Chapter Text
It’s about 11:30 on a Thursday night, near the end of their second year at Greendale, when it finally happens.
Troy and Abed are walking back to the campus after filming scenes for their reenactment of Kickpuncher 4: Rise of the Punchkickers and it’s a little eerie because everything is quiet in the late hour. The parking lot is almost completely empty but they spot Jeff’s Lexus, lit by a circle of light from the nearby streetlamp. They’re about to wonder out loud why Jeff, of all people, would be there so late but then there are voices and there he is, walking through the parking lot. He’s got a girl with him and when they reach the car he presses her up against it and she giggles and then falls silent - so clearly this isn’t just some kind of friend thing.
Which is weird because… the girl is Annie.
Hidden in the shadows, Troy’s mouth drops open and Abed’s eyebrows knit together in surprise and they both slowly turn their heads to look at each other.
“Pierce was right.”
~*~*~*~
They see Annie crying in the women’s room and later they see her sitting with Jeff at the pep rally. But they didn’t hear the apology, they didn’t see the way he pulled her to him instinctively when she was frightened, or the way she tucked her hand into the crook of his arm as he ushered her through the door of the gym with a little bow.
They see the kiss, and Jeff’s dazed look – and they maybe stop to wonder.
But they didn’t see the look that passed between them at the study table or the awkward attempt at a hug or the way Jeff bolted from the room. They didn’t feel the pressure of Jeff’s hands on her hips or see the reluctant way they turned away from each other at the end of the night. And no one stopped in the parking lot long enough to notice Jeff sitting in his car, banging his head against the steering wheel and muttering obscenities under his breath.
“Dammit, dammit, dammit.”
Annie’s debate winning techniques are never mentioned and everyone’s too distracted with the extra Spanish work or chasing a mouse around campus or preparing an oral presentation, to connect the dots to a few weeks later when Annie is suddenly desperate at the idea of Jeff failing Spanish.
Noticed or not, Annie and Jeff continue falling into each other’s wake and the more time they spend together the more they start to make these almost insignificant considerations for each other - it may seem like they’re just two friends walking down the hallway but no one saw the sideways smile he gave her when she caught up with him after class or how he automatically shortened his steps to match hers.
If Jeff seems to be changing or unwinding, it’s credited to his first adult relationship in years and being a part of this little oddball community and maybe having to really work for something. Everyone will continue to assume these things because no one’s around to see the way he immediately concedes to do her a favor, the way he can’t seem to say no, the fact that her opinion is really starting to matter in the way that Italian faucets and a flashy car used to matter.
And if Annie seems to be less of a robot, it’s believed to be the result of dating a tree-hugging hippy and having real live friends who don’t care about all those past mistakes. So no one thinks twice when she enrolls in the blow-off class that Jeff is taking instead of Sailing with Troy. And they definitely don’t notice when she starts wearing longer pencil skirts and silk blouses and heels that are an inch higher than normal.
It’s just sort of happens that they seem to intensify this emotion and, oh everything, in each other so when he yells at her he’s angrier than usual and when she cries she’s more intense than usual - but Jeff gets pissed a lot and Annie’s just an intense person so no one thinks anything of it. They don’t work it out and connect it to the subtle (increasingly everyday) changes like the fact that Jeff’s eyes now slide over to Annie first whenever he sits down at the table or how they’re always watching each other for cues or how her smile brightens, just ever so slightly, when he walks into a room.
And one day, when he’s trying to chose between two other women, no one sees that it’s Annie he’s talking to, it’s Annie he’s watching across the dance floor, it’s Annie whose unexpected presence fills his body with some kind of reliefafter two public and confounding declarations of love.
~*~*~*~
“Jeff?”
“….”
“Jeff.”
“…”
“Jeff?”
“Yeah?”
“We. Umm.”
“Okay. Okay.”
They step back from each other, Annie’s eyes searching the ground, her hands twisting nervously in front of her while Jeff just stares at her, a little slack jawed.
He closes his eyes and exhales slowly.
“Shit.”
She looks up, wary. “I’m sorry, I-”
“No. I’m-” Jeff cuts off and then they’re just staring at each other again. He shakes his head, “This night really sucks.”
At this, Annie suddenly seems to visibly shrink back into herself and Jeff’s eyes widen, “I don’t mean. God, Annie, that was.” He stops again and looks skyward. “Shit.”
Students are still milling around, laughing and shouting summer goodbyes, no one noticing the two of them, standing there in the middle of the walkway in awkward silence.
Annie’s eyes trail after a couple walking hand in hand toward the parking lot.
“You should go talk to Britta.”
“What?”
She nods resolutely, but not looking at him. “Go talk to Britta. Or Slater. Or.” She stoops and picks up one of her bags, “You should figure that out.” Finally meeting his eyes, she smiles, “It’s okay.”
He squints at her, unsure, “You’re being astoundingly mature about this.”
And then she’s giving him the wide Disney Princess Doe Eyes Bambi look that sort of got him into this in the first place, “I’ve grown up a lot this year.”
Jeff’s expression changes and something like a half-smile plays at the corner of his lips, “Yeah.” He draws the word out slowly.
Annie picks up her other bag, “Have a good summer Jeff.”
She walks away.
~*~*~*~
By the time Jeff slinks back into the gym the cops are there and one of the Dalmatians is being led away in handcuffs. Professor Duncan is being tended to by paramedics, his nose gushing blood, Chang laughing nearby.
He tries to pull Britta aside quietly but in the ten minutes since he’s been gone her disappointment has turned into fury and pretty soon they’re just yelling at each other.
“What kind of asshole just walks away when someone tells him they love him?”
“You don’t love me!”
“So?”
Somewhere in the middle of this Slater throws her hands up in disgust and storms out.
“I knew the whole paintball thing was a mistake.”
“What does that even have to do with anything?”
“Everything!”
And then she slaps him.
The second after she does it, Jeff sort of reels back, stunned and there’s a flicker of regret in her eyes but then she turns on her heel and leaves. For a moment everything is quiet and everyone’s watching him like it’s some kind of riveting television show.
No one sees Annie on the steps of the library with her fingers pressed to her lips.
~*~*~*~
The next two weeks are all gossip and whispering and drama.
Everyone wants to know what Jeff’s going to do and if he’s going to choose between Britta and Slater or go the way of the increasingly cliché “I choose me” scenario and if he does maybe Britta and Slater should just hookup with each other (thanks Pierce) and be done with it. But no one’s really seen Jeff so they don’t know that he’s actually been spending the majority of his time staring at his phone, at Annie’s name in his list of contacts and rolling over words in his head like “can’t” and “shouldn’t” and “don’t.”
There’s even more to gossip about when they learn that Annie didn’t go to Delaware after all and they pepper her with questions about why and did Vaughn cry and no, really, seriously, how much did he cry? She evades the questions and they try to tell her about the Tranny Dance drama but she doesn’t seem to want to hear about that either. They assume it’s because she’s just had her heart broken, poor dear, and topics of love are just too hurtful right now. No one knows about the time she’s alternating lately between waiting for the phone to ring and hating herself for waiting.
This isn’t what living in the moment is supposed to be, right? Waiting around for a phone call from a guy who of courseisn’t going to call? It’s Jeff after all and if there’s one thing she knows about him (there are a million things she knows about him but she can’t think about those right now) it’s that he does avoidance really well. So she never actually believes he’ll call but she feels nervous and twitchy every time her phone rings.
She’s little bit wrong about the avoidance thing though.
He ends up apologizing to Britta.
“He was completely drunk and he was talking about kisses that didn’t mean anything and how he’s really really sorry and how he wants to be my friend and he kept saying, ‘I really do value you and you’re not just a hot blonde anymore.’ Which is nice I guess but it’s weird. It was like he was trying to open up to me and talk about feelings and that’s weird right? So I told him everything was fine. Just to make him stop. And it is fine. Really. Drunk, emotional Jeff was sort of like some kind of emergency shut off valve to my attraction to him.”
Britta relates this to Shirley, who immediately turns around and calls everyone else, including Annie.
“Oh. Good.”
Annie hopes she sounded sufficiently surprised and she thinks about the text message she received earlier (much earlier – like, woke her from her sleep at 3:00 in the morning, kind of earlier).
It was from Jeff. Of course.
“talked to Britta, everything okay.”
Six hours later when she’s actually awake and this is clearly not a dream she decides to just respond with a happy face emoticon and then they both sit around wondering what “okay” means while everyone else just breaths a sigh of relief at another averted crisis.
~*~*~*~
Annie starts working at a local bookstore and Jeff is just right down the street doing some work for a law firm and the entire group knows these two bits of information but they don’t know about the day Jeff stops by the store with the excuse of looking for some law book for his boss.
She sees him walk in, all swagger and sunglasses and sleeves rolled up his forearms, and has to tamp down the sudden urge to duck and cover under the information desk.
“Hey.”
“Oh. Hi. Um.”
But he’s smiling, so maybe “okay” really just means normal and can we go back to the way things were?
Her hands only shake slightly when she types the name of the book he’s looking for into the computer database and if he notices he doesn’t say anything.
When he stops by a couple days later to see if she wants to go to lunch it really does feel like normal, like something friends do and it doesn’t feel like lying when she tells Britta and Shirley that she and Jeff sometimes meet for lunch - no one has any reason to believe that it’s anything more than that.
Except, they don’t see the way Jeff and Annie’s eyes will meet and hold across the table and suddenly she can’t eat anything because her stomach feels all weird and tumbly or the fact the he didn’t even notice that time the waitress left her number on the receipt or that sometimes when they’re leaving the restaurant Annie will feel the light press of his hand at her lower back.
It’s nothing, it’s friendship, it’s Jeff, it’s Annie, it’s normal – these are the things everyone else believes, so. It must be true.
And when they’re with everyone else, it’s easier to pretend because there are these five other people to play off of and Annie can gossip with Shirley and Jeff can banter with Britta and together they can all try to figure out whatever it is that Troy and Abed are doing in a given moment.
They spend half the summer at Pierce’s mansion and it’s kind of perfect because he’s got a swimming pool and an in-home theater room that basically makes Abed weep tears of joy when he first sees it. He and Troy are constantly marathoning movies like “Mega Piranha” and “Giant Octopus vs. Mega Shark” and sometimes they’re joined by any combination of the rest of the group.
Everyone’s there the night Annie and Jeff end up next to each other on the couch but it doesn’t seem to mean anything that they start the movie both pressed into opposite arm rests, that sometime later a bowl of popcorn spills and they hastily clean it up but then maybe aren’t sitting quite as far away from each other afterwards.
No one notices that halfway through the movie they both stop saying anything.
His hand ends up resting on her thigh (they were sitting close enough together and his hand had no other place to go really and it just ends up settling there and god, she almost whimpers when his thumb starts brushing back and forth along the bare skin) and their shoulders are pressed together and they’re both so busy wanting and not wanting it to be more that they have no idea what’s happening on the screen in front of them.
At the end of the night everyone says goodbye and drives away in separate cars, in separate directions, and there’s no consideration for the possibility that Annie will be lying in bed, at almost one o’clock in the morning, composing and deleting texts like some kind of nervous tick. When she does finally push “send” on the carefully worded and intricate “I had fun tonight” she stares at the screen for a moment in horror because now it’s out there and you can’t take that back and she drops her head to the pillow and groans.
But then her phone chimes and she actually feels that stupid, simple little noise low in her stomach.
“me too”
She exhales slowly, shakily, and her fingers trace over the keypad as she runs through the millions of possible responses.
Why?
What does all this mean?
What are you looking for Jeff Winger?
What are you wearing? (This one makes her giggle, and then stray toward actual wondering).
Can I come over? (This one makes everything go hazy for a second and she has to a take a shuddering breath before turning off her phone and throwing it across the room in terror).
No, she absolutely cannot be counted on to make rational texting decisions right now.
As she curls herself into her pillow she thinks about him lying in bed, thinking about her, and all of it makes her simultaneously want to scream in frustration and dance around the room in giddy schoolgirl-like joy.
~*~*~*~*
Annie’s different and everyone’s noticed. There’s something braver there, something bold. She’s always been adamant and defiant but the “formidable face” was always a bit like a little girl playing dress up, and now it’s just real. And maybe that’s what happens after someone breaks up with a shoeless hackey-sack player, maybe she’s been strengthened by this tragic lost love.
Or maybe it’s wearing her new bikini and floating on her back in the pool, her hair fanning out around her like a halo. And even though he’s leaning back in a lounge chair and he’s got sunglasses on and he’s talking to Shirley, she can feel his eyes on her, the way they trace her movement as she drifts over the water. It makes her skin feel hot in a way that has nothing to do with the midday summer sun.
Or maybe it’s the sound of her friends laughing around a fire pit, roasting marshmallows and tossing good-natured insults back and forth as red embers glow and crack and send curls of smoke into the night sky.
Maybe.
(And Jeff’s different too – he spent the entire summer watching movies with Abed and Troy, and eating lunch with Annie and teasing Britta and gossiping with Shirley and occasionally sharing a bottle of scotch with Pierce and he can’t even lie and say he hated it.)
~*~*~*~
It’s the last weekend before school starts again and they’ve all holed themselves up at Pierce’s, getting drunk and daring each other to do increasingly unrecognizable renditions of Lady Gaga songs and ordering pizza so many times that they’ve learned the delivery boy’s name and all shout “Lenny!” every time he shows up at the door. When they sober up they go swimming and play volleyball until someone mentions Greendale again and it’s time to start in on another bottle of vodka. They watch the series that Abed’s been working on over the summer, Greendale Dreamin’, and it’s actually pretty good and Britta ends up laughing so hard that she pees her pants.
It’s sometime late in the afternoon on Sunday and Troy’s on a raft in the pool, half asleep and turning in lazy circles over the water while Abed and Britta are spooned up on a lounge chair and Shirley sings along softly to the oldies station that’s playing over the outdoor sound system. Pierce is sitting with his legs in the water, recounting the tale of a “raven haired beauty” that caught his eye during the tumultuous summer of ’69 (ahem ’89) even though no one’s really listening.
Annie wanders around the house aimlessly and she can’t even tell if she’s drunk or sober anymore but Pierce’s house is really big and she just wants to walk around trailing her fingers over everything because it seems like the thing to do. At the end of one hallway is what Pierce has termed “the man cave” which doesn’t make a lot of sense because he lives alone so, basically the entire place is one big bachelor’s pad. But this room has a pool table and a fully stocked bar, a flat screen TV and a Playstation console. And sometimes Annie just feels really sad for Pierce.
Jeff’s in there racking a new game of pool, and she’s pretty sure she had known where he’d be, so it’s probably pretty inevitable that she’d end up there too.
He smiles and holds out a pool cue so she shrugs, “Teach me?”
“Annie.” He’s trying to look incredulous but he’s probably drunk too and his words come out softer than he means. “The game of pool is not something that can be taught. It’s something you just know. In here.” He pats his chest.
“Jeff, you weren’t as cool in high school as you might like us to believe, were you?”
He smiles, laughs, “Fine I’ll teach you.”
It’s really not some kind of come-on, she’s never played pool before, but as Jeff leans over her and shows her how to hold the cue between her fingers, she’s really glad that she asked. She can feel so acutely every point in her body he’s pressed against and how is it that he’s always so warm and solid?
This wave of, she’s not even sure what it is, crashes over her and she just really wants to kiss him again. She needs to kiss him again.
When he stands up she moves with him and turns around so that she stays in his arms. Her forehead is pressed lightly into his chest and she runs her fingers along the hem of his shirt.
“Annie.” There’s a warning in his tone.
She finally looks up and she’s barefoot so he’s just too tall and she’s the kind of drunk where everything’s a little tilty so she braces her hands on the pool table behind her and pulls herself up to sit on top, tries not to look nervous as she raises an eyebrow. His eyes darken and he immediately steps up between her legs and curls his hand behind her neck. Annie closes her eyes and tilts her head up, slides her arm around his back. But he doesn’t kiss her, just bends his head down so that his lips are close to her ear.
“This is a bad idea,” he whispers against her. But they’re empty words because his fingers are toying with the ties to her bikini, following their path down the bare skin at her back. She shivers and oh, arches in to him and then he’s moving and kissing her and as his tongue slides against her lips and sweeps into her mouth there’s only right here andnow and screw all those reasons not to. She slides her hands up under his shirt, thinking about, well, how often she’s thought about this or caught herself in a hazy fantasy of heated kisses and arms wrapped around her - so she’s tugging up and pulling the shirt over his head.
He pushes against her hips, sliding her back, further onto the table and smoothing his lips down the skin of her neck, down the edge of her bikini top as he pulls himself up onto the pool table with her.
Suddenly there’s a burst of laughter from outside. They both go still, as much as possible as they’re both short of breath and he’s close enough that she can hear his heart thumping in his chest. They hear the screen door to the patio slide open and then shut again and then Troy’s voice off in the kitchen.
“Jeff.”
“Yeah.” His head drops down. “Fuck. Yeah.”
He pulls back and reaches for his shirt. As he tugs it back over his head, Annie just sits there on the table feeling weirdly small and uncovered and she crosses her arms over chest.
Jeff looks back and something flickers over his features like he’s managed to sober up in that split second. He sighs and offers her his hand to help her down.
Everything’s suddenly all wrong.
“Annie, listen.”
She shakes her head, “No, it’s okay. I’m-”
“No. I need to say this.” He scrubs his hands over his face and takes a deep breath. “Look, I’m pretty much going to inevitably screw this up. If I haven’t already.”
Annie’s heart sort of leaps into her throat at “this.” This, this. It’s something.
“And I don’t want you to get hurt in the middle of whatever fucked up thing I’m doing.”
“But, maybe that won’t happen.”
“No. It will happen. This is why I avoid, you know…” He looks away, “All the relationship stuff. Why I’m trying things like being friends with women, not expecting more.”
“But you had sex with Britta.”
His gets this sudden deer-caught-in-headlights look, “You know about that?”
“Jeff.” She rolls her eyes, “Everyone knows about that.”
“Oh. Okay.” It takes him a second. “Well, that’s a completely different thing.”
“How?”
“It just.” Jeff looks down and she’s got a red spot at her collarbone where he lingered too long. Maybe everyone will notice and this whole thing will come crashing down on its own. He reaches out and brushes over the spot with his thumb. “Is.”
Her eyes flutter shut the moment he touches her so he quickly pulls back - her skin is much too soft for this being gallant thing (if that’s actually what it is) anyway. “God, Annie, I’m really drunk.”
She opens her eyes, “Okay.”
“We should probably.” Jeff steps back and nods his head toward the door.
Neither of them is completely sure exactly what just happened but as they join their friends back at the pool there’s this word tumbling around in the air and they both feel it.
Wait.