Amy's been back at school barely two minutes and is still rearranging her locker when Jake comes sliding up to her, clearly just having rushed in from outside, the snow still melting off his brown curls.

"You're early," she says, surprised, and then realizes that's not a very friendly greeting.

Jake doesn't seem to care. Instead, he nods enthusiastically and leans up against the locker next to hers. "Yeah. New semester, you know? Getting off on the right foot."

She laughs, and he looks confused.

"What's so funny?"

"I assumed you were joking. You know it's not a new semester, right?"

"But we just got back from winter break! I thought the new semester started along with, you know, the new year!"

"We haven't even had exams yet," she points out. "Second semester starts after midyear exams and Project Week."

"Whatever," says Jake, grinning at her. "New year, new me, then. Resolution: Peralta gets places on time!"

"How's that going for you?"

"As you can see, astonishingly well! For I am here, am I not? Here and crystal-clear."

"Not a saying."

"It is now!"

"Anyway," says Amy, rolling her eyes and carefully closing her locker, "we have-" she glances at her watch-"forty minutes before first period. What do you propose to do with yourself until then, O Punctual One?"

"Well, see, O Even Punctualler One, you're always here insanely early, so I figured you were the perfect person to help me figure out how to while away the weary hours."

"Okay, you know as well as I do it's O More Punctual One, not Punctualler."

"I do know that, and I did intend to make you correct me, cause your face gets all scrunchy when I screw up grammar and it's kinda adorable."

"What?" she screeches. Adorable? What does he think he's doing?

"What?" he parries back, eyes wide and worried.
"Did you just-"

"Nope!"

"Okay, then," says Amy, moving on, but filing away the "adorable" comment in the back of her mind for later consideration. "Ordinarily, I do homework. But, as it happens, I did enough work over break that I don't have any left for now. I can only assume you are not in the same predicament."

Jake rolls his eyes. "You're not wrong. "

"What do you have to do?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"On what our homework was."

"You didn't do any work over break?"

"It's called break for a reason," Jake explains. "Cause you're supposed to take a break from work."

"So you don't have anything done?"

"I do not."

"What am I gonna do with you?" she sighs, and it's a rhetorical question but he answers anyway.

"Teach me your ways, sensei. The ways of the anal-retentive and un-fun."

"If you're going to insult me, I'm certainly not going to help you."

"Fine. The ways of the appropriately organized and moderately pleasant."

"Not exactly sweet talk, but I'll take it. Now. Come with me. We can't rearrange your life in the hallway."

She heads for the library, which she knows from experience is empty this early in the morning, and Jake trots after her. She can hear his footsteps, but she doesn't look back-she can feel his eyes on her, and she's frightened to meet them.

Why does he do things like this? Call her "adorable" in a matter-of-fact tone and pretend like he hasn't said anything out of the ordinary, show up ridiculously early to hang out with her, give her that charming grin even while he's insulting her? Ask her to winter formal and then utterly neglect to show up...and then make it up to her with the most embarrassingly goofy thing she could possibly have imagined?

Why does she kinda like it?

They reach the library before her thoughts have calmed, so she plops down at one of the work tables and opens her planner ferociously, hearing Jake sit down next to her but not looking up at him.

"Okay," she says, turning to the page for this week, "get out a piece of paper. We're gonna plan your schedule."

"Paper?"

She turns to meet his eyes, hoping he's joking, but they're arrestingly sincere, and she realizes that Jake Peralta probably hasn't bought school supplies since September.

He confirms this belief by shrugging, and she sighs, ripping out a sheet from one of her notebooks and placing it in front of him.

"Please tell me you at least have a pen."

"Pencil okay?"

"It'll do."

He pulls off his backpack and places it on the table in front of them, unzipping it to reveal possibly the most trash Amy's ever seen smushed into that little of a space.

"I know I got one in here somewhere," he explains, fishing through candy wrappers and at least one old sock in search of something to write with.

"Stop, stop, stop," Amy orders. "I can't stand looking at this garbage. Just borrow my pen. We'll work on personal cleanliness later."

He looks affronted. "I am an extremely clean individual. Smell me."

Without thinking about it, she leans over and sniffs his neck. And yeah, okay, he does smell pretty good.

"I didn't mean hygiene," she clarifies, lifting her eyes to his, their faces still unusually close. "Just neatness."

He gives a crow of laughter, and she jerks backward at the sound. "You think I smell good!"

"I did not say that!"

"You implied it!" He stands up from his chair and addresses the rest of the (mercifully empty) library. "World at large: let it be known that Amy Santiago thinks I smell good!"

"Will you sit down?" she snaps, and grabs his arm, shoving him back into his seat.

"All right, I'm only teasing," he says, looking hurt, and she regrets her short temper.

"Don't worry about it." She cocks her head, looking at him, and on an impulse entirely spurred by the puppy-dog look in his eyes, adds, "And, don't you dare quote me on this, but you do smell good."

"Really?" Now he looks like a mischievous puppy, not a beseeching one.

"Yeah, really, don't make me say it again."

"Thank you, Old Spice," says Jake reverently, and before she can direct this conversation away from the alarming turn it's taken, he sniffs her in return.

"What are you doing?"

"Returning the compliment. You don't smell so bad yourself."

"All right," she says, smiling despite herself. "Enough of this. What classes do you have today?"

They plan out Jake's entire week over the next hour, but when Amy goes to bed that night, the only thing she remembers from that morning is the proximity of Jake's body to hers, and the feel of his breath on her neck, and the strange sensations it produced in parts of her body she definitely doesn't want to think about in connection with Jake Peralta.

Midyears at Schur High are three hours long, which always sinks in about a week before they're scheduled to begin. And this particular day, before Holt shows up to first-period English, is no exception.

"Literally everyone else's exams are an hour long," Jake grouses. "Okay, maybe an hour and a half. Still."

"I like it," says Amy, shrugging. "It's good preparation for college."

"Is everything you do in life in preparation for college?" Jake snaps back.
"No," replies Amy, offended, and sticks her nose in the air and looks away.

"Aw, hey, I'm sorry," says Jake, and pokes her with his pencil. "I know some of the stuff you do is in preparation for grad school."

"I'm not mad," says Amy haughtily, but she's glad when Holt walks in and she has an excuse not to talk to Jake anymore.

He keeps poking her with his pencil, though, and when she looks over at him he's making an exaggeratedly mournful face, and so she pokes him right back with her own pencil.

Having duly revenged herself, Amy fully intends to begin paying attention to Holt, since he's starting to talk about their upcoming midyear, and she opens up her notebook to begin taking notes...but just as she starts to write "Class Notes" at the top of the page, Jake steals her pencil.

"Give that back!" she hisses under her breath.

He shakes his head and grins.

So she reaches over towards him, but he snatches his hand away off his desk and down into his lap.

For a moment, Amy's stymied. She wants that pencil back, all right (and she wants to get it back from Jake, specifically, because letting him have it would be letting him win, and letting him win is an intolerable concept for her), but she doesn't want to put her hand in Jake's lap.

Or, rather, she kinda does want to put her hand in Jake's lap, and that scares her enough to shy away from it.

She's on the verge of biting the bullet and going for it-and hoping that the only thing she gets hold of is her pencil-when Jake abruptly pulls his hand out from his lap, still holding the pencil, and in one fluid motion reaches back and tucks it behind his ear.

Well, that's easier to deal with, certainly.

Amy carefully-because she definitely, definitely does not want Holt seeing this-reaches her hand around the back of Jake's chair, like she's yawning and just needs to stretch out, and rests her hand lightly near his head. He turns away from her and towards her hand and puckers his lips, lightly blowing on her fingers to let her know he's sensed she's there.

She lets her hand rest in place for a few more moments, until Holt looks away, then seizes the opportunity to make a grab for the pencil.

Success! Her hand grazes the back of his ear, but she has her pencil in hand.

Unfortunately, as she's moving her hand back over to her desk to, at last, begin taking notes, Jake reaches over and grabs her hand in his, claiming both it and the pencil for his own.

"Your move, Amy," he mouths, and she scowls.

She pauses a moment to think, but is inconveniently distracted by the feel of Jake's hand on hers, and her thoughts wander to that instead of to a game plan for Operation Pencil Recovery.

Why is this affecting her so much? She's held hands with boys before-hell, she's held hands with Jake himself before, less than a month ago, during Skate into Vacation. Maybe it was the fact that they were wearing gloves then, and they're not now, or maybe it's just that touching someone else during class feels pleasantly and thrillingly illicit, but she's way, way more aware of all the places their hands are touching than she'd like.

Though, she has to admit, it's not unpleasant. Jake's hand is warm, but not sticky-though she reflects, worriedly, that the warmth of his hand must mean that her hands feel cold to him. And then she realizes how ridiculous it is that she's worrying about whether or not Jake Peralta thinks her hands are clammy, and goes back to enjoying the sensation of her hand curled up inside of his.

She struggles a bit, tries to free herself from his grasp-and bring her pencil back once and for all-but he just closes his grip tighter, and she can't force his fingers apart.

She tries relenting, letting her hand go limp, in an attempt to fake him out, but he doesn't relax his hold on her, and she acknowledges with dismay that she's predictable.

So she gives up, and listens to Holt, and doesn't take a single note the entire class, because she's too busy holding hands with Jake Peralta. And it feels nice-both the struggle and the surrender, she notes, have roused something in her, a tiger she didn't know was sleeping.

At the end of class, he lets go of her hand, and she's surprised at how disappointed she is.

So all right, she says to herself, Jake can affect her body. But she's adamant that he has not made inroads-yet-upon the far more important territory of her heart.