Fic: It's Always Open Season On Princesses Part 19
Title: It’s Always Open Season On Princesses Part 19
Spoilers: Through S2
Word Count: 2228
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Really still asking this? Really?
AN: Harry Potter!!! Also, to a lesser extent- this. Thank you guys so much for reading this thing. Still. That’s awesome. This is another shorter one, but it involves Jeff in his underwear, so still good I think? I'm going to be gone for a couple days, but I'm not dead. So...don't think I'm dead if I don't respond right away.
3:02?
Jeff groaned and rolled over. He’d been trying to sleep since midnight and hadn’t had any luck so far. Camilla and her rapidly growing staff of assistants had camped out in the dining room all evening, throwing around words like ‘crudite’ and ‘accoutrement’ and one time ‘grappa’, which was at least slightly promising. Jeff hadn’t known that planning a party of this caliber was such an intensive process. He usually just showed up, fashionably late, pressed flesh with people he needed to and then tried to have sex with the coat check girl.
He had almost been ashamed he hadn’t thought of it. Throwing a party at Pierce’s mansion should have been the first thing he’d tried to do. Well, he had been a little distracted the past couple days. Truth be told, he still was, had practically been vibrating with the need to pull Annie aside all night and finish a single conversation with her. Or touch her dress. Or kiss her again.
It would most likely be that last one.
Jeff knew at some point that he was going to actually have to tell Annie the truth, but he wanted to wait as long as he could. They were good right now, great even compared to where they’d been a week ago or a year ago. They were still undefined, but that was fine with him. Especially as long as Annie was going to let him kiss her senseless and then see her in a towel. The problem was that there were things that she eventually needed to know that she would hate him for, Jeff was pretty sure of that. He just had to know that they were good before he was going to tell her.
He really didn’t want to get slapped again.
Giving up on sleep at least for the moment, Jeff heaved himself out of bed and his eyes fell on his messenger bag. He could just get rid of the whole thing, but Pierce probably had a copy of it. He stooped to retrieve the thick packet of paper that he knew had his signature at the end of it. Who had this kind of thing drafted ahead of time anyway? It was easily thirty pages, single spaced. Jeff had read it on the flight, looking for a loophole. He hadn’t had any luck and since landing had been pre-occupied with trying to keep Annie away from every man in a fifty mile radius. He sighed and dropped the contract onto his dresser and slipped out of his room. Sparing a glance toward Annie’s closed bedroom door, Jeff made his way down the stairs. The marble was freezing under his bare feet, causing him to hop from foot to foot. Some bad television was all it would hopefully take to make him pass out. If not, he was ready willing and able to go looking for liquor.
Before Jeff could collapse onto the couch, he noticed a weak beam of light lying across the hardwood floor, stretching from the direction of the kitchen. He shuffled toward it quietly and wasn’t all that surprised with what he saw.
There she was, perched on the counter with her back to him.
“Hey,” he said softly so as not to make her jump. She jumped anyway before dropping a bowl to the counter next to her. “It’s just me. Geez, how much coffee do you drink?” She gave him a small smile as he moved toward her. She tugged up the fallen strap of her tank top and Jeff noticed just how few clothes she actually had on. A thin camisole and pajama shorts was all she appreared to be wearing. And there he was, standing in the kitchen in a tee shirt and underwear.
It had the potential to get really awkward.
Or like a letter to ’Penthouse’.
He liked those odds.
“Hi,” Annie answered. As Jeff came around the counter to face her, she smiled over at him. “Can’t sleep?”
“I keep having nightmares about Camilla fighting her way back into the house, like a zombie,” Jeff replied, eating a spoonful of ice cream from the bowl that she had discarded before sliding it out of the way.
“I know,” Annie shook her head. “I was really starting to wonder if she was ever going to leave.” Jeff watched as she bit her lip. “So, do you know why she’s doing this exactly?”
“You mean taking over the house?” Jeff asked.
“I mean….” She waved her hands in front of her, searching for the right word. Jeff grinned.
“Foisting you on Italian society?” he filled in for her and Annie deflated with a nod. “If it makes you feel any better, I would bet a lot of Pierce’s money that she just wants an excuse to throw a party and wants to do it here where she won’t be responsible if someone mysteriously drowns in the pool.” Jeff hoisted himself up next to her as smoothly as he could and let his bare leg bump against hers. “Your age is just being used as an excuse,” he concluded quietly, staring straight ahead at nothing. He actually felt her still next to him and purposely didn’t look over at her.
They could talk about it right now. It would be easy enough to tell her everything right now. It wasn't that big of a deal, really. He was probably making it into a bigger issue than it was. But what if he managed to undo everything that he'd accomplished?
He pushed the idea aside.
“Yeah,” she whispered.
“How did your jelly turn out?” Jeff asked, rolling over the awkward moment as quickly as he could. Annie made a face and hopped off the counter. Jeff twisted his body around as his eyes followed her to the fridge, where she pulled a small jar from the shelf and closed it again. Approaching him slowly, she lifted it toward him with furrowed eyebrows. Jeff pulled it from her grasp and unscrewed the lid before letting out a chuckle.
Whatever it was looked slightly gray and runny and lumpy and nothing like any grape jelly he’d ever seen before. “What happened to it?” he asked with a grimace. She wasn’t going to make him eat it, was she? He was going to have to think quick if she offered him a taste, because he was not putting that in his mouth.
“I’m not sure,” Annie replied before giggling. Jeff met her eye in the dim light cast on them from the small fixture above the sink which had been left on. Her eyes had a clear shining quality to them that he couldn’t remember having seen for a long time. “I don’t think I followed the directions correctly?”
“Sergio is a terrible teacher,” Jeff noted as he set the jar back down on the countertop on his other side, careful to leave her spot empty should she want to hop back up. Instead, Annie simply stepped forward and pressed herself against it, palms flat against the tiled top.
Her cheeks colored and Jeff felt a twinge in his chest. “He was a little distracted,” she answered simply.
“What?” Jeff asked with a frown. “What was he distracted with?” Annie didn’t respond, just blushed deeper and gave her head a shake.
Oh god.
What the hell had happened between Annie and Sergio?
He couldn’t ask that, right? It wasn’t any of his business.
Except he had just kissed her that morning.
And she’d said she’d liked it. Wait, no. She’d said that she wasn’t mad that he’d done it. That wasn’t really the same thing. But she had liked it. He’d kissed enough women in his day to know that she was liking it, possibly too much given the way she’d shut him down. The idea that she would have still done anything with that greasy chef despite what was going on with them made his stomach churn in a way that embarrassed him. He got a strangle hold on the encompassing sense of jealousy that was flooding his veins and crammed it back down where it belonged, in the recesses of his brain. He had decided he didn’t care if she had a fling with someone while on vacation, hadn’t he?
That had been hypothetical. And when she would be across the ocean from him. That had been long before Jeff had gone into debt in order to get to her in any way he could.
It was before he’d made his deal with the devil.
“Have you…” Annie paused. “Have you been checking Twitter at all?”
Shit. She’d seen it already. She had seen in and had finally talked to Pierce and she knew everything and was going to confront him right now. Jeff forced his face into a confused frown, trying to think. But her forearm was just barely brushing against his thigh every few seconds and he couldn’t remember his mother’s maiden name right now. “No,” he lied after a moment. “Twitter is lame.” Annie gave a slow nod of her head, never breaking his gaze. “Why, have you seen it?”
Annie’s eyes narrowed for the briefest of moments before relaxing into a smile that seemed more knowing than Jeff really felt comfortable with. “No,’ she replied after a beat. “I haven’t really been on my phone at all.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t seem very vacation-y.” She pulled her lower lip in between her teeth and Jeff clenched his hand into a fist. She turned around and pushed herself back on the counter next to him, her smooth legs swinging against his. “Can I ask you something?” she asked without looking at him.
“Can I ignore it if I don’t like the question?” Jeff asked her and Annie frowned to herself. “What’s up?”
She glanced up at him nervously. “How did the thing with Britta start?”
Of all the uncomfortable questions she could have asked him, that was one Jeff was not ready for at all. “What? Annie,” he sighed. “I’m not talking about that with you.”
She swallowed and looked over at him. “Is it because you think I can’t take it?”
“No,” Jeff answered honestly. “It’s because talking about one woman to another is not cool.” He pressed his palms down flat on the countertop, his hand landing half on hers. She didn’t move it. He cleared his sleep-scratchy throat. “Annie, the thing with Britta was a bad idea. We both know that,” he said. “We both knew it when it was happening, too.” He took a deep breath. “And that’s all you get.”
She nodded. “I…I told Brita that I kissed you after the dance to see if I could.”
Jeff leaned over, bringing his head closer to hers. “I know.” It had actually been the first night that Britta had turned up at his door, tasting of vodka and stumbling around in boots with heels too high for her to drink in. She had mumbled it against his lips as he’d taken her shirt off and Jeff had paused for exactly six seconds while waiting for his frustration at that revelation to dissolve.
“I was lying,” Annie confessed softly, meeting his eye again.
“I know,” Jeff answered with a small smile.
“You said you came here for me,“ she noted in an almost dreamy tone, as if she’d just recalled that fact.
“I know,” he repeated and Annie smiled at him before leaning toward him and brushing her lips against his chastely. Jeff wrapped his fingers around the edge of the counter, wanting to give all of the control to her. She broke away and came back again before letting a tiny sigh out.
That was a good noise.
Just as Jeff unclenched his fingers from the counter to reach up toward her, Annie broke off again with a sigh. She opened her eyes and they landed on him, unfocused. Blinking again, her expression turned to one of hesitation. “Was…that okay?” she asked and Jeff bit back a chortle.
“Uh, yeah.” He nodded.
“I didn’t mean to,” Annie went on. “I just….”
“Was overcome by my handsomeness,” Jeff offered with a knowing nod. Instead the light swat to the arm that he was expecting, Annie looked at him evenly before exhaling and sliding off the counter to the floor. “Going back to bed?”
“I think I better,” she replied and then shook her head in a shy way that made Jeff’s stomach burn quickly and unexpectedly. “I need my beauty sleep anyway,” Annie said with a shrug, still hovering in front of his knee without touching him at all.
Beauty sleep?
“Hardly,” he murmured, only realizing a second too late that it had out loud. Annie’s eyes shot up to his face, matching his surprise. She let a soft laugh before tucking her hair behind her ears and making her way out of the kitchen. “Annie?” Jeff called, swinging his legs around to the other side of the counter to face her. She stopped and turned to face him with raised eyebrows. “You’re not going to make anyone eat this, are you?”
She grinned self-consciously. “Stay on my good side,” she warned with a grin before giving him a little awkward wave and leaving him alone.
He had every intention of doing just that.