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Bradley was splayed on the couch in Maverick's hanger, feet hanging off the side as he was too long to lay flat out.
He was also pretty drunk.
"I just don't get it. I mean I do. I agree we should have broken up. But you know?"
Maverick was sitting across from him in his own chair, nursing a beer. Both men were closer to drunk than sober but Bradley figured if ever there was a time for such things, it was after a break up.
He nodded along to Bradley's ramble. Mav was the best. He knew exactly what Bradley was talking about. Scrubbing his hands over his face he stared up to the ceiling before sitting up to take a pull from his own glass.
"You know, I'm 40 now. I always figured if I had this great love of my life, I'd have found them by now. Like mom and dad."
"Hmmm, I don't know how many people luck into a soulmate. But then again, the hard part isn’t the meeting. It's the keeping them. It's the work to keep a love and relationship alive."
"I just can't imagine that.”
Maverick wryly smiled over at Bradley, "That might have something to do with the break-up."
"I know! But I've worked really hard to get where I am. Really hard. When I think of the future,” he gestured between them and then around the hangar, “this is the stuff I see. Flying. The Navy. Hanging with the squad. Spending time with you."
"A little bit too much of my influence during your formative years perhaps."
"No, Mav. Never. I just don't see anything wrong with my life. It was better to break things off, not lead anyone on. Even if it hurts now, I don't want to be looking back a year from now knowing that I held on to a relationship that didn't fit me."
"Very wise, Bradley. It's important to know when to let go."
The silence between them held comfortably, the sounds of the desert echoing outside. If there was one constant that Bradley had noted over the years it was that all the middle of nowheres were some of the loudest places. The lack of traffic and people just meant nature had its time to shine.
"Do you think you have a soulmate, Mav?”
"Yes. I had a soulmate"
Bradley sat up straight at that, eager for details. "Tell me more. Who was she? What happened?"
Maverick smiled widely, his eyes crinkling at the corners. "Tom."
Bradley's face screwed up with confusion. "Tom?" Maverick just nodded and looked meaningfully back at Bradley, letting him work it out. "Wait, you mean Ice? Ice was your soulmate?"
"Yes, he was."
"Come on, you're messing with me."
"I'm not.
Cursing himself, Bradley wished he was a lot less drunk for this conversation. "But how?"
"He was the love of my life. There is no one that challenged me more to be a better person, no one else that believed in me no matter what I did. He helped me tear down the worst parts of myself and helped me rebuild myself into who I wanted to be. When I looked into the future, he was the constant I saw, more than flying, more than anything.”
“So, you don’t mean, like, romantic soulmate.”
“We had that too for a while.” Maverick winced and shifted in his seat. “If we had come up in a different time, if the laws were different back then, I think it would have been different.”
“You and Ice were together? Romantically? Like, with sex?” God, Bradley had chosen the wrong topic to come at while drunk.
Maverick gave a hearty laugh at that, “Yes, like with sex.”
“I had no idea.”
“That was rather the point.”
“Come on, Mav. I wasn’t going to go around reporting you to your chain of command at 8.”
“Believe me, that wasn’t the issue. It’s hard to realize because you were pretty young, but how far we’ve come in terms of how we treat men who love men has been phenomenal. I mean, beyond just our jobs we would have to worry about our lives. We weren’t going to bring a kid into that kind of secret. It was hard enough for us to worry about, we weren’t going to burden you with that knowledge.”
Bradley was forced to concede that the perspective of a kid might have skewed how seriously he’d have taken their secret relationship.
“So what happened? If he was the love of your life why didn’t you stay together?”
“We knew that love wasn’t enough.”
“What?”
“Relationships are hard even when everything is above board and legal. Life is hard even when you aren’t harboring secrets. I wanted nothing but the best for him and to see him happy, and he wanted the same for me. And being together in that way wasn’t how we were going to see that happen. Not with his career goals. Not in the Navy of then.”
“But if you were soulmates, wouldn’t being together have been more important than that?”
“I never was going to ask him to give up his ambitions. And he was never going to ask me to get out of the cockpit. We loved each other because of these passions and desires, the dreams that propelled us forward, not despite those things.
“Part of loving someone is doing what is best for them, and part of loving yourself is doing what’s best for you. We were friends before anything else, and knew we could stay friends after. And that would have to be enough.”
“Wow. I can’t believe it.”
“It was the right choice for who we were then, and the world we lived in. And Ice had a beautiful life. He had a beautiful marriage, raised amazing kids, and rose all the way up to COMPACFLT.”
“You didn’t get married though.”
Maverick smiled sadly at Bradley, and took a hard swallow of his beer. “No, I did not.”
“Never found the right person?”
“My right person was married to someone else.”
Bradley unsteadily leapt from his seat, “I don’t get it! How could you let him marry someone else when he was your soulmate!?”
“Just because he was my one and only that way didn’t mean I was his. I saw how much he loved Sarah. How much he loved his kids. How rising in the ranks fulfilled him. I never begrudged him any of the happiness in his life. I was best man at their wedding, godparent to his kids, and always offered to be a reference if he needed one, though God knows he knew better than to put me down.
“My love wasn’t conditional on it being reciprocated. With the cards we’d been dealt, our friendship was all we could have. I made my peace with that a long time ago.”
Bradley sat back down and stared at Maverick, though he was looking out into the distance. He couldn’t imagine the strength of loving someone that much. To have had a taste of that love for a short time. To be faced with what might have been as you watched them build their life with someone else.
“I’m sorry that he didn’t love you back.”
“He did, in whatever way he could. That was enough for me.”