one word prompt: memory

Because Amy is the most organized, deliberate, exact person she or anyone else knows, she’s been trying to pinpoint an exact moment where she fell in love with Jake for good, in a no-takebacks sort of way. 

The thing is, Amy has never fallen fast. There’s never any moment or action or memory that absolutely defines their relationship in a cut and dry way. She wishes she could say it was the first time they kissed, or the first time she said “I love you,” or when he purposefully lost a bet just to move in with her. But it wasn’t like that. She can’t point to anything and say that’s it, that’s the moment that changed the course of my entire goddamn life. When she was a kid, she used to want that, that orderliness, that certainty, that perfect little soundbite summarizing the whole topic in a sentence that could be packaged away for safekeeping. 

Ironically, Amy thinks, it was Jake who made her not care so much about that. 

Once, in 2012, he smiled over his computer screen at her. It was 11:39 PM. They’d been working a cold case for around twenty-four hours, and were no closer to solving it than when they started. She’d put her head in her hands, massaging her temples, staring through tired, blurry eyes at the file in front of her. But when Amy looked up, Jake was smiling at her. “We’ll solve this one,” he said. “We always do.” 

And they did. 

They weren’t friends then, not really, but they didn’t have to be: they trusted each other implicitly and explicitly, in a way so damningly simple and necessary to survival that Amy couldn’t even define it. 

Then there was that bet she lost in the last sixty seconds, him dancing towards her with a one-dollar ring and a shit-eating grin on his face, spinning and falling on one knee. And, sure, Amy might have hated her life in that moment, but it was worth it for the stakeout and riding in his crappy, broken-down car, and feeling, for once, like maybe it wasn’t even a little bit malicious. 

There was the time Jake stayed up with her all night, coaxing her into eating and drinking and taking breaks, when her little nephew got kidnapped in their precinct, and, by some mistake of bureaucracy or Holt, she got saddled with a case she was far too involved in. 

There was the tiny, nervous smile on his face just before he kissed her for real the first time. No excuses. No criminals to avoid. No fear. No ways out. Just them, in a small, dimly lit locker full of horrific criminal evidence. 

There was his amazed, soft gaze on her when she told him she loved him. 

His arms, unconsciously pulling her closer in the middle of the night. 

His fingers, brushing feather-light over her skin. 

Jake. 

When Amy was younger, she was afraid she wouldn’t know how to define love when she saw it. 

Now, she can see it so easily in every line of his smile.