fic: Soft Defenses (1/1)
title: Soft Defenses (1/1)
fandom: Community
pairing: Annie/Jeff
rating: PG
word count: 2,846
spoilers: Through 2.09 Conspiracy Theories and Soft Defenses/Interior Design
a/n: So, this is what I'm posting for redbrunja's Advent Calendar fic request, even though it literally has zero things to do with her prompt aside from the fandom and pairing. Sorry love, but I just couldn't not write this. That said, these fewer-than-three-thousand words were SO HARD to write in places, but I want to say thank you to my beta dearygirl for being insightful and awesome, and also to crackers4jenn for continually nudging/begging/informing capslockingly how excited she was for it :)
Jeff slides into his seat at the study room table across from Annie and she jumps, startled.
“What are you doing here? I thought you had a class at this time?”
“Test, finished early. Annie.”
Annie follows the lead of Jeff’s lean in and intense expression. She raises an eyebrow and sets down her pencil, folding her hands over her notebook.
“Jeff.”
“I have a . . . proposition for you. On a scale of one to ten, how would you feel about teaching the Dean a lesson?”
Annie slouches a little and tilts her head accusingly. “Jeff,” she sighs, “is this about the Dean auditing your class schedule?”
“No, Annie, this is about escaping the tyranny of a community college administrator with too much time on his hands and no sense of boundaries when it comes to my personal space.”
Annie exhales through her nose and narrows her eyes at Jeff, who raises his eyebrows back.
“He’s just trying to do his job. And by the way, I still don’t believe that you’re actually doing an independent study.”
Jeff “hmpfs” noncommittally. “So you’re pretty set in your principals then, huh?”
Annie nods once, curtly and with haughty precision.
“Hm, interesting.”
Jeff produces a large paper bag from beneath the table. Annie stares quizzically at it, wondering how she didn’t notice it before. Jeff must have put some effort into sneaking up on her. He folds his arms over his chest and waits.
“What’s in the bag?”
“Why don’t you open it and find out?”
“Is it for me?”
“Of course it’s for you, why else would - just open the damn bag Annie.”
He shoves the bag closer to her and she delicately uncrinkles the folded-over. When the bag is open she cautiously rises from her seat to peer over the edge of the bag. Jeff watches, attempting to hold up his grumpy façade - and failing. When she lets out a curious little “Oh!” and a blush starts to spread over her cheeks he can’t help but smile nervously.
Annie reaches into the bag slowly and when she withdraws her hand she’s holding an eight-pack of purple pens. She glances over the packaging, and then her eyes flick to Jeff’s face as she reaches back into the bag and pulls out a handful of packages this time, all purple pens in different styles.
Gel ink, ball point, fine tip, retractable, and even a few with erasable ink along with a field of purple flower erasers. After two more handfuls she picks up the bag and upends it, spilling the last few packages onto the table on top of the pile already there.
“You got me pens,” she says with a kind of cautious delight laced through her voice.
“Yeah,” Jeff mutters, suddenly sheepish.
“. . . so many.”
“Yeah, that was all they had.”
“What?”
“I got all of the pens they had. All the purple ones.”
“All of them?”
“All of them. The Greendale Staples is officially out of purple ink-dispensing writing utensils.”
“Jeff, that’s so . . .” Annie trails off and stares at him with a quickly growing smile lighting up her face and perhaps a few sparkling tears collecting in her eyes.
“Kinda makes you feel like you might misplace a principal or two, what with all the pens you’ll be carrying around, no?”
Annie clenches her jaw and tries to summon up a glare, but she just ends up staring into Jeff’s eyes with glowing, mildly exasperated energy. Jeff smiles back widely, totally convinced he’s won.
“You want me to lie to an administrator,” she whispers, scandalized, even as her fingers skitter over the pile of pens and wrap around one with a particularly cushy triangular rubber grip
“I want you to be part of an exciting opportunity to educate a fellow Human Being on some of the finer points of socially acceptable involvement with students.” Then, for the real clincher, Jeff continues, “. . . and I want you to make up for tattling to the Dean about my independent study in the first place.”
“Jeff, how do you even-”
He cuts her off with an incredulous look.
Annie rolls her eyes a little. “Okay fine, it was me,” she relents instantly.
Jeff nods once and extends a hand dramatically, “Thank you,” he intones with closed eyes.
“But you brought it on yourself by trying to cheat the system in the first place!” She can’t resist adding. She would be wagging a finger if she weren’t busy unzipping her backpack and shoving fistful after fistful of purple pens inside.
_
“Okay, so then it turns out, I have a gun too!”
“You forgot to say spoiler alert.”
“You mean nerd alert?”
They say it in unison: “Alert-nerd.”
Annie pauses and lifts the (purple) pen from her paper, rereading the script of their showdown with the Dean and Professor Professorson to herself.
She slips the tip of the pen between her lips to tap it lightly against her teeth and Jeff watches, at once unreasonably pleased and strikingly uncomfortable. He just sits for a moment, slouching against the booth in Greendale’s cafeteria, watching with fascination as Annie’s perpetually pink lips close and open slightly over the purple plastic of the pen’s barrel.
He remembers, with a kind of alarming clarity, exactly how it felt to kiss her - soft mouth tart with punch from the dance’s refreshments table, the insistent touch of her hands sliding over his shoulders and the easy synchronicity they’d slid into the longer the kiss had gone on.
Here he realizes another reason that kiss has been on his mind; when he’d tackled her in the study room as the tiny car on her diorama tiny-exploded and he hugely over reacted, he’d felt her hands creeping up over his shoulders as they lay there as if she was inviting him to just hang out on top of her for a while.
He notes with resign that he was right in his fear that kissing Annie the night of the Tranny Dance had unleashed some sort of unabashedly affectionate, emotionally confusing, nubile monster of a woman.
He plucks a blueberry from the Styrofoam bowl of mixed fruit sitting on the table between them and pops it in his mouth, chewing vigorously. When he swallows it feels like a boulder hitting his stomach.
“So, according to your little script there, what’s the motivation to team up with me and double cross Pelton?”
“That I’m in love with you!”
Jeff feels his heart shudder to a stop.
It takes probably no more than a fraction of a second, but it feels like longer to Jeff, who’s watching his life flash before his eyes, before Annie adds with no small dose of mania in her voice, “For the purposes of the scene! Of course. Not- I’m not really - because . . . you’re kind of gross. And also the dad of the group. And-”
“Yep,” Jeff barks out on a giant exhaled breath of relief. “All that. Very good reasons. To . . . not. Hey, prop guns! We need four, right? Where are you gonna . . . y’know, hide those things?”
Annie’s cheeks blush and her eyes drop from his to rake down his chest and over the top of the table before she swallows and yanks some calm from an unknown depth of her psyche. She draws a line beneath a few words already embellished with a squiggly speech bubble and quotation marks drawn with pairs of hearts with little tails on the ends.
“I’ve got it under control,” she answers with a confident, Annie Edison, Organizer Extraordinaire, At Your Service smile.
“Good, good,” Jeff nods robotically.
He stares at the table blankly, again caught up reliving the night of the Tranny Dance - sighing breaths and her heels clicking on the asphalt beneath them - and he shakes one hand under the table as if he could slough off the sense-memory of her soft hair when he’d cupped the back of her head and she’d raised up higher on her tip toes and pressed up against his chest.
“Well, good, if you’ve got everything under control,” here he inserts a meaningful pause and she looks up, wide eyed. They stare at each other. “I gotta, uh, go, I’ll just. Yeah.”
Annie waves him off, quickly reburying herself in her notebook, the page filling quickly with her neat handwriting. “Don’t forget,” she calls after him, “study room at seven thirty sharp to get ready!”
“Yeah, I’ll be there,” Jeff replies distractedly. He power walks away, toward the cafeteria exit, the drama department to find the prop guns, and ultimately to his car to bang his head against the steering wheel in a violent fit of relief, confounding disappointment, and general emotional panic.
Once Jeff has made his way through the cafeteria doors Annie slumps down in her seat and lets out a shaky sigh. She’d felt herself lift off on a cathartic high of dramatic creativity as she plotted out the scene she and Jeff would play for the Dean. Making a script of what she would say to Jeff, framing it in acting and espionage, made her bolder.
But when her eyes flicked over Jeff’s stunned expression as she backtracked from her declaration she’d realized that was how it always seemed to be with them. She felt herself pushing with him, pushing for more, stretching for something deeper and further. Until the Tranny Dance she’d been reaching blindly, tugging on threads of tension and pulling until a moment began to unravel, never remotely sure what she expected to find at the end.
Once he’d kissed her, really, really kissed her, like he was pouring everything into her and drowning with her in it all at once, she’d had an overwhelming dose of clarity. Clarity that had sent her home that night with a full and serene feeling in her chest even though Jeff’s terrified expression as he’d backed away from her should have tripped her into panic mode.
With the time and distance of summer she had figured out Jeff. She had figured out herself. She had come nowhere near figuring out herself and Jeff, in combination. There was too much there, too many silent looks filled with words, too many conversations of self-revelation, too many easy moments of affection for her to quantify the meaning or direction of it all.
Still - as she sits in Greendale’s cafeteria - like the number of purple pens in her backpack, it’s too much. It’s everything.
Annie takes a deep breath and places a tiny, purple period at the end of a line of dialogue and stage direction.
“ANNIE: Well guess what? Annie’s got a gun.
ANNIE shoots JEFF in the chest three times, and he falls to the floor, dead.”
_
It all starts rushing too fast after “I love you.”
Yeah, he knew that was what she was going to say. The preview in the cafeteria had alerted him to it, but this was still inherently and startlingly different this time around. Her voice cracks in his ear, low with tears, suppressed rage and hurt, and this is exactly the kind of thing he has always, always avoided.
He takes a few steps back, and she looms forward, tiny and red-faced and crying and then panic and regret are lacing themselves around his lungs and he can’t breathe because his own carefully-constructed script wherein kissing her (the first time, the next time, any time) was not a huge deal is crumbling fast and hard. There is no avoiding her, no avoiding himself, now. Even though the gun is fake, and the class was fake, Annie is too real. She is real, and she is hurt, and he was the cause.
It’s a relief when he feels the blanks hit his chest and stomach, even as the thought passes through his mind that the sweater he’s wearing is now ruined with holes and fake blood.
_
It’s a relief when the gun kicks in her hands and Jeff slumps to the floor.
Jeff Winger had had the nerve to come into Annie’s life and be maddeningly, stubbornly indefinable, and her outpouring of frustration was unstoppable once she’d gone off script. But saying it all and seeing his brow furrow and his eyes darken with fear and concern makes her feel the weight of it a little less.
She knows now that this confusing, affecting everything between them is there for him too. If it weren’t, if she’d inflated the whole thing herself and it had all just been meaningless kisses between acquaintances, then Jeff would never have that look on his face.
_
Jeff lays still and crumpled on the floor. The Dean’s yawps of grief register foggily as his mind reels. He hears Annie arguing with the Dean, asking why he would get involved if he “loved Jeff Winger so much.” Jeff almost smiles at her tone, her “what’s so great about Gross Jeff Winger, huh?” tone. It’s in that moment and the few following that he realizes all his fear and panic had been misplaced.
She reaches a hand out to help him up, interrupting his scattered thoughts, and Jeff takes it even though he could easily give a slight tug and have her toppling onto the floor with him. But Annie, little Annie, yanks him up from the floor, and one thought clears out the others and stands bright and simple in his head: she’s okay.
_
Later, it’s simpler again. They share fries.
Everyone has gathered in the blanket fort and Shirley and Pierce showed up with food - and t-shirts, inexplicably - and so they settled in a lopsided circle, lounging and eating and talking. Annie and Jeff’s cups are sitting next to each other in front of her bended knees and they keep getting mixed up. She takes a drink from one and grimaces, bumping his arm with the back of her hand as she holds the cup out to him.
“What?”
“Diet,” she says, with her mouth upended and her nose wrinkled. He smiles at her expression and takes the cup.
“You’re . . . adorable,” he mutters, and with his head inclined toward her and the rest of the group involved in their own conversations she’s the only one who hears him. She coughs, choking a little on her mouthful of soda.
She doesn’t ask him to repeat himself, just takes the napkin he offers her, and dabs at her mouth. Her gaze skips around in front of her, landing on Britta’s shoe, Troy’s animated hand gestures, Pierce’s watch, and she feels an overwhelming rush of nerves and heat. Next to her, Jeff clears his throat and shakes the cardboard box of fries at her. She takes one and smiles at him from the corner of her eye.
Moments later, the fort is tumbling down around them, and they’re suddenly enveloped in a light pink swirling cloud of cotton. Jeff’s hand shoots out and fists in the material and she’s too caught up staring at his lips, and the prickly hairs of stubble on his upper lip and chin to realize what he’s doing until their lips crash together. It’s a kiss that’s fast, a peck really, closed-mouthed, just motion forward and immediately back.
He’s smiling, looking embarrassed, and he widens his eyes and murmurs, “Here we go again,” with a kind of teasing chagrin.
In the few seconds after he’s spoken and she has yet to reply, she watches his eyes shade instantaneously from humorous to shocked to regretful.
She shakes her head and smiles, big and bright, and it feels almost too wide, like she’s forcing it, but then he’s just smiling back at her and leaning down and nudging her shoulder with his chin. She watches, a slowed-down silent moment, while he lifts his head and rests his lips against her shoulder before puckering them out in another kiss. His hair gel smells fresh and mildly citrusy, his eye lashes are longer than she’s ever noticed. She reaches up and touches his jaw, and his stubble pricks softly at her palm.
Jeff leans away and sits up straighter and Annie’s hand slips from his face. He glances at her once more, blinks slowly, and his smile has shifted to a half-cocked grin. He winks. She lets out a laugh, and that exact same full, serene feeling fills her chest, months old and brand new all over again.
Jeff lets go of the fistful of sheet, crawls up and out of their fort, and reaches a hand back in to help her out.
As her fingers slip out of his and she reaches up to smooth down her hair, she slides her tongue over her lips quickly. She can’t quite taste him like she could before - the first time, the second time.
She takes a deep breath and lets it out in a rush, then takes his offered elbow and they begin to pick their way through the mass fluffy destruction of the hallway.
fandom: Community
pairing: Annie/Jeff
rating: PG
word count: 2,846
spoilers: Through 2.09 Conspiracy Theories and Soft Defenses/Interior Design
a/n: So, this is what I'm posting for redbrunja's Advent Calendar fic request, even though it literally has zero things to do with her prompt aside from the fandom and pairing. Sorry love, but I just couldn't not write this. That said, these fewer-than-three-thousand words were SO HARD to write in places, but I want to say thank you to my beta dearygirl for being insightful and awesome, and also to crackers4jenn for continually nudging/begging/informing capslockingly how excited she was for it :)
Jeff slides into his seat at the study room table across from Annie and she jumps, startled.
“What are you doing here? I thought you had a class at this time?”
“Test, finished early. Annie.”
Annie follows the lead of Jeff’s lean in and intense expression. She raises an eyebrow and sets down her pencil, folding her hands over her notebook.
“Jeff.”
“I have a . . . proposition for you. On a scale of one to ten, how would you feel about teaching the Dean a lesson?”
Annie slouches a little and tilts her head accusingly. “Jeff,” she sighs, “is this about the Dean auditing your class schedule?”
“No, Annie, this is about escaping the tyranny of a community college administrator with too much time on his hands and no sense of boundaries when it comes to my personal space.”
Annie exhales through her nose and narrows her eyes at Jeff, who raises his eyebrows back.
“He’s just trying to do his job. And by the way, I still don’t believe that you’re actually doing an independent study.”
Jeff “hmpfs” noncommittally. “So you’re pretty set in your principals then, huh?”
Annie nods once, curtly and with haughty precision.
“Hm, interesting.”
Jeff produces a large paper bag from beneath the table. Annie stares quizzically at it, wondering how she didn’t notice it before. Jeff must have put some effort into sneaking up on her. He folds his arms over his chest and waits.
“What’s in the bag?”
“Why don’t you open it and find out?”
“Is it for me?”
“Of course it’s for you, why else would - just open the damn bag Annie.”
He shoves the bag closer to her and she delicately uncrinkles the folded-over. When the bag is open she cautiously rises from her seat to peer over the edge of the bag. Jeff watches, attempting to hold up his grumpy façade - and failing. When she lets out a curious little “Oh!” and a blush starts to spread over her cheeks he can’t help but smile nervously.
Annie reaches into the bag slowly and when she withdraws her hand she’s holding an eight-pack of purple pens. She glances over the packaging, and then her eyes flick to Jeff’s face as she reaches back into the bag and pulls out a handful of packages this time, all purple pens in different styles.
Gel ink, ball point, fine tip, retractable, and even a few with erasable ink along with a field of purple flower erasers. After two more handfuls she picks up the bag and upends it, spilling the last few packages onto the table on top of the pile already there.
“You got me pens,” she says with a kind of cautious delight laced through her voice.
“Yeah,” Jeff mutters, suddenly sheepish.
“. . . so many.”
“Yeah, that was all they had.”
“What?”
“I got all of the pens they had. All the purple ones.”
“All of them?”
“All of them. The Greendale Staples is officially out of purple ink-dispensing writing utensils.”
“Jeff, that’s so . . .” Annie trails off and stares at him with a quickly growing smile lighting up her face and perhaps a few sparkling tears collecting in her eyes.
“Kinda makes you feel like you might misplace a principal or two, what with all the pens you’ll be carrying around, no?”
Annie clenches her jaw and tries to summon up a glare, but she just ends up staring into Jeff’s eyes with glowing, mildly exasperated energy. Jeff smiles back widely, totally convinced he’s won.
“You want me to lie to an administrator,” she whispers, scandalized, even as her fingers skitter over the pile of pens and wrap around one with a particularly cushy triangular rubber grip
“I want you to be part of an exciting opportunity to educate a fellow Human Being on some of the finer points of socially acceptable involvement with students.” Then, for the real clincher, Jeff continues, “. . . and I want you to make up for tattling to the Dean about my independent study in the first place.”
“Jeff, how do you even-”
He cuts her off with an incredulous look.
Annie rolls her eyes a little. “Okay fine, it was me,” she relents instantly.
Jeff nods once and extends a hand dramatically, “Thank you,” he intones with closed eyes.
“But you brought it on yourself by trying to cheat the system in the first place!” She can’t resist adding. She would be wagging a finger if she weren’t busy unzipping her backpack and shoving fistful after fistful of purple pens inside.
_
“Okay, so then it turns out, I have a gun too!”
“You forgot to say spoiler alert.”
“You mean nerd alert?”
They say it in unison: “Alert-nerd.”
Annie pauses and lifts the (purple) pen from her paper, rereading the script of their showdown with the Dean and Professor Professorson to herself.
She slips the tip of the pen between her lips to tap it lightly against her teeth and Jeff watches, at once unreasonably pleased and strikingly uncomfortable. He just sits for a moment, slouching against the booth in Greendale’s cafeteria, watching with fascination as Annie’s perpetually pink lips close and open slightly over the purple plastic of the pen’s barrel.
He remembers, with a kind of alarming clarity, exactly how it felt to kiss her - soft mouth tart with punch from the dance’s refreshments table, the insistent touch of her hands sliding over his shoulders and the easy synchronicity they’d slid into the longer the kiss had gone on.
Here he realizes another reason that kiss has been on his mind; when he’d tackled her in the study room as the tiny car on her diorama tiny-exploded and he hugely over reacted, he’d felt her hands creeping up over his shoulders as they lay there as if she was inviting him to just hang out on top of her for a while.
He notes with resign that he was right in his fear that kissing Annie the night of the Tranny Dance had unleashed some sort of unabashedly affectionate, emotionally confusing, nubile monster of a woman.
He plucks a blueberry from the Styrofoam bowl of mixed fruit sitting on the table between them and pops it in his mouth, chewing vigorously. When he swallows it feels like a boulder hitting his stomach.
“So, according to your little script there, what’s the motivation to team up with me and double cross Pelton?”
“That I’m in love with you!”
Jeff feels his heart shudder to a stop.
It takes probably no more than a fraction of a second, but it feels like longer to Jeff, who’s watching his life flash before his eyes, before Annie adds with no small dose of mania in her voice, “For the purposes of the scene! Of course. Not- I’m not really - because . . . you’re kind of gross. And also the dad of the group. And-”
“Yep,” Jeff barks out on a giant exhaled breath of relief. “All that. Very good reasons. To . . . not. Hey, prop guns! We need four, right? Where are you gonna . . . y’know, hide those things?”
Annie’s cheeks blush and her eyes drop from his to rake down his chest and over the top of the table before she swallows and yanks some calm from an unknown depth of her psyche. She draws a line beneath a few words already embellished with a squiggly speech bubble and quotation marks drawn with pairs of hearts with little tails on the ends.
“I’ve got it under control,” she answers with a confident, Annie Edison, Organizer Extraordinaire, At Your Service smile.
“Good, good,” Jeff nods robotically.
He stares at the table blankly, again caught up reliving the night of the Tranny Dance - sighing breaths and her heels clicking on the asphalt beneath them - and he shakes one hand under the table as if he could slough off the sense-memory of her soft hair when he’d cupped the back of her head and she’d raised up higher on her tip toes and pressed up against his chest.
“Well, good, if you’ve got everything under control,” here he inserts a meaningful pause and she looks up, wide eyed. They stare at each other. “I gotta, uh, go, I’ll just. Yeah.”
Annie waves him off, quickly reburying herself in her notebook, the page filling quickly with her neat handwriting. “Don’t forget,” she calls after him, “study room at seven thirty sharp to get ready!”
“Yeah, I’ll be there,” Jeff replies distractedly. He power walks away, toward the cafeteria exit, the drama department to find the prop guns, and ultimately to his car to bang his head against the steering wheel in a violent fit of relief, confounding disappointment, and general emotional panic.
Once Jeff has made his way through the cafeteria doors Annie slumps down in her seat and lets out a shaky sigh. She’d felt herself lift off on a cathartic high of dramatic creativity as she plotted out the scene she and Jeff would play for the Dean. Making a script of what she would say to Jeff, framing it in acting and espionage, made her bolder.
But when her eyes flicked over Jeff’s stunned expression as she backtracked from her declaration she’d realized that was how it always seemed to be with them. She felt herself pushing with him, pushing for more, stretching for something deeper and further. Until the Tranny Dance she’d been reaching blindly, tugging on threads of tension and pulling until a moment began to unravel, never remotely sure what she expected to find at the end.
Once he’d kissed her, really, really kissed her, like he was pouring everything into her and drowning with her in it all at once, she’d had an overwhelming dose of clarity. Clarity that had sent her home that night with a full and serene feeling in her chest even though Jeff’s terrified expression as he’d backed away from her should have tripped her into panic mode.
With the time and distance of summer she had figured out Jeff. She had figured out herself. She had come nowhere near figuring out herself and Jeff, in combination. There was too much there, too many silent looks filled with words, too many conversations of self-revelation, too many easy moments of affection for her to quantify the meaning or direction of it all.
Still - as she sits in Greendale’s cafeteria - like the number of purple pens in her backpack, it’s too much. It’s everything.
Annie takes a deep breath and places a tiny, purple period at the end of a line of dialogue and stage direction.
“ANNIE: Well guess what? Annie’s got a gun.
ANNIE shoots JEFF in the chest three times, and he falls to the floor, dead.”
_
It all starts rushing too fast after “I love you.”
Yeah, he knew that was what she was going to say. The preview in the cafeteria had alerted him to it, but this was still inherently and startlingly different this time around. Her voice cracks in his ear, low with tears, suppressed rage and hurt, and this is exactly the kind of thing he has always, always avoided.
He takes a few steps back, and she looms forward, tiny and red-faced and crying and then panic and regret are lacing themselves around his lungs and he can’t breathe because his own carefully-constructed script wherein kissing her (the first time, the next time, any time) was not a huge deal is crumbling fast and hard. There is no avoiding her, no avoiding himself, now. Even though the gun is fake, and the class was fake, Annie is too real. She is real, and she is hurt, and he was the cause.
It’s a relief when he feels the blanks hit his chest and stomach, even as the thought passes through his mind that the sweater he’s wearing is now ruined with holes and fake blood.
_
It’s a relief when the gun kicks in her hands and Jeff slumps to the floor.
Jeff Winger had had the nerve to come into Annie’s life and be maddeningly, stubbornly indefinable, and her outpouring of frustration was unstoppable once she’d gone off script. But saying it all and seeing his brow furrow and his eyes darken with fear and concern makes her feel the weight of it a little less.
She knows now that this confusing, affecting everything between them is there for him too. If it weren’t, if she’d inflated the whole thing herself and it had all just been meaningless kisses between acquaintances, then Jeff would never have that look on his face.
_
Jeff lays still and crumpled on the floor. The Dean’s yawps of grief register foggily as his mind reels. He hears Annie arguing with the Dean, asking why he would get involved if he “loved Jeff Winger so much.” Jeff almost smiles at her tone, her “what’s so great about Gross Jeff Winger, huh?” tone. It’s in that moment and the few following that he realizes all his fear and panic had been misplaced.
She reaches a hand out to help him up, interrupting his scattered thoughts, and Jeff takes it even though he could easily give a slight tug and have her toppling onto the floor with him. But Annie, little Annie, yanks him up from the floor, and one thought clears out the others and stands bright and simple in his head: she’s okay.
_
Later, it’s simpler again. They share fries.
Everyone has gathered in the blanket fort and Shirley and Pierce showed up with food - and t-shirts, inexplicably - and so they settled in a lopsided circle, lounging and eating and talking. Annie and Jeff’s cups are sitting next to each other in front of her bended knees and they keep getting mixed up. She takes a drink from one and grimaces, bumping his arm with the back of her hand as she holds the cup out to him.
“What?”
“Diet,” she says, with her mouth upended and her nose wrinkled. He smiles at her expression and takes the cup.
“You’re . . . adorable,” he mutters, and with his head inclined toward her and the rest of the group involved in their own conversations she’s the only one who hears him. She coughs, choking a little on her mouthful of soda.
She doesn’t ask him to repeat himself, just takes the napkin he offers her, and dabs at her mouth. Her gaze skips around in front of her, landing on Britta’s shoe, Troy’s animated hand gestures, Pierce’s watch, and she feels an overwhelming rush of nerves and heat. Next to her, Jeff clears his throat and shakes the cardboard box of fries at her. She takes one and smiles at him from the corner of her eye.
Moments later, the fort is tumbling down around them, and they’re suddenly enveloped in a light pink swirling cloud of cotton. Jeff’s hand shoots out and fists in the material and she’s too caught up staring at his lips, and the prickly hairs of stubble on his upper lip and chin to realize what he’s doing until their lips crash together. It’s a kiss that’s fast, a peck really, closed-mouthed, just motion forward and immediately back.
He’s smiling, looking embarrassed, and he widens his eyes and murmurs, “Here we go again,” with a kind of teasing chagrin.
In the few seconds after he’s spoken and she has yet to reply, she watches his eyes shade instantaneously from humorous to shocked to regretful.
She shakes her head and smiles, big and bright, and it feels almost too wide, like she’s forcing it, but then he’s just smiling back at her and leaning down and nudging her shoulder with his chin. She watches, a slowed-down silent moment, while he lifts his head and rests his lips against her shoulder before puckering them out in another kiss. His hair gel smells fresh and mildly citrusy, his eye lashes are longer than she’s ever noticed. She reaches up and touches his jaw, and his stubble pricks softly at her palm.
Jeff leans away and sits up straighter and Annie’s hand slips from his face. He glances at her once more, blinks slowly, and his smile has shifted to a half-cocked grin. He winks. She lets out a laugh, and that exact same full, serene feeling fills her chest, months old and brand new all over again.
Jeff lets go of the fistful of sheet, crawls up and out of their fort, and reaches a hand back in to help her out.
As her fingers slip out of his and she reaches up to smooth down her hair, she slides her tongue over her lips quickly. She can’t quite taste him like she could before - the first time, the second time.
She takes a deep breath and lets it out in a rush, then takes his offered elbow and they begin to pick their way through the mass fluffy destruction of the hallway.