Fic: Raised by Wolves pt. 2 (Jeff/Britta)
Title: Raised by Wolves (part two)
Fandom: Community
Rating: R (cursing and some off-screen but serious violence)
Characters: Jeff/Britta, Shirley via text message
Spoilers: all of season 1
Word Count: 4002 (for part two)
Disclaimer: Harmon is boss.
Notes: Read part 1 first, it's here
Raised by Wolves (part two)
There is halfhearted banter on the walk to her place. It is a kind of spooky neighborhood at night, Britta will admit, and as she and Jeff walk along, taking up the entirety of the sidewalk, each of them holding onto a handlebar, she becomes increasingly aware of how many streetlights are burnt out, how many plastic bags are caught in chain link fences, how many vacant lots there are, full of weeds. Jeff grumbles under his breath.
“It’s only four more blocks,” she says, as they wheel up to the pedestrian overpass that crosses the freeway. Taillights and headlights flow beneath them and the air is thick with exhaust.
“Isn’t it time we let the environment fend for itself?” Jeff asks, acting like the incline to the midpoint of the overpass is the equivalent of the Regular Northwest route up Half Dome. (Not that Britta knows the names of the routes up Half Dome-Vaughn does, and when they were talking about going to Burning Man he had brought up ‘doing the Dome.’ Like the two are even remotely related. Ugh. Vaughn.) “I mean what has Mother Nature ever done for me?”
“She gave women boobs,”
Jeff looks over at her; there’s hardly any available light and his face is mostly cheekbones and smile. His teeth are the brightest thing out. Star teeth…star burns…okay, so maybe Britta is a little tired. She grins back at him.
“What in the Rodney King is going on up there?” Jeff stops short, forcing Britta to stop too. They’re back on the sidewalk now, and ahead of them is a swarm of flashing blue and red: cop cars. Lots of them. And a barricade. “Britta? Is this normal for your neighborhood?”
“Um, no. Not at all,” Well, it’s a little normal, for the parts of it that are farther away from here. But there are gang tags around and whatnot, and Elias, the cashier at the corner store, spends all his time behind bulletproof Plexiglas-but that’s not the sign of a bad neighborhood, right? Britta’s rent is cheap and her complex has like three gates, plus her apartment has five locks and she lives on the fifth floor, so the only thing she really worries about is fires, because the fire escape is rusted in a position useless to everyone, tenants and burglars alike. “Let’s just stop for a second. I know the cashier and he knows everything that goes on. Wait out here with the bike,”
Britta slips into the store before Jeff squeaks out his inevitable protest, and when she comes back out, drinking a strawberry milk, he is sitting on the curb, hunched inside his jacket. She imagines he is probably trying to look inconspicuous, but let’s be honest: super-tall, really pale white dudes wearing expensive watches kind of stick out around here.
She settles down on the curb next to him. “Elias says there was a big drug bust. Shots fired, somebody said. It had something to do with one of the gangs around here, probably. I mean, that’s what I read in the paper or something, that there are, like, Crips or something around. But you know what the weirdest part is? The drug bust was…in front of my building,” The last part rushes out on the last of her breath.
Jeff raises an eyebrow. It’s his I smell bullshit eyebrow. “Elias, eh?”
“He’s the cashier, dummy,” She punches him in the shoulder.
“So can you, um, go home?” The hesitation is weird-she realizes he is looking over her shoulder, at the cruisers circled like wagons on Bonanza. A siren wails and two of them peel out suddenly. “Because we could go back.”
“Looks like the cavalry’s all leaving. Want some strawberry milk, to give you courage for the walk back to Shirley’s?” She offers him the bottle and he takes it and swigs a ridiculous manly swig, wiping off a little pink moustache with the ease of habit. Jeff Winger, milk drinker. It kind of surprises her.
He unfolds from the curb like a mantis, and they head for her building under the watchful eyes of half the neighborhood, it seems like, people hanging out on porches and corners, curtains pulled back from windows, cops directing traffic. Paramedics are just shutting the doors on an ambulance in front of her building, but they really don’t seem like they are in any hurry. Fancy-looking detective-types are standing around comparing notes and looking grim.
Jeff seems seriously bugged out, his eyes scanning all around them. “Did you ever have to look at, like, crime scene photos or whatever when you were a lawyer?” Britta asks.
He huffs in a breath, blows it out weirdly, cheeks puffing. “I mostly defended shifty accountants, Britta. All the crime scene photos were either Excel screenshots or surveillance photos of overweight guys in off-the-rack suits getting handjobs from methheads,”
There seems to be little more she can say to that than: “Oh.” Besides, now they’re in front of her building and it’s immediately clear that shit is right this moment getting real.
Crime scene tape is everywhere, wrapped all over the fence where Britta chains her bike, the railing on the stairs, even in the scrubby hedge between the sidewalk and the curb. There are people going in and out of the building, though, and Britta finds a bored-looking young cop and tells him her story, and while he’s radioing some superior Jeff is standing right behind Britta, still doing that thing where his eyes are all over like a periscope.
“I’m gonna need to see some I.D.,” the young cop says, and he verifies Britta’s name against some list, and asks Jeff who he is.
“I’m her friend,” Jeff says. He’s joggling one leg, nervously, and the cop gives him the stinkeye, but finally tells Britta she can chain her bike to the fence even though the police tape is there.
“Just be careful inside, ma’am,” he says. “It’s kind of a mess,”
Britta is fuming about the ma’am-she’s barely older than the little twerp herself, who is he kidding-and Jeff is smirking even though he’s still a little wired.
“Well, you can go,” she says, once the bike is relatively secure. “Thanks. You filled your weekly quota of being an actual gentleman and now you are free to go score some hookers and blow,”
“I’m sure I can just ask that guy over there for both,” Jeff says, pointing across the street at Terri-from-the-deli, who is a transvestite and really sweet-way sweeter than Jeff, anyway.
“Asshole,” Britta says, shifting her messenger bag. It’s a little eerie, with all the cops around, and the ambulance just sitting there, lights off, paramedics leaning against the side of it and smoking. Just the sight of it really makes her want a cigarette again. She looks away.
“I won’t feel like I’ve fulfilled my gentlemanly duty until I see you safely to your door, Britta,” he says, now indicating that she should go ahead of him. “Besides, I think I saw a building like this once in a movie, I think it was called…Caddyshack? Cape Fear? Something like that. I know it started with a ‘c’. Oh wait-it was Candyman!”
Britta rolls her eyes but shudders a little bit inside, too-that movie is so freaking scary. “Suit yourself, creep,” she says, heading for the door. There are cops and detectives and maybe even reporters (everything Britta knows about crime scenes she learned from watching Law and Order reruns, so she’s just assuming about the detectives and reporters) everywhere. It’s so surreal-this place is normally deserted. There’s like a huge crowd of people standing around right near the one staircase up to the lobby, and she is pushing her way through them when she sees it: a chalk outline.
Britta stops short. Jeff is right behind her, and he’s taller, he sees it, too. “Holy shit,” he says, and his hand grabs her far elbow, pulling her closer-she’s not sure which of them he’s trying to steady. Maybe both of them.
It’s a chalk outline and a great dark pool of blood, or what Britta assumes is blood, all around the head of the outline. She gasps. “Oh my god, oh my god, Jeff, what the hell?”
“Come on,” his grip on her arm is firm; he pulls her away, the outline disappears behind uniformed backs. “Let’s just get inside. We don’t need to see this,”
“Okay,” she says, dazed. In the lobby all her neighbors are standing around and whispering, and the elevator is broken and Carlos from 2B is there and tells Britta everything: the deal gone bad, the gun, the dead boy who nobody knew but who could have easily been someone they did. It’s a story Britta’s heard a hundred times before, but it’s always been on TV or something, not in the parking lot where Donna’s girls from 7A sell lemonade on long hot summer afternoons.
Jeff’s hand finds Britta’s as she’s standing there numbly, feeling mostly just her own heartbeat, which is racing loudly to make up for her astonished and therefore silent internal monologue. “Come on, Britta,” he says, gently. “Let’s get you home,”
“That’s why the ambulance didn’t leave,” Britta says finally, putting it together, while they are trudging up to her apartment. Jeff squeezes her hand. “You don’t have to hurry for someone who is already dead,”
Jeff squeezes her hand again, then lets go as Britta starts to fumble her keys out of her bag. It’s quiet up here on her floor-quiet like normal.
As she’s letting them in, Britta’s phone vibrates, and she’s planning on ignoring it until she sees the number. She gestures to Jeff to come in, and points to the living room. “The TV’s in there,” she says. “This is my mother, she probably heard about the, um, the situation, and I have to talk to her. I need to talk to her, I mean. There’s, um, there’s beer and wine and stuff around if you need anything,”
And she shuts herself into her room, where there’s tiny pieces of home hidden everywhere, photos and things, and her mother’s alarmed voice in her ear, which makes tears come out of her, in a terrible throttling wave. Britta curls into a ball under all her blankets and listens and answers questions and listens more, and wishes for the millionth time that her mother wasn’t on the other side of the continent, because nobody else can settle her down the way her mother can.
“I love you, Mom,” she says, finally, and sniffles a little after she hangs up. Her room is pitch black except for the nightlight under her desk: it’s shaped like a little glowworm reading a copy of Treasure Island and it’s one of those silly things left from her childhood that sometimes helps a thousand miles feel like none at all. Not tonight, though. Britta pulls on her most comfortable sweatshirt, wipes her eyes, and gets to her feet. Life goes on.
The TV is on when she goes into the living room, but it’s muted, and Jeff clicks it off when she enters. “No, you can leave it on,” Britta says.
“Everything that’s on is about the, uh, incident, and you don’t seem to have cable,”
“I’m not going to pay for television, Jeff, when I can sponsor a child in Haiti for the same price,” Britta retorts, but halfway through she realizes that their old rhythms may not be the most appropriate here. “What are you drinking?” she asks, lamely.
“Strawberry milk and Kahlua,” he says, and when she makes a face he grimaces back. “It’s better than it sounds,”
“I don’t care what it tastes like as long as it helps me not think so much,”
Jeff graciously lets that one go, and passes the bottle along when she sits down beside him. They stare at the blank TV and Britta realizes that this is the first time Jeff has ever been to her place, and somehow this is more personal than that time they had sex. There are dirty dishes and trashy magazines everywhere and she is pretty sure that the delicates she handwashed in the sink this morning (a lifetime ago, it feels like) are festooning the bathroom like election-day bunting. There is nothing in her fridge but mustard and soy milk. Dusty VHS tapes of old X-Files episodes are lined up in semi-alphabetical order on the shelf above the television, even though she doesn’t even have a VCR anymore. Yep, having him in her place is definitely more intimate than having him, um, in her.
The fact that even after the awfulness outside she can’t stop thinking that everything is about herself disgusts Britta, and she knocks back a long, horrible-tasting drink. It is legit worse than cough syrup, and she scowls down at her stupid hands, feeling shallow and scared and guilty. Her phone buzzes again and this time it is Shirely, mildly hysterical. Britta listens for a little and then hands the phone to Jeff. “She wants to talk to you,” she tells his questioning eyebrows.
Jeff sighs and takes the phone. “Hi Shirley. Umhmm. Yup. No. No. Definitely not,” There’s a long pause during which he rolls his eyes and makes the ‘blah-blah-blah’ sign with his free hand. He sighs again, dramatically. “Okay, Shirley. If she lets me. Okay. Thank you for checking, bye.”
Britta takes her phone back. “’If she lets me?’”
“She wants me to stay here with you,”
“Uggh, Shirley, I’m an adult, dammit.” Britta rolls her eyes. “It’s your call, dude,” she says, getting up to go to the kitchen because the air in the living room is suddenly thick. Her phone buzzes more and simultaneously she’s got like a dozen concerned texts that need to be replied to and all the friends behind them placated. She finds herself texting back that she’s not alone and that seems to reassure everyone that she’ll be safe, although she’s pretty sure that her semester of Personal Safety 101 means she knows more about kicking ass than Mr. Afraid To Walk Down The Block After Dark over there.
In between all the texting she finds a bottle of peach schnapps way in the back of her cereal-and-liquor cabinet (which Jeff has, in perhaps-not-surprisingly-anal lawyer fashion, truly separated out into a cereal section and a liquor section), and mixes some into a half-empty 2-liter bottle of iced tea from the fridge. She finds a frozen pizza, too. “Do you want some dinner?” she asks, trying to sound light and hostess-y. “If you’re staying, that is,”
“I’ll take a steak, medium well, and some scotch,” he calls back, and she guesses that means he’s staying.
“Vegan frozen pizza and spiked Snapple are the specials of the day,”
“What, are we back in college? Oh wait, yeah, we are!”
Britta unwraps the pizza and shoves it in the oven without preheating. Preheating is for pansies, and the occasional non-pansy along the lines of Martha Stewart. She sweeps an armful of junk off the countertop and into the trash, and then the bathroom and hallway get the sort of quick cleaning that makes a place look decent in the dark even though by daylight it might look like a warzone. Finally she pours two glasses of tea, adulterates them (as in, makes them suitable for adult consumption) liberally, and carries them into the living room.
“Oh, I see you’ve met Mister T,”
Jeff looks down at the gigantic cat sprawled across his lap. “Is that his name? He didn’t introduce himself before he took advantage of me,”
Britta laughs. Mister T’s judgment is usually impeccable so she’s not sure why he hasn’t run as far away from Jeff as he possibly can. Perhaps he’s been bribed. “Here, have some of this, it tastes a little better than your curdled milkshake concoction. Pizza’ll be ready in a couple minutes. I see you found some sports on the TV,” It’s not like she’d expect him to grab some Kierkegaard off her bookshelves or whatever, but she finds herself somehow disappointed anyway.
“It’s just the end of the evening news. You should be proud of me, I also learned some things from the news: for example, did you know we now have a black president?”
Britta rolls her eyes. She wants to pet Mister T (and let’s be honest, he kind of looks like he wants to be petted) but he’s sitting basically on Jeff’s junk and she doesn’t want the guy getting any sort of mixed signals. They make good friends (and great co-conspirators) (and they have really incredible sex, like headboard-rattlingly-good, like if that study room table had been a bed, the-headboard-would-have-made-a-dent-in-the-wall-behind-it-good) but Britta’s not convinced it’s healthy for them to be friends, let alone fuckbuddies or girlfriend-and-boyfriend or whatever.
So they drink drinks that taste like high school field parties, and eat pizza that tastes like garlicky cardboard (epic Whole Foods fail, for sure), and sit on her couch, feet swung up on the coffee table amid the napkins and glasses and the usual clutter of Britta’s knitting projects and CSA brochures and surprising number of pots of colorful, petroleum-free lip glosses.
“So where am I sleeping tonight?” Jeff asks. He’s slumped lower and lower as the night’s worn on, and traitorous Mister T is passed out and boneless in his lap like the world’s hairiest midget street drunk. Jeff pets him idly, which is endearing.
“Right here, Winger. This here couch,” Britta pokes at the cushion between them for emphasis. Cocooned in her sweatshirt, hair loose, schnapps in her bloodstream, she feels relaxed, disconnected from the fight in the grocery store, from the outline in the parking lot, from everything.
“Ugh, Britta,” he whines. “This couch? Really? It’s too short for me,” Jeff demonstrates by swinging one leg up, the length of the couch, which means one of his feet is suddenly in her face and that poor Mister T shoots away from them like a comet. He goes into the kitchen and begins angrily crunching on his too-expensive organic kibble.
Britta frowns, batting Jeff’s foot away. He is wearing those ridiculous Burberry socks again. “Look what you did, you scared Mister T,”
“He’ll get over it, I’ll catch him a salmon or whatever. Butforserious, Britta, the couch is too short,”
“Maybe you’re too tall,” she retorts. “Why do you think I have to wear those ridiculous shoes all the time?”
“I’ve always assumed Daddy didn’t pay enough attention to you,”
Britta glares. “Fuck you,” she says, and even though she tries to make it vehement, he just waggles his eyebrows, which should not make him more attractive but somehow does, like he’s a goodlooking dude, and knows it, but somehow doesn’t care about it so much that he’s not afraid to look like a huge dork from time to time.
Britta switches gears. “Are you tired? Do you want to sleep now?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Not really, I’m still a little wired,” She swirls the last of the liquid in her glass, swallows it down. “But I’ll find you some blankets,” With a sigh, she gets to her feet, feeling her pleasant buzz fading.
“And a toothbrush and a pillow,” Jeff calls over his shoulder as she leaves the room.
Britta curses under her breath. She barely has those things herself. But she finds them both, and takes down all her underwear from the bathroom, and even gets him some fresh-ish towels and a still-wrapped bar of tiny soap from the days when she was living in a tent on a beach in Mexico and cleaning hotels for weed money.
When she goes back into the living room, Jeff has cleaned up a little bit: the coffee table is now home to just one glass, full of what looks like water, and he’s taken off his sweater and his jeans and looks very comfortable indeed. He is about a mile tall and most of it appears to be leg. Not that it’s anything she’s never seen before, but, still. He’s wearing weird boxer briefs in a preppy stripe that is kind of douchey but not unattractive.
“Here,” she tosses everything at him, the toothbrush in its wasteful box falling on the floor, the pillow pelting him right in his spiky hair. “Goodnight, Jeff,”
As she turns to go there is the sudden cacophony of their phones heralding the simultaneous arrival of text messages. Jeff reads his first and laughs.
Britta’s is from Shirley, and all it says is Use protection, Britta. Britta scowls. “Did you just get a text from Shirley? What does it say?”
He holds up his phone, and she has to get closer to see it, hotly aware of the shape of his chest underneath his shirt. Mister T winds around their ankles. The text says Use protection, Jeffrey. Britta’s scowl deepens. “People need to mind their own business,” she says, turning away.
“I suspect Shirley may have arranged this whole situation to further her own interests,” Jeff lawyers after her. Mister T jumps up on the arm of the couch where he can apparently keep an eye on both of them.
Britta is already brushing her teeth, but she steps into the doorway of the bathroom to look out at Jeff, who is folding his discarded clothing neatly (and dorkily). “Are you really saying you think Shirley arranged a murder to try and get us to sleep together again?” she says, around her toothbrush.
Jeff meets her gaze, his face empty for a moment, like he had forgotten about the whole situation below, and then he frowns-it’s not an expression she sees very often from him, he almost looks…embarrassed? He makes up his bed but doesn’t get in it. “No, that’s not what I’m saying, Britta,” He looks like he’s got more to say, but nothing comes out.
She supposes that’s as close as an I’m sorry that she’ll ever hear from him, and shakes her head a little bit before spitting out her mouthful of toothpaste. She shuts the bathroom door to pee and wash her face and change into her pajamas, and then goes to double check that the front door is locked. “Bathroom’s all yours,” she tells Jeff, not looking at him.
The door is locked, as much as it can be. Jeff watches her rattling the deadbolt. “Look, Britta,” he says, kneeling on the couch and resting his forearms on the back of it. “I’m not trying to be an asshole, here,” he says, as she walks into the kitchen for a glass of water.
She looks at him through the passthrough over the breakfast bar. The pillow has really done a number on his hair; for once it looks soft and the actual texture of human hair, not of Pringles. Britta waits.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Jeff goes on.
“Me either,” She carries her glass back into the living room and stands on the other side of the couch from him. His position makes them basically the same height and not for the first time Britta is reminded that if she was this close to his face all the time she might never stop looking at him.
“So what I’m saying is that I don’t know what to say, or how to deal with that, or if you’re okay or whatever. But if you want to talk about it…I’m just here, okay? I’m squashed on your couch and I’m here,”
This is Anti-Winger Territory and he looks manifestly uncomfortable, and Britta is thinking that this is awkward and lovely, like all the best moments of their friendship. And just as she’s moved on to the thought that Awkward and Lovely would be a great name for a Hall and Oates tribute band, he leans in, and she leans in, and they are kissing.
**end of part two**
Fandom: Community
Rating: R (cursing and some off-screen but serious violence)
Characters: Jeff/Britta, Shirley via text message
Spoilers: all of season 1
Word Count: 4002 (for part two)
Disclaimer: Harmon is boss.
Notes: Read part 1 first, it's here
Raised by Wolves (part two)
There is halfhearted banter on the walk to her place. It is a kind of spooky neighborhood at night, Britta will admit, and as she and Jeff walk along, taking up the entirety of the sidewalk, each of them holding onto a handlebar, she becomes increasingly aware of how many streetlights are burnt out, how many plastic bags are caught in chain link fences, how many vacant lots there are, full of weeds. Jeff grumbles under his breath.
“It’s only four more blocks,” she says, as they wheel up to the pedestrian overpass that crosses the freeway. Taillights and headlights flow beneath them and the air is thick with exhaust.
“Isn’t it time we let the environment fend for itself?” Jeff asks, acting like the incline to the midpoint of the overpass is the equivalent of the Regular Northwest route up Half Dome. (Not that Britta knows the names of the routes up Half Dome-Vaughn does, and when they were talking about going to Burning Man he had brought up ‘doing the Dome.’ Like the two are even remotely related. Ugh. Vaughn.) “I mean what has Mother Nature ever done for me?”
“She gave women boobs,”
Jeff looks over at her; there’s hardly any available light and his face is mostly cheekbones and smile. His teeth are the brightest thing out. Star teeth…star burns…okay, so maybe Britta is a little tired. She grins back at him.
“What in the Rodney King is going on up there?” Jeff stops short, forcing Britta to stop too. They’re back on the sidewalk now, and ahead of them is a swarm of flashing blue and red: cop cars. Lots of them. And a barricade. “Britta? Is this normal for your neighborhood?”
“Um, no. Not at all,” Well, it’s a little normal, for the parts of it that are farther away from here. But there are gang tags around and whatnot, and Elias, the cashier at the corner store, spends all his time behind bulletproof Plexiglas-but that’s not the sign of a bad neighborhood, right? Britta’s rent is cheap and her complex has like three gates, plus her apartment has five locks and she lives on the fifth floor, so the only thing she really worries about is fires, because the fire escape is rusted in a position useless to everyone, tenants and burglars alike. “Let’s just stop for a second. I know the cashier and he knows everything that goes on. Wait out here with the bike,”
Britta slips into the store before Jeff squeaks out his inevitable protest, and when she comes back out, drinking a strawberry milk, he is sitting on the curb, hunched inside his jacket. She imagines he is probably trying to look inconspicuous, but let’s be honest: super-tall, really pale white dudes wearing expensive watches kind of stick out around here.
She settles down on the curb next to him. “Elias says there was a big drug bust. Shots fired, somebody said. It had something to do with one of the gangs around here, probably. I mean, that’s what I read in the paper or something, that there are, like, Crips or something around. But you know what the weirdest part is? The drug bust was…in front of my building,” The last part rushes out on the last of her breath.
Jeff raises an eyebrow. It’s his I smell bullshit eyebrow. “Elias, eh?”
“He’s the cashier, dummy,” She punches him in the shoulder.
“So can you, um, go home?” The hesitation is weird-she realizes he is looking over her shoulder, at the cruisers circled like wagons on Bonanza. A siren wails and two of them peel out suddenly. “Because we could go back.”
“Looks like the cavalry’s all leaving. Want some strawberry milk, to give you courage for the walk back to Shirley’s?” She offers him the bottle and he takes it and swigs a ridiculous manly swig, wiping off a little pink moustache with the ease of habit. Jeff Winger, milk drinker. It kind of surprises her.
He unfolds from the curb like a mantis, and they head for her building under the watchful eyes of half the neighborhood, it seems like, people hanging out on porches and corners, curtains pulled back from windows, cops directing traffic. Paramedics are just shutting the doors on an ambulance in front of her building, but they really don’t seem like they are in any hurry. Fancy-looking detective-types are standing around comparing notes and looking grim.
Jeff seems seriously bugged out, his eyes scanning all around them. “Did you ever have to look at, like, crime scene photos or whatever when you were a lawyer?” Britta asks.
He huffs in a breath, blows it out weirdly, cheeks puffing. “I mostly defended shifty accountants, Britta. All the crime scene photos were either Excel screenshots or surveillance photos of overweight guys in off-the-rack suits getting handjobs from methheads,”
There seems to be little more she can say to that than: “Oh.” Besides, now they’re in front of her building and it’s immediately clear that shit is right this moment getting real.
Crime scene tape is everywhere, wrapped all over the fence where Britta chains her bike, the railing on the stairs, even in the scrubby hedge between the sidewalk and the curb. There are people going in and out of the building, though, and Britta finds a bored-looking young cop and tells him her story, and while he’s radioing some superior Jeff is standing right behind Britta, still doing that thing where his eyes are all over like a periscope.
“I’m gonna need to see some I.D.,” the young cop says, and he verifies Britta’s name against some list, and asks Jeff who he is.
“I’m her friend,” Jeff says. He’s joggling one leg, nervously, and the cop gives him the stinkeye, but finally tells Britta she can chain her bike to the fence even though the police tape is there.
“Just be careful inside, ma’am,” he says. “It’s kind of a mess,”
Britta is fuming about the ma’am-she’s barely older than the little twerp herself, who is he kidding-and Jeff is smirking even though he’s still a little wired.
“Well, you can go,” she says, once the bike is relatively secure. “Thanks. You filled your weekly quota of being an actual gentleman and now you are free to go score some hookers and blow,”
“I’m sure I can just ask that guy over there for both,” Jeff says, pointing across the street at Terri-from-the-deli, who is a transvestite and really sweet-way sweeter than Jeff, anyway.
“Asshole,” Britta says, shifting her messenger bag. It’s a little eerie, with all the cops around, and the ambulance just sitting there, lights off, paramedics leaning against the side of it and smoking. Just the sight of it really makes her want a cigarette again. She looks away.
“I won’t feel like I’ve fulfilled my gentlemanly duty until I see you safely to your door, Britta,” he says, now indicating that she should go ahead of him. “Besides, I think I saw a building like this once in a movie, I think it was called…Caddyshack? Cape Fear? Something like that. I know it started with a ‘c’. Oh wait-it was Candyman!”
Britta rolls her eyes but shudders a little bit inside, too-that movie is so freaking scary. “Suit yourself, creep,” she says, heading for the door. There are cops and detectives and maybe even reporters (everything Britta knows about crime scenes she learned from watching Law and Order reruns, so she’s just assuming about the detectives and reporters) everywhere. It’s so surreal-this place is normally deserted. There’s like a huge crowd of people standing around right near the one staircase up to the lobby, and she is pushing her way through them when she sees it: a chalk outline.
Britta stops short. Jeff is right behind her, and he’s taller, he sees it, too. “Holy shit,” he says, and his hand grabs her far elbow, pulling her closer-she’s not sure which of them he’s trying to steady. Maybe both of them.
It’s a chalk outline and a great dark pool of blood, or what Britta assumes is blood, all around the head of the outline. She gasps. “Oh my god, oh my god, Jeff, what the hell?”
“Come on,” his grip on her arm is firm; he pulls her away, the outline disappears behind uniformed backs. “Let’s just get inside. We don’t need to see this,”
“Okay,” she says, dazed. In the lobby all her neighbors are standing around and whispering, and the elevator is broken and Carlos from 2B is there and tells Britta everything: the deal gone bad, the gun, the dead boy who nobody knew but who could have easily been someone they did. It’s a story Britta’s heard a hundred times before, but it’s always been on TV or something, not in the parking lot where Donna’s girls from 7A sell lemonade on long hot summer afternoons.
Jeff’s hand finds Britta’s as she’s standing there numbly, feeling mostly just her own heartbeat, which is racing loudly to make up for her astonished and therefore silent internal monologue. “Come on, Britta,” he says, gently. “Let’s get you home,”
“That’s why the ambulance didn’t leave,” Britta says finally, putting it together, while they are trudging up to her apartment. Jeff squeezes her hand. “You don’t have to hurry for someone who is already dead,”
Jeff squeezes her hand again, then lets go as Britta starts to fumble her keys out of her bag. It’s quiet up here on her floor-quiet like normal.
As she’s letting them in, Britta’s phone vibrates, and she’s planning on ignoring it until she sees the number. She gestures to Jeff to come in, and points to the living room. “The TV’s in there,” she says. “This is my mother, she probably heard about the, um, the situation, and I have to talk to her. I need to talk to her, I mean. There’s, um, there’s beer and wine and stuff around if you need anything,”
And she shuts herself into her room, where there’s tiny pieces of home hidden everywhere, photos and things, and her mother’s alarmed voice in her ear, which makes tears come out of her, in a terrible throttling wave. Britta curls into a ball under all her blankets and listens and answers questions and listens more, and wishes for the millionth time that her mother wasn’t on the other side of the continent, because nobody else can settle her down the way her mother can.
“I love you, Mom,” she says, finally, and sniffles a little after she hangs up. Her room is pitch black except for the nightlight under her desk: it’s shaped like a little glowworm reading a copy of Treasure Island and it’s one of those silly things left from her childhood that sometimes helps a thousand miles feel like none at all. Not tonight, though. Britta pulls on her most comfortable sweatshirt, wipes her eyes, and gets to her feet. Life goes on.
The TV is on when she goes into the living room, but it’s muted, and Jeff clicks it off when she enters. “No, you can leave it on,” Britta says.
“Everything that’s on is about the, uh, incident, and you don’t seem to have cable,”
“I’m not going to pay for television, Jeff, when I can sponsor a child in Haiti for the same price,” Britta retorts, but halfway through she realizes that their old rhythms may not be the most appropriate here. “What are you drinking?” she asks, lamely.
“Strawberry milk and Kahlua,” he says, and when she makes a face he grimaces back. “It’s better than it sounds,”
“I don’t care what it tastes like as long as it helps me not think so much,”
Jeff graciously lets that one go, and passes the bottle along when she sits down beside him. They stare at the blank TV and Britta realizes that this is the first time Jeff has ever been to her place, and somehow this is more personal than that time they had sex. There are dirty dishes and trashy magazines everywhere and she is pretty sure that the delicates she handwashed in the sink this morning (a lifetime ago, it feels like) are festooning the bathroom like election-day bunting. There is nothing in her fridge but mustard and soy milk. Dusty VHS tapes of old X-Files episodes are lined up in semi-alphabetical order on the shelf above the television, even though she doesn’t even have a VCR anymore. Yep, having him in her place is definitely more intimate than having him, um, in her.
The fact that even after the awfulness outside she can’t stop thinking that everything is about herself disgusts Britta, and she knocks back a long, horrible-tasting drink. It is legit worse than cough syrup, and she scowls down at her stupid hands, feeling shallow and scared and guilty. Her phone buzzes again and this time it is Shirely, mildly hysterical. Britta listens for a little and then hands the phone to Jeff. “She wants to talk to you,” she tells his questioning eyebrows.
Jeff sighs and takes the phone. “Hi Shirley. Umhmm. Yup. No. No. Definitely not,” There’s a long pause during which he rolls his eyes and makes the ‘blah-blah-blah’ sign with his free hand. He sighs again, dramatically. “Okay, Shirley. If she lets me. Okay. Thank you for checking, bye.”
Britta takes her phone back. “’If she lets me?’”
“She wants me to stay here with you,”
“Uggh, Shirley, I’m an adult, dammit.” Britta rolls her eyes. “It’s your call, dude,” she says, getting up to go to the kitchen because the air in the living room is suddenly thick. Her phone buzzes more and simultaneously she’s got like a dozen concerned texts that need to be replied to and all the friends behind them placated. She finds herself texting back that she’s not alone and that seems to reassure everyone that she’ll be safe, although she’s pretty sure that her semester of Personal Safety 101 means she knows more about kicking ass than Mr. Afraid To Walk Down The Block After Dark over there.
In between all the texting she finds a bottle of peach schnapps way in the back of her cereal-and-liquor cabinet (which Jeff has, in perhaps-not-surprisingly-anal lawyer fashion, truly separated out into a cereal section and a liquor section), and mixes some into a half-empty 2-liter bottle of iced tea from the fridge. She finds a frozen pizza, too. “Do you want some dinner?” she asks, trying to sound light and hostess-y. “If you’re staying, that is,”
“I’ll take a steak, medium well, and some scotch,” he calls back, and she guesses that means he’s staying.
“Vegan frozen pizza and spiked Snapple are the specials of the day,”
“What, are we back in college? Oh wait, yeah, we are!”
Britta unwraps the pizza and shoves it in the oven without preheating. Preheating is for pansies, and the occasional non-pansy along the lines of Martha Stewart. She sweeps an armful of junk off the countertop and into the trash, and then the bathroom and hallway get the sort of quick cleaning that makes a place look decent in the dark even though by daylight it might look like a warzone. Finally she pours two glasses of tea, adulterates them (as in, makes them suitable for adult consumption) liberally, and carries them into the living room.
“Oh, I see you’ve met Mister T,”
Jeff looks down at the gigantic cat sprawled across his lap. “Is that his name? He didn’t introduce himself before he took advantage of me,”
Britta laughs. Mister T’s judgment is usually impeccable so she’s not sure why he hasn’t run as far away from Jeff as he possibly can. Perhaps he’s been bribed. “Here, have some of this, it tastes a little better than your curdled milkshake concoction. Pizza’ll be ready in a couple minutes. I see you found some sports on the TV,” It’s not like she’d expect him to grab some Kierkegaard off her bookshelves or whatever, but she finds herself somehow disappointed anyway.
“It’s just the end of the evening news. You should be proud of me, I also learned some things from the news: for example, did you know we now have a black president?”
Britta rolls her eyes. She wants to pet Mister T (and let’s be honest, he kind of looks like he wants to be petted) but he’s sitting basically on Jeff’s junk and she doesn’t want the guy getting any sort of mixed signals. They make good friends (and great co-conspirators) (and they have really incredible sex, like headboard-rattlingly-good, like if that study room table had been a bed, the-headboard-would-have-made-a-dent-in-the-wall-behind-it-good) but Britta’s not convinced it’s healthy for them to be friends, let alone fuckbuddies or girlfriend-and-boyfriend or whatever.
So they drink drinks that taste like high school field parties, and eat pizza that tastes like garlicky cardboard (epic Whole Foods fail, for sure), and sit on her couch, feet swung up on the coffee table amid the napkins and glasses and the usual clutter of Britta’s knitting projects and CSA brochures and surprising number of pots of colorful, petroleum-free lip glosses.
“So where am I sleeping tonight?” Jeff asks. He’s slumped lower and lower as the night’s worn on, and traitorous Mister T is passed out and boneless in his lap like the world’s hairiest midget street drunk. Jeff pets him idly, which is endearing.
“Right here, Winger. This here couch,” Britta pokes at the cushion between them for emphasis. Cocooned in her sweatshirt, hair loose, schnapps in her bloodstream, she feels relaxed, disconnected from the fight in the grocery store, from the outline in the parking lot, from everything.
“Ugh, Britta,” he whines. “This couch? Really? It’s too short for me,” Jeff demonstrates by swinging one leg up, the length of the couch, which means one of his feet is suddenly in her face and that poor Mister T shoots away from them like a comet. He goes into the kitchen and begins angrily crunching on his too-expensive organic kibble.
Britta frowns, batting Jeff’s foot away. He is wearing those ridiculous Burberry socks again. “Look what you did, you scared Mister T,”
“He’ll get over it, I’ll catch him a salmon or whatever. Butforserious, Britta, the couch is too short,”
“Maybe you’re too tall,” she retorts. “Why do you think I have to wear those ridiculous shoes all the time?”
“I’ve always assumed Daddy didn’t pay enough attention to you,”
Britta glares. “Fuck you,” she says, and even though she tries to make it vehement, he just waggles his eyebrows, which should not make him more attractive but somehow does, like he’s a goodlooking dude, and knows it, but somehow doesn’t care about it so much that he’s not afraid to look like a huge dork from time to time.
Britta switches gears. “Are you tired? Do you want to sleep now?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Not really, I’m still a little wired,” She swirls the last of the liquid in her glass, swallows it down. “But I’ll find you some blankets,” With a sigh, she gets to her feet, feeling her pleasant buzz fading.
“And a toothbrush and a pillow,” Jeff calls over his shoulder as she leaves the room.
Britta curses under her breath. She barely has those things herself. But she finds them both, and takes down all her underwear from the bathroom, and even gets him some fresh-ish towels and a still-wrapped bar of tiny soap from the days when she was living in a tent on a beach in Mexico and cleaning hotels for weed money.
When she goes back into the living room, Jeff has cleaned up a little bit: the coffee table is now home to just one glass, full of what looks like water, and he’s taken off his sweater and his jeans and looks very comfortable indeed. He is about a mile tall and most of it appears to be leg. Not that it’s anything she’s never seen before, but, still. He’s wearing weird boxer briefs in a preppy stripe that is kind of douchey but not unattractive.
“Here,” she tosses everything at him, the toothbrush in its wasteful box falling on the floor, the pillow pelting him right in his spiky hair. “Goodnight, Jeff,”
As she turns to go there is the sudden cacophony of their phones heralding the simultaneous arrival of text messages. Jeff reads his first and laughs.
Britta’s is from Shirley, and all it says is Use protection, Britta. Britta scowls. “Did you just get a text from Shirley? What does it say?”
He holds up his phone, and she has to get closer to see it, hotly aware of the shape of his chest underneath his shirt. Mister T winds around their ankles. The text says Use protection, Jeffrey. Britta’s scowl deepens. “People need to mind their own business,” she says, turning away.
“I suspect Shirley may have arranged this whole situation to further her own interests,” Jeff lawyers after her. Mister T jumps up on the arm of the couch where he can apparently keep an eye on both of them.
Britta is already brushing her teeth, but she steps into the doorway of the bathroom to look out at Jeff, who is folding his discarded clothing neatly (and dorkily). “Are you really saying you think Shirley arranged a murder to try and get us to sleep together again?” she says, around her toothbrush.
Jeff meets her gaze, his face empty for a moment, like he had forgotten about the whole situation below, and then he frowns-it’s not an expression she sees very often from him, he almost looks…embarrassed? He makes up his bed but doesn’t get in it. “No, that’s not what I’m saying, Britta,” He looks like he’s got more to say, but nothing comes out.
She supposes that’s as close as an I’m sorry that she’ll ever hear from him, and shakes her head a little bit before spitting out her mouthful of toothpaste. She shuts the bathroom door to pee and wash her face and change into her pajamas, and then goes to double check that the front door is locked. “Bathroom’s all yours,” she tells Jeff, not looking at him.
The door is locked, as much as it can be. Jeff watches her rattling the deadbolt. “Look, Britta,” he says, kneeling on the couch and resting his forearms on the back of it. “I’m not trying to be an asshole, here,” he says, as she walks into the kitchen for a glass of water.
She looks at him through the passthrough over the breakfast bar. The pillow has really done a number on his hair; for once it looks soft and the actual texture of human hair, not of Pringles. Britta waits.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Jeff goes on.
“Me either,” She carries her glass back into the living room and stands on the other side of the couch from him. His position makes them basically the same height and not for the first time Britta is reminded that if she was this close to his face all the time she might never stop looking at him.
“So what I’m saying is that I don’t know what to say, or how to deal with that, or if you’re okay or whatever. But if you want to talk about it…I’m just here, okay? I’m squashed on your couch and I’m here,”
This is Anti-Winger Territory and he looks manifestly uncomfortable, and Britta is thinking that this is awkward and lovely, like all the best moments of their friendship. And just as she’s moved on to the thought that Awkward and Lovely would be a great name for a Hall and Oates tribute band, he leans in, and she leans in, and they are kissing.
**end of part two**