Chapter Text
Betty gets new earrings, two tiny silver crowns that she says nary a word about purchasing. She just cleans the posts with rubbing alcohol, puts them in her ears, and wears them to Pop’s, along with a revealing ponytail and slightly mischievous smile.
He notices as soon as she sits next to him, of course.
“What are these?” he asks, tracing the soft, delicate skin of her earlobe with the tip of his index finger, the tiniest of smiles gracing his lips.
“Do you like them?”
Jughead nods, although he looks a little embarrassed by his own pleasure. He never did acknowledge her crown sweater out loud, and she never figured out whether or not he liked that, an indecision she’s chalked up to the general stress and chaos of his birthday, and to all his lingering insecurities about her feelings. Whether or not she was truly his. Which she was.
Which she is.
All these months later, he still sometimes looks at her like he can’t believe she wants to touch him, hold him, kiss him. All these months later. Even after sex. That look makes her insides flutter every time, even as it simultaneously breaks her heart.
She scoots a little closer in the booth, pressing her hip against his, and waits for the comfortable, familiar weight of his arm to fall across her shoulders.
“Is that…” The arm arrives, right on schedule. “It’s not, like, weirdly possessive of me, right?”
“Of course not,” she says, snuggling in close. “I picked them out. You didn’t tell me you wanted me to wear them.”
“True,” he concedes.
He doesn’t bring the earrings up again. Betty thinks—hopes—he understands what she meant by them.
She doesn’t belong to him. She chooses him. Over and over and over.
In Pop’s parking lot, Jughead ducks his head and grazes his lips just under her left ear, and she melts like a milkshake left outside in July.
A few days later, a tiny, battered silver key appears between the wooden beads of one of Jughead’s bracelets—not a bangle, per se, more like an actual tiny key he found somewhere, one that locks a cheap jewelry box or something similar. She notices when he shows up unexpectedly to walk her to school, and surreptitiously sneaks the cuff of his jacket sleeve up half an inch before taking her hand.
She says nothing, just squeezes his hand tighter.
The week after that, she notices a new, tiny sticker on the back of his laptop: a silhouetted female figure, bent at the waist, that she recognizes as belonging to a vintage Nancy Drew.
This time, she has to ask.
“Where’d you get that?” she says, raising her eyebrows at the sticker.
Jughead’s voice is all feigned innocence. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, Cooper,” he says, but there’s a little twinkle in his eye that tells her everything she needs to know about what she was supposed to see.
Betty counters a few days later with socks, no-show ankle socks that, when she takes off her sneakers and plops her feet in Jughead’s lap as they sit on the couch in the trailer, are revealed to be covered in tiny hamburgers.
“Cute,” he says, but before she can get the foot rub she’d kind of been hoping for, he declares himself starving and suggests a trip to Pop’s.
The next time she takes his pants off, she discovers he’s purchased light blue boxers with a pink floral print.
“Are we taking this too far, Juggie?” she wonders aloud, as she fights down the urge to simultaneously laugh and cry.
He shrugs. “Taking what too far?”
Betty shakes her head. “Nothing,” she says, and settles in to let him choose her all over again.
In the afterglow, she cuddles against him. He draws invisible crowns on her skin.