions whenever something comes to a close because you so desperately want for it to stick around for just another day even though time only moves forward.

Apparently, all my tears of mourning were premature. I woke up the day of the Endgame premiere to a text in the group chat from none other than Jeremy Renner kindly dictating how I’d be spending the next week. The already existing plans I had were more than content to shove themselves into a back drawer for the time being; Rose was with her father, the only thing I intended to do until I was explicitly needed by someone was to sit on my patio with a glass of Pinot Noir and watch the sky, revel in the beauty of California until New York started calling, and all of that went up in smoke when next to the thought of spending time with the people I’ve already started to miss despite only being on Day One of The End.

LA to Lake Tahoe is roughly eight hours, and buying a flight so quickly on a whim sounds like it requires effort. For the time being, I am on a short-lived, retirement-esque vacation, and exerting effort isn’t on the to do list. Reaching out to Jeremy for those directions seemed much lazier, so I did, and the conversation that was held bore even more fruitful results.

“Just ride with me,” he’d propositioned before I had the chance to ask for the address to punch in on Google Maps.

“Ride with you? For eight hours? No thank you; you drive like you’re auditioning for the Fast and Furious. My idea of a vacation does not include motion sickness.”

I could hear the eye roll slip through the speaker. “First of all, Scar, I love ‘ya, but you’re a pussy. You take some Dramamine and you get over it.” The transition between sentences was lost to me as I scoffed. “Secondly, I never said I was gonna be behind the wheel. I brought the bus out here to let my guy work on it a little and now we’ve gotta haul it back to Nevada since parking down here is a bitch, so he’s driving it back while I lounge on the couch and take a nice eight-hour nap. I am inviting you to hitch a ride with me – I’ve already extended the offer to two of the others, so it’s not a big deal.”

“Oh, I come in third place now?”

“We never know what your plans are. I had all but marked you as absent on Camp Renner’s attendance.”

That had stung a little. Was I really that much of an absent presence in the lives of my costars, my friends? I didn’t think me missing a few of the outings to the Underworld was that big an issue – I worked ‘round the clock, I all but raised Rose independently on the weeks I got her, and in the rare free moments, I burrowed under a blanket and prayed for sleep to find me. We weren’t young and spry anymore. We had children, responsibilities, lives. I was simply living mine and losing track of all the days that flew underneath my nose. “Well, consider me there,” I’d said in response, puffing up my chest even if he couldn’t see. “And on that bus to Nevada.”

There was once a time where I would have crossed the ocean on foot for Jeremy Renner. Things haven’t changed much.

By the laws of science or direction or whatever, the sunsets in LA are utterly breathtaking, but I’d go so far as to argue that the sunrises are equally beautiful. I spend my morning out on the patio in the back of my house with a cup of coffee watching the sun come up on a new day, a day that marks the definitive end of a chapter and the beginning of whatever comes next. Endgame has officially been out for a complete day, which subjectively feels as though an entire lifetime has passed – it’s what makes Jeremy’s little distraction of a road trip and vacation so irresistible. It gives me a moment to catch my breath and find my footing now that such a large chunk of my life has met its maker.

(Safe to say that LA also makes me a sap: all of the worst decisions I’ve made originated in the city of angels, where the sunshine seeps into my brain, heightening my emotions tenfold and leaving me completely compromised. It’s why I keep my resident status in New York. At least when I’m there my senses are about me and I’m not looking at everything with a pair of rose-gold glasses on.)

I’ve spent most of April living out of a suitcase, so there isn’t much to pack. I throw on something old and remotely comfortable that’s lingering near the bottom and return back to my patio to bide the time, let the late April morning breeze encompass me and the sun warm up my bare feet. My phone starts ringing somewhere close to noon, a press picture of Jeremy from a few weeks ago where he’s dramatically posing in a tangled web of streamers that we’d both found hysterical lighting up the screen of my phone. “Hello,” I sing into the receiver as I cradle the phone between my ear and shoulder.

Jeremy cuts right to the chase. “Can you please buzz me in?”

“Buzz you in?” I repeat.

“Yes. I am sitting in front of your house and there is a gigantic ass gate in front of it.”

“Wow, nothing gets past those eyes of yours, Renner.”

“C’mon, Scar. Buzz me in.”

“Is no one sitting out there watching the door?”

“There is, but I’m pretty sure me promising that I am indeed Jeremy Renner, fellow costar and acquaintance isn’t going to get me where I need to go.”

“He takes signed headshots as bribes.”

“Buzz me in.” The line goes dead before he can hear the low rumbling of laughter stirring in my throat.

I breeze through the house to make sure everything’s turned off, slinging my duffel onto my shoulder and pulling my suitcase along behind me on my trek out the door. The tiny panel on the foyer wall is blinking red, insinuating a request from someone wanting on the property. Renner. I punch in the code to open the gate and flip the lights in the foyer off.  

Jeremy comes rolling into my driveway right as the front door comes to a close behind me, his Porsche gliding onto its brakes and the smug smirk on his face visible even through the tinted windshield. “Mornin’, hot sauce,” he greets, pulling his hands out of the pockets of his leather jacket and letting them fall by his sides.

“Hiya, handsome.” I skip down the last few stairs, my suitcase clunkily following behind me. His smile lines deepen as he meets me halfway, arms open for the hug that I happily walk right into.

It’s a familiar hug, a safe hug, and the two of us let time stand still for a moment wrapped up there in one another’s arms. My chin comes down to rest on his shoulder, hands gripping tight to him as he nestles his face down into the small space in the crook of my neck. “Missed ‘ya,” he mumbles softly after I’ve had enough time to start losing myself in the scent of his soap and laundry detergent.

“You saw me two days ago,” I point out.

“Still missed ‘ya.” He pulls away from me slightly, one of his hands still hovering somewhere over my lower back. “Been catching up on your beauty sleep?”

“Truthfully, I think I slept more on the planes.”

Jeremy’s hand finally leaves my waist, reaching around me to grab my rolling suitcase. “Well, that makes one of us.”

“Aw, are you bitter?” I tease him, trailing behind him to where he’s got the trunk popped open.

“What, that we spent the majority of April on a plane? Little bit, but it comes with the territory.” He pauses as he lets the handle on my suitcase fall with a noisy clank. “Came.”

I watch him bend down to grab my suitcase, old habits dying hard and unable to bite my tongue. “Careful,” I warn him. “Don’t blow your back out.”

Whatever brief tension that blew over us leaves just as quickly with my comment, Jeremy’s eyes shooting up to give me the look of death. “Will you ever stop with the whole Old Man Renner thing?” he grumbles, swiftly picking up my luggage and hoisting it into the trunk.

He holds his hand out for the duffel, and I pass it off with the most winning smile I have in my arsenal. “If it hasn’t stopped by now, I’m afraid it never will.”

Both of his hands reach up and slam the trunk door back down. “Splendid.”

“So, what’s the game plan?” I ask as I shuffle back towards the passenger side of the car. “This is a pretty car, but it’s not the luxury tour bus I was promised.”

Even underneath his quintessential dad-baseball cap he’s got on, I can see him roll his eyes. “Figured this would be a hell of a lot easier to back out of your driveway – you seem pretty fond of all your trees.” I give him a nod of affirmation, the door handle giving way under the tug of my hand and allowing me to slip inside the Porsche. “We go back to my place, pick up the bus, and then we pick up the other hoodlums. And then it’s just a straight shot to Nevada.”

“How many other hoodlums are we talking?” Jeremy closes the driver door behind him, fishing the keys from the pocket of his jacket and jamming them into the ignition.

He shrugs. “Just me, you, and two of the others.” He turns the keys in the ignition, engine purring to life and the sounds of an AC/DC song that he was likely listening to when he got here quietly picking up where it left off. “I paid a pretty penny for my tour bus, I’d like to keep her in one piece.”

“So a certified road trip, then,” I finish. Jeremy just looks over at me, lips spreading into a wry smile as his wrist fluidly snaps the gear shift into reverse.

“You got it.”

We don’t talk much on the drive to Jeremy’s, instead rolling the windows all the way down and letting the wind rush in around us. I feel the bassline of the music running up from my feet straight into my teeth, sun warm on my arm every time it peers around the corners of the buildings and trees we pass. Coexisting next to Jeremy has never been complicated; if anything, it may as well be embedded somewhere in my genetic code considering how natural it feels. I think it’s why we’re constantly gravitating towards each other. There’s nowhere else we need to be if we’re beside one another. At one point his right hand drifts over onto the console, resting there casually with his fingers dangling down on the side as a quiet invitation for me to tangle them around my own. He squeezes my hand when I do – be it confirmation, reassurance, or just because, it warms up even the coldest parts of me and melts me farther back into the seat.

It’s about a half-hour drive from my place in Los Feliz to Jeremy’s in Hollywood Hills, the change of scenery in what’s only a five-mile drive somewhat jarring. Jeremy hates the city so he opts to practically live in the jungle, all of the pines and bamboo shrouding the Nest in vegetation and making it impossible to see the next-door neighbors down the hill. He and I differ on having a view of downtown anywhere, but I understand why he keeps things like this. It feels like we’ve already put LA long in our dust and are completely alone for miles, tucked away in a secluded corner of the world where nothing else can touch us. Breathing seems like it’s easier here.

Sure enough, his bus sits in the middle of his driveway waiting for departure just as insinuated. “We won’t be here too long,” he tells me as he swings the Porsche past the bus and pulls up into the garage to park. “Just gotta get my shit together and then we’re outta here to go get the others.”

“Yeah, remind me: why are we picking up the others again?” I ask, the car coming to a stop and Jeremy twisting the keys out from their ignition.

“They’re stops on the way, said I didn’t mind. You, on the other hand, were very much out of the way.”

My lips curl up into a soft smile. “I do know how to drive, y’know. I could’ve just met you here instead.”

“Yeah, well,” he mumbles sheepishly as he pushes his door open. “I don’t mind going out of my way for you.”

We come up through the garage into the living room where Jeremy whirls on ahead of me to god knows where, leaving me in my slower pace. I’ve only been the Nest one other time in my life and it’s rather hard to forget in all of its awe-inducing glory. Jeremy keeps his house looking something like a mausoleum; everything has its place and should something leave its place, his teeth are set on edge. The only thing about it that shows sign of life here are the scattered toys shoved under the coffee table or strewn about the couch that belong to Ava. That, and the way sunlight scatters through the trees and pours into the windows, and it feels like his interpretation of home.

I trail around to the bar, taking note of the gold-rimmed photo frame with all of his house rules as my fingers traipse over the surface of the bar. Do not fuck with Ava. No social media. No photos. No glass by the pool. Nothing in JR’s butt. It cracks a smile onto my face. We might not be the same people we were when our friendship first started, but some things never change, and those are the things that I hold onto tightest when I start feeling the world spinning.

“You hungry?” Jeremy’s voice tears me away from my train of thought. I turn my head to see him taking the stairs two at a time, his own duffel bag slung haphazardly over his shoulder. “I’ve got some leftover shrimp scampi that’s gonna go bad if I don’t eat it now.”

I pull myself up onto one of the barstools, letting my legs dangle as my eyes follow him across the room. “I’d never say no to pasta.”

He drops his duffel down onto the couch on his trek into the kitchen, disappearing from sight momentarily. My eyes wander around the room, and I spin back around to take a better look out his floor-to-ceiling windows that I know, should I press the right button, would lift up like a garage door and give me full rein of his backyard. Real-estate has always been one of his fortes; he once told me how he loved taking something and pulling all of its concealed beauty front and center. Everything sparkles, he’d said. Just gotta know how best to angle the light.  

Jeremy returns a few moments later, two forks balanced between his teeth with a giant takeout box in one hand and two Stellas gripped tightly in the other. He drops them once he gets within range of the bar, taking the forks out of his mouth and passing me one as I reach for one of the bottles. When he pulls out the barstool next to mine to sit down, he’s treated to the sight of a stuffed fox sitting on the stool. “I swear,” he sighs as he picks up the fox and throws it over his head, letting it land somewhere on the carpet near the couch. “Ava’s got more shit than I know what to do with.”

“You are preaching to the choir,” I reassure, Jeremy hopping up onto the seat and opening up the takeout container. “Rose won’t let me throw away anything of hers, even if it’s falling apart and only held together by a single, fraying thread. I’m one step shy of seeing if TLC wants to do a Hoarders special on a four-year-old.”

That elicits a chuckle out of him. “That’d be a good one.” He pushes the container a little closer to me, invitation to stab my fork straight through the middle and start twirling. “She in France with Dauriac?” he asks after a small pause. His voice lowers, much gruffer than before, meaning that something about that question is awkward for him to ask. I don’t know why – he, of all people, knows that I’m not one to hide shit, especially when it’s rather cut and dry.

Plus, Jeremy Renner is shit when it comes to keeping things from me. I know he never really liked Romain, only did his best to pour it on thick because he thought it was what would make me happy and as my best friend, he’s only ever been in the business of making sure that I’m happy.

“Yep,” I answer plaintively. “I think she’s with Romain’s mom this week?” One of my shoulders folds in a shrug as I take a bite, washing it down with the Stella. “Dunno. Rose doesn’t like me calling and cramping her style.” Jeremy just nods in understanding, the tines of his fork spearing through a shrimp. “Is Ava down the road with Sonni?”

“Canada, but yeah. Talked to ‘em last night.” Unlike myself, speaking about his ex is not done blasély. He and Sonni had a nasty divorce that ripped into him, and even when all was done and settled and given the thin smile of cordiality, he didn’t like to dwell on it. In the same vein of Jeremy only liking Romain to save face, I was never Sonni’s number one fan and was more than happy once she was out of the picture. I remember the toll that it took on him back when we were in the middle of Ultron and I can’t bring myself to forgive her for what she did to him in the way he’s seemed to move on from it. He hadn’t been himself at all, and sometimes I swear he’ll always be a few degrees off from the way it fucked with his head. Just like having Ava had shifted the axis of his world, going to war with somebody that I think he suspected he’d be with forever kept tilting him even further. Not that I’m the type to psychoanalyze (that requires too much effort for the vacation I’m supposed to be on), but it seems like the aftermath of it all still has its fangs embedded in him and talking about it isn’t really a road we should go down.

It stares back at me from the picture frame sitting to my left. Do not fuck with Ava. That little girl re-centered his entire universe. Being parents has changed us more than even we probably realize; the days when we were fucking around as we ran around a town that was not our own, wrestling in Evans’ living room floor and doing shots right before a bad karaoke session, bar-hopping after premieres and spending the weekends watching shitty Westerns, they are all long gone. Sure, we still laugh and joke, have our cake and eat it too, but now we can feel the rubber-band stretching out and all of our responsibilities waiting to smack us back in the face. We wait for it and we invite it, because that’s what gives us a place and a purpose in this world. We’re older. We’ve traveled around the sun a few times and it’s given us a few more wrinkles around our eyes, a few more miles on our record, and a few more reasons that any moments like these are those to be treasured and handled with care.

We eat in relative silence, Jeremy pushing the shrimp over towards my side of the container after he’s had his fill and me hitting the bottom of my bottle fairly quickly. Once I can’t stomach any more and Jeremy’s circling the bottom of his own beer, he disappears back into the kitchen long enough to get rid of our trash and we’re back out the door.

I get my things from the trunk of his Porsche, one of Jeremy’s arms outstretched to take one of my bags off my hands. “Yo! Miller!” he yells down the expanse of driveway as we walk out of the garage. “You ready to pull out?”

Jeremy’s driver grins like the devil, visible even from a couple of yards out. “Haven’t heard that one since my ex-wife,” he jokes, triggering Jeremy’s ridiculous laugh that makes him sound as though he might break into a coughing fit at any second. “But yeah, we’re good to go whenever.”

“C’mon, Scar,” Jeremy says as he reaches for my other bag to pass off to Miller. “Our chariot awaits.”

He might say Ava takes the cake, but Jeremy’s the one that’s got more toys than I think even he knows what to do with. The litany of motorcycles and cars and tour buses and things with motors that he has in his name astounds me. It all comes from a place of being able to have the things he never had as a kid and rightfully deserves now that he’s got the means to have it; I still can recall the first designer handbag that I purchased for myself when I had enough money in my bank account. It wasn’t because I needed it, it was because I wanted it, and the mantra of treating yourself had never felt more prevalent. I’d worked my ass off and I deserved some tangible reward for that. His bus is just that on a much larger scale with wheels.

Like every time we’re crossed with a staircase, Jeremy stops and holds his arm out for me to take. I roll my eyes as I scoff good-naturedly, accepting the offer anyways.   

I’ve been on the bus a couple of times before since Jeremy no longer takes studio-issued trailers and brings the bus in as substitute. It feels like a middle ground between the Nest and what I suspect will be the likes of Camp Renner. There’s always the smell of coffee coming from the full kitchen even when he doesn’t have the espresso machine plugged in, couches draped in thick cashmere blankets that I distinctly remember triumphing over Hemsworth in six rounds of rochambeau for during a lull in filming that we’d designated as siesta time, tinted windows that block the outside world out while inviting the sunlight in. Of course, there are significantly fewer signs of inhabitance on the bus now – no empty water bottles littering the counter, no random stuffed animals peeking out from underneath the skirt of the couch, the overhead radio that never seemed to be off now silent.

I let myself drop down onto the couch, kicking my sneakers off and folding my legs up underneath me while Jeremy settles down next to me. “So, which deviant are we picking up first?”

“Liz,” he answers, bringing his foot up to rest on the opposite knee and the arm closest to me stretching out along the back of the couch. “She’s the closest of the two.”

I turn my head so I’m facing him, bewilderment splashed over my features. “She’s literally five minutes down the road.”

His free hand lifts in a half-hearted shrug. “Parking is a bitch here. Besides,” he continues, the arm resting behind my head drawing a little closer to encompass me. “I didn’t make you drive. I happen to be a gentleman.”

I nod teasingly. “Of course.”

“Why else would I have let you wipe the floor with my remains for nearly ten years?”

My eyes widen as the choked laugh falls from my throat involuntarily. “Excuse me, let? Tying your own damn shoe did you in several times if I recall correctly, and I’m sure that your fingerprints will forever be embedded in my arm’s deep tissue from where you did your best to put up a fight. There was no let about it, I kicked your ass fair and square.”

“TSA could probably tell which prints belonged to me and which ones were result of the infamous fighting match between you and Hemsworth.”

“Damn straight.”

The memory leaves a fond smile lingering over my lips as I nestle back farther into the couch, Jeremy’s bare arm warm against the back of my neck. “You gonna miss it?” I say softly, hands wrapping around one of my knees.

His answer is barely a murmur. “Already do.”  

Lizzie lives down in one of the nearby canyons, barely a two mile trek. She’s waiting out in her driveway, bag sitting on the tops of her feet and hand shielding her sunglasses-clad eyes to catch a glimpse of us when we come creeping around the mountain. I stay on the bus while Jeremy gets out to help her load her stuff. I can’t help myself but to watch from the window of the bus as Lizzie nearly trips over her bag in the rush to meet Jeremy in the same hug he’d greeted me with earlier, propelling herself onto the balls of her feet and slinging her arms around his neck. The two of them are close in the same way that Evans and I are; there’s bonding in doing multiple films together, even more bonding when you’re putting your life in their hands as you go eighty miles an hour down a vertical drop or you’re relying on them to make you smile whilst trying to stave off a divorce with someone who doesn’t see reason. It’s safe to say that Lizzie held the keys to Jeremy’s sanity while we were trekking through Ultron. In return, he’s taken on the big brother role in stride.

They stay interlocked for a moment before she retreats and picks her bag off of the sidewalk, passing it off to him so he can stow it under the bus. A few moments later, I hear Miller open up the doors to the bus and footsteps follow right after.

Lizzie peeks around the divider as she pushes her aviators up onto her head, breaking out in a smile when she sees me. I’m like Jeremy in a lot of senses, one of them being that Lizzie was also the keyholder to my sanity as we trekked through Ultron. The severe drought of estrogen on set had grown unbearable (Cobie never stayed as long as I needed for her to) and having Lizzie around was roughly the equivalent of Jesus Christ descending from heaven. I was happy to have her then and I’m even happier to have her as one of my dearest friends now that all is said and done. “Babe!” she draws out delightedly, all but diving onto the couch. “Jeremy didn’t say you were coming.”

I have to suppress the urge to frown. “Have I really gotten that flaky?”

“You’re a single, working momma who sleeps with one eye open if you bother to sleep at all. I don’t call that flaky, I call it having a life.”

“Well, the life is on pause for the time being,” I finish, my arms snaking around Lizzie’s shoulders and drawing her in close.

“Good,” she answers, locking both her hands around the back of my waist. “I miss you even though you’re sitting right next to me.”

“Ladies, there’s a bed in the back if you want to continue the love-fest,” Jeremy informs us as signal of his return, looking down at the both of us with a crooked smile.

Lizzie unwraps one of her arms to swat dismissively at him. “Shut up, Renner.”

When Jeremy looks at me to see what my stance is on the subject, one of my eyebrows arches in contest. “You heard the woman.”

The other stop on our way out to Camp Renner is to pick up the other stowaway, one Christopher Evans who happens to be staying at some hotel in West Hollywood. It is infinitely more complicated than picking up Lizzie. For starters, maneuvering a tour bus down any street that’s off Sunset Strip is asking to defy the way of the natural universe. There is also no feasible place to pick him up near his hotel because parking a tour bus on the side of the road is begging for disaster and Chris doesn’t have security with him, so walking down the street is a hard negative. We have to Google Maps the business entrance to his hotel, Lizzie calling him and telling him that we’re doing this pick-up Oceans Eleven style lest we hold up traffic and get the cops involved, or worse, the paparazzi.

Jeremy and Lizzie agree that it would be rather entertaining to see Chris try and hop onto the bus while we roll very slowly on the brakes to keep from stopping, but I, being a fantastic friend and the voice of reason, shut down the idea and tell them that all that awaits us down that road is a trip to the emergency room.

Miller puts three minutes on the clock to get Chris on the bus and us out of the business loading dock before we inevitably cause a scene. Nothing about Jeremy’s tour bus is subtle. “We’re out front,” Lizzie barks into the receiver of her phone, perched up on the couch and looking out the window for any sign of him. “Double time, Cap.”

 “Sheesh, Olsen,” comes Chris’s voice from the speaker. “I’m on vacation, and vacations mean no running.”

“Renner says that you’ll be hitchhiking to Nevada if you don’t pick up the pace.”

“Tell Renner he can kiss my ass.”

“When hell opens their ice rink!” Jeremy yells.

From the window, I spot Chris walking out of the revolving door, donning his staple sunglasses and ballcap with the phone to his ear. Lizzie begins waving in the window, even though the chances of him actually seeing it are slim. “Black bus at twelve o’clock,” she instructs.

His head lifts slightly, stopping in his tracks. “Nah shit.”

Miller is outside to grab his luggage, Chris ending the call with Lizzie as he boards the bus. “Ever thought of being a drill sergeant, Lizzo?” he says, making his grand entrance. “Now that you’ve got free time, you should really make money off your real talent: bossing people around.”

“Somebody’s got to keep your asses in shape,” Lizzie mutters as she falls back down onto the seat, legs twisted beneath her.

“Ah, not anymore,” Chris sings. “I am off the clock, off the diet, and once we’re outta this zipcode, off the fuckin’ grid.” He glances over at Jeremy as their hands collide in the universal male greeting handshake. “Do you have service up in Lake Tahoe?”

Jeremy grins. “You have to hike for half a bar, and that’s on a good day.”

“Music to my ears.”

“Uh, yeah, speaking of music,” Jeremy transitions, spinning around in the seat he has since retired to. “Miller, can we get the radio back here?”

Miller, who has just started clomping up the stairs, shoots a glare Jeremy’s way on his way back to the driver’s seat. “You wanna come get this fuckin' thing turned outta here and across three lanes?” he suggests, hooking his thumb in the direction of the wheel.

“On second thought, my legs are functioning just fine to get up and do it myself.”

Miller makes us all sit down and shut up while he gets the bus back on the road, citing that it takes complete silence, finesse, and a dash of prayer to the traffic gods. Lizzie and I split off to the same couch, tugging one of the blankets down over us while I indulge her in all the recent pictures of my daughter that she’s since missed out on while Chris and Jeremy figure out how to not distract Miller while finding the appropriate radio station to meet their needs. Occasionally, I’ll glance away from the video of Rose that Lizzie is fully engrossed in to see what the boys are doing. Jeremy catches my sights at one point and he winks at me – it’s a subtle gesture that holds absolutely no sub-context of any kind, but I still find the warmth seeping into my cheeks and my lips curling into a smile.

Once we’re on I-5, Miller is less on edge and the boys are free to turn up the classic rock station as loud as they want. Lizzie and I snuggle together up underneath the blanket while Chris tells some incredibly animated story about the last day of his life that involves a room service guy, tears, and partial nudity. For some people, a road trip would entail stopping every couple of hours at a tourist trap, some unfortunate fate befalling them like running out of gas or getting lost or losing someone at a sketchy gas station, and finally arriving at their destination only to find that it was the journey that had meant everything or some other symbolic shit. For us, it’s just as the name would suggest: a trip via the road. Chris, Jeremy and I have all been left drained by the magnitude of press, Lizzie’s emotions are sitting under a very fragile veneer and threaten to trigger my own once it breaks, and we all just want a minute to breathe air that is not of the plane variety and appreciate one another’s company. Shenanigans can wait until tomorrow when we’re joined by the others.

“Who all is coming, anyways?” Chris asks at one point. “Not that you three aren’t a blast or anything.”

Jeremy begins to prattle off names from the top of his memory, counting them on his fingers while he stares at the ceiling in hopes it will have the answer. “Us four, Downey, Rudd, Hemsworth, Ruffalo, Karen, Brie, maybe Mackie? I know Danai couldn’t, Cheadle said he was up in the air about it and if he decided to come, I’d know when I saw his ass on the doorstep. Tried inviting Sebastian but his number’s out of service, so there’s that.”

“Out of service?” Lizzie repeats, her eyebrows furrowing together. Her hand juts out from the blanket, motioning at him. “Gimme your phone. I’d bet one of those gas station soft pretzels that you have it typed in wrong.”    

Jeremy pulls his phone from the pocket inside his leather jacket, throwing it clean across the aisle of the bus. Lizzie leans forward, intercepting the phone and cradling it down in her lap before it has the chance to knock me square between the eyes. “Password?”

“Ava’s birthday.”

“Anybody bringing their kids?” Chris continues with his questionnaire. It’s my turn to look in their direction with a puzzled look on my face, Chris returning it with an exasperated expression. “I gotta know if this is family friendly or if I’m allowed to drop a few F-bombs.”

Jeremy shrugs. “I have no fuckin’ clue. Scar and I obviously don’t have our girls so you’re clear for cursing at least until tomorrow.”

Lizzie makes a strangled sort of noise, one of her hands shooting up in victory. “It’s 3046, not 4046.” She stares Jeremy down across the way, her smirk dripping in complacency. “I believe you owe me a soft pretzel.”

“When Miller stops to refuel, I’ll give you my wallet.” He then makes a gesture. “And while you’re in there, change his number. Fuck knows I won’t remember that.”

“Way ahead of you, grandpa.” She starts typing away, not bothering to look up as the follow-up comment slips past her lips. “What are you gonna do without my sharp mind around?”

He sighs, arms stretching over his head as he leans back in the seat. “Deteriorate.”

“Poor Ava,” Lizzie chides. “Thank god she’s got me and Scarlett to keep the memory of you in your prime alive.”

“Wait, when did I get roped into this?” I ask, holding one of my hands up for pause. Lizzie glances back over her shoulder to give me a look.

“Since always,” she answers.

“Yeah, Scar,” Chris chimes in teasingly, and when I shift my sights up, he’s got some kind of look on his face that I would love nothing more than to slap clean off. “Since always.”

“Shut up.”

“Try and make me.”

“What am I ever gonna do without your smart ass around?” I steal Lizzie’s line, and Chris merely shrugs.

“You don’t have to worry about that. I see another twelve years of making films together in our future.”

I groan, head falling back against the arm of the couch as I slouch farther down under the blanket.

It’s not that I’d be opposed to that, not even in the slightest. Saying predicts you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, and this whole experience has been testament to that. I miss all of the people surrounding me, the ones that are on their way and the ones that I don’t know when I’ll see next equally now that there’s nothing more than memories tying us together. I try not to tangle myself up in emotion and be a sentimentalist. It stifles productivity and shuts off possibility. It’s been hard this time around, though; I find myself acting as a sponge, soaking up the way Chris makes fun of me and the smell of Lizzie’s perfume that’s started permeating into the blanket and the sound of Jeremy’s laugh reverberating off the bus walls to save for a rainy day when I physically feel the loss of them in my heart.

The hours start to rush past like the miles of asphalt underneath us, the engorged sun in the sky sinking lower as the afternoon stretches on. At some point we decide to give conversation a rest and take advantage of the copious amounts of space and blankets at our disposal. Lizzie and I keep in our arrangement on the couch, each of us taking an end with our hips bumping together in the middle. Chris takes the other small couch on the opposite side, and Jeremy disappears into the back room where he’s likely gone to have his privacy while FaceTiming with Ava.

I don’t know how much time passes between the time I close my eyes, supposedly blink and open them again, but it’s clearly been awhile judging by the state of unconsciousness Lizzie’s currently in when I peer around the blanket to get some sort of sense to my surroundings. Lizzie sleeps like the dead, stiff as a board and her aviators back down over her eyes to imply she is not to be disturbed. Someone’s tugged down the shade screens over the windows over our heads so the sun isn’t as infiltrating and I think the radio has been entirely shut off.

Tucking the blanket up underneath my armpit and freeing my arm, I carefully shift myself onto my side so I don’t wake up Lizzie. Chris is still laying on the other couch, but he’s awake, scrolling through something on his phone. He must sense my eyes on him, his head turning slightly and a lazy smile spreading over his lips when our eyes meet. “What time is it?” I whisper, my voice catching in different spots as I try to keep quiet.

“A little after four,” he hums quietly. “Miller said we’re a little over halfway there.”

“Ah.”

Silence settles back over us for an extended pause, Chris returning back to whatever it was on his phone that had been occupying his attention. “So, are you finally gonna tell him?” I shift a little more onto my side, one hand sliding up under the throw pillow I’ve since tucked under my head as my eyes burn little holes into the side of his head.

“Tell who what?”

Chris grimaces, looking away from his phone to shoot me the age-old ‘you know what’ that he may as well have a patent for. “Renner.”

“Tell Renner what?”

“C’mon, J. Don’t get all coy with me.”

“I’m not being—” Lizzie stirs a little, scaring Chris and I both into frozen positions as we watch her nestle deeper into the back of the couch. I feel like I can’t breathe until I’m positive she is still lost to the world of the awake, much more conscious of my volume when I pick up where I left off. “I’m not being coy, Chris, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He rolls his eyes, letting his phone fall into his lap as he turns slightly to look at me head on. “Speaking as your best friend from when you were seventeen, what I’m about to say comes from both a place of love and the fact that I probably know you better than even you do.” My eyes widen slightly as his prompt to get on with it. “You love him.”

I blink a few times in rapid succession. “Why would I need to tell him that? He already knows.” Clearly, whatever I’m saying isn’t settling right with Chris, him shaking his head more fervently this time.

“I’m not talking about like that. I’m saying that you love him.”

Oh.

Well.

Okay then.

My throat starts to close up, and I’m suddenly very aware of the tires rolling underneath us on the seemingly very specific way that the asphalt has been paved. The lack of words coming from my throat is invitation for Chris to continue, his voice low to keep the conversation between us. “Look, I’m not trying to come outta left field and throw something at you just to shock you. You two have been dancing around each other since we were in Albuquerque in ‘11. If there was ever a time to let him know how you really feel, it’s now.”

“I…I don’t…” My brain is short-circuiting inside my head, tongue heavy. For as long as I’ve known Jeremy, which has been a significant portion of my life, there has always been some sort of unspoken thing between us that didn’t have a name, barely saw any recognition, and could only be seen if the light hit it at the precise angle. I chalked it up to him being my best friend, the perfect gift from a universe that had aligned just right when our stars exploded. Sure, there were moments when I felt like I was deliberately wearing blinders to keep from letting something into my sights or when his walls were particularly difficult for me to scale over, but that was extenuating circumstance bleeding into our friendship and fucking everything over. “What even makes you think that?” I mutter out hoarsely.

One of his shoulders falls half-heartedly in a shrug. “You guys have always just been unnecessarily close. Or—well, no, not unnecessarily…just inexplicably close, I suppose.”

“You and I are close,” I offer up.

He shakes his head. “Nah, it’s not like that. You and I have our lines drawn pretty clear in the sand.” I give him that one, eyes cutting away for a brief second as concession. “But you and Renner are different. There’s just something blurred about it all. Maybe you just don't see it, maybe you didn’t mean to do it, but it’s there. Whenever you two are together it’s like nobody else exists, the way you speak your own little language in just one look and automatically know what the other is thinking.”

“I’m not that hard to read. Neither is he.”

Chris gives me a sad smile. “You’re both pretty damn impossible. You’re only easy to read because I’ve known you since you were seventeen, and he’s only easy because I’ve seen the man naked. There’s not a whole lot left to guess on after you cross that line.”

He makes a pretty strong argument there. “You both just have your tells. I know how you get when you’re in love with somebody, I know how it kinda consumes you. I had my suspicions back when you asked him to fill in for Walk of Fame, but it never went anywhere.” His head tilts to the side the deeper he falls into his contemplation. “And then I really had some suspicions when we were all in Atlanta for Our Town, but it didn’t go anywhere after that either. You just kept getting with these other people that weren’t him and it kept confusing the hell outta me.”

“Your point being?”

“You don’t get another one of…these,” he says, gesturing around us with his index finger. “You know I don’t believe in all that universe-meddling shit, but Scar, this is it. We have reached the end of the road. Now or never, do or die, collide or keep going in your opposite directions. Maybe, just maybe there was a fuckin’ reason all the other people didn’t work out, and maybe, just fuckin’ maybe, it’s because they weren’t the one thing that you kept passing up on for whatever reason. Stop letting it go nowhere, not when he makes you happier than any of the other tools I’ve had to sit by and watch you date.”

“They weren’t all tools,” I defend unenthusiastically.

“Eighty-seven percent were.” He sighs. “Just…just at least think about telling him while we’re out here, okay? Promise me you’ll do that much.”

“I don’t—"

“I have seen you cry a lot in your life and I have never seen you cry the way you did when we were in Singapore.”

I don’t have anything to fight him with on that one; I’m not one to willingly let someone else have the last word, but he gets it on grounds of interference by none other than the aforementioned man of the hour sliding through the now-opened door panels between the kitchen and the rest of the bus. Chris and I hit pause on the conversation, both looking back at Jeremy.

“Miller said there’s an exit with a gas station up ahead,” he informs us when he takes survey of the scene, eyes stopping on the still-dead-to-the-world Lizzie. “One that’s got the pretzel I owe her.”

He grins as he takes a few steps towards my couch, bending down and resting his hands so they’re right near Lizzie’s head. There’s a pause, like he’s quietly counting to three and building up to the moment where he claps, the sound like a shot. It sends Lizzie jolting upwards, sunglasses falling down the bridge of her nose.

Jeremy just starts laughing, Lizzie scowling once her heartbeat starts regulating. “Oh, fuck you,” she grumbles, tugging the blanket tighter around her chest as she flips him off.

“You love me, Olsen,” he sings. “Better wake up if you still want that pretzel, it’s gonna be here in one-point-three miles and if you miss out, then you miss out for good.”

My ears are still ringing from the clap, mind on a loop with his first words. You love me.

Chris stares past Jeremy, looking at me expectantly like I ought to take some sort of heed with his words, as though his words should hold a double entendre and mean something to me.

I spend the next four hours picking apart a soft pretzel as I comb back through my memory and analyze the last fifteen-something years of my life where Jeremy’s been involved to piece together a puzzle I didn’t even realize I’d been on the box of. 

Chapter Text

Camp Renner is embedded up in a concealed corner of the forest near Lake Tahoe, the stars visible overhead as we roll through miles and miles of what seems like nothingness. I’ve never been one to lose myself inside of nature. Some people like the insignificance that they feel when swallowed by trees that sprawl up to the sky and rushing bodies of water and the quiet hum of wildlife lurking somewhere the naked eye can’t immediately see. I choose to seek my insignificance in a crowded street, hum of street lights and towering skyscrapers that shield out any sign of the stars overhead. We all like to feel small in the grand scheme of our surroundings from time to time, reground ourselves in our humanity and remind ourselves that we are part of something that is so much bigger than us: I do it in a city, Jeremy does it out in the middle of Nevada.

I see the appeal, though, judging by the way the lines in Jeremy’s face begin to relax and the blue oceans of his eyes are clearer. He seems to have a piece of himself stowed away here that only ever gets its chance to come out and play when he crosses over the property line. It’s a new look on him. I like it.

The sun is just barely peeking out between the edges of tree branches and coloring the sky a dusky purple by the time we make it to Jeremy’s property. Camp Renner, in reality, is a little less summer camp and a little more ranch with significant amounts of untouched land and the occasional outbuilding. Trees flank it from every direction before we reach a mouth of the driveway where the foliage peels back and the pavement is somewhat uneven, the heart of the ranch waiting for us at the top of the hill.

Miller parks the bus at the fork in the driveway, Jeremy’s garage for the bus past the house and straight on down the road where Miller’s own getaway vehicle awaits him. Lizzie is the first one off the bus, claiming that if she doesn’t make it into the house within the next ninety seconds, her bladder will explode. Jeremy is hot on her heels in order to actually let her in the house; it’s so quiet outside that his shouts to her about her not ruining his hardwoods sound as though they’re coming from the back of the bus.

Chris and I are the last two to make our way off, our time now plentiful and our pace capitalizing on that. We haven’t had another moment where it’s been just us and he was at liberty to spell out all of my feelings for me since some hundred-plus miles ago. “Stop thinking so loud,” he says once it’s just us left, standing idly in front of me while I try to be a somewhat decent human being and fold the blanket back up.

I give him a pointed look. “And who’s to blame for that?”

His hands reach out to help me with my task of folding. “I feel kinda bad about springing it on you—”

“—you do?”

He rolls his eyes, ignoring the comment. “—but Scarls, I’m telling you, you might surprise yourself if you’d stop being a brick wall for twelve seconds.”

“They don’t call it a defense mechanism without reason,” I argue.

“Are you blind? He’d swallow glass before he hurt you.”

“That’s a bit much.”

Chris shakes his head as we take a step closer to each other and match up our respective edges of the blanket. “It’s not. Everyone that has hurt you in the last ten years, he’s got the name of on his shit list and will give ‘em hell at the first given opportunity. Granted, some have lines of people waiting to do that—” I cut my eyes back up at him, and he shrugs sheepishly. “But to him it’s all the same. Someone hurts you; he wants to hurt them back.”

“When exactly did you get your degree in Renner Studies? I don’t think I’ve seen you do this much character analysis since Harvard Hottie.”

“You don’t think I don’t hear about this kinda stuff firsthand? C’mon, J, don’t be dense. You’re our girl. We talk about you just as much as you and Liz and the other girls talk about all of us. Renner just happens to be the one who talks about you the most.”

I reach forward and grab one of the corners of the blanket from his hand, finishing up the folding on my own. “I don’t know,” I finally mutter defeatedly. And it’s true: I don’t. Spending the last four hours trying not to stare at Jeremy too intently as my brain kicked into overdrive has left me with a bundle of question marks and no hope of finding an answer. It’s as though I keep stumbling upon the same 404 error all because my brain and my feelings and some other unseen factor that has yet to be identified are all in entirely different books and can’t make sense of what I’m asking them to collectively do.

“Well,” Chris hums, picking up his phone from where he left it on the table and pushes it back down into the pocket of his jacket. “When you know, you know who you need to talk to about it.”

He leaves me alone on the bus with nothing more than a blanket and a train of thought that has already pulled into the station.

Talking my way through anything involving my costars has been something that, since Singapore, was deemed a decidedly horrible idea.

Worldwide promotion has always come with the territory. Personally, I’ve found that promotion extending beyond the safety of the US and the UK does its own brand of damage to me mentally. I love being in another country, love being surrounded by people who are so passionate about the things that we choose to pour our time and energy into. But I’ve never loved being talked at instead of talked to – in a dozen different languages no less – and the jarring time shifts and the unique tiredness that settles in my bones whenever we’re not somewhere that is even remotely familiar. It’s copious amounts of alcohol and the knowledge that I am surrounded by a plethora of people who are also losing their minds that get me through it, at least until we’re on a plane and can sleep for a few hours.

I steered clear of international press that I was not explicitly needed for after Rose was born. I couldn’t take her with me, it was too taxing and emotionally crippling to be away from her, and when Romain and I decided that it was best we call things off for good, being away so much gave him potential ammunition for a custody settlement should we have locked antlers on anything. Willingly signing myself onto international press for Endgame was like diving into the deep end of the pool when I could have just simply dipped my toes in. I wanted as much time with my people as possible, even if it meant my only memories afterwards were those pieced together from press photographs and interviews that wound up on YouTube.

Singapore was the first premiere event for Endgame, complete with a large purple stage and an afterparty and a fancy dress made by some designer whose name I couldn’t even pronounce sober. Both Chrises, myself, Rudd, Brie, and Robert were the focal points of the evening – I was tipsy in a dark room, thankful that it was too dark to see the mascara running down my face. Singapore felt like the first nail in a coffin of finality and I didn’t have the first clue on how to handle it. So, I did shots and hoped they would suppress the emotional wreckage (they didn’t), expecting to wake up the next morning with puffy eyes and no recollection of the evening.

I wasn’t that lucky.

“You trying to drink the whole bar dry, sweetheart?” Behind me, someone does a sweeping motion with their hand that shifts all my hair off my shoulders. It’s a gentle gesture, one that’s usually done out of care – normally, I’ve only ever been acquainted with it when someone was sitting next to me while I threw up. The hand stops on my bare shoulder, skin warm against mine and the weight of it oddly heavy. When I glance around to see who the culprit is, Jeremy comes into view in my peripheral vision.

“Not actively.” He leaves his hand on my shoulder, fingers stretching out and resting along the curve of my shoulder cap as he stops walking, hip bumping into mine from where he’s got me snugly tucked into his side. “But the night’s still young.”

Jeremy laughs in my ear, the sound of it dancing down my spine. “Well, I’d be a shitty friend if I let you go at it alone.”

He lifts his free hand slightly to flag a bartender our way, one of them immediately appearing on our end of the bar. I’m sure somewhere in their work contracts for this event, they are obligated to come running should we make any sign of needing their services. Jeremy leans away from me so the bartender can hear his order. The music might be loud, but I can still hear is request for a round of shots. “Bacardi?” I groan once the tux scuttles back down the counter to locate a clean pair of shot glasses. “Are you trying to kill me?”

“I’d thought about asking for a Redheaded Slut, but the last thing I need is another controversy.”

I stare at him for a moment in silence, the hybrid of a choked sob, scoff, and laugh forcefully pushing its way from my throat in response only seconds later. Even in the low-lights his eyes sparkle, puzzled and bemused when he turns his head slightly to look at me.

He doesn’t get the chance to ask me what that was for, and I’m grateful, because I don’t have an answer for it. Our shots arrive, pushed neatly across the bar top in our direction. Jeremy leans forward to grab them, handing one off to me and picking up the other for himself. “Cheers, darlin’,” he prompts as he holds his glass out in front of me. I forcefully clink mine against his, Bacardi sloshing around and threatening to spill over.

I bring my glass up to my lips and tip it back, the rum leaving a burning trail as it slides down my throat and straight into the pit of my stomach. “Fuck,” I cough, slamming the glass back down onto the bar. Jeremy just laughs as he drinks his glass dry. It’s a low grumble in his throat, vibrating through his suit jacket and into my bones.

“Too strong?”

“No such thing, Renner.”

It’s then that the world shrinks down into a terribly small box: me, and Jeremy. His suit tonight is all black with gold accents to pay homage to his character, fitted in all of the right places, my throat suddenly very thick. He is right in front of me, something that he hasn’t been for what feels like ages and something that he won’t be for much longer. My emotions all night would best be summed up as on a trigger, every moment threatening to break me if it dares push down hard enough. It’s having my best friend at my fingertips that I feel something start to crack.

It happened earlier in the night, when we were standing on the stage in front of a sea of luminescent Avengers logos that waved and screamed at us as their tribute for eleven years of something magical. We’d all stood there next to each other at a loss for words, a tribute video blaring out overhead, and it had been damn near impossible not to get emotional. The person I’d sought out in the moment was the same person standing by my side, already clutching onto my hand to keep us both steady like every other time. I’d just leaned up into Jeremy as the shock of it all rolled through me in little laughs and the squeeze of my palm in his.

I’d been good at keeping my composure, playing off the few escaped tears back on the stage. It was somewhat like it is now: a dark room, me and Jeremy, music so loud it’s a little hard to think straight, everything hitting us all at once in a neat package of goodbye that we are set to begin receiving.

But goodbye is not a word I am looking forward to saying to Jeremy, because I know that when we say it, it will mean something. We live too separate of lives to be able to confidently say that goodbye is a formality, that we’ll still see each other all the time.

My eyes are beginning to betray me already as I motion for a bartender, insisting on another round for myself. Jeremy watches me carefully as I all but snatch the glass out of the girl’s hand once she finishes pouring it. The burn when I toss it back and down it in one gulp feels vaguely like fire, the tears springing up in the corners of my eyes. At least this will give me an excuse for the inevitable waterworks.

“Scar…” he says, tugging me closer to his side. I wipe the back of my mouth as I return the glass, glancing down at my hand. No transfer from my lipstick – that means either my makeup artist is a god (likely) or it’s been gone for a while now (also incredibly plausible). “What’s wrong?”

I shake my head. Not talking about it sounds like a fantastic idea. In fact, I’d love nothing more than to get my hands on some tequila, turn this into a party and do everything, anything but talk about it. Normally, Jeremy would be my go-to person for that, never one for exchanging words or indulging in the art of conversation. It’s why we make most of our bad decisions when in the company of one another. Of course, now he decides he’s going to stray from character and pull words out of me with a fucking crowbar.

“Hey.” His other hand makes its way under my chin, angling my head up so he can get a solid look at me. A few tears have already started their descent down my face – strictly from the alcohol, of course, but the concern swimming in his irises is enough to push me past the brink entirely – and his face shatters. “Hey,” he says, voice soft. “What is it?”

“I just…” I swallow, words drifting away from me.

“What?”

I ponder my answer, nearly drawing blood as I bite down on my lower lip to suppress the tidal wave surging in my chest. The words from Rob’s speech back out on the stage echo in my head, keeping rhythm with the phantom pains from where I’d dug my fingernails into my wrists to keep from openly sobbing in front of thousands of people: part of the journey is the end, but I am humbled and honored to have walked so much of this road with all of the people standing up here with me and to be among their ranks as we cross over the finish line. You are once in a lifetime kind of people. I’m glad I got this lifetime and that I got you in it.

I’m glad that I got this lifetime, and I’m glad that I got Jeremy in it.

“You know you’re my best friend, right?” I find myself blurting out without warning. Jeremy blinks a few times, the curveball taking him somewhat by surprise. Clearly, he was expecting something entirely different. “I just, I don’t feel like I say it enough, but your friendship means the world to me, and the last however-many-fucking-years it’s been have been the best and also kinda the worst, but you’ve always been there for me and doing all this next to you has made me the luckiest girl ever and I really, really don’t wanna lose you when this is all over and—”

Jeremy breaks out into laughter, pulling me in for a tight hug. “Honey, you’re gonna give yourself a heart attack, just breathe,” he mumbles along the slope of my neck, his breath warm on my skin. “You don’t ever have to say that shit to me. I know. I’ve always known.”

The pressure of his words effectively slams down my defenses and I find myself sobbing all over the shoulder of his designer suit. I’m a trembling mess in his arms, clutching to him like he’s the only thing keeping me afloat, and he’s just laughing softly in my ear as he holds me tight and lets me cry. He eventually falls silent, the hug getting tighter as he takes whatever it is that he needs before relaxing his grip. “C’mon,” he coaxes as he swipes his thumb underneath my eyes. “This is a party. Let’s go have a little fun.”

I let out a watery laugh. “This is our party, Renner, I’ll cry if I want to.”

He grins, and for a split second, I swear I see some of the lights reflect in the corners of his eyes, the pooled tears exploding into a million dazzling rainbows. Jeremy doesn’t cry, but there’s a first time for everything, I suppose. “C’mon,” he repeats, wrapping me back underneath his arm and turning the two of us away from the bar. “I like this song. Evans needs some company on the dance floor. And, if I remember correctly—”

“—that Bacardi’s got you toasted; I don’t think you’re in the frame of mind to remember anything—”

“—you really like to dance.”

 Buzzed he may be, but he’s not wrong, so I shut up and let him guide me out to the small section in the middle of the room that Chris has cleared out and designated as the dance floor. He’s already gotten Hemsworth and Rudd to join him, making Brie laugh as he dances around her, tugging on her hand in the same way a child would.

“Finally!” he yells out delightedly when he sees us. “People who understand!”

“Wouldn’t go that far, Shirley Temple!” Jeremy shouts back in response. Chris’s face falls into a deadpan expression for a single beat of the music, bouncing back almost immediately as he resumes his attempts of persuading Brie into a waltz.

Jeremy wraps one of my hands around his, claiming me as his partner for this song. I don’t know if what we’re doing even qualifies as dancing; most of it is drunken swaying at best, Jeremy’s other hand holding steady onto my lower back and pressing me close to him. I probably won’t remember this on the car ride back to the hotel, much less once I’m halfway sober and leaving Singapore, so I make the executive decision to hold onto to this moment while I have it.

A rogue spotlight sweeps over us, Jeremy’s blue eyes illuminated and sparkling for that brief moment as his pupils adjust and lock in on me. “What?” I ask when his sights meet mine and don’t budge. “God, do I look like a raccoon or something?”

“No,” he laughs, even though I’m about ninety-eight percent positive he’s a liar. Waterproof mascara was not included in tonight’s look. “It’s nothing. Just happy to be here with you.”

A tiny whimper breaks in my chest right as the light leaves to keep circling the room at random. I close the space between us, chin resting in the crook of his neck and my hand clutching his so tightly that I run the risk of breaking it. His cologne is strong, but it’s familiar and is as much of a blanket of comfort as the way Jeremy tugs me tighter into his embrace. I just hold onto him, the tears starting to skip down my face once again as we sway back and forth without any real rhythm or sense.

“Love you, Renner,” I whisper in a tiny voice, it shattering as I let the words roll off my tongue. He must feel the sobs wrecking around inside my ribcage and snagging on bone as I refuse to release them, because he gives my hand three quick squeezes.

“Love you right back, Scarlett.”

For someone who drank well over any legal limit in the world, I remember Singapore in a vivid amount of detail. I suppose there really wasn’t much to remember, other than my poor attempts to stop sobbing throughout the night and holding onto Jeremy as though he’d turn to ash if I dared let go of him. It told me one thing, though: saying things now is not a smart idea, not when I’ve gone nearly a decade without saying anything at all. It’s best to laugh and pretend everything is normal.

Except Chris is in my ear, nudging for me to look at Singapore and make it mean something, something that I am blatantly missing.

But there is also a good chance that I’m still partially hungover from that trip and can’t see clearly at all, even if I wanted to.

By the time I drape the blanket over the back of the couch where I found it, slide my shoes back on, and make my way off the bus, there’s a barely-visible glow coming from the top of the hill where someone’s switched on all the outdoor lights at the house. Miller and Chris have a good head start on me, hauling all of our shit up to the house and loudly debating over who has the heavier load. I hug my arms close to my chest as I start up the hill slowly, letting the house come fully into view.

Calling it a cabin feels like underselling it entirely. Likely as big as the nest, the stone and timber finish of the house make it pop against the background of trees and look like something from a story book I’d read my daughter. The warmth that the lights radiate invite me closer to the house – it might practically be May, but Tahoe is no LA. Without the sun out, I’d like to bet it’s a nice step back into winter.

Jeremy’s got the garage door opened by the time I reach the top of the hill and the actual driveway for the house. He’s come back outside, meeting Miller and Chris at the mouth of the doorway to help them with all of the stuff. I amble over to where they’ve dropped all the luggage in a pile, pulling my rolling suitcase off to the side.

“No, don’t worry about that, Scar,” Jeremy quickly insists as I make a move for my duffel bag. “I’ve got it.”

“Jeremy—”

“I’ve got it,” he repeats, the quick wave of his hand dismissing me. “Seriously. Go inside, it’s cold.”

I want to protest it and insist that I am fully capable of carrying my own shit, but I figure it’s a rather pointless thing to argue and I leave the boys to it. If they’re that insistent, then by all means: let them have at it.

My suitcase clatters noisily as I drag it up the staircase that leads from the garage into the house, having to nudge the door back open with my elbow to keep the bag from knocking little dents into the banister. When I make it fully inside, I find myself in a small hallway that’s off of the kitchen.

Apparently, we are signaling a plane, every light turned on in the kitchen and in the living room that sits on the other side of a countertop. The light brings a fuzzy sort of comfort to the space, an open embrace that is similar to Jeremy’s own. It’s warm; not as mausoleum-like and Japanese-influenced as the Nest is, more vacation-cabin vibe than anything else. Jeremy spends a lot of his time here when he’s not needed in LA for work-related things, of which I’m able to pick up on quickly. The way he’s fashioned everything here, from the positioning of the couch and the style of granite countertops right down to the solid Glade air fresheners in the scent Cashmere Woods, this house is his escape form the world – if the Nest was the vision of his brain, then Camp Renner is a vision of his soul.

“There are exactly zero bars of cellular service here,” Lizzie announces as she materializes in thin air, likely returning from the bathroom.

“And that’s a bad thing?” I question.

“Hell no,” she replies delightedly as she flops onto the sectional, kicking her legs up so she’s sprawled out across the entire length of it. “I can’t remember the last time I was in the middle of nowhere with zero bars.”

“A plane, maybe?” I prompt for her, rolling my suitcase through the kitchen as I head for the living room.

She points at me in acknowledgement. “Sure.”

Right about the time I settle myself onto the other end of the sectional, there’s a significant amount of commotion originating from the same door that I just walked through. Lizzie and I both get a show as Chris and Jeremy try their hardest to squeeze through the door with all of the luggage at the same time – the two of them don’t believe in making multiple trips, nor do they have a shred of patience between them. It takes a minute but they manage, dropping everything onto the floor unceremoniously once they’re fully through the doorway.

“Is now a bad time to tell you I have breakables in there?” Lizzie winces. She’s messing with them, I’m sure, but the death look Chris is shooting her is no joke. If it were tangible, it would be a knife embedded square between Lizzie’s eyes.

“Okay,” Jeremy prefaces, leaning up against the island in the middle of the kitchen and steepling his fingers together. “We have two things we need to figure out.”

Chris nods thoughtfully. “Avengers, assemble.”

Lizzie lifts one of her hands and motions them over. “Assemble more in this general direction, please.”

“Two things,” Jeremy repeats, keeping us on track. “One, what the fuck we’re gonna do about dinner, and two, what the sleeping arrangements are gonna look like. Both important. Both preferably decided on before my weary ass hits that couch. Let’s put all three of our collective brain cells together and think.”

“Please tell me that because we were so kind as to accompany you here, we get first dibs on the best rooming situations,” Lizzie says.

“I mean, you look mighty comfortable on that couch, Liz,” Chris points out devilishly. “And I would hate to break you two apart. Right, Renner?” Lizzie rolls her eyes, childishly sticking out her tongue at him.

Jeremy ignores their banter as he continues to think out loud. “Well, for starts, I am not letting any of you fuckers sleep in Ava’s room—”

Lizzie frowns. “I am perfectly trustworthy,” she argues, and Jeremy gives her a pointed look.

“—but there’s the four guest rooms, the couch in here, pretty comfy couch in the basement, a shit ton of air mattresses to go around, hopefully. There’s gonna be more people than rooms, though,” he sighs. “Any ideas on how we split people up?”

My mind welcomes a new puzzle to start working through, the cogs turning immediately. “People who bring their kids get priority on the guest rooms…then I guess you could just do double-ups on people who have had to survive press tours with one another? Done more movies together, higher chance you share a bed.”

Chris comes up behind where I’m sitting on the couch, both of his hands clapping down onto my shoulders. “You know, if you wanted to sleep with me, J, all ‘ya had to do was ask.”

I nearly break my neck whipping around to glare at him. He couldn’t be any more satisfied with his well-timed comment if he tried – he is the cat who swallowed the canary as he falls down into the loveseats with both arms stretched behind his head. “Yeah, I’ll pass,” I answer stiffly. He smirks at me in response.

I know what he’s doing, which buttons he’s purposefully pushing, and it is not appreciated in the slightest.

“Somebody can take the master bedroom tonight,” Jeremy continues, much to mine, Chris, and Lizzie’s disapproval. After all of the traveling we’ve done, the first thing we all eagerly look forward to is a night – preferably several – in our own beds. Then, there’s Jeremy, doing his best to be Host of the Year and put everyone above himself, as always. Frankly, I find is more senseless than I do chivalrous.

“Renner, you do not have to be that nice to us,” Chris protests. “Sleep in your own fuckin’ bed, man.”

“I can sleep in a guest bed just as easily as you guys can. Besides, it’s got more room, we’ll probably wind up shoving an air mattress in there and having someone double or triple-up in there come tomorrow anyways.” I choose not to look in Chris’s direction, knowing full well that he is burning little holes into the side of my temple after that comment. He may as well be volunteering me for the cause already.

Lizzie shakes her head. “Jeremy, get real.”

Jeremy’s eyes shift over to me, as if I’d actually take his side in all this. I spell out his answer for him all in the pointed look I throw back his way.

“Okay, fine, I’ll be a shitty host and sleep in the bed that’s got the luxury mattress—”

“—hold everything, you said nothing about a luxury mattress—”

“—and you guys can just take one of the guest rooms each for tonight? We can all draw straws for who gets stuck with the Great Snoring Fluffalo or something tomorrow once the others begin marching in one by one.”

The three of us all give our varying means of approval, Jeremy moving onto the next item of business. “So,” he says, hands clapping down on the granite. “Dinner.”

“I can’t imagine that Dominos delivers,” Lizzie muses.

“You would be correct.”

“Do you even have anything edible in this house?” I chime in.

Jeremy has already begun opening up random cabinets, looking in each of them for something that he can write off as dinner. “Yeah,” he replies very unconvincingly. “Somewhere.”

“Oh, fuck nah,” Chris swears after watching a moment of Jeremy’s cabinet rifling, pushing himself out of the chair and striding into the kitchen. “This ain’t gonna work, Renner’s idea of dinner is half a bottle of malt whiskey and a Ding-Dong that expired in ‘07. I’m not letting that man feed me.”

“Why? You two have the same palate!” I call after him.

“Should have bought more pretzels at the gas station,” Lizzie mumbles under her breath, nudging me with her foot.

“Should we intervene?” I whisper. Lizzie merely shakes her head.

“There are zero bars of cellular service, which means I’m gonna be pretty strapped for entertainment. And this,” she accentuates with the circular gesture of her finger. “Should suffice.”

We sit back and let the boys put their problem-solving skills to use, having to stifle any laughs into our hands or one another’s shoulders to prevent from getting a particularly nasty glare from one of them. They stand in front of the refrigerator with the doors wide open, assessing the barely-there contents and trying to figure out what the two of them could possibly whip up for dinner. They begin arguing in hushed tones with one another, insistent on accepting absolutely no assistance or feedback from me and Lizzie. It’s amusing for the first ten minutes, but quickly loses its novelty.

Lizzie reaches her breaking point after the unfortunately legitimate suggestion of an ice sandwich makes its way back to us. She rolls off the couch in one fluid motion, stomping her way into the kitchen. “Okay, you’re letting all the cold air out,” she informs them as she squeezes her way through the space between their bodies.

It’s always been my belief that women are much more efficient decision makers than men. Lizzie is further proof to my theory: what took them upwards of fifteen minutes, Lizzie does in six seconds and a quick once-over glance. “Renner, you have chips?”

“Who the fuck doesn’t have chips?”

“Good,” Lizzie says, the upper half of her body leaning forward to get something out of the fridge. “Did you acquire this chicken sometime within the last year?”

“You do know that I’m a grown man and can take care of myself.”

“That is not an acceptable answer.”

“I’ve kept a child alive for six years.”

“I’m sure that could be argued.”

Jeremy groans, back slamming up against the island as he folds both arms over his chest. “I bought it last week,” he finally responds. Lizzie reemerges from the fridge, spinning around on her heel with a satisfied grin stretched over her lips.

“Excellent. One of you get the chips and the other can turn the stove on. I’m making nachos.”

The boys do as she says without comment. I catch Chris muttering out of the corner of his mouth as he and Jeremy are walking away from Lizzie, “I knew we invited them for a reason.”

I know Lizzie to like two things in life: Master Chef, and telling people what to do. For her, this is her moment to shine as she begins delegating jobs to the rest of us in the project we’re now calling dinner. The only thing assigned to me is to cut things up and pass them off to her once she gives the telltale signal that she’s ready – she doesn’t trust Chris or Jeremy with a knife, and rightfully so. I’m not quite sure I trust myself with the knife, but it’s preferable to the alternative. Lizzie gives herself a pretty lengthy list of to-dos; prepping the chicken, fixing the chicken, rounding up everything from Jeremy’s fridge, mixing everything together, putting it all together, popping it in the oven once it’s ready, and final presentation. Jeremy is tasked to drinks, and Chris is ordered to turn on the oven and then immediately leave the kitchen.

Once I’m rendered completely useless and ushered away from Lizzie’s handiwork (maybe this is what people who aren’t out promoting a film until they’re blue in the face get to do – they can have actual hobbies), Jeremy motions me over to the dining room table where he and Chris have retired to. “Come,” he invites loudly. “Join the rest of the incompetent.”

“I am not incompetent,” I correct him matter-of-factly, sliding into the seat that’s adjacent to his. He’s at the head of the table, so I have to swivel at an angle in order to place both my feet on the seat of his chair next to his leg. “Unusable, maybe, but not incompetent. That’s all you two.”

From across the table, Chris raises a singular eyebrow at me. If it wouldn’t warrant any kind of conversation afterwards, I’d unsheathe the fork from where it’s buried in between a paper napkin and throw it directly at his head.

“Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future,” Jeremy counters.

“There’s a dad bod in my future?”

Jeremy’s face falls. “Hey, they’re in right now.”

I snort, my foot nudging at the side of his leg. “If it helps you sleep at night, hotshot.”

Chris leans back in his chair, head falling back in defeat. “Lizzie! Hurry the fuck up already, the married couple is making me lose my appetite!”

I pray to whatever god that might be tuned in that my face isn’t as flushed as it feels.

Lizzie emerges from the kitchen a short time later with a plate that could rival the circumference of a tire, both hands clad in lime green alligator oven mitts as she carefully sets dinner down in front of us. “Everybody say thank you, mom,” she prompts sardonically.

“Thanks mom,” Chris parrots back mockingly, complete with a dazzling smile as his hand beelines towards the platter.

Lizzie rips off the oven mitts, hands settling over her hips as she admires her handiwork. “You’re welcome, you ungrateful children.”

“Ungrateful? You wouldn’t let us help you!”

“Yes, because I don’t want to spend my vacation with food poisoning!”

Barbeque chicken nachos and Tsingtaos don’t necessarily scream the dinner of A-list celebrities who are celebrating an eleven-year wrap of arguably one of the most successful franchises of all time, but it’s what we have to work with and it hits the spot. Lizzie’s not a bad cook, and for once, we don’t have to make the usual mad dash and come dangerously close to ripping someone else’s hand off in the name of getting enough food before it all goes. There’s nothing chaotic or rushed, even if it usually is just the good kind of chaos. We leave the giant plate in the middle of the table, the four of us picking as we go in between the casual conversation and short bursts of laughter that rattle straight through our ribcages. It’s the moments like these where the lines between comradeship as dictated by a contract and the family you hand-picked for yourself blur completely.

I’ve never been at peace when in the presence of people. There’s always been something that someone’s wanting out of me, whether it’s a picture or an exclusive or forgiveness or something else entirely that I can’t give, and it sets me on edge. Comfort is hard to find when I’m in a room of people who work in the same industry as me; it’s either about competition or comparing battle wounds or they’re really nothing more than strangers of the less-than-perfect variety. There’s nothing comfortable or peaceful about it, about them. It’s why I duck away into the throes of isolation more often than not. No use in playing a game you’re not all that interested in anyways.

But here, with my now ex-costars and full-time friends, even if we are something like a human hurricane when all thrown together, everything feels as if it’s in proper balance. Like things are the way they should be and there’s nothing I need to concern myself with. I feel the most at home within myself when I’m with these people – they’re the good men in all the storms, the pillars of strength and sources of smiles and sunshine in the morning that have kept me waking up for the last ten something years when I didn’t have much else.

We finish up dinner and make it through our third round of drinks when the Uno cards make a grand appearance, and any semblance of peace leaves the premises.

Uno is a vicious game, the four of us easily the most competitive any time the words game night were breathed into the open. Sure, Cheadle and Hemsworth and fuck, Mackie, they’re all tyrants, but myself, Jeremy, Lizzie and Chris are hell to be had. There’s nothing fun about the game we’re locked in: it’s war. Jeremy and Lizzie have made each other draw nearly half the deck in continued acts of vengeance, Chris keeps changing the color back to blue, and I’ve been clinging tightly to my sacred draw four until the right opportunity presents itself.

“Reverse,” Lizzie says, slapping down her card right before Chris has the opportunity to put down yet another color change card (I can see it there in his eyes) and saving me from a fate of having to draw from the deck.

I glance down at my hand, mind flickering between my two possible options out of my three remaining cards. It’s cruel, but there are no friends in Uno. So I lay out my draw four, Jeremy’s guffaw of disbelief following immediately behind.

“Scarlett!”

“Sorry,” I say, the tone in my voice indicative of my not being sorry whatsoever.

His eyes are steel as he guns me down. “You know I’m an officer of the law, right?” Lizzie groans loudly at the mention, coupled with the dull sound of her head colliding with the back of the chair.

“You’ve mentioned it once or twice,” I say nonchalantly as I slide the deck closer to him.

“I should have you arrested for that.”

Chris erupts into hysterical laughter at that comment, clutching onto his chest tightly as if that will help keep his heart beating while he wheezes away. My eyes narrow, cutting sharply at him. It doesn’t faze him in the slightest.

“Draw your four and shut up. We’re changing the color to red.”

“Paying homage to your name, I see,” Chris makes note once he’s stopped laughing beyond the point of words, starting to sift through his hand for his next move.

One of my eyebrows arches slightly. “Perhaps.”

“Red’s also the color of my blood, which she is apparently out for,” Jeremy grumbles.

“All’s fair in love and Uno, honey.”

Chris throws down a seven, and after some considerable thought (board games are her own personal brand of war strategy) Lizzie puts down a three. I grin, slapping down an eight. “Uno!” I announce delightedly, and the rest of the table is on red alert. We’ve had five or six of these moments, but none of them have been mine. They know what’s coming if they’re not careful: I’m the snake. I wait it out and strike when they’ve all got me in their blind spot.

“Ah, shit,” Jeremy swears as he begins rifling through his lovely deck of cards.

“Now would be a really great time to arrest her, Renner,” Lizzie suggests, and Chris starts snickering like he’s back in the third grade. Underneath the table, my foot forcefully collides with his shin.

Jeremy lays down a yellow eight, effectively throwing me off my game plan. “I’ve got a pair of cuffs upstairs.”

“Where? In the bedroom?” Lizzie teases. Chris is laughing so hard that I’m somewhat scared he’s going to fall straight over into the floor and give himself a concussion.

“Wouldn’t you love to know?”

“Chris!” I bark. “Your turn!”

“Ah, god,” he gasps for air as he sits upright, wiping underneath his eyes. “I fuckin’ love you animals.”

He puts down his color change card, as predicted. “Uno,” he declares smugly, and I see the brief panic in Lizzie’s eyes. “And we’re changing to blue.” Well, fuck me.

Before Lizzie’s got the chance to throw something down, Chris holds up his hand in pause. “Eh, hold on, Lizzo. Let’s make things interesting. New rule.”

Jeremy falls back in his seat, pushing his glasses up higher on the bridge of his nose. “You cannot make up new rules to the game an hour into the game. It is forbidden.”

“We did this all the time at my house.”

Jeremy’s eyes enlarge slightly, hand haphazardly flapping around as he gestures wildly. “This ain’t your house, dude.”

“Look, two of us have Uno, and you have half the fuckin’ deck, Renner, you better take this,” Chris says. “I’m going to act something out a la Charades. Person who guesses what I’m doing first can throw out all of their blues.”

Lizzie grins like the fucking devil. “Oh, I am so there.”

“Renner? Scarlett? ‘Ya in?”

I shrug, and Jeremy sighs. “Sure, whatever. Do it.”

Being as theatric as he is, Chris takes Charades very seriously. He slides his chair back before he stands up, smoothing out his t-shirt. “Okay,” he prefaces. “This is an action.”

“This is Charades,” Lizzie says. “Zip ‘ya lips.”

Chris obliges, launching into his performance. He starts by jogging in place in a very exaggerated manner, the rest of us all slumped back in our chairs as we observe.

“Running,” I call out, and Chris tilts his hand in a so-so motion.

“You’re running a race!” Lizzie suggests. Chris shakes his head.

He then stops in his tracks, lifting his arms over his head and whipping them around in a circular motion. The three of us stare at him in total bewilderment. “What in the literal fuck,” Jeremy utters out. “This is why we do not come up with new rules.”

Chris’s face falls. “C’mon!” he says, throwing his entire body into the rotating. “What’s this?”

“Hey – no hints!”

Chris then goes back to his over-exaggerated run, stopping every few seconds to do the little spinning motion in the air. Personally, I am at a loss for words – I don’t have anything blue in my hand, so it’s almost moot for me to be trying to crack DaVinci’s code, but this entire ordeal is vaguely like a car crash. It’s hard to look away from the disaster unfolding in front of my eyes. Jeremy and Lizzie, on the other hand, are just yelling out random things.

“Running with no sense of direction!”

“Some kind of new fit-person workout that involves running and doing the…is that the fuckin’ hula?”

“You’re in the running of a hula competition!”

“Running yourself ragged!”

“You’re…running in circles?”

“You’re running away from something?” Chris likes the sound of that, because he stops mid-gyration to shake his head. Lizzie sits up slightly in her chair. “So you’re running towards it?”

He doesn’t give anything else, just goes back to his prancing. Something’s there on the edge of Lizzie’s tongue, I can see it, she’s just trying to find the words. “You’re…uh, shit, running into a storm?”

Chris nearly drops to his knees, signaling with the pinch of his fingers that she’s close.

Jeremy’s sneaky as fuck and takes it. “Chasing a storm!”

It’s physically paining Chris to keep his mouth shut at this point – his own damn fault for picking the most obscure action – and he yells rather forcefully, “What kind of storm?” He does the little circular motion again.

There’s a scuffle as Lizzie jumps up from her seat, all but flapping her entire hand of cards around for us to see. She’s watching Chris in pure agony, the words not coming to her properly. “It’s…it’s…fuck—”

“Tornado!” Jeremy shouts, one of his hands slamming down on the table. “You’re chasing a tornado!”

“Oh, thank fuckin’ god!” Chris sighs in relief, both fists pumping above his head. “Renner, my man. Cleanse yourself of all your blues.”

Lizzie drops unceremoniously back into her seat, pouting. “Pick something a little less obvious next time, why don’t you,” she grumbles as she starts looking for a card to put down.

“No need for that,” Jeremy says. He then puts down every single card that he’s holding, face up so we can see the results. Jeremy’s been holding onto an entire deck of blue cards, the son of a bitch, meaning that Chris’s little rule change has just won him the game. I feel my jaw hit the floor, Chris is wearing his regret very plainly on his face, and Lizzie looks as though she’s going to lunge across the table and kill Jeremy with her bare hands.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Lizzie screeches.  

Jeremy just laughs, leaning back in his chair. “Whoever shuffled did a shit job, and I can’t thank them enough for it.”

“But…” Chris splutters, pointing down at the color change card that just effectively fucked all of us over. “But you…the rule change…”

“That’s what you call a poker face, motherfucker!” he crows gleefully.

Wordlessly, the rest of us toss our cards into the middle of the table, shock still ravaging through us while Jeremy just laughs and finishes off the rest of his beer. The word rematch is visibly lingering there on Lizzie’s tongue, something that will likely keep us occupied for the next six hours if we let her have her wishes.

“As fun as Avengers game night is shaping up to be,” Chris says, beating Lizzie to the figurative (and possibly literal) punch. “I would much rather do this from the comfort of my sweatpants and after I’ve had a shower.”

“I second that,” I add.

Jeremy’s eyes do a quick sweep of the table. “You guys can go take your stuff up to your rooms, get comfy. I can start a fire out back or something for us.”

No one argues that, so we all scatter to the four winds with Jeremy directing each of us towards one of his many guest rooms. Chris wiggles his eyebrows at me when Jeremy says that he’s putting me in the guest room that’s on the same hall as the master, and I make sure to punch him in the shoulder with the hand that’s got the most rings on it.

I’m left alone in my room, tossing my duffel bag onto the base of the bed as I take a quick glimpse around. There’s not much to it, really – a full-size bed, TV on the wall over a chest of drawers, half bathroom through one door and a tiny closet through the other. The wall that the headboard is pushed up against is the accent wall, painted a deep shade of maroon. I feel like if given a few candles, this is the kind of room that I’d escape in to clear my mind and feel safe, cocooned in warmth.

I take my time in stripping off my clothes and finding my pajamas that have been buried down at the bottom of my suitcase. Someone upstairs has turned on a shower – probably Chris – and the sound of water flowing through the pipes above my head could sound something like rain if I lied a little to myself. It’s all continuous and relaxing as I slip into a cotton pair of shorts and a very old T-shirt that saw its last better days nearly five years ago.

Time slows down even more once I shuffle into the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face and rinse off the weariness. I carefully watch myself in the mirror as I tug my hair back off my neck and shoulders with the scrunchie on my wrist, letting the few wisps of my bangs that refuse to go up in a tie hang loose. The familiar pair of eyes meet with mine in the glass after they finish flickering across the entire image reflected back at me. It’s been a long day – hell, it’s been a long month – but the night is still young.

Stars are not visible in New York City. Stars aren’t really visible in California if you aren’t in the exact middle of nowhere that the lights from the city don’t interfere. I’m not used to seeing them in abundance, which is alright by me. It’s not something that’s ever been make or break for me, looking up at the stars and making wishes or trying to make meaning of the stories they’ve got written there in the night skies. You don’t miss what you’ve never really known. But I can see the stars just from standing at the glass door that leads out onto Jeremy’s patio, where I see him sitting in front of the fire pit and poking a stick into an already dancing flame, and I feel my breath being stolen away.

They are exquisite in the way they cluster above the tree line, the little pinpricks of light that weave a story across the night sky and make everything grow farther away from a reality that’s been busy crushing me into the ground.

I push the door open and let the night air that’s stained with smoke rush around me, Jeremy’s head instantly snapping up to see who’s joined. His lips break out into a lazy smile at the sight of me, twitching slightly after his eyes leave down my face and trail down the rest of my body. “Were you expecting a tropical vacation, Miss Johansson?” he teases.

I roll my eyes good-naturedly, arms wrapping around myself in a loose hug. “Well, you did say you were starting a fire.”

“That I did.” For emphasis, Jeremy pokes at something in the fire pit that makes sparks go shooting up into the sky. The way I find myself gravitating towards the warmth of the fire is the only indication I have about how cold it actually is out here.

Jeremy pats his free hand on the spot next to him on the wicker sofa, which I take. “The other two still inside?” he asks as he clears his throat, eyes never leaving the ember that the end of his poker has landed on top of.

I nod. “Someone’s in the shower. I’d bet Chris, and then Lizzie’s got a thirteen-step skin care routine thing that she takes very seriously, so that’s probably what she’s doing.”

“You didn’t take very long,” he observes, the grin cracking a few more lines into the sides of his cheeks. “What, no thirteen-step skin care routine?”

The scoff pushes from my throat before I have time to catch it. “Please. My idea of skin care is very similar to yours: cold water and caffeine.”

“I knew you were my girl for a reason,” he laughs. Both of my hands clasp together and I let them fall in my lap, fingers tucked in between my legs. “Did you call Rose?”

My lips purse together. “Left her a message for when she wakes up.”

Jeremy nods slowly. “How many hours ahead are they?”

“Nine. She might be up already, I don’t know, but I do know that if she’s not and I wake her up by calling, Romain or his mother will put some kinda fucking curse on me that they’ve been saving to use since we filed for divorce.”

His smile starts to fade a little. “Well,” he says drily. “Better hope he and Sonni didn’t swap notes. Otherwise I think it’s safe to say you’d be fucked, sweetheart.”

I don’t know how to react to that. I’ve never known how to react whenever he brings Sonni up in casual conversation, because the feelings she evokes out of me are anything but casual. The cushion underneath me makes a weird sort of rustling noise as I inch closer to him, one of my hands threading through the crook of his elbow and resting there. It’s meant as a comforting gesture, but of course he misreads it.   

“Cold?” Jeremy laughs, cracking the moment.

“I’m from New York, I can handle a little cold.”

“Which is fantastic, but you’re dressed for Mexico.” His actions speak louder than his words do as he scoots closer to me, our legs pressed flush together. I hug his arm close to my chest and lay my head there on his shoulder, it all a perfect fit. Underneath my cheek, I feel him exhale.    

We sit like that as the seconds tick by, filled with a silence of the flames crackling and the wind blowing the trees behind us and the occasional sound of wildlife god only knows where. The fire dances without provoking, but Jeremy influences a move or two as he keeps poking his stick around in the embers to send sparks up.

He’s the one who breaks off our quiet. “You started thinking about what’s next?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“I’m having trouble seeing into tomorrow,” I answer with a sigh.

“Well, you’re not alone there.”

My attention stays enraptured with the way he’s agitating the rocks at the bottom of the pit, words falling out however they please. “I just…I know closing this chapter is a good thing. Makes room for bigger and better. Doesn’t mean I want to, though. Guess I’m just dragging my heels a little bit.”

“You’re sitting next to the man that willingly offered up his house as playground for the foreseeable future to all of his hellion castmates,” Jeremy retorts. “I might as well be standing in the middle of the road like a jackass.”

“Okay, yeah, you win,” I concede with a laugh. He doesn’t say anything, but I feel the low grumble of laughter somewhere in his body.

“Thanks for letting me one-up you.”

“What else am I good for?”

I steal a look at him, something about it intriguing me. Placing it is complicated; it’s like no matter what he does, he can’t conceal the smile and how it spreads across his face, the sparkle in his eyes and the shadows the fire is casting on his face making him appear younger. Happier. “What?” I ask softly, leaning back a little.

Jeremy shakes his head. “It’s nothing,” he insists. “I’m just happy to be here with you.”

The words are like ice water as they go shooting through my bloodstream. I’ve heard that before, in a moment that I should have never had a memory of. There, wrapped up tightly in his arms in Singapore with the tears flooding my face and ruining Jeremy’s designer suit because I didn’t want to even entertain the thought of letting him go.

But he’s still here despite it being over. We’re still here holding on, together, like all of the stars over my head spelled it out and decreed it so, long before we even knew this day would come—

My heart tangles up in my throat. He’s looking at me the same way he’s always looked at me: like I’m a star. Maybe that’s why the thought of letting Jeremy go scares me so much.

You only miss what you know.

And I don’t want to know anything different.

Chapter Text

I fall asleep in peace, so it’s only fair that I wake up to chaos.

I manage to sleep until about eleven, which is a rarity for me, even if I did get back to my room somewhere around two-thirty and have generally been running on fumes for the last month of my life. Something about sitting around a fire for several hours with three of my best friends in the world, laughing and soaking in one another’s company put a relaxer in my bloodstream and sent me right off to sleep once we retired back to our bedrooms. The rest a person gets in the middle of a press tour is only just considered so, and that’s if you look at it in a certain light and squint one of your eyes. It’s the days after when the crash is the hardest, and I wake up feeling like my battery has been significantly refilled.  

This is a good thing, because I desperately need it in order to keep up with the company that is underfoot when I finally walk out of my room.

The kitchen is alive, and it’s not just from the sunlight that’s pouring in through all of the open windows and glass doors that frame the room. Music’s coming from somewhere that I can’t directly pinpoint, loud as it throws us back all the way into the seventies. Added on top of that is the swell of conversation from the kitchen table, whose population has since grown in the last few hours.

Robert, who I didn’t know could make an entrance quiet enough that I’d miss it, is the first to take notice of my sleepy shuffling through the living room “Oh look, it’s Sleeping Beauty!” he announces, face brightening at the sight of me. Everyone’s attention shifts back towards me, and I toss three fingers up in a small wave. Susan, Chris, Lizzie, and Rudd are all sitting around the table, their expressions of greeting varied.  

“Did you get silencers for your chopper, Downey?” I ask blearily. “Didn’t hear you guys come in.”

He rolls his eyes good-naturedly, the empty chair sitting next to him that he’s got an arm lazily extended across the back of now my designated seat once he begins tapping on it. “You must not know my wife very well if you think she’s letting me operate any sort of flying apparatus.”

“Maybe not,” I concede, tucking myself into the seat next to him. “But I know you incredibly well, and I know that you don’t do well when you don’t get your way.”

Robert’s face goes blank as he ponders that. “Huh. Guess I ought to give you more credit, Scar.”

I force my mouth upwards into the showiest smile that I can manage. “Damn right.”

“Surprised they didn’t wake you up,” Lizzie comments. “It was like opening the doors and letting the circus come in.”

I shrug half-heartedly, slouching back in my chair. “When I’m out, I’m out.”

“Alright, people, brunch is rea—oh!” Jeremy seemingly materializes out of nowhere wearing an apron, what seems to be his staple heather grey t-shirt underneath that’s covered in something white. His eyes lock onto me first thing, the smile that spreads over his face like an involuntary muscle memory of sorts. “Morning, sweetheart,” he says as he dusts off his hands. “Nice of you to join us.”

I make a gesture, both palms extended and face up. “That’s me: nice.”

“You like French toast?”

“Who doesn’t like French toast?”

“Hopefully none of you, because I slaved over it for longer than I will ever admit.” He jerks his thumb over his shoulder, pointing in the direction of the kitchen. “Got the whole spread up and out like the great host I am.”

Chris raises his hand tentatively. “Are we allowed to go tear through it, or do we have to wait until you’re done playing favorites among your guests?”

I might be a few minutes into the world of the awake, but I haven’t lost my touch – the glare I send him could cut through a diamond without any struggle.

If it fazes Jeremy any, he doesn’t let it show, instead wiping his hands on his apron for good measure. “Go have at it,” he encourages. “And eat up, ‘cause I’m not feeding you hellions until later tonight. The less meals I have to cook for you people, the better.”

Lizzie’s the first one out of her chair, her hand brushing over the top of Jeremy’s shoulder as she slips by him. “Aw, Renner,” she pouts. “Feeling the love.”

I stay in my seat while everybody else gets up and makes their way into the kitchen. Jeremy picks up on it, because he stays firmly rooted in place. “Not hungry?” he asks, reaching behind him to untie the apron.

“Oh, no, I’m starving,” I diffuse. “Just don’t feel like getting in between what might actually turn out to be Civil War, round two over a blueberry.”

He makes a face, frown tugging on the corners of his lips. “I didn’t buy blueberries. Sorry, Scar.”

“That’s okay, I’m more of a strawberry girl.”

“Now those I did buy. Especially since they’re in season.”

From some crevice in my brain, there’s a tiny voice whispering to me that the whole ‘they’re in season’ thing is simply a deflection from the truth. That I know why he bought them really. It seems that Chris Evans has gotten his wish in all of this, with something stirring awake inside me last night out by the fire. Whatever it is, it has flooded through my bloodstream like some slow-acting poison and is starting to effect how I see, how I think, how I feel.

Something has switched me onto auto-pilot, because I find myself saying “You’re a good man, Renner,” as I get up to head for the kitchen.

I take my time milling around the kitchen as I fix myself a plate, making good on nearly driving a tiny fork through Chris’s hand to send him a message to quit his fucking around. Jeremy’s outdone himself with breakfast – or brunch, if time specifics truly matter – which doesn’t come as a surprise to me. No matter what he’d have other people believe, he thrives when he has company to tend to. Every stop that he can pull out in order to make somebody feel like they’re as much at home with him as they are anywhere else, he’ll do it. It’s an everyone-before-myself mentality that he has running whether he acknowledges it or not. I figure that I’d be doing the both of us a disservice if I don’t pile the food onto the little plastic plates that he’s also apparently gone out and bought for this specific occasion.    

Jeremy sits next to me at the table, an entire corner of his plate piled up with strawberries that he aligns directly in my reach. Robert, ever the conversationalist, keeps us all entertained as he prattles through story after story that he’s accumulated in the last handful of days that we’ve spent apart in the last month. I fly through most of my food, resorting to picking strawberries off of Jeremy’s plate without any resistance from him. It catches Chris’s eye – of course it fucking does, he’s practically tuned into everything that I’m doing when Renner is around as if it’s going to prove a point – and he just smirks, taking a long sip of coffee that I silently hope he will drown in.

We don’t get to sit in our post-brunch coma for long, as the doorbell starts ringing and it becomes something like Grand Central Station in the living room. First to show up is Hemsworth and Elsa, surprisingly just as kid-free as Robert and Rudd were. I am alerted of his presence by him sneaking up behind me, shaking my shoulders so violently that I jump out of my skin and nearly whack my head on the back of the chair, and then him stealing the half-eaten crust of my leftover French toast off my plate before sliding out of my now-murderous reach.

“Guess it’s time for me to leave!” I drone as he appears in front of me on the opposite side of the table, cheeks stuffed like a chipmunk.

“Never,” he mumbles around a mouthful of food. “You said we could have a wrestling rematch whenever we were done filming all these movies, and that time? It’s come.”

“I recall no such thing.”

“Moscow doesn’t ring a bell?”

I snort. “My memories of Moscow are all secondhand, as told to me by my publicist.”

“I’m happy to fill in any remaining holes. You lost the fight.”

I roll my eyes, picking up my coffee and draining the last little bit that remains. “I was hammered, not brainless.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Quit antagonizing her,” Elsa chides as she comes up behind me, her arms draping around my neck as she hugs my shoulders from behind. I give Hemsworth a look as I rest my hand over her arms in a half-return of her hug, feeling mighty protected by Elsa’s sudden presence.

“Yeah, Hemi. Quit antagonizing me.”

He scowls, picking up an abandoned orange slice off of Lizzie’s plate.

“Hi Scar,” Elsa says as she kisses me on the cheek. “When’d you get here?”

“Last night. Liz, Evans and I drove down with Renner.”

“It’s a miracle you’re all still in one piece,” she whistles.

“No kidding. Did you guys fly in this morning?”

She nods. “I told marido loco over there that I’d get on a red-eye flight when I was dead and he could check my coffin through luggage.”

“Speaking of luggage,” Hemsworth says as he pulls the orange rind out from between his teeth. “Renner, where the fuck should I go put all of ours?”

“You and Downey can rochambeau for the room Evans slept in last night,” Jeremy yells from the kitchen where he’s gone to start cleaning things up. Across the table, I watch Chris’s jaw drop.

“My room?! What about the other two?”

Lizzie leans over and rests a hand on Chris’s shoulder, the gesture wildly placating. “We’re ladies, Dorito. Our rooms obviously aren’t gonna go on auction first. Besides, you and the couch seem like a match made in heaven.”

Chris’s eyes narrow. “Keep pushing it, Olsen, see where it gets you.”

“You love me,” she sings as she slides her chair back, grabbing her plate and waltzing back into the kitchen.

“Bring me some French toast on your way back!” Hemsworth calls after her. Elsa rolls her eyes and whacks him in the shoulder as she walks by him.

I run my fingers through my hair, letting them catch on some of the tangles I haven’t bothered to properly brush out. “Well, if these are my last moments of not having to share a bathroom, I’m going to make full use of them and take a shower,” I declare, pushing back from the table.

“You gonna save water?” Evans asks me, mischievous smirk draped over his face as it encourages me to finish the rest in my mind.

I decide to use his own words against him as my exit line. “Keep pushing it, Evans, see where it gets you.”

I proceed to spend the next hour of my life using what I’m sure has to be all of the hot water, just standing in the shower and letting the pelting droplets of hellfire beat into my back and melt all the remains of my tiredness and stress away. There’s a solid layer of condensation covering the mirror when the water finally goes cold and I force my limbs to carry me out of the shower, the steam filling the room making everything foggy. I drag a hand over the surface of the mirror to clear a little place where I can see myself, my cheeks flushed from the heat and wet strands of hair sticking to my forehead.

My eyes meet their reflection in the fogged-up glass. Breathe, I command myself. Get out of your head.

Madness is one of the few strings keeping me tethered to reality, and although my ears are ringing from the blood pumping in them after a hot shower, I can tell someone’s turned up the music downstairs in the living room and has changed it to something much more aggressive than the Beatles. I dig out a pair of jeans from my suitcase and the first casual shirt that my hand touches to throw on. I’d neglected to pack a hairdryer, so I quickly ruffle my hair with a towel and tug it back with the hair tie resting on my wrist before I make my descent back down into the chaos.

I’ve missed quite a bit, apparently, because the living room and kitchen are teeming with people when I return. Hemsworth, Elsa, Rudd and Susan haven’t moved from their seats at the kitchen table, Robert and Chris have swindled Karen and Don into what’s looking like a very vicious game of Boggle, and Mark’s sitting with Brie off on the couch as spectators to the game.  

I round the couch, placing both of my hands on Brie’s shoulders. It startles her a little, relaxing slightly when she realizes that it’s me and melts backwards a little into the hug I give her from behind. “You smell really good,” she informs me.

“Thanks. Just got out of the shower.”

“Damn, how long have you been here?” she asks.

“Long enough to stake my claim on a room,” I reply, sitting down on the couch’s arm. “Which you should absolutely join me in if you haven’t been deemed to a fate of the couch already. I’m hoping if I go ahead and fill it to capacity, I won’t be stuck with a freight train.”

“I will most likely take you up on that offer, Johansson.” I beam down at her – it is not a secret that every woman that’s come on our set has been fully appreciated and loved by me. After years of being the only girl among the sausage fest, any crumbs I got thrown I held onto tightly. It’s resulted in friendships that’s almost like a sisterhood of sorts. Especially when filming Endgame, myself, Brie, Danai and Karen were all like a tiny cult.

“Oh, what am I? Chopped liver?” Mark protests.

“Aw, Ruffalo,” I drawl out. Brie’s face remains stoic.

“Yes,” she answers for me. “That is exactly what you are.”

“No, he’s the freight train I was referencing.”

“Seriously, when did you get here exactly?” Mark asks, ignoring the digs. “When did you have time to take a shower?”

“I was part of the band of idiots who drove down here yesterday. And the shower happened after brunch.”

Mark looks appalled. “You got in a car? With Renner behind the wheel?”

“Hell no. I haven’t completely lost it.” I nod in the direction of the Boggle game that’s occurring only a few feet away. “Who’s winning?”

“Karen,” Brie responds. “Although it’s a little too soon to tell anything, they had a fifteen-minute debate on whether or not ‘spake’ is an alternative past-tense version of ‘speak.’ I’ve never seen someone get that close to murder before.”

“Spake?” I reiterate in disbelief. “That’s not a word.”

Don hears this, twisting around. “Thank you!” he yells exasperatedly. Evans rolls his eyes as his face contorts up and he begins mocking Don. Clearly, it’s still a sore topic.

I join Brie and Mark in the spectator sport of Boggle, content to relax and let someone else do the entertaining for once. Brie tugs me down into the floor between her legs so she can French braid my hair, the feeling of her fingers weaving through my damp hair oddly relaxing. It’s a sharp contrast from the heated debates a few feet over about how many points a word is actually worth.  

“Where’s Renner?” I ask after I give another solid glance around the room and deduce that he and Lizzie both are still absent from the fray.

“Pretty sure he’s outside?” Brie guesses. “I think somebody else showed up and he went out to play welcome wagon.”

I ease myself off of the floor. “Going to investigate?” Mark asks.

“Always. Plus, I’d really like to be out of the line of fire when Evans inevitably throws his entire board at Don’s head.”

I leave the house from the garage exit, unsurprised to see the garage door up and sunlight pouring in through the opening. Lizzie’s standing in the mouth of it, hand shielding her eyes as she looks at something on her phone. “Thought you liked having zero bars,” I observe as I saunter up next to her.

She lifts her head quickly, the surprise of a new voice fading almost instantly. “We have lost people,” she informs me, an edge of irritation in her voice.

“Lost people?”

She nods succinctly, holding her phone up as emphasis. “Yep. Apparently, it didn’t matter that Renner had the wrong number for Sebastian, because Anthony deemed this the perfect time for them to take their bromance to a whole other level and make the trip together.”

Both of my eyebrows raise up into my hairline. “The two of them? Drove? Anywhere?”

“No, they flew, but they have to drive from the airport to here and somehow they have miraculously managed to get themselves lost. I guess it isn’t that far out of character for them, those two could will the moon out of orbit if they put their heads together.”

“So, you’re what? Tracking them?”

“Attempting to, anyways. Renner went to get something that ended in TV that will supposedly help us locate them and then herd them like cattle. You didn’t hear this from me, but I secretly think he’s glad Tweedledum and Tweedledumber are directionally challenged. He needed an excuse to show off his toys.”

“’Course he does.”

There’s the sound of an engine somewhere off in the distance, disrupting the otherwise peaceful serenity of nature that gives a small indication that Jeremy’s on his way back to us from wherever he disappeared to. Lizzie and I stand there in the sun as we wait, most of Lizzie’s attention on her phone and trying to harness some kind of signal from either a nearby cell tower or a satellite in space, whichever happens to be closest.

The sound of the engine grows louder and louder by the second up until Jeremy comes whipping around the side of the house behind the wheel of what looks like a jacked-up golf cart. “Scar,” he says as he kills the engine, rolling backwards on his brakes when he stops in front of us. “What, missed me?”

“You wish.”

“Find their location, Lizzo?” he asks, his arm draping over the top of the steering wheel.

She shrugs. “No, but we know they’re somewhere on the property. Or near the property. That’s probably all we’re gonna have to go on.”

Jeremy blinks a few times. “Lizzie,” he says very calmly. “I have nine acres of land and we’re in the middle of the woods. That’s barely a fuckin’ bread crumb.”

“Then I guess we’d better get this rescue mission underway.”

“Scar?” Jeremy asks, leaning forward a little bit in his driver’s seat. “You coming?”

I nod in the direction of his vehicle. “You gonna kill us in this thing?”

“It’s a UTV, and it’s safer than walking the streets of Manhattan. Not to mention I’m a fantastic driver.”

Lizzie just snorts, but I acquiesce and go along with it. There are only two seats inside the UTV, with a giant cart on the back that’s likely there to carry equipment. Lizzie’s brain does the math quicker than mine, because she puts a little extra bounce in her step that I don’t pick up on and put together until she’s already within arm’s reach of the UTV.

“I’m not sitting in that cart,” I make very clear to her despite the particularly evil grin she’s directing my way. There’s a tiny bit of empty space between both of the seats, and even though it’s completely illegal and most likely a bad idea, I go for it. “Make room.”

I use the sides of the UTV to hoist myself up, swinging my leg over Lizzie and sliding into the tiny gap of space. I find myself sitting on one of Jeremy’s knees and one of Lizzie’s, keeping my balance from sheer will. “So, Mr. Law Man,” Lizzie begins. “On a scale from one to prison, how illegal is this?”

“Very. I’m the fuckin’ sheriff,” he dismisses as he jiggles the keys and the engine comes back to life. “I can overlook it.”

Lizzie gives a small nod, and mumbles something under her breath that sounds vaguely like, “I’m sure you can.” I have to remind myself that she’s pretty much my seat and my seatbelt and smacking her will not bode well for me.

Jeremy’s foot finds the gas pedal easily, and it lays it on heavy. We whip down the hill of the driveway, my hand clutching tightly to Lizzie’s thigh as I lean back against the two of them to keep from flying out of the windshield. Definitely illegal and dangerous for a reason. But once we’re on relatively level ground, having the crisp midday wind blowing square in my chest as Jeremy speeds off down the road feels freeing. Sans my whole balancing act, I’d even go as far to call it fun.

“Okay,” Lizzie yells. “The text says that they made it off of 431 and he thinks they turned onto the property, but they got surrounded by a bunch of trees and never found the house.”

“Probably turned too soon,” Jeremy thinks out loud, making a rather sharp left turn. I lean heavy on him, hand darting out and putting a death grip onto his denim-clad thigh. “That, or they’re just really clueless.”

“Look at who we’re talking about. It’s plausible.”

It’s a beautiful drive, even if we are on an idiot hunt. The sky is a brilliant shade of blue, only the slightest wisps of clouds and fractured sunlight visible through the gaps in the trees. Everything’s green and brown around us, dust kicking up with the tires spinning wildly down the dirt road. It’s rich and warm (even if a small part of me is wishing I’d put on a jacket) and I just feel. It’s the right kind of exhilaration that doesn’t make me feel crazy but alive, rather. Leaping off the page. Real.

Not entirely unlike like the warmth of Jeremy’s chest beneath my spine as I lean back, solid and steady and not a figment of my imagination. Having him right underneath my body and fingertips, especially after all of the retrospection Evans has forced me to embark on, is almost dangerous. I have to tell my heart to settle down in my chest, to not read too far into it, but that seems like all it can do now. It went from not going deep enough to running the extra damn mile.

It takes us nearly fifteen minutes to find Mackie and Sebastian sitting in their rental car off the beaten path. Sebastian has never looked so grateful in his life. “Thank fuck,” he groans out of the rolled-down window in relief.

“Okay, but look at the logic,” Lizzie insists as she gestures towards Mackie. “You let that one drive. What did you expect?”

“Listen, our flight was awful and getting behind the wheel was the last thing I wanted to do, and he swore he could handle listening to a GPS. God, first I get neglected from the invite list,” Sebastian drones on dramatically, Lizzie and I both shooting pointed looks at Jeremy. “Then they get our order wrong at Del Taco, and then Mackie loses us in a forest; I mean seriously. A break. A single break is all I am asking to catch and apparently that’s too much?”

“Alright, Shakespeare,” Mackie grumbles. “We get it. Thou hast bad luck. Shuteth the hell up.”

Jeremy flings the UTV around in a turn that nearly puts me entirely in Lizzie’s lap, Lizzie grabbing onto the frame of the UTV to keep both of us in the vehicle. “It’s like being in a NASCAR race,” she laments.

“How do you even know what NASCAR is?” Jeremy barks out a laugh as he pulls out in front of Mackie’s car to lead the way back to the house.

“Unlike you, my television gets more than three channels.”

“Cable’s expensive.”

“Cheapskate.”

We make it back to the house in one piece, Sebastian and Mackie adding their car in the parade of vehicles that are lining the road in front of the driveway. “Whatever that is,” Mackie says, pointing at the UTV as Jeremy pulls it into the garage. “I want to drive it at some point before I leave. No, need. I need to drive it.”

Jeremy guffaws. “Over my dead body.”

The rest of the afternoon is relatively peaceful after that. Lizzie, Elsa and I sit outside near the pool while the sun’s out and providing us with a little warmth, sipping on Stellas while we watch Evans try (and fail) to wrangle Hemsworth, Sebastian and Rudd into a haphazard game of football. It’s less than successful and just winds up with them throwing the ball back and forth before one can tackle the other.

At some point, Lizzie decides to join the game, kicking off her sandals and pulling her hair into a sloppy ponytail. The boys complain about her making their numbers uneven and try to recruit either me or Elsa – normally, I wouldn’t shy away from an opportunity to make Hemsworth eat dirt, but I’m enjoying myself exactly where I’m at, as is Elsa. We wave and insist they continue providing us with our free afternoon entertainment.

Lizzie’s somewhat like myself in the sense that she’s scrappy as hell, especially when she needs to be. I’d initially pegged her as not the type to be interested in getting her hands dirty, but Lizzie’s appearance is habitually deceiving. She likes jumping into the fray with the guys and can hold her own quite easily. She manages to grab the ball and is sprinting towards the other end of the yard with all four of them hot on her heels. Evans just barely misses her as she crosses by the tree they’ve designated as the end zone, the excited peal of laughter bubbling out of her throat when she throws the ball down and launches into a victory dance.

Something about the sheer jovial energy exuding off of her makes me wilt a little, urging me to say fuck it and join in. I polish off the last of my beer and announce that I’m officially joining them, Evans grabbing onto my wrist and claiming me for his team before I have any say.

It doesn’t evolve beyond throwing the ball and looking for an excuse to tackle somebody, but it’s fun. Hemsworth and I take each other down a few times in several tackles that, were this the NFL, we’d be penalized and benched, Lizzie and I conspire against our supposed teams to reign supreme over the boys, and I find myself unable to stop laughing and screaming the entire time. It feels like we’re all on the playground at recess.

Lizzie makes another touchdown, her victory dance much showier than the first as she tries to jump above Sebastian and keep the ball from his reach. “How do ‘ya like me now!” she sings delightedly.

“Let me show you.” Without warning, Sebastian darts out to grab Lizzie by the waist. She jumps back and breaks out into a run. Evans and Hemsworth assist in the chasing effort, and I do well to quickly engage Rudd in some riveting conversation about his kid so they lose sight of me in their pursuits. Every man – and woman – for themselves, after all.

I don’t know which one of them gets to Lizzie first, but I see all three of them standing near the edge of the pool right about the time there’s a shriek and a splash. Lizzie comes shooting up to the surface a half-second later, spitting mad. “Are you fucking insane?!” she shrieks.

“How do you like us now, Liz?” Sebastian taunts. He then jumps back as a wet arm comes slinging out from the pool looking to find another victim to drag into the deep.

“It is fifty degrees, you morons,” Lizzie hisses through her now chattering teeth, slowly pushing her way through the water towards the stairs in the shallow end. “I’m gonna get hypothermia and die.”

“Renner said it was heated.”

If looks could kill, Christopher Hemsworth would be a dead man. “The hot tub,” Lizzie enunciates in a dangerously tense voice. “He said that the hot tub would be operational.”

Her clothes are dripping wet and clinging to her frame when she pulls herself up each stair out of the pool. The three Stooges take a step back once she’s out, knowing full well that they’ve gone and done it now – even if it did warrant a good laugh.

I decide that I probably ought to intervene, spare Jeremy a few bodies from varied causes of death in his backyard before the sun goes down. “C’mon, Liz,” I say. “Let’s go dry you off.”

As I lead her off up the hill and towards the house, she points an accusatory finger at the boys. “If I die in the next hour, I’m haunting all of you.” Evans holds his hands up in mock arrest and pretends to be scared, Sebastian and Hemsworth both failing to suppress their laughter.

“Renner!” I yell the minute I get the glass doors back into the living room pried open. “We need a towel!”

“Why do you…oh.”

In this state, Lizzie resembles a drowned cat: her lips are blue, wet hair plastered to her face, visibly shaking and pissed off. “Bathroom,” Jeremy dictates as he throws the towel at me and shuffles us along rather hastily. “Don’t drip on my carpets.”

I follow Lizzie to her bedroom, seeking out her luggage to find something dry while she stomps straight into the bathroom muttering about the different ways she’s going to get her revenge on all three of them. “Where’s your shit at?”

“C-c-closet.” I peel back the closet doors and spot her duffel bag, rummaging around for something that’ll be warm. I find a balled-up crewneck and a pair of sweatpants that look like they’ll do the trick.

“Cute underwear,” I comment dryly on the first pair that my hands had touched – lacy purple, Lizzie’s got taste – as I make my way over to the bathroom door. “Robbie?”

Lizzie’s stripped down in record time; all of her wet clothes slung haphazardly in the bathtub as she bundles up in the fluffy white towel Jeremy had practically thrown at her head. She nods as she grabs them from me. “Why didn’t you bring him?” I find myself asking, leaning up against the doorframe. Seeing each other naked is not a big deal. It’s been done before and it’ll likely be done again. Just a testament to mine and Lizzie’s ride or die friendship.

“B-b-busy,” she chatters, letting her towel drop to the floor around her ankles as she gets dressed. “Rockstar life k-keeps him occupied. Plus, you guys can be a lot to handle.”

“I take offense. I’m angelic.”

“Not you. The others.” She shakes her head as she shimmies into her bra, hands shaking as she fixes the clasp. “He’s p-pure.”

I nod slowly. “I get it. We’re intense.”

She shoots me a look that says yeah, no kidding. “That why you and C-C-Colin ended it?”

My face draws up. “Nah, we got to where we just wanted different things. No más.” One of my shoulders folds in a shrug. “Nothing I haven’t done a hundred times before.”

“Thought he was d-different,” she says, a little bit of light returning to her eyes as she makes a clear mock of me.

“I say that every time.” I pause, only halfway watching as she pulls her legs into her sweatpants as my mind travels elsewhere. “Wait, why would all of this break me and Colin up?”

“We’re intense. Sometimes that’s intimidating, and then the whole f-feeling like you’re not f-first place in someone’s life.”

“He wasn’t that insecure. At least, I don’t think he was, anyways. He knew full well what came along with me when we decided to take up making out with each other as a full-time extracurricular.”

She drops it, but I can sense that she’s holding back on saying something to me. What, exactly, I can’t pinpoint. “So, you’re not b-buying cute underwear for anybody?”

“Me, myself, and I,” I answer with a small laugh. That gets a grin from her, it disappearing once she tugs the crewneck over her head.

“You wish you were?”

“Eh.” That’s not one-hundred percent true, of course; Jeremy’s been running laps in my brain for the last twenty-four hours but it hasn’t yet gone into lingerie territory. Now it has. The tiny voice in the back of my brain – a betraying motherfucker if I’ve ever known one – suggests the color blue.

“Not a no.”

“Not a yes, either,” I retort, watching as a shudder ripples through her entire body. “Dry your hair. It’ll help.”

“Too lazy,” she dismisses, brushing past me and heading straight for the bed. I turn around, watching as she peels all of the blankets back and dives underneath them. She stares at me expectantly. “C-come on.”

I arch an eyebrow. “I don’t crawl into bed on command.”

“I need your body heat.”

“Oh, great, another someone to use me for my body.”

She rolls her eyes, the dull thumping sound of her hand slapping the mattress. I cave, complying with her demands and shuffling over to the other side of the bed. I untuck the comforter, carefully climbing in next to her. Lizzie’s on me the second my ass hits the mattress, scooting over and pressing both of our sides together. “Seriously, though,” she says softly. “You and Renner? That train still hasn’t left the station?”

My neck nearly breaks as I turn to shoot her a look. She cowers a little deeper underneath the blankets, only her nose up visible now. “Come on. We all see it.”

“There was also a time when everyone saw you and Renner too.” Her face scrunches up in disgust.

“God, it’d be like dating my uncle.”  

“Oh, gee, thanks for keeping me young, Lizzo.” I feel her nestle a little closer against me – Lizzie is a snuggle monster, and I’m somewhat like a piece of plywood. “What, you thought Colin and I…we broke up because of Renner?”

“I’m sure making out was a super fun extracurricular, don’t get me wrong, but I saw that fucking movie. I can only imagine that it was five hundred times worse with you guys during filming. You two have…intense nonverbals. It’d be intimidating to even the most self-assured man. Or woman.”

“We’ve known each other for a while,” I reason.

“Scarlett.” Lizzie’s eyes are piercing straight through all of the bullshit. One of her icy hands comes to rest on top of my arm, and I involuntarily shiver at the touch. “It’s me.” Translation: you just saw me naked, there’s no point in hiding anything here.

The armor takes another blow, creating a crack that’s enough to let her in under it. “I don’t…I don’t fucking know. For all the talk that we’ve got blurred lines, it sure does feel like there’s a point of no return that I can’t bring myself to cross over into.”

“What scares you the most about it?” Leave it to Lizzie to jump straight to the hard hitters. She’s no Chris Evans. He tells you like it is, she makes you get there on your own with a little bit of her guidance.

My eyes fixate on the ceiling as I search for the red tape in my mind. “I need him,” I find myself saying almost absently. “He’s always been there. During Ryan, Romain…all of it, he’s just always been there for me. I got comfortable, I guess. Going there means there’s now an opportunity for me to fuck it up and a likelihood of him leaving when I do.”

“Who says you’ll fuck it up?”

I let my head roll to the side so I’m staring at her head-on. “Hi, nice to meet you, I am Scarlett Johansson Reynolds Dauriac.”

“So what, you married your frogs instead of just kissing them.” I scoff a laugh, pulling the blankets up a little higher on my chest. “Love’s not safe. It’s risk and reward for a reason. But it’s cruel to keep denying yourself something just because you’re afraid it might go in one direction. What if it goes differently? What if it turns out that he was who you were supposed to be with all along and that’s why it never worked out with anybody else?”

“Jesus, have you been conspiring with Chris? You sound just like him.”

“Maybe he and I will use all of our newfound free time to start a relationship advice column.”

I shift under the covers so I’m laying on my side and facing her. “What if he doesn’t feel the same?” My voice is barely above a whisper, and the fear that overcomes me is juvenile and paralyzing. It’s valid, though. If I am willingly walking straight out into the ocean without any sort of life preserver to keep me afloat, I need to take inventory first. Love has continually failed me over the years – hooking up never worked in my favor because it always got misinterpreted, love felt like a joke as it dangled over my head just slightly out of reach.

And it’s never the other person in the equation that’s the problem. I’m not naïve or stupid. I know what the common denominator is. After two divorces and a daughter added in the mix, I’m considerably more careful. Colin was a chance that I took against better judgment. I can’t tune everything out and listen to my traitor heart – or worse, my traitor libido – again, especially not with Jeremy. Everything is on the line now that it’s him. It is quite literally sink or swim, and I may as well have cinderblocks tied to my ankles.

The corners of Lizzie’s lips curl into a sad smile. “He does.”

I open my mouth to continue playing devil’s advocate, but she inches a little closer to me. “It is impossible for anyone to meet you and not fall in love with you. Trust me.”

“Okay,” I sigh, relenting all control that I’ve got left hanging on and succumbing to the waves.       

She laces her fingers with mine as she curls up into my side, giving my hand a tight squeeze.

. . .

After a very real moment of terror in thinking that Jeremy, Hemsworth, and Mackie had managed to catch the house on fire while grilling steaks, we all settle into dinner right as the sun starts to go down. We’re situated outside on Jeremy’s backyard patio, the communal table crowded as golden hour falls right over us and creates a halo on the crown of everyone’s heads. I’m sandwiched in between Lizzie (who has fortunately not succumbed to hypothermia) and Sebastian. Jeremy is diagonal from me, occasionally catching my eye from the opposite side of the table and sparing a wink my way.

It drops my stomach to my knees.

Mine and Lizzie’s conversation has given me some sort of pep in my step in driving me towards talking to Jeremy about, well, anything, but of course the universe works in crooked ways. Right as I come to the conclusion, grit my teeth and decide to be a big girl, Jeremy is completely unavailable to me and a moment of private conversation. There’s a spark of fear that maybe that in itself is a sign it’ll all go wrong. It’s not risk and reward without reason, Lizzie echoes in my head. The universe must want to see if I’m willing to take a risk.

If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that Jeremy’s worth it. Even if I am scared to death over it.

Jeremy and his chef’s assistants Hemsworth and Mackie stuff all of us up with a ton of good food, and Robert waits until everyone’s halfway through their meal before standing up and clinking the side of his glass with a butter knife. “Attention, Avengers,” he announces, all of our sidebar conversations fizzling out.

“Since we’ve officially made it to the other side of everything, I wanted to force all of you into enduring another sappy speech from yours truly.” Hemsworth groans and throws a crumpled-up napkin at him. “And for that, I will make it the same running time as Endgame.”

From beside him, Susan nudges his hand. “Get on with it.”

“Right. Okay. You all know that these movies have changed my life, they’ve changed all our lives, blah blah blah. I don’t think I said it enough, though, just how much all of you have changed my life, which is a damn shame.” His hand finds Susan’s and clutches on. “This is more than something that a contract dictated for all of us or sheer happenstance or even just some nice bonus to work. This is family. You guys are my family. I’m better because I know you. I’m the man I am today because for some dumb reason, you all looked at me like your leader and I wanted to become whatever it was you saw in me. I wanted to lead the best damn group of people in the world and be a part of something special. And I did. I do. Always will, even if Feige is done with half of us.”

The sunlight is no longer an excuse for the shininess that’s reflecting from behind his glasses, and the sight of seeing Robert tear up instantly yanks down on my tear ducts. He lifts his glass up a little higher. “So, we’re toasting to whatever you kids want to toast to. For me, it’s this beautiful, clusterfuck family that we’ve made.”

Evans is the first to get his beer in the air. “To however many years of madness that only felt like blinking.”

“To this love of my life that’s second only to my blood family,” Hemsworth chimes in, his arm draping around the back of Elsa’s chair.

Lizzie’s arm brushes by mine as she lifts her wine glass. “To this golden age of our lives. May we look back on it when we’re all in the same nursing home.”

“To the people who carried me off every mountain and through every valley,” Jeremy says, his sights snagging on me. It makes the sob burn in my lungs.

I maneuver to my wine glass and stick it up. “To never knowing what alone would feel like again.”

“To that two billion dollars in the box office,” Mackie wraps up, and no one can think of anything else sentimental or poignant to add after that because we’re all busy holding our ribs as we laugh and wiping away the stray tears that built up from a toast and fell because of some ridiculous comment that’s painfully true to the nature of this family. We all clink glasses with each other a couple dozen times each before we throw them back.  

Dinner winds down languidly, the stars dimmer tonight than they were last night due to the flood lights Jeremy has illuminating his patio. I finish off my glass of wine and share a cigarette with Lizzie while we watch the show that is Renner and Evans trying to rig up a speaker for karaoke while Hemsworth attempts to successfully start a fire because he apparently will be damned if he does not get to make a smore. He comes very close to singing his eyebrows off, and Lizzie and I erupt into a fit of giggles that leave us breathless and coughing.  

“Alright, who’s up first?” Jeremy says as Evans puts the finishing touches on the volume, flipping the microphone in his hand.

Evans’s face flattens, swiping the microphone right from Jeremy. “Me,” he replies. “I set this up, I get first song.”

“Damn, alright then.”

He doesn’t get the audience he’d anticipated, as Hemsworth’s efforts to get more than just a few sparks proves fruitful and leaves us all much more interested in getting marshmallows on a bunch of skewers than his riveting cover of Rocky Raccoon. He winds up doing it twice because Karen is so beside herself in laughter that she absolutely has to send a video of it in full to Bradley.

I nearly kill Hemsworth for waving around his flaming marshmallow like a five-year-old and getting much too close to poking my eye out and setting my hair on fire, but I get myself two smores made and hike back over to the table to get a front row seat of Robert’s performance of My Heart Will Go On. Brie takes the seat next to me, and the two of us lip-sync along to Robert’s rendition quite dramatically with a salt-shaker doubling as our microphone. He earns a wild round of applause once all is said and done and he’s on his knees after the final note fades out.

Hemsworth is next, paying homage to his sister-in-law with Party in the USA that is complete with full-blown choreography. It leaves Don doubled over and crying.

Getting drunk takes much more than just two glasses of white wine, but there’s a nice warmth tingling underneath my skin. My eyes scan over the scene and settle on Jeremy, who’s holding a beer bottle and talking with Sebastian about something. He must feel someone looking at him because he tears his sights away and finds me. A smile spreads over his lips as he holds up his bottle in acknowledgement, and I feel myself start to melt like I’m one of the marshmallows on the end of Hemsworth’s skewer. It reminds me of what I want before the night is over and my twenty seconds of courage dies out.

We aren’t getting any younger here. Time’s just slipping through the hourglass, tonight will be a thing of the past sooner rather than later, and I’m starting to wonder why the hell I even bothered dancing around this for as long as I did. My heart is like a pair of little hummingbird wings inside my ears as the blood pounds. 

I wonder what it’d be like to hold him. To really and truly hold him, his body pressed against mine and his face at my fingertips.

What it’d be like to wake up next to him, his hand heavy on the dip in my waist.

What it’d be like to kiss him for more than five seconds for a performance or even just the good-natured, friendly sort of kiss – but now that I’m thinking about it, were they ever truly friendly to begin with?

What would it be like to f

“Please duet with me.” Lizzie’s voice snaps me back to reality, effectively wrecking my train of thought into a brick wall. I whip around, looking at her in bewilderment.

“Hell to the no.” I love karaoke, but I don’t make it a group effort. I am a one-woman show.  

She pouts. “Come on, Scar, you and I could do a mean Wannabe.”

“Ooh!” Brie exclaims, sitting up straighter in her chair. “If you do Wannabe, I’m so in.”

Lizzie’s hand juts out in Brie’s direction, giving me her patented see? look. “This is our chance to reach our final form as the Marvel girl band we were meant to become. Say yes.”

I gesticulate with the last bite of my smore. “I will join the girl band if and only if you can get Sebastian to do an encore performance of I’m A Slave 4 U. I wasn’t sober enough to appreciate it back in Atlanta.”

Lizzie’s eyes narrow in determination before she summons for him over her shoulder.  

Rudd and Jeremy have everyone in stitches when they kick off the first duet of the night, a Backstreet Boys song that is furnished with horrible harmonies and generally terrible dance moves. They don’t do it to sound good – which is rare, seeing as Jeremy is a karaoke elitist ninety-nine percent of the time – but rather to get a reaction, and a reaction they get. I pull my lighter out and start waving it around dramatically, while Evans just starts throwing dollar bills as Rudd gives him a shitty lap dance.

Mackie steals the mic next, Lizzie smugly informing me that I need to start warming up the pipes seeing as how Sebastian has agreed to go after him with my request. Part of me only suggested it because I figured there was no way that he would actually do it, but I guess that sometimes the gods are in need of a good laugh too at Sebastian Stan’s expense. Mackie starts the first verse of Beyonce’s Drunk in Love down in a lunge that has me scared for his hamstrings while I try to think of a song I could pull out of my ass. If I am to be roped into the karaoke circuit with a bang and a punch of girl power, I might as well stay up there and make it count.   

But, because the gods can sometimes be giving, the power promptly goes out.

We all sit there in the dark, everyone seeming to be on pause as the stillness and silence prolongs for a few seconds. “Give it a second,” Jeremy says from somewhere, the self-assuredness in his voice an indication that he’s got experience with this kind of thing occurring. “It’ll all turn back on.”

A few moments pass as we sit, waiting for something that doesn’t seem to be occurring. Finally, in the dark, I can see the deflation of Jeremy’s shoulders as Robert’s voice breaks through the silence of the wilderness that’s returned to being louder than all of us. “Is it going to turn on at some point within the next decade?”

“Otherwise I’m doing this shit acapella,” Mackie adds in.

“It’s the breaker,” Jeremy sighs. “We probably tripped it.”

Hemsworth snorts. “Renner, you were nominated for an Oscar twice. You should not have these kinds of problems.”

“I’m an actor, not an electrician.”

“Ooh, God of Thunder, did you bring your axe thingy? You could fix this problem for us real easy.”

“Fixing it won’t take long,” Jeremy continues, talking right over the peanut gallery and their never-ending stream of commentary. “Would be nice if one of you – preferably one of you who isn’t totally incompetent – could come and hold the flashlight for me.”

No sooner do the words leave his mouth does Lizzie slug me right in the shoulder with her balled up fist, knuckles slamming into my skin. It might be dark but it doesn’t stop me from shooting her a glare sharp enough that she can feel. Go, she mouths at me, the no-nonsense look on her face a downright threat.  

Not that I’d ever give her the satisfaction of knowing it, but I don’t intend to let any kind of opportunity pass me by.

I pull myself up onto my feet, hands absently dusting off on my shorts. “C’mon, old man, I’ll be your eyes,” I say as nonchalantly as I can. Even in the dark, I can see him smile in my general direction.

He waits for me at the doors, letting me shuffle into the house first. “Please don’t trip over anything,” he warns me as he pushes the door back into place, effectively separating us from everyone else. “We cannot afford a broken ankle.”

“Why? Are you also the local doctor?” I tease.

“Sweetheart, the day someone hands me a medical license is the same day they open up that ice rink down in hell.”

It’s Jeremy’s house, so he’s able to move around in the dark with relative ease since he’s got the locations of everything mapped out in his memory. I, on the other hand, am not as lucky, opting to taking my navigation slowly lest I accidentally trip over the furniture. He must sense that I’m flying blind, because I feel his hand slip around my arm and tug it in a little closer to his side. It’s like it is every other time: him reaching out for me, ready to latch on the minute I accept.  

I trust his sense of direction and that he’s not going to walk me into the coffee table, so I let him guide me through the house and out into the garage. It’s even darker, what with the lack of windows, and I clutch a little tighter to Jeremy as we make our way down the stairs.

His grip loosens once we’re on the floor, walking ahead of me to where the breaker box is at. I amble slowly behind him – he’s got more shit in this garage that could probably impale me should I approach it wrong and I’m not looking to die today – and with the lack of light and unadjusted eyes, I miss him stopping a few feet in front of me. I walk right into him, his chest solid and his hands reaching up to absorb the impact as he grabs both of my arms. “Shit,” I exclaim, taking a tiny step backwards. “Sorry, sorry.”

“You’re fine,” Jeremy insists as he laughs, the sound stirring up the embers in the fire that’s dim but still ablaze in my stomach. He then presses something cold into my hand. “Please don’t blind me with this, it’s industrial grade.”

“Well, that’d never be my intention.” I feel around for the button, it finally giving underneath my finger as light floods into the garage. I angle it downwards towards the ground as not to blind him, following along behind him towards the corner of the garage where his breaker box is at.

I find myself sitting down on the edge of a seat in the closest UTV as I hold the light out and aim at the breaker box. Jeremy works in relative silence, opening up the little panel and assessing whatever it is that he needs to assess in order to bring the power back. “Penny for your thoughts?” he asks after a moment of flipping switches.

“Uh, sure, I guess,” I trail off, somewhat caught off guard.

He chuckles a little. “You just don’t think quietly, ‘s all.”

“I wasn’t…” He turns around and the words die in my throat the second I see the knowing look in his eyes glinting in the artificial light. We both know I’m not the best liar, especially once I’ve been made.

Jeremy returns to his work, leaving me with a crooked smile before his back is facing me once again. “What’s on your mind, Scar?”

Even if he doesn’t see it, my body language speaks louder than whatever I could possibly say to him; arms folded over my chest to support the flashlight with two hands, sights focused down on my knees. You, I want to tell him. “Just a lot of different things,” I mumble.

He’s quiet, which is translation for he wants for me to expound. I sigh. “It’s a transition period, and a little bit of a mourning period, and I’m up in the air. Don’t know where I’m gonna land. You know how that goes.”

“I do,” he agrees. “But I also know you.”

“Do you now?” I quip.

“I do. For example, I know that you hate your natural hair color and that’s why you’ve had more hairstyles than I have one-night stands. I know that you don’t like the taste of tea, but the only thing you’ll spend money on at a Starbucks is one of their fruit tea things. I know that you knew more French when you got engaged to Romain than you did when you divorced him. I know that you’re an insomniac, and you’ve never driven the speed limit a day in your life, and you go on rescue websites to look at the dogs that are available for adoption whenever you’re sad, and that you were the one who pulled that infamous prank on Joss despite nobody ever coming forward or breathing a word about it to anyone else. And I know you’re thinking about more than just an answer to the whole ‘what now’ debate. Seems safe in my assuming that, anyways.”

My lower lip is trapped between my teeth, the pressure close to being enough to draw blood. Naivety says that him knowing all of that about me is just many years of friendship that have begun to pile on. Something else tells me that him knowing me like that has nothing to do with a stellar memory and a frequent presence in his life to reinforce it.

“Do you ever think about filming the scene?” I ask.

“What, Vormir?”

“Yeah.”

In the light I’m providing, I see one of his shoulders twitching into a shrug. “Sometimes. Anthony told me that our performance was very noir.” Joe had told me the same thing while filming, and had insisted I dial it back a bit because it wasn’t what they were going for. The whole haunted male protagonist and the femme fatale who is so in love that it turns fatalistic as she sacrifices herself in the end schtick, all of the fierce passion that ends with everything up in flames – it was hard for me not to go there when it practically leapt off the page. Wasn’t mine or Jeremy’s fault that we both picked up on the undertones and yanked it out to the forefront by its hair the second the Russos told us to play. We enjoyed playing around with our characters in a noir lens, even if the script didn’t call for it. It felt natural for us.

“I just always felt like there was a lot left unsaid.” He makes a grunting sort of noise in reply as he works that is agreement enough for me to continue. “Do you…well, I don’t fuckin’ know,” I mutter half-heartedly. “Do you think that’s always the best course of action?”

“Some things are better left unsaid. Some things aren’t. Just depends.”

“On?”

“Circumstance, mostly.” It’s his turn to sigh, spinning back around and pressing his back into the wall of the garage. The light catches in the color of his eyes and makes them sparkle as he gives me a rather pointed look. “Scar.”

“Renner.”

“Can we fast-forward the part where you speak in very lengthy, existential circles and I pretend to understand what’s coming out of your mouth and you just get to what you’re trying to say?”

“I’m…” His gaze is ripping through every wall and defense that I keep up like they’re made of tissue paper. My heart is pounding in my chest as the anxiety makes a crescendo – there is no going back if I step over that line. Jeremy and I suck at pretending in our own different ways. I lie right through my teeth and do exactly the opposite of what I say I will, Jeremy wears it all on his face. It would never be the same if it goes wrong, and I can’t lose him. I can’t ruin this. It’s the one thing in my life that I was willing to bank on being forever and forever can’t crumble away here. I won’t allow it.

But it’s Jeremy, and we’re never not honest with each other. And that’s what pushes the words up from the back of my throat, them falling off my tongue hesitantly and slowly like I’m feeling out the terrain as I go. “I’m trying to decipher if this is circumstance or if I’m better off letting things go unsaid.”

“Things with…what, us?”

I lift my eyes up to his, my answer spelled out in my silence.

It seems that that response was not out of the realm of possibility for Jeremy, because he just slumps a little more into the wall, as though some invisible pressure has been alleviated. “I know how you were with this kinda thing,” he admits quietly. “And backing you into a corner would go about as well as it would if I was doing that to a wild animal – I’d wind up living to regret it if I even lived at all. For me, letting it go unsaid has been principle.”

“I just keep thinking about filming that scene…and then when we got to press, in Singapore and the entire LA premiere and how some selfish part of me kept on grabbing on to you. Like you’d leave and let me go at first opportunity if I didn’t beat you to the punch. I still feel a little bit like that now.”

He rolls his eyes. “Woman, do you have any idea how oblivious you are? Like I’d ever let you go.”

One of my eyebrows raises slightly in challenge. “Well, I did fall off that cliff quite a few times.”

“Did you not read the same sides that I did? You forced your hand loose.”

“I can’t lose you,” I say definitively. “That’s all I know. No matter what’s said or isn’t said, or what I feel. If I have to hurt myself in the process, then so be it, but I’m…” I shake my head. “It’s not an option.”

“You won’t,” he assures me. “You could never.” The faintest traces of his signature crooked grin begin to appear and create the lines on his face. “I outlasted two husbands and however many fuckin’ boyfriends you had in between. I think it’s safe to say that if I’m not gone by now, I never will be.”

I scoff, but the moment of light-hearted deflections dissipates quickly once another question knots up in my throat. “How long?” He looks at me quizzically, and I gesture back and forth between us. “You know. How long’s it been since…me?”

Jeremy folds his arms over his chest, head cocking to the side as he glares at me. “Come on, sweetheart. You’re not that dense.”   

“Walk of Fame?”

“That was all but a marriage proposal, and I don’t do that shit overnight.”

“That interview where you told everyone how I made you want to be more of a man?”

He chuckles darkly. “Nah. I was as drunk as a skunk during that. We could’ve fucked on stage and I wouldn’t have remembered it.”

“I’m sure you would have.”

“You sat next to me on the plane – I was pounding straight vodka the whole way there. No chance.”

“Your hands did get a little frisky on the ride home.” I pause. “Not like I stopped you or anything.”

I watch as the feigned shock colors his face. “Scarlett Ingrid, we joined the mile-high-club eight years ago and you’re just now telling me about it?”

The laugh ripples through me like a stone skipping over water, a small smile remaining once it settles. “Seriously, though. When?”

One of his hands reaches behind his neck to rub at his ear, his entire demeanor sheepish and shy. “Somewhere between you no longer being jail bait and us going to San Diego in 2010 for Comic Con. Once we became friends, it was like it was just…there, I guess. I’ve always been crazy about you. Kinda hard not to be.”

“Why’d you never say anything?” I ask softly. “I mean, you had plenty of windows of opportunity. I was single for…maybe six months during that entire span of time.”

My joke bounces right off of him and falls flat. “It’s like I said, I know how you get. I’ve outlasted all the boyfriends; I’ve seen how you work and you’ve seen my track record. You think I could have dealt with losing you any better than you would have me? I didn’t really care how I had you in my life. As long as you were there, it didn’t matter to me how that came.”

My lips twitch nervously as I purse them, sights casting back down towards the ground. “You know I’m good at ruining things. Even if they are good.”

“We’ve got three divorces between the two of us. Statistically speaking, you and I are on a whole other level of being disastrous at relationships.”

“Never go into motivational speaking.”

“What I’m trying to say is that we cancel each other out. You suck? That’s fine, ‘cause I suck too. It’s okay. I don’t expect you to be something that fuck only knows I’m not either.”

“That is absolutely not what you said, but okay.”

“Okay, well, do you remember what I actually said a few years ago? When you were making me endure a lightning round of twenty questions once you figured out about my renovation schtick?”

“Everything sparkles,” I repeat back to him like he’d said it yesterday.

He nods, peeling off of the wall and taking a few steps in my direction. My heart is now slamming in my throat as I watch him stop once he’s standing right in front of me, his legs just a few inches away from where my foot’s resting. He reaches out and grabs my hand that’s holding the flashlight, gently guiding it so I’m pointing the flashlight up towards the ceiling. It illuminates the garage – I’m no longer sitting in the shadows, but in the light with him, and his mouth curls into a ridiculous smile. “Just gotta know how best to angle the light.”

It’s that unspoken thing between the two of us that’s lived in the shadows, never given a name, constantly skirted around and avoided and never fully acknowledged even when a little light caught it at precisely the right angle. Now, though, he’s shining the flashlight directly on it and forcing the two of us to see it for what it is. To acknowledge it. To embrace it.

“And if we don’t know how?”

“We do.”

“What if we slip?”

“Doesn’t matter. I told you: I’d never let you go.”

The way he looks at me causes my breath to snag on something in my chest – likely one of my ribs from where my heart has forcefully wrestled its way from the cage. “You know, you’re a dick for not telling me sooner. We could’ve been married by now.”

“And probably divorced.” It’s like he’s shot Novocain into my bloodstream, everything numbing as I look at him with a wild panic. I know that he’s never had his goddamn mind about him to begin with, but his timing blended with his choice of words is hilariously and terrifyingly awful. He just laughs, the ridiculous whine and cough building as he takes another step closer to me and presses his legs against mine. “Relax, darlin’, that’s never gonna happen.”

“I’ve changed my mind: you’re an even bigger dick for that comment alone.”

“You’ll find out more about other things that are big in time,” he teases. I use my free hand to smack him in the arm now that he’s within range. “Ow! Go with the hand without the rings next time, will ‘ya?”

“That’s what you get for making a divorce joke three seconds into this next step of our relationship. And for trying to make it all better with a goddamn innuendo.”

“It’s like you haven’t heard anything else that I’ve said to you,” he mutters, bringing his other hand up underneath my chin and using two of his fingers to tilt my head back. His blue eyes meet mine and I feel my heart plummet from my throat all the way to my ankles. It’s been awhile since I’ve allowed myself to feel anything for anybody, but even then, it’s never felt quite like this. “I am never going to let you go.”

He bends down, his lips meeting my forehead as they press a gentle kiss into my skin. I close my eyes and exhale deeply, letting the moment sink deep into my bones. His mouth lingers there for a few seconds and when he pulls back, it’s slow and painful. I feel the whine stirring in the back of my throat. Safe to say that once you’ve had the slightest taste of something, wanting more isn’t unexpected, and right now I want everything that he could possibly give me.   

“Someone’s gotta give these kids some electricity,” he reminds me as he shuffles backwards.

“Hemsworth’s the god of thunder,” I pout. “He can do it.”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. You and I have got all the time in the world.”

He’s still got a grip on my hand and tugs on it gently to persuade me onto my feet to follow him. I’ve no intention of letting go.

Chapter Text

Jeremy gets the power back on, and it is safe to say that whatever he does to jump-start it again has a hand in the now crackling electricity firing between us.

I lead the way out of the garage, and right before I can get the door opened, Jeremy is sharing the very narrow step I’m standing on with his entire body pressed against my back. A hand slips around my waist as I reach out to grip the banister in order to stay balanced. “Not in front of them,” he whispers, his breath warm against my neck and standing the hairs on my arms up at ninety-degree angles. “Later.” A strangled noise rises from the back of my throat that is sheer frustration blended with concession.

His fingers tighten around my hip as he squeezes, nudging me on through the doorway.

We don’t appear to have been missed too much, Mackie already in the middle of his song that has a grip on everyone’s attention when we return. Lizzie’s sights, however, are locked dead on me as I return to my seat beside Brie and reach for my wine.

Our eyes briefly cross paths, both of Lizzie’s eyebrows hitting her hairline. “Well?” she prompts.

“We still doing Wannabe or no?”

“Dude,” she hisses through her teeth. “It took you guys twenty minutes to flip a switch. What happened?”

I cock an eyebrow, raising my wine glass to my lips. “Wannabe,” I repeat casually. “Yay or nay?”

She pouts, but she lets the conversation go. I get the inkling that she will resume her interrogating once we’ve had our turn at karaoke and when I get a little more wine in my system. Little does she know she and all her valiant efforts will be met with a brick wall.

Mackie finishes channeling his inner Beyoncé and Sebastian puts on one hell of a performance that involves lots of hip gyrations and me cat-calling to the brink of cracking my voice; after that, the Marvel girl band makes its one night only debut. Myself, Lizzie, Brie, Karen and Cobie all get a little too into the song as we lose track of the words in favor for our on the spot choreography that leaves us breathless in laughter. Lizzie and I nearly fall into each other when we try to high kick during the chorus, Brie delivers the rap verse without a hitch, and all of the boys get so into it that Robert winds up standing in a chair dancing by the time we finish.

I keep a tight grip on the microphone in one hand and retrieve my wine glass with the other as I look for a solo song. My adrenaline mixed with the alcohol in my system feels like it’s enough to buzz me straight out of my skin. I pick a Bon Jovi song, kicking off both my shoes during the intro to Livin’ on a Prayer before I navigate my way on top of the table. The singing is not my finest by any means, but it’s fun to walk up and down the dinner table while head-banging and coercing everyone to participate in my performance. Rudd even jumps up on the table with me at one point and does air guitar back-up for me.

Right as the song is winding down, I throw the last of my wine back and let my eyes trail over to where Jeremy’s standing. He’s leaning up against the grill, only half-acknowledging Mackie beside him, the lopsided smile on his face so goddamn ridiculous that I’d love nothing more than to kiss it away. It’s my turn to shoot him a wink, and I swear the lines in his dimples deepen when he catches it.

I make my way back to my seat after passing the mic off to Lizzie, who has selected a Taylor Swift song to serenade all of us with. I collapse next to Brie, propping my feet up in the empty chair to my right. “Anybody ever told you that you’re the queen of karaoke?” Brie asks rhetorically.

“Maybe once or twice. Who do you think got these kids into it?”

She gives me that one, flapping her arms in a fanning motion that’s meant to mimic bowing. Lizzie then yells at all of us to pay attention to her solo endeavor.

Lizzie makes it through her song, and then Ruffalo starts making grabby hands for the mic. Typically, he’s one to take the back seat and merely be a spectator of our antics, so he captures everybody’s attention as he tries to figure out how to get the speakers to play his song.

“More wine?” When I glance over my shoulder, Jeremy’s standing there grinning down at me. It takes a single sweep of my sights over his face to put the pieces together. Ever the opportunist, he is.

“I’d love some,” I reply, grabbing hold of my empty glass and letting my legs fall from the chair to the ground.

He walks beside me into the house, guiding me out of sight of the windows as we weave through the kitchen where I abandon my wine glass. “Wine cellar’s downstairs in the basement,” he informs me almost at random, taking a sharp turn to where the stairs are. He stops, making a wide gesture towards them. “After you.”

There are only three doorways in the short hallway of the basement, the wine cellar behind the first door to the right. “So,” I begin as I follow him inside. “Was the wine just a ruse to get me alone?”

The wine cellar is dark, only the silhouette of Jeremy in front of me provided from the moonlight and exterior ground lights that are streaming in through the tiny windows near the top of the walls. “What did I say to you in the wedding scene for Our Town?” he retorts as he shuts the door, effectively sealing us off from the rest of our friends and as far as I’m concerned, the rest of the world.

My lips break out into a smile that threatens to tear my face in half. “Hell yes.”                 

“Hell yeah, baby,” Jeremy whispers as he grabs me by the wrist, spinning me around. He walks me up against the brick wall, his body a warm contrast to the freezing room around us when he eliminates the space between us and presses against me. Exactly the thing I’ve been wanting since he kissed my forehead and assured me that I wasn’t crazy for wanting this, wanting him. “Finally.”

“Oh, god, just shut up and kiss me, Renner.”

He does as he’s told, fusing his lips to mine and stealing the breath straight from my lungs. We’ve kissed several times before, and never once did it feel as though the heavens opened or fireworks were exploding or that everything was suddenly perfect with the world. They’d all been fairly nondescript kisses, either for acting purposes or simply just a slip of the lips when we had too much to drink. It doesn’t feel any different now than it did before – there are no glorious revelations befalling me as it happens – but this time it’s not just a kiss, it’s me kissing him and somehow that changes everything. It twists my stomach into knots as my hands root in the hair at the nape of his neck to hold him close and keep him exactly where I want him. He kisses me like I am the thing keeping his universe aligned and the only salvation he has from hell awaiting.

He sucks on my lip before pulling away, nose brushing against mine as he mumbles, “Finally.”

“Kiss me,” I insist.

Maybe it’s because we’re both a few drinks in, maybe it’s the fact we’re in a literal wine cellar and osmosis is real, but the sensation of kissing him like this is vaguely like getting drunk. He slides down my throat smooth and leaves a delicious burn, my mind is beginning to grow fuzzy, and the curling warmth that shoots out from my belly sends heat straight to my fingertips. He is strong and heady on my tongue while his own canvasses my mouth, learning every inch of me and committing it all to his memory.

Call it idealism, ignorance, or even downright delusion, but I’ve always believed in the soulmate shit, holding out my hope that somewhere on the planet there was someone hand-crafted with me in mind and I them. There have been false alarms before (obviously) but the way he fits to me isn’t lost. It’s enough to make me laugh, really, and I don’t know what I find funnier. The irony of it being him, or that for once in his life, Chris Evans got something in the love department right.

I must have gone and laughed anyways, because Jeremy asks me, “What’s so funny?” as he splits off, mouth moving to worry at one of my earlobes.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I reply, nails grazing over the skin right along his hairline on the back of his neck.

“Oh yeah? Try me.”

“Would…much rather use my mouth for other things.” His raspy laugh there in my ear makes my knees threaten to give.

“In due time,” he promises. “You’ve made it this long, gorgeous, what’s a few more hours?”

“Don’t tease,” I growl.

He laughs darkly in my ear, which is sign that he’s got no intention of listening to my threats. They’re all empty words, anyways, considering I’m the one at his mercy. His lips trail lower down the column of my neck, instantly finding the pressure point that’s throbbing. My head hits against the brick wall as the whimper builds in my throat. Both of his hands slide up my arms, pushing them up over my head until he’s got my wrists pinned against the wall and all of my control is completely relinquished. In the pit of my stomach, desire clenches so tightly that I feel like I’m going to combust.

“We’re like teenagers,” I gasp out as one of his legs wedges in between my thighs, his teeth grazing over my skin. “Two stupid, horny teenagers.”

He hums right on top of the exposed vein on my neck and I buck against him. “And?”

“It’s ridiculous.”

“Mm, seems to me you’re enjoying yourself,” he mutters as he leans closer into me, chest pressed firmly against mine. “Are you?”

His leg lifts a little higher in between my thighs and I keen. “Obviously.”

“Just making sure.”

What’s not to enjoy? I want to bite back at him. I’m grinding on him like I’m back at a high school house party where the only alcohol available was stolen beer that was so cheap it had a striking resemblance to dishwater in taste and chain-smoking cigarettes out on the balcony with a few girlfriends seemed very grown up of us. I am absolutely drowning in Jeremy Renner as he sucks on my neck and encourages the debauchery along, and I adore how the water burns my lungs.

“Jeremy,” I groan, my voice broken in my throat now that my mind has left me entirely. “Please.”

“Ah, ah.” His voice sounds like pure sex as he chides me, drawing his thigh back slightly. It’s a damn good thing he’s got my hands pinned above my head – I’d love nothing more than to wrap both of them around his neck and strangle him. “Not yet.”

His hands slip away from my wrists and travel south almost instantly, running over the curve of my ass before nudging me and giving the boost I need to jump up into his embrace. My legs tangle around him like vines and I cling to his neck, drawing his face in for another kiss. I suck his lower lip into my mouth and let my teeth ghost over it. “Goddamn, woman,” he grunts after I give his lip a sharp tug, him forcing a separation between our mouths and pressing his forehead to mine.

“I told you, don’t tease me.”

We stumble into one of the shelves, him lifting me up and setting me down on the edge of it. He’s fully in between my legs, face lined up with my chest, and I can think of no better place to have him as he eagerly helps my already-ridden up shirt along. Next to the chill of the wine cellar, the rough texture of his fingers as they drag up my torso are enough to set me on fire.

He just barely gets my shirt over my ribcage when he stops, finger tracing the ‘U’ shape of my tattoo. It tickles and I jerk so suddenly that my head nearly knocks straight back into the filled bottle cubbies behind me. Jeremy’s got a wolfish grin on his face as he looks up at me. “Why’d you really get this?” he asks.

I roll my eyes. “Of all the things for you to say when you’re halfway under my shirt.”

“C’mon, Scar. I’ve got my theories, I wanna hear it from you.”

“Why do you think?”

“Because you’re a fuckin’ tease.”

I bark out a laugh. “A fine one to talk, you are.”

“I’d much rather use my mouth for other things,” he says.

“Lucky me.”

Even in the dark, I see him wink at me. “Better believe it.”

I then feel his fingers begin to fiddle with the edges of my bra, so I suppose lucky me isn’t too far off.

“Stay in my room tonight,” he whispers after a moment, jolting me back into the present.

“What?” I feel a little dumb once the word flies off of my tongue, but my brain is several steps behind everything.

“Yeah,” he repeats for me, brushing the front pieces of hair off of my face. “If you want to. Sleep with me tonight. Me, you, and the luxury mattress.”

“The girls will be suspicious if I don’t tuck in with them,” I argue weakly, my only qualm with the idea half-assed and something I don’t even give a fuck about anyways.

He smirks. “Well, according to you, we’re two stupid horny teenagers,” he draws out slowly as his fingers dance up and down the sides of my thighs. “So, it shouldn’t be too out of character to just…sneak out once they’re all asleep.”

“I like how you think.”  

“I’m a man of many great ideas,” he agrees, hands slipping underneath me to hoist me so close to him that I’m barely seated on the shelves. My legs lock around his waist like a vise, hands finding his face as he kisses me again and again and again until I forget entirely that we’ve got appearances to somewhat upkeep.

Jeremy knows exactly where to find our excuse of a wine bottle as we’re walking out, pulling Dom Perignon by the neck and the devil dancing in his eyes.

I take a moment to run my fingers through the thick mess of waves my hair has become when I catch sight of my reflection in a picture frame hanging in the hallway right outside of the kitchen. I already looked ravaged as it is with my swollen lips and still-slightly dilated eyes, the last thing I need is mussed up hair that screams 'I've been off getting frisky'.  

Other company has already gathered in the kitchen, and I give myself a small pat on the back for the delayed timing between mine and Jeremy’s entrance. He’s taking the cork out of the bottle and rounding up glasses for everyone as I stroll by, so I take to a seat at the bar counter next to Rudd. As he hands them out, he purposefully brushes his fingers along the length of my hand when he passes me my glass. I glance up at him to see the way his eyes are glittering mischievously and feel a surge of something race through my veins so quickly that my heart skips.

I thank every god that could possibly be listening that both of my roommates are ready to tuck in around midnight because I am on the verge of vibrating straight out of my skin. Nothing about the moment in the wine cellar left me and my desire sated. If anything, it cranked up the dial and made the wait and the want that much more torturous. My hands are practically shaking as I shimmy into my pajamas and brush my teeth, struggling to play my dutiful part while my brain threatens to overload.    

We only managed to get one air mattress in our room, so it’s left for the three of us to divide up sleeping arrangements accordingly. “Two people in the queen bed, one on the air mattress?” Brie suggests the obvious, hands on her hips as she surveys the scene.

“I’ll take the air mattress,” I volunteer much too quickly. Brie and Cobie both look at me rather quizzically and I shrug. “If Rose calls, I don’t wanna wake one of you up.” It’s perhaps the worst excuse I’ve ever haphazardly slapped together and offered up, especially on the fly, but they don’t question it further and leave me to it.

The lights go out and the room falls quiet, and I have never been more awake as I stare up at the ceiling and wait for the two of them to fall asleep. Brie will likely be out first, Cobie a wild card – she’ll either follow suit nearly immediately or it’ll be another hour of her tossing and turning. I don’t know that I can wait another hour.

I keep my eyes fixed up on the ceiling, hands folded and resting over my stomach as I let my brain drift off to thoughts of Jeremy. I think about the look on his face nearly nine years ago at the Oscars when I’d ignored everyone on the red carpet to give him a hug, the even more surprised look on his face when he realized that my date was my manager. I think about the weight of his hand in its dangerously high position on my thigh on the flight back to Albuquerque after D23. I think about our mornings in the hair and makeup trailer comparing bruises and trying to figure out what move had done what damage. I think about the ridiculous wheeze of his laugh into my shoulder during Avengers press when we made a game of throwing pieces of crouton at Joss from across the room, the game only ending when one of us got caught and accused. I think about the goofy grin slapped over his mouth when I gave him his Our Town script with all of George’s lines pre-highlighted. I think of the giant bouquet of yellow and white roses he had sent to my house when Rose was born and the equally giant bouquet of red and pink roses he sent on my first Mother’s Day. I think about the bottle of malt whiskey we split when I divorced Ryan, the moonshine we shared when he divorced Sonni, the beers and basket of chicken wings we shared when my divorce to Romain was finalized while we were filming in Atlanta. I think about him holding my hand every time I was on the verge of tears, him letting me crawl into his lap and hold him tight against my chest when he broke down in sobs one day on set because Sonni had stuck to her guns and caused Jeremy to miss Ava’s ballet recital.

I think of how his arms felt around me at the Walk of Fame when he finished his speech and I launched myself into his embrace. How I couldn’t help to be glad Downey had bailed because imagining anyone else there but Jeremy, my best friend on the planet, seemed impossible. How even then I’d wanted him somehow, that it’s no surprise I still want him now.

Fuck waiting another hour, I don’t know that I can wait another minute.

Fortunately, my thoughts seemed to have wound down a long trail that’s bought me time. I cautiously crawl off of the air mattress, careful not to make any noise as I do. I tip-toe around to one edge of the bed to get a look at both Brie and Cobie. They both appear to be lost to the world, which is good enough for me. My steps are slow and as light as possible on my way to the door, taking nearly three minutes alone to turn the doorknob and open it so slow and quiet it’s as though it doesn’t happen at all.

Noises float from downstairs – not everyone likes tucking in early, I think some of them are still watching some western movie on TV – that mask my footsteps down the hall to Jeremy’s room. He’d retreated around the same time me and the girls did, citing he was going to call Ava and wish her goodnight. I know an excuse when I spot one. Thank fuck none of our friends are good at timezone math. (That, or they’re too drunk to do it.)

I open Jeremy’s door softly, slipping inside the tiny gap I make for myself and shutting it right behind me.

No surprise that the master bedroom is enormous. I do a sweep for him in the room, my eyes flitting off of the unmade bed on the opposite side of the room and circling over to the open space created by an archway in the wall. There’s a small lounge area, complete with two armchairs and a sofa that face a crackling fireplace centered in between large windows. I spot the back of Jeremy’s head in one of the armchairs, muscles in my face involuntarily reacting and twitching a smile onto my face. He appears to be reading something, his blue plaid pajama-clad legs propped up on an Ottoman at his feet.  

“Honey, I’m home,” I sing as my fingers fumble with the lock on the door. There’s a gravelly laugh from the other end of the room.

“Your roomies asleep?”

“Out like lights.” Jeremy’s still got his back to me, fully enraptured in whatever it is he’s reading. It sparks an idea. “Your call with Ava?” I joke as I pull my shirt over my head and drop it onto the floor.

Again, Jeremy chuckles, and it sends a wave of heat straight to the pit of my stomach. “Oh, it was wonderful,” he drawls out playfully. “Had a great conversation. It’s super riveting stuff, gymnastics.”

I yank my pajama shorts down over my hips and kick them into the same pile with my shirt. It leaves me standing there in nothing but my underwear – I’d dug straight to the bottom of my luggage to find something blue, just for kicks. He still hasn’t turned around, so I take the last few moments of my sanity about to me to take a deep breath and remind all of the sudden nerves slamming into my system why I’m here. It’s Jeremy. It’s always going to be Jeremy. I’m done denying myself what I want.

“I’m sure,” I agree as I cross the room, mindful of staying in his blind spot. “And now it’s just me and you.”

I circle around the arm chair and into his line of sight, the strangled noise of shock getting caught in his throat. My hand brushes over the back of the chair as I come closer, straddling his legs. Seeing just how hot and bothered he is at one glimpse of me near naked is gratifying.

“Jesus Christ,” he groans, unceremoniously throwing his newspaper onto the floor and putting his now-freed hands on either of my hips. He yanks me down into his lap and I watch as his eyes darken.   

“Scarlett’s just fine,” I quip, my fingers trailing down to the hem of his T-shirt. In response, I get a glare, but it doesn’t last for long. For him (and for me), touching me is much more fun than semantics.

“I was looking forward to unwrapping you, hot sauce.” I grip tight to his shirt and jerk it upwards, him acquiescing and assisting me in my efforts of getting him out of it.

“Next time.” Jeremy’s always been like a furnace, the heat of his now-bare chest rippling off him in waves as I canvas each curve of muscle and plane of skin with a feather-light touch. I lean into him and brush my lips over a spot on his bare shoulder, another choked sound ripping straight through his chest. His hands knot up in my hair while his body relaxes underneath my touch. “Besides,” I mumble as I bring my lips up to the place on his neck right beneath his ear. “I left you one thing.”

“You’re gonna…fuck, Scar, you’re gonna kill me,” he breathes out when I purposefully roll my hips, the friction nice enough that I dig my nails a little deeper into his back.

“I told you not to tease me.”

I feel him nudge me back a little, and I lift my head so we’re eye-to-eye. He’s carefully watching me, one of his hands sliding away from my hips and reaching up to push some of my hair behind my ears. It’s like the braided line of our sights are holding the two of us in balance and I feel the weight of it all the way down in my toes. “God, I’m so fuckin’ crazy about you,” Jeremy whispers.

My thumb traces the same patch of skin along his jawline. “I’m crazy about you.” Even there in the dim light provided only from his reading lamp and the flames crackling behind me, I see him in his eyes, sparkling and alive and beautiful as ever. “Take me to bed, baby.”

Ask and you shall receive.

He hooks his arms underneath my legs and picks me up, the swift motion eliciting a small shriek out of me. Next thing I know, my back collides with the mattress in a specific divot of the bed where the sheets and comforter have been completely thrown back. “Lucky you, right?” I tease him when I catch him looking down at me like he’s trying to plan on how to eat me alive, one of my eyebrows lifting suggestively.

“Lucky me.”

Conversation effectively dies as he starts putting his mouth to good use, leaving a trail of fire everywhere that he brushes over. I’m putty in his hands as his lips caress my sternum, the horseshoe tattoo, around my breasts and the tops of my nipples, my belly-button, down one of my thighs. “You’ve got no idea how many times I’ve imagined this in my head,” he mutters, his hands nudging my legs open wider as he nestles between them. “How much I’ve wanted you.”

I prop myself up on my elbows, looking down at him. The sight of Jeremy right between my thighs strikes a chord with my possessiveness and I dig my heel into his shoulder. “Show me.”

He’s content to tease me a little while longer, mouth mapping out the inner region of my thighs. “Jeremy,” I whimper, fingers tangling in his hair tightly.

“Did you put this on for me?”

“Yes,” I huff impatiently, squirming underneath him. “Jer, please.”

“Please what?”

My mouth goes dry at how dark his eyes are when my own meet them. “Please touch me.”

Jeremy hooks his index finger underneath the waistband of my thong and drags it down my legs so slowly that I’m about to fly off the bed. Once it's off and thrown blindly over his shoulder, I have a litany of threats – even pleas, if that’s really what he wants out of me – waiting on my tongue to hurtle at him. They aren’t needed.

He puts his mouth on me without preamble and I nearly come apart right then and there.

I melt away into the bed while he works his magic, a game that I think he’s enjoying and that I am too far gone to figure out the workings of. My lower lip is being torn to shreds as I try to keep quiet, remembering that we aren’t the only ones in this house, much less on this floor, but it’s so good, so good and I am rapidly losing control. He suddenly sinks two fingers inside of me and I swear, his other hand flying up to my mouth and covering it. Quiet. Right.

Must be quiet as Jeremy unravels me and causes me to lose my goddamn mind.

He works me until I’m right at the edge, whimpering into his hand and my fingers white-knuckling the bedsheet. “Come on, gorgeous,” he urges, his voice throwing gasoline on the fire deep in my stomach. “Come for me.”

Then he’s sucking hard on my clit and I feel the force at which I shatter in the backs of my teeth.

My hand slaps down on the mattress once, twice, fingers gripping to the bedsheet so tightly I feel like my bones might break as the orgasm tears through me. Jeremy keeps his hand tight on my mouth to suppress the sobs, somewhat a shame – I’d kill to see the look on his face when I scream out his name. I slowly float back down from where I slammed into my ceiling, my breathing heavy. “Fuck, that was good,” I sigh, lazily watching the show above me as Jeremy strips himself of his pajama pants and his boxers before he crawls on top of me.

When he kisses me, I can taste myself on his tongue and it sends a strike of warmth all the way to the base of my spine.

We lay there for a few moments, his tongue exploring my mouth and my lips eagerly searching his out every time they retreat. It doesn’t take long before the smoke rolls away and I’m fully aware of the still-burning desperation inside me. “Jeremy.”

“Scarlett.”

“Need you,” I mutter.

He laughs, the sound dripping in sex. “Do you now?”

“Remember what happens when you tease me,” I remind him, taking advantage of how relaxed he is and rolling us over into the middle of the bed where I’m straddling him. The way his pupils go wide and turn his blue eyes black amuses me, smirk pulling on my lips.

“Have your dirty way with me, woman,” he replies, hands stroking my thighs. “I’m all yours.”

Can’t say I hate the sound of that.

“As you wish.”

I take my time with him, kissing him slowly and deeply while my fingers trace each ropy muscle in his arms. My mouth eventually drifts down his jawline before stopping at his neck. Already I’m seeking out friction despite my urge to drive him a little crazy. He’s hard between my thighs and the dull ache in my belly throbs at the feeling when I experimentally roll my hips. The motion steals a guttural groan from him that makes me have to leave the sucking on his neck to capture his mouth and keep it occupied.

“Shh,” I whisper into his mouth as I grind down harder. It begins to get even too much for me and I find myself finally saying fuck it, reaching between us and positioning myself right over him.

“Scarlett,” he chokes out, hands gripping tightly on my waist to stop me before I can even wedge the tip of him inside me. “Wait—”

At least one of us has our minds still about us. “It’s okay,” I reassure him, physically straining at the control it’s requiring me to possess to hold back. “If you’re good.”

His head hits back against the pillow with a thud. “God, I’m so good.”

I ease down onto him slowly, my teeth baring into my lower lip so hard that I can taste blood. The feeling borders right along pain and pleasure as I lower myself until I’m sitting on top of his thighs, a shaky sigh escaping me. Beneath me, Jeremy’s eyes are blown. “Shit,” I hiss between my teeth.

I make myself keep my eyes open as I ride him, watch how the pleasure makes his face twitch and twist up and darkens his eyes, watch the way his fingers grip onto my hips, my breasts, my wrists. It’s beautiful, watching him come undone with every roll of my hips.

Finally, he loses his patience in the slow and torturous pace I’ve set and grips me by my waist, his knees coming up behind me as he sits us up and drags us closer to the headboard. The new angle pushes him even deeper and I can’t contain the involuntary moan at the sensation. It’s all the encouragement he needs to lift me off him and drop me back down.      

“There you go, baby girl,” he growls against my skin as his hips collide with mine again and again. "Fuck, you feel good." I whimper, nails digging into his back so tightly that I guarantee he’ll have the marks for a few days.

“All yours.” He’s beginning to lose a steady rhythm in how his hips jerk up to slam into mine, and I sense that he’s close. I capture his mouth again in a filthy kiss, clenching him just to see how it feels when he moans into my mouth. “Fuck, Renner.”

The spider webs of my own impending orgasm are spreading throughout my belly and tightening around my spine. I just want him, I want all of him all the time and fuck, how could I have been so stupid to deny myself of this, of him, for so many years now? “Right there,” I feel his lips mouth against my skin, the noise barely audible from the blood rushing in my ears.  

“C'mon baby,” I whine, my mouth worrying at his earlobe as he thrusts up into me. “I’m all yours. All yours. Come on.”

His hand slips between the two of us and rubs me in tight, stiff circles. It’s all I need to tip over the edge and I collapse into his shoulder, teeth sinking into his shoulder as my climax ripples up my spine. He only needs a few more thrusts with me quivering around him to fall apart, my name there on his lips as he does.

We sit like that for I don’t know how long, both of us boneless and melting into each other in the aftermath. “Hi,” he mumbles after a prolonged silence, sweeping all the hair off my shoulders and sending it down my back.

I peel back, the sex haze still swirling in his veins resulting in a dopey grin on his face that’s for me alone. “Hi, gorgeous,” I reply, giving him a small kiss on the lips.

“That was…so worth the wait.” I nod lazily, mostly watching him thread his fingers through wavy strands of blonde hair.

“Definitely not gonna wait that long again for the next time.” My agreement sparks a little curiosity in him judging by the way his eyes widen slightly and the edges of his mouth quirk.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he chuckles, shifting me off of him so I'm flat on my back on the mattress with my head half-swathed in a feather pillow. “We’ve got all night.”

It’s like music to my ears.

. . .

The sun is my alarm clock, brightness filling the room and stirring me from what is unquestionably the soundest sleep I’ve had in weeks. Disorient seeps into my brain as I go about gathering my bearings in figuring out where I am. Alarm clock on the night table in front of me. Walls painted grey. Lazy rustling from something – air conditioning, maybe? Or a fireplace. Definitely a fireplace. Large windows, nearly floor to ceiling, curtains half-drawn and giving me a view out into the forest where the room’s elevation makes me as tall as some of the trees that slope down the hill. A hand resting comfortably in the dip of my waist like it was made to fit there. A foot tangled around both of my ankles. Stubble brushing along my bare shoulder. Jeremy.

I sigh, melting deeper down into my pillow as I grip the sheet around me and pull it a little closer to my chest. So that’s what this feels like.

I start to doze back off as I nestle further back into Jeremy’s embrace, the sounds of him slowly rousing vibrating along my skin. “Mh,” he grumbles, the noise stirring in the back of his throat so low that I feel it in my belly. He stretches a little, hand dipping lower on my side and tugging me closer to him. “Am I dead?”

“No,” I rasp out, the hand already underneath the sheet gripping his fingers that are currently brushing over my hip. A low chuckle spurs in my chest. “Why, sex puts you out nowadays?”

He grunts in response. “Wondering how I managed to get to heaven.”

I scoff, even if his words do turn me to a puddle. “Not even close.”

Against my skin, he nods, the scratchiness of his stubble tickling me. “Wrong.” His lips then settle over my shoulder, lingering there for a moment. “You’re heaven.”

I twist around in his grip, adjusting myself so I’m laying with my face only inches from his. I don’t think I’ve ever been at liberty to be this close to him and do a full study, soak in every minuscule feature from the number of his eyelashes, to the places where his beard is growing in, to the faint lines around his eyes and mouth that would deepen if I were to make him laugh. Through sleepy blue-green eyes he looks at me, a new and unrivaled contentment swimming there in the oceans of his irises. He is the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. And he’s…well, I suppose this would make him mine.

The thought of that turns my heartbeat into rotor blades, only a few steps shy of being powerful enough to lift me out of this bed and somewhere up into the clouds.

I wrestle my hand loose from where I’ve snuggled it under the pillow and let it drift to his face, thumb gently tracing over his lower lip. His fingers close over my wrist and hold my hand there, him pressing a small kiss into the pad of my thumb after a moment. “Promise me something,” he murmurs against my skin.

“Anything.”

“Don’t disappear when I say what I’m about to.”

My head rustles the pillow as I give a rather imperceptible shake, eyes never leaving his. “Never,” I whisper with as much conviction as one can muster up at eight in the morning.

This time when he speaks, his voice is so quiet it could be mistaken with a house-settling noise or a gust of wind outside. “I love you.” Those three words bare him to me in a vulnerability I’ve never seen on him before. I’ve always understood him in ways most people never have and never will, but he starts to make a little more sense even to me when he looks like this. He is completely exposed laying here in front of me, like a raw nerve, every feeling he’s ever had painted on his face in black and white. It’s as though all of the years and life and mistakes are stripped away, only a childlike reverence and the truth remaining. It makes my breath catch in my throat, the feeling of his fingers tracing down my arm threatening to raise goosebumps. “You don’t have to say it back or anything. I just…I’ve been holding it in and now that you’re here, and I know you’re real, I needed you to know.”

His voice drops off and puts the ball in my court. I don’t need any time to make a decision on what to do next.

I remove the remaining inches between us and kiss him slow, heavy, drinking him in as I worry his lower lip between mine. Words have never been my forte and actions speak much louder anyways, but suddenly there’s an urge sitting on top of my chest that I feel like might crush me if I don’t bend my own rules. My thumb rests in the dimple of his chin as I pull away for a slight second, just long enough to tell him, “I love you right back.”

He steals the remaining breath from my lungs as he reels me in and kisses the knowledge of even my own name away.

When we come up for air, he bumps his nose against mine purposefully. “Oh, what a good morning it is,” he muses, and I laugh as I let my head collapse against his chest.

We lay there for what seems like a whole other forever, his hands warm underneath my shoulder blades and my cheek pressed close to the steady, strong beat of his heart that could lull me right back under. “Well, sweetheart, guess it’s time we go face the music,” Jeremy says, ripping through the dream I’ve been lounging on as his hands slide down my back before drawing away entirely.

I frown, snuggling deeper into his embrace out of my own selfish desires to stay here just a little while longer. “They’re dense, honey,” I try to persuade with the addition of a light kiss to his chest. “They’ve got no clue.”

He leans away from me, and when I look up, he’s got an eyebrow arched paired with the general perplexed expression on his face. “Assuming that they haven’t already, Brie and Cobie are gonna wake up to you missing. When they go downstairs to investigate, the cohort of heathens sitting around my dining room table impatiently waiting on the breakfast I am not serving them will be there to aid in the speculation.” He makes a point. “And if that’s not telling enough, then I’m sure the echoes of ‘Fuck, Jeremy!’ throughout the house last night did it.”

My jaw drops at his insinuation, the feverish smile breaking out on his face warranting my shoving him in the shoulder. “I was not that loud,” I protest, feeling the blush ravage through my cheeks in no time.

He’s already laughing. “Oh, yes, you were.” He falls flat on his back, face twisting up and eyes closed in what I suppose is meant to be a mockery of me. “Shit, Jer,” he mimics, his voice breathy and much higher than my voice could ever possibly stretch. “Right there, right there, don’t stop—”

“You’re the worst!” I whine, rolling over and covering my face with both of my hands. Jeremy just erupts into another fit of laughter, wheezing until the humor in the joke dies out for him. “The literal worst.”

“Not the tune you were singing last night,” he teases, rolling back onto his side to press one last kiss to my forehead before propelling himself upright and untangling his limbs from the sheets.

We drag our heels in the process of making ourselves look presentable. The rest of the world – and perhaps more terrifyingly, the majority of our costars – await us, and I can’t help but to want to stay here in this bubble of me, Jeremy, and no one else for a few more seconds. Right before he gets his hand on the doorknob to open the door and subject us to what has to be a semi-normal day ahead, I grab either side of his face and bring his lips down to mine one more time. It takes him by surprise, but he relaxes underneath my fingertips and breathes me in until we both have to break away.

His eyebrows furrow together. “What was that for?”

It’s my hand that settles on the doorknob first, pausing as I shrug. “’Cause I can.” He beams so widely that it’s impossible not to be infected by it. “And because I love you.”

We have enough control to walk down the hall and downstairs into the living room without holding hands or even brushing shoulders, adopting the appearance that all is normal and we’re not doing the walk of shame like we absolutely are. Usually, I’m not shy about the people I’m with. I am all for public displays of affection. I’m not one hundred percent on where Jeremy stands though, and even if we were on the same page, I think it’s safe in assuming that around the breakfast table at eight A.M. is the worst possible scenario to make a spectacle of ourselves.

Unsurprisingly, it seems as though everyone’s already awake and milling around. Jeremy’s trust at the grill last night must have extended over into breakfast detail because Mackie and Hemsworth are hard at work in the kitchen. I spot Lizzie laying down on the couch with her feet propped up in Evans’s lap about the time she spots me. “Scar!” she announces. “Morning, sunshine.”

“Sleep good?” I ask as I walk over, taking a seat on the arm of the couch so I hover right over her head.

“Yeah. Fortunately, Karen sleeps like the dead.” She tilts her head back a little to get a good look at me. “How about you?”

“Slept fine,” I answer as nonchalantly as I can possibly manage.

“Breakfast!” Someone – probably Mackie – yells from the kitchen, stealing our attention. “Breakfast, you animals!”

As I ease off of the couch arm and grab the outstretched arm that Lizzie is waving around for someone to take and pull her up, I notice that Evans has his eyes deadlocked onto me. He’s examining me, trying to put whatever pieces he can find together, and is frustratingly coming up empty. I just cock an eyebrow, giving the slight shake of my head to insinuate what? before I’m on my way.

I put faith in Mackie and Hemsworth not to poison me so I follow my grumbling stomach’s direction and pile food onto my plate. Lizzie designates the seat next to her at the table as mine and I happily slide in next to her. Everyone else fills in the empty spaces, some people splitting off to the couches to eat.

Jeremy’s sitting at the head of the table, a good three chairs away from me – he catches my eye right before he puts an entire strawberry in his mouth and I have to start guzzling on my coffee as if my senses rest at the bottom of the mug.

I actually allow myself to feel somewhat smug about our getting away scot-free during the first thirty minutes of breakfast. And then Cobie opens her mouth.

“Hey, Scar,” she says out of the blue as I’m cutting through my waffle. “Where’d you go this morning?”

I stop cutting, glancing up at her confusedly. “What?”

She doesn’t seem to understand why I’m reacting like this. To her, she’s asked a simple question with a black-or-white answer. “Yeah, we woke up and you weren’t in the room. Where were you?”

All it takes is an excuse like ‘oh, my daughter called and I went outside to take it’ or even something a little more of a stretch like ‘oh, I decided to go for a super impromptu run through the forest at dawn’ to bring about an end to this. But before the words have a chance to come together like I need them to, Chris Evans has put a few of his brain cells to use and is now sitting up even straighter in his chair with his eyes glued to me.

Goddammit.

“Wait…” he draws out, pointing at me before he shifts his line of sight down to the other end of the table where Jeremy sits, chugging coffee not-so-inconspicuously. “Wait a fucking minute. Did…”

Lizzie is next to hop on board with where Evans is going, her hand slapping me in the shoulder so suddenly that I drop both my fork and knife. “Jesus!” I wince.

“Scarlett?” she asks me, both her eyes about to bulge out of her head as she shoves my hair off of my shoulder. "Oh my god, is that a hickey?!" I sink a little lower into my seat, reaching for one of my strawberries and popping it in my mouth. If my jaws are occupied, I don’t have to spill.   

“Did you…” Evans turns away from Jeremy and back to me. “And you…”

Hemsworth then erupts into such forceful laughter that it sounds like he’s choking. “Wait, what’s happening?” Rudd asks no one in particular. “What’s going on?”

Robert, who is sitting next to Jeremy, reaches out and pats the top of his hand. “Way to go, buddy,” he congratulates dryly. Jeremy looks like he would rather be dead. “We’re all real proud of you.”

“Aw, dammit!” Mackie yells from where he sits over on the couch.

“Told ‘ya you shouldn’t have picked that far out,” Sebastian says with a shrug.

Mark, at the other end of the table, raises his hand slightly. “So, wait, who said after Endgame?”

“Pretty sure that was me,” Hemsworth manages to get out in between his laughs.

Evans’s face falls. “Um, no, I’m pretty sure you said after Infinity War, because I distinctly remember telling you that Renner was gonna be busy doing other press and your reply was that Skype sex absolutely counted. I think Don said after Endgame.” On the other side of me, Don nods in approval, motioning towards himself.

Cobie holds up a finger. “I said the premiere, is that close enough to get a cut?”

“Hell no,” Don says. “I was right on the money; therefore, I get all the money.”

Now it’s my turn to be confused. “Wait, what?” I look over to Lizzie for some sort of explanation.

She nods in the direction of Mackie rummaging through his wallet. “We’ve had a running bet on when the two of you would finally hook up.”

I blink a few times in disbelief. “Excuse me?”

“Yeah,” she continues casually. “The core four over there have had it going on for a while now, and once you get inducted into the Avengers, you get to contribute to the betting pool. Personally, I said once you and Baguette divorced for good. Cost me fifty bucks when you and Colin picked up making out as an extracurricular.” The look she shoots me is downright spiteful. “Thanks for that.”

I have about a thousand other things I’d like to say bouncing around inside of my brain, but none of them manage to connect into something coherent. Instead, I glance over to where Jeremy sits. He meets my bewildered look with a shrug, bringing his coffee cup back up to his lips.

In retrospect, I suppose I should have seen this coming.

“We expect invites to the wedding,” Robert tells me. “In fact, if you’d like, I’d be willing to host my house up as venue – I’ll even offer you the Avenger discount.” Susan pinches his elbow and he jerks back, wincing. “What? You had a stake in all this too, don’t act like you’re all innocent, honey.”

Evans is grinning at me like the fucking Cheshire Cat, chin resting on his propped-up fist. “Was it everything you dreamed it would be?” he teases, wiggling both his eyebrows.

“Oh, god, don’t even start,” I groan. “I just want to eat in peace.”

“Why? Because peace was hard to come by last night?”

My face falls. Well, at least now I don’t feel bad about throwing a grape at his head. He just laughs as it bounces off his forehead and onto the floor, clutching at his chest.

I go back to haughtily picking at my berries while everyone around me is swapping money and contributing their two cents to the commentary of mine and Jeremy’s sex life. It doesn’t bother me all that much, having them know, but I do feel a little miffed at the thought of my love life being subject to such a grand scale of speculation that I didn’t even have a clue. Guess I can no longer say I’m the beauty and the brains of the team.

Suddenly, I feel the weight of someone’s hand on my shoulder, redirecting my attention. At first, I think it’s Lizzie, or maybe Don to offer me a cut of his winnings, but I am treated to the sight of Jeremy when I swivel in my chair and look behind me. My eyebrows furrow together – when the hell did he get up? “What?” 

He says nothing in reply as his fingers slip underneath my chin and tilt my head back. Next thing I know, he’s bent down and kissed me. Beside me, Lizzie lets out a little shriek and someone – probably Evans – is applauding.

It consumes me entirely for the few seconds that it lasts, the world expanding once again when he pulls back. Jeremy must sense the question I’m going to ask, because he shrugs. “Not gonna hide it if they know.”

Seems like good enough logic to me.

He’s just about to walk off when my hand snatches his wrist, pulling him back. My heart is in free-fall as he looks back down at me, the split-second glance between us filling in all the spaces where words should go. I lift up out of my seat and fortunately, he’s there at the halfway point to meet me. I cradle his face as I kiss him, savoring the bitter taste of his coffee that his mouth has adopted. Mine, I think, the thought itching to burst out of my skin in front of everyone. Mine mine mine he’s mine and I’m his and if this is what you guys wanted then have it because he is mine.  

Across the room, I hear Mackie yell.

“Stop rubbing it in!”

The day progresses slow and easy, Jeremy suggesting the idea of a nature walk that I gladly take him up on. Only a handful of us actually go – Lizzie, Evans, Mackie, Hemsworth and Elsa, and then me with my fingers tightly laced with Jeremy’s as we traipse through the great outdoors and soak the sunshine into our skin.

Somewhere around noon, we make it to a small clearing where we can see off the mountain we’ve practically climbed. The mountains stretch out in front of us, sky a brilliant blue backdrop to a view that causes the breath to snag in my chest. Worth the walk entirely, of course, and the small part of me that thrives off of an adventure is giddy at the sight of something as unreal as Mother Nature in her element.

“Oh, wow,” I breathe out as I drag Jeremy close to the edge in the name of getting a good look. “Wow. That’s beautiful.”

“Yeah, you are.” My head snaps in his direction, only to see him donning a ridiculously dopey grin as he stares at me. “Love you.”

The way the words roll off his lips is natural; sure, we’ve said them to each other hundreds of times before, but now I know what he means by them and how they resonate in the pit of my chest. I know how to hear them the way I'm supposed to. I know how to accept them and wear them and let them burn into my skin because him loving me is an exquisite thing that strikes content into my soul and flusters me all the way down to my toes. 

“Love you,” I reply, giving his hand three quick squeezes as I coax him a little closer to the edge with me so I can have him name off all the places below us that he’s familiar with. I don't miss how natural it feels to say the words, either. My loving him is an exquisite thing that I was born to do.

. . .

“You sure you trust your life in his hands?” I ask Lizzie, line of sight darting up to the front of the car where Anthony Mackie sits behind the driver’s wheel.

She nods. “He knows I’ll haunt him if he kills me.”

“Text me when you guys land later tonight.” Lizzie gives me a mock salute as I draw away from the car door I’ve been leaning against, taking a few steps backwards. “Bye, guys.”

From beside Lizzie, Evans waves. “See ‘ya soon, Scarly.”

The window rolls up and the car engine comes purring to life. I watch with my arms folded over my chest as Mackie backs the car out of the driveway slowly, waving once they get turned in the direction of the main road. Mackie hits the horn a few times, their way of getting in the last goodbye, and then just like that, I’m left standing outside in my sweatpants staring at an empty road.

I figure now it’s really and truly over. We had our little extended fun, hid from the music, but like all things, it eventually grew too loud to face. We’ve got other jobs, other meetings, other responsibilities. Living in a bubble is a dream that only knows a fate of popping. Nothing lasts forever, and I do well to remember that. Somewhere in my chest, I feel the same stirring of emotions that is a reflex associated with the motion of accepting the close.

I may be on the verge of tears, but there’s a settling peace blanketing around me that assures me they’re not going to fall this time.

It’s the end of one great thing, but it is surely the beginning of something even greater.

“They gone?” Over my shoulder, Jeremy is approaching me, both hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans. I roll the weight onto one leg as I pivot towards him, arms still hugging my chest.

“Just left. Nobody left but you and me.”

Staying was one of the easiest decisions I’ve made in my life. All it took was one look at me in the darkness of Jeremy’s room, his fingers threaded through my hair and the quiet request for me to stay that settled my fate. A quick phone call with Romain ensured that Rosie would fly into Reno instead of LAX on Sunday when it was officially my turn, my assistant happy to gather up some more of my stuff and overnight it to Camp Renner. Ava's expected to show up on Tuesday for Jeremy's week with her, and then the beginning of something new will be upon us. The nerves and anxieties of change didn’t feel like an ocean.

Jeremy wraps one of his arms around my shoulders once he’s within reach, and I curl into the embrace. “This still doesn’t feel real,” I mumble, breathing him in.

“It’ll take a little getting used to, believe me,” he laughs. “But I meant what I said. I’m never gonna let you go.”

He kisses the top of my head and I sigh. He’s never going to let me go and I’m never going to let him – seems like a perfect enough place to start writing this new chapter of us.

“Thanks for staying,” he whispers into my hair, the sound barely audible above the rustling of the trees in the wind.

“Wouldn’t wanna be anywhere else.” And I mean it. “So, what now?”

Jeremy leans back so I can get a glimpse of his face when I look up. “Hot tub?” he suggests, raising an eyebrow.

“I didn’t bring my bathing suit.”

It’s a wicked, sinful grin that makes its way onto Jeremy’s face. “Just you and me,” he reminds me. His voice is low and rough, the sound of it driving little tiny shocks of electricity into my skin that roll a shiver up my spine. “Clothing is optional.”

“Hot tub it is then.”