Just Indulge Me

Toni was pretty sure she wasn't expecting any guests. It was a Sunday, for one thing, Pepper's coveted me-time day of the week when she tried to avoid scheduling anything for Toni so she wouldn't have work to do by proxy. It was also about 10:30 at night which was not a normal business hour by any stretch of the imagination.

Yet, there was a man on her balcony.

Toni had spotted him when she went to pour herself a scotch. One moment she SWORE everything had been normal, the next she looked up and a tall person with slicked back dark hair was outside her windows, peering around at the tower and the balcony like he was confused.

Being equally confused Toni headed over to the doorway, stepping out onto the balcony with her scotch and a furrowed brow. What the hell? Had he been skydiving? Had he climbed the building?

"Excuse me!" She leaned over to catch the man's eye as he turned toward her. "Hey there! Hi. Couldn't help but notice that you're standing on my balcony, which is attached to my tower which is also kind of my house. Little bit of trespassing there. Did security clear you?"

A change of scenery.

That had been the excuse she'd offered, a reasoning for a trip south that Steve had happily accepted when she'd asked him to come along. Somewhere in the back of her mind Toni knew the trip was one of pure avoidance, a way around dealing with everything that had been bubbling up since this whole 'thing' had started with Steve.

She hesitated from calling it a 'relationship' or referring to him as a 'boyfriend'. They weren't words she was used to using to describe the men she spent her time with.

Their tentative new connection had been good for a week or so, when Toni had just been coasting on that rush of new attraction and trying to put the gathering knot in her belly out of mind. It hadn't taken that long to sink in though, all the issues present that she hadn't considered...

Discounting his frozen years, she was eighteen years older than Steve, as Pepper pointed out when Toni finally spoke to her on the topic; a figure that made her choke on her coffee and left her feeling like a wanna-be pedophile.

Then there was the fact that Toni hadn't dated the same person for more than seven or eight months at a stretch since college and being faced with the prospect of a partner who may well want to stick with her for longer than that, given that Steve's thoughts on relationships seemed to be as old fashioned as his thoughts on many other things.... well to be honest it made her chest knot up and her breath come short to think about it too hard, so she tried not to.

Toni threw herself headlong into solving 'more important things'; burying her nose in even her most neglected and back-burner-relegated lab projects, trying to distract herself from the building media attention in New York, from Fury's irritation, from Pepper's worried questions, from her own reeling anxiousness...

It worked for a while, but restlessness took root easily and once decided on the trip she'd been glad for the busywork of packing a bag, of travelling, of showing Steve around the Malibu house and it's property. They took a drive around the city, went to the beach, and despite it all, by the third day they were in Malibu, she was back to working feverishly to distract herself, up before even Steve's early rising hours making a holy mess of the garage.

Slamming into the ceiling right underneath the guest room like that had PROBABLY woken him up... Better adjust the repulsiors some more. And sweep up all the plaster she'd knocked out of the ceiling.

Toni stared at the phone book entry in her smartphone as she sat on the front step of the restaurant.

If she'd been less of a mess she'd have sent for the Maiden, but letting her wet hair drip all over the inside of her trillion dollar baby was simply not acceptable.

Had Happy and Pepper not been spending their evening off with each other she would have called one of them, but as it was she didn't want to be the person to break up their alone time. Neither would forgive her for it for weeks, most likely, and this night had been rotten enough without making her most favorite and essential employees mad at her on top of everything else.

That left just one more person nearby to call who might not laugh at her situation openly...

With a sigh she tapped Steve's number and held the phone carefully away from her wet ear as it rang, wincing some as she heard his sleepy voice come over the line. Oh right, it was past midnight...

"Steve? Hey, it's Toni. Sorry to wake you."

[Mets Tickets were not, as Toni had feared, too insanely hard to come by a week off. At least not when you could afford to drop a bit on them, anyway.

She had woken up to one of those blissful Saturdays where nothing went wrong in the lab before she'd finished her second cup of coffee and none of her e-mails was marked urgent, managing to actually be ready to leave long enough before Steve left to squeeze in a couple rounds of pinball.

The ballpark when they arrived was loud and crowded, full of cameras, but wearing worn jeans and a t-shirt, with a ponytail pulled through the back of her baseball cap, Toni seemed to blend into the crowd fine. The sense of anonymity was most of what allowed her to relax.

The seats they ended up with were fairly close to the diamond, a good view of the action in Toni's admittedly uneducated opinion. She turned to Steve as they reached the right row, gesturing him on ahead of her.]

You want the aisle seat or does it matter?