Stranger Things | Community | Jeff/Britta
Stranger Things
Jeff/Britta
~4,700 words
It’s a relatively simple idea: they get married so she can have his outrageously good health insurance, then after her surgery and recovery, they quietly get an annulment. People do it every day.
Written for a prompt at the Community Ficathon: "Jeff/Britta, fake-marriage to get health insurance." Then the word count kept going up and up, so I figured it was easier to post here instead of in ten separate Livejournal comments. So thank you to the anon who requested the prompt! I hope you see this :D
As always, I know nothing about a) medicine b) law or c) health insurance. Takes place post-season four but without any season five potential storylines incorporated. Also pre-Affordable Care Act, although Britta wouldn't sign up, anyway :)
When Jeff stops by Greendale to have lunch with the group, they’re halfway through the meal and Britta hasn’t said a single word. “What’s up with you?” he asks, kicking her under the table.
She rolls her eyes and crosses her arms over her chest but remains silent.
“Britta has laryngitis,” Troy says around a badly-stifled giggle. He turns to Abed and grins, which tells Jeff they’ve been taking full advantage of her inability to speak all morning.
“Yes, and she should have stayed home today,” Annie says disdainfully. “It’s not right to subject the rest of us to your germs, even if you did have a psych class you couldn’t miss today.”
“I still think you have a fever,” Shirley adds, “and it’s not too late for me to go with you to the doctor this afternoon. I see you wince every time you swallow.”
Britta’s shoulders slump and she scribbles something on a napkin, then slides it across the table to Shirley.
“You don’t have health insurance?” Jeff reads over Shirley’s shoulder. “Aren’t you an adult?”
With a scowl, Britta digs a notebook out of her bag and begins writing again, quick and furious this time.
“‘Government, corruption, elitist white males,’” Abed says. He’s sitting next to Britta but doesn’t seem to be wary of whatever germs she has, unlike Annie.
“At least go to the campus Health Center. Nurse Jackie can make sure you’re not dying,” Annie says.
Britta takes a painful-looking gulp of water and makes a moving gesture with her hands.
“Okay, okay, let’s talk about something else,” Shirley says and Britta nods gratefully.
After lunch, Jeff grabs Britta by the elbow and leads her out of the cafeteria. “I’ll go with you to the Health Center, if you want.”
Britta shakes her head.
“Okay, well, I already texted my boss and told him I have an emergency, so I guess I’m not giving you a choice after all. I don’t really trust you to go without me physically taking you there.”
Nurse Jackie recoils when he sees Britta’s throat; he gives her a strep test and some honey lemon cough drops and tells her to get some rest while she waits for the results to come back.
“Want me to drive you home?” Jeff asks as they leave. It’s cold outside, looks like it’s going to snow.
She shakes her head and points toward her car. She holds up her phone as a promise to text him when she gets the results and he heads back to work for the last hour of the day.
The next day, he gets a text: Apparently I have tonsillitis. Pls bring tea and frozen yogurt.
He does some Googling (always a bad idea; he reminds himself never to look up an illness on the internet again) and on the way home, stops for the gross herbal tea Britta drinks along with her weird frozen non-dairy soy yogurt (if it isn’t yogurt, what is it? Another thing Jeff never wants to know).
“Okay,” he says when she answers the door silently, “tonsillitis? You know that means you have to get those things taken out, right?”
She takes the yogurt from him and goes straight to the kitchen. He settles on the couch and listens as she puts the kettle on and grabs spoons from the drawer.
“Britta, you really should go see a doctor,” he says, taking the offered spoon from her. “What else did Nurse Jackie say?”
“Money,” she whispers hoarsely.
He reaches over for a scoop of the disgusting non-yogurt. “So you’re just going to hope your tonsils don’t swell to the point that they block your airway and you suffocate?”
Her eyes widen almost comically. “That can’t happen.”
“Read it on the internet, so it’s at least forty percent true.”
She exhales loudly and throws her head back against the cushions.
“I have an idea,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about it all day and before you freak out and say no, let me finish, okay?”
It’s a relatively simple idea: they get married so she can have his outrageously good health insurance, then after her surgery and recovery, they quietly get an annulment. People do it every day.
Britta needs some convincing, though-her eyebrows shot up into her hairline when Jeff started talking and three days later he’s still having a hard time finding them. But maybe the pain is too much or maybe he freaked her out with that whole suffocating-on-your-tonsils thing, because she eventually relents.
They get married at the courthouse on a Friday morning. The rest of the group is there, Shirley and Annie standing next to Britta and Abed and Troy standing next to Jeff.
“You should at least wear a shade of white,” Shirley says gently. She and Annie spend an afternoon at the mall buying Britta an ivory dress with matching shoes and take great pleasure in forcing Britta to have her hair and makeup done in Shirley’s overly-large master bathroom.
“I don’t even believe in marriage,” Britta rasps grumpily to Jeff as they drive to the courthouse. “Or health insurance! It’s a corrupt capitalist scam.”
“There, there, Mrs. Winger. It’ll be okay,” Jeff consoles teasingly.
“No way. Why are you even doing this?”
Jeff shrugs. “Because you really are stubborn enough to die from something dumb like tonsillitis. Also, I owe you a favor or two. So.”
She slumps in her seat but doesn’t say anything for the rest of the ride.
Britta has her surgery a few days later. The group sits in the waiting room, reading old magazines and debating which is better: Good Morning, America or The Today Show. (Three for GMA and two for Today; Abed says the vote is invalid without Britta’s ballot.)
“Mr. Winger?” a nurse says finally. “Your wife is in recovery now. She’s still unconscious, but you can go see her if you want.”
It takes a second for Jeff to realize what she means, that Britta is his wife and out of surgery and he needs to get up to see her. Troy and Shirley start to rise, as well, but the nurse holds up a hand apologetically.
“I’m sorry, but immediate family only for now.”
“Of course. Go on, Jeffrey.” Shirley gives him a gentle shove in the small of his back and he follows the nurse down the hallway.
Hooked up to machines and even paler than normal, she looks small and fragile, two things Jeff never associates with Britta. Her heart monitor beeps steadily.
“She should wake up within the next hour or so,” the nurse says as she examines the tubes and writes something down on her clipboard. “She’ll be a little groggy until the anesthesia wears off but the surgery was a success. She did great.” She smiles and then pats Jeff on the arm before leaving.
He supposes he’s supposed to stay because that’s what husbands do, even though it’s freaking him out a little bit to see Britta so... vulnerable. He sends Shirley a text so she can let everyone know that everything’s fine and he’ll come get them when he can, and pulls a chair from the corner of the room next to the bed and waits.
Jeff has to cop to getting married to his co-workers; after he visits Human Resources to get Britta’s name on the insurance, it doesn’t take long for the word to spread. He goes along with it, saying that it was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, that he and Britta have been on and off since they’ve known each other. The lies come a little too easy-he realizes with a start that he only needs to revise their history slightly in order to make the story work.
He brings Britta back to his apartment after she’s discharged from the hospital. His boss insisted he take a few days off to care for her, and he figures that it won’t hurt to make sure she’s drinking enough water and taking her antibiotics to ward off infection.
Britta isn’t too satisfied by this development, but she still can’t really talk so she just scowls a lot. She does, however, brighten a little bit when Jeff shows her all the frozen faux-yogurt he bought her (along with the secret stash of Ben & Jerry’s that she’ll eat when he’s not looking) and informs her that he’ll be giving up his bed and cramming on the couch.
Jeff intends for Britta to only stay for two or three days, which seems long enough as it is. When she gets home from the hospital, she ends up sleeping for most of the day, and then when she does venture out of the bedroom, they watch TV on the couch in silence. It’s fine with Jeff, because the last time they spent so much time alone together was back when they were having secret sex, and he’s not sure exactly how to hang out with her for days at a time while keeping it strictly platonic.
On the third day, the insurance company calls him. Jeff had been waiting for this; he knows the law and he knows how often people get busted for insurance fraud. He spun a tale of spontaneity and crazy, passionate love and not being able to wait another second. Britta watches, half fearful, half disgusted, as Jeff convinces the woman that there’s nothing suspect about his new wife just happening to come down with tonsillitis three days after their courthouse wedding. She does say she needs to follow protocol, though, and that she’ll be placing them on something of a watch list.
“This was stupid,” Britta says. “You shouldn’t have let me drag you into this.”
“Just shut up, okay? People cheat the system every day and they get away with it. All we have to do is pretend to be really married for a while, and then they’ll drop it. No problem.”
But the problem comes a few days later. Britta’s voice is back so she’s able to answer the phone when the insurance company calls her to ask why she and her husband have different mailing addresses. “Sublet!” she blurts out. “I’m subletting until my lease is up!”
“They’re trying to catch us off-guard,” Jeff says as they eat ice cream for dinner. “Just... lay low here for a few more days, I guess. They’ll get tired of us and move onto someone else soon enough.”
Jeff goes back to work and Britta gets clearance from her doctor to go back to school. They have a sort-of morning routine by the end of the week and it’s a little scary at how seamlessly they fall into it. Jeff’s never lived with a woman before-or anyone, really-and although he misses his bed, he finds himself not minding having another person around all the time.
Not to say Britta isn’t an annoying houseguest: she leaves wet towels on the floor, she has awful taste in both TV and breakfast cereals, and she can’t watch the news without yelling about something. But sometimes she gets home from class before Jeff gets home from work, and she’s already stopped for Indian food and beer on the way home. Sometimes they stay up late and hate-watch Say Yes to the Dress. Sometimes she falls asleep on the couch and instead of leaving her there, he wakes her up enough to help her stumble to his bedroom.
The insurance company continues to call, as if they’ll bombard Jeff and Britta enough to get them to admit that it’s all a farce. One night, Britta goes to her apartment to get some clothes and when she comes back, she says she’s pretty sure there was someone in a suspiciously non-descript car casing the place. Jeff thinks she’s being silly until he sees the same car on his way to work one morning.
“If I get you arrested I’m never going to hear the end of it,” Britta says, “and I don’t want to deal with that for the rest of my life.”
“His and Hers jail cells,” Jeff jokes, although his confidence is beginning to drop. So on Friday after work, he stops by the liquor store and comes home with vodka and olives and scotch and lines the bottles neatly on the coffee table.
“Let’s forget about the asshole sitting outside trying to figure out if we’re criminals or not and get really, really drunk.”
Britta’s olive-to-vodka ratio gets more and more ridiculous the drunker she gets, so by eleven her glass is filled with so many olives that Jeff isn’t sure how she can even drink the vodka. He finds her a straw from a crushed, half-empty box in the back of one of his cupboards and she sips noisily. Straight vodka through a straw. Disgusting.
“Disgusting,” he tells her. He’s gone through quite a bit of scotch himself; his words sound fuzzy and loose, blurred around the edges.
She points toward his glass with disdain. “Says the guy who drinks the world’s grossest alcohol. Scotch tastes like sucking on a wet log.”
“There’s a dick joke there. I’ll figure it out in the morning.”
She rolls her eyes with great difficulty. “Do you think this is what all married people do? Or just us?”
“Get wasted to avoid thinking about the insurance company parked outside who wants to arrest us for fraud? I think that’s just us, kitten.”
“I don’t even believe in marriage.” She pulls her legs up on the couch, knees to her chest, and closes her eyes.
“Yes, Britta, we know. You’ve probably said this every single day since we got married. If I didn’t know you any better, I’d say you were protesting too much.”
She lets out a snort, too loud and too unladylike; he’s not drunk enough to point that out, though. “As if, Winger. Hand me my drink, will you? I’m too sleepy to reach.”
“Oh no you don’t. You can’t fall asleep on the couch because then I have to carry your drunk ass to bed. Because I’m such a gentleman and I’m still giving up my nice, soft bed for you.”
“Don’t strain your arm patting yourself on the back.” Her eyes are still closed and her voice is thick with alcohol and sleep.
He tugs on her hand. “Come on. I’ll walk you to bed so you don’t smash your face into the wall.”
She groans but allows herself to be pulled to her feet. She stumbles a bit and he keeps his hand on her shoulder to steady her. When they get to the bedroom she shimmies out of her jeans and flops onto the bed in just her t-shirt; after living together for a few weeks, Jeff’s seen her in her underwear-not to mention the hundreds of times he’s seen her in even less-but he still looks away.
“Okay, well, try not to puke in the bed.” He starts back toward the hallway when she stops him.
“Jeff.”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t… have to sleep on the couch, you know.”
She’s on top of the blankets but already burrowed into a pillow. She sleeps on the other side of the bed-her side, not his-like she’s been waiting this whole time for him to lie down next to her.
It’s a bad idea, but in the haze of alcohol Jeff realizes for only the second or third time that he and Britta are married, that she is his wife, and to millions of billions of other people who are not them, that means something, and it means a lot. He never thought he’d get married and especially not to her, and maybe it’s the scotch and maybe it’s the guy in the car outside who wants nothing more than to have a concrete reason to arrest him, but he slips his own jeans off and crawls into bed.
They’re quiet for a moment as they arrange themselves under the covers. Then he turns to face her and she smiles-a small, drunk smile. “Sorry I made you commit a felony. I figure maybe I shouldn’t keep hijacking your bed, too.”
“It’s been-” he starts and then stops. There’s something about her that makes him overly sentimental. Living with her this whole time, picking her socks up off the floor and washing the dishes while she dries, it reminds him of before, of sneaking around, of spending all his time with her.
“It’s been,” she repeats.
He meets her halfway. They had to kiss at the wedding, just a peck, and it happened so fast and so surreally that Jeff hadn’t had time to process what was happening. But now, despite the fact that he’s so drunk his toes are numb and the bed is spinning, he’s one hundred percent aware of everything.
“So, how’s your sham marriage going?” Shirley asks sweetly.
Jeff shrugs noncommittally. “Fine.”
He’s certainly not about to tell her-and Annie and Troy, who he’s also having lunch with-that he and Britta have been sharing a bed every night for the last two weeks, that even though they haven’t had sex, they’ve made out twice-once in bed, once up against the wall outside the bathroom-and that they haven’t discussed either of these developments, but instead tiptoe around each other, which is very difficult when you’re sharing a small space.
He is, however, very glad that Abed and Britta are both in class; Abed would be able to see through them in a heartbeat.
“Is the insurance company still stalking you?” Annie asks. “Because that’s just as illegal as what you’re doing.”
“Yeah, you should sue them! Can you do that? Is that a thing?” Troy says.
”Guys, it’s fine. They’re starting to back off and things will be back to normal in a few weeks.”
Shirley eyes him warily and he purposely looks away. He’d known they were going to press the issue, especially since they’ve most likely been grilling Britta and not getting any information at all. He supposes that’s a good thing, that she’s sharing nothing as well, because it means that either she doesn’t know what’s going on or she thinks nothing is going on.
And that could be a good thing or a bad thing. Sure, Britta could think that there’s nothing out of the ordinary happening, that all platonically married friends wake up practically spooning every morning. That it’s totally normal to have stopped talking about an annulment. That it’s no big deal that the insurance company hasn’t had anyone following them for four days now and neither has made any mention of Britta going back home.
See, the mature thing-the right thing-would be to sit down and talk about it, or maybe ask his friends for advice. But Jeff pulls out his phone and starts scrolling through the weather forecast and last night’s sports scores and the headlines of the day. Troy changes the subject, thankfully, and after Jeff finishes his salad he bolts for the parking lot with a hasty goodbye.
He’s almost out the doors by the library when someone grabs him by the arm and pulls. He stumbles and turns around to find Britta, eyes darting around the hallway to make sure no one’s looking. Without a word, he allows himself to be led into a supply closet.
She closes the door behind them. He tries to find a light switch but she shoves him back against a bookshelf before he can reach for the wall. “Ow, shit, Britta what-”
She silences him with her mouth; he feels her stand up on tiptoes and press against him, her hands at the back of his neck. It takes him a few seconds to comprehend what’s happening-the shelf is digging painfully into his back in at least three different places-but soon he’s kissing her, too, and his hands are on her waist and then in her hair.
This isn’t the first time they’ve made out in a Greendale supply closet. But there had been a conversation, an agreement: this is what we’re doing, this is how we’re doing it. Jeff knows this can’t go on. He knows they’ve gotten themselves into some serious shit this time. Because it’s somehow worse to share a bed without sex, to kiss sporadically and unpredictably. It’s somehow more.
This is the part they’ve never been good at. They can lie and sneak around and pretend like things are fine. But to grow the fuck up and do something about it all, that’s where they get stuck, time after time.
Without warning, Britta pulls away. She plants a final kiss in the corner of his mouth and then he can’t feel her against him anymore. “See you later.” Her footsteps echo against the floor, the door opens and light floods in, and then she’s gone.
The insurance company calls Jeff on his way home from work that night. “We’re dropping the investigation. Congratulations to you and your wife and we look forward to helping you any way we can in the future.”
So that’s that. Britta can go back home and in another few months, they can annul the marriage and with a quick brush of hands, it’ll be like it never happened. Goodbye Jeff and Britta modern married couple, hello Jeff and Britta friends who have lunch sometimes.
As Jeff unlocks the front door, he knows he has to tell Britta that it’s all over and done with. He knows he has to help her pack her things and say goodbye and then get used to sleeping alone again. But he doesn’t want to. He’s not entirely sure what it is he does want, but he knows that being married to her hasn’t been as bad as he thought. It’s been better than not as bad. It’s been good.
And he knows that it can’t keep going on like this, this half-ass thing stuck between friendship and relationship, pressing her up against the wall as they pass each other in the hallway, being thrown into bookshelves in Greendale supply closets, never talking about any of it. It’s stupid. They’re stupid. That’s always been their problem.
Jeff opens the door and finds Britta on the couch watching TV. She smiles in greeting before turning her attention back to the screen. She’s flipping channels: the news, a talk show, an infomercial, Teen Mom, a Seinfeld rerun. She stops on each for ten seconds.
He sits next to her and takes the remote.
“Hey!” she protests as he hits the power button.
“I think we should talk.”
Her eyes widen for a second before she catches herself and arranges her features into a smooth, neutral shape. “About what?”
“The insurance company called. They’re dropping the investigation. We’re all clear.”
“That’s good. Right?”
He nods. “Yeah. That’s good. You can go back home.”
“Can’t wait to get rid of me, huh?” she teases with the tiniest smirk.
“Britta.”
She stands up. “I should get my stuff together. It’ll take some time to track it all down.”
“Britta.” He reaches out to grab her wrist and she looks down at him with a sad, sort of pleading look.
“Don’t, okay? You did me an amazing favor and I’m grateful. You don’t have to do this.”
“You’re so fucking annoying, I swear.” He uses her hand to pull himself up and kisses her, his arms wrapping around her waist, his tongue swiping against her bottom lip.
She pushes him back on the couch and climbs over top of him. It’s a frantic few minutes of clothes and hands and an argument over who’s going to get up to get a condom. Eventually, Britta relents, shouting expletives at Jeff the entire time, but when she gets back it’s all forgotten. He tips his head back against the couch and digs his fingers into her hips. They’ve had sex on this couch at least a dozen times, but not in two years. A lot has happened since then, but they still work together the same way they always did. There are a lot of things he wants to say, but he refrains, kissing her instead, touching her instead. It feels like a relief after all this time, to touch her without worrying; just because they weren’t sleeping together when they were sleeping together doesn’t mean he wasn’t thinking about it constantly, what it would be like to reach over and kiss her and forget about all the stupid stuff that’s always kept them apart.
And he still doesn’t say anything afterward, when she’s curled up with her head on his chest and he’s running his fingertips over her bare spine.
After a few minutes of silence, she sighs and then scoffs. “So you’re going to make me start?”
He shrugs but smiles to himself.
“Fine. What is it that you want?”
“What do you want?”
She sits up and frowns at him. “And you call me annoying. I don’t know.”
“Well, I don’t know, either.”
“My last relationship was not good. I messed it all up.”
“My last relationship was you, technically.”
Britta laughs, then covers her mouth with her hand. “Sorry. That wasn’t funny.”
“Whatever, at least mine wasn’t Troy.”
“Hey, don’t be mean to Troy. He’s a good guy.”
“You really think you’re the one who messed that up?”
“I don’t know. Kind of.”
“We’re legally married.”
“We are.”
“Neither of us believes in marriage.”
“We don’t.”
They stare at each other for a second and Britta turns away with another sigh. She grabs his shirt off the couch and shrugs into it, her fingers running over the buttons quickly. She stands up, and the hem brushes the middle of her thighs. “This conversation is going nowhere,” she announces. “So I’m going to order a pizza.”
Jeff scrubs a hand over his face before reaching for his underwear. “I like being married to you,” he says as she crosses into the kitchen. “I like having you here.”
She stops walking but doesn’t turn around. “I like being here.”
“So what if you stayed?” He hears her inhale sharply and amends: “Or what if you just spent more time here?”
“I could do that. What about the annulment?”
“You should stay on my insurance. You know, just in case. Until you have your own.”
She nods and continues into the kitchen, rifling through the take-out menus. “What would we tell people?”
“Nothing. Anything. Whatever we want.”
“Would you be, like, my boyfriend or something?” Her eyes are firmly on the counter.
“If you want to get technical about it, I’m your husband,” he says, “but yeah, sure.”
“What kind of pizza do you want?”
He watches as she pulls a menu out of the pile and looks up and smiles. Her face is hopeful and it makes him hopeful. “This new place opened a few weeks ago. We got the menu in the mail the other day. I thought we could try it.”
“Veggie? Extra cheese? Both?”
“Okay. Veggie and extra cheese it is. You think it’ll be good?”
Her double meaning isn’t even the least bit subtle. He knows, already, that none of this will be easy, because it never is with them. He knows it’ll be hard and weird and it’ll take some time to get used to it all. They’ll fight and she’ll leave toothpaste globs in the sink and he’ll wake her up too early on Saturday mornings. She’ll be cranky when she’s studying for finals and he’ll get annoyed when she tries to rearrange his kitchen cupboards.
And maybe they’re not even cut out for this. But it’s worth a shot, isn’t it? If he likes waking up next to her every morning and going to sleep next to her every night, that means something, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s the timing, that they couldn’t figure it out before because it was meant to work this time. Maybe her tonsillitis and lack of ability to take care of necessary responsibilities like making sure she doesn’t bankrupt herself if she gets sick was the turning point.
Jeff nods, because his internal monologue is starting to get a little too corny for his liking.
“Yeah. I think it’ll be good.”
It is.
Jeff/Britta
~4,700 words
It’s a relatively simple idea: they get married so she can have his outrageously good health insurance, then after her surgery and recovery, they quietly get an annulment. People do it every day.
Written for a prompt at the Community Ficathon: "Jeff/Britta, fake-marriage to get health insurance." Then the word count kept going up and up, so I figured it was easier to post here instead of in ten separate Livejournal comments. So thank you to the anon who requested the prompt! I hope you see this :D
As always, I know nothing about a) medicine b) law or c) health insurance. Takes place post-season four but without any season five potential storylines incorporated. Also pre-Affordable Care Act, although Britta wouldn't sign up, anyway :)
When Jeff stops by Greendale to have lunch with the group, they’re halfway through the meal and Britta hasn’t said a single word. “What’s up with you?” he asks, kicking her under the table.
She rolls her eyes and crosses her arms over her chest but remains silent.
“Britta has laryngitis,” Troy says around a badly-stifled giggle. He turns to Abed and grins, which tells Jeff they’ve been taking full advantage of her inability to speak all morning.
“Yes, and she should have stayed home today,” Annie says disdainfully. “It’s not right to subject the rest of us to your germs, even if you did have a psych class you couldn’t miss today.”
“I still think you have a fever,” Shirley adds, “and it’s not too late for me to go with you to the doctor this afternoon. I see you wince every time you swallow.”
Britta’s shoulders slump and she scribbles something on a napkin, then slides it across the table to Shirley.
“You don’t have health insurance?” Jeff reads over Shirley’s shoulder. “Aren’t you an adult?”
With a scowl, Britta digs a notebook out of her bag and begins writing again, quick and furious this time.
“‘Government, corruption, elitist white males,’” Abed says. He’s sitting next to Britta but doesn’t seem to be wary of whatever germs she has, unlike Annie.
“At least go to the campus Health Center. Nurse Jackie can make sure you’re not dying,” Annie says.
Britta takes a painful-looking gulp of water and makes a moving gesture with her hands.
“Okay, okay, let’s talk about something else,” Shirley says and Britta nods gratefully.
After lunch, Jeff grabs Britta by the elbow and leads her out of the cafeteria. “I’ll go with you to the Health Center, if you want.”
Britta shakes her head.
“Okay, well, I already texted my boss and told him I have an emergency, so I guess I’m not giving you a choice after all. I don’t really trust you to go without me physically taking you there.”
Nurse Jackie recoils when he sees Britta’s throat; he gives her a strep test and some honey lemon cough drops and tells her to get some rest while she waits for the results to come back.
“Want me to drive you home?” Jeff asks as they leave. It’s cold outside, looks like it’s going to snow.
She shakes her head and points toward her car. She holds up her phone as a promise to text him when she gets the results and he heads back to work for the last hour of the day.
The next day, he gets a text: Apparently I have tonsillitis. Pls bring tea and frozen yogurt.
He does some Googling (always a bad idea; he reminds himself never to look up an illness on the internet again) and on the way home, stops for the gross herbal tea Britta drinks along with her weird frozen non-dairy soy yogurt (if it isn’t yogurt, what is it? Another thing Jeff never wants to know).
“Okay,” he says when she answers the door silently, “tonsillitis? You know that means you have to get those things taken out, right?”
She takes the yogurt from him and goes straight to the kitchen. He settles on the couch and listens as she puts the kettle on and grabs spoons from the drawer.
“Britta, you really should go see a doctor,” he says, taking the offered spoon from her. “What else did Nurse Jackie say?”
“Money,” she whispers hoarsely.
He reaches over for a scoop of the disgusting non-yogurt. “So you’re just going to hope your tonsils don’t swell to the point that they block your airway and you suffocate?”
Her eyes widen almost comically. “That can’t happen.”
“Read it on the internet, so it’s at least forty percent true.”
She exhales loudly and throws her head back against the cushions.
“I have an idea,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about it all day and before you freak out and say no, let me finish, okay?”
It’s a relatively simple idea: they get married so she can have his outrageously good health insurance, then after her surgery and recovery, they quietly get an annulment. People do it every day.
Britta needs some convincing, though-her eyebrows shot up into her hairline when Jeff started talking and three days later he’s still having a hard time finding them. But maybe the pain is too much or maybe he freaked her out with that whole suffocating-on-your-tonsils thing, because she eventually relents.
They get married at the courthouse on a Friday morning. The rest of the group is there, Shirley and Annie standing next to Britta and Abed and Troy standing next to Jeff.
“You should at least wear a shade of white,” Shirley says gently. She and Annie spend an afternoon at the mall buying Britta an ivory dress with matching shoes and take great pleasure in forcing Britta to have her hair and makeup done in Shirley’s overly-large master bathroom.
“I don’t even believe in marriage,” Britta rasps grumpily to Jeff as they drive to the courthouse. “Or health insurance! It’s a corrupt capitalist scam.”
“There, there, Mrs. Winger. It’ll be okay,” Jeff consoles teasingly.
“No way. Why are you even doing this?”
Jeff shrugs. “Because you really are stubborn enough to die from something dumb like tonsillitis. Also, I owe you a favor or two. So.”
She slumps in her seat but doesn’t say anything for the rest of the ride.
Britta has her surgery a few days later. The group sits in the waiting room, reading old magazines and debating which is better: Good Morning, America or The Today Show. (Three for GMA and two for Today; Abed says the vote is invalid without Britta’s ballot.)
“Mr. Winger?” a nurse says finally. “Your wife is in recovery now. She’s still unconscious, but you can go see her if you want.”
It takes a second for Jeff to realize what she means, that Britta is his wife and out of surgery and he needs to get up to see her. Troy and Shirley start to rise, as well, but the nurse holds up a hand apologetically.
“I’m sorry, but immediate family only for now.”
“Of course. Go on, Jeffrey.” Shirley gives him a gentle shove in the small of his back and he follows the nurse down the hallway.
Hooked up to machines and even paler than normal, she looks small and fragile, two things Jeff never associates with Britta. Her heart monitor beeps steadily.
“She should wake up within the next hour or so,” the nurse says as she examines the tubes and writes something down on her clipboard. “She’ll be a little groggy until the anesthesia wears off but the surgery was a success. She did great.” She smiles and then pats Jeff on the arm before leaving.
He supposes he’s supposed to stay because that’s what husbands do, even though it’s freaking him out a little bit to see Britta so... vulnerable. He sends Shirley a text so she can let everyone know that everything’s fine and he’ll come get them when he can, and pulls a chair from the corner of the room next to the bed and waits.
Jeff has to cop to getting married to his co-workers; after he visits Human Resources to get Britta’s name on the insurance, it doesn’t take long for the word to spread. He goes along with it, saying that it was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, that he and Britta have been on and off since they’ve known each other. The lies come a little too easy-he realizes with a start that he only needs to revise their history slightly in order to make the story work.
He brings Britta back to his apartment after she’s discharged from the hospital. His boss insisted he take a few days off to care for her, and he figures that it won’t hurt to make sure she’s drinking enough water and taking her antibiotics to ward off infection.
Britta isn’t too satisfied by this development, but she still can’t really talk so she just scowls a lot. She does, however, brighten a little bit when Jeff shows her all the frozen faux-yogurt he bought her (along with the secret stash of Ben & Jerry’s that she’ll eat when he’s not looking) and informs her that he’ll be giving up his bed and cramming on the couch.
Jeff intends for Britta to only stay for two or three days, which seems long enough as it is. When she gets home from the hospital, she ends up sleeping for most of the day, and then when she does venture out of the bedroom, they watch TV on the couch in silence. It’s fine with Jeff, because the last time they spent so much time alone together was back when they were having secret sex, and he’s not sure exactly how to hang out with her for days at a time while keeping it strictly platonic.
On the third day, the insurance company calls him. Jeff had been waiting for this; he knows the law and he knows how often people get busted for insurance fraud. He spun a tale of spontaneity and crazy, passionate love and not being able to wait another second. Britta watches, half fearful, half disgusted, as Jeff convinces the woman that there’s nothing suspect about his new wife just happening to come down with tonsillitis three days after their courthouse wedding. She does say she needs to follow protocol, though, and that she’ll be placing them on something of a watch list.
“This was stupid,” Britta says. “You shouldn’t have let me drag you into this.”
“Just shut up, okay? People cheat the system every day and they get away with it. All we have to do is pretend to be really married for a while, and then they’ll drop it. No problem.”
But the problem comes a few days later. Britta’s voice is back so she’s able to answer the phone when the insurance company calls her to ask why she and her husband have different mailing addresses. “Sublet!” she blurts out. “I’m subletting until my lease is up!”
“They’re trying to catch us off-guard,” Jeff says as they eat ice cream for dinner. “Just... lay low here for a few more days, I guess. They’ll get tired of us and move onto someone else soon enough.”
Jeff goes back to work and Britta gets clearance from her doctor to go back to school. They have a sort-of morning routine by the end of the week and it’s a little scary at how seamlessly they fall into it. Jeff’s never lived with a woman before-or anyone, really-and although he misses his bed, he finds himself not minding having another person around all the time.
Not to say Britta isn’t an annoying houseguest: she leaves wet towels on the floor, she has awful taste in both TV and breakfast cereals, and she can’t watch the news without yelling about something. But sometimes she gets home from class before Jeff gets home from work, and she’s already stopped for Indian food and beer on the way home. Sometimes they stay up late and hate-watch Say Yes to the Dress. Sometimes she falls asleep on the couch and instead of leaving her there, he wakes her up enough to help her stumble to his bedroom.
The insurance company continues to call, as if they’ll bombard Jeff and Britta enough to get them to admit that it’s all a farce. One night, Britta goes to her apartment to get some clothes and when she comes back, she says she’s pretty sure there was someone in a suspiciously non-descript car casing the place. Jeff thinks she’s being silly until he sees the same car on his way to work one morning.
“If I get you arrested I’m never going to hear the end of it,” Britta says, “and I don’t want to deal with that for the rest of my life.”
“His and Hers jail cells,” Jeff jokes, although his confidence is beginning to drop. So on Friday after work, he stops by the liquor store and comes home with vodka and olives and scotch and lines the bottles neatly on the coffee table.
“Let’s forget about the asshole sitting outside trying to figure out if we’re criminals or not and get really, really drunk.”
Britta’s olive-to-vodka ratio gets more and more ridiculous the drunker she gets, so by eleven her glass is filled with so many olives that Jeff isn’t sure how she can even drink the vodka. He finds her a straw from a crushed, half-empty box in the back of one of his cupboards and she sips noisily. Straight vodka through a straw. Disgusting.
“Disgusting,” he tells her. He’s gone through quite a bit of scotch himself; his words sound fuzzy and loose, blurred around the edges.
She points toward his glass with disdain. “Says the guy who drinks the world’s grossest alcohol. Scotch tastes like sucking on a wet log.”
“There’s a dick joke there. I’ll figure it out in the morning.”
She rolls her eyes with great difficulty. “Do you think this is what all married people do? Or just us?”
“Get wasted to avoid thinking about the insurance company parked outside who wants to arrest us for fraud? I think that’s just us, kitten.”
“I don’t even believe in marriage.” She pulls her legs up on the couch, knees to her chest, and closes her eyes.
“Yes, Britta, we know. You’ve probably said this every single day since we got married. If I didn’t know you any better, I’d say you were protesting too much.”
She lets out a snort, too loud and too unladylike; he’s not drunk enough to point that out, though. “As if, Winger. Hand me my drink, will you? I’m too sleepy to reach.”
“Oh no you don’t. You can’t fall asleep on the couch because then I have to carry your drunk ass to bed. Because I’m such a gentleman and I’m still giving up my nice, soft bed for you.”
“Don’t strain your arm patting yourself on the back.” Her eyes are still closed and her voice is thick with alcohol and sleep.
He tugs on her hand. “Come on. I’ll walk you to bed so you don’t smash your face into the wall.”
She groans but allows herself to be pulled to her feet. She stumbles a bit and he keeps his hand on her shoulder to steady her. When they get to the bedroom she shimmies out of her jeans and flops onto the bed in just her t-shirt; after living together for a few weeks, Jeff’s seen her in her underwear-not to mention the hundreds of times he’s seen her in even less-but he still looks away.
“Okay, well, try not to puke in the bed.” He starts back toward the hallway when she stops him.
“Jeff.”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t… have to sleep on the couch, you know.”
She’s on top of the blankets but already burrowed into a pillow. She sleeps on the other side of the bed-her side, not his-like she’s been waiting this whole time for him to lie down next to her.
It’s a bad idea, but in the haze of alcohol Jeff realizes for only the second or third time that he and Britta are married, that she is his wife, and to millions of billions of other people who are not them, that means something, and it means a lot. He never thought he’d get married and especially not to her, and maybe it’s the scotch and maybe it’s the guy in the car outside who wants nothing more than to have a concrete reason to arrest him, but he slips his own jeans off and crawls into bed.
They’re quiet for a moment as they arrange themselves under the covers. Then he turns to face her and she smiles-a small, drunk smile. “Sorry I made you commit a felony. I figure maybe I shouldn’t keep hijacking your bed, too.”
“It’s been-” he starts and then stops. There’s something about her that makes him overly sentimental. Living with her this whole time, picking her socks up off the floor and washing the dishes while she dries, it reminds him of before, of sneaking around, of spending all his time with her.
“It’s been,” she repeats.
He meets her halfway. They had to kiss at the wedding, just a peck, and it happened so fast and so surreally that Jeff hadn’t had time to process what was happening. But now, despite the fact that he’s so drunk his toes are numb and the bed is spinning, he’s one hundred percent aware of everything.
“So, how’s your sham marriage going?” Shirley asks sweetly.
Jeff shrugs noncommittally. “Fine.”
He’s certainly not about to tell her-and Annie and Troy, who he’s also having lunch with-that he and Britta have been sharing a bed every night for the last two weeks, that even though they haven’t had sex, they’ve made out twice-once in bed, once up against the wall outside the bathroom-and that they haven’t discussed either of these developments, but instead tiptoe around each other, which is very difficult when you’re sharing a small space.
He is, however, very glad that Abed and Britta are both in class; Abed would be able to see through them in a heartbeat.
“Is the insurance company still stalking you?” Annie asks. “Because that’s just as illegal as what you’re doing.”
“Yeah, you should sue them! Can you do that? Is that a thing?” Troy says.
”Guys, it’s fine. They’re starting to back off and things will be back to normal in a few weeks.”
Shirley eyes him warily and he purposely looks away. He’d known they were going to press the issue, especially since they’ve most likely been grilling Britta and not getting any information at all. He supposes that’s a good thing, that she’s sharing nothing as well, because it means that either she doesn’t know what’s going on or she thinks nothing is going on.
And that could be a good thing or a bad thing. Sure, Britta could think that there’s nothing out of the ordinary happening, that all platonically married friends wake up practically spooning every morning. That it’s totally normal to have stopped talking about an annulment. That it’s no big deal that the insurance company hasn’t had anyone following them for four days now and neither has made any mention of Britta going back home.
See, the mature thing-the right thing-would be to sit down and talk about it, or maybe ask his friends for advice. But Jeff pulls out his phone and starts scrolling through the weather forecast and last night’s sports scores and the headlines of the day. Troy changes the subject, thankfully, and after Jeff finishes his salad he bolts for the parking lot with a hasty goodbye.
He’s almost out the doors by the library when someone grabs him by the arm and pulls. He stumbles and turns around to find Britta, eyes darting around the hallway to make sure no one’s looking. Without a word, he allows himself to be led into a supply closet.
She closes the door behind them. He tries to find a light switch but she shoves him back against a bookshelf before he can reach for the wall. “Ow, shit, Britta what-”
She silences him with her mouth; he feels her stand up on tiptoes and press against him, her hands at the back of his neck. It takes him a few seconds to comprehend what’s happening-the shelf is digging painfully into his back in at least three different places-but soon he’s kissing her, too, and his hands are on her waist and then in her hair.
This isn’t the first time they’ve made out in a Greendale supply closet. But there had been a conversation, an agreement: this is what we’re doing, this is how we’re doing it. Jeff knows this can’t go on. He knows they’ve gotten themselves into some serious shit this time. Because it’s somehow worse to share a bed without sex, to kiss sporadically and unpredictably. It’s somehow more.
This is the part they’ve never been good at. They can lie and sneak around and pretend like things are fine. But to grow the fuck up and do something about it all, that’s where they get stuck, time after time.
Without warning, Britta pulls away. She plants a final kiss in the corner of his mouth and then he can’t feel her against him anymore. “See you later.” Her footsteps echo against the floor, the door opens and light floods in, and then she’s gone.
The insurance company calls Jeff on his way home from work that night. “We’re dropping the investigation. Congratulations to you and your wife and we look forward to helping you any way we can in the future.”
So that’s that. Britta can go back home and in another few months, they can annul the marriage and with a quick brush of hands, it’ll be like it never happened. Goodbye Jeff and Britta modern married couple, hello Jeff and Britta friends who have lunch sometimes.
As Jeff unlocks the front door, he knows he has to tell Britta that it’s all over and done with. He knows he has to help her pack her things and say goodbye and then get used to sleeping alone again. But he doesn’t want to. He’s not entirely sure what it is he does want, but he knows that being married to her hasn’t been as bad as he thought. It’s been better than not as bad. It’s been good.
And he knows that it can’t keep going on like this, this half-ass thing stuck between friendship and relationship, pressing her up against the wall as they pass each other in the hallway, being thrown into bookshelves in Greendale supply closets, never talking about any of it. It’s stupid. They’re stupid. That’s always been their problem.
Jeff opens the door and finds Britta on the couch watching TV. She smiles in greeting before turning her attention back to the screen. She’s flipping channels: the news, a talk show, an infomercial, Teen Mom, a Seinfeld rerun. She stops on each for ten seconds.
He sits next to her and takes the remote.
“Hey!” she protests as he hits the power button.
“I think we should talk.”
Her eyes widen for a second before she catches herself and arranges her features into a smooth, neutral shape. “About what?”
“The insurance company called. They’re dropping the investigation. We’re all clear.”
“That’s good. Right?”
He nods. “Yeah. That’s good. You can go back home.”
“Can’t wait to get rid of me, huh?” she teases with the tiniest smirk.
“Britta.”
She stands up. “I should get my stuff together. It’ll take some time to track it all down.”
“Britta.” He reaches out to grab her wrist and she looks down at him with a sad, sort of pleading look.
“Don’t, okay? You did me an amazing favor and I’m grateful. You don’t have to do this.”
“You’re so fucking annoying, I swear.” He uses her hand to pull himself up and kisses her, his arms wrapping around her waist, his tongue swiping against her bottom lip.
She pushes him back on the couch and climbs over top of him. It’s a frantic few minutes of clothes and hands and an argument over who’s going to get up to get a condom. Eventually, Britta relents, shouting expletives at Jeff the entire time, but when she gets back it’s all forgotten. He tips his head back against the couch and digs his fingers into her hips. They’ve had sex on this couch at least a dozen times, but not in two years. A lot has happened since then, but they still work together the same way they always did. There are a lot of things he wants to say, but he refrains, kissing her instead, touching her instead. It feels like a relief after all this time, to touch her without worrying; just because they weren’t sleeping together when they were sleeping together doesn’t mean he wasn’t thinking about it constantly, what it would be like to reach over and kiss her and forget about all the stupid stuff that’s always kept them apart.
And he still doesn’t say anything afterward, when she’s curled up with her head on his chest and he’s running his fingertips over her bare spine.
After a few minutes of silence, she sighs and then scoffs. “So you’re going to make me start?”
He shrugs but smiles to himself.
“Fine. What is it that you want?”
“What do you want?”
She sits up and frowns at him. “And you call me annoying. I don’t know.”
“Well, I don’t know, either.”
“My last relationship was not good. I messed it all up.”
“My last relationship was you, technically.”
Britta laughs, then covers her mouth with her hand. “Sorry. That wasn’t funny.”
“Whatever, at least mine wasn’t Troy.”
“Hey, don’t be mean to Troy. He’s a good guy.”
“You really think you’re the one who messed that up?”
“I don’t know. Kind of.”
“We’re legally married.”
“We are.”
“Neither of us believes in marriage.”
“We don’t.”
They stare at each other for a second and Britta turns away with another sigh. She grabs his shirt off the couch and shrugs into it, her fingers running over the buttons quickly. She stands up, and the hem brushes the middle of her thighs. “This conversation is going nowhere,” she announces. “So I’m going to order a pizza.”
Jeff scrubs a hand over his face before reaching for his underwear. “I like being married to you,” he says as she crosses into the kitchen. “I like having you here.”
She stops walking but doesn’t turn around. “I like being here.”
“So what if you stayed?” He hears her inhale sharply and amends: “Or what if you just spent more time here?”
“I could do that. What about the annulment?”
“You should stay on my insurance. You know, just in case. Until you have your own.”
She nods and continues into the kitchen, rifling through the take-out menus. “What would we tell people?”
“Nothing. Anything. Whatever we want.”
“Would you be, like, my boyfriend or something?” Her eyes are firmly on the counter.
“If you want to get technical about it, I’m your husband,” he says, “but yeah, sure.”
“What kind of pizza do you want?”
He watches as she pulls a menu out of the pile and looks up and smiles. Her face is hopeful and it makes him hopeful. “This new place opened a few weeks ago. We got the menu in the mail the other day. I thought we could try it.”
“Veggie? Extra cheese? Both?”
“Okay. Veggie and extra cheese it is. You think it’ll be good?”
Her double meaning isn’t even the least bit subtle. He knows, already, that none of this will be easy, because it never is with them. He knows it’ll be hard and weird and it’ll take some time to get used to it all. They’ll fight and she’ll leave toothpaste globs in the sink and he’ll wake her up too early on Saturday mornings. She’ll be cranky when she’s studying for finals and he’ll get annoyed when she tries to rearrange his kitchen cupboards.
And maybe they’re not even cut out for this. But it’s worth a shot, isn’t it? If he likes waking up next to her every morning and going to sleep next to her every night, that means something, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s the timing, that they couldn’t figure it out before because it was meant to work this time. Maybe her tonsillitis and lack of ability to take care of necessary responsibilities like making sure she doesn’t bankrupt herself if she gets sick was the turning point.
Jeff nods, because his internal monologue is starting to get a little too corny for his liking.
“Yeah. I think it’ll be good.”
It is.