songfic day 21: check yes juliet
Bettyâs window: a history.
(Inspired by âCheck Yes Julietâ by We The Kings.)
He still rides his bike through the dark streets of Riverdale every Saturday, when his fatherâs had too much to drink, and his motherâs too preoccupied with Jellybean to look after him properly. Some nights, he knocks on the door of the Andrews home, where Fred and Mary have already stockpiled his favourite snacks, and Archie is bouncing up and down in excitement because having Jughead over means he could stay up late playing video games.
Other nights, he grabs the ladder that he knows the Coopers always leave out, props it up against the wall below Bettyâs window, and climbs up, where she is waiting with a plate of cookies, a glass of milk, and a pile of Goosebumps books that they stay up reading while sitting back to back.
âYou know you can always just talk to my mom, right?â she says. âYou donât have to climb in through the window all the time.â
âAre you kidding?â he replies, his mouth full of cookies. âNo way. Your momâs, like, the scariest person in Riverdale.
They giggle because itâs true, and she passes him another cookie.
Jughead doesnât add that he happens to like it this way: that he and Betty can share something apart from their friendship with Archie, something secret, and that â as far as he knows â although Archie is certainly welcome through the front door, heâs the only one who gets in through the window.
His fatherâs having a really bad night, and although Archie has the new Tekken game, something in him wants cookies and quiet company over button mashing and yelling at the TV. So he makes his way over to Bettyâs window.
But somethingâs not right. Bettyâs pink curtains are half-closed, and Alice Cooper is peeking out from the side, glaring out into the dark.
His stomach sinks. He hides himself in the bushes and crawls back over to the Andrews home.
They never recover those quiet hours reading together in her room. But every Monday morning for the rest of that year, she passes him a small parcel of cookies.
It wasnât something heâd planned. How does one even plan falling, forward movement, unstoppable motion? Heâs a goner the moment she slides open her window, so much so that he calls her Juliet, and itâs a corny joke, but she smiles anyway, and lets him in.
He doesnât know that he means to kiss her until the last possible moment, when he feels himself hurtling towards her lips and is startled by their shape beneath his own â how well they fit together, how strange and wonderful she tastes on his tongue.
They stop, but only when they get to a break in the case. She says, to be continued, and although he should be thinking about finding that damned car, he is fixated on that kiss, and how he is to get the next one.
He lives here now, with his family. And so it is she who does the climbing this time â up the ladder, into the room.
He takes to sleeping naked because there is no preamble, no pretense needed in these midnights when she craves his body, just as he craves hers. He throws off the sheets the minute he hears the window opening, and though he has no words for the shape of her body crawling towards him in the moonlight, he memorises it. He could probably sketch it, if he had to.
She knows every creak in the room, and so when she beckons him into the bathroom, he knows theyâll be loud. She turns the water on, full steam, as he fucks her against the shower door, watching her flesh writhe and press against the glass, sticking a finger into her mouth for her to suck on and stifle her moans.
It is these nights that he lives for - when they are wet and spent on the bed, when she is too tired to climb back out.
That way, he gets to hold her until dawn.
The house is being sold. Heâd never really changed anything before leaving for college, so sheâs packing up her stuff to move back to their apartment in New York.
There is a box full of her mementoes that he had entrusted to Jellybean; he tells Betty that itâs on the top shelf of the closet. Sheâs sentimental, so he knows that sheâs about to go through it item by item: old pictures, report cards, notes heâd written to her in class.
Thatâs exactly why he left it all the way at the bottom: the small, black velvet box he bought more than a year ago and left with his sister for safekeeping. Was there anywhere better than here to ask the question? Where it all began, and where another chapter will begin again?
When she gets to it, she gasps, and turns. Heâs already on one knee.
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