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“There’s a new lead on the drug case,” Holt says as soon as they walk into his office, cutting right to the chase. Business as usual with that man. Amy elbows Jake just as his mouth opens, presumably to make a sarcastic quip involving robots and statues. He shoots her a sidelong glance and, in quietly amused complicity, says nothing.
“You’re going undercover at the New York Public Library. We’ve been told that, in order to transfer the narcotics, books have been hollowed out and the narcotics have been placed inside. The receptor then checks out that particular book, slips the dealer a roll of cash as they’re leaving the library, and gets out undetected. We’ve caught a buyer who told us about the method, and now we need to find the dealer.”
“They’re defacing library books?” Amy says incredulously. “For drugs?”
“Tragic,” says Jake, sounding positively gleeful.
Holt looks at him in disapproval.
“You start tomorrow.”
“Aaaaaamy!” Jake shouts as he enters the precinct, gate swinging closed loudly behind him. “Time to go! The library awaits!”
“Just a second.”
Amy huffs quietly, still fixated on reviewing the case files. He sounds far too enthusiastic for the kind of task that they’ve been assigned. On top of having to work fake jobs inside of their real ones, they have to look out for anyone who seems like they’d be dealing drugs. And, as both of them very well know, that could be literally anyone. Which means a long undercover stint at the library. She likes Jake a great deal, obviously, but spending five hours sitting behind a counter as he cracks jokes into her ear doesn’t sound like a very fun time.
Jake is sitting on Charles’ desk (plenty of wild hand gestures are coming into play and Charles looks entranced, as usual), so she puts her glasses on (Jake insisted that her “nerd glasses” would make her look more librarian-y), slips the case files into her bag, and stands.
As if he can feel her stand up, Jake hops off the desk and turns dramatically.
Amy almost forgets how to speak.
It’s idiotically simple, really, and she’ll later deny it to the ends of the earth, but Jake is wearing glasses and plaid and he looks exactly like every stock photo of every quasi-nerdy guy she’s ever seen. Is it off-putting? A little. Does she like it? Yes.
He smirks infuriatingly, prances over to her haughtily, and says in the most pretentious voice possible: “Shakespeare.”
“Hm,” Amy manages. “You’re practically a literature aficionado already.”
“Yes,” Jake says. “I know what all those words mean. Leggo!”
As it turns out, it takes all of three minutes for Amy start wishing that she’d never decided to be a cop.
To elaborate, as soon as they put their stuff down, Jake plops himself down on a stool and begins to hum the theme song from ‘Paul Blart: Mall Cop’ over and over again, tapping out the beat on a hardback copy of ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’.
“Oh my God,” Amy finally exclaims, whipping around to look at him. Jake stops immediately and the kind of grin that melts your heart explodes across his face.
“Honey,” he says.
“If you’re going to do that, I suggest you hang out in the kid’s section. You’ll fit in well there.”
“You wouldn’t send me away, would you?”
“I would.”
Jake has the audacity to wink at her as he stands up. Amy wants desperately to either kiss him or punch him in the nose.
She keeps her eyes on him as he leaves.
“The man who read fairytales to us said you were his princess,” says the little boy who checks out ‘Rapunzel’.
“Well, I guess I kind of am,” Amy replies with a smile, making a mental note to have Jake call her “princess” from now on.
Terry calls Jake just as they’ve closed the library and are packing up. Jake lets his ringtone – which is, predictably, a soundbite of Amy saying “you’re the worst” on loop – go for a full twenty seconds before answering, putting the phone on speaker with a flourish.
“Sarge!”
“Hey, Peralta. You and Santiago have to stay at the library a while longer. The guy we caught yesterday says that there was another transaction planned for tomorrow. We’re gonna need you to look through the books and check for narcotics.”
“All of them?!” Amy exclaims. “There are over fifty million here!”
“God, you know the most irrelevant things,” Jake mutters in that admiring tone she likes, and kisses her on the temple.
“Relax,” Terry says over the phone. “And keep it in your pants, Peralta. Our guy says today’s book is in a shelf near the front door, but he doesn’t know anything other than that. Santiago, you know way too much about the library, so you can lead on this one. Peralta, you just … help her. Good luck, you guys. Don’t do anything R-rated.”
“I refuse to be your sidekick,” Jake says immediately as Terry hangs up.
“Sorry, Jake,” she replies smugly. “I am the captain now.”
“That didn’t work,” he says. “You had a chance to say a really cool one-liner and you blew it. Are you proud now, detective?”
Three hours later, both of them are slumped over in beanbag chairs, opening books and tossing them aside haphazardly. Before they started, Amy would have admonished Jake for the mistreatment of books, but right now, she really couldn’t care less.
“There are so many books on art history in this stupid library,” Jake groans, running a hand through his hair.
“Don’t say that,” Amy chides absentmindedly, still flipping through her own tall pile of books. “The library never did anything to you.”
“Can we take a break, please?”
“Fine,” Amy says, if only because she’s gotten distracted staring at him at least six times in as many minutes. There are dark circles under his eyes and his hair is rumpled and his glasses are crooked and his sleeves are pushed up to the elbows and at this point, she’s completely comfortable admitting that he’s never looked this good. Not to her, at least.
Jake catches her staring and smiles sleepily. “What up?” he says – a reminder that he’s still Jake, not some stressed out Harvard grad whose father is the Comptroller of a major US city and will write countless sonnets about the stars he sees in her eyes or something stupid like that.
“Alright, be real with me, Santiago: how many of your fantasies take place in libraries?” Jake asks, still looking completely exhausted despite the gleam in his eyes. “Fifty per cent? Seventy per cent?”
“Kiss me,” is the only thing Amy can say, and Jake looks absolutely thrilled. He moves to sit next to her but Amy stops him and adds: “Between the bookshelves.”
An incredulous look is the only response she gets before he starts laughing, loud and long, and Amy has to bear it as he practically doubles over, wheezing with laughter.
“Okay,” Jake says, wiping tears from his eyes when he finally stops laughing. “Okay, you nerd. I can’t believe this.”
“Me neither,” says Amy grumpily as he takes her by the wrist and stands, pulling her into the aisle they’ve been sitting next to. “Sarge said nothing R-rated.”
“Duh,” Jake says, and lets her back him up against the shelf, because this is her fantasy and she gets to dictate how it’s going to happen. Books fall and get kicked aside and Amy honestly couldn’t care less as she kisses him and he laughs against her mouth, lifting one hand to cup her face. Every second of this is so compliant with every movie Amy’s ever seen that her mind immediately starts committing all of this to memory, just in case they never get the opportunity to do this again.
Jake has to break away eventually because he’s laughing so hard, still holding her face with one hand, and Amy has to start laughing too. This is so ridiculous, for real, and both of them are going to have to stay at the library overnight to keep checking the books, but she doesn’t care, she doesn’t, because she’s overflowing with joy born of fatigue and mirth and Jake.
“You – are – such – a – dork,” Jake says, punctuating each word with a light peck to the face.
“We should get back to work,” Amy says, arms hanging loosely around his neck. His breath is warm on her face. “This was a stupid idea.”
“I know,” Jake says, and kisses her again.
Another hour later – most of which is not spent working – they find the offending book containing the packet of cocaine (that Jake almost opens accidentally) and call Terry. He isn’t pleased at being woken up (“It’s only ten, Sarge.” “I’ve been asleep for an hour!”) but tells them that they can take the book to the precinct and put it in the evidence lock-up.
“Thank you for doing this,” he says, then hangs up abruptly.
“I think he fell asleep again,” Jake remarks. “What should we do with these books?”
“Leave them. We have to get these back to the precinct and I have to go home and fall asleep.”
“Amy Santiago!” A scandalized gasp. “You’re going to just leave the library books like this? For drugs?”
She frowns at him. Jake breaks into a grin and kisses her furrowed brow.