Archive of Our Own ^beta

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.

Chapter Text

As soon as Rooster saunters in through the doors of The Hard Deck, all suave swagger, broader and brawnier than Jake had remembered him to be, Jake knows he’s in trouble.

Jake spots him instantly, even while leaning against the bar countertop waiting for his beers courtesy of the hapless old timer trying to chat up Penny, gaze always inexplicably drawn to Rooster whenever he’s within radius.

They haven’t seen each other since that transient summer. Jake had kept tabs on him, through the navy grapevine that rivals his grandmother’s gossiping, just enough to hear of Rooster’s competence and capabilities.

When this special assignment had come through, and he had been recalled to TOPGUN, Jake had already known he’d be seeing Rooster here again. Hangman is the best amongst their current generation of aviators, unquestionably, but Rooster and Fritz are never too far behind. It keeps Jake on his toes, energized and eager, precisely the way he likes it.

Word had it that Rooster continues to be slow to act, when and where it counts. While unsurprising, it had still managed to disappoint Jake. Same old Rooster, he had thought, sullenly, scornfully.

He pauses by the jukebox, beer bottles in hand, and punches in a number from muscle memory. It’s a song he knows Rooster hates. Even Jake himself isn’t sure if he’s doing it to piss Rooster off, or as a droll nod to what they’d once had.

Maybe it’s both.

“Bradshaw,” he then calls out, the first to make a move, the first to control the ebb and flow of dialogue between them. Rooster can be infuriatingly slow, even in this, and Jake marvels firsthand at how some things don’t change. “As I live and breathe.”

The name sounds careless and comfortable on his tongue, and he’s grateful that he hadn’t slipped up and said Bradley instead.

It doesn’t escape him that Rooster deliberately calls him Hangman in return, clearly delineating the terms of their relationship to one another, in front of a curious horde of onlookers.

Their attempt at conversation starts out relatively inoffensive, as they circle around a tried and tested pattern of teasing and taunting one another, but rapidly turns sour.

“You’re snug on that perch, waiting for just the right moment that never comes,” Jake says, and he’s not only talking about work.

Then, because he has never been able to bite his tongue when he should, he adds with a widening smirk, “I love this song.”

The sedate and faintly amused veneer on Rooster’s face cracks, for a moment, and it is infinitely satisfying. Jake leaves, first in this too, before their interaction can become any uglier, any more vindictive.

When the music abruptly stops, Rooster yanking the plug out at the wall socket, it feels like an intentional affront. It’s a slap in the face, a rejection, a metaphor for how he evidently feels about their mutual history.

He’d never silenced the jukebox, before, no matter how often he’d bitch and moan about Jake’s taste in song selection.

Even the delicate sound of the piano isn’t enough to soothe the sting.

Penny jangles the bell above the bar, sparking a frenzy of chaotic glee, interrupting his brooding. Thankful for the distraction, he walks over to her in deference to the deal they had made that one summer. She smiles, a little soft on Jake from the day they met, jerks her head meaningfully from the guy seated in front of her to the doors. It’s the same old geezer she’d singled out earlier to buy everyone a round.

“Overboard! Overboard!” the crowd chants in unison, and Jake is more than happy to oblige.

As he shuts the doors decisively on the unlucky sod now sprawled on the sand, the tempo of the music changes.

“You shake my nerves, and you rattle my brain,” Rooster sings, in that low and husky voice Jake had been unable to forget, his fingers certain and confident upon the piano keys. “Too much love drives a man insane.”

His voice is throatier in this song, its cadence alternately swooping and soaring in harmony with the melody.

Jake promptly steps back outside, viscerally unable to endure being so close to Rooster when he looks like this – golden-skinned and godlike, radiant under the overhead lights. It doesn’t help that the words grate, the lyrics striking a chord, verging on discomfort.

Through the half-open side doors, he still has an unobstructed line of sight to Rooster hunched over the piano. He’s playing to the crowd, peering up at them from over the rim of his Ray-Bans, and they’re eating it up out of the palm of his hand.

They’d picked out their sunglasses together, Jake remembers, Wayfarers for him and Caravans for Rooster. Or Bradley, as he had been then. It had seemed harmless at the time, a coincidental meeting in a store downtown on a day-off.

Now, he wonders at how far they’d managed to stray from ‘casual’ and not even comprehend it until too late.

With effort, Jake averts his eyes. He stares out towards the skyline, although the blistering image of Rooster at the piano remains branded into his mind’s eye, fights down the sudden lump in his throat and the prickling warmth at his eyes.

“Hey.” It’s a voice he knows well, dearly beloved.

It’s not the voice Jake wishes it was.

“Hey,” he replies, not needing to turn around to know that it’s Javy.

“You got out of there pretty quickly.”

“It just started to hurt a bit, you know,” Jake says, in quiet admission. He’s never been good at hiding much from Javy, unable to keep him in the dark and at arm’s length like Bradley insists on doing with Phoenix.

“I know,” Javy replies, stepping closer until they’re standing shoulder to shoulder. There’s a depth of vast understanding in those few words, a lifetime of shared experiences underscoring the lifeline of trust between them.

He slings an arm around Jake’s shoulder, pulls him in close. Jake goes, willingly, without hesitation. It’s something he doesn’t ask for, physically unable to form the words or make the overture. It’s something Javy habitually offers, without censure or judgement.

Rooster’s voice wafts out to them, crisp against the stillness of the evening, and Javy’s grip tightens.

Jake shudders out a heavy sigh, only once, a long and slow exhale laced with regret for what he once had and likely never will again.

***

As the howls and cheers subside Bradley scans the length of the room, unable to help himself, fully expecting to see a familiar figure lingering cautiously at a distance.

He gradually comes to realize that Jake isn’t in the bar, at all.

Tash hands him a beer and he takes a long swig, to conceal the tremble of his fingers.

Bradley had thought they were playing at their standard spiteful game of one-upmanship; it had to be the reason Jake had chosen that particular fucking track on the jukebox. He had assumed that bookending their dreadful encounter with a song, one that he knew Jake had heard him play on the piano here before, might serve as a peace offering and hesitant truce.

Of course, part of his rationale had been purely selfish. Bradley can acknowledge that he revels in the applause and attention, too.

Now, he wonders whether they were ever on the same page at all.

On a hunch he makes his way through the mass of bodies toward the side doors, ignoring the unknown and unsought hands that touch him – slapping him on the back, patting his shoulders, some furtively running over the muscles of his arms.

They want him, in one way or another, but he doesn’t want them.

Not tonight. Not when Jake had been so close, close enough to touch.

He sees them, then, through the doors, standing outside on the sand.

The two silhouettes are facing away from him, looking out towards the darkening horizon rather than the bar, but Bradley recognizes them regardless. Coyote’s arm is draped around Jake’s shoulder, and Jake has curled a hand around his hip.

Their faces are turned toward each other, close enough to touch. He can’t make out their exact expressions, due to the angles and shadows.

It’s both innocent, and incredibly intimate.

Bradley can tell, though he has nothing quantitative to back it up, that Jake and Coyote aren’t together. Jake, in paradox to his outwardly projecting persona, had been notoriously private about this type of thing in public. He had never touched Bradley, when other people were around, not even offhandedly or innocuously.

He supposes that could have changed in these months that they’ve grown apart but somehow he just knows, bone-deep and definite, that his intuition is correct.

They’re not together.

That’s not what this, the shard of sharpened hurt in his chest, the blackening bruise of his heart, is about.

It’s more that, he can see unequivocally, that there’s no room for him at Jake’s side.

There once was. Maybe there won’t ever be, again.

The weeks of intensive training at TOPGUN that follow, conducted by goddamn Maverick himself in what feels like another immense cosmic joke at his expense, only seem to further reinforce that fact. They still bicker belligerently in the classroom and try to outdo each other in the sky. This time around however, Bradley goes home alone and the breadth of his bed seems especially lonely. Sometimes his doorbell rings, but it’s never Jake.

He spends a night, here and there, with someone he meets either at The Hard Deck or out on the town. He always goes back to their place, rather than his own.

It feels good, but never right.

Bradley knows the solution, the way to address some (though not all) of the bleak and yawning emptiness inside of him, is to take Jake aside and talk to him. There’s just never the right time. Jake is hardly ever alone, always with Coyote. There are sparse opportunities, once or twice, but often Jake has spent the entirety of that day being such a bastard that Bradley reconsiders whether he wants a do-over, at all.

Between getting their asses handed to them by a man thirty years their senior, unending bouts of pushups, and grappling with the pervasive specter of his dad’s death every time Maverick orders them to push past what they have been taught and told up until now, at the end of each day Bradley is not only silently seething but also utterly exhausted.

The calendar continues to roll over, the clock continues to tick down.

“That’s no time to be thinking about the past,” Jake says, succinct and self-satisfied, during yet another discussion in the classroom that had started out abysmally and is only progressively worsening with each passing minute.

It takes a moment for the words to seep in through the tumult of tangled thoughts in his head, slicing through the tension of having to deal with Maverick and Jake simultaneously.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bradley asks tersely, voice taut. He thinks, perhaps illogically, that Jake is referring to them.

The reality turns out to be far worse.

“You son of a bitch!” Bradley spits, struggling against the bodies holding him back, and he truly means it. He’s incandescent, foaming over with rage, at the insinuation.

“I’m cool, I’m cool,” Jake says, shaking off Fanboy, and he is. He’s calm, unruffled, not a hair out of place and smirk firmly fixed.

A part of Bradley knows that he has risen to the bait, that Jake is doing this on purpose for whatever reason – whether it be malevolent pleasure or some misguided sense of righteousness. Everything he says is carefully considered, after all. Jake is as strategic with his words as he is at guiding his Super Hornet in the sky.

Things turn frosty between them, after that. Maverick’s ruse with the dogfight football match thaws some of the chill, but not completely. Jake no longer swivels around in his seat to snipe at him throughout class, and Bradley tells himself he doesn’t miss it.

Then, all at once, the clock stops.

Bradley strides across the flight deck, on autopilot, head down. The Vice Admiral's parting words echo in an endless loop.

Come home safely, he had commanded, with an ominous finality. Bradley wonders if Simpson believes it to be possible.

There’s someone standing in his path, as if waiting for him. Bradley slows to a halt, caught off guard but ultimately not all that surprised. It feels inevitable, almost theatrical, that this should be the arena for one last exchange.

He ransacks his muddled brain for the right words, but Jake beats him to it as usual.

“You give ‘em hell,” he says, almost shouting to be heard above the rumble of engines and ocean and men. His voice is strained, a little hoarse. He’s squinting against the glare and there’s something in the slant of his face that Bradley recognizes, having seen it in his own.

It’s regret.

Hangman is rarely gracious in defeat, but sometimes Jake is.

There is something else, something more, that must be said between them, but the clock has reached zero and they’ve run out of time.

Jake walks on, and Bradley has to let him go.

He tries very hard not to think about how he may never see Jake again, may never have the chance to speak to him or the occasion to touch him, and is mostly unsuccessful.

Forget the book, Maverick had said to him on that one awful evening following a day of near disaster. Don’t think, just do.

Bradley has never had the book, in the first place, when it comes to Jake.

Chapter Text

“But I don’t want to go,” Jake repeats, in mimicry of the same roundabout argument they’ve been having for the last half an hour. He closes the aircraft manual he had been serenely reading before the interruption, throws a pillow at the bowed head on the bunk below.

Javy merely catches the pillow one-handed, which is rather dissatisfying.

The most tolerant person in his life, Javy is ever indulgent of his brand of braggadocio and bullshit but even he’s starting to look harangued. Jake counts it as progress towards victory, and doubles down.

“I don’t even really know Fanboy,” he adds, knowing full well that he’s veering from sulky into whiny and not giving a damn.

“You fucking do, at least well enough to buy him a beer,” Javy says, shortly, tucking Jake’s pillow under his head. He’s been riveted by his phone for the past few minutes, which is unlike him. Javy’s an old man when it comes to technology, almost as bad at texting back as Rooster had been.

That disjointed recollection is unexpected, uncalled for, and he hates that it still manages to hurt.

“Like I’ve been saying, we’re all going our separate ways in another week now that the mission’s done,” Javy continues, with great persistence and typical placidity, though Jake can tell he’s grinding him down. “And it’s Fanboy’s birthday so we’re going to surprise him at the bar, then have a good time together.”

“We’ve already been having a good time together,” Jake feels the need to point out, snide, because it’s objectively the truth.

They’ve been at the bar every night this week with the team, collectively celebrating the validation and glory of a miraculously executed mission.

Jake hasn’t had to buy his own drinks for days. Neither has Rooster, for that matter.

Since that handshake on the carrier, Jake’s dealings with him have been somewhat different.

They’ve only really interacted within wider company at the bar, an evident safety net, wordlessly handing off a beer or swapping a pool cue. Their fingertips barely brush, in these charged but ultimately anti-climactic moments. They silently smile at and shuffle around one another in newfound, or re-found, and lumbering companionship.

Jake hasn’t pushed for more, for once unwilling to be the first to disrupt the fragile and budding solidarity between them.

He’s also weary of always being the first to initiate, wary of always having to push and prod Rooster to take flight.

Javy is opening his mouth with a scowl, about to retort, then shuts it. The frown melts away from his face, and his expression turns as wily as his namesake. Jake waits, hiding his own smile, trying not to look too expectant.

“I’ll teach you that trick shot, the one I always slaughter you with.”

“Done,” Jake replies immediately because he’s not above bribery, and that trick shot is fucking awesome.

The Hard Deck doesn’t even look open when they arrive, though it should be at this hour of late evening. The front doors are shut, and it’s dark – mostly. Jake can see a fleeting glimmer of light inside, from what looks like an illuminated phone screen.

“What the hell is all this?” he says, about to go and peer through the glass into the dim and shadowed room. “Where’s Penny?”

Javy grabs him by the arm, firmly, with one hand. With the other, he’s texting someone furiously.

“It’s a surprise, you ass. Don’t go that way, go in through the back.”

“But what –,” Jake protests, because he’s not oblivious and moreover Javy is endearingly obvious, but he’s already being propelled forcibly towards the back of the bar, to the staff-only entrance.

“Now, don’t screw this up,” Javy says, in parting, opening the door and manhandling him inside.

When he is next rudely grabbed, this time by Phoenix, Jake accepts resignedly that it isn’t Fanboy’s birthday and that he has been set up.

Phoenix makes him sit down in a chair, somehow adeptly navigating the various obstacles of the bar even in the gloom, and then leaves. She switches on a solitary light as she goes, blows him a showily sarcastic kiss from the threshold where Javy is waiting for her.

Jake gives them the finger, and they just laugh at him through the glass – the fuckers.

The swell of the piano, mournful and melancholy, refocuses his attention.

“How can I just let you walk away? Just let you leave without a trace,” Rooster sings, low and longing. “When I stand here taking every breath, with you.”

His voice is silky and mellifluous, as heavy and as sweet as honey.

“You're the only one who really knew me at all.”

Despite himself Jake is transfixed, as petrified and immovable as stone. He has heard Rooster sing before, many times, but never like this.

Rooster doesn’t look at him, throughout.

It’s not a perfect performance, by any means. While his playing sounds pretty good, at least to Jake’s untrained ear, there are certain sections of the song that are simply too high for his vocal range.

But it’s Bradley, his Bradley, seated at the same worn-down and well-used piano where Jake first saw him.

This time, he’s not playing the piano for himself or for a crowd.

This time, he’s playing the piano just for Jake.

It’s the answer to, the culmination of, something Jake hadn’t known he was yearning for until this very moment.

“And you coming back to me is against all odds. It's the chance I've got to take.”

Bradley’s voice cracks here, as if breaking, raw and gut-wrenching, only once.

As the notes trail away and the music ends, Jake hurriedly scrubs at his face. His skin feels mercifully dry, his eyes are clear. When Bradley spins on the stool to face him, Jake finally notices that he has been seated closer than he usually would have chosen to be.

It’s still a cautious distance away.

Bradley looks at him, and Jake looks back. He doesn’t register the passing of time, suspended in a stationary second.

Then, Bradley stands up. He closes the distance between them in a few easy strides until he is standing right in front of Jake, hunkers down awkwardly so that he isn’t towering over him.

It looks fucking uncomfortable.

The significance of this act, in compromise, doesn’t escape Jake either, sends a fizzing and anticipatory thrill thrumming through his veins.

“Everyone loves a grand gesture, right?” Bradley says, slowly, slyly, in perfect imitation of a leap of faith Jake had once taken. His eyes are a little red.

He’s so goddamn calculating.

“Who the fuck said that?" Jake replies, in a futile attempt to prolong the inevitable. Bradley is looking up at him in that way again, like this is and they are a foregone conclusion.

It’s not fair that he is so used to having his way.

Maybe this time, Jake will be able to have what he wants too.

Bradley’s eyes gleam, golden under the light, understanding the game. “Some asshole.”

“Takes one to know one,” Jake says, even as his fingers trace helplessly along the planes of Bradley’s face, along the straight line of his nose, along the plushness of his parted lips, along the faintly ridged scars of his jaw.

Bradley allows it patiently, turns his cheek into Jake’s cupped hand, grazes his lips against the lifelines of his palm.

It feels like a confession, and a concession, though neither of them speaks.

After a prolonged beat, Bradley says, in an undertone, wry and self-deprecating, “So, uh, did it work? Because my knees are fucking killing me.”

Laughter bubbles out of Jake, out loud, bright and pure like the peal of a bell.

***

Bradley’s phone chimes as he’s brushing his teeth. It’s from Tash.

you’re welcome, dickhead.

She follows this up with two photographs. One is grainy, taken through smudged glass, and is of Jake in the clothes he was wearing last night. He’s seated on a chair at The Hard Deck, gazing off screen. The look on his face, gentle and gorgeous, makes Bradley save the picture to his own album, instantly. The second is a selfie of Tash and Coyote, at some dive bar he doesn’t recognize, sipping on colorful cocktails and flipping off the camera. It’s cute if a bit mystifying; he hadn’t even known they talked, outside of work.

Then, promptly ruining the moment, she sends through an onslaught of emojis that range from suggestive to outright phallic.

Bradley nearly chokes on a mouthful of toothpaste.

He decides to leave Tash on read for now as punishment, because that’ll undoubtedly piss her off.

Padding back through the bedroom, he leaves his phone to charge by the bedside and kisses Jake, burrowed in a cocoon of blankets and half-asleep, on the forehead in passing. Having Jake back in his bed is achingly familiar, reminiscent of a time when they were both younger and uninhibited and yet, too headstrong and hurt-full to make this, them, work.

He thinks, and hopes, that their chances are better this time around.

The clock on the wall ticks on, steadfast, and it sounds like a second chance.

As the kettle begins to boil, Bradley rifles through his inherited collection of vinyl records. He finds the particular sleeve he’s looking for, slots the corresponding disc into the record player, and adjusts the turntable needle.

The record spins and the song scratches to life. He can remember his parents dancing to this same music in the kitchen of this very house, content and carefree, boisterously singing the words to each other, a long stretch of shared life ahead of them.

“I’ve heard this before.”

Bradley turns around to find Jake leaning against the doorframe. He’s managed to find his own boxers, but it’s the fact that he’s pulled on an unbuttoned faded print shirt instead of his own that makes Bradley pause and stare, suddenly speechless.

“Yeah?” He eventually says, feebly, drawing his eyes away reluctantly.

Jake bites his lip, features solemn. “Yeah, it’s from that Marvel movie.”

Bradley sighs. “You uncultured bastard.”

He’s joking, mostly.

As the chorus permeates into the tranquil morning air in tandem with their twin mugs of coffee steeping on the kitchen countertop, Jake makes a face. “A little on the nose, isn’t it? Didn’t realize you were such a maudlin fuck, Bradshaw.”

His blossoming smile, soft and uncertain, belies the harshness of his words. The motes of first light filtering in through the window wreath his hair in a halo, and he is somehow more beautiful and more breath-taking than the first day Bradley saw him.

Rather than an answer, because sometimes Jake relishes running his mouth to provoke a reaction out of him, Bradley holds out a hand.

They twirl through the house, clumsy and cramped, as Mickey Thomas croons about fooling around and falling in love.

Bradley sings along, low and rough, lips pressed against the shell of Jake’s ear.

Jake’s hands tighten around his waist, and Bradley’s still-bruised heart soars.