Heavy Heart | Community | Jeff/Britta
Heavy Heart
Jeff/Britta
~9,000 words
It happens like this and like this and like this: a 30 Kisses Challenge.
This was written as a sort of 30 Kisses Challenge, using List Epsilon/Sweet. Each piece takes place during various times throughout the series (and beyond!) and are all unrelated.
For Libby, my capslock Jeff/Britta headcanon partner. You'll recognize a few of these :D
01 oranges
“You should kiss me now,” she says, demure and seductive but like she doesn’t know what she does to him. He’s known her for two weeks now but he knows her: she marches around in those too-high boots, she slings her bag over her shoulder like it weighs a thousand pounds, she walks up and down the hallways without a second glance to what’s going on around her.
So he grabs her and it’s just-her mouth is small and warm and her tongue slides against his and her hands are at his collar and his hands grip her waist. This isn’t what he thought it would be like. He spends most days in Spanish fantasizing about what it would be like to take her back to his condo, to the backseat of his car. He imagines peeling off those leather jackets and unzipping those boots and her skin, smooth and pale.
But kissing her is different. It’s too hot on the quad for him to be wearing a sweater. There’s a crick in his neck from bending over for so long. She’s wearing some sort of orange-flavored lip balm and it’s all he can taste, too-sweet manufactured oranges.
She pulls away and smirks, points a finger at him. “Now we’re even.”
And she walks away and he’s dazed.
“Yeah, fooled you,” he tells the retreating form of Professor Whitman. He can’t look her in the eye for two days.
02 pens on the floor
Britta does that thing, you know, where you pretend to knock your pencil over so you can bend over and talk to a classmate. Only, she shoves a folded-up piece of paper underneath Jeff’s shoe and snaps back up to sitting position with a triumphant grin. It’s pretty stupid, because now he has to knock over his pen to pick the note up, but it’s not like Señor Chang is paying attention to him anyway; he’s much too busy berating Starburns in the back corner.
Wanna play a prank on Annie and Vaughn today? They’re having a picnic lunch on the front lawn. We can put rubber spiders in their sandwiches.
He looks up from the note and gives her a look. She’s nodding, her eyebrows raised in excitement. He shakes his head.
That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. He writes back. Let’s do it.
---
They creep across the grass, duck behind bushes, avoid eye contact with students milling about and giving them dirty glances. Britta clutches a bag of black spiders, probably leftover Halloween decorations she pilfered from some supply closet somewhere. They’re not believable at all.
Vaughn is sitting cross-legged on a ratty-looking blanket, his guitar in his lap. Annie sits flush next to him, their knees touching, their hands intertwined.
“Aww, how sweet,” Britta mutters under her breath. “Let’s get ‘em.”
She creeps forward to where their picnic basket is propped up against a tree. Jeff watches as she slowly pulls the bag open and dumps the spiders inside. It makes a gentle patter noise, like raindrops or sock-softened footsteps.
Vaughn is telling a story, something about rainbows and birds-and is this guy for real? Jeff wonders for the million billionth time-and it muffles the sound Britta’s boots make in the grass as she dashes back to where Jeff is waiting.
“So, what now? We just wait for them to go get their food and then scream because it’s crawling with plastic toys?”
“Look, just because you would have put real spiders in there doesn’t mean you have to be such a jerk.”
“I’m not, I-“
“Shhhhh! Look!”
Annie reaches over and brings the basket closer to where she and Vaughn are sitting. “I made us peanut butter and banana sandwiches,” she says. She reaches her hand inside and pulls out one of the perfectly wrapped sandwiches. A spider sits right on top.
“Oh!” she yelps.
And Jeff doesn’t know why, because she should be expecting it, but Britta jumps at the noise. Her hair brushes Jeff’s mouth, the smallest whisper of a kiss, and he leaps back as well.
“What the-“ Annie turns around and sees them huddled in the bushes. “You guys!”
“Run!” Britta yells, and she grabs his hand and off they go, her laugh covering up Annie’s scolding.
03 ringing
Look at Mr. Buttons, she texts. He’s sleeping on your favorite dress shirt you left here! Attached is a picture of her stupid cat curled up on his lucky blue shirt, probably shedding gray hair everywhere or clawing holes in the sleeves.
He quickly dials her number and it only rings once before he picks up. “Isn’t he just the cutest?” she gushes. “He’s sleeping so sweetly.”
“On my shirt? Get that thing away from my shirt!”
“No! Look, Jeff, Mr. Buttons really likes you and since you haven’t been here since... you know, he’s missing you. So he found your shirt on the floor and made it into a bed!”
“Why was my shirt on the floor?”
“I’m not Susie Homemaker, okay, Jeff. My apartment isn’t spotless. Sometimes clothes end up on the floor.”
“I hate you.”
“Yeah, yeah. What are you doing?”
What do you do on the weekends now that you’re not sleeping with me? is the unasked question. “I’m going to the grocery store.”
“On a Saturday night? Oooh, crazy.”
“It’s less crowded, okay? I’ll see you on Monday. Get that beast away from my shirt. It’s dry-clean only.”
“Whatever, “ she says before she hangs up.
At the store, he almost buys the cheap, gross beer Britta likes because he’s so used to grabbing a six-pack for her. Then he finds himself in the pet aisle, staring at the assortment of cat toys. He buys something stupid, a stick with a feather and a bell on it, half so the dumb cat will leave his shirt alone but also because he hopes the ringing will annoy Britta. Cat toys really don’t make any sense to him (dog toys are much less pretentious: balls that squeak and ropes to tug) so he also buys a bag of cat treats, even though he’s not even sure cats eat treats.
He drives to Britta’s apartment and the lights in her living room are still on but instead of knocking on the door like a regular person he leaves the toy and the treats her her mailbox and drives away before he sees her walk by the window and changes his mind.
Four days later (because Britta is notoriously horrible at remembering to check her mail) he gets a text: Mr. Buttons says thank you for his gifts :). There’s a picture attached, her kissing the cat while he lays on the bed with the feather between his paws, Jeff’s shirt nowhere in sight.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, he replies. Take my shirt to the cleaners.
04 quid pro quo (one thing for another)
When it’s May and Abed tells you the whole group is going to help him move his things out of the dorm and back into his dad’s house, you wake up early on Saturday morning (your first Saturday of summer!) and put your hair in a ponytail and drive to Greendale with an extra-sweet iced coffee in one hand, ready to go. But when you get there, and it turns out everyone bailed but you and Troy, you spend the morning rolling your eyes and ignoring the boys as they make fun of the way you stack boxes in the car. (But they stop making fun of you as soon as you volunteer to go get donuts for the obligatory midway-through-break.)
You slam the trunk of your car shut and trek over to the Nadirs’ house (and Mr. Nadir isn’t home but at the falafel shop thank god because every interaction you have with him is more humiliating than the last) and you lug and march up and down stairs until both yours and Troy’s cars are empty except for the empty donut box and an Anthropology textbook you forgot to sell back to the bookstore.
You wipe the sweat from your brow and tell the boys you’ll see them later, but Abed catches your arm on your way out. “Here,” he says, handing you two discs. “Some footage from my surveillance cameras I think you might like. Thanks for helping, Britta.”
On the way home, you realize that you think you might know what one of them is, and you blush even though you haven’t blushed since you were twelve and you shouldn’t blush, really, because sex is natural but, okay, sex with Jeff on your friend’s bed is kind of really super disgusting and you should be embarrassed of that. Almost as embarrassed as you should be that Abed handed you a sex tape of yourself.
When you get home you see the discs are labeled with dates: 03.2011 (the sex tape, you think, putting it aside for another time) and 02.2010. You pop that one into your DVD player and Jeff and Abed are on your TV screen, a bottle of vodka between them.
“Well, you know, she's no barrel of monkeys. She wants everyone to be honest, but she lies to herself. She’s seen the world, but doesn't get it. She has more fights about stuff that doesn’t matter than a YouTube comment section. She’s passionate, which I find stupid, but entertaining,” Jeff says.
“You both share that dislike of yourselves. You’re equally incomplete, that’s why you're equally obsessed with each other,” Abed says.
You watch as they get drunker and drunker and Jeff practices leaving voicemails on your phone. At one point he kisses a picture of you that has a beer funnel coming through it, something like that, you can’t keep up with what’s going on. You hit stop on the remote before he leaves you the actual voicemail, because you’ve heard that, all forty minutes, and you don’t need to hear it again.
You stare at the blank screen for a few minutes and everything feels empty. You figure it can’t get any worse so you pick up the sex tape and pop it in.
05 last in line
December graduation is bigger than Britta thought it would be. Well, not the ceremony itself-because that’s still tiny, in the cafeteria instead of on the football field-but there are a good number of people unwilling to wait for spring to get out of Greendale, lined up along the makeshift stage.
She sits in the audience in the front row with the rest of the study group. They’ve all dressed up for the occasion and got there an hour early for good seats. They sit proudly among parents and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives and Shirley and Annie and Troy have started to cry but Britta’s eyes are dry.
Jeff is last in the alphabetical line and he stands uncomfortable and ungainly, waiting patiently for it all to be over. Every once in a while, he looks over to where the group is sitting and rolls his eyes or pointedly glances at his watch. Dean Pelton’s speech is rather long and rambly, Britta has to admit.
They clap at every name and by the Ts, Britta’s hands are starting to itch. She rubs her palms together and sits up a little straighter as Jeff becomes fourth in line, then third, then second.
“Jeffrey Winger!”
Shirley and Annie whoop and Abed lets out a low whistle but Britta can’t clap or cheer or do anything but smile sadly. Jeff waves to them all, blows them a kiss, catches Britta’s eyes and nods.
“Proud of you,” she says later, giving him a light punch on the arm.
“Yeah, well,” he says, smiling and looking down at the ground. “You gonna make it around here without me?”
She looks around the study room, at the party they’ve put together, at Troy spinning Annie around while they dance and Pierce and Abed watching and smiling and Shirley arranging the brownies just so. She can’t picture it without the seven of them but she smiles and nods.
“I think we’ll be fine,” she lies.
06 parachutes
“Did you really have a threeway in a hot air balloon?” she asks. Her voice is disembodied in the dark and he reaches out to touch her.
“Why? Are you jealous?”
“No. I just can’t decide if that’s gross or not.”
“It definitely wasn’t gross.”
“How did you even get into a hot air balloon?”
“Colorado Balloon Classic. You ever been? It’s actually pretty fun.”
“So you went to a balloon festival, a family event, and what? Just sneaked off and found two willing girls?”
“Uh, kinda. They had brought flasks with them.”
“Oh, ew.”
“Like you wouldn’t have done the same.”
“The flask or the threeway?”
“Either.”
“Weren’t you afraid the whole thing was going to come down? Was there even enough room for the three of you?”
“So curious. Are you trying to tell me you want me to take you this year?”
“No, I’m afraid of heights.”
“Come on. It’ll be fun.”
“But what if something happens and we start to fall?”
“We’ll bring parachutes.”
“Can you do that?”
“Kitten, you can do whatever you want as long as you do it with a smile.”
“Gross.”
“How is that gross? Why is everything I do gross?”
“It just is. Shut up.”
“Hey, you started this conversation, sweetheart. I was ready to go to sleep.”
There’s a pause.
“Wanna have sex?”
“Again? We just did it like two hours ago.”
“Okay, old man, sorry your stamina isn’t up to my level.”
“I just can’t believe you got all hot and bothered at the thought of having sex in a hot air balloon.”
“Will you just shut up and kiss me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
07 three times a day before meals
After a doctor confirms Nurse Jackie’s diagnosis of high cholesterol, Jeff goes through an oatmeal phase. It lasts for almost two months, and he doesn’t even sweeten it with brown sugar like Britta does hers when he forces her to eat it for breakfast.
“You’re in your thirties now, too. You never know when your body is just going to give out on you for no reason.”
She tries her hardest to snap him out of it, brings pizzas and pad thai and scotch when she comes over on Friday nights. She cooks herself cheesy omelets on Saturday mornings. She gorges herself on jelly beans while they hate-watch Lifetime movies.
But it’s not until she comes over with three cans of whipped cream and a gallon of ice cream and promises to let him eat it off of her does he start to look conflicted. She puts the ice cream in the freezer and lines the cans neatly in the fridge and gives him a quick kiss before she flops down on the couch and starts flipping through the TV.
He makes it about twenty minutes before she hears the clink of the cans.
“Hurry up and get your ass in the bedroom,” he shouts. “I’m going to have a lot of calories to work off!”
08 tattoos and piercings
“There.” She pats his arm and steps back to admire her handiwork. “I think it looks like the picture.”
He glances at the tattoo sprawling across his upper arm and nods. “Yeah, that should be good. You better hurry up and get dressed. We only have ten minutes to get to the cafeteria.” He slides on the black vest, careful not to mess up her paint job, and adjusts the wig on his head.
“How do I look?” he asks, voice deep and clipped.
She looks up from the mirror and stifles a laugh. “You look absolutely ridiculous. I’ve never seen anyone wear that much eyeliner.”
“Oh, come on. You’re not into these leather pants? You better get used to them because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get them off.”
“Ew.” She ducks into the front seat of the van and Jeff hears her clothes rustle.
“You could have gotten dressed over here you know,” he says, slipping chains over his head. “Nothing I haven’t seen bef-“
She pops back out from the front of the van and she’s dressed like-like some ridiculous fourteen year old boy’s fantasy. He should not be as attracted to her as he is right now: crazy makeup, pigtails, fucking corset dress.
“I look so stupid, don’t I?”
He swallows and shakes his head. “No. You don’t.”
“Okay, let’s get this over with.” She slides the van door open and motions for him to go first. He hops down and holds out his hand to help her.
“These shoes are crazy,” she mutters. She navigates her way down and when she’s safe on the sidewalk she lets out a breath.
“I’m going to say something that you’re going to think is disgusting but we’re about to go up against a sociopathic ex-Spanish teacher and anything can happen so just let me say it.” He lifts her hand up to his lips and drops a sweet, gentlemanly kiss on it. “You look sexy as hell and I would fuck the shit out of you in that outfit.”
It takes a second for her to register his words but when she does she rips her hand from his grasp and scoffs, taking off for the school without a word.
He’s glad to follow behind her.
09 closet
There’s a supply closet near the Spanish wing where they meet sometimes, mostly on Wednesdays because she has photography class at night and so she’s on campus for most of the day and he has nothing better to do but hang around the study room and pretend to study.
It’s not exactly the cleanest supply closet, but it is roomier than most on campus and it’s always empty-except for that one time Troy’s janitor friend Jerry walked in on them. So sometimes she’s getting out of her math class and she has thirty minutes to kill before she has to be in the darkroom so she’ll text him Still around? even though she knows he always is.
And he replies Yes and that’s it and he knows she’ll be in the closet waiting for him. And most of the time they don’t have sex, they just make out a little, and during math she always chews gum because it helps her concentrate so her breath is fresh and sweet like peppermint. And then she’s always late and she has to bolt across campus and he has a cup of coffee in the cafeteria and mills around for a while because sometimes she gets out of class early but when she doesn’t he heads home and never tells her he was waiting for her.
10 red light
There’s almost a foot of snow on the ground and no visibility but Dean Pelton would cut the Greendale dance budget before canceling classes so Jeff busts out his boots and scarf and cranks the heat in the Lexus and hopes for the best. He’s halfway to school when he gets a text from Britta: the buses rnt running can u pick me up?
He has to backtrack and it takes him three times as long, but he manages to pull up alongside the curb next to her apartment. She’s waiting on the sidewalk, buried beneath a hand-knitted hat and a scarf across her mouth and a puffy black coat. All he can see is her eyes.
“Thanks,” she says, sliding into the passenger seat and shaking snow from her hat. She begins unbundling, slipping off her mittens and unwrapping her scarf.
“Watch the snow in the car,” he says. He has both hands on the steering wheel to keep the car steady.
He can almost hear her roll her eyes. “Of course,” she says sweetly. She stamps her shoes on the floor, the snow clinging to the carpets.
“So glad I went out of my way to get you.”
“Shut up,” she says, leaning forward to flip on the radio. She fiddles with the dial, past Christmas carols and the pop station and the talk radio. Jeff’s afraid she’s heading toward NPR but then he hears a familiar guitar riff and she lets out a whoop and sits back in her seat.
“You don’t have to sell your body to the night!” she sings. It’s loud and off-key and Jeff groans.
“Must you?”
She ignores him and keeps singing, bouncing in her seat. The bass vibrates the steering wheel beneath his fingers. He grinds his teeth but at a red light, he grabs her by the shoulder and turns her toward him. He presses his lips to hers, tangling his fingers in the knots the wind made in her hair. With his other hand he turns the radio off. He pulls away and the light turns green.
11 boiling tar
“History is scary,” Troy says, looking up from his textbook. “People are always murdering each other in crazy ways, like poisoning their enemies with mustard or dumping hot tar on black people because they’re racist.”
“Mustard gas,” Annie corrects. “It’s not like the stuff you put on your sandwich.”
“Regular mustard would be pretty effective if your enemies didn’t like mustard,” Abed says. “Or if they were allergic.”
“That’s how we got Hawaii,” Jeff deadpans.
“History is so violent,” Shirley laments. “We should have taken a home ec class instead. Sweets don’t kill. Well, except for diabetes.”
“Why, so Britta could burn everything?” Jeff asks.
Britta looks up from her textbook and scowls. “How did I get dragged into this conversation? Make fun of Pierce, he’s sleeping!”
Everyone looks over at Pierce and shrugs. “Too easy,” Abed says.
“I happen to be a perfectly adequate cook,” Britta says.
“Ah, perfectly adequate. I’d kiss those Girl Scout badges goodbye if I were you,” Jeff snarks.
“I’ll give you something to kiss,” she mutters under her breath.
Jeff cocks his head toward her. “What was that, Betty Crocker?”
"Nothing!" she says in her best Shirley voice. "I have psych now. See you guys later!"
She gets up and leaves and is only halfway down the hall when she gets a text: Don't tempt me. She smiles but doesn't respond.
12 dragonflies and fireflies
“I got one!” Elijah yells. He screws the top on the jar tight. “Look!”
Jordan races up to his older brother and together they watch the firefly in the jar as it illuminates. “Cool! Look, Britta!”
“That’s great, guys!” she calls back. She sinks a little more into the grass and adjusts Ben in her lap. “See? This babysitting thing is a breeze.”
Jeff smirks and sits down in the grass next to her. “If only I was better at urging bugs to get into empty jelly jars.”
“Don’t be such a Debbie Downer.”
Ben gurgles happily and Britta lifts him up to face level. “Do you see your brothers? They’re catching fireflies. You can do it, too, once you’re just a little bit bigger.” She gives Ben a kiss on the cheek and sets him back in her lap, bringing her arms down to hug him against her, inhaling his sweet baby smell.
“I’ll kill you if you tell anyone,” she says. “But I kind of love this little guy.”
“I can tell. You used to kiss me like that.”
“I’m all Ben’s now,” she says, leaning her head gently on Ben’s.
“Britta, can we make ice cream sundaes now?” Jordan asks.
Britta smiles and looks over at Jeff. “Sure can. Jeff will go inside and help and me and Ben will be there in a minute. I just have to clean up his toys.”
The boys take off toward the house and Jeff stands up to follow. “Abandoning me with the sugar twins so you can have some time alone with your boyfriend?” he asks smartly.
“You know it,” she says with a smile.
As he walks by, he swipes the top of her head with his hand and once Shirley’s back door slides shut she gives Ben another kiss in the same place Jeff just touched her. “He’s so jealous,” she whispers, laughing into his hair.
13 heatwave
Neither of them have air conditioning in their apartments so it doesn’t matter where they go. It’s April but feels like July and they lay on Britta’s bed in their underwear, not touching and watching the ceiling fan rotate uselessly.
“Wanna have sex?” he asks every once in a while.
“Too hot,” she groans.
“So we’re just going to lay here and do nothing until it breaks?”
“Don’t talk,” she mutters. “You expel too much hot air.”
“You’re the one who lives on the third floor.”
“So go home then.”
“That requires putting clothes on and the thought of layers makes me want to throw up.”
“I have an idea. You have to put clothes on, but it’ll be worth it.”
He whines but does it anyway, complaining the whole time that she’s lucky because women’s clothes are cooler. She spins a little in her sundress and smirks.
“How much gas is in your car?” she asks as they start down the stairs slowly. The stairwell is hotter than her bedroom, stifling like the air is going to close in on them.
“Like half a tank, why?”
“Can I drive?”
“Depends. Does this idea lead to me getting to have sex with you?”
“Yes, actually.”
“Oh. Then okay.”
She gets behind the wheel of his car and cranks the air conditioning, letting out a sigh of relief when sweet, cool air finally pours out. She drives (and he makes fun of her driving) to the most deserted corner of the Greendale parking lot and shifts into park. “Get in the backseat.”
He laughs. “You’re serious? This was your big idea?”
She throws up her hands. “I didn’t see you coming up with anything!”
He leans over the gearshift to kiss her before they crawl into the backseat. “I’m teasing. This is one of your better plans.”
“Right?” she says as she climbs into his lap to straddle him. He takes back his complaint about women’s clothing.
14 99,999
“Will you concentrate on the road? You’re going to kill us before we can even make it.”
“Shhh, just a few more feet, probably.”
Britta looks down at the odometer at just the right time: the numbers change before her eyes. “Yes! Yes! We did it!”
“Mmm, yeah, great,” Jeff says, scrolling through his phone. “You can watch the road now.”
“Jeff. This is exciting. We’ve survived 100,000 miles in this stupid thing together and we haven’t murdered each other. I’d say that’s something worth celebrating.”
The RV speeds through the Arizona desert, Britta driving at least twenty miles per hour faster than she probably should. They’re one hundred miles outside of Phoenix and if they make it there before dark, they might find a good place to park and sleep for the night.
“We should celebrate with an oil change,” Jeff mutters.
Britta shakes her head. “I’m so sick of you. I’m going to leave you somewhere out here with nothing so you have to drink from a cactus to survive.”
“Good luck navigating those rest areas without me, sweetheart. Those truckers will eat you alive.”
“I can take care of myself, thank you very much. And besides, you would have to live with the guilt for the rest of your life.”
“We’ll see.”
After a minute he reaches over and turns off the radio, which wasn’t very loud to begin with. “Hey,” he says.
“What?”
“Wanna celebrate with a motel room? Actual bed sex?”
She waits a few beats before she smiles. “Okay.”
He leans over and kisses the spot where her tank top strap meets her skin. He’ll give her the 100,000-mile gift he already bought her later.
15 separated
“Four people to a car!” the ride operator shouts over the motor and they all look to Jeff.
“Okay, me, Troy, and Annie in this car, Abed, Shirley, Britta, and Pierce in that one,” he says.
They scramble onto the Ferris wheel and Troy and Annie spend the ride yelling to Abed and Jeff regrets his seating assignments. Pierce is apparently having some sort of acrophobic fit when they stop at the top and Shirley and Britta try to calm him down.
“What the hell’s going on up there?” Jeff yells, sticking his head out the side of the car.
“We got it under control!” Britta shouts back, hanging over the side.
“Don’t fall, wouldn’t want you to crack your head open on some carnies.”
She purses her lips. “That’d be some injury.”
“I’d kiss it better for you.”
“UGH,” everyone groans.
“Will you two stop it?” Pierce shouts. “You’re making me want to jump!”
Britta rolls her eyes but smiles and disappears from his sight.
16 reason for existing
“What is this?” Britta yells. “What. Is. This.”
Jeff finds her in the kitchen on a stepladder, one she uses to reach the high cabinets when she’s too stubborn to ask him to get stuff down for her. “What’s what?”
“This.” She’s holding it with two fingers, like it’s a bug or a used Kleenex.
“What does it look like?”
“It looks like an… engagement ring,” she whispers the last part.
“That’s because it is an… engagement ring,” he mocks, taking it from her and opening the box, checking for damage.
“Why is it on the top shelf of our kitchen cupboard?”
He rolls his eyes. “Come on, Britta. You’re not that stupid.”
Her face softens a bit but she’s still staring at the box in his hands. “You were going to propose to me?”
“I was thinking about it. Didn’t think you’d go looking up there.”
“Oh.” She crosses her arms over her chest, cupping her elbows. “It’s pretty.”
“You think so?” He takes the ring out of the box and examines it, holding it up to the light.
“How-how were you going to ask me?” she asks. “Were you going to do one of those lame hide-it-in-the-cake things that some guys think are sweet but are really just cliché and terrible?”
He shrugs. “I was just going to ask you.”
“Oh,” she says again.
“You don’t want me to ask you, do you?” he asks, stifling a smirk.
She’s still on the stepladder, eye-level with him for once. “I don’t know. But if you did ask me, I might not say no.”
“Noted.” He puts the ring back into the box and closes the top.
“What are you doing?”
“Putting it back in the cupboard.”
“You’re not going to…?”
“Not going to what? To slide this ring on your finger and ask you to be my wife?”
She nods.
He takes the ring out again and holds it out. “So take it.”
“Do it right!”
“So demanding,” he says. She lays her hand flat in the air and he slips the ring on her finger and he’s secretly relieved to see it’s a perfect fit. “You wanna do this?”
“Sure,” she says in a non-convincing nonchalant voice.
“Okay then.”
She leaps off the ladder and into his arms, knocking them both onto the floor. “Thought you didn’t believe in marriage,” he says between kisses.
“Shut up,” she says, “or I won’t do it.”
“So don’t.”
“No way. You’re stuck with me now, Winger."
17 underground
Britta hoists herself up onto the barstool and grabs the bartender’s attention. “Vodka neat,” she says. He turns to make her drink and Britta rummages in her bag for a few bills. She’s just about to slap a couple bucks on the bar when she feels someone lean over her and a credit card appears next to the glass the bartender slides over.
“Put it on my tab. McCallan, please.”
He sits down next to her and smirks. “You’re welcome.”
“What are you doing here?” she asks, narrowing her eyes. “I thought you only came here on Fridays.”
“Thought I’d see what kind of nightlife L Street gets on Saturdays.”
“You mean The Red Door.”
“I mean what I mean.”
She takes a sip of her drink. “Thought you’d have a big date tonight, since you told the group you were so busy this weekend.”
He shrugs. “Maybe I said it so I could sit here with you while you interrogate me.”
“Cute.” She drains her vodka and flags down the bartender. “Give me something sweet like a vodka cranberry.”
“Pace yourself, there, tiger. It’s not even ten o’clock yet.”
“I failed my psych test, okay? Don’t tell anyone.”
“Yikes. Well, you’ll, you know, get ‘em next time.”
“Your sympathy is astounding,” she says dryly.
“No, really,” he says. “Everyone has one bad test. I told you you’d make a good therapist and I wasn’t lying. I’m sure you’ll ace the next test.”
She takes a gulp of her fresh drink and then leans over and kisses him. “Thanks for the drink. I gotta pee.” She slides off the stool and stumbles into the bathroom.
18 the next best thing
“So.”
Britta runs her index finger through the ring of condensation her soda made on the table. She draws a B over and over and as he speaks, she traces his name in the water. “So.”
Jeff leans in a little and looks around, as if what he’s about to say is a big secret. “Look, I know this is, uh, uncomfortable and weird, but we used to be friends, right? We used to be able to hang out and get pizza without it being awkward, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, only after the pizza we usually boned on your kitchen table.”
It’s mid-July and most of town is deserted, people gone for better locales and beach-front property. But when you’re in your thirties and only halfway done with community college, it’s best just to stay at home for the summer. Anything else would be too sad. Or, Britta’s bank account is on life support and even a bus pass is putting her behind.
There’s only a few other people in the pizzeria, despite the fact that it’s Friday night and there’s not much in this town to do but eat. Maybe it’s because this place isn’t air conditioned and the smell of pizza mixes with the sickly sweet smell of body odor and it kills Britta’s appetite more than an awkward dinner with her best friend she used to fuck.
“Britta, come on. I’m trying here.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s just, we did this before. We can do this again.”
It’s easier now, than it was those last few weeks of school, to forget that Jeff Winger wasn’t once a large part of her days. But it’s when they’re in the same room does she remember kissing him and having sex with him and seeing his things among her things. And she thinks about kissing him maybe more than he should, and in gross contexts, too, like when there’s pizza grease on his lips or when he wipes sauce off his face with a cheap paper napkin.
So she just wants to go home and sit on the couch in front of a fan and pretend she’s not thinking about kissing Jeff Winger but for once his face is earnest and maybe losing Pierce back when school ended made him want to keep everyone closer or something like that. She picks at her pizza crust and nods. “We could go see a movie, if you want.”
He smiles and she averts her eyes away from his mouth, not thinking of making out in dark theaters like teenagers. And if he hugs her goodnight when he drops her off and his lips brush her cheek in a friendly way, well, she’s not going to complain.
19 numerical
He can keep count, for a while, of all the times he’s kissed her. He’d never admit it, of course, but he doesn’t lose track until about November, when they really start sleeping together on a regular basis. He doesn’t write them all down in a diary of anything lame like that. But she’s a good kisser and his heart is growing larger by the day so when he kisses her for the hundredth time, he memorizes the way her hips feel beneath his hands, the way she moans into his mouth a little. He files away the sweet smell of her shampoo and how her fingers are still a bit cold from the air outside. Later he can conjure up the way she tastes and the pale expanse of her skin. He thinks about these thinks later, when he’s not allowed to kiss her anymore, and he tells himself over and over he doesn’t miss it. Eventually he believes himself.
20 between heaven and earth
During that first summer she dreams that when she tells him she loves him he doesn’t walk away. Instead he takes her by the hand and leads her out of the room and into an empty classroom. He kisses her the way he kissed her during paintball when she decided to sacrifice herself: all hands and tongue and desperation.
“I’m in love with you,” he says when they part.
When she wakes up she feels horrible and guilty and stupid, just like she did at the dance. She rolls over in bed and snuggles with her cat a little bit and erases it from her mind.
21 sonata
“Come on,” Jeff says, tugging Britta by the hand. “Come dance with me.”
There’s a Boyz II Men ballad playing over the speakers and on the other side of the room Shirley and Andre are happily swaying back and forth. Britta feels too drunk to do anything but stand in one spot but Jeff’s drunk, too, so he tugs a little too hard and she has no choice but to follow him.
He pulls her close and wraps his hands around her waist and she tries to keep enough space between them by resting only her hands on his shoulders. They barely move and she’s fine with that; her feet are starting to hurt and she’s tired.
“Sorry I almost married you again,” he slurs into her hair.
She shrugs. “Sorry I called you a dick. And a jackass.”
“You’ve called me worse. You’re not a ding-dong, though. I don’t even know what that means.”
“Me neither.”
He presses a kiss to her temple and she pulls back and raises an eyebrow.
“What are you doing?”
“I would have married you, you know.”
“You’re drunk.”
“So are you.”
“I thought you said marriage is a lie?”
“Yeah but with you it wouldn’t be.”
The song ends and she stands on her tip toes to kiss his cheek. “Please never say that again.”
She walks away before he can respond. She’s going to have one hell of a hangover in the morning.
22 fine lines
Jeff looks different when he sleeps. Most people look younger: Troy and Annie look like actual goddamn babies, and Abed looks so sweet and peaceful, and the stress of motherhood is gone from Shirley’s face. Pierce, well, he looks like Pierce, and Britta doesn’t know what she looks like, obviously, because she’s asleep. Duh-doy.
But as Britta watches Jeff sleep for the first time ever-in her bed, at that, tangled up in her sheets and over-gelled head on her pillow-he looks older, so much older, so much sadder and worn out. Jeff doesn’t nap when the study group naps, coiled up on the couches in the back of the study room during all-nighters.
He’s curled around her, a comma or an apostrophe, and suddenly thirty-five is a giant, scary number. His face is lined and there’s a crease, just a small one, between his eyebrows, like he’s dreaming of something worrying or troublesome. Britta leans down and kisses it, lightly, gently, so he won’t wake up and see her. She rolls her eyes at herself when she settles back into her spot, though, because Jeff Winger in his old age has a way of making her a sentimental sap.
23 addiction
“Blech,” he says, pulling away and screwing up his face. “You taste like cigarettes.”
Subconsciously, her hand goes straight to her pocket and she fingers the outline of the lighter. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Either you just made out with someone who had just licked an ashtray or you started smoking again. I’m not stupid.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” she snaps, running her fingers over her lips.
He grabs her purse off the coffee table and begins rifling through it.
“Hey!” she yells. “It’s not polite to go through a woman’s bag. That’s like, the cardinal rule of life.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says distractedly. He pulls out her wallet and her keys and her cell phone and a couple tubes of lip gloss and what looks like fifty crumpled-up receipts. Finally, he gives her a triumphant smile and holds up a half-empty pack of cigarettes. “What are these?”
“What’s the big deal? It’s my body and my lungs and neither you nor any other man is in charge of what I put in it.” She crosses her arms and frowns. “And don’t make a dick joke.”
He rolls his eyes but she can see the disappointment on his face because the dick joke? Was definitely going to happen. “I don’t want to make out with you if you’re going to smoke. Brush your teeth first.”
“Fine.” She stands up but instead of going straight to the bathroom she leans down and puts her hands on the back of the couch, trapping him between her arms. She presses her lips to his, tongue swiping his bottom lip, and he opens his mouth almost involuntarily and when she pulls away, she drops a chaste kiss on his nose.
“Be right back. And I’m going to use your toothbrush!”
24 spastic
It happens when they walk into the classroom holding hands. It’s sweet, you guess, if you’re into that stupid middle school thing. Your heart (which exists) does this stupid muscle spasm and your stomach feels weird and you wish for one crazy minute that you had only managed to secure six seats instead of seven.
Later you’re all sitting in the study room trying to figure out what class to take together when Troy leaves for class and Abed and Pierce go with Annie and Shirley to check out the prank they pulled on Dean Pelton. It’s just the two of you then, flipping through course catalogs and circling possibilities and it’s quiet, the gentle hum of the AC in the background.
“You and Troy, huh?” you say finally, knowing that this may well be the only time you’ll be alone together this semester.
“Yep,” she says, not looking up from the page. “Are you going to say something weird about it?”
“No, wouldn’t dream of it.” You turn back to your course catalog but you only last in the quiet for a few more minutes.
“Actually, I am,” you start, and it’s an out-of-body sort of experience because you’re nervous and you have no idea what you’re going to say but words come out of your mouth anyway. “It doesn’t make any sense. Troy is a child. What the hell can he even give you?”
She finally looks up at you, squares her jaw, and you know she’s mad but you don’t care because it’s suddenly now or never, sink or swim. “You want to know? You really want to know?”
And you do but also you don’t because her voice is quiet and low and kind of scary and you think somewhere, deep down, you know what she’s going to say and it’s going to be bad but you nod anyway because you have nothing more to lose.
“I don’t wake up every morning worrying about what kind of mood Troy is in. I don’t have to play games. I don’t have to sneak around. When Troy is feeling something, he tells me about it. I can tell him how I feel about him and I don’t have to worry about him walking away. He’s a normal person. He’s normal.”
She turns back to the course catalog and circles something and you sit there, looking at the axe marks you made in the table a year ago because you’re not Troy and you’re not okay or normal. “I’m sorry,” you say softly. “I’m glad you’re happy.”
Her shoulders slump a little and you stand up and gather your books. You drop a kiss on her cheek before you leave and you wish, for the first time, that Troy could be where you are right now, watching through the window as she brings her hand up to the spot you kissed her.
25 quintessential
When she takes him to New York for the first time he wants to do all these stupid touristy things. He doesn’t come out and say it, but he keeps pointing out the Empire State Building every time they see it (read: a lot) and he looks longingly at a hot dog cart and he laments that it’s not snowing so they could go ice skating at Rockefeller Center.
All she wants to do is get drunk at her favorite dive bar in Brooklyn and eat burritos and lay in the sun in Washington Square Park. He doesn’t look enthusiastic at any of these suggestions so they stand there, silent, in the hotel lobby, waiting for the other to break.
“Okay, fine,” she says finally. “I know where we can go.”
She takes him to Serendipity and buys him a frozen hot chocolate even though it’s outrageously priced and filled with tourists wearing fanny packs. But he looks happy and doesn’t even complain about how many calories he’s ingesting. And she kisses him across the table and an old couple sitting nearby coo a little about how sweet they are and she thinks about how much New York resident Britta Perry would hate her right now but she can’t bring herself to care.
26 in the middle
“You and Annie had quite the adventure today, huh?” she says, pulling her shirt up over her head.
“I guess,” he says, tugging his jeans down.
“You like her.”
“So do you. Because she’s our friend.”
“You know what I mean.” She stands on her tiptoes and kisses him, reaching behind her back to unhook her bra.
He breaks away and trails his lips down her neck. “You’re the one who was in the creepy sex party in the blanket fort.” He gently pushes her back onto the bed.
“Blah blah blah. Wasn’t with a teenager, though.” She unbuttons her pants and lifts her hips off the bed push them down. “Help me with these, will you?”
He stands up and pulls her jeans down to her ankles. “Think you could get your jeans any skinnier, you giant hipster?”
“Don’t change the subject. Did you make out with Annie again? Guns and drama and conspiracies. Sounds romantic.”
“You didn’t tell me you loved me in a room full of people beforehand, so no, I didn’t.”
She sits up and frowns. “You’re a jerk. I don’t know what your problem is.” She puts her shirt back on and stands up, ripping her jeans from his grip.
“My problem? What about you? Bringing up Annie for no stupid reason.” He starts buttoning his shirt. “You being jealous of a nineteen year old isn’t cute or sweet, Britta. It’s sad.”
“Funny,” she says, zipping her boots. “That’s exactly how I feel about you chasing after her like she’s going to save you from yourself.” She pushes past him and out of the bedroom, and he turns around to follow her out.
“You’re just gonna leave?”
She grabs her purse off the couch and heads toward the door. “I think it’s best. I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess.”
She slams the door behind her and Jeff sighs, scrubbing his hands over his face.
27 tip
They like to come in sometimes, mostly to make fun of her, but sometimes they’re all meeting up after her shift and they come to get a milkshake and wait for her to be done. She likes those nights, because it’s nice to see friendly faces that aren’t teasing her but are checking watches and cell phones for it to be time to hang out with her.
Tonight it’s Jeff and Abed, picking at a shared plate of French fries and drinking Cokes. They’re all going to some student film festival in Boulder, mostly because Jeff and Britta lost a bet to Abed, but Britta thinks it’ll be okay, and if it’s not, they can always throw popcorn at the backs of people’s heads.
Jeff’s doing that cute thing where he pretends he doesn’t know Britta and that she’s just a regular waitress so he can be a dick to her, like when he complains that his Coke is too sweet or his fries too greasy. Britta’s boss is around so she has to grin and bear it, but when Jeff goes to the bathroom she catches Abed pouring a packet of Splenda into his Coke and she gives him a high-five as she walks by.
The diner is pretty much empty so she still has ten minutes to go when she starts reconciling her receipts. She slaps Jeff and Abed’s check down on the table. “Okay, the sooner you pay the sooner we can leave.”
Abed brings the check to the counter with a twenty and a look. “Jeff paid,” he says in a tone that implies he’s sorry for something. He goes and sits back down across from Jeff, who is laughing to himself.
Britta flips the receipt over and finds a lewd drawing of herself and Jeff, but since he’s a terrible drawer, it looks more like she’s kissing his leg than giving him a blowjob. “Ugh,” she mutters to herself. On the tip line he’s written Nice ass.
She puts the check and the twenty in the drawer and keeps his change for herself. She clocks out and meets them at the door, where she smacks his arm while buttoning her coat. Abed rolls his eyes as they argue the whole ride to Boulder.
28 broke; poor
Britta disappears after graduation. Jeff gets postcards sometimes, never from the same place twice, always saying that she’s having fun and she misses them all. She sends identical messages to the rest of the group.
One day there’s a knock on his door and she’s there, drenched from the rain and carrying a bulging backpack. “Hey,” she says. “I just got into town. Mind if I crash here for a few days?”
And he nods, opens the door wider, and she marches in and uses his shower like she hasn’t been gone for months. She dresses in a pair of his sweatpants and an old t-shirt and shows him the new stamps on her passport.
“What are you doing now?” he asks after she’s done telling him about getting robbed in Honduras.
“I don’t know. Maybe hang out here for a while, make some money, move to New York.”
He’d thought she’d had enough of her vagabond days, thought a college degree would make her settle down in one spot and act her age. He misses her, he hates to admit, and wishes that she would grow up so he could stop missing her.
“You can stay here as long as you want,” he says, getting off the couch to get them both beers from the fridge.
“Thanks,” she says with a smile. She takes a long swig from her bottle. “That’s really sweet of you.”
That night he pulls some blankets out of the closet to make up the couch to sleep on. “You can have the bed,” he offers.
She takes the blankets from his arms and throws them on the floor. “Nice try, Winger.” She kisses him, pulls him to the bedroom, and never moves to New York.
29 twice begun
The last time they kiss, although she didn’t know then that it would be the last time, it’s a kiss goodbye. They woke up in her apartment that morning but he left his English paper at home. “I better run over and get it,” he said. “Meet you at school?”
She smiled and nodded and without thinking leaned forward for a kiss. It was chaste and quick, the kind old married couples give to each other before work. The kind they’d been exchanging before falling asleep and when he came over with dinner and when she made coffee in the morning.
The next time they kiss it’s two years later and a hesitant brush of lips, something small and sweet and the opposite of anything they’ve ever been, together or apart. He smiles sheepishly at her and she returns it. “Uh, hi,” he says unsurely.
She reaches down and laces her fingers through his. “Hi.”
30 internal monologue
This is what it feels like to kiss her before she sacrifices herself to Chang for you:
She is the first girl in forever who can go toe-to-toe with you. She is interesting and smart and funny and weird and dorky an crazy. She makes you think. She calls you out on your shit. She changes the way you view women. She makes you want to be better.
You've been thinking about sleeping with her since the day you met. But back then it was different. Now you know her. Now she's the closest thing you've had to a best friend since you were nine. Now she's your Greendale co-parent, your co-conspirator. She's not Hot Girl Spanish Class anymore. She's Britta.
And maybe she did sleep with you to win at paintball. Maybe it meant nothing to her. But maybe it did. Maybe as you wind your hand in her hair and kiss her, she's thinking about exactly how much it all means.
And it might all be different tomorrow. She might wake up and regret it, or you might, or it might all just be a sleep-starved delusion. But this girl is sacrificing herself for you. She is losing a game for you, and she is so competitive, she loves winning, loves beating you. She is giving it all up for you.
She tastes like sweat, salty and sweet, the smell of her morning shower now almost twenty-four hours gone.
Professor Whitman said the first time you kissed was life-changing. But it's nothing, not even on the same realm, compared to this.
Jeff/Britta
~9,000 words
It happens like this and like this and like this: a 30 Kisses Challenge.
This was written as a sort of 30 Kisses Challenge, using List Epsilon/Sweet. Each piece takes place during various times throughout the series (and beyond!) and are all unrelated.
For Libby, my capslock Jeff/Britta headcanon partner. You'll recognize a few of these :D
01 oranges
“You should kiss me now,” she says, demure and seductive but like she doesn’t know what she does to him. He’s known her for two weeks now but he knows her: she marches around in those too-high boots, she slings her bag over her shoulder like it weighs a thousand pounds, she walks up and down the hallways without a second glance to what’s going on around her.
So he grabs her and it’s just-her mouth is small and warm and her tongue slides against his and her hands are at his collar and his hands grip her waist. This isn’t what he thought it would be like. He spends most days in Spanish fantasizing about what it would be like to take her back to his condo, to the backseat of his car. He imagines peeling off those leather jackets and unzipping those boots and her skin, smooth and pale.
But kissing her is different. It’s too hot on the quad for him to be wearing a sweater. There’s a crick in his neck from bending over for so long. She’s wearing some sort of orange-flavored lip balm and it’s all he can taste, too-sweet manufactured oranges.
She pulls away and smirks, points a finger at him. “Now we’re even.”
And she walks away and he’s dazed.
“Yeah, fooled you,” he tells the retreating form of Professor Whitman. He can’t look her in the eye for two days.
02 pens on the floor
Britta does that thing, you know, where you pretend to knock your pencil over so you can bend over and talk to a classmate. Only, she shoves a folded-up piece of paper underneath Jeff’s shoe and snaps back up to sitting position with a triumphant grin. It’s pretty stupid, because now he has to knock over his pen to pick the note up, but it’s not like Señor Chang is paying attention to him anyway; he’s much too busy berating Starburns in the back corner.
Wanna play a prank on Annie and Vaughn today? They’re having a picnic lunch on the front lawn. We can put rubber spiders in their sandwiches.
He looks up from the note and gives her a look. She’s nodding, her eyebrows raised in excitement. He shakes his head.
That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. He writes back. Let’s do it.
---
They creep across the grass, duck behind bushes, avoid eye contact with students milling about and giving them dirty glances. Britta clutches a bag of black spiders, probably leftover Halloween decorations she pilfered from some supply closet somewhere. They’re not believable at all.
Vaughn is sitting cross-legged on a ratty-looking blanket, his guitar in his lap. Annie sits flush next to him, their knees touching, their hands intertwined.
“Aww, how sweet,” Britta mutters under her breath. “Let’s get ‘em.”
She creeps forward to where their picnic basket is propped up against a tree. Jeff watches as she slowly pulls the bag open and dumps the spiders inside. It makes a gentle patter noise, like raindrops or sock-softened footsteps.
Vaughn is telling a story, something about rainbows and birds-and is this guy for real? Jeff wonders for the million billionth time-and it muffles the sound Britta’s boots make in the grass as she dashes back to where Jeff is waiting.
“So, what now? We just wait for them to go get their food and then scream because it’s crawling with plastic toys?”
“Look, just because you would have put real spiders in there doesn’t mean you have to be such a jerk.”
“I’m not, I-“
“Shhhhh! Look!”
Annie reaches over and brings the basket closer to where she and Vaughn are sitting. “I made us peanut butter and banana sandwiches,” she says. She reaches her hand inside and pulls out one of the perfectly wrapped sandwiches. A spider sits right on top.
“Oh!” she yelps.
And Jeff doesn’t know why, because she should be expecting it, but Britta jumps at the noise. Her hair brushes Jeff’s mouth, the smallest whisper of a kiss, and he leaps back as well.
“What the-“ Annie turns around and sees them huddled in the bushes. “You guys!”
“Run!” Britta yells, and she grabs his hand and off they go, her laugh covering up Annie’s scolding.
03 ringing
Look at Mr. Buttons, she texts. He’s sleeping on your favorite dress shirt you left here! Attached is a picture of her stupid cat curled up on his lucky blue shirt, probably shedding gray hair everywhere or clawing holes in the sleeves.
He quickly dials her number and it only rings once before he picks up. “Isn’t he just the cutest?” she gushes. “He’s sleeping so sweetly.”
“On my shirt? Get that thing away from my shirt!”
“No! Look, Jeff, Mr. Buttons really likes you and since you haven’t been here since... you know, he’s missing you. So he found your shirt on the floor and made it into a bed!”
“Why was my shirt on the floor?”
“I’m not Susie Homemaker, okay, Jeff. My apartment isn’t spotless. Sometimes clothes end up on the floor.”
“I hate you.”
“Yeah, yeah. What are you doing?”
What do you do on the weekends now that you’re not sleeping with me? is the unasked question. “I’m going to the grocery store.”
“On a Saturday night? Oooh, crazy.”
“It’s less crowded, okay? I’ll see you on Monday. Get that beast away from my shirt. It’s dry-clean only.”
“Whatever, “ she says before she hangs up.
At the store, he almost buys the cheap, gross beer Britta likes because he’s so used to grabbing a six-pack for her. Then he finds himself in the pet aisle, staring at the assortment of cat toys. He buys something stupid, a stick with a feather and a bell on it, half so the dumb cat will leave his shirt alone but also because he hopes the ringing will annoy Britta. Cat toys really don’t make any sense to him (dog toys are much less pretentious: balls that squeak and ropes to tug) so he also buys a bag of cat treats, even though he’s not even sure cats eat treats.
He drives to Britta’s apartment and the lights in her living room are still on but instead of knocking on the door like a regular person he leaves the toy and the treats her her mailbox and drives away before he sees her walk by the window and changes his mind.
Four days later (because Britta is notoriously horrible at remembering to check her mail) he gets a text: Mr. Buttons says thank you for his gifts :). There’s a picture attached, her kissing the cat while he lays on the bed with the feather between his paws, Jeff’s shirt nowhere in sight.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, he replies. Take my shirt to the cleaners.
04 quid pro quo (one thing for another)
When it’s May and Abed tells you the whole group is going to help him move his things out of the dorm and back into his dad’s house, you wake up early on Saturday morning (your first Saturday of summer!) and put your hair in a ponytail and drive to Greendale with an extra-sweet iced coffee in one hand, ready to go. But when you get there, and it turns out everyone bailed but you and Troy, you spend the morning rolling your eyes and ignoring the boys as they make fun of the way you stack boxes in the car. (But they stop making fun of you as soon as you volunteer to go get donuts for the obligatory midway-through-break.)
You slam the trunk of your car shut and trek over to the Nadirs’ house (and Mr. Nadir isn’t home but at the falafel shop thank god because every interaction you have with him is more humiliating than the last) and you lug and march up and down stairs until both yours and Troy’s cars are empty except for the empty donut box and an Anthropology textbook you forgot to sell back to the bookstore.
You wipe the sweat from your brow and tell the boys you’ll see them later, but Abed catches your arm on your way out. “Here,” he says, handing you two discs. “Some footage from my surveillance cameras I think you might like. Thanks for helping, Britta.”
On the way home, you realize that you think you might know what one of them is, and you blush even though you haven’t blushed since you were twelve and you shouldn’t blush, really, because sex is natural but, okay, sex with Jeff on your friend’s bed is kind of really super disgusting and you should be embarrassed of that. Almost as embarrassed as you should be that Abed handed you a sex tape of yourself.
When you get home you see the discs are labeled with dates: 03.2011 (the sex tape, you think, putting it aside for another time) and 02.2010. You pop that one into your DVD player and Jeff and Abed are on your TV screen, a bottle of vodka between them.
“Well, you know, she's no barrel of monkeys. She wants everyone to be honest, but she lies to herself. She’s seen the world, but doesn't get it. She has more fights about stuff that doesn’t matter than a YouTube comment section. She’s passionate, which I find stupid, but entertaining,” Jeff says.
“You both share that dislike of yourselves. You’re equally incomplete, that’s why you're equally obsessed with each other,” Abed says.
You watch as they get drunker and drunker and Jeff practices leaving voicemails on your phone. At one point he kisses a picture of you that has a beer funnel coming through it, something like that, you can’t keep up with what’s going on. You hit stop on the remote before he leaves you the actual voicemail, because you’ve heard that, all forty minutes, and you don’t need to hear it again.
You stare at the blank screen for a few minutes and everything feels empty. You figure it can’t get any worse so you pick up the sex tape and pop it in.
05 last in line
December graduation is bigger than Britta thought it would be. Well, not the ceremony itself-because that’s still tiny, in the cafeteria instead of on the football field-but there are a good number of people unwilling to wait for spring to get out of Greendale, lined up along the makeshift stage.
She sits in the audience in the front row with the rest of the study group. They’ve all dressed up for the occasion and got there an hour early for good seats. They sit proudly among parents and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives and Shirley and Annie and Troy have started to cry but Britta’s eyes are dry.
Jeff is last in the alphabetical line and he stands uncomfortable and ungainly, waiting patiently for it all to be over. Every once in a while, he looks over to where the group is sitting and rolls his eyes or pointedly glances at his watch. Dean Pelton’s speech is rather long and rambly, Britta has to admit.
They clap at every name and by the Ts, Britta’s hands are starting to itch. She rubs her palms together and sits up a little straighter as Jeff becomes fourth in line, then third, then second.
“Jeffrey Winger!”
Shirley and Annie whoop and Abed lets out a low whistle but Britta can’t clap or cheer or do anything but smile sadly. Jeff waves to them all, blows them a kiss, catches Britta’s eyes and nods.
“Proud of you,” she says later, giving him a light punch on the arm.
“Yeah, well,” he says, smiling and looking down at the ground. “You gonna make it around here without me?”
She looks around the study room, at the party they’ve put together, at Troy spinning Annie around while they dance and Pierce and Abed watching and smiling and Shirley arranging the brownies just so. She can’t picture it without the seven of them but she smiles and nods.
“I think we’ll be fine,” she lies.
06 parachutes
“Did you really have a threeway in a hot air balloon?” she asks. Her voice is disembodied in the dark and he reaches out to touch her.
“Why? Are you jealous?”
“No. I just can’t decide if that’s gross or not.”
“It definitely wasn’t gross.”
“How did you even get into a hot air balloon?”
“Colorado Balloon Classic. You ever been? It’s actually pretty fun.”
“So you went to a balloon festival, a family event, and what? Just sneaked off and found two willing girls?”
“Uh, kinda. They had brought flasks with them.”
“Oh, ew.”
“Like you wouldn’t have done the same.”
“The flask or the threeway?”
“Either.”
“Weren’t you afraid the whole thing was going to come down? Was there even enough room for the three of you?”
“So curious. Are you trying to tell me you want me to take you this year?”
“No, I’m afraid of heights.”
“Come on. It’ll be fun.”
“But what if something happens and we start to fall?”
“We’ll bring parachutes.”
“Can you do that?”
“Kitten, you can do whatever you want as long as you do it with a smile.”
“Gross.”
“How is that gross? Why is everything I do gross?”
“It just is. Shut up.”
“Hey, you started this conversation, sweetheart. I was ready to go to sleep.”
There’s a pause.
“Wanna have sex?”
“Again? We just did it like two hours ago.”
“Okay, old man, sorry your stamina isn’t up to my level.”
“I just can’t believe you got all hot and bothered at the thought of having sex in a hot air balloon.”
“Will you just shut up and kiss me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
07 three times a day before meals
After a doctor confirms Nurse Jackie’s diagnosis of high cholesterol, Jeff goes through an oatmeal phase. It lasts for almost two months, and he doesn’t even sweeten it with brown sugar like Britta does hers when he forces her to eat it for breakfast.
“You’re in your thirties now, too. You never know when your body is just going to give out on you for no reason.”
She tries her hardest to snap him out of it, brings pizzas and pad thai and scotch when she comes over on Friday nights. She cooks herself cheesy omelets on Saturday mornings. She gorges herself on jelly beans while they hate-watch Lifetime movies.
But it’s not until she comes over with three cans of whipped cream and a gallon of ice cream and promises to let him eat it off of her does he start to look conflicted. She puts the ice cream in the freezer and lines the cans neatly in the fridge and gives him a quick kiss before she flops down on the couch and starts flipping through the TV.
He makes it about twenty minutes before she hears the clink of the cans.
“Hurry up and get your ass in the bedroom,” he shouts. “I’m going to have a lot of calories to work off!”
08 tattoos and piercings
“There.” She pats his arm and steps back to admire her handiwork. “I think it looks like the picture.”
He glances at the tattoo sprawling across his upper arm and nods. “Yeah, that should be good. You better hurry up and get dressed. We only have ten minutes to get to the cafeteria.” He slides on the black vest, careful not to mess up her paint job, and adjusts the wig on his head.
“How do I look?” he asks, voice deep and clipped.
She looks up from the mirror and stifles a laugh. “You look absolutely ridiculous. I’ve never seen anyone wear that much eyeliner.”
“Oh, come on. You’re not into these leather pants? You better get used to them because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get them off.”
“Ew.” She ducks into the front seat of the van and Jeff hears her clothes rustle.
“You could have gotten dressed over here you know,” he says, slipping chains over his head. “Nothing I haven’t seen bef-“
She pops back out from the front of the van and she’s dressed like-like some ridiculous fourteen year old boy’s fantasy. He should not be as attracted to her as he is right now: crazy makeup, pigtails, fucking corset dress.
“I look so stupid, don’t I?”
He swallows and shakes his head. “No. You don’t.”
“Okay, let’s get this over with.” She slides the van door open and motions for him to go first. He hops down and holds out his hand to help her.
“These shoes are crazy,” she mutters. She navigates her way down and when she’s safe on the sidewalk she lets out a breath.
“I’m going to say something that you’re going to think is disgusting but we’re about to go up against a sociopathic ex-Spanish teacher and anything can happen so just let me say it.” He lifts her hand up to his lips and drops a sweet, gentlemanly kiss on it. “You look sexy as hell and I would fuck the shit out of you in that outfit.”
It takes a second for her to register his words but when she does she rips her hand from his grasp and scoffs, taking off for the school without a word.
He’s glad to follow behind her.
09 closet
There’s a supply closet near the Spanish wing where they meet sometimes, mostly on Wednesdays because she has photography class at night and so she’s on campus for most of the day and he has nothing better to do but hang around the study room and pretend to study.
It’s not exactly the cleanest supply closet, but it is roomier than most on campus and it’s always empty-except for that one time Troy’s janitor friend Jerry walked in on them. So sometimes she’s getting out of her math class and she has thirty minutes to kill before she has to be in the darkroom so she’ll text him Still around? even though she knows he always is.
And he replies Yes and that’s it and he knows she’ll be in the closet waiting for him. And most of the time they don’t have sex, they just make out a little, and during math she always chews gum because it helps her concentrate so her breath is fresh and sweet like peppermint. And then she’s always late and she has to bolt across campus and he has a cup of coffee in the cafeteria and mills around for a while because sometimes she gets out of class early but when she doesn’t he heads home and never tells her he was waiting for her.
10 red light
There’s almost a foot of snow on the ground and no visibility but Dean Pelton would cut the Greendale dance budget before canceling classes so Jeff busts out his boots and scarf and cranks the heat in the Lexus and hopes for the best. He’s halfway to school when he gets a text from Britta: the buses rnt running can u pick me up?
He has to backtrack and it takes him three times as long, but he manages to pull up alongside the curb next to her apartment. She’s waiting on the sidewalk, buried beneath a hand-knitted hat and a scarf across her mouth and a puffy black coat. All he can see is her eyes.
“Thanks,” she says, sliding into the passenger seat and shaking snow from her hat. She begins unbundling, slipping off her mittens and unwrapping her scarf.
“Watch the snow in the car,” he says. He has both hands on the steering wheel to keep the car steady.
He can almost hear her roll her eyes. “Of course,” she says sweetly. She stamps her shoes on the floor, the snow clinging to the carpets.
“So glad I went out of my way to get you.”
“Shut up,” she says, leaning forward to flip on the radio. She fiddles with the dial, past Christmas carols and the pop station and the talk radio. Jeff’s afraid she’s heading toward NPR but then he hears a familiar guitar riff and she lets out a whoop and sits back in her seat.
“You don’t have to sell your body to the night!” she sings. It’s loud and off-key and Jeff groans.
“Must you?”
She ignores him and keeps singing, bouncing in her seat. The bass vibrates the steering wheel beneath his fingers. He grinds his teeth but at a red light, he grabs her by the shoulder and turns her toward him. He presses his lips to hers, tangling his fingers in the knots the wind made in her hair. With his other hand he turns the radio off. He pulls away and the light turns green.
11 boiling tar
“History is scary,” Troy says, looking up from his textbook. “People are always murdering each other in crazy ways, like poisoning their enemies with mustard or dumping hot tar on black people because they’re racist.”
“Mustard gas,” Annie corrects. “It’s not like the stuff you put on your sandwich.”
“Regular mustard would be pretty effective if your enemies didn’t like mustard,” Abed says. “Or if they were allergic.”
“That’s how we got Hawaii,” Jeff deadpans.
“History is so violent,” Shirley laments. “We should have taken a home ec class instead. Sweets don’t kill. Well, except for diabetes.”
“Why, so Britta could burn everything?” Jeff asks.
Britta looks up from her textbook and scowls. “How did I get dragged into this conversation? Make fun of Pierce, he’s sleeping!”
Everyone looks over at Pierce and shrugs. “Too easy,” Abed says.
“I happen to be a perfectly adequate cook,” Britta says.
“Ah, perfectly adequate. I’d kiss those Girl Scout badges goodbye if I were you,” Jeff snarks.
“I’ll give you something to kiss,” she mutters under her breath.
Jeff cocks his head toward her. “What was that, Betty Crocker?”
"Nothing!" she says in her best Shirley voice. "I have psych now. See you guys later!"
She gets up and leaves and is only halfway down the hall when she gets a text: Don't tempt me. She smiles but doesn't respond.
12 dragonflies and fireflies
“I got one!” Elijah yells. He screws the top on the jar tight. “Look!”
Jordan races up to his older brother and together they watch the firefly in the jar as it illuminates. “Cool! Look, Britta!”
“That’s great, guys!” she calls back. She sinks a little more into the grass and adjusts Ben in her lap. “See? This babysitting thing is a breeze.”
Jeff smirks and sits down in the grass next to her. “If only I was better at urging bugs to get into empty jelly jars.”
“Don’t be such a Debbie Downer.”
Ben gurgles happily and Britta lifts him up to face level. “Do you see your brothers? They’re catching fireflies. You can do it, too, once you’re just a little bit bigger.” She gives Ben a kiss on the cheek and sets him back in her lap, bringing her arms down to hug him against her, inhaling his sweet baby smell.
“I’ll kill you if you tell anyone,” she says. “But I kind of love this little guy.”
“I can tell. You used to kiss me like that.”
“I’m all Ben’s now,” she says, leaning her head gently on Ben’s.
“Britta, can we make ice cream sundaes now?” Jordan asks.
Britta smiles and looks over at Jeff. “Sure can. Jeff will go inside and help and me and Ben will be there in a minute. I just have to clean up his toys.”
The boys take off toward the house and Jeff stands up to follow. “Abandoning me with the sugar twins so you can have some time alone with your boyfriend?” he asks smartly.
“You know it,” she says with a smile.
As he walks by, he swipes the top of her head with his hand and once Shirley’s back door slides shut she gives Ben another kiss in the same place Jeff just touched her. “He’s so jealous,” she whispers, laughing into his hair.
13 heatwave
Neither of them have air conditioning in their apartments so it doesn’t matter where they go. It’s April but feels like July and they lay on Britta’s bed in their underwear, not touching and watching the ceiling fan rotate uselessly.
“Wanna have sex?” he asks every once in a while.
“Too hot,” she groans.
“So we’re just going to lay here and do nothing until it breaks?”
“Don’t talk,” she mutters. “You expel too much hot air.”
“You’re the one who lives on the third floor.”
“So go home then.”
“That requires putting clothes on and the thought of layers makes me want to throw up.”
“I have an idea. You have to put clothes on, but it’ll be worth it.”
He whines but does it anyway, complaining the whole time that she’s lucky because women’s clothes are cooler. She spins a little in her sundress and smirks.
“How much gas is in your car?” she asks as they start down the stairs slowly. The stairwell is hotter than her bedroom, stifling like the air is going to close in on them.
“Like half a tank, why?”
“Can I drive?”
“Depends. Does this idea lead to me getting to have sex with you?”
“Yes, actually.”
“Oh. Then okay.”
She gets behind the wheel of his car and cranks the air conditioning, letting out a sigh of relief when sweet, cool air finally pours out. She drives (and he makes fun of her driving) to the most deserted corner of the Greendale parking lot and shifts into park. “Get in the backseat.”
He laughs. “You’re serious? This was your big idea?”
She throws up her hands. “I didn’t see you coming up with anything!”
He leans over the gearshift to kiss her before they crawl into the backseat. “I’m teasing. This is one of your better plans.”
“Right?” she says as she climbs into his lap to straddle him. He takes back his complaint about women’s clothing.
14 99,999
“Will you concentrate on the road? You’re going to kill us before we can even make it.”
“Shhh, just a few more feet, probably.”
Britta looks down at the odometer at just the right time: the numbers change before her eyes. “Yes! Yes! We did it!”
“Mmm, yeah, great,” Jeff says, scrolling through his phone. “You can watch the road now.”
“Jeff. This is exciting. We’ve survived 100,000 miles in this stupid thing together and we haven’t murdered each other. I’d say that’s something worth celebrating.”
The RV speeds through the Arizona desert, Britta driving at least twenty miles per hour faster than she probably should. They’re one hundred miles outside of Phoenix and if they make it there before dark, they might find a good place to park and sleep for the night.
“We should celebrate with an oil change,” Jeff mutters.
Britta shakes her head. “I’m so sick of you. I’m going to leave you somewhere out here with nothing so you have to drink from a cactus to survive.”
“Good luck navigating those rest areas without me, sweetheart. Those truckers will eat you alive.”
“I can take care of myself, thank you very much. And besides, you would have to live with the guilt for the rest of your life.”
“We’ll see.”
After a minute he reaches over and turns off the radio, which wasn’t very loud to begin with. “Hey,” he says.
“What?”
“Wanna celebrate with a motel room? Actual bed sex?”
She waits a few beats before she smiles. “Okay.”
He leans over and kisses the spot where her tank top strap meets her skin. He’ll give her the 100,000-mile gift he already bought her later.
15 separated
“Four people to a car!” the ride operator shouts over the motor and they all look to Jeff.
“Okay, me, Troy, and Annie in this car, Abed, Shirley, Britta, and Pierce in that one,” he says.
They scramble onto the Ferris wheel and Troy and Annie spend the ride yelling to Abed and Jeff regrets his seating assignments. Pierce is apparently having some sort of acrophobic fit when they stop at the top and Shirley and Britta try to calm him down.
“What the hell’s going on up there?” Jeff yells, sticking his head out the side of the car.
“We got it under control!” Britta shouts back, hanging over the side.
“Don’t fall, wouldn’t want you to crack your head open on some carnies.”
She purses her lips. “That’d be some injury.”
“I’d kiss it better for you.”
“UGH,” everyone groans.
“Will you two stop it?” Pierce shouts. “You’re making me want to jump!”
Britta rolls her eyes but smiles and disappears from his sight.
16 reason for existing
“What is this?” Britta yells. “What. Is. This.”
Jeff finds her in the kitchen on a stepladder, one she uses to reach the high cabinets when she’s too stubborn to ask him to get stuff down for her. “What’s what?”
“This.” She’s holding it with two fingers, like it’s a bug or a used Kleenex.
“What does it look like?”
“It looks like an… engagement ring,” she whispers the last part.
“That’s because it is an… engagement ring,” he mocks, taking it from her and opening the box, checking for damage.
“Why is it on the top shelf of our kitchen cupboard?”
He rolls his eyes. “Come on, Britta. You’re not that stupid.”
Her face softens a bit but she’s still staring at the box in his hands. “You were going to propose to me?”
“I was thinking about it. Didn’t think you’d go looking up there.”
“Oh.” She crosses her arms over her chest, cupping her elbows. “It’s pretty.”
“You think so?” He takes the ring out of the box and examines it, holding it up to the light.
“How-how were you going to ask me?” she asks. “Were you going to do one of those lame hide-it-in-the-cake things that some guys think are sweet but are really just cliché and terrible?”
He shrugs. “I was just going to ask you.”
“Oh,” she says again.
“You don’t want me to ask you, do you?” he asks, stifling a smirk.
She’s still on the stepladder, eye-level with him for once. “I don’t know. But if you did ask me, I might not say no.”
“Noted.” He puts the ring back into the box and closes the top.
“What are you doing?”
“Putting it back in the cupboard.”
“You’re not going to…?”
“Not going to what? To slide this ring on your finger and ask you to be my wife?”
She nods.
He takes the ring out again and holds it out. “So take it.”
“Do it right!”
“So demanding,” he says. She lays her hand flat in the air and he slips the ring on her finger and he’s secretly relieved to see it’s a perfect fit. “You wanna do this?”
“Sure,” she says in a non-convincing nonchalant voice.
“Okay then.”
She leaps off the ladder and into his arms, knocking them both onto the floor. “Thought you didn’t believe in marriage,” he says between kisses.
“Shut up,” she says, “or I won’t do it.”
“So don’t.”
“No way. You’re stuck with me now, Winger."
17 underground
Britta hoists herself up onto the barstool and grabs the bartender’s attention. “Vodka neat,” she says. He turns to make her drink and Britta rummages in her bag for a few bills. She’s just about to slap a couple bucks on the bar when she feels someone lean over her and a credit card appears next to the glass the bartender slides over.
“Put it on my tab. McCallan, please.”
He sits down next to her and smirks. “You’re welcome.”
“What are you doing here?” she asks, narrowing her eyes. “I thought you only came here on Fridays.”
“Thought I’d see what kind of nightlife L Street gets on Saturdays.”
“You mean The Red Door.”
“I mean what I mean.”
She takes a sip of her drink. “Thought you’d have a big date tonight, since you told the group you were so busy this weekend.”
He shrugs. “Maybe I said it so I could sit here with you while you interrogate me.”
“Cute.” She drains her vodka and flags down the bartender. “Give me something sweet like a vodka cranberry.”
“Pace yourself, there, tiger. It’s not even ten o’clock yet.”
“I failed my psych test, okay? Don’t tell anyone.”
“Yikes. Well, you’ll, you know, get ‘em next time.”
“Your sympathy is astounding,” she says dryly.
“No, really,” he says. “Everyone has one bad test. I told you you’d make a good therapist and I wasn’t lying. I’m sure you’ll ace the next test.”
She takes a gulp of her fresh drink and then leans over and kisses him. “Thanks for the drink. I gotta pee.” She slides off the stool and stumbles into the bathroom.
18 the next best thing
“So.”
Britta runs her index finger through the ring of condensation her soda made on the table. She draws a B over and over and as he speaks, she traces his name in the water. “So.”
Jeff leans in a little and looks around, as if what he’s about to say is a big secret. “Look, I know this is, uh, uncomfortable and weird, but we used to be friends, right? We used to be able to hang out and get pizza without it being awkward, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, only after the pizza we usually boned on your kitchen table.”
It’s mid-July and most of town is deserted, people gone for better locales and beach-front property. But when you’re in your thirties and only halfway done with community college, it’s best just to stay at home for the summer. Anything else would be too sad. Or, Britta’s bank account is on life support and even a bus pass is putting her behind.
There’s only a few other people in the pizzeria, despite the fact that it’s Friday night and there’s not much in this town to do but eat. Maybe it’s because this place isn’t air conditioned and the smell of pizza mixes with the sickly sweet smell of body odor and it kills Britta’s appetite more than an awkward dinner with her best friend she used to fuck.
“Britta, come on. I’m trying here.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s just, we did this before. We can do this again.”
It’s easier now, than it was those last few weeks of school, to forget that Jeff Winger wasn’t once a large part of her days. But it’s when they’re in the same room does she remember kissing him and having sex with him and seeing his things among her things. And she thinks about kissing him maybe more than he should, and in gross contexts, too, like when there’s pizza grease on his lips or when he wipes sauce off his face with a cheap paper napkin.
So she just wants to go home and sit on the couch in front of a fan and pretend she’s not thinking about kissing Jeff Winger but for once his face is earnest and maybe losing Pierce back when school ended made him want to keep everyone closer or something like that. She picks at her pizza crust and nods. “We could go see a movie, if you want.”
He smiles and she averts her eyes away from his mouth, not thinking of making out in dark theaters like teenagers. And if he hugs her goodnight when he drops her off and his lips brush her cheek in a friendly way, well, she’s not going to complain.
19 numerical
He can keep count, for a while, of all the times he’s kissed her. He’d never admit it, of course, but he doesn’t lose track until about November, when they really start sleeping together on a regular basis. He doesn’t write them all down in a diary of anything lame like that. But she’s a good kisser and his heart is growing larger by the day so when he kisses her for the hundredth time, he memorizes the way her hips feel beneath his hands, the way she moans into his mouth a little. He files away the sweet smell of her shampoo and how her fingers are still a bit cold from the air outside. Later he can conjure up the way she tastes and the pale expanse of her skin. He thinks about these thinks later, when he’s not allowed to kiss her anymore, and he tells himself over and over he doesn’t miss it. Eventually he believes himself.
20 between heaven and earth
During that first summer she dreams that when she tells him she loves him he doesn’t walk away. Instead he takes her by the hand and leads her out of the room and into an empty classroom. He kisses her the way he kissed her during paintball when she decided to sacrifice herself: all hands and tongue and desperation.
“I’m in love with you,” he says when they part.
When she wakes up she feels horrible and guilty and stupid, just like she did at the dance. She rolls over in bed and snuggles with her cat a little bit and erases it from her mind.
21 sonata
“Come on,” Jeff says, tugging Britta by the hand. “Come dance with me.”
There’s a Boyz II Men ballad playing over the speakers and on the other side of the room Shirley and Andre are happily swaying back and forth. Britta feels too drunk to do anything but stand in one spot but Jeff’s drunk, too, so he tugs a little too hard and she has no choice but to follow him.
He pulls her close and wraps his hands around her waist and she tries to keep enough space between them by resting only her hands on his shoulders. They barely move and she’s fine with that; her feet are starting to hurt and she’s tired.
“Sorry I almost married you again,” he slurs into her hair.
She shrugs. “Sorry I called you a dick. And a jackass.”
“You’ve called me worse. You’re not a ding-dong, though. I don’t even know what that means.”
“Me neither.”
He presses a kiss to her temple and she pulls back and raises an eyebrow.
“What are you doing?”
“I would have married you, you know.”
“You’re drunk.”
“So are you.”
“I thought you said marriage is a lie?”
“Yeah but with you it wouldn’t be.”
The song ends and she stands on her tip toes to kiss his cheek. “Please never say that again.”
She walks away before he can respond. She’s going to have one hell of a hangover in the morning.
22 fine lines
Jeff looks different when he sleeps. Most people look younger: Troy and Annie look like actual goddamn babies, and Abed looks so sweet and peaceful, and the stress of motherhood is gone from Shirley’s face. Pierce, well, he looks like Pierce, and Britta doesn’t know what she looks like, obviously, because she’s asleep. Duh-doy.
But as Britta watches Jeff sleep for the first time ever-in her bed, at that, tangled up in her sheets and over-gelled head on her pillow-he looks older, so much older, so much sadder and worn out. Jeff doesn’t nap when the study group naps, coiled up on the couches in the back of the study room during all-nighters.
He’s curled around her, a comma or an apostrophe, and suddenly thirty-five is a giant, scary number. His face is lined and there’s a crease, just a small one, between his eyebrows, like he’s dreaming of something worrying or troublesome. Britta leans down and kisses it, lightly, gently, so he won’t wake up and see her. She rolls her eyes at herself when she settles back into her spot, though, because Jeff Winger in his old age has a way of making her a sentimental sap.
23 addiction
“Blech,” he says, pulling away and screwing up his face. “You taste like cigarettes.”
Subconsciously, her hand goes straight to her pocket and she fingers the outline of the lighter. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Either you just made out with someone who had just licked an ashtray or you started smoking again. I’m not stupid.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” she snaps, running her fingers over her lips.
He grabs her purse off the coffee table and begins rifling through it.
“Hey!” she yells. “It’s not polite to go through a woman’s bag. That’s like, the cardinal rule of life.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says distractedly. He pulls out her wallet and her keys and her cell phone and a couple tubes of lip gloss and what looks like fifty crumpled-up receipts. Finally, he gives her a triumphant smile and holds up a half-empty pack of cigarettes. “What are these?”
“What’s the big deal? It’s my body and my lungs and neither you nor any other man is in charge of what I put in it.” She crosses her arms and frowns. “And don’t make a dick joke.”
He rolls his eyes but she can see the disappointment on his face because the dick joke? Was definitely going to happen. “I don’t want to make out with you if you’re going to smoke. Brush your teeth first.”
“Fine.” She stands up but instead of going straight to the bathroom she leans down and puts her hands on the back of the couch, trapping him between her arms. She presses her lips to his, tongue swiping his bottom lip, and he opens his mouth almost involuntarily and when she pulls away, she drops a chaste kiss on his nose.
“Be right back. And I’m going to use your toothbrush!”
24 spastic
It happens when they walk into the classroom holding hands. It’s sweet, you guess, if you’re into that stupid middle school thing. Your heart (which exists) does this stupid muscle spasm and your stomach feels weird and you wish for one crazy minute that you had only managed to secure six seats instead of seven.
Later you’re all sitting in the study room trying to figure out what class to take together when Troy leaves for class and Abed and Pierce go with Annie and Shirley to check out the prank they pulled on Dean Pelton. It’s just the two of you then, flipping through course catalogs and circling possibilities and it’s quiet, the gentle hum of the AC in the background.
“You and Troy, huh?” you say finally, knowing that this may well be the only time you’ll be alone together this semester.
“Yep,” she says, not looking up from the page. “Are you going to say something weird about it?”
“No, wouldn’t dream of it.” You turn back to your course catalog but you only last in the quiet for a few more minutes.
“Actually, I am,” you start, and it’s an out-of-body sort of experience because you’re nervous and you have no idea what you’re going to say but words come out of your mouth anyway. “It doesn’t make any sense. Troy is a child. What the hell can he even give you?”
She finally looks up at you, squares her jaw, and you know she’s mad but you don’t care because it’s suddenly now or never, sink or swim. “You want to know? You really want to know?”
And you do but also you don’t because her voice is quiet and low and kind of scary and you think somewhere, deep down, you know what she’s going to say and it’s going to be bad but you nod anyway because you have nothing more to lose.
“I don’t wake up every morning worrying about what kind of mood Troy is in. I don’t have to play games. I don’t have to sneak around. When Troy is feeling something, he tells me about it. I can tell him how I feel about him and I don’t have to worry about him walking away. He’s a normal person. He’s normal.”
She turns back to the course catalog and circles something and you sit there, looking at the axe marks you made in the table a year ago because you’re not Troy and you’re not okay or normal. “I’m sorry,” you say softly. “I’m glad you’re happy.”
Her shoulders slump a little and you stand up and gather your books. You drop a kiss on her cheek before you leave and you wish, for the first time, that Troy could be where you are right now, watching through the window as she brings her hand up to the spot you kissed her.
25 quintessential
When she takes him to New York for the first time he wants to do all these stupid touristy things. He doesn’t come out and say it, but he keeps pointing out the Empire State Building every time they see it (read: a lot) and he looks longingly at a hot dog cart and he laments that it’s not snowing so they could go ice skating at Rockefeller Center.
All she wants to do is get drunk at her favorite dive bar in Brooklyn and eat burritos and lay in the sun in Washington Square Park. He doesn’t look enthusiastic at any of these suggestions so they stand there, silent, in the hotel lobby, waiting for the other to break.
“Okay, fine,” she says finally. “I know where we can go.”
She takes him to Serendipity and buys him a frozen hot chocolate even though it’s outrageously priced and filled with tourists wearing fanny packs. But he looks happy and doesn’t even complain about how many calories he’s ingesting. And she kisses him across the table and an old couple sitting nearby coo a little about how sweet they are and she thinks about how much New York resident Britta Perry would hate her right now but she can’t bring herself to care.
26 in the middle
“You and Annie had quite the adventure today, huh?” she says, pulling her shirt up over her head.
“I guess,” he says, tugging his jeans down.
“You like her.”
“So do you. Because she’s our friend.”
“You know what I mean.” She stands on her tiptoes and kisses him, reaching behind her back to unhook her bra.
He breaks away and trails his lips down her neck. “You’re the one who was in the creepy sex party in the blanket fort.” He gently pushes her back onto the bed.
“Blah blah blah. Wasn’t with a teenager, though.” She unbuttons her pants and lifts her hips off the bed push them down. “Help me with these, will you?”
He stands up and pulls her jeans down to her ankles. “Think you could get your jeans any skinnier, you giant hipster?”
“Don’t change the subject. Did you make out with Annie again? Guns and drama and conspiracies. Sounds romantic.”
“You didn’t tell me you loved me in a room full of people beforehand, so no, I didn’t.”
She sits up and frowns. “You’re a jerk. I don’t know what your problem is.” She puts her shirt back on and stands up, ripping her jeans from his grip.
“My problem? What about you? Bringing up Annie for no stupid reason.” He starts buttoning his shirt. “You being jealous of a nineteen year old isn’t cute or sweet, Britta. It’s sad.”
“Funny,” she says, zipping her boots. “That’s exactly how I feel about you chasing after her like she’s going to save you from yourself.” She pushes past him and out of the bedroom, and he turns around to follow her out.
“You’re just gonna leave?”
She grabs her purse off the couch and heads toward the door. “I think it’s best. I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess.”
She slams the door behind her and Jeff sighs, scrubbing his hands over his face.
27 tip
They like to come in sometimes, mostly to make fun of her, but sometimes they’re all meeting up after her shift and they come to get a milkshake and wait for her to be done. She likes those nights, because it’s nice to see friendly faces that aren’t teasing her but are checking watches and cell phones for it to be time to hang out with her.
Tonight it’s Jeff and Abed, picking at a shared plate of French fries and drinking Cokes. They’re all going to some student film festival in Boulder, mostly because Jeff and Britta lost a bet to Abed, but Britta thinks it’ll be okay, and if it’s not, they can always throw popcorn at the backs of people’s heads.
Jeff’s doing that cute thing where he pretends he doesn’t know Britta and that she’s just a regular waitress so he can be a dick to her, like when he complains that his Coke is too sweet or his fries too greasy. Britta’s boss is around so she has to grin and bear it, but when Jeff goes to the bathroom she catches Abed pouring a packet of Splenda into his Coke and she gives him a high-five as she walks by.
The diner is pretty much empty so she still has ten minutes to go when she starts reconciling her receipts. She slaps Jeff and Abed’s check down on the table. “Okay, the sooner you pay the sooner we can leave.”
Abed brings the check to the counter with a twenty and a look. “Jeff paid,” he says in a tone that implies he’s sorry for something. He goes and sits back down across from Jeff, who is laughing to himself.
Britta flips the receipt over and finds a lewd drawing of herself and Jeff, but since he’s a terrible drawer, it looks more like she’s kissing his leg than giving him a blowjob. “Ugh,” she mutters to herself. On the tip line he’s written Nice ass.
She puts the check and the twenty in the drawer and keeps his change for herself. She clocks out and meets them at the door, where she smacks his arm while buttoning her coat. Abed rolls his eyes as they argue the whole ride to Boulder.
28 broke; poor
Britta disappears after graduation. Jeff gets postcards sometimes, never from the same place twice, always saying that she’s having fun and she misses them all. She sends identical messages to the rest of the group.
One day there’s a knock on his door and she’s there, drenched from the rain and carrying a bulging backpack. “Hey,” she says. “I just got into town. Mind if I crash here for a few days?”
And he nods, opens the door wider, and she marches in and uses his shower like she hasn’t been gone for months. She dresses in a pair of his sweatpants and an old t-shirt and shows him the new stamps on her passport.
“What are you doing now?” he asks after she’s done telling him about getting robbed in Honduras.
“I don’t know. Maybe hang out here for a while, make some money, move to New York.”
He’d thought she’d had enough of her vagabond days, thought a college degree would make her settle down in one spot and act her age. He misses her, he hates to admit, and wishes that she would grow up so he could stop missing her.
“You can stay here as long as you want,” he says, getting off the couch to get them both beers from the fridge.
“Thanks,” she says with a smile. She takes a long swig from her bottle. “That’s really sweet of you.”
That night he pulls some blankets out of the closet to make up the couch to sleep on. “You can have the bed,” he offers.
She takes the blankets from his arms and throws them on the floor. “Nice try, Winger.” She kisses him, pulls him to the bedroom, and never moves to New York.
29 twice begun
The last time they kiss, although she didn’t know then that it would be the last time, it’s a kiss goodbye. They woke up in her apartment that morning but he left his English paper at home. “I better run over and get it,” he said. “Meet you at school?”
She smiled and nodded and without thinking leaned forward for a kiss. It was chaste and quick, the kind old married couples give to each other before work. The kind they’d been exchanging before falling asleep and when he came over with dinner and when she made coffee in the morning.
The next time they kiss it’s two years later and a hesitant brush of lips, something small and sweet and the opposite of anything they’ve ever been, together or apart. He smiles sheepishly at her and she returns it. “Uh, hi,” he says unsurely.
She reaches down and laces her fingers through his. “Hi.”
30 internal monologue
This is what it feels like to kiss her before she sacrifices herself to Chang for you:
She is the first girl in forever who can go toe-to-toe with you. She is interesting and smart and funny and weird and dorky an crazy. She makes you think. She calls you out on your shit. She changes the way you view women. She makes you want to be better.
You've been thinking about sleeping with her since the day you met. But back then it was different. Now you know her. Now she's the closest thing you've had to a best friend since you were nine. Now she's your Greendale co-parent, your co-conspirator. She's not Hot Girl Spanish Class anymore. She's Britta.
And maybe she did sleep with you to win at paintball. Maybe it meant nothing to her. But maybe it did. Maybe as you wind your hand in her hair and kiss her, she's thinking about exactly how much it all means.
And it might all be different tomorrow. She might wake up and regret it, or you might, or it might all just be a sleep-starved delusion. But this girl is sacrificing herself for you. She is losing a game for you, and she is so competitive, she loves winning, loves beating you. She is giving it all up for you.
She tastes like sweat, salty and sweet, the smell of her morning shower now almost twenty-four hours gone.
Professor Whitman said the first time you kissed was life-changing. But it's nothing, not even on the same realm, compared to this.