Valentine's Day - 1981

Jackie leaned back against the kitchen counter, watching Hyde pour milk into a bowl of Fruit Loops. Her coffee had long since gone cold, but she needed a distraction. So she held it to her chest, clinging as tightly to it and as she's once held a security blanket. The pretense of drinking coffee would buy her some extra time, maybe even enough to work up an extra burst of fortitude to say what she needed to. In Jackie's other hand was a large Manila envelope. She fingered its edges, debating the best way to break the news. It was hard enough to get Hyde to have a serious discussion about what to make for dinner, much less something actually life-impacting.

"You're staring." He said, not even bothering to look up from his bowl.

Her throat clenched and she said the first thing that came into her head. "I'm living with a man who still eats children's cereal for breakfast."

Hyde snorted a laugh before spooning another bite into his mouth. "You're one to talk. I've seen you drink champagne through a Twizzler."

"That was one time."

"It was disgusting."

She shot him a flat look. "You called me Veruca Salt all week."

He smirked into his cereal before digging his spoon in again. "Weren't you basically Veruca Salt for most of your life?"

Jackie thought back to her first time hanging out with everybody in the Formans' basement, to the carefully cultivated persona she'd held onto for so long as a disguise, and shrugged. "I'm cuter than Veruca Salt. And I'm especially adorable when I'm drunk...unlike some people."

She set her mug on the counter and sidled over to the side of the kitchen table, before perching herself on the edge of his lap.

"That so?" He folder his arms over his chest. "The last time you saw me drunk, you couldn't keep your hands off me."

Her stomach fluttered with the memories from that night, from the morning after, and every day since then. Partially, because true to his promise, he hadn't touched more than a few beers total since New Year's. She peeked up at him through dark lashes. "That's because I was drunk, too."

He flipped her off in the sweetest way possible and went back to eating his food.

When Jackie didn't respond to the bait, Hyde stopped mid-chew. "Okay, you're acting weirder than usual. You on another diet or did I blow off washing the dishes again?"

Her face fell.

Why does he have to know me so well?

"This about Valentine's Day?" He asked innocently, stopping to take a sip of his coffee.

She was in too much shock for it to register in her face - not just because he had remembered the holiday, but because she was the one who had forgotten it.

By Hyde's miffed expression, he obviously took her lack of response as in indictment of his newfound skills as a boyfriend. He had been trying awfully hard to be less like his old self, doing his best not to take her for granted this time around. "Well, you can stop before you start, because Donna already called last week to harass me about it. It's handled."

Jackie frowned, turning over the thoughts currently plaguing her mind. "Would you believe I completely forgot about Valentine's Day?"

"No." He rolled his eyes. "You've no doubt been counting down the days."

"I'm not like that anymore." She huffed, her tone coming out harsher than she'd intended it to.

His head shook slowly, brow bunched in thought, like he was waking up from a long dream. "Sometimes I forget how different things are with you, now."

Her face lit up at the compliment. She was still getting used to those, too. "Oh. Well, I'm still expecting flowers, though."

"Yeah, Yeah. You wouldn't be you if you weren't." Hyde's smile was indulgent, lips curling in amusement. "I am taking you somewhere nice, so stop sweating it, okay?"

"You are?" A wave of affection washed over her before her instinct to control things kicked in. "How nice?"

"Nice enough, so settle down." He threw his head back and glared at her, blue eyes sparkling. "But I'm not wearing a tie, no matter how hard you pout about it. So, you know, lower your expectations or whatever."

She pursed her lips in a pique of petulance. "Fine. As long as you know that I'm never going to stop dreamin' the dream."

"Oh, I know. It's good to have long term goals, though." He tapped her hand condescendingly, Cheshire Cat grin creeping across his face.

Jackie always had a weak spot for his smile. And his hands. And the way she could feel the weight of his stare on her in the dark, even when he thought she was asleep.

Oh God. This is going to be harder than I thought.

"Damn, you smell good." He pushed his bowl to the side and pressed his lips into the crook of her neck. "If I didn't have to be at work in 30 minutes, I'd have us 'proving our love' all over this table right now."

The envelope squished between them, still heavy in Jackie's hand. "This is where we eat, Steven."

"Not what you said last Tuesday."

"I forgot about that." She eyes squeezed shut to block out the guilt.

Hyde's tongue froze against the side of her neck. "You know, you're not as subtle as you think you are, so just get it over with."

She pulled back to look at him. "What?"

"Something's bothering you. Something about me." He scrubbed one hand over his face and exhaled harshly. "Look, I've gotta leave soon, so if you're going to yell at me for something you think I forgot to do or something I shouldn't have done that I did do, you might just want to spit it out, already. You're on the clock."

When Jackie didn't immediate pipe up, Hyde pushed her shoulders back to get a better look at her and groaned at what he saw in her face. "Crap. You're not talking. That means it's something serious."

Jackie lifted Hyde's spoon from the table and scooped up a bite of his cereal, then carefully laid the Manila envelope on the white Formica table in front of him as she slowly finished chewing. His muscles tensed under her lap.

"The fuck is this?" He glared at the envelope as if it were covered in vomit.

"Just, open it."

He pointedly took the spoon from her hand and continued to eat his cereal, ignoring her request completely.

Jackie shook the contents of the envelope out onto the table and gestured to the legal document on top. "You know what this is, right?"

Hyde dropped the spoon with a clatter inside of the bowl and slumped back into his chair, making no move to look. "Yeah. I'm not impaired."

Her breath caught in her chest. "Will you..."

Please don't hate me.

Jackie cleared her throat and started again. "Are you - are you okay with it?"

"You know the answer to that," Hyde snapped. "I'm - I just - you hadn't mentioned it in a while. Figured you'd changed your mind. Hoped." His nose twitched under his glasses. "Obviously, I was mistaken."

"Steven," she cupped his face in her hands, stroking his sideburns with her thumbs. "You know why I'm doing this, right?"

He nodded shortly, still unable to look at her. "Can I ask you something, Jackie?"

"Of course you can."

"You said you still-back in Vegas," his jaw clicked, as he collected his thoughts. "You said that you still-."

"I do," she said, quickly, hoping to spare him any feelings of uncertainty. "Always. That will never change."

Hyde's body relaxed under her touch, but his lips were still pressed together so firmly they were beginning to lose color. "But you're still bailing?"

"No." She shifted in his lap and pulled the sunglasses from his face, hooking them into the pocket of his shirt. "I'm here as long as you're here, puddin'."

A flash of surprise lighted behind his eyes, before his expression smoothed out again, stoic as ever. "If you - if things haven't changed - then, why?"

"You know why." She bit her lip, and prayed that she was doing the right thing for them. And that he would come to accept it in time.

Hyde nodded and reached for the pen he kept in his back pocket, then leaned past her, pulling the document closer with the tip of it. "I know why you think you need to do this, but you're wrong."

"Maybe." She reached forward and absently straightened his tie, which he immediately pulled loose again. "But I need to be sure."

"I'm sure." He looked directly into her eyes for a long moment, then put pen to paper and signed his name on the line above the word 'spouse'. "Well...it was fun while it lasted, Burkhart."

"I'm not leaving you." Jackie dug her fingertips into his jawline to remind him that she was still there, still with him. "It'll be better this way. We'll get to choose. Every day will be an active choice for us to stay together."

"I already made my choice," he grumbled, pushing past her grip to bury his forehead against her collar bone.

"I need you to keep making it. Every day." She kissed the top of his head and absently wrapped one of his curls around her index finger. "I want to know you're with me because you want to be, not out of some misguided sense of obligation."

He picked his head up to look at her, expression sharp with hurt. "This isn't the same as with that bullshit and you know it. That wasn't real. Even if the license hadn't been as worthless as the paper it was printed on."

It wasn't Jackie's intention to allude to Sam, but it also wasn't a bad reminder. For as much as Hyde claimed to be a free spirit, he still hadn't fully escaped internalizing the traditional values inherited from his time living with the Formans. Jackie knew he wouldn't want to disappoint them by ending yet another hastily-made, drunken marriage, especially if was with somebody they approved of, this time. It had taken a full year before Kitty stopped getting that deep crease between her eyes whenever somebody mentioned Hyde's name.

Sam may not have cared what your reasons for staying with her were, but I do. I can't trap you like that.

"I know." Her voice wavered slightly at the end. "But can you honestly tell me that part of the reason you stayed with Sam wasn't because of those worthless papers?"

"I don't know." Hyde shrugged, looking more dejected than Jackie had ever seen him. "But you're not Sam. And what we have?" he gestured between them, "Not even the same ballpark. Got it?" Deep down, Jackie already knew all of this, but she couldn't deny that it helped to hear him say it. Beneath Hyde's usual calm facade, his expression was stormy. His fingers gently twined into the into the back of her hair, holding her head in place. "Got it, Jackie?"

The intensity of his words made her throat run dry. "Got it."

"Good." He pressed a kiss to her forehead. "I don't care about the papers. I never cared about any of that shit."

"Yeah," she said, releasing a weary sigh, "I know."

This only proves I'm doing the right thing.

"Look, you know how much I hate people, but not you. Not even when I did everything to make you think I did."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, oh." He smirked, challenging her to push her luck. "For a bunch of reasons I'm not going to go into right now, no matter how hard you nag me about it."

Jackie rolled her eyes and a hint of a smile appeared on his lips. Even though he'd been on his best behavior for the last six weeks - with their history - she could help but to expect the worst. "I also hate people."

"See? And our friends say we have nothing in common." He mumbled to himself, exhaled a deep breath and shook his head.

"I'm really fucking bad at this stuff. Maybe...maybe I don't deserve you - us - but that doesn't mean I'm just going to roll over and give up on it. Just know, I'm willing to do whatever I've got to do to make this happen, even if it means letting you go."

Before she'd even realized what she was doing it, Jackie's leg swung to the other side of his body and she'd straddled Hyde's lap. She kissed a path across his cheek to his mouth and murmured against his lips, "I love you."

He kissed her back hard, hands bracing the sides of her face as their mouths collided.

She rucked up his untucked button-down to feel the warm skin underneath her fingertips and took a second to regain control. "I love you. It's just hard for me to let myself believe all of this is real...because I want to believe. I really do."

"Believe it." Hyde's chair scooted back with a low scrape, allowing her to pull his shirt and tie the rest of the way off.

Her mouth was on his chest before his shirt hit the floor. "Are you sure we have time?"

"I'm the boss. I can open the store late if I feel like it." His fingertips ghosted the underside of her breasts through the material of her shirt. "And, I definitely feel like it."

She bit her bottom lip and looked away. "I thought...I don't know. I thought you'd be more angry with me."

"Why? Because I'm an asshole?" He slipped his hands underneath her shirt and lifted the underwire of her bra above her breasts, giving his thumbs better access to brush across her nipples. "Not sure if you know this, but I have it on good authority I'm actually worse when you're not around."

Desperate to feel him on her skin, Jackie lifted her own shirt and bra off and threw them on the ground beside his discarded clothes. "Everyone knows this, Steven."

He raised his eyebrows at her, incredulous. "You're kind of an asshole, too, you know."

Jackie pushed herself up onto the edge of table, letting her knees fall open as an invitation. "That's one reason you love me, right?"

Hyde's gaze warmed her skin like a heat lamp. "That reason's not even in the top ten. And no," he said, quickly covering her mouth with his hand, "I'm not going to start listing them, because you already know."

She nipped at his palm, forcing him to pull it away. "My long term memory is a bit fuzzy."

"It is absolutely fucking not." He affectionately rubbed the side of his finger under her chin. "You remember too much."

A pang of guilt plucked unevenly at her insides, like a broken harp. "I gave up on our marriage."

"But, you didn't give up on me, right?" He leaned forward, teasing up the hem of her skirt with one hand as he eased her panties down her legs with the other.

"I never could."

"Anyway, fuck that piece of paper. Besides, I've heard breakup sex can be really...awesome." Hyde waggled his eyebrows as his fingers drifted along the underside of her knee.

"We're just getting an annulment," Jackie reminded him, then leaned back onto her elbows and looked at him expectantly.

"We're still very much together."

"Details, baby..." Hyde's mouth traveled lazily up her inner thigh, his stubble leave a delicious burn in its wake.

Jackie's breath turned into a gasp as he pressed his tongue inside of her. She arched her pelvis closer to his mouth, legs inelegantly scrambling to his shoulders, knocking the annulment papers to the floor in the process. He pinned her to the table, fingers almost painfully gripping her ass as he pressed his tongue in harder, sweeping it back and forth over her center.

Jackie's fingers twisted into Hyde's hair as she started to shake, toes curling in her shoes.

"I'll drop the thing off at the lawyer's on my way home from the office," he whispered hotly against her wet skin, before pressing a finger inside of her and redoubling his efforts.

"No rush," she squealed, at an embarrassing volume, beginning to pant. Her pleasure built quickly, flaring to life, glowing warm in her stomach like well-lit kindling.

Hyde hummed his response before adding an extra finger, burying his face more tightly between her slick thighs.

"Take your time. There's no - there's no rushhh," she stuttered out, between staccato breaths, as she careened closer to her release.

Jackie's head tipped back with a groan and she winced as the back of her skull briefly connected with something solid. She cursed under her breath as she distantly heard an object slide off the table and crash to the floor. "Shit." Her thighs closed around his ears and her vision whited-out as her body shivered to its peak. "No rush...we have all the time in the w-world."

Hyde moaned at her words and held her close, licking her through her release. Before she had a chance to fully wind down, his jeans dropped to his ankles and he was inching himself inside of her with a long sigh, covering her small body completely with his own.

All passing thoughts of regret for their ruined work clothes flew out of her head as he began to pound into her in earnest.

She lifted her head to look at him, and that's when she noticed it: the annulment papers scattered across their kitchen floor, covered in broken crockery and the remnants of Hyde's soggy fruit loops. "Steven..."

Hyde paused for a moment, head turning to follow her gaze. "Oops?"

Jackie stared at the papers mouldering on the floor, black ink swirling out of the pulp into a pool of artificially colored milk. She knew she should feel something like panic or regret, but the only emotion she could muster at that moment was apathy.

They didn't matter. None of it did. It never really had.

He had already proven he was willing to marry her in Chicago, Las Vegas, and probably anywhere else in the world she might have asked him to.

What really mattered was that Hyde wanted to stay with her - with or without a marriage - and the realization brought a blinding smile to her face. Maybe she didn't have to do anything and things would remain exactly as they were at that moment?

His expression was as unreadable as usual, but she could have sworn she felt a breath of relief caress the side of her neck.

Jackie dug her heels into his back, forcing him close enough to fill her completely. "It's just a piece of paper, right? It's not like they don't grow on trees."

"That's right, doll." The back of his wedding ring brushed underside of her jaw before he kissed her there. She could feel the curve of his smile against her skin. "If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a goddamn tree hugger..."