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Sitting alone in a booth at Pop’s was a raven-haired girl, hair falling uncharacteristically over her eyes, stirring the straw in a tall glass of chocolate milkshake.
Once, several years ago, the same raven-haired girl had walked through that same door, looked over at that same booth and Archibald Andrews had gotten too distracted to listen to his best friend’s attempt of proclaiming her love for him.
They had not known it then, but there would come a time where the redheaded boy would instead proclaim his love for the girl who drew his attention that very day. She would say it back, though not right away. They later said it freely, often, those three words with all their intentions and promises of forever. He would eventually fail his promise. Once, then once again.
The second time was her breaking point, though she’d given him another chance if he asked for it.
He never did.
Standing at the Chock’lit shoppe’s entrance was a raven-haired boy, hair uncharacteristically drawn back from hours of dragging his hands through it, sitting outside in the drizzling rain of late summer.
Once, several years ago, the same raven-haired boy had sat in the booth beside hers, kissing the folded hands of a troubled blonde girl, realizing he wasn’t just a weird loner kid and she was more than the perfect girl next door. They had layers.
They had not known it then, but said layers would eventually become bridges between them, making them more and more similar. He would tell her he loved her, despite his insecurities, with tremor in his voice and the fear of getting hurt. She would say it back, right away, unwaveringly, as if the thought of hurting him was the furthest thing from her mind. Then she did. Once, then once again.
The second time was not his breaking point. He’d given her a million more chances if she asked for it.
She never did.
The man behind the counter didn’t greet him with his normal bravado, a tell-tale sign of his inability to not carry his heart on his sleeve, though he wondered if there was much of a heart left to carry. It felt irreparably shattered, yet the thought made him cringe. Certainly, he, he who proclaimed to be a writer, must have better words to explain the aching of a heart?
He supposed he could describe the face of the raven-haired girl, finding it bursting with words where it stayed almost manically focused on the milkshake in front of her.
Maybe non-fiction shouldn’t be his style of choice.
“Hey,” he said, falling inelegantly down in the seat across from her. He had expected the mask, the brave face and smug smile that was one of many reasons he’d never taken the time to truly get to know her. That was not what met him when she looked up and her chocolate brown eyes met his own. He’d seen them in many states over the years of sort-of knowing her. Humorous, spiteful, vindictive. But never this. Never empty.
“Chocolate for you, Jug?” Pop asked from his stance behind them. There were no one else in the shop, unsurprisingly as most of the town’s citizens had escaped the choking hold of small town summer for outside adventures.
He considered ordering a vanilla, just to prolong the state of torture he’d been wallowing in for the last few weeks since the invitation had unceremoniously dropped in his inbox, seemingly unsuspicious under the subject; would be nice if you came.
“Just coffee,” he said. “Please”.
He’d sent it. Not her.
He walked the streets so long that day that his shoes, albeit already slightly weary, had come apart at the seams, his big toe clad in neon green socks poking out in front.
He’d gotten the text twenty minutes after he returned home. His shoes were still on.
Did you get the email from Betty? It said. He should have known that she would send it to her, not him. He sent it to him, not her. Fittingly enough.
I’m marrying the man I stole from you.
I’m marrying the woman I stole from you.
Would be nice if you came.
He hated that idea. That you could steal someone from anyone, and in all honesty, he didn’t believe that was what happened. Still, it was sometimes easier, to think of it all as some grand betrayal that they both had to suffer through. A crime of great proportions. Someone stole their greatest possession. It’s something to pity. It was taken away from you.
It wasn’t something you lost.
Something you could have taken better care off, carried closer to your heart so it didn’t get away from you, slipping through your open fingers when you could have folded them neatly together, keeping it from running free.
But they had. Lost them.
And they had, inevitably, found each other.
“I want to be happy for them, Jughead,” she said, way later, after the coffee had been placed in front of his cold hands and they had changed pleasantries of the sort you did after not seeing someone for ten years. “But I can’t. Does that make me an awful person?”
“No,” he said, stirring his coffee by turning the spoon in slow eights, making an infinity symbol over and over though it seemed redundant to do so. He’d added sugar to his coffee, too much of it, even though he usually drank it black and now he’d ruined it.
She looked at him, her eyes swimming in disbelief.
“No,” he said forcefully.
She smiled then, very gently, only a tiny quirk of the corner of her lips, but it was enough to draw attention to the indents in her purple lipstick.
“Have you talked to them at all?” she asked, mouth once again dipping into a somewhat controlled frown. He hadn’t and told her as much. He, like her, had left Riverdale behind, never once looking back.
Which was a lie. Every once in a while, he put her name, then his name, into one of the all-too-many social medias he ventured despite his aversion to people who did just that. The frequency changed with the years. He didn’t do it at all at first (for his sanity), then way too often (in masochistic curiosity) and then less and less until he’d almost forgotten all about his former best friends and what looked like a thriving relationship.
He’d forgotten about the girl before him too, much sooner, though he spent months wondering if she too felt like her heart was an open wound that blead out on the carpet, that everyone around her was waiting for her to clean up her mess.
“I was married, you know,” she said. He knew. He still kept some contact with Toni, who still saw Cheryl from time to time. Their relationship had fizzled into nothing, without hurtful words or malice, just the eventual disintegration of such a fragile thing as love. Cheryl obviously knew someone who knew someone who knew Veronica, and Toni had told her about the tiny reception at a private beach in Monterey. He remembered being surprised by anything Lodge-related being something other than over the top.
Toni also told him when it ended. Apparently, he’d cheated, and his heart had ached for her for days.
“I should have called,” he said. It was the type of thing you regretfully said with a pained expression on your face, knowing there was a reason you didn’t pick up the phone. He still meant it. She waved it off, not bothering with a verbal acceptation of his half-ass attempt at an apology.
“We were never really friends, were we?” she said instead.
“But we could have been,” he followed.
“We could have been a lot of things, Jughead”.
They could. Almost had. She had sought him out during their first year in NYC. They had bonded over old cinema and old wounds, broken fathers and broken faith. She had fallen asleep in his lap during the final act of Gone with the wind. He had wondered what life would be like if rich-girl Veronica Lodge had walked into Pop’s that fateful evening and not been infatuated by the head of red hair, but simply walked out with her takeout. If Archie Andrews had decided to see his blonde best friend as more than just that and kissed her then and there in that booth, and not years later after Jughead himself had fallen for her a thousand times over.
Maybe he’d never come to love Betty Cooper if she’d never let him.
Maybe even Veronica Lodge with all her persuasiveness and persistence would take him on as her personal pet-project, and the lingering kiss in the Lodge-Lodge’s hot-tub wouldn’t be something to spite their partners, but something wanted.
He’d told her as much, when she eventually woke with creases on her face and make-up off-key.
Still to this day, he could not tell you who leaned in first, nor who looked down before lips could meet in a very unspiteful way.
They still hugged each other a little longer than necessary when she left his apartment.
“We both know I’d never be good enough for a Lodge,” he said humorously, grinning bashfully the only way he knew how. She rolled her eyes at him from the other side of the booth, but the glint in her eyes betrayed her.
“You were always the smartest, Jones”.
They went together to the wedding. She held onto his arm as if he was her lifeboat, and he let her. He asked her to dance, and they did. They faced their former partners together, telling them the wedding was beautiful and meant it.
They left before dinner, in a very uncharacteristic Jones-way, with Veronica’s promise of ordering in Pop’s entire menu if they only got out of there before the speeches.
He slept beside her, still fully clothed and held her close through aching sobs. In a very characteristic Lodge-way, she still woke up beautiful, ready to face the day.
They went back to New York together.
She eventually married a struggling writer who’d had his share of small town drama. He made her feel safe and loved, and she never once worried he would wake up and fall for another. Not because of the impossibly of it all, she had learned that everyone had a breaking point - even him, but because of her newfound trust in herself and that she, no matter what life threw her way, would be okay.
His words had taught her that, she told him over coffee one early morning, bouncing then one-year-old Penn on her leg. For he had finally written the book he could never get down on paper during his first college years, though everyone said the greatest art came from pain, and they all knew he’d experienced enough of it.
Still the words wouldn’t come before the two of them returned after that summer wedding, and he had remembered to call her on her birthday, then again the following month, and every month after.
Which was how the book about a murder that became a book about young love, in the end became a book about a raven-haired girl who walked into a small town diner and forged her own path to happiness despite the odds.
And a book about the boy who came to love her.