Five Times They Slept Together Before "Paradigms of Human Memory" and One Time They Didn't After
(Written for community_tv 's Britta Perry fanworks meme, and trucherrygirl's prompt in this post.)
TITLE: 5 Times They Slept Together Before "Paradigms of Human Memory" and One Time They Didn't After
PAIRING: Jeff/Britta
RATING: R
Twice in the fall they break into Jeff's old office at the Gazette-Journal-Mirror, which is now someone else's office, someone who keeps photos of a young family (2.5 kids, a dog, a white picket fence, the whole shebang) on the desk. Jeff tips the pictures over and Britta pushes him into the faux leather chair and when they're done she carefully flips the photos upright again.
Once it's wintertime and he gives her a ride home and they sit idling at the curb in front of her apartment for a long time, just talking at first, probably looking, to the neighbors, like really terrible drug dealers. (This is what Britta imagines. To the neighbors they look like what they are: fully-grown adults steaming up the windows of a not-new Lexus. Fully-grown adults not grownup enough to take it inside.)
Once it's the day after Pierce goes to rehab and Britta's home on the couch with dim sum, her knitting, her cats, a blanket, and something with subtitles on Netflix Instant when Jeff lets himself in. (She'd forgotten she'd given him a key ages ago, when her plants needed watering when she was out of town and at the very beginning of when this thing, whatever they're doing, had begun to feel like more than just hooking up and laughing and hooking up again.) His hair's wet and he smells like expensive soap and he crowds onto her couch, under her blanket, complaining about the traffic, about Anthropology, about how lately nobody can tie anything other than a four-in-hand knot and it's goddamn boring, Britta, can't people even try to be surprising? And all of a sudden its high school again and she's giving a handjob to a pretty, whiny boy under a blanket on an ugly couch, in an attempt to shut him up because sometimes it's so much better when he's not talking. But, unlike high school, this pretty, whiny boy has game, and later on she's the one who's shut up, who has lost her voice completely, who is breathless beneath him in the dark.
(Like high school, though, they have another go ten minutes later, and then he goes and gets them glasses of water and comes back and tells her that her sex hair is really hot. His sex hair is ridiculous but she doesn't say so, because after how upset he was about maybe meeting his father it's such a relief to see him as happy as he is now, in her bed, naked and relaxed and, okay, exceptionally good looking.)
(She wakes up really early, comically early, even, because his arm across her waist is basically just a big, warm slab of meat weighing her down, and she climbs out of bed and goes into the kitchen, where she sits for a long time eating milkless cereal out of a bowl with one hand and scrolling through Google Images and The Sartorialist and Wikipedia with the other.)
(He wakes up much later, slowly, scrunching a hand in the bedsheets where she should be and realizing she isn't there because she has a morning class on Early Modern Critical Anarcho-Feminist Theory or something like that. And it isn't until after he's done his morning pushups and eaten a protein bar out of the stash he keeps in her fruit bowl--for a vegetarian she never has very much fruit around--that he finds the neatly half-Windsored tie threaded through his keyring. It's one of his ties, one of his favorites, actually, and he's not sure if he left it here or if she stole it, but it makes the walk of shame out to his car not really a walk of shame at all, and he whistles all the way to school.)
(The whistling stops when the hard-of-hearing troglodytes at Hot & Brown write Jen on his cup instead of Jeff and he has to endure a study group meeting where everyone thinks that's hilarious. This means Troy cranking his Forrest Gump impression up to 11 and Annie saying he's always somehow reminded her of Jennifer Aniston, like maybe it's their iconic mid-90's hairstyles, Shirley chiming in to say that no, it's probably the generic white people cuteness, Abed rattling off famous Jennys of entertainment history, starting with Jenny Lind--Britta the whole time grinning at him like the cat that ate the canary. After class his finds her in a hallway and pushes her up against the wall, sliding one knee between her thighs, using his height to his advantage to kiss her thoroughly, not in the least bit distracted by her hands tugging at his tie. That afternoon in Anthropology she's forced to explain away the stubble-burn on her neck as a bad reaction to a cheap necklace she bought at the school bookstore and while she's blustering her way through an explanation of why she would ever darken the door of an Evil And Faceless Corporation Run Entirely By Old White Men Jeff catches Abed scribbling something in his menstrual cycle notebook. Shit.)
Once it's the evening after the evening they agree to break it off and they somehow both end up at a dive bar that recently received a favorable review from Denver's alternative newspaper. The bar has a photobooth and when sloppy drunk they're both kind of exhibitionists so don't judge.
Once the adrenaline wears off and they're at Denny's, just the two of them, Britta having showered thoroughly back at Greendale and now swimming in one of Jeff's comfortably faded Human Beings t-shirts. Jeff sits staring down at his coffee cup, at the swirls of leftover syrup on his plate. They had talked for a while about Shirley and Andre and Ben and Ben and how fucking amazing and gross and amazing and mostly gross the whole event was, and the words had worn off at about the same time the food had arrived. Now after plowing through a mountain of flapjacks they're curled around their bottomless coffees, rain ticking against the windows and the ordinary world outside. It feels like there's nothing left to say, or there's everything to say. The silence wraps around them like a blanket and Jeff isn't sure exactly when the awkward that has always charged their interactions shifted gears into something this intense. And then Britta slips off her boots and slides her feet into his lap and before he knows it he's rubbing her stockinged ankles while they work on the crossword puzzle on the back of the menu, trying to remember the name of Reagan's first Secretary of State while outside the sun rises into a brand new day.
TITLE: 5 Times They Slept Together Before "Paradigms of Human Memory" and One Time They Didn't After
PAIRING: Jeff/Britta
RATING: R
Twice in the fall they break into Jeff's old office at the Gazette-Journal-Mirror, which is now someone else's office, someone who keeps photos of a young family (2.5 kids, a dog, a white picket fence, the whole shebang) on the desk. Jeff tips the pictures over and Britta pushes him into the faux leather chair and when they're done she carefully flips the photos upright again.
Once it's wintertime and he gives her a ride home and they sit idling at the curb in front of her apartment for a long time, just talking at first, probably looking, to the neighbors, like really terrible drug dealers. (This is what Britta imagines. To the neighbors they look like what they are: fully-grown adults steaming up the windows of a not-new Lexus. Fully-grown adults not grownup enough to take it inside.)
Once it's the day after Pierce goes to rehab and Britta's home on the couch with dim sum, her knitting, her cats, a blanket, and something with subtitles on Netflix Instant when Jeff lets himself in. (She'd forgotten she'd given him a key ages ago, when her plants needed watering when she was out of town and at the very beginning of when this thing, whatever they're doing, had begun to feel like more than just hooking up and laughing and hooking up again.) His hair's wet and he smells like expensive soap and he crowds onto her couch, under her blanket, complaining about the traffic, about Anthropology, about how lately nobody can tie anything other than a four-in-hand knot and it's goddamn boring, Britta, can't people even try to be surprising? And all of a sudden its high school again and she's giving a handjob to a pretty, whiny boy under a blanket on an ugly couch, in an attempt to shut him up because sometimes it's so much better when he's not talking. But, unlike high school, this pretty, whiny boy has game, and later on she's the one who's shut up, who has lost her voice completely, who is breathless beneath him in the dark.
(Like high school, though, they have another go ten minutes later, and then he goes and gets them glasses of water and comes back and tells her that her sex hair is really hot. His sex hair is ridiculous but she doesn't say so, because after how upset he was about maybe meeting his father it's such a relief to see him as happy as he is now, in her bed, naked and relaxed and, okay, exceptionally good looking.)
(She wakes up really early, comically early, even, because his arm across her waist is basically just a big, warm slab of meat weighing her down, and she climbs out of bed and goes into the kitchen, where she sits for a long time eating milkless cereal out of a bowl with one hand and scrolling through Google Images and The Sartorialist and Wikipedia with the other.)
(He wakes up much later, slowly, scrunching a hand in the bedsheets where she should be and realizing she isn't there because she has a morning class on Early Modern Critical Anarcho-Feminist Theory or something like that. And it isn't until after he's done his morning pushups and eaten a protein bar out of the stash he keeps in her fruit bowl--for a vegetarian she never has very much fruit around--that he finds the neatly half-Windsored tie threaded through his keyring. It's one of his ties, one of his favorites, actually, and he's not sure if he left it here or if she stole it, but it makes the walk of shame out to his car not really a walk of shame at all, and he whistles all the way to school.)
(The whistling stops when the hard-of-hearing troglodytes at Hot & Brown write Jen on his cup instead of Jeff and he has to endure a study group meeting where everyone thinks that's hilarious. This means Troy cranking his Forrest Gump impression up to 11 and Annie saying he's always somehow reminded her of Jennifer Aniston, like maybe it's their iconic mid-90's hairstyles, Shirley chiming in to say that no, it's probably the generic white people cuteness, Abed rattling off famous Jennys of entertainment history, starting with Jenny Lind--Britta the whole time grinning at him like the cat that ate the canary. After class his finds her in a hallway and pushes her up against the wall, sliding one knee between her thighs, using his height to his advantage to kiss her thoroughly, not in the least bit distracted by her hands tugging at his tie. That afternoon in Anthropology she's forced to explain away the stubble-burn on her neck as a bad reaction to a cheap necklace she bought at the school bookstore and while she's blustering her way through an explanation of why she would ever darken the door of an Evil And Faceless Corporation Run Entirely By Old White Men Jeff catches Abed scribbling something in his menstrual cycle notebook. Shit.)
Once it's the evening after the evening they agree to break it off and they somehow both end up at a dive bar that recently received a favorable review from Denver's alternative newspaper. The bar has a photobooth and when sloppy drunk they're both kind of exhibitionists so don't judge.
Once the adrenaline wears off and they're at Denny's, just the two of them, Britta having showered thoroughly back at Greendale and now swimming in one of Jeff's comfortably faded Human Beings t-shirts. Jeff sits staring down at his coffee cup, at the swirls of leftover syrup on his plate. They had talked for a while about Shirley and Andre and Ben and Ben and how fucking amazing and gross and amazing and mostly gross the whole event was, and the words had worn off at about the same time the food had arrived. Now after plowing through a mountain of flapjacks they're curled around their bottomless coffees, rain ticking against the windows and the ordinary world outside. It feels like there's nothing left to say, or there's everything to say. The silence wraps around them like a blanket and Jeff isn't sure exactly when the awkward that has always charged their interactions shifted gears into something this intense. And then Britta slips off her boots and slides her feet into his lap and before he knows it he's rubbing her stockinged ankles while they work on the crossword puzzle on the back of the menu, trying to remember the name of Reagan's first Secretary of State while outside the sun rises into a brand new day.