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As soon as they’ve filed the motion to overturn Jake and Rosa’s convictions, Amy packs a suitcase for Jake and leaves it sitting next to the front door. She knows that even with all the strings they can pull, it’s going to take at least a few days – maybe longer. (Oh, God, please let it not be longer.)
As soon as they have a court date, Amy buys a one-way ticket to Charleston for the same day. She contacts the prison to let them know that Jake’s conviction is being appealed, and that she’ll be on hand to pick him up in the event that’s required.
(She guilt-trips Charles into doing the same thing for Rosa, thwarting with some difficulty his attempt to reverse who’s doing which pickup.)
She spends a day and a half sitting in a motel room off the interstate, fielding messages from Terry at the Kings County courthouse. When the conviction gets overturned, she switches to calling the prison administration office hourly to check on their progress processing Jake’s release paperwork.
(She’s convinced that they push it into the middle of the next day just to be spiteful.)
She wakes up very early the morning after the decision is handed down. She supposes the sensible thing would be to wait until the prison administration office opens at 9, and then call to check on progress, but she’s not feeling very sensible. So she gets up, showers and gets dressed, checks out, gets coffee, and is on the road before 7:30. She sits in the parking lot for nearly an hour until the visitor’s entrance opens, and then tells the desk officer why she’s there and asks for an update.
“I don’t have any information here about a prisoner release, miss,” the desk officer says, having gone through all the paperwork on his desk very slowly. “I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait.”
“Fine,” Amy says through gritted teeth. “Then I’ll wait.”
“It might not happen today,” the desk officer says provokingly.
“Then I’ll be back tomorrow,” Amy says, giving him a hard stare. He looks back at her, and it gives Amy a small sense of victory that he looks away first.
She turns around and marches across the lobby to a seat where she can see both the desk officer and the door into the main prison, and settles herself in to wait. She has water and granola bars for sustenance, a stack of crossword and soduku puzzles to occupy her mind, and a gym bag with a change of clothes for Jake whenever he emerges. She remains there through the morning, occasionally getting up to stretch her legs, as a steady trickle of visitors passes in and out. Even when she’s staring at a crossword, she’s noting whether the door is buzzing to let someone into the main lockup – or to let someone out.
Just before one o’clock, she feels the hair on the back of her neck prickle. She looks up just as the buzzer sounds, knowing that no one is waiting to get in. A few seconds later – or maybe it’s an eternity – Jake steps through the door: scruffy beard, orange jumpsuit, dazed expression. He pauses and looks around, then heads straight for her. A guard comes out behind him; when he sees where Jake is going, he smirks and shakes his head, then turns to go back into lockup. Amy, already on her feet, sees this and it makes her know that this is real, that Jake is free. Then he’s there and he’s holding her tightly and she can feel him shaking and she wraps her arms around him and holds on. She runs her hands up and down his back and buries her nose in his neck, inhaling him and willing herself not to cry.
When he loosens his hold, she pulls back and looks at him. “Hi,” she says quietly. Despite her best efforts, she can tell she’s got tears in her eyes. But she can see that he does, too.
“I am so happy to see you,” he says with a shaky smile.
“Me too,” she says, putting a hand on his cheek. Then she takes a deep breath. “I’ve got clothes for you.”
He looks around, still seeming somewhat disoriented, then sees the bag. “Oh, okay, great. Yeah, I need to return the uniform and sign myself out.”
“There’s a men’s bathroom over there,” she says.
“Right,” Jake says. He hesitates for a minute, as if he’s waiting for something; then he grabs the bag and heads for the bathroom. By the time Amy has gathered up the rest of her supplies and put them away, and walked back to the duty officer’s desk, he’s coming back out. He hands her the empty gym bag and drops his balled-up uniform jumpsuit on the desk with a thud.
“Can I help you?” the officer says with maddening slowness. Amy can feel her blood pressure rising.
“Release form for Peralta,” Jake says with grim patience. Once again the officer shuffles through every single piece of paper on the desk and in the hanging files on the walls, before going back to where he started and extracting the third sheet from the first pile.
“Per – allll – ta,” he intones. “Well, I guess this must be your lucky day.”
Amy watches Jake as he stands there, taking deep breaths through his nose and otherwise not moving. He looks more like himself now that he’s back in his own clothes, but that makes his pallor and the dark circles under his eyes that much more noticeable. She can see a muscle in his jaw jump as he reaches out to take the form and the pen that the officer is holding out just a little further away than he should be.
Jake takes the form, slaps it down onto the counter, and signs his name. He shoves the form and pen back through the hole in the grate, then stuffs the uniform ball after them.
“Hang on, just need to check these,” the officer drones on, then proceeds to unwrap and sort each piece of Jake’s uniform so slowly that Amy can envision herself channeling Rosa and reaching through the bars to choke him.
Finally, finally he can’t drag it out any longer. “You’re free to go,” he pronounces. Jake grabs Amy’s hand and heads for the exit before they guy can finish getting the sentence out. Once outside, he stops, takes a deep breath, and smiles at her. It’s not quite up to his usual standard, but she smiles back anyway, figuring the same is probably true for her.
“Okay, Santiago, how the hell do we get out of here?”
“Rental car, over there,” she says, pointing to the far corner of the parking lot. They walk across quickly, not speaking. Amy can’t wait to get out of there, but after she puts some of the stuff she’s carrying into the trunk and closes it, Jake takes her hand and pulls her into him and kisses her with quiet, hungry intensity. They are not normally big on PDA but right now Amy doesn’t care; she wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him back as if they’re alone and unobserved. She can still feel him trembling.
Finally he pulls back. “We should get going before I get myself arrested again,” he says softly with a small smile.
Amy shivers. “Don’t even joke about that,” she says.
They get in the car and Amy turns on the engine. She has already programmed her phone map for the journey back to the interstate, and she starts it up, then hands it to Jake and backs out of the space.
Jake looks at the onscreen map as Amy drives out of the parking lot and turns west onto the two-lane road. “What’s your plan for getting home?” he asks, glancing out at the fields running alongside them.
She glances over at him. “I was thinking of driving it,” she suggests. “You know, give you a chance to…ease back into things…. Unless you’d rather fly? Then we could drive to Charleston, or -”
He turns to look at her. “No, let’s drive,” he agrees. “I don’t think I’m up for being cooped up on an airplane just yet.”
She nods in agreement and looks over at him again, at how serious and pale and just plain exhausted he looks. She doesn’t feel happy yet, she realizes. She mostly feels relieved, that he’s safe and back with her and that this nightmare is over; but she also feels worried that maybe it’s not quite over yet.
Amy and Jake have been together long enough that she knows some things about what lies beneath his buoyant and personable exterior. She knows that, while he is genuinely capable of great joy and enthusiasm, in some ways his cheer is like a bright carpet that he lays over the deep chasm of anxiety that runs through his psyche. That he knows in his bones just how awful and chaotic things are, and has spent his life whistling past graveyards to bolster himself and the people he cares about – starting with his mother. One of the reasons he loves and relies on Amy is that he knows that she doesn’t need this from him. He knows that for Amy the universe is fundamentally a good and decent place – possibly in need of someone with high-level organizational skills to clean up some of the bigger messes made by its occupants (and God knows they’ve dealt with some horrifying ones in their line of work), but in its essence serene and ordered. He knows that he can show her his worst fears, and that she will still believe that everything is ultimately all right. And make him believe that too, at least some of the time.
All of which is to say that she has seen him brought low by fear and anxiety before. But she knows that what he’s dealing with now is bigger than anything he’s experienced in the past. He’s off the life-and-death tightrope he’s been walking in the weeks since he was tossed into Gen Pop, but she doesn’t know yet what the aftereffects will be.
When she looks over again, he has settled himself in now that he knows they’ll be in the car for a while – leaning back, resting his head, looking out the front window. He turns his head when she does and looks at her, but doesn’t say anything.
“Do you want to talk about anything?” she asks.
He leans over a little bit and slides his left hand under her leg. He knows she won’t hold hands while either of them is driving – she’s too safety-conscious – so they do this instead. She smiles and takes a hand off the wheel briefly to rub his arm.
“Tell me about all the dumb everyday stuff we haven’t been able to talk about,” he requests.
So she does. For the next four hours, as they drive north, she tells him stories about her brothers and their partners, their jobs and hobbies and homeowner issues. She tells him about her nieces and nephews: sports and plays and movies and photos. She tells him about where her parents went on their last overseas trip, as well as all the news she’s gathered from her weekly conversations with Jake’s mom. She tells him about babysitting for Gina, and Charles, and Terry (although not that she kept volunteering to do it as a way to get out of their too-quiet apartment). She tells him all the work gossip she’s been hoarding, about everyone in their precinct and beyond.
He asks questions, to keep her talking. Laughs at some of the stories – laughs for real at least once. Mostly he just looks at her and listens. She thinks he might doze off, but he doesn’t. She can still feel that his hand is tremoring a lot of the time.
~*~*~*~
They hit Raleigh-Durham during rush hour; she tells him where to find the hotel booking she’s already made for tonight, and asks him to plug the address into the map. He shakes his head and smiles slightly.
“Santiago style,” he murmurs.
“Nothing but the best for you, babe,” she says, smiling affectionately at him.
It takes nearly another hour before they’ve arrived and checked in, and by the time they walk through the door of their room Jake looks as though he’s about to drop. He hadn’t eaten anything on the drive – no appetite, he said – and Amy’s glad she remembered to book a hotel with room service so they don’t have to leave again if they want some hot food.
Jake drops the bags near the closet and then comes over to stand next to her at the window, where she’s fiddling with the HVAC system. She gets the AC going as low as she can manage, and then turns to look at him.
“How’re you doing, Jake?” she asks, grasping him lightly on the upper arms and looking into his face. “Are you okay?”
He tries to smile, but it’s still not working very well, and he takes a deep breath instead. He shakes his head, and she can feel that his muscles are still trembling under her hands.
“I’m freaking out a little, Ames,” he says, as though he’s confessing something. He sounds as though he’s having trouble breathing.
“Can you tell me about it?” she asks, looking at him closely.
He nods, still fighting to control his breathing, and she rubs his arms gently. “I got myself into Romero’s gang, y’know?” She nods. “And then the warden coerced me into being a snitch and figuring out how Romero was bringing meth into the prison.” The words are tumbling out now, as if he can’t tell her fast enough. “And then I figured it out, that he was bringing it in disguised as bars of soap, without Romero telling me, and told the warden. But then Romero told me how he was doing it, and the warden wouldn’t stop the sting operation. So then Romero knew I was a snitch, and he tried to stab me in the yard yesterday. Except that Caleb jumped in front of me, so he got stabbed instead. So then we were all on lockdown overnight, but I knew Romero was going to come after me again today. The warden came to tell me you had busted Hawkins five minutes before I was supposed to go outside.” The shaking has gotten steadily worse as he pours this out. He takes a deep breath. “Oh, and I accidentally covered myself with meth in the showers while I was figuring out how Romero was bringing it in. I think it’s still working its way out of my system.”
He slumps as he finishes; for a second Amy thinks he’s going to collapse, and she grabs him tightly to steady him. She hauls him the few feet to the bed as gently as she can, and sits him on the edge, then sits next to him, keeping hold of him. He bends over until his head is almost on his knees, breathing as heavily as though he’s just finished a sprint, shaking and sweating. She puts one arm around his back and the other over his clasped hands. She’s not sure what to say; she feels paralyzed with horror by the thought of how much danger he was in and how narrowly he escaped it. So she just holds onto him and whispers, over and over again, “It’s okay, Jake. You’re safe now.”
Eventually she can feel his breathing slow down, along with the shaking, and he sits up. He exhales in a huff, then looks at her. He still looks pale and tired, but not on the verge of collapse anymore.
“Better?” she asks.
He nods. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” she says, still holding onto him and watching him closely.
He looks around. “What time is it?”
She looks at her watch. “It’s nearly seven. Are you hungry? We could order some food -”
He shakes his head. “Still no appetite,” he says, and looks around again, then laughs a little and shakes his head. “I keep waiting for someone to tell me what to do. Guess I got more into the prisoner mindset than I realized.”
Amy doesn’t like this idea at all. “Well, what do you want to do?” she prompts.
He thinks for a minute. “You know – I really want to take a shower. A long, hot shower. And wash the prison smell off me.”
“Good plan,” she says, getting up and going to his bag. “I think everything you need should be in here.”
“Great, thanks,” he says quietly. He follows her, and busies himself digging around for clean clothes and his shaving kit, then disappears into the bathroom. She moves her bag a few feet away to where she can unzip it and find her own stuff.
A few minutes later, Jake sticks his head out the door. “Hey, Amy?”
Holding her own shower kit, she walks over to him. “What’s up?”
He’s turned on the shower and the bathroom is rapidly filling up with steam, but he hasn’t started undressing yet. He pauses, and she sees him swallow. “Will you – will you come in with me? I’m starting to freak out again, being in here by myself.”
“Sure,” she says immediately. He smiles (still doesn’t look right, maybe it’s the beard or the circles or the look in his eyes - ) and stands back to let her in. They undress in silence, no touching, no conversation, no eye contact. Amy keeps checking on Jake surreptitiously; she can tell he’s concentrating on regulating his breathing and she thinks about what he told her about the meth and how at home he always lets her shower first because he always loses track of time and uses up all the hot water. Sometimes he goes so deep into shower coma (as he calls it) that she will hear screams from the bathroom when the cold water wakes him up.
They get in the shower and Amy nudges Jake to get under the water first. They’ve taken plenty of showers together, some strictly showering business and others with…added entertainment. Amy has seen firsthand how Jake can disappear into his own head under the shower spray, especially when he has something on his mind, and not even her presence can distract him. So she lets him be, wordlessly switching places with him as they each go through their routines of washing and rinsing, and even she starts to zone out a little bit as she sees his shoulders and neck relaxing. Finally they are standing facing each other; Jake has his back to the shower head, letting it pound on his neck, eyes closed.
“You’ve still got soap in your hair,” Amy says quietly, reaching up to help rinse it out. Jake opens his eyes at the sound of her voice, looking as if he has just woken up. He reaches out his hands to her waist and gently pulls her into him, bending his head to kiss her. She keeps one hand in his wet hair and slides the other one around his waist, pulling him close and savouring the feel of his skin and the taste of his mouth.
It starts out slow and then starts to get more intense as they rediscover each other after more than two months of separation and stress and keeping everything bottled up. Then Jake reaches out and shuts the water off, and Amy pulls back.
“Is this okay?” she asks, feeling dazed and trying to catch her breath. “Should we stop?”
“Um, no,” Jake says, sounding – and looking – more like his normal self for the first time since she picked him up. “But we are wasting a ridiculous amount of water, and also I don’t think I can, um, progress this without one of us getting injured, so – can I suggest a change of venue?”
“Yes, you may,” she says, with just enough emphasis to let him know she’s correcting his grammar, and he smiles – small, but looking almost the way it should. Stepping out of the shower, she hands him a towel and grabs one for herself. Then she takes his hand and leads him to the bed.
*~*~*~*~*~*
Afterwards, they crawl under the covers and he falls asleep almost immediately. "Sorry, Ames," he mumbles, wrapping himself around her and tucking his head into the curve of her neck and shoulder. "I feel like I haven't slept for two months."
She lasts a little longer, staring off into space and feeling the weight of him in her arms. Even in deep sleep as he clearly is, he twitches and mumbles, and Amy strokes his hair and kisses him.
It may take a while for things to feel normal again, but that's okay. As long as they're together, they can find a way.
Today I don't need a replacement
I'll tell them what the smile on my face meant
My heart going boom, boom, boom
Hey, I said, you can keep my things they've come to take me home