Meeting, pt. 2 | Community | Jeff/Annie
Meeting, pt. 2
Community, jeff/annie
pt. 1
Jeff and Annie finally decide that they can be friends, no sexual-tension attached. It works. For a while. Inspired by a prompt by
eva_aftagrl on 
milady_milordto write a story based on When Harry Met Sally. There may/may not be any similarities to the movie in this fic.
Annie Edison and Jeff Winger are just friends, and friends don’t need to text each other to say that there was a parrot convention on campus (they made fun of them), or that she’s just made some peach ice cream and he should come over and watch old movies with her, or that he just wanted to say good morning and that he hopes she isn’t too hungover. No, they couldn’t do that anymore, because that would mess up her compartment. And so she joins the track team, and a knitter’s club (Britta’s idea), and she meets Jim.
Meeting
pt. 2
Harry Burns: I've been doing a lot of thinking, and the thing is, I love you.
Sally Albright: What?
Harry Burns: I love you.
Sally Albright: How do you expect me to respond to this?
Harry Burns: How about, you love me too.
Sally Albright: How about, I'm leaving.
~ When Harry Met Sally
She doesn’t call. Which is ridiculous. Not that she doesn’t call, but because he cares that she doesn’t call. It itches at him day and night, irking him somewhere near his sternum. It bothers him for a various of reasons: A) She’s his best friend, sex or no sex (and very, very good sex at that) and B) No one doesn’t want a piece of Jeffrey Winger after they get a taste. No one.
It’s that simple, he tells himself. Simple that he just doesn’t like being ignored, that he doesn’t like not being the one who has to dodge the person he’s had sex with. Simple that her silence irks him not because he feels something. He’s not that silly. He’s got a penis after all. It’s not that little Annie Edison has gone and crawled under his skin and made him sit up too quickly when his phone rings or make him check the e-mail on his Blackberry a couple hundred times a day. It’s not that. It’s not that when he woke up the morning and walked around her apartment, in the emptiness, when he found her note that told him that he, Jeffrey Winger, in fact was quite excellent at sex, he didn’t feel that usual rush of satisfaction that he usually felt. Instead, there was something hollow there. I need some protein, he tells himself. And that’s what he boils it down to: he just needs more protein. It can’t be that Annie Edison has done something to him. She isn’t responsible for this feeling inside of him that something has been carved out of him, deep and to the core.
Okay. So maybe he’s a little... irritated with her. Because she hasn’t called just in general. In fact, she’s been downright allusive in a sense. Alright, they hang out, but it’s always when someone else is there and it’s always because somebody else asks them out. Last night, it was Troy, who invited them to the Red Door (“Britta says it’s the worst, which means she likes it!” Troy tells them with too much emotion). But there was karaoke and they all had to try to find Britta who was helplessly drunk already and Troy kept loudly trying to convince her to let him take her home. And some guy came along. With Annie. Some slick-haired young Republican kind of guy tagging along on Annie’s heels, acting like he was some leashed dog or a toddler in a mall. That same kind of guy who greets you when you come in the bank and over a light beer will explain that he’s in “investment sales.” He is, in fact, the perfect sort of guy for Annie, he thinks. Nice. Good looking (not unlike Jeff Winger). And uncomplicated (unlike Jeff Winger). And he thinks to himself that he doesn’t need to be comparing this guy to himself, it’s not about that, he should be glad for Annie. Because she’s his best friend after all, and when that guy said a joke, she smiled a good sort of smile and laughs. He couldn’t tell if it was genuine, because it was dark at the bar and she had done this thing with her hair now that, although really attractive, hid part of her face. He doesn’t want to say she looked sad, because that was only his inner drunk voice talking
He’s glad for Annie, he guesses. There’s still this weird feeling inside him though, and it started after he woke up alone and feeling strange in her apartment that already smelled of espresso from the sex supply shop downstairs. He chalks the feeling up to some kind of indigestion or vitamin deficiency. So he starts eating better, working out more. He finds that if he focuses himself enough on trying to feel better, sometimes he can trick his body into not worrying about that she hasn’t called in a day, two days, three days, a whole week.
“If you don’t stop touching that thing, it’s gonna stay that way,” Shirley tells him as the two of them sip on protein shakes in the gym cafeteria. Lately, Shirley and him have been meeting up early in the morning for a spinning class. She is, with much of his chagrin, kicking his ass at it.
“Say what?” he asks, staring at her
She raises her eyebrows and turns her head to the side, trying to avoid eye contact. “Oh, you know what I’m talking about, Jeffrey. You and that phone are having sort of relationship that verges on the ungodly.”
He laughs and Shirley looks at him with her okay-I’m-funny-but-I’m-actually-serious expression. He takes a swig of his drink and says, “Shirley, listen: if my phone was a woman, she would be perfect. She gets me food, connects me to important people who will give me money, and she even hooks me up with hot chicks without even getting jealous. Like I said, perfect.”
Her eyes are squinted on him when she says, pointedly, “Oh, that’s nice. So the phone’s sort of like Annie, huh?”
He's text-messaging someone (Annie) when she says this, still laughing about his joke, but when she says it, in her eat-shit voice, he stares up at her in shock, eyes wide. “I...” he starts before shaking his head, trying to compose himself, “... Yeah. Right. Perfect if I wanted to be hassled by a Disney-eyed nag who thinks that the fact that I’m awesome is gross. Perfect if I needed to be reminded to floss or that my body image is unfounded or that I need to study a little bit so I don’t fail all my classes and then never get to be a lawyer. Perfect if I wanted someone who likes to date future campaigners of the Republican party who will actually just end up owning prefab houses and hating that his hot wife is sleeping with the guy who volunteers with her at the library. Yeah. Sure, Shirley. Pshew. Annie, perfect! With her big eyes and her tiny little fists and the fact that she gets red right on apple of cheeks when she’s a little angry with me or drunk or excited. With her thinking she’s got to save everybody and that everybody’s worth trusting other than herself. Yeah. Sounds awesome.”
There is a giant pregnant pause. The cafeteria, in fact, has gotten a little quieter and the man behind Shirley is giving him a furrowed brow expression.
Shirley, however, is not entirely shocked. She has that cross expression on her face that seems to say that she knew it, she knew it, she knew it. Of course, he should have figured so much, because if there was one thing to know about Shirley Bennett, it was that she was perceptive. Perhaps she expected too much of people (the Christianity talking there) and maybe she judged them when they didn’t fit into those neat little categories that she made for them (the Christianity talking there), but Shirley Bennett was a realist. Shirley Bennett was always on the pulse of what everybody was feeling and doing – it was like she picked it up out of the air with her fists. Plus, as he had figured out, she was the queen of smack, the master of gossip, and it was so much to the extent that it wasn’t a flaw, but rather a very valuable talent.
So, it’s not too shocking when she says, “Jeffrey, tell me that I’m wrong, because it sounds like you two have been engaging in some serious premarital sex.”
They stare at each other, and he debates whether he should tell her the truth or not. He realizes that lying will do him no good. Shirley was a fortress, a tried-and-true bullshit detector, and it was no good to make something up, to deny and lie and try to lawyer his way out of this. Shirley, like the mother that he never had, was going to snap her fingers at his lies and tell him that if he thought she was stupid he better get a new brain, cause she knows that he doesn’t want a whooping. So, he does that face he can feel himself doing involuntarily where he bites his bottom lips and raises his eyebrows and its as big as a confession as if he said, “We totally banged a couple nights ago.”
Shirley puts up a hand like she’s simultaneously dismissing him and praying to God for redemption. Then, pursing her lips she says, “Uh. Uh uh uh uh.”
He tries to sit closer to her but she scoots away from him, still holding up her hand and her chair scraping across the linoleum floor. Putting on his lawyer face, he says, “It wasn’t what you think! Honestly. It was like... a friendly competition.”
“A friendly competition?!” She interjects, glaring daggers at him. “I know you don’t think I’m stupid, Jeffrey Winger...”
“Oh crap. Here we go.”
“... because I will wipe that smug little smirk off your face. Sleeping with a girl who can’t even rent a car yet. You must be crazy. Friendly competition, my ass!” And there’s nothing to say in the least, because he knows she’s right. Of course, she’s right. He is gross and he shouldn’t have done it. Especially with Annie, dear little Annie, his best friend who he worked hard for. But! But still, everything would be all right. If only she would answer his calls and text-messages, and e-mails and facebook pokes and...
His phone vibrates and he picks it up so quickly, he nearly knocks his smoothie over on top of Shirley. He doesn’t see her horrified expression, or her wide-eyed glare as he flips through the text message quickly. Instead, all he notices is the weird drop in his stomach when he realizes its only from Troy (“U goin 2 C R dance recital 2nite?”), and he does a subconscious scrub through his messages, for some reason hoping he’s missed something. But he hasn’t.
When he looks back up at Shirley, her face has softened. Instead of disapproval, he sees some trace of suspicion, a line in between her eyes that says something, and as he tried to dissect it, she says, “I should be mad at you Jeffrey. You know that I should. But here’s the thing: As much as I hate how much careless you can be with little regret for people’s feelings, or their workout outfits that could have been covered in banana smoothie, I see this small little heart inside there. I also see a lot of ego, self-doubt. And a Jesus-shaped hole. But,” she pauses, takes a long sip of her smoothie, narrows her eyes at him, “but. Something’s... different. This isn’t like that one girl, what’s her name, Miranda?”
“Melissa. It was Melissa. Why does everybody forget her name... wait. Maybe it was Miranda. Or maybe...”
Shirley waves her hand in the air and says, “It doesn’t matter. Jesus will judge that later. But. Listen, for forever, you know I’ve been a proponent of you and Britta. Because it seemed like it was the right thing. She’s a nice girl with... problems. You’re, deep deep deep down, a nice boy. With problems. But, the more I get to know you, it’s like you two are. You’re the devil together. Like how you could never be with me, other than the fact that my dominating sexuality intimates you. We would ruin the world together. But we’ve all seen this little... thing that you and Annie have been entertaining with each other for the past year. That thing we’re you pretend that you don’t want to rip off each other’s clothes and engage in activities that Jesus would weep at. Like that was gonna last.” She snorts reprehensibly at this before shaking her head and continuing, “And this is coming from someone who loves you, Jeffrey Winger. Because we all love you. But this is coming from someone who loves the both of you: You two are damn fools for believing that you could get through this just as friends. I mean, it’s great that y’all got to hang out with each other, because you got to put all that angry tension bullshit behind you. Even if that hanging out meant engaging in things that would make Jesus cry.” She takes the last long sip of her smoothie before standing up and saying, down into his shocked face, “But, listen to me Jeff Winger: I’ve seen enough of you being a damn fool about the good women in your life and I am over it. You either are going – and don’t read wrong into this – put up or shut up. I suggest you put up, or else I will tell everyone how you cry like a little bitch in our spinning class. Isn’t that nice, Jeffrey?”
With a florid motion of her hand, Shirley tosses the cup over her shoulder, launching it in a perfect arch into a trashcan. She lifts an eyebrow before turning and shaking her spandexed hips out of the gym cafe.
Later, he receives a text message from her that says: No, it’s not Annie. Remember. I will tell everyone about your salty, salty tears. Tell her, Jeffrey. Don’t pull a Winger and callous her out of her life, which you always do.
--
She thinks that she’s getting her life back together, assembling it like a bunch of scattered puzzle pieces. She’s found that she’s good at that: constructing little boxes and compartments for the randomness of her life. Here: the mess of her parent’s divorce. Here: rehab that involved quiet nights alone with no visitors and many strange tears. Here: feelings, feelings in general. So, she stacks these boxes up nicely and she thinks she’s managed to put that one box back together like it used to be; here: impossible Jeff Winger, with his crooked grin, and his flashing eyes, and the good, long, easy silences between the two of them. Here: The bright light in her stomach when he took her small fingers into his wide, warm palm.
But Annie Edison is good at packing things away, and she thinks she’s done a fairly good job of it, after all. She thinks, with a nod of satisfaction at her own mental inventory, that she’s cleaned up the evidence quite nicely. Now, she can take out the pieces of Jeff Winger as she needs them, neatly. No more of the box sort of exploding on her, flipping everything upside down and out of order and without any sort of categorization. Annie Edison will not have that again, not when she supposes that she had figured out the first real adult thing in her life. She packs away the whole incident of his hands holding her face and his breath in her mouth and him, all of him, inside of her, and labels it with a big red mental marker of mistake. It’s there, in that little compartment, and she can pull it out when she wants to (she doesn’t think she ever will, though), but now she knows what to call it. It was a mistake. Her and Jeff Winger: a mistake.
She can’t keep dreaming about it, though.
So, the best thing for her, she thinks, while she re-compartmentalizing, is to avoid Jeff Winger. Or not avoid, exactly. That would be old Annie Edison, the one who had mental breakdowns and drove her body through glass plate windows. The one that couldn’t process a sort of mistake and her feelings. She feels now that she is the evolved Annie Edison, and the adult thing isn’t to run away from the man you… slept with. So, she does the only logical thing that comes to her: she moves on. She erases a segment of her life, the one labeled, Annie Edison and Jeff Winger were once best friends, and tries again. Annie Edison and Jeff Winger are just friends, and friends don’t need to text each other to say that there was a parrot convention on campus (they made fun of them), or that she’s just made some peach ice cream and he should come over and watch old movies with her, or that he just wanted to say good morning and that he hopes she isn’t too hungover. No, they couldn’t do that anymore, because that would mess up her compartment. And so she joins the track team, and a knitter’s club (Britta’s idea), and she meets Jim.
Jim, she thinks, is the perfect man for evolved Annie. He works at a bank. He graduated from a school out east and has a New England work ethic. Actually, he just plain has ethics. He isn’t religious, but he is spiritual, and happily goes to the Synagogue with her and her mother on Yom Kippur. He drinks, but never scotch, and she’s happy for this because when she kisses him she doesn’t feel a tingle in the back of her mind reminding her of other compartment. His mouth is actually usually cool and sweet against hers.
The first time they sleep together, they both laugh at each other once or twice. Her body never hitches but she has a good general warmth in her stomach. She thinks that it’s something, that it could grow into a sweet, demure sort of love. It’s over quickly, but she thinks it’s nice, and really, that’s good enough for her, right? Evolved Annie says right.
It’s the first relationship that the group doesn’t seem to have a real opinion on. Once, on a group excursion for bowling, Shirley asks if he goes to church, and he tells her, with his perfect row of teeth, You know, I’m in between churches right now, Mrs. Bennett. But what church do you go to? I would love to come visit it some week. Instead of being ecstatic, Shirley simply smiles and says that he is more than welcome, that they meet at the local high school, but she doesn’t offer a ride.
“What do you think of him, Shirley?” She asks her later when Jim excuses himself to go to the bathroom. “He’s cute, huh? And he had a 4.0 GPA when he graduated.”
“He’s.” Shirley reaches out and takes Annie’s hand in her own. Her smile only covers half of her face. “He seems like the right sort of man, pumpkin,” She says, in her sugary voice. Then, rubbing her thumb across the top of her hand, she adds, “But you’ve got to ask yourself if he’s the right sort of man for you, sweetie.”
Annie frowns. “Jim’s the right sort of man for everyone. He’s the right sort of man just, in general.”
Abed sits next to her, lacing up a pair of boat-big bowling shoes that look bought and not rented. He points at her and then to Jim’s retreating figure before saying, “Nice. You brought the ‘Freddy’ dynamic into the picture.”
Part of her wishes that things with Abed were the same with every person. Their kiss was good and a part that they played, something they could wash their hands of easily like dirt from hands. It was easy to compartmentalize Abed, simple as fitting together one of those dozen-pieced puzzle sets.
But there was always the problem of trying to figure out what exactly he was talking about at any given second. She raises an eyebrow at him and says, “Abed, his name is Jim, not Freddy. And you need to stop calling him that. He thinks you’re… weird.”
“I am weird,” Abed says before pulling his laces tight. “And it’s a minor error on the name thing. You see, Jim is the Freddy. You know? My Fair Lady? The man that Eliza Doolittle tries to convince herself that she’s in love with rather than the impossible, obstinate Henry Higgins.”
Shirley raises an eyebrow at him. “You sure the only reason that you and Abed moved in together was because of the money situation? Watching a bunch of girly musicals together like it’s normal, child I don’t know….”
Annie doesn’t pay attention to Shirley, though, she’s too focused at what Abed is saying. She sucks in a thin strip of air through her teeth before saying slowly, “Abed. You do realize that this,” she gestures wildly herself, her whole body, “That I’m. Annie Edison, is not a movie. This is. Well. Jim is a nice man, who I… like very much.”
“You paused at like,” Abed notes flatly. “Is that because you’ve convinced yourself you’re in love with him or because you’re completely ambiguous towards him?”
Shirley shakes her head, excuses herself for, “some kind of drink that gets me away from this conversation.”
Annie stares at Abed, whose eye line is level with hers. He doesn’t blink (she’s not quite sure if he ever really blinks). Then, finally, she said, slowly, “Abed. Listen to me. I love you, but I need you to stop calling Jim ‘Freddy’ because, he’s well. He’s good for me. He’s good and nice and evolved. He... works at a bank! He cuts his hair at home and isn’t surgically attached to his Blackberry and isn’t infuriatingly funny and when he looks at me nothing inside me breaks because his eyes are both sad and a little lonely but also full of something... else that makes my stomach do something strange inside of me. He doesn’t do any of those things, he doesn’t...” Annie feels her breathe knot in her chest and it feels like the world around her is turning into a blurred tunnel. At the end of this tunnel is just a thin part of focus, and there he is, looking goofy in his neon rented bowling shoes, smiling down at Britta who's eating Whoppers right from the cardboard box. His smile doesn't quite meet the edge of his eyes, but he seems to be trying, always trying. And then it happens, it’s almost like he can feel her somewhere inside of him, and he stops talking to Britta and looks up at her. His smile dissolves a little, she thinks, turns into more of a grin, a small gentle smile that seems to ask a question, some sort of question that shakes her down to her lungs, which feel small and strained now.
She looks away quickly, back at Abed, whose eyes are wide on her. Then, slowly he says, “Impossible Henry Higgins.”
“It’s not like that, Abed,” She says but she can’t believe how much of a lie it sounds as it leaves her lips. “It’s. I love Jim.” She prays a small prayer that the right name comes out.
Abed zips his hoodie up a little and then frowns. Slowly, he says to the air in front of him, “I know that life isn’t like a movie, Annie. In fact, we addressed this in season two. But movies are there because they kind of show us things about our lives. The difference between movies and us is that we get to write our own script. But scripts have to follow rules or else they just turn into bad versions of 2001: Space Odyssey. So. What script are you going to write, Annie? You’ve got a good one ready for you, if you’d just bother to finish writing it.”
There is only the smallest of silences between the two, one where Abed does something rare: he reaches across the tiny space between the two of them and squeezes the top of her folded hands, which she finds she's wringing together. Then, smiling a small grin at her, he gets up, puts on a pair of large black sunglasses and said, “Fuck it, Dude. Let’s go bowling.”
She realizes that she has been holding her hands so tight together that her nails have dug into her skin. Little pink half-moon shapes are on her skin when she finally releases her grip, but now her hands are shaking. She risks a look up once, only once, and he’s still there, looking at her. She glances away quickly, feeling something like a deep beating drum inside her stomach. She can’t figure out why he won’t just say something, come over and be normal. But he’s just staring at her, she can feel his gaze on the side of her face.
This wasn’t what she wanted. She had figured out Jeffrey Winger, but his compartment had a tendency to come undone, to get reorganized, to show up in other compartments, like: The Compartment of Annie Edison’s Future, and The Compartment of Annie Edison’s Feelings. So, she just wishes he’d come over and say something, say something distinctly Jeff Winger that would infuriate her, make her realize why she was with Jim after all.
“No,” she whispers to herself before taking a long drink of her warm cheap beer. “No. You’ve got it figured out, Annie. Don’t be a silly girl, now, not when you’ve gotten so far.”
And so when Jim takes her to his car after the bowling match and kisses her coolly and gently, she doesn’t run when he says, “Anne, I know this is strange, and usually I’m not like this. Usually I think about things for a long, good time and even then I am reluctant. You knew me, a banker and all. But with you, I think I know that you’re just the right sort of thing for someone like me. So do me the favor, Anne, do me the favor and marry me?”
The ring is impressively moderate and traditional, and it’s cold against the slimness of her finger. There’s something in her head ringing like a bell, like a warning siren, but she pushes it down inside of her. She thinks that he’s everything that she could have planned on marrying, after all. He doesn’t make her ache, at the very least, and Annie thinks that maybe that means something, she’s almost completely sure, almost.
A good man.
She almost calls him Freddy once, but then bites her tongue before saying, “Yes. Yes, of course I’ll marry you.”
--
He’s the last one to find out. The story goes: She told Britta, who told Troy, who (of course) told Abed, who told no one but then later insinuated to Shirley he knew something, and then Shirley backed Britta into a corner and threatened to not cook her anymore pot brownies if she didn’t spill, and so Britta caved. And then Shirley, being the queen of all Greendale gossip, leaked the story through the grapevine.
And he hears through Starburns. Fucking Starburns of all people.
And all this happens all throughout the extent of finals week, when she actually calls him now (“Jeff! Did I give you those notes for Biology?” or “Jeff! Swear on your life that you will actually look over the example questions that Professor Kane gave us! Swear it!” ). When Starburns leans over in the lunch line and says, “Heard your boobies-in-a-cardigan is finally off the market, Winger” he only cringes because it’s, well, it’s Starburns.
He also feels a small something poke him in the stomach, and for reason he has the innate desire to punch Starburns and his little creepy shoulder-dragon. “Uh. Yeah,” he says before sliding a block of jello onto his lunch tray. “She’s got some little slick-haired gremlin that follows her around like some GOP puppy dog. She’s a real lucky girl.”
Starburns simply cocks his top hat at him. “Uh, dude, that’s the little gremlin she’s going to get hitched to.”
“Right,” Jeff says, rolling his eyes. “I’m sure, since you’re on the pulse of the love lives of Greendale women. Wait,” he thinks for a second, “Maybe you have something there. You did make that creepy eye-sized hole in the girl’s locker room that Abed showed me to try to reenact Porkie’s.”
“Uh, yeah, dude.”
“Stop calling me dude. Now.”
“Whatevs, dude. But I’m telling you, that little squeeze of yours that you never got to bang, she’s totally off the market. I mean, I’m a drug dealer man, but you gotta respect the ring.” Starburns shrugs, puts an ungodly amount of mash potatoes on his tray before sauntering away.
There’s an old part of Jeffery Winger who wants to yell at his retreating figure that he did in fact bang that little piece of... and oh dear god. It hits him. Hits him like someone has smacked him in the mouth. He stops, the truth sinking in and suddenly he feels his tray sort of falling to the ground. He doesn’t care though, just ignores when Quendra whines, “Oh. My. God. You totally just spilled grape jello all over my shoes. Jefffff.....”
He knows where to find her, sort of always knows when to find her, no matter what. He doesn’t exactly rush through the hallways, but it’s an aggressive sort of walking, pushing against people who are in his way, including Leonard who makes a very pissed off sounding raspberry as he passes.
She’s sitting quietly in that one table in the library, the one where Magnitude etched “Pop Pop!” into the thin wood tabletop. Her hair is frazzled, like it always is on finals week, and she’s got her earbuds in, listening fervently for some little piece of information on her digital recorder that she hadn’t heard the first thousand times she listened to the class.
He rushes to her, but she doesn’t see him, is instead too focused, with her eyebrows knitted together. He stands there panting, not really knowing what he’s doing, what he’s supposed to do. Strike that. He knows what he should do: he should laugh, say she’s a fool, that marriage is for people who don’t like sex, and say “best of luck to you, kiddo.” He should get back to texting that chick who wrote her number on a napkin at the smoothie bar at the gym. He should start doing more pushups and getting out more rather than sitting at home and trolling AMC to see if he can catch When Harry Met Sally for some reason. But right now all he can think about is that annoying gremlin’s hands on her and that he missed the way she made a face at him and called him gross and sang bad Journey songs with him and how a little of her hair is getting in her mouth right now. And her mouth, for some reason that’s all he can think of, and he hates himself a little bit for suddenly thinking about how it was hot and good against his.
So that’s why he doesn’t think, really, just sort of picks up her digital recorder and unhooks it from her earbuds and then throws it across the room. He can hear it clatter somewhere in background, but right now all he can see is her wide-eyed expression, which is looking right up at him. She looks like he’s stabbed her pet puppy or something, or maybe that he punched her in the face.
Her mouth opens for a few seconds soundlessly until she manages with a voice that sounds like it’s tinged with something of a warning bell, “Je-eeff. What the. What have you done?”
“What have I done?” He asks, in his slightly-crazed voice. He can hear his voice but it feels separated from him, like he is having an out of body sort of thing. What did Abed say? He was Goldbluming? He doesn’t know. Instead, he simply says, “You’re. Getting. Married? Uh, have you never heard of a phone call? What? You’re too good to ever text message me anymore? Has your little gremlin been monitoring your every call? You couldn’t...” he finds himself sputtering off, trying to figure out what to say, but then he sees it. It’s not very big, but big enough, and it catches the light like a handful of glitter would catch his eye, like a warning sign of something not very desirable and not very pretty. It’s there, like the way somebody bleeding is in a room. It’s that more than anything that makes him stop. He finds the rage inside of him sort of die and turn into something still burning, but sadder, the way an ember is still a fire, but smaller, more reserved.
She catches his eye and she looks instantly down at her finger. “I. I’ve been wearing it for two weeks now.” She handles it nervously, pushing it up and down her finger, like she isn’t sure if she wants to take it off or not. “I was going to... tell you. I mean, I was going to tell all of you together! The whole group. But, I.” She looks flustered, does that thing with her stupid Disney eyes where they flutter at the speed of a couple hundred miles per hour. “But! Finals!” And he knows that she’s actually mostly telling the truth, that finals have occupied about ninety-nine percent of her brain for the past couple of weeks. He actually shouldn’t take all of this entirely personally. It’s just that she looks up at him with this sort of panicked expression and he can’t figure out what the panic is there for, and he wants to help, always wants to help, just shake her until she tells him how to help her.
There is a space between them, and he doesn’t know if he wants to close it to slap that... thing off her finger or if he just wants to apologize. Wants to tell her, shit, it’s your life, kid, marry whoever or whatever gremlin you’d like. He realizes that this would be the right thing to do, to just give her that Jeff Winger approving smile, which usually makes a little confidence jump up her spine, make her stand straighter. He finds he can’t do it though, can’t bring himself to do it. All he can find himself saying is, “Annie. Please. Do you even know this guy? You’ve been dating for what? Twenty minutes?”
“Two months,” she says behind gritted teeth.
“Oh!” he exclaims. He’s attracting attention now, he can see the people in the library’s faces staring at the both of them in a way that some people nervously eye someone walking down the street with a baseball bat. “Two months! I mean, what have you two been waiting for? Two months! So, you basically know everything about each other then, huh? I bet you don’t even know his middle name.”
“Nathan.” She folds her hands across her chest.
He blinks, taken aback, but then steps forward, glaring down at her. He can feel the fire in his eyes, growing there like he was just making a habit of throwing lint balls on the angry, frustrated flame inside of him. “Okay. So you know his stupid middle name. Nathan. Is that even a name?”
Her eyebrows fold near the middle. “...What?”
“Uh. Whatever.” He folds his hands in front of him and said, “Listen, I get it. I did something wrong. Or something. I don’t know.” He watches her face suddenly change in front of him, do that annoyingly effective Annie thing where her face turns instantly soft, sort of. Her usually tough expression evaporates and her eyebrows sort of turn upward and her eyes get even more impossibly large than they usually are. It catches him off guard, but there’s something burning inside of him that makes him keep going, “Yeah, I know, I’m not Prince Charming. I didn’t exactly bring you roses after our whole... thing that happened. But you had to know that that’s what was going to happen, Annie. I’m not that guy. I never will be. I’ll never be the guy that wants to rub your feet or tell you that you don’t look fat ”
The expression changes. Instantly. It turns from soft to the tense sort of look, like she’s gone far away and her lips have capsized into a thin, straight line. She frowns up into his face and then marches over to her recorder. Picking it up huffily, she yells across the expanse of the library, “Sure, make this all about you, Jeff Winger and your stupid handsome-ness-ness. Ness. That’s so typical. Did it ever occur to you that I didn’t want to talk to you because having...” she stumbles before yelling (way too loudly), “... sex! With Jeffrey Winger was less than spectacular? That you just failed to live up to Annie Edison’s expectations?”
His mouth felt a little slack-jawed but he managed to spit out, “And what expectations were those exactly? The expectation where I didn’t cry because I was fucking a girl instead of that guy from my Installation Art class?”
And that is it, he can feel it. There is a very, long real silence pervading the library. It’s her face though, that face that shows what he’s really said has hit the target. Her eyes turn wide and then fluttery and then just sad, so sad that she looks like some cartoon animal whose mother has just died by a cruel hunter’s arrow.
Behind him, he could hear Leonard say, “Ooooooooh. Burn.”
“Shut up, Leonard,” he says, but it’s too late. She's already storming out the library in a huff of short skirt and tight cardigan and he doesn’t even admire the view because every part of him is saying, Oh shit, Winger. You’ve done it now, as usual. You’ve always got to go and do that stupid thing you do.
He thinks quickly, looks around the library to see a bunch of eyes round as saucers on his face. They’re all thinking the same thing, he’s sure of it. They’re thinking about how much a gigantic jackhole he is, about how he’s probably actually pretty awful at sex, and how he’s actually kind of a monster after all.
So he can’t help it but grab the notebook and Biology textbook and run after her (because he knows that she’ll have a mild panic attack when she realizes she forgot both of them). He knows where she’s going, knows that she’s heading straight to her car to drive off towards her shithole of an apartment.
She’s moving her legs so quickly through the parking lot she’s almost hopping up and down. She’s rummaging through her purse, almost randomly, and there’s something so sad and frantic about her movements that a part of him aches, because he knows what it feels like, to feel so pissed and feel something inside of you spinning out of control that you want to just pull out your hair.
He runs after her, quickly. His voice is a little jumpy when he shouts after her, “Annie! Annie, come on! You know how I am. I’m a jackass, we all know that. I’m a real goddamn jackass and I didn’t mean it. I swear it. Annie!”
It hits his head before he can really figure out what’s going on. He remembers seeing her turn and throw the keys but it doesn’t register that she’s throwing her keys at him. And it doesn’t register that she’s crying, she’ s really crying, there’s this ungraceful amount of snot falling out her nose and her eyes are puffy and red.
He reaches up to his forehead where the keys hit and yells, “Goddamnit, Annie! What the he--”
“Go away!” She screams, and her voice is so loud and piercing and in a tone that he’s never heard before, not really. He’s heard the long screeches from her when someone threatens to steal her pen, or beat her at some kind of trite competition, or threatens to fail her at anything, but this, this is somewhere in her chest, somewhere deep, near her heart. “Go. Away!” Her voices trembles this time and her lips quivers like it can’t stay in one place. “Can’t you just go away? Why is it that you insist on always following me around?” She throws her hands out and he kind of knows he’s bleeding where the keys hit his head but he doesn’t care right now, couldn’t care in the slightest. Because he doesn’t know what to do with females who have mascara running down their faces and snot in their mouths and tiny fists near their hips because of him.
“Wha...?” he starts before coming closer. Something warm falls down his forehead and he knows he's really bleeding, but he ignores it wholeheartedly. “Annie. I’m sorry. I really am. I’m a jerk.”
“No,” she wails, pumping her tiny fists in the air. “No, you’re not a jerk.”
“Yes,” he says, holding his hands up. “Yes, I am. If I know anything about Jeff Winger, it’s that he’s a jerk.”
She smiles this watery sort of grin that dissolves quickly. Annie shakes her head, her hair getting caught in her mouth. “No, you’re not. I mean, you definitely are. I mean, you’re the impossible Henry Higgins.”
“I’m what? Wait, have you been talking to Abed? He keeps insisting on singing some song about some Henry guy.”
She laughs for only a second but then there’s tears flowing again. “It’s just. You are not just a jerk. I mean, I figured that out a long time ago, and this.... sad, good man sort of materialized in front of me. And you won’t leave! Damn you, Jeff Winger. Damn you and your stupid sad smile and your compulsion to defend defenseless people and your affinity for watching awesome feminist movies...”
“... Hey! Dolores Clairborne was a childhood staple for the most complicated and most feminist-indoctrinated young men out there.”
She laughs but it’s a laugh that's just sort of made of spittle and she says, “There you go again! And you! You and your stupid charm and your stupid... mouth! Your stupid mouth that I somehow convinced that I didn’t want to kiss all those years, and all of that! All of that won’t leave me alone! I’m Annie Edison, and I have had a script and I screwed up that script a long time ago, but I thought I got it back. I was supposed to get my degree and work as something vaguely professional and then get married to some nice man. And then!” She screws up her hands and makes that sound from her mouth when Annie Kim steals her ideas or Britta says that only NPR is the worthwhile thing listening to or when someone says they didn’t even bother studying for a test. “And then, you come in and just sort of... occupy this space inside of me. And I don’t mean that as a sexual sort of thing, even though that wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Sex was supposed to be messy and strange but nice and nothing more. It wasn’t supposed to be like. Well...” she indicates something that references back to the whole thing, that night when her hair was laced through his fingers and her breathe was hot on his tongue, “... it wasn’t supposed to be that. And then you, Jeffrey Winger, come along and ruin everything. And all I’ve got is this... script that I’ve written for myself. It’s the only control I have over my life now, after all that addiction and divorce and loneliness in my silly little short life. It has no... room! For someone like you, Jeff. And yet! You keep following me around, no matter what I do. Why is that, Jeff? Why is that?”
At first, he can’t say anything. No, literally, the words are stuck in his mouth and he when he tries to make something come up, it sort of tastes like the bitterness of bile. But then, as she’s shaking her head and walking away, without her keys and her textbook and notebook, he says, “You think? Fuck, Annie. You think I wanted some pain-in-the-ass girl with a conscience who calls me out on my shit was someone I asked for?” She stops, turns her head so that the corner of her eye is staring at him over her shoulder. “I mean, you’re the last thing I ever wanted. The last sort of person with all your making me remember that good people that, you know. Good people that I can let down. Well. My father left me when I was six. Six, Annie. And he left my mother, the greatest sort of person I’ve ever known.” The blood is sort of falling in his eyes but he blinked heartily and watched as she tearily turned and stared at him. She's sort of composed now, now that everything she had said had been expelled from her the same way you vomit up all the bad shit in your stomach during a flu, during a bad hangover. She looks gross; she looks ridiculously stunning with her messy, greasy hair and her swollen eyes. He shakes his head, sees a bead of blood fall on his expensive shirt and he finds he doesn't care at all. “And what if I did that to you? What if I’m nothing more than my father? And. Fuck.” He picks up the keys off the ground and then walks up to her. He puts the keys and the notebook and textbook in a nice pile. Then he walks hesitantly towards her before taking her hands in his own and placing all her stuff inside her grasp. “I couldn’t do what my father did to my mother, Annie. I just. I wouldn’t let myself do that to you.”
His hands are still on her own, and he just holds them there. Because there’s a part of him that thinks this could be something. Dammit, Winger, he thinks, say something. If he just said something he might fill in the void where he feels like something wounded might be. Give that Winger speech, make something real out of something uncomfortable and maybe something that they should actually address, not just put a laywer-bandaid on. For once, he is very aware that something very tangible is in front of him and he shouldn’t run, he shouldn’t Winger-out of this.
But that doesn’t happen. Instead, she withdraws her hands and says, “So. That’s that, then? You’re not going to be your father. I’m going to marry Jim. We’re going to follow our scripts. Right, Jeff?”
He blinks. The blood is real now. He feels it like boiling water on his cheek.
Say something.
“I.” He stops, swallows. “Yes. I think that would be.” He swallows again but his throat feels sandpapery and itchy. His eyes burn. “I think you’d be better off, Annie.”
As she drives away, he thinks about how it’s better this way. He remembers another car driving away, many years ago, his mother saying, We’ll be fine alone. You’re always better alone. You can’t hurt anyone when you’re alone, Jeffrey.
He finds, though, that he feels drained, like a sink that can’t hold water, like a pocket that drops everything worth anything down to the dirty ground.
“Our own scripts,” he says to himself, wiping the back of his hand across his face. “This shit is Billy Crystal. America’s Sweethearts era, too.”
He doesn’t try to text her for a couple days. He thinks it won’t last, this argument. It can’t. He won’t let it.
But then, this argument, what is means. He knows. He knows it’s about as much of an argument as a hurricane or fate is an argument. It means something more, he just can’t put his finger on it, or isn’t willing to put his finger on it.
But things have changed now, he feels it changing. It’s only when he shows her his passing grade in Biology that she smiles at him again, and the grin is forced.
She doesn’t call him again, and her only text to him is: Jim and I are throwing a New Year’s Party. Get to you later with details. It’s a mass message she leaves everyone in the group.
Still, he saves it, looks at it before going to bed every night, just to see her name: Annie, Annie, Annie, reaching through the space towards his lonely one for just a moment, reaching across her script to his.
Community, jeff/annie
pt. 1
Jeff and Annie finally decide that they can be friends, no sexual-tension attached. It works. For a while. Inspired by a prompt by
eva_aftagrl on milady_milordto write a story based on When Harry Met Sally. There may/may not be any similarities to the movie in this fic.Annie Edison and Jeff Winger are just friends, and friends don’t need to text each other to say that there was a parrot convention on campus (they made fun of them), or that she’s just made some peach ice cream and he should come over and watch old movies with her, or that he just wanted to say good morning and that he hopes she isn’t too hungover. No, they couldn’t do that anymore, because that would mess up her compartment. And so she joins the track team, and a knitter’s club (Britta’s idea), and she meets Jim.
pt. 2
Harry Burns: I've been doing a lot of thinking, and the thing is, I love you.
Sally Albright: What?
Harry Burns: I love you.
Sally Albright: How do you expect me to respond to this?
Harry Burns: How about, you love me too.
Sally Albright: How about, I'm leaving.
~ When Harry Met Sally
She doesn’t call. Which is ridiculous. Not that she doesn’t call, but because he cares that she doesn’t call. It itches at him day and night, irking him somewhere near his sternum. It bothers him for a various of reasons: A) She’s his best friend, sex or no sex (and very, very good sex at that) and B) No one doesn’t want a piece of Jeffrey Winger after they get a taste. No one.
It’s that simple, he tells himself. Simple that he just doesn’t like being ignored, that he doesn’t like not being the one who has to dodge the person he’s had sex with. Simple that her silence irks him not because he feels something. He’s not that silly. He’s got a penis after all. It’s not that little Annie Edison has gone and crawled under his skin and made him sit up too quickly when his phone rings or make him check the e-mail on his Blackberry a couple hundred times a day. It’s not that. It’s not that when he woke up the morning and walked around her apartment, in the emptiness, when he found her note that told him that he, Jeffrey Winger, in fact was quite excellent at sex, he didn’t feel that usual rush of satisfaction that he usually felt. Instead, there was something hollow there. I need some protein, he tells himself. And that’s what he boils it down to: he just needs more protein. It can’t be that Annie Edison has done something to him. She isn’t responsible for this feeling inside of him that something has been carved out of him, deep and to the core.
Okay. So maybe he’s a little... irritated with her. Because she hasn’t called just in general. In fact, she’s been downright allusive in a sense. Alright, they hang out, but it’s always when someone else is there and it’s always because somebody else asks them out. Last night, it was Troy, who invited them to the Red Door (“Britta says it’s the worst, which means she likes it!” Troy tells them with too much emotion). But there was karaoke and they all had to try to find Britta who was helplessly drunk already and Troy kept loudly trying to convince her to let him take her home. And some guy came along. With Annie. Some slick-haired young Republican kind of guy tagging along on Annie’s heels, acting like he was some leashed dog or a toddler in a mall. That same kind of guy who greets you when you come in the bank and over a light beer will explain that he’s in “investment sales.” He is, in fact, the perfect sort of guy for Annie, he thinks. Nice. Good looking (not unlike Jeff Winger). And uncomplicated (unlike Jeff Winger). And he thinks to himself that he doesn’t need to be comparing this guy to himself, it’s not about that, he should be glad for Annie. Because she’s his best friend after all, and when that guy said a joke, she smiled a good sort of smile and laughs. He couldn’t tell if it was genuine, because it was dark at the bar and she had done this thing with her hair now that, although really attractive, hid part of her face. He doesn’t want to say she looked sad, because that was only his inner drunk voice talking
He’s glad for Annie, he guesses. There’s still this weird feeling inside him though, and it started after he woke up alone and feeling strange in her apartment that already smelled of espresso from the sex supply shop downstairs. He chalks the feeling up to some kind of indigestion or vitamin deficiency. So he starts eating better, working out more. He finds that if he focuses himself enough on trying to feel better, sometimes he can trick his body into not worrying about that she hasn’t called in a day, two days, three days, a whole week.
“If you don’t stop touching that thing, it’s gonna stay that way,” Shirley tells him as the two of them sip on protein shakes in the gym cafeteria. Lately, Shirley and him have been meeting up early in the morning for a spinning class. She is, with much of his chagrin, kicking his ass at it.
“Say what?” he asks, staring at her
She raises her eyebrows and turns her head to the side, trying to avoid eye contact. “Oh, you know what I’m talking about, Jeffrey. You and that phone are having sort of relationship that verges on the ungodly.”
He laughs and Shirley looks at him with her okay-I’m-funny-but-I’m-actually-serious expression. He takes a swig of his drink and says, “Shirley, listen: if my phone was a woman, she would be perfect. She gets me food, connects me to important people who will give me money, and she even hooks me up with hot chicks without even getting jealous. Like I said, perfect.”
Her eyes are squinted on him when she says, pointedly, “Oh, that’s nice. So the phone’s sort of like Annie, huh?”
He's text-messaging someone (Annie) when she says this, still laughing about his joke, but when she says it, in her eat-shit voice, he stares up at her in shock, eyes wide. “I...” he starts before shaking his head, trying to compose himself, “... Yeah. Right. Perfect if I wanted to be hassled by a Disney-eyed nag who thinks that the fact that I’m awesome is gross. Perfect if I needed to be reminded to floss or that my body image is unfounded or that I need to study a little bit so I don’t fail all my classes and then never get to be a lawyer. Perfect if I wanted someone who likes to date future campaigners of the Republican party who will actually just end up owning prefab houses and hating that his hot wife is sleeping with the guy who volunteers with her at the library. Yeah. Sure, Shirley. Pshew. Annie, perfect! With her big eyes and her tiny little fists and the fact that she gets red right on apple of cheeks when she’s a little angry with me or drunk or excited. With her thinking she’s got to save everybody and that everybody’s worth trusting other than herself. Yeah. Sounds awesome.”
There is a giant pregnant pause. The cafeteria, in fact, has gotten a little quieter and the man behind Shirley is giving him a furrowed brow expression.
Shirley, however, is not entirely shocked. She has that cross expression on her face that seems to say that she knew it, she knew it, she knew it. Of course, he should have figured so much, because if there was one thing to know about Shirley Bennett, it was that she was perceptive. Perhaps she expected too much of people (the Christianity talking there) and maybe she judged them when they didn’t fit into those neat little categories that she made for them (the Christianity talking there), but Shirley Bennett was a realist. Shirley Bennett was always on the pulse of what everybody was feeling and doing – it was like she picked it up out of the air with her fists. Plus, as he had figured out, she was the queen of smack, the master of gossip, and it was so much to the extent that it wasn’t a flaw, but rather a very valuable talent.
So, it’s not too shocking when she says, “Jeffrey, tell me that I’m wrong, because it sounds like you two have been engaging in some serious premarital sex.”
They stare at each other, and he debates whether he should tell her the truth or not. He realizes that lying will do him no good. Shirley was a fortress, a tried-and-true bullshit detector, and it was no good to make something up, to deny and lie and try to lawyer his way out of this. Shirley, like the mother that he never had, was going to snap her fingers at his lies and tell him that if he thought she was stupid he better get a new brain, cause she knows that he doesn’t want a whooping. So, he does that face he can feel himself doing involuntarily where he bites his bottom lips and raises his eyebrows and its as big as a confession as if he said, “We totally banged a couple nights ago.”
Shirley puts up a hand like she’s simultaneously dismissing him and praying to God for redemption. Then, pursing her lips she says, “Uh. Uh uh uh uh.”
He tries to sit closer to her but she scoots away from him, still holding up her hand and her chair scraping across the linoleum floor. Putting on his lawyer face, he says, “It wasn’t what you think! Honestly. It was like... a friendly competition.”
“A friendly competition?!” She interjects, glaring daggers at him. “I know you don’t think I’m stupid, Jeffrey Winger...”
“Oh crap. Here we go.”
“... because I will wipe that smug little smirk off your face. Sleeping with a girl who can’t even rent a car yet. You must be crazy. Friendly competition, my ass!” And there’s nothing to say in the least, because he knows she’s right. Of course, she’s right. He is gross and he shouldn’t have done it. Especially with Annie, dear little Annie, his best friend who he worked hard for. But! But still, everything would be all right. If only she would answer his calls and text-messages, and e-mails and facebook pokes and...
His phone vibrates and he picks it up so quickly, he nearly knocks his smoothie over on top of Shirley. He doesn’t see her horrified expression, or her wide-eyed glare as he flips through the text message quickly. Instead, all he notices is the weird drop in his stomach when he realizes its only from Troy (“U goin 2 C R dance recital 2nite?”), and he does a subconscious scrub through his messages, for some reason hoping he’s missed something. But he hasn’t.
When he looks back up at Shirley, her face has softened. Instead of disapproval, he sees some trace of suspicion, a line in between her eyes that says something, and as he tried to dissect it, she says, “I should be mad at you Jeffrey. You know that I should. But here’s the thing: As much as I hate how much careless you can be with little regret for people’s feelings, or their workout outfits that could have been covered in banana smoothie, I see this small little heart inside there. I also see a lot of ego, self-doubt. And a Jesus-shaped hole. But,” she pauses, takes a long sip of her smoothie, narrows her eyes at him, “but. Something’s... different. This isn’t like that one girl, what’s her name, Miranda?”
“Melissa. It was Melissa. Why does everybody forget her name... wait. Maybe it was Miranda. Or maybe...”
Shirley waves her hand in the air and says, “It doesn’t matter. Jesus will judge that later. But. Listen, for forever, you know I’ve been a proponent of you and Britta. Because it seemed like it was the right thing. She’s a nice girl with... problems. You’re, deep deep deep down, a nice boy. With problems. But, the more I get to know you, it’s like you two are. You’re the devil together. Like how you could never be with me, other than the fact that my dominating sexuality intimates you. We would ruin the world together. But we’ve all seen this little... thing that you and Annie have been entertaining with each other for the past year. That thing we’re you pretend that you don’t want to rip off each other’s clothes and engage in activities that Jesus would weep at. Like that was gonna last.” She snorts reprehensibly at this before shaking her head and continuing, “And this is coming from someone who loves you, Jeffrey Winger. Because we all love you. But this is coming from someone who loves the both of you: You two are damn fools for believing that you could get through this just as friends. I mean, it’s great that y’all got to hang out with each other, because you got to put all that angry tension bullshit behind you. Even if that hanging out meant engaging in things that would make Jesus cry.” She takes the last long sip of her smoothie before standing up and saying, down into his shocked face, “But, listen to me Jeff Winger: I’ve seen enough of you being a damn fool about the good women in your life and I am over it. You either are going – and don’t read wrong into this – put up or shut up. I suggest you put up, or else I will tell everyone how you cry like a little bitch in our spinning class. Isn’t that nice, Jeffrey?”
With a florid motion of her hand, Shirley tosses the cup over her shoulder, launching it in a perfect arch into a trashcan. She lifts an eyebrow before turning and shaking her spandexed hips out of the gym cafe.
Later, he receives a text message from her that says: No, it’s not Annie. Remember. I will tell everyone about your salty, salty tears. Tell her, Jeffrey. Don’t pull a Winger and callous her out of her life, which you always do.
She thinks that she’s getting her life back together, assembling it like a bunch of scattered puzzle pieces. She’s found that she’s good at that: constructing little boxes and compartments for the randomness of her life. Here: the mess of her parent’s divorce. Here: rehab that involved quiet nights alone with no visitors and many strange tears. Here: feelings, feelings in general. So, she stacks these boxes up nicely and she thinks she’s managed to put that one box back together like it used to be; here: impossible Jeff Winger, with his crooked grin, and his flashing eyes, and the good, long, easy silences between the two of them. Here: The bright light in her stomach when he took her small fingers into his wide, warm palm.
But Annie Edison is good at packing things away, and she thinks she’s done a fairly good job of it, after all. She thinks, with a nod of satisfaction at her own mental inventory, that she’s cleaned up the evidence quite nicely. Now, she can take out the pieces of Jeff Winger as she needs them, neatly. No more of the box sort of exploding on her, flipping everything upside down and out of order and without any sort of categorization. Annie Edison will not have that again, not when she supposes that she had figured out the first real adult thing in her life. She packs away the whole incident of his hands holding her face and his breath in her mouth and him, all of him, inside of her, and labels it with a big red mental marker of mistake. It’s there, in that little compartment, and she can pull it out when she wants to (she doesn’t think she ever will, though), but now she knows what to call it. It was a mistake. Her and Jeff Winger: a mistake.
She can’t keep dreaming about it, though.
So, the best thing for her, she thinks, while she re-compartmentalizing, is to avoid Jeff Winger. Or not avoid, exactly. That would be old Annie Edison, the one who had mental breakdowns and drove her body through glass plate windows. The one that couldn’t process a sort of mistake and her feelings. She feels now that she is the evolved Annie Edison, and the adult thing isn’t to run away from the man you… slept with. So, she does the only logical thing that comes to her: she moves on. She erases a segment of her life, the one labeled, Annie Edison and Jeff Winger were once best friends, and tries again. Annie Edison and Jeff Winger are just friends, and friends don’t need to text each other to say that there was a parrot convention on campus (they made fun of them), or that she’s just made some peach ice cream and he should come over and watch old movies with her, or that he just wanted to say good morning and that he hopes she isn’t too hungover. No, they couldn’t do that anymore, because that would mess up her compartment. And so she joins the track team, and a knitter’s club (Britta’s idea), and she meets Jim.
Jim, she thinks, is the perfect man for evolved Annie. He works at a bank. He graduated from a school out east and has a New England work ethic. Actually, he just plain has ethics. He isn’t religious, but he is spiritual, and happily goes to the Synagogue with her and her mother on Yom Kippur. He drinks, but never scotch, and she’s happy for this because when she kisses him she doesn’t feel a tingle in the back of her mind reminding her of other compartment. His mouth is actually usually cool and sweet against hers.
The first time they sleep together, they both laugh at each other once or twice. Her body never hitches but she has a good general warmth in her stomach. She thinks that it’s something, that it could grow into a sweet, demure sort of love. It’s over quickly, but she thinks it’s nice, and really, that’s good enough for her, right? Evolved Annie says right.
It’s the first relationship that the group doesn’t seem to have a real opinion on. Once, on a group excursion for bowling, Shirley asks if he goes to church, and he tells her, with his perfect row of teeth, You know, I’m in between churches right now, Mrs. Bennett. But what church do you go to? I would love to come visit it some week. Instead of being ecstatic, Shirley simply smiles and says that he is more than welcome, that they meet at the local high school, but she doesn’t offer a ride.
“What do you think of him, Shirley?” She asks her later when Jim excuses himself to go to the bathroom. “He’s cute, huh? And he had a 4.0 GPA when he graduated.”
“He’s.” Shirley reaches out and takes Annie’s hand in her own. Her smile only covers half of her face. “He seems like the right sort of man, pumpkin,” She says, in her sugary voice. Then, rubbing her thumb across the top of her hand, she adds, “But you’ve got to ask yourself if he’s the right sort of man for you, sweetie.”
Annie frowns. “Jim’s the right sort of man for everyone. He’s the right sort of man just, in general.”
Abed sits next to her, lacing up a pair of boat-big bowling shoes that look bought and not rented. He points at her and then to Jim’s retreating figure before saying, “Nice. You brought the ‘Freddy’ dynamic into the picture.”
Part of her wishes that things with Abed were the same with every person. Their kiss was good and a part that they played, something they could wash their hands of easily like dirt from hands. It was easy to compartmentalize Abed, simple as fitting together one of those dozen-pieced puzzle sets.
But there was always the problem of trying to figure out what exactly he was talking about at any given second. She raises an eyebrow at him and says, “Abed, his name is Jim, not Freddy. And you need to stop calling him that. He thinks you’re… weird.”
“I am weird,” Abed says before pulling his laces tight. “And it’s a minor error on the name thing. You see, Jim is the Freddy. You know? My Fair Lady? The man that Eliza Doolittle tries to convince herself that she’s in love with rather than the impossible, obstinate Henry Higgins.”
Shirley raises an eyebrow at him. “You sure the only reason that you and Abed moved in together was because of the money situation? Watching a bunch of girly musicals together like it’s normal, child I don’t know….”
Annie doesn’t pay attention to Shirley, though, she’s too focused at what Abed is saying. She sucks in a thin strip of air through her teeth before saying slowly, “Abed. You do realize that this,” she gestures wildly herself, her whole body, “That I’m. Annie Edison, is not a movie. This is. Well. Jim is a nice man, who I… like very much.”
“You paused at like,” Abed notes flatly. “Is that because you’ve convinced yourself you’re in love with him or because you’re completely ambiguous towards him?”
Shirley shakes her head, excuses herself for, “some kind of drink that gets me away from this conversation.”
Annie stares at Abed, whose eye line is level with hers. He doesn’t blink (she’s not quite sure if he ever really blinks). Then, finally, she said, slowly, “Abed. Listen to me. I love you, but I need you to stop calling Jim ‘Freddy’ because, he’s well. He’s good for me. He’s good and nice and evolved. He... works at a bank! He cuts his hair at home and isn’t surgically attached to his Blackberry and isn’t infuriatingly funny and when he looks at me nothing inside me breaks because his eyes are both sad and a little lonely but also full of something... else that makes my stomach do something strange inside of me. He doesn’t do any of those things, he doesn’t...” Annie feels her breathe knot in her chest and it feels like the world around her is turning into a blurred tunnel. At the end of this tunnel is just a thin part of focus, and there he is, looking goofy in his neon rented bowling shoes, smiling down at Britta who's eating Whoppers right from the cardboard box. His smile doesn't quite meet the edge of his eyes, but he seems to be trying, always trying. And then it happens, it’s almost like he can feel her somewhere inside of him, and he stops talking to Britta and looks up at her. His smile dissolves a little, she thinks, turns into more of a grin, a small gentle smile that seems to ask a question, some sort of question that shakes her down to her lungs, which feel small and strained now.
She looks away quickly, back at Abed, whose eyes are wide on her. Then, slowly he says, “Impossible Henry Higgins.”
“It’s not like that, Abed,” She says but she can’t believe how much of a lie it sounds as it leaves her lips. “It’s. I love Jim.” She prays a small prayer that the right name comes out.
Abed zips his hoodie up a little and then frowns. Slowly, he says to the air in front of him, “I know that life isn’t like a movie, Annie. In fact, we addressed this in season two. But movies are there because they kind of show us things about our lives. The difference between movies and us is that we get to write our own script. But scripts have to follow rules or else they just turn into bad versions of 2001: Space Odyssey. So. What script are you going to write, Annie? You’ve got a good one ready for you, if you’d just bother to finish writing it.”
There is only the smallest of silences between the two, one where Abed does something rare: he reaches across the tiny space between the two of them and squeezes the top of her folded hands, which she finds she's wringing together. Then, smiling a small grin at her, he gets up, puts on a pair of large black sunglasses and said, “Fuck it, Dude. Let’s go bowling.”
She realizes that she has been holding her hands so tight together that her nails have dug into her skin. Little pink half-moon shapes are on her skin when she finally releases her grip, but now her hands are shaking. She risks a look up once, only once, and he’s still there, looking at her. She glances away quickly, feeling something like a deep beating drum inside her stomach. She can’t figure out why he won’t just say something, come over and be normal. But he’s just staring at her, she can feel his gaze on the side of her face.
This wasn’t what she wanted. She had figured out Jeffrey Winger, but his compartment had a tendency to come undone, to get reorganized, to show up in other compartments, like: The Compartment of Annie Edison’s Future, and The Compartment of Annie Edison’s Feelings. So, she just wishes he’d come over and say something, say something distinctly Jeff Winger that would infuriate her, make her realize why she was with Jim after all.
“No,” she whispers to herself before taking a long drink of her warm cheap beer. “No. You’ve got it figured out, Annie. Don’t be a silly girl, now, not when you’ve gotten so far.”
And so when Jim takes her to his car after the bowling match and kisses her coolly and gently, she doesn’t run when he says, “Anne, I know this is strange, and usually I’m not like this. Usually I think about things for a long, good time and even then I am reluctant. You knew me, a banker and all. But with you, I think I know that you’re just the right sort of thing for someone like me. So do me the favor, Anne, do me the favor and marry me?”
The ring is impressively moderate and traditional, and it’s cold against the slimness of her finger. There’s something in her head ringing like a bell, like a warning siren, but she pushes it down inside of her. She thinks that he’s everything that she could have planned on marrying, after all. He doesn’t make her ache, at the very least, and Annie thinks that maybe that means something, she’s almost completely sure, almost.
A good man.
She almost calls him Freddy once, but then bites her tongue before saying, “Yes. Yes, of course I’ll marry you.”
He’s the last one to find out. The story goes: She told Britta, who told Troy, who (of course) told Abed, who told no one but then later insinuated to Shirley he knew something, and then Shirley backed Britta into a corner and threatened to not cook her anymore pot brownies if she didn’t spill, and so Britta caved. And then Shirley, being the queen of all Greendale gossip, leaked the story through the grapevine.
And he hears through Starburns. Fucking Starburns of all people.
And all this happens all throughout the extent of finals week, when she actually calls him now (“Jeff! Did I give you those notes for Biology?” or “Jeff! Swear on your life that you will actually look over the example questions that Professor Kane gave us! Swear it!” ). When Starburns leans over in the lunch line and says, “Heard your boobies-in-a-cardigan is finally off the market, Winger” he only cringes because it’s, well, it’s Starburns.
He also feels a small something poke him in the stomach, and for reason he has the innate desire to punch Starburns and his little creepy shoulder-dragon. “Uh. Yeah,” he says before sliding a block of jello onto his lunch tray. “She’s got some little slick-haired gremlin that follows her around like some GOP puppy dog. She’s a real lucky girl.”
Starburns simply cocks his top hat at him. “Uh, dude, that’s the little gremlin she’s going to get hitched to.”
“Right,” Jeff says, rolling his eyes. “I’m sure, since you’re on the pulse of the love lives of Greendale women. Wait,” he thinks for a second, “Maybe you have something there. You did make that creepy eye-sized hole in the girl’s locker room that Abed showed me to try to reenact Porkie’s.”
“Uh, yeah, dude.”
“Stop calling me dude. Now.”
“Whatevs, dude. But I’m telling you, that little squeeze of yours that you never got to bang, she’s totally off the market. I mean, I’m a drug dealer man, but you gotta respect the ring.” Starburns shrugs, puts an ungodly amount of mash potatoes on his tray before sauntering away.
There’s an old part of Jeffery Winger who wants to yell at his retreating figure that he did in fact bang that little piece of... and oh dear god. It hits him. Hits him like someone has smacked him in the mouth. He stops, the truth sinking in and suddenly he feels his tray sort of falling to the ground. He doesn’t care though, just ignores when Quendra whines, “Oh. My. God. You totally just spilled grape jello all over my shoes. Jefffff.....”
He knows where to find her, sort of always knows when to find her, no matter what. He doesn’t exactly rush through the hallways, but it’s an aggressive sort of walking, pushing against people who are in his way, including Leonard who makes a very pissed off sounding raspberry as he passes.
She’s sitting quietly in that one table in the library, the one where Magnitude etched “Pop Pop!” into the thin wood tabletop. Her hair is frazzled, like it always is on finals week, and she’s got her earbuds in, listening fervently for some little piece of information on her digital recorder that she hadn’t heard the first thousand times she listened to the class.
He rushes to her, but she doesn’t see him, is instead too focused, with her eyebrows knitted together. He stands there panting, not really knowing what he’s doing, what he’s supposed to do. Strike that. He knows what he should do: he should laugh, say she’s a fool, that marriage is for people who don’t like sex, and say “best of luck to you, kiddo.” He should get back to texting that chick who wrote her number on a napkin at the smoothie bar at the gym. He should start doing more pushups and getting out more rather than sitting at home and trolling AMC to see if he can catch When Harry Met Sally for some reason. But right now all he can think about is that annoying gremlin’s hands on her and that he missed the way she made a face at him and called him gross and sang bad Journey songs with him and how a little of her hair is getting in her mouth right now. And her mouth, for some reason that’s all he can think of, and he hates himself a little bit for suddenly thinking about how it was hot and good against his.
So that’s why he doesn’t think, really, just sort of picks up her digital recorder and unhooks it from her earbuds and then throws it across the room. He can hear it clatter somewhere in background, but right now all he can see is her wide-eyed expression, which is looking right up at him. She looks like he’s stabbed her pet puppy or something, or maybe that he punched her in the face.
Her mouth opens for a few seconds soundlessly until she manages with a voice that sounds like it’s tinged with something of a warning bell, “Je-eeff. What the. What have you done?”
“What have I done?” He asks, in his slightly-crazed voice. He can hear his voice but it feels separated from him, like he is having an out of body sort of thing. What did Abed say? He was Goldbluming? He doesn’t know. Instead, he simply says, “You’re. Getting. Married? Uh, have you never heard of a phone call? What? You’re too good to ever text message me anymore? Has your little gremlin been monitoring your every call? You couldn’t...” he finds himself sputtering off, trying to figure out what to say, but then he sees it. It’s not very big, but big enough, and it catches the light like a handful of glitter would catch his eye, like a warning sign of something not very desirable and not very pretty. It’s there, like the way somebody bleeding is in a room. It’s that more than anything that makes him stop. He finds the rage inside of him sort of die and turn into something still burning, but sadder, the way an ember is still a fire, but smaller, more reserved.
She catches his eye and she looks instantly down at her finger. “I. I’ve been wearing it for two weeks now.” She handles it nervously, pushing it up and down her finger, like she isn’t sure if she wants to take it off or not. “I was going to... tell you. I mean, I was going to tell all of you together! The whole group. But, I.” She looks flustered, does that thing with her stupid Disney eyes where they flutter at the speed of a couple hundred miles per hour. “But! Finals!” And he knows that she’s actually mostly telling the truth, that finals have occupied about ninety-nine percent of her brain for the past couple of weeks. He actually shouldn’t take all of this entirely personally. It’s just that she looks up at him with this sort of panicked expression and he can’t figure out what the panic is there for, and he wants to help, always wants to help, just shake her until she tells him how to help her.
There is a space between them, and he doesn’t know if he wants to close it to slap that... thing off her finger or if he just wants to apologize. Wants to tell her, shit, it’s your life, kid, marry whoever or whatever gremlin you’d like. He realizes that this would be the right thing to do, to just give her that Jeff Winger approving smile, which usually makes a little confidence jump up her spine, make her stand straighter. He finds he can’t do it though, can’t bring himself to do it. All he can find himself saying is, “Annie. Please. Do you even know this guy? You’ve been dating for what? Twenty minutes?”
“Two months,” she says behind gritted teeth.
“Oh!” he exclaims. He’s attracting attention now, he can see the people in the library’s faces staring at the both of them in a way that some people nervously eye someone walking down the street with a baseball bat. “Two months! I mean, what have you two been waiting for? Two months! So, you basically know everything about each other then, huh? I bet you don’t even know his middle name.”
“Nathan.” She folds her hands across her chest.
He blinks, taken aback, but then steps forward, glaring down at her. He can feel the fire in his eyes, growing there like he was just making a habit of throwing lint balls on the angry, frustrated flame inside of him. “Okay. So you know his stupid middle name. Nathan. Is that even a name?”
Her eyebrows fold near the middle. “...What?”
“Uh. Whatever.” He folds his hands in front of him and said, “Listen, I get it. I did something wrong. Or something. I don’t know.” He watches her face suddenly change in front of him, do that annoyingly effective Annie thing where her face turns instantly soft, sort of. Her usually tough expression evaporates and her eyebrows sort of turn upward and her eyes get even more impossibly large than they usually are. It catches him off guard, but there’s something burning inside of him that makes him keep going, “Yeah, I know, I’m not Prince Charming. I didn’t exactly bring you roses after our whole... thing that happened. But you had to know that that’s what was going to happen, Annie. I’m not that guy. I never will be. I’ll never be the guy that wants to rub your feet or tell you that you don’t look fat ”
The expression changes. Instantly. It turns from soft to the tense sort of look, like she’s gone far away and her lips have capsized into a thin, straight line. She frowns up into his face and then marches over to her recorder. Picking it up huffily, she yells across the expanse of the library, “Sure, make this all about you, Jeff Winger and your stupid handsome-ness-ness. Ness. That’s so typical. Did it ever occur to you that I didn’t want to talk to you because having...” she stumbles before yelling (way too loudly), “... sex! With Jeffrey Winger was less than spectacular? That you just failed to live up to Annie Edison’s expectations?”
His mouth felt a little slack-jawed but he managed to spit out, “And what expectations were those exactly? The expectation where I didn’t cry because I was fucking a girl instead of that guy from my Installation Art class?”
And that is it, he can feel it. There is a very, long real silence pervading the library. It’s her face though, that face that shows what he’s really said has hit the target. Her eyes turn wide and then fluttery and then just sad, so sad that she looks like some cartoon animal whose mother has just died by a cruel hunter’s arrow.
Behind him, he could hear Leonard say, “Ooooooooh. Burn.”
“Shut up, Leonard,” he says, but it’s too late. She's already storming out the library in a huff of short skirt and tight cardigan and he doesn’t even admire the view because every part of him is saying, Oh shit, Winger. You’ve done it now, as usual. You’ve always got to go and do that stupid thing you do.
He thinks quickly, looks around the library to see a bunch of eyes round as saucers on his face. They’re all thinking the same thing, he’s sure of it. They’re thinking about how much a gigantic jackhole he is, about how he’s probably actually pretty awful at sex, and how he’s actually kind of a monster after all.
So he can’t help it but grab the notebook and Biology textbook and run after her (because he knows that she’ll have a mild panic attack when she realizes she forgot both of them). He knows where she’s going, knows that she’s heading straight to her car to drive off towards her shithole of an apartment.
She’s moving her legs so quickly through the parking lot she’s almost hopping up and down. She’s rummaging through her purse, almost randomly, and there’s something so sad and frantic about her movements that a part of him aches, because he knows what it feels like, to feel so pissed and feel something inside of you spinning out of control that you want to just pull out your hair.
He runs after her, quickly. His voice is a little jumpy when he shouts after her, “Annie! Annie, come on! You know how I am. I’m a jackass, we all know that. I’m a real goddamn jackass and I didn’t mean it. I swear it. Annie!”
It hits his head before he can really figure out what’s going on. He remembers seeing her turn and throw the keys but it doesn’t register that she’s throwing her keys at him. And it doesn’t register that she’s crying, she’ s really crying, there’s this ungraceful amount of snot falling out her nose and her eyes are puffy and red.
He reaches up to his forehead where the keys hit and yells, “Goddamnit, Annie! What the he--”
“Go away!” She screams, and her voice is so loud and piercing and in a tone that he’s never heard before, not really. He’s heard the long screeches from her when someone threatens to steal her pen, or beat her at some kind of trite competition, or threatens to fail her at anything, but this, this is somewhere in her chest, somewhere deep, near her heart. “Go. Away!” Her voices trembles this time and her lips quivers like it can’t stay in one place. “Can’t you just go away? Why is it that you insist on always following me around?” She throws her hands out and he kind of knows he’s bleeding where the keys hit his head but he doesn’t care right now, couldn’t care in the slightest. Because he doesn’t know what to do with females who have mascara running down their faces and snot in their mouths and tiny fists near their hips because of him.
“Wha...?” he starts before coming closer. Something warm falls down his forehead and he knows he's really bleeding, but he ignores it wholeheartedly. “Annie. I’m sorry. I really am. I’m a jerk.”
“No,” she wails, pumping her tiny fists in the air. “No, you’re not a jerk.”
“Yes,” he says, holding his hands up. “Yes, I am. If I know anything about Jeff Winger, it’s that he’s a jerk.”
She smiles this watery sort of grin that dissolves quickly. Annie shakes her head, her hair getting caught in her mouth. “No, you’re not. I mean, you definitely are. I mean, you’re the impossible Henry Higgins.”
“I’m what? Wait, have you been talking to Abed? He keeps insisting on singing some song about some Henry guy.”
She laughs for only a second but then there’s tears flowing again. “It’s just. You are not just a jerk. I mean, I figured that out a long time ago, and this.... sad, good man sort of materialized in front of me. And you won’t leave! Damn you, Jeff Winger. Damn you and your stupid sad smile and your compulsion to defend defenseless people and your affinity for watching awesome feminist movies...”
“... Hey! Dolores Clairborne was a childhood staple for the most complicated and most feminist-indoctrinated young men out there.”
She laughs but it’s a laugh that's just sort of made of spittle and she says, “There you go again! And you! You and your stupid charm and your stupid... mouth! Your stupid mouth that I somehow convinced that I didn’t want to kiss all those years, and all of that! All of that won’t leave me alone! I’m Annie Edison, and I have had a script and I screwed up that script a long time ago, but I thought I got it back. I was supposed to get my degree and work as something vaguely professional and then get married to some nice man. And then!” She screws up her hands and makes that sound from her mouth when Annie Kim steals her ideas or Britta says that only NPR is the worthwhile thing listening to or when someone says they didn’t even bother studying for a test. “And then, you come in and just sort of... occupy this space inside of me. And I don’t mean that as a sexual sort of thing, even though that wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Sex was supposed to be messy and strange but nice and nothing more. It wasn’t supposed to be like. Well...” she indicates something that references back to the whole thing, that night when her hair was laced through his fingers and her breathe was hot on his tongue, “... it wasn’t supposed to be that. And then you, Jeffrey Winger, come along and ruin everything. And all I’ve got is this... script that I’ve written for myself. It’s the only control I have over my life now, after all that addiction and divorce and loneliness in my silly little short life. It has no... room! For someone like you, Jeff. And yet! You keep following me around, no matter what I do. Why is that, Jeff? Why is that?”
At first, he can’t say anything. No, literally, the words are stuck in his mouth and he when he tries to make something come up, it sort of tastes like the bitterness of bile. But then, as she’s shaking her head and walking away, without her keys and her textbook and notebook, he says, “You think? Fuck, Annie. You think I wanted some pain-in-the-ass girl with a conscience who calls me out on my shit was someone I asked for?” She stops, turns her head so that the corner of her eye is staring at him over her shoulder. “I mean, you’re the last thing I ever wanted. The last sort of person with all your making me remember that good people that, you know. Good people that I can let down. Well. My father left me when I was six. Six, Annie. And he left my mother, the greatest sort of person I’ve ever known.” The blood is sort of falling in his eyes but he blinked heartily and watched as she tearily turned and stared at him. She's sort of composed now, now that everything she had said had been expelled from her the same way you vomit up all the bad shit in your stomach during a flu, during a bad hangover. She looks gross; she looks ridiculously stunning with her messy, greasy hair and her swollen eyes. He shakes his head, sees a bead of blood fall on his expensive shirt and he finds he doesn't care at all. “And what if I did that to you? What if I’m nothing more than my father? And. Fuck.” He picks up the keys off the ground and then walks up to her. He puts the keys and the notebook and textbook in a nice pile. Then he walks hesitantly towards her before taking her hands in his own and placing all her stuff inside her grasp. “I couldn’t do what my father did to my mother, Annie. I just. I wouldn’t let myself do that to you.”
His hands are still on her own, and he just holds them there. Because there’s a part of him that thinks this could be something. Dammit, Winger, he thinks, say something. If he just said something he might fill in the void where he feels like something wounded might be. Give that Winger speech, make something real out of something uncomfortable and maybe something that they should actually address, not just put a laywer-bandaid on. For once, he is very aware that something very tangible is in front of him and he shouldn’t run, he shouldn’t Winger-out of this.
But that doesn’t happen. Instead, she withdraws her hands and says, “So. That’s that, then? You’re not going to be your father. I’m going to marry Jim. We’re going to follow our scripts. Right, Jeff?”
He blinks. The blood is real now. He feels it like boiling water on his cheek.
Say something.
“I.” He stops, swallows. “Yes. I think that would be.” He swallows again but his throat feels sandpapery and itchy. His eyes burn. “I think you’d be better off, Annie.”
As she drives away, he thinks about how it’s better this way. He remembers another car driving away, many years ago, his mother saying, We’ll be fine alone. You’re always better alone. You can’t hurt anyone when you’re alone, Jeffrey.
He finds, though, that he feels drained, like a sink that can’t hold water, like a pocket that drops everything worth anything down to the dirty ground.
“Our own scripts,” he says to himself, wiping the back of his hand across his face. “This shit is Billy Crystal. America’s Sweethearts era, too.”
He doesn’t try to text her for a couple days. He thinks it won’t last, this argument. It can’t. He won’t let it.
But then, this argument, what is means. He knows. He knows it’s about as much of an argument as a hurricane or fate is an argument. It means something more, he just can’t put his finger on it, or isn’t willing to put his finger on it.
But things have changed now, he feels it changing. It’s only when he shows her his passing grade in Biology that she smiles at him again, and the grin is forced.
She doesn’t call him again, and her only text to him is: Jim and I are throwing a New Year’s Party. Get to you later with details. It’s a mass message she leaves everyone in the group.
Still, he saves it, looks at it before going to bed every night, just to see her name: Annie, Annie, Annie, reaching through the space towards his lonely one for just a moment, reaching across her script to his.