Chapter Text
however many years later (epilogue)
“Okay,” Bradley says uncertainly. “I have some notes.”
He watches Jake rolls his eyes for the nth time in the last few days. It feels like they’ve been at this forever. Jake will mince his words at any other time than this, it seems.
“First off, it’s still too long,” Bradley tells him.
“It’s the story!” Jake argues, motioning to Draft #3 of his speech as it lays between them on the table. It’s easily 10 whole pages, shoved into the smallest font Jake can read. It makes Bradley’s eyes hurt when he looks at it. Jake tells him that that’s just the bearing of love.
“It’s for the reception,” Bradley says. “People are there to celebrate and eat, not to listen to a podcast.”
Jake shrugs, and starts to shake his head. “If they don’t want to listen to a podcast about how much I love you, then they shouldn’t be invited to the wedding. Easy,” he says innocently. “See? Fixed it.”
Bradley huffs, and purses his lips in order not to smile. “Fix it for real,” he asks of Jake.
“Fine,” Jake grumbles. He starts to pen some notes into the margins of his packet.
“Thank you. Secondly,” Bradley says, “the last whole page is way too fucking explicit. Do not laugh,” Bradley chides as Jake flashes a grin. “Everybody we know is going to be there. You cannot say that my body seemed to melt into yours in front of your mom. That’s my future mother-in-law,” Bradley says, exasperated.
“Why not?” Jake asks. “I think she’d love it. She always taught me to be a loverboy.”
“No,” Bradley says dryly. “Not happening.”
“You’re the worst, Bradshaw,” Jake complains. He starts to run his red pen through a few lines at the end of the speech, although he’s shaking his head as he does it.
“You use that while you can,” Bradley tells him. “It’s gonna be Bradshaw-Seresin soon, you asshole.”
“That’s only if you let me finalize one of my speech drafts.”
“Not until you cut out the page about us fucking!” Bradley tells him.
“Boo,” Jake laments. “How am I supposed to remember then?”
Bradley rolls his eyes. “You can quite literally relive it anytime you want, baby.”
Jake quirks and smile, and Bradley watches as his crosses over words on his draft slowly become loopy doodles. “Anytime?” Jake asks innocently, less prominent but still smooth dimples poking through his cheeks. He bites slightly at his bottom lip, and Bradley—despite all these years—continues to fail to hold back the flush.
“Anytime after you finish your speech on how you love me,” Bradley decides, feeling wired at the edges already. This is motivation for them both.
Jake purses his lips, unsatisfied. “What if I tell you that I love you, and then we can both finish?”
Bradley grabs a pen and throws it at him, because if he doesn’t do that, he’s gonna climb over the table and mash his face in Jake’s so hard that they won’t be able to make the wedding. The wedding that is still six months away. Bradley’s gonna put them both out of fucking commission.
***
“I finished,” Jake says—not softly, but quietly—crawling into bed and draping himself over Bradley.
“Mm. The whole thing?” Bradley asks with a hum, pulling himself back from the brink of sleep. Slight stubble drags across his skin as Jake presses nosing kisses into his jaw.
“Well,” Jake mutters. “The new draft. But I took out the sex and all the euphemisms,” he bargains.
“You’re something else,” Bradley tells him as his mouth moves toward his ear.
“I’m a fiancé committed to the truth,” Jake murmurs before shutting Bradley up.
His lips press into Bradley’s, and Bradley opens his mouth under them immediately. Jake’s weight is a familiar blanket of warmth on top of him. Bradley’s ears ring as Jake bites into his mouth and moans, but Jake is taking it like a blessing, satisfied as Bradley’s hand ruck up at his t-shirt. However many times they’ve done this, it never gets old.
Jake’s not the exact same as he was all those years ago, but Bradley wouldn’t want him to be anyway. He was always beautiful, was always a charmer, was always someone Bradley wanted—but Bradley finds himself perfectly content and then some with the Jake he’s got here with him now.
The Jake with his shirt ditched into a pile of fabric at the end of their bed. With an engagement band over his finger. Even with the drafts upon drafts of wedding speeches that litter their kitchen table. It’s incredibly endearing to know that Jake has that many words he wants to say about them. (Still, though, Bradley’s asking him to cut at least 1,000. Love is impractical.)
“I love you, baby,” Bradley says, immersed in his thoughts as his hands gently trail Jake’s chest.
Jake hums. “Are you fucking me? Am I fucking you? Tell me somethin’,” he urges dramatically. “I finished my draft for this.”
Bradley rolls his eyes, even though his dick is quickly twitching to life under the blanket pooled at his hips. “Fine, just don’t say it back,” he deadpans.
“I just wrote an essay on how much I love you,” Jake says. “I’d give myself a fuckin’ A+. And to you,” he says, leaning deep into Bradley’s space, “I’d give you anything. Because I love you,” he says easily.
Bradley lets out a laugh. “Would you give me a finalized reception speech?”
“Oh my fuckin’ god,” Jake says, pushing Bradley’s shoulders into the mattress with a feigned annoyance. Bradley laughs and runs his hands up the sides of Jake’s bare torso. “I can’t believe I’m the teacher when you’re the one with all the deadlines. You know what’s due?” Jake asks. Bradley raises an eyebrow. “Sex.”
“C’mere, baby,” Bradley says, suppressing further laughter. He slots his hand into the crook of Jake’s neck and pulls him down. He can feel Jake smile into the kisses, mouths opening up against each other. “Anything for you.”
Jake hums. “You really are the best rebound I’ve ever had.”
“Thanks,” Bradley snorts.
Some things really do never change. Jake’s mouth feels the same it had felt back in college. Hot and wet, he licks into Bradley’s mouth with a fervor that he never seemed to lose. He pushes Bradley down into the mattress the same way he had onto the couch, which only makes Bradley want to fight; to get his hands on Jake all the more. The broad expanse of his chest is smooth and sweat-eliciting, familiar and warm—maybe with a few more muscles.
Bradley loves it all as much as he knows he has loved it that night, from the moment he began to look back. Maybe even more.
They decide on Jake topping because he has school the next morning, and all Bradley has is a few remote work calls. Jake mourns the decision slightly, but quickly gets over when Bradley reminds me, “Hey. You get to put your fingers in me if you want.”
The ‘if you want’ part is completely unnecessary. Jake tells him that he always wants that. Bradley figures that’s why his wedding speech reads the way it does if that’s what’s going through his brain 90% of the time.
Bradley wonders when that became both of their favorite parts.
“Jake,” he says, a little bit of a moan as Jake begins to scissor his fingers, mouth leaving marks on Bradley abs because he can do that—multitask; suck light bruises efficiently onto his skin while still fucking Bradley perfectly on his hand.
“Mm, baby?” Jake murmurs. The words ghosts over Bradley’s stomach before Jake licks the spot up, as if he’s left part of the small sentence there and needs to lap it back up.
“Do you remember—“ Bradley starts, biting down on his lip to muffle the moan that Jake’s curling fingers elicit out of him.
“Remember what, Bradshaw?” Jake coos, licking further down Bradley’s stomach, purposefully angling around his dick. Bradley huffs, pleasured and annoyed. Jake teases a third finger at Bradley’s rim.
“Bradshaw-Seresin,” Bradley wants to remind him, even if it isn’t quite official yet. But currently, he’s focusing all his willpower into not ruining the end-goal of Jake fucking him on his cock.
Instead he manages, “Do you remember when you called mousetrap? After Nat’s birthday party? When we—fuck—” Jake glides his third finger in. “When we practiced on the plastic bottle?”
“Of course, baby,” Jake says. “It’s in my speech, after all.”
Bradley doesn’t even have energy to chide Jake for that extremely inappropriate and embarrassing paragraph he’s yet to alter; his mind is swirling around one single question instead. “Were you hard?” he asks. “Were you thinking of me?”
Jake lifts his head up from Bradley’s torso, his eyes glistening and bottomless. “Baby,” he says, voice gravely and thick, “please let me fuck you.”
Jake’s cock slides into him just as deliciously as three fingers had. The slight burn is addicting, the stretch maddening. When Jake kicks them into a rhythm, his forehead against Bradley’s, Bradley asks again.
“Were you?” he asks, panting into Jake’s mouth. “Thinking of me?”
“God, Bradley,” Jake says. He pins one of Bradley’s legs and they both moan as his shifted angle hits deeper. “Of course I fuckin’ was.”
“Say it,” Bradley says brokenly. His lips brush over Jake’s, but the only thing they do is breathe.
“I was thinkin’ of you,” Jake tells him. “I watched you shove your fingers into the bottle—I fuckin’ told you to—and I was thinkin’ of you. I had to get so drunk after that,” he says, his words bleeding into Bradley’s mouth. “I swore I’d take it to the grave.”
Bradley pushes his head into the headboard, and manages a smile. “And look at us now.”
Jake grins. “Look at you now, baby. So gorgeous on my cock, just the same as when you take my fingers.”
“Jesus,” Bradley moans, his hand finding Jake’s hair to grab onto and not let go. The silver band on his ring finger shines against Jake’s mess of hair.
“It’s Jake, baby,” Jake says lowly, humming when Bradley tugs at a handful of bronde hair. “Jake Bradshaw-Seresin.”
Maybe it’s over the top to come untouched the instant that your fiancé declares himself with your soon-to-be shared, hyphenated surname. But it’s not like Bradley’s ever been normal about Jake. The engagement rings on their fingers are really just permission to keep being the way they are: abnormal, slightly unhinged, and a little in too deep but together all the way down.
Bradley wouldn’t have it any other way. Jake finishes in him with a biting kiss, and, in a deep and glowy haze, Bradley thinks for one second that this is the exact type of sex that’s worth writing about.
***
“Is it just me?” Natasha asks at the wedding. She’s hanging by Bradley and Cassandra as Javy films Jake, twirling his mom around on the dance floor. “Or was Jake’s speech, like, disgusting? Like, it wasn’t explicit, but I could see something wild in his eyes.”
Bradley snorts, and then promptly throws part of his drink back. “You should have seen the first draft,” he mutters.
“I thought it was cute,” Cass chimes. The crystalline flower she has pinned in her curls shines glitters at Bradley. It reminds him of Jake’s eyes. “I’m used to Jake complaining. Or Jake pretending not to complain while Jav and I complain for him. But all I hear about you is sweet,” she tells him. “I thought his speech showed that.”
Collaboratively, to Jake’s dismay, they had eventually gotten it down to only seven whole pages. Briefly, briefly, Bradley had almost thought about letting him keep some of their sex life in it. But his rationality had come back to him in post-orgasm clarity, despite how good Jake was at bringing him there.
Jake had booed at him, again. Bradley had made it up to him, again.
“That’s because I had him cut out all the sexual parts,” Bradley remarks, trying to hold back the smile that wants to make itself known.
Cass shrugs, as if it’s nothing less than what she’d expect. “It doesn’t take away from the fact that he loves you,” she says.
Bradley bites back a smile. “You’re right.”
“Bradley Bradshaw-Seresin,” Jake announces, calling to Bradley as he laughs his way off the dance floor. God, Bradley’s never been one for narcissism, but his name rings out beautifully, especially out of Jake’s mouth. “Remember when I told you I loved you for free?” Jake asks, getting his hands on Bradley’s suit front as Cass and Nat careen out of his way.
“Mhm,” Bradley hums.
“Well, I lied,” Jake laments. “I love you on one condition. That you come dance with your fuckin’ husband at your fuckin’ wedding.”
“Huh,” Bradley mutters, hands letting go of his drink and finding Jake’s waist. The fabric of his suit is fine against his palms. “I guess I can afford that.” Jake bites down on a grin as Bradley pushes them out towards the dance floor. “Anything for you, baby.”