Archive of Our Own

This is what Natasha gets for not taking Bob's advice about screening her calls. They are three movies deep into their Julia Roberts marathon when she answers the call from an unknown number during Mystic Pizza like a bonehead. Now instead of pretending to be a pizza connoisseur with her wingman, Phoenix is pulling into a parking lot shared between a dive bar and a 7-Eleven to pick up the two biggest morons she knows.

Hangman and Rooster sit on opposite ends of the pavement in front of the convenience store when she arrives, Big Gulps held to their faces like juvenile delinquents whose parents have opted to let them sweat it out. It is unlikely that they teamed up against someone stupider so she doesn't even bother hoping when she asks what it was this time. The awkward pause stretches for so long that Phoenix is about to snap, but it is only when Rooster looks like he's about to answer that Hangman quickly offers, "All I did was suggest that if Bradshaw wanted to pay homage to his father with his callsign, it might have been more appropriate to call himself Turkey given the way he's been flying lately."

Phoenix pinches the bridge of her nose with her thumb and index finger. "For fuck's sake…"

"Seresin has a glass jaw," Rooster snarls after a bit even as he clenches and unclenches his fist with a wince.

"Aren't you the one who ended up on the ground?" Hangman shoots back smugly. The purple is starting to settle in along his own knuckles.

She thinks miserably about how she could have been lounging on Bob's couch watching Julia Roberts dump barrels of fish into a himbo's Porsche right now.

"Boys, I left the measuring tape at home so put it back in your pants, get in the car, and don't even think about bleeding on my seats."

*

When Hangman grabs his spare aviators from her glove compartment, Rooster looks back and forth between them like a cartoon squirrel having a panic attack. The Tetris pieces drop into formation in Bradshaw's brain as his eyes go wide and he gasps, "You can't be serious!" She groans, silently willing the reflection in the rearview mirror to shut up because she is not prepared to have this conversation with Jake in the car, but of course Rooster presses on with, "Phoenix, are you dating this clown?"

It is not ideal to respond with a panicked excuse me when Hangman is already answering in the affirmative – with a level of certainty that is, frankly, a little disconcerting – but the discrepancy does not stop the horror from showing on Bradley's face as he begs her to make the lambs stop screaming.

"You're such a drama queen, Bradshaw," Jake scoffs.

She whacks Hangman in the chest before fixing him with a glare that warns him not to test her. He mumbles something about Rooster starting it that is so petulant that Phoenix has to stop herself from laughing, lest she encourage him. Meanwhile, Bradley is clearly in the middle of having a stroke when he sputters, "Natasha, he's—"

"Charming? Debonair?" Jake starts rattling off adjectives with a shit-eating grin. "As close to perfection as mankind has gotten?"

Rooster snaps his fingers. "Oh, I know. A complete asshole!"

"Hey Siri, play 'Hey Jealousy'."

The moment Gin Blossoms comes on over Hangman's now revived phone, Phoenix considers driving them straight into a tree to stop the bickering. Turning onto a residential block instead, she pulls over next to an empty park and Bradley leaps out of the Prius like he is on fire, already stomping towards the swings when Natasha turns to Jake and orders him to stay in the car.

"Let him walk home," Jake suggests before shouting in Bradshaw's direction through the open window, "He could use the cardio!"

"I'm going to go talk to Rooster," she tells him with all the patience of a daycare worker. This must be what it feels like to herd toddlers who have yet to master the cooperative play stage of development.

Hangman frowns. "He's not much of a conversationalist."

"Baby—" Jake looks at her with curiosity so Natasha clarifies with a grin, "Not a term of endearment. You're behaving like an actual infant and I really need you to not."

"Or you could use it as a term of endearment," he drawls, waggling his eyebrows as he leans across the armrest console to smile at her.

Phoenix un-clicks her seatbelt and meets him halfway until they're so close that she can see her reflection in the lens of his glasses. The thought runs through her head unbidden: if she kissed him now, he'd taste like bourbon and extremely bad decisions. They are playing a charged game of Battleship and she is so tempted to let him win when he licks his bottom lip and moves closer into her personal space, but at the last moment, Natasha whispers into his ear, "I'd have to find you endearing for that to happen, Bagman."

"Phoenix, you wound me," Jake chuckles, clutching his heart as he melodramatically staggers back in his seat. He is wearing the goofiest grin when he tilts his head to look at her and Natasha thinks, once again, about how much easier her life would be if he was less attractive.

"Dig deep to summon up the maturity of at least a ninth grader so that I am not forced to beat you to death on the way home, Seresin."

Before he can make a crack about not leaving youths unattended in cars, Natasha slams the door shut and makes her way to where Rooster is plopped down on a swing, not pushing himself far back enough for his feet to ever leave the ground.

"Before you start, I didn't tell you about this because it is none of your business."

"It's PTSD, right?" Bradley asks seriously, wide-eyed with hope that she is so messed up about half the team almost dying in enemy airspace four months ago that she'll take up with any old tool. "Nat, they make SSRIs for this kind of stuff!"

She laughs. "I see we're skipping the part where I tell you not to overreact because it is not a big deal?"

"Not a big deal because it only happened once and now he is stalking you? It's always the handsome ones who turn out to be psychopaths."

"Hangman will be thrilled that you think he's handsome."

"I think he looks like a camo Ken doll," he objects, scrunching his face up in disgust before lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Dead eyes."

Natasha rolls her own eyes skyward. This would be amusing if they weren't loitering in Palm Park in the middle of the night like drug dealers making a sale. Her feet are freezing in these stupid flip-flops and Rooster seems nowhere close to moving past this so she sighs and offers, "Would it help if I told you that he is good to me?"

"Gross."

"Not like that," she says, smacking Bradley's arm for thinking that there would be a single reality in which Natasha offered up details of her sex life with Hangman to him. They've both been such pains tonight though that after brief consideration, Natasha grins and breaks his brain by adding, "Okay maybe a little like that too, but—"

"Jesus, I am actually going to hurl!"

"Hey, you asked!" They listen to the wind howl for a minute before she continues more seriously, "It's a revelation to me as well, but he is shockingly decent once you get to know him."

"If you tell me that Jake Seresin is simply misunderstood, I am going to hang myself from the monkey bars," Bradley threatens with a groan before pleading, "You don't actually like him, right?"

Before she can figure out an answer, Jake wakes up half the neighborhood by leaning on the horn. It does nothing in her mission to get Rooster to see that Hangman is not a douchebag all the time, but the lights twinkling to life from the nearby houses is enough to get them out of finishing this conversation, which means that, at the very least, Hangman is a douchebag with good timing.

*

Jake has always been the type to need a muzzle in order to remain a silent passenger during a car ride, his abundant energy needing an outlet so he doesn't explode even during a ten minute drive to Whole Foods. Most of what she knows about his childhood comes from his inability to shut up while riding shotgun: there's the time he snapped his arm at the end of the pee-wee football season and, because he needed to keep his cast dry, he couldn't go to the water park with his siblings every weekend and instead spent all summer learning how to cook from his mother ("I make a mean peach cobbler, Trace"); or how he harbored a crush on the babysitter for years before learning that the only reason she was so kind to him when they were kids was because his brother had led her to believe that he was a make-a-wish kid ("I really thought she let me have the extra brownie every time because she was also madly in love with me"); or when he was very briefly the owner of a Harley at sixteen until his mother, an ICU nurse, found out and walked him through a ward full of traumatic brain injuries from motorcycle accidents ("She threatened to put my brain in a mason jar"); or how he desperately wanted to be an astronaut after watching The Right Stuff until he realized that space travel involved far too much math and decided to become Chuck Yeager instead.

Therefore, it is miraculous that the only sound during the drive back from the park is the classic rock station playing a steady rotation of Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Who. The guys don't even drum their fingers along when it briefly detours to Springsteen, which sets off alarm bells in Natasha's head that they might have concussions. Phoenix keeps waiting for one of them to say something incredibly stupid, but the insults never come and soon enough they are at Rooster's house.

"Ice your face, Bradshaw," Natasha reminds him when she gets out of the car to look at Rooster under the light of the streetlamp. They don't need Maverick to come up with another team building exercise because these two fools can't stop playing Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots with each other. Last time they had nearly come to blows during training, Mav had thrown Hangman and Rooster out of a plane above the Mojave Desert at the crack of dawn with nothing more than the parachutes on their backs, a quarter, and vague instructions to call him for a pickup once they reached the only functioning pay phone "a few clicks towards the sun." Not only did the impromptu skydiving adventure result in zero bonding, but Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb spent the first three hours walking around in circles while arguing about how the other had no sense of direction so that by the time they finally got it together enough to make it to their destination, they were so sunburnt that they could've been mascots for a crab shack. It would've been hilarious if Natasha didn't subsequently spend the entire weekend slathering a very pathetic Hangman with aloe lotion while he moped on her couch watching old episodes of Beverly Hills, 90210 and asking her repeatedly how no one on that show thought Andrea Zuckerman was an undercover cop.

In the present, Bradley gestures between her and the goofball in the parked car before saying, "We still need to talk about why this is a terrible idea."

"No, we don't. I am well aware."

"Literally sitting right here!" Jake calls out with exasperation. He's practically hanging out of the passenger side window like a golden retriever about to film an ASPCA commercial about unloved pets in need of adoption. Natasha should feel bad about not cutting him any slack when it took both Beavis and Butthead to start this mess, but it wouldn't do much for her insistence to Rooster that this is barely a thing if she started being nice to Hangman now.

"Want to get brunch this weekend?" After a beat, Rooster peers over at Jake and adds, "Please leave the dildo at home."

Hangman flips him the bird.

*

"For someone with such a wildly punchable face, it is astonishing that you do not own a first aid kit, Bagman."

Phoenix frowns as she picks through the Batman lunch box containing a stack of stolen napkins from In-N-Out, a tube of super-glue, and half a travel bottle of hand sanitizer. Of course, Hangman is ill-prepared to deal with the consequences of inciting a fellow moron into a fight; the idiot has yet to realize that flying too close to the sun every time is eventually going to stop working out for him.

"You can't get enough of this face, Phoenix," he sings from the bathroom, barely audible over the sound of the shower, "but feel free to leave at any time."

God, she'd love to walk away from this disaster of a situation – she could probably catch the end of Notting Hill if she went home right now – but she feels personally responsible for making sure that Hangman doesn't bleed to death. Natasha did not foresee that she'd inadvertently become Hangman's emergency contact when she refused to let him save her number in case one of the guys scrolled through his phone and realized that all the booty calls were coming from her.

"You called me, dumbass." If she was being ornery, Natasha would remind him that he just gave her the address for a dive bar and hung up like a coward before she could ask any questions or shoot down his request for a favor with a well-placed that's not the kind of dynamic we have, Seresin. If anyone has a reason to be annoyed in this scenario, it is most certainly her.

"Because I needed a ride," Jake clarifies, in the process of pulling on a commemorative Apollo 11 t-shirt as he walks back into the kitchen. Since he lives in a Hangman-centric world, she wouldn't be surprised if he was peacocking, but given that she has been greatly inconvenienced tonight already, Natasha is not stupid enough to pass up the chance to ogle someone who looks like he was sculpted by Michelangelo. She watches him rummage around his freezer before pulling out a bag of peas to press against his hand. He smells like eucalyptus shower gel when he slants his mouth next to her ear and murmurs, "I can handle putting on a band-aid by myself so unless you want to kiss it better—"

Natasha turns her face to capture his lips with her own. It catches Jake off guard for about three seconds before he crowds her space, unhurriedly kissing her back while his uninjured hand rests so faintly against the small of her back that it feels like there are electrical currents sizzling between his fingertips and her skin.

"You don't have band-aids either," Phoenix finally sighs against his mouth. He lets out a small whine as she pushes him out of the way before opening the cabinet under the sink to pull out the first aid kit she stashed there after binge-watching Chopped last month and showing up at his door with vegetables and the genius idea to make shakshuka. Always one to at least recognize that her limitations exist, Natasha knew that her lack of culinary ability meant that there was a fair chance that she'd slice off a finger, but thankfully the moment Jake saw her gearing up to make a running start to hack away at a Spanish onion like some sort of ninja, he offered to do the chopping. 

"I knew I had one of those."

"Nice try." Natasha hoists herself up to sit on the detached kitchen island before beckoning for him to plant himself on the bar stool in front of her. "What's with the sunglasses at night, Corey Hart? I already know Rooster nailed you."

"Sucker punched me," he corrects with a huff. "I didn't want to be rude by not returning the favor."

"Only you would think that walking away is the ruder thing to do," Natasha chuckles. "Ever considered not touching the live wire?"

"Where's the fun in that?" he asks with a wolfish grin that makes him look entirely too handsome for someone who has already put a glitch in her well thought out Friday night plans.

She gestures at his aviators. "Take those stupid things off and come here."

When he lifts the shades off his face, the first thing she notices is the start of a black eye and a cut over his eyebrow that is minor enough not to require stitches. It is surprising that they didn't do more damage to each other, but Natasha suspects that the bartenders in the less-than-savory part of town don't let their bar fights get too far along before breaking them up. 

"How does the money-maker look, doc?"

"Oh, it's a vast improvement," she teases. Natasha reaches up to let her thumb run along the bruise blooming under his eye and asks, "How hard did he hit you? I want to know if I should send him a deluxe fruit basket to show my appreciation."

"Bradshaw hits like my arthritic Nana," Hangman scoffs like even the mere thought of the other flyboy knocking him out is offensive. "Get him a gym membership instead."

"Your Nana?" she coos, a smile already tugging at her lips.

"Even sporadically decent guys love their grandmothers, Natasha." His tone is just a tad bit too somber to land the joke. 

Phoenix felt disloyal the moment she said it, but was she supposed to humor him for being an idiot? She had planned to let him get his way later to appease her guilt, but now finds it ludicrous that Jake expects her to flip their script of always giving each other grief just because he suddenly doesn't want other people to think that he's a jackass when he's being a jackass. She is as stubborn as he is, so instead of doing the mature thing and apologizing, Natasha doubles down and asks, "Did you want me to wax poetic about your sterling personality after you decked my best friend?"

"Bob is your best friend."

Bob is her best friend, but that is because he doesn't retreat into himself to the detriment of all his other relationships when He's Going Through It. If Natasha is being honest, the reason she and Bradley have held up for all these years is because they mirror the aspects of each other's personalities that are keen to drive other more well-adjusted people away. Their friendship is preserved like a cassette tape stopped in the middle of whatever song she listened to last and always waiting to pick right back up to finish the tune when she hits play again.

"The hierarchy of my relationships is not the current topic of conversation." For the purposes of pissing off Bagman, Bradley is her closest and dearest friend in the whole wide world, so she jokes, "I should've told Rooster that you're a dick most of the time, but I was trying to be complimentary."

"People say fonder things about serial killers on Dateline than you do about the guy that…" Off her raised eyebrow, he clears his throat and finishes with, "Than you do about me."

She appreciates him not complicating matters with labels, but it doesn't stop her from replying, "I think that says more about you than it does about me."

"Like what?" Jake challenges, his voice low and his green eyes glinting like gems even under the dim recessed downlights. He tips his stool forward until it is balancing on two legs, the bag of peas long abandoned on the floor as Jake plants his palms against the counter edge on either side of her. Why does it feel like he's calling the shots when she's the one on higher ground?

"Maybe serial killers on Dateline have better manners." Natasha cards her fingers through his hair before resting her hand at the back of his neck. He's so warm that her skin heats up from the proximity. Natasha gingerly dabs an alcohol wipe across his forehead before digging through the kit, peeling the backing off, and smoothing an Oscar the Grouch band-aid over his cut. The effect of the formidable Hangman wearing the same ridiculous frown as a puppet on Sesame Street is enough for Phoenix to reconsider her degree of annoyance with this whole situation. 

"Serial killers: a population historically known for their good manners," Hangman bites back before reminding her that she has never once complained about his etiquette before. He does look awfully cute if she's being honest with herself. She finds that what she really wants to do is stop discussing this and kiss the smirk right off his face again, but this is a game of chess so Natasha laughs and leans forward until he comes into focus in high definition. She isn't even sure what they're talking about anymore, but her brain helpfully offers, "They're also better at pretending to be nice."

Something flashes across his eyes too quickly for her to register what it means before he asks somewhat sincerely, "So you want me to be nice?"

"Where's the fun in that?" Natasha mimics. "Don't strain yourself trying to achieve the impossible, Jake."

"I do the impossible every day."

"At least your ego isn't bruised." When he insists that he's not really that guy, Natasha squints like she's trying to capture him in a different light. "Debatable."

Hangman sighs and pushes off the island block with his arms, the stool rattling behind him for a few seconds before settling on all four legs again. She misses the buzz in the air immediately as he lets out a frustrated groan and runs both hands through his hair.

"Hey, I was trying to be nice tonight!"

"Before or after the violence?"

"Before, obviously," he mumbles. "All I said was that if Rooster keeps flying like he's trying not to die, it's going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy and he will get you and Bob killed in the process."

"Hold on," Natasha snaps, her vision blurring as tries to make sense of his words. "When have I ever needed you to protect me? I'm not some frail damsel—"

"That's not what I was doing," he protests. "I was giving him constructive feedback."

Phoenix hops off the counter and stalks towards him like a tiger on the prowl. It is definitely An Argument if he's not trying to invade her personal space, but she's so furious that this is probably a good thing.

"I already have a back seater, Bagman."

"Back to Bagman again, huh?" He raises his hands up in exasperation, kicking the melted bag of peas so it goes skidding across the floor to the opposite wall. "Excuse me for caring, Phoenix."

"That is not what we do!" It comes out before she can stop the words from twisting into his stomach like a knife. Too slow to squeeze her eyes shut in time, Natasha doesn't miss the stricken expression flashing across Jake's face. She has gotten so good at playing it close to the vest that he doesn't know that she didn't mean it. Phoenix hates herself immediately, but before she can apologize, he has already put up a wall. "Wait, I didn't—"

"Hey man, it's cool," he says with a shrug. Jake knows that her pet peeve is when he does the Cali frat bro affectation that was born from watching too much Point Break with Coyote and a desire to tap dance on her very last nerve whenever they're arguing. Every time, she wants to shout that he doesn't even surf. She starts to suggest that they take a breather, but Jake guffaws and makes a crack about the world toppling off its axis if she ever had anything nice to say about him.

"I didn't realize you expected me to be your PR rep!" Suddenly, the olive branch that Natasha was ready to extend snaps against the weight of her fury and she hisses that calling him decent was being generous. Even though Natasha knows that her annoyance is more with herself for saying something crummy than it is with him for calling her out on it, his wince still feels like a small victory.

"Heaven forbid you choose me for a change, Trace."

That catches her off guard. Doesn't he see that she has been ignoring her instincts for the mere suggestion that there is something more to him than a slick smile and an unerring belief in his own infallibility? Every time she lets him into her bed or admits something that no one else knows about her, it's a choice to go against the warning in her mind that allowing herself to care about him is only going to end badly. As she follows him into the living room, Natasha feels like she's going crazy. Hasn't she been choosing him for months now?

"What do you want, a fucking rose? This is not The Bachelor, Jake!" Natasha shouts because they are both bad at de-escalating. "I'm here."

He spins around so quickly that she bumps right into him.

"Maybe you should go," he suggests so softly that her ears strain to hear it even with them standing a palm's breadth away from each other. Now she's the caricature of a histrionic woman: the louder she becomes, the quieter he gets. "Wouldn't want you to miss brunch tomorrow."

"Is that what this is about?" It's like someone has popped the top off a dropped soda bottle, the relief bubbling to the surface as her body shakes with unbridled laughter. Natasha puts a hand on his chest to steady herself, her forehead resting on Jake's shoulder as she tries to suck in deep breaths to reign in her hysteria before saying, "If you're keeping score, look around. Rooster is at home and I'm here with you, dork!"

"I know you don't have a thing for Magnum P.I.," Jake backpedals with an expert eye roll.

Natasha arches an eyebrow and smirks. "Sounds like you're a little jealous, Hangman."

"Be serious, Phoenix," he scoffs incredulously. "Bradshaw flies like someone piloting a chartered plane full of geriatrics to a shuffleboard tournament in central Florida."

Stifling a laugh, she goads, "He did save Maverick from getting shot."

"Bradshaw crashed his plane in the general vicinity of the enemy. That hardly counts."

"Is it exhausting to be an idiot all the time?"

"I think you meant charismatic, Trace," Jake counters with a megawatt smile so symmetrical that it is probably plastered all over the brochures for his dentist's office. 

"Pretty sure I did not, Seresin."

She doesn't miss his eyes drifting down to her lips before he quickly looks up again and tsks. "See what I mean about being unsupportive?"

"I could get t-shirts made," Phoenix suggests, waving her hand across the air as she announces, "Team Dipshit. We can put your face on it and everything."

"My punchable face?" he asks with amusement as he takes a step closer.

She nods. The static in the air crackles to life; it takes everything in Natasha not to reel forward when she promises, "I'll wear it to your next bar fight."

"You could have just as easily not picked up the phone," Hangman reminds her, near enough that Natasha places her hand flat against his chest in a half-hearted attempt to keep from closing the gap between them. She can feel Jake's heart thrumming underneath her fingertips in defiance of the composure he is unsuccessfully trying to project.

"I really need to be more discerning," she agrees before teasing that it seems like she is paying for her poor vetting process in more ways than one tonight. Natasha considers making a crack about the chickens coming home to roost before she thinks better of it.

"Are we going to pretend like your grand plans didn't involve watching Julia Roberts do an extended Olive Garden commercial for two hours?" This is what she gets for surrounding herself with a group of dudes whose idea of high art involves stunts that defy the laws of physics and an almost one-to-one ratio of dialogue to explosions. Tired of fighting against magnetic fields, her hand bunches up the front of his t-shirt to pull Hangman closer to her. Natasha curls her other hand around the nape of Jake's neck, rises on her tiptoes so they're at an equal height, and lets her mouth brush the shell of his ear as she groans, "Of course you'd pick the worst Julia Roberts movie as your frame of reference."

His fingers skate over her hips to support her balance, the heat blooming up her sides. Jake mumbles, "Diabetic comas are a buzzkill." Off her look of surprise that Jake Seresin is secretly watching chick flicks in his spare time, he sheepishly admits that the only reason he and his brother watched Steel Magnolias in the fifth grade was because they mistakenly thought it was the one with the hot welder chick who danced around in her underwear.

"You are a complete idiot," she informs him with a smile before her lips crash against his like an inevitability. Their kisses become sloppy as she stifles a moan against his mouth when he presses even closer. While Natasha threads her fingers through his still-damp hair, Jake's hands are everywhere, his touch just light enough to drive her crazy. The more he winds her up, the more borderline obscene her kissing gets until Natasha is all tongue and teeth and tugging on his bottom lip like he didn't just get hit in the face two hours ago.

When she shoves him backwards, he easily lands on the couch with a laugh. As Natasha stands there and tries to catch her breath, it dawns on her that getting tangled up with him time and time again is completely illogical and, if there is one thing that Phoenix isn't, it is that. But when Jake reaches out to hook his fingers into the belt loops of her jeans, she lets him pull her down to the couch anyway.

"Sorry for being a dick. I know you can take care of yourself. And I know that this," and here he gestures at the rapidly diminishing space between them, "doesn't entitle me to you blindly defending me on the rare chance that I'm acting like an asshole."

"Wow! That wasn't half bad, Seresin," Natasha whistles. As she leans over him, her short hair falls over his face as Jake tries to sit up to get to her mouth. She moves just enough out of his reach that, failing in his primary objective, Jake's lips trail the line of her exposed neck before dipping lower and lower. Her eyes flutter and he chuckles, the rumble sending vibrations through her. Natasha asks him what's so funny.

"All it took was mentioning one chick flick to get you going, huh?" he asks curiously like he is filing away top-secret information. With a self-satisfied smirk, he pretends to lament, "If only I had known sooner, Natasha."

Before she can ask him why that would have mattered, Jake starts murmuring movie names against her skin: Beaches punctuated with a kiss against her shoulder; Fried Green Tomatoes as his fingers skitter over her ribs; Terms of Endearment when she claws desperately at his suddenly-very-cumbersome shirt.

"I am begging you to stop talking," Natasha says with a laugh when he begins to say Ya-Ya Sisterhood, already tilting Jake's head back to kiss that stupid mouth before he can start rattling off Nicholas Sparks movies.

*

It is not surprising that Bob knows when to play dumb or that he's very good at it. He's got the face of someone you want to tell secrets to, trustworthy enough to be a metal vault if needed. Sometimes she forgets that if he wasn't a spectacular WSO, Bob would have made a decent spy.

On Saturday morning, Natasha is in the kitchen putting the final touches on their Bloody Marys while Bob is covering their Eggo waffles with whipped cream when there's a knock on her front door. She's wracking her mind trying to figure out if she's expecting packages when Bob offers to answer it because she "needs to put a hell of a lot more vodka in those drinks." Weekend Bob is a total lush. She's in the middle of a very generous pour when he calls out, "Nat, did you order a stripper?"

"What are you—"

Natasha walks out to find Hangman leaning against the doorway like he's posing for the poster of a Matthew McConaughey romantic comedy sponsored by Abercrombie. As always, Jake looks extremely pleased with himself while Bob looks like he is trying desperately not to laugh at her panicked face. For as long as the thing with Hangman has been going on – "You should call it what it is," Bob always sing-songs at her like Phoenix even wants to define what that would be – her best friend has known about it. Bob can always tell when there's something off with her so she knew after the first few times that there was no way she was ever going to be able to hide this. Nevertheless, it feels like they're all standing on the wrong part of one of those cartoons with the side-by-side panels of identical images where one contains something that does not belong.

"This is interesting," Bob remarks as she ushers him towards the kitchen and insists that it is quite boring. "But I am going to need a stronger drink."

Once Bob is gone, she turns to Hangman and asks if they made plans that she wasn't aware of.

"I apologized to Rooster. It's not my place to tell anyone how to fly."

Natasha doesn't tell him that she woke up to a voicemail with Devo's "Whip It" playing in the background while Rooster informed her that they needed to immortalize the day on a plaque because her boy toy said sorry for the first time in his life before ending the message with, "Kudos to you, Phoenix. It's like you taught Darth Vader empathy!"

"Solid first effort at being a human being,” she compliments Hangman, “but you lose some points for doing it over text."

"I didn't want to tempt fate. You only left me with five band-aids." He smiles at her. Jake has swapped out last night's Oscar one for an Ernie, undoubtedly to match the Texas Longhorns hoodie he's wearing. He's such a bonehead and Natasha wishes she didn't find it this delightful.

"So am I the next stop on your apology tour?"

"I apologized to you last night. Multiple times in fact," he says with a Cheshire cat grin. "I even recall groveling on my knees—"

A blushing Natasha quickly shoves him out of the entryway and into the hallway. The door softly shuts behind her with a click. Bob might know, but that doesn't mean he needs details. No one needs details.

"As much as I like you on your knees, Hangman," she flirts, causing him to preen, "what are you doing here?"

"Admit it," he dares, leaning his head against the wall as he smiles at her. "It was an A-plus apology."

"Only if we're grading on a curve, Seresin," she shoots back meanly.

Jake quirks an eyebrow and draws her to him, mumbling something about extra credit before his mouth finds her neck like a heat-seeking missile locked onto its target. Her hands grip onto the strings of his hoodie like she's pulling herself up from the edge of the Grand Canyon because Phoenix finds it very hard to focus on anything other than the solid press of his body and how good he is at not talking. Eventually the rest of her body registers the wild pinging in her brain reminding her that they are in a public space.

"You're going to scandalize my elderly neighbors," she reprimands with a hiss.

"Then let me in." There's that charming smile again. He's like The Big Bad Wolf trying to get Red Riding Hood to invite him in so he can devour her. Natasha presses the heel of her palm against his chest to create some space between them before he can pounce again.

"Bob's here," she reminds him without any real conviction.

"Like the two of you don't talk about me while braiding each other's hair." She doesn't expect him to understand the implicit trust required between co-pilots who fly a two-seater, but Phoenix is also not going to admit that she has gone to Bob a few times for advice on their relationship –  she's getting a headache just thinking about the label – but it is usually in the form of her begging him to hit her over the head with a baseball bat so she can snap out of it. "I've been meaning to discuss something with Big Ol' Balls anyway."

"I bet," Natasha sneers. "To be honest, I'm not sure you can control yourself in polite company, Hangman."

"Ye of little faith." He pauses for a beat and then pleads, "At least let me have some water. You wouldn't want me to become dehydrated, Trace."

Natasha rolls her eyes and makes him promise to be on his best behavior before she lets him in. His victorious smirk is enough for her to regret the decision before they've even stepped foot back inside. From the couch, Bob's eyes go wide with surprise when he sees Hangman stride in behind her.

"He's not staying," Natasha quickly justifies before her wingman can ask.

"Don't be hasty! Maybe I want to watch Erin Brockovich too."

"It's The Pelican Brief," she and Bob say in unison.

But he has already stopped paying attention to them and made a beeline for the waffles on the coffee table. "Do you know how long it has been since I've had carbs for breakfast?"

*

Bob watches Hangman watch Something To Talk About with the fascination of a marine biologist discovering a new form of algae. Jake is like an Amish person being exposed to his first dramedy, completely hooked on the horse-riding shenanigans and adultery. At one point, when he genuinely seems to believe that America's Sweetheart Julia Roberts will poison her philandering husband to death and the movie is going to turn into a murder cover-up, Bob looks at Natasha with so much joy on his face that she's happy at least one of them is having fun.

Natasha is not having fun. She's still trying to figure out how the wall between these two parts of life has broken down and how she can spackle it back together before they bleed into each other even further. Only half paying attention to everything, she almost misses when Bob invites Hangman to stay for Ocean's Eleven as Bonnie Raitt croons over the end credits of the movie.

"I have a thing with Coyote and Fanboy later, but maybe I can ask them to come over?" he says, jiggling his phone as he looks to Phoenix for affirmation.

"The more the merrier," Bob announces jovially, patting Seresin on the shoulder. "Who doesn't love a heist film?"

Phoenix is going to have a stroke. She's going to kill Bob. She's going to kill Bob while having a stroke.

"What are you doing?" she hisses at Bob when Hangman leaves to go make the call.

"Dude, I love this so much! He's like E.T. before Gertie taught him about botany!" Bob squeals. "Hangman probably thinks The Bridges of Madison County is about Clint Eastwood trying to stop eco-terrorists from destroying historical landmarks!"

She drops her head into her hands and rubs circles against her forehead like she's trying to reverse time. When she opens her eyes, Phoenix is disappointed to find that she is still rooted to the same spot.

Inviting Coyote and Fanboy turns into Coyote and Fanboy and Payback with Halo and Fritz on their way. Fifteen minutes later, half the squadron is crammed into her living room debating which celebrities they'd want to teach how to play poker. While the heated argument over which Chris would have the most obvious tells rages on, Natasha excuses herself to go stick her head in an oven. She is enjoying a cold beer in relative quiet when Hangman slips into the kitchen a few minutes later.

"You're not having fun," he observes before admitting that he probably didn't think this one through all the way.

"Everyone loves an impromptu group hang in their home, Seresin." He offers to get rid of them, but Natasha shakes her head and holds out a beer to him instead. "It's fine. Honestly."

"I really need to stop listening to Floyd. He gives the worst suggestions."

"When has Bob ever given you advice?"

Hangman suddenly looks very self-conscious. Massaging the back of his neck, he avoids eye contact with her as he tells her that he may have asked once or twice for advice regarding her. Natasha's eyes narrow as she shouts for Bob to come help her in the kitchen before turning back to Jake.

"You're talking to my Bob about me?"

"I think he's technically The People's Bob, Nat," Jake jokes, his smile faltering a little bit as she stares at him in bewilderment.

"That's like insider trading, Jake!"

"Hardly! It's not like I used intel gathered from Bob to get in your pants!" he insists. Jake flashes her a toothy grin before stage whispering, "This was way after that."

She whacks him in the stomach with a dish towel. Her elaborate nightmare is somehow getting worse by the minute. Natasha takes a slow calming breath before asking, "Why would you listen to Bob?"

"Genetics! His father is a couple's therapist!"

"That's not how genetics work, moron!" she is saying just as Bob enters in time to chime in with, "Paranormal, actually."

"Excuse me?" Natasha asks. She really is going to kill Bob and it's going to be so sad because they've gotten into a groove while flying so it'll be annoying to have to break in a new partner.

"Dad's clientele is a little less…corporeal these days," Bob explains. "After the divorce, he got super into fringe psychology and now he's a paranormal therapist."

"What the hell is that?" Jake asks.

"Rich people with haunted mansions hire my dad to figure out a spirit's unfinished business and help them cross over to the other side." Seeing their incredulous looks, Bob insists, "It is more lucrative than you'd think! Plus, he's having the time of his life! He spent five weeks last summer on a luxury yacht in the middle of the Mediterranean!"

As Bob pulls out his phone to show them the pictures, Jake throws the dish towel at his face. "Jesus, Bob! That would've been helpful to know before I took your terrible advice about the dog thing."

"You never asked!"

"What dog thing?" Natasha asks, eyes darting between the two of them. Bob takes that opportunity to remember that Fanboy really wanted to go to Belmont Park this weekend for their inaugural summer kick off. He practically runs out of the kitchen to propose the idea to the rest of the team. By the time Hangman and Phoenix have followed him out, Fanboy has convinced everyone that they'd be idiots not to go to the amusement park tonight. 

"Bro, are you even tall enough to ride a rollercoaster?" Coyote asks as they shuffle out of her apartment. Judging from the silence, she can only guess that Fanboy used a colorful gesture to respond.

"You two coming?" Payback asks, looking behind him. Natasha knows Jake so she knows that he's four seconds away from asking for a ride to avoid her wrath, but she pulls him back by his hood and tells Reuben that Hangman has been recruited for cleanup duty.

"Trying to teach him to be humble," she adds.

"Wouldn't hold your breath for that one, Phoenix."

And just like that, her apartment is blissfully empty once more. With her arms crossed over her chest, she focuses her full attention back on Hangman.

"I don't want to talk about it," he declares weakly as he starts gathering beer bottles. Jake looks at the water rings on her coffee table with irritation, mumbling to himself that it's not that difficult to use a coaster.

"Bob told you to make nice with Rooster, huh?"

Jake shrugs. "I told him it was a dumb idea. I'm not trying to date Bradshaw."

Natasha doesn't ask if he's trying to date her. She can only handle one catastrophe at a time. Her elbows dig into her thighs as she plops down to sit cross-legged on her sofa while he makes two trips back and forth to the kitchen to get rid of all the bottles. When she's sure that he has run out of things to clean, she asks, "Dog thing?"

"It is extremely embarrassing."

"So is everything you do. That has never stopped you before."

"Funny," he says sarcastically. "Going on a comedy tour later?"

"Jake," she warns.

He sighs. "Remember two weeks ago when I mentioned adopting a dog and you laughed in my face?"

"Vaguely."

Natasha remembers quite clearly that she was sobbing her eyes out during Homeward Bound at the time so she was only half paying attention when he brought it up. In the moment, she thought he was over-identifying with Chance because they were both rebellious and dumb, but Natasha did her due diligence and reminded him that he was too much of a neat freak to want a dog ("You could build computer chips in your apartment") and, even if he got over his compulsive tidiness, there was no way anyone would allow a dog on a naval carrier.

"Who is going to take care of the dog if you get shot down during a mission?"

"We could go halfsies," he suggested.

Natasha laughed and told him that she didn't want to be saddled with a pet neither one of them wanted because he was stupid enough to die. "You don't even like dogs, Bagman."

"That Sarah McLachlan will get you every time," he justified quickly before changing the subject to how there's no way two dogs would ever be able to pull one over on a mountain lion even if one of them was the guy from Back To The Future.

"You know it's not actually Michael J. Fox, right? The twist isn't that Michael J. Fox stepped out of the DeLorean and became a bulldog."

"But God, this movie would've been so much better if it were."

Natasha turns to him now and asks, "Didn't you end up deciding that you didn't want a dog?"

"The dog was never the point."

"How was the dog not the point when you were talking about adopting a dog?"

"The dog was a metaphor!"

"For what?"

"Commitment!" he shouts like it's the most obvious explanation.

There's a beat before she starts laughing. "That's deranged! Who would possibly come to that conclusion?"

"There's a clear line from…actually, never mind. We don't have to keep talking about this." Jake's face is starting to resemble a tomato as he tells her they are going to be late and starts looking around for her jacket.

"Aren't you allergic to dogs?"

"Yes, but…"

"That's a strange choice for a metaphor about commitment then," she tells him.

He tosses her jacket to her and quickly asks, "Can we head out to this thing already?"

Hangman is already halfway to the door when Natasha finally gets up to follow him. By the time they reach the elevator, his face has gone down a few shades. Phoenix knows she should probably say something, but she wouldn't even know where to begin so she lets her brain continue to pick apart the metaphor. They are cruising down the Coronado Bridge when she asks him, "When we split that hero for lunch last week, was that also supposed to be a metaphor?"

*

"Well, what did you say?" Bob asks eagerly as they make their way down the boardwalk. She and Hangman had split up as soon as they arrived at Belmont Park, Phoenix to find Bob and Hangman to meet Coyote at the Giant Dipper roller coaster. Natasha is positive that he would have agreed to meet Javy on the moon if it meant getting away from her. It took her a while, but she finally spotted Bob making his way out of an escape room and before she could say anything, he started apologizing profusely for not telling her about being Hangman's Mr. Miyagi sooner. He insisted that he was more of a sounding board than anything else and the only real advice he gave Jake was to stop being a douche, which only served to get him punched by Rooster anyway.

"How am I supposed to respond to something so convoluted that you need a decoder ring to figure it out?" Natasha asks Bob now, chewing on the straw of her cherry blaster milkshake as she ponders Jake's recent behavior. "Maybe Mav tapped him for a secret mission and he's cracking under the pressure?"

"When have you ever known Hangman to crack under the pressure?"

She nods reluctantly. "Well, he's losing it over something. That's the only explanation."

"That's not the only explanation," Bob says, rolling his eyes like he's talking to a child. "It's not out of the realm of possibility that he has feelings for—"

"Bob, this is Bagman we are talking about – he doesn't have emotions. They didn't get that far into the code when they built him." She doesn't really believe that – they all stopped believing it when he defied orders to go after Maverick and Rooster – but Natasha is hoping that if she says it enough times, she will stop feeling like a complete jerk. If Hangman is just a machine whose primary objective is to chase after the demon that lives in the air, then Phoenix doesn't have to acknowledge that she keeps inadvertently hurting his feelings every time he tries to be more than his programming. "What does commitment even mean to a guy like that?"

Bob squirms, practically whistling as he looks down the line of booths with carnival games like he has developed a sudden fascination with ring tosses and balloon busters. Natasha turns to face him with a look so murderous that it's a miracle Bob doesn't drop dead on the spot. When she says his name, it sounds like a hex.

"Shouldn't you be having this conversation with him?" Bob offers uncomfortably.

"Why? You two probably mapped out a ten-step flow chart already," she says, fuming. "What does he mean, Bob?"

"It's nothing over the top! There's not like…jewelry involved or anything." At that, Phoenix lets out a breath she didn't realize she was holding. Bob arches an eyebrow but before he can even think of sharing an observation, she silences him with a look that makes it very clear that she knows exactly where to dump a body so that it won't be found. "He wants to spend time with you in public without the cover stories, which by the way, Nat, have become so weirdly elaborate that at this point the only ones who haven't figured it out are Fritz and Coyote."

Natasha groans. Last month when they ran into Fanboy at dinner, she spent ten minutes telling him a barely linear tale that started with her Facetiming her parents, detoured to a Scorsese film with thinly sliced garlic that led to a pasta craving, and looped in an imaginary bet with Seresin involving a mechanical bull and a cattle rancher. By the time she got to "and that's why we're sitting here having ossobuco," Fanboy looked like that meme of the telenovela actress trying to do trigonometry in her head.

"Hey, Rooster didn't know!" Natasha insists defensively. 

Bob reminds her that those three are not exactly the LED bulbs of the batch. "I think it's kind of nice that Hangman wants to woo you."

"Only because you're a hopeless romantic, Bob," Natasha snickers. "Why didn't you tell him that I don't want to be wooed?"

"We are watching a three-day Julia Roberts marathon on basic cable with commercials. You want to be wooed, Nat." When she responds by giving him the middle finger, Bob follows it up by asking if she's going to chase after Hangman.

"Calm down, Nora Ephron," Natasha groans. If Bob had his way, they'd be at the Empire State Building right now. Natasha tells him to stop talking about her love life and join her for some mini golf.

To his credit, Bob makes it to the eighteenth hole before he blurts out, "I told him not to use the word commitment because you'd freak out!"

"I did not freak out. I have no problem with that word."

Bob nods. After a beat, he starts, "Remember in Runaway Bride when—"

"I'm not afraid of commitment, Bob."

Natasha stares intensely at the windmill spinning between her and Tiki Town glory as if she can intimidate it into rotating slower. She can feel Bob's eyes on her as he peers at her sneakers and makes a hmm sound. "Are those running shoes, Nat?"

"Shut up, Bob."

*

Bob is too daft to realize until Natasha elbows him in the stomach that the woman at the equipment return kiosk has been making eyes at him all evening. She hands him her golf club and leaves him to flirt badly. With the arcade power card she won for getting a hole-in-one at the volcano, Phoenix wanders into the poor man's Dave & Busters. She's walking past the kids trying unsuccessfully to claw themselves a Hello Kitty stuffed animal when she spots someone familiar at the skeeball machines. Unfortunately, Natasha would recognize Jake Seresin's ass in even the poorest of lighting conditions so she is left with the Sophie's choice of slipping out before he turns around or facing him head on like an adult. Taking a deep breath, she squares her shoulders and walks towards him like the goddamn fearless aviator that she is.

"It helps if you actually roll it up the ramp," she suggests when she is close enough to be heard.

Hangman whips around so fast that he practically drops the ball on his foot. "Phoenix, hey. Hi. What are you doing here?"

She waves the card in her hand. There is a long strip of winning tickets hanging around his neck so obviously he has been here for a while. "Where are the fellas?"

"Fritz puked on the tilt-a-whirl so Halo took him home. The rest of them are meeting Harvard, Yale, and Omaha at laser tag."

"You didn't want to see a bunch of nine-year-olds make them cry?"

Jake grins, his face illuminated by the dayglo lights around them. "Rooster said he'd video it for posterity."

"Look at you two," Natasha whistles, "thick as thieves now."

He shrugs like even he doubts the longevity of this alliance. Jake moves one machine down and asks, "So you want to skee?"

"I don't think that's a verb," she tells him before swiping the card at the bottom of the machine. The ramp is jet black with strips of neon green lights on both sides and holes backlight in neon blue. The moment it lights up, Phoenix feels like she's in Tron as she cranks her arm back and lets loose. She successfully drops her ball into the top hole all but one time, which would be impressive if Hangman wasn't standing next to her effortlessly hitting it every time despite looking like he was an ocean away. Never has a man looked so deflated to win before. She grabs his tickets from the slot as they step away from the machines to let some middle schoolers try their luck.

"I need to know what this is to you," Jake says suddenly.

"You have never needed that before," Phoenix reminds him. She has always known that kissing to avoid having a real conversation would only work for so long before the parts of Hangman that craved structure and concrete answers flared up. People like him need to know the rules of engagement even if they intend on breaking them.

"Not for lack of trying," he admits, prompting Natasha to wonder what other mixed metaphors she has missed along the way. "What I should've said last night was that I don't want to be the guy you call when you need to kill time."

"Again, you called me last night."

"You're avoiding the question."

"You called me and I dropped everything to show up." She hates how her voice catches when she asks, "Isn't that enough of an answer?"

"I'm not sure that it is."

*

"Do I strike you as someone who is afraid of commitment?"

"Yes," Rooster replies without skipping a beat. When her head snaps up at his betrayal, he laughs and explains, "We all are. It's self-preservation. Commitment is for folks who work a nine-to-five and don't leave behind a death note every time they go out on a job."

"That's super bleak, Bradshaw."

He shrugs and pops another handful of Dippin' Dots into his mouth from the cup between them. Phoenix had forgotten that Rooster has the appetite of a trash compactor. In the ten minutes since they've sat down, he has eaten all the tacos, three slices of pizza, and is currently working on finishing her Slurpee. Natasha has barely made a dent in her cloud of cotton candy. They're supposed to meet Harvard and Yale at the Mic Drop in half an hour and she would not be surprised if Rooster blew chunks during the ride's three story drop.

"I'm not saying it's hopeless! You just have to find someone who is crazy enough to know what he's getting into and be fine with it."

Phoenix groans, dropping her face into her open hands. "I think I like him."

"Yuck," Rooster says. She separates her palms to frown at him. "Sorry, someone put horseradish on my corn dog." As he scrapes off the offending condiment, he continues, "This thing you have with Hangman is as bizarre as one of those episodes of Tom & Jerry where they're friends for twenty minutes until Jerry sets Tom's tail on fire and gets him evicted."

"Bradley…"

"But…"

"But?"

Bradshaw appears to consider his words for a moment until he proclaims, "C'est la vie, Phoenix," before taking a massive bite of his corn dog. It's not what she expects and is not helpful in the least so she waits for him to explain himself. Naturally, Bradley takes this moment to chew thoughtfully like a kid under the watchful eye of his paranoid mother. She's almost at the end of her patience when he says, "Besides, that idiot is so gone on you that it's embarrassing."

Natasha's lips twitch like she's about to smile, but she quickly covers it up by stealing a cheese fry and reminding Rooster that he doesn't know anything.

"Dude, Hangman tried to play nice with me," Bradley points out. "He didn't even do that when our lives were on the line."

"Which was completely obnoxious, by the way," she shoots back, her annoyance flaring up again. "Why do men think that a dick-measuring contest is at all attractive?"

"We were going to get a ruler and whip them out before we even got to the subject of you," he jests.

Phoenix rolls her eyes. "I can't be with a guy who thinks I need him to defend my honor."

"It's okay to need people, Nat."

"That's rich coming from you, buddy."

"That's different. I am psychologically wounded."

Natasha chuckles. "Has that line ever worked?" 

Bradley tells her that he's going to keep trying until the day it does. Taking a deep breath, he clasps both of her hands between his own.

"If you're worried about appearances," and here he makes a gagging motion, "no one who has seen you fly is ever going to deny that you've gotten to where you are because of your skills, Phoenix, not because of who you may or may not be boning."

"I know that," she says with an appreciative smile. "But please never say boning to me again."

He grabs a piece of cotton candy from her, drops it on his tongue, and waits for it to dissolve before adding, "We'll all be too busy judging you for dating outside your species anyway."

*

As she stands in front of Seresin's door looking like someone who fell into a river, the only thing Natasha can think of is that Bob would love this. It haunts her how much he would love this, popcorn at the ready and his hands itching to start a slow clap. In fact, Bob would have probably gone one step further and handed her a boombox to really solidify what a cheeseball she was being right now. It's almost enough for her to turn back, but before she can, the door cracks open to reveal Hangman staring at her with a curious expression on his face. 

"Did you try to drown yourself on the way here?" Hangman quips when he takes in her soaked appearance. Normally, Phoenix is sure that he'd follow it up with telling her that she doesn't need to leap into the Pacific Ocean just because they called it quits, but he seems to think better of it.

Kid gloves, she thinks. Natasha knows no such way and orders, "Jeez, let me in before I die of hypothermia, Bagman."

Begrudgingly, he holds the door open so she can pass through. Natasha knows that it is driving him crazy to hear her Vans sloshing on his waxed wood floors so she does the courtesy of toeing them off at the walkway so she won't track rain all over his apartment. Jake holds his hand out for her wet windbreaker before leaving to get a towel, calling over his shoulder that he just took out the laundry so she can borrow a sweater from the living room if she wants.

Sure enough, it appears that he was in the middle of stacking his freshly laundered clothes by color when she showed up. Everything is as sharp as a pin, the corners of his t-shirts so immaculate that it looks like he used a T-square to fold them. Natasha digs into the basket of clothes he hasn't gotten to yet and pulls out a blue Birch Aquarium sweatshirt. She's in the middle of peeling off her t-shirt when he walks in.

"Jesus," he whistles under his breath, gaping at her as he stands there like a wallflower. "Make yourself at home, Nat."

If she got red every time she saw her co-workers in their underwear, she'd walk around with a permanent sunburn. 

"You've seen me in far less, Jake," she scoffs, throwing her wet t-shirt at his face. He hands her the towel and offers to make tea, not waiting for her answer before he leaves the room. Natasha has no doubt in her mind that he is, at this very moment, throwing her clothes in the wash so that they'll be nice and dry when she's ready to go. 

Plopping down on his sofa, she finally takes in the movie playing on his television. "Are you watching the July Is For Julia marathon?"

"She just stole a bread van," he calls out from the kitchen. "I'm starting to think that your girl might have a thing for playing low-key sociopaths."

She rolls her eyes. Leave it to Hangman to watch two rom-coms and suddenly think he's an expert at uncovering the main character's messy motivations for doing the unhinged things that she does. Phoenix is watching in rapt attention as Jules compares herself to pond scum when Jake comes back and tells the tv screen that she is not wrong.

"She's determined!"

"Personally, I'm more excited for the September Is For Sandy B marathon. Think of all the property damage!" Jake exclaims, handing Natasha her cup of tea. "To what do I owe the pleasure of your company, Phoenix?"

"Well, I was at home sobbing into a cartoon of mint chocolate chip while watching Stepmom because—"

"It's your grandmother's favorite song and she was the first one to support your dream of becoming a pilot." Off her surprised look, he reminds her defensively that he knows how to pay attention too.

"Anyway, I was feeling introspective and realized that I forgot something at the amusement park so I had to drive all the way back before it closed except when I got there, it had already started to pour," she rambles, gesturing at her hair. "And then I nearly made the poor high school sophomore at the prize booth cry because she tried to tell me they couldn't accept soggy tickets as if it was my fault that it was raining…"

"This is fascinating and all, but—"

"Long story short, I got you something," she says, hopping to her feet and pushing him towards the kitchen. There is an extra-large ICEE cup on his table that she now pushes towards him. Hangman looks at it like she just handed him a bomb.

"You shouldn't have?"

"Will you just open it?" Phoenix rolls her eyes skyward as she impatiently motions with her hands to hurry up.

Jake looks skeptical as he lifts the lid and peers inside. His eyebrows furrow as he sticks his hand in and lifts out a clear plastic bag of water.

"You got me a tiny goldfish?"

Natasha goes around the table excitedly, supporting herself with her palms on his back as she gazes over his shoulder at the majestic orange oval swimming around in circles. "I used your skeeball earnings to pay for half, so this is technically not a gift, but isn't she great? Her name is Goldie Hawn, obviously."

"Obviously," he deadpans. Jake looks sideways at Natasha like she has gone insane. "I wouldn't get too attached. You know these things die in like two weeks, right?"

"I mean, you'll have to get a tank so Goldie can thrive," she explains without missing a beat, suddenly an ichthyologist because she did a two-minute google search on goldfish care on the drive here. "There was a piece on NPR a few years ago about a woman in London who kept hers alive for forty-three years, which just proves that you can't keep a good fish down."

He gingerly places the bag in an empty fruit bowl. When he turns back to her, Jake looks like he's trying very hard not to smile. "How do you know the fish is a girl?"

"Woman's intuition," she says as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. Jake runs a hand through his hair and groans that her present feels an awful lot like homework.

"I'm going to ignore your lack of enthusiasm," Phoenix says pointedly, "and assure you that as part owner, I plan on helping you."

"Do you even know how to take care of a goldfish?" he asks her doubtfully. When she remains silent, Jake pulls out his phone and starts tapping away. She watches as his green eyes flit across the screen while he skims an article from PetMD. "Whoa, did you know that goldfish can eat romaine lettuce? I didn't even know they had teeth."

Before he can dive into a fish-related wormhole that will take up the whole night, Natasha covers the screen with her palm before confiscating his phone.

"You get that the goldfish was a metaphor, right?"

Jake clamps his hand over his mouth with an exaggerated gulp before rolling his eyes, taking a step closer, and saying, "Unlike you, Phoenix, I'm a literary genius and therefore understand metaphors."

"Unlike you, Hangman, I actually know how to make a good metaphor that people will understand," she challenges, moving closer and closer until her fingers are ghosting along his sides.

"Kind of seems like you're piggy-backing off of my thing," Jake replies smugly. He's standing so close that she needs to crane her neck up to look at him, suddenly captivated by the sharp angles of his chin. 

"It's called collaboration, dummy," Natasha whispers as she frames his face with both of her hands while her thumbs trace that superhero jawline. "It's what people who hang out and make out with each other do."

He gives her a lopsided grin. "I feel like there's a word for that phenomenon."

"Continued stupidity in the face of overwhelming odds?" He makes her feel like someone who is boarding the Titanic knowing fully that there is an iceberg up ahead and she can't swim. The terrifying thing isn't even how many ways it can go wrong – it's how much she doesn't care anymore. They're elite aviators; the odds have never applied to them so why should she start putting stock in them now?

"I said word."

"Insanity." Jake's mouth dips down precariously closer and closer until her impatience gets the better of her and she pulls up so she can kiss him already. As with most things, Natasha doesn't believe in wasting time once she has decided what she wants and, fortunately for Jake, that's him right now. She feels his jaw tick before he completely relaxes against her like he has lost whatever internal argument he was having with himself. She can sense him smiling against her mouth before he pulls back for air.

There's a twinkle in his eyes when Jake chuckles, "You're such a freakin' romantic." 

"Worked on you, baby," she counters smugly. "You've been pining like the forest."

"Did I just hear a term of endearment from Natasha Trace?" gasps Jake.

"Maybe I'm just trying to get you to put out."

"Not in front of Goldie," he hisses, shielding the goldfish bowl with his hand. "She's a classy lady."

"Now who's getting attached?" Natasha asks as she tugs on the front of his shirt to pull him away from the table and their innocent little goldfish and towards the bedroom. "Although you bring up a good point. We probably need to get her a friend tomorrow."

"Like an aquatic meet-cute with goldfish Kurt Russell?" He looks so serious that it makes her beam. It is, of course, exactly what she meant, but she just laughs that he is a complete idiot. Undeterred, Jake insists that it's what Julia Roberts would want.