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Jake doesn’t take his gaze off of the junction between the pavement of their driveway and the sidewalk, pretends that he can’t see Rooster’s eyes on him in his peripherals. It’s difficult to tell if it’s the rain blurring the sharp dividing line, or the residual wet edge in his eyes that he can’t seem to hide. Not from Bradley, not anymore. “Best get off that perch of yours and start talkin’, sweetheart. You got sixty seconds ‘fore I think the better of comin’ here in the first place.”
“Baby…” Bradley’s voice comes out too pained, too desperate, and Jake grits his teeth against the softness that rises in his chest at the sound. He suppresses a shiver, his shirt and hair still dripping from the walk back to their place after his absolutely justified disappearing act. Bradshaw, predictable in all ways but one this evening, was waiting for him, damp and despondent on the porch.
“Fifty five.”
Nobody in Rooster’s life can play the asshole better than Hangman, and no one in Jake Seresin’s rises to the occasion quite like Bradley Bradshaw. Jake can hear the frustration building in the other man’s chest, held at bay by a quick huff of breath. “God. Can you not…”
Jake can practically feel his mouth slip into younger versions of himself, an ill fitting bitter taste that sharpens his tongue before he’s aware of it. “Don’t you dare put this on me. This is not how I wanted tonight to go.” Jake’s mind, unbidden, flashes through memories, sorted neatly into categories of before and after.
Before, he sees the shared calendars and clandestine texts, the arduous task of getting their friends in the same place at the same time made even more complex by the necessities of the navy. Natasha flew in from Norfolk, Bob and Coyote carpooled down from China Lake, and Fanboy was already nearby with a coveted teaching position at top gun. Payback’s on a boat halfway across the world, but sent his regards and regrets. Jake pictures the Hard Deck, creamy tablecloths and candlelight, calla lilies and rose petals, all behind signs posted that it was closed for an event. Penny had refused to let him pay, had “put her foot down,” insisted that that’s what you do for family, but she’d left the key to the register where he could find it. Rookie mistake — the cash is already inside. He’d even enlisted Captain Mitchell — it’s still too uncomfortable to call him Pete, no matter how many times Maverick’s corrected him over family dinner — to distract Bradley long enough for Jake to make everything perfect. God only knows if they managed to make the Bronco more or less of a shitbox this afternoon.
And then after — after he got down on one knee and pulled out the simple gold band, modeled after the one Rooster wore looped around his dog tags. After he promised Bradley forever, asked him for the same. After he told Bradley about their friends gathered in from the corners of the world, begged him to come with Jake to the courthouse the next day and make an honest man out of him.
After Bradley’s face froze, anguished and twisted. Instead of watching the shimmer of gold slide onto Bradley’s finger and feeling a warmth bloom in his chest, instead of celebratory drinks with friends, instead of taking Bradley home and taking him apart piece by piece, slow like syrup, with his hands, his mouth, his tongue, his teeth — instead, an icy hollowness made a home in his throat. Jake’s only experienced a catastrophic engine failure once, but it’s the same feeling — the swoop in his stomach, trusting something that always made him feel powerful and secure and falling right out of the sky anyway. He didn’t stick around to hear the love of his life let him down easy.
The remainder of the night up until this moment is hazy; he doesn’t know how he wound up at the beach after storming out like the rejection was hot on his heels. He doesn’t know how long he stood on the sand in the rain, watching the angry grey ocean. He doesn’t know how many phone calls from Bradley and then from Javy he let go to voicemail. He doesn’t even know what made him turn around, what gravitational force pulled him home, where he knew Bradley would be waiting.
It’s that selfsame enigma of a man, breathing heavy and sharp, who draws Jake out of memory and into the present. “Ok. Could you just…let me get through it?”
Jake finally looks up, forcing himself to meet Bradley’s eyes no matter how painful it’ll be. And painful it is; Bradshaw’s not just guilty, not just despairing — he’s scared. It’s almost enough to make Jake relent, pull Bradley against his chest, anything to melt the tension around the other man’s mouth.
Almost.
“Your minute’s waning, Rooster.”
The way Bradley forces his mouth open to speak, you’d think Jake was trying to pour acid down his throat. Maybe that’s not so far from the truth. But it’s hard not to be placated by the first words out of his lips.
“I want to marry you, Jake. That’s all I want. I was so goddamn happy to see you holding out that ring. I would have taken you to the courthouse right that fucking minute, if I could have. I just — give me some time? Two months.” He takes a shaky breath. Ever the martyr, actually going for what he wants requires flexing an unfamiliar muscle. No longer as atrophied as it used to be, but one that will always be stunted by years of suppression. In any other circumstance, Jake would jump to tell Bradley how proud he is. “I need to take care of something first, and God, I wish I had done it years ago. I wish I could have — I’m so sorry. I — fuck —“ Jake’s suddenly catapulted back in time; Bradley’s voice is doing the same thing Captain Mitchell’s did over the radio in those terrible few seconds in the F-14. I’m sorry, Goose. He sounds so lost, stricken, hopeless, a dead-eyed edge in his voice in the exact same way. “I can’t lose you t—“ He swallows a choked sound before it can burst out of his throat. “I made you feel like I don’t want you and shit, Jake, that’s never been true.” He breaks into a thin, watery smile. “Even when I wanted to kick your pretty fuckin’ teeth in, I wanted you. You gotta know that.”
Something starts to unspool in Jake’s rib cage, leaving him lighter but dangerously destabilized. “So what‘s this mysterious thing you need to take care of?” He scuffs his boot on the wet concrete, remembering the way they fell apart like pyrotechnics after their first, messy attempts at this. The way Jake would lash out before he could let old hurts settle, the way Rooster would leave before he could get left. Remembering the painful, lonely, infuriating interim years. “What difference’ a couple months make in you wantin’ to be with me?” He’s not happy with how pathetic he sounds.
“Oh, baby,” Bradley breathes. “It’s not like that at all.”
“Then what is it like, Rooster?” Jake shoots back without pause.
Bradley takes a steadying breath, steels himself. Jake imagines, almost as a premonition, what it was like to be that godforsaken uranium plant, watching Rooster hesitate, hesitate, hesitate and then hit with brutal, life-upending accuracy.
“I can’t marry you right now because I’m already married.”
Jake realizes in this moment and in none prior that people really do see red, not as just an expression. His vision blurs, pink at the edges, before he notices the heat of tears pricking at his eyes. His hands move quicker than his mind, and before he knows it he has Bradshaw none too gently shoved up against the wall, fists clutching his shirt almost hard enough to tear, holding him at arm's length.
“When,” he spits, “were you planning on sharing that fun little tidbit with me?” The venom in his voice only drips sharper as he remembers staying up all night after the tension between them snapped in glorious relief, nothing in the world but him and Bradley. Legs tangled in sheets, wrapped up in each other in the dark, Bradshaw just started talking, unfolding the decades into a story that finally, finally made sense of the man underneath him. His dad, his mom, Maverick, his papers, the years he spent alone and desperately trying to be good enough, desperately afraid that he wasn’t.
Even that wasn’t the last piece of the puzzle; it came later, after a few real dates, something planned in advance with pressed shirts and something you eat with a fork and knife. After Rooster gave him a key to his place, after Jake had been round to Penny’s for Sunday dinners often enough to squabble with Amelia over which seat was whose. It stumbled haltingly out of his throat as if on colt legs — I love you — alongside a blushing confession about wanting something like his parents had. From the way Bradley remembers them, the stories Maverick tells, Jake wishes he had met them. He can’t give Bradley all of it — desperately in love at first sight, sickly sweet, soft kisses even when they’re angry. But there were parts of it — the ecstatic reunions after deployments, devotion like methuselah roots, the whirlwind courthouse wedding — that Jake had thought he could. As Bradley cautiously revealed this new side of himself, the hopeless romantic — Jake thinks he can be forgiven for being stabbingly blindsided that Bradshaw’s made a home wrecker out of him. “So much for telling me everything, huh?”
Bradley heaves a shuddering breath under the weight of Jake’s hands. “It’s Phoenix!” He gets out three syllables that turn Jake’s world sideways for the second time in as many hours. Jake takes his hands away, steps to the side, so when Bradley speaks again, it’s more measured, less breathless. Which makes it that much harder to hear. “I’m married to Natasha.”
Jake figures he’d be more pissed off if an unfathomable depth of confusion didn’t take precedence. It’s rare to render the great Hangman speechless, something cutting and ruthless quick to his lips even when he’s reeling internally. “Well. She’s been remarkably supportive of your truly extensive adultery.” Jake’s brain scrambles through the past for anything that could make this make sense. The glint in Trace’s eye when she gave him the shovel talk and her blessing in the same conversation, back when they first got their shit together enough for something serious. The three of them laughing over drinks as she cleared the pool table in one turn, hustling the twenty bucks off Jake he’d been buzzed enough to bet against her. Bradley rubbing soft circles into her shoulder while she cried after a muffled phone call with her dad devolved into a shouting match. Suddenly, the memory of that casual touch, so normal, tender even, in the moment, sours quicker than milk in the sun. “The handcuffs she got us for our anniversary make a lot more sense, though. She use ‘em on you first?”
The acrid insinuation that Bradley’s so much as looked at someone else while he’s been with Jake, out of pocket as it is, still fails to get a rise out of him. Rather than the white hot fury Jake could elicit so easily when they first met, Rooster merely raises an eyebrow. “You forget I’m gay, Seresin?”
Heat rises to Jake’s face — he was reminded thoroughly just a few hours ago, Bradshaw as fuckin’ perfect on his knees as always — but Jake figures that between the cold of the rain and how goddamn angry he is, it’ll be enough to mask the pink on his cheeks. “Seems to be a lot of that going around — you somehow forgot to tell me that you’re married to someone else,” he seethes, hissing through his teeth. “For the entire fucking time we’ve been together.” Someone else that Jake talked to almost every damn week. Someone else Jake considered a friend. Turns out, not a friend to Jake, more than a friend to Bradley, and both of them lying to him for the entire time they’ve all known each other. “You know she threatened me? Early on, when we first started fucking around. Told me you were the most loyal person she had ever met, that if I wasn’t just as committed to you she’d make sure I regretted it.” He looks up with an ice cold sneer. “Didn’t realize the bar was so low.”
Jake’s long known how to best kick the legs of Bradshaw’s self control out from under him. It used to be a game — Bradshaw had his teeth clamped down on caution like a lifeline, practically an invitation for Jake to wrench it from him. What would it take to get Rooster to spit it out and go for blood? How low could he goad Bradshaw into going? It’s rarer these days, takes longer, but it raises a dark satisfaction in Jake’s chest to prove that he’s still got it. Color spreads across Rooster’s cheeks and neck, his knuckles curling into tight fists. Jake wonders if he could still find a sensitive enough spot in Bradshaw’s vulnerable underbelly to get him to snap completely, those clenched fingers finding purchase on Jake’s jaw. Somehow, it seems like the bloom of acute, physical pain might blunt the more nebulous phantom ache in behind his ribs. It’s only the thought of Bradley’s nails biting sharp crescents of blood in his palms that stops him. Their eyes lock, jaws and shoulders tense; on the knife’s edge between going for the jugular or grasping for his hand, Jake gives just an inch.
“Okay.” The closest thing Bradshaw will get to an apology right now, followed by a harsh breath. “Why?” Like his mind hasn’t been working a mile a minute generating the worst possible reasons why they might have gotten married, why they stayed married. Not a version among them that doesn’t feature Jake as the meaningless interloper in their unnameable and impenetrable connection, stretching back far before they’d heard of some asshole called Hangman. Jake figures the impact will hurt no matter what form it takes, bracing himself for proof that he didn’t know either of them as well as he thought he did.
“It was back in basic. It was — you remember what it was like, before they repealed DADT.” Jake would probably retort with something about how yes, he knows exactly what it was like, were he not recovering from the conversational whiplash. What does this have to do with anything? “Nat and I had clocked each other pretty quick, but we were barely friends — and then she turned up at my door in the middle of the night.” This happened almost two decades ago, but Bradley’s face is so stony that Jake might’ve thought it happened yesterday. “She’d picked up a girl at a bar, nothing serious, but one of our squad mates had seen her and he —“ Bradley swallows, the lines of his throat tight with buried wrath. “He was blackmailing her, wanted her to — wanted something she didn’t want to give and threatened to report her if she didn’t.”
Jake grapples with the implication. He’d taken his own share of shit from colleagues when he’d come out, but never anything like this. Even now, when he’s questioning everything he ever knew about Trace, he’s struck by a sudden rage directed at this man from her past that he’s never met. “She figured if we got married, we could have a convenient cover, get better pay and housing, and fuck whoever we wanted on the side. We never figured DADT would be repealed, so it’s not like we could get married to anyone for real anyway. It was crazy, but we were both scared and, well, time was kinda of the essence.” He chuckles grimly. “We went to the courthouse the next day. Dress whites and everything. Worked like a charm.”
He goes quiet, suddenly seeming self conscious after letting it all out in a rush. Jake doesn’t realize the time it’s taking him to process until he sees the furrow between Bradley’s brows, the way he bites at his lip. Jake grasps at something, anything, to say, right now — anything to get rid of the fear in Bradley’s eyes.
“Oh.” He blinks, exhales. “That’s…” As the sticky gears of his brain, scrambled by the unexpected twists of this evening, put the pieces together, he finds himself swept up in a familiar wave of affection. Of course that’s what Bradley would do. There’s no limit to what he’d put on the line for a wingman — Jake doesn’t know how he expected anything else. At a loss for words, Jake moves slowly, telegraphing his intentions; Bradley doesn’t hesitate to take Jake’s hand when he offers it, threading their fingers together. Jake turns to lean up against the wall beside Bradley, close enough to press his shoulder into the other man’s.
“Don’t get me wrong — I’m still pissed at you.” The harsh sentiment is belied by the way he relaxes against Bradley’s warmth at his side, taking a full inhale for what feels like the first time since he stormed out of the Hard Deck. “You should have told me.” As much as he’s trying to project the resentment that came so naturally to him just moments before, his voice betrays him; gone is any sharpness to obscure his soft edges.
Bradley agrees, almost verbatim, almost before Jake’s even stopped speaking. “I should have told you.” The accord mollifies him somewhat, but it’s not enough. Neither is the apology that follows. “I’m so sorry. If I could go back — I wish I had.”
“So why didn’t you?”
When Bradley speaks, the mantra in Jake’s head that’s been playing on repeat — he doesn’t trust you, he doesn’t want you to know him, you matter less to him than he does to you, it’s your fault, you did something wrong, you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough — falls silent. “I — God, I was trying to figure it out. How to tell you but not — but without dragging Nat’s shit into it. Not my secret to tell, you know?” Jake feels tension leech out of places he wasn’t even aware of holding it. “It was more — it was different for her than for me, and she doesn’t talk about it. Like, with anyone.”
Jake just nods, something tight in his throat. His immediate instinct is to pity Trace, and he knows that’s exactly why she doesn’t tell people. She doesn’t need it, not from anyone and certainly not from him. Bradley answers his question just as he forms it. “I called her right after you left to get her permission. She says I’m an idiot, you’re a drama queen, and if we manage to get our shit together then she’s really happy for us.”
Jake laughs, light but real. “Sounds about right.”
“So.” Jake feels Bradley breathe against his side, hears him swallow. “Did we? Get our shit together.”
“You fishin’ to figure out if you’re engaged or not?”
When Bradley huffs a laugh, gentle and tentative and real, Jake thinks it might be the best sound he’s ever heard the other man make. And that’s going up against some stiff competition. “Something like that.” A nervous pause. “I gave you a pretty shit answer the first time. Can I get another shot?”
Jake hums as if he’s mulling it over, just to be an asshole. Like he’d deny Bradley anything in this moment. “Depends.” He does have one more nagging question. “Why are you still married?” He chances a small smirk. “I don’t know if you noticed,” he drawls, gesturing to their still-clasped hands resting against Jake’s thigh, “but DADT’s been history for a while now, and y’all seem to have moved on from each other.” Bradley grins at that; Jake and Bradley, so solid for so long now, were an even longer time coming, and none of the squad can pull in civilian bars quite like Natasha.
“Honestly?” His smile turns sheepish when he responds. “The benefits are nice, and I never…” he trails off and looks away, the way he does when he’s taken off guard by something that cuts to the bone. “And I never expected it to matter.” A beat. “Not like this.” When he looks back up at Jake, there’s a determined intensity in his eyes that speaks not to desire, but devotion. Whatever lingering traces of doubt that Bradley wedged between them at the Hard Deck evaporate under the warmth of his gaze.
Jake squeezes Bradley’s hand that much tighter and raises it to his lips. The kiss he places on his knuckles is slow, soft, reverent. Which provides sharp contrast to his subsequent return to being an arrogant little shit. “So how should we coordinate with Phoenix so you can leave her for your jaw-droppingly sexy mistress? You’re gonna want to lock down all this” — he waggles his eyebrows and runs a hand down his body, mockingly seductive — “sooner rather than later.” But the attempt to get a laugh out of Bradley only elicits a tender frown, the hurt he caused too fresh in his mind.
“You’re not my—”
Jake interrupts him with a light hand on his neck. “I know, baby.” Bradley holds his gaze for a second before nodding.
“Already taken care of. I meant to get it done a thousand times after we got together, I just…never got around to it. But we filed online, no contest, took fifteen minutes. It just takes six months to be finalized; some stupid law about reconciliation or whatever.”
Jake’s been pulled into Rooster’s orbit since long, long before they were together; he knows the man’s tells better than his own, and he knows right now that Bradley’s hiding something. His eye contact with the middle distance is too steady, and his thumb running across Jake’s is too fast, in perfect rhythmic paces rather than lazy, languid circles. Jake wills his own body language to project something casual, refuses to side eye Bradshaw like he instinctively wants to. Instead, he rests his head on Bradley’s shoulder, mind churning. There’s something that doesn’t add up here — literally, he realizes.
“You said it takes six months to be finalized after you file.” Bradley nods, and flicks a guilty smile Jake’s way. He knows he’s been caught, but he doesn’t seem too unhappy about it. “But you said we could get married in two.” Jake’s already flipping through recent memories, looking for something big and finding only comfortable monotony. “So you filed four months ago?”
Bradley nods, his grin growing wider. A tad too mischievous for Jake’s liking — he’s had quite enough surprises for this evening.
“Why?” Not when DADT was rolled back, not when they started dating, not when they moved in together, but randomly four months ago, with Jake halfway through a six month deployment and no milestones in sight?
When Bradley slides his hand out of Jake’s to fumble around in his pocket, Jake’s fingers follow instinctively, keenly feeling the loss of warm callouses against his own. The quip that rises quick to his lips, about what in Bradley’s jeans could possibly be more important than holding Jake’s hand, dies on his tongue when Bradley pulls out what he’s looking for.
A ring box.
It’s nondescript, an elegant black velvet. He watches, mouth suddenly dry, as Bradley’s deft fingers gently open it, revealing a gleaming, simple gold band.
“It was my dad’s.” Like Jake hasn’t seen it on Rooster’s dog tags a thousand times. “Got it refinished and sized for you.” When he glances up, he looks — not terrified, like he was earlier, but there’s an edge of nervousness in the set of his jaw, the quirk of his lips when he speaks. “Is it…do you like it?”
God, this man. Jake barely catches a glimpse of the warm, tender hazel of Bradley’s eyes before he moves in as if drawn by gravity. Bradley’s lips feel like a balm against his own after the hours of uncertainty tonight, familiar and right in a way that’s still mind boggling after all this time. The kiss is light, almost chaste, but it warms him like whiskey. “It’s perfect.” You’re perfect. He moves in again, lingers a second more. Bradley’s five o’clock shadow scratches his skin, his bitten lips tender against it.
“Here, look.” There’s an intriguing edge of mischief in Bradley’s voice. When Jake pulls back, he watches Bradley run his thumb over an inscription on the inside of the band: too good to be true.
“Oh, god.” It startles a laugh out of him. “Any chance I’ll live that down before we die?” Jake rolls his eyes, smiling wide enough that his dimples pop. Bradley returns it easily.
“You’re lucky it isn’t ‘slow ride.’” His grin turns wicked.
“Fuck you,” Jake drawls, heavy with affection. Then he cocks his head. “I’m realizing something.”
“Oh?”
“There’s one benefit to this alternative plan.” There’s a heat in his eyes that does not escape Bradley’s notice. When he responds, his voice takes on a husky rasp.
“And what’s that?” When Bradley steps closer, Jake smells the familiar citrus and smoke on his skin, and can’t help leaning into him, ghosting his lips over the man’s neck.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says, barely above a whisper and pitched low, “I’m very much looking forward to calling you my husband.” It’s unclear if it’s the nip to his earlobe or the term husband that elicits a low whine from Bradley’s throat, but it spurs Jake on either way. “But this way,” he mouths at Bradley’s jaw, one hand finding a home on the softest part of Bradley’s hip, “we get at least a few months of engagement sex.”
Bradley pulls back and looks at him as if he’s seeing him for the first time, eyelids hooded and lips parted. “Then I fully intend to make the most of the time.” He grabs Jake by his shirt, plastered to the contours of his torso and made almost transparent by the rain, and walks him backwards to the front door. When Jake reaches back, fumbling for the doorknob, Bradley’s arm snakes out and grabs his wrist. He pulls both of Jake’s hands to his lips, places kisses on his knuckles that burn like sparks on his icy fingers. “Yes,” he murmurs into the back of Jake’s hand.
“Yes what?” Jake feels at home in his skin in a way he’s missed, in a way that makes him grateful for it. His signature smirk, his hands clasped in Bradley’s, his eyes bright, giving his partner — his fiancé — a hard time just because he can. Because Bradley will let him.
“Yes you know what, asshole.” Bradley beams at Jake, flicks his abs through his wet shirt. “Yes,” he says, with less humor and more weight, “I’ll marry you.”
An earlier version of Jake would want to play it off, pretend like he could take this or leave it, like he’ll never wait around for anyone to keep up with him for long.
Fuck that.
“Can’t get rid of me now, sweetheart.”
And Bradley fuckin’ Bradshaw, who’s never played anything cool in his entire life, who notices when Jake’s tired and drops by his office with sugary drinks that he’d never buy for himself, who wipes engine grease on Jake’s best shirts just to see his nose scrunch, who can’t tie a tie for shit and uses it shamelessly as an excuse to get Jake’s hands on him — Bradley smiles like a supernova and hauls him in for a bruising kiss.
Bradley pulls back first, putting just enough space between them to wrap his fingers gently around Jake’s palm. He effortlessly produces the ring, held delicately between his thumb and index finger, and his gaze is impossibly soft when he meets Jake’s eyes. “May I?”
His brain forgets how to talk to every muscle in his body except those needed to nod his head. The band slides home, warm against his skin from Bradley’s fingers, a couple of errant raindrops still clinging to the shiny surface. Bradley’s so transfixed by the sight of it that he doesn’t seem to notice Jake finding the other half of the matched set in his own pocket. “Earth to Rooster.” He looks up, brown eyes wide and warm. “Your turn.”
He slides the ring on Bradley’s finger with what was supposed to be a smirk, but turns out too genuine, too bright. There’s something warm and weightless in his chest when he looks at Bradley, when Bradley looks at him; it’s the same look, the same feeling that accompanies it, and it’s only magnified by the realization that while he’ll have plenty of years to get accustomed to it, he doesn’t think he ever will. “Looks good on you, Bradshaw.”
Looks very good.