[fic] confessions of a selfish man.
confessions of a selfish man
community | jeff; jeff/annie
upto season two | pg-13 | 1600 | oneshot
basically, it’s long legs versus an annoying need to make the world a better place.
"You know, in five years you won't even remember me."
"William."
"I’m formed and you’re not and you still have changes to go through. You’ll change, then I’ll be Winnie the Pooh to your Christopher Robin.”
“No literary references left unturned. How do you figure Pooh?”
“Well, Christopher Robin outgrew Pooh. That’s how it ended. He had Pooh as a child and as he matured, he didn’t need him anymore”
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
- Beautiful Girls
The thing is; he’s always been attractive. (Even if he does say so himself).
He was that guy. The one whom all the girls got up and came to school for in the morning. And he only verbatim remembers that line from ‘Never Been Kissed’ because it was background noise during his make-out session with the Prom Queen, and has seeped into his subconscious. Obviously.
He would’ve been voted Prom King (his mother said so, and his mother was mostly right about him being awesome so she was probably right about everything else as well), but he was always too cool to attend something that was nothing more than a lame, over-glorified social-gathering of a bunch of morons with abnormally low IQ’s and their girlfriends’ bra sizes to match.
(He gate-crashed it later, but that was different. Gate-crashing is cool).
-
College was…well, college was. As in, over and done with. That’s the whole point, right? So what if he didn’t get that degree, he was too fucking busy and vice-versa, thank you very much.
-
“Do you love me, Jeff?”
“Of course I love you.”
Seriously, there are guys who have scruples about saying crap like this without ‘meaning’ it? Idiots. Every lawyer worth his salt knows that ignorance of the law is not a valid defence for any crime. And ‘guys will say anything to get a girl into bed’- that’s a law. The woman’s a lawyer. Anybody with time to spare and no life to speak of can do the math.
-
He gets disbarred. (He calls his mother and talks to her for an hour about the weather and doesn’t tell her. Maybe it’s because he’s deep and hurting and needs her. Or, you know, not.)
-
Community College is everything he expects it to be-goddamned awful. There are the motivational speeches on loudspeakers and people wandering about trying to make something of their lives and it’d be tragic if it wasn’t so hilarious.
He isn’t going to be ‘one of them’ and ‘a part of the community’ (stealing phrases from the Dean’s speech is easier than having to exert himself in being original). He’s Jeff fucking Winger and he’s going to sail through this and spend the rest of his life pretending that he’d lost his memory somewhere on a vacation in Hawaii and spent the next four years as the head of a tribal community. In which wearing clothes was considered a mark of disrespect for the Good Lord who, if He’d wanted us to wear clothes, would have made us with clothes.
He’s Jeff Winger, and this is what he does best. Bullshit.
-
He can’t decide exactly where Britta Perry falls on the hot/crazy scale (he came up with that before Barney Stinson was conceived of, and he means the character and not the actor, because Jesus, he’s not that old).
She thinks Gitmo (and the fact that she uses the military pet name for Guantanamo Bay obviously puts the crazy somewhere high on the x-axis) is her own personal business, but then she also has blonde hair that doesn’t come from a bottle (and he knows that, because he’s a connoisseur in women. The only reason he didn’t graduate was because they didn’t have the right classes. He would’ve been a willing student in ‘Understanding Women 101’.
Fuck that, he could’ve been a teacher in ‘Understanding Women 101’, and he’d have made more money than all those law firms that rejected his degree, combined). Basically, it’s long legs versus an annoying need to ‘make the world a better place’.
The legs win. The legs always win, his father had told him. (Okay, so not technically, but he’s pretty sure that if his father wasn’t a bastard, who’d impregnated his mother and then left her, he’d would have gotten around to telling him that eventually).
-
And then there’s Abed, and Troy, and Pierce, and Shirley and Britta and Annie and…well, him, and his life is suddenly Brady Bunch: The Incestuous, Dysfunctional Version and it sucks.
Caring sucks. Not that he does. Care, that is. Because he does. N’t. Doesn’t. Did you somehow miss the part where he's Jeff Winger?
-
So, Annie Edison.
There are two things he notices immediately; she has bigger breasts than Britta and her crazy, underneath that girl-next-door thing, is off-the-charts.
And she’s eighteen.
And he’s a hell lot of things but he’s not a pedophile so he’s pretty sure those two facts cancel each other out, and Annie Edison is therefore, just someone who exists peripherally in that master-plan of getting into Britta’s pants.
(He’d be lying if he said he doesn’t feel the slightest regret about her being out of the range of ‘fair play’, though, because seriously, girls who did not get hot until after high school are such a special breed of desperate that it’s almost a crime not to exploit the situation.)
He doesn’t though. He doesn’t believe in morality and ethics (or any difference between the two, whatever his sociology teacher might have said), but her eyes are too wide, so he doesn’t.
-
And she’s opening her hair and he thinks something stupid like- maybe Troy should see her now. Which is obviously the right thing to think, because anybody with slight sensory perception can see that she thinks she’s in love with him, and he remembers her as that girl in high school whom he doesn’t remember. And then he thinks he wants to lay her across that table and… and god, he’s turned on by an eighteen year old, he needs a therapist.
And then later when she kisses him, with too much force and all the bruising excitement of a teenager, intent on the point she’s making, he thinks…well, he doesn’t think.
-
She pretends like it doesn’t happen and he could tell her that he can still see it in the way her eyes shift slightly to the left when she talks to him and the way she doesn’t touch him in that Annie way that she touches everybody, but then he’ll have to admit he’s spending his time noticing stupid things like that, and he refuses to admit that because it isn’t there to admit in the first place, and that’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
(He found out at an early age that if he talked about it long enough, he could convince anybody of anything, even himself. It’s a handy skill).
-
He sleeps with Britta on the table that has marked every one of their sexually tense stare-downs, and there’s a lot of paint, even if his brain isn’t functioning enough for him to remember where it’s coming from, and there’s just the sound of skin against skin and those little sounds she makes when he does that. He marks it down for future reference. The world doesn’t explode.
Good thing he’s lived long enough to not expect it to.
(Annie probably still expects it to, even after the whole fiasco with the gay guy, because she’s the romance novel optimist. He’s not actually thinking about Annie, he’s thinking about the world exploding and human thought doesn’t have linear movement or causal connection so basically the point is…fuck it, there’s no point).
-
There’s this one moment he lets himself go and kisses her, hard, and forgets she’s that same girl who ties her hair in high ponytails and thinks that love makes the world go round, but she was going away, okay, and now she isn’t and she’s chosen h…them over that small-nippled, song-writing jerk, and it’s so-
He ignores her throughout summer.
-
The important thing to note here is that he’s not jealous. He has never in his life been jealous, because everything that belongs to him automatically gravitates towards him (and so he called women ‘things’, whatever, feminists to the left please) and the rest- he doesn’t want ownership rights over them anyway, occasional test drives, but even then they’re obviously getting more out of it than him. So, therefore, he is not jealous of Vaughn or Rich or whoever it is she thinks she’s in love with now.
(Also, Rich is older than him; obviously somebody forgot their creep-detector in middle of the lake).
The thing is; he isn’t jealous, it just…irritates him. It isn’t the centre of his universe obviously, just that maddening music from the other side of the wall which isn’t loud enough to appreciate nor soft enough to ignore and all it is, is just really, fucking annoying in the way that makes him want to punch somebody’s face in (he’s pretty sure he lost the metaphor somewhere along the way, but Rich being punched is just as good an ending).
-
He’s running and there’s so much rain and he’s going to get there and there’s that ‘love of a beautiful woman’ speech running through his head…and she’s nineteen. As, in barely legal. And five years later she’s going to grow up and realize that he isn’t the only man in the world who looks like that and talks like so, and five years later he’s still going to be that guy who falls for her tears and Disney faces and it really, really sucks.
He stops.
(He changes directions halfway through and ends somewhere else because, well, he’s Jeff Winger and this is what he’s always been best at. Bullshit).