Work Text:
so when the playing field is level
and it's you and me remaining
we will finish out the last few hundred miles side by side.
It doesn’t start until they’re alone, but they’re alone pretty quickly. The flotsam and dregs of the group head out one by one until they find themselves sitting alone, staring into empty glasses.
They should have been meeting in bars this entire time. This one maybe isn’t the most ideal, since she works here, but her shift passed her by, and here she is, and here’s Jeff too, and she knows what happens when they drink alone.
By the time their hands start accidentally-on-purpose brushing against each other, and their legs are pressed together under the table, Britta’s seized with the notion that she should get out of here before she does something she’ll regret. She’s not drunk. She has no excuse. Jeff notices her start to gather her purse, reach for her jacket, and he orders another drink. She won’t leave without him, so she sits back down, reasonably sure that he only ordered the next drink so that she’d stick around.
Well, of course she does. Britta has his back, just like always. Or his right, as the case may be. She’s been keeping an eye on him all night, and she knows something happened, and it probably didn’t go well, because this is the closest he’ll come to admitting that he doesn’t want to be alone right now. The awful side of Britta that she tries really hard to suppress feels some amount of relief. She can't just tell him that he and Annie wouldn't work, because a) she does not know that and b) she would die first. Well, and c), Jeff would laugh at her.
He’s not laughing at her now. He’s staring at her, he sighs once very deeply, and suddenly under the table she feels his thumb and pointer finger circle her wrist. Her heart starts beating faster, her pulse thrumming against his hand, always weirdly warm.
At this point in their cosmically intertwined lives, Annie’s gone. She’ll come back, but at least Britta has the summer before she has to sit through that soul-crushing reunion (and then be all “good for you Jeff, you kept someone on the line for years and years who has never been in a serious relationship”. That’s going to be her speech, she has it totally planned), and in this second, Jeff’s eyes are fixated on Britta, the hungry look she remembers, and right here in this exact moment, Britta feels something shift, and all of a sudden she is the one in power, the person fully and totally in control of what will happen next.
This is a crossroads. Britta has lived through moments like this before, and this feels the edge of something deep, like sitting in the manager’s office of a diner listening to her father explain away anything she says, like open highway in front of her and Radiohead’s 1997 tour dates in her lap, like that very first hit of ecstasy, like sliding smoothly between Jeff’s legs during a paintball game that she didn’t win.
She can see it so clearly, a runway lit up in front of her. This is where she makes the decision and lives with the fallout, right here in this bar she’s worked in for almost two years, next to this man she knows too well.
Britta doesn’t want to be this woman. The one you sleep with because you can’t be with someone else, the consolation prize. The rival. The object in the path of the oncoming train. But she is all of these things and more, so clearly Pierce was wrong (she is shocked!) because she hates herself exactly the right amount, and she actually wants this pretty badly.
So yeah, she’s taking the low, easy, dark road that she knows intimately.
Maybe she has something to prove, that she’s known him for almost six years but he still wants her, that he wants someone else but he still wants her, that maybe the only true constant of her life is one she shares with him: that they always kind of want each other.
Britta smiles, and covers his hand with hers. “Jeff, as your best friend -” right here he opens his mouth, sort of jerks forward, then falls back again with a look on his face extremely reminiscent of Abed’s on the day Annie explained Divergent “- I need to tell you that solo-drinking at your age is extremely unhealthy.”
There’s a brief pause where they stare each other down. Jeff breaks first.
“So let’s do this,” he says hoarsely, waving down the bartender. “What, vodka? Right?”
She wraps one palm around the sweating glass when it comes, and he watches as the moisture beads around her fingers. “Are you and Annie together?” she blurts, eyebrows knit.
“No,” he says eyes still on her hand, “we are not.” He looks up as she smiles sadly and downs the first glass in one.
“Okay,” she says lowly, putting the empty glass on the table with an air of finality, and looking him up and down, “let's do this, then.”
Jeff smiles. Britta crosses the road. To get laid on the other side? Gross. Whatever.
--
They’re five drinks deep and still riding off of the fourth-drink threshold of getting pretty handsy when they start to go over the logistics.
“We can totally do this, we've done it before,” Jeff babbles, one hand on her knee, the other playing with his glass as he’s pondering his next move, which is going to be a voyage northward from this knee. “We were pretty good at it too, right?”
“No, right? Totally, me and you, dude,” Britta says, laughing. “It won’t be weird, you can just pretend I'm Annie or whoever, and I can pretend you're literally anyone who can have sex with me without bumping my chin. Perfect.” Britta is still smiling sort of glassily, and his hand starts inching upward. She’s right, everything she’s saying is making perfect sense to him. It won’t be weird. It’s not weird now, so why would it be weird later?
“This time there isn't anyone to get mad about it. So it'll be like before, but without anyone yelling at us.” This is so easy. This is what he knows how to do. He's been adrift for a lot longer than he suspects he's actually been aware of, nothing but a mess of decisions half-made, but the lead-up to sleeping with Britta is something so tethered in muscle memory that’s it’s almost thoughtless. It’s been a long time since he’s had sex, and a longer time since he was having it regularly, but he knows which cards to play and Britta is unfolding in his hands like a fucking cootie catcher.
She’s nodding over and over, the smile on her face growing and it’s a goddamned sunbeam on a mountain, the clouds breaking. He kissed her for the first time about twenty minutes ago on the third drink, there’s so much built into the routine of this, steps he hasn’t managed to forget, the dance they do. They prowl around each other like metaphorical lions with excellent non-metaphorical bone structure. But just now he wants to kiss her again, so he does, and her fingers clench at the back of his head, pulling him closer, she’s moaning just a little into his mouth.
God. They should have been doing this more. He can’t remember right now exactly why they haven’t been.
“We do it till it isn’t fun anymore,” Britta says softly, her face still very close to his. “That’s our deal. When it’s done it’s done, and we let it die with dignity.” She takes one more gulp of her drink, breathing in deep after she swallows. “No harm, no foul, right?” She licks her top lip, nibbles on the bottom, and he's gone, hooked like a fish.
Jeff’s pretty dizzy at this point, and he’s also making way too many mental comparisons, so he just nods along at this, his eyes glued to her mouth, and that concludes their initial negotiations. They aren’t hard to please.
They kiss just like before, like someone’s taking notes and a winner will be announced.
--
Britta’s not actually an idiot, and she knows she’s playing with a significant amount of fire here. This is different. This is a different time, she is not going to get sucked down the rabbit hole that is her relationship with Jeff Winger, she is dominant and self-aware and she knows what she’s going to get out of this. She won’t give herself away bit by bit, like goldfish at a carnival. She is going to maintain control.
That said, she’s totally sitting in his lap. Britta doesn’t usually sit in laps, because the patriarchal concept of women being treated like children is disgusting, but sometimes maybe she ends up there anyway. There’s just a lot of him and her arms are only so long.
God. There’s so much of him. He’s really good at kissing her.
“We should go,” she hisses into his mouth, pulling back a little.
“What?” Jeff says stupidly, his fingers slipping just slightly into the waist of her jeans, his other hand somewhere in her hair. Did he pull her ponytail out? “No, don’t go, let’s stay here, buddy. Come here.” He leans in again.
“No, no, we have to go home,” she says, ducking away from his mouth so that his teeth crash kind of painfully into her hairline. “Let’s go home.”
“We’re going home?” Jeff asks her, and she nods. He puts his hands on her shoulders, bends down so they’re eye-to-eye. “We’re going to have sex?” he asks her, very seriously.
“Psh, yeah, obviously we’re going to have sex.” Britta grins, her lips stretched tight, and grabs one of his hands with both of hers, tugging him along behind her, her jacket and her purse dangling from his free hand.
Jeff’s feeling bad, and that’s always made her pretty horny. And if they want to use each other as some kind of distracting sex toy because their figurative kids (some of whom they’ve had unsuccessful romantic entanglements with) have all finally left the nest, well, they’re consenting adults and they know what they’re getting into better than most.
They’ll have plenty of time to regret this in the morning.
--
For the record, he doesn’t actually think of Annie, at least not while he’s actively engaged in having sex with Britta. Even if he wanted to, Annie probably wouldn't say things like “Jesus fuck, Winger, get your elbow off my damn chest” while he’s going down on her. So the illusion would be shattered almost immediately.
It’s impossible to sleep with Britta while thinking of anything but Britta. Hell, sometimes it’s impossible to sleep with people who aren’t Britta while thinking of anything but Britta, not that he’s been able to test that recently.
Britta almost always reeks of something: pot or cigarettes or thick booze, depending on where she’s been. It's rare she smells only like herself and usually when he's been in a position to breathe her in like this, she's smelled faintly like him too. He kind of likes that, though. Britta laughs at him in his ear almost every single time, which always makes him angry and for some reason that just makes things hotter? And for someone with such short legs, she sure can contort them in a lot of interesting ways. Those things combine to make the kind of experience he can’t get rid of for days and days.
Whatever else he may want, or thinks he wants, he doesn’t want to pretend she’s Annie.
This is what he’s thinking right now: he’ll worry about it later if he feels like it.
--
It’s weird in the morning.
Of course it is. She knew it would be. They wake up in her apartment, in what was Annie’s damn bedroom, in what was Annie’s damn bed, and there’s one nice moment where the sun is shining and he’s warm and comfortable and she’s naked, and then they wake up for real, and they’re tripping over each other to find an escape route.
They have sex again because they don't know what else to do, he gets in the shower with her, but it’s like the exclamation point at the end of a sentence, like Jeff thinks they’re going out swinging. They eat breakfast, they have coffee, they watch TV, and this should be familiar too, this was how they spent every weekend for months and months, but the rhythm is gone, the moment lost.
Maybe they need to drink more, but she’s pretty hungover. Eventually she stands up just so she has something to do with her body, and he stands too, he looks around the room like he can’t decide if he’s going to kiss her goodbye or just slink out.
“I have to work,” Britta offers, even though it’s not quite noon, and she works at a bar, the bar they just PDA’d to hell and back ten hours ago.
“I have to meet someone,” Jeff says, and she wants to ask what it’s like to meet someone you’ve pulled out of your own ass, but she lets it go.
Over the next two days, she realizes how much her social circle has completely evaporated. She sits around and tries to think of something to tell Jeff about how she's spent her time since they last saw one another other than work, sleep, TV, and spending like half an hour trying to get a stray cat to let her pet him, and comes to the conclusion that she’s either going to have to be an adult and admit that they’ve made a mistake, that their friendship means the world to her and she’ll do whatever she has to do to save it…or else that they’re just going to have to suck it up and keep having sex. Purely for the sake of getting human interaction, in the interest of her future as a well-rounded person.
Britta is all about personal growth.
--
hey come over
He sits there staring at his phone, pondering what route his life has set him on for him to be here debating over having additional sex with Britta. The truth is, he’s been spitballing on some kind of scenario of waiting around for Annie. Jeff likes to think of the kind of person who would do that, and then maybe photoshop his own face onto that far-reaching dream. Plus it's been less than a week and he's already slept with Britta twice.
His phone buzzes again with an :/ emoticon that he assumes is a misdial (but actually it probably isn’t, emoticons are not her native language), and then:
i havnt done laundry in 5 wks
He’s out the door in five seconds.
When he gets to her place he walks into her apartment with an air of authority, fully intending to tackle her to the floor as soon as he sees her, and yes, she's standing right there, her hair looks nice, her eyes are wide, and he can feel himself lurching for her when she freezes. This annoys him, he doesn't want to talk, he just wants to ride the momentum and fuck her before he has to think about this again.
“Hey,” she says, drawing the word out with a fake smile so big that he thinks he can see every tooth in her head.
“You texted?” he says back, and a flush creeps up her neck. Okay, that’s fine, he can work with that. That works very nicely.
“Yes. I did do that, yes.”
“So?”
She tilts her head towards her couch, and he follows her, lowers himself to sit next to her, has a brief, faded flashback of getting her shirt off on this couch last time he was on it. There’s an empty wine glass on the coffee table, which explains why she takes his hand, plays with the fingers. Her hands are steady though, like her gaze. “What are you doing?”
“So, I’ve been thinking,” she murmurs very lowly, and he feels his body reacting again, sends his dick a mental note to chill out for a second. “I think I’d like to do this more often.”
“Oh really?” he says, and Jeff is angry at the tone his voice takes, like he’s all discombobulated, like she’s doing this to him.
“Sure. Why not.”
“Well, it was awkward,” he points out, “and we don’t have a buffer anymore.” He’s not really talking himself out of having sex with her, he just likes it when she’s talking him into it more.
Britta lets out a huffy breath, and clicks her teeth with her tongue. He looks around the room, sees bags and boxes. “Are you moving out?”
“Yeah. I can’t afford this place by myself.”
Jeff nods, leans back for a second. Britta’s still holding his hand. Weird, to think none of them will be here anymore. He still half expects to see Troy come bounding out of Abed’s weird closet.
“Hey,” Britta says, as if she’s just had a brilliant idea, “want to get drunk again?”
“That depends. Are you wearing underwear right now?”
She raises her eyebrows. “Am I usually?”
Jeff licks his lips. “Hey, let’s get drunk.”
--
“Britta. Holy fuck, Britta,” he says an hour later, as she’s straddling him, her mouth on his neck, her hand somewhere way, way below his neck. She likes that, she likes that she can do this to him. She’s slept with Jeff more than anyone else she’s had any romantic history with combined, probably, but she can still get him going, leave him cursing and calling her name.
Britta likes to feel powerful, even if it’s only in this very specific context.
“I thought you kind of got over this,” she says, before lowering her head, nipping at his chest. So she uses her knowledge for evil sometimes. She’s not perfect, okay? Things like this happen.
She feels his leg jerk out and kick her coffee table, hears her empty wine glass shatter on the floor. She laughs at him, which causes him to do something with his fingers that kind of makes her go a little limp, almost boneless for a second, draped over him like a blanket, her forehead on his shoulder.
“God. Do you know how many times a day I had to stop myself from…” he says, and kisses her ear.
“How many times?” she breathes.
“Every day,” he says, just enough of a slur in his voice to make her believe him. His mouth is still on her ear. “Just the worst.”
--
“We don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do,” Britta points out the next day, a cereal bowl balanced on her knees. “We’re not doing anything wrong. Like, at this specific moment, I mean.” She looks at the door, she’s been doing this a lot.
Jeff thinks maybe she’s hinting that he should get out, but he doesn’t want to. He’s sick of sitting around alone, and he doesn’t want to go, even if Britta wants to get busy praying every single day for a revolution, or whatever it is that she does when she’s not hanging out with him.
“Want to go see a movie?” Jeff says.
“I’m not seeing Ted 2,” Britta says, like she’d been considering it this whole time. It stops being weird after that.
--
Britta’s new place, when she finally finds one, isn’t that great. And she can’t even really afford it, so it’s a game of rice twice a day, half-paying utilities, and getting by on fake sob stories. It’s kind of what someone like Britta who has never seen Game of Thrones imagines Game of Thrones would be like. She’s the chick with the hair and the dragons, and she kills everyone and doesn’t get evicted, she’s done this song and dance before.
Jeff starts laughing when he sees it, but still comes over. Speaking of old routines, they’re spending way too much time together. They’re going out, they see movies and go to bars and get food. These are all things they used to do, but there’s no one but each other to do it with, and it scares her, how much she enjoys it.
Because this is much harder and faster than before, like they're picking up directly where they left off, with no consideration for the interim years lived. Because it’s easy to fall into this trap. Because she’s thinking things she shouldn’t. Because they're not going to get the easy out this time and they'll have to press self-destruct under their own judgment and power. She's had relationships like this before (had literally this. exact. relationship. before) and she doesn't want this to get ugly and empty.
Because it’s really nice when Jeff looks at you, until he starts realizing that he could be looking at someone else.
And Annie will come back in a few months, everything that drove Jeff to her in the first place multiplied a hundredfold, and Jesus, she hates this.
But she likes having him in her bed, likes waking up with him, likes having someone to suggest TV shows and take up the other end of the couch.
Likes that it’s him doing it, and not some faceless stranger. That it’s her friend. The guy who understands her, the guy who won’t make her label things, the guy she always sort of thought was waiting in the wings of her life.
She thinks about how bogus it is that she’s still in Greendale when everyone else is gone. The only thing holding her here is Jeff and that disgusts her so much that she has a brief flirtation with not shaving her armpits, which ends when she becomes too itchy.
“Do you ever think what we would have done sophomore year, if Abed hadn’t ratted us out?” he asks one night, in between moving his mouth down her stomach. It always bugs her out, when they’re on the same page like that, although she doesn’t know why it surprises her anymore.
“’Ratted us out’? What, like a ratfink?” she laughs, and laughs harder when he pulls his head up to glare at her.
“Shut up. Do you?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“God, I don’t know, right now, Jeff? Something would have happened, we would have gotten all pissed off. Okay?”
“Probably,” he agrees, and goes back to what he had been doing.
--
Jeff doesn't always get high with her but when he does he's way better at it.
It happens as a natural progression: first he buys the weird disgusting (LOCALLY-SOURCED, JEFF!) beer he knows she likes and she…doesn't actually buy him anything, but she does always offer to share whatever she does have. She doesn’t notice the beer, so he brings over the beer he likes (ARTISANAL, BRITTA!), and then when that goes under her radar, eggs and gluten-free muffins which he makes for both of them the next Sunday. He’s not really sure how she doesn’t notice that, maybe because she spends breakfast with her head buried in her arms because of a raging hangover.
Slowly he fills her fridge, partly because she doesn’t like to sleep at his place every time because of some quasi-feminist nonsense, partly because he’s tired of the Chinese place that always gives her extra fortune cookies.
“Hey, there’s…a lot of food here,” she slurs one night, squinting suspiciously at the cupboards that suddenly burst with additional gluten-free and organic snacks, and at the bowl in the fridge filled with pre-hard-boiled eggs. Jeff stares pointedly at the ceiling, listening to her mutter about gnomes and eat something that he paid good money for while complaining about it.
Eventually she figures it out, stumbles back into the living room and squints at him. “You bought me food,” she says bluntly, in a tone other people might use to say “you cheated on me with my twin sister”.
“Well, I bought myself food, and put it here,” he says, speaking mostly to the screen of his phone. “I can’t actually survive on mustard and olives and fumes.” He glances up after about ten seconds of silence, trying to gauge what category of an unforeseen fuck-up this is.
Britta is leaning against the doorframe, sucking in her cheeks so much it looks obscene.
“I have weed,” she says finally, her face only half turned towards him, like she’s wondering if she can run away.
“Of course you do. Okay,” he says heavily, standing up very carefully, because at this point he’s had more than a few.
They blaze up underneath her bathroom window because it’s the smallest and the only one on this side of the building, the side that doesn’t get a lot of foot traffic. Their heads keep mashing together, and soon he can feel a faint buzzing on his skin, he’s much more aware of her than usual. Britta feels like electricity when he kisses her, a deep pulsing beat.
Britta eats half of what he brought over and he chases her around the kitchen while she samples what has become a snack buffet, because right now he cannot keep her neck out of his mouth. Or her earlobes. Or her shoulder.
At one point they sit there for a full five minutes laughing like turds, a couple of winners, jokers wild.
--
Jeff hangs out at the bar when she’s working sometimes. She slips him drinks and he gropes her ass when she walks by, which is expected, and she then stomps his foot while he either smirks or sticks his tongue out at her, depending on how many he’s had.
Which would be fine, like that’s fully normal, except once in a while he tugs at her belt loop as she passes, not staking a claim to her, just a reminder that he’s waiting, and for some reason that goes right down to her toes.
Sometimes they play a game, they go out together and split up at the door, hit on other people all night before they dump whoever they’re with and leave together, just the way they came in. They don’t talk about it, they’re fully cognizant of what they’re doing, they’re all over each other as soon as they get home, and Britta knows this is deeply, deeply psychologically unhealthy, and also probably kind of bordering on evil. They like to be reminded that they’re someone’s first choice. That sounds right. It’s just nothing she’s ever going to be able to viably explain to anyone else.
She had a psych class once (not with Duncan which is probably why she remembers the class itself and not just a mini post-class hangover) where the professor informed them that the whole couples matching up where the other is lacking thing is bullshit. Dominant people end up with dominant people because humans are only ever attracted to themselves.
It's not really important right now, just something she remembers a lot.
--
She makes him breakfast one morning, and that's when he gets worried. She wears her glasses in bed one night a week later when he half-jokingly makes the request, and then he gets terrified. Then…to be honest, right after that, she gets her bellybutton pierced, so that eats up about a week of his life, but after that it's directly do-not-pass-go back to tunnel-vision and plotting escape routes he never uses when they sleep in the same bed eight nights in a row.
Since she works at a bar and he has no job other than following her around, their days and nights get mixed up completely, so that he gets used to falling asleep with the sun in his eyes, blazing over her body. It’s summer, he’s never spent the summer with her. There’s nowhere to be, and no one else to see, just heat and sunshine and drinking and Britta filling up every second of his days and nights.
It would make more sense to spend…god, almost two months with someone else (someone who doesn't have a name that he has to add a pointed eye-roll and an "I know right?" to whenever he introduces her to anyone, for instance!). But this is the same as it was before, that poor young naïve Jeff Winger of early June who thought “yeah, let’s sleep with Britta a couple of times as an ego-boost or something” blinked, and months have gone by in a second and he has trouble sleeping when she isn’t there, which is happening less and less.
When she’s tired enough, the huskiness of her voice reaches unheard of heights/lows, it’s just a rasping scratch on his skin, and it feels like it leaves a mark. But that’s dumb, he’s someone Britta would laugh at when he thinks these things. Luckily, it never lasts very long, because he can’t keep his hands off of her, lower and lower until he strikes gold and she sucks in a long, high-pitched breath. So it’s very fleeting. Jeff remembers it, though, he remembers everything.
Remembers how obsessed with her he can get. How he spent a previous summer doodling hearts on her pictures in his yearbook and stalking her Twitter. How he couldn’t just sleep with her once, and be done with it.
Britta follows his gaze down her body, rolls her eyes. "Jeff, your weird giant hands are covering ninety percent of my torso. Is this whole thing because you have some kind of King Kong fantasy I don't know about?"
"Well, we can definitely go into that later."
It's very eerily calming to let Britta fill in the empty corners of his life; usually with sex, sometimes with long rants where she brings up Bernie Sanders way too often (he’s not positive if she’s a fan or not because he doesn’t really listen, but he’s pretty sure she isn’t). She’s less a tall drink of water and more a short sip of Pabst, and yet here he is, drinking her in and in and in.
However, the ninth circle of hell is probably Britta singing Lovefool at four in the morning.
--
Britta’s dad dies on the last day of July.
At that point it had already been a steady thing for nine weeks. They spent all their time together because they had no reason not to, and they’re falling into old habits so easily that she wakes up in the morning not sure what year it is. She’ll come in and pee while he’s in the shower but she freaks the hell out when he answers her phone, and she feels like it makes sense, and that their relationship is working out just fine.
Although he still does it anyway, answers her phone. She’s not even peeing this time, she’s just in the kitchen and can’t summon the energy to freak the hell out. Maybe he likes it when she yells at him? He probably does, gross.
While she’s wondering about whether kinkshaming him would be worth the effort (she’s already gotten a lot of mileage out of the nipple thing, and sometimes, maybe, gun to her head, he’s pretty hot when he’s angry…oh, shit), he talks quietly into her phone, and then there’s this horrible moment where he just stares at her, and she knows that the rug is about to be pulled out from under her, and the thought that’s consuming her, overwhelming her, is why does he have to be here to see it?
He puts her phone in his pocket and glances straight past her, at the door.
“Give me my phone,” she says, her own voice sounding much higher-pitched than usual. “Stop taking my fucking phone.”
Jeff doesn’t wait long. He tells her quietly, matter-of-fact. Much later, months and years later, when she’s able to remove herself enough to appreciate it, she’s glad it was him, because the only person who would be better at this would probably be Abed. Annie, Shirley, Troy, any of them would be a nightmare with this.
Abed is gone, they’re all gone except her and Jeff.
They end up on the couch, the TV on. She doesn’t remember how she got here. All she knows is that there’s a terrible roaring in her ears. Jeff is looking at her out of the corner of his eye, but he isn’t saying anything, and she isn’t sure how long they’ve been sitting like this.
“Jeff,” Britta says, breathing slowly, eyes shut. “I need to get out of here.” She didn’t know that until she said it, but she must have been right, because the walls are closing in. She’s dimly aware of them standing up, of being outside, of being in his car. God, she’s been naked in this car so many times, and suddenly that’s all she can think of, of all those times they couldn’t wait, when they parked behind trees or buildings, and how much of an evil high it gave her to see literally anyone else in his car, not knowing. For Christ’s sake, she still has a scar on her back from the seatbelt in the backseat.
Why does she do that? Why do they fuck in his car? Why does she want to fuck in his car right now? Jesus Christ, how old are they? Her dad is dead. She wants to have sex and she’s starving.
Britta watches the road go by. Jeff is silent, she keeps breathing slowly. He’s trying to sneak glances at her, but she doesn’t like the feel of his eyes on her, resolutely refuses to look back. He puts one hand on her knee, but carefully, carefully.
She’d been intending to get out of here by herself, but here he is.
Britta thinks the universe is speaking to her all the time, but especially right now.
She doesn’t respond to anything appropriately, and she can prove it. By banging someone whom she has had every conceivable feeling under the sun for in a gas station bathroom, and then eating a ton of french fries in the backseat of his car.
“Why can’t we go in the car?” Jeff asks after she drags him in by his shirt, in the kind of tone that confirms her suspicions that he’s been afraid to talk to her at all today. He’s watching her slip her jeans down with an expression she’s never seen before, and he keeps touching her hair, touching her face. She bats his hands away angrily.
“Shut up. Don’t do that. Do the thing.” That’s the extent of their conversation for the last two hours, and talking to or at each other is one thing they’re usually good at.
She wants this so badly she can’t hear, she pushes until she can’t, until she’s so packed in against him her nose is almost bent backwards, and she can’t see him, Britta can’t see anything, and when he finishes their breathing is the same, perfectly in time, in and out and in and out.
--
Here’s why Jeff keeps answering her phone:
- Because it makes her extremely angry.
- Because it rings all the time with bill collectors and she’ll never answer it. He likes to be aware of things like, say, Britta’s power being turned off, so that he knows to steer them to his place instead, thus avoiding another pitch-black shower situation and Britta’s pointy elbow in his eye.
- Because, and he is not proud of this, once in a while Troy calls, and the petty caveman side of Jeff likes the tone Troy’s voice takes when he answers the phone instead of her, and remember he is not proud of this, he takes especial joy in sending that little punk packing verbally (“oh my god, how old are you?” says someone in his head who sounds horribly like Annie).
The order of these reasons switch arbitrarily, but the reasons themselves stay pretty solid.
Obviously, he regrets it now, knowing that Britta’s dad dropped dead from an aneurysm at the bank is very awkward. Jeff probably couldn’t have predicted that coming in, but he sort of wishes he could have avoided having to tell her, at least. He doesn’t know much about Britta’s whole deal with her dad, but he knows there’s something there, a treasure trove that he doesn’t want to dig into. Maybe she’s the kind of person who can take on someone else’s shit, roll around in it gleefully like a…well, that metaphor is getting away with him, but regardless, he isn’t like that. Whatever, Britta is sort of a good person and he’s almost literally the devil’s advocate, he’s comfortable with that.
She’s scaring the shit out of him right now though, so he supposes they’re even.
Jeff can’t quite meet the teenaged gas station cashier’s eye when they move to leave. He doesn’t remember if they were loud or not, he’s sort of having trouble remembering his own name at this point. They’ve been driving for a few hours, they’re getting close to Denver, and they haven’t spoken. She won’t look at him.
He pays for gas and for a bottle of water, Britta hovering at his side. She has a funny, dazed expression on her face. Her hair is all messed up. He watches her dig around in the pocket of her jeans and methodically split up her change evenly for the charity containers that he's sure the cashiers borrow heavily from, she drops coins into each bucket singularly, plunk plunk plunk, and right then and there his life comes skidding to a complete crashing halt, something important inside of him stops spinning and lands in her direction, he’s pushed bodily over a threshold he’s been hovering in front of for years, and he’s left feeling honestly kind of pissed off.
Jeff gulps. Hands her a quarter.
He’s buckling his seatbelt when she speaks, and he actually jumps a little, startled.
“I stole your dad’s sparkplugs,” she says, seemingly looking at her own nose. She sounds like she’s been holding onto this for quite some time.
He stares at her for a few seconds. “What?”
“And I put ketchup in his gas tank. It wasn’t at Thanksgiving, it was later, when I went back to get my car. You weren’t there." She keeps looking right ahead.
“Why did you even have ketchup with you?”
“I got groceries while I was waiting for the bus.” Her voice cracks hard on the word ‘bus’ and she goes silent again.
Jeff leans over and kisses her forehead. He can’t think of anything else to say or do.
Then it’s like defenses have been breached, he can’t help himself, he grabs her, keeps holding onto her, she’s breathing hard now, but she’s not pushing back. Whatever it was that changed between them in that gas station is multiplying rapidly, and he clings to her. They make it about two minutes like this until she suddenly hitches herself away, kicks both feet out into the glove compartment.
“Get off of me, let’s go, just go!” she yells, but her eyes are still dry.
Wordlessly, he starts the car.
They make it another two hours before she turns to him, and it’s so close to being dark, the last of the sunset going behind the mountains, and it’s pretty breathtaking. No one else is on the road, and it’s easy to wonder right now if there’s anyone else on the whole planet except for them, and that’s when she says something, in a perfectly and eerily normal tone of voice.
“Do you think you can forgive someone for something they don’t remember doing?”
Jeff keeps driving. She keeps talking. “Something big,” she says in a prompting way, like she’s looking for advice or validation, “that they couldn’t even keep in their mind.” Britta wraps her arms around her body.
It takes a few minutes for him to find an answer, and it’s not actually going to be very helpful. “No.”
When she speaks again, her voice is much smaller than before. “I think I wanted to think I could.”
He doesn’t look at her, but his hands are shaking.
--
The Little Mermaid came out when she was nine, and her mother took her to it. Britta remembers it very well, being mesmerized by the color and the music and like she was rising up with Ariel. Her mother indulged her and took her four times. Britta is pretty sure this was all directly related to her mother wanting to keep her from quitting voice lessons, but Britta at nine was not a fool.
Beauty and the Beast came out a month after her eleventh birthday and her mother, maybe thinking Disney princess movies could be their new thing, made her leave her bedroom and go. Britta at eleven threw popcorn at the screen to stop thinking about how badly she had to throw up, because that girl is just sitting there, trapped at the whims of this thing.
Well. You can't un-ring the childhood molestation bell. And you also can’t exactly come back from your father using a lot of words like "always had an overactive imagination" and "a little bit of a drama queen (insert indulgent fatherly chuckle here!)" and “boys are never like this, are they?” but Britta, trembling in that chair with her feet that don’t quite reach the floor, she knows all they really mean are liar liar liar.
She doesn’t like to tell people, slightly because it doesn’t come up naturally ever, mostly because as soon as she says it, that’s it. That explains Britta! If she sees that fucking dawning realization pool over one more asshole’s face, she might explode. That’s the legacy. It makes her more angry than anything else now.
She’s angry all the time. Mean and guarded and so easy to throw off her game.
That is not everything. That is something that happened. She did not die nor was she born as a newly-minted eleven year-old in the handicap stall of a diner bathroom.
With that said, here’s the thing: the worst thing that ever happened to Britta happened six miles from her house, before she got her first period. There's a kind of freedom that comes from emerging on the other edge of that sword, sliced so deep that she can't see where the cuts end.
So Britta lived in New York.
So Britta skipped town when she was seventeen, and Britta once lived out of a tote bag and a backpack for two and a half years, and Britta has woken up on other continents and not actually been sure how she’s gotten there. There are swaths of time, months of her own life, which are completely lost to her.
Britta has taken truly tremendous amounts of shit, and she has given it right back. Britta understands the reality she is forced to live in, and Britta is not that person. Britta zigs when you think she’ll zag, she believes in no one and nothing except when she does, she’s never the person she should be. That’s how you explain Britta, because there is no explaining Britta.
Britta spends a lot of her time yelling into the void. Britta is so fucking tired.
--
They get a hotel room almost on the state line. Britta fell asleep like three hours ago, but Jeff had wanted to think, so he let her sleep, first against the window, then his shoulder, and after that she just kept drooping lower and lower, by the time he finally stopped her head was pressed into the denim of his jeans.
She managed to revive herself to get into the hotel, although there’s a very depressing sort of moment where she smiles sleepily at him without knowing what’s going on.
They don’t talk too much before falling asleep, but at least she’s talking. They have sex again, but it’s so quiet, she just kind of gazes solemnly at the headboard, and it’s freaking him out. Her skin is still a little salty from the truly astounding amount of fries she ate a couple of hours ago, and he can sort of taste it on her. Jeff’s really tired, and she just woke up, so there’s a weird, soft quality that isn’t normally present. Britta kisses him once on the corner of his mouth after, rolls off of him, and faces the wall.
God. This day has just been so fucked. He doesn’t even know what town they’re in right now, and he feels jumpy and nervous.
Britta’s so tense next to him that all of a sudden Jeff’s afraid she’s going to leave. Cut and run. He tries to think of going back home without her, and his breath hitches in his chest.
“You gonna take off?” he asks her bare back, almost impossibly pale in the moonlight. She says nothing. She shrugs once, like a full five minutes later during which he was absolutely not gazing at her in what could possibly be termed panic. He grabs for her thigh under the covers and she puts her cold hand on top of his.
The next day, he hustles her out of the hotel room and back into the car, keeps them headed in the same direction they were going yesterday. Well, that’s fine then. He’s coming around to this. Jeff and Britta in the wind going nowhere fast. He's always wanted to be in a road trip movie.
--
They’ve been driving for three days.
They passed through Utah, and now into Nevada. Jeff gets all excited when they cross state lines, it’s sort of endearing. She wonders idly what will happen when they hit the ocean. She wants to tell him to let her out, drop her off at a bus station, or on the side of the road. Britta’s hitchhiked before. She wants to tell him he doesn’t have to do this, and she never quite manages it, and he keeps buying them t-shirts at random Wal-Marts, and paying for hotel rooms and gas and food.
Britta was going to get out of Greendale alone. She hasn’t been alone for ten minutes.
Once or twice, Jeff starts to nod off while they drive, so they sleep in the car, she rises up and down with his breathing, and it's like being in a boat, riding on slow waves, his heart in her ears
“We can't sleep here,” Jeff had muttered the first time she pulled him to the backseat with her, sounding kind of horrified.
“Sure we can,” Britta yawned.
“We'll freeze, we're in the desert -”
“Nah, we won't.” She'd kissed his chin, or whatever part of him was directly above her face. There was no way they were going to freeze. She'd been so warm.
They aren't crammed into Abed’s dorm mattress anymore, but lying on top of him in the car felt like that had.
Once, years ago, Abed told her she was keeping him going.
She doesn’t think about it beyond remembering that it happened, but the words run through her head over and over, like a song.
--
It’s pitch black in their third hotel room when Britta jerks forward suddenly in the dark. He’s almost asleep, just drifting on the edge. “Jeff,” she croaks like she’s been crying, even though he knows she hasn’t, he’s been touching her this entire time, he even feels her face to make sure, rubs his thumb over her cheek. So much of her can fit into his hands. “We aren’t having fun anymore,” she says wildly, “this isn’t fun.”
He wraps his free arm around her, pulls her towards his chest. “Jesus. What are you talking about? I’m having a lot of fun,” he mumbles, “this is the most fun I’ve ever had in my entire life. Go to sleep, Britta.”
She twists away from him, and sits up, scrubbing her face with her hands. He turns on the light, his head feels like it’s packed full of television static. Britta’s in some shirt he bought because everything they had with them stank, and he’s reminded of why he is not the most spontaneous person in the world. Things that trip him up roll off her back, and he thinks of the terrifying netherworld of Britta’s Befores, before she reemerged into civilization out of what he can only assume had been a patchouli-scented hellscape.
It's weird to think of Britta as any younger than she was when he met her, although he doesn't know what the alternative would be. Maybe she burst fully formed from a Pearl Jam mosh pit?
“I’m going to tell you something,” Britta says. “In the interest of full disclosure.” She has this appraising look on her face that he hasn’t seen in so long, and all of a sudden it’s six years ago, they're so impossibly young and the most important thing in the world is proving that he's worth the next five seconds of her time.
“Okay,” he says, and their feet are touching under the sheets. Her feet are very short, and she wears heels so much she can’t feel her pinky toes. She told him that once.
“I’m not telling you this because it’s important. I mean, it’s important, but it’s not…I just…and not because you deserve it, or whatever. You came with me here, I know that, I’m just…” She looks helplessly at the ceiling of the hotel room in Nevada they’re in.
“Okay,” he says again.
Britta’s hands are scrabbling for purchase, clenching and unclenching, her fingers tangling together. “You should know,” she says finally, looking him dead in the eye, and he feels his blood freeze.
“Okay,” he says, a third time. She takes a deep breath, and closes her eyes.
“When I turned eleven, we went to a restaurant. Even my brothers, and one of them was in college, so that was a whole big deal. I got…I got a Cabbage Patch doll, and I was pissed because I was eleven, you know. I went to the bathroom, and there was a man in there, and he was…you know what he did, okay, I don’t have to tell you that. You know what he did.” She’s talking very quickly, her hands are clutching the collar of her t-shirt now.
He’s never wanted to reach for her this badly in his life, but he doesn’t. Jeff isn’t spontaneous. Jeff isn’t the person who can take on someone’s shit. Jeff isn’t her fucking boyfriend.
“Did you tell someone?” he croaks, and absurdly she starts laughing, she laughs until tears stream down her face.
Finally, she continues: “I told everyone. They didn’t do anything. He’d left by then. He left right after.” Her breathing is in short gasps. “But you know, that…that broke me.” Britta pulls her knees up to her chest, and it’s cold in the room, so cold when she’s not touching him at all.
He knows what it’s like to say it like that, put it in those absolutes. He understands how it feels dramatic and ridiculous to describe yourself that way, but it's the only thing that fits, that explains why you do the things you do.
So he knows, but Jeff doesn’t say anything, and Britta has her head cocked, a searching look in her eyes, her gaze is eating at him. Like she’s looking for something familiar that she can’t find.
“Your dad didn’t remember,” he realizes, connecting some very large dots with a very short line. She snorts, and pushes some hair behind her ear.
“I mean, it was a stupid story. It sounded made-up, the guy, he was wearing…anyway. Maybe if I hadn’t - my dad’s dead now, and he never did -” she says, and then she chokes, and really does cry, all at once with big, sloppy tears. Pressing one hand against her face, she gropes blindly with the other until he grabs hold, and she clings to his fingers, he squeezes back, and he sits there waiting for her to stop.
--
“Let’s go home,” Britta says the next day, and they do.
Everything is different after that. The drive back is fun, she likes road trips, she feels nothing but possibility as they drive. Jeff lets her take turns with him, and sometimes they roll down the windows and there’s nothing but the rushing wind around them.
Britta’s forgotten how good it feels to drop everything and go. Jeff is surprisingly good company on a road trip, now that the tension that had cocooned her has broken. Wait, she’s a butterfly? That’s fine.
Anyway, she has a good time. It takes them half as long to get home as it did to where they ended up, now that Jeff isn’t meandering across three states. They squabble over drive-thrus and music, which energizes her, and the desert is beautiful in August, stark and scary and the sky goes on forever, which calms her back down again. She leans back and takes in the world through ten dollar sunglasses, driving too fast and smiling more.
But there’s something new that hasn’t ever been there before when she leaves: she’s going home at the end of this, and she is absolutely fine with it. She didn’t know it could feel so good to come back to a place that you know so well, that you could miss somewhere like this. Britta loved New York, loved it, but when she was done, she was done, and she doesn’t want to go back. Britta never wants to go back, Britta is all about the vagabond life, moving forward and moving on, but when they hit the Greendale city limits, something in her relaxes, and she realizes again that that part of her life may have ended, the roaming and the wandering.
Jeff takes them to his apartment, but she leaves him behind before night falls. “Stay,” he tells her, tugging at her t-shirt, but she just kisses him once and heads out the door, leaving him standing there with his mouth pinched, and his eyes worried.
Britta goes home. To her parent’s house. Her mother’s house. Her mom is there, both her brothers and sisters-in-law, and all her nieces and nephews. The funeral was two days ago. She hasn’t had her phone on for five.
She doesn’t stay long. Perrys are kind of suffocating. No one says much to her, but she knows what they think. What they think she is. Her mom acts like she isn't disappointed, and Britta knows that she isn't surprised. There's nothing that can make them close but that doesn't mean (she keeps telling herself and telling herself) that they necessarily need to be far either.
She doesn’t need them, but she wishes sometimes that she could be the kind of person that a family like this could depend on.
Britta makes her excuses, and heads home, and she’s alone for the first time in a week, and she feels…not exactly good, but different. Maybe she’s made peace with something. Maybe she’s become self-actualized.
August goes by lazily, and now when she and Jeff go home, they bring the other one with them. Now it’s every night, there aren’t even attempts to stop or slow down. Now it’s daytime television and eating too much, and sleeping late. Britta talks her way back into her job, playing every grief card she has to put down, and she works in a happy haze. She’s thinking things like intense and for real this time and future and oh shit because it’s huge and it’s scary, but it’s all possible. It’s all happening. She’s not a coward.
It’s the weekend after Labor Day when she figures it out, knows what changed, what fully and physically and irrevocably changed: Britta’s pregnant. She’s totally knocked up.
She sits on the toilet for like an hour with three positive tests in her hand, trying to process, her jeans around her ankles. She didn’t wear underwear today. What kind of mother can she be if she doesn’t even wear underwear half the time? Babies need people who do laundry, and buy milk regularly, and all those other things that she doesn’t make time for, like owning a crock-pot.
God, and this is all her fault too. Britta has never been in the running for any responsibility awards, or whatever, but she lost her virginity when she was thirteen (that’s another point in favor of do not have this baby holy shit, actually!), and the one thing she has always been militant about has been birth control. So, awesome, this is more than likely a souvenir from that gas station bathroom when things got a little out of hand, which is definitely something she and Jeff can save for prom night.
Jeff. Jeff’s baby. Jeff’s really tall. She can’t have his baby. He’s way too tall.
No matter what she does, this is going to be very painful, but she already knows what she wants. She knows why she shouldn’t, and what she is, and who Jeff is, but she knows what she wants. Maybe not always how to get it, that’s where she stumbles. Maybe not why she wants it in the first place, even.
Britta is a lot of things, but Britta wants this.
“I’m pregnant,” she yelps as soon as the door opens, she can’t keep it in.
“No. What? You are not. No.”
That’s not really the reaction she was hoping for, although it is pretty much the same as hers was.
He collapses on the couch, covers his mouth with one hand. She sits gingerly next to him.
“We shouldn’t have a baby, right?” she says after many long, silent minutes, her voice quavering. “Jeff. Come on, what are you thinking?”
“I don’t know.” He looks sort of dead-eyed, she shrinks back a little bit. They sit silently for a long time. “We should get married?” he asks her, rubbing his eyes.
“What? No.”
“Okay,” Jeff says, and leans back again. He looks at her middle like it’s going to burst into flames. “A baby, huh.”
--
So, he’s probably in love with her. He knows that now. If he wasn’t before, he is now, so whatever. He’s so pissed about it. If he’s in love with Britta, then he has to rethink everything, he has to chessmaster the hell out of this whole situation. He has to know what he’s doing, hyperaware at all times, he has to make sure everything is perfectly arranged because this is the most important thing going on now. It’s extremely stressful, and not good for his skin.
He resents her highly for this, he actually spent a whole night needling her mercilessly until she raised one eyebrow at him. “Dude,” she’d said, “I know you get off on pulling my pigtails, but cool it.” Like she knew exactly what was going on. Whatever.
Also, FYI, just because he maybe loves Britta that doesn't mean Annie’s not in the back of his mind. He’d always thought maybe one day one of them would stick and the other would fade, and he’d know which way things were going to be from now on. In reality, every time he thinks it's finally happened, the tables turn back in on themselves, and he doesn't get any answers. It was always going to be one of them.
It's very strange to think of his life in terms of Annie or Britta: There Can Only Be One but it's been years since he hasn't. Well, except for when he thinks of very specific occasions of Annie or Britta: There Can Definitely Be Two.
They're all three of them too closely entwined, and he's been hung up on Annie since approximately forever, and three days ago she texted him that she'll be home tomorrow and ended it with a correctly used winky emoticon.
He's nervous because he doesn't know what to do or what he really wants, he’s doubting every move he makes and then Britta tells him she's pregnant when he comes back from work, and that's that. Locked down, squared away. The situation is no longer his prerogative.
“I guess…I’ll have to take out the piercing. I just got it too.”
Leave it to Britta to jump immediately to the only thing that could make this worse. He gets out of there after that, leaves Britta on the couch looking off into the distance.
Jeff ends up on a bench at Greendale, deserted for the summer, a bottle of rum in a paper bag in his fist. He calls Abed, he’s not sure why. Maybe Abed is a weird little wisdom goblin. Maybe he just misses him. Jeff makes an attempt to shoot the shit, to be normal, but Abed isn’t normal.
“You’re sleeping with Britta,” he says after about two minutes. “You’ve been sleeping with her all summer.”
“Yeah.” He doesn’t know why he’s surprised. “What the hell?”
“You’ve been together all summer. Except when you left town, I lost the signal for a few days. I should have upgraded when I had the chance.” He’d forgotten about that. He thinks of Abed, the new successful Abed who doesn’t sit around waiting for his friends to want to hang around him, he thinks of him still checking on their blinking dots, keeping track, keeping a mental tally, counting to six over and over again, then five, and now just two. It’s touching, in a weird and creepy sort of way. His and Britta’s dots must have blurred into one all summer.
“You know Annie will be there tomorrow. Are you going to have a showdown? Are you going to have a catfight? I know our group is usually safe for public consumption, but I could see it culminating in-”
“Abed, don’t be…don’t. I need you to tell me what…” Tell him what to do?
“What do you want to know, Jeff?”
“Tell me if I’m in love with Britta. Do your stupid wizard thing.”
“I can’t tell you if you’re in love with Britta. Are you drunk? Is this in vino veritas?”
“No. Maybe. Tell me if I’m in love with Annie.”
“Tell me why you’re asking.” It’s weird, talking to Abed when you can’t see his face, when you know the gears are whirring, but you have no warning for when the connection will be made. He’s been understandably hesitant to let Abed in on very much in his life, he already knows he’s fucked up, he doesn’t need Abed telling him all the extra ways he’s the worst that he hasn’t even thought of yet.
“Abed, I’m going to tell you something that you cannot tell -”
“Britta’s pregnant.”
“Goddamnit, Abed, what the hell?”
“Well, if you’d married her you’d be calling Shirley, not me.”
Jeff sits down, slumped on the ground, his back to the stoner tree. “I told her I needed to think. So tell me what to think.” Because right now Jeff’s thinking family, and not the cool chosen version but the biological prison that any idiots with an embryo box and some seeds can spit out, and that’s the scariest thing.
“When you and Britta got together before, how did it happen?”
“She wanted to, she asked me, she -” She’d been trying to get that stupid white jumpsuit off in the study room before they went back to the post-astronaut mission rager or whatever they were calling that one, and he took his off too and they were tipsy, and she was teasing him, and then she kissed him, and more clothes came off than were probably necessary, but they were alone, and he still wanted her, he’s always going to want her. He’d been so busy kissing her that he’d stumbled, and she’d literally scrambled up and over him, pulled him so that he landed on top of her on the couch, laughing. Britta laughs a lot when they're alone. “It was supposed to just be for fun. So we didn’t get angry. We were just drunk.”
“So you could sleep together.”
“Lots of people get horny when they’re drunk, Abed, that’s a thing that people know about, it’s nothing to base your damn life on!”
“Sure. Do you guys get drunk on purpose so you have an excuse to do what you want with each other?
“No.”
“People don’t do that.”
“They probably do! You need to stop talking to me now. Watch more movies. I’m sure this happens.”
“Why didn’t you ever sleep with Annie? Annie wanted to sleep with you, usually even when she was sober.”
“Because I’m not…I didn’t want to be that guy. I didn’t want to disappoint her, she always thought I was great, and she didn’t – if I’d slept with her, then I’d be the sleazy guy who sleeps with the nearest warm body-”
“You’re not afraid of disappointing Britta.”
“That’s because it’s not possible for me to disappoint Britta.”
“Why not?”
“She already knows everything.” Abed doesn’t say anything to that, and Jeff feels absurdly victorious.
He takes a long drink, feels it burn just a little bit on the way down. “Annie wanted things that I didn’t…that I can’t…she’d want to get married, and have-” He pauses.
“But you’re doing it with Britta instead.”
“Abed, it doesn’t matter anyway, does it? I’m stuck with her now.”
“It’s going to matter to her.”
“Fuck.” He drinks again.
“Do you want me to tell you what I think?”
“Sure. Go for it. Why not.”
“You and Britta both think that you’re the protagonist, but you’re not. You're desperate to go against what people expect and be complicated and nuanced, when in reality you're just two boring people who are romantically engaged, and honestly, since you’re having a baby, kind of disappointing.”
That makes absolutely no sense to him, so Jeff hangs up on Abed then. Calls him back and apologizes, then hangs up again.
He’s not that drunk, and he thinks of Annie. Jeff thinks about Annie a lot, but this is different. This is the kind of hard examination and soul-searching he only lets himself do when he’s pretty sure no one is going to be around to see him.
Whenever he looks at Annie, looks at the pictures she posts on Facebook or at the updates she makes to Twitter, at every success she’s grabbing for herself, all he can think of is being with her, what kind of fucking power couple they could be.
He can see a future with her so easily, he can see them taking over the whole world together. Annie’s star is rising, he could ride her coattails to the fucking moon, and something about that is so appealing to him. Annie looks at him like he hung the moon, even now, even when he’s pretty sure she’s trying really hard not to. That’s something he enjoys. Annie is ruthless as hell (people think she’s sweet but she isn’t, he knows her, he knows this about her, and he likes her better that way), she ticks all his buttons while simultaneously breaking every single one of his rules, and that’s sexy, and goddamnit, he really thought at some point he would get to sleep with her, at least once.
With Britta the future seems like there will be a lot of nasty surprises (“I’m pregnant” counting first and foremost) and like he'd have to pay really close attention to their tax returns. How he’ll have to be there, watching her try and fail again and again. He’s going to have to see her put herself out there, put too much of herself on the line, and take the heat when things fall through.
There are things he doesn’t like about Britta, maybe even hates. They’re the exact same things that he hates about himself.
Then he thinks about Britta herself, the Britta he knows, about rolling the dice and playing his cards with her. The feel and smell and taste of her, all the things he’s memorized about her, how she looks when they’re plotting, how she looks naked with soft morning light all around her, how she looks when she sleeps, how she looks when she cries, how she looks when they’re alone and she smiles.
He could think about that for the rest of his life.
--
“Okay, let’s do this.”
Britta looks up from where she’s lying on his couch, sees Jeff slump in. He’s drunk. God, she wishes she was drunk. She’s not going to be drunk for a long time.
“What?” she asks, getting up and helping him stumble to the sofa without thinking. He cups her face in his hands, looks hard at her.
“Let’s have the stupid baby,” he growls, and she glares, pulls back.
“This isn’t 1952, Jeff, I don’t need you for any of this if you’re going to be a dick about it.”
“I want to have a baby with you,” he says in a whine, and she closes her eyes and counts to ten. “Britta, marry me,” he says before she even makes it to six.
“I’m not going to marry you. We don’t want to get married.” Once she thought she did, a few times she even thought she was going to, but it’s not going to happen for them.
“I could marry you though,” Jeff insists, “you would be cool about it,” he says, as if this should be obvious. “Let’s just get married, and have a baby and just be that way.”
“Let’s sleep on it, maybe,” Britta suggests, pulling at his hand until he reluctantly stands up with her and trails her to the bedroom. God, even this is repetitive. They’ve done this whole thing before, but that was when there were two of them instead of three.
“Abed thinks we’re boring,” he says before he closes his eyes, his hand resting on her stomach. “We’re not boring. We’re special.”
“We could stand to be a little more boring,” Britta says, her head pounding.
“Britta, why don’t you want to marry me?” he says.
“Lots of reasons,” she says, but he’s already asleep.
--
Jeff’s hangover distracts him a little in the morning, but not enough. He’d like to think that he’s made his peace with the situation, but he’s also dodging texts from Abed and reading and rereading the text from Annie that he hasn’t answered yet.
Plus, Britta’s still pregnant.
“Did I say something stupid?” he asks, watching Britta make herself breakfast, trying not to inhale any scents of any kind.
“Of course you did,” Britta tells him. “Don’t worry about it.” They always get a free pass when they’re drunk. It’s the only rule they made that they’ve managed to keep.
Jeff stares at her stomach, he has a crazy feeling that if he looks away, it’s going to suddenly balloon out on him. Britta’s going to look so weird. He can’t wait to see her try to bartend pregnant, he is absolutely bringing like three cameras.
“So,” he asks, as she sits across from him at his kitchen table. “I guess we should figure this out.”
“Are we having a conversation?” she asks, her eyes narrowing, toast dangling in her hand. “Because I thought we were just -” Britta makes an indecipherable hand motion “- and now a baby, which is fine, but, I -”
“Well, we’ve never had a conversation,” he points out, taking her hand.
“I don’t want to have a conversation.” Britta pulls away. “We can do the baby thing.”
“Again, we've never had a conversation. Not even once. Don't you think... I mean with that whole...thing?" He motions to her abdomen.
“No, I don't think. Isn't that our whole deal? Conversations are for people who intend to decide things.”
“I thought our deal was to have fun.”
“So much fucking fun,” says Britta through clenched teeth. “It's not like I don't know what you wanted out of this. It's fine.”
“Do you want to get married?” he says, and he watches Britta stiffen.
“Jeff -” she starts, sounding like she’ll be choosing her words very carefully. He doesn’t want her to answer him right now, he wants to know what he’s doing, where he’s going. He wants to move forward. He does move forward, he pulls her to him, leans in and kisses her, properly, like someone should kiss someone they probably love. Someone pregnant with his baby. Someone he’s going to be with. Someone he has to be with.
She blinks slowly at him when he pulls back, puts one hand on his chest, pats him twice there kind of awkwardly, still a little dazed as she sits back down next to her plate.
They sit silently, until Britta drops her fork on the table, looking at her phone.
“What?” Jeff asks, rubbing a finger on his temple.
“Annie’s home,” Britta says, sounding very carefully casual. She eyes him, and he looks at the floor, but not soon enough. “You already knew! God, Jeff!” she says, less casually.
“It doesn’t matter. I mean, I told her we were going to go have dinner, but…it matters in that we will go see our platonic associate Annie -”
“No!” Britta slams one hand into her thigh, closing her eyes. “Shit. I forgot. This has…just forget what I said. Forget all of it. You should do what you want. I’m not going to be the person who...I know what this was. I knew what it was the whole time,” she amends, her eyes still shut. “This doesn’t change anything,” she says after a second, looking up at him.
“I’m not going to get together with Annie, Britta, fuck. You’re pregnant. Is that the kind of person you think I am?”
“No, you need to sleep with her,” Britta says, like she’s just found the answer.
“You want me to sleep with Annie?” he repeats. “What, are you pimping me out now? Should we maybe consult Annie about this beforehand, or should I just show up naked?”
“Literally no one on earth wishes you had slept with Annie more than me. This is always going to be a thing if you don’t do it, I don’t care if you do it, I don’t care what you do!” Britta’s yelling now. “Just go be with her, it doesn’t fucking matter!” Her face is turning really red. “I know you want to be with Annie. You always wanted to be with Annie. We were going out with other people when we were doing this before, so it’s fine.”
“No, I wasn’t!” he spits.
Then she laughs at him, harsh and mean, and he hates it, he hates her. “Well, that’s sad for you.”
Anger is rushing through him like a boiling river, who does she think she is to tell him this, how he feels, and what he should be doing? “I love you, you fucking moron,” he yells. So that’s out there, sitting there in the space between them, like something tangible.
Britta’s whole body contracts a little, and her face gets even redder. “Asshole. Get out,” she says, low and clear, and he does what she says, ignores the fact that it’s his apartment, ignores the fact that there are tears in his eyes, tears in her eyes too, and he leaves, slams the door behind him.
--
Britta’s still in his apartment when he gets home from meeting up with Annie. It had occurred to her to just go home, but it also occurred to her that if she goes home now she’ll probably just keep driving until she pops this damn kid out, and never see him again.
That sounds like a bad idea, she should sleep on it first, and Jeff’s bed is very large and comfortable. It’s not like she’ll stay all night. She assumes he’ll need the apartment. Britta made a fool of herself again, she needs to ruminate on that for a while before she makes her next move.
The move to the bed never happens. She doesn’t gather up all her things that have migrated here either. She throws up a few times, and tries to eat some crackers, and her heart is racing, but she just sits here on his stupid ugly couch, she knows it was expensive as hell and she also knows that it’s hardly even comfortable.
She doesn’t even turn on the TV. That’s how weird this has become. Visions of futures fill her mind, where she and this baby are alone together, or where she and Jeff make the exchange every month or so, or where Jeff takes her to the cleaners for custody and her kid ends up calling Annie ‘mom’ and seeing her once a year for a week. Oh, shit. He probably wouldn’t do that, right? That would be such a dick move, hypothetically.
Sitting here, waiting for nothing but a man who loves someone else. This is who she can't be. She's lived many lives, and been many people, and she knows when something doesn't fit.
And yet here she is, on Jeff’s couch, carrying his stupid child, while he fucking romances their friend. This is who she is, apparently.
Anyway. Jeff comes in and kind of jumps when he sees her, because she’s sitting in the dark and staring at him.
“Oh. Hey,” he says. “Uh. You want this?” He offers her a container of leftovers from wherever he took Annie to.
Britta stares at him in silence for a few seconds, then bristles. “Americans throw away three million tons of Styrofoam every year and it takes a million years to biodegrade,” she says, maybe a little too loudly.
“Okay.” Jeff puts the food in his fridge, all chromey and shiny and it has plenty of room for all that wine she bought two days before she took the pregnancy test, like nice timing again there, Britta.
She feels sick when he sits down next to her, but for a reason that she suspects is different than usual.
“So how did it go?” she asks, her mouth extremely dry. “How’s Annie?”
“Annie’s good. She asked how you were. I told her about the baby. Sorry.” Jeff shrugs. “She’s moving to Chicago. She’s going to Northwestern in December.”
“Oh.” That’s a lot of information that Jeff just delivered in a monotone. He isn’t touching her, but he’s so spread out, his limbs splayed. “That’s great.” Suddenly, he looks at her like he is deeply irritated about something.
“Get over here,” he says, frowning at her.
“Uh, excuse you?”
“You heard me.”
“…no.” She doesn’t like this. It’s another game she isn’t going to win.
“Jesus, Britta, I –” Jeff snaps, and then lets out a huffy breath, flings his head back and stares at the ceiling, apparently counting silently. “Okay,” he says, sounding very carefully controlled. “Fine.” He moves closer to her, sidling sideways like a crab. “This usually works better when we meet in the middle, you know.”
Britta’s actually having trouble moving right now, her stomach a mad roil. “Don’t be an asshole,” she warns him, and she has tears in her eyes, and she’s so angry, she hates this. Hates him? Hates herself. “Just do what you want,” she tells him for what feels like the fiftieth time today.
“You know, you can be kind of a bitch.”
“Oh please, there are songs about the kind of bitch I am!” She glares right back at him, and she really, really isn’t going to cry, she is not. She lets out a breath, and her ire goes out of her with it, leaving her empty, deflated. “I’ll, um, I’ll get out of your hair,” she says, but doesn’t move, and his eyes widen for a second before his fingers loop her wrist.
“No. Stay here.” Jeff looks kind of scared, she realizes, and since she’s obviously a really bad person, that calms her down.
Britta can feel her mouth form a thin line though, and she tugs her wrist out of his grip. Jeff shrinks back just a little, and god, this stupid fucking man does so much to her. “What are you trying to do?” she asks, desperate for a straight answer, an end to this.
“I’m…I’m trying to do what you just told me to,” he says, smirking at her with that douchebag I-just-thought-of-exactly-the-thing-to-say-to-get-into-your-pants…face (she really needs a shorter word for it, she sees it all the time).
Well. He’s not exactly wrong.
Britta takes a deep breath for what feels like the first time all day, and she kind of unclenches her body a little bit. Smiles. Leans to him so that their faces are almost touching. He’s gazing at her, not so much sappily, but in a way where she has a weird and sudden urge to go hold up a liquor store with him. “What about Annie?” she says, and touches her stomach once, enjoying the way his eyes drift down to look, the way they soften.
She could possibly be persuaded to get used to this.
“Annie can do better,” Jeff says airily, still smiling. His hand covers her own.
“Oh, and I can’t?” But she’s smiling too, she can’t stop.
“You can’t,” he agrees, leaning closer. She’s laughing now.
“Oh my god, fuck y-” is all she gets out before he kisses her.
--
Later, much later, she wiggles out from under his arm and pokes him until he blinks.
“Mmm?”
“You didn’t pick me, okay? I picked you.”
Jeff groans, rolls away from her onto his side. She leans over on the bed, rests her chin on his shoulder. Runs her fingers down his side. Eventually he squints at her, and sort of lightly shoves her off of him.
“Annie sent you packing, and I took pity on you,” her disembodied voice says.
“Goodnight, Britta.”
“See you tomorrow,” she says sweetly.
It’s less than a minute before he rolls back over, his nose in her hair, his arm over her waist. Nothing is set in stone and nothing is written, but they picked each other, and that’s probably enough.
“You did not,” he mumbles into her hair. She kicks him under the sheets.
--