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1.
"Ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven-point-five bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven-point-five bottles of beeeeer—"
"Peralta," Amy growls.
“Take one down, pass it around, but not to Santiago because she’s a huge nerd, ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six-point-five bottles of beer on the wall…”
“JAKE!” Amy shouts, slamming one hand on the steering wheel with such force that she thinks she feels the car shake. “Shut the hell up!”
“Make me,” Jake goads her suggestively from the passenger seat. Amy sets her jaw tightly and curls her fingers around the leather wheel cover with a grip made for strangulation. “Santiago, come on! This is a road trip! Get into the spirit! The spirit of road trips!”
Amy’s scowl is a sight to behold. “First of all, this is not a road trip; the Captain wants us to drive to Orlando to represent the precinct at the IACP—”
“Right? Or-lan-do!” Jake interrupts, beaming delightedly and throwing his hands in the air. “Beach vacation, Amy! You, me, beach things! Sand and bikinis and stuff! You could, like, have sex on the beach with a drifter!”
Amy scrunches her nose in disgust.
“You do know that studies have shown sandy beaches contain extremely high amounts of fecal bacteria, right?” she says. “And sand mites. I’d get hepatitis. And dysentery, probably.”
“Why do you know that?” Jake mutters with an incredulous gesture, but his face is scrunched in disgust now, too. “Your buzzkill skills are still top notch, I see.” He brightens. “Buzz-skills! It’s funny, because—”
“Because I’m skilled at getting buzzed and I’m also a buzzkill, yeah, I get it,” Amy growls. Jake looks nothing short of overjoyed that she continues to understand his extremely basic sense of humor. “Anyway, second of all, the only spirit I’ll want to get into if you keep singing will be a dead one, because—”
“Ew, you wanna bang a ghost?” Jake guffaws, effectively ruining the extended metaphor she was about to tie up neatly. “Maybe I should take this up with the Captain.” Amy hits him. “Hands on the wheel! Unless you wanna, like, get a ticket, or whatever, and I can totally give you one, because I’m a cop.” (“No, you can’t—!” Amy starts to yell.) “So since you’re driving, I get to play DJ, right?”
Amy pales. “Oh, no.”
Jake’s grin is wide and toothy. He produces a beaten-up, bright pink iPod nano straight out of 2007 and wiggles it in the air at her. She must make a face at it, because he gives a helpless shrug and explains, “It was Gina’s. I killed a spider for her.”
Amy rolls her eyes and goes back to watching the road, bracing herself for whatever garbage Jake’s about to start blasting out of her poor car’s speakers, but after an extended silence, she glances over at him again. He’s frowning in bewilderment at her.
“Why are you not fighting me on this?” he blurts out. “I was literally gonna alternate between ‘Baby Got Back’ and the Magnum, P.I. theme song.”
“That’s probably all you’ve got on your iPod anyway,” Amy bites back, but then she sighs, trying to quell her instinctive abrasiveness, because if she’s going to be stuck in a car with Jake Peralta for two days on the world’s most boring and traffic-congested set of highways (if she’s going to have to stay in a motel room next door to him overnight), that attitude will definitely not be conducive to her sanity. “Anyway, it’s…” She bites the inside of her cheek to try to take the begrudging tone out of her voice. “It’s only fair.” She straightens again, pointing sideways at him without taking her eyes off of the cars ahead. “But when we switch shifts in DC, I am rescinding your control.”
“Oh, God grant me the good fortune that there’ll be bumper-to-bumper traffic,” Jake crows, which elicits a loud groan from Amy. “Let’s turn this car of yours into a party car!”
Amy asks God to grant her something, too, and that is the serenity not to murder Jake Peralta.
After a few seconds, Jake lets out a chuckle of triumph, which can only mean he’s all hooked up and Amy is doomed. She breathes in deeply through her nose, stretching her fingers, trying to draw up from some well of forbearance and drown herself in it.
Then the song starts.
She blinks, flummoxed. She doesn’t dare look over at Jake, for fear that such acknowledgement of his existence will reveal that he’s playing some kind of enormous practical joke on her.
“That’s…” She opens and closes her mouth, floundering.
“Shhh, Amy,” Jake scolds her in a whisper. “Listen to the music.”
Let us be lovers; we'll marry our fortunes together. I've got some real estate here in my bag...
“I thought—” She can’t help talking; she really can’t. “I thought you hated Simon and Garfunkel.”
“Amy, please; they are the greatest musical contributors of the twentieth century,” Jake scoffs. “Well. Them and Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. And Weird Al Yankovic. ...And Dolly Parton.”
“No, like, you literally told me once that you hated Simon and Garfunkel,” Amy snaps. “When I was playing ‘The 59th Street Bridge Song’ at the precinct picnic last year.”
“Oh.” Jake is scrambling now; he always gets that shaky smile on his face when he is. “Well, I was clearly. Lying. To throw you off the scent. It’s not like I… might have remembered you liked them and bought their greatest hits album for the trip, or, y’know, whatever.”
And Amy would rather die than let anyone in the world know that Jake Peralta made something warm open up in her chest and a smile slip onto her face right then, so she just rolls her window down and lets the wind in and leaves it at that.
2.
“You really don’t have to do this,” Amy says for the fifth time when they’re already on the highway.
“Yeah, thanks, Captain Obvious,” Jake replies, and then, fingers drumming out an erratic beat against the steering wheel, he flashes her a grin. “Maybe more like Lieutenant. You haven’t been promoted in obviousness yet.”
Amy rolls her eyes under scowling eyebrows, which only seems to increase his apparent joy at getting to play chauffeur to her since her car’s in the shop. Such a surrendering of autonomy and dignity would normally be avoided, trust her, but for some stupid reason, the subway line that goes to her parents’ house is undergoing maintenance, and her mom is not the kind of woman who even remotely accepts rescheduling anything (like, to be honest, there’s zero doubt that she would come back to life and yell at everyone if they ever tried changing the date of her funeral), so here Amy is, sitting in the passenger seat of Jake’s bucket of bolts, which smells a lot like mustard and can’t seem to negotiate its radio stations, starting to feel an entirely unwanted sympathy toward murderers.
She has done nothing to deserve this. She has saved lives and faced down gunfire and she rescued a cat from a tree, once.
“I’ll give you gas money,” she vows, instead of yelling at him for his unfairly exuberant grin in her time of untold mortification.
Jake waves a hand at her. “Nah, as long as your mom’s making that stuff with the meat inside the potato—”
“Papas rellenas,” Amy corrects him grumpily.
“Te amo, too, Santiago.” Jake looks immensely proud of himself, but Amy knows that he can't speak Spanish to save his life; she's heard it; she's lived through it. “But seriously. Crushing debt or no crushing debt, there is very little in this world that can't be fixed with your mom's cooking.”
Amy is inclined to agree with him, but there are three reasons why she doesn’t. Number one: Outside of the workplace, agreeing with Jake Peralta has only ended in tears and a narrowly avoided lawsuit. Number two: She is not ready to live in a world where Jake is on such familiar terms with her family, but that’s the world she is living in, because he was the one who was sent to go alert them when she was hospitalized by a perp five months ago, and he was the one who spent last Christmas with them. Number three—
“Roll the window down,” Jake tells her.
She pulls a face. “It’s pouring rain outside.”
“I know,” Jake replies. “I want to see what happens when wet blankets get really wet. That came out wrong. But I was insulting you. Be insulted. But not so much that you hate me forever.”
“You know what, I’ll make you a deal.” Amy sighs, slumping back in the worn-down leather seat. “Shut up for the rest of the ride, and you can come over for papas rellenas whenever you want.”
“Wow, seriously? Thirty minutes of my silence for a lifetime supply of Santiago family cuisine? Bup-bup-bup, can’t take it back; it’s already out there!”
Amy groans.
“Are you sure it isn’t going to, like, give your mom a heart attack?” Jake asks cheekily. “Bringing someone of the male gender who isn’t one of your brothers to her house, I mean. Sorry, I just had to get that burn in there; Silent Peralta activate!”
To her bewilderment, he doesn’t say another word; he doesn’t even move to change the radio station, which is a big deal for him, since he only ever listens to them for as long as they’re playing songs he can sing along obnoxiously to and then switches. After a while, cautiously, she reaches for the knob and wiggles it over to the only classical station she knows, just to mess with him, and she feels a little better at the sight of the abject agony on his face.
After about fifteen minutes of Bach, he rummages through the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a pack of gum, offering it to her with one hand. She stares at it, then at him, then back at it.
“Why are you doing this?” she blurts out.
He blinks at her.
“You can talk,” she says.
“Doing what?”
“Why are you doing what I asked you to do and – and being so nice to me?” she demands hotly, like she’s personally offended, which she really isn’t, because it’s not that it isn’t a good feeling, because it… kind of is; it’s just starting to wear away at her confidence in her detective abilities that she cannot, for the life of her, fathom why Jake is treating her with anything resembling mature civility.
He snorts loudly through that stupidly big nose of his.
“If you would prefer I treat you super horribly, I can swing that,” he tells her, and then, sobering, announces, “Your hairdo makes the back of your head look like a horse butt. If you were a movie, you wouldn’t be Die Hard. You—”
“Jake,” she warns him, jutting her chin out, and he clamps his mouth shut, clearly struggling to keep the smile on it.
“Is it really that weird?” he asks after a while with a scoff that’s a little to forcedly nonchalant.
Amy, without thinking, just wanting to punch a hole in the suddenly thick atmosphere of the car and feeling critically unequipped to deal with the inexplicable fluttering inside of her chest, petulantly retorts, “Yes!”
“Oh,” Jake says, and nothing else, and the air shifts in the car, right then.
Amy doesn’t know why, but something tugs in her chest in the direction of a mood of instants now gone, waved away by her own hasty hands.
Jake remains silent, but she has a feeling that it’s no longer because she asked him to. She sinks a little lower in the chair, watching the freeway drag by, gray and predictable.
--
“Jacob!” her mom exclaims in total delight, ushering Jake into the house like he’s her eighth son. “Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes. Get in here; come in, come in. To what do we owe the pleasure? Hector and Esteban are both here for the weekend; they’ll be so happy—BOYS, JAKE PERALTA’S HERE!”
“Ah, wow,” Jake grits out through an enduring grin, one hand hovering protectively at his ear, which has no doubt just been blown out. “Your mom should give noise lessons to the foghorns in Rockaway; I am definitely deaf in one ear now.” He gasps theatrically. “A half-deaf cop! That’s a made-for-TV tearjerker waiting to happen!”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Pineapples,” Amy teases him with a fond, automatic nudge to get him to lower his hand.
“I forget, are Hector and Esteban the ones who made me watch the Cuban soap operas?” Jake inquires, wiggling his pinkie in his ear now.
“No,” Amy replies patiently. She doesn’t blame anybody for having trouble keeping up with her family; it took her years to do it anyway. “That’s Carlos and Luís. Esteban and Hector are the twins, and they’re the youngest; then me, then Luís, then Carlos, then Ricardo, Javier, and Diego. And then my dad, Emmanuel – Manny. And you already know my mom, Pilar.”
She mentally indexes all of their ages in her head, the way she always does, because as great of a detective she is, there have been multiple occasions when she’s been about three years behind on how old everyone is: Diego, thirty-five; Javier, thirty-four; Ricardo, thirty-three; Carlos, thirty-one; Luís, thirty; herself, twenty-eight; Hector and Esteban, twenty-one. (She wishes she had been old enough to remember the look on her mom’s face when she realized that the harmless baby son she was planning on having after the birth of her only daughter turned out to be a pair of rambunctious twins.)
“Right.” Jake looks shell-shocked. “Was Diego the one who did the… bone-shattering back-claps? Because I might not be able to survive a second round of that, papa repellants or not.”
“Rellenas,” Amy corrects him. “Papas rellenas. Come on, dumbass; I know that you’re doing that on purpose.”
“And not at the expense of a single ounce of my personal entertainment.” Jake beams. “Seriously, though, that guy could have probably given Sarge a small bruise, which is pretty huge, need I remind you.”
Amy remembers, with a certain degree of fondness, the past year’s Noche Buena – how Jake had played football out in the snow with Esteban and all of the kids, how he hadn’t taken seconds on the roasted pig because he’d heard Amy complain enough times about always getting the more meager portions in a house full of brothers, how he’d done that charming flirting thing with her mom that had basically guaranteed him a place at every family dinner until the end of time, how Diego had proposed he stay the night once it got too late to bother driving back, and Jake had slept on the air mattress on the floor in Amy’s room, not without a nicely humiliating amount of implications from her family of how no objections would be made to the two of them sharing a bed.
Amy had been all ready to be embarrassed, but then she and Jake had sat up whispering and stifling their laughter until two in the morning, and he’d been letting Diego’s hyperactive five-year-old hang off of his arm like a pendulum while simultaneously helping her mom make breakfast for twenty-seven people, and the only thing she’d really felt was an absolute sense of contentment.
“Jakey, are you staying for dinner?” her mom coos, poking her head back in from the hallway.
“Él quiere los papas rellenas, mamá,” Amy tells her.
“Los papas rellenas!” her mom repeats. Her brown eyes twinkle. Her hair is tied back with a scarf Amy had bought her on a vacation to Arizona years ago. She’s shorter than all of her sons, but a couple of inches taller than Amy. “Your boy has good taste, Amalia.”
“Mamá,” Amy whines, closing her eyes tightly to blind herself to whatever shit-eating grin Jake undoubtedly has on his face, because she’s almost positive he’d forgotten her full name up until that moment.
“I had forgotten that your full name is Amalia up until this moment,” he whispers.
Amy’s mom hears him, and because she’s a traitor and also, for some reason, Jake’s biggest fan, she cheerfully expounds, “That’s right! Amalia Rosalía Santiago Lopez. A beautiful name for a beautiful girl.”
“Mamá, I’m thirty years old,” Amy grumbles at the same time Jake says, “Yes indeed.”
She whirls on him. “What?”
He blinks. “What?”
“Come into the kitchen, Amy; you can help me cook,” her mom declares, and then, right on cue, Hector and Esteban lope into the room from the hallway. They are both college seniors, so they've been conditioned to speak with incredible volume at all times.
When they see Jake, they let out identical whoops in greeting and yell, arms flung toward the ceiling, “YOOOOOO, PERALTAAAAA!”
Jake grimaces, but doesn’t cover his ears, which Amy silently congratulates him on while her mom drags her into the kitchen.
And it’s only a little weird, Amy thinks, that Jake stays for dinner, and helps peel the potatoes, and opens everyone’s beers, and makes her dad boom with laughter, and charms her mom the same way he always has, and looks kind of perfect facing her at the dinner table, beaming, cracking jokes, toasting her with his bottle of Cerveza.
It’s only a little weird that she feels her stomach sinking miserably, watching him get back into his car and drive home for the night.
“Pilar, as always, you have brought a glimmer of light into my miserable life, you beautiful woman,” Jake butters up her mom at the door before turning to Amy. “Until we meet again, Amalia Whatever Santiago Something.”
“So, like, Monday, at work,” Amy deadpans.
“I was kinda going for the dramatic there, but if you wanna be a buzzkill and destroy my feelings of sorrow, fine; be that way.”
“He’s such a nice young man,” her mom comments, watching Jake’s car roll along down the street, with implication that Amy does not appreciate.
“He has zero table manners,” Amy replies tartly. “And he can’t spell.”
“Ay dios mío,” her mom mutters with a shake of her head, and nothing more. She moves back into the house, gesticulating as if to shoo all of the nonsense out of her immediate proximity, but Amy stands on the stoop until Jake’s single working tail light vanishes around the corner at the end of the street. When she comes back to herself, she realizes that she’s smiling.
She whacks her own cheek lightly, whispers “Stop that,” and goes back inside, because she has always been a pragmatist, a practice which disallows the gazing-after of tail lights in the cool spring night.
3.
This is probably the best day of Jake’s life.
“You’re so high, holy crap,” he exclaims with a gleeful guffaw that Amy, limp and giggling in the passenger seat, mouth stuffed with gauze, shares. “This is gold. I could film you and then blackmail you until you’re penniless.”
“You could!” Amy agrees, throwing her arms out like he’s just proposed the most unexpectedly brilliant idea since the invention of the toilet. “You wanna know something crazy? When I was ten, I ran the club with the hamstrings.”
“Uh-huh.” Jake nods, relishing it. “That must have been soooo fun.”
“Soooo fun,” Amy echoes, still chuckling intermittently. “And I like your car, it’s the nice car, like a Batman car.”
Jake sits up straighter. “First of all, you making any references to Batman is pretty much guaranteed to give me a semi, so that’s cheating. Second, what the hell, Santiago; that’s literally the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Amy makes a very over-the-top face, full of nose scrunching and a downturned mouth and crinkled eyes like she’s just smelled something incredibly bad.
“I can say nice things to you,” she argues in a high voice, the kind a wronged teenage girl might use. “Here, watch, listen.”
“Which one? I can’t do both at the same time; I’m driving,” Jake replies cheekily. “Your car, which, by the way, has a ridiculously sensitive gas pedal; I mean, this thing is like my mom on national holidays.”
Startling him, Amy reaches one flopping arm over and grasps his wrist, gently, the way she does when she’s tugging him after her on a case without noticing what she’s doing. It feels dumb to say that his heart shoots up and hits the roof of his mouth, but, well, that happens.
“I think you’re a… great detective,” Amy tells him, and her grin is softer now, making her eyes glimmer (he thinks – again, he is driving, responsibly). “And you’re great. And you’re my best friend. And I like hanging out with you… and I like you.”
Jake stiffens. The radio is playing “God Only Knows.” Amy sighs contentedly, apparently satisfied with her little monologue, and slumps awkwardly over in the seat so that her head is poised on his shoulder. The emergency brake must be digging into her, but she doesn’t seem to care, maneuvering herself so that she’s slumped halfway against him, still holding onto his arm.
“Hey, question,” he finally manages to get out through his suddenly tight throat. Amy hums quietly in answer. “Anything we say or do right now can and will be forgotten completely by you when this stuff wears off, right?”
“Ummm,” Amy replies, frowning in thought. “Yeah? Probably?”
Jake takes a deep breath and exhales it in a blow. He stops the car at an intersection where, overhead, through the clouding rain, the traffic light glows bright red.
“Amy Santiago,” he says quietly, so quietly that a small part of him hopes she doesn’t hear him, “You—” He remembers the shape her mouth had made around the smile that had spread over her when she’d lost a peanut, when she’d doubled over, sputtering with laughter, and Brooklyn, despite its black night, had never looked brighter. “Are perfect to me.”
Amy’s silence after that makes his heart drop back down again, plummeting unpleasantly, and because he’s uncomfortable with emotions, because he saw Teddy kiss her outside the precinct just the week before and saw how much her whole body arched into it because she’s still the kind of woman who doesn’t think she’s worth kissing, he appends, “Perfectly dumb!”
She’s already out. He’s relieved, in a way, but he makes a point of not moving no matter how much circulation he loses, because the curve of his shoulder feels pretty right with her head nestled against it, and she smells like the ginger lotion of hers that he once swiped from her purse after his hands got blistered from a morning at the batting cages, and it’s good professional policy to let your partner take naps on you, anyway.
4.
Amy has seen her fair share of an inebriated Jake. He’s usually very loud, and exuberant, and rowdy, and prone to throwing his arms around people’s shoulders in sloppy half-hugs, and wired to start dancing (badly) on any flat surface he can find.
He’s never quiet, even when he’s sober. And Amy’s having a very nice time with Teddy, laughing lightly at the bar with him and going through code quizzes and swapping ridiculous precinct stories, but she can’t help the straying of her eyes to the empty booth where Jake’s sitting, thumbs tapping slowly against the rim of his empty glass of beer, head either lolling drunkenly or hanging dejectedly.
There’s something about seeing Jake isolated and unreadably mute that brings the mood of the whole place down. She’s seen everyone from the precinct taking rotating shifts to sit with him, and the music’s too loud for her to hear anything, but judging by Charles’s crestfallen frown and Rosa’s lowered gaze and the somber line of Jeffords’s mouth and Holt’s barely visible sigh, none of them are making any progress.
And maybe Amy’s selfish, but she doesn’t go over there to try to contribute; Teddy’s beaming at her with harmless adoration in his eyes and she’s had enough drinks that she doesn’t care enough to actually move (but not so many that her stomach doesn’t get all pinched whenever she glances over to find Jake slumped over a new shot glass), and eventually, two o’clock rolls around, and that is way too late even by Saturday night’s standards, so everyone unanimously agrees to break it up (although Gina writing lewd things on the walls in lipstick is definitely contributing).
“Santiago.” That’s Holt’s voice, making her instinctively perk up and practically stand at attention. She whirls around, Teddy’s hand still clasping her shoulder, and blinks raptly at Holt’s stony expression.
“Yes, sir?” she replies, hoping that he’s not about to rescind his allowance of her to take a Berkshires weekend.
“Peralta is in no state to drive himself home,” Holt states. “And, frankly, I don’t trust him to take public transportation, either. You wouldn’t mind being the designated driver, I hope.”
Amy opens her mouth to reply that no, of course she doesn’t mind, but Teddy speaks before she can.
“He can just take a cab, right?” he suggests, not unkindly; it’s the logical question to jump to, especially because this section of town has plenty of taxis anyway.
“No,” Amy says instantly. Startled at herself, she looks over at Teddy and shakes her head. “He can’t afford it.”
Teddy snorts a little at that one, shrugging. “He can’t live that far, can he?”
“He has a crushing debt,” Amy explains distractedly, turning back to Holt (and Teddy’s hand slips off of her shoulder). “Yes, sir, of course I can make sure Peralta gets home in one piece.”
“Thank you,” Holt tells her, in a suspiciously genuine tone, like he’s just been absolved of a father’s stress for his errant son. “Have a good weekend. Good to see you, Theodore.”
After he’s left, Amy faces Teddy a little guiltily and a little helplessly, her eyebrows upturned, maybe to try to convince herself that she actually does feel really bad about having to abandon him when, in reality, she only feels a tiny bit bad.
“Sorry,” she says with a weak movement of her shoulders, and then, like it’s sufficient explanation, she expounds, “It’s Jake.”
Teddy blinks, like something’s just dawned on him, but he’s smiling that indulgent smile of his before Amy can look too much into it. He pats her arm understandingly, and that almost prods guilt into her.
“I understand,” he tells her, and then shrugs in a what-can-you-do sort of way. “It’s Jake.”
Some unspoken implication lingers underneath the words, the same way it maybe had when she’d said it, and when Teddy leaves, Amy doesn’t watch him go – she’s already halfway to Jake’s table.
“All right, come on, big guy,” she sighs, slinging an arm under his shoulders to lift him up. He stumbles, falling into her. “Let’s get you home.”
She knows that he’s conscious, because she feels his eyelashes dart against the skin of her neck at one point (sending goosebumps jolting down her arm), but he still isn’t speaking, or laughing, or singing, or any of the obnoxious things he usually does, which suddenly seem much less obnoxious in theory now that she’s being deprived of them.
“Okay, this needs to stop,” she half-yells after they’ve been driving for about twenty minutes in total silence. Jake gives a start in the passenger seat, blinking blearily. “You’re seriously freaking me out, Jake; what’s going on?”
“Huhn?” he answers, and Amy rolls her eyes, turning onto the next street Siri tells her to (and she doesn’t know why she has Siri there, anyway, except as a comforting illusion, because she can reliably get to Jake’s apartment building from anywhere in the city).
“You’re not being fun drunk Jake,” Amy elaborates. “You’re being… weird, quiet, sad drunk Jake. And I’m—listen, I’m just, I’m worried about you, so – come on. Tell me what’s wrong.”
She kind of hates herself. Detectives do the work themselves; they don’t expect to get the answers just by asking for them.
“Nothing,” Jake grunts in a voice a couple of octaves lower than his usual fare, and Amy knows it’s serious, because he doesn’t even tease her mercilessly for showing concern for him. “Iss’nothing.”
“Damn it, Jake!” She’s full-yelling now. “We’re partners, okay; we agreed on the first day, no keeping secrets! I told you I was taking that interview with Major Crimes, and you told me when you—fornicated with the medical examiner, so don’t… don’t break the streak now. Whatever it is, we can figure it out. Is your mom sick? Did you get evicted again?” She gasps. “Oh, my God. Do you have cancer?”
“I’m just,” Jake slurs out, and Amy shuts her mouth, listening, but he trails off emptily. She hits the wheel in frustration.
“Jake,” she grits out, hoping he’s too drunk to remember what she’s about to say, “Please.”
There’s not much traffic on the rain-slicked streets, so they reach the sidewalk in front of Jake’s apartment building within a few minutes, giving him no time to answer. Amy waits for him to unbuckle his seatbelt and clamber out, but he just sits there, even after she turns the engine off.
“If this was a movie,” he says sloppily, eyes trained on his lap, “I’d… tell you. Right here. Right now. ’n front of the whole… I’d do it.”
“Huh?” Amy says, all intelligently, pulling a face.
Jake curls his fingers into his pants and closes his eyes.
“I’m happy y’r happy,” he mumbles. When he turns to look her in the eye, it’s like a punch to the solar plexus – his face is earnest, and sad, and resigned, and rueful. She wonders, with clarity that stings her, if this is the way he’d watched his father walk away, if this was the way he’d stared at the street from his window all day, waiting for him to come back. “I juss’... you make me happy, so—so you sh’d… be happy.”
Amy’s mouth creaks open around words she hasn’t even conjured up and probably will never be able to after that, and she swears she reaches after Jake when he fumbles open the passenger door and slips out into the dark, but when she manages to quell the upended ache in her chest, she finds that her hands are still on the steering wheel, cold at the knuckles from the air creeping in past the door he’d forgotten to close.
5.
“I appreciate this,” Jake says genuinely, his feet kicked up on her dashboard, and he sees the way she gnaws at her inner cheek to refrain from shrieking at him to stop it. “Even when I’m unemployed and disgraced, I still get Santiago chauffeur service. I don’t have any actual money to give you for gas, but I stole some tickets from Chuck E. Cheese’s, so if you know a gas station that accepts those—”
“You’re going to be fine,” Amy cuts him off abruptly. Her hair is down, and she’s in a t-shirt with Paul Simon’s face on it and jeans and a parka, because it’s a Sunday, and it’s the first snow of the year, and she apparently hadn’t felt the compulsion to put on a pantsuit for him, which he finds a little insulting, but that’s vastly outweighed by the fact that she’s allowing him to see her in cop civvies.
Jake blinks at her, at the confident tilt of her chin, at the way her hands no longer clutch the steering wheel, but guide it. She’s been biting her nails again; he can tell.
“I—what?” he blunders out.
Amy turns the car.
“You’re going to be okay,” she reiterates. She hadn’t bothered putting on her makeup, her long brown eyelashes unbowed by the mascara he’s used to seeing.
“I know,” he says softly, which is a lie.
“You’re not alone,” Amy continues, even though he’d voiced no sentiments to that effect (emphasis on voiced, because they’ve been plaguing him ever since he’d started packing all of his desk knick-knacks into a cardboard box). “So stop acting like you are. You’ve got Holt, and Jeffords, and Charles, and Rosa, and Scully and Hitchcock, I guess.”
Jake feels a smile quirk up, on both sides, none of the crooked smirking he usually resorts to when he’s close enough to her to smell her shampoo and see the tan line from where her suit jacket sleeves usually stop.
“You’ve got me,” she finishes, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“And the most attractive face in all of New York state,” Jake adds compulsively, making pistol fingers at her, but when she shoots him an aside glare, he lowers them. “I’m sorry; I’m uncomfortable with emotions.”
“No, you’re not,” Amy tells him frankly.
He thinks that maybe he could kiss her, right then.
“Whatever, fartface,” he says.
“Yeah,” Amy agrees, not without a certain degree of fondness, the whiteness of the snow making all of her look warmer, more golden, brighter. “Whatever.”