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Archie Andrews has historically not been great at tests. He still remembers his parents’ disappointment when they found out he might be held back in second grade because he couldn’t read, and the devastation he felt when Weatherbee told him he’d have to repeat senior year. It’s hard, really. Sometimes when he stares at a page, the words swim around instead of making sense, and it doesn’t help that the things he’s meant to know feel so useless.
Suffice to say, he’s never been the best at figuring out the right options to choose, even when the answers are staring him right in the face.
Like the fact that finally sleeping with Betty Cooper after a forever as friends should probably mean more than it does, or that their relationship is careening towards a knife’s edge. But every time he feels himself getting too comfortable with the way her body fits in his, the words friends, just good old friends bounce around his mind, the way she said it after their first time together in the shower, and he could still smell his shampoo in her hair. See, he gets it, he really does. She has more than enough on her plate right now, and he probably does too. They’re friends, they’re a comfort, they’re escape, and that’s all. Archie just knows that if he pushes too hard, he’ll end up in the same place he did after the fallout of Hedwig, so it’s better not to push at all.
So he puts aside the excitement he feels when he sneaks into her room, forces down the happiness of waking up next to her in bed, pretends that it doesn’t sting when she has to leave. Maybe it should mean something more, but they’ve decided it doesn’t, and the last thing that either of them needs right now is something complicated.
Still, Archie looks at Jughead some mornings, as they’re both heading off to school together, and feels the confession at the tip of his tongue, eager to run out of him like students after the bell. I’m sleeping with Betty, it would be so easy to tell him, especially if they’re just friends with benefits, if it means nothing at all. He can almost picture the look on Jughead’s face, confused but ultimately supportive, if it makes the two of them happy. In the seven years since they all last saw each other, Archie’s certain that any other feelings have been washed away. So it kills him to hide it from his best friend, although Archie’s willing to admit that it might hurt more to shatter the fragile status quo he’s set up with Betty. If it’s what Betty wants, Archie is determined to believe that it’s a casual and that’s fine.
Funnily enough, it takes Veronica Gekko (or, he supposes it’s Lodge now) to torpedo the quiet, the same as she did ten years ago when she walked into Pop’s. On some fateful Monday morning she gathers them all in the teachers’ lounge to drop the bombshell. Veronica’s announcement about her divorce from Chad feels like a revelation. It’s a long time coming, he thinks, even though he’s only known the guy for a little while. Chad emanated something rotten from the first time Archie set eyes on him, and Veronica has no business being around someone like that. Maybe something left over from their old days, Archie feels almost responsible for making sure that she’s all right.
It sets off something within him, although he’s not quite sure what it is, caught somewhere between concern and hope. Although, hope for what, he doesn’t really know either.
Betty’s eyes don’t leave Archie for the entire meeting, not even when she goes to hug Veronica. He’s not certain what to make of that, either.
He’s on his way out of the room, right behind Betty so that they can make their way back home together, when Veronica calls him back. Betty stops when he does, glancing at him, and he tells her to wait outside. “I don’t think it’ll be long,” he says.
Veronica pulls him back to the middle of the lounge, brings them to the sofa, and sits them both down. “Ronnie, what’s going on?”
“I just thought you should know, about me and Chad.”
He frowns. “What do you mean? Did something else happen?”
“We’ve been fighting a lot, but it’s been much worse since I came back to Riverdale,” she explains. As she’s talking, she lays a hand on his arm. It’s gentle, and he finds himself relaxing into her touch. “We’ve been fighting about you.”
“Me?”
“It’s possible that despite everything that’s happened between us, Archie, in my heart of hearts, I still love you,” Veronica says. “Tell me I haven’t been imagining things, I know there’s something here.”
It’s like the air has been sucked out of the room, and Archie’s struggling to breathe, never mind consider how to respond to her. He’s not sure what to feel, or even what he’s supposed to be thinking.
Ever since they’d gotten back to Riverdale, since he found out that she was married, Veronica had been locked away. Convenient, that he wouldn’t have to dig too deeply into them. Her marriage to Chad is a reminder of the separate lives they’d been living, and how little they’d been involved with each other in the interim. Even if she hadn’t been married, the last time he’d seen her was seven years ago when he cheated on her with, well, Betty. He’s thought about her in the last few years, for sure, but it’s been a complicated emotion.
He misses her, yes, but more than that he misses the time they shared in Riverdale. He misses the days when all his friends were around him, when they were just kids and the world was still ahead of them. Perhaps it feels unresolved sometimes, but doesn’t your childhood always feel unfinished?
Before he figures it out, Veronica answers his problem for him, launching forward to meet him in a kiss. He’s too stunned, and it takes him a few moments before he even remembers how to move. It’s muscle memory, like high school days, when he moves against her in response. For a sobering second, the image of a different pair lips on his flashes across his mind, and he remembers Betty standing just outside. He pulls his head back, but Veronica’s smiling, satisfied.
“I’ll let you think about it. I’ll see you tomorrow, Archiekins.”
Without waiting for a reply, Veronica presses a kiss to his cheek, gets up, and walks off. He takes a few moments to collect himself before meeting Betty outside the lounge.
From the way she smiles at him, Archie can’t tell how much she’s seen, or what she might even be thinking. “Ready to go?” Betty asks.
The walk home is a silent one. They’ve been friends long enough that silence isn’t a strange part of their time together, but there’s a loaded undercurrent that lies in wait in this one. It takes Betty, and most of the walk back, to break the quiet.
“Big news, huh?”
“Yeah, no kidding,” he says. “I think she’ll be better off, though. Chad seemed like kind of a jerk.”
“And now she’s free to find out what she really wants.”
Archie sneaks a look at Betty when she says that, but her expression betrays nothing. She’s standing so close to him, arms brushing as they walk. Distantly, he wonders what would happen if he tried to take her hand, the way he sometimes used to when they were children, back when it meant nothing then, too.
“Maybe Ronnie will have time for the jewellery store now. And the renovations, if she still needs me for them.”
This time, he doesn’t miss the way Betty’s lips are pulled into a thin line, but he’s not sure where to fit that in the middle of everything else.
“She’ll be looking for something… all-American now, I’m sure,” Betty offers.
And just like that, the status quo is shifting again, and Archie’s beginning to think that he can’t keep up. “That’s not really the look she goes for,” he says.
Betty gives Archie a long look before she continues. “I’m pretty sure it’s always been what she goes for.”
They don’t talk again until they’re standing outside the Cooper residence. Faintly, they can hear Juniper and Dagwood playing inside. It’s something sobering, to get back into the logistics of their everyday life. Archie’s not quite ready for that yet, though.
“Do you want to come upstairs? Jug’s working at Pop’s until late.”
He sees the conflict run through Betty’s face before she finally nods. “I think we should talk.”
He leads her through the door, the way he’s done a million times, the way she came through just yesterday. She lets him take her up to his room until they’re both seated on his bed. Everything feels so familiar but there’s a new distance he doesn’t understand. He wants to touch her.
“Archie,” she starts, reaching for his hand in the space between them. “I’ve had a lot of fun these past few weeks, and some days, this escape has been the only thing saving my sanity. But I think it’s time we ended things.”
“I don’t understand.”
Betty bites her lip, like she’s weighing her response. “I saw Veronica kiss you, Archie.” He opens his mouth to protest, but she goes on. “Please let me finish what I need to say before I lose the nerve to say it. You’re my best friend, and you always will be. So the last thing I want is to tear you in two, or be left at the wayside when you start hanging out with Veronica and I’m waiting for you to sneak into my room. It’s better we put everything to rest now, before things get hard, and before we ruin our friendship.”
“But that…that doesn’t change anything, Betty,” he sputters out. It’s funny how so much can change in an hour. When Archie woke up this morning, he thought he knew how the day would end, but apparently everyone’s been playing at games without letting him in on the secret. “We can still—"
“Doesn’t it, though? We’re just having fun. We shouldn’t let this stop you from pursuing anything that could be real.”
Couldn’t this be real, he suddenly wants to yell, but his mind feels like the ground has been pulled out from under him and he hasn’t been given enough time to recover from the fall. So instead, he says this: “You’re saying that I should get back together with Veronica?”
To Betty’s credit, her expression doesn’t change. “I’m saying that if you’re asking me that question, maybe you already have your answer.”
He doesn’t have a response to that, not right now, anyway. Maybe if she’d get back to him after a few hours of processing. Sure, his kiss with Veronica wasn’t bad, but what about everything else that he’d been doing with Betty?
She sighs. “Do you have feelings for Veronica, Archie?”
He doesn’t think he has a response to that, either. Yes, he likes Veronica, he cares about Veronica, but…
“I should go,” she says. She leans forward, slow, kissing his cheek just where Veronica did, but this time Archie’s thinking about how much he doesn’t want her to go. His hand catches around her wrist, and he thinks about the times he’s done this to pull her into a kiss.
“You’re welcome to stay.”
“I think I might’ve overstayed, actually.”
Archie shakes his head, because the irrefutable truth of the universe is that he’ll never be without Betty Cooper. “You never could.”
She gets up anyway, and for a minute they stare at each other. “You’re a good friend, Arch. I’m glad we have each other.” She takes a beat before adding, “I hope it works out with Veronica.”
The statements are too loaded, each one with too many strings attached and longer list of things behind them. So he just asks, “Let me walk you to your door?”
As they walk down, Betty asks about his classes, like nothing has changed at all. It’s almost as though if he wanted, he could lock this afternoon away in a box, and never open it again, and let everything remain in its place.
He waves at the twins in the living room when Betty opens the door. “Can I walk you to school tomorrow?” Archie asks.
“Of course. Nothing’s really changed between us,” she says, and he’s not sure he believes her. Betty pulls him into a hug, squeezing tight. He tries not to think about the fact she’s been using the same perfume since high school, some scent that Alice bought for her to try, some scent that he thinks now as irrevocably hers. Something unchanging, the way Betty’s always been.
When she shuts the door, Archie tries to figure out why he feels like he’s just been broken up with.
It’s almost like, if Archie closed his eyes, the last ten years would disappear, to a time before the town went dark. He’s back in his room, back in Riverdale High, caught between Betty and Veronica. He’s fifteen, sure that the girl next door is too good for someone like him. He’s eighteen, and she’s telling him there’s nothing between them worth pursuing. He’s twenty-five, standing on the precipice.
For as long as he’s known Betty Cooper, there’s been a way that the world works. Even as everything around them has been set on fire, it feels as though the universe has turned on the axis of the two of them.
In a lot of ways, she’s been his guiding light. From second grade when she caught him up on reading, to calling her up first when he wanted to gather the gang back in Riverdale, it’s Betty that he depends on. So, he figures, it bears logic that if she thinks he should be with Veronica again, there must be something there.
There’s a deeper thought within him too. Getting close to Betty is scaling a cliff face. If he does it right, it’s perfection. If he’s not all in, if he makes a single wrong move, he’d lose everything.
He’s never going to lose Betty Cooper. She is past, present, future; all the possibilities of the universe collapsed into a single moment. This much he knows is true: without her, there’s no Archie Andrews.
He’s never quite been a betting man, not when it comes to her. His strength is dusting off the old to see if he can make it work this time.
So, he decides, when it comes to the precipice, he’d rather not fall off, but he’ll take what he can get from tread ground. He texts Veronica to meet him in the morning.
By the time Archie wakes up the next morning and makes it down to the kitchen, Jughead’s already preparing coffee for them. Archie sets his phone down on the counter as they settle in for breakfast.
“You’ve gotten pretty good at all this since working at Pop’s,” Archie says.
Jughead shrugs, pushing a mug towards him. “Tabitha will have my head if I don’t. At least I finally know what’s in the food I’ve been eating my entire life.”
Archie’s phone buzzes. He tries to ignore it, but it doesn’t stop.
“Someone’s busy,” Jughead says.
Archie glances over to see new messages from Veronica come in. She’s already set reservations for dinner. He’s not sure how he feels about that, given that they haven’t even spoken.
“Yeah, it’s Veronica,” Archie says. Before he thinks the better of it, he adds, “She wants to get back together, I think.”
“Huh. I guess we really are back in high school.”
“You don’t think I should do it?”
“That’s definitely not what I said. You’re an adult, Archie. I think the two of you can figure it out.”
“I’m meeting Ronnie when we get to school,” he tells Betty as they’re walking.
She smiles. “I hope you two are happy together.”
It’s as she’s saying it that Archie realises, he wishes she’d tell him something different, but he’s not sure what exactly it is that he’d rather hear.
They don’t bring up Veronica again.
Veronica kisses him fiercely when he tells her about getting back together. He thinks there are students who spot them as they walk by, but he realises that since he’ll be actually dating Ronnie, it doesn’t actually matter who sees. There’ll be no need for night jogging rendezvous now.
She walks into his embrace, and all Archie can think about is the sharpness of her perfume. He thinks she must’ve changed it since the old days, but he can’t remember what that was like.
He wonders if he’s supposed to tell her about Betty, about their arrangement, but he can’t bring himself to do it. The things that happened between him and Betty deserves to stay between the two of them, he decides. It was good specifically because it was an escape, and Archie doesn’t want to pull it down crashing into reality. Bringing it out to Veronica would be pushing it under a spotlight, and he could do without the scrutiny.
He nods along when she tells him about the plans that she’s already made for the two of them. And it’s okay. It’s better this way, really.
It’s even okay when Veronica tells the rest of their friends at lunch. Without meaning to, he trains his eyes on Betty. As best as he can tell, her smiles are genuine. He tells himself that’s how it’s all supposed to be, anyway.
He looks over at Veronica, once they’ve all separated. She’s got that softness in her eyes, the one she has just for him, her hand is warm in his. He could be happy, he decides.
Between Veronica’s divorce, the Pembrooke renovations, the football team, and the fire department, the two of them end up not having too much time together (he’s suddenly not sure how he managed it with Betty). Which is why when she suggests taking it slow, Archie finds himself eager to agree.
“It’ll be like dating for the first time again,” she promises, although he thought the whole point of being in your twenties was getting to escape the hang-ups of high school.
Funnily enough, as they round on three months, he thinks it’s probably the longest they’ve gone without sex, or at least it’s up there.
Dating Veronica again after seven years apart feels like time collapsing and stretching into oblivion all at once. It’s somehow as if the world has stopped spinning, but also that it’s simply turning at the wrong angle. He finds it all too easy to slip into old routines, old habits. The years have changed them — Archie wakes up with nightmares that Veronica doesn’t know how to handle, she’s dealing with a divorce he doesn’t know how to talk about — but at their cores they’re still the same people: the small-town boy and the rich city girl, fighting against the machinations of her father.
It was kind of tiring then, too.
The thing is, Archie doesn’t remember feeling so alone, the last time he dated Veronica. But there’s so much he wishes he could talk about, this time, and there’s just no one to do it with. Veronica is out of the question, for obvious reasons; his relationship with Jughead has rarely ever included their girlfriends; Jackson doesn’t know Veronica (or Betty) like that; and it feels wrong to talk to Betty.
It’s that Veronica’s perfume doesn’t smell right, that kissing her doesn’t feel the same, and he doesn’t feel quite so sorry when she leaves him. Not like it was when he was with—
He can’t afford to think like that right now, not when he’s trying to make things work, the way that they are.
Archie Andrews has historically not been great at tests. What that means is that he’s never been the best at figuring out the right options to choose, even when the answers are staring him right in the face.
“Penny for your thoughts, Archiekins?”
He looks over at her, his girlfriend, and thinks about how he should be counting himself lucky for where his life has ended up.
“I’m okay, Ronnie. Don’t worry about me.”
It doesn’t seem like she entirely believes him, but she doesn’t press the issue. That’s good enough for him.
Instead, she leans over to press her lips against his, pressing and pushing against him insistently. He loses himself in the actions, in the touching and pulling and kissing and needing. They’re best when they’re like this, he thinks, when it’s all flesh and no words.
So it makes no sense that he’s thinking about how else he’s been kissed recently, and who else has been doing the kissing. It’s probably breaking some rules, that his mind wanders off to being in a room opposite his own, with someone else entirely. He wants to tell himself that it’s normal, though, that he’s just out of practice, and he’s conscious about his recent history.
Still, it also makes no sense that when Veronica whispers, “I think I’m ready to go further,” it strikes an ugly beat in his chest.
“Can I walk you home today?”
He’s directed the question at Betty, during a precious break between classes.
“You aren’t going with Veronica today?” Archie’s pretty sure there’s a coldness in Betty’s words that might not have been there before, but it’s probably fair to set it against him, if he’s honest. Since picking things back up with Veronica, he’s been heading over to the Pembrooke on most days, which has left Betty to her own devices.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t miss his best friend, though.
“She’s meeting with Hiram. Gonna try talking to him about SoDale, I think.”
He doesn’t mention that he’s meant to go to the Pembrooke tonight to finally have sex with Veronica again. Somehow it doesn’t feel like appropriate conversation.
Betty nods slowly. “Okay, then. I’ll see you later, Arch.”
Something feels off, so he asks: “You doing okay?”
“I’m fine,” she tells him, and brushes him off with a wan smile.
It takes him a little while to locate Betty after school, but eventually he finds her in the teachers’ lounge with Jughead. He doesn’t know if he’s imagining it, but he thinks they’re standing close, and it unsettles something in his stomach.
Which, again, obviously makes no sense.
He pokes his head in, and Betty and Jughead break apart. Jughead is headed to Pop’s, so Betty comes out to meet him alone.
“Ready to go?” he asks. The question, the situation, all feels vaguely like déjà vu in a way he doesn’t appreciate.
They make it off school grounds before Archie caves. “You and Jug looked like you were talking about something serious,” he says, like it’s casual (although he’s suspecting that casual things are never quite so casual).
“It’s nothing for you to worry about, Arch.”
“Oh.”
Betty is quieter than usual, although he’d have to admit that the last usual they’ve had was before Veronica’s divorce.
“Are you…mad at me, Betty?” he says. “I know you’ve said that you’re fine, but I’ve known you since we were four and I can tell that something’s wrong.”
Betty doesn’t speak for a long while, and he’s about to start backtracking when she finally does open her mouth. “I’m not sure what you want me to say right now.”
Her arms are crossed over her chest: she’s feeling uncomfortable. Betty’s biting her lip: she’s stressed. There’s a knit in her brow: she’s a little angry too. She’s dodging the question: the ball’s meant to be in his court, he supposes.
It’s when she speaks that Archie realises there is something he’s trying to earn— her absolution. He’s not entirely sure why he needs it, not when he’s done his best to be honest the whole time, not when Betty was the one who pushed him to Veronica in the first place.
“I want you to tell me why you’re upset,” he says.
It takes another long silence for her to reply him. “I want you to be happy, Arch. I really do. A little part of me just…maybe I didn’t realise that you’d really get back together with Veronica.”
“You told me to do that,” he tells her, because he’s not sure what else there is. He did it because she knows him and he hoped that she might know him better than he does himself. He has feelings for Veronica, to be sure, but he came to her looking for an answer. When you’re in a storm you search for the stars to tell you where to go; Betty Cooper is his.
She gets wound up, and he can tell that he’s in for, well, something, anyway. And suddenly, he takes it all in— that knit brow, the new indignant look on her face— and he cuts her off before she can lash back at him, because there’s something starting to click together at the back of his mind. “Wait, why are you mad at me?”
He struggles in the working, but there’s an equation beginning to form.
For Betty’s part, his question has collapsed her, taken the heat out of her. They stand like that, in the middle of the street, half a second away from something vicious, something sharp they’ll never be able to take back. “You’re…” he begins, but the weight of his unsaid words is an unsurmountable one, and he trails off.
Finally, she says, with apparent difficulty, “If you haven’t figured it out, Arch, I don’t think I can tell you.”
Betty turns off into a different direction, one he’s judging that probably takes her to Pop’s, and he lets her go. As he’s watching her walk away, Archie can’t fight the feeling that there’s a confession of his own he has for her, waiting at the tip of his tongue. But it remains within him, locked away, lodged behind a maelstrom of confusion. He thinks he’s just not strong enough to face it.
That night, Archie goes over to Pembrooke anyway. He’s thinking that there’s something he needs to tell Veronica. There’s a truth he owes her, he’s sure of that, but what exactly that truth is he doesn’t know. Mostly he imagines the words finding their own way to his tongue when he opens his mouth.
But he doesn’t quite get the chance. Once he crosses the threshold, Veronica has a finger to his lips, shushing him when he tries to speak. He’s not certain of what he has to say anyway, so he files it away for a later conversation, and sets his focus on her. He lets her pull him into her bedroom, and he shuts the door behind him.
As Veronica’s legs hit the bed, she falls back, taking Archie down with her, and his arms bracket her body. She kisses him, so he complies. Kissing Veronica is an old rhythm, a rehash of high school days, teenage nights when everything was new.
His hands graze over explored territories, sneaking beneath the hem of her blouse. Her skin is soft under his fingers, but he’s shocked by the memory of someone else’s flesh. By instinct, Archie pulls away, and Veronica frowns under him. “Archiekins,” she says, “is there something amiss?”
But there isn’t, there can’t be, so he just shakes his head and keeps going. He kisses her harder, trailing down her jaw, sucking on her neck.
Veronica makes quick work of his belt, and she tugs his pants down. Every point of contact between them makes his blood rush.
When Archie closes his eyes, for a moment he forgets that he’s in Veronica’s bed in the Pembrooke, and he’s thinking of a different room, one full of lit candles and a window that faces his own. The girl in his arms is the light of his life, his guiding star in the night. She is the past, present, and future; all the possibilities of the universe collapsed into a single moment.
He is caught between consciousness and the delirium of her memory, but as he calls out her name, all matters of the world snap swiftly into focus. “Betty…”
This time, Veronica is the one to pull away, sharply pushing Archie off her. “What did you just say?”
He jumps back, suddenly deeply aware of what he’s done, what he’s been doing, and the immediate shame of his actions fills him. “Ronnie,” Archie scrambles, his mind cycling through for some sort of excuse, but either none comes, or he’s sick of lying to himself.
“I’m begging you to have something to tell me.” Her eyes shine with tears, and as much as he’s been suddenly shifted, it kills him to see it. It’s true, what he’s always said. He cares for Veronica, but he’s learning that he doesn’t love her.
If he were a better man, he probably would do the decent thing, come up with a lie that neither of them believe, but that both of them could live with. She heard him wrong, he was saying something else… But that’s not what he wants to do.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, and he means it. “I lost myself.”
“How long? How long have the two of you been lying to me again?”
Archie shakes his head, finally finding the words he needs. “We haven’t– she hasn’t. This isn’t Betty’s fault, it’s mine. I thought I wanted this, but I should’ve never led you on. We’re not the same people we were in high school. And I think you knew it too.”
Her stare is cold. “Get the hell out.”
And he does. There is a conversation he needs to have with her, a much longer apology, and penance to pay, but this isn’t the time, and Archie’s itching to go anyway.
He walks the dark streets of Riverdale, letting the reality of what he’s done sink in. He’s a fool, he knows, a jerk and an asshole. But he walks lighter, too, with his new realisation, made clear all at once in his walk down the wrong path.
The honest-to-God truth is that he’s in love with Betty Cooper. He thinks about all the circles they’ve run around each other, most of them self-inflicted, and he wonders how he’s never seen it before. It’s been right in front of him this entire time, and he’s been blind all the while.
It’s no surprise that he ends up in front of her house, then, even though he hadn’t been thinking about it. The light in her room is still on, so hands shaking, he sends her a message.
[To: Betty]
Can I come upstairs?
Betty quickly answers back in the affirmative. He jogs over to her porch, easily finding the extra key that Alice hides. When he opens the door to Betty’s room, she’s seated on her bed, clearly waiting for him.
“Hi,” Archie says.
“Did something happen? Are you okay?”
Archie’s quiet as he takes her in. She’s beautiful, she really is. Her blonde hair pulled into a loose ponytail, her pink lips stretched into a concerned smile, her wide eyes staring at him. And he knows that there’s a scar near her elbow from when she fell off her bike, and a mole on her hip.
“Veronica and I broke up.”
“What happened? How are you feeling?”
Mind whirring, Archie is set more into revelations than emotions, so that’s how he presses on. “I know why you’re mad at me,” he says, and Betty crosses her arms, like she’s trying to retract into herself. He takes a couple of steps so that he can sit on the bed in front of her, and he pulls her hand out to hold it. She looks down like she can’t believe the way they’re making contact. “I think you’re in love with me, Betty. And I’m in love with you.”
At that, she glances up at him, meeting his eyes. “Arch,” she says, voice hoarse, “you can’t say that.”
“But it’s true. You’re my best friend and I’m in love with you.”
“How can I believe that? After everything, after all this time?”
And it should be true, that too much has happened, that they’re a line that’s been ruptured, maybe that they’ve missed their chance. But it’s not, because it’s Betty and Archie, and if the foundations of the universe were broken down, it would be their names written in the atoms. “Do you remember that song I wrote for you?”
“We were kids,” she protests.
“Well, then I’m asking the same thing that I did seven years ago. Give me tonight. Give me right now, and we’ll figure out everything else as it comes. Do you trust me?”
Betty nods, so he takes her into his arms, and kisses her slow. Betty is not new to him but there’s new electricity in the air tonight, a weight in every touch between them. There’s a heat building up, but he doesn’t go any further. There will be a lifetime for that, he knows for certain. He whispers that he loves her against her lips, like a prayer to the stars.
Archie lays her down, resting her head on his chest. With every breath he takes, he’s sensitive to how she moves with him. The time for words is over, at least for tonight. When morning comes, there will be a future to face, but they’ll do it together.
“I love you, Arch,” she says, as she passes into dreams, and he realises that he’s never been so at peace in his life.
Archie Andrews has historically not been great at tests. But as he glances down at Betty Cooper, content and asleep in his arms, he knows for once, he got it right.