Chapter Text
maybe i'm the same as all those men
writing songs of all they're dreaming
but would you tell me if you want me?
The night of junior prom, Jughead realizes something.
He realizes that not only can he touch Betty Cooper – but that if he does, she will not pull away.
He had not asked her to be his date, exactly. Nor had she asked him, exactly. Instead, when Kevin had announced at the lunch table that he was bringing his new boyfriend from Southside High as his date, Betty had pouted, lips puckered around the straw of her lemonade. “We always go together.”
Kevin shrugged. “You could go with Jughead.”
His name so rarely came up in the context of school dances that Jughead had frozen, unsure how to respond. Thankfully, before the silence could stretch on for too long, Veronica had dropped into the seat beside Kevin with a weary sigh and launched into a diatribe about how unfair it was that her AP Euro teacher had scheduled an exam for the morning after The Matchelorette finale.
He assumed that the suggestion had been forgotten until they were filtering out into the hallway before fifth period, and Betty tugged on the loose zipper on his backpack. The rosy flush on her cheeks as she gazed up at him was so distracting that at first he missed what she said entirely.
“I said, would you want to go? To prom?” She shrugged, looking past his shoulder at something down the hall. “I know you’re not really into that sort of thing, but – I think it’d be fun.”
For whatever reason, he’d agreed.
So he goes through the motions. He procures a suit, and borrows his dad’s truck. He purchases a corsage that he keeps overnight in a plastic container in his fridge, and then pins it to Betty’s dress in her living room. He poses awkwardly with her in front of her fireplace so her father can fiddle around with his new iPhone and take a series of uncomfortable snapshots that will probably be lost to the digital abyss a few years from now when he upgrades to a newer model. It is silly, and clichéd, and more expensive than he’d anticipated.
But it’s not all bad. At the dance there are cupcakes and sweet, fizzy punch. His friends clutch their chests in overdramatic shock when they see him enter the gymnasium wearing his suit (though he quickly ditches the jacket, and rolls up his shirtsleeves past his elbows before anyone can notice they’re actually a little too short for his lanky arms).
Betty grabs his hand and drags him out onto the dance floor, and she smiles and laughs as he shuffles his feet and swivels his hips, bumping into the other sweaty, moving bodies around them. When a slow song starts to play, she settles herself into his arms like it’s as natural as breathing, placing his hands at her waist, looping her own around his neck.
With her body close and warm beneath his fingertips, Jughead realizes that not only can he touch Betty Cooper – he likes touching her.
(It’s not until a few weeks later, when she starts showing up at the Twilight projector booth every Friday night, that he begins to wonder if maybe, maybe Betty likes it when he touches her, too.)
.
Archie drops his bag on the kitchen island and pulls his phone out of his pocket, swiping it open. “Pepperoni and mushroom?”
“Sounds good.” Jughead sets his backpack on one of the counter stools and digs through it for the clean pair of boxers he’d brought along to the swimming hole. “I’m gonna change.”
Archie’s “powder room,” as Mrs. Andrews always called it, is nearly the same size and shape as the small bathroom in the trailer Jughead shares with his dad. Unlike their bathroom, however, it contains only a toilet, a sink, two embroidered hand towels, and some potpourri in a jar that Jughead is almost certain has sat unchanged since they were in middle school. Right around the time when she moved to Chicago, leaving Fred and Archie behind.
It wasn’t long after Jughead’s own mother had left, but that was where the parallels ended. Archie’s parents had sat him down on their living room sofa, and broken the news gently, and talked it through. They met with a family counselor. They signed papers that made it official where Archie would live, how often he’d visit his mom, and how often she’d come to visit him.
No one had bothered to tell Jughead that his parents were splitting up. Gladys Jones was just there until one day, she wasn’t anymore.
Years later, the potpourri has lost its scent; all Jughead really remembers is that it used to make his nose itch. He sheds his swim trunks, his damp skin clammy against the air, and lets his mind drift instead to its favorite topic as of late: Betty.
He’s found himself observing her more closely these past few months – ever since prom, if he’s being honest with himself. Today, swimming with their friends, she’d seemed…jumpy. Distracted. Squirrelly, even, though it’s a word he’s surprised to find himself associating with Betty, who is so often the steady one amongst their circle of friends. She had rebuffed his invitation to join them for pizza and video games, two vices she was normally happy to indulge in when her mother wasn’t watching her diet and exercise like a hawk.
All the same, he has no reason to doubt that she was drained after spending hours swimming and basking in the August sun. He’s tired, too – the good kind of tired, where he can already tell that as soon as his head hits the pillow tonight, he’ll fall right to sleep.
By the time he emerges from the bathroom, Archie has relocated to the living room, thumbs flying over the screen of his phone. The Xbox is booting up on the television. Jughead collapses onto the sofa beside him, and nudges his friend in the arm.
“Did you order?”
“Yep. Twenty minutes.”
The start screen loads, but Archie makes no move to play. Jughead elbows him again, harder this time. “Think you can tear yourself away from Veronica long enough to lose miserably?”
Archie elbows him back, but continues tapping away at the screen. “Look who’s talking.”
Jughead turns on his controller. “What?”
“ Do you wanna come over, Betty?” Archie mimics, his voice high and reedy.
Jughead scowls at the tv, not daring to make eye contact. “Betty likes video games.”
“You like Betty.”
Scrolling over to the start button, Jughead says nothing. If even Archie has noticed, there isn’t much point in denying it.
The more salient question is whether Betty herself has noticed.
While the game loads, Archie glugs from a bottle of Gatorade. “You should ask her out.”
“If only it were that simple,” Jughead mutters.
“It is that simple, Jug.”
It’s not what Jughead would call a compelling argument.
And yet.
He thinks about what Archie said all night.
He decides that maybe, for once in Archie’s life – a life that has included taking two different girls as dates to the same school dance, and no less than three attempts to chug a gallon of milk in one go – his best friend knows what he’s talking about.
He makes a plan to ask her out that Friday at the drive-in, but she’s a no-show for the first time all summer, homebound with an ill-timed headache. Disappointed, he opens the box of Milk Duds he’d bought for her from the concession stand and shakes a few into his palm. He had a great segue in mind that won’t make any sense if he doesn’t do it while they’re watching a movie together.
It doesn’t matter. When she says yes the next day, sitting at her family’s kitchen table, he forgets why he was so hesitant to ask her in the first place.
When she’s pressed up against him in the cool, clear water of the swimming hole, her body warm and alive under his touch, he forgets his own name.
Kissing Betty Cooper is unlike any other kiss he’s ever had in his life.
Not that Jughead has had many kisses to compare it to. In the seventh grade there was a brief peck with Veronica at someone’s birthday party, the aftermath of a dare that had left him blushing furiously, and refusing to speak to her for a week. Then another a few years later, with Ethel Muggs – longer, wetter, with greater intention, but ultimately more for her enjoyment than his.
The gentle yield of Betty’s lips beneath his is so unlike the perfunctory brush of Veronica’s, or the unsteady probe of Ethel’s, that it may as well be a different act altogether. Her pulse flutters under his thumb, and as he slants his mouth against hers she makes the faintest sound of pleasure low in her throat. He feels like his spine is melting down through him, like only the water itself is keeping him upright.
When she pulls away, he lets her go, hands trailing after her in the water, already longing for her to come back.
When she climbs up onto the shore and shows him the teardrop on her hip, everything inside of him collapses.
.
Jughead is thirteen years old when his mother leaves.
Someday he’ll look back on what happened and think, this was inevitable . That it should have happened sooner – after the night FP broke a finger putting his fist through the wall, or the day Gladys cut her foot on the shards of a ceramic plate she’d flung against the kitchen floor.
That he couldn’t really blame her for leaving his father after years spent wondering what meant more to him: the half-moon on his hip that matched the one on hers, or the snake that curled around his bicep, inked there by choice.
Now, though. Now it’s nine o’clock on a cool Thursday night in April and FP is yelling and Jellybean is crying and Gladys is strangely silent, gliding in and out of the house as she moves the handful of bags she’s packed into the trunk of her car. Jughead is curled up on one of the kitchen chairs, arms around his knees, watching it all from a distance.
When she’s finished packing, Gladys stands in the doorway and says, “Jug, come outside for a minute.”
He hesitates, and then follows her onto the front lawn, the grass damp and prickly against his bare feet.
She lights a cigarette and takes a long drag before turning her head to exhale. Both of his parents smoked, but they had always been careful not to do it in the house. Jughead has never inhaled actual smoke, that he can remember – just the acrid smell that lingers in the air after it’s dissipated.
“Jellybean and I are going to go live with your grandparents in Ohio.” Gladys pauses. “Do you want to come?”
Jughead looks back at the house, uncertain. “Forever?”
“Maybe.” She exhales. “Probably.”
She waits for him to answer, and he realizes: she’s actually giving him the choice. Stay, or go. Him, or her.
He realizes that the fact that she is giving him a choice means she has already made hers.
“No,” he tells her. “I want to stay.”
Gladys nods, as though this is what she knew he’d say. “Go say goodbye to your sister.” When he hesitates, she gestures towards the house.
Jellybean is too little to really understand, he thinks, and she’s already crying anyway, so he wraps her in a hug and presses his face to her soft, downy hair. He hopes she won’t see that he’s crying, too.
At some point, FP must have left; his motorcycle is gone from its usual spot at the side of the driveway. Gladys stamps a kiss to Jughead’s temple and tells him to lock the front door before he goes to bed.
He sits by the window, chin resting against the back of the couch, and watches his mother and sister drive away until they reach the end of the block, where the car turns left, and he can no longer see them.
.
His father is still awake when he gets home, watching television from where he’s sprawled out along the battered orange couch that doubles as Jughead’s pull-out bed.
FP props himself up on one elbow, craning his neck to peer at Jughead over the arm of the sofa. “The hell happened to you?”
Jughead falls still in the doorway. The logical part of his brain recognizes that his clothes are more or less soaked through, because he hadn’t bothered to dry off before throwing them back onto his body. The emotional part registers that there’s genuine concern in his father’s voice.
Neither of them stands a chance against his heart – his overwhelmed, lovesick heart, which feels like a swollen balloon that’s somehow been run through a meat grinder without popping.
“I got splashed,” he says, as if it’s an answer and not the gateway to a million more questions. Then he locks himself in the bathroom, where he turns on the showerhead, peels off his damp clothes, and steps into the water before it’s even grown lukewarm.
Betty Cooper – Betty Cooper, with blonde hair and green eyes and straight As and gold earrings and lacy collars and vanilla milkshakes and straight white teeth and lips that he now knows are warm, smooth, unbearably soft –
Betty Cooper is his soulmate.
His heart jumps at the thought, one single, uncontrolled pulse of joy. Just as quickly, it sinks into the pit of his stomach. No , he corrects himself, shivering as the water flows down his back. Betty Cooper shares his mark. Which is not the same thing.
His parents shared a mark, but they’d always been unsentimental about it. It wasn’t what held them together, they insisted. And in the end, they were right.
He’d been so angry back then. Thirteen years old and abandoned, hunched over his laptop at Pop’s, typing away at the exact kind of furious manifesto that kids like Reggie Mantle imagined when they saw Jughead’s permanent scowl and worn-down sneakers. Soulmates were bullshit, love was a lie, and all that jazz.
A little more than a year ago he’d come across one of those old documents, buried deep in a folder on his desktop, and opened it out of curiosity. He’d barely made it halfway through before he deleted the whole thing in a fit of embarrassment. In the years since, his understanding of soulmates – along with his grasp of sentence structure – had evolved.
He had come to realize that his parents’ marks weren’t meaningless. The marks meant they shared something at their core. Something fundamental. But all the years in between – the growing, bending, twisting, breaking – had warped them into something no longer compatible. Pieces from two different puzzles.
And that was just life. The world was cruel to some, kind to others, but no one made it through without being changed somehow along the way: smoothed into something glossy and sleek, or battered beyond repair.
As much as he might wish for it, he and Betty are not the same.
By the time Jughead emerges from the bathroom, FP has already disappeared into his bedroom.
If there is one thing his father is good at – perhaps the only thing he’s good at, as far as parenting goes – it’s giving him privacy.
Jughead tucks a pillow against the arm of the sofa and lays down across the cushions, dragging the blanket from the back down over his legs. The couch is a pull-out, but some nights he can’t be bothered to go through the whole rigamarole, unfolding the rickety legs and creaking springs, listening to FP grumble in the morning that he can barely squeeze past the mattress to reach the front door.
He wriggles onto his back until he’s semi-comfortable, and then stares up at the ceiling, his hands crossed over his stomach beneath the blanket.
He can still picture it so clearly in his mind, like it’s a video clip set on endless repeat. The wet drops of moonlight on her skin, her fingers slowly peeling the lace away from her hip. For a moment, it had felt euphoric. His whole body had gone numb at the realization. The mark that had been a part of his body for all his life was a part of hers, too. Betty.
Betty.
A week. Betty had known for an entire week, and she hadn’t said anything.
He tries to imagine it happening the other way around. He’s self-aware enough to know that he probably wouldn’t have said anything, either.
He wonders why she did. She could have easily pretended not to know. But it’s burdensome knowledge to carry alone. He wonders, too, if she’s told anyone else. Veronica. Her sister, maybe.
He wonders if he should tell Archie, and what Archie would say if he did. Aside from some occasional, gentle ribbing, they don’t talk about that stuff.
Jughead knows that even though Archie and Veronica have said I love you to one another, they are not soulmates. It’s easy enough to put two and two together: Veronica’s strident tone whenever the subject comes up, Archie’s studied indifference as she rails against it.
Archie acts like it doesn’t bother him, but Jughead can tell that he cares.
He won’t tell Archie.
It is depressingly easy to avoid Betty for the rest of the week. If not for some key points of intersection – Archie’s house, the diner, school – their lives might unfold like parallel lines, north and south along the railroad tracks that cut through the center of town.
It’s less easy, but not impossible, to put her out of his mind during the day.
But sometimes, at night, he lets himself go.
He thinks about what sex with Betty might be like. He’s never had it; he’s never given sex all that much thought before, not in any detail, at least. But he knows what it’s like to kiss her now, and what she tastes like. He remembers the feel of her bare skin under his palms and how she clutched at him in the water while they kissed. He envisions her breasts, the dark ring of her areolas visible through the thin wet fabric of her bra.
It’s not all sexual fantasy: he thinks about holding her hand in the hallway at school, eating dinner with her family, going on dates. Maybe they’d sit side-by-side in a booth at Pop’s, and share a milkshake with the same straw. Maybe he’d borrow his dad’s truck on one of his nights off and take her to the drive-in like a regular date, sit with his back against the cab so Betty can nestle between his legs and curl up against his chest.
He’s never shared a bed with anyone other than his sister, but he pictures lying beside Betty, how her hair might look messy in the morning while she blinks at him from the other pillow. He doesn’t know for sure, but he suspects that unlike him, she’s the kind of person who’s bright-eyed from the moment she wakes up.
If he can rein his imagination in there – to the physical, to the immediate – they are mostly good thoughts. Pleasant, sweet, comforting, if unlikely.
Sometimes, though, his mind tiptoes past the edge of the world he inhabits now – high school, the trailer park, Riverdale and its environs – and into the vast, blurry abyss of his future.
There’s college, of course. Betty’s natural next step, but his own is an open question. His grades are good, but not necessarily good enough for scholarships. Will Betty want to attend the same college as him? Will she settle for something lesser than she’s earned, because it’s the only thing he can afford?
The thought of life beyond that gets even hazier. Jughead knows how to scrape by, to make the most out of very little. He’s scrappy and smart. The possibility of living a starving artist’s life has never scared him off from the prospect of making a go as a writer.
But the life he’s envisioned for himself – admittedly, more out of resignation than desire – was a solitary one. Won’t Betty want more than a one-bedroom walk-up and microwaved ramen for dinner? Doesn’t she deserve more than that?
He thinks about his mother, and the thin, hard line of her mouth the night she left.
It’s easy to avoid Betty. It’s also, he soon realizes, lonely.
He spends another Friday night alone in the drive-in projection booth. When he takes a bathroom break, he spots Fred Andrews’ truck parked in a spot towards the back, but there’s no blonde ponytail among their usual group of friends. It’s as clear a signal as any that the next move is his to make.
So the next day he untangles his bicycle from the rusted chain tethering it to the front steps, inflates the tires with a pump he borrows from the family next door, and rides it across town to the Coopers’ house.
The person who answers the door is neither the best case scenario (Betty herself) nor the worst (Alice, who still says his name like she is pausing to hold back a sneeze between syllables). It’s Polly.
Despite being fairly close in age, Betty and her sister’s friend groups had rarely overlapped growing up. Most of Jughead’s interactions with Polly Cooper over the years could best be characterized as coolly indifferent. Today, however, she does not look pleased to see him.
She snaps her gum and leans against the doorframe, eyeing him up and down in a way that makes him want to curl in on himself. “What do you want?”
She’s dressed in her Pop’s uniform, probably about to head out the door for a shift. He’d been surprised, the first time she’d appeared at the side of his booth to take his order. Polly had always been the mean sister – the one who pulled other kids’ hair when she got angry, who liked football players and gossip, whose sweet Cooper smile too often hovered just on the edge of cruelty. He has never thought of her as someone particularly well-suited to customer service.
“I wanted to see if Betty’s home,” he says, as though it isn’t obvious.
Polly lets him dangle for a few excruciating seconds, then steps aside. “Come in.” She closes the door behind him. “Wait here.”
Betty must not have given her all the details, he thinks, otherwise she wouldn’t have let him in at all. Not with her own history of soul mark-related heartbreak. He watches as she bounds up the stairs, her tight, curled ponytail bouncing as she goes. It’s an unusual look for Polly, who can usually be spotted in a crowd by her brightly colored headbands alone. From behind she looks exactly like her sister.
Jughead shoves his hands in his pockets and wanders off a few steps towards the living room. He could probably count the number of times he’s been inside Betty’s house on one hand; there was no reason to hang out here, under Alice Cooper’s strict rules and watchful eye, when next door there was Archie’s messy rec room, a space his parents had long ago ceded to dirty sneakers, cookie crumbs, and spilled sodas.
It is more or less what he remembers: orderly, tasteful, but also with the distinct impression that it is unlived in. It feels more like one of the staged living room sets at Ikea than an actual home.
He is studying the key hook by the door when Polly thuds down the stairs again. “She’s in her room.” She reaches past him to grab her keys and slips out the door before he can clarify whether that means he’s invited to come up.
After a few moments of silence, and no indication that Betty plans to come downstairs, he decides that whether or not it does, it’s his only remaining option.
He finds the door to her room shut – almost definitely Polly trying to make things more difficult for him – and he knocks lightly.
“Come in,” he hears.
Betty turns toward him from where she’s seated at her desk. What looks like college brochures are strewn over the desktop before her. Her eyes are clear, her ponytail is neat. She looks…fine. He doesn’t know why he’d imagined anything else.
Stepping further into the room, Jughead lets his eyes sweep over the walls. Betty’s bedroom is like childhood preserved in amber: pink curtains, floral wallpaper, fluffy pillows. The only sign that a teenager occupies this room is the corkboard pinned to the wall behind her desk, covered in photographs of her friends and pictures of celebrities torn from magazines.
He wonders if this is how she remembers growing up, everything soft and pastel, or if she remembers it the way he does – denim overalls and striped shirts, grubby hands and dirt under their fingernails.
“You missed Mad Max ,” he says lightly. He reaches into his backpack and pulls out a box of Milk Duds, placing it on the desk.
Guilt flickers across her face, and he feels like an asshole. Betty is not the one at fault for nearly a week of radio silence.
She rests her hand beside the box of candy, nudging it with her pinky. “I didn’t think you’d want me to come.”
Jughead tugs at the back edge of his beanie, shifting on his feet. Now that he’s here, he has no idea what to say to her.
“I can see why you’d think that,” he concedes. “But it’s not the case.” He sits gingerly on the edge of her bed, and she turns in her swivel chair towards him.
“I’m sorry,” he begins. “I know I didn’t…react well.”
“No,” she agrees quietly. “You didn’t.” Her fingers are curled around her knees, and the effect is odd, coupled with the way she’s sitting. Like she’s bracing for impact.
“You surprised me.”
“I know. I thought you’d…be happy, I guess,” she admits. “I thought you liked me.”
“I do like you.” The words spill out of him with shocking ease. The same words he’d agonized over for weeks – now little more than an afterthought, a given. They’re beside the point.
“I like you,” he repeats, softer this time.
She shakes her head a little. “But you don’t want me to be…that.”
He’s glad she doesn’t say it. There’s something embarrassing about it, the word soulmate , like just voicing it out loud is a confession of sorts.
Even so — the fact that she’d think that makes his chest hurt.
“No, it’s not — I know I’m — anyone would be —”
Jughead snaps his jaw shut. Everything is jumbled — his brain, his stomach, the word salad falling out of his mouth.
He pauses, unsure how to phrase what he means, or if it’s even something he is ready for her to know. He settles for another apology: “I’m sorry I acted like such a dick. I’m — it’s got nothing to do with you. You’re perfect.”
Nothing in her face changes, but he knows right away that it was the wrong thing to say.
“Okay.” Betty swivels back towards her desk. “I didn’t tell anyone else, if you were worried about that.”
“I thought maybe Polly knew,” he admits. “She didn’t seem very happy to see me.”
“She knows we went out together. She saw me when I got home.”
Her face angles towards the brochures scattered over the desktop. Jughead leans slightly forward, but he can only make out the one that says University of Missouri. As far as he knows, Betty has never expressed any interest in Missouri, or the South in general, but it’s probably on her list for the journalism school.
“I’m sorry.” Again. The third time around, it’s starting to sound toothless. “I didn’t tell anyone, either. Did…you want to keep it that way?”
She looks at him over her shoulder. “You mean like keep it a secret?”
A secret , like he’s ashamed of her. Is that what she thinks? Or — now that she’s had more time to sit with it all — is that how she feels about him?
“No, I just meant — between us.”
“So, a secret,” she says flatly. Betty whirls back around to face him. Gaze impassive, she shrugs. “Whatever you want is fine with me.”
Jughead’s heart pounds painfully. He hadn’t envisioned this conversation going well , exactly. But he hadn’t envisioned it like this.
“I don’t want that.”
Betty watches him, widening her eyes slightly when he doesn’t elaborate. “So what do you want? Because I –” Her voice cracks. “I thought I made it clear what I wanted.”
“You did. And I do…want…things to change.” He starts slow, feeling the words out as they come. “I knew that when I asked you to the movies. I mean, that’s why I asked you.” He swallows. “I just didn’t know they were going to change so fast. I thought…I thought we were shifting into second gear. Not, like, tenth.”
Betty bites down a watery smile. “I think you mean fifth.”
“You’re the expert.” Jughead takes a deep breath. “I think that we do want the same thing, it’s just…there are things about my life that aren’t necessarily going to match up with yours. In the long term.”
It feels insane, talking this way with a girl he’s kissed once. He’s seventeen. He hasn’t even gotten his driver’s license yet.
But it’s the responsible thing to do, he tells himself. His parents never questioned their connection. Look where it got them.
“What do you mean?”
He gestures half-heartedly towards the college brochures behind her. “Like — college.”
Betty leans forward slightly, her gaze suddenly intense. “You can go to college if you want to. You’re such an incredible writer, and there’s always financial aid. And scholarships. I’ll help you.”
“But — that’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“It’s —” He sighs. “I’m not…I don’t want you to wake up twenty years from now and wonder where your whole life went because of me.”
She sits back. “Why would you even think that?”
“Because — I think that my mom never really stopped and asked herself if it was what she wanted. She just decided that she was with my dad, and that was that. And she obviously regretted it.”
Surprise flickers in Betty’s eyes. “Your parents are soulmates?” Jughead nods. “Wow.”
“Obviously they’re not the greatest proof of concept.”
“Mine aren’t.” Betty’s eyes flit towards the open door, and he realizes that he’d never actually asked if her parents were home. “They acted like we were the perfect little family my whole life. Now they’re off at some couple’s therapy retreat to pretend they don’t despise each other.”
“So we’re all just doomed, I guess.”
He’s joking — sort of — but Betty shakes her head, reaching forward to clasp his hands. His heart jumps into his throat.
“We’re not our parents, Jug,” she says, voice quiet but firm. “I’m not your mom, and you’re not your dad.”
Without warning, heat prickles at the backs of his eyes. Jesus . All this, and now he’s going to cry, too.
Letting go of his hands, she stands from her chair and settles next to him on the bed.
“I think about…what we could be. And it’s scary, a little bit. We’re so young. But it makes me feel…excited. Like there’s this whole world ahead of us.” Her knee touches his thigh, just barely. “I don’t think that us being in each other’s lives could ever be a bad thing.”
She’s watching him with serious eyes. He thinks his heart might explode if he looks back at her for too long. He swallows down the lump in his throat.
“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do next,” he admits.
Betty cracks a smile. “We don’t have to do anything,” she says. “We can just…go on dates, and act like a couple of high schoolers.”
He huffs a laugh. “Well, your parents aren’t home.”
Her lips quirk in surprise, and Jughead flushes. He hadn’t really meant anything by it, but it’s not like he’s opposed.
"Juggie." Her voice is low and soft in his ear, the way it had been at the swimming hole last week. "Do you want to be alone with me?"
He draws back to look at her eyes, her mouth — the way her lips are just barely parted as she looks back at him — and decides there is only one possible way to answer that question.
Their second kiss is gentler than the first had been; he wants to impart his contrition. He keeps his palms flat against the comforter of her bed. When she pulls back, her eyes stay closed for a beat longer than he expects, a small smile forming on her lips.
"I like doing that," she confesses, her cheeks flushing pink.
"Me too." Jughead allows himself to touch her hand, stroking his thumb along her wrist. "Were you planning on doing anything today?"
"Not really."
Betty half-turns her head towards the desk, and he finds himself struck dumb by the shape of her profile. God, she's pretty. And she wants him . She wants him, and they share the same soulmark. It seems impossible. Like he's been playing his life on hard mode all this time, and just stumbled upon a cheat code.
"We could watch a movie or something," she continues. "Oh, or go to Pop's. I don't know." Her nose wrinkles. Adorable. "That's what we always do."
Jughead coughs when he realizes she's waiting for him to say something. "That's okay. I like all those things."
He feels stupid saying it, all his hard-earned eloquence slipping through his grasp. Betty deserves soliloquies, speeches; she deserves his very best.
But she looks pleased, anyway, so: good enough.
“Okay.” She stands up from the bed and takes his hand, turning towards the door. “Let’s go.”
tbc