Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She takes the class on a whim.

They look at her like she should know she does not belong, but she has reached a place within herself that knows she will be wherever she likes. There is no place Betty Cooper should not be as long as her whim and her will have their way. They always do. Eventually. Therefore, she takes the class on a whim because her whim is law.

She doesn’t hold it against them. It is a freshmen level course, and she is on her way out, but she takes it anyway. Something to color her dull resume, she excuses, a bright blip squeezed within the customary ballot of anatomies and chemistries, but creative writing, as basic as it comes, is a shock after taking classes like sensory physiology and advanced biostatistics.

There are no grades, none formal anyway, and this is difficult for her. She calibrates herself better with firm expectations. Then, the graduate student at the front tells them to express, go by feel, release, and she starts to think she made a mistake.

Until she sees him, the unadmitted reason she enrolled, based on her whim and unfavorable probabilities, based on nothing, unusual for her. There he is, though, three seats ahead and two rows to the left near the windows, the front corner, the farthest from the exit where Betty prefers to sit. The twenty percent chance swung her way. 

She’s only taking two graded courses this semester, filling up the rest of her schedule with lab time and her senior thesis, which is more than three-quarters done. This detour won’t cost her anything. Glancing at him again, she thinks even if it had disadvantaged her, she would’ve been here regardless.

He nibbles on the end of his pencil, molars crunching into the cheap metal, barely listening to the graduate. Hunched over his composition notebook, which he struggles to keep laid flat, he scribbles and chews at varying intervals. She looks at the Pentel that her father gave her, the sleek body, fine tip, protected eraser, worth more than ten of his teethed number twos and resting atop her prim and brand-new baby blue Moleskine. Everything unscathed. Untouched.

His grey Jansport looks like those inflatable Christmas decorations that litter the lawns in her neighborhood two weeks after New Year’s, like the dead and soggy ones she saw buried in the slush on her way to school this morning. He accidentally kicks it with his nervous leg, the one with the knee that never stops jittering, and his backpack moves like it’s just a shell, like he carries nothing but that notebook, that chewed-up pencil, and needs nothing else.

You’re here, she thinks, listening to the graduate outline rough plans for the semester, alternating partnered peer reviews and group critiques, personal essays, short stories, potential novel outlines. Everything is up in the air, to be determined, but when she hears partnered, her gaze slides to the back of his head, greedy hope slicking through her gut, but she notices he doesn’t pause, his manic chewing uninterrupted by the mention of anything, his eyes glued to the notebook as if any of the graduate’s hackneyed expectations are just window dressing, necessary means to his own selfish ends, the ends that must exist within that notebook. He isn’t here to participate, not fully anyway. He just wants the time.

The graduate shakes a monstrous, lopsided Mad-Hatter-looking top hat at them, and she hears the delicate papery shift within it like insect molts – prompts. He continues explaining their first assignment, but Betty cannot stop staring at the back of the boy’s head, the place where his beanie ends, the careless black curls peeking up from beneath it.

Then, her vision fills with deranged pink and purple, the sound of a million castoffs like a plague of locusts rising from razed wheat roaring in her ears. The graduate gestures the hat at her like he expects her to conjure the rabbit from the abyss within, but all she pulls from its depths is a small fortune-cookie slip of soft, glossy paper. Wolf.

Someone a few seats ahead asks about length, and the graduate gives Betty a disappointed look.

“I don’t deal in word limits,” he announces to the class, but he looks directly at her, perhaps knowing like the others that she is out of place. Betty stares back, waiting for him to look away first, unwilling to play these games anymore. “You know your limits.”

Betty studies the unblemished end of her Pentel while her computer runs through lines and lines of code, functions separating and cataloguing and looping through thousands of sequences, filtering out the duds, and funneling the neat ones into a tidy table for final processing.

Her eyes shift to the fortune cookie slip resting on the blank first page of her Moleskine. A heavy crease runs through the middle of the wolf. Like an inside joke, she considers, pressing the point of her pencil into the word, pinning it to the empty page. The fine tip pierces the word, punctuating its middle with a single hostile period. Wolf.

Warmer but still not quite right. At least, she wouldn’t have said so before, would have thought of something colder, with quieter severity, pretty but ill-meaning. Then, she saw him, and it was instant heat. Not her own, though. It didn’t come from inside her. There is very little warmth found there.

At first, it is only a sense and not a thought, an awareness of heat. It is conscious only of the difference between them and interprets none of the implications. She is cold. He is heat. She could be warm, too. But the only way she can become warm is to eat the heat. And that cold, cruel slithering thing wants to be warm, needed to be warm as soon as it saw him, perhaps knowing he would keep her warm far longer than the others. She could subsist on him for a while. Predators understand the differential values of prey. He would last.

She writes wolf on the first line in her precise, calculating script, slicing letters within the lines, and it conjures images of starving, prowling packs in late winter, gaunter faces and skinnier bodies closer to coyotes than full-fleshed wolves. The image feels wrong. She isn’t a pack animal.

Heat. A wolf plodding through the deep snow alone, ice-bitten paws and frosted nose, snow-blind and listening for any crinkle or rustle beneath its feet, any sense of warmth. Then, a note of friction, a faint emanation of heat, the smell of it, and her jaws sink into the snow. Her frosted nose roots out the small stupid bundle of warmth just emerged from the safety of its hole, teeth latching onto the supple scruff, wrenching all that precious, delectable heat out into her frozen wasteland. She tears open the soft giving stomach, burying into the warm meat, the hot guts steaming, gorging herself on it, one paw pinning a twitching leg to the snow, sated by the shivering stare of black glass. She loses herself in the heat, the softness of inky fur, the adorable whorls of it.

On the page, there are few legible phrases, nothing but made-up letters and the unhinged suggestions of words. There are loose human and wolf teeth, an anatomical heart with the left ventricle torn open, and a demented snowflake with the visage of a skull in its center. At the end, her pencil circled for so long there is nothing but a deep dark hole yawning across the bottom third of the page.

She writes real words next. Full sentences. It doesn’t translate as well from the images in her head to the page, but then she figures that’s what the class is for, to bring what’s inside of her head out into the real, interpretable world, to give her thoughts form, expression.

He sits in the same spot, which she appreciates, predictable prey. She likes it when her predictions come true. Seated a safe three desks behind him, it is enough space to disguise her interest but near enough for closer observation.

He doesn’t have his grey Jansport this time, but he pulls the same curved composition from his back pocket before he sits down. During the graduate’s open, he keeps it pinioned beneath his forearm, scribbling away with the same partially digested pencil. It’s like he always expects the stories to fly away if he doesn’t hold them down.

She starts at the top, the homespun knit of his cap, patches where it needed mending. Upon closer inspection, there is the suggestion of points around the hem, a crown, cute, prince of bunnies.

His ears are tucked beneath, but she sees his earlobes are attached, and then traces the slope of his traps on either side, his hunched shoulders. She wonders what he looks like beneath that denim sherpa, the one he is never seen without, never seems to take off. Wiry, she guesses, based on proportions, not rabbity or fluffy, but those curls peeking out from beneath his beanie, she knows they are as soft as rabbit fur.

Before she can pick apart any more choice details, the graduate interrupts her dissection, placing the Mad Hat on the podium. “Find the student with the same prompt,” he directs. “And critique each other.”

Betty immediately hones in on the boy, opens her mouth to say – nothing. She hasn’t named her prey yet, and she doesn’t get the chance when he pairs with a mousy brunette. Usurped by a mouse, Betty gripes, pressing her tongue hard behind her teeth watching her shyly trade stories with him instead.

“Hey.”

Her gaze cuts left, frustration on the surface, but the pixie with bush baby eyes brandishes her fortune-cookie slip to Betty with little enthusiasm. Wolf.

Betty deflates like the post-holiday Christmas decorations, left to rot on the dead lawn. She ignores the pixie’s skeptical look when Betty unhappily hands over her composition.

One paragraph in, she hates the story. It tries to be the wolf, but it’s limp and meatless, rabbit food, not rabbit.

She loses interest halfway down the page, keeping half her focus on the interaction three seats ahead, the demure mouse and the fidgety rabbit. More a hare, she decides.

His upper body hunches over the mouse’s story, mindfully chewing between decisive edits and comments delivered directly to the draft, adverse to face-to-face interaction. He looks like he is racing to the end. The mouse looks like she is drowning, but Betty would tear through flesh and bone to read the curled pages shivering in her insecure, little paws.

After she finishes Betty’s vignette, the pixie looks drunk and sedate, admitting with unsettled wonder, “I feel torn apart.” Betty feels gnawing hunger, but not from the girl’s story, rabbit foot. “It’s got this sinking teeth feeling.” She gives the story back to Betty. “I didn’t expect it,” she says, looking at Betty beneath her pink bangs with newfound respect.

Betty hands her the bloodless pages. “I feel nothing.”

The pixie recoils like Betty actually reached for her with teeth. Not what she expected at all.

“We try to be as constructive as possible here,” the graduate scolds in passing, giving Betty that look again, like she knows she shouldn’t be here.  

Betty melts like sugar cubes in boiling water, plastic smile surfacing on command. “It’s very colorful,” she supplies, her eyes softening, anemic blue giving way to beatific green. “I just couldn’t connect to it very well.” I won’t eat you.

The pixie’s disappeared back behind her fairy door, though, snubbing Betty’s toothless bromides. Ungrateful bitch. She should be thankful she didn’t feel the full weight of the bite, left to let the venom wear off. Betty shouldn’t fill up on bread anyway.

Betty sinks back in her seat, posture failing, perfect veneer peeling back, but no one is paying attention anyway. Hungrier than ever, Betty catches snippets of the conversations around her, and then feels sick with anger. Wolves jump out at her, leaping from behind pairs of heads bent together in close discussion, up from beneath desks and hopping from backpacks. They snap from every page. The graduate gave the same prompt to everyone.

She feels tricked, her eyes returning to the black jackrabbit, staring at the story pinned beneath the blade of his forearm, the other wolves he reads about but not her own, the selfishness he gives the mouse but not her.

It takes a while for the rest to realize, and then someone finally calls it out, prompting a group discussion that feels more like a lecture. Betty wishes she could control time. Or slit the graduate’s throat.  

Some students complain. Others find it funny. The graduate also points out that no one thought to compare notes with each other, peer critique before the due date. No one should write inside a vacuum. Another trick. More underhandedness. Sneaky, Betty thinks, her eyes tracking the graduate across the front of the classroom, something to watch out for.

“What was the point of the exercise?” he asks, flipping the Mad Hat onto his head, the wolf prompts tumbling out around his ears.

The boy doesn’t raise his hand, interrupting the student next to him. “No one prompt produces the same story,” he answers, and Betty wonders if he figured it out a long time ago, before the graduate ever produced the hat, before he even dreamed up the assignment. “Even the same story can be told a million different ways and be original. There’s never one side.”

At the end of class, he slides out of his seat with all the grace of a hare dodging brush and trees to escape the predator, messily stuffing his notebook into his back pocket, but she sees something flutter to the ground. It whisks beneath his chair, so he misses it. He doesn’t look behind him, also unlike her, always concerned with losing sight of things, being caught unawares.

Betty meanders to the front, glancing at the graduate scooping the wolf prompts into the trash bin, the rest of the students filing out. Subtly, she kneels, pretending to tie her shoe, and covertly slips the paper into her notebook.

Outside the classroom, she cracks open the cover, and sure enough, it’s the wolf composition, one page, front and back in erratic scribble, a rightward slant and long letters that stab their neighbors above and below. Betty strokes the name printed at the top in the left-hand corner, unusual. He’s left-handed, she realizes fondly, reading his name. Jughead Jones. Silly, whimsical, the perfect name for her black jackrabbit.

Waiting for her functions to finish, Betty lays out the story, using a couple paperweights to pin it flat. She waited to read it, couldn’t bring herself to do it in public. She needed time to digest it, savor it.

Tracing the J’s of his silly name, she smiles after the first paragraph. She knew it. Gut-deep, that trusty spark of instinct never fails her. He knew it, too, calling out from the same hidden animal place. He wrote himself as the prey.

He writes of being hunted, dogged by some unknown specter he cannot see, but he knows it is there. He circumvents the prompt, never outright names the wolf. Everything is a guess, a blind assumption, but he moves forward despite. Looking behind, it’s a waste of time, energy.

Animals understand the finiteness of energy. Barring an immediate threat, they ration it and weigh it, ever cognizant of reserves. Survival is paramount, but he can’t make life-or-death decisions based on incomplete information. There could be a predator, but it is just as likely there isn’t. In the end, he gives up, stills, feels the teeth close around him, and calls it love.

It’s more philosophical than she expected without the sterility of scientific writing, but he isn’t unaware of predator-prey dynamics. It’s far more flowery than her own writing, but she admires his ability to turn these concepts into prose.

The mystery and suspense are palpable. His writing is tactile and highly visual, very metaphor heavy. He puts into words perfectly what she cannot, what she hasn’t learned yet, and what she suspects she will never know how to express normally, never learn to fake. His words have the emotional weight hers never will. It makes her dizzy, though, the gravity of his words, so much empathy.  

A message bubble pops onto her screen, the telltale opening of the school song drawing her attention. She expects a reply from her PI about a Monday meeting to review her latest chapter, but then, she spies the little red maple leaf icon in the right corner of the bubble.

Maple Mingle, the university’s social media platform, is a superfluous branch from their webmail and Blackboard. It was supposed to be used for group chats and coordinating projects, but some of the students use it for gossip and the like. When she first enrolled, she expected most students to eschew the platform, but then Cheryl Blossom started using it almost exclusively to organize her parties, and it took a hold. Betty doesn’t buy into any other social media, and she wouldn’t, but unfortunately this one is an academic requirement.

Mila from Physical Anthropology drops the invite in Messenger, and Betty gets lumped in by accident. She took the class sophomore year and ended up in Mila’s group for the final project, but Mila never thought to remove her from her friends list once the class was over. They haven’t shared more than three sentences since then, but Betty still slips unfortunately into her Send Alls.

As usual, she decides not to go, until a perfunctory perusal of the guest list persuades her otherwise. Hovering over the username, his tiny avatar pops up, [email protected]. This school is too small.

Her cursor dallies around the reply buttons, wondering if he’s the type that goes to keggers on sorority row.

She types a quick can’t wait <3 and hits reply all.

Her mother would not approve of the drop in her sweetheart neckline, but she hopes he lives up to his nickname, watching him beeline for the drinks. She expects him to stop at the keg, but he meanders to the small folding table lined with mixers, selecting a bottle of locally brewed root beer and stripping the label.

His companion, another boy almost a head taller, pours himself a jack and coke. They clink their drinks together and take a pull in tandem before turning to the crowd, planning their approach. His eyes never fall on her, but she feels the taller one’s pass over her, linger for a beat, feels the slide of his corner smile tucking up between her legs.

Betty peels from her faceless faction and intercepts the pair on their way through the crush. “Jughead,” she calls, placid smile in place, voice as sweet and clear as a mockingbird.

He turns, his easy, uneven smile at the ready, and she feels more warmth bloom in her belly as it widens. She would carve it from his face and hang it if she could, leave it crooked within the squared frame.

“Hey, Betty, right?” he says, and it chafes and soothes in equal measure, that he remembered, but that he must also confirm. “I didn’t think you came to these things.” He knows of her, but he doesn’t know her. That feels a little better and a little worse, and she ends up in the same place again.

“Sometimes,” she tells him, shrugging, demurring, drawing him toward her by pulling her gaze down. He doesn’t, but his friend sways in her direction, eyes following the plunge of her collar. “Who’s your friend?” she asks, to keep the conversation going, maybe inspire some jealousy.

None of that surfaces. He seems glad to place the tall one between them like a bundling board. “Ah, yeah, Sweets, this is Betty Cooper. She’s in my Creative Writing class, but,” he pauses here, glancing at her for permission or afraid he will get the next bit wrong. “You’re, um, a chemistry major, yeah?”

“Biochem,” she corrects, feeling floaty he remembered even half that. “Pre-med.”

Sweets gives her a look that says too rich for my blood. “Why are you taking creative writing?” he asks point-blank.

Betty watches Jughead’s gaze flit off to the side, catching someone else’s attention across the living room. It makes her feel like a pit stop on the side of the road, a cheap sandwich from a trucker’s vending machine that will cut straight through him as soon as its eaten, and something starts to boil in her chest, red and hot, as red as Jughead’s shirt.

The red of his button-up is nearly as offensive as the number of buttons he left undone, but his undershirt tastefully matches his charcoal grey trousers held up by a functional pair of suspenders. He doesn’t look like himself at all, yet Betty cannot look away. The difference a color can make, she thinks, wanting to reach out and touch it, the potency of it, the red like a violation. He looks like free real estate, and she wants to snatch him up, front more than asking price. Her imagination is a tome of renovations, the ways in which she would rearrange him, remodel him, gut him.

“For fun,” she offers flippantly, tacking a teasing lilt to the end. “Why not?”

Cotton candy lips, full and pink and directing the gaze from the sharp teeth hiding within their plush invitations, little mermaid eyes blinking long and slow with bike chains waiting behind spring green irises to strangle him, she lets it all seep from her visage, every snare and trapdoor at her disposal. Sweets falls inside her, while Jughead loiters on the outside, polite and well-meaning, but his mind miles away, in the clouds, away from her.

Away from her.

“Sweets,” she muses, glancing over her shoulder to make sure he continues following her deeper into the woods. “Is that short for something? Is it a joke?”

“Sweet Pea,” he answers, the nickname drawn out in one drunken, dulcet slur. He drove them here on his motorcycle, and she wondered the entire time if they would make it. She still feels the rumble of the engine between her thighs, his shaky handling as he guided the bike down the service road.

She suddenly stops and rounds on him, wrapping his leather lapels up in her hands and jerking him forward, inhaling roughly. “Not sweet,” she concludes, gazing up through her lashes, no mascara, as thin and light as dandelion seeds. “Maybe poisonous.”

“Definitely generous,” he says with a leer, swooning into her, both stumbling back into the trunk of an old growth sugar maple, causing her to drop her purse. She thinks he meant to say dangerous, and it makes her laugh, light and cheery as a robin, but dawn is nowhere near.

“You cold?” he asks, slipping his hands inside her coat.

“Always,” she divulges, flattening her palms on his chest. “Help me.”

He buries his hand in her soft waves. “God, you’re beautiful,” he tells her, and she knows he never uses that word. Hot. Sexy. Fuckable. Never beautiful.

He braces his fingers along the back of her neck, thumbs hard beneath her jaw. “Fucking beautiful.”

“Beautiful enough,” she begins, swaying into him, his belt buckle digging into her lower belly, the suggestion of his cock hard lower. “To fuck,” she finishes, letting the syllable flip off her bottom lip, her jaw sinking into his thumbs with the weight of the word.

“Yes, please,” he breathes before smashing his mouth to hers, pressing her body into the maple tree, buckle hard against her navel.

She nudges his hips back just enough to raise her skirt, letting him slip his thigh between her own, giving her something to grind down on. He kisses a sloppy path down her jawline, slipping her earlobe between his teeth and biting down harder than necessary as she deftly negotiates his belt, breaking the bridge of his jeans. He palms her breast through her dress, kneading, feeling for her nipple, and she gasps on cue when he pinches.

“Condom,” she whispers, and he halfheartedly reaches for his back pocket. She stops his hand, retrieves it for him, politely asks him to lay down on the ground.

He lays out on the mossy forest floor, shimmying his jeans and jockeys down just enough to pull his dick out, stroking himself while she divests herself of her coat and her panties.

“I’m clean,” he tells her, but she blinks slowly at him, cotton candy smile lulling him to lie back and enjoy the show, letting her roll the condom onto his cock.

“I’m not,” she divulges, sinking down around him and relishing his eyes rolling back in their sockets, like some animals do when they die.

When he looks up at her, she asks him to keep his eyes closed, gently swiping her fingertips across his lids, beckoning his eyelashes to rest upon his high cheekbones. Closed, she can imagine, eyelashes the right length, the right thickness, as dark and curled, cheekbones of similar height but darker. She buries her fingers in his hair, soft and abundant, but. Greasy. Not quite right. Almost, but not quite right.

She rocks herself on his cock, longer and thicker than she would expect, but no less satisfying. He groans, grabbing her hips, digging his fingers into the soft flesh behind the handles of her hipbones, but he lets her take complete control.

The pitch of his grunts and moans is too low, lower than she needs, the pressure of his hands too rough, his hair too slick, his torso too long as she runs her nails from his shoulders to his navel. It’s not quite – right. But, he's warm, warm enough to imagine.

Sitting up, she bounces on his dick, palms balanced on his stomach, racing towards her own completion. She almost says his name, the wrong one, but bites her tongue. Not that Sweets would hear it, his eyebrows knitted together, his grip increasing the pace of her rocking. She listens to him moan, watching him get closer. She bends down, and he holds her in place and starts thrusting up inside of her, taking his own pleasure as he nears the finish.

He keeps his eyes closed, his chin tipped toward the treetops, neck extended toward her, tendons and veins distended across the supple column, and then she sees it, the snake curling up from the edge of his throat, nudging beneath his ear. Her hand lands there, thumb stroking beneath the slope of its striking jaw. Her other hand trips across the forest floor, brushing against the pink leather of her purse.

Her hand finds the snake first. Her knife finds it second, beheading the serpent just as he comes, his hands yanking her hips down as the blade eats through inked skin. His body doesn’t know what to do, hips jerking and gut jumping with ecstasy, cock spurting like a ruptured artery while the real one empties out into her hands.

Then, she comes too, feeling that warmth flood through her fingers wrapped around his throat, the warmth flooding through her belly. The decapitated snake jerks inside of her, not knowing why but doing it anyway, pure instinct climaxing within her. Pretty, long dark lashes flutter against high cheekbones, his mouth gaped in pleasure, his grip weakening as he bleeds out inside her, around her.

When her orgasm abates, she realizes he is dead but still hard. One of her hands sinks into his hair, soft as rabbit fur, black as her jackrabbit, but. Greasy. Ugh.

She raises her hips, letting his dead, swollen cock slip from between her legs. It flops down across his thigh, bobbing and jumping occasionally like a snake would do without a head, but she knows he’s dead, one eye open, pupil floating in bloodshot white and unseeing, rolled up beneath the lid.

She looks down at her hands, blood black as night, steaming from her fingertips. Her insides feel glowy, light and buoyant, warm as sunlight. You will do this again.

She notices the blood doesn’t show against the forest floor, but she feels the squelch of it when she presses her hand by the side of his head. Gently, she brushes his eyes closed, leaving specks of dirt on his eyelashes, dusting his cheeks. Her mind purposely morphs his features how she likes, focusing on the similarities, the rest of his eyelashes against the top of his cheekbones, the black curls from up under his ears, but within moments, the rest of the details coalesce into everything that is essentially different, and the glow in her chest fades.

You will do this forever until. She stops herself there, wiping the sweat from her forehead. She pulls the used condom from his cock with a wet snap, putting it in the trash bag with the bloody knife, and stuffing it into her purse.

The next day, she returns to the motorcycle where they left it parked on the unused service road. The gully isn’t far, and before she rolls it into the ditch, she wipes down the handles and the seat. It crashes to the bottom and settles on its side, partially obscured by the underbrush. She drags hefts of dead branches and tosses them down into the ditch until they completely cover any trace of the bike, at least at first glance.

She returns to the body with a shovel, a bag of lime, and another trash bag. It takes two hours to dig the shallow hole, only deep enough to get the job done.

While she bundles his clothes into the black hefty, something falls out of the chest pocket of his leather jacket and thumps to the ground. The steel catches the rising sun, glinting up at her, a Zippo with the same serpent slithering up the length of it, the one she decapitated on his neck.

She pockets the lighter and then rolls the body into the hole. Showering him with lime, she knows the flesh will quickly melt away. The earth will gladly take it. This is always the part that makes her anxious, even when she knows no one will be able to pinpoint the time of death. And that’s supposing anyone finds it.

Three miles outside of town, she burns his clothes and her own and the purse in a pit. Watching the pink taffeta melt and char, she thinks it’s a shame. It was the perfect dress. It was a perfect complement to that red shirt.

She buries the ashes and goes home and sleeps through the rest of the weekend, sated for the moment.

Chapter Text

Is she only one who sees this? Is it a figment of her imagination? Whether it is the unpredictable entropy of the universe that places him within her orbit or the powers that be want her to kill him, she doesn’t know, only that it is an inevitability.

She stares at the back of his neck while the graduate discusses sentence structure – the pale nape, the jut of his top vertebrae, his terrible posture. She chose a three-quarters view this time, one row over. He leans back in his seat, and her eyes graze his stomach, the thin layer of baby fat she would peel back to reveal the solid sinew beneath it.

What is the importance of varying sentence structure?

He raises his hand to answer, and she thinks his fingerbones would make the loveliest of windchimes. His broad shoulders are vaguely masculine but nothing else, yet she would sink her teeth into that hidden delicateness if she could. She wants to strip the skin from his back, spread his ribs and crawl inside. She would curl herself within his chest cavity, nestle between his lungs, hug his heart to her stomach and squeeze, feel it flutter like a bird in a cage, squeeze until it stopped.

To keep your reader’s engaged.

Kill him. Kill him. Kill him. Her insides scream with it, and all she can think about it is how to make it last, this new obsession, prolong the buildup. Sweet Pea was satisfying, something to tide her over for a while, but it’s a temporary fix. Eventually, she will have to do it, kill her darling.

“Hey.”

Betty peeks up over her fist.

“Jughead,” he cues, like she could forget, like he never introduced himself two weeks into class when they were in the same group discussion. Like she never called out to him at the party last weekend. Like he doesn’t think he is worth remembering.

“I know,” she says, peeling her temple off her fist. “Betty.”

He snorts, not meanly. “Yeah, I know.”

“Are you busy right now?” He taps her desktop, counting down the seconds to her rejection.

Betty looks around to an empty classroom. Another black hole yawns across the page beneath her pencil. He notices it but doesn’t say anything. “Not particularly,” she admits, sitting up and filing her things into a neat stack, calmly folding the cover over the hole. Despite, he is looking at her and actually seeing her. She wonders what she did to earn the attention. Since their first class, they haven’t exchanged more than a handful of sentences, a few group critiques but nothing else. It felt like she barely existed at the party.

“You like coffee?” He helps lift her backpack onto the desk, such a gentlemanly gesture it makes her smile small.

“Yes,” she says, decisive, feigning disinterest. She doesn’t want coffee. She wants to drag him into the nearest biology lab and preserve him in ethanol, but then it might ruin all that soft black fur.

He smiles, staring at the ground as she loads her notebooks into her book bag. She wants to eat it off his face, the tender apples of his cheeks, the tip of his button nose, that full bottom lip. “Good. I don’t think I could trust you if you didn’t.”

Betty drops her eyes, hoping it hides the hunger. She doesn’t want to spook him, not so soon. “That’s all it takes?”

He laughs, adjusting the shoulder strap of his own messenger bag. “So. Coffee?”

She nods and follows him out of the classroom. When she remains a step and a half behind him, he keeps slowing down, waiting for her to catch up before finally rolling to a standstill.

“Why do you keep doing that?” he asks, genuinely interested.

“Force of habit,” she admits, though it is partially to keep an eye him. But also because her mother preferred Betty walk behind her. For the longest time, it was a bad habit, and one she broke years ago. She doesn’t quite understand why she’s fallen back into the hind-step now. She doesn’t want to scare him because she thinks if she gets any closer, it will set off his fight or flight. It’s hurting her to keep the predator under the surface. His proximity makes her insides crawl.

“I don’t like people walking behind me,” he tells her, taking a step forward, looking over his shoulder to see her through the same. “Makes me nervous,” he continues when she joins his side, standing like equals. Smart prey. He wants to keep an eye on her, too.

Taking his seat across from her, he opens with, “I meant to tell you at the party,” and it immediately confuses her.

She wipes some pencil shavings from the butcher paper and sets her mug on top. “Tell me what?”

The coffee shop is busy, but their table is tucked away in the corner between the bookshelves. He likes his little nooks and crannies, like a bunny. Yet, with no basis in fact, she wonders if he needs witnesses, knows he shouldn’t be alone with her. To be fair, he shouldn’t.

“But, you disappeared right after I ran into you,” he continues, skipping over her question. “I thought you went with Sweets somewhere, but I saw him later. Of course, I haven’t been able to get a hold of him since. Bet he’s shacked up with some chick again.”

“Sweets?” she wonders, playing dumb.

He glances up at her. She doesn’t detect any suspicion. “The guy at the party,” he reminds her. “Tall one, snake tattoo.” He points at his neck. “I told him it was stupid to put that there. Hey, also I wanted to apologize.”

He’s all over the place, which doesn’t seem like him. Though fidgety, he sounds so organized and coherent in class. “For what?”

“Um, at the party, I probably seemed standoffish. It’s not you, trust me. I’m pretty awkward in general, and parties make me uncomfortable. Sweets hates it. But, I feel okay in there,” he explains, waving in what must be the direction of the classroom, she assumes. “And, maybe, with you, in discussions.” With her? Comfortable with her, she wonders, watching him guard his coffee black. It reads like an oxymoron, but she’s not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“Which is why I asked you out.” He taps his mug, a nervous affectation, drawing her attention back to those lovely fingerbones. “But, you know, I’m not sure I should get comfortable with you with how you describe the usefulness of a scalpel,” he jokes, smirking up at her. Humor makes him feel safe.

“Why did you ask me out?” That uneven curve makes her salivate, smiling politely and covering her urge to eat it off his face with a sip of her latte.

“Oh, right,” he remembers but gets distracted again picking through the colored pencils. “I was wondering,” he starts again, licking his lip and selecting a robin’s egg blue. Her eyes follow the movement of his tongue over his bottom lip, full and pink. No boy should have lips that pink. It’s maddening. As maddening as his inability to think in a straight line. “If you’d like to be writing partners,” he finally finishes, meeting her eyes with uncertainty.

“I thought you already had one,” she points out, recalling the mousy brunette.

“Hazel is, um, great.” Jughead traces an oval, an egg. “I just don’t think we’re a good fit for, um, critiquing. She’s too – nice.”

“She’s shallow,” Betty fills in, knowing full well. She’s been paired with Hazel.

Jughead gives her a wry look. “Well, yeah.”

“And you want someone to tear you apart,” she figures, taking another careful sip of her latte. Her hands are vibrating just with the thought of the word.

“Pretty much,” he confirms, drawing tight lines of blue circles within the oval. “Constructively, of course.” He returns to the cup of pencils, pale purple, shell pink next. “And, I think our styles are compatible.” He’s drawing an Easter egg in her colors. What isn’t she seeing? Does he know what he’s doing?

She recalls his wolf composition, how it complemented her own. “You mix metaphors too much.”

He presses his mouth to his palm to hide his smile, gaze lifting. His blue blue eyes meet hers through those long, black eyelashes, and it is intoxicating. “I can’t decide,” he divulges, tickled by the callout. “I just like them all too much.”

She tries to find suitable substitutes, anything to at least fulfill paler versions of her fantasy, but she is Goldilocks burning through bears.

Betty corners him at Cheryl’s next party, an invitation she won by the skin of her teeth and a well-timed bribe. Compared to Mila’s soiree, he seems happier to see her, letting her cage him into the intersection of two imposing bookshelves where she caught him leafing through the Blossom’s private collection.

“You’re here again,” he muses, like he doesn’t quite believe it, like she should have better and more exciting places to be.

She tips her Solo cup against his label-less root beer. “Speak for yourself.”

He smiles, tilting himself into the bookshelves, lovingly stroking a few spines. “Most of these haven’t been cracked once,” he tells her, like it’s the worst crime a person could commit. “Makes me want to steal them.”

Betty rounds his shoulder, filling up his vision. “I’ll keep watch for you.”

He laughs, tipping one of the books out from its untouched spot, the pages lily white. “I don’t think I can fit them all in my car, and I’d feel bad.”

“For stealing?” she wonders.

“For leaving any behind,” he says, so tenderly, a soft and endearing thing to say.

She studies the fond angle of his eyelashes as he reads the spine and wants to brush them closed, bring him peace. “If not all, then none.”

He nudges the book back into place. “Who said that?”

“Me.”

“You’re so strange,” he tells her, but he sounds glad. At her confusion, he tacks on, “I mean that as the highest compliment.”

“But, what do you mean by strange?”

His gaze flits off to the side, uncomfortable, red bleeding into his cheeks, so fucking cute. “I can’t figure you out. The moment I get an idea, I suddenly realize I have no idea what you’re really like.”

“What do you think I’m like? Your current assessment,” she bids, leaning into him, closing up any potential exits. She’s coming on too strong, and she knows it, but she keeps peeling.

“I don’t know,” he admits, shrugging, his shoulder almost brushing her breast. If it touches her there, it’s over. “You’re an enigma.” Now.

Before she can pick him apart further, a vibrating sound erupts from his pocket. He sighs in frustration, and she keys in on it, the implications of it. Does he like it when she makes him uncomfortable?

He politely excuses himself, prompting Betty to give him a little space. After quickly skimming the text, he curses. “Shit, it’s my sister. I have to go.” No, no, no.

He pounds the rest of his root beer and considers leaving it on one of the bookshelves, but she offers to take it. “Thanks.”

Betty reluctantly swings to the side, letting him out. He pauses, though, licking his lips. “I’m not bailing on you,” he assures her, nervously biting his lip, picking at the chapped skin. She should buy him some lip balm. “I like talking to you.”

She likes talking to him, too, but it’s getting harder and harder to keep it to talking. “It’s okay, Jughead.” She waves the empty bottle at the door. “I think it’s admirable. You care about your family.”

It is also something to consider, she notes to herself. Smiling at his grateful smile and watching him hop off, she wonders how long it would take before his family realized if he was missing. Does he text his sister a lot? Does she expect one from him every day?

She finishes the rest of her drink in one swallow, blanches at the syrupy sweetness of whatever spiked punch Cheryl Blossom concocts for these gauche parties, but the liquor eases the pinch of unsuccess.

In the kitchen, the trash can is overflowing, so Betty finds a home for it on the counter. She debates having another drink, but there really isn’t a point in staying now.

She wasted another perfect outfit, looking down her generous cleavage, the red silk, the same color lace of her bra peeking out. He didn’t look at her tits once. He also didn’t wear red this time, just all that grungy plaid. He must have an endless supply of S t-shirts or it’s the same one. She should buy him some new clothes without holes, but he probably wouldn’t wear them.

Betty grips the granite counter, putting all her body weight on her elbows and wrists to distract from the gnawing in her stomach. She’s starving.

“Can I top you off?” someone asks from her left.

Betty plasters her best golden girl smile on her face and tilts her gaze upwards. The first thing she sees is the black curling up from beneath his ears, and her insides clench with want. “Please,” she says, nudging her cup toward him.

It would be good to top off the tank. The high from Sweet Pea wore off last week, and she’s been running on fumes. While he pours her more saccharine punch, she considers the potential. He’s pretty, but the only real similarity is the hair, and she doesn’t know whether she can afford to be picky tonight. She’s so fucking hungry.

Reggie wows beneath her, sliding his palms up her bare thighs, takes the Lord’s name in vain. She can agree. He feels wonderful inside her, just how she imagined, not too big, a pleasant fullness.

Reggie’s head falls back against the forest floor, dark curls disappearing into the soil. “Jesus Christ.”

Betty rocks forward, humming as his softening cock moves inside her. “Hey, Reggie.” He hms without opening his eyes. “I have a surprise for you.”

“Oh?” He massages the flesh behind her hipbones, shifting her back and forth again.

“But you have to do something for me.”

“Anything for you, baby,” he promises, looking up at her through heavy-lidded puppy brown eyes floating in a soup of leftover endorphins.

“You have to keep your eyes closed,” she orders, smiling like a saint.

He nods, smirking like this is all just some game he knows he will win because he’s never lost before.

Betty bends down and presses her lips to his chest, licking his collarbone, tongue sliding down the well-developed pectorals, before her teeth catch on his nipple. “You’re so fucking hot,” he tells her, fingers slipping into the crevice of her bare ass. His eyes are half-lidded watching her, and she tsks, shaking her head. He laughs and closes his eyes again, his baking soda white smile bright against the black earth.

Her hand skims the ground, finding the lip of her purse, lavender this time. Her fingers curl around the pearl grip, sliding it as surreptitiously from the purse while keeping his nipple between her teeth. Rising, she slips one hand down to where his cock is about to fall out of her, feeling around his girth, and he blissfully sighs as she directs the muzzle to his sternum.

She barely curls her fingers around the trigger when he comes out of his orgasm-induced stupor. He immediately catches sight of the pistol and launches her off him, knocking the air out of her.

She loses her grip on the gun and hears him bolt into the trees, cursing to herself as she searches for the pistol, her hands scrambling across the ground. She spends too much time recovering, but luckily, she knows the woods better than anyone.

He makes it to the train tracks before she intercepts him, holding him at gunpoint as the train’s light starts rounding the corner. Reggie begs her to let him go, but she’s too annoyed with chasing him down to enjoy it. The chase excited her, ignited her prey instinct, but it disappoints her shooting him between the eyes when she wanted to watch his chest open around the bullet, hoping to see his ravaged heart. Se times the shot perfectly with the approaching train, the pistol firing simultaneously with the horn, growling with frustration as he drops like a bag of rocks.

Dragging him into the bushes, she knew she would have to make concessions. There was bound to be outliers, but Reggie ends up ruining her precision. Sweet Pea was a clean kill, a beautiful kill, but Reggie looks so sad crumpled in the hollow of a tree in nothing but his crew socks.

It takes forever to drag him the half mile back to the clearing. She has to leave him in the hollow of a tree while she retrieves his winter coat, rolling him onto that and hauling him back.

She is exhausted by the time she gets back to her killing floor, but she still tries to get some glimmer of her fantasy, repositioning him where she fucked him. His face is all wrong, though, features pinched in horror, not docile and accepting like she needs. She closes her eyes and bends forward, running her fingers through his hair, but he is too cold. No warm glow in her chest. All wrong. Not even close to quite right.

Fucking asshole.

Each one lasts about a week or two, and then the hunger comes back. Some are harder to swallow than others and less than satiating. She thinks she is getting worse at it.

The itch keeps coming back. He doesn’t make it easy for her, planting himself in her life. Between the party and their writing, he has somehow become a regular fixture. After the party, there was a newfound interest in her, but she anticipated it would fade away. This sudden friendliness feels like a turning of the tables, like he is trying to draw her out now, atoning for his standoffishness at the party. But, it never amounts to anything more than friendliness.

He routinely inserts himself in her chat threads, sends her messages about their next assignment, attaches his millions of drafts, and she reads every single one. He invites her on afternoon walks, readings at Tinny’s bookshop, lunch at the student union. She wonders if he is lonely without Sweet Pea or if he genuinely enjoys spending time with her. He definitely appreciates her feedback on his writing. He never shuts up about it.

It becomes a daily thing, an expectation. She doesn’t think a single day passes without seeing him, and eventually, as she dreaded, it becomes a need.

After the reading, Jughead offers to get her another coffee, but she feels like her heart is racing from the two coffees he’s already forced on her. Or it’s the spacing of the seats, his warm shoulder pressed tight against hers for the entire event. The only reprieve came when he stood up to ask a question, and then she wanted to smooth her hand up his thigh, mid-distance runner’s legs.

She’s never spent so much time with a guy she wasn’t dating, yet they haven’t exchanged so much as an empty flirtation. At least, not from his end. She can’t crack him. It’s never happened to her, floundering to attract her prey. She has the success rate of a dragonfly, but he’s the lone five percent she can’t get her hands on, not without force, and that would ruin everything.

When he gets back from the bar, he’s not alone, and it makes her want to scream.

“Hey, look who I ran into!” he exclaims, handing her another excessive dose of caffeine. His blood must be seventy percent coffee instead of water.

Betty doesn’t recognize the young man, and he doesn’t have the most forgettable face. No one wears mission control glasses like that anymore. He looks like a forties style code breaker, like he should be hooked up to a bunch of wires in front of a radio in someone’s forgotten bunker. He’s kind of cute, in an ornery puppy sort of way. Sometimes Jughead gets like that, and it amuses her.

“This is Dilton Doiley,” Jughead introduces, and the name rings no bells. “We used to be in Eagle Scouts together when we were kids.” Oh, that explains it.

Apparently, Dilton is in Riverdale on furlough to visit his sick mother. He doesn’t seem bothered by it, though. It was only a matter of time. He only came to Tinny’s to look for a book, something historical and violent.

“We used to play that crazy game on overnights. What was it called?” Jughead is more energetic than usual, but that could be the five cups of coffee in his veins or the questionnaire after the reading. He loves these readings.

“Gryphons and Gargoyles,” Dilton supplies. He looks between Betty and Jughead as if he is trying to solve some difficult equation. She doesn’t like it. Jughead, oblivious, looks like he is eight years old again in a tarp tent with three other little boys rolling die over a makeshift board that someone smuggled in their pack.

They talk for a while longer until the café closes. Well, Dilton and Jughead talk the most while Betty politely listens from the opposite side of the table feeling superfluous. At their usual separation point, Jughead gives Dilton his phone number and tells him they should catch up, get lunch before he leaves, and then he bids Betty a good night with a friendly pat on the shoulder. It is so gentle and dissatisfying that when he leaves them and heads in the direction of his apartment, Betty immediately turns to Dilton and asks him to walk her home.

Dilton cries, and it’s awful, tears streaming down his dirty cheeks as she sticks the knife through his stomach and jerks it to the side, opening him up on the forest floor. His guts spill onto the earth, and Betty finds her release, the plug in her stomach uncorking and letting all the ugliness drain out, replacing it with euphoria, relief, control.

His blood is hot, and his innards steam in all the right ways. His hands claw at the ground, but he doesn’t get anywhere. Betty leans over him, fingers skimming along his forehead, behind his ear, tracing his black hairline, cut too short. He cries, hiccupping and moaning, and she picks up some of his tears on her fingertip, slips it into her mouth. Salty and sad, all that practiced severity smeared off his boyish face.

In a few minutes, he slumps to the ground. His eyes go glassy and faraway, looking like roadkill on the forest floor. Betty rolls him onto his back, leaving his guts cooling in a pile next to him. She manipulates his face back into a semblance of restful sleep, easier to do when he’s newly dead.

It’s nearly perfect, so much more satisfying than Reggie. His mouth is a more pleasing visual, closer to the original. She cups his cheeks, raising his chin higher, pressing a chaste kiss to his lips. The hue of his skin is only a shade lighter than Jughead’s olive tone and feels just as soft as she imagines. She rubs her cheek against Dilton’s, nuzzles his neck and roughly inhales the smell of him, strangely sweet with the metallic undertones of his innards piled next to them. It’s close. Almost but not quite right.

None of the rabbits measure up.

Sweets was too greasy. Reggie’s hair too gelled. Dilton’s too stiff and short. Reggie was too muscled, too masculine. Sweets was too rough, too tall. Dilton was too short, too mechanical. Reggie too chatty, too fake. Nothing quite comes close to her idea of the ideal, and she is running out of hiding places.

Her imagination fails to fill in the gaps, but she finds things that help, takes them.

When she runs into writer’s block, she lines up her trophies at the top of the page. The Zippo from Sweets. A commemorative coin from Reggie. A .50 caliber rifle round from Dilton. It helps. She writes in the veins of the Greeks, of maenads sacrificing snakes to flame and faceless arbiters of fate flipping coins at gates leading deeper and deeper into hell. For the epistolary practice, she writes a letter from a soldier fighting rats in the trenches, hoping his lucky bullet will save him.

The graduate seems surprised by her compositions, but pleasantly so. He doesn’t look at her anymore like she doesn’t belong in his class, especially when she starts working with Jughead.

The black jackrabbit is more critical. He comments on the sterility of her writing. It’s too medical, like reading the human body, and sometimes very cold. She never just says arms and legs and blood and teeth, but incisors and tendons and humor, the shift of a deltoid versus a shoulder. It is arresting and visceral, but he argues it can be alienating to the layman, that it will only appeal to a niche audience. She almost says she would love to read him, his insides, write them herself, if he’d let her.

He was right, though. They are compatible. She is getting better with his help, finding the right words, figuring out how to translate the inside of her head to the page, expressing or whatever. And, he likes it, the inside of her head. His palate is more versatile than she expected, capable of digesting more than rabbit food.

With each critique, she needs to find another backup bunny to slaughter. It is not so much the critique as the interaction that sets her off. It makes her feel strangely validated, and she begins to crave it, his approval. Each time he speaks to her, lays eyes on her, smiles at her writing, she wants to tear him apart. Instead, she redirects her teeth elsewhere, rips into another bunny. She spares him to spare herself.

It goes like this for several months. She eats through too many, and people are starting to notice. He is starting to notice.

By midterms, the itch returns for the fourth time.

He waits for her at their table on the chilly veranda outside the student union, pouring hot coffee from his oversized Thermos. It’s the kind she would expect to see under the arm of a construction worker, army green and chunky.

They always eat out on the veranda, huddled on the same side of the table. “Hot things taste better in the cold,” he reasons, and she believes that, taking a seat and staring at the steam coming from his lips as he says it.

She sits close to him, but he never says anything, never moves towards her. She applies pressure, subtly brushes her fingers against his as they share mugs of soup, but he never reciprocates, never shows any returned interest. He also never moves away.

It is always friendly. Always warm. But no heat. So little she starts to wonder if he’s something else, considering his relationship with Sweets, if he has other interests – studying his careless mannerisms, his unassuming smile, no hint of impropriety or discomfort – or no interests at all. Or it’s her. He simply has no interest in her, at least none with any real heat.

He pours her a mug of tomato bisque while she peels back the foil from the grilled cheese.

There is a week until Spring Break, and the days alternate unseasonably warm and late frost, but he stuffs himself into layers of flannel beneath his customary denim sherpa. He never wears a scarf, but sometimes she shares hers with him. She wants to ask about his plans for Spring Break, where he will go, if she can follow. She doesn’t know what it will be like to go a day without seeing him, and that is discomfiting because eventually she will have to go forever without him.

He steals half the grilled cheese, the melted Kraft singles stretching out between the slices. “Why are you taking this class, Betts?” Betts. He’s the only one that calls her that.

“Why not?”

“Doesn’t it – I don’t know – mess with your timeline, graduation?”

She shakes her head, pinning the other slice so the cheese can separate. “I could’ve graduated last year.” She considered graduating last term, which would’ve given her a free semester to finish her senior thesis and relax. Then, she saw him.

“So.” He waves the grilled cheese at all her lost time.

She wants to say she would’ve lost much more had she followed her mother’s expectations. Alice is still chafed by her decision, but Betty would’ve lost this. “I had the free time, and it didn’t cost me anything,” she explains, dipping her slice in the bisque. “I thought this would be more interesting than taking more upper electives I didn’t need.”

“Interesting,” he parrots, unhappy with her choice.

“Roads less traveled,” she amends, and he side-smiles at her. Better.

That smile does it, brings back the itch, to stitch the derisive dimple above his left eyebrow in place, frame the shy smugness of his bowed lips, flash freeze the tickled gleam in his blue blue blue eyes. The itch to hear the moans he’d make as she surrounded him, the sounds when she swallowed him, let himself die inside her, let her gorge her cold, cruel body on all that withheld heat.

He checks his phone for the fifth time, and it pulls her gaze to the nervous rubbing of his fingers against the home button.

“Are you late for something?”

He drops it back into his pocket and apologizes, returning to the soup, sipping slowly. Sliding the mug back to her, he explains, “You remember that guy at the party, the one I came with?” She restrains every emotional tick in her face – the surprise hitching above her right eyebrow, the disappointed pulse in her lower lip, the panicked flare of her nostrils – and nods.

“I’ve been trying to get a hold of him for weeks now. Sometimes he does this, just drops off the map for a while, but it’s never gone on this long. His roommates haven’t seen him either. I’m just – worried. Really worried.” She wonders how close they were. Sweets wasn’t a student. They might’ve known each other a while. 

He pulls apart his grilled cheese into small smushed pieces. “And other guys have been disappearing. At least, that’s what they’re saying. That somebody might be, um, taking people,” he continues, popping a piece into his mouth but not chewing with any real enthusiasm, completely unlike him. “Disappearing people. Killing people,” he finishes, so quiet she has to bend closer to hear him.

She gets distracted by the shiny grease on his finger pads, wants to lick them clean, sooth and redirect his concern with her tongue. When he looks back at her, her eyebrows immediately pinch with worry, too. She should be.

There was noise around Reggie’s disappearance when some swamp rat found his car in the pond where she left it. His body wasn’t recovered, though, thank her lucky stars. But, if Jughead is starting to detect a pattern, then the police probably are, too.

Betty folds her hand over his own. So hot. Hot hands. Hot breath. “I’m sure he’s alright.” She slips her fingers between his own, stroking the soft webbing, feeling the stronger emanation of heat from his palm. It makes her dizzy.

“I’m sure it’s just a coincidence,” she assures him, saintly smile in place. 

She needs to move up her timeline.

The Friday before Spring Break, he invites her to an evening reading with Pre Turnblock, his least favorite contemporary author. On the walk to Tinny’s, he warns her they might get kicked out for heckling, and she jokingly asks if he brought projectiles. “Worse.”

It’s warmer than usual, spring moving in quickly. Jughead looks uncomfortable in his denim jacket. With his hands stuffed inside his pockets, he flaps his arms to cool himself off. The movement sends a wave of his smell her way, and it almost makes her hind-step again to avoid it. He’s getting too comfortable with her.

“Are you going home for spring break?” she asks.

Scratching his cheek, he half-smiles and admits he’s a townie. “It’s not something I advertise.”

“Why not?”

“My dad is the sheriff.”

Oh. “Is that a bad thing?”

Betty fixes her stare across the street, schooling her features back into a pretense of calm. When she turns back, he sways away from her, drawing out his not really so much like a little kid that it reminds her he is two years younger, a sophomore, and she is a senior. She will be gone soon.

“Some people treat you differently,” he explains, and she wonders if he is directly referring to her reaction, if he can sense her panic.

“They either get really weird or weirdly interested. A lot of my friends aren’t exactly pro law enforcement.” It always surprises her to know he has other friends besides her and wonders when he sees them with how much time they spend together, but then he doesn’t sleep. He told her he wasn’t the most comfortable in social situations, but he seems to do well in small groups, especially in class. Yet, she isn’t with him all the time, though she wishes she could be.

They near Tinny’s, and she is running out of time. She wants to kill the fucking sheriff’s son. Needs. Her mind runs through a million scenarios that all end the same way, her in a little cement coffin. Needs.

She loops her arm with his and jostles him closer. “It doesn’t make a difference to me.”

He snorts, letting her lead him along.

It doesn’t, cement coffin or no. It just means she must be more careful, and it moves her timeline again, a week earlier than she planned, which isn’t what she wanted. She isn’t prepared for tonight, but there’s no time. She must do this before people start to associate her with him, before his name conjures the thought of her own. It might already be too late. God, she’s been so stupid.

This might be better, she considers, calming herself. No, this is better. Spring Break will help. It might take longer for people to realize he’s missing. Maybe he decided to take an impromptu trip. Young men did it all the time.

“Hey,” she bids, stopping suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk. Their side of the street is empty. “How invested are you in this thing?”

He faux waffles, swaying away again from the direction of Tinny’s before rocking onto the tips of his toes, pulling her with him. “Not super invested. Why?”

“I want to take you somewhere.” They can hear the bell ringing above the front door to Tinny’s, ding after ding as people filter into the bookshop. No one can see them.

“Somewhere,” he repeats, grinning at her vagary. “Sounds ominous.”

“You’ll like it,” she promises, tugging him away from the bookshop. “It’s the spot where I get most of my inspiration.” She tries not to be too pushy, too demanding.

“Intrigue,” he breathes, letting her draw him in the opposite direction, for once following her lure. It calms her. “Are you sure you want me to know about your special spot? What if I steal it?”

“Sharing is caring,” she returns, taking his hand and pulling him into the next alleyway.

“You’re so trusting,” he quips.

She guides him through a hole in the fence which opens out into a ditch. They stumble through the weeds and up onto the tracks. Betty starts in the opposite direction of the main thoroughfare, and Jughead trails behind her, joking, “I’m getting Stand By Me flashbacks. You’re not gonna show me a dead body, are you?”

Betty doesn’t hear any hesitation, but it makes her round on him. She sobers, regarding him standing in the middle of the tracks with his hands in his pockets, so trusting. “Why? You want to see one?”

He laughs lightly, but when she doesn’t smile, too, he stops. It’s not normally so difficult for her to drop the pretense, but the spooked look in his bunny blue eyes feels like rejection. He sees her. He sees all of her. But doesn’t know it. He sees but continues to search for the other one, the human one. She senses it, the fear smell, jackrabbit ears twitching, feeling out the predator, but he cannot comprehend it, not fully. It’s the only chance she’ll give him, his one get-out-of-jail-free card. If he leaves, she will let him. If he doesn’t, she will eat him.

He doesn’t move, a hare waiting for the predator to move first, knowing it’s there but not where.

“Oh my god, I’m joking, Jughead,” she breaks, twisting on her heels and continuing down the tracks. She listens for his footsteps, the clunk of his boots against the metal railing.

“I’ve never seen one,” she hears right next to her and startles. She didn’t expect that. He is heavy-footed, always, those boots thumping around, announcing his approach, his departure. She always knows where he is by his footfalls.

“What?” she asks, tempering the wavering surprise in her voice. “A dead body?”

“Yeah. Have you?” She feels his eyes on her face, and she doesn’t know if he’s looking for the other one, wondering where she’s gone.

“In anatomy,” she lies, ignoring his stare. “A cadaver.”

“That’s not really what I’m talking about.”

“What are you talking about?” She knows.

“Not some preserved, sterile mannequin in a cold basement, Betts. A real person, dead, rotting,” he explains, impactful descriptions meant to shake her up. 

“No,” she defends and realizes it comes out like that, defensive, but not what he expects, not shocked or uncomfortable.

“Okay,” he brushes off, ending the line of inquiry, and his heavy footsteps return, boots landing heavy against the tracks. “How far is this place?”

“A few miles,” she admits, poking at him, playing her part. “You up for it?”

“I want to see,” he says, bumping his shoulder into hers, something he has never done. “Your special spot. Where the mysterious Betty Cooper finds her inspiration.”

Chapter Text

“Here it is,” she announces, swinging her arm wide at the clearing.

The Sweetwater murmurs below them. The ground is dry on the raised bank, dryer than the muddy riparian around them. The maple and beech are finding their leaves, letting the moonlight, full and heavy, filter through the branches. It’s so bright she can see the details in his black curls. It is better than she could have hoped for. Despite her thwarted plans, the night chose her.

“I can see why you like it,” he says, walking a slow circle around the clearing. She quirks a brow, and he laughs lightly, his axis tilting as he falls against a beech tree. “Your dark fairytales.”

“Dark,” she repeats, mocking his affectation. “There’re no breadcrumbs to lead you out of here.”

He peeks over his shoulder at the trees behind him, the nothing spaces between them. “So there isn’t.” Nothing but her candy house with the oven waiting inside to yawn and devour him whole.

“In the summer, there are fireflies in these woods,” he tells her.

She knows this. There are no fireflies in the places she buried the rest of the rabbits, all scattered a couple miles in each direction from this very spot. This is his spot; she saved it for him.

“We’ll come back in the summer,” she says. She will have graduated by then and gone back to Maine. She will go on to Brown in the fall, but he will be here forever. We – she will come back here, to be with him and the fireflies.

He leans back against the beech, looking up through the branches at the moon. The pale, long stretch of his neck draws her toward him, and when she expects him to recoil, he laughs as she falls into him, feeling the rumble of his amusement in her stomach. “Are you cold?”

“I’m always cold,” she admits, pressing her forehead to his chest. He is so hot. She wants to crawl inside of him.

“I would’ve brought hot cocoa,” he tells her, letting her fold her entire body against him. She thinks about that Thermos, the unwieldy weight of it, how it could take teeth and shatter jaws. “Come on, let’s go to Grumpy John’s. I’ll pay,” he offers, hands in his pockets but letting her drape herself over his warm torso.

She rubs her forehead against his sternum, shaking her head no. He’s not going anywhere anymore.

“I really like you,” she whispers. She really does. She really really likes him. She wants to smell him all the time, wants to live inside this heat forever, feel the wheeze and creak of his ribs as they stretch to accommodate her, feel his laughter all over her body as she hugs his heart to her stomach.

“I do, too,” he returns, and she feels his fingers running from the top of her head and trailing through her hair. You.

She accidentally clocks his chin on the way up, and his startled smile gets smeared off his face with her lips, her urgency cracking it open and letting her tongue inside. He lets her kiss him for a beat before his hands find her shoulders, gently guiding her away, but she keeps her hips pressed into his own, her eyes stuck on his lips.

“What are you doing?” His embarrassed smile returns.

His hands grip her shoulders, holding her away from him. Her stomach bottoms out. He didn’t mean it that way. He doesn’t want her. Why doesn’t he want her?”

“You said you liked me,” she reasons, spreading her legs around his thigh and then drawing her knees inward, letting him feel the heat there. She will make him want her. Want me.

When she braces her hands on his chest and tilts her pelvis forward, generating some friction, he swallows, his gaze drifting down to her lips, too. Finally. A reaction. The right one. He murmurs something that sounds like little fast.

“I’m to the point.” To punctuate this, she rolls her hips, grinding down on his thigh. He breathes roughly through his nose, saying her name, his voice low and timorous. He lifts his thigh just a little, just enough she senses the returned pressure, and she sighs into him. His hands skim down her arms, and when she thrusts against him again, his hands find their way inside her jacket and grab her by the waist.

“Betty, fuck,” he gasps, making her name sound synonymous with the curse.

Her thighs clenching around his own with the word. “Say that word again,” she bids, her hands insistent at his sides, fingers creeping under the hem of his shirt.

“Which one,” he grinds out, looking down at her, something pained in his expression, overwhelmed.

“Both,” she considers, hands beneath his shirt, nails skimming from the bottom of his ribs to the buckle of his jeans. He groans, and she starts undoing his belt, jerky impatient motions of her hands this way and that, hard enough his hips move with her impatience.

“Betty, wait,” he tries, hands hesitating, folding over her own only to jump back with doubt.

She makes a noise of frustration in the back of her throat, nosing along his collarbone. “What?”

“Have you – have you done this before?” he asks, almost a whisper.

She hums her confirmation, dragging down the zipper of his jeans, wondering if she played the demure pink little virgin too well. God, he smells so good. He’s so warm.

He tries to say something but falters when she palms him. He’s hard. “I haven’t,” he strains to say, and she freezes, waiting for him to finish that thought, willing it to end any other way.

“What?”

“I haven’t done this before.”

No. “Had sex in the woods,” she extrapolates, hoping he doesn’t mean what she thinks he means.

He finally settles his hands over her own, gently peeling them away from the bridge of his jeans. “Had sex,” he corrects. “At all.”

Her gut condenses and thumps around the ugliest feeling, something that’s been busy eating her alive for months now, what’s felt like years – possession. Obsession. Greed. He will be all hers. All hers.

Betty leans into him, pinning their hands between their bodies. “That’s okay,” she assures him.

The look he gives her tells her that isn’t the problem, but he’s too afraid to say it, too afraid to admit that he’s afraid.

“Do you want to?” she asks gently, softening her gaze even though he can probably feel how wet she is between her legs.

She doesn’t know what she’d do if he said no. That wouldn’t fit her fantasy. She thinks she would enjoy it just as much – no. He needs to want it, too. She wants this one. Needs it now, at this point. His inexperience only makes it sweeter, more relishable. He will be all hers. Just thinking about it makes her giddy.

“I do,” he says in a way she knows he doesn’t mean it. “I just – wanted you to know.”

She cups his cheek with the hand that was grabbing his junk earlier, holds his gaze steady with her own, open and accepting. It is a beacon in the dark forest to orient himself but no less predatory, like the misleading light at the end of the angler fish, the portentous shine in the tapetum lucidum that could be a harmless deer. Or the wolf.

“I really like you, Jughead,” she reiterates, tipping up on her toes, whispering it against his mouth. She senses so much heat there, it makes her heady with want. “You like me. Isn’t that enough.” She doesn’t frame it as a question.

“I don’t even know what to do,” he confesses against her lips, but she quickly assures him it’s alright. She’ll show him.

“Sit down,” she directs, and he immediately slides to the ground. His back against the tree trunk, long wiry legs spreading out between her feet, he looks like a propped up wooden soldier, like she could do anything to him.

She shimmies out of her panties, and his eyes trace the fall of them out from beneath her skirt, getting caught around her knees. “Help,” she bids, the tips of her fingers on his shoulders.

He tries to control his breathing, long inhales, fast stuttering exhales, his hands bracing behind her knees. His fingers hook beneath the elastic to draw them the rest of the way down her legs. He helps untangle them from around her ankles and then holds them up to her, not sure what to do with them.

She flicks the underwear off his fingers, and his eyes drift toward the crumpled bit of pink cotton on the ground. Dropping to her knees, she straddles him. When he feels her settle in his lap, he balks. “Your knees.” He reaches for them, offering up his jacket to save her the discomfort.

He’s so sweet, too sweet that she wants to go for the kill now, staring at the pale space beneath his jaw. “It’s fine.” The ground hurts, but she likes it. The pain distracts her from doing something worse, something that will ruin this. “Give me your hand.”

“Okay,” he mumbles, saying nothing when she brushes his beanie off his head. It lands somewhere near her underwear.

Turning his palm upward, she curls his three middle fingers. He doesn’t understand until she guides his hand beneath her skirt. His breathing gets rougher, staring at his disappeared hand like he may never get it back.

“Here.” She presses on his knuckles, causing his fingers to slide slowly along her clit.

The pace of his breathing picks up, his eyes glued to his wrist. She shivers, shifting her thighs closer together, balancing herself on his shoulder with her other hand. She moves his fingers for him at first, setting the pace, and he’s such a quick learner, taking point as soon as her hand slides up his wrist. He comprehends the general objective of this, but it doesn’t really click until he feels her get wet. She knows he feels it when his gaze cuts up in surprise, a filling mixture of insecure curiosity, excitement, nervous want.

Betty folds her hand over his once more, fingers curling over his knuckles. “Inside me,” she says, guiding him to tuck them up into her pussy.

He swears, jolting in surprise. “It’s really hot.”

She hums in agreement. His fingers feel much hotter than her insides. “Just, stroke lightly, okay? Up against.” He does it once, watching her face, and she keens, nails digging into his wrist.

His hand jerks away, but she holds him in place. “Shit, did I hurt you?”

“No, perfect. Just like that,” she assures him, her own breathing getting away from her.

He obeys, does it again, another test stroke. “Yes. Again.”

Once he establishes a rhythm, she presses her fingers against her clit, rubbing gently as he strokes the front of her pussy, the space that makes her thighs and guts dissolve in pleasure. “Yes, Juggie,” she moans, and his eyes flicker to hers with the pet name, fascinated, studying her reactions.

She fists her free hand in his jacket, wrenching between shoulder and neck. He asks her if it feels good, and she nods, bleary-eyed, bending down to push her mouth under his jaw. She awkwardly trails upwards, kissing his cheek. “Keep going.”

Her fingers curve around the back of his neck, nails finding his nape, anchoring herself there as she starts rocking against his fingers with more urgency. “I’m gonna come.”

He nods, not knowing what to expect. When her nails sink into the back of his neck, he winces slightly but increases his pace, flipping her skirt up to watch his fingers sink inside of her, her own circling her clit in tighter faster circles. He seems mesmerized by it, his fingers disappearing inside, her fingers working roughly against her clit, the strength of her muscles, why it feels so good to her.

When she comes, he curses loudly, surprised at the hot suck of her pussy, the tightening and fluttering, and she wonders what he’ll say when he feels that on his cock. She keeps his fingers pressed to that spot as long as she can stand. When the sensation becomes too much, she manipulates his fingers from her pussy, and the noise makes his mouth O, the feeling of her pulling him inside, unwilling to let go. She doesn’t think she can.

“Very good,” she commends, running her fingers through his hair, soft and clean. It’s finer than she imagined, but there is so much of it, so much to hold onto.

She kisses the corner of his mouth, the beauty mark on his chin, before kissing him fully. He responds more this time, letting her coax his lips apart, slip her tongue back inside. He tastes so good, sweet, like he was sucking on one of those hard candies before he met up with her. He keeps a stash in his left pocket, and when she feels around, there they are, the plastic wrapping rustling. It makes her smile into the kiss, her hands skimming down his chest.

While she distracts him with her mouth, she reaches inside his jeans, her palm folding over his cock. So hard.

He jerks away, unused to the sensation of someone else’s hand on his dick. He’s so untouched, it’s exhilarating. “Are you?” she wonders, her thumb slipping over the head, finding slick precum. God, she doesn’t know what she’ll do if he says no, not at this point.

“Um, condom.” Thank you.

He doesn’t have one, and she smiles, her insides liquid. “I’m on birth control,” she informs him, scooting forward. She wants him raw.

“Yeah, but,” he tries, his hands finding her hips.

She shrugs out of her jacket, bids him to do the same. “If it makes you more comfortable,” she offers, though she doesn’t have one either. Her hands tug at the collar of his t-shirt, helping him draw it up and over his head. Winter pale but not as wiry as she thought, not a blemish on him aside from a few stray beauty marks.

“Is it really okay?” he asks, humming a little when she strokes him again.

She nods and bumps her nose against his before dipping down to kiss him. “Really okay.”

Betty rises on her knees a little, lining him up. She wets the head of his cock with her slick, and his eyes keep flickering back and forth between her face and between her legs. He can only feel what she’s doing, but it makes him hum low in the back of his throat with the slide of his cock through her folds. When she slips the head inside, he hisses, grabbing her hips again.

“It’s okay,” she whispers, anchoring one hand in the hair at his nape and the other around his shoulder, lowering herself an inch at a time, exhaling with relief as he fills her up. He doesn’t breathe, his eyebrows knitted like he’s in pain.

Once he’s fully seated inside her, his head falls back against the tree trunk. “Oh, holy fuck,” he breathes, and her mind repeats the words, head tipping forward to press their brows together. He feels perfect, just right.

“I’m gonna move,” she says, and he nods, readying himself for it.

The first thrust is long and slow, and his moan is exactly the same, breaking at the end as she immediately gives him a short one at the end. His grip tightens with her descent like he wants to pull her off him, like it’s too much too bear.

“I can’t,” he warns her, voice trembling. She hushes him, pressing her mouth to his temple. It’s okay.

She ducks down, gently nibbles his bottom lip, licks the bow of the top, taking the time to study his features while he’s preoccupied by the tight hot suck of her cunt, something he’s never felt. All mine, she marvels, observing his reactions – the overwhelmed wrinkle of his brow, the delicious flush in his cheeks, the parted O of surprise on his pink mouth. She rocks against him, smiling at the alternating vise-like hold and loose massage of his hands on her hips.

He comes quickly, which she doesn’t mind. Clutching at her and moaning, he looks baffled, hands bracing along her lower back and shoulders, bottomed out inside of her. He keeps cursing low against her neck, thrusting up. She strokes the back of his neck, nails carding through his hair. It is unbelievably soft, black rabbit fur, just right.

Betty reaches down to feel his cock twitching inside of her, curls her fingers around his balls, and he whines, teeth finding her clavicle. Now, that wasn’t so scary, was it? She kisses his temple again, tastes his sweat on her lips, salt mixing with sweet. Not so scary, she tells herself.

Her skin still vibrates with adrenaline. She falls back, stretching out on the forest floor with her palm on her sternum. Her heart is racing beyond her, and she tries to calm herself down with the trees, the giant nightlight in the sky. The trees haven’t gotten all their leaves back from winter, but it lets the full moon through, lighting up the entire clearing. She feels so good inside, light as air, glowy, but like she might explode.

He slowly lays out next to her, nestling into the duff. His little finger touches hers, and he leaves it there. Her pulse slows with the contact.

They stare up through the trees, catching their breath. She feels his come leaking out, shivers with the feel of it. Better than she could have ever imagined.

His hand slips over hers in a way that makes her think of tectonic plates shifting over each other, his fingers playing through her own, creating dangerous friction. He draws it across the short distance, and she feels his warm lips against her knuckles. It draws her toward him, rolling onto her side, leaning up on her hand to regard him, the serenity in his sprawl.

Licking her lips, she reaches out to touch him, her hand hovering above his chest. His smile gives her permission to explore, smoothing her hand over the baby fat on his stomach, feeling out the solid muscle beneath it, the spread of his ribs, the subtle relief of the V slanting from his hipbones to his softening cock. His skin is feverishly hot.

“You okay?” she asks and immediately regrets it. She doesn’t want to know, especially if he isn’t.

He rests his hand atop hers again, disarming smile in place. “Yeah.”

She sighs with relief, laying herself out, wrapping her entire body around him. He turns, enveloping her in his arms, and there is a new earnestness in his movements, responding to her without uncertainty. He pulls her against him, letting her hook her leg around his thigh, his palm hard and insistent at her lower back, and they must look like two snakes fucking on the forest floor, desperate and eager.

“I love you,” he whispers, and she tenses, keeping her gaze below his chin.

He swallows, and she tracks the slow bob of his Adam’s apple, the tick in his jaw as he processes his confession, but she focuses on the physical reactions, the living evidence of him. The words don’t quite make sense to her, but it could be because she didn’t predict them, certainly not in the way he delivered them. He didn’t say it like a newly deflowered virgin might stupidly admit or an asshole would leer looking for seconds, but in the way she knows he has for a while.

“I love you, too,” she says before she can think twice about it. She does. She loves him to the point of delirium, to the point she will kill him, if only to keep him.

Betty rolls on top of him, bringing her knees tight to his thighs. He doesn’t hesitate, rising to meet her, hands skimming up her back and smoothing along her shoulder blades. His nails find her skin, sending sparks through her flesh. “I like you like this,” she tells him, thinking to herself, never stop touching me.

When she unbuttons the front of her dress, he hums in appreciation, dipping his head to nose between her bare breasts. He nuzzles one with his cheek, and she clenches around nothing, needing something. He can’t be anyone else’s, she thinks desperately, gasping as he closes his mouth around her nipple.

He’s hard again, cock nudging against her thigh. One more time. Just one more, please.

She moans as she sinks down around him, easing into the pleasant stretch, the scratched itch. “You feel so good,” she marvels, rocking hard against him.

“You probably don’t know how fucking good you feel,” he mutters against her breast, licking her skin. She laughs, but he cuts it off when he nips her nipple, a love bite, before spreading his mouth over her breast and lightly biting down. Betty loses the small cry, and it sounds too wanton, too alarmed that he could do something she wouldn’t expect but would mess her up. She rocks herself more roughly on his cock, and he bites down harder, causing her nails to carve along the back of his neck.

She needs to come this time, with him, tucking her fingers down between her legs, sighing as she touches his cock move in and out of her. He suddenly nudges her hand out of the way, replacing her fingers with his own, and she keens, knocking their teeth together into a sloppy kiss.

“What a good student,” she praises, brushing her thumb across his spit-slick bottom lip.

“Good teacher,” he returns, helping her bounce on his dick. He licks her thumb, briefly sucks it before biting the tip. Bity bunny. She loves it.

Betty’s insides start condensing, reaching for that ever ebbing and flowing edge. She feels at war with herself, wanting it, craving it, needing it, yet frightened by it, desperate to draw it out. He watches her, trying to hold himself back for her. He probably won’t make it, but she appreciates the effort. She adores it. You’re too perfect.

He climaxes first, but she’s so close, close enough to reach it before he’s too soft. He groans in disbelief feeling her clench and flutter around his cock, too oversensitive and spent, but he lets her, guiding her rocking, keeping firm pressure on her clit that makes her head spin.

When he draws her close afterwards, she realizes she is shivering, phantom jolts low in her belly. He runs light kisses across her jaw, licking beneath her ear. She closes her eyes tight, needy adrenaline bleeding through feel-good endorphins. She hugs him to her, nails digging into his shoulders. You have to be mine. Now, you definitely have to be mine.

She nudges him backwards, his eyes meeting hers, trusting, accepting. He loves her, and she didn’t know it. Sneaky rabbit. With gentle pressure, she guides him to lay out on the forest floor. His black hair disappears into the soil, his body pale against it, almost glowing. Be where I can always find you.

“Close your eyes,” she bids, and he obeys, smiling up at her as those long, black eyelashes drop to rest against his perfect cheekbones.

Her hands land on either side of his head, memorizing him like this. There’s not an inkling of doubt or mistrust on his face, almost innocent. Perfect. Just right.

She didn’t bring anything with her because she didn’t plan to kill him tonight, and for a brief second, she wonders if that means something. She could pick another time, plan better. He’s too perfect like this. Would next time be as right, with all the pieces slotting into place, fitting neatly against one another?

Her hand brushes against a rock, and then she knows. It was always going to be tonight.

Her fingers close around the chunk of jagged granite as she leans in to whisper in his ear, “I love you.”

Eyes closed, he responds in kind, thumbs massaging the slope of her thighs. She drags the rock with her, rising above him, taking it all in, his accepting repose. He repeats the words a final time moments before the rock smashes into the side of his forehead.

The resounding crack reverberates through her arms, feeling like lightning in her chest. He doesn’t move to stop her, can’t, unable to defend himself against the second one landing right below the first, the crack widening.

She can’t bring herself to do a third, the bloody rock slipping from her fingers to the ground. She stares wide-eyed at him, the wound gaping at her.

He lifts his hand, but she is too stunned to move, her eyes absorbing every detail, his shattered skull, blood leaking from his ear, his nose, streaming down his forehead. He says her name, weakly, reaching for her. Her alarmed inhale seizes in her throat hearing him speak with his head yawning at her.

“Betty,” he garbles, fingers brushing her thigh. He somehow finds her limp hand dangling at her side, tripping over her bloody fingertips. “Betty,” he chokes. “Okay.”

Her fingers curl against his own on contact, and then she realizes she is crying, moaning low. A soft purr of pain rises from her diaphragm. It is constant and tender, emerging from an unknown place. It’s not like Sweet Pea or Reggie Mantle or Dilton Doiley. It’s all perfect. There is no trace of distress even as he struggles to breathe. He’s not fighting. All perfect.

And all wrong. And too late.

His hand drops, a soft thump against the duff, his entire body deflating like those fucking Christmas decorations. His skull continues to bleed, seeping more slowly. She extends a hand, too afraid to check, but her fingers feel beneath his jawline, pressing up against the soft spot tucked under the bones. It is there, as weak as his voice, tremulous, struggling involuntarily.

Too late. She bends down, her fingers skimming through his hair one last time, black and soft as rabbit fur, exactly as she imagined. Betty noses his neck, under his ear, rubbing her cheek against his shoulder. He’s still so warm, and her insides are warm, too, supernova bright, but it continues to purr with pain. Perfect and wrong, she kisses his ruined temple, letting the dull, achy moan escape.

After a couple minutes, she rises slowly to her feet. She feels heavy, vision blurry, like she’s looking through a film of ether. She feels like that, vaporous but crowded, under pressure. Her eyes scan the clearing, the evidence of their bodies writhing in the moss and old leaves, wonders if there is residual warmth in those small pockets of earth.

She spots his beanie by the beech, dragging her feet over and picking it up. Bits of leaf stick to the wool, and she takes time to pick them out, dusting it off on her thigh.

Gazing around the clearing once more, she thinks she did this too messy. She should have planned better. She had time. She rushed it. She could have waited. It was too messy, she thinks, considering the bloody rock at her feet, the bloody fingerprints she left on his body, her DNA all over him, his DNA all inside her.

She picks up the rock, her jacket, and turns to leave the opposite way they came. Her eyes land on him one last time, her fantasy come to fruition, the tableau complete. It’ll last, she reassures herself, feeling full, but her gaze falls on his hand, the one that reached for her. Betty – okay.

A small floating glow catches her eye in the periphery. She tilts her head a little, too tired to turn all the way, but when she sees it, understands what it is, it arrests her attention. There by the beech where she took him, bumbling around the trunk, a lone firefly.

Chapter Text

She sets the crown on the desk and immediately has the urge to hide it. Resting next to her laptop, her Pentels and baby blue Moleskine, it looks wrong amongst these innocuous things. It looks like an insult. It is too well-loved, too hard-earned to be an inconspicuous object tossed in with her office sundries. This culmination of months-long want, it needs to be where no one else can find it.

Betty rubs the wool between her fingers like she’s stroking a rabbit’s foot for good luck. That’s what you are, she thinks fondly, my lucky jackrabbit. What he will always be in her mind, a perfect memory. A memory.

She removes the first drawer and stashes the beanie in the small space near the back. Resetting the drawer, she makes sure it is flush with the frame. Good enough for now.

Turning toward the restroom, she stops, doubles back, staring at her desk. No, it doesn’t feel right. She pulls the drawer out and grabs the beanie. It needs to be better, somewhere more secure, more deserving. He deserves more.

She grabs the anthology of mythologies she bought after Cheryl Blossom’s party, the volume he selected from the shelf, musing to her that he wanted to steal them all. She bought a copy from Tinny’s a few days later, a chunky tome with a red hardcover and gold-edged pages.

Finding the bowie knife she used to disembowel Dilton Doiley, she carves a square into the book’s innards, gutting it and dumping the chunk of pages into the trash. Then, gingerly, like laying down an infant to sleep, she nestles the beanie within the new cranny, his new home. Betty replaces it on the shelf in its designated spot with the other encyclopedias. It looks stark against the black and grey spines of her medical textbooks, but it’s a secret message only to her.

Satisfied, she heads for the bathroom, trailing mud across the hardwood. Her hands are moderately clean from rinsing them in the Sweetwater, but the rest of her looks savage in the mirror, fresh from sacrificing a virgin to some pagan god, she thinks with terrible amusement.

Her breath gets stuck in her chest for a moment. She massages her sternum, forcing breath through it, deep and even. Despite the ache, she glows underneath the dirt and the blood flecked across her cheeks and neck and collected beneath her fingernails.

Unbuttoning her dress, she finds a bruise beneath her left breast, faint teeth marks on her right, living evidence of him. Baring her neck, she presses her fingers around the kiss mark sucked beneath her chin, watches the skin around it pale and flush with the pressure. Bity bunny. He wanted to leave his mark on her, leave a lasting impression. The ache in her hips and the spaces around the bones let her know there will be bruises there, too. He will last. At least for a little while. At least on the surface.

She grips the counter, letting herself feel the remnants of his hands on her, like a vestigial limb that will wither and fall off in time. Too little time.

He was hiding, too. I love you. Was he afraid of her? Or did he know? Did he know what she was, what she was going to do to him? Nonetheless, he followed her. He wanted her. Have you ever seen a dead body?

Betty – okay. Betty – okay. Betty, it’s okay. Don’t cry. I love you. I know.

He knew. He hid from her. He knew, and he came anyway. Betty’s hands grip and relax, grip and relax, holding the bathroom counter as she rocks her body into the porcelain.

His hesitation had nothing to do with performance anxiety. He knew she was going to kill him like he knew she killed Sweet Pea and Reggie and Dilton. He knew he was going to die. Hunted. Giving in. He wanted to be eaten. She smelled the death wish on him from the beginning. It was written on the fucking page. To be loved is to be consumed. One of his favorite themes, and like her, he took it in the literal sense.

She felt that when their fingertips touched. His skull opened on the forest floor, and yet he reached for her. She felt that. Didn’t she?

Betty releases the counter, rocks her feet back to flat on the tile. No. He had no idea what had happened to him, what she had done to him. With half his head caved in, how could he have known what was happening to him? That purr of pain rises from her belly again.

She buries her face in her hands. It’s confirmation bias. It’s pathetic. She laughs and shakes her head at her reflection. Why does this feel different? Why is she trying to rationalize with herself? She got what she wanted.

Would you have done it differently? If she could, she would do it all over again. She would do it forever. How else could she show she cared? She loves him.

Letting her ruined dress puddle at her feet, she steps into the shower. The water feels colder than usual. She feels hot, feverish, her skin and flesh burning with it. He’s still inside her. At least for a little while longer.

Her hand slips down her belly, over the soft swell below her navel to tuck her fingers up into her cunt. She strokes the pleasant ache he left, remembering the fullness of him. Pulling her hand out, his cum pools in her palm, slicks her fingers. His mouth tasted lovely, clean and liquid and hot, like heat, like the word heat. She licks at the small puddle with all the delicateness of a kitten in a milk saucer, sucks her index finger and delights in the last of him. His cum tastes sweet, too much sugar in his diet, the undertones of acidity from his coffee addiction.

You are so perfect.

She holds out her hand, lets the hot water wash away the last living evidence of him, of her, of them.

It’s over. Always more quickly than she hopes, even when she tries to slow it down in her head. Humans are so fragile, and she had no time to make it last.

She convinces herself of this, that she didn’t have a choice. She comforts herself with the knowledge that he belongs to her now, but the good part, the part she craves and builds up in her head, the fulfillment of her fantasy, it fleets. It must. But, it doesn’t hurt any less for it to be over. It feels unbearable, more unbearable than satisfying, and she doesn’t understand. It never has before.

Her gut purrs and purrs and purrs with agony. You were so perfect.

She wakes up late the next morning, later than she should. Her knees hurt and her hips ache. It feels like the marks he left are lighting up like sirens. Rolling over, she checks her phone, half-expecting a text asking her out for coffee to exchange ideas for their next composition, but her home screen is blank.

Plodding across the room in her fluffy bunny slippers, she pulls out the encyclopedia of mythologies. Cracking the spine, she finds the crown where she left it, the very proof it happened in the dried blood blacker than the dark grey wool. There won’t be any more texts from him.

Even so, she dresses herself, swaps her skirt for jeans to hide the cuts and bruises, and heads for their café because he likes the butcher paper they lay on the tables with cups of colored pencils and half-eaten crayons. She suspects he has nibbled on a few himself. She would sip her latte while he doodled and rambled about his writing, hoping to write as much as possible over Spring Break, asking about hers, if she’ll write, too. If you do, will you share it with me? I like your writing.

It’s not too much to stomach?

His tickled smile peeking out from behind his palm, the point of his colored pencil pausing over the sunbeams sparking out from a demented sun. You’re like a clinical Poe or a sociopathic Grimm. I really like it. I think your medical background makes it a lot more interesting. It’s unique.

She spills half her latte on the service counter. The barista offers to make her another, but she says she should cut back on her dairy anyway. Her diet has gone downhill since she started spending time with him. Alice would not approve. She bites her tongue.

Their table is open in the corner, and when she looks, the barista asks if her boyfriend is coming later. She smiles politely. “Who?” No more questions follow.

She takes her latte to go, stepping out onto the main thoroughfare. Too much light gets through her sunglasses, making her eyes ache. She feels hungover, like that night she did too much coke with Veronica back in high school, two months before she found her calling, something better to replace the coke and the Adderall and the Xanax, something that never gives her a hangover. Until now.

It’s balmy for early spring, but last night was warm, warm enough to produce a single firefly. His spontaneous intentions created it, something he said offhand, and it was like his words alone were enough to pull such an impossible thing into existence. He was a dark fairytale come to life.

She dumps her latte into the trashcan and doubles back into the alleyway, following the path they took last night. It takes longer to reach the clearing, but she is exhausted, feet dragging.

During the day, it still looks like a fairytale, dewy and green and bright, the Sweetwater murmurous and constant in the background, the half-leaved maples and beeches letting in dappled sunlight. It’s warm enough for the dragonflies to be out hunting.

She normally comes back the following night to clean up, never has time for it the night of, because for how meticulously she plans her curriculum, her future, her fucking wardrobe, she never plans this part of her life well. It is ruled by instinct, and though she attempted to plan him – best laid plans of mice and men. He would’ve liked that one. 

Everything looks as she left it. Except. She visually measures the distance between his body and the beech where she first fucked him. Except him. She is certain he was farther from it, but he’s almost to the trunk.

Her insides seize up, muscles contracting, body growing lighter for flight. Her eyes search the tree line for movement, evidence of broken brush. Did someone move him? Does someone know? God, she was stupid to come back here. Someone could be leading the police here right now, and here she is, foolishly standing next to her latest kill in broad daylight.

She scours the clearing for any residual evidence she might’ve left, a barrette, lip balm that could’ve fallen from her pocket. Then, she sees it, some kind of goop, a small patch of it from where she left him – vomit. There’s evidence of dragged boots in the duff from the spot she killed him. Or thought she killed him.

Her gaze cuts back to the body, prone, jeans still undone, shirt and jacket across the clearing near the beech. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t look like he’s breathing.

She stops next to his body, staring down at him. His face is a bloody mess, but the rest of him looks the same, unspoiled and perfect.

She kneels and nervously sets her hand on his chest, gentle at first, fearing and hoping to feel warmth there. A small ember flickers in her stomach. He is warm, and it instantly blooms in her chest, feeding the glow. Within seconds, she feels returned pressure against her palm, his shallow, stilted breaths slow and labored. Bending down, she hears them struggling to get out, and when she checks his pulse, it is tremulous and frightened but fighting, the bird weak but alive. She smells sourness on his breath, leftover vomit stench.

Betty snatches her hand back, reeling, her heart lurching. It sends a small, alarmed grunt up from the back of her throat. Not possible. 

The fracture in his skull appears to have stopped bleeding, but it doesn’t look any better than it did last night, ghastly and brutal. There’s dried blood from his ear, streaking his upper lip, evidence of severe trauma. His right eye is swollen shut, ugly red and purple bulging around the wound. He shouldn’t have made it through the night. What are you?

Tentatively, she reaches out once more, fingers brushing his chest, feeling along the smooth curve of his clavicle. “Jughead?” No response. She taps his shoulder. “Jughead.”

His breaths come short and ragged, barely audible. It could be agonal gasping, but then he suddenly moans low and unhappy, his hand edging along the ground toward her, following her voice. It grazes her scraped knee, making her sigh, another hitched little animal noise escaping from her belly.

His mouth works at something, chapped lips weakly murmuring the words he said last night. The cramp in her chest dissolves, melting and dripping some unknown substance through her organs. Her head drops to his chest, temple to the handle of his sternum, listening to the weak fluttering of his heart, dying bird in a cage. It is an impossible sound. Betty – okay. 

She needs to kill him. She needs to do it now and do it right. Smother him with his jacket or bash his head again, cave it the rest of the way, leave none of his pretty face. This is her chance to save herself.

Betty returns the moan into his chest, no vibrating in response to his struggling heartbeat. Turning her face, she stares at his chin, the mark she left in the same spot as her own. Reaching out, she touches the purpling bruise, fingers tripping up and over the point of his chin, over his lips, the full bottom, the cupid’s bow. All the pink is gone, but she feels his breath wisping across her finger pads. 

You wanted to kill him again. You wished for it. Here’s your chance. It’s not fair. It’s mercy. It’s bad form.

She leans over him, studying his face, the bulbous swell around his ruined skull, his purpled eye swollen beyond recognition, but the other half of his face untouched, perfect. Carding fingers through his soft black hair, she marvels at him. “My rabbit,” she murmurs, brushing her lips against the trench carving a path from his hairline to his eyebrow. She strokes his hair, listening to his labored breathing. “You’re always defying my probabilities.”

How did she ever think she could do it again? “I should’ve known.” She just needs a little more time to think about it, sleep on it, figure out what this thing is fighting in her chest, fighting in time with his little canary.

When she gets back to her apartment later that evening, she turns on the local news. After Reggie, she started keeping her ear to the ground. She dumped Reggie’s car into some remote pond three miles from his body, but then some swamp rat dragged the pond, and eventually the authorities were crawling all over the area. In contrast, Sweet Pea’s disappearance barely raised a murmur on the horn.

It’s been less than twenty-four hours, though, far too soon for anyone to notice, but when she expects the usual traffic accident or deer problem, she doubletakes at the headline. Front and center in a sea of microphones and flashing lights, Sheriff Jones takes point.

Betty’s knees buckle, dropping onto the couch. She turns up the volume at the same moment the sheriff starts pleading with the public for any information on the whereabouts of his only son. Search parties will be organized and a volunteer center set up at the local Elks Lodge.

Jesus, she thought that would take longer, but then he is the sheriff’s son. Maybe Jughead really does check in with his family every day. He implied it that night, too, that the department has a feeling someone is disappearing people. Three disappearances in three months were bound to raise some concerns, and now a fourth. She bets they have ‘serial killer’ with a question mark on an index card next to a lineup of photos – Sweet Pea, Reggie, Dilton – her bunnies. And now her black jackrabbit joining the fluffle. 

It is tactless, though, being so vocal, splashing himself across every news station within the tri-county area. It’s a good way to move up a serial killer’s timeline, get someone killed. Betty should know. She moved hers as soon as she found out Jughead was the sheriff’s son.

Mr. Jones is panicking. He knows if his son is missing, the likelihood of recovering him alive, let alone his body, is slim to none the longer he waits to look for him. He’s terrified.

Shit.

While Sheriff Jones gave only the bare minimum surrounding his son’s disappearance, Betty reads about the leak in the Sunday paper. Someone snagged an interview with Moose Mason, Jughead’s roommate who is also, apparently, friends with Reggie Mantle. He highlights Jughead’s plans to go to a book reading Friday night with a friend, some girl. Jughead never told anyone it was her, or Moose hadn’t been listening when her name was dropped. 

Either way, she was lucky. Unless they pulled Jughead’s phone records or peeked at his Maple Mingle inbox. She’s splattered all over them. Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

‘I figured he was getting some,’ Moose shrugs off. ‘But then he wasn’t answering his phone, and with what happened to Sweet Pea and Reggie, better safe than sorry.’

The mystery girl becomes the center of the story. Sweet Pea and Reggie both disappeared after a party. No one noticed Dilton Doiley was missing until he failed to report for duty in Virginia, not even his ailing mother.

The journalist generates a few interesting theories. Her favorite, though, is that two people are involved, the young woman, the bait, and the man, the hook. Because a single woman could not possibly be responsible. To be fair, the statistics don’t support it, but Betty knows there are always outliers.

She tosses the paper onto the coffee table and bangs her head against the couch cushions. Slumping, she forces herself to take deep breaths. It’s fine. This is fine. Jughead knows plenty of young women. He’s on Mila Novak’s email list, and he got into Cheryl Blossom’s party, though she still doesn’t know how. Maybe he knows somebody. Maybe Reggie.

Betty turns on the morning news, hoping someone will address the leak, disprove some theories. Sure enough, there is Sheriff Jones announcing sweeping search parties of the woods behind Tinny’s. Betty turns off the television, tossing the remote onto the coffee table. Fine. Someone made the decision for her.

She crumples the paper and stuffs it into her recycling bin, shoving it all the way to the bottom.

She should’ve fucking killed him. She didn’t plan this well at all. She should’ve taken her time. She never gets so close to her victim. She should’ve learned her lesson the first time.

Okay. She takes more deep breaths. Okay. She will make one last sweep of the clearing, find anything that could incriminate her, and if he’s still alive, she will smother him. She has to do it soon. If the search starts at Tinny’s, it will take them roughly an hour to reach his body depending on their spacing and pacing. If the first search doesn’t find his body, she will come back tonight and bury him. There’s a nurse log, the perfect spot to hide him. It’s a good plan, even if it hinges on too many uncontrollable possibilities.

In case she runs into the party, she wears hiking clothes. If the search reaches the clearing, she hopes she can blend in with the rest of the party. She won’t have time to bury him now, so she arms herself with nothing but what can fit into her pockets, a hefty bag and a flashlight. 

She takes the trail behind her four-plex, the one that led her home last night, the one she chose for its convenient access to the woods. The clearing is two miles from her apartment and requires crossing the Sweetwater, but she found an old footbridge her freshman year that gives her easy access to either side of the river. She is pretty sure no one knows about it, and that works to her advantage.

His body is right where she left it. There are no new patches of vomit, no evidence he moved from the spot since Saturday morning. He couldn’t crawl any further.

Betty walks several circles around the clearing, searching the ground for anything she missed and finds nothing, no shiny lip balm cap peeking from beneath a clump of moss or – her underwear. She left her underwear behind. How the hell did she miss that? That should’ve come with the rock. How could you be so stupid?

She shines the flashlight around the clearing, checking the brush, around the roots of the trees. It should be near his jacket, but kicking it aside, she doesn’t find it. Perhaps an animal took them. Her gaze cuts back to Jughead sprawled on the ground. Or he took them, hoping to crawl out of the woods with evidence of her. 

After retrieving his jacket and t-shirt, Betty drops to her knees next to him, eyes running over his jeans, looking for the telltale bulge of her panties. All she finds are the hard candies in his left pocket and his keys in the right. Where the hell could they have gone then? She checks his jacket pockets but only finds his cell phone.

Oh. He was crawling towards his jacket. To get his phone. What were you thinking letting him live? What were you thinking not checking for his fucking cell phone? Why is she so myopic when he’s involved?

This would be concrete proof of their connection, and she thanks her lucky stars she got here first. She should be more grateful he didn’t reach his jacket and call his father.

Repeating her mistakes, pure hubris because she got away with it the first time. But, how could she not? He is so much more perfect than the last one, it pales in comparison. That one barely measures up, she thinks, eyes running across his bare chest, the beauty mark beneath his right nipple, the gentle slope of his stomach leading to the light dusting of hair beneath his navel, such aesthetically pleasing proportions.

“Hey, rabbit,” she whispers, watching his chest, his stomach, waiting for movement. 

“Rabbit?”

She tucks her fingers up beneath his chin, pressing against his carotid. Nothing. She increases the pressure, feeling for his pulse, leaning down and pressing her ear to his chest. Nothing. No tremorous thump beneath his sternum, no struggling flutter in his neck. Nothing. His skin is cold. 

Nothing. She hovers the back of her hand over his parted lips, waiting to feel a wisp of breath, anything. Empty. “Jughead,” she murmurs, stroking his unblemished cheek, expecting that responding moan again, his tongue grappling with her name. “Jughead.” Nothing.

She repeats the checks in rapid succession, temple to sternum, index and middle finger hard beneath his jaw, back of hand to lips. Nothing. He is cold.

“Jughead,” she says to his chest, hoping it will call the warmth back. His intentions created the firefly, something from nothing, despite unfavorable probabilities. He was alive yesterday, an impossibility. He should be alive today. If he was alive yesterday, he should be alive right now. He wasn’t beholden to the laws of probabilities. He transcended reality; he didn’t live in the natural world. He lived inside his head, but she knows from his writing, he dies there all the time.

“Jughead, wake up,” she bids so quietly, afraid to say it louder, afraid of what she will hear in her voice if she does.

It’s a fairytale. It’s a dream. He’s her miracle. He survived her. She repeats this over and over in her head, listening for his heartbeat to return. No one has ever survived her.

Betty slides forward, rolling herself up to hover above the ruined half of his face. “Rabbit, run,” she whispers. Rabbit at rest, her thoughts echo back. She dips down to kiss his ravaged skull, the corner of his broken eyebrow. “Rabbit, run,” she says again only for the same words to come back at her from their nothing place. Rabbit at rest.

Dried blood on her lips, she stares at his pretty, ruined face, praying for a twitch of his ear, a wrinkle of his nose. Empty. Something snuffs the light in her chest.

Sitting up, she drapes the jacket and t-shirt over her arm, doublechecking she has everything else on her person. All set. Taking one final look of the clearing, the fairytale setting, the fantasy complete, she licks her lips; it tastes like iron and old. Nothing left for her here.

Betty marches back to her apartment, crossing the footbridge, her feet following the familiar path on autopilot.

In her living room, she takes off all her clothes except her underwear and pulls his t-shirt over her head. Sliding her arms into the jacket sleeves, she hugs the denim and clumping sherpa around her, laying herself out on the couch. She falls asleep to the sound of the news, the volume low, inundated with the smell of him, the last waning evidence of him.

When she wakes up, she discovers the search parties never came within a mile of his clearing. They went in the opposite direction of the Sweetwater. Betty shrugs out of his jacket and takes off his shirt, leaving both on her couch. She trudges into the bathroom, slips into a fresh set of clothes, and then walks five blocks down the road to use the payphone outside the High Five corner store.

In front of the blinking neon hand and dollar sign, she punches three numbers. Dispatch picks up on the third ring. What is your emergency? What is her emergency? It was me. Instead, Betty tells her where to find the body of Jughead Jones and hangs up.

Home is a five-hour drive away. She didn’t want to come back, but her hand is forced. Luckily, her mother sent her several emails in the last couple weeks requesting her presence, so it doesn’t look like she’s leaving in hurry.

Rolling up the circular driveway to the big white colonial with the red door, she wishes she’d stayed in her apartment in Riverdale, holed up on the couch wearing his jacket and watching the local news and waiting for that abrupt knock on her front door. Instead, she adopts radio silence, completely unplugging from it all. She doesn’t want to know.

She wants to hide in her bedroom, draw all the black shutters and darken all the pink, but her mother won’t let her. And perhaps that’s better. She needs the distraction to keep herself from doing something stupid, making any more foolish phone calls.

Her mother comments at least three time on her appearance, that she’s put on a little weight since Christmas, and it shows. Diet is everything, Elizabeth, she reminds her, swiping thumbs under her bruised sleepless eyes. You look stressed out, sweetheart, she coos, handing her bottles of mother’s little helper and study buddies, the unforgettable pharmacopeia of Betty’s adolescence.

Her father greets her with a warm hug, and it feels so good, Betty holds on longer than she normally would, clutching at the soft blue cashmere of his sweater, drawing in the safety of vetiver and cedarwood, the forest. Afterwards, she regrets it because then he knows something is wrong. He smiles at her and welcomes her home, but his distance grows after, letting her mother take the reigns while he tries to figure it out. It won’t take him long, not with her history.

So, she hides and occupies herself with her mother’s premeditated social schedule, luncheons at the club, Mrs. Water’s third daughter’s bridal shower, and the annual Fredick’s garden party.

Betty prepares herself like a prized china doll. She moisturizes her face and ices her eyes and forces herself into sleep with a cut-up xanny bar. It feels just like old times, and there’s something horribly comforting in the familiarity of being under the influence again, numbing the beast.

Betty understands why Alice wanted her home. Her mother introduces her to at least ten different young men at every event, reviewing her virtues, outlining her academic achievements, highlighting her flawless appearance – summa cum laude in her class and Brown Medical and her shiny blonde hair, imagine all those lovely little toe-headed children, guaranteed genius.

What’s your senior thesis on again, sweetheart? As soon as Betty skims the surface of her research on the mechanisms of antibiotic resistance in H. pylori, every pair of eyes glaze over, and she mentally bows out, lets whatever faceless suitor in front of her take the conversation wheel in their own selfish directions. Jughead always tried to understand what she did, patiently let her put it into layman’s terms for him. And he liked it, liked hearing about, liked hearing her talk about it.

Eventually, all the pastel bleeds into one monstrous bland Easter egg of the long wait at Reveille and Trent will be at Brown Law and lovely weather for sailing. She gets five offers to go sailing, twice by the same gentleman. It all feels very outdated and Victorian, and her mother treats her like she’s still a demure virgin. Betty’s mind recedes further with the thought, everything turning inward, leaving nothing but the shell.

Periodically, she feels her mother’s knuckles beneath her chin. Eyes up, teeth out, Elizabeth. Stand up straight, dear.

Betty escapes to the restroom. In the mirror, she looks normal, white linen summer dress, blonde hair curled by her mother that morning, cheeks shiny and pink. The pretty shell is in place, but it feels like someone filled her insides with steel wool, and it’s cutting her up, shredding organs and scouring her thoracic cavity. She’s not hungry. She feels like she ate something bad, and it’s eating her.

Pop a Xanax, sweetheart. Smile. Teeth. Betty beams at her reflection, but the light in her chest is gone. Beautiful, sweetheart.

She sits on the toilet, clutching her cramping stomach, leaning her head against the wall and wondering how to get it out of her. Then, she sees her underwear, the blood spot in the center. Well, that’s some good news. Except for the red on her white dress.

At night, she spreads Jughead’s jacket on her bed and sleeps inside it. It still smells like him and the forest floor, soil and tang of boy sweat and a smidge of sweet and whatever else that permeates him but cannot be described and drives her wild and ravenous and calm all at the same time. It’s the only way she gets any sleep. That and another Xanax. Old habits dying hard. She’s regressing, and she knows it, but. Betty – okay.

The third night she tries to get off with his beanie pressed to her face. She inhales roughly, fingers working insistent circles over her clit, but the friction goes nowhere. She got more sparks from his fingers playing over her own after she fucked him for the first time, probably could’ve gotten off just by holding his fucking hand.

Betty lines up her trophies on the bedside table and tries again, focusing on each memory, the thrill, the glow – the decapitated snake, the crack of the pistol, Dilton’s sad, wrecked sobbing. It’s always worked. Betty – okay. Burning rubber. Old blood on her fingers.

On Friday, she packs her freshly laundered spring clothes, courtesy of Alice Cooper. No, no, darling I insist. Betty notices a few blouses missing, replaced by ones she has never seen. Like Betty’s wardrobe still needs Alice’s stamp of approval.

Looking around her childhood bedroom where Tinker Bell threw up on the walls, she wonders if she keeps this aesthetic because she genuinely likes it or for its convenience. Her lure is pink perfection, and it rarely fails her. She’s at a hundred percent efficient right now, which should be a good feeling, an achievement, but then she remembers how she got there –

“Betty.”

A soft knock at her door forces Betty to school her expression. Voice light as a feather, “Enter.”

Her dad gingerly opens the door, peeking around the edge to make sure she is decent, ever the gentleman. “Hey, sweetheart, you have a moment?”

Betty smiles beatifically and nods, neatly folding another silk blouse and placing it in her luggage, obscuring the denim of Jughead’s jacket, lost amongst the half-dozen nearly identical blouses.

Her dad takes a seat on the bed, starts helping her fold khakis. “We haven’t had many chances to talk,” he points out, handing over a pressed pair of capris. “Your mother’s kept you busy.”

“She’s doing it for my own good, right?” Betty rationalizes, though she knows she probably won’t marry any of those boys. At least not right now. She won’t marry for love either. She kills the things she loves. Maybe her mother knows her better than she thought.

Her father doesn’t confirm or deny the assumption, just keeps folding clothes while Betty gathers her things from her vanity. Blocking her father’s view, she collects her trophies into her toiletry bag. Jughead is at the bottom of her luggage.

She notes her mirror is still littered with photos and random notes from high school. Why did she keep these? Looking up and meeting her father’s gaze in the mirror, she pretends nothing is wrong.

“How’s your thesis coming?”

“Good, dad, it’s done. I defend in a couple weeks.” She resists the urge to rip every photo down, burn the whole lot of memories framing her mirror. It was her red phase, and though it was the start of something transformative, the photos mean nothing. Half the people in them are dead anyway.

He says he will try to make it, but she tells him not to bother. “I know you’re busy, too.”

“I can make time, sweetheart, to support you.”

Betty freezes. It is the same genial, golden-father tone, his I love you to the moon and back voice, and that’s precisely why it sets her off. She hears it. He knows.

She swivels on her heels, saintly smile in place. “I’d love to have you there.” If she fights him on it, then he will definitely know. She zips up her toiletries bag and stuffs it into her luggage, ignoring his interrogation eyes.

He doesn’t smile back. He knows her game too well. “Betty, have you had any more of those urges?”

Betty gives him a questioning look like she doesn’t what he’s talking about, leaning down to kiss his cheek. “I’m fine, daddy.” Daughterly peck, shoulder squeeze, jaunty bounce of her blonde ponytail.

“Honey, I know,” he finally lays down. “You think I don’t follow the news in Riverdale?”

Betty maintains, expression neutral, closing her luggage. It’s hard to get the zipper closed. Her mother gave her too many new shirts. She waits for him to say it out loud. He could be referring to something else. She prays he is referring to something else.

“Those boys going missing.” He covers her hand with his own, so patient it chafes.

Betty pats his knuckles with her free hand. “Boys will be boys,” she excuses lightly, girlish lilt, open smile.

He gives her that look, disappointment. You screwed up again, sweetheart.

Betty squeezes his hand, shaking her head. “Dad, it wasn’t me.”

“I have to clean up after you again,” he concludes. He sounds disappointed but resigned to it, like it will always be his responsibility.

She continues to pretend, unlike last time when the police came to their house. “You don’t have to clean up anything because there’s nothing to clean up.” She couldn’t pretend when there were cops on the front porch.

“They found that boy, the sheriff’s son,” he informs her. She figured that would be the outcome. She’s the one who called in the anonymous tip. “He’s alive.”

The entire drive home Betty tunes into every Riverdale radio station on her phone, listening for updates on the investigation. She convinced her dad to let her go back to school, but he told her to contact him if anything happens. I can make some phone calls, Betty. We can clear it up. Like last time, backroom conversations with the mayor, pressure on the detectives, and then her father making a special trip to the hospital. I didn’t do anything, dad.

By the time she reaches the New York border, she can’t stand it anymore and pulls into a rest stop to troll the Riverdale Register’s website for any additional news. After she types Jughead Jones into the search box, the first headline is Missing Young Man Found.

There’s a grainy photo of their clearing, police tape, an ambulance on the service road where she lured Sweet Pea. It is one of the few access points to that neck of the woods. Then, there is Jughead strapped into a gurney being rolled into the back with two paramedics, followed closely by his father in uniform, his campaign hat falling off and landing in the mud.

Her eyes continue down the page. Victim in critical condition at Riverdale General. No statement given.

Another grainy photo, Jughead’s visage grinning out from the page, his senior high school portrait. It is probably the only professional photo of him and the most recent. He looks so painfully young, barely a year ago. It should feel good knowing she took that, she ate that, but she feels like she wants to throw up. From nerves or something else, she doesn’t know.

An anonymous tip helped locate nineteen-year-old Jughead Jones. Sheriff’s Department gave no comment. Sheriff Jones grateful to have his son back alive. ‘A blessing.’

There’s no mention of any other bodies discovered near the clearing. Sweet Pea and his motorcycle are less than a mile from that service road, but it’s all white noise. Her black jackrabbit is alive. Worse for wear but breathing. He survived her.

She hugs her phone to her chest, leaning back against the headrest with a sigh of relief, little glow fluttering. You’re alive.

Then, the dread returns. What happens when he wakes up? If he’s not already awake.

Chapter Text

The hospital feels haunted this time of night. The night nurses are half-asleep at their stations. It takes them five minutes to respond to a patient call, listening to the incessant beep, resentment curdling their face. The residents work on their paperwork, look over tests, hide in the breakroom or sleep with their beepers next to their ears. Betty has this to look forward to in four years, but she has never required much sleep, much like Jughead.

In the reception area, she scans the walls and ceiling for security cameras. Riverdale is a small college town in the middle of rural New York. Riverdale General might have a couple night security guards, but Betty doesn’t spot any surveillance cameras in the corners. As she moves from floor to floor, taking the stairs, this seems to be consistent throughout the hospital.

She peeks out the windows to estimate the distance from each floor to the next. The hospital is built like mismatched blocks stacked on top of one another. If she needed to, she could get onto the roof from some of the patient rooms depending on the wing.

All the doors automatically open to her with pneumatic whooshes of air, like she’s moving through a different world with each successive section, each one its own small microcosm of human suffering – broken hearts, bum lungs, intermediate care for the doomed elderly, and then finally, the intensive care unit.

Betty finds the bright screen listing the patients and room numbers, but there are two Jones on the list, and she has no idea if they would list Jughead given the circumstances, for his own safety.

She hides in an empty room, waiting for the night nurse at the station to get a patient notice. It takes thirty minutes, but eventually there’s the pestering beep, an eyeroll, a sad sigh, and then the nurse marches off on squeaking, orthopedically sound shoes.

Betty hurries around the desk and flips through the files in the organizer on the wall. There he is, F.P. Jones near the top, room 314.

However, once she reaches the corridor, there is a deputy reading a magazine outside Jughead’s door. Shit.

Betty sneaks into another empty patient room, only three doors down from Jughead’s. The deputy is too engrossed in his magazine too notice, or too tired, when he yawns. At the window, she estimates the distance to the second-floor landing, cranes her neck to see if it is the same height at Jughead’s room. She could make it down.

In the bathroom, she starts flushing gauze and disposable towels down the toilet, waiting until the bowl begins to fill, and then she breaks the float ball and the flush valve, causing overflow.

She crosses the hall into an occupied room, watching through the window slot until water starts to flow from beneath the door. It takes about five minutes for the deputy to notice, leaving his post by Jughead’s door and following the growing puddle into the room opposite her.

She doesn’t waste time, slipping out of the room and hurrying down the corridor. Betty peeks through the window, scanning the room for Mr. Jones or the little sister, but the room is blessedly empty at first glance. She opens the door only wide enough to fit through, letting it close behind her with a soft click.

Betty edges up to the corner toward the bathroom, listening through the door. Silence. He’s alone.

The room is quiet except for the measured beeping of the monitors surrounding him, the mechanical hiss and click of the ventilator. He is a mess of wires and tubes, needles stuck into every available vein. His face is almost entirely obscured by the mask, the long plastic tube running from his mouth to the ventilator, his makeshift trachea, the only thing keeping him alive.

They closed the crack in his skull with thick staples, shaving his hairline to accommodate a few. The thin flesh around his eyes and temple and nose are an amalgamation of purple and blue, sallow yellow-green around the edges. 

Betty picks up the medical chart, reviewing the doctor’s illegible scribble. She picks up some of the acronyms from medical terminology class. Abx, intravenous, TBI. Skull fracture, linear, coronal and temporal. Diastatic, coronal suture, fronto-zygomatic, orbital fracture. Potential vision damage to right eye. Induced coma to reduce swelling. Mechanical ventilation administered. The severe dehydration and saline drip near the end pale in comparison to the laundry list of traumas.

She brutalized him, and yet he survived. He was dead when she left him, but here he is, the monitors telling her he is alive.

Betty replaces the clipboard in its holder and takes a seat on the edge of his bed. There’s a knot in her chest that gets tighter and tighter as she picks apart the details on his face, on the monitors surrounding him, tracing the staples in his forehead. The steady but slow beep of his pulse makes her uncomfortable, coupled with the drip from the saline and antibiotics and whatever they are using to sedate him.

She could use a taste herself, still recovering from her binge over Spring Break, but instead, she touches his hand, careful of the IVs, avoiding them. None of that helped her, not over Spring Break, not before, not ever.

His knuckles are scraped, and she wonders when that happened, if his hands spasmed against the ground when she struck him. “Hey, rabbit,” she greets, stroking the pad of his thumb, the only free space on his hand where there are no scrapes, no needles. He doesn’t respond, but all the machines tell her he is alive. At least in the medical sense. 

Her hand moves up to his forehead, finding bare skin between the mask and the bruising, his undamaged hairline. His hair is unwashed. It feels like Sweets, but it’s still him, still soft and fine and so much of it. You’re still my rabbit.

Carefully, she opens the front of his gown, pale, unblemished chest covered with a tangle of wires hooking him up to the machines. They look like they are sucking the life out of him, subsisting off him, giving the illusion of keeping him alive. She wants to rip every single one off his chest, her chest. He doesn’t need them. He’s magic, immortal rabbit in the hat.

Betty gently lays her temple to his chest, needing to hear it herself. She doesn’t trust the machines. The bird isn’t fluttering, not fighting against its cage, but it trills in time with the beeps. Chirp. Thump. Chirp. Thump. He’s warm, warm again. She nuzzles the slope between his shoulder and chest, inhaling deeply, waiting for the smell of him. It is the last thing she needs to check off her list, the final living evidence of him that will satisfy her, but it doesn’t come.

She turns her head, tip of her nose touching his skin, moving up towards his clavicle, inhaling again. Nothing but the sterile empty smell of the hospital, the undertones of rot, like something mildewing, lingering evidence of death.

Betty plants her hand on the other side of his shoulder, getting closer, turning her face all the way to press her nose to his chest. She draws a deeper breath. Nothing. “Where are you?”

She keeps searching, moving up his chest, careful of the wires, again wanting to rip them off to get to the essence of him. She noses around the replacement trachea, her nose moving along his skin, slipping over his collarbone, dipping into the jugular notch, and then there’s a hint of it hidden in that tiny nook. Her lungs fill up with it, a wolf catching the scent of the rabbit through the deep snow, searching, wanting, hungry. She moves up beneath his neck as far as she can go, navigating the ventilator tube, the plastic frame of the mask. There.

She wants to sink her teeth into it. He smells like it, too, as heady as the taste of him. Heat.

“There you are,” she marvels with relief, drawing him inside of her. “You’re alive.” It’s a redeeming breath on the waning ember in her chest.

“Juggie,” she moans, other hand finding his shoulder, slipping further beneath his gown, grasping at the solid warmth of him. “You ate your way out.” Little by little, he did. Her fingers grasp at him, feeling out the wiry muscle of his deltoid, her gamy hare. You’re alive.

Rising, her forehead drags across his chest, taking the remnants of his smell with her. She stares at his relaxed face, the rest of his long eyelashes against his undamaged cheek. Peaceful. Sleeping beauty. Her fingers move from his shoulder to his neck, feeling his pulse, touching the fading mark she left beneath his chin, skimming over the mask.

Do it now.

Her gaze falls on the outlets behind his hospital bed, the oversized plugs hooked up to the monitors and the ventilator, hooked up to him, keeping him alive.

Do it now.

The police left, and her father touched her shoulder. It will be okay, Betty. I’ll take care of it. He didn’t say it like it wasn’t her fault, like this was all a misunderstanding. He said it like it couldn’t have been anybody but her, like he knew it was always going to be her. There was a boy in the hospital waiting to wake up, and when he did, Betty would be – her father did it for her, culled the last rooster, back when she was just doing it for fun, when she saw it as a game. Veronica didn’t think it was a very fun game, but then unlike the boys, they never found Veronica, so she couldn’t give her opinion. For once.

It isn’t a game this time. And perhaps that’s what makes it scarier. She didn’t feel bad letting her father clean up after her the first time. It saved her the trouble.

You’re not a game, she thinks, skimming fingers along his intact hairline.

She should, though. Save herself. Save her family the embarrassment. Save her father.

Save Jughead.

She can’t call her father. Because he will come and finish what she started, no questions asked, like he’s coming to clean up her toys, put everything back into the toybox. You’re not a toy, she swears, stroking his cheekbone.

Save herself. Save her family the embarrassment. Save her father. Don’t be weak.

Save Jughead.

It’s a lopsided list, but she feels the world tilting about her, sliding off the balance. He makes her feel level and out of control all at once. She drops her forehead to his chest again, rubbing his shoulder with her thumb. It feels so good to be touching him again and finding him warm.

Despite her fear of being caught, it hurts less to have him alive than have him dead, and then it is an easier decision. Choose less pain, simple, something she can comprehend. The other stuff, the more confounding elements in the equation, she can tackle those later. She just wants him to be alive.

“You get to live another day,” she cheers, tapping his chin. It is instant disappointment, like Pavlov’s dog, her father in her ear. She is weak.

Peeking out the window, the deputy has returned to his post, magazine open on his lap. He licks his thumb and turns the page, making Betty grumble. Down the hall, a janitor mops up the flood with little enthusiasm.

Betty walks back to over to the exterior windows, reevaluating the drop to the second-floor landing. She’s in luck; it’s not too steep. It means she will have to leave the window open, but she knows she can get out before anyone notices.

She drops from the window onto the roof, letting her knees buckle to soften the landing and the sound. From there, she finds the fire escape down to the ground, and leaves in the direction she came, slipping behind the tree line and following the trail back to her apartment.

If anyone saw her, she will find out by tomorrow. Her father is number one on her speed dial. It was a stupid thing to do, another one to add to the long list of idiocies she’s committed since she first saw him. You would do it again.

Betty falls back against a maple tree, sliding to the ground. She hugs her knees in tight, guarding the glow in her belly. To see him, smell him, hear him living and breathing, he was partially digested but still her black jackrabbit. He survived her. You let him.

She changes into nothing but his t-shirt and cozies up inside his denim sherpa like a security blanket. Retrieving her trophies, she lines them up on the coffee table and then lays out on the sofa, stretching her bare legs along the cushions.

With his beanie on her stomach, she strokes the dark grey wool. The late-night news drones on in the background, single-fatality traffic accident, Easter holiday drowning on the Sweetwater. Her fingers play around the edge of her underwear, picking at the tiny pink bow, teasing beneath the elastic. She strokes her lucky rabbit’s foot, listening to the winning lottery numbers, a dog attack, the weather.

The next segment involves the investigation into the assault on Jughead Jones and its connection to the recent disappearances. Betty’s attention drifts over, seeing that same fuzzy photo on the screen, his uneven grin, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, happy to be in his last year of high school.

She slips her fingers beneath the elastic, traipsing through golden curls, her middle finger teasing her slit. The anchors speculate about the connection of the disappearances to his assault. The university distances itself, even though the president issued a curfew a few days ago. No students on campus grounds after 10 pm.

There’s a shot of Riverdale General, and Betty sighs, index and middle finger teasing herself apart. You’re alive, she remembers, fingers stroking, working wetness through her folds. He wouldn’t smell that way if he were dead.

They flash a photo of Dilton Doiley in his dress uniform. There’s a brief interview with his ailing mother. He was supposed to visit her the following morning. Betty recalls the steam rising from his intestines, his choked little sobs, the taste of his tears as her middle finger circles her clit.

Apparently, Dilton’s father committed suicide ten years ago. His mother hopes he didn’t do the same thing. Betty wonders which she would prefer – that some psycho-killer murdered her son, or the psycho killed himself. She studies the woman, her oxygen mask, skin sagging and bloodless. Jughead looked more alive. What would she choose?

I’d rather I did it, Betty concludes, smiling to herself. Far more enjoyable to do it herself, but she’s manipulated suicides in the past. They weren’t as fun.

There are more interviews with the Mantles, crying mother, angry father. The anchor mentions a lawsuit against the police department for ignoring their calls for an investigation back when Reggie first disappeared. Pulling Reggie’s Camaro from the swamp certainly put some gasoline on that fire.

Her back arches, more insistent circles of her two middle fingers around her clit. She thinks these are recycled recordings from the same interviews taken months ago. She finds that funny, sighing with amusement as index and middle digits work her up, remembering the feel of his soft, unwashed hair between her fingers.

Her other hand rubs at the wool, thumbing over the points of his crown. Prince of bunnies, she thinks fondly. You survived me. She’s so dead. She’s looking at aggravated assault with intent to kill and no less. I’m so fucked. She fucked him, and now he’s going to fuck her, and not in the good way. She rolls her hips against her hand, recalling the good way. He felt so good.

Betty grunts, stuffing the beanie against her mouth, biting down. The pace builds, the muscles in her thighs contracting and releasing in time with that chirp, thump, working up the tension in her gut.

He’s going to eat her. She ate him, and now he’s eating his way out of her. He will wake up and say her name and tear her apart from the inside out. Her father won’t be able to clean up that mess. If she calls her father, he’ll come and kill him, just like he did the last one. If you couldn’t do it. Is this the thrill she wants, the risk of being caught? Like last time, playing a game, playing with her food as her father would say. Or is it him? Special bunny.

Her mouth gapes, releasing a happy little moan. She leaves a circle of spit on his crown, arching against the sofa cushions. Turning her head, she watches reruns of the crime scene where they found her jackrabbit, footage of them rolling him into the back of the ambulance, the urgent, serious tone of the reporter almost comical.

Betty laughs, her other hand slipping under her panties, fingers tucking up inside of her. She remembers him there, her good student, her quick learner.

Eat me. The high-tension wire in her spine breaks, pleasure spiraling out from her fingers into her belly and down her thighs, and she realizes she wants him to, wants to see what he will do. Do you really love me?

Betty acts normal. She dons the new spring blouses and A-line skirts from her mother. Her pink cheeks and bright skin return. She is prim and cut from rose quartz, polished like a shiny red apple. The Jughead weight melts off her body. Her lattes slim down to black Americanos, swapping grilled cheeses for fresh salads, but she keeps a sweet thing in her pocket, sometimes a lifesaver or mini burger gummies, like little tokens of good luck, small prayers for him.

And she waits.

She expects anything but what does follow. Nothing.

Every time she goes to class, she expects deputies loitering by the door, perking up at the sight of her. There will be Sheriff Jones front and center with a pair of metal bracelets with her name etched on the bridge. Made special for you. She expects red and blue flashing lights outside her apartment, the brim of a campaign hat passing the window of their creative writing class, rough hands dragging her from the research lab.

No one looks at her any differently. Almost no one. First thing post-Spring Break, the graduate mentions Jughead, the assault, send your best wishes, but the way he looks at her. After class, when she expects him to accost her with suspicion, he only asks how she’s doing. I know you were close. It wasn’t suspicion but pity. Maybe because she often confuses her father’s disappointment for mistrust; the two go hand-in-hand.

Yet, the way he says it, close. Is that what they were? Was it obvious? Did it look like that to their professor? Not like what she intended – a stalk, a hunt, a murder plot – but close, the suggestion of burgeoning friendship, of intimacy. Did it feel like that from the inside?

Days pass with no news. Victim in critical condition. No police statement.

No one knows the sheriff’s headspace, if there is any progress in the investigation, any suspects. Betty guesses, meanly, that he doesn’t know what’s doing, what he will do, if his son doesn’t wake up. Inaction implies no leads. And with no casual drop-ins at her apartment or her classes, no friendly can we talk? – Betty is nowhere near their radar. Yet. Has Sheriff Jones even pulled his son’s phone records? Inaction implies incompetence as well.

Days turn into weeks. Betty’s thesis defense approaches like a speeding train. Her father calls for an update. He must be tracking the news, too. He asks if she needs him for ‘support’.

“Everything’s fine, dad,” she assures him, stirring a pot of Bolognese. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

Pasta boiling, salad spun and dried and tossed and dressed on the counter, flawless baby blue plate and bowl and stemless glass of wine – everything in its right place. 

She hops up onto a stool, reorganizing her utensils on the breakfast bar, and turns on the news. Sipping her Pinot, she listens to the winning lottery numbers. It’s been relatively quiet in recent weeks, no more interviews with the families of the deceased. She thinks Dilton’s mother died early last week, right after her interview, closing the final chapter on the Doiley family line. Whoops.

Betty spins noodles around her fork, indulging in carbs on a Sunday night. Her defense is in a few days, if she makes it that long. She would like to, if not for all the work she put into it.

She knows she’s getting complacent, but she learned long ago that getting anxious about things she cannot control usually lead to worse results. Her red phase is a perfect example. She decided not to kill her rabbit. She’ll live with the consequences. Maybe she’ll get lucky, and he’ll die. She won’t get the chance to be the unveiled monster spotlighted on the other end of his accusing finger. She just – really wants to see what he will do, but then curiosity and the cat and all that.

Betty finishes her plate, letting nothing go to waste. It’s probably her last proper Bolognese, light on the salt. She hears prison food is the shortest route to hypertension. If you let yourself get that far.

Betty comes back from her thesis defense and knows something is wrong, a predator sensing another one wandering too far into her territory. She can smell it. Her front door is locked, but when she bends down to inspect the lock, she finds scratches around the keyhole.

Her first instinct isn’t to call the police but beeline for the gun under her mattress. She can’t call the cops anyway; it would be free license to search her apartment, and she still doesn’t know if she is on their list of suspects for the Jones assault.

She deliberates her approach. She could feign nonchalant, drop her keys in the bowl by the door, set her book bag down on the couch, stroll toward the bathroom but make a sharp left into the bedroom. Unless they’re waiting for her in the living room, behind her bedroom door. Should she go to the kitchen first, find the butcher knife? Ugh, so much blood. It’d seep through the cracks in the hardwood. The gunshot would alert her neighbors.

Betty takes a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. Someone probably burgled her. It’s a coincidence.

Unlocking her front door, she steps inside, nothing out of the ordinary. Drops her keys in the bowl. Sets her backpack on the couch. Goes into the kitchen to reheat leftovers. She pulls open the knife drawer, but stops, hand on the butcher knife.

Sniffing the air, her nostrils fill with the heavy, stewy smell of tomato sauce and meat, like someone already reheated the Bolognese she planned to eat after gutting her intruder.

Holding the butcher knife, she walks over to the kitchen sink, and there is the entire containers of leftover Bolognese and pasta. They ate the entire thing, scraped the Tupperware clean. There’s the dirty fork, a drink glass with lip smudges on the edge. They couldn’t even be bothered to soak it, parmesan cheese crusted on the sides. Someone broke into her apartment and ate all her leftovers. Who the hell?

Then, she hears it, soft music, distant, her bedroom. My love must be a kind of blind love. Her blood runs cold, hot anger condensing in her belly.

I can’t see anyone but you. Clutching the butcher knife, she doesn’t go to the bedroom. Instead, she combs the rest of the apartment. Everything is dark. She flips the lights on as she goes – her balcony, the hall closet, her bathroom. No one. Nothing appears to be missing.

The bedroom door is cracked, only wide enough to let the music out. Betty’s fingers barely touch the handle, nudging it a few inches, listening for movement on the other side, any creak of the floorboards, the airy swish of a curtain or squeal of her mattress. You are here.

She pushes the door the rest of the way open, remaining at the threshold with the knife raised above her shoulder, blade angled at the floor. Empty. And so am I.

A record spins in the small player in the corner. She can tell someone rifled through her 45s, the only things she has left of her grandmother. You remind me so much of her, her father told her, and that meant something to her.

Crossing the threshold, she expects a trap, a shotgun rigged to blow her brains out, a mallet to come down on her head, but her room is empty, too.

Maybe millions of people go by.

Everything is as she left it that morning. She scans the entire room, searching for discrepancies – bedspread neat and wrinkle-free, pillows organized by color and size. Her clothes are lined up by season in her closet. Her hamper is closed, no dirty laundry in sight. All her books are on the – fuck.

But they all disappear from view.

The empty space gapes at her, the home for the anthology of mythologies, his home. Betty drops the knife, her hand covering her sternum, heart ready to fly from her chest. No, no, no.

Her eyes catch red in the periphery where the ink blotter is blue. The book. The book is on her desk. Did she leave it there? No, she wouldn’t be that stupid. It always lives on the shelf when she’s not home, an innocuous thing amongst the rest of the encyclopedias and nonfiction, her secret message.

She steps up to the desk, reaching out to stroke the embossed gold letters on the hardcover, the deep, arresting red of it. Please don’t let them be gone, she begs, fingers curling around the lip of the cover. Bracing herself, she edges it open, praying, hoping.

Crown gone. Trophies gone. The bottom drops out of her stomach. Nestled within the nook she carved for him, surrounded by the safety of the gold-edged pages – a pair of birth control glasses and, coal black pupils milky, Dilton Doiley’s rotting eyes.

And I only have eyes for you.

Chapter Text

Her mother’s phone goes to voicemail for the third time. Betty keeps trying, hanging up, pressing redial. By the fifth time, Alice picks up. She expects a biting reprimand, but her mother sounds tired. “Hey, sweetheart, I left my phone in my purse. We just got home.”

Betty forces herself to stop biting her nails. Another bad habit rearing its ugly, demeaning head. “Just got home? From where?”

“Didn’t we tell you? Your father has a conference in Miami this week. We came down early,” her mother explains, yawning into the receiver. “What’s wrong? Why are you calling so late? How did your defense go?”

Betty ignores her. “Is dad there?” Her father used the business trip excuse last time, too. He must’ve planned for Betty to screw up in advance.

“Oh, he’s in the bathroom. He had a little too much to drink tonight, but you know, winning clients,” her mother lilts, her voice far away. She put her on speaker phone. Betty imagines her mother at the vanity taking makeup remover wipes to her face, revealing the lines around her eyes and the corners of her mouth. Her parents are aging, her father. “I don’t think he’s in a fit state.”

“Was he with you all night?” Betty takes another turn about her bedroom, passes the anthology. Dilton’s unseeing eyes watch her.

“Most of the day,” her mother confirms. “Lots of clients. Lots of sangria. Why? What’s wrong, sweetheart? Did your defense go well?”

“It went fine,” Betty snips and then reigns it in. “Please tell dad I passed.” It would be their code word that everything is well and good, even though it is anything but. She doesn’t know what she wants, for him to help her, but she knows what that entails. If she calls him here, he will kill Jughead.

Before her mother can ask any more questions, she hurls a quick I love you and hangs up.

If her dad was in Florida the entire day, then. Betty slams the book closed. Someone found Dilton Doiley’s body. She half-hoped it was her father, taking matters into his own hands as always, but she still doesn’t know how he would find the body. She doesn’t know why he would unearth it if he didn’t plan to reveal it, why he would leave evidence in her apartment. Even if her father pinpointed the location of Jughead’s assault, it would be a crapshoot finding Dilton. Someone knows. Someone saw her. That’s the only way.

But, they didn’t go to the police. If they had, she would know by now.

If it wasn’t her father, then who?

According to the news, Jughead Jones is still in the hospital, but that could be a misdirection, too. The probability it is him is just – impossible. But then, he is not beholden to the laws of Bayesian statistics. There is no precedent for an animal like Jughead Jones, her magic rabbit out of the hat.  

However, Betty installs two more deadbolts and a chain on her door and puts alarms on all her windows.

She graduates in less than a month, although functionally she graduated after her thesis defense. She considers breaking her lease a couple months early and hiring movers to put her things into storage, and then she could go back to Maine, finish the remainder of her courses there. She could claim a family emergency, convince her professors. 

It doesn’t change the fact someone broke into her house and stole her trophies. Her gun is gone. The bowie knife she used to gut Dilton is also gone. They even took Jughead’s denim jacket and t-shirt. Everything is gone.

It also doesn’t change the fact someone found Dilton’s body. And, if they found his body, they might find Reggie’s, Sweet Pea’s, if they don’t already know, if that haven’t always known. She wants to confirm, but it would be walking into a trap. It might not even be Dilton’s eyes. It could be more deception, tricking her into leading them to the bodies.

Despite the extra security measures, Betty doesn’t want to leave her apartment. She should go back to Maine. She could call her dad. Any moment the police could show up.

Yet, when her father calls her thinking something is wrong, Betty quickly assures him it was only about her defense. I passed, daddy, and she injects meaning into it, trying to convey her safety, hoping he buys it. If he comes, he will kill Jughead, and she hasn’t decided whether she wants that. She wants to tell him, wants this to go away, but then another part of her, this new and curious part of her, wants to see what is waiting for her, who is waiting for her at the other end. Jughead and her curiosity, they’ll be the end of her.

Instead of running away, she leaves her apartment, goes to their coffee shop, and orders an Americano. The worst thing she could do is deviate from her routine. Unlike Jughead, she needs to follow a pattern, at least in public.

Reaching for the creamer, she bumps someone’s elbow. The apology is on the tip of her tongue, but he beats her to it. “Oh, Betty, sorry, I didn’t see you there.” The graduate passes her the carafe, smiling at the stir sticks and then at her.

That’s what she gets for deviating even a little, indulging in half-and-half like a cow. “Please, you first,” she bids, nudging it back his way.

Betty watches him turn the handle on the carafe, wondering why she’s never seen him here before. It feels strange encountering him outside of class, like finding a tortoise in a forest. When she runs into her PI in public, especially at a social event, she doesn’t know how to act, whether she should be the principled mentee or the young energetic undergrad, blend with her peers or elevate herself for her superiors. He’s not much older than her, though, and in any other setting, they would be equals. 

“You don’t usually get creamer in your coffee,” he points out, pouring himself a splash.

Betty puts way too much half-and-half in her to-go cup, a few drops spilling onto the counter. “Excuse me?”

He backtracks, stirring his coffee. “I didn’t mean – I just see you here a lot,” he explains. “With Jughead.”

Betty stares at him, but he deliberately avoids meeting her gaze. How did she miss him? Because you were with Jughead. And where her rabbit was concerned, she had a one-track mind, blinded by prey instinct. “Right,” she says tightly, snapping the lid onto her paper cup.

He smiles awkwardly, cheeks and lips tight, contrition in his eyes. “See you in class,” he says, twisting the top on his travel mug and taking leave.

Betty watches him go out of the corner of her eye. The barista over the counter gives her a sympathetic look. “I heard about your friend,” he says, the hiss of steaming milk making it hard to grasp the words. “Hope he pulls through.”

Betty emits her brightest, most thankful smile. “You’re sweet.” It dies on her face the second she exits the café.

She missed too much on the first pass. She doesn’t normally miss these things, but he was just so – distracting. She was so blinded by Jughead that the graduate watched her enough to know how she took her coffee.  Magnetic, she tries again. Mesmerizing. Better. He would like that.

Betty sips her coffee, burns her tongue. There’s too much cream. What are you doing to me?

She remembers Dilton’s glasses, his eyes in the book. How long has the graduate been watching her?

Betty backtracks to the alleyway, squeezing through the hole in the fence and starting down the train tracks. Periodically, she peeks over her shoulder, looking for movement along the tree line, the buildings that go from obviously thriving to decrepit, condemned storefronts. The struggling economy is creeping down main street, for lease signs filling up windowfronts like dominoes. It makes it easier for Betty to disappear unseen into the woods.

She makes a few circles of her trails, drinking her coffee, tracking her footsteps in the duff for a second, unfamiliar pair. After a few rounds, she only finds her own, but just in case, she hides within hollows a few times and waits for approaching footsteps. No one is following her, or they are very good at tracking her without making themselves known.

Betty takes the chance, following the trail for Dilton’s killing ground. She reaches the clearing, smaller than Jughead’s, cramped in comparison, and feels the cramp of disappointment and panic in her chest seeing his recently exhumed body sprawled next to the freshly unburied grave. His eyes are missing.

“Shit.”

Betty steps back, feels it at her back, phantom shivers crawling up her shoulders, closing in on her, vision tunneling. She curses again, knowing she made a mistake.

With as much thought as Reggie probably gave it, Betty bolts for the trees, forgoing the trail and hightailing for her apartment. She practically vaults the footbridge, slipping and splashing into the opposite bank, almost taken out with the current. She arrives at her apartment sopping wet, heart hammering in her chest. Slamming her front door behind her, terror striking out from her lungs, she hurriedly locks the deadbolts, strings the chain, and then rests her forehead against the wood. Shit, shit, shit.

Days go by, but there are no more gifts. Either her extra security measures are working, or there’s a timeline. There’s nothing about Dilton Doiley on the news, but Betty feels too vulnerable, knowing his body is lying out in the open, and there’s nothing she can do about it. She has no gun, few avenues for escape. She burns Dilton’s glasses and his eyes to ashes, but still feels exposed, violated, and that’s not her preferred position. She prefers to do the violating, the toying.

She isn’t sleeping. Without her trophies, without him hidden inside her book, it’s difficult. She grew so used to sleeping inside his shirt, his jacket, she tosses and turns without them. The scouring feeling in her gut comes back, like someone sucked all the light out, but unlike Jughead, she doesn’t have life support, nothing to feed her until the next one. Those trophies, his crown, they were her life support. Betty whines, twisting onto her other side, her gaze coming to bear with the empty book. Why are you doing this to me?

She starts seeing the graduate everywhere. Where she never encountered him, suddenly, there he is, like someone lifted the Jughead blinders, and then he swallows up her field of vision. She sees him at Tinny’s, the coffee shop, on the veranda outside the student union eating his brown-bagged lunch. She sees him in every place she used to spend time with Jughead.

Without her jackrabbit in the way, she sees things more clearly, sees him, and her gut sees him, too. If she stops frequenting her usual spots, he will know she knows. She feels him watching her, but every time she looks, he directs his eyes elsewhere. Sneaky. Underhanded. She should’ve known. Their very first class she felt it, and yet ignored it. You’re too bright, bunny.

Eventually, she cannot keep waiting for him to make the next move. Betty doesn’t dither with supposition; she pursues concrete evidence. She stalks and hounds and pounces. She doesn’t run away. Yet before she can pinpoint her misgivings and initiate a plan, her PI intervenes.

On the night she plans to follow him, the little maple leaf pops up on her computer screen. Her mentor’s email is insistent. She knows if it isn’t mandatory, Betty will always forgo socialization. She wants to celebrate her last student’s successful defense. Her PI retires after this semester, and Betty doesn’t want to burn that bridge. It might jeopardize a critical recommendation letter.

Before she leaves the apartment, she tests every alarm, inspects the new dead bolts. He hasn’t gotten in so far, but she doesn’t feel any safer. He might resort to desperate measures, might detect some weakness in her security, and that worries her, what he knows, what she doesn’t. She needs to catch him before he catches her.

The graduate is listed in the phone book, his first mistake. She would never let herself show up in the yellow pages. It hints that he isn’t who she thinks, but plenty of predators are very adept at pretending to be sheep. He might even be better than her, going so long under her nose.

Betty prays dinner goes quickly, hoping to catch the graduate at his apartment, follow him to the woods, confirm her suspicions. It drags. Professors and graduate students can shop talk for hours. Betty lingers as long as she can stand, counting down the minutes on the clock above her mentor’s head. Once she’s stayed an appropriate amount of time, consumed enough drinks and appetizers to be polite, she yawns, shakes all the hands, thanks them for the celebration, and bows out.

She needs to make a brief pit stop to her apartment to change, pick up a few supplies, but as she approaches her front door, she knows it happened again.

There are no scratch marks on her new locks, but she can hear the music through the door, louder this time. Make me your slave greets her at the door. Her forehead falls against the wood, her fingers resting on the doorknob. He beat her to it. How the hell did he get into her apartment?

Tie me down, make me behave follows her through the living room. She sets her book bag on the sofa but stops. The remote has been placed in the exact spot she always puts her backpack, definitely not where she leaves it on the tray on the coffee table, where she finds dirt sprinkled on the glass top. With the music, it’s too purposeful, the placement of the remote.

Betty picks it up, presses the power button. It’s on the same channel as the local news, but it’s a segment about housing prices on the southern side of town. She sucks her lip between her teeth, looking for some hidden message, but it eludes her. Then, it clicks. She navigates to her DVR, and at the top of her plethora of true crime reruns is a short recording of the local news from earlier that day. She presses play, dreading whatever segment she missed today.

Her stomach bottoms out at the headline. Body of missing young man found in Fox Forest identified as Reginald Mantle. Another anonymous tip dropped right in the sheriff’s lap. Now they will think she wants to get caught, but she doesn’t understand why her giver would reveal Reggie’s body and not Dilton’s. Because he wanted you to see Dilton.

Betty turns off the television and tosses the remote onto the couch. She should turn off her record player, too. The song restarted a couple minutes ago.

Let me belong to you finds her at the door to her bedroom.

The first thing she notices is glass on the floor, the broken window, the alarm disabled and ripped off the sill and left on the floor by her desk.

Make me be true.

There’s blood dripping down the shattered glass, drops of it on the hardwood. He sliced himself open to get into her bedroom. Persistent creature, whatever he is. She’ll admit it intrigues as much as it irritates her and makes her feel exposed. It’s new territory, being the hunted. It’s humbling, and she fucking hates it.

Tell me what I can do.

The anthology of mythologies is on her desk, centered on her ink blotter in the same spot. Nothing else is out of place. She doesn’t waffle this time, flipping the cover open.

Let me belong to you.

Teeth with roots strung into a necklace, the clasp open, waiting to wrap around her throat. Reggie Mantle. Fuck.

Betty waits until the last student leaves before approaching him. She leaves her backpack on the center-front desk, her signal, a white flag. It doesn’t matter if these gifts are love letters or threats. She won’t run away.

“Yes, Betty?” he asks, opening the conversation before she can engage in pleasantries. It cuts her time in half.

Speaking of cuts, she glances at the sleeves of his sport coat. It covers his wrists. “Hi, yes, I wanted to talk to you,” she says, words crisp and succinct.

He glances up at her, a flicker of something in his eyes, vulnerability, hope, and then they dart back to his messenger bag. “There’s something I wanted to discuss with you, too,” he confesses, and she feels the first bolt of flight fear in her gut, ignores it. This is not a forfeit, she assures herself, but an acknowledgment. A nod for a job well done. She’s secretly always wanted to meet another monster, even though she didn’t imagine being the prey in this scenario.

Betty plants her hands on the desktop, folding one on top of the other. “You first,” she invites, demure smile in place.

He looks right at her mouth, and then at her eyes, and she wonders if he detects the disconnect. The lamb in her smile; the tiger in her eyes. “It’s delicate.” His gaze flits to the open door.

Betty side-eyes the hallway, the students meandering past. She lifts her hands and waltzes over to the door, light on her feet and kicking out the stop with a lackadaisical sweep of her foot. Once it closes, the din of the hallway muffled, she swivels on her heels, regarding him more closely. He wants privacy. She’ll give it to him. Gladly. Curiously. She has never encountered another predator, and she’s deathly intrigued by him. What flavor of monster are you? Why can’t she smell it on him? He is very good at hiding it.

“What did you want to talk about?” Betty strolls back to the desk, setting her hip on the edge.

The graduate snaps his messenger bag closed. “You’re graduating this semester, right?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she intimates, appreciating the opening. 

He doesn’t hitch his bag on his shoulder, his fingers lightly tapping the leather flap. “Shoot.” The word makes her gut thump. He has her gun.

“I was wondering if I could send my final from home.” It’s the end of the semester, and they are pretty much spinning their heels before final compositions are due. “I’m mostly wrapped up here, and I’d like to go home. I start med school in August, and I’d appreciate the extra time off,” she explains, flattening her palm on the desktop and canting her body toward him, giving him a nice profile of her tits in her tight sweater. He looks like he is trying not to react.

She wonders if he is immune to her, if this isn’t a friendly acknowledgment but simply a bigger fish eating a smaller fish. She’ll show him how hard it is to swallow her. She’ll scratch and claw on her way down. Every time his shoulders move, her gaze cuts to his wrists, looking for a bandage edge, any evidence of injury.

“Well, that’s,” he stammers, and that sets off alarms in her head. “I would be fine with that.”

“Excellent,” Betty chirps, standing up, feigning her exit.

“Just, um, before you go back home, I was wondering,” he starts and then stops again.

Betty stops, swaying toward him. “Wondering,” she trails off, studying the look on his face, nervous, reticent, grappling. Is he afraid to tell her? That’s disappointing.

“Since you’re graduating, and you won’t be in my class anymore, I was wondering,” he rambles on, and Betty tamps down a frustrated sigh. Get it out already. He’s still pretending with her, and it’s annoying. “Would you have coffee with me?”

Betty flattens both her palms to the desktop, elbows locked. He doesn’t flinch, but he reads the aggression in her stance. “Are you extorting me?” That’s even more of a letdown, horribly anticlimactic. There’s nothing more pathetic than a blackmailer.

He balks. “What? For a grade? No. No! That’s not what I’m saying.” He panics. He imagined this much differently. So did she. Then, he removes his sport coat, pulling at his tie. “Jesus, Betty, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to give you that idea,” he says, folding the coat over his messenger bag.

She gobbles up the opportunity, eyes ravenously examining his bare arms. Her blood instantly cools. No bandages. Not a single nick. Only a scattering of tattooed stars at different junctions – wrist, elbow, pale underbelly of his forearm. Her green eyes lift to meet his own, puppy brown and fearful. He could lose his job for this proposition. “I appreciate the offer, but I have to decline,” she tells him, peeling her hands off the desktop. What a waste of time.

It’s not him. Then, it’s not him. If not him, then who?

The following Sunday, Betty goes to the hospital. It is dumb, but she needs to confirm for herself. It’s improbable, but then he’s an improbable thing, an unpredictable thing.

Betty plasters on her best golden girl grin and greets the receptionist with a friendly chirp through a bouquet of obnoxiously pink balloons. The nurse responds with an equally as bright smile, a day shifter, and it is something Betty counts on, infectious emotion, even if it’s faked. “I’m here to visit Jughead Jones!”

The nurse’s smile instantly withers. “I’m sorry, dear, he’s not accepting visitors.” Not hard evidence.

Betty affects a pretense of disappointment so convincing even the balloons sink a few inches with her despondency. “Oh, I hoped.”

The nurse gives her a wan, pitying smile. “I know, but his father isn’t allowing it. I can leave a message for you, the balloons,” she offers, reaching for the bouquet.

 “No, no message,” Betty says, but she hands her the balloons. “If you would, though.”

“Who should I say they’re from?”

Betty smiles but maintains the pressure, dashed hope in her eyes, dejection in her cheeks. “Please tell him Katrina Savoy sends her best.” Betty rushed alongside Katrina her freshman year, when she thought it was a good idea joining a sorority, to blend in. Katrina died in a car accident six months later.

“I’ll do that,” the nurse promises, taking the bouquet of bubblegum pink balloons from her, beaming at the tasteful, cheery arrangement. “I’m sure he’ll appreciate the thought.”

Betty lunges. “Oh, is he awake?” she wonders casually, hopeful friend on the outside, grasping predator on the inside.

The nurse nods, returning Betty’s false hope with another comforting smile. “He woke up about three weeks ago.”

Betty taps the counter. Right after Spring Break. Right after she snuck into his hospital room.

She leaves through the automatic doors cursing under her breath. He is here. His father probably has under watch twenty-four seven. There’s no way that little bastard is sneaking out and breaking into her apartment to leave her gifts. Was he even walking, talking, coherent? For all she knows, he’s a vegetable, but the nurse assured her he would ‘appreciate the thought.’

You did say you wanted him to eat you.

Betty leans back against her Mustang, the one she restored with her father, the one she considered driving across the Canadian border after the fallout from her red phase. The seafoam green paint job isn’t exactly inconspicuous. If she left now, she could make it to the border before midnight. Her passport is current. She could disappear in Canadian wilderness, that snowy wasteland, go back to where she came from.

Betty jerks open the driver’s side door and drops into the seat, slamming the door behind her. She grips the steering wheel, glaring through the windshield. In the rear view she sees the hospital doors opening and closing, outgoing patients, incoming visitors.

I did, she confirms, releasing the steering wheel. I did want him to eat me. I do. He’s the only one who deserves it.  

But what if it isn’t him? If not him, then who?

Like clockwork, three days after she tries to visit Jughead in the hospital, she comes home to more music.

See the pyramids along the Nile.

She doesn’t know how he could possibly have gotten into her apartment this time. In the kitchen, she spots the empty pie tin in the kitchen sink. He ate it straight, the entire three-quarters of it, the old cherry pie from her celebration dinner. She snorts, leaning her chin on her fists, staring at the dirty tin, leftover pie she never planned to finish.

It might not even be a man, she muses to herself, standing up and heading for the bedroom, but it reminds her so much of him, of her jackrabbit, that she can’t help believing it is him. Or it’s more confirmation bias. She wants to believe it’s him, so her mind tunnels. She can’t let it.

Watch the sunrise on a tropic isle.

However, she feels calmer now, knowing what to expect, resigned to it. Maybe even excited for it. Someone knows how to play, and they do it very well. It’s a new challenge. She wonders how they will go down, if they will be as filling as her jackrabbit. She knows she is cornered, that he is probably waiting to drop key pieces of evidence, that he’s only doing this to scare her, make her do something stupid. She’s already done a few dumb things, but so far those consequences haven’t come to bear.

Just remember darling all the while.

Mind games. She’s the only one that plays mind games, not the other way around. Sneaky rabbit, she thinks again, with no basis in fact. Her gut continues leading her toward the bedroom, toward him. Somehow, some way, it is him. Her gut is never wrong.

You belong to me.

Betty licks her lips at the sight of the anthology on her desk. She keeps putting it back on the shelf empty of his gifts, and he replaces it in the exact same spot on her ink blotter, squared with the edges, every time a new treasure for her.

I’ll be so alone without you.

Tokens of affection. Threats more likely. She did him wrong. He’s going to play with her, and then he’s going to eat her. He’s her instant karma coming back around to fuck her sideways.

Maybe you’ll be lonesome, too, and blue.

Betty stops halfway to the desk, noticing her bedspread, usually tight and neat, nary a wrinkle. There in the center of her queen a furrow where someone’s body once lay, one patch gathered like it was clutched in a hand, a hollow in her pillow where he rested his head. And then, over a bushel of pink roses, a wet spot.

Just remember until you’re home again.

She kneels on the bed for a closer look, but it couldn’t be anything else. He jacked off on her bed and left her another nice little gift on the comforter. She laughs short, staring at the spray of cum with disbelief. There’s a dirty fork in the crease between her pillow and the sheets, cherry pie residue thick on the tines. He ate her pie and masturbated in her bed. You little freak.

Betty strides over to the anthology, dying to know now. The cover opens, and she smiles fondly. It could be a threat. It could just as likely be a love letter.

Nestled neatly in the gold-lined pages a shadow box, like he measured the dimensions to get it just right, and stretched between the two panes of glass, Sweet Pea’s decapitated snake fashioned into a fake butterfly. It almost doesn’t matter the message. He gets her.

You belong to me.

She stares at the blinking cursor in the blank word document for a solid two hours. When she looks at the clock, it is already ten. She told her professors last week she would finish her finals from Maine, but here she is, holed up in the apartment she hasn’t left in five days. Betty sips from the half-empty can of sugar-free Red Bull, her guilty pleasure for cramming. She hasn’t needed to cram since junior year. She hasn’t slept in what feels like weeks, but now she doesn’t want to, somehow knowing she will wake up to another fresh horror, worse than her gifts. Will it be love? Or ruin?

Before she went into hiding, she attempted another nightly visit to Jughead’s hospital room, wanting to see if he was really awake, but Sheriff Jones has now assigned two deputies outside his door. Someone must have found out about her earlier break-in, or at least suspected because of the flooded hallway and the open window. Under such strict watch, it seems impossible that her jackrabbit could be the gifter.

Is it you? She types this into the document, watching the cursor blinking after the question mark, begging for the answer.

The tiny red maple leaf pops up at the bottom right corner of her screen, bopping and dinging at her. She purses her lips but clicks on it, opening her Messenger. The subject line is straight to the point, hey, innocuous and unassuming on its own, but it’s from the graduate. I need to see you.

Betty runs a hand through her loose hair, tucking her foot up on her office chair, elbow to knee. I told you I wasn’t interested, she types back. This is inappropriate. She picks at the fraying end of her hoody sleeve, waiting for his reply, or no reply, whichever. 

I know, but please. I just want to talk, he sends back, typing quick, urgent.

Betty is about to blow him off again when the ellipsis blooms at the end of the thread, dot, dot, dot. I know what you did.

Her teeth lock together, staring at the message box, wishing it would burst into flame. Betty taps the escape key, too light to trigger the function. He can see her responding ellipsis, reading her frustration for hesitation. Where?

My office, one hour. A little boop lets her know he left the chat.

Betty considers her options. She was fairly certain it wasn’t the graduate, but after a second thought, she reasons he could’ve put his foot through the window, could’ve cut his leg instead of his hand. It could be a trap. Despite his adamant denial, it could be blackmail. That might be all he wants, to fuck her, extort her for sexual favors. The cum spot on her comforter implies that intention. She could get out of these unwashed sweatpants and take a shower, paint her mask and don her pretty pink shell, but she’ll make him regret it. Betty kills the things she fucks.

She groans, her forehead hitting the desktop. It’s not the time for a palate cleanser. Not like you have a choice.

She stares at the disappointing cursor. Is it you?

He might have a failsafe, though. If he’s planned this thoroughly, he has a plan for when – if she tries to kill him. If it is her last meal, she might as well enjoy it, she figures, running through her list, the ways in which she has wanted to kill people.

The clock turns ten sharp. She doesn’t have a choice. He has her in the snare, but she won’t go down screaming like a bunny. She’d rather slaughter him and burn for it. No one is allowed to get the best of Betty Cooper. Except.  

Betty arrives at Corning Hall at 10:59pm. It’s well past the president’s curfew. No one stopped her, though she took the back way through the woods. The entire building is dark. It’s one of the oldest buildings on campus, housing English and Dance, both low funded and nearly defunct departments. By the syllabus, the graduate’s water closet office is here. In four years, she has never had an occasion to come here, and her reason now is just pitiful.

Betty tests the door, hoping it’s locked. It is the most dispiriting little click she has ever heard.

She steps into the building, pulling her cardigan close around her shoulders. She predicts his tastes, shell pink cashmere and cream silk blouse, her matching pink A-line skirt. Her tasteful slip-on sandals are light against the linoleum as she meanders toward the office listings by the admin counter. His room number is listed near the top, on the third floor.

Betty checks her phone, looking for updates from Maple Mingle. He could change his mind, she muses, adjusting the strap of her clutch, and then laughs at herself. No one changes their mind about fucking Betty Cooper, especially when they have her over a barrel with her dirty secrets. He might actually have you over a barrel, she jokes with herself, waffling at the foot of the stairs. Having to get on her knees, even briefly, is belittling.

She takes the steps one at a time, ascending as silently as possible. At the third-floor landing, she peeks through the window slot, checking the hallway for any light. Nothing but the security lights near the marked exits.

Betty gently pushes the fire door open, careful of the loud click, and slips through the small opening. It closes behind her, noisier than she intended, but it only echoes through the staircase.

She double-checks her purse, touching the knife, the one she used to kill Sweet Pea. Whoever broke into her apartment didn’t take it, perhaps not knowing it was a murder weapon. The bowie knife she stole from Dilton was much more obvious. It is six or one-half dozen of the other. The knife will do just fine for a castration and a femoral nick.

Save for the security lights, the hallway is pitch black. There are no lights behind any of the office doors, no soft glow from underneath. She counts down the numbers until she reaches the graduate’s, 314A.

Betty takes her deep breaths, evening herself out, squaring her shoulders. You made your bed, young lady, her father reminds her. You had your chance to get out of it. She cracks her neck and then levels her gaze with the door, distorting and stretching her mouth before molding it into her signature saintly smile.

Lifting her fist, she delivers several dainty but direct knocks and waits to be beckoned. No one responds. Betty sighs and knocks again, louder this time. She hopes there aren’t any other lingering graduate students on this floor. No response. This better not be another fucking game.

She softly calls his name through the door. “I’m here. 11pm on the dot like you asked,” she delivers, her mouth at the seam between the door and the sill, close enough to leave a pink perfection smudge on the wood. No answer.

Asshole. Betty grabs the door handle, fully expecting him to have her trophies lined up on his desk, photos of her misdeeds, his hands ready at the zipper of his trousers. He wants the control. He wants her to sweat. Enjoy it while you can, fucker, she muses, opening the door.

The first thing she notices is the stench of piss, the putrid scent of it too strong to go unnoticed, and then the puddle on the floor catching the moonlight from the open blinds. The second thing is the graduate’s body dangling from the heating pipes along the ceiling, the damp spot on his trousers. Then, the rope around his throat, tight beneath his jaw, the unnatural angle of his neck.

Well, that’s.

She scans the office, the open whiskey bottle on his desk, a half-empty tumbler, and the fluorescent glow of his laptop. She negotiates herself around the body, careful not to touch it. Betty pulls the end of her cardigan sleeve over her hand and tips the screen her way, expecting an open word document, his suicide note with too many flourishes and long-winded descriptions, a failed author, professor-in-training with his head too far up his own ass. But, it’s not his last sob story. It’s their message thread, reopened, his green activity dot glowing against the stark white of the chat box. Two words precede the blinking cursor – tiger, tiger – and nothing after to fill the void.

She unlocks her phone and brings up Mingle Messenger. He’s there, little green dot on their thread, their last few messages hanging near the top of the chat box. She opens the message box, and there’s his ellipsis idling in the corner, begging.  

What is – trap. It’s the last thought flitting through her brain as adrenaline fires through her nerves, her veins, before she finds herself swiping her fingerprints off the doorknob and sprinting down the hallway.

She shoves open the fire door, almost slips on the first step, but catches herself on the railing. Taking the stairs two at a time, she flies out the back doors, sprints across the soccer fields for the tree line. At some point in the woods, she loses her sandals, running barefooted through the forest. Her feet find the trail to her apartment by instinct alone.

She arrives on her doorstep dry heaving, failing to catch her breath. Her thighs are burning. She doesn’t think she’s ever run so fast in her life. There are tears at the corners of her eyes, her entire body trembling with remnant flight. Thinking she might vomit, she presses the backs of her knuckles to her mouth, sticky spit on her lips.

Betty leans back against the door, trying to control her breathing. She should leave now, pack her bags, leave the rest behind. It’s too late to call her father. The Canadian border isn’t far. She will be fine.

It is coming together, yet she can’t read any of the moves. She feels the pieces moving about her, lining up, readying to strike the queen and checkmate the king, her freedom. She doesn’t – she can’t get out of it. 

Resolving herself to running away, the worst possible outcome in her eyes, the most degrading thing she will ever have to do, she hears it. Drifting through her front door. Music.

When I think of you.

Her breathing slows, the panic in her chest dissolving. Her insides go completely still. Somehow, she knows, this is the blade. Her throat is collared by the wooden restraints. He has the rope. The crowd is salivating for her reckoning.

My heart remembers.

She turns, unlocks the deadbolts, opens the door. The music grows louder. Her bedroom door is wide open.

All the love we never had.

She leaves her clutch on the sofa, doesn’t retrieve the knife. Her entire apartment is pitch black except her bedroom, the funneling light bright, leading her forward, directing her.

Just me and you.

There is no one there, but every lamp is on – the bedside, the desk, the overhead – obnoxiously bright. Her desk lamp was moved, centered on the ink blotter. It spotlights the book, the anthology of mythologies, as if it means to interrogate it. She notices her office chair in the corner, the path cleared of obstacles. Shuffling toward the desk, she tracks dirt across the hardwood

When I think of you, I remember springtime.

The book is in its proper place. It never belonged on the shelf. Adding insult to injury.

That was when we fell in love.

Betty reaches the desk, resting her palms on either side of the book, the anthology, a compilation of fairytales and myths and imaginary creatures and monsters. Years, centuries from now, she imagines herself in this book, the weight of her transgressions built to legend, raised to mythological status. That was all they were, humans made into monsters, reduced to make-believe. No one wants to believe those things exist.

Her thumb strokes the edge of the spine. She feels simultaneously strung out and exhausted, wondering what it will be this time. What else is left?

Her heart cramps, doing the math. No. Fingers trembling, she touches the cover, black tar dread filling up her chest. Please.

She missed it. She wasn’t paying attention. He made her look in the wrong direction – the dead bunnies, the graduate – not at the last one that still mattered.

Betty lifts the cover, the spine cracking. It is more well-loved than the copy on the Blossom’s shelf. More than well-loved. Cherished. Invaluable.

Rabbit, she mourns, drawing the cover over, bracing herself for the contents. She stares at the lamplight, letting it burn her retinas for when she looks down, a brief negative image to obscure the ruin she will find in there. It’s over, she tells herself, gently, consoling, resigning herself before the pain becomes unbearable. She can feel it building from the base of her chest again, vibrating through her diaphragm, that same purr of pain. Rabbit. Juggie.

She forces herself to look, gaze dropping, fear tears turning to something else.

Just me and you.

Her face wrinkles in confusion, staring at the contents like her mind is playing tricks on her. Laid flat in the center of the nook, her underwear from that night, crumpled pink, the frayed bow in the center, dirt-flecked cotton, bloody fingerprints.

Her muscles contract instantly, calves, thighs, ass condensing for flight when she feels him, warm at her shoulders, that unforgettable heat. She draws her shoulders forward, so cold the heat hurts, shocks her. He surrounds her, hands landing next to her own, encasing her inside it, all that heat.

“Hey, Betts.”

Chapter Text

Her first instinct is to lash out, but she telegraphs her elbow, and he slams his hands down on her wrists, pinning them to the desk. He pushes his hips into her ass to hold her in place, slipping one thigh between her legs, his knee unyielding against the hard knob above her own. It feels like there is so much more of him where before he seemed delicate, wiry but breakable. His grip on her wrists feels like iron.

“No, no, no,” he hushes, like he’s calming a cornered animal. She thrashes, bumping her hips back into him. He emits something between a growl and a laugh, squeezing her wrists so hard there’s pain. She gasps when he kicks one of her legs out, taking away her leverage.

Eventually she tires, arms and shoulders aching. When she cools, he hums, nosing in her hair. She wants to crawl out of her skin. Nothing terrifies or frustrates her more than being tied down, restrained, driven into a corner.

“Good girl,” he whispers, kissing the back of her head.

She grunts low and short in the back of her throat, rolling her shoulders forward. He draws her hands wide, lowering her closer to the open book. It makes her feel more prostrate, subdued. She almost whimpers, a wolf in a snare, ready to chew through flesh and bone to get away. She can smell the dirt and remnants of herself from the underwear under her nose.

“Are they coming for me?” she wonders softly, hanging her head.

He chuckles lowly. “Why would anyone be coming for you?” He kisses the side of her neck, trailing lips beneath her ear and drawing the lobe between his teeth. “Besides me.”

He is punishing her, but she wants to believe it is more a scolding than a condemnation. She’s afraid, but the feeling of his warm lips on her skin makes her clench around nothing, little tickles of pleasure curling up from her lower belly. He’s warm, and she smells him, and after the last month without him, her body cannot help reacting to his proximity, the reality of him. 

The missing underwear is right under her face, like a sharp reprimand, concrete proof of her transgressions. He smiles against her skin. “You were so distracted by my fingers in your pussy, you didn’t see me pocket them,” he explains, kissing the tense line of her neck.

“They weren’t in your pockets,” she reasons, tilting her head away, giving him more access.

His mouth is on her ear, hot breath making her shiver. “I can dig holes, too,” he intimates.

She sees now, his own secret message, coopting her red book. Their sins were reflections of her own – Dilton’s myopia, Reggie’s vanity, Sweet Pea’s hubris. It is a scolding, but.

He presses the front of his jeans into her ass. He’s hard. It’s distracting, confusing her. She’s afraid, but she still wants him to fuck her. She’s always done the fucking, and she wants to know what that’s like, to be fucked, even if this ends with his father at her door.

“What are you?” She bumps her ass back into him, looking for friction. Her nails dig into the desktop when he groans, rocking himself into her. If she can get him to fuck her, then maybe she can get away. Let him fuck her, let herself enjoy it, and then when he comes, when he’s vulnerable, she can regain the upper hand. And do what?

He tightens his grip on her wrists, drawing the bones closer together as if he can sense the rebellious direction of her thoughts. It is painful to the point she hisses, flinching away but going nowhere.

“I’m your rabbit,” he reminds her, and she spots the baby blue Moleskine on the edge of the desk, the cover held open by a water-smoothed stone from Sweetwater River.

She wrenches against his hold, agitated. He’s restraining her adrenaline, and she wants to bite something. “Let me go,” she demands, struggling. “I’m not feral.”

He snorts, resisting her. That hidden delicateness, it was an illusion. “Aren’t you?”

Betty drops her head, losing steam, breathing hard. She’s trying to reconcile the fidgety, docile jackrabbit from before and this thing. It coalesces with her imagination, but it is incongruent with her experience. She doesn’t know why the police haven’t shown up, if he just wants to toy with her some more before he throws her away. Before he kills her himself.  She’s just – confused. She wants to be excited, wants to hope this is meaningful, that he loves her, that this was because he loves her, but she’s been wrong before.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

He presses his lips to her crown again, leaves them there to whisper, “I wanted to see what you would do.”

Like her. “You lied to me,” she concludes, hating him. She expected to be happier about this, but she is mad, more at herself than him. Her black jackrabbit wasn’t real. It was a cruel trick. She was supposed to want this, but somehow she misses him.

He laughs, and she feels it in her body, vibrating through her stomach, her shoulders, exactly where she wanted to feel it. “No, I never lied,” he reasons.

“You were pretending,” she amends. Like her. He was never the prince of bunnies. He was a fantasy.

“I never pretend with you, Betts,” he argues, nuzzling her nape with his forehead. “That was all me.”

No. That’s not possible. He cannot be like her and be like that. No one is like that. He is either one or the other.

His mouth is at her ear again, following the trail of her thoughts like they’re as well-worn and familiar as her paths through the forest. “I’m everything.”

Betty trembles; it’s beyond her. Her insides vibrate with too many conflicting emotions, muscles buzzing with want, her own cunt desiring him while her mind keeps screaming to run. He’s saying all the right words, and every single one terrifies her. No one has that much empathy. If he did, she could last; he could make her happy, satisfied – prince of bunnies and homicidal equal. He would be her emotional prism. He would share her more violent interests.  

“This is what you wanted,” he reminds her.

She shakes her head but angles her hips backwards, lets him slip his thigh between her legs, applying pressure right where she wants it. Her skirt and underwear are in the way. Based on his grip, he could tear through them. He could tear through her.

It is what she wanted. He managed to eat his way out of her, and he did it with flourish. He was the writer; his imagination was always far more expansive and inventive than her own. She could never have predicted his Rube Goldberg of deception and manipulation.

“Running scenarios, that’s what writers do,” he reminds her, following her thoughts once more. “You wanted it to be me, Betts. Aren’t you lucky?” So lucky. She often thought that throughout this ordeal. Too lucky.

His lips trace the shell of her ear. “I’m going to let you go. Can you be good?” He relieves some of the pressure on her wrists.

She nods, relaxing her palms on the desktop. She can’t decide if she wants to acquiesce to the guillotine or bite back. It’s not in her nature to just take it. If he means to swallow her, she won’t go down easy.

“Good girl,” he commends, releasing her wrists and stepping back. A sensation runs up the side of her neck, crawling up behind her ear and into the base of her skull – a lick of pride. It would sound condescending from anyone else.

She massages her wrists, inspects the red rings beginning to purple. Turning around, she watches him amble about her room, fiddling with bobbles on her vanity. There are no photographs pinned around the mirror. He doesn’t point this out, brushing his fingers under her jewelry tree as if making windchimes sing.

There’s suddenly so much more of him. He fills up the space, consumes it. His arms and legs seemed to gain a foot each, his fingers extending and encompassing so much more of what he touches. It’s as if he’d been a spider crouched in the corner, appearing harmless all curled up like that. Until he unfurled. Not small. Not small at all. He looks like he could swallow her whole.

His fracture hasn’t completely healed, the long ugly crack running just above his eyebrow and disappearing beneath his beanie. They haven’t removed the staples yet, his forehead Frankenstein-esque, like she could pull a single staple and all his warm stuffing would fall out. Not stuffing. Something worse. He looks fine, though, moves about like nothing is wrong, tip-top shape. Based on the bruising alone, he must be on very strong painkillers.

He catches her staring at his injury and smirks, pointing at the closed wound. “They talked about minimizing scarring, but why would I cover up your love letter,” he jokes, and she inhales so quickly it sounds like a hiss. He smiles at her reaction and twists on his heels towards her bed.

Betty reaches behind her to touch the edge of the anthology, fingers tripping up over the lip of the book into the hollowed-out pages. That was how he saw it, too, tokens of affection. What are you?

“You said you wanted to see what I would do,” Betty mentions, her mind circling around the question, afraid to ask. Did she satisfy him? Disappoint him? She tilts her head as if to drain the thought from her head.

Jughead smiles softly at her, sardonic edges melting. “I wanted to see how much you loved me.” It’s his face, his eyes, boyish and shy and adoring, like she’s some rara avis he’d long thought extinct.

Betty’s features crumple, the weight of that, his own emotions sinking into her like apples in her back. Tears pile up in her eyes, struggling to process them. She does love him. As soon as he says it, it strikes her unbelievably hard, the numbness crumbling away.

“I tried to kill you,” she reminds him, choking on the words. “Like the others.” Like this cheapened it, lumping him in with the fluffle. He deserved better. Is that why she was so dissatisfied? To have it end just like the others.

Jughead strides toward her, wrapping his hands around her shoulders. He massages the bones, and she reels again by the reach of his fingers, encompassing so much of her. “You killed the others because you loved me,” he reasons, ducking his head to keep her gaze as she tries to look away, ashamed. Shame, an unfamiliar bitter taste on the back of her tongue. It comes in waves and waves with the rest of the emotions, heaping atop the more familiar ones, anger and aggression always the most prominent, the only human emotions she thinks she’s ever been capable of defining and expressing. She’s feeling too many things at once, navigating them with no notes, no standard operating procedure.

“And look,” he beckons, releasing her shoulders. “You didn’t kill me.” He swings his arms wide, palms up, a miracle. “That’s how I knew.”

Betty twists away, wrapping her arms around her middle. She wants to hug him if only to feel him respond now, envelope her in his long, spidery arms, warm and comforting. This emotion – it makes her nauseous, her body unused to it, wanting to reject it, but it could be the glowy overload in her belly. His proximity makes her feel luminescent, supernova bright, but she doesn’t want to implode again.

She wants him to fuck her, especially knowing how much he wants to do the same. He’s practically vibrating with it, circling her, fingers curling and uncurling, agitated. It’s a live wire strung tight between them, but she just needs – is trying to process.

Jughead’s fingers skim her shoulder, tracing up along the path to her neck, drawing pain of want wherever they make contact.  He works his fingertips into the tension there. “You’re not wearing the necklace I made you,” he notes, faux insulted.

Betty slinks away toward the desk, and the distance calms her, lets her think more clearly. She looks at the open book, her panties with his bloody fingerprints. Even with his head smashed in, he was still planning. “It didn’t go with anything,” she tells him, her voice distant. Her thoughts are stuck on that night, her missing underwear, wondering how far back he planned this.

He chuckles, looks at her until she meets his gaze. “It’s not supposed to,” he intimates, and it manages to make her laugh, a short, brief one.

Jughead smiles to himself, picking at the lint on his jacket, and when she looks, he shrugs one shoulder up into his face, inhaling deeply. It’s the jacket, the one she slept in every night until he stole it back, the one she wore while she masturbated with his crown pressed to her face, the crown restored to his head.

“We smell good,” he comments, sly-eyed, as if knowing what she’s done while wearing his second skin. Her arms clench around her waist.

He shrugs out of his jacket, tossing it onto the bed. He’s getting comfortable, like he’s planning for a long night. Then, she sees his bare arms, the bandage around his left wrist. He follows her eyes and brandishes it at her. “Oh, yeah this. You know I expected you to batten down the hatches, and I needed some time anyway,” he explains, checking the dressing, tucking in a loose end. “I was down for the count after Dilton. Digging up a body is hard. I threw up in your toilet by the way. Don’t know if you noticed. Tried to clean up most of it. Sorry for wasting your spaghetti. I kept the pie down, though.”

He drops onto the mattress, bobbing up and down. “But yeah, the window. Had to get in somehow,” he reasons, shrugging. “Broke the window in my hospital room to cover it up. Six more stitches.”

He would tear through flesh and bone to get to her. He falls back onto her bed, the coils squealing. “Getting in and out of my hospital room, too, that was a trial. My father can be very overbearing when he wants to be but never when he has to be.”

Scanning her walls, he frowns, waggles his finger at the framed watercolor reproductions, calming nature scenes, tasteful but empty. “You didn’t hang that lovely butterfly I caught you.”

Betty turns, sits on the edge of her desk to regard him sprawled on her bed, arms spread wide. The sight of him like that makes her want to shed her panties and climb on top of him. “It clashes with the décor.”

He rolls his eyes, smoothing his hand across the bedspread, fingering the roses.

“You’re not gonna ask about the glasses?” she prompts and feels manipulated. By the smug, pleased look on his face, he wanted her to ask.

“You don’t have to wear those all the time,” he allows, but then adds crudely, “But eventually I wanna fuck you in them. I think you’d look sexy in glasses, like a librarian.”

Betty hugs her middle tighter, imagining him fucking her in the stacks, foot balanced on the shelf, tips of her shoes bumping against the spines of archived medical journals with each thrust, her glasses slipping down the bridge of her nose. “Is that your type?”

He grins, head falling back against the mattress. “You’re the only one that’s my type, Betts.”

It’s too romantic and too hard to follow. He keeps veering this way and that, crude to cryptic to creepy to loving to caring to fond, and each one feels genuine. He is everything. 

“He’s very near-sighted, you know,” she tells him, referring to Dilton.

Jughead lifts his head to look at her, sensing the brush of humor. “Sounds like someone I know.” It was a secret message to her.

“They’re gone,” she confesses about his gifts, tracing shapes on her desktop with her index finger. The rings around her wrists aren’t going away.

He sighs. “Of course they are. All that hard work.” He doesn’t mean it. At least, she doesn’t think so. He never expected her to keep incriminating evidence, tokens of affection or not. Maybe that was one of his tests.

Jughead rolls onto his side, balancing his head on his fist. He looks so contrastive against the stark white and pink of her bedspread, like a black hole yawning in the middle of it, revealing what was always beneath it. But, it’s not black, it is its complement, a white hole radiating light. White holes only exist in theory.

He sweeps his hand across the comforter again and then grins up at her. “Made a nice memory here,” he reminds her, patting the bedspread. “I couldn’t help myself. It was too neat.”

Is that his kink? She’s too neat a predator until she isn’t, until she has her prey in her hands, beneath her. He wants to scramble her, make her afraid, make her run, make her acknowledge him.

“I thought about jacking off on that stuffed cat in your closet,” he continues, sitting up. Her last stuffed animal, the one she cannot give up, is a reflection of her childhood cat Caramel. He was the first thing she killed. She wonders if Jughead knows that.

How much does he know? “How did you find the bodies?”

He launches himself off the bed, rocking his heels to flat. “You don’t know?” The first flicker of disappointment, but she can tell it isn’t substantial.

When she doesn’t respond, he bobbles his head side-to-side, debating with himself. “I’m gonna monologue a little, if that’s okay,” he warns her, cracking his knuckles.

Then, he backtracks, smiling at her, the awkward, boyish one, a little withholding, a little shy. “I knew what you were.” She imagines it was the night she led him into the woods, to the spot where she finds her ‘inspiration.’ She remembers his face when she opened his only escape hatch, staring into the dark tree line and just knowing there was something in there ready to gobble him up.

He saunters toward her, taking up space, crowding her against the desk. He’s not even touching her, and she feels surrounded by him. His gaze is so intent, the shyness dissolving into bald-faced, morbid affection. “I suspected, but I didn’t really know until Mila’s party.”

She recalls that party, his purposeful distance, using Sweet Pea as a barrier. It wasn’t social awkwardness. He was distracting her, so he could study her.

“I told Sweets you were really into him, and he followed you. That was easy. You’re very – god, Betty, you’re gorgeous,” he explains, dropping to his knees like the very thought floors him. “The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he muses, touching her dirty ankles.

He swipes fondly at some of the dried mud between her toes. “My beautiful predator.”

Betty doesn’t understand. Sweets was. “He was your friend.”

Jughead stares at her soiled feet, his hands wrapped around her ankles, fingers crossing his thumbs. For the first time, she feels breakable in someone else’s hands.

“I love you so much, Betty,” he admits, thumbs stroking her ankle bones. “We all have dark thoughts, wants,” he admits, and then amends, “Most of us.” His grip suddenly tightens, eyes trained on her muddy feet, tracing to the soil line. “We never get to act on them. When the opportunity comes.” He smiles up at her, bright but screwed in wrong. “You’re what I’ve written come to life.”

Betty swallows, wanting to touch him, rest her hands on his shoulders, remove his crown and run her fingers through his hair. What are you? “Did you – did you watch?” 

His tender smile slants into a smirk. “I like to watch.” His fingers work at her ankle bones more insistently. “And you didn’t disappoint.” He bends to kiss her knee. “I saw the bodies. Damn, Betty.”

He watched her. He watched the whole thing. And she never suspected. How could she? He’s not a predator. Not entirely. He’s something else.

He snickers, palms smoothing up her calves, humming to himself as he wraps his hands around her knees. “It’s funny because you’re gonna be a doctor, but you’re like a hammer or a meat grinder. When you kill, it’s like watching a wolf tear apart a deer. Dilton, a fucking slaughter.”

What did he feel when she disemboweled Dilton? Did it unplug the ugliness in his gut, too? He looks up at her, and she thinks yes, he felt that, too. He feels everything.

It hits her, the extent of his manipulation, the intricacies of it. He was careful, precise, calculating everything with minimal error and still getting what he needed from it through her.

“You’re a scalpel.”

He smiles and thumbs his nose. He likes her choice of paralleled metaphor, and that makes her feel good, fulfilled by his approval. Why does she want it?

“Dilton,” she stutters, her pulse picking up, feeling light-headed.

“We messaged every now and then. I knew he was gonna be in town for a few days, so I dropped hints about that book. He was a big history buff, loved it violent. I knew Tinny’s carried that book. It was a bit of a lark, but you’re not the only lucky one,” he explains, hands moving up her legs. He takes her skirt with them, his thumbs hard against the seams of her inner thighs. He’s not the only one that gets off on it, cornering his prey, remembering the success of his machinations, the control it gives him.

His fingers dig into her femoral arteries, tender pressure points inspiring fear, discomfort. It feels like she might pass out. He’s better at this. She wonders if he’s done it before.

“And Reggie,” he continues, hands beneath her skirt now, traipsing into more dangerous territory. She’s not ready for it. If he touches her underwear, he will know where her thoughts keep going. She’s not ready to give him the satisfaction yet of knowing he’s got her.

“I mentioned on my way out there was a hot blonde in the kitchen who turned me down. Reggie, well, he loves competition. I knew you were going to toss my empty. You’re not a heathen; you’re a good girl like that. You’ll find a trashcan. So polite and neat when you’re not killing people,” he muses more to himself than her, spreading his fingers wide on her thighs.

Her knees almost buckle feeling his fingers reach for her, spreading out like spiders on her skin, ready to lunge. “Did you kill our teacher?” she ventures, staring at the hungry extent of his fingers. 

He gives her thighs a contemplative look, studying the drape of her pink skirt, what he knows she wore for the graduate. His eyes narrow in anger for a second, corner of his jaw tightening, as if thinking about how her skirt would look if the graduate had gotten his way. “I didn’t have to. He did it for me.”

Not following, she waits for him to expound. It is one thing she dislikes about writers, their intentional vagaries, but it always manages to lure her in. No one can resist a good mystery.

“I left him love letters of a sort,” he confesses, smirking at her knees. “From you. I didn’t sign them, but he thought they were from you.”

“Of a sort?” she prompts further, mocking his past affectation, repeating words back that he doesn’t find acceptable.

It makes him smile. He always appreciates her callouts. “More like threats, I guess.”

He sighs, lifts his gaze to meet hers. “I saw him.” The derisive dimple above his right eyebrow surfaces when he discloses, “At Tinny’s. At the coffee shop. Looking at you. Coveting you.” His thumbs work against her skin again. “While you were looking at me.” He was far more attentive than herself. You’re so bright, bunny.  

He never misses anything, except that night at Cheryl Blossom’s party. He called her an enigma, that his assessment of her was everchanging. What about her was difficult to divinate and define? Whether you were capable of loving him as much as he loves you. She stops herself. She doesn’t know that yet.

“I didn’t think I was the possessive type,” he continues, eyes moving across her face, down her neck, the rise and fall of her breasts with each heady breath. “I let you go off with the others. I encouraged it, but that was for a very specific purpose. That was to find out what you were and what you wanted, especially from me.” His enigma. His puzzle to solve. Had he?

“But him, he didn’t get to look at you like that. That’s a privilege only we allow,” he concludes lowly, staring at her without blinking.

We. That does something to her, a lick of pleasure flicking up between her legs when he says it. We. Because she thought the same thing. The graduate didn’t deserve to look at her like that. It annoyed her. It annoyed her that her stalker might be the graduate. It was disappointing. Only Jughead deserved it.

“So, I threatened him. Repeatedly. That you were going to go to the administration about his propositions. It didn’t take very long,” he finishes, bending to kiss her thighs where his fingertips end, working his way higher and higher. “Which worked in my favor. I needed to draw you out of the apartment anyway. And I needed to scare you into running home. I wanted you scared. I wanted you ready to give up.”

“Were – are you setting me up?” she finally asks.

He gives her an odd look, surprised she interpreted it that way. “You didn’t look through the tabs, did you? You ran first,” he supposes, lips curling like he wants to laugh. “I wrote a suicide note, Betts.”

“The bodies, Reggie,” she reasons.

“Did you watch the whole segment?” he asks, referring to the recording he left her of the discovery of Reggie’s body. “Ruled gang-related. Reggie was a drug dealer. Sweet Pea, too. That’s a favorite Ghoulie tactic, ‘defanging and skinning snakes.’ Taking Dilton’s eyes wasn’t farfetched either for a gang like the Ghoulies.”

“The Ghoulies,” she repeats. She recalls the name, short segments in the news about their local exploits, mostly drug-trafficking and meth lab busts. 

“It pays to be the sheriff’s son,” he sing-songs.

“It was perfect, though,” he continues, lips against her skin. It keeps distracting her. 

The high-tension live wire strings ever tighter, but she wills herself not to part her legs any further. She has more questions.

“Why?”

“Fit with my theme,” he explains, chuckling to himself. “Stroke of luck.” Is she also his lucky rabbit’s foot?

It was a theme, each gift a symbol. He was telling her the story through them, writing her love letters in the only way he knew how, in the only way he knew she would appreciate. You’re so smart, bunny, she suddenly thinks, the supernova glow in her chest softening, a haloed haze developing around the edges. The imploding feeling abates.

It still doesn’t explain that night. Why did he follow her if he knew what she was? Why didn’t he say anything? What did he expect her to do?

Betty clenches her thighs together, and he sobers, thumbs slipping in-between to pry them apart. She lets him, gripping the edges of her desk, braving the last question. “Did you want me to kill you?”

His stare is hard but sincere. He can feel her closing up, raising her guard, and that’s the last thing he wants. She fears his answer, but these confessions aren’t meant to scare her. They’re assurances, acknowledgements, admissions of devotion, but she can’t believe that until he says it outright.

His grip is firm on her thighs, his gaze direct, unwavering. He’s on his knees, an act of supplication. “As I said, Betty, you’re what I’ve written come to life,” he reiterates, and she thinks of his first composition. It was the first thing she read of his. To be loved is to be consumed. “I wanted someone to love me enough to kill me,” he says, sounding so pleased with her.

“I didn’t kill you,” she points out, all the blood rushing to her head. The desk takes more of her weight. 

He kisses her thighs again, first one and then the other, lips soft against the downy skin, reverent. “You loved me enough to try.” He bows his head against her legs. “You loved me enough to let me live.”

“Then, all this,” she starts, the edge of her bottom nudging the anthology as he works his way up her thighs again before settling his chin on one, contemplating the hem of her skirt.

“If you let me live,” he clarifies. This was always the plan, but only if he survived. Only if she let him survive.

Her fingers itch for his hair, the sweet inky curls behind his ear. “What if I’d killed you?”

He turns his cheek into her skin, hands moving behind her thighs, running them down to her knees. He can’t keep his hands off her, or he thinks she will bolt if he doesn’t touch her.

“Either way, it was enough for me,” he intimates, stroking the ticklish backs of her knees. “I just hoped you would try.”

Like her, did he think that was the only way to prove she cared? How could she truly love him if she wasn’t willing to kill him? Better yet, how could he truly love her if he didn’t let her? That would be – her perfect victim.

“I hoped you wanted me enough to kill me,” he adds, palming her calves. She did; she wanted him so badly that no one else could have him. She wanted to kill him if only to keep him.

“Were you happy I didn’t?” she braves, lifting one hand, letting it hover above the points of his crown.

He turns his head suddenly and licks her thigh, and then he bites it, making her gut jump as he moans the word into her skin. “Ecstatic.”

He nuzzles her thigh, and it dislodges his crown. She can feel the ridges of his skull fracture, the catch of the staples. It must hurt him, but he sounds aroused when he marvels, “You let me do all this. And it was so much fun.” He rubs his forehead against her skin, sounding pleased, practically euphoric as he drawls again, “So much fun.” It bleeds into her, transferred from the connection of his skull to her flesh, as if leaking from the fracture and infiltrating her, diffusing up through her thighs, tucking a tiny bolt of pleasure up between her legs.

She sways backwards, feels the wash of his adoration, his satisfaction with her, swooning when he says, “You never fail to surprise me.”

He raises her skirt higher, revealing her underwear. His mouth moves upwards, sucking sloppy kisses into her skin. His beanie falls off as his lips reach the tops of her thighs. “God, Betty, please let me show you what I learned,” he pleads, fingers brushing the edge of the elastic. “Students are only ever as good as their teachers.”

Her hands finally land on his shoulders, fingertips directed toward his head, aching to touch his hair. He sighs happily, like that was all he was waiting for, her to touch him.

“Who taught you?”

He peeks up at her, quirks a brow. “Taught me?” 

Someone must have taught him. While her father has cooled over the years, he was very colorful and imaginative when he was her age, albeit much smarter and more controlled. Still, he made mistakes. And he didn’t expect Betty to be like him. She could never tell if he was delighted or devastated by that, but he took responsibility for her. He tried to teach her the basics of covering her tracks, but it was the one area of study where Betty had the most trouble focusing. She always got carried away. Yet, Jughead.

“Betty, I’ve never done this before,” he tells her, not quite following.

That is impossible. He didn’t make any mistakes. No one is that good on their first try. No one is that lucky. Betty was sloppy and stupid her first time. She made the mistake of involving Veronica. She misread that one. She misread Jughead, too. What else has she misread? Is she misreading this as well?

“I was waiting for you.”

The glow in her chest softens, haloed haze spreading out into her stomach, her arms, ending in her hands on his shoulders. Does he feel that? He is the cause – her demented sun.

With no basis in fact, waiting for her, a complement. A partner.

She wasn’t, though. Waiting.

Or maybe she was. Veronica. She thought Veronica could be that, yet after it imploded, she convinced herself going it alone was safer. No one was like her. No one would last. Only her father.

He told her another predator was more dangerous than getting caught. There was a reason roaming grounds of cougars rarely overlapped, and if so, only slightly. No one likes to share resources. They’d kill each other before that, if necessary. Therefore, wanting a partner was foolish. It was self-destruction. Did she have a death wish, too? Was she lonely?

Maybe it was because she believed passion when shared was more fulfilling. She was comforted that she had her father. Her father was the only one she could trust.

She can’t trust Jughead. She shouldn’t. Solitary predators aren’t meant to coexist in proximity.

God, she doesn’t know what she wants.

Betty pushes him backward, using only the necessary amount of force to create some space, navigate around him. He lets her go, eyes following her like two blinking question marks. It reminds her of that cursor, the unsaved Word document still open on her laptop. Is it you?

“Betts,” he bids, remaining on his knees, palms supine on his thighs.

She wraps her arms around her stomach, guarding the glow as she pads toward the bedroom door. Is she ready to die?

He’s on his feet with an uncharacteristic agility, moving so quickly and soundless. No more heavy footsteps. He repeats her name, and she stops in the open door. “Give me a moment.”

If she turns right, he will grab her. He will catch her, overpower her before she can reach the front door. She won’t even make it to the sofa.

If she turns left, she could probably fit through the narrow window above her shower. There’s a lock on the door. Could she get through the window before he broke the simple lock? There are sewing scissors in the bottom drawer below the sink.

She turns left into the dark hallway, and she can feel the tension she leaves behind, his silence loaded, dark, unhappy. Maybe he wanted the chance to chase her, fuck her in the foyer before he strangles her. While he strangles her. Will it be just as fun to break down her bathroom door, wrangle the sewing scissors from her hands, and stab her to death? The cleanup would be easier in the bathroom. Tile floors.

“Betty,” he says again as she disappears around the corner.

Her footsteps are light on the hardwood, noiseless, so he cannot judge how quickly she reaches the bathroom, but he must hear the soft click of the door, the turning of the lock.

He doesn’t immediately follow her. Or she doesn’t think he does, her ear against the door. When he doesn’t, she hesitates. It throws her off. Why isn’t he coming after her? She stares at the window above her shower stall for what feels like forever, willing her feet to move, scramble up the tile. She could use one of the shower shelves to heave herself up and through the narrow slot. She has time. She has a chance to get out from under this, him.

Something breaks in her bedroom. It sounds like her jewelry tree, necklaces and earrings flung against the wall.

Betty reaches for the handle on the bottom drawer, but he’s soft-footed, too, when he wants to be, even when he’s mad dashing for the bathroom. She doesn’t have time to get the scissors before his boot lands right above the lock. It takes one firm strike, and the door slams into the wall, breaking the doorstop.

She rounds on him with the scissors in hand, but he does it. He wrestles them away, grabbing her wrist and slamming it down on the counter. His fingers overlap, constricting the bones in her forearm again to the point of excruciating pain. He could break her wrists. He could break every bone in her body with his hands alone. Her wrist still sore from before, she easily gives up the scissors to save her bones. Hearing them clink against the tile floor, acid of fear rises and burns in her throat.

Betty shoves at him with her free hand, trying to get enough distance to punch him. She should aim for the fracture, rip out those fucking staples and make all the big bad uglies spill out of his wretchedly clever brain. Would they match her own? Would all the goodness and the everything come out with them?

She should hit him, but it would be – underhanded. It would be cheating, a sucker punch.

He doesn’t give her any more time to consider it, grabbing her hips and roughly lifting her up onto the counter. He pushes his way between her legs, prying her squirming thighs apart to make room for his hips. She pushes desperately at him, trying to gain leverage with her knees, grabbing at his shoulder, anything but his wound, but he’s got her in a hard place. She should hit him in the head. She should just do it. She yanks his hair instead, the next best thing.

He swears and shoves her backwards. Her shoulders slam into the mirror, her skull knocking the glass. Her vision blurs, pain radiating out from the contact point. She hears the crack and thinks it’s her skull, paying her back in kind, but then the tinkling of broken glass. A few shards land next to her hand, fractured mirror images of their struggle.

“Do you want me to fucking kill you?” he grinds out, breathing hard. He wraps one hand around her throat, another around her wrist, keeping her pinned to the shattered mirror. “Is that what I’m supposed to do?” 

They’re both breathing hard, creating a pocket of charged humidity between their bodies. Betty swallows so he can feel it against his palm, trepidation, knowing he could crush her windpipe. He stares at her heaving chest like he wants to rip the silk down the middle. He’s hard again, nudging her center.

“It goes both ways, doesn’t it?” she challenges, wanting to roll her hips against him, soothe the dull achy throbbing between her legs. Fighting is one of her favorite forms of foreplay. It might be his, too.

He chuckles, thumb stroking behind her ear, the protrusion of her styloid process, one of her favorite features of the human skull besides the Turkish saddle, the delicacy of the middle ear bones, the jugular foramen. Malleus means hammer.  

“You still think I don’t love you?” he wonders, watching her free hand edge towards the shards of mirrored glass with something like distant but fond amusement. “I killed you in my own way,” he reasons, thumb hard against the protrusion. “I did everything short of it.”

It felt as terrible as dying, as what she imagined it felt like to die. Murdering him felt like murdering herself. When she thought she could subsist on him for a while, the glow lasted only as long as the night. The gnawing emptiness happily crawled back inside her gut and made its home there again. The glow only returned when she knew he was alive.

She didn’t feel that way after her first botched murder. She didn’t feel anything but annoyance. With her black jackrabbit, it felt like she was alive again, and only because he was, too. She was unaccustomed to mourning her prey. She was unaccustomed to a lot of emotions, and she’s feeling them all right now. He’s never looked more alive, and it’s amplifying them.

“I don’t think that’s the point, Betts,” he explains, his peripheral vision on her inching fingers, small wavering smile on his lips. “It isn’t that I will kill you. It’s that I can.” His grip tightens on her throat, a minor threat. If he wanted, he could strangle her right here. “That’s what you want.”

When she gets a hold of the broken glass, he smirks and dares her, “Try it.” He makes no move to grab her and wrestle it out of her hand.

The shard barely an inch off the counter, he releases her throat to snatch her wrist, laughing like this is fun, a game of tag. “I’ll eat my way out of you again,” he promises, shifting himself closer. He presses the front of his jeans against her, hard line of his cock unmistakable. There’s only denim and a spare strip of cotton between them.

The glass cuts into her palm, easily but less than cleanly, one side of the wound deeper than the other. Blood drips down her wrist and over his fingers. The struggle opened the stitches on his own hand, red bleeding through the bandages. It is an image that never fails to arrest her attention, bleeding, run of red. She drops the glass, releasing the flood. Her blood soaks through his dressing, mingling.

He lets go of her hand to grab her throat again, hold her still so he can crush his mouth against her own. Freed, her hands find his belt, eagerly slipping the tongue from the buckle. She struggles with the button, whining when he bites her bottom lip. It distracts her for a moment, fingers lingering on the unbroken bridge of his jeans, yielding to his mouth, his tongue sliding along her own.

When he knows he has her, his hand leaves her throat to join the chaos between her legs. He rips her underwear while she breaks the bridge of his jeans, unzipping, shoving them down just enough to get at – a messy, brutal thrust that makes her grunt in pain. She hitches her knee higher on his hip, twisting herself to ease the discomfort.

He doesn’t give her time to adjust, jerking her forward by her hips. Her back slides against the broken glass, palms sliding along the porcelain. She’s lucky it doesn’t cut up her shoulders.

It’s a relentless pace, each thrust all but knocking the air out of her. There is no slack, no respite. He yanks on her hips to meet his own. Every time she tries to gain leverage, using her free hand to push herself up, he jerks her forward. It feels like he’s trying to shove himself up into her stomach. It feels like he’s trying to do everything short of killing her. It feels fucking exquisite.

She gets the front of his shirt in her fist, anything to anchor herself. It leaves a blood handprint on his shoulder. He’s the same, never failing to surprise her, in the best and worst of ways.

He curses, thrusts growing sloppy, belt clinking with every rough rock of his hips. “You still on birth control?”

It is such out-of-place consideration that she wrenches him forward to make him kiss her. He takes that as confirmation, losing himself once more in the tight hot suck of her cunt, sucking on her tongue to mimic the sensation. It’s filthy, but not as filthy when he takes her hand and brings it to his lips, kissing, licking at her wound, wolfish incisors nibbling around the swelling edges.

“Come on, virgin,” she goads meanly.

In retaliation, he flattens his palm on her lower stomach and presses down. Then, it feels like he’s hitting something she knew was there but didn’t know he could get at from that action. It makes her squirm to get away from the sensation, fantastic but unfamiliar. “Virgin doesn’t mean timid,” he argues breathlessly, his pace increasing.

He was the first time. He looked overwhelmed, painfully boyish slumped against the tree while she let her panties drop to her knees. He suddenly smiles, following her thoughts and whispering, “I was scared.”

His gaze is unfocused, watching his cock move in and out of her at a punishing pace. He’s going to come soon, but she’s only halfway there. He’ll be vulnerable.

“Of dying,” she gets out, gasping when he bears down on her stomach. She grabs his wrist, trying to relieve some of the pressure. It’s messing with her head, scrambling the rational part of her brain, the one that keeps trying to remember he will be vulnerable when he comes. She’ll have an opening.

I’ll eat my way out of you again. Betty keens and despises him for it, for getting it out of her. He’s eating her right now.

He chuckles and then moans, using the mirror for balance as he loses himself inside of her. “Of disappointing you,” he struggles to admit, eyelids wavering, trying not to close his eyes.

She doesn’t know what she looks like beneath him, messy hair, blood everywhere, pink lipstick smudge on her cheek. He’s making a mess of her.

“Liar,” she accuses, twisting against him when he gets it just right. Sixty percent there.

He smiles even as wrinkles form on his forehead, eyebrows pinching together, maintaining, “I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

She digs her nails into his wrist and then he comes, moaning low and bottoming out inside of her. He roughly grabs her hips to steady himself, spasming between her legs. The blissed-out look on his face makes her pussy clench, needing more friction, anything, forty percent, thirty. She wants – needs to reach the top of the rollercoaster with him.

His hair falls into his eyes, closed in disbelief. “Asshole,” she mutters even as she sweeps the hair out of his eyes. The moment of his vulnerability passes without incident. She bites the inside of her cheek.

He takes another moment to enjoy the heaven between her legs before finding his bearings. The corner of his lip curls up, the beginnings of a shit-eating grin. “I’m working on it,” he promises, bracing his thumbs on the insides of her thighs, peeling them apart to let his cock slip out of her pussy. He grunts low in his throat, watching the slow drip of their indiscretions, her pussy swollen and deep pink.

“You’re gonna leave me like this?” she supposes, drawing him partway from his self-reflection.

He smooths his palms up and down her spread thighs, his gaze still on his come dripping from her cunt. “Of course not,” he assures her. “That would be despicable.”

True to his word, he hauls her forward, her bottom slipping off the counter, leaving behind a streak of sweat. As soon as her feet touch the tile, he spins her about face, bending her over the counter. Her hip bones dig uncomfortably into the porcelain edge momentarily, and then he yanks her hips back, creating enough space to slide his hands across the tops of her thighs, fingers dipping between her legs. She feels the cool metal of his belt buckle skim her thigh.

“Unbutton your blouse,” he orders, middle fingers sliding through her folds.

She uses one hand to deftly undo the buttons down the front, letting him see the color of her bra. It matches the delicate pink of the underwear he shredded. His fingertips meander around her swollen clit, waiting for her to undo the front clasp. She untucks her blouse from the skirt bunched around her waist, and then flicks open the clasp, letting her breasts spill out. He sighs happily at their appearance, rewarding her with a firm couple strokes right where she needs it.

“I wanted to show you what I learned,” he reminds her, fingers slipping down over her clit to tuck up inside her. She’s sore, and she swears into her arm. She’s never been fucked before. She’s always done the fucking, but the sound of his fingers in her cunt, the obscene squelch, it feels like her thoughts are melting from her ears.

The steady but laborious climb of her orgasm abated moments ago, but the ascent restarts when he strokes that special spot again, the gears on the track clicking in time with the motions of his fingers. Her head drops, shoulders hunching up around her ears. She feels his come dripping down her thigh. “Fuck,” she mouths into her arm.

His free hand slithers around her waist, moving up her ribcage and navigating the drape of her blouse to palm her breast. He catches her nipple between index and middle finger, rolls gently at first, and then firmer, to a point it sends a tickle and itch straight to her clit. It makes her moan, small, ending on a high note, a noise she has never made.

“You’re being very good,” he commends, bending to kiss her shoulder, kneading her breast while he thrusts his fingers in and out of her pussy.

Betty notices for the first time the blood all over the counter, smeared across the broken mirror. She sees the red handprint on the front of his wrinkled shirt in their fractured reflection. The run of red makes her roll her hips on his hand, beckoning him deeper. He rewards her with a second set of knuckles.

“You’re lucky you can find the button,” she tells him even as she gasps, sore and strung at the same time.

He chuckles low. “Is this enough for you?”  

No. It’s good, phenomenal, but it’s not enough. Damn it. He wants her to ask. She needs to ask. He’s hard again. She feels it against her right buttock.

He doesn’t wait for her to respond, fingers slowing to a leisurely pace. Her high recedes instantly. Asshole. “Want to make a deal?”

“Fuck you,” she grinds out, about to finish herself. One of her hands crawls across the counter, but he abandons her breast to slam his palm over her wrist, pouncing on her like a jumping spider. She presses her mouth into her arm in frustration, teething at the soft flesh. She needs to bite something.

“Come on, you’ll get what you need,” he promises. His dick is caught between his lower stomach and her ass. “Humor me.” It’s almost a plea. He’s placating her. He really wants whatever it is.  

Betty’s mouth leaves a sloppy red suck mark on her skin, remnant indents from her incisors. “What?” she grunts.

“I’ll fuck you,” he assures her, and the word makes her clench around his fingers. He must feel it by the rock of his hips into her ass, dick sliding between her cheeks. Then, comes the catch. “If you watch yourself while I do it.” He pulls his fingers from her cunt, his small-stunned exhale met with a subdued whine. It’s a tight promise for him. She should have more bargaining power in this scenario.

She hums her frustration into her arm, wishing he would just fuck her. Her pussy clenches at nothing, sending her sliding back down the ramp.

“I think you’ll like it,” he reasons, tapping the head of his cock against her pussy, his inhale shaky. “You should see what you look like when I fuck you.” Is that what he thought that night? That he fucked her. Laughable. “I can’t get it out of my head,” he admits, sliding his cock through her folds, running it along her clit. It makes her thighs tremble. “It’s all I think about.” He spreads his palm on her lower back, lining himself up, waiting for her answer.

She isn’t sure she’s ready for this, watching someone fuck her. Feeling someone fuck her and facing the visual reality of it were two completely separate experiences. Submitting, being restrained, the vulnerability – it’s her biggest fear. But, if it were anyone, it should be him. Maybe a small part of her wants it to be him, a small unpermitted part of her. This power play – it is almost exciting. Only almost.

Jughead presses the heel of his hand to her sacrum, fingers spread wide across her lower back. The reach intimidates her.

It must be a heady victory for him, managing to corner her, trap her inside him. It would be for her if the tables were turned. He must relish it, the chance to control her. She wiggles her hips, needing just a little friction. He bears down on her lower back, pinning her. He’s not going to let her go. She could say no, and he’d continue to fuck her brains out, and she’d get nowhere.

“Fine,” she cedes, lifting her head. She meets his gaze in the broken mirror, jaw tight. “You win.”

The last syllable is forced out of her when he slides home, no warning, no preamble. The look on her face alarms her, wide-eyed shock like a deer sighted by a cougar, a kittenish cry breaking from the back of her throat. It’s a face she didn’t know she could make, and the shit-eating smirk on his face when she faces it almost cancels out the delicious friction and fullness as he scratches all her itches.

He slowly curls his hand under her jaw again, fingers closing around her throat. “When are you going to get it, Betts?” He takes some of the weight of her head, keeping her chin lifted, staring, studying her face in the mirror. “You won.”

He gives her one long, slow, drawn-out thrust. He lets his hips linger at the end so she can feel the fullness of him. She missed it. God, she missed it.

“You wanted me to eat you,” he reminds her, repeating the motion, languid slide out, forceful but controlled slide in. “You wanted me to fuck you.” Again. The small animal in her throat gets loose.

He keeps her stare in the mirror, rocking in and out of her, his pace far steadier and more disciplined than before when he hate-fucked her. She forces her eyes to stay open, even when each pitch of his hips creates that pitiful, defeated noise. She focuses on his baby blue eyes that match her journal, the robin’s egg colored pencils at their coffee shop, their lunch table on the veranda outside the student union. It’s a color that follows her, always on the tail of that soft, inky rabbit’s fur a tangled mess on top of his head.

He smiles, proud of her, and then it hurts. His eyes, they have what she lacks, what she can never find inside herself, what she can only get by killing. His emotion is like a knife in her gut, ready to open her up. It’s not a play. It’s not a game. “I’m giving you what you want,” he assures her.

It’s too much. She tries to drop her gaze, hiccupping, about to sob. The glow in her chest, the halo around the edges, it burns.

He tightens his grip on her throat, keeps her head up. She squeezes her eyes shut, crying when his next thrust is much less than gentle.

“Open your eyes,” he demands. He stops fucking her. Eighty percent. Sixty percent. “I can do this all day, Betts,” he threatens, sliding his palm up her bare thigh, around the curve of her ass, peeling her apart to see the stretch of her cunt around his cock. “I’ll keep coming,” he explains, fingers constricting around her throat in warning. “You’ll stay right where you are. Then, you’ll really know what it’s like to be fucked.”

A shallow thrust, not nearly enough friction for her. The angle isn’t right. She clenches, tries to rock back, but he bucks, pins her hips to the counter. Her hipbones dig into the sharp edge. He always keeps his promises, even the punishing ones. Fuck.

Betty takes a few deep but shuddering breaths, flattening her palms on the counter. Her face relaxes in a few moments until he curls his fingers under her knee and hauls it up onto the counter. It spreads her wider. It also raises her hips, an easier height for him, but then it puts her on tiptoes, forced to place more weight into her knee to save her standing foot the ache. He wants her uncomfortable. He wants her snared.

She can’t do anything. Not if she wants him to fuck her. This is more uncomfortable than she imagined.

Betty swallows with difficulty. He relaxes his grip, a small reprieve, and her eyelids lift reluctantly, green meeting blue.  “Good girl,” he praises in a single breath, and then thrusts in just the way she needs.

Moaning with relief, she stares at her face. Beet red shame high in her shiny cheeks, the flush of humiliation and frustration spreading across her chest. His hand looks like an albino spider clamped beneath her jaw. She looks like a wolf in a trap. No, a wolf pinned by a larger one, a male, alpha. Wolves are far more loving during courtship and mating. Then, she thinks of lions. He’s done everything but bite the back of her neck.

Wet green eyes, overwhelmed tears at the corners, her mind is on the edge of shutting down. He’s almost broken her. She doesn’t feel loved. She feels beaten into submission.

“Hey,” he murmurs, sensing something is wrong. “Don’t do that,” he whispers, softly, almost kindly. He releases her throat to card his fingers through her hair, brushing it out of her face. “Hey, Betts, it’s okay.”

She hiccups again, and it makes her feel pathetic, as pitiful as Dilton Doiley.

He starts to panic, pace slowing again. “How do I keep you here?” he wonders, mostly to himself.

She can’t meet his eyes in the mirror, but then she feels him press his palm to her mouth. “Come on,” he beckons, nudging her lips with the knuckle of his thumb. “You need to bite something.”

She doesn’t quite understand, staring at her half-mast eyes reflected in the shattered glass. Her knee slides out further, thinking he wants more access, letting his cock split her wide. Her lips fall open, a small plaintive whine escaping. He takes the opportunity to shove the meat of his palm between her teeth.

“Bite down,” he orders.

She does, hard, sinking her teeth into his flesh. The blood in her mouth wakes her up. She growls, low and animal, something far less small and fragile. Some say a person’s bite is worse than a dog’s, and the thought makes her bite down harder. He curses, but it sounds like a moan, his hips snapping against her backside.

She groans in response. He smiles and winces simultaneously, pleased with her. It takes resolve to break skin, and he knows that, and he loves her for it. He rewards her for it, fingers finding her clit and rubbing tight, fast circles. The clicks of the rails come faster. She sees herself in the mirror, his palm caught between her teeth, blood at the corners of her lips. It makes her arch her back into him, changing the angle, begging for more friction.

He obliges, rocking into her with a rough exhale, struggling to control his own breathing. Each thrust makes her jaw clench in response. “Good girl,” he gets out, cheek twitching in time with his thrusts.

He doesn’t want her passive or docile. This isn’t a demotion to rabbit, to chattel. Letting him fuck her doesn’t make her any less of a predator, she realizes. It doesn’t diminish her lethality. This isn’t a chastisement. It’s an acknowledgment. It’s why he wants her to look in the mirror. He wants her to see not only herself but him as well, how much he loves her, how much he is willing to do to give her what she needs even when she doesn’t know it herself, how much he enjoys being eaten, her jaws clamped around the meat of his palm.

That winds the coil tighter. He feels it, her steady moaning against his palm, her thighs trembling. Her knee slides off the counter, needing more leverage to push her hips backwards, meeting him halfway. She can’t keep her eyes open anymore, squeezing them shut as she tips over the first crest, her stomach flipping right before the final drop. She doesn’t know how hard she bites him when she comes, can’t control the force of her jaws, but he comes, too, at the moment she does it.

She screams into his palm. Each one breaks in the back of her throat, stilted, short bursts as her nerves light up. There is the constant background pleasure that comes with the ascent but then sudden amplification, lightning bolts of it spiraling out from his fingertips and up into her belly, out through her thighs. It ends with tiny keens, her gut convulsing, hips twitching. She licks at his palm, reaching down to grab his other hand and move his fingers off her clit, too much, overstimulated.

He’s cursing under his breath, sunk into the feeling of her clenching and fluttering around his cock. She wonders what that feels like for him. She’s felt it around her own fingers, and she can only imagine. Like she’s bleeding him out?

“That feels incredible,” he marvels, unwilling to pull out, his hips flush with her ass.

She unlatches from his palm, and he peels his flesh off her teeth. “Incredible,” she says, blood and spit leaking down her chin. She tries to catch her breath. It’s not the most descriptive word.

He chuckles, inspecting the teeth marks. “I can’t think of a better word,” he admits. “Let’s just say I understand now why Sweet Pea and Reggie were obsessed with sex.”

The realization reminds her how new this must be for him. He’s lucky. Most people don’t find someone completely physically compatible on the first try. But then most people don’t orchestrate their first round of serial murder with minimal error, so.

“I thought it was gonna be really awkward,” he continues, slowly slipping out of her, still oversensitive. “Which is can be,” he concedes, sighing as he pulls all the way out. He leaves behind that pleasant soreness, memory of fullness, one of her favorite feelings. “But, with you, that’s not how I feel.”

Betty never felt awkward with sex. Probably because she’s always been the one fucking them, even when they didn’t know it, and she kills the things she fucks. How could she be embarrassed? They weren’t around to embarrass her after the fact, couldn’t talk behind her back, spread rumors, call her a slut. Killer slut. That wasn’t so bad.

Jughead didn’t seem the type to gossip anyway. What would he say? Getting your brains bashed in is better than an orgasm. Something to that effect.

She suddenly backtracks. She’s not scared anymore. She’s joking with herself. She’s comfortable, satisfied, full. She feels no compulsion to kill Jughead.

Betty pushes herself up on wobbly arms, realizing aloud, “I don’t feel that way either.” In more ways than one. She could do it forever, let Jughead fuck her, fuck him without killing him. It’s not that it bests killing and fucking. It’s different, addictively different.

He kisses her shoulders, and she wants him again. “Thank you.”

He hums in question, massaging her waist, the tops of her thighs. His hands leave streaks of red across her white blouse, her bare thighs.

He’s painting her in red, in more than red. Her emotional prism, taking her basest feelings – anger, aggression, want – and fractionating them out into more nuanced forms of them – possessiveness, preservation, consideration – though they are still wrapped up in a haze of selfishness and arrogance. Yet, he adds to them more unfamiliar emotions tied to her wants – fondness, admiration, love.

She should repair his stitches, disinfect the bite on his palm. It makes her sigh with affection. That he even knew she needed that, something to bite, something to fight before she sunk away, that it was the only way he could keep her with him. He didn’t want to break her. He didn’t want to tame her. He wanted to challenge her.

He’s watching the movements of his hands across her body, transfixed by the trail of red they leave behind, but his eyes are soft, reverent, his eyes from that night. Fullness of emotion, it gives her headrush. He loves her just as she is, untamed, feral hammer.

He catches her looking and smiles, brushing the hair off her shoulders. “I told you,” he reminds her, pressing his lips to her neck, up beneath her ear. “I’m everything you need.”

She turns around to face him directly, witness it outside the cracked reflection. His smile doesn’t go anywhere. It’s complete now. He cups her hand inside his own, thumbs his own blood into her cuts. “We can do this forever,” he tells her. It has permanence. If she wants it.

“Promise?” He’ll let her be a predator. He encourages it.

“Promise,” he swears, swiping their blood onto his finger and slipping it into his mouth, a pact. Her lips part and he gathers more, lays his finger on the flat of her tongue, sighing when she closes around his finger and tastes them.

He draws his finger out slowly with a slick pop before smoothing it along her bottom lip. There’s no blood left on it. “Others?” she asks, nipping at him.

“Definitely,” he says softly. She’ll be the hammer. He’ll be the scalpel. Perfect complements.

He thumbs her cheekbone, staring at her with that small shimmery smile, like he’s seeing exactly what he’s written come to life, and the intensity of that fulfillment reflecting her own, the gravity of it, there is a breach inside her. Her lungs fill with it. The weight is unfamiliar, the pull, and it feels like vertigo, a dizzying sensation of wanting to fall. He is everything.

He bows to press a chaste kiss to her forehead, whispering an old hunter’s creed, asking for her own promise, “Take responsibility for what you kill.”