Chapter Text
you called me up from a payphone
i said: hang tight, i can drive you home
i pulled on up, and with a southern accent
i offered you my dad’s leather jacket
- the arkells, “leather jacket”
Her marriage dies in the fall, with the leaves on the trees.
Jughead stares at the words he’s just written, the only words in an otherwise blank document. He changes the fall to autumn. He takes a drink from the cup of tepid coffee sitting next to him. And then he deletes the sentence and clicks the document closed.
He can’t write this story now. He shouldn’t write this story, ever, but especially not on this cloudy morning, with Archie Andrews sleeping off last night’s drinks on his sofa. But the second book is, as so many people have said, harder than the first.
Archie stirs, flopping onto his back with a muffled grown. Jughead closes his laptop.
“Fresh coffee and Advil coming up,” he announces, rinsing out the coffee pot.
Archie sits up slowly, one hand against his forehead. “Fuck, man,” he says. “What did you let me drink?”
“Hey, they say to never get in the way of a man making bad choices to cope with his divorce.”
With a slight grimace, Archie swings his feet to the floor but makes no move to get up. “Do you think I should call her?”
“Archie.” Jughead sets the coffee pot down and levels his friend with a look. “No. No, you shouldn’t call her.”
“It’s just so fucking weird,” Archie says, looking dejected. “I don’t know what the right thing to do is. I lived with her for five years, and now I’m just supposed to never see her, never even talk to her?”
“You might be friends again someday,” Jughead says, scooping coffee grinds.
Archie gets that look on his face that is both hopeful and unsure, the one that makes his female fans swoon. “Yeah.” He runs a hand through his messy hair. “Thanks for letting me crash, Jug.”
“Of course,” Jughead says, and he means it, because Archie is his brother, has always been his brother, and after their senior year of high school, which Archie spent in Chicago and Jughead spent in Toledo, they had cooled down enough from the tension of their junior year to piece their friendship back together, this time with even stronger glue.
They have always been friends, and they always will be. So Archie forgave Jughead for his gun-slinging past, and Jughead forgave Archie for marrying the only girl he’d ever loved.
Honestly, the divorce was the only thing that ever truly surprised him.
After high school, Veronica jetted off to Europe, he headed to Bowdoin with a death-grip on the scholarship he’d managed to get, and fate had thrown Archie and Betty together again. Archie went to NYU for music, Betty to Columbia for journalism, and they got a two-bedroom apartment together, just as friends, just for the convenience. Three months later, when Archie called and struggled through some preliminary small talk, Jughead knew I want Betty to be my girlfriend was coming the second he answered the phone.
For a couple bitter weeks, all he could think was of course. He thought it over and over: of course of course of course. He even discussed it with Veronica over WhatsApp, both of them walking the line between feelings of resignation and annoyance regarding the inevitability of it all. She’d propositioned him (guess we have to have revenge sex), and after he stumbled over an answer in which he said some bullshit about how much he valued their friendship, she replied OMG Jughead I was joking, but I’m happy to know I mean that much to you followed by a long string of emojis, the meaning of which he couldn’t decipher.
Archie and Betty getting together didn’t surprise him. He wasn’t at all shocked when Archie started writing songs about her, or when their nauseatingly cute couple photos started showing up on social media. By the time Archie proposed, two years after their awkward phone call, Jughead had slipped back into the role of his early adolescence, listening to Archie talk about Betty as if he had absolutely no skin in the game. He’d even seen Betty by then - just once, but still - and they’d both survived the encounter.
Jughead was the best man at their wedding. He gave a fucking toast. He brought a date. He was alone with Betty for only two minutes, when she caught him smoking on the balcony of the main building on the pretty New England vineyard where the wedding was held. She looked so beautiful it could have knocked him off his feet and she couldn’t quite maintain eye contact with him.
For years now (five years, but who’s counting), Jughead has steadily remained Archie’s friend, and that is the pin that holds them all together. It’s like they’ve all dropped two decades off their lives and they’re six years old again, and Jughead loves Archie, and Betty loves Archie, and it is their love for him that defines the quasi-friendship they have. In the years since the wedding Jughead has seen Betty with relative frequency, and they’ve found their footing in the patterns of their childhood. They make small talk, they tease Archie, they argue casually about books. No one ever mentions high school, and that’s never weird, because their avoidance of the topic isn’t rooted in the fact that Jughead and Betty dated, lived together, and fell apart dramatically then, but in the fact that high school was a pretty terrible time for all of them, a past they prefer not to think about.
And so Jughead was never surprised. Not by their marriage, not by the barrage of photos from their two-year wedding anniversary trip to Paris, not by the way Archie sincerely thanked his wife when he won an emerging songwriter award. He wasn’t surprised when last year Archie started talking about babies. When Archie called him and started a sentence with Betty and I… Jughead was quite certain that, given the way things were going, he’d end it with are having quadruplets! or something equally impossible that would hit him over the head, yet again, with the fairytale perfection of Archie and Betty.
But Archie had said, Betty and I are getting divorced.
After the divorce, Archie becomes Jughead’s writing companion. They spend a lot of evenings in his loft together. He sits on a stool at the counter and tugs at his hair in frustration, repeatedly deleting paragraphs, even pages, and Archie sits on the couch with his guitar on his lap, scribbling viciously on sheets of paper with a miserable look on his face. Neither of them seems to be having much success, but Jughead figures the company is good for them both.
Jughead is trying to write a novel that follows the tone of his last, something gritty, something noir, something with a narrator just one step outside of a macabre puzzle. He hasn’t been wildly successful, not by any means, but he does get the occasional royalty check, and his agent is desperate to maintain, through careful curation, the image of J. Jones III as a damaged soul who pours his feelings into books for young women to devour.
His agent and his publishing house want him to write a page-turner they can slap a shadow-filled cover on and market as the next Gone Girl (no matter how many years go by, that remains, to his endless frustration, the yardstick for a good psychological thriller), but Jughead’s brain and heart aren’t in it. He wants to write what he’s always written, the story in his life right now, the one he observes from the fringes.
The images in Jughead’s mind are of blonde hair tangled in the wind, of tan lines left like tattoos when wedding rings are removed, of a girl whose childhood dreams slip like grains of sand through her long, lean fingers.
Sometimes, when the music in his headphones is soft, or there are a couple seconds of dead air between songs, he hears Archie singing quietly, testing out chords. His lyrics are variations on a single theme: Eyes so green in the night’s streetlights. On that day in November, I’ll always remember. You said ‘don’t say you’re sorry’ and oh how you cried.
Jughead wonders if they’ll ever talk about it, how all their words centre on the same subject, how all the writer’s block crammed into his Brooklyn loft has the same pair of eyes, the same fleeting smile, the same sense of loss at its heart.
He’s trudging along through the monotony of his daily life (morning: contemplate mortality; afternoon: spend several hours at a private school helping six to twelve-year-olds improve their reading comprehension; evening: eat something unhealthy and try to write) when the phone call surprises him. He’s walking home after picking up shawarma from his favourite hole in the wall, and answers the phone with his headphones still in his ears, speaking into the little attached mic.
“Hello?”
“Juggie, hi.”
Her voice very nearly stops him in his tracks. Part of it is the simple fact that she’s calling him - Betty hasn’t called him in a couple years, not since she was organizing a surprise party for Archie (a dull reminder that Archie’s the kind of guy who likes a surprise party, who appreciates the effort, who doesn’t freak out and try to bail). Part of it is the fact that he and Betty have exchanged exactly two pieces of communication since the divorce: his text said hope you’re doing okay and hers I am, thanks. And part of it is that she calls him Juggie, which she hasn’t done since she was sixteen years old.
“Betty,” he replies. “Hey.”
“How are you?”
Jughead cracks a half-smile; Betty’s good manners are bred right into her bones. “I’m fine. How are you?”
She sighs. He thinks he can hear nerves in that sigh, but he might be imagining it. “I just - I just want to make it clear that I’m not calling you as… as like - like a rebound-type thing. That would be ridiculous, right?”
“Uh.” Jughead licks his lips, somewhat taken aback. “Right.”
“Okay.” There’s some shuffling on her end, a clanking sound. “I sort of need a favour.”
Intrigued, he asks, “What’s up?”
She sighs again. “I’m pretty sure someone stole my purse. I don’t have my phone or my wallet and I’m… in Hoboken.”
“What?” Jughead says. He can feel his brow crease. He’s home now, and he jogs up the three flights of stairs to his loft.
“I need a ride,” Betty says. “And you’re the only one I know with a car.”
“Why are you in - ”
There’s more shuffling on her end, more clanking. When she starts talking again she speaks more quickly, “Listen, the bartender gave me a dollar for the payphone and I’m on my last quarter, so I can’t keep talking, but if you can’t give me a lift, I totally understand.” She exhales. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t even have - ”
“Betty,” Jughead cuts in. He rifles around the bowl he throws random crap into for the keys to his truck. “I’ll come get you. What’s the address?”
She gives it to him and he scribbles it down on the brown napkin from the restaurant.
“Thank you,” she says softly. “Really. I owe you.”
Jughead shakes his head even though she can’t see him. “Hang tight,” he says. “I’ll see you in about an hour.”
The navigation on his phone leads him to a bar that’s not exactly run down but has certainly seen better days. He realizes, once he’s parked the car, that he’s been clenching his jaw, grinding his back teeth together. He’s nervous - he hasn’t been really and truly alone with Betty in years.
She’s easy to find once he walks inside, the same spot of brightness she’s always been. She’s been wearing her hair a bit shorter since college, soft waves that rest atop her shoulders instead of her old ponytail. She’s sitting at the bar in a leather skirt that’s ridden up her thighs since she’s crossed her legs, and her shirt is a soft, periwinkle blue, the kind of colour that always makes him think of her.
Jughead summons his confidence and sidles up to her, leaning against the bar. “Why, Betty Cooper, as I live and breathe,” he says in a half-hearted Southern accent, aiming for levity.
Her eyes meet his, and there’s a smile in them to match the one on her lips. “Of all the gin joints in all the world, he walks into exactly the one I directed him to,” she banters back, and it’s the wry easiness of her tone, the flush in her cheeks, that makes him realize she’s a little tipsy, an empty beer bottle sitting in front of her.
He sits down on the stool next to hers. “So, I’m going to need the story,” he says. He catches the bartender’s eye, gestures to Betty’s empty bottle and then holds up two fingers.
She sighs. “Veronica,” she says, which makes Jughead smile, because really, that’s almost an explanation in and of itself. “She said I needed to… you know, get over the divorce by getting under someone else. She said I should get out of the city and find a ‘disposable lay.’” Betty makes lazy air quotes around those words, her nose slightly scrunched. The bartender sets two bottles in front of them and she takes a sip from hers. “So, I did, because she wouldn’t stop bugging me, and because I know she means well, but I’m not… exactly in a place to get under anyone. I was sitting here, and I was pretty lost in thought - my purse was where you’re sitting now, and when I went to get my phone, it was gone.”
“Did you call the police?”
“What’s the point?” Betty asks with a little shrug. “Nobody here saw anything; it’s lost for good. I only had a little cash, and I’ll cancel my credit cards. I’m due for an upgrade on my phone anyway.”
Jughead nods slowly. “Look at you,” he says. “Just going with the flow.”
She shrugs again, offering him a smile. “Sometimes there’s nothing else you can do.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and when her eyebrows lift in a wordless question he adds, “About your purse. And about the break-up.”
Betty looks down at her beer. “Thanks.”
“Are you doing alright? For real?”
“It was… amicable.” She traces a finger through the condensation on the side of the bottle. “I love Archie. That - it hasn’t changed, and that’s the crazy thing. I love him just as much now as I did on the day he proposed.” She sighs. “Which means I probably never should have married him.”
“You were young,” he says. “Really young.”
“I was in love with an idea, not a person,” Betty says. “I was in love with the story of Archie and me. I thought we’d tell our grandkids one day about how I used to shine a flashlight through his window when we were supposed to be asleep. And Arch - it was the same for him. He was in love with… perfect Betty Cooper. But I don’t even remember the last time I was her. I don’t know if I ever was, really.”
Jughead nods and takes a long drink of his beer. He’s not quite sure what to say to her - they’ve never come close to having this kind of conversation before, not in years.
Mirroring his movements, Betty takes her own long drink. “He probably told you, right?” she guesses. “That we were trying to get pregnant?”
He blinks at her, mildly surprised, but nods again. “Yeah, he told me.”
“That’s how I knew it was over,” she says very softly. One of her hands rests over her knee, and he can see her manicured nails beginning to sink into her skin. “I took a pregnancy test, and when it was negative, I started to cry. Archie was trying to comfort me but I was just - I was so relieved.”
“Why?” Jughead asks, matching her soft tone.
She looks at him with wet eyes. “I couldn’t do it again, I couldn’t go back to that. I never wanted to be her. Perfect Betty Cooper.”
He reaches out and gently slips his hand between hers and her kneecap. The faint indentations there begin to fade almost immediately. He says, “I know.”
He pays Betty’s six-drink tab (five hers, one his) and waves away her insistence that she’ll pay him back as soon as possible, steering her out of the bar and toward his truck with a hand hovering very close to her back. She smells like sweet, flowery shampoo and wheaty beer.
It’s chilly out, but Betty rolls down her window and reaches her hand outside of the car, the wind rushing between her fingers. Her hair flies into her face but she doesn’t seem to mind.
Jughead wants to write her down, every bit of her, in this moment. She’s like something from Kerouac. She’s like something full of feeling.
The radio plays quietly and the wind is loud in the car. “Is Arch okay?” Betty asks.
“Yeah,” Jughead says. “I think so. He’s channeling everything into some extremely depressing songs.”
She laughs softly, wistfully. “Same old, then.”
“Yeah,” he agrees, glancing over at her. “Same old story.”
Betty rolls up her window after a while and rests her forehead against the glass. She wraps her arms around herself like she’s cold, but she doesn’t say anything. She tucks one of her legs up underneath herself, and Jughead tells himself very firmly to look at the road, not at her thighs.
He feels like they’ve travelled ten years back in time. Betty’s skin looks exactly the same, pale and smooth, having lost most of its summer tan. The sight of her blonde hair in his peripheral vision reminds him of car rides all those years ago, driving her to or from shifts at Pop’s diner in companionable silence.
The song on the radio changes, and Jughead passively recognizes the first few chords. It’s not until a voice joins the music that he recognizes the song - it’s Archie’s, the only song of his that’s made the charts and managed to stick around. He wrote it six years ago, after Betty agreed to marry him.
“Oh, I may be young,” Archie sings. “But I know when I love someone, when I love someone, and it’s you, oh, it’s you. It never changed for me, it will always be - ”
Jughead jams the power button on the radio with more force than necessary, cutting Archie off abruptly.
“It’s okay, Jug,” Betty says softly. She sounds very tired.
“You want me to turn it back on?”
She straightens up in her seat, stretching both legs out in front of her, and throws him a smile that he can tell, even from a quick glance, is sad at its edges. “It’s not that okay.”
He smiles back at her, then says, “You look like you’re freezing, Betts.” As soon as he calls her that, that old, familiar nickname of hers, he wonders if it’s another qualifier to be a member of the I-Loved-Betty-Cooper-Once club, if it’s something only he and Archie share, something only they still call her. He knows she goes by Beth in her professional life now - a name that’s a little more mature, a little less mid-century.
“I’m okay,” Betty says, but he knows it’s a lie, and he reaches back to rifle around in the backseat. He tosses aside some discarded fast food wrappings and hauls a jacket up into the front seat, setting it on her so that he can put both hands on the wheel again.
Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the slightest shake to Betty’s hands as she touches it, fingers sliding slowly over fabric, and regret bursts somewhere inside of him, shockwaves of it running through his chest, his stomach, his limbs. It’s not the leather jacket, not the one she used to wear, not the one that ultimately split them apart, but it’s a leather jacket nonetheless, and all of that might be a decade behind them, but there are bits of the wounds that still feel fresh.
“Betts,” he says very softly; he means I’m sorry.
With that fierce determination she gets sometimes, she pulls the jacket over top of her chest and arms to keep warm, and presents a firm change of subject: “Are you hungry?”
Jughead releases the breath he’d been holding. He grins, meeting her eyes for a beat. “Have you met me, Betty?” he asks, and he takes the next exit.
When they get back to the city, Jughead has demolished three hamburgers and Betty is still nibbling at her fries. She’s wearing his jacket now, folded tight around her chest to keep herself warm, and in the leather jacket, the leather skirt, she looks like a girl she might’ve become once, before he turned her away.
She asks him to drop her off at Veronica’s place on the Upper West Side, where she’s been staying since the divorce. As they sit in traffic, Betty sips her milkshake and asks, “What movie are you seeing tomorrow?”
Jughead glances over at her, somewhat surprised, and Betty looks back at him with a challenge in her eyes.
“What?” she says. “You think I’d forget your birthday?”
“No,” he says, but in truth, he’s put so much effort into trying to forget things about her that he wouldn’t be surprised if she did the same. “I just… haven’t decided yet, actually.”
She toys with her straw; it makes squeaking sounds against the plastic drink cover it’s shoved through. “Is Arch going with you?”
“No, he has that thing. The workshop.”
“Oh. Right.”
He finds a place to pull over fairly close to Veronica’s building. “Door to door service,” he says. “Almost.”
Betty looks over at him with those earnest eyes of her, so pretty beneath her carefully curled lashes. “Thank you, Jughead.”
“Anytime,” he says easily. He examines her face. “Hey, Betts - how did you know my number? If you lost your phone, you didn’t have your contact list.”
“Oh, I - I memorized it. When we went to Europe.” She shrugs. “The guidebook said it was good to memorize a number or two for people back home, just in case.”
That trip was three years ago, but he doesn’t point that out. “Ah,” he says.
Betty slips out of his jacket and hands it to him; Jughead tosses it into the back again. “Well, um, thank you,” she says. “Seriously. I don’t know what I would’ve done without - ”
He leans over the centre console slightly, just enough to bump her elbow with his own. “Stop.”
She flashes him a quick smile - it’s nervous, almost sheepish. “Have a good night, Jug.”
“You too,” he says as she opens the door. “Call those credit card companies.”
Betty nods. She closes the door behind her but then she doesn’t move, just stands totally still on the curb for a moment before turning back around to face him. She opens the door back up.
“Forget something?”
“Do you want me to go with you?” she asks. “To the movies. Tomorrow. Since Arch can’t.” She swallows. “I’ll buy your ticket, and your snacks. To make today up to you.”
“Betty, c’mon, you don’t have to - ” He stops halfway through his protest. She’s got those earnest eyes again, this time with a dash of hope thrown in, dancing in her irises, and Jughead is suddenly sixteen years old, putty under her gaze. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay. I’ll pick you up at eight.”
She smiles at him, simple and sweet. After she closes the truck’s door, he watches her walk inside, following the movement of her bare legs.
Jughead blows out a breath and leans back in his seat. On the horizon in front of him, peeking through the city’s tall buildings, the sun is setting. The sky is burning red.
tbc.