Chapter Text
Gale Cleven meets the man who will be his husband three days before he meets the woman who will be his wife. He falls for Marge pretty much instantly. Figuring himself out with John takes a little longer. But not much.
John comes into his life like a whirlwind, in a way that’s overwhelming and uncomfortable at first - this big, wild man with his gorgeous face and dangerous body. He bull-in-a-china-shops his way into Gale’s room at flight school, and into his life, and the merest glimpse of him in Gale’s peripheral vision sets a twist in his stomach that’s unfortunately very easily identifiable as the sort of lust he’d hoped he was going to grow out of.
There are two things he can do about it, Gale reckons, as he sits on the edge of his rickety army cot with his hands wedged under his thighs, watching John talk a hundred miles an hour as he strips out of his jacket and blouse, all impossibly wide shoulders and irrepressible energy.
You’re either all in or all out , his dad whispers in his head, voice slurred and scratchy, wallet empty, whiskey glass empty, head full of beautiful, reckless hope. And if you don’t know which you should be, roll the dice.
“You remind me of my friend Buck, from back home. Manitowoc, Wisconsin,” John says, with his not-quite-right accent and his ridiculous moustache and his large, powerful hands moving too fast and too much.
Gale doesn’t say anything, thinks about his own hands, and how large the dice used to feel in them when he rolled for his dad, in case he had better luck. He hasn’t picked up dice in a decade, maybe, but he thinks they’d feel smaller in his hands now.
“Whaddya say, Buck?” John asks, and there’s the same beautiful reckless hope there that characterised the ruin of Gale’s whole childhood. This man feels more dangerous than the war they’re not quite in yet.
He rolls the dice.
“Sure, Bucky,” he says, and feels like he’s going to say those words a thousand times at least before he’s sick of them. “Why not.”
**
It’s the same with Marge, at the bones of it, apart from all the ways in which it’s different. Gale meets her in the library at the end of that first week, looking for some book or other mentioned to them by one of the instructors, some reference to air warfare strategy from the Great War. John had laughed at him when he’d said he was going to try and find it, but Gale knows if he brings it back to their room John will read it draped over his shoulder, and steal it once he’s done.
She’s reshelving books at the other end of the library, and Gale watches her, because there’s no one else around to see him doing it, and because he’s lightly transfixed by the halo of her sunshine hair, and the delicate way she traces a finger down the spine of each book once she’s put it back, as if she’s settling it into its place, comforting and decisive.
If he lingers, waiting til she’s done with her reshelving and back behind the desk, before he makes his way over to check out the book, there’s no one else around to see him doing that either. She smiles up at him when he puts the book down, and it is pure, unprecedented sunshine straight into his veins. He hadn’t seen her face properly, before, just a glimpse of a rosebud mouth profile, but full on, up close, she is beautiful in a way that gives him butterflies.
It’s not quite the twist in his stomach that he’s living with now John sleeps five feet away from him, but it’s pretty darn close. It’s something more alongside being something less, something different. Just for her.
“My name’s Gale Cleven,” he says, though he wouldn’t make a habit of introducing himself to strange women, usually. “Or Buck, I suppose, these days.”
The smile she gives him then makes the first smile he received feel perfunctory, and she reaches out to shake his offered hand. “I’m Marjorie Spencer,” she tells him, dimpling. “Marge, mostly.”
He feels uncommonly brave. All in or all out. He rolls the dice.
“Would you think it very forward of me, Marge, if I asked if I could stop back here when you’re done for the day?” he asks her. “I’d like to take you for a cup of coffee, if you wouldn’t mind.”
There’s a little flush creeping across her cheeks, but she holds his gaze, steady, her eyes almost the exact same blue as his own.
“Sure, Buck,” she says to him, and he knows already that he’s going to fall in love with the way she’s hiding her laugh tucked under her tongue. “Why not.”
**
Gale goes back to his empty room at the barracks and kills a bit of time on the pointless busywork the Air Force seems to have fallen in love with - making sure that their room will pass inspection, ironing his spare uniform, and John’s, just in case. John had polished both of their boots the day before, so pressing the creases out of his pants feels like a fair return. Neither of them have mentioned the way they’ve started doing this, but there’s something steadying and bone-deep right about it, from where Gale is standing. They’re a team. They look after each other.
He’s finished shaving and is fixing his hair when John walks in, flask in hand. There’s a sudden blooming warmth up Gale’s spine when their eyes meet in the mirror, the same slick heat as always, the very beginning of something unspeakable.
“That primping for me?” John asks, and Gale can tell just from his voice that the flask is so far mostly full. The sun’s nearly all the way down. “You coming out with me and the boys tonight, Buck?”
It’s not exactly a bone of contention, that he doesn’t go drinking with them, but John does ask every time, every single time, even though Gale never touches a drop. Mostly, Gale says yes, even when he doesn’t want to. When he says no, John stays home too, and keeps him company. He tries not to say no too often.
“Not tonight,” he says, still into the mirror, and feels a little spark of pleasure at the disappointment John can’t quite hide. “Got a date.”
Something a little sick slinks in alongside the twist in his stomach at the look on John’s face. I might be a little wrong about you, Gale thinks, but you’re a little wrong about me too. It’s not the first time he’s had the thought. It’s a satisfying thing, to lie awake in the middle of the night and breathe very slow and steady while he listens to John getting himself off in the bed five feet away. He’s pretty sure he knows what John thinks about. It’s nice, somehow, to not be alone.
He leaves John alone in the room feeling just a little taller than he usually does, and heads off base back into town. There’s a brief moment where he contemplates stopping in at the florist and buying Marge a bunch of flowers, but thinks better of it. He’s hoping for a chance to walk with her a little after they have coffee, and can’t quite see how a soggy bundle of blooms between them would enhance that experience.
Gale’s a handful of minutes early - you never keep a woman waiting, his dad says in his head, as they’re late leaving the dog track to meet his mother at church for the sixth Sunday in a row - and so he waits in the entryway to the library and watches Marge closing out the desk and shrugging into her light jacket, fixing her hat on top of her neat curls. She’s wearing lipstick now, where she wasn’t earlier in the day, and it’s the same sort of satisfying as meeting John’s eye in the mirror before. Gale shaved a second time for this, did his hair particularly carefully for this. Marge put on lipstick for this. It’s nice to not be alone.
There’s a diner down the street that Gale’s eaten at before, towering piles of eggs and bacon with John on a free morning after a long night, and he steers himself and Marge in that direction, rolling the dice on whether or not she’ll let him put his hand on her waist as they climb the steps. She does, with a sly little smile over her shoulder when he does it, like she knows exactly how much thought he’s putting into this.
They get milkshakes and coffee, one of each for each of them, because she dithers on the menu and he finds it charming, and he leans far enough across the table that his knuckles brush hers sometimes when they reach for their drinks. She laughs as quietly as she can when he says something not all that funny, and it fills the room and his lungs in the exact same way it does when John decides he’s going to sing.
Marge is clever, and sharp, and funny in a delightful way he’s learned not to expect from girls, mostly too preoccupied with making sure he knows they’re decent and well behaved to snort at a stupid pun or poke fun at a silly story. It feels breathlessly easy to sit here with her and have her call him Gale, mostly, slipping in the occasional Buck with a pointed raised eyebrow as if she knows the story behind it must be ridiculous, and is biding her time to ask about it.
Its nearly fully dark when he tells her he should be getting her home, and there’s the slightest hint of a pout on her face before she agrees, sarcastically congratulating him on being a gentleman, and then allowing him to help her with her jacket and hat, tilting her face up to his as he puts it gently down over her curls.
She’s going to let me kiss her, he thinks, and burns a little with it.
The route she steers them back to her front door is meandering, as the sun disappears completely and the stars climb up, and Marge tucks her hand neatly in the crook of his arm so that they fall perfectly into step. The same steady, bone-deep rightness of ironing pants and polishing boots is settling into Gale, and everything in him is wild and calm all at once.
He doesn’t need to roll the dice when she steps up onto her porch stairs to make them the same height. All he needs to do is tuck his hands into the dip of her waist and pull her just a little closer, and let her kiss him, and kiss her back.
It’s a little more of a kiss than is proper, perhaps, for a first date the first day they’ve met, but there is something here that is at the same time so familiar and completely alien. Marge pulls back, taking a little hitching breath and smoothing down the lapels of his jacket to get some space between them, and the look on her face lights Gale from the inside out.
I’d bet on this.
He’s expecting the room to be empty when he gets back, expecting John to be out for hours yet, expecting to be woken in the small hours by him stumbling back in smelling like whiskey and someone’s cheap perfume and the sticky sweet scent of sex, and instead John’s lying on his bed, flicking idly through the library book, bare feet hanging over the bottom, incongruously delicate arch of them a strange contrast to the rest of his sturdy body.
“Reckoned you’d be out with the boys,” Gale says, mouth a little dry. “Don’t tell me the great Bucky Egan blew off a night drinking and chasing skirt to stay home and read?”
John scoffs, and gets up off the bed with slightly alarming grace. He crowds into Gale’s space as if he wants to make sure they both know he’s the bigger man, and then very slowly, very deliberately, swipes his thumb across Gale’s lower lip.
It’s its own sort of violence.
John lifts his thumb up to his face for a moment, examines the little smudge of rosy pink lipstick Marge left there, and then sucks it into his mouth. He looks at Gale, who doesn’t look away.
“Sweet,” John says, almost to himself, and then breaks the moment, smacking Gale in the chest with the history book. “C’mon Casanova, take your boots off and read me a bedtime story.”
**
Gale lies awake for what feels like a long time in the dark, waiting for John to fall asleep. It’s taking a little bit of getting used to, getting himself off with someone else in the room, someone who might wake up at any moment and maybe know exactly what he was thinking, but John doesn’t seem to let it bother him, and so Gale allows himself to follow suit. John’s breathing tips from heavy to deep about twenty minutes after they turn the lights out, and Gale lies under his blankets, sliding a hand gently back and forth across his stomach as he waits, to be sure. He’s not going to roll the dice on this.
It’s the same simmering need he’s become used to over these last few days, with a bright streak through it the color of Marge’s lipstick, smudged a little over her pout, wiped from his own mouth, sucked from John’s thumb. He’s not picturing anything in particular, he tells himself as he moves his hand quick and decisive over his cock, not imagining anyone in particular, not bright blue eyes or wide shoulders or slender fingers or the delicate arch of a foot or curls of any color or wet pink mouths or or or-
Gale turns his face into his pillow as he comes, just in case, and then lies as still as he can through the aftershocks, deciding against listening for any telltale hitch in John’s breathing. Often there is one.
**
For the first time in Gale Cleven’s life, everything is actually going right. Ostentatiously, he’d joined the Air Force in the name of doing the right thing for his country on what felt like the eve of an inevitable war, but the war hasn’t reached them yet and Gale’s starting to be able to admit to himself that he’s here because he desperately wants something more out of life. He’s done with shouldering gambling debts and working the oil fields, he’s done with being his father’s son. He’s rolled the dice on his life and he’s after something wild and new and beautiful.
He’s found three things that fit the bill - a boy and a girl and a whole universe full of sky.
“Did you think it was going to be like this?” John asks him, a little less drunk than Gale had expected him to be, after their first solo flight. “Did you think it would feel like this?”
“I’d hoped,” Gale says. “Hoped it would feel like this. Hoped I’d be good at it.”
“You are,” John says, and then reaches over to straighten Gale’s tie, even though they’re both well aware it’s perfectly straight. “Maybe even a little bit better than me, now and then.”
“Now and then,” Gale echoes, and steals a sip of John’s whiskey, just for the look on his face.
Gale’s in love with flying, and flying is in love with him. If he lost everything else and could only belong to the sky, he thinks he’d manage mostly fine. It’s the first time in his life that he’s doing something that he feels born to, that he takes a seat and finds that he is exactly where he should be, on the left hand side of a cockpit with a fort humming with life all around him. He starts out in fighters, the zip and glide of them, as most of them do, and it lights something in his soul. There’s peace on the horizon, he doesn’t have to roll the dice, he has a full view of the board and all its infinite possibilities. All there is between him and oblivion is his own skill, and it’s more than enough. He’s more than good enough.
Mastery of a fighter jet feels a bit like something that was handed to him while he wasn’t paying attention. Bombers are different, and the first time he takes a B-17 up into the blue he knows he’s not going back to flying solo. He’s been alone all his life, in one way or another, it’s high time he was part of a team. A crew, a co-pilot, a shared channel, a shared purpose. It’s nice to not be alone.
John and Marge are just as good as flying, the warmth and the wild of them both, filling up all the places inside him Gale was so used to thinking about as being gray and listless. When he stops to think about it, the way they’ve become twin norths, twin stars to him, he feels like perhaps he should feel like he’s being pulled apart, like he’s being split, rended, divided. It doesn’t feel like that, at all. It feels like balance, like equilibrium, like the perfectly controlled swing of a pendulum from one point to another, exactly as it should.
If he had to say it out loud, if anyone looked particularly interested in asking him about it, which thankfully they don’t, he’d say that in John he’s found a true friend, and in Marge an ideal partner. As he doesn’t have to say it out loud, he thinks quietly to himself that he’s fallen in love with them both.
All in or all out, he mocks his father in his head, and feels grimly satisfied. He’ll stack the odds on this, weight the dice if he has to.
It doesn’t feel like either/or. Doesn’t feel like a looming choice. It just is.
Gale Cleven, a boy, a girl, and the sky.
**
“I've done something foolish,” Gale says to Marge, as they're watching the sun going down on the library steps.
He'd waited for her at closing, brought sandwiches and soda, and she'd smiled at him like he was the first sunny day of the year.
“I find that hard to believe,” she responds, taking his face in her hand. “You're not prone to foolishness.”
Oh, I absolutely am.
“I've fallen in love with you,” Gale says.
Marge laughs. “That's not foolish,” she tells him, and risks a kiss to his unsuspecting mouth, even in broad daylight. “I'm in love with you too, so that's just good god damn sense, Gale.”
It's the sort of thing John might say, and that somehow makes him feel less afraid. He kisses her back, just once, just quickly, and settles back into the warmth of the evening, one hand curled perhaps a little too tightly around her waist.
**
His sense of calm about this lasts up until John gets the devil in his ear the way he so often does, and starts a campaign to meet Marge.
“C’mon Buck,” he says, wheedling irresistibly as he puts the perfect amount of cream into the coffee Gale has stopped insisting h e prefers black. “I’m starting to think you’ve made this broad up.”
Gale ignores him.
“Whatcha scared of?” John tries, stealing the pomade from the side of the sink and hooking his chin over Gale’s shoulder to get a good look at himself in the mirror. “Think she might take a look at me and trade you in for a real man?”
Gale ignores him.
“Is it because you’re worried we’ll tell her all your bad habits?” John asks over the comms as they’re taxi-ing up the hardstands, engines idle. The whole class can hear him, it’s become a running joke. “Worried we’ll tell her you’re not a gentleman after all?”
Gale ignores him. Marge is well aware he’s not a gentleman, he’s a pilot, that’s why she loves him.
“She makes you happy, doesn’t she?” John asks, when Gale’s getting ready to leave for a date with Marge. “I can see it on your face, you think you’re so good at hiding what you’re feeling, but not from me, Gale. She makes you happy.” His voice is very soft, and the look on his face is painful. “I wanna meet the woman who makes you happy.”
There’s no arguing with that, unfortunately.
**
There's a foolish, childish part of Gale that thinks maybe he can just keep them apart, that he can have them both in two separate realms of existence, but the part of him that's going to be a pilot, that's going to be a leader of men, knows better. He's living in a fantasy land.
He has the best of both worlds, balanced on a perfect fulcrum.
John knows him, named him, marked him out for everyone to see as the other side of his coin, his match. And they’re perfectly matched, light and dark, wild and wilder, the gambler and the man who rolls the dice. John drinks, and Gale steals just enough of his whiskey to imagine how his mouth might taste. John sings, and Gale laughs just enough to show everyone that John is there to entertain, and not to mock. John picks up girls and fucks them round the back of the bars and Gale lounges against the door to the alley and pretends he isn’t half hard about it. He’s not jealous, really, because that’s all of John those girls get, and he gets everything else. More than everything else. He gets the wild and the danger and the sleepy-soft first hours of the day, lingering glances and soft touches and the solid heat of his body as John soaks up his personal space like it’s liquid gold. He gets John on the comms channel whooping at take off, he gets stolen unauthorised flights, he gets the left seat of the cockpit. He gets excellence, his and John’s perfectly matched. They’re the best of a really good bunch of pilots, they’re going to be the best in their group, the best in the Air Force. The best in the sky, the two of them. Gale would roll the dice on that all day long.
Marge is the other amplitude of the pendulum, standing at the other end of Gale’s wingspan. She’s a mirror where John is an inversion, wearing the sunshine of their shared colouring the way Gale might have if he’d been raised into joy rather than the roll of the dice. They’ve fallen over themselves into each other in a way Gale would have scoffed at if he’d read it in a book, desperately in love and addicted to the taste of it. Gale’s not a virgin, had always been relatively popular with the girls in his home town, but had always been vastly aware of the reputation following him around, courtesy of his father, and had taken great pains to be just as respectful and well-mannered and gentlemanly as the reputation wasn’t. He’s used to the pretence and negotiation that comes with sex with girls you see every weekend at church, and Marge is nothing like that. Marge wants, and isn’t afraid to want, and isn’t afraid for him to know it. She kisses him wet and deep in the dark on the front porch of her landlady’s house at the end of each date, and lets him touch her wet and deep in the dark on the quiet back streets of town. They make love for the first time in the deserted library in the middle of the night, shuddery and silent, and Gale knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Marge is golden and perfect and too good for him, and his, irrevocably.
He has the best of both worlds, balanced on a perfect fulcrum, and if he could he’d live in this equilibrium forever, where he gets hours with John, hours of intimacy they both know toes right up to the line, and hours with Marge as well, both, having to change nothing.
It's not possible. He's got one path in front of him, which is that he puts this fantastical, criminal thing with John away, and focuses on what he can actually have. He wants Marge, desperately, in the same slick hot way he wants John. He just doesn't get to have both, and he has to remember that.
The first step is closing the gap between them, pulling both bright points together so he has to stop pretending that they can continue to coexist just as they do.
“The guys have been on me about meeting you,” Gale says to Marge one evening, when they’ve spent a long, luxurious date night in the locked back roo m of the empty library. She’s spread out beneath him, mostly naked, and he’s brushing gentle kisses over the slick insides of her thighs. “I've held them off so far but they're starting to think I've made you up.”
“You mean John's started to think you've made me up,” she says, tone arch and dimples sharp.
She misses nothing, his Marge. It's one of the many things about her that he's completely lost his head over, how quick and clever she is, how unwilling to pull punches.
“He comes up that much, huh?” Gale says, a little rueful, because he's been trying to avoid speaking about John even half as much as he wants to, but even that much has apparently been enough.
“Him and the sky. You're lucky I'm not the jealous type,” Marge tells him with a teasing little tone.
He feels sick to his stomach, just for a moment.
“I'd love to meet your friends,” Marge says, tone a little softer, face fond. “On one condition.”
“Oh yeah?”
“There has to be dancing. I will go and meet your friends, and you will dance at least three songs with me.”
God, she knows him so well.
“Two,” he counters, enchanted.
“Three,” Marge says, firm, “But they can be slow ones.”
“You drive a hard bargain,” Gale says, but she has him eating out of the palm of her hand and they both know it.
**
“Marge says she'll meet you, and the others, as long as there's dancing,” Gale says to John when they're crammed on one cot together, studying a flight manual they definitely have two copies of.
John's laugh is a shocked, vibrant thing.
“I have to do three songs with her, apparently,” Gale continues, and leans a little further into the solid heat of John's side.
“You poor man,” John says, and rests his cheek briefly on Gale's hair. “Three whole dances with a beautiful girl who wants you. How you suffer.”
“She's said they'll be slow ones,” Gale allows. “So you're on the hook for at least one fast song, she deserves that much.”
John makes a noise low in his chest. “I could teach you,” he says quietly.
Gale imagines it, standing in the circle of John's arms, pressed close, hands steady on his waist, moving in perfect time.
“Not a good idea John,” he says just as quietly, and John doesn't disagree.
**
There’s not really a roll of the dice, because there’s no damn choice here. He has to go all in, or he’s ruined.
**
It’s magic. It’s better than he could have ever imagined, the two of them in a room together, it is seamless and perfect and magic and devastating.
Marge is her usual sharp delightful self, absolutely the same as she always is, in no way cowed or awed by the array of men in uniform doing their best to impress and embarrass her in turn. She holds her own, teasing and laughing and smiling, tucked safely up under Gale’s arm as she always is, as though she belongs there, and she does.
John is on equally good form, congenial and charming in a way that always leaves Gale a little wrong-footed, making sure Marge has a drink and is included in conversation and keeping the boys in line. Gale stands at the bar with Jack Kidd, who he sometimes thinks would have been a much more convenient roommate, and watches.
“Nicest I’ve ever seen him treat a girl,” Jack says to him quietly. “Keep an eye on that.”
Gale laughs, because he’s pretty sure it’s supposed to be a joke, but there’s something so familiar in the way John looks at Marge as he leans in to say something in her ear, over the cacophony of the bar, in the way Marge looks back. They both look at him like that, from time to time. He tries to work out how to feel about it, rolls the dice on it, and decides he doesn’t mind.
“What do you think?” he asks Marge, when they’re dancing.
It is a slow song, as she’d promised, and they’re pressed close together, her hands up around his neck, one tangled in Gale’s hair and the other dipped under his collar. Her lips are pressed up under his ear, head tipped down so no one can see the way she’s scraping her teeth against his skin.
“He’s charming,” she says, and lays a little sucking kiss against the hinge of his jaw. “And he knows it. I like him a lot.”
Gale tries not to think about the fact that she knew he was asking about John without him needing to clarify it, instead pressing a little closer to her, knowing she’ll be able to feel the way he’s half hard against her stomach, knowing that’s exactly what she was aiming for.
“You’re a menace,” he tells her, dipping his fingers just a little firmer into the small of her back. “And you know it, and I like you, a lot.”
She kisses him again.
“You get two more slow dances with me, and then a fast one with John, and then I’m taking you out of here,” Gale says against her cheek. “Satisfied?”
“Not yet.”
For all that he makes a big show of being the civilised half of the Two Bucks, as they’re now known, when it comes to some things, Gale’s really no better than John. He rolls the dice. They wait until the rest of the boys are drunk and distracted and then Gale curls an arm around Marge’s waist and pulls her out into the dark.
She kisses him as soon as they’re clear of view, the way he’s now so familiar with, the way that still takes his breath away every time. They’ve got good at this, over the past few weeks, at seizing a moment and pushing each other’s buttons - she’s already wet when Gale slides a hand up under her skirt, careful of her garter belt, leaving her stockings in place as he slips his fingers into her underwear.
“How far?” he whispers into her ear, reaching up with his other hand to steady her head against the wall.
She laughs, a low breathy thing, and tips her hips up against his hand. “Everything, please, I’m not getting down on my knees back here, these stockings are new.”
“Menace,” Gale tells her, and pulls her leg up round his hip, holding her steady as he unbuckles his belt and fumbles a condom out of his pocket.
“You like it,” Marge says with a little gasp as he works his fingers inside her.
He pushes into her the way he knows she likes, a little faster and harder than he usually would, although he wouldn’t usually fuck a girl around the back of a bar. They’ve been a bad influence on him, her and John.
“I do,” he says, fucking into her so hard it pushes her up onto her toes, bracing his hand behind her head so it doesn’t scrape against the brick. “I like it so much.”
She smiles against his mouth, panting, pushing back against him. “I know,” she kisses his jaw again. “John was telling me all night how much you like me.”
John’s name cuts through him like a searing line of heat down his spine. They get all tangled up in his head then, desperate for them both, and he mouths at the column of her neck as Marge slips a hand between them, pushing her skirts up higher so she can slide her fingers over her clit at the perfect counterpoint to the way he’s fucking her. They’ve got to be quick and they know it.
“Come on,” she says breathlessly. “Come on come on, please.”
“You too,” he manages, “God you’re perfect, you’re perfect, I-”
She bites down on his shoulder as she comes, leaving a wet ring of teeth marks over the seam of his blouse, and he follows her over the edge.
It takes them a minute to settle, breathing heavy and unsteady, and then there’s a soft noise from the other side of the alleyway, the sound of someone clearing their throat.
Gale is utterly unsurprised to see John standing there, somehow. He doesn’t move. Marge smoothes her skirt down and fixes her hair, teeth set in her lower lip.
“Boys are on their way out,” John says, voice shockingly hoarse. “I’ll see you back on the base, Buck?”
The words are stuck in his throat. Every part of him is lit aflame. How long were you watching? He feels adrift, like they’re teetering on the edge of something they won’t make it back from. Neither he or John have any way to salvage this.
“Help Gale walk me home, John,” Marge says, with an easy little smile, like they’re still sitting in the bar, like he didn’t just walk up on them fucking against a wall.
There's a long pause. “Yes ma’am,” John says. “I’ll meet you out the front.”
He takes a few steps back and turns away from them, giving Gale a moment to rebuckle his belt and straighten Marge’s skirt. She’s smirking a little, not at all ashamed to have been caught, and he takes a breath and tries to let her calm quench the burning feeling rippling out through his limbs. These things happen , he says to himself. You’ve caught him before, he’s never cared.
They step out into the lamp light, and John steps in front of them before they’re fully in view of the street, a sharp, appraising look on his face. He’s had a lot less to drink tonight than he usually would. There’s a moment where he looks them over, almost like he’s assessing troops on parade, and then he huffs a little laugh.
“Amateurs,” he says softly. “Here, let me-”
The rest of the sentence is swallowed up by the way he closes the distance, reaching for Gale and straightening out his collar, and then turning to Marge, and lifting his hand slowly up to her face. It’s a completely different gesture, he’s telegraphing every movement, giving her plenty of time and space to step away, but she stays still, tilting her face to him. John wipes his thumb over the peak of her cupid’s bow, just as he did to Gale weeks before, and just like before takes his lipstick-smudged thumb to his mouth and sucks it clean.
“There,” he says, with devastating softness. “Good as new.”
It’s dark, and late, and Marge will likely be in trouble if she gets caught coming home, but she takes them the long way back, holding Gale’s hand with her other arm linked through John’s, the three of them twined together trying not to take up too much space across the sidewalk. They’re quiet, in a companionable way Gale is used to with both of them, with walks like this with Marge and nights in their room with John, the easy way nothing really needs to be said. It should feel awkward, perhaps, given that Marge and John are basically strangers, given what he’d seen, but instead there’s that strange bone-deep rightness again.
To avoid any extra aggravation, Marge makes them leave her a few doors down from her house. She stands under a streetlight, glare shining off her hair like a halo, making her features somehow sharp and soft all at once.
“I had a lovely time tonight,” she says, and Gale tries to keep it all separate in his head, the way she’d looked dancing with John, the smile on her face when she was introduced to the boys, the noise she made as she came on his cock.
She pushes up on her toes to kiss Gale goodnight, kisses him exactly as she would if they were alone, assertive and possessive, kisses him like it’s a prelude to fucking, even thought John is right there. Gale makes a soft little sound into her mouth that he’s hopeful John can’t hear, and kisses her right back. He can see John out of the corner of his eye, and tries desperately not to look.
After a long few heartbeats, Marge pulls back, puts a little space between the two of them, and then turns to John. He's taller than Gale, by just a little though it seems like more, and so she puts her hands on his shoulders to steady herself as she leans up to brush the lightest kiss across his cheek. It lands perilously close to the corner of his mouth, and Gale thinks perhaps a different man would be enraged, or at least a little put out, but it just feels about right, to him.
“Good night,” she says softly, and walks off up the street to her front door.
They stand in silence, watching her safely into the house, and then when the door has clicked shut and the light has gone on at the upstairs window, they turn without a word and head back to base. The silence feels very careful.
Gale undresses in their room with his back to John, fast, and climbs into bed without bothering to lay his uniform out for the next day, as he almost always does. There's something fizzing under his skin that needs to be blanketed. John turns the light out, whispers goodnight a lot softer than he usually would, and gets into his own bed.
When he wakes in the morning, John has already left, and Gale's uniform is laid neatly over the back of his chair.
**
After that, it’s easy, in the same utterly debilitating way everything about falling in love twice has been so far. There’s a special kind of magic to it, Gale finds, having them both together in the same room. He’d felt, before, that perhaps he’d be pulled apart, each extreme of the pendulum, but once he’s rolled the dice on it he finds it’s not like that at all, finds that he settles perfectly at the point of equilibrium. Marge and John work together, in the same and different ways that each of them work with him, and so when he has them both in front of them he’s bathed in the dappled light of how much he adores them both, and how adored he is in return.
The next months pass like that, a perfect balance. They spend hours in the air, pushed to the limits by their instructors and then pushing themselves further. There's the distant spectre of the war in Europe, a hum over the airwaves, and yes they're going to be combat pilots, and yes there will be a war here, soon perhaps, but right now, in this moment, nothing can touch them.
He and John are stealing hours in the forts whenever they can, constantly being hauled over the coals for it and tacitly allowed to continue, eking out their supremacy over the rest of the class by the sheer ferocity of how much they want it. Flying is everything, and flying with John in the seat next to him is more. Gale’s unstoppable in a fort, no one gets close to him except John, he is exceptional, he is incomparable, he is everything his father told him he would never be.
“You’re a damn good pilot,” his CO says, when he hands him his bars and makes him a 2nd Lieutenant, just a handful of men ahead of John, the alphabet working in your favour. “Just arrogant enough. Very nearly smart enough, too.”
Gale laughs, because he knows he’s supposed to, and shakes the man’s hand.
“It’s not arrogance,” he says to John later at the bar, while they’re waiting for Marge to join them. “We’re just as good as we think we are.”
John hands him his whiskey, the last half inch swirling with the almost-gone ice. “Maybe even better,” he says, and Gale tries not to flush under the way John watches him swallow.
Across the bar, Marge comes through the door, in the brand new dress she saved for the occasion, sweet blue and green.
“Here’s our girl,” Gale says without thinking, and John stares at him.
Well, Gale says to him, mutinous and in the privacy of his own head, it’s the truth. I share her with you as much as you share me with her.
Over the course of many many nights in this bar, they’ve negotiated the dances to a nice balance, two slow ones to Gale and two fast ones to John, and then whoever in their associated rabble is brave enough to ask her, in the face of the twin stares of the Bucks. So far that’s mostly Jack Kidd and Bill Veal, both of whom find it very entertaining to take Miss Spencer and spin her round the floor. Gale doesn’t mind it, watching Bill put his hands on Marge’s waist and boost her through a little bunny hop in a particularly enthusiastic number, but it's not like watching her dance with John.
Watching Marge dance with John is -
something.
It’s like watching John fly a plane. It’s like watching Marge laugh. It’s everything and more than everything and he sees the two of them moving together like they’re made for it and wants.
He knows he’s not hiding it, not managing to keep it to himself, and he rolls the dice on it. Puts money on the fact that they’ll accept this, that they’re in this with him, whatever it is.
It’s unsustainable, that’s what it is, says his father, not that his father would care enough to notice, if he were here. It’s foolhardy nonsense, boy. Know your place, is what he’d say.
They are my place, Gale would say to him, if he were brave or stupid. He knows, obviously he knows, that objectively his father is right. It’s nonsense. It’s a pipe dream. He’ll marry Marge and John will be his best man and they will untangle themselves, and they will live separate normal lives like separate normal people and he will not feel like he is eating himself alive when he doesn’t have them both at his fingertips.
Not yet, he says to himself, as John lifts Marge up and spins her around, shrieking with laughter, pins flying out of her hair. Not yet, when he puts her down on Gale’s lap and goes back to the dance floor to collect the pins. Not yet, as John holds her mirror and Gale helps her redo her hair, pressed together in a too-small booth, shoulder to thigh. Not yet not yet not yet.
He wishes there was someone with a camera, wants a picture of this, of the three of them as they are now, before they have to be anything else.
Marge drags him out onto the dancefloor once John's fixed her hair to his satisfaction, and Gale wraps his arms around her and revels in the way she tucks her head down against his shoulder, and allows himself the brief luxury of watching John watch them, just for a moment. John's smiling into his whiskey and tracking them round the floor like he'd never have to explain himself.
“I love you,” Gale says into Marge's hair, and knows she heard him by the way she looks up at him.
“Keep talking sweet to me and I'll make John give you my last dance,” she says, luminous.
“You wouldn't do that to him,” Gale manages around a laugh. “Or me. Or yourself.”
Marge goes up on her tiptoes then, and kisses him. “No,” she says. “I suppose I wouldn't. Someone's got to look after us, after all.”
It's getting late. Gale swaps with John and sits with Jack Kidd while his best friend leads his best girl around the dance floor in a very unlikely sort of foxtrot, and feels deeply content.
“That doesn't bother you?” Jack asks, gesturing at the way Marge beams up at John.
“Why would it?” Gale responds.
The song ends, and both Marge and John turn to look at him, big bright smiles a perfect match. They're still holding hands when they make it back over to the booth.
“You gentlemen ready to walk me home?” Marge asks. She's flushed from gin and dancing and Gale adores her.
“That's my cue,” Jack says, and he leaves them to it.
“Your chariot awaits,” John says, and offers Marge his arm in an elaborate gesture.
She laughs, and Gale laughs with her. It’s the same as it always is, almost, except Marge is a little quiet, biting her lip a little, sneaking glances at the pair of them. She’s got that look on her face, the one Gale loves so much, that means she’s thinking hard about something. John seems content to fill the silence, and Gale is content to let him talk, to let Marge think, until they get to the streetlight where they always leave her.
“You’ve been quiet tonight, Marge,” John says, before Gale has a chance to say anything. “Something on your mind?”
Marge takes a deep breath. “Don’t panic,” she says, “And don’t get mad.”
John frowns, and Gale follows suit, and then Marge puts her hands on John’s shoulders and pushes up onto her tiptoes the way she always does when she kisses him on the cheek and instead she presses her mouth against his, kisses him deep and promising the way she kisses Gale.
The world tilts, just a little, and then snaps back. Gale feels right and reasonable and everything about it is all wrong, but he feels right. John kisses Marge back, only for a second, and then he pushes her away, excruciatingly gentle, takes her hands from round his neck and puts her back down on her feet.
“Marge,” he says, quiet and broken and miserable.
“It’s alright,” she says, and reaches out a hand to Gale. He goes, helpless. “It’s alright, isn’t it Gale?”
She kisses him then, the way she always does, the way she just kissed John, and he can taste the whiskey in her mouth. It is wild and intoxicating and insane. She kisses him, and kisses him, and then she stops, and steps back.
“Don’t panic,” she says again, a little uncertain edge to her voice now. “And don’t get mad. It’s alright. It is, isn’t it?”
Gale can’t speak.
John is always the thing he can’t be when he needs something. “Marge,” he says, again, “What are you doing ?”
She wrings her hands, and then stops, looks up at them both with a suddenly militant expression. “There’s going to be a war,” Marge says. “Any day now, there’s going to be a war, and you’re both going to be in it.”
“Marge,” Gale starts, still no idea where he’s going with this.
“And this thing,” Marge continues, cheeks flushed now, hands twisted in her skirt. “This thing that we’re doing, the three of us, where we’re not talking about it, even though it’s right there -”
-it’s right there-
“-it’s not going to be enough, it won’t be enough for me, if you’re gone. And so I kissed you, and I kissed him, and I’m going to go inside now, and you’re going to go home, and if you’ve got any god damn sense you’ll kiss each other, and tomorrow you’ll come back here, together, and take me out to breakfast, and we will work out how we do this so that everyone gets enough. Because I think it might be perfect. And I want it. And you do too.”
She looks at them for a moment longer, and they stand there and look at her, and then she nods, sharply, and turns around and goes inside. Gale watches her go, the way he does every time he says good night to her, and then turns to look at John. John looks scared.
“C’mon,” Gale says, because John scared turns his stomach, and he rolls the dice. “You heard the lady. Don’t panic.”
“I don’t panic,” John says, and leans up against him, just for a moment. “I’m a pilot. And we’ve got orders.”
They do, and so they go home.
**
Kissing John is like kissing Marge, except for all the ways it’s not. It’s like flying, except for all the ways it’s not.
“God,” John says, breathless and desperate against his mouth. “God, I hope she knows what she’s doing, I can’t give this up Gale, I can’t, I’ve wanted-”
They’re standing in the middle of their room, a careful distance from their locked door, a careful distance from their beds, marooned in the space they share.
“Me too,” Gale says, and kisses him again, puts a hand up to his face and pulls him closer. “John, me too.”
It goes on like that, the two of them, standing toe to toe, hands up around each other’s necks, fingers stroking over jaws and cheekbones, kissing and kissing and kissing like they’re fifteen, like that’s the only thing they want to do. They’re only touching just that much, because anything else feels dangerous and perfect and too much, and Gale wants.
He puts space between them, instead of stepping closer, because they’re going to get up tomorrow and take Marge to breakfast and work out how they get to have everything they want.
“John,” he says, very quietly, into the space between their mouths. “She knows what she’s doing.”
**
It’s one of the stranger mornings of his life. Gale gets ready with John, the way they always do, jostling for position in front of the mirror and shoving each other as they put their boots on, the way they always do. John takes an extra moment, runs his comb through his hair one extra time, and Gale feels the tenderness rising up in his throat like it might choke him.
“I swear to god Gale if you make a crack about me taking too long with my hair I will tie you to your bedposts and sweep your girl off her feet and never put her down, and it’ll serve you right.”
Gale laughs. “I was gonna tell you that you’re plenty pretty as you are, but I guess I’ll just keep my mouth shut.”
John stares at him for a moment, eyes wide and shocked, and then he steps briskly into Gale’s space, and kisses him, solid and unmistakable, just for a moment.
“You’re plenty pretty too,” John says.
It’s not the first time John’s called him pretty, not the first time he’s made a comment like that, not the first time John’s looked at him with that expression, he looks at him like that all the time. But this is the first time John has looked at him like that and they haven’t been pretending it means nothing.
“Hurry up,” Gale says, instead of anything else, “I don’t think today is the day to keep Marge waiting.”
John laughs, the sound somehow softer than usual, and opens the door, holding it wide so that Gale can walk out first. They make their way off base and into town without really talking, the same easy steady quiet they always enjoy. Gale has absolutely no idea what Marge is going to say, no idea what she could possibly have planned for them, if she even has a plan. But he knows that the three of them are going to sit down, and talk it through, and that she’s going to find a way to give them everything.
Marge is already sitting in the diner when they walk past, gets up and sticks her head out the door and calls them in. Gale can’t help the smile that blooms on his face when he sees her, and he knows it’s the mirror of John’s. Marge is wearing a dress he’s seen a thousand times before, an old, worn, pink dress that isn’t her best, that makes her look a little younger and less put together than she usually does, and Gale adores her in it.
“Morning gentlemen,” she says, with a big smile. “I hope at least one of you has come prepared to buy me breakfast. I want pancakes.”
They get her pancakes, and they sit in the round booth at the back of the diner, pressed together more closely than is proper, and they drink coffee and eat breakfast and pass each other slim little smiles right under the radar and the whole time Gale can feel the weight of the dice in the palm of his hand.
“Alright,” John says, when Marge has finished her pancakes and is licking the syrup from her fingers like a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing, with a smug little grin on her face that Gale is more familiar with from evenings in the library with the doors locked. “Alright, Major Spencer, let's hear the flight plan.”
Gale adores him too.
Marge sets her coffee cup down, and looks at them both. “Nothing fancy,” she says with a little smile. “I’m in love with Gale, and he’s in love with me. You’re in love with Gale, and he’s in love with you. And you and I, John, we could fall in love. We wouldn’t even have to try.”
You’re in love with Gale, and he’s in love with you. It’s not a lie. It’s not anywhere close to a lie. But it’s not a truth he’s come anywhere close to admitting to.
John looks down at his hands. “Even before we start on whether or not it's possible,” he says, and there is something absolutely riddled with grief in his tone. “The fact is that we shouldn't even try.”
It's the opposite of how he'd sounded about it just an hour before, all the expectant excitement burned off him, leaving a big man looking shockingly small inside his uniform.
Gale opens his mouth to say something, anything, and Marge shushes him, instead raising one expressive eyebrow and waiting for John to continue.
“You and him make perfect sense,” John says, pulling back on the grief a little and buttoning up. “You can be together easily, no one will think twice or look twice, you can be married in a few years and happy and that will all be fine and wonderful.”
It's the truth, exactly what Gale knows he should want, what he used to want, from some faceless woman, before he knew them both, and he looks at Marge and knows they are both thinking the same thing. It wouldn't be enough.
“And me and him,” John goes on. “We could have something, maybe, for as long as we're stationed together, behind closed doors, as long as we're careful. I know men who do, who get away with it, but it's not for keeping. And I don't think I could start knowing I couldn't keep it.”
Gale has a dim vision of how that could be, getting to have John, his body and his mouth and his boundless love, and then having to give it up. Me neither.
“But you and me, Marge? Yeah, we could fall in love, we could do that, maybe, but we shouldn't. It'd destroy you and him. It'd destroy you. We should leave things as they are. I'm not going to wreck your reputation, Marge.”
Gale is supposed to be a leader. He's supposed to be able to identify the way forward, to make men fall in line, to make them believe in what can be done. He's supposed to be a gambler, he was born to it, he's supposed to be able to roll the dice.
He does nothing.
Marge blows a raspberry.
“Nonsense,” she says, and then laughs when they both jump at the noise. “Utter nonsense. Maybe that's true for ordinary people, maybe that's true if you've got no spine and no imagination, but you're not ordinary people. You're not ordinary men, you're pilots. And I know for a fact that neither of you lack spine or imagination.”
Gale smothers a laugh in his napkin because he doesn't know what else to do with the look on John's face.
“Don't be a coward, John,” Marge says kindly. “It doesn't suit you.”
**
They roll the dice.
**
It takes a little bit of figuring out. There’s a lot to change, even though the foundational basics remain absolutely the same, but Gale is a pilot, and a gambler, apparently, and so is John, and they’re quick learners.
“You’ve got to be quiet,” Gale says, voice rasping despite himself.
He’s on his knees at John’s feet, both of them still mostly dressed, one arm holding John’s hips in place as he works his mouth slowly down over John’s cock, taking him inch by inch until his eyes sting and his throat objects and he keeps going regardless. John makes a low, wounded noise, hands so careful in Gale’s hair that he can feel them trembling, and then chokes on a shout as Gale swallows around him.
“I can’t,” he gasps. “I can’t, I can’t, Gale oh god oh fuck oh-”
He has to be quiet, because if anyone hears him they’re ruined. Gale reaches up blindly, hand searching the length of John’s torso until he finds his neck and chin, and his aim was to press his palm over John’s mouth to keep him quiet, but instead John draws his fingers between his lips and sucks, hard.
Gale’s not quite able to keep his own moan back then, and the sensation of it around his cock makes John suck harder, thrust his hips up just a little, and it becomes a vicious circle as they hurtle towards the edge, Gale giving up on restraint and shoving his hands down his pants, getting himself off as John comes down his throat, biting down on Gale’s fingers and shaking uncontrollably through it.
“Jesus Christ,” John says after, when they’re tidying themselves up and getting ready to pretend it never happened. “You’re getting so fucking good at that.”
They’re getting a lot of practice. Marge had termed it evening the score up with the sort of smirk Gale now associates with imminent chaos and/or orgasms. John has an identical expression, and Gale’s starting to think he might be in over his head. He doesn’t care. He knew this might happen when they rolled the dice, and he let them do it anyway.
And now he gets this. This utter insanity, this perfection, this strange new balance where Gale gets things he had no idea were possible. He gets late nights with Marge in the deserted library, gets earlier-than-necessary mornings with John, all perfect skin and sweat and shuddery gasped out breaths and leaving to kiss one with the taste of the other still all over his tongue. And he gets some nights lying alone on his bed, touching himself lazily as he waits for John to come back from his turn with Marge, thinking of the two of them together, of how John might look as he fucks her, of how John might look as he fucks him.
They’ve not done that yet, not quite. Gale’s never done it before, is a little humiliated by how badly he wants it, and John’s too careful to push it. There’s an unspoken agreement that they’ll leave that last final damning step until they can spend a night together, all three of them, and in the mean time they stick to each fucking Marge, and making each other come in the privacy of their room, and feeling oddly giddy about the whole thing.
It feels like they’re getting away with something. It feels like they rolled the dice without knowing they were weighted, won big and fled the state.
They get away with it. They go dancing with the rest of their class and sit with Marge tucked between them, take it in turns to dance with her, take it in turns to buy her drinks and make her laugh and she looks at them both like she adores them, because she does. She does. Jack Kidd watches them with a kind of exhausted resignation that makes John laugh, but no one else seems to think anything of it, and that suits them just fine.
Everything is its own kind of perfect, as 1941 starts coming to its end. There’s no war on them just yet, and they are in love. December begins, not really that cold, not as cold as any of them are used to, and Gale starts to believe that they really might get away with it, with no war, and this love.
He believes that all the way up until December 7th.