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first thing's first: i'mma say all the words inside my head
i'm fired up and tired of the way that things have been
second thing second: don't you tell me what you think that i can be
i'm the one at the sail, i'm the master of my sea
Betty is not a girl who wants to go wild.
She supposes she looks like she does, often enough, standing at the edge of a football field as the setting sun sets her high, perky ponytail aglow, the bright yellow ribbon affixed to her hair calling out for attention, beckoning eyes toward her, her tiny white skirt clinging tight to her hipbones, her ass, the outsides of her thighs, riding high up when she kicks a leg into the air. She knows what boys think when they watch her punch a pom-pom into the air, flip her hair over her shoulder, and shake her hips to the bass beats of some top 40 track. She knows how she seems, but that’s not how she is. In truth, Betty would give anything to be at home right now, tucked into an armchair by the fireplace, clad in sweatpants and a t-shirt three sizes too big, sipping low-fat hot cocoa as she watched snowflakes dance outside the window.
Instead, however, she’s spending her fourth spring break on a beach, this time in Miami, where it seems at least one-third of the nation’s college-aged population has gathered. Everywhere around her are people in bathing suits, revelling in their youthful hotness, drinking vodka out of old Gatorade bottles, spiking volleyballs over nets, making out under beach umbrellas. Not far from where Betty is sitting, the captain of her cheer team, Veronica Lodge, is holding court, chatting with a couple of their teammates about which clubs they should head to tonight as she perches on her boyfriend’s lap, his hand wrapped firmly around her thigh and his face pressed into the crook of her neck. As different as they are, Betty’s come to love Veronica, but they’re still opposites in fundamental ways - which is why Betty’s sitting alone on her beach towel, a book in her hands as she tries to both acquire a tan and to actually start thinking about her essays for the semester.
Spring break, after all, is known in circles other than her own as reading week.
The sun is hot on her skin, deliciously so, after the past couple months of coughing and sniffling through the Maryland winter, but Betty keeps her cover-up on rather than laying out in the navy blue bikini Veronica helped her shop for. In a few months, it’s more likely than not that she’ll wear a uniform that will bare her midriff and that an image of her with pushed-up breasts and an exposed stomach will be projected onto giant screens and national broadcasting stations, but for now her cheerleading top is full-length, and clothes that show her stomach still make her self-conscious, reminding her of being small, seven or eight years old, of her mother’s fingers pinching the baby fat on her belly, of crying quietly in the bathroom afterward, of realizing that the greatest expectation in her life was that she be beautiful.
So: cover-up on, large sunglasses shielding her eyes, and a scholarly edition of Paradise Lost open in her hands, Betty tries to engage in some productive vacationing.
She only reads about three pages before the rays of sun falling onto the pages of her book are disrupted by a shadow.
“Mind if I join you?” a voice asks, a little rough around the edges of the question.
Without looking up, Betty says, flatly, “I have a boyfriend.” Looking like the kind of girl who’d like to go wild on a Miami beach has the unfortunate, misogynistic consequence of the word no always requiring some further explanation, and that lie tends to shut things down. My body belongs to another dude is what it says, and she feels little pinpricks of rage whenever she uses it, sharp as manicured nails digging hard into the palms of her hands, easing off just before her skin is broken.
“Okay,” the voice above her says slowly. “That’s cool. I was just wondering if I could join your book club.”
She finally looks up, and her eyes settle first onto the book in the hands of the boy standing in front of her - it’s the exact same edition of Milton’s epic that she’s holding, turned in his grasp so that she can see its cover, his finger tucked between the pages, saving his place. She blinks, and her gaze darts up to his face. He’s got blue eyes that are squinting slightly in the sunlight and a hat on over his dark hair, a beanie, one that looks like it very well might be made of wool, in spite of the heat. It seems incongruous considering his outfit, which consists of swim trunks, a t-shirt, and flip-flops.
“Milton seminar?” she asks; that’s the class she’s reading for.
“Seventeenth-century lit,” he replies, and nods toward the sand next to her towel, a wordless may I?
She nods, lifting her bag and moving it out of his way.
“You’re Veronica’s friend, right?” he asks as he sits down in the sand. It sticks immediately to his sweaty skin, and Betty glances at his legs. He’s tanning very well, much better than she is.
“Yeah.” She glances over in Veronica’s direction and finds that her friend now has her tongue in her boyfriend’s mouth. “Do you know Reggie?” she asks, tilting her head toward them.
“Sort of. By proxy. I know Archie.”
Betty nods. “So you’re not on the team with them, then?”
“The football team?” The sound of his question is a little startled; the look on his face is caught somewhere between amusement and something that looks like offense. “No. No. I grew up with Archie. He always plays that card when he wants me to do something - you’re my oldest friend, Jughead. That’s how I ended up on this trip.”
“Jughead?” she repeats.
He nods, heaving a sigh so quiet she almost doesn’t hear it, but she can see it very clearly in the movement of his chest. “Long story.”
“I’m Betty,” she offers. “If you grew up with Archie, that means you’re from Riverdale, right?”
“Yeah.” Silently, his eyes ask, how’d you know that?
“I am, too,” she explains. “Archie and I figured it out once, when he was going on about the best milkshakes in the world. My family moved up to Toronto when I was four.” They’d thought it was fate, she and Archie did, for about a week, until he’d kissed her at the end of their second date and she’d laughed so hard about how weird it was that she ended up in tears.
“You’re Canadian?”
“Dual citizenship.”
Jughead nods. “Why’d you come down here for college?”
“Seemed like the right choice,” she says - or rather, lies. For an instant, she remembers holding her acceptance letter to McGill. Her parents paid the application fee, but that was as far as their generosity extended where her individual decision-making was concerned. Towson’s cheer team had national titles, so Towson was where Betty was going to go.
She yanks herself out of her thoughts and plasters on a smile. “Aren’t you hot?” she asks, her eyes flitting up to his woollen beanie.
“You tell me,” he says, a wry quirk in one corner of his mouth, and Betty feels her eyebrows shoot up above the frames of her sunglasses. Before she can reply, he says, “Sorry,” quickly, confidence melting away into a bashfulness that is almost endearing. “Judging by your response when I came over, you’re not looking for someone to flirt with you.”
She likes that he doesn’t say sorry - I know you have a boyfriend. The smile on her face loses its plasticity, becoming softer and more earnest. “Oh, is that what that was?” she teases, and maybe he’s just been in the sun for too long today, but she swears his cheeks turn a little pink.
Jughead clears his throat. “How’re you liking it?” he asks, chin jutting toward the text in her hands.
“I love it,” Betty says honestly. “It’s so beautiful. We’re reading book by book for my course, but I’ve read ahead a couple times; I can’t help it. It’s funny - I know how it’s going to end, but it’s still so compelling.” She bites her bottom lip, feeling like she’s babbling. “I think I’m going to write my term paper on the first book.”
Jughead nods slowly, his gaze drifting toward the ocean. He must be sweating under that hat, Betty thinks. His voice is low and cryptic when he says, “Beginnings are the best part.”
Unsurprisingly, Betty spots him at dinner, his friend group and hers converging once again, taking up three tables and making trips back and forth from the buffet. Betty sort of assumed she’d sit with Veronica and Reggie, and maybe make friendly conversation with Archie if he wasn’t too busy making eyes at one of her teammates, but she finds herself drifting to a different table, her flip-flops thwacking with each step she takes. She feels a little less on display now, in the dimly-lit restaurant, comfortable in a pair of pink denim shorts and a gauzy white shirt. She feels less like Betty-the-cheerleader and more like Betty-the-person, and it’s that version of herself, the real version of herself, that makes her way over to where Jughead’s sitting with an overloaded plate of food in front of him.
“Are you preparing for hibernation?” she asks as she sets her plate down in the unoccupied place to his right.
He looks up at her. Curls of hair are slipping out from under his beanie, falling into his eyes. “Oh, I don’t know if you should sit here,” he says, and Betty freezes halfway through pulling the chair out. “I have a girlfriend.”
She stares at him and he stares at her until she can read the mirth in his eyes, and she breathes out a laugh, rolls her eyes, and plunks down gracelessly into the chair.
“Did you get any further with our friend John Milton today?” he asks as he digs into his dinner.
“Not really.” Betty spears a large leaf of lettuce with her fork, wondering how she might get it into her mouth with even an ounce of decorum. “V came at me with a monologue about this being our last spring break ever, so… ”
“Archie’s given me one or two of those,” Jughead says understandingly.
Betty gives up on the lettuce, nudges it off her fork, and eats a cherry tomato instead. “What are your plans?” she asks. “For after.”
“Clichéd move to New York, probably,” he says. “Live in a shoebox of an apartment. Drink a lot of cheap black coffee. Find a twenty-four hour diner and try to write.”
“Write?”
“Uh, yeah.” With the hand that isn’t holding his fork, he rubs at the back of his neck. “I’m writing a novel. Trying to, anyway.”
“Really?” she asks, unable to keep a note of delight out of her voice.
But she thinks he might hear it as something else, as something it’s not - skepticism, maybe - because his eyes are downcast when he says, “Yeah. It’s a bit of a pipe dream.”
“No,” Betty says, all earnestness, like she’s ten years younger. “No, that’s amazing.” Briefly, stupidly, she wants to tell him about the notebooks she used to have, filled with family trees for characters she’d created and point-form details of the mysteries she plotted out as she fell asleep each night. She pushes that thought away and adds, “Really.”
The tips of Jughead’s ears have gone red. “We’ll see,” he says. “Uh… what about you? What’s next?”
She cuts into her chicken a bit more aggressively than necessary; her knife scrapes across her plate, making an ugly, screeching sound. With a little wince, she sets her cutlery down and grabs her glass of water instead. “The dynastic plan is a move to Dallas.”
“Dallas?” he echoes.
“Yeah. I’m going to audition to cheer for the Cowboys. My grandma was a DCC; my mom, too. My sister’s on the team right now - she’s got a leadership role. I’ve been prepped for this my entire life, basically. Unless I really mess up… that’s where I’ll be next year.”
“Cheerleading.”
The way he says that word makes her fingers tighten around her glass, knuckles going white. “Yes,” she says simply. She can feel her defenses rising - she’s a good cheerleader, she’s a fucking great cheerleader, there’s nothing wrong with doing what you’re good at - and she doesn’t want to risk saying anything more in case the words come out snappish and irritable and not at all cheery.
His mouth makes an interesting shape, his lower lip partially drawn in. “Cool,” he says, and just like that, Betty feels the need to justify herself, to justify her choices and her future and the life that was basically assigned to her to this boy she barely knows.
“It’s not just rah-rah sis-boom-bah stuff,” she says tightly. “It’s not just shaking your ass. They do a lot of community outreach, and there are charity initiatives, and kids’ camps, and a group does USO tours, and - ”
“I didn’t say anything, Betty,” he cuts in, his voice soft. “I didn’t say it was any of that or none of that. I’m sure it’s great. I’m sure you’ll be great.”
She hates the way he’s looking at her, blue eyes full of comfort and questions, something gently probing in his gaze. She never wants him to stop.
She stabs her fork into a piece of her chicken and chews it very slowly. It tastes like rubber in her mouth.
The hours closing in on midnight find Betty in a sweaty, strobe-lit space, music blasting so loud she can feel the beat of the bass in her stomach. She’s changed again, into a tight amber-coloured dress and a pair of black heels with a floral print. They’re cheap shoes, purchased specifically for this trip, for this atmosphere, and the lack of arch support as she balances on four spindly inches is going to come back to bite her tomorrow.
Her friends are all so beautiful, short dresses showing off toned legs, smiles loosened by jello shots, the sparkle of laughter in their eyes making Betty nostalgic for this very moment, even though she’s living it. This is her very last spring break. Next year, everything will be different. She’ll never be so young again. There will never again be so many possibilities lurking around the edges of her prescribed future. Her heart aches as she bites into a lemon wedge, tequila still burning the back of her throat.
Jughead is standing by the bar, rolling the neck of a mostly-full bottle of beer between his forefinger and thumb, eyes sweeping over the crush of bodies on the dance floor. Archie’s dancing with a girl Betty’s never seen before, his hair a bright shock of red in the half-dark. Veronica’s got her head tipped back against Reggie’s shoulder, eyes heavy-lidded as they grind. Betty ignores the dude to her left who’s been not-so-subtly staring at her boobs and heads for Jughead as alcohol settles in her stomach, warming her from the inside out.
“Hi,” she says, her voice sounding too loud even over the roaring pulse of the music.
“Hey,” he replies, turning so that his body is angled towards hers. She searches his eyes and decides that he’s not drunk.
“I’m sorry,” she tells him. She drops the volume of her voice but leans in close so he can hear her. “About earlier. About getting so… ”
He touches her arm, cupping her elbow very lightly in his palm, a touch that’s almost tender. “It’s okay.”
They’re talking into one another’s ears, their cheeks aligned, and Betty turns her face to look at him. Their noses almost bump. For reasons she can’t explain, the next thing she says is, “I don’t have a boyfriend.”
His smile is small and enigmatic. “That’s okay, too.”
She wants to ask him what comes next in this scene. She wants to ask him how he’d write it. But before she has a chance, she hears the first few notes of a song she’s heard at every single cheer practice for the past few months, and it’s only a moment later that hands are grasping hers, pulling her into the throng of bodies, hips bumping against hers, shoulders pressing close.
“It’s our song!” Veronica yells in her ear, slinging an arm around Betty’s neck, and Betty laughs and hugs her back, her body falling into the beat of the music as naturally as breathing.
She doesn’t know how long she dances with her friends, but when she finally extracts herself from the group, wisps of hair sticking to her sweaty temples, her mascara hopefully un-smeared, she finds Jughead exactly where she left him. She's buzzing with energy, fairly happy, and awfully intrigued by him, and that’s how her hands make their way to his chest, pressing lightly against the cotton of his shirt.
“You don’t dance?” she asks with a tilt of her head, a seductive flutter of her lashes.
He looks simultaneously amused and wary. “Not usually.”
“What if I asked you to?”
Jughead lifts a hand and pushes a curl of her hair out of her face. His other hand settles cautiously against the dip of her waist. Betty finds herself sighing when he touches her, like it’s something she’s been waiting for for the longest time.
“Come on,” she says softly, and takes both his hands in her own, tugging him onto the dance floor. He looks a little reluctant, but he doesn’t resist, and once they’re both just two of many twenty-somethings in a club that smells sharply of spilled beer and perfume and hair gel, she wraps his arms around her waist and feels his hands come to rest at the small of her back as she pushes her hips lightly into his.
He leans in, lips brushing her ear, and Betty shivers, surprising herself. “Are you drunk?” he half-yells.
“No,” she promises, letting her own mouth skim against his jaw, and it’s the truth. She’s had a single shot of tequila and she feels nothing but sober as his thigh slots between her legs. She makes a little sound in the back of her throat, a sound she hopes he doesn’t hear, and lets her lips fall against his neck in the lightest of kisses.
Jughead pulls her even closer, his hands now gripping her hips, his fingers long and lean and strong, and Betty doesn’t give in to the temptation to grind down against his thigh, but she does press against him, hard, attempting to relieve the ache building between her legs, and drops her forehead briefly to his shoulder. One of his hands finds its way into her hair, winding around her hair-sprayed curls, and tugs lightly.
She lifts her head and says, “Tell me about your novel.”
He stares at her, his eyes a blue so dark it’s navy, almost black, like the ocean at night. “You confuse the hell out of me,” he tells her, low and gruff and thrilling, in the tone of voice most people might use to say you’re beautiful.
His group and hers head off to another club, footsteps uneven on sidewalks, girlish laughter filling the air. Betty and Jughead walk in the opposite direction, back to their hotels. The city is still bright but Betty tilts her head back anyway, hoping to see stars. Jughead’s hand brushes against hers occasionally, but he never takes the plunge and grips her fingers with his own. They end up talking, inexplicably, about Ian McEwan. Betty says, with conviction, that Atonement is his worst novel and the look on Jughead’s face - dismay and delight mixed together - makes her laugh out loud, the sound high and breathy.
They slow down near his hotel and loiter in front of the doors that open into the lobby. They’re automatic, those doors, and every time either one of them makes a tiny movement, they slide open, an endless invitation. Betty waits for Jughead to make one of his own. He spends five minutes on a long-winded defense of the The Children Act, first.
“I don’t want to be presumptuous,” he says, looking like he’s a heartbeat away from scuffing his toe against the concrete. “But do you want to… ”
“Do I want to what?” Betty asks, intent on making him say it, but when his eyes meet hers, all her stubbornness vanishes and she answers the unfinished question: “Yes.”
He’s sharing a room with Archie. There are clothes everywhere, a half-empty bottle of whiskey on the desk, and the bathroom smells of a cologne Betty wouldn’t recommend to anyone she actually likes. They don’t turn on any of the lamps. She skims her fingertips over his jaw in the dark.
“Betty,” he says quietly, his fingers circling his wrist.
“I don’t want you to think I’m - ” she starts and then stops. “I don’t do this oft - ”
“I don’t think you’re anything.” She can hear his frown in his voice. “Do you really think I’m always judging you?”
She bites the inside of her bottom lip and wriggles her wrist out of his grasp.
“Betty?” he probes, when she stays silent.
“I want you to like me,” she finally confesses on a breath that rushes out of her.
“I do like you.”
“Not - like this,” she sighs. “Not like this, like - like wanting to sleep with me. Like - ”
Jughead puts his hands on her shoulders and runs them down her arms, a gesture that’s probably supposed to be comforting but only seems to set her skin ablaze. “You don’t want me to want to sleep with you?”
“No, I - of course I do. I just want you to understand that… ” She struggles to find the words to verbalize something she’s barely acknowledged within herself. “That I wrote a book in my head, once. When I was eleven. It was probably truly terrible. There were fairies. And I’d forgotten all the plot twists by the time I got back from cheer camp. But I wrote it. In my head, anyway.”
His breath is warm on her face. “You contain multitudes,” he says, sounding like he’s teasing.
She heaves a sigh, her stomach sinking. “Jughead - ”
“No, I’m serious.” His palms find her cheeks. “I’m serious.” The city lights, just barely spilling in through the fifteenth-floor window, glitter in his irises. “I want to see every one of them.”
She tilts her chin up like she’s granting him permission. His hands are so gentle on her face, like butterfly wings: the heel of his hand tilting her jaw up even further, the pads of his fingers against her cheekbones.
When he kisses her, finally, Betty has the fleeting thought that he tastes like a vanilla milkshake.
Ten minutes later finds her stretched out across the sheets of his hotel bed, her head not quite reaching the pillows. Jughead had smiled when Betty shoved the comforter on the floor, muttering about how it was essentially a petri dish. She bit his bottom lip when they kissed again and his smile faded away against her mouth.
He’s kissing her neck now, almost studiously, scraping his teeth against her skin, sucking gently, noting her reactions. She’s breathing shallowly in her chest, and her fingers creep up into his hair, sliding just beneath the edge of his beanie.
“Can I take this off?” she murmurs.
It seems like he takes a long time to answer, his mouth in the dip of her collarbone when he says, “Yeah.” He moves down her body, ostensibly to make the hat-removal task easier for her, and runs his tongue along the skin just above the bustline of her dress.
“You can touch me,” Betty breathes. “Touch me.”
He squeezes one of her breasts, his other hand sliding up her thigh, beneath her dress’ hemline, and Betty loses herself to his hands, which seem to be everywhere all at once, so thoroughly that he has to pluck at the string of her thong against her hip three times in order for her to get the message.
“Yes,” she says, but first she pushes herself up under him a bit and helps him out of his button-up shirt and the white, ribbed shirt beneath it. He nudges her back down and tugs her underwear down her legs.
Betty reaches her hands down, aiming hazily for his belt buckle, but then she hears his knees hit the thin hotel carpet at the foot of the bed, and she rises up on her elbows quickly as he rests her calf against his shoulder.
“You don’t have to,” she says quickly. No one has, ever, but she doens’t tell him that.
“Betty.” He pushes her dress up so that it bunches at her hips. “Every one.”
When he puts his mouth on her she gasps and squirms, her head pressing back into the mattress. He licks at her slowly, tortorously, slips one finger inside her and then two, and Betty fists the sheets in her hands and makes a series of needy, whimpering noises until he finally gives his full attention to her clit and she breathes, “Jughead, oh - oh my god.”
She comes with her hands in his unruly hair, her hips bucking shamelessly against his mouth, saying his name like she needs something only he can give her.
He leans back over her as she comes down, and when she opens her eyes she sees that his lips are gleaming, wet with her. She kisses him and tastes herself on his tongue. “Do you - do you want me to - ”
Jughead shakes his head and mumbles, right into her mouth, “I want to fuck you.”
Her hands find his belt buckle, with precision this time, shaking only a little as she works it undone, and without meaning to, she says, “Please.”
Laying naked on the bed while Jughead searches through Archie’s crap for the stash of condoms he’s certain his best friend has is faintly frustrating, moderately amusing, but above all, weirdly comforting. This is as unplanned for him as it is for her.
After he returns to the bed, she takes the foil packet from him, rips it open and rolls the condom onto him. He makes a low, gravelly sound, deep in his throat, when she touches him. She straddles his thighs and his hands find her hips; she sinks down onto him slowly, trying to watch his face even as her own lashes flutter.
“Fuck, Betty,” he groans, his grip on her so tight it hurts. “God - ”
She runs her nails lightly down his chest and gives her hips an experimental roll. “What would our good - ” She cuts herself off with a pleased gasp. “...our good friend John Milton say about you taking the lord’s name in vain?” she teases.
Abruptly, he flips them over, making her squeal, but then he’s fucking her, hard, and she can feel every one of his thrusts in her whole body in a way that makes her moan, her heels against his back, her nails digging into his shoulders.
“Of all the beaches in all the world,” he says, his breaths heavy against her cheek, “she ends up on mine, reading the same damn epic.”
They almost come together - he helps her over the edge just before him, and in the end, it’s her name he’s breathing like a prayer.
The hotel hallways get noisier as the night wears on, filling with college students arriving back after last call, still a little drunk, still high on the freedom of their vacation and the rays of the sun. Betty sighs and presses her nose into Jughead’s shoulder. His skin is so warm.
“You good?” he checks softly, his hand stroking up and down the bare skin of her back.
“Yes,” she says. “Very. Just - Archie will probably be back soon, right? I should go.”
Jughead echoes her sigh with one of his own. “Yeah. I guess he will.”
She tilts her head back to look at him, and he leans down to press a kiss against her lips, his arm curling around her, holding her close for a beat. Betty pulls away reluctantly and pushes the sheets aside, locating her underwear and then stepping back into her dress. Its zipper is on the side seam and she wishes it ran up the back instead, so she could ask for his help and hold her hair aside and feel the brush of his fingers on her spine.
“So, maybe I’ll… see you around tomorrow?” she asks, tugging self-consciously at her dress.
“Yeah.” He’s pulled his jeans back on and he’s standing, too, fidgeting as nervously as she is, his left hand combing repeatedly through his hair.
“Okay,” she says. “Um. So… bye, Jughead. It was really nice to - really nice to meet you.”
He looks at her in a way that makes her feel like she’s still naked. “You too, Betty.”
She turns around and heads for the hotel room door, her feet already complaining about being shoved back into her cheap heels.
“Wait!” Jughead says suddenly. “Wait, I’m sorry.” She turns around to see him yanking his shirt back on and hastily doing up buttons. “I’m an ass. I’ll walk you back to your hotel.”
“Oh, I can grab a cab or something.”
“No, I’ll walk you,” he insists. “And - or - I mean…” He trails off, opening the door for her. “Maybe we can go somewhere. Back to the beach. To swim. Or not. Or - ”
“Or to find a twenty-four hour dinner?” Betty suggests, soft and light.
Jughead smiles. His hair is an utter mess. He looks both adorable and appealing. “Or to find a twenty-four hour dinner,” he confirms.
She presses the button for the elevator. “I’ll still need to go back to my room. I’ll need more comfortable shoes.”
“We can get you more comfortable shoes,” he says immediately.
She studies him for a second and then her smile begins to emerge, blooming slowly at first and then breaking out over her face, a veritable grin. She’d like to ask him how things are in Riverdale. She’d like to know how he takes his coffee. She’d like to feel the sparks of electricity when their knees bump under the table. She’d like to hear the story behind his beanie. She’d like to watch the sun rise with his feet buried next to hers in the sand.
Maybe she would like to go a little bit wild, as long as it’s with him.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s.”
fin.