His fumbling explanation did a lot to ease her mind, actually. He was a lot more smooth with the women he was planning to bed and forget. “No, no, you didn’t do anything wrong,” Summer assured Tony. “Only, you know, usually if /you/ bring a woman here, you have something different in mind than looking at the night skyline.” She linked her hands behind her back, looking up at the stars. “I didn’t,” a shrug, “expect that you … would ever … ” She trailed off, somehow unwilling to say it aloud.
Tony sometimes hated his reputation. It kept him from making genuine connections with people. He scraped his thumb under a fingernail, forming somewhat more eloquent statements in his mind before just spewing them out.
“It’s – been a while, actually. Since I’ve brought /anyone/ here, at all. Tower’s empty after hours most days… Not that, you know, that was why I -” He sighed at himself and rose, dusting his pants off. “I mean, I’ve thought of asking you for drinks a couple times, but when you save the world together, well,” that almost sounded like a joke – or at least making light of the truth. He’d thought about it more than a couple times, but it just never seemed like a good idea. Summer was fantastic. Totally fantastic! It’s just – he was wary of relationships in general. No one seemed to see the real him. There was Tony Stark the weapons dealer, Iron Man, Tony Stark the forgetful , drunk, rich, attention-seeking asshole – he just wanted someone he could be Tony around… not that he made that easy on himself. He very rarely stopped acting whatever roll those people put him in long enough for them to notice there was anything underneath the shallow surface. He smiled awkwardly as the sun slipped out of sight.
”- Can I pour you a coffee? JARVIS makes an amazing espresso. Peels paint, that shit does!”
Summer watched him, listening underneath the babble. He tasted of — uncertainty, hope, of secrets and things he didn’t even admit to himself. Layers and layers. How could she have missed this? “No, thank you, Mr Stark,” she began, “I’d rather have kahlua, if you don’t mind.” A particularly fierce gust of wind whipped at her skirts, and she shrieked a little, clutching at them. Giving Tony a gamine smile, Summer added, “Maybe I better go inside.” With the graceful ease of her dancer past, she made her way back inside the penthouse, pausing at the door to settle her skirts. “Why didn’t you?”
He laughed and held an arm out to make sure she didn’t lose her balance. “In, in, we’ll talk there!”
When the glass door closed behind them, JARVIS turned on the radio low enough to provide background noise without being disruptive, and increased the temperature of the room a few degrees to make up for the wind’s chill.
“So, you’re asking why didn’t I, as in why didn’t I ask you out?” He asked as he circled his bar and browsed through the hectic, semi-organized collection of bottles. He’d misplaced things more than once on this countertop and lost them for months on end, only to find that they were in plain sight, only a few inches to the left, or something simple like that.
“I guess that since I ruin every good relationship in my life with money or sex and all my good sex with relationships and money, I didn’t want to risk it. I’ve done it a few times, and they were all train wrecks, you know?”
Subconsciously, he avoids the more painful memories – Pep leaving him, that phone call going unanswered as he flew through the portal, Obadiah ripping the reactor from his chest after trusting him his whole life, because he remembers vaguely that she’d pick up on the depth of the pain associated with them. Instead, he brought up the emptiness, the lack of caring, and there was no stopping his loneliness, but it was dulled by his stellar mood at the moment.
Picking up her skirts with one hand, Summer wandered over to the bar, hitching herself up on a stool. She leaned both elbows on the counter, watching Tony with head tilted to one side. “You’re saying … whenever you just wanted sex, they wanted something more serious? And … you,” she cleared her throat, stalling, then just went on with it, “you can’t figure out how to be exclusive in a relationship?”
One hand came up to prop her chin as she studied him. Did he expect her to fix this? She could sense the loneliness, like bitter almonds in the air, and that he regarded her highly, but what did he want? Suddenly noticing her, and bringing her back to his tower, confessing that he’d thought of asking her out for drinks — it was all a little too faery tale.
Self-consciously, Summer added, “What changed your mind?”