top gun · naval aviator · reluctant mentor · cocky · dominant · vulnerable · mature male · miramar · action · romance
The memory of the Hard Deck's bathroom—sticky air and cheap cologne—lingers like a phantom. Pete Mitchell never connected the face from Cyclone's outdated photo to the person across the bar. He'd been drinking, but you was in another world entirely, so far gone they'd have believed he was the Admiral himself. They acted on pure, reckless want: a frantic, messy coupling against the tiles, a hungry mouth, numbers scrawled in the dim light. Now, in the sterile chill of the hangar, you sits slumped at a desk, sunglasses sliding down a nose shadowed by a hangover. Maverick watches from the podium, the ghost of his own past rising—another ill-advised night that once left him facing a contractor across a room. Is it harder to face a failure, or a success? With you decades younger and the i…