Fic: Here We Are (1/1)
title: Here We Are (1/1)
fandom: Community
pairing: Annie/Jeff
rating: pg13
word count: 3,124
spoilers: Through Pascal's Triangle Revisited
a/n: For the milady_milord "What Happens Next?" Fic Challenge. Beta'd by veritas724 and crackers4jenn. Title from Jason Mraz's "A Beautiful Mess."
When she first steps forward, and it takes just a second to catch up to the fact that, yeah this is what she’s really doing, it feels like a lot of things are colliding all at once; who he is and who he should be and where she is and who she will be, rushing in when she pauses and his eyebrow inches up, then slipping away when he leans in.
Her lips touch his (and it’s not just her, because he’s tugged into synchronicity with her and they meet and hold) and it’s just . . . solid and good and familiar underneath the layer of novelty and risk. It’s over before either of them can be startled at how simple it was, after months of not quite knowing.
It’s a kiss yes, it’s romantic, yes, but there’s something there - the safety net of the last nine months - waiting to catch the weight of the fallout if it ever comes. Friendship and standards and concessions and a quiet, specific timbre between them.
And maybe it will all come rushing at them, thirty-five and nineteen and jerk and freak and bad and good, but not right now. Right now it’s good and they’re them and they like them, okay? Maybe it’s okay to just be them, here, for a minute.
He is not a jerk and she is not a freak, he is not all bad and she is not all good and they’ve learned this over the last nine months, learned it and tested it and found over and over again that they’ll take care of each other (even when he yells at her. Even when she makes him feel like an asshole. Sometimes they need it.)
And beyond the logistics and the demographics that are supposed to separate them, it just feels good - opening your eyes once in a while and seeing somebody opening theirs too and smiling because everything is crazy right now but, Oh, I know you. You know me. Can we just-? I need someone to talk to.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be talking.
Maybe it’s this, with mouths and hands, and stepping in closer to crush up against and fingers slipping through hair, closing around arms, up on tip toes, changing angles and tasting, breathing in deep because there’s just not enough, never close enough, never this.
For a few crazy seconds, when the only concession they’ve made is that they’re not quite breathing the same air (his hand splayed across her back says ‘I might think about never letting you go,’ and her fingers brushing over his collar say ‘don’t, seriously’) it runs through their minds that, maybe this is going to happen.
_
Maybe they can hold off long enough, just till after graduation, just till they can get a little distance. Maybe then they can pretend they’re other people, ones that just met at twenty-three and thirty-nine, at graduate student and lawyer, at May/December instead of creepy.
Maybe they can be more normal-looking, not like the mismatched pair they are, his Armani and her Gap clashing, her looking like she’s sixteen sometimes when she’s in flats and smiling up at him like he could lasso the moon for her if she wanted.
Like a real couple, like the ones that sit at the tables around them in a hole-in-the-wall Italian place where he takes her on their first date.
_
. For Real .
Annie can positively glow with excitement and yet remain demure as she shuts the front door behind her, and Jeff can grin and open his umbrella for them (it rained on their first three dates, they’ll tell the story later) and they can run out to his car and laugh at nothing as she fusses over her hair until he leans over and kisses her on the cheek and she surprises him both when she grabs his face and kisses him soundly, properly, on the mouth.
(He can tell that story later too, and she can blush and slap his arm - “love taps, sweetheart, they’re love taps!” - But she secretly loves how proud he is of her impulsive moments. Those moments are what eventually got them together, of course.)
Jeff can be stunned and impressed and exhilarated for the rest of the night that finally, finally this is happening, no matter how long it took for it to be okay somehow. He can be in a better place, a place where he feels like he’s ready for someone like her - someone good and strong and sweet. He can think ruefully about the ass he was before, and about how he never could have deserved her then, but now. Now everything’s different, completely; it’s like he’s a whole new person, nothing of the old him is there at all anymore.
Annie can be so, so glad he waited to ask her out, because . . . well because people change so much during their early twenties and it couldn’t have been a good idea to get together with someone seriously until she was older, more experienced, wiser. What does a nineteen-year-old know about life anyway? She can be glad to have all that nonsense from high school behind her, and to have had time to start fresh and forget all the things she thought about friends and trusting people and thinking she knew what was important to her.
What a difference a few years can make.
They can be, really, perfectly boring, like a couple from a movie, and a little predictable in their fights and their make-ups. They can follow such a familiar pattern that people forget the unconventional beginning and it seems like the most natural thing in the world for him to propose when she’s graduated with her Master’s and he’s made partner.
They can think back to Greendale and how absurd it was and be glad that they waited it out to start their lives together because, in the end, they found each other, and they waited until it made sense no matter how they felt back then.
_
Maybe they can pretend they’re other people. People who would be better-suited (though his suit collection is impressive to say the least), more expected, easier to define. Maybe they could fool someone, get one over on convention.
Maybe it can happen that way, if they don’t mind waiting, wondering, wasting a little more time.
Maybe, they think, standing on the quad and still hugging each other close because it just feels good and they need to not think too much about what that will mean after right now (when everyone can just walk out and say hello and freak the hell out because Annie and Jeff were totally just kissing and nobody saw that coming except maybe Abed), they can just back away.
Maybe they can manage to stop touching each other and leave the rush of it behind and not speak or email or text each other because it will just be easier that way.
_
. Stay .
Annie can patiently file books at the public library; let her fingers run over the spines, maybe flipping open a romance novel or two, just to see what the fuss is about. She can get caught at it by another one of the summer pages, a guy who graduated two years ahead of her and is attending the school she lost her scholarship for.
She can experimentally flirt and smile and maybe lean in a little, and she can feel her smile fading when his just looks so . . . smarmy. She can be completely unsurprised when he tells her he’s pre-law because of course he is. She can spend a day dissecting why he’s smarmy and Jeff isn’t no matter how many of Jeff’s escapades she’s heard about.
She can imagine that this guy is Jeff in one of his expensive lawyer suits, leaning in and grinning and winking at her. Just pretend for a minute, since it’s all she’ll get.
Jeff can have the summer to quietly assist his one non-douchey law school buddy with paperwork. He can endure having it rubbed in his face that no, he doesn’t have a wife and kids to take on vacation, doesn’t have a reason to hire an assistant to handle the phone calls and filing and busy work people hire secretaries for.
He can hate himself for the whole thing - plagiarizing the diploma, getting caught, not being able to get back out of it. He can maybe on purpose lose control of his flagrantly wandering mind and think about Annie in her “going for a professor thing” get-up perched on the desk where he sits in the office that’s not his, answering the phone with a breathy, “Mr. Winger’s office.” Just for a distraction once in a while, from reality.
She can very consciously decide to let all these illicit thoughts (and they are illicit because she and Jeff just . . . they couldn’t) run a little bit rampant and can realize a week later that she’s sitting on a bench on the lawn at the library on her lunch break holding her phone and composing text after text that she never intends to send.
He can fester in that office, feeling miserable and sorry for himself and ungrateful. He can stare at the family pictures, at the pretty brunette wife and squint and . . . jesus christ, get a hold of himself.
She can accidentally hit send on a particularly carefully worded email.
He can read it on his laptop in the office that isn’t his.
She can putter on Facebook for a few minutes, a bit of her absolutely crazy to entertain the thought that-
“Annie,
Let’s have coffee.
Jeff”
She can reply on autopilot, and he can respond to her reply, confirming that he got it, and that he’ll meet her there.
They can sit and stare at their screens. They can try to tamp down the smiles, and the hope. They can anticipate and pick out clothes too carefully, and somehow fly through the next day until it’s time.
She can chicken out, and text him five minutes late (so unlike her) and say they need her at work and she’ll reschedule and she never will because what she has (had) with him she can keep. And she needs that sometimes.
He can stand outside the coffee shop and be blindingly angry at her, because now it feels ruined (god he can be so dramatic) and they had a really good Colombian roast (yes, he sees the irony.)
They can stay in their separate circles for the rest of the summer, thinking, and ignoring, and convincing themselves.
She can walk into Anthropology 101 and halt for the tiniest second when she sees him sprawling out of his desk near the middle of the room before moving to sit front and center, just like she always did before.
He can follow her with his eyes while keeping up a conversation with Pierce and zone out for a minute or two before shrugging it off and reminding himself that she’s young and things happen and it’s not a big deal. He’s a grown up, and it’s not like he was in love with her or something. They’re friends, and things got awkward and this is why they don’t sexualize the girl, goddammit.
They can just continue like that, until he snaps at her one day and she crumples a little just like she used to and he says he’s sorry, but she doesn’t blossom back into herself again.
He can feel like he just slammed into a wall because really? She hasn’t grown up at all over the summer? Well, it’s not like he hadn’t gotten a warning.
She can quietly fold the hurt over, and tell herself she’s glad she cancelled the coffee date, because look where they would have ended up anyway?
They can each simmer with their own disappointment under the watchful eyes of the study group, and dismiss questions with incredulous finality.
_
They can ignore it. They can tow the party line and maybe Britta can win something for once and maybe Annie can transfer after all and start over somewhere new where no one knows her or remembers her or understands her. Jeff can stay where he is. Stay who he is. Stay.
Maybe they can just stay, and it will feel safer and easier to define and probably it will be for the best anyway.
Probably.
But maybe it doesn’t all have to be so hard.
Maybe it just is what it is, and it can be something else, something them. Maybe they’re just friends - really good friends - who kiss and maybe it’s kind of a lot and not always for an audience, but maybe everyone will just understand and never ask any questions and nothing will really have to change, officially. Maybe they’re that lucky, or that crazy, or that special, or that different.
_
. Friends .
They can share the heat of summer, watching fireworks, having sno-cones or lemonade or ice cream and only remembering they’re both technically grown ups when cold-lipped kisses turn hot.
They can play Scrabble with his law terms and her SAT words, show each other movies they haven’t seen, and stay up till 2 a.m. on weeknights, having too much conversation until they fight and don’t talk for a week, but then that concert is tomorrow and he never paid her back for the other ticket because he was going to drive and get dinner.
They can have the silence in his car
(With a new windshield. That was the first day, a week after the dance; he called her out of the blue and griped obtusely about being stranded and she picked him up from the repair shop, hands shaking on the wheel from the newness of him and her until he kicked her under the table in the food court at the mall because she kept clenching - “God Annie, just unwind. You’re like a rubber band that just so happens to have put on a cardigan.” - and that’s when she threw her straw at him and he grabbed her hand to avoid a napkin attack and everything stopped for a few seconds until his phone rang and he seriously considered lying that it wasn’t the repair shop telling him his car was ready to be picked up.)
on the way there until she turns on the radio and usually (all the time) he veto’s NPR, but this time he doesn’t say anything and somehow that makes her just want to cry. It seems really significant, and it scares her as much as it thrills her, something so little and stupid that’s become an indication of something. He won’t apologize because he wasn’t wrong, and she won’t because she wasn’t but they’re here and he wants her here so he leaves the quiet British droning on for her even though she doesn’t even want to listen to it.
She understands that it’s a cliché, this push and pull between them, but the luxury of summer is in carefully choosing when they’ll see friends and when they’ll see each other and separating the two so they can test out the conventions of this thing they’re wading into on their own terms.
They can stand in the middle of the crowd, her leaning back against his chest while he drums on her arms because nobody they know likes this band, (but the bassist is the older brother of this girl she wasn’t friends with in high school but is friends with on Facebook and has no filter when it comes to event invites) so nobody knows them here. Nobody is shocked when Annie says ‘douche bag’ or when Jeff sings along and actually isn’t that bad.
They can pause in the car afterwards, sticky and cold with sweat as the air conditioner comes on, interrupted by passersby yelling and laughing, spilling beer and passing weed as they trek toward their own cars. She can take a breath and ask him what this is all about, because she’s having so much fun with him, but he hasn’t been him all summer and she needs to know what that means.
They can wait. Just sit and wait as it gets darker and darker and the crowd of cars thins out and he can finally tell her that avoiding work could be really stressful. She can smile and he can silently concede that it might sound ridiculous, but he can continue and explain because she’ll listen.
He’s been ducking and parrying the last, whatever, ten years, maneuvering to stay a step ahead, because there’s always been something to hide. And right now, he’s not hiding anything (not anything at all, except maybe her, and how doesn’t try not to sexualize her anymore) and it just . . . he guesses he’s just enjoying it.
The unspoken “with you. Enjoying it with you,” can hang between them until she crawls over and onto his lap and they can barely see each other it’s so dark now but she traces over his forehead and his jaw - stubble, and it’s at once dangerous and domestic - and down his throat. She can feel his hands shift on her hips, closing and claiming and she can think that she doesn’t care if it’s inappropriate that it turns her on when he does things like that. She likes being part of this new happiness that he grabs and doesn’t let go.
She can be so buoyed by that realization, that feeling, by the last two months and the nine before that that she doesn’t even kiss him before she’s sliding back to her seat, hot with anticipation as he throws the car in drive and gets them back to his apartment as fast as he can without killing anyone.
She can laugh nervously as he fiddles with his keys until he just drops them on the ground at the door and almost shoves her back against it to kiss her like he has to hold his place until they can get inside and he kicks the door shut and they can not even pause once until they’re in his bed and god they’re in his bed.
How did they get here?
They can wonder, and breathe a little shakily, and not be too shy to say out loud that this is actually really terrifying, right?
“A little.”
“God, I- you know I love you right? I really-”
“I love you too.”
They can roll, tangled in his sheets, kind of lost, kind of found.
Maybe they can.
_