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When the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell passed the House, the Senate, and was signed into law by Obama, all that was sent in their group chat was a series of exclamation points. No one dared say anything quite yet—not until it was fully rolled back, not until they were sure it wouldn’t be yanked away at the last minute without everyone who outed themselves in the meantime unceremoniously discharged.
Nearly nine months later, in September of 2011, the chat woke up to a picture of Callie’s hand with a sparkling new halo cut diamond ring on her fourth finger.
OMG congrats!!!! Natasha sent to the chat before opening up her private text chain with Bradley. tell me about them on leave? she asked.
She’d known for close to two years now that her boyfriend was raised by his mother and three fathers. Nick Bradshaw died when Bradley was a toddler, but the two unnamed men who stepped up and helped Carole, who loved him as their own, were a mystery to Natasha. She knew random facts about them that Bradley had let slip by accident, but not which characteristics belonged to which man, or what they do for the Navy that’s had Bradley so tightlipped for years.
yeah , he texted back. Right underneath it popped up another message, i asked if i could bring you to the wedding whenever they have it and they said yes.
She knew their relationship was solid, that they were serious, but seeing that one of the first thoughts on his mind when hearing his parents were getting married was to include her made her grin helplessly.
N: i’d love to
N: wait, you HAVE to introduce me first, i can’t meet them for the first time at their wedding that’s insane
B: you already kind of know them, just not as my dads
B: and they know who you are
N: ????????!!
B: i’ll explain more on leave
B: do you want to come to our house in san diego instead of meeting halfway? neither of them will be home it’ll be low pressure
Natasha and Bradley already had nebulous plans to spend their miraculously overlapping leaves together, but nothing solid. Usually they met up wherever was most convenient and looked fun, but this was another step she’d been waiting to take since he charmed her parents at their Academy graduation.
She respected the secrecy his dads had to live by, but the curiosity about the Bradshaw family history that she’d tried to tuck away in the back of her mind had kept burning. She didn’t want to get too far ahead of herself, but these could be the future in-laws if things kept going as well as they were currently going.
N: sure! where will they be tho?
B: dad pissed off another admiral and got sent off to fly milk runs to nowhere again & other dad has to go to some brass conference that i’m technically not supposed to know about
B: anyways i’ll text you our address & we’ll call later so we can talk flight details
An active duty pilot and some sort of high-ranking officer that she apparently already knew and who knew of her. Intimidating, but she would never have made it this far in life if she were one to back down from a challenge.
-
Her flight got into San Diego around seven, but by the time she deplaned and met Bradley’s car at Arrivals, the sun had almost fully set.
“We can go out to eat tonight, or we can just figure something out with what’s in the fridge at home,” he offered, after putting her bag in the back and kissing her hello.
“Let’s just go home,” she said. “I’ve been trying not to say anything so you wouldn’t feel bad about keeping secrets, but I have to know what’s going on with your family.”
“Desperate for the ‘hot goss?’” he teased her in a fake valley-girl voice.
“ Yes . You’re making it sound like it’s gonna be, like, state secrets!”
“I honestly don’t know if you’ll believe me without photographic proof,” he said.
“I trust you! I’ll believe you!”
He kept his eyes on the road but shook his head. “No, you’ll think I’m lying, or worse—a nepotism hire.”
“What the hell? Is one of your dads, like, the goddamn Secretary of the Navy?”
“No!” he laughed out. “It’s just–God, you know what? You’ll see when we get home. It’s only a couple more minutes once we get off the Five.”
“I’ll be waiting patiently,” she sing-songed, fluttering her eyelashes at him mockingly.
Natasha kept poking him in the shoulder for the rest of the drive while he tried to keep up conversation about anything but his dads. She was a younger sibling, and very well-practiced at annoying people, but he kept redirecting the conversation until they finally pulled into the driveway.
“You’re not gonna like, blindfold me on the way in or anything, right? Keep up the surprise ‘til it kills me?”
“Nah, we don’t keep any incriminating pictures on the first floor. Too easy to get caught if someone shows up by surprise,” he said.
There were no pictures of his dads in the entryway after all, but there were nearly enough pictures of Bradley in varying stages of life so as to constitute a shrine to him.
“Holy shit, you had braces?” she exclaimed gleefully. “And look at you in your cute little tee-ball outfit, oh my God!”
“Yeah, yeah, okay, keep it up and you won’t be invited back. Can I convince you not to make fun of me in my awkward stages if I finally tell you about my dads?”
Natasha abandoned her inspection of his embarrassing middle school pictures immediately and turned on her heel with a focus that, frankly, frightened him.
“Yes. Show me now. I have to know, I’ve been waiting for this for two full years.”
She followed him up the stairs at a half-jog, adding, “You know, when I take you home to meet the rest of my family, I’ll show you all of my embarrassing pictures, too. Equal exchange, babe.”
“What, like when you used to wear your hair pulled straight back in elementary school and your ears stuck out? Your mom already showed me those at graduation.”
“What? Traitor!” she cried, pulling her hair forward unconsciously.
“Don’t worry, you grew into them. I think they’re cute.”
“You’d better,” she grumbled.
They turned the corner after hitting the landing at the top of the stairs, and she found multiple large service photos hung on the wall.
“Bradley, that’s Vice Admiral Kazansky.”
Holy shit .
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “And that’s my other dad, Pete Mitchell,” he added.
She closed her eyes in shock and turned to him slowly.
“As in, Captain ‘ Maverick ’ Mitchell?”
“Uh huh.”
“I need a second,” she said.
“Yeah. I’ll go put your bag down in my room.”
Natasha watched him walk further down the hallway and open a door at the end of the hall. What the fuck . No wonder he was so secretive about his dads. She turned her back to the portraits so she could think for a single second without her mind going blank at the bombshell Bradley had just dropped on her. When she was in high school, her mom had helped her learn meditative practices after she had stressed herself to sickness worrying about grades and NJROTC and extracurriculars and sports and getting a Congressional Representative to nominate her for the Academy. She had spent plenty of time then overwhelmed, but this situation right now was really knocking on the door to take one of the top spots. She clenched her fists tight and controlled her breathing while Bradley slowly ambled back up the hall toward her.
“So…processed yet?” he questioned.
“Not really, no. That’s my boss’ boss’ boss. And that’s the only guy in the Navy with three confirmed air-to-air kills.” she responded, sounding a lot more calm than she really felt.
“Well, I know it’s a lot–” he started.
“A lot?! Are you fucking kidding me?!”
“Nat,” he said, wide-eyed.
“No, no, it’s fine. Just had to get it out of my system. I’m good now. I’m good.”
“Too good to be true?” he asked.
“ Don’t quote Seresin at me, that distraction is not going to work.”
They both stood in silence for a minute. The Iceman and Maverick were Bradley’s dads. This was the answer that Natasha had been waiting for for years, but it raised about a thousand more questions instantly.
“What were they like?” the question almost burst out of her after the lull in conversation. “The only time I’ve ever seen Admiral Kazansky in person, he was absolutely screaming at a pair of lieutenants on my ship about some stupid maneuvers that almost caused a friendly fire incident. He wasn’t, like, a drill sergeant when you were growing up, right?”
“Oh, no, Dad was great. I mean, a lot of times he had to be the responsible one because Mom and Dad would let a lot slide if they thought it was funny, but he wasn’t crazy strict or anything.”
“Hold on, did you call both of them ‘dad?’ Doesn’t that get confusing?” she asked.
“Yeah, I mean, I do have to clarify with ‘Ice’ and ‘Mav’ who I mean, but it’s a long story why,” he shook his head.
“No, I wanna hear it, I’m here to find out everything about you guys.”
“Okay, well here’s their deal. My dads love each other a lot, like it was embarrassing when I was a kid and they wouldn’t stop calling each other pet names, but they’re also literally the most competitive assholes I’ve ever met in my entire life. They’ve been arguing for actually twenty-five years about who’s the better pilot. Okay?”
“Okay?” she answered bewilderedly.
“Okay. So when I was maybe six or seven, I really wanted to learn how to pitch before I moved up from tee-ball to little league, and Mom thought that would be a good activity for my dads to help me with when they got home from deployment. Anyways, while they were watching me one day, I asked for ‘dad’ to come play catcher for me and they argued for a solid ten minutes about who I meant by ‘dad.’”
Natasha snorted at that. She was pretty sure she could see where this was headed.
“By then, I’d come back in from the yard asking why they were taking so long and they asked me, who was the dad I was calling for. And I’m seven, I don’t understand the passive aggression happening, and I just say, ‘either.’ So they forced each other to take turns being catcher for the rest of the afternoon, and neither of them has ever, ever conceded the fight about who gets to be ‘Dad’ and who picks a different title.”
“So you guys have just lived like this for twenty years?” It was hardly a question, the judgment flat in her voice. “I think this leave is gonna explain a lot about you.”
“Nat,” he whined.
“No, no, I get it now. You’re a sweetheart when you want to be, but you’re also a stubborn jackass when you think you’re right.”
He wrapped his arms around her and nuzzled into her neck from behind.
“No, come on, be nice to me, I’m sharing all the secrets you wanna know right now. If you’re mean to me, I might just clam up,” he joked.
She squirmed in his arms before giving it up as a lost cause.
“Fine, you’re a total sweetheart all the time and never a stubborn jackass even though you’ve literally started arguments with a superior officer about flight technique on multiple occasions.”
“Dad would be proud of me,” he remarked.
He kissed her cheek and pulled back to just an arm around her waist.
“Alright, we’ve got four billion photographs in this house, what do you wanna see next?”
“Dinner?” she prompted.
Bradley laughed. “Yeah, I think I can find you some dinner, Nat.”
He stopped at a little shelving niche in the wall filled with more pictures and opened a drawer, pulling out a small photo album before guiding them back down the stairs. Natasha followed him to the kitchen and perched on a counter stool as she was gently handed the album.
Bradley pulled open the fridge doors and peered inside, shifting things and opening drawers.
“Okay, looks like we’ve got some leftover spaghetti and pizza, or we’ve got ingredients for omelets or sandwiches or something.”
“Just throw the Italian in the microwave, that’s easy,” she responded.
While he busied himself finding plates and opening tupperware, she opened the album. The very first picture was a poorly taken selfie of Nick Bradshaw and a very young Pete Mitchell. Bradley had shown her pictures of Nick and Carole before, himself looking tiny and incredibly blond in all of them, but she’d never seen a candid of Maverick Mitchell before. God, he looked young. And small, especially compared to Goose. Me and Pete, May ‘82 was scribbled into the white space at the bottom of the polaroid. On the next page was a picture of Maverick with an arm slung over Carole, her sundress just beginning to show a bump. Pete, Carole, and Baby Bradshaw, November ‘82 . The next dozen or so pages showed Maverick, Carole, baby Bradley, and occasionally Goose in varying combinations, all of them smiling.
She faintly noticed Bradley putting a plate down in front of her, and took a sip of the glass of water he placed next to it, but kept slowly turning the pages, running her fingers over the white edges of the photos.
“Dad loved that camera,” Bradley broke in. “Took it everywhere, even up in the Tomcats sometimes. Usually he’d just send us back landscapes from up high, but right before he and Dad got sent to Top Gun, he got this one picture through the canopy of Mav flipping off a MiG. That one got passed around a lot, because no one actually believed Mav about the MiG encounter. I think it’s a couple pages ahead of where you are right now.”
She flipped until she found it, a polaroid looking far more battered around the edges than any of the others, and there was Maverick’s striped helmet in the foreground, his middle finger up, extremely close to another jet.
“Hey, eat a little bit before you keep going. You’re gonna get hangry.”
“But I don’t wanna get any sauce or grease on your pictures,” she said.
“You could just pause on the investigation for five minutes, they’ll still be there when you’re done.”
“You are a mean man, Bradley Bradshaw. Taunting me with the juiciest secrets in the Navy and then expecting me to pick between dinner and seeing pictures of my commanding officers when they were young and stupid.”
“I don’t think Ice was ever stupid,” he replied.
“No defense for Captain Mitchell!” she noted gleefully.
“Eat your food and I’ll answer more questions,” he laughed out.
The album was set aside with a clean napkin as a bookmark while they ate. She thought about all the questions that had been eating at her since she’d noticed him covering things up at the Academy. A lot of them answered themselves once she knew who his dads were, like who was Jewish and who was vaguely Christian, or which one of them he’d gotten taller than by the time he started high school.
“Okay,” she considered, “I’m assuming Iceman’s the one who taught you how to drive based on the motorcycle I just saw Maverick on in the album, but who taught you how to fly?”
“Oh, well, Mom and my dads both agreed Ice should be the one to teach me how to drive and fly, because he actually follows the rules and safety limits of vehicles, so he technically was the one who taught me how to take the plane up and do everything and land. But Mav thinks you’re not actually a great pilot until you learn how to break the rules and still win, so he’d sneak me onto base sometimes when they were demonstrating maneuvers that Ice didn’t think I should know yet.”
She laughed, imagining a teenage Bradley being hidden from superior officers by his own dad. It was quietly thrilling, she thought, to talk openly about his childhood. To hear the stories she should have heard years ago when she’d told him about her life, her parents and her siblings and her childhood firsts. She finished her plate and took it over to the sink, suddenly bitter about how much of his life had been necessarily devoted to secrecy. It wasn’t fair that Callie and Julia had to hide for years, or Bradley’s dads for decades. It made her feel childish to be complaining about the unfairness of the world, and a smaller part of her felt ashamed that there was a voice in her head whispering about how it had affected her and Bradley’s relationship as well. She was usually proud to be Navy, but while she scrubbed her dishes and put them in the dishwasher, she allowed herself half a minute to be resentful of its role in making the people she loved afraid.
She washed her hands and dried them, letting the anger pass. There was only so much time she and Bradley had together before they had to go back to their separate postings, and she wasn’t going to waste right now brooding when there was still half a photo album full of happy memories she wanted Bradley to explain to her.
She turned back to find Bradley had moved himself and the photo album to the living room she could see through the wide cased opening. He’d sat on the couch and pulled the throw blanket off the back for her. It was never truly that cold in southern California, no matter what time of year it was, but Natasha had always had cold feet, no matter what. She joined him on the couch, taking the blanket from him and sticking her toes underneath his thighs, which he accepted with only a faint grimace. She’d trained him well.
“Okay, Admiral’s son, show me the rest of the goods,” she teased.
“Oh, you’re going to be insufferable about this, aren’t you. Thanks, Obama.”
She laughed and pulled the album closer into her lap.
“So we were right before they went to Top Gun, right?”
“Yeah,” Bradley answered, “summer ‘86.”
The first photo when she turned the page was of Goose and Maverick in dress whites, smiling giddily outside a beach cottage. “Us two characters” going to Top Gun! it read.
The next couple pictures were the two of them at the beach, or at the O-Club, or just landscapes by the shore. One showed Maverick with a blonde woman in professional dress, the caption written in a way that she could tell was supposed to be funny, if only the reader was in on the joke.
On the other side of the page was a candid picture of half a dozen aviators from the Top Gun class in flight suits, relaxing in some lounge at Miramar. Bradley started pointing out faces to go with the callsigns written at the bottom.
“Okay, so that’s Hollywood and Wolfman, there’s Slider, and Sundown, and my dads.”
Maverick, she could pick out instantly because of all the photos she’d just seen of him with the Bradshaws, but was that Iceman right there? Hm.
“What’s that look on your face? You recognize any of them?” he asked.
“Nah, just thinking, ignore me” she denied.
“Nat, come on, what’s up?” he asked again.
“It’s just…your dads were hot.”
“Natasha, no,” he breathed in horror.
“You asked! You could’ve ignored it when I told you to!”
“I didn’t think that’s what you were gonna say! Oh my god…” he trailed off.
“It’s okay, babe, you’re hot too, don’t worry about it.”
“I can’t let you meet them anymore, you’re gonna leave me for one of my dads.”
“I could leave you for both of them,” she offered.
“Natasha!”
“I’m kidding, Bradley, I’ve got the only guy I need right here.” she consoled. “But I do wanna see the rest of these pictures. Chop, chop, babe.”
“I’m skipping the volleyball tournament, you’ve lost your viewing privileges on those.”
God , he was cute when he pouted. Time to make the most of their time together. She closed the album, pulling the napkin back off the coffee table to mark their place, and made her way toward the stairs.
“What, you’re giving up because you can’t see them shirtless?”
“I think I can wait until tomorrow. Get up these stairs, sailor, it’s you I wanna see shirtless,” she called out behind her.
“Yes, ma’am, Lieutenant Trace, ma’am!” he barked.
He grabbed the album to put back in its drawer upstairs. It really could wait until tomorrow.