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The wedding’s just starting to wind down when Amy tips back her drink, leans in towards his ear and says, quite calmly, “Can we go up to your room please?”
“Yes,” Jake blurts because well, obviously. Then almost as quickly, “Wait, why?”
“My garbagey dress is still in there,” Amy says, her breath warm on his neck, sweet with champagne. When she leans back he finds himself moving with her, keeping the distance between them at a fraction above non-existent. Just so he can still hear her over the DJ of course. That’s all. “You let me change up there earlier, remember?
“Oh.” He blinks, ignoring the tug of something that is absolutely not disappointment but just happens to feel very similar. “Of course! Yeah, let’s–”
“Why?” She’s still too close for him to see but it doesn’t matter – he can hear the smirk in her voice. “What’d you think I meant?”
“Uh…” A telltale warmth that can only be a blush starts to creep up his cheeks but she’s so close, and so warm, and she smells way too good for someone who spent her afternoon sorting through trash, so he figures he might as well just lean into the whole thing. He’s just the right side of not sober to think it’s a good idea.
“I thought you’d finally given into your overwhelming desire for me,” he says, voice low. When he turns his head to face her he feels his attempt at a smirk melt instantly into a real smile – dopey and stupid and genuine – because wow, this close, in this light, Amy actually glows.
“Yeah, you got me,” Amy says, not missing a beat, “I just can’t help myself.” She reaches out and rests her hand lightly on his tux. “It must be the jacket.”
“I knew it!” he crows, somehow managing to be both relieved and disappointed that she’s going with the joke. And maybe a little turned on at the way that she just tugged on his lapels. He contains multitudes, okay? It’s all very confusing. “Three buttons, Amy. Three.”
Amy hums a laugh low in her throat, a husky late-night kind of sound that he usually hears over a table at Shaw’s, and one that always hits him squarely in the chest. Jake curls his hands around his beer bottle, picking at the label to avoid picking at the edges of why she always makes him feel weird and warm and awesome.
“Y’know what, you don’t actually have to come up,” Amy says, eyes on his beer as she pushes her chair back and grabs her purse. “You can just give me the key if you want to finish your–”
“What? No!” That flutter he feels is not panic. Probably not. He just doesn’t want the night to end yet, that’s all. No need to examine why. “N-no, I’m done,” he lies, getting up and steering her away from the table before she can see the water-line still half way up the bottle. “I’ll come up with you.”
“Y’know, I still don’t understand why you even have a room here,” Amy says, as they wind their way over towards the lobby, waving goodnight to some of the remaining guests as they pass. “Is your apartment really so messy that you couldn’t risk Jenny Gildenhorn seeing–”
“Uhh no, thank you,” he says, stopping dead halfway across the dance floor and turning to glare at her. “My apartment is a palace and any girl would be thrilled to spend her evening there, Amy.”
“Sure it is,” she says, planting her hands on his back and shoving until he starts walking again.
“It is!” he insists, content to let her lead him. Okay, maybe more than content. Maybe he slightly, kind of … loves her hands on him? Oh boy. “I’m only staying the night because Charles and Gina made me.”
“They–”
“Made me, yeah,” he repeats, as she stops pushing and falls into step beside him again. He doesn’t miss the contact. His back is just strangely cold now. Total coincidence.
“I don’t understand.”
“Gina really wanted family to stay the night,” he elaborates, waving a hand towards the remaining guests, almost all family on one side or the other, “so they’d have no excuse not to stay until the lights went up and the bar was dry – her exact words. Apparently I count as family.” A smile tugs at his lips. “That actually might be the only thing Gina and Charles agreed on about this whole day.”
“That’s actually kinda sweet.”
“It’s expensive, is what it is,” he complains, fishing the room key out of his inside pocket. “But I couldn’t let Gina down–”
“Really? ‘Cause you’re letting Gina down right now,” the woman herself cuts in, from somewhere behind them.
“Heyyy girl,” Jake says, spinning round to face her with a winning smile that, well, loses.
“Shut it.” Gina waves a hand around the room, her nail polish glinting under the lights. “You seem to be leaving, but that can’t possibly be right since the party is still in full swing and I expressly forbade–”
“Okay, first of all, this is half-swing at best,” Jake says, looking pointedly towards the emptying dancefloor, the tables of half-finished drinks. “Quarter-swing, even. And second, I need to go give Amy her dumpster dress back.”
“Amy can get her dress herself,” Gina says, “or better, she can throw it right out.”
“Hey!” Amy objects. “It was a nice dress!”
Jake nods, a not entirely involuntary jerk of his head. What? It was a nice dress.
“Eh, this one’s better,” Gina replies, waving a hand over the dress she picked out.
Of course that makes Jake look over at the dress too. Not his fault! And Amy’s in the dress, obviously, so when he looks at the dress he’s really just looking at Amy and that’s a problem because damn it, he could do that all night. Kind of has been actually. The idea that she might have noticed makes him feel a little unsteady in a way that’s got nothing to do with the amount of champagne he consumed to get through Boyle’s toast earlier. The idea that she might not have noticed makes him feel a whole lot worse. (Multitudes, remember?)
“C’mon, just stay for one more song,” Gina wheedles, seizing her chance as Amy wanders away to say a few more farewells.
“I can’t,” Jake says, watching Amy go. In a cute, slightly wistful, and totally non-creepy way. He hopes. “C’mon, Gina–”
“Ohhhh.” Jake looks back at Gina. Her eyes are wide and he is definitely, definitely busted. “I get it.”
“What? No. No.” Now this flutter definitely is panic. “Gina, there’s nothing to ge–”
“So that’s why you finally caved and got the room! So that you and Amy could–”
“Gina!” Jake repeats, flapping his hands to get her to lower her voice. “That’s not – no–”
“I have but one request.” She clasps her hands together as if she’s praying. “Put my dress away in a really dark closet first so it doesn’t have to watch you two–”
“Gina! We haven’t – we’re not going up there to – I’m not–”
“Not what? Not still totally into Santiago?”
“No!” he says, even as his gaze strays – pathetically beyond his control – towards Amy again.
She’s saying goodnight to Charles, half-heartedly swaying beside him as he tries to convince her to dance. “Maybe?” he amends, watching Amy half-dance, half-walk herself away from the reach of Charles’ arms. “Kind of.” When Amy stumbles off the step up from the dancefloor to the carpet she laughs, trying to turn the whole thing into a twirl.
“Okay, yeah. Yes,” Jake says, folding like the half-drunk, half-in-love idiot that he is. “Just … don’t make a big deal of it, alright?”
“Oh, I’m absolutely going to.”
“Okay, well my life as I know it is over,” Jake says, throwing a grimace at Gina that only makes her smile widen. “So now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go.”
“You mean you’re gonna go get so–”
“What? I can’t – I can’t hear you over the music,” he says, pointing as his ears as he backs away towards Amy. “Okay, goodnight, goodnight, b--b-bye!”
Before Gina can say anything else he turns on his heel and hurries over to Amy, grabbing her hand and towing her to the elevators.
“Woah, Peralta, where’s the fire?” Amy grumbles as she tries to match his pace. “Why are you being weird?”
“Why’s your Mom being weird?” he fires back hastily, and though Amy rolls her eyes she also doesn’t return to her line of questioning, so he chalks it up as a pretty good comeback.
It’s somewhere between the elevator doors closing and the second floor that Jake realises he’s still half-holding her hand. It’s probably just the champagne and the motion of the elevator and the long day but just for a second, just before he lets go of her hand, it feels a little like flying.
---
Amy Santiago’s clothes are on the floor of his hotel room.
Context, obviously, pretty important here.
Amy is fully clothed in something other than the dress on his floor and he wasn’t even there when she stepped out of the dress and left it on his floor but still, Amy Santiago’s clothes are on his bedroom floor.
Jake’s brain short circuits at the sight, a half finished sentence dying on his lips. His motor functions go next, taking an unplanned and unintended break that leaves him frozen in the doorway of the room, Amy stuck behind him out in the hallway.
“Uh – Peralta?” she prompts, giving his back a gentle shove that brings him back to reality. The reality where Amy Santiago wants to be in his hotel room at one am and he’s physically blocking her from coming in. Oh God, he’s an idiot.
“Right, yeah,” he says quickly, stepping inside and spinning to face her. “Sorry. Come in, come in.”
The door clicks shut behind her with a soft but definite thud, blanketing the room in a sudden silence that is heavy and weird and kind of awesome. Even their footsteps are silent, muffled by the ridiculously plush carpet that presumably explains a little of the extortionate room fee. Right now, at this exact moment, Jake thinks it was worth every cent.
“I – uh – love what you’ve done with the place,” Amy says lamely, when the silence has stretched just a little too long. She waves her hand around the immaculate hotel room, so unlike his apartment, and Jake huffs a laugh, relieved to realise that she’s as wrong-footed as he is by this moment. Her dress on the floor. The warm half-light from the lamp in the corner. The giant king-size bed dominating the room, white sheets perfectly folded down.
“You know me,” Jake says, going with the joke, “famously house-proud.”
“Right.” She laughs, a little too loud in the quiet room.
“Didn’t count on you being the one to mess the place up though,” he says, bending to retrieve her dress and handing it over. “I never took you for a clothes on the floor kind of girl.”
“I’m not!” Amy protests, folding the dress over her arm. “I just didn’t want to leave my dirty dress on those white sheets!”
Okay, so they’re acknowledging the bed now, apparently. Great.
“There’s the Amy Santiago I know,” Jake manages to get out, absolutely not looking at the bed, thank you very much. (There’s a mint on the pillow).
“I mean you could bounce a quarter on those bad boys,” Amy goes on, because she’s trying to kill him, presumably.
“I’d give that a try but I basically bankrupted myself to pay for the room,” he says, tugging off his suit jacket and draping it over the desk chair beside him.
“And here I thought you were already bankrupt,” Amy says, making no effort to leave just yet.
He tries not to read too much into that, reads a god-damn novel into it anyway.
“Destitute,” he amends, “not bankrupt.”
“Big word, Peralta.”
“Well, sometimes I read the ‘Word of the Day’ calendar on your desk.”
“I knew it.” Amy laughs.
“I’ll deny that when I’m sober,” he says, untying his bow tie because he’s hot and it’s kind of choking him and okay, maybe because it always looks super cool when James Bond does it.
“Anyway, I should go,” Amy says, her eyes following his hands with an unguarded appreciation that kind of makes it hard to breathe, even as he loosens his collar. (Thank you, Mr Bond.)
She tucks her purse under her arm and adjusts her dress one more time, flashing him a smile. “Thanks for letting me keep this in here.”
“Since you did, you want to just split the rate I’m paying?” he says, one more stupid joke, anything to keep her around another couple of minutes. “How about I pay for the stuff I took from the mini bar before I saw the price list, and you just pay for the room?”
“Nice try, Jake,” she says, patting his arm in farewell just as her heel catches in the thick carpet, sending her stumbling into him. Her light touch on his arm tightens as she grabs him for balance, her clutch dropping to the floor with a thud. The little gasp of surprise she lets out is the only sound in his whole world except a steady ringing in his ears. He thinks, randomly, that she was right when she told him off earlier. He did sit too close to the DJ.
“Uh – here,” he says, bending to retrieve her clutch for her. “Stop dropping stuff on my fancy hotel room floor.”
“Right, sorry,” Amy says, tucking her purse back under her arm. “Thanks.”
“No thanks needed,” he says, shrugging. “Just pay the bill like we discussed.”
Amy musters a half laugh, more a huff of breath than anything else. Up close like this, she looks tired and so, so pretty. Her eyes are a little bloodshot from too long in her contacts and there’s a tiny smudge of black where her mascara has started to run. It’s such a little thing, so human and normal and end-of-the-day, but it makes something in his chest ache because he wants it. Wants the end of every day with her.
“Goodnight, then,” Amy says, reaching out and giving one of the loose ends of his bow tie a little tug, just enough to make him catch his breath. “007.”
He smiles, opens his mouth to make a joke, to call her Maxi Pads, but then she’s walking away and all he can muster is a quiet, “Goodnight, Ames.”
He watches her go until he just can’t watch anymore, until he has to do something. “Hey,” he calls out just as she reaches the door, without really knowing what he’s going to say.
“Yeah?” She turns back in the doorway and there’s something in the soft speculative look she gives him that makes him think, maybe, That makes him brave, almost. Sort of. Not quite.
“Never did get that slow dance,” he says quietly in the end, ducking his head to his chest.
“You never asked,” is her reply, just as quiet, and he looks up in time to see the door click shut behind her.
---
On Monday morning, Charles sits down beside his desk and says, “Jakey! Best wedding ever or best wedding ever, am I right?!”
“Yeah, buddy,” Jake says, thinking about cool white sheets and a bright pink dress on his floor. About the smudge of mascara under Amy’s eyes. “Best wedding ever.”