Chapter Text
come into the water
do you wanna be my baby?
are you waiting to touch me?
It happens on a muggy, sunny Tuesday in early August, the summer before senior year.
Archie drives all four of them out to the swimming hole in his old jalopy, and when Jughead tugs his jeans off at the water’s edge – because he’s Jughead, and god forbid he wear shorts when it’s hot out – he tugs his swim trunks with them, a bit too far.
Betty, rarely the first to jump in, but never the last, is already treading water. It’s not unusual for her gaze to be turned towards Jughead, as it is now; these past few months, she will soon realize, it’s been turned towards him more often than not.
Arms and legs churning, she catches a glimpse of the little mark that sits below his hipbone: half of an upside-down heart, just like hers.
She sinks below the surface, and holds her breath while her heart pounds in her chest. She can’t let him see her face.
If he sees her face, he’ll know.
.
Betty sees her father’s mark when she is twelve years old and walks through the bathroom door that he forgot to lock behind him. It is a dark, jagged shape on his left lower back.
It does not match her mother’s.
Growing up, soulmates are not something that Betty thinks about very much.
Of course, she knows that they exist. She has read the fairytales, watched the Disney movies, hummed along to the love songs on the radio in her parents’ cars. But romance has never captured Betty’s imagination the way it has, say, Polly’s. When Polly wants to play dress-up as a bride at her wedding, Betty wants to solve the mystery of why there isn’t any groom.
One rainy afternoon, when they are very small, coloring side by side on the floor of Betty’s bedroom, Polly pulls up the skirt of Betty’s pink dress and presses the tip of a blue marker to her skin.
“I finished it,” Polly proclaims, and then flounces off to her own bedroom, leaving her markers scattered across the floor.
Betty can only see her own mark if she twists around with her back to the mirror, so that’s what she does, holding her skirt up around her stomach with both hands. There’s a half-blue heart right there on her body, where before there was only something resembling a teardrop shape. It’s prettier now, she thinks, staring at it in the mirror, and that’s how Alice finds her only a moment later.
Their mother yells at Polly – that is a very private part of your sister, young lady, and where did you find a permanent marker? – but Betty is the one who cries.
Betty’s parents are not soulmates. The realization tears open a gnawing hole in twelve-year-old Betty’s heart, one she didn’t expect. One she’s not sure she can ever stitch back together.
She wants to tell Polly. But Polly has been so weird lately, now that she’s fourteen and takes the bus to the middle school instead of walking with Betty and Archie every morning to Riverdale Elementary.
So she holds the secret in her chest until Monday at lunchtime, when she tells Veronica she needs her help with something in the bathroom. Veronica, assuming her best friend has finally started her period and needs the advice of a wiser, more experienced sixth grader, is happy to oblige.
Instead, Betty pulls her into the accessible stall, and tells her in a whisper what she saw.
Veronica seems unimpressed by the revelation. She hoists herself up onto the window ledge next to the toilet, letting her feet dangle. Her shoes are cute, shiny leather ones with small heels that make her just about Betty’s height when they’re standing face to face. Betty’s mom says she’s still too young to wear heels.
“A lot of people’s parents aren’t soulmates.”
She says it like this is common knowledge, and not a crack in the foundation of Betty’s very existence. “Aren’t yours?”
“I don’t know. They’ve never said.” Veronica shrugs. “They can barely stand to be in the same room together, so I hope not.”
Betty must be silent for longer than she intends, processing this information, because Veronica slips back down to the ground and cups her hand around Betty’s elbow.
“Finding your soulmate and living happily ever after is Disney movie stuff, B,” she says softly. “The odds of finding someone with the same mark as you are like, one in a billion.” She tilts her head. “You really didn’t know that?”
Betty’s cheeks burn. She feels stupid. Like a child who’s clung to their belief in Santa Claus for years past the point when adults still found it charming.
“No, I – I know.” Betty swallows down the lump in her throat. “It’s just…my parents said they were. I trusted them.”
It’s not true, she realizes later, walking home alone from school like she does every Monday afternoon because Archie has soccer practice. Her parents never said they were soulmates. But they let her think it. They let her read the books and watch the movies and sing the songs, safe and comfortable in the knowledge that someday she’d find the person who was meant for her, just like they had.
They never said, one in a billion, Betty. Those are the odds you’ll ever find them.
They never said, we never did.
.
Archie drops Veronica off first. She slides across the backseat to press a kiss to Betty’s cheek before slipping out the door, ruffling her hand through Archie’s hair as she goes.
He watches her as she reaches the front doors of the Pembrooke and stops to dig through her bag for her keycard.
Jughead clears his throat from the passenger’s seat. “I think we can assume she’ll make it to the penthouse safe and sound, Arch.”
Archie turns his key in the ignition, meeting Betty’s eyes briefly in the rearview mirror before he mutters, “Shut up.”
In Archie’s driveway, Jughead tugs on the sleeve of her t-shirt, his hand brushing against her arm. He’s been doing that more, since summer started – touching her. Not in a way that ever feels intentional, but the kind of fleeting, casual touches that until now, he’d always shied away from.
She isn’t really sure when the shift had happened – junior prom, maybe, which they’d attended together as friends. At a dance, touching her was unavoidable. Maybe he’d just needed to see for himself that her skin wouldn’t burn his fingers.
“We’re gonna order pizza and play Xbox,” he says. “You wanna come?”
Betty shakes her head quickly. Whether or not he’s noticed, it’s the first time she’s made eye contact with him since the swimming hole; she’s not sure how long she can maintain it without breaking down entirely. And that’s not what she wants right now. She wants time to think.
“I’m beat. Too much sun.” She waves over her shoulder as she crosses the lawn towards her own front door. “Bye, guys.”
Mercifully, the house is empty. Her parents are still at work, and Polly is probably on her shift at Pop’s, where she’s waitressing this summer to save up spending money before she heads back to Towson in the fall. Betty strips out of her t-shirt and shorts and swimsuit in the laundry room and drops them in the washing machine, then races upstairs to take a shower.
While she waits for the water to heat up, she twists away from the mirror, chin over her shoulder. She squints, tracing the familiar shape with the tip of her middle finger, the way she’s done so many times before. A curve to the left that hooks back around to the right, a straight line leading back up to a point.
Jughead was at least twenty feet away when she saw his. And it was only visible for a few seconds. What if it was an illusion? What if her mind just showed her what it wanted to see?
What would it mean if the thing her mind wanted her to see was her own mark reflected back at her on Jughead’s bare skin?
There had been no moment of clarity, when she saw it. No puzzle piece snapping into place, no magnetic force drawing them together. She didn’t think, it’s you. She wasn’t in love with Jughead Jones before that moment, and she isn’t in love with him now.
The water is too hot when she steps into the shower, but she lets it run.
If Betty is being honest, she had always imagined that Jughead might be one of those rare people who is born without any mark at all.
Not because there is anything wrong with him. Nor because he is unappealing in any way. Just because – he’s Jughead, who flinches away from hugs. Who rolls his eyes at the mildest hint of affection. She’s never understood why someone would hold themselves at a distance that way, if they knew that their match was out in the world somewhere, waiting for them.
Now she knows: he knew there was someone to find. Maybe he didn’t want to be found.
Betty spends the next day with Veronica, laying out by the rooftop pool at the Pembrooke. They’ve been making frequent use of it all summer – neither of them has a steady job this year – and have fallen into a routine, arranging their lounge chairs so Veronica is bathed in sunlight, Betty in the shadow of the red-and-white striped umbrella.
“What’s up with you and Archie?” she asks.
Veronica doesn’t answer right away. Her face betrays nothing as she turns it towards Betty, though that’s no great feat when it’s half-covered by an enormous pair of Bulgari sunglasses. “What do you mean?”
“Yesterday. You two were very…affectionate.” Betty rolls onto her side, propping her chin in her hand. “Are you getting back together?”
Archie and Veronica’s on-again, off-again relationship was the stuff of legends at Riverdale High, spanning years and a spate of public break-ups and make-ups. Their last split, though, had seemed like the one that would finally stick, because it was the first one that had happened without any tears or accusations at all. They’d just agreed that they were better off as friends.
“No. Well, I don’t think so,” Veronica amends. “I don’t intend to. But…I miss him.”
“You guys hang out all the time.”
“Yeah, with you and Jughead and everyone. I miss doing other things with him.”
“Sex,” Betty says with a hint of a smile.
Veronica nudges her sunglasses down her nose to peer at Betty. “If it was just sex I wanted, I wouldn’t have to go to Archie for it.”
“That’s true.” Not that Betty would know much about it. She’s never had a boyfriend, never had sex. She got drunk and made out with Reggie Mantle at his winter formal afterparty back in February; she had let him unzip her pink dress, and touch her breasts, but no more. The bodice of her dress had remained bunched around her waist the entire time. If they were soulmates -- and she’d doubted, greatly, that they were -- she hadn’t wanted to know it.
Veronica takes a sip of her spiked lemonade. “If we were getting back together,” she says carefully, “would you feel okay about it?”
Archie and Veronica have been Archie-and-Veronica for so long that sometimes Betty forgets she herself had ever been a factor. Veronica never does.
“Yes,” Betty says firmly. “I’ve been over that for years. You know that.”
Of course, that was more or less what she’d said when they were all fifteen, and Veronica and Archie had slept together for the first time. Then, it had been a lie, but she’d still managed to keep up her best poker face as her best friend confessed what she’d done with the boy Betty had been pining over for nearly half of her life. After all, she told herself, sex was just sex. It was something that existed only in the moment.
But she hadn’t been able to hide the way it crumbled when Veronica described the curved, looping shape of Archie’s mark, and she knew – finally, with certainty – that it did not match her own, as she’d always hoped.
It didn’t match Veronica’s, either, but Veronica didn’t care. By that point, she no longer believed that the marks meant anything at all.
They’re just another symbol of shame, she’d proclaimed during a sleepover in the eighth grade, eyes bright with conviction. One hundred years ago if you were caught with a guy’s hand up your skirt they’d call you a whore. Unless you said, oh, it’s because we’re soulmates, we couldn’t resist one another. And no one would argue with it because it’s not like they were going to check and see.
Veronica’s take wasn’t uncommon amongst their peers, though Betty suspected most of their motivation was driven by hormones and not a burgeoning interest in feminist theory. By tenth grade, it was decidedly lame to care about something like saving yourself for your soulmate, whether or not you believed in the concept. Who wanted to find their match in high school, anyway?
Betty had never asked Archie what he thought about the marks. Whether he cared that he and Veronica weren’t a match. But she saw the way he looked at Veronica; back then, it sometimes felt like looking into a mirror.
“Who are you into these days?” Veronica asks. “There’s still time for a summer fling.”
Betty shrugs. “No one.”
“Not Jughead?”
Her heartbeat quickens, and Betty shifts onto her back, staring up at the spokes on the underside of the umbrella. Had Veronica seen Jughead’s mark yesterday? She knows what Betty’s looks like. She’d make the connection.
Or is there something else Veronica is seeing that Betty is not? The thought makes her feel like there’s not enough air in her lungs.
“Why would you say that?”
“Because it would be really cute to go on double dates together.” Veronica laughs. “But you sound horrified by the mere prospect, so I’ll take that as a no.”
“I’m not horrified. Just surprised.”
“Really? I think he likes you. And you spend a lot of time together.”
“I spend more time with you,” Betty points out. “I’m not secretly in love with you.”
“Keep telling yourself that.” Veronica shrugs, opening a magazine over her lap. Betty can smell the ink-and-perfume scent; it reminds her of afternoons spent in Veronica’s bedroom, sprawled out on her fluffy plum-colored comforter, ripping out pages for the fashion collages Veronica used to insist they make in anticipation of the changing seasons.
Betty smiles, and sits up, placing her sunglasses onto the little table between them. “I’m going to swim.”
On Friday nights, Betty sits with Jughead in the projection booth of the Twilight Drive-in. Every time, she eats a box of Milk Duds that he swipes for her from the concession stand, happy to watch and listen while he rattles off a running commentary on why whichever blockbuster he’s being forced to play that week is actually a sign of the cinematic apocalypse.
(Milk Duds are her favorite movie snack for the sole reason that her mother had always forbidden them. They’ll ruin your teeth, Elizabeth.)
It’s become their summer routine. She can’t remember exactly how it began, other than she’d started the Memorial Day weekend screening of Jaws in the back of Fred Andrews' truck with Archie and Veronica and Kevin and Joaquin, and somehow ended it sitting on the other side of the projector with Jughead. After that, she began to bypass the pretense that she was anything other than a fifth wheel with her friends, and head straight for the booth instead.
This Friday night, though, she’s not sure she can make it through all of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 without telling him that she’s his soulmate.
(Does Jughead even believe in soulmates? She doesn’t know. She’s never asked him, and he’s never offered his thoughts.)
She texts him: Not gonna make it tonight, I’m not feeling well. She adds a sad-face emoji at the end.
Jughead texts back a few minutes later. Aw, feel better.
Polly gets home a little after nine o’clock, and finds Betty in bed already, reading a book. She pauses in the doorway to Betty’s room. She looks tired, her headband askew on the crown of her head, the stiff cotton skirt of her Pop’s uniform wrinkled and creased. “What are you doing home?”
“I had a headache.” Betty places her book facedown in her lap. “How was work?”
She knows that her sister does not like the job at Pop’s – does not like pasting on a smile for eight hours at a time, and grinning like a madwoman through spilled drinks and rude demands and sore feet. Polly has never been as adept at wearing the Cooper mask as Betty is.
Polly sighs as she enters the room, collapsing into Betty’s desk chair. “It was fine. But this stupid woman yelled at me for bringing her a burger without lettuce on it. Who gives a shit about lettuce? I had to give her a free milkshake.” She glowers at her hands, picking at a hangnail. “I should’ve dumped it in her lap.”
Betty laughs, sinking back into her pillows. “You should quit is what you should do.”
“Not gonna happen. My friends want to go to Cabo for spring break next year. Mom and Dad aren’t paying for that.” Lifting her head, Polly looks at her thoughtfully. “Hey. Are you doing okay?”
Betty’s face grows warm under her sister’s gaze. “Yeah, why?”
Polly shrugs. “You’ve seemed quiet lately.”
The words teeter on the tip of her tongue: I think Jughead Jones is my soulmate. But she can’t say them. Not to Polly.
Not to Polly, who thought she’d found the love of her life in high school – soul marks be damned – until he called her one night after three months of dating long-distance at different colleges, and told her he’d found his match.
“I’m fine,” Betty says.
Polly rests her head on her forearm where it lies along the back of the chair. “You didn’t tell me Mom and Dad were fighting again.”
Betty shrugs. “It’s nothing new.” It would play out the way it always did. Silence around the breakfast table; heavy sighs and pointed looks over dinner; a slammed door at bedtime. Rinse and repeat.
For the first few years after she’d learned the truth, their arguments had terrified her, each one another crack in the bond between two people connected by nothing but their own choices. Now she wonders why they still bother.
“You should still tell me.” Polly looks at her phone. “It’s not that late. Do you want to watch Netflix or something?”
Betty shakes her head, rapping her fingers against the spine of her book. “I was kinda getting into this.”
“Fine.” Polly heaves herself to her feet. “Goodnight, nerd.”
The next afternoon, Betty is home alone again when the doorbell rings.
She’s in the middle of toasting bread for a sandwich, but it’s most likely a delivery, and her mother will be angry if she leaves it to sit on the front step. Even though this is Riverdale (the north side of Riverdale), and there probably hasn’t been a package theft reported since Betty was in grade school.
She’s wrong. It’s Jughead.
He gives her one of those fleeting half-smiles of his, the ones that always give her the feeling that he’s apologizing for something only he knows about. “Hey.”
“Hi.” Betty wills her entire body to look relaxed, which of course results in anything but. “What’s up?”
Jughead lifts the plastic grocery bag looped around his wrist. “Left my swim trunks at Archie’s a couple days ago. I thought I’d stop by and see if you’re feeling better.”
It takes her a moment to remember what she’d texted him last night. “Oh, yeah. Much better. Thanks.” Betty tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. “How was the movie?”
“Stupid, but it’s fun. The worst thing about it is it’s just so long. And they did that weird CGI de-aging thing with –” Jughead stops, an odd expression crossing his face. “Is something burning?”
Betty darts back into the kitchen, only dimly aware that Jughead is following her inside. She unplugs the toaster oven and flicks on the exhaust fan over the stove, but the fire alarm starts to squawk before it can make any difference.
“Shit.” Betty starts to drag one of the kitchen stools over so she can get high enough to turn it off, but Jughead beats her to it, stretching up on his toes to hit the button and silence the alarm.
For a moment she just stares at him, at the long lines of his arms. When did he get so tall?
“Thank you,” she sighs. “My mom would’ve killed me if the fire department came.”
“Not if you burnt the house down?”
Betty laughs. “That would’ve been your fault. You distracted me.”
Grabbing a pair of tongs, she removes the burnt slices of bread and drops them into the trash. “I was making myself a sandwich. You want one?”
“Always.”
Given the smoky state of the toaster oven, they settle on grilled cheese, chattering about nothing in particular as Betty keeps a watchful eye on the stovetop. For a few blissful, carefree minutes, she even forgets that she’s joking about Archie’s gross, peeling sunburn with the person she is theoretically supposed to fall in love and spend the rest of her life with.
“This is a perfect grilled cheese,” Jughead proclaims with the first bite. “Nice, buttery crunch, just the right ratio of gooey cheese. No unnecessary vegetables mucking it up. And cut on the diagonal, too. You’ve outdone yourself, Betty Cooper.”
She swallows before she answers, unable to stop the grin that spreads across her face. “The highest of compliments.”
“I feel like I should at least try to make it up to you.” Jughead’s voice is light, but he keeps his eyes on his lunch. “There’s a double feature at the Bijou on Tuesday. Maybe we could go. My treat.”
Betty goes cold and then, just as quickly, flushes hot all over. Jughead Jones is nothing if not circumspect, but it’s clear what he’s doing. He’s asking her on a date.
“Maybe.” Her mouth feels dry; she takes a sip of water. “What movies are playing?”
“Film noir night. Strangers on a Train and Double Indemnity.”
“Classics.” The films themselves don’t matter, and they both know it. “Um, yeah. That sounds fun. Count me in.”
When she glances up at him, his gaze is still trained on his half-eaten sandwich, but he’s smiling.
For the next three days, it’s all she can think about.
Some of the thoughts are light, fluttery, like the ones she used to have about Archie. This is a boy who likes her. This is a boy she likes. He’s going to pick her up at her front door, buy popcorn and soda for the two of them to share, and sit beside her in the dark, just because he wants to.
Sometimes the thoughts stay there.
Sometimes they spiral.
What if she hadn’t seen that mark on Jughead’s hip – would she still feel this anticipation rippling through her like a current every time she thinks about their date? She thinks the answer is yes. She thinks the fact that she’s been spending every Friday night since school ended keeping him company at work means something. She thinks it means something that once the initial panic had quelled, the first thing she had felt when she saw his mark was not disgust, or disappointment, but curiosity. She thinks that maybe she and Jughead were already falling into step this summer in a way they never had before.
But she doesn’t know.
More importantly – is this the right moment to tell him? What if they kiss? What if they never touch at all? At what point does withholding information cross the line into a lie?
She tells herself that she doesn’t want to tell him because he might not believe in it, anyway. She imagines him scoffing: You buy into all that soulmate bullshit, Betty? Really?
But there’s another fear, too, a deeper fear, because in her heart of hearts, Betty Cooper is a believer.
There is an order to these things, in the stories, in the songs. A boy and a girl fall in love, and then it’s revealed that they’re soulmates, destined from the start. It’s not supposed to happen the other way around.
How else could you know if it’s real?
Jughead drives them to the theater in his father’s faded red truck, circling around the block twice so he can find a spot where he doesn’t have to parallel park. He’s wearing a shirt she’s never seen him wear before – blue, button-down, short-sleeved – and his suspenders are snapped up over his shoulders, instead of hanging loose from his hips like usual.
She almost feels underdressed in her casual yellow sundress. But she blushes when they’re waiting in the line for tickets and he turns to her and says, as if it’s only just occurred to him, “You look really pretty.”
The movies are both ones she’s seen before – also with Jughead, who practically knows them by heart. It’s hard to focus on the screen when she already knows who will die, at whose hand. Instead she silently catalogs the faint heat of Jughead’s arm where it rests besides hers, the bob in his throat when he takes a sip of soda, the soft slide of his shoes across the sticky floor as he shifts in his seat.
It’s half past ten when the credits roll on the second film. They chat idly about movies as they meander back to the truck – they’re showing Mad Max: Fury Road at the Twilight this weekend, which Jughead considers to be a personal victory – but when he sticks the key in the ignition, he doesn’t turn the car on.
He sounds nervous when he says, “Would you maybe want to go to Pop’s?”
“No,” she says truthfully. She loves Pop’s – who doesn’t – but Polly is working tonight, and Archie and Veronica are probably there, along with Ethel and Josie and Reggie and Val and Moose and god knows who else. She doesn’t want to see any of them right now.
“Let’s go to the swimming hole,” she says.
She will realize later – lying in bed, on the precipice of sleep, her cheek clammy against the damp pillowcase – that part of her must have known what she was going to do. That subconsciously, she craved the synchronicity: to reveal herself to him where he’d done so for her, a mistake transformed by intent.
Now, though, the swimming hole sits in her mind as though it is the only logical option. Pop’s is too public. Her house is full of parents. And Jughead has never invited her to his home.
Jughead guides the truck into the same spot between two trees where Archie had parked his jalopy a week ago. “No one’s here,” he murmurs.
“That was sort of the point.” She flashes him a smile before she swings open her door and hops out of the cab.
Trusting that he’ll follow her, Betty walks down to the broad, smooth slab of rock that juts out past the water’s edge to the part of the pond that’s deep enough to jump in. She slips off her flats and sits at the furthest point, letting her feet skim over the surface. Jughead settles down beside her a moment later, feet bare, jeans rolled up to his calves.
“You don’t want to swim?” he asks.
“In a minute.” She leans back on her palms and lets her chin tip up towards the sky. It’s a clear night, and this far from town it’s dark enough to see a smattering of stars.
Jughead mirrors her, his hand resting beside hers on the cool surface of the rock. “My parents used to bring us here sometimes.”
“Yeah?”
“Yup. At night.” Jughead nods. “Jellybean was too scared to swim in the dark, so they’d go swim and I’d sit with her and tell her myths about the constellations.”
Betty smiles, but something about the story sits wrong with her. Growing up, when she was afraid, it had never been Polly’s job to comfort her.
“Tell me one,” she says.
There’s a long stretch of silence as Jughead scans the sky.
“Okay,” he says. “You see that one straight up, that’s like a tilted rectangle, sort of?”
“No?”
He points. “That one.”
“I don’t know what you’re looking at.” Betty giggles when he rolls his eyes.
“Here.” He sits up and shuffles so he’s sitting right behind her, his chest warm against her back as he takes her wrist in his hand and points it up towards the sky. His chin bumps gently against the back of her head. It takes everything she has to not just melt against him.
He moves their hands slowly, tracing the shape for her. “Do you see it now?”
If she says yes, will he move away? She doesn’t want that. But she doesn’t want to lie to him, either. “I see it.”
“Good.” Jughead places her hand back in her lap, but stays close. When he speaks, his voice is quiet enough that she has to lean in to hear him.
“That’s Lyra. The legend goes that it was the first lyre ever made, and it belonged to Orpheus. He was the most talented musician who’d ever existed. He could play that lyre, and plants and animals and rocks and clouds would swoon. He could even stop the Sirens from singing.”
“So he was the Archie Andrews of his day.”
Jughead laughs, and her chest grows warm at the sound. “Yes. A total Archie Andrews.”
He clears his throat. “Anyway, he fell in love with a beautiful woman named Eurydice. They were soulmates, they got married, they were blissfully happy together. You get the picture. But not even a year later, Eurydice was walking through the woods and she stepped on a poisonous serpent, and it bit her, and she died.”
Betty makes a small, sad sound in her throat.
“Orpheus was devastated. He wouldn’t accept it. This was his soulmate, after all, and there’s only one in the whole world, right? So he descended to the Underworld to try to save her. He played his lyre down there, and it was so beautiful that the music summoned Hades, who agreed to let him bring her back to the living world. But there was one condition.”
“I think I know where this is going.”
She can’t see his face, but she knows, somehow, that he’s smiling. “Shh. Pretend like you’ve never heard this part before.
“Hades said that Orpheus could bring her back to the living world – but Eurydice had to follow him, and he couldn’t look at her until the journey was complete. He had to trust her. He had to be patient. And Orpheus said, pfft, of course I trust her. I love her. She’s my soulmate. And so they left.
“It wasn’t a difficult journey, but it was a long one. After a while he couldn’t even hear Eurydice’s footsteps anymore. It became harder and harder for him to keep going – what if she had fallen behind? What if she was gone? Eventually he just couldn’t take it anymore. He looked back. She was still there, as beautiful as ever, the life coming back to her the closer they got to the end. But he’d broken the only rule he had to follow. And as he watched, his love slipped back into the shadows, into death, forever.”
Betty looks back at him over her shoulder. “This is a really sad story, Jughead.”
“Oh, it gets worse. Orpheus was bereft. He wandered the lands aimlessly, strumming his lyre, which of course was so beautiful that every woman who heard him fell in love with him immediately. But he rejected all of their offers of marriage. He only wanted Eurydice, and he couldn’t have her. Eventually there were so many of these angry, rejected women that they just ganged up on him and killed him with their rocks and spears.”
Betty wrinkles her nose. “Gee, that’s not sexist at all.”
“Well, the Ancient Greeks made it up, not me.” Jughead shrugs. “Then some god put his lyre up in the sky. The end.”
Betty shifts around to face him. “So you told that heartbreaking story to your little sister.” She raises an eyebrow. “Were you trying to teach her a lesson? Always trust your soulmate?”
Jughead makes a face. “If anything, the lesson is that putting so much stock into all that soulmate stuff means you’ll end up miserable and dead.”
Betty can’t tell how seriously he’s taking the question. She’s not sure how seriously she meant it. Her heart tumbles into her stomach anyway.
“I think Jellybean’s takeaway was that she should be terrified of poisonous snakes,” he continues. “There are many valid interpretations. Death of the author, et cetera.”
They lapse into silence, the only sound around them the soft buzz of insects, the gentle lapping of the water.
The corner of Jughead’s mouth pulls up into a half-smile. “Do you want to go swimming now?”
Betty instructs him to turn around while she slips off her dress. She dips her toes in, then her feet, then her ankles; she holds her breath and slides all the way into the water.
When she tells him it’s okay, Jughead tugs his clothes off quickly, and surprises her by diving off the edge of the rock.
He surfaces a few feet away, smoothing his wet hair away from his face with his hands. “You didn’t warn me it was cold.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
Jughead swims closer. Both of them look pale, almost ghostly, in the moonlight, but Betty thinks it suits him better.
“You were right,” he says. “This was a good idea.”
Betty smiles. He’s so near that she nearly kicks him where she’s treading water, and she starts to swim slowly backwards, towards the part where it’s shallow enough for her to stand. Jughead follows.
She stops when her feet settle on the pebbly, silty bottom. The water’s surface falls just beneath her collarbones, but Jughead is taller, and as he stands before her she can see most of his bare chest. It feels strangely intimate, though she’s seen him with his shirt off plenty of times. She thinks that if the water fell just a few inches lower, he’d see her rapid, fluttering heartbeat vibrating beneath her ribcage.
“It’s nice to be here at night,” she says. “It’s so quiet.”
Jughead exhales a long, slow breath, then says, “It’s nice to be anywhere with you.”
She doesn’t know what happens first – his fingers cupping her cheeks, or her hands grasping at his shoulders, or their lips meeting – but in the space of a heartbeat they’re kissing, and god, it feels good, the way his warm body presses against hers in the cold, calm water.
The kiss is slow, tender. He says her name when he pulls away, still close enough that she can feel his breath against her cheek. She thinks: this is how it’s going to sound for the rest of my life. My name, just like this.
When her eyes flutter open, she finds him gazing right back, and she knows. It has to be now.
Betty slides her hands down his shoulders, his skin smooth and cool under her fingertips. “I have to show you something.”
Her movements are almost mechanical: stepping back onto the shore, squeezing the excess water from her hair. Jughead trails after her at first, stopping where the water is waist-deep. It’s like he knows what she’s going to do before she does.
“Betty, you don’t have to,” he says. “I don’t care if we’re not –”
He falls silent as she peels down the wet edge of her lacy, peach-toned underwear, angling her body towards him so he can see.
It takes him a few seconds – it’s dark in the woods, and the mark is small – but she can tell the exact moment it registers. His face goes blank. Not the blankness of surprise, or confusion, but studied, intentional indifference.
Still, there’s a catch in his throat when he asks her, “How long have you known?”
“Only a week.”
He says nothing. Betty doesn’t know exactly what she was expecting, but it wasn’t this. Sick, leaden panic lurches through her. “I saw it by accident. When we were here with Veronica and Archie. I didn’t – I didn’t know how to tell you, I didn’t want to do it when they were around –”
Jughead is out of the water now, marching past her towards the pile of clothing he’d left on the rock slab.
“What are you doing?” It’s a stupid question – he’s getting dressed again. What she really wants to know is why. This is supposed to be a good thing. A happy moment. The beginning of them.
“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything.” Betty stumbles towards him, the rocks sharp beneath her feet. “I didn’t know how.”
Leaving his shirt half-unbuttoned, Jughead bends forward and picks up her dress, holding it out for her to take. His face is turned towards the trees. “I just want to go home, okay?”
It’s hard to tell when he won’t look at her, especially in the dark, but she doesn’t think he looks angry. He looks – sad. Stricken.
She doesn’t understand.
Shivering, Betty tugs her dress back over her head, and follows him back to the truck. They drive home in silence, and she stares out the passenger side window, counting every beat as she breathes in, then out.
Jughead pulls to a stop in front of her house. Betty unbuckles her seat belt, but stays in the cab, hands in her lap.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asks.
“I –” His voice wavers. He swallows, still gazing forward through the windshield. “You’ve had a week to process this. I need time.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, for what feels like the hundredth time. She doesn’t even know what she’s apologizing for anymore.
Jughead finally looks at her, meeting her eyes only briefly. “I’m not mad at you. I just – I need you to give me some space.”
“Okay,” she agrees quietly. “Thank you for the movie. I had a really good time.” She waits, but he only dips his chin in answer.
“Goodnight, Jughead.”
“Goodnight.”
She can feel his eyes on her all the way up to her front door. But she never turns around to look back.
tbc