Chapter Text
Jake pushes open the door to The Hard Deck, lured by the faint notes of music on the evening air. Someone is playing the piano, hauntingly familiar, though he can’t immediately identify the tune.
He heard about the place from a previous squadron mate who’d been posted here before and decided to check it out tonight, figuring there was no point in waiting around twiddling his thumbs in barracks once he’d unpacked. He elected to remain in his civilian clothes, technically off duty until tomorrow.
There’s a dark-haired woman behind the bar, wiping down the countertop. A girl of around ten or so is perched atop a high bar stool, swinging her legs and engrossed in a paperback. He can’t see the piano or the piano player yet.
The woman arches an elegant eyebrow at him. “We’re not open yet.”
He flashes her his most charming smile, dimples deepening, and purposefully accentuates his drawl. “Aw, c’mon. Don’t be like that. You let the guy playing the piano in; why not me?”
She looks unsure whether to be amused or aggravated by him. It’s a reaction he’s well-versed in receiving. She decides on amused which generally means the outcome will end up working in Jake’s favor. “He’s been here before. You haven’t.”
“There’s got to be a first time for everyone, right?”
“Alright,” she says after a long beat during which she blatantly sizes him up. “You can stay on one condition. If I ring this bell at any point tonight, you have to come over to me at the bar and do as I say. Deal?” She gestures to the old-fashioned bell as she speaks.
“Deal,” Jake agrees, though he has no idea what she’s talking about. He doesn’t intend to hang around long enough to find out anyway, given the early start tomorrow.
As he's about to turn away, she extends a hand. “Penny.”
“Jake,” he says, shaking it. Her grip is strong, her gaze direct.
“Welcome to San Diego, Jake.”
He chuckles. “That obvious, huh?”
“Absolutely,” she replies, and her smile turns warm and knowing. “Bradley’s out back.”
The piano, worn-down and well-used, is situated between two posts behind the bar countertop, lovingly adorned with squadron patches and military memorabilia. The guy playing said piano is around Jake’s age, maybe older. He doesn’t turn around as Jake approaches, seating himself down to watch from a cautious distance.
Penny had called him Bradley, her voice flavored with fondness. Jake wonders if they’re related; he can’t see an obvious resemblance, but that doesn’t mean anything.
Bradley’s fingers caress the keys deftly, coaxing a bittersweet melody from the depths of the piano’s body.
Then he starts singing, a few lines here and there almost like an afterthought. His voice is low and husky, lends itself naturally to this sort of soppy and overly sentimental love song. He doesn’t seem to notice Jake being there at all.
Despite himself, Jake is transfixed. Mustaches and floral print shirts aren't his usual schtick at all. But it works for Bradley. He’s handsome, though not necessarily at first glance, in a classic and timeless way.
There’s something about him too that is innately enthralling. He’s magnetic and mesmerizing like this, clearly in his element.
The music drifts to a halt, the end of the song, the final mellow notes carried away by the balmy breeze. Bradley’s hands come to rest almost reverentially on the keys as if in private supplication, but Jake is unable to look away. He hadn’t registered the passing of time, feels suspended in a stationary second.
“Are you just going to sit there watching me all night?”
“Well, you did take my breath away,” Jake says shamelessly, mischievously. He smiles, the same smile he had given Penny, knowing it shows him off to his best advantage.
Bradley scoffs at that, mouth twitching into a reluctant smile. It’s a nice smile if somewhat aloof, as though he’s here in the bar but also somewhere else.
Somewhere Jake can’t reach, even with all his charisma and confidence.
“I’m Jake,” he eventually offers, attempting to dispel the unsolicited chatter reverberating around his head.
“Bradley.”
Jake simply nods, doesn’t tell him he already knew that.
“How about a beer?” Bradley asks after an interlude that could have been seconds or a handful of minutes or even half an hour. He’s looking directly at Jake now. While his smile remains enigmatic, Jake can tell that he's finally fully here. “On me.”
He says it with an effortless and understated self-assurance as if he already knows that Jake will say yes, as if he already knows where and what the evening will meander toward.
As if this is, and they are, a foregone conclusion.
The presumption is one Jake is used to drawing, irrespective of whether he wants it or not. He’s attractive and aware of it, and that always leads to unwelcome advances and unwarranted theories about his proclivities and behavior.
Bradley’s laidback manner and compelling appeal should be annoying, and it ordinarily would be, but Jake finds that tonight he’s been lulled into complaisance, the melancholy romance of the music having insidiously permeated beneath his skin.
When Bradley reaches out and takes Jake’s hand, the grain of his palm is as rough as the rasp of his voice had been in song.
***
Bradley expects Jake to be a one-night stand, as most of the people who approach him at the bar end up being.
Even so, he finds himself inexplicably regretful when Jake sheepishly slips out from under the sheets to leave, the heat and imprint of his body fast fading, mumbling an excuse Bradley doesn’t quite catch. It’s not yet midnight which stands out as strange, but maybe Jake has a flight to catch or another bed to warm.
The thought while internal and fleeting is unnecessarily although perhaps not uncharacteristically cruel. Rueful, Bradley tries to imbue an unspoken apology into the way he carefully presses Jake against the front door and kisses him.
From the cant of Jake’s face, wistful and introspective, from the tender yet thorough way he kisses Bradley in return, Bradley imagines he must feel regretful too.
He kisses Jake goodnight, and then he kisses Jake goodbye.
Bradley expects to never see him again.
When he meets Jake the following morning in what should have been their first meeting but now obviously isn’t, in matching flight suits rather than civilian attire, it seems like an immense cosmic joke at their expense. A flush of irritation creeps up Bradley’s neck, infusing his cheeks with blotchy spots of color.
In contrast, Jake’s face stays entirely impassive. He sits at the very front of the classroom, chewing obnoxiously on a toothpick, and doesn’t look at Bradley. At work, he seems to genuinely delight in being cocky and cavalier, in embodying the caricature his callsign implies.
Bradley had heard of Hangman before, both due to the ruthlessness of his reputation and due to Phoenix’s incessant if amusing griping about his antics and character flaws whenever his callsign came up in conversation. He'd never bothered to ask about her beef with Hangman or how she knew him, hadn’t cared to know the details.
Bradley had heard of Hangman before, but he'd never heard of Jake.
He stares at the instructor rather than at the back of Jake’s head. He tries not to think about how he had run his hands through that gleaming hair, had kissed the turn of his once cute but now condescending mouth, and is mostly unsuccessful.
Phoenix looks at him quizzically throughout the course of that first week, having picked up on the strained atmosphere between them. He shrugs her off gently, doesn’t have the words or the inclination to explain.
If he had met Jake merely one day later as intended at base rather than at a bar, they would be strangers. At times, he wonders if that would be preferable.
On Friday night Bradley is slumped on the couch in his sweats, rehashing the events of the week amidst reruns of crappy network television shows, when the doorbell rings. He opens the front door anticipating a pizza delivery but finds Jake standing there instead.
“Well, this is wildly presumptuous,” Bradley says dryly after a long and awkward pause, glancing pointedly at the duffel bag at Jake’s feet and the half-rack of beer under his arm.
Jake smiles, and it’s the same smile from that one ephemeral evening at the bar. “Everyone loves a grand gesture, right?”
It’s easy, far too easy, to lean in and meet him in the middle again.
After a few false and fumbling starts, unsure of how to relate to one another with the added baggage of being closely matched colleagues, they stumble into a tentative routine. They bicker belligerently in the classroom, try to outdo each other in the sky, and somehow still end up falling into bed together at the end of the work week.
On those certain earmarked evenings where Bradley plays the piano at The Hard Deck, Jake conveniently happens to be there too. He’s either playing pool with Coyote or smooth-talking Penny or arguing with Phoenix. Bradley notices him every time; his posturing and preening is distinctive, even in a busy and crowded bar.
They don’t talk about it, though Bradley knows Jake’s presence can’t be a coincidence.
There are several things they don’t talk about, a gradually growing list as time marches steadily forward. Jake’s eyes tend to involuntarily flicker toward and follow Bradley whenever he enters the vicinity. Bradley occasionally absently slings an arm around Jake’s waist as they’re curved together, sticky and sated. Jake deliberately selects songs from the jukebox catalogue that he knows Bradley will hate. Bradley always lets Jake have the last slice of pizza, starts keeping his favorite brand of beer in the fridge.
Jake lingers far away from the piano on the nights Bradley is playing rather than close at hand. It niggles at Bradley, a petty but persistent knock to his pride.
They don’t talk about these things because this, and they, won’t last.
They’re casual, a soda-sweet and effervescent fling, summer fireworks destined to fizzle and flare out when the time-limited weeks at TOPGUN inevitably come to an end.
It bruises regardless that this impermanent and undiscussed thing between them is starting to feel more authentic and fundamental than any real relationship that Bradley has had before.