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Black sky. Black car. Black, inky coldness that’s freezing up his joints despite the heavy wool hanging around his body. Black leather glowing under the stereo lights.
He can feel the tension in her body without even looking at her—the rage burning through her skin.
“I don’t need a coat, Veronica; I’m fine with my serpent jacket!”
“Well I’m not,” slamming the overcoat against his chest, echoing inside his ribs, “the last thing we need is to have you be recognized thanks to your gang symbol if we...”
She cuts herself off there, blinking irresolutely out into the night for a moment before marching to the car door—slamming it behind her—but the unspoken words bounce through the air anyway.
‘...if we find them.’
Cold air stings the insides of his lungs, and shrugging Hiram Lodge’s coat over his shoulders he tries his best to stop thinking about the ‘if.’
They say that strange things happen in Greendale—unexplainable things that hunt you in the night. Ms. Grundy had died there, he knows, but that—like so many other things—had been the result of the poison of it’s sister town across the river.
Riverdale, Greendale; were they really so different in the grand scheme of things? From his window they both look the same after dark—curtained windows with nightlights shining bravely through the cracks only to die a lonely death in the darkness. Secrets hidden from the light of day.
The thought of secrets and late night activities reminds him of his companion, and through his eyelashes he glances at her, at the tightness in her jaw, at the gleam of the diamond on her finger.
Turning signals flash on the road behind them and Greendale fades away into the night.
He’s concentrating on avoiding spilling peanut remnants on her father’s stolen coat and Veronica’s got some French, too underground for him to even ask about, music sliding out of the speakers and into the silence. He’d always been accused of being the pretentious one of the group, and in most cases he’ll take the title gladly but he has a feeling that she might have him beat in this particular department of life’s finer things.
“Are you seriously eating peanuts in my freshly cleaned, first generation Corvette right now?”
Her sharp voice breaks his concentration and a flurry of peanut shell dust falls down into his lap and the creases of his coat, as he thinks to himself that maybe she beats him car pretentiousness too.
“Is that a problem?”
A glare settles on him for a moment, and then her eyes are back on the badly paved road.
“No.”
“Liar,” he snips back, shoving a handful into his mouth—chewing abnormally loud.
“I just don’t know how you can possible eat at a time like this.”
“Name me a better time and I’ll do it then.”
He’s irrationally angry tonight, with her, with the world, with himself. He should be grateful that she called him—should be happy that he doesn’t have to face the possible truth they’re heading towards alone—but the scent of her is in his nose and his lips are still tingling from his girlfriend’s goodnight kiss and he can’t understand what the woman on the radio is wailing on about; doesn’t know if he even should.
The plastic crinkles as he shoves the bag into his—her father’s—pocket—peanuts snapping apart beneath his teeth.
She’d been wearing lipstick, he realizes belatedly, when he’s crouched next to her on the side of the road; hidden in the car’s shadow. He’s holding her hair back in his fists because she doesn’t have a hair-tie, and she’s got a disinfectant wipe clenched inside her manicured fingers that she keeps scrubbing against her lips—rubbing them raw—and it’s turning raspberry colored in the darkness.
The air smells faintly medical as the wind turns towards them. The scent must hit her the same time it does him, because suddenly she’s hauling herself to her feet and dragging him up with her.
“Sorry.” she says, and the fact that it’s the first thing she’s said to him since they were standing together in the parking lot in Greendale’s Four Seasons Motel, peering into the window of room 307, makes his jaw clench.
“Sorry—I guess liquid courage and an empty stomach don’t mix. Who knew, right?”
“Do you mean to tell me that you’ve driving me around while under the influence, Lodge?”
Last name—no sympathetic inflection. Her eyes are dull in the glow of the headlights; tired, and he begins to paw through her purse to find those mints that he always steals whenever she’s around.
“I got where we needed to go, didn’t I? Don’t act like mom.” she gripes, only to stick her tongue out far enough for him to drop a mint onto it a second later.
“Blame my self-preservation.” he answers idly, half pulling, half carrying her to the passenger seat, “Give me the keys.”
“I can drive.”
“I don’t care, give me the keys.”
She’s in the seat now, glaring up at him with a unimpressed expression, but before he has to ask her again she jerks her head towards the ignition where the keys are still dangling.
Metal clinks loudly in the silence as he pushes the driver’s seat far enough back for his legs to have room, and the car turns back onto the road easily; leaving the evidence of Veronica’s emotions behind them in the grass, along with the lipstick stained wipe he tosses into the air.
“You shouldn’t litter.”
He wants to reach over and grip her hand, wants the gold and the precious stones to cut into his skin, but all he says is,
“The earth will survive one baby wipe.”
The motel’s parking lot is practically deserted when they pull in, Veronica cutting the headlights almost as soon as they’ve parked.
There’s a beat up SUV that he instantly concludes is the property of whomever is working the front desk, and a few spots over there’s an old VW, with rusty chrome and a myriad of state stickers covering the back window.
Hope rises for a moment, lifting fear off his shoulders, only for it to come crashing back down a minute later when Veronica’s hand grips onto his bicep—the other pointing past him out the window.
The old ramshackle Ford sits in the dim corner of the parking lot, unoccupied—no conflicted couple sitting separated by the console. His stomach tightens; and Veronica’s voice is quiet in the air.
“This doesn’t mean... I know which window it is.”
He feels his head jerk in a stiff nod; car doors opening and closing as softly as they can. She leads the way—bare calves flashing in the neon lights beneath the shadows of her coat. Sharp heels and worn leather thud against the pavement, and he thinks that his hands are trembling inside the silk lining of his pockets.
Riverdale grows up around them without a murmur, streetlights and dark shadows encroaching on them in turn. He’s dug a divot into the side of his cheek with his eye-tooth, and on the other side of the car Veronica is curled in on her self, knees pressed to her chin, shoes deserted somewhere on the floor.
“Do you want to go back—home, I mean?” he corrects, not looking at her.
A sigh, and then she’s turning to look at him, fabric rasping against fabric.
“Where else am I going to go?”
“We—you could leave, if you wanted to. Nothing is holding you here.”
“You don’t have anything either.” she mutters petulantly, holding out a hand to brace herself on the dash when they come to an abrupt halt at a stop light.
Her fingernails gleam gently under the red lights—he lets himself watch them; watches the light play over them and up the delicate bones in her fingers.
“It’s green, Jones.”
“I know.” he shoots back, and now he’s the childlike one, fighting for any semblance of control.
“Where would you go, if you were me?” Veronica asks, once they’ve started again and she’s sure that his eyes are on the road and not her.
“California.” is the immediate response, “It’s too big for him to easily find you and it’s not like you have any friends there who would try to give you false comfort.”
“Seems like you’ve given my escape plan plenty of thought. What about yours?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Well then you’ll have to come with me. We can go and be angry and pathetic and heartbroken together. Who knows, maybe you’d even learn what the sun feels like.”
The words are light, easy. They cover the heartache so prettily.
He would scream if he thought it would change anything.
The glass in the window is smudged and dirty—doing it’s best to cover what the pulled back curtains don’t. TV lights flicker out into the parking lot and reflect on Veronica’s face—illuminating her too blank expression and glassy eyes.
Two figures on the bed, heads thrown back. They’re laughing. Just outside two hearts are bleeding out onto the crumbling concrete and they’re laughing.
“That’s enough.” reaching out slowly, wrapping his stiff fingers around her elbow, “We’ve seen enough now, let’s go.”
She nods, stiffly—not looking at him—and together they step back into the night.