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They have to spend one night in the hospital in Florida, and Amy can’t help but feel a little guilty (because, well, she did shoot him, even if it was to save his life).
She manages to convince the others to head back to Brooklyn; they’re not all going to be able to fit in Terry’s mini van anyway.
(Charles makes a big show about leaving Jake - “We were just reunited! This is cruel!”)
Amy’s been alone for six months, she just wants to be alone with Jake now. She’s allowed to be selfish.
They don’t even really talk. They’re both so exhausted, and Jake is so pumped full of pain meds, that they just drift in and out of sleep, lying cramped in the hospital bed together.
“I missed you,” Amy murmurs into him at one point, but he’s asleep and softly snoring, and she’s overcome with the urge to cry.
And she does.
He almost died.
She saw him with a gun held against his head by a man who had threatened to kill him.
She hadn’t seen him in six months, she hadn’t kissed him, or told him she loves him and he almost died.
When Jake next wakes up his neck and shoulder are wet.
Dopily he frowns, and tries to turn his head, but Amy’s face is buried so determinedly in the crook of his neck, and she is fast asleep, that he can’t.
He runs a hand down her arm and intertwines his fingers with hers, and brings her hand toward him enough to pepper it with kisses.
“I missed you,” he murmurs, and an asleep Amy nuzzles further into his neck.
In the morning the doctor tells them they’re cleared to head back to New York. “You’ll need to check in with a doctor and take your pills three times a day,” he tells them, “and I should also tell that I would advise against intercourse over the next two weeks.”
“Say what now?” Jake asks, and the doctor sighs.
“Jake,” Amy says under her breath, her cheeks flaming. “I’m sorry, Doctor,” she says, “we totally understand.”
“You just had to shoot me didn’t you, Ames?” Jake jokes.
“I’m sorry, was this a domestic dispute?” the doctor asks, concerned.
Amy shoots Jake a look. “No, no, he left out the part where I saved his life and told me to shoot him.”
“That part is true, yes,” Jake confirms. “She did save my life and I love her very much.”
“Alright,” Amy mutters, taking Jake by the arm and leading him out of the doctor’s office.
They’re on the first flight home; a first class upgrade thanks to the bullet wound in Jake’s leg.
“God, I can’t wait to get rid of those frosted tips,” Amy says as they take their seats.
“Admit it, you like them a little,” Jake replies, resting his leg up.
Amy rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling, and Jake grins and points at her.
“Eyy, there’s the eye roll I missed so much!”
It takes a lot of effort to resist rolling her eyes again.
They go to Jake’s apartment from the airport, and Amy unlocks the door for him and he hops in on his crutches, pausing for a moment to take everything in.
It’s not how he was expecting it to be - how he left it; unlived in for six months.
He hobbles around on his crutches as Amy shuts the door behind her.
It was neat, and lived in. He sits down on the bed - fresh sheets, and on the wall beside his bed are photos, files, and maps, all to do with the Figgus.
He looks at Amy, who sits down on the bed next to him.
“What?” she asks.
“You were staying here.”
“What? No I wasn’t.”
“This place is Santiago clean,” he says, “and there are fresh sheets, and that,” he gestures to the wall.
Amy looks at him. “I didn’t stay here all the time, just sometimes. It was a good place to come and work on the Figgus case.”
She stands up and gets some Chinese take away out of the fridge, grabbing two forks before hopping back on the bed. “And, y’know,” she continues, handing Jake a fork and a container, “I missed you,” she looks up at him, “this place made me feel less lonely in a weird way.”
He looks at her in wonder before kissing her desperately. “I missed you so much, Ames,” he whispers, pressing his forehead almost insistently to hers.
She caresses his cheek with her hand. “I know,” she breathes, “I missed you so much, too.”
When he wakes the next morning Amy is gone. It’s strange to wake up in his apartment after so many months in Florida, and he lays there for a moment.
The apartment doesn’t smell like him anymore. It smells like Amy. He doesn’t mind that at all.
He sits up, and swears at the pain in his leg.
There’s a note on the bedside table in Amy’s handwriting.
Jake,
I’ve gone to work but I’ll come back to yours afterwards. I’m sure Charles will come too.
Make sure you take your meds with food! There’s some take out in the fridge.
Amy xx
He smiles at the note, at the way it was written with such precision - Santiago Style .
He can’t help feel upset that she has to go back to work. He wishes he could be in the precinct now, or that Amy could at least be here with him.
He really did miss her. Six months is a long time.
Almost as if his thoughts summoned her, she’s coming through the door.
“Babe!” he says gleefully, “did you come home because you miss me so much?”
She sits down on the bed and slouches sadly. “No,” she moans, “it’s because Captain Stently put us on the night shift.”
“What?”
“Yeah, for going to Florida to save your asses, can you believe that?!”
“Jesus, that sucks, this new captain sounds like the worst.”
“Yeah,” Amy sighs, before looking up at Jake, “but at least we get to spend the day together now,” she adds more happily, kissing him softly.
“Yeah, that’s not a bad thing,” Jake murmurs, kissing her again.
“Although I am gonna have to have a nap at some point,” she says.
“That’s okay,” Jake replies, his lips moving from hers to her neck, “my meds make me sleepy anyway.”
But Amy isn’t listening, as a soft moan escapes her lips.
“Jake!” comes a sudden cry, and Jake practically jumps away from Amy to see Charles standing at the entrance.
“Charles!” Jake exclaims, looking from Charles to Amy.
“Oh yeah,” Amy says, her cheeks slightly red, “did I not mention that Charles came over to cook you a special breakfast?”
“No, you did not,” Jake mutters, hugging Charles hello. “Buddy! Hey!”
“Oh you just wait till you taste this breakfast I’m cooking you up, Jakey, you’re gonna love it!” Charles says happily.
“Does it involve testicles?” Jake asks, afraid of, but knowing, the answer.
“How did you guess?!”
“Why does your food always involve genitals?” Jake mutters as Charles begins to busy himself in the kitchen.
He sleeps when Amy is at work, and wakes up when she comes back through the door..
“Night shift sucks,” Amy complains as she sits down on the end of Jake’s bed and pulls her shoes off. It’s only been a week but the night shift makes it seem like a year.
She flops back onto the bed so that she’s lying next to him, and he drapes an arm over her.
“Worth it to have me back though?” he asks sleepily.
“Eh,” she teases, and he shoves her playfully.
“Shut up, you love me,” he says, and she rolls into to him, kissing him.
“Yeah, yeah I do,” she murmurs, and he smiles dopily.
They move to the couch and Jake eats cereal and Amy eats pasta.
“I’ll probably go back to my place tonight, well, I mean today,” she mentions as casually as she possibly can. She feels awkward, but she’s run out of clean clothes, and she doesn’t trust the laundromat in Jake’s apartment building. She once found a dead fish in one of the washing machines.
Jake shrugs, “Okay, cool,” he eats a mouthful of cereal and adds, “you should bring some more stuff over when you come back.”
Amy pauses, fork in midair. “Why?” she asks, confused.
Jake’s heart freezes, they're still moving in together, right? “I just meant, when we move in together.” he says cautiously. “You still wanna do that, right?”
“Yeah, of course, but like, I’m not moving in here,” she replies, “you should move into mine.”
“What, why? This place is great! And it’s cheaper!” he protests.
“Jake, you don’t even have a table,” Amy says.
He gestures to the coffee table. “What do you call that?!”
“I mean like an actual table people can eat food from.”
“You can eat food off this!”
“It’s a coffee table, Jake. It’s for coffee!”
“Stuff can be two things!”
She sighs and puts her pasta down on the coffee table.
“Ha! See! Food on the so-called ‘coffee’ table,” he says victoriously, pointing accusingly at her.
“Jake,”
“Fine, just bring your fancy ‘dining’ table with you when you move in!” he says heatedly, using air quotes around the word dining table.
“And put it where?!” she asks him exasperatedly, and he gestures around himself dramatically.
“Jake, my place is obviously the better choice. It’s bigger, better, and in a nicer neighborhood.” she says logically, “it makes sense to move there.”
“And my place is cheaper and in a cooler neighborhood, Ames, don’t you want to be hip?”
“Cobblestank is not a cool neighborhood, Jake, and it’s cheaper because it’s smaller and grosser.”
“Offensive,” Jake says, half jokingly, pointing at Amy, who rolls her eyes. “I just thought you’d be happy to move in here,” he adds, his tone genuine, “you just spent six months practically living in the place.”
“I wasn’t living here, Jake, I just stayed over once or twice a week to work on the Figgus case and because I missed you,” she tells him, “not because I want to live here forever.”
“Okay, so what do we do?” he asks.
“Let’s just watch some of The Office, okay? We don’t need to sort this out now.”
“Yeah, okay,” Jake agrees, and Amy yawns, resting her head on his shoulder.
“Whoa, Daryll totally looks like Doug Judy,” Jake comments as the episode starts, and Amy laughs.
“He totally does!”
“Right?!”
“Right!”
“Spooky. I wonder if we have TV doppelgangers too?”
The day feels sort of aimless with Amy there, even though she’s mostly asleep during the day, it’s nice to know she’s there.
His mom comes over that day, bring with her enough food to feed a small army.
She hugs him tightly and he feels guilty that he didn’t contact her sooner.
“It’s so good to have you back, Jake,” she says, “now let’s get some proper food into you.”
Karen tells him about the lesbians across the road’s wedding and his aunt’s 60th birthday party that ended in a fire.
“What about you? Are you glad to be back?” she asks him.
“God, so much. Florida is the worst, Mom.” he says and she laughs. “But, I don’t know,” he adds, “it’s kinda weird, it’s not how I expected it to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I guess I didn’t think I’d be spending a lot of my time alone in my apartment when I got home. I thought, y’know, I’d be out solving super cool crimes.”
“You need an adjustment period, Jake, you were away for six months with no contact, life can’t go back to normal straight away.”
“Yeah, but six months isn’t that long, it’s only half a year. It’s not like I was gone for five years or something. Life can’t have changed that much.”
“How are you and Amy?” she asks suddenly, catching Jake off guard.
“We’re fine, Mom,” he assures her.
“Long distance is hard, even when you get back,” she says. understandingly.
“We’re just… I don’t know, she’s working nights so I hardly see her… I almost feel like we’ve gone backwards a little bit, I don’t know. It’s like, even though I’m back, I’m still missing her.”
He wakes up that morning to Amy unlocking his door.
“Ames,” he says, his voice laced with happiness and sleepiness. He sits up and reaches out for her, pulling her onto the bed and wrapping her in a hug.
She laughs. “What, did you miss me or something?”
“Yeah,” he says softly, looking into her eyes, “yeah, I did.”
She smiles before they kiss hard and slow, and for the first time since that first night back he feels at home.
“I miss you too, Jake,” she whispers breathlessly when their lips leave each others’.
He kisses along her neck. “Well then let’s do something about that,” he murmurs, moving down to her collarbone.
“Jake,” she attempts to protest but it comes out as more of a moan. “Jake, we still have one week.”
He stops kissing her and looks at her mock offended. “Everything just has to be about sex with you, doesn’t it?”
She laughs and kisses him.
“I don’t know why my leg should stop us from having sex, people without legs have sex all the time.”
“All the time?” Amy asks quizzically.
“Yeah,” Jake insists, “they literally never stop doing it.”
Amy lets out a snort of laughter and rests her head on Jake’s chest.
She sits back after a moment. “I did want to talk to you about something though,” she says, looking up at him. “I wanted to say sorry for yesterday. I shouldn’t have been annoyed at you for assuming that I’d move in to yours when I assumed the exact same thing.”
“Ames, you don’t have to apologise, it’s okay, I get it.”
“You were gone for six months and I missed you so much, and we can’t just pick up where we left off like nothing happened, but that’s okay. Because you’re back and I love you. That’s what matters. So we don’t need to rush anything. Neither of us are going anywhere, we’ve got all the time in the world to work out where we’re gonna live and stuff like that.”
He kisses her gently. “I love you, Ames.”
She smiles and kisses him again… and again.
“I was also thinking we could go to back to mine and watch Die Hard on my far superior couch,” she says some minutes later.
“Shhh, Couch will hear you!”
“Yeah, because your apartment is tiny,” she teases, grinning.
They go to Amy’s and watch Die Hard and Die Hard 2 on her couch (which yes, is better than Jake’s, but he’d never admit that). She falls asleep during the second one, but he can’t really blame her, she did just spend all night working.
He gets up and drapes a blanket over her, propping her head up with a question; he brushes her hair back and kisses her on the forehead.
“Best girlfriend,” he murmurs to her, and she lets out a loud snore in response.
He sits back down next to her and spends the day watching her ‘Recently Watched’ on Netflix.
Maybe they weren’t the same as before, and they can’t pretend to be. But that’s okay, he decides. They’re strong, and they’re growing. And they’re together, finally .