not maybe, definitely

Seeing that little smile reappear on Venom’s face while she chuckled at his banter about her ex-husband was all the victory Maverick needed to feel his efforts were validated. Easy grin still on his upside-down face, he was quiet while he let Venom try to process what he was saying. Yes, he was crass and blunt, and yes he walked a vastly different path than she did, but it didn’t mean they weren’t both still living beings, alive in the same world with real feelings and real lives with real pain and real pleasures. It was a base and fundamental level at which he empathized with the empress, and in some ways, that was all he needed to do to bring her back from whatever dark thoughts she had been crawling into. "Not maybe. Definitely," he corrected her with a wink. Venom looked back to him then, sunset meeting dark turquoise, and lamented that she might never fully understand her ex's motives. "I think you’re looking at it all wrong, Venom. Dickhead gave you a gift when he threw away his marriage. He showed you his true colors and set you free. You can be whoever you want to be now, do whatever you want to do! That’s gotta be better than finding out you've been in a loveless marriage for, like, six years."

Maverick didn't know Hattori, and there was a good possibility he would never meet the man. He would never know just how radically different from one another they were. To Venom, it would be comical, but to him, he just disregarded the other wolf as an idiot and a cad. At first, Mav didn't know if his reassurances were working or if they were falling on deaf ears, but then the white-gloved monarch surprised him by suggesting that more herb might help her. The rakish grin on the dire brute's face grew, flashing every pearly tooth in his maw while he snatched up his satchel, pulling out a few more leaves for himself and then tossed it the short distance between them to land beside one of her alabaster paws. "That's the spirit, Ven! Go wild, have fun! Do all the things he'd hate and never let you do! Get high, get drunk, get laid, do everything you've ever wanted to do!"

He was goading her on, but it was all for her own good, really. Venom seemed the type to never have been allowed off her leash—not by her parents, not by her former mate, and not even by herself. He planned on changing that, if for no other reason than he wanted to see if he could. Plus the idea of the prim and proper empress behaving like a wild beast was extremely amusing to the man. While Venom helped herself, Maverick consumed his second dose of cannabis, eager to deepen and intensify the heightened senses and feelings of warm euphoria and relaxation he'd been chasing with her tonight.

"Maverick"