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It’s definitely a mistake the first time. Not the sex—though that comes with its guilt for forgoing her own rule—but in the haphazard way in which they first stumble into the bedroom. Jake’s hands busy at the hem of her dress, her own fumbling over the buttons of his shirt. The way she falls backwards over his bed is in the back of her mind as he starts trailing his lips up her thighs.
And if she ends up on the right side of the bed when it’s over, she pays it no mind. Not when Jake rolls back to hover over her and sprinkle kisses over her face until she laughs at his dumb jokes.
(“We’re never making a sex tape, though. You know that, right?”
He nods, the softness in his eyes reassuring, but his lips holding their telltale smirk. So she kisses it off him.)
In truth, she doesn’t notice until the fifth or so night they spend together. Her hand is pressed to his shoulder, barely keeping her propped up above him as she breathes through the aftershocks. So it makes sense for her to fall the way she’s leaning, sprawling out beside Jake while he presses soft kisses to her palm. This time is different for a couple of reasons—the complete lack of alcohol in both of their bloodstreams, for one, and how for the first time, it finally hits her.
“You’re a thief.” She says it slowly first. Then braces herself back up on one arm and hits him in the chest. “A thief!”
“What?” He’s still staring at her with an unfair amount of adoration in his eyes, so she hits him again. “Hey, ow! What did I steal?”
All right, so she might be a little crazy from the leftover endorphins, but he is, in the loosest definition, a thief, so she has every right to elbow him in the stomach as she crawls over him to the left side of the bed. It immediately feels better this way, where she can face both the window and him, as confused as he may be. He’s beautiful, too, with the hazy light now illuminating the edges of his skin. (Don’t tell him she ever thought that, though.)
“My side of the bed,” she answers.
“This is my bed.”
She tucks herself further into him, securing her place on the left side. She pulls his arm around her, too, for good measure. And, as a last resort, she presses a few kisses to his shoulder because they both know that at the end of the day, he won’t deny her anything.
Almost anything, that is. For while he does relent that night—albeit with a childish defiance and a frown that she has to kiss off of him—he’s a pain in the ass the next night they spend together. He beelines straight to her bedroom the second she lets him in, her greeting dying on her lips as he brushes past her. She follows him to her bedroom, where he’s already sprawled on the left side of the bed.
“What are you doing?” she asks. She sits by his feet, legs folded under her.
“Winning, duh.”
It takes a few seconds for her to mind to catch up, though, in retrospect, connecting the dots between her boyfriend grinning up at her and his unwavering immaturity isn’t that difficult.
“You’re taking my side of the bed?”
“It’s my side, too!”
“What?” Amy stands up and paces a few steps forward. “You don’t have a side!”
He folds his other arm behind his head and closes his eyes. It’s true—he doesn’t. Most nights, he sleeps in the centre of the bed where he has equal access to all corners of the comforter to pull to him in pursuit of the perfect blanket burrito. On the nights he isn’t alone, he just ends up wherever’s the most convenient. (Or, if he’s in his own home and feeling exceptionally nice, he’ll subtly offer his guest the good lump on his mattress. He knows how to be a good host, all right?)
But Amy looks particularly annoyed, her forehead creasing and everything, and she might possibly be the love of his life, but the opportunity is too good to pass up. He cracks open one eye to find her pacing full-force now. It’s adorable how worked up she gets.
“Of course I have a side,” he jokes. “Who doesn’t have a side?”
She stops suddenly with her hands on her hips, and the stern look in her eyes has him reaching towards her, needing her. With a huff of breath, she relents and sits rather forcefully on his abdomen. He probably deserves it.
“What about our movie night?”
Jake closes his eyes again, knowing she’s about to pull every tactic in the book to get him up. He’s not going to budge.
“I already have Die Hard set up,” she continues.
Definitely, totally not budging.
“We could have sex on the couch after.”
He’s not budging, he’s not budging.
Amy shifts over him until she’s straddling his waist, then slides her hands under his shirt and up his chest. She lowers herself over him as she goes, his shirt ridden up completely and her mouth ghosting over his.
“Or before,” she adds, and he can feel her breath on his lips.
When he tries to kiss her, though, she leans back just far enough that he can’t reach her and moves her hands to the mattress beside him. And when he finally sits up to wrap his arms around her and pull her back to him, she wrestles out of his grasp and perches on the other end of the bed. So that’s how it is.
He’s not quite ready to give up his cause just yet. Even if his extremely gorgeous girlfriend is peeling off her shirt and reclining back just a couple feet from him and trailing her hand down from her bra to under her waistband and—okay, he budges. Sue him.
It’d be nice to say that was their lowest point, that they figure out a mature system to trade off who gets to sleep on which side (such as sleeping on their preferred side at their own houses, which Amy suggests innocently before inviting Jake over that night and every other night. He refuses. They don’t spend the night together for two weeks.)
So they end up in Amy’s living room with a notepad in her lap. It’s completely blank, and doesn’t seem to change no matter how long she stares at it, and Jake has already given up, choosing to fall asleep with his head on her shoulder.
“There’s a logical solution,” Amy says aloud. She’s been saying such motivational, yet false, claims for the last twenty minutes.
Jake hums in response, and presses a lazy kiss to her collarbone.
After five more minutes of tapping the pencil against her thigh, Amy gets up to make a cup of coffee, leaving her boyfriend to fall into the couch cushions. When she comes back, lifting his head into her lap, he tries to bring up his solution again.
“We could just keep competing for it,” he says.
She waits for his follow-up ideas; ridiculous notions like bake-offs and sand castle building races and whoever can hitchhike the farthest out of the city. But he’s looking up at her steadily this time, so she tosses the notepad and pencil to the side and takes a long sip from her mug.
“Fine.”
Jake grins up at her in that silly way that always drops her heart into her stomach and jumps up.
“Race you up and down the stairs!”
He’s up and running to her front door instantly, and her coffee nearly slips out of her hand. It leaves a small stain on her jeans that has her frowning for a moment—that’s going to take hours to soak out—but then she’s up and following Jake into the hall. He’s waiting at the top of the stairs for her, fiddling with his phone.
As she approaches, he turns the screen towards her. “Figured it’d be easier to time each other, yeah?”
“You’re serious,” she says, trying to search his eyes for any sense of logical reasoning, but then he’s bouncing on his toes and handing his phone over.
“I’ll go first!”
A laugh sneaks out of her—a combination of her own exhaustion and Jake’s antics—and she leans against the banister to ground herself. Then it’s “ready, set, go” and he’s flying down the stairs. Another string of laughter bursts out when he smashes right into the wall only to fling himself down the next flight. He returns with considerably less energy than he began with, and drops to his knees on the final landing.
“Time?” he rasps, then fully collapses to the floor before she can answer.
Amy doesn’t try to hide her enthusiasm this time, nudging him with her foot as she starts stretching to warm up. “Get up, loser. It’s time to learn how it’s done.”
He manages to sit up just as she pulls her hair back, stretching her arms up above her one last time before propping one leg before the other and crouching before the first step. Squinting at the phone timer, Jake wheezes. “Go.”
His un-oxygenated brain perhaps makes the wrong call, he thinks, when Amy returns, high and mighty (and definitely faster than him), only to discover he never timed her in the first place. She’s yelling at him, probably—it’s hard to tell when the blood still hasn’t stopped pounding in his ears—but he stands by it. There’s no such thing as a good race without a smidge of cheating.
“You could do it again,” he says, interrupting. She glares. They both know she doesn’t have the energy for a good round two. “Or, we run it side by side.”
“You know I destroyed you, Peralta.”
“Nuh uh! You have no proof.”
He’s up now, leaning into her space to goad her on.
“And whose fault is that?” She shoves him a bit, and he pulls her with him.
“One last race,” he sings, bringing them both to the edge of the landing.
With one last look into his eyes, and a barely muttered “go,” Amy’s running down the stairs again. Jake isn’t too far behind, leaping down a few stairs and nearly ramming into her from behind. Then he’s after her for realz, reaching for the hem of her shirt or any piece of her he can tug backwards. He catches her a couple of times, but she always skirts away, not even bothering to glance back.
They’re nearing the bottom when Amy realises she’s going to lose. She tries to circle around him as she hits the ground floor and has to work her way back up, but he catches her just as she anticipated, the combined momentum toppling them both to the floor. He’s already laughing by the time her head stops spinning, and she rests it against his shoulder, catching her breath.
“You—” she sucks in another breath “—cheater!”
It would sound more threatening if she hadn’t broken into laughter the second after. Sometimes she wonders how he can possibly make her feel so many things at once. Her chest is bursting with a severe lack of air and something a tad more profound—but her lips are pressed to his before she can register moving—so she’ll ponder that later.
(There is no clear winner that night. They’re equally champions in their own right as they attempt to stumble back up the stairs to Amy’s apartment before losing all their clothes.)
It doesn’t last a month until they’re wrapped up in each other on the couch, too drowsy to compete for what would be the third night in a row. Amy’s head keeps dropping off his shoulder, then jerking back up as she wakes up just a little more. Truthfully, Jake isn’t faring much better., but he has the energy to keep his eyes open long enough to turn off the television and detangle himself from Amy with a final kiss to her temple.
“Bed time.” He chuckles as she falls into the space he vacated, curling around herself.
He bends down to kiss her face a few more times until she’s swatting him away and blinking blearily through the darkness. Their gazes hold for just a second before her eyes drift shut again, and she shuffles closer into the cushions.
Bouncing up and down on his toes to regain some wakefulness, Jake assesses his girlfriend. Then slides his arms under her and picks her up (with only a little bit of a grunt, thank you very much). She doesn’t put up much, or any, resistance, but wraps her arms around his neck and traces over his skin in a way that has Jake certain he might drop her.
He wishes he could say he set her down on the left side of the bed. He really does. It sounds like the good boyfriend thing to do. But she’s too tired to put up a fuss anyway, and he’s lost the past four contests, so he deserves this, okay? Even if she’s a sore loser in the morning and dumps his coffee in the sink.
The week Jake buys a new mattress is the first week they spend every night together. It isn’t intentional—they spend the first two nights at Amy’s, nothing unusual for them, it’s always easier to bring over a few days worth of clothes at once. Then it’s two days at Jake’s to set up the mattress.
(“They would have set it up for you!” Amy grunts as she falls into the doorframe.
“For a hundred bucks! Can you believe that? It wasn’t even that hard. I just had to beg Terry to borrow his minivan—”
“He refused to unless I drove.”
“—slide the mattress into the back—”
“You gave up after forty minutes and made me do it.”
“—carry it upstairs—”
“You—”
“—with the help of my super amazing, super beautiful girlfriend!”
Amy slams the door shut with her foot, and looks at him with an all too threatening glare that has him glad there was a queen-sized barrier between them.
“And now we just have to get it up to the loft,” he speaks softer and quicker with every word, as if Amy wouldn’t notice the extent of the effort he was describing, “take down the old one, and throw it away.”
Amy drops her end of the mattress. “We?”)
She sleeps on the couch the first night, two mattresses taking up the rest of the apartment’s floor space minus the sliver Jake curled up in, too exhausted to continue. After six more gruelling hours after work the next day, most of which are taken up by Chinese take out and an episode of Serve & Protect, Jake proudly collapses on his new, readily-made bed. He’s melodramatically out of breath and feigning falling asleep when Amy drops down beside him with promises of finally paying off from all their hard work (if you catch her drift).
He doesn’t mean to spend another night with Amy, really, but she had a difficult case that morning, and the least he could do was bring over pierogis and a movie other than Die Hard.
It isn’t until the end of the weekend (and two more nights with Amy tucked into his side) that he notices how much time they’ve spent together. Actually, he doesn’t notice at all. Amy leaves a bag of her stuff behind, several days worth of clothes, toiletries, and her second favourite mug. It isn’t like they never left an item or two at each others’ apartments, but never this much, either. The message is clear; Jake could add the bag’s contents to his home, or leave it until the next time she came back, when she’d undoubtedly retrieve her things without another word.
He stresses over it for about three hours, pacing the kitchen while he brews a second cup of coffee then watches old cartoons to drum out his incessant worrying. A memory keeps flashing into his mind, no matter how many times he tries to push it out. His father, packing up his very essence from their house, from the old television in the living room to the green toothbrush by the sink. The spaces he left were marked by a lack of dust, and his mother had gone through cleaning every last surface.
But when he shows up a couple days later in Amy’s apartment, he’s got a pizza box in one hand and his own bag over his shoulder. She takes them both from him while he gets plates from the kitchen, and it’s easy, easy, when she comes up behind him with a kiss to his shoulder and steals his pizza slice as he’s distracted.
“Bet I can eat more pizza than you,” she says, already taking a bite.
(She’s right. She’s always right. Whether it’s slowly adding more belongings to his apartment or winning the left side of the bed for the fifth time that week. He thinks he almost loves her for it.)
“What if we trade off every week?”
She’s standing with her back to him, watching the toaster closely. (It’s prone to burning whenever she’s the one to use it.) He sits on the counter behind her.
“What’s the catch?” he asks.
“Catch?”
“Amy Santiago never gives in so easily.”
The toast pops up, and she jumps back. Reaching for a plate, she says, “No catch. It’s just easier.”
He studies her for a moment. The way her hair slips forward over her face as she takes out the bread, her smile when she can’t find one black splotch on her otherwise dark brown toast. She gets some butter on her thumb while moving the butter dish and licks it off, her other hand resting on her hip as she looks back at him and raises an eyebrow. His heart doesn’t stop, just slows while the world softens around the edges, but it’s clear. He loves her, without a doubt.
“Yeah, sure, okay,” he says. He stops paying attention when she brushes her hair aside.
She grins. “Great. You can have the rest of this week, and we can switch on Sunday.”
“It’s Saturday.”
“Yup!”
The butter knife drops to the floor as he surges forward, his hand landing in the middle of an over-toasted (“It’s not burnt!”) slice of bread, as he kisses Amy. Her hands fly to his chest, and he leans just far enough forward that she has to turn to face him completely, back against the counter. She laughs as he pulls away, lifting a hand to his cheek.
“That’s not going to change my mind, you know.”
He smiles and turns his head to the side to press his lips to her palm. “I know.”
They have places they always fall into. At first it was side to side, maybe an arm draped somewhere close to a waist, but there was always space. Space to breathe and think about what the hell they were doing. It didn’t last long. Jake likes wrapping around her, twisting the blankets around them. It’s messy and a pain to fix in the morning, and she’s always scolding him, even when she was wrapped just as tightly around him hours before. That’s where she likes to be, her hands looped around him. He’s a bit pickier, tossing and turning, sometimes grabbing the blankets in fists or folding into her. Head on her sternum, arms low on her hips, knees up and laced through her thighs.
Which is why it’s surprising when Amy becomes the clingier one. It’s not two seconds after she’s set down her book that she’s wrapping herself around him, practically on top of him. He sighs and shuts off his phone to secure his arms around her. Her feet slide past his, nearly hanging off the bed.
Then it hits him, and he leans back as far as her arms allow him to, peering closely at her. Eyes closed and mouth parted, she looks half asleep, but one poke at her ribs has her tightening up in a way sleepy Amy never does.
“You’re trying to slide onto the left side,” he accuses.
She yawns, shifting her weight just a little to the left until she’s practically falling off him. He throws an arm out farther just to spite her. Eyes opening a crack, she looks at the empty sliver of bed she’s trying to steal before looking up at him.
“I would never,” she says, and tries to kiss him as if that’ll make him forget. (Okay, it probably could have, but he turns his head out of the way before it comes to that.)
“You’re sliding your foot over right now!”
He pushes her foot back with his own, trying to trap it under his weight. Then her other foot sneaks past, and before he knows it, they’re caught in the middle of a war. She breaks before he does, hands clutching his shirt as her smile erupts into laughter, the kind that shakes mountains and makes Jake fall in love with her just a little bit more.
It’s hard, sometimes, on the nights they spend apart. There aren’t many of them anymore, most of their nights spent at one apartment or the other, interrupted by the occasional late night at work. When it’s decided that Amy will go undercover at the Texas State Penitentiary, they don’t realise all of the implications until Jake pulls himself off the case and spends the first night alone in his bed, hundreds of miles from Amy. If he pulls all of the covers up around him, it almost forms enough of a mass to pretend he’s holding her.
Some nights, he imagines all the different ways to brag about how he got to sleep on the left side as much as he wanted to. He considers him a bit of a comedic genius, but now the joke’s on him because he’d rather sleep on the floor of a prison cell if it meant being next to Amy again.
There’s nothing more wonderful than the text that she’s on her way home, except maybe the super cool amazing heist they’re caught up in, but—no, Amy, she’s more important, definitely. He can’t wait to tell her everything that’s been going on, hear her wild lady-prison stories in return. She can have the left side, too, he doesn’t even care.
Then Figgis calls, and everything goes to hell.
It’s a cascade of emotions from leaning back with a grin on her face, already mentally arranging her apartment for Jake, to sparing one last glance at the building in her rearview mirror as she drives home alone. Normally, she’d respect the department’s thoroughness. But when she spots the box of doughnuts on the counter, she can only feel angry at the fake-smiling gentlemen who took away her captain and her boyfriend without a moment for goodbyes.
She doesn’t know how long she stands by the door, staring at the doughnuts just visible through the kitchen entryway. Her purse goes somewhere near the hook on the wall, close enough that Amy lets go and doesn’t notice when it misses and falls to the floor instead. Her shoes are next, haphazardly thrown off in the general direction of the door as she makes her way into the kitchen.
(They hover too close to one another, shoulders brushing as Amy orders drinks for the both of them. The squad mingles about around them, somewhere in the distance, as they manage to drift closer and closer.
“Wings, too?” she asks him, glancing at the short menu to distract herself from the way his arms are sneakily pulling up her shirt, how much she wants to drag him out of here.
His lips find themselves along her hairline as he slides even closer, whispers in her ear.
“Mm, I can think of something better back home.”
She laughs, letting him pull her into a kiss that she could get lost in if not for the bartender rounding their way.)
It’s a box of shitty, powdered doughnuts. Amy slides her hands over the box, tries to imagine Jake standing in line, picking out the messiest doughnuts of the bunch to surprise her. Then setting them here, placed just so she couldn’t miss them. He’d have some awful joke, something with a sweet ending that would lead to her pinned against the counter with her blouse undone.
“Asshole,” she mutters.
The tears come before the sobs, wracking her frame and drawing every breath out of her reach before she can take one. Her hands are shaking as she picks up the box, and tosses it to the floor. It doesn’t spill, barely even cracks open, so she kicks it into the fridge. Kicks it over and over until there’s a fine layer of white powder radiating through the kitchen and her lungs finally give out.
She sleeps on the hardwood floor that first night, exhaustion curling around her as she drifts off where she sits.
The next day is devoted to cleaning. She intended to get started on the Figgis case immediately, but her alarms go off unperturbed on the other side of the house, and she doesn’t wake until nearly noon. Dust and powdered sugar coat her skin as she trudges to the bathroom, where she’s assaulted again by memories of Jake. She half expects him to walk through the door, argument on his lips about the environmental benefits of showering together, but there’s only a mostly empty shampoo bottle and shaving cream in his place.
So she starts picking things up, rearranging them out of sight and out of mind. She puts his shampoo under the sink, his coffee mugs in the back of the cabinet. The donuts go in the trash, the floor scrubbed and lemon-scented. She makes it all the way to the bedroom on autopilot, but pauses while sweeping up his clothes into the laundry basket.
She bundles up in one of his old favourite sweatshirts, the one she stole nearly a year ago at the beginning of their relationship. The sun has barely started to set, but she crawls into bed all the same, daunted by the extra mattress space. She spends the first half of the night spread out over the bed; a foot in one corner, her opposite hand stretching in the other direction, and all of her too aware of the empty gaps in between. As the hours drag on, she curls in on herself, and finally drifts off with her arms around her knees.
(“I love you,” she whispers, still staring at the door that shut her out.
Lingering on the other side, Jake casts one last look back before taking the seat offered alongside a mountain of paperwork and the witness protection agents.)
There are few things more depressing than the hotel artwork in Larry’s house. Such as the hospital corners on the tan bedspread, the fake fruit in the kitchen, the mysterious stain outside the bathroom, and just about every other single thing in this miserable house. The sheer size of it is the worst, with more floor space than any apartment he’s owned. The unoccupied space only reminds him that he’s utterly alone.
He spends most of his time holed up in the bedroom. There isn’t much he can do without being reminded of her. The lack of her. He alternates between staring at the ceiling for hours on end to turning on his side and extending an arm to the left side of the bed. It’s not hard to imagine Amy lying there, looking back at him, smiling and laughing at some joke that definitely wasn’t good enough. That’s when she’d shuffle closer to him, and he’d press kisses over her cheeks and lips to preserve her happiness forever. But instead he watches the memory of her fade from his grasp.
Holding back tears, he turns back to the ceiling.
There are three significant moments when Jake comes back home. One, that he isn’t at his own apartment, instead curled up with Amy on her couch. Two, of course, is that Amy is back in his arms, his hands gripping the shirt around her waist as he drifts off against her shoulder. It’s barely into the afternoon, but he’s been holding himself back from falling asleep in case he wakes up and he’s back in the hell known more commonly as Florida.
Amy brushes her fingers gently through his hair, as if she’s afraid he’ll disappear, too. “I missed you,” she says. She’s been saying it all day. It’s easier than admitting to how empty she felt without him.
He says, “I missed you, too,” and it means I love you, I never want to leave you again.
Three, he gets into the right side of the bed without another thought. It’s more of a testament to its closer positioning to the door, which he goes through backwards, hands dancing frantically from Amy’s hips to her waist to her hair. He wants nothing more to touch her, has waited seemingly years to feel her skin hot against his, but he keeps faltering at the last moment. He isn’t afraid, of course not. But what if six months was too long?
He might be slightly afraid. Amy stops, leaning back just enough that he can’t chase her lips, and he knows he messed something up. He’s already lowering his hands, a million apologies rushing through his mind, when Amy gently pushes him onto the edge of the bed and steps between his legs, pressing a kiss to his forehead. Her eyes are dark, pinning him in place, but soften as she whispers, “I love you,” and presses another small kiss to his nose.
She doesn’t give him time to respond, just nips at his lower lip until his mind catches up and he draws her further into him. But when she’s finally underneath him, her clothes somewhere on the floor in unorganised piles that he knows she’s going to have to pick up before she sleeps (because he knows her, his Amy, still after all this time), he takes the moment to whisper it back. He keeps repeating the three words between every kiss down her abdomen, and she barely manages a response before pushing him farther down.
It takes two weeks to get back to their routine. Half of that time is spent convincing Amy that she doesn’t need to try cooking breakfast every morning, no matter how close her charred bricks are to finally looking like pancakes. It takes another couple of days to stop looking over their shoulders and double-checking all the locks. Jake doubts the nightmares will ever stop, just keeps waking up in the middle of the night to wrap himself tighter around Amy and count her breaths until he can fall back asleep.
She wakes up, too, sometimes, sitting up in bed when he returns with a glass of water, her hands searching for him in the dark. (They don’t keep the curtains open anymore. You can never be too sure who’s peering in.)
They don’t talk at first. Amy will take the water from him and set it on the nightstand while he settles back in beside her. Her hands will cup his face, and he never looks back at her, but he knows she’s trying to search his eyes, ask him if he’s okay. He’ll turn his head to press a kiss on her palm, and he doesn’t know, doesn’t know what his answer is, but Amy will kiss the top of his head anyway in response.
“What time is it?” It feels wrong to break the silence of the night.
“Just after two.”
His eyes blink open, just as Amy folds further into him, her hair brushing over his cheeks.
“Are you okay?” Her voice is muffled into his shirt. It’s the first time she’s asked the question out loud.
Jake takes a moment to sweep her hair aside before muttering something that’s nearly an affirmation. He keeps his hands in her hair, twirling the strands around his fingers and hoping she doesn’t ask more.
Her fingers drum on his chest for a moment, but she drops it. Then she drums a little more and asks something else. “Do you still want to move in together?”
“Yes.”
Her lips quirk up at the haste of his response. “Okay.”
Fortunately, Amy doesn’t attempt to make breakfast the next morning. Jake finds her in the kitchen with some microwavable oatmeal and an extra coffee, which he promptly, and happily, scalds his tongue on. The window is even open again, letting in the autumn breeze. It feels, finally, like home.
Then Amy mumbles around a mouthful of oats, “What’ll you miss most?”
“What?”
“About the apartment. When you move into mine.”
He takes another sip of coffee, sure that he’s still half asleep. “I’m not gonna miss anything because you’re moving here.”
“Jake, come on.” Amy frowns and takes a sip of her own. “This place is a dump.”
“Like your apartment is any better?”
“Um, clearly.”
“Name one thing—”
She starts ticking off her fingers. “Better location, more space, adequate heating system, nicer neighbours—”
“So there’s a couple of drawbacks! Every place has them.”
“Does everyone also share their place with an entire rat family?”
Jake gasps. “Leave Mrs. Paws and her children out of this!”
Suffice to say, the conversation does not go well. If it weren’t for his newfound hatred of sleeping by himself, Jake would’ve sworn to never leave his apartment again. Instead, he winds up at Amy’s that night, watching Die Hard angrily and poking at his chicken-fried rice.
(Not to say he’s mad at Amy, who’s still infuriatingly the best and most beautiful person he knows. Though he might give her one less kiss than usual, just for pride’s sake.)
He still sleeps on the right side of the bed most nights, without giving the habit any concern. If Amy notices, she doesn’t say anything, just occasionally gets in the right side before he can, switching it up like they used to.
It only gets worse when Jake officially moves his belongings into her apartment, boxes sitting here and there, his packing style hopeless to even Amy’s carefully concocted lists. So his water bottle with the built-in silly straw sits on one nightstand, while his police badge rests atop the other. There’s an alarm clock on each, with both of their phones sitting on the left near the closest outlet. It’s a style of messy that Jake has perfected over the years with a touch of that Santiago charm. It’s theirs.
Really, it doesn’t matter where they sleep, as long as it’s in each other’s arms.
So it’s a shock when Amy wakes up with a string of kisses down her neck only to fall asleep later that day exhausted and alone.
He’s out on bail only a day later, and she knows that they can’t waste a moment trying to solve this case, but she supposes a few minutes won’t hurt when she gets him back in her grasp outside the county court. She’s just as shocked as he is when she starts crying—sniffling, really—into his collar.
“It’s all right, Ames. We’ll catch the bastards.”
She chokes on the words rising up inside her; I don’t want to be without you ever again. They’re true, every last one of them, but the intensity scares her. So she’s mutters, “Damn right,” instead, and promises to analyse exactly how far she’d go for Jake Peralta later.
(The answer is the ends of the earth, farther if she could. It’s not the first time she’s thought about marrying him—it’s one of the next bullet points on her life plan, of course, right after making sergeant—but she never expected it to hit her all at once. There is no one else she wants to spend her life with, no one else she could dream of. And she can’t bear to lose him now.)
She wakes up two months later alone again, tears still cracking over her cheeks. The memory of yesterday’s trial is a blur, the bottles of wine she trips over on her way to the bathroom accounting for that. In the shower, she manages a few more moments of sleep before waking up to the now freezing stream of water. She stumbles out, confused, and almost calls out for Jake before it hits her all again.
She roots around for his old favourite hoodie, then curls up back in bed, and tries to imagine a different reality.
Throughout the day, she can’t keep still. The pillows do little to block out the light, and every half hour her phone rings until she unplugs it and throws it somewhere deep into Jake’s messy pile of clothes in the closet. At one point she has to migrate out from her blanket pile for some food, and stuffs herself with his junk food cabinet, swallowing it down with orange soda. He’s not gone. She’s just keeping their home secure in the meantime. That means acting for the both of them—keeping Die Hard playing in the background, changing her ringtone to “Shake It Off,” making two cups of coffee in the morning. He’s not gone.
And at night, she gets in on his side of the bed, fluffs his pillow by hitting it against the bed frame as he does, and tries to feel what he’s feeling, hundreds of miles away.
(“I’m great, splendid even, like I’ve just taken down thirteen German criminals with my bare hands as the entirety of Los Angeles bursts into flames behind me.”
“If the whole city’s in flames, doesn’t that mean you failed?”)
It’s been a while since he was last in a twin bed, if his crappy prison bunk could be considered as such. Hell, he’d take his old college dorm room over this, and that had the permanent scent of weed and Cheetos. Although if he’s making wishes, he wants Amy in his arms—or him in hers, more accurately, safe in their own soft, non-mouldy bed. Far away from here.
He turns on his side at that, facing what he thinks is north, or what could possibly be southwest, as if he could see across the 700 miles to Amy, hopefully at home and not wearing herself thin. (He knows, okay? But let him imagine.) At the very least, he has two pictures taped above him, and if he stares at them long enough, he can almost hear her laugh. Oh, God, please don’t let him forget her laugh.
As it turns out, he remembers. He wraps his arms around her for longer than thirty seconds, and her chin fits perfectly against his shoulder, and he kisses her until he’s out of breath and there are tears in their eyes. He makes her laugh over and over until he’s sure nothing has changed, and she takes his face in her hands, fingers curling around the unfamiliarity of his beard.
“I love you.” She’s only told him seventeen times in the last hour. (He’s counted, of course. He will never take any of them for granted.)
He kisses her, respectively shortly, because they’re surrounded by a plane full of people that have been disgusted by them since the pre-boarding checks, and says, “I love you, too.”
The rest of the trip home is a dream, mostly due to the fact that he’s half asleep for all of it. The exhaustion of the past eight weeks hits him all at once, and he awakens only enough for Amy to drag him along through the airport and into the taxi, then back home. He collapses on the couch, and for a moment, Amy rests against the wall behind him and resists the urge to pinch herself. Then he’s up, walking around the apartment to ensure everything is the same.
He ends in her arms, as always, sliding in front of the microwave that’s heating up something delicious and warm. It beeps to signal that it’s done, but it doesn’t matter. He’s not letting go of her now. (And he might be drifting off against her shoulder again.)
Somehow Amy, blessing that she is, manages to grab the dish and shuffle them to the couch, wrapping her arms more securely around him and offering him an egg roll. Egg rolls lead to orange soda and that somehow leads to sleepy couch kisses that warm Amy’s heart, released in bursts of laughter.
“I love you,” she reminds him.
He smiles soft and slow against her jaw, mutters something that might be a number, and passes out for the final time that night.
Jake wakes up when the sun does, which is so startling he almost forgets where he is and how badly he needs to pee. Both hit him around the same time, when he automatically stumbles into a bathroom, and it hits him that he isn’t sharing it with twenty other guys. And it smells like flowers. He’s never been quite so thankful for air fresheners.
She’s on the couch where he slowly detangled himself from her moments ago. Her face is pressed into the armrest and she’s curled around a throw pillow in his absence. Love swells in his chest for the umpteenth time in the past twenty-four hours, and he collapses right back next to her, folding her in his arms and sliding his legs between hers, partly to be as close to her as possible and partly not to fall back off the couch. He’s asleep before it can occur to him to carry her to bed.
The second time he wakes up, hands are stroking back his hair. It’s safe and soft, and he can feel Amy draped around him, her breath skating by his neck. It takes a lot of effort to blink open his eyes, turn his head a bit to the right to meet her gaze. She smiles, her hands stilling as she reaches up to kiss him.
“Good morning,” he says.
She smiles wider and kisses him again, her hands drifting to cup his face. It wakes him up the rest of the way, but just as he shifts to hold her more firmly, she pulls back.
“How are you?”
“Great.”
From the way her mouth immediately turns down, Jake backtracks, knowing that he responded too quickly to be believable. “I mean, not great?” He just wants her to go back to smiling and kissing him. “It’s great being home. With you.”
He gets a smile at least, but her eyes are glossy, and he’s pretty sure he promised to never make her sad again. If he hasn’t, he really, really should.
“I’m glad you’re home, too,” she whispers.
He kisses her before she can do something like cry. Which will make him cry. It seems to work well enough, and he keeps pressing kiss after kiss to her face while he thinks of a Plan B—as much as he’d prefer to kiss her for the rest of the day, the crick in his neck is begging him to get off the couch, and his stomach readily agrees.
“Come on,” he announces. He grabs her hands and helps her into a sitting position before yanking her up to his side. Her eyes are brighter now, which brings a smile to his face. “Breakfast time!”
She lets him drag her all the way to the door before she protests. “What are you doing?”
“We’re going out.”
“I’m not dressed!”
Stopping to scoop up her keys and wallet—his are still in his measly bag of prison belongings—and slip on the super durable fluffy slippers Amy bought him last Christmas, he looks her up and down. She’s still wearing her airplane clothes, the separate outfit she brought with her specifically for flying, which consists of leggings and his sweatshirt (and no bra, due to a few lazy make out seshes).
“You look great.” He leans in to kiss her before she can object again.
They spend the rest of the day effectively wrapped up in each other, from sitting squeezed together in the same side of the booth at Sunny Side Up, to catching up on all of the Serve & Protect episodes he missed, to partaking in some more aerobic activities on the couch. And in the hallway. And on the bed.
“Scoot.”
She’s just exited the bathroom, having earlier declared that no matter how beautiful she may look, she would not, under any circumstance, forgo her nightly moisturiser. (Jake tried to complain as she pushed out of his arms, even going to the lengths of starting a tickle war when he knew full and well they were banned from any sort of “war” or “battle” after the Central Park incident. Gina’s contract wasn’t legally binding, anyway.)
“What, why?”
He’s been on his phone for the past six minutes, playing the word game Amy downloaded for him that he’s too lazy to delete. As far as he can tell, there’s plenty of room for her to lie down next to him.
She tuts at him until he finally rolls to the left side of the bed, rolling back into her when she’s settled.
“Since when do you sleep on that side?”
She freezes for a moment, then tucks into him, looking over at his screen. “Since when do you know what ‘superficial’ means?”
Quickly shutting off his phone, he stutters out, “What? Nothing. Just… porn?”
It’s lame, but he gets a kiss for it. So that’s pretty much worth everything.
Mornings are Amy’s favourite time of day. They didn’t used to be, back when waking up meant snoozing her first 6am alarm just to muster the strength to open her eyes by the second one and get out of bed for the third. But that was before she got quiet mornings sweeping back Jake’s hair and kissing between his eyes to make his nose twitch, hear him grumble something inaudible and turn a bit further into her. She wonders if he thinks his hair gets that messy naturally, or if he knows she musses it up, sleepy and delirious herself.
Often, she thinks about when it happened—the change in her routine, accompanying the human-sized mess in her life. The best thing in her life. Like the addition of sleepy kisses once he finally stumbles into the bathroom once she’s done with her shower, or the extra coffee he’s already prepared when she finishes applying her makeup.
But it’s waking up next to him, their things on their respective sides of the bed, in their room, in their house, for what seems like the billionth time, that she feels the most at peace. It’s the sense of permanence, of security. She could bottle the moment up, keep it forever, and never let it go.
It turns out she never has to.
Jake carries her into their apartment that night, accidentally knocking her feet against the door, despite all her protests.
“It’s what you’re supposed to do!” he keeps claiming.
She’s laughing too hard to get out a proper response. “Not—” she tries to catch her breath “—yet!”
But he spins her around, nearly falling into the couch, and carries her all the way to the bedroom before finally setting her down. She lies down instantly, clutching her stomach and trying to think around the pounding in her head. He follows quickly after her, pressing kisses down her neck and over her collarbone.
Running a hand through his hair for stability, she tries to remember how she got here. Something about marriage and too many drinks at Shaw’s and enough public indecency that Rosa all but dragged them into a taxi. And there’s the ring on her finger.
She’s definitely too intoxicated for rational thought, but somehow she manages to get Jake on his back—she’s not entirely sure when his shirt came off, but she’s glad it’s gone—and becomes fascinated by the ways the light refracts against her ring as she runs a hand down his chest and follows with her lips.
He lets her have her way for a moment, his laughter fading into a soft smile, before sitting up and regaining control again.
“I love you,” he says, then pins her down as she loses her breath in a different way.
They last forever, because of course they do. In less crazy snapshots, they spend most of it doing work and bringing work home and reading about more work while documentaries and Die Hard and a documentary about Die Hard play in the background. Amy starts reading more as she settles into her work as a sergeant, hunched over her books in bed while Jake watches her slowly droop towards sleep. He picks up his fair share of books, too, such as the murder mystery his wife gave him for Hanukkah and The Expectant Dad’s Survival Guide.
Things change when the newborn enters their bedroom, getting the special soft spot in the middle of the bed, pushing Jake all the way to the edge because “what if I roll over and suffocate her!” It gets easier as she grows up and becomes the perfect cuddling size, filling Amy’s phone with pictures of baby Sadie asleep on an equally unconscious Jake. (It also gets harder when she learns how to crawl and manages to jam a knee into his gut—or worse—every single morning.)
The space between Jake and Amy grows throughout the years, with another, and then three, jumping children between them. And then her husband gets up to jump, too, creating a mashup of “four little monkeys jumping on the bed” and “tickle monster” that results in enough shrieking that the neighbours call the police on them more than once.
“Can you tell us a story?”
They’re spread out on the bed. Bella has wide eyes and a thumb in her mouth, which Jake gently replaces with a big two-arm hug instead. Sadie’s curled around Amy, peering over her shoulder at the storm raging outside. The next clap of thunder starts another wave of crying from the newest Santiago-Peralta, and the children scramble around their father, who’s farthest from the window.
“What kind of story?” he asks, nudging the girls back into his arms.
“The one about the pretty lady.”
He grins, pressing a kiss to each little forehead, purposefully ignoring the eye roll Amy sends his way. “Once upon a time, the most pretty lady ever—”
“Prettiest,” Amy corrects.
“Yeah, she is.” Jake matches her smile. “The prettiest lady ever met the prettiest—”
“Messiest.”
“—prettiest man ever. They didn’t know it yet, but they were gonna fall in love forever.”