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In her four-year stint as an art major, Amy learned a lot of different words to describe beauty. She studied brushstrokes that communicated immeasurable pain and triumph and hope and fear. She learned how one piece of art could capture a moment so intense she felt like she could feel the artist’s breath on her neck. She felt positive that she’d never meet anyone who could make her feel as much as Michelangelo could with just one facial expression.
Until she met Jake.
Sure, it took a few months to get past his thick manchild exterior. In fact, the first time he was vulnerable in front of her, he wasn’t even aware that she was around. Captain McGinley suggested she sit in on the other side of the glass while Jake interrogated a suspected child molester. “Peralta can get a confession out of anyone,” the grizzled old man had said. “Anyone.”
She’d arched an eyebrow skeptically. How good could a twenty-eight-year-old boy who catapults jelly beans across their desks every time she worked on paperwork actually be at interrogating criminals?
Very good, apparently. And even though his voice was crackly through the crappy microphone connected to the speakers in her observation room, she could clearly hear all the emotion in his voice; his shoulders were tense and tight and drawn up close to his neck, which was flushed a light shade of pink. And in less than an hour, he’d coaxed a confession out of the old pervert. He leaned back in his seat and rubbed his temples as two beat cops led the old man away, and even though Amy was sure there was already a small mountain of paperwork waiting for her at her desk, she could not draw her eyes away from him. He sat for several moments after the door closed, and she held her breath.
She jumped when he suddenly sprang out of his seat and slammed his fist against the metal table hard enough to leave a shallow dent. He started pacing, and his face was contorted with a tortured rage she didn’t previously believe he was capable of. It wasn’t until he began trying to flip the interrogation table - which was bolted to the ground - that she stood and hurried out of the room, feeling like she was seeing something private. Her desk was, as predicted, buried beneath paperwork, so she sat and pulled the first one forward blindly and tried to compose herself enough to absorb the words on the pages before her.
He didn’t emerge for another half hour, and she hardly chanced a glance up at him as he brushed past her desk. Suddenly she felt hyper-aware of him, of his movement and the shape of him at the upper edge of her vision where he sat at his desk. She found herself holding her breath again, as if at any moment he was going to burst and throw all of his belongings off of his desk with one sweeping move of his arm.
Clack. She jumped. A pink jelly bean spun with leftover momentum in the center of her case file. Her head snapped up toward Jake and he was grinning at her cheekily, like he hadn’t just punched a dent in an interrogation room table, like he hadn’t just gotten a confession for a terrible crime out of a terrible person in record time. She stared at him disbelievingly, open-mouthed, until he flicked another jelly bean at her that hit her square in the forehead.
“Peralta!” She snapped, and his grin widened.
She got it, really. He didn’t want people to know. She didn’t understand why yet, but she was sure it would come. He liked being the manchild, liked causing the chaotic antics that seemed to plague the nine-nine on a weekly basis, and right then, she was the calm to his storm. And she was okay with that, because suddenly his immaturity was a painfully obvious shield for something else. Jake was a puzzle she was determined to solve.
Later, when she finally accepted Terry’s weekly offer to go to Shaw’s with the rest of the crew, she waited until Jake was alone at the bar before perching on the edge of the stool near him.
“Hey,” she said softly.
He glanced at her, down to the empty stool between them, and then back to her. “Don’t worry, my cooties aren’t contagious,” he said disparagingly over the rim of his whiskey glass.
She rolled her eyes. “I just wanted to say that you did a really great job with that perp earlier.” His brows drew together as he lowered his glass. “McGinley...told me. Uh, about how you got a confession in, like, under an hour. That’s...that’s really impressive.”
His chin lifted a little, so that he was looking down his nose at her, and she felt heat rising up in her cheeks. “Thanks,” he said, and his voice sounded like it did earlier in the interrogation room but without all the static. Just raw emotion. He looked like a real person for the first time since meeting her.
And it made her stomach feel weightless.
From that moment on, she felt the dynamics between them shift. Sure, he still harassed her and she still let him know exactly how annoying and unprofessional he was, but there was a new-found respect there, too. If he couldn’t figure something out in a case file, he’d slide it across their desks and ask her to look over it for anything he might have missed. If she had a particularly difficult interrogation going, he’d offer to step in to provide a little variation. And Amy rather liked their new partnership.
But she had no idea she was only scratching the surface until one bright, cold morning in February a year after starting at the nine-nine.
She was testifying in court against a serial killer she’d helped capture, whose main victims were young women who ranged from eight to thirteen years of age. And in order to drive home exactly how brutal the guy was, the prosecution brought in images from the crime scene. She’d studied these images for weeks, pouring over them until they were so burned into her memory that she saw them all like a flickering horror show in her mind when she tried and failed to sleep at night.
But seeing them like this, in this setting, where the man responsible for the horrific, gruesome murders flashing across the television screen watched them without even a hint of emotion while the friends and families of the victims sobbed loudly on the row behind her, was too much. She excused herself and hurried out of the courtroom, leaving her purse behind, blindly and numbly shoving her way through the crowd until she found a quiet bench in a secluded hallway where she could catch her breath.
“Santiago?” A familiar voice rang from the end of the hall. Jake was walking toward her, looking confused and also a little amused. “What are you doing here?”
“Testifying,” she mumbled.
He flopped down on the bench beside her. “You alright?”
She sighed and dropped her hands to her lap. “No,” she grunted, studying her trembling fingers. “I’m not.”
He nodded and turned his gaze to the wall across from them. “It’s that serial killer case, right? The one who killed…?”
“Eight little girls,” Amy finished.
Jake made a displeased noise in the back of his throat. “That’s brutal,” he said. “Is there anything I can do for you? Like, d’you need water or food or anything like that?”
Amy let her head fall back against the wall behind her. “Can you just...make this be over?” She gestures toward the wall, in the general direction of the court.
“If I could, I would,” he said seriously. His hand bridges the gap between them and lands on her knee lightly, and he pats her there a few times consolingly. “You should know that you did everything you could on that case. And if it weren’t for you, he’d probably still be out there right now. You saved a lot of lives, Santiago.”
Her eyes followed his retreating hand, and when they darted up to meet his, he was smiling at her sympathetically. “Thanks,” she said softly, and he nodded. “I need to get back in there.”
“Just hang in there. And, uh, we’re all going out for drinks later. You should come,” he said as he stood.
It was the first time he’d ever invited her along. “That actually sounds really great right now,” she said as she stood. He kept pace beside her, walking with her all the way back to the doors of her courtroom. “Hey, Peralta?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
He shrugged and smiled crookedly. “No worries.”
Later, at the bar, Terry asked her how her case went. “It was rough at first,” she said, studying the way the liquid in her martini glass moved when she swirled it around. “But then Peralta randomly showed up and made me feel a little better.”
“Peralta was there?” Terry asked incredulously. “Why?”
“I don’t...know…” she said, lowering her glass slowly. “I figured he was there testifying, too.”
“He told me he needed the afternoon off to help get his mother to a mechanic,” Terry said, rising up off his elbows to crane around the bar. But Jake was behind him, with Charles and Rosa, waiting for his turn to throw darts. Amy studied him in bewilderment and he glanced over at her like he could feel her eyes on him. They held each other’s gazes for a moment, and then he pressed his lips together into a line and nodded slowly at her, as if to say, you’re welcome.
Her chest still felt hollow, but now there was a warmth there, too.
She would apologize later for getting him in trouble with Terry, and he would shrug her off because, “Seriously, Santiago, it was nothing.”
There were a lot of little moments like that between them. Nothing special, nothing groundbreaking, just soft, passing gazes full of the kind of depth some artists spent their whole lives working to capture on the canvas. And with each passing day, Amy saw bits and pieces of him and his loyalty and devotion and dedication that he worked so hard to conceal. It surfaced around Gina, around Charles, and around his mother when she visited the precinct once in a blue moon. And occasionally Amy would catch him watching her over their computer monitors with a gaze so smoldering it would throw her off for the rest of the day.
By the time Holt came around three years later, they’d settled into a really fantastic working relationship and friendship. Over the course of that first tumultuous year of Holt forcing Jake to grow, those expressions increased both in intensity and frequency directed at her, until it was like looking at the sun, like she couldn’t quite stare directly at him or else she’d lose her eyesight forever. It scared her, honestly. So she dated Teddy because he liked her and told her and he was safe. She felt Jake’s lingering stares on her and Teddy when she brought Teddy along to the bar, but she refused to study them, because she just knew she wasn’t ready to figure out what was lying beneath the surface.
But in the end, like a moth to a flame, she was drawn to him. He found her alone in the evidence lockup and within moments he had her, all of her, completely and totally his. And based on the way his hands ran up her back and anchored her neck in place, she had an inkling that he was fully hers, too.
Over and over again, they collide, and Amy is dizzy with an unparalleled joy that far outlasts any of her previous relationships. She wakes up early almost every morning and watches him while he sleeps, watches the peaceful tranquility of nothingness flickering across his expressive face, and it lights her up with a contentment she’s never experienced before. And even when he grunts and sleepily tells her that she's being creepy, she just giggles in exhilaration until he rolls over on top of her and smothers her laughter with sleepy morning kisses.
But the greatest look he gives her happens early in the evening on a warm night in May. They're in a cavernous dance hall somewhere in Brooklyn, and through the windows she sees the lights of the city glowing in the distance. There are a hundred and fifty pairs of eyes on them, and she’s nervous because the white dress that clings to her suddenly feels cumbersome and she’s just never been good under close scrutiny or at dancing so the fact that both are happening simultaneously is borderline too much for her. But then Jake, handsome Jake in a sharp black tuxedo and red tie, slides his arm around her waist and tugs her a little closer until they’re chest-to-chest. She lifts both her arms to hook around his neck as his other arm wraps around her waist and their foreheads touch just as the music starts.
She sees their family and friends on the edges of her vision, but she can’t tear her eyes away from Jake. She knows so many words to describe beauty and passion and love, but none of them are good enough to capture the emotion in his gaze. He hums along to the melody quietly, so that only she can hear it, and his thumbs stroke a soothing pattern on her spine. She focuses on that feeling and does her best to reciprocate by gently running her nails across the soft hair at the base of his head.
When she closes her eyes she remembers that moment in the observation room, and that moment at Shaw’s, and the time he discovered she was allergic to dogs after she nearly suffocated while trying to interview a witness. She remembers sitting in his car with him after his dad cancelled on him and he’d poured his heart out to her for the very first time, and the time she saw him press a quick peck on top of Gina’s head and the first time she ever heard him make a promise to Rosa with a thousand pushups and when she opens her eyes she wonders what in the world she ever did to deserve someone like Jake.
They sway on the dancefloor, pressed together as closely as her full skirt will allow, and Amy imagines a long, endless future of dancing with Jake. In the early morning hours in their kitchen at home, in weddings, in holiday parties and governor’s balls and she wonders if it will ever feel like this again. His grip tightens around her, pulling her closer still, and he presses his lips against hers lightly. “I love you,” he whispers when they break apart.
And oh, oh, how she loves him back. It flows through her, it makes her heart expand until it feels as though it’s going to burst in her chest, and she wants to scream it at the top of her lungs. “I love you, too,” she whispers breathlessly, and yeah, she’s done for, because the look in his face is just too much for her fragile heart to handle. In that moment she’s sure he could tame an ocean or bring a kingdom to its’ knees; he looks at her like she’s the most precious work of art on the planet. It’s so soft and warm and tender and she’s so thankful that he’s her husband now because that look alone is enough for her to need him for the rest of her life.
He looks at her like that all night; at the head table when they eat, over his mother’s head when he dances with her, over Gina’s shoulder while Amy dances with Holt. And at the end of the night when they climb into the limo beneath a canopy of flickering sparklers held aloft by everyone on the planet that she loves, she practically yanks him to her and kisses him over and over until his hands are tangled in her hair and she’s on the verge of passing out from lack of oxygen.
They get to their hotel room and he flops down on the edge of the bed. “Wait,” he says softly as she moves to take her dress off. “Just...wait.”
She stands very still and tries to suppress her smile as his eyes rake over her. He looks dumbstruck, his eyes wide and his mouth parted, almost exactly like he’d looked hours earlier when she first emerged on her father’s arm at the other end of the aisle. He’d swallowed thickly then, just as he swallows thickly now. Only now Charles isn’t behind him to reassuringly pat his shoulder and Holt isn’t officiating the ceremony so that he could gently elbow Jake out of his shocked state, so the minutes drag on.
“Ames,” Jake croaks, bringing her hurtling back to the present. “You...you’re...God,” he shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it and reaches for her. She steps forward and takes both of his outstretched hands and lets him lead her to stand between his knees. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispers.
And the words don’t matter, she realizes, because at the end of the day, words are just words. It’s the way they’re spoken that conveys the meaning, just like the brushstrokes of a painting. He speaks like Michelangelo paints. So instead of trying to come up with new words or better words, she just bends down until their lips meld together. She pours everything into him, holding him in place with her palms beneath his jaw, her thumbs perpendicular to the hollows of his cheeks, and a soft moan escapes his throat. His hands drift up to her waist and the rightness is as overwhelming now as it was two years ago in the evidence locker, as overwhelming as she predicts it will be for the rest of their lives.
She pulls away slowly, reluctantly, and peeks at him through her lashes. His eyes are closed, brows drawn together, and he’s straining to follow her. “You’re everything,” she says, and his eyes flutter open. “You’re everything and...and…” she trails and runs her fingers through the tuft of hair at the crown of his head that always stands straight up. “I’m so glad you’re mine.”
“I am. I’m yours. Forever.” He pulls her forward into a hug and tucks his head against her stomach and she laughs. “And you’re mine.” He says seriously, arms contracting around her waist.
“Forever,” she echoes, and she swears she sees it all in that moment. Winding and twisting and at times scary, but together. She drops her head down so that her lips rest against the top of his head. “Forever,” she whispers into his hair.