Help! (I Need Somebody)

by Fopperies

Summary:

Even when Bradley has no one, he has Maverick--estranged or not. When he gets a girl pregnant in college, it's Maverick that he turns to for help when he's left alone with a baby that he doesn't know how to care for.

(Pre-Canon, Pre-Reconciliation fic)

Bradley stood in the strange driveway and squinted against the morning sun, looking at a house that was more modest than what he had been imagining, building up in his head. 

When he had been just a kid waiting for Maverick between visits, Bradley had pictured him staying in exotic places and doing exotic things. He imagined luxury and fun, houses bigger than his own in towns cooler than his, a life that suited Maverick, extravagance that lived up to him as Bradley saw him, larger than life. Young and naive, Bradley hadn’t understood money, but he knew that Maverick brought more with him when he came, knew that he poured money into his mom’s pocket that became clothes on his back and special, non-essential food in the fridge. 

But he was standing in front of Maverick’s assigned quarters now, and it was nowhere exotic, nowhere rich at all. It was a little house without opulence or frills. Nothing about the house said Maverick at all, an unfamiliar Jeep in the driveway that Bradley hadn’t ever seen before. But the address matched the one given to him by Tom Kazansky over the phone.

Maverick was inside, and it had been years since he and Bradley had been in the same room, the same state. 

There wasn’t much choice left for him though, and that was why he was here. A big why that was shifting at his feet, bundled in the cheapest car seat that money could buy. The only one he could afford, one that he’d had to purchase before he’d been allowed to leave with the baby. His baby, one hell of a surprise.

He’d been having fun at college, but so had everyone else, and he was the only one in his dorm to get a knock on his door–social services calling. 

A month old baby with his name marked down as the father and a mother who had taken off, leaving just her parental rights behind. His own last name was on the birth certificate, legally the kid’s own. And Bradley–hadn’t taken it well. He could barely remember the mother, just enough to tell the social worker that yeah, they’d had sex, but what did that mean? It didn’t mean anything, even as he felt the earth drop out from under him. But in the end, it had meant everything–it had meant a lot. 

It had meant lying in bed at night and sweating into his sheets, waiting for the test to come back, waiting for the verdict to come in. It had meant taking a bus to his bank and standing at the ATM, looking at the value on his bank statement, the number a lot smaller than he remembered the last time he had looked, a lot smaller than it had been before the college had been cashing his tuition checks. It had meant taking an envelope out of the mail, hands shaking, and seeing the DNA results there in bold print, unmistakable, plain black and white truth for him to take in. It meant missing a midterm and withdrawing from his classes in the middle of the semester, better than failing out altogether, but just barely. 

It meant a lot of things, but the biggest thing that it meant was that he’d had to swallow his pride and his feelings and leave to find Maverick. Finding him meant looking past the canyon of issues that had cracked open between them. But when the cards were down and his number was up, he didn’t have anyone else, no other family to his name but Maverick– Maverick and now the little baby at his feet.

The cab had dropped them off and left, not a friend or someone who cared, no one who would idle at the curb until they safely made it through the door. If Maverick wasn’t here, they were fucked, more than they had been. The California sun was beating down on them, and he heard the baby making little unhappy noises at his feet. 

Bradley had bundled her up tight on the Greyhound bus, air conditioning blasting down on them overhead, turning a cranky baby into a furious one every time he had to do an awkward diaper change, hunched over and trying to do it in his lap. But it was hot now, miserably so, and they couldn’t stay outside all day. 

He had to go in, and the crying baby should have been all the encouragement that he needed. But he was frozen, couldn’t make himself knock on the door and ask to be let in. He’d kicked Maverick out, and now he had to come crawling back, no apology or explanation to ease the pain of showing up at his door.

Bradley had no house of his own to kick Maverick out of anymore, he’d sold the Bradshaw house to pay for college. He had poured it all into tuition, what little he’d had left after paying off the mortgage, a higher debt than he’d ever known his mom had shouldered on her own. 

Maverick had offered, in a letter that Bradley had torn up, to pay for his tuition, but it hadn’t been a consideration then. He’d had enough for a couple of semesters, and then after that he’d rather take out a loan, rather collect pennies from the street than take anything from Maverick. Rather get the money anywhere else than to let Maverick contribute to Bradley attending a nice normal state school, a world away from where he’d wanted to be, what he’d planned on doing his whole life. 

But paying for tuition had turned into paying for a baby, a little package that came with a thousand hidden fees of her own, and Bradley had found the bottom of his own pockets all too quickly. 

He needed help. And he didn’t want to ask for it, wouldn’t have for just him. But there was a whole person hanging in the balance, his person, and he was furious and he was heartbroken, but he wasn’t someone who wouldn’t do whatever it took to do right by his own kid. 

It had been over two years, but he felt like he had aged twenty just in the last month. Bradley was sweating, the racing heart in his chest doing nothing to help, and he knew he had to knock. The rustling at his feet wasn’t leaving him any choice. But there had never really been a choice at all after social services had shown up at his dorm.

He raised his arm and rapped on the door, not ringing the doorbell, not yet. Buying himself another minute, maybe, if Maverick was still sleeping or just out of earshot.

But Maverick was an early riser, and the house couldn’t have been more than nine hundred square feet– there was no far enough away not to hear.

The blistering heat was miserable as he stood there stinking in the hoodie that he’d put on days ago, back in Virginia. He smelled like musk and bus, about sixty hours stale. He wasn’t a sight for sore eyes himself, but the door opened, and it was Maverick–the best and worst thing that he’d seen in years. 

Maverick was already dressed, casual and geared up for a quiet Saturday in a tee shirt, jeans, and bare feet. He looked–the same, unchanged and frozen in time, could have been five minutes lost between them or ten years. His hair was damp like he’d just taken a shower, but it was neat and tidy as it had ever been. Maverick had an easy smile on his face when he opened the door, like he was expecting someone who wasn’t Bradley, like he’d been expecting someone better or someone more. But Bradley watched the expression slip right off of his face, some kind of shock settle in as Maverick looked from him, greasy and sleepless from days on a bus, to the carrier at his feet— her face obscured, but still undeniably a baby under the covers. 

Maverick looked down at the kid and then back up, his brows pulled up high in disbelief. Bradley didn’t know if Maverick was shocked to see him in particular or just him and the baby, but it didn’t much matter, anger cramping ugly in his gut like a clenched fist. It didn’t take much, where Maverick was concerned, for that white hot fury to settle in. He’d come to ask for help, to crawl on hobbled knees, but the sight of Maverick and his easy Saturday mood just slugged Bradley right where he was already hurting.

“I guess you didn’t even need to pull my papers to ground me after all,” Bradley said as he gestured at the baby, angry and choking, nothing like the calm greeting that he’d spent days trying to rehearse on the bus.

“Bradley,” Maverick returned, already stunned to the max, unflinching at Bradley’s sharp words. Bradley didn’t know, suddenly, what kind of greeting he’d been looking for, but as Maverick stood stupid in the doorway and didn’t move, didn’t turn to let him in, he was somehow still disappointed.

The baby’s feet were kicking unhappily under her blanket, refusing to be forgotten, intent on not being ignored. 

Maverick stared down at the car seat, still completely dumbstruck, and Bradley’s heart twisted up into his throat.

He knew, knew knew knew, that Maverick would never turn them away, he knew it, but. They didn’t have anywhere else to go, and he felt the yawning gape of the unknown snapping at his heels the longer that Maverick took to invite them in. Maverick would, he would, but uncertainty lurched inside of him anyway.

Before the papers, before it all, there was no question.

Bradley had a problem, or a worry, something he needed, five hundred dollars that his mom didn’t have for a senior trip–there was Maverick, no need to ask twice because Maverick had already started helping him by word one.

And then Maverick had pulled his future out from under his feet, taking all of Bradley’s certainty, too. 

It wasn’t his place to apologize or beg, and he was still furious, but the silence stretched between them until Bradley’s mouth opened, words waiting in his throat to fill the void. He didn’t know if he would beg or just start cursing, but Maverick jolted back to life and stopped him, swinging the door wide and stepping back in one fluid motion. Bradley could see Maverick’s neat living room through the doorway, and some frantic tension soothed out of his belly, one rod pulled out of his spine. But there were still so many more.

He and Maverick startled into motion at the same time, heads almost clanging into each other as they both crouched down to grab the baby and Bradley’s bags at the same time. Maverick jerked back upright to attention and put both of his palms up in the air, playing easy and non-confrontational, clearly reluctant to to set Bradley off during their first interaction in years. Bradley cleared his throat and grabbed the baby and his bags all at once, used to hefting them now after full days transferring from bus to bus. 

Maverick stood back and didn’t volunteer his help again, closing the door behind him and standing frozen as he watched Bradley set his things down by the couch. He’d only moved a few feet, just barely past the threshold, but he was in, and it felt like a shift, something more monumental than just the drop in temperature from the AC.

Neither of them moved to speak or sit down, the heavy silence between them only broken by the restless baby and the agitated noises building in her throat. 

Maverick made an aborted motion, gesturing at Bradley, but he stopped and pulled his arm back, his hand tucking up to his mouth and settling there. He grasped at his chin that he must have already shaved that morning, his face as neat and smooth as Bradley remembered.

It was still a normal person’s early morning, but Maverick had probably been up for hours, probably already gotten more done than most people did in a full day. 

Bradley wanted to squirm.

Wanted a hug, and to throw a punch, too. He felt swollen with emotion, full to burst. Barely knew what he was feeling, didn’t quite know who he was feeling for, and to. 

Finally Maverick seemed to shake himself, abruptly clearing his throat, and Bradley didn’t know what he was about to say, but he didn’t want to hear it. Too angry or too scared, too much of everything, so he cut Maverick off instead.

“I dropped out of school,” he said quickly, and Maverick’s eyebrows shot up, Bradley’s words not what he’d been expecting to hear.

“You dropped out of school,” Maverick repeated, nothing in his tone, no reaction at all, just reactionary acknowledgement. 

“Yeah, you know. Couldn’t make it to any of my classes. Got a baby now,” Bradley added, finally voicing it, giving a name to the elephant in the room. 

“I can see that,” Maverick agreed, and he didn’t sit, just leaned against the wall by the door. Bradley had wanted to wow Maverick all of his life, wanted to leave him speechless, but this had never been on his list of top one hundred ways how. 

“Is there…should I keep the door open? Someone else coming in?” Maverick asked, searching for what to say, and he was being generous, no hard inquisition first thing through the door. It was somewhere between a parental reaction and that of the friend that he’d always been for Bradley, always presented himself to be. 

“No. Just us,” Bradley told him, and didn’t offer any more. He didn’t know why. The words were choking up in his throat, words he’d been dying to tell someone, and that someone was always Maverick. But they didn’t come out, just couldn’t, not yet. 

He knew that if he stayed, if Maverick would let him, and Bradley knew that he would, no matter what, that he would tell Maverick. He would spill his truth and his whole sick guts all over everywhere, all over Maverick and his military issued housing. But he couldn’t yet, had to hold onto something other than his anger, as close as he could get to his dignity. 

Bradley had been looking down at the baby, watching as she kicked off the blanket and revealed inch by inch of her little body, her tiny squirming legs and feet. He had counted in his head, measuring out every second that he could go without giving in to the urge to look at Maverick. 

He looked up, finally, tried to stay looking mad, as mad as he felt, but he saw on Maverick’s face that some naked fear must have been showing there, too. 

Maverick was plastered to the wall, somehow trying to blend in and disappear, nowhere to run but doing his best to try anyway. But Bradley dragged his eyes up to meet his, and Maverick softened, something going loose around his eyes. He kicked off of the wall and closed the distance between them, crouching at Bradley’s feet to kneel by the baby’s carrier, his head ducked low to peer under the hood of her car seat.

She had started squirming in earnest, working herself into a cry, but Bradley barely registered the sound. He could barely hear past the pounding in his ears, and after long days and nights on the bus, he’d been conditioned to half tune her out.

But Maverick looked like a deer in headlights, enraptured by what he saw. 

And Bradley could picture it, too. Could see what Maverick was seeing. She was little, barely over a month, and from his perspective only barely just starting to look like a person, still mostly pink and squished. She had brown hair, not much of it, and a stranger on the bus had told Bradley that she looked like him. Her eyes, they’d said, but Bradley hadn’t seen it. For him they were mostly shut, or squeezed tight and leaking big tears, fat droplets rolling down bigger cheeks. He had squeezed her into her last onesie, and under the blankets her pale legs were sticking out, no socks on her feet. He’d lost the socks somewhere around Oklahoma, but it wasn’t like she was walking anywhere anyway. 

Bradley knew logically what Maverick was seeing, but when Maverick’s face went loose and soft, something big screwing up behind his jaw, he wondered if he’d been seeing the same thing as Maverick after all. 

Her lungs were wide open now, and Maverick’s hands were twitching at his sides. 

Bradley didn’t know what he’d expected.

He knew what he’d come here for. He was a college kid, and didn’t have much money left in the bank. No babysitter, no prospects, and no sleep, not since her. He came to Maverick for help, because it had always been Maverick there for him, or his mom, and there was only one of them left. He’d come for help, but he hadn’t known what he’d get. 

He had built Maverick up as a villain in his head. All of their good times, their cherished memories, he had pushed back and away, buried under the rubble, under a whole collapsed mountain of his aching hurt. Bradley had made a monument of Maverick’s worst qualities to replace them instead, a collage of all of Maverick’s worst hits. Of a Maverick who missed his games, been deployed for his broken arm, missed a phone call on his birthday; a hit list of forgivable mistakes until the big one, their sentinel event. 

In Maverick’s absence, that memory, that betrayal, had become Maverick, eclipsed all of his memories of the man.

He hadn’t been able to get through the day any way else.

But looking at him now, crouched down and open, swallowing hard with something like tears in his eyes, it was hard to remember the cruel, pretend Maverick that he had reduced him to in his mind.

Maverick pulled his eyes up and away from his kid and Bradley swallowed, the air heavy between them. He wanted to spill his guts, and almost did, but Maverick cleared his throat and broke the tension.

“What’s her name?” Maverick asked, and there wasn’t anything distinctly girl about her, nothing feminine about the month old baby at their feet. But social services had given him some things, and one of the gifts was the pink blanket that she’d just kicked onto the living room floor.

Bradley told him, and Maverick looked up at him, sharp. He watched the full gamut of expressions flash across Maverick’s face before Mav cleared his throat and blinked quickly, tears in his eyes for real this time, no mistaking them.

“Yeah?” Maverick asked, and he reached out a hand, tentative, waiting until Bradley nodded his permission. Maverick settled his hand carefully around her foot, and Bradley watched, distant and frozen, as her toes fanned out before they clenched pink against Maverick’s palm.

“You name her that on–on purpose?” Maverick asked, closing his hand around her little foot. His hold was gentle and reverent as she kicked out against Maverick’s palm but he didn’t let go, unflinching.

Bradley’s whole body was clenched, breath held, watching with an ache while Maverick touched his daughter for the first time. She kept kicking out, but Maverick held on, steady.

He felt flushed with feelings, but he didn’t want any of them, not a single one. There wasn’t room, wasn’t space to think about any of it, not now, not with everything in the world looming up large around him.

“No,” he answered, his throat dry. “Just a coincidence, didn’t have anything to do with it,” Bradley finished, and Maverick never let go of her little foot, but he looked up at him, brows pulled tight. 

He didn’t know what he’d been expecting from Maverick. Disappointment, or a lecture at least. But Maverick didn’t have any of that for him, and he didn’t pry. 

The baby was crying in earnest now, but Bradley was desensitized after days and weeks of her crying, unsoothed. It wasn’t until Maverick cleared his throat again and looked down at the baby that Bradley moved into action.

Bradley lurched towards the carrier and started to undo her straps, but Maverick didn’t let go of her foot still, tiny and dwarfed by his palm.

He unbuckled her and then froze, looking up to see Maverick’s face, so close to his own as they both knelt on the floor.

“Can I get her?” Maverick asked, and it wasn’t how Bradley had seen this going, not how he’d rehearsed it on the bus. He’d imagined–Maverick apologizing, begging, maybe, or himself reluctantly eating crow. But he never thought Maverick would just–be easy and unquestioning, still Bradley’s bunker in the storm.

Bradley nodded, and then Maverick was picking her up, his movements deft and sure.

Maverick lifted her out of the carrier and Bradley felt everywhere on his body that Maverick wasn’t touching, felt the absence and envy of his touch with a familiar pain in his gut.

He had been an only child, and there was rarely any competition for affection in his life, not when Maverick visited. Not even when he’d brought a girl or a friend; whoever came to visit was forgotten at the door as soon as he and Maverick were in the same room. Bradley watched now, feeling like a spectator at his own reunion as Maverick held his daughter in his arms like she’d always been there, like he knew just what to do. She didn’t quiet, cries didn’t stop, but the cadence of her complaints changed and softened, like she knew that relief was inbound.

“Hungry?” Maverick said, and he was sliding a hand to her bottom as he spoke, feeling the diaper under her button-up suit. 

Bradley startled out of his reverie, and it had been a while, a couple of hours since he’d mixed up her formula with the sink water on their chartered bus. 

It felt surreal, all of it, not at all like he’d played it out in his head. He had a lot of time to think, on the bus. He’d imagined maybe he would blow up, or not even have to, cut short by Maverick’s groveling, freely given. But Maverick wasn’t offering any penance and he couldn’t find it in himself to demand, that sore spot in his chest still aching, but he was already so wrung out. He had been underwater for weeks, and he didn’t know if being in Maverick’s living room had lifted his head above the swell or pushed him under that much more.

He was wrongfooted, but he was reminded for the nth time that his wants came second or third or fourth, all overlooked for the little girl in Maverick’s arms.  

It was easy to fall into the baby’s routine that he was still trying to learn. It felt more natural than trying to broach any of the topics that were swollen up between them in the room. 

“Yeah,” Bradley said, and his voice came out rough and thick, gravely with the emotions that had risen up, choking. He cleared his throat and stood, turning to grope around in the bag that he’d dropped as soon as he had made it through the door.

Her bottle looked cloudy, and he knew that it needed a better wash than he’d been able to do in the small bathroom on the bus. He had usually been able to get a seatmate to hold her while he did what he could to prepare her formula in the bathroom, trying not to breathe too deeply or think about the water quality on the bus. He groped around the duffle bag that contained all of their combined things, as much as he’d been able to carry, and it was humbling to see the sum of their meager belongings, not much. 

The container of formula was almost empty, they had arrived just in time. She had enough for one bottle left, maybe two. He had been careful on the bus–the packaging was clear about not watering it down too much, but he’d had to ration, just a little.

They had made it though, to shelter and safe haven--the lion’s den all in one. 

But basic essentials, water and shelter and food, he wouldn’t have to worry about. It was everything else, the resentment and hurt, and his desire that was torn between asking Maverick for a hug and slugging him in the gut.

Bradley took her bottle and her formula and started to make his way into the kitchen, the officer’s housing a small and intuitive design, but he startled when Maverick was already in there, baby in one hand and a pot in the other.

While Bradley had been grabbing items from their bag, Maverick had been in the kitchen getting things ready, and Bradley burned with some kind of feeling, an emotion that he didn’t even know.

He wanted to be sore, wanted to hold on to all of his hurt feelings, but the weight of the burden on him the past few weeks had been so heavy, so immense. He felt some tightness pulling off of his chest, the gravity of the situation not just all on his shoulders anymore.

It had been–a shock. To go to bed holding on to ignorant bliss, and wake up the next day to the whole responsibility of another person. And the baby was unrelenting, there was no taking time away or putting her off. If she was hungry, or she was wet, those needs didn’t wait and it didn’t matter what he was doing or what else needed to be done.

And the pressure had been crushing, and he hadn’t known what to do.

He couldn’t go to class, and he had never been good at making close friends. His roommate had made it clear that this was not going to be a Three Men and a Baby situation, and his RA had already approached him about moving out of the dorm. Bradley was an only child, now a single parent himself with his own kid, and he had barely known how to hold the baby that they had handed him. There was no licensing for new parents, just a small bag from the baby’s foster family that she’d been staying with for a few weeks weeks, paperwork, and Good luck and Congratulations, Mr. Bradshaw.

Bradley had been alone, and the weight of the universe felt like it was bearing down on him.

But at the end of the day, even when he was alone, he had Maverick. 

Maverick, who had no faith in him, who had shot down his dreams and torn away his future. But it was Maverick who also wouldn’t kick him out, a truth that Bradley knew, indisputable, even as resentment and hurt burned under his skin.

Maverick who was setting the pot of water to boil and holding the baby in the crook of his arm like she’d always been there, natural in a way that Bradley worried that he would never feel.

It maybe should have stepped on his ego to see Maverick handling things seamlessly, and maybe after he had more than thirty minutes of interrupted sleep it would, but all he felt was weeks of exhaustion and the sag of relief.

He could go to the bathroom and the baby would be there when he came back, and he could close his eyes and not worry about dropping an infant on a sticky bus floor. Bradley’s eyes pricked with tears, days late and taking his momentary reprieve as an excuse to pour in. 

“Bradley,” Maverick said, and he startled back to awareness, shaking his head and meeting Maverick’s eyes. He had been standing in the doorway frozen, swaying on his feet, a blink away from breaking down and falling over where he stood. Maverick was closing the distance between them and pulling the bottle and formula out of his hands, and Bradley let them go, fingers slack, no strength in his grip. “Go sit down,” Maverick implored, and Bradley teetered.

He and Maverick needed to talk, probably needed to really have it out.

But he felt weak and he had a thousand emotions crashing in his gut, and he just–he didn’t want to fight, didn’t want to argue at all.

He wanted to go sit down. He needed it, needed a minute, even at the cost of relinquishing control to Maverick, to whom he had a thousand things to say, a hundred angry words he had collected over the years, all buzzing in his chest.

“I’ve got to make her bottle,” He objected, but didn’t make any move to take the supplies back from Maverick, planted where he stood.

Maverick rolled his shoulder, shaking his head and nodding back towards the living room where Bradley had come in.

“Let me do it. Go sit,” Maverick instructed again, and he wanted to, temptations galore.

“You don’t even know how,” Bradley tried to protest, tried to muster up some kind of defense.

“Instructions are on the can, I’ve got this. You look like you’re about to fall over,” Maverick said, and he was already unscrewing the bottle and taking it over to the sink, deftly beginning to wash it out with only one hand.

The baby was even being quiet, more placid and agreeable than she’d been for Bradley and their whole two thousand plus mile trip. 

And still he couldn’t let himself give in, no matter how good it sounded, no matter how wrung out he felt from head to toe. Bradley was waiting for something, couldn’t rest until he got it, and Maverick glanced up at him and read into his soul.

Bradley looked at him, taking his fill. Maverick hadn’t changed a hair, just as handsome as Bradley had tried not to remember. He hoped that he had changed some, hoped that Maverick was looking at him now and seeing someone more adult than the kid he had been, the kid that Maverick had crushed. He’d lost some of the baby fat from his face, but not all, and he’d been working on getting more muscle in the gym. But it all probably meant nothing when he was unwashed and rank, looking like the Greyhound special. 

“We’ll talk. Okay? We’ll talk,” Maverick said, and that clenched feeling eased off, and that had been it. Exactly what he had needed to hear, and Maverick had known, just like he always did.

But he hadn’t always given, and that had been the whole problem, the core of the canyon that had cracked open between them.

But Maverick had promised–Maverick had said, said they would talk, and that was enough for now, all that his aching body had been holding out for.

Bradley let go of the door where his hands had been clinging for purchase, and he walked his tired ass back over to the couch that he’d seen when he came in. The couch that had had his name on it since he walked through the door.

He fell heavily into the cushions and closed his eyes, and that was it for hours, his body tired and too wrung out to give any more. He’d gotten them to Maverick, and that was all he could do, spent.

When he woke up, it was to a hand on his foot, shaking him by the toe.

Bradley didn’t have to open his eyes to know who was touching him. He’d woken up like that a hundred times, maybe more. He squeezed his eyes shut even tighter, swallowing against the swell of feelings that Maverick’s touch evoked. He had forgotten little things like that, the way that Maverick always woke him up for school, or at his mom’s bidding when he was a teenager and sleeping in way too late on the weekends. Bradley had forgotten, but his body hadn’t, knew Maverick by touch, by heart.

He had a million memories of Maverick just like that, quiet and domestic, and he’d tried to lock them all away when he’d promised himself that they were done, that he would never think about Mav again. 

But there was no forgetting Maverick, and his heart pulled tight when he felt his familiar touch.

He played asleep long enough for Maverick to do it again, to grab him by the foot and tug. Bradley opened his eyes then, blinking blearily to sell his performance, but the yawn and stretch that followed were both real. He hadn’t slept in so long, and even laying half-collapsed on Maverick’s couch was better than the bus, better than his dorm with a baby that he couldn’t soothe or ignore.

When he arched his back and dragged his legs straight across the carpet, feeling pops and twinges in his spine, Maverick moved and sat down next to him on the sofa. Bradley felt his muscles tense and relax in his stretch, and he drew the moment out, reluctant to turn and face Maverick and open the moment up between them.

He stalled and stretched for as long as he could before he finally dragged himself to face Maverick, taking him in. 

Maverick was sitting with the baby in his lap, her little body curled in his arm. She was still, and sleeping, wrapped up tight like a pita pocket in a blanket that Bradley had never seen before. Her body was encompassed completely, and he couldn’t see her feet or hands, just a small bundle with a peeking face, her lips in a relaxed pout and eyelashes fanned against her flushed cheeks. Maverick’s knuckle was against her mouth and Bradley watched as she nursed on it intermittently, lips working and then stilling in rest.

As she stayed asleep, something heavy clogged his sinuses, a fresh wave of soggy hurt and something bitter, all of his inadequacy and fears.

He looked up at Maverick, and the room felt so heavy, suddenly. It was there between them. A thousand unspoken words, and even more tears.

Maverick had sent him letters that he hadn't opened, but not a lot. They had stopped after he had dropped the first couple off at the post office, earmarked for return to sender. There hadn’t been any phone calls, but he hadn’t left Maverick a number anyway. It didn’t stop Bradley from irrationally hoping for a call though, just for the pleasure of rejecting it. His empty mailbox had hurt after a while, even though it had felt like a victory right at first. He had yelled and told Maverick to leave him alone, and not immediately, but soon, Maverick had listened. 

It didn’t make him feel better, not the look on Maverick’s face then or the silence that had ensued. 

They still wouldn’t be talking now, maybe wouldn’t have started talking again ever if Bradley hadn’t ended up with a baby that he had no room for in his college life. He wondered how many years would have gone by if he hadn’t gotten someone pregnant, hadn’t gotten on that bus, hadn’t lowered himself to ask for Maverick’s help. 

Bradley swallowed around a mouthful of resentment, and Maverick’s mouth turned up at the corner, both of them watching the other like two animals circling. 

He hadn’t asked for help yet though, and Maverick hadn’t waited for him to do it. He had just started giving instead. 

It was too quiet, and Bradley cleared his throat, opened his mouth to start spilling.

“You’re low on supplies,” Maverick said, cutting him off instead. 

Bradley choked back the confessions and accusations that were rising high in his throat and reeled it all back in, startled. “I–yeah, we only just about made it,” he answered, wrongfooted suddenly. 

“I put the car seat in my Jeep while you were out, I thought we could go to the store,” Maverick kept talking, spinning Bradley even further on his ass. It was all logical, and more than logical it was necessary, just a couple of diapers left in their bag and even less formula. But Maverick had said they would talk, and this wasn’t what he had to have had meant. 

“Yeah, sure,” Bradley answered back, feeling like his ears were full of water. They needed to go, and he needed to talk to Maverick too, but it was just another lesson on priorities. He was falling into the rhythm of baby life, getting used to watching his own wants shift to the backburner.

Bradley thought about his mom a lot, lately. A single mom and with only a Maverick to help, sometimes, when he wasn’t deployed. He had been told that he was his dad’s clone his whole life, but it was Carole’s shoes that he found himself walking in now, feet too big and stumbling.

He swallowed everything that was rising to the surface, the things he’d thought about for two thousand miles and two years before that, and then they went to the store.

They were quiet in the Jeep as Maverick drove and Bradley tried not to nod off again. Maverick had the doors on, but Bradley thought that he’d caught sight of them off in the driveway when he’d gotten out of the cab with the baby. He wondered if Maverick had put them back on just for them while he’d been sleeping, or more specifically, for the baby in the carrier that was buckled into the backseat. 

It wasn’t a comfortable silence, but it was a mutual one, only broken by Maverick explaining that the baby was wearing the last diaper that he’d been able to find in the bag. 

They got a cart at the store, and it was surreal, the whole shopping expedition. Bradley was still exhausted, and it all felt dream-like to be doing this with Maverick.

Maverick who was pulling items off of the shelf and showing him, just barely waiting for Bradley’s assent before he was tossing things in the cart. He was addressing the shopping trip like a mission, taking it all in stride like another challenge to face. Not affected at all by Bradley showing up, still estranged, with a baby he didn’t even know the who what where for. 

When Maverick pulled a big box into the cart, careful so he didn’t disturb the baby, asleep in her carrier, Bradley finally woke from the spell. The box was huge, and Bradley could see on the side that it was a white bassinet, assembly required. 

“Hey,” Bradley said, putting a hand on Maverick’s arm where he was still trying to wedge the box into the cart. It was the first time they had touched, and it had been years. His fingers curled around Maverick’s wrist and Bradley could feel the corded muscle of his wrist, the strength of the arm under his palm

“We don’t need all of that,” Bradley said, feeling the old ache of hurt pride that Maverick had put there a long time ago. “You don’t even know if we’re staying.”

Maverick didn’t let go of the box, and Bradley felt his pulse under his fingertips, unwaveringly strong.

“Did I miss a crib in your bag?” Maverick asked, steady. “You have one back at home?”

“No,” Bradley answered, no to both. Didn’t tell Maverick that the bag was as much of a home as they had now, not much else other than his childhood memories and a futon in the storage unit that he had left back in Virginia. 

“Then you need it. Staying or not,” Maverick turned the box at just the right angle and it slotted into the cart like it had never been a problem at all. 

“You’re not even going to ask if I am?” Bradley asked, talking to Maverick’s back as the other man had already turned back to the shelves. He watched Maverick’s shoulders stiffened, but he didn’t turn, still facing pacifiers and bottles and a whole shelf of Bradley didn’t know what, didn’t know much at all when it came to this baby, or Maverick, or his whole god damn life right now.

“This how you want to do this? In the store?” Maverick asked, picking something up and holding it in his hands.

“Yeah, it’s how I want to do this,” Bradley told him, and took a step towards Maverick, crowding him into the shelf. Because I’m worried we might not ever talk about it if we don’t, he thought, but didn’t say. Just stood there imposingly until Maverick turned around, and he felt emboldened and shaken all at once at how much Maverick had to tilt his head up to look him in the eye, pressed in this close. He hadn’t been that much taller than Maverick, the last time that they’d fought. 

Bradley didn’t know if Maverick had always been this small, or if it was his own anger that was shrinking him now.

“Okay,” Maverick agreed, but he stood up straight and pushed back into Bradley’s space, too, walking him backwards until there was more than a foot between them and they were closer to seeing eye to eye. 

Bradley didn’t know what he wanted, what he was trying to get out of Maverick, only that this was the man that he’d always wanted everything from, always been greedy for. He had wanted for years, and even if he had thought he was over it, it was painfully obvious now, in proximity, that some things never changed. 

Maverick stared at him, expectantly, with the lines of his body squared off. But Bradley didn’t know what he wanted from the conversation, didn’t know what he wanted from Maverick himself, and so he gave him nothing, only stared back.

Maverick gave in, and gestured at the infant sleeping in her carrier.

“A baby. You have a baby,” he said, and Bradley nodded. “So tell me how it happened.”

Bradley felt stiff and bristly, and he knew then what he had been looking for from Maverick, that what he had always been looking for was a fight. 

“Well, I fucked a girl at a party one night, and now here we are,” he answered, crossing his arms, not sure why the words were coming out the way they were. Maybe he just couldn’t talk to Maverick anymore without feeling angry, and that was just the way it was now. 

Maverick’s brows drew tight, and if Bradley had been younger and his mom had been in earshot and alive, maybe he would have scolded him for his language. But Maverick never busted his balls like that when it was just the two of them, just the two men, he used to say, and he didn’t look like he was going to start now, even if Bradley was being a dick. And he didn’t rise to the bait either, just stood there and gave Bradley patience and time.

“Alright, and where is she?” Maverick answered, throwing Bradley off course with the conversation’s trajectory.

“Hell if I know,” he snapped, voice loud and harsh, and they both turned to look at the baby as she started to fuss and squirm. Bradley didn’t know what to do, but Maverick started moving the shopping cart back and forth while they stood in place, and her body went still again, contented where she lay.

Bradley watched Maverick take care of his kid like he’d been with her all her life, already better at it than Bradley was, calming her down after the outburst had made her upset. He deflated, right back to feeling smaller than Maverick again. Small and vulnerable like when he was young, always looking for this man’s approval, and getting it right up until he didn’t, when it had mattered most.

“We weren’t together, and I didn’t even know about the baby until social services came knocking down my door. She signed away all rights, who knows where the hells he is…she was just some girl at a party,” Bradley said, talking about the mother of his child, the child that felt like an unfairly high price for a one-night stand that he barely remembered and had barely enjoyed. 

The thought felt ugly as soon as it formed, and he swallowed the shame that he felt as Maverick looked at him, right through him, like he could see his every nasty thought. Maverick, more than most, knew just how ugly Bradley’s thoughts and words could be. Just how deep his hurtful thoughts could burn. 

“I couldn’t do it by myself at school,” he added, and that was it, the root of what he needed to say.

He couldn’t do it by himself. He had told Maverick the opposite, the last time they had seen each other.

I don’t need you, Bradley had spat, and now he found himself here in the store with Maverick and a baby, feeling every inch of how much his words had been untrue.

“Are you staying? Is that why you came here, to stay?”

“Am I even allowed to stay with you? Would you let me?” Bradley asked, thrown off already by the question, but maybe he shouldn’t have been. Maverick never went out of his way to talk about feelings when they were close, much less now, in the baby aisle of a store. 

Maverick waved his arm to the cart, filled to the brim. “Of course you can stay. It was never–I never–” Maverick paused, finding his words. “Of course you can stay, Bradley,” he repeated instead.

Bradley weighed his offer, and found the question that he had really been burning to ask since Maverick had let him through the door.

“Do you want me to stay?” He said, forcing his voice to come out strong, not weak like he felt.

Maverick’s face went soft at his words, and he wiped a hand across his mouth. He looked familiar, painfully so. He had been Bradley’s whole life for a while there, and his favorite person for longer still.

“Of course I do. I never wanted you to go.”

They were in the middle of a big box chain store, and there were other customers around to witness the whole scene, but Maverick stared at him steadily while he kept the shopping cart moving minutely back and forth, keeping the baby sleeping and settled. Bradley felt a storm inside of him just to look at Maverick again, nothing between them really resolved, but he felt soothed somehow, too.

Bradley nodded, and he stepped forward to Maverick like he was going in for a hug, and Maverick moved too, but the opposite way. They were awkward and off-kilter after years apart, and they tried to come back together again but both went the wrong way, Bradley’s foot accidentally came down hard on Maverick’s own, and then they both laughed with unease. Maverick clasped him on the shoulder instead, and Bradley nodded at him with his head down at the floor while they both cleared their throats. 

“Alright, we’ve got the bassinet. You’re staying, so you need some more gear,” Maverick said, and that was it. You’re staying, he had said, a done deal.

Bradley had known that he would be welcome, known it in his gut, but his wrung-out nerves and gnawing loneliness from the past couple of years had still made him worry. The loneliness, and the wall that had grown between them from everything done and said. 

Something unclenched inside of him at the easy resolution, made in public in the middle of a store.

“To be honest with you, Mav,” Bradley started, that familiar name rolling off of his tongue like it hadn’t ever left. “I have no idea what the hell I’m doing, or what any of this shit is.”

Maverick barked out a laugh and took him down the aisle, and like that they were up and running. It wasn’t done and things weren’t settled, but for now it was enough, and it was more.

When they came back to Maverick’s house, it was with a carload of baby things, and the baby herself fussing in the backseat. 

Maverick had loaded the cart, and it had felt awkward for Bradley at the checkout when it came time to pay. His bank account wasn’t dead empty, but he watched the sales total ring higher than he could afford, enough that would wipe him out in one blow. He fumbled with his wallet anyway, but Maverick pulled out his own instead, smoothly pushing Bradley’s hand back into his pocket without a word.

He had gone shopping with Maverick as a kid, gone on adventures and out to eat. And Maverick had always paid, even when Bradley had gotten a job in high school and had a few bucks to his name. It hadn’t felt weird then, but Bradley felt uneasy about it now. Things were different, their world had tilted on its axis when his mom had died and again when Maverick had pulled his papers, and their relationship had shifted right along with it.

Everything was for the baby, but he’d told Maverick to get out of his life, only crawling back now because he needed him.

He felt in some way like Maverick still owed him, but not like this, not money, and it made his neck hot to see tangible proof of the burden that he was, added up in dollars and cents. 

“I’ll pay you back,” Bradley offered as they rolled the cart to the Jeep, holding the baby carrier now because they had needed every square inch of the cart for boxes and bags. 

He didn’t know if Maverick still saw him as a child, son of Carole and Goose. But he didn’t want to be in that same box that he’d been in before. He had made a life on his own the past couple of years, and now being seen as a child didn’t feel right, didn’t fit. Never really had with Maverick anyway, but the desire to be seen as an equal was stronger now than ever. 

Maverick shook his head and pulled sunglasses onto his face, his eyes unreadable with the reflection of the setting sun in his lenses. 

The total had neared a thousand dollars, and Bradley’s insides were squirming from the debt. 

“I will,” he insisted, wanting to be a man now, for himself and for his daughter and for Maverick, too.

“I missed the baby shower,” Maverick joked, a queer look on his face that Bradley didn’t know what to do with. 

Maverick had missed a lot, and they both knew it.

Bradley let it drop, but knew that he wouldn’t forget. He vowed to start a running tally, and the first day’s total was already breaking his bank. He needed a job. A job, and a plan, and a whole new life.

But they had a place to stay now, and he had help, and Maverick, and it was a lot more than they’d had this morning.

When they got back to the house, they fell into step, picking up an easy rhythm between them like the beat had never been missed.

Bradley took the baby through her normal routine, the formula replenished and a stock of diapers freshly procured, while Maverick unloaded everything from the car. He had lost his mind in the store and bought a changing table and a stroller too, bigger ticket items set to be delivered some time this week. It felt surreal, the speed at which he and Maverick were reconciling, but things didn’t feel fully natural between them yet, either. Maybe they needed more than a department store heart to heart, but Bradley was exhausted, and in the Bradshaw family, Carole had been the communicator. Another strength that she had taken with her when she went.

Bradley had the baby in his arms, diaper changed but clothes still askew as he skipped straight to feeding her. He had limited experience with her still, but he had figured out quickly that the faster the food went in her, the less screaming, and that had gone a long way in a crowded dorm.

He was still standing in the kitchen when Maverick brought in the last of the bags, closing the door behind him and heading into his own bedroom with the big box that contained the bassinet that they’d argued over at the store.

Bradley watched as Maverick headed back out to the garage and then returned with the case that Bradley knew to have been Duke Mitchell’s, the case where Maverick kept his most-used tools. He had kept it at the Bradshaw house until Bradley had kicked him out of it for good, and it was like seeing an old friend to watch Maverick reappear with it now. He had learned on those same tools as a kid and then well into being a teenager, back when he’d begged to be let in on whatever project Mav had going on. Maverick had always let him help, and it was a flood of familiarity to see Maverick, unchanged by the years, with the tools that were unchanged, too. 

He followed Maverick into the bedroom, baby still nursing at the bottle in his arms.

Maverick had made quick work already of breaking down the box, and he had the white wooden pieces laid out on the floor at the foot of his own bed. Bradley had already clocked the small house as being one bedroom only, and the room was military neat but still had Maverick’s personal touches scattered throughout. He recognized the pictures on Maverick’s dresser, the familiar faces of his parents looking out at him, Maverick, and the grandchild they would never meet. 

He saw his own face too, smiling at him from years gone by. 

Bradley turned his back to the ghosts looking at him from behind their frames and turned to Maverick, watching as he opened his tool case and inspected the bag of bolts in his hand.

“This is your room, Mav. Why are you putting it in here?” Bradley asked, and Maverick didn’t look up at him, kept digging around, intent.

“Baby gets the bedroom,” Maverick said, unbothered as he got to work. Bradley didn’t see instructions anywhere, and he could guess that Maverick had never even taken them out of the box. The way that Maverick had laid the wooden pieces out on the floor, Bradley could already see how it would become a bassinet, the small shape that would be formed. 

It felt real, somehow, even more than holding the baby herself in his arms. Seeing the little bed that Maverick had bought her, the real bed where she would sleep. She had been in a portable cloth pack and play in his dorm that he’d had to leave behind, no room on the bus. But this was a real bed for a real home–for a real baby, too. 

It made his skin crawl with anxiety and the heavy weight of responsibility, and he tried to work out his feelings as he argued with Maverick instead of addressing the way that he was feeling suddenly, hot around the collar of his unwashed clothes. 

“I can’t kick you out of your room,” Bradley argued.

“She needs a room, you can’t keep her out there while we’re up and walking around. She won’t get any sleep and we’ll be creeping around everywhere trying not to wake her up,” Maverick pointed out, and he wasn’t wrong, but they hadn’t even been speaking a day ago. Twelve hours ago, even. Bradley was getting whiplash at the idea that now he would be taking over Maverick’s life, his bed.

When Bradley didn’t say anything else, Maverick spoke again as he started putting together the first piece.

“Baby gets the room,” Maverick said, like it was law. “I’ll be fine on the couch.”

And he probably would be, shorter than Bradley, but that didn’t make a couch a better place to sleep. Bradley knew that Maverick had issues with his back every once in a while. Understood without being told that it was probably an injury leftover from Maverick’s ejection, the same one that had killed his dad. 

Some things didn’t need to be spoken, and Bradley knew when Maverick and his mom both preferred for them not to be. 

“We’ll take turns, at least,” Bradley argued, not much more of a fight to be had.

Maverick reached out for a piece, and without being asked, Bradley crouched down to hand it to him. Bottle was almost done, and he needed to find some kind of cloth to lay down for her because this was usually when the vomiting started, too. It had been a long three days on the bus, and there was still the sour smell of thrown up formula on his clothes. 

He put the piece in Maverick’s hands and Maverick looked up at him, doing a double take as he took in the sight of Bradley feeding his daughter, a soft look falling over his eyes. 

“Turns,” Maverick agreed, and Bradley nodded at him, holding his gaze until Maverick was the one to break. “You can take tonight, you look dead on your feet, kid. You need to sleep in a real bed.”

Maverick wasn’t wrong, and Bradley wanted the bed, wanted to sleep right now more than anything. But it felt uncomfortable to give in after he’d spent a couple of years arguing with Maverick in his head. He swallowed his pointless disagreement, and grunted thanks as he watched the baby finish the bottle, starting back over to his bag to look for one of the baby’s towels that he had in there. They were mostly all soiled and stinking now, but he didn’t need something fresh for her to throw up on. Maverick heard him rustling around and lifted his head, watching him through the door.

The baby had started to cry too, and he cradled her in his arms and bounced her, trying to soothe her before the throwing up started and made it all worse.

“You need something?” Maverick called, stilling and putting his ratchet on the floor.

“She’s about to throw up everywhere, I’ve got a towel in here somewhere,” Bradley said, still looking.

A couple of beats of silence went by and Bradley found what he was looking for, one of the less soiled little towels. He spread it out under her, used to their routine.

“Did you burp her?” Maverick said finally, something careful in his voice.

“She kinda does that on her own,” Bradley said, looking at her warily. “When she throws up.”

She hadn’t done it yet, but after a couple of weeks, he knew the process, her inevitable spitting up. He had gone through a lot of quarters in his dorm laundromat, and then it had been a lot worse on the bus.

“Before she spits up,” Maverick said, and Bradley heard him get off the floor and walk over to where they were. “Can I show you?” Maverick asked, his voice halting, and Bradley knew that he was probably waiting for their first fight. Bradley was too, and it was probably coming, but he was tired today and just didn’t have it in him. He barely remembered what it felt like to not be tired, hadn’t slept in what felt like a year. Not since that first knock on his door.

Instead of arguing, Bradley nodded, and Maverick picked the baby up from where Bradley had her laying flat on her back. He took the towel from Bradley too, wrinkling his nose at the fabric that had gone stiff and crusty in spots from her spit up, and the rancid smell. Maverick laid it across his shoulder, and then held the baby upright, her mouth to the towel and Maverick’s hand snug under her butt. 

Bradley watched as Maverick patted her back with a cupped hand, beating a steady pattern across her back. His eyes flitted from Maverick’s hands, big on the small baby, to his eyes that were downcast as he looked at the little girl snug against his own chest.

Maverick kept going until the baby gave a small burp, and then he looked up at Bradley to see if he was watching.

“You do that every time she eats, make sure she sits up, and she shouldn’t throw up. Not as much, anyway,” Maverick said, smiling at him with those big white teeth that sat a little crooked in his mouth. Bradley swallowed, feeling younger than he had even when Maverick had paid their whole bill at the store. 

“She’s been barfing all over me for two weeks,” Bradley admitted, and Maverick laughed, gesturing at Bradley until he took her back into his arms. Maverick laid the towel down over his shoulder, his fingers brushing over Bradley’s neck, tickling him where his stubble was starting to grow in from days on the road without a shave. Bradley tried not to shudder at his touch, only just managing it. 

“Now you know,” Maverick said, and he turned back to finish building the bassinet. “If you keep doing it she’ll probably give you another one.”

Bradley obeyed, imitating what he’d seen Maverick do. He knew he was out of his depth, and it was both embarrassing and reassuring to be with Maverick now, who seemed to somehow know exactly what needed to be done. It was a lot like when he had been a kid and Maverick had the answers to everything, Bradley’s guidepost for life. 

“She didn’t come with a manual,” Bradley admitted, looking down at the baby as she drooled against the cloth, but she didn’t throw up like she always had before. 

“They make books. I’m surprised you didn’t run straight to the library,” Maverick said, and it was light and teasing, but he wasn’t wrong, not at all. Bradley had always been a reader, he wanted to learn things and follow the rules, do everything the right way. It had always been a point of friction with Maverick, who didn’t get his name from nowhere. But he had played along as much as he could with Bradley’s need to follow instructions and do everything by the book. And other times he had pushed him beyond those boundaries too, showing Bradley that rules could bend and that some were even made to be broken, too.

But Bradley had been knocked on his ass, and he was a far sight from that bookwormish version of himself that done everything that he was supposed to do and still gotten knocked down. He had been taking blows left and right, between losing his mom, his dream, his Maverick, and now the new future that he had been building for himself, too. He blinked at Maverick who had already gone back to focusing on his work, startled by the reminder of who he used to be.

He hadn’t felt like that Bradley in a long time, and it was jarring to be reminded now.

“Didn’t even occur to me,” Bradley admitted, sagging in the doorway. “It’s been a long few weeks, Mav,” he said, but he meant months, years.

And it hadn’t occurred to him, not at all. Since he had understood the reality of the position that he was in, his mind had defaulted back to one solution, and he had ridden over three days in a bus to get to it. He had only ever thought about running to Maverick, hadn’t looked for other answers or tried to figure anything else out.

As much as he needed help with the baby, maybe he needed support for himself even more. Betrayal aside, Maverick was still his person, the only one that he had left. 

Maverick was making good time, putting the bassinet together at a focused clip. But Bradley watched as he slowed down, looking up at him from under his dark lashes as he nodded his head at the bed. 

“So tell me about it,” Maverick said, and Bradley did.

There were bags strewn all over the house that needed to be unpacked, a lot more gear that needed to be set up and opened. Instead, Bradley sat on the bed with the baby in his arms and started talking, words spilling out that he hadn’t known even needed to come up. 

He told Maverick about the girl, or at least what he remembered of her, which wasn’t much. 

They had hooked up, and it wasn’t great, usually wasn’t. He hadn’t done much sleeping around in high school, had barely gotten his dick wet at all, too busy focusing on school and his mom and Maverick when he was around. And it had been a fun challenge at school for a while, sleeping his way through the dorms, but it was never more than that, wasn’t any kind of substitute for what he’d really been looking for.

He had slowed down after his first year at school, mostly tired of the game and how unsatisfying the prize was at the end. 

Bradley had been drunk when they slept together. Her name was Audrey, and she had blonde hair that might have been from a bottle instead of natural born. But all that had mattered to Bradey had been that she was willing and game, available when he’d been interested in trying to score. She was in a statistics class of his, and he thought that they had probably shared a couple more. He didn’t even know if she was in the same year, or what her major was. She had sent him an email or two at his school email address, but it hadn’t been serious, and neither of them had been looking for something real. Bradley hadn’t thought about her again until a little over a month ago when a social worker had knocked on his door.

There was a baby, he had been named as the father, and the mother had relinquished her rights. 

He had been blindsided and numb as he agreed to a paternity test, clobbered by a gut punch that he’d tried to ignore, even said a prayer to a god that he wasn’t sure was listening. 

Bradley told Maverick the gist, the very basics that there were to tell. At some point Maverick must have taken the baby, let him lay back further on the bed while they talked. Bradley remembered Maverick moving around the bedroom while he watched through a haze, the bassinet assembled at the foot of the bed. He had stopped talking and Maverick had too, working with quiet efficiency while he pulled a sheet onto the small mattress in the bassinet, getting ready to put the baby inside. Into her first real bed, bought and put together by Maverick himself. 

Bradley had been half asleep then, barely awake as Maverick pulled his shoes off of his feet from where they hung off the end of the bed. When he finally passed out, it was with the final thought that Maverick had put them both to bed.

 

---

 

Bradley slept a long time that night. 

Maverick must have woken up with the baby and pulled her out of the bedroom when she stirred. When Bradley dragged himself out of bed almost half a day later, he was fully clothed and the bedroom door was shut tight, and it was almost like he was back on campus, waking up alone in some strange dorm.

But he heard the baby squawking in the next room, and reality had crashed in like a ton of bricks.

He was a father, he’d come groveling at Maverick’s door, and was a full lifetime and continental United States away from college life.

When he finally emerged and padded into the kitchen, he was greeted by the sight of Maverick sitting at the two-person table with a baby in his lap. Bradley had blinked at the sight and crushed down the choking feeling in his chest. It had been the first day of a new life. 

They fell into a routine after that.

Maverick was test piloting, he found out. They did night flights pretty often, and Maverick’s work day was variable, and so his sleep schedule more or less was, too. It was easy between them, almost like it had always been, and they traded nights on the couch and bed without fuss. 

They talked some, too. About the baby, and the weather, what Maverick had going on in the garage. 

But not about the Navy, or Bradley’s own questionable future, questionable life. 

It worked like that, easy, unnervingly so. Bradley waited for the other shoe to drop every day. For whatever force that made Maverick pull his papers to swell back up between them, to reflect in how Maverick treated him or started to act. But nothing was different. It was all the same, Maverick treated him the same, as good as he always did. Not as good as a secret, hidden part of Bradley had hoped–but as much good as he was entitled to without asking for more than he knew Maverick could give.

He had wanted a lot of good, in his teens. He had laid in bed at night with his hand on his dick and seen one person and called out one name and they were both Maverick, every night and more. Bradley had wanted a lot of good, a lot of great and mind-blowing, but it wasn’t like that, couldn’t be, and he had tried to teach himself not to hope. It was easy to feel hopeful when Maverick had been around so much after he lost his mom, and before. Maverick was always there there there, and it would be the biggest lie if he didn’t admit that he kept wishing for something more. He kept wishing even as Maverick never stepped out of bounds or gave any sign that Bradley could ever leave the safe space in his heart, trapped in stasis somewhere between kid, friend, and family.

It had been easier not to think about it when Maverick pulled his papers.

Wanting more had been crushed under the rubble of their relationship, all of his anger and hurt. 

For a while, it was easy to put it out of his mind even after he was back at the house, back in Maverick’s life. There was the tension between them, a lot of his own pride to swallow, and a baby with constant demands. Bradley could avoid thinking about it, or at least pretend that he was. They were up late together one night when the dam broke, and there was no not thinking about it anymore. 

Bradley was having his first legal beer with Maverick, and the show Moonlighting starring Bruce Willis before he went bald was playing on the TV. He and Maverick weren’t watching it, not really, but the cadence of Bruce Willis’s smartass quips was good background noise for their conversation. It kept things light, in a territory where they could both sip from their bottles and smile from their seats across from each other on the recliner and the couch. 

Maverick was stretched out, in just a tee shirt and his boxer briefs, Bradley more or less in the same. It was how Bradley had grown up, both of them comfortable around each other late at night, but now it felt different somehow, the two of them both adult men. 

Maybe that was what sent Bradley’s mind there, his eyes flickering occasionally to Maverick’s leg on the couch, tanned and dusted in black hair that disappeared into his shorts. His eyes went further up, too, all the way up to where the crotch of Maverick’s underwear was filled out and suggestive. 

It didn’t mean anything, just guys hanging out, but the baby was asleep in the bedroom and suddenly all Bradley could think about was sex. 

“Did it ever happen to you?” Bradley asked, his mouth moving faster than his mind. Maverick had been looking at the TV, but his eyes cut over to Bradley instead when he spoke, his tone more serious than it had been a minute ago. Maverick furrowed his dark brow, and Bradley finished the question that he hadn’t meant to ask at all.

“With a girl. You know. Get someone knocked up,” Bradley said, clearing his throat and licking his lips.

Maverick treated him like one of the guys growing up in a lot of ways, even bringing him on trips with Iceman and their other pilot buddies, man time that had meant a lot to a kid without a dad. But Maverick hadn’t ever talked about his own sex life with him, not beyond what he’d said to him during the talk, and even then only in general terms about how to treat your partners, and how to always keep himself safe.

That last lesson apparently hadn’t completely hit its mark.

Bradley had met a couple of Maverick’s girlfriends growing up, and overheard conversations that his mom and Maverick had about settling down and the one. But he was curious now, with them on more equal footing, how many of Maverick’s romantic secrets he would finally be willing to give up.

They were both living with proof of Bradley’s own sex life, and he felt bold enough to ask about Maverick’s now, too.

And Maverick’s legs were spread on the couch and maybe Bradley had never stopped thinking about him like that at all, not really, and definitely not now. 

“No,” Maverick finally answered, after a long beat where Bradley was determined to look anywhere but Maverick’s groin.

Maverick sat up on the couch suddenly, bending forward and putting his elbows on his knees like he was deep in thought. Bradley wondered if Maverick had caught him staring, and his pulse started to race, but there was no way. None at all.

Maverick kept talking, fortunately not about Bradley’s eyes on the bulge of his dick. 

“But not because I was perfect, not because it couldn’t have. It was all luck. I could easily be you,” Maverick said, cutting his eyes over to Bradley and then back to the TV between them, not holding his gaze. Bradley took the opportunity to tug at his own underwear, adjusting himself from where he’d started to thicken up.

“To be honest though, a lot of the people I was having sex with couldn’t get pregnant anyway,” Maverick said with feigned nonchalance, sheepish but testing. He looked at Bruce Willis doing some bit on the screen for a long time, and then he finally turned back to Bradley, steady in his gaze. 

It was a measured reveal, and if Bradley thought his heart had been racing before, it was nothing compared to the thundering in his chest now. 

Maverick was sitting too casually to be anything but privately tense, and Bradley held himself carefully too, trying to wrap his mind around what Maverick had just said without revealing exactly how and why it was so meaningful to him.

Finally Bradley took a long sip of his beer and nodded, more to himself than to Maverick.

“Yeah,” Bradley agreed, nursing at his beer again. “Me too. The same.”

The room went quiet after that, Bruce filling the room with his chatter as they both waited a while to speak. It wasn’t how Bradley had pictured kind of, sort of coming out to Maverick, and even in his greedier fantasies he had never pictured Maverick coming out to him. He didn’t know why Maverick had told him at all, and he didn’t–he wasn’t going to hope that it was for any real reason, any reason that would fan the flame of his crush that wouldn’t die.

Neither of them touched back on their mutual revelations, and they went back to talking about the newest project bike in the garage, a subject much safer than their shared bisexuality.

But Bradley thought about Maverick and men constantly after that.

Thought about Maverick and him, about Maverick inside of him and the other way around. Maverick under him and on top, between Bradley’s legs and Bradley in the strong spread of his in return. His mind and his dick were both fixated on Maverick again, and the increasing twine of their lives. Bradley was an addict and he had relapsed hard. He had only ever escaped his fixation the first time because of physical distance and anger. But all of that resentment was slipping through his fingers like water that he couldn’t quite catch in his hands. 

If he had been fooling himself into thinking that he was over it in any way, there was no more fooling himself after that night. 

It started to drive him crazy. 

The knowledge that Maverick liked men was another landmine waiting to be stepped on, and Bradley kept circling the spot, daring it to blow. 

He was getting better at taking care of the baby, and he wasn’t working, so as she settled into her routine, Bradley did too. She developed steady sleeping habits, and started waking up only one time a night. It was a world of difference from the first two weeks with her in his dorm, and he wasn’t alone. Maverick was there and had jumped into helping with both feet, and he was good, teaching Bradley things that he hadn’t even known he was missing before. 

It didn’t feel like being a kid and having Maverick instruct him on how to fish or do a wheelie on his bike. It felt bigger, and it felt like more. 

Maverick was teaching him how to take care of his child, and he was leading by example–on how to care for her, and how to love her, too. 

Bradley found himself looking at her all the time, even when she wasn’t making a sound or demanding his attention. He looked at her just for fun, just because now, because he liked the way that her mouth opened and showed her big pink gums. He liked the way that she kicked her legs when he came close enough for her to see his face, the way that she turned her head to the sound of his voice. Bradley liked all of these things now, and he liked taking secret note of them and telling them all to Maverick later, too.

He had been listening out for the sound of Maverick’s motorcycle to come tearing down the street for hours before it finally did, the day she gave him her first smile.

Maverick was off of duty at different times depending on how his flights went, and if there were any issues in pre-flight with the aircrafts that he was testing. Bradley didn’t always know when he’d be home, but inevitably he was waiting for Maverick all day regardless, hopeful for him to come back as soon as he walked out of the door.

It felt like it took longer than usual today because of how swollen he felt with the urge to share with Maverick, the only person in the world beside himself who would care.

He felt like Maverick’s little housewife sometimes, taking care of the house and the baby, doing everything but wearing pearls and heels, everything but fucking him, welcoming him home every day with spread legs and a beer.

Bradley tried to look busy when Maverick finally got home, pulling the front door open wide and walking in with his glasses still snug on his face. His hair was slicked back like he’d gotten on his bike with it still wet, like he hadn’t wasted any time leaving base straight from the shower that Bradley knew he always took post-flight. 

He looked good, his muscled upper body filling out the black shirt that he had on, his jeans snug across his thighs. Bradley swallowed the arousal that didn’t belong right now, that he didn’t want to feel, that had nothing to do with why he had been excited for Maverick to come home all day.

The baby was laying on his chest, her front pressed to his, and Maverick made a beeline for them both when he spotted them in the kitchen. Bradley had moved there when he heard the bike, figuring that it looked more dignified than standing by the window with his face pressed to the glass like he had been for most of the day. 

The baby kicked her legs out against his belly when Maverick came close enough for her to see, standing behind Bradley so he could look at her face peeking out from over his shoulder. 

“Hey, sweetheart,” Maverick said, brushing the back of his knuckles against her cheek and murmuring a greeting to him, too. Bradley didn’t have to see his face to hear the smile in his voice. 

Maverick’s hand brushed against Bradley’s neck when he pulled it back, and Bradley felt his skin go hot as goosebumps broke out down his arm. He could imagine, for a second, that the sweetheart was for him. 

“Mav,” Bradley said, quickly, trying not to let his mind wander deeper into dangerous territory than it already was. “Guess what I got today?”

Maverick walked into the bedroom, Bradley knew from experience, to take his wallet and his keys out of his pocket and put them on his nightstand. He was a well-oiled machine of consistency at home, a true Navy man. He had a lot of habits that Bradley hadn’t been privy to as a kid, but he was getting a bigger picture of Maverick and his life now that they were sharing a house as equals, more or less. 

“What’d you get?” Maverick called from the other room, and Bradley could picture him sitting on the bed and pulling his boots off, going to his closet to put them away. 

Bradley waited until Maverick padded back into the kitchen in his socks, looking comfortable, home. 

“A smile,” Bradley said, telling Maverick what he had been dying to share with him all day.

“Yeah?” Maverick asked, and his face split wide open in a white toothy grin that wasn’t quite perfect or straight, but that was pure Maverick, and so gorgeous that it made Bradley ache, heartsick. “Real one? Not gas?”

Bradley shook his head, smiling back at Maverick so hard that it made his cheeks hurt, “Nah, she had gas too but this was legit. The real deal.”

Maverick whistled, low and appreciative, and they stared at each other with matching grins like a couple of idiots. 

“Let me see,” Maverick asked, and Bradley handed her over. Maverick held her up carefully with his hand on the back of her head, and they both stared at her and waited for her next party trick. She blew spit bubbles at them, but didn’t give anything else up, even when Maverick pulled silly faces at her, trying to tease out a repeat performance.

“Just for daddy, huh?” Maverick joked, and Bradley froze, his whole body stilling even as the baby’s face brightened up in an even bigger smile than the one she had given him earlier.

Maverick was fawning over her, exaggerated and sweet, but Bradley could barely hear him past a loud ringing in his ears.

Daddy. 

It was the first time that he had heard it, the first time anyone had ever called him that, not even in a private thought in his own head.

And–to hear it from Maverick–

It was strange, like seeing himself and his own life from the outside in. Since the social worker showed up in his college dorm, he had known logically and per the indisputable DNA truth, that he was a father. But it hadn’t meant anything, even after they’d both moved in with Maverick, and the baby thing had started to feel real and doable, too. 

But daddy, that was new. 

That was him, he had been made a daddy by the little girl in Maverick’s arms. And Maverick was–Bradley didn’t know, maybe afraid to even internally put it into words. He remembered from early childhood calling Maverick Uncle Pete, but then he had gotten just a little bit bigger, and he wanted to call Maverick by his name, his real name–Maverick, like grown ups got to do. 

Even then, he hadn’t wanted to be a kid to Maverick, he had wanted to be someone real in Maverick’s eyes. 

And now Maverick was here and helping him with the baby, and doing it with him, and Bradley wanted–

He swallowed hard around what he wanted, tried to smile back at Maverick who had lifted the baby up close to his face so he could press kisses into her little belly as she smiled again and grabbed at his hair.

“Guess I get smiles too,” Maverick said, turning to him and holding Bradley’s eyes with a warm look on his face.

Bradley nodded back and smiled, too, feeling something real and too honest showing on his face, unable to hide. Maverick didn’t look away like he sometimes did when moments stretched out too long, and Bradley held his breath as Maverick’s eyes flitted down his face. 

He licked his lips and caught Maverick’s eyes watching his mouth, but only for a second, and then Maverick was turning back to the baby and forcing the moment to pass. 

Bradley ran his hand through his hair, fingers still milk-sticky from the last bottle that he’d made, snagging in his curls as he tugged and pulled. The wince of pain was good though, kept his mind away from his dick that had started to fill out in his sweats. 

“You’re so good with her,” Bradley said, mostly just to say something, to patch the hole in conversation, fill the void. “How’d you learn so much about babies?”

It was a rhetorical question, just an excuse to hear Maverick talk. He knew that Maverick had been close with his parents, he had heard from his mom often enough that Maverick had changed his diapers and held him the day he was born. The older he got, the more that he hated when she teased and made those jokes for reasons that wouldn’t have made sense to her, and he wouldn’t have wanted them to. 

But she had been dead for years now, and he would have listened to any joke she wanted to make at his expense now, would have killed just to hear her voice. 

Maverick surprised him though.

He hummed, still pointedly looking at the baby and not at Bradley at all, and his voice was soft and thoughtful when he answered. 

“I was the oldest kid in a few of the foster homes I ended up in. The older ones ended up taking care of the babies sometimes, depending on the home.”

It struck Bradley dumb, and he didn’t say anything back, too surprised to even try. Maverick had always been around, and he picked things up about Maverick and his life here and there. Most of it had been overheard from conversations between Maverick and his mom, but he never knew anything about foster care. Bradley had been aware that Maverick didn’t have any family other than them, but he had assumed, or taken for granted, that all of his losses had happened as an adult.

There was a picture of Maverick that he’d always had in his head, and it had been reshaping into something new, something real, since he had shown up on Maverick’s door, his own need greater than his resentment. He felt thankful in some way for the need that had brought him here, thankful for all of the sides of Maverick that he was getting to know, even if it had made him want so much more.

But the wanting wasn’t new. Bradley had wanted Maverick since he had gotten his first woody, ever, just watching him wash his mom’s car one summer, years before. 

He had been sent outside by his mom to help and been left speechless and shy by the sight of Maverick, wearing jeans and no shirt, all tanned skin and defined muscles rippling under the hot sun. He’d had to duck around the side of the house, crouching low in the bushes to hide the tent in his shorts. And that had been just the beginning, the first of a hundred little hard-ons that he’d had to hide. 

It had gotten worse as he got older, getting bold about trying to show off his own body to Maverick, bad enough that he was embarrassed when he looked back. Looked back and thought about himself, doughy and painfully teenaged, trying catch the eye of a Maverick who hadn’t looked twice.

Bradley had wanted him since then, embarrassingly, but the more that he folded into Maverick’s life here, he was realizing, dangerously, that he loved him now, too.

And maybe he always had, but now he was learning Maverick the man instead of the myth, and it was worse because it was real and he wanted as badly as ever, or, impossibly, wanted him even more. 

“And then there was you, and your mom and dad didn’t know shit about babies,” Maverick continued, his voice even quieter then, and Bradley could see that the baby had one of his fingers in her strong grip, unshakeable. 

“Yeah?” Bradley asked, willing to bear more stories about himself in diapers, anything to keep Maverick talking to him so open like this. 

“Oh god,” Maverick laughed, and Bradley did too, the sound contagious. “Your dad picked it up pretty easy, but your mom. Man. I left her notes all around the house every time our leave was up.”

“Maybe that’s just your fate, Mav. You’re called into service every time a Bradshaw doesn’t know what to do,” he teased, and Maverick’s soft look slid from the baby right to him.

“Maybe,” Maverick agreed, stretching out each syllable. 

Bradley felt emboldened, and his mouth was running away from him like a train he couldn’t catch.

“The Bradshaws and the Mitchells, meant to be, right?” He pushed, and the corner of Maverick’s mouth tugged up in a half-smile before he turned away, closing up. 

The day felt electrified after that, a shift in the air. Maverick played normal and Bradley didn’t try to get more out of him, but there had been a palpable change, a different tension in the house. It was the weekend, and they usually went out together and got the shopping done, sometimes finding the odd activity to do. Maverick didn’t signal that anything was off, and Bradley took silent note of the supplies that they were short of, even thought of an old favorite movie he was going to ask Maverick if they could rent at the store.

It was a far cry from his life even six months ago, weekends of drinking and a side of sex, and a whole lot of quietly missing Maverick as much as he resented him. 

But when Maverick disappeared into his bedroom and came out dressed in clothes that were tighter than normal, his favorite leather jacket on, he didn’t have to say anything for Bradley to know that their unspoken plans were off. Maverick looked good, not like he was headed to the grocery store at all.

“Where ya going?” Bradley asked, aware without being told that he wasn’t invited to wherever it was.

He was sitting on the couch with the baby in his lap, and he nervously ran his fingers over the fresh outfit that he had just changed her into in anticipation of leaving the house. If Maverick noticed the outfit change, he didn’t say anything, and Bradley felt inexplicably embarrassed at the presumption that they were going to spend time together. 

Bradley was struck by the painful memory of being ten and feeling betrayed by his mom for not letting him spend the night in the hotel room that Maverick had rented with his girlfriend at the time. ‘But there’s a couch!’, he remembered complaining for hours, relentlessly. Maverick always stayed with them at their house, and Bradley couldn’t understand what was different this time, why Maverick wasn’t with them where he belonged. And then, worse, why Bradley wasn’t invited to where Maverick was. So jealous that it had eaten him up inside, unable to understand why his mom was so mean, why she wasn’t letting him spend the night with Maverick (and some girl). 

Maverick’s keys were in his palm, ring looped around his finger, and he looked so handsome that jealousy burned Bradley up inside like he was ten years old again, on the outside looking in.

The baby in his lap made a cooing sound, drooling onto her clean clothes. Maverick avoided Bradley’s eyes but looked down at her with something that was maybe like guilt on his face.

“Getting dinner with a friend, she’s in town for a few days,” Maverick said to the baby, to the room, to anyone but Bradley himself.

“Yeah? Gonna bring her home?” Bradley asked, surprising himself. Maverick did look sharply up at him then, and the tension in the room was a whole lot heavier than the baby on his lap. Bradley scrambled to excuse himself, “Because we can make ourselves scarce.”

He had no idea how they would do that, but he felt embarrassed for making it a thing at all. 

But Maverick shook his head, firm. 

“Baby gets the bedroom. Don’t be scarce,” he said, hesitating before he swooped down low to press a kiss against the baby’s temple. Bradley could smell his cologne when he did, and the ends of Maverick’s hair tickled his neck as he passed. His gut hurt with the ache of his wanting, the desire to ask Maverick to stay home. 

“I’ll be back,” Maverick said, no offering of when. He was gone out of the door then, motorcycle revving before Bradley could croak out a reply to the empty room.

Bradley waited for a long time. He kept up the pretense of not waiting for a while, flipping through the  channels on TV, playing with the baby. But then it was her last bottle of the night and she was tucked into the bassinet, nothing else for him to do. He couldn’t even pretend anymore, outright sulking on the couch with the TV dark, unable to keep up the act when there was no audience.

There was no point waiting by the window, not when he could always hear Mav’s motorcycle roaring down the street. But he wanted to anyway. Wanted to stare at the empty driveway until Maverick’s bike was occupying it, until Maverick himself was home and with them, not out on some date.

The clock ticked past midnight before he gave up and went to bed. It was his turn in the bedroom anyway, and going to sleep by himself wasn’t any different from any other night since he’d been there. But it felt different, the house felt emptier and smaller, awareness in his heart that Maverick wasn’t out on the couch, just a shout away.

It felt strange to lay in Maverick’s bed without him there. Bradley knew that if it wasn’t for him, wasn’t for them, that Maverick would probably already be home and laying where he was laying right now. And he wouldn’t be alone. 

Bradley knew that if they weren’t invading Maverick’s space, Maverick would have brought his date home, would probably be fucking her in the bed right now. 

He could picture it, envision how the whole night would have played out. 

He could picture Maverick, driving home from the bar or restaurant with his girl on his bike. He would pull her into the house by her hand and push her into the bed, right where Bradley was stretched out.

But he didn’t want to imagine that, didn’t want to feel tears stinging his eyes in the dark. Instead–instead he closed his eyes and saw himself out on the date, he and Maverick being coy and not obvious out in public. Pushing at each other’s feet under the darkness of a table, and his dick got fat under the covers as he imagined Maverick discretely putting a hand high up on his thigh. He would push Maverick up against the outside wall of the bar and kiss him rough, nothing soft about the kiss or their bodies, matching hard-ons between them. It was him on the bike, ducking his face to press against Maverick’s shoulders as he steered them home, powerful and confident and larger than life. He would like it when Bradley looped his arms low around his belly, push back against Bradley’s dick where it pressed firmly into the small of his back. 

Bradley pushed his hand down into his boxers and grabbed himself, stripping his fist up and down his shaft while he tried to stay lost in his head, swept out in the tide of the hypothetical.

He tried to imagine what was next, how they would crash into the house together, finally allowed to do all of the touching that they couldn’t do in public at the bar. His hand stuttered to a stop as he imagined what came next, imagined them walking to the bed that he was in, all over each other. 

Bradley groped his hand down lower, tugging on his balls as he went, feeling the churn of needy arousal peaking high in his gut as he did. He dipped low to the tight furl of his hole between his cheeks, and he pressed in greedily with two dry fingers.

It burned, but he felt worse without them inside, needy and wanting as he imagined Maverick pushing him into the bed and following right after, grinding into the press of their bodies against each other. Bradley grabbed his dick with his other hand and started jerking off again, quick and rough, not fucking himself with his fingers, just holding them inside to feel full–only a shadow of what he craved. 

He whined as his orgasm built up inside and crested, balls pulling tight as he worked his hand faster and harder, tugging his rim open even more with his fingers as he finally came. 

It didn’t feel any better after, as he lay in bed with his come cooling against his skin, sticky inside of his shorts. He felt even worse when he tugged his fingers out of himself and his hole pulled hot and stinging at his fingers, burning even when he was empty, a bitter reminder of just how pathetic he was. He cleaned up quickly and rolled onto his belly, no better off for having come. 

Bradley fell asleep like that, aching and embarrassed instead of satisfied, miserable from thinking too much about Maverick who was doing anything, everything, but thinking of him.

Sometime later, it was the hallway light that woke him up. 

He slept in the pitch blackness, but he woke to a sliver of light spilling across his face, right into his eyes as he blinked.

Bradley was still disoriented when his vision focused, and he saw the dark form of Maverick standing in the room. His body went rigid under the covers, and he didn’t sit up or speak. A second of wonder bloomed in his chest at the idea that Maverick had snuck in to see him–but Maverick wasn’t looking at him at all. His back was turned to Bradley, and the baby was in his arms as he swayed where he stood.

Bradley’s throat felt dry, and he was acutely aware of the burning between his legs, his jerk-off session painfully fresh in his mind as he wondered what Maverick had been doing before he came home. It felt surreal to watch Maverick holding his baby now, like nothing had happened, like he hadn’t just gone out to fuck someone while Bradley stayed home and tried to act normal, like he wasn’t splitting in two. 

But there was a spell over the whole room, and Bradley was powerless to say anything, to ruin the moment between Maverick and his baby girl. 

Instead he watched and wanted, silently. Acutely jealous of the baby being held, of the girl that Maverick had almost certainly fucked, and even of Maverick and the ease and confidence with which he held the baby. Bradley felt tugged and split between so many wants, so many unfulfilled needs of his heart. 

Eventually, Maverick set her back in the bassinet, and Bradley watched through slitted eyes as he started to undress. It was like a painful parody of the fantasy that he’d had just hours ago, a funhouse mirror version of the reality that Bradley wanted. Maverick was stripping, but not for him, and it hadn’t been Bradley who had ridden his bike tonight–ridden him. 

Bradley thought that Maverick would get to his briefs and stop, but instead Maverick undressed all the way to bare skin. He should have looked away, but he didn’t, shamelessly stealing the barely-lit vision of Maverick’s tight ass flexing as he bent over and picked up his discarded clothes from off of the floor. Bradley’s breath caught when he saw the heavy hang of Maverick’s dick, thick between his legs as he walked out, quietly shutting the door behind himself.

He listened as the shower turned on, a bitter taste in his mouth.

 

---

 

It was some kind of beginning of the end for them. 

The shift between them had started before that night, and Bradley rushed it down the cliff. He couldn’t help himself. If playing it cool was the right answer, Bradley was nothing but wrong. It was an obsession that he couldn’t shake, a stir craziness in his bones. Maverick started to go out more after that, and it chiseled away at Bradley until his need was a gaping hole in his chest. The more that Maverick pulled away, the faster Bradley pushed him.

He became obsessed with the where, when, who of Maverick’s life, and Maverick took to that kind of questioning with a defensiveness that came with being a lifelong bachelor. 

The easiness between them dried up, and Maverick, maybe willfully obtuse, took Bradley’s restlessness all the wrong way.

Maybe the wrong way was the only version of the truth that Maverick could handle, when reality was so much messier than the alternative. 

A few weeks of Bradley breathing down Maverick’s neck went by, holding on tighter the more that he pulled away. It was another morning-after for Maverick, and Bradley hadn’t been able to fake civility since Maverick had disappeared out of the door again instead of staying home. 

He couldn’t contain himself, and he snapped at Maverick over breakfast, didn’t catch the words before they were out of his mouth as he asked Maverick if he’d ‘be home tonight, or if I’ll see you again sometime next week.’

Bradley regretted it as soon as he’d said it, but it was already done. But he saw Maverick squaring up in his seat, and he braced for a blow.

“Bradley–I know–I know this is hard. You’re still a kid yourself, and now you’re having to be at home and taking care of a baby–I get it,” Maverick said, finally, and Bradley’s spine straightened, bristling like a cat over how badly Maverick could miss the mark.

“If you want, if it’ll make you happy–if you wanted to leave her here with me and go back to college, that’s okay,” Maverick said, looking up at Bradley with sincere, doleful eyes. It only made Bradley angrier, feel that much worse. “That’s okay, Bradley. I can even…see if I can put in a word for you, see if we can get things figured out at the Academy,” Maverick finished, like it was an offering, and Bradley knew rehearsal when he heard it. 

He hadn’t felt so angry, so hurt, since he had found out what Maverick had done with his application. But somehow, this was worse. They had been–it had felt like they were something, they were getting somewhere. And then his jealousy had gotten bad, and that was on him, but this was the worst possible thing that Maverick could have said.

Maverick was looking at him steadily, holding the baby in his lap like a natural, not like Bradley who was still sometimes scared of doing things the wrong way. 

His heart was cleaving in two, and he was right back there, all of their progress gone up in smoke as his temper swelled and burst. 

“Now I can join the Navy? Now you’ll put a word in for me to get in? So it was never about not wanting me in. You just wanted me away from you…in the Navy, out of the Navy, whichever puts you and me on opposite ends of the fucking world, huh Mav?” Bradley panted, everything spilling out of him in a crushed rage. 

And he was crying before he knew it, his face furious and unwavering, hot tears of rejection spilling down his face that he didn’t bother to wipe away.

Bradley looked at Maverick holding his kid, offering to take her since Bradley was clearly so unhappy, and he was the picture of a ready-made dad. He wanted to snatch his baby back, wanted to hold his kid, but a miserable twist in his gut made him want to be the one being held by Maverick, too. Wanted to take his own child and swap places, seeking comfort in Maverick’s arms from the man himself, relief from the force of his own unhappy wanting.

Maverick face crumpled, and Bradley didn’t feel good still but he felt better just to know that he mattered, that he could hurt back.

“God, no, Bradley…” Maverick started, sighing and world-weary. “I only ever wanted you to have options. Your mom–the whole point–all I ever wanted was for you to have a life. And I’m trying to offer you that again now. I don’t want you to go away. I want you–,” and Maverick stopped then, clearing his throat. 

He shifted the weight in his arms and looked down and away, somewhere distant. 

“You having choices, you having a future. That’s what I want. That’s all that I ever wanted for you.”

Bradley thought about it for a long time. Thought about signing away his rights, leaving his kid, leaving Maverick and going off to try and fly in the skies alone. But it was never about the sky. It was always about him. 

Maverick.

“Well, this is what I want,” Bradley said, suddenly. The truest thing he’d ever said to Maverick, almost the whole picture, if only Maverick wanted to look.

And maybe he did, because he looked up sharply at Bradley’s words. The tension was back, and not one made of Bradley’s angry outburst. Maverick licked his lips and Bradley looked down at his mouth, for once not trying to hide it. 

“Okay,” Maverick said, and Bradley’s eyes shot up from his mouth. “Good.”

Bradley nodded, and the tension was dispersed but not gone, not over with.

“We’ve got a couple of things we need at the store,” Maverick said, suddenly. A peace offering, and less than Bradley was quietly asking for, but something. “Let’s go out.”

Not how Bradley wanted, not at all, but still them, together. But Maverick didn’t go out that night, and it was enough. 

Maverick didn’t ask if he wanted to drink after the baby was asleep, just brought out a beer for each of them and kept them coming. They rented the movie that Bradley had in mind that very first night that Maverick went out without them, and it played in the background mostly unwatched as they talked.

The offer that Maverick made had been on his mind all day. 

Bradley’s gut was cold with guilt when he thought about those few weeks between social services telling him about the baby, and then later when he got the results. She had been with a foster family while Bradley drank at parties and failed exams and prayed to fuck that it was all a bad dream. It made his guilt worse to think about Maverick, a foster kid just like he had been sentencing his own daughter to be. 

“I was hoping she wasn’t mine,” Bradley finally confessed under the blue light of the television.

He and Maverick were side by side on the couch, open beer bottles on the table between them. 

“That’s okay,” Maverick said, careful, crossing his arms over his chest and turning to face Bradley where he’d half-melted into the cushions.

“It’s not,” Bradley disagreed, hot and a little bit tipsy. “I know–I know what it’s like not to have a dad, and I was hoping, I thought–fuck, not me. She wouldn’t have had anybody,” He choked out, ashamed of himself and close to crying for the second time that day, a hot sting in his eyes. 

He didn’t look at Maverick but he felt his eyes on him, felt his arm fall over his shoulders. He tucked down into Maverick like that as Maverick moved over him in a hug, in careful reassurance. He felt little again, like Maverick was still bigger than him and could do anything, be anyone he needed. Someone who could never hurt him, but that had been a lie after all. 

It felt good anyway though, and he let Maverick pull him into the safe shelter of his body.

“I would have just left her with nobody and felt happy about it. I didn’t have a dad, but I had mom. And–I had you. She would have been alone,” Bradley confessed, right into Maverick’s neck, the scent of his sweat and cologne like a soothing balm. 

“Well, she’s not alone. She’s got you, and you’re doing great, kid. And she has me, too,” Maverick added, tentatively. He cupped the back of Bradley’s head and ran careful fingers through his hair. Bradley felt sober suddenly, but wished he was a lot more drunk. It would be easy to give in to how he was feeling, if he was. It would be easy to push and see what Maverick would let him get away with.

“And you do, too. You’ve got me, Bradley. I’m not going anywhere,” Maverick continued, carrying tension out of Bradley’s body with just his voice. 

Bradley knew that he meant it like a promise. Under his hurt, a hole that he kept prodding like a missing tooth, Bradley knew he was good to his word.

But Maverick didn’t see it all, the full picture. Bradley didn’t have him, not really, not like he wanted, not like more. 

He clutched clumsy fingers in Maverick’s shirt and thought about everything he wanted from Maverick, everything he wanted to do, everything he wanted them to be. Couldn’t imagine Maverick reciprocating, or staying if he knew. Even if sometimes, in the lingering moments, sometimes it felt a lot like maybe.

He felt so good in Maverick’s arms, so at peace, he almost wanted to say something. Almost wanted to lift his head and put his mouth on Maverick’s, drag his hand down to his dick that didn’t feel totally soft anymore in his jeans. But he couldn’t lose him again, not now. Not when it meant losing him for her, too. He let Maverick hold him, instead, and tried to pretend to be a version of himself that didn’t crave more.

It was different, after that night. 

Maverick quit going out, like he hadn’t been running from intimacy or Bradley or the growing swell of their relationship. They went back to spending most of their time together, back to Bradley waiting on bouncing heels to tell Maverick about what the baby did each day.

And it felt good, felt like family, but it wasn’t all, wasn’t everything.

It felt sometimes like Maverick wasn’t just coming home, but like he was coming home to them, to their family. Maverick called him daddy sometimes still, declaring that the baby needed to hear it if she was ever going to say it herself. More and more, Bradley wondered what Maverick would be called, who Maverick was going to be to both of them. 

He knew who he wanted him to be, and the vision was more and more what he thought about when he laid in bed. Maverick, his for real, coming home to him for real. The baby’s other parent in all but name, and maybe, someday, that too. 

But the reality of that fantasy was that he needed to be an adult, a real one, Maverick’s actual equal in life.

It was a lot to live up to and he knew it, having chased Maverick’s shadow his whole life. 

They slipped back into their routine, even as they both surreptitiously held their breaths, wary of the undertow even on the calmest of days. 

The baby was a full-time project, more of a challenge for Bradley than Maverick who had a supernatural handle on the art of multitasking with a baby in one arm. They had never established rules for what Bradley was expected to do while Maverick was on base, days when Bradley listened out for the sound of a jet flying overhead.

He would take care of the baby, and then during her naps he would follow their path of destruction around the house, trying to make it seem like they were only half as disastrous as they really were. He thought about Maverick and the notes he left for his mom, wondered what notes Maverick might leave for him if he was ever deployed.

Bradley was a full-time daddy and a part-time maid, and eventually it started to make him feel lost, and like his world was very, very small.

He was doing a final clean before Maverick was due home, most likely. The sky had been quiet for a while, and usually that meant that Maverick was done for the day, or he was flying something long-range and painfully far. Bradley hedged his bets on the former being true, and he was straightening up and doing something dangerously close to snooping, too. 

The kitchen drawers were mostly empty, the signature of a man who never put down roots. Bradley had organized some of them himself, and he was tucking away a stack of papers from the baby’s last doctor visit when he pulled open a drawer and found a big yellow envelope. 

It had Peter Mitchell scrawled in black marker on one corner. Obviously not for him.

But Bradley opened it anyway, pulling crisp documents from inside.

Real estate papers stared up at him, all for one property from what he could tell. It was heavy with legal jargon and hard to parse through, but there were pictures paperclipped to the stack. An airplane hangar, big and looming in the desert. 

He looked at the papers for a long time, picturing a future for Maverick that he didn’t know his own place in at all.

Maverick came home within the hour, and Bradley left the papers out for him to find.

And he did, running his fingers along the photographs while Bradley watched. Maverick didn’t try to shove them away, didn’t try to hide what Bradley had dug out and laid bare. He didn’t accuse Bradley either, didn’t point out that he’d had no right to snoop.

“You’re moving?” Bradley asked, finally, not sure what else to say. “To…an empty hangar somewhere?”

Maverick looked at the papers for a long time before he looked up and met Bradley’s eyes. He tried to keep his face neutral, not showing the panic that he felt. 

“In the Mojave desert,” Maverick told him, and Bradley felt himself sink. But Maverick shook his head and pushed the papers back into the envelope, putting them away. “But I withdrew my offer a while back.”

“How long’s a while?” Bradley asked, but he knew, he knew the answer.

Maverick gave him his back and busied himself with putting the envelope back in the drawer.

“Couple of months,” Maverick said, and Bradley would bet anything that Maverick had called his real estate agent the day that Bradley had knocked on his door.

The silence hung heavy in the room, and Bradley tried to think of something–the right thing to say to a man whose life he had disrupted. And he wanted to disrupt it even more. He wanted to turn it inside out and upside down, in all of the ways that he knew Maverick wasn’t ready for.

“If that’s something you wanted, we could–I don’t know,” he offered, weakly. 

But Maverick shook his head and pushed the drawer closed, definitive. 

“I was setting myself up for a different life, by myself. But then you came back,” Maverick said, simple. He didn’t look like a man missing out, one filled with regret. He turned his back to the counter and pulled his arms defensively over his chest, crossing his legs at the ankle while he did his best impression of casual for Bradley.

It was the kind of life he had imagined for Maverick as a kid, the sort of place that he had pictured Maverick would be when he first showed up. In a bachelor’s paradise, full of high-speed toys and a high-speed life. Not standing in the kitchen in his socks with no intention of going back out for the day, a new package of diapers that he’d brought home on the table between them.

Maverick must have pictured that life for himself, too, and Bradley had showed up right when he had started trying to build it. Something sore must have shown on his face, because Maverick’s expression dropped, tender, and he looked up at Bradley with eyes that were softer than he’d seen before.

“I’m glad that you came back,” Maverick added, and Bradley felt naked want flush across his own face.

“Mav,” he started, and it was bubbling up, honesty about to spill out ugly between them. He rose from his chair and walked over to Maverick, coming in close until Maverick was caged in against the counter. Maverick let him do it, but then he turned his head to the side so he didn’t have to look at Bradley and the hunger that was written all over him.

“It was a special property anyway. I was going to use the space to do some restoration work, a few project pieces I’ve had in storage. But the living space–it was probably going to be a trailer set-up. No point doing the renovations to make it something else, not when it was just me,” Maverick told the wall, looking anywhere but Bradley.

“Mav,” he repeated, quiet, close enough to feel the heat of Maverick’s body. 

“It was decommissioned by the Navy,” Maverick continued, but Bradley didn’t want to talk anymore. He reached out instead, taking Maverick’s wrist into his hand. Maverick’s pulse was pounding under his skin, as fast as Bradley’s own. 

He leaned in, and their thighs touched in the tight crowd of their bodies. 

“It sounds like your dream,” Bradley murmured, afraid to say anything, afraid for the push that would make Maverick run.

“Not my dream,” Maverick answered, and he turned then, facing Bradley in the closeness. “Just a good way to pass the time.”

Bradley leaned in then, no resistance or self-preservation left.

But Maverick turned his head and pushed away from the counter, making room between them so that he could walk away. The baby was crying, up from her nap.

“I’ll get her,” Maverick said, and then he was through the door and free from the moment. Free from Bradley, who didn’t turn away from the counter even when Maverick and the baby eventually came back into the room. He stayed like that until his erection had gone away, willed out of existence by the unforgiving press of the cabinets and the dread of turning around. It took a while to go away as Bradley’s mind stayed foggy from the feel of Maverick right there against him, an answering hardness that he’d felt against his own thigh.

They didn’t speak of it again, neither of them daring to bring it up. But it sent Bradley down a new path, his head pointed in a different direction, an angle of attack. 

Seeing Maverick’s plans from before made everything real.

Bradley kept wondering what he could do to build a new life, one that had himself in it as something more, not a burden anymore. 

Eventually he started looking for jobs. The more he reached for Maverick on that deeper level, the more he felt uneasy riding Maverick’s dime. It was security and emasculation all at once, to be so taken care of, so kept, and his heart was torn, leaning into both feelings in mixed measure. 

He knew that Maverick would let him stay and let him feed off of him forever. He would take care of Bradley, but more importantly, he wouldn’t ever see him as anything more. It was that thought that burned through him as he picked through the newspaper, checking the help wanted ads every day.

Bradley waited a while, letting the peace settle before finally bringing his plans before Maverick; judge, jury, and executioner. Bradley thought he had a good pitch, and at his most hopeful, he imagined Maverick being proud of him, impressed with how he was maturing without having to be led there by the nose. But that wasn’t the reaction that he got at all, and it galled right off the bat.

Maverick swung hard in the opposite direction of proud, and it struck anger in Bradley’s belly when he immediately began trying to set down the law. 

Bradley had set a list of the jobs that he had inquired about between them on the table, and Maverick would barely give it a second glance.

“Bradley,” Maverick started, and his tone stoked the flames of a familiar fury. It was never lurking too far beneath the surface, an anger that had never really been hashed out. “Online school, correspondence school–anything. School. Not some random job. Are you going to leave her alone with a stranger for a minimum wage job somewhere?”

Maverick pointing out that it would be minimum wage– that as a college drop-out single parent, that was all that he was worth, burned right through him. 

“I’ll work nights, or when you’re home on the weekends–whatever it takes,” Bradley said, trying to keep his cool, trying to show maturity and not the explosive anger that they both knew he was capable of. 

But Maverick didn’t relent.

“If you work nights, you’ll have to sleep all day. Who is going to take care of the baby?” Maverick pressed, and it stung and grated and it was another rejection to throw in the pile, the hurt stack on Bradley’s heart. “She’s not ready. You’re not ready.”

Bradley grabbed the paper then and crumbled it in his fist, furious and aching and never ever good enough.

Maverick let the moment hang between them, and then he spoke, waiting until Bradley looked up from the table and met his eyes. 

“What are you trying to prove?” Maverick asked, and it was more than Bradley could swallow, a hit too big for him to take on the chin.

Bradley was all wrung out, and everything inside of him bubbled up and over, past every limit that he had.

“I’m trying to prove myself to you! What do you think?” He exploded, not keeping his voice down anymore, not minding the sleeping baby in the next room. “I know it doesn’t even matter anymore, with–with her, but you still stood in my way. Pulled my whole god damn application. Who do you think I'm trying to prove myself to?”

Maverick looked struck, worse than if he’d been hit, slumping back in his seat. 

Bradley’s words broke the unspoken truce between them, and there was hurt broken out all over his face. Even to Bradley it felt like a betrayal, and he knew that he was crossing a line. It was like he was betraying Maverick and betraying them by bringing it up, shattering the relationship that they had worked to rebuild.

Bradley hadn’t done anything wrong, not here, not about this, but it felt like it anyway when that look of defeat fell across Maverick’s face like a veil.

“You don’t have anything to prove to me, Bradley,” Maverick said, and Bradley knew that Maverick really thought it was true.

He wanted to drop it, to go back to their easy truce, the camaraderie between them. But camaraderie wasn’t enough, and he wanted more. 

“Yes, I do,” Bradley pushed, and his words croaked out of him, his throat gone dry and embarrassing. Maverick looked at him, even, his eyes searching for something on his face. 

“Look at me. See me,” he begged, out loud, and Maverick tightened up all over like he really did, and he was afraid of what he saw. 

Bradley didn’t wait for Maverick to run, to start going on dates again, to hide from all that they were and could be. He leaned forward across the table and grabbed Maverick by his shirt collar, pulling him in hard and needy for a kiss.

It was a wet press of Bradley’s open mouth against Maverick’s closed lips, his eyes squeezed shut tight so he didn’t have to see the look on Maverick’s face. Didn’t have to see him deciding to push him away.

Maverick’s mouth opened like he was going to argue and push back, but he licked back against Bradley instead, deepening the kiss and letting him in. Bradley moaned between them, the sound caught by Maverick’s mouth and the slide of their lips. 

He didn’t open his eyes though, too scared by what he could find, what he could see. Instead he pulled at Maverick until he stood, and their bodies pressed together tight as Bradley crushed himself into Maverick’s front like he could bury himself there, safe in the touch points of their bodies.

He wanted–he wanted to go to the bedroom, to Maverick’s bed that he had slept in for months alone. Coming into the sheets to the scent of Maverick in the covers and all around him, wishing that they were together, that Maverick would one night just stand up and walk in to join him from the couch. Or that he could do the same and not face rejection.

But the baby was napping in there, and he was afraid if they stopped it would be over, something else that they never talked about and tried to ignore.

Bradley backed himself up to the table, pulling Maverick with him as he fell back flat on his back. Maverick pushed into him as hard as he was being pulled, taking up all of the real estate between Bradley’s spread legs.

The table skidded against the floor with the onslaught of their combined weight, but Bradley was undeterred, fumbling his hands between them anyway, pulling at all of their clothes that he could reach. Maverick’s mouth had slid away from his own, trailing open and wet down to his jaw, sucking at the exposed line of Bradley’s throat. 

He was more of a man than he had been when he’d kicked Maverick out of his life, and Bradley knew that he had matured and leaned out since their big fight. But he had been mostly sedentary, stuck home with a kid, and a hateful embarrassment burned through him when Maverick’s mouth trailed down his soft jaw. He kissed along Bradley’s neck and to his chest that had been exposed, shirt pulled right over his head. His body wasn’t as defined as it had been just a few months ago, and the reality of Maverick seeing him so raw made him want to cover up and squirm.

But he arched into Maverick’s mouth as he sucked down the swell of his pecs instead, raising his hips so that Maverick could work his pants down his legs and onto the floor.

Maverick straightened up then, and Bradley panted up at him as he lay flat on his back. 

There wasn’t anything soft about Maverick at all. Bradley had tugged his shirt up and off, and worked his jeans halfway down his thighs. Maverick was toned, a physique shaped by discipline and a devotion to staying airworthy and fit for flight. His waistband was tugged down below his dick and the dark thatch of hair that trailed from his groin to the muscled skin of his belly. Bradley reached forward like a man starved, wrapping a hand around Maverick where he was hot and thick. 

He needed it, the anchor of touch, scared that Maverick would pull away even from his vulnerable spread. 

Maverick didn’t pull away though, he fucked into the squeeze of Bradley’s fist instead, circling his own hands around the back of Bradley’s thighs and pulling them up and out until he was opened wide. 

Bradley had fucked and been fucked at college, but no one in months, and no one like this–no Maverick. He stroked and twisted his palm up and down Maverick’s dick, and it felt big even to his own large hands, wider than anything he’d ever taken inside. He was too smart to say that though, knew that Maverick had a hair trigger for calling it quits and running away. The table was cool against his back but he arched against the wood and pulled his ass up high anyway, tilting his hips so Maverick could see the hole between his legs under the bright kitchen lights. 

“Christ,” Maverick said, and he let go of one of Bradley’s legs to grope down to where his skin was soft and almost hairless at the apex of his thighs, dragging dry knuckles down Bradley’s crack and into the give of his ass. Maverick put pressure there until Bradley’s hole opened around the rough press of his knuckle, sucking him inside to the first joint of his bent finger. 

He rubbed the back of his head against the table, distracting himself from the sting in his ass as he fucked himself down onto Maverick’s touch, wanting more. He would have taken him like that, dry, whatever Maverick wanted to give him. He was free to split Bradley’s body open around his fingers, his cock, anything, as long as he didn’t leave him empty inside. 

“Like this?” Maverick asked, and Bradley nodded, needy. “Just like this? You want me to fuck you just like this, spread open on our table?”

Bradley moaned at Maverick calling it their table as much as he did at the lewd words, at the picture that Maverick was painting for him. It was happening fast, but it had to–no other way to handle Maverick who was an immovable rock, unwavering, until you pushed him off the cliff. After the right push, Maverick was pure momentum, an unstoppable force set loose. 

Maverick was going Maverick, and Bradley whined as he unbent his finger inside of him and slipped in another too, spreading his hole open and pliant even without the ease of lube.

He was still jerking Maverick off, and he blindly pulled him forward by his dick, lining Maverick up at his hole even with two fingers still stuffed inside. Bradley didn’t care, nudging Maverick inside, bearing down on the head of his dick as he tried to take him dry.

Painfully, Maverick pulled his hips back and away from the sucking heat of Bradley’s hole, dragging his fingers out too. 

“Don’t,” Bradley groaned, scrambling to hold Maverick and pull him back in. “I can take it.”

Maverick was unwavering though, out of Bradley’s grasp with his dick flushed and bobbing between them. If Maverick walked away now, he might never come close enough for Bradley to reach again, and he was desperate for that not to be the conclusion of their story.

“This is fast,” Maverick said, scrubbing his hand over his face, the one that hadn’t been inside of him just a minute ago. 

“Fast?” Bradley said, and he sat up then and pulled Maverick to him hard. It was forceful enough that Maverick tripped forward, stumbling, but he still let himself be trapped against Bradley’s heat. Bradley hadn’t been working out, but he wasn’t a kid anymore, and he had grown into his big frame. His grip on Maverick was unrelenting, and he pulled Maverick by the hips until his dick dragged between Bradley’s legs, sliding in the precum that Bradley had been dripping into his own pubes. Maverick rocked into the slippery press, both of them panting at the feel of their dicks grinding into each other, making contact for the first time.

“This is the slowest fuck of my life. I’ve been jerking off to the thought of you for years,” Bradley begged, needy, emptier than he had ever been. 

He felt like a desperate housewife, splayed across the kitchen table and begging for a neglectful husband’s touch. But he could only aspire to be Maverick’s housewife, a promotion by all accounts, and he would settle in life for a lot less, a lot worse. He could hope though, and he did, hiking his legs up around Maverick’s hips again and pulling him in low enough that his dick nudged back to his hole. Maverick’s fingers had tugged him open enough that he wasn’t quite closed, lax enough that just a nudge had Bradley parting open, trying bear down to take the fat head of Maverick's dick.

“I’m not going to fuck you dry,” Maverick rasped, pushing in low to suck on the soft meat of Bradley’s chin. But he didn’t pull his hips back, left himself close enough for Bradley to fuck down, gasping as he was pulled apart painfully by the girth of Maverick sliding in, widest at the flared ridge of his head.

His head lolled against the table and he saw the grocery bag that Maverick had brought home with him earlier from the store. Bradley groped for it, into the crinkling plastic, and his hand clasped around the bottle that had been on the list that he’d given Maverick the night before.

He pulled off the cap and drizzled blindly between his legs, baby oil spilling hot against his balls and dick before he managed to get any on his hole or Maverick. Bradley groped between them then and took Maverick’s shaft in his hand, stroking the oil over the full length that he hadn’t yet taken inside of him, his fist colliding with his own ass as he drenched Maverick’s dick to the root.

Even as he was still slicking him, Maverick started fucking in, hard, and Bradley stroked him until he ran out of length that hadn’t already disappeared into his hole. He groaned then and let go of Maverick, rolling his head against the table as Maverick didn’t waste a second, burying himself to the balls.

The stretch was huge, bigger than he’d ever had, and more, more emotional and filling than any fuck from before.

“Is this what you wanted?” Maverick asked him, stuffing him full, reaching into the mess of oil between them to take Bradley’s dick in his hand as he started to fuck his hips in and out.

“The whole time,” Bradley confessed, gripping the table with both hands as he spread his legs open wide for Maverick, angling his hole so Maverick could rock into him deep with each thrust. It wasn’t going to take much, his need thick and his body buzzing. The oil was hot, smoothing Maverick’s thrusts until he was gliding in and out of Bradley’s body with ease despite the immense stretch. 

The kitchen was silent but for their panting and the slick sound of Maverick fucking him, Bradley’s hole worked open and soft, making sucking sounds when Maverick’s dick plunged into him deep.

“That first day?” Maverick panted, working his hand faster on Bradley’s dick.

“You could have bent me over in that store, fucked me right over our cart,” Bradley babbled, and Maverick groaned and fucked him for a few more forceful thrusts, so hard that the table slid the last few inches into the wall with a screech. He latched onto Bradley’s neck as he came, sucking hard into the underside of his chin where he was still soft with baby fat that wouldn’t go away. 

It would probably bloom into a full hickey under the suction of his mouth, and Bradley thought , good, as Maverick held himself inside of him as deep as he could get, pumping his load deep into his guts. The hand on his dick didn’t relent, and Bradley finally came with a cry when Maverick reached up and cupped his chest, pinching his nipple between his pointer finger and thumb.

Bradley’s hole clenched hard enough around Maverick that it pushed his softening dick out, and Bradley gasped out his loss, at the sudden shock of being empty. Maverick pushed three fingers into him as soon as his dick was out, rubbing the pads of his fingers into Bradley’s prostate and filling him back up to ride out the end of his orgasm.

When his dick finished spurting against his belly, Bradley lay panting and still spread under the press of Maverick between his legs.

Everything was starting to cool, all of the oil and the mix of their come, but Maverick didn’t pull his fingers out. He kept them stuffed inside, even when Bradley started to shiver from oversensitivity, a flayed open nerve.

“You could have had me that first day, too,” Maverick said, still rubbing into his body as he breathed into Bradley’s neck.

“Liar,” Bradley croaked, hoarse. He might have been shouting for the whole of their fuck, he didn’t know, his mind blissed out and empty.

“Maybe,” Maverick agreed, pushing his come back inside where it had started to spill out. He kept his fingers still, not fucking him anymore, just keeping Bradley full and plugged as they both started to come back down. “But I thought about it. You looked–different. You looked good,” he admitted, a secret just for them.

“I am different,” Bradley said, and Maverick pulled his head up then. They looked at each other, bodies still intertwined. They were both different. They had grown apart and then back together, into something that fit.

“Yeah,” Maverick said, and then he pressed his mouth back in for a kiss, both of them bracing to get up as they heard the baby start to stir in the distance. “You are.”

 

---

 

A few months later, most of their shared lives were packed up and taped in boxes, ready to move out. 

Bradley’s study guides were one of the few things left out, stacked on the kitchen table next to the baby’s essential gear. He had a few books that he was working through, all geared towards entrance to an FAA approved Aviation Maintenance Technician School. 

He would have plenty of hands-on experience when they moved into the hangar, the renovations on their living quarters due to be done by the end of the week. Maverick had already found their first project piece, an old P-51 Mustang that had seen better days, in bad enough shape for Maverick to purchase for a decent price from an old friend. They had all looked at it together in the scrap yard, even the baby babbling her approval from Bradley’s arms.

Bradley could hear her now as he came into the house, the clapping of her little hands from the other room as Maverick serenaded her. 

“Spring became the summer, who’d have believed you’d come along?” Maverick’s voice carried, perfectly imperfect across the house. 

Bradley followed the sound, finding them on the floor together, Maverick flat on his back and the baby sitting between his legs, looking down at him with a wet smile.

“Reaching out, touching me, touching you,” Maverick cooed, tickling her belly in time with his singing, off key. A lazy grin spread across Bradley’s face as he watched them, his presence given away by the baby herself as she spotted him and reached out for him with two slobbery hands, asking to be picked up.

Maverick rolled his head against the floor, craning his neck to see him.

“Hey,” he said, grinning, lifting the baby high into the air as he did so that Bradley could grab her with ease. 

“This how you get all the girls, Mav? Singing? No wonder you’re stuck with me,” Bradley laughed, blowing kisses into the baby’s neck as she babbled a gibberish hello. 

“What can I say?” Maverick smirked, staying put as Bradley straddled him on the ground, sinking down into Maverick’s lap with the baby still in his arms. “It’s her song.”

Bradley smiled at him, happy and sticky with warmth as Maverick anchored him with strong hands on his hips. They grinned stupidly at each other as the baby flailed her arms, content in the squeeze of their small family on the floor. 

“Yeah,” Bradley agreed, bending low for a kiss and laughing when the baby tried to give Maverick one, too, open mouthed and gummy. “It sure is, Mav.” 

Notes:

I haven't written *soft* before, but here is soft boys, soft feelings, soft baby appreciation.

It has been a while since I completed a RoosMav work, please let me know what you think! :)