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It isn’t until his phone has been buzzing insistently under his thigh for what feels maybe like a good ten minutes does Jughead, with great annoyance, finally rip his headphones from his ears and tear his eyes from the blue glow of his laptop screen.
Every time a text dings on his computer he rues ever connecting his phone to his laptop. Goddamn Steve Jobs, can’t leave well enough fucking alone, this is why Gen Z is getting into flip phones. It’s just impossible to have a modicum of peace anymore—
All of this flies from Jughead’s mind when he sees thirty-seven missed texts from Betty Cooper, the very latest merely reading Jughead come upstairs I SWEAR TO GOD.
“Betty?” he calls, and across the building he can hear her yelled response, however faint. He pushes his laptop away and scrolls backward through the thread of their text messages (HELP he reads, as well as come hereeeeee, are you there????, and please please helppppppp) all the while taking the steps of the Lodge Lodge’s stairs two at a time.
“Where are you?” he calls from the second-floor landing, and from slightly closer but still muffled he hears her response: “The bathroom!”
Betty’s assigned room for this “weekend getaway,” as Veronica had termed it (snowbound as they might be—but there’s no way in hell Jughead is skiing, or snowboarding, or whatever it is she and Archie are doing currently; strapping his feet to fiberglass and bombing down a mountain coated with ice sounds like a deathwish, but thanks), is two doors down from his own, and he follows the sound of Betty’s voice into her room and toward her bathroom door.
“Hello?”
“Jug,” she calls, “I’m stuck!”
“What?”
“I’m stuck!”
He shakes his head and looks around the room. Characteristically neat. He tries the knob, but it’s locked.
“What do you mean, stuck?”
Through the thickness of the door comes the unmistakable sound of a groan. Betty’s silent for a moment. He leans his ear against the wood. Betty—he thinks—mumbles something.
“Huh?”
“I said, my toe!”
Jughead leans back from the door. There’s silence again, until—
“My-toe-is-stuck-in-the-faucet.”
Jughead shakes his head, as if he might have misheard.
“I remember this episode of Dick Van Dyke,” he shouts through the door, and Betty makes a noise that Jughead thinks might be a laugh.
“I thought you’d say The Seven Year Itch!”
“I’ve actually never seen it.” He shrugs, contemplating the moment. “The door is locked,” he tells her.
“I know.” She sounds a little exasperated.
“Do you want me to break it down?” He asks, thinking of the bathroom door of his own weekend bedroom, and what a dislocated shoulder might feel like, but Betty is predictably steps ahead of him.
“That’s crazy, you’d hurt yourself!”
Jughead inspects the doorknob: standard, like any found in a suburban home, no keyhole so much as a small hole in the center of the knob…
“Wait,” he yells through the door, “there’s probably a key, a skeleton key!”
“You really think?” Betty is yelling, but Jughead has already scanned the top of the door frame and moved backwards into the hall. Atop the frame of the door closest to the landing he strikes gold—in the form of a gold-looking straight pin with a loop on top. He stretches to reach his bounty.
“Got it!” he calls through the bathroom door again, and the lock pops! open the same moment she yells “Wait!” and he’s swinging the door open in triumph as Betty is squealing “Don’t look!”
“Sorry, sorry!” He squeezes his eyes shut and holds his hands out in front of him superfluously at the same time, as though he hasn’t now already seen Betty Cooper naked in a bathtub.
Heat rises up his neck and his ears burn. His legs bump into something and his hand hits something else that feels like terry cloth, and now he’s completely disoriented, both at this self-imposed blindness and the glimpse, however brief, he’s now had of what are Betty Cooper’s completely beautiful breasts (I’m going to hell, runs through his head), which will be forever seared into stark relief behind his eyelids. He lives a moment in this insanity before he realizes Betty is still speaking.
“Oh god this is so embarrassing—”
“—sorry, I—sorry,” he’s repeating, his own voice so loud in his ears that he nearly misses the implications of Betty’s next words—
“—this is not how I imagined getting naked in front of you—”
—until what feels like a good thirty seconds, and in reality are probably far less, have passed before his eyes fly open of their own accord.
“Wait, what?”
Betty’s eyes are wide, her bottom lip pulled into her mouth in a sort of grimace, like she’s trying to pull the words back into her body. She sinks so far into the bathtub with a squeak of skin against porcelain that Jughead can only see her forehead, bright tomato-red against the paleness of the knot of blonde hair atop her head.
“Do you—” she stammers, “...I’m stuck.” Her eyes turn toward the foot of the tub, where her big toe is indeed, jammed into the mouth of the faucet.
Jughead shakes his head and tries to recenter despite what feels like a major shift in his universe.
“Right, uh. Did you—um. Try soap?”
Betty’s head shakes (or what he can see of it over the rim of the bath, his lower back pressing into the edge of the sink basin as though he might be able to put even more space between them), the movement bobbing her topknot left and then right.
“Can’t reach.” Her hand snakes out of the water and points over his shoulder, where a decorative pinecone-shaped thing of soap sits in a dish at the edge of the sink. He picks it up and turns back to Betty, hesitating.
“Do you—should I—catch?”
Betty flushes again, and this time covers her face with both hands, groaning loudly.
“Just—,” her hands come to rest on either side of the bath and she seems to straighten slightly, shaking her head with what looks like resolve. “Just come here.”
She shrugs her shoulders with a jerk, splashing the water. Her cheeks pinken ever deeper, a shade that causes him to look up at the ceiling, so much does it remind him of the sight of her nipples, ghosting dark just below the surface of the water.
It takes several minutes—maybe it takes several hours, he’s having what feels like an out of body experience here—but soon they both grow so exasperated at the whole slow progression of trying to free Betty’s toe from the faucet that her nakedness becomes a near afterthought to him.
It’s not until the right mixture of soap, water, and a strategically applied cotton swab successfully free her, and her foot slides back into the water, that Betty lets her shoulders relax. Her head falls back to rest against the porcelain of the tub in clear relief.
Jughead smiles. Then he remembers—naked, naked—realizes what he’s staring at, lost as he is smiling into Betty’s face with a feeling of accomplishment, and his eyes snap upwards toward the corner of the ceiling where it meets the wall.
“Uh—” he stammers.
“Jug?”
“Yeah?”
“Pass me that towel over there?”
Jughead stands, relieved to have an assignment, a purpose again. He holds the towel out behind him. “Here.” He feels the soft weight of it leave his hand as Betty whispers a soft thanks.
There’s a moment of silence before she speaks again.
“Jug?”
He assumes this is his permission to turn back around, that she’s wrapped herself in the terrycloth and is dismissing him, but when he turns Betty is holding the towel loosely in front of her body, not so much covering herself as she seems to be hugging it to her torso. The knuckles of her fists are white where it grips the fabric.
He looks back up to her face, and sees her lip pulled back into her mouth again—but differently. Her expression is different.
“Did you mean it?” he blurts out, unthinking.
Betty’s hand reaches out and yanks him forward by the collar of his hoodie, the towel forgotten as she kisses him hard until he kisses her back. The transition from first seeing Betty Cooper naked to kissing Betty Cooper is as smooth as the skin of her waist under the palms of his hands.