Betty was at the park watching Eliot climb up the slide. It was an early summer day, the sun was high in the sky. Eliot waved at her when he reached the top and she smiled, overwhelmed for a minute by how strong, how big her son had become. Last summer he was going down this same slide, wobbly and unsure, insisting that she catch him at the bottom every time. Now if she even tried to be near the slide, he would tell her "Mama, go away." She had to sit on the park bench with her latte and watch from a discrete distance.
To her left was a father placing his toddler daughter in a bucket swing, her arms flailing in the air, her legs wiggling so much it was hard for him to put her in the seat. There was a pinch in Betty's throat of longing, not for the man with dark hair, but for the idea of a father, taking his child to the park. When the toddler was in the swing he pressed a kiss to her forehead and then started to push the swing.
Betty looked away and towards the pond. That is when she saw a boy, maybe four years of age, step into the pond. Betty looked around for the boy's parent. The park was full of mothers with children, but she wasn't sure who this boy belonged to. The child took another step deeper into the pond and reached out as if he was going to catch something, and that is when Betty saw the gleam of the frog on the lilly pad. A second later the frog jumped away and the boy fell face first into the water, arms flailing behind him.
Betty was up and running, her feet in the pond before she realized she reached it, mud suctioning around her runners. She had the boy's body in her arms, his back pressed against her chest. He wasn't coughing, there wasn't much of a sound. She laid him down on the grass, aware of the growing hum of noise, of people around her. Eliot grabbed at her upper arm as he always did for comfort, and she was glad he was there, that he was safe, but she had to focus.
She started doing CPR on the small child, grateful that she had muscle memory of it from being a lifeguard all those years ago. The repetition of actions calming her. Then there was a series of coughs and the boys dark blue eyes opened to meet hers, and she pulled him up into a grateful hug. There was lots of cheering. All the parents had gathered around them with their own children in their arms. Then a man, the same man she had seen pushing the toddler girl in the swing earlier came behind Betty, his eyes full of tears, his left arm wrapped around his wriggly toddler daughter. He took the boy from her arms, repeating "I am sorry" to the boy, and "Thank you" to Betty in equal measure.
The other parents turned away, she could hear mutterings of judgement against him, words of praise for her. Maybe life was simple to them, maybe things had always been easy. Betty remembers the time she found less than one year old Eliot with her bottle of pills in her hand, open. A few pills on the floor, a few in his infant fist. She kept counting them and she couldn't be sure she was counting them right, so she took him to the hospital, had his stomach pumped while the nurse looked down at her in judgement. There were no pills in his stomach, but there could have been.
Now there was this dad with two kids at the park, overwhelmed and probably tired, and all these strangers had forgotten the mistakes they had made with their children, the almost accidents, the near misses, the brushes with evil, the ones they knew about and the ones they didn't.
Betty looked into the dad's eyes and said "I understand. I've been there. We all have." She said it quietly but she knew some of the moms' heard, she only cared that he did.
He looked up at her, his blue eyes meeting hers "Thank You." he said, and she knew she had never received more genuine words of gratitude before. She picked up Eliot who was pulling at her t-shirt and she looked at the small boy in the man's arms, and she was so grateful she had seen him enter the pond, so grateful she could breathe life back into him.
"What is your name?" she asked the boy.
He was too stunned to answer. The dad had one child in each arm now, their legs resting on his hips. Betty could tell by the way the children were positioned, they were used to this, that the dad was used to being outnumbered. The boy was dripping wet and muddy.
The dad answered for the boy "This is Max, and this is Sarah, and I am Jughead."
What an unusual name, Betty thought. "I am Betty, and this is Eliot."
"Ah. Thank you so much Betty. I can't believe it happened. I just.."
Betty cut him off "I get it." and then to change the subject she says "Max, that is a very cool bug on your shirt. What kind of bug is that?"
"A praying mantis" Max says, a look of pride covering his face. "They are my favorite."
"My favorite is the three-horned rhino beetle" Eliot said pushing his way out of Betty's arms and on to the wood chipped ground of the playground. Max scrambles out of his dad's hold.
"What is your opinion on dung beetles?" Max asks.
"Eww" says Eliot. "But I really like caterpillars" and the two walk off together towards the swings as if nothing had happened just a few minutes ago, as if Max is not still dripping with mud from the pond. Betty was struck again by the resiliency of kids.
"It seems like Max made a friend." Jughead says, a tentative smile on his face.
"It seems like Eliot made one also."
It had taken Jughead a year to find out what had happened to Eliot's dad. Right away he had told Betty that his wife Carol had left them for a child free life just three months after Sarah's birth. Betty had been sympathetic, but she didn't tell him what happened to Eliot's dad. In all the time they had spent together, she never even said his name.
Jughead would not have even known that Eliot's dad was dead if he hadn't overheard Eliot telling Max that his dad was "In the ground." Jughead has felt a tremor move through his body when he heard that phrase. By that point the boys were inseparable, the families were inseparable.
But tonight over a bottle of wine, all three children asleep in Jughead's bed, Betty had told him about what happened to Eliot's father, Matthew. Matthew had been older than Betty, had swept her off her feet in college. He was a stock broker that took her on fancy dates when all she could afford was mac and cheese. He was funny, had a quirky sense of humor, and when Betty graduated college he proposed to her with a room full of balloons.
When Eliot was three months old everything was fine. Betty and Matthew were sleep deprived but mostly happy, they were figuring things out. Then a scandal broke about Matthew's work. He was stealing money from his company and his company was stealing money from others. It was not a quiet scandal. It made the front page of the New York Times, and that very day before the police had any time to do anything, Matthew had killed himself. Betty had found his body in the bathroom.
Betty didn't meet Jughead eyes when she said this. Her face was flushed red. Jughead said the first words Betty had ever said to him "I understand." He couldn't say he had been there. He hadn't, but he wished he could have held her then. Helped her then. But he hugged her in this moment, the moment after she told him the truth, and he felt love sweep through his body, not the kind he had felt all year for her, the platonic kind that had sprung from gratitude, that had grown with each day they shared, but the kind that flushed through his whole body, made him want to join his lips to hers, till they were both full of heat.
But this was not the moment for that. He felt betrayed by his body. This was a moment of friendship, he thought, the moment for comfort. He tried to focus on that. Not the new feelings stirring in his chest, as if a bear had woken in its cave after a long slumber.
Betty was finishing up her essay on the link between childhood head injuries and violent criminals for The Atlantic when Jughead dropped Eliot off. Or rather it was just supposed to be a drop off, but then she offered Jughead coffee and somehow that led to her baking up a batch of snickerdoodles from the dough she always kept in her freezer.
Jughead lived two houses down the road now, so he could have headed home while the kids played in the backyard. The boys were now both nine, and had made the trek between their houses on their own many times, Sarah often with them, sometimes not.
But instead they lingered on the porch, even though Betty should be working, Jughead too. The first draft of his third novel due in a week. But they needed this, she thought, it had been a while since they had this kind of time together to talk without the kids constantly interrupting. When she voiced that thought out loud, he laughed.
"You mean three days?" He said. She thought about it for a second and realized he was right. It had only been three days.
"For us that is a while." He nods in agreement. Their lives were so intertwined. The kid's lives too. Half the other parents at school thought they were married to each-other, the children siblings by blood instead of choice. Betty didn't correct their assumptions anymore, and she noticed Jughead didn't either. For her it was easier than answering the sort of awkward questions people asked single mothers. She assumed Jughead had similar reasons.
Sometimes she wondered what life would be life if they were in romantic relationship. The longing for it was in her body when they hugged, or when they found themselves cuddled on the couch, caught up in the intensity of a movie. But she couldn't afford anything to go south. They were a family already, somehow, and this was enough for now, maybe forever.
Congratulations Graduates! the sign in Betty's living room reads and the boys are posed under it, both of them grinning and holding up diplomas. The house is filled with friends, with family. Jughead feels a swell of pride when he takes another photo.
"Are you done now, dad?" Max says with a groan.
"Yes." Jughead replies and both boys run off towards the cake. He can't imagine his life without both of them in it, Eliot as much his son as Max. The houses will feel so empty next year without them both, with just Sarah in his house.
He heads to the kitchen looking for Betty, but she isn't there, Alice is there though, icing even more cupcakes. Jughead nods at her and heads out onto the porch. Betty's back is to his and she is looking out at the lawn. He goes to stand beside her, and he sees her face is covered in tears.
"Oh, Betty" he says, and he takes her in his arms. In all their years of friendship, well over a decade now, he has not seen her in tears.
"They will be gone so soon. I will have an empty nest in two months." Betty says, and Jughead realizes he still has Sarah for two more years, so this is different for him. "I just don't know what I will do!"
"Spend all your time at my house." Jughead said, pressing a kiss into her hair, something he had done so many times he has lost count. Betty offers up a faint laugh.
"I don't think that will cut it." She says, and he can't help himself in this moment. The timing is probably terrible for her, her face is covered with tears but he has to try sometime so he leans down and presses his lips against hers and they feel impossibly soft, impossibly lovely.
Betty pulls her body away from Jugheads slowly, so not to wake him. He lets out a little whimper and turns over. She pulls on her shirt and her pajama bottoms.
The kids are home for Christmas, the houses both filled again with noise and laughter during the day, although now they are all asleep. Sarah is a freshman at Sarah Lawrence, and the boys are both Juniors at New College, sharing a shoe-box apartment in Brooklyn this year. They will be leaving again on New Years Day.
Betty and Jughead decided that this wasn't the time to tell the kids they were together. Why rock the boat? Jughead had moved back to his house for the week and they had tried to resist being together, but they had both struggled with sleep for a few days which had led them to their current situation, Betty sneaking in and out of his house like they are teenagers.
Betty shoves on her shoes and quietly opens the door from Jughead's room to the living room, revealing all three kids on the plaid couch staring at the door
"I told you. Pay up." Sarah shouted. Betty feels her face flush red. The kids look entirely too pleased with themselves. Betty turns back into the room.
"Juggie, get up." she says loudly and he opens his eyes, stares at her sleepily for a moment and then joins her in the doorway. It is his turn to flush red.
"Hi, guys." He mumbles. "I guess you caught us."
"So did this happen our whole childhoods?" Sarah asks excitedly.
"No" both of them exclaim loudly.
"For how long?" Eliot asks.
"A little over three years." Jughead said, rubbing his face. "It's four in the morning, can we just all go back to sleep and talk about it then." Betty notices that he has slipped his other arm around her waist at some point.
"You put this off for three years, and you expect us to wait another three hours to talk about it?" Max said, then he glances at Sarah "You were living with dad for two years while they were together and you didn't figure it out till now?"
Sarah stares at the floor
"How did you guys find it out?" Betty asked.
"You know how you guys video chatted me last week, and my roommate was in the background?"
"Yes." Betty remembers it. Sarah's roommate was a striking redhead who kept rearranging things in the kitchen behind Sarah.
"Once I got off the phone she asked me how long you two had been together, and I said that you were just friends. She laughed in my face, and said she doesn't know any friends who kiss each other on the lips every five minutes. And I realized that you did do that a lot and had for a while, and I just never thought about it. You guys were just always best friends in my mind. Anyways when she put it that way it was pretty clear that you were more than that." Sarah smiles.
"So this is an awkward question to ask ones parents but how did you start dating?" Max asks, looking more at the ground than Betty or Jughead.
"This is an awkward thing to tell ones' children, but when you and Eliot were getting ready to leave for University we just started kissing, and well, we liked it." Jughead's face is bright red when he says that and Betty has to force herself not to laugh. "It wasn't like one day we were friends and one day we were a couple, we just slowly went from being friends to being more. it felt natural. It wasn't like we sat down at the kitchen table and talked it out, or I asked Betty out on a date and we made a big deal out of it. It just happened organically."
It was true, Betty thought, there was a distinct lack of drama when they became a couple, there was a lot of heat through. It had been really hard for them to stop touching. They found out slowly that each of them had restrained themselves from romance earlier because it seemed like it was bound to be complicated, but in actuality there was nothing complicated about it.
Or rather nothing was complicated except telling the kids. At first, they didn't tell the kids because things were so new, and Sarah was still at home, and then it became complicated because they had been together so long and they hadn't told the kids. But now the kids knew, and no one seemed particularly angry.
"When were you going to tell us."
"This spring" Betty said firmly "Because your dad was going to put his house on the market." That was the deadline they had given themselves. "Are you guys ok with this?"
All of the kids looked at each other and then at Betty and Jughead with giant grins on their faces.
"We are great." Eliot says.
"The best." says Max.
"The only way I would be better is if you guys had done this say 15 years ago." Sarah says with a huge smile on her face.
Betty felt her heart glow. Jughead leaned in and kissed her on the lips. That is when the chorus of ewwws starts.
Notes: I was walking to work today, and this one shot popped into my head more or less fully formed and I could not stop writing it, I think it actually wrote itself. I apologize for the errors. Cross posted on AO3