Heyo! I'd like to request a drabble with the following prompt:
15. "I had a very nice dream that started like this."
Characters: Bradley Bradshaw
For the thirst weekend (if it is still going on)
Bradley Bradshaw was breathtaking.
Had you ever met a man who was so pretty? God, he was actually devastating, with his sun kissed locks tousled thanks to your fingers, his lips slightly swollen from kissing. The various freckles and moles scattered across his tanned body.
No, you don't think you had ever been with a man so beautiful. Especially when his head was in between your legs, brown eyes looking up at you like you hung the moon.
"Y-you what now about me?"
No sooner as you requested, he repeated his words, "I had a very nice dream that started like this."
Bradley Bradshaw. Had a dream. About you. Where he was about to devour you with his mouth. You.
"You dreamed about me?" Was all you could say. Funny how just a moment ago, he was making you see God with his fingers. And now you were beginning to wonder if this was all a dream because it sounded too fucking good to be true.
"Yeah? Fuck, now's not the time I should say that, is it?" For being maybe three inches from your bare cunt, if that, he sure had his wits about him.
"That's the hottest thing ever. Can I come on your face about it?"
"Yes Ma'am," was all Bradley said before diving in.
Look Me in the Eyes (Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw x Reader)
*GIF not mine*
Summary: During naval training, your jet crashed and burned, taking your memories with it. But the lieutenant who saved you seems to know you better than he lets on. The only issue is that he refuses to tell you his name.
A/N: pfft half yall don’t read this anyway so imma just say rooster’s hot, oreosmama out *drops mic*
Word count: 3345
It’s not the pervading scent of antiseptic and boredom that has carved its way into your skin, nestling deep into the creases of your brow and your sneering upper lip—
It’s his unflinching gaze.
The lieutenant hovering over you, with a spoonful of green, gelatinous “dinner” posed over your lips, mumbles, “Open the hatch, the F-18 needs to land.”
He’s a staunchly built man ornamented in the same naval jacket he’d been wearing when you first came-to in the hospital room, his lofty shoulders embellished in unfamiliar patches. Over the last two days, most of which have consisted of him lording himself over you or sitting back in the chair beside your bed, his five o’clock shadow has thickened, and the wrinkles underneath his teasing eyes darkened a shade.
The F-18 bumps against your sneer, and he chortles to himself.
You know why you’re here.
Well, sort of.
You know that it must’ve hurt. Like a falling-unconscious-due-to-pain kind of hurt. Black and blue splotches paint your temple and upper left cheek, and each time you force a smile, it aches. The rest of your body looks the same. In the first shower you’d been allowed, you twisted and turned as much as your burning abdomen could handle and had come to the conclusion that you were glad you didn’t remember much of what had happened.
The only real issue was that you didn’t remember much of anything.
The story you had been told was haphazardly crafted, not unlike if a toddler had drawn a house with crayons and passed it to you, insisting it looked exactly like the one you lived in.
It goes something like this: you were flying your jet when the engine stalled, and when you ejected, your head smacked against the windshield. You were lucky—you were unconscious when you had crumpled in on yourself, snapping five of your ribs like pencils, and when you’d landed on the ground, face in the dirt—you were so, so lucky.
But the lieutenant says differently.
When he found you, you were awake. You were echoing his name into the stagnant desert air, screaming and sobbing in ways that still keep him up at night.
You know because he sleeps with folded arms on the edge of your mattress, and he rattles the metal skeleton each time he flinches. And the times when he thinks you’re too buried in exhaustion and slumber, his hand finds yours, fingertips light as air against your skin.
These are the only times the lieutenant bares that part of himself to you.
In the mornings, when you can look him in the eyes and see the guilt buried underneath, he winces a smile onto his lips and asks if you remember anything yet.
You don't.
And he winces again. “Back to the drawing board, huh?”
The lieutenant is a nice-enough man when he wants to be. The only issue is that he doesn’t seem to want to be.
“Tell me your name,” you snipe, dangling over the precipice of flinging Jell-O across the room.
This is a game he never wants to play, despite how often he wins. He has the whole naval base’s hospital staff refer to him as Sir or Lieutenant-no-last-name, and each time you ask, he’ll give you the same response.
“You know my name.”
You don't. He’s a complete stranger. He can hold you hand and feed you Jell-O and help you hobble to the bathroom; he can brush the hair from your sweat-crusted face in the mornings and, on some rare occasions where he thinks he’s woken up before you, he’ll graze a feather-soft kiss on your bruised temple.
And you still haven't got a clue.
Because whoever the lieutenant is, the tight grip he has on your heart is completely foreign to you. It’s a grip that says you and him aren’t just something definable—you were a we in this life; the pair of you have formed a way of living in tandem, your own intrinsic tango to which nobody else knows the steps. It’s not just like or a passing fancy. It’s not just hot static running through veins.
This is fully fledged; this is oxygen now. The rise and fall of your chest is the rise and fall of his. The absence of it must be suffocating.
So you don't know why he doesn’t like this game. He makes a question-answer into a back-and-forth, and then he winds and winds you up until you’re ready to snap.
It’s not fair. God, it’s not fair. You deserve to know his name. Doesn’t he know it’s not just a tickle in the back of your mind anymore? If he was the one whose name you were screaming, didn’t you deserve to know what it was?
“Why do you keep doing this?”
You watch his lips purse, the color bleeding out of them and into pink patches on his neck and cheeks. The spoon rattles against the tray, and the glob of green wavers in its curve. He refuses to hold your gaze like always. Self-inflicted torment disguises itself as burnt-sienna irises. The life you’ve forgotten is bowing his shoulders, and your crash, no matter the fact that he saved you, is eating away at him.
Then the lieutenant smiles, in the fractured way—the way someone might laugh at a funeral.
“Because knowing my name wouldn’t help you. You never called me by it, anyway.”
This, oh God—this is the closest you’ve ever gotten, and you’re still wading in the darkness. A name you’d never even call him by, what a wonder that does to your psyche.
A name was a start; it was a first impression. There was a lot in a name.
So you’d never called him by his name… so what?
So what, only lovers knew each other by more than a name? So what, he never called you by yours? So what, you didn’t want to ever call him by his name, never felt the urge, but felt it was rather proper considering you didn’t know what to call him at all?
He keeps you doggy-paddling for it.
The hospital room is polluted with silence for the rest of the night. Slowly, you finish the Jell-O as he sits back in his chair, watching, yet not quite seeing you. You missed when his staring felt like a buzzing fly. Now it’s a thunderstorm hanging over you, foggy and dampened, and you’re struck every few seconds with a shiver.
He doesn’t reach out for your hand when you pretend you’ve fallen asleep. Twenty minutes past lights out, he stands and heads into the bathroom, slowly creaking the door closed and locking it before the shower faucet turns on and stays on for a long, long time.
Where his hand should be is where he laid his jacket, one sewn patch erroneously rough against your palm. With another glance at the light underneath the bathroom door, you haul the leather jacket up into your lap, tracing the ridges and folds. You trails your fingertips along the jacket, searching for… something. Anything.
Cold metal, a zipper slips underneath your fingers, and you sit up straighter despite the outcry of pain in your ribs.
A pocket, and inside is a small plastic card—his ID.
That, and a small, velvet box.
No…
No, you won’t open it.
No, no, because he shouldn’t even have that here.
Why—dear God—why did he have that here?
It’s not for you. That’s for sure. You don’t even want to open it. No.
It’s not yours. It’s not yours to have, especially since he hasn’t offered it to you, and it’s not yours to wear, and it’s not yours to look at, to watch, iridescent, crystal devotion reflecting the moonlight from the room’s lone window.
But when you lift the cover and curse the stars that the man whose name you don’t even know knows you so well, knows how beautiful it is in your eyes, and even worse, how well it fits on your finger, you know it’s yours.
Well, not yours.
It’s hers. The one before the crash’s.
That’s her ring on your finger, and that’s her lieutenant grieving in the bathroom.
This is her life, not yours. All you own anymore is the absence pulsing in your chest.
You own the spasms in your veins, the brief and lasting panic of who am I, really?, the deficiency of life and past and love; the frail hold on this reality, on that man, on this ring.
The rest is not yours, so you should let it go.
Then, ideally, you should be able to float away, free from these junctions to a girl you don’t know. The man who loves her loves your face. He loves your body, and your voice, and each of the words falling from your lips, perhaps in the wrong order, yes, but he’ll rearrange them in his mind so that it matches hers.
Ideally.
Ideally, it’s not this drowning feeling, a weight like a hand pressing hard against your chest, shoving you deeper and deeper under the current. She’s the one who breathes, not you. You don’t need to breathe. You’re an accident in this world.
The I.D. slips from your grasp and falls to the floor.
You’ve read it. You saw the name, the rank, the naval symbol. In the dim moonlight and the single glowing strip underneath the bathroom door, his not-really-a-smile smiles up at you from the vinyl floor.
And now you see it, chrome duct tape peeling off the jagged stitches of a patch, the one over his heart. Another of his games: his missing call sign.
It… fits him. Strangely enough.
Is this what you called him?
The hospital room floods with a subdued yellow light carried out by the steam of the lieutenant’s shower. He emerges with a towel wrapped around his lower body, a sheen of wet on his cheeks you’re not certain was caused by the shower.
Like you, this is his third shower in this room, but unlike him, he’s not wearing a smirk when he exits, bare feet padding along the cold tiles. He doesn’t spare you a glance while he pilfers through his black duffle bag, the one seated on the only other guest chair in the room—the one that never moves.
Maybe it was a good thing he didn’t look, because you hadn’t thought to take off the ring. It was a plan as half-baked as when you’d first decided to put it on. Some barbaric, frenzied part of you, the same one that had slipped it on and hugged it close to your heart, refused to yank it off. It was another you—not her nor you, but a new one that had fallen in love with him, Rooster, without memory or qualms, the one that had no issue with him lingering in every corner of your mind; no, in fact, she preferred it.
You don’t listen to her when the lieutenant pivots back to face you, a fresh pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and the rest sourced from the duffel bag in tow, one fist curled into his towel at his waist. His eyes land on yours, and your fingers slicken with the sweat of your palms, tremble like the thumps beneath your ribcage.
At the worst moment possible, you notice, in the hazy yellow light of 10:07 PM, that Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw’s eyes are achingly akin to whiskey. It’s the dark, thick kind that coats your tongue and hits you five seconds after you sip it like a freight train; heady, terribly intoxicating, and in large doses, coaxes out the worst side of yourself at an even worse moment.
The ring clinks against the bed’s metal framework before shuddering against the tile floor, and his eyes leave yours to watch it rattle. The skin of your left ring finger burns from the swift twisting and tugging you’d employed in a state of tipsy panic—your plan had been to slip the ring unnoticed beneath his leather jacket, the same place you’d stuffed the velvet box.
A breath tears itself out of the lieutenant’s chest. Tan skin rises and falls once, and his grip goes white-knuckle on his towel.
Then he pads back toward the bathroom without a word and disappears behind the slammed door. Somehow, in some terrible way, it is even harder to breathe with him not in the room after that.
But he bursts through the door a second later, completely negligent of the violent pacing of your heart, donned in clothes wrinkled and stretched in odd places from frantic dressing. He covers the distance with three long strides and slackens back into the plastic hospital chair, the heavy creases under his eyes never having looked so deep-seated.
You see it now. The damage this whole experience has done to him. He’s been hollowed out, rigorously gutted to the point that one last revelation might finally crack him in half and let the despair pour out.
You’re afraid to tell him all that you don’t know. That even though you had slid that ring on and off your finger, you still don’t know him. But, God, you want to tell him that you love him, despite knowing it won’t be enough. It’s not even enough to you, and it’s all that you have.
Usually, he wears this sheen layer of tenderness over his face; it slips off every night when you close your eyes, and he smooths it back on in the mornings in the mirror. Some days he layers it on so thick you never even notice the grief hidden underneath.
It must have gotten too heavy to bear.
The silence hangs just as heavy. He runs both hands down his face, pressing hard enough that his skin emerges pink, and folds his hands, knocking them against his lips. Veins in his eyes grow redder by the second, and your heart begins a slow crawl up your throat at the watery levels of his eyelines, waiting to spill. The ring sits on the floor untouched.
“Do you,” he faltered, clearing his throat. “Do you… remember anything?”
He’s looking at you so intensely that your skin is searing. Shame washes over you, grasping your shoulders and burying you deeply into its chest. You want to cry.
“Nothing.”
The lieutenant stares at you a second longer, stretching it out until you’re trembling. Then he looks away, down, before reaching and retrieving the ring from the ground. He observes it for just a second, the way it glimmers in night’s imperfect lighting, and his eyes squeeze shut.
Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw, you’ve learned, will draw things out until the perfect moment has come. He will wait until the ache swells and culminates, with a tolerance so inexhaustible you wonder if, in all your time loving him, you ever bothered to wait up. He’s noticed how the darkness has swallowed both of you wholly, and only now does he offer reprieve.
Bradley tells you your name.
And he tells you that he’s been in love with you since the first second he saw you.
He tells you that he can’t bear the thought of losing all that you’d had, and that his world had been crumbling apart before his own goddamned eyes ever since your jet’s engine had sputtered and died. He tells you that he’s so, so fucking sorry he couldn’t save you, sorry that your life ever got entangled so messily with his in the first place, and even more sorry that he’s so useless to help you find your way back, that you can’t seem to find your way back to him.
And when you began to cry, he bolted up from his seat and held you, whispering apologies into your hair, and you cried a little harder, because you had found your way back to him, but he wouldn’t ever care, because it wasn’t the same path you’d taken before.
You cry because it hurts to hold him, and even more because it hurts him to hold you. You want all of the I-love-yous he’s ever said to be for you, and you want that damned ring too.
You want that goddamn ring on your finger right now because he’d promised you that it would be yours. That first moment he’d ever seen you, stumbling drunk in a crowded Hard Deck and spilling his beer half on his Hawaiian shirt, half on yours, that he’d make up for it by putting a spendy ring on your little finger right there, despite not actually knowing where right there was. The only one I’ll ever buy, he’d hiccuped, it’ll be yours, darlin’.
“Rooster,” you croaked into his chest. “Roo.”
A provoked sob tore from your throat, your arms and ribs aching from how tightly you clung to him, even after he froze. You surfaced from the curve of his shoulder, hands sliding past his sides, over his thrumming chest, and up to cradle his damp jawline before drawing his face down to yours. He mumbled your name, whiskey eyes potent as ever, and you smothered the rest of his question against your lips.
You couldn’t tell who was crying anymore. Your cheeks’ dampness was his, just the same as his lips pressed against yours so harshly, so numbingly you couldn’t quite tell where yours ended and his began. It must have been somewhere close to where his tongue met yours, making up for lost time as he fought hard and fiercely for everything he’d been starved of for three, going on four, unbearable days. His hands left their leverage against the bed and latched onto your hips, rough fingertips familiarly caressing the soft slopes of your sides, and when you offered an airy moan to him, he accepted eagerly with a tightening grip.
You separated from him with a small cry, ribs twinging. Bradley pulled away in horror, and his dilated pupils struggled to sober up to join. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, larger hands now grappling at yours and trying to remove your grasp. “You need—ice, I’ll go get you some ice–”
“Roo, no,” you mumbled, refusing to let go of him.
He paused, and his body shivered under your touch. The familiarity of his name from your mouth seemed as comforting to him as it was to you. His lips twitched and curled, and he breathed a small sigh. The hard lines of his face grew tender as he slid his hands down to your wrists, turning and pressing a kiss to each palm.
His heart jumped and throbbed against your fingertips, and you had no doubt he could feel the same from yours. The heat of his damp cheeks had grown infinitely warmer under your touch, and for all the nights you’d spent with just a grasp on his hand, the change was more and more welcome.
“Don’t leave me again,” he pleaded against the skin of your palm, voice thick and bittersweet, like honey seeping through your ears. “I don’t think I can handle that again.”
He steeled himself against your mattress with one hand when you tugged his forehead down against yours, lips just whispering against one another. You smiled.
“Was it all the Jell-O that did you in, or…?”
“Yeah, actually,” he nodded, tongue pressed against his cheek. “It was. I hope you know we’re never having Jell-O in our house ever again.”
“Not even lime?”
“Especially lime.”
You huffed, “Fine.” You pulled away, despite how desperate Bradley was to follow you. He let you fall back against the pillows with your hand still in his grasp, and he settled onto the edge of the mattress, letting his spare hand find home in the pliant skin of your thigh. Your eyes rose to the ceiling. “But it’ll cost you.”
Soft lips brushed the back of your left hand before cold metal slipped around your finger. “One of these?”
Pairing: Bradley Bradshaw x fem!reader, Phoenix x Hangman cameo <3
Category: One-shot
Summary: You and Bradley have been successfully dating secretly for months...until your father, Maverick, walks in on the middle of a makeout session.
Warnings: Making out, steamy foreplay, language, drinking
You moaned as Bradley pushed you back against the lockers, the sound muffled by his mouth on yours. His hands were everywhere, under your shirt, gripping your thighs, finding your hands and tugging them above your head.
“Bradley,” you gasped, tilting your head back as he attacked your neck with open-mouthed kisses. “Bradley, baby, they’re gonna, gonna come in,” you bit back another moan as he sucked on your pulse point. “Gonna see us.”
“Shh, no one will see, everyone’s gone.” Bradley pulled back enough to rest his forehead against yours, searching your face. “Are you okay? Wanna stop?”
“No,” you shook your head and sighed, running a hand through his hair. “I want to tell him.”
“And get me shot out of the sky?”
“Are you saying you can’t outgun him?”
“Your dad is Captain Maverick Mitchell, no one can outgun him.”
“I could.” You smirked.
“You’re not the one he’s going to kill when he finds out,” Bradley smirked back, gripping your thighs and lifting you up easily. “That his precious little daughter is dating an older man,”
“By four years.” Your legs wrapped around him easily, lips pressing against the scars on the side of his face.
Bradley’s breathing stuttered. “Our dads were friends. Pretty sure I’m breaking some kind of unspoken code or something.”
“It’s not just you who’s breaking it.” You giggled, biting your lip when Bradley chuckled. God he was so hot.
Bradley moved to sit on the bench running between the rows of lockers, hands sliding up your back as he captured your lips once more. Your eyes closed as you relaxed into him, into the man you had loved in secret for the past eight months.
“Baby,” he moaned, a hand moving to massage the inside of your thigh.
You whimpered in response. “Roos,” your hands slipped up under his shirt.
A soft laugh caused both of you to freeze. “Roos?” Maverick appeared around the corner of the lockers to lean against the doors. “She calls you Roos?”
“Oh, shit.” Bradley stood straight to attention, looking down as you fell to the ground with a yelp. “Bradley!”
“Sorry,” Bradley helped you up, the two fumbling against each other while Maverick looked on with a smile.
“Dad, I can explain,” you turned around and braced yourself between him and Bradley. “He’s, uh, we’re, it’s just, ever since I joined the academy we’ve-,”
“We’re in love, sir.” Bradley’s statement caused you to look back at him with wide eyes. “I promise, my intentions are strictly long-term, I want to date her and then I plan on marrying her.”
“What?” You squeaked.
“I know, Bradley.”
You whirled back around. “What??”
“Guys, Goose and I wrote the book on secret relationships. Who do you think helped him sneak off base so he could go see your mom? Who do you think first discovered that the locker room after hours was the best place to-,” Maverick cut himself off with a cough and a little gesture between the two of you. “You know.”
You stared at him, still trying to process. “You’re…taking this surprisingly well.”
Maverick smiled at you, his eyes sparkling with that special light that only showed when he was looking at you, his daughter. “Honey, if you’re going to be with anyone, he’s the one I’d want you to be with.”
“Dad,” you smiled, eyes growing glassy as the weight of an eight-month long secret lifting off your shoulders.
“Love you, sweetheart.” Maverick straightened and coughed again. “All right. You can…carry on.” He turned to leave before another thought him. “Bradley,”
“Yes sir?”
“Hurt her and I’ll be using live ammunition during our next training session.”
“Yes sir.”
And with that Maverick left, leaving you and Bradley alone once more.
You turned around slowly to find Bradley looking as stunned as you. “Did that…Did that just happen?”
“Uhh, yeah,” Bradley ran a hand through his hair. “I think it did.”
# # # # #
Hangman looked up from the pool table when you and Bradley entered the Hard Deck, a grin lighting his already smug expression. “Well, well,” he gave a nod as the two of you approached. “Bradshaw. Mitchell.”
“Seresin,” you looked him up and down. “What, we’re on last name basis now?”
“Would you prefer I call you both Bradshaw?” Hangman smirked as he looked down at Bradley’s hand securely interlocked with yours. “How long has this been going on?”
“About eight months, babe.” Phoenix clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll explain when you’re older.”
“Called it!” Fanboy crowed, turning to punch Coyote in the arm. “You owe me fifty bucks.”
“You guys bet on this?” You looked from them to Bob, watching as he fumbled a wad of cash out of his pocket. “Bob, what are you doing?”
“Umm, I lost.” He gave a sheepish grin. “I thought you were just close friends because you grew up together.”
Fanboy beamed. “And I said that friends don’t look at each other like you two do.”
You looked at Bradley, mirroring his bemused smile. “I need a drink, baby.”
“Yes ma’am.” He pressed a quick kiss to your forehead, right in front of everyone.
You blushed, grinning after him as he made his way through the crowd.
When you looked back you found Phoenix smirking at you. “Got it bad, huh?” Her hand rubbed idly against Hangman’s shoulder.
You could nothing but nod with a deep, satisfied sigh. “Terminally, I think.”
“So much for that unspoken friend code thing, huh babe?” Hangman looked over at Phoenix.
“Didn’t stop us.” Phoenix grinned before kissing Hangman hard, not breaking even when Bradley returned with two beers in tow.
“Oh yeah,” you began, looking up at him as you accepted the beer. “I like this.”
