Author's Note:

Thank you for following me into my second Sweet Pea/Betty (Sweet B? Swetty?) story! The early support has been wonderful and very appreciated. This chapter introduces the other half of our pair and I hope you enjoy it!

XO ForASecondThereWe'dWon

II

If only his friends could see him now, strolling the lawns like some kind of Gatsby interloper, drinking warm Gatorade instead of chilled champagne and propelling a rusted red wheelbarrow instead of a gorgeous daffodil-coloured Duesenberg. Sweet Pea had found it in a crummy old garden shed―the wheelbarrow, not the Gatorade―which he'd raided after his employer failed to be even the smallest fucking bit helpful in getting him set up with supplies. Northsiders were one thing, but Penelope Blossom was really out of touch with the real world. His friends would've lost their shit if they'd known he was working for her this summer, Toni's girlfriend especially. Which was exactly why Sweet Pea hadn't told them. It was easy not to, since being a chatterbox wasn't something he was known for. Switchblade, yes. Smalltalk, no.

It had been a freak, right place, right time type of thing. After Fangs had been shot, it had made the entire Serpent population feel goddamn awful to see him bumping around unevenly with his crutch. Most of them felt that way right from the start; a select few were encouraged into sympathy after Sweet Pea… convinced them. With everyone living in trailers (it was a fucking trailer park, so there was nothing to be done about that), Sweet Pea's best bud had to choose between struggling up and down rickety-ass steps or staying indoors in one place like a pathetic invalid. Fangs had talked to Sweet Pea about the hospital, giving him a crystal clear indication that he was done memorizing walls and counting the specks on ceiling tiles. Toni wanted to fix the situation, Cheryl Blossom had gotten hotheaded and demanding to back her up, and Jughead had decided, since becoming Serpent King, that this was the ideal chance to give their territory some community atmosphere or some shit like that; mostly, when Jughead's mouth opened, Sweet Pea's ears closed. The result was Sunnyside Garden, as they'd christened it over bottles of cheap, foul beer that had made his mouth taste like the inside of a sock. It wasn't a hell of a lot, but there was a scraggly row of daisies coming up and a handful of tomato plants, plus a bench (a sturdy one) for Fangs to sit on and receive the old fresh air cure. And it looked fucking nice, alright? Sort of gave the Serpents something of their own.

Rewinding from the finished project, Sweet Pea would've found himself outside a chain store garden centre in early spring, tossing bags of dirt into the back of a borrowed truck. That was when Penelope Blossom had come along and given him the kind of assessing look that, in his experience, usually merited a firm right hook. He had been considering it―not less because she was an adult woman, but more because he knew she'd given Toni a hard time―when she'd suddenly offered him a job. He'd known dick-all about 'landscaping' as she'd called it, but he knew that all she'd seen was a rough-looking Southside kid with dirty hands who wasn't wheezing, despite having heaved a dozen solid bags of soil into a truck bed. That was fine. What he'd seen in her was an ignorant snob with a garden gnome called 'prejudice' shoved up her ass. Did Sweet Pea want to take her money all summer long? Hey, he could think of worse things.

The joke was on… both of them, as it turned out, because he was learning how much he actually liked being outside―like, in nature. The grass here was Super Mario green. Penelope Blossom's property had no neighbouring houses and was as packed with trees and gardens as the basement of the Whyte Wyrm was with rats when they forgot to set traps on the regular. It wasn't like the scrub dominating the trailer park, nor the over-manicured beds of suburbia. Or, if it was supposed to turn into that last thing, Sweet Pea's employer had a nasty shock coming to her at summer's end. In the couple of weeks he'd been working for her, he'd hardly seen the woman, and he wasn't a goddamn dunce: there was no way he was going to actively seek her out begging for instructions. Besides, the one rule he knew to exist was that he not enter her house. Fucking wacko. As if he wanted to. He'd keep doing the work, making his money, and going home just as sweaty and dirty as every other Southside kid who'd accepted the inevitability of menial labour from June to August. Without a boss around to supervise him, the days felt like they belonged to Sweet Pea.

Mowing the lawns had been the first godawful chore―a pain in his ass as sizeable as the hole in the wall of the History hallway boys' bathroom at Southside High (RIP). Once every trip across the yard didn't feel like exploring the virgin jungles of Jumanji, Sweet Pea got the lay of the land and embraced his dominion. Jughead's kingdom may have had drunks and pool tables, but Sweet Pea's had roses and… roses. And more roses. It started to freak him out, every time he yanked the most monstrous weeds from a sloping bed and found more of the same flower, or kept watch over new growth he'd discovered, only to see it sprout thorns and twist tight buds into thick, saturated petals. On an afternoon he'd delayed his executively-decided-upon snack break and caught his dangling shoelace on even more of the stupid things, Sweet Pea had ripped a large vine out of the ground. Unluckily, Penelope had waltzed past later, seen the plant scrap lying on the ground, and screeched like a banshee, so he'd had to lie to her face about finding it that way, which was really no hardship. Lesson learned; after that, he always took his breaks on time to prevent the unparalleled grumpiness that was a direct result of hunger.

Since the nature of his natural work required that he keep both eyes on the ground (except when he was trying to cultivate the ability to move his eyes independently, like he'd seen one time on TV), Sweet Pea balanced it out by spending his breaks lying flat on his back. While he sweat into the mown grass, encouraging the blades to stain the back of his neck green, he'd eat something with seeds, apples mostly, then sneakily bury the core. He couldn't help himself; the temptation to utterly fuck up Rose Land with a surprise fruit tree was too great. Slim chance of rapid results, but he knew how to play the long game. Also, he always forgot where he'd buried them, so it wasn't like he could check for progress. Anyhow, the sky, his alternate workday view. It was pretty great to lie down somewhere Sweet Pea didn't need to worry about broken glass. Without his Serpents jacket to protect him, that was important. He did see snake shapes in the clouds sometimes, then they'd dissolve again and he'd be back on Blossom property with no gang and no jacket. No one but himself.

Lonely? Not exactly. The hardest thing was only being able to sketch a shitty half-picture of what his days were like when he was back in his own neighbourhood. Working out here was like working for a Disney villain on a moon colony, and he sort of figured he wasn't supposed to talk about any of it; his presence always seemed to make Penelope kind of nervous, the way a loose end or a blabbermouth makes a mob boss nervous before he sends one of his goons to blow the guy away. Well, it wasn't like that. She didn't scare him, the situation was just strange. Keeping his eyes on the ground definitely didn't hurt though. In the mobster movies, it was always the guys who didn't see nothin' who lasted the longest. Sweet Pea measured his own employee lifespan in dollars and pictured laying the bills end to end the length of the property.

It was the damn roses that made him look up.

He'd stayed away from the house for as long as he could, tidying the outer gardens with rough justice and two-handed tugs of anything that didn't belong, but eventually, he had to tackle the gardens lining the shaded walls of Thicket Hall. Here, with the old brick as a backdrop, climbing roses had flourished, winding up wooden trellises. Sweet Pea was examining these structures, one by one, eyeing them from the ground upwards for broken boards or rot, when he looked up high enough to see arms pushing a window open directly above him.

Instinctively, he hid, launching himself against the house amongst the flowers. It was stupid, and as his heavy boots dug into the dirt, he glared at the brick wall like it was a mirror and he was really glaring at himself. He worked here! He wasn't trespassing! He was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing! So, what? Was he startled? Scared? "Bullshit," Sweet Pea whispered to himself and stepped back, gaze rising like bubbles in a shaken soda.

There were the arms, still hanging out the window, leisurely draping down in perfect opposition to the way the roses had struggled their way up. Sweet Pea told himself he was just breathing hard because it was fucking hot, shade or no shade. Just a couple of standard, everyday arms. Anywhere else, they'd be normal. Here, at the dwelling of Penelope Blossom, they were odd. His employer always, always wore a glove. The owner of these arms did not.

Betty had officially been an online English tutor for three weeks. Meaning that she had unofficially been the anonymous star of the Thicket Hall peep show for three weeks, walking out to the edges of Riverdale coated in sunscreen. She was thinking of using her earnings to buy a car. It was something she considered while she was working, after her neck became too stiff to read. The worst thing was hearing them breathe―her clients. The opening of the viewing window made Betty tense up, but it was a mechanical sound, like a door lock or the press that printed copies of the Register. The breathing was very personal and, even though she couldn't see who the visitors were, they became far less anonymous to Betty than she suspected that she was to them. She didn't want to know what had some of these young men breathing so hard, concentrating instead on the mild annoyance resulting from the way their noisy exhalations threw off the pace of her reading. Betty was exploring classical literature and, honestly, not all of it was compelling; it was such a drag to have to reread passages, paragraphs, or whole pages of Middlemarch because some perv was getting himself too worked up on the other side of the door.

Between clients was Betty's favourite time of day and she shifted and stretched like a figure drawing model between poses. She was art, after all. That was how Penelope Blossom had told her to see herself when she'd been hired. It was impossible for Betty, naturally curious, not to wonder what the paying peepers saw. What did they comprehend from her? What would they learn or make from it? She wasn't exactly a museum exhibit, but she still sort of wanted to know what her purpose was, not that she would be changing anything to strive towards that purpose. Since she'd started coming in to work, Betty had had a few awkward conversations with Penelope, wherein her employer hinted at her own clients' tastes and Betty sat stiffly, either not drinking her tea or gulping it in her nervousness, feeling both jarred and thankful that her entire job was to sit still. Nudity was simple in a way it had never seemed to her before. Penelope could keep her costumes and props and, hopefully, not tell Betty anything about them in future.

The strangest thing to happen so far, including the breathing and the uncomfortable chats, was that Betty was adjusting. The appointments still made her nervous―less nervous than webcamming had, because even though she had to show her bared body from the back, she didn't have to show her face―but she discovered she could mitigate that anxiety by staying at the house for hours each shift. Coming early gave her time to relax and get into whichever book she was reading. Penelope had warned her that she would only be paid for the appointment itself, yet Betty made enough from those that it was no trial to stretch out her time at 'work.' Her actually being at the house didn't seem to bother its owner who, Betty suspected, missed having her daughter around. Aside from the reminder about her pay, Betty had never been discouraged from hanging out in the room she'd been assigned.

When to come early or stay late was solved in a short phone call with Penelope, who meticulously scheduled Betty's entrances and exits around her own agenda so that no one ever saw her. Betty was deliberating about asking Thicket Hall's mistress for a key. Right now, the door was left open for her, which she was sure wasn't ideal. However, it wasn't as though Penelope would have halted her sessions to come down and unlock the door for Betty if she'd been forced to knock. That would defeat the whole point of her quiet coming and going. A key was serious though. It meant ownership, trust, and some stretch of permanence. Not exactly compatible with Betty's idea of her job as empowering, risky, and transitory. Yes, she had her own room, but she wasn't living in it. In fact, she and the room were still working on their relationship―the closet relationship she'd had or ever planned on having in that house.

Ignoring the room's obvious flaw of having a hole through which teenage boys paid to see her naked, its only additional defect was that it heated up like an oven. Thicket Hall was an old house, which meant no air conditioning. Even nude, Betty was perpetually warmer than she would've liked to have been and started drinking enough water that she looked forward to sprinting down the hall on pee breaks. Still, she tolerated the heat for as long as she could until, one stifling day in June, she decided to wage war on the previously unbudgeable singular window her room possessed. The thing was swollen in its frame and painted over in places from past Band-Aid-style restorations designed to make things look better on the surface without fixing any of the problems underneath. Betty sweat more than ever shoving the thing open, but continuously panted to herself under her breath that it would be worth it for the fresh air. She'd waited until that side of the house was in shade and, when the window popped open, couldn't resist hanging her arms out. Closing her eyes, Betty laid her forehead on the sill, breathing.

To be continued...