Chapter 3

The familiar tinkling of the bell above the door told Betty that, against all logic or reason, some other fool had braved tonight's storm and was now seeking the comfort and warmth of Pop's. Praying that the newcomer wasn't of the festive-friendship-minded variety – she'd have precious little solitude in the next week or so, and had exactly zero interest in spending these last, blessed minutes alone making inane small talk with some other, lonely traveler – Betty slid a little lower in her booth, hoping to escape notice, and hid her face behind the large, leather-bound menu that she'd memorized back in grade school. She wouldn't look up, wouldn't risk any chance of making eye contact, would make herself invisible to the very best of her ability…

"Well, Jughead Jones, as I live and breathe!" Pop Tate's musical, baritone voice rang out. Betty's menu dropped from her suddenly lifeless fingers as she sat bolt upright in shock and stared towards the front door where, sure enough, Jughead Jones was brushing snowflakes from his inky-black curls and beaming at Pop with a warmth she could feel from here.

"How are you, Pop?" he was asking, his voice a deeper rumble than she remembered, and yet inexplicably familiar. "Think you can squeeze me in somewhere?"

"Well, it'll be a struggle," Pop chuckled indulgently. "We've been booked up for weeks, and the weather's just fine, but I'm sure for my best customer, I can figure something out.

"Of course," he added, turning towards Betty with a gleam in his eye that she could see even from here, "it might be easier if you were willing to squeeze in at a table with another patron." Before Betty could even attempt to school her features into an appropriate expression – what would an appropriate expression even be in this situation? – Jughead was following the older man's gaze… directly to her. His eyes widened briefly, and he made a swift, small movement of his shoulders, as if he'd just caught his breath.

And then he smiled at her, that slow, lazy grin with a hint of deviltry behind it that she remembered from a million childhood capers and teenaged shenanigans, and time collapsed in on itself in the most wonderful way imaginable. "Betty," he said simply, for all the world as if he'd expected to run into her here… as if they'd planned it.

"Hey, Jug," she answered, astonished to hear her own voice, just as casual as his. "Care to join me?"

Betty Cooper.

Jughead's weathered boots were carrying him towards her, even as his brain struggled to grasp that this was happening… that she was really sitting in the same, old booth at Pop's, looking entirely familiar and yet entirely different at the same time. Her hair was the same, rich gold it had always been, but it hung loose in heavy waves that fell past her shoulders now, rather than being tightly scraped into the high ponytail he remembered from their shared youth. Her eyes were the same, fathomless green that continued to haunt his dreams, but they crinkled more at the corners as she smiled at him, and he thought she might be wearing a soft smudge of shadow around them, whereas teenaged Betty had eschewed eye makeup – it just makes me look like a raccoon, Juggie! – except on rare occasions when she'd let Veronica do her makeup (and had privately confided to him that she felt like a clown, but didn't want to hurt Ronnie's feelings by saying so. He'd always thought she looked equally beautiful, with or without the makeup, but had never said so either). Her cheeks were still a soft, pink hue, but they had lost their childish roundness, leaving high, broad cheekbones, and a slightly squared jaw that contrasted with lips that were as full as he remembered.

Since kindergarten, Betty Cooper had always represented the pinnacle of feminine beauty for him. There'd been no question, no competition. "Beauty" and "Betty" were synonymous in his mind, even when he hadn't seen her for years.

But Betty, ripened to maturity, eclipsed the teenaged Betty just as fully as teenaged Betty had eclipsed every other woman in the world.

Even an hour ago, he might have felt trepidation at seeing her again… fear that she'd be horrified to see him again after the pains she'd taken to drop his acquaintance, years ago.

But he'd finally gotten honest with himself over those past few hours in the truck. It was possible that she wouldn't be glad to see him. But if that were the case, it was more likely to be a consequence of the distance he'd put between them (and her own possible, and fully justifiable, resentment for it) than an actual disdain for his company. Because she'd been his best friend his entire life… until he decided their friendship (and his crush) were standing between her and her best life, and so had walked away without even an attempt at an explanation.

And right now? The best friend he'd spent a lifetime loving, and almost a decade missing, was smiling at him… smiling as though not a moment had passed since their last conversation… smiling as though she were about to pull out a box of unexpected trash and turn it into Christmas magic once again.

And so, he dropped into their old booth, directly across from her. He could feel his own smile, threatening to split his face, as he greeted her with a casualness that in no way matched the tumult of his feelings.

"Hey, Betts," he said easily. "How've you been?"

"Hey, Betts," Jughead said to her as if nothing had changed… as if they'd just spoken hours ago, rather than years ago… as if running into each other were the merest commonplace. "How've you been?"

For a moment, Betty didn't have the faintest idea how to respond… whether to cry or scream or laugh… whether to give him a rapid-fire update on every event or thought of the past decade, or a simple "not bad," or whether to tear him a new one for disappearing for years – years – and then cropping up without warning.

But she'd worked hard, over the years, to resist her mother's conditioning and the resulting tendency to treat every situation as an occasion for high-stakes drama. She'd worked hard to take life as she found it, without worrying too much about what it should be… to be happy in the moment as it was. She'd consciously chosen acceptance and peace and joy in her life, every time the choice had presented itself, and she'd just as constantly turned away from the constant, harping dissatisfaction that was her mother's stock in trade.

And so, as she had so often in the past few years, Betty let the laughter bubble up within her, and pour out in rich overflow, allowing herself simply to be happy that she was here with Jughead. She laughed heartily and whole-heartedly, shaking her head at him fondly as she did, laughing even harder when he joined her. It really was so… wonderful? absurd? absurdly wonderful?

Whatever it was, it was hers, and she'd take it.

"Can't complain," she shrugged casually when their shared laughter finally subsided, answering his question at last, as simply as possible. "Life's good… or it was until I got on the road about ten hours ago. Everything kinda went to shit at that point."

Jughead gasped dramatically, clutching at his heart. "Betty," he stage-whispered. "You just said shit."

"Shut up," she told him, leaning across the table to shove him playfully in the shoulder, and he gasped again.

"You said shit and shut up, and you inflicted violence on my poor, defenceless person," he said in a tone of deep mourning that was countered by the mischief dancing in his deep blue eyes. "What happened to you, Betty Cooper?"

"You should worry more about what might happen to you if you don't back off," she teased back, mock menacingly. "I'm a tough-as-nails city girl now, and my repertoire of both violence and coarse language goes well beyond what you've seen so far."

"Violence and coarse language," he countered, grinning. "Sounds like someone's bucking for a PG-13 rating over here."

"Damn straight," she answered, and they both laughed again. Before either of them could say anything more, though, Pop was back, sliding heaping plates of food in front of them, along with creamy milkshakes in frosted glasses.

"We haven't even ordered yet, Pop," Betty protested, laughing.

"And I haven't gone senile yet, Betty," he replied with a warm smile. "You two haven't changed your orders since you were about 10 years old and graduated from the kids' menu."

"He's not wrong… on my side, at least," Jughead confirmed. "And…" he lifted the top bun of his bacon cheeseburger and used his fork to lift the lettuce, tomato and onion off the top. Betty smiled happily, lifting her own bun so he could slide the extra vegetables onto her burger, while with her other hand, she speared her pickle on her own fork and slid it onto his plate. "… he remembers exactly how we like it," Jughead concluded.

"I couldn't forget a thing like that," Pop confirmed, smiling again before he disappeared back in the direction of the kitchen. Betty couldn't help but wonder, though, what else he remembered, and what else he'd observed over the years. Because when she came in here alone, Pop always gave her double vegetables on her burger. It was only tonight, with Jughead, that he'd made a standard portion for her to steal the extra from her friend's plate as she always had in years gone by.

"He hasn't forgotten how to make a burger either," Jughead observed after silently and efficiently demolishing about half of his.

Betty, who was still carefully chewing her third bite, nodded in emphatic agreement and, without thinking, slid a portion of her fries onto Jughead's plate, grabbing one of his onion rings in exchange. She didn't even realize what she'd done, the muscle memory operating without conscious thought, until Jughead nodded in acknowledgement and said a quick 'thanks.'

This was bizarre… or, to be more accurate, it seemed like this should be bizarre. To be back in Pop's, with Jughead, who she hadn't spoken to in years, having a late dinner in the teeth of a snowstorm, should feel bizarre and surreal and awkward. It should be hard.

And instead, it was simply reinforcing the feeling of home she'd had the moment she stepped across the threshold and breathed in the familiar scents and sounds of Pop's. What was bizarre was how utterly comfortable and peaceful she felt, how easily she was falling back into the rhythms of the hundreds of times they'd sat here together before, how natural it felt to banter with Jughead and share food with him and pick up the threads of their lifelong friendship as if they'd never let them fall.

But they had… or rather she had. And she'd done it on purpose, which felt like a terrible thing to acknowledge, even to herself. Jughead was the best friend she'd ever had… better than Archie, the literal boy-next-door she'd known since birth… better than Veronica, the "new girl" who'd taken Riverdale by storm halfway through their sophomore year in high school and become Betty's first female friend, who'd roomed with her in university, and flown her to Paris for Christmases, and tried too many times to count to give Betty's "look" a boost of glamour. Much as she loved both Archie and Veronica, to this day, Betty knew they'd never been able to compare with Jughead. He was her other half, the person who knew what she was thinking from a simple lift of her brow, the one whose curiosity and quest for the truth matched her own (and led them both into countless scrapes in their childhood). He was the one she still missed daily, all these years later.

And he was the one she'd dropped intentionally, all those years ago. Because, as wonderful as his friendship was… it hadn't been enough for her. She wasn't sure she'd ever really known when it started, but somewhere in those last years in Riverdale, she'd fallen fathoms deep in unrequited love with him. She'd wanted, dozens of times, to tell him how she felt… or just kiss him – BAM! – and show him the tumult of her feelings.

But she'd been too much under her mother's thumb to even contemplate the idea of making the first move like that. Nice girls didn't do that. And nice girls didn't date "hoodlums from the South Side," as her mother phrased it, conveniently glossing over her own, South Side roots. And the other kind of girls... the ones who weren't 'nice'… well, things never ended well for them, did they?

So she'd waited… and waited… for years, only to realize that Jughead was never going to make a move because, from his perspective, there was no move to make.

She was his best friend, his buddy, his partner in crime. She'd sometimes wondered, with an exasperation that fell roughly halfway between bitterness and amusement, whether he'd ever even noticed that she was a girl.

If he had, he'd kept the observation to himself.

And when they both left for university, she'd hit a breaking point. She could tell from his first few messages that her importance in his life was dwindling… that he was meeting new and smarter and more interesting and better people now that he'd left Riverdale, while she continued to measure everyone she met against Jughead, and find them wanting.

It was just a matter of time, she'd realized, until Jughead met someone as wonderful as he was… until he fell in love and began building a life in which she'd be lucky to qualify for a mention in the credits as "second blonde woman" or something equally generic. And as earnestly as she wanted that for him, as desperately as she wanted him to find love and happiness and recognition and peace… she couldn't bear to stand by and watch it happen.

And so she'd backed away from him, had stopped emailing or texting or calling… had limited herself to postcards at Christmas and, when those went unanswered, she'd filed his friendship away in her memory banks as one of the precious things she'd been privileged to hold for a while, but that weren't hers to keep.

She'd hated herself for it, of course. She knew she was lucky to count herself a friend to Jughead… knew that it was petty and petulant of her to end that friendship simply because he'd never reciprocate her feelings and see her as more than a friend.

But she'd done it anyway.

And now, here he was, forgiving her as if she'd never betrayed their years of friendship… picking up the threads as if they'd never been dropped.

Betty silenced her mother's voice in her head, telling her what a disappointment she was to everyone, and decided to simply enjoy it.